Open Thread Sunday 02-07-16

Good morning 99percenters!
Sunday morning news dump and music by Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks --RIP Dan Hicks.

Pentagon Releases 200 Photos of Bush-Era Prisoner Abuse, Thousands Kept Secret
'What the photos that the government has suppressed would show is that abuse was so widespread that it could only have resulted from policy or a climate calculated to foster abuse.'

The Pentagon on Friday was forced to release nearly 200 photographs of bruises, lacerations, and other injuries inflicted on prisoners presumably by U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The record-dump was the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and nearly 12 years of litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which fought to expose the Bush-era torture.

The images, the group says, prove that there was "systemic abuse of detainees." And while troubling, attorneys say that even more problematic is the roughly 1,800 photographs that the government refused to disclose.

"The disclosure of these photos is long overdue, but more important than the disclosure is the fact that hundreds of photographs are still being withheld," said ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer, one of the attorneys in the case.

The Super Bowl Promotes War

Super Bowl 50 will be the first National Football League championship to happen since it was reported that much of the pro-military hoopla at football games, the honoring of troops and glorifying of wars that most people had assumed was voluntary or part of a marketing scheme for the NFL, has actually been a money-making scheme for the NFL. The U.S. military has been dumping millions of our dollars, part of a recruitment and advertising budget that’s in the billions, into paying the NFL to publicly display love for soldiers and weaponry.

Of course, the NFL may in fact really truly love the military, just as it may love the singers it permits to sing at the Super Bowl halftime show, but it makes them pay for the privilege too. And why shouldn’t the military pay the football league to hype its heroism? It pays damn near everybody else. At $2.8 billion a year on recruiting some 240,000 “volunteers,” that’s roughly $11,600 per recruit. That’s not, of course, the trillion with a T kind of spending it takes to run the military for a year; that’s just the spending to gently persuade each “volunteer” to join up. The biggest military “service” ad buyer in the sports world is the National Guard. The ads often depict humanitarian rescue missions. Recruiters often tell tall tales of “non-deployment” positions followed by free college. But it seems to me that the $11,600 would have gone a long way toward paying for a year in college! And, in fact, people who have that money for college are far less likely to be recruited.

Despite showing zero interest in signing up for wars, and despite the permanent presence of wars to sign up for, 44 percent of U.S. Americans tell the Gallup polling company that they “would” fight in a war, yet don’t. That’s at least 100 million new recruits. Luckily for them and the world, telling a pollster something doesn’t require follow through, but it might suggest why football fans tolerate and even celebrate military national anthems and troop-hyping hoopla at every turn. They think of themselves as willing warriors who just happen to be too busy at the moment. As they identify with their NFL team, making remarks such as “We just scored,” while firmly seated on their most precious assets, football fans also identify with their team on the imagined battlefield of war.

Syria: NATO's Last Desperate Options in Lost Proxy War

As Syrian forces and their allies complete the encirclement of Syria's largest city, Aleppo, the United States and its regional allies have signaled a sudden increased interest in ground operations in Syria, including US airpower backing Turkish-Saudi ground forces.

While it is obvious the US and its allies are responding directly to the collapse of their proxy forces across the country, their most recent threats to further escalate the conflict in Syria are tenuously predicated on "fighting ISIS."

The Guardian in its article, "Saudi Arabia offers to send ground troops to Syria to fight Isis," would report:

Saudi Arabia has offered for the first time to send ground troops to Syria to fight Islamic State, its defence ministry said on Thursday. 

“The kingdom is ready to participate in any ground operations that the coalition (against Isis) may agree to carry out in Syria,” said military spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asiri during an interview with al-Arabiya TV news. 

Saudi sources told the Guardian that thousands of special forces could be deployed, probably in coordination with Turkey.

Risking World War III in Syria

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter last October said in a little noticed comment that the United States was ready to take “direct action on the ground” in Syria. Vice President Joe Biden said in Istanbul last month that if peace talks in Geneva failed, the United States was prepared for a “military solution” in that country.

The peace talks collapsed on Wednesday even before they began. A day later Saudi Arabia said it is ready to invade Syria while Turkey is building up forces at its Syrian border.

The U.N. aims to restart the talks on Feb. 25 but there is little hope they can begin in earnest as the Saudi-run opposition has set numerous conditions. The most important is that Russia stop its military operation in support of the Syrian government, which has been making serious gains on the ground.

A day after the talks collapsed, it was revealed that Turkey has begun preparations for an invasion of Syria, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. On Thursday, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said: “We have good reasons to believe that Turkey is actively preparing for a military invasion of a sovereign state – the Syrian Arab Republic. We’re detecting more and more signs of Turkish armed forces being engaged in covert preparations for direct military actions in Syria.” The U.N. and the State Department had no comment. But this intelligence was supported by a sound of alarm from Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Why Western Warmongers Create One Disaster After Another in the Mideast
The wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan failed because short-sighted Western interests trumped the needs of the people.

Despite an almost total lack of public debate, Western military escalation in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is on the rise.

Renewed military interventionism has been largely justified as a response to the meteoric rise of Islamic State networks, spreading across parts of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

Missing from government pronouncements, though, is any acknowledgement that the proliferation of Islamist terrorism is a direct consequence of the knee-jerk response of military escalation.

Discarded to the memory hole is the fact that before each of the major interventions in these three countries, our political leaders promised they would bring security, freedom and prosperity.

A Look at Ukraine’s Dark Side

A new French documentary depicts a long-denied truth – that Ukraine is in the grip of extreme right-wing nationalists who seek to impose what the British scholar Richard Sakwa has called a monist view of nationhood, one which does not accept minorities or heterogeneity. Rainbow politics is not what the Maidan uprising was all about.

Like the Communism which held power in Ukraine before 1992, this new extreme nationalism can impose its will only by violence or the threat of violence. It is by definition the antithesis of European values of tolerance and multiculturalism.

This intimidation is what Paul Moreira’s Canal+ documentary, “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” shows us graphically, frame by frame. That this repression happens to take place under an ideology that incorporates elements of fascism if not Nazism is incidental but not decisive to the power of the documentary. [Click here for the documentary in French; here for a segment with English subtitles.]

But what Moreira shows – as surprising as the contents may be to a Western audience – actually represents very basic journalism, reporting on events that are quite well known inside Ukraine even as this dark underbelly of the Maidan “revolution” has been hidden from most Europeans and Americans.

In Pivot to Asia, US Military Reinforces Its Foothold in the Pacific

While Donald Trump blusters about how China hurts the US economy, US foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific is an issue that typically garners little mainstream analysis. However, the United States is deeply immersed in a regional chess-game against China’s rising power: The US is expanding its ongoing military presence in the Asia-Pacific, at the expense of national sovereignty, local democracy, human rights and the environment.

In 2011, President Obama announced a "pivot to Asia" - a policy shift that would devote more resources to the Asia-Pacific and counter China's rising power. Just as he was about to start his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in July 2015, Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford cited Russia and China as top national security threats to the United States, highlighting Russia's nuclear weapons stockpile and aggressive foreign policy actions, and China's growing military strength. Meanwhile, Dunford claimed that ISIS is less of a concern than Russia and China.

Last August, the US government released its maritime security strategy for the Asia-Pacific. It outlined the competing claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea, along with China's rising military power and expansionist moves in the Asia-Pacific, such as its construction of artificial islands near the Spratly Islands. The US released its strategy to notify all nations, particularly US allies, of its position.

No 'Artful Smear.' Clintons Paid $153 Million in Speaking Fees, Analysis Shows
Thousands are calling for the public release of speech transcripts

There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about the speaking fees paid to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and an analysis published Saturday sheds some light on exactly how much Wall Street and other major corporate powers ponied up for the former Secretary of State and her husband, President Bill Clinton.

$153 million, CNN concludes, is the amount the power couple raked in between February 2001 and the launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential bid in May 2015. What's more, the Clintons received an average pay of $210,795 for each of the 729 addresses given during that time period.

During Thursday's Democratic debate, Clinton accused her primary challenger Bernie Sanders of an "artful smear" because of his repeated references to her exorbitant speaking fees, particularly those paid by banking giants such as Goldman Sachs.

According to the analysis, Clinton collected at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches given to big banks, while the pair earned a total of roughly $7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to Wall Street.

It’s almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system
Sanders has ended the coronation and fired up the grass roots. Now Clinton's electability argument is crumbling too

Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton and Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, shakes hands as they greet the audience before the audience before a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by MSNBC at the University of New Hampshire Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016, in Durham, N.H. (AP Photo/David Goldman)(Credit: Associated Press)

It would be hard to overstate what Bernie Sanders has already achieved in his campaign for president, or the obstacles he’s had to surmount in order to achieve it. Not only has he turned a planned Hillary Clinton coronation into an exercise in grass-roots democracy, he’s reset the terms of the debate. We are edging closer to the national conversation we so desperately need to have. If we get there, all credit goes to Bernie.

Many of those obstacles were put in place by Democratic national party chair and Clinton apparatchik Deborah Wasserman Schultz. Without pretense of due process, Schultz slashed the number of 2016 debates to six, down from 26 in 2008, and scheduled as many as she could on weekends when she figured no one would be watching. To deprive would-be challengers of free exposure, Schultz robbed voters of free and open debate and ceded the spotlight to the dark vaudeville of the Republicans. That Sanders got this far in spite of her is a miracle in itself.

Big Campaign Cash for Clinton From Monsanto Lobbyist

A Monsanto Co. lobbyist, who is seen as Hillary Clinton's "main man" in Iowa, was among the top financial bundlers of contributions to benefit Hillary Clinton's run for the White House in the most recent quarter, new Federal Election Commission reports show.

Jerry Crawford of the Crawford & Mauro Law Firm in Des Moines, Iowa, bundled $151,727 for the campaign over the quarter ending Dec. 31, FEC documents show. Crawford is senior adviser to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and was the Midwest Co-Chair of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign in 2007-08. His firm listed Monsanto as a client in the most recent quarter, reporting $60,000 in lobbying income from Monsanto. Monsanto is known as one of the nation's most powerful corporations, and is currently engaged in a range of public policy debates over regulation of its genetically modified crops and top herbicide product, Roundup.

Another Monsanto lobbyist, Steve Elmendorf, bundled $20,295 in contributions for the Hillary for America organization during the quarter, FEC documents show.  Elmendorf also does work for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which has been battling against mandatory labeling laws for foods made with GMOs.

Beyond Flint, Michigan: Mainstreaming the Navajo Water Crisis

The history of uranium mining on Navajo (Diné) land is forever intertwined with the history of the military industrial complex. In 2002, the American Journal of Public Health ran an article entitled, "The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People." Head investigators for the piece, Brugge and Gobel, framed the issue as a "tradeoff between national security and the environmental health of workers and communities." The national history of mining for uranium ore originated in the late 1940's when the United States decided that it was time to cut away its dependence on imported uranium. Over the next 40 years, some 4 million tons of uranium ore would be extracted from the Navajo's territory, most of it fueling the Cold War nuclear arm's race.

Situated by colonialist policies on the very margins of U.S. society, the Navajo didn't have much choice but to seek work in the mines that started to appear following the discovery of uranium deposits on their territory. Over the years, more than 1300 uranium mines were established. When the Cold War came to an end, the mines were abandoned; but the Navajo's struggle had just begun.

Back then, few Navajo spoke enough English to be informed about the inherent dangers of uranium exposure. The book, Memories Come to Us in the Rain and the Wind: Oral Histories and Photographs of Navajo Uranium Miners and Their Families, explains how the Navajo had no word for "radiation" and were cut off from more general public knowledge through language and educational barriers, and geography.

Freak Storms and Butterfly Die-Offs: Welcome to the Future We've Been Warning You About
This is your climate on fossil fuels.

The year 2015 will go down in history, at least until next year, as the hottest year ever recorded on the planet.

By a wide margin, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2015 "shattered" global temperature records, beating out the previous hottest year (2014) easily.

Extreme weather events, fueled by anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD), continue to pile up, to the extent that they are quickly becoming normalized.

In late December 2015, a freakish oceanic storm moved into the Arctic where it pushed temperatures 50 degrees above normal, even causing melting at the North Pole in the dead of winter.

December brought wild weather events in other places too, as the UK saw its single wettest month ever recorded, with nearly double the average rainfall. That month in the UK also shattered temperature records, with an average temperature that was 4.1 degrees Celsius higher than the long-term average.

ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE IS BAD ENOUGH TO CREATE A NEW GEOLOGIC PERIOD

For over a decade, both climate activists and scientists have used one word to describe the mass-level changes humans are causing on Earth: Anthropocene. But whether or not this word actually describes a real, measurable geologic time period has been the source of major scientific debate.

Now, a new study is adding fuel to that debate, finding that human influence on the environment changed the planet so dramatically that the world recently moved into a new geological epoch. In other words, there’s scientific proof that we’re living in the Anthropocene, the study’s researchers say.

In the study, published Thursday in the journal Science, the international Anthropocene Working Group states that the man-made Anthropocene epoch is distinct and likely starts in the mid 20th century, as human influence on the planet increased dramatically when the nuclear age began.

“The paper that has just been released … is in effect saying we also think we know what level of hierarchy this [Anthropocene] unit is. We think it’s an epoch level,” said Colin Waters, co-author and secretary of the working group, in an interview with ThinkProgress. “The reason for that is the scale of the changes being every bit, if not greater than, the changes that happened in the beginning of the Holocene.”

The Deal That Brought the Colorado River Back to the Sea
For eight glorious weeks, from March 23 to May 18, 2014, the Colorado River flowed all the way to the Gulf of California, something it hasn't done regularly since the 1930s. Minute 319, a 2012 amendment to the 1944 water treaty between Mexico and the United States, allowed water from the Morelos Dam to run through a 40-mile stretch of parched riverbed to the Colorado River Delta. Scientists designed a "pulse flow" to release 105,392 acre-feet of water to mimic spring floods and "base flows," which will continue until the measure expires in 2017. The long-term goal of Minute 319 is to create a cooperative system whereby both nations can share the Colorado River for water storage and ecological restoration research. "We're never going to get back to a condition where the delta was like it was in the 1930s before the Hoover Dam went up," said Karl Flessa, a lead scientist on the binational research team. But if the project were extended to allow more flows, we could see "a whole series of narrow parks of native vegetation and native trees and native birds," he said.

1) Bird Migration

Scientists observed increased numbers of delta birds: raptors around the basin, migratory birds, and even birds normally associated with agricultural growth and urban development. Osvel Hinojosa Huerta, director of the Water and Wetlands Program at Pronatura Noroeste in Mexico and co-chair of the Minute 319 environmental flows team, is helping monitor the wildlife response to the release. "As soon as we released [the pulse flow], the river came back," Hinojosa Huerta said. "And this was in the spring, late March, so it was in the middle of the migration season." Stopover sites like the delta are critical for the survival of migrating birds, which breed as far north as Canada and Alaska and winter as far south as Central America. "The migrating birds saw this new habitat, this new opportunity for use and rest."

2) A Fairer Role for Mexico

The original 1944 water treaty stipulated an annual 1.5 million acre-feet allowance of water for Mexico, but that water had to be used immediately because Mexico didn't have much infrastructure to store water. The Minute 319 amendment provided Mexico a long-needed water storage area: Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, located on the edge of Nevada and Arizona. It is a crucial concession, especially during droughts. "The main benefit is this collaboration to prevent a water crisis," said Hinojosa Huerta. "Before Minute 319, Mexico had no participation at all in how the river was managed data-wise." Now Mexico is a partner in management of the watershed. "Minute 319's really changed the concept of how we are approaching water management." 

Europe’s Shift to Dark Green Forests Fuels Warming

An expansion of Europe's forests towards dark green conifers has stoked global warming, according to a study at odds with a widespread view that planting more trees helps human efforts to slow rising temperatures.

Forest changes have nudged Europe's summer temperatures up by 0.12°C (0.2°F) since 1750, largely because many nations have planted conifers such as pines and spruce whose dark colour traps the sun's heat, the scientists said.

Lighter-colored broad-leafed trees, such as oak or birch, reflect more sunlight back into space but have lost ground to fast-growing conifers, used for everything from building materials to pulp.

Overall, the area of Europe's forests has expanded by 10 percent since 1750.

Climate Economists React to Obama’s Proposed Oil Tax

On Thursday, President Obama dropped a surprise in his transportation plan as part of his annual budget. The plan — dubbed the 21st Century Clean Transportation System — calls for $300 billion in investments over the next decade in high speed rail, driverless cars and mass transit across the U.S.

That would cut down on carbon pollution and could help the U.S. meet its 10-year climate goal of reducing carbon emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels.

That Obama wants to reduce transportation emissions is no surprise. Twenty-seven percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to transportation, second only to electricity generation as the main source of emissions.

The surprise, though, is how he wants to pay for it. The $300 billion would come via a “fee” of $10 per a barrel of oil, phased in over five years. According to CNN, it would apply to both domestic and imported oil used in the U.S. but not exports. That translates to roughly an extra 25 cents tacked onto a gallon of gas if oil companies decided to pass the cost onto consumers.

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - I Scare Myself

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Payday Blues

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Where's the Money?

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - The Euphonious Whale

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Walkin' One And Only

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - Along comes a Viper

Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks - It's Not My Time To Go

Dan Hicks (December 9, 1941 – February 6, 2016)

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Last night I had the strangest dream. I dreamed of a wonderful place that I had visited in my youth, a place I recognized very well. A place that I knew every step of, knew the people by name, even mentioned in the dream that I had visited there in the late 60s, early 70s (those were my rambling across the country days). I knew it all very well, as if I was there only yesterday. When I awoke I could not remember actually being there, but I know that I was, it was all too very familiar. It was very strange, knowing I had been there before but not remembering when awake. Could I have actually been there but just don't remember? But what a pleasure it was visiting it again! Have you ever had that happen before?

There is an opening for doing an Open Thread, if anyone is interested in taking it.

Have a great day!!

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hecate's picture

this is a place you've been before in dreamtime, though not in waking world. I have several worldscapes I've visited, in dreams, over the decades; upon awakening, each time, they feel vividly Real, like "I" have definitely been there before, & in Real waking life. But that feeling fades the more I have to snap back into this world; this world says I've lived there "only" in "dreams."

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that is the conclusion I came to. That it was a dream that I had had many years ago that still resided in the recesses of my mind and for some reason came to the forefront now, as if I had just had the previous dream a few days ago, with worldscapes, people and names fully realized as before. The mind is a mysterious thing and I am at a lose as to why it came back to me now.

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hecate's picture

recurring dream-worldscapes are not frozen, most of them, they go on even when I'm not visiting them. So sometimes when I find myself in them, I have to catch up.

Since you say it was a 60s-70s place, there in the dream, maybe Hicks & "I Scare Myself" returned you there. In Charles Perry's fun and accurate tome The Haight-Ashbury, we learn that what became known as "the sixties" was really just some people in a neighborhood, the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, that proceeded to get loose in the world. And that, since one of the attributes of these people, in this neighborhood, was that they were not bound by ordinary conceptions of space and time, one of the very first manifestations of what they were, did not occur in the Haight-Ashbury at all, but instead in the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City in Nevada, where played the Haight band the Charlatans, with Dan Hicks first on drums, and later on rhythm guitar and vocals. That was one of the first places where people started scaring themselves. Maybe he was giving you a little wink and a nod, as he swirled on out.

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although the worldscapes had not changed the inhabitants did. In my last night dream I visited a house in a neighborhood that I very well remembered. There were some very large pleasant dogs that had resided in this house in my previous dream. The dogs were still there but the occupants of the house had changed. I asked them what had happened to the previous occupants by name and told them that I had not visited there since the late 60s/early 70s. Very strange. Perhaps it was an archetypal reference to an idyllic time that I wish had been rather than the chaotic drug induced amnesia that it was in reality, the reality in which I had indeed scared myself.

I don't remember Dan being there but I hope he is if my mind decides to revisit this dream state.

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Shahryar's picture

I could almost draw a map of this alternate place. I could name streets but they'd all have quotes around them, like "Geary St." because it's not that at all. It's a different Geary St. It goes to the ocean but the geography is different, there's a bazaar at the end of the street, several stories high that looks fairly ancient. There are hills, a "financial district", shops, apartment buildings....and I can never find my car.

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hecate's picture

long thought that if Anonymous really wanted to be useful it would do things like obtain and release the withheld Abu Ghraib material.

Releasing, and then freezing, the DoD payroll, every now and again, that would be useful, too.

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of useful things Anonymous could be doing, that is if they are not tools themselves. Queue the Twilight Zone theme music.

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hecate's picture

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http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/7/1481249/-Hillary-and-Human-Righ...

Please tip and rec. and be sure to read the article it links to in Harpers. It is brutal. Why the FBI isn't investigating the Clinton foundation instead of servers is beyond me.

If the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies do their jobs, the foundation will be closed and its current and past trustees, who include Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, will be indicted. That’s because their so-called charitable enterprise has served as a vehicle to launder money and to enrich Clinton family friends.

It is beyond dispute that former President Clinton has been directly involved in helping foundation donors and his personal cronies get rich. Even worse, it is beyond dispute that these very same donors and the Clintons’ political allies have won the focused attention of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she served as Secretary of State. Democrats and Clinton apologists will write these accusations off as conspiracy mongering and right-wing propaganda, but it’s an open secret to anyone remotely familiar with accounting and regulatory requirements for charities that the financial records are deliberately misleading. And not coincidentally, those records were long filed by a Little Rock–based accounting firm called BKD, a regional auditor with little international experience.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Clinton's servers are the shiny object that detracts from the Clinton Foundation. That would explain why the server issue was raised from what was once considered the dead. Hillary needs to get elected for reasons more than power and ego.

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boy does dk5 suck. I wonder how much he spent for what he got. Absolutely a waste of money imo. If it isn't broke, don't fix it. You have every bell and whistle dk5 has and none of the problems.

My husband is watching the football game in the same room that I am sitting. He keeps talking to and about it to himself. If only I had earplugs.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

shaharazade's picture

has no TV to tune into. He is probably following the game on the net. Yes dkos is so fucked up it's now inoperable. Might be a blessing in disguise. I despite all my good intentions have been too hooked to the dkos fake front of what's going on here politically. Maybe it's a good thing to not have the capacity to argue with cowardly idjits and assorted Rw'ers disguised as Democrat's.

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hecate's picture

is over, and so is football.

The avatar of boxing, Muhammad Ali, is physically and mentally immobile because of brain damage incurred in the "sport"; a shell of his former self. As boxing is a shell of what it once was. Back when there were little rings everywhere, and little boys everywhere were encouraged to climb into them. No more. The same is happening with football. It is no longer defensible, and no one even any more tries. It is accepted that it is a "sport" with a 100% injury rate, and every time the autopsy surgeon opens up a dead football-player's brain, there is CTE in it. At some point some avatar of the sport will publicly display himself as a CTE-destroyed stumblebum. Joe Montana is today public with the fact that he basically cannot move. His hands are so crippled with arthritis he can't sleep, he's had three neck fusions and needs another, his back is over, a knee is gone and an elbow too, a foot has been numb for two decades, and an eye floats around in his head due to brain damage. We know football is over because Mike Ditka, the fabled "Iron Man," who once had a heart attack on the sidelines and tried to wave it off, now says he would let no son of his play the game, as he watches those he played with drift into the brain-damaged fog. When he dies, he knows, they'll find CTE holes in his brain, too. Schools are canceling their football programs, and parents are reluctant to allow their children to enter them. It's finished. All that is required now, is to wait for the time to catch up.

Same with war. Now that there is no draft in the United States, and hasn't been for more than 40 years, there is no reason whatsoever why there should be a single human being in the United States military. It astounds me that there still is. There is no legitimate or even sane reason for any human being to enroll in an outfit whose sole and stated purpose is to kill people and destroy things. Eventually the US military will be down to a single, lone, lost soldier. Who can then be displayed in a museum. As Ishi once was.

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other sports are becoming suspect as well. In the early 80s I trained in the Korean martial arts, Tae Kwon Do and Hopkaido. I did the full contact thing for a while until I discovered, because of 20/200 vision in my right eye and limited peripheral vision, that I was too susceptible to a left roundhouse or left hook, so I gave it up, but not after a few good brain jarring blows. That may explain a few things about me, huh.

About the military, don't forget about robotics. Queue that Twilight Zone theme song again.

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Shahryar's picture

sports tend to become more violent when players are paid. Football is dangerous anyway, because it involves hitting. I'll just mention soccer because I played it in high school and then a very short stint on a semi-pro team. The rules change once you get beyond high school. Things that would be a penalty or even get you thrown out of a high school game are overlooked when money's on the line. I prefer the gentlemanly way of playing, where you can't just run into an opponent.

Maybe if we had professional flag football...but then that wouldn't satisfy guys in the den watching their 52 inch TV and going "oh man! that must have hurt. Haw haw!"

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mimi's picture

thanks for the list, especially for the link to the French Ukraine documentary. I know that I need to see and understand it and I will.

Just wanted to say that there is a diary on the gos The First Jewish President - By David Harris Gershon Well, I have nothing much to say about the diary, it's common sense, but wanted to say that I appreciated Don Midwest's links he posted there in several comments. Learned something from them. More than from the diary itself.

I wonder if Sanders loves that kind of support David Harris Gershon offered him with that diary. Hard to tell, after seeing this, how am I supposed to know what's going on in Sanders mind and understand this guy?
[video:https://youtu.be/YWl6TLvlFEk]

No offense to anyone, I am just a little ambivalently confused and feel ashamed about it, because I don't know why I feel that way. When I came new to the US in 1982 (mind you I never had any personal contact to Jews or Jewish culture in Germany before, because of lack of both in Germany in those days, still. I think it's different today.) I had my culture shock. Heh. It happens, but I remember being always attracted to some musicians, writers and media types in print and TV for their funny, liberal, democratic socialist leaning stuff they voiced or produced. In my mind they were closest to what I felt was more "European". It took a while to realize that those guys and gals were mainly of Jewish descent. Smile So, I like me those folks til today. Especially their wit, sharp mindedness and humanitarianism. I didn't know the couple of others, who aren't. That took more the 25 years.

Anyhow. I like the old documents proving some stuff that needs to not be forgotten.

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most of what's contained in that article has already been published, but mostly on the net and not by USAian sources, I remember seeing most of it months ago.

From the article:

Nothing like Moreira’s documentary has appeared on U.S. television or in mainstream U.S. newspapers. The dark side of the Maidan – and in particular the role of neo-Nazi groups and other violent extremists in fomenting and achieving the coup d’etat – have been discussed almost exclusively at alternative and independent outlets, mostly on the Internet.

The editorial boards of the country’s newspapers of record – The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal – ensured that newspaper columns and op-ed pages set out almost exclusively Official Washington’s narrative day after day. Opposing views were increasingly choked off, finally getting no space whatsoever in mainstream outlets.

More sunshine does not hurt however.

Am I wrong or didn't David Harris Gershon proclaim himself a Hillary supporter a few months ago?

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shaharazade's picture

and today published a dairy supporting the Brooklyn deli guy. Can't give provide a link as dkos5 has run amok. It can't connect to anything other then the FP.

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mimi's picture

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mimi's picture

still have a need to put all of it together and really understand and keep it fresh in my memory. I read WP, NYT only when others mention and link to their articles. I had my "guts feelings" from very early on about the neo-Nazi involvment, but never said so, because I felt nobody else believed it, and so I waited to see what comes out of it. I will definitely see that documentary. It's good for me.

Yes, I think David Harris Gershon is a more center right democrat leaning person, and as such a Clinton supporter, but it's interesting to watch how he reconciles his diverging loyalties.

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hecate's picture

fun things about having Sanders as president would be watching him make the ritual walk across Lafayette Square to St. John's Church, and then seeing the place burst into flames as he enters.

On why he believes it is unwisdom to abjure electoral politics: "An election in 1932 ended up killing fifty million people around the world."

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Listen. Can you hear it?

For many market watchers, a confluence of factors - led by oil, but encompassing China, the emerging world, and financial markets - are all brewing to create a perfect storm in a global economy that has barely come to terms with the Great Recession.

“We are in a very unusual situation where market sentiment is of a different nature to anything we’ve seen before,” says Thygesen.

Unlike previous pre-recessionary eras, the current sell-off has seen commodity prices, equities and credit conditions all move in dangerous lockstep.
..
“China’s growth is probably less than officially reported. Russia and Brazil are doing very badly. South Africa is flirting with recession. Even India may not be doing as well as was forecast,” says Blanchard, who left the Fund after seven years late last year.

Spreads on high yield US energy corporates have soared to unprecedented highs. “They make Lehman look like a walk in the park” says Thygesen.

More than a third of the entire US high yield bond index is now vulnerable to crude prices remaining low or falling even further, according to calculations from Oxford Economics.
As a result, 2016 is set to see the first wave of corporate bankruptcies in the oil and gas sector. Highly leveraged US shale companies will be the first be picked off. Should escalating defaults have a further depressant effect on oil prices, it could unleash a tidal wave of corporate bankruptcies in the world’s largest economy.

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hecate's picture

a-00-dam.gif

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lotlizard's picture

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