Category: Politics

Trump finally faces reality — amid talk of early ouster

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that “the president of the United States incited an armed insurrection against America.” She called him “a very dangerous person who should not continue in office. This is urgent, an emergency of the highest magnitude.”

Source: Trump finally faces reality — amid talk of early ouster

In case anyone on the Right is still trying to weasel out of the thought that Trump is responsible for the attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes: don’t forget this is a culmination of months of agitation about “stopping the steal.” I usually try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, because, in politics, it’s all hyperbole, and we all understand that. But, this time, and just for the record, I think the people who lay the blame for storming the Capitol directly on Trump are exactly right.

To make the case that Trump incited the riot, prosecutors would have to show that he intended to provoke violence, but his words are vague enough that it’s possible to argue that he was simply urging his supporters to peacefully protest outside the Capitol.

Source: Trump May Be Shielded From Riot Charges by Klan Speech Ruling

And this is the part where all communication breaks down, in America’s social-media civil war. Even Bloomberg admits there’s a lot of gray in what the President actually said, and concludes that it would be very difficult to prosecute, let alone convict. I’m convinced they wouldn’t have been there if the President hadn’t been talking about showing up on 6th, but he didn’t call for actual violence. But that doesn’t stop half the country from ranting and raving on their social media accounts as though the President told people to take up small arms, break into the Capitol, and kill every Democrat they see.

He is to blame for starting this, but why? Did he expect them to extrapolate to violence? Or did he want them to make a show that a lot of people were upset about the voting issues? Did he mean for mob craziness to take over? Or did that happen on its own?

They appear to have been mostly rudderless, and seem to have “just gone with it” when they saw how little resistance they faced. The pictures don’t show a lot of “protest” signs in the group, and they certainly brought hammers to smash windows to open doors. You can factor all of those things into your conspiracy theories, but it just doesn’t seem — at least to me — that they, as a group, were determined to “overthrow” our government, and install Trump as king. Rational discussion on this whole topic is really rare, which is why I’m updating this with an actual example from a serious news organization.

UPDATE: As this continues to reverberate through the news, it’s important — at least to me — to clarify that while Trump encouraged people to show up and do something in regards to “stopping the steal,” but fell short of encouraging actual violence, the whole premise of showing up to do anything to interfere with certifying a concluded election was facile to begin with. I, too, think the evidence points to systemic election fraud, but they couldn’t make that case in court (which is a whole other topic), and that’s the way the system works. So contending with Congress after failing at the bar, is, in fact, seditious, and that alone is reason enough for political opponents to bring another case for impeachment. I think it’s a waste of time, but they absolutely have a case. If they want to give Trump another official middle finger, and they’ve got the votes to see it through, then, I guess, you know, whatever. Seems like there are more substantive things the Congress could be working on, but I get it, and I won’t begrudge them for it.

Why Porn Stars Like Me Are Terrified of VP Kamala Harris

I respect Harris for seeing gays and women of color through a compassionate lens. After four years of Vice President Mike Pence, it’ll be nice to see someone make the executive branch empathetic again. Still, I doubt Harris’s executive empathy will extend to exotic dancers, porn stars, strippers, prostitutes, or erotic masseuses: The vice president-elect brings a lifetime of animosity toward sex workers to Number One Observatory Circle.

…

Harris’s hatred goes back to her days as San Francisco District Attorney. In 2008, Harris opposed a San Francisco ballot initiative to legalize prostitution. “I think it’s completely ridiculous, just in case there’s any ambiguity about my position,” Harris told The New York Times. She proclaimed the law would roll “a welcome mat out for pimps” and push vulnerable women into the arms of drugs and guns.

Source: Why Porn Stars Like Me Are Terrified of VP Kamala Harris

So, let me get this straight. Kamala Harris gets to be as politically hard on sex work as you can be, but she still gets credit for being “compassionate” towards marginalized demographic sectors, while Pence — according to my Googling — has not done or even said anything politically, one way or another, about sex work, but he’s still considered un-“empathetic.” Got it.

When it comes to sex work, Harris always has a but. Harris has expressed one too many buts about my chosen profession. We need all Americans to raise a but to her objection to sex work. If not, Americans might soon have nothing to jack off to.

Right. Whatever Kamala Harris is doing or not doing in regards to the legality of sex work, I’m very confident that it will make exactly ZERO impact on the amount of stuff “to jack off to” available to Americans. What an eyeroll-worthy statement! As long as Reddit exists, Americans have nothing to fear. The site used to be a great collection of forums for nerdy interests. Now the site is being run as an experiment in using social media to manipulate national discourse, modded by psychopaths, and driven by crazy people at the fringe of every topic discussed, all as a precariously-thin veneer over the world’s largest, free hub of every type of pornography that can be categorized (and probably some that can’t). Yes, I’m bitter about this, and I take every opportunity I can to bag on Reddit now.

Don’t even try to tell me that you can’t monetize yourself having sex on the endless numbers of paid pornography sites, and don’t even get me started about OnlyFans and it’s copycats. Not to mention that you can post endless come-ons for your site(s) with snippets of hard-core pornography on Twitter. With all of this going on, it’s a little difficult for me to understand how people who want to pimp themselves out online can complain about not being able to get paid. If anything, if you aren’t getting paid for performing sex acts online, it’s because so many people are trying that you are probably just getting lost in a sea of slighty-better-than-average-looking people trying to do the same.

You can tell me that actual, physical sex workers — i.e, prostitutes — face unfair legal problems with making a living. I’ll buy that, and I can say that I support people making money however they want, but don’t try to tell me that pornography is in peril, in any way, shape, or form, from any politician, or that you face difficulties in selling yourself performing sex acts online. With so much porn popping up in the mainstream sites that have become “the internet,” that just doesn’t compute.

Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

Misinformation about the election and the coronavirus is also gaining a foothold in American society, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Source: Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. This has raised concerns about how to get people to believe in a “baseline reality,” said Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos.

You have to somehow square this with the fact that hundreds of mainstream news organizations, Twitter, Facebook, and Google exist — in the presence of pervasive internet access, and nearly ubiquitous ownership of small, networked computers — and put all information online, in realtime, available to everyone. In other words, this is happening when there is the least amount of friction in getting facts into people’s heads than ever before, and one can scarcely imagine making that process any easier.

“Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn’t have any basis in reality or fact,” Jackson said.

I don’t think this is particularly new. The desire and the effort to bend the world to one’s own view of it has always been present. It’s the infinite spectrum of information, and the now-essentially-infinite supply of content at any point in that spectrum, that satiates this desire. No matter what you want to believe, you can find enough sources confirming that belief to convince yourself that you have a complete mental picture of the situation. The deluge of cherry-picked information has made it far easier to believe whatever you want to believe, and find support for that, than to try to separate the wheat from the chaff, recognize disinformation, and form an objective opinion based on the most-credible interpretation of the facts.

The term I use is “converge.” You have to keep reading disparate sources until facts converge. And that takes a lot of mental effort. Not only that, but in many examples of high-profile, widely-covered political stories — upon which people will hang their political identities — the stories never converge to form a clear picture of what actually happened. As more and more people report more and more arcane facts and figures about highly-controversial issues, this problem is on-track to get even worse.

#SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.

The article goes out of its way to highlight absurdity of the question, and disparage anyone who responded “yes” to it. But someone is going to have to help me understand why this question should be considered absurd when someone broke into a highly-secured, solitary-confinement wing of a prison, disabled all of the security cameras, and murdered an extremely well-connected underage-human sex trafficker — to prevent him from naming names at the highest levels of governments all over the world — and then evaded all investigation. If that doesn’t speak to a conspiracy of elites at least indifferent to the running of a child prostitution ring to you, then I don’t know what other events would have to have happened in that chain to flip your opinion on the matter. Those events alone should be enough to substantiate the bulk of the theoretical statement. I mean, is Ipsos’ addition of the “Satan-worshipping” clause supposed to flip the whole statement to the side of absurdity? And right there, we getting into the disinformation and manipulation of the facts that people can point to as the cause of all the societal problems the article is decrying.

UPDATE: I see now, from the Wikipedia article, that the whole “cabal of satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles” thing is the basis of QAnon itself. You’ll have to forgive me if I try to avoid reading too closely on either side of the political divide.

Extract or Die – Pirate Wires

Among many things, including talent, opportunity, and soft power, the technology industry has brought tremendous tax revenue to the Bay Area. The budget of San Francisco literally doubled this decade, from around six billion to over twelve billion dollars. With our government’s incredible, historic abundance of wealth, the Board of Supervisors has presided over: a dramatic increase in homelessness, drug abuse, crime — now including home invasion — and a crippling cost of living that can be directly ascribed to the local landed gentry’s obsession with blocking new construction. This latter piece is important, as it appears to be the only thing our Board cares about. This is because significantly increasing the local housing supply would decrease the value of the multi-million dollar homes almost every single one of our Supervisors owns, and we could never have that.

Source: Extract or Die – Pirate Wires

This is the most-direct analysis I have seen of why Silicon Valley has become the most overpriced area in which to live in the US. The situation described here is heart-wrenchingly discouraging, but what’s completely and utterly heart-breaking is that nothing seems to be getting learned by it. I’ve watched the San Francisco housing market from afar — with no small amount of schadenfreude — for many years now. They’ve been on this course for a couple of decades or more, and it just keeps getting worse. Instead of enacting any policies to help matters, they keep doubling down on the liberal policies and NIMBY-ism that has gotten them into such a sorry state of affairs to begin with.

Dominion Machine Statistical Problems

This whole Twitter thread. It’s another, completely-independent way of looking at the voting data, like The 2020 Election, Benford’s Law, and Twitter, and it’s another smoking gun that indicates that the voting machines — in precisely the places that needed help — have been tampered with. Again — and I can’t stress this enough — the courts need a protagonist. You can’t just prove this by math. You have to show that some person hacked the machines, and you will never be able to do that. There’s too much obfuscation and redirection. So I’m more and more convinced that the election was stolen, but that Biden got away with it clean. This has been done so well, that I’m convinced “dissidents” in one of the three-letter agencies — with experience in this sort of thing in other countries — had to have been involved.

If the election was really, truly hacked, then Republicans in Congress have to do something about it, lest they lose another election because of it. The real question — the only question, at this point — is what they will do about it. The real story will get around, whispered in the back rooms of Washington office buildings. The people who could do something about this will eventually know what really happened here. The thing to watch is what happens to voting machines before the next election. That will be the last piece of this puzzle.

 

Trump’s “Plan” to Distribute COVID-19 Vaccines Is a Predictable Clusterf–k | Vanity Fair

According to Politico, the Trump administration has basically decided to pass the gargantuan, daunting task of getting vaccines to people to individual states, a strategy it used to address the pandemic this spring that led to disastrous results. While state and federal officials agree that the country’s 21 million health care workers should be the first to get doses, “there is no consensus about how to balance the needs of other high-risk groups, including the 53 million adults aged 65 or older, 87 million essential workers and more than 100 million people with medical conditions that increase their vulnerability to the virus.” Trump and company have told governors they have the ultimate say when deciding who gets vaccinated when; it’s also chosen to “allocate scarce early doses based on states’ total populations,” which will ultimately lead to difficult choices in states with a bigger proportion of residents who are at at risk. (The virus has disproportionately affected Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities when it comes to hospitalizations and deaths.) Experts worry that could undermine confidence in the effort to vaccinate the population, the success of which is dependent on persuading a huge number of Americans to get immunized.

Source: Trump’s “Plan” to Distribute COVID-19 Vaccines Is a Predictable Clusterf–k | Vanity Fair

I’m sorry, but do the erudite writers at Vanity Fair think that there would be consensus on how to distribute the vaccine if Biden was President right now? That the “correct” President would cause everyone to line up in agreement? That everyone would be satisfied with a plan to distribute a limited resource, instantaneously, to at least the article’s-referenced four, huge, non-overlapping, geographically-disparate, highly-at-risk demographics? That if anyone else but Trump wasn’t president, everyone would magically come together, singing Kumbaya? This is the sort of opportunistic trolling that usually passes for a comment on Twitter or Facebook. All media is now becoming cheap shots and pettiness.

What should the President — any President — do about this situation? How could you distribute the vaccine in a way to achieve maximum local effectiveness? Maybe… oh, I don’t know… Maybe we could break the decisions down a little. Maybe we could figure it out on a more-local level. Hey, I know! Maybe we could let the States decide how to do it within their own borders? That way they could adjust the distribution based on what’s happening within a much-smaller area than the entire country. Just a crazy thought I had, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Oh, wait.

This is what passes as journalism at one of the largest print publications still going. I clicked another political article, and it reeks just as badly. The third graph purports to mind-read half of the members of the Catholic Church in the US. At the very, very least: [CITATION NEEDED]. That any of this passes for top-end reporting now is proof we’re doomed as a society. Social media has ruined ALL journalism.

Major shift at Supreme Court on Covid-19 orders – POLITICO

The Supreme Court signaled a major shift in its approach to coronavirus-related restrictions late Wednesday, voting 5-4 to bar New York state from reimposing limits on religious gatherings.

The emergency rulings, issued just before midnight, were the first significant indication of a rightward shift in the court since President Donald Trump’s newest appointee — Justice Amy Coney Barrett — last month filled the seat occupied by liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September.

Source: Major shift at Supreme Court on Covid-19 orders – POLITICO

Why is it a “rightward shift” to reinforce the single, most-fundamental, undergirding tenant upon which this country was founded? The people who settled this country were religious zealots who refused to be told what to do and how to do it when it came to practicing their belief in God, and they formed an entire country based on that premise. From the Declaration to the Constitution to everything that followed, not being told what to do when it comes to religion is about as American an idea as anything, and perhaps what makes this country unique. That principle of refusing to be told what to do has flowed through everything else that’s followed, from the South’s secession, to the gold rush and the Wild West, to people who refuse to wear masks.

Many people still think the “freedom of religion” — and all that this phrase implies — is the most-valuable protected right in the Constitution. The people who don’t like it may think this needs to be changed. That’s fine. There’s a process for that, and they can avail themselves of it. It’s been done several times before. But I’m quite certain that those who would want to repeal the First Amendment (or, at least, retract the clause about religion) understand just how the daunting that prospect is, and that this is perfectly indicative of how unpopular and difficult this would be.

The freedom to express your religion is just about as fundamental to speech and assembly as possible. They’re all intertwined. So, as long as the First Amendment stands in effect, the idea that anyone can tell anyone else how or when or where to worship God as they see fit has to be rejected.

The First Amendment is not a “privilege” bestowed by the government, to be revoked during times of crisis or inconvenience. The First Amendment is a restriction on government power, recognizing the inalienable rights of the governed. It’s a subtle difference that consistently confuses a lot of people.

UPDATE: A former federal judge, law professor, and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, wrote an op-ed at the Times, saying basically the same thing I’ve said here: the issue is of paramount Constitutional importance, superseding even global pandemics.

That message is lost if the case is seen as the mere product of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival at the Supreme Court. With the presidential election behind us, the balance between Covid-19 precautions and civil liberties no longer needs to be a partisan issue. The right to exercise religion in accordance with conscience is one of the most important in the Bill of Rights, and it is time for mayors and governors — and courts — to treat it that way.

The 2020 Election, Benford’s Law, and Twitter

In response to allegations of rampant voter fraud, and subsequently digging into the details of the voting, Scott Adams tweeted (and I’m embedding static images, for reasons which will become clear):

Knowing what he was talking about, I laughed, and bookmarked the link. Sure enough, this post went viral on Reddit. In it, someone demonstrates that the votes for Biden in highly-contested areas do not fit the expected statistical pattern.

Someone forwarded me a link to this article, in Gnews — whatever that is — but, again, something that will become clear later. That article references the Reddit post.

The article includes a link to the data, and the math to produce the graphs, hosted at GitHub. The top left graph demonstrates the issue at hand.

Since the most concise place to link into all of these seems to be the Gnews article, I linked it in Twitter, with a comment: “Absolutely fascinating.” I hit refresh in my browser, and got this suspension:

I was also immediately emailed a notification that I had been suspended for — get this — posting nudes.

I’ve since looked around the Gnews site for more about what they’re all about, and they have several articles showing Hunter Biden in various… extremely compromising pictures. So I’m guessing that’s what the ban is all about. But if they want to ban me for posting a link to a news site that they’ve blocked entirely because they don’t want to hurt the Bidens, well, they can have their stupid service.

As for the actual content of the story, and the implications of the statistical math, I agree with the interpretation that it is a smoking gun for fraud. Up till now, I was willing to assume that the allegations of systemic vote manufacture were just paranoid delusions of a party desperate to hold on to power, and I was confident that, once reviewed, problems would be easily attributable to normal human error. Even though all the questionable counts seem to only be going one way, I assumed that the courts would ensure that it was all sorted out.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot. If this is all true — if the data really shows this statistical anomaly in many hotly-contested areas — especially where Biden “extended” his “lead” in after-election-day counting — then it changes the equation. This would make it incumbent on the Democrats to put all of the votes on the table, and prove that they haven’t fudged the numbers.

UPDATE: Wondering how widespread these Hunter Biden pics/videos were, I searched Reddit for “Hunter Biden sex tape.” There are dozens of posts with headlines saying that you would be banned for posting any link to it/them, because they were leaked against someone’s will. Meanwhile, at the top of the search results, in the “related subreddits” section, was a link to an entire subreddit devoted to… leaked sex tapes. What a bunch of hypocritical tools. “Sure, you can post intimate videos of people without their consent, just not of anyone powerful, who could afford to sue us and make a dent in our revenue.”

Oracle founder donated $250,000 to Graham PAC in final days of TikTok deal – The Verge

FEC documents show that Ellison made the $250,000 donation to the Security is Strength PAC on September 14th. The Security is Strength PAC has bought ads exclusively in support of Graham’s political ambitions, including his 2015 presidential campaign and his current reelection bid for the US Senate.

Source: Oracle founder donated $250,000 to Graham PAC in final days of TikTok deal – The Verge

Larry Ellison is one of the richest people in the world. $250K is lunch money for a guy like this. The truly sad thing about our American democracy isn’t that it can be bought; it’s that it can be bought so cheaply. It’s nauseating.

I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book – Mother Jones

Pivar, 90 years old, is an art collector, scientist, and a founder (alongside Andy Warhol) of the New York Academy of Art. He ended up speaking with me for over an hour about his “very, very sick” friend in a conversation we wound up publishing in its entirety. Stuart told me—over and over again—that Epstein suffered from “satyriasis,” which he described as the male version of nymphomania, and that he used his money and power to “make an industry” out of having sex with underage girls. This apparently entailed Epstein having sex with “three girls a day” and “hundreds and hundreds” in total. He said he never knew Epstein was having sex with children until Maria Farmer, a student at the academy and an acquaintance of Pivar, had told him she had been assaulted and held hostage by Epstein. He also claimed that Epstein had never invited him to what he called “The Isle of Babes,” a reference to Epstein’s private island where much of the child sex trafficking allegedly occurred.

Source: I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book – Mother Jones

This admission, from one of Epstein’s supposedly closest friends, sort of puts the nail in the coffin of this particular kerfluffle. Not only did ESR’s denouncement of using the word “pedophile” to describe Epstein miss the mark ethically and morally, it also missed the mark factually. Here, someone very close to him admits that he was a straight-up pedo. I’m sure this was all documented in the early days of these revelations, but I hadn’t wanted to read about it that closely. Given the broad outlines of what could be reported in polite circles, I was quite certain that the line had been crossed so completely that the line no longer existed, and this proves it. It doesn’t take a genius’ genius to figure that one out.

The whole article is a gift that keeps on giving, but this hook is what made me read the whole thing:

After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, a media narrative coalesced around the question of his strange place in the global elite: Epstein the master salesman, a man who had skillfully conned his way into the world’s most powerful circles, fooling everyone in the process. But after my travels through the book, after hearing more of the petty gossip and childish drama of the people who rule our world, I realized this was obviously incorrect. Built into the premise of Epstein the mastermind scammer is the notion that some kind of legitimate path to a legitimate global aristocracy exists. To call Epstein a grifter is to assume he circumvented some genuine meritocratic world order, where the “real” virtuosos dutifully climb the “real” ranks into the oligarchy, powered by nothing but their native talents.

The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all.

This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down.

But the final analysis — that Epstein was a tool in the employ of the CIA — was both novel to me, and is pretty convincing. It fits the facts pretty well.