Malazan Empire: Lady Bliss - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

Double post. Because why not? There's plenty of fodder. From the same Murdoch-owned outlet.
Highlights of a Michelle Obama speech listing why DJT is NOT fit to be President. Once upon a time any one of these would see his political career combust, but together ... I wonder what it would take to get people to register just to vote against him, or for swing state voters to go "Nope, not that guy"? I wonder if there is any act he could commit that would turn Republican voters off him?
Look, I get it, Kamala isn't great. But she's at least an adult. And frankly anyone who can string two words together and doesn't have a criminal record would be better than the orange turd. Don't vote for Kamala because she's ... whatever. I don't care. Vote for her because it means Trump will lose. Because if he wins, I am genuinely fearful for the future of the USA and by extension the rest of the world.

‘Childish’: Michelle Obama cuts loose in appearance on Kamala Harris’s behalf in key state
In a searing speech, former US first lady Michelle Obama has made the case for Kamala Harris – and against Donald Trump.

https://www.news.com...3440144c0a12bd9

Michelle Obama has hit out at Donald Trump, describing him as a “predator”, immature, a “known slumlord” and convicted felon.

The former US first lady pleaded with Americans to shut down the “ugliness” of Trump years as she spoke at a campaign rally for his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the key swing state Michigan today.

The presidential election is just 10 away, on November 5, US time.

In a broad ranging speech, Mrs Obama spoke at length about what she described as an ongoing threat to women’s reproductive rights and healthcare, and also questioned why the Demoncrats nominee was being held to a higher standard than Mr Trump.

“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” she said.

“But for Trump, we expect nothing at all. No understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals. Instead, too many people are willing to write off his childish, mean-spirited antics by saying, ‘Well, Trump’s just being Trump.’ Rather than questioning his horrible behaviour.”

In her often searing remarks, Mrs Obama said many of those who served closely with the Republican nominee during his first term as president saw the “danger” and, as a result, were now refusing to publicly support him.

Among those critics is General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff – America’s most senior military officer – under Mr Trump, and recently described the 78-year-old Trump as “a fascist to his core”.

“I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m a little frustrated that some of us are choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn,” Mrs Obama said.

“I hope that you will forgive me if I’m a little angry that we are indifferent to his erratic behaviour, his obvious mental decline, his history as a convicted felon, a known slum lord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse, all of this while we pick apart Kamala’s answers from interviews that he doesn’t even have the courage to do.”

In any other profession or arena, Mr Trump’s criminal track record and amoral character would be “embarrassing, shameful” and he would be disqualified, she argued.

“I hope that you will forgive me if I am worried that we will blow this opportunity to finally turn the page on the ugliness once and for all, because, believe me, if Donald Trump is president again at some point or another, that ugliness will touch all of our lives,” she said.

“It will not matter what you look like, how you worship, who you love, or how you vote, if you don’t make six or eight or 12 figures. If you’re not famous, if you criticise or disagree with him in any way, if he doesn’t view you as his equal or relevant to his ambitions, I promise you, he will not think about you when he gets into the Oval Office, and that will have real consequences for all of us.”

When Mr Trump was first elected as 45th president of the United States in 2017, Mrs Obama said he was given a pass, with Americans rolling the dice when they catapulted him into the powerful position – betting that “he couldn’t possibly be that bad”.

She said others didn’t think it mattered who was the US president, while some “thought it’d be a good idea just to blow up our entire democracy”.

“Let us not forget the incompetence and the corruption, the chaos that was the cornerstone of his entire four years in office,” she added.

Mrs Obama cited examples from Mr Trump’s term, including his handling of the pandemic, for which she claimed he was “woefully unprepared”, endangered lives, sowed distrust in doctors and scientists and peddled fear and confusion.

“He had no clue how to get us out of that crisis, no ability to bring back the millions of jobs we lost so suddenly. No idea how to get our students back into school safely, no attempt to help stem the epidemic of loneliness and isolation that too many of our young people are still dealing with,” she said.

The US had one of the highest death rates in the world from Covid, while seven million more jobs were lost in America than in the combined nations of the European Union, she added.

“Again, all of this occurred with Trump in charge, and sadly, this was just this tragic exclamation point on his disastrous presidency installing judges and justices who have now stripped away our reproductive freedoms, cracking down on protesters marching to protect their sons from being shot because of the colour of their skin, rolling back protections for LGBTQ Americans, fanning conspiracy theories, unleashing hatred in our communities,” she said.

Then the American people “fired him from a job that was too big for him to begin with, he tried to steal it, egging on a violent mob that breached our nation’s Capitol”, she said.

In 2021, a congressional panel investigating the mob assault on the US Capitol laid out its case that Mr Trump and his claims of a stolen election were at the heart of what amounted to an “attempted coup” to remain in power.

The special committee sought to persuade a divided country of the existence of a deep-rooted and ongoing plot – orchestrated by the former president – to overturn the result of the 2020 election won by Joe Biden.

Mrs Obama also questioned how Mr Trump would handle a natural disaster when he “spreads lies and conspiracy theories about climate change”, or the support he would offer for people facing the prospect of their jobs being replaced by technology.

She also asked the crowd how Mr Trump could protect black lives when he once took out a “full page ad to demonise innocent young black teenagers in New York City and who has dreamed openly about his own version of a purge”.

“Where, in his words, he has said for one day, one real rough, nasty day, he says he will allow cops to use violence indiscriminately, who I am sure has never spent a single second thinking about the lives on the other end of those batons,” she said.

Then there is the turmoil the US has been thrown into after the Supreme Court overturned a landmark legal decision which granted citizens the constitutional right to access abortions until the point of foetal viability, Mrs Obama said.

Known as Roe v Wade, the ruling had protected women since 1973, until it was sensationally overturned.

The popular wife of former president Barack Obama said Mr Trump had no “emotional maturity or foresight” to protect women.

“If Donald Trump wins this election, in states that are already putting abortion bans into effect, his FDA could further outlaw patchwork systems of telehealth appointments and mail order pills, thereby eliminating the last remaining protections for women in those states,” she warned.

“He could take actions that effectively ban abortion nationwide, which would put all of us in danger no matter what state we live in.”

“We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing life saving treatments because they are worried about being arrested. More medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all. More OB gynaecological clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving unsold numbers of women in communities throughout this country without a place to go for basic gynaecological care.”

She called on American men to step up and vote for the best presidential choice for the daughters, sisters, nieces and mums in their world and to take “their lives seriously”.

Mrs Obama confessed the race is too close, and she wants to see the “country finally turn the page on the politics of hatred and division”.

“What in the world is going on? And it’s clear to me that the question isn’t whether Kamala is ready for this moment, because by every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready the real country. The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?” she asked the crowd.

“To do what it takes to get her across the finish line, or are we going to let ourselves get distracted and fall for the scam? Are we going to lose sight of the dire consequences if we come up short and right now, folks, I have to be honest, I’m not completely sure of the answers to those questions.”

Michigan is a key state for both sides, but Democrats currently fear it is slipping away from them, with recent polls trending in Mr Trump’s favour.

The so called “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania have often voted for the Democratic candidate. The three helped propel Joe Biden to victory in 2020.

But anger from some communities in these states at the US’s backing of Israel in its war against Hamas, as well as the decent popularity for Mr Trump among blue collar workers, could see the wall break for the Republicans.

At the rally, Mrs Obama added that America needed “a grown up in the White House – someone with the maturity and fresh ideas to keep moving our country forward”.

She praised Ms Harris for spending her life fighting for the vulnerable and working class people, taking on big banks and transnational gangs with warmth and class.

Mrs Obama urged the enthusiastic crowd not to fall for the “scam” as she held a “genuine fear” for the country, its children and the direction it could go.

She said everyone knows she “hates politics” but she hates people being taken advantage of even more, adding too many Americans remained “confused and buying into the lies and distortions from people who do not have our best interest at heart”.

“There’s too much we stand to lose if we get this one wrong,” she said.

Fucker Carlson at it again with a very uncomfortable metaphor for the USA and how it should be treated. I'll bet DJT loves this metaphor. If he knows what one is.
Once again from a Murdoch owned outlet in Australia.

‘Been a bad little girl’: Bizarre pro-Trump rant reveals weird fringe of conservatism
Hold your nose. Grab a bucket. Whatever you need to do to restrain your nausea as you read these remarks.

https://www.news.com...cbae4c15fe99671

Sam Clench

Comment

Hold your nose. Grab a bucket. Whatever you need to do to restrain your nausea.

Here we have remarks from the conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, once of Fox News, but since an inhabitant of the internet’s less palatable fringes.

They came during an event hosted by Turning Point USA, an organisation representing young conservatives in the United States.

Mr Carlson was stumping for Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. He offered up an interesting metaphor for the state of his country.

“If you allow your two-year-old to smear the contents of his diaper on the wall of your living room, and you do nothing about it. If you allow your 14-year-old to do a joint at the breakfast table. If you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger. You’re going to get more of it,” Mr Carlson said.

“And those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you, and it’s not good for them. No! There has to be a point at which dad comes home.

“Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they are his children. They live in his house.

“But he is very disappointed in their behaviour, and he is going to have to let them know.

‘Get to your room right now, and think about what you did!’ And when dad gets home, you know what he says?”

(I promise you, you are not prepared for what dad says.)

“‘You have been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you are getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking, because you’ve been a bad girl.’”

My my, what to make of this? One feels the need to enlist a psychiatrist.

Fortunately for Mr Carlson, he is one of the few people on this earth wealthy enough to afford the many, many hours of couch time it would require to properly unpack whatever the hell is going on in those quotes above.

The “hormone-addled” 15-year-old in this metaphor, the “bad little girl”, is the United States itself, or rather the slice of it that votes for the Democrats.

Mr Trump is dad, of course. He “loves” these 80 million or so Democratic-voting Americans, disobedient as they may be. But he is disappointed in their behaviour, and he shall have to let them know, via whatever one might define as the political equivalent of a vigorous spanking.

We shall set aside, I think, the fact that this metaphor is being offered by a 55-year-old man, talking about a theoretical 15-year-old girl. And that said 55-year-old was speaking with a mix of relish, glee and malice.

Appropriate, though, isn’t it, how the disobedient child here is a girl, being disciplined by a harsh father figure?

That does not strike me as remotely coincidental. It aligns too perfectly with how the macho-pilled Andrew Tate-adjacent right, of which Mr Carlson is a part, sees its political opposition: as pathetically feminine, and in need of stern male leadership to pull it back into line.

In this fantasy, the political left does not need to be debated, any more than a father needs to debate his teenage child. No, it needs to be punished, and instructed. To be put in its place. To be told who is boss. It’s a fundamentally authoritarian worldview, in policy and soul. And the subtext of sexism, bordering on misogyny, is not subtle.

The bad little girl needs to be slapped into submission. For her own good.

I recall a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Republican Party, and indeed conservatism on a global scale, proudly saw itself as the advocate of personal freedom and small government.

What is this vision put forth by the Tucker Carlsons of the world? The opposite. It’s paternalistic in the extreme. It elevates one man, at the head of an overweening, interventionist government, as the “father” of the nation, whose will and every whim must be obeyed or punishment will follow.

It’s the US president not as a servant of the people, but as their ruler. It’s a dream of government not as an instrument for bettering people’s lives, but for imposing one’s own views and values on others.

No, worse than that. It’s government as a weapon, with which to flagellate or even humiliate your political opponents.

What a monstrous perversion of conservatism. One willingly embraced by conservatives themselves, seemingly oblivious to what they have become. A political philosophy without dignity or anything resembling a noble purpose.

Tucker Carlson is no pariah. He is not relegated to fringe events with other internet weirdos. He is introducing the former, and possibly future US president at official events, and advising millions of credulous followers on how they should think about politics.

At least we’re not governed by hormone-addled women, though. That would be weird.

To a certain degree, revenue needs yearly growth to match raises, fringe costs, and costs of doing business - especially as more regulations accumulate. If that doesn't happen to the degree required to keep core staff and leadership there, it all goes to pieces.

That being said, I think sometimes the business people get lost in the sauce and unattach themselves from the staff doing the things that make the money and/or the organization go. Copying the infinite growth models that higher finance pushes to get explosive growth (also extractive growth) becomes easier because that's what the superstars are doing and maybe success here means that happens or an opportunity to personal move up into that world.

I'm working for a government that needs to hire many more people on all fronts, needs to raise wages, be more diverse/inclusive/accessible, welcome parents far more, and do so while a big segment of the public doesn't believe in doing any of this for government staff. Oy...

I woke with a terrible cold, body aches all over. I would ideally have taken the day off but I'm behind on something for a client which I only took over because someone else went off sick. So I thought better to power through and face the physical consequences rather than the professional ones. Then I get a request from my boss that makes me seriously regret my decision. Why oh why did I bother?

I work for a company with no share holders. We're for profit but all profit is invested back into the organisation and its people. You would think it would be a utopia. Yet somehow, the top brass STILL manage to be money grabbing arseholes. I wouldn't mind but I have to sit through endless town hall meetings where they go on about how proud they are to lead a purpose driven organisation. Why are you making us grow 10% a year every year, in that case, you pillocks!