Today's Pix

About That Thing In Mississippi

Teabagger fave Chris McDaniel challenged Thad Cochran in a GOP primary and lost.  The 'Baggers are trying to tell us that Cochran courted "the black vote" to pad his totals blah blah blah.

Look, guys - I'm not gonna try to convince anybody that the 'Murican voter is some kinda genius, but if those Mississippi Democrats wanted to fuck up the GOP's chances to get their guy back in the Senate, they woulda voted for McDaniel.  I can't possibly be the only one here who remembers Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell, can I?

Of course, it seems the Press Poodles are willing to go with the Shenanigans-At-The-Polls narrative - or at least the Tea-Party-Is-So-Over blurb - because if they point out that a lot of people in today's GOP really are stoopid enough to see a duck and call it a frog, then they lose the dramatic tension and it makes it harder for them sell us the Red vs Blue / They're All The Same / It's A Horse Race bullshit.

Just a thought.

Happy Birthday, Virginia

The Commonwealth of Virginia officially ratified the Constitution of the United States and became the 10th state of the United States on June 25th, 1788.

The Invisible Hand

..is invisible because it's another mystical fabrication of "capitalists" who aren't interested in doing any more work than it takes to sell us the illusion of a useful product instead of creating something of real value.

There's no such thing as Alternative Medicine.  Anything that's been studied and tested and peer-reviewed and proven beyond the 95% Certainty Threshold is called Medicine - because that's what it is.  Everything else comes under the general heading of Quackery. However, there are new things that come along all the time, and some of them could lead to (or actually be) the next great discovery.  So the point is - as always - to be skeptical and to demand evidence.

By the 1920s, a huge fad had grown up around Radium (eg), which was being touted as a miracle substance - "liquid sunshine" is how some companies described it.  They sold people on drinking water that had been infused with radon gas, and never mind that a good buncha these suckers died of various cancers and leukemia - Marie Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia believed to have been contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation - and her original lab notes are still too radioactive to be handled safely.

Science finds something interesting, and almost immediately, the sharpsters gather to figure out how to use this new stuff to separate the marks from their paychecks.

Commerce must be regulated.  We have to be careful not to let regulation be used as a political weapon to gain an unfair advantage just to beat down competition, but every time we've allowed "the free market" to run wild, we've paid a heavy price.  A little of that good ol' American Common Sense is in order here.

Call It "Quaint"

FAIR-TV looks at the week's Press Poodling:

Isn't it Interesting?

Interesting, but not surprising at all.

Here's a report (Business Insider) on how researchers are unlocking the secrets of how Antibiotics-Resistant bacteria are making it really hard for us to kill them.

The global threat of antibiotic resistance could finally be tackled after British scientists discovered a chink in the armour of deadly bacteria.

Health experts have warned that within 20 years even routine operations like hip replacements and organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection.

But now scientists at the University of East Anglia have discovered how the bug responsible for E-coli and salmonella builds an impenetrable wall to keep out antibiotics.

I guess it's interesting to me mainly for these three reasons:

1) A properly funded public institution (not in USAmerica Inc, of course) is leading the pack while we're sittin' here with our thumbs up our ass.

2) Evolution, motherfucker.  How do you suppose those brainless little bugs have managed to flummox "the greatest healthcare system on the planet"?

3) For the Dems - you've been handed 2 more great little items that should be more than enough to beat the GOP bloody.  What do you intend to do with them?

One God Further

Saturday Nite Tunage

Born To Be Blue --Mavericks




No Sugar Tonight --Guess Who

"a bag of goodies and a bottle of wine - we're gonna get it on right tonite"




No Matter What --Bad Finger




All My Only Dreams --The Wonders




A Cheat --The Blue Hawaiians




Dirty Work --Steely Dan




I Wanna Love You --Delbert McClinton




I'd Rather Go Blind --Etta James




Walk Away --James Gang

Today's Pix

  

White Bird --It's A Beautiful Day

Today's Bile Venting

I'm not crazy about every little thought-item that pops outa this guys head, but sometimes, ya just gotta lance that carbuncle and squeeze it all out.

Here's the rant from The Rude Pundit that got him kinda "censured" by a few of the more sensitive blog-izens:

6/18/2014

Father and Daughter Cheney Can Go Suck a Dick

Let's state this as plainly as possible: The Iraq "war" was a complete and total waste. It was completely and totally worthless. The United States and the rest of the world would be in better shape if Saddam Hussein were still in power. Every life lost was for nothing. Every limb, every scar was for nothing. Every veteran who faces the unending nightmare of PTSD does so for nothing. Let's just stop fucking pretending anything else. Let's grow up a little and face that fact. Let's look the families of the dead in the eyes and tell them the truth.

The invasion of Iraq was the heaving fuck of a bloated superpower dragging its gut over to pump away because it could. And most everyone just went along with it, applauding each "victory" like it was the motherfucking Battle of Gettysburg. All that's left behind is the giant cosmic fucking joke that is a United States made weaker by wasting trillions of dollars on the mad ego trip of acid-blinded utopians and an Iraq that is exploding like a bottle of soda shaken by a paint mixer and uncapped by a gun.

And we need to bring former Vice President Dick Cheney before those families and have him tell the truth: "We did it for the dollars. We went to war with Iraq because war profiteering was the easiest goddamn way to enrich already rich people, like my friends at Halliburton. It was robbery and we named it 'patriotism.' It was extortion and we called it 'honor.'" Then, we should let the families do what they want. Maybe they'd let him go. Maybe they'd tear him limb from hideous limb. Maybe they'd rip out his machine heart and fuck the hole left behind, jizzing into his sternum.

If nothing else, it would stop him from co-signing an editorial from him and his heinous daughter-beast, Liz, like the one that ran in the Wall Street Journal today. In it, Cheney and Cheney pretty much say that President Obama is an America-hating cocksucker who wants our enemies to win and who is too stupid to understand jackshit about the real world, the world that Cheney (Dick) understands is full of threats without understanding that they are threats he created.

Here, in one paragraph, is enough rage fuel to keep your house running for months: "Our president doesn't seem to [care]. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America."

The first thing that comes to mind is "Golfing? Really, you fucking piece of frog shit and its daughter? You are criticizing a president for golfing?" But what the paragraph is really saying is that Obama doesn't care if the United States is attacked by "terrorists."

And then: "Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch. Indeed, the speed of the terrorists' takeover of territory in Iraq has been matched only by the speed of American decline on his watch." Dick Cheney bears no blame for the "decline" of America, oh, no. Not the vice president of an administration that wrecked the economy.

The Rude Pundit imagines Dick Cheney dictating this to Liz Cheney, his fingers too slickened by the viscous goo that comprises what we might call his skin, a gelatinous semi-human form that doesn't so much as move as undulate, that doesn't so much as eat as absorb, so that one can place, say, a kitten or a Pakistani child on his globular stomach and it will be digested immediately, without chewing, without swallowing. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, secretly turns the egg vibrator in her snatch up to "WMD," and she can barely pound out the words her father slurps out for need of crying out in orgasmic glee.

The two of them actually have the audacity to speak out and call Obama's policy toward Iraq "willfully blind," as if Obama is deliberately attempting to undermine some great and mighty victory in Iraq. That's as much living in a fantasy as those who say, "Well, at least we got rid of Saddam."

That Dick Cheney is still alive is a demonstration that either there is no God or that God said, "Fuck it" and walked away a long time ago.

- See more at: http://rudepundit.blogspot.com

About That ISIS Thing In Iraq

As usual, if you wanna know what's going on, you need to find somebody like Juan Cole - somebody who might actually know what the fuck he's talking about.

But of course, that's obviously not what's on the "mind" of the average Press Poodle, who apparently still thinks it's a good idea to make us listen to a near-human pustule like Dick Cheney.

But anyway, here's Cole's take:

Already in the past week and a half, many assertions are becoming commonplace in the inside-the-Beltway echo chamber about Iraq’s current crisis that are poorly grounded in knowledge of the country. Here are some sudden truisms that should be rethought.

1. “The Sunni radicals of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are popular.” They are not. Opinion polling shows that most Iraqi Sunnis are secular-minded. The ISIS is brutal and fundamentalist. Where the Sunnis have rallied to it, it is because of severe discontents with their situation after the fall of the Baath Party in 2003 with the American invasion. The appearance of video showing ISIS massacring police (most of them Sunnis) in Tikrit will severely detract from such popularity as they enjoyed.

2. “ISIS fighters achieved victory after victory in the Sunni north.” While this assertion is true, and towns continue to fall to it, it is simplistic. The central government troops, many of them Shiite, in Mosul and in towns of the north, were unpopular because representatives of a sectarian Shiite regime. The populace of Mosul, including town quarters and clan groups (‘tribes’) on the city’s outskirts, appear to have risen up in conjunction with the ISIS advance, as Patrick Cockburn argues. It was a pluralist urban rebellion, with nationalists of a socialist bent (former Baathists) joining in. In some instances locals were suppressed by the fundamentalist guerrillas and there already have been instances of local Sunnis helping the Iraqi army reassert itself in Salahuddin Province and then celebrating the departure of ISIS.

3. “Iraqi troops were afraid to fight the radical Sunni guerrillas and so ran away.” While the troops did abandon their positions in Mosul and other towns, it isn’t clear why. There are reports that they were ordered to fall back. More important, if this was a popular uprising, then a few thousand troops were facing hundreds of thousands of angry urbanites and were in danger of being overwhelmed. In Afghanistan’s Mazar-i Sharif in 1997 when the Pashtun Taliban took this largely Tajik and Uzbek city, the local populace abided it af few days and then rose up and killed 8,000 Taliban, expelling them from the city. (A year later they returned and bloodily reasserted themselves). Troops cannot always assert themselves against the biopower of urban masses.

4. “The Sunni radicals are poised to move on Baghdad.” While ISIS as a guerrilla group could infiltrate parts of Baghdad and cause trouble, they would face severe difficulty in taking it. Baghdad was roughly 45% Sunni and 55% Shiite in 2003 when Bush invaded. But in the Civil War of 2006-7, the American military disarmed the Sunni groups first, giving Shiite militias a huge advantage. The latter used it to ethnically cleanse the capital of its Sunnis. The usually Sunni districts of the west of the city were depopulated. The mixed districts of the center became almost all Shiite. There simply isn’t much of a Sunni power base left in Baghdad and so that kind of take-over by acclaim would be very difficult to achieve in the capital. As Joshua Landis puts it, ISIS has picked a fight it cannot win.

5. “The US should intervene with air power against ISIS.” The Sunni radicals are not a conventional army. There are no lines for the US to bomb, few convoys or other obvious targets. To the extent that their advance is a series of urban revolts against the government of PM Nouri al-Maliki, the US would end up bombing ordinary city folk. The Sunnis already have resentments about the Bush administration backing for the Shiite parties after 2003, which produced purges of Sunnis from their jobs and massive unemployment in Sunni areas. For the US to be bombing Sunni towns all these years later on behalf of Mr. al-Maliki would be to invite terrorism against the US. ISIS is a bad actor, but it so far hasn’t behaved like an international terrorist group; it has been oriented to achieving strategic and tactical victories in Syria against the Baath government and the Shiite Alawis, and in Iraq against the Shiite Da’wa Party government. But it could easily morph into an anti-American international terrorist network. The US should avoid actions that would push it in that direction. So far the Baath regime in Syria is winning against the Sunni radicals. The Shiite majority in Iraq can’t easily be overwhelmed by them. Local actors can handle this crisis.

6. “US interests are threatened by the ISIS capture of Mosul.” It is difficult to see what precise interest the hawks are thinking of. Petroleum prices are slightly up because the pipeline from Kirkuk to Ceyhan in Turkey is closed. But it only does a few hundred thousand barrels a day on good days. Most oil in Iraq is produced in Basra in the Iraqi deep south, Shiite country where ISIS is unlikely to gain sway. And in any case high petroleum prices may be good for the US. More Americans should be using public transport, moving to the city from the suburbs, buying electric vehicles and electric plug-in hybrids and putting solar panels on their roofs to power their EVs. These steps are desirable to fight climate change and for economic health. Wars for oil are so 20th century.

7. “The US should be concerned about Iranian influence in Iraq.” The American hawks’ attitude toward Iran in Iraq has all along been comical. US viceroy Jerry Bremer used to warn against “foreign” influence in Iraq, making Middle Easterners fall down laughing. Shiite Iraqis and Shiite Iranians don’t always get along, but warning Iraq against Shiite Iranian influence is like warning Italy against Vatican influence. Iran has an interest in seeing radical Sunnis rolled back in Iraq, and if ISIS is in fact a danger to US interests, then the obvious thing for the US to do would be to improve relations with Iran and cooperate with Tehran in defeating the al-Qaeda affiliates in the region. In fact, this has been the obvious course since 2001, when president Mohammad Khatami of Iran staged pro-US candle light vigils throughout Iran after 9/11. Instead, Neocons like David Frum maneuvered the Bush administration into declaring Iran part of an imaginary Axis of Evil on behalf of right-wing Israeli interests. This stance has all along been illogical. The Obama administration is said to be considering consultations with Iran about Iraq. Even Bush did that at one point. It is only logical.

Happy Solstice Everybody

Under The Boardwalk (cover)  --John Mellencamp

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