Donald Trump's April 2nd "Liberation Day"

BobbyG's Libation Day...

 

 

All this Trump "tariffs" gaslighting is way beyond old.

 

 

"Good, good, GOOD, good libations... Good, good, GOOD, good libations... "

 

OK, ENOUGH YUKKING AROUND

 

Heard this on NPR today while on our way to pick up our grandson Calvin this afternoon.

"Empathy, the act of understanding and sharing the feelings of others, has long been the underpinning of religious, humanitarian, and philosophical teachings.

Now, there's a new perspective increasingly heard in conservative circles: Empathy isn't always a good thing. Elon Musk, for example, recently said that we have to fight against "civilizational suicidal empathy," something he believes is weaponized by Democrats to 'import' as many immigrants without legal status as possible. It's also being preached from right-wing pulpits by pastors who say empathy's OK but that not everyone's deserving of it..."

I continue to be irritated with the apparently indelible conflation of "empathy" with "sympathy."

 

 

Above: that's how I learned it. Percieving the shared world as others do (or might). "Affective" is perhaps closer to "sympathy." Grifters like Donald Trump have finely-sharpened cognitive empathy acumen, in the Time Share Closer sense (can you say "Trump Baja Ocean Resort"?) "Somatic"? "I feel your pain." Yeah, perhaps to a lesser or greater degree.

 

Whatever.

 

INTERVIEWEE STANFORD PROF JAMIL ZAKI

Interesting guy. Add more books to the pile.

    

 

FOLLOW-UP BOOK NOTE

 

Finished this one yesterday.

 

Cross-reference with Mary Anne Franks' books, in particular her riffs on the 1st Amendment (see prior post).

ONE MORE

 

This one dropped tpday. I'd forgotten that I was on pre-order.

 

 

Goes to this dopey, now moribund idea of mine.

 

More on this one in a bit...

One of these leaders has spent more than 3 years surviving unrelenting military assaults by Putin's Russia.

The other is loudmouth bully & draft dodger Donald Trump.

 

Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event… - Jonathan Chait

I could scarcely be more appalled today.

It Was an Ambush
Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.
By Tom Nichols

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting…

3 months of war,

with no clear end in sight.

 

Like so many people, I assumed and feared that Ukraine would be overrun by Putin's military in a matter of days, with President Zelenskyy quickly exiled, captured, or killed. Boy, were we all wrong. "Cometh the hour, cometh the man" indeed.

 

Month four of war now commences. The multiplicative adverse effects increasingly reverberate around the world.

"From a purely geopolitical point of view, this war matters enormously. Should Vladimir Putin pull victory from his initial catastrophes, we can expect a riven Europe, which would disable the uneasy alliance that won the Cold War and gave the world more than half a century of prosperity after World War II. A Russian victory would encourage China to eye the possibility of conquering Taiwan and imposing its hegemony in East Asia. And it would lead countries around the world to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, because they would know that, in the final analysis, they are alone. And lonely, fearful countries with nuclear weapons may very well use them."—Eliot A. Cohen

per CNN:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have marked the start of “a third world war,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin must be defeated “as soon as possible” if the world wants to preserve civilization.

That was the stark message that Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist George Soros delivered on Tuesday to attendees at the 2022 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“Even when the fighting stops, as it eventually must, the situation will never revert” to where it was before, warned the 91-year-old Soros.

“Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. That’s why I say civilization may not survive.”

Meanwhile, in my country, our maudlin, n-dimensionally fractious domestic political shitshow lurches on incoherently—likewise with no clear resolution(s) in sight.

 

Arizona GOP "Stop-The-Steal" gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake shows off the portrait she says will hang over her desk once she's elected.

 

Is it too early to start drinking yet? 

 

EXIGENT PRIORITIES?

 

Not making much progress sorting through this stuff of late. The Parkinson's ain't helpin' matters.

 

ERRATUM: FILE UNDER "MALIGN TECHNOLOGIES"

 

 

I have never understood this infatuation. to wit:

Highly recommend the videos of "CoffeeZilla."

 

BREAKING

Speechless.

UPDATE: The death toll has now risen to 21.

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LET US PREY

…Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader—who once said, following a school shooting in his home state of Kentucky, “I don’t think at the federal level there’s much that we can do other than appropriate funds” for school safety officers and counselling—tweeted that he was “horrified and heartbroken” by the tragedy at Robb Elementary School. Ted Cruz, the junior senator for Texas—who once ran a campaign ad that boasted, “After Sandy Hook, Ted Cruz stopped Obama’s push for new gun-control laws”—tweeted that he and his wife were “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting.” Governor Greg Abbott—who last year signed seven pieces of gun-rights legislation into law, including one that permitted Texans to carry handguns without a license and another exempting the state from future federal gun restrictions—said that he and his wife “mourn this horrific loss and we urge all Texans to come together to show our unwavering support to all who are suffering.”

Politicians like these are routinely criticized for their hypocrisy and empty gestures—their “thoughts and prayers.” But, if only for the sake of rhetorical hygiene, we should go a step further. Republicans, as we know, get what they want. It is their best feature. They have vacuumed up the state legislatures, gerrymandered much of the country, stacked the Supreme Court and the federal judgeships, turned back the clock on L.G.B.T.Q. rights, paralyzed entire school districts with engineered panics over critical race theory and “grooming,” ended (or so it seems) reproductive rights as a constitutionally guaranteed freedom, and blocked all attempts at gun-control legislation. If the leaders of this political movement, which in Texas managed to ban most abortions and criminalize health care for trans kids in the space of a school year, took real offense to murdered children, they would never simply accept their deaths as the unfortunate cost of honoring the Founding Fathers’ right to take up muskets against hypothetical government tyranny. They would act. If America were not afraid to know itself, we could more readily accept that gun-rights advocates are enthralled with violent sorrow. This is the America they envisaged. It is what they worked so hard for. Their thoughts and prayers have been answered.—Jessica Winter

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"Cometh the hour, cometh the man"

Володимир Зеленський

 

Heroic Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy will not flee, and will probably soon die in Kviv defending his nation from the obscene war criminal Vladimir Putin.

 

 

This is a horrific tragedy. People of Russia, rise up and remove madman Putin and his Mafia.

History has accelerated; the impossible has become possible. Shifts that no one imagined two weeks ago are unfolding with incredible speed.

As it turns out, nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. They do not, as some academics have long imagined, have eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals. Nor do human beings always react the way they are supposed to react. Last week, nobody who was analyzing the coming war in Ukraine imagined that the personal bravery of the Ukrainian president and his emotive calls for sovereignty and democracy could alter the calculations of foreign ministers, bank directors, business executives, and thousands of ordinary people. Few imagined that the Russian president’s sinister television appearances and brutal orders could alter, in just a few days, international perceptions of Russia.

And yet all of that has happened. Volodymyr Zelensky’s courage has moved people, even the hard-bitten CEOs of oil companies, even dull diplomats accustomed to rote pronouncements. Vladimir Putin’s paranoid ranting, meanwhile, has frightened even people who were lauding his “savvy” just a few days ago. He is not, in fact, someone you can do business with, as so many in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington falsely believed; he is a cold-blooded dictator happy to murder hundreds of thousands of neighbors and impoverish his nation, if that’s what it takes to remain in power. However the war ends—and many scenarios are still imaginable—we already live in a world with fewer illusions… — Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic

#StandWithUkraine

 

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