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.

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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.....