Popular Comments

The fact that many now turn to Facebook and other social media for their news is part of the problem.  The erosion of the Fourth Estate proves its importance in keeping a democracy running.  

max_weisenfeld said:

Less humid now and tomorrow and a nice breeze

I’ll buy that for a dollar!

Smedley said:

I'll rephrase and try again. If the problem on May 23, 2024 is a deluded electorate, how and why was the electorate apparently non-deluded in 2020-21, and what was the inflection point?

Racking my brain for inflection points in 2020. All I can come up with are a pandemic and the murder of a Black man by a white Minneapolis police officer.

Less humid now and tomorrow and a nice breeze

Came upon these just recently:

Songs of disappearance - Australian Bird Calls.

In this ARIA chart-topping recording of pure birdsong you can hear 53 of our most threatened species:

(ARIA is the Australian Recording Industry Association.  Aussie version of the Grammy Awards.)

https://youtu.be/c2M0H9Z1HuQ

Aussie Birds and their calls

https://youtu.be/vhlE13EqjJk

Australia's most common birds

https://youtu.be/T5UEwzp2bWs

Me three yesterday.  Finding today difficult.

For those who thought the original tale was a bit fishy ... although I doubt the bacterium ever looked like this...

nan said:

Yes, I expect you to believe that there was a CIA coup in 2014.  You are an adult, presumably well educated.  You have a brain and access to information.  

As shown by using one's brain and access to information, it was not "a CIA coup".

Getting Ukraine’s History Right Is Crucial for Anti-Imperialist Politics | Truthout

"To begin, it is not accurate to characterize the popular uprising as a 'U.S. coup.' During the Cold War, the United States actively supported and even initiated coups in Latin America and elsewhere, which involved supporting top-ranking military officers using troops under their command to seize control of governmental institutions by force. The Maidan uprising, by contrast, included upwards of 800,000 protesters in Kyiv and hundreds of thousands elsewhere in the country. Based on my interviews with participants in the uprising and my study of the members of the resistance coalition, which did include some right-wing nationalists but was overwhelmingly dominated by a range of democratic parties, it is clear to me that the vast majority of the Maidan uprising were liberal democrats who engaged in legitimate acts of nonviolent resistance against severe government repression. Many of them spent months in freezing temperatures in a struggle for a better Ukraine dominated by neither Russia nor the West. To label participants in the Maidan uprising as puppets of Washington is as unfair as labeling peasant revolutionaries in El Salvador during the 1980s as puppets of Moscow. ...

"The limited amount of U.S. funding of opposition groups did not 'cause' the Maidan uprising any more than the Soviets providing arms to leftist movements caused revolutions in Central America, Southern Africa or Southeast Asia. The world is not shaped solely by the machinations of empires and without the agency of ordinary people. The United States can’t just send in the CIA and instantaneously cause a change of government. It’s one thing to get some generals to stage a coup, which arguably is what happened in Guatemala, Iran, Chile and Brazil. Getting millions of people out onto the streets is something different entirely."

[Emphasis added]

.

I see I have a few bird videos to view!