Also, an anguished fucking climate change! For a few brief days, the weather here was unseasonably warm, and there were actual bare spots of ground to be seen here and there. It was enough to trick the Lilac into budding prematurely. The snow came back, and with it, freezing weather. All the noise about an hour ago prompted me to look out my studio window, where there were many goldfinches gorging themselves on the buds. Click for full size.
Published on Jan 7, 2017Support it on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…
“Attack of the Cyber Octopuses” is a retro-futuristic cyberpunk short film. The aim is to recreate the look and feel of the Eighties Sci-fi classics, without using CGI nor chroma key.
official website: http://www.chaosmonger.com/aotco/
making of blog: http://cyberoctopuses.blogspot.com
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
instagram: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
twitter: https://twitter.com/CyberOctopuses
Make has an interview about how the Cyber Octopuses were made, which makes for fun and interesting reading!
Over at Pharyngula, PZ has a post up about the recent, appalling Nazism of Rep. Steve King. Part of my comment was:
D’ya suppose any of these gits realize that they are adherents of Charles Manson? I guess that wouldn’t bother them much.
At the time I wrote it, I wondered if people would get that reference at all, because Manson was a long time ago, along with his attempt at inciting a race war, whereupon all the brown peoples would destroy one another, leaving all the white people triumphant. I’m more than pleased to see that I wasn’t all alone in that thought jumping into my head:
@CNN sounds like something CharlesManson would say
— Oswald Rojas (@mrpresident650) March 14, 2017
@jbouie this is Manson-level racist delusion, the suit-wearing version of "whites dig a hole in the desert, hide, then emerge to rule."
— Robin Kimball (@RobinKimball) March 14, 2017
And they weren’t the only ones, either.
You can read more at Raw Story.
Oh, politicians and their email. If one is guilty of committing an email no-no, they all are. Honestly, it’s when politicians try to be smart that they plumb the depths of stupid. Emailitis is doing the rounds of many new appointees. We’ll start with Wayne Tracker, also known as Rex Tillerson. What a tangled web we weave, when we first practice to deceive.
Another alias email account — that of “Wayne Tracker”— is poised to cause problems for a high-level official, this time former Exxon CEO and current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Tillerson used an alias email account from at least 2008 to 2015 to discuss climate change, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said in a court filing Monday.
Schneiderman, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are currently investigating whether Exxon defrauded the public by engaging in a campaign to discredit climate science, propping up the value of its oil and gas reserves. The Wayne Tracker email account — Tillerson’s middle name is Wayne — was discovered in the course of the investigation, known as the Exxon Knew case.
“This is a significant development in Schneiderman’s investigation into what Exxon knew about climate change, when it knew it, and what the company did to conceal it,” Naomi Ages, Greenpeace’s lead on the climate liability project, said in a statement. “Was Rex Tillerson that worried about climate risks for Exxon? Or was he more worried about the risk of revealing them to his shareholders and to the public? Or was it both?”
Documents uncovered in 2015 suggest that as far back as the 1970s, Exxon scientists knew that burning fossil fuels were the primary contributor to climate change.
Environmentalists have long been saying that to prevent catastrophic climate change, humanity needs to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. But Exxon — as well as the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel interests — have worked against that effort, funding attempts to discredit the theory of global warming.
It is illegal for a company to withhold liability risks from its shareholders.
[…]
It has come to light that, as governor of Indiana, now-Vice President Mike Pence conducted official business via an AOL account that was subsequently hacked.
[…]
EPA head Scott Pruitt’s emails are also under scrutiny. His former office, the Oklahoma Attorney General, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit to force the release of emails between Pruitt, his deputies, and oil and gas interests. Pruitt also used a private email account to conduct official business, a fact he denied during his Senate confirmation hearing.
For all the people screaming over Hillary Clinton using a private, secured server for emails, to the point of wanting her locked up, where’s all the yelling over Pruitt, Pence, and Tillerson? Why is it their particular fuck-ups and deliberate obfuscation and lying is okay? It’s not even making minor scandal points among the Trumpholes, which goes to show, I suppose, they never actually gave one tiny shit about Ms. Clinton’s emails, they simply used it as an excuse, and unfortunately, it’s one that worked, as we now find ourselves neck deep in a corrupt regime.
Pat McCrory.
There are times schadenfreude is ever so sweet, and this is one of them. Pat McCrory, that eternal bigot, is now whining that his bigotry is interfering with him finding a job. It turns out that a lot of people aren’t terribly interested in hiring an attention-pandering bigot. Who knew?
In an interview with the Raleigh News & Observer, McCrory complained that his decision to champion HB2 — the infamous “bathroom bill” that banned transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice — was hurting his career prospects.
“People are reluctant to hire me, because, ‘oh my gosh, he’s a bigot,’” McCrory explained to the newspaper. “Which is the last thing I am.”
Unfuckingbelievable. He still clings to this insistence that he’s not a bigot, oh no, why he’s a champion superhero, protecting peeing people!
McCrory said that while he’s been considered for part-time teaching positions at some universities, campuses have been reluctant to hire him over fears that he might spark a backlash among students, who would then respond with disruptive protests.
“That’s not the way our American system should operate – having people purged due to political thought,” he complained.
Oh no, don’t be dishonest, Pat. This isn’t a case of thought crime. You did much more than have an unpopular, stupid, bigoted political thought. You drove the bigoted HB2 at any and all cost, even when your own constituents stood against it, and you were costing your state millions upon millions of dollars. That’s different from having a political thought. Our ‘American’ system should not be stuffed to the rafters with incompetent bigots, either, but it is, and people have the right to oppose them, which they did. You lost your job through your own actions, and you have not taken one step back on your draconian views.
McCrory’s complaints echo similar comments he made recently during a podcast interview in which he claimed that “if you disagree with the politically correct thought police on this new definition of gender, you’re a bigot, you’re the worst of evil.”
Oh For Fuck’s Sake! You godsdamned piece of shit masquerading as a human being! Such a fucking liar. This has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness, nor thought police, nor a ‘new’ definition of gender, and you are a fucking bigot, a terrible, toxic, venomous one, and yes, you are on the side of evil. Someone should have, at some point, taught you there are consequences to both speech and actions. There are *four* pages on Affinity, all posts about McCrory’s evil legislation, and yet all he can manage to do is whine about what a victim he is. And here I thought it was only us SJW snowflakes who did that. Tsk.
Via Raw Story.
but it wouldn’t have been much of a party without all you wonderful people who bother to read and comment here. You are what keeps me going, and you have provided a great deal of support through many dark days. You have also provided me with a wealth of content, my profuse thanks for that, too! So…
And Happy Anniversary to us all!
:D
A long exposure of ‘Ocean Wave’.
This is a stunning art piece, and watching the video, oh, there’s immense joy and delight in it. Watch, then go over to The Creators Project to read all about it!
Joe Baker, Room 101.
…Part of 1984‘s appeal is the language Orwell developed for identifying fascist control methods that are increasingly visible today. Power structures like the Ministries of Truth, Peace, Plenty, and Love—each of which represents the opposite of its title—are reflected in an Environmental Protection Agency led by a climate change denier, and an education department run by someone who prefers “charter” to public education. Conway’s “alternative facts” sound a lot like the book’s “Newspeak,” the simplification and rebranding of common language, and “Doublethink,” whereby the government controls historical records and the news, sounds an awful lot like Breitbart retellings of current events.
With 1984‘s popularity, the constant debate about whether our current world is more like Orwell’s dystopia or the one described in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has resurfaced as well. Both books warn of the dangers their authors perceived was on the horizon, but the living legacy of 1984 is its mark on language, so Creators asked artists to illustrate the terms and concepts from the book that they see reflected in today’s society.
Alex Gamsu Jenkins, Two Minutes of Hate.
You can see the rest of the fabulous artwork, along with each artist’s statement at The Creators Project. Fantastic work!
Downy Woodpecker, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
All the Nazis have a brand new hero, Rep. Steve King. King finally stopped dancing around his white supremacist beliefs, and all the Nazis are jubilant, as reported by Think Progress.
CREDIT: Screenshot, Daily Stormer.
“Steve King is basically an open white nationalist at this point,” Andrew Anglin wrote on Sunday. Anglin is the founder of The Daily Stormer, a meme-heavy, far-right site that takes its name from an English translation of a Nazi tabloid. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently reported The Daily Stormer has become the most popular English-language, far-right site on the internet.
“OUR civilization and SOMEBODY ELSE’S babies. Not really any nuance there,” Anglin wrote. “Steve King should be Speaker of the House. Period. There [sic] is as plain as the nose on your face. He is /ourguy/.”
[…]
And that, from a sitting congressman, is part of what has internet racists excited — both about the comments themselves, and what they suggest regarding the prominence of white nationalism under Trump.
“King is more /ourguy/ than Trump has ever been, but would he be saying these kinds of things without Trump? We can only hope these kinds of statements serve to embolden more of our people, as they see that people like themselves are in positions of power,” begins an article on Altright.com, Richard Spencer’s new site.
[…]
Spencer himself also praised the comments, saying in a YouTube video that he’s “proud” of King and musing, “if this is a signal that conservatives are moving in the right direction under Trump, that they are getting at something real, then I am very happy.”
That line was echoed on Gab, which became the favored messaging platform of white nationalists after Twitter started cracking down on hate speech.
“If Trump’s presidency has emboldened members of Congress to speak up against our destruction, the success or failure of Trump’s policies will be a mere footnote in his legacy,” one use wrote.
David Duke, former leader of the KKK, went on a Twitter tear praising King, urging supporters to move to Iowa, and floating King as a successor to Trump who would “finish the job.”
[…]
King also drew praise on Stormfront, a neo-Nazi web forum founded by a former Alabama Klan boss. The SPLC calls Stormfront “the first major hate site on the Internet,” and, until it was overtaken by the Daily Stormer, it was the most prominent.
“Congressman King has always stood up to the anti-white establishment but lately he seems to have manned up to his full power level,” one user wrote, praising King for not walking back on Monday. “When they get our back we need to get theirs. A U.S. Congressman is not just some smuck [sic]. BUGS, Alt-Right, 4Chan, Pepe Task Force…you guys already own most of the internet. Maybe help out the Congressman?”
Other users at Stormfront were thrilled at the new platform for their ideas.
“At least the idea is being talked about in the news,” one user wrote, ending their post “88” — which is shorthand among neo-Nazis for “Heil Hitler.”
[…]
“It’s time for KING STEVE to take his place below the throne of the GOD EMPEROR,” he wrote. The “god emperor” is a far-right pet name for President Trump. “We need Steve King memes ASAP. Make them, spread them. We already memed a man President, we can meme a man Speaker.”
It remains to be seen whether or not King will stand firm in his white supremacism after the inevitable backlash. So far, he’s doubled down and been unapologetic in the face of criticism. I don’t really need to point out how bad this is, do I?
Full story at Think Progress.
Shutterstock.
Oh gods, Kellyanne Conway. Who on earth let her back on television? In attempts to wave aside the whole “President Obama wiretapped me!” delusions of Mr. Tweet, she brings up ‘an article’ about surveillance, which sounds like it either came out of Breitbart or The Tin Hat Times. To People in general: NO, your microwave oven is not watching you. It’s not taking your photo. It’s not recording you, either.
Q: Do you know if Trump Tower was wiretapped?
Kellyanne: There was an article this week—you can be spied on via a camera in your microwave pic.twitter.com/rObFkIrLGG
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) March 13, 2017
Q: Do you know if Trump Tower was wiretapped?
Kellyanne: There was an article this week – you can be spied on via a camera in your microwave.
Though Trump initially accused Obama of “tapping my phones in October,” Conway suggested the surveillance might have gone much further than that. Asked by The Bergen Record if she “know[s] whether Trump Tower was wiretapped?” Conway replied, “What I can say is that there are many ways to surveil each other now, unfortunately. There was an article this week that talked about how you can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets, any number of different ways. Microwaves that turn into cameras, etcetera.”
Microwaves that turn into cameras. Earlier, Ms. Conway deflected questions by stating that she wasn’t Inspector Gadget. I think perhaps she’s been watching too much Inspector Gadget.
(WikiLeaks’ recent dump of CIA documents indicates some microwaves have the capability to be used as cameras. It appears Conway’s claim was based on that.)
I don’t think that would be much of a concern in the Trump household, would it? Do they ever actually set foot in a kitchen, or know what anything is for, and how to use it? I’d think a microwave would be out of the question, because it would be difficult to have one gold plated. (If there is a gold plated microwave out there, I beg of you, please let me live in ignorance.)
Later, on Good Morning America, host George Stephanopoulos asked Conway was asked why she would suggest Obama using high-tech microwaves to surveil her boss “without any evidence.” Conway responded by saying she was actually referring to surveillance capabilities in general, not what did or did not happen in Trump Tower specifically, and acknowledged she has no evidence that Trump was surveilled whatsoever.
“No, of course I don’t have evidence for these allegations,” Conway said.
That rather sums up the whole fuckin’ regime. The full story is at Think Progress.
Trump l’oeil: the atrium of Trump Towers.
Peter York has a fascinating essay over at Politico, about the shared aesthetics of dictators. Florid, overblown, excessive, and so on. Within this rather limited aesthetic, York identifies 10 defining dictator chic rules obeyed by most dictators, and he wrote a book about Dictator Chic. Just a bit here:
After my book Dictator Style came out, friends and editors would call me to alert me to the latest tranche of pictures to be released: unverified photos of Robert Mugabe’s plutocratic-looking house in Zimbabwe, the sacked Qadhafi compound in Tripoli and the Yanukovych palace in Kiev. Each time, I felt as if I could predict every last chair cover and golden heroic beast. Come on, I’d think, surprise me!
Then, in late 2015, I came across a set of pictures with no identifying text. They appeared to show a gigantic apartment in what looked, from the windows, very much like New York. But I know Manhattan and its sophisticated style pretty well, and at first glance, you would think the place didn’t belong to an American but to a Russian oligarch, or possibly a Saudi prince with a second home in the United States. There were overscaled rooms, and obviously incorrect-looking historical detailing and proportions. The home had lots of gilded French furniture and the strange impersonal look of a hotel lobby, with chairs and sofas placed uncomfortably far from one another. There were masses of gold; there were the usual huge chandeliers, branded relics of famous sportsmen like Muhammad Ali, and mushroom-colored marble floors. There was relatively little in the way of paintings, but otherwise, the place reeked of dictator chic.
As it turned out, this familiar yet unfamiliar apartment—a familiar style to me by then, but in an unlikely location—belonged to Donald Trump, who by then was running for president. This was the penthouse of the potential leader of the free world. The design work, I have since learned, was started by the late Angelo Donghia, a decorator better known for a chic Manhattan look. But the substantive current design had been done by one Henry Conversano, who designed extensively—and perhaps unsurprisingly—for casinos. No matter how you looked at it, the main thing this apartment said was, “I am tremendously rich and unthinkably powerful.” This was the visual language of public, not private, space. It was the language of the Eastern European and Middle Eastern nouveau riche.
Why does all of this matter? Domestic interiors reveal how people want to be seen. But they also reveal something about the owners’ inner lives, their cultural reference points and how they relate to other people.
Head over to Politico for the full article, recommended!