W. Niederhut

I'm re-printing this article from this evening's WaPo for non-subscribers. Good for some laughs. 🤪 Worried by Florida’s history standards? Check out its new dictionary!By Alexandra Petri July 28, 2023 Well, it’s a week with a Thursday in it, and Florida is, once again, revising its educational standards in alarming ways. Not content with removing books from shelves, or demanding that the College Board water down its AP African American studies curriculum, the state’s newest history standards include lessons suggesting that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit.” This trend appears likely to continue. What follows is a preview of the latest edition of the dictionary to be approved in Florida.Aah: (exclamation) Normal thing to say when you enter the water at the beach, which is over 100 degrees.Abolitionists: (noun) Some people in the 19th century who were inexplicably upset about a wonderful free surprise job training program. Today they want to end prisons for equally unclear reasons. Abortion: (noun) Something that male state legislators (the foremost experts on this subject) believe no one ever wants under any circumstances, probably; decision that people beg the state to make for them and about which doctors beg for as little involvement as possible. American history: (noun) A branch of learning that concerns a ceaseless parade of triumphs and contains nothing to feel bad about.Barbie: (noun) Feminist demon enemy of the state.Biden, Joe: (figure) Illegitimate president.Black history: (entry not found)Blacksmith: (noun) A great job and one that enslaved people might have had. Example sentence from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”Book ban: (noun) Effective way of making sure people never have certain sorts of ideas.Censorship: (noun) When other people get mad about something you’ve said. Not to be confused with when you remove books from libraries or the state tells colleges what can and can’t be said in classrooms (both fine).Child: (noun) Useful laborer with tiny hands; alternatively, someone whose reading cannot be censored enough.Christian nationalism: (noun) Certainly constitutional; probably what the Founding Fathers would have preferred!Classified: (adjective) The government’s way of saying a paper is especially interesting and you ought to have it in your house.Climate change: (noun) Conspiracy by scientists to change all the thermometers, fill the air with smoke and then blame us.Cocaine: (noun) A substance discovered in the White House; the only fit subject for news cycles.Constitution: (noun) A document that can be interpreted only by Trump-appointed and/or Federalist Society judges. If the Constitution appears to prohibit something that you want to do, take the judge on a boat and try again.Coral: (noun) Superfluous refuge for fish, others who have failed to adapt to life on land.DeSantis, Ron: (figure) Governor who represents the ideal human being. Pronunciation varies.Disney: (noun) A corporation, but not the good kind.DOJ: (noun) Schrodinger’s legal entity that is both good and evil simultaneously, used for investigating legitimate country-shaking crimes (Hunter Biden possessing a firearm) and conducting illegal raids (Donald Trump kindly opening his home to some classified documents).Election: (noun) Binding if Republicans win; otherwise, needs help from election officials who will figure out where the fraud was that prevented the election from reflecting the will of the people (that Republicans win).Elector: (noun) Someone Mike Pence should or should not have accepted, depending.Emancipation Proclamation: (noun) Classic example of government overreach.Firearm: (noun) Wonderful, beautiful object that every person ought to have six of, except Hunter Biden.Florida: God’s paradise on Earth; sometimes Ohio; see “The Courage to Be Free”! All parts of the country at once. Real estate here will only get more valuable.FOX: News.Free speech: (noun) When you shut up and I talk.Gun violence: (noun) Simple, unalterable fact of life, like death but unlike taxes.Alexandra Petri: We will stop at nothing to protect the childrenImmigration: (noun) When someone leaves their country of origin to seek a better life elsewhere; huge insult to the receiving country, to be prevented at all costs.Independence Day: See Jan. 6.Jan. 6: (noun) A day when some beautiful, beloved people took a nice, uneventful tour of the U.S. Capitol.King Jr., Martin Luther: (figure) A man who, as far as we can discern, uttered only one famous quotation ever and it was about how actually anytime you tried to suggest that people were being treated differently based on skin color you were the real racist. Sample sentence: “Dr. King would be enraged at the existence of Black History Month.”Liberty: (noun) My freedom to choose what you can read (see Moms for Liberty).Moms for Liberty: (noun) Censors, but the good kind.Nature: (noun) Something it is okay to boil, probably. Like soup.Orca: (noun) Enemy of the state, vessels.Orwellian: (adjective) When people are mad about a book written by Josh Hawley or another Republican, not when people try to erase slavery from history.Pregnant (adjective): The state of being a vessel containing a Future Citizen; do not say “pregnant person”; no one who is a real person can get pregnant.Queer: (entry not found)Refugee: (noun) Someone who should have stayed put and waited for help to come.Slavery: (noun) We didn’t invent it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it was a free job training program.Supreme Court: (noun) Wonderful group of mostly men without whom no journey by private plane or yacht is complete.Trans: (entry not found)United States: (noun) Perfect place, no notes.Unfree: (adjective) The best way for thought and people to be.

It seems kind of odd that an incumbent President would be in charge of which challengers get Secret Service protection. Talk about a conflict of interest! As for the mods moving this thread, it seems quite appropriate, Ben. It's not about the JFK assassination.

A number of Presidents haven't been so pacific. Reagan invaded Grenada after the Beirut barracks bombing. GHWB invaded Panama, then launched the Persian Gulf War, after giving Saddam Hussein mixed signals about annexing Kuwait. Dubya Bush launched the carpet bombing of Afghanistan after 9/11, then invaded Iraq. I think the issue here with Biden is, why isn't he talking to Putin and endeavoring to end the violence in Ukraine? On the contrary, Biden continues to taunt Putin, while escalating support for the faltering reconquista. IMO, Biden and Zelensky should be trying to negotiate an end to the bloody war-- letting Putin have Crimea and a Donbas corridor.

It's like something from a Coen brothers movie... After the government subpoenaed the Mar-a-Lago security cam footage, Trump tells his maintenance guy, Olveira, to delete the footage.Olveira then tells his IT guy, Traveras, to erase the footage.Traveras says, "I don't think we can do that, can we?"Olveira says, "The Boss wants it erased."Then Olveira drains a swimming pool to flood a storage closet containing the security cam data.But the data was, apparently, salvaged.

RFK Jr. is tanking among Democrats, rising among Republicans: poll | Business Insider India

Good history article today about how the state of Florida undermined the "benefits" of slavery for their freedmen with their brutal 1865 Black Codes. www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/07/slavery-beneficial-skills-florida-ron-desantis-stop-woke-black-codes/

Most Putin apologists around here have completely ignored the longstanding Aleksander Dugin blueprint (from 1997) for Russia to annex Ukraine-- even after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. It's bizarre. The Kremlin narrative blaming NATO for Putin's goal and efforts to annex Ukraine has been deeply embedded in the world media. Even Putin's illegal annexation of Crimea was blamed on the West by Kremlin propagandists working in Western Europe and North America.

So true. Yet, most Americans are clueless about LBJ's perversity and sociopathy. The man covered his tracks very well in the mainstream media.

Damn. Every time we get to the nitty gritty on these threads, they get banished to the "discussion" forum.

My daughter would have been mortified to attend the Barbie movie with an old Boomer like me. (She does a hilarious impersonation of Boomers, based mainly on phrases I use around the house.) Instead, she dressed up like Barbie and went to see the film with some girlfriends.

Yes, John, this is the thanks we get for trying so diligently to exacerbate our irrelevance. At least Seamus still loves you, and our little Pomeranian still follows me around, when she's hungry... 🤥

I would like to hear RFK, Jr.'s opinions about; 1) Putin's missile attacks on Ukrainian civilian targets since February of 2022, 2) Putin's recent drone attacks on Ukrainian grain warehouses-- and how that might impact several nations dependent on Ukrainian grain. Perhaps he can "school" us.

Ain't it the truth? I have joked that a person can drive all day in Texas and still be in Texas-- but I think I unintentionally stole that line from Jack Kerouac's book, On the Road.

FWIW, Paul Rigby's source here, Tyler Durden, is a pseudonym for a Bulgarian emigre named Daniel Ivanjiiski. His father was some sort of Soviet/Bulgarian apparatchik in Sofia, where Daniel was born. He was banned by the SEC for some sort of investment banking fraudulence, before starting his Zero Hedge website. He has been accused of peddling Kremlin propaganda, but has, reportedly, denied the allegation. U.S. Accuses Zero Hedge of Spreading Russian Propaganda - Bloomberg

Very interesting, Leslie. I had no idea that Albarelli consulted on Wormwood, and had detailed knowledge about Frank Olson's killers. If I recall correctly, the film did not identify the killers, but did claim that the CIA had thrown Olson out of the window.

Kirk, On the contrary, I recently agreed with John Cotter that he and I have been "exacerbating our mutual irrelevance." My only "follower" nowadays is our little black Pomeranian. (Winston Churchill and I have both had a little black dog.) And I think John's only follower is his cat, Seamus... 🤥

This is the most honest Mitch McConnell press conference I've ever seen-- certainly less disingenuous than his last re-election victory speech, in which he took credit for establishing Obamacare in Kentucky... 🤥 On a serious note, however, something is seriously wrong with the Senate minority leader.

Leslie, I watched Erroll Morris's Wormwood documentary with great interest a few years ago, and I thought the conclusion was that two CIA-affiliated hit men had thrown Frank Olson out of the window. I do vaguely recall Sy Hersh refusing to name his sources.

"Incandescently stupid": Former DHS official says he had to "dumb" down classified memos for Trump www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/incandescently-stupid-former-dhs-official-says-he-had-to-dumb-down-classified-memos-for-trump/ar-AA1eo7P8?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=11cd2bfa52094a04b266206d59d4ea05&ei=13July 26, 2023Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump, shared how he often had to oversimply national security reports for the former president."This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can't read. The man doesn't read. We've gotta boil this down into a one-pager in his voice," Taylor told podcast host Brett Meiselas on Tuesday. "And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like, 'Afghanistan, How to Put America First and Win.' And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand," Taylor added. "I mean, I literally said in there, 'You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals.' I mean, it was that dumb and that's how you had to talk to him."

Perhaps. Literary fiction is one of my favorite genres. But what I was referring to, more specifically, is your erroneous concept of the relationship between Big Oil, corporate plutocracy, and America's political parties. (See graph below.) As an example, Republicans in the U.S. have repeatedly cut taxes for the wealthy during the past 40 years-- espousing Milton Friedman's "Trickle Down" economic theories. Democrats have opposed Trickle Down, while advocating Keynesian approaches to economic stimulus during recessions (e.g., Obama's 2009 Stimulus Recovery Act.) It is true that both parties have been corrupted by the quest for funding, but it is the Republicans who wiped out a century of campaign finance reforms and put elected offices up for sale to the highest Dark Money donors with their Citizens United SCOTUS ruling.

I notice that Sidney Gottlieb is listed with the FBI group on this chart. But, according to Stephen Kinzer, Gottlieb's Operation MK-Ultra was managed by Richard Helms and the CIA, and also closely associated with Fort Dietrick.

Yeah, Ron, I've been following the catastrophic climate news closely this summer, because my sister lives in the Sonora Desert near Tucson. Obviously, catastrophic climate change is here. It's extremely depressing-- including the current fires on the Greek islands of Rhodes and Corfu, which I have visited in happier times.

Geez, John, as usual, you missed the point. Like American MAGAts, you have an inaccurate, delusional understanding of basic 21st century American politics. For starters, you should try reading Duke University historian Nancy MacLean's book, Democracy in Chains. Amazon.com: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America: 9781101980972: MacLean, Nancy: Books

Pamela, The Beatles first trip to the U.S. was on February 7, 1964. Your November 18, 1963 news clip (above) was, apparently, the first time the Beatles were mentioned on U.S. television, after returning to Heathrow from a Swedish tour.

Putin has, allegedly, been attacking grain warehouses in Ukrainian ports. Does this constitute a crime against humanity, since it may result in regional famines?