Facebook, Oh Facebook XVI.

god

Facebook banned God, who has over 3 million followers, for the above post. Facebook God is a progressive sort of god, and I guess that got up some FB angel’s nose.

While God might not be safe from the wrath of Facebook, his swift reinstatement shows that hell hath no fury like millions of social media fans who want their deity back.

Last week, God – the verified Facebook page with more than three million followers – posted the following: “Dear Americans, Stop making your military so damn huge and give people medicine and education because you’re sick and stupid. Thanks, God.”

Two days later, God was slapped with a 30-day ban.

God, being God, wasn’t having it though. “I posted this opinion on the day it was announced that Obamacare will be defunded and 24 million people will lose their healthcare,” he said in an article on Good. “The opinion goes viral, gaining over 100,000 likes and 15,000 shares. A few hundred people disagree with the opinion. Rather than move on, or even use the ‘angry’ reaction face, what do they do? They report the opinion as being offensive.”

god1

“Today I was notified by FB that My Account has been restored! THANK YOU, HUMANS! I am sure that the huge response from you yesterday was the difference in achieving this so quickly,” God wrote.

“YOU. YOU ARE AWESOME.”

Via Scary Mommy.

The Man Behind the Curtain.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaking at CPAC 2011 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr).

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaking at CPAC 2011 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr).

Trump’s antics are excellent at diverting attention, and certainly, for many people, trolling the Pendejo-elect is fun, and no doubt a safety valve. As these distractions trundle along, the man behind the curtain is busy doing all the nefarious dirty work. It’s the hands of the man behind the curtain that need watching.

Exhibit A in this sordid department is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is as comfortable lying with a poker face as Trump is attacking critics like Streep. The takeaway is, watch what they do, not what they say.

McConnell’s latest bout of high-stakes hypocritical lying came Sunday, when he told CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” he would not slow down or reschedule any of this week’s conformation hearings, after Democrats protested that nominees like billionaire Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education designate, had not submitted financial disclosure forms. McConnell has scheduled most of the hearings for Wednesday, the day Trump gives his first press conference since Election Day and the day after President Obama gives his farewell address. The hearings will get scant coverage on television, the medium that most helped elect Trump.

“All of these little procedural complaints are related to their frustration at not only having lost the White House but having lost the Senate,” McConnell said, referring to Senate Democrats’ demands for probing the many conflicts of interest and private agendas of the most billionaire-filled cabinet in history. “I understand that, but we need to, sort of, grow up here and get past that.”

When McConnell mocks “procedural complaints” and says “grow up,” he means the GOP must be free to quash anything that interferes with their power grab. This is the GOP’s Senate leader who single-handedly blocked President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a moderate praised by Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT. McConnell is also responsible for blocking Obama’s appointment of 84 federal district court judges—one-eighth of the district court bench—including noncontroversial nominations. And he is the same Republican who in February 2009 wrote a letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, saying “prior to considering any time agreements on the floor on any [Cabinet] nominee, we expect the following standards will be met.” That included completing FBI background checks, all financial disclosures, Office of Government Ethics vetting, committee questionnaires and “courtesy visits with members.”

McConnell has long been one of the least principled Republican leaders. In the late 1990s, he opposed all forms of campaign finance reform when the McCain-Feingold bill was proposed, countering deregulation of donation limits and disclosure by donors was all that was needed. McConnell changed his tune on disclosure after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, because the biggest GOP donors wanted to throw all the mud they could but were too cowardly to publicly attach their names to the political attacks they funded.

McConnell is a committed hypocrite, a master of two-faced falsity, and filled with sociopathic ruthlessness. While all eyes are on Trump, he’s busy pushing the mountains of shit through the door before anyone even notices. It’s past time to take eyes off the puppet, and pay attention to the puppet masters.

Full article at Raw Story.

The Bombshell.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic.

The Russian involvement in the election gets more and more interesting. As much as the Pendejo-elect wants this ignored and forgotten, that’s one wish he’s not going to get. The ‘net suffered yet another minor explosion over the latest allegations, which have not been verified.

Yesterday, CNN published a bombshell report: The classified briefing on Russian interference in the U.S. election includes information, collected by a former member of British intelligence, that Russia possessed compromising personal information on Donald Trump. The allegations are unsubstantiated but were sufficiently credible for the intelligence community to inform President Obama and President-elect Trump.

CNN builds on a report by Mother Jones published before the election, based on the same information. BuzzFeed subsequently published the full dossier, which has been circulating among journalists and others for weeks, that was the basis of CNN and Mother Jones’ reporting.

The dossier contains a variety of sensational allegations, including that Russia has videotape of Trump engaging in exotic sexual acts with prostitutes and that there was an ongoing exchange of information between the Trump campaign and Russia. (The later allegation is substantiated, in part, by Russian officials.)

If you’re going to click about and indulge in reading all that juicy intel, I suggest having an empty stomach. Yes, some of it is that bad. Over at Think Progress, it’s been noted that the verifiable and public statements by Trump about Russia, and Putin in particular, take on a brand new shine and spin, given the new allegations. They take a good look at 15 of Trump’s statements, waxing eloquent over the intelligence and strength of Putin.

Full Story at Think Progress.

Also see: ‘Trump claims he has ‘nothing to with Russia.’ His son said the opposite. Donald Trump Jr. claimed “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The Phantom Atlas.

I love maps. I have a calendar up which is comprised of antique maps. Cartography is a colourful and wonderful art, as well as a record of how we thought at various stages. The farther you go back, the more fascinating maps are, and it’s not just the artwork. Of course they were terribly wrong, and wrought more of imagination than anything else, but there is such wonder and awe! So many places that turned out to have existence in the mind, so many magical creatures which weren’t. Now you can explore The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching. (Yes, I noted the Simon & Schuster UK, and I’m not happy about it.)

Sea monsters on Olaus Magnus’s “Carta marina et description septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium” (“Nautical Chart and Description of the Northern Lands and Wonders”) (1527–39).

Sea monsters on Olaus Magnus’s “Carta marina et description septemtrionalium terrarum ac mirabilium” (“Nautical Chart and Description of the Northern Lands and Wonders”) (1527–39).

“This is an atlas of the world — not as it ever existed, but as it was thought to be,” Brooke-Hitching writes in an introduction. “The countries, islands, cities, mountains, rivers, continents, and races collected in this book are all entirely fictitious; and yet each was for a time — sometimes for centuries — real. How? Because they existed on maps.”

Mythical islands were often copied by mapmakers, who, for instance, could not easily voyage out to the Southern Hemisphere to see if it did indeed have the giant Terra Australis continent. The Phantom Atlas includes Hy Brasil, recently the subject of a Boston Public Library exhibition, which stayed on maps for five centuries, and had tales of a sorcerer who lived with huge black rabbits and, later, UFOs. Although Brooke-Hitching features extremes of credulity, like a 40-foot “sea worm” that roamed the shores of Norway on a 16th-century map by Olaus Magnus, he also cites more recent mistakes. Sandy Island was recorded in the eastern Coral Sea by a whaling ship in 1876, and it wasn’t until November 2012 that it was deemed fictional. And in the 19th century, there were still those who believed in a flat Earth, such as Professor Orlando Ferguson of Hot Springs, South Dakota, who in 1893 illustrated a map arguing for this planar view of the planet, which he based on biblical texts.

What makes Brooke-Hitching’s book more than just a collection of oddities is the emphasis on why these errors happen, and how relying on religion at the exclusion of science, or valuing outsider reports ahead of indigenous knowledge, detrimentally impacted centuries of exploring.

Map of the Arctic by Gerardus Mercator (first printed 1595, edition from 1623), with the mythical “Rupes Nigra” magnetic black rock at the North Pole.

Map of the Arctic by Gerardus Mercator (first printed 1595, edition from 1623), with the mythical “Rupes Nigra” magnetic black rock at the North Pole.

There’s much, much more at Hyperallergic.

The Painting Hated by the GOP.

David Pulphus's painting in response to the Ferguson unrest, "Untitled #1", won first place in Missouri's 1st Congressional District in the 2016 United States Congressional Art Competition.

David Pulphus’s painting in response to the Ferguson unrest, “Untitled #1”, won first place in Missouri’s 1st Congressional District in the 2016 United States Congressional Art Competition.

Each year since 1982, the Congressional Institute has sponsored a high school art competition whereby students submit artwork to their congressional representative’s office, which in turn selects a winner. The 435 winning artworks are then exhibited in Washington, DC, hung salon style in a hallway between the Capitol Building and Longworth House Office Building for a year. The office of Representative William Lacy Clay, a Democrat from St. Louis, Missouri, selected a painting by Cardinal Ritter College Prep High School senior David Pulphus in early May 2016. Early this month, the untitled painting was hung in the Capitol. A few days later, the Independent Journal Review, a right-wing website with a mixed record on factual reporting, published an article titled, “Painting of Cops as Pigs Hung Proudly in US Capitol.” A cycle of outrage began. Fox News picked up the story. In a ginned up moment, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican from San Diego, California unscrewed the painting from the wall, delivered it to Representative Clay’s office, and went to Fox News to brag about it. Today, Representative Clay and members of the Congressional Black Caucus rehung the painting. Shortly thereafter Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican from Colorado, removed it again, only to have Representative Clay rehang it again. Congressional Republicans are discussing how to remove it permanently.

The full story is at Hyperallergic. For people who almost never shut up about being persecuted or censored (or criticized), conservatives are always the first ones to try and censor anything they don’t like.

Word Wednesday.

words

Footle 

Noun. Intransitive verb, footled, footling.

  1. To talk or act foolishly.
  2.  To waste time: trifle, fool.

Footling

Adjective.

  1. Lacking judgment or ability: Inept <footling amateurs who understand nothing – E.R. Bentley>
  2. Lacking use or value: Trivial <footling matters>

v.”to trifle,” 1892, from dialectal footer “to trifle,” footy “mean, paltry” (1752), perhaps from French se foutre “to care nothing,” from Old French foutre “to copulate with,” from Latin futuere, originally “to strike, thrust” (cf. confute). But OED derives the English dialect words from foughty (c.1600), from Dutch vochtig or Danish fugtig “damp, musty;” related to fog (n.).

“It was a unique machine. By the time of his last try, Marc had grasped the point of it: you had to make up a question in your head, then consult the oracle. He had hesitated between ‘Will I get my medieval accounts finished in time?’ which he found too footling, and ‘Is there a woman somewhere who will fall in love with me?’, but he didn’t want to know if the answer to that was no, so he had finally opted for a question which didn’t commit him to anything: ‘Does God exist?’.  – Dog Will Have His Day, Fred Vargas.

The Presidential Inauguration: Softly Sensual.

Trump humps flag. Twitter.

Trump humps flag. Twitter.

The man responsible for planning President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration says the event will be notable for its “soft sensuality.”

In response to a question about whether he had enough performers for the swearing-in, Tom Barrack, the chairman of the inauguration committee, told reporters to expect something “beautiful.”

“We’re fortunate in that we have the greatest celebrity in the world, which is the president-elect, side by side is the current president…So what we’ve done instead of trying to surround him with what people consider A-listers is we are going to surround him with the soft sensuality of the place,” Barrack said in the lobby of Trump Tower.

“It’s a much more poetic cadence than having a circus-like celebration that’s a coronation.”

Oh, right. As if people are going to believe the King of Crass, the Prince of Pussy Grabbing didn’t want to put on the bigliest, yuuuugest circus ever. It’s always interesting to see just what shit people try to spin when things don’t go the way Donny wants. I guess all those frantic pleas that went out to one entertainer after another were what, performance art? I’ve never bothered to watch any inauguration, and this one I’ll be especially pleased to skip, but I have to say that even if I had planned on watching, the words “soft sensuality” combined with “Donald Trump” would effectively scare me away.

Naturally, the Twitterati are all a twitter over this latest spin.

Full story at CBS News.

Say Hello!

BlogsInt

We have new bloggers joining FTB, and most of them will need a few dazed days to get their blogs together, but Odgraphix is up and running, with a terrific post.

Also up and running, Reprobate Spreadsheet, known to some of us as Hj Hornbeck, and Crip Dyke, at Pervert Justice. There’s also a rumor going  around about The Babbler, check it out. And say hi to Rowan at Cobs Web, too!

Have a visit, say hello!

MMIW Website.

mm

Families of missing and murdered Indigenous women should sign up for MMIW inquiry emails while they wait to register to participate, inquiry commission officials say.

The emails will provide updates ahead of the inquiry, which is expected to begin in spring.

“We want to create a families first process,” said Michael Hutchinson, the commission’s director of communications. “Nobody has a list of the people that want to take part in the national inquiry.… We’re trying to collect that information from families.”

The MMIW inquiry has a new website, where families should be able to register soon.

[…]

The commission is only now starting to connect with families through the new website, to develop a database of who wants to give formal testimony to the commission in the new year.

Hutchinson said they are developing a form to simplify the process of registering with the inquiry.

A crisis line is also available for family members or friends who need support at 1-844-413-6649.

Via CBC.

National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.