Ladies and Gentlemen......

......I submit that castration would resolve the controversy

In a televised interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump said that for women who would ignore a theoretical ban on abortion there would have to be "some form of punishment, yeah."

burn them at the stake?

We are all weed

Humans have co-evolved with cannabis for at least 12,000 years....We have changed cannabis and cannabis has changed us. Our ancestors have bred cannabis for hundreds of generations. Today, hemp seeds’ protein profile and essential fatty acid profile perfectly match humans’ nutritional requirements. The cannabinoid profile of hemp has been bred to suit many demands, from medicine to social use. The origins of agriculture and civilization itself are linked to cannabis, and all archaeologists agree that cannabis was grown by our first ancestors to begin farming in Asia.

Then why, one may ask, is it illegal?

Cannabis prohibition has always been about money, power and the centralization of economic and political control. Hemp fuel and fiber are inexpensive to make and naturally decentralized. Small groups of people created the marijuana myth so they could profit from the expensive, capital intensive petrochemical alternatives that dominate our political process and economy today. 

oh


hemp-cannabis-and-marijuana-whats-the-difference 

50 shades of crap

"....the immense popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey is actually great news for men. It’s a signal from the female gender....transmitting an exciting and encouraging message to men everywhere: “We are interested in sex! We’re just not interested in sex with you unless you’re a superhot billionaire."

   --Dave Barry

Like national debt or climate change, our children’s children may be the ones who pay for the sins of this generation - and they will likely ask, “Why are there so many copies of this crap book ‘50 Shades of Grey’?

50-shades

Cuba- that about covers it

......the utter arrogant, idiotic, and imperial absurdity of Barack Obama going to Cuba to lecture the people on democracy, freedom, and how to achieve a good society. 

What, like the United States? Really? The U.S… the mass incarceration capital of the world, home to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, an “armed madhouse” (Greg Palast) of a nation where: the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent; 6 Wal-Mart heirs together possess as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent; politics and policy are in grip of an unelected and interrelated dictatorship of money and empire; an openly plutocratic oligarchy rules in total indifference to public opinion; world-capitalist ecocide finds its leading carbon-addicted financial and propagandistic centers; white median household wealth is 13 times higher than Black median household wealth; more than 16 million children (22 percent of all U.S. children, including 38 percent of Black children) live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level; municipal water systems are rife with poisonous lead; infrastructure is crumbling; pollution is rampant; schools are under-funded and mind-numbing; civic discourse is hopelessly degraded; racial hyper-segregation and the harsh racialized concentration of poverty and joblessness (in Black ghettoes, Native American reservation, and Latino barrios) is predominant; one in three Black men is saddled with the crippling lifelong stigma of a felony record; politicians and not-so “public” policy are bought and sold like any other commodity; the current endless and populace-marginalizing presidential election is shaping as a contest between (in Diana Johnstone’s words) “the two most hated people in the country” (the mad-dog imperial war hawk Hillary Clinton and the quasi-fascist media buffoon and real estate mogul Donald Trump); much if not most of the populace is kept in a woeful and dangerous state of mass ignorance and stupidity about history, current events, and much more; violent death (fed by off-the-global-charts homicide and suicide rates) is rampant; purposefully mass-murderous assault weapons are widely available and ubiquitous; mental illness proliferates; natural resources are regularly stripped and destroyed; livable wage jobs have disappeared en masse; commercialized mass alienation and soulless anomie are endemic; substance abuse and obesity are epidemic; economic insecurity is pervasive; more than half the population is either poor or near-poor; food is systematically poisoned and adulterated in field, factory, corporate laboratory, box-car, tractor trailer, warehouse, restaurant, and grocery store; agriculture is criminally misdirected and absurdly extra-local; water supplies are gravely imperiled; more than half of federal discretionary spending pays for a giant war machine and global empire that accounts for half the world’s military spending; you can’t even watch the last three minutes of a college basketball tournament game without having to be bombarded with ten minutes of mindless mass-consumerist commercials.
   --Paul Street

cuba-reflections-on-life-and-death 

The Myth of the Free World

A recent award-winning film, Even the Rain, shows how knowledgeable, progressive anti-imperialists fail to recognize the people they interact with as human. It can happen to any of us. It is about the limits of knowledge, and how discovering humanness, in a dehumanizing world, comes at a cost.

the-myth-of-the-free-world 
even the rain 

In Defense of Disruption

“There must be a force that interrupts [society’s] functioning at some key point.”
   --Martin Luther King, Jr.

disruption 

 

Ultraviolence

The people in Brussels — like the people in Paris, and like the far greater multitude of victims in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, etc — are, yes, “reaping the whirlwind” of Western foreign policy. The criminals who carried out the most recent attacks have adopted the mindset of our Western elites, who teach the world, day after day, that the destruction of innocent lives is an acceptable price to pay in order to achieve your objectives. You can and must do “whatever it takes” — even if whatever it takes is, say, the death of half a million innocent children. Or a war of aggression that leaves a million innocent people dead. Or drone-bombing a wedding party. Or sending missiles into a hospital. Or sitting in the Oval Office — your Peace Prize gleaming on the mantelpiece — while you tick off the names of victims on your weekly “Kill List.”
   -- Chris Floyd
zero-sum 

Chicago- in the street

"Trump seems to confuse basic human decency with political correctness. Protesters aren’t getting roughed up? Too politically correct! Won’t suckerpunch a guy who flips you the bird? Too politically correct! Well, as Trump believers discovered in Chicago, political correctness runs both ways. Screw the lid off that pandora’s jar and what comes blowing back is a howling mob of thugs, cholos, anarchists, communists, socialists, Berninators, drug freaks, hijabs, shemaghs, beards, facial tattoos, dreadlocks—the stuff of wingnut night terrors."
   --Matt P. Jager 
trump-gone-bad

the humorist

"if you're a good humorist, the stuff that you do is not funny. Because I think that great satire, and great art that is under the umbrella of satire, you have the responsibility to avoid making it just about finding the punchline. Because mirth cripples rage. And when you're trying to inspire people to recognize what's wrong with the government and do something about it.....to step out into the street and raise your first in the air, you can't give people.....the relief of the laugh."
   --Mr. Fish 

 

the candidate it deserves

But the reality of the matter is that many Sanders supporters will not only abstain, they will actually vote for Trump if Hillary wins the nomination. For some, it would be a vote to punish the DNC for its anti-Democratic coronation of Clinton (via the superdelegates). For others, it’d be a nihilistic act: an attempt to burn down the establishment, or to give America “the candidate it deserves.”   
--Musa al-Gharbi


clinton-unelectable

the Narcissist

“He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics....otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.” 
   --clinical psychologist George Simon

mental health 

the Brown Shirts

 “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
    ― Martin Luther King Jr.

"From the beginning, Hitler wielded the support of a brutal, thuggish armed paramilitary wing, the notorious Sturmabteilung (SA), the Storm Detachment (or storm troopers). Also known as the Brown Shirts, the SA often used violence against its opponents in the streets of Germany’s cities, and its sheer presence intimidated Germans across the political spectrum......Would it be possible for Donald Trump or some future Trump-like figure to build an armed following of his own? Frighteningly enough, the answer is certainly: yes. And it might not even be that hard."

Trump SA

made in the USA

Our monster

Gary Lindorff

The electrodes were pulled,
The thing woke, shaking off its death-trance,
Got up, looked around.
We had a monster.

It is ours.

We created it
Out of provincialism,
Greed
And our fear of everything.

It swam up out of the depths of our
Not taking ourselves seriously,
Evolved out of our choosing war every time.
It grew fat in the nursery of our cultivated indifference,
Descended when we lost our appetite for principles.
It started by devouring our dreams.
It licked its shark teeth
When we let the angry neighbor convert us.
When we let the self-righteous
Do all the praying,
Its shadow crossed the land.
When we gave up on each other,
When we gave up on the land,
That was when we felt its breath on our necks.
When we stopped voting our conscience
And invested all of our naiveté in a virtual future,
That was when we summoned it
To lurch forward.
And when we abandoned the hope of the moment,
That was when it knew it had a home!
You know, that old place
That we used to call home?
Where the door now stands
Wide open to the wind and rain,
Where the windows rattle
When the fracking earthquakes shake the land?
Where the paint peels
On the empty farm stand?
Our monster sits on the leaning porch
Just like a human
Waiting for the world to end,
Except smiling
Like a damn politician.

FUTBAWL!

ok, lets take a break from all the doom and gloom (Trump) and talk about the glorious sport of FootBall!............................wait, what? football is eventually going to wither away and die? BBAWWWLLLL

CTE evidence 

there will be blood

what a riot

Donald Trump warned on Wednesday that his supporters could riot at the Republican convention in Cleveland if he is not “automatically” made the party’s nominee if he arrives with the most votes but fails to secure a majority of convention delegates.

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/16/donald-trump-warns-riots-convention-denied-nomination/ 

Cable News Covers Everyone’s Speech but Sanders

Fox News, CNN and MSNBC all declined to carry Sanders’ speech, instead offering punditry about the evening, with the chyrons promising, “AWAITING TRUMP” and “STANDING BY FOR TRUMP.”

Sanders’ major sin appears to have been choosing to discuss policy rather than dishing out the typical hoorah platitudes. His hour-long speech which, according to Talking Points Memo, wasn’t carried even in part, focused on issues like campaign finance reform and the barriers to mass political change.

trumped 

back to the '50's

“Anarchist extremists believe that society should have no government, laws, or police, and they are loosely organized, with no central leadership. Violent anarchist extremists usually target symbols of capitalism they believe to be the cause of all problems in society — such as large corporations, government organizations, and police agencies.”
   --The FBI- Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools, guidelines 

are you a puppet?

Jeffrey Lewis

thanks to R. Beatty

enemy- earth

.....the Defense Department is widely regarded as one of the nation's leading polluters, producing vast amounts of chemicals from ordnance that leach into groundwater, as well as air pollution from military vehicles. The EPA lists more than 130 Superfund sites on military bases.

"Congress would never consider letting the nation's biggest corporate polluter off the hook. Why, then, would Congress grant immunity to America's, and the world's, largest polluter?" 

   --Heather Taylor, deputy legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council

pentagon's-war-on-the-earth 

mr. fish

do they have uniforms yet?

"Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!"

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016

Neil

the good ol' days

“I love the old days — you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
   --Donald Trump

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/12/standing-free-speech-not-threat-free-speech

Break Free from Fossil Fuels

 "Crude oil is already history and has no future," 
   --Nnimmo Bassey

...."pursuant to the public trust doctrine governments are the trustees of the vital natural resources on which human well-being depends; they have a “fiduciary duty” to manage them for the benefit of all present and future generations. Governments have no right to authorize the destruction of those resources today to the detriment of future generations and constitutional rights to life, liberty and property. These legal rights will help provide the frame for the public messaging and legal strategy of climate-protecting civil disobedience....." 

   --Jeremy Brecher

climate insurgents 

ourchildrenstrust.org 

breakfree 

the Media hates Bernie

As usual in American politics, money can explain a lot.....as Sanders has closed the gap on Clinton, the press has gone from ignoring to distorting.  With billions of dollars on the line, the last thing the mainstream media (MSM) wants is a revolution.

   --John Atcheson

MainScreamMedia

John Oliver on Donald Drumpf

January 20, 2017....the inauguration of President Drumpf....you will remember that date because time travelers from the future will come back to try and stop the whole thing from happening....

Bern

Sanders still presents the best possible hope for America. It is not much, but it is not delusional to carefully invest in that hope by embracing Sanders’ strategy within a seemingly rigged Democratic party. However, if Clinton prevails it is clear that the energy Sanders’ candidacy has created must be harnessed towards either a progressive take over of the Democratic party and/or the fortification of alternatives to the corrupt two party system.

   --Yoav Litvin

bern 

planet waves

"The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
   --George Carlin

democracy

"If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten."
   --George Carlin

Postmodern Science

“The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know,”  
   --Jonah Lehrer


"Science as it is practiced today is clearly not sufficient to guide humanity to a socio-ecology that is dynamic and harmonious – one that can mimic a complex ecosystem capable of thriving for hundreds of thousands of years, like a forest or a coral reef – or even the tens of thousands of years that some indigenous peoples managed without any reliance at all upon the scientific method.
On the contrary, scientistic hubris could just as well lead to our extinction. The scientific method gave humans unprecedented power over matter – and we used it to make possible the relentlessly efficient machinery that is already facilitating rapid climate change and the earth’s sixth great extinction of species."
   --Christy Rogers 

is-the-world-living-or-dead 

Size Matters!

the trusted New York Times reliably ponders the most important topics of U.S. and global polices.

big Donald

sad Donald 

back to Iraq

At some point during this film from deep inside Iraq’s many wars, one asks oneself, shattered: “Do I need to watch this?” Jihadi executioners clear a pavement opposite a marketplace and shoot a suspected informer while he kneels, hooded, then kick the body casually. Next, the Islamist fighters are hanging alleged looters from a rafter by their bound wrists so that their quarry dangles there – “like piñatas”, says the commentary – before bullets rip through them. And there is worse to come, in a different way, from the less fervent but more arrogant cruelty of American soldiers.

only the dead

Anger Management Plan- Texas style

The state of Texas passed a campus carry law that is set to take effect on August 1, 2016. Already, professors at the University of Houston were told that once the new law is effective, they might want to “be careful discussing sensitive topics,” “drop certain topics from your curriculum,” “’Not go there’ if you sense anger,” “limit students access off hours,” “go to appointment-only office hours,” and “only meet ‘that student’ in controlled circumstances.”
   --Laura Finley

A dean at the University of Texas-Austin announced last week that he would be leaving the school, citing concerns regarding state campus carry legislation that goes into effect Aug. 1. The law will allow handgun owners (Students!) to carry concealed firearms on public college campuses including inside buildings.

Steiner will take over as dean of University of Pennsylvania School of Design on July 1. "I would have never applied for another job if not for campus carry," he said in an interview. "I felt that I was going to be responsible for managing a law I didn't believe in."

Texass 

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale

Public tracking techniques such as facial recognition [and tracking billboards] are "largely unregulated"

In Germany, the Astra beer brand recently created an automated billboard that noted when women walked past. The billboard approximated the women’s age, then played one of several prerecorded ads to match.

Retailers can use facial recognition systems to see how long people of a particular race or gender remain in the shop, and adjust displays and the store layout to try to enhance sales.

 your name here