Schadenfreude: Cardinal Bernard Law

I'm not a religious individual. Even if I was, I'd have trouble with the concept of unending divine retribution, especially if it was merely for disbelief or being a worshipper of a different god. On the other hand, there definitely should be a place for people like Law. Three guesses where that is:

Boston’s eighth bishop and fourth archbishop, Cardinal Law was the highest-ranking official in the history of the US church to leave office in public disgrace. Although he had not broken any laws in the Commonwealth — clergy were not required to report child sex abuse until 2002 — his actions led to a sense of betrayal among many Boston Catholics that the church is still dealing with today.

The abuse scandal was “the greatest tragedy to befall children — ever” in the Commonwealth, the attorney general’s office said in 2003, and “as archbishop, and therefore chief executive of the archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law bears ultimate responsibility for the tragic treatment of children that occurred during his tenure. But by no means does he bear sole responsibility.”

The attorney general’s office said the abuse extended over six decades and involved at least 237 priests and 789 children; of those, 48 priests and other archdiocesan employees were alleged to have abused children while Law was leader of the Boston archdiocese.

I, of course, will be looking forward to Bill Donohue's usual illogical attempt to blame the victims, the media or anyone else except Law for all of this, but that's only because I appreciate unintentional absurdist humor. After all, it's not like he'd actually be making a real argument or something.

So maybe there's hope for American democracy yet

I don't think I need to continue to harp on the massive shortcomings of Roy Moore as a politician, much less a functional human being. There are plenty of examples of them here and here, but what's gratifying about his special election loss to Doug Jones is that he wasn't put in a position to have a hand in national policy decisions in the US Senate. However, what's equally irritating is that it took a sexual harassment scandal (and if true, a outright pedophilia scandal) to do him in.

Nobody bothered to pay much attention to the fact that he's been living in a squalid alternate reality for decades in which bullhorn-level advocacy of theocracy, racism, homophobia and xenophobia were considered actual virtues instead of reasons to cringe, or that his entire campaign for the Senate - with the likes of Steve Bannon and Louis Gohmert clapping for him like trained seals - was built on that toxic worldview. It's as if being a reject from the most clichéd comedy movie about a trailer park pol was somehow a ticket to beatification. Unfortunately, for some people, it still is.

And the worst thing is that he can always make a run for Richard Shelby's seat when Shelby quits. Shelby is 83, so it's unlikely he'll run again. And although Roy Moore is down and out now, I get the sinking feeling we'll still have him to kick around in a few years' time - just like most other landmines.

Now reading

Another Life by Andrew Vachss.

A few more reasons not to vote for Roy Moore

This is probably not going to influence the Alabama special election one way or the other, but Matthew Sheffield pointed out yet more creepiness about Moore in Salon:

Contrary to Moore’s denial, however, he has extensive ties to people who have been involved with neo-Confederate groups. Like Moore, his controversial associates have also claimed they are not racist. Beyond the racial views they conceal in public, one thing Moore and his allies have in common is their shared view that Christians should have more rights than non-Christians and that America should be ordered in accordance with their understanding of Biblical law.
 

Moore’s connection to the Christian supremacist universe has primarily come through the Foundation for Moral Law, a nonprofit organization he established in 2003. That was shortly after he was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for failing to abide by a federal judge’s directive to remove a large Ten Commandments memorial from the state court’s grounds.
 

The foundation has become notorious in recent months for its duplicitous accounting (including off-the-books payments to Moore under the stewardship of his wife, Kayla, who is its president) and its willingness to receive a donation from avowed neo-Nazi Willis Carto. It also has long employed John Eidsmoe, a radical Christian attorney who has written extensively about how Biblical law as described in the Old Testament should supersede the American legal system.

 

Eidsmoe, who was the law school mentor of former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., has also spoken at a “Secession Day” event and addressed a segregationist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. Like Moore, Eidsmoe says he is not a racist. He has defended speaking to controversial groups by claiming he will speak “to anyone.”

There's more, of course - with Crazy Roy, there always is - but if the stuff I just quoted above doesn't creep you out you're probably reading the wrong blog - or just living in the wrong country. And the South Africa that existed during Apartheid is mercifully gone.

Now reading

Terminal by Andrew Vachss.

Roy Moore, Moral Arbiter of All That is Good in This World

You'd think that someone who has his share of publicly identifiable issues concerning outright wackjobbery and an alleged desire to spend some quality time with teenage girls just might learn to keep his mouth shut and let his political surrogates do the talking for him, but then you wouldn't be Roy Moore.

Lucky you if you're not him, though. From Business Insider:

Embattled Republican Senate candidate from Alabama Roy Moore is being accused of anti-Semitism after implying that business mogul and liberal fundraiser George Soros, who is Jewish, is going to hell.

"He's still going to the same place that people who don't recognize God and morality and accept his salvation are going," Moore said Tuesday. "And that's not a good place."

Moore made the comments about Soros while speaking with radio host Bryan Fischer on his local Alabama show, The Ordinary People Society.

Conservative news source The Reagan Battalion tweeted that Moore's statements about Soros were "straight-up anti-Semitism."

Moore also said that Soros's "agenda is sexual in nature" and is "not American culture."

Moore's comments came on the heels of a Breitbart News report alleging that Soros is trying to register felons in Alabama to vote against Moore. While Alabama did recently pass a law allowing felons to vote, there is no evidence to back up Moore's and Breitbart's claims.

Well, then. He just doesn't stop, does he?

Notice that I didn't say stop and think; it's long been a foregone conclusion that Moore - who wears a cowboy hat for many of his photo ops - verbally shoots from the hip all the time even when it's obvious that (A) the gun is still holstered and (B) the only thing he's liable to shoot is his own foot, but that's hardly surprising; in fact, where he's concerned, it's inevitable.

(Helpful hint to Bryan Fischer: You might want to change the name of that show from The Ordinary People Society to something else. See, there's this book with a somewhat similar title and in this case it might hit too close to home. Just a suggestion.)

Malcolm Young, 1953-2017

I knew his time was going to be up due to his early-onset dementia, but I wasn't prepared for his passing a few days ago.

His rhythm guitar was exactly the sort of concrete you need to build a metaphorical expressway of a rock song on, and it's shown nowhere better than this example from 1977:

Schadenfreude: Charles Manson

Because, after all, psychopathic leaders of murder cults are such regrettable losses to the rest of humanity.

Now reading

Mask Market by Andrew Vachss.

Now reading

A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick.

Second place tie for last

I don't really need to go into all of the morbid details concerning the Paul Manafort (and Rick Gates) indictment - plenty of others have by now. However, I'd like to point out that my first guess on the issue last Friday had either him or the equally suspect Michael Flynn being the main target of Robert Mueller's first indictment, but even though my primary guess was Flynn he wasn't the target this time around.

And my use of the phrase "this time around" isn't meant as hyperbole.

Because there will be others.

Las Vegas, October 1st

I'm not going to go into a full-blown "analysis" (read: Monday morning quarterbacking, since I'm not anywhere close to being a law enforcement officer, much less a Las Vegas or Nevada law enforcement officer) of the events of October 1st, but here's my 2 cents on it:

Yes, you have a right to own a gun. And even use it, either for self-defense, hunting or other legitimate uses. That's not what the maniac who shot up Vegas did. He brought 23 - I repeat, 23 - pieces to the Mandalay Bay with the express purpose of killing as many people as possible, and he apparently had about 19 more that he left at home. If anyone is going to make any sort of an argument legitimizing his ownership of enough firepower to give an entire infantry platoon pause, I only have one thing to say to you: you're fucking delusional.

60 people got turned from human beings into non-breathing inanimate objects by only one of those guns. Care to guess how many more he could've killed if he only had more time on his hands before he offed himself?

This is not about your right to keep and bear arms. This is about badly needed, sane limitations on having enough damn guns to storm Normandy all over again all by your lonesome self, and whether or not any politician will bother to listen to any reasonable effort to stop this from happening all over again.

Because it will.

And I'm starting to get so revolted by it that my instinct for just packing up and leaving the country before it kills itself dead is starting to kick in with a vengeance.

Not helping with the Deep South stereotypes

Alabama elected this guy the GOP nominee for US Senator. Hence the observation.

As most jokes go, it's a sick one. As most realities go, it might be time to move somewhere else.

Now reading

International Relations Theory (fourth edition) by Scott Burchill et al., because apparently I had a need to indulge in some breezy light reading during the early fall.

Another black eye anime cons didn't need

Namely, this. Oy gevalt.

I try my damnedest to be positive about anime fandom and anime conventions in general, but it's shit like this and the entire creeper debacle at Project A-Kon back in 2013 that remind me what a mistake that can be. I wish I could sit back and say things like this never happen, but that's simply not the case.

Worst. Facepalm. Ever.

Considering who actually did it and why, that is.

Is it too early to consider future plans for a bomb shelter, yet?

Now reading

Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny.

Charlottesville

If you thought that this was the sort of America I'd hope to end up being a citizen of as a grown adult, you're out of your fucking mind.

A major problem with all of this, it seems, is our very own Mango-in-Chief, who not only took his time in equivocally "condemning" the violence there but certainly saw fit to take an utterly graceless swipe at the CEO of Merck for daring to leave one of his pet projects because it seems to be sponsored by someone who made a ton of political capital from the same "hatred, bigotry and group supremacy" Kenneth C. Frazier mentioned in his tweet.

Then again, this is something I've expected to happen ever since the Mango got elected. No one should've been surprised at all that this was going to happen. If you are, you've either been living in a cave since late 2015 or are incredibly naïve.

Regardless of that, I suspect there are dark days ahead for everyone in this country if this sort of bullshit is allowed to continue; the only problem is that we seem to have a "President" who seems utterly incapable - or just plain unwilling - to put a stop to it.

Now reading

Down Here by Andrew Vachss.

You just wish this was the result of a bad acid trip

So, then. Where to begin...?

I could start off by President Unintelligible giving this insane - but utterly in character - speech to a Boy Scout jamboree, or his continuous hectoring of his own hand-picked Attorney General, or his handpicked new White House Communications Director's harassment of his previously handpicked White House Chief of Staff, or his bizarre race-baiting during a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, or his demagoguery-fueled attempt to ban transgender troops from serving in the armed forces via Twitter that seems to have not phased anyone serving in the military who's actually associated with making such policy decisions.

Yeah, I could've started with any of those, really.

But where does it end?

Does it end?

Now reading

Only Child by Andrew Vachss.

Was reading

Pain Management by Andew Vachss. And yeah, I did finish it before I updated this thing.

Now reading

Dead and Gone by Andrew Vachss.

Like father, like... (The sequel)

Eric Trump continues to be himself, which is hardly pleasant for the rest of us.

Then again, this is a guy whose brother decided to help get Dear Old Dad elected by (at least graphically) allying himself with quite a few equally unpleasant people, so I guess we shouldn't be shocked at the phrase "not even people" being used by Eric.

I feel that Eric Trump is definitely a person, however.

He's also a complete idiot.

Not much else to tell, actually

There weren't nearly as many surprises as some people might have been expecting in James Comey's Senate testimony, but this passage makes me wonder how much Team Unintelligible was damaged by it:

After Comey's testimony, Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz said Comey "admitted that he unilaterally and surreptitiously made unauthorized disclosures to the press of privileged communications with the President."

As NPR's Scott Horsley reports, the lawyer also accused Comey of misstating the timing of the leak.

"Although Mr. Comey testified he only leaked the memos in response to a tweet, the public record reveals that the New York Times was quoting from these memos the day before the referenced tweet."

In fact, Comey's timeline appears to be correct.

Trump tweeted on Friday, May 12, that "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversation before he starts leaking to the press."

Comey said it was that tweet that prompted him to ask a friend to reveal the contents of the memo to a reporter the following Tuesday, May 16. The Times ran a story about the memo contents later that day. Although the Times also reported on May 11 — before Trump's tweet — about Comey's private dinner with the president, that story made no reference to Comey's contemporaneous memos. New York Times reporters corroborated Comey's timeline on Thursday after Kasowitz's statement.

So that's it? The biggest weapon in Kasowitz's arsenal for discrediting Comey's testimony is an assertion about its timing that isn't even correct?

This is going to be a long, hot summer.

Just not for Comey, IMO.

Like father, like...

Of course, if you're Eric Trump you just might be like your old man in a lot of respects - none of them apparently good:

Eric Trump, Mr. Trump's second-oldest son, told Forbes all the money from the annual golf tournaments at Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York benefited children with cancer, and he did not pay to use his family's golf course.

"We get to use our assets 100 percent free of charge," he told Forbes' Dan Alexander.

But IRS tax forms Forbes obtained show use of the course wasn't free after all. The for-profit Trump Organization received payments from the not-for-profit Eric Trump Foundation for use of the golf course, part of the $1.2 million that has no documented receipts beyond the Trump Organization, according to Forbes.

More than $500,000 in donations raised from the tournaments was re-donated to other charities, many of which were connected to Trump family members or interests, according to Forbes. Four such groups held their own charity tournaments at Trump golf courses at later dates. The nonprofit Donald J. Trump Foundation also donated $100,000 to the Eric Trump Foundation to cover tournament costs, money that was then redirected to Trump businesses, Forbes claims.

According to Forbes, it was now-President Trump himself who demanded that the Eric Trump Foundation be charged for the use of the golf course.

Seriously, if Team Unintelligible keeps going this way it's not like they'll need a Democratic landslide in the 2018 congressional elections to sink their administration - they're doing an incredible job of that all by themselves.

I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked!

It's not much of a surprise that President Unintelligible may have, oh, openly attempted to get his former FBI director to drop a case or two because an old buddy of his was feeling the pressure, but then again nothing that narcissistic idiot does these days surprises me much.

Now, Trump acting like an adult during Comey's testimony, that would be surprising.

Then again, perhaps not.

In memorial: Gregg Allman, 1947-2017

And a second musician whose body of work I greatly admired buys the farm in as many weeks.

Oh, shit.

Signal Boost: "White House’s 2018 Budget Plan Would 'Devastate' R&D, Says AAAS CEO Holt"

If you really needed any more explanation from a source outside President Unintelligible Central about why his budget would be especially hard on scientific and medical research, look no further than the following post from the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

The double-digit percentage cuts President Donald Trump is proposing in his fiscal 2018 budget plan for science and technology programs would “devastate America’s science and technology enterprise” and weaken the nation’s economic growth, Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said Tuesday.

Pointing to the budget blueprint the White House delivered to Congress Tuesday, Holt said, the plan, if enacted, would make steep cuts to science and technology programs and “negatively affect our nation’s economy and public well-being.” He cited several agencies and programs facing particularly “severe” cuts.

For instance, the proposal calls for sharp reductions in science and technology programs, including 11% from the National Science Foundation, which champions basic scientific research across all fields except medical topics; 22% from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest biomedical research agency; and 44% from the Environmental Protection Agency’s science and technology programs.

“Slashing funding of critically important federal agencies threatens our nation’s ability to advance cures for disease, develop new energy technologies, improve public health, train the next generation of scientists and engineers and grow the American economy,” said Holt.

The Energy Department’s scientific research efforts also face deep cuts. Its Office of Science, the government’s central energy research agency, largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences and the home of a renowned network of national research laboratories, would be cut by 17% and its Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy would face a 69% reduction. The budget proposal also calls for the department’s Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy program to be eliminated altogether by fiscal 2019.

The Agriculture Department’s research programs were not immune to proposed reductions. Funding for the Agriculture Research Service, for instance, would shrink by 38%; the National Institute for Food Agriculture would face an 8% decrease; and the Forest Service research programs would be cut by 10%. The Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey, which maps the Earth’s systems to help officials monitor natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides, is slated to be cut by 15%.
  
At the Commerce Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific agency, which uses satellite data to forecast and track severe weather and conducts research on oceans, fisheries and climate, would see funding fall by 9%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology that leverages measurement science to advance innovation would see a 23% decrease.

Holt stressed that the budget proposal in now in the hands of Congress where it is up to lawmakers to accept, reject or shape, a reality that was on full display when the Republican-controlled Congress restored many of the cuts Trump outlined in his fiscal 2017 budget plan.

During an afternoon press conference, Holt noted that the administration’s budget proposal deviates from how the scientific enterprise has long been viewed. “It has been regarded as an investment that leads to economic growth and human welfare,” said Holt, noting that the fiscal 2018 plan “is completely contrary to the idea of investment.”

Holt applauded Congress for “prioritizing federal research and development” when lawmakers finalized spending on May 4 for the remainder of fiscal year 2017, which ends after Sept. 30.
He called on Congress to continue to make research and development investments a priority and “to once again act in the nation’s best interest and support funding for R&D in a bipartisan fashion – including both defense and non-defense programs – in FY 2018 and beyond.”

Signal Boost: "We’re Seth Rich’s parents. Stop politicizing our son’s murder."

Although the following Washington Post editorial co-authored by Mary and Joel Rich - the parents of murder victim and current conspiracy theory target Seth Rich - was intended to stop the nonsense being spouted about the circumstances of his murder, I'm under the sad impression that it'll fall on mainly deaf ears (for one thing, opportunistic ghoul Sean Hannity didn't give up repeating it even after Fox News did, so why should he stop now?) considering who it was intended for.

Regardless of that, the editorial bears repeating - especially since this is becoming more and more like Vince Foster all over again, and for no good reason other than what only a hardened cynic might be able to dredge up in their worst imagination.

Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you have no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there are few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case.

Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.

Our beloved son Seth Rich was gunned down in the early hours of July 10, 2016, in his Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Bloomingdale. On the day he was murdered, Seth was excited about a new job he had been offered on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Seth had dedicated his life to public service, and he told us that he wanted to work on the campaign’s effort to expand voter participation because he loved our country dearly and believed deeply in the promise of democratic engagement. Seth had been walking around, calling friends, family and his girlfriend, pondering the broader picture of what the job change would mean. He wondered how he would pick up and move to New York City for four months, the strain that might put on his relationships, and how it would all affect the life he had built for himself in Washington.

We know that Seth was abruptly confronted on the street, that he had been on the phone and quickly ended the call. We also know that there were signs of a struggle, including a watchband torn when the assailants attempted to rip it off his wrist. Law-enforcement officials told us that Seth’s murder looked like a botched robbery attempt in which the assailants — after shooting our son — panicked, immediately ran and abandoned Seth’s personal belongings. We have seen no evidence, by any person at any time, that Seth’s murder had any connection to his job at the Democratic National Committee or his life in politics. Anyone who claims to have such evidence is either concealing it from us or lying.
 Still, conservative news outlets and commentators continue, day after painful day, to peddle discredited conspiracy theories that Seth was killed after having provided WikiLeaks with emails from the DNC. Those theories, which some reporters have since retracted, are baseless, and they are unspeakably cruel.

We know that Seth’s personal email and his personal computer were both inspected by detectives early in the investigation and that the inspection revealed no evidence of any communications with anyone at WikiLeaks or anyone associated with WikiLeaks. Nor did that inspection reveal any evidence that Seth had leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks or to anyone else. Indeed, those who have suggested that Seth’s role as a data analyst at the DNC gave him access to a wide trove of emails are simply incorrect — Seth’s job was to develop analytical models to encourage voters to turn out to vote. He didn’t have access to DNC emails, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee emails, John Podesta’s emails or Hillary Clinton’s emails. That simply wasn’t his job.

Despite these facts, our family’s nightmare persists. Seth’s death has been turned into a political football. Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop. The amount of pain and anguish this has caused us is unbearable. With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us.

To those who sincerely want to get to the bottom of Seth’s murder, we don’t hold this against you. We don’t think you are monsters, and we don’t think you are terrible people. We know that so many people out there really do care, don’t know what to think and are angry at the lack of answers.

We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth’s memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare. We ask those purveying falsehoods to give us peace, and to give law enforcement the time and space to do the investigation they need to solve our son’s murder.

In Memoriam: Chris Cornell, 1964-2017

I still have a hard time believing this.


I'm having an even harder one accepting it.

Schadenfreude: Roger Ailes

Again, I don't wish death on people I can't stand. However, I also refuse to fete the memory of assholes in a hypocritical manner after their passing, and I won't do it for Ailes, either.


It wasn't merely that Ailes made it possible for lunatics like Louis Gohmert or Michelle Bachmann viable forces in national politics via Fox News, but he also succeeded in making it possible - or even mandatory - for people to act like petulant 8-year-old bullies raging away on an uncontrollable sugar high in order to get elected to office. That also means that he made Donald Trump possible as well - and just look where that's gotten us all.


Oh, and then there's the entire sexual harassment thing as well, on top of all that other happy horseshit.


So if you want to see a eulogy, go look at Charles P. Pierce's. Or maybe the one from Deadspin is brutal enough.

In other "alternative facts" news, water is now dry

It seems that the biggest enemy of a President who changes his mind this rapidly on the efficacy of an agency's director is the institutional memory of the press. Witness this tidbit from a New York Times editorial, for example:

By firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country’s history.

The explanation for this shocking move — that Mr. Comey’s bungling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server violated longstanding Justice Department policy and profoundly damaged public trust in the agency — is impossible to take at face value. Certainly Mr. Comey deserves all the criticism heaped upon him for his repeated missteps in that case, but just as certainly, that’s not the reason Mr. Trump fired him.

Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for Mr. Comey when, in the final days of the presidential campaign, he informed Congress that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. “He brought back his reputation,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “It took a lot of guts.”

Of course, if Mr. Trump truly believed, as he said in his letter of dismissal, that Mr. Comey had undermined “public trust and confidence” in the agency, he could just as well have fired him on his first day in office.

Mr. Comey was fired because he was leading an active investigation that could bring down a president. Though compromised by his own poor judgment, Mr. Comey’s agency has been pursuing ties between the Russian government and Mr. Trump and his associates, with potentially ruinous consequences for the administration.

The part about Comey being compromised by his own poor judgment is a relevant one, since earlier that day it was noted by several media outlets about what a belly-flop he took on the subject of the Huma Abedin emails. Granted, those mistakes were serious. Serious enough to probably cost Hilary Clinton the 2016 Presidential election, in fact. But not as serious as the fact that Comey wanted more money in order to expand the investigation into Russia's influence with the Trump administration, or the fact that Comey was supposed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday before he got axed.

And now he won't.

Funny how that works out, isn't it?

Uh oh

Everyone's had more than one moment in their lives where national - or even international - events have the tone of the other shoe dropping, and I'm completely convinced that this might not just be a shoe; it might be the entire shoe rack:

The White House has fired FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections and possible ties to the Trump campaign and top aides.

"Today, President Donald J. Trump informed FBI Director James Comey that he has been terminated and removed from office. President Trump acted based on the clear recommendations of both Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said in a statement.

"The FBI is one of our Nation's most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement," the president said in the statement.

Two points:

1) The oddest things about crown jewels is that if you're not paying attention somebody can very easily replace them with ones made out of paste;

2) Oh, Archibald Cox. A pity you passed away in 2004. I'm sure you'd be sending Comey a sympathy card with a pocket edition of the Constitution wedged inside (and the phone number of a lawyer to help with his future Senate testimony) about 5 minutes after he got axed.

Well, there's a huge non-shock

It's not so much the "I don't stand by anything" admission that gets me as it is the fact that President Unintelligible decided the best way to follow that up was to toss CBS' John Dickerson out of the oval office and continue to beat the "Obama tapped* my phones" drum sans proof all over again.

(*Or "tapped", since PU's spelling in a tweet about this was "tapp". After all, "speling countz".)

Jay Maynard and the perils of selection bias

Other people have done most of the legwork in attempting to refute Jay "Tron Guy" Maynard's singularly odd take on this year's Penguicon (such as Jer Lance), but I decided to go out on a limb and just looked at the list of panels and events with an eye towards seeing if it really was nearly as bent toward politics as he said it was, much less the politics he seems to abhor.

Huge surprise that it wasn't.

If you look at on Penguicon's schedule, it comes off as so screamingly bent towards the mix of hacker/Linux and SF enthusiast programming that you really, really wonder precisely what alternate reality Maynard was attending his Penguicon in. Another major problem is that even if you only look at the "Life" programming category (which is the rock you'd think that political discussions would  be found under), so much of it is oriented towards non-political subject matter that you begin to fear for Maynard's sense of reality testing. This perception isn't exactly helped by the following series of complaints he made (as quoted from File 770):

Still, I’d promised this year’s con chair that she’d get a fair chance to address my concerns, so I came back one more time. Guess what? More hard-left GoHs — the odious Coraline Ada Ehmke, she of the Contributor Covenant that prohibits project members from being politically incorrect any time, anywhere, in any venue, on pain of expulsion (who had to cancel due to an emergency); Sumana Harihareswara, who I found out the hard way was a hard-core feminist as well; and Cory Doctorow, well-known left-wing author — more politically correct panels, 15 of them on such topics as “Queering Your Fiction” and “Let’s Get the Taste of 2016 Out of Our Mouths” and “Exploring Themes in Zen Cho’s Work” (with “Intersectionality, diaspora and immigration, the culture of British education, and queer relationships also appear in Cho’s stories over and over” in the description). When I was asked to submit lists of panel topics, I was instructed not to be controversial, but it seems the Left has no such admonition.

Uh huh. The problem with all of that, however, is this:

Ehmke is an Open Source developer, and this is a con heavily devoted to that subject regardless of her political leanings. The same applies to Harihareswara. Doctorow is a...oh, c'mon. And as to those "politically correct" panels Maynard is bitching about, one of them - wait for it - is entitled in full Whiskey Tasting 2017 - Let's Get the Taste of 2016 Out of Our Mouths!, hosted by that raving Trotskyist (and former Capricon con chair) Greg "Guido" Williams.

As to the rest of those panels, no one pointed a gun at Maynard's head and demanded he attend them. Or Penguicon. Granted, he could have gone to the likes of Basic Design of 3D Printed Firearms  as a corrective instead, but...well, that would have led to severe cognitive dissonance issues - or merely the disproof of Maynard's screed.

And you can't actually have facts trespassing on the sacred fantasy-based territory of a good screed, can you?

Of course not.

Oh Noes!

I now haz a Dreamwidth account.

As to why, here it is in a nutshell:

LiveJournal was bought by the Russian company SUP Media in 2007, but the servers themselves weren’t relocated to Russia until December of 2016. The new Terms of Service (TOS) agreement bans “political solicitation” and requires that any content which is considered “inappropriate for children according to Russian law” be marked as adult/18+ content. Given Russia’s attitudes toward LGBTQIA content, this likely means any queer content must be marked as 18+. Some users have argued that the new terms could even constitute an outright ban on LGBTQIA content.

In addition, any LiveJournal blog which receives more than 3,000 viewers in a 24-hour period must register as a media outlet; this places that blog’s content under even further content restrictions. Critics of the new policy further worry that LiveJournal’s compliance efforts will expose users to the Russian police force’s invasive web monitoring.
Uh, no. Afraid not. Thanks, but I'll pass.

Stupid vendettas just keep getting stupider all the time

Beale's Syndrome (n.): a psychological condition that causes already long-standing, petty vendettas to become increasingly moronic over time and repeated incidents.

So, this guy was at it again with his vendetta against SF author John Scalzi, and -

Wait a minute.

Putting out an over-obvious parody of a soon-to-be-released Scalzi novel on Amazon in a weak effort to tweak his nose (or whatever Castalia House was trying to accomplish) is one thing, but resorting to some of the crap mentioned below is precisely the reason why VD has gotten his entirely deserved reputation as an thoroughly unsavory, egomaniacal pain in the ass who's always glad to go the extra unwanted step in proving it. A few examples from File 770, below:

Rev. Bob:

Well, THIS is a revolting development…
I was browsing on Amazon half an hour ago and noticed that The Corroding Empire showed up in the mentions for the book I was looking at – so I clicked and took a look. I opened the preview and felt my red pen twitching at the very first line of the narrative, which is never a good sign. I not only did not proceed to purchase the book, but left a one-star review explaining why:

The confused tenses in the very first sentence of the narrative (visible in the preview) tell me there’s no need to read more. It’s obvious to me that the editor/publisher spent more time and effort in ripping off the cover than he did getting the text right.

A few minutes later, I was given a compelling reason to edit the review. I suspect it will be of interest to others…

EDIT: How fascinating. Mere minutes after leaving the above review, I received a phone call from someone identifying himself as a Castalia House representative. That individual then proceeded to threaten to publicize my private information and stated that he was recording the telephone call – neither of which I had consented to.
Buyer, beware! Stay FAR away from this company!

Specifically, the caller read off a street address (which I did not confirm to be mine or not) and had obviously obtained my phone number, claiming Amazon had provided the data because I was a Castalia House customer. (Not true in any sense. Amazon doesn’t give ebook buyers any such information, and I hadn’t made the purchase.) That’s not the way to win friends and influence people, Teddy.No kidding.

A little bit later, he explains further about the fallout from the really fun dealings he had with this minion of VD's:

I notified Amazon very soon after receiving the call. Considering that the caller claimed to be with Castalia House (distributed on Amazon) and represented himself as having received my contact information from Amazon (a blatant falsehood) as a result of a purchase (which I did not make), it seemed to me that Amazon would want to be made aware of the incident.

If I’d known at the time that Beale had given the caller his approval, I would have included that nugget as well. As it stands, I added a comment under my review with that info, as well as replying to Amazon Customer Service’s “how’d we do?” email with the update and a link to the page.
The Amazon agent I spoke with sounded properly appalled by the incident, and I made it plain to her that I did not hold her or Amazon responsible for an instant. (I’ve worked in customer service; I know how important it is to distinguish between frustration at the situation and anger at the person helping you.) I know Amazon doesn’t pass along such customer-specific detail to ebook sellers even when a purchase takes place, but the fact that someone CLAIMED they had goes to… is it defamation when it involves a business rather than a person? Definitely not good, potentially actionable, and since Amazon’s got all the power in the relationship with VD/CH, as well as an army of lawyers around the globe, they may as well be the ones to look into it further.

So let me get this straight, now: this was over a "parody" that - as far as I can tell - was a poorly written, transparent attempt to blunt sales of Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire prior to its release. Or something. And now VD is having people harassing reviewers on the phone over this crap.

Seriously?

This is something an alleged fucking adult does? His ego is just that thin? And, furthermore, he's conned other alleged adults (his Dread Ilk come off as being just as terminally cartoony fanboy as their name suggests) into doing it for him?

Oh, but there are other examples as well. From rochrist:

I made the mistake of making a snarking comment in one of the fake reviews. The fellow immediately tracked me down in RL. He assures me though that it will be Vox himself I hear from. He is just a dutiful minion.
A dutiful sucker is more like it, since these little third-party threats always make it easy for the ringleader to claim innocence while his minion takes the fall.

Look, everybody knows that SF fandom has been historical rife with feuds. Tons of them, in fact. But this is an entirely new weapons-grade load of bullshit that misses one very important point: fiction, still being an art form above all else regardless of the genre it might fall into, is always going to result in criticism. Fair criticism, petty or inaccurate criticism, but criticism all the same. It's entirely inevitable. And if your reaction to such criticism about a work that wasn't intended as serious in the first place is to get a group of your dopey little "friends" (again, the word "sucker" comes to mind as being more accurate, as does "sycophant") to harass online critics is indicative of the fact that you have a very, very serious problem in dealing with the adult world.

Then again, VD has always assumed that he's a genius and that his supposed enemies are all far, far lesser men than he.

And you remember the old joke about what happens when you assume, right...?

Thumped

It's not exactly startling - at least, not now - that the FBI is investigating Donald Trump's potential deep ties to Russia, but it's hardly the bombshell that some people might make it out to be considering how he was running around cheerleading for Russian hackers even before he got elected. However, here's the statement by FBI director James Comey in his testimony on March 20th that will probably ruin Trump's day the most:

Comey said there is “no information” that supports Trump’s claims that his predecessor ordered surveillance of Trump Tower during the election campaign.
 
“I have no information that supports those tweets,’’ he said. “We have looked carefully inside the FBI,’’ and agents found nothing to support those claims.
Under questioning from the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Comey said no president could order such surveillance. He added that the Justice Department had asked him to also tell the committee that that agency has no such information, either.


Oops.

Now reading

Distraction by Bruce Sterling.

(Or re-reading it, as the case may be - I ended up losing my original paperback a few years ago on a train [joining a parade of gloves, winter caps, umbrellas and who the hell knows what else] and hope not to repeat that feat all over again before I finish it this time...)

4.444

...is the grand total of sexual abuse incidents lodged against the Roman Catholic Church in Australia between 1980 and 2015. If only a quarter of those allegations are true, that's sickening beyond belief.

But I'm sure Bill Donohue will have his usual red-faced, angry excuses all lined up - if he even bothers to bring any of this up, that is.

Alternative Fact-o-Rama

You might think that a certain high-profile underling of President Cheeto couldn't be upstaged in her reference to a massacre that never happened, but it looks like she somehow managed to do just that since it's apparently not the first time she's done that sort of thing.

Then again, this is her boss at work just today. Given the atmosphere at the White House since January 20th, why should anyone be particularly surprised?  

Now reading

Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick.

Happy now? (or, the Age of the Orange Quisling)

This isn't going to be a post detailing the idiocy and ethical bankruptcy of our incoming President. That's all been detailed (and will continue to be detailed) on sites such as this. Instead, this is about how he got to where he is, and why it terrifies the hell out of me.

Donald J. Trump, you see, is the beneficiary of Russian hackers. Hackers who were almost certainly hired by this guy, who has taken great care to turn his own country into a massive human rights shithole after years of manipulating domestic politics, instituting repressive measures against opposition political movements and NGOs alike and an occasional convenient invasion of nearby countries such as Ukraine or Georgia. Trump's ties to that guy are more than a little, shall we say, blatant despite his protestations to the contrary. And then there's this little tidbit:

The FBI and five other intelligence and law enforcement agencies are working together on an investigation into whether Russia’s government secretly helped President-elect Donald Trump win the election, according to a new report.

The collaborative probe is partially focused on whether any covert money from the Kremlin financed hacking operations to benefit Trump’s campaign, McClatchy reported Wednesday.
Two people familiar with the matter told McClatchy the intelligence agencies involved include the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and representatives for the director of national intelligence. Two law enforcement agencies — the Justice Department and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — are also participating.

According to McClatchy, the interagency working group is informal and began scrutinizing possible Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race last spring. A key mission of the six-agency team, it said, is examining who financed the email hacks of major Democratic Party sources last year.
Admittedly, all of this may lead to nothing - but I doubt it. Why? Mainly due to the fact that when pressed by reporters during what can safely be termed the Press Conference of Doom Trump's response  later Tweet was just a bit, well, unbalanced:

President-elect Donald Trump vehemently denied that Russia has compromising material on him or that he has any personal connection to the country, tweeting on Wednesday morning that "Russia has never tried to use leverage over me" and asking his followers "are we living in Nazi Germany?"

The reaction of CIA director John Brennan, although calm in comparison, wasn't exactly supportive:

“What I do find outrageous is equating an intelligence community with Nazi Germany,” Brennan said on "Fox News Sunday." “I do take great umbrage at that, and there is no basis for Mr. Trump to point fingers at the intelligence community for leaking information that was already available publicly.”
Brennan also defended the intelligence chiefs' decision to share the information with Trump.
“Bringing to the attention of the president-elect as well as the current president that this information was out there was a responsibility, in the mind of the intelligence directors, of the intelligence community," Brennan said.

The CIA director also responded to claims by the Trump campaign that the intelligence community is attempting to undermine and delegitimize Trump.
“Making sure that the president-elect himself was aware of it, I think that was the extent of what it was that the intelligence chiefs wanted to do," he said.
Brennan also vowed support for the new Trump administration.

Brennan has my sympathies. If I were in his shoes, I'd be heading for the exit about a minute after Trump becomes President. Not that he'd be alone in that, of course.

Problem is, how do you get out from under the fact that Trump seems completely oblivious to any concerns about this issue? Or the fact that most of the nominees for his cabinet look like a Russian-style oligarchy just waiting to happen? Or that most of them aren't exactly prime examples of doing anything other than previously wanting to dismantle the department he's being put in charge of (Rick Perry) or defending school kids from Grizzly attacks everywhere but not much in the way of promulgating public education (Dominionist Christian and Amway heir Betsy DeVos)?

Thing is, you don't. Congress has to.

Lotsa luck with that. We'll all need it.

Now reading

Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.

Happy New Year, fellow serfs

Happy New Year, all.

I'm afraid that I may have lost my temper a bit about the situation concerning the Arizona Diamondbacks, but you may agree with me a lot more if you read this link.

Or you could just cut to the chase and read my rant from Facebook, reproduced here:

I had a rough day at work. So rough, in fact, that I fully and vehemently agree with former Maricopa County supervisor Andy Kunasek when he allegedly told Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick to “take your stupid baseball team and get out” and go back to “fucking West Virginia”.

The audacity of having yet another one of these kleptocratic, self-centered multimillionaire pukes gouge yet another local community out of money for their own personal paean to the greatness of themselves just about takes the cake for sheer chutzpah - and then shits it back out for the rest of us mere mortals to subsist on. It gets better, of course. Is Kendrick a political and financial ally of the Koch brothers? Of course he is. Does he come off as much of a whiner about how wronged his team is legally in addition to coming off as an utter greedhead? Well, he's suing Maricopa in order to get out of his current lease, isn't he?
 

I'm sick of all this shit. All. Of. It. If it wasn't for my continued interest in sports as actual sports and not glorified pro wrestling, I'd take every one of these shitbag owners, line them up against the wall at an struggling-but-succeeding inner city school (you know, the type that especially need the funds these assholes demand) and then have every single member of that school's honor roll piss on them from the roof. Because none of them deserve the dignity of being the subject of a firing squad.