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