In ten brutal paragraphs, Jeffrey St. Clair lays out the horrible devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, and (of course) slams our President's absurd claims about how great his Administration handled it. Close to 5,000 dead, not "16," and our President never says who issues those rave reviews of his "performance" Jesus Mary and Joseph why is everything a damn performance anymore? Anyway, it really is well past time for Puerto Rican statehood -- I mean, given the number of times we've all had to tell people Puerto Rico is part of America, you know, maybe we should drive the point home.
Reed Richardson at FAIR reminds us that the whole "anonymous" kerfluffle just so happened to occur right around the time our Administration committed to further military involvement in Syria, which supports the hypothesis that our Administration, which loves drama, perpetrated the "anonymous" op-ed in the New York Times as a false flag operation. How do the libertarian-inflected folk who voted for our President because he promised a new-different-better foreign policy feel now, I wonder? Well, I don't wonder that much, because that was always a slim reed to hold onto.
Nicholas Powers at TruthOut reminds us that "Nike Uses Liberal Multiculturalism to Hide Abuse" -- specifically, abuse of the workers, in low pay and unsafe working conditions, who make Nike shoes. I've been obsessing lately over Hillary Clinton's suggestion during her campaign that we shouldn't break up the big banks because that won't solve racism or sexism or homophobia (gosh, I wonder why she lost!), and Mr. Powers's observations map pretty well onto that. (I do think he's overstating the effect 3D printing has on "making fully automated factories possible." 3D printers make knickknacks now, and get zero scrutiny from product safety regulators.)
Here's little-reported dung nugget from our President's August 30 Indiana rally: he slammed wind power, hitting on every last "problem" wind power supposedly has. In order: no, turbines don't kill that many birds; no, it's not the end of the world when the wind doesn't below because every form of energy has the occasional supply issue, and no "wind turbine syndrome" is not a thing, which anyone who's spent time in an actually noisy place already knows. He's taken all the crap-with-crap-sauce arguments fossil fuel PR hacks put out over the years and dumped them all in one paragraph! Our President really is everything wrong with our civilization in one person.
Finally, from the "I'm Pointing This Out So You'll Ignore It in the Future" file: long-time Republican donor Sean Klarman urges everyone to vote Democrat in the upcoming midterms, because "democracy is at stake," but you no doubt remember how many right-wingers urged you to vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 because democracy was at stake, so I hope you can forgive me for thinking this is a) just another attempt at corralling you into their game, instead of making them play our game, or b) ratfuckery from a big right-wing donor.
Comments