Everyone had an awesome time
The Washington Post has some Sean Spicer memes.
https://twitter.com/markzohar/status/823016081061187584
Regarding the dishonest media, to quote Melania Trump, "When they go low, we go high." Period #SeanSpicerFacts pic.twitter.com/MsZnEyPfom
— Sean Spicer Facts (@SeanSpicerFacts) January 22, 2017
https://twitter.com/Jamie_Foreman/status/823045216504606724
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
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.
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.
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.
It’s that bad….
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/rogue-scientists-race-save-climate-data-trump/?mbid=social_cp_fb_tny#slide-1
@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.
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.”
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.
Probably. I could check with my live-in historian. He would know.
@ 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.
Indeed not. Those V2 rockets that punished London while the invasion was moving eastwards? Those.
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow deals with that history too (in a heavily fictionalized, hallucinatory way.)
TRUMP ON VOTING FRAUD.
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