monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Geopolitical penis envy?

this is likely why georgeob and mcg are always on about things in Britain and Europe

thanks for the reminder

(recloses flap)

You seem to be making an effort to reach across the aisle lately. Nothing wrong with it; just interesting.

I hope there ends up being an english transcript.

Apropo of nothing, I had a thread on the french election that went nowhere, not least since I didn't post there much myself.

I figure Le Pen won't disappear, but neither will he...

UKIP has lost a swathe of council seats in England and Wales, leading to claims that the party is in crisis ahead of June's general election.

In total, UKIP lost 145 councillors and secured one seat.

It was wiped out in Lincolnshire, losing 13 seats, while all its nine representatives in Essex were defeated.

Online cartoon character Pepe the Frog appears to have been killed off by its creator in a bid to stop his image being hijacked by far-right groups.

Pepe's creator Matt Furie over the weekend depicted the frog in a coffin, mourned by other members of his Boy's Club cartoon strip.

Furie recently complained that "a chilled frog" had become a hate symbol.

Pepe has recently been depicted as Adolf Hitler and as a member of the US white supremacist Ku Klux Khan group.

The alt-right group, a disparate group of right-wingers, has repeatedly shared Pepe re-workings on social media.
The frog made its debut in 2005.

Furie lamented in a recent article for Time magazine that it was a nightmare that his "blissfully stoned... peaceful frog-dude" in Boy's Club - who enjoyed "a simple life of snacks, soda and pulling his pants all the way down to go pee" - was now being used as a symbol of hate by racists and anti-Semites.

Recent efforts by Furie and Boy's Club fans to reclaim Pep were overshadowed by the the alt-right's movement's transformation of the character during the US elections last year when it claimed Donald Trump as its presidential candidate of choice.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has chosen to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, the first step in a broader effort by Republicans to change the way the agency evaluates the scientific basis for its regulations.

The close relationship between Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and fossil fuel interests including the billionaire Koch brothers has been highlighted in more than 7,500 emails and other records released by the Oklahoma attorney general’s office on Wednesday.

The documents show that Pruitt, while Oklahoma attorney general, acted in close concert with oil and gas companies to challenge environmental regulations, even putting his letterhead to a complaint filed by one firm, Devon Energy. This practice was first revealed in 2014, but it now appears that it occurred more than once.

Trump’s Wall Faces a Barrier in Texas: Landowner Lawsuits

LOS EBANOS, Tex. — One of the principal barriers to President Trump’s border wall begins in Aleida Garcia’s expansive backyard.

She and her husband have built a small park alongside some scrubland on their 30 acres, and they enjoy a panoramic view of the Rio Grande Valley. They say they will fiercely resist any effort by the federal government to take over their property, the continuation of a fight that began a decade ago.

And they are not alone. More than 90 lawsuits involving landowners opposing the federal seizure of their property in South Texas remain open from 2008. The property owners have the support of many Texas politicians in a state where land ownership has an almost mythic resonance, and their opposition to a border wall could delay any construction by years while lawsuits wind through the court system.

Mr. Trump and John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary, have said they can build a wall in 24 months, even though Congress did not include any funding for construction in its latest spending bill. Fresh legal challenges, along with the existing ones, make that timetable highly unlikely.

The landowners’ strategy is clear: Use the courts to forestall construction and try to outlast the tenure of Mr. Trump.

Indeed, those closest to the perceived dangers of illegal immigration are providing perhaps the most formidable opposition to the president’s plans. They are well aware that their land has become a major point of transit for drug traffickers and smugglers, and some have been victims of crime. But they also believe that the border is already heavily patrolled, by drones, federal agents and the local authorities, and contend that a wall would have mainly a symbolic value at the cost of their land.

While Mr. Trump made a border wall central to his presidential campaign, the concept is not new. In 2006, at the urging of Congress, President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act, which mandated building physical structures to stop illegal crossings by people and vehicles. Nearly 700 miles of wall and fencing was ultimately built, mainly on federal land in California and Arizona.

But the government has taken very little land in Texas, which has 1,254 miles of the border with Mexico, most of it privately owned.

“Here in Texas, we take the concept of private property very seriously,” said Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes nearly 300 miles of the border with Mexico. “We take pride in our land, which has often been passed down for generations. And Texans stand up for ourselves when the federal government tries to take what is ours.”

Ms. Garcia’s case shows how difficult seizing private land can be. Nearly a decade ago, officials from the Department of Homeland Security tried to take parts of her land in order to build a border wall. Ms. Garcia fought back in court, and this year the government decided that it didn’t need her property after all.

But now, she thinks, Mr. Trump’s plans could again imperil her land. “We’re just waiting and watching as they start talking again about building a wall,” she said.

The Four Flagrant Lies Republicans Are Telling to Sell Trumpcare
GOP congressmen spent the weekend misleading the public about what will happen if the American Health Care Act becomes law.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985, but it reads like prophecy today. On the first page, just a few paragraphs in, is the following passage:

Quote:

What George Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Aldous Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture ... As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”

This 30-year-old book, written by a relatively unknown media critic who died in 2003, captures our cultural and political moment with terrifying precision, and helps explain how we ended up with a reality TV charlatan as president.

“We’re a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology,” Postman wrote, “are now given form by TV, not by the printed word.” All of reality is a show, in other words, and has to be seen and experienced as such. This is especially true of politics, which, in the age of TV, is almost entirely about optics and entertainment.

Americans are in more pain than any other population around the world. At least, that's the conclusion that can be drawn from one startling number from recent years: Approximately 80 percent of the global opioid supply is consumed in the United States.

Pain drugs are the second-largest pharmaceutical class globally, after cancer medicines. "There was about 300 million pain prescriptions written in 2015," Irina Koffler, senior analyst, specialty pharma, Mizuho Securities USA, told CNBC.

The 300 million pain prescriptions equal a $24 billion market, Koffler said, but it's not a market evenly divided around the globe. Rampant use of opioids in the United States, which represents only 5 percent of the global population, points to a larger divide between affluent nations and the rest of the world when it comes to prescription painkillers.