David Brooks: trying to excuse the inexcusable

Learning From Mistakes

We have been asked (by David Brooks) to understand that mistakes were made (by lots of important people but also by David Brooks) because it turns out that war is tricky. And when war is waged for example, on behalf of people so crooked that they have to screw their pants on, whose only understanding of the complexities of war come from “Combat” for the Atari 2600, whose grasp of the politics and history of the middle east goes no further than what they remember from the last issue of the ‘warmongers quarterly guide to the world’s largest and least defended oil fields’, what results may not be a Jeffersonian democracy founded in the hope of peace and brotherhood for all. And that despite the fact that mistakes were made (by many people including David Brooks) we should totally be humble (like David Brooks), and forgive people (like David Brooks) trusting that if in some small way things did not turn out exactly as hoped, that we should trust that the very smartest people made these decisions for the best of reasons. And to suggest that this is an innaccurate recap of events is nothing more than mean spirited partisan politics and petty jealousy. Which is why it’s beneath the dignity of America’s most humble pundit (like for example David Brooks) to actually take the time to specifically admit that he happily sang from the same songbook as the Bush administration neocons that purposefully distorted, or invented any intelligence they could to justify the invasion of Iraq.

And this is utter horseshit. The most generous thing one can say about those people who believed we should go to war with Iraq is that they were gullible. All of the other reasons to go to war with Iraq are various shades of bloodthirst or avarice or paranoia or dangerously unrealistic optimisim that Saddam could be removed quickly, relatively bloodlessly and easily replaced with a democratically elected government. David Brooks doesn’t want to admit to any of that. He’s happy to look at opinion polls showing broad support for intervention (after troops were already on the ground), at self serving attempts by the administration to blame the fiasco on bad intel (cooked up to order by Cheney’s pet analysts).

I mean just look at the reaching David Brooks has to do to try and justify his enthusiastic support of the invasion and subsequent occupation:

If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it?

He’s slipping. That’s the kind of argument we’re accustomed to hearing Jonah Goldberg make. An argument that requires time travel is not a persuasive argument. But it’s all he’s got, because any attempt to update his argument requires integrity. Let’s pick a thing that’s happening right now that could have dangerous consequeses if allowed to continue, for example the Governor Sam Brownbeck or Governor Bobby Jindal’s out and out war on education in Kansas and Louisiana. Public education in those states is and will continue to be a fiasco, turning out thousands or millions of young people without any chance to get into a good university, and making sure that any good university in those states is both privately funded and prohibitively expensive for students that aren’t already rich. It’s not WWII, but it’s bad enough. left unchecked there will be millions of young people in those states who will never have the chance to make a good living, because their government has abdicated its responsibility to educate them. Those young people will start at a tremendous disadvantage and suffer more of the ills of poverty than they would have had to if they got a good education. Some people will have to take more hazardous jobs than they would have otherwise, and some fraction of those will be killed by them. Those states have also done all they can to fight the ACA, and refuse medicaid expansion. More citizens will die from those policies. So, having said that, and proving insofar as it can be ‘proved’ in a blog post that the policies of Governors Brownbeck and Jindal are causing avoidable suffering and death to citizens of those states in order to pander to the basest of their base, would it be ok to kill Governors Brownbeck and Jindal? Absolutely not. Should they be stopped, opposed by every legal means and their administrations examined for any hint of corruption the prosecution of which might slow down their assault on the residents of those states? Absolutely.

But David Brooks can’t get there. He can’t admit that killing people should be the last resort of anyone that claims to call themselves civilized and not the first. Look at this:

After the 1990s, many of us were leaning in the interventionist direction. We’d seen the fall of the apartheid regime, which made South Africa better. We’d seen the fall of communist regimes, which made the Eastern bloc nations better. Many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world.

His example refutes itself in one word: Yugoslavia. Anyone who paid attention in the 1990s saw what happens a deeply divided country ruled by a repressive government led by tyrant dies. People pick up guns and knives and try to settle old scores.

He’s going to try and tell us he’s learned his lesson, though:

Finally, Iraq teaches us to be suspicious of leaders who try to force revolutionary, transformational change. It teaches us to have respect for trimmers, leaders who pay minute attention to context, who try to lead gradual but constant change. It teaches us to honor those who respect the unfathomable complexity of history and who are humble in the face of consequences to their actions that they cannot fully predict or understand.

Nowhere in there does it say, “when we make a predictable mistake, let’s not listen to those people that were cheering for it like fans at a hometown highschool football game any more”. Nowhere does it say, “Let’s start listening to the people who told as many people as they could, as loud as they could, that it was a bad, maybe criminal idea.” Nowhere does it say “let’s start prosecuting the liars and the torturers and chase it down until all of the liars, war profiteers, torturers and other assorted war criminals are behind bars.”

 

Comments: 73

 
 
 

I’d go back in time & strangle David Brooks in his crib.

Not all I’d do in the past, but it would be a start.

 
 

The thing is that Brooks doesn’t give a damn about Iraq anyway. Not in the least.

His argument, week after week, boils down to this: come on you voters, elect a Republican in 2016, even though the last time Republicans were in the White House they promptly bankrupted the government, and then they fucked up the war in Afghanistan, and then they fucked up by invading Iraq, and for their finale they wrecked the entire world’s economy.

But ignore all that, voters! Hand wave, hand wave, here’s some irrelevant side-issues, here’s a time travel fantasy that a junior high school student would roll his eyes at, here’s a bunch of rather nauseating moralistic posturing, but whatever, whatever, for God’s sake please don’t take my tax cut for millionaires away!

 
 

I’ll start believing in God as soon I see all the pompom wavers for the Iraq invasion lose their high paying jobs and Cheney and Junior both in orange jumpsuits in the Hague.

Lying SOB’s.

These assholes loves ’em the WAR PROFITS for the rich and AUSTERITY!!!!! for everyone else and try to pretend that this is just common sense and basic economics.

 
 

After the 1990s, many of us were leaning in the interventionist direction. We’d seen the fall of the apartheid regime, which made South Africa better. We’d seen the fall of communist regimes, which made the Eastern bloc nations better.

Sorry, Bobo, bad examples since armed invasions didn’t accomplish either of those things.

What WAS “seen” was how Reagan and Thatcher made big political hay out of invading Grenada and the Falklands.

And SOME dumb shits thought that applying that same idea to the Middle East would be a political windfall for the GOP and make a great stick to beat the Dems with.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

After the 1990s, many of us were leaning in the interventionist direction

Many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world.

For values of “us” equaling “we villagers.”

Just WHY you might have believed (not “thought,” Bobo, you continue to conflate those two different things) that is what makes you a worthless PoS. Those (as in not the “us” you mentioned above) who spent some time, ya know, actually thinking about it, recognizing the dangers of going down that road. Sadly, the “usses” running the show when “us” st00pidly did it STILL hadn’t spent put a moment of serious thought into what WOULD LIKELY HAPPEN when they carried out their st00pid, naive, evil, immoral, illegal, cock waving plan.

Is it stupidity, stubbornness, obliviousness, or maybe something else and all of them that allows Bobo to maintain the pretense that the war was not a great big steaming lie that he cheered for even when there were a LOT of people loudly pointing out what a great big steaming lie not to mention st00pid fucking idea it was?

Allso, the obligatory: http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos-in-paradise/

 
 

Beautiful, H.

You know that dick move with the honey glazed frosting festooned with sprinkles? That is David fucking Brooks!

Oh wait, that is when you trip someone by gently tapping the unplanted foot in such a fashion as to send it into the achilles of the planted resulting in a face plant…Wait, what were we on about again?

 
 

This is why I’ll have a hard time voting for Hillary. No excuses for voting for that war. Back to Applebee’s to rewrite your column, Mr. Brooks. Loser.

 
 

The notion that we ought to now go to Baghdad and somehow take control of the country strikes me as an extremely serious one in terms of what we’d have to do once we got there. You’d probably have to put some new government in place. It’s not clear what kind of government that would be, how long you’d have to stay. For the U.S. to get involved militarily in determining the outcome of the struggle over who’s going to govern in Iraq strikes me as a classic definition of a quagmire.

~ Dick Cheney 1991

The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

~ Dick Cheney 1992

 
 

David (fucking) Brooks: STILL trying to excuse the inexcusable.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Major Kong said

Do I recall Bobo mentioning that at any point during the run-up to rabid jingoist cheerleading preceding the invasion? Nope, pretty sure he conveniently completely elided the subject.

Do I recall any of the MSM (“Mainstream media,” not “men who have sex with men” – I know Teh Ho and I both discussed it and I’m we were not alone in that) talking about that? *crickets*

 
 

Bobo and his fellow pompom wavers for the Iraq War love to excuse it because of “faulty intelligence”.

It’s worth remembering the truth tellers of the time, eg Hans Blix, Scott Ritter and David Kelly, who repeatedly debunked all of BushCo’s lies.. for which they were viciously slimed by the RWNJ’s… Kelly committed suicide, and Ritter was accused of being a child molester.

And don’t forget Darth Cheney words about these inspectors non-faulty intelligence work “Absence of proof is not proof of absence.”

 
 

Bobo and his fellow pompom wavers for the Iraq War love to excuse it because of “faulty intelligence”.

When the CIA wouldn’t tell Rumsfeld what he wanted to hear, he created his own intelligence service that would.

 
 

It’s been a while, too long IMO, since we had some POOP in here.

 
 

Hey Pupienus, how’s that crazy Texas weather in person? Looked nutty on the “news” this morning. I hope you’re on high ground…

 
 

The sheer magnitude of hypocrisy being wallowed in by the Duggars is so blatant that it becomes very easy to overlook some of the more nuanced aspects of it.

Josh “Self-Admitted Child Molester” Duggar “remained very much alive”. I believe the “kids these days” were labelling this degree of burnage “REKT”.

 
 

I am still having trouble with the fact that the Duggar Child Molestation story was “broken” by InTouch Magazine. And that there’s another molester in the mix named Bill “unwanted affection” Gothard.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

We’re in no danger. We strive to avoid low water crossings so we should be okay.

Just got back from walking Bagoas along the levee. Trinity River is 10 feet or so above flood stage. Fortunately, that’s thirty feet beneath the levee top so all is good. http://i.imgur.com/iRaDHkb.jpg

It was much higher yesterday. http://i.imgur.com/BALA2ra.jpg (not my photo, found on reddit) I circled our building so you can see we’re alright.

 
 

It was much higher yesterday. http://i.imgur.com/BALA2ra.jpg (not my photo, found on reddit) I circled our building so you can see we’re alright.

Cool, glad you’re safe! Looks like the Texas “scenery” is quite different from your Portlandia locale…

 
 

Re: Teh Duggaring:

Over at Mock Paper Scissors we decided that every reference to Josh Duggar commented on the internets shall forevermore be: “Xristian incestuous, home-schooled pedophilia aficionado, deemed too toxic for an official hate group, Josh Duggar” — it’s not as short and pithy as santorum, but, hey, whatcanyoudo.

 
 

I also feel it’s important to note that if you’re getting pith in your santorum, you’re doing it wrong.

 
 

We’re in no danger.

i totally forgot that you had moved to texass…i still think of you being in lovely oregon…glad you and teh ho are a-okay, and bagoas also too…

this whole duggar thing has squicked me out more than i thought it possible to be squicked…just one of their commercials is enough to give me the creeps for the entire day.

the ‘stern talking to’ and friend of the family apartment rehab=counseling is incomprehensible to me…but then again, they felt as though ‘hard labor’ would cure the kid…how draconian are jim bob and mother duggar’s brains?

 
address my envelope, lips!
 

I really can’t think why more people who say “OCCUPATION!!” in Iraq is good (Damn you, Bobo) don’t look long and hard at the Yugoslav republic and recall how long the “unified” (under a vicious dictator) government hid the festering hatred of the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in the region. As sson as that government “left” (Tito died), the entire region destabilized in a truly horrific fashion.

Of course, Yugoslavia didn’t have oil, so they weren’t paying attention.

(It did have the best all-grey concrete mini-golf course in the Mediterranean, though. My mother had friends in what is now Croatia, and we’d go to a small town named Crickvenica and play mini-golf, swim, and eat ice-cream. We always drove, because the car was filled with treats they couldn’t get under the Communist government, like disposable diapers.)

 
 

In formerly Communist Yugoslavia, diapers dispose of YOU!

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Over at Mock Paper Scissors we decided that every reference to Josh Duggar commented on the internets shall forevermore be: “Xristian incestuous, home-schooled pedophilia aficionado, deemed too toxic for an official hate group, Josh Duggar” — it’s not as short and pithy as santorum, but, hey, whatcanyoudo.

Related

 
 

Related

Hey, I came up with it first! Cheeky cartooning bastard.

 
 

re: the “stern talking to” given to Josh “Self-Admitted Child Molester” Duggar.

Delivered by this guy.

 
 

Chris Hedges

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_pathology_of_the_rich_white_family_20150517

You have to hand it to rich white families. They steal with greater finesse than anyone else. If you are a poor black teenager and sprint out of a CVS with a few looted bottles of shampoo, you are likely to be shot in the back or sent to jail for years. If there were an Olympiad for crime, rich white families would sweep up all the medals; blacks would be lucky to come within a mile of the first elimination trial. I don’t know why black people even try to compete in this area. They are, by comparison, utter failures as criminals. The monarchs of crime are rich white people, who wallow in their pilfered wealth while locking away in prisons a huge percentage of poor men of color.

Rich white families are also the most efficient killers on the planet. This has been true for five centuries, starting with the conquest of the Americas and the genocide against Native Americans, and continuing through today’s wars in the Middle East. Rich white families themselves don’t actually kill. They are not about to risk their necks on city streets or in Iraq. They hire people, often poor, to kill for them. Rich white families wanted the petroleum of Iraq and, by waving the flag and spewing patriotic slogans, got a lot of poor kids to join the military and take the oil fields for them. Rich white people wanted endless war for the benefit of their arms industry and got it by calling for a war on terror. Rich white people wanted police to use lethal force against the poor with impunity and to arrest them, swelling U.S. prisons with 25 percent of the world’s prison population, so they set up a system of drug laws and militarized police departments to make it happen.

 
 


Delivered by this guy.

That is fucking terrifying…

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

That is fucking terrifying…

Too true but don’t just look at his pic, read the article too.

 
 

Too true but don’t just look at his pic, read the article too.

Ew, I did. Not only did I find his picture terrifying but also the sub-classification of child porn and that his defense is “weeeeelllll…josh SAID he only did it once, so…ya know, no biggie!”

The thought of monsters like him in positions of authority is infuriating and sickening…

 
 


Too true but don’t just look at his pic, read the article too.

Ew I did. Not only is his picture terrifying, but the sub-groups of child porn terrifying, that his defense is, “weeeeeellll…josh SAID he only did it once so, ya know…no biggie” is nauseatingly terrifying, and that there are monsters like him holding positions of authority is is mind-numbing terrifying…also, the amount of people who are actually defending the duggars is quite shocking…

 
 

FYWP…

 
 

“[V]arious shades of bloodthirst or avarice or paranoia or dangerously unrealistic optimisim[…]”

Golly, that sounds an awful lot like the Sanderistas infesting FireDogLake and the Daily Kos and Democratic Undergound and the Smirking Chimp and …

All these underground lefties have come up into the light, the better to shoot down their enemies in the Democratic Party, and Fishtroller only knows what they will do when Bernie loses and all their hopes are cruelly dashed. With any luck they will return to their holes to sulk and sit out election and pave the way for the ultimate Republican victory. Not a dime’s worth of difference and all that, don’t you know.

 
 

If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it?

Why is this question always framed as killing the infant Hitler? Nobody ever seems to address the possibility that an intervention or institutionalization could occur so that the threat he will pose is neutralized.

Does anybody posing this stupid question ever stop to reconsider the whole “evil baby” premise it is based on?

 
 

Good point. I’m going to set the WABAC machine so I can get Hitler’s parents.

 
 

Good point. I’ll set the WABAC so I can kill Hitler’s parents.

 
 

In every hole in your body, Word Press, in every hole!!

 
 

Okay, just got off the boat. Didn’t want to because Bobo and whatnot. Shoulda listened to the voices.

Is this supposed to be Bobo’s mea culpa for supporting Operation Iraqi Liberation? Wow. Opening with – “of course I’d strangle that baby”. Really?

BUT THAT BABBY IS HITLER! LOOKIT HIS MOUSTACHIO! omfg. It’s a fucking baby. FFS.

Maybe it’s super high-level meta. Maybe Bobo is trying to highlight the complete absence of any moral sense exerted by our policy makers. The decision is solely whether or not to “take out Saddam” – the million dead Iraqis are just an afterthought, like whether or not it is morally okay to strangle babies in their cribs.

 
 

He keeps advocating for atrocities, because that’s his freaking job, he doesn’t realize not every molehill needs to be turned into a mountain of skulls. His job is to make the indefensible sound like a moral imperative. He spent too much time reading Caesar’s “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars” and not enough time reading Vercingetorix’s “This Roman Bastard Killed or Enslaved Everyone I Ever Loved”
Here’s how he does it:
step one: you say that killing people is wrong, but what about Hitler, he’s arguably the worst, most bloodthirsty murderous person in all history, would killing him be OK?
step two: you agree that killing Hitler would be OK, but he’s hiding behind the Wehrmacht and the SS who are also horrible people can we kill them too?
step three: you agree that war is sometimes necessary to stop people like Hitler, and we swear this guy over there is just like Hitler can we please please please go to war now? And can we kill babies and torture children if we tell you they’d grow up to be Hitler?
At this point I don’t think he can help himself.

 
 

“This Roman Bastard Killed or Enslaved Everyone I Ever Loved”

Nice guys those Romans.

When you have to invent words for “kill one out of every ten” or “nail someone to a tree until they die” that says something about your society.

 
 

Just noticed that BBBB noted the baby thing twelve hours before I did. AHEM indeed.

 
Big Bad Bald Bastard
 

You were too busy fantasizing about traveling back in time and banging Hitler’s mom.

 
 

Dennis Hastert was a member of the House who voted for the Defense of Marriage act. He subsequently as Speaker twice put before the House of Representatives the constitutional amendment that would have cancelled retroactively all the same sex marriages that had taken place legally. …

The rank hypocrisy of this man using his power to persecute other people for doing what he was doing.

Secondly, and it is relevant to note that in terms of the hypocrisy area, you mentioned Gingrich had to quit. It turns out Gingrich was at the time having an affair with the woman he is now married who was an employee of the House Agriculture Committee. And then Livingston who was supposed to replace him had to quit because he was having an affair not just with a woman but with a lobbyist who was lobbying him.

So then in an effort to get somebody [who was clean], they get Hastert. The point is that all this was happening while they were impeaching Bill Clinton for having oral sex.

So I think that it now looks like if you take Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, and Robert Livingston the the Republican Speakers or would be speakers, Clinton is a choir boy.”

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Our family is growing. Today Iskandar became the newest family member. He’s a tiny little Flame Point Siamese, just about eight weeks old. Bagoas (yes, that’s why “Iskandar”) is having a hard time adapting. He’ll come around though. Don’t know if teh kitteh will, though – he’s very much not interested in Bagoas.

 
Big Bad Bald Bastard
 

I dunno about the name, Pup, it may put you off Iskandar kebabs.

Note to self, go to Turkish restaurant on day off…

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Nothing will ever put me off Iskender kebab, as you might have suspected. The other day I saw a post in the Japanese Food reddit with the title “[some steak] …from the show “cooking with dog.” I was relieved to find it wasn’t what it might have been.

You borked the link, though. Here it is for anyone interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?skender_kebap

 
 

Our family is growing. Today Iskandar became the newest family member. He’s a tiny little Flame Point Siamese, just about eight weeks old. Bagoas (yes, that’s why “Iskandar”) is having a hard time adapting. He’ll come around though. Don’t know if teh kitteh will, though – he’s very much not interested in Bagoas.

we will soon be raising our grand cat…i suspect maeve is going to flip a tit when she arrives…

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Oh for fuck sake. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?skender_kebap

I really need to start paying more attention.

 
 

The link breaks itself, Pup, or at least it did when I tried to copy-paste it. Apparently, Chrome doesn’t like a capital I with a dot over it, so converts it to %C4%B0. I wanted to paste it in from CopyPasteCharacter.com, but they didn’t have it. As an alternative, here’s a redirect that doesn’t use any non-standard characters, so the curious can see what’s under discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskender_kebab

(Serbiaball continues to demand that we remove kebab from premises, but that’s its problem.)

 
 

Yeah, shit. Opera did it too and you know how picky Opera is about following standards.

Serbiaball Wasn’t Polandball a new thing not that long ago? Now it’s a huge thing? Jebus I need to get out of this shoebox I’m living in.

 
 

just finished reading about arizona wanting a 12 month lifetime cap on welfare benefits only to be confronted by the walker/czaja tag team which is clearly determined to win the race to the bottom…cannot linky on iphone, so get googlin…

 
 

Nothing will ever put me off Iskender kebab

Good stuff. Had plenty of that when we used to deploy to Turkey.

Spent a couple months flying airline trips out of Munich. Pretty much lived at the Turkish restaurants because I found most of the German food to be pretty bland. Wiener schnitzel? Imagine a really dry veal parmesan without any sauce on it.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Some people just aren’t into Schnitzel. Me, I love all the Schnitzels.

 
 

Wasn’t Polandball a new thing not that long ago? Now it’s a huge thing?

Huge enough that it’s got its own thread on alternatehistory.com now, which is how I could into it.

 
 

A Czech restaurant near us (sadly closed now) used to have something called “Chodsky schnitzel” (and I’m probably misspelling that), which was a schnitzel served with a brown mushroom gravy. Very nice.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

Don’t know what the Czech name for it is but the mushroom gravy is the German Jäagerschnitzel. Usually made with a pork cutlet.

Meanwhile, Ifor some bizarre reason I cannot fathom I decided to check in at GayPutzRiot. Hoo boy.

This is interesting.

An official with the jihad-advocacy group CAIR has been arrested in a pedophile sting operation after attempting to meet up with a “12 year old girl” who turned out to be several adult cops.

Same fella used to run a camp for Mohammedan yewts.

Seems like this story has been receiving considerably less coverage than the Josh Duggar thing, doesn’t it?

I can’t even begin to unpack that.

Then,

It’s nice that the press has the pseudo-woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner to talk about; it gives them cover to ignore Hillary’s corruption scandals, and other things.

BENGHAZIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!

I couldn’t stand to go any further and I sure as hell aint gonna go looking for mangoes.

 
 

The fact is, I am hardly through with you liberal traters. Once you are reported to the NSA you will get the punishedment you deserve for hating the USA and our freedoms and abusing them. By the way we are the best at war and the bible says no gays.

 
Big Bad Bald Bastard
 

Seems like this story has been receiving considerably less coverage than the Josh Duggar thing, doesn’t it?

I hear the creep is going to lose his TLC reality show.

 
 

Weird thing about that pedophile sting story – over 100 people were arrested, but the only one anybody seems to mention is the one Muslim. I wonder why that is.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

POOP or PENIS? Why can’t a story have both?

Indeed.

In other news, when I went to make up Teh Ho’s lunch of leftovers today I found, to my horror (and his), that I had left the pot of lamb rogan josh on low heat overnight. It was a solid mass. Oh well, the basmati rice and saag paneer (homemade paneer because it’s so easy) will have to suffice. And a garlic naan, so there’s that.

 
 

For the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clinton’s presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in one’s own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political party’s policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.

 
 

“I’m saying, what should the pope use his moral authority for?” Santorum asked. “I think there are more pressing problems confronting the earth than climate change.”
The Catholic Church has long framed climate change as a moral issue, noting that its potential impacts — rising sea level, more frequent extreme weather events, and natural resource scarcity — disproportionately impact poor and developing nations. The Pope is expected to release an encyclical letter on the environment June 18, which will be the Church’s strongest move to date on addressing the issue of climate change.

in the churches i grew up in, there was this whole thing about being good stewards to the earth…so what was that all about? was i mislead as i was trying to be a good lutheran?

and kudos to dkw…a POOP and PENIS story…the only thing lacking is a MOM…

 
 

One of them being that libertarianism has attracted many male-dominated subcultures, like computer programming (think Silicon Valley),

 
 

They just recently have something that qualifies as
a league for women there. Avoid leave it in a place with very low temperatures,
in direct sunlight, or heavy rain. He released his last film, “Vous n’avez encore rien vu” (loosely translated as “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”) 
in 2012 and was still working right up to the end.

 
 

Non-political aside: rest in peace, Sir Christopher Lee. You will be missed.

 
Pupienus Maximus
 

TIL that “fabbest” is a word and it’s in the motherfucking Dragon K… – wait, I get confused – scrabble dictionary. I don’t want to live anymore.

Also, reddit.com/r/EnoughLibertarianSpam is a highly amusing place. Latest post is Breitfart trying to defend some banned subreddits, notably /r/fatpeoplehate, which were engaging in off-site harrassment. Doxxing and shit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughLibertarianSpam/comments/39fx59/breitbart_tries_to_defend_the_banned_subreddits/

 
 

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