‘the love of helen and paris’ , jacques-louis david
I’ve got some major messes going here, some of them even of my own making because my brain went AWOL again. I got nuttin’, or else too much to bring, but i need some time to sort things out here.
Updated July 8, 8 a.m. w/ offerings:
Star-Spangled Bigotry: The Hidden Racist History of the National Anthem’, Jason Johnson, theroot.com
After noting Keyes’ bigoted beliefs, he brings Key’s little-know third verse:
’And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave’
“In other words, Key was saying that the blood of all the former slaves and “hirelings” on the battlefield will wash away the pollution of the British invaders. With Key still bitter that some black soldiers got the best of him a few weeks earlier, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is as much a patriotic song as it is a diss track to black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom. Perhaps that’s why it took almost 100 years for the song to become the national anthem.”
‘Treaty banning nuclear weapons approved at UN’; Supporters hail step towards nuclear-free world as treaty is backed by 122 countries, the Guardian (122 out of 195) Woot!
‘US Expands Military Footprint in Syria to EIGHT Bases, ‘Modifies’ Kobani Air Base’, July 5, 2017 by Vanessa Beeley
“In the North, we can speculate that the US is trying to create optimum conditions for an autonomous Kurdish region and the eventual partitioning of Syria, following the already skewed US road map. According to Gevorg Mirzayan, Associate Professor of Political Science at Russia’s Finance University, Kurds control 20% of Syrian territory, when ISIS is defeated the likelihood is that they will want to declare a “sovereign” state. This would play into, not only US, but primarily Israel’s hands.
The US/Israeli agenda has clearly been to form a buffer zone inside all Syrian borders from North to East to South preventing Syrian access to neighbouring country borders & territory and reducing Syria to a geopolitically isolated, internalized peninsular. This plan was discussed by Syriana Analysis:” (video)
And internal link to Sharmine Narwani’s June 28 Dispatch From the Middle East: U.S. Buildup All About Iran’, Requiring an American wedge between Syria and Iraq, the americanconservative.com
“It was agreed upon with the Russians that this was a deconfliction zone,” says CJTF spokesman Dillon.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov begs to differ: “I don’t know anything about such zones. This must be some territory, which the coalition unilaterally declared and where it probably believes to have a sole right to take action. We cannot recognize such zones.”
Since regime-change plans fell flat in Syria, Beltway hawks have been advocating for the partitioning of Syria into at least three zones of influence – a buffer zone for Israel and Jordan in the south, a pro-U.S. Kurdish entity along the north and north-east, and control over the Syrian-Iraqi border.”
Some charge that the YPG, ‘the sexy anarchist militants led by women’ are by way of one step in partitioning Syria. (David Graeber is one of their champions on TRNN.) Some of b at MOA’s commentariat believe that Putin has, or is in the process of, backing off his long dedication to a ‘free and whole Syria’.
I’d read this about Juan Cole of the cruise-missile left before, but given that ‘CIA-trained’ is big in the Twitterverse now, you decide:
‘Don’t Be Fooled by Rosy Renewables Projections’, Wenonah Hauter, July 3, ecowatch.com Creepy hidden faux metrics, but still I’d love to know what ‘renewables’ v. actual ‘sustainables’ are, including externalities of production of wind and solar, including battery storage, wars (?) for any required rare minerals, etc.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
I went to a service of the religion of the realm last sunday, evangelical. the subject of the sacred center of the service, ie, the sermon, cuz it’s all about the logos, was “what does it mean to be good?” ugh. if we are not sure, why not start at something simple? what will we chicken littles do? what shall we ever do?????
don’t forget your hippopotamus oath now.
how many of us look at the poor getting preggers as a form of theft? they are stealing something from the rest of society.
look at them poors smoking a doob! they are pulling something over on the rest of us.
toss their babies into the river. until they get a job.
one positive way to be good, as opposed to the purely negative way of “doing no harm,” is to act like a good mother. some things are just not that goddam complicated.
comment eaten.
how many people look at the poor getting preggers as theft from the rest of society? poor people in general are con artists. look at all that dope smoking. they can have kids when they get a goddam job.
being a mother is hard. try to be a good mother is about the best positive advice one could give, starting w/the simple. the foundation is not that complicated.
ay yi yi and lol on the video!
@ thd: what fukkery. wonder what happened the UR ninja reporters? may i add: ‘Dakota Access Security Firm’s Top Adviser Led Military Intelligence Efforts for 1992 LA Riots’, steve horn, july 5. yeah, we knew ‘tiger swan’, but not this, at least i hadn’t:
“DeSmog has found that Marks also headed up intelligence efforts for the task force which brought over 10,000 U.S. military troops to police the 1992 riots following the acquittal of Los Angeles Police Department members involved in beating Rodney King. In addition, Marks, a long-time military analyst for CNN, led intelligence-gathering efforts for the U.S. military’s 2003 “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, which was dubbed “Operation Iraqi Liberation.”
ah, seems that they’re in berlin, so it’s unlikely i’ll find news that way.
Kevin Gosztola reports that sunshine is scarier than hellfire.
https://shadowproof.com/2017/07/06/indigenous-journalist-faces-trial-flying-drone-document-dapl-construction/
capitaliszms is the fairest most advagdificious system ever devised. when I fly their little toys around, they call foul. see how that works? like the nihilists said in the Big L, “it’s not fair!” bunch of crybabies. just what will they do when I put a stinger missile on mine? what if I add rocket boosters & plutonium?
humanity needs to ponder the question my meemaw asked w/a cackle every morning we got into the car w/her driving: did ya’ll change ya’lls underwear? but I never did understand how clean boxers helped w/a bumpy ride. still don’t.
i may be able to decode your meemaw’s cackled question. j. she was implying that she might get y’all into a car accident, and back in the day, the horror of being taken to a hospital in unclean knickers was almost a fate worse than death. srsly. ;-)
more soon, then back to the salt mines. oh, and i updated this open menu w/ a few bits and bobs…
Lol. I got it. Welcome back. “That way they’ll know I was a lady.” If my bloomers are freshly pressed when I eat the big enchilada.
well…more by way of ‘yer mama and meemaw taught you right!’. (see: another version of ‘respectability politics’, and no…i won’t give you a café link. ;-)
back briefly, i must admit. ‘they say life’ll kill ya, but…they won’t say when.’ (dammit)
but spit dudn’t count, srsly. think skidmarks or some such….ewwwww, but true.
on slo-brain edit: also think ‘surprise’ (gasp) mentsrual blood, a bit o wee…
but as for evangeical sermons, sorry, but the most recent best sermons, imo, were given by the vicar (a self-designated flawed human) on ‘manchester’ tomorrow night here on SLC pbs. couldn’t find any sermons on their tube, but someone posted the vicar’s and geordie’s (robom green) bromance.
true love, but extending far further into ‘his’/their community. he explains wht love is all about; i guess a in christ’s love.
if we all blow ourselves up, i’m sure we’ll still have time to be embarrassed about loss of bowel control at ground zero. never a reason not to be gentlemanly or ladylike.
we’ll make great pets. hear that spacedudes?
anybody w/a damn peep worth hearing in that silly inbred quilting circle is in the African American church.
i hear the music rawks, too! (if you mean AME) main reason to go to church, imo. ‘we’ll make great pets’, lol.
but it occurred to me last night that my mum was w/ her inexperienced in driving mum, the car wrecked somehow. her mum was dead at the scene, and my 12-yr-old mum sustained a fractured skull and almost died. she became a ‘mum’ to her two younger sibs, which of course totally shaped the rest of her life. but: my guess is that she had clean knickers in the hospital.
on edit: i do hope you’ll try ‘grantchester’, and here’s hoping that if you do tune in, it’ll be a good episode, maybe even include a sermon. but what’s really the very most important news is this: we got 15/100ths of an inch of rain yesterday!!!!
I bro’t some light reading w/me to church today to fortify me against the sermon. practicing sortilege, I stuck my finger to the wind and:
so now to you both the herald & the escape, I come, you save me! you have pity on me! As you peer into how all things are dangerous for bread-eaters, know that it is luck whether one experiences good, or suffers the other. Being outside of these experiences, it is necessary both to see the peril, even when one’s life goes well, and to inspect one’s own livelihood, lest it is has escaped one’s notice that his own life is already corrupted.
Philoctetes to Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus
Philoctetes is only briefly mentioned in the Iliad. Sophocles “rewrites” the epic history, from the tensions & silences of the tradition. like the wife in Juvenal’s epic diatribe against women: “She weighs Homer & Vergil in her scales and justifies Helen. She knows historians I never heard of.”
…in which muslim hindu catholic pi, who later taught kabalah, was instructed by his father to ‘follow reason’, post-enlightenment. ‘i just want to love god, papa’, pi says.
Many years ago, I used to follow Cole’s blog, but; after getting censored a couple of times while commenting; I started paying attention to what and who he censored.
I smelled a rat and bailed from his site; never to return.
I had also found far more informed sources, for my M.E. information.
further ballasting the ‘weird cole’ meme, he now swears that he’d never been a cheerleader waving pompoms for r2p libya, which is utter rubbish, as we saw it in real time. DN! is weird; as w/ some of the dubious ‘human rights’ ngo’s, she gets it right sometimes. keeps ya off-balance, eh?
Yeah, DN is definitely a cautious watch.
Given Amy Goodman’s experience in Indonesia with her fellow reporter Nairn; it gives one major pause; and a major disappointment to this grizzled old fart…
Trump Jr. just gave Mueller what John Sirica gave the Watergate investigation — a Russian tie back to the White House. And gave evidence that NSA hasn’t looked at these emails yet. Which sorta makes sense since NSA works backward from events to lighten their workload — which they could do otherwise by not collecting every single body’s communications into the monster in Utah. So “Obama wiretapped Trump Tower” is just bluster.
What Russia wants is repeal of the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions a bunch of organized criminals (they defrauded Russian taxpayers of the equivalent of $230 million and laundered the funds in New York real estate, which brought them into Trump’s range of contacts. And the lawyer for the folks sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act was dangling “information about Clinton collusion with Russians” as bait for a meeting attended by Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort (lately lobbying Russian organization’s interests in Ukraine). At the meeting the lawyer’s claim of information becomes vague (or Trump Jr.’s memory of it becomes vague). The replacement for Preet Bharara, no prince of integrity himself, let the Magnitsky Act bunch off with a $6 million settlement and no confession of guilt – the standard for elites before the Southern District of New York. They get to keep the real estate. Interesting that the Russian state prosecutor has not pursued them or requested courtesy extradition (the US likely does not have reciprocity of extradition with Russia.)
Go long on popcorn futures; it’s going to be a long summer and fall.
Unlike in Watergate there is no opposition party power to force Congressional hearings. But there is the Mueller investigation into obstruction of justice, which this Magnitsky case might be depending on how you read the $6 million slap on the wrist.
But the GOP, who chanted “commie, commie, commie” every time Obama moved toward any limited rapprochement with Russia is suddenly in love with Russia. How long will that last after Bannon is gone from the White House?
There is a definite change in the heat; it is still heat but it is getting squeezed at the ends and above. (Excuse the redirection but I have been reading wartime stories of Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler – “The Lady in the Lake”, o my!) If this is distraction, it is currently my bread and peanut butter.
Wintry weather is hitting even the north of the North Island of New Zealand, and the Larsen ice shelf finally lost its segment C, which is twice the size of Lake Ontario and trillions of tons of ice. The best satellite photos can be viewed at RT, but also this brief description of scientific assessment:
http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/
Another cooling thought was a link at NC today for the Adorers of the Blood of Christ sisters building a chapel to block a pipeline advance – cooling because while the title of the order seemed adversely chilling in a different way, for me it brought to mind our Sangres above Santa Fe, which turn blood red at sunset and whose full name is Sangre de Christo. The sisters care for the environment – Adorers of the Sangre de Christo.
Just before dawn a lone coyote trotted so smoothly down my street. It didn’t lope but to call it trotting doesn’t fit. Better, it flowed past my gate, like a river.
yes, thanks for the links. we’d been discussing the large calved iceberg, and yes, as i remember it, ‘as much water as in lake erie’. but you might want to give this link to b; i’m sure he and his commentariat would get a bang out of it. and very cool on the coyote…
‘Neocons Enlist in Anti-Trump #Resistance’, July 15, 2017, consortium news, james carden
the quick version is that PNAC closed its doors in june; lots of the original necons and now ‘bipartisan’ one have formed a repurposed neocon bill kristol PNAC dedicated to defending democracy in the US and EU from Putin.
“The Alliance,” read the statement, “will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.”
Woops, maybe that was Lake Erie, sorry.
Here’s another link in my search for news worth digesting – not long and simply put, but it had me thinking about returning to ‘city state’ mentalities for getting things done that need to be done. A needle in the haystack, maybe, but it goes with me finding inspiration in folk like the Christie that is Agatha and Raymond Chandler writing during world war epic mayhem about life beyond the battles. Take this, for instance:
“I went back along the silent hallway. The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.”
Chandler, like T.S. Eliot in poetry, puts so much detail into his writing that you are back in the very stuff and character of life as it is being lived. I am amazed.
And in all of that nonsense, I forgot to include the link:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/14/fed-up-with-washington-dc-look-to-washington-state/
Typical me.
And by the way, cp’s search couldn’t get me to this article when I put in “Washington” – I had to backtrack the archives to get to it. I guess it wasn’t bomb-astic enough…
thanks for the wa v. wa link, ww; and yes, chandler’s prose is very rich.