Author Archives: JonathaBateson

Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

by JonathaBateson Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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When I came home from the hospital last year, we (i.e., Marian) scurried around for a few days moving furniture. In the end, one of our sofas ended up getting shoehorned into my study, where it was out of our sight and all too vulnerable to feline claws. So a few months ago we bought a cheap slip cover, basically designed to give the cats something to claw at other than expensive upholstery. It’s mostly worked, but there were unforeseen consequences.

You see, the slip cover has an elastic band around the bottom to keep it in place. When the cats discovered this, they decided it made a great cat hammock. Over on the right, you can see what it looks like from the outside. Basically, it’s just a bulge. I think you can guess what happened next after I took this picture. (Insert Battle of the Bulge jokes here.)

Luckily, I also took some pictures before Hopper showed up, something I’ve been doing for weeks. But as you can imagine, it’s really hard to get a decent photo from underneath the sofa. However, thanks to my persistence, along with my camera’s articulating LCD screen, I eventually got one. Below, you can finally see Hilbert in the the cat hammock close up. It’s pretty obvious what the attraction is. In fact, you’d practically think it had been designed as a cat domicile: dim, cozy, and shaped like a cat. Who knows? Maybe it was, and we just got tricked into buying it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

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Here’s How President Obama Is Using the ‘Oil Weapon’—Against Iran, Russia, and ISIS

by JonathaBateson Posted on October 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It was heinous. It was underhanded. It was beyond the bounds of international morality. It was an attack on the American way of life. It was what you might expect from unscrupulous Arabs. It was “the oil weapon”—and back in 1973, it was directed at the United States. Skip ahead four decades and it’s smart, it’s effective, and it’s the American way. The Obama administration has appropriated it as a major tool of foreign policy, a new way to go to war with nations it considers hostile without relying on planes, missiles, and troops. It is, of course, that very same oil weapon.

Until recently, the use of the term “the oil weapon” has largely been identified with the efforts of Arab producers to dissuade the United States from supporting Israel by cutting off the flow of petroleum. The most memorable example of its use was the embargo imposed by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) on oil exports to the United States during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, causing scarcity in the US, long lines at American filling stations, and a global economic recession.

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Here’s How President Obama Is Using the ‘Oil Weapon’—Against Iran, Russia, and ISIS

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