Hypothesis

Since October 1, 2017, high publicity mass murders in the US break down like this:

ISIS – 8

Domestic terrorists – 84

We will talk seriously about gun regulation when the Fox News audience is as fearful of being shot to death by a hotheaded White guy while walking around downtown as they are of being run over by a Uzbeki.

In other words, the carnage must be as spectacular as bringing down the World Trade Center.

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Mozart again. Laudate Dominum.

It has happened here.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say ‘Heil’ to him, nor will they call him ‘Führer’ or ‘Duce.’ But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of ‘O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'” (1935)

— Dorothy Thompson, first American journalist thrown out of Germany in 1934 for criticizing Hitler

Another Dorothy Thompson quote:

“Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.”

Celebrate the unconventionally courageous and kind.

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Coolness. What is it and what are its characteristics?

What is Cool?

In spite of the ambiguity, it seems that we remain capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. So what is cool? Let me say that cool resists linear structures. Thus a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool, while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool. A CEO is not cool, unless he is a reasonable risk-taker and refrains from pursuing success in a predictable fashion. Coolness is a nonconformist balance that manages to square circles and to personify paradoxes. This has been well known since at least the time of cool jazz. This paradoxical nature has much to do with cool’s origins being the fusion of submission and subversion.

A president is uncool if he clings to absolute power, but becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power in order to maintain democratic values. This does not mean that the cool person needs to be an idealist. On the contrary, very few of the coolest rappers are idealists. Idealism can be extremely uncool, as shown by the self-righteous examples of both neoDarwinists and creationists. Cool is a balance created by the cool person’s style, not through straightforward rules or imposed standards. Coolness implies the power of abstraction without becoming overly abstract. Similarly, the cool person stays close to real life without getting absorbed by it. Going with the masses is as uncool as being overly eccentric. It is not cool to take everything, nor is it cool to give everything away: it seems rather that the master of cool handles the give and take of life as if it were a game. The notion of ‘play’ is important to cool, because in games power gets fractured and becomes less serious, which enables the player to develop a certain detached style while playing. For the cool, this detached style matters more than the pursuit of money, power and ideals.

The good thing about being cool is that most cool people are not born that way. It can be nurtured.

Right now, Bernie, Donna and Liz are not cool. Trump has never been cool. Anyone whoever voted for Trump is viciously anti-cool.

The regulars on this site? Very cool.

Dear Lizzy Warren

I read that you told Jake Tapper that you agreed that the 2016 primary was rigged for Hillary Clinton based on things Donna Brazile said. By the way, even Donna Brazile says the primary wasn’t rigged but she was shocked *SHOCKED!!* that the only Democrat who was running last year for the Democratic Party nomination was also the person who bailed out that same party with her own personal money.

The 2016 primary wasn’t rigged. The 2008 primary was. Here’s what that rigging looked like when the DNC rules committee voted to give Barack Obama 54 unpledged delegates from Michigan after taking his name off the ballot resulted in him losing the primary to Hillary Clinton. Let’s watch, shall we?

Hillary Clinton went to the Denver Convention trailing Obama by a statistically insignificant number of votes, all of them the product of the rules committee decision, and didn’t even get the courtesy of an unrigged floor vote. She won the popular vote then too.

Where were you in 2008? I can guarantee you that every Hillary voter in 2008 has that Rules committee meeting etched in their minds forever, especially since many of us were forced to vote for that ladder climbing, self absorbed corporate schmoozer in November 2008.

We worked our asses off last year for Hillary in the primaries where she also took all of the big blue states. Bernie has lost all of my respect at this point. He needs to sit down and STFU. And you and the other Dems need to remember to dance with the ones who brung ya’. That was us, the forgotten, ignored, denigrated but now, really enraged Clinton supporters.

You owe us all an apology.

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Pm317 pointed me to Elizabeth Rogers @ahumorlessfem on Twitter. Rogers posted a thread explaining the Hillary Victory Fund in mind numbing detail. Here’s the Storify version of the thread.

Which only goes to prove that “no good deed goes unpunished” especially if your name is Hillary Clinton.

The DNC power vacuum

Read this account of the DNC from Donna Brazile. Bottom line: no one was minding the store at the DNC between 2012 and 2015. Obama’s consultants had drained it dry and he left the organization $25 million in debt. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was in charge and she was doing a shitty job with fundraising.

When Clinton’s campaign found out about it, she chipped in $10 million of her own money, put the DNC on a strict budget and signed a campaign fundraising deal with it to keep it afloat with her campaign taking a cut as if she were an incumbent president. It was highly unusual but probably necessary.

Donna also looked for proof that the primaries were rigged against Bernie. They weren’t.

Bernie lost, fair and square.

Soooo, there’s that.

You’d think that someone with as much control as Hillary had would make sure to lock Bernie out- just like Obama’s friends in the DNC locked Hillary out in 2008. But she didn’t.

As to whether the deal she made with the DNC was unethical, I dunno. She was technically and officially, the ONLY DEMOCRAT in the primaries. Bernie wouldn’t join the party. Make of that what you will but if you’re not going to join the club, you shouldn’t expect to share the spoils.

Also, Donna Brazile is partially responsible for what happened to the DNC and the anger of the “old coalition” that voted Trump into power. Dumping the working class and the south was part of her and Obama’s strategy for getting elected.

Maybe she should keep a low profile.

Just sayin’.

Ayayay!

So much going on in the last 24 hours, it’s hard to know where to start.

How about how Rupert Murdoch and company at the Wall Street Journal and Fox News are gang banging America. Jennifer Rubin at WaPo laments how the Wall Street Journal editorial page, always out on the edge, has now completely abandoned any notion of principled conservatism in service to Trump. It’s recent editorial in favor of firing Mueller was breathtaking in its capitulation to the mob. That should alarm us because it’s not the White working class that reads the WSJ.

While Fox News never had a credible domain like the WSJ’s news division had, the WSJ had retained its respectability before the Murdoch’s bought it. Says Rubin:

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a different matter, however. The move from grudging defense of a Trump presidency to full-blown, Fox-like rationalization has been ongoing since Trump won the nomination. This week’s double-hitter was met on social media from liberals and conservatives alike with a mix of horror and sadness. “Just when you think you’ve lost your capacity for shock, you read this [op-ed from Rivkin and Casey] + WSJ unsigned editorial calling for Mueller’s resignation,” tweeted former Journal opinion writer and editor Bari Weiss.

The Journal editorial page was long thought to be the crown jewel of fiscal conservatism — a staunch defender of open markets, legal immigration and economic freedom. Internationally, it was anti-communist and supportive of U.S. leadership in the world.

Jay Rosen of New York University tells me via email, “From my perspective the Oct. 25 editorial was an important event because it combines so effectively with this development, in which the Journal reporters were told to stand out by their greater willingness to give Trump the benefit of the doubt — greater, that is, than the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, Bloomberg and others in their peer group.” He continues, “The implicit appeal is not to impersonal and timeless standards of veracity but to an ideological position that, according to the newsroom editors, the others guys have taken while the Journal does not.” He argues, “This is an attempt to give intellectual respectability within the news tribe to ‘the enemy of the people’ attacks. The editors were saying to their reporters: Okay, maybe not enemies of the people, but they’re acting like enemies of Trump! We don’t do that.” He sees a cumulative effect at work. “The news staff and the editorial pages do operate more independently than people assume, but it’s the combined effect we should look at,” Rosen says. “The news side gives him the benefit of doubt, the editorial pages endorse an extreme position in which Mueller cannot fairly investigate. The signal to what used to be called establishment Republicans is: There are no institutionalists among us any longer; it’s tribalism all the way down.”

In this case, Tribalism starts at the top as well.

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Hillary Clinton was on the Daily Show last night and explains why we all need to be more vigilant about our news sources and why she’s not going away:

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Susan Simpson, one of the most thorough lawyers I’ve ever read, and Preet Bharara weigh in on Trump’s defense of the constitution with respect to the Uzbeki who ran people over on Tuesday in NYC:

Some things are worth spending money and time on. Our justice system has to remain one of our Crown Jewels to the rest of the world.

Extreme vetting, elimination of due process and a sped up execution will do nothing to deter the ideological extremists who are already in this country. They’re already prepared to die for their cause.

Everybody who is peeing their pants over terrorism on soft targets should calm their tits already. Deterrence depends on anti-terrorism programs already in place. If you want to have a better chance of not being killed in a terrorism attack, your time is better spent pressuring your congressperson to reject Trump’s defunding of anti-terrorism programs like the one he wants to eliminate in NYC.

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More mellow music from Zero 7:

Hmmm, that’s interesting.

See this tweet from David Begnaud at CBS:

Manafort is supposedly under house arrest with a very soigné ankle bracelet, a $10,000,000 bail, and was asked to surrender his passport.

I wonder which one he surrendered?

Inquiring readers want to know…

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Senator Schumer (D-NY) has a message for president Trump in the aftermath of the terrorist attack yesterday. It’s about that anti-terrorism funding that NYC is counting on:

And all you Trump voters peeing your pants about Muslims running you down should think about whether Trump has your best interests in mind when it comes to your personal safety or if his apathy is just a result of his boorish and calloused, “F}#% NYC, it didn’t vote for me” attitude.

If he can do it to NYC, he can do it to anyone who is insufficiently servile. He likes whip kissers.

It’s never too early…

… for a good, mellow song.

Here is Sia Furler and Zero 7 before she became just Sia:

OT: You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on jeans to make your ass look great. These dirt cheap ones work just fine. Wait for a sale. I got mine for about $20 bucks.