1/ This was our lead story on Jan.30th, and here we are in late February proving this sad article to be spot on - read it keeping the Parkland shootings in mind.....
One of our alert readers sent us this disturbing blog post, the premise of which is that American society is not just at risk of collapse, we are already collapsing because of our pathological capitalism.....
Hold on, you say- "it's not that bad".....but it is. Think of "the base".
Read this again, it's excellent....
You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”
Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history.
2/ Says it all.....
3/ Frank Rich on the news of last week.....
In Senate testimony yesterday, FBI director Christopher Wray said that the agency had delivered the final results of its background check into now-disgraced aide Rob Porter back in January, months earlier than the White House, and especially Chief of Staff John Kelly, has claimed in the wake of Porter’s firing. Should Kelly’s mishandling of this episode cost him his job?
In a sane or even half-sane White House, Kelly would have been bounced long ago. Last fall, he smeared the Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson in retaliation for her complaint about Donald Trump’s disrespectful condolence call to the widow of a slain soldier. Kelly never apologized to Wilson for inventing a scurrilous tale about her but instead delivered this irrelevant and sanctimonious piety from a White House podium: “When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor.” Now we have proof, if any was needed, that Kelly is a compulsive liar and a moral fraud.
4/ Bill Maher with his Friday opener.....excellent....
HBO
“This is big,” announced Bill Maher at the top of Friday night’s Real Time.
The HBO host was of course referring to the big news of the day: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment charging 13 Russians—and several companies—with interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
According to Mueller’s indictment, which heavily relied on findings by The Daily Beast, the baker’s dozen were linked to a Kremlin-backed troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, and “had as its object impairing, obstructing and defeating the lawful governmental functions of the United States by dishonest means in order to enable the Defendants to interfere with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
5/ Matt Taibbi with a caustic article on where the rage comes from that drives killings like the Parkland massacre.....most interesting.........
Mourners stand during a candlelight vigil for the victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 15, 2018.
Over two decades ago, I traveled to a city in the Russian provinces called Rostov-On-Don to interview a psychiatrist named Alexander Bukhanovsky.
Bukhanovsky, now deceased, was famous. If you've seen the movie Citizen X, about the capture of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, Bukhanovsky was the guy played by Max Von Sydow. He was the Soviet Union's first criminal profiler.
One of the first things he said was that both Russia and America produced disproportionate shares of mass killers.
One of the first things he said was that both Russia and America produced disproportionate shares of mass killers.
"Giant militarized countries," he said, "breed violent populations."
Bukhanovsky at the time was treating a pre-teen who had begun killing animals. He told me this young boy would almost certainly move on to killing people eventually. He was seeing more and more of these cases, he said.
Nikolas Cruz, the 19 year-old just arrested for shooting and killing 17 people in Parkland, Florida, supposedly bragged about killing animals. He reportedly even posted photos of his work on Instagram.
Bukhanovsky at the time was treating a pre-teen who had begun killing animals. He told me this young boy would almost certainly move on to killing people eventually. He was seeing more and more of these cases, he said.
Nikolas Cruz, the 19 year-old just arrested for shooting and killing 17 people in Parkland, Florida, supposedly bragged about killing animals. He reportedly even posted photos of his work on Instagram.
There will be lots of hand-wringing in the coming days about gun control, and rightfully so – it's probably easier to get a semi-automatic rifle in this country than it is to get some flavors of Pop Tarts – but with each of these shootings, we seem to talk less and less about where the rage-sickness causing these massacres comes from.
6/ How the rest of the world sees this country.....a painfully amusing three minutes.....
When the rest of the world looks at America’s gun problem, it’s often with bafflement.
Sunday with Lubach, which is sort of like the Dutch version of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, looked at guns — specifically, the US’s love of firearms. And it’s very telling.
For one, the satirical Dutch video describes America’s love of guns as so bad that it is an illness: Nonsensical Rifle Addiction, or NRA — a reference to the biggest gun lobby group in the country.
7/ Fox News AKA Republican TV.....
8/ My my my, I did not know this......meth [methanphetamine] is back in a big way, and cheaper than ever....
PORTLAND, Ore. — They huddled against the biting wind, pacing from one corner to another hoping to score heroin or pills. But a different drug was far more likely to be on offer outside the train station downtown, where homeless drug users live in tents pitched on the sidewalk.
“Everybody has meth around here — everybody,” said Sean, a 27-year-old heroin user who hangs out downtown and gave only his first name. “It’s the easiest to find.”
The scourge of crystal meth, with its exploding labs and ruinous effect on teeth and skin, has been all but forgotten amid national concern over the opioid crisis. But 12 years after Congress took aggressive action to curtail it, meth has returned with a vengeance. Here in Oregon, meth-related deaths vastly outnumber those from heroin. At the United States border, agents are seizing 10 to 20 times the amounts they did a decade ago. Methamphetamine, experts say, has never been purer, cheaper or more lethal.
9/ Just a charming little story from CBS News, about a goose named Kyle.....3 minutes....
10/ The title of this is "F#ck you! I Like Guns".....written by an Army veteran.....
America, can we talk? Let’s just cut the shit for once and actually talk about what’s going on without blustering and pretending we’re actually doing a good job at adulting as a country right now. We’re not. We’re really screwing this whole society thing up, and we have to do better. We don’t have a choice. People are dying. At this rate, it’s not if your kids, or mine, are involved in a school shooting, it’s when. One of these happens every 60 hours on average in the US. If you think it can’t affect you, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. So let’s talk.
I’ll start. I’m an Army veteran. I like M-4’s, which are, for all practical purposes, an AR-15, just with a few extra features that people almost never use anyway.
11/ Hmmmm....the medical system at work again.......good story from the Times....
Heart Stents Are Useless for Most Stable Patients. They’re Still Widely Used.
Why are so many people agreeing to an expensive procedure — and putting themselves at risk — for a placebo effect?When my children were little, if they complained about aches and pains, I’d sometimes rub some moisturizer on them and tell them the “cream” would help. It often did. The placebo effect is surprisingly effective.
Moisturizer is cheap, it has almost no side effects, and it got the job done. It was a perfect solution.
Other treatments also have a placebo effect, and make people feel better. Many of these are dangerous, though, and we have to weigh the downsides against that benefit.
Lots of Americans have chest pain because of a lack of blood and oxygen reaching the heart. This is known as angina. For decades, one of the most common ways to treat this was to insert a mesh tube known as a stent into arteries supplying the heart. The stents held the vessels open and increased blood flow to the heart, theoretically fixing the problem.
12/ I like golf.....it's a challenging and difficult sport, so this article struck home.....in the real world nobody plays twice with guys who cheat at golf....
Golf was so close! It was so close to moving beyond that stereotype — the image of a rich, old, unathletic white man making sexist jokes and trading real estate tips. The image of someone like Donald Trump.
The dominance of Tiger Woods started to make it seem cool, and the First Tee program tried to make it accessible for kids of all backgrounds. But Tiger Woods disappeared for a while. And now the president, who generally likes to spend long holiday weekends near a golf course, is hogging golf’s headlines. It’s making me think twice before admitting out loud that yes, I am a golfer.
Most people I talk to seem to understand that President Trump doesn’t represent a typical American (if we have to have immigrants, how about Norwegians?); men know he doesn’t represent men accurately (just your typical “locker room talk”), and golfers know he doesn’t represent golf. But if you’re not those things, you might not know.
Todays farming joke
PEPPERMINT
I recently spent $6,500 on a young registered Black Angus bull.
I put him out with the herd but he just ate grass and wouldn't even look at a cow.
I was beginning to think I had paid more for that bull than he was worth.
Anyhow, I had the Vet come and have a look at him.
He said the bull was very healthy, but possibly just a little young, so he gave me some pills to feed him once per day.
The bull started to service the cows within two days, all my cows!
He even broke through the fence and bred with all of my neighbor's cows!
He's like a machine!
I don't know what was in the pills the Vet gave him ............
But they kind of taste like peppermint.
Todays English language lesson
You think English is easy?
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture..
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert..
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..
19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend
Todays religious joke
A Priest and a Rabbi were sitting next to each other on an airplane. After a while, the Priest turned to the Rabbi and asked,
"Is it still a requirement of your faith that you not eat pork?"
The Rabbi responded, "Yes, that is still one of our laws."
The Priest then asked, "Have you ever eaten pork?"
To which the Rabbi replied, "Yes, on one occasion I did succumb to temptation and tasted a ham sandwich."
The Priest nodded in understanding and went on with his reading.
A while later, the Rabbi spoke up and asked the Priest, "Father, is it still a requirement of your church that you remain celibate?"
The Priest replied, "Yes, that is still very much a part of our faith."
The Rabbi then asked him, "Father, have you ever fallen to the temptations of the flesh?"
The Priest replied, "Yes, Rabbi, on one occasion I was weak and broke my faith."
The Rabbi nodded understandingly and remained silent, thinking, for about five minutes.
Finally, the Rabbi said, "Beats the shit out of a ham sandwich, doesn't it?"
