Collared Dove, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Collared Dove, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Credit: AP Photo.
Oh those poor anonymous shitlords, whatever will they do with their loyalty to the Tiny Tyrant? Seems they are rather upset about the stripping of online privacy. Tsk. I also want to point out, on the off chance this is seen in the relevant circles, that cooperate and corporate have nothing in common.
…Even as some voters began expressing remorse for entrusting a misogynistic failed businessman with improving their health care and saving jobs, Trump’s army of trolls—on 4chan, on gab.ai, and, most notably, on the r/The_Donald subreddit—remained steadfast.
At least, until this week.
Earlier this week, Republicans muscled a bill through Congress that strips away Obama-era protections on users’ online privacy, opening the door for internet service providers to begin selling their customers’ private information to the highest bidder. Everything from a user’s location to their shopping habits to their browsing history will be on the menu.
For a group of people whose cretinous online behavior is predicated on remaining largely anonymous, such a disruption would be unwelcome to say the least. And the fact that the Trump administration has vowed to sign such a bill into law has proven to be a very triggering turn of events.
Now, users in Donald Trump’s online safe spaces are cycling through all seven stages of grief.
Shock:
This is an attack against freedom. I want to make my own decisions about my life, not others, and that includes my private info as well. this is total bs, the house giving in to the business “establishment”, Pres Trump should stop this!!!!!
Denial:
I’m completely against this bill. Trump would never put something this idiotic through though. It’s all Paul Ryan and his cooperate shills.
Anger:
Trump needs to VETO this shit. This shit wreaks of swamp water and is definitely not part of MAGA.
Bargaining:
This is big, I’m very disappointed in it, it’s one of my top issues. But immigration, budget cuts, repealing Obamacare (and NOT getting in Ryancare), and Draining The Swamp are bigger, especially in aggregate.
Pain:
This bill will not be vetoed…Oh fuck me. Shit man.
Depression:
“So what do we do if Trump doesn’t veto? Do we still support him?”
And finally, acceptance:
“Hey man, this is deregulation! This is what Trump promised, it’s what he campaigned on.”
But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, a scam artist who bilked hundreds of people by creating a fraudulent university atop a charter of “trust me, I got this.” Is it any wonder, then, that some Trump supporters still assume the president knows what he’s doing, even when all the evidence suggests otherwise?
“Can’t help it, but getting rid of Obama-sneaky BS is a good thing,” writes another Breitbart commenter. “That scoundrel had to be up to something censorious, anti-freedom or something similar.”
The comments are sourced at Think Progress, who has the full story.
Deadpool musical, a Beauty and The Beast Gaston parody. Enjoy! (Depending, may be NSFW, because Deadpool, much cussing.) Watch all the way to the end, else you’ll miss the after credits scene!
Dola Indidis.
A Kenyan lawyer, Dola Indidis has decided to sue some very long dead people, along with Israel and Italy, for the unlawful trial and execution of Jesus. Why? Well, someone has to uphold the dignity of Jesus. (Jesus can’t do that, because he’s stuck in an oak tree right now.)
A Kenyan lawyer has filed a petition with the International Court of Justice in The Hague, suggesting that the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ was unlawful. … The former spokesman of the Kenyan Judiciary is reportedly attempting to sue Tiberius (emperor of Rome, 42 BCE-37 CE), Pontius Pilate, a selection of Jewish elders, King Herod, the Republic of Italy and the State of Israel.
“Evidence today is on record in the Bible, and you cannot discredit the Bible,” Indidis told the Kenyan Citizen News.
Oh, sure you can discredit the bible. It’s one of the easiest messes to discredit. Barely takes any time or work at all. It’s a bit bothersome that an attorney doesn’t realize that the bible is a mashed up mess of stories, heavily edited over the years, with many different versions, which often contradict one another, and that does not constitute evidence. I would seriously hope that attorneys have a grasp on the concept of evidence.
Although those he suggests should have been convicted during the original trial have not been alive for more than 2,000 years, Indidis insists that the government for whom they acted can and should still be held responsible.
“I filed the case because it’s my duty to uphold the dignity of Jesus and I have gone to the ICJ to seek justice for the man from Nazareth,” Indidis told the Nairobian.
“His selective and malicious prosecution violated his human rights through judicial misconduct, abuse of office bias and prejudice.”
Dude, Jesus is supposed to be a god, so I’d think he can handle his own dignity issues. Also, the whole crucifixion nonsense was set up by Jehovah in the first place – that’s why he got busy with little Mary in the first fuckin’ place. Jehovah isn’t much good at planning, that much shows up clearly in the bible – he’s basically good at genocide, rape, and various gruesome punishments, so the whole “I’ll have kid and kill him” plan, yep, that’s Jehovah all over.
He is challenging the mode of questioning used during Jesus’s trial, prosecution, hearing and sentencing; the form of punishment meted out to him while undergoing judicial proceedings and the substance of the information used to convict him.
The substance of information? I’m pretty sure you don’t know what that means at all, Mr. Indidis, given that you think the bible is evidentiary in nature. I’m also curious as to who is footing the bill for all this nonsense.
Full story here.
Copyright 2017 by KPRC Click2Houston – All rights reserved.
Do you see Jesus? Right there, in the tree, for true! A woman has claimed to see Jesus in an oak tree, and if you click over and watch the video, it’s easy enough to see why. Her house is crammed full of religious icons, statues, paintings, all that. I did laugh, watching part of the video, where they zoomed back from the tree, and superimposed a white Jesus image over the tree, so that people would know how to locate Tree Jesus.
“I was looking out the window and there he was,” Clack said. “I have little square panes in my windows, and it looked like it was framed. I just laughed and said, ‘Lord, you even framed it for me.’”
Clack, who is Catholic, said she noticed it around 4 p.m. when the sun shone on it. She describes the figure as “a big face.”
“Remember, it’s bark,” she said. “When you stand back 15 feet or so, (you can see it) — it’s a big face.”
Now I’m curious – do all the acorns have tiny baby Jesuses? This would also make Jesus a Dryad. Uh oh, he fell into the wrong mythos.
Via KPRC.
Republican Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Wagner.
We open today’s can of stupid with Pennsylvania, and Sen. Scott Wagner. Wagner is all for opening up state forests to drilling for natural gas. Why, we don’t need forests, what are they good for? Just full of trees and animals and stuff, they aren’t important at all. Yesterday, we had the tin cap idiocy of Lord Monckton, and today the climate change theories of Wagner:
NPR reports that Pennsylvania State Senator Scott Wagner on Tuesday gave a talk in favor of conducting natural gas drilling in state forests — and he justified his position by using a scientifically incorrect analysis of climate change.
Specifically, Wagner said he wasn’t worried about carbon emissions leading to a warming planet because the change in the planet’s temperature was more likely caused by the Earth getting closer to the sun every year.
“I haven’t been in a science class in a long time, but the earth moves closer to the sun every year–you know the rotation of the earth,” Wagner said. “We’re moving closer to the sun.”
I don’t believe you. I don’t think you have ever been in a science class. That said, why are you relying on your own ignorance? There is a ton of information, clear, concise, evidence-backed, and easily understood, even by people like yourself, available. Information which would point out the idiocy of destroying state forests.
Wagner also suggested that climate change could be caused by the heat emitted from human bodies.
“We have more people,” he said. “You know, humans have warm bodies. So is heat coming off? Things are changing, but I think we are, as a society, doing the best we can.”
Oh ffs. Climate change is driven by humans, but not in that way. If this is how you did in school, I am absolutely amazed you graduated. Via Raw Story.
Matriarch Grace and Vala the Brave having supper. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
From rq, click for full size!
© rq, all rights reserved.
Black-capped Chickadee zoooooom. Click for full size.
© C. Ford.
The Tiny Tyrant was speaking to women. Yeah, you already know this is going to be bad, don’t you? I’m just going to relay the idiot’s words, it’s late in the day and my tank of caustic is low:
“My cabinet is full of really incredible women leaders,” Trump told the room. It’s unclear what he meant by the word “full,” however. In fact, Trump’s cabinet is more white and more male than any cabinet since Ronald Reagan.
Full of women? Since when? Having Kellyanne hanging around does not equate to “full of really incredible women leaders”. Or else y’know, all those photos of white men are doing a great job of blocking them out of view. Oh, and your daughter doesn’t count.
“Since the very beginning, women have driven, and I mean, each generation of Americans, towards a more free and more prosperous future,” Trump said. “These patriots are women like the legendary Abigail Adams, right? Who, during the founding, urged her husband to remember the rights of women. She was very much a pioneer in that way. We’ve been blessed with courageous heroes like Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery. And went on to deliver hundreds of others to freedom, first in the underground railroad and then as a spy for the union army. She was very, very courageous, believe me. Around we’ve had leaders like Susan B. Anthony. Have you heard of Susan B. Anthony? I’m shocked that you’ve heard of her — who dreamed of a much more fair and equal future and an America where women themselves as she said helped to make laws and elect the lawmakers, and that’s what’s happening more and more.”
He is shocked that women have heard of Susan B. Anthony. I rather imagine that’s the result of him not knowing a damn thing about Ms. Anthony until right before his “talk”. Someone should really tell the fucking idiot that it’s much better for fucking idiots to stay quiet, rather than open their mouths to constantly prove just how much of a fucking idiot they happen to be. Please, just shut the fuck up already.
Via Raw Story.
Playing with hydrophilic beads again, thanks to Marcus, who is responsible for a great deal of displacement activity on my part. That’s actually good for me, so I’m thankful. :D
© C. Ford.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes arrives for a weekly meeting of the Republican Conference with House Speaker Paul Ryan and the GOP leadership on Wednesday. CREDIT: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite.
On Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee chair and former Trump transition team official Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) made the extraordinary claim that Democrats are actually the ones obstructing his committee’s investigation into connections between President Trump and Russian officials.
Nunes — who abruptly cancelled all scheduled committee hearings last week, including one that was to feature testimony from Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general who alerted the White House to Michael Flynn’s deceptions about his communications with Russian officials and was fired for refusing to enforce President Trump’s Muslim ban — told NBC News that “it appears the Democrats aren’t really serious about this investigation.”
“They need to give us their witness list because we have no idea who they even want to interview,” Nunes said. “So, at the end of the day here we’re going to get to the truth, we’re going to find out who’s actually doing a real investigation… we’re going to do an investigation with or without them, and if they want to participate that’s fine, but the facts of the matter are pretty clear.”
But a source with knowledge of the situation tells ThinkProgress that Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee actually submitted a tentative witness list to Republicans on Tuesday and haven’t yet heard back. That information was corroborated by Business Insider’s Natasha Bertrand, who reported that a “[c]ommittee aide tells me Dems provided witness list to Nunes yesterday and offered to schedule hearings next week, have not heard back.”
[…]
Nunes might say “the facts of the matter are pretty clear,” but they’re not. Here’s what we do know. Last Wednesday, Nunes held a press conference where he appeared to clumsily validate Trump’s claim that Obama wiretapped his Trump Tower phones by saying he has “recently confirmed that on numerous occasions the intelligence community incidentally collected information about US citizens involved in the Trump transition.”
Instead of sharing that information with the intelligence community or his committee members, Nunes raced to the White House to brief Trump, whose campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with foreign agents. In the week since, Nunes has steadfastly refused to share what he claims to know about legal incidental collection at Trump Tower with his House Intelligence Committee colleagues.
The list of willful obstruction on the part of Nunes and Gowdy continues over at Think Progress, and it’s quite the long recount of obstruction. It would be downright laughable, the weak attempt to place blame on democrats, except for the fact that this is extremely serious. If this was anyone else, everyone would be going apeshit, screaming for impeachment and imprisonment. The silence of those on the right is more than telling, it’s an indictment all its own, of just how much they truly don’t care about such treasonous actions, as long as the crimes are being committed by someone on their side of the fence.
Think Progress has the full story.
Seeing as it’s Word Wednesday here at Affinity, what better day to review the atrocious mangling of language Trump indulges in? Todd Gitlin has an excellent article and review up of the Tiny Tyrant’s Art of the Non Sequitur, along with his working vocabulary, which is more suited to a toddler.
Once upon a time, there were presidents for whom English seemed their native language. Barack Obama most recently. He deliberated. At a press conference or in an interview — just about whenever he wasn’t speaking from a text — his pauses were as common as other people’s “uh’s.” He was not pausing because his vocabulary was impoverished. He was pausing to put words into sequence. He was putting phrases together with care, word by word, trying out words before uttering them, checking to feel out what they would sound like once uttered. It was important to him because he did not want to be misunderstood. President Obama valued precision, in no small part because he knew he lived in a world where every last presidential word was a speech act, a declaration with consequence, so that the very statement that the sky was blue, say, would be scoured for evidence that the president was declaring a policy on the nature of nature.
That was then. Now we have a president who, when he speaks, spatters the air with unfinished chunks, many of which do not qualify as sentences, and which do not follow from previous chunks. He does not release words into a stream of consciousness but into a heap. He heaps words on top of words, to overwhelm meaning with vague gestures. He does not think, he lurches.
Here are some examples from TIME’s transcript of their cover story made out of their phone interview with the president of the United States. I have italicized the non sequiturs, incomplete propositions, indefinite pronouns and other obscurities that amount to verbal mud.
I used to have sequential eyerolls over Bush Jr’s mangling of language: uninalienable, subliminabable, resignates, disregardered, impedent, misunderestimated, and so forth. Well, at least Bush tried for the big words. That’s better than a basic vocabulary of “bad, sad, bigly!”
Click on over for the full gibberish analysis!
And here’s a fine example of the Gibberish Takeover:
“I think the president is very well steeped in world affairs, especially Europe, NATO, all of the issues,” Spicer declared. “He was a leader in the effort to call Brexit, as you know.”
Spicer, however, did not explain how Trump led the “effort to call Brexit.”
“So, I think both on the EU and that, that’s that,” Spicer concluded.
How, exactly, does any of that answer the charge that the Tiny Tyrant is ignorant when it comes to world affairs? We are talking about the fucking idiot who presented Ms. Merkel with a bill, for fuck’s sake. He also didn’t have the slightest idea of what NATO is, or how it works. He was not a leader in the effort to call Brexit, although he did plenty of cheerleading for it. And what we get is: “So, I think both on the EU and that, that’s that.” WHAT IN THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN? Is everyone getting so damn stupid that such shite gets a pass, or worse, knowing nods?