Between the evils of Verizon, and the FTB server also hating me today, I’m giving up. I can’t get anything scheduled for morning, so if I get up, stuff will be on time. If I don’t, well, things will get started a bit late.
Grackles do love a tasty worm or three, but they are also intimidated by them, what with those tasty bits trying to survive and all. I’ve seen more than one grackle confused and baffled, after grabbing a tasty worm by one end, finding the rest of it curled around its beak. So, the general method is grab tasty worms, and keep ahold of them until near dead. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Hope Hicks, left center, attends a White House press briefing in January. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post).
A statement by Hope Hicks on Monday truly highlights the absurdity of the Tiny Tyrant and the Wannabe Regime. It not only reads like a parody, it reads like a bad comic book parody, being chock full of magnetism.
President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor … and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.
Um, that’s so over the top, you kind of need to keep staring at it, in the hope the ol’ brain will comprehend it one day soon. It’s so full of “oh, no, no, nope, so fucking wrong” it has the ability to reduce people to sputtering wrecks, morphing into balls of tearful laughter somewhere on the floor. If Trump loaded himself down with magnets, he wouldn’t have a magnetic personality of any kind. He may be considered charismatic to some, although I’m hard pressed to think of any. Even his diehard fans don’t consider him charismatic, they liked him because he 1) wasn’t a politician and 2) was a hateful, asshole bigot who promised them white vengeance. No charisma in sight.
Brilliant? Right. We are talking about the Fucking Idiot who said: “You know, I’m, like, a smart person.” A sense of humour? Where? Because I’m pretty sure if there ever was one residing in Trump, it jumped ship ages ago. Making people feel special? Huh. Like refusing to shake hands with Angela Merkel? Or the thousands of tweets denigrating just about everyone on the planet? Or all the Trump Tantrums™ and insults he lets fly all over the white house? Jesus, I haven’t even warmed up on this one yet, the list could go on forever here.
Hicks composed the statement in response to a Washington Post report on Trump’s habit of cutting down staffers with insults. The most jarring thing about her characterization of the president is not the inaccuracy; it’s the sudden rejection of Trump’s entire political brand.
To say that Trump “exudes positive energy” is to ignore the whole premise of his campaign. He would not need to “Make America Great Again” if America were currently great — and Trump made very clear that he believes it is not.
Not only that, but the Tiny Tyrant ran on a platform of bigotry and hate. All of it was “those people are criminals! rapists! awful! evil! stealing your jobses, precious!” and so on. FFS, not only does this represent a brand new low in fucking idiocy, this blatant attempt at pandering to, um, whoever, will not work. Most people know it’s absolute bullshit, and his diehard followers don’t want a magnetized Trump, they want the stupid, evil asshole they voted for, so the point of all this? No idea.
About this project
girls run the galaxy.
That’s what I learned in 1977 when I first saw Star Wars. The moment Princess Leia schooled Han and Luke for launching a “rescue” with no plan to get off the Death Star, I met a role model for life. She was bossy and bold and inspired confidence in an entire generation of girls and women.
Flash forward to 2017 and I remain a dedicated Star Wars fangirl. I’m now in my mid-40s, and on my way to adulthood I picked up a doctorate in clinical psychology and became a documentary filmmaker. My work focuses on stories of racial and gender justice, and in 2015 after attending my first Star Wars Celebration I was totally preoccupied with the question: Who are the girls and women of Star Wars fandom, and what stories do they have to tell?
LOOKING FOR LEIA is a feature documentary film that explores the phenomenon of Star Wars “fangirls,” women and girls who connect deeply to the galaxy far, far away and are unique in the stereotypically male Nerd arena. The film reaches beyond Princess Leia to look at how female fans have shaped and expanded the Star Wars Universe, and how these stories speak to experiences of gender resilience and resistance.
We’re featuring an intergenerational and culturally diverse group of female fans, as well as women who are film buffs and cultural scholars, cosplayers and gamers, artists and authors. We’re talking to women in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math); women who use Star Wars in the classroom; women whose career path was shaped by Star Wars; women whose love of Star Wars has helped them battle cancer and live with disability and mental illness; mothers, daughters, and sisters in Star Wars families; women who are rebels and royalty, imperials, bounty hunters, and jedi. Every generation has a Star Wars story, and we’re hearing about the original trilogy, prequels, animated series, comics, Extended Universe/Legends, video games, new trilogy, stand-alone films, and conventions.
NascentAdjective.
Coming or having recently come into existence.
[Origin: Latin nascent-, nascens, present participle of nasci to be born.]
(C. 1624)
“Near the end of Delancey Street, the smells of sea and fresh water, along with the stench of refuse that those who lived near the waterfront simply dumped off the edge of Manhattan every day, mingled to produce the distinctive aroma of that tidal pool we call the East River. A large structure soon slanted up before us: the ramp approach to the nascent Williamsburg Bridge. Without pausing, and much to my dismay, Stevie crashed onto the boarded roadway, the horse’s hooves and carriage wheels clattering far more loudly against wood than they had against stone.” – The Alienist, Caleb Carr.
Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman in the awesome movie of the same name. All Images: Warner Bros.
Also, Wonder Woman scored 97% on the Tomatometer. So, could all those people who just had be asses and insist the movie would totally suck because DC please be quiet now? Thanks.
From Giliell, click for full size! Vulture, oh, I love Vultures. Click for full size!
© Giliell, all rights reserved.
From Charly, click for full size!
© Charly, all rights reserved.
European Goldfinch, from Charly, who notes this is shy bird which stays under cover, photo ops are rare. Those colours! And that last shot, oh. I’m so happy when I get to see such dinosaurs. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved.
Trump. AP News.
It seems the Tiny Tyrant shares Bush Jr.’s love of comic style intelligence. Oh, yay. Not only a fucking idiot, but proud of it.
President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.
Most mornings, often at 10:30, sometimes earlier, Trump sits behind the historic Resolute desk and, with a fresh Diet Coke fizzing and papers piled high, receives top-secret updates on the world’s hot spots. The president interrupts his briefers with questions but also with random asides. He asks that the top brass of the intelligence community be present, and he demands brevity.
As they huddle around the desk, Trump likes to pore over visuals — maps, charts, pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA Director Mike Pompeo phrased it.
“That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” said Pompeo, adding that he, too, prefers to “get to the core of the issue quickly.”
The fawning ass kissing of Pompeo and Coats is sickening, to say the least.
Yet there are signs that the president may not be retaining all the intelligence he is presented, fully absorbing its nuance, or respecting the sensitivities of the information and how it was gathered.
Goodness. Perhaps I’ll find time to be shocked after I make every effort to recover from this near-fatal eyeroll.
Intelligence officials were prepared to deliver daily briefings to Trump throughout the transition period, but the president-elect often turned them away, usually agreeing to sit for briefings only once or twice per week.
“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump told Fox News last December.
If you need to, like, tell people you’re smart, like, all the time, you’re a fucking idiot.
Trump prefers free-flowing conversations over listening to his briefers teach lessons. “It’s a very oral, interactive discussion, as opposed to sitting there and reading from a text or a script,” Pompeo said.
I’ll refrain from the easy joke here. I. Will. Refrain. I. Will…
When he took office, Trump signaled to his national security team that he favors concise points boiled down to a single page.
“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” he said in a pre-inaugural interview with Axios. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”
Trump also has encouraged his briefers to include as many visual elements as possible. This is a reflection, aides said, of Trump’s career as a real estate developer who evaluated blueprints and renderings to visualize what a property eventually would look like.
Oh yes, being a sleazy, mobbed up real estate con, why that’s just like presidenting! Golly, there must be an easy peasy blueprint for everything!
The cover of the August 2017 edition of MAD. Image provided as exclusive to The Washington Times. (MAD).
Via The Washington Times. The magazine is available in digital format on June 2. Print editions will hit the newsstands on June 13.
nordic prime minister meeting. the orb of world domination loses power and is somewhat less threatening on these latitudes. pic.twitter.com/t5K7NfQOqu
— Jussi Karlgren (@jussikarlgren) May 29, 2017
Ha! That’s a vicious and delicious score. :D You can read all about it at The Hill and Raw Story.