Rico's rants: 2017.02

From: "ROBERT KELLEY" <kelleyinwestport@mail.com>
Date: February 25, 2017 at 12:14:26 PM EST
To: "ALISON KIMPORT" <alisonkimport@yahoo.com>, "CAROLYN LIEBERMAN" <tidepoolpottery@me.com>, "MARK SEYMOUR" <mseymour@proofmark.com>, "MIKHAIL WAGNER" <mjgwagner@comcast.net>, "PAM WALTERS" <rwalters2517@charter.net>, "Peg Fowler" <pegfowler@vistabeam.com>, "Polly Gardner" <pgardner68@aol.com>, "TIM WALTERS" <walterst@wit.edu>
Subject: One more time...

I was poking about in my Archive Folders and found a collection of photos entitled "Only In Israel". This one has been around before, but, it's still good one more time...

Why 7-11's don't get robbed in Israel

Fashion Trends and Women's Fashion Shows - BAZAAR Magazine

From Harper's:
http://people-celebrity-today.com/robinmcgraw/2/index.php?affid2=997601697&t202id=953&c1=001fbd1ce05b231154076fe7471e6279cc&c2=004bbfe29c2da47194cc66bc61e4acfc35&id=717318445

Rico says one can only hope...

The disturbing reality behind that Chinese tiger drone video

From The Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/24/a-disturbing-reality-behind-that-chinese-tiger-drone-video-making-the-internet-rounds/?utm_term=.f47093594262&wpisrc=nl_az_most

Rico says it was too much to hope it was real...

24 February 2017

Alamo defenders call for help: 24 February 1836

From History.com:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/alamo-defenders-call-for-help?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2017-0224-02242017&om_rid=847fd754baf09b7865bbc1fb225e1b1b26c8bf50caf45bc6e6b7fec8944a2985&om_mid=152925206&kx_EmailCampaignID=10035&kx_EmailCampaignName=email-hist-tdih-2017-0224-02242017&kx_EmailRecipientID=847fd754baf09b7865bbc1fb225e1b1b26c8bf50caf45bc6e6b7fec8944a2985

Rico says that, in the end, it didn't help...

Fasting diet 'regenerates diabetic pancreas'

From the BBC:

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-39070183?ocid=global_bbccom_email_24022017_top+news+stories

Rico says he'd try it...

23 February 2017

Melania Trump would’ve been priority deportation in 1990s under Trump administration rules.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/23/melania_trump_would_ve_been_priority_deportation_in_90s.html?wpsrc=newsletter_slatest&sid=5388f344dd52b8e411003d4e

Sent from my iPhone : 215.866.6184

No wounds In his back

From True West:

http://www.truewestmagazine.com/no-wounds-back/

Rico says more long-lost history.

From an article in Wired about a very big emerald, a line about a guy named Ferrara that Rico could relate to:
"Only once did he lunge across a conference table and threaten to beat the shit out of somebody."

Raquel Welch

Rico says the skinny girls they're using in ads and movies these days don't do it for him like Raquel did:

Irritating

Rico says that, having been a graphic designer since he got out of high school in the 1979s, he finds the layout style used by Wired magazine to be stupid and unnecessary:

Apple Memos discovered

From Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/treasure-trove-of-internal-apple-memos-discovered-in-th-1792676966?utm_source=gizmodo_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-02-23

Rico says it's ancient history, but interesting...

An ambush of tigers rip a drone out of the sky

From Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/watch-an-ambush-of-tigers-rip-a-drone-out-of-the-sky-an-1792672660?utm_source=gizmodo_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-02-23

Rico says you don't want to be ambushed by tigers...

The 25 most powerful passports

From Travel + Leisure:

http://www.travelandleisure.com/culture-design/most-powerful-passports?xid=newsletter-brief#berlin-germany

Rico says the Dutch win, as usual

The cinematography of 'Arrival'

From Time:

http://time.com/4677598/arrival-oscar-cinematography/?xid=newsletter-brief

History for the day: 1945: U.S. flag raised on Iwo Jima

U.S. flag raised on Iwo Jima

This day in History

Feb
23 THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1945

U.S. flag raised on Iwo Jima

During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines from the 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment of the 5th Division take the crest of Mount Suribachi, the island's highest peak and most strategic position, and raise the U.S. flag. Marine photographer Louis Lowery was with them and... read more »

American Revolution

1778

Friedrich von Steuben arrives at Valley Forge »

Automotive

1958

Formula One champ kidnapped »

Civil War

1861

Lincoln arrives in Washington »

Cold War

1955

First council meeting of SEATO »

Crime

1885

A remarkable reprieve for a man sent to the gallows »

Disaster

1887

Earthquake strikes Mediterranean »

General Interest

1954

Children receive first polio vaccine »

1981

Spanish rebels storm Parliament »

Hollywood

1997

Schindler's List shown uncut on network television »

Literary

1868

W.E.B. DuBois is born »

Music

1978

It's a tie for Song of the Year at the 20th annual Grammy Awards »

Old West

1940

Guthrie writes "This Land is Your Land" »

Presidential

1861

Lincoln avoids assassination attempt »

Sports

1980

Eric Heiden speed skates into Olympic history »

Vietnam War

1966

Desertion up in South Vietnamese army »

1971

South Vietnamese advance stalls »

World War I

1917

Germans begin withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line »

World War II

1945

Marines raise the flag on Mt. Suribachi »

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Trump rescinds transgender bathroom rules from Obama era

From the BBC:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39047883?ocid=global_bbccom_email_23022017_top+news+stories

Rico says this'll go badly...

22 February 2017

Seven Earth-sized exoplanets have everyone freaking out

From Gizmodo:

http://gizmodo.com/these-seven-earth-sized-exoplanets-have-everyone-freaki-1792604101?utm_source=gizmodo_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-02-22

Rico says, eventually, aliens...

Trump administration issues new immigration enforcement policies, says goal is not ‘mass deportations’

From The Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-administration-seeks-to-prevent-panic-over-new-immigration-enforcement-policies/2017/02/21/a2a695a8-f847-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html?wpisrc=nl_az_most

Rico says it won't seem humane to those being deported...

Amid storms and fears about dam, Oroville residents are unsure who failed them

From The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/amid-storms-and-dam-fears-oroville-residents-are-unsure-who-failed-them--if-anyone/2017/02/21/0f4d0942-f7aa-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?wpisrc=nl_az_most

Texas teacher tweets ‘Kill Some Jews’

From the Clarion Project:

http://m.clarionproject.org/news/texas-pre-school-teacher-tweets-'kill-some-jews'

Rico says you can always count on Texas for prejudice...

21 February 2017

Going after our gubs

I thought you might like this article on Slate:
Appeals Court Rules that Second Amendment Doesn't Protect Right to Assault Weapons
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/21/appeals_court_holds_second_amendment_doesn_t_protect_assault_weapons.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_em_ru

Rico says there was a line about "from my cold, dead hands" that applies here...

Yiannopoulos out at Breitbart

Rico says good riddence to bad rubbish and pedophiles...

Sent from my iPhone

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Date: February 21, 2017 at 6:19:13 PM EST
To: mseymour@proofmark.com
Subject: Milo Yiannopoulos is out at Breitbart.
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February 21, 2017

Milo Yiannopoulos Resigns From Breitbart

By Osita Nwanevu

The White House's Various Connections to Newly Infamous Pedophilia Advocate Milo Yiannopoulos

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

Appeals Court Rules that Second Amendment Doesn't Protect Right to Assault Weapons

By Mark Joseph Stern

McMaster Is an Improvement, but He's Going to Be Cleaning Up After Trump Like Everyone Else

By Joshua Keating

Trump's First Supreme Court Case Could Have Major Implications on His Travel Ban

By Osita Nwanevu

Trump Is Still Getting Advice From the Guy Who Said Sandy Hook Was a Hoax

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

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Sweden? Nothing happening

The Washington Post has an article by Rick Noack about Trump's delusion about Sweden:

President Trump caused confusion during a Saturday rally in Florida when he said: “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” Trump then mentioned the French cities of Nice and Paris and the Belgian capital of Brussels. The three European cities were attacked by terrorists over the past two years.
Although Trump did not explicitly say it, his remarks were widely perceived in the United States and abroad as suggesting that an attack had occurred Friday night in Sweden.
At a rally in Florida on 18 February, President Trump listed several countries with large numbers of refugees that were recently struck by terror attacks. "You look at what happened last night in Sweden," Trump said, but Swedish authorities were not aware of any such incident that night.
Trump attempted to clarify his remarks, tweeting Sunday: “My statement as to what's happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on FoxNews concerning immigrants and Sweden.”

Rico says the guy's just making it up as he goes along... (But that he gets his news from Fox is scary, and that he uses Twitter to communicate is, too...)

No such number, no such asshole

How the fuck does the phone company (and we all remember Our Man Flint's TPC, right?) even parse a phone number like 202.000.0000?

(Rico says there's no call-back, of course, so he can't even tell them to fuck themselves...)

Solo not going solo

Gizmodo has an article by Germain Lussier about the upcoming Han Solo movie:

The first photo from the set of the still-untitled Han Solo film was posted recently, and things are pretty cramped in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.
From left to right you’ve got Woody Harrelson, co-director Chris Miller, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, co-director Phil Lord, Donald Glover, and, of course, Chewbacca.
Along with the photo comes a few minor pieces of news. There’s confirmation that Waller-Bridge and Thandie Newton are in the film. Joonas Suotamo is playing Chewbacca and, though there were a few rumors to the contrary, the film is back on its 25 May 2018 release date.
“Watching such inspired people from all over the world, with such unique voices, come together for the sole purpose of making art, is nothing short of miraculous,” Lord and Miller said in the release. “We can’t think of anything funny to say, because we just feel really moved, and really lucky.”
Cameras are now rolling. Expect to learn some more in April of 2017 at Star Wars Celebration.

Rico says he'll see it...

Trump's Florida rally

Esquire has an article by Jeb Lund about Trump in Florida:

If people told you that MAGA hats come 25 percent off when you look peevish and 50 percent off when you're already wearing a sneer, the line snaking out of the airport hangar and a quarter mile down South Apollo Blvd. in Melbourne, Florida, and awaiting President Trump's first rally since his inauguration, would have made you believe them.
These are the wages of a campaign and an ideology of apocalyptic civilizational struggle: a pep rally that feels undergirded with dread, voters who dismiss leftists as "special snowflakes living in a bubble", gathering in an eighty-three percent white county that went for Trump by nearly twenty points, and pointing across the road at a few hundred protesters behind a net barrier, wondering whether an international Jewish financier has underwritten a special attack for Saturday afternoon.
Whitey Taylor— "it's not Blackie, it's Whitey," he clarified— hawked MAGA hats and Hillary For Prison shirts at fifty Trump rallies during the campaign and was unconcerned about the stakes. A customer asked if he was worried about protester violence; as Taylor turned his face to look at the man, a little smirk embedded in the off-white beard and deep lines framing his nose and mouth. "I've got a 9mm. I don't worry about any of these people."
The worry grew stronger down the road, where the line looked interminable and threatened to disappear into the gray that seems to swallow the horizon under the lowering sky of a Florida afternoon. Two retired women sat in folding canvas camping chairs, watching the line, waiting for the rest of their party to gather, certain the protesters across the road were paid by George Soros.
"I think there's a good share of them," said Francis Gilmore, who'd moved down to Florida in the last decade. They were here to advance the Soros agenda. "You can go anywhere you want, do anything you want, live the way you want, say anything you want. No sort of control. They will control us." Soros was the bad kind of billionaire, not like the ones in Trump's cabinet, who "don't have to rob the money from us because they've got enough of their own."
Her friend, who refused to give her name, agreed. "There are many others besides George Soros, but Soros is the biggie," she said. "All the braindeads suck in the false news, because they don't have the ability to read and get the proper information." The friend had gotten a lot of the hidden details from The Creature from Jekyll Island, a Federal Reserve conspiracy book written by an HIV/AIDS denialist who believes he knows the location of Noah's Ark and can cure cancer with a poisonous plant extract. When asked where else she gets her news, she replied, "Mostly radio."
Gilmore and The Nameless Friend agreed that the protesters represented a rejection of the office of the president and a historical breach of civility.
A man with dusty clothes, gap teeth, and a tan darker than his sandy blonde hair walked by with a four-year-old girl on his shoulders.
"Hey, who wants to kill an unborn baby?" he said, gesturing across the street. "All them are retards. That's some shit."
Matt —a Republican fifty-something ex-Manhattanite network security guy— was a unicorn in all this, possibly the last person in America civically engaged enough to attend a political rally without his thoughts already ossifying into full-throated allegiance or resistance. He smoked a cigarette and wrung out the ends of sentences with a sardonic twist, working through ideas in real time. He was there for the same reason we're all supposed to be there: to be convinced.
Matt wasn't sweating the fact that this was technically a Trump campaign event. Early fundraising— just money itself— didn't matter, he said, before ticking off accurate ballpark figures for the Clinton campaign war chest, the vote differentials in midwest battleground states, misbegotten ad buys, and Clinton's lack of personal appearances in states within "the blue wall". He didn't seem to know he wasn't supposed to be having a good time and was excited about getting close to the stage. "If I play my cards right, I'm leaving as the technology czar," he said, laughing. "I'm here for a job interview, is what I'm saying."
Just then, Air Force One buzzed the hangar. The crowd took out cell phones to record the moment. Matt captured it too, smiled, then melted through the security cordon. He was the last of his kind and didn't know it.
Outside of watching planes landing and ridiculing hippies, a sullenness permeated the Trump crowd, barks of laughter sending heads darting left and right in surprise. Families spoke with families, friends with friends, discreet clumps of humans waiting only to engage personally with the leader who embodied each fictive resentment and its only resolution. This is a movement that flows only upward toward the one— Steve Bannon's ideology of atomized victims besieged by a much vaster humanity written on each individual, until the idea of something as energetic as a "rally" starts to seem like a cruel joke. Stamp out the sparse laughter and the jeering and conversations about soccer practice and what to eat when everyone got home, and the line in Melbourne could have been a cortège.
The only other people who seemed to be enjoying themselves when planes weren't landing were the leftists. Maria Telesca-Whipple, a self-described "old anti-war horse," local native-plant landscaper, and former organizer, was excited by the possibilities for local action that the Trump administration was bringing.
Outside of watching planes landing and ridiculing hippies, a sullenness permeated the Trump crowd.
"It's been maybe fifteen years since we could generate five thousand people for a rally in this county. This is empowering." A few minutes she later found herself holding up her placard in front of her face so she didn't have to look at the man passing by who stopped and began yelling at her about fetuses and blood.
Her fellow leftist, Franco Velasquez, a naturalized citizen and orthotist born in Colombia and educated at Columbia tried to ignore the sanguinary tirade. "I think the Trump phenomenon is bringing new people into an awakening of social consciousness," he said. "I think it is. I've never done this before." Velasquez noted the stream of people in MAGA hats walking out of the hangar and off to their cars. Trump's speech was still going, broadcast on two giant video boards and coming out of the same loudspeakers that had been blaring My Way an hour before, but the faithful were going home, heads down. Nearby, a twenty-something woman protester in a hijab faced a volley of snarling valedictory comments from the exiting Trumpers.
"I think the crowd is a little bit sad compared to during the campaign," Velasquez said, underlining how elusive joy can be when victory promises only a single actor confronting a constantly escalating and embroidered threat of social collapse. "They look kind of somber, kind of depressed, trying to hold onto something that is leaving them. Just by looking at their faces, they don't look very enthusiastic."
One early departer was Dr. Alex Moses, a black Trump supporter. Moses wore a MAGA hat and spoke with a hard-to-place accent that he declined to identify because, "wherever anybody comes from, that doesn't matter".
"We came all the way from Jacksonville," he said, explaining his sneaking out early. It was for his kids, he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at two young children who were a dozen paces behind and in danger of fading into the crowd. "The kids just wanted to see his face."
Moses would vote for Trump again if the election was tomorrow. The first month had been an unqualified victory. "During Obama, for eight years, I suffered, was unemployed, dependent on my wife's income," he said. Trump got him a job. He is still unemployed now, but he just enrolled in Liberty University to study divinity. It's just a matter of time. He stopped his furious pace and commenced yelling every reply, pointing angrily across the street at protesters who were going to "obstruct everything". "All those losers there better shut up or put up, 'cause I put up for the past eight years. That's what democracy's all about: you vote, and the person who wins, everybody supports him. Nobody protested Obama."
Night had fallen, and protesters finally walked across the street and engaged the remaining Trump supporters in a group, perhaps a few dozen chanting and waving placards at the stragglers still emerging from the hangar. Police lights flickered on cruisers that had been parked on the lawn. Voices raised, but no one was throwing punches.
"America was going down the tubes," said Bill Moro, a raspy-voiced and stubbly fifty-something who voted for the first time ever for Trump. "They said our constitution was unconstitutional. That's what Obama said. And Clinton."
"Trump needs to drain the swamp of judges, too," he said. "I don't care what he does. I'm behind him a hundred percent. Put it this way: if he became a dictator, and they said, 'We want him in forever,' he's my man. He's in. I'll never vote against him ... I love his power ... It's the power that does something to me."
By now, Trump supporters were trying to engineer the confrontation they were certain George Soros had funded. A man with a Resist Liberalism sign held a small amp atop his head and played the world's shittiest sample of a baby crying to somehow lampoon the leftists in front of him. A trio of college-aged boys not yet old enough to drink took in the moment. "I'm just here for the memes," one said. "I'm just here for the memes."
Trump's speech was long forgotten now, the plug-and-play inanities of the campaign rolled out again even though he was already President, vague promises of what he will do coming one after the other, as if to obfuscate the fact that he is the only one to blame for not taking on what he can do. What remained was the glower— the resentment-as-lifeblood, that special animating energy that comes from conjuring what you wish, anointing it as fact, and wedding it forever to conspiratorial denial.
It got through to one immigrant. Glennis Barber, an older woman from England who married an American and understood that George Soros isn't the only obstacle. "I came to the rally because everything you see on television— we have reporters like you— down him. They don't listen to what he's saying," she said. She'd already heard from her sister back in England what Muslims do. No-go zones, making England a Muslim country. "The Muslims are a big bad thing in Europe, they're absolutely disgusting, and they need to be shoved out. I don't want them in here. A Muslim, their religion is not a religion, it's their life. You might like sharia law, but I don't," she explained. "It's their way of life, is to take over the whole of America, and you people are so dumb you don't see it."
Traffic was still backed up as people passed by the scrum of protesters and supporters and walked off through the flickering lights. The young Muslim girl in a hijab was still there. She was from Orlando, Florida and had protested circa Occupy, and she conceded she wasn't prepared for the reception she'd gotten that afternoon, one that darkened as the day faded and made her want to withhold her name, for fear the night would stretch on forever online.
During the speech, she'd stood among the Trump supporters who watched on the big screen and listened through the loudspeaker. Afterwards, she'd moved together with the bloc of protesters who converged to greet the Trump supporters leaving the speech. Her head covering was noticeable, even in the crowd.
Later that night, she texted me a video of people walking in parallel to her, yelling, just a few blocks away outside Keiser University. She said they'd followed her from the rally, and their clothes and conversation suggest as much. The people looked familiar, in the same way that a composite does, in that way that all white people yelling racist things have a sneer that verges on archetype.
"Leave," a woman shouted on the video, flipping her off. "You don't like America, get the fuck out ... You are a disgrace to America," the man walking next to her said.
They mocked her camera. "You can jack off to that later, the man drawled. "I've got a big ol' white American redneck dick."
The woman in the hijab told him where to stick it. "I can put it up your little tight ass," he countered, "and I won't be hittin' that clit, 'cause it already got removed."