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The community standard that shields Nazis

Nov 23rd, 2016 2:51 pm | By

Our Facebook overlords are helping the Nazis win.

Jim Wright tells us he’s been locked out of his Facebook account, while Nazis frolic happily all over the place.

I’ve been banned from Facebook.

My account has been suspended supposedly for violation of community standards.

My profile is still active, you can still access the page and comment on posts that haven’t been deleted by Facebook. But I myself am locked out.  I can’t post, comment, or access the Facebook messenger system.

The community standard I violated is apparently the one where you’re not allowed to criticize actual, no fooling, Nazis.

Yes, actual Nazis.

That’s right, I was banned for criticizing an actual Nazi.

The Nazis who got him banned … Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »


Haggling over the quid pro quo

Nov 23rd, 2016 2:13 pm | By

On NPR, a conversation about the conflict of interest issue. Richard Painter advised Bush Junior and Norman Eisen advised Obama.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

President-elect Donald Trump shifted positions on several issues yesterday. But in a talk with The New York Times, he avoided placing many limits on his opportunity to profit while in office.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

The president-elect, who has worldwide business interests, admits that he, quote, “might have requested a business favor from visiting British politicians.” His staff had previously denied that.

INSKEEP: His staff also denied that Trump sought a business favor when talking with Argentina’s president, but his daughter Ivanka – a vice president of his company – joined that call.

His daughter was on … Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments
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Eavesdropping on a toddler

Nov 23rd, 2016 12:30 pm | By

Ploughing through the interview.

Jaw nearly dislocated.

As far as the, you know, potential conflict of interests, though, I mean I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest. That’s been reported very widely. Despite that, I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest anyway. And the laws, the president can’t. And I understand why the president can’t have a conflict of interest now because everything a president does in some ways is like a conflict of interest, but I have, I’ve built a very great company and it’s a big company and it’s all over the world. People are starting to see, when

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments
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A disaster for humanity

Nov 23rd, 2016 12:01 pm | By

Phil Plait tells us Trump is apparently going to cut off the funding for NASA’s climate research.

In an interview with the Guardian, Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, said that Trump will eliminate NASA’s Earth science research. This is the mission directorate of NASA that, among other important issues, studies climate change.

In other words, Trump and his team want to stop NASA from studying climate change. From the article:

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

This confirms essentially the same comments made

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 10 comments
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Buffoons who end up ruling their worlds

Nov 23rd, 2016 11:31 am | By

A bit later Trevor Noah said more about Trump’s skills as a crowd-pleaser.

You know, funny enough, one of the biggest moments of realization was when Donald Trump won the election because when I came into the show, I said, I think this guy can win. This was when he first came down that escalator. He gave his first speech. And then I was like, wow, this guy’s going to do well. And I remember man – people laughed at me. People were like, oh, you silly ignorant person who’s just come to this world. You clearly shouldn’t be at “The Daily Show” because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And I was like, but I don’t know. He

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
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You have to be able to switch up as well as down

Nov 23rd, 2016 11:16 am | By

Speaking of Trump’s incredibly stunted vocabulary, and the horrifyingly stunted thinking and knowledge that reflects – Trevor Noah said some interesting things about all that on Fresh Air yesterday.

If you look at this election, I feel like Donald Trump was speaking a different language to Hillary Clinton. You know, it’s not dissimilar to what we saw in South Africa with our president Jacob Zuma. I remember sitting with people laughing when they would watch the debates, and they’d go this guy’s a buffoon. Oh, man, he has such a low word count. He’s got the grammar of a 5-year-old. He has the – you know, vocabulary of a toddler. And I said, yeah, but do know how many

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 14 comments
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Special tremendous

Nov 23rd, 2016 8:42 am | By

The Times published a transcript of its meeting with Trump yesterday. Le tout Facebook is talking about it, so I hastened to find it. It will probably take me all day to read it though, because I’ll have to take frequent breaks, because reading unscripted Trump is so abrading to the nerves.

I just can’t get over how thick he is. I feel as if I should take that as read and focus on the substance, but I find it difficult. The thickness has a lot to do with why the substance is what it is. The first extended passage reveals it in all its chattering nakedness:

TRUMP: O.K. Well, I just appreciate the meeting and I have great

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
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Turkish police continue rounding up academics

Nov 23rd, 2016 8:29 am | By

Mahir Zeynalov on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/799514778716794881

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/800823333159890945

https://twitter.com/MahirZeynalov/status/798185888408707076… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
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Guest post: The slow nuke of climate change is already detonating

Nov 23rd, 2016 7:53 am | By

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on This is who he is.

Also, he will have the nukes. He’ll use them. I don’t think there’s any way he won’t. He has no inhibitions, no understanding, no impulse control, no ability to reason or check himself – why would he not use them?

He could be game over. It’s looking likely.

And of course the slow nuke of climate change is already detonating at a rate of 4 Hiroshima bombs a second. Even if we cut carbon emissions to zero at this very moment, this accumulation of energy would continue for many decades due to the enormous inertia of the climate system. That’s just how long it would take for … Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
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Trump is out to destroy the free and independent media

Nov 22nd, 2016 6:02 pm | By

Robert Reich on Facebook:

Historically, despots have used 7 techniques to destroy the independence of the media:

1. Berate the media. Yesterday Trump called two-dozen TV news anchors and executives to the Trump Tower – including Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos, and Wolf Blitzer — to chew them out about their reporting during the election.

2. Blacklist media that criticize them. Trump has maintained a blacklist of news outlets to which he has refused to grant event credentials. This morning he cancelled a meeting with the New York Times.

3. Turn the public against the media. Trump refers to journalists as “dishonest,” “disgusting” and “scum.” He tweets that the New York Times has lost “thousands of subscribers because

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
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The Queens boy

Nov 22nd, 2016 5:35 pm | By

Journalists and journalistic outlets must never again agree to meet with Trump off the record.

Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post says what the tv people did wrong yesterday and the Times people did right today.

The disaster yesterday:

Brandon Friedman, a Virginia-based public relations executive, offered his theory on Twitter: “They walked into an ambush, agreed not to talk about it, then Trump went straight to the Post with his version.”

Then it was just a hop, skip and jump to a big headline on the Drudge Report, with its huge worldwide traffic: “Trump Slams Media Elite, Face to Face.” As Business Insider politics editor Oliver Darcy aptly put it, that is “how a lot of America will

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
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Just call them Nazis

Nov 22nd, 2016 5:10 pm | By

Dear Media:

Please stop calling them the “alt-right.” Just call them Nazis. They won’t be offended. Nazis are super hard to offend, unless you call them Jews.

-Andy Borowitz

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Trump now sees things differently

Nov 22nd, 2016 4:37 pm | By

As we’ve seen, in one of the least surprising “surprises” of the week Trump said hahaha I was just kidding, I’m not going to throw Crooked Hillary in jail.

The Washington Post reported this morning that Trump “has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation.” We learned of the decision by way of Kellyanne Conway, who appeared on MSNBC earlier today.

…Conway said Trump now sees things differently. “I think when the president-elect, who’s also the head of your party, tells you before he’s even inaugurated that he doesn’t wish to pursue these charges, it sends a very strong message, tone and content” to

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
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Trump provides free storage

Nov 22nd, 2016 1:11 pm | By

Trump’s other BFF, the Washington Post, reports on an admission by the Trump Foundation.

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.

That admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were recently posted online at the nonprofit-tracking site GuideStar. A GuideStar spokesman said the forms were uploaded by the Trump Foundation’s law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.

The Post doesn’t know if the IRS got the same forms.

In one section of the form, the IRS asked if the Trump Foundation had transferred

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
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Very rough

Nov 22nd, 2016 12:24 pm | By

Hoo-boy. Trump changed his mind about having a tantrum at the NY Times, and they had their meeting after all.

(What can it be like having a meeting with him? A giant petulant baby with way too much power? It must be such a bizarre experience.)

The Times shares:

The strained relationship between Donald J. Trump and The New York Times took an odd path on Tuesday when a planned meeting between the president-elect and the newspaper was abruptly canceled by Mr. Trump and then quickly rescheduled.

After a morning of back-and-forth statements and Twitter posts, Mr. Trump arrived at midday for a meeting with Times representatives at the paper’s Midtown headquarters. Seated next to the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments
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All the power, none of the criticism

Nov 22nd, 2016 8:11 am | By

Trump also doesn’t understand the limits on his power. He thinks he gets to decide which cases the Attorney General will investigate.

President-elect Donald Trump has decided that his administration will not pursue criminal investigations related to former rival Hillary Clinton’s private email server or her family foundation, his campaign manager said Tuesday.

Trump’s apparent decison, conveyed by campaign manager Kellyanne Conway in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,’’ would be an extraordinary break with political and legal protocol, which holds that the attorney general and FBI make decisions on whether to conduct investigations and file charges, free of pressure from the president.

I guess protocol is for losers.

Trump’s conciliatory gesture stood in contrast to his continued fights

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
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This is who he is

Nov 22nd, 2016 7:59 am | By

Yesterday Trump held a “summit” with some people from the news media – and pitched a Hitler-style fit at them for covering him in such a meany unfair way.

I wish I were joking.

David Remnick heard from people who were there.

He points out the obvious: that any idea that the job would make Trump a wiser and better human is dead as a stone.

First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the presence of television executives and anchors, Trump whined about everything from NBC News

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 11 comments
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The day in Trumptweets

Nov 22nd, 2016 7:18 am | By

President Pussygrabber’s latest batch of tweets is astounding.

“Only the crooked media” cares about the massive conflicts of interest that a president who has “interests in properties all over the world” presents. No, Donnie, you’re wrong about that, citizens also care.

This is President Corrupt doing that projection thing again – accusing other people of the very crimes he is trying to hide. Tragically, it’s worked for him so far.

… Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 4 comments
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Headlines

Nov 22nd, 2016 6:05 am | By

The BBC seven hours ago:

Turkish MPs to vote on controversial underage sex bill

The BBC one hour ago:

Turkey withdraws child rape bill after street protests

One wonders why it was “underage sex” seven hours ago and “child rape” six hours later.

From the second article:

This bill sparked a rare thing here: cross-party opposition. The AKP MPs who proposed it insisted it would not pardon rapists or sexual abusers and was simply intended to exonerate men who marry underage girls apparently with consent.

Miss the point much? Consent is not meaningful in underage girls. Men exploit underage girls; their underageness makes that easier to do. Saying “Jeez they only want to marry them” makes it worse, not better. … Read the rest

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments


Tomb Raiders Ride Again: National Geographic’s Breaking News

Nov 21st, 2016 | By R. Joseph Hoffmann

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. …. He is not here.’  Mark 16.6f.

Whether or not National Geographic has found where they “really” laid the body of Jesus is a hot and controversial topic right now.  But right or wrong, it is certain that he keeps popping up.

First the good news for believers:  Diggers (let’s not call them archaeologists) working within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered what they claim is the tomb of Jesus.  Again.  It seems … Read the rest

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