The last week’s “impeachment show” was a painful spectacle. Everyone betrayed everything; the only people who seemed to be truly self-aware were the horrible, sleazy, republicans and Donald Trump’s defenders. There was nothing to expect from them except the worst and, boy, did they deliver.
I’m not going to quote big swathes of this, because you should just give it a listen.
Have you seen gun nuts sporting a patch that reads “RWDS”? It stands for Right Wing Death Squad.
I am an equal opportunity hater. One of the big mistakes the republicans make is the assumption that you must like whoever is opposed to whatever you hate; i.e.: if you loathe Trump you must like Biden. In fact, my hatred for them is at nearly an equal level, although I admit Trump’s phony revival preacher drawl makes me hate him just a little bit more.
I imagine every morning that Meghan McCain wakes up, rolls over, and thinks “I suppose that the world out there is desperately wondering what I think about ${whatever}.” And that wake-up flash of lucidity is shared by most members of the pundit class, who mistake their dominance of the media landscape for interest on our part.
The US has tried to assert its colonial dominance over the internet, and has acted as though it is its domain since the beginning. That has had a lot of policy implications, and has created a “karma debt” that I think we are only starting to confront.
Taylor Mali’s slam nation performance: What Do Teachers Make?
[WARNING: sexual abuse]
Any group which is generally male-led, maintains strong insider-versus-outsider privacy, and has its own process for adjudicating misbehavior – is going to be a haven of sexual abuse. Period. This applies in retrospect to the US congress, the roman catholic church, police departments, certain buddhist ashrams, some yoga schools, the boy scouts, etc.
In Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes [wc] he writes at one point that what the US needed was an intelligence agency, but what it got was a “Department of Dirty Tricks.” [Read more…]
This is a trick that the US defense contractors have used for decades: spread the risk and the reward across a larger pool, and you pick up an army of free lobbyists that are looking out for their self-interest.