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/