Friday 4 August 2017

i am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people in the country

In a desperate plea for help, some brave soul at the White House leaked the full transcripts of Dear Leader’s conversations with the president of Mexico and the Australian prime minister, demonstrating that in private, one-on-one situations he’s still every bit as sub-literate, narcissistic and nasty as he is in public—for those holds-out that hoped he might have cultivated two personรฆ like his presidential opponent prescribed since he seems to be guilty of all the accusations that he hurled at Clinton. The transcripts are indeed humiliating and undermine America’s position when it comes to future negotiations on anything, but it is necessary to expose this regime for the vacuous and nihilistic sham it is. Imagine that these conversations occurred just after his inauguration (epochs ago in Trumpian time)—I wonder how much more unhinged he’s become since then.

Thursday 3 August 2017

home improvement

An omnipotent electronic, on-demand retail empire has had its furtive plans to use its fleet of delivery drones (previously) to survey and assess the state of the customer’s abode and garden and recommend fixes—or at least subtly advertise suggested products or services that one might be interested investing in, as Super Punch informs, receive official endorsement in the form of letters patent and the sole intellectual-heir to such fly-bys.
Not only would this buzzing and strafing let one know that the roof over one’s head might be in need of repairs, collusion between marketers and insurance providers might also inflate one’s rates and liabilities accordingly. What do you think? It might also spot dangers early so that catastrophes might be prevented. Convenience has its costs in any case and this development, which seems far more fraught with potential for abuse and manipulation, is following right after the maker of autonomous vacuum cleaners made a pledge not to sell on data the units had gleaned in respect to the layout and manifest of owners’ living spaces.

emotional rescue

We acquired the extremely useful term gigil just recently and have long been captivated with needful words and those with no English equivalent, but are really indebted to Futility Closet for introducing us to the notion of emotional granularity, which failed to register with us earlier despite having come across the same good feeling thesaurus ourselves previously. Having the vocabulary to articulate finer distinctions in one’s psyche imparts mental well-being and has tangible benefits, like greater emotional resiliency and lessens incidence of dependency and abuse. Coarsen up your way of talking about feelings—some will certainly resound for us and we’ll recognise those positive qualities in others—at the links directly above.

donbass

Disconcertingly the Russian prime minister has issued a statement in reaction to Dear Leader’s reluctant signing into law a bill continuing sanctions against Russia, North Korea and Iran (Dear Leader had reservation because he believed that Congress was undermining his executive authority and as a businessman who founded a company worth many billions, he was far more qualified than the legislative branch to negotiate a deal with foreign powers) that characterises the decision as a trade-war.
Dear Leader could have tried vetoing the bill but given almost universal bipartisan support to levy the embargo, which began in 2014 in response to the annexation of the Crimea, but that would have been even more damning confirmation of collusion and there was support enough to overturn any attempts to block its passage. The previous US administration expelled dozens of Russian diplomats and commandeered some of their property holdings that weren’t accorded extraterritorial status, but at the time, the Russian response was not symmetrical or immediate. Instead, Russia barred US citizens from adopting Russian orphans, ostensibly, over gay marriage—with adoption understood as code for sanctions throughout. Just now, the American mission to Moscow is being told to reduce staffing by half and its properties are being seized. The continued embargo foremost jeopardises the profitability of the Russian energy sector by making it harder to seek investors and business partners for its natural gas pipeline to western Europe. The broadly accepted narrative holds that Russia was motivated to interfere with the US presidential election with an aggressive social media campaign of sophistry to make Dear Leader appear to be the more palatable alternative.

Wednesday 2 August 2017

conjuring

It’s always frustrating when I go to download an episode of Fresh Air with Terry Gross and end up summoning a demon. Is anyone else experiencing this? After this opening interlude, the show proceeded as normal—and we suspect that the currently available version has been duly exorcised—and was a really good one, in fact, with a profile of the performer and composer behind the quite timely School House Rock! number “I’m Just a Bill” and a captivating deconstruction of The Doors’ “Light my Fire.”