There Is No Art In This White House


By Elayne Griffin Baker

There’s no literature or poetry in the White House. No music. No Kennedy Center award celebrations. There are no pets in this White House. No loyal man’s best friend. No Socks the family cat. No kids’ science fairs. No times when this president takes off his blue suit-red tie uniform and becomes human, except when he puts on his white shirt-khaki pants uniform and hides from Americans to play golf. There are no images of the first family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation. No Obamas on the beach in Hawaii moments, or Bushes fishing in Kennebunkport, no Reagans on horseback, no Kennedys playing touch football on the Cape.

I was thinking the other day of the summer when George H couldn’t catch a fish and all the grandkids made signs and counted the fish-less days. And somehow, even if you didn’t even like GHB, you got caught up in the joy of a family that loved each other and had fun. Where did that country go? Where did all of the fun and joy and expressions of love and happiness go?

We used to be a country that did the ice bucket challenge and raised millions for charity. We used to have a president that calmed and soothed the nation instead dividing it. And a First Lady that planted a garden instead of ripping one out. We are rudderless and joyless. We have lost the cultural aspects of society that make America great. We have lost our mojo, our fun, our happiness. The cheering on of others. Gone. The shared experiences of humanity that makes it all worth it. Gone. The challenges AND the triumphs that we shared and celebrated. The unique can-do spirit Americans have always been known for. Gone. We have lost so much in so short a time.

Vote Democratic all the way down the ballot on November 3rd.

Yes, the four corner ropes keep it level, the center supports all the weight.

"99% of violence last 3+ years s from the left refusal to acknowledge a peaceful transfer to power because Hillary lost."

This is an outright lie. No one questioned the transfer of power based on the election result. Many people were horrified that a self centered imbecile.. TLDR.

"With such a polarized society, why would one introduce a voting method lacking high standards of control, unless the party pushing for such is that they want to seal the election?"

Introduce? Read up about mail in and absentee ballots. You have to go state by state. They have existed for a long time, they leave a paper trail. Nothing "introduced" there. Much better than any form of electronic voting for instance.

"So this piece of fake news is taking the position that Trump will bitch / moan and fight after the election all those un-counted mail in votes."

That is the position Trump is taking, explicitly and literally, yes.

Then just so up and VOTE in person.

Exactly, why bitch about mail in ballots when you can shut up and vote in person?

As for possible mail in shenanigans that dont occur:::::

Election fraud is extremely rare. If you shut up and vote in person you dont have to be worried about your mail in vote getting lost.

Vote in person and be done with it.

There you go, just like you, personally, dont have to get an abortion, you can also, if you so wish, vote in person.

Why stop people from voting by mail, is it because you are afraid to lose?

W-wait... how the fuck did you find that? Are you some kinda wizard or something?! That shit's in JAPAN and you still found it! The Europeans didn't find Japan until 1957! I mean, seriously, can you imagine driving around Belgium in a Citron and suddenly BAM!! IT'S FUCKING JAPAN OUTTA NOWHERE! And that's when you realize you're floating in a canal in the center of Ghent because you've been fuck-all pissed on Avec Les Bons Voeux for the last week and a half. That shit happens to me at least twice a week and I'm fucking tired of it. Can't they just move Japan out of the way or something?

Well, it's sort of what the whole movie is about... guy goes to the center of the galaxy looking for God but learns he was really looking for himself... and then dies fighting himself as it also happens to be an alien in galaxy-jail. That old yarn.

Self-actualization is great but it's really just the mid-point of the journey (unless you die fighting an alien).

pretty fair.

rather have competent, caring, compromising (to get problems addressed), near-the-center leadership. rid america of crazed, corrupt, callous, craven cowards that prefer power over contentment.

tho' seeing higher education, sane healthcare, and a tax structure that provides for all the necessities of running a country...if that's a revolution - then joe missed the mark.

(see there? complaining about joe & ain't in office yet! not about the party, it's about feeling good enough to want to party!)

problems want to have...
- road surfaces so smooth, have to fight the impulse to nap
- primary education so effective, 8yr-old takes over doing the taxes after seeing last year's submitted forums
- healthcare so affordable, have no reason to see doctor...when too broke, embarrassed, or there are needles!
- an employer that pushes you to work harder w/"are we paying you too much?" & you know the bastard is right.
- hoping your mandated paid vacation time isn't so long you forget how to say 'you want fries w/that'
- keeping your voting selection secret because you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings 'it was so hard! all were so worthy! have to choose someone?!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klUweWE-u6A

The shot at :50 is fascinating to me, because you can see the... vapor? cloud? smoke? hit the edge of the city center and get shoved upwards and off-camera. The shockwave keeps going though, invisible at this angle but for the dust / material blasted off of the buildings as it goes.

Also: woohoo! at 1:43. Didn't expect that.

In the Warner Bros universe, Albuquerque is at the center of everything.

Crime stems from poverty and deprivation (and greed, but those aren't the sorts of criminals Rand McRandface is talking about).

Poverty and deprivation can be addressed through social services.

Republicans typically gut social services.

I know in my state we'd be much better off with more useful social services and better-funded schools, but every damn time republicans get control of the Governor's office or the legislature, they cut social services statewide. So the areas that most need those services suffer regardless of who they may have elected to local leadership. When dems manage to get back into control they reform things a bit to provide extra funding to social services, and things improve for a bit. Then republicans get back in, etc yadda wash rinse repeat.

So yeah, democrats tend to be elected in population centers, because for the most part they seem to actually want to help people. The current Republican philosophy seems to be "lol shutup poor people are stupid figure it out fuckers." I'm perfectly happy to examine any evidence to the contrary (by which I mean policy positions advanced by republicans that actually help improve the lives of most people).

"I especially appreciate the way everything very clearly looks like it exploded out of a central point."

No, that is not how it works. What you see in the model is our point of view. Whats closest to us is moving away slowly, what is further away is moving away faster.

If you choose any random point (you cant really, we are stuck here) and start your model there it would be similar but centered at your new point of observation.

Any random two points in space (in this model) will be moving away from each other with a speed that correlates to the distance between them (unless the two points are close and local conditions prevail temporarily).

The question of a "center of an explosion" and "where is it now" makes no sense. Everything that now is was in that centre, so now the center is everywhere (according to our current best model).

Just after 1:29 you can see the heat shield impact - about 1/4 up from the bottom of the frame, just left of center.

Sneeze on every one of these assholes.
If not for self centered morons like these, the epidemic would be over with under 1/10 of the current infection and death numbers.

I'm so happy they are starting to get pepper sprayed, it's totally the correct response. Self defense is an excuse to use it, and anyone without a mask under 20 ft from you (the 6 ft distance is bullshit, you aren't safe under the distance a sneeze travels) is assaulting you.

The gallery is accused of repeatedly bringing in white-supremacists. The guy in the video is accused of being a neo-nazi figurehead.

The only evidence I’m seeing though is the gallery bringing in one guy I’d clearly label white supremacist, and then a bunch of people that same to have the wrong opinions on immigration, but it’s hardly clear that there is anymore evidence than that with which to convict.

This matters to me because here in Canada a student assistant was brought in for discipline and became the center of a storm for playing a fee minutes if an interview that included UT prof Jordan Peterson. She was accused of promoting hate and violence(and even committing violence herself) for the act of playing the video. All this because Jordan Peterson is a ‘well known’ alt-right extremist...

The evidence I’ve seen here has the same stink to it and so I’m reluctant to just convict the accused on the mobs say so.

It took me two seconds to figure out this was fake or at best a total misrepresentation, and under two minutes to find plenty of evidence to that effect.

They only look bad when viewed totally out of context. This was edited to create a false narrative that some random innocent meek individual supporting rational discourse was attacked by a violent gang of anti free speech liberals, which is asinine and a blatant lie. He's a professional racist instigators defending racist ideologies at a racist propaganda center being protested, not free speech but his freedom to espouse racial hatred unopposed and uncontradicted.
I'm sad this bullshit is still getting passed around without explanation three plus years later.

I bet if we saw the five minutes before this conveniently edited video started, no one could question them calling him a Nazi and shouting him away, since he is in fact one, one who actively and publicly works to legitimize Nazism and other racist ideologies...he is a long time professional public aggressor and race baiter.

He has every right to discuss his ideas, the rest of us have every right to vocally disagree. When his ideas are actually supporting racial violence, it's pretty disingenuous to complain when they spark some "verbal violence".

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)