June 14, 2016

Fully Loaded: Inside the shadowy world of America's 10 biggest gunmakers

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/04/fully-loaded-ten-biggest-gun-manufacturers-america

This is a long investigative piece- the type of journalism we need more of.

June 14, 2016

I will always be a *Bernie supporter, but Donald Trump is my enemy.

There's no need to demonize tRump. He does it himself and other people, like Ken Burns, critique him far better than I ever could.

Hillary Clinton or Donald tRump. That's what it comes down to for me.

Others certainly have the right to disagree that he poses such a great threat that he must be defeated. I don't and won't disrespect that choice, but I sure as hell will disagree.

He's a fucking insane little fascist. And he's dangerous as hell.

*Of course I'll always be a Bernie supporter. He's my Senator.


The last verse of Stephen Vincent Benet's "Litany for Dictatorships"- which has been on my mind a lot lately.


We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.

Our children know and suffer the armed men.

June 14, 2016

Whether you support HRC or not, the right's attacks on Huma Abedin

are despicable. And they are ramping them up in the wake of Orlando.

Roger Stone, an informal adviser and confidant to Donald Trump, appeared this morning on “Breitbart News Daily,” where he accused Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin of potentially being a spy for Saudi Arabia and radical Islamist groups.

“Now that Islamic terrorism is going to be front and center, there’s going to be a new focus on whether this administration, the administration of Hillary Clinton at State, was permeated at the highest levels by Saudi intelligence and others who are not loyal Americans,” he said. “I speak specifically of Huma Abedin.”

Stone said that Abedin, who has been the target of several far-right conspiracy theories, comes from a family of “hardcore Islamic ideologues” and “has a very troubling past, she comes out of nowhere.”

“We have to ask: Do we have a Saudi spy in our midst? Do we have a terrorist agent?” he added.

<snip>

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/trump-ally-roger-stone-calls-huma-abedin-terrorist-agent

June 14, 2016

Donald Trump is a fucking fascist. Here's a poem for him, a reminder for us

Litany for Dictatorships

A poem by Stephen Vincent Benet


For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time…

For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten
By the skillful boys with the rubber fists,
-Held down and beaten, the table cutting the loins
Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking
Like a headless hen's on the floor of the slaughter-house
While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.
For those who still said "Red Front" or "God save the Crown!"
And for those who were not courageous
But were beaten nevertheless.
For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth
Quietly in the hall,
Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time
And kill the guard in the privy before they die,
Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.

For those who carry the scars, who walk lame - for those
Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard
And the earth smoothed back before the morning and the lime scattered.

For those slain at once.
For those living through the months and years
Enduring, watching, hoping, going each day
To the work or the queue for meat or the secret club,
Living meanwhile, begetting children, smuggling guns,
And found and killed at the end like rats in a drain.

For those escaping
Incredibly into exile and wandering there.
For those who live in the small rooms of foreign cities
And who yet think of the country, the long green grass,
The childhood voices, the language, the way wind smelt then,
The shape of rooms, the coffee drunk at the table,
The talk with friends, the loved city, the waiter's face,
The gravestones, with the name, where they will not lie
Nor in any of that earth.
Their children are strangers.

For those who planned and were leaders and were beaten
And for those, humble and stupid, who had no plan
But were denounced, but were angry, but told a joke,
But could not explain, but were sent away to the camp,
But had their bodies shipped back in the sealed coffins,
"Died of pneumonia." "Died trying to escape."

For those growers of wheat who were shot by their own wheat-stacks,
For those growers of bread who were sent to the ice-locked wastes.
And their flesh remembers the fields.

For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
For all those strangled, gelded or merely starved
To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,
The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,
The revolutionist lynched by the private guards
To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.

For those betrayed by the neigbours they shook hands with
And for the traitors, sitting in the hard chair
With the loose sweat crawling their hair and their fingers restless
As they tell the street and the house and the man's name.
And for those sitting at the table in the house
With the lamp lit and the plates and the smell of food,
Talking so quietly; when they hear the cars
And the knock at the door, and they look at each other quickly
And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face,
Smoothing her dress.
"We are all good citizens here. We believe in the Perfect State."

And that was the last time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house
And the family was liquidated later.
It was the last time.
We heard the shots in the night
But nobody knew next day what the trouble was
And a man must go to his work.
So I didn't see him
For three days, then, and me near out of my mind
And all the patrols on the streets with their dirty guns
And when he came back, he looked drunk, and the blood was on him.

For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night,
For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children,
The children spat-on at school.
For the wrecked laboratory,
The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well
The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square
And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.

For the cold of the pistol-butt and the bullet's heat,
For the ropes that choke, the manacles that bind,
The huge voice, metal, that lies from a thousand tubes
And the stuttering machine-gun that answers all.

For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns
Without name, without ressurection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons - John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody - oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth.

Our children know and suffer the armed men.

June 14, 2016

"Paris Stands With Orlando": The Eiffel Tower

?quality=75&strip=color&w=1680

http://time.com/4367679/orlando-shooting-eiffel-tower-solidarity-lit-up/

June 14, 2016

Gentlemen: Courage is not a masculine attribute

Cowardice is not a feminine one.

And yet, many, many men can't seem to indicate courage or cowardice without assigning a gender to both.


I'm not one for censoring language, but for fuck's sake, think about what it says about your own bias when you equate courage to having a dangly pair between your legs and what it says when you equate cowardice to having female genitalia.

June 14, 2016

There are a myriad of trump theories. I like this one: "he's lost the plot".

Ever since he became the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump has shrugged off the complexities of appealing to a general-election constituency as irrelevant to a man possessed of political invincibility. When his supporters started becoming unglued last week amid his heedless campaign of racial incitement against a Latino judge overseeing Trump University fraud litigation, Trump instructed them to chill out.

“I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is,” he told them, according to multiple Bloomberg News sources.

One of Trump’s most Trump-like surrogates, Carl Paladino, explained the Trump victory strategy like so: “My instruction from HQ is really simple. It’s one word: Win. And that’s what we intend to do.” That “winning” isn’t really a strategy is almost as important a caveat as the fact that Paladino is talking about New York, one of many blue states (including Maryland and California) that Trump apparently hallucinates about winning.

As Trump closed in on the magic delegate threshold this spring, continuing to be spectacularly unfazed by evidence that he is extremely unpopular outside of the Republican primary electorate, it became tempting to imagine that his entire campaign was an elaborate scheme or work of performance art—an initiative undertaken by someone who never intended to win the primary, let alone the presidency. That certainly fits the facts better than conceiving of Trump as someone with a sophisticated plan for reaching the summa of global politics.


<snip>

https://newrepublic.com/article/134183/donald-trump-lost-plot

June 13, 2016

Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting

"Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind," Trump said in a lengthy interview on Fox News early Monday morning. "And the something else in mind -- you know, people can't believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can't even mention the words 'radical Islamic terrorism.' There's something going on. It's inconceivable. There's something going on."

In that same interview, Trump was asked to explain why he called for Obama to resign in light of the shooting and he answered, in part: "He doesn't get it or he gets it better than anybody understands -- it's one or the other and either one is unacceptable."

For months, Trump has slyly suggested that the president is not Christian and has questioned his compassion toward Muslims. Years ago, Trump was a major force in calls for the president to release his birth certificate and prove that he was born in the United States. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly stated as fact conspiracy theories about the president, his rivals and Muslims, often refusing to back down from his assertions even when they are proven to be false.

During an appearance on the "Today" show later Monday morning, Savannah Guthrie pushed Trump to explain what he meant in the earlier interview.

More:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/13/donald-trump-suggests-president-obama-was-involved-with-orlando-shooting/?tid=sm_tw
















June 13, 2016

I want to forget Mateen. Forget he ever drew breath. And remember and honor

those who died.

Here's one: His name was Edward Sotomayor, Jr. He was 34. He was a travel agent. He evidently had a great sense of fun and loved top hats.

?w=938


I know it's not possible to forget Mateen, but I believe his victims deserve more attention than he does.

My deepest sympathies go out Mr. Sotomayor's family and friends.

<snip>

Ferguson described Sotomayor as among the best-known figures in the gay travel industry, as national coordinator for the "Drag Stars at Sea" cruise, which featured stars of the popular reality TV show "RuPaul's Drag Race."

"He had traveled to so many places in the world," Ferguson said. "He loved travel."

Sotomayor was keenly aware of the dangers facing gay travelers, and of prior incidents of mass violence like the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, Ferguson said.

But he never let fear stop his adventures.

"What I will say, over and over again, was he was a person who said, 'We cannot be afraid,'" said Ferguson. "I know his friends are going to be the exact same way… we are not going to be afraid."

<snip>

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/pulse-orlando-nightclub-shooting/victims/os-orlando-mass-shooting-edward-sotomayor-20160612-story.html

June 12, 2016

It's really, really hard to talk about radical Islamic terrorism

Those engaging in it are a tiny, tiny minority of Muslims. Those supporting it, although a larger group are still a small minority. There are something like 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. I fear the demonization of Muslims that could lead to horrific attacks on innocent people. But that doesn't mean that it isn't a real problem. So how to address it?

Is there anything currently analogous within any other major religion? No, there really isn't it. So much of it seems to me to be blowback related. I'm not excusing it, but that's a big factor. U.S. and western interference and actions in the Mideast and other Muslim nations have created the perfect environment for the fomentation of hate and violent lashing out/back. Catering to Saudi Arabia, overthrowing Mossadegh- it's a long sad list of Western imperialism.

But- and here comes the part which may anger many of you- the false equivalency between Xian extremism and Radical Islam, is wrong headed. I understand the impulse to protect the majority of Muslims who are in no way culpable, but it just doesn't logically work. Of course there are Christians who are hateful and violent, but the scale is quite different, and it's not just quantitative.

Every ISIS atrocity I hear of (and I'm not saying Orlando was such an incident), I can't help but think of the Kuwait baby incubator propaganda story, but times are different in this era of social media and we know many of the atrocities we hear about are fact, not propaganda.

Radical Islam is well established within several societies and protected by powerful leaders in several countries. Western actions to reduce it have backfired time after time, actually increasing it.

Pretending that Radical Islamic terrorism isn't any greater a threat than other forms of terrorism currently extant, makes it difficult to discuss it.

Obviously, those primarily to blame are the people actually carrying out horrific attacks, but for decade upon decade, Western Powers and particularly the U.S. have been responsible for creating conditions that foster the twisted philosophy of Radical violent Islamic groups.

I feel a bit guilty just writing this. Hell, if I were Muslim I'm sure I'd feel defensive as hell, and I want to reiterate that I know that it's only a tiny minority of Muslims who are actively involved or associated with groups like ISIS.