War Withdrawal, Collude, Cap Riot, Trump the Ripper, Sydney Unreasoned

Shamelessly stolen from She Who Seeks:

  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger goes to Afghanistan (figuratively) right to the the point of greatest success, after which nothing has been accomplished: Which is why we should leave ASAP.
     
  • In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reviews President Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan as what she suggests is an aggressive, forward thinking, strategy against terrorism and cyber attacks. Biden, she says, seems to be fighting the wars of the next 20 years instead of war as it was fought in the last 20.
     
  • Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, is happy that the record is now unambiguous. The degree of certitude on Russian behind-the-curtain manipulation to get Trump installed in 2016 has graduated from reasonable speculation and obvious conclusion to established fact, even though that is unlikely to sway a political party that, as reported by Tucker, sees Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a documentary.
     
  • Those of us who watch idealized police procedural television shows can tell you that criminal conspiracies are most vulnerable at the seams. Plotters eventually compete for the best plea deals. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit watches fiction turn to reality as the first of January’s big, bold, lethal insurrectionists becomes a springtime canary. That one should be the first of a growing number, as more are primed to push each other aside in a mad rush to take positions in the great right wing circular firing squad. Ready, aim, witness protection.Interestingly, those who are not talking don’t know who is. So suspicion, anger, and fear in the ranks is producing more stress.
     
  • Dave Dubya reminds us of last week’s startlement (is too a word) as last year’s Trump donors discover that the campaign has been raiding their bank accounts, giving a whole new meaning to Stop the Steal.
     
  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara defends the right of social media platforms to ban Citizen Trump for violating their guidelines and to decline to prohibit documented falsehoods. They are private organizations and are not obligated to act as public utilities.I’m not familiar enough with libertarian nuances to know what Michael feels about defamation laws. If we accept as a premise that those who are harmed have a right to sue, then should platforms that decline to prohibit harmful falsehoods be made legally vulnerable as well?
     
  • Trump supporter and sometime conspiracy aficionado Sydney Powell is being sued for billions of fists full of dollars for falsely charging a voting machine company with stealing the election from rightful president Donald Trump. The Propaganda Professor takes a look at her legal defense, that no reasonable person could have believed her weird accusations and why the defense is a logical absurdity.I share a lowbrow common reaction. There is a certain twisted irony in her my-followers-are-dumb-as-a-rock defense.
     
  • First Delta Airlines, then Coca Cola are attacking the Georgia’s wild new voter suppression law. Then hundreds of corporations condemn the voter chokeholds, and previously planned movie productions leave the state. Andy Borowitz brings us the latest as the City of Atlanta pulls out of Georgia. Okay, now stop, just STOP tapping that keyboard! I already know it’s satire.
     
  • Green Eagle is stunned that Republicans are now attacking (are you serious) baseball? Really? Green Eagle speculates on what revered icon might be next.Really?
    Baseball?
     
  • nojo has insight about the main reason democracy is a dangerous idea.

  • Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson writes movingly about the death of a university professor who fought a great battle for conservative freedom of speech, eventually winning in a victory for academic freedom.
     
    As I happen to be superficially aware of the controversy, I can point out that James is incorrect on pretty much all counts.
     


     

  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, former pastor, current atheist Bruce gets a loopy sort of warning that he’d better believe again.
     
  • driftglass has a creative way of summarizing what I think of as the exclusionary rule of Christian dogma.
     
  • Can we agree that racism is a moral wrong? Can we also agree that a House of Worship must advocate for some standard of morality? North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has a simple suggestion. If your church has nothing to say against racism it is time to look for another place to worship.
     
  • In Scotties Toy Box Scottie illustrates white privilege with guns and cars.
     
  • Tommy Christopher covers the controversy as a Newsmax reporter tries hard to get President Biden to fire US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, because we simply cannot, cannot, have a Black US official talk about racism in US history, now can we?“…so does the president think our founding documents are racist?” asks indignant Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson, who is shocked that anyone would think there is, or has ever been, racism in America.

     

  • Glenn Geist, in MadMikesAmerica, has some fun with Tucker’s White Nationalist replacement theory (some immigrants are a threat to our European cultural – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – heritage), wondering how Tucker would have reacted to the sinking of the Titanic. You know, those undesirables locked in steerage. He then takes a brief look at Tucker’s own uh, cultural heritage. Quite a bit for 4 short paragraphs and a brief footnote.
     
  • PZ Myers wonders about the newest attempt at caucusing by Republicans in Congress. The America First Caucus will be dedicated to Anglo-Saxon traditions and European architecture. Sounds a lot like Professor Myers has the right label for it: The racists/fascists/white supremacist caucus.I dunno. For 600 years or so after Rome fell, European architecture was mostly thatched roof lean-to style. Kind of like tents without the fabric, inexpensive nylon not having been invented.

    And Anglo Saxon tradition, beginning almost a thousand years ago in 1066, has been all about getting the sand kicked out of them in the Battle of Hastings by Norman invaders from France who have stomped them into the ground and ruled Britain and Wales ever since, putting the A-S population through starvation, oppression, and various forms of discrimination that persist to this day. In the decades following William the Conqueror’s conquering, some historians estimate about 1 in 6 Saxons died horribly from Norman imposed starvation.

    Not a tradition I’d like to repeat.

    Seems like all that tradition and architecture nonsense is wafer-thin euphemism for prospective white-folks-only immigration and voting rights policies. Tucker Carlson having permuted into legislative action. Just wild speculation on my part, you understand.
     

  • Imani Gandy at Rewire News Group takes aim at Texas lawmakers who are considering a handful of truly horrific anti-trans proposals.
     
  • Daunte Wright ought to be alive. He was stopped for a minor offense. He was then arrested for an outstanding warrant on a minor charge. He resisted, a police officer tried to taze him but instead put a bullet into his chest, ending his life. End of story, right?CalicoJack in The Psy of Life goes into common mental processes that might have kicked in at each step, making the indefensible incident at least understandable.
     
  • Well, conservatives (some) do blame the victims for those videoed police shootings that seem unreasonable to the casual lay observer. At The Onion, authorities tackle the problem directly, with more and better instruction. At last, some reality. Police encounters will become much safer with a better prepared, more highly trained, urban population who will have learned how to deal with the emotionally agitated authorities who are assigned to protect them.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice Lacey Wallace, an Associate professor at Penn State, asks if America is in the middle of an epidemic of mass shootings. Professor Wallace says we are not.
     
  • Frances Langum helps mean Jimmy Kimmel get mean with a mean former wrestling coach now US Senator who gets mean with Anthony Fauci, who is about as kindly as a gentle person can get.
     
  • Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez, who has become a bit of an expert on the issue, discusses the debate about vaccination passports and what everyone seems to overlook. The issue should really be seen as two issues. Okay, maybe three.
     
  • Iron Knee at Political Irony wonders why registering for a vaccine hasn’t been a whole lot easier and suggests a possible answer.
     
  • Feel discouraged enough yet? Well hold on to the railing. Infidel753 can bring you back up, with a review of an intense study by Swedish doctor and medical researcher Hans Rosling. Rosling demonstrates that most of what we think about the world is totally backed up by data, if the data is restricted to about 1965. Hans looks at death rates, birth rates, health care, infant mortality, poverty levels, income, literacy, female education, and on and on and discovers that each category is dominated by accelerating trends in positive direction. Humanity is on an under-reported upswing.If this keeps up, each of us may indeed take comfort, as we depart this mortal coil, knowing that we leave a much better world for Betty White.
     
  • Reductress looks to the semi-bright side of life with 4 (or maybe 3, but who’s counting?) affirmations that you will find uplifting until your mom blows it all away with one comment.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen goes poetic with a deeply caring poem about not caring: A retelling of a refalling of Icarus.
     
  • James O’Keefe is a sometime guest at conservative enclaves and on occasional television programs. He is famous for deceptively edited videos that have, in the past, damaged innocent folks, but are now typically laughed off by his targets. At News Corpse, Mark reviews the latest O’Keefe expose, in which a minor technical person at CNN is interviewed. O’Keefe promises that, this time, the scandal will have CNN executives “shaking in their boots.” Mark reviews the videos (there are two) and speculates that whatever boots CNN executives may be wearing these days are entirely unshaken.
     
  • They put one of ours in the hospital, we put one of theirs in the morgue. That’s the Chicago way. M. Bouffant, at Web of Evil, goes global war when he gets warped by a cell phone battery. You think Chicago is tough? You warp my battery, I’ll rip your company to pieces, then make your entire country glow in the dark. That’s the LA way.For God’s sake, get this individual a replacement cell phone!
     
  • I suppose it’s worth reviewing the world’s record in the category of bad, really, really bad, reporting. Hackwhackers goes back more than a century and a half as “Not-so-bright correspondent Lawrence Gobright”, writing for Associated Press, happens to mention, paragraphs into his report on a play in Ford’s theatre, that oh-by-the-way President Lincoln has been assassinated.
     
  • Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes recalls his not-quite-hippie days in an is-NOT-a-commune surrounding a couple of geodesic domes. Decades later, he is bored to tears re-reading a few books by R. Buckminster Fuller, tomes he recently discovered from his life back then.
     
  • Sarah Cooper has a prayer we can all understand about overcoming shame.
     
  • tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors brings us the heartwarming story of Coco-chan, the wonderful cat who notified authorities, saving the life of an elderly man in distress. tengrain covers the police ceremony honoring him, and Coco-chan’s gracious reaction.
     
  • Ant Farmer’s Almanac goes all dictionarium with a new definition of a word that might increase your vocabularium.Actually, I’m slightly irritated. It seems unfair to force an elderly refugee from the Truman years to look stuff up.
     
  • John Scalzi at Whatever holds up for viewing his still-in-repair 6 necked hydra monster of a guitar. Interesting in a grotesque sort of way. Wonder how it plays.
     
  • The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study by a British research group into whether physical attractiveness influences academic success in the field of economics.

– Podcasts –

3 thoughts on “War Withdrawal, Collude, Cap Riot, Trump the Ripper, Sydney Unreasoned”

  1. Anglo-Saxon traditions include the rule of law, accepting the results of elections even when you don’t like them, and a subtle sense of humor — things conspicuously lacking in contemporary American right-wingnuts. Please don’t insult my ancestral culture just because a few stupid hicks who don’t know jack about it choose to hijack the name.

  2. So “Anglo-Saxon tradition” is the new code for white nationalism.

    “Western Civilization” wore out its value after the Oath Keepers swore to defend it, and Proud Boys swore an oath to not apologize for it.

    “I am a Western Chauvinist
    And I refuse to apologize
    For creating the modern world.”

    Funny how “equality” and “democracy” are never their traditions or values.

    1. Such assholes are completely irrelevant to Western civilization. They can no more re-define it or affect what it means than a headlouse can re-define the law of gravity. Equality and democracy are part of its traditions, and the fact that such people don’t recognize that proves only that they are full of shit.

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