The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[Douglas Caddy]

The state attorneys general of Texas, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Louisiana, S. Carolina, Utah, W. Virginia filed an amicus brief favoring Trump with the eleventh circuit court of appeals. They like pro-trump Judge Cannon now look asinine as the circuit court in its decision shot down all their contentions as well as repudiating Judge Cannon who is now in Judicial purgatory.

[Douglas Caddy]

Great article with documents showing

 

Column: The saga of DeSantis' migrant flights gets uglier (msn.com)

[Steve Thomas]

5 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

I think we are going to see big changes in Russia this next week.

People are being snatched off the street, loaded on buses and sent off to the front lines. Putin is emptying out his prisons and sending the convicts off to war. Russia doesn't have the food or weapons or winter clothing to logistically supply 300,000 new conscripts. Now the Russian people are facing the prospect of nuclear annihilation if Putin launches nuclear weapons. The airports are crowded with people desperate to get out.

This reminds me so much of what Russia looked like at the end of WWI. It looks like 1917 all over again.

Steve Thomas

Russian Panic Spirals With Arson Attacks, Street Fights, and Manhunts

The Kremlin is struggling to control the sheer chaos sweeping Russia a day after Vladimir Putin announced mass war mobilization.

By Allison Quinn Sep. 22, 2022

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-panic-over-war-mobilization-spirals-with-arson-streets-fights-and-manhunts?ref=home?ref=home

Steve Thomas

[Matt Allison]

3 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

The Kremlin is struggling to control the sheer chaos sweeping Russia a day after Vladimir Putin announced mass war mobilization.

Yep, the countdown begins...

[Ron Bulman]

Man, this guy screwed up.  He should have gone home, sobered up and called the FBI in the morning.  If he feared the possibility the kid's republican extremist friends might come to his house that night, he still should have gone home then called the FBI hotline (to document it) then the local police, drunk or not.  I have to wonder about the source as I'm not familiar with the NY Daily News and the last line credits it to Fox News.  Mowed down could be an attention seeking article title.

North Dakota man tells police he mowed down teen who was part of ‘Republican extremist group’ (msn.com) 

Edited September 23, 2022 by Ron Bulman

[John Cotter]

10 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

John,

     I'm no apologist for post-WWII U.S. imperialism, and I understand your point about Manicheanism in U.S. foreign policy-- going back to the Cold War era of Allen and John Foster Dulles-- but I also think that some people are overlooking what is truly evil about Vladimir Putin and his totalitarian police state in the modern Russian Federation.

    We all wanted to believe that Putin was some sort of enlightened despot, and even a "convert" from atheistic Stalinism to Russian Orthodoxy.

     I first realized that it was all a facade in 2007, after Putin and the FSB seized our ROCOR in Western Europe and the U.S.-- through an internal political coup, not entirely bloodless -- in order to use what was left of the Russian Orthodox Church (after 1917) as a mere tool of Putin's police state.  How cynical was that?  It was the same thing that the Bolsheviks had done to the ROC in Russia after 1917.  At the time (2007) Putin even told ITASS that "religion is one of Russia's most important weapons of self defense!"

    IMO, Putin is a KGB apparatchik at heart.  He's, obviously, not a communist, but he has certainly admired and used Stalin's methods to transform the Russian Federation from a nascent democracy (in the 1990s) into a brutally repressive totalitarian state.  He controls the media, and murders and/or incarcerates his critics.  Now he is committing mass murder of civilians in Ukraine, and even exfiltrating Ukrainian civilians to Russian prison camps-- as Stalin did in the era of the Gulags.

    How can such conduct be acceptable to Jeff Carter or anyone else on the planet?

William,

I agree with you that Putin’s behaviour as you describe it is reprehensible. Such blatant brutality is not generally a feature of modern western so-called democracies.

My skepticism about western “democracies” relates to the fact that they are not really democracies but plutocracies or indeed kleptocracies. I say kleptocracies because, as you probably know, St Thomas Aquinas and other Church Fathers maintained that wealth is theft.

Their zero-sum logic was that because the earth’s resources are finite, one person acquiring more than his or her fair share entails depriving others of theirs.

And this is the problem when people (not you) use the pretext of the alleged moral and functional inferiority of other countries and their leaders to attack and subjugate them – a classic ploy of imperialism – notwithstanding that such aggression contradicts the presumed moral superiority in question.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that when western “democracy” is closely scrutinised, its presumed moral superiority is problematic. Moreover, its presumed functional superiority arguably arises from its pillaging the resources of the Global South.

The opening post of this thread by Joseph McBride consisted mainly of an article by Irish newspaper columnist Fintan O’Toole. The following extract from a recent article by O’Toole on the death of Queen Elizabeth II and monarchy generally is in a similar vein to what I’ve said above.

Quote:

In 1776, the great English republican Thomas Paine wrote, in relation to his country’s monarchy, that “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right”. Monarchy is a habit we in Ireland managed to break.

And it’s a bad habit, a dependency. Like most drugs, it delivers its highs, but it does so at a great physical and mental cost.

Part of the price is the necessity to lie about history. The hereditary principle rests on the notion that the present head of state descends from ancestors who were pure and holy and sacred.

This can’t be anything other than a lie. Paine suggested of “the present race of kings” that “could we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise, that we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtilty obtained him the title of chief among plunderers”.

So what? Supporters of monarchy would say that turning history into a fairy tale is a harmless fantasy. But it actually does a lot of harm in both principle and practice.

The idea embodied in monarchy is that a particular family is entitled to sit at the top of the entire structure of the Constitution because it carries the blood of some ancient chief plunderer.

 This is merely nepotism on steroids. And nepotism is not an abstract concept or a pretty adornment. Monarchy validates the accumulation of inherited wealth and privilege by a minority.

It is not innocent. It solidifies a structure of gross inequality.

The queen’s lavish funeral was a display of fabulous wealth in a society that treats the poor with utter contempt…

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/09/20/fintan-otoole-monarchy-is-a-bad-habit-up-the-republic/

Edited September 23, 2022 by John Cotter

[Ron Bulman]

Alex Jones is a sick mokeyfeather.  I don't believe in censorship but for the pain and suffering he's caused the families and friends of those who died at Sandy Hook he should be in jail for a long time with no access to the press or internet.

Alex Jones lashes out at critics at trial over Sandy Hook hoax claims (msn.com)

[Matt Allison]

1 hour ago, Ron Bulman said:

I have to wonder about the source as I'm not familiar with the NY Daily News and the last line credits it to Fox News. 

 

the teen had threatened to call people after their argument around 3 a.m. Sunday

 

yeah, there's the first clue we aren't really getting the whole story here lol...

[Benjamin Cole]

6 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

Russian Panic Spirals With Arson Attacks, Street Fights, and Manhunts

The Kremlin is struggling to control the sheer chaos sweeping Russia a day after Vladimir Putin announced mass war mobilization.

By Allison Quinn Sep. 22, 2022

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-panic-over-war-mobilization-spirals-with-arson-streets-fights-and-manhunts?ref=home?ref=home

Steve Thomas

Steve-

I badly want to believe this. But remember, the Daily Beast is CIA-affiliated. 

Be advised. 

Also: Remember early coverage of the Iraq Wars?  M$M media reporting on wars should always be taken with a grain of salt. 

Edited September 23, 2022 by Benjamin Cole

[Matt Allison]

16 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

I badly want to believe this. But remember, the Daily Beast is CIA-affiliated. 

Those photos and videos look pretty real to me, Ben...

[Ron Bulman]

19 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

 

This should be posted in every truck stop across Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Let's add Texas, OK, AR, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and both SC's.  Opp's, Missouri and Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and the Dakota's? 

Edited September 23, 2022 by Ron Bulman

[Benjamin Cole]

57 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

Those photos and videos look pretty real to me, Ben...

Matt-

There are 144 million people in Russia.

Were the BLM riot scenes reflective of more than 330 million Americans?

Was the 1/6 riot-scrum-occupation of the Capitol a sign that most Americans wanted to overthrow the government? Or only that a minute sliver, less than 0.1%, had any plans to overthrow the government? 

I hope Putin is deposed immediately, yesterday in fact, and a ceasefire declared in Ukraine, and then a peaceful resolution. 

The ugly truth: The US leadership class seems pointed towards a long war, and Putin too.

Remember, US foreign-military-trade policies are made by the Council on Foreign Relations crowd  (think Dulles-neo-con-liberals), and the M$M (and especially Daily Beast) toe the line.  

I hope you are right. 

 

[Matt Allison]

11 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

There are 144 million people in Russia.

True. But it isn't really a stretch to think they are upset about getting drafted to go to war, is it?

A war they were told was only a brief "special military operation".

The Russian people might be inundated with fake news on a daily basis, but the internet has allowed the truth to escape, and it has reached much of the populace.

[Benjamin Cole]

15 minutes ago, Matt Allison said:

True. But it isn't really a stretch to think they are upset about getting drafted to go to war, is it?

A war they were told was only a brief "special military operation".

The Russian people might be inundated with fake news on a daily basis, but the internet has allowed the truth to escape, and it has reached much of the populace.

Well...the American people have largely tolerated or even embraced and paid taxes for not one but four major wars that were far, far from US shores in the postwar period--Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

"We are fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here!"

In contrast, Ukraine is wedged right up against Russia, and has been Russian territory on and off for 1000 years.

And now foreigners are pouring weaponry into Ukraine. Russia has been militarily attacked from the east more than once. 

I would say Putin has a far easier case to make to the Russian people than the DC leadership class has had in those four wars aforementioned, all of which were prosecuted at length and none of which were even close to US borders. 

Indeed, ponder the major US political parties today---does anyone in the either party challenge the globalized US military posture? The neo-cons and the neo-libs run the show---the ghost of Allen Dulles would be proud. 

There is no intellectual diversity anymore on foreign-military-trade matters--HRC and LIz Cheney are the same woman. (Cheney is the one wearing glasses). 

Why would you expect a broad-based anti-war movement in Russia?  

You see how US non-interventionists are treated, even despised, marginalized, called "dangerous extremists." 

Russia? 

 

 

 

 

[Matt Allison]

18 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

In contrast, Ukraine is wedged right up against Russia, and has been Russian territory on and off for 1000 years.

 

Ukraine has been a sovereign nation since 1991. Putin has been waging war on them since 2014.

He's finally being held accountable for his atrocities.

When it comes to his demise, he has no one to blame but himself.