Saturday, December 30, 2017

Baby Boomers are coming to get you!

There’s even now a tendency in some corners of what passes for a left to turn to generational shaming and hate.  The real problem, I have been told in all seriousness, is Baby Boomers – that is, all U.S.-Americans born between 1946 and 1964.  This “Generation of Sociopaths” (the openly insane title of a book, penned by a Millennial venture capitalist, that purveys contempt for all those loathsome creatures who had the audacity to be delivered from their mother’s wombs in post-World War II America) is accused of looting the commons, perverting democracy, generating savage inequality, ruining the environment and more, all in service to it endless pursuit of narcissistic self-glorification. (My sincere apologies.  I was born in 1958).
     -- Paul Street

generational-divide-and-rule


Friday, December 29, 2017

unraveling

The externalities of a pillaged, ravaged planet, billions in poverty, and diminished resource base are not taken into account by mainstream economics. If rare earth minerals and metals were properly accounted for, a car would likely cost six figures, and a computer five figures. This would be an unobtainable and untenable situation for the average middle-class American, as only the rich could afford such luxuries, and thus, the majoritarian tyranny of our narcissistic and ahistorical culture continues.
    -- William Hawes

the-great-unraveling-decoding-modernity

Monday, December 25, 2017

word- merry christmas

Losing the capacity to express oneself may be a small price to pay for the societal benefits obtained by preventing wholesale use of dangerous words. But it does mean that the vocabulary you have acquired over a lifetime will soon be obsolete. You will be denied the use of many of your most cherished descriptors. Whole phrases may eventually be banned. It might be wise, therefore, to consider using your most powerful, poignant, defiant, descriptive or critical words very soon, while you still can. Otherwise those words could end up like stranded assets, left in the mind to rot.
    -- Paul Dean

at-a-loss-for-words

Sunday, December 24, 2017

christian nation

The biggest problem with the Republican tax plan has nothing to do with taxes.


The most insidious part of the GOP tax bill is a provision pushed for by the religious right for the past 25 years. Contained in this small section of the bill is a provision that will set the country on the road to Theocracy.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

ring of fire

The Thomas fire has now swept through territory once lightly populated with Chumash Indians who regularly burned their food-gathering lands. As Kat Anderson has shown in Tending the WildNative American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, 2006, local Indians managed their wild food resources by burning the land to encourage their growth and to create clearings in which they could better hunt game. While the coastal Chumash relied heavily on sea food, inland groups harvested acorns as their staple supplemented with chia seeds, the fruits of the holly leafed cherry and small game. The untouched wilderness eulogized by John Muir was in fact a carefully managed environment, with swathes of chaparral charred in controlled burns where the plants had long co-evolved with regenerative lightning-sparked conflagrations.
    -- John Davis
urbanwildland/ring-of-fire

Friday, December 22, 2017

by the numbers

3.  Mandates automatic Medicare cuts of at least $25 billion in 2018 and $400 billion over 10 yearsIn effect, seniors will pay for tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy as automatic spending cuts are triggered because the tax cuts add $1.5 trillion to the national debt. Automatic cuts altogether will total $136 billion in 2018 and include reductions in agriculture subsidies, student loans, military retirement and more. [Congressional Budget Office (CBO)]

Thursday, December 21, 2017

the water will come

New York City is a sea level rise hot spot, with sea levels rising there 50% faster than the global average, due to subsidence of the ground and ocean current dynamics. With 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion currently standing in flood zones, it is good that The Big Apple is one of the most proactive cities in the world when it comes to sea level rise adaptation. In response to the $19 billion in flood damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York City is scheduled to break ground in 2019 on a $750 million, ten-foot high flood wall along the east side of Manhattan, part of a $3 billion barrier system informally called the “Big U”, designed to protect lower Manhattan from storm surges.
water-will-come-sea-level-rise

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

get shopping!

...as Luther said, the Devil (guilt) is lord of this world….secular ‘rationalism’ and liberal Protestantism deny the existence of the Devil (guilt). Their denial makes no difference to the economy, which remains driven by the sense of guilt; or rather, it makes this difference, that the economy is more uncontrollably driven by the sense of guilt because the problem of guilt is repressed by denial into the unconscious.
     -- Norman O. Brown

That is why so many people will be having a special guest for Christmas.  Possessed by their possessions, while disbelieving in Luther’s Satan, the American people are in the process of bringing Satan home for the holidays.  Unseen but present, he will have a place of honor at Christmas dinner tables throughout the land.  But don’t worry, he has a parsimonious appetite and just nibbles.  My sources tell me that he likes turkey and ham, but isn’t too keen on vegetarian fare, and forget vegan.  Yet I am told he has a ravenous appetite for presents, so get shopping.  I hope my sources are reliable, but I never disclose them.  You can always get him an Amazon gift card. 
         -- Edward Curtin

Joe Bageant

Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days, programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the "cheap oil fiesta" that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a time to show some guts, it's now. Not by protesting ­which has become a security state supervised liberal pussy sport -- but by giving up the material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those leftie and alternative books from Amazon -- sitting on our asses reading and drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of inaction and consumerism. It's the only real act of protest possible by the prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you'll be just one iPodless, and car-less little guy throwing a single stone at the United States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you're still capable of any kind of life after the stellazine mind conditioning we've all been administered for past 40 years, I've got folding cash that says you will own your life in a way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on Jabba's corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he's alive and yank the feeding tube?

-- Joe Bageant, 2008

nine-billion-little-feet

Monday, December 18, 2017

crawl under a rock

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
— Mahatma Gandi, 1869-1948

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

-- Felicity Arbuthnot

the-instinct-to-attack

make it stop

After November 8, 2016, America became a racist, xenophobic, hate-the-poor cesspool. No longer did we have a President who looked and acted cool, so cool that he even smoked cigarettes; we ended up with an orange orangutan who needs to see his name plastered on every tall building, an orange orangutan with a tiny penis!!!  I know this because an artist did a hilarious sculpture mocking Trump!  (Haters, it’ OK to body-shame if the target is Trump – HE IS RACIST AND SEXIST AND THIS IS WAR.)
    -- Brian Foley
how-to-stop-trump

Saturday, December 16, 2017

No typo

...a 2015 report authored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School determined that the median household net worth in the Greater Boston region is $247,500 for whites, $8 for US blacks, $12,000 for Caribbean blacks, $3,020 for Puerto Ricans and $0 for Dominicans.

that-was-no-typo

Thursday, December 14, 2017

good luck with that

This is a wake-up call for Democrats. Democrats, I told Mr. Jones this, and I love Doug, they’ve taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time. It’s time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor. They’ve always had our votes and they have abused our votes .. This is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.
-- Charles Barkley, former NBA player and son of Alabama 

wake-up-call-democrats-alabama

does this sound familiar?

In a presentation critics characterized as remarkably similar to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's case for the Iraq War, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stood before a missile fragment that she claimed bears Iran's "fingerprints" and asserted that the Iranian regime poses "a threat to the peace and security of the entire world."

"Make no mistake: What Nikki Haley is doing right now is laying the groundwork for a U.S.-Iran war on behalf of Saudi Arabia," 
-- Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.

"Wonder when Iran holds its press conference to highlight all the American and British munitions the Saudis have used on hospitals, the Sanaa airport, etc."
-- Spencer Ackerman

nikki-haley-laying-groundwork-war-iran

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

karma

The ability of humankind to control events has never been more tenuous. Like it or not, we have ceded much of that control to the realm of those non-human actors that we have long ignored or, more recently, actively aggravated: now, we are collectively suffering real-life home invasions by the dark powers that we had thought safely relegated to the past, buried deep in our subconscious, or rendered impotent by our technological prowess. Is it possible that the overt expression of our atavistic aggressions is stirred by new realizations of our impotence? 

As the kids say, karma is a bitch: but it is also, more simply, less sexistly, a mirror. I was caught up in some of its pay-back earlier in the week, my temerity (surely another name for hubris) at having built a home for myself and my family in the Wildland Urban Interface was cosmically answered by the ravages of Southern California's Thomas fire.
-- John Davis
the-epic-of-our-awakening

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Welcome to Kandahar

Hell is everything that Christian mythology paints it as. Hell is pain, death, suffering, bleakness, and fire. But it isn’t some mystical dimension where rapists and Hitler are suffering for eternity. Hell is right here on earth, war is hell; it’s not made to punish evil people, it’s made by evil people and it’s the innocent who suffer. It’s children, parents, brothers, sisters, people just trying to live their lives, all being tortured and killed, brutalized and raped. The innocent are the ones left weeping while the evil ones reap rewards. War is indeed hell in ways that no one can understand unless they’ve seen it. I have not been to hell, but I could see it from where I stood.

-- Adam Denker

an-afghan-year-my-road-from-soldier-to-socialism

Sunday, December 10, 2017

american fable

The fable must be accepted. We are spreading freedom and equality. Simple as that. End of story. Say that the United States is the greatest counter-revolutionary force in the world, and be branded a traitor–by the counter-revolutionaries. Wherever democratic freedom rears its ugly head, you can be sure that U.S. media flacks, as well as special forces, drones, proxy terrorists, and battalions are on hand to crush what they claim to defend.
we-the-sheeple

Saturday, December 9, 2017

the coming liberal hangover

Look, I know what you’re probably thinking, but it isn’t like liberals don’t actually care about fundamental liberal values like freedom of the press and speech and all that. It’s just that they desperately need the Democrats to take back the House and the Senate next year, so they can get on with impeaching Trump, and if they have to stand by while the corporations suppress a little leftist dissent, or, you know, transform the entire Internet into a massive, mind-numbing echo chamber of neo-McCarthyite corporate conformity … well, sacrifices have to be made.

This can’t go on forever, after all. This level of full-blown mass hysteria can only be sustained for so long. It’s all fine and good to be able to whip people up into a frenzied mob, but at some point you need to have an endgame. The neoliberal ruling classes know this. Their endgame is actually fairly simple. Their plan is to (a) make an example of Trump to discourage any future billionaire idiots from screwing with their simulation of democracy, and (b) demonize anyone deviating from neoliberal ideology as a fascist, racist, or anti-Semite, or otherwise “abnormal” or “extremist.”

     -- c. j. hopkins

the-year-of-the-headless-liberal-chicken

Friday, December 8, 2017

annihilation- the Earth is our witness

“Only by descending into this hell in imagination now can we hope to escape descending into it in reality … the knowledge we thus gain cannot in itself protect us from nuclear annihilation, but without it we cannot begin to take measures that can actually protect us.”
-- Jonathan Schell

We have at most two decades to avert environmental catastrophe and sustain realistic hopes for a decent future. Failure on that score would mean that nothing else we care about and fight for – democracy, social justice, peace, artistic expression, equality, and more – would matter all that much.  It’ll be about the best possible arrangement of chairs and drinks on the decks of a sinking ship.  We’ll just be fighting to turn a scorched world upside down – pushing for the more egalitarian slicing out of a poisoned pie.
-- Paul Street

the-burning-earth-bears-witness-in-california


Al, go back into comedy

"I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party"
--- Senator Al Franken

Thursday, December 7, 2017

preservation of your mind

Preservation: The Art and Science of Canning, Fermentation and DehydrationChristina Ward

Preservation counters violence with violence, ‘by any means necessary’. The poor vegetal substance is bombarded by infernal heat, depravation, acids and outright invasion by the food preserver. Natural pathogens and microorganisms are enlisted against natural processes in a kind of torture in order to make the Brussels sprout viciously extend its own life (NATO, EU, G7, transformation and preservation of power – all of them, Brussels). Pressure Canning is a slaughter on an infinitesimal level; pickling is a ruthless analogy to the witch-trial. Pathogens must be denied the ‘free water’ of their hosts; they must die of dehydration, be subsumed en masse in drought. Biology is intervallic, rising and decreasing in pitch: Attack (cut), delay (preserve) and ebb to silence (in mulch, in the intestine). The battlefield is both minute and gigantic. It must be. For in the US alone, some 76 million illnesses and five million deaths can be attributed to foodborne illnesses – the Triffid-like revenge of green matter corrupted by mass production, forced transport, and the manipulation of supply and demand.
-- Martin Billheimer

the-specter-of-preservation

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

i spy

The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.
-- The Intercept

trump-white-house-weighing-plans-for-private-spies

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Drag them into the Street and set them on Fire

This tax bill is an abomination, an act of brutal plunder.  Its sponsors should be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, if not hung from a lamp post.

-- Paul Craig Roberts

plunder-capitalism

Monday, December 4, 2017

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Unprecedented joint air force drills between the US and South Korea, featuring hundreds of warplanes, have kicked off despite dire warnings from Pyongyang and Moscow's calls to avoid new provocations after the recent launch of North Korea's new ICBM.

us-south-korea-air-drills

Sunday, December 3, 2017

dissident



ordinary truth

While there is no indisputable absolute truth: there is ordinary truth, the kind that is simply demonstrably true; it is supported by credible, verifiable peer-reviewed evidence that makes sense of everything. It meets the smell test of dialectics. Reality revolves around truth like the Earth revolves around the sun.

A nation of people that are incapable of grasping truth are delusional; they lack the character and fortitude to grapple with reality and its inconvenient truths. They cannot see what is in plain sight. Fear blinds them.

-- Charles Sullivan

fanning-the-flames-of-revolution

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Ye Shit-list o’ The Lord

Gluttony is second only to lust on Ye Shitlist o’ The Lord, and looking around, it appears that humans have not only overpopulated the earth with their lustful antics, they’ve filled it to overflowing with gluttonous, flabby, morbidly obese, thoughtless, brutal assholes.  Gotta blame much of this mess on God, Himself for telling His clueless minions that they should “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  One of the best examples of The Lord’s dark sense of humor; with His blessings, the planet is overpopulated to bursting by gluttonous, fat-assed killers.

-- John Rohn Hall

roads-to-perdition-paths-of-righteousness-and-the-gray-area-in-between

Friday, December 1, 2017

mad as hell

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. [shouting] You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
-- Howard Beale
In the end, you can die on your principles and feel the incredible lightness of being a human being, and feel emancipated even near the gates of endless poverty, waning sanity and extreme disenfranchisement from this capitalist franchise called America.
-- Paul Haeder

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

ooooh. man-crush!

We met at night at his family’s ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja, north of Riyadh. M.B.S. [Mohammed bin Salman] spoke in English, while his brother, Prince Khalid, the new Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and several senior ministers shared different lamb dishes and spiced the conversation. After nearly four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth, pointing out that I was exactly twice his age. It’s been a long, long time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new ideas about transforming his country.
-- Thomas L. Friedman, the Moustache of Understanding
Saudi Arabia is the most fanatical, retrograde theocracy in the world today.  It’s no wonder that a bloodthirsty autocrat like Salman would rule such a kingdom. But how does Friedman fit in with all this? Why would he want to put his reputation on the line for such a dodgy miscreant as Salman?  He knows the Saudis are funding extremist madrassas around the world. He knows they’re arming and training jihadists to fight in Syria, and prosecuting a genocidal war of annihilation in Yemen. He also knows that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9-11 came from Saudi Arabia, the petri-dish from whence all Salafist terrorism emerges. He knows all of this, and yet, he still provides cover for the man by writing a lengthy Homage to a Saudi Dictator in his weekly article at the Times. Why?

friedman's-paean-to-a-saudi-tyrant

mustache of understanding


That's clear. 'We' are the Law

“The law is clear: Director Mulvaney is the acting director of the CFPB,” 
-- Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary 

White House budget director Mick Mulvaney was confronted with outraged protests on Monday as he arrived at CFPB headquarters for his first day as "acting director" of the agency—a title also claimed by Leandra English, the CFPB's deputy director.

CFPB-agency-power-struggle-begins

Monday, November 27, 2017

coming soon GEEZER*RADIO

Imagine its 1971, you are somewhere in Tampa, Florida, and you are stoned out of your mind......



as heard on WUSF Underground Railroad, 1971
:the lyrics in their entirety
http://www.rkdn.org/titanic%20lyrics.htm

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Sex Panic!

the boundary between cultural tolerance/intolerance blurs and shifts with each passing revelation, as the litany of sins, ancient or recent, cardinal or venial, snowballs into an avalanche of aggrieved, undifferentiated accusation—a stampeding herd of “Me-Tooists.” Successive waves of long-forgotten gropes and slurps now overwhelm the news channel chyrons, leaving us with the sense that no greater crime against humanity is possible than an unsolicited horndog lunge of the hand or tongue, some of them from twenty or thirty years past but divulged only in the past few weeks.

the-great-american-sex-panic-of-2017

Friday, November 24, 2017

Black Friday

Stay tuned for an important GeezerNation public service announcement:

Congratulations consumers citizens for your glorious achievement on this historic day of maximum patriotism. As we head home from the malls and super-stores that sustain us and our way of life, we can rest assured that we have performed our most profound and meaningful duty for the Homeland.



Thursday, November 23, 2017

Spanksgiving Day Poem

I’ve got my daughter on the Thanksgiving trip
Down from the Catskill Mountains,
Where the holy days are every day
In the mountains of the shroud heights.
Where at the season’s end we gave thanks
To trees and salamanders and red efts,
And the last frogs before the birches and beeches turned,
And the oaks and the maples,
The wild orchards of the last berries, and bluestone walls
Built for property’s tomb
Falling into streams where the rain runs free,
Speaking in language which to others is babble.
To her and I, raise a glass: with redbark wine we drink,
And with whitebark wine and yellow-wine-talking leaves.
It is the nature of a grand speech to say, Thanks to you
Who have no big talk or tradition
Of one day only to give thanks
But give love and make love and spread love
In every romance of morning and every sun setting
And every season going and coming.
Such is Thanksgiving.  The rest is an old rug
Walked on with annual precision
At the sound of a dying clock.
So I say to her, let’s laugh and call it Spanksgiving.
Which is what it is, this punishment of travel and shop.
In the cars they’re all mad, beating themselves to get
Somewhere going to families ignored for the year long,
Smacking heads that look like asses against walls
Of airlines, roads, red lights, green lights, colors
That have nothing to tell except stop and go, but mostly stop.
We shall give a sweet spanking
To all who we love, with whom we laugh and sing.
Not a hard hit, just a slap with bright
Twinkling eyes, a love slap.
There’s no way forward for such a holiday
Except to mock and laugh.
For it is mad to say thanks in the tradition
that locks history at bay.
And there it is, howling, contorted, unrecognizable:
A feathered fearing tortured creature in a cage,
And a fearing people laid with tethers,
Running for life at the Year Zero
Of the first Thanksgiving, when the mad dash
Called history across this continent started.

why don't you go eat some tofu or something...

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

live from a rusted out garage

The plan: force the USA to attack Iran

.....the goal will not be to defeat Hezbollah or Iran anywhere. For all their racist rhetoric and hubris, the Israelis know that neither they nor, even less so, the Saudis have what it would take to seriously threaten Iran, or even Hezbollah. But their plan is, I think, much cruder: to trigger a serious conflict and then force the USA to intervene.

At this moment in time it is pretty clear that an attack on Iran is being prepared and such an attack is possible or even likely. But it is not a done deal yet. For one thing the Saudis and Israelis have a long history of empty threats and both regimes love posturing and grandstanding. And for all their bravado they do realize that Iran is a formidable and very sophisticated adversary. They probably also remember what happened when the Iraqis, with the full help and support from the USA, the Soviet Union, France, Britain and pretty much everybody else attacked Iran when Iran was at its weakest. Following a long and horrible war, the Iranians are now stronger than ever, Saddam is dead and the Iranians are more or less in control of Iraq. Iran is simply not a good country to attack, especially with a lack of a clear vision of what “victory” constitutes. So you ought to be crazy to attack Iran. The problem is, of course, that the Saudis and the Israelis are crazy, they have proved that many times over. So our best hopes is that they might be just “crazy”, but not “that crazy”. Not much of a hope, but that’s the best we got.


Tuesday, November 21, 2017

absence and presence


Posted on 


Writing is always about absence. To practice it you must absent yourself from immediate experience, and what you write is always a memory or a prediction of the experiences from which you are absent, otherwise you would have nothing to say but “I sit here typing…” The practice of most other arts is its own kind of present experience, but writing is uniquely mental, solitary and abstract.
And imagination may be a wonderful thing, but it is not as wonderful as the Real World Out There, the one we have to abandon and despise in order to live inside our own minds.
As another irreplaceable day, unique in all of endless time, with its unrepeatable configuration of birds, clouds and winds, its dense totality of living entities in this incomparably life-filled sphere, whose  collective actions will never again take the exact shape or have the exact same participants they had today – passes away, and i have shut myself inside again where so little changes, and so little is alive by comparison, i mourn a life i’ve never known, the impossible life of a self-conscious being who could move in that plenitude as an ecstatic participant, in any locality – not even for a whole life, just, possibly, for one whole day. Who could naturally feel (without chants or hallucinogens, without coercion of any kind) in relationship with that totality of the living non-human, absorbed in it, almost utterly meaningless to it, and yet safe: neither predator nor prey, just praise-animal. A tiny part of the dance in that place, that time only – but fully part.
Why does human life seem instead like a pin-hole of light in the grim shutter of a dark-lantern? We made those shutters, no one else. We turned it all inside out, by coming to tortured consciousness only of the temporal vastness of “I am not,” and fearing and hating that understanding, instead of realizing the baroque and inexhaustible variety (age doth not wither nor custom stale etc.) of the time we are, and learning to immerse ourselves in it, even with so few turns round the sun in order to do so. Collectively, we go on trying to de-complexify everything until it is either boring or dreadful, now in our shoddy automaton world that doesn’t even work well for most, that never gives even the  privileged more than a momentary illusion of control – when all around us, and inside us too, was a breathing, palpitating, circulating body of such inexhaustible abundance of forms.
Yes, from before the beginning of our self-consciousness, we had to kill and eat living things, and kill or flee anything we feared would eat us. Was there nothing more we could do with that primal understanding than to become what we have become? I sometimes wonder what it would have been like if a photosynthesizing creature had developed self-awareness.
I suppose when we give up on presence, and disappear into the imagination, we can at least fill the world with interesting phantoms.

everything you know is wrong?

If what we’re left with is “free” content (i.e. the creator gets no income for creating and posting content), Facebook, Google and click-bait link farms of sensationalist headlines, we’ll end up with a thoroughly homogenized web of “approved content” underwritten by lobbyists, the entertainment industry and elitist foundations/think tanks, and little in the way of real dissent or diversity of independent analysis.
In other words, we’ll be left with officially generated and sanctioned fake news and “approved” dissent:
unemployment is at record lows, inflation is near zero, the “recovery” is alive and well, Russia is the enemy and any suggestion to the contrary is propaganda that must be eradicated as fake news, etc.
Simply put, the web is becoming Orwellian. There’s plenty of approved “diversity of opinion,” but dissent is being sidelined to the fringes as a risk to the perfection of managed content.
the-demise-of-dissent-why-the-web-is-becoming-homogenized

Monday, November 20, 2017

autonomous



ban-killer-robots

sands of empire

the flag of empire

“We can have a special one — our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bone,” 
-- Mark Twain
That black flag full of skulls and crossbones now flies over the U.S. Capitol, and it isn’t coming down any time soon. The United States is an empire with no recognizable domestic opposition. The imperialist Theodore Roosevelt was right: many Americans believe it is the right of the U.S. government to rule the world. But the anti-imperialists such as Carnegie, Schurz, and Twain were also correct. Empire will be our undoing, for it is not a reflection of our greatness and benevolence, but of our weakness and savagery.
america's-turn-toward-empire

Sunday, November 19, 2017

it just ain't fair

"Dear Roy, I was sitting in the bathtub trying to calm down after binge-watching reruns of Duck Dynasty when someone knocked on the door. I ran down the steps to answer the door but noticed that I'd forgotten my towel so I grabbed a Kleenex and held it over my privacy and opened the door. Standing there was a man I couldn't absolutely swear was Jewish but you know some of them don't look Jewish like that Ronan Farrow who is Woody Allen's son but looks like Frank Sinatra who I believe was an Italian and not Jewish. Anyway, this man asked me if I would go on the record to the Washington Post and say that Judge Roy Bean Moore had tried to get in my underwear 35 years ago. I said absolutely not I wasn't even in the country 35 years ago I was in Guatemala if that's any of your business. But, I said to him, even if Judge Roy Bean had tried to get into my underwear 35 years ago or 35 days ago I would still vote for him because that's what Jesus would do because of Moslems and fairies. So, I said to him, you can go tell George Soros and Jeff Bozo I'm not going to smear a godly man for doing what any red-blooded American male would do in similar circumstances. He said, OK then but then he said he had to sneeze and because my mama raised me to be polite I handed him my Kleenex and the next thing I know there were CNN cameras filming me and the next thing I know the video went viral and now all the guys at the pool hall look at me funny. So Judge Roy Bean if you get to the Senate like I know God wants you to I hope you will use your pull to get YouTube to take down that video because it was kind of cold that day and it is not really representative of my natural nature. Thank you and God bless. Your pal, C.K. Dexterhaven"

-- Chris Floyd

Saturday, November 18, 2017

taxman

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.
Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman
And you’re working for no one but me.
-- george harrison

American taxpayers have been forced to shell out $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Thursday, November 16, 2017

no alternative

In this new era of financing, people were urged to go beyond their own capacity to pay by consuming with their future income. Another way to circumvent the natural laws was the new consumerism. The simple principle that demand creates supply had expired. Instead, supply was first created, after which, with the help of marketing, demand as well as the necessary consumption culture was introduced, as illusory as tobacco advertising and bank credits. There are hundreds of bread brands in your supermarket, but not quite the one you want, right?

-- Mats Sederholm
they-say-there-is-no-alternative

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

helpless

one trillion

The Harris County Flood Control District estimated that one trillion gallons of water fell in the county (where Houston lies) in four days.
extreme-harvey-rains

any adults in the room?

“haaay, what about Trump?”

The question turned into a mini cluster explosion, it ignited the space we all sat around. The release of ‘what about trump’ turned the aroma of the surrounding natural greenery into a nauseating irritating smell of sulfur. It must have taken 30 seconds before anyone would answer. 

-- Jimmy Centeno

ok-no-more-politics-for-you



Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Second Notice

To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out.

-- 15,364 scientists

warning_2017

Monday, November 13, 2017

it's the end of the world as we know it





the Russians aren't coming

On Thursday [last], RT America, the US-based subsidiary of RT (formerly known as Russia Today), announced that it would, under pressure from the United States government, register as a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

The US government has given no public justification for its demand, which will require that RT America provide information on its finances and on individuals involved in directing the news outlet. RT clearly reflects the views of the Russian government and avoids criticism of the Putin regime. However, the US has made no similar demand in relation to other outlets that have government financing and backing—the BBC, for example. Moreover, the United States operates a vast network of news agencies that work, officially and unofficially, to promote the interests of the American ruling class all over the world.


US-brands-RT-a-foreign-agent

meanwhile- Saudi Arabia

Last weekend during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri suddenly and dramatically resigned, raising questions about whether the Saudi leadership was engineering a political crisis in Lebanon as a way to counter the defeat of its jihadist proxies in Syria.
Given the timing and the unusual circumstances — from a fancy hotel in Riyadh — questions also were raised about whether Hariri’s resignation amounted to the kidnapping of the Lebanese leader (who has dual Saudi citizenship) or whether it presaged a new front in the regional wars.

-- Dennis J Bernstein

Friday, November 10, 2017

why don't we do it in the road?



have you seen the saucers?



Africa- post-colonial blues

It may not be the heart of Africa but it is the key to Africa. Forget about “Niger” and think of Azawad. Think of the bigger and older picture: a region that encompasses northern Mali, southern Algeria, southern Libya, western Niger and northern Burkina Faso.
It’s here – Azawad – where the four US Green Berets were recently killed. And it’s here where the French Foreign Legion has positioned itself in the latest scramble for Africa. The cover story is the “War on Terror”. But don’t be fooled: “white guy rule” has returned to the Sahara.
-- Aidan O'Brien

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

you talkin' to me?

...one often overlooked factor contributing to mass shootings is an all-to-common male attribute, the recourse to violence.  It is a defining, endemic, feature of patriarchy.  It plays a significant role in domestic or family violence, the male’s mistreatment of the female and/or children in the family.  In addition, it is often an implicit — if not explicit — feature in a man’s relations with other men, whether in a bar, in a sport’s contest or on the battlefield.

-- David Rosen

terrorism-white-mens-murderous-rage

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

love it

essential existentialist

Search for nothing anymore, nothing except truth.
Be very still and try to get at the truth.
And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I?
— D. H. Lawrence

The self is an illusion. Freedom is an illusion. Responsibility is an illusion. Guilt is an illusion. Everything is an illusion.

-- Edward Curtin

Monday, November 6, 2017

Putin's troll army

So we’ve finally seen some of the social media ads which we are told skewed the entire election in 2016 and constituted a key part of the internet assault on America launched by Vladimir Putin’s “troll army.” Scary stuff, blazoned across front pages and screen scrolls everywhere. But before going on, perhaps we should find out what makes a social media account part of Putin’s invasion force?
Well, according to Twitter, it is ANY account created in Russia. Or any account where the user has a Russian email address. Or if their name contains Cyrillic characters. Or if they ever tweet in Russian.  Or if they have ever logged in from any Russian IP address — even a single time. Twitter says: “We considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria.” 
russian-ads-and-american-madness

Friday, November 3, 2017

GDP- god damn progress

"There clearly is going to be an impact on GDP in the short run. We will make it up as we rebuild. That will help GDP."
-- Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin
In the short term, ...disasters do indeed cause harm to the economy, but after the initial shock they’re more likely to have a net positive impact on the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Welcome to the cruel, topsy-turvy economic logic of a civilization facing the risk of collapse. As millions of people increasingly suffer the devastation of climate breakdown, we can expect the economy—as measured by conventional benchmarks—to maintain and even strengthen itself right up to its breaking point.

-- Jeremy Lent

the-cruel-topsy-turvy-economics-of-collapse

you've been 'unpersoned'

On November 30, 2016, presumably right at the stroke of midnight, Google Inc. unpersoned CounterPunch. They didn’t send out a press release or anything. They just quietly removed it from the Google News aggregator. Not very many people noticed...... Little did most people know at the time that these were just the opening salvos in what has turned out to be an all-out crackdown on any and all forms of vocal opposition to the global corporate ruling classes and their attempts to quash the ongoing nationalist backlash against their neoliberal agenda.
Almost a year later, things are much clearer. If you haven’t been following this story closely, and you care at all about freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and that kind of stuff, you may want to take an hour or two and catch up a bit on what’s been happening. 
-- c. j. hopkins

Thursday, November 2, 2017

rise up

mad as hell

If this Trump tax plan passes, Americans making $60,000 will still be paying over four times more of their income in payroll taxes than Americans who make $1 million. And America’s millionaire-packed top 1 percent will get 80 percent of the new Trump tax cuts, the Tax Policy Center calculates.
....the Economic Policy Institute has calculated the costs of maintaining a no-frills middle class existence in various parts of the United States. In Houston, one of our nation’s cheaper major cities, a family of four needed $62,544 in 2016 to live a bare-bones middle class lifestyle.


watchtower