Trump Vs. Intelligence

Trying to keep track of what Li’l Donnie Trump lies about and is just plain stupid about can be a full time job.

 

With brutal sub-zero cold rampaging across the United States, Trump wondered aloud whatever happened to all that “Global Warming”.  Not to be too particularly hard on Li’l Donnie; he’s not the only Republican to confuse climate and weather.  The overall climate of the globe is getting warmer but it doesn’t stop cold weather from happening. In fact, global warming can exacerbates the excesses of winter weather. 

 

Like the Polar Vortex. There are two channels of wind that blow around the upper reaches of Earth’s northern hemisphere, the Jet Stream and the Polar Vortex. The Jet Stream generally holds to the north of the United States but it’s path can meander into the lower 48 states. The Polar Vortex generally holds a tighter circular path over the northern polar regions but can expand outward and cover Canada and the United States. Apparently a warmer planet weakens the intensity of the Jet Stream which means its lacks the usual force to lock the Polar Vortex in place over the North Pole.

 

The upshot in this case is that Global WARMING has created a circumstance to create COLDER weather.

 

Weird, huh? Yeah but it's true. 

 

On top of not grasping what Global Warming means, Donald Trump went to war with intelligence.

 

Specifically, he took issue with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats as well as CIA Director Gina Haspel on certain key points of foreign policy. 

 

Coats and Haspel testified to the Senate that Tehran isn’t “currently” taking steps to develop nuclear weapons and that “technically” they remain in compliance with the Iran nuclear deal.  

 

Here is Trump’s well thought out and reasoned response to that: "The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran.  They are wrong! When I became President Iran was making trouble all over the Middle East, and beyond.” 

 

Again, not to be too particularly hard on Li’l Donnie as he’s not the only Republican to conflate Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the other trouble Iran makes  “all over the Middle East, and beyond.” 

 

The deal to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons was designed (this could complicated so do try to keep up, OK?) to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

 

It was NOT designed to keep Iran from having guns and rockets. It was NOT designed to keep Iran from supporting terrorist organizations. 

 

It was NOT designed to make Iran being a best buddy to America.

 

NO, the deal to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons was designed to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons. And from all credible evidence, the deal to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons was and is keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

 

Until Li’l Donnie turned tail and violated the deal despite all evidence that the deal to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons was and is keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Because Trump just knew in his enormous gut that the deal to keep Iran from getting nuclear weapons was a BAD DEAL and Iran was getting nuclear weapons.

 

Also, Coats and Haspel told the Senate that no, ISIS is not defeated.

 

Commander Bone Spurs retorted, “They are TOO! I defeated them! So there! You’re all pootie heads!” 

 

And Coats and Haspel advised the Senate that it is unlikely that North Korea’s Kim Jung Un is giving up any of his nukes. 

 

Li’l Donnie put his fingers in his ears and hollered, “NO! You are bunch of meanies!! Kim Jong Un is my bestest friend in the whole wide world and he told me he would give up his nukes! HE TOLD ME!!!!”

 

This behavior is not new and it’s not Trump’s most egregious display of ego over facts. Remember when Trump shared a stage with Vladmir Putin and denounced the findings of American intelligence officers about Russian interference in America’s election process and spoke in support of Putin’s denials of those charges. On foreign soil, Trump disrespected Americans over the word of a world leader of a foreign power hostile to American interests.  

 

If Congress, particularly the Republicans in the Senate, had any backbone, they should call out Trump’s lack of leadership and his fraudulent statements against those who serve this country.  

And Lo, There Shall Come a Finale: The Good Place

This is the first of three posts looking at recent TV finales.


Today, we’re looking at the Season 3 Finale of The Good Place. 

If you are a fan of The Good Place, you know this show is remarkably complex as it re-invents itself from season to season, sometimes episode to episode. 

The Good Place could’ve mined its first season premise for a few years. Like Samantha Stevens hiding her witch powers on Bewitched for nearly a decade, the producers could’ve just given us the wacky antics of Eleanor Shelshtrop ducking and weaving to hide her true nature from her fellow neighbors in paradise.  

But that concept was blown up by the mid-point of season 1

And then all the bits of that concept were swept into a rubbish bin by season’s end. 


By the time we got to season 3, Eleanor and her 3 fellow souls targeted for torture are not even in the afterlife but have avoided their fatal fates in a rebooted timeline. The premise has become a group of 4 people examining their lives after brushes with death. 


A premise that is up-ended about 4 episodes in when they discover the true nature of the afterlife and their doomed fates within it. 


So now the premise becomes a group of 4 people, doomed to never make it to the real Good Place, on a mission to help others avoid their fate. 


And about 4 more episodes, that premise is now out the window.


Michael has discovered that in over 500 years, no one has earned enough points to get into the Good Place.  Michael immediately suspects the demons of the Bad Place have hacked the system until he has another realization: the system itself is not keeping up with the complexity of life. Even the most good hearted, well intentioned action can have so many bad connections, the points can total in a negative direction.

For example:

You buy a dozen roses for your mom. A kind gesture, you get points for it.


Except the roses were grown in an oppressive country where poor people scrounge for a meager existence.


The roses were grown using cancer causing pesticides.


The roses are trucked across the border by illegal immigrants.


The guy you bought the roses from stole them from the illegal immigrants.

The simple kind act of buying a dozen roses for your mom has earned enough negative points to put you on an expressway to the Bad Place.   


Shawn, the boss demon from the Bad Place, thinks this is just stupid. People are bad. Period. End of sentence. 


Judge Hydrogen agrees to an experiment. Let Michael create a new neighborhood to see if he can replicate the results of his first “Good Place”. 


So we’re back it would seem to the premise of Season 1: not so good souls in a “Good Place”. 

But not quite.


Under a lot of stress, Michael has a breakdown and is unable to greet the new human souls. Eleanor is forces to assume the role of “architect” for the new souls. 


Shawn and his demons are screwing with the new experiment by selecting souls of people who know our original squad. Makes getting objective results rather difficult. It’s particularly problematic with Simone shows up. Simone and Chidi were colleagues at the university in Australian in the rebooted timeline and they had a relationship. In order to keep the experiment on track, Michael erases Simone’ memories of Chidi. Unfortunately, this also means Chidi has to have his memory altered as well, going back to just before the falling air conditioner killed him in the first timeline.  


This is a very, very heart breaking turn as such a step erases Chidi’s relationship with Eleanor. 


The season finale episode ends with a emotionally shattered  Eleanor greeting Chidi not as her lover but as a person who thinks he is a brand new arrival to this strange afterlife, the Good Place. 

Man, this show is evil.  

So we’re at the end of a season with about 8 months or so to ponder what’s next. Wherever The Good Place goes next, it will be in a direction we would never anticipate.  

 _________________________________________

Coming up on future installments of And Lo, There Shall Come a Finale: 


The season 4 finale of Outlander


The series finale of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt 

The cast of The Good Place (l to r): William Jackson Harper, D'Arcy Carden, Ted Danson, Kristen Bell, Manny Jacinto, Jameela Jamil and Marc Evan Jackson

The Art of the No Deal

Hey, the government’s open so that’s a thing. For three weeks.

Then we’re facing the same damn problem again? Maybe.

Let's call it "The Art of the No Deal".      

To review:

About 3 years back, Donald Trump, candidate for President of the United States (remember when that used to be funny?) promoted a big but simple idea to stop the swarm of illegal immigrants swarming over the border like some kind of swarming swarm: a wall. A big, beautiful wall, stretching along the southern border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Trump proclaimed himself a genius at building things and if anyone could build a wall, it was him. And crowds at his rallies would chant, “Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!”

Oh, that silly Trump and his silly idea about the silly wall.  Well, it’s not like we have to worry about it since there’s no well in hell Li’l Donnie is ever gonna be….

November 2016: what the fucking hell just happened?

OK. Deep breath.

Don’t worry. The logistical issues and humongous costs of securing property along the entire southern border and then constructing a wall of sufficient size and density would prevent the wall from being more than a pipe dream for Li’l Donnie. Never mind the ineffectiveness of such a wall at addressing the actual problems our country has regarding immigration. Even if Trump got a bug up his butt to push for the damn thing, wiser heads in Congress would….

December 2018: what the fucking hell just happened?

Trump decides now is the time to double down on the wall and refuses to sign the budget deal approved by the House and the Senate unless he got money for his wall. 

After 35 days of government shut down, a budget deal was passed and signed without any money for his wall.

As is always the case with a government shutdown, whatever the cause du jour is for instigating the shutdown never wins. Sen. Ted Cruz (known to friends of the blog as a “lying fuckkbastard”) tried to stare down the rest of the government to repeal Obamacare. It didn’t work.

Last year, the Democrats tried to stall on government funding to get protections for those persons harmed by Trump’s reversal of the DACA program. It didn’t work. 

A government shut down is all about political theater, a chance to prove you’re serious about your cause to the voters back home. 

The thing is there comes a point where the instigator of a shutdown realizes the cause is lost but the voters back home got the message so it’s time to cut bait and move on.

In the case of this latest shutdown, Trump as the instigator of the shutdown was too stupid to realize all that and kept pushing.

For 35 days, government workers went without a paycheck because Trump, alleged master deal maker, couldn’t deal with Nancy Pelosi, the will of the people or with reality.  

Yep, definitely "The Art of the No Deal". 

One question I’ve heard a lot was why did Trump wait until the Democrats were in control of the House of Representatives to make such a big push to get wall funding. 

Trump sees relationships as transactional and transactions are adversarial and adversaries must have a winner and a loser. Delusional idiot that he is, Trump probably saw the Democrats in control of the House as an opportunity to crush an adversary, a chance to put Democrats on the spot for denying the border wall, a wall that Trump seems to think is a beloved concept by the entire country. 

Most polls show that the majority of Americans see the wall as too expensive and inordinately impractical. 

Anyway, the government is fully open for business. Until February 15^th. Maybe, just maybe, cooler heads and reasonable minds will prevail.

But this is Washington we’re talking about. More likely, I may be forced to write in a few weeks hence:

February 15, 2019: what the fucking hell just happened?

I Am a Genius!

Saturday night, the family headed out from the Fortress of Ineptitude for dinner at Cracker Barrel. They have on each table a peg board game where if you leave 2 pegs in, you're "purty smart".  If you leave only 1 peg, you are a genius!

Well, guess what?  

I AM A GENIUS!!!

I also have the memory of a goldfish. 

The Cracker Barrel peg game is not some endeavor of Euclidian geometric complexity. To be blunt, once someone has solved the damned puzzle, you just do the same thing again and you're a genius over and over again. 

The Cracker Barrel peg game has proclaimed me a genius before. But whenever I dine at Cracker Barrel, I never remember what worked before and I have to solve the damn peg game from scratch each time. 

Usually, I have to settle for "purty smart". But once in awhile, the right synapses fire in the right order and end up with a peg board with 1 peg in it. 

I AM A GENIUS!!!

Well, I take my victories where I find them.   

Doctor Who: A Week of Beginnings and Endings

The bad news for Whovians is we have to wait until 2020 to get any new episodes of Doctor Who.

The good news is those episodes are really on the way as production on Series 12 began this past week. 

And no other news. We know Jodie, Bradley, Tosin and Mandip were on a location shoot, apparently back in South Africa (where the gang shot "Rosa" for Series 11) but as par for the course with Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who, we have zero clues what the gang is up to.

Well, we have a whole year to agonize over what may or may not be happening.

In the neighborhood of the Fortress of Ineptitude, there was some news that negatively affects our Doctor Who watching habits. To watch Doctor Who, it has been our habit to abscond from the Fortress and go see Doctor Who at Geeksboro.  This past week, just as a new season of Doctor Who production was beginning, Geeksboro was coming to an end.

Geeksboro was a local business that catered to the geeks and nerds who obsess over Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Walking Dead, anime, video games and more.  For about 7 years, Geeksboro was this old hole in the wall storefront in a strip mall with a some battered couches and chairs in front of a pull down screen to watch TV shows and movies, some table space to play board games, pinball games and stations to play video games. There was a bar serving coffee, smoothies and wine along with pastries and other snacks. There was a decidedly lo-fi vibe about the place but it was warm and welcoming. 

About a year ago, Geeksboro owner Joe Scott announced it was time to move. 

Geeksboro was going to move a mile or so up the road into an empty restaurant space. Joe said it would be the Geeksboro we know and love but better with a kitchen serving up a full menu of food and with more space. 

I don’t want to piss on a man’s dreams, particularly when the man in question is down and his dreams have apparently died but I was never happy at the new Geeksboro. I know others who spoke well of the new location but it was the little things.

Like how the first time we went to the new Geeksboro to watch Doctor Who and we approached the bar to order the smoothies we liked to get, peach and strawberry for Andrea and Randie and just peach for me. At the old location, the gang knew us to the point they would start preparing our smoothies when they saw me walk up to the bar. In the new location, they did not have smoothies. I know I’m being petty but this irked me. And I never did find a satisfactory drink to replace my beloved smoothie. I acquiesced to ordering something called a “Ting” which is some kind of Sprite like beverage.

The room set up for TV watching was bigger and had a much nicer screen than the old location. But it seemed so vast and less cozy than the old location.   

And as for the much heralded kitchen with full menu, there was very little that wasn’t ladened with cheese and jalapeños and deep fried. 

Again, I’m pretty much pulling a Sheldon Cooper here and kvetching against change. Yes, the old location had terrible parking and it could be a bit crowded on a busy night but I’ll be damned, it still felt like our Doctor Who place. I felt like a guest. At the new location, I felt like a customer.

Well, my bitching aside, I’m still sorry to hear of Geeksboro’s closing. I’m sorry that Joe’s dreams came to a crashing and inglorious end. From reports I’ve heard, he sacrificed more than just money but lots and lots of time which also cost him his marriage.  I would rather his dreams succeeded, even if it meant my bitching about the lack of smoothies and the excess of deep fried cheese jalapeño things. 

We have a year until we can get new Doctor Who. Maybe in that year, a new spiritual successor to Geeksboro will rise up. 

Seven Soldiers Saturday #3

Hi there! It's time for another installment of Seven Soldiers Saturday. 

This is a weekly serialization of an adventure featuring the Seven Soldiers of Victory. Back in the 1940s, SSoV writer Joe Samachson wrote a story that was never actually drawn and published. Three decades later, DC editor Joe Orlando rummaging around the files and desk drawers in the mid 1970s comes across the script and assigned it to be drawn by some of DC's best artists of the day. 

In our previous installments, a magical imp named Wee Willie Wisher has sent the individual members of the SSoV to confront a variety of mystical conundrums.

We've seen the Shining Knight and Green Arrow & Speedy deal with their magical adventures over the last two week. 

This week, the Crimson Avenger (AND Wing) face a mystic peril of royal proportions.

In the 1970s, Mike Grell was a major artist for DC, making a big splash on Superboy & the Legion of Super Heroes as well as drawing Green Arrow in Action Comics and Green Lantern's back up in the Flash. Grell would go on to create, write and illustrate an epic sword and sorcery series called The Warlord.  

The Crimson Avenger holds a special place in DC publishing lore as the first masked costumed super hero, predating Batman's first appearance in Detective Comics#27.  












Even in universe; Grant Morrison established that the original mask, hat and cloak of the Crimson Avenger are used in a special ritual whenever a new member joins the Justice League, in honor of him being, in the Martian Manhunter's words, "the first of our kind". 

Who exactly was the Crimson Avenger? Lee Travis, a crusading newspaper publisher, fought crime with the aid of Wing How, his trusted valet and chauffeur. 

The Crimson Avenger's original look was inspired by the pulp hero The Shadow. Later, he would adopt a more conventional super hero outfit during his run with the Seven Soldiers of Victory.  






In the 1980s, writer Roy Thomas revived the character in the suit and cloak outfit with new adventures set in 1938.   



In the credit where credit is due department, the scans for these SSoV stories come from Diversions of the Groovy Age. Sadly, the Groove Agent is no longer posting as he once did but the site remains a treasure trove of comic books from 1968 to 1980.  

Next week in Seven Soldiers Saturday #4, the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy encounter the strangest world of all from the mystical manipulations of Wee Willie Wisher. 

ENCORE: Abbott et Costello aller au Collège

Here is some silly nonsense posted on  I'm So Glad My Suffering Amuses You way back on Wednesday, May 1, 2013

______________________________________

Scene: Two college freshmen studying for French class.

Bud: "Excuse me, can you help with a question on this 

assignment?"

Lou: "I'll be happy to help if I can."

Bud: "Do you know what 'Je ne sais quois' means? 

Lou: "'Je ne sais quois?"

Bud: "Yes, 'Je ne sais quois'." 

Lou: "Oh, I know that means."

Bud: "Oh good! What does it mean?"

Lou: "I don't know."

Bud: "What?"

Lou: "I don't know."

Bud: "I thought you said you knew."

Lou: "Know what?"

Bud: "What 'Je ne sais quois' means?"

Lou: "But I do."

Bud: "So what does it mean?"

Lou: "I don't know."

Bud: "You don't know?"

Lou: "No! 'I don't know'."

Bud: "Look, I don't know either."

Lou: "Don't know what?"

Bud: "What 'je ne sais quois' means!"

Lou: "But I told you." 

Bud: "No, you haven't told me nothin', buddy!"

Lou: "Yes, I have." 

Bud: "No, you said you don't know."

Lou: "No! 'I don't know'."

Bud: "Great! So we BOTH don't know."

Lou: "No, that's 'Nous ne savons pas'." 

Bud: "Don't bring another language into this!"

Lou: "That's still French!" 

Bud: "So you know French, eh?"

Lou: "Yes, yes I do."

Bud: "And if I ask you do you know what 'Je ne sais quois' 

means, you would answer....?"

Lou: "I would answer, 'Yes, I know what 'Je ne sais quois' means?"

Bud: "Aaaaaand...what does 'Je ne sais quois' mean?"

Lou: "I don't know!" 

Bud: "Arrgh! There you go again! I ask do you know what

'Je ne sais quois' means and you say yes!! And when I ask 

you what 'Je ne sais quois' means, you say I don't know!!!!"

Lou: "Ah ha! That's it!!" 

Bud: "What? What's it?" 

Lou: "You just said what 'Je ne sais quois' means!" 

Bud: "What did I say?"

Lou: "I don't know!" 

Bud: "What? You weren't listening?"

Lou: "Yes I was." 

Bud: "And I said what 'Je ne sais quois' means?"

Lou: "Yes, you did!" 

Bud: "So what did I say?"

Lou: "I don't know."

Bud: "Arrgh! You said you were listening."

Lou: "I was!"

Bud: "But you said you don't know!" 

Lou: "No! 'I don't know'."

Bud: (sigh) "No, brother, you don't..."

Lou: "Yes, I do."

Bud: "So you keep telling me. But I gotta tell ya, this 

conversation's lacking a certain...I don't know.."

Lou: "Je ne said qouis?"

Bud: "I give up!" (exits) 

Lous: (calling after) " That's 'J'abandonne'." 

----fin----

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Il est maintenant temps que nous rire doucement à l'absurdité de ce petit drame tout en sirotant un verre de vin rouge à l'extérieur d'un café parisien. Ah, ces américains stupides !