Author Archives: LashundU23

Friday Cat Blogging – 25 March 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The evil dex will be keeping me up all night tonight, but that’s OK. I actually kind of enjoy it. Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud, and in this case the cloud is lots of afternoon crashes over the next few days to make up for the lost sleep.

But then again, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case the silver lining belongs to Hopper, who gets a great place for her afternoon snooze. Hopper thinks dex is a wonder drug that makes humans more like cats, and who’s to say she’s wrong?

Taken from:  

Friday Cat Blogging – 25 March 2016

Posted in alternative energy, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Friday Cat Blogging – 25 March 2016

Who’s Going to Pay For the Latest Iraq War?

Mother Jones

Andrew Sullivan wonders why fiscal conservatives aren’t asking some searching questions about the cost of the ISIS campaign:

The ISIS campaign is utterly amorphous and open-ended at this point — exactly the kind of potentially crippling government program Republicans usually want to slash. It could last more than three years (and that’s what they’re saying at the outset); the cost is estimated by some to be around $15 billion a year, but no one really knows. The last phase of the same war cost, when all was said and done, something close to $1.5 trillion – and our current travails prove that this was one government program that clearly failed to achieve its core original objectives, and vastly exceeded its original projected costs.

If this were a massive $1.5 trillion infrastructure project for the homeland, we’d be having hearing after hearing on how ineffective and crony-ridden it is; there would be government reports on its cost-benefit balance; there would be calls to end it tout court. But a massive government program that can be seen as a form of welfare dependency for the actual countries — Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Kurdistan — facing the crisis gets almost no scrutiny at all.

Yep. The only problem with Sullivan’s post is the headline: “Does The GOP Really Give A Shit About The Debt?” Surely that’s not a serious question? Of course they don’t. They care about cutting taxes on the rich and cutting spending on the poor. The deficit is a convenient cudgel for advancing that agenda, but as Sullivan says, “it is hard to resist the conclusion, after the last few weeks, that it’s all a self-serving charade.”

Indeed it is. And not just after the last few weeks. After all, if they did care, they’d be demanding that we raise taxes to fund the cost of our latest military adventure. Right?

View original article – 

Who’s Going to Pay For the Latest Iraq War?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Who’s Going to Pay For the Latest Iraq War?

A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

* Seventy-three years ago, on February 17, 1941, as a second devastating global war approached, Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life magazines, called on his countrymen to “create the first great American Century.” Luce died in 1967 at age 69. Life, the pictorial magazine no home would have been without in my 1950s childhood, ceased to exist as a weekly in 1972 and as a monthly in 2000; Time, which launched his career as a media mogul, is still wobbling on, a shadow of its former self. No one today could claim that this is Time‘s century, or the American Century, or perhaps anyone else’s. Even the greatest empires now seem to have shortened lifespans. The Soviet Century, after all, barely lasted seven decades. Of course, only the rarest among us live to be 100, which means that at 70, like Time, I’m undoubtedly beginning to wobble, too.

* The other day I sat down with an old friend, a law professor who started telling me about his students. What he said aged me instantly. They’re so young, he pointed out, that their parents didn’t even come of age during the Vietnam War. For them, he added, that war is what World War I was to us. He might as well have mentioned the Mongol conquests or the War of the Roses. We’re talking about the white-haired guys riding in the open cars in Veteran’s Day parades when I was a boy. And now, it seems, I’m them.

* In March 1976, accompanied by two friends, my wife and I got married at City Hall in San Francisco, and then adjourned to a Chinese restaurant for a dim sum lunch. If, while I was settling our bill of perhaps $30, you had told me that, almost half a century in the future, marriage would be an annual $40 billion dollar business, that official couplings would be preceded by elaborate bachelor and bachelorette parties, and that there would be such a thing as destination weddings, I would have assumed you were clueless about the future. On that score at least, the nature of the world to come was self-evident and elaborate weddings of any sort weren’t going to be part of it.

Continue Reading »

View original post here – 

A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A 70-Year-Old Reflects On the So-Called "American Century"