Tuesday Tummler, 7 Cheshvan 5776

This site has the same problem as the Catholic Church: not enough priests, who can be trusted to stay out of the communion wine and the altar boys, to daily say morning mass. JtC has of late been donning the vestments twice a week, on Sundays and Tuesdays, but he can't do that no more, because he has too many Other Masters. So I am, for the nonce, assuming the Tuesdays. But this cannot long continue. Because I already commonly extrude each Saturday morning more words than any reasonable being can bear. No one wants that twice a week. So, c'mon somebody, say you'll be an OT Tuesday.

Otherwise, things could, and fairly rapidly, get pretty dire in here. Like, I could bring out a mime.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlwdpNw1FW8]

Maybe a mime menaced by an accordion.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flxPXmM3CWk]

There could—yes—be banjos.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wCzFbbWPc]

Or, driven to it by writer's block and whiskey, I might descend into doing impressions.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKy7amnWhR0]

Because Tuesdays, at least in the West, are associated with Mars, Marvin the Martian cartoons may attack.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXvsGe657Q]

Cruelly-clad animals, they could ride across the site on roombas.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Epytc4wMJ5Y]

The point is, there is simply no telling, just how bad it might get. To nick from Shakespeare, who himself nicked from the bible, in composing his Bottom's Dream:

the eye of man hath not heard
the ear of man hath not seen
man's hand is not able to taste
his tongue to conceive
nor his heart to report
how hath fucking bad it be, ye

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKcAYMb5uk4]

So, somebody, step up. Say you'll be a Tuesday OT. Just . . . step right up.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URp-Dbhr7EU]

Meanwhile, the Science Men, they are bickering about the invention of dogs.

Used to be thought that dogs, for some unknown reason, decided to come on out of wolves, while following along humans, somewhere in the long time when humans were hunting and gathering.

But then came the great garbage revelation of 2013, in which it was Decided dogs only invented themselves out of wolves when humans ceased moving and settled down to grow such wonderments as turnips and rutabagas. Because then the humans, they made garbage mounds. Where the dogs wanted to Go.

Now, in this most recent Wisdom, it is said that dogs first came to be in India. Which would mean they are Hindu. And would explain why they are so often so driven to so hump everything. Because they are trying to get back to the tantra.

I myself favor the theory set forth in the true-life Science book City. In which it is postulated that humans don't actually exist, but are just some made-up shit in mythic fireside tales told by dogs.

Some different-one Science Men are in a puzzlement about why Pluto has "woodworm-like pits." They are having Guesses, but basically they Don't Know.
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One Science Man claimed it was acne, which Proved the planet is actually a Living Head, but he was Ordered out of the Room.

In my opinion, woodworms are some of the coolest people ever—I love the patterns they leave in wood—and I am glad they may also be worming around Pluto.

Also, if you eat wormwood, as opposed to woodworm, you can actually, fairly easily, travel to Pluto. And without ever leaving Earth.

There is literally no End, to the Wonders of Science.

For instance the Chinese, they went in and fucked with the genes, and created micro-pigs. That are even smaller than those quite small pot-bellied pigs, that white people had been buying. Until they discovered the pigs still grew to be 200 pounds or so. At which time the white people would take them to the Shelter.

But the Chinese, with the gene-fucking, soon they will have Dr. Moreaued a micro-pig that will fit in your purse, and for all of its life. And lo, the white people, shall they then rejoice. And then, when I shop, in the supermarkets, I shall hear the hosannas, of snorts, sounding from the micro-pigs, as they root around down there, in the purses.

Everyone knows that George II violently opposed the creation of "human/animal hybrids" . . . mostly because he himself is a cross between a human, and a goat anus. And so he made Laws to Stop the Creation of Beings, such as Himself.

But there are no such strictures against human/animal hybridization in China. Which is why I can now present to you—in a site exclusive, thanks to my lingering connection to Bedlam News, a non-ordinary news service created by my karass back in the last millennium—the below astounding photographs of successful scientific bridgings between humans and animals, and humans and humans.

First we see this:
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A baby with adult legs, so that it can rapidly run up and down the endless aisles of the giant warehouses, retrieving and then passing Buy Junk objects on to the Giant-Hand Babies (pictured below), so that the objects can then be loaded onto Carts, to next be whiz-banged to some dock, where they will go into jetpack trucks, to be delivered to Somewhere.
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The Giant-Leg Babies and Giant-Hand Babies are even now filling all of the positions at all of the Amazon warehouses.

But these are as nothing, compared to the creation of the Human Who Doesn't Need A Toilet.

As everyone knows, there is no longer any room on this planet for human doody. The sewers, the septic tanks, they are everywhere choking, failing. What then, as Lenin once famously asked, is to be done? Simple. Create a human who doesn't need a toilet.

This, now, has been done. Behold:
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Here we see a human/animal hybrid, chopping peppers, peppers fertilized by her own poop and pee. For while the top part of the hybrid is a human, the bottom part is some sort of animal. With this creature, sewage and septic systems, they have been obviated. Because animals don't use toilets. Instead, when these hybrids have to go, they go out into the yard, and go there. And where they go, they grow things. Which they will, in the fullness of time, eat. The poop and the pee of the hybrids, they will thereby replace all of the chemical fertilizers. Which will no longer be Necessary.

O Science! O Wonderment!

As is well known, Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, is a human/animal hybrid, a cross between a human and a steer. A farm animal. And, when this farm animal recently retreated from the 2016 presidential race, because Jesus told him to, Ayn Rand Paul, he was ecstatic. "Finally!" Ayn ejaculated. "Now all the people, they will know, that I am the stupidest person left in the race!"

But then, a terrible thing happened. Uncle Ben Carson he almost immediately proceeded to gallop into a great harrowing thundering run of stupidity, one nearly unprecedented in American politics. One in which he proclaimed, among other things, that Satan controls evolution, which is why no one rushes the school-shooters, and why the Jews didn't race up the steps of the Reichstag with flamethrowers to crisp the Hitlers.

Uncle Ben meanwhile released, as the enduring and essential logo of his campaign, this:
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And so, Ayn, he was so put out. Uncle Ben had stolen the duncecap right off his head!

How, he wondered, as he writhed in his bed at night, could he retreive the duncecap, that was so rightfully his?

Then, finally, Ayn, he hit on it. He would go onto a winger radio show. And he would say this, about Bernie Sanders:

It amazes me and it actually kind of scares me. I've been spending more time going after Bernie and socialism because I don't want America to succumb to the notion that there's anything good about socialism. I think it's not an accident of history that most of the times when socialism has been tried that attendant with that has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it. Stalin killed tens of millions of people. Mao killed tens of millions of people. Pol Pot killed tens of millions of people. When you have a command economy, when everything is dictated from one authority, that's socialism, but it doesn't come easily to those who resist it.

The deep dumbness of this statement, it is without limit. It is like a perpetual-motion machine of stupidity. Perpetual-motion machines, they are supposed to be impossible. But, trust the Pauls, to come up with one.

I will here focus on but one facet of the perpetual-motion machine of stupidity. That is the claim that "Pol Pot killed tens of millions of people."

At the time that the Khmer Rouge went truly wiggy, there were not even 10 million people in all of Cambodia. Thus, for the Khmer Rouge to have killed ten million people—much less the Ayn-asserted "tens of millions of people"—this would have required that they reduce the population of Cambodia into the realm of the negative. There would have had to be minus-people living there. Or, they would have had to import Cambodians from other universes, in order to kill them.

Ayn here reminds me of a newspaper guy I used to work for, who every time he wrote about East Timor, would raise the death count. Eventually he was claiming more people had there been killed than had ever actually lived there. I would say to him, "T––, there's no need to inflate the numbers. The truth is bad enough." But he brushed that aside. He reckoned that to get people's attention, one had to constantly balloon the numbers. In this, he was forever fleeing the truth expressed by Stalin—who surely would know—that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

Gotta give that guy credit on this, though: out of all the people I've heard aver that if such-and-such a person were elected president, they would leave the country, T-- is the only one who ever actually did it. He said if George II were to assume the throne, he was outta the US. And, once George II assumed, outta the US he went. To Canada. Where he lives to this day.

Where was I? Right. Accordion, and bagpipes.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQVYOsZOEA8]

Scarier than Halloween! Hot damn!

Halloween is coming, and a fun book to read this time of year is Roger Zelazny's A Night In The Lonesome October. It is narrated by Snuff, Jack the Ripper's dog. Snuff, in the course of things, makes a friend, who is a cat. Who is the familiar of a witch, Jill. Who, in the course of things, becomes a friend of Jack's. All four of these people are sympathetic characters. Folks like Dracula and Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes also pass through the thing. Recommended. Pretty much highly. This is the last book Zelazny wrote. Before colorectal cancer killed him in 1995. At age 58. Which was totally wrong.

I combed through the tubes to see What Happened on this day in history, and, near as I can figure out, nothing has ever been as important as the fact that on this day, in 1955, Harry Belafonte recorded "Day-O."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvl8pzXoXww]

Jim Webb is apparently planning a Halloween-style press conference for later today, in which he will announce he is running for president as an independent, which will free him to appear in public as he really is: clothed wholly in a slavery diaper, blasting off a shotgun, sucking his son's penis.

In 2020, "entertainment" and politics" will at last completely merge. Now that we know that Kanye West and Lindsay Lohen shall be contending against one another for the presidency.

West is linked via his penis with the Kardashians. Who are so omnipresent they must be of the Overlords. While it has long been known that Lohan is a "sacrificial goddess" enmeshed in "a Freemasonic conspiracy involving US intelligence agents" in which she is "a MK-ULTRA-like sex slave who perform[s] in what [a]re described as Call to Chaos rites."

So, basically, a Bush III v Clinton II rerun, with more sex, and—maybe—better music.

There are many reasons why I do not fly on airplanes. One is because, as I am sitting there, in an insanely-thin metal tube, constructed by congenitally insane human beings, at an insanely elevated altitude, suddenly, my suddenly insane seat-mate, feels the need to start biting me, and then rolls over on the floor, and dies.

A postmortem exam is being conducted on a 24-year-old Brazilian man who collapsed and died aboard an Irish aircraft on Sunday after he bit another passenger.

Cork police arrested a 44-year-old Portuguese woman travelling with the man after discovering five pounds of suspected amphetamine powder in her suitcase.

Ireland's police force, known as the Gardai, is hoping the post-mortem will show if the man ingested a substance which led him to his frenetic state.

Gee. Ya think?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKk-w_0SpSw]

The Russian serial killers, they are just so pleased, to be trying out all their new war toys, on the brown people of Syria.

As the howlingly embarrassing brain-dead drooling-idiot site Moon of Alabama ejaculated on October 7, Vladimir Putin's 63rd birthday:

He he ... Russia is now really showing off Smile

Four Russian Navy warships have fired a total of 26 missiles at the position of the terrorist group Islamic State in Syria, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced. The missiles were fired from the Caspian Sea.

"Four missile ships launched 26 cruise missiles at 11 targets. According to objective control data, all the targets were destroyed. No civilian objects sustained damage," Shoigu said.

The missiles flew some 1,500 km before reaching their targets, probing their efficiency.

"And a happy birthday to you dear Vladimir Vladimirovich," Shoigu added.

Isn't it glorious, how we can all clap and laugh and dance and sing, and even come, oh so pleasantly and pleasurably, in our pants, when it is the Russians who kill brown people, rather than Americans?

It is, of course, traditional, to invoke Thanatos, on Vladimir Putin's birthday.

For instance, Anna Politkovskya, journalist—at the time the premier thorn in Putin's puckered pute-hole—was assassinated on Putin's birthday, in October 2006.

Investigating, was she, then, the false-flag attack of the Moscow apartment bombings, which effortlessly eased Putin into power, and the slaughterhouse of the Second Chechen War, in which Putin oversaw the crushing of a country, and the killing and maiming of more than a million souls.

Just a little present. Politkovskya's death. From Putin's friends.

Politkovskya worked for Novaya Gazeta. The newspaper Mikhail Gorbachev set up with his Nobel Prize money. It is the premier independent newspaper in the country. Gazeta reporters, they die, when that, to the government, is necessary. Six major investigative reporters, to date. All while on about the apartment bombings. And/or Chechnya.

The Russian serial killers, they are determined to be just as big and bad as are the Americans. Thus, if the Americans bomb a hospital in Afghanistan, the Russians will set about, in Syria, bombing ambulances, bombing ambulances in Idlib, bombing an ob/gyn hospital, bombing a field hospital, bombing an amublance depot. Dropping bombs that kill 48 people from a single family.

The Russians! They are great! They are mighty! They are massive! They are equal! They can bomb and bomb and bomb again! For they are not Americans! They are the anti-Americans! So with them we can freely get our ya-yas out! We can come! And come and come and come again! When they bomb! For we are all, then, christhitlerallexcusedallalmighty, wunderbar!

Oh happy day. When Putin walks. When he walks. When he wash. Oh lord. All our sins away.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGDvDGE7zk]

Richard Pryor, once upon a time, back in 1977, they allowed him a TV show. He knew it would never last, so he put as much into as he could, right up front.

Pryor, he knew from experience, that all guns speak, and everything every gun ever says, is Wrong and Foul and Filthy.

He put that into his show.

Then it was cancelled.

Because he was just too True.

The people with the money, they decided it was just better. That the people watch. What was then on the other networks. Happy Days. Laverne & Shirley.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sunsLde_ZWY]

Albert Einstein, these days, is no longer a human. He's been all demigodded. In science, he's the guy who, nearly 100 years on, inscribed theories still out of reach. In profane political discourse, he's a thing, that people will sling, when they want to make some point about socialism, zionism, pacifism, whateverism.

I don't like those Einsteins. I like the Einstein who is a human. Who, like you, like me, sometimes had his drawers down.

Which is why I like this story, related by astronaut Pete Conrad, to journalist Oriani Fallaci:

I didn't attend Einstein's classes, because he only taught seniors. But I knew him, though. Boy, what a character! First there was his hair, so long he could have braided it. Then his eyes, good, wicked, beautiful, ugly, sad, gay, everything. Then his sweatshirt. White, with short sleeves, and a picture of Popeye printed across the front. Popeye, you know? The one who eats spinach to grow strong. Einstein used to wear it for eating ice cream. Otherwise, he used to mess up his good shirt.

He liked strawberry best. You know, the kind with the whole strawberries in it? The trouble was, he didn't want his ice cream in a dish, he wanted it in a cone. And then he never stood still while he ate it, he used to walk while he ate it. And then he didn't walk normally, he used to hop while he ate it. That was because he had one foot on the pavement. And the other foot in the street.

Boy, what a man! I loved that man. Not for his theory of relativity. But for the way he used to eat ice cream.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKZPO01iFzY]

(And so maybe you're wondering: "what the hey is a 'tummler,' and what are all those weird numbers and words, there in the title, after the 'tummler'?'" Well, the weird numbers and words, after the tummler, they are this day, October 20, 2015, in the Hebrew calendar. Inscribed, for you, this day, just as a reminder, that not every human on this planet, runs the world go round on Greg time. As for what is a tummler, Mel Brooks, who once was officially employed as one, puts it this way: "a tummler wakes up the Jews when they fall asleep around the pool after lunch. One of the things I had to do as the pool tummler was, I used to do an act. I wore a derby and an alpaca coat, and I would carry two rock-laden cardboard suitcases and go to the edge of the diving board and say, 'business is no good!' and jump off." A tummler is a person who "stirs up tumult or excitement," a jack-of-all-trades, a jester, a fool, a fallen one, a person of songs and shtick and slapshtick, a person who may, if necessary, flourish a pig-bladder, or pull back to such truth-jokes as the one about the mother whose son excitedly announces that he has been picked for the part of the Jewish husband in a school play, and then the mother storms: "You tell the teacher you want a speaking part!" A tummler, he and me and we, strives to please you. And every day.)

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhSfZplNbN0]

P.S. Oh yeah. And as for the latest recurrent nonsense in Palestine. Ruben Bolling, he already said, all that has can and will ever be righteously and rightfully said.

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lotlizard's picture

Hey, after all these years I finally understand a remark a writer made in 1969 regarding the trial of the Chicago Seven.

Namely, that although presiding judge Julius Hoffman's conduct of the trial was scandalous, he was "more a tummler than a Torquemada."

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lotlizard's picture

The Egyptian government has abolished the charities of the Muslim Brotherhood, on which many poor people depended, and equated defense of human rights with "terrorism". All with U.S. support.

(from free software guru Richard Stallman's political notes page)

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enhydra lutris's picture

Hospitals run by Hezbollah for ages now.tvguide

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

lotlizard's picture

Moon of Alabama is a legitimate progressive opinion aggregator and in my experience its writers and their motives and practices are not any worse than ours are here.

Disagreeing on Russian intervention in Syria doesn't taint the whole blog, any more than disagreement with one or another post on c99 wouldn't justify someone slandering this whole site and its members.

Just my two cents (or are those ::ominous chord:: two kopecks? ::ominous chords::).

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hecate's picture

Alabama entry I cite to is treif. Cheering death. With even an animated gif smiley face. How can one not vomit, at something like that? The site is now consistently enraptured of killing, so long as the killing is not committed by Americans. Which is why billmon, whom the site claims to trail, has nothing to do with it.

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lotlizard's picture

I hear what you're saying — many of us revile Hillary Clinton for cheering Qaddafi's death.

And every August I feel a similar revulsion at everyone who still insists the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified and a glorious victory to be celebrated.

But with the notable exception of David Swanson — who took over 125 HRs on GOS pushing back against the near-universal cheering surrounding the supposed success of the OBL Abbottabad raid — who, really, can be reliably counted not to cheer death, ever?

Everyone I read seems to have moments when they cheer death, as long as, according to their respective personal loyalties, it's "good guys" dealing it out and "bad guys" on the receiving end. Remember "GM is alive. OBL is dead. Obama 2012"? Or every Hollywood action film ever made?

Is there some articulatable reason to harbor special disdain for Moon of Alabama? A reason they should be held to a different, higher standard? (Yes, this does sound somewhat like the hasbara claim that Israel's critics are unfairly holding Israel to a higher standard.)

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hecate's picture

I have never cheered anyone's death.

And no, I have no particular animus against Moon of Alabama. Many other previously piously allegedly "anti-war" sites—landdestroyer, global research, etc.—not to mention the various Russian versions of Voice of America (RT, Sputnik, etc.)—are now just as orgasmic, in their wallowing in death, now that it is the Russians, rather than the Americans, who are doing the killing. And, if you'd like, when I have the time, I would be happy to quote from these, and other sites, previously so piously "anti-war," now happily wallowing, in troughs of blood. Because Russians are spilling it. Rather than Americans.

You can't cheer one motherfucker's guts getting blown out, and then scream till your lips bleed that it's a war crime that some other body's bowels explode into the air. You just can't. Not in my universe.

James Jones, in WWII, was taking a shit on a South Pacific island, and a Japanese man—an "enemy"—came upon him, and tried to kill him. And instead Jones, he killed the Japanese man. And all Jones' tears, they did, like water flow. And Jones went to his commanding officer, and he said he had to get right out, of all of the shit, and right now. Because he would never kill anybody ever again. And he went back to the States, and he wrote this, remembering all the dead he had seen:

[T]he dead, frozen like flies in plastic, realized—at the moment of death, when of course they stopped—that humanity must grow to feeling, to empathy, or become extinct.

But the dead cannot speak.

The dead cannot speak. So we, the living, as Jones understood, must speak for them. And the first thing that we must say, is this: NO MORE DEAD PEOPLE.

Nobody, ever, anywhere, for any reason, gets to kill anyone.

There is, for me, but one guiding light, which I grasped from Kenneth Patchen:

"I write along a single line: I never get off it. I said that you were never to kill anyone, and I meant it."

It’s simple. There’s nothing at all complicated about it.
War—There won’t be war when you decide you won’t murder other human beings.

You cannot hate without hating all; and you cannot kill some without killing all—because the welfare of any man is the welfare of all men. Through violence men are made to enslave and murder one another; through violence the world has been turned into this unimaginable hell; through violence the rulers of this hell are enabled to maintain their positions.

Have you ever looked at a man?
There is something helpless and majestic about a man.
If you believed in anything, you could not kill a man.

A man has two legs. He’ll build a house—from cellar to rooftop, with his own hands. He’ll put seeds in the ground. He’ll watch the sun and the rain at work. He’ll take a woman to bed. He’ll find enough tenderness and love to get him through the day. You’d think that man deserved a little something. You’d think that man was worthy of a jot or two of sympathy and consideration. You’d think that maybe someone would say, Let’s just let him alone for a while, and see what he can do.

They try to fix it so nobody’ll care what happens to a man anymore.
I don’t mean millions—I mean any one man anywhere.
If anything is worth anything it’s because one man is worth something.
If any one man isn’t worth something, then nothing whatever is worth anything.
It’s all got to come back to any one man anywhere or it isn’t going anywhere.
Don’t tell me how interested in Confucius or Jesus Christ you are.
Tell me how interested in any one man anywhere you are.
You don’t get it.
You’d cry.
You’d cry if you could feel that.
It’s all got to come back to one man or it isn’t going anywhere at all.

This house. Do you see this house?
It is a house where human beings live.
There is a strange dignity about them.
They are looking at you as I talk.
I want you to leave them alone.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYq3mIBZLw]

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lotlizard's picture

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MarilynW's picture

Cheney was someone I wished would not survive those heart attacks.

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To thine own self be true.

hecate's picture

the October 7 entry quoted in the diary, all below, from the foul and fetid stench of Moon of Alabama:

—October 9, cumshot for killing, "video shows the armored Russian Mi-24P combat helicopters flying low and fast over Syria and using a copious amount of decoy flares while eliminating panicking terrorists."

—October 11, cumshot for killing, "but today at least a few IS honchos found their end. The probably decisive difference was the involvement of the 4+1 intelligence operations room in Baghdad on which I reported here ten days ago."

—October 12, cumshot for killing, "Russia plans to more than triple the airstrike sorties it flies per day in Syria. This to support the several thousand new fighters coming in now from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon to help the Syrian government and its people."

—October 14, cumshot for killing: "In north Latakia, where there is currently preparatory fighting in Salma (Russian TV video with an interesting comment on Syrian troop moral). The aim is to kick the enemy northward and out of the country and to secure the border with Turkey. The area must be cleaned to prevent any surprises against Latakia and the Russian bases there. The attack should then move further to the north-east where the intermediate target is Jisr a Shugur and then along the M4 highway towards Idleb."

—October 15, cumshot for killing, "these forces will be destroyed and there is nothing the U.S. can or will do about that."

—October 17, cumshot for killiing.: "we are seeing several smaller operation around Rastan where Russian helicopters help (video) to slice and dice an insurgent bubble, in Latakia."

—October 19, cumshot for killing, "the Russian just snuffed out a 16 vehicle ISIS convoy."

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lotlizard's picture

Why Is The U.S. Silently Bombing Syria's Electricity Network?

That's the kind of reporting and research I value Moon of Alabama for (as I do other sites). I visit them and other such sites for the occasions when they pick up on events and developments that other sources don't or haven't.

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hecate's picture

the essential question is: are people here anti-war? Or just anti the wars waged by the Americans?

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lotlizard's picture

By that standard, CNN would be treif since 1991 and Bush 41's Gulf war. Remember the "Highway of Death"?

The sources regarded as most "reputable" by conventional standards — let's say the NYT, the Washington Post, AP, Reuters, the BBC — all push good-guy/bad-guy propaganda framings, celebrate successful killing "missions," rig the game in favor of bloodthirsty warmongering leaders and countries.

Yet isn't it the case that we all still rely on them, cite them, "consume" their "product", give them audience that they can sell to their advertisers? When do we declare them and their writers and editors treif? How much death do they have to facilitate, before we say enough is enough? Before we encourage everyone never to look at them ever again?

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mimi's picture

headlines ... Just can't help it... Even what is called in German the "Lügenpresse". My logic is that you can't know what is a "reputable" source, if you don't know what the "not so reputable ones are". And that is one heck of an awful job to find out. And because there are just too many sources out there and too many news sites, the best thing is to not read them. Your brain stays healthier that way. Smile

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lotlizard's picture

What if another essential question is, who or what is in a position to serve as a "check and balance" on American, Saudi, and Israeli military action?

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hecate's picture

the essential question is: are you into killing people? Can you conceive of it? Do you figure it somehow in some way in some place at some time "justifiable'?" Like, jesuschristalmightyfuck, maybe that there's an Israeli! A Saudi! An American! Wholly hell! If you can, in some way, justify it—killing—then, to my mind, you're just a Cheney, clad in a different dress.

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lotlizard's picture

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mimi's picture

a hard look at the banality of evil, I would say the answer to your question at least in the past always turned out to be those with bigger and with more weapons. Too darn damn stupid that they all use 'em to kill people at one point in time. But then it's already to late.

I think East and West Germany in the fifities and sixties and early seventies were lucky. They got away without being killed. But I think that was an outlier. Won't happen again.

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MarilynW's picture

but I don't think the USA cares much. We are a big country if measured by land mass.

His election speech was much like Obama's with lots of talk about change. He is young, 43, tall, good looking and cool. He brought out the young vote.
Let's hope he lives up to his campaign promises.

In the meantime thank you Hecate!
Caucus99 has so many people registered, there must be a Tuesday OT person among them to help you & Johnny.

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To thine own self be true.

lotlizard's picture

The Saudi Dynasty, Key U.S. Ally, Tops the World in Barbarism

Without continuing U.S. support, the Sauds would be treated by Saudis even worse than Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicholas II, and Benito Mussolini, were: they’d be treated the same way they themselves have treated anyone in Saudi Arabia who has protested their decades-long tyranny. Would the fanatic fundamentalist clergy that the Sauds have shared power with be treated any better? Even from the standpoint of moderating Islamism, the results of overthrowing the Sauds would likely be better than what America — the world-policeman for the imperial Saudi tyrants — has produced. But it would need to be done before the Sauds acquire nuclear weapons.

What needs to be changed first is the American government — its control by an aristocracy that’s firmly wedded to the Sauds. The American aristocracy (especially its three most powerful components: petrodollar Wall Street, oil-and-gas billionaires, and military-industrial-complex billionaires — all of whom benefit from alliance with the Sauds) needs to be defeated in America. The American people need to strip the U.S. aristocracy (at least those three elements of it) of their power over the U.S. Government. It can’t be done unless the news-media start informing the American people of reality. (For example, in neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party Presidential debates has this immense problem, and candidates’ positions regarding it, been even so much as mentioned. That can’t possibly reflect a democratic nation — an authentic democracy.)

More re a potential Saudi path to nuclear weapons:
Saudi Arabia, Hungary sign nuclear pact

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In case you need a point of reference

This warning by a US Air Force official came mere days after US/NATO planes bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing several “innocent men, women and children” for the sake of getting at Taliban terrorists purportedly hiding within.

If entertainment-addled Americans need a frame of reference, they might think of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1. In that film, the tyrannical “Capitol” bombed a hospital to try to kill visiting “terrorist” rebels, including Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the rebel movement. The rebel leaders then exploited outrage over the hospital massacre to whip up even more support for the anti-Capitol insurgency. Don’t be surprised if the Taliban is similarly able to exploit the Kunduz bombing to drive up support and membership.

And to understand the extent to which our own government is perpetrating terrorism in the name of fighting it, recall that in The Dark Knight, the horrifying apex of the Joker’s campaign of terrorism on Gotham City was also the bombing of a hospital. The main difference is that the Joker at least gave warning and only blew up the hospital after it was evacuated. Unfortunately for Doctors Without Borders and their patients, they fell prey to an even more ruthless villain.

General Otto’s warning also came mere days before The Intercept reported on a classified leak that, among other revelations, disclosed that 90 percent of the victims of recent American drone strikes in Afghanistan “were not the intended targets” of the attacks.

Permission to speak, Lt. Gen. Otto, sir: how many terrorists do you think were created by the 90 “collateral” murders committed with your drones for every 10 “terrorists” killed?

For another Hollywood reference aid, consider the 1984 movie The Terminator. In the future world of that film, the human resistance against the world-conquering artificial intelligence called Skynet lived under skies infested with drones called “Hunter-Killers.” Perhaps to avoid a copyright lawsuit, USAF and the CIA have instead opted for the synonym “Predator” for their own aerial robotic assassins (at the risk of running afoul of yet another Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the 80s).

“That we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.”
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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enhydra lutris's picture

but, for me, it missed the mark. I not only don't need movie references, I miss them, because I see very, very few movies and have, over my lifetime, consistently seen very, very few movies. TV shows ditto. OTOH, that still allows me to both understand and grok how truly horrible, terrorist, and criminal these behaviors are.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Where Chicago Police 'disappeared' 7,000 people

Police “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at an off-the-books interrogation warehouse in Chicago, nearly twice as many detentions as previously disclosed, the Guardian can now reveal.
From August 2004 to June 2015, nearly 6,000 of those held at the facility were black, which represents more than twice the proportion of the city’s population. But only 68 of those held were allowed access to attorneys or a public notice of their whereabouts, internal police records show.
...
According to an analysis of data disclosed to the Guardian in late September, police allowed lawyers access to Homan Square for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged over nearly 11 years. That percentage aligns with Chicago police’s broader practice of providing minimal access to attorneys during the crucial early interrogation stage, when an arrestee’s constitutional rights against self-incrimination are most vulnerable.
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gulfgal98's picture

yesterday and today. It keeps going down, often right as I am trying to write a comment or post one. Here goes again.

I have a number of comments to make. First, regarding the Open Thread, one does not need to write a long essay or post a bunch of links to do an Open Thread. Most of the ones I do are not serious and rarely contain a lot of news. I volunteered for my one day as a way to force myself to write something, anything, even if it is nothing.

What I am saying is that the Open Thread is simply a meeting room for us to post news or comment during the day before Joe posts Evening Blues. All it requires is for someone to volunteer to create a diary or article with the header Open Thread on it and may a couple of words like "Here it is, Have at it." We have over one hundred members, many of who do not actively participate, but probably do read. Having an Open Thread gives them an opportunity to participate if they so desire. I hope someone would volunteer to do Tuesdays or even two people volunteer to share Tuesdays. It is not that hard. Good

Second, I have been reading the back and forth here about wars. My own opinion is that I am not going to avoid reading certain blogs, journals, media just because they are reporting the negatives of our wars. I am a firm believer in knowledge, however ugly or unpleasant, is power. Does that mean I read blatant lies like those in the right wing? No. But even when the mainstream media is acting as propagandists for our government, I still feel there is value in reading it as well as other sources so I can have the "feel" of what is out there. I would not be actively involved in a Peace vigil if I thought killing people was a good thing. Just my simple minded $ .02 for what it is worth.

I just got another update on the backpackers. My husband called me from the top of Pilot Mountain where there was cell phone service. He said the views from Pilot Mountain were spectacular and made this trip worthwhile. He said they were on schedul which means that they are still planning on coming into Brevard late tomorrow. Apparently everyone will be staying at the gg B & B which means I need to clean the place, wash towels (thankfully the sheets in the two extra bedrooms were already washed), and hit the grocery store for food for breakfast on Thursday morning. I am assuming we will go out to eat Wed. night, probably at a local Mexican restaurant.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

JOLTS-Hires-Openings.PNG

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gulfgal98's picture

Are these crap jobs or is the applicant pool over qualified? Or under qualified, which I doubt?

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

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enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

mimi's picture

It sounds a little like it somewhere in the thread.

So, has lotlizard or hecate ever killed a man in war combat zones? I think if you have killed a man in combat up close and saw the dead body of whom you killed, then I tend to believe you all would come to agree with hecate. Just saying, no offense to anyone.

Moon of Alabama, ah, I had read the site years ago only, because it was said it's a "great" one, and I thought people who like Brecht's Whiskey Bar and songs, just must be "my kind of people". Smile But then I can't read that much. So, I forgot about them.

Moon of Alabama and the whole Three Penny Opera was one of my favorites when I was young. Some of the music pieces I heard over and over as a teenager and couldn't stop it. I adored Lotte Leynia and Kurt Weill. I had a time when I had a crush with dramaturgy and imagined I would get into that field. I think I was fourteen. Smile

Here are the songs I have listened over and over again. Especially Surabaya Johnny. Oh my, just look at the lyrics, those hormones messing with me:
[video:https://youtu.be/aSLTvKC-P3Y]
lyrics

Surabaya Johnny

I was young, I was just sixteen then,
when you came up from Burma one day.
And you told me to pack up my suitcase,
and I did, and you took me away.
I said, "Do you work nice and steady,
or do you go sailing and roving out to sea?"
And you said, "I have a job on the railroad,
and baby, how swell it's all gonna be."
You said a lot, Johnny. It was all lies.
You sure had me fooled, right from the start.
I hate you when you laugh at me like that.
Take that pipe out of your mouth, Johnny.

Surabaya Johnny. Is it really the end?
Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?
Surabaya Johnny. Ooh, I burn at your touch.
You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you so much.

Thought at first you were kind and gentle,
'til I packed up and went off with you.
And it lasted two weeks until one day
you laughed at me and hit me too.
You dragged me all over the city,
up the river and down to the sea.
Now I look at myself in the mirror
and some old woman looks back at me.
You didn't want love, Johnny, you wanted money.
I gave you all I had. You wanted more.
Oh, don't look at me that way.
I'm only trying to talk to you.
Wipe that grin off your face, Johnny.

Surabaya Johnny. Is it really the end?
Surabaya Johnny. Will the pain never mend?
Surabaya Johnny. How I burn at your touch.
You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you so much.

When we met I forgot to ask you
why they called you that funny name,
but in every hotel on the seacoast
I found out, and I loved you all the same.
I'm tired. I'm worn out.
The sea's pounding in my ears.
And I reach out my arms to hold you.
You're not here and who even cares?
You got no heart, Johnny. You're just no good.
You going now? Oh, tell me why.
I love you after all, Johnny, like that very first day.
Don't laugh at me no more, Johnny.

Surabaya Johnny. Is it really the end?
Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?
Surabaya Johnny. Oh, I burn at your touch.
You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you,
I love you, I love you so much.

This one my father enjoyed the most:
[video:https://youtu.be/aPG9GcykPIY]
Why not relax a little and listen to the slow going, calm of the original "Drei Groschen Oper (Three Penny Opera)" movie and look for the subtitles. There are answers in there to the big questions of life, right at the beginning ...
[video:https://youtu.be/eUgkrlL8GkE]

With regards to the Tuesday OTs. Hecate, you cut your Sunday one in half and post one half on Sunday and the other half on Tuesday. Dash 1

Sigh, I will never write OTs and I will ever wonder what you are all about. So for sure I come back, because I don't give up hope to one day havomg a big "flash of wit" and understand all the "secrets" in the "mystics" of the "digits" in the "fog" of the intertubes.

I start listen to the radio a lot. (Getting really old). Heard a great piece about exploitation of prisoners via prepaid credit cards they get when they leave the prisons on WPFW this morning between 9 am to 11 am. Don't remember how the show is called and don't get it to hear the audiofile here. I think it was either on "Crossroads" or on "Community Watch and Comment". Boy, that made me mad. Here is a site that is concerned with that.
Stop Prison Profiteering

Oh, I am happy over the results in Canada's elections. At least something will change a little.
Have all a good day.

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enhydra lutris's picture

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

lotlizard's picture

http://antiwar.com/

The Debate and the Myth of the Antiwar Democrat

Dead is dead. And smaller interventions still breed resentments. As the recent debate shows, Democrats know how to speak about war without sounding like a cardboard cutout of a cowboy, but history shows their decisions end up just as bloody. They may make more apologetic faces when speaking about the dead, and speak more somberly about various US “accidents” like bombing a hospital, but the blood is on their hands just the same. It’s encouraging to see someone like Chafee and maybe Rand Paul on a good day or Donald Trump on a lucid day speak critically of US wars, but it isn’t going to change anything. Decision 2016 will still be a choice between men and women who confidently charge into war and men who make uncomfortable faces while they do the same.

On a cheerier (and less "cheer death-ier"?) note, The Rag Blog is an online "rebirth" of the Austin, Texas underground newspaper The Rag.
http://www.theragblog.com/

From Wikipedia:

In January 2010 The Rag Blog broke a story by novelist Marc Estrin titled "Got Fascism? Obama Advisor Promotes 'Cognitive Infiltration'" that "stirred up an Internet storm.".[14] The article revealed a previously unreported and highly controversial strategy for fighting dissension and "extremism" that had originated with Obama friend and appointee Cass Sunstein, writing in a 2008 scholarly journal.[15] The story "went viral," and was then covered by Raw Story, Salon.com, CommonDreams, OpEd News, Daily Kos, and Information Clearing House.

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mimi's picture

I was wondering about them. Of course I have no clue. So they are anti war and libertarian and based on the Randolph Bourne Institute (publisher of Antiwar.com)
hmm...

Every RBI project is designed for maximum inclusiveness, in the hope of enabling people from all points on the political spectrum � libertarian, left, right, and center � to join together on the vital issue of opposing war.

Really? Good luck with that. I always get a nervous tick in my eyelids, when I read something like that.

So, please educate me. What's right and what's wrong about that site?

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lotlizard's picture

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Randolph_Bourne_Institute

Of course, some readers are always going to prefer to reject anything connected with the label "libertarian" out of hand.

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mimi's picture

years til I realized there is a difference between liberals and libertarians and then it took me some more time til I understood there are left-wing and right-wing libertarians. I really hated that part of it. Now I have even to deal with neo-liberals. In my time, when I was young, we didn't have these terms in Germany. The way people, who identify themselves as part of these categories, talk in the US is sort of horrible to me (weasel wishy-washy spaghetti wording) to find out if they are right-wingers or not. And for sure I reject the right-wing libertarians, if I am able to detect them. Which I often don't, because I hate to waste time to figure that out.

I still have not found out who is a right-wing libertarian around here... So would you please identify yourself in your sig-lines. Makes life so much easier. Thank You. Smile

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lotlizard's picture

Known for insisting people refer to him using the title Graf (Count) Lambsdorff, he was a central figure in the corruption scandal known as the Flick affair.

I was, like, "Huh?" But it's true: his party, the Free Democrats or FDP, are referred to as "the Liberals" in Germany. Supposedly the "pro-business" party, they glorify individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and free markets, and have been a driving force in privatizing, deregulating, and Americanizing everything.

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mimi's picture

in the sixties and seventies., oh wait, that was Genscher. But who says the liberals can't be crooks ? These days the FDP are I guess the true classic neo-liberals, right?

Germans are always "American everything", that's not news, no matter which party. (Not so much the population, I think). I wonder if we have even more than three people in the parliament, who dare to be "not everything American" and then what's that going to change?

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lotlizard's picture

Among FDP politicians, I liked Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, but in practice her progressive positions always wound up being marginalized by hardliners in her own party and in the CDU / CSU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger

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mimi's picture

I was not living in Germany anymore and rarely try to read German news. Thanks for the link, may be I try to follow her a bit in the future.

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lotlizard's picture

Back in the days when input fields had a fixed number of columns — a holdover from the IBM punch card days, and the 25 x 80 character displays computer screens had before Apple brought out the Macintosh — I would fairly often find myself invoking Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger's surname as a demonstration to clients or co-workers that their input field for 'family name' was too short.

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lotlizard's picture

Tom Friedman still gets paid big money to ejaculate onto the pages of the howlingly embarrassing brain-dead drooling-idiot New York Times.

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