Syria Today

 Warning - this is not pleasant 

Just a little something to fuck up your weekend in case you're contemplating supporting 45*'s possible intention to throw in with Putin and Assad.

This is the shittiest thing I've seen since the Nick Berg beheading - don't watch it if you're not prepared for the worst.

Not kidding.

This is bad.

"Pick me up daddy, pick me up" cries child, both legs amputated at knees, in #SyAF barrel bomb strike at #Habeet, #Idlib. pic.twitter.com/kYQpqW2uY0

— Riam Dalati (@Dalatrm) February 16, 2017

A barrel bomb is a type of improvised explosive device used extensively by the Syrian Air Force during the Syrian civil war. They are typically made from a barrel that has been filled with High Explosives, along with shrapnel and/or oil. In Syria they are typically dropped from a helicopter.

Today's Quote

"There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous."

--Raymond Chandler

hat tip = FB friend Mikell Hanes

Back To The Roots

WaPo

A million more votes for Democrats.  Thirty-three more seats for Repubs. That's not democracy.

Today's Wingnut

Well, that's a little scary.

What He Meant

Today's Tweet

Trump gets negative marks for his handling of foreign policy, immigration, threat of terrorism https://t.co/FlkuBvWD3X pic.twitter.com/1rWmOUF8vW

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) February 16, 2017

Keith

Watch this video on The Scene.

On Facebook Today

This is where I stand. To me, Facebook is a useful vehicle for my passion and activism.

Our 45th President, his power-hungry cronies taking positions of authority in his Cabinet and administration, and the majority of Republicans in Congress are a real and active threat to me, my way of life, and all the people I love.

Some people are saying that we should "give him a chance", that we should "work together" with him because he won the election, and he is "everyone's president."

This is my response:

•I will not stand for disgracing our country with deplorable acts of treason against the citizens of the United States.
•I will not stand for mistreatment of our veterans, the disabled, our children and elderly.
•I will not forget how badly he and so many others treated former President Barack Obama for 8 years.
•I will not "work together" to privatize Medicare, cut Social Security and Medicaid.
•I will not "work together" to build a wall.
•I will not "work together" to persecute Muslims.
•I will not "work together" to shut out refugees from other countries.
•I will not "work together" to lower taxes on the 1% and increase taxes on the middle class and poor.
•I will not "work together" to help this man use the Presidency to line his pockets and those of his family and cronies.
•I will not "work together" to weaken and demolish environmental protection.
•I will not "work together" to sell or give away American lands, especially National Parks, to companies which then despoil those lands.
•I will not "work together" to ignore or undermine our treaties and commitments to Native Americans or their rights and lands.
•I will not "work together" to enable the killing of whole species of animals just because they are predators, or inconvenient for a few, or because some people want to get their thrills killing them.
•I will not "work together" to remove civil rights from anyone.
•I will not "work together" to alienate countries that have been our allies for as long as I have been alive.
•I will not "work together" to slash funding for education.
•I will not "work together" to take basic assistance from people who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
•I will not "work together" to get rid of common sense regulations on guns.
•I will not "work together" to eliminate the minimum wage.
•I will not "work together" to support so-called "Right To Work" laws, or undermine, weaken or destroy Unions in any way.
•I will not "work together" to suppress scientific research, be it on climate change, fracking, or any other issue where a majority of scientists agree that Trump and his supporters are wrong on the facts.
•I will not "work together" to criminalize abortion or restrict health care for women.
•I will not "work together" to increase the number of nations that have nuclear weapons.
•I will not "work together" to put even more "big money" into politics.
•I will not "work together" to violate the Geneva Convention.
•I will not "work together" to give the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party and white supremacists a seat at the table, or to normalize their hatred.
•I will not "work together" to deny health care to people who need it.
•I will not "work together" to deny medical coverage to people on the basis of a "pre-existing condition."
•I will not "work together" to increase voter suppression.
•I will not "work together" to normalize tyranny.
I will not “work together” to eliminate or reduce ethical oversite at any level of government.
•I will not "work together" with anyone who is, or admires, tyrants and dictators.
•I will not support anyone that thinks its OK to put a pipeline to transport oil on Sacred Ground for Native Americans. And, it would run under the Missouri River, which provides drinking water for millions of people. An accident waiting to happen.
•I will not "work together" to destroy the separation of church and state.
•I will not "work together" to obliterate the separation of powers and the importance of having three co-equal branches of government.

This is my line, and I am drawing it.

•I will stand for honesty, love, respect for all living beings, and for the beating heart that is the center of Life itself.
•I will use my voice and my hands, to reach out to the uninformed, and to anyone who will LISTEN.

That "winning", "being great again", "rich" or even "beautiful" is nothing, when others are sacrificed to glorify its existence.

If you agree feel free to copy and re-post (this results in larger numbers of people seeing a post), and if you want, sign your name below ours. Also, if we have left anything out, feel free to add it to this list.

Signed:
Patricia Rollins Trosclair
Andrea Dora Zysk
George Georgakis
John Christopher
John Bowles
Patrick St.Louis
Carla Patrick
Darnell Bender
Vickie Davis
JMichael Carter
Janice Frazier-Scott
Rev. ELaura James Reid
Jeanette Bouknight
Rev. Dollie Howell Pankey
Gerald Butler
Carolyn McDougle
Vaughn Chatman
Adrienne Brown
Gary Trousdale
Steven E Gordon
Isis Nocturne
Debi Murray
Maureen O. Betita
Mona Enderli
Fernie James Tamblin
Myrna Dodgion
Alan Locklear
Tom Wilmore
Jackie Evans
Donna Endres
Lora Fountain
Roberta Gregory
Heather A Mayhew
Stevo Wehr
Nathan Stivers
Jen RaLee
Joan Holden
Leigh Lutz
Deborah Kirkpatrick
Linda Levy
Tom Rue
Nancy Hoffmann-Allison
Beejay McCabe
Michael James Myers
Edward T. Spire
Rupert Chapman
Dawn R. Dunbar
Robin Wilson
Monique Boutot
Laura Brown 💪🏼
Susan Aptaker
Steve Katz
Bonnie Wolk
Risa Guttman-Kornwitz
Angela Gora
Butch Norman
Sharon Tolman
Sue Zislis
Maurice Hirsch
Satch Dobrey
Jim Krapf
Don Starwalt
Deb Johansen
Daniel Anderson
Diane Kenney
Rebecca Koop
Nancy Shuert
Bill Pryor
Patrick Lamb
Bob Travaglione
Margaret Ragan
Martha Peters
Steve Wilson
Lauren Sullivan
Scott Bevan
Roger Saunden
Susanne Lavelle
Benita Yimsuan
Kathryn Scarano
Kathleen E Neff
Evey G Quines
Debbie Dey
John Dennehy, Jr.
Marsha Vaughn
Henry Kielarowski (Apollo)
K. Paige Wheeler Fleury
Amy Righter
Lisa Ruben
Ruth Rogow
Melody Keen Haller
Gil Friend
David Eisenberg
Rudy Sovinee
El Fraser
Chico Huff
Kim Clarke
Leland Sklar
Chris Beveridge
David Kevin Sweet
Guy Rocky Stroup
Frani Mulleaux
Chuck Gurney
Marty Martin Eigenberger
Jen Sepanski
Troy Welch
Mike Goyette
Beth Brown-Pettit
Gretchen Lynn Demarah

Intercepted

Jeremy Scahill's podcast from The Intercept via Stitcher



For the most part, I can do without Glenn Greenwald - a little too prissy, in that he sounds like he's setting himself up as the Purity Police, which seems to push the Both-Sides crap; so, a bit of a fart-breather.  That said, he's good at keeping us informed as to how we go about sifting thru all the chaff coming at us from the Press Poodles in order to get a little closer to figuring out What Is vs What Ain't.

Anyway, I'll take Scahill any day, and I've crushed on Naomi Klein for quite a while.

Today's Today

On February 17, 1600, Fr Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy.  According to a letter from the time, he made "a threatening gesture" towards his judges and said, "Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it".

People with balls (using that word in the figurative sense) are the ones who move this whole thing forward - in big and little ways.

Giordano Bruno

... was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and astrologer.[3] He is celebrated for his cosmological theories, which went even further than the then novel Copernican model. He proposed that the stars were just distant suns surrounded by their own exoplanets and raised the possibility that these planets could even foster life of their own (a philosophical position known as cosmic pluralism). He also insisted that the universe is in fact infinite and could have no celestial body at its "center".

Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including Eternal Damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern.[4] The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. After his death he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science,[5] although historians have debated the extent to which his heresy trial was a response to his astronomical views or to other aspects of his philosophy and theology.[6][7][8][9][10] Bruno's case is still considered a landmark in the history of free thought and the emerging sciences.[11][12][13]

In addition to cosmology, Bruno also wrote extensively on the art of memory, a loosely organized group of mnemonic techniques and principles. Historian Frances Yates argues that Bruno was deeply influenced by Arab astrology (particularly the philosophy of Averroes[14]), Neoplatonism, Renaissance Hermeticism, and legends surrounding the Egyptian god Thoth.[15] Other studies of Bruno have focused on his qualitative approach to mathematics and his application of the spatial concepts of geometry to language.[16]

WTF Moments

Rolling Stone

Standout: "The leaks are real. The news is fake."

I can say I've been a little impressed with the Press Poodles performing better than they've done before.  We still need to find the new Sam Donaldson, but they're starting to get up and push back.

Let's Lay Down A Marker

To be clear:

Obama inherited a big fucking mess from W and in his calm and cool way, he went about fixing what he could fix over the next several years.

45* inherited the thing in fair-to-middlin' shape and in his hysteria-mongering and chaos-creating way, he's fucked it up in less than a month.

The 45* Problem

Headlines at Vox this morning:

This is a very bad pattern.

The View From Out There

Getting pretty dark, boys and girls.

One For Ms Sarandon

You have the right to hold your opinions, and to speak, and to vote for whomever you want, and to urge others to do the same.

But (you knew there was a "but" comin', right?), you end up sounding a lot like Ayman Zawahri back in the 70s when you say things like having 45* in office is better than Hillary.

Because we need to be shocked violently in order to wake us up? So we can see the wonder and glory of whatever it is you think is better because that's what you think is better?

What you're doing is leveling a charge of false consciousness. We have this big horrible problem but all those dopes are just too ignorant to know it. We'll make some big horrible thing happen to snap 'em out of it - for their own sake.

Pithy adage 1: Revolutionaries always come in promising bread and freedom, but they always deliver years more of misery.

And look, I do it too. There's prob'ly 100s of posts on this blog that have something to do with "those rubes are so fucking stoopid".

I get it. But there's a bit of a difference in that I'm not the one hoping for the worst so I can prove my point and take advantage of the crash to make things the way I want them. And that's what I see you doing.

Pithy adage 1a: I'll take evolution, not revolution.

And also too, remember this one?
Predicting disaster
Expecting disaster
Wanting disaster
Facilitating disaster
Causing disaster

Where are you on that list?

Please stop doing shitty things to me and saying it's really for my own good - and that I'll thank you in the end. Just stop.

In closing - and I say this with all the love and charity in all the hearts of all the saints - Fuck off, lady.