too scary for words

Fukushima Today

deserted streets of Futaba
banner- "Nuclear energy is the energy of a bright future”

Arkadiusz Podniesinski, the noted documentary photographer of Chernobyl, recently visited Fukushima. His photos and commentary depict a scenario of ruination and anxiety, a sense of hopelessness for the future.

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_72562.shtml

bernie

Thomas Merton

"We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.

The primoridial blessing, “increase and multiply,” has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.

As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for us…"

   --Thomas Merton

and a happy new year

GeezerNation temporarily indisposed

zappa of course

last train outta Starkville

bwahahaha.....

Misc. Rock

Mr. Pollard of Guided by Voices fame.......

the most useless tool in the entire history of human civilization

DragStreetFire

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, “You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done."
   ---George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) 

John Trudell: 1946-2015

“He got a fast horse. Comanche warriors made sure he got their best. Hoofbeats thunder through the Time Ripple, cracking open the curtains that divide the spirit worlds, casting sparks back our way. Let’s gather them up and build fires.” — Greta Montagne 

The great Santee Sioux poet/philosopher/warrior passed December 8, 2015 after a long bout with cancer. He was at peace, surrounded by family and friends; many had tirelessly helped care for John thru this transition. He lived a magnificent life. He was 69.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/09/john-trudell-human-being/print/ 

the invisible man

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.
   --George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008) 

Revolution Blues

Why should things be easy to understand?
— Thomas Pynchon (1977)

a Sunday nutritional tip

Blessed be the Donald

back to the future

Roll it

View from the East

We, then, sprang up like wild grass in a desert, multiplied, and roamed the streets of Rabat, Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, calling for a revolution. We wanted democracy for our sake, not Bush’s democracy tinged with blood; we wanted equality, change and reforms and a world in which Gaza is not habitually destroyed by Israel and children of Derra could protest without being shot; where leaders do not pose as divinities and relish the endless arsenals of their western benefactors. We sought a life in which freedom is not a rickety dingy crossing the sea to some uncertain horizon where we are treated as human rubbish on the streets of western lands.

http://www.ramzybaroud.net/forget-daesh-humanity-is-at-stake/

The Arc of Instability- a review

it is part of the ideology of imperialism to view its victims as hopeless savages or barbarians incapable of self-determination who require the altruism of a holy, civilizing mission carried out by its conquerors
   --Michael Perino

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/27/the-arc-of-instability/print/ 

GeezerNation celebrates 69th Anniversary!

Next year marks the beginning of our 7th decade of award-winning*, hard hitting**, and utterly stupid*** reportage, and I for one am getting kind of tired.

*

**

 

***

Stop Shopping!

Thanks

https://www.facebook.com/CeCeRogers.Musician/videos/10153839995824416/

and thanks to R. Beatty

Black Friday

Today we will examine the parking lots of Black Friday, where all the action will be. Stay tuned for exciting visuals......

http://www.strongtowns.org/blackfridayparking/ 

that settles it- Killer Mike endorses Bernie

"I don’t trust the church or the government. A Democrat or a Republican. A Pope or a bishop or them other men."......but he do like Bernie

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/24/influential-rapper-delivers-impassioned-speech-sanders-revolution

Philip K. Dick rolls over in his grave

Any New York commuter using the city’s subway recently may have felt as if Adolf Hitler had e been defeated. The interior of subway trains has been decorated with symbols from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, all courtesy of an Amazon ad campaign.....the Nazi propaganda was conceived by online retailer Amazon to promote its new dystopian show “The Man in the High Castle”. The series shows an alternative history of the world in which the Axis powers (Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan) won World War II.

Art is still 'relevant'....bwahahaha!

BOSTON — With placards reading “God Hates Renoir” and “Aesthetic Terrorism,” a small band of protesters descended on the Museum of Fine Arts here this week. In their view, the long-dead French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who painted “treacle” and “deformed pink fuzzy women,” is overrated, overvalued and should not be taking up gallery space here or anywhere else.

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/renoir-protests-metropolitan-museum-art-342338

A pro-Renoir demonstrator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo by Brian Boucher.

exciting times

"Staying strong or remaining hopeful will not, by themselves, survive the rush of madness we seem to be falling into, exemplified by the enthusiastic insanity of longing for the excitement of an Apocalypse in order to feel more alive"
   --José M. Tirado

 

Cruisin'

shocked and awed.....

America’s state governors should be more afraid of the homegrown redneck

As Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute told the Economist, terrorists tend to avoid the bureaucratic hurdles thrown in their path by legal routes to resettlement. "Refugee resettlement is the least likely route for potential terrorists.  Of the 745,000 refugees resettled since September 11th, only two Iraqis in Kentucky have been arrested on terrorist charges, for aiding al-Qaeda in Iraq.." By contrast, many of the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks in Paris Friday night were native born residents of France and other EU nations. It's been confirmed by European officials that the alleged mastermind is Belgian and that a suspected accomplice was born in Paris.

Americans Are as Likely to Be Killed by Their Own Furniture as by Terrorism

Since 9/11, a total of 238 American citizens have died from terrorist attacks, or an average of 29 per year. To put that in some perspective, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the average American is as likely to be crushed to death by televisions or furniture as they are to be killed by a terrorist.

Reaping the whirlwind

“Reaping the whirlwind” is a good biblical phrase, well-known in the wider culture. It means just what it says —  you sow violence, you reap violence. You spend decades destroying secular political movements in Middle Eastern countries, spend decades deliberately and openly fostering sectarian extremists as your proxies, spend decades in an open military alliance with the world’s chief peddler of retrograde Islamic extremism, spend years invading and destroying whole nations, leaving sinkholes of violence and ruin behind — and guess what? You’ll have a world crawling with violent sectarian groups that have the means to strike back at you when you strike them...... there would have been no victims on the Paris streets if not for these actions and policies.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/2531-age-of-despair-reaping-the-whirlwind-of-western-support-for-extremist-violence.html 

Massive Attack

with god on our side

Bama

Alabama is a glacier moving slowly downhill.

No one will ever come back against the Tide, ever. There was that loss to Ole Miss for some reason and now there is only the drought, and the nuclear wasteland, and Alabama wandering through it smiling. Derrick Henry is 245 pounds and can outrun entire SEC defenses. Death is the only real undefeated team.

Alabama does not need water or sleep or hope like weak human flesh, nor even require a functioning quarterback. Don't watch the Tide unless you like watching the football equivalent of famine, or are an Alabama fan, and these are the same things. They play Charleston Southern and Auburn to end the season, and then Florida in the SEC Championship. They are already basically in the Playoff. Give up hope forever. Give it up now.

~~Spencer Hall

In space, no one can hear you scream

"This off-planet economy will forever change our lives for the better here on Earth."
--Planetary Resources president and chief engineer Chris Lewicki

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/11/13/planet-mining-bill-us-congress-seeks-privatize-outer-space 

 

the Master Scatologist

DANGER. offensive and/or dumb lyrics

SkyCam! Futbawl from above!

No, its not the same as SkyNet where drones would be raining death down on the hapless Minnesota Gophers or perhaps the Florida Gators, but it is a 'unique' view of FutbawlTM in all its glorious chaos and stupidity.  

See grown men run in apparent random directions and crash at full speed into other men; see people wander aimlessly on the sidelines; see the SkyCam squeegy guy clean the SkyCam lens.

This is all free on ESPN3! No commercial breaks, just random SkyCam Action.  FutbawlTM at its best! 

the bureaucracy of assassination

the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government. 

“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong."
   --a source within the intelligence community

Most of the time, drone operators are trying to kill someone specific. They call these people—the people being hunted—“objectives.” What does an objective look like? Here’s an example.
This timeline was for a man named Bilal el-Berjawi. Intelligence agencies watched him for years, then the British government stripped him of his citizenship. After calling his wife, who had just given birth in a London hospital, Berjawi was killed by an American drone strike. Some people thought the call might have given away his location, but the drones already knew where he was.

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers

Remember the Alamo

or not

"there is not a single scene in The Alamo which corresponds to a historically verifiable incident"
   --Alamo historian Timothy Todish

The Mexican troops who attacked the Alamo are always described in the history books as the aggressors, so the first thing to clarify is that the Alamo was in Mexico. The so-called “Texians” who were in the fort representing the Republic of Texas were part of an attempt by U.S. slave states to expand the scope of slavery westward.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/06/the-alamo-americas-shrine-to-white-supremacy/print/ 

clown car graph

the incomparable jim varney (1949-2000)

New York!

Microsoft is Evil

I don't actually use Windows 8 but I totally understand.....

does anyone have a plan?

Patrick L. Smith 'splains a progressive foreign policy.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/does_anyone_have_a_plan_heres_how_we_fix_decades_of_overseas_neo_conservative_adventurism/

Calvin the God

      best cartoon strip ever...........

WalDrone

 time to clean that shotgun and stock up on shells......

"Drones have a lot of potential to further connect our vast network of stores, distribution centers, fulfillment centers and transportation fleet," Walmart spokesman Dan Toporek told Reuters. "There is a Walmart within five miles of 70 percent of the US population, which creates some unique and interesting possibilities for serving customers with drones."

fear

“The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot - and it's only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid impotent fear." 
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

Fear of Clowns- 6.8%

The Complete List of Fears, 2015
The following is a complete, list of all of the fears addressed by the Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 2 (2015), including the percent of Americans who reported being afraid or very afraid.

https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2015/10/13/americas-top-fears-2015/

Walmart is not mean enough

This is a company that pays it employees so little that they skip meals and organize food drives; receives so many government subsidies that the public pays about $1 million per store in the United States; and is estimated to avoid $1 billion per year in U.S. taxes through its use of tax loopholes.
However, we live under an economic system that is so insane that this has now been deemed by financiers to be insufficiently brutal.

More is never enough — Wall Street is cracking its whip, demanding no letup in this massive upward flow of money. No slack is allowed. When do we stop believing this machine can be reformed?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/23/not-even-wal-mart-is-ruthless-enough-for-wall-street/print/ 

Strawberry Fields Forever

The first thing any thinking person learns about the Internet is not to trust everything you see there......A devil-may-care approach to Internet-sourced material has been particularly striking when it comes to the case of the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. It has now become de rigueur on the part of the West’s mainstream news outlets to tout the dubious work of a British Internet outlet called Bellingcat, which bases its research on photographs and other stuff pulled off the Internet.
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/20/mh-17-case-old-journalism-vs-new/

still in Wile E. Coyote mode

a message from Bob the Angry Flower

built to spill- these guys are geezers!

the spectacle

Its Monday and I decided its Guy DeBord Day.....

Debord's 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle, and....the Situationists began to formulate their theory of the spectacle, which explained the nature of late capitalism's historical decay. In Debord's terms, situationists defined the spectacle as an assemblage of social relations transmitted via the imagery of class power, and as a period of capitalist development wherein "all that was once lived has moved into representation"

Huh? Make sense to me.....

We are constantly inundated with information – saturated with stimulation in our physical and digital surroundings. But much of this information is superficial. As many critics have declared, we are constantly ‘plugged in’ without any real form of escape available. The constant influx of information can cause fatigue, apathy, and mass confusion.

“Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.”
― Guy Debord

 “I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers.”
― Guy Debord

Corbu Glasses

It was Swiss architect Le Corbusier who first made owlish black spectacles a signature, thereby giving generations of geeky architecture students their claim to the "look". But, does anyone really want to look like Corbu, considering the following? Better to wear the Fatal Vision® marijuana goggles!

Beginning his practice in the second decade of the 20th century, Le Corbusier wanted to correct the ‘chaos’ of the city and create an ideal order. His impact on modernist planning thought is incalculable, and his ideas were widely applied in cities during the 1950s and ‘60s. For urbanist Peter Hall “the evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him”. The creation of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), in which Le Corbusier played a significant role, reinforced the strict professional separation of architects as an ego-driven profession and distinct caste, with their modernist ideas later mirrored in urban planning approaches. Le Corbusier indicated that citizens might be “re-educated” to interact with his urban vision. Ultimately, though, Le Corbusier was of the opinion that city planning was altogether “too important to be left to the citizens”. 
    --D. Beatty

a message from Jesus' friends

Alas, the Left Wing Conspiracy and Liberal Agenda is spreading like a plague not only through our fine society, but through lesser cultures as well. Their sinful antics and attempt to pass off their wanton carnal desires into mainstream culture is destroying society and mankind.

http://christwire.org/mission/

neil

hillary

Attack, n.
Actual meaning: Criticism.

Usage:  As someone in a powerful position, I don’t feel like having to be responsible for the consequences of my actions today, or any other day. I think I’ll just conflate being criticized and being attacked and play the victim so that I can shift the blame for them back onto my critics and anyone trying to hold me accountable for my actions. Then I’ll reconstruct myself as a champion of democracy in the face of the terrorist peril with the aid of the mass media woohoo!

   --Modern Newspeak Dictionary, Ben Debney

the friendly atom

there is an important difference between external radiation exposure (from X-rays or swimming in radioactively contaminated seawater), and internal contamination from ingesting radioactive isotopes..... "Think of the difference between merely sitting before a warm wood fire on the one hand, and popping a burning hot coal into your mouth on the other."

Internal contamination can be 1,000 times more likely to cause cancer than the same exposure if it were external, especially for women and children. And, because cesium-137 stays in the ecosphere for 300 years, long-term bio-accumulation and bio-concentration of cesium isotopes in the food chain – in this case the ocean food chain – is the perpetually worsening consequence of what has spilled and is still pouring from Fukushima.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/14/fukushima-radiation-in-pacific-reaches-west-coast/print/

thought

Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done.
--Jack Handey

Water is Water: physical reality is surpassed only by "our physical reality"

The message is clear: those of us who live without running water are learning not only to make do with less, but to shift our relationship with water completely. The Māori people of New Zealand have an expression that can form the basis of this new relationship – ‘Ko au te awa, Ko te awa ko au‘ which means ‘The river is me, I am the river.’ For those living in water-rich places where the tap flows easily, this may be hard to grasp. But we need only go without a drop of water for a day to begin to appreciate the truth of this saying.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/12/the-browning-of-california-the-water-is-ours/ 

I did not know that Punk was dead

Yes that's right, punk is dead,
It's just another cheap product for the consumers head.
Bubblegum rock on plastic transistors,
Schoolboy sedition backed by big time promoters.
CBS promote the Clash,
But it ain't for revolution, it's just for cash.
Punk became a fashion just like hippy used to be
And it ain't got a thing to do with you or the me.
  --Crass, You'll Ruin It for Everyone, Live 1981

The Jeffrey Lewis cover......


 

marijuana goggles

"these look awesome! can't wait to get stoned and take a high speed drive on Interstate 55 wearing my Fatal Vision® goggles!"

"...wait. what? these are for discouraging marijuana use?"

“Whoever invented ‘marijuana goggles’ has apparently never consumed cannabis, or is simply a brilliant marketer,” said Matt Simon, a legislative analyst and New England political director of the Marijuana Policy Project. Simon cautioned that an unintended consequence may be that “kids who try ‘Fatal Vision’ goggles will be more likely to try cannabis so they can find out for themselves if the effects are actually similar to the goggles.”

http://fatalvision.com/simulation-goggles/marijuana-simulation-experience.html

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/420-songs-about-weed

what is true?

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

  --George Orwell

"Wondrous technology has become both our friend and our enemy. Every time we turn on a computer or pick up a digital device – our secular rosary beads — we are subjected to control: to surveillance of our habits and routines, and to lies and manipulation."

 --John Pilger

http://www.versobooks.com/books/1931-the-wikileaks-files 

"Golf Carts of the Damned"

The Villages [near Orlando Florida] is the largest gated over-55 community in the world. It holds more than 100,000 residents in an area bigger than Manhattan. And everyone gets around via golf cart.

In 2009, the New York Post labeled it "ground zero for geriatrics who are seriously getting it on." The story reported that couples had been caught having quickies in the golf carts and noted there was a thriving black market for Viagra. A local police officer told the paper, "You see two 70-year-olds with canes fighting over a woman and you think, 'Oh, jeez.' "

http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/fresh-and-juicy-scandals-in-the-villages-disney-world-for-old-people/2132545 

My recollection from our stop-over in the Villages (of the living dead) was that the carts are supposed to be governed to run no faster than 25mph. As you can imagine there is an active market for souped up carts. I didn't get to experience the after cocktails ride through the curving streets of our "compound" but the golf cart beat the car back to the house. 

We'll be making a return visit in February for more research.

--R. Beatty, notes from the field
 
Street Legal
 http://www.villagesgolfcartman.com/

Heavy Weather

Real weathermen watch Levi32

bring it, Levi! 

http://www.tropicaltidbits.com/blog/2015/10/01/joaquin-becoming-a-powerful-hurricane-increasing-risk-to-the-united-states/

Bern Baby, Bern!

Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the audience for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework

Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands and issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans: $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights; improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security; revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewables to combat climate change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups; free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on.

--William Kaufman

 

Tuesday- the Karma Police

There was a simple aim at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.

https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/

TomorrowFreakinWorld

Today's young people sure know how to party. At Woodstock, we just sat in the mud; didn't have no taxis or Ubers, whatever the hell those are.....


Well, I went to the TomorrowWorld music festival yesterday. A lot of fun! ...until it was time to go home. All the shuttles stopped running and apparently there was some kind of traffic jam so the taxis couldn't get to us. We spent the night laying on ponchos in the mud and rain. Finally at 5:30 am we just started walking down the road.. 3 miles till we found a taxi. It was insane. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of ppl were left stranded and had to sleep on the ground. No water, no food, no shelter. They covered it on the news.. you should check it out! Pretty insane!

I got a lot of great pics during the festival. My phone had died by the time we were leaving tho. Seriously looked like something out of the Walking Dead. We were all covered in mud because it had been raining all day...... I even saw two girls asleep on top of a cop car! I also saw some ppl pile into a random tractor out in one of the fields, to get out of the rain. People were wrapped up in ponchos, trash bags, whatever they could find. It was a complete mess.

--Elisabeth B. reporting from the scene

http://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/chaos-in-chattahoochee-hills-rain-catches-tomorrowworld-organizers-ill-prepared-leaving-thousands-stranded-overnight-outside-the-festival/

Mississippi, It’s Time

“I don’t think that anyone can argue now that it no longer represents racism. Whatever you want to say about cultural heritage, that flag doesn’t represent anything but racism now – and it especially represents racism to black folks, which is reason enough for white folks not to ever fucking wear it. It’s disrespectful and a form of terrorism to subject them to it.” 

“I lived all of my life in the South until I was 50 years old and I don’t believe that Southern culture is the Civil War. I believe it’s the least of Southern culture. To me Southern culture is Faulkner and Tennessee Williams and the blues and jazz. To make the Civil War who we are as Southerners is a huge mistake.”

--Steve Earle

Arcturus

“Where do you come from?"
"From the planet of a distant sun, called Earth."
"What for?"
"I was tired of vulgarity.” 

― David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus

Ok, Ok, Ok

Dick Cheney is still a downer....

"The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is"

Ok, Ok

that was a downer......

Introducing the B61-12

Making the use of nuclear weapons "thinkable" for the first time since the 1940s- the combination of accuracy and low-yield make the B61-12 the most usable nuclear bomb in America’s arsenal. That’s because accuracy is the most important determinate of a nuclear weapon’s lethality.

Tensions between the US and Russia are already at a near-term high in recent weeks, and look to be getting even worse amid new reports from Germany’s ZDF that the US intends to deploy new nuclear weapons (the B61-12!) to Germany and upgrade its nuclear infrastructure across Europe. 

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-most-dangerous-nuclear-weapon-americas-arsenal-13433

Trump the Chump

Several years ago I watched Trump perform on a pay-per-view Wrestlemania show at a friend’s house in Atlanta. It was real male smoker. We hooted and made off-color jokes as we drank my friend’s fine wine and some smoked huge cigars. Between matches, Trump in a black trench coat trailed by two thugs made violent threats as he searched for Vince McMahon, the billionaire CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Before the main event, Trump found McMahon, and with the two thugs dragged the beefy billionaire into the ring, where he was tied to a chair. With a big grin, Trump, then, roughly shaved McMahon’s head. There was some fiction about revenge for something; but none of that mattered. What mattered was the theater. McMahon played the victim to the hilt: He wailed in pain and humiliation and made vengeful threats. In a previous Wrestlemania outing, Trump pummeled McMahon about the head and shoulders next to the ring. The crowd loved it! McMahon’s wife, Linda, a WWE manager, of course, ran unsuccessfully for a senate seat in Connecticut where the WWE is headquartered. You can’t make this stuff up.

--John Grant, http://thiscantbehappening.net

Wile E. Coyote mode

Our now-daily apocalypses do not presage a conveniently purgative Big One after which everything will be different for everyone. It’s more likely that they are just early evidence of a fundamental physical law: that any closed system becomes more chaotic as heat is added to it. Perhaps someday that law will seem as definitive to us as gravity’s, but right now humanity is frozen in Wile E. Coyote’s classic pose, wildly scrambling seven steps in the air off that cliff, still not looking down.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/17/california-burning-life-on-a-tinderbox-planet/print/

the simulacran republic

The light of the hologram plays on material reality and remakes it in its own image, destroying all connection with the natural world. Malls and suburbs and hyper-real surfaces and speed ...meaningless but dazzling technology. The earth gets a makeover in the image of Disneyland and becomes inhabited by humans who are commodified versions of themselves.

--Joe Bageant, 1946-2011

http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.05/Essays/12.Joe.thrush.pdf 

Things Have Changed

all quarters

Alright already- harsh criticism from the cat quarters (actually had no comments from any quarters). 
No one is reading this blog, you idiot!

Anyway, the obligatory cute cat item is out of the way as we trudge forward. 

culture-death

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”  
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

FUTBAWWWLL

College football is back:  a Neanderthalic tug right back to the very late Pleistocene. 
Block, Kick, Kill. Its in our genes thanks to cave man DNA!. 
Hey, Neanderthals are smart!

With an average cranial capacity of 1600 cm³, the cranial capacity of Neanderthals is notably larger than the 1400 cm³ average for modern humans, indicating that their brain size was larger.

Dawn of the Long War

"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the U.S. or any other country. Make no mistake about it: we are at War now- with somebody- and we will stay at war with that strange and mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives."

   --Hunter S. Thompson

Movement

You may not yet realize that you [will read] a column about the migrant crisis in Europe. But it is always best to begin at the beginning. Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghans, South Asians—one way or another, directly or indirectly, immediately or at a slight remove, they are all victims of the policies through which the Western powers have sought over centuries to impose their will upon weaker people they thought worth disrupting, subjugating and exploiting. 
   --Patrick L. Smith

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/09/america_owns_this_nightmare_everything_thomas_friedman_and_the_media_gets_wrong_about_the_migrant_crisis/

beach

https://youtu.be/v0CYB5V9e64

Exercise vs. Diet

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/05/have-your-coke-and-guzzle-it-too