Everyone had an awesome time

The Washington Post has some Sean Spicer memes.

https://twitter.com/markzohar/status/823016081061187584

https://twitter.com/Jamie_Foreman/status/823045216504606724

Comments

12 responses to “Everyone had an awesome time”

  1. Omar Avatar

    I think that all this has to be a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from the fact that the US failed to grab all of Iraq’s oil while it had the chance to grab it.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/trump-cia-iraq-oil_us_5883ccf5e4b096b4a23243b2

  2. Charles Sullivan Avatar
    Charles Sullivan

    Thank you for doing this, for tracking the bullshit for future reference. Sometimes I have to turn away, and turn off NPR radio, or other media, but I keep coming back here because I know it needs to be done. Thank you so much.

  3. latsot Avatar

    Re the jellybeans:

    Some time ago I worked for a startup. You can probably tell how long ago it was by the fact that it called itself an e-commerce company. Anyway, the boss did an annual speech that we all had to attend. Bear in mind that “all” meant about 20 people. One year he put up a slide with his predictions of what the company would be worth in a year. We were delighted. He was going to put up an insanely huge number, wasn’t he? What would it be? A million? Two million? Either suggestion would be ludicrous.

    Needless to say, he blew us out of the water. It was three hundred million.

    To be fair, that was the greatest single act of morale-boosting the company ever did. Never have so many people been so united in their desire to immediately get another job.

    The company was sold about two years later for £1.

  4. Omar Avatar

    In these opening days of Trump’s Reich, I happen to have been reading a novel that begins in the last days of Hitler’s Third : James A Michener’s Space. A damned good read IMHO.

    At Peenemunde in Holland, the German rocket scientists who had been trying to destroy London were trying to save the documents relevant to their work, and to prevent them falling into the hands of the SS, French or Russians. They decided to try a surrender to the Americans.

    Whatever the historical accuracy of all that, it has an uncanny resemblance to the present race by American climatologists to save their stuff from Trump and his underlings.

    AT 10 AM the Saturday before inauguration day, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, roughly 60 hackers, scientists, archivists, and librarians were hunched over laptops, drawing flow charts on whiteboards, and shouting opinions on computer scripts across the room. They had hundreds of government web pages and data sets to get through before the end of the day—all strategically chosen from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—any of which, they felt, might be deleted, altered, or removed from the public domain by the incoming Trump administration.

    It’s that bad….

    https://www.wired.com/2017/01/rogue-scientists-race-save-climate-data-trump/?mbid=social_cp_fb_tny#slide-1

  5. latsot Avatar

    @Omar

    *Shudder*. Horrible but unsurprising. I’m no longer an academic but when I was I was acutely aware of apparently mild changes in the UK government which would mean funding had to be increasingly business and goal oriented. This terrified us (academics and sympathetic businesses alike) and together we took measures to make a mockery of the new rules and do whatever it was we were going to do anyway by deceptive means.

    I don’t think Trump’s attack on science is anything like that, though. We were never in danger of our science being taken away. When the funding dried up, we just made alliances with fields that still had lots of funding. We were never in the same boat as the people you mention.

    But…. come to think of it… A lot of my work has involved cybersecurity. Plenty of governments – mine, most notably in recent years – have been convinced that we can have backdoors to encryption that only the (assumed benign) government can use and not the baddies. Many of my colleagues have explained to the UK government why this is fundamentally impossible and there are thousands of academic papers explaining why this is so. The government chose to ignore the papers and the experts. They chose not to abolish paywalls for academic research and they contradict its findings on a daily basis.

    Fuck it, we’re screwed too, for our own idiotic reasons. And Trump is meeting May in the next few days, that seems unlikely to end well for anyone.

    I’m already terrified, stop making it worse.

  6. iknklast Avatar

    Omar, I am currently reading “The Guns of August” about the beginning days of WWI, and a lot of it sounds eerily familiar.

    I think the message is, to quote Hegel: “What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

  7. James Garnett Avatar
    James Garnett

    Has there ever been a similar case of an administration imploding on its first day actually at work? Spicer’s going to get eaten alive. He’s so far out of his league that it’s a different sport now.

  8. iknklast Avatar

    Has there ever been a similar case of an administration imploding on its first day actually at work

    Probably. I could check with my live-in historian. He would know.

  9. Silentbob Avatar

    @ 4 Omar

    It’s absolutely true! I thought that was common knowledge, but maybe only with us space geeks. The United States would never have made it to the Moon without Nazis.

  10. Ophelia Benson Avatar

    Indeed not. Those V2 rockets that punished London while the invasion was moving eastwards? Those.

  11. Lady Mondegreen Avatar
    Lady Mondegreen

    Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow deals with that history too (in a heavily fictionalized, hallucinatory way.)

  12. Omar Avatar

    TRUMP ON VOTING FRAUD.

    President Donald Trump said in a interview with ABC News which aired Wednesday that he believes millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, but that not a single one was cast in his name.

    During a surreal exchange, anchor David Muir grilled Trump over his continued spreading of the falsehood that millions of illegal ballots were cast in the 2016 election, which Trump had previously said was the reason for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton beating him in the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.

    And Trump did not back away from his claim in the slightest.

    “We’re gonna launch an investigation to find out,” Trump said, doubling-down on his Wednesday morning Twitter announcement. “And I will say this: Of those votes cast, none of ’em come to me. None of ’em come to me.”

    OBVIOUS SOLUTION: Trump will have to grab more control over the voting, in the future and for the sake of the future.

    http://www.businessinsider.com.au/trump-voter-fraud-abc-interview-2017-1