Tuesday, July 31, 2018

off the rails

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”-- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Today the global situation is perilous. There is an overwhelming inertia at play here and the momentum is leading us off the rails. Or, rather, on the rails to 21st century concentration camps…as the threats of global warming, nuclear war, and worldwide pollution hang overhead as a modern-day sword of Damocles. To repeat a Benjamin quote which many have noticed for its prescience: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.”
from-frankfurt-with-love

Monday, July 30, 2018

the Great Disorder

The panicky reaction to Trump's latest acts demonstrates that he is undermining and destabilizing the US political establishment and its ideology. So our conclusion should be: yes, the situation is dangerous, there is uncertainty and elements of chaos in international relations – but it is here that we should remember Mao's old motto: "There is great disorder under the sky, so the situation is excellent!"
    -- Slavoj Žižek
There are many things to dislike about President Trump, but he is shaking up the establishment and raising mishandled issues that would not otherwise be discussed. He is causing chaos and his policy prescriptions are rarely correct, but he is unintentionally creating opportunities for positive change, if people can rise to the occasion in an informed and strategic way. 

great-disorder-under-the-sky

A World Leader’s Demise

by Gregory Ross / July 29th, 2018

bolting upright, sweat pours down his brow
as the nightmare, held captive by his unconscious,
escapes into the night.
the afterimage, still vivid behind his eyes,
stalks his camouflaged conscience.
strangling back a cry he tries to evade the figure
whose words sear his psyche:
“your soldiers are on strike.
no longer will they kill for your greed and pride.
they are in the world building hospitals and schools.
your ships carry food to the poor,
your planes medicine to the sick.
weapons have been dismantled.
the world has chosen peace.
we wish to forgive you, that you may join us.”
he got up to turn on the light, to remove the night.
in that instant, brightness engulfing the room,
his heart stopped to see the figure: a Woman,
perhaps Vietnamese or Latina.
maybe Native American or African.
she smiled and in that moment he died of fear.
he was buried, the only peace
his troubled soul could accept.

Saturday, July 28, 2018

Too Many Puppies


The obligatory cute dog item is still as valid today- in 2018 the 21st-est century if there ever was one- as it was not so long ago (last year) when we were younger and stupider.  We here at GN contend to stay out of the way as we move forward. 

anon. speaker  
"I mean, dogs are cute sort of, except when they are slobbering all over you, the furniture, and the 2 year old. Wait, I don't have a 2 year old."

".....in 2012, there were 83 million owned dogs"
   --Humane Society data

".....dogs will never make it to Mars, and if somehow one did, well, the cats would not be pleased"
   --Bart Simpson

Monday, July 23, 2018

interference

In its fixation on the question of “Russian interference” the media ignores the content of that interference—which was, more significantly than the production of disinformation, the revelation of inconvenient truth. The Democratic Party thwarted the highly promising candidacy of Bernie Sanders, bitterly disappointing (and one would hope, appropriately disillusioning) a generation.
And the Russkies wanted to interfere in this pure democratic process! They wanted to actually EXPOSE the fact that the Americans themselves had rigged their own election!.....how DARE the Russians facilitate the U.S. electorate’s awareness of DNC antics! That’s private, in-house stuff, U.S. dirty laundry. Not Moscow’s business! For Moscow to reveal this stuff was total INTERFERENCE! Unforgivable!
    -- Gary Leupp

the enemy really is "US"

For all intents and purposes, Donald Trump is an enemy of the people.  As is Vladimir Putin. As are the Clintons, the Bushs, Barack Obama, and any individual that fills the power structure which has smothered us since the country’s founding. Their allegiance is not to us; it is to global capital. It is to the system that was deliberately arranged by our founders with the purpose of protecting wealth and power from “the mob” (us). 
    -- Colin Jenkins

american-okie-doke


Thursday, July 19, 2018

jack white

Everyone creating is a member of the family
Passing down genes and ideas in harmony
The players and the cynics will be thinking it's hard
But if you rewind the tape, we're all copying god


Wednesday, July 18, 2018

summiteers

So it appears America and democracy have miraculously survived the dreaded Trump-Putin summit … or Trump’s meeting with his Russian handler, as the neoliberal ruling classes and their mouthpieces in the corporate media would dearly like us all to believe. NATO has not been summarily dissolved. Poland has not been invaded by Russia. The offices of The New York TimesThe Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC have not been stormed by squads of jackbooted Trumpian Gestapo. The Destabilization of the Middle East, the Privatization of Virtually Everything, the Conversion of the Planet into One Big Shopping Mall, and other global capitalist projects are all going forward uninterrupted. Apart from Trump making a narcissistic, word-salad-babbling jackass of himself, which he does on a more or less daily basis, nothing particularly apocalyptic happened.
    -- cj hopkins

trumps-treasonous-traitor-summit

Thursday, July 12, 2018

History A, or History B?

The Memphis trial [MLK 1999 civil trial] has opened wide the door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire or oneself.
    -- James Douglass, 1999
the-two-conflicting-histories-of-the-king-assassination

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

a wide net

Human rights groups and independent researchers have found between 67 percent and 99 percent of nominal terror cases involve varying degrees of FBI involvement, often with the bureau acting as the primary engine—providing materials, plans and encouragement to a “suspect,” often after he or she merely expresses pro-jihadist sympathies online. The gap between idle internet musing and actual acts of violence is a wide one, and one the FBI routinely helps close by constructing these Potemkin plots.

another-foiled-terror-plot

Tuesday, July 10, 2018

L E R

the keystone

“The 21st century will be spiritual or will not be.”
    -- Andre Malraux 

We are not going to save the world without learning how to actually live in the world".
-- William Hawes 
ecology-the-keystone-science

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Happy 4th!!!!

The government of Americans means to have its way through the use and threatened to use of superior force. It will lie. It will deceive. It will kill. It will escalate the threat and use of force to the highest level it dares. It will bluff, dangerous as that can be.  It will do whatever it must to dominate. It does this in the face of the fact that its very preparation for a nuclear war may destroy all life.

    __ Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 1986

happy 3rd of July!

DUBAI: Mourners tossed flowers from a helicopter and a ferry into the Arabian Gulf off the coast of Iran Tuesday to mark the 30th anniversary of the U.S. Navy shooting down an Iranian commercial airline, which killed 290 people. The July 3, 1988, downing of Iran Air flight 655 by the U.S. Navy remains one of the moments the Iranian government points to in its decades long distrust of America. They rank it alongside the 1953 CIA-backed coup that toppled its elected prime minister and secured Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s absolute power until he abdicated the throne before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
    -- John Gambrell

1988-iran-flight-downing

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

lest we forget

“The Day After” became one of the most highly rated shows in U.S. history and gave a huge boost to the nuclear freeze movement.
https://youtu.be/Iyy9n8r16hs

Monday, July 2, 2018

meat puppets

Industrial farming of cows, pigs, sheep and chickens, plus harvesting fish, for human consumption is the single greatest cause of the interconnected environmental catastrophe.....The vast majority of people are unaware of the devastating effects of our collective eating habits, and from this position of uninformed ignorance disaster flows.
    -- Graham Peebles
diet-ignorance-and-the-environmental-catastrophe

Sunday, July 1, 2018

so long Anthony, goodbye justice

Donald Trump could conceivably get five Supreme Court picks in his first term, all of them coming from his toxic list of 25 candidates with the Federalist Society’s seal of approval. For perhaps the next 25 years, the Supreme Court will be an entity to be defied not pleaded with. It will have become the Court of Lost Resort.
So perhaps we should thank Kennedy for leaving. His exit should shatter any remaining illusions that the Supreme Court will intervene to save the nation in deus ex machina fashion from a tyrannical president. The salvation of the rights of the people are now solely in the hands of the people themselves.
Justice won’t be found in the courts. It will be won in the streets.
-- Jeffrey St. Clair
 anthony-kennedy-and-the-court-of-lost-resort

watchtower