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http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."
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http://archive.is/Oomaz

It was November 2016 and the only person I knew who believed Trump would win the US election was the owner of my gym. This was clearly a ridiculous prediction so, seeing the chance for some easy money, I offered to bet him $100 that Hillary would win.

But the gym owner, clearly not wanting to do his dough, pointed at this horrible thing in the corner with the name “sled” and said: “If Trump wins you have to pull 70kg on it.”

It was double what I could usually pull. And, if I won the bet, the gym owner would pull double his personal best.

I didn’t want Trump to win – he’d grabbed women by the pussy and mocked a reporter’s disability. He’d promised to build a wall and called Mexicans “rapists”. The thought of his presidency was frightening but so was pulling the sled. What if I herniated a disc?

After Trump claimed victory, I went up to the gym in a foul mood. “Just fucking load up the fucking sled, all right, and let’s get it over with,” I said without much grace as I strapped a belt around my waist.

I pulled the sled like a human oxen while being filmed and the gym staff cheered. I did it. But the Trump victory soured my successful show of strength.

Yeah, I could pull a pretend sled. But how was that going to help me when the world had been destroyed by nuclear weapons or climate change?

Hungry and sore, I repaired to a restaurant down the road that I had never visited and where I had never seen anyone come or go from. The silent restaurant – no background music, no other diners – seemed like the perfect place to welcome the end of the global liberal order.

What new political order had been born tonight?

An elderly waiter appeared and handed me a menu. Most things on it were not available. The one dish that was was unspeakably awful and the colour and texture of cement.

I never went back. But I also didn’t return to the gym. I associated it now with Donald Trump, the bad meal and pulling the sled.

It was 9 November 2016 and my thinking about fitness changed almost overnight. In tune with the times, it became more Trump, less Obama.

In the spirit of the Donald, I drank more bottles of Diet Coke and ate more McDonald’s. I dropped the gym – embracing Trump’s belief that we are given a certain amount of energy and if we use it then we are depleting a finite resource.

According to the book Trump Revealed: “Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, ‘You are going to die young because of this.’”

I didn’t want to die young, so I didn’t go to the gym.

Trump explained his exercise routine like this to Reuters: “I get exercise. I mean I walk, I this, I that. I run over to a building next door. I get more exercise than people think.”

I walked. I this. I that. Months passed. Then a year. Trump was going to be in power for another 1,000 years. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Could I really avoid the gym for the entirety of his presidency?

I missed being strong enough to open jars and carry groceries. So, last week, I returned to the gym, slinking back in as if no time had passed. I hoped that by wearing a puffy jacket and MC Hammer pants I could hide my lack of definition – that I could pretend I had maintained my fitness on my own. At home, running to the building next door. On the couch. While tweeting.

But you can’t hide fitness. You either have it or you don’t. You can either lift the dumbbell or you can wobble on your fifth rep and drop the load.

You are either strong or you are weak. And I was weak.

When I started my gym program again last week, I started at the beginning. I started on the simplest machines and with the lowest amount of weight. I did a split squat on a box and fell over from a lack of balance. I got vertigo doing calf lifts. My knees clicked.

The next day I woke up feeling like a human ironing board. Sitting down became impossible. I had to sort of fall on to chairs because there was no “bend” available in my legs. And typing this is agony – my arms hurt. There’s no strength in my wrists.

The cruellest thing about fitness is that it doesn’t last. It should be the rule that you only need to get fit once. And once you get there, you stay there.

I was fit in 2016, before Trump. But when you stop, it goes. And it goes quickly. A week or two and you have to start again with the 2kg dumbbells and the tremor in your forearms.

I returned again this week – to the boredom and pain of the gym – trying to build up back to the strength I had before Trump became president.

The struggle is Sisyphean.
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Herbert Hoover said:
This is fucking hilarious. Easily the funniest thing I've read this week.

And it really shows how off the deep end some of these people are. Literally turning themselves into human trash because some politics happened they didn't like
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But his diminishing health and physique are everyone else's fault but his.
 
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Wait so this weak fuck made a bet, had to see it through, and broke the hell out of a personal best on the sled pull while being cheered on for being awesome and they threw all this away because "DRUMPF!"? There is stupid and then there is this..
It was 9 November 2016 and my thinking about fitness changed almost overnight. In tune with the times, it became more Trump, less Obama.

In the spirit of the Donald, I drank more bottles of Diet Coke and ate more McDonald’s. I dropped the gym – embracing Trump’s belief that we are given a certain amount of energy and if we use it then we are depleting a finite resource.

According to the book Trump Revealed: “Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, ‘You are going to die young because of this.’”

I didn’t want to die young, so I didn’t go to the gym.
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Translation: "I got so butthurt the guy I didn't want to win totally won, so to prove to everyone how bad he is I decided to live just like him!". Now All she needs to do is receive a small loan of a million dollars and bang some Russian broads and her Trumpsformation will be complete.
 
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Is there anyone that actually read this and nodded along with this dumb brick of shit. "Yes, this is why I can no longer go to the gym. The world is ending and everyone is going to fucking die because people disagree with me."

Absolutely no fucking self-awareness whatsoever. If she had any, she'd realize she just sound like fat fuck looking for excuses.
 
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https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/07/05/opinions/trump-is-definitely-in-charge-opinion-stanley/index.html

We can now say we're entering the age of Trump. It's been a long march to this moment. Around this time last year, the summer of Scaramucci, Donald Trump's staffing was an unholy mess, his poll numbers hit new lows and the GOP health care initiative died in Congress. Perhaps Trump could not govern, some speculated. But a year later, and just a few months before the midterm elections, Trump is most definitely in charge -- and he is changing the character of America step by step.

Trump is advancing post-liberal politics in three key areas. First, a foreign policy that is marked by realism totally undisguised by platitudes or historical sentiments. NATO friends, for instance, have been warned they must contribute more towards the organization's budget. In the Middle East, the United States has thrown its weight behind the unexpected alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia. And Trump has pulled out of deals that he says weren't working (Iran) or that he doesn't philosophically agree with (Paris climate accord). His withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council is emblematic of his approach. We all know the UN is a joke on human rights (its membership includes dictatorships such as Cuba and China); critics accuse its members of turning the council into a platform to attack Israel. Trump is simply the first President to do the decent thing and walk away.

Second, Trump is pushing forward with what former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon once described as the "deconstruction of the administrative state." This is partly about a deregulation agenda -- everything from banking to the environment to repealing the Obamacare individual mandate. But it's also about reversing the tide of what conservatives deride as Obama's "you didn't build that" mentality, with its implication that a big state is an inevitable, benign feature of modern capitalism. Trump, by contrast, is pushing corporate tax down from 35% to 21%, and the majority of tax filers will see a saving this year. The irony is that Trump has proved you can create jobs in the United States with conservative free market remedies, and yet he still insists on imposing foreign goods tariffs that threaten the supply chains and markets of the very workers he wants to help. The age of Trump might be hypercapitalist, but it's also nationalist and traditionalist. Trump seeks to return to being a country that leads in exports, not imports.

He also wants to turn the clock back more generally, which brings us to his third assault on the liberal consensus: social policy. The Trump era will be marked by potentially violent conflict over cultural issues that lawmakers have failed for decades to resolve through compromise.

Immigration is a stark example. The administration's decision to separate families of migrants -- many who are refugees seeking asylum -- illegally crossing the border has triggered a profound moral backlash that has led to protests, mass arrests and the occupation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Trump's supporters see fighting illegal immigration as a matter of enforcing the law; growing numbers of those on the left regard it as an incremental step toward fascism. Conservatives say to liberals, "You never complained when Barack Obama did this sort of thing," but liberals can point out that Trump has applied policy in such an aggressive way that it tips this whole debate into a war over foundational values. And if you think that's bad, just wait until Donald Trump announces his Supreme Court nominee.

The President is going to nominate a conservative who will presumably tilt the court against Roe v. Wade. The New York Times alleges that the Trump administration waged a "quiet campaign" to encourage Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire; it is widely reported that conservative groups, such as the Federalist Society, have been "instrumental" in deciding the list of replacements. And we know that Trump has remained loyal to those religious voters who backed him in spite of his dubious moral past.

Here then is perhaps the most dramatic way in which Trump could change America not just for the few years that he is President but for an entire generation, moving the energies of the judicial branch -- not only through the Supreme Court but countless federal appointments -- toward a more conservative interpretation of the law. My suspicion is that a future Trump-shaped Supreme Court will be more concerned with protecting religious freedom of expression than rolling back the legislation and judgments of the past 30 years. But the left, reasonably, will conclude it cannot take that risk, which may turn the nomination process into an almighty battle fought not just in the Senate but in the streets.

Every President's first midterm contest is about the President; it's a referendum on how they're doing, a chance for the opposition to mobilize and throw congressional roadblocks in front of the executive's agenda. Few midterms, however, will be quite as angry or polarized as the upcoming one, and not because 2018 represents a vote in the context of Trump's failure. Because it's a vote at a moment of his success.

Trump continues his streak of surprises. First, he won the election, then he proved far better at manipulating the media, setting the issue agenda and exerting executive authority than might have been expected. He has slowly colonized the Republican Party, achieving a growing uniformity of opinion. The fact that all of this "winning" is not reflecting in his opinion polls -- which still put his job approval below 50% -- only demonstrates that for Trump to triumph in his own particular way, he has to alienate a lot of people on the other side of the argument, to divide the country in two and trust that there are enough of his people in the right number of congressional districts, or electoral votes-rich states, to keep him in authority.

Trump is not the President for all Americans, but he is finally redefining the country along lines approved of by those Americans who lent him their votes in 2016.
 
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-42009219

Imagine you're at a busy airport, somewhere in Europe or the US. You're meeting your wife (let's call her Layla) after work and flying off for a mini-break. She's running late, so you sit down in a coffee shop to wait. Soon you're lost in thought, so you don't see your beloved waving from across the terminal. How can she get your attention? Shouting your name would work. But if she does that, bystanders will panic. Security will circle. Your law-abiding missus could be taken to a stark side-room and interrogated for hours.

What's the problem?

Your wife is a practising Muslim, and your name is Jihad.

What's life like when your loving parents saddle you with a name that provokes shock, rudeness or awkward jokes across much of the Western world?

The BBC asked three men named Jihad - a doctor from Chicago, a famous Syrian actor, and a young engineer from the Palestinian territories building a life in London.

In Arabic-speaking countries, Jihad - sometimes spelled Jehad - is a perfectly normal thing to call your baby. The word means "a struggle for a noble cause". And in the days before 9/11 and the War on Terror linked it to mass murder in the public imagination, it functioned just like any other name.

For Jihad Abdo, one of Syria's best-known actors, it was the name his millions of fans followed. The one the authorities followed. The one that got his car smashed up when he was felt to have criticised Syria's government in the LA Times.

Abdo was ordered to give a TV interview in support of President Assad. He refused, and fled the country.

The US was his sanctuary - but his name quickly proved a liability.

"I raced to America in October 2011," Abdo explains by phone from Paris, on a break from filming the US comedy-drama Patriot. "In no time I was introducing myself to people and seeing this… reaction…"

"Especially in the Midwest, when they heard my name was Jihad the first thing that appeared to their minds was the image of suicide bombers, and the jihadists that attack the army in Afghanistan or Iraq."

Abdo, whose most popular TV show had an audience of 50 million, simply couldn't catch a break in Los Angeles. He suffered through 100 failed auditions and scraped by delivering pizza for Domino's.

He realised that to keep his career, he would have to lose his name.

"I just imagine someone with the opposite thing in my country, with a name that we fear. He won't be able to make it big in the entertainment business," he explains.

"And as Shakespeare said 400 years ago, 'What's in a name?' I said - 'Change it.' I love my name, but I also want to survive.

"I consider myself an open-minded guy, and my wife as well. Humbly speaking, we don't care about having this name or that name. What we care about is our mission in the world, our ethics and our achievements."

He considered Jude, but settled on the name Jay - simple, innocuous - American.

Things changed overnight, "because Jay for them is a lovely guy - it brings to them Jay Leno or... lovely people - people they are comfortable with. It doesn't create any 'sensitivity', let's say."

His family think it's funny, he says.

"But they understand totally, because the same thing happened with the name Osama years ago. And the same thing happened in Russia with the name Koba after Stalin died. And the same thing happened with Adolf in Germany.

"I don't want to have problems because of my name when my mind is totally different - and my heart."

Abdo, 55, still uses his original name in Syria and the wider Middle East. And some US friends have rejected the rebranding.

"They said, 'Can I keep calling you Jihad? Because I hate this misunderstanding about anything outside America.'"
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I love this part at the beginning :
.Editor's Note: (Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph. He is the author of "Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration Between LA and DC Revolutionized American Politics." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.)
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Lmao and then they put up his picture front and center
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Basically telling people "this is who you want."
Over this so hard.

Edit to add:
I know that they put that disclaimer on every editorial that they print, it seems so much more heartfelt with this one.
 
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