[AMV] President Trump #289 Nog steeds zonder inreisverbod

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 09:42 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:
George is no fan of the Donald

https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/848621306769797120

Who the hell is George Takei?
Zulu, startrekrekstar ca 1968 , zie rechts
[ afbeelding ]

Big Bang Gast ca 2013, zie links
http://bigbangtheory.wiki(...)rdconfusefantasy.jpg

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 09:48 schreef PippenScottie het volgende:

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George Takei gaat het in de 2018 midterms opnemen tegen Devin Nunes.

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Donnelly becomes third Dem to back Gorsuch; Tester to vote no

Neil Gorsuch on Sunday picked up a third red-state Democratic backer, Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly, but remains short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

Donnelly declared his support for Gorsuch as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in separate TV appearances, brought the chamber further toward a bitterly partisan standoff over President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Republicans are vowing to confirm Gorsuch this week, even if it requires changing Senate rules to kill the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.

Later Sunday, however, Montana Sen. Jon Tester said he would vote against Gorsuch and against cloture. "I cannot support a nominee who refuses to answer important questions," Tester said in a statement.

Donnelly said that he shares many fellow Democrats' frustration over the GOP's refusal last year to grant even a hearing to former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. Still, the Hoosier added that he would not obstruct Gorsuch in response.

“I was deeply disappointed by the way the most recent Supreme Court nominee, Judge Garland, was treated by the Senate," Donnelly said in a statement, "but as senator, I can only vote on the nominee that comes to the Senate floor."

Donnelly also endorsed a 60-vote standard for Supreme Court nominees, but his office underscored that he would not vote in favor of a Democratic filibuster. Gorsuch's nomination is expected to come to the Senate floor Tuesday, with a pivotal vote to break a filibuster anticipated on Friday.

At this point, Gorsuch has the support of every Republican and three Democratic senators: Donnelly, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. His Democratic opponents number 37, according to POLITICO's whip count, or four votes short of the number needed to successfully filibuster.

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De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft zondag (lokale tijd) gezegd dat de Verenigde Staten de nucleaire dreiging van Noord-Korea zullen "oplossen", met of zonder hulp van China.
"Als China Noord-Korea niet gaat aanpakken, doen wij het wel. Dat is het enige wat ik hierover zeg", zei Trump in een interview met de Britse krant The Financial Times, meldt de BBC.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 10:04 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:

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Er valt veel te lachen met de horrorclown. Maar zulke plannen van hem is niet om te lachen.
Dit is horror. Stuurt hij aan op een oorlog/inval te Noord Korea?
En wie gaat er met kernbommen gooien?

Wat betekent dat voor de relatie met China? Nieuwe koude oorlog? Gaat China Noord Korea bezetten/ bevrijden

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 10:11 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

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Wat China gaat doen is zeker interessant. Maar ook Zuid-Korea zit niet op een oorlog te wachten. De economie wordt vernietigd en ze zijn miljoenen vluchtelingen rijker. Hetzelfde geldt voor China, die hebben ineens miljoenen hongerige Koreanen aan de grens staan.

Als de VS een oorlog zou beginnen dan is dat volkomen eenzijdig. Ze gaan er geen bondgenoten voor vinden. Alle landen in de regio zijn gebaat bij de status-quo.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 10:12 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:

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Ik denk niet dat het gaat gebeuren. Dit is alleen maar grootspraak. Trump kan dat wel willen, maar uiteindelijk is hij geen alleenheerser die wel even bepaalt welke kant hij het leger op stuurt.

En gelukkig maar!

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 09:51 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:

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1 april !

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 10:11 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

Als de VS een oorlog zou beginnen dan is dat volkomen eenzijdig. Ze gaan er geen bondgenoten voor vinden. Alle landen in de regio zijn gebaat bij de status-quo.

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Donald Trump’s Fictional America
I grew up surrounded by Chávez’s alternate reality. Now I’m watching one consume the United States.

Speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplished most godlike works. It can banish fear and remove grief, and instill pleasure and enhance pity. Divine sweetness transmitted through words is inductive of pleasure and reductive of pain.” - Gorgias

If you think the postfactual world is a recent development, then you should see how Hugo Chávez was and is still mourned in Venezuela. One can safely say that the Venezuelan revolutionary, who from 1999 to 2013 presided over the largest oil boom in history in the most oil-rich country in the world, and yet left behind a hungry, ailing, economically ruined society, was a downright catastrophe for his country’s citizens. A factual catastrophe, as it were. Yet many there, especially the very poor, who are the hardest hit by Chávez’s failed policies, still idolize him as a savior. Some have even set up a religious cult around him.

Against all reason and evidence, for more than two decades they have been living in a postfactual universe.

Meanwhile, the developed world seems to be discovering this concept for the first time. As President Donald Trump and his team of surrogates lay waste to one fact after another, the Western media is brimming with lamentations about our entry into the post-factual era and eulogies for the “factual” one we left behind. In these essays, post-truthism is typically defined as some sort of illness of objectivity, brought on by a rise in subjectivity and sheer emotion. “The truth has become so devalued,” they say, “that what was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency.”

But take it from someone who grew up in Venezuela, surrounded by a fictional universe of Chávez’s making: These interpretations are all wrong. For one, they assume that the scientific understanding of the world is somehow the natural route—the obvious one, the longstanding one—when in fact, blind faith was until very recently the unvarying constant of civilization. For most of our human history, we lived to survive, and when faced by doubt we were not embarrassed by beliefs that required no verification. But now, late in the age of Google, we are led to believe that that which cannot be verified is somehow immediately worthless. As if we really live in the complex world of facts, and not the more human world of belief.

Indeed, these essays completely ignore the true merit of post-truthism: Its narrative coherence—an easy consistency that the behemoth of data spouted at us by the mainstream media frustratingly lacks. It is precisely this coherence, this simplicity in a world of complexity, that makes fiction in the eyes of many worthier than reality.

As former President Barack Obama said in a recent New Yorker interview, “The new media ecosystem ‘means everything is true and nothing is true.’” Consider wealth inequality. Depending on where you read about it, and often simultaneously from the same source, you will discover that the Gini coefficient has been steadily rising across the developed world, though specially in America, because of—what? Robots? Trade with China? Reaganomic deregulation? Sheer financial depravity? Illegal immigration? Taxes? Even for an economist such as myself, the answer is unclear. (And so, then, are the solutions.) It might be all of the above, but one cannot know for sure: The question remains open. And so the truth then becomes that all of it is true—but also maybe none of it is true.

But then Trump says that the explanation is much more simple: It’s NAFTA, and China. “We’re living through the biggest job theft in the history of the world folks,” he says. We can fix it easily. In terms of conviction and coherence, who can beat such clarity of vision?

Many people have been too eager to blame post-truthism and the rise of Trump on a deficiency of education. On sheer showmanship and “sentimental politics,” whatever that is. On the rise of new, data-driven polling and marketing techniques. Some even blame Hollywood. In short: A stupefied populace, prodded listlessly by social media and big data, voted for Trump precisely out of the stupidity of his rhetoric.

But this is beyond offensive: It is intellectually lazy. It attempts to explain the Trump phenomenon only by the supply-side of the equation—with what he was proffering. What about the very human demand he tapped into? It is not an army of gullible slouches and racists on sofas with guns, smartphones and a brief vocabulary who brought Trump to power—but rather a large, disenfranchised, chunk of society that was promised meaning through social mobility, got none of it, and after almost a generation of stagnating wages still had no clear, coherent answer to the question: Why, after so many years of work, am I still suffering?

Trump’s Republican primary contenders couldn’t answer that question. Hillary Clinton couldn’t either. And certainly none of them proposed a fix—or a new ethos to replace the flailing “American Dream” ideal. Trump did all of the above—constructing an alternate reality that gave his supporters a concise answer to their question, and the hope of a solution. It doesn’t matter that it’s all bogus. To Trump voters, a fake reality—especially one laden with obvious enemies and golden promises—is better than nothing, or more of the same.

“Why am I suffering?” It is this question that has always prompted the disheartened to search for faith. For most of our history, religion gave them the answer they needed (i.e. “I suffer because I am sinful”). But modern populism in the vein of Trump and Chávez can do the same. When citizens ask these leaders why are they suffering, they too get a simple answer: “I suffer because of them.”

Like religion, populism asks for blind allegiance, dismisses truth as the unconditional value of meaning and arises from a certain unverified, mythological coherence. And like religion, populism promises a distant resolution—one that never comes, of course, but is constantly dangled in front of its supporters, who are soothed by the expectation.

The main focus of populist policy is therefore to tend to these people waiting—to give them a reason for their suffering, to verbally recreate the post-factual world of their beliefs, to make them feel like they are moving forward. Populism is not a system of facts or solutions, operating in the complex world of policy and legislation, but rather an interactive fiction, borne of posturing and symbolism, where whole countries can become not what they are, but what they believe themselves to be.

It should therefore not surprise you that the first items in Trump’s presidential agenda are patently ineffective. A wall to Mexico, banning Muslims from entering the country and attacking the media and intelligence agencies are about as useful in terms of public policy as building a pyramid in the desert. But they pack quite the rhetorical punch and do reinforce the fictional recreation. They are good, populist, policy.

I’ve seen this all before. If I were to recount my experience growing up under Chavismo I would be unable to frame it in the stereotypical terms of terror and loss: “On Monday they took my neighbor, two months later they took my uncle never to return, three years later they took me and sent me to war.” This is not a story only of destruction.

Instead I would have to say that on December 1999, the year Chávez came to power, my country’s name was changed from Venezuela to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. That in 2002 Columbus Day was renamed the Day of Indigenous Resistance. That in March 2006 the coat of arms was changed to one where its horse galloped to the left. That a year later the time zone of the country went back 30 minutes. That Bolívar, our founding father, an aristocratic admirer of the British Empire, suddenly became an anti-imperialist leftist according to official propaganda, textbooks and city graffiti. And that people all around me relentlessly nodded to all this gobbledygook.

This was all pantomime to a massive corruption industry working behind the curtain, one which stole, at its lowest estimate, the unimaginable amount of 300 billion USD and utterly ravaged my homeland. But according to official propaganda, it was always the American imperialists, with the tacit support of a treasonous Venezuelan middle-upper class, doing the destroying. This fiction was so aptly portrayed, and indeed so convincing, that the majority of Venezuelans did not care to peek behind. Chávez might have demolished the country’s institutions and economy, but in their place he put in a rhetorical reality that was worth more to his supporters than the factual, material one he destroyed. So in fact this is another kind of story: one of a country slowly becoming delirious.

How can nothing but promises and enemies be worth more than concrete progress? Because after survival, most humans crave not wealth but meaning—a sense of what to do as they keep pushing the boulder uphill. In Venezuela, for the historically poor and disenfranchised, Chávez offered a potent alternative to the vacuous gradualism of other politicians: He offered revolution. One which exhorted ordinary people to get involved and with a vengeance; one built not through policy, but through unaccountable, impassioned rhetoric. A revolution that was happening as long as you believed it was.

The same thing is happening now in America. “Work hard and you will achieve, society will achieve”—so long the meaning of life dangled by liberal democracies (and known as “the American dream” in the United States) has become obsolete. With that gone, it was not long before those left behind fell under the populist spell Trump was conjuring. Like Chávez, Trump offers his supporters not details, policies or laws, but faith. The swamp will be drained, he promises, and walls will rise to protect and shelter, and ruined factories will begin their clanging anew. It’s all empty rhetoric. But as long as you believe it, it is already happening. Who can say that post-factual worlds do not undergo post-factual improvements?

You might be thinking that Trumpism cannot possibly endure, that the president’s most diehard supporters will eventually release themselves from this deception, and that American moderates will never succumb to it. But do not to underestimate the power of fiction. I watched the delirium spread like wildfire through a population, infecting extremists and moderates alike. And I watched it go on and on and on. Even today, 52 percent of Venezuelans still view Chávez positively, despite daily and yearly evidence in the form of increasing scarcity, crime and illness to the contrary.

Remember: Delirium is contagious. It is self-enforcing. It feeds through the natural channels of society’s networks effects. Looking through history one can find many examples of civilized nations being rhetorically driven unto dementia and total war. Like Venezuela, yes. But also, like Russia in the early 20th century. And yes, like Germany in the 1930s. Reasonable people in these countries thought they’d be able to resist the irrationality. They couldn’t. Do not assume the United States will not be next.

You should therefore see Trump’s increasing war against the media and established fact for what it is. Not as a case of presidential derangement, or even a certain carelessness about what is factual. Not even as some sort of obstinate demolition. It is something else altogether. Like all populists, Trump is motivated mainly by the construction of a fiction. His is a carefully designed plan to recreate for a large enough chunk of people an alternative reality in which there really is success, there really is vengeance, there really is a sense of improvement. For himself and for his audience, this suspicion of improvement, like the placebo effect that begins before a drug begins to work, is good enough. And to your dismay, durable enough also.

Stopping the delirium will not be easy. I wish I could say something similar to what Alberto Barrera Tyszka, the famed Venezuelan novelist, said the year Chávez died: “We live in a complex country, and only complexity can save us.” But in this case what you, Americans, need is simplicity. Coherence. A sense of purpose with which moderate Trump supporters—your best allies in this mess—can align themselves.

Constantly trying to disprove, on a daily basis, what Trump says will only bait people into their confirmation biases. It will increasingly entrench moderates on both sides unto abstention or, worse, the extremes. What you need is a powerful message with which to substitute a true plan for a false spell.

Luckily for you the truth is all the more urgent now. Facts may be complicated, but truth, when earnest, can also be simple. In these times we live, during one of the most potent disruptions society has ever lived in terms of technology, culture and the economy, the priority has to be safeguarding a disappearing middle and working class. Go to them. Speak to them. Gain their trust again. Rescue from its ruins the true American dream—the narrative that made your greatness possible—and present it to them anew. But mean it, this time.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 11:05 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:

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Hoe zit dat staatsrechterlijk in Amerika?
Kan Trump per decreet een zogenaamde politiionele actie uitschrijven richting Noord Korea?
Vooral niet oorlog noemen?
Ik dacht dat hij niet op eigen houtje een land de oorlog kan verklaren?

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 11:27 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

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Dat klopt, je hebt een meerderheid nodig voor een oorlogsverklaring. Maar hij kan wel op eigen houtje bepaalde acties tegen N-K ondernemen in het kader van nationale veiligheid. Als N-K daar op antwoordt met een oorlogsverklaring dan is er geen meerderheid meer nodig, natuurlijk.

Dat is natuurlijk allemaal hoogst speculatief. Er gaat in dit geval niets gebeuren omdat mensen als Mattis goed begrijpen waarom de status-quo in Noord-Korea het beste is voor iedereen. Behalve de Noord-Koreanen zelf dan.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 11:47 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Dat een oorlog niet direct op de korte termijn in het belang van de regio is lijkt me wel duidelijk, maar ik zou niet direct weten waarom de 'status quo voor iedereen het beste is'. Ik denk dat het Zuiden een 'regime-change' wel zou toejuichen. De Chinezen raken ook in toenemen mate geïrriteerd door het gedrag van NK. Het is in tegenstelling tot vele andere dictaturen ook geen allegaartje van facties die het land in chaos doen storten als het dictatoriale regime wegvalt.
Natuurlijk is het wel een kernmacht met een knettergek staatshoofd dus directe militaire actie is voor de regio vrij risicovol. Maar ik zou niet willen zeggen dat 'de status quo voor iedereen het beste is'.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 11:54 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

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In het Zuiden is de animo voor een hereniging aan het afkalven. En flink ook. De jongeren geven er maar weinig om.

https://newrepublic.com/article/92781/korean-unification

Het zal de economie van Zuid-Korea ten gronde richten. China zal misschien niet meer een enorm probleem hebben met een kapitalistisch land aan de grens in het geval van unificatie, maar die vluchtelingen gaan ze gewoon de deur weigeren. En dat gaat de nodige diplomatieke druk opleveren waaronder China uiteindelijk zal moeten bezwijken en deel van het land vol heeft met wereldvreemde, zieltogende vluchtelingen.

Ook de Noord-Koreanen zelf zullen de nodige problemen hebben. Hoe trek je mensen die al meer dan twee generaties in een waanwereld leven weer in het land der levenden? Dat kost tientallen jaren. Misschien wel meer. Ze hebben geen flauw benul.

De tactiek van N-K is er altijd eentje van chantage geweest. Daar gaan de landen in de regio graag mee akkoord. Ik denk ook dat de VS liever weer wat voedselpakketten stuurt dan het lont in het kruitvat aansteken. De leiders van N-K zijn misschien wel gek, maar zelfdestructief zijn ze niet. Die gaan niet de eerste klap uitdelen.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 12:05 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Maar wie heeft het over hereniging? Er zijn nog heel wat meer opties dan enkel de huidige situatie of een hereniging. Sterker nog, het feit dat je de huidige machthebbers gedwongen laat vertrekken betekent ook niet gelijk dat het vervangende bestuur een Westers geörienteerde liberale democratie hoeft te zijn.

Het stoort de regio ook met name dat NK wel degelijk steeds meer provocerende acties uithaalt. Raketten die bijna in Japan landen, een moordaanslag in het buitenland, enzovoort.

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 12:38 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

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De Kim-dynastie vervangen voor wat? Een andere despoot? Het hele fundament van dat land is de persoonlijkheidscultus en de demonisering van alles wat buitenlands is. Ik zie geen scenario waarin je een regime change kunt doen zonder een exodus van Koreanen te bewerkstelligen.

Dit is natuurlijk wel voer voor een andere discussie en heeft niet zoveel meer met de Amerikaanse president te maken

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Some of President Donald Trump’s former campaign hands are rushing to sign lucrative deals with foreign clients, shrugging off their own pledges to avoid foreign lobbying and the president’s vow to “drain the swamp.”

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, whose partner, Barry Bennett, had said last year that their new firm wouldn’t lobby for foreign nations, is among those searching for foreign gold. Lewandowski and Bennett are actively seeking to represent foreign governments and consult on overseas elections, and members of the firm have met in recent weeks with officials from Albania and Kosovo.

[...]

quote:

Op maandag 3 april 2017 09:42 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:
George is no fan of the Donald

https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/status/848621306769797120

Who the hell is George Takei?
Zulu, startrekstar ca 1968 , zie rechts
[ afbeelding ]

Big Bang Gast ca 2013, zie links

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op maandag 3 april 2017 12:38 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

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De Kim-dynastie vervangen voor wat? Een andere despoot? Het hele fundament van dat land is de persoonlijkheidscultus en de demonisering van alles wat buitenlands is. Ik zie geen scenario waarin je een regime change kunt doen zonder een exodus van Koreanen te bewerkstelligen.

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Dit is natuurlijk wel voer voor een andere discussie en heeft niet zoveel meer met de Amerikaanse president te maken

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Op maandag 3 april 2017 10:15 schreef Mystikvm het volgende:

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Klopt, het gaat nooit gebeuren. En hoe treurig ook voor de Noord-Koreanen, het is beter dat het land zo blijft.