America

A popular Iranian newspaper has called on the government to intercept US cargo ships stationed in the Persian Gulf in retaliation to America freezing Iran’s assets.  Kayhan newspaper urged the government to take action, after Iran’s appeal to the UN to stop US violations of state immunity and seizure of assets fell on deaf ears. Presstv.com reports: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote to UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Thursday to ask him to intervene with his “good offices,” but the United Nations said it would intervene should both parties request it.

When Beyoncé Knowles-Carter dropped her surprise Lemonade record on HBO last Sunday night, the Internet, well, it lost its mind. Perhaps moreso than any other artist recording today, Mrs. Knowles-Carter commands the power to reduce adult human beings into automata programmed for the typing of assorted punctuation.

As the online world exulted in the opening baseball bat pyrotechnics of Beyoncé’s seeming record of recovery from her husband’s infidelity, however, Brentin Mock at The Atlantic‘s CityLab was captured by a moment of quiet and stillness:

The falcon cannot hear the falconer, wrote William Butler Yeats. Political leaders, like the falcon, were meant to obey their minders, but Yeats’s falcon had soared above them and loosed mere anarchy on the world. Today, Donald Trump’s campaign soars above our conservative elites, who in their foundations, their little magazines, their think tanks, define what conservatives may do or say. Trump ignores them, they tell us, and disorder and chaos must follow.

Authored by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org,

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Cognitive Dissonance

As is our custom, about once a month Mrs. Cog and I venture out from our homestead up here on the mountain and seek out civilization. While the Beverly Hillbillies considered this to be movie stars and swimming pools (‘ceement’ ponds actually) in our case, civilization is defined as more than two retail stores per square mile.