The Middle East explained.......
Are you a wee bit confused by what is going on in the Middle East?Let me explain……………
We (the USA) support the Iraqi government in the fight against ISIS.
We don’t like ISIS, but ISIS is supported by Saudi Arabia whom we do like. Please read twice…
We don’t like Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but ISIS is also fighting against him.
We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in its fight against ISIS.
So some of our friends support our enemies, some enemies are now our friends, and some ofour enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don’t wantour enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.
If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they could be replaced by people we like even less.
And all this was started by Bush invading a country to drive out terrorists who were not actually there until we went in to drive them out.
It's quite simple, really.
Do you understand now?Good, let’s blame it all on Obama.
1/ With the war drums pounding and Americans being scared to death by the barrage of fear from the media, noone has looked at how another war will bankrupt the country and make zillions for the military-industrial complex and the oligarchy.....
Charles Blow points out the absurdity of what they are trying to do, and how so far they are succeeding.......
Here we go again.
Wednesday night, during a prime-time speech, the president laid out his plan for dealing with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS.
He made clear that “while we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland,” he still “will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq.”
He called it “a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy” and not a war. Yet, for all practical purposes, a war seems to be what it will be.
And most Americans, before the speech, seemed to be on board if not leading the way.
According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll published Tuesday, a vast majority of Americans see ISIS as a threat to the United States, a slight majority believe the president hasn’t moved aggressively enough, and most support expanding United States airstrikes into Syria.
But I implore the president and the nation to proceed with caution.
We can kill anti-American fighters and even their leaders, but we can’t kill anti-American sentiment. To some degree, every time we commit our forces in the Middle East we run the risk of further inflaming that sentiment.
For every action, there is a reaction. And there are also consequences, some of them unintended.
2/ And a wonderful cartoon from the Times featuring a new app - Iraq 3.0.....clever and amusing.....
3/ This Senator is often seen with his cranky old buddy, John McCain, but is always creating fear and negativity about everything.
Jon Stewart is fed up with Senator Lindsey Graham, and has made this very funny pastiche of his more hysterical pronouncements......there is also a bit with the excellent Samantha Bee......
A great five minutes..........
Senator Lindsey Graham faced a concerned America on Sunday and bluntly said, “This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed back here at home.” But instead of fear, this filledJon Stewart with amusement and skepticism.
Stewart, somehow, thought “we’re all gonna die” was maybe a bit of an overstatement, and showed clip after clip of Graham “sustain[ing] this level of panic for 13 years.”
Samantha Bee joined Stewart to assure him that Graham isn’t irrationally freaking out. Unfortunately, they picked up some audio of “Graham” very much freaking out himself…
4/ In his closing last week Bill Maher announced the Republican Congressman he is targeting for the midterms, and in this four minute segment explains why.....
Bill Maher ended his live D.C. show tonight by announcing the winner of his “Flip a District” campaign: Republican Congressman John Kline.
For months, Maher has been going down a list of potential Republicans to target for this November’s midterms with the goal of “flipping” their district to the other party. He went through a few dozen choices before settling on Kline.
Maher will be traveling to Kline’s district to do stand-up, and he explained why this congressman––whom you probably never heard of––is his big target: because he’s “the living embodiment of legislation for hire.” He called Kline a “silent threat” who doesn’t say “kooky things” but votes with the people who do.
Maher said hopefully, this can serve as a symbol for the “crummy, corrupt representation” America has nowadays.
5/ In many of his columns Paul Krugman has been puzzled why distinguished economists persist in pushing failed policies, over and over again, but last week he figured out why - it's tribal. The powerful advantage of the right wing repeating lies and bullshit over and over and over is that it works.....
Wish I’d said that! Earlier this week, Jesse Eisinger of ProPublica,writing on The Times’s DealBook blog, compared people who keep predicting runaway inflation to “true believers whose faith in a predicted apocalypse persists even after it fails to materialize.” Indeed.
Economic forecasters are often wrong. Me, too! If an economist never makes an incorrect prediction, he or she isn’t taking enough risks. But it’s less common for supposed experts to keep making the same wrong prediction year after year, never admitting or trying to explain their past errors. And the remarkable thing is that these always-wrong, never-in-doubt pundits continue to have large public and political influence.
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But as regular readers know, I’ve been trying to figure it out, because I think it’s important to understand the persistence and power of the inflation cult.
6/ As you know John Oliver is British, so he naturally did a piece on the Scottish vote for independence which is coming up this week.....it's a combination of what you need to kow about why this is happening, and what the implications are mixed in with some very funny jokes.....14 excellent minutes....
Here’s a story for which John Oliver is uniquely qualified to cover: the Scottish Independence movement. As an Englishman, Oliver spent most of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight breaking down the unusually polite campaigns for and against a break of Scotland from the UK and ultimately made his case for unity as only someone who has watched too many British romantic comedies could.
Over the course of the show’s main segment, Oliver looked at the rival political operations, including the “Better Together” campaign’s slogan, “No thanks.” As the host said, “‘No thanks’ is a violently British way to refuse something. That is just one step away from ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly.’”
Later, Oliver turned to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s feeble attempts to keep the United Kingdom united. “He embodies all of the things I hate most about England,” Oliver said of Cameron, “and I’m English!” Showing a particularly damning photo of Cameron at Oxford, he added, “That is the face of a man who fast-forwards through the servant parts of Downton Abbey.”
Finally, Oliver decided to make his case for Scotland staying with the UK using the kind of grand, sweeping, romantic gesture found in films like Love Actually. Surrounded by bagpipe players and Scotland’s inexplicable official animal, the unicorn, Oliver used written placards to plead, “Don’t go, Scotland!”
7/ Thomas Frank explains why the Democrats are possibly going to lose the Senate and the House this fall - it's because the party bigwigs have lost their focus and have been captured by the political geniuses in Washington.....a very interesting read if you are at all interested in politics.
The beginning is a takedown of an Ezra Klein article, but he progresses to look at the bigger picture......
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich (Credit: AP/Reuters/Tannen Maury/Saul Loeb/John Duricka/photo montage by Salon)
In a recent article on Vox, Ezra Klein declared that his generation of Washington journalists had discovered political science, and it is like the hottest thing on wheels. In the old days, he writes, journalists “dealt with political science episodically and condescendingly.” But now, Klein declares, “Washington is listening to political scientists, in large part because it’s stopped trusting itself.” Klein finds that political scientists give better answers to his questions than politicians themselves, because politicians are evasive but scientists are scientists, you know, they deal in “structural explanations” for political events. So the “young political journalists” who are roaring around town in their white lab coats frightening the local bourgeoisie “know a lot more about political science and how to use it” than their elders did.
Hence Klein’s title: “How Political Science Conquered Washington.”
Nearly every aspect of this argument annoyed me. To suggest, for starters, that people in Washington are—or were, until recently—ignorant or contemptuous of academic expertise is like saying the people of Tulsa have not yet heard about this amazing stuff called oil. Not only does Washington routinely fill the No. 1 spot on those “most educated cities” articles, but the town positively seethes with academic experts. Indeed, it is the only city I know of that actually boasts a sizable population of fake experts, handing out free-market wisdom to passers-by from their subsidized seats at Cato and Heritage.
The characteristic failing of D.C. isn’t that it ignores these herds of experts, it’s that it attends to them with a gaping credulity that they do not deserve. Worse: In our loving, doting attentiveness to the people we conceive to be knowledgeable authorities, we have imported into our politics all the traditional maladies of professionalism.
8/ Jon Stewart on the President's speech on ISIS-IL.....an excellent seven minutes, and has Jon acting a bit like an investigative reporter amidst all of the jokes....which is good!
Listen to his closing....it's so bloody true.......
Jon Stewart spent the first part of Monday night’sDaily Show trying to sort through the confusion and mixed messaging being sent by the Obama administration on exactly what strategy they’re using (and what we should be calling it) to fight ISIS.
Stewart first rounded up complaints from the “coalition of the kvetching” over Obama’s strategy before getting to the fight over semantics on whether the U.S. is at war. Stewart also found it funny that Obama is justifying ISIS action with the 2001 AUMF he actually wanted repealed, which is why he’s so “lucky that Congress never does anything you ask.”
Stewart concluded by pointing out a key difference between the Obama and Bush administrations: the Bush administration was “incredibly disciplined and focused” in doing the wrong thing, while the Obama administration is doing the right thing, but couldn’t be more “chaotic and confused” about it
9/ Beyonce and Jay Z have made a 2 minute B/W movie which is directed by a hot film director, is incomprehensible, has shots of the old west, a gnarled old rancher and Jay Z smoking a big ceegar. I suppose this is a big deal in the popular media, so here it is.....
Before On The Run Tour: Beyoncé and Jay Z premieres September 20th on HBO, the power couple has released “Bang Bang, Part 1.” The video is the first segment in a trilogy of short films directed by Dikayl Rimmasch.
The narrative introduces the lovers’ characters: Beyoncé as a club singer and Jay Z as a criminal of sorts. The video ends on a cliffhanger, with the couple abandoning a diner after seeing a wanted poster for themselves in a newspaper. What are they running from? Are they guilty or innocent? Hopefully these questions and more will be answered in “Bang Bang, Part 2.”
The short film was inspired by French New Wave film and the couple’s fascination withBonnie and Clyde. One can see the influences in the use of black and white, the lack of dialogue, and Ennio Morrocone’s classic composition used for the soundtrack.
10/ Princeton University professors have looked at the data of how we are governed, and how policies are made, and concluded we are not a democracy any more but an oligarchy.......
It's nice to have some officially smart people conclude what some of us have known for a while.......
This problem has been steadily escalating for four decades. While there are some limitations to their data set, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez constructed income statistics based on IRS data that go back to 1913. They found that the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us is much bigger than you would think, as mapped by these graphs from the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities:
Piketty and Saez also calculated that as of September 2013 the top 1% of earners had captured 95% of all income gains since the Great Recession ended. The other 99% saw a net 12% drop to their income. So not only is oligarchy making the rich richer, it's driving policy that's made everyone else poorer
11/ This is different - Bill Maher ended his HBO show on air and had a live concert across town 10 minutes later, so Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann did a sports announcer schtick of Maher getting across town.....very amusing, about 9 minutes......
Bill Maher pulled off a pretty amazing feat tonight: doing his HBO show live, then running across D.C. and doing a live stand-up show. And to entertain viewers in the meantime, surprise guests Michael Moore and Keith Olbermanndid play-by-play, sports-style over-hyped commentary of Maher’s run.
And in true play-by-play fashion, there was a camera following Maher live every step of the way as he changed clothes, ran to the car, drove across town with a police escort, and then stopped to run three blocks when a boy scout helped an old lady cross the street in front of the motorcade.
Both Olbermann and Maher followed this with some choice pieces of color commentary. Olbermann observed the Newseum, as Maher passed by, as a memorial to “back in that time when we used to have news.” And when Maher was in the changing room, Moore riffed a bit on Maher’s hygiene and, a little later, his protective cup.
12/ An absolutely hysterical two minute clip of how the media responds when black people get shot, and how to improve the PR of the event......better pictures......
Whenever a black person gets arrested or killed and it makes headlines — as was the case for 18-year-old Michael Brown — some media outlets make the mistake of perpetuating racist stereotypes before the truth has even been sorted out. Swayed by an institutionalized fear of black youth, news stories all too easily fall back on racially coded words like "thugs" and "hoodlums."
While the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri was able to hire an all-white public relations agency to mitigate outrage, the families of young men and women like Brown rarely, if ever, get that same opportunity
13/ Great column from Timothy Egan on the power of video, and by implication the shallowness of our national attention span........the power of a video beheading changing public opinion from "no way" to "lets git 'em"........
The barbarians in Iraq and Syria had been beheading innocents, raping girls and slaughtering “infidels” well before a single awful video appeared of an American journalist being executed by a masked fanatic. The world shrugged.
Racism in the era of the first African-American president continued to drive the actions of police and festered in high places, well before Donald Sterling was caught on tape saying he didn’t want prominent black people appearing in public at games played mainly by blacks. Meh.
And about 1.3 million American women were assaulted by an intimate partner last year, with more than 150,000 of them being hit by a fist or something hard. It was just another stat in a jumble of disconnected figures — that is, until a professional football player was shown cold-cocking his fiancée.
We are roused to action by cruel realism, but only if it looks and sounds authentic. Reasoned calls to our better angels are no longer enough. It takes the YouTube snuff films of gangsters with a religious cause, or the fuzzy images captured by an elevator robo-cam, to move a nation.
Against this backdrop, President Obama on Wednesday tried to convince a fickle country, its citizens driven to their smartphones by national attention deficit disorder, to kill some bad guys. Kill, in a sort of war, at the ragged edge of a longer war nobody except John McCain defends anymore. For the moment, we’re with the president. But trust me: It will all change with fresh pictures.
14/ Everywhere you look on corporate media, there's horrible old John McCain pontificating and pushing war.....so Colbert took him to the cleaners......a great four minutes.......
Stephen Colbert devoted some time last night to covering Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s cable victory lap, Dick Cheney‘s redemption, andGeorge W. Bush‘s “eerie” prophecy that an early withdrawal from Iraq would have bad consequences.
“It’s like he’s some kind of prophet,” Colbert mused. “What’s his name — Nostra-dumbass. It really seemed like he could see the future in 2007. If only he could have seen it in 2003.”
If he could have seen the war in 2007, then, Colbert asked, would his other predictions come true If so, Barack Obama should really be on the lookout for minotaurs.
15/ Just finishing it's eight episode run this week on Sundance Channel is the series "The Honourable Woman" starring Maggie Gyllenthal, and Mary and I have been riveted by this series. It's intelligent, very timely, helps you understand some of the stuff that's happening in the Middle East but most of all it's great storytelling. And excellent acting.
We are streaming it on Amazon Instant Video, but I'm sure it will be available for free soon. This story from the Guardian is a synopsis of the final episode so has some spoilers in it, but it won't matter......this series grips you from the start.....
Complex, intelligent drama for adults.....
She remained the kid who blamed herself … Maggie Gyllenhaal with Oliver Bodur in The Honourable Woman. Photograph: Des Willie/BBC/Drama Republic
In last week's penultimate episode of Hugo Blick's truly gripping Middle East thriller The Honourable Woman (BBC2), a bomb went off, the heroine's brother was murdered in front of his wife who immediately went into labour and the heroine herself was unaccounted for, presumed dead. And some detractors said it was slow.
Following the form of Blick's beautifully taut thriller, you wouldn't put it past him to kill off Maggie Gyllenhaal's Nessa Stein an hour early, leaving the ship without its captain for the final leg of the voyage. But he didn't. Always showing his workings (or just enough of them), Blick spirited her out of the bomb smoke and into yet another unfamiliar, dusty room, her clothes crusted to her back with dried blood, captive once more, and squinting at a small, high window, hoping for sunlight. Although why she went to Hebron without security when she sleeps in a panic room at home in London remained unclear. After seven hours and 10 minutes of Blick's dexterous yarn-spinning, I was too invested to care
16/ We like the stories of Mount Dora being one of the xx best places to retire to, or praised as a quaint Florida town etc. etc.
However, I can't recall a scandal like this, of abuse at the National Deaf Academy which is opposite the entrance to the Mount Dora Country Club. This story aired on NBC News, and it's a painful three minute video.
What is also a little upsetting to hear is the multiple calls [dozens] to the MDPD going unreported or ignored, and no follow-up. Now we have the FBI investigating......
NBC NEWS
The FBI is investigating the alleged abuse and neglect of vulnerable deaf and autistic children at a residential treatment center in Florida, NBC News has learned.
An exclusive NBC News investigation found that 10 different patients at NDA Behavioral Health System in Mt. Dora, Florida, also known as the National Deaf Academy, have alleged physical abuse to a government-funded advocacy group for the disabled in 2013. Three families, including the family of one of those ten patients, have filed suits alleging abuse
“He’s been broken,” said Hannah, who alleges in her lawsuit that her son was physically abused and inappropriately touched. “And our whole family has been broken.”
“If they do this to him –- and he can talk,” she said, “think of what they do to the ones who can’t talk.”
Todays video - one of the weirdest videos ever.....surreal, bizarre and a little bit scary.......what's that in my sink? Is our life real?
From Cyriak 2014, who is a VERY strange dude......
Todays two line joke collection......love #2.....
Todays senior joke
Two young businessmen in St. Petersburg, Florida were sitting down for a break in their soon-to-be new store in the shopping mall.
As yet, the store wasn't ready, with only a few shelves and display racks set up.
One said to the other, "I'll bet that any minute now some senior is going to walk by, put his face to the window, and ask what we're selling."
Sure enough, just a moment later, a curious senior gentleman walked up to the window, looked around intensely and rapped on the glass, then in a loud voice asked, "What are you sellin' here?"
One of the men replied sarcastically, "We're selling ass-holes."
Without skipping a beat, the old timer said, "You must be doing well. Only two left."
Seniors -- don't mess with them, They didn't get old by being stupid!
Todays pregnancy jokes
Q. Should I have a baby after 35?
A. No, 35 children is enough.
Q. When will my baby move?
A. With any luck, right after he finishes high school.
Q. How will I know if my vomiting is morning sickness or the flu?
A. If it's the flu, you'll get better.
Q. Since I became pregnant, my breasts, rear-end, and even my feet have grown. Is there anything that gets smaller during pregnancy?
A. Yes, your bladder.
Q. What is the most common pregnancy craving?
A. For men to be the ones who get pregnant.
Q. What is the most reliable method to determine a baby's sex?
A. Childbirth.
Q. The more pregnant I get, the more often strangers smile at me. Why?
A. 'Cause you're fatter than they are.
Q. My wife is five months pregnant and so moody that sometimes she's borderline irrational.
A. So what's your question?
Q. What's the difference between a nine-month pregnant woman and a model?
A. Nothing, if the pregnant woman's husband knows what's good for him.
A. No, 35 children is enough.
Q. When will my baby move?
A. With any luck, right after he finishes high school.
Q. How will I know if my vomiting is morning sickness or the flu?
A. If it's the flu, you'll get better.
Q. Since I became pregnant, my breasts, rear-end, and even my feet have grown. Is there anything that gets smaller during pregnancy?
A. Yes, your bladder.
Q. What is the most common pregnancy craving?
A. For men to be the ones who get pregnant.
Q. What is the most reliable method to determine a baby's sex?
A. Childbirth.
Q. The more pregnant I get, the more often strangers smile at me. Why?
A. 'Cause you're fatter than they are.
Q. My wife is five months pregnant and so moody that sometimes she's borderline irrational.
A. So what's your question?
Q. What's the difference between a nine-month pregnant woman and a model?
A. Nothing, if the pregnant woman's husband knows what's good for him.
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