April, 2017 archive
The Spoils 0
Balloon-Juice’s Anne Laurie explains.
Tales of the Tarheel Potty Police 0
North Carolina legislators just can’t stop peeking under the stall.
Afterthought:
Doesn’t anyone else recognize how pervy is their preoccupation with pee?
Golden showers must fill their dreams,
as smiles await them with their streams . . . .
“Benefit of the Doubt” 0
Responding to a recent kerfuffle about white privilege and its effects on the local economy, Tim Hurley writes with sensitivity and perception of his own experience, as a white man, of white privilege. I commend the article to your attention. Here’s a bit:
This is how we can contribute to the systems of white supremacy without any swastikas or pointed hoods. It is an insidious part of our daily lives, regardless of creed or ideology. You can be a Democrat, a Republican, a liberal or a conservative and contribute to a culture of white supremacy. The actions can be ugly and intentional or small and unthinking – judging the name on a resume, overlooking certain students in a classroom – but the cumulative impact is devastating . . . .
It’s the Testosterone, Stupid 0
In The Sacramento Bee, Marcos Breton tries to make sense of Donald Trump’s positions on Syria and of the press’s reaction to his raining robotic death from the Syrian sky. A snippet:
Instead of criticizing Trump for attacking Syria on humanitarian grounds after seeking to block Syrian refugees, CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria praised Trump’s Syria bombing as “the moment he became the President of the United States.” MSNBC anchor Brian Williams marveled at the “beauty” of the bombs dropped on Syria as the cameras rolled. This soft media coverage evoked the lack skepticism at the start of an Iraq War in 2002 that ultimately was waged on the false pretense of Iraq harboring “weapons of mass destruction.” We can’t make that mistake again. We can’t pretend that Trump is suddenly strong for dropping 59 bombs on Syria after he and others painted Obama as weak, despite the fact that Obama dropped 12,192 bombs on Syria in 2016, according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.
I fear that any attempt to make sense of what Donald Trump does will fail. There is no ore in that mine.
In a related piece, Steven M. tries to understand why the U. S. press seems to like war so much (at least when it’s not their children in harm’s way), despite the history of America’s failure to achieve its goals in almost every aggressive military endeavor* since World War II (in which, remember, the United States and its allies were the attacked, not the attackers).
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*Just for a few examples, Korea (a stalemate at best), the Bay of Pigs, Viet Nam and Southeast Asia, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. I’m going to a concert this afternoon, so I don’t have time to link them all up, but you can do the research easily enough.
The significant positive outcomes for the U. S. and the West during the last six decades–notably the fall of the Berlin Wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain–were achieved thankfully short of war.
Ryan’s Derp 0
There is nothing I can add to this.
Surgical Strike 0
Afterthought:
You do realize that the phrase, “surgical strike,” is an oxymoron credible only to the other kind of morons.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Guns on campus are working out so very nicely, thank you.
About 7 p.m., a round fired from a firearm at Flynn Hall grazed the male victim, who suffered a minor injury, St. Paul police acting Cmdr. Jennifer Corcoran said. Corcoran was not sure where in the residence hall the shooting occurred and if the shooter and victim were university students.
The practitioner of politeness has not been produced.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Pardner, I think this cowpoke was packing his ole shooting irony.
The 46-year-old man’s pistol accidentally discharged Thursday afternoon as he holstered the gun in Fairfax County, Virginia, police said.
Bachmann Spurner Overdrive 0
Farron Cousins notes a classic example of psychological projection.
Words fail me.
(Errant “div” tag fixed.)
