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We Went Through The Door — Why Now?
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We Went Through The Door

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.
― Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories

Now we have to hope the parachute opens.

The word of the year for 2016 was Post-truth and the contender for 2017 is Kakistocracy, a term meaning a state or country run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. [Via Shirt in Comments]

If you enjoy words you could read about Falconry terms like: Hoodwinked, Fed up, Under one’s thumb, Wrapped around one’s little finger.

You can cheer up with Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s version of Fanfare For The Common Man, and then bum yourself out with For What It’s Worth followed by Eve of Destruction.

It is definitely time to legalize cannabis.

Update: Consider – The Trump administration has not had a single appointment approved, but has asked all current appointees to resign at Noon today. There are no US ambassadors in any country and no heads of any Cabinet department.

22 comments

1 Badtux { 01.20.17 at 1:59 pm }

Well, that’s the one good thing about the November elections: lawful weed here in California.

2 Shirt { 01.20.17 at 2:39 pm }

Now you know where the word “caca” comes from and boy-howdy! Does it fit!

3 Bryan { 01.20.17 at 3:08 pm }

It passed for medical purposes only in Florida, and while local doctors seem OK with passing out Oxycontin like M&Ms, cannabis freaks them out.

Usually it comes from the terminus of the colon. Shirt, but Cacastocracy is rather descriptive of what we are about to get as a government.

4 Shirt { 01.20.17 at 4:41 pm }

I hope we’re all wrong, that he really does “trump” Washington, Lincoln, both Roosevelts and Clinton (Obama too!) and not succumb to a level below G. Dubya Bush.

5 Bryan { 01.20.17 at 5:34 pm }

Hope springs eternal, and so do leopards, muggers, and traps. Based on all of the evidence he has supplied over his life, this is going to be an even bigger disaster than his Atlantic City casino.

6 Badtux { 01.21.17 at 11:38 pm }

“Mad Dog” was confirmed and took office on the 20th with Trump signing the bill allowing him to become SecDef. Shows you Trump’s priorities. He wanted to make sure he had the military under control first thing.

7 Bryan { 01.22.17 at 4:40 pm }

Well, the General is a known quantity who already has a security clearance, so his only problem was the waiver. Several of the others are probably unhappy about financial disclosures and other personal information required for confirmation.

8 Kryten42 { 01.23.17 at 2:45 am }

Well, some people are preparing for what’s to come:

Hackers downloaded US government climate data and stored it on European servers as Trump was being inaugurated

Expect more:


A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country: Volunteer “data rescue” events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov, NASA.gov, DOE.gov, and whitehouse.gov, uploading them to the Internet Archive. Another is planned for early February at New York University.

Nobody sane trusts Trump or his associates a nano-meter!

9 Bryan { 01.23.17 at 9:01 pm }

Everyone assumes that he is going to eliminate anything and everything that doesn’t support his distorted view of the world.

10 Kryten42 { 01.23.17 at 11:02 pm }

Obviously, a valid assumption.

I was just watching a brilliant performance by Tom Walker (a British actor, comedian & satirist who uses the pseudonym Jonathon Pie) do a takedown of Trumpet’s speech! PMSL But the funniest part is that many (mostly American’s) on Twitter think he’s a real Brit Journo! LOL But if you love a good laugh, take a look (via YouTube):

The Inauguration of Trump: Pie Reacts

PS. He’s correct about the Left also.

11 Bryan { 01.24.17 at 12:21 pm }

You get the feeling that Mr Walker doesn’t like the Desolation of Drumpf. 🙂

12 Kryten42 { 01.24.17 at 9:09 pm }

You are the master of understatement Bryan. 😉 😆

He reminds me of Jon Stewart, to a degree. Comedians can get away with stuff journalists would be hung, drawn & quartered for! 😉 LOL

13 Kryten42 { 01.25.17 at 4:29 am }

Part of Trumpets Oval Office renovations:

Gold AK47 Chair & Lamp

AK-47 Assault Rifles a congratulatory gift from Putin. 😉 😆

(Image actually from Artist Rainier Weber Designs – A unique Gold-Plated AK-47 chair & lamp stand using real rifles.)

Just figured we could use a laugh… That’s not too far from truth. *sigh*

And here, Bryan:
CIA Starts Recruiting Its Newest Asset: Donald Trump

Given CIA’s past recruits… Makes sense. LMAO

14 hipparchia { 01.25.17 at 6:38 pm }
15 Kryten42 { 01.25.17 at 7:30 pm }

Yep! And increasing… 🙂

And, this:
Top Russian Cybercrimes Agent Arrested on Charges of Treason

Hmmm!

Also arrested was Ruslan Stoyanov, head of computer incident response investigations at Kaspersky.

16 Badtux { 01.25.17 at 10:25 pm }

Interesting indeed. Sounds like Stoyanov and Mikhailov fingered the wrong hacker, one who had connections higher up. If the goal was to stop cooperation between Kaspersky and the FSB’s Cybercrimes division, mission accomplished….

17 Bryan { 01.25.17 at 10:47 pm }

Kryten, the chair has to recovered in white and gold or it will clash with the new decor.

The world’s weather services have been downloading data, as well as grad students who will need it for their theses .

Kaspersky caught them with their hand in the till and Putin is arresting and/or disappearing anyone involved.

Check out Samantha Bee, Kryten, very similar to “Mr Pie”.

18 Bryan { 01.25.17 at 11:26 pm }

Deja vu – in the Soviet days the KGB regularly recruited actual criminals to preform functions like burglaries to avoid conflicts with the Militia, the criminal police. In the GULags the criminals got the easy jobs, while the politicals received the worse punishment.

It looks like the Cybercrimes Division screwed up and started to arrest and prosecute hackers who were being protected by other divisions within the FSB.

19 Kryten42 { 01.26.17 at 5:16 pm }

Yeah. 🙂 A fair assessment.

And now it seems Trump will lift economic sanctions against Russia, after talks with Merkel & Putin on Sat. & May’s visit. May opened her Trumpet visit by attacking past US foreign policy failures.

The three horsemen ride again! But with Howard replaced by Putin, Shrubbery with Trumpet, & Blair with May (who has fantasies of being Thatcher & admires Reagan).

It’s fitting that the Doomsday clock has been set to it’s closest to Midnight in it’s history.
Nuclear ‘Doomsday Clock’ ticks closest to midnight in 64 years

Twitter users are pissed @ Twitter as they are now censoring.

“Twitter users have been noticing for the past few days that if you search words like “asshole,” racist,” “tiny hands” and “douchebag,” it will bring up a bunch of results, along with President Donald Trump’s profile. Now, it appears that Twitter is actually censoring those results to exclude President Trump.”

I am enjoying Paul Krugman’s tweets however. 😀 He isn’t hiding his absolute disgust. He refuses to even acknowledge Trumpet as “President” & refers to him usually as “Agent Orange”! LOL

And… The WHouse is reporting that the 20% tax on Mexican imports to pay for the wall will be about $10bln. Hmmm. Basic arithmetic on the $316bln reported imports is $63.2bln. A lie, or did they just run out of fingers? Another theory is the *brains* there calculated the amount on the trade deficit of $50 bln. Either way… The USA is sooooo screwed!

Curiously, the first tweet about the tax came not from Dem’s (of course) but Lindsey Graham! “Simply put, any policy proposal which drives up costs of Corona, tequila, or margaritas is a big-time bad idea. Mucho Sad.” LOL

20 Kryten42 { 01.26.17 at 5:47 pm }

I condensed a series of tweets by Krugman:

The Mexican tariff incident is truly amazing, because it shows dysfunctional, ignorance, and incompetence at multiple levels. The motivation for Spicer’s initial remarks seems to be that Trump is feeling disrespected (again): people are making fun of him (again) because he promised that Mexico would pay for the wall, and it won’t. So someone had the bright idea of claiming that a tariff will do it imagining that the House plan for a border tax adjustment as part of corporate tax reform is the same thing. But it isn’t.

For one thing, that adjustment can’t be country-specific; also, it isn’t really just like a tariff. But wait, it gets worse Tariffs aren’t paid by the exporter; it depends a bit on the details, but it’s basically a tax on domestic consumers.

Wait, it gets worse still: the claim that everyone else taxes imports is wrong too. A VAT is NOT like a tariff. It’s a sales tax that is neutral in its effects on trade. Now, the proposed border tax adjustment is a bit different. It might in fact act like a combined export subsidy and import tariff. But for that very reason, it might well be considered WTO-illegal because it’s not just doing what others do. And even if it somehow doesn’t bring down the world trade system, its effects would be dissipated by a stronger dollar.

So let’s sum up: Trump was probably feeling low, so aides told him they had an answer to his critics but they didn’t understand either the economics or the world trade rules, and didn’t realize how explosive the whole thing was. Now they’re trying to walk it back, looking even more ridiculous in the process. How are we going to survive years of this?

And, Trumpet has helped the Mexican economy. The Peso is up about 1.4 since Nieto told Trumpet to (essentially) drop dead. 😀

21 Kryten42 { 01.26.17 at 6:55 pm }

Hmmmm! Maybe Trumpet’s 1st invasion will be a Native Indian reservation! What could go wrong?

‘Over my dead body’: tribe aims to block Trump’s border wall on Arizona land

22 Bryan { 01.26.17 at 9:46 pm }

Native American reservations are sovereign nations. The US government has to negotiate with them, just like they negotiate with any other nation. Drumpf has already pissed off the President of Mexico by being an obnoxious jerk and that is not how you negotiate a ‘deal’. Any possibility of a US-Mexican deal just went out the window. No leader of Mexico can negotiate now, the population won’t tolerate it.

Krugman has a nice succinct explanation – Trump voters are going to pay for the wall with higher prices on the Mexican goods that US companies now make in Mexico, and the produce grown in Mexico. What a brilliant plan. [/snark]