message from Iran (not Iraq)

Citizen Cane

[edited for content] 
"This is one solid cane; it more than takes care of my medical needs, and provides a level of security knowing this product could be used as a baseball bat if necessary."

--Scott, Tucson, AZ, Feb 24, 2013

http://www.knifecenter.com/item/KA9406/ka-bar-9406-tdi-self-defense-walking-cane 

Allman Bros

whippin' post

maybe Greg and Duane would have liked this.......

Impeachment scenario

Paul Ryan meets with vice president Mike Pence. “Mike,” he says, “let’s face it. You’ll never be elected president. You’re from Indiana, you call your wife mother, you’re creepy, probably a closeted gay. Let’s make a deal: I impeach Trump and you get to be president for the next three years. Schoolchildren have to memorize your name. You get to be on a stamp. Maybe one day on the three cent coin. In 2020, however, you step aside. You endorse me. I’m the Republican nominee.”

Pence goes along. Why wouldn’t he? Sure beats another three years of attending funerals.

After Trump, things turn calm. No more drama. This is very bad for women, gays, blacks. The Republican Congress works closely with Pence to pass a bunch of stuff that makes us look back at Ronald Reagan and wonder if that guy was really a liberal. Pence seems “normal” after Trump. The Republicans get lots of things done. Granted, all bad. But done.

In 2020, Paul Ryan gets to present himself as the courageous man who took on a president from his own party because it was the right thing to do for the country. Powerful stuff. A true profile in BS courage.

-- Ted Rall 

Leaf Blower

NRA terrorism

Osama bin Laden didn’t fly planes into the Twin Towers. Perhaps he never actually killed with his own hands at all, but is certainly recognized as killer and terrorist. Bin Laden was a facilitator - someone who provided the means and inspiration for others to execute. Wayne La Pierre may never have killed with his own hands either, but he’s complicit in providing the means for others. So is it hyperbole to label La Pierre a terrorist?

-- Vern Loomis

the-nra-the-dragon-in-our-midst

human cartoon

Available evidence is beyond reasonable doubt as prosecutors might say that I’m a human and I’m a cartoon. If being both at the same time, in the same frame, were a crime, I’ll be convicted in seconds by a white jury or black jury, a jury of men or women. And if being both is a rare artistic adventure, I’m a Don Quixote. Actually, being both is normal, as normal as being a Trump, a Sean Hannity, a Butt-Head. I’m an animated human. I’m an animated cartoon.

-- L. Ali Khan

im-a-human-and-im-a-cartoon

sands of empire

Gaddafi was the last pan African barrier to Western imperialism 2.0 in Africa. His removal opened the floodgates to 21st century Western power in Africa. The French are now back in Mali. AFRICOM (the US military) is all over the place. And now Morocco wants to be African again......NATO’s destruction of Libya completely humiliated the African Union. It tore the heart out of an alternative African future. And left Africa seriously exposed once again to the Western imperial virus: a virus contemporary Morocco carries. 

   -- Aidan O’Brien

the-empires-fifth-column-in-morocco

old milwaukee

the Orangeman sez Buy!

Trump lights up the board on psychopathic job seeking and authoritarian traits, the consummate salesman taking life by the hoo ha and selling his way into legendary salesman status. These traits may be deleterious to the entire world, but it doesn’t matter, the goals have been set to accumulate money, power, status…you know, be a real success in the world. Trump will sell the world out to Goldman Sachs and other financial vultures who are interested in feeding on a dying planet, truly a once in a species-time firesale. Good thing we elected the greatest salesman on earth during such opportunistic times.
    -- Jason Holland

death-of-an-orangeman?

a crapload of CO2

a new scientific paper has documented growing fluxes of greenhouse gases streaming into the air from the Alaskan tundra, a long-feared occurrence that could worsen climate change.
The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires).

That's an amount comparable to all the emissions from the US commercial sector in a single year.

alaskas-thawing-soils-pouring-CO2-into-the-air

reverse reality

“No, we shouldn’t stop reading the New York Times and the Washington Post; it’s important to understand what we’re being told to believe."
-- Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst

George Orwell’s basic concept reflects a simple tenet of propaganda: the thing you are hiding is often hid behind its exact opposite. Orwell expressed this concept in 1984 with the government slogans, “War is Peace,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” 

orwell-freud-and-the-syrian-ruse 

dangerous men

Many people view Donald Trump as the most dangerous man on the planet, but next week he flies to Saudi Arabia for a three-day visit during which he will meet a man who surely runs him a close second as a source of instability. This is deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, 31 – the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his father King Salman, 81, is incapacitated by old age – who has won a reputation for impulsiveness, aggression and poor judgement in the two-and-half years he has held power.

trump-cozies-up-with-saudi-arabia

Alexander Cockburn

“Is your hate pure?” he would ask a new Nation intern, one eyebrow raised, in merriment or inquisition the intern was unsure. It was a startling question, but then this was—it still is—a startling time. For what the ancients called avarice and iniquity Alex’s hate was pure, and across the years no writer had a deadlier sting against the cruelties and dangerous illusions, the corruptions of empire.

remembering-alex

stuck inside "reality" with the Trump-Putin blues again

In any event, here we are now … stuck inside this simulation of “reality” where Putin-Nazi hackers are coming out of the woodwork, a partyless neoliberal banker has been elected the President of France, Donald Trump is an evil mastermind or a Russian operative, depending on what day it is (as opposed to just a completely incompetent, narcissistic billionaire idiot), and neoliberal propaganda outfits like The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, The Guardian, NPR, et al., are perceived as “respectable” sources of journalism, as if their role in generating and occasionally revising the official narrative weren’t so insultingly obvious.

    -- C. J. Hopkins
invasion-of-the-putin-nazis

the fabulous American worldview

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis;….. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties, but it’s very comfortable”

    -From Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, 2005

“The critical function of the mainstream media in the current situation should be to report the facts that clearly and unambiguously contradict government claims. This has so far not occurred, and this is perhaps the biggest indicator of how incapacitated the mechanisms for democratic governance of the United States have become.”

    - Theodore A. Postol 

fabricating-the-american-worldview

re-wilding foretold

It is here, in the Northern Channel Islands, sometimes known as America’s Galapagos, that there exists the opportunity to glimpse the next America.

The triple-threat of deglobalization, deleveraging and depopulation (3-D)......suggests there may be an opportunity for the kind of re-wilding originally proposed by Dave Foreman and newly elaborated by William Hawes, as the economy slowly darkens and tunnels back into the past. Population, global trade and global borrowing statistics are being rewound as I write. Can humanity and its natural environment wait out the reversal of several centuries of the damage mercantile capitalism, industrial capitalism and now neoliberalism, have wreaked upon them?

america-in-3D

What geezers think about- No. 1

I've had this flannel shirt for like 20 years, a gift from my ex-mother-in-law (Idamay!) and it has been my favorite, and mostly only, flannel shirt. But, the right sleeve has always been longer than the left (a minor issue that became over the years an endearing and indeed nostalgic aspect of the shirt). Recently I bought a new flannel shirt of similar color, figuring it was probably time to let go of the past. Got it home, washed and dried it for first use, and lo-and-behold, the right sleeve is longer than the left.

This got me to thinking. Are flannel shirts, maybe all flannel shirts, made with the right sleeve slightly longer? It does seem possible what with the low quality and lax standards of world-wide flannel shirt manufacturing. Or is it done intenionally, as a snub to Western consumers, who probably wouldn't notice the différence between good flannel and a cotton/rayon blend, much less the length of a sleeve?

or, my right arm is shrinking......

or, my left arm is growing.

frightening thoughts

Otis

Fucked-35 in Boise

F-35s would drive increasingly informed, outraged and organized residents from their homes. F-35s are 8 to 16 times louder than A-10s (current plane in use at Gowen), and 4 times louder at takeoff and landing than F-16s, which are also much too loud for an urban airport. Noise levels will make a large area unlivable, or unhealthy to inhabit. The planes would be within three miles of the city’s heart, and their noise footprint would far exceed what has been modeled.

the-city-and-the-war-machine

flight-of-the-discords

You can't do that in America!

"We have been fighting for six months and we are sorry to get to this point but at the moment there is a threat of liquidation and if that happens then the factory will not be returned in one piece."
-- Trade union representative Vincent Labrousse

Workers at an ailing car parts factory in central France have destroyed equipment and "booby-trapped" the site to pressure the country's car-makers to keep the plant afloat.

french-workers-protest-plant

Unconquerable World

Ultimately, the longing for spiritual rejuvenation and community empowerment will break through the cage of modernity, if we are not first destroyed by ecological devastation and/or economic collapse. Longing, in all actuality, is too mild a term; actually, there is an intense craving for unique and authentic notions of identity, for belonging to a caring culture, for sharing and cultural blending. There is also, to an extent, evolutionary reasons and epigenetic possibilities for the deep desires, for instance, to want to sing and dance around a fire, to go on long walks to calm the mind, to talk to plants and animals, to feel the Earth’s joys and pains, to partake of psychedelic plants. It’s what our species has done for millennia, and no freeways, high-rises, fluorescent-lit malls, or gated communities can possibly make up for these urges.
rewilding-america

the long sleep

Every day we experience death, or a mirroring of death, when we sleep. As Alice A. Bailey writes, people “fail to relate death and sleep. Death, after all, is only a longer interval in the life of physical plane functioning; one has only ‘gone abroad’ for a longer period.” Death cannot take life; life cannot be taken, life simply moves from one manifest form to another, from one state of consciousness to another, subtler, more intense state.
   -- Graham Peebles
readiness-is-all

Nostalgia cuts both ways

Since I’m impossibly drawn to the past, to my own antiquity, for comfort as well as instruction, a question is how to use our own experiences, including our parents and their parents – and their dreams –   to turn back the death wave coming out of Mar-a-Lago.

    -- Clancy Sigal

the-politics-of-nostalgia

May 4- gotta get down to it

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

the forest god

Like an appearance of the Hindu Warrior Goddess Kalaratri, over 200 female cadres of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) emerged from the Jungles of Chattisigarh on April 24^th to kill 25 paramilitary soldiers, and in so doing, also shatter much of what remains of the political mythology of the post-WWII era.

-- Paul Bentley

kalaratri-appears-indigenous-women-take-up-arms-in-india

the Royal Family

The Executive Branch has gone Regal. The Supremes and Congress stand idly by as a new Camelot emerges, the gilded kingdom now realized in the space-time of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Air Force One and a verdant estate on the southern spit of the moated Palm Beach. The First Family and its courtiers lightly hold the levers of power, as Arthur deftly wielded Excalibur over his fractured Kingdom, their roles both inspirational and ceremonial, while knights errant venture forth to manifest their President’s desire to slay the dragons of administrative power – clear in their mission of ridding the Federal Government of its role in bureaucratic management. Henceforth, it seems, the nation’s peoples shall live in an anarchic limbo where their livelihood is guaranteed only in the excessive acquisition of capital, its hoarding protected by the all-powerful caparison of the First Family.

horror show

cosmik debris

situation normal- death from above

Ed. Note:
GeezerNation regrets the many depressing posts here over the past 4 years that were in general critical of the United States and its world-wide bombing machine (WWBM). However we feel we have no choice and must give an accurate accounting (from the many reliable correspondents) of the truth of the matter. Being merely depressed is vastly preferable to experiencing the WWBM on a daily basis. If we in America experienced such a reality, perhaps in short order the "ruling class" would also have a new reality to experience.....

In recent weeks U.S. aerial bombardments in Syria alone have reportedly killed several hundred people, mainly civilians. Daily raids in Iraq, mostly targeting ISIS in Mosul, have accounted for more than 3000 civilian deaths, according to AirWars sources. To believe this is a departure from the past – or that civilian casualties are simply an inevitable by-product of combat – is to ignore the American history of savage warfare, which since World War II has meant bringing horrendous death and destruction from the skies.

-- Carl Boggs

imperialism-and-the-logic-of-mass-destruction

drone New York

Upstate New York is leading the way for the Pentagon’s plan to expand its drone program from isolated areas into populous communities, which offer ready access to workers. One hundred and sixty miles to the west of Syracuse, just outside the city of Niagara Falls, an Air National Guard base — the largest employer in the county — is in the final stages of building a cutting-edge digital tech center with huge bandwidth. There, pilots and sensor operators will do shifts at computer consoles, guiding MQ-9 drones and firing missiles on kill missions. The center is on track to become fully operational in a matter of months.

    -- Norman Solomon

killer-drones-in-the-empire-state

a means to no end

In our technopoly, logical thinking has become illogical; cause and effect, means and ends have been inverted.  The causes of our problems are touted as the means to end them. These “solutions” are always offered with a straight face, as if they made perfect sense.  This is how societies operate when in the grip of myths.  In this case, the myths of science, progress, and history.  Such myths render the obvious invisible as they create a hopeless inevitability in people who can imagine no alternative and have been convinced that science is the secret to salvation and the means to the things they have learned to desire, including longevity and perhaps “immortality.” And these things have become the means to additional means in an endless loop from which, by definition, ends are absent.  As a result, the search for truth, celebrated as a goal of science, is slyly eliminated. 
    -- Edward Curtin

marching-in-circles-faustian-thinking-and-the-myth-of-science

idiot

Idiot wind
Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote
Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We're idiots, babe
It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles and impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy.

There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.

reign-of-idiots