Tuesday, October 31, 2017

ed. note:

This past August, GeezerNation relocated (established a Regional Office) to Western New York. Our editorial thrust would have involved the development of the WNY into the New Netherlands Project (N'nethP), but alas our lack of data on the WNY(local) culture cost us some some bucks I can tell you, and that's not including legal fees.

So here we are in the WNY, only one canal in sight; Amsterdam it is not. Please refer to the link for some insight from the Home Office:  https://eurogeezer.blogspot.com

our dream of course:

"the build-out of N'nethp will be the attainment of the dream for a New Netherlands in the WNY with its 'Capital' in Batavia and the Lackawana-Erie Canal system linking Buffalo-Batavia-Rochester (BufBatRoc!)"

Sunday, October 29, 2017

become your own media

“The actions of Google constitute political censorship and are a blatant attack on free speech. At a time when public distrust of establishment media is widespread, this corporate giant is exploiting its monopolistic position to restrict public access to a broad spectrum of news and critical analysis"
-- David North, director of wsws.org
....in April 2017, Google implemented ‘Project Owl,’ ostensibly aimed at reducing the prominence of “fake news” in its searches. The program utilized “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content” (there’s some technonewspeak!) and to downgrade “offensive” material. In the weeks that followed, many leftist and progressive websites saw double-digit percentage declines in the traffic referred to them from Google searches. Among these were Alternet (-63%), Democracy Now!(-36%), Common Dreams(-37%), Truth-Out (-25%), The Intercept (-19%) and Counterpunch (-21%). The steepest decline was experienced by the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org), whose search traffic fell by two-thirds.

-- Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

alternative-media-under-attack-by-algorithms

the final war

So now, understanding at last that we are all at war, the final war, the forever war between our species and our vast complex single enemy, the planetary ecosystem that engendered us, I know how I will live, girded by the invisible armor of the middle class everywhere, but especially in the rich world. I know that I can go down the street to the coffee shop every day, and one day the sky will be thick with the smoke of wildfires incinerating a town to the north, and everybody will be wearing surgical masks, and the sun will be red as molten steel in the sky’s furnace, but in a few days the smoke will dissipate and I’ll go back to the coffee shop and joke with the waitress and get my coffee. “It’s a good day to be alive,” she’ll say, and I’ll agree.

-- Christy Rodgers

the-third-world-war

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Corporatocracy- the new normal

Capitalism is an economic system, which we have elevated to a social system. It only has one fundamental value, exchange value, which isn’t much of a value, at least not in terms of organizing society or maintaining any sort of human culture or reverence for the natural world it exists in. In capitalist society, everything, everyone, every object and sentient being, every concept and human emotion, is worth exactly what the market will bear … no more, no less, than its market price. There is no other measure of value.

-- c. j. hopkins

tomorrow-belongs-to-the-corporatocracy

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

carry on

“I can't go on…I’ll go on.” —final two sentences of Samuel Beckett's novel, The Unnamable.

Yet, at times, I'm baffled as to how we, the scant and scattered few, who refuse to close our eyes and block our hearts to the realities of the day continue to go on. What force restrains one from reeling into the street seized by lamentation?

-- Phil Rockstroh

Monday, October 23, 2017

on to Africa

NATO’s destruction of Libya simultaneously achieved three strategic goals for the West’s plans for military expansion in Africa. Most obviously, it removed the biggest obstacle and opponent of such expansion, Gaddafi himself. With Gaddafi gone, and with a quiescent pro-NATO puppet government in charge of Libya, there was no longer any chance that Libya would act as a powerful force against Western militarism. Quite the contrary - Libya’s new government was utterly dependent on such militarism and knew it.

Secondly, NATO’s aggression served to bring about a total collapse of the delicate but effective North African security system, which had been underpinned by Libya. 

And finally, NATO’s annihilation of the Libyan state effectively turned the country over to the region’s death squads and terror groups. These groups were then able to loot Libya’s military arsenals and set up training camps at their leisure, using these to expand operations right across the region.

gaddafi-west-sirte-recolonization

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

the fire next time

....we continue to send urban sprawl into our fire-dependent ecosystems with the expectation that firefighters will risk their lives to defend each new McMansion, and an insurance system that spreads costs across all homeowners will promptly replace whatever is lost.
This is the deadly conceit behind mainstream environmental politics in California: you say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanisation of our increasingly inflammable wildlands. Land use patterns in California have long been insane but, with negligible opposition, they reproduce themselves like a flesh-eating virus.
el-diablo-in-wine-country

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

dumbed down to death

“Down with intelligence! Long live death!”
-- José Millán Astray, Spanish General under Franco

If I now feel compelled to evoke the words Millán Astray used eighty-one years ago in Salamanca, it is because they have gained a bizarre relevance in today’s America. The resurgence of nationalism in our time has not yet reached the homicidal extremes it did when Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco misruled their lands, but the United States still faces an assault on rational discourse, scientific knowledge, and objective truth. And this war on intelligence, too, despite the edulcorated pieties that come from those who carry it out, will lead to many deaths.

-- Ariel Dorfman

trumps-war-on-the-mind


Monday, October 16, 2017

Stage Four Breakdown- pornography, gun violence and social death

"The society and its institutions are no longer comprehensible and are increasingly out of control. Social consensus and a shared sense of social purpose have all but vanished. … Leaders govern virtually without support. The regulatory apparatus … [is] unable to cope with the overwhelming complexity, the loss of social legitimacy. … The situation has become intolerable and untenable. The need for fundamental change is inescapable.”

-- Duane Elgin


A trip to my local grocery store reveals a magazine rack with dozens of covers showing beautiful models selling a lifestyle that requires what the advertisers manufacture and market. Also on the rack are a half-dozen very slick magazines selling gun culture. There’s no other way to describe it; you never see a critical or analytic article. The photography is eye-catching and slick, the models manly and masculine — except for the hotties holding machine guns, a much loved image. There’s a strong focus on the latest versions of the now classic AR-15. The “look” of these magazines can be described only as gun porn. Instead of luscious, naked women spread across a centerfold, the usual cultural understanding of “pornography,” in these magazines its images of lethal weapons that trigger the erotic charge.

-- John Grant

mandalay-bay-top-o-the-world-ma

Saturday, October 14, 2017

psycho killer

please rise!

It’s as if a moral and cultural bomb has been detonated now that this guy tweets and says things not allowed in school. I have youth in my ‘behavior room’ saying stuff right from the president’s mouth. These words and statements we do not allow children to say in school. Racist and sexist and anti-disabilities things, we don’t tolerate but the president is spouting off these horrendous statements. I’ve already got my hands full with young people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities that put them in the behavioral and defiance categories. With Trump, my caseload of high school youth spouting off hate and racist comments is skyrocketing. 
– social worker/counselor at a very big high school near Portland, Oregon
god-damn-america

a very fine line

But I’m telling you, that I know it’s a very fine line, and lots of crazy luck, that divided my path from Paddock’s
-- Greg Palast, journalist and film maker
I-went-to-school-with-the-vegas-shooter

Friday, October 13, 2017

southern brain

The human brain can hold 10 times more memories than previously believed, according to a new study. The key to its amazing ability lies in synapses, the neural connections responsible for storing memories. Researchers from the Salk Institute found that each synapse can hold about 4.7 bits of information. This means that the human brain has a capacity of one petabyte, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. This is equivalent to approximately 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text.

Or, in the case of Bubba and Jerlene's brain capacity at the NASCAR track, the equivalent to every NASCAR driver that ever drove- their car number, color, sponsor decals, engine specs, tire specs; their number of wins/losses, lifetime standings, wrecks/with fire, wrecks/fatal; their pit crews/pit crew wives/who is sleeping with whom; their marriages/divorces/kids; their personality/media ranking/how many times they slept with the media; their bitter enemies/number of fight/deaths; their clothing/hat style; their preferred brand of chew; a detailed and comprehensive knowledge of NASCAR rules and regulations; detailed and comprehensive knowledge of every NASCAR track/parking lot/infield/location of all food and beer venues nationwide.......

man, I can feel my brain expanding right now
 
-- db desgnr

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

what war?

The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.

-- Robert McNamara

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts.  First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven.  Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.

Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with.  In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal.

Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism.  What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability.

-- Andrew Bacevich

how-we-learned-not-to-care-about-americas-wars

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

American shooter

Las Vegas, the crass and sterile US landscape on stilts and steroids, retails in empty sensation. Dominion of night where coruscating lights have scoured away the stars. Perpetual, meretricious come-ons. City of towering, shlock temples wherein what the US holds sacred is worshipped: legal larceny, the deification of empty sensation, and the transubstantiation of everything it touches, flesh and material, into fodder for exploitation. Kitsch über Alles. A 24/7 neon pentecost of mammon. 
A wilderness of the collective mind howling with hungry ghosts. Vengeful spirits…inundate the air of the US cult of death. The imprecatory prayers of millions of slaughtered Indians ride the western winds and are funnelled into the void of vapidity that is Las Vegas. 
A man, eaten hollow by alienation, his soul rancid with displaced rage, stands on a hotel balcony. The heft of his firearm is the only thing that feels tangible in his hollowness and amid the weightless sheen of the architecture of the city below. 
The life of an Iraqi, Libyan, Yemenian, Syrian, Palestinian et al. translates into nothing in the US American system of value. “The only thing those people understand is brutality. When we rain down death….that is the fate they demand.” 
The shooter’s mind roils. He acts as he has been conditioned to act. Now, he has achieved the power and control he has been denied. He is a military empire of one. His birthright as a US American has been fulfilled. God bless the USA. 
-- Phil Rockstroh

Start at 7:00 mark

Monday, October 9, 2017

the psychopathic economist

....one man, the economist James Buchanan, helped the super-rich to seize control of our system of government.

The assumption that we can keep societies open and free to everybody is going to have to stop. We are going to have to recognize that some people simply are not qualified and do not want to belong to a civil order. Until we begin to make discrimination along those lines, then I think we are going to be extremely vulnerable.

-- James M. Buchanan

Most people are normal people, in the same way as I was a normal person fifteen years ago. They have no idea about the depth of cynicism and downright evil to which their trusted leaders will sink in order to further enrich themselves (for they are invariably rich already), and/or seize more power. Most normal people like to sneer at their politicians and say they do not trust them, but the fact is that mostly they do – that’s why they keep on voting in a basically rigged electoral system. For all their bluster and affected contempt, they have no real inkling of just how depraved our political system is, nor how monstrous the people who control it.

-- John Andrews

the-merchant-of-menace

Sunday, October 8, 2017

so long Tom


I gots the late-capitalist blues again

You can see why Trump raced to paint Stephen Paddock as a whack-job. Like the billionaire thrill-killer Robert Durst, Paddock was someone Trump could relate to: he was a millionaire, a landlord, a habitué of casinos, and a man who enjoyed the company of foreign-born women. Trump would rather not confront one of the most pressing questions of the Vegas massacre: what happens when the one-percenters snap and go full-auto on crowds of middle class white people? Somewhere along the line Paddock had done a Colonel Kurtz in the American outback, holing up in a planned retirement community in the Nevada desert, adjacent to Bunkerville, the Masada of the gun-obsessed property rights fanatics. Will Carl Ichan be the next one to crack?

Perhaps Stephen Paddock is, in fact, a kind of new normal in late-capitalist America, where once anonymous men harboring long simmering fantasies of white-male impotence burst out of their quiet cul-de-sacs to settle their grievances with bump-stocked military-style assault weapons.

 - - - Jeffrey St. Clair

the-resident-evil

Friday, October 6, 2017

American Psychos

It started at the end of the fifteenth century. A cohort of brutal, sociopathic Europeans, fresh from the torture rooms of the Spanish Inquisition, and later from duty in the religious wars, arrived on American shores to kick butt. By 1610, they and their successors, by steel sword, axe, knife, and pike, biological pathogens and very occasionally by blunderbuss, had killed fifty million largely stone-age indigenous people.  In the northern temperate zone of this vast continent, some of those mass murderers became the founding patients of the Psych Ward; others followed, less blood thirsty perhaps, but they too quickly adopted the deadly imperial ethos established by those first conquerors. This is the institution in which we Americans now find ourselves immured.

-- John Davis

psych-ward

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Hive of Empire

“Believe!” is the mantra.  To do otherwise: blasphemy, betrayal, unthinkable.  A worker bee’s allegiance must be pledged to the Hive.  Mindlessly and in good faith we toil, oblivious to our own slavery.  Unaware that we’re nothing but resources to be harvested at the whim of the Banking Queen and her Wall Street/Government Drones.  We stand in unison, teary-eyed-proud when The Star Spangled Banner is sung; ignoring the glorification of rockets and bombs, deaf to the third stanza, which cheers the slaughter of runaway slaves during The War of 1812.  Dutifully we cast our sham-election votes.  Left duopoly/right duopoly; death or death, destruction or destruction, war or war, impervious in our sad, sorry, electro-lobotomized ignorance.  Heedless of the abrupt cliff at the end of the road.  Faces buried in our new iPhone 8s; happily texting, tweeting, mimicking the latest mindless chatter, necks bent over on 90 degree angles, spellcheck, google maps, Facebook, iTunes.  Unconcerned with other worker bees around us, for they are equally insulated from their surroundings.  Electro-lobotomized, exemplary and exceptional worker bees.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

they want you dead

These despicable slugs of what magnificent Twain called “America’s only native criminal class” are the chancred alley whores who have sold themselves and their function to the one blackbag operation that out-evils even the Israel Lobby: the NRA and its associated gangsters.
 -- Paul Edwards

the-long-night-of-machine-gun-murder

Sunday, October 1, 2017

white stripes

just Google it

Like the media barons of old, who alone could afford the economies of scale necessary to distribute newspapers through delivery trucks and corner shops, Google and Facebook are the monopolistic distribution platforms for new and social media. They have enormous power to decide what you will see and read, and they will use that power in their interests – not yours.

-- Jonathan Cook

googles-new-search-engine-bias

watchtower