Reality Check.

Credit: Bigstock.

Credit: Bigstock.

The inaugural speech was dark, ominous, painting a picture of a disintegrated America. The inaugural speech was also a lie. All of it. This should not come as a surprise; if there has been any consistency about Trump, it’s been that he lies, constantly. It’s in Trump’s interest to paint such a picture, and it’s also necessary for his plans for fascism – reality is not his friend. Fortunately for us, Think Progress has a nice point by point refutation of all Trump’s inaugural claims.

During his inaugural address on Friday, President Donald Trump painted a bleak picture of an America beset by violent crime, drugs, and lack of education. He presented himself as a savior who will “fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.”

[…]

But as was the case during Trump’s similarly dire Republican National Convention speech, many of the claims he used to paint his picture of “American carnage” were false. In other instances, Trump referred to real problems, but didn’t mention that he has no plan to fix them.

[…]

Here are some of the ways in which Trump tried to deceive the American people about the state of their country during his first speech as president.

Jobs

“Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed… We will bring back our jobs,” Trump said.

But during the Obama years, the economy has actually been adding jobs each month at a steady pace: it added jobs for 75 straight months, the longest streak on record. There were 2,157,000 more jobs added over the last year, and 11,250,000 created over Obama’s presidency.

Head over to Think Progress for the full reality check.

Yep.

HLM

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken.

The Power to Nullify.

Reps. Julio Gonzalez and John Koster.

Reps. Julio Gonzalez and John Koster.

Two state legislatures are considering measures that would allow lawmakers to overrule decisions by Supreme Court majorities — and one Florida Republican wants to change the U.S. Constitution to allow Congress to do the same.

In Florida, state Rep. Julio Gonzalez (R-Venice) has filed two bills that would allow the state legislature or the U.S. Congress “to override or nullify court decisions.”

House Joint Resolution 121 would allow lawmakers to undo any state court decision by a two-thirds vote for up to five years, and House Memorial 125 would permit Congress to propose a similar constitutional amendment to give themselves the power to nullify federal court decisions.

Gonzalez, an orthopedic surgeon, said the bills are necessary because judges are often unaccountable to voters and unable to decide cases without considering their practical or political impact.

“(The legislation) would curtail the tendency of activist judges to manipulate the law to suit their political views and agendas,” Gonzalez said. “Equally as important, this would force the people to engage the Legislature in enacting rectifications to current laws that they see as objectionable or flawed, restoring the natural relationship between the people and their legislative bodies. This would also force the electorate to more carefully look at their candidates and their actions during times of re-election.”

There’s that dog whistle, “activist judges”. Yes, we only want judges who will do what we want, fuck the law!

[…]

Washington is considering a similar measure that would allow lawmakers to “reject the determination of the court” by a simple majority on cases where the state’s Supreme Court rules an act unconstitutional.

State Rep. John Koster (R-Arlington Heights), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said he supports the measure because he believes the court overstepped its authority in deciding a lawsuit on education funding.

“It’s a worthy effort to tap (judges) on the shoulder and remind them of separation of powers,” said Koster, who admits the bill might not pass.

Gonzalez identified rulings on public displays of religion — including holiday celebrations and school prayer — and laws against flag-burning as his justification for the bills.

Emphasis mine. Well, that didn’t take long, did it? There isn’t even the slightest effort to wrap this in flowery language. I wonder how long it will be before bibles and public prayer are foisted on what’s left of schools.

Via Raw Story.

Just The Facts, Ma’am.

facts

Handy dandy help for everyone, from FactCheck.org – How to spot fake news. An article to bookmark and refer to when needed, and I imagine it might be needed a lot in the coming years.

…Those all still hold true, but fake stories — as in, completely made-up “news” — has grown more sophisticated, often presented on a site designed to look (sort of) like a legitimate news organization. Still, we find it’s easy to figure out what’s real and what’s imaginary if you’re armed with some critical thinking and fact-checking tools of the trade.

Here’s our advice on how to spot a fake:

Good, solid advice. Click on over to read the whole article.

And, here’s a good way to sharpen up those bullshit detection skills, learning that correlation does not imply causation. While most people know this, at least hazily so, that’s one fact that tends to get kicked out in favour of “hmmm, that’s interesting, ennit?” and “that’s some coincidence!” and so forth. We’re all prone to veering off into the more magical type of thinking, and the correlation/causation bit is an oft used trick to manipulate people. Being much smarter than that, of course you want to make sure you don’t fall for such shit. Head on over to Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations, and you can enjoy learning all about it. Spurious Correlations is now a ridiculous and wonderful book, and I highly recommend it.

Okay…Inauguration Roundup.

IR

© Laura Racero.

Oh, where to start. I guess we’ll start with “Hey, look, a tiny, Bane-full inauguration!

(Photo: Wikipedia commons and screen capture).

(Photo: Wikipedia commons and screen capture).

For all the boasting about the bigliest ever, the crowds at Trump’s inauguration were woefully scant. The Twitternet jumped all over this immediately, and you can see many of the tweets here. Also noted by the Twitternet, and most everyone else on the planet, Trump borrowed a bit of his speech from a fictional villain, which is terribly apropos, but he picked the wrong villain, Bane. Bane was more of a “eat the rich!” kind of villain. That didn’t stop Trump:

Fans of the Batman franchise film The Dark Knight Rises were startled to hear the words of the movie villain Bane coming out of Republican Pres. Donald Trump’s mouth as he made his inaugural address — purportedly written by Trump himself — on Friday.

“We’re giving the power back to you. The people,” Trump said Friday, a nearly verbatim quote from Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay for the 2012 film starring Christian Bale as Batman and Tom Hardy as Bane.

You can read all about this one, and see some of the tweets here.

The Twitternet also broke out in gales of laughter and comparisons over Kellyanne Conway’s outfit:

Kellyanne Conway attends President Trump's inauguration (Screen cap).

Kellyanne Conway attends President Trump’s inauguration (Screen cap).

Conway’s outfit, which TMZ claims she describes as “Trump Revolutionary Wear,” is a red-white-and-blue getup that is meant to be somewhat reminiscent of Revolutionary War-era military uniforms.

CNN’s Hunter Schwarz notes that her coat is actually a $3,600 Gucci wool a-line coat — and CNN’s Kate Bennett writes that the coat was originally designed to pay tribute to the city of London, which isn’t exactly a place to celebrate the American Revolution.

You can read all about that, and see tweets here. Oh, and the buttons on it are cat heads.

Then there’s a compilation of all the things that didn’t happen, didn’t come through, and weren’t bigly at all:

Women’s March bus permit requests outnumber inauguration requests by 3 times.

Most hotel bookings have been made by anti-Trump protesters.

Trump is wrong (again): dress shops still have plenty of available frocks.

“There’s never been less demand for inaugural ballgowns in my 38 years,” Peter Marx, who owns D.C. dress shop Saks Jandel, told People. “Never ever has it been less for the inaugural.”

Other shops expressed similar sentiments.

“We were expecting heavy traffic and it has not been that way,” a D.C. Bloomingdale’s representative told Elle. “The last inauguration was a lot more people shopping.”

A spokesperson from Intermix told the outlet, “Usually, it is really big for us, but this year we haven’t seen anything yet, surprisingly.”

Elle notes that “among others we called, White House Black Market and Cusp in Georgetown confirmed they have options in stock. So does Neiman Marcus. And Gucci. And Lord & Taylor. And Nordstrom.”

There’s more here.

And there were artists out, as well as all the marchers and protesters. FORCE put on a big show:

CREDIT: Nate Larson.

CREDIT: Nate Larson.

…For roughly 45 minutes, a slideshow of photos and quotes from survivors circulated on the front of the building, as passersby stopped to take it in. The organizers of the installation hoped their message reached at least a few visitors here for Trump’s inauguration.

“As a native woman, as a queer woman, as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and intimate parter violence, there’s so much that is traumatic about seeing my country support somebody that represents violence against all of those things,” said Rebecca Nagle, a co-director of FORCE. “The racism and the misogyny that [Trump] represents is bigger than just him as a person and a figurehead, but is something that is deeply embedded in American culture.”

Many victims of sexual assault were particularly traumatized by the election of Donald Trump, who bragged on tape about sexually abusing woman. Now, as he prepares to enter the White House, there are already signs that Trump won’t pursue policies aimed at preventing sexual violence. As part of his proposed plan to reduce government spending, Trump administration officials reportedly approached the Department of Justice with a plan to eliminate the federal grants used to combat violence against women.

“The goal of the piece is really to uplift survivors voices at a time that a lot of people are normalizing Trump’s behavior,” said Nagle.

Full story at Think Progress. A great work by FORCE!

And because there’s always bad news:

President Donald Trump’s whitehouse.gov page omitted references to a number of policy issues championed by his predecessor, including climate change, civil rights and healthcare, providing a blueprint for the new administration’s priorities over the next four years.

Full story here.

Swarfcrow.

I definitely want to build a large scarecrow come Springtime, but in the meanwhile, I want to make a small one, using swarf for the head. So, time to play a bit and decide what I want to do…

Swarfcrow

And a better shot of the swarf, because it’s so pretty:

Swarfcrow1

And Trashcrow – this would be for a full size only, too much of a pain to do small. Doing a Trashcrow would give me a chance to play around with plastic bag molding, and playing with fire and other fun stuff. :D

Scrows

Scrows1

Clickety for full size. © C. Ford.

Seeing Science!

africa-safari

Eggfactory

Eugenics

katherine-johnson

Katherine Johnson, NASA Physicist.

All of these are from Seeing Science, and there’s so much there! They also have a marvelous timeline, which starts in 1021:

1021

1021

Alhazan (965–1040), an Arab physicist, publishes the 7-volume Book of Optics, in which the pinhole camera and camera obscura are described. Leonardo da Vinci doesn’t show up until 1508.

There’s so much to explore! Seeing Science. * Seeing Science at Hyperallergic.