By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you.
— Mike Godwin (@sfmnemonic) August 14, 2017
Everything happening now is a dumber version of an event preceding it:
Stupid Watergate
Dumb Cuban Missile Crisis
Dipshit Third Reich— Maggie Serota ?? (@maggieserota) August 12, 2017
20-year old Ohio jihadist riots w/ 1000 fellow militants with medieval weapons then runs over 15 people & we'd be talking drone strikes rn.
— Local Milk Steak (@ZeddRebel) August 13, 2017
He so wants to say, "The Nazis have said very, very nice things about me." pic.twitter.com/ZoW3Y29lK0
— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 15, 2017
Not a novel point, but may be the best single-sentence summary of "Trumpism" I've seen. https://t.co/Br0ZYLffVa pic.twitter.com/AE8FH9qf8t
— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) August 14, 2017
"I condemn White Supremacy, but vote for Trump's agenda" is the new "I send thoughts and prayers to the victim, but vote against gun safety"
— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) August 13, 2017
A question from a senior Republican aide just now: "What idiot in [Trump's] admin is telling him to worry about the white supremacist vote?"
— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) August 13, 2017
Counterpoint: maybe his political instincts about how crucial they are to his coalition are correct. https://t.co/Hml6Zx0vAC
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 13, 2017
NotMax
Handwriting on the wall?
Villago Delenda Est
Or, it’s the entire point
jl
@NotMax: Who knows? They guy can’t focus on anything. What happened to the war on Sessions? Bannon just makes sure he’s the last guy n the room next couple of days and his problem gets fixed, maybe. Won’t change anything even if he is fired. Trump going to fire Gorka and Miller too? The PR problem won’t go away if Miller is involved in communications.
Mart
A question from a senior Republican aide just now: “What idiot in [Trump’s] admin is telling him to worry about the white supremacist vote?”
Guess they never heard of Bannon, Miller, or Gorka.
NotMax
@jl
He can move them sideways to make up a newly formed President’s Commission to Document Genetic Inferiority.
(Wish it was solely 100% over the top dark humor.)
NotMax
All of ’em, Katie.
jl
@Villago Delenda Est: Sobering link. It makes one important point that I think is true, and argued for in the previous thread. Trump didn’t need to end up here. He could be a controversial president with 50-50 ratings and keeping at least some of his populist promises he made. It was some kind of choice. The question is, what kind of choice, and why it was made? Or how was it made by default through sheer stupidity, personality disorder, and incompetence, if is not a conscious strategy.
Weak point is that too much of its conclusion relies on unreliable Trumpster tales and gossip. But that doesn’t matter too much. They ‘why’ is less important than what Trump and his gang say and do, where they are taking the country, and that has to be very vigorously opposed regardless of the ‘why’. Trump is coddling racists, fascists and Nazis and he has to be reined in.
Origuy
Bernard Kenny, 79, died today of cancer in his home in England.
The murder of Jo Cox by a white supremacist now appears to be the start of a lot of things.
?BillinGlendaleCA
I’m thinking of joining the Los Angeles Astronomical Society; membership gets you access to their dark sky observation location. It’s down the road from where I took Saturday’s Milky Way pics. They may be able to teach me how to use the telescope I purchased last year and how to take pics using it.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est: Great link. Plain fact is that Trump was one of the chief birthers, and Birtherism was founded on fear and hatred of Obama for his intolerable blackness.
On top of this was Trump’s personal animosity toward the president. Trump could not believe or accept that Obama might be his superior, let alone his equal.
This isn’t just some post Nixon BS that Trump has inherited and chooses to perpetuate. Trump has always surrounded himself with white supremacists, and has always been slow to disavow the worst of this scum.
And despite any distraction, Trump always comes back to advocating policies that negatively impact non-whites, whether they are immigrants or citizens. No wonder racists quickly sniffed out one of their own and supported Trump in the primaries, while too many other Americans chose to look the other way, or got all butthurt when Hillary talked about the basket of Deplorables.
Sloane Ranger
Rest in Peace Mr Kenney.
Steeplejack
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
“Do eeet!” (Rob Schneider voice)
BlueDWarrior
This would have been George Wallace’s Presidency if somehow he had won in ’68.
We have let thoroughly stupid people occupy high office because they, at the very least, mouth the words their stupid followers want to hear.
At some point, the more smart people either have to assert control, or give up on the notion of America being an enlightened nation and start to more earnestly Balkanize against the stupid parts of the country.
I think former is much easier than the latter.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: You saw the pics, it’s pretty dark up there. It’s just down the road from the Boy Scout camp I went to as a teen.
Steeplejack
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I am strongly in favor of your joining up. Access and information are good things.
LeonS
It not really comparing them to Nazis, not any more than one might compare the Yankees to baseball players.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Acquaintance here has a camera hooked up to his telescope, with a timer and rotor on the tripod to move along with the sky. Takes some astonishing shots.
Pretty sure he has a Facebook page on which he posts them, but he has a common name so I can’t point you directly to it, and have no experience tunneling down through hundreds of Facebook name matches to pinpoint him. Haven’t seen him in months; next time I do shall try to get the URL.
hellslittlestangel
The complete quote hits even nearer the mark:
Um, all of ’em, any of ’em that, um, have, have been in front of me over all these years.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: I have the telescope with a motorized tracker and a mount for my camera. I’ve tried it here with little success(light pollution is the likely problem).
sm*t cl*de
The one at the top.
Do Republicans really believe that Trump is a well-meaning dunce who only acts like a racist Nazi because of bad advice from his aides?
Amir Khalid
Some light relief is in order, after these days of hand-wringing over … well, you know.
Aunty Beeb’s Travel page has a story on Bislama, the English pidgin spoken in Vanuatu. It includes this conversation between the writer and some locals:
And also the Bislama for “bikini”: Basket blong titi.
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Light pollution sucks donkey dick.
OzarkHillbilly
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: I was kind of surprised how bright LA was from where I shot on Saturday, you could really see the bright glow of LA in the southeastern horizon. You couldn’t see it visually, but the camera amplifies it quite a bit.
opiejeanne
@Amir Khalid: This sounds remarkably like a passage in “The Sex Lives of Cannibals” by J. Marten Troost. A very entertaining book about living on Tarawa, in Kiribati. I think the cannibals are in book 2, “Getting Stoned With Savages” which I think begins on Vanuatu where he learns all about Kava, but ends on Fiji.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid: Highly recommended, if you want more great anecdotes about pigins & creoles: Derek Bickerton’s Bastard Tongues. Fun read, and informative, too!
Boatboy_srq
@NotMax: Lord Dampnut says what he thinks his audience wants to hear, and that changes venue to venue. This report is nothing more than Murdoch’s Build The Wall moment.
Just one more canuck
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m on vacation in Prince Edward Island right now, quite a distance from any towns. A couple of nights ago we went outside about 11. I hadn’t seen so many stars for decades – even camping in Ontario you get some light interfering with the view. You could almost read by the starlight
Jerzy Russian
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I recommend joining. Astronomers are, as a group, the second most awesomest people on the planet (the commentators on this blog currently hold a narrow lead in that category).
J R in WV
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
What kind of ‘scope did ya get? If you have a computerized aiming mount for the telescope (I bet you do, that’s nearly all they sell today) all you need to get started is an adapter to fit between your camera body and the scope eyepiece.
Basically you need to get the tripod level and aim the scope at a known position at a known time and date. After that the computerized mount does the rest. Here’s an article about something to look for in late August and early September. A 4 mile wide asteroid is coming within 27K odd miles of the earth !!!
I have a 5″ Celestron, unfortunately wife bought for me it just before the computerized mounts became common and inexpensive… but it was a great xmas present, and I have looked at many nearby interesting things with it. Without the computerized mount deep space photography is hard, you have to manually pan the telescope to keep your gadget aimed at your subject object. With a computerized motorized mount, you just get things set up and start an exposure, then have a cuppa tea while you wait for photons from far away to impact your sensor.
You could, if you lived in a dark place, even have a widescreen device indoors and watch Saturn in the cozy warm while the hardware is out in the cold and dark. There’s a subdivision in the wilds of Arizona with no outdoor light allowed at all, because everyone who lives there is an astronomer. I have a small camp in SE Arizona in a fairly dark place, haven’t tried the telescope out there yet, but planning to try to get a used scope and get into it soon.
J R in WV
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Also, there are filters designed to eliminate urban frequencies of light, like the sodium band, which is the bulk of current streetlights.
StringOnAStick
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Join up! Some friends of ours bought a house that came with a Sky Pod observatory and a serious telescope plus attachments. It is complicated enough that they joined the local group then put out a call to pay any member who could show them how to use it. Half the members who responded had that telescope model and offered their help for free just because they love the hobby so much.
Mnemosyne
@sm*t cl*de:
“If only the Czar knew!”
More seriously, Republicans are people who have a difficult time believing that other people think and believe different things than they themselves do. I’m pretty sure that each Republican thinks that Trump wants exactly what s/he wants, and Trump has encouraged that projection because he’s a narcissist.