Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Kunstler

"I consider our techno-industrial economy a transient phenomenon, and many of the assumptions and ideas about it as erroneous, especially the sci-fi fantasies du jour, invoking a dazzling robotic nirvana to come. My book The Long Emergency detailed exactly the dead-end we find ourselves in. And the follow-up, titled Too Much Magic, describes the cargo cult of wishful thinking that arose after 2008, when the fragility of our phony-baloney banking system was exposed as the matrix of fraud that it is. Our pornified culture, with its overlayment of mass murder, drug abuse, gluttony, and celebrity idol worship is the epitome of decadence—anything goes and nothing matters. My view is that we’re heading into profound systems failure and the outcome will be a re-set to a far less complex human condition. We’ll be lucky, when the dust settles, if we can land back in an early 19th century level of activity, but we could go full medieval, or worse. At the moment, we can’t construct a coherent story about what is happening to us; and therefore we can’t make any coherent plans to act in the face of it. Our current politics reflect this sad state of affairs."

an-interview-with-james-howard-kunstler

Friday, February 23, 2018

Skydio: acting in our behalf!

"We are entering a new age where computers aren’t just static objects that we tap on and read information from; computers will become mobile agents that act on our behalf in the world. We believe building intelligent machines that bring the creative capacity of software to life in the physical world is the opportunity of a generation; a future where they multiply human creativity and human possibility."
    --- Skydio, https://www.skydio.com/about/ 

the black panther

“The black panther is a vicious animal. He never bothers anything, but when you start pushing him, he moves backward, backward, and backward, and then he comes out and destroys everything that’s in front of him.”
    -- John Hulett
It’s like a giant armored rhinoceros plowing through the cultural/political tundra trailed by critics — tick birds and scavenging rodents picking at its fleas and nibbling its droppings.
    -- Osha Neumann 

a-white-guy-watches-the-black-panther

Thursday, February 22, 2018

so long, Billy

“Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.”
    -- Romans 13, New American Standard Version of the Bible

“We are selling the greatest product on earth. Why shouldn’t we promote it as effectively as we promote a bar of soap?” 
    – Billy Graham, Saturday Evening Post, 1963

Graham.....left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he intruded into politics in the 1950s. The shift from secular governance to “In God We Trust” can be laid squarely at this minister’s feet.






Wednesday, February 21, 2018

rootin' tootin' Putin

Evil Russian Bots attack the Homeland!

"One of the most divisive issues in the nation is how to handle guns, pitting Second Amendment advocates against proponents of gun control. And the messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult."
"When the Russian bots jumped on the hashtag #Parklandshooting — initially created to spread news of the shooting — they quickly stoked tensions. Exploiting the issue of mental illness in the gun control debate, they propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman, was a mentally ill “lone killer.” They also claimed that he had searched for Arabic phrases on Google before the shooting. Simultaneously, the bots started other hashtags, like #ar15, for the semiautomatic rifle used in the shooting, and #NRA."
    -- After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced, bSheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, New York Times, Feb. 19, 2018

new-york-times-exploits-parkland-tragedy-to-escalate-anti-russian-campaign



sorry, the Russians aren't coming

On Friday, thirteen Russians and three Russian entities were charged by special counsel Robert Mueller for conspiring in interfering with “US political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”  While there was tooting and trumpeting on the media circuit, the more astute were less impressed.

In of itself, these actions, including the social media campaigns and advertising, were matters of minor significance, even if they did simulate the idea of grand chaos.  To suggest that they somehow tipped the balance is self-comfortingly delusional.  What these indictments may well inadvertently show is that such Russian operations were a form of revenge for US meddling, notably in Ukraine in 2014. The target of that meddling was the pro-Russian leader, Viktor Yanukovych.
    -- Binoy Kampmark

muellers-russia-indictments

Monday, February 19, 2018

cities, ibid.

“entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it.”

un-sustainable cities

Dr William Rees, of the University of British Columbia, who created the ecological footprint analysis with Mathis Wackernagel, describes modern cities as “entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it.” According to Rees, New York requires a supply base almost 1000 times the geographic size of the city itself. Tokyo requires an area twice the size of Japan to maintain it. A recent study showed that the 744 largest cities worldwide require more carbon dioxide sequestration than the entire world’s forests could provide. Dr Rees is clear, “sustainable cities is an oxymoron”.

are-modern-cities-sustainable?

post-truth

What has happened is that the spinning machine of marketing, branding and advertising has extended beyond products and services and entered a previously guarded domain of fact and evidence, rational argument and justified conclusions. And it has done this simply by transferring its hucksterism to social media platforms that now own the public discourse space.
    -- Joseph Natoli

in-the-post-truth-classroom

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Obama-esque

Barack Obama’s presidential portrait was revealed in Washington, and the comparisons to Mona Lisa have been as immediate as they are expected.
“The man, she is the enigma,” says noted art-historian Basel D’Arte, best known for his critiques of famous paintings, and less so for his grasp of the distinctions between masculine and feminine pronouns in the English language. 
“When you look at the Obama man, you see much beauty, strength, and a certain how-you-say? A bit of a real fuck-you? Oui, c’est ca. A certain ‘fuck-you-I’ve-thought-about-this-a-lot-and-I-don’t-think-you-really-have. This is what the painting says, and that is why his eyes? They rolls like a royce.”

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Tomorrow I will be loosened
From bonds that hold me fast
That the chains all hung around me
Will fall away at last
And on that fine and fateful day
I will take thee in my hands
I will ride on the train
I will be the fisherman
With light in my head
You in my arms

nothing

Friday, February 16, 2018

are you a Rooskie?

According to experts in the corporate media, and our corporate-sponsored representatives in government (and, it goes without saying, the “intelligence community”), the primary weapon the Rooskies are using to destroy democracy, and life on Earth, is this sowing of “divisiveness” and “discord,” and “distrust” of our government and corporate elites, who love us as they love their own children, and who would never try to manipulate us, or treat us like interchangeable commodities, or bankrupt us with their Ponzi schemes, or debt-enslave our families for profit, or any other horrible things like that.
    -- c.j. hopkins
the-war-on-dissent-part-2

Thursday, February 15, 2018

the South will rise again

In the past year, we've seen a burst of audacious political assertiveness coming out of Old Dixie, and I'm not talking about those Trumpeteering, tiki-torch-brandishing, tinhorn KKKers the media focuses on. The real story is that a fresh, "Reclaim the South" movement of young African-American populists is emerging, kindling long-suppressed hope in the racially scarred Deep South and offering the possibility of real economic and cultural progress.
    -- Jim Hightower
south-rising-again

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Bezos!

City of Buffalo's mayor wasn't stupid enough.

The contest to find the stupidest mayor in America is best understood in this context, as yet another episode in Amazon’s efforts to shaft taxpayers. And judging by the quantity and enthusiasm of the bids, the taxpayers still haven’t caught on.

There is a reason that Jeff Bezos is considered a genius.


    -- Dean Baker
stupidest mayor in America

we'll all need shotguns

“Shotguns, everyone wanted shotguns,” an Iraqi commander said when asked about the weeks in late 2016 when ISIS first began using drones to drop small bombs on Iraqi soldiers. “The quads [quad-copters] are the hardest to hear, see, and hit. At night, they’re really hard to see even with night-vision equipment. One of my men, found an old marsh gun [a 10-gauge shotgun] and we used that to take down a few of them.”

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

bottom feeders

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”    -- Jean Baudrillard
When we were not barraged with the discord that cyberspace presents us, we had only to deal with off-line voices, which had a range limited by the analog networks unable to tap us into a second by second update of an American mass psyche. We are now treated to such in our online dimension of reality. Here, bottom feeders with low information opinionate on a bottom ceaselessly descending toward a dark abyss where we can no longer see each other.
    -- Joseph Natoli

bottom-feeders-with-low-information

the shock of the real

I see or hear people I know saying things that I find shocking. Racist and xenophobic and mostly just vindictive and vengeful even. The tolerance for American wars speaks to this, I think. Yemen is being reduced to rubble but America simply doesn’t care. The erosion of public education and its effects are partly masked by the addiction to technology. Smart phones, I suppose, in particular. But I say that sincerely. The weird masturbatory text compulsion eats up hours of everyone’s day. People no longer even look at each other. Where Walter Benjamin once marked the shock of late 19th century urban life with the rapid passing of faces in a crowd, today the shock is of the passing faces not seen. Life takes place on screens. A life increasingly unreal.
    -- John Steppling

Monday, February 12, 2018

whitey on the moon

Taxes taking my whole damn check,
Junkies making me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is going up,
An’ as if all that shit was’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)

Martin Luther King drives a Dodge Ram!

.....our society will pay up the ass for that military parade Trump and his Military Mercenaries want for Pennsylvania Avenue. Tens of millions for the parade. All that US Military Continuing Criminal Enterprise killing hardware on display, tens of thousands and thousands of gallons and pounds of diesel and jet fuel expended, so Americans can go teary eyed, shedding crocodile tears like they do at Super Bowls, while jet squadrons and SEAL teams attack the home-field, while medal of honor winners do the coin toss at the beginning of the game, while Dodge Ram sells lie after lie, using Martin Luther King’s words, man, for halftime commercials squeezed between the Doritos for men/for women ads, squeezed between Jeff Bezos in his Misanthropic Alien Skin doing an Amazon commercial, while bombs burst in air. Didn’t you get all choked up seeing those Blackhawks strafing the stadium?
    -- Paul Haeder


Sunday, February 11, 2018

Stupor Bowl post-script

For most of the history of American football, behemoth arenas, both domed and open to the elements, referred back to the civic venues of the Romans.  Try as it might, the cool blue glass of the U. S. Bank Stadium cannot obscure these origins. It cannot hide the fact that corporate survival and football are both blood sports. Football is gladiatorial combat with a lower immediate kill rate, though not an inconsiderable one, and with grave longer-term neurological dangers. Veterans of foreign wars and domestic pigskin battles were arrayed and honored in Minneapolis, but none of the maimed, or coffined, or fully-addled were. As for the populace itself, its members may not get fed to the lions anymore, but they can still be bled by the powerful.
And manipulated by their minions.
    -- David Yearsley

Saturday, February 10, 2018

is that a smartphone in your pocket?

....or are you glad to see me?

Along with the familiar camera and microphone, smartphones can pack a slew of other exquisitely sensitive sensors.

Fingerprint/TouchID: Scans the user’s fingerprint
Proximity: Measures the distance of other objects from the phone’s touch screen
Light: Gauges the light level in the phone’s environment
Barometer: Measures ambient pressure around the phone
Accelerometer: Measures acceleration of the device’s movement or vibration
Gyroscope: Evaluates degree and direction of a phone’s rotation
Magnetism: Reports the magnetic field intensity around the phone
Gravity: Measures the force of gravity

smartphones-data-collection-security-privacy

Thursday, February 8, 2018

ed. note

Public Service Announcement 2:
Here at GeezerNation, as we seek a fair and balanced approach to “fake news”, from time-to-time even we become sick of the soul crushing nature of the editorial content of the present fake moment- the slow apocalypse.
Therefore, to make available a public therapeutic service for you, blogging person, we offer up kittens.

(note: well, after an exhaustive search to find an appropriate kittens video from the nearly 4,840,000 results on Google and finding none, we have included a non-video photo of our cat)














Wednesday, February 7, 2018

wimp

For some jobs, only a homicidal maniac will do.
On February 2, it was reported that Korea expert Victor Cha had been removed from consideration for American ambassador to Seoul.  The New York Times said that Cha believes he was dropped because he opposes a US attack on North Korea.
Wimp.

Monday, February 5, 2018

spook art

Recent writing on CIA’s role in the kulturkampf against the Red Menace paints an image of debonair spooks recruiting the most interesting Western artists and using them, unbeknownst, as a liberal wedge against radical movements at home and abroad. The Agency created cultural institutions, magazines and, most importantly, a financial market to support movements such as Abstract Expressionism; it penned articles in favor of a liberal-leftish ideology of self-expression that could exist only in the ‘democratic’ West; it organized exhibits, printed books, organized press conferences and it paid grants. Episodes from the operations resemble the work of a paranoid comic programmer with sinister preoccupations. It is as if Thomas Pynchon, MK GRVTI 49, was behind the whole thing, perhaps working both sides against the middle, like one of his characters.
    -- Martin Billheimer

assassins-of-the-image-the-cia-as-cultural-gatekeeper
    

Thursday, February 1, 2018

our geo-historical moment

Our species, fully constituted as a geophysical force, now contends with the terrifying consequences of engaging with other biospheric forces.
We are a species in retreat. Pusillanimous descriptions of our geo-historical circumstances such as ‘climate change’ are daily challenged by the occurrence of extreme weather events that disrupt society, destroy infrastructure, and obliterate human life. Twenty lives were lost in Montecito and two others remain missing, buried perhaps, beneath mud or swept out to sea. These events might be more effectively described as Weather Terrorism. However, the ascription of such an inflammatory label to acts of ‘Nature’ - to grant weather agency - requires a profound philosophical re-orientation.
    -- John Davis

weather-terrorism

watchtower