Jinnistan wrote:

But Pete Hegseth, who I haven't really mentioned yet, is a good example of the former case of reactionary right-wing interests.  He's a Christian Nationalist, whose association with a very significant congregation of "reconstructionist" evangelical churches is very concerning.

Hoooo leee shit. That makes for compelling reading.

btw that Dick Gregory segment I mentioned starts at around 27:30 or–so, not 30; it depends on which vinyl rip (or record) you're listening to. 

Maybe this should be "least reported news" 'cause I'm not sure how many headlines it's generating, and it feels that maybe it should be the top headline of the day?

The US just shut down our embassy in Ukraine today due to a report of an imminent "significant air strike", which comes just days - hours really - since Putin revised Russia's policy on the use of offensive nuclear weapons, lowering the threshold of responding to conventional weapon attacks which might just rhyme with Ukraine's brand new ATACMs.

Anyway, I thought that was worth noting.  That would be one way of ending the war in a day, although I assumed that Putin might wait until Trump was in office to officially look the other way.
 

Professional pig-titty, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks, has been acting pretty strange for a while now, but especially since the election.  It did strike me as pretty odd when Uygur chose to attempt to defend sex criminal Matt Gaetz by claiming that Gaetz was a victim of "the establishment" because they saw him as a threat, and so dug up some dirt on him.  Never mind that the dirt in question was sex trafficking of a minor.  Ah, what diff?  All that matters is that the deep state doesn't like anyone who challenges them, which is of course why Bernie Sanders had to step down after they found....oh, right, nothing, nothing at all, because somehow Bernie Sanders managed to not be a child sex trafficker, but, c'mon, we can't all be expected to live up to those superhuman standards.

Bringing it all into clearer focus, Uygur is now doubling down in his position as a extremist accelerationist by blushing over his excitement at Trump's election victory: "My mortal enemy is the establishment. And they have been defeated!"  Uygur says he's "far more optimistic now" with Trump in power, while still pretending to have progressive ideals.

So which "establishment" are we talking about here exactly?  Sure, Trump definitely represents a potentially fatal threat to a number of American institutions at the moment.  Looking at his cabinet picks, and perusing Project 2025 (whose several contributers are now cabinet picks), and we can see direct hostility towards the establishments of public education, public health care, social safety nets, environmental regulations, net neutrality and the independence of the Justice Department.  Oh, and the dismantling of the establishment clause of the Constitution.  Is that the "establishment" Cenk is referring to?  Maybe, maybe not?  The established norms of presidential accountability and culpability?  The overturning of all of the Warren Court established precedents?  Perhaps Cenk even means the establishment of liberal democracy itself?

Let me tell you which "establishments" Cenk is definitely not referring to, because these will not be establishments under threat during Trump's presidency: the financial elite establishment, the corporate establishment, the 'pay-for-play' election fundraising establishment, the tech oligarchy establishment, the fossil fuel establishment.  And, despite any dishonest pretenses to the contrary, the military industrial establishment, because for all of this talk about ending "forever war", Trump's platform and policies points toward an escalation of military funding, only slightly redirected towards China and more isolationist interests, as well as for any domestic utility that Trump sees fit.  Is any of this inspiring "more optimism" than Biden/Harris' admittedly more boring status quo or expansions on their previous successes?  Tell me, Cenk, just how much are you invested in crypto anyway, for all of this to be worth your optimism?

Cenk continues: "It’s not just that the establishment candidate lost, it’s that their media is mortally wounded...The source of their strength was their propaganda machine - the mainstream media."  I agree that the mainstream media is largely broken, for a number of oft-repeated reasons.  I disagree that this is something worth celebrating.  So what's the alternative?  What will take its place and restore integrity to our new journalism regime?  "Now, online media is strong enough that their oppressive monopoly on the American mind has been broken.  Now, we’re in the jungle. They hate that! I love it!  This uncontrolled marketplace of ideas is where I’m home. I’d rather be in the populist woods than an establishment prison."

Oh, I see.   Cenk's just jacking off here.  This sounds like a high-schooler's understanding of how media and journalism works.  Speaking of "broken" American minds, has Uygur ever bothered looking around at maybe how it's exaclty this online media culture, from the algorithmic platforms to these extremist demagogic cheerleaders (like Cenk), which has caused our current breakdown of epistemic orientation?  The mainstream has been complicit in this breakdown precisely because they've adopted these algorithms and preference for partisan divisiveness, not in spite of it, because mainstream media has abdicated its function to extoll and enforce truths, rather than post-truths, that has eroded the public's faith rather than the public preferring the confusion of post-truths.  I'm sure this cunt isn't so thick to misunderstand how historically populist movements more often than not tend to lead to establishments themselves, albeit more authoritarian ones (ie, with more "prisons"), but maybe it's just that Cenk believes that he'll have some greater earned authority once the new populist establishment rolls around and why he's spending this much time boot-licking that imminent establishment's heels.  "MAGA is not my mortal enemy (and neither is the extreme left)."  Well well well, "enemy of my enemy", you fat phony fuck.  Maybe you'll at least please the tigers in this "jungle" with your rancid ass.

These bellicose "burn it all down" gestures are appropriate for a high-schooler just learning to temper their passions and impatience, but it's a sad look for a middle-aged swindler, with dual understandings that "crises" equals good fundraising for the cause and that at the moment there happens to be a lot more nihilist young men willing to part with their dollars than true progressives whom you've already tapped out.  Such a pivot towards MAGA makes good business sense, if otherwise incoherent politics.  But rather than offering an acceptable alternative to true journalist media, Cenk and his Turks are just as much demagogues as their Daily Wire/Rogansphere/Blaze/Breitbart collegues on the extreme right.  Cenk offers little more than performative emotion, dictating how his audience should feel about any particular issue, all while assuring them that he's the only voice they have to trust.  Standard evangelical shilling, which is also good business.  (Ana Kasparian plays the role of performative exasperation, in tandem.)  If Cenk has his preference, such demogogic extremes would become central to our media environment, as opposed to more sober, stable, established adherence to critical dissection of truth and facts.  Because Cenk thinks he's Axl Rose all of a sudden?

When you're more interested in breaking things than fixing them, it's easy to gloat when things start falling apart.  ("When you talk about destruction...")  I'm more than willing to see the plan, but I haven't seen any resemblance of one being offered here, except to be optimistic about MAGA?  Yeah, fuck that.  When someone wants to start building something that's tangibly constructive, rather than spewing hypocrisies for contrarian dollars, then maybe I'll start listening.  The more important question though is....would Cenk even get the joke if someone were to deliver a pallet full of Charmin to his house?  I don't know how subtle I've been about this, but dude needs to start wiping that sodden sweaty ass.
 

Cenk Uygur and Russell Brand in an epic circle jerk.

Speakng of Jon Stewart - Dammit, let's do it!




We could spend all day fantasizing about an alternate timeline where Bernie Sanders ran and possibly won in 2016, 2020, 2024.  But Bernie is the kind of guy who tends to get better marks in hindsight.  Policies aside, there happenes to be very little assurance that a Sanders candidacy would have been successful in either of these campaigns, and the problem which obscures this confidence is that we don't really know the extent to which Sanders would have gotten pushback from the mainstream corporate media.  More assuredly is the fact that he would have received a considerable amount - based on the somewhat hysterical corporate media reaction to his brief lead in 2020, where even in Dem-friendly media Bernie was being compared to the Nazis.  Popular support quite aside, Bernie Sanders has always been a deeply unpopular candidate in the minds of corporate-oriented media, and there's little way of knowing just to what degree this corporate media would have been willing to villainize him in order to prevent his anti-corporate policies from becoming reality. 

After all, even in the face of Biden's less hostile, but still substantial, institution of checks on corporate power was met with opposition in the media.  Give Bernie credit in the above clip for pointing out that Biden did, in fact, achieve a great deal of policy wins in his single term, because this fact has been deliberately obscured by the mainstream media.  Note that only a small number of Americans were even aware of Biden's primary legislative accomplishment (and I'm sure those numbers are even less for successes like the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, etc.).  Now one could say this was due to Americans simply not paying attention to the news media at all, but it starts to look dubious when you have someone like the New York Times defiantly refusing to report on these legislative wins because "it's not our job to help Biden win".  (Meanwhile they're tacitly helping Trump to win by abdicating their fact-checking responsibilities.)  Now note how many post-election op-eds in these same corporate news sources are accusing Biden of trying to do too much, as if his ambition had anything to do with voters' disappointment with the candidate.

And note how much energy was spent in cable news especially seeking to push Kamala Harris to specify in what ways she would differ from Biden in his policies.  This is after these same news outlets lied out loud about price-gouging, and Kamala's own billionaire donors were (publicly!) demanding that she back off of Biden's more consumer-oriented policies.  And now wonder aloud just why was it that Kamala decided to not say a peep about these policies, about the CFPB, FTC, SEC?  About Biden's successful fight to cap drug prices?  About green energy investments?  In the over $170 billion dollars in forgiven student debt?  Now, who knows?, maybe Kamala is just a ditzy idiot who honestly thought that she could win the presidency by saying as little as possible.  Maybe her communications team was equally dim.  But I think more likely is that Kamala was simply less committed to furthering Biden's more grand schemes.  Because if she were committed, it would have been very easy to answer the question of "what would you do differently?" with a resounding "We're going to do more, we're going to go further, we're going to finish what we started", all while laying out a vision for green energy, public education, public health care, consumer safety, data privacy, etc, without expecting the mainstream media to push these facts for you.  Because I guarantee you that's what Bernie would have said.
 

I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon of lauding this Killer Luigi.  I'm not going to buy the poster to place in my bedroom or subscribe to the fanzine.  People can call him the 'John Brown' of health care all they want to, but, honestly, I wouldn't want to hang out with John Brown either.  (He's kinda crazy!)  The only thing I'm willing to do is to chuckle a little bit at the irony of how this health care martyr got caught eating at McDonalds.  Do you you think those Panera employees would have dropped that dime?  Shouldn't you have gotten pinched while dumpster diving at a Trader Joes?  But nope, you went cheap and easy.  Don't you know McDonalds is why Trump won?

I still have this burden of humanism that keeps me from a more full-throated defense of vigilante murder, but I also prefer to find a silver lining in all of this.  Rather than condemning the apparent celebration on social media for this CEO's death, it might be more productive to consider the validity of the frustrations, and the fact that this appears to cross deep across bipartisan lines.  Luigi can sit in prison, whatever.  But wouldn't it be nice if out of all of this we might actually see something like a public option emerge?  Maybe a reckoning that people really shouldn't have to suffer or die due to a pro-profit system incentivized to supply as little care as possible?  I mean, since we're supposed to be reckoning with these supposed working-class/middle-class American frustrations which we're being told the last election was all about?  Maybe I can applaud Luigi's sacrifice if we get something truly constructive out of this.  Somehow I doubt that we're going to be seeing very much introspection from the billionaires or their media though, and if anything the last election more accurately reflects how easily these American frustrations can be distracted.

So, some facts about not just UnitedHealthcare but the entire scam insurance industry that is designed to cause more harm than health.  Like a lot of other industries right now, insurance companies are employing A.I. software to rig their prices, reduce their liability and generally make it more painless for them to not have to look your in the eye when they take your money and tell you, "Sorry".  And make no mistake, UnitedHealthcare happens to be at the forefront of this incipient atrocity.  And they are quite profitable at keeping your money, and this particular CEO happened to be on his way to meet with investors who were celebrating all of that money that they were not using to save people's lives.

A little deeper in the A,I, weeds:  As we know, A.I. can be a valuable calculation tool, and if used for things like advanced diagnostics and biomedicines it may even prove revolutionary.  But unfortunately, A.I. can also be used for more corrupt purposes, like finding innovative ways to deny people the services that they're paying for.  Like an algorithm that has a "90% error rate" to deny medical claims because the company has already calculated that "only about 0.2 percent of policyholders will appeal their denied claims".  Why would a health care company use a more accurate diagnostic tool if it leads to less profits?  It's not like "care" is a word with a definition.  And why do so few patients - I'm sorry, consumers - bother to appeal these faulty denials?  Like these same companies have rigged the appeals process to be as opaque, time-consuming and unresponsive as possible to discourage such efforts?  And, btw, maybe sick people have less energy to invest in this kind of stressful, time-consuming pursuit?  After all, this specific lawsuit is still ongoing, well after a year, with god knows how many more years the expensive lawyers for the insurance companies can drag it out.  And why is this even a lawsuit to begin with, because our legal and regulatory system has been unable to hold such business practices accountable even when it's demonstrably costing tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of lives?

So, I definitely don't want to see more people taking "frontier justice" into their own hands.  That will lead to a whole lot of unintended and more malicious trouble.  But as for empathizing with this CEO, on his way to his important investor meeting to discuss how to rig the system further for greater profit?  Well, I'll say that I hope the fat fuck had a nice breakfast.  Better than McDonalds anyway.
 

I've fallen out with a lot of the online leftist media recently, for a variety of reasons, but I still cosign David Pakman, even though, as I've said in the past, I do find him a bit boring precisely because we happen to be so simpatico on so many issues.  Unlike so many people, apparently, I'm not really interested in echo chamber forums, and am not stimulated by hearing reinforcement of my opinions, but, as it so happens, Pakman just seems to share many of my own perspectives and rationales on a number of subjects, even when these have forced him into being unpopular with some of the left-media as of late (he refuses to support Hamas, for example).

What I do seek out, outside of regurgitation, is optimal articulation of my own position, so I'd like to quote David Pakman here in this regard:

I want to talk a little bit about corporate media's normalization of authoritarianism, which I believe is going to be very relevant over the next four years.  With Donald Trump's second term about to kick off, it's really more important than ever to understand how the US media normalizes authoritarianism.  The framing and the tone and the focus of reporting on Donald Trump's policies and behavior play a major role in shaping public perception, and also in manufacturing consent, in reducing horrible authoritarian overreaches to mere policy disagreements.  And what I don't want to see is us fall into the same traps that helped Donald Trump during his first term.  Think back to that first term, when Trump separated families at the border, the media's response would often fixate on the logistics.  You know, Trump is struggling to manage the backlash to his zero tolerance policy.  What about the human cost?  What about the authoritarian impulse behind that policy of family separation, and the sort of clerical use of cruelty as a deterrent?  That got buried under political analysis as if it were just another routine policy debate....And the same thing happened with Trump's constant attacks on the press, the headlines would say "Trump is a very fierce critic of the media", "Trump's breaking norms...", Trump was systematically undermining  a free press, which is a cornerstone of democracy in general and a cornerstone of the framework of the United States.  Even the media itself which was being attacked by Trump would say, "He's punching back at his perceived critics", and it makes it sound like an edgy tough guy strategy, rather than the dangerous attempt to erode accountability that really motivated Trump's attacks on the media. 

So that was the first term.  And now Trump is gearing up for a second term, and to a degree corporate media is already falling into familiar patterns.  When Trump unveiled plans to reinstate Schedule 'F', which is this mechanism for purging the federal workforce of those that he deems disloyal, a lot of outlets sort of use the anodyne phrase "reshaping the federal bureaucracy", always using the term "bureaucracy" as sort of a perjorative or negative.  It's sort of like calling arsonists "engaged in remodeling efforts" when they decide to burn a house down.  This is not bureaucratic tinkering.  What Vivek and Elon and Trump plan to do is really laying the groundwork for consolidating power, and they've said, it's about turning federal agencies into tools of personal loyalty to Donald Trump. 

Corporate media is failing you on this.  It's just failing you.  Now, corporate media's ratings, for the most part, are down dramatically since the election, but that's a different story...

Trump's recent rally announcement...instead of really grappling with the fact that Trump...even now is finding ways to whip his base into a frothy frenzy with violent rhetoric and recreating a very similar event to what led to the Trump riots in 2021.  They [Corporate Media] talk about the expected crowd size and the slogans and how this is a rally that might be used to preemptively boost his popularity and have him enter office with a higher approval rating.  It's the same very dangerous superficial playbook, which you treat it like theater instead of really interrogating the authoritarianism that lurks beneath what Trump is doing. 

Now why do I bring it up now on January 2nd 2025, 18 days before Trump's second term?  Well, that's exactly why.  Because Donald Trump's second term is shaping up to be even more dangerous than the first.  He's surrounded himself with loyalists, and he's doubling down on the grievance politics.  He's explicitly promising to weaponize government against enemies...

Trump's telling us what he'sgoing to do and the stakes really couldn't be higher, and the media's role is either going to be "we're going to expose this behavior as authoritarian" or "we're going to enable it".  And it's going to make a big difference...

If corporate media contines to sanitize Trump's actions, and looking at these authoritarian moves as "it's a controversial move", "it's an unusual choice", focusing on the strategy over the consequences, then Trump's efforts to dismantle the democratic norms he wants to dismantle is going to slide under the radar, and we saw it to a degree in the first term and we're potentially heading that way here...

When you see the corporate media using euphemism and false equivalency and false neutrality to cover naked authoritarianism, you reach out to them and you say "what the hell are you doing?  For as long as you continue covering this stuff in this way, I'm tuning out."  Demand better from the media outlets that you are seeing this stuff happen on.  And most importantly, stay engaged.  Because Trup's strategy depends on people  either tuning out or becoming desensitized to what he's doing.  The media will shallowly cover it and that will make it worse.  But if you understand how corporate media coverage is normalizing the authoritarianism, you're not just better equipped when it comes to media literacy, you're better equipped to foment democracy.  And so we can't let corporate media frame Trump's second term as just the second of two chapters in a political theater.  Because if we do that, we will very quickly lose the sense that this is not politics as usual.  It's authoritarianism.  We need to call it what it is before it's too late.

Jinnistan wrote:

I want to take the opportunity to say directly to crumbs and Rock - Welcome to the party, pals.

Just wait until Pierre Poilievre gets in there and.....tickles Trumps taint?

Also, it says everything about Trudeau that my two favorite things of him can be summed up in gifs

I'm about 85% sure that Trump's guff about annexing all of this foreign property is just a troll (and apparently for Trudeau, I guess it worked?), but there's another aspect to the plan which does fit into a larger neoconservative project, and one which is actually more sane, in cold pragmatic terms, than just ball-swinging bluster.

I don't think it may be a coincidence that, for this administration entering in which is baldly committed to abdicating any shred of environmental responsibilty in the face of the ensuing climate chage crisis, two of the first targets of avaricious expansion include this hemisphere's largest reservoir of the kind of permafrosted tundra which, under the conditions of a warming planet, would yield a vast wealth of arable land and unearthed mineral and fuel resources.  You know, "national security" reasons.  And no doubt that Russia is likely doing the same , viewing their own vast Arctic and Siberian tundras in much the same way.  Because these are not stupid people.  The notion of "hoax" is only a belief of the gullible minions whom these leaders rule over.  But they know what the science is.  The deal is that they've simply made their peace with it, and have no intention of doing anything about it.  And why should they?  Since they've already gamed out all of the benefits and opportunities (for them) to allowing such a planet-shifting change to take place, and those benefits and opportunities are dependent on laying claim now to the resources needed for this inevitabilty.  The North is destiny, and you polite Canadians should feel honored to be so blessed with our soon-to-be American occupation.  Would you rather be stuck in the abandoned shit-swamps of the Southern planetary 2/3rds?

Whether any of all that will play out in the next four years is another matter.  I just find it helpful that they're getting more honest about it.  And it is pretty amusing that for a President who has been so concerned with countering his image as a fascist, his first order of business is to start picking out his prospective Austria and Czechoslovokia.