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junkworldusa · 3 years

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belated book asks, thank you for indulging me!

1- What book are you currently reading? bros karamazov, 2/3s through atm.

i hate that i’m thinking about pathologic (video game) the entire time but i can't help it. the way characters are constantly bursting into people's houses & going "you’re an angel, you're the best person i've ever met, you're a saint" to someone they just met 5 minutes ago is so. distinct. i joked on twitter that the first half of the book is just alyosha running around completing sidequests, which i still think is true, but once i got to the grand inquisitor part i was like "Okay mr dostoevsky, you’ve got me."

2- What book did you recently finish? "selections from science & sanity" by alfred korzybski, recently featured in the gumby quotes. a while back i listened to a 6 hour long interview with robert anton wilson where he talks about korzybski & general semantics so i gave it a shot. it's an abridged version of a 900 page book & i definitely plan on reading the full work at some point, it's wild. if you’re interested in language, consciousness, the gap between words & meaning, and/or hacking your brain i would recommend it. he repeats himself a lot but that's a side effect of his pedagogy, the goal of which is the eventual re-wiring of your entire nervous system in order to achieve a more rational worldview/healthier reactions to things. (so repetition via words/sounds/actions is necessary 2 engage the organism-as-a-whole.) the most important takeaway for me is that everything & everyone you interact with is a completely unique object, and this necessarily extends to temporality-- Bob in 1999 is NOT the same person as Bob in 2010, and treating them as though they were is a harmful mistake. interestingly enough, im taking a class with J.F. martel (weird studies podcast, author of "reclaiming art in the age of artifice") & last night he said what amounts to exactly the same thing, except he was arguing for like, a soft animism (i-thou vs. i- it) & korzybski was arguing for a more "rational" & secular world. so fascinating.

3- What’s a book that’s been on your to-read list for a long time? ulysses. i know. i know. i have a copy but keep bouncing off of it. idk why, i liked portrait of the artist as a young man. i think i’m worried i’ll turn into this person:

4- What’s the next book you’re hoping to read? i just got "speech play: research & resources for the study of linguistic creativity" in the mail so probably that. i'm on a childlore kick rn & this is like... horizontally related 5- Is there a book you own, but aren’t planning on reading?

around 2 years ago i was walking home after a show high on E & i ran into a guy i had met at work a couple times. went over to his apartment because MDMA is like, "everything is SO meaningful and SO much fun." i barely remember our conversation but he ended up being like "you would like this book, here take it, i have 3 copies." so i now own a copy of "the eater of darkness" by robert m coates. i still haven't read it. the moral of this story is [???]

6- What was your favorite series as a kid? Would you still read it now? so many of you asked this question :P

THE TRUTH: i was obsessed with lotr from age 8 to 13 with a level of dedication that i've never known since. yes, i would still read it now. i reread the silmarillion last year & it was naturally a way more rewarding experience than when i was a kid! 8- Fantasy or sci-fi? i like & have read a lot of older sf/f (le guin asimov pkd etc etc) but im not actively into either nowadays. i read whatever reaches me from the queer sf/f twitter pipeline (like whatever's on wizards vs lesbians) but otherwise dont pay much attention. so the answer is "idk!!!”

12- Have you ever read a celebrity memoir? If so, whose was it? the only memoir i've read in recent years has been "memories, dreams, reflections" so if jung counts as a celebrity, there you go 14- Fiction or non-fiction? non-fiction in both quantity of books owned & what i prefer reading. i almost view them as 2 separate activities bc the motivation for & experience of reading them are so wildly different 15- Favorite fiction genre? i know i said im not "actively into" sci fi but 16- Favorite non-fiction genre? "philosophy" i guess. i also really love any phenomenological/experience-based studies of paranormal stuff, like "the terror that comes in the night" by david hufford or anything by jacques vallée. basically books that both a) take strange experiences seriously & b) examine/catalogue them scientifically (to whatever degree).

22- How do you organize your books? “poorly” 26- What’s your favorite book? fav non-fiction book: “time loops” by eric wargo. what if freud's career-making "irma dream" was a premonitory dream about the oral cancer that would severely impede his quality of life in his old age? (fantastic blog entry by the author, serves as a kind of intro to this topic: http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4326 )

when i read “time loops” it felt like everything i had ever read (& will ever read future tense) was for the sole purpose of understanding it. “time loops” picks up where J.W. dunne's 1927 "an experiment with time" left off. i won't say too much more about it but everyone should read it. it's so smart & engaging & will totally blow your miiiind, maaaan speaking of "an experiment with time," in 1964 a guy named vladimir nabokov began an experiment of his own following the directions dunne laid out in his book. dunne encouraged readers to write down their dreams in order to test the theory that a later event could generate an earlier dream.

nabokov’s experiment with dreams & time strongly influenced “ada or ardor: a family chronicle” which happens to be my favorite novel. i first read it when i was 18, and i've reread it 3 times since then (with the help of ada online, my beloved http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/ ) i would not recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t already like nabokov & know what he’s about. it’s fucked up & self indulgent & i love it so much

30- What character do you connect with the most? when jung said he was bad at math? i felt that

#asks

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realhankmccoy · 4 years

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The Real Racists Are On the Left

““Что мешает американским педикам сильнее всего? "Какая. В самом деле. Получает. Их. Жесткий?” (What gets America’s faggots harder than anything? “What. Really. Gets. Them. Hard?) said Vladimir Putin, chuckling, face tight as he’d recently had a new round of plastic surgery. German and Russian were his strong suits, but nothing quite amused him more like parodying the deranged, deformed English that had been arising in America due to leftist power struggles on Twitter. Ever since Making America Great Again had risen to power on Twitter, even more leftists than ever before were flocking to the platform. All knew their scraggly, lowly, position in comparison to the titans, as much as they felt moral supremacy inside. Yet, knowing the nation was rebuilding itself, wanted to claim a piece of social power for themselves -- leftist as it may putatively be -- on the platform of Trump’s choosing anyway. Like cats flocking to a farmer, they knew Trump provided the milk. And they were thirsty.

“Well,” Dr. Plushenko said, considering the analytics charts he’d been combing over. It seems, by their own admission, America’s leftists bone the hardest for fantasies written by men who vote for Trump. They really love the notion, more than anything else, of a right wing, silent majority male writing a transformation story that takes a gay man and makes him straight. This is due to how they -- not even very far deep down -- hate themselves, know their own sexuality is sick, and know that they’d be improved if they were straight. They also love to see a racial fantasy, in which a white man becomes a thick, long-dicked black man, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc., the white racist stereotype of a crude, racially subordinated man who can barely control his raging straight sex drive. This is their very favorite, as it is flush in line with the plantation sexuality that has long driven the original Americans to wipe out, use, rape, and subordinate American minorities. Mr. President, they even love a good conversion of a faggot into a tough, take no shit Russian straight man, because this is flush in line with Tucker Carlson and the right-wing agenda to make America ally with Russia, all in our white power move to dominate the future of earth from a stance of conservative values. That’s the position these fantasies are all written from, when the right-wing authors over there get to work. That is why they resonate so strongly in the nuts of their cucked, subordinate left-wing readership. The left-wingers know their place and cannot help but leak and jizz uncontrollably for the future they really want to see: a straighter future of white supremacy, in which turning straight is seen as sexually hot and kicking a person of color back down into its traditional role as a drooling, dumb sex beast is seen as hot and desirable as well. Society in the real world then falls in line with this fantasy becomes far more flush in line with it all accordingly. It’s working wonderfully, thus far. Minorities have less power and are getting weaker. These white cucked leftists are fueling it all. There is no way they can fight the truth nature of their testicular desires, and, dare I say it, the true nature of their very souls. As long as the left remains on the bottom, we’ll continue to be on top, and have so much winning that we almost get sick of winning...

“VЭто очень верно,” Putin said, stroking his chin, thoughtfully.

“Yes, so that is true,” Plushenko continued. We traditional conservatives just capitalise off the desires of the rabble, which is how, despite the rabble purportedly being leftist, they always fall and submit to real men like us in the end. We always win many more elections than our population represents in raw numbers. They eat it up. They love us. The desires are coming from their genes and their nutsacks, to put it crudely, but it is indeed the truth.”

Plushenko droned on and on at length, as he was wont to do. Putin was looking out the window, perhaps considering something else. “Look at this Lady Gaga, as this one calls herself. She went with Kong Kong tropes. Her fans desired old racist tropes to be part of her sexuality, her fans wanted object of sexual desire to be transformed into a lumbering, brainless black beast to affirm white supremacy as ‘the cerebral ones’, and so she merely cashed in on it. Many black leftists were outraged, and rightly so, but they were unable to cancel her and she still thrives because leftism IS white supremacy, and blacks simply weren’t large enough a group to drown out all the white supremacy-desiring leftists in states like Iowa, Vermont, Indiana, Rhode Island and Maine:

“отвратительный“ Putin responded.

“So how do we respond to this?” Plushenko asked. “I have not determined yet. Certainly, if we could degrade these know-it-alls and give them new lives in Magnetogorsk as engineers, they would learn a thing or two. Perhaps installing them in upgrade bodies -- leftists being such a putrid sort -- and learning to serve as rentboys right here in Moscow would be a start. There remains a Russian... appetite... for the male body, as while we Russians have been trying to stamp out homosexuality, it still exists, unfortunately. “Beastial new Russian lives, however, unlike their right-wing fantasy of becoming straight and conversative, faggot-stomping Russian men, the sort of superior men they could only dream of becoming.... this gets them very hard, yes, but we must do something more leftist for them, being that they are leftist in thought -- if not soul, genes and groin. We will force them to becoming drooling sex beasts, faggot sex beasts, obsessed with their own thick dicks, meant only to serve the superior Russian fagstomping male. If they see a hairy asshole, they will become hopelessly overcome with lust, falling onto hands and knees like animals, leaking precum all over themselves, licking it out, as randy as a dog and a goat at all times, humping each other’s asses, probing and tonguing each other’s anuses, stroking the silky fur of their legs while just hanging out and laughing their idiot laughter. “Uhh, man, I uh... kinda, remember when we were from, like, America?” If they see a hairy armpit, they will not be able to look away, drooling at the tongue for how they might be able to serve and get a whiff. I can picture it now, their IQs lowered to the point of their own stereotypes against sexy subordinate dick-controlled people of color. Only they will be white, here in white Moscow, the tables having been turned on their racist lives.”

“And they will serve the great men of the Russian empire instead now. Due to the Oriental flaw, a reconstituted American male, after being put through proper sexual brainwashing, bennies and stupidification procedures, and forced to pump iron in the gym... such a male will ultimately strengthen our gene pool. That is, if these faggots are ever allowed to be sperm donors, which is not likely given the inferiority of the sick and subordinate gay man in Russian society in general. Trump wants to offload a lot of them abroad until the election is over to ensure his re-election, as who knows who they’d vote for, sick creatures as they are, and simply electroshocking them and retraining them won’t go over as well in the currently overly leftist political climate of America. But with collusion and collaboration between our two empires, we’ll be able to maintain a high level of secrecy after these racist gays are rounded up, thrown into vans, and flown in from New England. President Trump mentioned routing them through LaGuardia, as nobody would suspect...you can practically waltz through security there as it is now, and with the Feds opening up a hallway for us in the back, the only hard part will be the arrests at gunpoint. We can worry about more intense plans after reelection is secured for President Trump, but for now, this should all make for a nice reorientation vacation for them -- call it a permanent vacation, haha -- and be a lovely, high quality sexual enhancement to downtown Moscow. We should find this hotbed of American sex beasts right in the core of our premier city to be quite a luxurious improvement, male gigalos anxious in the nuts and underneath the skull to hopelessly, helplessly, eager serve our superior Russian male. This will be more than healthy for a growing Russian revival as we work with America to strengthen the position of rightist whites.

“перфект,” Putin responded, seeming bored, wondering if something might be wrong with Plushenko. He’d have to watch this scientist most carefully. But he was compliant with the request, and it would be enacted. ‘выполнить план.’

#maga #racism #leftism #socialism #lgbt #russianinfluence #putin #russia

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Trump’s Paradigm of the Personal https://nyti.ms/2NwK2xW

Excellent piece by @CharlesMBlow of the Times. Highly recommend, also the comments are interesting as well.

Trump’s Paradigm of the Personal

He confuses the way he thinks he is treated with the well-being of the country.

By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist

Published Aug. 25, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 26, 2019 |

For Donald Trump, all is personal.

And in his view, he is not the executive of the company. He is the embodiment of the country. He runs the country the way he ran his business, as the curating and promotion of his personal brand.

The people who support him are customers — people to be sold a vision and a dream. The people who criticize or oppose him threaten the brand and must be dealt with.

For Trump, everything is image-based and rooted in the appearance of personal relationships. When the Danish prime minister rebuffed his overture about buying Greenland, calling the idea “absurd,” Trump threw a tantrum and canceled his visit to Denmark.

Trump discussed the episode at one of his press gaggles, calling the prime minister’s response “nasty’ and saying, “We can’t treat the United States of America the way they treated us under President Obama.” He went on to say: “She’s not talking to me. She’s talking to the United States of America. You don’t talk to the United States that way, at least under me.”

No, actually, she was talking to him.

America was not being dismissed or disrespected. This proposal, which sounded like a joke, was being laughed at. And this president hates being laughed at.

Everything in Trump’s view is about whether someone is nice or nasty to him. It’s not about the country at all. It’s not about historical precedent or value of continuity.

His dislike of his predecessors — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter — is personal, not rooted in policy. He has a particular obsession with Obama, and has set about to undo everything Obama had done.

It’s petty and small and beneath the presidency, much like Trump himself.

I believe that Trump has had a longstanding belief about how China should be dealt with, but I believe that the current trade war is as much a personal beef with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. Trump thought that he could play rough and that Xi would fold.

That was silly and shortsighted. The U.S. presidency is term-limited. China’s is not. The Chinese may experience pain from the trade war, but they can afford to wait Trump out.

The fact that Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, won’t attempt to manipulate the economy in ways Trump thinks would be favorable, but is instead operating as an independent thinker, Trump takes as a personal slight. Trump appointed him. Trump demands loyalty and blind obeisance.

When China announced another round of retaliatory tariffs this week, Trump had a Twitter meltdown, tweeting “... My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?” and sending the markets into a tailspin.

Trump hated North Korea’s Kim Jong-un before he loved him. Kim has played Trump like a fiddle. Kim has baited Trump into two summits, where Trump got nothing and Kim got a priceless public relations moment. Kim can just send Trump love letters and do what he wants and surrender nothing. In Trump’s paradigm of the personal, Kim likes him and is his friend.

Vladimir Putin is also exploiting Trump’s personal need to be liked — his weak man’s desire to be admired by strong men. Trump has a deep and mysterious affection for Putin. Yes, Putin helped to get him elected, but I’m not sure even that explains the way Trump genuflects for him.

Everyone around Trump knows his weakness: He is a bottomless pit of emotional need, someone who desperately wants friends but doesn’t have the emotional quotient to know how to make and keep them. So, they flatter him and inflate him.

They have all become major-league yes men and women.

None of this is good for the country. The presidency is not owned; it is occupied. It is bigger than any man or woman. Men have grown into it, but they have never subsumed it.

The presidency must have one eye on the past and one on the future. It must place national interest over personal interest. It has absolutely nothing to do with any one person’s feelings.

In George Washington’s farewell address of 1796, he said:

“The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

Trump is trying to embody the country and to lead it astray in the way that Washington warned against. Trump is a slave to his emotions, and this impulse is doing great harm to the nation, both internally and on the world stage.

I’m not sure that damage is irreparable. Our democracy, though fragile in many ways, has proved remarkably durable in others. But there is no doubt that the damage Trump is doing is deep and will take time and effort to undo.

Trump’s personal problems will leave a national scar.

COMMENTS FROM READERS, ADD YOUR THOUGHTS AS WELL:

""Trump’s personal problems will leave a national scar." More like an open wound that won't heal. 60 million citizens have succumbed to his bombast, and to date there seems to be no weakening of their support. That will take years if not decades to heal. It may never. Iraq and the Bush years were tragic, but with President Obama we started a recovery. Even with one of the deepest recession, we all pulled together, and we started the to build jobs again and pulled out of the recession quicker than the rest of the world. We lead the way. But literally within days of Trump taking office the country started it's tragic descent into the abyss. And there is no end in sight."

CHERRYLOG754, ATLANTA

"Because this president views himself a king, like Louis XIV, his actions and words smack of "l'etat c'est moi". Which is a fancy way of saying, what Charles just said, he thinks he embodies the nation, not leads it. Which is funny, because if you are the nation, wouldn't you have a better appreciation of its history, culture, mores, and values? One would think so. I watched the world leaders at G-7 and except for Trump, each shows a keen understanding of what their country represents and where it's headed. Even newbie Boris Johnson is well educated, even if his bombast often resembles that of Trump. More important, they know they are leading their entire countries, not just a small base of ardent supporters. Trump's problem is he can't grow his base, because he doesn't want to: the best part of his job is the one he shouldn't be doing on the taxpayers' dime: holding political rallies to boost his ego." CHRISTINE MCM, MASSACHUSETTS

" In other words Charles, Trump lacks the temperament to be President. Anyone who is honest with him/herself knows that. Even the Republicans in Congress know this. The problem is that neither they nor Trump's base care."

JAY ORCHARD , MIAMI FL

"It makes a sort of sense that Trump expected his "tough guy" act with President Xi would result in Xi giving in. Just as he thought his thrown down the papers and stamp out of the room would make Speaker Pelosi grovel for whatever he wanted. Trump, in the private sector, could choose his victims, and he made sure they would at least perceive he was far richer and more powerful, (whether he was or not) so he could, bluster and rage, doing as he pleased and demanding whatever he wanted. That doesn't work when you become a public employee, which the President is, and Trump has no other rabbits to pull out of that same tired stage hat. And he clearly can't figure out why it's not working any more."

1DCAce, LOS ANGELES CA

"There's nothing mysterious about the President's admiration for Mr. Putin. Putin has made Russia into exactly what Mr. Trump would like to make the United States: an authoritarian plutocracy where the super-rich can do absolutely anything they want — except dispute the legitimacy of the government — while everyone else is kept in line by voter suppression, state-controlled media and churches, and an intimidating security apparatus."

JL WILLIAMS, WAHOO NE

"From my understanding of Trump, his greatest fear, going back to his early days in NYC, is that he is not taken seriously. It's an old vs new money sort of thing, as far as I can tell. He tried to buy his way into big money society by assuming a false name and giving the media false numbers about his personal wealth he was so desperate to prove his real worth. He put gold plate on everything he touched, hoping that would show how wealthy he was. Still, no one took him seriously. And now he's finding that world leaders fail to take him seriously as well. You can almost hearing him thinking -- I'm in the White House, surely they'll take me seriously now. But alas, he's the poor little sort-of-rich boy that no one wants to play with. He doesn't care about the country. He only cares about himself. And he still finds that no one takes him seriously. Sad, as he used to like to say."

AVRDS, MONTANA

"Excellent observations as usual from Charles Blow. I would only add that Trump's form of mental illness is dangerous. It is not innocuous, rather it is pervasive and boundless. That renders him an immediate dangerous to our nation. Immediate. That means he must be removed office immediately. Failure to do so opens the door to sheer disaster and that is exactly what we are looking at everyday he remains office. Disaster." INDEPENDANT, ALABAMA

"After World War 2, our allies respected the United States. Mr Trump has destroyed this respect. Now, our once-firm allies are looking to go around the United States and put their countries first. This will result in a race to the bottom. Trump has diminished the US - and succeeded in making China and Russia great. However, it’s important to remember the this isn’t just Mr. Trump. The vast majority of Republicans like what Mr Trump does, not seeing the damage and reveling in his tough-guy rhetoric. When the damage becomes too obvious to ignore, they’ll say that Trump was’t really a Republican (as they did with George W Bush) They will also, of course, blame Democrats for the consequences of Republican policies. Pity that Republicans, including Mr Trump, seem incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions."JOHN M, OAKLAND

"For Trump, the sun rises and sets in himself. He cannot conceive of anything without inserting himself somehow. He cannot make any move without calculating how it will benefit him personally. The farthest from what a leader should be."NM, NY

"In my more than 60 years I have never experienced a President who truly believed the nation, the American people, excluded all who did not support him. Nor millions of my neighbors who were fine with that idea if they considered themselves as part of that group of supporters. This, to me, is among the most dangerous things which this man has unleashed. My disappointment in my neighbors goes very deep. We will get past Trump, but not the millions of our fellows who like him."DAGWOOD, SAN DIEGO

"Countries can tragically and suddenly head in the wrong direction. In the 1930s, Germans were the most educated in Europe with Berlin the leading city in Europe. Ten years later, the country and most of Europe was destroyed. 75 million dead. It can happen here." SOMEWHERE, AZ

"I have a hard time seeing where it is all personal with Trump. He is faithfully carrying out two agendas, one of the white nationalists and one of the extreme libertarians. It is hard to tell how much of his rolling back of Obama's accomplishments are personal and how much is agenda driven. There seems little question that Trump will have done permanent damage. Western countries will no long be able to trust the US again as they did in the past as another Trump could be elected in any future election. It cannot be quantified how much he has set back efforts to fight climate change but it would seem to be considerable. Can white nationalism be put back in the bottle? That seems unlikely. Trump has uncorked some of the worst stuff in the US population. It is anybody's guess whether the country can return to its previous level of civility." BOB, HUDSON VALLEY

"In the same address Washington also spoke about the three big threats that could destroy America: too much debt, influence of foreign interests and political partisanship. hmmmm" AERYS

"People keep trying to find rational explanations for Trump's behavior. I don't think he generally acts from anything more complicated than going with what makes him feel good. He, and those around him, often say that when he feels attacked, he punches back. That is consistent with a lot of the strange things he has done. Punching back makes him feel strong and he likes that feeling. The problem is that governing is complicated. If Trump's feelings are hurt, he seems to feel justified in throwing a temper tantrum. That tendency to bluster in an effort to intimidate may work for male gorillas, but leaders of governments ought to know better." BETTY S, UPSTATE NY

“The U.S. presidency is term-limited.” The US presidency was term-limited. Does anyone really think he’s joking when he talks about being in office another 10 or 14 years? He’s not going to leave willingly. The bottom line here might end up being whether the military will support his coup."

CLAIRE ELLIOTT, EUGENE OR

"Rather than making America great again, 45 has made America a second rate country. Our allies no longer trust us to keep our word. Our enemies see that our leadership is faltering. It will take years perhaps decades to regain the trust we once enjoyed throughout the world. People see that 45 has not thought out anything he says past the current news cycle. There is no vision for America, no grand plan, nothing."

PSCHWIMER

"Now that this "president" has decided that he has the authority to order America's private businesses to cease all operations in China (which would entail crippling a great many of them financially), it seems to me that the 25th Amendment truly needs to be invoked. Which is to say that the walking apparition named Mike Pence should visit the Oval Office along with the leaders of both houses of Congress and as many of Trump's cabinet members as can be rustled up and tell our delusional chief executive that he has no such authority over private industry and that he should immediately and publicly acknowledge this. He should also explain that the order he had delivered was intended only as a suggestion or a recommendation. Should he refuse to go along with this, it would be clear that he's fully entered the realm of madness (as his private obsession with China would already seem to indicate) and that his removal from office would thereby become necessary. If we weren't already at such a critical juncture we could spend a good deal of time discussing Trump's own business connections with Beijing and arguing that his preference for having his (and Ivanka's) branded merchandise produced there should dictate that he not impugn other American business executives for doing the same thing (let alone "order" them to cease doing so). It's too late for idle speculation, however. Mad King Donald really has to go." STU FREEMAN, BROOKLYN

"I have to think that Washington's words would be met by Trump with blank incomprehension, not merely because the language is hard (by comparison with Trump's own "cartoon-bubble" mode of communication) but because understanding it would require Trump to betray his own most firmly-held convictions." PORTLAND, OR

"Thank you, Mr. Blow, for another strong column. This president's bizarre behaviors have led to complete demoralization and discouragement for U.S. citizens. How can a powerful country be so feckless when it comes to getting him out? Someone commented that the 25th amendment wouldn't work because it's for cases of complete incapacity. I assume they mean physical incapacity. In the case of mental/emotional incapacity, does a President have to be drooling and catatonic, or fly into a rage on television? Is it not enough that he lies constantly, proposes buying another country, frequently insults allies, calls himself the chosen one, decrees that private businesses shall exit China, and flip-flops in divergent directions on important national policies during the same 24-hour period? If it were another president in another time, members of Congress would have taken Trump in hand and led him away to restore order and standing to our country. But no, Congress is on vacation and Trump golfs while the Amazon burns."GWOO, HONOLULU

"The Greenland episode is classic Trump: throw out a crazy initial offer and see what happens. But international politics is not pure business. Greenland was never up for sale by Denmark. Trump's behavior makes him look wholly irrational and by extension makes the American voting public look like a population of fools. Trump displays isolationism with "America First." Other countries should take this seriously. In fact, they should quarantine the United States. They should do so until America can figure out how to elect a sane president and a stable cast of supporting legislators in Congress. Indeed Trump has a penchant for calling those he dislikes "nasty," but that term is reserved for women in power, such as HRC and the prime minister of Denmark. Trump befriends ruthless dictators in countries like North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- leaders who actively torture and kill their people -- without referring to them in this way. Trump is also already backtracking on China. He will not let the economy crumble before the election: after all, it's his only real "selling point." Trump maintains a particular disdain for Obama because he is black and Trump is an overt racist, as demonstrated by violations of the Fair Housing Act in the 1970s to the Central Park Five to birtherism to Charlottesville to the Squad. The election next year is bound to be a close one. Do what you can to see that Trump does not win a second term."

BLUE MOON, OLD PUEBLO

#politics #trump news #trumpism #trump scandals #trump administration #president donald trump #greeland #impeachment inquiry now #impeach trump #impeachthemf #impeachtrump #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #g7 #g7biarritz #trump trade war

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kylorenpunk · 5 years

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Do them all. Suffer as I did 😂

Bitch I told you this was our friendship. We force each other to answer all the questions.

1. selfie

Well… I wasn’t dubbed Selfie Queen for nothing…

This one is interesting bc I have zero makeup on. The most recent ones are too blurry. A lot of my fav selfies are full faces of makeup tho.

2. what would you name your future kids?

I feel like that’s a decision for both parents but I really like the names Felicity, Isabella and Dimitri. Yes, all of them are names from various franchises I enjoyed throughout the years. Be glad I’m out of my phase where I thought Vladimir was a good name.

3. do you miss anyone?

I miss all my friends I don’t get to see frequently. Love all of y’all and hope y’all are doing well in life!

4. what are you looking forward to?

Fucking graduating. Jesus Christ it’s taken me five damn years.

5. is there anyone who can always make you smile?

From my club it’s Chris, Yara and Josephine. Also my entire friend group from back home. Honestly I love my friends so much.

6. is it hard for you to get over someone?

I feel like every situation is different so that’s a tough question to answer.

7. what was your life like last year?

I honestly don’t remember much from December of last year. It was a good time though.

8. have you ever cried because you were so annoyed?

I’m an emotional bitch. I’ll cry over anything. I cried over fucking Mulan the other day.

9. who did you last see in person?

My parents and brother. Earlier in the day my club.

10. are you good at hiding your feelings?

I’m shit at it. My face gives away everything. The other day my professor was going into her inspiration porn narrative and I just gave her a cold dead look the entire time.

11. are you listening to music right now?

No but I have the Hamilton soundtrack stuck in my head right now since that’s what I was last listening to. If you haven’t heard it I highly suggest it. Man I wanna see it so badly.

12. what is something you want right now?

Sleep but I’m trying not to throw off my sleep schedule right now and am waiting a bit before going to bed. I only got three hours of sleep last night so that’s fun.

13. how do you feel right now?

Kinda tired. Relieved that I got two service projects in a row done today. It’s been a long weekend.

14. when was the last time someone of the opposite sex hugged you?

My friend Sebastian hugged me when I dropped him off. I guess that counts.

15. personality description

I’m a makeup loving nerd who enjoys sitting in pajamas watching anime and superheros as much as she enjoys swatching EVERY lipstick in Sephora. According to my friends I can’t go 5 seconds without mentioning how old I feel and my love for Dungeons and Dragons. I’m also an asshole. (Wow this sounds like a 12 year old writing this)

16. have you ever wanted to tell someone something but you didn’t?

Yeah tons of times. It’s bitten me in the ass. Oh well live and learn I guess?

17. opinion on insecurities.

Everyone has them? If they say they don’t then they are lying. Mine is mainly related to my appearance or how I speak.

18. do you miss how thing were a year ago?

I miss how things were in the beginning of this year. It started off strong then kinda turned into a shit show.

19. have you ever been to New York?

No but it’s my top thing on my bucket list. My friends and I are highly considering a trip.

20. what is your favourite song at the moment?

Of all time: Get Low by Lil Jon

Currently: “Told You So” by Little Mix (If you haven’t heard their new album I highly suggest it if you love girl groups that preach women empowerment)

21. age and birthday?

22 - June 21st (She’s a Cancer)

22. description of crush.

I don’t have a hardcore crush right now. More like 5 second crushes that are over the second they do something I don’t like.

Edit: Currently “celebrity?” crush is Nathan Sharp. I am seriously considering dropping $55 to see him at a convention this month.

23. fear(s)

Heights, something terrible happening to my loved ones, wild snakes, and the usual common anxiety fears

24. height

Five foot three inches. I’m short. Yes I know it’s not that short but tall people like to put me in the short category anyway.

25. role model

My mom’s coworker who was my internship supervisor. She has a doctorate’s in what I want to do and is amazing at what she does. The amount of knowledge and experience that women has is incredible. She is also extremely funny and knows how to teach with a sense of humor which I appreciate.

26. idol(s)

Celebrity idols? I don’t really idolize celebrities bc humans are humans and have flaws.

27. things i hate

Immaturity, intolerance of differences, demeaning slurs, The Last Jedi, and the new Fantastic Beasts movie

28. i’ll love you if…

Play with my hair, are kind to my friends and family, share common interests, show an interest in what I have to say, basically respect me and those close to me and we’re good

29. favourite film(s)

Hairspray, High School Musical, The Greatest Showman, Stardust, The Harry Potter series, Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy

30. favourite tv show(s)

Jane the Virgin, Naruto (fuck off I hate myself too ok), the first three seasons of Arrow before it turned to shit

31. 3 random facts

I’m not artistically talented but I genuinely enjoy makeup and creating looks

I have a nonverbal brother with autism and he’s my favorite person ever

I completely programmed my brother’s communication device by myself

32. are your friends mainly girls or guys?

Now my friends are mainly girls but when I lived in Tampa 90% of my friends over there were guys (Hi Mason). I’m going to say that’s bc of us all playing video games in the Delta lounge (RIP Dirty D). But yeah now it’s mainly girls and 80% of my dude friends are gay.

33. something you want to learn

Sign Language. Ice skating. Hairstyling. Fashion (I’m trying to be better about putting clothes together). Also I’m down to learn more about makeup and techniques

34. most embarrassing moment

Either farting while doing an air guitar in front of my entire girl scout troop

or signing to my friend that I liked her friend at a party and his brother repeated what I had signed out loud in front of everyone

wait. No. When I F U C K E D up in front a super hot guy while volunteering and then chose an 18 year old jock as my wingman. 18 year olds are dumbasses. Don’t use them as wingmen. Fuck you Khaled.

35. favourite subject

In grade school I think it was English or History. It really all depended on the year.

36. 3 dreams you want to fulfill?

VISIT NEW YORK

Hike the Smokey Mountains

Visit Europe

37. favourite actor/actress

Chris Evans (especially when he is trying to fight orange president on twitter)

Also Mark Hamill is perfect

38. favourite comedian(s)

I don’t watch comedians often. I guess the Fluffy guy?

39. favourite sport(s)

The only time I give a shit about sports is when my university is undefeated or playing my first university in football. Or the soccer world cup if it’s on. However I appreciate the skill it takes to do a sport.

40. favourite memory

San Antonio. It was my first time traveling without family and it was the greatest time. It was such a cool city

41. relationship status

Single - I take my sweet ass time

42. favourite book(s)

Eragon (No, I haven’t finished the entire series. No, I don’t want spoilers bc I will do it eventually.)

43. favourite song ever

“Get Low” by Lil Jon

“Look Through My Eyes” by Phil Collins

44. age you get mistaken for

Last year I got mistaken twice in a row within an hour for a middle schooler. I was 21 at at that time. During my internship one of the parents asked me if I had any kids. I’m either mistaken as a parent or as a 13-15 year old. There is no in between.

45. how you found out about your idol

N/A since I don’t have an idol

46. what my last text message says

“lmao it’s alright” to Joey but the previous one is more funny “thankfully no one threw up this time” in regards to my friend’s party last night

47. turn ons

Well I aint about to talk about my sex life so let’s go with personality

Common interests such as superheros or anime, charismatic, easy to get along with, common goals in life, cares about their loved ones, has passion, and someone I can hold an intellectual conversation with

48. turn offs

rudeness, immaturity, inattentiveness, bad tempers, superiority complex, not being genuine, judging others, treating people like objects, and general lack of care for others or themselves

49. where i want to be right now

Back in the smokey mountains in a cabin watching movies and anime

50. favourite picture of your idol

N/A

51. starsign

She’s an emotional Cancer

52. something i’m talented at

Apparently I’m good with kids Makeup too I guess?

53. 5 things that make me happy

friends, family, nerdy shit, makeup and Kakashi

54. something thats worrying me at the moment

Some shit happened last night that has me worried for some friends but I’m sure they’ll figure it out

55. tumblr friends

A shit ton of y’all I know IRL. I won’t tag y’all bc that’s annoying af

Joey’s my only internet friend @earthschampion (answer my text bitch)

56. favourite food(s)

pasta, empanadas, crab rangoons, taziki sauce

57. favourite animal(s)

Meerkats and koala bears

58. description of my best friend

K @burnitstronger: realest damn friend you will ever have. Will tell you how it is and provide never ending love and support. Never understands my dumbass shenanigans but loves me anyway. Love you boo

J : Will also tell you how it is and forces you to watch Naruto and ruin your damn life. Will happily go with you to eat junk food after class. Will fight anyone who wrongs you and is def still plotting revenge on all my ex’s. Stans Loona

M: Will scream at you in Leo in a frightening but loving way. Has the best damn fashion sense I have ever seen. Is the friend that comes by when I need her to and brings a shit ton of snacks and love (J does this as well).

59. why i joined tumblr

I was bored on fourth of July in 2012 and my friends kept telling me that this website would be fun. Also the avengers “fandom” from back then

60. ask me anything you want

I would say I’m sorry Mason but I enjoy making all my friends suffer. Make sure to give him a follow bc he’s cool. @masonjar828

#ask #me #yikes this took a long ass time

6 notes · View notes

davidjjohnston3 · 3 years

Text

7.24.2021'Reflections of a Russian-Romantic-Orthodox-Post-Soviet Obstetrician / Aspiring Catholic-Post-Reformation-Unified-Church Pediatric Neurosurgeon (Divider of Freak-Conjoined Child-Brains) cum. Bethlehem College and Seminary M. Div. Global Studies + Savior of Worldwide North Korean Studies + Policy + Final Flaming Sword Destroyer of Democrat Intellectual Arrogance, Child-Hate, God-Hate and Anti-Korean Racism' Flaming swords that divide people, change the world, change souls... Russia's determination to remember tragedy as well as mercy and a spirit of gentle adoption whereby they treat students and other young people much different from what I did; also Russian anti-Nazism - everlasting I imagine - in an age when respect-me-or-die attitudes, moral purity, intellectual hubris and Scientism, messianic corporatism and much else are either being accelerated or badly necromanced as everyone tries to settle every little score (an easy way to forget all the starvation, organ-harvesting, betrayal of human promise that is going on every second). I'm only writing this because it's 7:08 in the morning and it's easier to write than not to write. Lately I developed the habit of 'Holding the Dream' to paraphrase the title of a Nora Roberts novel about children that I tried to turn in to 'Project 521' in a gentler time. I read a C.S. Lewis essay though I forget which one, perhaps 'Home,' about being known. When I read this essay at night it reminds me of a more trusting whole time as does Knausgaard's 'A Time for Everything' whose title is a joke at several levels; a book I'll finish reading, if I even finish 'Autumn' which is my favorite work of his about an unborn daughter, a 'notebook-letter-bouquet' which is a genre I appreciate.For a while I felt I was close to greatness and that my mind and heart were in unison with those I most respect around this globe such as Chancellor John Piper with respect to abortion-culture - playing God - but no matter what I say this is a Maoist era in which power has to be backed by guns or other 'hard' resources. I was also compelled or perhaps tempted to provide background for my spiritual development which in retrospect attracted 'assassins' who were only interested in cherry-picking my worst moment. I honestly came to feel that there is some 'unconditional evil, unconditional hatred' in some that makes them - no matter how nobly they speak or how hard they worked in the past - determined to destroy something at the end rather than build something or help someone or do what they said they would do.I wondered if I blasphemed someone or something so that God allowed the Prince of Darkness through these people, every professing Christians or family-members. People are talking about spirit and intellect and insight but forget that Lucifer has all these in abundance. I've had some delusions and kept responding to people outside of myself. I learned a lot about people whom understanding was without purpose or profit as a) telling them to themselves, that their expectations were wrong or criminal or sadistic or nihilistic or of the party of 'the protest of ultimate futility' - the messaging whereby someone says ultimately nothing matters or you don't matter - was never going to alter their mindsb) this increased experience of human / spiritual evil didn't really constitute increase of knowledge, wisdom, understanding but only more 'CCP-esque pimp-love lie-fare gas-lighting brain-damage; brick to the head' or to put it more gently a wrong emphasis of factors which distorted mood or disposition as an orchestra with good rehearsal, preparation, and conductor could be eroded in the wrong hands over time, and people were just trying to wear me down in a 'Bleed France White' war of attrition against everything I've tried to be and do I also realized of late the time had come to give up certain perquisites that I had had in mind to one day gain or 'help myself to.' At the bottom of my soul I guess I always wanted to cash in; someone else on FB after the miraculous sparing of my life in 2012 started spreading around an experience that I had had with a student in 2012 which was nothing like the K-wave NC-17 version could have been the CCP deepfake character-assassination pretext for WW3 or Covid unrestricted biowarfare against white guys. Words can't fly back in to the mouth that once let them out and at this point I have no idea what my legacy could be - or in a way hopefully no one even cares anymore although I suspect they keep some version of the story somewhere for a dinner-party IDK why I am saying this; you can reason with some people / try and teach them but if they have no compelling reason to change they might just savage youI wondered lately whether some people really believe. They want life but their interpretation / understanding or imago of life - who knows? 'Tomorrow will be like today only more so' (Isaiah, mutatis mutandis). They might love life or hate life but they want it and they also often don't care where it comes from, which is part of why right now the debate over social justice or the fact that so much in the United States comes from outside of the United States, or the fact that poor Millennials et al. are often still unable to get married and have children while Boomers ride emperor-on-palanquin- style on top of the Social Security system and reproach us for believing, like the title of a novel about Shanghai, 'What We Were Promised' at the breakfast-table or in (public, Democrato-Maoist-intellectual-town-bike-fruitbasket) schools about freedom, self-esteem, magic - world peace, nuclear disarmament, the 'salvation' of the natural environment, outer space, technology, non-traditional families, racial reconciliation, international adjudication of breaches of international law and esp. enforcement of human rights. It struck me several times in recent months and years that the rulers, the sovereigns, the princes and great captains of the nations I admire such as Israel and Korea were often either a) special forces soldiers (such as Moon Jaein, Ehud Barak)b) human rights lawyers (Roh Moohyun, Moon Jaein again)c) spies (the individual who might actually have closest to total control of world-events right now; or at least the ultimate veto of everything and everyone, with variable selectivity and specificity / detail) I don't know if I was overreacting or what; I was comfortable with my 'modest income' from mental illness and felt adequately justified since I was engaged in respectable activities; I felt I hadn't really had a moment's rest in life since I was about 4, constantly shot at, judged, abused, thrown to wolves etc. and blamed for my own problems since I 'didn't "make" daddy____.' I even believed I had a chance to re-emerge since everyone amid Covid appears to be essentially on the same side. Before recent events I event felt an 'FDR-moment' / 'New Deal moment' was feasible under Biden though I now see clearly I believe that JRBJr. can't control his underlings, staff, et al. as FDR was able to do; and America and the world are simply too complicated. Vladimir Putin was saying - and he doesn't always lie - basically that constitutional democracies are too weak. Neoliberal+ shills, 'Wahh bureaucracy, Milton Friedman, grist for our mill, cliche, cliche, eat the poor, abandon the weak, post-partum-abortion, God is dead' but a lot of these people are part of a bureaucracy as well and Russia's got government bureaus, CCP does, Korea does. Anyone who ever loved or admired Confucius or studied China knows - though many such as Ezra Vogel and Tu Weiming and some dumb-ass Australians and Indian-Singaporean pervert this knowledge for pleasure and profit - what can be achieved through sincere, spiritual, loving, reverent, educated, talented, qualified, also beauty-loving, statecraft.I guess the only question in a way is whether Microsoft themselves have nuclear weapons or Google built the guidance-systems or something and that's not an LRB title though if I had lived a purer life to this point I might be on staff there or at least they'd welcome me in the cake-shop. Howbeit at this point my 'last wish' is kind of to die in Korea where they journalists are NOT affected or mercenary, and the rag-picking of ppl like me is not fake or ultimately egocentric / meretricious / simulacrum or sham-virtue (again I hate to talk about Nietzsche since I wanted to move on to just David Platt, Saint Augustine, John Piper, John MacArthur, global Christianity 2022). Korea's also, I noticed, a country where the Covid body-account appears to be honest and I know for a fact, as Dr., Prof, much else Eric Feigl-Ding has been talking about on Twitter about 25 hours a day, a country in which the Democrat mentality of 'you got sick you're stupid' or the Milwaukee mentality of 'you got sick bypass watch you die joke at bar but we're still good Christians South Park Satan must be good to be evil sometimes' isn't in effect and people have resolved to do everything they can both to prevent and to mitigate as well to contain or pocket though no one wants to talk much about that. Like I said the other day I wish I were in Korea; I also had a dream about one of those free-standing station-stops in rural Japan that reminded me of 'Cafe Lumiere' by Hou Hsiao Hsien and a conversation I had with Prof. Ban Wang fmr. Rutgers and last I checked Stanford about how Japan had built these intricate rail-systems in order to help preserve rural culture. Another good film about rural Japan is 'Hanamizuki' although IDK if post-Covid anyone is going to want to talk again about micro-sized kindergartens, the Iraq War, fishing, the meanings of trees, following through on commitments or promises, or returning gratitude and love. IDK whether the stuff I read over the last 5-10 years about housing-prices in places like rural Japan or, alternatively, Vladivostok are as low as I've read but if they have good internet I might go if only b/c people there aren't interested in teaching you every lesson or extracting the max. from you then leaving you to die in the name of 'getting to know one.' There's a short Somerset Maugham book called 'The Moon and Sixpence' though I don't admire Maugham that much and prefer his literary criticism / critical appreciations of other writers and cultures to his fiction but it feels like what some people are looking for today is more like 'huge amounts of money, charming personality, offer we can't refuse, satisfying sexual favor or we either vivisect you or pozz you up with 1st-gen anti-psychotics / kill you with ECT and still deny the exist of God, as well as demons.'My other privileged Millennial friends are all mad at me for not bearing fruit and my 'last love' said I dishonored my parents but Koreans & maybe they don't get just how much Mark Johnston et al. are totally committed to reversing course at the most destructive possible moments and never paying what they said they'd pay; like how terrorists will sometimes detonate one bomb for the civilians and another for the first responders on the scene - though maybe I just ran out of chances.

0 notes

arbane235 · 3 years

Text

Good summary of the accomplishments of Trump:

"I know I’ve been highly critical of the Trump presidency. But to be fair, and in the spirit of Presidents Day, I'm here to apologize for all my rants and just admit that President Trump wasn’t that bad...... other than when he incited an insurrection against the government, mismanaged a pandemic that killed nearly half a million Americans, separated children from their families, lost those children in the bureaucracy, tear-gassed peaceful protesters on Lafayette Square so he could hold a photo op holding a Bible in front of a church, tried to block all Muslims from entering the country, got impeached, got impeached again, had the worst jobs record of any president in modern history, pressured Ukraine to dig dirt on Joe Biden, fired the FBI director for investigating his ties to Russia, bragged about firing the FBI director on TV, took Vladimir Putin’s word over the US intelligence community, diverted military funding to build his wall, caused the longest government shutdown in US history, called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” lied nearly 30,000 times, banned transgender people from serving in the military, ejected reporters from the White House briefing room who asked tough questions, vetoed the defense funding bill because it renamed military bases named for Confederate soldiers, refused to release his tax returns, increased the national debt by nearly $8 trillion, had three of the highest annual trade deficits in U.S. history, called veterans and soldiers who died in combat losers and suckers, coddled the leader of Saudi Arabia after he ordered the execution and dismembering of a US-based journalist, refused to concede the 2020 election, hired his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to work in the White House, walked out of an interview with Lesley Stahl, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” suggested that people should inject bleach into their bodies to fight COVID, abandoned our allies the Kurds to Turkey, pushed through massive tax cuts for the wealthiest but balked at helping working Americans, incited anti-lockdown protestors in several states at the height of the pandemic, withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, withdrew the US from the Iranian nuclear deal, withdrew the US from the Trans Pacific Partnership which was designed to block China’s advances, insulted his own Cabinet members on Twitter, pushed the leader of Montenegro out of the way during a photo op, failed to reiterate US commitment to defending NATO allies, called Haiti and African nations “shithole” countries, called the city of Baltimore the “worst in the nation,” claimed that he single handedly brought back the phrase “Merry Christmas” even though it hadn’t gone anywhere, forced his Cabinet members to praise him publicly like some cult leader, believed he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, berated and belittled his hand-picked Attorney General when he recused himself from the Russia probe, suggested the US should buy Greenland, colluded with Mitch McConnell to push through federal judges and two Supreme Court justices after supporting efforts to prevent his predecessor from appointing judges, repeatedly called the media “enemies of the people,” claimed that if we tested fewer people for COVID we’d have fewer cases, violated the emoluments clause, thought that Nambia was a country, told Bob Woodward in private that the coronavirus was a big deal but then downplayed it in public, called his exceedingly faithful vice president a “p---y” for following the Constitution, nearly got us into a war with Iran after threatening them by tweet, nominated a corrupt head of the EPA, nominated a corrupt head of HHS, nominated a corrupt head of the Interior Department, nominated a corrupt head of the USDA, praised dictators and authoritarians around the world while criticizing allies, refused to allow the presidential transition to begin, insulted war hero John McCain – even after his death, spent an obscene amount of time playing golf after criticizing Barack Obama for playing (far less) golf while president, falsely claimed that he won the 2016 popular vote, called the Muslim mayor of London a “stone cold loser,” falsely claimed that he turned down being Time’s Man of the Year, considered firing special counsel Robert Mueller on several occasions, mocked wearing face masks to guard against transmitting COVID, locked Congress out of its constitutional duty to confirm Cabinet officials by hiring acting ones, used a racist dog whistle by calling COVID the “China virus,” hired and associated with numerous shady figures that were eventually convicted of federal offenses including his campaign manager and national security adviser, pardoned several of his shady associates, gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to two congressman who amplified his batshit crazy conspiracy theories, got into telephone fight with the leader of Australia(!), had a Secretary of State who called him a moron, forced his press secretary to claim without merit that his was the largest inauguration crowd in history, botched the COVID vaccine rollout, tweeted so much dangerous propaganda that Twitter eventually banned him, charged the Secret Service jacked-up rates at his properties, constantly interrupted Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, claimed that COVID would “magically” disappear, called a U.S. Senator “Pocahontas,” used his Twitter account to blast Nordstrom when it stopped selling Ivanka’s merchandise, opened up millions of pristine federal lands to development and drilling, got into a losing tariff war with China that forced US taxpayers to bail out farmers, claimed that his losing tariff war was a win for the US, ignored or didn’t even take part in daily intelligence briefings, blew off honoring American war dead in France because it was raining, redesigned Air Force One to look like the Trump Shuttle, got played by Kim Jung Un and his “love letters,” threatened to go after social media companies in clear violation of the Constitution, botched the response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans when he finally visited them, pressured the governor and secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him votes, thought that the Virgin islands had a President, drew on a map with a Sharpie to justify his inaccurate tweet that Alabama was threatened by a hurricane, allowed White House staff to use personal email accounts for official businesses after blasting Hillary Clinton for doing the same thing, rolled back regulations that protected the public from mercury and asbestos, pushed regulators to waste time studying snake-oil remedies for COVID, rolled back regulations that stopped coal companies from dumping waste into rivers, held blatant campaign rallies at the White House, tried to take away millions of Americans’ health insurance because the law was named for a Black man, refused to attend his successors’ inauguration, nominated the worst Education Secretary in history, threatened judges who didn’t do what he wanted, attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, promised that Mexico would pay for the wall (it didn’t), allowed political hacks to overrule government scientists on major reports on climate change and other issues, struggled navigating a ramp after claiming his opponent was feeble, called an African-American Congresswoman “low IQ,” threatened to withhold federal aid from states and cities with Democratic leaders, went ahead with rallies filled with maskless supporters in the middle of a pandemic, claimed that legitimate investigations of his wrongdoing were “witch hunts,” seemed to demonstrate a belief that there were airports during the American Revolution, demanded “total loyalty” from the FBI director, praised a conspiracy theory that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, completely gutted the Voice of America, placed a political hack in charge of the Postal Service, claimed without evidence that the Obama administration bugged Trump Tower, suggested that the US should allow more people from places like Norway into the country, suggested that COVID wasn’t that bad because he recovered with the help of top government doctors and treatments not available to the public, overturned energy conservation standards that even industry supported, reduced the number of refugees the US accepts, insulted various members of Congress and the media with infantile nicknames, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential medal of Freedom at the State of the Union address, named as head of federal personnel a 29-year old who’d previously been fired from the White House for allegations of financial improprieties, eliminated the White House office of pandemic response, used soldiers as campaign props, fired any advisor who made the mistake of disagreeing with him, demanded the Pentagon throw him a Soviet-style military parade, hired a shit ton of white nationalists, politicized the civil service, did absolutely nothing after Russia hacked the U.S. government, falsely said the Boy Scouts called him to say his bizarre Jamboree speech was the best speech ever given to the Scouts, claimed that Black people would overrun the suburbs if Biden won, insulted reporters of color, insulted women reporters, insulted women reporters of color, suggested he was fine with China’s oppression of the Uighurs, attacked the Supreme Court when it ruled against him, summoned Pennsylvania state legislative leaders to the White House to pressure them to overturn the election, spent countless hours every day watching Fox News, refused to allow his administration to comply with Congressional subpoenas, hired Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer, tried to punish Amazon because the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post wrote negative stories about him, acted as if the Attorney General of the United States was his personal attorney, attempted to get the federal government to defend him in a libel lawsuit from a women who accused him of sexual assault, held private meetings with Vladimir Putin without staff present, didn’t disclose his private meetings with Vladimir Putin so that the US had to find out via Russian media, stopped holding press briefings for months at a time, “ordered” US companies to leave China even though he has no such power, led a political party that couldn’t even be bothered to draft a policy platform, claimed preposterously that Article II of the Constitution gave him absolute powers, tried to pressure the U.K. to hold the British Open at his golf course, suggested that the government nuke hurricanes, suggested that wind turbines cause cancer, said that he had a special aptitude for science, fired the head of election cyber security after he said that the 2020 election was secure, blurted out classified information to Russian officials, tried to force the G7 to hold their meeting at his failing golf resort in Florida, fired the acting attorney general when she refused to go along with his unconstitutional Muslim travel ban, hired Stephen Miller, openly discussed national security issues in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago where everyone could hear them, interfered with plans to relocate the FBI because a new development there might compete with his hotel, abandoned Iraqi refugees who’d helped the U.S. during the war, tried to get Russia back into the G7, held a COVID super spreader event in the Rose Garden, seemed to believe that Frederick Douglass is still alive, lost 60 election fraud cases in court including before judges he had nominated, falsely claimed that factories were reopening when they weren’t, shamelessly exploited terror attacks in Europe to justify his anti-immigrant policies, still hasn’t come up with a healthcare plan, still hasn’t come up with an infrastructure plan despite repeated “Infrastructure Weeks,” forced Secret Service agents to drive him around Walter Reed while contagious with COVID, told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” fucked up the Census, withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization in the middle of a pandemic, did so few of his duties that his press staff were forced to state on his daily schedule “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings,” allowed his staff to repeatedly violate the Hatch Act, seemed not to know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, stood before sacred CIA wall of heroes and bragged about his election win, constantly claimed he was treated worse than any president which presumably includes four that were assassinated and his predecessor whose legitimacy and birthplace were challenged by a racist reality TV show star named Donald Trump, claimed Andrew Jackson could’ve stopped the Civil War even though he died 16 years before it happened, said that any opinion poll showing him behind was fake, claimed that other countries laughed at us before he became president when several world leaders were literally laughing at him, claimed that the military was out of ammunition before he became President, created a commission to whitewash American history, retweeted anti-Islam videos from one of the most racist people in Britain, claimed ludicrously that the Pulse nightclub shooting wouldn’t have happened if someone there had a gun even though there was an armed security guard there, hired a senior staffer who cited the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre as a reason to ban Muslims, had a press secretary who claimed that Nazi Germany never used chemical weapons even though every sane human being knows they used gas to kill millions of Jews and others, bilked the Secret Service for higher than market rates when they had to stay at Trump properties, apparently sold pardons on his way out of the White House, stripped protective status from 59,000 Haitians, falsely claimed Biden wanted to defund the police, said that the head of the CDC didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to rescind protection from DREAMers, gave himself an A+ for his handling of the pandemic, tried to start a boycott of Goodyear tires due to an Internet hoax, said U.S. rates of COVID would be lower if you didn’t count blue states, deported U.S. veterans who served their country but were undocumented, claimed he did more for African Americans than any president since Lincoln, touted a “super-duper” secret “hydrosonic” missile which may or may not be a new “hypersonic” missile or may not exist at all, retweeted a gif calling Biden a pedophile, forced through security clearances for his family, suggested that police officers should rough up suspects, suggested that Biden was on performance-enhancing drugs, tried to stop transgender students from being able to use school bathrooms in line with their gender, suggested the US not accept COVID patients from a cruise ship because it would make US numbers look higher, nominated a climate change sceptic to chair the committee advising the White House on environmental policy, retweeted a video doctored to look like Biden had played a song called “Fuck tha Police” at a campaign event, hugged a disturbingly large number of U.S. flags, accused Democrats of “treason” for not applauding his State of the Union address, claimed that the FBI failed to capture the Parkland school shooter because they were “spending too much time” on Russia, mocked the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, obsessed over low-flow toilets, ordered the rerelease of more COVID vaccines when there weren’t any to release, called for the construction of a bizarre garden of heroes with statutes of famous dead Americans as well as at least one Canadian (Alex Trebek), hijacked Washington’s July 4th celebrations to give a partisan speech, took advice from the MyPillow guy, claimed that migrants seeking a better life in the US were dangerous caravans of drug dealers and rapists, said nothing when Vladimir Putin poisoned a leading opposition figure, never seemed to heed the advice of his wife’s “Be Best” campaign, falsely claimed that mail-in voting is fraudulent, announced a precipitous withdrawal of troops from Syria which not only handed Russia and ISIS a win but also prompted his defense secretary to resign in protest, insulted the leader of Canada, insulted the leader of France, insulted the leader of Britain, insulted the leader of Germany, insulted the leader of Sweden (Sweden!!), falsely claimed credit for getting NATO members to increase their share of dues, blew off two Asia summits even though they were held virtually, continued lying about spending lots of time at Ground Zero with 9/11 responders, said that the Japanese would sit back and watch their “Sony televisions” if the US were ever attacked, left a NATO summit early in a huff, stared directly into an eclipse even though everyone over the age of 5 knows not to do that, said and did nothing when US intelligence agencies presented intel that Russia placed bounties on the heads of US soldiers stationed in the middle east, called himself a very stable genius despite significant evidence to the contrary, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and kept his promise, and a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember at the moment.

But other than that. . . Yea, he was great!" - Unknown

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thisismydesignhannibal · 6 years

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FannibalFest 2017 Recap! 1/3

PIC HEAVY!

PHEW! Going to have to do a few of these to even attempt to cover such an amazing experience! My apologies for taking so long with this... Con drop is real people! And even though I’m usually on Tumblr more, Twitter was easier to use during the Con. If you’re interested in even more pics and stuff, you can always go find me there (@MyDesignHanibl). I’ll do some general con stuff in this post, and follow up with two about the tours (one for each day).

FIRST OFF, WHAT AN AMAZING CON!!!!!

If you were thinking about going but were on the fence, PLEASE consider it next time! It was absolutely amazing. The guests, tours, panels, props, meals and overall vibes were just wonderful. @fannibalfest-toronto did an incredible job!

Our wonderful guests, Janice Poon, Vladimir Jon Cubrt, Martha De Laurentiis, Demore Barnes, Scott Thompson, and Aaron Abrams! And one of many appearances of special guest, Peking Hannibal... Janice brought him and he got a really good run for his money with us ;)

SO MANY MORE THE PICS under the cut!

I apologize in advance that my pics of the guests aren’t better... I was so busy clapping and giggling (not to mention not wanting to shove a camera in their faces) that they could be better :/

The cast arrived at the welcome ceremony ahead of Mamma Martha. They seemed so happy and excited to see us, Vlad ran around the room giving high fives, Demore was incredibly eloquent, Aaron and Scott hilarious, and Janice adorable!

The guests were presented GORGEOUS personalized flower crowns by the incredibly talented @apoptoses Below, you can see the lovely crown she made for me, and her absolutely STUNNING cosplay of Margot! Love and hugs my talented, funny, lovely Hannipologist friend XO P.S. She takes commissions!

Some photos of me with the Cast and one with Mamma Martha! They were all so generous and seemed to get a real kick out of everyone’s poses. I love Janice being EXTRA in the group photo and Scott deciding to make it like an awkward family photo... Demore kept his hand on my back through the photo and I could barely concentrate ;P He really tries to make sure people are at ease and he is constantly dropping words of eloquent wisdom with that incredible voice of his!!! When it came time for my solo photo with him, he asked what I wanted and I just blurted out “I want you to strangle me!” he gave me that low chuckle and this pic is what came of it... we laughed later at the autograph session that it looks like I’m being strangled by a Dr Seuss character ;P Aaron and Scott really liked my photo with them, and Aaron even posted it on his Instagram! It was from Scott’s comments about how his gun instructor on the show had to keep telling him to tone down the Charlie’s Angels with how he wielded the gun, HA! Vlad was super high energy and welcoming... I was able to borrow the plastic knife from the lovely @miasmatik and ask him to “cut my throat” Vlad asked if I wanted us to play serious to which I stupidly responded “I’m happy you’re murdering me!” He laughed and said “Ok, then I’m going to be really menacing.” ;P They all loved @apoptoses flower crown and my shirt by @wisesnail <333

Mamma Martha! We were incredibly lucky that Martha announced at the last minute that she was going to do free autographs and selfies with everyone! She was so generous with her time and seemed really amazed by the dedication and creativity of the fandom. No major Season 4 news, but she’s definitely working on it and appreciates our ongoing support.

One of the biggest highlights for me was when my fic The Way I Changed You won the Stag Awards for the fluff category!!! Both Janice and Demore presented my award (a copy of the @radiance-anthology and a nice plaque!) and gave me some lovely hugs :) I’ll do a proper post for it soon, but I’ve finally got it up on AO3 if you’d like to read!

Aaron and Scott joking about not caring that the other is answering questions aimed only at them ;P With all their hilarity and jokes, what struck me most is that they seem so much like an old married couple! Aaron is such a long-suffering wife, and Scott constantly looks to Aaron to both rein him in and egg him on :P They riff off each other so much and seem really in sync. Both incredibly good sports and Aaron in particular seemed so fascinated and complimentary of the fandom and everything we do.

Martha did her own panel and told us so much about how Hannibal came to be, the complexities of rights, and how she found herself in the roll she’s in. I had no idea that she started out with a modeling scholarship that took her to New York... hating the modeling, she then went to school for accounting and started doing books for films in New York! Such an inspiring story. The final panel had everyone, including Janice, which was a lovely treat! Janice’s story was just as fascinating as Martha’s, including designing weddings for Saudi princesses, being an editor, and owning a fancy shop in Toronto’s high-end Yorkville neighbourhood. She described herself as “rudderless” and said it was a wonderful thing :D

At his panel Demore spoke so eloquently about basically everything and gave two lucky Fannibals the opportunity to get played like a cello...to two songs he hummed from Phantom of the Opera ;P Aaron found he was missing a button at the Sassy Science panel...eventually he substituted a Hannibal pin to fill in the gap!

Some more photos of the cast... Demore being beautifully eloquent at the meet and greet, Aaron checking Scott before he said something he shouldn’t (he was slacking on the job a bit!), Vlad being Vlad and really coaxing the energy in the room, and Aaron making Hannidoll bow down to him in the meet and greet (take note of the pin). Mostly they asked questions about us at the meet and greet, and seemed so genuinely interested in the fandom and what we do. They said we feel like a family :)

A fun arrangement of Hannidolls that accidentally ended up as a centerpiece on the main table at the luncheon! Aaron in particular seemed to think it was hilarious and took a ton of pics ;P It was moved off the table since we didn’t want them to be uncomfortable, but they thought it was funny :)

Our dinner with Janice! The menu had vegetarian options for us few vegetarian cannibals, which was lovely. Janice came around and sat with us while we ate and was honestly just ONE OF US. She’s just like talking to another Fannibal, albeit one who knows a bunch of stories about teaching Mads to cook and whether he swallows (he does ;P) and she can be just as wonderfully inappropriate as us (take for example her comment about hypothetically saving Hannibal’s cock in the freezer for “reasons” instead of eating it ;P) Afterwards she signed our menus and hung out. She in no way kept herself separate from us and often was seen around the Con or taking in panels (or messing around with the Peking Hannibal!)

Peking Hannibal was a big hit...Janice brought him to the party and he made lots of appearances throughout the Con. He’s an actual Mads body cast so you can imagine that we were...interested...for reasons ;P Janice’s sanguinaccio dolce demo was on the second day and she had him all laid out and covered in fruit (top pic!) and was totally cool with us checking him out after the demo was over.

OK! I have so many pics but I should stop :P If you have any particular questions just let me know!

Stay tuned for 2 more posts on the two tours!!!

1st tour post

2nd tour post

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lolsmurfaccounts · 6 years

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Funniest League of Legends Jokes on the Internet

When it comes to jokes, there are plenty of then out there, but they are even funnier when they are about our favorite games League of Legends is no different, and the bright and witty minds of the internet have come together to compile one of the largest collection of jokes about a fandom that is currently out there Just do a quick search for “League of Legends” jokes and you will find plenty of websites that feature them.

Dig a little deeper by hanging out on LOL forums and talking to people in-game and you’ll come across many more jokes But you don’t have to do all that work to get the biggest chuckle from LOL jokes, because we’ve scoured the internet and found the best League of Legends jokes out there, and then used super-secret-sciency formulas to rank and categorize them and have listed them here You don’t have to hang out LOLNexus and wait for the perfect joke to come along All you have to do is read below Here’s one to get you started:

Q: Why does Teemo live in a small house?

A: He doesn’t need mushroom

Best Q & A League of Legend Jokes

Q & A jokes are the most popular of the jokes out there for League of Legends players. Plus, these funny League of Legends jokes are all about characters in the game.

That seems to be the most creative outlet when it comes to creating these jokes. Lot os these funniest LOL jokes are the same ones that you will have made with your friends, but the Q & A section is definitely the biggest here. We have saved some of the best worst Q & A jokes for a lower section, but you should be able to get a laugh out of most of these.

There were a lot more jokes out there than just these, but we had to skip a few of them because the touched on racial or overly sensitive topics, or were simply sexual in nature (and in bad taste as well). Here are the very best of the Q & A jokes that we were able to find.

Q: Why didn’t Sivir win the spelling bee?

A: Because she could only spell shield

Q: Why did Fzz fall off his trident?

A: Because he’s unbalanced!

Q: What do you call Malphite getting a double kill against Azir and Anivia?

A: Killing two birds with one stone

Q: Why did Fiddlestick get promoted?

A: Because he was outstanding in his field

Q: Why do chefs love cooking for Ekko?

A: Because he always goes back 4 seconds

Q: Why is Yasuo the best roommate?

A; Because he always HASAKEY

Q: What’s the Yordles’ most hated phone carrier?

A: Teemobile

Q: What’s Vayne’s favourite site?

A: Tumblr

Q: What do you call a Blitzcrank with 6 Triforces?

A: A really expensive hooker

Q: Why is Tf an illegal immigrant?

A: Because he doesn’t have a green card

Q: Who is the most academically successful female champion?

A: Jinx She got A’s while the rest of them got D’s

Q: Why can’t Olaf find a handicapped parking spot?

A: He can’t be disabled

Q: Why did the manaless Syndra run from the teamfight?

A: She didn’t have the balls

Q: What do you call a game-winning laser?

A: Viktor-E

Q: How does Janna shield her allies?

A: With Ease (With E’s)

Q: When is a door not a door?

A: When it’s a Jarvan

Q: Why is Zilean the master of time?

A: Because he’s got a Zilean clocks!

Q: What do you call an AFK Shyvana?

A: A statikk Shyv!

Q: What is a marksman’s least favorite plant?

A: A-kali Flower!

Q: What do you call a Renekton support?

A: Gatoraide!

Q: What do you call a Camille that’s stealthed?

A: A Camille-eon

Q: Why did Nami fail her final year at school?

A: All her grades were under C!

Q: What did Aurelion Sol say when he bumped his leg on a wall?

A: Ao, my shin!

Q: What do you call a Warwick that’s MIA?

A: A wherewolf!

Q: What is the secret League of Legends religion that every player follows?

A: Siontology!

Q: What do Rammus and Malphite listen to?

A: Rock ‘n’ Roll! Ok

Q: Why can’t Gangplank play cards?

A: Because he’s always standing on the deck!

Q: Did you know that Alistar is dyslexic?

A: He always goes oom!

Q: What do you do to a toxic Zyra?

A: Repot them!

Q: How long does it take to save up enough money for a Locket?

A: Aegis

Q: What do you call Renekton wearing a vest?

A: An In-vest-igator!

Q: What’s Lee Sin’s favorite game mode?

A: Blind pick!

Q: Where does Fiora water her plants?

A: En garden!

Q: How does Sona charge her phone?

A: With a Power Chord!

Q: What do you call Kennen when he is stunned in Lightning Rush?

A: Static Electricity

Q: How many bronze players does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Who knows – They can’t climb the ladder

Q: Why is Yasuo never locked out of his house?

A: Because he always Hasaki!

Q: Why was Caitlyn pulled over on the highway?

A: She was going AD miles per hour

Q: Why did Riot take off LeBlanc’s silence?

A: So she can hear the screams of her enemy as she one shots them

Best One-Liner League Jokes

Some of the best jokes out there from League of Legends players came as one-liner jokes. These have been pulled from around a dozen different sources, including the official game forums. It is impossible to know who to credit these jokes to, as they are repeated and passed around so many times until the originator of the joke is impossible to discern. Plus, some of these are pretty obvious, and were probably thought up by more than one LOL player at once. Check out these hilarious one-liner jokes straight from other players.

Lee Sin walks into a bar and into a chair, and into a table

Brand got banned for flaming

At the start of the game, Blitz said “Let’s go invade!” Then he ran very fast using his ‘W’ skill

Sometimes Volibear tells me jokes, but I just can’t bear them

Yorick walks into a bar, there is no counter

100 people followed Singed on Twitter They all died

You know Zilean is having a bad day when he asks you for the time

Katarinas dark secret is that she’s prone to getting dizzy

Trundle never ceases to be amazed about how everyone on the internet knows he’s a troll

Mordekaiser really hates airport security

Shacos darkest secret is that he’s afraid of children

Sometimes Karthus picks up a sword and pretends that he’s Arthas

Amumus favorite emote is /cry

Heimerdinger has a gadget for every occasion, but his friends think he went too far during the attack of a mariachi band of penguins dressed up as clowns

Once Evelynn almost choked to death, but nobody could tell

Evelynn is constantly being bothered by an old man named Gargamel

When Katarina got into the assassination business she made a killing

For some reason Alistar suffers from headaches

Soraka hates the saying “when you hear hoof beats, think horses”

Teemo is a big player in the underground drug market

Ryze’s big secret is a real shocker!

When Malphite and Rammus hang out they like to Rock n’ Roll!

When Udyr masturbates, is it considered bestiality?

Maplphite once took swimming lessons. He doesn’t like to talk about it

Warwick used to do a lot of huffing and puffing, and there were three talking pigs involved. So, don’t do drugs, kids.

Cassiopeia always knows how much she weighs thanks to all her scales.

Singed made a potion so strong it made him see double! Turns out it was just Shaco playing a prank!

Taric’s mother thinks he’s a real gem!

Vladimir really loves Bloody Mary! She’s his girlfriend!

Everyone stared when Lux asked if anyone’s got a light?

Once Kog’maw had a cold, but no one could tell.

Tristana is disappointed that it’s never a rocket in your pocket.

Sometimes, to mess with people Kayle and Morgana switch clothes.

You know what happened when Blitzcrank went on a date with katarina? He knocked her up!

Did you see Annie dance last night? She was on fire!

We would tell you a Pantheon joke but there are over 300 of them…

Noc Noc? Who’s There? Daaaaaaaaaarrknesssss

Best “Yo’Momma” LOL Jokes

One of the categories that seems to be severely lacking in the League of Legends joke world is the “Yo Momma” joke. These are a staple of any comedy gathering, and other games have tons of Yo Momma” jokes about them. But we were only able to find a few. Maybe you can come up with some of your own jokes in this category and add them to the game forums and other places where players congregate. In the meantime, check out these jokes, and remember, we are certain that YOUR momma is a very nice person and that none of these jokes actually apply to her personally.

Yo momma is so fat, Cho’gath feasted on her and gained full stacks

Yo momma so ugly she feared Nocturne!

Yo momma so fat, Fiddlesticks drained her and got diabetes!

Your mum is so fat she has to recall twice to get back to base.

Yo momma so fat, when Singed tried to Fling her, he broke his back

Best Worst Jokes about League of Legends

As we sifted through thousands of jokes to make this compilation, one thing became very clear: there were lots of jokes out there that really should just have been drug out into the street and shot. But some of those terrible jokes were so terrible that they were actually funny. Those are the ones that we felt compelled to include here. If you laugh at these, then you probably need to get some better jokes in your life. If you groan…well..don’t blame us. We didn’t write them. We wouldn’t admit it if we did.

Q: What does Mordekaiser hate the most?

A: Airport Security

Q: What do you call a Lucian that goes AFK?

A: A Black Leaver

Q: How do you beat Orianna?

A: Ochris Brown

Q: What car does Garen drive?

A: A FORD EMACIAAAA

Q: Why is Riven such a broken champion?

A: Because a sword mirrors its owner

Q:How many platinum 1 players do you need to replace a light bulb ?

A: None, they would break the ladder and blame everyone for it

Olaf: Hey Elise do you know what counters Vi the most?

Elise: No what?

Olaf: Me, because I’m a VI-king

A family was driving along on a road trip

Little kid: Ahri there yet? Ahri there yet? Ahri we there yet? Ahri there yet?

Q: Why does Viktor make a great friend?

A: Because he always has a spare helping hand!

Q: Why does Viktor always win his lane?

A: Because he always has the upper hand!

Q: Why couldn’t the potato play ADC?

A: Because no one would peel for him

Q: How do you troll players in League of Legends?

A: Yorick roll them!

Q: Why is Master Yi’s Q so buggy?

A: Because it’s “alpha” strike!

Teemo walks into a bar. “I’ll have a glass of water, please!”

(2 seconds later)

Bartender: “Here’s your wat… wait, where’d he go?”

Best League of Legends Pick-Up Lines

One of the League of Legends humor categories that was simply stuffed was the pick-up line category. Now, only a girl (or a guy) who actually played LOL would get these jokes. Anyone else would simply look at you as if you were crazy. There were hundreds and hundreds of jokes in this category, but we didn’t have the room for all of them, so we pared them down to some of the ones that made us chuckle. Remember, you use these jokes at your own risk. If you don’t have a significant other, you probably won’t after you use these pick-up lines either. If you already do have a partner, then you might be without one if you use these lines on them too. Let’s take a look at some of the best League of Legends pick-up lines.

Damn, if being sexy was a crime, I’d have to call Sheriff Caitlyn because you’re guilty as charged.

You know, if Ezreal saw you, he’d need a map. He’d get lost in your eyes.

Girl, is your name Ashe? Because your beauty stunned me from a distance!

Is your name Janna? Because you blow me away.

Hey girl, wanna come back to my base and check out my Needlessly Large Rod?

Are you an AD carry? Because I’m fired up and ready to serve.

Are you Cassiopeia? Because when I stare at you I get hard.

Are you Orianna? Because you can play with my balls.

Can I invade your jungle?

Can I put my doran blade in your doran ring?

Can I tap your dark spheres?

Did I mention its mating season?

Do you main Ahri? Because I find you charming.

Even if you were Singed I would still chase after you.

Girl you’re like draven – spinning me around town.

The League of Legends URF/NURF April Fool’s Joke

One of the jokes that we found to be the funniest didn’t actually come from the players. Many players will remember the URF and NURF April Fool’s jokes that Riot trolled everyone with if they have been playing LOL for any length of time. If you are new to the game, or for some reason, you haven’t heard about these, then allow us to enlighten you, because this was really a great prank, and the fact that Riot was able to change it and do it again – and fool everyone again – made it even better.

Okay, so the story starts with URF – a new game mode that the company claimed was going to be introduced temporarily to see how it worked out. The developer called it URF, which stood for Ultra Rapid Fire. It was supposed to make everything thousands of times faster, including attack speed, movement, crit damage and even gold was supposed to increase. Mana costs and cooldown times were also supposed to have gone up. Of course, the company made this announcement just before April 1st, and it turned out to be an April Fool’s Joke.

But then, they brought it back once again, this time calling it NURF (for New Ultra Rapid Fire) and it had the following specifications:

+100% mana and energy cost on all abilities

+200% cooldown inflation on abilities, items and summoner spells

+225 movement speed reduction

+200% delay between basic attacks

Critical strikes deal 50% of base AD

Units critically strike on 150% of attacks

Of course, that was exactly the opposite of “URF” and this one wasn’t real either. It was just another April Fool’s joke that fooled people..again.

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maxmundan · 7 years

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Now, don’t get me wrong, it matters. It matters a whole hell of a lot. It matters that a presidential candidate conspired with a hostile country to try to influence the election. It matters that everyone who is caught up with him; everyone in his campaign; everyone in his family, seemingly aided and abetted what should be considered nothing less than on open act of treason and an attempted coup of the U.S. government. It matters that none of the republicans in Congress (and a good number of the Democrats) don’t seem to give a damn that treason almost certainly occurred but are more than willing to look the other way, as long as it allows them to fulfil their agenda of funneling even more money to their corporate masters. Every single American should be angry as hell and ready to pour into the streets to demand that our sovereignty as a nation be returned. All of this is true. None of it is in dispute. We need to get rid of Trump and every single person who aided him in this travesty in any way. And once they have all been driven from public office, then they need to be held legally accountable for betraying their country. Our country. The point I am trying to make, however, is that once all that has been accomplished, there is still a massive pile of problems and inequalities that we need to face as a country. By all means, expose Trump and his cronies for the criminal charlatans they really are and make them pay for every last one of their crimes. My question, though, after all of that has been completed, is “What next?” First and foremost, what do we do about our heavily marginalized and divided nation? Trump could never have come anywhere near the presidency if we didn’t hate and distrust each other so intensely. We can’t even seem to agree about the very reality of the facts that are emerging about the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. A poll recently taken by Public Policy Polling comes to the difficult to comprehend conclusion that 32% of Trump voters don’t believe the meeting between Trump Jr. and representatives of the Russian government actually happened and another 24 aren’t sure, even though Trump Jr. admitted it happened and published the emails setting it up himself through his twitter account. Try to get your head around that. More than half of Trump voters either don’t believe or aren’t sure about what is already known and accepted fact. How do we even begin to communicate with people who can’t agree on what is obviously right in front of their faces? I don’t know how we do it, but I do know that we must. We need to find a way to come together and talk as Americans and find common ground. When push comes to shove, we really all do want the same simple things. We just disagree on how to get there. One very positive sign of the growing resistance to Trump is that so many liberals and progressives and conservatives who, in the past, would be much happier squabbling over the tiniest detail of government direction or responsibility, are currently banding together to fight this obvious threat to our nation. I am a dyed-in-the-wool lefty liberal but some of the best acquaintances I’ve made during this trying time have been with traditional right-leaning conservatives, who put country over party and are none too happy with all America stands for being junked and abandoned and sold for parts to Vladimir Putin. Are we going to go back to squabbling and demonizing each other as soon as this immediate threat is over or will we try to work together to create something we can all love? It comes down to a question of “What kind of America do we want to be?” Will we be the America we’ve always claimed to be and never quite lived up to, or the America we’ve come to be; the one that says, “Everything, even treason, is acceptable, as long as my side wins.” Another glaring problem we must address is the extreme racial divide in America that, for all our fancy talk and attempts to gloss over it, has never fully been addressed. If nothing else, The Trump candidacy and now presidency have exposed virulent strains of still festering racism, misogyny and homophobia in this country. Again, I have no answers but I know we must begin to talk to each other with humility and honesty if we are ever to bridge this gap and bring some much needed healing to ourselves and each other. In a way, political correctness has been a big mistake, in that it has helped present a shiny veneer of civility and progress, while allowing the deep racism in this country to go underground. Now that it has been exposed by Trump and his cronies and his cult, we have no choice but to try and tackle it head on. By that I mean that we need to look deep into ourselves to examine our own racism and prejudices rather than point the finger at the racism and prejudices of others. We need to show the bravery and open-mindedness we have always claimed as Americans but never truly shown. There are many other issues we will have to tackle, as well. We need a better health care system in this country. We need to deal with the crazy level of income inequality and the stranglehold that corporations currently hold over public life. We need to find a way to remove the insane amount of money and corruption from politics. We need to support and embrace education and science as the vehicles that have always led us out of the darkness and away from tyranny and oppression. The list goes on and on, but we need to face these problems head on. We need to face them together. So yes, the first order of business is to deal, as harshly as possible, with these traitors who have infiltrated and taken over our government. Once that is finished, however, the real work of rebuilding the nation will still remain. The rise, and inevitable fall, of Donald Trump are merely a symptom of something that’s been ailing this country for a long time. Once we’re finished with Trump, we need to fight the disease.

Max Mundan, This is why the Trump/Russia Scandal Doesn’t Really Matter

#prose #politics #donald trump #trump #treason #america #trump russia

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andrewuttaro · 5 years

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New Look Sabres: GM 59 - FLA - Fourida Part One

I was honestly shook quite a bit when Kirpa was eliminated that way last night. I really thought she was going to make it to hometowns. Then again Cassie is probably getting eliminated next week if we’re all being honest. Oh yeah, this is the Sabres blog. I’m a married man now and this is the first full season of the Bachelor or Bachelorette I’ve watched. I’ve enjoyed it more than the Sabres as of late and I think you know why. I also trust your intelligence enough to understand that if you’re not enjoying an entertainment product enough to justify consuming it than you should step back. At the end of day that’s what our watching hockey is. You could probably read my frustration after the Devils game and that is not a good place to write this blog from. I took a step back. I am going to miss this in the summer. There is going to be a space of late August where I’m dying for this team’s name. This team hasn’t been in the playoffs for going on eight years and nonetheless I take in every little bit of Buffalo Hockey. I just love it and that’s how this blog started. That’s the new attitude. Therefore, I now give you, very enthusiastically, Playoff Trash Talk: Florida, you haven’t had your traditional second half run to get to the playoffs. Is everything ok? The Sabres are in no position to lecture y’all in how to make the playoffs but perhaps Buffalo can teach you all a lesson in playing once you’re there. Oh, you’re tired of the no-one-comes-to-our-games joke? Do something about it! The national hockey media drops Buffalo like a sack of potatoes whenever we’re not competitive so you don’t get to plead for relevance if you can’t be relevant in your own friggin market! You and us are the two teams in this division that always look like fringe playoff teams but never seem to get there. If and when we do meet in the playoffs you can bet the Sabres got more to give than your merry band of tanned Canadians. Sabres in 6! Now let’s get down to tonight’s matchup: the prior three matchups this season were a story of frustration and jubilation on both sides. We thought there was a Skinner-Yandle spat developing last game and here we are now in… different spots regarding the playoffs. It doesn’t look great for us right now but your done and if we’re going to make it, we got to play with confidence. I’m going to be the change I want to see in the world and call you Fourida Part 1! We’re getting two points against y’all and two points against your vastly superior neighbors to the north! 2+2= FOURIDA! I stole that play on words from every other hockey blogger, but I don’t care! LET’S GO!

I was absorbed by the drama between Kirpa and Cassie during the first, but I watched pieces and monitored twitter. It was either hot garbage or a scary good period from the Sabres according to twitter and what actually transpired on the ice was truly a mixed bag. On the ice in the first you see those confounding turnovers in all three zones, you see the bad defensive plays, and you see the hanging Ullmark out to dry. However, the chances the visitors did get were quality chances in the first. No score through 20 minutes. For all you folks decrying the O’Reilly trade guess which team won most the faceoffs in the start of this one? Yep, BUFFALO! That’s good because the Panthers outshot the Sabres. Something might have been said in the locker room during the first intermission because the visitors came out with some fire afterward. The second period saw the shot gap close quite a bit. It was hardly five minutes in when Jack Eichel got the puck into the offensive zone with Mittelstadt trailing not far. The initial shot was haphazardly and whatever. Every scoring play in this game kind of looked like a slow-motion train derailment but the Sabres had the man advantage and would use it for once. Sam Reinhart got the puck and shot it toward his Captain who got credit for a deflection goal that may or may not have gone off his stick. Nonetheless, the Sabres got the 1-0 lead and took it to the second intermission. The way the final frame goes though just about sums up this season.

Before you know it the Sabres are down 2-1. The first Panthers goal was by future Sabre Jonathan Huberdeau and the second goal was an absolute snipe by a guy named Jayce whose last name I will not even make an attempt at. He looked pumped too because he just about squeezed the life out of Vincent Trocheck for the assist. Okay, it’s one goal, let’s catch our breaths, guys. It isn’t over-. Shoot. Aleksander Barkov punched another one home in a goal I will absolutely blame Ullmark for. It snuck in on the post Linus had covered so I don’t know what went wrong. Down 3-1 and our boys stabilized it for a little while. They were crashing the net so hard poor James Reimer lost his helmet to Jake McCabe’s crotch at one point. Jack Eichel even scored a goal! Well, it got challenged and called back because we’re not allowed fun things in Western New York Sports anymore. The Sabres kept pushing until Jonathan Huberdeau scored again with less then four minutes left. Could they take him back to Buffalo? He cut through the D like warm butter. Terry Pegula was at the game after all! Vladimir Sabotka scored a goal in the dying minutes of this one for comedic relief, but it ended in a loss nonetheless 4-2 Florida. The goalie failed, the defense failed, and the forwards failed. This was another team loss and at this point it really feels like I tied an anchor to this team after enjoying that Islanders win so much. I want to apologize for my crassness and excitement after that win. I forgot how this goes. That said, I’m still not turning away any tickets you buy for me.

I’m not going to bother with three things right now: 1, I am sticking to Fourida and you can fight me if you hate optimism. I’m drinking the Kool-aid, fight me! 2, the out-of-town scoreboard isn’t my concern anymore. These guys need four or five wins in a row now before we can look at that with any degree of seriousness. 3, I know dropping from an 82% chance at a playoff spot in November to this is an historic, shitty record. I am not piling on sadness because, what did we say at the start: this is an entertainment product, not a misery machine. Take a deep breath. Watch the Bachelor! That’s a train-wreck we can all enjoy, eh? Like, share and share this blog around; and while you’re at it pray or send your good feels Kyle Okposo’s way. He’s got a concussion again and his injury history paints a very scary picture about that. Cheer for him if you can’t bear to do it with this utter collapse. Breathe in with me again, and out, and wind up for it: Let’s Go Sabres!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Carl Hagelin would be a fun, speedy addition to a bottom six that is anemic at times. Obviously, you want the right price for him. Alex Wenneburg is a bigger gamble, but I would take any shake up at this point if it doesn’t cost too much.

#buffalo sabres #hockey #blog #nhl

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brettaresco · 7 years

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Chapter 4- Correcting Trump

During these early days of the #resistance, there are those in America who remain confused as to why so many others oppose Donald Trump’s presidency. Setting aside his policies (some of which, believe it or not, have attracted a modicum of support), these people don’t understand why thousands (millions?) demonstrated against Trump’s administration as soon as he was sworn into office. Don’t get me wrong- I get the idea that we should “give him a chance” and not judge him before he does anything. We are one nation, founded on the peaceful transition of power and support for whatever leaders our fair democratic process may elect. However, we are also founded on the ideas of freedom of speech and assembly, and the citizens of a government by and for the people have every right to protest a man (or a movement, or a policy) with which they disagree. As for why many are choosing to do so immediately, I can think of quite a few reasons, but for the purposes of this column I’ve decided to focus on a facile (but arguably very important) one.

Donald Trump is a man completely devoid of politeness, empathy, or emotional intelligence.

This is not news. Based on his actions dating back decades, it’s hardly a stretch to conclude that our king baby, who once proclaimed he alone could fix all that’s ailing the country, would be incapable of human decency. And so far, throughout both his campaign and his improbable presidency, he has proven that to be the case. Nonetheless, over 60 million Americans voted for him. Why? Well, because most of them hate Hillary Clinton. But that’s neither here nor there….

The point is, now that Donald Trump is president, some expect him to suddenly act presidential. But why would he? Voters gave his irresponsible actions to this point the ultimate seal of approval. And though many of those same people now wish he would exercise some self-restraint, we know that he is fundamentally incapable of doing so. He still takes to Twitter at every perceived slight and orders bogus investigations to satisfy his ravenous ego, all while maintaining the “Sad!” language that got him this far in the first place.

That language is what I’ll take issue with here. As Trump normalized it long before he announced his candidacy, it went relatively unremarked upon for the entire election cycle. If his usual methods of communication had received even the smallest amount of scrutiny, his campaign would have been over when he mocked a disabled reporter or hinted at the assassination of his opponent. So while I commend members of the media for recognizing that we had (and have) bigger fish to fry, I also think it’s essential to occasionally remind ourselves just what a vile human being we’re dealing with. When Mike Pence said Donald Trump “doesn’t speak like a politician”, he was right… but Trump also doesn’t speak like a civilized human being.

Frankly, and sadly, that’s why some people like him. In a “change election,” many voters found Trump’s disdain for Washington double-talk refreshing. Which is all well and good… but it doesn’t excuse the kind of unapologetic cruelty that Trump still displays as the leader of the free world. It’s one thing to insult a bunch of celebrities in a TV show boardroom- it’s entirely another to refuse to answer a reporter’s question and call his respected media outlet “fake news.” (Sidenote based on that clip: for someone who’s never apologized for anything, Trump sure expects a lot of apologies.).

It is with this in mind that I present something I like to call “Correcting Trump.” In it, I take Trump’s own words and attempt to translate them into sentiments befitting someone in his position. Ready? So am I. And I have been for a long time.

(Note: Some of these are corrections of tweets, which are a maximum of 140 characters long. If a correction is longer than 140 characters, it implies that maybe Twitter wasn’t the best venue for what Trump was trying to convey, which is quite often the case.)

TRUMP (in a tweet from yesterday, 1/31/17): “When will the Democrats give us our Attorney General and rest of Cabinet! They should be ashamed of themselves! No wonder D.C. doesn't work!”

CORRECTION: “I understand that some people have legitimate concerns about Jeff Sessions’ appointment, as he was once considered too racist to be a federal judge. I look forward to listening to the concerns of congressional Democrats as we work to approve someone who I believe would be a great Attorney General. I am also willing to listen to their concerns about other Cabinet members, including those who have previously disdained the departments they will oversee or who have absolutely no experience relating to their appointments. Oh, and Washington, D.C. has worked, albeit slowly at times, for almost 250 years.”

TRUMP (from his speech at a 2015 campaign rally in Iowa): “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”

CORRECTION: “Though I believe I am intelligent in many areas, including higher education, casino management, and vodka production, I know nothing about the military. In fact, I dodged – I mean, excuse me, legally avoided – the draft, due first to my studies and then to some serious bone spurs in my feet (at least one of them... right or left... I don’t remember). Thus, if somehow elected president, I would defer to military officers who have spent their entire lives in the service when dealing with ISIS, one of the greatest current threats to the geopolitical order. Believe me.”

TRUMP (referring to Senator John McCain at a 2015 appearance at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa): “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

CORRECTION: “John McCain is an American patriot, the likes of which our country has rarely seen. I am not fit to carry his jock strap, let alone speak about him in a manner that is anything less than wholly reverent. He may not like me, but reasonable people have their differences, and seeing as he has spent his life defending this country and I’ve spent mine leeching off of it, I will only say that I have the utmost respect for him.”

TRUMP (as part of a July 2016 news conference): “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

CORRECTION: “I don’t really think it’s appropriate for me to comment on Hillary Clinton’s emails. Frankly, I don’t know anything about computers- I’ve just been using this story to try to score points with people who know as little as I do! And of course, being a patriotic American citizen, I would never ask a foreign government that may very well be hostile towards our democracy to invade the privacy of any other citizen, let alone one who spent much of her life in faithful public service. I know the press wouldn’t stoop so low as to print ill-gotten gains from places like WikiLeaks, nor should they. I’m actually very afraid of Russia’s disinformation campaign during this election cycle. I sincerely hope Vladimir Putin doesn’t decide to go after my ‘missing’ emails- I don’t think the pro-life crowd would support me anymore! Of course I’m just kidding… that all happened before email.”

TRUMP (referring to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Gold Star parents of slain Muslim Army Captain Humayun Khan, in July of 2016): "If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say... Maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me."

CORRECTION: “What John Kasich said.”

TRUMP (in a tweet dated May 10th, 2012): “.@Cher attacked @MittRomney. She is an average talent who is out of touch with reality. Like @Rosie O'Donnell, a total loser!”

CORRECTION: “Although I do not believe in life after love, as I am physically incapable of the latter and thus cannot imagine anything in relation to it, Cher is undoubtedly a talented individual. She starred in multiple TV shows, both of which were better than any that I’ve ever done. She also won an Oscar (which, like me, is a tiny little man). And she can sing! Wow. I’m in awe of her. And Rosie, too, whose performance in A League of Their Own was very intimidating to me, as I’ve never thrown a ball or had Tom Hanks acknowledge me in any way.”

There… isn’t that better? Finally, a certain degree of respect in the White House. I’m not great with social media (beyond my fantastic jokes), but I’m going to start occasionally tweeting some of these, if only to show Mr. Trump how to treat people with dignity. You can join in too, using the hashtag #correctingTrump. It may not solve anything, but every little bit helps… even just to keep us all sane.

#correctingTrump #humayun khan #donald trump #hillary clinton #cher #rosie o'donnell #john kasich #mitt romney #rick perry #ben carson #oscars #a league of their own #john mccain #ghazala khan #khizr khan #jeff sessions

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chris-carson · 7 years

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The State and “CULTURE”

I woke last Friday to CULTURE day. The nawf Atlanta trio Migos had finally released their long awaited record, an opulent, yet plangent example of the melodic trap we all love so much. I spent the morning listening to the record while reading the news about President Trump’s executive order banning people from seven majority Muslim nations from entering the U.S.and barring the entry of all Syrian refugees.

In the midst of anxious political moments it is nice to have things like music and art to offer a respite from the uncertainty. Metro Boomin has done us all a great service by producing the hit “Bad and Boujee.” It is one of the most unique songs put out in the last year, with it’s oozing tempo and reverberating bass line and each verse snapping over the track. The whole atmosphere is nocturnal, the listener can't help but feel at home in the night time, revelling in danger and sleaze. At least that’s how it makes me feel and I confidently nodded my head as the train pulled me along to work.

Reading the news, infused with the gettin-mine kind of swagger that hovers like loud gas over each track on the record, I thought, this is how Trump must feel and by the time the track “Slippery,” featuring Gucci Mane started playing, I started to picture details from the Trump Dossier, the secret opposition research compiled by a former British intelligence agent and circulated amongst journalists for months before election day. It references a night Trump is said to have had in Moscow during the Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Imagine, the hotel room is dark as Donald Trump, now President of the United States, rests his stocky sextogenerian frame on an otom in the corner of the room. Two young women kneel on the bed. Maybe there are tarps to keep the mattress dry, maybe the point is to make as big a mess as possible and destroy the suite that just held the Obamas. Our new President undoes his bowtie and starts to slip off his suspenders. The girls are unsure of what to do. He gives them a smile and stroked their naked rear ends. What happens next is a matter of imagination. Trump may have laid down and had the young woman, in all likelihood arranged to be there by the Russian Government, squat over his fleshy red body and urinate all over it. But it is also possible that he asked them to piss on one another. But we may know one day. The Russians are said to have a video of it.

That this is how our President has been said to act, really derails my own sense of bravado while listing to CULTURE. What is listed in the Dossier is what you would expect to see in a move, or hear on a trap record, not read on the front page of a newspaper. But the point is there are layers to life and in each layer are appropriate levels of swag. My innocent fantasies I have while listening to trap are on the far lowest level. Well above that is the rap star layer, where guys like Migos get to do baller ass shit all the time without consequences. I can’t be mad at them. As CULTURE proves, they are obviously major talents pushing the art of hip hop to new places. They deserve all the balling as shit they get. They are entertainers.

Above all those layers is President of the United States and in there the rules, as far as I see them, change. Now swag, ballin, sleaze, greatness, however you wish to identify it, are measured in different ways. When Donald Trump was just a reality TV star, an entertainer, we could judge him the same way we judge rappers, but now he is President. He needs to be held to a higher standard. That there is even a suggestion that the scene in the hotel I described earlier might possibly be true, that there is even a suggestion that our President is beholden to Kremlin, even providing the Kremlin with information about expatriated Russian oligarchs living in his hotels, that anyone of those things can be said about a sitting American president is something we all need to take very seriously. We need to take the Dossier seriously until it is proven to be the lie Trump said it was. Too much is at stake and Trump can't be trusted to keep his own self satisfied swagger in check.

Meanwhile, questions like “Is my president a spy for Vladimir Putin,” have already begun to wear away at people’s sense of security. Over the last 10 days since his inauguration I’ve heard more people talk about buying firearms, people that wouldn't have said the same thing two years ago. I learned what a “go bag” is (full of money, panties, and a gun she said in case shit hits the fan) the other day at work when a colleague thought about making one for herself, just in case.

Migos CULTURE is not without these dark, sinister elements as well, a Travis Scott like sonic macabre of the night life. Even on a track like “Bad and Boujee,” which on the surface is a strutting statement of unabashed masculine braggadocio, is accented by Metro Boomin’s piano chords that are, to me, reminiscent of the chimes on Tupac’s “Hail Mary.” The one thing that hasn't changed in Hip Hop in the 20 years between Tupac’s Don Killuminati and Migos CULTURE is the forms predominance as the art form of the Black American ghetto. Despite superficial developments of style and delivery, The themes of making it out of the struggle for life and liberty that is the ghetto persist, but what has changed, and what is evident in Migos CULTURE that is different from an artist like Tupac is the unapologetic success. Even in Tupac’s most arrogant moments, and this is true of Hip Hop’s great golden age artists, he is still trapped in the guilt and remorse for what he has has done to make it.

On “Hail Mary” Tupac echoes Lady MacBeth’s request to the spirits that tend to mortal thoughts to,

“unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty!”

He raps,

“let's go deep inside the solitary mind

Of a madman who screams in the dark, evil lurks, enemies

See me flee, activate my hate, let it break, to the flame, set trip

Empty out my clip, never stop to aim”

But for Migos, the darkness on the CULTURE stops short of penetrating the conscious and elicit similar anxieties or guilt, as it did for Tupac.

Listen to “T-Shirt,” the latest single from the record. The voice of conscious, Momma, they rap,

“Told me not to sell work

Seventeen five same color tee shirt,”

Then later they are holding the “choppa” to protect the same riches gained from ignoring momma’s request. For Tupac, success requires a loss of humanity that ultimately leads to, if not the physical prison of a jail cell, then the emotional prison of remorse. On CULTURE, Migos has been liberated from the guilt of success through the transformative power of their unending, and unshakable Swagger.

Our president is as sh. Reading President Trump’s Executive Order and looking at the events of the weekend, capitalized by Trump’s termination today of interim Attorney General Sally Yates for “betraying” the administration, The Donald is similarly shielded by an unshakable, and remorseless sense of Swagger. Hours after instituting his Executive Order last Friday, while airports were embroiled in confusion as agents tried to parse through what it all meant, and at least one picture floated on Twitter of a small child in handcuffs, Trump very quietly made his Chief Strategist Steve Bannon a member of the National Security Council, the one that oversees the White House Disposition Matrix, also known as the legal kill list, then very coolly bragged to the press about how well the order was being carried out. It is that kind of shameless confidence in the face of reality that we love in our rappers and should be afraid of in our presidents.

#culture #migos #donald trump #steve bannon #president #lil uzi vert #immigration #immigration ban #tupac shakur #vladimir putin #kremlin #trump dossier #metroboomin #shakespeare #swag #swagger #migos – bad & boujee ft. lil uzi vert (video)#writing

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7newx1 · 4 years

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As the world reels from the novel coronavirus pandemic, Russia is doing its best to turn global turmoil into propaganda fodder. To date, a country of 146 million people straddling Europe and Asia and that has a great deal of commerce with those two great epicenters of the disease reports only 438 confirmed coronavirus cases and no deaths. One previously disclosed fatality has been dismissed by authorities as attributable to other causes. But according to official statistics from Russian state media, over 52,000 people remain under medical supervision “in connection with suspected coronavirus infection.” Perhaps the real number of Russia’s coronavirus patients lies somewhere in between. Garry Kasparov, a world-renowned former world chess champion and the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, told The Daily Beast why the Kremlin’s dubious claims shouldn’t be taken at face value: “Of course Russia is lying about their coronavirus stats and I can say that confidently because they lie about everything,” said Kasparov. “Dictatorships lie when they have to—and when they don’t; it’s about control. Control of information, shaping reality, and, most importantly, appearing all-powerful and all-knowing. If the regime can be surprised or overwhelmed by a virus, maybe it’s not so powerful after all, a dangerous line of thought for a repressed population to have. Until there is truly independent testing—and the stories we’re hearing out of Russia are not encouraging—we just don’t know what’s going on.” Even so, Western media outlets have disregarded the Kremlin’s less-than-sterling reputation for honesty and transparency, and lauded Russia’s self-proclaimed success in controlling the deadly virus.In January, Fox News reported Russia’s decision to close its border with China and in early February uncritically repeated the claim that “Russia has only two confirmed cases of the virus, but authorities have taken measures to prevent its spread by hospitalizing people returning from China as a precaution.” In late February, Fox News stated that “Russia only has three confirmed cases of the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus,” without questioning the probability of such fantastic statistics in light of a pandemic raging in neighboring China. Last Sunday, showcasing Russia’s coronavirus aid to Italy, Fox News posted photographs released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service, with the doors of Russian military trucks adorned with heart-shaped flags that read: “From Russia with love.” Apparently accepting Russia’s claims as ironclad facts, Fox News fawned: “Russia has so far reported very few confirmed coronavirus cases, noting just 306 infections and one death. As the U.S. and Europe struggle to contain the virus, nations once viewed as rivals are stepping up in the global coronavirus response.” CNN wrote on Saturday that, “According to information released by Russian officials, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's strategy seems to have worked. The number of confirmed Russian coronavirus cases is surprisingly low, despite Russia sharing a lengthy border with China and recording its first case back in January.” Kasparov, a persistent critic of Putin, wonders why anyone would believe this stuff, much less report it. “Repeating Russia’s numbers is ridiculous. Trust must be earned, and Putin lies about everything from his invasion of Ukraine to the more directly comparable epidemic of HIV in Russia that officially doesn’t exist. Why should western governments and media treat Putin’s dictatorship in good faith when it’s not returned, and in fact is exploited?” Putin Worries Coronavirus Could Screw Up His Constitutional ‘Coronation’Russia’s alleged triumph over the coronavirus coincides with Putin’s maneuvers to become the country’s president for life, a role all but assured through pending constitutional changes. Amendments in question have already been approved by both houses of parliament and are now pending a nationwide vote on April 22, which will take place come rain or shine—coronavirus notwithstanding. The possibility of conducting the vote by mail is currently under consideration. In the meantime, the Kremlin-controlled Russian state media are reminding citizens that the country’s very survival depends on Putin’s leadership. Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russia's most popular Sunday news program, Vesti Nedeli, is leading the way. “Let’s be honest,” he insisted earlier this month: “Russia without Putin is non-viable.” But there is ample evidence the regime’s information war is being disregarded by Russians in the trenches trying to deal with the reality of the disease. On Monday, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin gave the authorities five days to develop a system that would track and notify people who have come in contact with any known carriers of coronavirus. The system would simultaneously notify special regional headquarters set up to fight the pandemic.Authorities have begun building a 500-person hospital to house coronavirus patients near Moscow and Russian doctors reportedly are alarmed that some cases are being ascribed to pneumonia and seasonal flu without testing. The same state media TV shows that would have you believe everything is under control are being filmed without audiences. Everyday Russians are stocking up on astronomical quantities of toilet paper and buckwheat, disregarding the government’s assurances that coronavirus is being contained. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state media outlets RT and Sputnik, launched a Twitter initiative designed to prove that Russian grocery stores show no signs of panic buying. Simonyan’s idea backfired, as multiple citizens responded with photographs of emptied store shelves.Lingering memories of Soviet-era cover-ups are exacerbated by more recent denials, such as Russia’s covert warfare in Ukraine, its role in the downing of the Malaysian aircraft MH-17, clumsy denials of the Skripal poisonings and obfuscation of crucial details about a radioactive explosion involving a nuclear-powered missile in northern Russia last year. But the Kremlin’s persistent aim to keep the coronavirus numbers down is paying off thus far, since Russia’s international flights are unimpeded by worldwide bans. While U.S. President Donald J. Trump barred travelers from China, its largest neighbor continues to receive the benefit of the doubt.“Just as China’s information crackdown led directly to the massive outbreak now threatening the world,” says Kasparov, “Putin’s will also have an impact across the Russian border. The radioactive cloud from Chernobyl poisoned much of Europe. The flights still coming out of Russia—not on the banned list because of the low official numbers—could spread disease all over the globe.” Painting a rosy picture of Russia’s future, the Kremlin-controlled state media predicted doom and gloom for everybody but the motherland, especially the hated United States.Last week, experts on The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev were crowing about economic troubles for the West. Russian economist Mikhail Khazin opined that Russia is the only region that can grow and prosper economically during the challenging times of the coronavirus pandemic. Other experts on the show suggested that America is withering as a superpower, while a new age is dawning for Russia and China. They concurred that “Soviet-like regimes are winning” and the new world will be more authoritarian. Host Vladimir Soloviev concluded: “Enough talk about individual freedoms.” With angry animus, Soloviev argued that history would disprove the premise of Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man and would lead to the uprooting of liberal democracies.As he has in the past, Soloviev referred to President Trump as “Donald Ivanovych” and marveled at the statements and actions of the American leader who is himself in the risk group for contracting coronavirus. The Russian Models Instagramming From China’s Coronavirus CapitalStill, Russian state TV pundits kept their usually sharp ridicule to the minimum. Their exchanges revealed the hope that Western sanctions imposed after the annexation of Crimea and other Putin abuses of international law would soon be lifted, with the coronavirus pandemic overshadowing all prior concerns. Dmitry Kiselyov argued during this Sunday’s episode of Vesti Nedeli that multiple Western governments will be undergoing deep changes and the sanctions against Russia will soon become obsolete. As for the short-term propaganda goals, the Kremlin still anticipates the arrival later this spring of U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien for Moscow’s big 75th anniversary celebration of victory over the Nazis. President Donald J. Trump reportedly “wanted to go but faced pressure from advisers not to embark on such a journey.” The parade is scheduled for May 9—the very month the coronavirus epidemic is expected to have reached a peak in Russia.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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thisdaynews · 4 years

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The Trouble with TikTok

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-trouble-with-tiktok/

The Trouble with TikTok

Margaret Sullivan was having fun. TheWashington Postmedia critic and former public editor of theNew York Timescollaborated in the production of a humorous musical video on TikTok earlier this month. “You hardened journos may think this is pointless,” she tweeted, “but the street cred I now have with my 12-year-old twin goddaughters…” A few days later, anotherWashington PostTikTok popped up, tweeted by Dave Jorgenson, thePost’s in-house TikTok expert. In it, happy newsroom faces flash by in a series of quick cuts, with the notable exception of a deadpan Marty Baron, the paper’s executive editor.

Set to upbeat music, these quirky videos seem relatively harmless. They’re simple promotional vehicles, and they attract young TikTok-loving audiences. But America’s journalists, like America’s youth, are falling in love with the most effective medium ever introduced to extend Chinese media practices into the United States. Journalists should not be promoting a platform with a documented history of political censorship. Nor should journalists use TikTok as a news medium, because TikTok—unlike other attempts to extend authoritarian media globally, such as RT (Russia Today)—relies on its users’ ignorance of its origins and practices. How many teens, or journalists, are aware TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, paid what was at the time the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for invading the privacy of underage users?

Story Continued Below

TikTok seems like a great new media story, and, in some ways, it is. For a relatively new social media platform, TikTok’s numbers are staggering. It is the No. 1 app downloaded in the iOS store, and it’s estimated that in the first quarter of 2019, more than 220 million TikTok app downloads occurred between Google Play and Apple’s iOS store. Funny TikTok memes pop up on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as well as in its proprietary app. If TikTok seems like it’s everywhere these days, that’s because Bytedance spends a fortune to keep teens hooked and to keep everyone else talking about it. In September, TikTok was the top advertiser on Snapchat, and the second-largest advertiser on Youtube. TheWall Street Journalreports that Bytedance plans to spend an astounding $1 billion advertising TikTok this year.

But from a journalistic perspective, the question of what can’t be found on TikTok is more important than the quirky music videos that dominate the app. TikTok, which is called Douyin in China, is the first successful global social media giant pioneered domestically under the Chinese censorship regime, and since the app’s introduction, questions have swirled about what videos are allowed to appear on the platform. According to internal documents describing TikTok’s guidelines obtained by theGuardian—policies that TikTok now claims are outdated and no longer employed—TikTok censored videos mentioning taboo topics in China, such as Tiananmen Square, Tibetan and Taiwanese independence and the Falun Gong. Likewise, videos and hashtags about the Hong Kong protests “barely exist on TikTok,” theWashington Postnoted. A former TikTok content moderator told theNew York Timesthat, in the newspaper’s words, “managers in the United States had instructed moderators to hide videos that included any political messages or themes, not just those related to China.”

TikTok is both an audacious attempt to extend Chinese global media reach and a fun app that promotes joy. Those two realities aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they’re symbiotic. According to the documents obtained bytheGuardian, TikTok censored numerous subjects that extend beyond the obvious topics deemed dangerous to the Chinese state. According to theGuardian’sreporting on the directives in the documents, TikTok suppressed videos about “a specific list of 20 ‘foreign leaders or sensitive figures’ including Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung, Mahatma Gandhi, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Kim Jong-un, [and] Shinzo Abe.” Think of how much social media vitriol is generated by figures on that list, and it’s easy to understand why a fun app would want to blacklist those politically divisive figures.

After the documents were revealed, the company issued a statement denying it continues its previous policies. “Let us be very clear,” the company said, “TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked. Period. Our U.S. moderation team, which is led out of California, reviews content for adherence to our U.S. policies—just like other U.S. companies in our space. We are not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”

Still, despite TikTok’s new claims to be observing standard U.S. media practices, it’s clear that until very recently TikTok more closely monitored its content than its American social media competitors did. Even if TikTok might not formally remove content, the former content moderator interviewed by theNew York Timesnoted that TikTok employed what’s commonly known as “shadow banning,” a practice that would allow “such political posts to remain on users’ profile pages but … prevent them from being shared more widely in TikTok’s main video feed.”

The global debate over the tension between free expression and social harmony is seemingly playing out everywhere today. China’s enormous economic leverage has created new parameters for conduct and behavior by business partners seeking access to the Chinese market. Just as the NBA had to very carefully navigate a tweet by a Houston Rockets executive supporting the Hong Kong protests that infuriated the Chinese state, so too must Hollywood producers, video game corporations, book and newspaper publishers, and numerous other businesses navigate Chinese censorship demands. These demands are becoming more common and more insistent, and on platforms like TikTok, they’ll no doubt continue to emerge.

Chinese censorship has gone global. Just as the U.S. government spent the second half of the 20th century encouraging the global expansion of American values, such as freedom of expression, the Chinese government has now opened the first half of the 21st century by promoting global restrictions intended to ensure approving portrayals of Chinese state authority. The consequences of this evolution in global media culture arise almost daily. When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg proclaims the importance of free speech, as he did recently in a speech at Georgetown University, his implicit target is the Chinese regime that bans Facebook, not progressives who want Facebook to more tightly regulate political advertising and hate speech. Facebook, it should be noted, will soon launch “Lasso,” a direct competitor to TikTok.

In recent public pronouncements and congressional hearings, some U.S. politicians argue Twitter and Facebook are, in fact, doing too littleto combat the dangerous spread of misinformation and inflammatory propaganda. Under this line of thinking, moderation policies like TikTok’s might offer a remedy to America’s social media ills. Senator Kamala Harris, for example, has called for Twitter to shutter President Donald Trump’s account because of what she says are his violations of Twitter’s terms of service. Zuckerberg had no answer when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked him whether Facebook would prohibit political advertisements featuring provable and obvious lies.

This battle between free expression and policing of content is playing out within TikTok, too. TheWall Street Journalrecently reported that ISIS uploaded gruesome torture and beheading videos—set to danceable music and accompanied with celebratory emojis—to TikTok. The videos were not detected and deleted by TikTok until the newspaper made the company aware of their existence. By then, they had been shared thousands of times. When terrorists and criminals violate terms of service by spreading messages or portraying crimes that directly inspire violence through algorithmic networks, some level of content control might be deemed legitimate even by libertarian critics. Questions like these speak to the most fundamental notions of what constitutes an ethical and responsible public sphere and how a society should organize and regulate its media.

Democracy and efficiency often sit in conflict. The issues arising with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter are forcing every nation and society to calibrate its tolerance for media freedom on a spectrum that runs from the protection of liberty through the encouragement of accuracy to the enforcement of harmony.

It’s the responsibility of journalists to explain this context, and right now, they’re falling down on the job. Not long ago, theNew York Timespublished a largely celebratory article about TikTok and its embrace by American high school students and educators. The reporter, Taylor Lorenz, noted parenthetically that TikTok’s corporate owner Bytedance is a “Chinese tech conglomerate,” but nowhere was TikTok’s history of censorship of content inimical to the Chinese state’s authority mentioned.

Perhaps more important, nowhere did Lorenz mention TikTok paid a $5.7 million fine to the U.S. government earlier this year. The fine, paid to settle violations identified by the FTC, involved the illegal collection of “names, email addresses, pictures and locations of kids under age 13,” as theWashington Postreported,adding that it was “a record penalty for violations of the nation’s child privacy law.” One would think a feature article celebrating a social media app’s enormous popularity among American teens would note that it had not only demographically targeted users younger than 13, but that it had also admitted illegally collecting information about them.

For users who might consider employing TikTok in schools—and news sites—around America, the inclusion of such relevant information is essential. The general tone of the piece would not have to change at all; TikTok is, in many ways, a liberating social technology that brings much joy to the lives of millions of American teenagers. But it’s also a Chinese social media program that’s settled with the FTC for illegally collecting information on underage users, has a history of censoring user-generated content, and is now said to be under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a governmental review panel. That national security investigation is looking into how the app sends data back to China.

Just as any article about Facebook would be incomplete if it ignored Facebook’s history of apologies for admitted privacy violations, any article about TikTok that omits its record of censorship and illegal behavior is irresponsible.

This might be the juncture where TikTok and its American counterparts meet. None of the social media giants, whether American or Chinese, wants to reveal embarrassing information about how it actually conducts its work as media. Yet it seems clear all social media—whether TikTok, Weibo, Facebook or Twitter—privilege state or corporate authority above the public’s interest. That makes them terrific vehicles for advertising and propaganda.

It also means the need for independent, comprehensive and critical reporting about these apps is vital. Watching journalists vie to become “TikTok famous” like high school teenagers isn’t encouraging.

#Foreign #Politics #TikTok #trouble

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4evertrumpanalysis · 5 years

Text

Putin and Trump. Bromance as a conspiracy

Welcome back, guys. As we all noticed, Trump has a weird obsession with using tweets to express his emotions. He uses them to express his anger against the European Parliament, he uses them when expressing his hate towards fake news, he uses the to express his constant anger towards LGBT democrats, and he sometimes shows his undying love for covfefe.

All in all, some of his most peculiar tweets are about none other than the president of Russia: Vladimir Putin.

As I browsed through the numerous tweets Trump posts, I found a couple of gems that might tell us more about their bromance, if analyzed properly. Through out time, the dynamic of their relationship, portrayed by Trump himself changes a lot.

First, we start in 2011 when in his book “Time to Get Tough”, Trump praises Putin for his “big plans for Russia” which totally contradicted what Obama was trying to do. By saying “ I respect Putin and the Russians but cannot believe our leader allows them to get away with so much…Hats off to the Russians…”, he begins showing his admiration towards the Russian president, totally ignoring his own president, with whom he never agreed with.

I did some digging and how it evolves is that, in 2012 he tweeted his disappointment in Putin after “he showed bad body language”.

Kind of funny how his opinions changed so fast, because shortly after that, in 2013, Trump regained his respect for him, when Russia passed “anti-gay” laws. In his tweet he wrote how he “will become his new best friend”. Which makes me think that, considering the language he is using, Donald Trump will always state his admiration for Vladimir Putin if what he does is close to what he envisions.

All is fair in love and war, in 2014, Trump yet again has mixed feelings about Putin, which tells me that he gets very excited when the Russian president shares his ideals or pays attention to him, but starts bad mouthing him once that attention is gone. Through his tweets we can observe that all Trump wants is to receive approval from Putin.

The reply from a fellow twitter user, underlines how at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump was very happy to tell everyone how well he was treated in Russia and how he got “a present, a beautiful present” from Putin himself.

Although Trump had his standards set and his impression of Putin was fixed, he chose to deny that maybe Putin really doesnt like the states. In my opinion, the way he uses Twitter as a way to show his thoughts on certain matters, is a very open and blatant way to attract attention, because what other thing does want from Vladimir Putin except for his recognition?

In 2016, Trump stated in (yet again) a tweet that Putin “liked him”. The context being: Democratic National Committee emails being leaked by WikiLeaks, and Trump saying that the Russians were behind it, and doing it as a favor to him because Putin “likes” him .

In conclusion, throughout 4 years of them knowing each other, the two presidents had a long bromance history, kept (inevitably) alive by Trumps records: his tweets.

I dont know wether his tweets can be proof for what actually happened in between them because it is very one sided, which reminds me a lot of unrequited love.

Through the language Trump uses in his tweets we can see that he is very adamant about communicating through media what his relationship with Putin really is like and believes he can influence the public’s opinion as well. When you use media like Twitter to influence someone’s political view, it means you’re really using your last resort.

So guys, my fellow millennials, citizens of USA, or just politically woke followers, if you ever want to be a politician or president of the United States, dont go acting like a high school girl in love that likes to post her thoughts about her crush on Twitter.

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