Brett McGurk: Syria and Turkey … “policy incoherence and risk”

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18 hours ago, 15 tweets, 4 min read Read on Twitter

Regarding Syria and Turkey, there is some disinformation out there (including from the POTUS himself), so here is some background on what is admittedly a complex matter with no easy or magic formulas:

First: It was Trump (not Obama) that made the decision to arm the Kurdish component (YPG) of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to take Raqqa, then ISIS’s capital city. He made this decision after his national security team developed options for his review.

The SDF suffered thousands of casualties in the Raqqa battle. Not a single American life was lost. Trump later expanded the operation down the ERV. He touts these operations in political rallies but without apparent thought as to who did the fighting and dying.

The weapons provided were meager and just enough for the battle against ISIS. (The SDF cleared IEDs by purchasing flocks of sheep.) They were not “paid massive amounts of money and equipment” (as Trump said today). Nearly all stabilization funding came from the @coalition.[the coalition against Daesh (!?) [dahy-EESH] (ISIS)]

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DuckDuckGo bang commands for Vancouver Unitarians (and for everyone)

There are some good reasons for using the DuckDuckGo search engine and even for making it the default search engine on your browser so you can just type search terms right into the location bar (address bar) at the top of your screen.

This post goes into just one reason: the bang command.

There are thousands of bang commands. Below are a few that may interest you and others wanting to know more about UCV from its website (vancouveruntiarians.ca) and from elsewhere. There are links to results of the bang commands here embedded in them so you don’t have to type them to try them out. Just click on them.

!bang / then scroll down (the spaced slash and the rest of the line are not part of the bang command)
!bang acronym / looking for a bang command that searches a website listing acronyms/initialisms
!acro UCV / for information on initialism UCV; the UCV on 49th at Oak is in <cough> the Acronym Attic
!bang UCV / looking for a !ucv bang command (and – spoiler alert – that was it, used just there)

!ucv / entering a bang command without a search term takes you to the home page
!ucv small groups / joining a small group is a good way to connect with people sharing an interest
!ucv principles for kids / for grownups too (see link in item found)
!ucv vision statement / !? “What it says on the tin.” / … as they say
!ucv core documents / then scroll down and click on link in large type

!? bylaws and rules (pdf) site:uua.org / seven principles, six sources on first page after contents

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‘It makes absolutely no sense … unless … in which case it makes perfect sense’

Novelty Joke PM From Fake Country Meets With Trump, Silent On Assange

Sep 20 · 6 min read

Scott Morrison, the novelty joke Prime Minister from the imaginary nation of Australia, met with his boss Donald Trump today without any mention of the US government’s transnational conspiracy to imprison an Australian citizen for exposing American war crimes. The two imperial governors publicly discussed the possibility of Australia accompanying the US into a war with Iran, as well as the US trade war with China and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brownface scandal, but there is no record of any mention of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

It makes absolutely no sense [for the country to act like this] unless you think of [the country] as part of a single US-centralized empire, in which case it makes perfect sense.

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Cory Morningstar: The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent

see other tweets that link to this piece

The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent series has been written in two volumes.

[Volume I: ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V • ACT VI • Addenda I] [Book form]

[Volume II: An Object Lesson In Spectacle • ACT I • ACT II • ACT III • ACT IV • ACT V] [ACTS VI & VII forthcoming]

updated with these two tweets:




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Wei Wu Wei


!gb “Quite so: the only practice—and once.” (Wei Wu Wei)

!? writer Wei Wu Wei :: !w Wei Wu Wei :: !wq Wei Wu Wei

Terence Gray (Wei Wu Wei) was born in England in 1895, left the country in middle age, and died in Monaco in 1986, aged 90. As Wei Wu Wei he wrote seven books published in the years 1958 to 1968. In the preface to the first he explains why he uses a pseudonym.



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“There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. It’s time to grow up and stop …”

It is more cognitively comfortable for veterans and their families to maintain the fairy tale that those who helped facilitate US imperialism are heroes who did something helpful and meaningful, but the fact that human minds are preconditioned to select for cognitive ease is a glitch in our operating systems which causes unhelpful cognitive biases; it’s a flaw we need to overcome, not a virtue to be coddled. By continuing to coddle it you are facilitating war propaganda, and war propaganda is the indispensable foundation of war itself. By facilitating war propaganda you are participating in the war machine as surely as someone who takes up arms and fights in it, only less honest because, as Representative Crenshaw’s face attests, at least someone who takes up arms is putting some real skin in that monstrous game…

There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. It’s time to grow up and stop pretending otherwise.
—Caitlin Johnstone


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Alex Tizon: My Family’s Slave

tweets that link to this story
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David Bohm interviewed by David Suzuki


interview was in 1979; block quote below is from a book first published in 1993

The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.
—David Bohm,
The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory

!a The Undivided Universe :: !gr The Undivided Universe

!gb “a separate organism is clearly an abstraction” :: !g David Bohm


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