Have you forgotten?

We're having a heat wave.... *wheeze* ...

Hot enough for ya?  Apparently hot enough to melt cats.....

Prairie dogs have a complex language with nouns and adjectives.

Guns! 2016!!

Jeb Bush: ‘Taking Out Saddam Hussein Turned Out To Be A Pretty Good Deal’ and then hear about what actually happened.

Ben Carson and the fetal tissue issue.

Graphene will save the world... if we don't self-destruct first.  (Corn is part of the problem.)

Can we finally get a War Crimes Tribunal?

CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation.  We knew this then, we know this now.  What is so awful is the inability to admit we went full-Dr. Mengele on the people in Gitmo.  We tortured.  Admit it.

And then send the people responsible for this horrible moral and ethical failure to jail.

A little of this, a bit of that

Laser pointers and cat variations

Bed bugs and the psychological effects of coping with them.  And ways to get rid of them.

Protecting our drinking water.  Cleaning plastic from our oceans.

Monsanto working hard to discredit scientists.

Mark Ruffalo, a true hulk.  Fear of powerful women.

Dutch sexuality education.

Interesting question and intriguing answers:  What has the internet made obsolete?

The awfulness of the 2000 presidential election revisited.

How can you tell if rocks were tools in prehistoric times?

The dangers of coal to our climate.  Ocean conservationist sounds a warning to Canada.

Eggs, chickens, and turkeys are going to become more expensive.

Wendell Potter explains the machinations of the health insurance companies.

Pesticides killing off the Monarch butterfly.

Ten poverty myths disproved.

New Bush, new lies about the Iraq War.

They would like to have us forget they made the mess in Iraq.

As much as they want to rewrite history, we won't let them.

This should be front page news.

Bush and Cheney lied us into war.  But we knew that.  Even back then.

What Digby said.

Iraq explained in five minutes (greatly simplified)

Moon dust and cereal...

Moon dust and its dangers.

Negotiating with terrorists.

An Iraq War Veteran says what he thinks about war and warmongers.

Why ignorance is being embraced as a virtue in the GOP.

Life in the most religious states.

Tom Tomorrow gets it right.

Plastics, even non-BPA, can affect your hormones.  And pesticides may give your child autism.

10 invasive species

Women listening to men in Western Art History.  And speaking in a sexist language.

Cereal killers...

This should be really interesting...

Bush and Blair's emails and conversations before the Iraq War will be released.

Well, we're certainly NOT.

George W. Bush: 'I'm Comfortable With What I Did'

Riverbend is back!

Posting after ten years of silence.

(h/t to Bryan of Why Now?)

Friday Follies

A good overview of the Steubenville rape trial.

Never forget what we did to Iraq.  Even though Donald Rumsfeld would like you to.

Transgender people speak out.

Steven Colbert about the voting rights act.

Yet another robot thing I will have to beat to death if it gets near me.

Dissolving our sea-shelled creatures.

Luke uses the force of his 9 year old self to fight off big corporations trying to take his city's water.

America's rape culture.

Locusts

Locusts are grasshopper were-beasts.

Two reddit posts of interest:  what one fact pisses you off and what scam do you think more people should know about.

NRA President’s Son Convicted For Road Rage Shooting, Nears End Of 10-Year Jail Sentence

How the US public was defrauded by the hidden cost of the Iraq war

Wow!  A journalist actually practicing journalism.  This Is What Happens When A Journalist Forces A Banker To Actually Answer A Question

Jaw-dropping quote of the day:

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was. 

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Life, wind and fuck ups.

Why it's worth it to live.

A US wind map.

The Koch brothers very bad no good week.

Georgia.  Yet another state I will not visit nor support if I am able.

The Supreme Court fucks up again.

Women need to recognize verbal sabotage and manipulation.

Curveball.  The excuse created by the neocons to attack Iraq.

I tend to resent it when people tell me I'll need a tissue

But this time they were right.

They removed it from YouTube, but it still plays on MoveOn.org. Click the link.

The fungus among us...

Why does the far right seem to ooze out from under the rocks when the economy is shaky and politics are polarized? Easier to blame others and reach for guns rather than work together to fix things?:

The far right is on the rise across Europe as a new generation of young, web-based supporters embrace hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to examine the phenomenon.

Research by the British thinktank Demos for the first time examines attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.

The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused on cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a concern.

"We're at a crossroads in European history," said Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European parliament. "In five years' time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency."

I have to admit I was shocked at the rabid savagery aimed at protesters of the Iraq invasion during Bush's reign of terror. The delight at going to war.. any war... after 9/11. The belittling of the humanity of the citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, etc etc. The bizarre embrace of torture with assurances it wasn't really torture and besides the detainees were islamofascists and Jesus would have approved. The suggestion that using nukes really wouldn't be so horrible. We have our own American Taliban and Nazis right here, despite our best efforts in education and exposure to other cultures.

They must hatch like toadstools, surrounded by bullshit and darkness. Sunlight is the only cure.

Birds and bees

Mandatory bird.

Phila of Bouphonia's Friday Hope.

I guess the Koch brothers didn't buy the right scientist...

Koch-Funded Berkeley Temperature Study Does “Confirm the Reality of Global Warming”

Honeybees and bumblebees. And lighting their hives on fire.

How Japan cleans up after a disaster.

Now they've pissed off the nurses...

Outraged by the arrest of two nurses and a union organizer volunteering at the Occupy Chicago protest over the weekend, National Nurses United is planning a protest at Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office today.

The group, the nation's largest union of registered nurses, is calling on its membership in Chicago to picket City Hall this morning to demand that misdemeanor trespassing charges against the nurses and all of the protesters be dropped.

Do you think they've learned anything? The Iraq war is finally over. And it marks a complete neocon defeat

About time:

Regulator throws lifeline to underwater borrowers

and

'We can't wait': Obama to use executive authority to boost economy as Republicans dither on jobs

And magic! There is no more poverty!

Stating the obvious

Bush Policies Dominant Cause Of National Debt

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has updated and refined a widely cited chart, laying out the origins of the country's current fiscal trajectory. And as before, the lion's share of the problem comes from ongoing George W. Bush-era policies -- particularly deficit-financed tax cuts, which eliminated Clinton-era surpluses and left the Treasury poised for a huge hit when the financial crisis and economic downturn further eroded federal revenues.

By the end of the decade, CBPP projects that, on the current trajectory, the Bush tax cuts, exacerbated by the economic downturn, combined with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for the significant majority of public debt as a share of GDP.

Without those factors, and without the need for stimulus measures under President Obama, CBPP projects that the debt-to-GDP ratio would have dropped under both Presidents Bush and Obama.

Georgie wants some credit?

Bush Reportedly Declined Invite Because He’s Peeved He Hasn’t Gotten Enough Credit For Bin Laden Killing

I'll give him credit... for ignoring Bin Laden



and starting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq.

I think he really doesn't want to be upstaged by President Obama's talent for multi-syllabic complex sentences and the ability to talk intelligently off the cuff about many subjects....

We were always going to go to war with Iraq

But we knew this the minute Georgie was selected to be president in 2000:

In his evidence Mr Blair said he had always made clear to US president George Bush that he would be "up for" regime change in Iraq if it was the only way of dealing with Saddam Hussein.

He acknowledged that he had discussed ousting Saddam with Mr Bush as early as December 2001 - even though it was not then British policy.

The inquiry released a newly declassified document from March 2002 - a year before the invasion - in which Mr Blair said the UK should be "gung ho" about the prospect of getting rid of the Iraqi dictator.