Sam Seder & Co. send up this bogus “doctor” and snake-oil salesman in — well, not quite GRAND style, but guess who was grandiose?
Yes, that’s right…Wile E. — sorry, Sebaaaaastian Goooooorka, sooooooper-genius, Alfalfa Male, shitty parker of Mustangs…and now, apparently, also a part-time televangelist with three wheels hanging off a cliff.
Meanwhile, here’s the Man of God behind the scenes:
…and the proof is in, courtesy of the Young Turks and Alt-Right Leaks:
There isn’t a lot to add to this except the following:
WHAT A SAD FUCKING BUNCH OF LOSERS! They don’t have any real clout or following, so they have to make up a fake one with 99 sock accounts for every real, verified one, and then spam YouTube videos with dislikes and fake comments to make it look like their videos are doing better, and their opponents’ ones are doing worse than they really are? That’s so pathetic!
On the plus side, that’s actually heartening, too…because it means that in real-world terms, these people are weak as watered sauce. Their fake cyber-presence is all they have. They don’t have the numbers at the polls, and that’s where it really counts. Gaming YouTube’s algorithms is the best they CAN do, and once those algorithms change to weed out the sock-factories, they’ll be right back to square one.
He’s suing CTV for “libel”, i.e. doing the media’s job of actually REPORTING THE NEWS? That’s chutzpah for ya.
BTW, if you’re going to go that route, pal, you might want to sue the Toronto Star for exposing your crooked ass, too…
Patrick Brown personally directed his top party officials to “get me the result I want” in a Tory nomination that has been the subject of a police investigation into alleged fraud and forgery, the Star has learned.
The former Progressive Conservative leader emailed specific instructions to Bob Stanley, then the party’s executive director, and Rick Dykstra, then PC president, five days before the nomination meeting in Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas.
“Let them all fight it out. And get me the result I want. But no disqualifications here. Kitchen is too hot,” Brown said in a May 2 email exchange that is now in the hands of Hamilton Police.
[…]
The email exchange obtained by the Star was part of two banker’s boxes of evidence handed over to police detectives by the Tories on Oct. 27.
Federal prosecutors have been assigned to the case.
Oh yeah, and there are still those two women who have allegations of sexual assault to answer, too. Can’t wait to see how THAT pans out.
So long, Pattycakes. Don’t let the door hit you where your mama done split you.
That, folks, is the glossy, well-practiced smile of a professional liar. And why wouldn’t she lie? After all, she’s very likely among her own father’s victims.
Now, I can totally understand why a sexual-abuse victim who’s economically dependent on her abuser would cover for him just to save her own skin, but Ivanka is supposedly her own woman. Married to someone else, with a business allegedly her own (and from which she has not divested himself, even though she’s legally required to do so in light of her very public job). Why is she STILL covering for him, and so damn cravenly at that? She can, and SHOULD, quit that job and have nothing to do with the White House, for the public good as well as her own. She’s not a real advisor, as she can’t give advice for shit. If she were that, she ought to tell her old man to step down and face justice at long last. Or at least quit her job (paid, unpaid, who the hell cares?) in shame at what she’s become.
Yet there she is, smiling and lying her ass off, and verbally spanking a reporter for doing a reporter’s job — asking questions in the public’s interest. She’s really effin’ stupid, but she’s also quite shameless about it. You know what that makes her, don’t you?
Yup. It makes her COMPLICIT, a word we already know she’s never bothered cracking a dictionary to find and understand. But you know what ELSE that makes her?
Yup. It makes her an airhead. A bimbo. Someone whose only real job is to smile for the cameras and shill whatever she’s told to shill. Without questioning for an instant whether the product is actually foul.
“Police action”? Hardly. Policing doesn’t end up with demilitarized zones. Or any of the other scary things you’ll see in this CBC report from two weeks ago:
As you can see, north-vs.-south hostilities are still very much alive at Pan Mun Jom, and every so often, there are incidents that point out just how great the mutual distrust still remains. The fact that nobody shoots anyone who’s from the other side, only their own, may only be indicative of one thing: Nobody wants to be the bad guy here.
And since when do “police actions” require ARMISTICES, let alone ones administered by supposedly neutral (or at least, materially disinterested) foreign powers? Canada is still monitoring the Korean DMZ, as are Switzerland and Sweden. What does that tell you?
I’ll tell you what it tells me: The Korean War was NEVER a “police action”. That language is what George Orwell called “pure wind”, spoken only by excuse makers in the White House and Pentagon. Only an idiot would repeat it and expect others to believe it.
In truth, the Korean War never really ended. It’s still on, and very much so. What we’re seeing is simply a decades-long ceasefire. The absence of open gunfire doesn’t mean that the war is over. Neither do the repeated ripples of aborted peace talks. Until the DMZ becomes as much of a harmless historical artifact as the Berlin Wall now is, the Korean War will not be over.
As for whether the symbolic reunification that happened under the Olympic banner actually “takes” on a more concrete level, that still remains to be seen. Things may very well go back to business as usual, if they don’t get suddenly and precipitously worse when a certain tin-pot dictator (and I don’t mean the chubby little guy with the funny haircut in Pyongyang) starts throwing temper tantrums and challenging others to a pissing contest for the umpteenth time.
…’cause they’ve taken all the coal from the ground:
Yeah, sorry, coal miners who voted for Donnie. You got the fuckin’ shaft. And there’s not a damn thing he’s gonna do about it, because he already got all he wanted out of you. Just like the Big Steel industries of yore. Better start retraining for sustainable energy careers, because that’s where the future is. Don’t look to him for help with it, though, because the big dumb fuck doesn’t even understand the issue.
A church in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, is inviting worshipers to bring AR-15-style rifles to be blessed in a ceremony next week. The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland is located just a short distance from an elementary school.
Church leaders expect over 600 people to attend the blessing next Wednesday morning, in which worshipers have been asked to bring their own AR-15 gun, or, as the church refers to the weapons, the “rod of iron.”
[…]
Tim Elder, the Unification Sanctuary’s director of world missions, said Tuesday that the church believes that the gun symbolizes the ‘rod of iron’ that is mentioned in the Bible’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation.
The church website advises parishioners: “If unable to purchase and legally transport such a ‘rod of iron’ because of laws barring the purchase of weapons, or other reasons, couple are invited to purchase a $700 gift card from a gun store, as such evidence of their intent to purchase a ‘rod of iron’ in the future.”
Elder told the Associated Press the weapons will be checked at the door, unloaded and secured with zip ties. However, he stressed that last week’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School only strengthened his conviction that the blessing should go ahead.
“Now more than ever, good people need to stand up and claim for themselves the tools that can be used to stop that kind of evil,” he said.
Well, Mr. Elder, it can’t honestly be said that you were at the front of the line when Jesus was handing out the brains now, can it?
Meanwhile, the parents of local schoolkids (the church is near a school) have expressed some concerns which are rather understandable in light of how “the rod of iron” actually works. Here’s what a doctor who treated the victims of the Parkland school shooting found, and why she thinks AR-15s (and other “rods of iron” like them) should be banned:
Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and they do not bleed to death before being transported to our care at a trauma center, chances are, we can save the victim. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different; they travel at higher velocity and are far more lethal. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than, and imparting more than three times the energy of, a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.
I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. I saw one from a man shot in the back by a SWAT team years ago. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat travelling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.
With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to a trauma center to receive our care.
One of my ER colleagues was waiting nervously for his own children outside the school. While the shooting was still in progress, the first responders were gathering up victims whenever they could and carrying them outside the building. Even as a physician trained in trauma situations, though, there was nothing he could do at the scene to help to save the victims who had been shot with an AR-15. Most of them died on the spot, with no fighting chance at life.
If that’s not proof that it’s a murder weapon waiting for a chance to kill someone, I don’t know what is. But then again, since when is the gun cult swayed by logic or rationality, much less the gory medical specifics of how murders happen?
Oh, and apropos “cult”: Yes, this church IS a cult. The word “Unification” in there should be a dead giveaway. Yup, it’s the far-right, loony-toony Moonies again! When a church infamous for its cultic recruiting tactics gets behind a murder weapon, that should tell you what kind of “religion” would “bless” a “rod of iron”.
It’s only a few days old in terms of official use, but the Venezuelan digital currency, the Petro, is already a billionaire:
Unlike Bitcoin (which many call Shitcoin, for good reasons), the Petro and the Petro-Oro are backed by Venezuela’s considerable oil and gold supplies, respectively. Meaning, it’s backed by something concrete and actually valuable, as Bitcoin is not.
As for how well the new currency will fight corruption, bank fraud, economic blockades, and other fascist opposition schemes, that remains to be seen. But it seems to be off to a roaring start.
Buena suerte, Venezuela.
PS: Here’s Sam Seder, talking with Bitcoin expert David Golumbia, and demonstrating tacitly how Bitcoin differs from the Petro/Petro-Oro model:
Golumbia makes the important points that Bitcoin behaves like a stock, not a real currency (hence its ridiculous volatility), and also alludes to its far-right, “anarcho-capitalist” roots. Bitcoin, in short, IS shitcoin. Its fascist and criminal associations are undeniable. Given that the Petro’s purpose is to undermine such motives, the two could not be more different.
Supporters of murder victim Tina Fontaine and her family gathered outside a Winnipeg courthouse to address the media after Raymond Cormier was found not guilty of the teenage girl’s murder. It’s the second time this month that a white man got off scot-free for the killing of a young indigenous person, and this outrage runs deep. For while Tina was troubled, drug-addicted, and homeless at the time of her death, she was far from forgotten and unloved, as speaker after speaker here makes clear. She was valued and loved, and scores of people worked hard trying to get her out of that impossible life and into a livable one, right up to the day she disappeared. To see their struggle be laid waste like this is hard to bear, even for a complete outsider like myself.
People think that drug-addicted, sexually abused and exploited kids are throwaways in this society, and never more so than when they’re non-white. Indigenous kids are the most abused and exploited of all in this land; the system has made it so that it’s hard for them not to be. Let’s keep in mind that residential schools did not shut down that long ago; the last of them closed only two decades ago. But the abuses committed there have been going on for at least a hundred and fifty years. That’s a lot of institutional abuse, torture, mistreatment and cultural disenfranchisement. Add to that the ongoing fallout from the “Sixties Scoop”, the age of child abductions and forced adoptions, and an ugly picture emerges; a picture that’s far from finished. It’s a black eye on a country that celebrated its sesquicentennial just last year. But that’s where we are, so let’s own up to it. We, as a country, have failed Tina Fontaine. And Colten Boushie. And countless, unnamed others just like them.
Meanwhile, in the interests of fairness (snort, yeah, I love that word too, and never more than in a context as unfair as this), here’s the acquitted, in his own words:
It wouldn’t be the first time that his words have tripped him up, as many honestly believed they would be the conviction of him. The man has some nerve, and it’s the kind of confidence and boldness only a racist in a racist system could have. He’s been convicted of many things, but murder won’t be one of them, and that’s because our so-called justice system was written by white men, FOR white men — and because it has already deemed young Aboriginals like Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie to be disposable.
Jimmy Dore nails it to the wall, again…and yup, he’s got receipts, as usual:
And he got them from an impeccable source, too. The New Yorker‘s Adrian Chen, who actually investigates internet trolls for a living (remember how he broke the story of Violentacrez, the most infamous troll on Reddit?) has done his homework on this womp-womp. Suffice it to say that this is NOT Pearl Harbor, or 9-11, or anything even remotely close.
In fact, it doesn’t even come up to the sniffy “standards” set by Lord Ha-Ha or Tokyo Rose. When a tweet about Hillary Clinton’s sex life only gets nine likes and three retweets, that’s a pretty dismal showing. Most likely, the troll farm in this instance was not about “swaying the election” at all, so much as it was simply about fishing for eyeballs and then feeding them good ol’ commercial spam once they were hooked.
And it didn’t even do THAT well, either.
But hey! If you fell for “Veterans US” on any social media platform, and spread their shit around, congrats. You’re a dumbass. Maybe not, as Jerry Nadler would have it, a traitor to the land you claim to be all about, but definitely a dumbass. You stand for nothing, but fall for everything, including some barely-literate-in-English spam from overseas. You are a stupid person, and you should feel stupid.
And if this kerfuffle has not made you resolve to be more media-literate and skeptical in the future, you may as well admit that you’ve wasted your new year. Because someone’s counting on you being the dimmest bulb in the string, and it’s not the Russkies…it’s the home-grown con-men who are all too happy to take money and other help from any mafioso or clown who’s willing to give it to them.
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.
