Saturday, December 30, 2017

Baby Boomers are coming to get you!

There’s even now a tendency in some corners of what passes for a left to turn to generational shaming and hate.  The real problem, I have been told in all seriousness, is Baby Boomers – that is, all U.S.-Americans born between 1946 and 1964.  This “Generation of Sociopaths” (the openly insane title of a book, penned by a Millennial venture capitalist, that purveys contempt for all those loathsome creatures who had the audacity to be delivered from their mother’s wombs in post-World War II America) is accused of looting the commons, perverting democracy, generating savage inequality, ruining the environment and more, all in service to it endless pursuit of narcissistic self-glorification. (My sincere apologies.  I was born in 1958).
     -- Paul Street

generational-divide-and-rule


Friday, December 29, 2017

unraveling

The externalities of a pillaged, ravaged planet, billions in poverty, and diminished resource base are not taken into account by mainstream economics. If rare earth minerals and metals were properly accounted for, a car would likely cost six figures, and a computer five figures. This would be an unobtainable and untenable situation for the average middle-class American, as only the rich could afford such luxuries, and thus, the majoritarian tyranny of our narcissistic and ahistorical culture continues.
    -- William Hawes

the-great-unraveling-decoding-modernity

Monday, December 25, 2017

word- merry christmas

Losing the capacity to express oneself may be a small price to pay for the societal benefits obtained by preventing wholesale use of dangerous words. But it does mean that the vocabulary you have acquired over a lifetime will soon be obsolete. You will be denied the use of many of your most cherished descriptors. Whole phrases may eventually be banned. It might be wise, therefore, to consider using your most powerful, poignant, defiant, descriptive or critical words very soon, while you still can. Otherwise those words could end up like stranded assets, left in the mind to rot.
    -- Paul Dean

at-a-loss-for-words

Sunday, December 24, 2017

christian nation

The biggest problem with the Republican tax plan has nothing to do with taxes.


The most insidious part of the GOP tax bill is a provision pushed for by the religious right for the past 25 years. Contained in this small section of the bill is a provision that will set the country on the road to Theocracy.

Saturday, December 23, 2017

ring of fire

The Thomas fire has now swept through territory once lightly populated with Chumash Indians who regularly burned their food-gathering lands. As Kat Anderson has shown in Tending the WildNative American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources, 2006, local Indians managed their wild food resources by burning the land to encourage their growth and to create clearings in which they could better hunt game. While the coastal Chumash relied heavily on sea food, inland groups harvested acorns as their staple supplemented with chia seeds, the fruits of the holly leafed cherry and small game. The untouched wilderness eulogized by John Muir was in fact a carefully managed environment, with swathes of chaparral charred in controlled burns where the plants had long co-evolved with regenerative lightning-sparked conflagrations.
    -- John Davis
urbanwildland/ring-of-fire

Friday, December 22, 2017

by the numbers

3.  Mandates automatic Medicare cuts of at least $25 billion in 2018 and $400 billion over 10 yearsIn effect, seniors will pay for tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy as automatic spending cuts are triggered because the tax cuts add $1.5 trillion to the national debt. Automatic cuts altogether will total $136 billion in 2018 and include reductions in agriculture subsidies, student loans, military retirement and more. [Congressional Budget Office (CBO)]

Thursday, December 21, 2017

the water will come

New York City is a sea level rise hot spot, with sea levels rising there 50% faster than the global average, due to subsidence of the ground and ocean current dynamics. With 72,000 buildings worth over $129 billion currently standing in flood zones, it is good that The Big Apple is one of the most proactive cities in the world when it comes to sea level rise adaptation. In response to the $19 billion in flood damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York City is scheduled to break ground in 2019 on a $750 million, ten-foot high flood wall along the east side of Manhattan, part of a $3 billion barrier system informally called the “Big U”, designed to protect lower Manhattan from storm surges.
water-will-come-sea-level-rise

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

get shopping!

...as Luther said, the Devil (guilt) is lord of this world….secular ‘rationalism’ and liberal Protestantism deny the existence of the Devil (guilt). Their denial makes no difference to the economy, which remains driven by the sense of guilt; or rather, it makes this difference, that the economy is more uncontrollably driven by the sense of guilt because the problem of guilt is repressed by denial into the unconscious.
     -- Norman O. Brown

That is why so many people will be having a special guest for Christmas.  Possessed by their possessions, while disbelieving in Luther’s Satan, the American people are in the process of bringing Satan home for the holidays.  Unseen but present, he will have a place of honor at Christmas dinner tables throughout the land.  But don’t worry, he has a parsimonious appetite and just nibbles.  My sources tell me that he likes turkey and ham, but isn’t too keen on vegetarian fare, and forget vegan.  Yet I am told he has a ravenous appetite for presents, so get shopping.  I hope my sources are reliable, but I never disclose them.  You can always get him an Amazon gift card. 
         -- Edward Curtin

Joe Bageant

Mainly though, aware Americans are watching and waiting for someone else to make an important move. Guts are nonexistent in Americans these days, programmed out of us during the posh captivity of the "cheap oil fiesta" that drove our grotesque and brief civilization. Still, if ever there were a time to show some guts, it's now. Not by protesting ­which has become a security state supervised liberal pussy sport -- but by giving up the material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those leftie and alternative books from Amazon -- sitting on our asses reading and drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of inaction and consumerism. It's the only real act of protest possible by the prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you'll be just one iPodless, and car-less little guy throwing a single stone at the United States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you're still capable of any kind of life after the stellazine mind conditioning we've all been administered for past 40 years, I've got folding cash that says you will own your life in a way that seemed previously impossible. Hanging onto or chasing the bling is over with anyway, as dead as the economy. The Olive Garden and Circuit City are still open, true, but only because the hair and nails still grow on Jabba's corpse. Would somebody please quit pretending he's alive and yank the feeding tube?

-- Joe Bageant, 2008

nine-billion-little-feet

Monday, December 18, 2017

crawl under a rock

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
— Mahatma Gandi, 1869-1948

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

-- Felicity Arbuthnot

the-instinct-to-attack

make it stop

After November 8, 2016, America became a racist, xenophobic, hate-the-poor cesspool. No longer did we have a President who looked and acted cool, so cool that he even smoked cigarettes; we ended up with an orange orangutan who needs to see his name plastered on every tall building, an orange orangutan with a tiny penis!!!  I know this because an artist did a hilarious sculpture mocking Trump!  (Haters, it’ OK to body-shame if the target is Trump – HE IS RACIST AND SEXIST AND THIS IS WAR.)
    -- Brian Foley
how-to-stop-trump

Saturday, December 16, 2017

No typo

...a 2015 report authored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School determined that the median household net worth in the Greater Boston region is $247,500 for whites, $8 for US blacks, $12,000 for Caribbean blacks, $3,020 for Puerto Ricans and $0 for Dominicans.

that-was-no-typo

Thursday, December 14, 2017

good luck with that

This is a wake-up call for Democrats. Democrats, I told Mr. Jones this, and I love Doug, they’ve taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time. It’s time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor. They’ve always had our votes and they have abused our votes .. This is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.
-- Charles Barkley, former NBA player and son of Alabama 

wake-up-call-democrats-alabama

does this sound familiar?

In a presentation critics characterized as remarkably similar to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's case for the Iraq War, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stood before a missile fragment that she claimed bears Iran's "fingerprints" and asserted that the Iranian regime poses "a threat to the peace and security of the entire world."

"Make no mistake: What Nikki Haley is doing right now is laying the groundwork for a U.S.-Iran war on behalf of Saudi Arabia," 
-- Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.

"Wonder when Iran holds its press conference to highlight all the American and British munitions the Saudis have used on hospitals, the Sanaa airport, etc."
-- Spencer Ackerman

nikki-haley-laying-groundwork-war-iran

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

karma

The ability of humankind to control events has never been more tenuous. Like it or not, we have ceded much of that control to the realm of those non-human actors that we have long ignored or, more recently, actively aggravated: now, we are collectively suffering real-life home invasions by the dark powers that we had thought safely relegated to the past, buried deep in our subconscious, or rendered impotent by our technological prowess. Is it possible that the overt expression of our atavistic aggressions is stirred by new realizations of our impotence? 

As the kids say, karma is a bitch: but it is also, more simply, less sexistly, a mirror. I was caught up in some of its pay-back earlier in the week, my temerity (surely another name for hubris) at having built a home for myself and my family in the Wildland Urban Interface was cosmically answered by the ravages of Southern California's Thomas fire.
-- John Davis
the-epic-of-our-awakening

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Welcome to Kandahar

Hell is everything that Christian mythology paints it as. Hell is pain, death, suffering, bleakness, and fire. But it isn’t some mystical dimension where rapists and Hitler are suffering for eternity. Hell is right here on earth, war is hell; it’s not made to punish evil people, it’s made by evil people and it’s the innocent who suffer. It’s children, parents, brothers, sisters, people just trying to live their lives, all being tortured and killed, brutalized and raped. The innocent are the ones left weeping while the evil ones reap rewards. War is indeed hell in ways that no one can understand unless they’ve seen it. I have not been to hell, but I could see it from where I stood.

-- Adam Denker

an-afghan-year-my-road-from-soldier-to-socialism

Sunday, December 10, 2017

american fable

The fable must be accepted. We are spreading freedom and equality. Simple as that. End of story. Say that the United States is the greatest counter-revolutionary force in the world, and be branded a traitor–by the counter-revolutionaries. Wherever democratic freedom rears its ugly head, you can be sure that U.S. media flacks, as well as special forces, drones, proxy terrorists, and battalions are on hand to crush what they claim to defend.
we-the-sheeple

Saturday, December 9, 2017

the coming liberal hangover

Look, I know what you’re probably thinking, but it isn’t like liberals don’t actually care about fundamental liberal values like freedom of the press and speech and all that. It’s just that they desperately need the Democrats to take back the House and the Senate next year, so they can get on with impeaching Trump, and if they have to stand by while the corporations suppress a little leftist dissent, or, you know, transform the entire Internet into a massive, mind-numbing echo chamber of neo-McCarthyite corporate conformity … well, sacrifices have to be made.

This can’t go on forever, after all. This level of full-blown mass hysteria can only be sustained for so long. It’s all fine and good to be able to whip people up into a frenzied mob, but at some point you need to have an endgame. The neoliberal ruling classes know this. Their endgame is actually fairly simple. Their plan is to (a) make an example of Trump to discourage any future billionaire idiots from screwing with their simulation of democracy, and (b) demonize anyone deviating from neoliberal ideology as a fascist, racist, or anti-Semite, or otherwise “abnormal” or “extremist.”

     -- c. j. hopkins

the-year-of-the-headless-liberal-chicken

Friday, December 8, 2017

annihilation- the Earth is our witness

“Only by descending into this hell in imagination now can we hope to escape descending into it in reality … the knowledge we thus gain cannot in itself protect us from nuclear annihilation, but without it we cannot begin to take measures that can actually protect us.”
-- Jonathan Schell

We have at most two decades to avert environmental catastrophe and sustain realistic hopes for a decent future. Failure on that score would mean that nothing else we care about and fight for – democracy, social justice, peace, artistic expression, equality, and more – would matter all that much.  It’ll be about the best possible arrangement of chairs and drinks on the decks of a sinking ship.  We’ll just be fighting to turn a scorched world upside down – pushing for the more egalitarian slicing out of a poisoned pie.
-- Paul Street

the-burning-earth-bears-witness-in-california


Al, go back into comedy

"I of all people am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party"
--- Senator Al Franken

Thursday, December 7, 2017

preservation of your mind

Preservation: The Art and Science of Canning, Fermentation and DehydrationChristina Ward

Preservation counters violence with violence, ‘by any means necessary’. The poor vegetal substance is bombarded by infernal heat, depravation, acids and outright invasion by the food preserver. Natural pathogens and microorganisms are enlisted against natural processes in a kind of torture in order to make the Brussels sprout viciously extend its own life (NATO, EU, G7, transformation and preservation of power – all of them, Brussels). Pressure Canning is a slaughter on an infinitesimal level; pickling is a ruthless analogy to the witch-trial. Pathogens must be denied the ‘free water’ of their hosts; they must die of dehydration, be subsumed en masse in drought. Biology is intervallic, rising and decreasing in pitch: Attack (cut), delay (preserve) and ebb to silence (in mulch, in the intestine). The battlefield is both minute and gigantic. It must be. For in the US alone, some 76 million illnesses and five million deaths can be attributed to foodborne illnesses – the Triffid-like revenge of green matter corrupted by mass production, forced transport, and the manipulation of supply and demand.
-- Martin Billheimer

the-specter-of-preservation

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

i spy

The Trump administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.
-- The Intercept

trump-white-house-weighing-plans-for-private-spies

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Drag them into the Street and set them on Fire

This tax bill is an abomination, an act of brutal plunder.  Its sponsors should be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, if not hung from a lamp post.

-- Paul Craig Roberts

plunder-capitalism

Monday, December 4, 2017

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Unprecedented joint air force drills between the US and South Korea, featuring hundreds of warplanes, have kicked off despite dire warnings from Pyongyang and Moscow's calls to avoid new provocations after the recent launch of North Korea's new ICBM.

us-south-korea-air-drills

Sunday, December 3, 2017

dissident



ordinary truth

While there is no indisputable absolute truth: there is ordinary truth, the kind that is simply demonstrably true; it is supported by credible, verifiable peer-reviewed evidence that makes sense of everything. It meets the smell test of dialectics. Reality revolves around truth like the Earth revolves around the sun.

A nation of people that are incapable of grasping truth are delusional; they lack the character and fortitude to grapple with reality and its inconvenient truths. They cannot see what is in plain sight. Fear blinds them.

-- Charles Sullivan

fanning-the-flames-of-revolution

Saturday, December 2, 2017

Ye Shit-list o’ The Lord

Gluttony is second only to lust on Ye Shitlist o’ The Lord, and looking around, it appears that humans have not only overpopulated the earth with their lustful antics, they’ve filled it to overflowing with gluttonous, flabby, morbidly obese, thoughtless, brutal assholes.  Gotta blame much of this mess on God, Himself for telling His clueless minions that they should “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”  One of the best examples of The Lord’s dark sense of humor; with His blessings, the planet is overpopulated to bursting by gluttonous, fat-assed killers.

-- John Rohn Hall

roads-to-perdition-paths-of-righteousness-and-the-gray-area-in-between

Friday, December 1, 2017

mad as hell

Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get MAD! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot — I don’t want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. [shouting] You’ve got to say: ‘I’m a human being, god-dammit! My life has value!’
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
-- Howard Beale
In the end, you can die on your principles and feel the incredible lightness of being a human being, and feel emancipated even near the gates of endless poverty, waning sanity and extreme disenfranchisement from this capitalist franchise called America.
-- Paul Haeder

watchtower