He's feeling so wired that he even turned the word "science" into a verb for the occasion. After all, it's the best time in the history of America to be alive in America. All you need is to get down with the "churn" of technology, baby. Whether you're a desperate entrepreneur in Maryland fiddling around with a 3-D printer to make stuff for Etsy to pay off your onerous college debt, or an out-of-work fracker in North Dakota dreaming of going green now that the oil is being exported via bomb trains to New Jersey for shipment across the wide Atlantic, life has never been better.
Obama's cheerful editorial celebrating an alleged reduction in crime rates received ironic pride of place right above a reprint of an older article instructing readers how to make "an untraceable ghost gun in America" with a 3-D printer. But never mind all that. Because he is so celebrating the greatness of skipping the middle-man Uber drivers so that Uber investors can rake in ever more profits with driverless vehicles. People who need robots are the luckiest people in the world.
As for humans, he wants to put them on Mars by 2030. No surprise that it was an outlandish blockbuster Hollywood movie called The Martian that inspired him:
Of course, I’m predisposed to love any movie where Americans defy the odds and inspire the world. But what really grabbed me about the film is that it shows how humans—through our ingenuity, our commitment to fact and reason, and ultimately our faith in each other—can science the heck out of just about any problem.With writing like that, is it selfish of me to be impatient for the first of his many, many overpriced autobiographies to hit the bookstores?
And if you're feeling sad and blue and poor and not excited about billionaires traveling to outer space, then it's all grouchy Donald Trump's fault (And as ever, Obama reduces crushing social problems to the neoliberal buzzword, challenges.)
Here’s another thing I believe: We are far better equipped to take on the challenges we face than ever before. I know that might sound at odds with what we see and hear these days in the cacophony of cable news and social media. But the next time you’re bombarded with over-the-top claims about how our country is doomed or the world is coming apart at the seams, brush off the cynics and fearmongers. Because the truth is, if you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.Because anybody this self-satisfied should make you feel satisfied, too:
Obama is so wired on capitalistic crack, he starts getting redundant:
This kind of progress hasn’t happened on its own. It happened because people organized and voted for better prospects; because leaders enacted smart, forward-looking policies; because people’s perspectives opened up, and with them, societies did too. But this progress also happened because we scienced the heck out of our challenges.This is truly presidential talk. When Trump goes low with the F-word and violence toward women, Obama goes high with heck.
No way would he ever plagiarize Matt Damon's original line from The Martian:
Obama and Damon actually owe each other. Once an ardent critic of the president's bellicosity and conservatism, Damon abruptly changed his mind after a very special visit to the White House to screen Monuments Men with Democratic bundler George Clooney. Obama took Damon aside and helped him see the neoliberal light. Obama is now quoting him and pimping out his movies every chance he gets. Matt Damon is now totally wired for Hillary Clinton.
To show how bipartisan they all really are, another fine upstanding folksy family guy is also extremely wired on Churn Baby Churn. Back when the elites on both sides of the Uniparty were still into sabotaging Bernie Sanders while insanely propping up Clintchurian candidate Donald Trump, Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich of Ohio praised Wall Street for its churning expertise.
He told CNBC's John Harwood that he didn't understand why Bernie was saying Wall Street's business model is a fraud. "Wall Street's there to provide some of the glue to make that economic system churn," he seethed, oddly thinking that glue makes for more creamily efficient whipping. "Did we have problems there?
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| Feel the Churn, Not the Bern |
Kasich, neoliberal centrist that he is, sounds exactly like Hillary Clinton. She must be thanking her god-given talents that Donnie bumped the moderately extremist Kasich out of contention when he did. That whole "Pied Piper" strategy and collusion with mainstream media to elevate Trump is working out beyond her wildest dreams. She really scienced it.
So I do wish everybody would stop singling out and picking on Hillary Clinton for those WikiLeaks revelations about her coddling and canoodling with Wall Street and bragging about her own "economic good fortunes." Because Obama isn't exactly talking to the lower orders in his Wired screed either:
That’s how we will overcome the challenges we face: by unleashing the power of all of us for all of us. Not just for those of us who are fortunate, but for everybody. That means creating not just a quicker way to deliver takeout downtown but also a system that distributes excess produce to communities where too many kids go to bed hungry. Not just inventing a service that fills your car with gas but also creating cars that don’t need fossil fuels at all. Not just making our social networks more fun for sharing memes but also harnessing their power to counter terrorist ideologies and online hate speech.I'd always thought that one responds to challenges, not that one must "overcome" them. And that gives credence to the notion that neoliberals use the word "challenge' as a euphemism for distracting the poor and working classes from the capitalistic horrors unleashed upon them by neoliberalism.
But, I quibble.
The better to further distract you from record wealth inequality and the militarization of our domestic police forces and spy agencies, the special Obama edition of Wired also devotes a whole section to fear-mongering about the cyber-espionage emanating from Russia and China. This helps the ruling class racketeers set the paranoid stage for public acceptance of World War III to supplement the creeping erosion of our own civil rights. The recent unproven claims that Putin is attempting to throw the upcoming elections through the series of embarrassing (and mostly, pretty boring) WikiLeaks revelations about Clintonland is the new casus belli meme wherever you go on the social networks these days.
That’s one reason why I’m so optimistic about the future: the constant churn of scientific progress. Think about the changes we’ve seen just during my presidency. When I came into office, I broke new ground by pecking away at a BlackBerry. Today I read my briefings on an iPad and explore national parks through a virtual-reality headset. Who knows what kind of changes are in store for our next president and the ones who follow?I'm afraid to ask. But in my own little virtual-reality headset, I'm sort of hoping for a bottom-up democratic counterrevolution against increasingly dangerous capitalistic churns-for-profit, accompanied by the emergence of third, fourth, even fifth parties. I'm hoping for more WikiLeaks revelations on, say, Obama's own closed-door speeches to the war-hungry and money-hungry plutocrats pulling the strings. And I don't much care whether the leaks come from Russia or from Mars.
Jobs, not drones. Education, not a trillion-dollar nukes upgrade.
Meanwhile, here's Neil DeGrasse Tyson giving Obama a satirical reality check on his big spacey distracting Martian propaganda.
5 comments:
Obama is going out with the same lovely sounding speeches that propelled him into the spotlight to run in 08. Every pic and video of him shows a choreographed public relations stance, smile, demeanor and message.
Meanwhile, see NYT page A1, Oct 10.
Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Strained to Hone Her Message, Hacked Emails Show
By AMY CHOZICK and NICHOLAS CONFESSORE
Quote:
“The exchanges show how Mrs. Clinton’s long-gestating plans to pursue the presidency collided with a newly populist mood in the Democratic electorate (which one of her advisers called the “Red Army”).
Almost all campaigns calibrate stagecraft, speeches and strategy. But the new emails seem to underscore Mrs. Clinton’s public struggles in defining her politics and her reasons for wanting to become president.
The private discussions among her advisers about policy — on trade, on the Black Lives Matter movement, on Wall Street regulation — often revolved around the political advantages and pitfalls of different positions, while there was little or no discussion about what Mrs. Clinton actually believed. Mrs. Clinton’s team at times seemed consumed with positioning and optics.
“Do we worry that publishing an op-ed that leans this aggressively into our newfound position on Keystone will be greeted cynically and perhaps as part of some manufactured attempt to project sincerity?” Mr. Fallon wrote. The best way to appear consistent, he concluded, was “if her position merely leaked out of the labor meeting.”
In another exchange...Clinton’s speechwriter circulated a draft of an op-ed about her plan to reform Wall Street. Her senior advisers agonized over whether she should address calls to reinstate Glass-Steagall...
Mrs. Clinton was leaning toward endorsing a return to Glass-Steagall, and that not doing so risked antagonizing ....Warren, who had campaigned to reinstate the rule. The campaign feared that Ms. Warren might back ...Sanders.
She argued that other policies would better regulate Wall Street risk.”
My thought ---Clinton coverage isn’t resolving anything. Her commenter fans just point us to her website. The media aren’t discussing her proposals. It’s all Trump trash all the time, and he’s responding, going over the top every day.
The media needs to shift now, even as Trumpf gets more atrocious.
Show a table listing issues where Trump and Clinton agree and where they disagree on issues.
Then show a table of where each candidate departs from their previous positions. Table may be too long for all Trumpf's changes, so use highlights.
Is that too revolutionary for the Times and others during an election campaign?
Get issues out there and give us some relief from reality show garbage, which now only a psychiatrist can deal with at this point.
In....no....va....tion.
Waaaay Off Topic
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Breaking News: The Tonkin Gulf thing all over again.
"An American warship struck rebel areas in Yemen in the first direct U.S. attack on the group. The rebels had fired on the ship."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/world/middleeast/yemen-rebels-missile-warship.html?emc=edit_na_20161013&nlid=48169905&ref=headline&_r=0
President Peace Prize said it was OK, because they started it. No boots on the ground, yet––that will be up to Hillary, whom I count on to be up to it––just our sailors tiptoeing around on their water.
That Obama dude sure is good looking. He's slender, elegant, suave, refined. So what if he smells like sulfur.
Speaking of Obama, why don't we take his advice and Look Forward, Not Backward. I'm working on cleaning off my crystal ball and will report when I get a clearer view, but so far this is what I'm seeing.
The Wikileaks emails revealed that the Clinton campaign was totally banking on Trump being the nominee, to the extent that it made some of their staff feel very nervous. Undoubtedly they were kept out of the loop for security reasons about the secret stash of dirt on Donald that was being saved for the general election. They also may not have been aware of how embedded the media was in the campaign, a media that would get both jobs done - helping Donald become the nominee and leaking dirt as needed for the general election.
Let's not forget that all that dirt could have been used to prevent him getting the nomination, but none of it was leaked. Those tapes weren't just discovered 11 years later. NBC even owned some of them and there's plenty more floating around. Poor Donald. He's caught between a rock and a hard-on, I mean hard place. He can't even reveal that he was the procurer of Babes for Bill on the Lolita Express without condemning himself. Sad.
So it turns out that the NYT wasn't just selfishly giving Trump virtually the entire front page day after day for months on end just for page clicks. It was a strategy to keep Donald motivated by seeing himself constantly in the limelight. The Clinton machine played him and still are. They know they can just let him implode, although knowing Hillary, she'll drop more dirt just for payback. Trump had better keep a heads up for drones after Hillary gets elected. She actually asked if they could drone Julian Assange. It wasn't revealed if that was during a Kill Team meeting on Terror Tuesdays or not.
Looking further forward, Mme. President is going to have one hell of a time with Les Deplorables. After she dissed so many of them, they aren't going to forget that, ever. If there was ever comes a time of revolution, it will be under the reign of Queen Hillary.
And internationally? Putin isn't going to forget that the Clinton Cabal blamed Russia and Putin for attacking and undermining American 'democracy'. Look for a uniting of an ever expanding 'Axis of Evil' with Russia, Iran, China, etc. against the global empire lead by President Clinton.
Don't expect to detect a hint of any of this in the American press. The NYT and the rest of the corporate media will be sure to black it all out to make the Empress look good. Never mind Russia, the media should look at itself if it wants to expose the undermining of our 'democracy'.
Unfortunately for all of us, Obama, Hillary, and the entire establishment stifled the peaceful political revolution movement starting with Occupy and carried on by Bernie. I'm afraid Les Deplorables will actually be the ones now to stoke a revolution, and it won't be the peaceful, political kind since even the most naive of us can now see that we live in a plutocracy with collusion by their corporate media.
Les Deplorables have the fighting spirit, the guts, and the will. Yes, they also have the guns to provide them with a false sense of security and bravado, not to mention intimidation which worked at the Malheur NWR, although that was under Pussycat Obama not Hellcat Hillary.
Les Deplorables are as fed up as the rest of us, but they're fa more motivated and UNITED now that Hillary has gathered them into ONE BIG BASKET. Hillary sure does have a way with people.
I still say we'd be better off with Trump. Think of how united we'd become!
Vote Jill, not Hill.
George Bush beat Obama to it, with his vision in 2004 of going to the moon by 2020 and Mars by perhaps as early as 2030. I expect Obama's vision will turn out the same as Bush's. Such talk is a reminder of little understanding and urgency Obama has about global warming.
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