Quotes, Izzmonster Tummy Edition
Is that a saying yet?
"In a runaway reaction, the best reaction is to RUN AWAY"
-- acronus, YouTube, comments, on "Runaway: Explosion at T2 Laboratories"
I lost three sirens during the tornado. I had somebody complain to me later on that I turned one of them off during the tornado. [Audience laughs.] I said, "No, that was the one that disappeared." Four hundred pound piece of metal, still -- I never found it. I have no idea what happened to it.
-- Joplin, MO Emergency Management Director, in "20 Minutes in May," lecture on emergency management during and after the 2015 F-5 Joplin tornado
America is brimming over with amazing ideas, all implemented in the most ass-backward and idiotic way.
-- Michael Toledano, Facebook, comments
Just ahead of the Canada Day long weekend, a Saskatoon man may have committed the most Canadian act ever: buying a full-sized canoe with a briefcase full of Canadian Tire money.
-- Morgan Modjeski, "Only in Canada: Saskatoon man buys canoe with briefcase full of Canadian Tire cash," CBC News
The pilot was too close to the rocks. Touch the... [makes circular motion with hand over head] *whp whp*... Everybody down.
-- Mont-Blanc mountain guide Phillipe Choub, interviewed in "Mountain Rescue Episode 4," describing a helicopter crash he was in, in English, and communicating spectacularly
Not agreeing is not the same as not listening. We listen because when we don’t we miss important cues that say someone is dangerous. Frequently, when I am talking with men and we disagree, they come back with no you didn’t listen to me. Then they say I don’t understand.
-- @Smoking_Pen, Twitter
Every single raindrop feels like someone hitting you with a needle. Every piece of gravel feels like a bullet. Pieces of metal will fly around like helicopter blades. You just can't be out in it. It's like being in a blender for hours and hours and hours.
-- stormchaser George Carunas, interviewed in "Worst Weather Ever"
They are motivated by the increased impotency of liberal Western institutions, even as they are complicit in their enervation. The same radical right-wing that long accused Muslims of being treasonous has become the actual fifth column, not only besotted by Russia but in bed with Vladimir Putin, actively working with a longstanding geopolitical rival to galvanize the greatest threat to the West and liberal democracy in our lifetimes. That’s far greater a threat to the West than any jihadist terrorism.
-- Haroon Moghul, "The White Genocide That the Far Right Won't Talk About," Ha'aretz
There is no negotiating with, or appeasing, or even engaging a party that feels no responsibility to the truth. Lying is more than “uncivil.” It corrodes relationships and trust, and the damage it does it permanent. I know it’s fashionable these days to wear one’s cynicism on one’s sleeve: We predict every promise will be broken because expecting honesty is laughably naïve. This makes reality easier to live with and joke about. But it’s a symptom of national rot. Being lied to, constantly, is not the price of being governed. That we have naturalized this-that we expect nothing less, in fact-shows how far we’ve already gone down a bad, bad road. This was already an unhealthy country in many ways. But at least lies were still resented. Now they are celebrated.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
*Trump locks children in cages without food, beds, soap, or medicine*
Red hats: Those aren't REAL concentration camps!!
*Antifa throws a milkshake*
Red hats: OMG, HATE CRIME!! HATE CRIME!! *drives car into crowd*
-- Donna Coyne, Facebook, comments
I think it's good that they do remember it. To remember the hardship, and suffering of earlier generations, and to realize clearly the true cost of coal -- not in money, but in blood, and in grief, and in toil, and in tears.
-- historian David Perry, interviewed in "Disasters of the Century: 'Black Week'," on the memorials for the Senghenydd mine disaster of 1913
The nation broke its promise to provide community-based care and treatment for the mentally ill following the closure of state mental hospitals beginning in the 1970s. It’s a promise that ultimately society must keep, and for which it must pay.
-- Editorial Board, "Three things you think you ‘know’ about homelessness in L.A. that aren’t true," Los Angeles Times
Just because someone has reasons doesn't mean you can reason with them.
-- Croaker, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
It was so big, it was causing twenty-foot waves; people were surfing on Lake Michigan outside of Chicago, from a storm that was pounding the east coast.
-- SUNY SFLK climatologist Scott Mandia, interviewed in "Worst Weather Ever"
The forces most keen to warn you of a white genocide, however, want the white genocide that actually happened to happen again. To get there, they must undermine the liberal Western order that keeps minorities much safer than any alternative; only in the absence of a strong West, rooted in liberal values, can there be an eliminationist campaign against those who do not fit within the white supremacist worldview. People of color. Jews. Muslims. Even the white ones.
-- Haroon Moghul, "The White Genocide That the Far Right Won't Talk About," Ha'aretz
My cat hid in the bottom level of her cat tree (about 3ft tall) on moving day so we just stuffed a sheet in the exit hole and moved her in that.
-- @exoreys, Twitter, spotted at Cheezburger.com
"It's a very stupid thing, but here we are," he said, noting it was likely accurate to say this is probably the most Canadian thing that's ever been done.
-- Tomas Terfloth, quoted in Morgan Modjeski, "Only in Canada: Saskatoon man buys canoe with briefcase full of Canadian Tire cash," CBC News
The Trump administration may be "reunifying" families, but their definition of a family is only a parent and a child. If, for example, a 9-year-old crosses with an 18-year-old sister - or an aunt or uncle, or a grandparent, or anyone who isn't the child's documented legal guardian - they are not counted as a family and they will be separated.
Mothers and children may be considered "together" if they're held in the same gigantic facility, even if they're locked in separate cages with no access to one another. (In the world of CBP and ICE, that's how the 10-year-old girls locked in a giant cage are "not separated" from their mothers who are in cages elsewhere in the facility.)
In the process of "reunifying" families, the government may possibly count a family as reunited by sending the child to a distant relative they've never met - not their parents. Some relatives may be unwilling to claim these children because it would be inviting ICE to investigate their own families.
-- Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, 20 June 2019, on her visit to the McAllen detention facility
The problem isn’t simply that Trump-who styles himself a “law and order” president-values neither: He objected to the Central Park Five’s going free, despite the DNA evidence proving their innocence. He wanted their false imprisonment. It isn’t just that he advocates against due process, tars asylum applicants as criminals, and characterizes even their children as an “infestation.” It isn’t simply that he sees black men as intrinsically guilty, the same as brown refugees. It’s that he shouts about law and order while upholding the immunity of the rich and the cruel: He pardoned Joe Arpaio, who tortured undocumented immigrants in unlivable tent cities he openly called concentration camps, and, in pardoning Dinesh D’Souza, has signaled he will pardon his cronies if they are convicted for illegally helping him.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
“It goes to the core of what’s wrong with Great Ape Society these days, “Andrew EeekEeekEeekOooooh, a chimpanzee and free speech advocate, shrieked at me. “This kind of helicopter mother matchmaking doesn’t prepare young bonobos for the real world. I lay it all out in my book Actually, You Should Just Bite Each Other: An Antidote To Everybody Not Biting Each Other. If young bonobos learn that their mothers will help them hook up and ward off coitus interruptus-ors, how will they ever learn to charge around, hooting, shrieking, breaking branches and tearing up small trees? And it’s not just leading to a lack of life skills,” he added, throwing poo at me. “This wrongly ordered parenting means that bonobos today are hostile, if you can believe it, to my continually inviting poachers and clear-cutters to speak in their increasingly limited forest habitat! Debate me!” he shouted. More poo.
-- Tabatha Southey, "The birds, the bees and the bonobos," Maclean's
Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but at least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.
-- Michelle Goldberg, "The Welcome Humiliation of John Bolton," The New York Times
There were at least two suicides in the wake of this incident. A Japan Airlines employee, who was working with victims' families, and an inspection engineer who issued a certificate of airworthiness for the doomed plane after the 1978 tail strike.
-- narration from "Why Planes Crash: Breaking Point," on JAL 123, the deadliest single-aircraft crash in history
Conservatives fantasize about unleashing the power of the State while constantly bemoaning that power when it is used for any collective good. Thus, conservatives think it a good thing that the power of the State can be used to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy, but bemoan the very idea that the power of the State be used to compel a chemical company to not pollute the public water supply.
-- Derelict, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
It had the energy of two atomic bombs. That's how powerful it was.
-- -- SUNY SFLK climatologist Scott Mandia, interviewed in "Worst Weather Ever," on Hurricane Sandy's kinetic energy scale rating
this is how fascism comes to power. Not through elections (they never won a free election anywhere) but because a significant section of the state and capitalist class side with them and clear their way to power by aiding in eliminating opposition.
-- @andrewflood, Twitter
It is clear, now, that there was nothing to wait for. In the time we’ve been waiting, the rich have only gotten richer and angrier and whiter, but it will never be enough for them.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
In October 1946, technicians at the White Sands Proving Ground in Nevada installed a camera in the nose cone of a captured V-2 and launched it straight up into the sky. Within 30 seconds, the rocket disappeared from view. But then it began looking back, its 35-mm camera snapping photographs every second and a half, up to an altitude of 83 miles, before crashing down to the desert. A search plane found the wreckage and recovered the film, protected in a cylindrical steel cassette the diameter of a dinner plate.
“A truly dramatic spectacle unfolded when the film was developed,” the camera’s designer, Clyde T. Holliday, recalled. “On these photographs we saw what a passenger on a V-2 would see if he could stay alive on the zooming ride up to that height and back again, and how our earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a spaceship.”
It was a view that had before been only imagined, but its practical benefits were unmistakable. This first visit of a camera to the margins of space yielded photographs of a quarter of the United States, an area of nearly a million square miles. The curvature of the earth was visible, along with bands of clouds stretching hundreds of miles in rows like streets.
Meteorologists were immediately enthralled by the possibilities. The director of the Weather Bureau, Francis Reichelderfer, wanted reprints of the images from the camera’s designers at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University to be shared with every weather office in the country, “so our forecasters can obtain a glimpse into what may well turn into a potent weather forecast tool in the future.”
-- Andrew Blum, "How a Nazi incursion into Labrador to set up a secret weather station heralded a new era," The Toronto Star, excerpt from The Weather Machine
[O]ur relationship when it comes to Megan’s fashion is based on what you might call a “modified democracy,” where we both give our opinion and then Megan does what she wants.
-- Sue Bird, "So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend," The Players' Tribune, on her girlfriend Megan Rapinoe
Oh my God! The door break open! Oh my God! The door just break open!
-- witness in archival footage, in "Worst Weather Ever," as floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy innundate her house
In retrospect, possibly the biggest lie of the various police themed movies and TV shows I grew up watching was how they regularly portrayed cops and neo-Nazi, KKK, and other white supremacist types as mortal enemies, with the former hunting the latter as relentlessly and zealously as they do leftists in real life. In reality, not so much.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Meanwhile, those in power will celebrate how much they deserve their wealth and how little anyone else deserves. And they will grab for more. You’d think they’d be happy: America now has the highest income inequality in the industrialized world. But even that is not enough. The greed is insatiable. And it is a greed not just for wealth but for domination-for permanent entitlement. What they want is to be served. At restaurants. On golf courses. In corporate offices. There is no form of protest they will respect: loud or silent, formal or spontaneous, civil or rude. Written petitions or marches on the streets.
They don’t care. Those in power have been very clear about what they do care about. “We have more money and more brains and better houses and apartments and nicer boats,” Trump said Wednesday in a speech to his supporters, because he cannot help but say what he really means. “We are the elite.” That vicious little “we” excludes most of America. Those in power have cut off diplomatic relations with the country they’re meant to govern, and the party they’re meant to govern with. The point-of-no-return polarization that pundits still feebly warn against is already here. It is sad. It is true.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
We hold these truths to be self evident: that all seats must be returned to their original upright and locked position, and that your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device.
-- @tomjuarez, Twitter
I had a good friend once say I was pure evil, wrapped in Mister Rogers' sweater. I liked that.
-- magician Nicholas Wallace, Penn & Teller: Fool Us intro
LBJ: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
There must be a corollary to this that says if you can convince the lowest white man that someone is trying to steal his money (socialism!) he'll resist any effort to save his life, his future, the world, etc.
-- Paul Bloom, Facebook, comments
It’s not that I’m too old for this shit, but this shit sure has gotten old for me.
-- Roy Edroso, "Right wing mood swing in DC," Roy Edroso Breaks It Down
What I think a lot of people who don't have as much contact with people like this don't understand is that they actually think making jokes about people dying of torture, and rape, and just basic "cruelty is funny if the person suffering is on the other team" talk is something they think EVERYBODY DOES and then lies about doing if their wife or pastor is asking. That's why Trump bragging about sexual assault didn't even register with so many of them. To them, the story wasn't that he said it ("of course he did - who doesn't?"), but that he got caught and the librul media was making such a big deal about it.
-- Shirley0401, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
To the uninitiated, having Chill and being cool are synonyms. They describe a person with a laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis, and reasonably interesting tastes and passions. But the person with Chill is crucially missing these last ingredients because they are too far removed from anything that looks like intensity to have passions. They have discernible tastes and beliefs but they are unlikely to materialize as passionate. Passion is polarizing; being enthusiastic or worked up is downright obsessive. Excessive Chill is “You do you” taken to its most extreme conclusion, giving everyone’s opinions and interests equal value so long as they’re authentically ours.
-- Alana Massey, "Against Chill," Medium
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
-- Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, quoted in Laurie Penny, "No, I Will Not Debate You," Longreads.com
Would the same speech-perhaps replacing Germany with a modern stock villain like Iran, Russia, or China-even make a ripple today? We can read the Iowa Speech and say without hyperbole that we have read twenty-five vastly worse things already today just by spending a half hour on Twitter. We can hear more egregious and problematic things from the President, from members of Congress, from major media figures. Alt-right types would probably call Lindbergh a cuck for not hitting The Jews harder, and he would immediately land a six-figure job as the new face of Turning Point USA. Tucker would have him on every night, between Glenn Greenwald and the segment on immigrant crime waves.
-- Ed Burmila, "Back When American Fascism Was Bad: On the Cancelling of Charles Lindbergh," The Baffler
Detainees can pay to make phone calls, but all of their possessions are taken from them at the processing center. The only way they can get money for a call is for someone to put money on their accounts. I asked if people or charities could donate money so that they'd be able to make phone calls to their family or lawyers, but they said no - a donor would need the individual ID number for every person detained at the center, and ICE obviously isn't going to release that information.
-- Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, 20 June 2019, on her visit to the McAllen detention facility
Sonya: It's a hell of a journey. What else is there to do, but have marvellous sex?
Joan: I thought I'd take a book.
-- dialogue from "Red Joan"
Chill has now slithered into our romantic lives and forced those among us who would like to exchange feelings and accountability to compete in the Blasé Olympics with whomever we are dating. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean whomever we are “hanging out with.” Whomever we are “talking to.” Chill asks us to remove the language of courtship and desire lest we appear invested somehow in other human beings. To even acknowledge that there might be an emotional dimension to talking or dating or hanging out or coming over or fucking or whatever the kids are calling it all these days feels forbidden. It is a game of chicken where the first person to confess their frustration or confusion loses. But Chill is not the opposite of uptight. It is the opposite of demanding accountability. Chill is a sinister refashioning of “Calm down!” from an enraging and highly gendered command into an admirable attitude.
-- Alana Massey, "Against Chill," Medium
Somewhere halfway through the Great Recession, in the midst of one grotesque 1%er or teabagger performance or another, is when I realized that this is the real appeal of revolution. Not that you might get a better life, not that you might get a more efficient government, but that it was literally the only way that certain categories of criminals would ever face any kind of accountability for their crimes. And those are usually the very worst sorts of criminals, even if society says their crimes are legal. When you're barely making rent and can't afford health care you need, and one of the people who's forced that state of affairs onto you is on the TV fuming about how it's outrageous that you think you can tax him so he can't afford a second yacht or whatever... Well, lining him up against a wall and shooting him might not make your life any better, but does anybody not see the cathartic appeal, or, frankly, think he doesn't deserve it?
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Tim Fazenbaker, a glad-hander with a distinctly oily Ted Cruz vibe, came up to dangle crowd-bait bromides like “political correctness has taken over in a way like never before, we are on the brink of social war, all these leftist companies like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are silencing conservative voices” etc. But the crowd was losing interest in opening acts by then, so Fazenbaker yelled things like “Sharia law has come here! Think about that!” and warned that “we’re gonna turn into Canada.”
-- Roy Edroso, "Right wing mood swing in DC," Roy Edroso Breaks It Down
Focusing the conversation on the ethics of disseminating speech rather than the actual content of that speech is hugely useful for the far right for three reasons. Firstly, it allows them to paint themselves as the wronged party - the martyrs and victims. Secondly, it stops people from talking about the actual wronged parties, the real lives at risk. And thirdly, of course, it’s an enormous diversion tactic, a shout of “Fire!” in the crowded theatre of politics. But Liberals don’t want to feel like bad people, so this impossible choice - betray the letter of your principles, or betray the spirit - leaves everyone feeling filthy. There’s no way to come out of this convinced of your own political purity. The thing is, though, that establishing your own political purity isn’t what progressive politics are supposed to be about.
-- Laurie Penny, "No, I Will Not Debate You," Longreads.com
Asbestos is like "I CAME HERE TO RETARD FIRES AND CAUSE CANCER, AND I'M ALL OUT OF FIRES"
-- Michael Yosef Miller, Facebook
She is a communist. An anti-white liberal.
-- Neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr., quoted in (no byline) "Neo-Nazi sentenced to life without parole for Charlottesville hate crimes," CBC News, on killing Heather Heyer
You know the "Question Authority" bumper sticker? I suggest one: "Question Technology."
-- aviation lawyer and United 811 incident survivor Bruce Lambert, interviewed in "Why Planes Crash: Breaking Point," on JAL 123, the deadliest single-aircraft crash in history
Conservatives love the power of the state when it is deployed to enforce the hierarchies that they contend are "natural".
-- Linnaeus, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The far right does not respect the free and liberal exchange of ideas. It is not open to compromise, and it does not want a debate. It wants power.
-- Laurie Penny, "No, I Will Not Debate You," Longreads.com
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions.
-- Alexander Chase, quoted in Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardoso, "An open letter to the chief rabbi of South Africa and his rabbinical court," Times of Israel blogs
Indecision is not a noble virtue.
-- Alana Massey, "Against Chill," Medium
"In a runaway reaction, the best reaction is to RUN AWAY"
-- acronus, YouTube, comments, on "Runaway: Explosion at T2 Laboratories"
I lost three sirens during the tornado. I had somebody complain to me later on that I turned one of them off during the tornado. [Audience laughs.] I said, "No, that was the one that disappeared." Four hundred pound piece of metal, still -- I never found it. I have no idea what happened to it.
-- Joplin, MO Emergency Management Director, in "20 Minutes in May," lecture on emergency management during and after the 2015 F-5 Joplin tornado
America is brimming over with amazing ideas, all implemented in the most ass-backward and idiotic way.
-- Michael Toledano, Facebook, comments
Just ahead of the Canada Day long weekend, a Saskatoon man may have committed the most Canadian act ever: buying a full-sized canoe with a briefcase full of Canadian Tire money.
-- Morgan Modjeski, "Only in Canada: Saskatoon man buys canoe with briefcase full of Canadian Tire cash," CBC News
The pilot was too close to the rocks. Touch the... [makes circular motion with hand over head] *whp whp*... Everybody down.
-- Mont-Blanc mountain guide Phillipe Choub, interviewed in "Mountain Rescue Episode 4," describing a helicopter crash he was in, in English, and communicating spectacularly
Not agreeing is not the same as not listening. We listen because when we don’t we miss important cues that say someone is dangerous. Frequently, when I am talking with men and we disagree, they come back with no you didn’t listen to me. Then they say I don’t understand.
-- @Smoking_Pen, Twitter
Every single raindrop feels like someone hitting you with a needle. Every piece of gravel feels like a bullet. Pieces of metal will fly around like helicopter blades. You just can't be out in it. It's like being in a blender for hours and hours and hours.
-- stormchaser George Carunas, interviewed in "Worst Weather Ever"
They are motivated by the increased impotency of liberal Western institutions, even as they are complicit in their enervation. The same radical right-wing that long accused Muslims of being treasonous has become the actual fifth column, not only besotted by Russia but in bed with Vladimir Putin, actively working with a longstanding geopolitical rival to galvanize the greatest threat to the West and liberal democracy in our lifetimes. That’s far greater a threat to the West than any jihadist terrorism.
-- Haroon Moghul, "The White Genocide That the Far Right Won't Talk About," Ha'aretz
There is no negotiating with, or appeasing, or even engaging a party that feels no responsibility to the truth. Lying is more than “uncivil.” It corrodes relationships and trust, and the damage it does it permanent. I know it’s fashionable these days to wear one’s cynicism on one’s sleeve: We predict every promise will be broken because expecting honesty is laughably naïve. This makes reality easier to live with and joke about. But it’s a symptom of national rot. Being lied to, constantly, is not the price of being governed. That we have naturalized this-that we expect nothing less, in fact-shows how far we’ve already gone down a bad, bad road. This was already an unhealthy country in many ways. But at least lies were still resented. Now they are celebrated.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
*Trump locks children in cages without food, beds, soap, or medicine*
Red hats: Those aren't REAL concentration camps!!
*Antifa throws a milkshake*
Red hats: OMG, HATE CRIME!! HATE CRIME!! *drives car into crowd*
-- Donna Coyne, Facebook, comments
I think it's good that they do remember it. To remember the hardship, and suffering of earlier generations, and to realize clearly the true cost of coal -- not in money, but in blood, and in grief, and in toil, and in tears.
-- historian David Perry, interviewed in "Disasters of the Century: 'Black Week'," on the memorials for the Senghenydd mine disaster of 1913
The nation broke its promise to provide community-based care and treatment for the mentally ill following the closure of state mental hospitals beginning in the 1970s. It’s a promise that ultimately society must keep, and for which it must pay.
-- Editorial Board, "Three things you think you ‘know’ about homelessness in L.A. that aren’t true," Los Angeles Times
Just because someone has reasons doesn't mean you can reason with them.
-- Croaker, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
It was so big, it was causing twenty-foot waves; people were surfing on Lake Michigan outside of Chicago, from a storm that was pounding the east coast.
-- SUNY SFLK climatologist Scott Mandia, interviewed in "Worst Weather Ever"
The forces most keen to warn you of a white genocide, however, want the white genocide that actually happened to happen again. To get there, they must undermine the liberal Western order that keeps minorities much safer than any alternative; only in the absence of a strong West, rooted in liberal values, can there be an eliminationist campaign against those who do not fit within the white supremacist worldview. People of color. Jews. Muslims. Even the white ones.
-- Haroon Moghul, "The White Genocide That the Far Right Won't Talk About," Ha'aretz
My cat hid in the bottom level of her cat tree (about 3ft tall) on moving day so we just stuffed a sheet in the exit hole and moved her in that.
-- @exoreys, Twitter, spotted at Cheezburger.com
"It's a very stupid thing, but here we are," he said, noting it was likely accurate to say this is probably the most Canadian thing that's ever been done.
-- Tomas Terfloth, quoted in Morgan Modjeski, "Only in Canada: Saskatoon man buys canoe with briefcase full of Canadian Tire cash," CBC News
The Trump administration may be "reunifying" families, but their definition of a family is only a parent and a child. If, for example, a 9-year-old crosses with an 18-year-old sister - or an aunt or uncle, or a grandparent, or anyone who isn't the child's documented legal guardian - they are not counted as a family and they will be separated.
Mothers and children may be considered "together" if they're held in the same gigantic facility, even if they're locked in separate cages with no access to one another. (In the world of CBP and ICE, that's how the 10-year-old girls locked in a giant cage are "not separated" from their mothers who are in cages elsewhere in the facility.)
In the process of "reunifying" families, the government may possibly count a family as reunited by sending the child to a distant relative they've never met - not their parents. Some relatives may be unwilling to claim these children because it would be inviting ICE to investigate their own families.
-- Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, 20 June 2019, on her visit to the McAllen detention facility
The problem isn’t simply that Trump-who styles himself a “law and order” president-values neither: He objected to the Central Park Five’s going free, despite the DNA evidence proving their innocence. He wanted their false imprisonment. It isn’t just that he advocates against due process, tars asylum applicants as criminals, and characterizes even their children as an “infestation.” It isn’t simply that he sees black men as intrinsically guilty, the same as brown refugees. It’s that he shouts about law and order while upholding the immunity of the rich and the cruel: He pardoned Joe Arpaio, who tortured undocumented immigrants in unlivable tent cities he openly called concentration camps, and, in pardoning Dinesh D’Souza, has signaled he will pardon his cronies if they are convicted for illegally helping him.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
“It goes to the core of what’s wrong with Great Ape Society these days, “Andrew EeekEeekEeekOooooh, a chimpanzee and free speech advocate, shrieked at me. “This kind of helicopter mother matchmaking doesn’t prepare young bonobos for the real world. I lay it all out in my book Actually, You Should Just Bite Each Other: An Antidote To Everybody Not Biting Each Other. If young bonobos learn that their mothers will help them hook up and ward off coitus interruptus-ors, how will they ever learn to charge around, hooting, shrieking, breaking branches and tearing up small trees? And it’s not just leading to a lack of life skills,” he added, throwing poo at me. “This wrongly ordered parenting means that bonobos today are hostile, if you can believe it, to my continually inviting poachers and clear-cutters to speak in their increasingly limited forest habitat! Debate me!” he shouted. More poo.
-- Tabatha Southey, "The birds, the bees and the bonobos," Maclean's
Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but at least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.
-- Michelle Goldberg, "The Welcome Humiliation of John Bolton," The New York Times
There were at least two suicides in the wake of this incident. A Japan Airlines employee, who was working with victims' families, and an inspection engineer who issued a certificate of airworthiness for the doomed plane after the 1978 tail strike.
-- narration from "Why Planes Crash: Breaking Point," on JAL 123, the deadliest single-aircraft crash in history
Conservatives fantasize about unleashing the power of the State while constantly bemoaning that power when it is used for any collective good. Thus, conservatives think it a good thing that the power of the State can be used to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy, but bemoan the very idea that the power of the State be used to compel a chemical company to not pollute the public water supply.
-- Derelict, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
It had the energy of two atomic bombs. That's how powerful it was.
-- -- SUNY SFLK climatologist Scott Mandia, interviewed in "Worst Weather Ever," on Hurricane Sandy's kinetic energy scale rating
this is how fascism comes to power. Not through elections (they never won a free election anywhere) but because a significant section of the state and capitalist class side with them and clear their way to power by aiding in eliminating opposition.
-- @andrewflood, Twitter
It is clear, now, that there was nothing to wait for. In the time we’ve been waiting, the rich have only gotten richer and angrier and whiter, but it will never be enough for them.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
In October 1946, technicians at the White Sands Proving Ground in Nevada installed a camera in the nose cone of a captured V-2 and launched it straight up into the sky. Within 30 seconds, the rocket disappeared from view. But then it began looking back, its 35-mm camera snapping photographs every second and a half, up to an altitude of 83 miles, before crashing down to the desert. A search plane found the wreckage and recovered the film, protected in a cylindrical steel cassette the diameter of a dinner plate.
“A truly dramatic spectacle unfolded when the film was developed,” the camera’s designer, Clyde T. Holliday, recalled. “On these photographs we saw what a passenger on a V-2 would see if he could stay alive on the zooming ride up to that height and back again, and how our earth would look to visitors from another planet coming in on a spaceship.”
It was a view that had before been only imagined, but its practical benefits were unmistakable. This first visit of a camera to the margins of space yielded photographs of a quarter of the United States, an area of nearly a million square miles. The curvature of the earth was visible, along with bands of clouds stretching hundreds of miles in rows like streets.
Meteorologists were immediately enthralled by the possibilities. The director of the Weather Bureau, Francis Reichelderfer, wanted reprints of the images from the camera’s designers at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University to be shared with every weather office in the country, “so our forecasters can obtain a glimpse into what may well turn into a potent weather forecast tool in the future.”
-- Andrew Blum, "How a Nazi incursion into Labrador to set up a secret weather station heralded a new era," The Toronto Star, excerpt from The Weather Machine
[O]ur relationship when it comes to Megan’s fashion is based on what you might call a “modified democracy,” where we both give our opinion and then Megan does what she wants.
-- Sue Bird, "So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend," The Players' Tribune, on her girlfriend Megan Rapinoe
Oh my God! The door break open! Oh my God! The door just break open!
-- witness in archival footage, in "Worst Weather Ever," as floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy innundate her house
In retrospect, possibly the biggest lie of the various police themed movies and TV shows I grew up watching was how they regularly portrayed cops and neo-Nazi, KKK, and other white supremacist types as mortal enemies, with the former hunting the latter as relentlessly and zealously as they do leftists in real life. In reality, not so much.
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Meanwhile, those in power will celebrate how much they deserve their wealth and how little anyone else deserves. And they will grab for more. You’d think they’d be happy: America now has the highest income inequality in the industrialized world. But even that is not enough. The greed is insatiable. And it is a greed not just for wealth but for domination-for permanent entitlement. What they want is to be served. At restaurants. On golf courses. In corporate offices. There is no form of protest they will respect: loud or silent, formal or spontaneous, civil or rude. Written petitions or marches on the streets.
They don’t care. Those in power have been very clear about what they do care about. “We have more money and more brains and better houses and apartments and nicer boats,” Trump said Wednesday in a speech to his supporters, because he cannot help but say what he really means. “We are the elite.” That vicious little “we” excludes most of America. Those in power have cut off diplomatic relations with the country they’re meant to govern, and the party they’re meant to govern with. The point-of-no-return polarization that pundits still feebly warn against is already here. It is sad. It is true.
-- Lili Loofbourow, "The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone," Slate
We hold these truths to be self evident: that all seats must be returned to their original upright and locked position, and that your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device.
-- @tomjuarez, Twitter
I had a good friend once say I was pure evil, wrapped in Mister Rogers' sweater. I liked that.
-- magician Nicholas Wallace, Penn & Teller: Fool Us intro
LBJ: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
There must be a corollary to this that says if you can convince the lowest white man that someone is trying to steal his money (socialism!) he'll resist any effort to save his life, his future, the world, etc.
-- Paul Bloom, Facebook, comments
It’s not that I’m too old for this shit, but this shit sure has gotten old for me.
-- Roy Edroso, "Right wing mood swing in DC," Roy Edroso Breaks It Down
What I think a lot of people who don't have as much contact with people like this don't understand is that they actually think making jokes about people dying of torture, and rape, and just basic "cruelty is funny if the person suffering is on the other team" talk is something they think EVERYBODY DOES and then lies about doing if their wife or pastor is asking. That's why Trump bragging about sexual assault didn't even register with so many of them. To them, the story wasn't that he said it ("of course he did - who doesn't?"), but that he got caught and the librul media was making such a big deal about it.
-- Shirley0401, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
To the uninitiated, having Chill and being cool are synonyms. They describe a person with a laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis, and reasonably interesting tastes and passions. But the person with Chill is crucially missing these last ingredients because they are too far removed from anything that looks like intensity to have passions. They have discernible tastes and beliefs but they are unlikely to materialize as passionate. Passion is polarizing; being enthusiastic or worked up is downright obsessive. Excessive Chill is “You do you” taken to its most extreme conclusion, giving everyone’s opinions and interests equal value so long as they’re authentically ours.
-- Alana Massey, "Against Chill," Medium
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
-- Marshall McLuhan, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, quoted in Laurie Penny, "No, I Will Not Debate You," Longreads.com
Would the same speech-perhaps replacing Germany with a modern stock villain like Iran, Russia, or China-even make a ripple today? We can read the Iowa Speech and say without hyperbole that we have read twenty-five vastly worse things already today just by spending a half hour on Twitter. We can hear more egregious and problematic things from the President, from members of Congress, from major media figures. Alt-right types would probably call Lindbergh a cuck for not hitting The Jews harder, and he would immediately land a six-figure job as the new face of Turning Point USA. Tucker would have him on every night, between Glenn Greenwald and the segment on immigrant crime waves.
-- Ed Burmila, "Back When American Fascism Was Bad: On the Cancelling of Charles Lindbergh," The Baffler
Detainees can pay to make phone calls, but all of their possessions are taken from them at the processing center. The only way they can get money for a call is for someone to put money on their accounts. I asked if people or charities could donate money so that they'd be able to make phone calls to their family or lawyers, but they said no - a donor would need the individual ID number for every person detained at the center, and ICE obviously isn't going to release that information.
-- Elizabeth Warren, Facebook, 20 June 2019, on her visit to the McAllen detention facility
Sonya: It's a hell of a journey. What else is there to do, but have marvellous sex?
Joan: I thought I'd take a book.
-- dialogue from "Red Joan"
Chill has now slithered into our romantic lives and forced those among us who would like to exchange feelings and accountability to compete in the Blasé Olympics with whomever we are dating. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean whomever we are “hanging out with.” Whomever we are “talking to.” Chill asks us to remove the language of courtship and desire lest we appear invested somehow in other human beings. To even acknowledge that there might be an emotional dimension to talking or dating or hanging out or coming over or fucking or whatever the kids are calling it all these days feels forbidden. It is a game of chicken where the first person to confess their frustration or confusion loses. But Chill is not the opposite of uptight. It is the opposite of demanding accountability. Chill is a sinister refashioning of “Calm down!” from an enraging and highly gendered command into an admirable attitude.
-- Alana Massey, "Against Chill," Medium
Somewhere halfway through the Great Recession, in the midst of one grotesque 1%er or teabagger performance or another, is when I realized that this is the real appeal of revolution. Not that you might get a better life, not that you might get a more efficient government, but that it was literally the only way that certain categories of criminals would ever face any kind of accountability for their crimes. And those are usually the very worst sorts of criminals, even if society says their crimes are legal. When you're barely making rent and can't afford health care you need, and one of the people who's forced that state of affairs onto you is on the TV fuming about how it's outrageous that you think you can tax him so he can't afford a second yacht or whatever... Well, lining him up against a wall and shooting him might not make your life any better, but does anybody not see the cathartic appeal, or, frankly, think he doesn't deserve it?
-- CP, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
Tim Fazenbaker, a glad-hander with a distinctly oily Ted Cruz vibe, came up to dangle crowd-bait bromides like “political correctness has taken over in a way like never before, we are on the brink of social war, all these leftist companies like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are silencing conservative voices” etc. But the crowd was losing interest in opening acts by then, so Fazenbaker yelled things like “Sharia law has come here! Think about that!” and warned that “we’re gonna turn into Canada.”
-- Roy Edroso, "Right wing mood swing in DC," Roy Edroso Breaks It Down
Focusing the conversation on the ethics of disseminating speech rather than the actual content of that speech is hugely useful for the far right for three reasons. Firstly, it allows them to paint themselves as the wronged party - the martyrs and victims. Secondly, it stops people from talking about the actual wronged parties, the real lives at risk. And thirdly, of course, it’s an enormous diversion tactic, a shout of “Fire!” in the crowded theatre of politics. But Liberals don’t want to feel like bad people, so this impossible choice - betray the letter of your principles, or betray the spirit - leaves everyone feeling filthy. There’s no way to come out of this convinced of your own political purity. The thing is, though, that establishing your own political purity isn’t what progressive politics are supposed to be about.
-- Laurie Penny, "No, I Will Not Debate You," Longreads.com
Asbestos is like "I CAME HERE TO RETARD FIRES AND CAUSE CANCER, AND I'M ALL OUT OF FIRES"
-- Michael Yosef Miller, Facebook
She is a communist. An anti-white liberal.
-- Neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr., quoted in (no byline) "Neo-Nazi sentenced to life without parole for Charlottesville hate crimes," CBC News, on killing Heather Heyer
You know the "Question Authority" bumper sticker? I suggest one: "Question Technology."
-- aviation lawyer and United 811 incident survivor Bruce Lambert, interviewed in "Why Planes Crash: Breaking Point," on JAL 123, the deadliest single-aircraft crash in history
Conservatives love the power of the state when it is deployed to enforce the hierarchies that they contend are "natural".
-- Linnaeus, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, comments
The far right does not respect the free and liberal exchange of ideas. It is not open to compromise, and it does not want a debate. It wants power.
-- Laurie Penny, "No, I Will Not Debate You," Longreads.com
The peak of tolerance is most readily achieved by those who are not burdened with convictions.
-- Alexander Chase, quoted in Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardoso, "An open letter to the chief rabbi of South Africa and his rabbinical court," Times of Israel blogs
Indecision is not a noble virtue.
-- Alana Massey, "Against Chill," Medium