Severian knows it's a joke. The hell is up with you today? :D

we listen to piaf on the regular but i'm looking for written human practice.

i'll go elsewhere on the internecks


what's wrong with your failed jokes! 2 in a row?

but try again

a la tercera va la vencida

Oh.. my.. god

I'm right there with you. It's not my furnace's fault. I've been unfair to my awful furnace that is going to cost $6,000 to replace.

Seriously though.. I have been feeling the same way. A friend of mine thinks Sessions' goose is cooked, but I have no faith in this administration or in congress to make the tough, scrupulous call.

Sessions' guilt, or admission of wrong-doing, would necessarily implicate Trump, and then congress would have a much bigger turd to bury. My bet is Sessions is going to walk, and the media will be blamed for spreading inflammatory rumors.

What's "ethical" is simply being redefined by the post-Tea Party right before our eyes. I saw a public school teacher sharing a Facebook story accusing the women who protested Trump's speech by wearing white of being sluts... in a forum where he interacts with students. This should be unethical, punishable, but hahah. Nope. Silly me. Women with opinions are incompetent sluts who should be "drained," and it's OK for state employees with a huge influence on kids to say this right next to their "way to go across country team!" Status updates.

This is the world. I'm getting under a table.

OUCH. FUCK!

i'm sorry for your loss

--

eta: my gift to you. to help with the furnace

http://lifehacker.com/this-free-cook...u-c-1792833962

finally, not just one but TWO decent poets! (in the sense of them being decent people. i don't know about their poetry. but i'm checking this out).

HEY, my jokes are COMEDY GOLD! ( <- see, that's in golden color and all, just like The Donald likes his signature, and his showers).

see? three time's a charm!

i actually laughed by the end of that parenthesis

thanks

These motherfuckers... Some shit you just can't make up, man.

Pence used personal email for state business — and was hacked

LOCK-HIM-UP! LOCK-HIM-UP!

I'm still just dumbfounded that a particle detector seemed to be picking up radioactivity, right outside the University of Washington, unless I dreamt it! I've seen an article in the local newspaper about a big machine that can eradicate blocks of radioactive waste, but after that evening I really lost my reign on things...pushed a couple of people, screamed to no one off a bridge repeatedly at night, lost my notebooks...bad craziness.
https://www.facebook.com/JLYGIIDC/ph...660868/?type=3
I suppose that we've got little robots at work, fixing toward betterment of the aftermath, but didn't someone tell me a radio-active pylon still making waves of out-of-control waste fell off of the continental shelf? Zoinks!
http://o.canada.com/news/fallout-fro...t-coast-waters

Sessions isn't going anywhere.

Pence's email thingie will blow over.

Trump will not resign or be impeached anytime soon. "Russia" will be a "Benghazi"--something to fire up the base, but of no real legal consequence.

My reps--barring Sherrod Brown--don't give a fuck about me.

This all just hit me at once.

yes. that's the lucid view.

the issue is what to do, though. yes? it's always that question. "how should i live?" or whatever.

survival, ethics, and the calculus that goes with all that.

not easy.

I'm thinking doing fuck all is most logical, at least in my situation.

I can't change anything. Why bother? Why bother even keeping up on news I can have no influence upon?

Smart people are tracking Trump and going after him. Maybe it'll lead to something. Maybe not. In any case, I'm not needed.

this is not an insane choice, actually.

remember that garrison keillor article about him getting into his tomatoes or something? i don't recall exactly. basically, retreating into the private sphere.

of course the argument goes back at least to voltaire, where the poor innocent candide gets burned by politics and international upheavals and resolves in the end to just "cultivate his own garden"

or, eventually, you can go back to epicurus who recommended, among other things, to live simply, and to stay away from politics.

i don't know. what's your "philosophy"? i put it in quotations because philosophy is not an ideological formula but an activity, so it can't really be used in this sense, yet we still use it anyway, so i still gotta ask.

there are many ways to "do good" (if that's your thing) which don't necessitate you going bananas.

selfishness and altruism need a balance or the species goes extinct. at least if you believe richard dawkins as a biologist.

then again i'm not advocating for biological determinism. just looking at realistic options.

ethics didn't become a whole branch of philosophy because correct actions were easy to figure out.

but yes, we're oppressed.

so how do we become liberated?

eta: here for your enjoyment:

http://www.humanistictexts.org/epicurus.htm

see #20

but the whole thing really

I'm definitely in need of some clarity, pretty goddamn desperately. My brain feels like it's a jack-in-the-box that someone (me) keeps shoving back in and winding up again and again and again.

I think a little bit of selfishness is absolutely necessary here. For people like you and me, and many of the other frequenters of this thread anyway.

I need to find a way to be "selfish" and let myself be calm and not trembling with ulcer-enduring tension like a goddamn hummingbird. I don't have any tomatoes though. And I can't escape the news feeds without escaping my cash-money, so that's rough. But by all means, do nothing, at least for now.

I may say the opposite in five hours because I'm manic as hell right now, but at this moment... yeah. Sessions is gonna be a-ok, Trump is gonna be a-ok. The American people have no reason to cling to any such assurances though. Most of us are probably more likely to lose our jobs in 2017 than Trump. That's just life. So find your peace. And please tell me how you did it when you find it, because I'm honest-to-god losing it. Depression, rage, exhaustion from depression-rage... these are my daily emotions. Exhaustion is the only thing keeping me from going off the reservation.

For what it's worth, I think I'm going trough much of what you're going through, so if you need to shoot the shit about it (or, better yet, ANYTHING ELSE) drop me a PM.

I'm a little queefed off that nobody laughed at "I'm a monster!" to be completely honest with you.

I use memes so infrequently because they're so terrible, but that one was pitch perfect.

Now I am going to unknow that you were joking, and take offense at your pepper-green comment just 'cuz.

J'ACUSE!

then again, withdrawal into an epicurean garden is not always possible. desirable, sure, but possible?

i don't know. i lucked out with my situation or maybe i was always looking for it.

i'm living in my woods but anything from an ecological catastrophe to a change in the laws could make this into a place of misery. nothing lasts forever, after all, does it?

eventually, whether from a retreat, an epicurean garden, or a place of healing, one has to connect with the world again. sorta like guido anselmi in 8 1/2: he's hiding in a spa, but the world comes to get him. he tries to run away (even hides under the table, lol) but eventually has to make peace with it.

it looks as if social and community life are unavoidable. and one has to find a way to continue in it.

of course, nothing wrong with a little rest and recuperation first.

so i'd suggest that.

a retreat is great but it doesn't have to be permanent. hence, vacations.

Arrested Development was a highlight of human civilization. Never saw the Netflix (was it Netflix? Amazon?) "sequel", though. All this "streaming" shit is an abomination.

gonna go out to my storage and dig out seneca's letters from a stoic---which i haven't looked at in ages

Petition urges Obama to run for president - of France

Just a whimsical thing, I know, but in any case fuck Marine LePen. FUCK Marine LemotherfuckingPen.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Mor...rs_to_Lucilius

--

eta: this is fucking brilliant, right on the first letter:

What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

Ok. We good.

see, that's your tomato

Trumpalump accuses Barrack Obama of wire-tapping his motherfucking phone ... Calls Obama a "Bad (or sick) guy!" ... cites absolutely no evidence... will likely be believed by half the country

Every day I think the ballon is going to pop, and it just keeps inflating.

ruy teixeira says stay calm and pass the ammunition

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...istic-leftist/

He lied. Said something outrageous. Mis-spelled "tap."

But

HE'S NOT GOING ANYWHERE!!!!

It took me about 6 weeks to accept this. Beat you.

your idea of liberation is downloading a new game to your phone. Keep drinking that flouride dope!

mmmmmmm tasty fluoride stole my iq

make smallpox great again

I od
A French government committee has heard testimony, suppressed by the French government at the time and not published online until this week, that the killers in the Bataclan appear to have tortured their victims on the second floor of the club.
The chief police witness in Parliament testified that on the night of the attacks, an investigating officer, tears streaming down his face, rushed out of the Bataclan and vomited in front of him just after seeing the disfigured bodies.
The 14-hour testimony about the November attacks took place March 21st.
According to this testimony, Wahhabist killers reportedly gouged out eyes, castrated victims, and shoved their testicles in their mouths. They may also have disemboweled some poor souls. Women were reportedly stabbed in the genitals – and the torture was, victims told police, filmed for Daesh or Islamic State propaganda. For that reason, medics did not release the bodies of torture victims to the families, investigators said.
But prosecutors at the hearing claimed these reports of torture were “a rumor” on the grounds that sharp knives were not found at the scene. They also claimed that maybe shrapnel had caused the injuries.

Q. For the information of the Commission of Inquiry….can you tell us how you learned that there had been acts of barbarism within the Bataclan: beheadings, evisceration, eyes gouged out …?
Investigator: After the assault, we were with colleagues at the passage Saint-Pierre Amelot when I saw weeping from one of our colleagues who came outside to vomit. He told us what he had seen.
Q. Acts of torture happened on the second floor?

Further on the investigator described how this was kept from relatives:

A. Bodies have not been presented to families because there were beheaded people there, the murdered people, people who have been disemboweled . There are women who had their genitals stabbed.
Q. All this would have been videotaped for Daesh !
A. I believe so. Survivors have said so.

Elsewhere, the investigator says, women were sexually tortured, stabbed in the genitals, and their eyes were plucked out. People were decapitated.
The clerk of the inquiry (or “rapporteur”) pressed the chief of committee for clarity on whether victims were decapitated or mutilated. The committee chief replied that the authorities had given out conflicting information that said victims were merely shot or blown up. He then added this damning statement about one victim’s father discovering the gruesome truth in the morgue:

Mr. President Georges Fenech Indeed, the Committee is troubled by this information which has appeared nowhere [in the media]. Thus, the father of one of the victims sent me a copy of a letter he sent to the investigating judge, which I quote in summary: “On the causes of the death of my son A., at the forensic institute in Paris, I was told, and what a shock it was for me at that moment, they had cut off his testicles, had put them in his mouth, and he was disemboweled. When I saw him behind glass, lying on a table, a white shroud covering it up to the neck, a psychologist was with me. He said: This is “the only presentable part, your son’s left profile.” I found that he had no right eye. I made the remark; I was informed that they had punctured his eye and sliced down the right side of his face, where there was a very large hematoma that we could all see. ”
This particular witness could corroborate the statements that we heard from one of the BAC officials, that one of his investigators vomited immediately on leaving the Bataclan after finding a decapitation and evisceration. Are you aware of such facts?

A prosecutor appearing before the inquiry replied lamely that no sharp knife had been found at the scene that could have been used for torture. Perhaps shrapnel had caused the mutilation, he said. The head of the committee asked if an explosion would have placed testicles in a victim’s mouth:

Prosecutor: I specify, for the sake of clarity: some of the bodies found at the Bataclan were extremely mutilated by the explosions and weapons, to the point that it was sometimes difficult to reconstruct the dismembered bodies. In other words, injuries described this father may also have been caused by automatic weapons, by explosions or projections of nails and bolts that have resulted.
Q. Would those have put a man’s balls in in his own mouth?
Prosecutor: I do not have that information.

fake news

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPYL7lf4_ro

Ctheory has an excellent series of articles on the current political situation, here is the latest one

http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/from-t...ichaean-again/

In 1989, a different poet not only updated New Colossus but predicted what would happen almost thirty years later:

Quote:

Give me your hungry, your tired your poor I'll piss on 'em That's what the Statue of Bigotry says Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death and get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard

Truly fuckin' brilliant.

I gotta say I love Drumpf's latest bullshit. Motherfucker never thinks things all the way through, but this one is a particularly delicious slice of self-inflicted Catch-22: if he wasn't wiretapped, he's lying for the hundred billionth time; if he was, a FISA court concluded there was probable cause to further investigate that he was getting jiggy with Putin's dong again. Marvelous.

Latest bullshit's particularities aside, there's a clear pattern here which I at least have not seen or heard mentioned by anyone, a fact rather disturbing in itself since it doesn't exactly take a PhD to notice it. (If whoever's reading can let me know this has been pointed out, I'd appreciate it!). So:

— After Trump was correctly called a bigot for shitting on Latin Americans, Muslims, African-Americans, you name it:

"Hillary Clinton is a bigot! She's a bigot!"

— After he was correctly called a sexual predator following the airing of the grab-'em-by-the-pussy/I-just-start-kissing-'em/I-go-in-their-dressing-room-because-I-own-the-joint tape:

"Bill Clinton is the biggest sexual predator ever!"

— After his and his team of immoral subcreatures' bullshit was correctly called fake news:

"I'm running against the dishonest mainstream media and their fake news!"

— After the the shitty impression generated by his relation with Russia escalated to shock in light of constant new evidence and correctly started being called the biggest scandal since Watergate:

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate!"

As you very well know, the list is far, far longer, but you get the point. While it's tempting to say that these are simply man-baby knee-jerk reactions in the "You're the puppet!" vein, there's something much more perverse at work here: hijacking accusations to sling them back verbatim is a TEXTBOOK fascist disinformation tactic, the rationale behind it being that most people's minds are a coupla sandwiches short of a picnic anyway (can't say they're wrong there), which makes the masses unable to come up with and/or process fine distinctions over a single term/concept. The consequence is that the counter-attack, no matter how unfathomably untruthful, becomes exponentially amplified, because it's not just "the Leader" and his tweets and Conway and Spicer and that blonde mass of putrefaction who sits near Anderson Cooper every night —what's her name, McEnany—, it's the original accusers/critics who, to the great intellectually unwashed, keep bringing up a word which has been redefined to them by Steve Bannon. The machine feeds itself: there's no need to shoot criticisms of your own invention at your rivals when all you have to do is fuck up, get called on it, fire back the same fuckup you got called on, lather, rinse, repeat.

TLDR: shit's still fucked up beyond all repair

Just the shit he posted about Obama — I shiver every time I remember that the President of the United States called his predecessor "bad (or sick!)" on social media... Jesus Fucking ass Christ — is an impeachable offense according to some.

Also...
Have you guys heard of the Emolument Clause? Trump's been violating he constitution since the day he took office, but there's an actual clause prohibiting his refusal to put his assets in a blind Trust. Impeach!

Then remove from office! Not the same thing! Must do both! Then impeach EVERYONE until someone ½ sane takes his place. Anyone know the party affiliation of the current Post Master General?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...bca_story.html

the hotels apparently were booked way in advance of the election--but stilll...

ACA shit is gonna hurt a BUNCH of people. Goddamn, those who varted for him and for the R Sens and Reps, fuck them people, truly

im lucky in that i recently went from buy your own to a group plan, so i think i'll be unaffected, but the shit is gonna hit the fan on this one

he is cutting funding to Coast Guard (WHICH PROTECTS OUR HOMELAND!!!!!) to better facilitate the distribution and enjoyment of cocaine by his rich friends.