You raised your house, like, yesterday.
As I think I remarked during the Kavanaugh hearings, there must be a constituency for the proposition that we need no more smug preppy assholes in power.
I'll relink my Swiftian satire challenge from the older thread in case anyone else would like to play (not to throw shade on the earlier players), and also admit that I couldn't watch the video. Could anyone else not bring themselves to watch the video? Is it worth watching?
Could anyone else not bring themselves to watch the video?
Me!
Based on the still, I'm picturing Deputy Leo portraying the MAGA prick in the movie, though.
I'm not watching that kind of video right now unless there's some reason that actually watching it is more important than reading about it and understanding the issue. Because of the ubiquity of cameras, we're in a time where a lot of those videos no longer work to shock people into action; instead they're just more material for consumption on the internet.
Also, I feel enough rage with no real outlet right now. Viewing that kind of video makes me nauseated with anger and then I can't do anything about it - I mean, it's all very well to say "channel your fury into calling your representatives and donating and volunteering", but actually I do that stuff anyway, trying to do it when I'm blind with rage doesn't work real well and it doesn't resolve my rage anyway.
I will say that the more one hears about these incidents, the more one starts to sympathize with the Bolsheviks. "Send you to the gulag after a perfunctory trial and leave you there forever" starts to seem like a reasonable tactic, and maybe even a way to resolve my anger.
Am I allowed to hate obnoxious MAGA hat wearing teenagers and social media rage junkies and clickbait journalists like the one who wrote the linked article?
So many people to hate and only 24 hours in a day.
Who wants to pick through that mess?
It strongly seems like right-wing figures put out attempts to recontextualize the video, that didn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny, but which nevertheless a lot of the media took as carte blanche to throw up their hands and say HOW CAN WE POSSIBLY EVER BE SURE SO MANY PERSPECTIVES.
4: Well... I think I did watch a bit of the video when the story first broke.. was that weeks ago? or yesterday?
I don't understand how this can be important. A bunch of white high school kids did something stupid and racist. Something like this must have happened every day of the 21st century.
Clumsy effort at cultural critique: this went viral because (a) it matched so many liberal/left priors - correctly so! -, (b) the offender being a teenager people took more interest in it as a proxy for what's in our future, and finally (c) precisely because it's exactly what it seems like, a grinning redhat asshole being an intimidating asshole and backed up by a would-be mob of very similar people, centrist media types felt a strong urge to force down their appropriate visceral reactions, show their eyes were lying, so they could continue to be evenhanded.
(I originally wrote "your Cuomos and Weisses" but Weiss seems to have kept out, and Chris Cuomo shared a debunking thread, so I guess I didn't retain exactly who the bland white folks being reacted to by LTwitter were.)
I believe the children are our future.
By targeting a Native American, the MAGAs successfully refuted the stereotype that they only hate on immigrants.
I'm with peep. No one was physically hurt, and no one thinks any crime occurred. Kids being racist assholes isn't news.
What kind of shitty amateur upstart monastic school lets its students wear uniform and non-uniform items at the same time while on a school excursion?
7 was what surprised me also. I guess good PR firms really work.
12: More generally, I seem to recall that in HS we were accompanied by adult chaperones during off campus school sponsored events. Where were the adults while all of this was going on?
I suppose maybe they were watching and thought it was fine.
I came up with a contrarian perspective!
This incident exemplifies the greatness and diversity of the U.S. Native Americans, Black Hebrews, and White Catholic teens were all demonstrating at the same place and time.
No one died or even seriously injured. Hurray for the U.S.A!
Why is everyone channeling Ja Rule all of a sudden?
Update, it looks like Jake Tapper had a lot to do with the turnabout.
I took the opportunity of a discussion of this at the other place to hate on the underlying event the students were attending, and smoked out a few people who are now off my Christmas card list. So that's a win.
I had to look up the Black Hebrews. Good grief. Much prefer the demented but non-violent archaeological fantasies of the British Israelites (sample: the ten lost tribes of Israel moved east out of Babylon and became Scythians, or as Herodotus called them "Scoloti", which obviously indicates they are the ancestors of modern Scots, see the Declaration of Arbroath: BUT NO they instead became the Cimmerians of the Pontic Steppe, from which we derive "Cymri" so clearly the lost tribes of Israel are in fact Welsh, etc etc).
Am I allowed to hate obnoxious MAGA hat wearing teenagers and social media rage junkies and clickbait journalists like the one who wrote the linked article?
Permission granted.
I hope people don't confuse the actual Jewish people who are black with the Black Hebrews.
I assume anybody wearing a MAGA hat is racist. Why wouldn't i?
If only they were catholic not Catholic.
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I'm not crazy about her prosecutorial past and her milquetoast platform (we need radical change with regard to climate change and income inequality for starters and she's giving us middle income tax cuts and the like) but Kamala Harris is being birthered and that's some extremely offensive racist bullshit.
|>
The high school racists are appalling, rightwing and maybe mainstream media excuses them to its shame.
The "Black Hebrews" are also appalling, shouty and confrontational in high traffic spots, they are as obnoxious as people who carry large graphics of fetuses to protest abortion, a similarly impaired and bizarre worldview. Usually the shouty group is about a dozen guys, it's a conscious choice not to engage them because they want to have a "debate." I don't know what they did on the day in question.
I haven't seen much in the way of critique of those guys. I haven't especially looked for such a critique though. If it's true that there is no or very little critique, or that the critique only comes from right media outlets, there's some food for thought there about bias there I think.
12: In my day, they only had lay people on staff. I have no idea whether or how much that might have changed.
The Black Hebrews have no ties to major institutions / political parties that I'm aware of, so they would be less relevant to the broader state of the country even if they had the same number of habitual yellers as, say, anti-choicers.
27. Great, agreed.
They are relevant to walking through DC when they piss people off in my opinion, which they do often. Doesn't excuse the teenagers, but just omitting them seems to me like an error.
25 Why bother to critique them? They're fringe kooks and not worth the time. These racist MAGA shitheads are the Bret Kavanaughs of the future.
26: In Mossheimat it refers to single-sex schools in general, even if secular. Which appears now to be a localism.
29: I get it now. We're attacking these teens now, while they are young and vulnerable, to prevent them from ever getting to be on the Supreme Court. It's a kinder, gentler version of killing baby Hitler.
And so much less traumatic for the executioners, considering that kid's face.
27, 29 suggest that the problem with the young shitheads is not how they actually behaved that day, but with who they are.
Quietly omitting accounts of others who actually behaved badly on the day in question seems like bad behavior to me.
32 Does it turn baby Schicklgrubers into Hitlers? I don't usually like the 'the Left made me be an asshole' formulation, but in the reaction and counter-reaction to this thing, you can see kids drawing the wrong inferences about what side they ought to be on. The Trumpers aren't wrong to see these things as a great gift, at least in the very short term.
I saw the initial viral video Saturday morning and was appalled.
I was already going to a Native-led MMIW vigil on Saturday afternoon, and was already planning to say nothing and do nothing that would call attention to myself other than as a supportive presence.
(I wore a red shirt, visible under my coat at the neck, and luckily do not even own a red hat.)
do not even own a red hat
Is this the new, "don't even own a tv"?
Between red MAGA hats and those pink knitted pussy hats, I'm kind of surprised how salient head gear has become in today's political landscape.
Would a pussy hat with MAGA stitched across the front make people's heads literally explode if they put it on?
Damnit Charlie, have a care. You know what happens to redshirts.
27, 29 suggest that the problem with the young shitheads is not how they actually behaved that day, but with who they are. Quietly omitting accounts of others who actually behaved badly on the day in question seems like bad behavior to me.
No, it's acknowledging that there's a difference between bad behavior in isolation and bad behavior that constitutes the leading flank of a movement that controls most of the country. (Why did a Republican PR firm start spinning the redhats?)
In actual descriptions of the action, I don't see people downplaying the Black Hebrews being assholes. But that's about the sum total of how much they need to be talked about.
I have a red Washington Nationals hat that I can't wear anymore.
I also have a Orioles shirt that says "Trumbo #45." Poor Mark Trumbo, I can't wear his shirt any more.
These Black Hebrews really are a pox on society. This incident might be the most prolonged interaction any of the MAGA teens have had in person with an urban-dwelling black person, except at school sporting events. They go to the city expecting black people to be crazed anti-white racists who are also loudmouthed buffoons. And now that has been confirmed, by these literal cult members who are what, a total world population in the three digits?
Clowns and weirdos have adorned imperial courts for millennia. You just need to incorporate them productively into public ceremonies.
Update: the Covington students are apparently GOING TO THE WHITE HOUSE. Just another installment in Subtext to Text.
Like, invited to meet the President going.
For instance, filibusters might be conducted by Black Hebrews instead of Senators.
45: I was wondering how long it would take for that to happen.
Perfect. They are to Trump what the Muslim Clock Kid was to Obama.
Conservatives really, really, really hate it when liberals go after their boys. This past year has taught me that lesson well. I wonder if this will pivot into a long trending public discussion about White Mothers' Tears, which to my knowledge hasn't happened yet at scale (has it?).
Maybe Trump will feed them cold fast-food hamburgers.
White Mothers' Tears
You mean as a weapon, like BBQ Becky's tears? Or is this an organization?
I think Trump's media savviness might be failing him here. If he really wanted to go big with this, he would invite the Black Hebrews as well, and then broadcast the whole thing on live TV.
If Obama was President he would have invited Nathan Phillips too. Maybe a few of the Black Hebrews too.
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So aside from the uncertainty of whether the MILF will play ball, one must also take into account that there are several groups outside of the scope of the BOL and the 2014 CAB.|>
First term Obama, Phillips and the students. Second term Obama, maybe Phillips only. Neither the Black Hebrews.
I forgot that Obama didn't actually invite Kanye and Taylor Swift to the White House -- that was just a joke I made.
The front page looks very weird and truncated. I feel bad.
45: Looks like that may not be happening after all!
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/01/nicholas-sandmann-not-invited-white-house-yet.html
This is the moment that Trump truly became President.
60: Don't feel bad, heebie. We live in weird and truncated times.
53: exactly, version of "white women's tears" specifically for mothers of upstanding young white men and women who suffer unfairly in this grim new era. It seems to be increasing in salience a bit since all the "Brett Kavanaugh could be my own son!" epiphanies last year.
If an organization with this name does form, well, the phrase "irony is dead" will also be dead.
Well, every single reputable, and non-reputable news organization has been backing up on the initial story. That is about as good a clue as any that something is not right in the original story propagated. I'm feeling less confident since the original post of the photo, which was basically a mona lisa smile meme in waiting. Anyway, I watched most of it today.
The picture looks super bad; the video clips look kinda bad but more confusing; the whole video (you're welcome, I did watch most of it) looks just like a bunch of people standing around doing their thing for 2 hours. Some of that 2 hours was shitty.
It does look bad on a meta/media level. It doesn't seem to be bad physical action on anyone present's for the thing's part. It got a lot of initial attention/articles from NYT, Fox, CNN, and shit Meghann McCain(!) got resurrected and commented on it. Then they all apologized, full out and directly.
I admit I am confused by all this.
My guess is that when the kid got doxxed and the school got bomb threats, they decided it was easier to back off the initial story than run stories about how even when kids to bad things you shouldn't threaten to kill them.
65: I'm guessing that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is once again cheering up the news.
Some of the doxxing claims were right wing bullshit. They claimed liberals found where the kids got in to college and called admissions officers to rescind the admissions. On Sunday of a holiday weekend. When admissions decisions (aside from early) haven't been made yet.
67- I'm always startled by groups like that.
A cross-competitive, coordinated, traditional and online media, anti-death conspiracy to stop potential school related mass killings through twitter apologies is a possible framing you could apply. It's working hard though. Kinda like,
the other ideas about what is driving the "MILF to play ball"?
In related news, there's this new study:
In spring 2017, not long after President Trump took office, bullying rates among Virginia middle school students were 18 percent higher in places where voters had chosen Trump over Hillary Clinton, a study says.
A coincidence, surely.
Yep. Kids are horrible with encouragement. Anyway, TPM and Bouie don't buy that the video exonerates the kids, so I'm assuming the media isn't walking back because they're wrong.
I think it's important to be cautious, fair and non-judgmental when evaluating videos of entitled little rightwing shitheads.
Anyway, I'm not watching the video. I haven't even seen The Office yet. I got a lot of backlog on video.
71: I mean they specifically, in the first/second page of the study, say do not take what they are doing to summarize their statement. They say this may have happened.
The study's authors have tried really hard to say this may have happened. Then they say, please don't just summarize this as it has happened. That is good and fair authoring. At least quote from the main section of the article and not the summary of the summary like the WP did.
I mean, they literally took "changes in support for trump" alongside "reported incidents" without qualifying the spectrum asked (because the data wasn't available). There are so many statistical issues with this (that the authors acknowledge) that it's basically a cool idea that didn't lead to anything.
That should be cool to do. Keep doing it! But stop whatever you are trying to do.
Although it was decades ago I read his book, I am apparently an expert on the work of Kamia Harris' father.
The kid's parents hired a PR firm headed by a CNN contributor which helped mainstream the pushback. So the lesson to our youth is the usual one, make sure you're born to the right parents.
I bet they try to get their homeowners insurance to pay for that.
A scrimmage in a protesting nation.
A chant around some MAGA bile.
Two hundred thou in college preparation
Drops to a memed You-Tube fail.
The maga youth are horrible and their school appears to be a repeat offender, but I'm unclear that anything was served in covering the story to the point where they became right wing celebrities.
The times are definitely weird but, for better or worse, not yet truncated.
I'm trying to decide whether to try to read this book or just trust that I'm better off (as a human being capable of ethical actions above and beyond ever getting out of bed) not knowing the details.
Is 84 notably different to what happened elsewhere in the ConUS?
I think it was a more complete genocide, at least compared to the Plains.
This incident might be the most prolonged interaction any of the MAGA teens have had in person with an urban-dwelling black person, except at school sporting events.
If so, that's by choice. You can see into downtown Cincy from the top of their school's driveway. I was just putting urban-dwelling black people to bed 10-minute drive away, and that's only so long because the roads are indirect.
85, 86: Yeah, California was much more of a textbook "ordinary settlers head over to the local village and shoot everybody" genocide, as opposed to other areas where there was more organized warfare and diplomacy and the US government was the main actor on the settler side.
That doesn't make any sense. The Okies could have shown them the way and everything.
87: The videos of the kids from that school at sporting events also aren't going to reassure many people.
90: I'm not trying to be reassuring! But I think it's unlikely any of them are actually from Covington, which is fairly diverse, and that in the best scenarios they're passively racist and uncomfortable with people unlike themselves. And that's a choice they and their families reinforce with the choices they make.
I was just pointing out it's 0 for 2 if you count sports and protesting.
91: But I think it's unlikely any of them are actually from Covington
And of course, the school itself has not been in Covington since the early '50s.
And the latest narrative correction is that Philips was "only" a Vietnam-era vet not having been deployed to Vietnam. Both the NYT and aAPo described him as a Vietnam vet using incorrect information although it appears that he himself never made the claim.
Time correction:
An earlier version of this article, using information from the Indigenous Peoples Movement, gave an incorrect description of Mr. Phillips's military service. While Mr. Phillips said he served in the military during the Vietnam era, he told The Times after publication that he was not deployed in Vietnam. The Times has requested his service record from the Pentagon.
Wait, why does the Times get service records on demand when everyone else has to wait until the government reopens? Sheesh. We should just say "Cold War veteran" for everyone who served between 1945 and 1990.
I'm considering reading about genocide as an appetizing alternative to thinking more about the subject of the OP, apparently. 81 gets it dead right.
Genocide for bounty in Michigan? Also something similar in the SW, per Flashman and the Redskins, my principal source on matters Western.
I'm not sure where you're going with this, Mossy.
I just feel that sometimes Californians feel they're, like, special?
I thought California also had a short period of large-scale if not industrialized slavery of the Native Americans who were captured.
Californians do often feel special, but not on this topic.
We're all special, Mossy, in our own way.
Oh okay, got it. My thought process is not crystal clear either, obviously, but I'm too tired to explain at any length. ANY length.
I mean also if you're really bent on having an American Nightmare Media Experience either Flashman or GK would probably be a lot more entertaining.
Twitter isn't helping anybody.
Back before twitter, we had political and media freakouts over substantive, urgent, and totally not invasive and exploitative controversies like what Terry Schiavo's family should do, or be able to do.
Elián González on line two.
(Although weren't both driven in part by Peggy Noonan? Maybe one good thing about Twitter is I haven't heard anything about her in years.)
Speaking of twitter, I just came across a prescient Stanley post from 2010: "I'm vaguely unconfortable [sic] with the fact that all these world leaders are tweeting."
I'm not saying everything was perfect before Twitter.
Anyway, somebody is going to have a really awkward time writing the alumni newsletter.
Speaking of why twitter sucks, it looks like the incident was deliberately signal boosted by a professional troll.
From the link:
Twitter suspended an account on Monday afternoon that helped spread a controversial encounter between a Native American elder and a group of high school students wearing Make America Great Again hats.
The account claimed to belong to a California schoolteacher. Its profile photo was not of a schoolteacher, but of a blogger based in Brazil, CNN Business found. Twitter suspended the account soon after CNN Business asked about it.
The account, with the username @2020fight, was set up in December 2016 and appeared to be the tweets of a woman named Talia living in California. "Teacher & Advocate. Fighting for 2020," its Twitter bio read. Since the beginning of this year, the account had tweeted on average 130 times a day and had more than 40,000 followers.
Rob McDonagh, an assistant editor at Storyful, a service that vets content online, was monitoring Twitter activity on Saturday morning and said the @2020fight video was the main version of the incident being shared on social media.
McDonagh said he found the account suspicious due to its "high follower count, highly polarized and yet inconsistent political messaging, the unusually high rate of tweets, and the use of someone else's image in the profile photo."
In summary: social media sucks, everyone who uses social media sucks, and you should all delete your accounts right now.
People who close their html tags too early also suck.
16: Update, it looks like Jake Tapper had a lot to do with the turnabout.
I've actually tried not following the stupid thing in detail, but apart from the messy circumstances of the event itself this has been a classic of the right-wing cultural outrage* genre including Tapper's** role. It is to be noted that the Kentucky PR firm was co-founded by Scott Jennings who is one of CNN's RW 'balance" talking heads and a frequent guest on Tapper's show. The puke funnel at work and play.
*Last seen in this level of full force during the Kavanaugh hearing. Any hint that the actions of a privileged young white guy might have negative consequences is met with full on sound and fury. To paraphrase that great Crooked Timber commenter aphorism: There must be in-groups whom society protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom society binds but does not protect.
**Overall, I think Tapper is OK by the low standards of CNN/TV media folks, but he is massively thin-skinned and has several times risen to the defense of the ppor-maligned powerless right-wing. Perhaps most famously when he led the defense of Fox News when the Obama administration. But that's a pretty sweeping declaration that they are "not a news organization." How are they any different from, say - ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different? Hmm, let me have a think.
Josh Marshall has what I think is a good new holistic response. The original takes on the incident were correct interpretations, but in the grand scheme this incident and most like it are too small to bear the weight of the systemic injustices they're being made to stand in for, and the social media scrums have an inherent shallowness and tendency toward whataboutisms bouncing off each other ad infinitum.
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NMM to avant-garde filmmaker, poet, and founder of the wonderful Anthology Archives Jonas Mekas. A giant. RIP.
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113: It's easy to forget that Obama really did try to seriously challenge the primacy of bullshit news, and got abused for it by "legitimate" news organizations -- and defended by almost nobody of consequence. And now we have a birther president.
115: That captures it, yeah.
In summary: social media sucks
Well sure, what I meant in 107 was more that there was one monkey flinging poo which was annoying, so Twitter came in and introduced 10000 monkeys flinging poo so you don't even notice the first anymore.
Does that belong on the other thread?
Belatedly to 105: nah, I'm not seriously looking for entertainment; I just meant to flippantly point out the unpleasantness of the media circus stuff. I mentioned the book only because there are a few specialists and/or interested parties who post here on the topic, but none of them have showed up to remark on having read it or anything... so whatever! Maybe I should bite the bullet and become an active Twitter user instead of freeloading... let me read the rest of the thread and see if anyone has anything to say about the benefits of Twitter.
See 114 lk!
Also, GK? Chesterton?
It's easy to forget that Obama really did try to seriously challenge the primacy of bullshit news
Hey, remember that time when Helen Thomas said something negative about Israel so Obama kicked her out of the White House Press Corps and gave her seat to Fox News?
121 Holy shit yes. A real wtf moment.
This is the Marshall post mentioned in 115. I agree that it's very good.
Helen Thomas suggested that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine." Then she resigned from her Hearst job, was dropped by her agent and offered what seemed at the time like a sincere apology, though she later recanted.* Personally, I think the Israelis should get the hell out of the occupied territories, but it's pretty hardcore to say Israelis should get out of Israel (one part of "Palestine") and "go home" to Germany and Poland, as Thomas proposed.
Obama did not kick her out of the White House Press Corps, though his press secretary called the remarks "reprehensible."
*Per Wikipedia: "On December 2, 2010 ... Thomas told reporters that she still stood by the comments she had made to Nesenoff. Referring to her resignation, she said "I paid a price, but it's worth it to speak the truth."[1][78][79] During the speech, Thomas said: "Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street are owned by Zionists. No question, in my opinion."
125 That's harsher than I remembered it, I thought she was calling for Israel to get out of the occupied West Bank..
Worth noting that she was Arab. Its not an unreasonable position to hold for someone with roots in the region that predate Zionism.
That explains why she wouldn't buy my used Soda Stream.
126: She used the word "Palestine" and didn't mention occupied territories. I don't think anyone ever tried to justify her words with the claim that she was talking about Occupied Palestine, but I think that defense wouldn't be completely implausible.
Anyway, regardless, telling Jews to go home to Germany and Poland is, by itself, pretty problematic - and supports the idea that she was talking about Israel as a whole, since Jews in the territories could "go home" to Israel, right?
And, um, "Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street are owned by Zionists." Also not nice.
Not watching that video or reading anything about it is one of the easiest acts of bullshit-narrative self-protection I've ever managed. The look on that kid's face and the words "Native American veteran" were all I needed to run away. I don't know how people sustain the appetite for all this stupid performative outrage.
In related news, my mother tells me that Meryl Streep eats at a cannibal restaurant in LA so she's throwing her Mama Mia dvd out.
130.2: What newsletter does your mom read?
130.2 : Snopes says this isn't true -- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cannibal-restaurant/ - but the evidence looked pretty convincing to me.
Back in the day, I used to read alt.folklore.urban. Before that, there was nobody to ask about which restaurants had cannibalism.
132: I think it's the "Crazy Old Floridian White Lady Times" or maybe the "Bulletin for People Who Literally Believe Everything They Read" or somesuch.
133: It has to be true. My mother assures me that she "checked it out." You're not calling my mother a liar, are you? She also assures me that Snopes is biased, so, y'know.
I wish BonsaiKitten was still online.
135.2: I agree with your mom! Snopes is ridiculous! If you owned a super-exclusive restaurant that served human flesh, would you post the address on the web?
OT: Things happening in Venezuela?
The customers are happier than the entrees.
If you owned a super-exclusive restaurant that served human flesh, would you post the address on the web?
Of course I would, but I would make it an un-copy-and-pasteable graphics element without a google maps hyperlink, as per standard recommendations in the Restaurant Webmaster's Guidebook.
Things have been happening in Venezuela for months. I predict protestors will be shot.
Is an answer to lk's challenge finally gleaming on the horizon?
130.1
There are people around who were played by Russian twitter bots so thoroughly in 2016 that, more than 2 years later, they're still emotionally invested in being angry at imaginary people.
I was reminded of that when I came across the story linked in 111 that this whole thing probably went viral due to the efforts of a professional troll.
People's appetite for performative outrage is apparently limitless and will probably end up killing us all.
Plenty of Caribs in Venezuela. Just sayin'.
Trump is going to wag the dog on Venezuela, isn't he?
Trump has recognized the opposition leader as president of Venezuela.
Venezuela should respond in kind.
Was interested to see via the NYTimes new word bot that the first use of "beclown"* was today in a story about this incident.
*Although a different form of the verb may have appeared previously.
I think somebody would have to declare themselves interim president of the U.S. first.
149: So I see. Actually coordinated with the Latin Americans, for a wonder. For now, all that matters is how the various armed forces jump. IDK detail, but AFAIK Chavez started coup-proofing on day one, so. Longer-term, serious sanctions on oil exports will hurt, but then they hurt Iraq too. At the UN level I assume China and Russia would veto, but IIRC US action alone could be decisive because only refineries on the US Gulf have significant capacity to process Venezuelan crude.
150/2: I emphasize 154.1. This isn't Trump ranting, it looks as if it's being driven by professionals at State.
Highly coordinated: Guaido, US, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, in minutes.
Military apparently solid for now; refining (not straightforward).
Top 10 Most Popular at The Atlantic dot com right now:
1. Victims of sex pest Bryan Singer speak out
2. The science of hagfish slime
3. How Amazon works: Part 45,589 in an eternal series
4. How the failing leftist media wronged the MAGA teens, by Caitlin Flanagan
5. The MAGA teens are an example of how you can't trust viral videos, by Adam Serwer
6. Ariana Grande is cancelled because of her cultural appropriation
7. The MAGA teens are an example of how you can't trust viral videos, by Julie Irwin Zimmerman
8. The MAGA teens are an example of how you can't trust viral videos, by Ian Bogost
9. How the failing leftist media wronged the MAGA teens, by Conor Friedersdorf
10. Women's bathroom lines are still too long
Pence seems to take a particular interest in Venezuela - 7 tweets out of 70 this month (not including RTs) on the subject.
161: Is your point that Unfogged needs to try harder to beat The Atlantic?
159- Would have been awkward if Guaido wasn't in the loop. Congratulations you're President now- wait what?
162: Yes. BBC says the policy has bipartisan support. Interesting.
California refiners today do move crude from Ras Tanura on VLCCs, but these ships draw too much water to get into the ports in Los Angeles or San Francisco Bay. The cargo on these ships is shuttled ashore in smaller tankers via an operation known as lightering.Seriously? Why do they not have offshore terminals?
VLCC->offshore terminal
VLCC->lighter->onshore terminal
That's exactly twice as many transfers of crude oil.
I was thinking maybe that the transfers would occur in less environmentally sensitive places, e.g. the first one way out in international water and the second on in a harbor. Thus, not near the beaches. California likes their beaches, because they're better than Oklahoma's.
To be clear, I have no actual information. I'm just reasoning from first principles.
Offshore terminals can also be way out in international water. And the lighters have to offload in harbors full of exciting collision hazards. Harbors which are literally right next to the beaches. Also, extra emissions from the lighters.
Actually, more than twice as many transfers, because the lighters by definition carry less oil than the VLCCs.
I would guess those ports just don't get enough traffic from giant ships to justify the cost of building offshore terminals. But I too don't actually know anything about this.
I think Kant had something to say about that.
Reading. I'll get back to you when I've finished the book.
PADD 5 (West Coast), which is logistically isolated from the rest of the US, is also supplied with a ~50/50 mix of locally produced and imported oil. [...] Imports into California in 2010 were mainly medium to heavy sour crudes, principally from Saudi Arabia, Ecuador and Iraq.
Sweet crude comes from Texas. I remember that from graduate school.
It looks like the VLCC McVLCCFaces do go into Long Beach, but only after the load has been reduced, or made "lighter" through the use of some kind of technique with an unrelated name. Some cursory googling suggests that the problem in most ports that can't accommodate full VLCC's at the moment is dredging more than anything else.
Well yes, they're lightened by lighterage. The question remains why has the problem not been obviated? Neither by dredging nor by offshore terminals?! Why does no-one share my outrage here!?!
Why are you outraged that massive oil tankers can only efficiently unload in the part of the US most oriented around petroleum processing and distribution, and not in some other random part?
179. Also from Britain (and China and Russia and Australia and Nigeria and Saudi and... )
It isn't random it's a huge economy with a huge petroleum sector! And it has to refine its own fuel because there aren't pipelines across the Rockies!! Efficiency!!! WHY DO I EVEN HAVE TO ARGUE THIS?!
For whatever it's worth, my earlier responses above followed my looking at my twitter. The WaPo and other outlets did mention the Black Hebrews, I agree with Minivet's assesment that the whole thing is a disproportionate response. I didn't help by talking about my loose impressions right away.