CK MacLeod's

Matt Yglesias: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying – Vox

[E]ven Fox didn’t tout Bartiromo’s big scoops on Trump’s legislative agenda, because 10 months into the Trump presidency, nobody is so foolish as to believe that him saying, “We’re doing a big infrastructure bill,” means that the Trump administration is, in fact, doing a big infrastructure bill. The president just mouths off at turns ignorantly and dishonestly, and nobody pays much attention to it unless he says something unusually inflammatory.On some level, it’s a little bit funny. On another level, Puerto Rico is still languishing in the dark without power (and in many cases without safe drinking water) with no end in sight. Trump is less popular at this point in his administration than any previous president despite a generally benign economic climate, and shows no sign of changing course. Perhaps it will all work out for the best, and someday we’ll look back and chuckle about the time when we had a president who didn’t know anything about anything that was happening and could never be counted on to make coherent, factual statements on any subject. But traditionally, we haven’t elected presidents like that — for what have always seemed like pretty good reasons — and the risks of compounding disaster are still very much out there.

From: Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying - Vox

What It’s Like To Have Your Anti-Trump Art Go Mega-Viral – Co.Design

What It’s Like To Have Your Anti-Trump Art Go Mega-Viral – Co.Design

So, does Mitchell make any money on the work, which has been shared so many times? He uploaded a high-res image of the symbol and granted permission for anyone to use it personally for free. But for those who want to support his work or simply want something readymade, you can also buy T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and journals emblazoned with the symbol through Threadless.“I really just want to spread the image as much as possible and cement it in history,” Mitchell says. “In all honesty, the amount I’ve made from my Threadless shop so far is still less than my hourly rate, so I don’t really see it as a big deal. If you look at my Twitter, half the replies are people wanting to know where they can buy a shirt. Threadless is happy to help them out with that, and so I’m happy to let that happen.”Now that the symbol has flooded our streets and our timelines, Mitchell just has one request: “Impeach this idiot already,” he says.

From: What It’s Like To Have Your Anti-Trump Art Go Mega-Viral

Steven Pearlstein: Mark this date: Donald Trump is now a lame-duck president – The Washington Post

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Steven Pearlstein: Mark this date: Donald Trump is now a lame-duck president – The Washington Post

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From: Mark this date: Donald Trump is now a lame-duck president - The Washington Post

This is a Waterloo moment for Trump, the tea party and their alliance. They have been stopped in their tracks not only by Democratic opposition but because of a mutiny within their own ranks. Although never particularly liked or respected, it is now clear that they are no longer feared. The bankruptcy of their ideas and their incompetence have been exposed. Their momentum has been dissipated. Their rejection of political norms has itself been scorned. Our long national nightmare may finally be coming to an end.

Jonathan Freedland: With Trump it’s time to go beyond mere disgust – The Guardian

Jonathan Freedland: With Trump it’s time to go beyond mere disgust – The Guardian

From: With Trump it’s time to go beyond mere disgust | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian

One seasoned Democrat told me that among the reasons Trump won in 2016 was that a long year of Crooked Hillary talk, about emails and Goldman Sachs and the like, had steadily demoralised and demobilised the liberal base. If sustaining fury at Trump helps keep those same voters energised, so they eventually turn out to defeat him, it’ll be worth it, he says.
But it can’t just be in the form of world-weary, if witty, tweets. What’s needed is a coherent argument, one that explains why Trump’s repulsive behaviour matters. For Americans, that will surely centre on the state of their society. The civic realm is being degraded by Trump’s lies, vanities and insults. The national conversation is being coarsened. The basic democratic assumption, that disagreements can be resolved through discussion rather than coercion and violence, is being eroded from the very top. Note the language of Scaramucci’s outburst: “I want to fucking kill all the leakers.”

David Wallace-Wells: When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans? – New York

David Wallace-Wells: When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans? – New York

Ecology

Ecology

[C]limate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.
It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do. Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.

From: When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?

(Originally posted 1 April 2012)

All N'd & Q'd →

Customizing the Intercom Launcher for WordPress

March 25, 2018 | Posted in Using WordPress, Web Design | | No Comments ↓

Intercom is a relatively recently created cross-platform messaging tool, in use at around 25,000 sites, whose “Inbox” app or sub-app can work as a slick customer support/interaction alternative to older systems like ZenDesk. It will work out of the virtual box in WordPress, and some aspects of its appearance and other features can be managed via the Intercom control panel. Substantially modifying the initial look of the Intercom “launcher,” however – for instance, to replace Intercom’s icon with one of your own – requires a bit of custom coding.

Intercom launcher at Pippa

You can see the Intercom launcher in use at WordPress-based sites like Tradeshift.com and Pippa.io, where it has been modified in color. Because the launcher operates via iframe, its other visible characteristics will not be accessible to regular site-level CSS. To reach further into it, you will have to create a “custom launcher,” requiring a process or series of steps whose requirements may not be initially clear from a perusal of Intercom’s help pages, which do not happen as of this writing to include any WordPress-specific implementation examples.

The techniques in this simple explainer/tutorial may also be helpful if you’re working on, say, a Stripe payment widget or a Vimeo player or other javascript-enabled, iframe-dependent add-on with an accessible API. Read more ›

Posted in Using WordPress, Web Design

The Scholar’s Stage: You Do Not Have the People

March 3, 2018 | Posted in History, Operation American Greatness, The Exception, War | | No Comments ↓

[T]he Korea issue is but an extreme expression of a tendency that blights the entire field. We are uncomfortable with democratic accountability, unwilling to subject ourselves to public debate, and uninterested in the constraints public opinion and popular politics place on the policies we craft. This complacency is not excusable. It is not sustainable. We cannot defend the cause of freedom without the support of the people. To try and do this is to risk terrible disaster.

From: The Scholar’s Stage: You Do Not Have the People

We cannot defend the cause of freedom without the support of the people. To try and do this is to risk terrible disaster.

When have “the people” ever risen to defend the cause of freedom other than in the face of disaster?

There is also a contradiction in terms here: To commit to any project at all, and especially to great military or defense project, is to accept constraint, in some senses or for some even radical constraint, on freedom. This philosophical problem will undermine all projects seeking American strategic coherence. The American idea simply does not permit the latter. They are mutually exclusive.

(so: “the stationary state”) (oag #13)

July 20, 2017 | Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Operation American Greatness | | No Comments ↓

What a colossal missed opportunity.
— Dan Scotto (@dscotto10) July 18, 2017

Well what's colossal about the missed opportunity is that it circumscribes the entire era, not just this moment of broad GOP pseudo-control.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) July 18, 2017

(It always had to be pseudo-control, since the anti-government party is constrained from coherently exploiting formal "control" of govt)
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) July 18, 2017

(meanwhile the culturally ascendant, formally out-of-power party of govt can exploit system paralysis itself against dismantlement of govt)
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) July 18, 2017

(so: the stationary state, eroding entropically, searching for the crisis that may demand or allow for true "progress" – or mayn't)
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) July 18, 2017

Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Operation American Greatness

Jacket X

“The world of things calls for art, in which intellectual accession to being moves into enjoyment, in which the Infinity of the idea is idolized in the finite, but sufficient, image.” — Emmanuel Levinas

July 8, 2017 | Posted in notes, Photography | | No Comments ↓

Photo by Sullivan & Sullivan

Posted in notes, Photography

Gutenberg: The Invention of the Printing Press, the Destruction of WordPress

July 7, 2017 | Posted in notes, Using WordPress | Tagged with: Gutenberg, Wordpress | 4 Comments ↓

Or at least that’s what some people seem to think about the new “page-builder” style editor with which WordPress.org seems to be planning to replace the current post editor:

While the developers working on the Gutenberg editor plugin have obviously put a lot of work into creating the plugin and I commend them on their efforts so far, the truth is, this plugin is nowhere near ready to be included in WordPress and needs a lot more work, in particular, UX work.The WordPress.org Gutenberg page states: “The goal of the block editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable.”
Unfortunately, the plugin as it currently functions is a long, long way from achieving this goal.

That’s from the WPMUDev blog, under the title “Gutenberg Editor Review: Please Don’t Include This in WordPress Core.” User reviews of Gutenberg in plug-in/Beta form are not much better, though a few users do profess to be excited about it.

Posted in notes, Using WordPress Tagged with: Gutenberg, Wordpress

For the Fourth: Holy American Major League of Nations (Notes on Baseball, Booze, and the Re-De-Nationalization of Americanism)

It welcomed the tests of time/
Like an eternal friend,/
Our country is blessed,/
Our country is such!

The Anacreontic Song (Georgia Tech Glee Club)

Watch this video on YouTube

God Bless a Metonym

Scott observes a process of the trans-nationalization of baseball alongside the seemingly contradictory patriotic and militaristic displays at Angels pre-season games. He refers specifically to members of the military being asked to stand for rounds of applause, and he wonders why women who have not had cosmetic surgery are not instead asked to stand. As further discussion confirmed, and as consideration of the ritualistic singing of the national anthem at modern American Major League baseball games ought to confirm, the relationship of baseball to American (American-style) nationalism is a complex and possibly contradictory, possibly dialectical one.

Scott: And the cool thing is that the term “American” itself contains these potentialities. Have you written about that?

I believe that Scott was referring to the notion that our Washingtonian empire of Unitedstatesia has managed to seize the grand metonym “America” for itself along with the economically most promising expanse of the North American continent, arguably (materially-demonstrably: historically) the most geo-politically and geo-economically exploitable terrain on the planet under our loosely speaking modern conditions of commerce and technology – secure, resource-rich, underpopulated, arable, temperate, benefiting from relatively unobstructed internal and external connections: To employ the baseball cliche, the United States is the country that was born on third base geographically.

…the rest of the thing →

Posted in Anismism, Music, Neo-Imperialism, Old Gone Over, Political Philosophy, Sports, US History, War, Yoga Tagged with: America, American Idea, Americanism, Anti-Federalism, baseball, Borat, Constitution, Democratic Republican, Federalism, Francis Scott Key, Francis Scott Smith Miller, Gordon Wood, Ideal Americanism, Jefferson, Kazakhstan, Madison, Metonymy, National Anthem, Nationalism, Pennsylvania, Scott Smith Miller, Star-Spangled Banner, War of 1812, Whiskey Rebellion, Woodrow Wilson, Yoga

While 2017 happens…

June 4, 2017 | Posted in notes | | 3 Comments ↓

If not the very best picture of 2017 so far, the one below, which has been sweeping through Twitter, has to be in the running at least for best and most sympatico – “this man is all of us just living our lives while 2017 happens lol!” – amateur photo:

THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, Cecilia Wessels, mandatory credit

According to the photo caption at Times Colonist, “Cecilia Wessels snapped the picture of her husband, Theunis, as the twister passed near their home in Three Hills.”

Posted in notes

Counter-Drizzle on the Hypothesis of the End of the American World-Historical Era (OAG #12c)

May 31, 2017 | Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Operation American Greatness | | 1 Comment ↓

The counterargument vs Panic of the Fall of the US Order can still be made either independently or, perhaps more difficult, complementarily.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

In short: The American ideal retains its impetus vs. particular events, individuals, while US preeminence remains materially determined.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

If Merkel's Europe assumes leadership for a time, for example, it seems openly on historically inherited terms…
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

…if and when an US restoration is sought, a place at and quite possibly at the head of the table will likely still be available…
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

…After the Trumpian interregnum is over, the bodies buried and costs tallied, a more mature "condominium" ought to be achievable.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Operation American Greatness

German Trust in America – the Trend (#OAG 12b)

May 31, 2017 | Posted in Operation American Greatness | Tagged with: Germany | 4 Comments ↓

There has been some attempted pushback – including in the comments here – on the notion that Donald Trump has uniquely damaged German-American relations, particularly in relation to the views of the German public – for example:

Merkel chose a Munich beer hall as her venue to speak out and she was on the campaign trail for the elections to the Bundestag in October. She was speaking to a German audience which holds the United States in poor esteem. By the way, this has nothing to do with Trump. The percentage of Germans who trusted the US plunged from 76% to 34% during the first six years of the Barack Obama presidency. (On the other hand, sixty percent of Germans admire the ex-CIA whistle blower Edward Snowden as a heroic figure.)

As the poll history depicted above demonstrates, observers like M.K. Bhadrakumar are playing the deepest valley in recent pre-Trump American-German relations vs. Obama’s post-Bush, inaugural high. Read more ›

Posted in Operation American Greatness Tagged with: Germany

Tweet-Drizzle on Merkel on New World Disorder (OAG #12)

If the generation since the fall of the USSR has been a tale of the unfitness of the USA for leadership, then Trump is pure continuity.

May 28, 2017 | Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Operation American Greatness | Tagged with: Balakrishnan, Mao, Merkel, Schmitt, Stein, Timothy Garton Ash, Trump | 2 Comments ↓

The 100,000 ft, theodicy of Trumpism, paradoxes of neo-imperialism view is that long-term unreliability of US world leadership was a given.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

The unsuitability of the US as hegemon is what made its hegemony tolerable, but also made a crisis inevitable. It's occurring right on time.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

…also predicted: that left-liberals who spent the last decade or generation or two deriding US-led global order would bewail its demise.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 28, 2017

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2018-03-05 10:53:28

Was Never Trump Now MAGA

ha. ha. ha. This did not age well now did it?

Steven Pearlstein: Mark this date: Donald Trump is now a lame-duck president – The Washington Post

2017-07-22 16:05:36

to CK MacLeod

CK MacLeod

+ BTW, I recently upgraded some this and that on the back end of the blog, and it does seem to make comments post much faster [. . .]

Gutenberg: The Invention of the Printing Press, the Destruction of WordPress

2017-07-22 16:00:39

to bob

CK MacLeod

For WordPress self-hosted people, there is already a "restore legacy editor" plugin, even though Gutenberg hasn't been installed yet as the default.

Gutenberg: The Invention of the Printing Press, the Destruction of WordPress

View More →

2011-01-29 3:16 pm
Inventing the World
bob
@ CK MacLeod:
I was sloppy in my moral/ethical formulation. I agree with your response about the need for actualization up to a point. [...]
2015-02-01 12:02 am
To Wade McKenzie
“A” rarely if ever equals “A” only
CK MacLeod
I think I still have a copy of I and D in my book boxes, and haven't looked at it in a very long time, [...]
2013-02-02 8:42 am
Voegelin’s Gnosis, Part 2: Crossing
bob
John 3:16 encapsulates a question, is belief static or dynamic? I believe threfore I am saved. Or, I believe and every action [...]

In the future everybody will be right about Iraq for fifteen minutes

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June 19, 2014

History, Neo-Imperialism, notes, WarIraq Iraq War Operation Iraqi Freedom

In the future everybody will be right about Iraq for fifteen minutes

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June 19, 2014

History, Neo-Imperialism, notes, WarIraq Iraq War Operation Iraqi Freedom

What other than the actual invasion of Iraq under proven-false premises could actually prove those premises false, at least as we articulated them to ourselves while, we believed, safely ignoring the always-wrong and resoundingly re-defeated defeatists?

Continued

The Brady Bunch Annihilated

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September 4, 2012

Philosophy, Religion, TVabortion choice family Liberalism marriage the Brady Bunch

The Brady Bunch Annihilated

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September 4, 2012

Philosophy, Religion, TVabortion choice family Liberalism marriage the Brady Bunch

What could better capture the nihilistic impetus of philosophical liberalism - individualized instrumental reason - than its discovery of the moral impossibility of human reproduction itself?

Continued

The Abuse of Counterfactual History (10 Years After, Cont’d)

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March 26, 2013

History, Neo-Imperialism, Warcounterfactuals Iraq

The Abuse of Counterfactual History (10 Years After, Cont’d)

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March 26, 2013

History, Neo-Imperialism, Warcounterfactuals Iraq

If finding WMDs had not mattered, how much would finding them have mattered?

Continued