DDD EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ~ MARCH 10, 2017

MINUTIA AND INCONSEQUENTIA

• Okay, I realize everybody's already seen it, but watching Korea specialist Professor Robert Kelly's Skype interview with the BBC getting interrupted by his kids, followed by his wife's desperate attempt to get the kids out of his home office, probably did more to lift global spirits than anything since November's disastrous US election night results. So, HUZZAH! Also, if you're one of those irrepressible sour-pusses for whom this video was a disturbing reminder of the ever present deadening hand of the Patriarchy or some other such shit, then please allow this great rundown of why you should allow yourself to enjoy this accidental spectacle to get you back on the human track!
• Yer old pal Jerky is sad to report that, with the publication of his latest piece at Nation of Change, so-called "journalist" Dave Lindorff has joined the ranks of Julian Assange/WikiLeaks, The Intercept/Glenn Greenwald, CounterPunch/Chris Hedges, Jacobin, and pretty much anyone who cashes a paycheck from/appears on Russia Today as having lost all credibility on the issue of Donald Trump and Russia. The depths to which some of these so-called “purity leftists” have sunk in their most recent efforts to wave off scrutiny of the increasingly obvious and nefarious overlap between this White House and the dark and dirty nexus of the Kremlin/Russian oligarchs/Russian organized crime... it boggles the goddamn mind. I mean, this Lindorff guy actually used to be a respected journalist of sorts. And now, he's peddling WikiLeaks' (intentional) "misinterpretation" of their CIA document dump--days after it's been definitively debunked--and worst of all, now he's echoing Assange's disgusting fanning of the Seth Rich murder conspiracy flames? Nope... sorry Lindorff. There's simply no un-jumping that shark.
• Trump's army of Redcap deplorables has struck again, this time in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where 64-year-old Richard Lloyd tried to burn down a convenience store because he mistakenly believed the Indian owners were Muslim Arabs... and because they failed to stock his preferred brand of orange juice. Upon giving himself up at the scene, where he had rolled a large dumpster in front of the store's entrance, filled it with signs torn down from the front of the store and set the whole thing on fire, Lloyd reportedly told sheriff’s deputies that he was trying to "burn the building to the ground" in order to "run the Arabs out of the country." While appearing in court the day after his arrest on arson charges, Lloyd informed the court that he will be representing himself, and that he was just "doing his part for America." No word yet as to the identity of Lloyd's favorite brand of orange juice, but as soon as I find out, I'll let y'all know.

JUST LOOK AT THIS FUCKING IDIOT

***

Speaking of hate crimes, I’m frankly shocked more of a fuss hasn't been made about Trump's attempt to mainstream the long-standing Far Right notion that a significant number of anti-Semitic attacks are self-inflicted “false flag” events. 

Trump made this claim last Tuesday, at a gathering of attorneys general, when asked about the sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents since his election (which, coincidentally, was seen as a victory by the likes of Richard Spencer and David Duke). He answered that often such incidents were "the reverse", and that they were carried out "to make people, or to make others, look bad." 

Now, while faked hate crimes do, indeed, take place--on both sides of the political divide--pushing the idea that a majority, a plurality, or even a significant minority of these incidents are bogus is a dangerous road to travel down, particularly at this fraught historical moment. Some of the many reasons why this is the case are explored in Sam Kestenbaum's article for The Forward. 

But The Forward is a publication targeted at a Jewish readership. Considering the fact that the Jews own the media, why hasn't a bigger stink been raised about the President--particularly THIS President--saying “y’all are doing it to yourselves to make me look bad!”?  

Am I right people?! Are you with me?!

Please clap.

***

SUGGESTED READINGS

1. Now that a fairly well preserved and undeniably gorgeous 3000-year-old collosal statue of Ramses II has been discuvered beneath the streets of a Cairo slum... yer old pal Jerky can't help but wonder how many more incredible finds lie in wait for our shovels and eyeballs? Read all about what's being called one of the greatest archaeological finds of the past century and a half!

2. This Vulture feature interview with an epic-beard-bedecked David Letterman proves, yet again, that David Letterman was, is, and forever will be, the greatest. When interviewer David Marchese asks Dave about the many, many times he'd interviewed Donald Trump over the years, the reply is great:

I always regarded him as, if you’re going to have New York City, you gotta have a Donald Trump. He was a joke of a wealthy guy. We didn’t take him seriously. He’d sit down, and I would just start making fun of him. He never had any retort. He was big and doughy, and you could beat him up. He seemed to have a good time, and the audience loved it, and that was Donald Trump. Beyond that, I remember a friend in the PR business told me that he knew for a fact — this was three or four presidential campaigns ago — that Donald Trump would never run for president; he was just monkeying around for the publicity. So I assumed that was the story and now it turns out he’s the president. Now, who owns New York? 

It’s a family. The Wassersteins.
Say the head of the family, let’s say his name was Larry Wasserstein. If Larry behaved the way Donald behaves, for even a six-week period, the family would get together and say, “Jesus, somebody better call the doctor.” Then they’d ask him to step down. But Trump’s the president and he can lie about anything from the time he wakes up to what he has for lunch and he’s still the president. I don’t get that. I’m tired of people being bewildered about everything he says: “I can’t believe he said that.” We gotta stop that and instead figure out ways to protect ourselves from him. We know he’s crazy. We gotta take care of ourselves here now.

Read the whole thing. Especially if you're my mom, who loves Dave to bits. You're gonna love this interview, Ma!

3. Okay, we've had a wondrous historical find, and we've visited with a beloved old friend. Now, it's time to get down to business, this time via an essay entitled What He Could Do, the work of Mark Danner, for the always estimable New York Review of Books. After a noteworthy caricature and an epigram from Stephen Bannon (about whom more in coming editions of the DDD), it begins:

Standing beneath the dais on inauguration day, squeezed uncomfortably between the Washington establishment gathered at the west front of the Capitol and Trump’s hooting supporters on the lawn below—“Lock her up! Lock her up!” they chanted when Hillary Clinton was introduced—I marveled that the rain that had threatened for hours chose to fall at the precise second the newly sworn president opened his mouth to speak. It seemed a grim joke, so obvious as to be in bad taste, bringing forth inevitable clichés of an Age of Trump ushered in by weeping skies. I felt the water run down my face (all umbrellas had been confiscated); and yet it took only a few hours to learn I’d been mistaken. “You know, I looked at the rain,” the expansive new president told the black-tied attendees at the Liberty Ball that evening, “which just…never came!” By the next day he was telling CIA employees that “God looked down and he said, ‘We’re not going to let it rain on your speech!’” Soon he was raving about the sunshine.

This is a lengthy, girthy, even a meaty read, but trust yer old pal Jerky, it's worth risking a mental UTI to climb aboard and take the ride.

***
QUOTE OF THE DAY

“The fatal conceit of Obamacare is, we're just going to make everybody buy our health insurance at the federal government level, young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for the older, sicker people. So, the young healthy person is going to be made to buy health care, and they're going to pay for the person who gets breast cancer in her 40's, or who gets heart disease in his 50's. The whole idea of Obamacare is ... the people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick. It's not working, and that's why it's in a death spiral.”

- Wisconsin Representative and inexplicably reputed "policy wonk" and "Republican intellectual" Paul Ryan (R-Cheesehead) lets us all know that he has no idea how health insurance works. Either that, or he's against the basic concept of insurance, on a philosophical level. Which I don't think is what he was going for with the goofy shit he was spewing in the above video. Thankfully, Ryan is being subjected to widespread public ridicule for his incredible gaffe.

DDD EXTRAS

• I've created a new blog! The Mediavore! From Cult to Canon, from Classic to Trash, this is the place to find out what yer old pal Jerky thinks about all the latest media! Cinema! Books! Music! Comics! Television! Bullet Reviews! In-depth Analysis! If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to send them along! New stuff coming shortly!
• If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on whatever day of history that it happens to be when you're reading this, why not check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog? You're sure to find something of interest, guaranteed!

THE TAKEAWAY

If y'all are going to the movies, check out Logan and Jordan Peele's directorial debut, Get Out. Both are excellent.

...AS YER OLD PAL JERKY SCRAMBLES TO KEEP UP...

WHERE THOSE EXECUTIVE ORDERS COME FROM

What a week it’s been! Like a diabolical infant colossus suffering from projectile diarrhea, Dear Leader Trump spent the last few days giving the rest of the world a taste of the foul be-shittening that Americans have suffered since his inauguration. 

Last week, for instance, he threatened to send military troops to "deal with" Chicago's crime problem; this week, we learned that he leveled similar threats against Mexico. Last week, he put federal employees on notice about their social media habits; this week, Iran was put on notice over a successful missile test (and by the way, congratulations, guys!). And of course, this week, we learned that during his call with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, Trump complained about a deal to accept twelve hundred refugees as the "worst ever", and said the call itself was the day's "worst by far". Last week, of course, Trump was busy being America's worst President ever, by far.

So you see how they all connect.

Not that choosing targets farther afield helped bolster Trump's approval ratings at home. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened, as everyday, more Americans appear to be waking up to the reality of this shared nightmare. One indicator of this is the fact that it's taken Trump exactly 8 days to slide into majority disapproval status... something no President in living memory managed to do before serving at least a few hundred days.

Whether Trump's historic plunge in popularity was entirely due to the fallout from the disastrously incompetent roll-out of his unconstitutional "Ban on (some) Muslims"--up to and including White House spokeslizard Kellyanne Conwoman's use of the (fictional) Bowling Green Massacre as justification for it--or whether it was something else, pollsters have yet to determine.

For instance, Americans may have been expressing their displeasure at Trump choosing to fill the Supreme Court vacancy stolen from President Obama with Neil Gorsuch, a 40-something Scalia clone who started a Fascism Forever club back in his prep school days. Of course, he now says he was kidding--which I suppose makes his college years some sort of perverse performance art project--so I'm sure it's okay. I mean, I'm sure no Republicans would have complained if, say, Justice Sotomayor had chosen to write "Viva la Reconquista!" in her high school yearbook, then spent her college years working to make Texas and California part of Mexico again... right? 

And by the way, what the fuck was up with that handshake?!

Unfortunately, most Americans couldn't care less who sits on the Supreme Court. So that probably isn't what caused Trump's approval ratings nosedive. Could it be because they discovered that Trump's plan to bestow "religious freedom" upon America involves creating "wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to same sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity"? This, in the same week that he asked Jerry Fucking Falwell Jr to head up "a White House task force on reforming higher education"?!

Sadly, that probably wasn't it. It's far more likely folks didn't appreciate the way Trump used the 65th annual National Prayer Breakfast to put on a clinic for how to be a flaming asshole, by attacking Mark Burnett--who had just introduced him--and mocking ratings for The Apprentice ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced him as the show's "boss", prompting this response from Arnold:

Then again, Americans love them some drama, so maybe the drop in Trump's popularity is just blowback from that botched Navy SEAL raid in Yemen.

What's that you say? You haven't heard about that botched Navy SEAL raid in Yemen? The one that led to the loss of SEAL Team 6 member William Owens and a $300M Osprey? The one that killed scores of innocent civilians, despite initial Pentagon claims of "no civilians killed"? The one that Trump okay'd over din-din? The one that was undertaken "without sufficient intelligence"? The one he didn't bother overseeing from the White House Situation Room, despite being in the White House at the time? The one described as "a disaster" by multiple government officials? The one that some Trump loyalists tried floating a "Blame Obama" tactic over, before having that tactic decisively slapped down, forcing them to switch narratives midstream and declare "Mission Accomplished!"? 

Yes, that botched Navy SEAL raid in Yemen.

It should be noted, however, that in the midst of all that human wreckage, Trump did at least get to fulfill one of his most beloved and oft-repeated campaign promises. He got to "take out" the family member of a suspected terrorist! That's exactly what happened when a bullet ripped through 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki's neck at some point during the raid. After reportedly suffering for two hours, Nawar was reunited with her big brother (and fellow American citizen) Abdulrhaman, who was killed alongside their father, accused Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar, in a drone strike authorized by the previous administration, back in 2011. 

So, you know, at least something about this raid went right.

SATAN, LAUGHING, SPREADS HIS WINGS

As for all the countless things that went wrong--including the non-stop farrago of lies about the op put out by the Trump administration, up to and including the bizarre release/retraction of a video they tried to claim was captured during the raid--surely we'll get to the bottom of things after a few hundred million dollars' worth of overlapping Congressional investigations. I mean, thank goodness the Benghazi hearings set such a high bar in establishing precedent for how to deal with this sort of thing. I can hardly wait to watch the fireworks on C-SPAN!

Hey! What's Trey Gowdy up to these days, anyway? I hear that dude is a real Rottweiler.

***

WHAT ABOUT BANNON?

1. Politico's Adam Wren sat through all the “documentaries” put out by the de facto US President Steve Bannon this week so you wouldn’t have to. So what did he discover? Well... let's just say that there are those who seem to think that Bannon is some kind of evil genius. Turns out they're half right.

2. Who knew that, back in the days before you could tell he was dying of long term alcoholic liver toxicity just by looking at him, de facto US President Steve Bannon was involved in Biosphere 2?! The folks at Motherboard have the inside scoop. You won't learn much about the project itself, which was "written off largely as a stunt, and not very good science to begin with", but what it tells us about one of the most powerful people in the world "could be the greatest finding of all."

3. Speaking of Bannon’s intellectual pedigree, were you aware that he's long been obsessed by a book touting a peculiar theory of history? As Linette Lopez explains in this Business Insider report...

In the book, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe theorize that the history of a people moves in 80-to-100 year cycles called "saecula." The idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, who believed that at a given saeculum's end, there would come "ekpyrosis," a cataclysmic event that destroys the old order and brings in a new one in a trial of fire.
This era of change is known as the Fourth Turning, and Bannon, like Strauss and Howe, believes we are in the midst of one right now. 

According to the book, the last two Fourth Turnings that America experienced were the Civil War and the Reconstruction, and then the Great Depression and World War II. Before that, it was the Revolutionary War. 

All these were marked by periods of dread and decay in which the American people were forced to unite to rebuild a new future, but only after a massive conflict in which many lives were lost. It all starts with a catalyst event, then there's a period of regeneracy, after that there is a defining climax in which a war for the old order is fought, and then finally there is a resolution in which a new world order is stabilized. 

This is where Bannon's obsession with this book should cause concern. He believes that, for the new world order to rise, there must be a massive reckoning. That we will soon reach our climax conflict. In the White House, he has shown that he is willing to advise Trump to enact policies that will disrupt our current order to bring about what he perceives as a necessary new one. He encourages breaking down political and economic alliances and turning away from traditional American principles to cause chaos. 

In that way, Bannon seems to be trying to bring about the Fourth Turning.

Knowing that a guy who believes all of the above--and who also believes that Sarah Palin, the Duck Dynasty guys, and Donald Fucking Trump are the best America has to offer--is now de facto President of the United States of America is enough to set even the stoutest knees to knocking. I think I speak for every sane human being on Planet Earth when I say: "Cirrhosis, don't fail us now!"

ON THIS DAY IN PARAPOLITICS, MAY 14

On this day in 1607, the English colony of Jamestown, in the state of Virginia, is first settled. It was the first permanent English settlement in the New World, coming on the heels of some epic failures - like the Lost Colony of Roanoke - and would serve as capital of the colony for 83 years. 

On this day in 1643, Louis XIV becomes King of France upon the death of his father, Louis XIII. The Bourbon royal, popularly referred to as the Sun King, was only 4 years old at the time, enabling him to eventually become Europe's longest-reigning monarch, ruling France and Navarre for 72 years and 110 days.

On this day in 1796, medical researcher Edward Jenner administers the first ever smallpox vaccination. Just imagine how thick that dull the syringes must have been back then... Ugh.

On this day in 1948, in the city of Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion declares: "We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel." Within hours, Israel is repelling military attacks from pretty much all of its neighbors.

On this day in 1955, the nations of Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia sign a mutual defense treaty. They call themselves the Warsaw Pact.

On this day in 1970, the Red Army Faction, or RAF, is established in Germany by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Mahler, and Ulrike Meinhof. The RAF described itself as a communist and anti-imperialist "urban guerrilla" group engaged in armed resistance against what they deemed to be a fascist state. Their terrorist activities mostly consisted of attempts to free jailed members of their gang using violent means. They eventually hook up with the Socialist Patient's Collective, or SPK, a real bunch of nutters who believed that "illness as the protest against capitalism and considering illness the anticipation of the human species that does not yet exist but that should be created through illness." As such, they took a hard-line stance against capitalism... and doctors. I'm not kidding. In their own documents - some of which were co-written by respected French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre! - they proclaimed themselves to be staunchly "pro-illness." You couldn't make up this crap if you tried.

On this day in 1984,  Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is born. That's right... the fucker ain't even 30 years old yet. How's that Mac'N'Cheese taste, amigo?

On this day in 1995, the Dalai Lama proclaims 6-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima to be the eleventh reincarnation of Panchen Lama, thereby proving that, contrary to popular supposition, Tibetan Buddhism isn't any more enlightened than any other world religion.

Oh, and today is also World Naked Gardening Day. Just thought you'd want to know.