A Tale Of Two Non-Presidents

A tale of two non-presidents…

I try, as I have said, to avoid expressing an opinion on other nations’ internal affairs. To a large extent, it’s because said internal affairs are as much not my business as our internal affairs are not their business, or should not be.

But things are a bit different when it comes to the Imperialist States of Amerikastan, simply because it is the Imperialist States and believes that it has a divine right to rule the world. In other words, since the ISA makes our business its business, its business becomes our business.

Now let’s just take a look at its business, since who rules it, at least according to its official theology, rules the world.

First, I will discuss the Man Who Will Never Be President, the Great Liberal Hope, Bernie Sanders.

No, Mr Sanders is not going to become President of the Imperialist States. He is not going to become President of the Imperialist States because, for one thing, he is merely a gatekeeper for Killary Klingon. When the challenges to the Klingon are safely seen off he will stand down and, of course, endorse her. He will do this even if he leads her in the preliminaries because the argument already goes that he can't get the general vote behind him, so if he wins the nomination, someone like Donald Trump (a Democratic Party mole whose only mission is to sabotage the Republican Party, as it happens) will win the final election. In fact leading the Klingon in the preliminaries is good from their point of view; it helps in the plan to stifle all other challengers. Who's going to challenge Killary when Sanders is the obvious man to back? And when he steps aside, who will dare vote against Killary since that means the bogeyman Trump - or whoever - will win?

You know, I've been watching elections for thirty years, ever since I was fourteen, and I've never seen an election that was, already, as blatantly maniuplated as this one.

But let's pretend for the sake of argument that Mr Wunderkind is not a dummy candidate and gatekeeper. Let's pretend he's a serious candidate and that he wins. What then?

I'll predict something right now: Bernie has it in him to be a greater war criminal than Obama and Bush put together. The support he'll get from his dupes...er, voters...will be even more frantic than the worship Obama's acolytes give him. The desperation with which they'll support him will be fuelled by their inability to admit that they've been fooled yet again by a "liberal leftist" who in reality is a warmongering imperialist mass murderer just like his predecessors. They'll hyperventilate while accusing all dissidents of being Jew-hating right-wingers, just as the incumbent’s worshippers call all his opponents “racists”; and their "intelligentsia" will mock those from the left who oppose him for being "unrealistic" and "expecting too much". And as for Germany and the other European countries, they'll turn even more somersaults at his bidding than they do already, for fear of being called "anti-Semitic" and having the word "Holocaust" dredged up once again.

And anyone who knows that Bernie voted to send arms and money to Zionistan while the Zionazis were bombing Gaza, and to sanction Russia when Banderastani Ukranazis were shelling Donetsk, knows that he's got a history of backing Nazism. Some socialist he is. 

Let me remind those who wish to vote for Sanders that this is what they will be voting for:

[Source]

And this:

[Source]

So it's probably for the best that he's got no intention of winning at all.

The other person I will talk about is the Man Who Was A President, Jimmy Carter.

Mr Carter has, it seems has liver cancer. I hope he recovers. Despite what I am about to write, I am not wishing him a painful death from a neoplasm. No.

But, let me remind all the Jimmy Carter fans that this was the man who signed the order, on 3^rd July 1979, to start arming, training, and funding jihadi terrorist headhunters against the government of Afghanistan, in the full knowledge that this would trigger a Soviet intervention. When the Soviets did intervene, on 24^th December, this was the same man who started grandstanding about a "Soviet invasion", boycotted the Moscow Olympics, and threw the door open to the continuing Amerikastani programme of cooperation with Islamic jihadis.

Apparently, Carter is now determined to spend the rest of his life "fighting for women's rights". I'm certain the Afghan women who were in miniskirts and studying in universities for careers in 1979, and who - if they're still alive - are in shuttlecock burqas now, struggling for a living, their sons and husbands dead or maimed or missing, will appreciate knowing of his decision.

[Source]

Then, this was the man with whose encouragement the then US stooge Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, setting off what Iranians to this day call the Imposed War, in which thousands of Iranian Baseej child child volunteers made human wave attacks on Iraqi positions and were hit by US-supplied poison gas.

[Source]

This is also the war which directly led to the destruction of the Iraqi economy, provoked Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Iraq’s historical province Kuwait, led to Amerikastan’s twenty years of war against that country, its virtually total destruction, and the current fragmentation and civil war.

[Source: AFP, obviously]

Just because Carter is less evil than his successors does not absolve his crimes in office. He could at least make a beginning by admitting those crimes.

Do you think he will? 

The Wait

Title: The Wait
Material: Watercolour on Paper
Copyright B Purkayastha 2015

I prefer to leave it up to the viewer's imagination what the woman is waiting for and what her emotions are.

Dino Tales

  

Your quiz question for today: Identify this (sadly extinct) creature.

Hints: 

1. It used to live in China and Mongolia.
2. It was about the size of a large turkey.
3. It had about the brain power, at best, of a chicken.
4. It was a predator of small to medium sized animals – up to the size of a small pig and

5. It was a solitary hunter which couldn't run particularly fast so probably waited in ambush for prey to come by.

[Source]

No, it isn't a chicken from a mad scientist's lab, cool as it might be.

I’ll give you an additional hint: its name is extremely well known, but most people will completely fail to recognise it when they think of that name.

No, that name is not Maozedongasaurus, either.

Well?

Perhaps you’ll recognise it if I show you the Hollywood version?

This:

[Source]

Yessssss...now you know it, don’t you? Velociraptor. Owing to the Jurassic Park franchise, the second-most recognisable dinosaur in the world, allegedly, right after Tyrannosaurus rex.

Of course, like everything else in Hollywood, Velociraptor looked nothing like that and nor did Tyrannosaurus, which in reality had a longer, narrower face, much less pronounced brow ridges, smaller arms, and in all probability a coat of feathers.

Did I say feathers? Yes, I said feathers. I said Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers. The only questions are whether it had them lifelong or only when a chick...er, baby...and whether said feathers were downy and hairlike or a full plumage like the Velociraptor.

Somehow, this looks much more impressive than the "conventional" image [Source]

So, yes, let’s get back to that Velociraptor, shall we? By now, you’ll have understood that Jurassic Park got one hell of a lot of things wrong, but, you know, you haven’t even begun to understand just how wrong.

Let’s see where they began; in the first film, they wanted a relatively small, highly agile dinosaur as an antagonist. In the book on which the film was – very loosely – based, the animal antagonist was based on a much earlier – it lived a full 30 million years before the Velociraptor – dinosaur, Deinonychus. This was about shoulder high to a human, but still looked a lot like the Velociraptor, with feathers, an elongated toothy snout, and a stiff, rigid tail. That's because they belonged to the same group - dromaeosaurs.

Michael Crichton, who wrote the book, chose to call the dinosaur he based his story on Velociraptor for one reason only – the name was “cooler” and easier to pronounce. Crichton even said so.

Sounds like the kind of thing Amerikastani administrations hire marketing agencies to come up with when trying to find ways to invade yet another country.

But that wasn’t quite enough. Crichton didn’t just want a Deinonychus. He wanted an enlarged, scarier Deinonychus. So, for reasons best known to himself, not only did he make it even larger, he decided to give it intelligence on the order of chimpanzees. This from an animal, you need to understand, with a brain to body ratio that would make it much, much stupider than a sparrow. And, of course, he decided to make it a pack hunter capable of fast running, because a solitary ambush predator just wasn’t scary enough.

At this moment, whether Deinonychus was a pack hunter or not isn't even established either way.

So in the film based on the book, the turkey-sized, solitary, Mongolian Velociraptor became an oversized Deinonychus with a behaviour pattern no actual Deinonychus could ever have managed – moreover, a Deinonychus that didn’t even look like a real Deinonychus – even without the feathers.

As for the feathers, that can at least be excused partly – at the time the original film was made, there was not yet evidence (though there was certainly lots of suspicion) that Velociraptor and Deinonychus had plumage. Now we know that not only did they have plumage, they were basically toothed, clawed birds.

But that was not the end of the confusion. Not yet.

You see, while the original Jurassic Park was being made, a much, much larger animal was discovered – another dromaeosaur – known as Utahraptor (go ahead and guess where it was found). I remember reading back then (1993) about how though the film “velociraptors” were admittedly bigger than the real ones (they didn’t say how much bigger), this was validated post facto by the discovery of the Utahraptor. Unfortunately, the real life Utahraptor was another feathered stiff-tailed quasi-bird beast, and as much bigger than a Deinonychus as that was than the real Velociraptor.

And then, because things weren’t complicated enough, the subsequent films in the franchise resolutely refused to correct the initial mistake, thereby fixing the fiction in the public eye.

So I don’t know if you’ve been keeping score, but here’s what:

1. Velociraptor was a small, solitary, feathered ambush predator from China and Mongolia with a stiff, rigid tail.

2. Its name, because it sounded sexy, was given to a larger, but otherwise similar, predator from an earlier predator from North America.

3. Said larger predator was then scaled up in size and given abilities far beyond its capabilities, and this was “validated” by the discovery of a larger member of the group, still.

4.Then this totally fictional creature that was thereby created was fixed in public consciousness as the original Velociraptor.

Click to enlarge enough to read the names [Source]

That gives you an idea of the dromaeosaurs, but if you want scale, here is one:

[Source]

Really, this is sounding more and more like the propaganda campaigns that created myths like Russia’s “invasion of Ukraine” and “Assad’s gas attacks”, isn’t it?

The people responsible how to make a tangle so intricate most people won't even try taking the threads apart again.

So here's a Velociraptor racing with a friend...um, trying to kill and eat it.

[Source]

He might prefer to eat the makers of Jurassic Park instead.