lola

Buzz Windrip lives

CNN reported last week that “Donald Trump just keeps ‘joking’ about serving ‘more than two terms’ as president.” People might want to hear this “joke” as more than just a put-on. As correspondent Mary Elizabeth Kelley-Bibra writes from Germany: 

“...Trump is just ‘testing’ the ‘idea,’ I think, in an attempt to gauge what the public response might be (a) to his rejecting the [2020] election results if he loses and refusing to step down, or (b) if he wins, changing legislation to allow himself to run for a third term or declare himself ‘President for Life.’ The problem is that no one seems to be taking this very seriously. It is not a joke."

-- Paul Street

and what about North Korea?

More than a third of Americans would support a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea if that country tested a long-range missile capable of reaching the United States, new research has found, even if that preemptive strike killed a million civilians.

“As we have previously found, the U.S. public exhibits only limited aversion to nuclear weapons use and a shocking willingness to support the killing of enemy civilians.”

majority-of-us-citizens-would-approve-preventive-nuclear-strike

obliteration

Neither elites nor populace seem able to recognize that Iran is not Syria....those who think the US can get away with a limited “tactical” assault on Iran are deluding themselves. Iran does not have the weaknesses Syria has faced for the last decade, and it is precisely determined not to allow them to develop. Iran will not allow itself to be struck at will by the US or its ward state, Israel, without punching back. It the US delivers a “bloody nose” attack to Iran, Americans better be ready for a punch in the face.

And Israel, and those in the US establishment for whom Israel’s interests are central, do not care if an aircraft carrier is sunk, or if the region burns.....That’s what they want! They are trying to provoke a war in which they—either the US on their behalf or Israel directly with its nukes—can “obliterate” Iran. They don’t care who else gets obliterated in the process, and they cannot imagine that could be them. Did I mention—Does anybody ever?—Israeli nukes? Ace in the hole, that they will play if necessary to steal the pot.

    -- Jim Kavanagh

eve-of-destruction-iran-strikes-back

kiss your guitar

his life was in danger

Yes, Mark Field, his face red with indignation, looked like a man who had lost the plot, who was filled with an overwhelming sense of his own entitlement, and who was deeply threatened – not by violence from the protesters but by arguments he simply has no way of addressing rationally.

The real debate we need urgently to engage with is not whether Mark Field is a wife-beater or misogynist. It is how we deal with the power structure he represents, the system he is a loyal servant of. For that psychopathic system is ready to beat us all, men and women alike, into the dust, to keep extracting the last ounce of wealth from a dying corpse, to obliterate our futures.

    -- Jonathan Cook

Tucker in 2024

thanx and a flip of William F. Buckley's hair to Bill......

Carlson on John Bolton

‘Bolton is "a tapeworm"......Try as you might, you can’t expel him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agencies, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering — but somehow never suffering himself. This is Washington in a nutshell: blunder into obvious catastrophes, refuse to admit blame, and demand more of the same. That’s the John Bolton lifecycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, and cable news appearances. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it’s always good business.’

Persian cats

The Persian cats are by now well trained in anti-drone measures.

"anyone that can take aircraft out at 60,000 feet is going to cause you considerable pain if you attack them. your call"

    -- Posted by: m | Jun 20, 2019 9:00:46 AM

"Let's not forget the Venezuela failure. Guaidumb has been exposed as a corrupt dog along with his group of degenerates. Now this failure in Iran is yet another embarrassment for orange with hair. Trump will advise his crew to find an easy win anywhere so he can somehow save face. Another invasion of Grenada is imminent"
    -- Posted by: Comandante | Jun 20, 2019 8:55:57 AM 

iran-shoots-down-strategic-us-drone

weaponizing global warming

Global Warming, that vast amorphous phenomenon characterized as a hyperobject by Timothy Morton, is an all-encompassing reality. Its reach extends far beyond the puny swamp of special interests that is Washington D.C. It awaits its moment as a transformative element of global, governmental change. Birthed in the dark past of the Industrial Revolution, it’s unleashed demons of fire, flood and drought may now force us to transcend our ideological divides and re-invent the political process.
-- John Davis

global-warming-as-a-tactical-weapon

Mainstreaming 2

“He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.”
    -- Cormac McCarthy,  The Road

...so much of the world we inhabit, in all its gray capitalist drudgery, in all its gaudy pomp, its tatty circumstance, its bricolage culture, is a product of our acquiescence. The notion of the unreachable distance of the ideal may represent more a failure of collective imagination than a material impediment. How many of us are convinced that there is no alternative to capitalism? How many have ingested that neoliberal narcotic of foreclosed imaginations?

mainstream-101-suppressing-socialism

mainstreaming 1

How ironic that the collapse of faith in western media is caused by its own relentless fealty to profitability. The corporate press has now become, for vast segments of the population, a transparently deceitful congeries of second-rate pseudo-journalists who traffic in base fictions at the behest of elite capital. Meanwhile, ranks of first-rate independent journalists now dot the coarse hide of the staggering beast of the mainstream, more woodpeckers than parasites, slowly penetrating the dense carapace of falsehood that coarsens the consciousness of western citizenry. Only relentless infusions of capital are keeping the beast alive. Quantitative easing for the propaganda class.
    -- Jason Hirthler

bob

are we having fun yet?

....eat shit and die rich people!

Experiential travel, they call it, as if only high-priced retreats qualify as a holiday experience. Jetting to an upscale tent city to be treated as an ersatz potentate while we pretend we’re roughing it is truly camp. Glamping—and car camping too—fulfill bourgeois fantasies of being served by locals while living better than them. More than the journey or the destination, it’s about pampering ourselves. By making us feel safe, comfy, and special, all this evolved travel mediates our outdoor encounters. From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with Styrofoam, dwelling in our portable playpens and paradise playhouses distances us from nature by circumscribing our experiential horizon around the familiar objects at hand and focusing on our own enjoyment. Are we having fun yet?

where-the-wild-things-were-abbeys-road-revisited

broke the mold

go to your room!

We Are the Aliens We’ve Been Waiting For

Navy pilots, have you heard,
Are talking to reporters
From the Times
and from the Post
About what they’ve seen
In the skies — UFOs
And who knows
What those could be
Space people? ETs?
Let’s just say they are
Let’s just say they see
Society’s catastrophes
And, let’s just say they say:
We’d like to turn your globe
into a salutary garden
End the wars, and poverty,
and property, and properly
Establish peace
The only thing we’d need
In exchange is your support
Because we’d all outnumber them
By such a massive margin
There’d be no need to resort to force
Something that could happen,
Actually, with no space people at all
Here on planet Earth

    -- Elliot Sperber

the Doctor

extinction meme

“…ecological data is so complex, and is about such complex phenomena, that it’s difficult to make that data into facts, let alone start living those facts, rather than repeating truthy factoids…”
-- Timothy Morton, Being Ecological

It is difficult, outside of academia, to argue convincingly that we should abandon Modernity. Yet our obsession with facts, the factoids and the mimetic ideation that lives in our brains as memes, may well be standing in the way of our simply meshing with the environment, not as humans uniquely capable of realizing reality through our consciousness, but as ecological beings.
-- John Davis

ecological-beings

where were the spiders?

idiot

What is before us now are the death throes of capitalism, which is oddly enough also capitalism at its apogee with a precipitous descent ahead due to its profound unsustainability. A common analogy of our times is referencing going off a cliff of some kind to describe the present trajectory of this idiot society, e.g. an unstoppable train with no brakes going over a cliff, or Wile E. Coyote having already gone over the cliff and simply hasn’t bothered to look down yet to notice he’s run out of terra-firma. Whatever variation of the analogy chosen, the point is that we know the cliff is there, but the collective state of our idiocy doesn’t seem to care too much. It has other idiot priorities it deems more necessary to care about, so it plows ahead despite knowing it has run out of track.
    -- Jason Holland

the-idiot

exciting news for your 501(c)(3

The U.S.Department of State is offering a grant of $75,000,000 to non-government-organizations to help it to further meddle in Syria.

us-government-seeks-ngo-help-for-removing-iran-from-syria

?

thanx and a tip of the wave machine to Tom Beach