Monday, January 29, 2018

College Humour Section

Kill Phil part 1 
There was work to be done. It had been two years of solitary. the Baker Act was behind me -Then it was the transplant, rehab, and then the disposal of Nurse Ratchet. All the while I was lying in wait. Knowing I would get stronger and have new leadership on the home front. I was short on meds and hadn't eaten in four days. It was two clicks to the Krishna House. Couldn't expose the operation just for rice - they knew me from 2002, when I compromised their location while stealing food and assorted percussion instruments - to close to shands and my ole penthouse suite.
TIMES HAD CHANGED BUT IT WAS STILL PUKE ORANGE AND PAYBACK TIME.
YESTERDAY, GOT ON THE GREYHOUND AND WENT TO ST AUG FOR A BITE AT THE OLE BALL COACHS VACATED PREMISES. STOCKED ON MEDS AND LEFT MY ODIFEROUS CALLING CARD. BACK IN TOWN IN FULL CAMMO WAITNG TO INFILTRATE THE ENEMY CAMP. HAVE BEGUN TUNNELING ACROSS FROM THE DOME. BATTLING ORGAN REJECTION BUT HOPEFUL OF SABOTAGE AND SUBTERFUGE. LOST A PINT OF THE RED STUFF DUE TO PICK AX MISHAP AND BLOOD THINNERS. MAY CALL IN FOR REINFORCEMENTS, STARTING TO SEE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF ORANGE AND BLUE. THE GATOR WALK MAY BE MY LAST CHANCE ON GETTING ON THE FIELD IF I CAN HOLD OUT.
mAY HAVE TO CALL IN A STRIKE iF uNABLE tO pROCEED WITh mISSioN tHE hORROR.....THE hORROR kILL pHIL coordinates...........


    -- psychogator

ed. note

Public Service Announcement 1:



Sunday, January 28, 2018

free the land!

Cooperation Jackson is an emerging network of cooperatives and grassroots institutions that aim to build a “solidarity economy.” By seizing on the crisis and weak links of modern capitalism and building on the historic struggles for racial equality by the black people of Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson has created a model we can all learn from.
    -- Richard Moser
jackson-rising-a-real-strategic-plan

Friday, January 26, 2018

“extremist” or “terrorist.”? you decide

....we we no longer live in a world where nation-against-nation conflict is driving the course of political events. We live in a world where global capitalism is driving the course of political events. The economies of virtually every nation on the planet are hopelessly interdependent. Capitalist ideology pervades all cultures, despite their superficial differences. It is a globally hegemonic system, so it has no external enemies. None. The only threats it faces are internal. Its “enemies” are, by definition, insurgent … in other words, “extremist” or “terrorist.”
  -- c. j. hopkins
War-on-Dissent

Thursday, January 25, 2018

bring on the kittens

Would we accept....wholesale censoring of the internet if it were being carried out by Donald Trump or the UK’s Theresa May? Or even Rupert Murdoch, for that matter? Of course not. We would call it a blatant suppression of free speech, and be thinking about how to break up these dangerous new-media monopolies.
But when it is “nerdy” Zuckerberg and the faceless billionnaires behind Google and Twitter doing it, the censorship is presented as simple technical adjustments made for the benefit of mankind – tweaking algorithms to separate the “truthful”, all-American wheat from Russian chaff.
the-war-against-fake-news-is-a-war-on-us

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

War, Inc.-Plan of Empire 2

You know what they say. Just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. And they are. 
[Erik] Prince’s latest initiative in Washington is a proposal to provide a private, global spy network that would report directly to CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the Prez, bypassing official U.S. intelligence agencies.  Pompeo, like Prince, is one of Trump’s most loyal partisans.
...the House spending bill released on January 17 would allow Trump, or people under him, like Pompeo, to fund intelligence programs in complete secrecy, without any authorization from Congress. 
Trump has just finished his first year as Shithole-in-Chief. The ride just gets bumpier from here.

not Al Pacino

“Any artist [person] who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist [person] in him.” 
– Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”



So I’ve had to deal with people being drawn to me because they think I’m a celebrity. I’m not an actor. I’m the real thing.

- Frank Serpico

Monday, January 22, 2018

Uranium Bullets

by Maria Stadnicka / January 21st, 2018

I always arrive late for everything.
Stuck in a traffic jam by the docks,
missed Noah’s boat but
survived under water
accidentally trapped between stolen books
by a word heavier than a stone,
lighter than a feather.
Hidden in the overcrowded wooden train carriage,
radicalised by the anonymity of my blue name-tag,
with a heart growing outside my body.
Each beat painfully visible to the guards
around the Monopoly table.
On the waiting list for ballet lessons,
radicalised by the price of uranium bullets on Mother’s Day
handwriting an apologetic note.
My deep eye silenced.
The familiar solemnity of a world without face.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

the masters of war

[this] military training video says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way it views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the military must be prepared to address in the near future, which include criminal networks, illicit economies, decentralized syndicates of crime, substandard infrastructure, religious and ethnic tensions, impoverishment, economic inequality, protesters, slums, open landfills, over-burdened sewers, and a “growing mass of unemployed.”
    -- John Whitehead

“This is a fantasy, the idea that there is a special military science of megacities. It’s simply not the case. … They seem to envision large cities with slum peripheries governed by antagonistic gangs, militias, or guerrilla movements that you can somehow fight using special ops methods. In truth, that’s pretty far-fetched. … You only have to watch ‘Black Hawk Down’ and scale that up to the kind of problems you would have if you were in Karachi, for example. You can do special ops on a small-scale basis, but it’s absurd to imagine it being effective as any kind of strategy for control of a megacity.”
    -- Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums




Saturday, January 20, 2018

deportee

“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”
    -- Donald Trump

Jean Montrevil, a well-known community leader in New York City, was, indeed, taken out. “I just had my first wake-up in Haiti after 32 years,” Jean told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour Wednesday morning. He went on to describe his ordeal: “I was deported on Tuesday, without any notification from my lawyer. They just deported me. My case was still in court. It was very tough, two days of hell. … Imagine staying up for two days straight, with no food and shackled up and with no explanation. And now I’m in Haiti.”

trumps-roundup-immigrant-leaders-has-begun

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Gabbard 2020

“Our country’s history of regime-change wars has led countries like North Korea to develop and hold on to these nuclear weapons because they see it as their only deterrent against regime change.”
   -- Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

tulsi-gabbard-speaks-truth-to-power

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

ape men


“We won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the 21st century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress (again, when measured by the rate of progress in 2000), or about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century.”
    —Ray Kurzweil, futurist and trans-humanist 

I don't feel safe in this world no more,
I don't want to die in a nuclear war,
I want to sail away to a distant shore 
and make like an ape man.

-- the Kinks




One thing is clear: Toffler’s future shock was a tricycle ride. For, what Kurzweil is projecting is an inhuman pace in the most literal sense. How will primate anxieties ever comport this light-speed alteration of everything at once? Does anyone ever raise an apish arm in the lab to ask? Nor can I chastise Kurzweil for merely voicing a disembodied statistic. That would be an ad hominem attack (one day we will have to explain this logical fallacy to our artificial children). The humanist recognizes immediately that there is no human agent conducting this tempo. Technology (whatever the hell it is, no one really knows) is dictating the pace as a prelude to full-on control. We’ll get to declarations of war a little later. But am I alone in reading this statistic as technology’s gauntlet laid down: “We’re gonna run your monkey-asses over”?
    -- Norman Ball

the-unrehearsed-flight-to-transhumanity

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

a pile of shit

“Make no mistake, America is diminished today in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of history.”
-- Dan Rather

America has been diminished and continues to be diminished not because it’s leaders call countries “shit”, it’s because they turn countries into shit. Like when liberal President, Barack Obama, dropped 26,171 bombs in the Middle East in 2016. This equates to dropping a bomb every 15 minutes for 24 hours a day.
-- Rob Seimetz


“Speaking of shithole countries: Among industrialized nations, the United States enjoys the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children; the greatest inequality of incomes; the lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged; lowest number of days of paid holiday, annual leaves, and maternity leaves; second lowest social mobility rate; highest infant mortality rate; highest prevalence of mental-health problems; highest obesity rate; and the highest consumption of anti-depressants per capita. The U.S. has the third-shortest life expectancy at birth; the largest international arms sales; largest military budget; third-lowest scores for student performance in math and science; second highest high school drop out rate; highest homicide rate; and the largest prison population in the world.”
-- Vince Emanuele




some weird shit

Trump is a thieving, lying turd. In that respect, he is as presidential as it gets. Going back to Day One, the United States has been led by white males [plus Obama] behaving badly.
    -- Ted Rall

all-presidents-are-assholes?

Magokoro Brothers

Sunday, January 14, 2018

we have met the enemy and....

A great hatch work of events and attitudes, a cataclysmic reorientation of ways of knowing and feeling, of living together as a social society have led us to Trump and Trump to us. A mountebank huckster so clearly self-deluded and not evolved beyond infantile instantaneous gratification. A ludicrous, embarrassing president but also an avatar of the entire American culture. You describe Trump, you describe us.
    -- Joseph Natoli

what-to-worry-about-and-what-not-to-worry-about

Saturday, January 13, 2018

the slow apocalypse revelation

We are done with the elegant and smooth-talking Obama (and long done with Clinton) and are now exposed to the crude, but refreshingly un-hypocritical brutalities of Trump. How could this not be an improvement within the polity? How could this not be an opportunity to understand the true nature of our predicament? How could this not be a much-sought-after revelation?
    -- John Davis
mud-slide

Friday, January 12, 2018

Golden Globs

....this year’s ceremony marked the maiden public voyage of the Oprah for President bandwagon. Just when you thought that American politics could not possibly degenerate any further into PR imagery, personality cultism, and identity- politics symbolism in order to divert attention from the real crises facing the human race, these elite desperadoes will see you and raise you. With the advent of Oprah, the political science of emptiness plumbs new depths of style over substance, groupthink over reason, bathos over compassion—the basic Hollywood formula since the advent of moving images.

    -- William Kaufman

reflections-in-a-golden-globe

Thursday, January 11, 2018

this is not a comedy

“Sure, there are jokes to make: Yeah, he’s orange, ha-ha, but the answer is no. You’re either going to get the same jokes over and over, or we’re going to be normalizing him by making really silly jokes about him.”
    -- comedian Jen Kirkman, when asked if Trump was good for comedy,

how-not-to-unwind-a-clockwork-orange

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

no one is protesting here

Reading the New York Times coverage of the Iran riots I was struck by a comment by a protester: “On Instagram, I saw a picture of a woman in Tehran with her S.U.V., who wrote she spends $3,000 on her pets each month,” Mehdi said. “A person can live here with that money for a year. I got angry.”

I don’t see how any of this is different here in the U.S.? I live in Orange County, California where people in high-end SUV’s definitely spend on their pets what a homeless person in an encampment down the freeway could live on for a year. But no one is protesting here.


protesters-from-iran-to-orange-county

Sunday, January 7, 2018

WAR, Inc.


As of late September 2017, the United States wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria and the additional spending on Homeland Security, and the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs since the 9/11 attacks totaled more than $4.3 trillion in current dollars through FY2017. Adding likely costs for FY2018 and estimated future spending on veterans, the costs of war total more than $5.6 trillion. 
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/

stay tuned

will the Republicans [and some Democrats] be going after Social Security in 2018?

“Social Security is the soft underbelly of the welfare state. If you can jab your spear through that, you can undermine the whole welfare state.”
    -- Stephen Moore, Club for Growth

Saturday, January 6, 2018

the party’s over

A few people have asked me why I have stopped commenting on American party/electoral politics. The answer is simple: we know what the state of affairs is, we know the elements that have produced it, we know what has to be done – and we know that it manifestly is not being done. There is no mystery about any of this. Nothing has changed over the past year since the Orangutan’s ascendance which, in turn, has cleared the way for the long promised Republican troupe’s rampage against the 20th Century. So, what’s the point of repeating what was written a year or two or three ago? If those of us who share a certain perspective have made not the slightest impression on the American body politic, and if that is due to the overwhelmingly powerful forces that have warped its sense of reality, then another couple of thousand words cannot make a difference.

    -- Michael Brenner

the-futility-of-american-politics

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Nospeak

“We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.… The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime [having unorthodox thoughts] literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
    -- Syme, 1984

“the ultimate aim of Newspeak is to enclose people in an orthodox pseudo-reality and isolate them from the real world.”
    -- Jem Berkes

“President Trump has made 1,318 false or misleading claims over [his first] 263 days [in office]. Many of these claims are repeated over and over again – significantly more than three times."
   -- Washington Post’s Fact Check project

forbidden-words

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

afterburn

On December 22nd. the skies over Southern California lit up with the afterburn of a Space-X rocket, launched from Vandenberg Air Force base, a few miles north of Point Conception - its spent hydrocarbons leaving an ethereal plume that flared across the western sky. The event was reflexively echoed, in real time, by social media. Below, deep in the Sespe Wilderness, the Thomas fire still raged.

Somewhere, in this confluence of signs lay indications of the Anthropocene. The enigma of the epoch was made explicit both in this kerosene fueled apparition in the late evening sky and in the burning of over 275,000 acres of Southern California landscape in the month of December.

   -- John Davis

afterburn

Monday, January 1, 2018

gimme all your digital cash, now!

If Switzerland accepts the change to digital money, a country where until relatively recently most people went to pay their monthly bills in cash to the nearest post office, then we, in the western world, are on a fast track to total enslavement by the financial institutions. It goes, of course, hand-in-hand with the rest of systematic and ever faster advancing oppression and robotization of the 99.9% by the 0.1%.
    -- Peter Koenig

runaway-train-towards-full-digitization-of-money-and-labor

watchtower