Yes, We do Elect Dumb Leaders.

Carl Paladino, who co-chaired Donald Trump’s New York campaign, and is a school board member, wrote out his wishlist for 2017:

1. Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford. He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarret, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.

2. Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.

3. Someone with a brain, a set of balls and a lack of fear who has enough money so as to not owe anyone anything once elected and who believes in a market economy.

4. We need a $50 million dollar train station as much as we need parasitic people like Lou Ciminelli, 80% of the school board and the dizziness of socialistic progressive politicians who never signed the front of a paycheck. At best 400 people a day take a train. They are not complaining about exchange or Depew. We are already the laughingstock of America for having the dumbest elected leaders ever. Why add to it.

How sweet. Perhaps the good people of Buffalo will take a look, and decide this person really shouldn’t be on the school board, for more than one reason. Going by Mr. Paladino’s lack of grammar, and general ignorance, he wouldn’t pass a standard high school test.

Via Raw Story.

Gas Station Moon.

moon

Yesterday, the president-elect appointed private space advocate and businessman Charles Miller to the NASA transition team.

[…]

Last year, Miller led research that concluded private and international partnerships could make it 90 percent cheaper for NASA to set up a permanent, crewed base on the moon. The lunar base could theoretically be used to mine water from the moon’s craters and split it into hydrogen and oxygen—rocket fuel—to sell to private companies. By turning the moon into a gas station, there are hopes that these mines could make space exploration cheaper and easier.

Oh, there’s an idea, let’s get busy destroying the moon while we finish killing our earth. Yep, that’s bound to work. The colonial mindset, it never dies. Like mindless termites, gnawing and chewing through everything, with destructive glee. I have nothing outside a gigantic, near-fatal eyeroll.

Via Raw Story.

An Arms Race It Is!

Cult-of-Trump-4

Yesterday, Trump tweeted about how more nuclear weapons are needed, making a lot of people tense and unhappy. Your worries have just doubled down, because Trump has not had a single thought about this, just ran right into things with his brain shut and mouth wide open: now we need an arms race! Gosh, won’t that be fun.

On Friday, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough said President-elect Donald Trump endorsed a nuclear arms race during a brief phone conversation they had with him earlier that morning.

“Mika asked the president-elect when we had the opportunity what his position was on — trying to clarify the tweet yesterday regarding the nuclear arsenal,” Scarborough said, referring to a tweet Trump published on Thursday calling for the United States to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

“And the president-elect told you what?” Scarborough said to Brzezinski.

“Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass,” she replied. “And outlast them all.”

Trump’s statement directly contradicts the spin spokesman Jason Miller offered Thursday afternoon in an effort to downplay Thursday’s tweet — spin that interpreted Trump’s comments as merely warning about “the threat of nuclear proliferation.”

[…]

Trump’s comments Friday indicate Miller had it wrong. The president-elect is actually endorsing a nuclear arms race, not warning about the dangers of one, because he’s confident the United States would somehow always win.

Trump’s position represents a break from the nonproliferation efforts the United States has led for decades. As ThinkProgress detailed last spring, international nonproliferation agreements reduced the number of operational warheads in the world from a high of 64,452 in 1986 to 10,315 in 2015. The president-elect’s statements suggest that downward trend will come to an end.

Friday is far from the first time Trump said reckless things about nuclear weapons. During an interview last March with Chris Matthews, Trump said he was open to using nukes if the situation called for it and questioned why we’d make them if we never intended to use them. During a Fox News interview the next day, Trump wouldn’t even rule out the possibility of using nukes in Europe.

“Europe is a big place,” Trump said. “I’m not going to take cards off the table. We have nuclear capability.”

“Europe is a big place.” The sheer idiocy of this man makes me despair. Trump is the compleat ignoramus, an Ignoramus’s Ignoramus. No attention span. No knowledge. No ability to think. No mindfulness. He doesn’t read, at all. No books, no newspapers, nothing. He “skims, glances”. Christ, we are so fucked.

In response to a subsequent question about what steps might stand in the way of Trump using nukes if he becomes president, Hayden said, “The system is designed for speed and decisiveness. It’s not designed to debate the decision.”

That’s reassuring. (For the sarcasm impaired: heavy sarcasm.)

Via Think Progress.

“You Can’t Get Help”.

Photographer: Grzegorz Krysmalski.

Photographer: Grzegorz Krysmalski.

Oh Trump, promising jobs, a better economy, oh my! People who truly bought that load of rotten tripe, I feel sorry for you, but only a little, because it didn’t take much to find the truth of the matter. Trump is known for providing jobs, he just doesn’t pay people. As for people who do get paid, well, most of them aren’t those uppity Americans who want a working wage.

As Donald J. Trump, the man who’s entire campaign was predicated on bringing American jobs back to America, vows to keep his promise to the people, a Virginia winery owned by son Eric Trump is petitioning to government for the opportunity to hire foreign workers, the New York Post reports.

The request, filed by the Trump Winery on Dec. 2 and posted online by the Department of Labor Wednesday, show that the Trump-owned vineyard is requesting six foreign workers under the federal H-2 program, a temporary work visa that allows US employers bring foreign labor.

According to the application, Trump Vineyard will pay the H-2 workers $10.72 an hour for 40 hours a week, as well as an unpaid lunch break. It will run from January until June 2017.

The winery also requested visas for workers in 2014 and 2015. This should not be a surprise, it came out, over and over and over and over and over during the endless campaign that many of the workers hired for various Trump enterprises were those dreaded illegal people, who were tireless and excellent workers, who also agreed to a lower wage. If you’re now angry, or feeling sorry for yourself, try to figure out why in the hell you ignored all this at the time.

Trump ran on a pro-worker populist platform throughout his campaign, and maintained that image despite numerous reports indicating the president-elect hires foreign workers at his establishments, including his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago.

A New York Times report published in February revealed the Trump Organization rejected hundreds of US applicants in favor of hiring foreign workers:

“[N]early 300 United States residents have applied or been referred for jobs as waiters, waitresses, cooks and housekeepers there,” the New York Times wrote. “But according to federal records, only 17 have been hired. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries.”

“You can’t get help,” Trump told MSNBC’s Morning Joe in September, defending his company’s decision to hire guest workers over US citizens. “Getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible.”

You can’t get help. A full translation: you can’t get submissive help for cheap in the pool of American workers.

Via Raw Story.

A White Christmas.

Ann Coulter (Shutterstock)

Ann Coulter (Shutterstock)

Ann Coulter attended VDARE’s Christmas Party, piling yet another conservative onto the unapologetically white supremacist platform. We’re going to be seeing more of this, like Bill O’Reilly’s recent adoption of white supremacy. I had thought the normalisation of fascism and the open agenda of white supremacists might take at least a short while, but apparently not. The open embrace of white supremacy should be ringing alarm bells all over the place, but I no longer have even the smallest bit of faith in people hearing those alarms and waking the fuck up.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported Wednesday that Coulter was spotted Dec. 9 at VDARE’s annual gala and even gave an impromptu interview to John Derbyshire — a U.K. expat famous for being too openly racist for the National Review.

[…]

“VDARE’s list of contributors, in fact, is akin to a Rolodex of the most prominent pseudo-intellectual racists and anti-Semites,” wrote the SPLC’s Stephen Piggott. “They include names like Jared Taylor, who once wrote that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization; Kevin MacDonald, a retired professor who wrote a trilogy claiming that Jews are genetically driven to undermine the Christian societies they often live in; and the late Sam Francis, a white nationalist ideologue who wrote several key racist books.”

This is Coulter’s second star turn at a white nationalist event since the fall, Piggott noted, “In September, she spoke to the annual “Writers Workshop” event put on by the anti-immigrant and white nationalist publishing house The Social Contract Press (TSCP).”

The TSCP is a Michigan-based publishing house that specializes in the writing of white supremacists.

[…]

The election of Donald Trump has emboldened many U.S. racists and spurred them to reveal their true colors.

Via Raw Story.

Lui Ferreyra.

lui-2

lui-6

Artist Lui Ferreyra draws colorful portraits of hands and faces, works that use discrete shapes of color as highlights and shadows. These geometric fragments are blended by the viewer’s eye rather than the artist’s hand, producing color fields that Ferreyra intends to call attention to the connection between seeing and language.

“There’s a double move at play here,” explains Ferreyra’s website about his work. “The first move is substantiated by a geometric matrix which functions as surface: it embraces and emphasizes the aspect of flatness within a complex network of geometric shapes, each unique unto itself. The second move is fulfilled by the cumulative effect of all the shapes functioning together as a color-field in which each shape contextualizes every other shape, thereby providing all the necessary visual cueing to manifest a kind of window one can look through. Surface and window, at and through, like language which points both at the world and back at itself.”

You can see more of Ferreyra’s colorful drawings, in addition to oil paintings, on Instagram, Facebook, or William Havu Gallery where he is represented.

This is incredibly beautiful work, and allows shape and colour to be shifted by the viewer’s eye, making each perception unique.

Via Colossal Art.

Cool Stuff Friday.

The Sleeping Gypsy 1897, by Henri Rousseau. Courtesy Wikimedia.

The Sleeping Gypsy 1897, by Henri Rousseau. Courtesy Wikimedia.

A reflection on the lost art of lying down by Bernd Brunner. What do you do to put yourself in a reflective, unhurried state of mind?

ant
The Queen Does Not Rule: The ant colony has often served as a metaphor for human order and hierarchy. But real ant society is radical to its core.

We know now that ants do not perform as specialised factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. An ant’s role changes as it grows older and as changing conditions shift the colony’s needs. An ant that feeds the larvae one week might go out to get food the next. Yet in an ant colony, no one is in charge or tells another what to do. So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?

The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants. In brief encounters, ants use their antennae to smell one another, or to detect a chemical that another ant has recently deposited. Taken in the aggregate, these simple interactions between ants allow colonies to adjust the numbers performing each task and to respond to the changing world. This social coordination occurs without any individual ant making any assessment of what needs to be done.

One of nature’s most physiologically fascinating creatures, mantis shrimp are not only the fastest attackers in the animal kingdom, but they also possess what might be the world’s most interesting and impressive set of eyes. Each mantis shrimp eye has three ‘pupils’, with receptors for 12 distinct colours – yet another world record. But perhaps the most amazing aspect of mantis shrimp eyes are their ability to detect polarised light – largely invisible to humans – which they use to signal to other mantis shrimp that a burrow is occupied from afar, preventing close-quarters showdowns to the death. Taking the mantis shrimp’s lead, scientists are hoping to use a camera that detects light polarisation to catch certain kinds of cancer early.

Via Aeon.

Dance dance automation: music from the factory floor.

Raghad Saddam Hussein Praises Trump.

Raghad Saddam Hussein, daughter of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Raghad Saddam Hussein, daughter of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. (photo credit:REUTERS).

Raghad, who blames the US for the chaos that unraveled in her country, hopes that President-elect Donald Trump will be different from his predecessors.
“This man has just arrived to the leadership … But from what is apparent, this man has a high level of political sensibility, that is vastly different than the one who preceded him,” she told CNN. “He exposed the mistakes of the others, specifically in terms of Iraq, which means he is very aware of the mistakes made in Iraq and what happened to my father.”
During his presidential campaign, Trump said he opposed the war on Iraq, however he was publicly supportive of the invasion in interviews before and after the war. And while saying that Saddam Hussein “was a bad guy,” Trump has praised the former Iraqi leader’s efficient killing of “terrorists”.
Most people should at least be marginally aware, by now, that one of the very few things which actually gain Trump’s attention is flattery of any kind. I imagine it won’t be long before we’re hearing about Trump and Hussein being the very best of buddies and bedfellows.
Via CNN. (Warning: autoplay video.)

Trump, Twitter, and Nuclear Weapons.

Trump, and his buddy Putin, are now happily chattering about nuclear weapons. The consensus? We need more of them! Oh good, we’re all gonna die.

The timing of Trump’s tweet is interesting because it came after Russia said this week that it was looking to strengthen its own nuclear capabilities to be able to penetrate missile defense shields.

Via Raw Story.

The Glass Ceiling Has Been Shattered!

Donald Trump and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway celebrate during an election night rally. CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher.

Donald Trump and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway celebrate during an election night rally. CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher.

On Thursday morning, the Trump transition team announced that former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway will serve as counselor to the president. In that role she’ll be the highest ranking woman in the White House.

A statement released by the transition team announcing the move is boilerplate — “I am pleased that she will be part of my senior team in the West Wing,” Trump is quoted as saying — until it gets around to discussing Conway’s role in Trump’s victory, where it makes the claim that Trump “shattered the glass ceiling for women.”

President-elect Trump’s victory on November 8th also shattered the glass ceiling for women. Conway is the first female campaign manager of either major party to win a presidential general election.

Hear that, women? The glass ceiling hath been shattered, it is no more. From this point forward, there is nothing at all to prohibit women from the highest reaches of endeavor. Nope. I do have to wonder if it occurred to anyone that there’s a lingering stench of “hey, she rode there on my coattails, but still, it’s good” to the message.

While it’s true that Conway is the first woman campaign manager to preside over a presidential victory, the statement overlooks that Al Gore’s 2000 campaign was managed by Donna Brazile. Like Hillary Clinton, Gore won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, after the Supreme Court shutdown a Florida recount.

The statement also overlooks the obvious fact that Clinton this year became the first woman nominated as a major party’s presidential nominee and his victory denied her the chance to shatter the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.” Trump scolded her during the campaign for mentioning the historic nature of her candidacy, accusing her of playing the “women’s card.”

Oh, there’s that stench wafting by again. Yes, it’s fine if a man holds a woman up to tap that glass ceiling, but if a woman dares to do such herself, there’s that terrible woman card again. Silly women, right?

“I have to assess people based on what I see in totum,” Conway said. “And this is a man I’ve been alone with many times who’s never been anything but gracious and [a] gentleman and elevated me to the top level of his campaign, the way he’s elevated women in the Trump organization for decades, because he respects women.”

Yes, there you have it. Elevated. Trump elevates women, because they aren’t capable of doing that themselves. The above was part of Conway’s response to the revelations of Trump’s long line of sexual assaults. Sure, he respects women, he just thinks various parts of them belong to him, to be used and discarded at will. Elevator Pussy Grabber. Got it.

Before coming aboard the Trump campaign as a “data and messaging expert” in July, Conway helped conduct some of the flawed polling Trump has invoked to justify his proposed Muslim ban. In her role as counselor, she’ll be responsible for helping Trump “carry out his priorities and deliver his message from inside the White House,” the New York Times reports.

So, basically, a secretary. Oh, I meant counselor.

Full story at Think Progress.

George Washington Kept His House, So…

By Martin Falbisoner - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.

By Martin Falbisoner – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.

Oh, the excuses for allowing Trump to violate the constitution keep coming in, each stupider than the last. The latest from Tom Cole (R-OK) is that George Washington kept his house while serving as president, so it’s all good, you betcha. Has anyone told Donny he has to give up his gold-plated apartment? No. Has anyone said Donny can’t manage his personal residences? No. The hypocrisy of republicans continues to float over everything, as their lies and excuses get weaker and weaker.

While ethics expertswarn not divesting will likely create an unconstitutional conflict, Congressional Republicans are apparently not concerned.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said on Wednesday that he does not think Trump needs to disentangle himself. “To be fair to him, he’s not a guy who made his money out of doing business with the government, particularly,” he observed.

Cole added that he thinks Trump’s team is “trying to be careful,” because “opponents will try to put the worst aspersions” on anything he does. “I don’t expect the family to get out of a family business, for goodness sake. I mean, you read much history, George Washington was still pretty active in managing Mount Vernon when he was president of the United States.”

Washington’s Virginia estate was hardly comparable to Trump’s self-proclaimed $10 billion portfolio.

Think Progress has the full story.