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erronis

erronis's Journal
erronis's Journal
April 23, 2022

Couple stays in Ukraine to take in all the pets left behind

https://twitter.com/i/status/1514325046596014082

Couple stays in Ukraine to take in all the pets left behind (wait til the beautiful message at the end ❤️
https://digbysblog.net/2022/04/22/friday-night-soother-151/

April 22, 2022

A bit of musical and scientific "enjoyment". Dedicated to Judi Lynn and elleng

https://phys.org/news/2022-04-physics.html

The singing saw video may (or may not) be your cup of tea. I'm very impressed!
April 22, 2022

TooLoose LeTruck: Too good to not read

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/04/21/three-things-dead-deader-deadest/#comment-933023

But please read the whole thread. There are some brilliant (and some not) posters there.

TooLoose LeTruck says:
April 21, 2022 at 8:38 pm

In honor of dead Russian generals…

He Was the Very Model of A Russian Major-General*

He was the very model of a Russian Major-General,
With knowledge biological, nuclear, and chemical,
He knew the czars of Russia, great battles territorial
Kulikovo to Stalingrad, so famous in memorial;

A highly educated man, proud son of Mother Russia,
Keen to take the fight abroad, if needed into Prussia,
He’d studied all the theories and memorized the tactics,
The ideal one to send to fight the Nazi drug fanatics;

The battle started well that day until the Javelin struck,
Blowing up the general’s tank and the general’s luck,
And now he’s headed home in a mood quite funereal,
He was the very model of a Russian Major-General.

*with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan

I am horrified and furious at what the Ukrainians are suffering thru…

I can even muster some sympathy for Russian conscripts who don’t want to be there…

I feel ZERO pity for dead Russian generals.

Sometimes when I see a video of a Russian helicopter being shot down, or a tank erupting in flames, I find myself cheering… and then I realize I just watched several human beings die a horrible, ugly death, too… and I feel sick to my stomach…

But when a Russian general bites it? I’m fine w/ that…
April 17, 2022

If we go to war with russia, can we arrest Fucker Karlson, all of fux news and their funders?

Just asking the question...

Seems that most of the RW/libertarian news media and money-bags are in traitorous territory - aiding and abetting the enemy.

April 17, 2022

Why Brexit Britain is turning purple with shame - The Guardian, Stewart Lee

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/17/why-brexit-britain-is-turning-purple-with-shame

And some purple prose...
Like a bald man masturbating alone into an open pedal bin, Boris Johnson’s Brexit Britain disgusts itself. And yet, despite being observed on the gents’ toilet’s security camera that is the modern world stage, it continues its abasement unabashed. After the second world war, the German volk were described as experiencing kollektivschuld, a national shame. But the capacity for shame has been surgically removed from our leaders. And it pulses only weakly, like some underactive perineal muscle, in the electorate that endorses them. Could it be possible instead for the physical mass of a nation, rather than the citizens it comprises, to display the attributes of shame?

...
But consider Boris in-All-Frankness Pays-Fixed-Penalty Unreserved-Apology Anger-and-Frustration Birthday-Exemption Poledancing-Cyberlover Wallpaper-Freeloader Lebedev’s-Party Watermelon-Picaninny Tank-Topped-Bum-Boys Deprogramme-a-Transperson Fifty-Pound-Offender Dead-in-the-Water Vaccine-Rollout All-Purpose-Get-Out Johnson. Having bent human language to associate Kier Starmer with Jimmy Savile, it appears an actual living child molester, in the shape of the Brexiter Imran Ahmad Khan MP, was still a member of his own party. Meanwhile, Johnson has been belatedly fined for the first of the lockdown breaches he lied to parliament and the British public about. He should, of course, resign, but clings on, like a sheet of shatted toilet roll stuck to the sole of the national shoe.


April 9, 2022

I knew the spaghetti tree was for real!

It's been labeled as a hoax but it's obviously for real.

https://www.ststworld.com/spaghetti-tree-hoax/


A worker stacks vermicelli, which is used in making traditional sweet dishes popularly consumed during the holy month of Ramadan, at a factory in Allahabad, India, on April 5, 2022. #
Sanjay Kanojia / AFP / Getty
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2022/04/photos-of-the-week-tile-tapping-tomb-sweeping-beach-mines/629515/

But I'm not sure about those marsh mallows.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/10027343311

April 8, 2022

GOP operative Stuart Stevens on how Republicans went from Cold Warriors to Putin apologists

https://vtdigger.org/2022/04/08/vermont-conversation-gop-operative-stuart-stevens-on-how-republicans-went-from-cold-warriors-to-putin-apologists

Great interview with one of the members of the Lincoln Project.

"I think that the compromising of the Republican Party by Putin and Russian intelligence is the most successful intelligence action in modern history."

Stevens, who lives in Vermont, now finds himself inside a very different political operation. He is a central player in the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and argues the current Republican Party should be “burned to the ground.” His latest bestselling book is, “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”

“I think that there is a large element of the conservative movement that has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. … Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it’s a devastating conclusion. But I think it’s the only honest one,” Stevens told The Vermont Conversation.

“We have an autocratic movement in America that is threatening democracy itself,” Stevens said. “They’ll be for democracy when they win and they won’t be for it when they lose. That means you’re not a democracy. And if we don’t wake up and face this, we’re going to lose democracy.”


I think that the compromising of the Republican Party by Putin and Russian intelligence is the most successful intelligence action in modern history. It really isn’t complicated. Russia supported Trump in 2016. We know that. You can argue whether or not they made a difference. That’s always difficult in politics because causality is the hardest thing to determine. But we know that they made a concerted, massive effort to elect Donald Trump. They were so successful that when this was exposed, conservatives defended it by calling it a “Russian hoax.” Can you imagine, if you’re a Russian intelligence officer, how you’re chortling? At one time, the Republican Party was the chief antagonist to the Soviet Union, then Russia. And now that party has become an apologist for Putin. So Russia supports Donald Trump. Donald Trump gets elected. Donald Trump does everything he can to weaken NATO. He tries to leverage critical defense weapons like Javelins (anti-tank missiles) with Ukrainian President (Volodymyr) Zelenskyy. The result of that is a nine-month delay in arming and training Ukrainians. It is no exaggeration that a lot of Ukrainians are dying because Donald Trump tried to leverage Zelenskyy. And Republicans still wouldn’t impeach Trump.

A large element of the conservative movement has become a pro-Putin autocratic movement. They see Putin as a white Christian nationalist. There are no gay people in Russia. You never see any women in power in Russia. It is not a democracy. Putin is a strong man. All of this draws much of the Republican Party.

Donald Trump did not change the Republican Party. He revealed it. And for those of us who worked in the Republican Party for a long time, it’s a devastating conclusion. But I think it’s the only honest one.
April 7, 2022

Bill Clinton: I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/bill-clinton-nato-expansion-ukraine/629499/

Not sure how much of this will escape the firewall. An interesting read from a first-hand participant.

When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried not about a Russian return to communism, but about a return to ultranationalism, replacing democracy and cooperation with aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn’t believe Yeltsin would do that, but who knew what would come after him?

If Russia stayed on a path toward democracy and cooperation, we would all be together in meeting the security challenges of our time: terrorism; ethnic, religious, and other tribal conflicts; and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. If Russia chose to revert to ultranationalist imperialism, an enlarged NATO and a growing European Union would bolster the continent’s security. Near the end of my second term, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO despite Russian opposition. The alliance gained 11 more members under subsequent administrations, again over Russian objections.

Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.
April 7, 2022

Articles Prove Chinese Surgeons Procure Organs Before Brain Death : Medscape

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/971750
Archived: https://archive.ph/pCtUG

In a deep dive into obscure Chinese language transplant journals, a pair of researchers from Australia and Israel have added a new layer of horror to what's already known about forced organ harvesting in China.

Searching for documentation that vital organs are being harvested from nonconsenting executed prisoners, a practice that the China Tribunal confirmed "beyond any reasonable doubt" in 2020, Jacob Lavee, MD, an Israeli heart transplant surgeon, and Matthew Roberston, a PhD student at Australian National University, uncovered something even more shocking: that vital organs are being explanted from patients who are still alive.

"We have shown for the first time that the transplant surgeons are the executioners — that the mode of execution is organ procurement. These are self-admissions of executing the patient," Lavee told Medscape Medical News. "Up until now, there has been what we call circumstantial evidence of this, but our paper is what you'd call the smoking gun because it's in the words of the physicians themselves that they are doing it. In the words of these surgeons, intubation was done only after the beginning of surgery, which means the patients were breathing spontaneously up until the moment the operation started…meaning they were not brain dead."

...
The article is "evidence that this barbarity continues and is a very valuable contribution that continues to bring attention to an enormous human rights violation," said Arthur Caplan, PhD, head of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine. "What they've reported has been going on for many, many years, the data are very clear that China's doing many more transplants than they have cadaver organ donors," he told Medscape, adding that the country's well-documented and lucrative involvement in transplant tourism "means you have to have a donor ready when the would-be recipient appears; you have to have a matched organ available, and that's hard to do waiting on a cadaver donor."

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