#western united states

[have-you-seen-this-animal]

Hey friend, I just started a poll blog to find the cutest baby animal. I thought you and some of your followers might be interested in submitting some cuties so I can get a bracket going!

Debated on whether or not to answer this ask, because I don't think people follow me to find new blogs, but I realized I could just do a poll in honor of yours! Good luck with the new blog!

Beetle grubs are some of my favorite baby animals, because they're so ridiculous and wiggly.

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Townsend’s Solitaire

Find this thrush bird in forest edges in the West. The white eye-ring and long, slim tail with white outer feathers are key marks to look for in the field.

By RICHARD BUQUOI

[howgaytobequeer]

I went and joined iNaturalist, and you can see my adventures in the Klamath Falls, Oregon, USA area right over here.

I may occasionally post summaries of particularly interesting encounters with my local wildlife here, but iNat itself is the place to watch for day-to-day shenanigans.

[xmozhnolyubitx]

Next year we have a road trip planned across the United States. I cannot wait until my eyes see these endless red hills and canyons for themselves.

[itsoliverohanlon]

American newspaper article from this day in 1924 about a tourist map of the western United States that shows the highways and roads that link the National Parks in that part of America.

Source: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92066926/1924-01-23/ed-1/seq-1/

[tmninjagirl]

this is the most timeline ever!!!!

[thingsiwishihadknownsooner]

That is a bathrobe.

RB to see how others think-- also, what territory you're from and version of English you speak! (this is to settle a thing I am pondering)

[hussyknee]

This ruling is non-binding (not sure how it would be enforced even if it was considering Israel's chief protector is the U.S., which doesn't recognise the International Criminal Court and keeps trying to punish it for this kind of thing), but there's support for it across the board except from the US and its new vassal state, the UK. The Tory government has backed the US in ignoring every ICJ ruling on Palestine thus far and Starmer has been avoiding the issue but reinstated funding for UNRWA a few hours after the latest one. Starmer is a spineless Zionist maggot and as much of a US shill has the Tories however, so which way his government tips will probably depends on the strength of the US's reaction.

If you still want to vote for that death-worshipping lurching corpse in November and maybe claim back some of the voters who've decided they can't endorse this bloodthirsty maniac, now is the time to take to the streets and threaten to withhold your vote unless he fucking complies. Don't worry, the same amount of you will vote for him anyway since genocide is not a red line for you, but the DNC is jumpy enough now that they might want to err on the side of caution. Please try and stop your precious democracy from massacring any more children, even if only to save your own skins.

[technofeudalism]

incredible that everyone is crying crocodile tears over the death of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Asia/whatever. do you... know anything about these stations, by chance?

1982 Duke paper citing that VOA/RFE/RFA are CIA propaganda.

Brief History of VOA’s Domestic Propaganda

"During the Cold War, America’s three largest overseas propaganda venues were Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE) and Radio Liberty (RL). These mass media outlets are still active today, avidly pushing US geopolitical and corporate interests, including wars, invasions and regime change operations. During the Cold War, these networks pushed US-government propaganda under the guise of advocating democracy, human rights and truth. They still do. But only the VOA was truthful enough to admit it was state financed. Beginning in 1942 under the Office of War Information, the VOA now has a US$200-million budget and broadcasts its propaganda in 45 languages to 270 million people per week.1 The RFE and RL began in 1949 as covert creatures of the CIA. Funding was funnelled through one of the CIA’s many front groups, the National Committee for a Free Europe. (See p.18.) This was revealed in the late 1960s but continued until 1972 when Congress began covering its budget. Still proud of its role in the Cold War, the RFE/RL’s website now brags that the “news and information” it aimed at “audiences behind the Iron Curtain,” “played a significant role in the collapse of communism....”2

U.S. Planting False Stories Common Cold War Tactic

The New York Times in 2000 revealed a classified history of CIA's covert 1953 operation in Iran to oust the prime minister and bolster Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It included planting articles and editorial cartoons in newspapers. The CIA used disinformation tactics in Latin America, using radio broadcasts under the name Voice of Liberation to help topple the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. It used similar tactics in Chile to discredit Socialist President Salvador Allende who died in a 1973 coup when forces loyal to Augusto Pinochet overthrew his government.

U.S. Government Has Long Used Propaganda against the American People

During the early years of the cold war, [prominent writers and artists, from Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to Jackson Pollock] were supported, sometimes lavishly, always secretly, by the C.I.A. as part of its propaganda war against the Soviet Union. It was perhaps the most successful use of “soft power” in American history.

NYT 1977: Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.

One of the C.I.A.'s first major ventures was broadcasting, Although long suspected, it was reported definitively only a few years ago that until 1971 the agency supported both Radio Free Europe, which continues, with private financing, to broadcast to the nations of Eastern Europe, and Radio Liberty, which is beamed at the Soviet Union itself. The C.I.A.'s participation in those operations was shielded from public view by two front groups, the Free Europe Committee and the American Committee for Liberation, both of which also engaged in a variety of lesser‐known propaganda operations. The American Committee for Liberation financed a Munich��based group, the Institute for the Study of the U.S.S.R., a publishing and research house that, among other• things, compiles the widely used reference volume “Who's Who in the U.S.S.R.” The Free Europe Committee published the magazine East Europe, distributed in this country as well as abroad, and also operated the Free Europe Press Service. Far more obscure were two other C.I.A. broadcasting ventures, Radio Free Asia and a rather tenuous operation known as Free Cuba Radio. Free Cuba Radio, established in the early 1960's, did not broadcast from its own transmitters but purchased air time from a number of commercial radio stations in Florida and Louisiana.

Fantastic Truths, Compelling Lies: Radio Free Europe and the Response to the Slánský Trial in Czechoslovakia

This article examines the coverage by Radio Free Europe (RFE) of the show trial of Rudolf Slánský in 1952 and contrasts this coverage with documents on the response to the trial within Czechoslovakia. RFE aggressively portrayed the trial as a pack of lies and condemned its anti-Semitism as not authentically Czechoslovak. The response within Czechoslovakia was more much nuanced. Most publicly accepted the trial as valid and acted in ways that underscored that acceptance. Within this acceptance, however, they varied from the trial script and brought their own meanings to the story. Those meanings were not always ones that either RFE or Czechoslovak leaders would have recognised as true.

How America Backs Critics of Freedom

MUNICH -- A quiz: Which American radio station airs lengthy speeches portraying the United States as a decadent power and an unreliable ally? Which American station employs commentators openly contemptuous of Western democratic ideals? The answer is not some clandestine outfit sponsored by Moscow. The name of the station is Radio Liberty. It is part of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Inc., headquartered here in West Germany, but directed from Washington. These two radio stations are a key element in the Reagan administration's campaign to bring a stronger Western point of view to residents of Soviet bloc countries. Their entire budget -- $98 million this year -- comes from the American taxpayer, courtesy of Congress. Children of the Cold War, the radios were to serve as an electronic substitute for a free press for the peoples of the Soviet bloc. RFE covered Eastern Europe and RL the Soviet Union. Officially independent, the stations were in fact funded and loosely supervised by the Central Intelligence Agency. But the CIA was always careful throughout the 1950s and the 1960s not to dictate the contents of broadcasts. Editorial control was left to the fairly autonomous RFE/RL management. Later in the 1970s, when the CIA connection was publicly exposed, supervision of the stations was transferred to the Board of International Broadcasting (BIB), appointed by the president. And herein lies an inherent contradiction: the radios are expected simultaneously to act as the authentic voice of their East European and Soviet audiences and as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)

i honestly think too many of you accepted at face value that this image was secretly exclusively about communism

[have-you-seen-this-animal]

This animal was requested!

[sitting-on-me-bum]

A western ring-necked snake (Diadophis punctatus), native to the western U. S. There are around 4,000 known snake species on Earth.

(Image credit: Alison Davis Rabosky, University of Michigan)

[inatungulates]

Eastern North Pacific long-beaked common dolphin Delphinus bairdii bairdii

With California brown pelican Pelecanus occidentalis californicus and western gull Larus occidentalis

Observed by lalagregg, CC BY-NC

[stone-cold-groove]

New radar sky-watch to guard arctic frontier. Western Electric ad - 1952.

[troythecatfish]

[tmninjagirl]