No Credibility: The Regime in a Nutshell.

Melania Trump. CREDIT: AP/Alex Brandon.

“I wish Melania would really take this on. There’s no way that she can,” Parry Aftab, founder of WiredSafety, told the Globe. “She can’t. It won’t work. There’s no credibility.”

Think Progress has an article up about the so-called initiative of the queen, er, first tyrantess (yes, yes, I know, deal with it), which was supposed to be all about cyberbullying, with a particular focus on children and social media. The above quote says it all, really. No Credibility covers the whole clown show of the current regime. Not only has there been no move by the first tyrantess to do one damn thing, how on earth could anyone take her seriously, when she defended the Tiny Tyrant’s bullying on Twitter? Something to the effect that “if you hit at Donny, he hits back 10 times harder.” That’s hardly the sentiment of someone who is anti-bullying. It is the sentiment of someone who stands firmly behind a bully, with nary a shrug as long as it results in them getting what they want.

This is yet one more small item in a sea of them which shores up Ms. Tyrantess’s role in things. She is not a victim, in any way. She’s a woman with agency, who has made various decisions in her life, and she obviously quite likes the life she has at the moment, and shows no desire whatsoever to go rocking the boat now. This is why there won’t be any retraction of her various defenses of bullying on the part of the Tiny Tyrant; if there’s any attempt at such, it will be a mouthful of mush which evades any actual apology or responsibility. I suspect she came up with cyberbullying as a focus because she couldn’t think of anything else, and had to say something. I have no doubt she now regrets it, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if her focus undergoes a change in the coming days.

Full story.

What Consequence?

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley on Face the Nation.

“I think that is what it is,” Ambassador Haley said. “President Trump still knows that they meddled, President Putin knows that they meddled, but he is never going to admit to it and that’s all that happened.”

Dickerson tried to pin down the Trump appointee on what consequences Russia will face.

“Not just Russia, any country needs to know that there are consequences when they get involved in our elections,” Haley claimed, without citing interference by any other country or listing consequences.

Right. So everyone knows Trump is a liar. Everyone knows Putin is a liar. “There are consequences!” Really? What consequences? We have an illegal idiot with delusions of grandeur sitting in the white house, who apparently, cannot be ousted, even though there are near countless legal reasons to do so. What has happened to Russia, outside of Trump wanting to hand Putin whatever the fuck he wants? Some consequence.

Full story and video here.

First Word: Idiot.

President Donald Trump (AFP Photo/SAUL LOEB).

9. What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump? (Numbers are not percentages. Figures show the number of times each response was given. This table reports only words that were mentioned at least five times.)

idiot         39
incompetent   31
liar          30
leader        25
unqualified   25
president     22
strong        21
businessman   18
ignorant      16
egotistical   15
asshole       13
stupid        13
arrogant      12
trying        12
bully         11
business      11
narcissist    11
successful    11
disgusting    10
great         10
clown          9
dishonest      9
racist         9
American       8
bigot          8
good           8
money          8
smart          8
buffoon        7
con-man        7
crazy          7
different      7
disaster       7
rich           7
despicable     6
dictator       6
aggressive     5
blowhard       5
decisive       5
embarrassment  5
evil           5
greedy         5
inexperienced  5
mental         5
negotiator     5
patriotism     5

This is part of an extensive Quinnipiac Poll, you can see the whole thing here.

World Bodypainting Festival.

Painted bodies, fire-breathers, burlesque dancers, freaks plus the finest club sounds – Roll up, Roll up! Into our magical Wonderland!

Body Circus 2017presented by DIAMOND FX  got again a stunning venue. On the east bay of the lake, at the new festival city Klagenfurt you can discover the enchanting castle LORETTO.  This majestic venue will host the traditional, surreal and bizarre ball. “Body Circus“ which is traditionally held on Wednesday’s and known as the main attraction of the festival week.

For the 20th edition of the World Bodypainting Festival, once again we invite you to push the boundaries and let your imagination run free. Guests show up in fantasy costumes from Drag Queens to bodypainting, decoration, masks, extreme make-up, bizarre fashion, and latex outfits. Unleash yourself from your normal day surroundings. Dive into a wild night with the most enchanting artists, latest club tunes from our international DJ’s and provocative stage shows.  For those who need help or want to get ready with others, the styling jam session is the place to be.  Transformed and ready for circus, are also the girls behind the bars, serving Champagne, Cocktails and juggling buckets of Vodka through the dancing crowd filled with decorated bodies –  Roll up, Roll up!

You can spend hours checking out the whole scene here. I’d love to go!

Sunday Facepalm.

In the coming days, 100 US Senators will be delivered an important package. But this delivery won’t be a simple note from one of their constituents. Within days, every single US Senator will be delivered Baby Hope, a twelve-week old baby, with a personal message from her to defund Planned Parenthood and redirect tax payer dollars to community health centers.

[…]

Here is the letter to every US Senator from Baby Hope:

Dear Senator,
My name is Baby Hope. I’m only 12 weeks old, but I want to live. Sadly, there is a high likelihood I will be killed by Planned Parenthood before I ever get a chance to be born. Even worse, Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider that kills 900 preborn babies like me each day, would get paid by American taxpayers to kill me.

However, you can stop Planned Parenthood from killing me and many others. Here’s how: Vote for a health care bill that will not subsidize abortion and will redirect abortion giant Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding to community health centers.

For my sake and hundreds like me, I beg you to refuse to fund abortion and Planned Parenthood in the health care bill.

Please protect me.

Sincerely,

Baby Hope

Dear anti-autonomy asshole christians,

It would be ever so nice if you all would get one tiny fact into your malnourished, underused brains: no federal or taxpayer monies go towards terminations. Please repeat that to yourselves as many times as necessary for it to penetrate those pea brains. Federal monies go to womens’ health, as in breast exams and other cancer prevention, among other things.

As for Baby Hope, please shove her where the sun don’t shine. What women do in regard to their own bodies is none of your business, and trying to remove one of the only sources of healthcare for women is not helping them. Nor are your “community health centers” or your “women’s clinics”. Your personal hatred of women is your business, of course, however, your thirst to see it translated into an increasing amount of women dead, along with a higher number of children born into dire circumstance needs to stop. Learn to mind your own damn business, and try something different, like looking after children who are bereft of care. There are plenty of them. There are also many children in this country who go without adequate food every day. That situation could use more attention. Women do not need you fucking assholes constantly attempting to control every aspect of their lives. You could always turn to advocating for comprehensive sexual education, accessible, affordable birth control, and more education for girls. Those are all proven methods in reducing abortions.

As always, since you find women being allowed full human rights and control over their own bodies so terribly distressing, I give you my constant suggestion: leave it up to that piece of shit god of yours. You’re the ones who think he’s so great and mighty and all that. Seems to me you must be pretty damn sure there’s no such god at all, else you’d be happy to put it all in his hands, no?

Via ChristianNewsWire.

Bråvalla Canceled, No Men To Take Its Place.

The camping site of the Bråvalla festival. Photograph: Tt News Agency/Reuters.

A Swedish Music Festival is taking to heart the Michelle Obama mantra of “when they go low, we go high” with a gendered twist. A few days have passed since the organizers of Sweden’s four-day Bravalla festival announced their cancellation of next year’s event after news broke that four rapes and 23 reports of sexual assault happened at this year’s iteration of the fest. “Certain men … apparently cannot behave,” said organizers in a report. “It’s a shame.”

[…]

Rather than go without a music festival next year, Swedish radio host Emma Knyckare tweeted that she wanted to see “a really cool festival where only non-men are welcome” that would go “until ALL men have learned how to behave.” Now, she’s making that dream a reality. She has since written on Instagram that a “man-free” festival will take place next summer. “In the coming days I’ll bring together a solid group of talented organisers and project leaders to form the festival organisers,” she told BBC. “Then you’ll hear from everyone again when it’s time to move forward.”

The “man free” festival idea follows the Womyn’s Musical Festival that was regularly held in Michigan for nearly four decades. That festival was a haven for lesbians and queer women, but ultimately shuttered after protests against its trans-exclusive policy. The Swedish festival hasn’t announced specifics in regards to how transgender communities will integrate into the man ban, but we’d expect them to be a bit more flexible.

Well, here’s hoping that transphobia doesn’t dominate the man-free festival, and I hope it’s a success.

The Guardian has the story on Bråvalla, Out has the story on the replacement.

Religious Shroomin’ and Snorting Chocolate.

Photograph: Fredrik Skold/Alamy.

Researchers are once again feeding shrooms of the magic kind to religious leaders, well, some of them anyway. I noticed a glaring absence of a representative of the Religious Reich. I have no idea why this is being done, it’s already been done, back in the psychedelic ’60s. Pretty much the same response of anyone who has their first experience with shrooms: “Cool, man, cool.” Of course, it if persuades any of the religious to mellow the fuck out, it’s all good. Shrooms have always had a mild effect on me, but it’s one of the sweetest rushes on the planet. We’d all probably be happier naked apes more likely to put energies into play rather than war, if we were all allowed a pocketful of shrooms. I wouldn’t mind a pocketful of shrooms.

The Guardian has the full story.

On the naked apes behaving stupidly department, we have a new thing, snorting cacao.

Now meet Coco Loko, a “snortable” chocolate powder being marketed as a drug-free way to get a buzz. The product, created by Orlando-based company Legal Lean, includes cacao powder, as well as gingko biloba, taurine and guarana, which are commonly found in energy drinks.

Nick Anderson, the 29-year-old founder of Legal Lean, says he heard about a “chocolate-snorting trend” in Europe a few months ago. He ordered a sample and gave it a try.

“At first, I was like, ‘Is this a hoax?,’” he recalled. “And then I tried it and it was like, okay, this is the future right here.”

Yeah, okay, whatever. All I thought when I first saw this was “fuck, that sounds messy.” Might give brown nose a whole new meaning. My second thought was “I wonder how many people are gonna die.” True chocolate allergies are rare, and most all of them involve raw cacao. Those allergies are most often anaphylactic in nature, also. I think everyone would be better off with a light menu of shrooms.

The Washington Post has the story.

DO NOT TOUCH.

SCREENGRAB.

Most of us learn early in life the delicious temptation of “Do Not Touch” and manage to get over not having license to touch every thing on the planet. Apparently, Mike Pence never got that particular lesson. He might have made an effort at a less obvious, furtive slide of the fingertips anywhere except under the note with “DO NOT TOUCH” on it. And here Pence thinks he’s the perfect model of morality in the christoverse. Tsk. For shame, Mikey.

The Guardian has the story, along with many of the reactions across Twitter.