It’s not so bad to be Tiffany anymore

I’m having a weird reaction to the revelatory Buzzfeed News story that Trump is a lying crook. I’m not surprised that he’s a fraud, that he directed his lawyer to lie under oath about his corrupt business dealings with Russia, and that the article is cautious and sober while pointing out that Trump was committing felonies. Nobody is surprised by any of that any more.

No, it may be silly and trivial, but my brain had a hiccup every time it ran across the word “children”.

And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.

In his plea deal with Mueller’s team, Cohen acknowledged that the conversations he had about the project with Trump exceeded the three short briefings he testified that he gave the president and that he also held more extensive discussions about it with other members of the Trump family. The sources said Cohen gave Trump’s children “very detailed updates.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the word “children” has nothing but positive associations for me, and it was jarring to hear about children scheming to commit crimes, even as I know I am a child of my parents, and I knew Ivanka and Jr are grown-ass adults. Great big criminal grown-ass adults with undeserved wealth and unwarranted power, who lied at every step of a federal investigation.

A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump’s attorney wrote that she was only “minimally involved” in the project. “Ms. Trump did not know about this proposal until after a non-binding letter of intent had been signed, never talked to anyone outside the Organization about the proposal, never visited the prospective project site and, even internally, was only minimally involved,” wrote Peter Mirijanian.

Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 7, 2017, that he was only “peripherally aware” of the plan to build a tower in Moscow. “Most of my knowledge has been gained since as it relates to hearing about it over the last few weeks.”

I think, though, I’ll be able to overcome my qualms at sentencing children, and will be able to find grim satisfaction in their trials. Lock up the whole damn crime family.

Except Tiffany. And probably Barron. Probably. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he was a courier for conspirators, hiding bag money in his teddy bear.

I wanna go to Mexico now

My wife and I have been watching this show, The Final Plate, on NetFlix. It features these talented chefs competing against each other for something or other — they basically ripped off Iron Chef. It started off interestingly, but is turning into a bit of a slog, and jeez, I’m really disliking the emcee and those obnoxious, pointless pauses (“and now … … … … … begin!”). I’ve developed a few other gripes, as well. But this isn’t about the show!

Fortunately, before I began to sour on it, one of the early episodes featured the cuisine of Mexico, and oh man, I started pining to visit Mexico again. If nothing else, just for the food. I still dream about real Mexican food.

Then I saw this video.

It is silly — I don’t know how you would test for Mexican ancestry, since the people there are such a melange of different origins. Spanish? Native American? Black? All those other Europeans who have migrated there? I don’t think any test is going to find that I have much in the way of Mexican ancestry — I’m a blinding white mixture of Scandinavian and English (although 23andMe does say I’m 0.6% Spanish), so I’m not going to get any discount from AeroMexico. Unless loving the place would give me some honorary, spiritual association. Or the test is only a random number generator, which wouldn’t surprise me.

The video ends with some guy saying, I’d go to Mexico, if they had Taco Bells on the street corners down there. He would be disappointed. Taco Bell is terrible greasy cheesy glop — real Mexican food is diverse and complex and wonderful and the kind of thing I would dream about. Maybe more Americans should visit the country and learn more about it.

Milo Yiannopoulos meets the Church Militant, and a love-in follows

It’s the damnedest thing. Yiannopoulos gets invited on to Michael Voris’s reactionary Catholic show, and he accepted. I guess that tells you how desperate for attention he has become.

I tangled with Voris a few times 8 or 9 years ago — he had a YouTube channel called The Vortex (it’s now been shuffled around to the “ChurchMilitant Archives”) in which he railed against atheists, Catholics who weren’t Catholic enough, and gays, and demanded that America become a Catholic monarchy…so kind of a squirrely Bill Donohue on meth. The pairing of Voris and Yiannopoulos was unexpected, but they really hit it off and had a little lovefest online. It’s a bit like those old commercials for Reese’s — “You got peanut butter on my chocolate! No, you got chocolate on my peanut butter! Yum, it’s delicious” — only substitute shit and snot for peanut butter and chocolate, and no, I’m not going to try it to see if the combination suddenly acquires a delightful flavor.

Here, you can suffer as I did.

It begins with Yiannopoulos whining about his ‘tragic’ fall from grace. His explanation is that he got too big and too powerful, so a leftist conspiracy was mobilized to tear him down with lies.

But who cares about Milo Yiannopoulos, anyway? The bulk of the conversation — if we can call it that, Voris only gets an occasional word in edgewise — is Milo rambling on and on about how he despises Pope Francis, but reveres the institution of the papacy, which is where he and Voris are clearly copacetic. Both think the the church is full of deviants and perverts, and that the way to fix the Catholic church is to clear out all the gay priests, although, Milo is quick to add, Leftists make way too much noise about priestly rapists, it wasn’t that bad, he got over it, the real problem is social justice warriors getting all up in arms about it. Blah blah blah. Talking fast to bury all the lies and inconsistencies.

He also comes down strongly on the nature vs nurture debate (I say there is no debate, it’s both, and you can’t untangle all the influences.) Milo strangely argues that it’s all nurture, that you can shape a child any ol’ way you want, making him the only blank-slater I’ve ever heard from.

There’s also a prolonged eruption of misogyny. Did you know that lesbians ruined everything, that they’re all bitter divorcees and spinsters, and that If you take god away from a woman and she’s 35 and doesn’t have a man by her side, bad things happen, and that he’s certain that Generation Z will change everything back. He wants to see women burning their briefcases and marching in defense of motherhood, which roused Voris to interject that that is authentic feminism, as represented by the Blessed Mother.

The last bit of the video is the two of them going back and forth, piously declaring that they’ll pray for each other, and Milo suggesting that he might come back to the way of purity and light and Catholicism, but he needs 5 or 10 years more to have fun indulging in his degeneracy. Voris is cool with that.

Only watch on an empty stomach. Anthony Barcellos, you are a wicked man for sending me that — I’m pretty sure it was a mortal sin.

You aren’t a real man until your beard is soaked in blood

Welp, I’ve read the worst response to the Gillette commercial so far. It’s written by a person claiming to be a veteran and law enforcement officer (now that’s scary), and is illustrated with a photo of a tattooed man with a huge black beard. It’s full of hyper-violent fantasies and textbook toxic masculinity.

I first grew my beard when I was in the Sandbox. I can’t tell you who I was with over there, because technically the government still owns that part of my life.

I was the guy that assholes feared. You know why they feared me? Because I hunted down bad guys. And I killed them. My beard has been covered with the blood of terrorists more times than I can count.

My beard has also been covered with the blood of my brothers. The day the IED when off and I was one of only a handful of guys that made it out with all of our limbs.

The day a sniper took out the man who stood next to me on the best day of my life, my wedding day… and then stood in front of me when he took a bullet so I could one day go back to my bride.

I don’t believe any of it. The veterans I’ve known who have seen combat come back changed by a horrific experience and are reluctant to talk about it — I think this fellow has come back from some cartoonish Hollywood movies. He’s extraordinarily obsessed with his beard and killing people, yet he calls those Middle Eastern terrorists he hates bearded bastards without noticing the irony. He ends his improbable rant with the hashtags #BeardUpAmerica #GunsOutBeardsOut…as if a face full of hair is synonymous with manliness, while equating beards and guns.

I really don’t want to think this blustering poseur is actually carrying the responsibility of law enforcement.

He also makes me want to shave, but I refuse to be manipulated by a commercial, and even more refuse to have that kind of reaction to that idiot.

Vicious

In an article about the resignation of Deputy Secretary Pam Patenaude from HUD, we learn some more ugly facts about Trump’s brain.

President Trump in late September grew incensed after hearing, erroneously, that Puerto Rico was using the emergency money to pay off its debt, according to two people with direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking.

Trump told then-White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico, because he thought the island was misusing the money and taking advantage of the government, according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal deliberations. Instead, he wanted more of the money to go to Texas and Florida, the person said.

“POTUS was not consolable about this,” the person said.

  1. Trump is a petty tyrant who will lash out vindictively over perceived slights.
  2. Trump totally lacks empathy. People were sick, dying, and in desperate straits in Puerto Rico, and he cut them off without a qualm.
  3. Trump is a selfish grifter who takes deep offense if he thinks someone else is grifting.
  4. Trump will always think others are grifting, because that’s what he’d do.
  5. Trump is a goddamn racist.

We need to get him out of office, and kick out all his hangers-on as well. I don’t know if the country can make it to the end of 2020.

When reality conflicts with wish-fulfillment fantasies

I’d almost forgotten alt.seduction.fast! That was one of those pariah newsgroups back in the 90s that I filtered against because you knew anything emanating from that quarter was going to be poisonous garbage that needed to be alt.kill.it.quick. It makes a brief appearance in this comic about how pick-up artists morphed into the alt-right, which rings true. Yeah, online misogyny rapidly evolved into the whole toxic stew that afflicts us today.

These two panels struck me as particularly insightful.

Damn you women for not fitting into the ridiculous playbook developed by stupid PUAs! It’s all your fault!

You had just one job, Chinese space botanists

I’m not so good with keeping plants alive and healthy (one could argue I have the same problem with spiders), but as it turns out, Chinese space scientists are just as bad.

One day after China announced it grew the first plants on the Moon, the fledgling plants have been pronounced dead. Rest in peace, lunar sprouts.

On Tuesday, China’s space program said that cotton seeds had germinated in a biosphere carried to the Moon by the nation’s Chang’e-4 lunar lander. By Wednesday, mission leads had broken the news that the plants perished as the lunar night fell over the probe’s landing site.

To be fair, they are facing conditions worse than Minnesota.

The Sunday arrival of the lunar night, which lasts 14 days, deprived the plants of sunlight. During a lunar night, temperatures can plummet as low as −170°C (−274°F). Meanwhile, daytime temperatures on the Moon can reach a sweltering 127°C (260°F). These massive fluctuations are one of the main obstacles encountered by lunar explorers.

But still, that’s no excuse — they knew all this way ahead of time when planning the experiment. Were they just hoping for a spell of warm weather? They knew that wasn’t going to happen, either. Meteorology on a dead planet with virtually no atmosphere is a much easier problem than it is here.

The remaining seeds and fruit fly eggs contained in the mission’s biosphere are not likely to be viable after two weeks of light deprivation and freezing temperatures. According to China’s National Space Administration, they will decompose and remain sealed to avoid contaminating the lunar surface.

They killed fruit flies, too? I don’t understand the point of this experiment if the chamber environment was so poorly planned that one night of expected temperatures was going to kill everything.

Keep this in mind next time you read The Martian. That book was gratingly optimistic and unrealistic about everything.

The Singal problem

You might want to read this Twitter thread by Siobhan points out how Jesse Singal delicately carves up his sources to only allow views that align with his own perspective through.

Short version: Singal reported that the controversial “conversion therapy” lab of Kenneth Zucker was shut down for purely political reasons by omitting the words of scientists who pointed out that he was far out of the mainstream of clinical practice.

That kind of slanted reporting is why transgender individuals, you know, the people most endangered by his biases, consider him to be shady and untrustworthy.

The miracle of selling razors

This is a really good commercial.

Without saying a single outrageous thing, by presenting a purely optimistic message, it has generated a huge amount of controversy and has everyone talking about it (gosh, I just put it on my blog). It’s selling razor blades, and it doesn’t show any razors — none of the male models in the ad are lathered up, or even in need of a shave or a trim. Nobody is shaving. I’m impressed with how neatly capitalism can exploit both good and bad sentiments to serve the cause of selling stuff.

From another perspective, it’s also cool how it has maneuvered a lot of men into whipping out their manly six-shooters and blasting away at their feet. The message is that bullying, sexual harassment, and condoning bad behavior with silent assent are bad, but that good men can and will oppose such behavior, which has provoked the peculiar, guilt-ridden response of “how dare Gillette accuse me of bullying and harassment!”, completely missing the opportunity to identify with the good-looking, well-groomed men who are stopping bullying and harassment. You’ve got a chance to see yourself mirrored in commendable behavior, or oppressive behavior, and thousands of men are screaming, “How dare you criticize my choice to catcall, or mansplain, or punch people!”

And now everyone is selling razors for Gillette. It’s a marvel.