"The more complicated answer involves the media’s drive to 'humanize' and explain those who see Trump as their long-awaited salvation. Like the endless journalistic forays into the Rust Belt to profile Trumpers with shuttered steel mills as a photo backdrop, the Roseanne reboot intended to show what the media kept calling the 'white working class' sympathetically. The latest iteration of Roseanne Conner would demonstrate that the real-life people her character represents are not racist caricatures. This is, after all, what we would like to think about our fellow Americans—that we have differences, but we can still come together as one nation. Halfway through the first episode of the new season, Roseanne Conner and her Jill Stein–voting sister Jackie Harris, played by Laurie Metcalf, have already reconciled after an argument about Trump, hugging out their political differences.
But so often the actual Trump supporters ruin that narrative. Journalists and researchers are now finding that the veneer of 'economic anxiety' among Trump supporters is built on a foundation of hate. Fans of Trump say little about the president’s Gilded Age economic policies, but boy do they fume over kneeling NFL players. And because this racism, xenophobia, and paranoia is not what we want to find, we go looking again and again until we find an answer that is more comforting."Which is to say, there's something peculiar about an American press corps that is unwilling to judge a president, a political party, and the supporters of both by what they actually say, think, and do.
"When I first began playing onstage, I was pretty self-conscious. I was just trying to hold my own with the bass guitar, hoping the strings wouldn't snap, that the audience would have a good experience. I wasn't conscious of being a woman, and over the years I can honestly say I almost never think of 'girliness' unless I'm wearing high heels, and them I'm more likely to feel like a transvestite. When I'm at my most focused onstage, I feel a sense of space with edges around it, a glow of self-confident, joyful sexiness. If feels bodiless, too, all weightless grace with no effort required. The need to be a woman out in front never entered my mind at all until we signed with Geffen."Highly recommended, especially if you aren't convinced that Courtney Love was always awful.
"After they hung up, Hunter took aside Renaat Van den Hoof, who was in charge of the pilot on the Walgreens side, and told him something just wasn’t right. The red flags were piling up. First, Elizabeth had denied him access to their lab. Then she’d rejected his proposal to embed them in Palo Alto. And now she was refusing to do a simple comparison study. To top it all off, Theranos had drawn the blood of the president of Walgreens’s pharmacy business, one of the company’s most senior executives, and failed to give him a test result!
Van den Hooff listened with a pained look on his face.
'We can’t not pursue this,' he said. 'We can’t risk a scenario where CVS has a deal with them in six months and it ends up being real.'”To paraphrase G. B. Shaw (sort of), pure meritocracy is a fabulous fucking idea. It's a shame nobody, especially hyper-Capitalist / Libertarian societies, have ever tried it.
Not sure where America goes from here, but guessing it involves Ted Nugent on stage wearing blackface playing Skrewdriver covers.
— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 30, 2018
"As a result he has every incentive to simply continue to bilaterally negotiate with Kim to achieve Moon’s and Moon’s government’s understanding of the ROK’s national interest. By impulsively deciding to grant Kim a summit based and now impulsively pulling out of that summit because of some tough talk, the President seems to think that his maximum pressure campaign got him the opportunity for the summit and can now simply be reimposed and once again achieve positive goals. The problem, of course, is there is no evidence that the President’s maximum pressure approach actually contributed to or set the conditions for Kim to pursue a bilateral US-DPRK summit, which is something Kim, his father, and his grandfather have been trying to achieve for decades. . . .
Kim has largely already gotten what he wanted. He got the President to agree to meet with him. He got two photo ops with Secretary of State Pompeo. He got the President to call him an honorable man. And he got the President to call this off, making the US look like the mercurial, erratic, and unreliable obstacle to peace. It is important to remember that there are a whole bunch of foreign reporters in the DPRK right now because they were there to observe and report on the destruction of the DPRK nuclear test facility. If we’re very lucky, Kim won’t decide that he too can play the “or else” game as well and scarf these folks up as hostages to use as bargaining chips."tl,dr: Kim Jong-un drank Trumps milkshake. Because of course he did.
Long story short: it took Donald Trump to make a third-world murderous dictator into the rational "good guy."
— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 25, 2018
.@jordanbpeterson is the Theory, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, Marc Lepine, Elliot Rodger, Alek Minsassian, George Sodini are the Practice
— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 24, 2018
"How many more tragedies have to happen before we recognize that misogyny kills? The longer we ignore the toxic masculinity that underlies so many of these crimes, the more violence we’re enabling.
Sadie Rodriguez told the LA Times that her daughter Shana Fisher 'had four months of problems' from the Santa Fe shooter.
'He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no.' A week before the shooting, she says, her daughter stood up to the shooter and 'embarrassed him in class.'
This comes not even a month after the van attack in Toronto that killed 10 people and injured 13 more – violence enacted by a man who was reportedly furious that women wouldn’t sleep with him. Before that there was the 2015 shooting at an Oregon college by a young man who complained of being a virgin with 'no girlfriend'. In 2014, there was Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and left behind a 140-page sexist manifesto and videos where he warned: 'I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it.' In 2009, George Sodini killed three women at a gym in Pennsylvania after lamenting online that younger women wouldn't date him."
watching #RoyalWedding stuff just makes me think of Diderot: we aren't free until we murder the last priest with the guts of the last king
— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 19, 2018
"There is a street party happening in New York this evening. There will be taco trucks, Jarritos margaritas and a mariachi band – but this is not a Cinco de Mayo parade that got the date wrong. This party’s only theme will be retribution.
Festivities are taking place outside the Manhattan apartment of Aaron Schlossberg, the lawyer who was filmed being irate and abusive towards Hispanic restaurant workers this week. Schlossberg threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the workers, saying he believed they were illegal immigrants because they were speaking Spanish to some customers."Beautiful. Also, America is the only country I know of where speaking more than one language is considered a defect.
"We see this again and again: Democrats bend over backward to show conservative white voters respect, only to see some remark taken out of context and their entire agenda characterized as stealing from hard-working white people to give undeserved benefits to shiftless minorities. And then pundits demand, 'Why aren’t you showing those whites more respect?'
So when we say that, what exactly are we asking Democrats to do? It can only be one of two things. Either Democrats are supposed to abandon their values and change their policies, despite the fact that many of those policies provide enormous help to the very people who say Democrats look down on them, or they’re supposed to take symbolic steps to demonstrate their respect, which always fail anyway. How many times have we seen Democrats try to show respect by going to a NASCAR event or on a hunting trip, only to be mocked for their insincerity?
In the world Republicans have constructed, a Democrat who wants to give you health care and a higher wage is disrespectful, while a Republican who opposes those things but engages in a vigorous round of campaign race-baiting is respectful. The person who’s holding you back isn’t the politician who just voted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the wealthy and corporations, it’s an East Coast college professor who said something condescending on Twitter.
So what are Democrats to do? The answer is simple: This is a game they cannot win, so they have to stop playing. Know at the outset that no matter what you say or do, Republicans will cry that you’re disrespecting good heartland voters. There is no bit of PR razzle-dazzle that will stop them. Remember that white Republicans are not going to vote for you anyway, and their votes are no more valuable or virtuous than the votes of any other American. Don’t try to come up with photo ops showing you genuflecting before the totems of the white working class, because that won’t work. Advocate for what you believe in, and explain why it actually helps people.
Finally — and this is critical — never stop telling voters how Republicans are screwing them over. The two successful Democratic presidents of recent years were both called liberal elitists, and they countered by relentlessly hammering the GOP over its advocacy for the wealthy. And it worked."Sorry for the over-long quotation, but this is the clearest statement yet of why some Democrats are flailing in the Trump era. They're trying to play a game they literally cannot win, ever.
"A major problem is that home often becomes as demanding as work.
'I feel like I have two jobs,' said Nam Yun-ju, aged 38. 'There are so many small and detailed things that a mom needs to take care of, even while she’s working, and it takes up so much energy and time. From changing the filters at home, or paying the insurance, I’m the one that has to communicate with the outside world. Even when the daycare tutor uploads a picture of my child online, I’m always the one writing comments.'
According to Lee Ye-jin, 38, the social standards of an ideal mother are too high for women to bear, leading them to feel guilty if they don’t meet expectations. 'There’s too much pressure on being a super-mom, probably because of portrayals of mothers in the media where mothers do work and childcare without any trouble. At the same time, everyone’s telling me that a child needs a mother’s care. Even when I get to do something away from the child, I’m stuck with a sense of guilt,' said Lee.
'I have no idea why elementary schools call in the students’ mothers to volunteer at the school cafeteria or at the crosswalk in front of the school,' said Ms. Jeong, aged 37. 'The [mothers] have regular gatherings at the kids’ cafe, and it’s awkward for me not to go. But the funny thing is, there are no fathers at those meetings.'"When a major holiday comes up in South Korea I rarely ask my adult female students what their plans are, because nine times out of ten they'll mention the drudgery of having to prepare for, cook meals, and clean constantly for at least three days in a row.
America 2018: porn stars are more vital to our democracy than "serious" journalists are
— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 3, 2018
"While mock meat has a place in some temple kitchens, much of the cooking consists of vegetables, rice, and plant-based proteins that have not been purposely twisted to resemble meats. This is especially true in Japan, where Buddhist law prohibited the consumption of four-legged animals throughout the empire for centuries, eventually doing away with the edict in the 19th century. Due to a lack of appetite for meat, Japanese people never tried to imitate it with other substances, says Akiko Katayama, a food consultant and host of the Japan Eats podcast. Similarly, in the heavily vegetarian country of India, you won’t find traditional mock meats for the same reason. 'For many Indian vegetarians, I don’t think a meat substitute would even register since meat was never a reference point to begin with,' says Chitra Agrawal, the author of the vegetarian Indian cookbook Vibrant India.
However, in China, the origins of both tofu and wheat gluten are somewhat linked to their use as meat replacements. In Mandarin, mianjin, or wheat gluten, means literally 'wheat meat' (George Ohsawa, the founder of the macrobiotic diet, coined the term 'seitan' for the same food in 1961). And tofu, a food that dates back to prehistoric times in China, was popularly known as 'small mutton' in the 10th century, according to records. Although they need not only to be enjoyed as meat analogs, they have been used as such for centuries. There is mention of seitan textured to emulate goose in the classic Chinese cookery book Recipes From the Sui Garden by the Qing Dynasty Chinese poet Yuan Mei. And the Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West references wheat gluten several times, including a scene in which demons attempt to serve a monk a meal of human flesh and brains fried to resemble wheat gluten—that is, meat masquerading as mock meats."The author concludes that if we always approach these foods as "substitutes" we'll never learn to appreciate their own culinary virtues.
"With a firmer grip on the regime and a strengthened nuclear strike capability, all this diplomacy moves Kim closer to his remaining goals of prioritizing the economy and elevating North Korea’s international standing as a nuclear state. The fact of hosting friendly meetings with foreign delegations and presenting them with memorabilia commemorating the recent success in 'perfecting the national nuclear forces' is a nuclear status fait accompli. And even if North Korea can’t rejoin the international community in full because of continuing human rights abuses and opaque economic practices, going on the diplomatic offensive is a smart way of discouraging the international community—and especially China—from stringently implementing an increasingly suffocating international sanctions regime. Diplomacy is a low-cost means of getting sanctions relief, which will help improve the North Korean standard of living. At the same time, an extended process of reconciliation with South Korea holds out the promise of much needed economic investment and assistance. Already there’s talk of an energy corridor running from Russia, through North Korea, down to the South. That all this encourages greater friction in the U.S.-South Korea alliance and mutes the preventive war narrative that was building last year in Washington is simply a bonus.
Kim’s playing a multi-level game. Thinking in terms of Kim having a singular or primary motivation oversimplifies the reality that diplomacy done right can do many things at once—for example, nudge the United States out of the picture while presenting North Korea to the world as a 'peaceful' nuclear state that doesn’t deserve to be under such stringent sanctions. Kim’s diplomacy encourages a public narrative of rapprochement with both the South and the United States, which in turn helps bring all of his goals closer to reality. North Korea does not necessarily need to abandon any of its nuclear weapons for all of this to happen."The fact that Trump is probably going to meet with Kim in three to four weeks is already a major win for the North Korean regime. Xi and Macron and Saudi Arabia simply put on meaningless banquets and parades and promptly got exactly what they wanted from Trump.
pretty sure Kanye is running in 2020 or 2024. as a Republican.— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) May 2, 2018
