War $$$

“we are prepared to fight and win” [Russia has] “chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term existential threat.....This year’s budget request reflects our solemn commitment to the security of our allies and partners.”
   --General Philip Breedlove, commander of the US European Command

So up goes US military expenditure yet again, and the Pentagon’s generals and the Wall Street investors and the weapons manufacturers all over the United States rub their hands in delight. These snaky schemers are what the great President Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex” of seemingly patriotic Americans who, in the final essence, are America’s own worst enemy.   
   --Brian Cloughley

is-washington-preparing-for-war-against-russia? 

Let it Bern

So does [Sanders], after spending months hammering home the reality that Clinton is the bought-and-paid candidate of the the banks, the arms industry, the oil industry and the medical-industrial complex, and after enduring endless lies about his own record spouted by Clinton and her surrogates, go ahead and endorse her as the party’s standard bearer for the general election? Does he walk away and return quietly to Vermont? Or does he instead continue to fight for his “political revolution” by another route?
the-push-to-make-sanders-the-green-partys-candidate

God's Red Pencil

".....for the last seventy years all chemical and biological technologies, from genetic engineering to pesticides, have been built on a myth of precision and specificity. They have all been adopted under the pretense that they would function without side effects or unexpected complications. Yet the extraordinary disasters and repercussions of DDT, leaded paint, agent orange, atrazine, C8, asbestos, chlordane, PCBs, and so on, when all is said and done, have been stories of the steady unraveling of a founding myth of precision and specificity.

Nevertheless, with the help of industry propagandists, their friends in the media, even the United Nations, we are once again being preached the gospel of precision. But no matter how you look at it, precision is a fable and should be treated as such."

   --Jonathan Latham

Precision 

how many medals you got?

"....James P. Stevenson, has just written an essay analyzing yet another, little examined set of visual aids propping up the surrealism of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC).  His subject is the proliferation of glittering “been there, done that” decorations now adorning the chests of our senior military officers." warisboring.com
   --Chuck Spinney 

pentagon-gong-show

in Palestine

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned … what is required, despite pessimism of the intellect, is optimism of the will.”
   -- Antonio Gramsci

.....nearly every Palestinian expresses a sure confidence in their eventual success, even if the time frame may be vague or long-delayed.  It is hard to find anyone here who accepts that the Zionist project is permanent, at least in its present form —  or that the liberation struggle will ultimately fail.

in-palestine 

threescore and ten

threescore years and ten the age of seventy as one's allotted span, with biblical allusion to Psalm 90:

You have set our iniquities before you,
    our secret sins in the light of your presence.
All our days pass away under your wrath;
    we finish our years with a moan.
Our days may come to seventy years,
    or eighty, if our strength endures; 
yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,
    for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

no-retirement-age-for-rebellion 

Prince

thanks to R. Beatty for the clip. Prince solo at 3:28

resistance is futile

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity....we repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure....

 "hey Bernie!" How are those numbers? Ha! Didn't do so well in your old Brooklyn neighborhood did you? Wonder why that is?"
   -- Hill


At least 126,000 voters in Brooklyn, New York, were purged from voter rolls. The purge seems to be a symptom of the state’s “closed primary” system, which forces voters to affiliate with a political party to vote. Yet, the disenfranchisement of so many voters in Brooklyn and in other parts of the state ahead of the primary on April 19 has most Democrats excusing what should be considered voter suppression.
   --Common Dreams, Copyright FDL Media Group ©, All Rights Reserved

Timed out and Turned off

I must regretfully concur

I only write ominous op-ed pieces like this in the spirit of hoping I’m an inaccurate prophet. But I’m unable to avoid the difficult conclusion that nuclear war, absent an immediate, fundamental, worldwide change in attitude, is an inevitable part of our future. It could be weeks, months, or years away. But it is coming.
   --Winslow Myers 

inevitability-nuclear-war

globalzero.org 

Technocracy- The Security-Digital Complex

The interface [between public agencies and the private sector] is in fact more like a revolving door: Facebook’s head of security joined the NSA in 2010; Regina Dugan, former director of DARPA, is currently a vice-president at Google; and Mark Penn, a former State Department adviser to Hillary Clinton is now responsible for strategy at Microsoft. Condoleezza Rice is on the Dropbox board; she was also provost of Stanford University, the institution with the closest links to Silicon Valley (Google and Cisco were created there), before she became George W Bush’s secretary of state. Rice was the main witness at the marriage between the (public) defence sector and the (private) technology one. This alliance was consecrated in March by the defence secretary, who was “so grateful” to Eric Schmidt for agreeing to head the Pentagon’s new Defence Innovation Advisory Board: being chairman of Google, he was “the perfect chairman for this.” The digital giants, which have the largest stock market capitalisations in the world, spend ever-growing sums on lobbying the US government and the EU.

silicon army

Kid Creole

how about some rage?

Burn Baby Burn

It has come to my attention that Cleveland probably needs a new convention center anyway, so if the old one- the Quicken Loans Arena- should somehow catch on fire, say during the Republican National Convention, then its all good.

Loser Nation

I can get behind that. A positive vibe for a loser America. 

 “smoking marijuana might make you a loser”
   --Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton
latimes-marijuana 

“Our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use. We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial effects of marijuana.”
   --National Institute of Drug Abuse spokesperson
tracking-the-pot-wars 

Krugman attacks!

.....when someone starts seriously and effectively challenging core assumptions and values of our political economic system, the progressive veneer quickly vanishes. This is demonstrated in Paul Krugman’s verbal attack on the Bernie Sanders campaign in his “Sanders Over the Edge” editorial.
 
Krugman does not hold back. Bernie supporters and Bernie himself are described by Krugman as intolerant, cultish, shallow, vague, without substance, lacking character and values, dishonest, short on ethics, really bad, petulant and self-righteous. Wow.
   --Rick Sterling

SNARL 

Planet X from 27,000,000 BC

Planet X is coming and the aliens that live on it are getting really hungry after 27 million fucking years....they're going to need a sizable snack.

According to Daniel Whitmire and John Matese, who, in 1985, co-wrote a featured article for Time magazine titled “Did Comets Kill the Dinosaurs? A Bold New Theory About Mass Extinctions,” have revisited their mass extinction theories and formed a link with the search for Planet Nine.

By their reckoning, Earth is subject to major extinction events every 27 million years caused by a barrage of comets flung at Earth by the gravitational instabilities triggered by the eccentric orbit of a major planetary body like Planet Nine. As if a planetary bombardment wasn’t enough, more dislodged comets would disintegrate close to the sun in the inner solar system, creating clouds of debris that dim the sunlight, causing a global cooling event that speeds up the demise of life on Earth.

planet-x 

get out of MS

Consider, the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, signed Tuesday by Mississippi Republican Gov. Phil Bryant.

Remember, Mississippi's motto is "Virtute Et Armis"- by valor and arms. Doesn't this bring clarity to the political situation in the state? "We are 'brave' and if you mess with our 'values', we will shoot you; we may shoot you anyway."

the devil in mississippi

Land Grab

A new investigation by the non-partisan watchdog Center for Western Priorities has uncovered wide-ranging ties between....extremist groups and Western legislators involved in a coordinated effort to take our national lands from the American people. At the center of the land grab is Ken Ivory, a Utah state representative and president of the American Lands Council. Ivory has been accused of fraud in three states for allegedly scamming local governments into funding the ALC using taxpayer money.
westernpriorities

The Sheep Look Up

 Cool! Check out the Tampa Bay area on the interactive map. Why is there a red FBI circle over Dunedin?

Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with “augmented reality” software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes.
spies-in-the-skies

Panama my Mind!

On Wednesday, [WikiLeaks] the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), "which targets Russia and [the] former USSR." The "Putin attack" was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government's funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.
wikileaks-usaid-putin-attack 

"How ironic—no, how perverse—that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour....That 'giant sucking sound' you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the U.S.A."
   --Peter A. Cotorceanu
beyond-panama-delawarepapers

It is interesting but not at all mysterious that there are no Americans named in the Mossack Fonseca documents. The reason is simple. U.S. law so clearly favors the rich that they have no need to go offshore to form shell corporations. They can do so legally in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada. Rich people everywhere know it too. No need to go to Panama or Switzerland. The U.S. is now the best tax haven on the planet. Hopefully the corporate media will decide to cover that story too.
   --Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report
panama_papers_problem 

civic warfare

Since anarchism holds the state to be undesirable or harmful, where are the voters to go once the reality of November 2016 passes, when the neoliberal status quo continues marching ahead? The answer is found in the streets as civic warfare spreads throughout America. Detroit, Chicago harbingers of more to come. Killings, disrupted public services, police/citizen confrontations, mass shootings, arbitrary shootings and military-armed police can only add up to one conclusion. Civic warfare. It’s already started.

   --Robert Hunziker 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/01/neoliberal-asphyxiation/print/

a simple thing

are we going to have to drag the rich into the street and set them on fire to get this very simple thing accomplished?

...a true financial transactions tax [a sales tax on financial securities purchases], that is still quite reasonable at tax rates of 0.25% to 2.5% can pay for all of a Single Payer health care program in the US and still have hundreds of billions left over...

how-a-financial-tax-will-pay-for-national-health-care 

iPhone slimed

“But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.”
― Edward L. Bernays

 

Requiem for the American Dream

“There’s nothing surprising about this. That’s what happens when you put power in the hands of a narrow sector.”
   --Noam Chomsky 

and a GZ steel defensive walking cane salute to R. Beatty....

 

Ralph Nader calls it....

 ....I think so

Donald J. Trump is done. He will not be the Republican Party’s nominee for President. He will not receive the requisite number of 1237 delegate votes to secure a majority going into the Republican Convention in July.
trumped 

Methane

Leading climate scientists are not willing to honestly expose their greatest fears, as discovered by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! whilst at COP21 in Paris this past December, interviewing one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Kevin Anderson (University of Manchester) of Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research who said: “So far we simply have not been prepared to accept the revolutionary implications of our own findings, and even when we do we are reluctant to voice such thoughts openly… many are ultimately choosing to censor their own research.”

 CH4

the anarchy of Capital

There is every reason to think that electoral “politics” in the United States (and most places) is bullshit. For people who yearn for a very different world to get involved in this “process”–which is almost entirely scripted by people who absolutely do not yearn for a very different world–is a big waste of energy and commitment.

....what is advanced as “politics” in mainstream, and even much of the “fringe,” of the United States is not really politics. Instead it is the calculation of interests under the imperatives faced by the capitalist/global imperialist ruling class of the United States.....what people seem to miss, and that needs to be driven home once again, is that there is a ruling class, and this class operates according to certain imperatives. Simply put, and on one level it is just this simple, in the United States and for pretty much the whole world, capital decides.....the basic social decisions in a capitalist society are made by what is necessary for this process to continue to advance; again, to simplify, the accumulation of profit decides; This is the case unless there is some truly countervailing force. And the point is that pretty much nothing....within the acceptable bounds of “politics” comes to anything like a countervailing force.

bring-on-the-crackup 

War, Inc.

the free market is working......

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter 5-year-old civil war.

Army vs. CIA