.....and now

the wayward penis

The political and journalistic elites of this country, notwithstanding their orchestrated soap operas of partisan feuds and personal acrimony, together preside over a babel of lies and cheesy gossip and crackpot xenophobic conspiracy theories—this is the entirety of our public discourse nowadays, a mad cacophony that drowns out even the barest mention of the grave economic and environmental/climate emergencies besetting our planet and our species. It’s as though the entire country has yet to graduate from high school. I guess that’s why it finds tales of that milieu so compelling while taking so little interest in more serious matters.

    -- William Kaufman

brett-kavanaughs-wayward-penis

"Brad" Kavanaugh going down

pre-emptive relocation

...concerned people from across the US might consider moving to Detroit, Michigan – not to live quietly and complacently in the Motor City, however. In addition to joining local activists and organizations, such as the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center, the People’s Water Board Coalition, the Detroit Food Policy Council, the Michigan Poor People’s Campaign, and other organizations engaged in transforming the city into a more livable place, activists could also join forces with local organizations to reclaim the local government, and other entities. 
    -- Elliot Sperber

the-commune-of-detroit

apocalyptic breakdown

America is pissed

If you have any questions, go talk to Clint....

so, which is it?

“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them. It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years, but it’s going to happen. They’re going to be overthrown, the people of Iran have obviously had enough,” 
    -- Rudy Giuliani

“The United States is not looking to do regime change in Iran.”
    -- U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley

the 2018 Downward Spiral Tour

.....here we go, America! The Blue Line and the Red Line are converging....the Blue and the Red!  oh, glorious revolution; all hail the Blue/Red....

what could possibly go wrong?

The Israeli government has recently claimed that it can “legislate anywhere in the world”, that it is “entitled to violate the sovereignty of foreign countries”, and that “is allowed to ignore the directives of international law in any field it desires”. This was written in an official response letter to the Supreme Court last month.

      -- Jonathan Ofir, Mondoweiss, September 18, 2018

downwardly mobile; upwardly pissed

....the contemporary decline of the West’s middle class may end up advancing, indirectly, the banner of humanity that the Left has carried forward since the seventeenth century.
     -- Chris Wright

three-cheers-for-the-decline-of-the-middle-class

bus

It is easy to memorize the relatively few train lines in even the largest city. If you know all the buses, you’ve a better brain than Wittgenstein. All timetables for public transportation are modernist masterpieces of dialectics, digression, and confusion, laid out in an obsessive symbolic economy. The bus-devotee adds up the parallel lines, skipping over the tedious gloss to get to the heart of the matter, which is Arrival and Departure. All of life is somewhere between those two points, whether vegetal or mammal. Speculation about curved time and the Beyond are confined to angry complaints and threats – but only if the bus is late. Like the Tao or Torah Scroll, the folded schedules project into the past and out to the future simultaneously. The Present is a static trust in the continuum of routine. Statues seen from light years away… long-deserted routes keeping time by extinct clocks, almost for pity’s sake.

    -- Martin Billheimer

a-grandroute-waiting-for-the-bus

step back from the screen

The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet’s fate tomorrow.

And because of that it is structurally bound to undermine or discredit anyone, any group, any state that stands in the way of achieving its absolute dominion.

If that is not the thought we hold uppermost in our minds as we listen to a politician, read a newspaper, watch a film or TV show, absorb an ad, or engage on social media, then we are sleepwalking into a future the most powerful, the most ruthless, the least caring have designed for us.

    -- Jonathan Cook

why-were-blind-to-the-system-destroying-us

from Cafe Domenico

That we can ignore dark reality is due to the pretense, essential to bourgeois reality, we are or can be above nature, a pretense abetted  by much of  popular spiritual practice,  and the basis for class structuring of society, for flight to the suburbs away from the crime and crumbling of cities, for liberal obeisance to corporatocracy, for white supremacy as well as for ongoing anthropocenic species suicide. The pretense is self-defeating; the nature we pretend to be above is our own embodied mortal nature. So repugnant is this [truth] that we will forgo the fight to save the human-supportive world in order not to have to face that fight for our human soul we have been assured we can escape by the cherished promise of  Progress.
    -- Kim Domenico

how-to-keep-going-by-knowing-the-apocalypse-is-now

hurricanes are us

George W. Bush was swiftly vilified for his callously lethargic response to the swamping of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Yet within a mere two weeks, Congress had appropriated $60 billion in emergency funding for Katrina survivors. 

In the wake of Maria, the government of Puerto Rico pleaded with the Trump administration for $94 billion disaster relief. It took the Ryan/McConnell-led Congress six months to act on Puerto Rico’s urgent request for help and then they only allocated a mere $16 billion in federal aid. In those six months, nearly 5,000 Puerto Ricans may have died, according to a mortality analysis by public health researchers at Harvard University. Most of these weren’t victims of the storm itself, but of government indifference and incompetence in the days, weeks and months that followed.

---- Jeffrey St. Clair

maria's-missing-dead

Daron Malakian

and your politicians don't know how it feels.....

to be thick as a brick

turning Vietnamese

....any mass movement for ecological regime change will almost certainly be met with corporate and state violence....

Facing an existential threat from a superpower with unlimited resources, the people of Vietnam relied on their deep knowledge of their ecological context, the mobilization of human power on an epic scale, a collective resourcefulness and seeming fearlessness, careful management of scarce material resources, a willingness to work for the common good rather than personal gain or comfort, a refusal to be co-opted by either enemy government, and the will to stand up to a great power that’s capable of wreaking massive destruction.

    -- Stan Cox

climate-mobilization-look-to-vietnam

auden

Time…
Worships language and forgives 
Everyone by whom it lives

I don’t believe this is true today. Science and technology – in my lifetime – have collapsed time, debunked any remnant power of incantation, and demonstrated that human power over the material world is the only power that matters. Of what consequence can it possibly be, then, this persistent idea I have that Auden was a prophet?

    -- Christy Rodgers

a-rapture-of-distress-audens-augury

DBs

on the road to Idlib

Assad has said he is preparing a final offensive in Idlib, and Russian warplanes this week began bombing the region. Humanitarian organizations have warned of an unprecedented level of civilian bloodshed, and Trump himself has threatened U.S. retaliation if an all-out offensive is launched, especially with the use of chemical weapons.

“If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get very, very angry. And the United States is going to get very angry, too,” Trump said.

Russia, which has beefed up its naval and other forces in the region in recent weeks, has charged that the United States is preparing to manufacture a chemical weapons attack to justify military intervention. It says its operations in Idlib are aimed at up to 14,000 fighters linked to al-Qaeda.

    -- Karen DeYoung, WashPost, 9-6-2018

from Cafe Domenico

Living as we must amidst the constant assaults on human dignity in the  shared late-capitalist, neoliberal context,  personal knowledge of the  soul’s reality is the only way to proceed with at least a minimally protected heart, Trump or no Trump. Protect one heart (your own),  express the peculiar reality of one soul, and there’s a chance to make peace that is real, as long as you stay in the ring, that is, in the nearly abandoned human context of family, community, locality and the promises that bind us along the invisible lines of relationship.
    -- Kim Domenico, Utica, NY

contesting-the-undeclared-liberal-war-on-freedom

2026

and here I was thinking it was gonna be 2037 just as db. desgnr predicted in 1996......

...in contrast to the elite-managed mainstream narrative regarding the climate time frame, there is a group of courageous and prominent climate scientists who offer compelling climate science evidence that human beings, along with millions of other species, will be extinct by 2026 (and perhaps as early as 2021) in response to a projected 10 degree celsius increase in global temperatures above the pre-industrial level by that date.
-- Robert J. Burrowes

human-extinction-by-2026?

arctic-news-extinction

live

happy Labor Day!

Greetings to all hard working Americans from the Ayatollah. 

No bombing middle eastern countries today! Time to drink the beer and devour the pigs in their blankets and watch the tiny ball get smacked around! 

Much preferred to hurling missiles in all directions brothers and sisters!

But back to work tomorrow, eh?

thanx to the MJ Irregulars