Spain at 185 km/hr

Google has removed the "On Votar 1-Oct" Catalan referendum app tweeted out by Catalan First Minister Carles Puigdemont to his followers on September 23 after being ordered to do so by the High Court in Catalonia.
 google-removes-catalan-referendum-app

flagged down

Why do Americans pledge allegiance to the “flag,” as opposed to the nation or its government? It boils down to capitalist greed. The origins of the Pledge date to 1892, when James B. Upham, the marketing executive of the popular children’s magazine The Youth’s Companion used the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas to promote a conference in honor of the American flag. He pushed the Pledge in his magazine as a way to promote nationalism and sell flags to public schools. Schoolhouses purchased 26,000 flags the first year alone.

Kids reciting the pledge were supposed to raise their arms at the same time — yep, the Hitler “sieg heil” salute before Hitler. World War II put an end to that in American schools.

-- Ted Rall

ban-the-pledge-of-allegiance

a view from Norway

Buffalo is like much of the U.S. today. Unemployment is acute, as is poverty. Certain stats jump out at you, like 76% of disabled people live below the Poverty line in western New York state. Numbers mean nothing in unemployment, though, because the long term unemployed are simply not counted. All you have to do is walk around. There is an overriding sense of futility in American society, today. And one feels it in a visceral manner when returning here. The looks, the suspicion, the anger. Maybe it is because I live in Norway, but the sense of anger in America feels overwhelming. But so does the sense of smug entitlement.

    -- John Steppling

the-landscapes-of-capital

you go girl!

take a knee

Who among those kneeling today in solidarity with Kaepernick are willing to pay a price? What’s the NFL’s price?  The Tycoons who own the teams?  Who among them agrees with a man who gave his life for black liberation, Dr. Martin Luther King, who made it emphatically clear that the fight against racism involved opposing a trinity of devils when he said:

We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values and other things. We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed. America is a hypocritical nation and [we] must put [our] own house in order.

the-super-patriotic-draft-dodgers-rag

ed. note

Here at GeezerNation- although we are admittedly news whores and don’t care if you confuse us with the evil presstitute- our purpose is to disseminate the propaganda that you need.

We like it, and we are sure you will like it.

-- dbdesgnr, ed.

starve them

The WSJ editors think that depriving people of enough food to stay alive is humane....

Withholding food aid to bring down a government would normally be unethical, but North Korea is an exceptional case. Past aid proved to be a mistake as it perpetuated one of the most evil regimes in history. The U.N. says some 40% of the population is undernourished, even as the Kims continue to spend huge sums on weapons. Ending the North Korean state as quickly as possible is the most humane course.”

(“Options for Removing Kim Jong In”, Wall Street Journal)

it's all coming back to me now

Christy Rodgers

Run to the trees
Trees will be burning
Run to the sea
Sea will be boiling
All on that day


fire-and-rain

the downward spiral

"We will continue on our present course, and . . the probability of one or another proposed disasters....will rapidly increase until some small event triggers the apocalypse of the consumer society."

-- Eugene Linden

correcting-gregory-bateson

the time for satire has (not) passed

I won’t describe it further.  If you saw it, you know.  If you didn’t, you can imagine it.  You know—Donald Trump.  But this was acid-trip Trump, Trump as flat-out Jack D. Ripper, co-starring the entire rest of the planet Earth as the hapless Group Captain Mandrake......

-- john eskow  

full-dr-strangelove

holy wars

No one dies for their country. Misled citizens die for their governments.

the time for satire has passed

“It is the very nature of imperialism to turn humans into beasts.”
    -- Che Guevara

The time for equivocation and satire where Donald Trump is concerned has passed. Indeed if the current US President’s address to the 72^nd UN General Assembly in New York confirms anything, it is that satire must now give way to a sober and serious appreciation of the clear and present danger his administration poses to the world.
-- John Wight

trump-at-the-un-nuremberg-redux

Artificial Insanity

Perhaps you haven’t noticed the investor class getting all gung-ho these days over Artificial Intelligence (AI). Only a couple of decades ago, these same people dismissed AI because it wasn’t very useful yet. But that’s all changed due to advances in machine vision and learning, and now VCs, hedge funds, and most of the rest of the usual big-money suspects are salivating over prospects of automating most of the rest of the economy, even including agriculture.

AI-zombifying humanity

Equifuck

Equifax was....hired a year ago, on a $10 million contract, to “help the SSA manage risk and mitigate fraud for the mySocialSecurity system, a personalized portal for customers to access some of SSA’s services such as the online statement.”

"The Social Security Administration’s partnership with Equifax raises serious questions about the security of Americans’ most sensitive information, and they owe the American people answers immediately. We need to know whether Social Security data is vulnerable to cybercriminals, and I intend to find out exactly what’s being done to ensure every single American is protected."

-- Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, ranking minority member, Senate Finance Committee’s subcommittee on Social Security and pensions

how-badly-did-equifax-breach-damage-the-social-security-system?

Trans-Korean Railway

In sharp contrast to the Trump administration and the Beltway’s bellicose rhetoric, what “RC” (Russia-China) proposes are essentially 5+1 talks (North Korea, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, plus the US) on neutral territory, as confirmed by Russian diplomats. In Vladivostok, Putin went out of his way to defuse military hysteria and warn that stepping beyond sanctions would be an “invitation to the graveyard.” Instead, he proposed business deals.

Largely unreported by Western corporate media, what happened in Vladivostok is really ground-breaking. Moscow and Seoul agreed on a trilateral trade platform, crucially involving Pyongyang, to ultimately invest in connectivity between the whole Korean peninsula and the Russian Far East.

-- Pepe Escobar

the-russia-china-plan-for-north-korea

Skynet- death from above

From stratosphere to exosphere, the Pentagon is now producing an armada of fantastical new aerospace weapons worthy of Buck Rogers.

By 2025, the United States will likely deploy advanced aerospace and cyberwarfare to envelop the planet in a robotic matrix theoretically capable of blinding entire armies or atomizing an individual insurgent......the Pentagon apparently hopes to patrol the entire planet ceaselessly via a triple-canopy aerospace shield that would reach from sky to space and be secured by an armada of drones with lethal missiles and Argus-eyed sensors, monitored through an electronic matrix and controlled by robotic systems. 

-- Alfred W. McCoy

wonder-weapons-for-world-dominion

Houston and beyond

The liberal response to all of this is to demand that Trump make a public act of contrition by acknowledging the existence of climate change in some primetime speech. How quaint. I don’t care what Trump believes or what he says. What difference could it possibly make at this point? Climate change is a fact. The sea levels are rising. The polar ice caps are melting. The forests of the West are burning. The Colorado River is dwindling. The snowpack in the Rockies, Sierras and Cascade Mountains is shrinking. Bird migration patterns are changing. Coral Reefs are bleaching out. Salmon and grizzlies are being driven toward extinction. All of this is happening whether Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt believe it or not. And there’s little they could do to change the dynamic, even if they were willing to try.

-- Jeffrey St. Clair

chronicle-of-a-flood-foretold

the Master Race

“All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership” 
-- Teddy Roosevelt

“They’re trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our history” 
-- Donald Trump

white-supremacists-defile-sacred-land

prince, one more time

sometimes I almost feel just like a human being

sometimes you gotta cut it out

Make no mistake about this. Fascism is a tumor. You don’t negotiate or appease a tumor. You cut the fucking thing out, and in this case antifa is one of society’s scalpels.  

-- Miguel A. Cruz-Díaz

dancing-with-the-devil

Nazis in the woodwork

Charlottesville Nazis to the rescue! How much simpler could it possibly get? Corporatocracy? What corporatocracy? We got goddamned Nazis coming out of the woodwork! Racist Nazis! Confederate Nazis! Nazi apologists! Nazi sympathizers! This is no time to worry about who’s actually wielding political power, or how they’re manufacturing hysteria and otherwise manipulating people (not you, of course … other people). No, what we need to do now is censor the Internet, and other venues for Nazi hate speech, and round up all these racist Nazis and subject them to anti-Nazi therapy, or anti-racist empathy programs, or just gang up on them and beat them senseless.

-- c. j. hopkins

the-united-states-of-manufactured-hysteria

criminal justice

If people could hold the same open-mindedness and sympathy (aka “benefit of the doubt”) for real-life criminals that they hold for The Blues Brothers, we’d be in a much better place in our country in regard to incarceration. Rehabilitation-centered prisons within Nordic cultures have shown to result in reduced recidivism, to the extent of some prisons literally having to close down due to lack of inmates. This all stems from the notion that prisoners are people too, and they can be taught how to be responsible working citizens when they re-enter society. We, on the other hand, consistently hold high rates of incarceration and recidivism, and our culture continues to treat all who have broken the law as though they are too rotten to ever be employed, healed, or rehabilitated. Many American legislators want to clean the streets of all these people, even intentionally making criminals out of good people through the drug war, so that they may continue the wage slavery that is modern prison labor within our largely-privatized system. Due to this societal dehumanization, the term “criminal justice” has become kind of a cruel joke in America.

-- Ezra Kronfeld