Fumesucker
Fumesucker's JournalShould moderate Christians address the violent extremist terrorist factions within Christianity?
Do you think signs like this encourage or discourage violent Christian extremism?
Taibbi: America Is Too Dumb for TV News
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125This is a horrible thing to have to say about one's own country, but this story makes it official. America is now too dumb for TV news.
It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
The old Edward R. Murrow, eat-your-broccoli version of the news was banished long ago. Once such whiny purists were driven from editorial posts and the ad people over the last four or five decades got invited in, things changed. Then it was nothing but murders, bombs, and panda births, delivered to thickening couch potatoes in ever briefer blasts of forty, thirty, twenty seconds.
What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism. The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier.
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"I saved a bundle on Christmas presents this year by discussing politics on Facebook"
And BOOM! goes the dynamite...
It's not any great conspiracy, it's not even conscious to a big extent, it's people being people
If something threatens your job, your livelihood as well as your social status that you have struggled for all your life you are going to be extremely biased against it and you will oppose it reflexively in every way.
The establishment is the establishment because it is the group of people who have clawed their way by whatever means necessary to the top of the heap in an ever more competitive and savage political, economic and social environment. Alpha-humans to the core they react to any challenge to their world view and status with aggression. As physical aggression becomes less and less effective and common aggressive behavior doesn't end but rather other forms of aggression are sublimated for the physical.
Oh, there's probably some conspiracy going on but it's a tiny fraction of the overall freakout among the One Percent by which I mean the one one hundredth of a percent actually.
Reddit humor for gearheads: Just Rolled Into The Shop ... and.. Ask A Shitty Mechanic
I've laughed until the tears were streaming down my face more than once looking at this stuff and reading the comments.
If you non gearheads only knew how thoroughly you were mocked by those dumb ass grease monkeys..
https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/
https://m.reddit.com/r/AskAShittyMechanic
Wingnut fanfic: What Defeating ISIS Would Look Like
Quite possibly the dumbest and most bloodthirsty thing I have ever read.. The author is a retired Infantry Colonel.
http://journal.ijreview.com/2015/11/250238-what-defeating-isis-would-look-like/
“Our goal is simple. We are going to destroy ISIS and kill its members. There will be no negotiations, no hesitation, no hands tied behind our backs. They wanted war. They will have it,” said the President. The new GOP Senate majority leader dispensed with the filibuster, and the declaration of war passed easily. The President also announced that all Americans must pay their fair share to support the war effort, and imposed a temporary 7% payroll tax on working Americans. Those not working must also pay their fair share too, he said; he signed a bill cutting all social programs 7% and shifting the savings to the military. The Democrats went ballistic; the President’s approval rating hit 60%.
The destruction of Raqqa was the first part of Operation Linebacker III, the leveraging of American air power to annihilate all urban centers controlled by ISIS forces. Covered from interference by Russian aircraft by a protective screen of F-22s, the B-52s worked their way from urban target to urban target, literally obliterating any ISIS-supporting town in Syria. This supported the Wildman’s strategy of depriving ISIS of any of the vestiges of an actual nation state. The caliphate, to the extent it governed anything, would rule over rubble.
In Kuwait, the huge storage facilities housing divisions worth of United States military equipment were activated, as airliners alerted for military service ferried in the heavy corps of United States Army troops and Marines to man it. They drew their gear and headed north back into Iraq over familiar roads to familiar staging areas. Logisticians worked 22 hour days supporting this massive movement of almost 150,000 troops.
At an airfield outside Irbil, the brave Kurds beheld a nearly endless series of C-17 cargo planes flying in with the weapons and ammunition Obama refused to supply. The Iraqi prime minister called the President to complain that he had never given permission for any of this; the President informed the Iraqi leader that America wasn’t asking.
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Joe Stiglitz tells Democracy Now that war cost will reach $5 to $7 trillion
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/10/27/nobel_laureate_joseph_stiglitz_on_rewritingJOSEPH STIGLITZ: OK. Well, the book I wrote with Linda Bilmes was called The Three Trillion Dollar War. Actually, we estimated the cost would be well in excess of $3 trillion. Just imagine what we could have done with those—with that amount of money to address the real problems in our society. But we knew that we were being conservative when we said $3 trillion. We, for instance, when we talked about disabilities, we were looking at the evidence from the previous wars, and we knew that this war the disabilities would be much, much higher. Unfortunately, we were right. And about 50 percent of those coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq are disabled. And by now, our estimate of the cost of the disabilities alone, and healthcare and disability benefits for that group of people, is over $1 trillion. You know, I don’t—
AMY GOODMAN: Which brings the cost of war to? Just the financial cost?
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Oh, we’re—you know, I said before we were $3 to $5 [trillion]. We’re talking $4 to $6, $5 to $7 trillion.
Reports on college literacy levels sobering
Article is fairly old but I don't see any evidence that things in this area are improving.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/10928755/ns/us_news-education/t/reports-college-literacy-levels-sobering/#.VkojwLxdSUm
Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.
More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.
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Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.
Hillary Clinton was played for a chump by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy she was the first to name
I've had this OP in mind for a while now, I've been holding off because I don't particularly enjoy being divisive but the events of the last twelve hours or so in Paris have made this subject far more relevant than it would have been otherwise.
Hillary was a chump, there is no doubt about it, she believed The Big Lie told by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that Iraq was an existential threat to the United States. That she was played for a chump isn't the worst of it, she then went on to help catapult the VRWC lies to the people of the United States in order to further the invasion of Iraq which led to further destabilizing the the most volatile area of the planet, the Middle East.
There is an old saying about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, if there is anyone on this planet who should have known that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is not to be trusted that person is Hillary Rodham Clinton. There is no excuse for the level of naivete she showed in the matter of the Iraq war and invasion.
I am horrified and dismayed beyond my capacity to adequately describe that a chump of this magnitude is the likely Democratic nominee and next President of the USA.
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