Saturday, December 31, 2016

bye 2016- pre/post Trump

America don’t need no stinking badge, or is it that Bonus Soldiers WWI killing machine, that blacklisting and drug warring machine, that ignorance is more than bliss joint, all those gun shops and cigarette stores America, all those high fructose corn syrup children running for their Ritalin, all those big ass student loan interest rates to the tune of 1 point five trillion dollars, or that America of the mortgage-killing bank of USA loving kind, all of it, and more, America, WAY before the shit-storm of Trump.
-- Paul Haeder
trump-mocks

Sunday, December 25, 2016

12/26/2016 wilderness

Responding to the Trump triumph with insult and denigration, no matter how valid, is worse than a waste of time. It is an exercise in denial. The Democrats lost this election in just about every substantial and meaningful way, not only by running a corrupt primary process, not only by expecting fealty to a hollow candidate, but by decades of withdrawal from meaningful engagement with too many deserving Americans. Any idiot knew, in 2008, that the country was in ferment and that that ferment needed to be addressed honestly and substantively. The scale of Democrats’ failure to do that is measured by the rise of the Tea Party in 2010. The country has been hurting for a long, long time, like the tail gunner in Catch-22, and Democrats have treated only scratches when the body politic has its guts spilling out.


why no one won this election..... There was no one to vote for. We’ve been in the wilderness much longer than we generally acknowledge. Bigots didn’t put us there. Misogynists didn’t put us there. White nationalists didn’t put us there. They all may contribute to keeping us there, but capitalists puts us there, and capitalists will keep us there until we develop more effective wilderness survival skills.
-- William M. Boardman  
so-this-is-what-a-national-nervous-breakdown-looks-like

7 days of Christmas- DAY SEVEN

GeezerNation has no bad news today.
Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays!

Saturday, December 24, 2016

7 days of Christmas- DAY SIX

Well, this is Christmas Eve day, and I haven't done anything remotely 'Christmassy'. We watched Deliverance last nite, and I don't believe there was any Christmas theme in that film unless you can count the really cold, rushing water. ok, I guess the boys having fun in the woods was in the spirit of giving and receiving. Myrna says it best......



21st century post modern fascism style

The thing that will become the signature of Trumps first 100 days is going to happen at the nuts and bolts level. I suspect things, daily bureaucratic things are going to grind to a halt. This is the 100 days of incompetence in the most basic operations of government. Trump will escalate his twitter output, though, and perhaps the eventual Trump library will all be tweets. And built in Vegas.
What comes from all this depends on people deciding to emulate the small symbolic victory of Standing Rock. It does not come from an entitled elite petulantly demanding their war loving sociopath replace the other parties vulgarian and authoritarian clown. This is 21st century post modern fascism. Its only which style code you feel best with. Reject this binary world view. Reject any candidate who endorses U.S. Imperialism and 800 plus military bases throughout the world. Stop all U.S. intervention and stop believing the manufactured narratives on Syria, about Russia, about Castro, and about China. Most everything MSNBC tells you can be turned on its head…and it will be closer to the actual truth. The U.S. is far more guilty of everything it charges other countries with doing. As such Samantha Power deserves a special seat in hell. The U.S. commits more war crimes, more human rights violations, more interference in the affairs and elections of other countries, than anyone else. And we prosecute dissent more ruthlessly, and are the least transparent of any country in the world save maybe Uzbekistan. We have intelligence agencies fighting proxy wars with other of our intelligence agencies. The U.S. is now a massive societal dinosaur. To go the way of the Great Auk or Woolly Mammoth might not be such a bad thing for the planet.

to-go-the-way-of-the-great-auk-the-clintons-and-the-media

Friday, December 23, 2016

7 days of Christmas- DAY FIVE

There was a line for Santa and a line for the women's bathroom. And one woman, after asking me 1,000 questions already, asked, which is the line for the women's bathroom? And I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. And she said, I'm going to have you fired.
I had two people say that to me today. I'm going to have you fired. Go ahead. Be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet costume. It doesn't get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? I'm going to have you fired. And I want to lean over and say, I'm going to have you killed.

Yo, Earthlings

Yo, earthlings. Just got in. How is it hanging? I see the dog and pony show is over. And it was Trump by a nose. So I guess it’s oh my God the sky is falling from here on in. Please, stop. If I laugh any more I will bust a gut. Fools! You are going extinct and you fuss over trivia. But after all isn’t that so appropriate. A whole species rushing around in busy confusion like an anthill some boy kicked over. Busy, busy and pointless. What better prelude to extinction? Can you not hear the laughter of the Gods?
    -- Michael Doliner
yo-earthlings

Thursday, December 22, 2016

frizzle fry

a small window into our Orwellian world

Western mainstream media’s coverage of the Syrian war is “compromised” as their local sources are “not credible” and, in the case of Aleppo, not even there, a Canadian journalist said in an emotional speech at the UN.


Tuesday, December 20, 2016

the goodness of our greatness

“'So what are we supposed to do then?' comes the angry cry. Well, one thing we could do to begin breaking this deadly cycle is to quit living in a dreamworld and recognize what the actual policies of our governments are, what our governments are actually doing, and the actual consequences of these actual events. We have to be done with the childish notion that our greatness and goodness is forever being assaulted out of the blue by motiveless monsters who don’t appreciate how greatly good we really are."    --Chris Floyd
eyes-wide-shut-flying-blind-in-an-age-of-atrocity

7 days of Christmas- DAY THREE






7 days of Christmas- DAY TWO-AND-A-HALF

I’d been wandering through an emotional desert for forty years, alone with no one to care for me, and I’d even gone so far as to purchase the gun I was going to commit suicide with. Had it sitting right there on the seat next to me in fact. But when I saw the sign that said “Season’s Greetings,” a flood of warmth, kindness, and Holiday Good Cheer filled my aching heart, and I suddenly realized I was dearly loved, and that I could save the pistol for shooting somebody else instead of myself.

How very fucking heartwarming.


Season's Greetings

Monday, December 19, 2016

our violence

In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders … in the role of villain. They  have not yet learned to remove the dangerous influence of religion from political life. Their violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. Our violence, being secular, is rational, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. We find ourselves obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy…
     -- William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict



Sunday, December 18, 2016

7 days of Christmas- DAY ONE

For your Holiday Enjoyment, GeezerNation offers "7 Days of Christmas"

Santa-
he’s in the walkways of all the malls, inside the stores inside all the malls, and at office Christmas parties, on postcards, lawn displays, billboards, digital ads, Youtube videos and rent-a Santa’s. Let that sink in a minute. You. Can. Fucking. Rent. One. You can’t get away from him unless you plan to spend the rest of the Christmas season in an ironclad, shrink-wrapped and airtight deprivation chamber submerged in 100 feet of water off the coast of nowhere in particular. If you’re above ground and breathing you will have to deal with Santa Claus, and he most certainly will deal with you.

death-to-santa

Friday, December 16, 2016

the Truth is everywhere

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
    -- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
"As it goes, the future as it currently happens is immensely, greatly in harmony with Huxley’s boldest dreams with so little pushback or objection that Richard Nixon must be turning over in his grave. But, why Nixon and why final defeat?"

nixons-final-defeat 

Thursday, December 15, 2016

Truth is an 'opinion'

“Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will,"
    -- Mark Twain
While the coverage of war in the past has given rise to many daring journalists – Seymour Hersh in Vietnam, Tariq Ayyoub in Iraq, photo-journalist Zoriah Miller, and hundreds more – the war in Syria is destroying journalistic integrity and, with it, our readers’ ability to decipher one of the most convoluted conflicts of the modern era.

In Syria, as in Iraq and other warring regions in the Middle East, the ‘truth’ is not shaped by facts, but opinions, themselves fashioned by blind allegiances, not truly humanistic principles or even simple common sense.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

the 3 S's

Our duty as radicals is weaken capitalism and build organizations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our grandchildren (not really so far away) can lead a revolution. If we don’t do it, our descendants will remain corporate chattel. Our generational assignment — should we decide to accept it — is sedition, subversion, sabotage: a program on which socialists and anarchists can work together.
    -- William T. Hathaway

carlin life is worth losing



Tuesday, December 13, 2016

foreign affairs

29

I resolved today I would not look at the slimey underbelly of life in USArya, and instead look at the silver lining in the clouds, ...and indeed, a gorgeous sunrise rose over freshly fallen snow, the air was crisp and alive, the sun was brilliantly blinding. Had a great cup of espresso from a perky girl in a bikini, danced around at the gas station washing my windows, sang through the grocery store buying hamburger and bread, ... then came home to the news that Tillerson was SecState and Bolton is Asst SecState. Congratulations to Mr. Trump and Mr. Tillerson,... however, did you not see the footnote on that announcement?

That rabbinally-crazed NeoCon and former UN Third UnderSecretary John Bolton 'will be in charge of day-to-day operations' at State. That means Bolton will run State exactly like Clinton ran State, tied at the hip to the CIA Black Ops in Libya and Syria and God knows where else Crusader warplan, and that bodes great NeoCon evil for USArya.

Bolton will massage and manipulate every communication that Tillerson receives, spinning it with a CIA/MIC war theme, so that Tillerson will be reduced to the facile spox role of a Kerry, reading from a Bolton script, like WTF am I doing in Beijing threatening 1.3 billion people? Bolton has neither the experience nor the contacts, neither the wisdom nor the equanimity, to be in-charge of the CIAs country club caddie shack, much less in defacto control over State.

Where yesterday I was pulling my savings out of broker-banks over the Goldman Mob's now total control of finance; today, I'm pulling my savings out of the US entirely, selling my house, moving to a rental by the airport light-rail, selling my vehicle for a leave-behind bicycle, with a full-fare open ticket in hand to anywhere, beside my bug-out bag, my passport, my credit cards, my laptop, my inoculations records and my TWIC.

Oh, and a comfortable pair of walking shoes. You can never have too many shoes, lol.

MIC IS NOW IN CONTROL OF DEFENSE, NSA, CIA AND STATE, AND GOLDMAN IS IN CONTROL OF TREASURY, COMMERCE, OMB, NEC AND FED. THIS IS THE NEO-CON END-GAME: THE 1998-2001 SOFT COUP-HARD COUP, THAT TOOK AMERICA DOWN.

Posted by: chipnik | Dec 10, 2016 3:59:06 PM | 39

need an ambulance

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Burn the Flag Day

Burning the flag is the legal way to dispose of worn or dirtied flags. Flags are the way politicians wrap their butts to appear patriotic. Flags should be burnt, preferably with the politicians and their butts within.
-- Formerly T-Bear
Let’s welcome our new Commander in Chief by demonstrating how little he knows about the Constitution of the United States. Each incoming president is required on inauguration day to take the oath of office, affirming to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” But Trump proved his ignorance of this document when he recently wrote, “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!” The Supreme Court, however, thinks otherwise. It has twice ruled that burning the national flag is not a crime but a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment, a legal way to protest government policies.

burn-the-flag-on-inauguration-day

Friday, December 9, 2016

democracy is for losers

Trump won the election because he didn’t try to sell the Gettysburg Address. Upfront and fascist in his scorn for the democratic idea, he declared his candidacy on June 16, 2015, a deus ex machina descending by escalator into the atrium of Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, there to say, and say it plainly, democracy is for losers. Money, ladies and gentlemen, is power, and power, my friends, is not self-sacrificing or democratic. Never was and never will be; law unto itself, and the only one that counts. Name of the game, nature of the beast.

hostile-takeover

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

if you missed it; an Orwellian moment

The Washington Post last week published a front-page blockbuster that quickly went viral: Russia-promoted “fake news” had infiltrated the newsfeeds of 213 million Americans during the election, muddying the waters in a disinformation scheme to benefit Donald Trump. Craig Timberg’s story was based on a “report” from an anonymous group calling itself PropOrNot that blacklisted over 200 websites as agents or assets of the Russian state.


Almost everyone outside of the Washington Post who critically examined the list concluded it was at best shoddy and ill-considered, and at worst a deliberate attempt to encourage a chilling effect on Russia-related reporting.
The vast majority of reporters would have needed to see something a lot more concrete than a half-assed theoretical paper from such a dicey source before denouncing 200 news organizations as traitors.
     -- Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
USA Today, Gizmodo, PBSThe Daily BeastSlateAP,  The Verge and NPR all uncritically wrote up the Post’s most incendiary claims with little or minimal pushback. Gizmodo was so giddy its original headline had to be changed from “Research Confirms That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News” to “Research Suggests That Russia Played a Major Role in Spreading Fake News,” presumably after some polite commenters pointed out that the research “confirmed” nothing of the sort.

why-are-media-outlets-still-citing-discredited-fake-news-blacklist

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

You have been Faked Out- 3

This neoliberal simulation of democracy, and normality, and reality, is what the corporate media, and the entire neoliberal intelligentsia, is desperately working to shore up at the moment, as they took quite a hit with this election mess. Trump was not supposed to win. He was supposed to be another Hitlerian bogeyman that the neoliberals could save us all from, but then, well, look what happened. The problem for the neoliberal ruling classes, and the mainstream media, and liberals generally, having gone balls out on the Hitler schtick, is that they pretty much have to keep it up now, which is going to get increasingly weird as Trump turns out to not be Hitler, but, rather, just another Republican plutocrat, albeit one with zero government experience and some certified bull goose loonies on his staff. I’m sure Trump will want to help them out, though (i.e., his neoliberal “enemies”), with the occasional racist or misogynist tweet, as he will need to maintain his “white working class” creds, at least until the “War on Islam” gets going.
    -- CJ Hopkins
manufacturing-normality

only love can save us now

truth

What is truth?  Can truth appear in the midst of everything that is set against it?  Can we still recognize truth if it emerges.
Can we be awoken from our postmodern dogmatic slumbers by a stark opposition between true politics and anti-politics? With Standing Rock, we have in front of us a real point of contact with this question, and the proof of this is that what happens at Standing Rock will matter in a very large way, I would even say a “world-historic” way.
-- Bill Martin 


Monday, December 5, 2016

End Game of Corporatist Globalization


“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?"
-- George Orwell, ‘1984’
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
-- Frank Zappa
The Western World has now reached the point where the illusion is becoming too expensive to maintain. Alternative media represents an intolerable diversity of opinion and often exposes the lies found so necessary by Corporatist Orthodoxy. Alternative media is, so seen, an undesirable remnant of the halcyon days of Democracy, when questions were permitted, and authorities could be held to account.  Having destroyed sovereignty by way of Globalist incorporation it is now found to be time to further incorporate and consolidate austerity by destroying ‘alternative media’.
-- Stephen Martin 
     

Sunday, December 4, 2016

the Iron Heel

"Make no mistake: armed force state repression is alive and well in the United States. The Iron Heel lives, updated and refined for the current age. It did not simply pass into the dustbin of history with the Ludlow Massacre, the Palmer Raids, Kent State, COINTELPRO, the murder of Fred Hampton, or Wounded Knee II. It has hardly been rendered obsolete by the soft power of the mass media and other modes of propaganda and thought and feeling control, including carefully staged quadrennial electoral extravaganzas that tell people that democracy consists of getting to mark a ballot for five minutes or less once every four years and then going home to let rich people run the world (into the ground)."
-- Paul Street

the-iron-heel-at-home-force-matters

Saturday, December 3, 2016

fly the flag

The national religion of the United States of America is nationalism. Its god is the flag. Its prayer is the pledge of allegiance.
The flag’s powers include those of life and death, powers formerly possessed by traditional religions. Its myths are built around the sacrifice of lives to protect against the evils outside the nation. Its heroes are soldiers who make such sacrifices based on unquestioning faith. A “Dream Act” that would give citizenship to those immigrants who kill or die for the flag embodies the deepest dreams of flag worship. Its high priest is the Commander in Chief. Its slaughter of infidels is not protection of a nation otherwise engaged, but an act that in itself completely constitutes the nation as it is understood by its devotees. If the nation stopped killing it would cease to be.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Tragically Hip

To make it our battle

The water from my tap smells like mildew
on oily rags.
When I drink it there is a moment when
I have to tell myself to swallow
or I will spit it out.
I boil water for my coffee
to get rid of the taste.
Every morning I take Duff for a long walk.
It’s cloudy and rainy today,
but through the clouds and rain
I can feel the Earth warming as the sun comes up.
I can smell the odor of the water treatment facility
a few blocks from where I live.
An aggressive smell, somewhat sweet,
like artificial fruit.
We don’t own our water.
It was bought
and now it’s sold back to us.
I know neighbors who don’t talk to each other anymore.
Some people got a couple thousand dollars,
some hundreds of thousands.
They put in a pipeline about two years ago.
It runs right under Stillwater Dam.
It crosses route 171 and then winds up a steep hill.
The trees, all clear cut and hauled away.
There was lots of talk about jobs,
until the pipeline moved far enough away
that they started replacing our locals
with other locals.
During my walk this morning with Duff
I think about what’s going on at Standing Ridge Sioux Reservation.
Harassed, intimidated, maced, gassed,
shot at with rubber bullets, dragged away from prayer ceremonies,
their teepees and tents pulled down. . . 
All because they are trying to protect the water.
How rarely our government prosecutes crimes committed by the wealthy.
Standing Rock? I talk to my neighbors. They say:
That’s a long way off.
They’re just trying to make it through another week
on less than minimum-wage jobs.
We walk past a big puddle that forms in the alley behind my house when it rains.
I stand there this morning, as I have many times before
and watch the puddles percolate from the gas
seeping through the Earth.
If you listen closely, they pop
with a happy sort of sound.
I guess we missed our chance when they came to frack.
When they laid the pipeline,
we missed our chance 
to make it our battle.

Monday, November 28, 2016

You have been Faked Out- 2

The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg — headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” — cites a report by an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.”

The Post should be very proud: It staked a major part of its news story on the unverified, untestable assertions of this laughable organization.

washington-post-disgracefully-promotes-a-mccarthyite-blacklist

confessions-of-an-alleged-russian-propagandist

Sunday, November 27, 2016

You have been Faked Out

The mainstream media (MSM) has taken to blaming the election on an avalanche of “fake news.” An academic has produced a list of so-called fake news outlets; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has vowed to crack down on fake news; President Obama lectured a somniferous German audience on the dangers of fact-free journalism and “demonizing” people or institutions.......

.......the strategy is nonetheless a threat, because it could easily serve as a pretext to silence alternative media and to more militantly police the internet. This could be the upshot of this election cycle—a serious move by the state to impose thought control on the web.
    --Jason Hirthler

all-the-news-fit-to-omit

Thursday, November 24, 2016

the future, not

“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”

That’s how Richard B. Spencer saluted more than 200 attendees on Saturday, gathered at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of  people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.”

richard-spencer

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

north dakota

"The attacks came as water protectors used a semi-truck to remove burnt military vehicles that police had chained to concrete barriers weeks ago, blocking traffic on Highway 1806. Water protectors’ efforts to clear the road and improve access to the camp for emergency services were met with tear gas, an LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device), stinger grenades, rubber bullets, and indiscriminate use of a water cannon with an air temperature of 26 degrees Fahrenheit. Some flares shot by law enforcement started grass fires which were ignored by the water cannons and had to be extinguished by water protectors. Law enforcement also shot down three media drones and targeted journalists with less lethal rounds."
fire-and-ice-another-ignored-outrage-at-standing-rock

Monday, November 21, 2016

across the sea with the powers-that-be

In 1975 Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam dared to try to assert his country’s autonomy. The CIA and MI6 made sure he paid the price.......

Sunday, November 20, 2016

FUTBAWL interlude- Nick Saban

Alabama beat the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, but Nick Saban’s mad!


Nick Saban sounds like my dad before he told me to grab a switch circa 1994. 

Saturday, November 19, 2016

all kinds of time

"I get a lot of groans for talking this way, especially at the kitchen table here in Oregon. Why are you always so depressing? That’s no way to motivate people! But regardless of how we speak about it, climate change is beyond control now. The time to act was 50 years ago. What some recent evidence of the way things are heading? Temperatures at the North Pole this week are 36 degrees higher than normal. The living planet will survive, though our species, speaking of hubris, likely won’t in the long term. Life on earth survived the Permian Extinction, when more than 98 percent of the species on the planet were wiped out almost overnight geologically speaking. From that extinction new forms of life emerged, evolving in wild new directions. See Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, which might be considered an uplifting book if your timeline is expansive enough."

--Jeffrey St. Clair

Black milk of daybreak, we drink it at evening

They would have us believe anything other than the truth: that everyone and everything will die; that all nations, ethnicities, religions and structures will fall away into rubble, into nothingness, and be forgotten; and that even the planet itself will be reduced to atoms and melt away, like black milk, into the cold deeps of empty space. And in the face of this truth, nothing matters ultimately but each specific, fleeting instance of individual being, the shape we give to each momentary coalescence of atomic particles into a particular human situation.
That's all we have. That's all there is. That's what we kill when we murder someone. That's what we strangle when we keep them down with our boot on their throat.
    --Chris Floyd
Broken-light: work-for-the-night-is-coming

Death Fugue
Paul Celan, 1920 - 1970


Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta 
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his
     dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us to play for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes

He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air
then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland 

your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite

Friday, November 18, 2016

the long shadows

The real question is, finally, how do such grotesque immoral people control the government. Trump is picking from the same class of neo con hawk as Hillary planned to — Bob Corker replaces Michelle Flournoy. I don’t personally see much difference. Gingrich or Nuland? The same privately funded think tanks churn out these ghouls. The Enterprise Institute, CATO, the Heritage Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, The Brookings Institute, The Center for American Progress, The Rand Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Hoover Institute. The list is pretty long. Whats pretty funny, but also revealing, is that think tanks labeled *liberal* (like Center for Strategic and International Studies) include members such as Madeleine Albright and Ehud Barak. The point is that the entirety of this gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, from Wall Street to the NGOs have been in the service, for sixty or seventy years, along with the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, and U.S. State Department, of destroying any socialist movements globally that happen to occur. And with squashing dissent domestically. And with disseminating a constant never ending stream of anti communist, and anti socialist propaganda, and with the dissemination of propaganda to label alternative views and values as crazy or fringe (the smearing of Stein/Baraka is the most recent clear example).
So forgive me if I can’t find it in me to care much about Trump. If protesting Trump expands to become a protest against neo liberalism, against militarism and war, and against white supremacy — then count me in. Or lets have some teach-ins. Until then we can all try to educate ourselves and others.
    --John Steppling

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Mose Allison, 1927 – 2016

If there was ever a year that killed more musical talent, I don’t want to know about it. Prince, Keith Emerson, Bowie, George Martin, Jimmy Haskell, Maurice White, Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, Glenn Frey, Dan Hicks, Gato Barbieri, Merle Haggard, Bernie Worrell, Scotty Moore, Rob Wasserman, Pete Fountain, Bobby Hutcherson, John D. Loudermilk, Toots Thielemans, Pierre Boulez, Buckwheat Zydeco, Al Caiola. Two of the founding members of the Jefferson Airplane — Paul Kantner and Signe Toly Anderson — died on the same day at the same age. And now Mose Allison. The one thing we can learn from most of these people: to live a longer life, play a musical instrument.
mose-allison-goodbye-there-universe
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/mose-allison




Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Revolution A.D. 2020

In late 2012, Peter Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut made a startling claim, based on an analysis of revolutionary upheavals across history.
He found there are three social conditions in place shortly before all major outbreaks of social violence: an increase in the elite population; a decrease in the living standards of the masses; and huge levels of government indebtedness.
The statistical model his team developed suggested that, on this basis, a major wave of social upheaval and revolutionary violence is set to take place in the US in 2020. His model had no way to predict who would lead the charge; but this week's election gives an indication of how it is likely to unfold.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

the Cartoonist's view

Trump’s fascism will come about naturally, caused by the perfect storm of his ego, his CEO mentality, the politics and personalities of the men and women with whom he is surrounding himself, and a set of developments that are all but inevitable.

Canceling the next election? For these characters, it will be an easy call.


    --Ted Rall

donald-trump-is-a-fascist

Monday, November 14, 2016

moving on.....

Get over it folks. This is where we are at. Now its time to move on; one household, one street, one community.......
"Some of my students/kids have said they were disappointed when I'd posted I'd found a way to reconcile this. Here is why. Not because I 'believe' in it, and not because I think this is a 'good thing.' Its not. Its a fucking nightmare come true. But: this is who we are. This wasn't 'made.' This is what it is, what is HAS been. Only now we have the chance to see it with open - sober - eyes. See the horror death and destruction we've wrought on other cultures, the disrespect, hate and intolerance with which we face our neighbors (globally and locally). Hopefully: now is when we've 'bottomed-out' and realized WE - inside, ourselves - are not in any way 'exceptional,' but WE are the fucking problem. We can't deny, we can't whitewash..."   
    --Chairman Chad

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Leon: 1942-2016




Election Final

Having stealthily, assiduously cultivated and nurtured the most regressive, dim, and hateful elements in its Redneck Wing for decades, the CEO Wing gaped impotently as Dogpatch was appropriated by a vulgarian who spoke to peckerwoods directly, not in code.  He jettisoned the few Silverspooners and Coupon Clipper Bosses, stole their ground troops and mobilized their outrage.  He only succeeded then due to the universal rage of the working class that has been dealt out and bankrupted, its jobs and prospects stolen and its lives sunk, for the benefit of a tiny clique of professional criminals.

The Republican Party is done, killed because Trump grabbed its posse.


Democrats, confident of being lesser evils, opted for "selbstmord". After Occupy’s warning, exposes of record financial inequality and the rapid unravelling of democracy, one might have thought a show of fight against those evils would be mandatory, but no: they pre-selected the candidate who embodied them instead. As the long, impassioned cry went up across the country, from the young, working people, the ill and poor, disabled and elderly, for an old man who would be their champion, Party commissars chose to freeze out Bernie’s burn and go geriatrically into that good night. Then, when caught out in their shoddy chicanery, they Hitlered Putin.


The Democratic Party is done, dead of peritonitis from undigested hubris.

deplorables 1, empire 0




Saturday, November 12, 2016

Election post-mortem 3

Despite the transparent defects of the Clinton campaign, her bi-coastal minions were astonished at the results. As with Brexit, the media couldn’t understand the populist rage boiling beneath their lofty studio sets. Particularly the partisan mainstream media (MSM) that threw its full weight behind Clinton from the outset of the general campaign. Their strategy was typical of the liberal mindset, which principally cares about identity politics. The media aimed to destroy Trump by exposing his sexism and racism and sense of elite entitlement. The relentless smearing of Trump, the unearthed audio tapes, the timely advent of a phalanx of sexual accusers, and the haunting image of a Great Wall on the Mexican border–all of this “horrified” Starbucks America, the coastal enclaves of educated, profitably employed, and multi-cultural voters. They couldn’t understand how anyone could vote for Trump because they were only focused on multi-culturalism, which is the only message the Democratic Party has left. The top 10 to 20 percent of society, coasting along on the information economy, think it’s all about sexual politics and an outdated bible-based worldview. There’s plenty to that, but there’s a lot more to the authentic rage people feel about having their livelihoods ruined by an oligarchic state that sees them as riff raff–a reserve pool of cheap labor to be patronized every four years and otherwise ignored.

blaming-everybody

Friday, November 11, 2016

Election side note

Considering that corporate right-wing Democrats still blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s 2000 “loss” to George W. Bush (scare quotes due to the fact that newspaper recounts show that Gore actually won the state of Florida), it comes as little surprise to hear them blaming Green Party candidate Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s loss yesterday to Donald Trump.

Do a little arithmetic, however, and that line of argument is quickly exposed as bullshit.


what the hell- Bob Marley





Thursday, November 10, 2016

Election post-mortem 2

Dumbass Democrats. Congratulations, you played yourself!
"Well, who the hell are the Democrats going to blame now? The degree to which you scapegoat the Green Party or the white working-class is precisely the degree to which you are proving you will never learn a damn thing and are completely unable to lead this country.
If it wasn’t such a farce, I’d say it is King Lear redux."

    --Richard Moser

dumbass-democrats

Election post-mortem 1

an excellent column from our favorite playwright, John Steppling.....
Max Bialystock: "How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?!"
    --from Mel Brooks’ The Producers.
Trump was the perfect wrong play, wrong director, wrong cast. And he won. Springtime for Hitler is a hit. But something happened during the last month of this election. I suspect Clinton had it won after the first debate. So, how and why did the DNC clutch defeat from the jaws of victory? The answer is more complex than one can fully evaluate and dissect this soon, but one clear element is that much of that corporate wealth that owns America turned, finally, on Clinton. 

the-big-split

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Election Downer- 11/9

The jokes on you! and Hillary!

the most agonizingly-wretched campaign of all times is over, the ballots are counted, and the new president will be (insert joke here). The only thing that is certain is, we lose.  What a joke.



Monday, November 7, 2016

Election Countdown- 11/7

What is unfolding now is a scourge against the American people and this election marks the end of this illusion of democracy. Former Black Panther and imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal gives an astute analysis on the state of America. Calling it “the ultimate reality show”, he described how this U.S. Presidential election reflects “the fall of empire” and noted that “this is how democracies fall. History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.” Like the fall of the Roman Empire, these two faces on the ballot box remind us of plutocrats drunk with power who have their shaky inept hands close to the nuclear button.
    --Nozomi Hayase
the-political-charade-ends-the-real-battle-begins

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Election Countdown- 11/6.1

NBC News reported that US government hackers had penetrated “Russia’s electric grid, telecommunications networks, and the Kremlin’s command systems” to be ready to “hit back” in case Moscow tries to disrupt the US presidential vote on November 8.  

cia-prepping-for-possible-cyber-strike-against-russia

Election Countdown- 11/6

Finally, Trump will fly to the Moon, where he will hold his largest intergalactic rally ever at the Mare Crisium Teleportation Center at 8:00 p.m. MST.

trumps-marathon-includes-moon?

Saturday, November 5, 2016

Election Countdown- 11/5

The catastrophic failure of critical thought required for a white woman in America to support a rich, violent, misogynistic imbecile like Donald Trump is as mind boggling as imagining how an uneducated, disenfranchised white man falling out of the middle class would support someone who stole every dollar he didn’t inherit.  But this is what it is to be white, and Hillary Clinton’s oft repeated admonishments to the violence encouraged by Trump at his rallies as behavior not reflective of who we are is preposterous bullshit.  Of course, it’s who we are!  We are the most violent, delusional gun culture on the face of the planet and that deplorable sludge on the bottom of the most subterranean pipe of the American experiment is plentiful, thick and doesn’t take much to get stirred up.  We are that.
white

Friday, November 4, 2016

Election Countdown- 11/4

So if you’re content with the ‘lesser evil’ vote Hillary/
It’ll fan the very flames of discontent/
That are fueling fascist sentiments/
And personally I can’t wait to see/
How much more threatening the next Trump will be/
Or fuck it, vote Trump if you’re really feeling courageous/
I’ve always wanted to try living in the dark ages/
Ja kids, it’s great to witness history in the making/
But watching it repeat is even more entertaining


    --the Juice Media

With the election nearing, massive amounts of citizens are finally beginning to understand the dangerous and growing divisions, the serious sickness in our society. The mainstream media makes it appear that the battle between those on the right and left will be fought mainly on issues of identity politics and the wider “culture wars”. This is nonsense, of course. The real fault line lies between those brave and imaginative enough to join hands and build new forms of peaceful, sustainable, non-coercive societies, and those flailing souls stuck believing in the obsolete, failed models of the past, victims of centuries’ worth of indoctrination. There are those who wish to remain slaves to capitalism, to bigotry and warfare, and those yearning to break free.

the-great-divide

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Election Countdown- 11/3

"This is the only deal in town: outright, unvarnished right-wing rule, or simpering, cowardly 'moderate' management of a violent, rapacious system. That’s been the choice on offer since 1976. That’s the choice on offer today. The only difference is that the system has metastasized to a monstrous degree over the years: lacking any genuine opposition, the system has grown more violent, more rapacious........so now the nation swings from being ready to embrace a perceived leftist to the brink of voting in a bellicose rightist as it seeks the genuine change no one will give them. Of course, after the scorched-earth tactics of bipartisan neoliberalism and the inevitable moral degradation and brutalization that comes from year after year after year of vicious aggressive war, the choice for Trump is more nihilistic. It’s as if people believe positive change is no longer possible — so let’s tear everything down and see what happens. (This is the actual, open philosophy of the Breitbart gang, who are now directing Trump’s campaign.)"
    --Chris Floyd
barrel-bomb-the-cataclysmic-close-of-campaign-2016

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

the revolutionary view

“It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.” 
― Jean Baudrillard

Almost no major US medium endorses Trump. The entire Wall Street capitalist class is against him. The Political Establishment of the two-branch one political-party system is against him. Most of the military and secret service elites are against him. Nearly all US’s European ally politicians and media are against him. So, from OUR standpoint there must be something good about him. “OUR” can be understood as revolutionary, radical left, or just those who do not want wars to escalate.    
    --Ron Ridenour
usa-elections-a-revolutionary-view


Monday, October 31, 2016

machine

"Control can sometimes be an illusion. But sometimes you need illusion to gain control." 
--Mr. Robot

Our machines no longer work for the people: it is us who now effectively work for our pointless and deadly machines, literally and figuratively, either in useless industrial jobs or by paying federal taxes for programs which serve no common good. It is the oligarchy and its servile mass media which distract the masses, allowing elites to control financial flows and money laundering operations, weapons smuggling, as well as privatizing potentially liberating inventions such as quantum computing, renewable technologies, cures for cancer and preventable diseases, and genetic advances. To emancipate and unshackle the human condition from needless suffering should be the collective goal of society: instead, we are servants of machines, peons of progress and GDP advances of the economy, and prisoners of the Democratic and Republican parties and their shadowy corporate overlords, the psychic vampires who siphon human potentialities and energies from what could be vibrant, egalitarian, peaceable communities, if they were allowed to prosper freely.

    --William Hawes

two-parties-one-machine

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Rev. Billy

in light of the recent acquittal of the Bundy Boys, in America, if you are a white, christian (Morman) male, you get a pass for your armed occupation of federal property. If you are black, or muslim, or a member of the First Nation, you are a terrorist, and get jack-booted for your non-armed more or less peaceful demonstration against powerful corporate interests.......

"After the power of what we have seen among the Squamish canoeists and kayaktavists and now of the Standing Rock Souix and their many guests, now is a good moment for us to return to these teachers, without anxiety that we’re headed back to the sixties.  Many of the American Indian Movement heroes were murdered by the feds.  But this time if we stand by and don’t defend these first people—if all we do is watch, the way that white settlers stared from their front porches at the walking and dying on the Trail of Tears—then we won’t be able to save ourselves." 
make-your-stand-standing-rock

Thursday, October 27, 2016

We are all Deplorables now


The corporate media is sending a message; a message aimed at a much broader audience than undecided American voters (assuming such creatures really exist). The message is, “get with the fucking program, or get stigmatized as an anti Semite, or a racist, or a Russian spy, or whatever.”
A line is being drawn in the ideological sand......This line cuts through both the Left and the Right … supersedes both Left and Right, making bedfellows of supposed adversaries like Obama, Clinton, Kagan, Wolfowitz, Scowcroft, and their ilk on the Normal team, and a motley crew of Trumpists, Putinists, European populists, Corbynistas, Sandernistas, socialists, anarchists, Wikileakers, anti-Zionists, anti-capitalists, neo-Nazis, Black Lives Matterers, angry Greek pensioners, environmental activists, religious zealots, the Klu Klux Klan, David Graeber, most of the contributors to CounterPunch, and various other “extremist” types, many of whom detest each other, in the Deplorables current starting line-up.
   --C. J. Hopkins

the-pathologization-of-dissent

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Is this a great country or what?

"In treating Social Security like a slush fund, the federal government has borrowed, spent and vowed to pay back the $2.5 trillion or so “surplus” in payroll tax revenue it has siphoned out of Social Security. The money has been spent but the federal government has promised to pay it back."
    --Tim Geithner, President Obama’s first Secretary of the Treasury

All lies are bad, but some lies do more harm to the livelihood of American civilians than others.  Probably, the biggest lie, which most severely hurts millions of Americans, involves the true status of the Social Security system.  The harsh truth is that the government, over a 30-year period, has taken and spent every dollar of the $2.7 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue which was specifically earmarked for paying benefits to the baby boomer generation.  There are no plans to repay the money.  The money was taken without the knowledge, or the permission, of the public.

why-does-the-government-continue-to-lie-about-social-security

watchtower