Individual-1, a joke or a threat? (talk Trump)

[laklak]

TANSTAFFK.

[JimC]

That is extremely nasty, even by the standards of Trump's Amerika...

[Hermit]

That is extremely nasty, even by the standards of Trump's Amerika...

[Coito Two]I see nothing immoral about it, and it's 100% legal. You people only cry foul because It was done under Trump's presidency. Had it been done under Obama, you would have cheered him on. Besides, Hillary Clinton ... emails ... liar ... war hawk ...[/Coito Two]

[Animavore]

Add this to the Vietnam war refugees being sent home and the 7 year-old girl who died from dehydration while in ICE custody the other day and it makes this administration look pretty horrific.

I'm convinced that anyone who is unwilling or unable to stop when enough is enough by continuing to excuse and support this administration will have no problem doing so all the way to the gas chambers.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Looks like this was one sweet deal. Trumps negotiate the best deals, really tremendous deals!

'Trump’s Inauguration Paid Trump’s Company — With Ivanka in the Middle'

When it came out this year that President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee raised and spent unprecedented amounts, people wondered where all that money went.

It turns out one beneficiary was Trump himself.

The inauguration paid the Trump Organization for rooms, meals and event space at the company’s Washington hotel, according to interviews as well as internal emails and receipts reviewed by WNYC and ProPublica.

During the planning, Ivanka Trump, the president-elect’s eldest daughter and a senior executive with the Trump Organization, was involved in negotiating the price the hotel charged the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee for venue rentals. A top inaugural planner emailed Ivanka and others at the company to “express my concern” that the hotel was overcharging for its event spaces, worrying of what would happen “when this is audited.”

...

Greg Jenkins, who led George W. Bush’s second inauguration, was perplexed by the Trump team’s mammoth fundraising haul. “They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did,” Jenkins told WNYC and ProPublica this year. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.”

...

Around the middle of the month, with Inauguration Day scarcely a month away, Ivanka Trump was asked to help resolve a dispute between inaugural planners and her family’s Washington hotel, according to emails.

The problem: Organizers thought the hotel was charging too much money.

Emails show that Ivanka Trump connected Gates with Mickael Damelincourt, managing director of the hotel. Damelincourt responded with a new rate of $175,000 per day for use of the Presidential Ballroom and meeting rooms, offering a $700,000 charge for four days of use.

It is not clear what the earlier price was, but Damelincourt’s revised rate did not satisfy one of the lead organizers of the inauguration, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.

In an email to Ivanka Trump and Gates, Wolkoff, who had previously managed the Metropolitan Museum’s annual gala and fashion shows at Lincoln Center, expressed discomfort with the price.

“I wanted to follow up on our conversation and express my concern,” Wolkoff wrote in the December email.

“These events are in PE’s [the president-elect’s] honor at his hotel and one of them is for family and close friends. Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” she wrote, noting that other locations would be provided to the inaugural committee for free.

“I understand that compared to the original pricing this is great but we should look at the whole context,” Wolkoff wrote, suggesting a day rate of $85,000, less than half of the Trump hotel’s offer.

A former Trump hotel staffer confirmed that the inaugural committee paid for inaugural week events at the hotel. It’s not clear what price the committee ultimately paid. Previous media coverage has focused on spending by outside groups at the Trump hotel but it was not known that the official inaugural committee itself spent significant sums there.

[Animavore]

Another of Trump's criminal buddies under fire.

https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-prep ... HF4SkPQ79E

[JimC]

In any previous era, the sheer amount of criminal goings-on amongst a president's coterie would be fatal...

Apparently not so in the current DSA...

[DRSB]

Not sure this is on topic but might throw some light on the psychology of the voters.

American anxiety

The United States is a country consumed by anxiety. This has been true for a very long time. But it's getting worse.

Be honest: You sense it in yourself. The vague mist of worry that always lurks in the background, ebbing and flowing through the day, the sense of creeping inadequacy that prompts you to work ever-harder. You can detect it in the agitated drive to do ever-more to protect those you love from an endless stream of dangers and threats — and in the urge to keep up with friends, acquaintances, and news online during almost every waking moment, perhaps even crowding out sleep, making it impossible to settle down or drive away the subtle sensation of insufficiency.

Way back in the 1820s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Americans were restless in the midst of their prosperity and freedom — existentially anxious that they would run out of time in their finite lives before getting a chance to enjoy all the good things available to them in a world of liberty and abundance. In the second half of the 19th century, doctors defined and diagnosed an anxious condition they dubbed neurasthenia, which they traced to the accelerating pace of modern life. In the 1940s, poet W.H. Auden described his time as an Age of Anxiety, and the theme recurred over and over again in social commentary through the following decades down to the present.

Still, today's anxiousness feels different — more acute, more pervasive, more deeply woven into the very fabric of our lives and world.

Nearly one-third of adolescents and adults suffer from some form of anxiety disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A poll released in May by the American Psychiatric Association, meanwhile, found that 39 percent of respondents were prepared to describe themselves as more anxious than they were just a year ago. Another 39 percent say they are equally anxious, while only 19 percent feel less anxious now than they did in the recent past.

We see evidence of it all around us — in the increasingly stringent rules that public schools apply to our children; in the parallel phenomenon of helicopter parenting; in the trigger warnings and safe spaces proliferating on college campuses (and off campus as well); in the surge of prescriptions for anti-anxiety medication. You can even hear it in the tenor of online political debate, which often involves one group accusing another of displaying irrational anxiety about this or that sociocultural trend. ("You sure are a poor, pathetic snowflake." "No, you're the real snowflake!")

What's behind the spike in anxiety? There are almost too many potential causes to list them all. There's the same liberty and abundance that Tocqueville noted, only more so. There's the same sense of dizzying cultural acceleration and change that that got the blame for neurasthenia 150 years ago, only more so. There's an accompanying worry about the fragility of our economic status — a fragility intensified by the combination of capitalism's pervasive creative destruction with the minimalism of the safety net we choose to provide for ourselves.

And then there is, of course, the technological component — especially the immensely powerful communications technologies that saturate our late-modern lives. One might think they would be the greatest means of forestalling loneliness ever devised, but something close to the opposite appears to be true. Every text we receive triggers a tiny dopamine rush in our brains to which we quickly become accustomed. Before long we crave more of it — and feel its crushing absence when the messages fail to arrive. The result is a surge in neediness. "Why isn't my friend texting me? Is he writing someone else, someone more interesting, funny, or sexy instead?"

What Jean-Jacques Rousseau called amour-propre — the anxious longing for the approval of our peers, along with the tendency to transform ourselves into what we imagine they want us to be — can become overpowering, as we seek to become the kind of texting partner who will inspire others to respond. In middle school and high school, when so many lifelong social habits first get formed, this worry can spiral out of control into the paralyzing compulsion to text almost constantly — hundreds or even thousands of times a day and on into the night — as teenagers do everything in their power to forestall the fear of the technologically mediated interactions coming to an end.

Social media platforms can be just as bad, with people presenting their lives as a series of great accomplishments and happy set pieces. It's socializing as PR stunt, with Facebook "friends" substituting for real friendships, which involve intimacy and the authentic self-exposure of something closer to the whole you.

Then there's Twitter, which amplifies every local story into something the whole world can obsess over. An event in one place can become a national story for a few minutes, and then another, and another, creating the impression of a world filled with chaos and danger — the perfect backdrop for a perpetual anxiety attack. The human mind might be simply incapable of processing it all and keeping it in the proper factual and moral perspective.

It would be bad enough if this cluster of social, economic, cultural, and technological trends were producing individual unhappiness and even misery. But there are also political consequences.

Anxiety is a form of fear — and politics driven by fear tends to be illiberal. That's because liberalism is a political form that strives for openness, and people who are deathly afraid will be inclined to consider openness a luxury we simply cannot afford. Hence the rise of right-wing demagogues peddling conspiracy theories and draconian policies to make sense of and give order to the disorienting cybernetic swirl in which we swim. Hence also the "fascists are upon us!" hysterics on the other side, whipping up fresh cycles of terror and working to justify political incivility and even violence as a necessary protection against the enemies of democracy as well as common decency.

The politics of anxiety is an ugly business. Like the psychology of anxiety on which it is based, it is easy to provoke but a challenge to dissipate once it settles in. That's especially true when the anxious person — or the anxious nation — denies that anxiety is at work behind the scenes, as it so clearly is, right now.

https://theweek.com/articles/808417/ame ... -_LvO8j4YI

[Scot Dutchy]

That is exactly what the right wing want anxious and scared people. Easy to manipulate. Americans have this illusion that they think they are free when in fact they are prisoners of their society.
Terrified of health, movement, work and social conditions. A dog eat dog mentality. No job security. Who would not be anxious is such a society.

[JimC]

I agree, Scot - it suits the big end of town perfectly...

[pErvinalia]

Yep.

[Brian Peacock]

Why do the conspiracy-theorists all refer to that one guy as 'no-name', and act like saying voldemort would summon him or something?

Anyone know?

Link to any example of conspiracy theorists using that particular term?

Or did that just come to you after some weed?

Can't it be before AND after some weed?

My Insta has a lot of that stuff on it (it's deliberate, my other social media exercises have been deliberately left, this one deliberately right). Thing is, I ain't clicking that shit lol

I do think it is too easy to dismiss some real problems as conspiracy theories. I am pretty confident that academia and the largest chunk of media is left-leaning, so try to wander a bit.

But like I said - I aint clicking that shit.

But we all click it in our heads eh?

[Scot Dutchy]

The trouble is Americans just cant envisage how the rest of the first world lives. They presume we all live under the same stresses and strains as they do. Only those who travel will get an impression of a different society but how many do that? Also when they do it they are so brainwashed they cant accept what they see. I have experienced plenty of ex-pats because of certain organisations I was active in. It took them three to four years depending where they live to realise how different Europe was.

[L'Emmerdeur]

After making great progress in helping to open up national monument land to exploitation by fossil fuel interests, Ryan Zinke is moving on to better things.

'Trump Says Interior Secretary Zinke Leaving Administration'

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is facing federal investigations into his travel, political activity and potential conflicts of interest, will leave the administration at year's end, President Donald Trump said Saturday.

Trump, in tweeting Zinke's departure, said the former Montana congressman "accomplished much during his tenure" and that a replacement would be announced next week. The Cabinet post requires Senate confirmation.

Zinke is leaving weeks before Democrats take control of the House, a shift in power that promised to intensify probes into his conduct.

...

Zinke, 57, played a leading part in Trump's efforts to roll back environmental regulations and promote domestic energy development. When he recently traveling to survey damage from California's wildfires, Zinke echoed Trump claims that lax forest management was to blame in the devastation.

He pushed to develop oil, natural gas and coal beneath public lands in line with the administration's business-friendly aims. But Zinke has been dogged by ethics probes, including one centered on a Montana land deal involving a foundation he created and the chairman of an energy services company that does business with the Interior Department.

Investigators also are reviewing Zinke's decision to block two tribes from opening a casino in Connecticut and his redrawing of boundaries to shrink a Utah national monument.

Zinke has denied wrongdoing.

You know, the best people really shouldn't have to abide by the ethics rules that were put into place to restrict lesser mortals. This pattern of witch hunts against them is hurting America. Sad!

[Scot Dutchy]

And they keep falling. JFCOAPS. He cant get them in office fast enough.

Trump: ‘I want to thank him for his service to our nation’

WTF