Looking Marvelous

Somewhere in Iowa

Best Campaign Video Ever?

Back to Libya

"Just as there was no al Qaeda or ISIS to attack in Iraq until the U.S. bombed its government, there was no ISIS in Libya until NATO bombed it. Now the U.S. is about to seize on the effects of its own bombing campaign in Libya to justify an entirely new bombing campaign in that same country."
--Glenn Greenwald 

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/27/the-u-s-intervention-in-libya-was-such-a-smashing-success-that-a-sequel-is-coming/

RIP, LaVoy Finicum

Now, sweet prince, take your ease in the wide and fenceless pastures of Heaven. Be assured that we shall not — we cannot — we dare not rest until all the land stolen by murder and plunder from the native Americans is safely in the hands of monied white men packing heat and sporting camo. We shall overcome!

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/27/grazing-in-heaven-a-martyr-for-the-barons-rebellion/print/ 

Military Speak

Eisenhower is rolling in his grave.......

The Defense Department will invest $12 billion to $15 billion from its fiscal year 2017 budget slotted for developing a Third Offset Strategy on several relatively small bets, hoping to produce game-changing technology, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

“This is a learning space. Some of the investments we make won’t to pay off. But we are going to place multiple small bets on places where we think we can make a difference, where we think the leverage of the technology exists to actually move the enterprise forward and look at the potential for a third offset. The question we’re trying to pose now is, 'Do the technologies that are being developed in the commercial sector principally provide the kind of force multipliers that we got when we combined tactical nuclear weapons [in the first offset] or precision and stealth [in the second offset]?' And if the answer is yes, then we can change the way that we fight in this battlespace”

http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/policy-budget/budget/2016/01/23/terminator-conundrum-pentagon-weighs-ethics-pairing-deadly-force-ai/79205722/ 

exceptionalist

"One of the bedrock features of our exceptionalist consciousness is a belief in the perfection of our republic. From our Providentially guided revolution emerged a set of institutions that were exquisite in their workings by definition. They were eternal, and hence in no need of further change. De Tocqueville noted this about us in the 1830s: We had our revolution and want no more of it. All that is given us is and will remain as it should be.
Along with exceptionalist consciousness we find our universalism—another pair of cousins. Not only are we God’s chosen, but the rest of the world is fated to follow us. Americans are, in both of these ways, history’s highest achievements."
   ----Patrick L. Smith


http://www.salon.com/2016/01/19/bernie_sanders_and_david_brooks_both_wrong_this_year_of_fox_news_and_donald_trump_fueled_rage_cant_be_fixed_by_any_candidate/

Football is so over

"You might need to drive through the desert in a car by yourself in a landscape that looks as empty as you feel. I did that last week. Somewhere west of Phoenix an F-16 out of Luke Air Force base ripped through the sky over me. He was flying low, so low I thought he was five hundred feet off the ground at most, and clearly laughing his ass off watching every car on I-10 shudder like terrified beetles at the sound of his engine. I got mad at him for a second for being in a flying death car when I couldn't, and for scaring the shit out of me while I was having a pleasantly numb drive through the desert, and then I got mad because I was mad."

   --Spencer Hall

http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/2016/1/18/10785916/blatant-homerism-florida-2015-2016 

Gandhi

Gandhi was ahead of his time. Although he might not have used today’s terms, ideas pertaining to environmentalism, agroecology, sustainable living, fair trade, local self-sufficiency, food sovereignty and so on were all present in his writings. He was committed to inflicting minimal damage on the environment and was concerned that humans should use only those resources they require and not amass wealth beyond their requirements. People have the right to attain certain comforts but a perceived right to unbridled luxuries would result in damaging the environment and impinge on the species that we share the planet with. His own lifestyle was a highly sustainable one, focusing on simplicity, austerity and need rather than want.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/04/ecological-meltdown-and-nuclear-conflict-the-relevance-of-gandhi-in-the-modern-world/print/ 

dial-a-death

by ensuring greater precision in bombing “enemy” targets, reducing the yield of a nuclear blast (a “dial-a-yield” feature), and making a nuclear attack more “thinkable,” the B61 Model 12 is actually a more "humanitarian" and credible weapon than older, bigger versions. 

“minimizing civilian casualties if deterrence fails is both a more credible and a more ethical approach.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/18/modernizing-the-opportunities-for-nuclear-war/print/

Cosmik debris

But I said look here brother
Who you jiving with that cosmik debris?
Now who you jiving with that cosmik debris?
Look here brother, don't waste your time on me

Sean Penn, secret agent man

"I take no pride in keeping secrets that may be perceived as protecting criminals, nor do I have any gloating arrogance at posing for selfies with unknowing security men. But I’m in my rhythm. Everything I say to everyone must be true. As true as it is compartmentalized."
   ---Sean Penn 

https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/01/10/sean-penn-intelligence-dangle/

Fox News too dumb for America?

....back in 1985 Neil Postman warned us that television was going to destroy us in his brilliant book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”  Postman warned that the public was addicted to amusement and that the distraction would lead to ever-increasing totalitarian control of the population. He argued that, if the public relied on television for its news, we were doomed, since the medium of television could only offer news as entertainment and commodity.

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/05/they_created_our_bundytrump_hellscape_fox_news_angry_white_audience_will_destroy_us_yet/ 

the West- some perspective

Out in the high desert of Nevada’s basin and range country, down roads with names like the Extraterrestrial Highway that run off into the sky, and where the hardscrabble rancher and the miner still call the shots, a full-scale insurrection was born.

1995
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/05/showdown-in-the-malheur-marshes-the-origins-of-the-armed-occupation-in-burns-oregon/print/

2016
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/08/rancher-rebels-the-rise-of-the-wise-use-movement/print/

Ed Hammell

monkey

"Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn't mean the circus has left town"
   ---George Carlin

the Age of Stupid

“To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death”
  --Chris Hedges

sprawl

wacky Arcade Fire.....

big Pot

...the rise of corporate marijuana is better illustrated by the tech millionaire Jamen Shively, who announced plans in 2013 to create a chain of pot shops modeled on Starbucks that would “mint more millionaires than Microsoft” — acknowledging at one point, “We are Big Marijuana.”

Willie Nelson......has been a vocal advocate of marijuana legalization for more than half a century, but he has watched the last few years unfold with a combination of joy and dread. Even as the country has softened its stance toward marijuana, a legion of large corporations has gathered to dominate the legal market. Nelson figures he has at least one good fight left. In what may be his last political act, he is declaring war on Big Pot.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/willie-nelson-crusade-stop-big-pot.html 

thanks to R. Beatty for all things pot or weed related

1966

"There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past"
   ---George Carlin