Categories
Politics Syria

Vladimir Putin, Put Your Shirt On. You Are Not Muscular, You Are No Saint

The fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he has the moral compass to talk about diplomacy is in itself laughable. The fact that he sees himself capable of teaching the idea of Diplomacy to Americans is Rolling On The Floor Laughing Out Loud.

Putin and the Syrian leader Bashar Assad jumped on an off the cuff remark by Secretary of State John Kerry, where Kerry suggested a total surrender of Syria’s chemical weapons as the only way to avoid military action. The here’s our weapons ball began rolling almost immediately with Putin leading the way and here at home, the Republicans – who haven’t yet met a war they didn’t like – suddenly became peace makers, lovers of diplomacy.  They began praising Putin The Savior yesterday, as if he was Christ getting ready for the second coming.

All this love going his way from the Republicans in the United States Congress and the exaltation from a right winged media blitz on all this week, must have went straight to Putin’s head, prompting him to pen an op ed in the New York Times. A Plea for Caution From Russia was written well, made some good points. But the message was totally corrupted by the messenger.

Ordinarily this part of the message I would agree with. In this passage, Putin explains how much of the world view America and our military power, and the irony of using the military to protect innocent people who sometimes end up being inadvertently killed by military action.

Putin, take it away!

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.

No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect.

If that was all Putin had to say, then his message would be more acceptable, more believable in spite of the messenger. But then Putin went where he clearly had no right going.

At this point in his article, Putin was probably admiring the masculinity of his shirtless physique in the mirror, when decided to tell Americans that we are not exceptional and shouldn’t even feel like we are.

Brace yourself.

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

And the part of Putin’s message that showed us just how broken his moral compass really is, and why the message was totally corrupted was when he talked about everyone being equally created by God… Yes, Putin really said that. Yes, the same Putin who is persecuting people in Russia because of their sexual orientation. That same Putin said this:

We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

Putin, put your shirt back on. You are not muscular and you are no saint, despite what the Republicans say.

Categories
Anthony Weiner New York Politics

PIC Anthony Weiner Loses – Gives World The Middle Finger

With 99% of the votes in New York counted, Anthony Weiner has only 4%. Maybe Weiner was showing us how many votes he got and this finger was the start of his count.

 

Categories
Entertainment war

What I’ve Been Playing: Rome 2 Total War

I’ve been playing Total War series games since Rome Total War first came out back in 2004 and I fell in love, as did many others. It was a revolutionary game by being the first attempt to make such a strategy game on such a massive scale. Over the years the Total War series has expanded and entered many different eras from the Medieval era to the Napoleonic era. Every good franchise though needs to return to its roots so Creative Assembly came out with Rome 2 Total War; I was stoked and wanted to play this game till my fingers fell off, sadly the love affair is short lived.

 

What I like :

  • It’s Rome! I fell in love with the time period before and I still adore it to this day.
  • The interface has been given some practical changes since Shogun 2. I can now load up Rome 2 and instantly just launch right back into my campaign
  • The campaign map looks beautiful to say the least

 

What I dislike: 

  • It’s…unfinished (What a shock). The game is full of glitches, bugs, and crashes to the point that any internet forum is overcome with reports of them.
  • I hope you have a supercomputer to run this game or at least $800-$1,200 to spend on building one; the game may not be as demanding as say Battlefield 4 but it still requires a serious build. Here are the specs.
  • The AI is still way too passive and dumber than dirt. The AI is extremely passive to any military advancements you’ll make and when they do decide to respond it’s usually with just a ton of poorly equipped armies thrown at you with no organization at all. On the battlefield it’s just as bad, I hate having to chase down fleeing range units and it’s just too easy to defend against waves of soldiers being thrown at you with no tactical planning.
  • You can’t win. I have put 30 hours into the game so far and have two campaigns running (Rome and Macedon) and have reached the point where it’s just impossible to continue. The game is a balance between military conquest and keeping your populace fed and happy, sadly once you expand to a certain point the people will just become unhappy. This in turn will halt any expansion and force you to garrison huge armies into provinces to keep everyone happy and under control. Failure to keep the people happy will cause a revolt and unlike Total War’s of old where a revolt is a small pathetic army, a revolt in Rome 2 is a closer to a full scale invasion force.
  • The graphics don’t resemble those of a finished $60 game that requires the computing power of god to run. Honestly, Medieval Total War 2, a now seven year old game, would look better than this running on max settings

 

I really really wanted to love this game and finally get a finished product from Creative Assembly but they just failed to deliver. I’m stuck with a buggy and unfinished product again and am currently waiting for them or the modding community to fix this game. If you really want this game wait till Christmas time when it drops in price but, if you can’t wait I’d suggest going to the www.twcenter.net and finding a mod to overhaul this game.

Categories
Politics Syria

Jon Stewart Fires a Barrage of Truths at Fox News

But we’re talking about Fox News here, and chances are they’ll have no idea what Stewart meant when he said;

And I get that Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its motus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.

After all, what Stewart said was true, and truth plus a dose of Fox don’t mix.

Categories
Featured

Adolf Hitler to Lose Honorary Citizen Title in German Town

Adolf Hitler will lose his honorary citizen’s title in Goslar, Germany, the latest town to distance itself from the former Nazi leader, officials said Wednesday.

The northern town’s council adopted a motion Tuesday to drop Hitler as an honorary citizen, town spokesman Christian Burgart told AFP.

Town councillors from the far-left Die Linke party initiated the move, which must still be formally confirmed by Goslar’s administrative council on October 29, he said.

Local leaders had earlier argued that since Hitler died in 1945 he no longer held the honorific title bestowed in 1934, Burgart said.

Nevertheless, town authorities wanted to “double up the legal aspect with a symbolic act”, he said.

Goslar — a town in northern Lower Saxony state and home to 42,000 — is the birthplace of Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the opposition Social Democrats

Categories
Politics Syria

Fox News Wonders if Syria is Sign That The End is Near

The video below is Fox News’ Neil Cavuto discussing with evangelical writer and former political consultant Joel Rosenberg whether or not the current civil war in Syria is a harbinger of the End Times.

To be fair, both pundits were careful to say that we simply don’t know if Damascus is about to be destroyed in accordance with Old Testament prophesy, but thought it was something we should all be keeping an eye on.

Rosenberg has been conjecturing about conflict in the Middle East being a sign of the End Times since at least 2006, and has been a frequent Glenn Beck guest during the time Glenn Beck was a thing, so it appears the particulars of what is happening in the Middle East during any particular year are less important then the general theme of imminent-supernatural-maybe-perhaps-doom. All of this is likely to be quite upsetting to the Fox News audience, especially those who have forgotten to take their morning anti-apocalypse pills.

Categories
Politics Syria

Diplomacy Gets Syrias

One of the criticisms of President Obama’s plan to strike Syria was that once a country unleashes weapons on another, the consequences are unpredictable and uncontrollable.

The same could be said for diplomacy.

Obama’s speech last night was certainly different from the one he planned to give when he announced his intention to speak to the nation late last week. He now confronts an offer by the Russians to mediate a deal whereby Syria would put its chemical weapons program under international control in exchange for a promise not to employ military measures. The president is doing exactly what he should be doing in response to this offer. His plan faced almost certain defeat in Congress and now he’s found a diplomatice way out.

Many news outlets are saying that the president and John Kerry have bungled this issue and seem to be lurching from one bad plan to another. I disagree. Obama has always said that his main issue is with Assad’s chemical weapons program, whose existence, by the way, the Syrians didn’t acknowledge until the past two days. That’s enough to convince me that they actually launched the attack.

So without doing much but issuing a threat, the president has won an important victory. That the Russians leapt on Kerry’s offer of international oversight is more evidence that they were concerned that American missile strikes would be devastating to their standing in the world and would unmask them as supporting Assad’s August chemical attack. The Security Council, stuck between doing the wrong thing and doing nothing, has sprung to life. And all because the American president did what American presidents are supposed to do: lead.

It’s clear to me that this diplomatic plan will bear fruit because the other option is unacceptable to most everyone else. The US, though, will not give up the right to use their military and honestly, I think the Russians know this. The best deal they can get is to forestall strikes while international monitors take control of Assad’s previously phantom chemical stockpiles.

Done well, this will be another example of American-led diplomacy. And it should put to rest any talk about America’s decline in the world. We still have the power to force other regimes to change their behavior.

For more, go towww.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Featured

Kanye West Responds to Ray J’s “I Hit It First”

Ray J came out with his “I Hit it First” song, definitely at slap at Kim Kardashian,  Kanye West’s baby mama.
One of the lines from the song says,
“She might move on to rappers and ballplayers, but we all know I hit it first,” Ray J sang. “But now baby chose to go West.”

Everyone expected West to respond, but he never did and the one sided feud quickly died down.

Months later, West made a trip to a late night talk show and performed a rap song questioning Ray J’s manhood. In fact, West referred to Ray J as “Brandy’s little sister.”

“Brandy’s little sister lame man he know it now/When a real brother hold you down you ‘sposed to drown,”

Ouch! Video below.

Categories
Celebrities

PIC – A Naked Miley Cyrus Sitting On A Wrecking Ball

Somebody get this girl some help… Quick!

Bricks and Stones…

More Miley photos here.

Categories
Entertainment twerking

Viral “Worst Twerk Fail EVER” Video was Actually A Stunt By Jimmy Kimmel

On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel brought an end to all the conspiracies surrounding the authenticity of a YouTube Twerking video gone viral. In the video,  “Caitlin Heller” tried to impress her boyfriend by doing her best twerking moves. Those moves didn’t turn out too well, as “Caitlin” ended up on fire… literally!

The video, seen over 9,000,000 times on YouTube was an instant hit, but many questioned whether the video was real. Well on Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel explained that he was in fact, behind the whole thing. And “Caitlin” wasn’t really Caitlin, but a stunt actress named Daphne Avalon.

“To the conspiracy theorists on the Internet who thought the video was fake: You were right it was fake,” Kimmel said, while showing an extended version of the video with him putting out the fire.

“We shot the video about two months ago. We put it up and didn’t send it to any TV station. I didn’t tweet it, we didn’t put it on any websites. We just put it up on YouTube and let the magic happen.”

Kimmel is known for his internet pranks. And this one, was genius!

Categories
chemical weapons Politics Syria

White House: President Will Back Efforts to Secure Syria’s Chemical Weapons

President Obama will back a United Nations effort to secure Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, the White House said Tuesday.

Separately, a group of senators said they were working on a new use-of-force resolution that would only authorize military action if Syria refuses to relinquish its stockpile of chemical weapons to international control.

This development took place a day after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) canceled a procedural vote scheduled for Wednesday on authorizing a limited military strike on Syria.
The outline under discussion by the nine lawmakers would require the United Nations to pass a resolution stating that Syrian President Bashar Assad gassed his own people. It would also call on the U.N. to remove all of Syria’s chemical weapons by a certain date.
The resolution would authorize U.S. military action if those goals are not met, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

Categories
Anthony Weiner Politics

Lawrence O’ Donnell and Anthony Weiner – What’s Wrong With You Lawrence?

I’m a Lawrence O’ Donnell fan. But after watching his “interview” of Anthony Weiner last night, I was left feeling disgusted.

To think that on the eve of one of the most important mayoral elections nationwide, that Lawrence would bring Anthony on his show for the sole purpose of picking a fight, left me wondering about the state of our media.
You expect this behavior from Fox, not MSNBC!

There were important issues to discuss. New Yorkers are still looking for answers from their candidates before heading to the polls, and instead of engaging Mr. Weiner in an important and necessary debate,  Lawrence did New Yorkers a disfavor with his fifteen minutes interview asking Weiner, “what’s wrong with you?”

The interview left me wondering,  what’s wrong with you Lawrence? I know ratings are low, but did you really have to stoop to the Bill O’ Reilly and Fox News standards?

Sad indeed.

Video:

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