The Trump presidency

[mojo pixy]

Verbs ending in -ize, -ise, -yze, and... | Oxford Dictionaries

In both American and British English, there is a small set of verbs that must always be spelled with -ise at the end. The main reason for this is that, in these words, -ise is part of a longer word element rather than being a separate ending in its own right. For example: -cise (meaning 'cutting) in the word excise; -prise (meaning 'taking') as in surprise; or -mise (meaning 'sending') in promise.

advertise
compromise
exercise
revise
advise
despise
improvise
supervise
apprise
devise
incise
surmise
chastise
disguise
prise (meaning ‘open’)
surprise
comprise
excise
promise
televise

/diversion

 

[Cloo]

Thought occurred to me about people saying 'Protest doesn't work' 'Protesters are making too big a deal out of things'... I guess the thing is we'll never know what Trump and co would have done if people hadn't protested and made a big deal. Made ban permanent? Started keeping lists of Muslims? Revoked Muslim passports? Maybe, maybe not, but silence could well have been taken as assent to continue down same path ASAP.

 

[ska invita]

Jennifer: What is it doing?
David Lightman: It's learning.

Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/us/politics/trump-white-house-aides-strategy.html?_r=0
gives the impression of being an accurate write up on whats going on in the white house

 

[mauvais]

This is along the lines of if you don't like xxx you'll have to spell out exactly what utopia looks like. Which is just silly, isn't it

It's not really that, and it's not really silly. I said much the same on the 'war with China' thread. If you can't imagine what form it would take and what it would look like in practice, how meaningful is the possibility? In this case, the event being the American establishment - or some weird bit of it, anyway - deviating from the path of neoliberalism and global capital.

We're now entering an era where electorates are clearly against protectionism, against free movement, against supranational entities and against overarching trade agreements like TPP & TTIP. If the EU, with its 4 pillars of freedom of movement, epitomises neoliberalism, how can the new era be an acceleration? I don't get it.

For the obvious reason that what the electorate wants, and even thinks it is getting, is not necessarily connected to what the electorate actually gets. Personally I wouldn't call any of this an acceleration, but I'm far from convinced it's a meaningful change of direction. In the case of Trump, I'm not sure that the actual outcomes, much less the ideology, even deserve to be recognised as a coherent thing at all.

But, like you, I don't know - my understanding is very weak.

That seems to be asking can he (they) deliver? We really will have to wait and see. If the political shift towards restrictions on free movement and protectionism fails- as it might well in our massively interconnected world- then globalisation might reassert dominance. Trumpism might be a minor hiccup in neoliberalism, or might be a disruption before the neoneoliberalist economics of the future.

Not quite. 'Can they deliver' implies an intent and the resulting struggle against the norm. I'm more inclined to ask, 'do they even want or intend to deliver'. Is anyone but the guy at the bottom even really interested?

 

[existentialist]

lots of people are called jesus but i've never seen you kick up a fuss about them.

"Jesus" is a name, though: "Christ" is more of a job title. Christ (title) - Wikipedia

 

[camouflage]

"Jesus" is a name, though: "Christ" is more of a job title. Christ (title) - Wikipedia

Ah... like Smith, Baker or Archer.

 

[existentialist]

Ah... like Smith, Baker or Archer.

Heh, I suppose so . Except being a smith isn't quite as grandiose as being a saviour or redeemer

 

[CrabbedOne]

You say that like the Iranians are just Russias Sardaukar mercenaries sent to establish their dominance over Arrakis, rather than very concerned neighbours who like Russia know they're next on the jihadi&co target list.

That's the way the Russians might look at it. Though they are not effete enough to be much worried by bogeymen like IS and their ilk. The Americans with their massive ICBM arsenal, trillion dollar defence budget and tendency to opportunistic regime change are the problem.

For the Iranians the Russians are just another bunch of dangerous imperialists that they buy arms off. At the moment willing to help along a revolution extending across the Levant that once spooked the KGB as much as it did the CIA when it took Teheran. Khomeini called the USSR the "lesser Satan". The Russians are now useful idiots to offset the Great Satan's incompetent meddling. And when Mosul falls that'll provide “250 kilometers of security to Iran,” in Iraq. An enemy country that invaded Iran in 1980 and only a few years ago was occupied by a great horde of far more dangerous Americans now dwindled to a couple of reluctantly deployed Brigades. Iraq just needs a little more patient work to be Iran's backyard. The Salafi-Jihadis are in their way a gift from Allah to the guardians of the revolution. As is Trump with his talk of keeping the oil but aversion to occupation and useful infatuation with Putin. One wounded snake is now to be played off against the other.

 

[camouflage]

That's the way the Russians might look at it. Though they are not effete enough to be much worried by bogeymen like IS and their ilk. The Americans with their massive ICBM arsenal, trillion dollar defence budget and tendency to opportunistic regime change are the problem.

For the Iranians the Russians are just another bunch of dangerous imperialists that they buy arms off. At the moment willing to help along a revolution extending across the Levant that once spooked the KGB as much as it did the CIA when it took Teheran. Khomeini called the USSR the "lesser Satan". The Russians are now useful idiots to offset the Great Satan's incompetent meddling. And when Mosul falls that'll provide “250 kilometers of security to Iran,” in Iraq. An enemy country that invaded Iran in 1980 and only a few years ago was occupied by a great horde of far more dangerous Americans now dwindled to a couple of reluctantly deployed Brigades. Iraq just needs a little more patient work to be Iran's backyard. The Salafi-Jihadis are in their way a gift from Allah to the guardians of the revolution. As is Trump with his talk of keeping the oil but aversion to occupation and useful infatuation with Putin. One wounded snake is now to be played off against the other.

tl:dr; "Shai hulud".

 

[CRI]

Jennifer: What is it doing?
David Lightman: It's learning.

Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/05/us/politics/trump-white-house-aides-strategy.html?_r=0
gives the impression of being an accurate write up on whats going on in the white house

Was about to post this. Some interesting nuggets:

This account of the early days of the Trump White House is based on interviews with dozens of government officials, congressional aides, former staff members and other observers of the new administration, many of whom requested anonymity. At the center of the story, according to these sources, is a president determined to go big but increasingly frustrated by the efforts of his small team to contain the backlash.

Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander around, testing doorknobs until finding one that leads to an exit. In a darkened, mostly empty West Wing, Mr. Trump’s provocative chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, finishes another 16-hour day planning new lines of attack.

“We are moving big and we are moving fast,” Mr. Bannon said, when asked about the upheaval of the first two weeks. “We didn’t come here to do small things.”

Chris Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and an old friend of the president’s, said: “I think, in his mind, the success of this is going to be the poll numbers. If they continue to be weak or go lower, then somebody’s going to have to bear some responsibility for that.”

Cloistered in the White House, he now has little access to his fans and supporters — an important source of feedback and validation — and feels increasingly pinched by the pressures of the job and the constant presence of protests, one of the reasons he was forced to scrap a planned trip to Milwaukee last week. For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon.

Mr. Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

So he's been signing Executive Orders without reading them, and didn't even know he'd put Bannon on the NSC. Oh, ok.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Was about to post this. Some interesting nuggets:

This account of the early days of the Trump White House is based on interviews with dozens of government officials, congressional aides, former staff members and other observers of the new administration, many of whom requested anonymity. At the center of the story, according to these sources, is a president determined to go big but increasingly frustrated by the efforts of his small team to contain the backlash.

Aides confer in the dark because they cannot figure out how to operate the light switches in the cabinet room. Visitors conclude their meetings and then wander around, testing doorknobs until finding one that leads to an exit. In a darkened, mostly empty West Wing, Mr. Trump’s provocative chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, finishes another 16-hour day planning new lines of attack.

“We are moving big and we are moving fast,” Mr. Bannon said, when asked about the upheaval of the first two weeks. “We didn’t come here to do small things.”

Chris Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and an old friend of the president’s, said: “I think, in his mind, the success of this is going to be the poll numbers. If they continue to be weak or go lower, then somebody’s going to have to bear some responsibility for that.”

Cloistered in the White House, he now has little access to his fans and supporters — an important source of feedback and validation — and feels increasingly pinched by the pressures of the job and the constant presence of protests, one of the reasons he was forced to scrap a planned trip to Milwaukee last week. For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon.

Mr. Priebus bristles at the perception that he occupies a diminished perch in the West Wing pecking order compared with previous chiefs. But for the moment, Mr. Bannon remains the president’s dominant adviser, despite Mr. Trump’s anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed giving his chief strategist a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban.

So he's been signing Executive Orders without reading them, and didn't even know he'd put Bannon on the NSC. Oh, ok.

Bannon only works 16 hour days! The utter flyweight.

 

[CrabbedOne]

On Bloomberg Trump's Rule-Slashing Is Bad News for Europe's Banks

...
At a banking conference I attended last month, the head of capital markets at a big European firm said it was ironic that the meltdown in the U.S. mortgage market triggered the financial crisis that's led to tighter regulations, and yet the U.S. banks looked likely to be first to get relief from those rules, thus giving them a competitive advantage.

To be clear, European banks are in large part the architects of their own post-crisis misfortune. They were much slower than their U.S. counterparts to recognize that they needed new capital to bolster their balance sheets. And they fought against every new rule proposed by regulators designed to prevent future mishaps becoming the burden of taxpayers.
...

A lot of Europe's banks are still in a shitty state. They were laxly regulated before the crisis and still are. The Swiss moved to clear up some systemic risk due to angry popular protests but elsewhere it's been pretty half hearted. Expect a lot of such growling as Trump unmuzzles the Wall St beast once again.

 

[CRI]

Freudian slip I suppose . . .

 

[belboid]

"Jesus" is a name, though: "Christ" is more of a job title. Christ (title) - Wikipedia

Christine, Kirsten, Christian. Guess what they're all derived from

 

[CrabbedOne]

On Lawfare Does Trump Want to Lose the EO Battle in Court? Or is Donald McGahn Simply Ineffectual (or Worse)?

...
One person who must bear responsibility for the awful rollout of the EO is White House Counsel Donald McGahn. The White House Counsel is charged with (among other things) ensuring proper inter-agency coordination on important legal policies and with protecting the President from legal fallout. McGahn should have anticipated and corrected in advance the many foreseeable problems with the manner in which the EO was rolled out. And he should have advised the President after his first anti-Robart tweet, and after the other more aggressive ones, that the tweets were hurting the President’s legal cause.

If McGahn did not do these things, he is incompetent, and perhaps we can attribute impulsive incompetence to the President. But if McGahn did do these things—if he tried to put the brakes on the EO, and if he warned his client about the adverse impact of his tweets—then he has shockingly little influence with the President and within the White House (i.e. he is ineffectual). And if McGahn is ineffectual as opposed to just incompetent—if he did, in other words, warn the President about the impact of his tweets and was ignored—then that lends credence to the suspicion that Trump knows the consequences of his actions and wants to lose in court, with the most plausible explanation being that he is planning for after the next attack.

Trump's tweets buggering up the passage of his "Muslim Ban". Perhaps deliberately to undermine the judiciary perhaps not.

 

[Pickman's model]

Christine, Kirsten, Christian. Guess what they're all derived from

christopher
christabel

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?

Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?

 

[CrabbedOne]

On TSG IntelBrief: A Rise in Levels of Hate

...
Likewise, the U.S. has experienced a rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence targeting Jewish communities and individuals. According to a statement by the Anti-Defamation League, there have been at least 50 bomb threats to Jewish community centers since the start of 2017, 14 of which led to evacuations. The recent spike is consistent with increases in levels of anti-Semitism across the U.S. over the last several years. Muslim mosques have also been the targets of hate crimes and attacks. In the month of January 2017 alone, two mosques were destroyed by fires in Texas; police are still investigating both. The community reaction to the second fire, at the Islamic Center of Victoria, has been public and positive, with churches and synagogues offering the use of their facilities. The second Texas mosque fire came on the heels of the horrific attack on a mosque in Canada, when a gunman entered the Quebec Islamic Cultural Center and murdered six worshippers in an attack eerily similar to the June 2015 racially-motivated Charleston church shooting.

The current levels of anti-immigrant and xenophobic anger—along with the increased targeting of people based on religious or racial motivations—harken back to the 1930s, where political and social xenophobic trend lines combined with disastrous consequences. Indeed, reports that seek to dismiss or minimize possible consequences of the spike in hate incidents are likely more destructive than reports that exaggerate the risk or parallels. The reversion to the rhetoric of the 1930s is being fueled and sped by the technology of 2017. In addition to the individuals and groups spreading hate, social media bots continually multiply nativist and nationalist sentiment into racist propaganda spreading across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

It's depressingly easy to stir this stuff up again. There's parallels with the very reactionary Sunni victimhood based identity that's sprung up since the fall of Baghdad tapping on old tropes of treachery.

It's all waiting out there in the grass particularly US anti-Semitism which often found expression in attacks on "liberal elites" with or without "Hollywood" added on. The not-real America: the enemy within. The socialism of fools, innit.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Bill filed that would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency:

Cosponsors - H.R.861 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sponsored by three Republicans from the south, naturally. Further proof that we should have let the south leave when they offered.

 

[mather]

So he's been signing Executive Orders without reading them, and didn't even know he'd put Bannon on the NSC. Oh, ok.

Not much is known about Bannon but if he is the cunning political strategist some claim him to be then I have to wonder how much of a hand Bannon had in selecting himself into the NSA? If Bannon is the power behind the throne then he could not have asked for a better president than Trump, who on some levels seems to desire the presidency yet doesn't want to do any of the work associated with the job.

 

[bluescreen]

Bill filed that would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency:

Cosponsors - H.R.861 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

Is this a regular sort of thing that won't get anywhere, or is he filing on behalf of the White House with a reasonable expectation of getting it past?

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Is this a regular sort of thing that won't get anywhere, or is he filing on behalf of the White House with a reasonable expectation of getting it past?

I don't recall seeing it on the bill list before. In the past there was a reasonable amount of support for the EPA.

 

[belboid]

Not much is known about Bannon but if he is the cunning political strategist some claim him to be then I have to wonder how much of a hand Bannon had in selecting himself into the NSA? If Bannon is the power behind the throne then he could not have asked for a better president than Trump, who on some levels seems to desire the presidency yet doesn't want to do any of the work associated with the job.

mm, there's fair bit known about Bannon

 

[bluescreen]

I don't recall seeing it on the bill list before. In the past there was a reasonable amount of support for the EPA.

Is it all part of this deregulation, small government drive? As I understand it, Trump wants to devolve responsibility to the states, which is bound to lead to huge inequalities and failures. Deeply ironic that the bill's sponsor is from Florida, a state in the forefront of rising sea level, but whose legislators seem to be doing their damnedest to deny climate change.

 

[DotCommunist]

mm, there's fair bit known about Bannon

he's hardly been a wallflower

 

[DotCommunist]

trying to think of a poison ivy gag

 

[Pickman's model]

trying to think of a poison ivy gag

never around when you want her

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Is it all part of this deregulation, small government drive? As I understand it, Trump wants to devolve responsibility to the states, which is bound to lead to huge inequalities and failures. Deeply ironic that the bill's sponsor is from Florida, a state in the forefront of rising sea level, but whose legislators seem to be doing their damnedest to deny climate change.

The Republicans have been after the EPA for decades. The only reason this is popping up now is because they think they can get it done this time.

 

[bluescreen]

The Republicans have been after the EPA for decades. The only reason this is popping up now is because they think they can get it done this time.

So they are going to make money out of it?

 

[mather]

mm, there's fair bit known about Bannon

Some yes but not all, he is one of the lesser known people in Trump's cabinet. Then there are all the conflicting and contradictory reports about how much power he does have and how good he is at using it.