Neo-con hawks and their ratings-chasing media ghouls always assert that military intervention is the correct response to foreign policy disputes. And they leave it to everyone else to try to talk them down. They beg the question. They never bother to justify what they demand, they only snidely, sneeringly assert the inevitability of their position.

Happened when this disaster started, happened every time anyone suggested reducing our footprint in Afghanistan, is happening right now as they throw their tantrum and blame everyone but themselves for this 20 year fiasco. Happened in Vietnam. Happened in Iraq (wait till someone finally gets us out of that mess and it's more complicated than calling an Uber to go home).

Maybe it's time we stop letting them control the discussion?

Maybe we should ... get involved in the civil war in Afghanistan!

On book publishing day !

With a foreword from Michelle Obama, of all people, she doesn't really need the ones of eyeballs I can send her way. But it's the thought that counts, right?

Nearly all of the world’s emperor penguin colonies may be pushed to the brink of extinction by 2100, a new study has found, as the United States moves to list them as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

If climate change continues at its current rate, more than 98 percent of emperor penguin colonies are expected to become quasi-extinct by the turn of the century, a group of global researchers wrote in the journal Global Change Biology on Tuesday. The scientists’ near-term predictions were equally grim: They estimated at least two-thirds of colonies would be quasi-extinct by 2050.

(Quasi-extinction refers to a population being doomed for extinction even if some members of the species remain alive.)

Spoiler: it was never banned. And it was never thought of as literally evil. It was just hard to sing.

My home town's represented by a moron.

Today’s Anniversary of Medicare & Medicaid reminds us to reflect on the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families. To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes. https://t.co/mOdUuX7THT

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) July 30, 2021

The point is not that the Unified Trump GOP Canon for What Truly Happened on Jan. 6 is being continually and contradictorily rewritten. The point is not that what we are being told is absurd, inconsistent and downright goofy. The point is that the specifics don’t matter; what matters is that we are being told, blatantly, repeatedly and without shame, that we simply did not see what we saw, and we are expected to go along with it. This is an exercise in power, to see how malleable our reality really is.

It is because of this that the Jan. 6 commission is so sadly necessary. We did see what we saw. It is too important to let that fact get drowned out.

Prescient, from 2015.

Pandora's (voice?) box is now open!

The documentary “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” which opened in theatres on Friday, is an angry, elegant, often overwhelmingly emotional chronicle of the late television star’s life and his impact on the people close to him. Directed by Morgan Neville, the film portrays Bourdain as intense, self-loathing, relentlessly driven, preternaturally charismatic, and—in his life and in his death, by suicide, in 2018—a man who both focussed and disturbed the lives of those around him. To craft the film’s narrative, Neville drew on tens of thousands of hours of video footage and audio archives—and, for three particular lines heard in the film, Neville commissioned a software company to make an A.I.-generated version of Bourdain’s voice.

...

When I first spoke with Neville, I was surprised to learn about his use of synthetic audio and equally taken aback that he’d chosen not to disclose its presence in his film. He admitted to using the technology for a specific voice-over that I’d asked about—in which Bourdain improbably reads aloud a despairing e-mail that he sent to a friend, the artist David Choe—but did not reveal the documentary’s other two instances of technological wizardry.

Expect this in every other political ad you'll see in 2024.

From one of the dumber of the wingnut media outlets...

“I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature. Like, I mean, if there is some disease out there — maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.”