Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020
Title : Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020
Link : Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020
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Back to February
Mar. 1, 2020
I changed my title:
Cult-Like Ignorance is Death: Trump and the Coronavirus
Excerpt (first use of the term criminogenic I've seen):
This criminogenic administration poses a serious threat to the nation and the globe. If there is anything to learn from an earlier time about governments wedded to ignorance, racism, anti-intellectualism, racial cleansing, and the glorification of ultra-nationalism, it is now. Trump and his merry band of incompetent lackeys are symbols of a necropolitics that is wedded to destruction, violence, greed, falsehoods, and the needs of capital. Terminal idiocy, cult like absolutism, bottomless ignorance, and unbridled arrogance and narcissism have given rise to a form of neoliberal fascism and a culture of cruelty unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. This is what neo fascism looks like when it ignores social needs for the demands of cravenly loyalty and the accumulation of power and profits. Trump is a menace and danger to the world not just the United States. Obsessed with loyalty, he hates competing centers of power, ravages public health services in favor of his free market, privatization, and deregulation while putting unqualified political hacks such as White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow in important positions of leadership. Ludlow recently claimed that the spread of the virus was almost airtight contained in spite of growing evidence to the contrary.
Nazi Germany once showed us what the end of humanity looked like. Trump and his followers have revived that threat. Trading on a culture of fear, lies, false promises, massive anxiety, and the demand for unconditioned loyalty, Trump thus far has managed to keep his neoliberal fascist administration, afloat, in spite of his repeated acts of domestic terrorism—violence waged against the populations he is supposed to represent. The coming crisis may prove his undoing. Let’s hope one byproduct of this crisis is what Walter Benjamin once called “profane illumination” leading to massive collective resistance. One place to begin might be to take seriously Bertolt Brecht’s argument that it is impossible to condemn fascism without condemning capitalism.
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Numor break (my word for humor that isn't really funny) from SNL
This is behind the Daily Beast paywall but Alert summarizes it: GOP strategist lays out his plan for Obama to help snatch the White House away from Trump
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Washington State Probing Troubling Coronavirus Outbreak In Nursing Home
I added to my earthquake (aka "The Big One") emergency food supply early yesterday morning to beat the crowds. Pandemic food can go in the fridge. Since I live in an excellent 500 resident senior continuing care facility should we be quarantined the staff will assure we are well fed, but I wanted to have my own supply.
Special interest: Rock music and psychoanalysis, a 33 minute video.
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| Cape Cod |
My tweet, click to enlarge, he called it a hoax yesterday and tried to take it back today:
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Below: The latest book about Trump, Sink in the Swamp
Donald Trump’s war on coronavirus is just his latest war on truth | Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian
- Trump has nodded in a similarly conspiracist direction, tweeting that the media are doing all they can “to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible”. That reference to the markets is key.
- And so his first instinct is that of the Manhattan hustler-hotelier loudly assuring guests that the strong smell of burning coming from the ground floor is merely the chef trying out a new barbecue rather than a sign that the building is on fire. Crucial to that effort is talking loudly over the fire marshals, or even gagging them altogether.
- You could see that when Trump spoke in the White House briefing room, brazenly contradicting the experts by his side.
- Note the fate of Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. On Thursday he dared say that “we are dealing with a serious virus” with a higher mortality rate than regular flu. That was deemed insufficiently upbeat for the great leader. According to the New York Times, “Dr Fauci has told associates that the White House had instructed him not to say anything else without clearance.”
- The new mantra, it seems, is to be one of Trump’s favourite phrases: repeated again on Thursday: “Nobody really knows.” That could be the motto of post-truthists such as Trump, conveying the hope that voters will become confused, concluding that no truth is ever even possible, and that in the fog of information and rumour it’s best simply to trust the man in charge. That’s what Trump wants every American to believe, about coronavirus and everything else for that matter: nobody really knows.
Their drawing is worth 1000 words:
We'd originally pitched the title, "Another S**tstorm in F**ktown: The Donald J. Trump Odyssey." We, or at the very least I, earnestly wanted that to be the title of the book. In my point of view, it is an appropriate title for a book about the current political era. Now, everybody involved in the decision-making process actually had a sway over this—book agents or people working for the publisher 100 percent vetoed that title. The compromise was that "Another S**tstorm in F**ktown" is the title of the first chapter of the book. You can't get everything in life, but there's compromises to be had.
What would you do if Trump defender and Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight called you, mistakenly believing you were Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and shared his ideas to help President Trump win re-election? Would you let him talk or inform him he had the wrong number? How would you react if Rudy Giuliani suddenly texted you, claiming he was being held hostage on an airplane by Robert Mueller, who wouldn't release him until he ratted out Trump? Would you laugh it off or write about it?
These are just a small fraction of the experiences that Daily Beast reporters Asawin "Swin" Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay lay out in their new book about covering Trump World, "Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington." Suebsaeng and I spoke about the book recently on "Salon Talks."
"Sinking in the Swamp" is a no-holds-barred look at the reporters' first-hand experiences of covering all things Trump. As Suebsaeng details, Trump's Washington hotel is "swamp central," where administration officials and their dubious allies flock to show their loyalty, while in essence paying tribute to their leader by spending lavishly at the hotel he owns.
Suebsaeng and Markay also detail their hilarious interactions with Trump's best-known defenders in the media — some of whom I've had run-ins with as well — from Sebastian "Dragon of Budapest" Gorka to Dan "Own the Libs" Bongino. They also reveal who the two biggest liars in TrumpWorld are — and that's a stiff competition.
Despite this buffet of hucksters, liars and all around ethics-free sleazebags, Suebsaeng makes that the most dangerous person of all is the swamp's proprietor, Donald J. Trump. And if he wins again in November, no one can predict how deep, dark and dangerous that swamp will become. Watch my "Salon Talks" with Asawin Suebsaeng here, or read a transcript of our conversation below, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trump Touts Border Wall In Face Of Coronavirus: ‘Border Security Is Health Security’
“You’ve all seen the wall is going up like magic,” he continued, saying they’d “have 500 miles built by very early next year.”
“We will do everything in our power to keep the infection from entering our country. We have no choice,” Trump said. “Whether it’s the virus that we’re talking about or many other public health threats, the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and well-being of all Americans… Now you see it with the coronavirus.”
“When you have this virus... or any other problem coming in. It’s not the only thing that comes through the border,” Trump said. “And now just using this — so important, right? So important.”
Dr. Celine Gounder — a clinical assistant professor of infectious diseases at New York University and host of the podcast “Epidemic” — said Trump’s remarks “show a real lack of understanding on the way diseases spread.”
Mike Huckabee Sickens Twitter Users With Coronavirus Scenario Involving Donald Trump
The former GOP Arkansas governor used a bonkers analogy to take aim at “the left & media.” It backfired.
Back to February
Back to February
Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020
Enough news articles Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020 this time, hopefully can benefit for you all. Well, see you in other article postings.
Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020
You are now reading the article Hal Brown blog March 1 - 2020 with the link address https://randomfindtruth.blogspot.com/2020/03/hal-brown-blog-march-1-2020.html