UTUSN

UTUSN's Journal

December 10, 2025

The ironies of RUBIO's font dictates - (the font itself is covered in a different thread. )

* IRONY: Conservativism is supposed to be about minimum government interference in people's lives. It has long been said that Dear Leader is not only not a Conservative but is not ideological at all, basically just goes by authoritarian whim about what is good for him. So down to the most trivial things, he involves himself in the smallest details of everybody's lives.

* IRONY: Cubans are Hispanics, no? Yet RUBIO first (2015) started by fiercely (as much as he can mildly be) opposing Dear Leader, but in a blink has turned totally loyal. And as an HIspanic has swamped himself to the gills in persecuting other Hispanics into the bargain of any others in an undiplomatic assault on what the State Department does. And here, along with the involvement in the pettiest of details, he turns his attention to *font*. RUBIO, of Cuban Exile heritage, reaped extreme benefits of immigration and residency that other Hispanic branches didn't get - imagine *two* Senators and presidential candidates and extensive colonization of a state (Florida) and significant impact on both political parties (hatred towards Dems, collaboration with Reps). The font is just the writing on the cake's icing. If anybody is "DEI" RUBIO is.

December 6, 2025

MAGAts have a high tolerance for shame, embarrassment, and sociopathy.

That's what I will Reply in the Comments sections of MAGAt tabloids.

*** ON EDIT:

Will add, to play off their age-old attempts at calling us "bleeding hearts ... snowflakes ... hypocrites (for not bleeding/snow over the misfortunes of their horrible idols) : You have sociopathy and no shame/embarrassment.

December 6, 2025

My quandary: Have never had reactions to any.

In my previous 70+ yrs lifetime, the only vaxes I had were the childhood and school things and the military things - all of which were routine/mundane accepted and unquestioned. In my majority Middle Period decades (post school and military, all Civilian) had nothing, and especially nothing the Flu one because it didn't seem important and heard people say they caught the Flu because of the shot and can't pinpoint whether I ever got the flu. When the covid new-kind-of-scary pandemic thing happened, it came with a new political dimension to it and I took all of the boosters, did the whole thing of loss of some loved ones and learning some new level of mortality and hatred of antagonists.

So have had them all - all the covids, then later the anti-shingles/pneumonia/RSV and rigorously Flu. And never have had reactions, to the point that I wondered whether the pharmacists were actually not doing the placebo thing.

I've got the covid/Flu in October as usual, simultaneously as usual, nothing happens (so far) as usual. (The shingles & pneumonia are forevers.)

*** My only mild, quandary now is that this time with the season changing, have had some sniffles and the occasional annoying sneezing fits. Are those routine, dust, allergies - I only dust and such when things get intolerably irritating, so there's that. So, are the sniffles/sneezing just "normal"?

I've introduced myself to nasal, salt inhaler things, which are helpful.

December 3, 2025

The label "Democratic" is gone if the holder is crooked.

Yes, his voting has been almost all Dem and he was endorsed every time by the party hierarchy, but he had a hefty dose of Faux Propaganda Network appearances with tons of breaking with Dem admins mostly about Border stuff.

In recent elections he's had Progressive, young women contenders who are said would lose to the Wingnut MAGAt big ranch and oil bosses of the Border, Laredo TX district.

Big umbrella aside, crooks forfeit the Democratic label.

December 1, 2025

Slipped past, KRASNOV's taking over Kennedy Center meant he fired David RUBENSTEIN (no Vogue cover for Melanie)

Remember years ago that "the Carlyle Group" was a big boogyman here? I had zero clue to what it was, only that it was something in the Neocon Iraq attack that we detested. My cluelessness turned into mystification to find out that RUBENSTEIN came from the Jimmy CARTER admin, where there was a nest of vipers at his breast: Tweety (Chris MATTHEWS for the young'uns), Pat CADDELL, now RUBENSTEIN and probably others. In later years, when this outfit became known for vast riches, RUBENSTEIN's profile was more about his buying (the Magna Carta?) and other historic knickknacks. And article is bursting with his billions more in humanitarian and other fundings.

But when KRASNOV took over the Kennedy Center and installed himself as the boss, it was yes another travesty but the detail that RUBENSTEIN was the boss he replaced somehow didn't filter through down to my level. This is not to cry-for-him-Argentina/RUBENSTEIN since the article points out he, indeed, wasn't big on Dem ideology (or just not-CARTER?) for starters. The article points out that his type of billionaire is a fraction of the new type and is in the Endangered status. It's just gobsmacking the extent of his worthy fundings and of KRASNOV's personal vindictiveness and destruction.

*********QUOTE*******

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/david-rubenstein-carlyle-kennedy-center-private-equity/684985/
Remove paywall: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/david-rubenstein-carlyle-kennedy-center-private-equity/684985/

When Donald Trump Fired David Rubenstein
The private-equity billionaire spent decades building influence in the capital. Then his philanthropy collided with the president.

.... Several weeks earlier, Donald Trump had fired him as the chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Rubenstein chairs many elite institutions, but the Kennedy Center might be seen as the capstone of his résumé. Explaining his decision, Trump had posted on Truth Social that Rubenstein did not “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” The president announced that the “amazing” new chair of the center would instead be one “DONALD J. TRUMP.” ....

Being a lawyer was not, he came to realize, his calling. He told Sorensen several times that he yearned to work in politics and public policy. His ambition was not workaday; Rubenstein said that he had the White House in his sights. Sorensen made a few phone calls, and at age 25, Rubenstein became chief counsel to the charismatic senator Birch Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana. Bayh entered the 1976 Democratic presidential primary with high hopes but flamed out, laid low in part by his support for abortion rights. Rubenstein dialed Sorenson again. “Well, do you have any more candidates that I might work for?” he asked. Sorensen put Rubenstein in touch with a powerful lobbyist, who in turn connected him with a southern Democratic presidential candidate who needed staff. Rubenstein signed on. “I didn’t know Carter from a hole in the wall,” he told me. “I can’t say I had a compelling desire to work for Jimmy Carter.” ....

That reverie held no kick for him. Rubenstein had tired of playing the mercenary. And, he told me, “nobody thought I was a great lawyer.” It was the Roaring ’80s on Wall Street; he saw peers from the political world, men lacking anything like his IQ, getting wealthy. One morning, he read that former Treasury Secretary William Simon had invested $330,000 in a greeting-card company and made nearly $70 million in 18 months. Why not hang out a shingle, he said to himself, and try my hand in this world? Rubenstein quit his law firm and, with three partners and fundraising help from the financier Edward Mathias, obtained $5 million in seed capital to launch Carlyle in 1987; the founders named the company after the historic New York hotel to confer a touch of class. The game to which these men sought entry was known as private equity. Most major private-equity funds sat in financial capitals: New York, London, and Hong Kong. Carlyle’s headquarters faced Pennsylvania Avenue, in between the White House and the Capitol. “If I had moved to New York to do it, nobody would have taken me seriously,” Rubenstein told me. “I didn’t have investment-banking experience, and all the other private-equity firms have been started by investment bankers.” ....

A business titan is not nature’s rebel. Rubenstein’s vote to honor Pence for standing up to Trump likely did not escape the president’s notice. So maybe that counts for courage. But couldn’t a man with all that money, and all that power, do something more for the country he loves? Rubenstein shook his head and gave me a look that suggested that, like most of his class, he’d already made up his mind.

********UNQUOTE*******

November 29, 2025

A pedestrian (mine) level peeve about AI, with Degrasse TYSON's chiming in.

AI is *way* outside of my knowledge competency, even more than brazillions of other subjects. What prompts this are the petty peeves of having to deal with it on an (this) internet discussion board. Notice, I'm not close to knowing or arguing about the tons of facets even of what it is and how it already impacts jobs, creative independence and rights of possession, and much else I can't even list.

What set me off on this today was posting a YouTube that convinced me on sight that it was legitimately KIMMEL delivering a magnificent takedown of Dear Leader, only to have what I've decided to call an "AI Sleuth" to debunk it as AI. At my level of age of 78 years with our U.S. level of official education and cultural maturity (meaning, rose-colored delusion), it has been bad enough to deal with *proofreading* (no time for that) with the GUTENBERG typing technology, but now having to second-guess every bit of digital junk that crosses my eyes (especially at my late age of not wanting to put up with crap) is explosively annoying and irritating.

Here is that thread: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220835923

Right after, a separately/independent thread sprung up about how AI bamboozeld a respectable venue: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220836071#post35

I chimed in about my irritation at having been bamboozled myself, but with the added tangent that another wrinkle was my having posted, in the past, something from a *legitimate* source (something like AP, Reuters, NPR) and having been debbie-downered by a similarly LowTech DUer so unsure of themself that she asked whether this AP/Reuters/NPR thing was "real" or AI?????! -----Talk about *my* being pissed off from another direction!!!!!!!! -------- in other words, our paranoia from uncertainty surfacing among us Low Tech types.

*** I'm hanging onto not being totally lost and paranoid because my early education had the remnants of FDR-HST world view of humanistic positivity (despite the realities of their personal antagonisms), which developed into the old fashioned Liberal Arts with terms like "Critical Thinking" (not to mention concepts of Civics and Public Service). I remember the young wife of a cousin 'splaining that t.v. commercials were not to be taken at face value "truth." I already knew that. But eventual English Lit analysis of texts regarding narrators/unreliable-narrators and such drilled into me caution and debunking of whatever crossed my eyes.

Am just saying that a troglobyte Dear Leader has been perverting language as in "fake news" instead of "disinformation" and that the supposed conundrum of detecting "AI" is nothing more than applying *Critical Thinking." Here's Neil Degrasse TYSON being elementary about it. I didn't get my stuff here, from him.

?si=UxSGq1ETMxTdurLa

November 28, 2025

Am adding "AI sleuths" to my lifelong list of Annoying Irritants (AI) -

O.K., fine, if our internet gadflies alert us when we are sincerely taken in by a misleading AI thing. But some of us in the 78 age range post something that is INOFFENSIVE or whose content is on "our side" and some Annoying Irritant debbie-downer/website-nanny/thread-killer immediates posts "AI"! Even worse is when we post something from an entirely legitimate source (think: AP, Reuters, NPR) and a fellow Clued-out posts, "I this real? Is it AI?"

*** At my advanced age I can pinpoint milestones of great cultural changes that required a whole Paradigm-changing thing. I guess AI is now one of those. But some of these puffed-up AI Sleuths are Annoying Irritants.

November 27, 2025

07-24-98 shooting of two Capitol police officers - previous D.C. gun of officials - not for MAGAts to make hay about

(From my monitoring of Chris "Tweety" MATTHEWS (who?) :
.... "Heroes" Tweety and Tom DeLAY. In the aftermath of the 07-24-98 shooting of two Capitol police officers when the slain officers were duly eulogized and called heroes, Tweety latched on to this, the way we have seen him attempt to glorify himself in other instances: Like saying he was assigned to Africa in the Peace Corps and "WALKED THE SAME GROUND" THAT CHURCHILL had passed through. Or when he said, "I am an ICON! I have been 'done' by SNL!". So now that the Capitol policemen were being called heroes, Tweety came forward to say that HE had been a Capitol policemen, TOO, JUST LIKE THEM, when he was starting out. It turns out that he had worked a (temporary?) job for three months as that. In all the years before the officers were shot and eulogized, he probably NEVER referred to that job, most likely thinking of it as a rent-a-cop turn, until he could see in retrospect the glory that he had been DESTINED to from the beginning.

But he is not the only glory hog. When that incident was happening, the news of the moment reported that Tom DELAY had hopped a plane out of town and immediately turned around in Houston when the incident was over. This show of courage is why he has been dubbed, "Tom-DePLANE!-DePLANE!-DELAY".

But searches of countless news reports of that time show no mention of the hopping-the-plane. Only this is left:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm /... "...House members, many rushing out of town, did not have to remain behind. DeLay slipped out the main door of the Capitol less than 15 minutes after the shooting. He looked stricken. Asked if he'd seen anything, he said, "Did I ever. I don't want to talk about it." Aides rushed him into his waiting car. ...."

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