Fanning The Flames Of Discord -- March 8, 2018

I've thought about "this" for the past six months or so. I just don't have the energy to post on this subject. But if folks think the Russians limited their meddling to US politics, folks are incredibly naive.

There are only two countries that have the resources and existential reasons to meddle in US politics: Russia and Saudi Arabia.

I always thought it was Saudi Arabia that was the money behind the puppeteer pulling the anti-fracking and anti-pipeline strings.

Now, without a doubt it was the Russians all along. Again, if folks think the only thing the Russians are interested in is US presidential campaigns, they are very, very naive.

Link here to Detroit Free Press:

At about the same time they were interjecting themselves in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, online trolls from Russia were also tweeting and posting about controversial U.S. energy issues — including Enbridge's Line 5 oil pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac, a Republican report from a U.S. House committee found.

The report, released Thursday by the Republican majority on the U.S. House's Committee on Science, Space and Technology, reviewed evidence provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram that the social media giants had identified as Russian accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company based in St. Petersburg "established by the Russian government for the purpose of deceptively using various social and traditional media platforms to advance Russian propaganda," the report states.

The trolls targeted controversial fossil fuel transportation projects between 2015 and 2017, including the Dakota Access Pipeline, a proposed oil transmission line from North Dakota to southern Illinois that prompted national debate amid protests involving American Indians and others in 2016.

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On Another Note

Had President Obama placed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, something the unions have been begging for, for years, the mainstream media would have give the president much support.

Tariffs on steel and aluminum: good for US workers; bad for Wall Street.

Mainstream media: the silence is deafening.

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Notes to the Granddaughters

Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, Emily W. Sunstein, c. 1989.

Author says this if the first complete or definitive biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley -- the only stellar English Romantic author for whom there is no complete or definitive biography.

1780 - 1830: the age of Romanticism.

Namesake daughter of the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died giving her birth in 1797; father was philosopher and novelist William Godwin; she was the lover and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley; she literally embodies the English Romantic movement.

Romanticism: among its many definitions or qualities, this one -- an intensity not merely in love and sex but in all the passions; expressiveness, imagination, innovation, risk, exploration, exoticism, glory; ordeal and woe.

What distinguishes Mary Shelley is her love of justice, learning, wisdom, and freedom.

Wrote Frankenstein at the age of 19.

Born during the 8th year of the French Revolution.

"At 16 she ran away to live with 21-y/o Shelley, the unhappily married radical heir to a wealthy baronetcy, who personified the genius and dedication to human betterment she passionately admired all her life. Although she was cast out even by her father, the dynamism of this liaison produced her masterpiece, Frankenstein, which she conceived during one of the most famous house parties in literary history with Shelley and [Lord] Byron on Lake Geneva, and wrote while being battered by a series of calamities. The worse of these was the suicide of Shelley's wife. Albeit reluctantly, the lovers married, but fierce public hostility drove them to Italy. Here their two children died, a trauma from which Mary Shelley never entirely recovered. Nevertheless, Shelley empowered her to live as she wished: to enjoy intellectual and artistic growth, love, freedom, and a 'wild, picturesque mode of living ... ' When she was 24, he drowned, leaving her penniless with with a 2-y/o son.

She lived for another 29 years.

Invalided at the age of 48; died of a brain tumor in 1851; poetic timing, just as Prince Albert opened the Great Exhibition, a showcase of technological progress against which she had warned in her most famous book.