It's a funny thing that even as the Clintonist mainstream media get more and more settled into the #Russiagate paranoid conspiracy theory narrative and see Russkie influence everywhere, the actual evidence revealed by Mueller's investigation confirms how bogus the PCT narrative is. Jonathan Turley breaks it down at The Hill:
A nice prank idea, but minus a bunch of points on the implementation for doing it in an area over pedestrian trails.
Car dangling from Toronto bridge cut down, but mystery of how it got there leaves city hanging
Toronto police are scratching their heads over who left a car dangling from a cable on the Leaside Bridge.
Commuters found themselves doing double takes on Wednesday morning as they drove by the empty shell of a blue sedan hanging from the bridge.
From my Patheos blog The Zen Pagan:
Someone’s Prom Dress Is Not Your Culture (The Zen Pagan)
Well, the Internet is all upset over a dress again. But this time it’s not the color of the dress that’s the issue, it’s the color of the wearer.
The 2016 election. The Trump administration. Mass shootings. Paranoid conspiracy theories about child-rape sex dungeons in pizza places and Russian hackers. Nazis rallying in the streets. People getting assaulted for wearing the wrong baseball caps.
And where, you ask, has The Unreasonable Man been during these troubled times? Asleep at the switch?
I believe this is the first time I've ever said this: Mark Zuckerberg is entirely right.
Some in the tech world are in a moral panic about the fact that zillionarie tech baron and Facebook board member Peter Thiel is a major donor to the campaign of the vile Donald Trump. Now, there are many reasons to want to keep as far from possible from Thiel; this is a guy who actually said, way back in 2009, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"and spoke of the extension of the franchise to women as a negative development. He's also one of the founders of Palantir, a primary contractor of the "national security" deep state -- a hell of a thing for a self-described "libertarian" to be involved with. So his politics are awful, contradictory, irrational, and inhumane. In that realm, anyone paying attention concluded "fuck Thiel and the horse he rode in on" long before Trump became the GOP nominee, and his support for Trump is actually kind of low on his list of sins.
But the idea that a company should purge itself of board members based on ideological purity, on political opinions and affiliations outside their corporate role, is exactly the sort of self-sorting and silencing of dissent that is taking us down the spiral of partisanship.
Fifth points for courage and wanting to save a dog. Minus fifty for mixing LSD with DXM, and another minus fifty for not taking basic psychedelic precautions like having a sober friend around.
Troopers: Man mixing LSD and cough syrup saves dog from imaginary fire (WNYT NewsChannel 13)
HALFMOON -- A Halfmoon man allegedly broke into his neighbor's house to save the family dog from a fire, Thursday night. However, there was no fire. Troopers say he was on LSD and hallucinating.
Troopers say 43-year-old Michael Orchard of Inglewood Drive told them he mixed LSD with cough medicine Thursday afternoon and they found him, standing heroically with a dog in his arms outside of what he thought was a giant inferno.
"He believed that the residence was on fire and he was rescuing the dog," said Trooper Mark Cepiel, Troop G Spokesperson.
The mess in Syria is the starkest example of why a Clinton II administration, sure to continue to ramp up tensions with Russia and pursue an even more belligerent version of the brutal and stupid foreign policy status quo, could be more damaging to the world than even a Trump administration.
That status quo is actually inching us towards war with Russia.
War. With. Russia. You know, the country some experts believe has us outgunned when it comes to nukes.
Growing up in the Reagan era, I always thought it would be a Republican who brought about nuclear annihilation. Well, given that Hillary Clinton is a old "Goldwater Girl" who gets her foreign policy from Henry Kissinger, maybe that intuition wasn't too far off...the woman most likely to destroy the world is a Republican at heart. So if it comes to it, I'll have that bit of comfort that my instincts weren't completely off as I wait for incineration.
Warmongering in Washington, Preparation for War in Moscow (The Nation)
Cohen argues that we should be “shocked” less by Donald Trump’s sex talk or by Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds as secretary of state than by the entire political-media establishment’s indifference to Washington’s drift toward war with Russia. Since the breakdown of the Obama-Putin agreement to cooperate militarily against terrorists in Syria, which Cohen blames primarily on the Obama administration, Washington has escalated its warfare rhetoric against the Kremlin and Russian President Putin in particular. The man with whom the Obama administration proposed to partner with in Syria only two weeks ago is now denounced as a “war criminal” for Russia’s fight against terrorists in Aleppo, which was to be “liberated” by the now aborted US-Russian military alliance. The Washington Post was more specific, publishing a leaked account of how Putin might be arrested outside of Russia and put on trial. But the first victim might have been Secretary of State Kerry, who negotiated and advocated the proposed alliance and who now must level against Russia the same charges of “war crimes,” dealing a devastating blow to his own reputation. Putting another nail in the coffin of its jettisoned cooperation with the Kremlin, the White House officially accused the Putin leadership of trying to undermine the American electoral system through systematic hacking, even though it presented no real evidence for the allegation. Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to base their coverage of US national security in this regard solely on unrelenting vilification of Putin, not on US national interests. Any talk of partnership with Russia, as still advocated by Donald Trump, is traduced as “insanity” (Rachel Maddow on MSNBC).
The Weirton, WV police fired Stephen Mader for not killing Ronald D. Williams Jr (pictured). Here is why American police, as an institution, are the enemies of civilization. Good cops are systematically forced out.
Weirton terminates officer who did not fire at man with gun (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.
Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.
“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.
...
“I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop” situation.
But just then, two other Weirton officers arrived on the scene, Mr. Williams walked toward them waving his gun — later found to be unloaded — between them and Mr. Mader, and one of them shot Mr. Williams’ in the back of the head just behind his right ear, killing him.
...
In a meeting with the chief and City Manager Travis Blosser, Mr. Mader said Chief Alexander told him: “We’re putting you on administrative leave and we’re going to do an investigation to see if you are going to be an officer here. You put two other officers in danger.”
Mr. Mader said that “right then I said to him: ‘Look, I didn’t shoot him because he said, ‘Just shoot me.’ ”
On June 7, a Weirton officer delivered him a notice of termination letter dated June 6, which said by not shooting Mr. Williams he “failed to eliminate a threat.”