2017, The Year Of The Red Pill

There is a distinct bad science fiction vibe to our new year. We are going down the rabbit hole, the world upside-down. Our insolvent billionaire is just one contradiction, there are too many others to count.

I see this situation as a sort of state change. If so, we are completing a transition to new rules. It is probably not very useful to look for analogies in American history for the past century or so. We must look further afield. But foreign analogy is rarely accurate, because culture matters.

Trump's Worst Appointments Open Thread

Category I - Worst of the Worst. Outright evil people with police state tendencies in highly powerful positions.

 

Mike Pompeo - CIA - Pro-torture, pro-Gitmo, pro-secret-prisons, surveillance maniac, aligned with Tom Cotton's obsession about Iran,  advocates executing Edward Snowden, thinks civilian leadership must be more deferential to the military. Lack of transparency means he can do his stuff with little oversight.

Why Mr Tillerson is a shoo-in for the SOS position Open Thread.

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The ROW needs to wake up.

 

On Gen Flynn, Rachel Maddow is even funnier.

And this was the funniest of all.

The Forced Faithless Electors Have A Case Open Thread

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♠ In a couple of states, Electors who wanted to not vote for Hillary were either removed or forced to vote for Hillary.

But despite his proclamation, Bright’s vote for Sanders was ruled to be improper, and he voted for Clinton after all, according to The Associated Press.

Looking Forward to Escaping East Asian Pollution Open Thread

Beijing is on a 5-day red alert for smog, with school closings, residents told to stay indoors, and hundreds of factories closing. From today:

A "high level of confidence" that Putin meddled in an American election [Update: Trump to accept CIA-FBI report]

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This is something that Trump should not dismiss out of hand.

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

What Democrats Don't Get Open Thread

An NYT op ed explains:

As Monday’s Electoral College vote approaches, Democrats should be fighting tooth and nail. Instead, we are once again left with incontrovertible proof that win or lose, Republicans behave as if they won while Democrats behave as if they lost. What this portends for the next four years is truly terrifying.

...

So ... what is going on with the Russia thing? Open Thread

Are we being played by the CIA and anonymous officials? Is this a deep state propaganda pushback against Trump, and is Obama hanging back just like he did when the FBI went after Hillary? To my knowledge, no news reporters have seen actual evidence in the form of documents, they're reporting characterizations of assessments made by anonymous officials.

 

The Death of Liberalism, The Walking Dead and the Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex

This year I realized that The Walking Dead is actually an allegory about the death of liberalism. Consider:

 

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