Proof that a leopard never changes its spots.

I am just recovering from the weekend of the cyclists here at gulfgal's B & B. Everyone left yesterday and today is clean up and recovery day.

Enjoy.

https://youtu.be/wHAwWDC3jKw

are at the Bernie scene in Binghamton!

Bad News: It's the New Good News

when you are in Star Trek, a creature will leap on you to suck all the sodium out of your body.

"The Eleven" references the song's time signature, 11/8, and is the product of multiple and recurrent violations of the nation's narcotics laws.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFhgC3ODfYU]

I have a tragic money-sucking trainwreck happening within a few hours' drive and from lack of better oversight by me (those few hours, lake effect snows, broken arm, dying dog) it has spun out. That was my retirement nest egg!!.

Over the "poor me". I attempt to find my way through enemies, clueless allies and now a Contractor who will not return emails. I want no phone conversations, best everything has an electronic tag with him. And I am a non-citizen to-boot.

Some time later, two power outages, and at least this draft is still here. Yay! Sorry for the personal spew. Never again.

unless they attack someone else.

After a Russian commercial airliner was downed over Egypt’s Sinai last October, Western media reported that the Islamic State bombing was retaliation against Russian airstrikes in Syria. The killing of 224 people, mostly Russian tourists on holiday, was matter-of-factly treated as an act of war by a fanatical group without an air force resorting to terrorism as a way to strike back.

Yet, Western militaries have killed infinitely more innocent civilians in Muslim lands than Russia has. Then why won’t Western officials and media cite retaliation for that Western violence as a cause of terrorist attacks on New York, Paris and Brussels?

Instead, there’s a fierce determination not to make the same kinds of linkages that the press made so easily when it was Russia on the receiving end of terror.

For example, throughout four hours of Sky News’ coverage of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London, only the briefest mention was made about a possible motive for that horrific assault on three Underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people. But the attacks came just two years after Britain’s participation in the murderous invasion of Iraq.

Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the Iraq War’s architects, condemned the loss of innocent life in London and linked the attacks to a G-8 summit he’d opened that morning. A TV host then read and belittled a 10-second claim of responsibility from a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda affiliate in Germany saying that the Iraq invasion was to blame. There was no more discussion about it.

To explain why these attacks happen is not to condone or justify terrorist outrages against innocent civilians. It is simply a responsibility of journalism, especially when the “why” is no mystery. It was fully explained by Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the four London suicide bombers. Though speaking for only a tiny fraction of Muslims, he said in a videotaped recording before the attack:

“Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”

The Islamic State published the following reason for carrying out last November’s Paris attacks:

“Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake part in the crusader campaign … and boast about their war against Islam in France, and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets.”

This is why people don’t trust Hillary: How a convenient reversal on gun control highlights her opportunism

For a campaign trying to paint its opponent as a heartless dog-whistling lackey for the NRA, you would expect its own candidate to have a pretty consistent background on the issue. But of course, we’re talking about Hillary Clinton. During her 2008 campaign, Clinton’s tune on guns was quite different, especially after her then opponent Barack Obama opined that some Americans “cling to guns or religion.” Clinton called his comments “elitist” and “out of touch,” and even bragged about learning how to shoot a gun as a child. She also made an argument that was very similar to the allegedly racist argument that Sanders made in 2015:

“What might work in New York City is certainly not going to work in Montana,” said Clinton. “So, for the federal government to be having any kind of, you know, blanket rules that they’re going to try to impose, I think doesn’t make sense.”

[video:https://youtu.be/FvpgHGpQYFo]
from the Real News Network

by the end of the week to make it more visible. These arrests are always anticipated and organized, so nobody who gets arrested, actually is surprised about it. They want it that way to make a statement.

The Wages of Sin

And, as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy.

The Greek polis, or city-state, soon to be swallowed up by the Macedonian empire, was the nucleus that—like early New England town halls in the United States—made it possible for an individual to be a political being, to have agency and a voice. Empire requires a centralized, authoritarian government that has no use for the demos. Greek democracy, always a patriarchy, was with the rise of empire extinguished. Corruption and a lust for power defined the new ruling elites. The citizen, as in our system of “inverted totalitarianism,” became irrelevant. As the Athenian general Thucydides noted, the tyranny that Athens imposed on the outer reaches of empire, it eventually imposed on itself. Athens, like the United States centuries later, was hollowed out from the inside by the corrosive force of empire. The brutal tools of control used initially in distant parts of the empire—in our case militarized police, drones, suspension of civil liberties, wholesale surveillance and mass incarceration—migrated back to the homeland. This is how most empires die. They commit suicide.

The loss of civic virtue, Plato wrote, left a population hypnotized by the illusions flickering on the wall of a cave. Such distorted images of reality—our electronic hallucinations are beyond Plato’s imagination—fuel irrational beliefs and desires. They foster a visionless existence. Our images are skillfully manipulated by the elites to keep the population entertained and passive. Those who seek to question the illusions are, Socrates warned, usually attacked and killed by the mob, which does not want its comforting myths punctured. When reality is too painful to bear, a population does not seek freedom or truth; it becomes an accomplice to its own enslavement. Epicureanism, the reduction of life to the pursuit of fleeting individual pleasure, seduces the public. Cynicism rules. Distrust is everywhere. The community breaks down, and, men turn to public affairs hoping to snatch from thence the happiness they hunger for. Thas Plato writes, “all goes wrong when, starved for lack of anything good in their own lives, ey set about fighting for power, and their internecine conflict ruins them and their country.” This collapse creates a dream world “where men live fighting one another about elaborate shadows and quarreling for power, is if that were a great prize. …”

At the end, death arrives as a relief.

We are no more immune to the forces of decay and death than were ancient Athens, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the Mayans, the Aztecs, Easter Island, Europe’s feudal society of lords and serfs, and the monarchial empires in early 20th-century Europe. Human nature has not changed. We will react as those before us reacted when they faced collapse. We will be increasingly consumed by illusion. We will seek to stop time, to prevent change, to embrace magical thinking in a desperate effort to return to an idealized past. Many will suffer.

This time, collapse will be planetwide. There will be no new lands to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate, no new natural resources to plunder and exploit. Climate change will teach us a brutal lessen about hubris.

The wages of sin, as Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans, is death—first moral and intellectual death and then physical death. The first, we already are experiencing. It would be reassuring to believe we could as a species avoid the second. But if human history is any guide, we are in for it. And the worse it gets, the more we seek to thwart change through magical thinking, the more our eventual extinction as a species is assured.

...from the title. The Facebook version is closing in on 5,000,000 views. The YouTube version needs to go viral, too. Watch it and share it.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bS7JbIii3Y]