Sunday, April 30, 2017

what we don't want to know about

At a time of growing tensions between nuclear powers......Washington has quietly upgraded its nuclear weapons arsenal to create, according to three leading American scientists, “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”
Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, [they] conclude that “Under the veil of an otherwise-legitimate warhead life-extension program,” the U.S. military has vastly expanded the “killing power” of its warheads such that it can “now destroy all of Russia’s ICBM silos.”

Guernica

Guernica represented the first instance of a new kind of war. The Blitz followed it, then Dresden and the fire-bombing of Tokyo. Then Hiroshima. The “saturation” bombing of Vietnam — a nation virtually defenseless from the air — left millions dead. Now we have watched Fallujah and Aleppo and Mosul while today the United States bombs seven countries simultaneously: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.
And so Guernica remains, alas, timely, timeless, universal.
    -- Cal Winslow

Saturday, April 29, 2017

There’s gold in them thar' geezers

“Golden years” has taken on a new meaning in light of modern capitalist medicine. My physical decline now provides a way for dynamic medical entrepreneurs to mobilize armies of attendants and “create jobs,” the highest social good in our dark times. Seniors like me have a new social role, stimulating a stagnant economy by plodding from visit to visit.

   --Paul C. Bermanzohn

monetizing-my-mouth

Friday, April 28, 2017

John Prine and Carrie Rodriguez

post-constitutional

“I would call the people who did this a bunch of chicken-shit assholes that are brutalizing the Constitution,” 
   -- Jay Leiderman, Barrett Brown’s lawyer

Award winning journalist Barrett Brown was re-arrested and taken into custody Thursday, the day before he was scheduled to be interviewed for a PBS documentary.

journalist-barrett-brown-taken-back-into-custody


unintended consequences you didn't know about

the Cassini space probe—containing more deadly plutonium [72.3 pounds of Plutonium-238] than had ever been used on a space device—was launched 20 years ago. And this past weekend—on Earth Day—the probe and its plutonium were sent crashing into Saturn.
Cassini didn’t have the propulsion power to get directly from Earth to its final destination of Saturn...So NASA [in 1999] had Cassini come hurtling back at Earth at 42,300 miles per hour and skim over the Earth’s atmosphere at 727 miles high. If there were a rocket misfire or miscalculation and the probe made what NASA in its “Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission” called an “inadvertent reentry,” it could have fallen into Earth’s atmosphere, disintegrating, and releasing plutonium. Then, said NASA in its statement, “Approximately 7 to 8 billion world population at a time … could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure.”

Thursday, April 27, 2017

fisherman

I wish I was a fisherman
Tumblin' on the seas
Far away from dry land
And its bitter memories


Wednesday, April 26, 2017

the French elections

The establishment got another burning in the French elections on Sunday, revealing again that there is no level of voter disgust that will not find some voice in the current range of elections.  The terror for pollsters and the establishment now is whether Marine Le Pen will realise her anti-Euro project and drag the French nation kicking and moaning into a new, even more fractious order. In her way will be the pro-European Union figure of Emmanuel Macron.

short-choices-the-french-presidential-elections

Cafe Domenico- the unconscious liberal

[traditional liberalism] “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks.  It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be a force in history.”
  -- Reinhold Niebuhr 

Fervor, enthusiasm, passion, fanaticism, zeal, ardor; all highly colored words that so easily can cause disturbance in the soul of the liberal committed to the workings of reason.  This is because the unconscious liberal has no contact with enthusiasm; deferential always to the civilizing voice which exacts enormous amounts of repression in order to “succeed’ in this world, ( i.e., to score high as possible on SAT’s and LSAT’s), these words today conjure mobs, lynchings, bacchanals, DWI’s; never the exalted condition of happiness, the reality of the gods that are constituent in the souls of men and women.

-- Kim Domenico

the-key-to-resistance

no skin in the game

is this what it has come down to? the dude in the yellow shirt checking his fucking phone.....

Monday, April 24, 2017

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone
But it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me

The U.S. defense budget is over three billion dollars a day. 
    -- John Steppling

puritan-jackals

Hipsters will save us

Those who write of environmental catastrophism (and it’s a rich tradition) and its shadow of economic collapse are limning a dystopian future in order that it might be avoided. Others, in the charming small town that lies eight miles distant from my perch in the urban wildland, and throughout the planet in places inflected with a hipster sensibility, practice, or at least consume, arts, crafts and produce that are informed by a sophisticated awareness of a potentially blighted tomorrow.

    -- John Davis

no-tomorrow-or-fashion-forward

Sunday, April 23, 2017

North Korea

Shut me off 'cause I go crazy with this planet in my hands
-- Monster Magnet 
It was the terrible devastation of [the] bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Korea’s relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.

By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living “a troglodyte existence.”In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang’s harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that “Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.” Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.

-- Paul Atwood

why-does-north-korea-want-nukes?

the swamp-draining populist

Americans “must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
    -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
Trump, it turns out, is not the worker-friendly populist he posed as while running for president.  He’s not the great anti-establishment outsider determined to return “power to the people” he claimed to be in his Inauguration Address.  His economic program amounts to neo-liberalism on steroids.
You don’t say! Gee, who knew? Anyone who’s paid serious attention to American electoral politics and policy over the course of history, that’s who.
-- Paul Street

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Carolyn Wonderland



smokin'

+ The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just breached the 410 parts per million barrier for the first time in 3 million years. Perhaps it will hit 420 next year and we can all smoke a bowl of Alaskan Thunder Fuck to celebrate…

--Jeffrey St. Clair

Friday, April 21, 2017

Trump goes global

In any event, the danger has passed. Trump, having assumed the mantle of Commander in Chief of Global Capitalism’s worldwide arbitrary killing machine (and with Cohn and the usual Goldman Sachs guys making sure he doesn’t go nuts and start screwing around with their ongoing efforts to transform the planet into one big happy, neo-feudalist theme park prison), can relax and focus on improving his golf swing. Whatever mess he makes of the country (i.e., the United States of America, the nominally sovereign nation state that most Americans believe they live in) will be tolerated by the global capitalist establishment, as they couldn’t care less about actual Americans, or Brits, or Greeks, or Syrians, or whoever. We’re all just a bunch of canon fodder, and servants, and deplorables, and losers, to them.
-- c. j. hopkins

the-president-formerly-known-as-hitler

Bill O'Reilly and his Loofah- 2004

 “You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I’d join you and you would have your back to me and I would take the little loofa thing”
-- Bill O'Reilly 
whatever-happened-to-the-loofah?

fine and good


Wednesday, April 19, 2017

fly united

We’re collectively being dragged down an airplane aisle, and we’re failing to act. A U.S.-Saudi war is threatening millions with starvation in Yemen. In Syria, the U.S. is risking a nuclear confrontation with Russia. The Pentagon is considering attacking North Korea. Baby steps toward slowing down the destruction if the earth’s climate are being reversed. Warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment, and presidential drone murder have been normalized.

-- David Swanson

dont-be-a-united-airlines-passenger


the Gate of Tears

The UN and the international media claim only 12,000 or so deaths in Yemen but this just doesn’t add up. If there have been 90,000 airstrikes (or one every 12 minutes, 123 a day for two years now) that means that only one Yemeni is killed for every 8 strikes? They must take us for idiots, or more likely, just to ignorant and brainwashed to know better.
    -- Thomas Mountain
The US has to protect its national interests in controlling the Bab Al Mandab chokepoint between the Red Sea and Indian Ocean through which passes the trade of the two biggest international partners, Europe and Asia.
“Mad Dog” Mattis is not going to sit by and lose control of the region. The US has a airbase in nearby Djibouti and most likely planning permanent bases in Yemen to aid the incoming onslaught of US military might.
us-moves-toward-major-intervention-in-yemen

todd snider

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Jeffrey Lewis

art of the nation

"The real news is the Trump phenomenon makes sense only as dark theater or evil art. This President has roots and experience not in the Law or the Military or Governing — but in the world of Finance and Entertainment. He’s a self-proclaimed master of the Art of the Deal. He made himself a TV star by his willingness and relish for firing people. He deals in superlatives; when he likes you you’re wonderful; when he doesn’t, you’re a worthless dog subject to the cruelest ridicule. The pivot from one to the other is “transactional” and can be virtually instantaneous. One minute he’s strangely sucking up to Vladimir Putin who can do no wrong and in the next he’s condemning him and bombing Russia’s close protectorate in the Middle East. For such a narcissistic Artist Of the Real, the nation itself becomes a personal canvas. Dawn Tweet storms and monstrous bombs become like concentrated daubs of cobalt blue or violently flung gobs and slashes of cadmium yellow onto the canvas of state."

art bull

Monday, April 17, 2017

it's Monday, stop complaining

No, you can’t really make this stuff up: Orthodox economists continue to tell us that the reason for ongoing economic stagnation is that wages and unemployment benefits are too high. Yes, that’s right. You haven’t suffered enough.

economists-say-wages-too-high

Saturday, April 15, 2017

War- the aphrodisiac

To give a kill order and then calmly sit down to eat a feast with the president of China is what the establishment wants from our rulers, even if they don’t quite trust them. Character, for them, is action without contemplation, a killer instinct. Justifications can come later, if at all. Nothing quite excites the press like a president who can break the rules and get away with it, a president who swaggers around like the meanest motherfucker on the planet and act like there’s no one to hold him to account. 

love at first strike




meanwhile, Iran

Iran’s presidential elections are fast approaching, and, as always, all the political groups, from the reactionary fundamentalists to the traditional conservatives, moderates and reformists, have been trying for months to position themselves for a strong run in May. But what is different this time around is the influence of the “deep state” ― the secret and semi-secret networks of military, security and intelligence forces that allegedly profess support for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ― which is setting itself up to decide the future president of Iran. The next few weeks are crucial.

iran-deep-state-rouhani-election

Friday, April 14, 2017

the rocket's red glare

Speaking of hollow displays of patriotism and the worship of state violence, how about those beautiful missile strikes? There’s nothing like a majestic missile soaring through the desert air! It’s a damn shame Brian Williams and Rachel Maddow weren’t on the receiving end. Fuck them, and every other yuppie-liberal who works at NBC. They are directly responsible for Trump’s victory, and everything that follows. Our billionaire-rapist-chickenhawk president who likes to eat chocolate cake while firing cruise missiles couldn’t have won the White House without the help of CNN and MSNBC. Always remember that.

In the meantime, who will the U.S. bomb next? And how long before the world is drawn into what could become the most devastating war in the history of humanity: WWIII? Those are the most important questions of the day.

-- Vincent Emanuele

let-the-good-times-roll

frontline Australia

As Australian political, military and intelligence establishments are integrated into the war plans of a growing American obsession — the shift of trading, banking and development power to the east —  Australia is making an enemy it never bargained for. A frontline has already been marked at Pine Gap, the spy base the CIA set up near Alice Springs in the 1960s, which targets America’s enemies, beckoning, of course, massive retaliation.

australia-beckons-a-war-with-china

Thursday, April 13, 2017

to the Moon!

“From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
-- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut
The Autonomous Space Agency Network (ASAN), a global network which promotes open source and ‘DIY’ space exploration, said it executed the first protest in near space on Wednesday....the agency tweeted a no nonsense message to President Trump alongside spectacular footage of the same message dangling from space.



Wednesday, April 12, 2017

the last century

runaway

back to the future

The U.S. had returned to fighting the last war. The one great moral force in the world was appalled at the release of low-grade, bath-tub variety Sarin gas and caused five dozen largely ineffective Tomahawk missiles to be lobbed at a remote air-field (back in service days later) and the Russian Bear’s nose to be tweaked. A masterstroke of nineteenth century diplomacy (by other means)!

Meanwhile, its Empire continued to be roiled in real and consequential ways by the blow-back of over one hundred and fifty years of the burning of fossil fuels, the sixth extinction, acidifying oceans and great clouds of turbid toxicity settling over Asia. And its profoundly reactionary leader, to no great surprise, had prepared his response: the nineteenth century be damned, his environmental policy would be guided by attitudes forged in the seventeenth: North America, nay the planet, the gift of the Great Provider to her chosen people – exists to be raped and pillaged at its God-given pleasure.

-- John Davis

the-waste-land

Sieg Heil

Ever since 9/11 and our subsequent invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, each time there is a major sporting event they spread out the giant American flag and trot out the honor guard to sing our national anthem. The real connivance is how they always show us American GIs dressed in camouflage,  as if they just came from the battlefield. Check out the Nuremberg rallies and see the torchlight parades and honor guards with their brown or black shirts and swastikas throughout. This mania to salute soldiers who had no business being sent to the Middle East to invade, kill, be killed and occupy foreign lands is sadly congruent to what transpired with Germany’s attacks and occupations of most of Europe. Yet, throughout history this is exactly what empires have done. Why should ours be any different?

-- Philip A. Faruggio

amerika-a-new-reich

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Nation

“In the Nation, there is law; in the Colony, there is only a concern with order. In the Nation, citizens call the police to protect them. In the Colony, subjects flee the police, who offer the opposite of protection. In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands. In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty.”  

-- Chris Hayes

a-colony-in-a-nation

Comment

It has come to our attention here at GeezerNation that our settings for Comments were preventing some commenters from actually posting comments, which could be construed to be counter-productive and not indicative of our "open comment" policy. Needless to say, Bob our Admin/IT director has addressed the issues and hopefully resolved them, maybe.
    -- ed.

Fox the News

I’ve never worked at Fox. But I used to spend enough time there to gain insight into a dysfunctional organization.
This was during the years immediately following 9/11. George W. Bush and his wars were popular, especially with Fox viewers. And I went after Bush more aggressively than anyone else. So they were constantly begging me to come on as a liberal punching bag.
-- Ted Rall

Monday, April 10, 2017

the baby killers

We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to make public opinion subservient to their murderous ends.
—Albert Einstein, 1934
While Ambassador Haley and President Trump are wringing their hands over the truly tragic slaughter of innocents in Syria, one wonders how they responded to news that in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul just a few short weeks ago, on March 17, hundreds of innocent civilians perished when their homes were bombed by U.S.-led air strikes against Isis strongholds in the city........I don’t recall seeing Ambassador Haley holding up.....images of grief-stricken Iraqi parents weeping over the bodies of their children killed in the strike. Could their apparent indifference to the fate of these children be due to the cause of death? Instead of being the victims of the Syrian government’s alleged use of poison gas, they died from American bombs, blessed by God and the Almighty’s second-in-command, the U.S. Joints Chief of Staff. I guess that crucial difference — the type of weapons used and the side that used them — determines who is and who isn’t worthy of our most righteous indignation....

you better wake up

db desgnr approves this video. 

Thanx to Tom Beach at WFCF-88Five-FM


Sunday, April 9, 2017

America the Beautiful- please bend over

JACK
I don’t understand. It’s yes or no. A yes or no question. It isn't some epistemological 
quandary. Either you packed your suitcase, or someone else did. And that is that. Oh but that is not that. Because in your mind you packed your suitcase yourself. In your mind, you didn't do anything wrong. You believe that, don't you? Yes. You do. And you believe that it is your right to believe that. You believe it's your right to believe anything you want. You believe it is your right to do anything you want. But in fact, Mr. Smith, it is not your right to believe and to do any thing you want. See, there are rules. And there are rules for a reason. Do you want to live in a world without rules?

JOE
No.

JACK
In a state of total anarchy?


KAY
No.

JACK
No. I didn't think so. So how about you get with the fucking program. This country is in a state of war. War. To defend your way of life. So you can go home to your little townhouse on Garfield fucking Place or wherever. So that you can hop on a fucking airplane and go shopping with your fucking wife in Paris. So your daughter can get high with her Black Bloc friends. Who do you think you are dealing with? Do we look like airport rent-a-cops to you? We are the fucking United States of fucking America you fucking idiots! Do you like your lives? Your comfortable lives? Well, guess what, folks. We make them possible. We keep the goddamn economy from collapsing. We keep you safe from the criminals and terrorists. Do you know how we do it? We do it with guns. And bombs. And missiles. And knives. And sticks. We fucking kill people. We kill them for you. Is it convenient for you to believe otherwise? Well, guess what? Fuck what's convenient for you. Fifty goddamn years you were to free to believe any fucking thing you wanted. We didn't care. It didn't bother us. We didn't care if you believed in Martians. But you know what, folks? Now we care. It matters to us now, what you believe. The United States of America is at war. It is World War fucking Four, people. And World War Four is for all the marbles. It's one big world now, in case you missed that. One big system. And we fucking run it. And guess what? We intend to continue running it. Now is that is alright with you, if we do that? 

america-the-beautiful

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Cafe Domenico- the work to be taken up

Conscientious disobedience coming from one’s self-acknowledged dignity as a human being, is a very different act than that of partisan fighting over the Russians influencing our politics, absorbing as that is, or identity politics that depends for its energy on the victim condition of the individual or group.  It suggests that the important and necessary work for men and women is to locate our innate righteousness so we can turn to creating a society “we can willingly join.”
This is the work to be taken up once we have turned our servile, prostrate will away from its habitual customary deference to the given standards of “good behavior,” which, after all, are really no more demanding than do your job, don’t make waves, collect your salary and benefits, buy stuff, let your pesky passion be satisfied with deciding between android vs iphone, or Wall St.-approved Democrat vs. Wall St.-approved Republican.
-- Kim Domenico  

Friday, April 7, 2017

escalation

....the lack of short-term memory in Washington is staggering to behold. Fourteen years after the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, which only succeeded in opening the gates of hell out of which ISIS and other Salafi-jihadi groups emerged, and six years after turning Libya into a failed state, in the process sparking a refugees crisis of biblical proportions, here we have yet another act of aggression against a sovereign state in the Middle East by the US.

-- John Wight


airstrikes-without-justice

Thursday, April 6, 2017

the baby killers

“It crossed a lot of lines with me. When you kill innocent children – innocent babies – with chemical gas… that goes beyond red lines,” 
    -- Donald Trump
Is it a crime for states to slaughter innocent, defenseless people with savage weaponry, or is it not? Then condemn it, no matter who does it. Or is it only a crime if one of our “designated enemies” does it? Are the murdered children in Yemen less precious -- or less dead -- than the children in Syria? Where are the calls to "do something" to stop the criminal states killing children in Yemen? Instead we see liberal praise for Trump for "finally talking sense" when he threatens to escalate a war that the US and other nations have been cynically stoking for years.
    -- Chris Floyd
sympathy-for-the-devil


Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Gil Scott-Heron

Scott-Heron covered the waterfront: he dealt with race, class, gender, and the environment. “We Almost Lost Detroit” had nothing to do with a race riot.  It was about nuclear power. It was based on a 1975 book by John G. Fuller, which presented a history of Fermi 1, America’s first commercial breeder reactor, with an emphasis on the 1966 partial nuclear meltdown. In the song Scott-Heron raised the question, “…and what would Karen Silkwood say if she was still alive?”
gil-scott-heron-and-the-black-radical-tradition


Tuesday, April 4, 2017

April 4, 1967

 50 years; not much progress......
“I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.....We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
    -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
fifty-years-on 
50-years-later

stone love

Monday, April 3, 2017

wake up, America!

....pigs here in America and pigs around the world pose an existential threat to our national security, our freedoms, our values, all that we hold dear.
As soon as they master the technology, which in theory they can.
And when pigs can fly, we will face a frightening danger.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

terminal velocity

The insanity is how much we are taking and subjugating our wills to; how far we allow the perpetrators to go into our own heads until we believe suicidal walking is an option; and how willing we are to move closer and closer to the edge of the cliff that capitalism has carved out from which the world to jump off. The insanity is the lack of rebellion, the lack of mouthing off to the controllers and the Little Eichmanns; the insanity is the de-education, the re-education by/for/through the controllers. The real madness is our lack of anger and our collective lack of will to take on the ignorance that is at the heart of consumer-predatory-extractive Capitalism. For those of us who do, we are lone actors, men and women lost of tribe, hitting the horizon at terminal velocity speed.
    -- Paul Haeder

the-edge-of-the-cliff

war pigs

war pigs

Saturday, April 1, 2017

the death of the EPA

The EPA has long been viewed by the corporate right as a kind of rogue cop, prone to making uninvited no-knock raids on the mephitic operations of oil, coal and chemical companies. Protecting the environment is fine, as long as it doesn’t take a bite out of the bottom line. By the late 1970s, environmental regulations were enforced, often feebly, yet the EPA began to constrain the profits of the petro-chemical industry. This modest interference in the toxic trade would not be tolerated. The Agency’s days have been numbered ever since.
-- Jeffrey St. Clair, editor, CounterPunch
a-pruitt-runs-through-it

watchtower