holiday

good wood

Anti-American

and a good morning from Nicky Reid.....

I’ve always been the kind of fat insane faggot who owns her slurs and wears them proudly like gang colors. I call it the Eazy E school of political incorrectness. You can be a patriotic pacifist, or you can be an Anti-American with attitude. My homegirls in the Squad have sheepishly chosen the prior, but I for one am proud to be a flag burning, middle finger waging, Anti-American bitch, and if Trump wants to send me back to the County Cork, I’ll pack my bags if he agrees to kiss my ass on the way out.

why-im-a-proud-anti-american

food

Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto/Bayer. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto. India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill. And Bayer’s hand is possibly behind the ongoing strategy to commercialise GM mustard in India. Whether on the back of militarism, secretive trade deals or strings-attached loans, global food and agribusiness conglomerates secure their interests and have scant regard for choice or democracy.

There is the premise that water, seeds, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to these conglomerates to milk for profit, under the pretense these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

    -- Colin Todhunter

the-corporate-capture-of-agriculture

remember Serbia?

Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard. A commentator in the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.

    -- James Bovard

americas-forgotten-bullshit-bombing-of-serbia

spoonful

raconteurs

99%

This weekend, Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, re-wrote the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty. You likely learned the original words when you were in elementary school. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” When pressed on that longstanding American ideal, Cuccinelli added a codicil. “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet.”

In other words, people fleeing poverty, crime and political oppression is no longer good enough for entry into our country. Compassion is dead. You must demonstrate you are not a burden on those of us whose immigrant parents got here first.

-- Jeff Spevak

the-stuff-of-liberty

election night special

In games so purgatory
We're all just dying for a laugh
What's your boy practice?
Presidential looks, top of his class
What's darker, streets or airways?
Pregnant with rumors of rewards
If your terminally bored
Fall in behind the motorcade and lock your doors

Money money!
Your dreams stay to today

Slaughterhouse country
Offers up her favorite son
Who cares why anything gets done?
Gets something done
A moral gerrymander
I could've laughed til I was sore
But I'm too busy bracing for
The dark side of the holiday, the same before

Money money!
Your dreams stay to today
Money money!

United we stand, united we stand
United we stand for unity
Believa-believa-believa-believa
Believa-believability
Don't touch! Don't touch the machinery!

    -- Burning Airlines

mission: control

[The] leaked documents show that the Trump administration is drafting an executive order that, if upheld by the courts, could essentially end free speech on the Internet. The draft order would put the FTC and the FCC, headed by its notoriously corrupt chairman Ajit Pai, in charge of monitoring and policing online speech on social media platforms, online forums, and more.

"Political bias by digital platforms remains unproven. In fact, an independent study by The Economist points towards search platforms having a bias towards virality and attention, not political ideology," said Lewis. "This matches reports from books like Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" and others that study social media addiction. It is this sort of algorithmic bias towards virality that foreign adversaries use to sow disinformation and mistrust in our country."

the future

drag, street, fire

It is an irrefutable incontrovertible fact that, when the nation’s cities are clogged with millions of angry Americans demanding radical change day after night after day after night, who break stuff and refuse to disperse and fight back against the cops and are willing to get beaten up and sometimes killed for their cause, and it’s impossible to carry on business as usual, our worthless public officials will yield to their demands and do what’s right.

Until then, mass shooters will continue to terrorize our public spaces, SUVs will belch greenhouse gases and Trump will tweet crazy racist BS. Bad things happen because good people don’t force them to stop.

    -- Ted Rall

why-congress-wont-act-on-gun-violence-climate-change-impeaching-trump-or-anything-else

let us talk about Hiroshima

[that] the bombing of Hiroshima was a “necessity” appeared in a 1947 article, signed by former Secretary of War Henry Stimson...

The Stimson article was the moment of formal creation of the Hiroshima myth. A historically challengeable argument was recast as unquestionable—drop the bombs or kill off tens of thousands, or maybe it would be millions (the U.S. regularly revised casualty estimates upwards), of American boys in a land invasion of Japan. It became gospel that the Japanese would never have surrendered owing to their code of honor, though of course surrender is in fact exactly what happened. Nonetheless, such lies were created to buttress a national belief that no moral wrong was committed, and thus there was no need for reflection and introspection by the United States. Full speed ahead into the nuclear age.

the-hiroshima-bombing

fisherman

build that wall!

...push Congress to let President Trump take all that money (the Pentagon’s new FY 2020 $738 billion budget) and apply it to building a wall not just along the Mexican-US border but all the way around the darn country! ....the US and the entire world will be safer because the US — the prime purveyor of violence and chaos in the world for decades — will be preoccupied with the most massive construction project in the history of mankind, walling in the world’s “exceptional nation.”

Instead of Reagan’s “City on a Hill,” we’ll be Trump’s “City Behind a Wall.”

just-let-trump-spend-the-whole-war-department-budget-on-building-walls

delirium

primus

propaganda always wins

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
— David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government”, 1768

‘It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.’
    -- Alex Carey

‘Propaganda always wins…if you allow it’
-- Leni Riefenstahl

The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies in the West. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever vigilant overlords in the media, financial and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914.

propaganda-censorship-power-control