[Babylon Bee] VATICAN CITY‐Pope Francis has made one of his official, Popey announcements. (For our Protestant audience, a declaration from the pope is kinda like when Russell Moore tweets something; it carries a lot of weight for Catholics.)
Anyway, the pope declared that any time you've spent watching The View in this life will count as time served in purgatory.
"Frankly, if you watch those women bickering, that's punishment enough," said Pope Francis in a speech. He declared that your time will be tallied up by the angels, who will then mark that off as though you'd spent the time in purgatory.
The pope said the exchange rate for time is about 1 hour of The View for a "good six months" of purification in purgatory.
"Exchange rates fluctuate, of course, and it depends on the episode," he remarked. "An episode with Alyssa Milano or Chelsea Clinton is obviously worth a lot more than a regular episode."
The show's ratings saw a small bump after the announcement but ticked back down when Catholics realized they'd rather just spend time in purgatory.
Posted by: Frank G ||
10/17/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
I wish y'all stop putting [Babylon Bee] - spoils my guessing game.
#2
Easy to tell - they're evangelical Christians i.e. the only people left in this country who know enough about the various Christian confessions to make a joke that pokes fun at doctrinal and cultural differences between the Baptist and the Roman Catholic.
To the woke morons, Christianity's an evil blob, a mass of undifferentiated, fascist-leaning oppressors of womyn, travesties, unicorns and everything good and pure.
These people wouldn't know Luther from Luther Vandross, or Aquinas from Aquaman...
We have to, lest certain parties complain they weren’t warned. Also, to be fair, that makes it consistent with our non-Bee articles, a practice we started to protect Fred when those vicious idiots on Las Vegas were threatening to strip him of all his assets. Otherwise the hint would be that they’re the only articles lacking overt source identification.
[DW] Al-Shabaab ...... the Islamic version of the old Somali warlord... has mostly struck Kenya when attacking outside of Somalia's borders. But after recent arrests of alleged al-Shabaab fighters in Æthiopia, is the Islamist group turning to Æthiopia as a new target?
The al-Shabaab krazed killer group has sown fear and terror in Eastern Africa for more than a decade. The terrorist group is fighting to oust the Somali government and establish a society based on a rigid interpretation of Islamic Shariah law. Its original leadership was affiliated with al-Qaeda.
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[Zeihan] That’s just North Korea. The South Koreans, accurately reading their history and geography, view China and Japan as even more significant security threats. Japan outpopulates South Korea by well over 2:1, China by over 20:1. The navies of either country could wipe the Korean navy from the seas in days. To the south, east, and west, South Korea is surrounded by waters that either Japan or China could dominate given the right push. South Korea’s second city, Busan, is in a particularly vulnerable spot separated from mainland Japan via the Korea Strait, barely more than 100 miles across. Inchon, the western extremity of the Seoul metro region, isn’t much further away from China. And of course, Korean trade links to the wider world are impossible to maintain without both Japanese and Chinese quiescence.
For decades this has all been moot. South Korea, Japan and China were all members of the U.S.-led global Order. The U.S. Navy has ensured peaceful seas and ample trade. Oil, LNG and raw materials flow in, finished goods flow out, and Korea is one of the world’s largest transshipment and manufacturing nodes. So long as the Americans remain involved, Korea’s economic and security problems remain purely theoretical.
But the Americans – left, right and center – want to slim down America’s global position. The Korean deployment is America’s third-largest (after Japan and Germany), and the one that is by far in the trickiest and riskiest strategic position. And that is what keeps Moon’s administration up at night. The Americans are losing interest, and there is no version of a post-Order world where South Korea continues to survive at all – much less as a wealthy, trading nation – unless Seoul can obtain a powerful, dedicated ally.
So it was all Moon could to do cave in trade talks with the American administration on everything. And not just in trade negotiations. The Trump administration is insisting that South Korea compensate the United States for ongoing troop commitments to the tune of at least $5 billion annually. That’s a lot for a country Korea’s size, but honestly it’s a bargain considering what 26,000 American troops can do when they are suitably motivated.
Is caving to the U.S. on trade and defense reimbursement enough to keep the American troops in-country in this post-Order world? No clue. But Moon, correctly, concluded that without conceding to American terms there was no chance whatsoever.
[Babylon Bee] U.S.‐After Trump moved some troops from Northern Syria, he was immediately blamed for causing violence in the typically peaceful Middle East.
Syria, which was known around the world as an idyllic paradise until January 20, 2017 at 12:00 PM EST, is now in shambles thanks to some minor troop reassignments. Trump tried to restablize the Middle East by announcing a deployment of 2,000 U.S. troops to defend the famed bastion of democracy and freedom Saudi Arabia, but it was too late. The damage had been done.
"It's sad that the usually serene resort destination of Syria has been transformed into a war-torn hellscape under Trump," said Hillary Clinton. "Under my watch, the Middle East was basically a big golf resort."
Barack Obama and George W. Bush joined in their condemnation of what Trump has done to the Middle East. "It's like they say in Texas," said Bush. "Attack Iraq once, shame on me. Attack it twice, well, then you won't get attacked again."
"Trump has betrayed our allies, the Kurds," said one man in Arizona who had just googled "who are the Kurds" a few minutes before. "Look at all this violence he's causing in the usually utopian paradise of Syria."
The nation has called on Trump to allow U.S. soldiers to stick around for another few centuries in order to bring our various conflicts to a satisfactory conclusion.
At publishing time, the Pentagon had issued a reminder to the nation that "we've always been at war with Turkey."
[Townhall] There are three questions that our terrible, terrible ruling class raises whenever it opens its collective kale-hole to lecture us: 1) Does the elite think we are really, really stupid, or 2) Is the elite really, really stupid, or 3) Is the elite all of the above? The last week has been eventful, even by Age O’ Trump standards, and the one enduring takeaway is just how bad these people are at gaslighting us with inept lies that demand we disbelieve what’s happening right in front of us. But it should come as no surprise that our alleged betters are no good at gaslighting because they have proven themselves to be no good at anything.
Here’s a fun test: can you name something ‐ anything ‐ major in the last two decades that our best and brightest have not screwed up?
I’ll wait.
Gaslighting is their default move because gaslighting is all these losers have. It’s not like they can sit back and let you read their CV of achievements. Iraq, Obamacare, their annoying millennial kids...all disasters. The members of America’s current ruling class are King Midases of failure. Everything they touch turns to suck.
So, because they have no other way to deal with the damning evidence of their utter incompetence, our elite instead tries to convince us that we are crazy for noticing just how lame they are. That’s called "gaslighting," the straight-faced denial of what’s happening right in front of you that tries to leverage your politeness and deference to convince you that it’s not the elite that’s rotten. You’re just crazy for noticing, you crazed crazy person of craziness.
Take the Northern Syrian crisis ‐ please. I generally side with the non-commie Kurds over the Turks, but facts are facts and facts mean something. We keep hearing how we "betrayed our allies," but who promised the Kurds that we would fight Turkey on their behalf? It’s a big jump from "Let’s both fight ISIS" to "Take that, NATO ally." But our garbage media, and our garbage politicians, sort of hand wave away the fact that you can’t "betray" someone by not doing what you never promised to do, especially when no reasonable person could ever expect you to do it.
...It’s bad enough that they lie to us, directly and by omission, all the time. But what makes it worse is how their lies are such glaringly obvious fabrications and/or dissimulations that the deepest insult is that they think we might believe them.
#1
Next : " Damn, this new grass is causing all kind oh health and economic problems. " , I have an Idea, lets start growing coca in our own country and undercut the cartels and wean the kids off mamajuana." , Hey , we could start growing out own poppies also and Afghanistan could go Fark itself. "
#2
Common sense ("called 'common' for being so rare" - Chesteron).
Wonder how many Americans support the Shitshowmen on this issue?
Not that there are any trustworthy pollsters... maybe someone could survey Army or Marine recruiters and simply ask them to respond, yea or nay, to the Q, "As a recruiting tactic, would you find it effective to mention the prospect of fighting in Syria and against Turkey as per Congress's desired policy?"
Maybe a follow-up Q: "Can you even begin to describe with any clarity that desired policy?"
[Spectator] Try as he might, Trump probably won’t be able to fix it ‐ just what The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire... is counting on.
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO
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Posted by: trailing wife ||
10/17/2019 00:00 ||
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#3
You could hear the sounds of NATO's dying gasps when the Iron Curtain fell and Germany reunified. NATO is now one of those marriages where they are long separated and only are married because they haven't divorced ... yet.
#7
It crumbled under Clinton. Especially with the expansion all the way up to Russia's borders. Enforcement of provisions in the treaty weren't enforced, standards slipped and it became a social club for politicians and generals.
#9
Not only did I watch it happen from within the military, after I got out and worked for the DoD I saw it even more. Most of us were wondering why the hell NATO was still around and what we were doing. The bombing of Serbia told us. It was about spreading western Europe's power. Nothing more.
#10
That spread allowed the EU to come into being. If it wasn't for the spread of NATO with German money and American might, the EU wouldn't exist as it does today.
[STAT] It has become the geneticist’s version of, "What, me not inclusive? But I have a black friend!" In the case of modern studies of DNA, researchers called to task for studying mainly European populations often defend themselves by pointing out that they included some Yoruba (or Khoisan or Bantu or other African) DNA in their analysis, too.
Research presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) on Tuesday and Wednesday shows how "woefully inadequate" such tokenism is, said Dr. Neil Hanchard of Baylor College of Medicine, who led one of the studies.
He and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 426 people from 13 African countries and 50 ethnolinguistic groups from across the continent, producing "an unprecedented, in-depth cataloging of the genetic diversity of people across the African continent," said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a medical geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the ASHG program committee who was not involved in the study.
The research was done as part of Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa), a consortium that was launched in 2013 to remedy the underrepresentation of that continent in genetics research.
"There is so much genetic diversity across the African continent, if you sample from just one or two ethnolinguistic groups you know something about one or two groups," Hanchard said. Because most studies linking a DNA variant to a disease or other trait have been done on Europeans, and the human "reference genome" ‐ hailed as the blueprint of humankind ‐ is missing millions of DNA sequences that are found only in Africans, people of African ancestry are at risk of not benefitting from gene-based personalized medicine.
#6
Let me think about it for a second: Go to Europe where their is excellent health care on call and good food, public records to trace genealogies for centuries, or... Africa where there are various fevers known and unknown out in the countrysides. Let me think about it and get back to you.
#7
It's even simpler than that magpie. These people went to Africa and examined "426 people from 13 African countries and 50 ethnolinguistic groups" [wow]. When asked "well did you find anything interesting?" they had nothing to say. So they pulled the racist card.
#8
Well, that's today's story. 3 days ago we had "South African scientists demand the return of hundreds of tribal DNA samples after a British institute was accused of trying to use them to make money"
#9
This is where the Chinese are going to kick our ass. Unbiased, disinterested research on taboo topics.
Our SJWs in the universities view their role as preventing harmful truths from being publicized. The Chinese don't give a shit. Be prepared for the uncanny result of woke Leftists calling Chinese people chinky-dinky rat men incapable of rational thought.
It's Us vs. Them, don't look for consistency among the Left. They will happily betray their own principles to play to their preexisting prejudices.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
10/17/2019 16:28 Comments ||
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#10
This is where the Chinese are going to kick our ass. Unbiased, disinterested research on taboo topics.
Well, I'll give you 5/100 points for knowing what "disinterested" means. But the rest of it is a bloody joke. Just look how many original (not an elaboration on somebody else's work) scientific papers Chinese publish.
#12
Unbiased, disinterested research on taboo topics.
What g(r)omgoru said. Also, how does a totalitarian society that hired Google to set up a social points system with facial recognition and immediate, real-life repercussions — on top of cutting out access to any search terms the Communist government lists as verboten — do anything unbiased and disinterested? These are Mao’s culture warriors all grown up, from the culture that spawned the Khmer Rouge and Shining Path among so many others, not former College Republicans.
#13
Identity politics is now spreading its poison across the sciences.
It could take a decade or two, but Herb may be proved right on this one.
There are two separate issues here.
(a) The decline of Western science
(b) Chinese science.
(a) The decline is, IMO, exaggerated. People are beginning to notice that straight A/super collegial (and, of course, victim class) students make lousy scientists - because "collegiality" = ass kissing and getting straight A = never argue with the teacher. However, every significant scientific advance starts with somebody who's arrogant enough to think "suppose everybody else, but me, is wrong (on this particular issue)?"*.
The conformists, once they become independent researchers, publish trivialities, or (most of them are ego-putzes who come to believe - because of their fucking grades, that they're geniuses) start faking results, and get caught.
(b) Chinese, because of Confucianism, are very strongly consensus & group think. Notice how in their folklore only the, perpetually drunk, Taoist monks show any signs of non-consensus thinking?
* 99% of the time they're wrong. But the 1% is where all the human advances come from.
#14
There is a third point Lex. Part of the decline, IMO, is that most original thinkers in the West were siphoned into computer programming. Now it comes to the end because general, wide-application programming packages replace specific programs. Remember when people were writing specific book-keeping programs? Nowadays you can do it all with Excel. So, you don't need so many programmers. But, creative people gotta create.
[Peter Zeihan] This day was always going to happen.
On October 7, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a partial withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria. Soon after, Turkish forces began moving south across the border to strike Kurdish forces which had been until extremely recently under American protection. Two days later the partial American withdrawal was upgraded to a full evacuation of all forces.
Wailing and gnashing of teeth across the American political spectrum quickly erupted, with many condemning the tactical and political aspects of the president’s decision. I’m of mixed minds:
On the one hand, the Kurds – whether in Syria or Iraq – have been America’s only reliable regional allies since America’s first major confrontation with Iraq back in the early 1990s. When we have asked, they have answered. Every single time. In many cases U.S. forces didn’t even do the heavy lifting, but instead relegated themselves to providing intelligence and materiel support. Without the Kurds’ assistance the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would have been far nastier affair, post-Saddam Iraq would have been far less stable, the defanging of ISIS and the destruction of the ISIS caliphate would not have happened. In Syria in specific, the Kurds habitually provided at least five times the forces the Americans did.
On the other hand, the United States was always going to leave Syria. If the Americans were unwilling to commit 100,000 troops to the overthrow of Syria’s Assad government and its subsequent forcible reconstruction, then there was little reason to become involved in a decades-long, grinding multi-sided civil war.
The primary reason American forces remain in Syria at this point is to limit Iranian penetration. That battle was lost six years ago when then-President Obama allowed the Syrian government to cross Obama’s own red line on the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. Obama made it crystal clear that any U.S. military action would be small scale, focused on Special Operations Forces, and largely dedicated to backing up the Syrian Kurds. Whether under Obama or Trump, an American withdrawal has always been inevitable. It’s just taken seven years of Syrian-Russian-Iranian victories on the battlefield and the large-scale dismemberment of the ISIS Caliphate to make it imminent.
Aside from the Iranian vector, American national and strategic interests in Syria are utterly nonexistent. Syria – even backed up by Iran – is a military pigmy that Israel could easily shatter. If Jerusalem really wanted to, it could roll into Damascus in a long weekend. (Sticking around, of course, would be a barrel of shiv-wielding monkeys.) American interests in Lebanon are less than American interests in Syria. Jordan has been a de facto Israeli client state for years. And that is quite literally all she wrote.
The far more important fact – comfortable or uncomfortable depending upon your view – is that the evolving American view of Syria is really little more than a microcosm of an evolving American view of the Middle East writ large
Head to the article and enjoy a good read.
Posted by: 3dc ||
10/17/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
See - Fracking
Can we now start pulling out of the Department of Energy which was created back in the old days of the Oil Crisis. Capitalism solved the problem the government has been screwing around with for 46 years.
US intervenes "The US should stop occupying Middle Eastern countries!"
US stops intervening "OMG the US are abandoning the people in the Middle East!"
The Left: "Imperialism, Colonialism, and War are bad."
Trump: "I agree."
The Left: "WE NEED MORE WAR AND FOREIGN OCCUPATIONS AND WE NEED IT NOW!!!"
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
10/17/2019 00:00 ||
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#1
It's said consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but I think the little minds inside the beltway are consistently nauseating in their machinations.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/17/2019 0:18 Comments ||
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#4
These Shitshow characters pulled the same stunt about Russia when it served their purpose in 2012 and 2016: telling lies to get elected.
Dems in 2012: Russia's not a threat! My opponent's a bloodthirsty warmonger! "The '80s want their foreign policy back (tee hee)!" Oh and, "I'll have more flexibility after the election"
Dems in 2016: Russians are a mortal threat to everything sacred in woke America! ... Russians are poisoning our precious bodily fluids! ... hacking our paper-based balloting system... they've recruited Orange Man Republican! He's a bloodthirsty warmonger a Friend of Putin, no, a Corrupt Silovik, no, he's a kkkREmLiN aGEnt!!!!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Babylon Bee] VATICAN CITY‐Pope Francis has made one of his official, Popey announcements. (For our Protestant audience, a declaration from the pope is kinda like when Russell Moore tweets something; it carries a lot of weight for Catholics.)
[Peter Zeihan] This day was always going to happen.
