Category Archives: Viva!

Retired US Navy admiral William McRaven praises John Brennan, says he won’t be scared into silence by Donald Trump – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A retired US Navy admiral who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden tells Donald Trump he will be honoured if the 45th President yanks his security clearance just like he did to former CIA director John Brennan.

Source: Retired US Navy admiral William McRaven praises John Brennan, says he won’t be scared into silence by Donald Trump – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Aretha Franklin: THE QUEEN OF SOUL

The Queen of Soul is gone.

As long as I’ve been alive, Aretha Franklin was here.

I have heard so many folks say that they felt like Aretha Franklin was family.

I understand that. To me, like so many others, she’s Auntie Re. The Aunt that kept it real. The Aunt that could throw down. The Aunt that would tell you the truth – and, Auntie Re told you the truth through her songs.

Aretha Franklin was the soundtrack for Black woman. Didn’t matter what kind of Black woman you were, Aretha Franklin had a song, and an album for you. After all, she’s had a career that spanned 6 decades. She has sung with pretty much everyone who was anyone for the past 60 years in music, in front of the microphone and in the recording studio. She has known everyone in the music business.

Someone on the radio while I was going home said something so true…

As long as Aretha Franklin has been in music, did we ever hear negative stories about her? All we heard was about her graciousness, her professionalism, her realness. I think a lot of that has to do with her being from Detroit and never growing away from Detroit. Through good times, and bad, Aretha Franklin was Rev. Franklin’s daughter from Detroit.

There are so many moments that you can recall from her life. Being raised in the church, and who her father was, she was right in the middle of all the action of the Civil Rights Movement. She was an activist, and a Citizen of the World before that was a ‘thing’.

Your mother, grandmother, Aunties got you listening to Aretha Franklin. You listen to her music…but, it took getting older to understand what Aretha Franklin was telling you. As you got older, you understood the meaning of the lyrics. As you got older, your soul connected with her voice. I can remember when she first touched my soul…the song that made you play it over and over because you thought that Aretha Franklin was singing just to you.

I have loved to see the tributes to her. The stories. The pictures of her over the years. Aretha Franklin defined Black Beauty….the history of Black women and beauty can be seen through Aretha Franklin.

One hundred years…two hundred years from now…they will study Aretha Franklin…they will be listening to her music.

There is a reason why Rolling Stone named her the Singer – period.

I’m not a writer. Just a fan. A fan who weeps. A fan who is so happy to have lived during her time.

Please share your favorite videos. Stories. Memories. Ways she touched you. How she spoke to you.

 

Boy who saluted Indian flag in viral flood photo faces deportation

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Nine-year-old, but not his mother, left off list of citizens published in Assam crackdown

A child who appeared in a photograph that went viral last year saluting the Indian flag in chest-deep flood water has been declared a foreigner and could be deported as part of a government drive to root out illegal immigrants.

Haider Ali Khan appeared in a photograph with his teacher and two others on 15 August last year, India’s 70th independence anniversary, showing the group saluting the Indian tricolour.

Continue reading…

What Juvenile BS!

Closing Thought–16Aug18

The more I watch Our Dear Leader perform for the media I ask myself just how far will this infantile person go in his bullying of critics….well I did not have to wait too long to find our….now did I?

President Donald Trump is following through on his threat to revoke the security clearance of former Obama administration CIA director John Brennan, a vocal critic of the president, the White House said Wednesday. “Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, per the AP. Brennan has been deeply critical of Trump’s conduct, calling his performance at a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland “nothing short of treasonous.” Sanders said the security clearances of other current and formers officials are also “under review.”

They include former FBI Director James Comey; James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence; former CIA Director Michael Hayden; former national security adviser Susan Rice; and Andrew McCabe, who served as Trump’s deputy FBI director until he was fired in March. Also on the list: fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. At least two of the former officials, Comey and McCabe, do not currently have security clearances. Former CIA directors and other top national security officials are typically allowed to keep their clearances, at least for some period, so they can be in a position to advise their successors and to hold certain jobs. Experts have said that stripping a security clearance in response to public criticism would be an unprecedented politicization of the clearance process, and Democrats were quick to decry Trump’s move.

This mental 5 year old would risk national security to punish anyone that criticizes him….again juvenile……it is bad enough the he insults and bullies people on Twitter all because he wears his feelings on his sleeve like the spoiled brat he is.

Just another attempt by Dear Leader to silence his political enemies and that my friends is called “censorship”……got it now?

What’s next?  Banning newspapers with op-eds that hurt his feelings?

The Boston Globe decided it was time for an organized response to President Trump’s attacks on the media as an “enemy of the people”—and hundreds of newspapers responded. At least 343 publications agreed to publish editorials Thursday against what the Globe calls Trump’s “dirty war against the free press,” reports the Guardian. They include some of America’s biggest newspapers as well as smaller publications nationwide, though the Wall Street Journal is among the holdouts, reports the BBC. A selection:

  • The onslaught from the president is “scary. We’re afraid, for our personal safety and for the future of our country,” write the editorial boards of the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times. “These attacks on the press are an attack on our nation’s foundation. And we’re angry. Angry that we work so hard to carry out the mission our Founding Fathers envisioned, to provide the free flow of information so critical to a well-functioning democracy, only to be demonized by our president for doing our jobs.”
  • Not covering Trump aggressively would be a “dereliction of duty,” writes the editorial board at the Topeka Capital-Journal, one of the few papers that endorsed Trump in 2016. “We’re not separate from the public. We are the public. We live and work and play in Topeka and surrounding areas. We go to restaurants and send our children to school. We drive the same roads, see the same doctors,” they write, describing Trump’s attacks as sinister. “We’re not the enemy of the people. We are the people.”
  • “We support a free and vibrant press, a nation where the powerful are held to account by the Fourth Estate. Journalists are not the enemy of the people; we’re advocating for the people. We stand with our colleagues,” writes the editorial board at the New York Post, adding: “Will this make a difference? Not one whit.”
  • “Criticizing the news media—for underplaying or overplaying stories, for getting something wrong—is entirely right. News reporters and editors are human, and make mistakes,” writes the New York Times editorial board. “Correcting them is core to our job. But insisting that truths you don’t like are ‘fake news’ is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people’ is dangerous, period.”
  • John Diaz at the San Francisco Chronicle says that while they have published plenty of anti-Trump editorials and spoken out many times against his attacks on the press, they’ve decided not to join the crowd this time. The coordinated campaign “plays into Trump’s narrative that the media are aligned against him. I can just anticipate his Thursday morning tweets accusing the ‘FAKE NEWS MEDIA’ of ‘COLLUSION!’ and ‘BIAS!’” Diaz writes.

So I Have Written!

Turn The Page!

As California Burns, Trump and Zinke Use Catastrophe to Benefit Industry

As California Burns, Trump and Zinke Use Catastrophe to Benefit Industry

The Trump administration and House Republicans are using the fires across the West as an excuse to chip away at bedrock environmental laws.




A car passes through flames on Highway 299 as the Carr Fire burns through Shasta, Calif. U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has falsely suggested that more logging would help prevent the devastating fires raging across the West.

A car passes through flames as the Carr Fire burns in Shasta, California. U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has falsely suggested that more logging would help prevent the devastating fires raging across the West.

Noah Berger / AP

U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wrote recently that “radical environmentalists would rather see forest and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.” In Zinke’s zero-sum equation, the devastating wildfires in California would stop if those radical environmentalists would let the timber industry cut down more trees.

The truth is that Zinke and House Republicans are using the destruction across the West as an excuse to chip away at bedrock environmental laws created to ensure that science drives decisions about the future of our nation’s forests.

Everyone agrees that we must protect homes and lives from the catastrophic effects of fires, but Zinke’s argument is dangerously oversimplified, cynically disingenuous and downright false. And that’s not the worst part. He also proclaims that climate change has “nothing to do” with these wildfires, even as scientists and firefighting officials unanimously assert that climate change is creating the conditions that allow destructive wildfires to thrive. These types of fires will only grow in intensity and frequency if we do nothing to address climate change.

With increasingly warmer weather, forests are becoming drier and prone to burning throughout the year. Over the past 30 years, climate change has doubled the area affected by forest fires in the western U.S., according to a study that appeared in the 2016 Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

This year alone, there were 63 large, uncontained fires in the U.S. in the first week of August, according to the Washington Post.

As Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, told the New York Times: “Let’s be clear. It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires.” 

Climate change isn’t the only culprit. Historic firefighting practices, increased grazing and commercial logging also have created the conditions for increasingly devastating wildfires. In many Western forests, naturally occurring wildfires every five, 10 or 20 years historically helped to clear debris on the forest floor and make room for stronger, healthier growth. However, in the late 19th century, government agencies adopted a policy of complete fire suppression – and the fuel that is feeding today’s fires has been building up for a century.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke arrives at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Livestock grazing on public lands has also reduced the frequency of the low-intensity fires that helped keep the forest strong 150 years ago. Without grasses and ground vegetation left to fuel such fires, forests now burn only when there is a significant buildup of woody debris, which leads to more severe fires.

At the same time, commercial logging operations have removed the largest and most fire-resistant trees. These trees are replaced by dense groups of younger trees that act as fire ladders, providing fuel for fire to burn intensely and travel high up into the forest canopy.

Established wildfire risk reduction strategies that include encouraging “defensible space” and prescribed burning and thinning that selectively removes smaller trees and brush have helped to counter these impacts–especially in forested areas near communities, which are known as the Wildland-Urban Interface. One recent study in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest showed that selective thinning and burning helps to restore the forest back to its natural state and reduce the severity of fires. However, these wildfire risk reduction strategies rely on public funds, which are in short supply these days.

Zinke’s preferred strategy is not about being selective. Instead, it involves bowing to special interests and clearcutting large swaths of trees, following the false logic that aggressively eliminating trees means fewer trees to burn. Clearcutting also happens to be the way that the timber industry turns a profit.

Zinke has been espousing this argument as Congress negotiates the 2018 Farm Bill, which funds our nation’s food security, nutrition and conservation programs. The House version of this bill includes provisions that would exempt large-scale logging in our national forests from environmental review and public input while reducing Endangered Species Act consultation requirements.

If these proposals were to make it into the final bill, they would change the way that our national forests are currently managed, pushing aside science and public input to push forward timber industry interests above the interests of communities, recreation and ecology. Provisions in the House bill that aim to fast-track commercial logging and road building could increase fire risk and create additional dangers for surrounding communities, such as erosion and mudslides.

Zinke’s false assertion that large-scale logging is our best fire prevention strategy hasn’t been the only attempt by the Trump administration to use the deadly California wildfires to misinform the American public. Last week, President Trump tweeted incorrectly that firefighters faced a shortage of water in what appeared to be an effort to insert himself into debates over how best to allocate the state’s water.

All of this is nothing new for Zinke and the Trump administration, which continues to wage an all-out campaign to subvert science and deny the existence of climate change. For the tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate their homes, and the many firefighters who are risking their lives, climate change is very real. They are counting on us to fight for wildfire risk reduction strategies that address the real reasons these fires are burning – before it’s too late. 

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Oleg Sentsov se meurt, Poutine reste de glace

Le monde s’est mobilisé pour obtenir la libération d’Oleg Sentsov. Chacun a espéré un geste, sinon de justice, mais de miséricorde de la part de Poutine. Bien au contraire, l’homme du KGB est resté insensible à toutes les supplications les plus diverses. Plus de cent personnalités du monde de la culture et des arts ont imploré la grâce de leur collègue Oleg Sentsov. Parmi les signataires, on retrouve le metteur en scène Jean-Luc Godard, le metteur en scène britannique Ken Loach, le Canadien Devid Kronenberg et la ministre de la Culture française Françoise Nissen. On a cru naïvement que la grande fête fraternelle du Mondial de football en Russie aurait été couronnée par une amnistie en faveur des prisonniers politiques. On s’est trompé. La libération de Oleg Sentsov aurait pu justifier les familiarités que s’est permises Emmanuel Macron avec Poutine en le tutoyant publiquement. Même pas ! Le Kremlin est resté de marbre. On n’attendrit pas aussi facilement les bourreaux.

Le 14 août, la journaliste Zoïa Svetova a été autorisée à rencontrer Oleg Sentsov dans la prison « Ours blanc » au nord de la Sibérie. L’entretien a duré deux heures. Elle était accompagnée de trois membres du personnel pénitencier, dont un colonel. La journaliste a trouvé Oleg Sentsov très affaibli. On savait par son avocat qu’il ne se levait plus depuis le 8 août.

Le 9 août, Oleg Senstov est entré dans la dernière phase qu’endure un gréviste de la faim. Au début, on s’habitue à la faim. Ensuite, des transformations apparaissent dans le corps. Troisième étape, le gréviste vit avec ces changements. Lors de la quatrième étape, les organes commencent à refuser de fonctionner. Il s’agit de problèmes de cœur, d’anémie causée par la baisse du taux d’hémoglobine et d’une faiblesse générale. Son avocat a dit qu’on lui perfuse un mélange nutritif qu’il accepte, mais cela est insuffisant pour le sauver.

Oleg Sentsov a perdu 17 kg. Les organes intérieurs peuvent refuser de fonctionner à tout moment.  

Poutine devrait se rappeler le destin du dissident d’Anatoly Martchenko et le sort du régime soviétique qui le maintenait au Goulag. Le 4 août 1986, Martchenko avait entamé une grève de la faim pour exiger la libération de tous les prisonniers politiques en URSS. Il a jeûné 117 jours et est mort d’épuisement quelques jours après sa libération. L’Union soviétique a ensuite disparu très rapidement. La condamnation de Oleg Sentov est une violation du droit et de la justice aussi criarde que l’ont été celles des dissidents soviétiques, tels Alexandre Soljenitsyne et bien d’autres.

La mansuétude grandit ceux qui la prodiguent. La cruauté condamne les bourreaux et leur régime. Poutine a déclaré que la chute de l’Union soviétique a été une catastrophe. C’est son Goulag qui a condamné l’URSS. Puisse-t-il tirer, les leçons de son passé pour ne pas avoir à le revivre !

Émue par le martyre d’Oleg Sentov, Marie-Claude Chevalier a écrit une lettre à Poutine. Je la joins. avec sa permission.

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