Some Art

Gunduz Aghayev:

In 1998-2002 he studied in Azerbaijan State Painters' Academy. His first exhibition was held in 2004. The second exhibition of his works was held in Baku Muesum Center. His exhibitions were held outside of country, as well. He took part in exhibitions held in Russia (2008), Turkey (2011) as well as "Friendship" exhibition held by the French embassy in 2002 and international artistry exhibition held in Turkmenistan in 2013.

Also he participated in the "Art for democracy" project. As a protest against injustice in his country he turned to cartoon genre and faced strong pressure; he was sacked of all projects. After constant pressure, in 2014 he left Azerbaijan.

ProLeft Podcast

(paraphrasing) "OK, you're vegan - I get it, and good for you - but this is the zombie apocalypse, and we're all sorry your dietary preferences aren't being accommodated, but this can of Beefaroni is pretty much the difference between living to fight another day and crapping out completely."

The Professional Left

podcast

Don't forget the swag

Oh, Those Moonies

"...they cling to guns or religion..."  Yeah - that stupid Obama guy.

Vox, Tara Isabella Burton:

As the debate over gun control raged across America in the wake of last month’s school shooting in Florida, a group of worshippers wearing bullet crowns and toting AR-15 rifles gathered in a Pennsylvania church this week to hold a “commitment ceremony” for about 250 couples.

The ceremony was held at the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania. The weapons, which Reuters reported were unloaded, were meant to represent the biblical “rod of iron” referenced in the Book of Revelation, used by God’s representative to dominate his enemies.

As the nearby Wallenpaupack Area School District moved its students to another school over concerns about the armed celebrants, church leaders argued for the power of guns to do God’s will — and protect the innocent. “Each of us is called to use the power of the ‘rod of iron’ not to arm or oppress as has been done in satanic kingdoms of this world, but to protect God’s children,” said the church leader, Rev. Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, in a statement. “If the football coach who rushed into the building to defend students from the shooter with his own body had been allowed to carry a firearm, many lives, including his own, could have been saved.”
One thing I noticed: in every picture I've seen so far, all of the AR15s are 'safed' with a zip tie through the receiver, making it almost impossible to load them with any ammo.

If the guns (and the gun owners) are blessed with ethereal powers for good, then earthly measures to ensure they don't fall into evil ways are totally unnecessary.

It's almost as if there's some kinda scam going on here.

Trae Crowder

It's National Heart-Wrenching Tragedy Day again - already?

Trump Inc Podcast

Not quite what the name might imply - this is WNYC looking into 45*'s finances.

This one looks at how 45* managed to go broke running a joint that basically had a license to steal.



I stayed at the Taj a few times when I was selling hospital stuff in the 90s, manning an exhibitor booth during the annual meetings of New Jersey ER docs.

It was always in February, but still, the place never had any kinda crowd at all.

A few dozen in the gaming rooms, never more than 8 or 10 people at any of the bars, and you could walk into any restaurant in the place and get a table any time - never any live entertainment, even in the big theaters.

And these meetings were always scheduled over a weekend.

I never noticed anything, of course.  It just gives me more of a really creepy feeling thinking about one more shitty thing involving Donald Trump, to go along with thinking about what shitty things he and his gang are pulling every day he stays in office.

Fever Swamp

Lies
Damned lies
Statistics
Politicians
The internet

Don't forget what we're up against.

WaPo, Craig Timberg & Drew Harwell:

Forty-seven minutes after news broke of a high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., the posters on the anonymous chat board 8chan had devised a plan to bend the public narrative to their own designs: “Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors.”

The voices from this dark corner of the Internet quickly coalesced around a plan of attack: Use details gleaned from news reports and other sources to push false information about one of America’s deadliest school shootings.

The posters on anonymous forums, a cauldron of far-right extremist politics, over the next few hours speculated about the shooter’s ethnicity (“Hope the kid isn’t white”) and cracked off-color jokes. They began crafting false explanations about the massacre, including that actors were posing as students, in hopes of blunting what they correctly guessed would be a revived interest in gun control.

The success of this effort would soon illustrate how lies that thrive on raucous online platforms increasingly shape public understanding of major events. As much of the nation mourned, the story concocted on anonymous chat rooms soon burst onto YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where the theories surged in popularity.

I see plenty of examples of spin -and some pretty hard spin - on "the left", but most of the nonsense that qualifies as truly toxic garbage is coming from "the right".

So don't fall for the Both Sides bullshit.

Today's Tweet

I think it's easy to see why some people scoff at the notion of Global Climate Shift. 

They look at these graphs (eg) and they see about a 1°C rise over 150 years - having heard the semi-panic in "the liberal voices of the left" about the catastrophe coming if it rises another 1 or 2 degrees. 

I hear this one all time: "It takes 150 years to go up 1°, so in the next 150-200 years - before it's a real problem - they'll come up with something to fix it and make it OK."

Of course, that's old news because the pace is accelerating, and the point of no return is not just closer than they figured a few years ago, but could be right on top of us now.

Most "conservatives" I know aren't big on Continuing Education, preferring the comfortably numb position of assuming all that new stuff is just Political Correctness. Plus the voices coming from "the right" have been telling them for 30 years it's all nonsense because "the truth is always somewhere in the middle", and they buy into that shit even when it's a question of 2+2=4 vs 2+2=6. So they can blow it off as just more political noise that they don't need to worry about.

We get so conditioned that when we see the "once-in-a-lifetime storm" is happening about every 2 or 3 years, we can regard each one as the anomaly instead of understanding that this freaky shit is actually the new norm.

I think that - along with some other things - is starting to change. 

Because the pendulum swings.

Want to see 168 years of climate change in two minutes?

Here is our movie, updated through 2017. pic.twitter.com/ppwXgFPGdA

— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) January 18, 2018

 

Nature Bats Last

While we're having to waste time arguing over stoopid shit that should be obvious to a cave snail, we've got a problem that is fast-becoming truly unsolvable.

Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland just registered a temperature of +6 C (43 F).

Here is a map of the parts of Europe that are currently colder than the northernmost weather station on Earth. pic.twitter.com/8LoJjSxGxL

— Robert Rohde (@rarohde) February 24, 2018

 

Live Science, Mindy Weisberger
During the Arctic winter, when the sun hides from October to March, the average temperature in the frozen north typically hovers around a bone-chilling minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius). But this year, the Arctic is experiencing a highly unusual heat wave.

On Feb. 20, the temperature in Greenland not only climbed above freezing — 32 degrees F (0 degrees C) — it stayed there for over 24 hours, according to data from the Danish Meteorological Institute. And on Saturday (Feb. 24) the temperature on Greenland's northern tip reached 43 degrees F (6 degrees C), leading climate scientists to describe the phenomenon on Twitter as "crazy," "weird," "scary stuff" and "simply shocking."

Weather conditions that drive this bizarre temperature surge have visited the Arctic before, typically appearing about once in a decade, experts told Live Science. However, the last such spike in Arctic winter warmth took place in February 2016 — much more recently than a decade ago, according to the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And climbing Arctic temperatures combined with rapid sea-ice loss are creating a new type of climate feedback loop that could accelerate Arctic warming, melting all Arctic sea ice decades earlier than scientists once thought.

Last week, it was warmer at Cape Morris Jessup in Greenland than it was in Paris.

That Thing About Guns

The Conversation, Jeff Daniels:

While President Donald Trump has not shied away from offering suggestions on how to prevent school shootings – including one controversial idea to arm teachers – what often gets overlooked in the conversation is research on the subject that has already been done.

This research includes one major study of school shootings conducted in part by the very agency charged with protecting the president of the United States himself - the U.S. Secret Service.

Has this research been ignored or just forgotten? I raise the question as one who has studied averted school shootings and the news coverage that followed.

Two months after the Columbine tragedy in 1999, experts from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service collaborated to study the “school shooter” phenomenon. They published the study on their findings in 2002. The study focused on examining the thinking, planning and other behaviors of students who carried out school attacks. Particular attention was given to identifying pre-attack behaviors and communications that might be detectable – or “knowable” – and could help prevent future attacks.
The Key Findings of that report are nothing new (click on "one major study" in the 2nd graf above). We hear about the efforts aimed at prevention every time. But every time, the debate gets hijacked, and we start arguing about the 2nd amendment, and a Big Brother Database, and good guys with guns, and blah blah blah.

Another thing: the 2nd amendment does not allow for anyone to own any gun.

We hear a lot about "The Heller Decision" - when SCOTUS affirmed "the right to keep and bear arms" applies to individuals and not just a collective (ie: Militia).

But remember one thing - Antonin Scalia (the guy who wrote that majority opinion) said the rights guaranteed by the 2nd amendment are not limitless - there's nothing in the amendment prohibiting congress from imposing some restrictions.

So let's focus on the first effect of this widespread misunderstanding of the 2nd amendment: The public's easy (ish) access to the kinds of guns intended for use only in war.

And also too - call me nutty, but I'm set-in-stone sure that gun violence somehow has something to do with guns.

Today's Pix

(click and be happy)

The Big 2A

Like everybody else arguing in favor of a framework of sensible gun laws, I always get a lot of pushback from ammosexuals that eventually boils down to: "shall not be infringed - that's the phrase that matters, Libtard - SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED ".

(notice how I left out all the typos and spelling errors and grammatical hernias, in order not to make fun of the knuckle-headed rubes who're dumb enough to think that way - cuz I'm just a nice feller)

So anyway, their 4-word absolute-ittude has been a real stopper (in that they think that's all they need), but I think this might be a pretty good rebuttal:

You're ignoring 85% of what the 2nd amendment says - so we get to ignore 85% of the rights you claim the amendment confers on you.

In fact, I'll cut that back to just 50%. You can have either "keep" or "bear" - your choice.

This popped up on Twitter and it's what got me thinkin':

The Conversation, Saul Cornell:

The Second Amendment is one of the most frequently cited provisions in the American Constitution, but also one of the most poorly understood.

The 27 words that constitute the Second Amendment seem to baffle modern Americans on both the left and right.

Ironically, those on both ends of our contemporary political spectrum cast the Second Amendment as a barrier to robust gun regulation. Gun rights supporters – mostly, but not exclusively, on the right – seem to believe that the Second Amendment prohibits many forms of gun regulation. On the left, frustration with the lack of progress on modern gun control leads to periodic calls for the amendment’s repeal.

Both of these beliefs ignore an irrefutable historical truth. The framers and adopters of the Second Amendment were generally ardent supporters of the idea of well-regulated liberty. Without strong governments and effective laws, they believed, liberty inevitably degenerated into licentiousness and eventually anarchy. Diligent students of history, particularly Roman history, the Federalists who wrote the Constitution realized that tyranny more often resulted from anarchy, not strong government.

I have been researching and writing about the history of gun regulation and the Second Amendment for the past two decades. When I began this research, most people assumed that regulation was a relatively recent phenomenon, something associated with the rise of big government in the modern era. Actually, while the founding generation certainly esteemed the idea of an armed population, they were also ardent supporters of gun regulations.

Consider these five categories of gun laws that the Founders endorsed.

#1: Registration

#2: Public carry

#3: Stand-your-ground laws

#4: Safe storage laws

#5: Loyalty oaths

Today's Tweet

We got a copy of his insurance card, right? And let's run a credit check on his mom to make sure she can handle the co-pay. 

Oh yeah - call the guys in IT just in case we need 'em to set up a GoFundMe page on this one.

Our #hero has a long road to go, but he's looking better. Anthony Borges (age 15) was shot 5 times using his body as a human shield to protect classmates and save lives! He deserves the highest honors & best medical care we can give another human being.#FloridaSchoolShooting pic.twitter.com/wpEVcddaSg

— John Moffitt (@JohnRMoffitt) February 25, 2018

Today's Quote

(Pass this one along to your congress critters)

"If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, fuck their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don't belong here."

--California Treasurer Jesse (Big Daddy) Unruh, referring to lobbyists

Good Guy Punished

Houston Chronicle, Jay Jordan:

Police in Amarillo shot an innocent man who helped foil a possible church shooting.

The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage.

In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun.

Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition.

The victim, who spoke to ABC 7 Amarillo, has since been released and told the station he would do it all over again despite being shot by police.

"There were other people there," Tony Garces said. "I just took the gun away from him. I got shot. I got the bad part. It's life."

The weird part (which isn't weird at all): He started out as a good guy without a gun, but by the time the cops got there, he was the good guy with a gun, and the cops shot him because he was the guy with the gun.

Weird part #2 (which also isn't weird at all): I'm wondering if this is going to make NRA-TV.

At first I tho't they wouldn't wanna be anywhere near this one. But those guys are pretty remarkably good at selling, so I think we can fully expect a Turnaround. 

"If Mr Garces had been appropriately armed, then the would-be shooter is the only one to have been shot."

But it still comes down to this: Gun violence in this case was thwarted by unarmed people - and we don't know that the perp really intended to shoot anybody in the first place.

Amy Siskind

The Mueller probe made news this week with new indictments, and the probe’s fourth and fifth guilty pleas. A comparison of public knowledge on where the probe was headed was made to the “tip of the iceberg,” as charges against a previously unknown Dutch man whose father-in-law is a Russian oligarch came Tuesday. Trump’s White House continues its high-drama chaos with continuing threats of firings and actual resignations, and amid controversy over access to highly classified materials.
Week 67 hi-lites:

1. On Saturday, at the Munich Security Conference, US lawmakers from both parties and top national security officials told Europe’s foreign policy elite to ignore Trump’s tweets, Trump’s main mode of communication.

11. Trump tweeted that the FBI missed “signals” sent out about the school shooting because the agency was too focused on Russian collusion, drawing widespread condemnation, including from survivors on Twitter.

12. Asked about Trump, Emma Gonzalez, a Parkland student who is helping organize gun-control marches in DC and other cities on March 24 said, “the best thing for us to do is ignore him,” calling his words “disgraceful.”

15. On Monday, WAPO reported according to a White House official, after the flurry of negative news to hit the regime in the last week, the school shooting which killed 17 was viewed as a “a distraction or a reprieve.”

18. Politico reported the Trump regime is trimming language on women’s reproductive rights and discrimination from the soon-to-be-released State Department annual report on global human rights.

19. By order of the regime, passages which deal with women’s access to contraceptives and abortion will be removed, and a broader section which chronicles racial, ethnic and sexual discrimination will be pared down.

20. The State Department report is relied on by a range of people, from U.S. lawmakers to political activists. Officials say these late, unusual revisions reflect Trump regime orders while many key roles remain unstaffed.

75. BuzzFeed reported Mueller’s team has now identified more than $40 million in “suspicious” financial transactions to and from companies controlled by Manafort. Mueller’s October indicted listed just $18 million.

82. Manafort and Gates received large amounts of money for their work in Ukraine from 2006–2015 which they laundered by bringing it into the US as corporate loans, also avoiding reporting the money as income.

83. When the money dried up, Manafort and Gates lied to lenders about their finances, and set up a real estate scheme under which they were able to obtain millions in financing in 2015 and 2016.

84. Lawfare reported while there are no allegations about the Trump campaign directly, the indictment alleges bank fraud between 2015 and 2017 during which Manafort and Gates were both involved with Trump.