Americans are intimately familiar with the city of Fallujah. It's where the Sunni resistance to the occupation of Iraq was born, and where nearly 100 American soldiers lost their lives in the bloodiest battle of the Iraq War. More than 1,500 civilians were killed and over 70,000 buildings were destroyed in those battles.
Republican candidates are trying to one-up each other in the game of "Who can be the bigger Warhawk".
I found this nugget (which I retitled) inside a Wapo article:
Report: Greek leader threatened with military hostilities
Greece’s dire financial straits meant it had scant leverage to push back against some of its creditors’ most onerous demands. ...
The moves are fostering a deep sense of resentment among Tsipras’s allies and a conviction that Europeans sought to humiliate him. During a pivotal meeting with Merkel, French President François Hollande and European Council President Donald Tusk, Tsipras at one point received a thinly veiled threat that if he walked away and left the euro, Greece risked going it alone geopolitically, too.
According to two officials in Brussels with knowledge of the exchange, the specter was raised of aggression from Turkey — a neighboring nation viewed in Greece as a historic antagonist.
Are you sufficiently terrified? Unless you are currently cowering under your bed and praying to whatever diety you think can help you, then you aren't terrified enough.
If you don't believe me then you weren't watching cable news in the days leading up to Independence Day.
The "Little Ice Age" and its included climactic minima is often partially attributed to an extreme solar minimum. In particular,
During the period 1645--1715, in the middle of the Little Ice Age, there was a period of low solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum. The Spörer Minimum has also been identified with a significant cooling period between 1460 and 1550.[69] Other indicators of low solar activity during this period are levels of the isotopes carbon-14 and beryllium-10.[70]
Now, a new model of solar behavior which is producing shockingly accurate predictions with respect to the sun's 11 year activity cycle predicts an extreme decrease in solar activity during the 2030s.
continued below the break
Seymour Hersh's blockbuster story The Killing of Osama bin Laden, got a lot of attention for a very short period of time. That media attention was mostly in the form of character assassination such as “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank,” and general "kill the messenger" attacks.
Greetings, 99%! I hope you will enjoy my sharing with you this week's cartoon based, of course, on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who recently announced that he is running for President. He has been beastly for a long time, continues to be beastly, and has surely earned his turn as one of Les Beastiables.
NOTE FOR NEW READERS: This series features a new Les Beastiables cartoon every Wednesday about 1:30-1:45 PM Eastern on Daily Kos, Friday afternoons here. We indulge in a little Franglish because the French are tres classy. But I digresse.
For the serious story behind the cartoon lampoon, please read on while we make the beastie squirm on the hot seat. Then you'll be able to "cleanse your palate" with cute chimp photos before you leave.
One year ago yesterday, Israel conducted an assault on the Gaza Strip. The Israelis bombed Gaza infrastructure, like power and water plants, and deliberately targeted civilian housing.
The Israeli attack brought international condemnation.
Washington, DC – Following a week of impressive Supreme Court decisions, many are saying Obama’s legacy is secure. But is it really? Has all of America forgotten about the war on whistle blowers, the war on immigrants, the war on drugs, war on privacy, and the war on civilians living underneath drone aircraft? This not mention the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the continuing pillaging by Wall Street. So how exactly is Obama’s legacy secure? Well, sometimes it takes a comedy show to break all this down. Watch this clip from “Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp.”
RESISTANCE REPORT by Lee Camp
https://www.popularresistance.org/video-5-hints-obamas-legacy-will-not-b...
All eyes have been on Greece this week, but the real action is on the other side of Asia.
Athens at the dawn of the 6th Century B.C. was an unremarkable city. The arts, science, and philosophy that would make it great were still centuries away.
The only notable thing about Athens of the time was its relatively large size, which was also the source of its problems. Athens was too large to feed itself and this was becoming a crisis.
(My apologies to Thomas Jefferson)
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the citizen long guaranteed by our Constitution, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to that separation.
photo credit TERRAPIN Bright Green
I'm thinking of a series of green articles like this that show not so much what is wrong with our environment but rather what to do about it now in the new world of climate change. This is a start:
