Friday, March 31, 2017

time's arrow


swamp rats

A party of swamp rats from the Louisiana bayou filed a class action lawsuit today against President Donald Trump, saying that his repeated vow to “drain the swamp” was a libel against legitimate swamp dwellers. 

rats!

the grey area

Overton window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas the public will accept.
You have to be willing to look at some dead babies being pulled out of rubble if you’re going to be ok with drone strikes. The horrors we champion in nationalistic fits of pride are killing innocents in droves, we are launching attacks and delivering misery in the middle east to the faceless nameless hordes which resemble a slow moving genocide over the last several decades. Yet, in the hazy shade of grey the status quo positions remain salient because the middle just drifted off into another digital alternate reality, too lazy to care about what their tax dollars are supporting. 

myth-political-grey-area

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

good soldier Trump

“It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world [sexually transmitted diseases], it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider.....You know, if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam, we have our own Vietnam—it’s called the dating game.”

-- Donald Trump

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Fuck you, Dick!

“There’s not any argument at this stage that somehow the election of President Trump was not legitimate, but there’s no question that there was a very serious effort made by Mr. Putin and his government, his organization, to interfere in major ways with our basic, fundamental democratic processes. In some quarters, that would be considered an act of war.”
-- Dick Cheney, former Vice-President

dick-cheney-act-of-war

steve earle....

'67


Monday, March 27, 2017

Apocalypse Now, Redux

At Auschwitz, 1.1 million people were murdered. In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, those killed were four times higher than that concentration camp. That reality cannot be processed by anyone who thinks the United States is the greatest country in the world. 
-- Mike Hastie
insane-truths

Duty

“We have a right to sit wherever we want to sit, and we have a duty to do so.“
-- Martin Luther King, Jr

More than ever, as Americans facing the nightmarish current reality, we need to include with our passion for defending rights the knowledge of our duty to be human beings, to serve a reality larger than the one that comforts the ego,  the deeper reality worthy of human beings and human becoming.  Rights is a popular word; duty, except among Marines and Boy Scouts, is not. But it is time, aside from defending victims,  we rallied around something more inclusive, more meaningful and more visionary than rights exclusively,  that comes from and speaks to the nobility, dignity, and strength inherent in whole human beings. 
-- Kim Domenico
 duty

Saturday, March 25, 2017

nuke porn

America- not insane?

Imagine the subject [American citizen] strapped in a chair like Alex was in Clockwork Orange, barraged with images of frightening terrorists until his mind accepts them as “the enemy,” at which point “the enemy” is immediately switched, and now it’s Hitler that is coming to get him, which, after a time, he comes to accept (and forgets the former terrorist “enemy”), at which point “the enemy” is switched once again, and now it’s Putin and the Russians who are after him. And so on … until his mind just snaps and surrenders to whatever official “reality” is being fed into it any given day. At which point you have rendered the subject a totally compliant, scramble-headed, functionally psychotic member of society, whose attention span is about twenty seconds, and whose brain you can fill full of fancy pharmaceuticals to keep it from completely melting down in response to the stress of the cognitive dissonance that it has to deal with on a daily basis.

-- C. J. Hopkins

united-states-of-cognitive-dissonance


Friday, March 24, 2017

the music of Bannon!

Over the last few weeks, I have watched White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s grim oeuvre of nine documentaries. I hesitate to call them films since in their visual style they would more accurately be classified as extended political commercials, some running to nearly two deadly hours.  That these affairs are better viewed as advertisements is confirmed by the name of the production company: Citizens United.

Across this deranged corpus the intent of Bannon’s musical choices remains unchanged: frighten and dismay. Thus we hear ominous, creeping strings above ponderous, portentous bass notes when Bannon’s latest prophet, Duck Commander Phil Robertson (The Torchbearer, 2016) appears resplendent in full biblical beard and priestly camo-headband, journeying across the globe to reveal God’s truths from his own Louisiana swamp to the Acropolis and Auschwitz.

-- David Yearsley

ear-of-darkness-the-scores-of-steve-bannons-films


Thursday, March 23, 2017

G A T T A C A

The Rockefeller Foundation had become interested in DNA because its trustees feared a Bolshevik-style revolution. Intense public resentment had already compelled the break-up of their Standard oil Company in 1911; so the Foundation sought ways, said trustee Harry Pratt Judson in 1913, to “reinforce the police power of the state”. They intended to find the ultimate key to human behaviour which would allow the resentful and envious mobs to be effectively managed.
The Foundation had two strategies for management that were distinct but complementary: to control human behaviour at the level of social structures: family, work and emotions, which the Foundation referred to by names such as “psychobiology”; and to control human behaviour at the level of molecules. 
-- Johnathan Latham

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

national shame

It is now March 16, 2017, forty-nine years after the My Lai Massacre. Since the end of World War II, my lifetime, as I am now 72, the United States has bombed 30 countries. The atrocities have never stopped. What happened at My Lai is extremely important to understand, because atrocities during the war were U.S. Policies. My Lai is a metaphor for the entire Vietnam War. My Lai was NEVER an aberration. 

-- Mike Hastie

my-lai-massacre-49-years-later

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

not fair, Norway!

With apparently nothing more challenging to do with its time, the UN, since 2012, has been publishing an annual list of the happiest countries in the world.....The 2017 top ten countries, all bunched closely together, are:  Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, and (tied) Australia and Sweden.  The U.S. is ranked #14, which, given that Donald Trump is president, and Betty DeVos is Secretary of Education, seems outlandishly high. 

why-are-norwegians-so-happy?

remember this

This is the face of 21st century feudal society; bickering capitalist tribes vie for world power, while in the shimmering heat of the techno-desert King Mohammed bin Salman plots our death.

not 1933, just worse

By June 1933, there were 2 million Brownshirts, twenty times the size of the German army, and these “brown-shirted gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick…. Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm-trooper even for cold-blooded murder.”

July 14 1933, all other political parties were prohibited, and the fascists could confiscate the property of any organization it considered anti-Nazi and could summarily revoke anyone’s citizenship.

That was fascism. Here, a great number of liberal-leftists call Trump a new Hitler, some even claiming that we live under a fascist regime. Yet Trump does not possess his own party, nor an armed fascist militia obedient to him, let alone one of hundreds of thousands. Trump has not thrown out the Bill of Rights, wiped out the AFL-CIO, sent his political opponents to concentration camps. He can’t even shut down Saturday Night Live. Trump is a billionaire racist, sexist war-monger out to salvage the US corporate empire, nothing more, nothing less. 
-- Stansfield Smith
first-two-months-in-power-hitler-vs-trump

Sunday, March 19, 2017

the door

....we must somehow recapture the mythic in our lives, because – as storytellers have been trying to warn us since the dawn of the Machine Age – without it, without stories and daily rituals that reconnect us to the regenerative living world, we are at risk of irreversible degradation: of becoming completely sealed off, emptied out and meaning-free beings. As all other social ways are blocked, and we head down the conveniently provided and thus far highly profitable chute towards a fully mechanized existence.

It is the end game of having for a thousand generations seen the living world as a battlefield: first it was humans, as prey turned alpha predator, against the other species; then tribe against tribe, and finally each against all. Thus the only door to safety from the forces we have unleashed is the door to the machine – a thing we invented ingenuously perhaps, with the intention of relieving ourselves of hard physical labor – but ultimately a nonliving thing that exists to neutralize and supplant the contingencies of the living world. 

the-door

from Cafe Domenico - Utica, NY

Having had our reality reduced to the material, physical and empirically verifiable, we have been left to grope our way around in a world completely unlike the world of our ancestors, which always had been animated and sustained by a larger, invisible world existing behind this one.
-- Kim Domenico
the-fear-of-consciousness-and-the-rise-of-the-buffoon

Saturday, March 18, 2017

the low decades

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
-- W. H. Auden

George Scialabba’s Low Dishonest Decades: Essays and Reviews 1980-2015.....the book stops a year before Donald Trump’s election....there is no better way to understand this low, dishonest president than by reading Scialabba’s take on those who paved the way for him, especially Ronald Reagan. While I certainly understand how surprised some Americans are by Donald Trump’s awfulness, as if he was some sort of historical deus ex machina, I cannot escape a sense of déjà vu as if the years 1981-1989 were being replayed. Are we being forced to endure horrible reactionary presidents for all of eternity like Bill Murray enduring Groundhog’s Day? God help us.

scialabba-for-the-defense


don't want to live in america no more

Friday, March 17, 2017

school of rock

look on the bright side

.....count me out of the obsessive anti-Trump trend. Sure, he’s nasty. But everyone in that system is. Obama was a war-mongering Uncle Tom and Hillary would have been worse. But count me in on the ongoing resistance against Patriarchy, a cause that’s been vital for millennia and isn’t about to quit now.
-- Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

the President really, really wants you to die

The Trump regime has defended its plan to cut the “Meals on Wheels” program by saying it “doesn’t show any results.”....what are the only “results” produced by not delivering meals to the sick and shut-in who can’t provide for themselves? THEY WILL DIE.....Trump and his allies believe in a biologically based “nation” led by “genetically superior leaders.” By their own words, that is what they are seeking to create. But how can you make a nation “great again” with so much “inferior” material out there? Why, you cull the herd, you cut off the “weak” and the “losers” and let them wither away and die.

the-trump/bannon-war-for-biological-nationhood

Hannah Arendt

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

the President wants you to die

Do the math:

the average monthly Social Security awarded to Americans in November 2015 was $1,363.23


The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers the following information on average elderly expenses:
* Housing costs average $1294 a month.
* Transportation costs average $571 a month
* Food costs average $459 a month
* Entertainment averages $205 a month

* Personal insurance averages $228 a month 
* Health care costs average $480 a month

That all totals $3237



Thursday, March 16, 2017

Trump at Sea

“We will give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing -- you know what that is?  Win!  Win!  We’re going to start winning again.”
-- President Donald Trump
Victory at Sea remains a cinematic expression of our war-making past. If you really want to understand President Trump’s strategic mindset (such as it is), get your hands on a DVD of the series and watch it. But let’s pray it doesn’t turn out to provide a blueprint for a deeply militarized trip down memory lane to the 1950s and a world of future combat operations no one should want to imagine, no less plan for. 

winning_world_war_II_in_the_twenty-first_century

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

build this!

“We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals…. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”
— President Donald Trump 

[Trump's] objective is to allow wealthy corporations to buy public assets at firesale prices so they can turn them into profit-generating enterprises. That’s it in a nutshell......none of this has anything to do with rebuilding America’s dilapidated infrastructure or even revving up GDP. That’s just public relations bunkum. What’s really going on is a massive looting operation organized and executed under the watchful eye of Donald Trump, Robber Baron-in-Chief......Infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg. Once these kleptomaniacs hit their stride, they’re going to cut through Washington like locusts through a corn field. Bet on it.
-- Mike Whitney

trumps-infrastructure-boondoggle

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

party on!


The Netherlands has a lot of political parties on the ballot, which is solid-gold guaranteed party action. The Netherlands does it differently for sure. They allow anybody to run for parliament (a membership to a political party is required), with almost no rules to start a political party. The parliament has only 150 seats yet 81 parties intended to be part of the general elections in 2017. Only 31 parties registered for the elections and 28 parties made it to the ballot.

By comparison, the 2 party system in the United States is generally B-O-R-I-N-G; the only saving grace to our 2016 election was the 'Trump and the Clown Posse' show.

One of the 28 parties on the ballot is the Niet Stemmers (not Voters) party. If elected, the party will simply leave its seats vacant. ‘No longer will their votes go to other parties; from now on the non-voters will get their own seats’.


What a great country!

dutch-election-six-first-time-parties

eyes wide shut

The life expectancy of a homeless person is 50 years
    by Gary Lindorff
   
A crow will never peck out the eyes of another crow.
Perhaps that is why they live longer than men.
(Paraphrase from a poem by Shukrulla.)


I am a crow.
Shukrulla is right,
I would never peck out the eyes of another.
We fight each other and sometimes we are rough
But mostly we stick to language.
“Hey, Garbage Wing, can’t you share?
You be the lookout for a change, I’ll work the field!”


Like that.


But we watch some of you combing the dumps
To feed your families
And we watch some of you living high above each other
In gleaming towers with blue water on every floor
That you rarely go in and never drink
But lounge beside in the sun
Covering your eyes with dark scales,
Blaring annoying sounds that seem to make you happy.


Like that.


Caw!
Caw!
Caw!


What am I saying?
I am saying,
We know you
Better than you know yourselves.
We have watched you very closely
For a very long time!

You should watch us
And learn something.
I will never peck out the eye of my kin!
And that includes every crow everywhere.
We are one people, one nation.


Caw!
Caw!
Caw!


What am I saying now?
You haven’t learned very much
With your big heads.
No, you haven’t learned a thing.


I am saying:
You should take turns
Being the lookout and working the field
And take care of each other.
Listen to each other,
And stop pecking out each other’s eyes!

Sunday, March 12, 2017

EPA hat

It’s difficult to imagine a more destructive choice for the health of Americans, the avoidance of dangerous climate change, and the health of the American economy than Scott Pruitt as head of EPA. Mr. Pruitt’s denial of the basic science behind climate change makes him as unfit for the office of EPA administrator as an astrologer would be for head of NASA.
-- Dr. Jeff Masters, Weather Underground
epa-chief-denies-basic-climate-science

the Kingdom

Effective from 30 December, 2016, the Investigatory Powers Act(IPA), more commonly known as the “Snoopers’ Charter,” has been in full force and this means the end of privacy for those living in the United Kingdom.  Now the British state has  realised a totalitarian-style surveillance apparatus which is arguably the most intrusive system found within any democracy throughout history. Today the British state has the power to arbitrarily monitor, intercept, record, and even hack the communications and Internet use of the entire population. 
-- Julian Vigo
the-snoopers-charter

Friday, March 10, 2017

be-here-now

You will see where I am going with this. As a species, Homo sapiens could well be on its last upright legs.  That means you.  It means me. It means our beloved children and everyone we hold dear. And it is quite likely that another round of chemo (e.g., the Paris Agreement) will forestall the inevitable only slightly.
-- Elizabeth West 
dont-get-distracted-by-the-sideshow

Thursday, March 9, 2017

total screen

What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.  
-- Jean Baudrillard
The Trump presidency is the ultimate larger-than-life – for many the only – show on earth. It's open to debate whether the vicious civil war currently in effect between Team Trump and powerful deep state factions enmeshed with the neocon/neoliberalcon galaxy is just shadowplay; or whether this is the real deal underlining the eventual crash and burn of the American Empire.That's all too predictable, when a reality TV star becomes president. When "post-truth" pseudo and/or non-events on screen 24/7 make a mockery of "reality." When the screen determines the perception of truth; if an "event" is not on show, it never happened.

-- Pepe Escobar
total-screen-how-baudrillard-anticipated-trump

ticking bomb

Wednesday, March 8, 2017

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It speaks volumes the mainstream and metastasized press bends over to this slob Trump or the slick lying Obama or the Carousing Clinton or minor league W or the cold as stone Bush Sr., or Ray-gun . . . . This country’s nationalism and pro-military and pro-Anything in/by/from/for the USA mental illness, it is the reason we spend trillions on defense (sic — offense), from arms to aircraft, from surveillance to digital data mining, giveaways to Israel and Saudi Arabia, every dime is in multiple conduits to the controllers, to the elites, the money changers, oh those chosen few, all that, in this country, where the Democrats applaud the lies of Trump, where they are afraid, truly the party of war-making and fearful knee-jerking. These suits and slacks people are some of the most bizarre species on earth. Clap-clap-clap like trained Sea World lobotomized aquatic mammals.

We bomb, spray, drone, pollute, electrocute, incinerate, nuke, and contaminate the world for the shekel, for the greenback, as our veins and heart move oil from one vital organ to the next. The offal of the world is our propaganda, the sell-outs made every nanosecond, the sucker born every mega second, and the lies and duplicity and braying nationalism and red-white-blue-apple-pie great waves of grain fairytales that get rewrapped in new high-tech shrouds of the lying class that as a country we have now become.

Death is life, truth is lies, Trump is a Man, Americans are Saviors.

WAR IS PEACE . . .FREEDOM IS SLAVERY . . .  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
 

   -- Paul Haeder

Abominablecare

So Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell stood up yesterday, in their latest act of unbridled arrogance and complete disregard for the American people, and said they are going to replace Obamacare with a plan that will increase choice for health care “consumers” and at the same time increase affordability. (Trump has promised that he would provide  “insurance for everybody”.)
Of course they were lying.
the-big-lie-about-health-care

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Secretary of Stupification

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has little interest in public education as a stabilizing force that enriches society and contributes to civic knowledge and the development of critical thinking.
DeVos and other neoliberals in the Democratic and Republican parties would have Americans believe that eradication of welfare benefits, including public schools, school lunches, food stamps, public housing, and other programs, is driven by an effort to empower “the people.” But the welfare state’s destruction would merely result in the reintroduction of a neo-feudalistic system in America, in which the poor are forced to indenture themselves to a corporate aristocratic class (even more so than now) to survive. The return of a Dickensian system of social and economic relations may be a high priority for DeVos and her ilk, but Americans should recoil in horror at just how radical this “reform” agenda is.
-- Anthony DiMaggio
devos-and-the-destruction-of-the-welfare-state

Comments section

“have you ever fucked a nigger?”
-- Donald Trump, according to the father of a friend of actor Don Cheadle 
 I don’t avail myself of Twitter, or Facebook, but on two occasions I’ve written pieces for websites that elicited a tremendous amount of hate mail.  Oddly enough, one of them was a piece bemoaning—of all things–the way that Christina Aguilera sings; the other was about Caitlin Jenner’s political beliefs. These two ventures into the sizzling cauldron of red-hot internet hatred were enough to keep me off social media for the rest of my life.  But—I suppose like most people–I have an abiding fascination with the depths of loathing in the Comments sections underneath controversial posts.  And in the case of Don Cheadle’s Trump story these comments reached a pitch of such frenzy that it’s hard to imagine how it could get any uglier…although we know it will; we take it on faith.
-- John Eskow

the-pornography-of-internet-comments

Monday, March 6, 2017

I'm the Slime

rootin' for Putin

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
          -- D.H. Lawrence

".....for most Americans, woefully ignorant of history and geography, and mostly shockingly incurious overall, they’re education stems primarily from TV and film. And Hollywood endlessly produces narratives of CIA and military virtue. And of course police heroism. Take for example the new spin off Blacklist: Redemption, in which in episode two our friendly illegal and covert black ops travel to Turkmenistan, or maybe it was Kazakhstan, who knows, but either way this country is portrayed as a nation of bearded thugs, stupid, comically inept and ignorant, and yet the very premise of such clandestine interference in a sovereign nation is never questioned. Dozens are killed, but hey, they have beards and represent that great ‘other’ that America sees as disposable, much as most of white America sees the poor, especially black and brown poor, as disposable. The anti Russian theme is simply the latest installment in the great genocidal founding principles of this slave owning nation."

-- John Steppling

have-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been-a-secret-agent-of-vladimir-putin?

Sunday, March 5, 2017

across the universe

consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it. In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local. 
quantum theory consciousness
thanx to T. Fulford

report from Turkey

“I speak to Europe now: You will soon be drowning in the water that you are now drinking. You will pay for what you are doing to Syria and to other countries. It is entirely your fault, Europe! It is entirely your fault the West! One day, true leaders of the world will come, and they’ll cut off all the gas and petrol supplies to you, and you’ll find yourself in even deeper shit the one into which you threw this part of the world! You’ll have to burn your designer clothes and shoes, just to stay warm. You forgot, but you will soon be reminded, Europe: we are all human beings!
http://journal-neo.org/2017/02/25/turkey-and-syria-blood-tears-and-walls/
-- Mustafa Goren
turkey-and-syria-blood-tears-and-walls


Friday, March 3, 2017

stats

We here at GeezerNation pay absolutely no attention to statistics, or anything else for that matter except Donald Trump.......never-the-less, it has come to our attention that a recent downward trend in blog viewing activities has developed.

Our blog friends in France remain our faithful and stalwart viewers, but dare I say it, our viewership in the good ol' USA remains pathetic and has been pathetic for quite some time.

Todd Snider no doubt understands.....



in case you missed it

After struggling mightily with whether or not to tune in, I was able to overcome my fears and convince myself to sit down in the privacy of my den and watch President Trump present his first address to the U.S. Congress.  What fears?  Well, maybe not quite the same fears that motivated early Christians to outlaw dancing as the “work of the Devil,” but in that general ballpark.
-- David Macaray
trumps-speech-to-congress

Thursday, March 2, 2017

public service announcement



report from Tehran

Every time I’m back in Tehran I’m impressed with the surprising number of open avenues for serious intellectual discussion. I was constantly reminded of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, the son of a mullah born in poor south Tehran who later translated Sartre and Camus and wrote the seminal Westoxification (1962).
He spent the summer of 1965 at Harvard seminars organized by Henry Kissinger and “supported” by the CIA. He pivoted to Shi’ism only toward the end of his life. It was his analysis that paved the way for sociologist Ali Shariati to cross-pollinate anti-colonialism with the Shi’ite concept of resistance against injustice and produce a revolutionary ideology capable of politicizing the Iranian middle classes, leading to the Islamic Revolution.
-- Pepe Escobar 
letter-tehran

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

bowling for politicians

It was Oops bowling alley and bar in Pace, just over the bay from Pensacola in the Florida panhandle’s 1st congressional district, and freshman representative Matt Gaetz was making his final stop in a day of public meetings on February 23. The others had been in smaller, more dignified settings and even there Gaetz, like his colleagues across the country, had faced some sharp questions from chanting, sign-wielding protesters. But this site was cavernous, loud and beery. Several hundred people, none of them wearing business attire like their representative, jammed into an eating area between pool tables and the bar. Gaetz was the menu.
   -- David Underhill 

watchtower