President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

He magically stayed off Twitter in early November 2016. It can be done.

I’m surprised the Brits or the Israelis haven’t found a way to jam or hack his mobile already.

 

There is no telling how many intel services have gotten stuff off of his phone.

 

Gonna backtrack a bit.

About the cultural sites thing... You know who does that? The very people those jerks in Washington claim superiority over.

Okay, I need to calm down and I want you to meet someone in the figurative internet sense that one can meet anybody.



This is Khaled al-Asaad. Or more appropriately, this was Khaled al-Asaad. He was beheaded by ISIL in 2015 after refusing to surrender artifacts excavated from the ancient city of Palmyra. He was 83 at the time. So you might be thinking, "He was an old guy protecting his lifetime academic hobby horse and who cares about some statues from a civilization that's been gone for thousands of years?"

Let me try to create an analogous model. Imagine a bunch of homicidal Fundies decide to ransack the archives of the Museum of Natural History to fund whatever anti-intellectual, destructive, anti-humanity thing they want to bring about. (This would be pretty much everything they stand for. Just pick one.) Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Fagan meet them at the door. The Fundies demand everything in the vaults and Gould and Fagan tell them no. They respond by publicly beheading two of our finest science educators and then defiling and hanging their bodies on the front portico.

That's pretty much what happened in Syria in August of 2015.

Those wastes of protein murdered the Syrian equivalent to Carl Sagan. Khaled al-Asaad was a proponent of reason. He believed in the power of education and the strength of critical thinking as a defense against ideological darkness. He paid for it with his life.

Do you think any of those fat, hateful, useless politicians in Washington would have had a tenth of the fortitude it takes to not let their life's work be used to further the suffering of people who are already going through hell? Do you think there's a reason UNESCO and other powers that be consider the destruction of cultural sites to be a war crime? Those buildings and artifacts connect us across time, space, and tribal lines. The work of long-gone hands reminds us of our humanity and thus our fragility. Our bodies go and humanity has what the winners want us to know and the things we left behind. The Parthenon, Palmyra, the collections at The Victoria and Albert, The Smithsonian, and The Hermitage are Grandpa's watch and Aint Sayrah's family Bible writ large enough for all of us to see. We lose something more important than stone and paper and clay when those things are destroyed. We lose another guide to who we are and how we got here.

And because someone elsewhere snapped that they would listen to this when they heard it from someone with the academic bona fides, I'll add: You just did.

Oscar Madison
BA anthropology
WKU, 1994

 

Everyone needs to read this. It's really good.
Vichy Republicans.

 

So good at communicating; authentic; tells it like it is.....

 

#Presidementia

 

My 401(k) is up ∞ since TRUMP was chosen by Gawd to be POTUS. So screw these people!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/sunday/deaths-despair-poverty.html

 

That’s an interesting - frankly misleading - way to frame a column that’s clearly about something bigger than Trump and includes this quote from Andrew Yang:

“We have to stop being obsessed over impeachment and start actually digging in and solving the problems that got Donald Trump elected in the first place.”

 

Veep Yang?

 

Pretty sure he was making a Doc "Libtard" Holliday reference.

 

The problem that got Donald Trump elected is white racism. I look forward to Yang digging into that. His statement is vapid and meaningless. Trump's been impeached already. He's really saying, "why isn't anyone paying to ME?"

 

I know a user when I see one.
Watching the remarks, the signs are all there.
He is a speed freak and the crashes from that can be very unpleasant.