I'm Honoured...

...to earn my first block on Twitter from @AngryBlackLady.

The offending tweet of mine ?

@AngryBlackLady FYI https://t.co/DTOFNahTng

— nofarhorizons (@nofarhorizons) October 27, 2015

In which video Imani's (above) tweet was featured, which I thought was kinda cool.*

Your prerogative Imani, your prerogative...

* Should have explained the context & intent better I suppose, but Imani doesn't know me from Adam, and I couldn't think what to say, hence, fuck it, just 'FYI.'  Oh well.

Cilla Black

RIP

Belated, but then...I'm not exactly BBC Breaking News:

John Oliver on Laibach in the DPRK

Should have known I suppose that John Oliver would address Laibach in the DPRK.  Though I do wonder if Oliver personally is genuinely ignorant of Laibach's music as the piece would seem to purport.  Laibach are way cooler than might seem to anyone whose only exposure to them was this bit.


Oh, and I guess this is the DPRK's official Twitter account ?  Tempted to follow them, if they are consistently this awesome.  Not so sure about the CIA & Dawkins...

Jeb Bush is a Dick Part MMDCCLXI

The 'smarter Bush':

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours” and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That's the only way we're going to get out of this rut that we're in.”

There isn't enough work for the existing population, so those in work, should work even longer hours.  We need an even more productive & even more-overworked workforce, than that which ensures not enough jobs currently.  Makes perfect sense.

Asshole.

Jeb Bush says Americans should work more hours. but they already are working more than ever before for stagnant pay pic.twitter.com/WpsGUqvszI

— Political Line (@PoliticalLine) July 8, 2015

MP Follows Official Protocol Shock Horror

Labour's Andy Burnham derided over cringeworthy sign off to Prince Charles’ spider memos

The former health secretary was writing a letter to the Prince of Wales thanking the royal for congratulating him as a newly-appointed minister.

But he ended the note with the hand-written flourish: “I have the honour to remain, Sir, your Royal Highness’s most humble and obedient servant.”

The sign-off appears to be following ministerial protocol, with fellow former health secretary John Reid using the same wording when he wrote to the prince.

However, Yvette Cooper, the former planning minister, signed off her letter to the royal with the simple phrase: “Respectfully yours.”

As the fight for the Labour leadership hots up, Mr Burnham, a frontrunner in the race, has been derided for his obsequious reply. 

One commentator said the sign-off spelled the end of his leadership campaign, while others agreed it had severely damaged his credentials as a leftwing moderniser. 

Others on Twitter accused Mr Burnham of “sucking up” to the heir to the throne, while another tweeted: “Your most obedient servant? Thought better of Andy Burnham #socialism”

Just curious, but what would be the appropriate 'left-wing' or 'socialist' protocol for addressing the future monarch ?  Surely Yvette Cooper's 'Respectfully Yours' is also excessively fawning and deferential towards the evil institution that is the monarchy.  Respect ?  Why should she respect Charles ?  He's a fascist figurehead surely ?  A greedy aristo. mooching off the labour of hardworking Brits.

How about 'I fart in your general direction' ?  Too mild ?  'Go fuck yourself you royal cunt !' ?  Maybe he should have smeared the letter in his own faeces ?  There must be a guide out there somewhere...

It's Just a Fucking Programme and Life is Fucking Short

Wait, what, Sue Perkins is now receiving death-threats over stupid speculation that she could be chosen to host Top Gear ?  What insane jihad will Mel soon invite ?  What fucking asshole could have anything against Sue ?  Other than...THE GAY thing...obviously.  She's the loveliest of ladies, what the hell is this hate ?  Is there somewhere I can sign up to resign from the human fucking race ?  I despair of this shit...

In Defence of Dumbfuckery

Er, Digby...just why exactly would you assume the young lady in question is confusing  her 'pseudo-scandals' ?  And wait, is Watergate a 'pseudo-scandal' now or 'the greatest political scandal in American history' ?

Really, there's three questions to ask here:

1. Was Hillary involved in the Watergate hearings ?
2. Did Hillary lie at the Watergate hearings ?
3. Is a self-confessed fan of Ted Cruz likely to care about the actual facts regarding 1 or 2 if they support a current right-wing meme ?

We could answer our first question with a quick trip to Wikipedia, but hey, 'anyone can edit Wikipedia' right ?  (Well, sorta...)  So how about a reference to oh, I don't know...The William J. Clinton Presidential Library say ?

After graduating from Wellesley College in 1969, Hillary entered Yale Law School where she met Bill Clinton. In 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal, Hillary worked on the staff assisting the House Judiciary Committee with its investigation of the Nixon administration.

So, yeah.

Hillary Rodham (center), a lawyer for the Rodino Committee and John Doar (left), chief counsel for the committee, bring impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in the Judiciary Committee hearing room at the U.S. Capitol in 1974 in Washington.

Short answer to our second question is that no-one knows for sure except perhaps Hillary.  But it does seem to be quite the right-wing meme that Hillary was fired from the Watergate hearings by Jerry Zeifman for lying, based on an article by one Dan Calabrese.  Snopes calls it False, and says that in fact Mister Zeifman had no authority to fire her (...but would if he could...), but it does sound like his recollections on the subject over the years have been changeable.

And again in 1998, Zeifman was undeniably quoted in a Scripps Howard News Service article as confirming that not only did he not "fire" Hillary, but that it was not even within his power to do so:

Jerome Zeifman, chief Democratic counsel on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 ... does not have flattering memories of Rodham's work on the committee. "If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her," he said.

So, she wasn't actually fired, and we certainly can't prove she lied, but that's not really important, because one guy said she's a liar...and...we get to link Hillary's name in a negative way to another famous political scandal.  Which leads us to...

Pregunta número tres.  Well, who are you going to believe ?  Snopes ?  'The Liberal Media' ?
Or Daily Kos...sorry, Fox News, Hot Air, Breitbart, and Rush Limbaugh ?

I think you already know the answer to that.  And you know what, Amber *Liberty Girl* is free to believe what she wants, even if that's that Vince Foster was murdered to prevent him talking about a secret deal with the UN to take away everyone's guns and/or a secret lesbian tryst between Hillary and Janet Reno.  And she's young, so she may yet one day evolve out of the right-wing media bubble.

Give her a chance maybe ?  After all, I'm making an awful lot of assumptions about her political background (as is Digby) based on a quick perusal of her Twitter feed.  It may be that she just genuinely doesn't trust Auntie Hill.  I don't blame her for that if that's the score.  I don't either.

TBogg Goes There

Dude's got a reputation to maintain.  Edgy...

I get that we are supposed to have opinions on everything– or else why have Twitter — but sometimes a joke is a just joke, or, as Stephen King once said: “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”

Noah’s jokes aren’t the Holocaust — and I’m sure by now someone is upset that I used ‘shoah” in the headline because that is how the Internet rolls — and endless discussions by well-meaning people who argue that humor and comedy exist as tools for the greater social welfare … well, they’re doing it wrong.

TBogg is based on the west coast of the US (San Diego) BTW, in case you were thinking this was some April Fools Prank.

10th Anniversary of Nu-Who

Huh, so I guess I missed the tenth anniversary of Nu-Who.

Peter tells us how he felt when he first saw #Rose. Tell us what made you squee when you first saw it... #DoctorWho http://t.co/H7ZO1mrcgQ
— Doctor Who Official (@bbcdoctorwho) March 26, 2015 

Squee.  Really, 'squee' ?

5 things you never knew about #Rose #DoctorWho #10YearsofNewWho pic.twitter.com/GcZRxYDpYv
— Doctor Who Official (@bbcdoctorwho) March 26, 2015

1. Which set a terrible precedent
2. Possibly the worst idea in the history of 'Who'.
3. One good thing about launching in 2005 I guess.
4. Huh.
5. Okay.

Anyways, I just hope Moffat redeems himself with the new series currently shooting and gives us the 'proper' Capaldi/Coleman series he denied us last year.  Not sure I can ever warm to Clara again though.

The Arquettegate Intersectionality

So, Patricia Arquette made some comments backstage at the Oscars, à propos of her call for pay-equality for women, that were perhaps not best calculated, and apparently people took it badly, and argued about it on Twitter, as people will.  Whatever, don't care, move on.  Having read a transcript of Arquette's comments, and not following Twitter, I naively assumed that the cause of offence was the implication that somehow the fights for equality for racial minorities and the 'gay community' were already and fully won, and that now it was the time to focus on women.  But, no.

Being fool enough to listen to a certain podcast (rhymes with rib lime), I am reliably informed that the problem was 'Intersectionality'.  Okay, let's take a look-see on the old wiki, and ah, fuck me.  Scroll, scroll, scroll...'a Marxist-feminist critical theory'...ugh.  I'm remembering now why I never liked liberals when I was younger.  Yeah, I get it, the experience of a black lesbian is different from that of say a black man or a white woman, and people can be oppressed along multiple axes of identity.  Yeah, no shit.

Coke meets Social Media meets Gawker meets Adolf Hitler

So apparently, Coca Cola came up with a cutesy social media campaign to turn hateful tweets into cutesy ASCII re-tweets of the same, and the geniuses at Gawker decided to test whether they could get Coca Cola to retweet extracts from Adolf Hitler's Great Austrian Novel Mein Kampf, and, well...
turns out, sure 'nuff, they could...  And thus ended one of the great social media campaigns of this particular mayfly era.  Perhaps in future, Coke could take advice from one of their transnational peers before engaging on a cutesy but ultimately untested and not-totally-thought-out marketing campaign ?  How about...McDonalds, say ?  They'd surely know how to navigate this sort of landscape securely and safely, free of the threat of humiliating mockery...er...

Stay classy, Cristina...

Argentine President Mocks Chinese Accent on Twitter

Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner caused a furore on Wednesday by joking about her hosts’ accents while on a state visit to China seeking badly needed investment.
Fernández tried to mimic a Chinese accent by switching “rs” with “ls” in a tweet in Spanish that translates as: “Did they only come for lice and petloleum.”
...
The controversy comes as Fernández struggles to distance herself from the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was found dead in his bathroom on 18 January, hours before he was to elaborate on allegations that Fernández helped shield Iranians connected to the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre that killed 85.

But, bad economy, debt, the oh-so-convenient death of a political enemy...  I can see why Cristina might see any distraction from domestic politics back in Argentina as a.....Oh, yeah...This could be a bad sign...