Seattle 1999

“Americans seem to have been out of practice in these things....Everyone’s so polite. The only things that are burning are dumpsters filled with refuse.” He pointed to a shiny black Lexus parked on Pine Street, which the throngs of protesters had scrupulously avoided. In the windshield was a placard identifying it as belonging to a WTO delegate. “In Paris that car would be burning.”

twenty-years-ago-today-seattle-diary

set the world on fire

Tell it

happy thanksgiving

Many on the far-left have argued for simply erasing the holiday from the map or changing it to a day of mourning, but to be perfectly politically incorrect, days of mourning are a fucking bummer and nobody learns shit from a national bummer, just ask 9/11 if you don't believe me. But if the pagan harvest can be appropriated by the state then why not repossess that bitch for a new generation of savages. I say we declare the fourth Thursday of November America's Day of the Dead
    -- Nicky Reid

thanksgiving-should-be-americas-day-of-dead

warren

culture

"What we kids didn’t understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world"
  --robert crumb

todd

seattle

the clown prince

Donald J. Trump eats up the stage clownishly, his cathartic value slight, someone Dante would place in the Malebolge, the evil ditches of the eighth circle in hell. He is not a protagonist in any sort of tragedy but is rather that rough beast determined to make America a tragedy. He’d rather rule in a country he destroys than serve any will but his own. Our Executive in Chief.
    -- Joseph Natoli

the-self-unravelling-trump-cannot-avoid

elysium 1.0

The biggest problem is fascist capitalism, private profit supremacy and the domination of a ruling class of wealth and power that must be contested with and defeated for there to be any future for the race. That race is not simply people with testicles or vaginas or light skin or dark skin or who are married or single, but more people with less survival opportunities as that system creates far more profits for an ever smaller group of humans of a ruling class and its professional servants while dumping the loss on more and more members of a “diverse” working class and the poor who need to act up, create democracy and transform the world. Fast, if not sooner.
    -- Frank Scott

the wealth tax

Under Sander’s proposal, for a married couple, the rate of the wealth tax rises from 1% on net worth over $32 million until it reaches the top rate of 8% on wealth over $10 billion. For a single person, the tax rate applies to the above net worth amounts cut in half.

Had there been a flat tax of 8% on all of the wealth of the wealthiest 0.1%, the tax would have raised $7.49 trillion during the 15 years from 2005 to 2019. 

most-people-pay-a-higher-wealth-tax-than-the-wealthy

ending the world

“The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruins means nothing…He must obey his own law as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths…He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better…it is the law…the only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization—absolute and unconditional—of its own particular law.” 
    – C.G. Jung, quoted by Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

Obedience to neoliberal reality requires that we fail our lives. Good, decent, gentle, yes, totally offended by Trump, but to be that kind of generic nice guy, that ethical liberal, one must disobey the inner law predicated in one’s soul. This is what most people do, it’s fully accredited, it will keep you out of trouble. Until everything breaks down, which surely is already happening, it may earn one a good retirement....The tragedy is in our staying hidden from each other, encased in the silence, unable to feel each other’s humanity that is like our own. To me, mass extinction is a terrible, frightening likelihood, but in failing to teach, and ourselves obey, the soul’s law, we have already ended the world.
    -- Kim Domenico, Cafe Domenico, Utica

drown

feel the Bern- No.1

“If we define ‘working class’ simply as not having a college degree, then fully three-quarters [or at least two-thirds] of all Americans are working-class. 'Class', however, is defined not in terms of income or degrees but in terms of power. Especially regarding labor. If you define “working class” in terms of power – bosses who have it and workers who don’t – at least 60 percent of America is working class, and the true middle class – the journalists, professionals and semiprofessionals, people in the management class, etc. – are not more than one-third at best.”
    -- Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War

Among the Democratic candidates for president, there is one person who speaks for this vast, long-suffering working class, this beating heart of America: Bernie Sanders. Whether or not all his legislative goals are achievable in the short term, he is the one fighting most aggressively for the interests of workers. It is hard to argue, after all, that his proposals for “workplace democracy,” the cancellation of student debt, tuition-free higher education, a federal jobs guarantee, aggressive action to combat climate change, Medicare for All, and so on are against the interests of the large majority of Americans. So what does it mean to say, as so many do, that he is unelectable?
    -- Chris Wright

is-bernie-sanders-electable?

road to nowhere

the fate of your screen is guaranteed

When you look at your computer screen, or the screen on your smartphone or the screen of your television set, it is a liquid crystal display (LCD). An important component of the LCD screen is indium, a rare metallic element that is processed out of zinc concentrate. The two largest sources of indium can be found in eastern Canada.....and in Bolivia. Canada’s deposits have the potential to produce 38.5 tons of indium per year, while Bolivia’s considerable mines would be able to produce 80 tons per year.

    -- Vijay Prashad

coup-in-bolivia-and-the-screen-youre-using-to-read-this

elysium

In this future where comforting narratives like McKibben’s steer the populace away from the much darker truth, manufactured humanitarian disasters provide the palatable cover for the dirty work of securing access to raw materials needed for battery production and wind turbines by armies whose bases are hardened for sea level rise, yet whose tactical vehicles are still necessarily dependent upon dense fossil fuel power. At this time of great uncertainty, a genuine dissent which had languished under the spell of false promises of “green” technology and ignored the mass violence that underpins modern industrial society, emerges out of necessity from the growing direness of global crop failures and economic breakdown. This growing dissent, which threatens the illegitimate power held by the global elites, is met with heavy repression that draws upon decades of unimpeded surveillance tech implementation, the militarization of global police forces, and the use of private security. Climate change at its core is about conflict.
    -- Cory Morningstar

baby-shark-coup

beep beep

the new face of Bolivia

When Luis Fernando Camacho stormed into Bolivia’s abandoned presidential palace in the hours after President Evo Morales’s sudden November 10 resignation, he revealed to the world a side of the country that stood at stark odds with the pluri-national spirit its deposed socialist and Indigenous leader had put forward.

With a Bible in one hand and a national flag in the other, Camacho bowed his head in prayer above the presidential seal, fulfilling his vow to purge his country’s Native heritage from government and “return God to the burned palace.”


macho-camacho-the-coup-in-bolivia

rise

home

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i've become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Warsan Shire

up

manic depression

its all about Ukraine?

"When the dust settles in a month or two, the House of Representatives will have impeached President Donald Trump with a one-sided partisan vote and then the Senate will have exonerated Donald Trump with a similarly one-sided partisan vote.  But at the end of the day, the United States will have acquired a new strategic ally in Central Europe: Ukraine. The very first day of the impeachment hearings in November has been responsible for an important national security decision that had no input from Trump’s national security team or from the congressional foreign policy committees. The implications of this decision are onerous."
    -- Melvin A. Goodman, former CIA analyst

Five years ago, when Ukraine first came into the news, those Americans who thought Ukraine was an island in the Pacific can perhaps be forgiven. That members of the House Intelligence Committee don’t know – or pretend not to know – more accurate information about Ukraine is a scandal, and a consequential one.
    -- Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst

ukraine-for-dummies

lithium

It is important to recall that Bolivia has suffered a series of coups, often conducted by the military and the oligarchy on behalf of transnational mining companies. Initially, these were tin firms, but tin is no longer the main target in Bolivia. The main target is its massive deposits of lithium, crucial for the electric car.

after-evo-the-lithium-question-looms-large-in-bolivia

Bolivia- never mind everything is ok

"The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia's constitution. These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail. We are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere."

    -- Donald Trump

Bolivia

“Bolivia’s Morales resigns amid scathing election report, rising protests” reports The Washington Post........etc.

So there you have it. The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world’s largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a “disputed election”. 
Nothing to do with the fact that right-wing mobs had been terrorizing this leader’s family, or the fact that the nation’s military literally commanded him to step down and are now currently searching for him to arrest him, leading to ousted government officials being rounded up and held captive by soldiers wearing masks.

All perfectly normal and not suspicious at all.
    -- Caitlin Johnstone

msm-avoids-the-word-coup-in-bolivia-reporting

happy Veteran's Day

He Would Tell You

Here in the secret chambers
Of my darkest heart are things
I will never tell:
Here is oily blood and brittle bone
Here are clotted lips, frothy lungs
Decomposed and muted tongues
Here twisted cloth lays strangely stiff
In a powdery triptych pit
Where a dumbstruck man and wife
Lock quick lime arms round their
Dream face child, here
Past the grave yards fragrant stones
Memory’s nightmare head will not lay prone
Its battlefields etched on a red brocade
Inlaid with a crown of skull and bones
Yes, here in the busy chambers of my
Heart are things I will never tell
Though I swear we did not mutilate-
Only booby trapped or ransacked-
Disdained from taking human souvenirs.
No, we did not do that.
So, though I nearly did
Let me never tell you
Things you cannot know
Let me never tell you
Things that won’t let go.

Marc Levy

medicinthegreentime

climate change contrarian post of the day

1. 3
   Thomas Binder says:

   16 Oct 2019 at 5:47 AM

   When sunny you sweat, when cloudy you shiver, and CO2, elixir of life, is rising:
   It’s the weather, stupid! Then think about how crazy and or corrupt you would be if you (allegedly) believed that climate, the statistics of weather, was not driven by sun, cosmic rays, clouds and oceans but by (anthropogenic) CO2.

   No science-denying green plant could ever hit on the idea to (un)consciously deny sun, cosmic rays, clouds and oceans (low-pass filter of the climate system because of their heat content), blame O2 as the “toxic climate (change) culprit” and even want to sequestrate it.

   Actually it is even worse because, from the green plants’ perspective, O2 is toxic by allowing to destroy aka to burn (them). But I guess no green plant could ever become as arrogant, ignorant and intolerant to fight the fauna’s and human’s elixir of life O2, as some humans can.

   The IPCC is a fraudulent political UN organisation (see Climategate) that even manipulates data (see e.g. Tony Heller) so that the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, the 1930ies Warm Phase, the Global Cooling from 1945-1975 and the hiatus from 1998 ff. are flushed down the memory hole because their misbelief is disproved for many years.

   As a not brain-dead human(ist), scientist and cardiologist I can say that the arrogant, ignorant, intolerant anti-CO2-, so anti-life cult #IPCCCO2Hoax is one of the most inhumane, unscientific and sickest of all inventions by psychopaths.

   Thomas Binder, MD

warning! DNC

I don’t have high hopes that Bernie will fight back this time when they screw him over again. I hope I’m wrong or at least I hope his campaign leaves the threat of it there to create a known moral hazard for the DNC if this is the path they take. The younger voters are showing that they are basically a bit more decent than the “pragmatic” Boomers and X’ers. There is evidence that they have……empathy. I am so relieved by this and feel this is an indication that a progressive party can win because they have some massive numbers they could draw from. And there are X’ers like me as well as Boomers who aren’t totally evil. We kind of want the world to survive.  We will be there for this change. The tepid centrist Democrats will not help with this imperative.
    -- Kathleen Wallace

the-democratic-officeboy-machine

hey Eugene

thanx and a tip of the ol' watch cap to Eric.......

back to hell

dummycrats

....they’re going after Trump not on his major crimes but because he went after a leading Democrat. Does that remind you of anything? Yes. Watergate. They didn’t go after Nixon on his major crimes. They were off the record. It was because he had attacked the Democratic party. 

Is it the right thing to do? I mean, Trump is impeachable 100 times over. You know, he’s a major crook. There’s no doubt about it. Is it politically wise? I frankly doubt it. I think it’ll turn out pretty much like the Mueller report, which, that I thought was also a political mistake. What’ll happen is probably the House will impeach, goes to the Senate. The Republican senators are utterly craven. They’re terrified of Trump’s voting base. So they’ll vote to turn down the impeachment request. Trump will come along, say I’m vindicated. Say it was the Deep State and the treacherous Dems trying to overturn the election. Oh, vote for me.

    -- Noam Chomsky

massive attack

Schrödinger’s Caliph

Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, the much-feared talking beard of the (former) Caliphate of Iraq and the Levant has been killed for approximately the seventh time, on Oct 27, 2017. In memoriam also, Special Forces hound (name still classified), who died while pursuing this villain, like Lassie of yore.

in-memoriam-x-7-the-late-late-al-baghdadi