New Year's amnesia

[we] live in a world of comparative calm that is, at some remove, deeply unsettling. We spend our mornings rifling through the papers, scrolling through our bright screen display, consuming and digesting the latest breathless reportage from the centers of power. Yet we are far from the action. We live in our prefab arcadias, urban enclaves soothed by ubiquitous white noise, zoom along spotless highway tracts between corporate campuses and homogenized shopping centers, half their storefronts empty, like the glass-paneled ghost towns of a forgotten consumer frontier. Our corporate offices are muffled spaces. The low hum of the building core lulls its drones into a kind of quiescent repose. Repetitive motion injuries advance in the breezeless hush of the office. Colleagues speak in low tones, particularly the men, a generation of halting, soft-spoken males anxious to embody non-aggressive communication styles in a new world of trigger warnings and harassment complaints. We pace through crowds pacified by the narcotic haze of Big Pharma, desensitized to the booming retail carnival that envelops us. Yet there is, outside the high walls of the metropole, violent coercion at work on behalf of the giant engines of capital, a kind of muted savagery whose cries we only faintly decipher amid the din of our merchandised mayhem.
    -- Jason Hirthler

rain, reconsidered

“Our local observations show the last five years (2014 through 2018) have all had above-normal rainfall in Wilmington (NC), and are collectively the wettest five year period since records began in 1871. While it's never possible to attribute a single storm or even a particular year's weather events to climate change, the Fourth National Climate Assessment states ‘Across most of the United States, the heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent. The amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased over the past few decades.’”

All-Time-Moisture-Records-2018

Courtney Barnett

selfie

anti-imperialist

“I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.” 
    -- Mark Twain

fuck-you-dying-american-empire

dead South

carlin

Chuck Mertz- this is hell

“I hate feel-good news coverage....It makes people ignore the reality of what’s going on in the world.”

Chuck Mertz has hosted This is Hell! since 1996. Before that he worked selling Christmas decorations, counting and etching bushings, delivering newspapers, stocking shelves and mopping floors, making gyros, dismantling schools, working concert security, cleaning vegetables, canvassing homes, washing dishes, cleaning apartments, attending to a parking lot, conducting telemarket research, making sandwiches, selling books, working the door, working a loading dock and warehouse, counting people, counting shoes, freelance writing, production assistanting, field producing and assignment editing.

thisishell.com/interviews

shakin'

Thanx and a flip of the hair to Eric....

old man

imagine

communication breakdown

and now for something............

bum-er

Syracuse cops convinced a judge to sign a search warrant to force doctors to search a man’s rectum for drugs. An X-ray (also performed without his consent) had already shown there was no contraband in his anal passage. The forcible search turned up nothing. The man was then billed $4,500 for this anal-rape by cop.
    -- Jefrey St. Clair

syracuse-cops-push-st-joes-to-probe-mans-rectum-for-drugs

banksy in bethlehem

The Walled Off Hotel was intended as a temporary and provocative piece of installation art, turning the oppressive 700-kilometre-long wall that cuts through occupied Palestinian land into an improbable tourist attraction. Visitors drawn to Bethlehem by Banksy’s art – both inside the hotel and on the colossal wall outside – are given a brief, but potent, taste of Palestinian life in the shadow of Israel’s military infrastructure of confinement.

banksys-walled-off-hotel-in-bethlehem

advantage, Trump

he actually did something sane; scary....

Last Friday President Trump had another long phonecall with the Turkish President Erdogan. Thereafter he overruled all his advisors and decided to remove the U.S. boots from Syria and to also end the air war.

This was the first time Trump took a decisive stand against the borg, the permanent neoconservative and interventionist establishment in his administration, the military and congress, that usually dictates U.S. foreign policy.

why-trump-decided-to-remove-us-troops-from-syria

the French speak

risk

“Global heating is technically more correct because we are talking about changes in the energy balance of the planet. We should be talking about risk rather than uncertainty.”

    -- Richard Betts, University of Exeter

"I've worked on this for 30 years and I've never been as worried as I am today. Global warming doesn't capture the scale of destruction. Speaking of hothouse Earth is legitimate."

    -- Hans Joachim Schellnhuber—Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

global-heating

roll on

Thanx, and a tip of the sailor's cap to Howard.....

contemplation

.....although the planet may not shed a tear for the demise of technological civilization, hope on the individual scale for the moment is possible. Going through the black night of the soul, members of the species may be rewarded by the emergence of a conscious dignity devoid of illusions, grateful for the glimpse at the universe for which humans are privileged for the fleeting moment.

    -- Andrew Glikson

“Having pushed a boulder up the mountain all day, turning toward the setting sun, we must consider Sisyphus happy.” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942)

boycott Texas

A children's speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise take any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation.

    -- Glenn Greenwald

israel-texas-anti-bds-law

gilets jaunes 2019-

The French Yellow Vests Insurgency may or may not grow into a major threat to the established order; nobody knows for sure how it will play out....revolutions take a long time to play out: The American Revolution, 1775-1783; the French Revolution, 1789-1799; the Chinese Communist Revolution, 1945-1950; the Cuban Revolution, 1953-1959; the Spring of Nations Revolutions of 1848-1852 against monarchies in Germany, France, Italy, and Austria.

....over the past three decades, neoliberal globalization set the table for dissolution of the middle class as wages around the world collapsed into a SE Asian vortex of slave labor. This is the heart of the matter behind the Yellow Vest movement, albeit sparked by the Macron government’s new fuel taxes. This is also the biggest reason why a worldwide revolution of the working classes may actually happen, inclusive of pretty much everybody below the top 1% plus the upper-upper-middle-class.

---- Robert Hunziker

the-yellow-vest-insurgency-whats-next?

young Steve

gloria

your 14 minutes of Paris chaos

be your own prison!

"....who hasn’t noticed how the Web has become like so many chambers in a Russian roulette game, as more and more of our attention is absorbed by the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon, and we pull the trigger on our consciousness?  Marketized and re-militarized, the Internet has become a place for the Masters of Algorithm War to move our data points around like poker chips in a game of Bullshit. Fake News (Voice of America or RT?), Black Friday mega-deals, the latest Trump tweets, what chum will we go for today? Oh, the humanity."
    -- John Kendall Hawkins

good-panopt-bad-panopt

color theory

....when blended together Republican red and Democrat blue yield purple — the color not just of bipartisanship, but of the financial elites who support them (in the US and globally) — i.e., the color of royalty. And the opposite of purple (its negation), as any glance at a color wheel will tell you, is yellow. As such, the yellow of the yellow vests is more than just the color of anti-neoliberalism, it’s the color of anti-inequality. That is, it’s the color of radical democracy, of a radical egalitarianism that is hostile to the privatization of the public realm, and hostile to the concentrations of wealth that characterize the present toxic organization of the world.
    -- Elliot Sperber

understanding-the-yellow-vests-movement-through-basic-color-theory

Révolution 2018

"Just think of France becoming the front-runner again for a Revolution, 230 years after the Storming of the Bastille, bringing a new order into nation states, away from globalization and maybe back to sovereign governments, building up new trading relations and partner alliances on a basis of equality, rather than imposed by a one-polar world order."
    -- Peter Koenig

the-macron-implosion-will-it-spread?

the gilets jaunes

To put this dispute into terms American drivers would understand, the government of President Emmanuel Macron proposed a hike of 28 cents per gallon for diesel and 17 cents per gallon for gasoline. Though these taxes were the immediate trigger, the context in which this policy was imposed made the difference. In domestic economic policy Macron has been a smoother French version of Donald Trump. The tax on diesel followed a whole series of tax gifts to the most wealthy French citizens and businesses, including elimination or reduction of estate and wealth taxes as well as the replacement of a progressive income tax with a flat tax. These tax policies were a neoliberal dream that had already become a nightmare for working class citizens.
    -- Juan Cole

• Even the moralistic criticisms that accuse the gilets jaunes of materialism and selfishness can be called into question. Was not the increase in the price of bread the main factor pushing the women of Paris to mount their furious march on Versailles in October 1789? The history of social struggles is peppered with movements arising from an exasperation that owed to the material conditions of the popular classes, movements that can give rise to greater awareness, bring out wider demands, and which can converge with other struggles. Or not.
•     -- Aurelie Dianara, University of Glasgow

French run amok- Russia to blame!

So it appears the privatization of France isn't going quite as smoothly as planned. As I assume you are aware, for over a month now, the gilets jaunes (or "yellow vests"), a multiplicitous, leaderless, extremely pissed off, confederation of working class persons, have been staging a series of lively protests in cities and towns throughout the country to express their displeasure with Emmanuel Macron and his ongoing efforts to transform their society into an American-style neo-feudal dystopia. Highways have been blocked, toll booths commandeered, luxury automobiles set on fire, and shopping on the Champs-Élysées disrupted. What began as a suburban tax revolt has morphed into a bona fide working class uprising......

By Sunday, the corporate media were insinuating that diabolical Russian Facebook bots had brainwashed the French into running amok, because who else could possibly be responsible? Certainly not the French themselves! The French, as every American knows, are by nature a cowardly, cheese-eating people, who have never overthrown their rightful rulers, or publicly beheaded the aristocracy. No, the French were just sitting there, smoking like chimneys, and otherwise enjoying their debt-enslavement and the privatization of their social democracy, until they unsuspectingly logged onto Facebook ... and BLAMMO, the Russian hackers got them!
    
-- cj hopkins

the-indiscreet-charm-of-the-gilets-jaunes

American crazies

Recent efforts to burnish the image of members of the Bundy Public Land Grab clan bear close watching. A flurry of Bundy-friendly articles and videos commenced in early November. This began with a fawning piece in the Idaho Statesman featuring Ammon Bundy “a sunlight kind of guy” at his apple orchard in Emmett Idaho.

Near the end of the conference on Saturday afternoon, Ammon Bundy took the stage to describe his family’s battle over grazing rights as part of a religious war. In an hour-long speech that often resembled a sermon, Bundy called environmentalists “an enemy to humans,” and said they are driven by a non-Judeo-Christian theology. He also read from the New American magazine, which is published by a subsidiary of the far-right group John Birch Society: “United Nations is essentially a global government under construction. The fact that the U.N. functions as a church for the religion of environmentalists reveals just how dangerous this religion is.” Bundy also said that water shortage and overpopulation are “lies” …

    -- High Country News, 4/26/2018, Range Rights and Resources Symposium 

rebranding-bundy

whip it with Waters

arctic monkeys

these guys seem popular......3,397,133 views

the vanishing

The image of a wild animal becomes the starting-point of a daydream: a point from which the daydreamer departs with his back turned.

– John Berger, Why Look At Animals? (1980)

the-last-descent

elvis

Poppy Bush and the highway of death

“Much good can come from the prudent use of power. And much good can come from this:  A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right”

    -- George H. W. Bush, State of the Union address, 1/28/1992

(Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait on February 26 and 27, 1991)

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. ‘It was like shooting fish in a barrel,’ said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun…for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely…. ‘Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,’ said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer…U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck, from cluster bombs to 500 pound bombs…U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions….
    -- testimony of Joyce Chediac, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal

hit me blockhead!

thanx and a tip of the hammerhead to Eric

and that's the truth

/ed note:
we often run columns by mr. hopkins, in spite of his snarky comments and incredibly sarcastic and cynical views. however, he nails it this time.

There is only one truth … the official truth. The truth according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of “truth” was invented (i.e., to render any other “truths” lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some “objective truth” (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger’s dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn’t. The truth is just a story … a story that is never our story.
    ---- cj hopkins

manufacturing-truth

David Crosby 'Vow of Hair'

Almost cut my hair
Happened just the other day
It's gettin' kind of long
I could've said it was in my way
But I didn't and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
And I feel like I owe it, yeah ... to someone, yeah

After years of procrastination, I finally decided to take the Vow sometime during the fall of 2016. And yes, I still got hair, and it was just lying around (or blowing around or whatever hair does) and putting up with the occasional 'trim' which sometimes was disastrous and a general embarrassment.... "Hey professor; nice haircut". Now, all people can say is "he took the Vow", and wonder why the hell they went bald at age 35. 

I certainly don't know. Its a mystery.

The Vow does allow a certain latitude in your relationship with the hair-dresser person, and yes you can visit the hair-dresser but only under the following conditions: 

Your hair must be "annoying you", or, your significant other says the dreaded words, "you need a trim". 

Only these 2 conditions can compel you to visit the hair-dresser person, and according to the Vow, you must tell the hair-dresser person exactly these words: "You can cut my hair, but when I walk out of here, my hair must be longer than when I walked in".

The Vow is not to be taken lightly- its seriousness or gravitas is on the order of the sacred Vow of Weed, "Smoke 'em if you got 'em". 

In other words, "grow it if you got it". 

    -- db desgnr