Just so you know — people will be gathering at the Republican party office tomorrow at 5 to protest the events in Charlottesville.

I think it’s entirely appropriate to throw this vileness directly into the laps of the Republicans. Own it, people: this is your party now.

I do believe I said something about that cultural marxism lunacy that’s been floating about in the far right fever swamp for several years. Now would you believe Charles Pierce has found an astonishingly incoherent policy statement that reads like it came straight out of that swamp?

Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck. However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing. Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.

…

Academia has served as a principle counter-state node for some time and remains a key conduit for creating future adherents to cultural Marxist narratives and their derivative worldview. The Deep State – The successful outcome of cultural Marxism is a bureaucratic state beholden to no one, certainly not the American people. With no rule of law considerations outside those that further deep state power, the deep state truly becomes, as Hegel advocated, god bestriding the earth. Global Corporatists & Bankers – Exploitation of populations, unfettered by national protections and notions of personal morality and piety. Democratic Leadership – The democratic leadership has been a counter-state enabler that executes, sustains, and protects cultural Marxist programs of action and facilitates the relentless expansion of the deep state. Republican Leadership – More afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” the Republican Establishment accepts and enforces cultural Marxist memes within its own sphere of operations. In doing so, knowingly or not, it becomes an agent of that.

Pure madness. Except this doesn’t come from some fringe nutter on Twitter. It’s from a guy named Rich Higgins, who was serving on the National Security Council. The conspiracy theorists have taken over the state.

Our boob of a president has now announced that Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, because he’s a blustering incompetent who would love to bomb something to distract from the legal actions creeping up on him.

North Korea is happy to call his bluff. They’re spreading the news about their attack plan, and they’re willing to be specific: they’ll launch missiles at Guam.

North Korea said under its attack plan, four Hwasong-12 rockets would fly over Shimane, Hiroshima and Koichi prefectures in Japan, hitting waters 19 to 25 miles from the island, the Associated Press reported. The plan could be sent to leader Kim Jong Un for approval within a week or so.

They’re threatening to fire a warning shot. So we’re at the next step in the nuclear poker game: they’ll launch a few missiles at us, just to let us know they have the ability. What shall we do next? Do you think our madman would possibly back down and negotiate at some point? I don’t think so.

A prediction: If Kim Jong Un lobs a few bombs in our general direction, Trump will use that as an excuse to target and destroy the missile launching sites…and then the shooting war begins.

Donald Trump is blustering at North Korea.

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening – beyond a normal statement – and as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which the world has never seen before.

This is total madness: mad threats against a paranoid semi-religious cult of personality. It can only lead to the death of millions.

Mark Bowden gives a detailed analysis of our options, none of them good. Bowden, you may recall, is the author of Blackhawk Down, so he has some experience in examining military cluster-fucks, and this looks like the cluster-fuckiest of them all.

I visited Seoul a while back, and it is a lovely, prosperous city of about 10 million people. It will be the first casualty if Trump decides to John Wayne his way against an egomaniac with a wall of artillery aimed at the place, and Tokyo would be next on Kim Jong Un’s list of targets. We have to shut down our American version of Kim Jong Un before he unleashes unspeakable tragedy.

James Damore, the author of that dumbass Google manifesto, has been fired. Now he wants to sue Google, and all the usual suspects are howling about “Free Speech!”

It’s absurd. This really isn’t a free speech issue.

• Damore was working for a private company; constitutional free speech rights apply to limits on how the government can regulate expression. He would be a fool to try and sue on free speech issues.

• His position did not include a contractual proviso that he was allowed to use company resources and time to promote his ideas. This wasn’t a job, like tenured professorships, that encourage some degree of independence of expression as part of the job.

• Even when free speech is part of your employment, there are restrictions. I can’t decide to teach invalid bullshit to my students, or sexually proposition my colleagues, without getting slammed hard and losing my job (admittedly, after a lot of painful bureaucratic entanglement, but even positions with public recognition of their independence have limits.)

• Employers can have a code of conduct, and Damore apparently violated Google’s. That gives them the right to decide that one is unsuitable for a job.

• Imagine that Damore, through incompetence or malice, had disrupted Google’s computer network. We’d have no problem seeing that that was a fireable offense, because it affected property and things. Damore in this case had deliberately disrupted the people who worked at Google. Why do we struggle to see the equivalence? His manifesto was blind to the importance of empathy and social concerns, but that doesn’t mean a multi-billion dollar organization has to be.

Most embarrassingly, Damore has a Ph.D. in Systems Biology. How the heck do you get an advanced degree in biology and hold the kind of false biases about human nature written in that manifesto?

But don’t you worry about James Damore. Julian Assange is offering him a job, and he’s guaranteed to fall upwards into the arms of rich MRA/racist asshats. He’s found regressive notoriety among these kinds of people:

Eric Weinstein, managing director of Peter Theil’s investment firm Thiel Capital, wrote a widely shared tweet to Google asking the company to stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.

“Your girl” ought to have the freedom to code without ignorant assholes writing manifestos to poison the work environment against her; she deserves the freedom to fight back against lies, like those of Damore.

And isn’t it ironic that Damore is now achieving infamy not by his skill in coding, but in his primitive incompetence at social issues, which now requires him to find success not in coding, but in placating an alt-right mob?

Someone threw an Improvised Explosive Device through a window in Bloomington yesterday. Police are baffled.

Neither the FBI nor the Bloomington Police Department, which initially responded to the explosion, speculated on a motive for the incident.

“At this point, our focus is to determine who and why,” Potts said at a news conference. “Is it a hate crime? Is it an act of terror? … Again, that’s what the investigation is going to determine.”

We know a few things already.

A Bloomington mosque was attacked with an explosive device Saturday as people were preparing for morning prayers, investigators and witnesses said.

A bomb was thrown into a religious building before the start of their services, but it might not have been an act of terror. OK. It might not have been intended to intimidate or discourage practitioners of a certain religion that has mobs of haters who blame them for their problems.

OK.

I’ll wait patiently while the cops try to figure it out. At least they aren’t responding by shooting people, which is a step forward.

Lynna is your curator. This thread isn’t going away any time soon. SAD.

(Previous thread)

That’s good to know. It’s a line in the amicus brief filed by the ACLU in a case in which Bob Murray, reality-challenged friend of coal, is suing John Oliver for saying mean things about him and the coal industry. It’s hilarious. Somebody had fun writing it.

This case is beyond meritless. It is offensive to the very ideals of free speech embodied in the First Amendment. The fact that Plaintiffs filed this case is ridiculous enough; but, to pour gasoline on the fire, plaintiffs’ counsel has also filed a motion asking the court to make John Oliver not say mean things about him anymore. It is frankly shocking that Plaintiffs were able to find attorneys willing to file a lawsuit that is so obviously unconstitutional.

It is apt that one of Plaintiffs’ objections to the show is about a human-sized squirrell named Mr. Nutterbutter, because this case is nuts. Which also begs the question: is Mr. Nutterbutter one of the 50 Doe Defendants included in this action?

I have to remember the general principle in the title next time someone tries to sue me.

I have this crazy idea that America really needs a political party that supports labor, women, and minorities, and that is dedicated to helping all people rise up. It should favor causes that improve civil rights and distributes power widely and works on making America better, rather than claiming it is already the best. It ought to have a platform that states clearly that it wants to promote the general welfare and strengthens every level of society, and that encourages greater autonomy of individuals, no matter how poor or wealthy they are.

Yeah, I’m a dreamer. I’d like to see the Democratic party become that party, rather than drifting away, because sure as hell the Republicans are its antithesis. Obviously, the Democrats are not that party right now. The Democrats just want to win by appealing to Republican voters. They don’t want reproductive rights to be an essential part of their platform.

Democrats will not withhold financial support for candidates who oppose abortion rights, the chairman of the party’s campaign arm in the House said in an interview with The Hill.

Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said there will be no litmus tests for candidates as Democrats seek to find a winning roster to regain the House majority in 2018.

“There is not a litmus test for Democratic candidates,” said Luján, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman. “As we look at candidates across the country, you need to make sure you have candidates that fit the district, that can win in these districts across America.”

“Litmus tests“? WTF? This is about standing for a principle that is supposedly represented by the party that wants our vote. You want your party to stand for nothing, nothing is what you’ll get. Writing off pro-choice candidates in particular districts because you’ve decided they can’t win there is an admission that you want to elect Republicans Lite — that you want to populate the party with people who will undermine the goals of the party even more.

I don’t want politicians who’ll accommodate lunacy, I want politicians who will stand up against it. We have precious few of them. And the crusade against allowing women to control their own organs is becoming evil and absurd, and they’re winning because of the craven politicians who are apparently in charge of policy for the Democrats.

Look at what’s going on in Kentucky: they’re trying to shut down the last abortion clinic in the state, and it’s getting militantly ugly. They’re going to wheel in a jumbotron and show graphic videos of abortions to passers-by. You know, if they had a jumbotron showing videos of cancer surgeries, it would be gross and horrific and bloody, too — but it wouldn’t be a good argument that we should stop treating cancer.

This has to be one of the top priorities for a party that I would support — it has to defy the religiously-motivated nonsense that is driving the defunding of Planned Parenthood, the closing of women’s health clinics, and the demonization of women who want to make their own choices about children. If the Democrats want to be the party that doesn’t give a fuck about any of that, good luck in the next election when they have to make a case that they’re different from the assholes now in power.

By the way, you know what else doesn’t work? Silicon Valley douchebro billionaires deciding that plutocrats like Bloomberg should be our next candidate. I am constantly horrified by the bad ideas people suggest to rejuvenate the party, when the real problem is that they’ve lost all connection to reality and the needs of the people they’re supposed to represent.

The Mooch has been fired. He only lasted 10 days on the job. He didn’t even make it to the opening show of SNL!

Poor guy. He missed the birth of his child to hang out with Trump, his wife is divorcing him for tying his ambitions to Trump, and now Trump has kicked him to the curb. I’m almost feeling some sympathy for him.

So who’s next? Next to be communications director, next to be fired, next to be impeached?