yeah

Yeah it's all coming back to me now
My apocalypse, my apocalypse
The curtain rose and burned in the morning sun
Yeah the curtain rose and burned in the morning sun

Bill Callahan

mercury blues

cry for Venezuela

“We’re in conversation with major American companies now…it would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot at stake here.”

-- John Bolton

...the strategic planners inside the Beltway see in Venezuela today an opportunity to strike a death blow to socialism and anti-imperialist politics in Latin America. While they shed crocodile tears over elections, democracy, and corruption, the reality is that the vultures of Empire are circling around what they feel is a carcass to be stripped clean. 
    -- Eric Draitser

coup-in-venezuela-the-full-story

in NewsGuard we trust

NewsGuard and its shady advisory board – consisting of truth-lovers such as Tom Ridge, the first-ever homeland security chief, and former CIA director Michael Hayden – came under scrutiny after Microsoft announced that the app would be built into its mobile browsers. A closer examination of the company's publicly listed investors, however, has revealed new reasons to be suspicious of this self-declared crusader against propaganda. As Breitbart discovered, NewsGuard's third-largest investor, Publicis Groupe, owns a PR firm that has repeatedly airbrushed Saudi Arabia.

newsguard-pr-investor

Local H. Channel 5

Somewhere in Atlanta long ago.....

blessed

buffalos

thanx and a flip of the ol' mustache to Eric

everything's fine

no poem tonight

-- Gary Lindorff

I shake my head,

And frown into
A virtual page of white —
This screen —

That lights my face
In this otherwise dark room
That we have been trying to heat
Against the storm

That blows as if to extinguish
Our little box of light.
The white of the screen
Mimics the white 

Of the fields and forest
Hidden by the blackness
That turns the windows into mirrors. . .
In which I see myself 

Trying to write.
But no poem comes,
Even though this sweetest of worlds
Deserves to be remembered.

All I can do is stare
Into the ominous white noise
Of the virtual
Page of white.

raconteurs

Belushi

emergency

The careless extension of what the American Sci-Fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘The Dithering’ – those decades when we understood the atmospheric CO2 problem but totally failed to address it - guarantees its imminent arrival. The catch now is that the climate is changing everything for us. We have already liberated enough carbon in the atmosphere to put the weather on disaster auto-pilot for the next millennium. We can but batten down the hatches, stockpile provisions and close the fire-doors. The weather is the effective change-agent, not we nor our politicians. The pretense that humans are in charge has finally to be abandoned. We await our fate possessing only crude materials of resistance and, thus far, almost no political will to emplace them.
    -- John Davis

a-national-emergency

ex-president

TRUMP HASTILY DEPARTS WHITE HOUSE, ENDING CRISIS
by Lisa Chung, Washington Post, May 1, 2019

the capital —

Barely six months after the midterm elections, Donald Trump appears to have abandoned the White House and abdicated his role as president. He issued no formal statement, though four White House aides — who spoke on the condition of anonymity — claim they found a napkin on the president’s desk in the Oval Office on the evening of April 30, scrawled in red ink with the following message: “Blame Crooked Hillary & Hfior & the Fake News Media.”

democracyawakensinaction

from Cafe Domenico

Since the awakening of my deep imagination in early mid-life, I have wrestled with my fate as a writer. I was back then thoroughly entangled in family life and in relative impoverishment, working as an adjunct instructor at local colleges when, through undergoing a psycho-spiritual crisis of major proportions, I found existing within myself a magnificent and very real alternate world. Ever since, my struggle has been to reconcile this immense capacity to imagine reality differently, that makes sense to my heart and is coherent, with my very limited circumstances living in dismal Utica and essentially chained to the small coffeeshop business we launched 16 years ago. The business was and remains the one tangible result of the aforementioned awakening; in my eyes, it embodies the dream of universal brotherhood which is also the anarchist dream, and for that I love it without reserve. Although it defies pragmatic business orthodoxy and is not “successful,” and thus cannot be explained to our business-savvy friends, its basis in the dream of beauty is why we cannot forsake it. It is our creation, our work, and our fate.

    -- Kim Domenico

fate-fatalism-and-freedom

strike

Teachers are supposed to submit to the massive underfunding of our schools and tackle the problems in our usual way–self-sacrifice. This means working insane hours, trying to do what can’t be done, and spending our own money to buy what Los Angeles Unified School District will not. It means being blamed for the district’s shortcomings and the negative effects poverty has on our overwhelmingly impoverished student body.
Finally, we said “No.”
    -- Glenn Sacks

LA-teachers-strike

dark skies

StartRocket aims to use a formation of tiny cube satellites to create programmable displays in the night sky in a low-Earth orbit of 400-500 kilometers (248-310 miles). Each satellite would have a single collapsible sail to reflect the light of the sun, forming a single pixel in the giant nocturnal display measuring 50 square kilometers across (19 square miles).

orbiting-billboards

burn lands

Even in the burn lands, the beauty of the hills, valleys, canyons and distant mountains remains. Bathed in the soft glow of early morning and evening light, it is transfixing. Scoured by cold north-easterly Santa Ana winds (in other seasons, the fire wind) the atmosphere is preternaturally clear, the landscape stunningly chromatic. Yet as the year turns, and we enter another millionth sliver of geologic time, it is apparent that although we humans are often individually long-lived, as a species we will die young.

-- John Davis

burn-lands

dead elvi

Newsguard- what could possibly go wrong?

We tell you if a news site is reliable—right in your browser!

1. You can install the NewsGuard plugin in either your Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari browser with one click. NewsGuard uses journalism to fight unreliable news. Our trained analysts, who are experienced journalists, research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trustworthy--and which ones aren't. Our Green-Red ratings signal if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda, giving readers more context about their news online.

Newsguard — by virtue of its deep connections to government and Silicon Valley — is lobbying to have its rankings of news sites installed by default on computers in U.S. public libraries, schools, and universities as well as on all smartphones and computers sold in the United States.

In other words, as Newsguard’s project advances, it will soon become almost impossible to avoid this neocon-approved news site’s ranking systems on any technological device sold in the United States. Worse still, if its efforts to quash dissenting voices in the U.S. are successful, Newsguard promises that its next move will be to take its system global.

how-a-neocon-backed-fact-checker-plans-to-wage-war-on-independent-media

not popular

The way I see it, the global capitalist ruling classes now have less than two years to put down this current “populist” insurgency. First and foremost, they need to get rid of Trump, who despite his bombastic nativist rhetoric is clearly no “hero of the common people,” nor any real threat to global capitalism, but who has become an anti-establishment symbol, like a walking, talking “fuck you” to both the American and global neoliberal elites. Then, they need to get a handle on Europe, which isn’t going to be particularly easy. What happens next in France will be telling, as will whatever becomes of Brexit … which I continue to believe will never actually happen, except perhaps in some purely nominal sense.
    -- c.j. hopkins

the-war-on-populism

crypto

Epiphanies on symphonies, epic epigrams
Man these words last for centuries
This shit's timeless, scribe it on your door
Don't say the sky's the limit when there's footprints on the moon
Moonwalking on the sun, sun beaming, I'm a star
Stars shooting into space, spaceship it up to Mars
Yeah, I'm universal, my purpose to pursue this path
And get back that's how life's sposed to circle

Uh!

thanx and a tip of the helmet to Richard......

B-21

....when the U.S. military develops a capability, it seeks to use it, even in cases where it’s wildly inappropriate. (Again, think of the massive B-52 bombings in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in a counterinsurgency campaign classically meant to win “hearts and minds.”) Fielding a new strategic bomber for global strike, including potential thermonuclear attacks, will not so much enhance national security as potentially embolden future presidents to strike whenever and wherever they want in a fashion devastating to human life. The B-21 isn’t a force-multiplier. It’s an Armageddon-enabler.

enabling-armageddon

'shroomin'

somewhere near Huntsville, Alabama.....

fpe.today/videos

duck soup

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon. However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.

    —Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report 

happy new year