very good post Doublethink. It's been a disaster for Britain. The next Ambassador needs to be an excellent golfer who is good at just throwing games.
Well, it looks like our next Prime Minister is going to be Trump's BFF and poodle, so clearly anyone speaking the truth, in whatever capacity, will clearly be entirely unwelcome and out of place in the next UK administration.
I'm wondering if, in fact, Evil Insect Overlords have taken over the world (or are trying to), but haven't quite got the Humming-Bean-look correct (or convincing)...
For months now, I've been reminded of passages from one of The Famous Children's Books by some Famous Religious Author (but I devoured them all in one swell foop of time and now can't tell them apart, so I can't say which book -- maybe L'Engle? Maybe A Swiftly Tilting Planet?) . Anyway, the passages have the child protagonists viewing A Shadow (through a telescope, surely?), and The Shadow is moving slowly across the face of the planet (Earth?), engulfing it in darkness.
Just reading it gave me chills.
And I feel like it's happening For Real right now.
Just when I think he can not get any worse he does.
How many times has this been said on this thread and the other one? Perhaps we should reconcile ourselves to the fact that it can always get worse but we are incapable of imagining what those worse things are because we are too pure/naive/stupid.
Just when I think he can not get any worse he does.
How many times has this been said on this thread and the other one? Perhaps we should reconcile ourselves to the fact that it can always get worse but we are incapable of imagining what those worse things are because we are too pure/naive/stupid.
Or because what the Orange one does is actually unimaginable. We cannot perceive how bad he actually is.
A regent from what I recall. Plans were made when he first fell ill, but he subsequently recovered. After his terminal decline, a regent was selected.
I fear Pence is next in line to your throne...I'm not sure from what I read that is much better.
(as an aside, note the porphyria diagnosis is questioned by some)
And of course the nation was already governed by the Government in the Houses of Parliament. Royalty had fully assumed their role as figure-heads by then. A seriously ill or mad First/Prime Minister would have done more harm to the country's administration than poor old George.
I'm wondering if, in fact, Evil Insect Overlords have taken over the world (or are trying to), but haven't quite got the Humming-Bean-look correct (or convincing)...
For months now, I've been reminded of passages from one of The Famous Children's Books by some Famous Religious Author (but I devoured them all in one swell foop of time and now can't tell them apart, so I can't say which book -- maybe L'Engle? Maybe A Swiftly Tilting Planet?) . Anyway, the passages have the child protagonists viewing A Shadow (through a telescope, surely?), and The Shadow is moving slowly across the face of the planet (Earth?), engulfing it in darkness.
Just reading it gave me chills.
And I feel like it's happening For Real right now.
Doris Lessing portrays European colonialism as a dark shadow spreading across the planet. In a different book she describes a mock trial of the White Races that is turned into a trial of humanity as participants realise that their own history is not as spotless as they imagined. Lessing was born in Persia and grew up in Rhodesia. She is a very thought-provoking 20th Century writer. I sold quite a few firsts of hers when I was mad, and over the years I have been replacing what I lost and adding to it. So I have rather a connexion to her writing and may be biased.
Maybe we don't have to worry so much about who to run against Trump in the next election. Yesterday he lost all the votes in Baltimore. 'Rat infested." His voters like him when he's dissing others, but people are sensitive about their hometowns.
I'm trying to imagine the amount of outrage that would be generated if a Democratic politician regularly referred to parts of rural (and therefore "real") America as "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" and similar terms.
I seem to recall a clip from a WW2-themed film, in which Himmler (?) described Jews as comparable, in terms of utility, to rats, or bed-bugs.
If the potus goes the same way, it could be said that it takes one to know one...though it could also be said that, as food for predators, rats, and bed-bugs, are actually more useful than he. It's worth remembering, too, that rats are intelligent, resourceful, and sagacious, animals, which is more than can be said honestly of the potus.
I wouldn't wish the little blighters on poor, ensorcelled, Melan(chol)ia, but might it be possible to infest the White House with bed-bugs? Even they would be hard pushed to penetrate that orange hide, but it would be worth a try.
I wouldn't wish the little blighters on poor, ensorcelled, Melan(chol)ia, but might it be possible to infest the White House with bed-bugs? Even they would be hard pushed to penetrate that orange hide, but it would be worth a try.
They don't sleep in the same room, so you could perhaps just infest his. But what did the bedbugs ever do to deserve that?
I wouldn't wish the little blighters on poor, ensorcelled, Melan(chol)ia, but might it be possible to infest the White House with bed-bugs? Even they would be hard pushed to penetrate that orange hide, but it would be worth a try.
You're too kind. I have no sympathy for her. She admits she married him for his money and you know what they say about marrying for money -- you work for it every day. If the bed bugs infest the, "I don't really care," jacket and the rats shred the speech she stole from Michelle Obama, that would be fine with me.
I note, though, that the said potus appears to have no knowledge of the existence, or purpose, of the Oxford comma.
No doubt. Basic English as she is spoke often seems to stump him. However, he seems well versed in the use of the colon. It's the part of his anatomy he seems to do most of his speaking out of.
It appears ICE can now pick you up anywhere in the US, demand you prove you are a citizen and deport you if they don’t believe you - without access to due process. And they have an exemption allowing them to engage in racial profiling ?
Is this correct, or are the reports I’m seeing exaggerated ?
They can and do, though not necessarily legally. That's about to be tested in the courts (give 'em hell, judges). We just had another American citizen deported for three freaking weeks before he made it back here, and a nine-year-old schoolgirl citizen held in detention for more than a full day because a border creature didn't like the way she explained herself on the way to school. No doubt there are many, many more cases.
It's not without due process, technically. It's just that, when it comes to anything related to immigration, what counts as process is laughable.
I've done a few immigration court cases. Immigration is one of the few areas where non-lawyers are granted license to represent clients in tribunals. And, so long as you've got a Real Shiny Barred Lawyer™ looking over your shoulder and countersigning your forms, they'll let law students represent clients in court. So I've gone toe-to-toe with ICE a few times.
The first time, we got the case dismissed because we bothered saying "no" when they asked if we conceded the charges, instead making them prove that our client was actually removable. A pair of experienced attorneys working for the people of the United States couldn't prove the underlying facts, couldn't find the records they needed in their files (they hadn't read them, though we had), and ended up pissing off the judge.
They then ran us through two months of administrative and bureaucratic nonsense and runaround, threatened our client again, and generally wasted our time (and trips to their office two hours south) until someone new got assigned the file and decided it was easier to give us what our client was legally entitled to rather than deal with us any more.
Or then there's the time our asylum client was told by her deportation officer (seriously, that's what they call the ICE officers in the detention centers) that there wasn't any use going to her hearings, because they were going to deport her anyway.
Or the time when we're waiting for our client's closed circuit video appearance (she's at the former medium-security private prison that's now called the "residential center," we're 2.5 hours away at the court) and watching the judge berate the woman who's having her moment in court. She's sobbing, in tears, while the judge is yelling at a translator on the phone that he's holding up to the microphone, trying to tell her to stop crying. Here she is, in a glorified cinder block closet in a prison an ocean away from her home, fleeing unimaginable horrors (or, I guess, quite imaginable ones), without an attorney or any guide to this arcane and capricious system she's found herself in, with the only voice speaking anything like her own language coming from a telephone held to a microphone, translating the harsh words of an uncaring judge.
Or the time when we get a rush shipment of our client's national ID card so she can be released on bail...and the deportation officer loses it. Or can't find it. Or tries to blame us for not delivering it. Or, we find out after some very panicked phone calls to the residential center, never bothered walking the twenty feet from her office to the secure locked box where you drop off sensitive items for the deportation officers.
And that's just with people I've worked with personally, and the stories and details that aren't identifying—because these stories are so common. This is normal. This is how the immigration system in America works.
People often wonder how the Nazis were able to find those willing to be concentration camp guards, or run the trains that led to them...
In this case, it's pretty simple, especially in border communities: you can make good money as a border patrol/USCIS/ICE agent, which is hard to come by in lots of border towns. It's a federal job, with a pension, security, a union, and health insurance. If you have to feed your family, the job that pays three times what cutting sugarcane or picking cotton in the South Texas sun would...well. It's not always an easy choice, but sometimes it has to be made.
Now, there's a broader question of why many of these regions have been neglected, exploited, and left impoverished for so long that people have to take these jobs out of necessity. Or why babyjails, residential centers, and prisons always seem to pop up in depressed communities where attempts to shut them down become attacks on a dying town's biggest and most stable employer.
I saw an article about Pelosi pointing out that Kushner owns slum properties in Baltimore, some of which have been the subject of complaints about black mold and rodent infestation. Once again Trump blames others for his own evil conduct and those of his family.
I have come to the opinion that anyone wishing to join a body concerned with enforcing borders or dealing with immigrants, in the USA or the UK (and that includes the Home Office), should automatically be rejected.
I was listening to NPR yesterday, one of their reporters went to a recent Trump rally and interviewed some supporters. They all listened to Fox News because the others were fake. One woman said she loved Trump because he was "rough around the edges," and didn't think before he spoke and she was rough around the edges so he spoke for her. What can we do about dumb people who don't want a president who is smarter than they are?
I was nearly in tears listening to these people, but then they did a piece on wild boars infiltrating the cities, eating our garbage and spreading diseases so deadly they have to be incinerated. Somehow it cheered me up.
We have right-wing nutjobs in Australia who respond positively to racism and bigotry and don't look beyond their own self-interest other than to the interests of 'white' Australians. There are people here who like Trump. Your problems @Twilight are similar to ours. America is not alone in having to deal with idiots and the evil bastards who stoke their dangerous stupidity.
Comments
Well, it looks like our next Prime Minister is going to be Trump's BFF and poodle, so clearly anyone speaking the truth, in whatever capacity, will clearly be entirely unwelcome and out of place in the next UK administration.
O that he would crawl back to the primeval slime whence he came, Spawn of Azathoth that he is.
The thought that he is still potus is almost unbelievable. You couldn't make it up...
And, alas and alack, I fear @Anselmina is probably right about Ukland's fate next PM.
For months now, I've been reminded of passages from one of The Famous Children's Books by some Famous Religious Author (but I devoured them all in one swell foop of time and now can't tell them apart, so I can't say which book -- maybe L'Engle? Maybe A Swiftly Tilting Planet?) . Anyway, the passages have the child protagonists viewing A Shadow (through a telescope, surely?), and The Shadow is moving slowly across the face of the planet (Earth?), engulfing it in darkness.
Just reading it gave me chills.
And I feel like it's happening For Real right now.
Cthulhu preserve us all...
How many times has this been said on this thread and the other one? Perhaps we should reconcile ourselves to the fact that it can always get worse but we are incapable of imagining what those worse things are because we are too pure/naive/stupid.
Or because what the Orange one does is actually unimaginable. We cannot perceive how bad he actually is.
How did people deal with King George III of England when he was mad from porphyria?
Thx.
I fear Pence is next in line to your throne...I'm not sure from what I read that is much better.
(as an aside, note the porphyria diagnosis is questioned by some)
And of course the nation was already governed by the Government in the Houses of Parliament. Royalty had fully assumed their role as figure-heads by then. A seriously ill or mad First/Prime Minister would have done more harm to the country's administration than poor old George.
Doris Lessing portrays European colonialism as a dark shadow spreading across the planet. In a different book she describes a mock trial of the White Races that is turned into a trial of humanity as participants realise that their own history is not as spotless as they imagined. Lessing was born in Persia and grew up in Rhodesia. She is a very thought-provoking 20th Century writer. I sold quite a few firsts of hers when I was mad, and over the years I have been replacing what I lost and adding to it. So I have rather a connexion to her writing and may be biased.
I blame trump. It is clearly Fake News.
Shame. Shame. Shame.
What various news outlets are saying is, Trump denigrated a congressman's Baltimore district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
While reporting this, a CNN commentator, whose family lives in Baltimore, got choked up.
I note, though, that the said potus appears to have no knowledge of the existence, or purpose, of the Oxford comma.
@Twilight, your unfortunate brain has obviously been affected by potusitis, and, although IANAD, you should seek medical advice immediately.
It should be noted that comparing despised minorities to vermin or disease is a commonplace fascist rhetorical tic.
If the potus goes the same way, it could be said that it takes one to know one...though it could also be said that, as food for predators, rats, and bed-bugs, are actually more useful than he. It's worth remembering, too, that rats are intelligent, resourceful, and sagacious, animals, which is more than can be said honestly of the potus.
I wouldn't wish the little blighters on poor, ensorcelled, Melan(chol)ia, but might it be possible to infest the White House with bed-bugs? Even they would be hard pushed to penetrate that orange hide, but it would be worth a try.
They don't sleep in the same room, so you could perhaps just infest his. But what did the bedbugs ever do to deserve that?
You're too kind. I have no sympathy for her. She admits she married him for his money and you know what they say about marrying for money -- you work for it every day. If the bed bugs infest the, "I don't really care," jacket and the rats shred the speech she stole from Michelle Obama, that would be fine with me.
No doubt. Basic English as she is spoke often seems to stump him. However, he seems well versed in the use of the colon. It's the part of his anatomy he seems to do most of his speaking out of.
Is this correct, or are the reports I’m seeing exaggerated ?
I've done a few immigration court cases. Immigration is one of the few areas where non-lawyers are granted license to represent clients in tribunals. And, so long as you've got a Real Shiny Barred Lawyer™ looking over your shoulder and countersigning your forms, they'll let law students represent clients in court. So I've gone toe-to-toe with ICE a few times.
The first time, we got the case dismissed because we bothered saying "no" when they asked if we conceded the charges, instead making them prove that our client was actually removable. A pair of experienced attorneys working for the people of the United States couldn't prove the underlying facts, couldn't find the records they needed in their files (they hadn't read them, though we had), and ended up pissing off the judge.
They then ran us through two months of administrative and bureaucratic nonsense and runaround, threatened our client again, and generally wasted our time (and trips to their office two hours south) until someone new got assigned the file and decided it was easier to give us what our client was legally entitled to rather than deal with us any more.
Or then there's the time our asylum client was told by her deportation officer (seriously, that's what they call the ICE officers in the detention centers) that there wasn't any use going to her hearings, because they were going to deport her anyway.
Or the time when we're waiting for our client's closed circuit video appearance (she's at the former medium-security private prison that's now called the "residential center," we're 2.5 hours away at the court) and watching the judge berate the woman who's having her moment in court. She's sobbing, in tears, while the judge is yelling at a translator on the phone that he's holding up to the microphone, trying to tell her to stop crying. Here she is, in a glorified cinder block closet in a prison an ocean away from her home, fleeing unimaginable horrors (or, I guess, quite imaginable ones), without an attorney or any guide to this arcane and capricious system she's found herself in, with the only voice speaking anything like her own language coming from a telephone held to a microphone, translating the harsh words of an uncaring judge.
Or the time when we get a rush shipment of our client's national ID card so she can be released on bail...and the deportation officer loses it. Or can't find it. Or tries to blame us for not delivering it. Or, we find out after some very panicked phone calls to the residential center, never bothered walking the twenty feet from her office to the secure locked box where you drop off sensitive items for the deportation officers.
And that's just with people I've worked with personally, and the stories and details that aren't identifying—because these stories are so common. This is normal. This is how the immigration system in America works.
In this case, it's pretty simple, especially in border communities: you can make good money as a border patrol/USCIS/ICE agent, which is hard to come by in lots of border towns. It's a federal job, with a pension, security, a union, and health insurance. If you have to feed your family, the job that pays three times what cutting sugarcane or picking cotton in the South Texas sun would...well. It's not always an easy choice, but sometimes it has to be made.
Now, there's a broader question of why many of these regions have been neglected, exploited, and left impoverished for so long that people have to take these jobs out of necessity. Or why babyjails, residential centers, and prisons always seem to pop up in depressed communities where attempts to shut them down become attacks on a dying town's biggest and most stable employer.
That's another rant entirely.
Blackadder the Third..
I was nearly in tears listening to these people, but then they did a piece on wild boars infiltrating the cities, eating our garbage and spreading diseases so deadly they have to be incinerated. Somehow it cheered me up.
That would endorse the idea of 'survival of the fittest', no?
How about Denmark buy America? Leave their government out of the deal though, they've already been bought.
The Borowitz Report takes this idea and runs with it.