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?

Reince Priebus has been fired. How do I know? Trump announced his replacement in a tweet, of course.

I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017

Isn’t this administration professional?

In other fun news, Anthony Scaramucci’s wife, Deidre Ball, has filed for divorce, citing his excessive ambition and connection to Donald Trump.

It’s like everything The Donald touches turns to ashes and slime. Or is it just that ashes and slime are attracted to The Donald?

The latest iteration of the health care repeal bill was presented to the senate in the dead of night, while most of us were sleeping, and put to a vote. Three Republicans — Murkowski, Collins, and McCain — voted with the Democrats to kill it. The maverick was mavericky one more time.

But still…there were 49 Republicans, and Mike Pence waiting in the wings, willing to wreck the hobbling compromise that they call Obamacare. Remember that. All those other Republican senators who have been occasionally willing to complain about the fool running the country caved and were willing to go along with this abomination: Ryan and Graham voted for it. And remember most of all that McConnell is the arch-villain who has been orchestrating it.

Remember all of them. And remind everyone else when the next election rolls around.