The current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.
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The big question now is not what Trump and the White House are saying about the Russia story. They will evidently say anything. The questions are what really happened and who can uncover the truth.
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I was most saddened during Comey’s testimony not by the White House’s response, which I’ve come to expect, but by the Republican House members questioning him. They are members of a branch of government that the Constitution holds as equal to the presidency, but they acted like Trump staff members, decrying leaks about Russia’s attack rather than the attack itself. The Watergate equivalent is claiming that Deep Throat was worse than Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Nixon.
Climate change deniers are at it again. The logic goes, “How could global warming be real when your driveway is
piling up with cold, cold snow?”
Well, there’s bad news for deniers — research has shown that
extreme weather, for example, massive snowstorms, are actually linked
to climate change.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, which has studied climate change extensively winter storms have increased in both “frequency and
intensity,” and climate change is “increasing the odds of more extreme
weather events taking place.”
As
meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote in Slatein
2016, just after a record-breaking winter storm dropped 26.6 inches of
snow on New York City in just one day, “there is clear evidence global
warming is boosting the odds of recent big Northeast snowstorms.” Read more (3/13/17 6:21 PM)
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials handcuffed Democratic Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez after he refused to leave ICE’s Chicago offices on Monday.
Gutierrez was at the office with a group of lawmakers, community activists and immigration lawyers for a meeting with ICE about recent deportation cases.
When the meeting concluded, Gutierrez and seven others felt that officials had not yet answered some of their most pressing questions and decided to stay until they did. Read more (3/14/17 9:12 PM)
On March 8, Kansas Sen. Steve Fitzgerald fired off an ungrateful missive after receiving a thank you note from Planned Parenthood Great Plains.
One of Fitzgerald’s constituents made a donation to the health care provider in the senator’s name, a donation he did not appreciate because, in his estimation, Planned Parenthood is on par with Dachau, the first death camp established in Nazi Germany.
"This is as bad — or worse — as having one’s name associated with Dachau,“ Fitzgerald wrote Planned Parenthood Great Plains, in a letter the organization tweeted. Read more (3/14/17 9:33 AM)
The Girl Guides of Canada – Canada’s largest organisation for girls and women – have a long tradition of visiting other scouts in the USA, to the benefit of both American and Canadian scouts, but that’s come to an end, because Canada’s Girl Guides are worried that Muslim girls, brown girls, and girls whose families come from countries singled out for discrimination by the Trump regime will face discrimination at the border.
The announcement follows on a series of high-profile incidents in which non-white Canadians were harassed, threatened and turned away at the US border.
The Guides didn’t mention Trump by name in their announcement, but they talked about Guiding’s tradition of diversity and inclusivity and the worry that “some girls could get left behind when a group tried to enter the US.”
Canadian schools are also talking about cancelling all of their field-trips to the USA.
This Republican congress, and its idiot manchild president, are willing to let Americans die so they can give even more money to the richest people in the country.
More satire that is indistinguishable from reality: Paul Bibeau, writing as Trump, says, “Making a phony Donald Trump say or do things that might embarrass our movement and stop us from making America great again… That wouldn’t be hard at all.”
If you’ve ever heard Trump say something you agree with, you can be sure that if you wait a few minutes, he’ll say the exact opposite. “Alternate facts” are the key to sustaining your trumpism in the face of these insults to your intelligence.
Related, today’s long profile of Kellyanne Conway in the Atlantic: “She once insisted, on CNN, that Trump should be judged by ‘what’s in his heart’ rather than ‘what’s come out of his mouth.’”
From now on, ask yourself… Am I seeing Donald J. Trump on an official White House or Breitbart video presentation? Or is he being shown to me by Jake Tapper, or other people I can’t trust with evidence of any kind, even if it’s filed as an exhibit in a criminal case?
Ask yourself: Am I seeing the Donald J. Trump I know? The one who only wants to make America great again? Or does this Donald Trump seem different, doing things and saying things he would never do or say?
Ask yourself: Is this the Donald J. Trump I believe in? Because if it isn’t the Trump you believe in, it’s probably not me, is it? That just makes sense!
Be careful, because you may be seeing more fake Trumps soon. The elite media may flood the networks with what they will call disturbing examples of corruption or possibly treason. None of it is real.
Raph Koster is one of the world’s most celebrated game designers, responsible for the design of Ultima Online, CCO of Sony during the Star Wars Galaxies era, and author of the classic Theory of Fun. Ever year, Raph gives a barn-raising/barn-burning speech at the Game Developer’s Conference, one of the don’t-miss moments of the conference. This year’s speech is no exception.
Raph describes this year’s speech as “darker” than in previous years, and I don’t know if that’s the right word – more like “angry.” Koster is angry at the proliferation of abusive behavior in online worlds, especially in the new VR and AR worlds, which are recapitulating every stupid mistake made in share online spaces all the way back to text MUDs.
But the designers of Koster’s era had an excuse: they were making mistakes no one had ever made before. The current crop of designers – all the way up to Marc Zuckerberg, who so disgusted Koster during a job interview that Koster publicly says he never expects to work for Facebook again – are making mistakes that have been lavishly documented, and the only explanation for making these mistakes again is either cruelty or depraved indifference to cruelty.
Koster says that online worlds are disproportionately used by people who are emotionally vulnerable, as a therapeutic tool. These people are the bread and butter of the games industry, but the industry does nothing to protect them from the bad behavior built into the games they design.
The underlying problem here is that games companies want to act like capricious gods when it suits them, but claim to be powerless in the face of their users’ bad conduct when that suits them. It’s the World of Democracycraft problem, which I’ve been discussing with Raph (and writing about) for more than a decade.
Koster isn’t just raging here, he’s exhorting: he’s telling the designers of GDC where to find solutions, how to spot the problems, how to fight the fires before they kindle. It’s a wonderful speech. I hope he posts a transcript soon!
