Friday, February 17, 2017

The Media and Trump

Please do not mistake me for a Trump supporter.  I am not.  I am very concerned with his business not being in blind trust and why Russia intervened on his behalf in the election.  I am horrified at the suggestions that the EPA and FDA might be completely eliminated -- as these are necessary for our lives and health.  I am very concerned that Republicans are going to use this administration as an excuse to cut Medicare and Social Security, when Trump clearly stated from the outset that he wouldn't touch those things. I am very concerned about his attitude toward the free press.

On the other hand, his statements that the press is "lying" are, I believe, being misinterpreted by the liberal press.  It's not that they have individual facts wrong.  Nor, I think, was his word "tone" quite correct.  It is that the media distorts the big picture.

The news media is a business that sells negative drama.  Positive, normal, boring things don't get reported.  What gets reported is sensationalism.  This is distorting.  It does not give a complete picture of what is going on.

Moreover, it does not give a broad scope of even what might be sensationalist.  Only a few stories ever rise to national attention.  It's like triage in an emergency room.  News gets screened for how much it will grab our attention.  We hear that.  The rest ends up on the cutting room floor.  You really have to do a lot of research to try to get the big picture.

I see the news media as being a bit like a horror movie.  You go there to get scared. The movie theater encourages you to eat mountains of popcorn, slathered in butter substitute, to deal with your fear -- so you can also get fat.  The news is like that.  You watch it and you get scared -- and you probably eat in front of the TV and get fat.

I do find the characterization of yesterday's speech as being a "rant" as misleading.  He seemed calm and coherent to me.  I do agree with him that his supporters will watch that speech and not find that it was a rant.  They're going to believe him that his administration is a well-oiled machine.

He's very slick and convincing.

I don't know if his administration is a well oiled machine yet. I doubt it.

I still fear that he is a corrupt, totalitarian, foreign agent.

But the media is distorting that press conference for sure.  What that press conference was was a slick piece of propaganda which in fact made Trump look smart and the press look like a crowd of annoying insects.

This is also what Kellyanne means when she says listen to his heart and not his words.  He's not a lawyer.  He's not an academic.  There are always going to be things that he says that can be picked apart.

But his followers are also not academics or lawyers.  They are, by and large, less educated, less intellectual, and lower income.  They are going to listen to tone.  They are not going to pick apart facts.  They are going to find the press harping on minor factual errors annoying.

I want to resist Trump.  I want him out as soon as possible. I feel he is hugely dangerous for this country.

However, he has a point about the press, and he does know what he's doing in terms of PR.

If we want to defeat him, we have to be less stupid about it.  We can't engage in petty insults and name calling.  That's weak.  We can't do sensationalist distortion of rumors.  That's not going to work.

We have to keep our attention on real issues: corruption, ties to Russia, totalitarian tendencies.  We can't look like a bunch of annoying insects attacking a person who knows how to present himself on camera.  He is, after all, a professional performer and comedian.  He knows how to get ratings.

I don't know if he's a successful businessman.  His finances are not transparent.  We hear stories of huge debts, bankruptcies, unpaid contractors, defrauded customers.  Personally, I doubt his claim that he's been successful as a businessman.  The fact that his name and face are used to promote hotels does not mean that he is a successful businessman.

However, as a performer and as a propagandist, he's hugely successful.  That's where he excels -- and we have to be smarter at responding to that.




Story of S______ list of variable names

I was at one time a computer programmer.  In computer programming, we had variables, and usually a program started with a declaration of the variables, or comments explaining them. I had this idea that it would be fun to write a book that was like a compute program in this way, where the characters and places all had variable names.

In fact, in other fiction books, the character and place names are really variables as well, since they're just fictional names that represent the character.  However, in this book, the variable names were more explicitly such.  I have a list of the variable names, or abbreviations, as I called them near the start of the book, after the forward.

Someone brought to my attention that if you're reading this book in e-book format, it's hard to refer back to the list of abbreviations; so I thought maybe it would be helpful to just put the list of abbreviations in a blog here, to make it easier to refer to when you're reading the book


S. F-R, Jr. — the male lead
W. F-R — wife of the male lead
W. F-R, Jr. — daughter of W. & S.
WS1 — first son of W. & S.
WS2  — second son of W. & S.
S* — deceased mother of the male lead
S. F-R — deceased father of the male lead
A. M. — the female lead
A* — husband of the female lead
A3 — first son of A. & A*
A4 — second son of A. & A*
CityOne — where S. lives
StateOne — as state distant from CityOne
Rivertown — where A. lives, lesser suburb
MountainOne — where S. has a vacation homes
ShoreOne — where S. had another vacation home
Mountain Twenty-five — where A. has a vacation home, a much lesser resort area
J. — a 'friend' of S.
WarmIsland — location of the estate of S.'s stepfather
SuburbOne — where W.'s parents live
V. — a friend of A.
AirportSix — a small airport near CityOne
A. D. — one of S's former girlfriends
C. J. — another of S's former girlfriends
Ms. F. — an attorney
CountySeat — a small city near Rivertown
BigPharamceutical — C. J.'s employer

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

anti-trump Limericks

I didn't write these, but I'm copying them with permission of the author, John Major

Paul Ryan

Paul Ryan's both craven and weak,
as he kisses Don's ass cheek by cheek.
The head of the House
has the spine of a mouse;
when he speaks it is more like a squeak.


Mike Flynn


Good riddance to slimeball Mike Flynn,
whose own falsehoods have just done him in.
This egregious baboon
is gone none too soon,
one more turd in the Trump garbage bin.



#45



Our president, Donald Smallhands,
takes unconstitutional stands,
and backed by the mob
thinks a citizen's job
is to do as His Smallness commands.
Like his hands, his mind is quite small,
and he can't keep his eye on the ball;
though Wharton's his boast,
his brain cells are toast
and he seems to know nothing at all.

Kellyanne

That bad piece of work Kellyanne
has The Dump in the palm of her hand.
What so e're he might say
she explains it away,
and keeps lying as fast as she can.


I wish I could figure out how to fix the background color for text that's copied from somewhere else
 

Monday, February 13, 2017

FB meme about the resistance

Pretty much sums it up, folks!
This is long but it is important.
This is where I stand. Period.
I make no apologies to any or all of my FB friends for this. I know some are tired of political postings and rants. But apart from cutesy posts of recipes, meals, flowers, dogs, seashells, balloons, pictures, cats, and drama, and even beautiful expressions of spiritual beliefs, FB is (until it gets taken away) a vehicle to express our outrage at how far our country has currently fallen on the humanitarian scale.
To me, FB is a useful vehicle for my passion and activism. The fevered Ego currently occupying our White House, his power hungry cronies taking positions of authority in his Cabinet and administration, and the majority of Republicans in Congress are a real and active threat to me, my way of life, and all the people I love. And unless you are worth billions of dollars, they are a threat to you and your life, too. So I will Resist and I will be part of the resistance, and proud of it. If you can join in or hang with it, fine. But if not, then you probably need to unfriend me now. I refuse to "play nice" in the face of what these people are doing. Our country's well-being demands that we stand and resist.
Some people are saying that we should give #45 a chance, that we should "work together" with him because he won the election and he is "everyone's president." This is my response:
I will not say #45's name.
•I will not forget how badly he and so many others treated former President Barack Obama for 8 years...
*I will not "work together" to privatize Medicare, cut Social Security and Medicaid.
•I will not "work together" to build a wall.
•I will not "work together" to persecute Muslims.
•I will not "work together" to shut out refugees from countries where we destabilized their governments, no matter how bad they might have been, so that we could have something more agreeable to our oligarchy.
•I will not "work together" to lower taxes on the 1%.
•I will not "work together" to increase taxes on the middle class and poor.
•I will not "work together" to help #45 use the Presidency to line his pockets and those of his cronies.
•I will not "work together" to weaken and demolish environmental protection.
•I will not "work together" to sell American lands, especially National Parks, to companies which then despoil those lands.
·I will not "work together" to enable the killing in any way of whole species of animals just because they are predators, or inconvenient for a few, or because some people want to get their thrills killing them.
•I will not "work together" to remove civil rights from anyone.
•I will not "work together" to waste trillions more on our military when we already have the strongest in the world.
•I will not "work together" to alienate countries that have been our allies for as long as I have been alive.
•I will not "work together" to slash funding for education.
•I will not "work together" to take basic assistance from people who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
•I will not "work together" to allow torture and "black op" prison sites.
•I will not "work together" to "take their oil."
•I will not "work together" to get rid of common sense regulations on guns.
•I will not "work together" to eliminate the minimum wage.
·I will not "work together" to support so-called "Right To Work" laws, or undermine, weaken or destroy Unions in any way.
•I will not "work together" to suppress scientific research, be it on climate change, fracking, or any other issue where a majority of scientists agree that #45 and his supporters are wrong on the facts.
•I will not "work together" to criminalize abortion or restrict health care for women.
•I will not "work together" to increase the number of nations that have nuclear weapons.
•I will not "work together" to put even more "big money" into politics.
•I will not "work together" to violate the Geneva Convention.
•I will not "work together" to give the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party and white supremacists a seat at the table, or to normalize their hatred.
•I will not "work together" to deny health care to people who need it.
•I will not "work together" to increase the profits of the insurance companies.
•I will not "work together" to deny medical coverage to people on the basis of an alleged or actual "pre-existing condition."
•I will not "work together" to increase voter suppression.
•I will not "work together" to normalize tyranny.
I will not “work together” to eliminate or reduce ethical oversite at any level of government.
•I will not "work together" with anyone who is, or admires, tyrants and dictators.
•I will not "work together" with #45 or anyone who supports him, because I will not allow one man to feed upon the fears of the populace, blaming minorities for their condition or their inability to thrive.
This is the line, and I am drawing it.
·I will stand for honesty, love, respect for all living beings, and for the beating heart that is the center of Life itself.
•I will use my voice and my hands, to reach out to the uninformed, and to anyone who will LISTEN for what's really so dangerous about #45, his friends and the Big Lie they spin to the world:
That "winning", "being great again", "rich" or even "beautiful" is anything more than nothing... When others are sacrificed to glorify its existence.
PS: If you agree, please copy and re-post (we understand this results in larger numbers of people seeing a post), and if you can, sign your name below ours. Also, if we have left anything out, feel free to add it to this list.
Consider this an opportunity to make a declaration of commitment, in becoming part of The Resistance.
Signed:

annalisse mayer