#ozyfest

I see this and my reaction is “Yawn. Another one.”

I feel nothing about this. There’s nothing to feel. It’s impossible to have any response to yet another invocation of Vince Foster, Benghazi, Uranium One, to say nothing of random things like ‘lies’ and ‘dirty deeds.’ The outrageous will always become familiar when it’s constant enough.

I have to assume it’s different for Garrison. It would be easy to explain this as Benjy using Hillary as an easy distraction when he wants to avoid things like the Russian NRA spy, the Paul Manafort trial or Trump’s random Iran tweetstorm (which was itself a distraction). But simple ‘whataboutism’ doesn’t explain his hearing about Ozyfest. I’d never heard of that before today; had you? He had to have been actively searching for something about Hillary Clinton - probably a Google news alert - to hear about it.

No, I think Garrison needs the hatred. He needs to rekindle his contempt for Hillary on a regular basis because it’s the only thing he feels anymore. The only way he knows he’s alive is when he feels the bile rising. But even then there’s a diminishing results factor at play. Like a rat becoming desensitized to the dopamine surges he gets when he hits a button, Garrison couldn’t have felt the same passion when he drew this as he had back in 2016, could he?

Even if only in the back of his head, there must be the random thought ‘She’s not the president. She’s not in power. It doesn’t really mean anything to go after her now.’

And then he’ll slam his fist down and tell himself ‘She’s running in 2020! I know she is. She’s still relevant, dammit! I’m not wasting my time by focusing on her. I’m not obsessed! She still matters!’

Because what else does he have? He’s an old man. The world is growing ever stranger, with no apparent place for him. He needs something, some reason to exist. Hatred of a woman who doesn’t even know he exists wasn’t what he dreamed of back when he was a child and the world was bright and huge and full of potential, but it’s all he has now.

A few weeks ago, I learned about a dystopian gathering called OzyFest where people paid real American dollars to gaze longingly at thinkfluencers and hear soup-brained psychopaths like Karl Rove host panels.  The Silicon Valley–funded Ozy — which is somehow not an incisive performance art piece about our culture’s inexplicable worship of rich morons — includes Laurene Powell Jobs on its board and takes its name from the famous Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” which is about the fleeting nature of power and a cautionary tale about hubris.  Somehow, Ozy is comically self-important enough to not only name itself after a big dead king who got owned by the sands of time, but also to offer a new (incorrect) interpretation of the poem to serve its own ends.  “We read it differently,” they say.   “To us, the poem says think big, but be humble, lest you end up ‘two vast and trunkless legs…in the desert.’”  Sure, okay, that poem definitely says ‘try hard and do your best!’ Ha ha!

Anyway, I bring all this up to preface the Ozy’s incredible Instagram page, which takes its parent organization’s blind lunacy to an entirely new and horrifying level.  Twitter user @avvvvita surfaced one post today, and holy shit, every single one is an embarrassing attempt to pander to what rich Silicon Valley types think Millennials want.  “We’re bringing some brains to your feed...by putting facts on celebrity photos. #SeeBeyond,” Ozy’s bio reads.  Look at these brains.

What if IG was smart? 📸 ➡️ 🧠 Let OZY bring some brains to your feed. . . . The War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70), also known as the Paraguayan War, was fought between Paraguay and the alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, profoundly changing the region and utterly devastating Paraguay. Although estimates vary significantly, one of the most commonly cited statistics is that the country’s pre-war population of approximately 525,000 was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men, making it proportionally the most destructive war of the modern era. Did you know that, @zedd? . To learn more about the War of the Triple Alliance, follow the link in our bio, where you can access the full article we’ve written about it. 🇵🇾 . . . #factsonzedd #OZYfactor #SeeBeyond #zedd #facts #nowyouknow #paraguay #war #whatisitgoodfor

A post shared by OZY (@ozy) on Aug 25, 2018 at 4:17pm PDT

… AND it leads the world in female participation in the workforce. How do they do it?! You tell me, @cristiano. Actually, we’ll tell you: link in bio. . . . #factsonronaldo #SeeBeyond

A post shared by OZY (@ozy) on Aug 17, 2018 at 4:45pm PDT

What if IG was smart? 📸 ➡️ 🧠 Let OZY bring some brains to your feed. . . . @kyliejenner coming in with the fascinating facts. Belarusian women participate in the labor force more than men, by the largest margin in the world — 86% for women compared to 76% for men, according to International Labor Organization figures compiled by the World Bank. What can other countries learn from Belarus’ example? Well, getting women into the labor market is not everything — despite these stats, women take home barely three quarters of the pay of Belarusian men, and domestic violence is a widespread issue in the country. Shockingly, the countries that lead in female participation statistics have often had their populations ravaged by war or genocide, such as Rwanda, Burundi and Cambodia — Belarus lost 25% of its population in World War Two, more than any country. Fascinating, @kyliejenner, simply fascinating. 🇧🇾👮‍♀️👩‍⚕️👩‍🏫👩‍🔧👩‍🔬👩‍✈️👩‍⚖️ . To learn more about the economic opportunities of Belarusian women, follow the link in our bio to read the article we wrote about the issue. . . . #factsonkylie #OZYfactor #SeeBeyond #facts #nowyouknow #belarus #feminism #kylie #kyliejenner

A post shared by OZY (@ozy) on Aug 30, 2018 at 12:24pm PDT

This is either the stupidest fucking thing anyone has ever put online, or it’s a pretty good troll. 

Adam Peck at ThinkProgress: 

On Saturday evening, Hillary Clinton appeared on stage at an outdoor music and cultural festival in New York City and vowed to help reunite immigrant families with the children who were kidnapped by the Trump administration.

“I’m going to be tweeting about this in the days to come, but if any of you work for an airline please direct message me because these families will need vouchers and discounted tickets to be reunited over these thousands of miles,” she told a large crowd at New York City’s OZY Fest on Saturday evening.

She was referring to the children who were forcibly separated from their families on Donald Trump’s orders earlier this summer. More than 3,000 kids — some younger than five years old — were kept in caged facilities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After widespread public outcry — and several court orders — Trump backtracked on the policy and his administration was forced to begin reuniting children with their parents.

But so far, the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees ICE — has willfully dragged their feet in reunited children. Despite a federal judge demanding that the youngest abductees be reunited by July 10, the administration took two more days to comply with the order. And even then, nearly half of the children in question — 46 of the 103 covered by the court order — remained separated, with the administration claiming they were ineligible for reunification for a myriad of different reasons.

The court also imposed a second deadline of July 26 by which time DHS must reunited roughly 2,500 other children aged 5 to 17 with their families. On Friday, the Department of Justice said it had already reunited 450 children, leaving more than 2,000 still awaiting reunification by Thursday’s deadline.

While the administration claims it is doing everything in its power to reunite the children they kidnapped, there is ample evidence they have made it as hard as possible for some parents to reunite with their children.

[...]

If anyone was wondering what America would look like if Donald J. Trump didn't pull off the most historic election win in history, Hillary Clinton gave us a glimpse of that Muumuu wearing train-wreck.