The moron in the Oval Office watched “Lou Dobbs” last night and got a bee in his bonnet about the Google search results for “Trump News.” Now he’s threatening to “regulate” Google’s search engine. No, really:
WASHINGTON – White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is considering new regulations on Google’s search engine to address his concern that it turns up too many stories that are critical of him.
Pressed by reporters at the White House on Tuesday about a tweet the president wrote criticizing Google’s search engine as “rigged,” the director of Trump’s National Economic Council said the administration is “taking a look” at federal regulations for the company.
“We’ll let you know,” he said.
Even the not terribly bright Chris Cillizza was able to vaporize this embarrassingly foolish complaint, pointing out the idiotic premises on which it rests, which include profound ignorance of how search engines work and a media ranking system devised by a crackpot that classifies “news” from Alex Jones as “center right.”
Sweet Fancy Moses, fellow citizens, we are living in the stupidest of timelines. Open thread.
cmorenc
So are the Google results for Hillary Clinton that also dredge up “email server” also rigged?
MomSense
I don’t even know how to process all of this BS anymore.
low-tech cyclist
Jeez, does he ever stop whining and complaining about how unfair life is to him?
Awfully bizarre thing for a guy who’s (unfortunately) President and (allegedly) a billionaire to be doing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Doesn’t this guy have any actual work to do? You’d think being president would be time consuming.
Platonailedit
Platonailedit
Post in moderation. Fucking trump.
Luthe
I’m going to repeat my complaint from the previous post: Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back. IT’S NOT EVEN FUCKING SEPTEMBER, PEOPLE!
/hates the pumpkin spice trend with all of their black, shriveled soul
germy
A republican calling for a business to be regulated?
Through the looking glass now.
Jeffro
Wait…you’re saying Alex Jones ISN’T “center-right”? Say what now?
(actually considering the state of the current GOP, AJ actually is about dead center of the right wing…)
@Luthe: this is true, it’s just way too early…heat index here in NoVA is something like 105 degrees. It felt like I was walking through hot soup last night when I went to walk the dog at 10pm.
Amir Khalid
Even if Trump sounds 24/7 like the dimwitted, whiny little pisser he is, there will always be those people who insist they “like what he’s saying”. But at least everyone else will be entertained and further motivated to keep on working to bring him down, right?.
trollhattan
@Luthe:
Dovetail that horror with the fact I saw my first Christmas wrap display at the beginning of the month (looking at you, Costco).
Leto
Combination of further outsourcing and the 2017 tax cuts:
‘They’re liquidating us’: AT&T continues layoffs and outsourcing despite profits The communications giant is expecting a windfall of $20bn in savings from Trump’s tax reforms, but has closed 44 call centers since 2011
This also seems be another union killing strategy.
germy
One of the funniest bits I saw W. Kamau Bell do was his powerpoint presentation “Pat Buchanan is so racist that if you google Pat Buchanan, google auto fills ‘Pat Buchanan Racist?'”
Litlebritdifrnt
@Luthe: Any of the holiday spices disgust me because they usually include large quantities of cinnamon which I cannot stand. I do not understand why American Apple Pie includes cinnamon as an ingredient as it totally destroys the flavor of the apple. The only spice that should be near apples is a gentle dusting of Nutmeg. End of story.
PS) We mailed our immigration appeal today. I will keep the jackals updated as things progress.
dmsilev
@Luthe: Yes, but at least Christmas carols aren’t yet playing incessantly.
lollipopguild
@Luthe: Was in CVS the other day, they already had the Halloween stuff out.
dmsilev
I was reading coverage of this over at Ars Technica, and one of the commenters pointed out that Trump’s outburst might have been triggered by a tribute to John McCain that Google had on their homepage for a while.
bjacques
Old Man Yells At The Cloud
Maybe he needs the “Santorum” treatment…
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: Yeah, Trump’s “the media unfair to MEEEE” complaints apparently resonate with the losers in his base. You’d think constant meeping by an alleged billionaire POTUS would strike all sentient beings as tiresome, but then again we’re talking about people who firmly believe they’re oppressed because they’re white Christians, so…
hilts
Once again, it’s time for another diaper change for our thumb sucking crybaby-in-chief.
Betty Cracker
@dmsilev: I’m sure all the McCain adulation is triggering the orange fart cloud something fierce! But as usual, you can draw a straight line between what he’s pissed off about today to what aired on Fox News in the last 24 hours.
A former PM in Australia wrote an op-ed calling Rupert Murdoch “he greatest cancer on the Australian democracy,” and someone on Twitter said that should be expanded to the entire planet. There’s a lot of truth to that, I think.
ETA: If Steyer or some other left-leaning billionaire really wants to rescue American democracy, the most expedient route might be to buy Fox News and run content on actual foxes 24/7.
Luthe
@trollhattan: Christ in a manager. The only places allowed to have Christmas merchandise out are craft stores, because homemade gifts need lead time to be completed by the holiday. Anywhere else should be sent lumps of coal post-haste (now there’s a way to prop up the coal industry).
patrick II
We seem amused at the stupidity of intimidating Google. They are not stupid, but venal. It was lack of right wing news on Facebook that brought Zuckerberg to D.C. a couple of years ago to face Republican Senators who told him more right wing news or face regulation. Zuckerberg caved and opened the doors. We all know what happened then.
Intimidating news sources has been useful, and not just Facebook. But because of the nature of Google, its complex algorithm base, and its owners (I consider them somewhat more responsible than Zuckerberg) I don’t think it will be as easy to intimidate Google. But we think of those algorithm as just some neutral machine, which is why I think we find amusement because of course they are objective, but they are not, they are rules written by men and can be changed if the incentive, carrot or stick, is big enough.
chris
@dmsilev: The story I’ve seen is that Loud Obbs tweeted a story by PJMedia which has a handy chart from Sheryl Atkisson. If you want to see the dumb, there’s a link in this tweet:
schrodingers_cat
@Litlebritdifrnt: Agreed about cinnamon. I like cinnamon as the essential ingredient in garam masala. I don’t think it works in desserts. Nutmeg, cardamom and vanilla are dessert spices (not all at once).
Luthe
@Luthe:
It occurred to me the Shitgibbon is in fact propping up the coal industry this by ensuring there are so many people now on Santa’s naughty list.
Haroldo
@Litlebritdifrnt: Did you catch yesterday’s Guardian story about how UKs immigration system has been becoming more and more and more complex and confusing over the years?
Good luck!
schrodingers_cat
@patrick II: YouTube algorithm promotes far right crap, not just here but also in India.
The Ancient Randonneur
Poor Donald, he was born with a silver spoon stuck up his ass.
Kay
Guffaw. This is why I say all the Trump hires are low quality. They are! People who go out and say things like this are cowardly, bad people with no self respect.
I love the defense too. “Well, they all wanted giant tax cuts and that’s why they act like such absolute morons on Trump’s behalf!”
That’s the DEFENSE.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The wall to wall coverage of McCain must be driving Trump nuts.
Aleta
Tell people to mistrust negative reports about him, attack press freedom. Pose as the underdog, claim he and his supporters are victims. Campaign 2016 all over again. Encourage irrational belief–there’s a thing out there (google) that will harm us.
Along with the attacks on the JD, virulent rhetoric on TV and in crowds that immigrants are dangerous, seizing their children, cheering for militarization, and evangelicals claiming he and Pence are god’s plan–it resembles historical appeals that totalitarianism is safer than democracy.
Kay
How can anyone say Trump doesn’t care what people think about him? It’s ALL he cares about. He wakes up every day and starts searching for mention of himself. It is LITERALLY all he does.
He’s either fuming and lashing out because people refuse to love him or crowing about how much people love him. That’s it. That’s the waking hours.
There’s nothing else there. It’s not just central to him- it is him.
jc
Trump loves to threaten to sue people, to make scary promises that put his power over others front and center. Half the time it’s all bluff – but he had you going there, didn’t he? Oh boy, abusing power is such fun, isn’t it?
Tenar Arha
@Betty Cracker: I imagine the howls of horror, and legislative outrage if Steyer et al actually did this. They really don’t understand that the same “corporate personhood” they worship like Moloch does protect that kind of fox-y reboot. I believe they’d sue, under everything they could throw at it, to stop it. And the SC ought to reject them all, based simply on their pro-business, pro-corporate slant.
Addendum: Then again if there’s 5 radical RW’s on the Supreme Court, that’s how we got Plessy vs. Ferguson as Constitutional for decades. (That’s bc I’m assuming if Section 5 of the VRA, reauthorized by a large majority, could be struck down by the Roberts Court with Scalia on it, then one with Kavanaugh & Goresuch could rationalize anything based on their RWNJ ideology. Can you tell I’m pretty pessimistic about the SC in general now?)
Mike in NC
Reading “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”, it was Fat Bastard’s idiotic belief that having been elected under dubious circumstances, he still expected the news media to automatically kiss his feet every time he appeared in public. What a stupid fucking disgrace.
Gelfling 545
@Luthe: My Granddaughter, a big fan of pumpkin spice, also feels that this is unseemly. It’s for actual fall with pumpkins and corn stalka and SWEATERS.
Kay
I get a kick out my refusing to love the Trump Family. They think they’re owed it, but I disagree.
They’re bad people. I don’t even have to like them let alone love them. Never. That’s when they’ll get it.
They can’t buy the public’s love it and they can’t make a fucking deal with the Russians to scam it, which gives me great satisfaction.
I literally would not hire Donald Trump to repave my driveway – not in 2016 and not in 2018. I hire better people than him.
JPL
@Kay: You are definitely spot on. Who tweets NO COLLUSION at one in the morning, or searching google at five in the morning. Trump is obsessed, and nothing good can happen while he is in charge.
Brachiator
I thought this was a joke at first. A holdover from April Fool.
So now I guess instead of looking at any mainstream media site, I’ll head straight for The Onion.
JPL
@Gelfling 545: Is it any good?
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
Yep. He’s a toxic narcissist. He has no center. It’s just a giant sucking black hole of neediness that can never, ever be filled.
The Hoarse Whisperer on Twitter has been on the narcissist beat for a while, and he’s really good at explaining it in layman’s terms.
(I had been mistakenly referring to The Hoarse Whisperer as “she,” but he’s actually a he.)
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
not only that, but being forced to give a decent statement, and to fly the flags at half-mast, has pissed him off.
Plus, he looked like a fool on that phone call to Mexico.
PS-Badger pictures are always welcome. :)
rikyrah
@Kay:
I dunno Kay.
I see it as a two -pronged way:
He wants to be adored.
He wants to be able to PUNISH AND SILENCE those with the audacity NOT to adore him.
Gelfling 545
@bjacques: I thought of that but then I recalled that I have a beloved young relative who shares his surname and she has suffered enough!
Aleta
@lollipopguild: That would be sat an. Christmas music will sally forth and eventually prevail.
Haroldo
@Betty Cracker: Hi, Betty, I seem to have doxxed myself in Comment 27. Let’s see if putting in my un-doxxed name will recitfy things, otherwise could you make the comment disappear? Thanks.
scav
I hear there’s a second-story water-cooler (the one near the break room, not the one near the men’s john) at the ACME LLC hedquarters. where unkind words about Trump were once uttered. Unleash the Federal Investigation!!
NotMax
@Luthe
Displays of Halloween candy showed up at the markets the friggin’ first week of August.
Mike in NC
@lollipopguild: Ace Hardware was putting up Christmas displays yesterday. All I wanted was a lousy lightbulb.
Mnemosyne
In non-Trump news, my pre-surgery cooking spree and boxing up of clutter continues apace. I now have three sets of freezer meals ready (chicken cacciatore, stuffed peppers, and spicy lemon chicken) and I’m going to make some chili tonight for my last option. I’ve figured out what in the craft room can be thrown away and what needs to be boxed up, so I’ll be boxing the rest up tonight. I also have about 4 more loads of laundry to do, but I can only do 2 a night because our dryer is old and slow.
Ladyraxterinok
@Litlebritdifrnt: My SIL is from mainland China. Accordong to her background, cinnamon is a medicine. Cinnamon in a dessert means it’s a medicine, not a dessert. Likewise, no cinnamon scented candles for the holidays.
Corner Stone
@patrick II:
Google is a for-profit publicly traded company. Who in their right minds would think the algos are objective and unbiased? They are biased to get the clicks that get Google the money.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
WHEW
I’m tired just reading that..LOL
TomatoQueen
Cinnamon in compounds such as “apple pie spice” and that goddamned pumpkin crap starts out low quality and goes foul quickly. The thing to do is get your cinnamon in small quantities at the start of baking season and discard any remaining with the used gift wrap at the end. Best cinnamon evah is from Penzey’s (the Korintje kind is a revelation), from whom you’ll already be getting your vanilla anyway. Banish all bad cinnamon into a hazmat container with every cinnamon-stench candle from Yankee Candle, Colonial Candle, and Walmart and dump the lot in Bedminster, NJ.
Corner Stone
@rikyrah:
He looked like a petulant, puffy toad of a fool on that call. It seriously played like an SNL cold open with Alec Baldwin.
Gelfling 545
@Dorothy A. Winsor: He says it’s more befitting to a presidential funeral. I say fine, let him have one.
schrodingers_cat
@TomatoQueen: Better still, buy cinnamon sticks at the Indian grocery store (100gm for $2) and grind them as needed in your coffee grinder or mortar and pestle. I have a brass mortar and pestle for dry spices.
D58826
@Luthe: Since I want to get an early start on the season, anyone know where I can Easter egg dye kits and choc. rabbits :-)
NonyNony
@NotMax:
Heh. They’re hoping to get the early buyers to buy up a whole bunch, pig out on it, and have to come back and buy more before Halloween. :)
There’s a big gap in the retail calendar between “Back to School” and “Halloween”. Supermarkets haven’t really figured out how to monetize Labor Day, except for sales on grilling supplies and food for the actual weekend.
The start of Football Season has taken over the local supermarkets here though. I haven’t seen any Halloween candy yet – too much Football to celebrate. Get your Bud Light and Tostito’s for the start of Football Season folks! (And my local supermarket always seems to have giant displays of Coke and Diet Coke to celebrate Football Season at the end of August/beginning of September. Probably because of Ohio State…)
Haroldo
@Corner Stone:
My guess is those are green algos, eh?
schrodingers_cat
@Ladyraxterinok: Many spices have antibiotic and anti-inflammatory properties and double as medicines. Turmeric, ginger and cloves are a good example.
NotMax
Make America Google Antagonistic.
Bring back Alta Vista!
:)
Corner Stone
@Kay:
What task or job would you actually hire him for? He’s too bloated and out of shape to shovel manure or turn compost, so the job outcome would be…umm…shitty. Maybe paint the outside of a barn? Because then you could harass him and not pay him until it was covered enough.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Excellent observation!!
Sister Golden Bear
Elizabelle – To answer your question from downstairs, I only got a day in Bangkok to do sightseeing, so I’d love to go back to Thailand for a real vacation and see more of the country.
Chon Buri, where Dr. Suporn’s clinic is, is far, far off the tourist path. In fact, there were only 2-3 instances where I saw Western farangs who weren’t either patients or their caregivers. (And one of those instance was at Chon Buri’s only tourist destination — the largest Chinese-style Buddhist temple in Thailand, which was impressive.)
The funny is, living in the multi-culti Bay Area, I didn’t really notice — except when I saw Westerners.
Oddly enough, the “Western-style” mall in Chon Buri does have a lot Japanese restaurants (probably at least half the restaurants on the third floor, which was entirely made up of restaurants), so I’m not sure if there’s Japanese tourism there — Chon Buri is basically an industrial city, but it next to the ocean — or whether the Thais simply have a taste for Japanese food.
Gelfling 545
@JPL: I think it’s ok. Granddaughter loves it. Their chestnut praline at Christmas time, now: ambrosial.
schrodingers_cat
@Corner Stone: Scarecrow for my vegetable garden. His visage gives me nightmares.
Yarrow
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Did you have your meeting? Is the appeal because you got denied or is it another step in the process. Hopefully everything is going okay there.
Yarrow
@Corner Stone: Carnival barker. He’s good at getting attention and taking money from rubes.
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
I know! I guess I’ll get to rest after the surgery. ?
TenguPhule
@MomSense:
I simply imagine Trump’s head on a pike in front of the White House.
It keeps me grounded.
chris
Ayup.
Two stories I have seen today, one saying that California will burn to the ground and the other saying that the rest of the southern states will become uninhabitable soon after. By the gods, I miss Obama.
Mnemosyne
@TomatoQueen:
Ground cinnamon actually does work to block ants from coming in — I was skeptical, but they refused to cross the barrier I lay down on the kitchen floor between the kitchen and the dining room, and I used it other places as well. So that’s a less wasteful re-use of old cinnamon. ?
shelley
No, but Ive recently found crushed raspberries make a very effective dye!
Amir Khalid
@Sister Golden Bear:
I think it’s more like Japanese restaurant chains have a taste for Thais’ money.
A Ghost To Most
@chris:
That presumes that the southern states are livable now.
Just One More Canuck
@The Ancient Randonneur: “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth”j
oatler.
OT voting in AZ is pretty fucked up right now because of “contracters”.
Frankensteinbeck
“Who gets to tell the boss we don’t have the power to do that?”
schrodingers_cat
Meanwhile in India, Modi’s government yesterday arrested several activists, human rights lawyers all over India. Including Sudha Bharadwaj a human rights lawyer who works pro bono for the dispossessed against mining company interests in one of India’s poorest states, Chattisgarh.(India’s Appalachia).
The main divide in India is not religion but caste. All these activists/artists have worked and spoken about Dalit rights. Coincidence? I think not.
Fair Economist
@NotMax: Sadly Halloween has become a big business holiday like Christmas so the season runs on far too long. The lack of an iconic holiday between the 4th and Halloween doesn’t help although Christmas still drove the bus over Thanksgiving and then backed over it to be sure.
Mnemosyne
@Just One More Canuck:
The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south.
Teddys Person
@Corner Stone: I’d hire him to be the person that gets dunked in the dunk tank at a carnival whose proceeds go toward paying DREAM application fees.
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
I would say they are objective but not necessarily unbiased. We normally think of those things going together, but they aren’t necessarily the same. Objectivity means they’re relying exclusively on measurable evidence to reach their decisions, but lack of bias means those decisions aren’t slanted one way or another. A good example of an objective but biased system are the ones used to generate gerrymandered districts. They’re objective because they depend exclusively on facts in their decision making, but they’re biased because their programmers wrote them to produce results that were slanted a particular way.
It’s easy for bias to creep into any kind of algorithm that works by being trained on a set of training data, as happens with many “deep learning” and other AI algorithms. The quality of the results depends critically on the quality of data in the training set. If you feed the system biased data, it will produced biased results, even if it is using objective measures to generate them. In particular, if you use data from an existing, biased system as your training set (e.g. use recidivism data from a bigoted criminal justice system when training an algorithm to predict who will reoffend) you will get results that reflect the bias of the existing system.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@lollipopguild:
Halloween stuff has no reason to be out prior to 9/15.
Brachiator
@Tenar Arha:
Unfortunately, the justices in Plessy were mainstream Apple Pie All-American racists. And the vote was 7 to 1 (one justice was away visiting family when the Court heard the case). Of course, this is the America that Trump wants to return to.
The Dangerman
So, what would qualify as Right Right?
ChrisS
[86] The same with seasonal beers. Sam Adam’s Octoberfest doesn’t need to hit shelves til then either.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Would you hire dt to lay down in your driveway and be paved over?
It is a moral question isn’t it?
You’d have made the world a better place, you might enjoy driving on him daily, but think of the value of the house?
Luthe
@Fair Economist: One of the upsides of working for Williams-Sonoma was that Thanksgiving is actually their biggest money maker, so it held the line against Christmas. Sure, some Christmas stuff would be out, but the turkey was king.
Roger Moore
@Corner Stone:
I would hire him to run a business I was trying to run into the ground. It’s what he’s best at, and it’s why Putin wanted him as President.
NotMax
@ChrisS
Oktoberfest on WoW is in September this year, also too.
Yarrow
@lollipopguild: Halloween stuff is out at my local supermarket as well, including cardboard displays with supposedly scary themes like black cats and leafless trees.
Just One More Canuck
@Mnemosyne: Substitute lies for facts
patrick II
@Corner Stone:
Correct. And if the right regulatory rules are changed, it can affect Google’s bottom line. As puerile as Trump seems when complaining about negative news, he has some leverage, and it works for his audience.
Mr Stagger Lee
Check out this week’s podcast of Jon Favreau’s The Wilderness,the topic this week is the media.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: Contd.
Correction: Its the Maharashtra’s state government (BJP is in power here too) that arrested these activists
hueyplong
Jesus fucking Christ on a pop tart, I just finished dropping f bombs on someone who told me this Google pout thing was a real story.
FFS.
Let the fuck dive into a comment section and see what Bob From Burlingame has to say to him.
WTF?
AliceBlue
@Ruckus:
Speaking of “pave over”…
Stephen King wrote a short story a number of years ago called “Dolan’s Cadillac”.
Read it and imagine Trump as Dolan.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
Aren’t the castes derived from religion?
/earnest question
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
Hmmm. At the rate the crazy guy in the White House is going, soon we will have only one holiday, Trump Day, all year long. One hell of a parade, though.
schrodingers_cat
@TenguPhule: No. Castes are theoretically derived from your profession, although in practice they are hereditary. In India, Muslims and Christians too follow the caste system.
Just One More Canuck
@Platonailedit: I just googled ‘soon to be impeached ‘ – Trump was the first story
Aleta
Splinter
‘ ‘ A few weeks ago, rumors spread across the internet that a child had died in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody. It turned out that information was false. The Vice News report that spurred those rumors, however, is just as disturbing. It tells the story of Yazmin Juárez, 20, a Guatemalan asylum-seeker who entered the US in March and was detained by ICE in Dilley, Texas. She brought her 18-month-old daughter, Mariee, across the border with her. While in detention, Mariee developed a respiratory infection that became increasingly serious. When Juárez was released, she sought medical treatment for her daughter, but it was too late. Six weeks after their release, Mariee died.
Juárez is now taking legal action against ICE.
…
Doctors contacted by Vice for the article say that the treatment that Mariee received was “reasonable,” and it’s possible she would have died even if she had hospital care from the beginning of her illness. Others say that the stress of being in detention could have damaged Mariee’s immune system.
“Respiratory diseases, they flourish in the setting of crowding,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine told Vice. “Now you’re adding this terrible level of psycho-social stress on kids, that could also impair their immune system, making them more susceptible to viruses and bacteria.”
“Those stresses are real; they affect the child’s abilities to fight an infection and illness and win,” Brian Blaisch, a pediatrician who has worked in immigrant detention centers, told Vice.
Past government reports have found consistent problems with medical treatment at the Dilley facility where Juárez and her daughter stayed. The facility is run by private prison giant CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) and was built by the Obama administration. It’s the largest family detention center in the country.
In 2016, a report from the Department of Homeland Security found that the center didn’t respond properly to sick detainees. “Parents and children should not have to wait 24 hours for treatment and should not have to wait for their healthcare needs to become urgent to receive quicker attention and treatment,” they wrote. Another review of Dilley’s facilities released in July found widespread problems.
From Vice:
At Dilley, [doctors] Allen and McPherson found detainees seeking medical care were held together in a gym because the facility lacked sufficient medical space. They also said Dilley had trouble keeping pediatricians on staff, did not hire a child psychiatrist, and sometimes placed toddlers and their parents in medical isolation for days as punishment for normal toddler misbehavior. On one occasion, a nurse mistakenly gave multiple children at Dilley adult doses of a vaccine, they found.
… ‘ ‘
https://splinternews.com/toddler-died-from-pneumonia-six-weeks-after-leaving-ice-1828640183
The Dangerman
@Corner Stone:
I wouldn’t trust him with anything more serious than extremely low end porn production; no, Donald wouldn’t be the on screen actor. I’m thinking coffee boy. Hell, he’d probably fuck that up.
schrodingers_cat
@TenguPhule: Upper caste Christians in Goa call the poor lower caste Christians, maka pao (give me bread) Christians and in Kerala, Syrian Christians call lower caste Christians, rice Christians.
MattF
@The Dangerman: Hard to say. ‘Nazi’ is short for National Socialist, after all.
Mathguy
@bjacques: “Trump” defined as fecal matter or the act of defecation would make sense, especially given his proclivity for tweeting while “Trumpin.” This does have a nice ring to it: “Sorry, I had to take a trump.” “Wow, that was a huge trump.”
Amir Khalid
@schrodingers_cat:
Muslims too? Tsk tsk.
schrodingers_cat
@Amir Khalid: Yes. Caste plays the same part in the subcontinent that race plays here.
TenguPhule
@Corner Stone:
i understand there are vital scientific experiments we consider too inhumane for rats or pigs.
Emma
@Fair Economist: When we arrived in Chicago ye many years ago we were introduced to the State Street Windows Ritual. Every year before Thanksgiving the windows in all major stores would be shrouded and interesting construction sounds could be heard from inside. Then, the day after Thanksgiving everyone made the pilgrimage downtown to see the Christmas windows. That was the real opening of the Christmas season. It was fabulous. Now, by the time Christmas rolls around it’s like “Meh. You’ve been playing that effing song about the reindeer since November 1st.”
The Dangerman
@Mathguy:
Maybe if it was something extreme and not, ya know, standard fare, i.e., “Holy Hell, after that chorizo burrito with the poblano peppers, I had such a Trump that I’ll have to repaint the bathroom”
Litlebritdifrnt
@Harold M Persing: Yeah I did see that. It really is a nightmare, they give you rules and then routinely break those rules. I am not giving up. I will fight to my last breath to get him permission to stay here. I should imagine that the Immigration Judge doesn’t want to go up against my Mother and my Sister. They are formidable women.
O. Felix Culpa
Trump wants better coverage? Here a friend’s suggestion:
1. Stop doing bad things.
2. Start doing good things.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat: The whole untouchable thing confuses me. Why on earth would you discriminate against the people who do the dirtiest jobs when those people are performing vital services without which you’d be suffering some really bad things?
AThornton
@MomSense:
“I don’t even know how to process all of this BS anymore.”
To the rescue!
On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit
“Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound (e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity.”
C. Isaac
@TenguPhule: Magical thinking that makes it so their stuff don’t stink.
schrodingers_cat
@TenguPhule: Well it confuses me too. It must have its roots in racism because the Sanskrit word for caste is varna which means hue (color of skin).
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
And that social class plays in much of Europe. My impression is that Indian caste is more rigid than European class, but that it’s a difference of degree rather than kind.
J R in WV
So someone needs to read the First Amendment to Kudlow, slowly, with definitions of the complex words, a couple of times. Google would be perfectly legitimate to prune all the right wing nutjobs out of the search results, and the government STILL couldn’t do any thing about it.
Now I’ll read everyone else’s comments, and comment some more. I’m sure this thread will have some great stuff.
Oh, yeah, ran into a neighbor at the grocery store yesterday afternoon. She went to Trump’s rally last week, and said she had a great time getting RAGE off her mind in the demonstration. She added that she wore a tee shirt with “It’s Mueller Time” on it, which was a huge hit with everyone, said she could have sold hundreds of them!
trollhattan
As Undersecretary for the Cybers, can’t Barron straighten daddy out on this googles thing?
Only the best people.
TenguPhule
@J R in WV:
You must be an optimist.
Kudlow is the human equivalent of dead wood. Him being wrong is a universal constant. Attempting to change that risks destroying reality as we know it.
donnah
So, after recalling how hard Obama worked, spent time visiting various causes, read extensively, met often with heads of state, had business meetings and special dinners, I am dumbstruck that this asshole of a president has time to watch FOX, chat with Hannity and Dobbs daily, play golf every weekend, and write the occasional executive order.
He’s such a lazy-ass disaster, yet he causes destruction and damage to an entire country, not to mention the rest of the world. I guess it’s all of those “best people” he put into power. Imagine the destruction he he actually applied himself.
Roger Moore
@TenguPhule:
It’s a feedback loop. The people who get stuck with the dirtiest jobs become social pariahs because many of those dirty jobs (e.g. jobs involving human waste or dead animals) have negative religious connotations. And because those people are now pariahs, they can’t get anything but the dirtiest jobs. One of the functions of a class or caste system is to make sure there are people who are obligated to do the dirtiest, least attractive jobs so those jobs don’t get skipped.
trollhattan
@J R in WV:
Kudlow’s brain is so cocaine-riddled he’s likely not capable of taking in such information, much less use it to evaluate whatever New Donny Thing of the Day is occurring. I officially hate all these people–there’s virtually no administration member who is not rotten to the very core. Just like he wanted.
Swear we’d be better off with President Gus Fring.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: I am not an anthropologist but my guess is that it has its roots in good old racism, see my earlier comment.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: Look at your language too, pariah is an untouchable caste in southern India. British Raj’s bureaucracy with the help of their Brahminical scribes helped entrench these differences by their penchant for classification. Remember, during Victorian era, social Darwinism was all the rage.
trollhattan
Holy fuckballs.
Manyakitty
@Betty Cracker: Brilliant! I would totally watch that!
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, it used to be about profession, but then it became about racism. Some asshole decided that it is hereditary like some kind of blood line. It’s a bunch of crap. I suspect it’s asshole Brahmins who decided they like the power they had at the top of the stack and probably conspired with Kshatriyas. (I’m a Brahmin, so I can talk shit about them all the time. :-)
cain
@Aleta: Fuck me, this is like worse than gitmo. Every time we think we can’t get more evil, we find ourselves doing even more evil things. Fuck these people. I feel so helpless, I don’t know how I can help these people! :( :(
TenguPhule
@donnah:
He’s relying on the rest of the government to keep going as usual so he doesn’t have to personally work.
And it can, to a certain extent.
But the damage is growing. The machine is out of oil and nobody refilled the anti-freeze.
When it breaks down, its going to cascade.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: As a woman, one is a non-person no matter what caste. So even Brahmin women zero claim to exalted religious status.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: Missing have between women and zero.
patrick II
@Roger Moore:
So when speaking of algorithms I should say “we think of them as unbiased because they are objective, but while objective, they are not unbiased.
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
My understanding is that both Indian caste and European class came originally when the countries were overrun by foreign invaders. The invaders set themselves up as rulers and invented a bunch of rules that justified them and their descendants remaining permanently in charge. It may have had a bigger racial component in India than in Europe because the racial difference between the invaders and the natives were bigger there, but it was at its root a system for justifying the continuing power of the conquering people.
Manyakitty
@trollhattan: Gustavo is hard working and terrifyingly disciplined.
Death Panel Truck
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s driving me nuts, too, for a different reason. The guy doesn’t deserve the adulation.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/08/mccain
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
Now, see, in my world, one of the founding principles is that “If momma aka wife isn’t happy, nobody is happy!” Any man who doesn’t understand that principle is going to be an unhappy person all his life, and may never quite understand why he is so unhappy. And won’t ever be able to fix it. Sad. Trumplike.
Ksmiami
@Tenar Arha: I think the sc will be radically altered if the rt gets its way, meaning that if we have to disband it to serve the majority it will happen- peacefully or through violent reaction
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: The Aryan invader theory has been challenged and the jury is still out on that.
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
Slightly simpler: just because they’re objective doesn’t mean they’re unbiased.
bemused
@Corner Stone:
I’ve had the same thought so many times. I think of various, even fairly simple jobs that I wouldn’t hire him to do from pet sitting, mowing the lawn, watching our home while we are on vacay, watering the outdoor plants, shoveling the sidewalks, etc. You wouldn’t be able to count on him to do, never mind more complicated jobs like doing your taxes and so on. He’s totally unreliable and incapable of completing a task on his own.
schrodingers_cat
@J R in WV: Wise theory. Manusmriti’s (Hinduism’s Leviticus) writer/s were not so enlightened, unfortunately.
trollhattan
@Manyakitty:
And, now seems to own Nacho lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
The last parking lot meeting with Mike was pretty revealing about those two characters.
OldDave
@Mnemosyne:
Make sure it’s not because the vent line to outside your home isn’t clogged with lint. Fires can happen that way.
patrick II
@Roger Moore:
Does everyone have to be more eloquent than me?
germy
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Will the villagers lose interest when Obama delivers the eulogy?
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
That might change now. With less women in the pool, arranged marriages are going get interesting. Of course, that article you linked to in another thread about hard right indian men is also interesting. With the rise of an independent women, they aren’t going to be an attractive prospect from a woman’s family/woman especially it is about subjugation. The whole thing reminds me of an article regarding Egypt or some other country where they talked about muslim men joining Al Qaeda because there are no jobs and they are not able to get married (and I assume no sex) and so they join these terrorist groups to give them purpose. How idiotic that it’s happening all over again.
Also fuck these people who abort their female babies. The only good thing that will likely happen about all of this is that we’ll finally get that population down due to less women. The flip side is that India is going to turn hard right. Sigh.
The Moar You Know
@trollhattan: Fun fact: most Japanese think all American foodstuffs are diseased or poison and won’t buy them. Especially beef.
They’re not wrong, by their standards. We do virtually no inspection and even less quality control of our foodstuffs. Americans eat garbage. I really didn’t understand that until my first trip to Europe. Our food is trash.
As to cars, how are you going to drive a Buick through Tokyo? I bet you’d make it a mile before getting lodged in one of those alleys they call streets.
Corner Stone
@trollhattan:
Are we sure they didn’t mean “blithering critique” ? There’s no way Trump knows anything coherent about the economic policies of Japan.
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
Yes. SATSQ.
trollhattan
Scott Walker trailing Tony Evers for WI governor.
Make it so.
schrodingers_cat
@cain
India has already turned hard right, the butcher of Godhra is the PM. I think things are turning because unlike 2014 they are not even pretending that they care economic progress. BJP has consistently lost ground in the Loksabha they have lost far more byelections than they have won.
trollhattan
@The Moar You Know:
Yeah. Suppose we could export US-built Civics to Japan but there, those are probably considered Large Vehicles. Besides, we’re too busy building Eff One-fiddys.
Brachiator
@TenguPhule:
In Japan, this would be the Burakumin. They were associated with “impure” occupations (executioners, undertakers, workers in slaughterhouses, butchers or tanners).
Ruviana
@Roger Moore: Humans respond to rank and hierarchy. Way before what we think of as civilization and modernity different societies were dividing people up on the basis of culturally-constructed social statuses. Some Native American societies had caste-like categories that one was born into including slave categories but these weren’t what we think of when we think of the highly-commodified commercial slave trade of the 17th-19th centuries. I think we can probably have basically equal societies but we’re working against a part of ourselves that really responds to hierarchy and rank.
Leto
@NotMax: But that’s more in line with traditional Oktoberfest. Plus it means I get to wear my sausage hat and liderhosen! Dwarf party here!
Mnemosyne
@schrodingers_cat:
It was also the heyday of the “scientific” racism that culminated in eugenics and other really bad science.
Ruviana
@Brachiator: The burakumin is another great example of how this kind of status is shaped and “naturalized.” Japanese people who are descendants of burakumin hide their ancestry because of its negative connotations.
In other matters it’ll be really cool to get the edit function back one day ’cause I would’ve appended this to my earlier comment.
Ruviana
@cain: Unfortunately a drop in available marriageable women seems to lower their overall social status. I could probably find citations but I know I’ve read that about China. It seems counter-intuitive since you’d think the “scarcity” of women would make them more socially valuable.
NotMax
@Leto
Don’t forget the polka music.
;)
Jeffro
@Corner Stone:
I’d pay him to feed some worms, that’s for sure. While doubling as a target for previously consumed Bud Light. Which I guess would drown the worms…hmm…
cain
@schrodingers_cat:
The alternative though also sucks. I really don’t think Congress I is any better. We need a coalition that is check on everyone.
Aleta
@TenguPhule: For Buddhism and Christianity, yes. Depending on the locality and the outcast group and the period in history it’s not the whole story.
zhena gogolia
I just noticed that Cole tweeted this during his parents’ 50th anniversary celebration: “I’m ready to go and our main courses are not here yet.” He’s just like me in many ways.
Mnemosyne
@Ruviana:
It does seem strange, but I think I’ve read that, too. A scarcity of women seems to make them even more of a commodity than usual and you end up with a lot of kidnapping, selling girls/young women to the highest bidder, etc.
Jeffro
@donnah:
During the later part of the 2016 GOP primaries, the Trumpov campaign – I think it was actually Don Jr? – reached out to the Kasich campaign* wanting Kasich to come on the ticket as VP. Kasich would handle everything: domestic AND foreign policy. “most powerful VP in history”, yadda yadda.
When asked what, then, DJT was going to handle, Jr replied, “he’ll be around making America great again”. At the time I took it to mean that Don the Con just wanted to do the ceremonial fun stuff. HE CAN’T EVEN DO THAT.
*What do you know, I remembered it correctly.
Fair Economist
@Emma: The ritual of changing from Thanksgiving to Christmas decor is my second most missed thing from the old reasonable length season – after respite from those endless Christmas tunes. Since there is little Halloween music the hyperextended season is not quite as annoying.
The Moar You Know
@trollhattan: They are. Subject to massive taxation. Additionally, US makers don’t have the capacity to build right-hand drive cars. In Japan, they drive on the left side of the road, so…right hand drive cars mandatory.
And the US carmakers have bitched about that for decades…and yet somehow the Japanese had no issues making left-hand drive vehicles for export.
We are fucking pathetic even without Trump.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: Congress is merely inept and corrupt, RSS led BJP is pure poison for India. I know Sanghis. They are true believers. I speak their language. Nagpur is in Maharashtra. They are casteist and misogynist. In the British era they were British chamchas and now they go on pretending like they are the biggest patriots.
Any coalition that defeats BJP will include Congress. Today’s Congress is nowhere as strong as it was in Indira Gandhi era. I would like to see either Mayawati or Mamta Banerjee becoming the coalition PM. They have been chief ministers of huge states so they have the executive experience.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: BJP led Maharashtra government is behind today’s arrests. They want to bring back the late Peshwai where Brahmins (of a specific subcaste) reigned supreme. He has been among the worst CMs Maharashtra has had, this includes left parties, Congress and even Shiv Sena.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: * He is Devendra Phadnavis.
catclub
@The Moar You Know:
my comment on this: A US beef produced was going to test every single steer for MadCow and certify their product was clean, for export to Japan.
The US (dept Agriculture?) forbid them from advertising that fact – unfair. It is a mixed up system.
Barb 2
The Orange fart supposedly has a college degree!??! I’m from the West coast and I have never heard of his “great” college. We have so many top rated colleges where we had to work hard for our degrees. I did all the studying, wrote my own papers, took the tests etc. My degrees are earned.
So this rich creep comes along with his daddy’s paid for degree – and he makes all other degrees from “his” college look fraudulent as well. Sort of like – pay your money for a printed degree for the wall to impress your clients. A politician in Florida did that – phoney degree. Trump degree is phoney as well. One of the politicians in Japan called Trump an economic illiterat. Trump needs to be stripped of his college degree – and his high school degree as well. He apparently never did the required work for those degrees.
Auto correct on this kindle tablet makes the strangest “corrections” – I think I have caught them – but too often auto correct re-edits. That’s my excuse – what is Trump’s excuse for his extreme stupidity?
End of rant. Thanks for reading.
The Moar You Know
@catclub: Forbade them from actually doing the testing, too.
Because our food is literally garbage.
Roger Moore
@Ruviana:
Being more valuable doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be treated more equally. If women used to be treated as a commodity, becoming more valuable just gives men more reason to want to control them.
Leto
@NotMax: You say that like it’s a bad thing! This past Sunday our parks dept held their last free outdoor concert. It was a brass band that did quite a few traditional German drinking/polka songs. It was a really good time.
How are you enjoying BfA?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Aleta:
Perfect storm in 2016, unlikely to happen the same way again
Calouste
@The Moar You Know: And funnily enough, local subsidiaries of Ford and GM in the UK and Australia have been making right hand drive cars for decades without problems.
JWL
Trump probably thinks Google is the last name of the company owner.
How quaint it now seems that GHW Bush was once ridiculed for admitting having his luddite mind blown by a scanner at a super market check-out. I laughed then, too, but turned out the last laugh was on me. I own an i-phone now, in all its digital glory, and all I use it for is to make and receive phone calls. Which is to say, I spent more money a fucking phone than I did for a month’s rent years ago in San Francisco, back in the days when Pac Bell was the only game in town. My younger self would no doubt shake his hairy head sadly and ask, “Man, what happened to you”?
geg6
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Apples and cinnamon are meant to be together. I wouldn’t touch an apple pie without a little cinnamon. You can keep the nutmeg.
catclub
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
It is healthy to remind oneself that the 2001 terrorist strikes on the WTC were a perfect storm of lucky terrorists. Maybe Trump 2016 was as well.
geg6
@schrodingers_cat:
I will not be making you or litlebritdifrnt my famous cinnamon rolls any time soon. ;-)
Roger Moore
@Barb 2:
Trump’s degree is from the Ivy League’s odd dual track system. The Ivies have a deserved reputation for good academics, but it only comes from part of their student body. On the one hand, they try really hard to bring in the best and brightest students, no matter what their background, and to give them the best education they can. On the other hand, they bring in the scions of the rich and well connected, who are mostly there to make connections with other wealthy scions, and whose parents can be expected to pay handsomely for the privilege.
It’s a system that works out well for everyone. The real students get access to a great education and an opportunity to make connections with people who would otherwise never give them the time of day. The wealthy scions get undeserved academic prestige. Anyone who knows about the Ivies can guess which class of degree any particular alumnus fits into; it’s pretty obvious where Trump fits.
Brachiator
@Ruviana:
I thought it was just the opposite, based on a couple of things I had read, but I have not followed this comprehensively. One random article, from the Economist, noted.
geg6
@Fair Economist:
And the only one of the three you mention that I find in any way enjoyable is Thanksgiving. I despise Halloween and Christmas in pretty much equal measure.
geg6
@Teddys Person:
A crash dummy at the Insurance Institute of America. He’d be good at that.
geg6
@Roger Moore:
Not to mention he was a transfer student. I’ve never heard of a transfer student at an Ivy. Certainly not at Penn. But Papa Drumpf apparently gave them a hefty check to take Cheetolini as a transfer.
Elizabelle
@NotMax: Week before last, spied a large outdoor display of Halloween garden statuary at Kroger. Middle of August. Too early, Kroger! Not even Labor Day yet.
Halloween has become as much an adult (and pets’) holiday as it is the Kids’ National Night Holiday.
Gin & Tonic
@geg6: Not to mention that he always says he has a degree from Wharton, implying that he has an MBA from the business school (which is actually very rigorous and not generally susceptible to the legacy problem), but he doesn’t. It’s a bachelor’s degree from UPenn, where, at the time he was a student, Wharton was running some sort of real-estate-focused program at the undergrad level (but I don’ t know if they still do.)
Elizabelle
@geg6: Cheetolini. And his Trumplorables.
Lock the doors.
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
If the worms don’t mind the meal, they probably won’t mind the refreshments.
john b
@ChrisS:
Oktoberfest is a celebration that takes place in September, for some reason. /pedant
NotMax
@Leto
Haven’t purchased BfA.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@geg6:
Well, there’s Obama.
(Oxy has a program with Columbia that allows for transfers after 2 years, Obama took advantage of that.)
Shana
@Emma: My husband’s cousin used to do the windows at Carson’s for decades.
montanareddog
@john b: it always finishes on the first Sunday in October
JAFD
I attended the University of Pennsylvania, a few years after our President*. In the ’60’s, studing ‘business’ in college was not very prestigious – it only became so in the stagflation of the ’70’s, when the economy seemed to get oversupplied with BAs. One of those twists of history that did my almamommy some good.
In my Penn days, the undergraduates at the Wharton School got classified at ‘frat boys looking for guts’, athletes (Penn in the ’70’s had several nationallyranked basketball teams – you may want to digup the programs, see how many of their players were Wharton students.), guys who Always Really Wanted To Become CPAs,and guys Waiting To Inherit The Family Business.