missed it in Rochester

the Russian lake

....a Kerch Strait incident designed as a cheap provocation, bearing all the hallmarks of a US think-tank ploy, is automatically interpreted as “Russian aggression”, regardless of the facts. Indeed, any such tactics are good when it comes to derailing the Trump-Putin meeting at the G20 in Buenos Aires this coming weekend.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, chaos is the norm....Poroshenko’s approval rate barely touches 8%. His chances of being re-elected, assuming polls are credible, are virtually zero. Little wonder he used the Kerch to declare martial law, effective this Wednesday, lasting for 30 days and bound to be extended. Poroshenko will be able to control the media and increase his chances of rigging the election.

-- Pepe Escobar

teasing-the-russian-bear

make america rake again

“I was with the president of Finland, he said ‘We have a much different — we’re a forest nation.’ He called it a forest nation. And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.
    -- Donald Trump

no-we-wont-be-raking-our-national-forests

takin' a ride

predators R us

The very idea, however unpalatable, that with life’s initial appearance predation was an immediate “logical/reasonable” response should give us philosophic pause.

    Current scientific knowledge suggests that the predator/prey relationship began very soon after life itself arose.
    This ancient antagonistic natural relationship often gave and gives rise to what is known as an “evolutionary arms race” or what might be considered in Hegelian terms as a dialectical relationship.
    Yet, now, perhaps in the Age of the Anthropocene when man has become the apex predator and the world has become his prey this ancient dialectic might be coming to an end.
    -- Dan Corjescu


prey-and-predator-the-end-of-a-dialectic

its the climate

[A] major climate report was issued by the U.S. government weeks ahead of schedule, on arguably the quietest journalistic Friday of the year: the day after Thanksgiving. It’s not clear who is responsible for the odd timing, but in spite of that, Part II of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA) is much too powerful a document to stay buried.
A-Report-Not-To-Be-Buried

wake up

you

By Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on …

Policy Statement

Here at GeezerNation our motto has always been, "if you read it here first, we didn't write it".

just peachy

/Ed. Note:
the Content Committee could not determine the marketable value of the content. They just said slap a warning on it.
the following content is for MATURE ADULTS ONLY. You know who you are.




/thanx and a tip of the MAGA cap to Eric

Geographies of violence in Southern California

The carbon sequestered in over a quarter million acres of trees and shrubs and within the building materials of many thousands of structures has now been released to the atmosphere in these hellacious wildfires spread across California. In a state that has seen most of its historic old growth forests logged into extinction, its fossil biomass extracted from the earth for well over a century, where its gasoline burning automobiles clog its cities and highways and its industrial and domestic energy needs are largely supplied by the burning of natural gas, its wildfires count as the reciprocal in a cycle of violence.
    -- John Davis

geographies-of-violence-in-southern-california

Assange

Cruelty and truth are often matters of excruciating banality, and now it is clearer than ever that the United States will, given the invaluable chance, net the Australian publisher and WikiLeaks founder to make an example of him.  This man, who dirtied the linen of state and exposed the ceremonial of diplomatic hypocrisy, was always an object of interest, notably in the United States.  “He was,” confirmed Andrea Kendall-Taylor, former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia under the director of national intelligence, “a loathed figure inside the government.”

    -- Binoy Kampmark

looking at a screen, 2018

the revolution was a lie

I was a teenage anarchist
But then the scene got too rigid
It was a mob mentality
They set their rifle sights on me
Narrow visions of autonomy, you want me to surrender my identity
I was a teenage anarchist
The revolution was a lie

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro

Assange

A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes. … They will stop at nothing. … When U.S. Vice President Mike Pence recently visited Ecuador, a deal was done to hand Julian over to the U.S. He said that because the political cost of expelling Julian from the Embassy was too high, the plan was to break him down mentally… to such a point that he will break and be forced to leave.
-- Christine Ann Hawkins, Julian Assange's mother

in Assange’s case, the penalty for having a firm commitment to truth has been especially excruciating and will almost certainly end in his premature death. This is simply the reality. Because of the system under which we live, a 100% commitment to truth is now a clear pathway to oblivion. Assange is experiencing this reality to the fullest. That’s what’s happening here.
    -- Eric Zuesse, Greanville Post, 11-16-2018

the filter bubble

-[un-filtered content]- 
Iraq was destroyed in a nakedly illegal oil grab, more than one million human beings were killed, and the ‘mainstream’ continued to treat the criminals responsible as respectable statespeople, and to take seriously their subsequent calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ in oil-rich Libya. With Libya reduced to ruins, the same journalists dreamed on, treating the same criminals with the same respect as they sought yet one more regime change in Syria.
    -- Media Lens

the-filter-bubble

its my job

On Wednesday evening, former U.S. Marine Ian David Long failed to stop doing his job. He had been employed by the U.S. government to fire a machine gun at people. That had been his job for years, and part of that time he had participated in the war on Afghanistan. He had been given awards for the fine job he’d done in combat. Nobody had been outraged. Nobody had called him names or questioned his sanity.

CNN’s inaccurate headline, “Thousand Oaks gunman went from Marine vet to mass shooter. Investigators want to know why,” creates a mystery where none exists. The question is not how he became a mass shooter but how so many others have managed to cease being mass shooters.

    -- David Swanson

a-tale-of-two-marines

Greta

a tip of the wool cap to Eric........

the shackles of the 20th century mind

".....the real tragedy of war is its futility, that people are made to rationalize murder and carry it out, that lives are wasted as a result, that everyone is affected for generations, that souls are lost and cannot find peace"
    -- Dennis Morgan

for-what?

Malibu burning

guitars not guns

Life After Wartime

originally posted on 7/23/2016.....

Burned all my notebooks
What good are notebooks?
They won’t help me survive
My chest is aching
Burns like a furnace
The burning keeps me alive

"....if you have been to war, all of this is waiting for you, all day every day, lurking in the silence of the suburban streets where your neighbors are invisible hostiles, or the clangorous city streets where no one looks anyone else in the eye, where the suit on his phone bumps into you and moves on past without breaking his stride, in the plastic-coated food, and the gas-soaked pavement and the cheesy, piped-in music everywhere – so one day you flip out, you say no more terror, no more dread, no more waiting for the ax to fall. Not enough to go for a drive and blast the car stereo till your gut shakes. Not enough to drink yourself stupid and beat the wife or girlfriend bloody when the rage takes hold."
    -- Christy Rodgers

gun's R us

How has the USA come to the point that so many people feel compelled to own guns—and to use them—in the first place? Citing lax gun laws—or even the influence of the gun lobby—again does not so much answer as beg the question of why and how it has come to be that the US is characterized by such gun culture, laws, and lobbies. Nor does it help to explain the particularly traumatic form of the mass public (school, movie, church) shooting that has become so common.

gun-problem-a-white-supremacy-capitalist-empire-problem?

the commander

big exit

pj

Peter Gabriel

america of the parking garage

uh, white people please ignore the following lyrics, or, refer to Wikipedia....

[Outro]
You just a Black man in this world
You just a barcode, ayy
You just a Black man in this world
Drivin’ expensive foreigns, ayy
You just a big dawg, yeah
I kenneled him in the backyard
No probably ain’t life to a dog
For a big dog
this is america

let's do the collapse again

“It was just a collapse in the insect community. A really dramatic change… The insect populations in the Luquillo forest are crashing.” 
    -- Bradford C. Lister and Andres Garcia, Climate-Driven Declines in Arthropod Abundance Restructure a Rainforest Food Web, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

collapsing-rainforest-ecosystems