John Kerry addresses pentagon brass, f words

C-Span ran Kerry addressing what appeared to be U.S. Army brass, the men in their chairs arms folded and eyes held rigidly forward staring ahead emptily without moving, and no noticeable breathing when the camera is on them, each in their own internal world it seemed as they're hearing but not really listening. Thinking about something more real than the situation they're in and more real than the situation being described. There is nothing substantial in what they are hearing to seize upon, but being told it's amazing, and worse, they had all just been betrayed and are being told otherwise. They understand their place as pawns, high as they are, and they know the men under their command will head off into any adventure that they're directed, and they don't like what just happened to their men at sea. They are clamping down hard on their tongues, nearly biting them off were it not for opposing force jacking their jaws so their heads might blow their eyeballs though their eye sockets like canons. Their boss is a dope, and they are his spectacle and this is the price that they pay from their own integrity. Every one of them more acute than the Gumby person telling us through them how our world is, against evidence, he with the moving modeling clay face describing his stop motion world. Kerry selling his catalog of achievements is a painful itemized litany of concrete abject failures on an international scale.

Picture it: the Star Trek shape shifter Memory Alpha but much taller wearing an impeccably tailored suit and bending over the podium shifting around his vestige features forcing sound through his face holes forming words presuming to describe an evanescent reality to men made of granite.

Kerry urges one word they must all think, "progress … progress." One word said twice, for feeble emphasis, it needs two to stand up. None of the military trained men flinched but I did. It's like a key turned in my spine and I go full on retarded my arm flails violently off to the side and hangs in the air, my head tilts opposite my tongue goes floppy as if helpless and I spray with pronounced difficulty and intense feigned sincerity, "but what's the word I should think? "

How about F words?

Encountered online and looked up for some reason. It's a small group and they're all either known, easy or fun. A few even apposite to Kerry's idea of progress.

fantods: a. Am ill-defined state of nervous irritability. b. Nervous movements caused by tension. 2. An outburst of emotion; a fit.

fardel: a pack; a bundle. A burden

fatuity: absurdity: a ludicrous folly; "the crowd laughed at the absurdity of the clown's behavior"
 
fatuous: asinine: devoid of intelligence. Obnoxiously stupid, vacantly silly, content in one's foolishness

faute de mieux: for want of a better alternative.

favela: the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil.[1] In the late 18th century. Even before the first "favela" came into being, poor citizens were pushed away from downtown and forced to live in the far suburbs. However, most modern favelas appeared in the 1970s, due to rural exodus, when many people left rural areas of Brazil and moved to cities. Without finding a place to live, many people ended up in a favela

feculence: foul with waste matter. Foul with extraneous or impure substances; abounding with sediment or excrementitious matter; muddy; thick; turbid

federalism: a system in which the power to govern is shared between national and provincial/state governments, creating what is often called a federation. Proponents are often called federalists.
 
Federalism in the United States is the evolving relationship between state governments and the federal government of the United States. American government has evolved from a system of dual federalism to one of associative federalism. In "Federalist No. 46," James Madison asserted that the states and national government "are in fact but different agents and trustees of the people, constituted with different powers." Alexander Hamilton, writing in "Federalist No. 28," suggested that both levels of government would exercise authority to the citizens' benefit: "If their [the peoples'] rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress."

Feiler Faster Thesis: a thesis, or supported argument, in modern journalism that suggests that the increasing pace of society is matched by (and perhaps driven by) journalists' ability to report events and the public's desire for more information.

The idea is credited to Bruce Feiler and first defined by Mickey Kaus in a February 24, 2000 Kausfiles blog post and Slate online magazine article, "Faster Politics: 'Momentum' ain't what it used to be."

ferrule: (a corruption of Latin viriola "small bracelet," under the influence of ferrum "iron.") is a name for types of metal objects, generally used for fastening, joining, or reinforcement. They are often narrow circular rings of metal, or less commonly, plastic.

Most ferrules consist of a circular clamp used to hold together and attach fibers, wires or posts, generally by crimping, swaging, or otherwise deforming the ferrule to permanently tighten it onto the parts that it holds.

Stop the flow in its tracks by folding a small, absorbent cloth and taping it around the metal collar—known as the ferrule—of the brush.

Fiat justitia ruat caelum: "Let justice be done though the heavens fall." The maxim signifies the belief that justice must be realized regardless of consequences. According to the 19th-century abolitionist politician Charles Sumner, it does not come from any classical source.[1] It has also been ascribed to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, see "Piso's justice".

fiduciary: a person to whom property or power is entrusted for the benefit of another. of or pertaining to the relation between a fiduciary and his or her principal: a fiduciary capacity; a fiduciary duty. of, based on, or in the nature of trust and confidence, as in public affairs: a fiduciary obligation of government employees. depending on public confidence for value or currency, as fiat money.

filet mignon: dainty cut

flak catcher: a slick spokesperson who can turn any criticism to the advantage of their employer

flat effect: A severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. People with depression and schizophrenia often show flat affect. A person with schizophrenia may ...

flechettes: a pointed steel projectile, with a vaned tail for stable flight. The name comes from French fléchette, "little arrow" or "dart", and sometimes retains the acute accent in English: fléchette.

flensing: flensing knife removes the outer layer of blubber from whales.

flid: spaz, chemical caused birth defects An insult usually meaning spacker, thick, incapable or physically challenged. Shortened term of Thalidomide, a German-invented drug which was used ...

Floccinaucinihilipilificate: pupils at Eton, combining a number of roughly synonymous Latin stems. The word was inspired by a line in the Eton Latin Grammar that listed verbs that govern a genitive noun: "Flocci, nauci, nihili, pili, assis, hujus, teruncii, his verbis, aestimo, pendo, facio, peculiariter adduntur."[1] Latin flocci, from floccus, a wisp or piece of wool + nauci, from naucum, a trifle + nihili, from the Latin pronoun, nihil (“nothing”) + pili, from pilus, a hair, something insignificant (all therefore having the sense of "pettiness" or "nothing") + -fication.

flop sweat: fear of failing

Forcas: described in the Goetia in the following terms: "He is a Knight, and appeareth in the Form of a Cruel Old Man with a long Beard and a hoary Head, riding upon a pale-coloured Horse, with a Sharp Weapon in his hand. His Office is to teach the Arts of Philosophy, Astrology, Rhetoric, Logic, Cheiromancy, and Pyromancy, in all their parts, and perfectly. He hath under his Power 20 Legions of Spirits."

Chiromancy or palmistry is the divinatory art of reading the lines of the human hand. Pyromancy is divination by fire. Great age is often associated in magic with arcane wisdom. For example, the ancient god Saturn presides over difficult studies and dark secrets.

force majeure: superior force, also known as cas fortuit (French) or casus fortuitus (Latin),[1] is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, strike, riot, crime, or an event described by the legal term "act of God" (such as flooding, earthquake, or volcanic eruption), prevents one or both parties from fulfilling their obligations under the contract.[2] However, force majeure is not intended to excuse negligence or other malfeasance of a party, as where non-performance is caused by the usual and natural consequences of external forces (for example, predicted rain stops an outdoor event), or where the intervening circumstances are specifically contemplated.

free-rider: in economics, collective bargaining, psychology, and political science, "free riders" are those who consume more than their fair share of a public resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production. Someone who obtains goods or services legally without paying; One who obtains benefit from a public good without paying for it directly

Freigabe die Hunde: free the dogs

freshnet: A flood resulting from heavy rain or a spring thaw. Whereas heavy rain often causes a flash flood, a spring thaw event is generally a more incremental process, depending upon local climate and topography. The term freshet is most commonly used to describe a spring thaw resulting from snow and ice melt in rivers located in the northern latitudes of North America, particularly Canada, where rivers are frozen each winter and thaw during the spring. A spring freshet can sometimes last several weeks on large river systems, resulting in significant inundation of flood plains as the snow pack melts in the river's watershed. Spring freshets associated with thaw events are sometimes accompanied by ice jams which can cause flash floods. A stream or river of fresh water which empties into the ocean, usually flowing through an estuary."Freshette", a female urination device.

frisson: a sudden, passing sensation of excitement; a shudder of emotion; thrill: The movie offers the viewer the occasional frisson of seeing a character in mortal danger.
Origin: 1770–80; French: shiver, shudder, Old French friçons (plural) < Late Latin frictiōnem, accusative of frictiō shiver (taken as derivative of frīgēre to be cold), Latin: massage, friction

frottage: The act of rubbing against the body of another person, as in a crowd, to attain sexual gratification. a. A method of making a design by placing a piece of paper on top of an object and then rubbing over it, as with a pencil or charcoal.b.A design so made.

fug: a warm, stuffy, or smoky atmosphere in a room."the cozy fug of the music halls"

fugue state: a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. After recovery from fugue, previous memories usually return intact, but there is complete amnesia for the fugue episode. Additionally, an episode is not characterized as a fugue if it can be related to the ingestion of psychotropic substances, to physical trauma, to a general medical condition, or to psychiatric conditions such as delirium, dementia, bipolar disorder or depression. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor (Dissociative Amnesia).

fuliguline: pertaining to sea ducks.

fumet: a rich, concentrated broth made from bones of fish, chicken, game birds, etc. boiled with wine, herbs, etc., used in sauces, for braising various foods, etc.

fundament: a. The buttocks. b. The anus.2. The natural features of a land surface unaltered by humans. 3. A foundation, as of a building. 4. An underlying theoretical basis or principle: "All neighbor states ... must revise ... their policy fundaments"

fusillade: A discharge from a number of firearms, fired simultaneously or in rapid succession. 2. A rapid outburst or barrage: a fusillade of insults. To attack with a fusillade.

furshlugginer: From the Yiddish, an old, battered piece of junk. One of several words Anglicized and popularized by the original writers of MAD Magazine. The word comes from shlogn ("to hit") with the prefix far- which often indicates the one so described is taking on the quality named.

"Chinese Ask Kerry to Help Tear Down a Firewall"

"A group of Chinese bloggers asked the United States to take up the cause of Internet freedom in an unusual meeting on Saturday with Secretary of State John Kerry."

One by one, the bloggers voiced concerns to Mr. Kerry, who arrived here on Friday to discuss regional issues with China’s leaders, that the ability of Chinese citizens to gain access to information was under siege and that the country’s prospects for becoming a democracy were uncertain at best.

“Will you get together with the Chinese who aspire for freedom” and help “tear down this great firewall that blocks the Internet?” asked Zhang Jialong, a reporter for Tencent Finance, a division of China’s largest social media company.

Click the NY Times for the rest of the article.

'Kerry gives Russian foreing minister a giant potato'

Add your own caption

 

Top comment:

"That's a big fuckin' potato. Do you know what would taste great on it? Heinz ketchup."

Gawker

Clear, verifiable

Secretary of State John Kerry insists Israel is safer now. The agreement halts in place progress toward development of nuclear weapons. The agreement is not based on trust, but on access and verification. That simple message is repeated throughout. And by repeated, I mean repeated. 

It is the sort of item seen on Hot Air that is most often skipped because both interviewer and interviewee repulse me. Having said that I must admit that Candy Crowley really does make the challenges that right-wing politics is interested in making. It is not a fluff interview. However she accepts the answers at face value without argument and gets along to the next question or charge. And the answers are pablum. Here's a recap:

Verify verify let me be clear verify verify verify, clear verify, clear, verify, clear verify verify clear clear clear verify verify verify better than before, lifting some sanctions will not have an affect, verify, verify, get unstuck, clear verify verify.

The reason I watched is because the display frame appeared obviously cartoonishly Photoshopped to me, as you might exaggerate the jaw of Jay Leno.  I was certain of it. How dare Hot Air Photoshop a video. Is the whole video Photoshopped? What's going on here? That is why I clicked. Turns out, it is not Photoshopped. I was wrong. Kerry's chin really is that comedically rounded and exaggerated all the way through. I cannot quite believe it. Like his whole lower jaw is filled in with fat from his... somewhere else in order to purposefully produce a cartoon, and yet the new arrangement actually does speak. 

And his darting tongue is so incredibly reptilian that I cannot take my eyes off his face. I am absolutely mesmerized by Kerry's lips and lower jaw. I look back at Candy Crowley and the natural repulsion that occurs despite the apparently good questioning drives me straight back to John Kerry's face, and my fascination with his facial tics and cartoon jaw and annoyance at droning about verify verify verify and lipreading a straight line with darting tongue that nonetheless discusses State foreign policy, selling his agreement has me riveted on his lips waiting for the tongue to pop out again. 

Of all the strange videos I've watched this year to date, they're all right there faithfully listed on YouTube history, it's quite incredible, this must be the oddest of all, because this is the face of my American media and this is the face of my American State Department. 

(It's a sales pitch. I sense Candy Crowley does not buy the vacuum cleaner, even if she might suggest she did.)

flexibility

I do not care to scorn flexibility even feckless flexibility, bat, bat, bat, bat, save! I admire the diplomatic flexibility in evidence: 

"Here's a thought for you." 

"Psych! I said, that was just a thought, can't a guy think aloud in public without being taken for a nutter?" 

"But that is a good idea. We can do something with that idea. That was a good one." 

Hmm, damn, it could give them the advantage. This could turn out poorly. We could be made the fools. More importantly, I could be made the fool. The boss, the communal project, might whimsically contradict me and in flight say the opposite of what I'm saying here. It's happened. 

"Check that." We're not going to go through that again. Smells too much like Bush, "Sorry." 

"We'll probably go with a strike. That's the thing. A strafing. To make the point that you pay for using those weapons. We're going to Congress. The whoooooole shebang." 

Talking about it openly like this and so broadly, strike or no strike, will work to put the fear in Assad. Obama said it will change the calculus and it did. See what happened?  Warships repositioned, Congress assembled, UN discussions, conferences between nations, all dragged in staring straight at Assad and a flake could pop off any second. Fear Obama or deride him as too absurd to occupy his position but that is exactly why you must live on edge moment to moment and like Saddam Hussein you will never be comfortable, not for one conscious or unconscious second, you must keep moving.  Because now, any moment, voooomp.

See how clever that is? We don't have to assume responsibility for all of it. We're the wild card.  The UN really can do it. They can take full responsibility. And if the UN fails, the UN fails, it has nothing to do with us. We did our best. They'll take care of things just fine.

Meanwhile on our side, the United States of America, we bumble it, fumble it, bounce the problem, to Putin, to Congress, to France, to Britain, to Defense, to State, to UN. And we know because we've seen, how the UN comports in live war. They make ludicrous powder blue targets and abruptly close shop and go home. It is not possible to confirm or follow through with anything that is agreed upon. That is the nature of the situation. 

But it doesn't matter because blame falls elsewhere, and that is the important thing, we're free of it. Please stop dragging us into these things and go directly to the UN.

Recall Hans Blix. Let's do that again. There is a flexible guy. I recall at least a full year or thereabout of Hans Blix saying he was getting no cooperation whatsoever from Saddam Hussein at the time. The deal was, at the time, cooperate or be smashed. Looking back, this is how I recall Blix's reports: He's not cooperating, he's not cooperating, he's not cooperating with the new thing, he's playing games, he's not cooperating, I'm telling you he's not cooperating, he's jacking me around, we're being made fools of, he's not cooperating, we're just going through motions, he's shifting things around, the gates are locked, I get no cooperation at all, why are you attacking? You Bastard! You weren't supposed to do that! Bush is a war criminal. 

"Obama’s Syria muddle"

"What is the Obama administration plan in Syria?"

It depends on whom you ask and when.

At 9 p.m. Tuesday, President Obama, in his address to the nation, said that he had “asked the leaders of Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force.”

This contradicted what his secretary of state, John Kerry, had said in testimony to Congress just 11 hours earlier. “We’re not asking Congress not to vote,” Kerry told the House Armed Services Committee. “I’m not asking [for] delay,” he added later.

The administration’s frequent shifts convey the feeling that it is a spectator observing world affairs. Russia is drafting a proposal. France is taking a different proposal to the United Nations. And the people’s House has returned to its previously scheduled program: holding votes undoing Obamacare. 

Care to take a guess how it will turn out?

Kerry, with Chris Hayes

Was at pains  to minimize the video’s influence on the debate in Washington and beyond. “No,” he insisted when Hayes asked if the killers in the video “become, by definition, our allies.” Kerry argued: “In fact, I believe that those men in those videos are disadvantaged by an American response to the chemical-weapons use because it, in fact, empowers the moderate opposition.” Kerry added that “they are not part of the opposition that is being supported by our friends and ourselves.”

The daily beast, I know, them, but still. Good for you Chris for asking that. I like the way Kerry can go to that incredibly stupid place for friendly faces and like-minded people and have frank discussions like this. It is not altogether unhelpful having Party mouthpieces like that even when so annoying, but good for Chris for asking that hard question. But okay then, as long as the people in the video are disadvantaged let's do go ahead then and thanks for telling we've been supporting all along, that goes far in explaining Ben Ghazi without mentioning it. 

The thing that drew me to the piece was NYT editors barfing when watching the video. I made up the barfing part, apparently they got ill and I imagined it while reading by accidentally visualizing myself in the room with that information. And a lot other information too, that I would be sorting and attempting to frame into some kind of narrative, so careful with that

Sponsored Warfare

Up on Drudge now: Kerry: Arabs Will Finance Our War

h/t Icepick

It makes me want to look again at exactly where Armageddon is supposed to take place.

Kerry turns the tables on Rand Paul

washingtonpost

The best part:

Jabbing his finger, Kerry disagreed, saying it was guaranteed that Assad would use chemical weapons again if the U.S. doesn't act. 

Kerry, a Vietnam veteran,

The Washington Post reminds us.

reminded Paul that "you've got three of us here who have gone to war" and that they know what it involves. 

They do. Then ends with bluster, claims victoritah, everybody laughs and laughs. I am not impressed with the polemics, though, maybe somebody is. Three of them went to war so that is proof that Assad will use chemical weapons again.

When do they imagine that to happen, anytime I suppose, apparently everyone was laughing too much to ask, the article is brief on the Washington Post and closes abruptly, but my first guess would be on the 2nd anniversary of Obama's red-line statement.

I happened to turn on the t.v. with Sharpton following and critiquing the Facebook opinion of the most important person in the world, Sarah Palin, saying how despicable, dith-PICK-able it is to politicize something so important as war.

!

It was like a ghostly apparition, death itself, two round lifeless taxidermy eyes upon a ghastly skeletal mouth opening and closing mechanically up and down, frighteningly close to a demented self-willed ventriloquist's doll with a strangely groomed mustache and a tuff of sparse frizzy hair glued on top, speaking to itself in a mirror, horrified at its own image, terrified by its aggressively feminine pink vitality so close to its own end.