Aw, fuck it

extended music episode

sacred mountain

We were going to see the scopes. The mountain was under lockdown. Armed guards, rented by the University of Arizona, blocked passage up the new road and patrolled the alpine forest on the crest of Mount Graham. Only certified astronomers and construction workers were permitted entry. And university donors. And Vatican priests. But not environmentalists. And not Apaches. Not at night, anyway. Not any more.

    -- Jeffrey St. Clair

telescopes-and-the-desecration-of-mount-graham

Rekognition

what could possibly go wrong?

"Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add image and video analysis to your applications. You just provide an image or video to the Rekognition API, and the service can identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Amazon Rekognition also provides highly accurate facial analysis and facial recognition. You can detect, analyze, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, cataloging, people counting, and public safety use cases."

amazon.com/rekognition

The Simulation of Democracy

One of the most complicated and frustrating aspects of operating a global capitalist empire is maintaining the fiction that it doesn’t exist. Virtually every action you take has to be carefully recontextualized or otherwise spun for public consumption. Every time you want to bomb or invade some country to further your interests, you have to mount a whole PR campaign. You can’t even appoint a sadistic torture freak to run your own coup-fomenting agency, or shoot a few thousand unarmed people you’ve imprisoned in a de facto ghetto, without having to do a big song and dance about “defending democracy” and “democratic values.”
    -- cj hopkins

the-consent-factory

the revolution will not be allowed

pretty soon protest of any kind will land you in jail so can we just go ahead and get it over with and start burning shit down, starting in Washington DC?

Oklahoma

HB 1123: New penalties for protests near "critical infrastructure"

Targets protests around certain public facilities by creating a new criminal offense for trespass onto property containing “critical infrastructure.” The law’s extensive list of “critical infrastructure” facilities ranges from a petroleum refinery to a telephone pole. Willfully entering onto property containing critical infrastructure without permission is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to $1,000 or six month in jail, or both. Evidence of intent to damage or otherwise harm the operations of the infrastructure facility would make the offence a felony, punishable by at least $10,000 (with no maximum provided) or imprisonment for one year, or both; actual damage or vandalizing of the facility is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Organizations found to have “conspired” with perpetrators are liable for up to $1,000,000. The sponsor of the law told a House of Representatives committee that it was prompted by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in North Dakota. (See full text of bill here)

Status: enacted

Introduced 6 Feb 2017; Signed into law 3 May 2017

Georgia

SB 1: Expanding definition of “domestic terrorism”

Would have broadened the definition of “domestic terrorism” under Georgia law to potentially include demonstrations, boycotts, and other forms of protest and political expression. Under the bill, the previously high bar for committing domestic terrorism – harm caused to a group of 10 or more individuals – is lowered to include causing harm to at least one individual or disabling “critical infrastructure.” The new target, “critical infrastructure” is in turn very broadly defined to include “public or private systems, functions or assets, whether physical or virtual, vital to the security, governance, public health and safety, economy, or morale of this state or the United States.” The bill also introduces a new provision targeting actions that have a political or ideological component, such that domestic terrorism would include an action intended to advance “any ideology or belief,” whether held individually or as part of a group. Commission of domestic terrorism as defined by the bill would be a felony punishable by prison sentences ranging from five years to life. Given the broad language of the bill and extreme penalties involved, rights leaders feared that it was aimed to monitor, punish, and chill free speech activities including protests. (See full text of bill here)

Status: defeated / expired

Introduced 10 Jan 2017; Approved by Senate 1 March 2017; Failed in House 28 March 2017

us-protest-law-tracker

dB's

community

“Community—the communal mode of production and life—is the oldest of American traditions, the most American of all. It belongs to the earliest days and the first people, but it also belongs to the times ahead and anticipates a new New World. For there is nothing less alien to these lands of ours than socialism. Capitalism, on the other hand, is foreign: like smallpox, like the flu, it came from abroad.”
    -- Eduardo Galeano

“Cynicism and pessimism are not the mood of the socialist. This means that when injustice is uncovered, the writer assumes that justice is possible.” The antidote to cynicism is to “retain faith in the capacity of human beings to overcome the present,”
    -- VijayPrashad. 

no-one-is-coming-to-save-us-except-ourselves

the middle-manager in Antarctica

Burdened as the middle manager is with a pedigree of doubt, and trapped in a cubicled prison cell, suffering endlessly in like company, it behooves us to understand that these errant figures, tormented by perceptions of privation and suffering the frozen associations of life in Antarctica, should finally be granted their righteous due.
bigdeadplace/welcome-to-the-program

netanyahoo

netanyahu-announces-day-of-mourning-for-fence-damage

Israel- kill and kill and kill

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam.  The pressure at the border will be awful.  It’s going to be a terrible war.  So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.  All day, every day....the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”
    -- Arnon Sofer, adviser to the government of Ariel Sharon, Jerusalem Post (11 November 2004)

There are two racial groups in close proximity in Palestine.  The members of one racial group—the one to which Netanyahu and Kushner belong—are free to come and go as they please, to live life, to travel, to study, to work, to raise children.  The members of the other racial group are to varying degrees denied those rights, though nowhere more starkly and abjectly than in Gaza, where over two million people have simply been rounded up and warehoused without prospects or hopes, let alone rights, simply because their very existence is deemed to be a mortal threat to the exclusive racial identity of a state that was violently established on their land and at their expense.  To maintain the exclusive identity of that state, these people must either accept their fate as essentially human cargo in permanent storage—a superfluous population—or take the bullets that the Israeli army has prepared for each one of them.

    -- Saree Makdisi

kill-and-kill-and-kill

America- “vision, courage, moral clarity”

"The IDF has enough bullets for everyone"
    -- Avi Dichter, Israeli Minister of Internal Security

At least 55 Palestinians were killed on Monday in Gaza and more than 2,700 others wounded as the Israeli army fired live ammunition, tear gas and firebombs at protesters assembled along several points near the fence with Israel.


the U.S. and Israel "stand together because we both believe in human rights" and "believe that democracy is worth defending"

    -- Jared Kushner

massacre-in-gaza

WMD

"economic sanctions … may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history."

  -- Sanctions of Mass Destruction, John Mueller, Karl Mueller

Iran-disinformation-and-sanctions-of-mass-destruction

happy mother's day

"....Barron hoping his mother doesn't notice as he barfs while listening to Dad."

Students: the face of your enemy

Mick Mulvaney, acting director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

"At a time when the number of and the size of student loans are spiraling out of control, it's simply appalling to me that the administration is deciding to close the one office in the United States government that is exclusively focused on promoting fairness in student lending." 
    -- Christopher Peterson, senior fellow, Consumer Federation of America

war-on-students

teenie weenie

It’s hard to know much of anything factual about Trump. Which is why we must pay homage now to porn star Stormy Daniels for revealing the Truth about his penis size.

In the unstable, uncertain Spectacle of innumerable, intertwining, and overlapping universes we call Home, this fact is indisputable: Donald Trump has a midget dick. 

    -- Douglas  Valentine

is-it-presidential?

the last gusher

Citizens for Responsible Oil and Gas (CFROG) in Ventura County in Southern California is fighting big, medium and little oil as they rapaciously squeeze the last reserves of an oil-rich county by drilling, fracking, and even tar-sands extraction right in the middle of the Oxnard plain, one of the richest row-crop regions in the state. There is, at this point, no such-thing as responsible oil and gas. But as CROG’s executive director, Kimberly Rivers, explained to me, this milquetoast designation is necessary to maintain ‘a seat at the table’. This is a table that is sliding irrevocably into the trash-heap of history. But for now, attendance at the last supper of the depraved predation of the earth’s crust provides a few scraps of satisfaction in the reining in of the worst acts of malfeasance by the County and oil industry cabal.
    -- John Davis

modernitys-long-twilight

The Arc of Instability- countdown, May 10, 2018

Last night [wednesday 5-9-2018] Israel again attacked Syrian military positions in al-Quneitra in south-west Syria. This time the Syrian missile forces responded with a barrage of more than 20 missiles against Israeli positions in the occupied Golan heights. Israel escalated further with 70 strikes against Syrian positions.

"....both the Israelis and the Neocons always, always, double-down. The notion of cutting their losses and stopping what is a self-evidently mistaken policy is simply beyond them. Their arrogance simply cannot survive even the appearance of having made a mistake. As soon as Trump and Netanyahu realize that they did something really fantastically stupid and as soon as they run out of their usual options (missile and airstrikes first, then terrorizing the civilian population) they will have a stark and simple choice: admit defeat or use nukes.Which one do you think they will choose?"

    -- the Saker

syria-sets-new-rules-for-israeli-strikes

drone wars won't be this much fun

ThunderSkunk

5 hours ago at 09:49 am

Drones will get very interesting. If you follow it forward a bit, once they become so ubiquitous the novelty of them is devalued by the public, people are going to realize how much fun knocking them out of the sky is with an RC plane, especially when you can enjoy the cockpits eye view in your living room, and play WWI Flying Ace with your friends. Anyone can build an RC fighter plane, but without anything to hunt down and destroy, the appeal is limited, but with a sky full of drones, and drones carrying payloads... the ultimate 3d Game, building your own dogfighter, flying in a sky full of pinatas. Made more fun by the real risk of getting your own plane shot down by corporate & governmental countermeasures. Upgrade your plane with a mini-jet and launch direct intercept courses leaving no time for countermeasures. Use a solid rocket assist, and launch your steel-edged X15 from under the cover of a tree, 2.3 seconds later, an amazon.com box falls out of the sky as your prize. Walk into and out of a shopping mall afterward and lose the police satellite trail. Oh to be 14 again.
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associated forces

It is clear upon reading the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), put forward by Senators Tim Kaine and Bob Corker, that it gives nearly unlimited power to this or any other president to be at war whenever he or she wants, with minimal justification and no prior specific authority.

The new Kaine/Corker AUMF declares war on at least the following places and people: the Taliban, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, ISIS anywhere, al-Shabaab in Somalia and elsewhere, al-Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra in Syria, the Haqqani network in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Nigeria, and associated forces (as defined by the president) around the globe.

    -- Rand Paul

congress-moves-to-give-the-president-unlimited-war-powers

Homo sapiens sapiens

“& innocence will not shield anyone from these days / & innocence does not cleanse / & innocence will not save us / from what we now know”
    -- Juliane Okot Bitek

“Slaughter is a defining behavior of our species”. Carnivores kill for food but humans kill relatives, children, friends, rivals, strangers, people seen as “other” for whatever reason, kill for revenge, for pleasure, for entertainment, for beliefs.
    -- Julie Wark

still-alive/still-life

angst, the '90s

black cube

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this obvious scam targeting my family had all the hallmarks of an intel op and coincided with Team Trump's reported efforts to "dig up dirt" on me.

    -- Colin Kahl

trump-and-black-cube

learn a trade!

Princeton economist Alan Blinder says the job market of the future won’t be divided between people with college degrees and those without, but between work that can be outsourced and work that can’t. “You can’t hammer a nail over the internet,” he observed. “Nor can you fix a car transmission, rewire a house, install solar panels, or give a patient an injection.”

True, today the lifelong earnings of college graduates exceed those who don’t attend college. But there’s no evidence this will be the case going forward. Have you paid an electrician or a plumber anytime lately? There’s a reason they’re hard to find and can command a high wage. It’s called scarcity.

    -- Chuck Collins

my-advice-to-high-school-grads

local culture

Yemen

 At least 70,000 have been killed by bombing alone. That number does not include the probably one hundred thousand who starved or died from easily preventable diseases. When asked about the real numbers UN officials are evading any sensible response.

The Saudi coalition strikes on civilians are not by accident. The Saudis target infrastructure, all food and people transport, health facilities and any gathering that is deemed suspicious. Other strikes are targeted assassinations.

yemen-a-new-phase-of-war

age of anger

The world’s disaffected people, without power or social and economic wherewithal, lash out against other victims because they feel alone, abandoned and impotent, and can’t even begin to understand or contemplate changing the system itself. Theirs is a similar mentality to that of Trump voters who thought he’d be a “wrecking ball” to bring down “the system”, without understanding that “the system” is basically people like him, the notorious 1% who are well out of their reach (they even have bunkers in remote places with helicopters and sniper towers for when the apocalypse finally comes). And now Trump is ensconced as chief stoker of the flames of ressentiment, fueling them with xenophobia, attacks on the media and the (other) establishment, and exalting lies and greed.
    -- Julie Wark

Surprise!

Were the West’s leadership not so eager for the war to commence, one might say the core tragedy will spring from a cultural misread. Eschewing symbolic gesture, the Russians do not telegraph. They deliberate slowly on crucial decisions, a quality easily misconstrued (through our cultural lens) as dithering and reticence.

When they do decide, often based on the oddest final straw (what Holmer calls their unseen red lines), Russia is perhaps the most resolute nation on the planet –and the most deadly. (Russia was responsible for three out of four Nazi kills in WW2.) Western war-gamers afford them all due respect.

    -- Norman Ball

as-world-war-3-approaches-yet-again

5-4-2018

four-dead-ohio-may-4-1970

the web of weirdness

"Let's re-de-centralize the web. It was designed as a de-centralized system, but now everyone is on platforms like Facebook....we read things from narrower and narrower circles, and meet more people just like us. These people support the views we express, which validates us and makes us feel more and more sure of our opinions, and makes others seem more and more weird....social media may be fun for the individual but destructive of society."

    -- Tim Berners-Lee

internet-pioneer-tim-berners-lee-calls-for-new-web

...your mind

....and now for some psychiatry

In 1980, the same year Reagan was elected president, the American Psychiatric Association published its revised diagnostic “bible” (the then DSM-III), ushering in a newly invented mental illness called “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The symptoms of ODD include:  often argues with adults, and often refuses to comply with authorities’ requests or rules. 

beyond gentrification

Perched on the façade of 3239 Bruce Dr. in Fremont was a sign no potential homeowner—or, at least, no homeowner in an affordability and accessibility crisis—wants to see: “Enter at your own risk.”

Unless you’re a pair of millionaire investors, who decided to purchase the home on March 30 for $1.23M.

los-angeles-county-is-choosing-to-create-a-rich-mans-land

WhipperSnappers