…something that sounds like a bad joke, and it IS bad, but it’s no joke:
Yup. The Very Stable Genius had a brainfart, and one that was already shot down at the height of the Cold War:
During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” according to one source who was there. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” the source added, paraphrasing the president’s remarks.
Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall.
The briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added. “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”
Do the same thing that they did when Eisenhower was president and cooler heads prevailed, people…dismiss the idea on the grounds that it’s dumber than dog turds. Which could be dropped into a hurricane with better results than any number of motherfucking NUKES.
PS: Holy shit, how did I miss THIS? It came out two weeks ago:
…one of the two hydra-heads of the Kochtopus is dead:
And bless David Doel for not sugar-coating anything about this lousy fucker’s life. Including his early adventures in the not-so-fine art of screwing people out of their money (in this case, his brother Fred).
Alas, the OTHER half of the Kochtopus, Charles Fucking Koch, is still alive and kochin’. Meaning, yup, we’re not done with these mofos yet.
And if the will is read and turns out to contain the anticipated plummy posthumous donations to all the usual Kochtopus tentacles, we’ll likely be stuck with hideous, world-wrecking Koch crapaganda for years or even decades to come.
Still, ding fucking DONG. My only sorrow is that it didn’t happen long ago. Like, right around the time these bastards started financing shitty economic and political doctrines via their pet stink tanks.
If by any chance you believed that Jeffrey Epstein’s rich, powerful former cronies had him killed in order to keep him quiet, you might want to calm down, wipe away that lather, and watch this:
Don’t worry, people, this legal fight has just begun. The victims — the REAL people that the rich cronies feared would speak out — are still coming forward. Far from being intimidated by his jailhouse death, they are now empowered. When Epstein hung himself, he released them from the non-disclosure agreements he’d had them sign (under duress, no doubt). They are speaking out, and they are suing his estate…and they stand a good chance of being witnesses in more than one criminal trial in future, too.
Epstein is NOT the victim in this case. He is not even A victim. The exploited girls — recruited by Epstein via Ghislaine Maxwell and who knows what others — are the victims. They are grown women now. They are survivors.
And if anyone thought they were quashed and silenced and would make no trouble, those fools are about to be proved terribly wrong. There is no conspiracy big enough to hold them back any longer.
PS: Here’s the final verdict on how he killed himself:
Seems like there was a perfect storm of factors at work to make it possible. But I don’t doubt that it WAS suicide, even so.
Easily. According to Jeanne Theoharis, interviewed here, the conditions in the facility where he was being held, pending trial, were atrocious:
And let’s not forget that he was in solitary…a fact that’s significant in itself. A mentally healthy individual would have trouble living like that. Epstein, as the circumstances of his life should make abundantly clear, was NOT mentally healthy. Far from it. A man who has murals painted on the walls of his mansion, of himself inside the razor-wired walls of a federal penitentiary, is not a well man. Even truly tough guys, like El Chapo, who is also currently imprisoned in the MCC, find the place to be a hellhole. So it’s not surprising that the conditions in there would be sufficient to push a more vulnerable individual over the edge.
Moreover, there are the salient facts that Epstein’s own lawyer pushed for him to be taken OFF suicide watch. A defence attorney would presumably be acting on the orders of his client. I can only gather that Epstein WANTED to kill himself, and was looking for an opportunity. Whether he did so out of despair, driven to it by a depressing environment that would crack even a tough nut, or whether he did it with some obstructive purpose in mind, either way, it’s clear to me that he offed himself. And that the jailhouse conditions proved infinitely helpful to him, with or without the nefarious background influence of such despicables as Bill Barr, and all the powerful types he pimped those girls out to.
Welp. It’s a rare day when I’ll actually give Marco Fucking Rubio credit as being a voice of reason. But today I’ll do it, because just this once, the shoe fits:
Yeah, folks, there’s no need to formulate elaborate conspiracy theories here. No need to blame Bill Clinton, who was so inept at keeping even a few lousy blowjobs a secret, and certainly no need to make him out to be some kind of mastermind in this. No need to blame anyone else, either. Jeffrey Epstein’s death was indeed suicide, and not murder. The known facts line up in that direction already. And I’m going to share what I think the likeliest scenario is, based on those facts.
How did he do it?
Epstein didn’t kill himself while supposedly on suicide watch; he was taken OFF suicide watch, at the urging of his own defence attorney. I’m going to make an educated guess that he gave every sign of compliance after his first effort went awry, so that his jailers would relax their guard — literally — and thus give him a chance to make good on his bid the next time around.
Why did he do it?
Epstein had every reason to kill himself. All his dirty laundry was being ignominiously aired in public, and he knew it. His victims have been coming forward for years, telling their stories to any journalist who would listen; Virginia Roberts, in particular, has been admirably persistent. Those accounts had finally gained enough traction to result in his arrest.
And, after years of pooh-poohing of those victims by the media, and sweetheart deals with local prosecutors, Epstein was finally on the verge of facing actual justice for his crimes. There would be no opportunities left to escape to his Virgin Islands villa for unimpeded further indulgences, as he had done in the past. Nor would he merely be jailed at night, and allowed to “work” (at WHAT?) during the day, as he had done after his first conviction. There would be no more chances to slip away from his keepers and be found, hours later, soaked in sweat and wandering the streets. This time, Epstein was well and truly caught. A fact which, by itself, would have made him desperate for any escape. And since all the other escape routes were now closed to him, death was his only way out.
But how do we know that he would want to kill himself? Simple: He left one hell of a trail of breadcrumbs. And it starts right on his own doorstep in New York.
In a report on the mansion, valued at more than $55 million, The New York Times noted that its artwork includes, on the second floor, a commissioned mural of a “photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.”
The Times quotes R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist who recently met with Epstein at his home, as saying, “(Epstein) said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’”
The home also includes such oddities as a hallway covered with artificial eyeballs originally made for wounded soldiers, a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and a chess board with custom figures, many dressed suggestively and modeled after one of Epstein’s staffers, The Times reported.
Glass eyes in the walls, a creepy chess set, a chandelier with a life-size nude female mannequin suspended from it, and murals of penitentiary scenes featuring Epstein himself? Yeah, I’d say he was definitely obsessed with SOMETHING. Several things, in fact: Sexualized control over women (in this case, very young girls), a personal sense of being omnipotent and omniscient — and the terror of having all that taken away from him, and him being under the all-seeing eyes of the prison wardens himself, instead.
Epstein wanted to rape his way through life. He had delusional fantasies about being some kind of sexual Svengali, spreading his “seed” throughout the world (thankfully, nobody seems to have propagated any of his “seeds”, so far as we know). He cultivated the powerful, the influential, the wealthy and the titled, all in an effort to gain the power he sought for himself but did not actually have. Does anyone seriously think that one so obsessively full of himself would NOT kill himself if it were all stripped away by the authorities?
And there is no doubt that he knew what lay in store for him, and dreaded life in prison. The mural was one indicator of where his mind was at. Another is the well-known fact that sex offenders, particularly those who have molested children, do not last long in the prison population if ever they are taken out of solitary confinement. Lots of prison inmates were themselves abused as children. Since these angry guys have little left to lose, any one of them would have cheerfully beaten up Jeffrey Epstein or even killed him. In fact, they’d be more than happy to do it en groupe. Imagine the horror of knowing that THIS is how you could expect your high-flying life of crime to end.
It is unlikely that Epstein would be formally executed for what he’d done, but very likely that a life sentence would be nasty, brutish, and short. To prevent that, Jeffrey Epstein did the one thing he still had the power to do: He took his own life. And in so doing, he took his fate out of the hands of the justice system. It was also final fuck-you for all his victims, robbing them of the satisfaction of confronting him in court. In short, he was a coward, and he died a coward’s death.
No conspiracies necessary, and no elaborate theories required.
Maybe that perpetually dumb look on his face is because he’s punching himself in it constantly? I dunno…judge for yourselves:
Oh, Bowtie Boy…when you have such blatantly racist luminaries as David Fucking Duke and Richard Fucking Spencer defending you…you really need to wake up to yourself. Not only is white supremacism a real thing (and a real PROBLEM), you’re soaking in it.
What if bigots were all inadvertently honest about their bigotry…like THIS guy?
Yes, that’s right: He bravely admitted that the “Straight Pride” people are in fact a racist group. Not that we hadn’t already guessed, but there’s your confirmation, straight from the horse’s ass.Whoopsie!
And the best part, for me, was that one city councilwoman (you can see her in the foreground), doing a facepalm as soon as the laughter breaks out. She may not be as dramatic about it as Green Shirt Guy here…
…or Plaid Shirt Guy here…
…but, like those guys, her reaction pretty much says it all. For EVERYONE. She is our Hero for Today.
Can we give that priceless Facepalm Lady some viral internet love, please? PLEASE?
Hey, everybody. Sorry I’ve been incommunicada these last few days, but shit has gone DOWN. I lost a good friend to cancer (Thinking Man Neil, greatly and terribly missed even though we both knew it was going to happen eventually…just, maybe, not so damn soon.) A few days later, I also had a birthday, sadly clouded by the loss of my dear friend (who, thoughtful to the end, left me some of his most cherished possessions and a simple message of love in a card, thus cementing the sad coincidence between his untimely passing and the regularly scheduled event of me marking another year of looping ’round the Sun).
And THEN, right on time for said birthday, THIS shit happened:
And THIS shit also happened, the next day:
In both cases, the motivation behind the massacre was the same: It was RACISM. And that rules out leftism as a motivator, categorically, because the left has always historically been opposed to racism, whereas the right has historically been conducive to it. Who but racists could continue to support “gun rights” over HUMAN rights?
And it seems that something is changing on the Internet, at last, because Cloudflare has no-platformed one of the major sources of far-right radicalization — namely 8chan. A forum which another of my friends aptly called an “incel cloning vat”. They wrote:
The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit.
[…]
We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services.
So, finally, SOMEBODY is admitting that hate speech is NOT free speech. And that hate speech is not just shitposting for shitposting’s sake, nor is it just harmless, victimless fun; it has far-reaching real-world consequences. Real people are killing other real people as a result of that speech. Edgelords are literally driving each other over the edge. And the worst part is, even if one service provider stops them, others are still willing to step into the breach, because CAPITALISM:
Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare’s network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site’s operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn’t respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare’s problem, but they remain the Internet’s problem.
I have little doubt we’ll see the same happen with 8chan. While removing 8chan from our network takes heat off of us, it does nothing to address why hateful sites fester online. It does nothing to address why mass shootings occur. It does nothing to address why portions of the population feel so disenchanted they turn to hate. In taking this action we’ve solved our own problem, but we haven’t solved the Internet’s.
In the two years since the Daily Stormer what we have done to try and solve the Internet’s deeper problem is engage with law enforcement and civil society organizations to try and find solutions. Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained an indication of potential violence. We will continue to work within the legal process to share information when we can to hopefully prevent horrific acts of violence. We believe this is our responsibility and, given Cloudflare’s scale and reach, we are hopeful we will continue to make progress toward solving the deeper problem.
It’s commendable that Cloudflare is at least doing something about it on their own platform (and even more so that they are calling on governments to do something about it as well), but the fact that the whole Internet hasn’t yet come together to stop fascism is worrisome. It is precisely this hands-off approach, this unwillingness to slaughter the sacred cow of Freeze Peach, that enables the worst to flourish. It is the willingness of service providers to take hatemongers’ money that continues to fuel the hate machine. It is capitalism that is enabling fascism.
Meanwhile, on other platforms, the racism — some more covert than others — goes on. The question is: Who’s going to no-platform FUX Snooze? And motherfucking, daughter-letching Donnie? Is anyone going to bother?
The obvious answer is no. Of course not. Hate drives FUX’s ratings, and Twitter’s traffic. It greases the wheels of the NRA’s murder machine, and keeps the gun-wanks buying and their victims dying, so the vicious cycle never ends. It’s all about the eyeballs. Every viewer is more money for the advertisers who feed the hatemongers, and every taker of what’s being peddled — be it racism or guns — puts more money in the pockets of the gunmakers who keep the NRA’s lights on.
Once again: Crapitalism at work. Crapitalism doesn’t care who gets hurt, or who kills whom, as long as money gets made, and that money keeps getting suctioned right to the top, where too much of it is resting already, and virtually nothing is trickling down to those in need.
And that is a cancer even more malignant than the one that took my dear and thoughtful friend Neil from this world far too soon.
Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next.
--Arthur Miller, "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible'", The New Yorker, October 21, 1996
All opinions here are the brain-wrackings of Sabina C. Becker, unless otherwise credited. If you cite them, please give credit where due.
