Luna

trickle down

Well, duh!

....Data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and un-employment....[found] that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.

-- © David Hope and Julian Limberg, International Inequalities Institute, The London School of Economics and Political Science

ain't it just awful

proud to be an american idiot

for Trump supporters...the election fraud narrative features three characteristics that supercharge its psychological appeal: It makes a complex and hostile world seem orderly, controllable and certain. 

-- Aaron C. Kay, Mark J. Landau 

Or, you're just a fucking idiot.

Courtney

You know you love her....

 

the Gulf of Crazy

Ever wonder why your wife married you? Ever ponder the knowing or questioning 'look' that she gives you when you are talking crazy shit? Ever have the realization that she probably has no idea what you are talking about or why, and is thinking, "why did I marry this crazy person?".  

And you know as well as I that we have just scratched the surface of "crazy".

To wit:  Have you ever thought about your death and what to do about the darn funeral? More specifically, what to do with your body- Burial? Cremation? Taxidermy?  

Wait! Is taxidermy really an option? You bet it is! And as you are reading this right now, the germ of an idea is forming in your brain! 

For those that can't form ideas in their brain, try to form a picture: a nice basement lounge, or perhaps a man-cave for those that cannot get past the 90's; comfortable seating; a good sound system; a well stocked bar complete with beer taps. Standing behind the bar with a smile on his face and a hand on a tap is......you. The dead, perfectly preserved in taxidermic splendor, you. Go ahead, person that can't form ideas. Sidle up to that bar, stick your glass under the tap, and pull down that hand!

That, my friends, is the gulf of crazy that separates us.

-- dbdesgnr, 1/4/2016

thanks to L. M.  for clarifying the Gulf of Crazy
thanks to C. F.  for being bat-shit crazy

lenny

live free or die

devolution

evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM) - $1,795,000
This unit cost reflects an average for the entire projected Fiscal Year 2021 purchase, which includes ESSM Block I and Block II versions.

back to normal

ed. note/
Welcome back to GeezerNationTM 

Now that things are back to normal- Bad Man OrangeTM gone, everyone vaccinated,  economy booming, Obama and Bezos memoirs published- we can resume our programming:

 

bring it

idiot!

if Lust is a product, Courtney is the spokesperson

to-do list

Laundry
Vacuum
Roar at sky
Get cat food
Get Pentagon de-funded
Win imaginary argument with God
Lose actual argument with God
Write some blog or something
Call parents
Find way to ruin Mike Pompeo’s day
Do dishes
Burn motherfucker to ground
Discover new ways I’ve been fooling myself
Discover new ways I’ve been limiting myself
Discover new ways I haven’t been loving myself
Vomit up primordial delusion-based conditioning
Become big pimpin’ billionaire poet

Get rid of this annoying film over my perception which inhibits my ability to fully see things as the thunderously beautiful miracles I know they are in each and every moment and be constantly floored by pleasure and gratitude

Clean bathroom
Kill patriarchy
Create healthy world for my kids
Sweep
Cry
Let in pleasure
Create culture
Sing loudly
Listen deeply
Love bravely
Be impaled by presence
Be electrified by ordinariness
Be immolated by aliveness
Do something about fly screen
Mop

-- Caitlin Johnstone

Jackson State - May 15

Gotta get down to it....

On Friday, some 11 days after Kent State, another Vietnam war protest on a campus turned deadly. At Jackson State University in Mississippi, a junior at the college and a passing highschool senior were killed by police who were responding to out of control protests. Twelve other people were also injured when some of the 75 local and state police fired more than 400 rounds at the crowds. Nobody seemed to know why they did exactly, with the police saying they had been threatened in various ways. Nobody was ever punished for the killings at Kent State or at Jackson State. 

jackson-state-and-forgotten-history

is it spring yet?

miami

Miami Vice star Don Johnson once asked Hunter S. Thompson to answer old Zen philosophical question: 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' Hunter S. Thompson answered by reaching up and slapping Johnson upside his head.

local H

drover

heroes

oh wait! back to Papa Joe

register this:  The principal immediate goal of the Democratic Party in this primary (and when I say “Democratic Party” I always include “its allied media”), in the midst of a pandemic, was to kill single-payer healthcare, the most basically humanistic and politically advantageous social policy—indeed, as the present pandemic makes clear, the most obvious social necessity—one can imagine. The Party strangled it, and smothered any other such initiative, by coalescing around Joe Biden, who has vowed to veto Medicare-for-All even if it passes congress, has long sought to cut Social Security, and promises his billionaire donors that, if he’s elected, “nothing will fundamentally change.” No Republicans necessary.
    -- Jim Kavanagh, The Polemicist 

joe-or-no

the Proud Bozos

"....this is a lot cooler than it was when I was a kid with a lousy BB gun."

gone wrong

decemberists

We're Thick as a Brick

david ker thomson

Far from being a nexus of innovation and risk-taking, capitalism is atrophy and decay. It only ever appeared to work because of the power of oil, a liquid dense with life and death and the power that is unbound in fire. Any fool can make a spark and claim that the power of oil is his own entrepreneurial cleverness or “efficiency.” Fancy business schools at elite universities sit atop such gushers and it gives them a few generations of loft from which they can display themselves and their superiority more fully. The funny thing is that the era of capital is itself a stratum of a few inches charred and crushed and registered in a future geological archive. Its only real power can be prophesied as a quantity of a particular viscosity and compression, available in a distant worldtime as a renewed fire. As Bender the robot puts it, “we’re boned.”

why-do-we-write?

made in America

~re-posted:  ideological content~

So how about you get with the fucking program.
This country is in a state of war. War. To defend your way of life. 
So you can go home to your little townhouse on Garfield fucking Place or wherever
So that you can hop on a fucking airplane and go shopping with your fucking wife in Paris
So your daughter can get high with her Black Bloc friends
Who do you think you are dealing with? Do we look like airport rent-a-cops to you? 
We are the fucking United States of fucking America you fucking idiots! 
Do you like your lives? Your comfortable lives? Well, guess what, folks. We make them possible. We keep the goddamn economy from collapsing. We keep you safe from the criminals and terrorists. 
Do you know how we do it? We do it with guns. And bombs. And missiles. And knives. And sticks. We fucking kill people. 
We kill them for you. 
Is it convenient for you to believe otherwise? Well, guess what? Fuck what's convenient for you. Fifty goddamn years you were to free to believe any fucking thing you wanted. We didn't care. It didn't bother us. We didn't care if you believed in Martians. 
But you know what, folks? Now we care. It matters to us now, what you believe. The United States of America is at war. It is World War fucking Four, people. And World War Four is for all the marbles. 
It's one big world now, in case you missed that. One big system. And we fucking run it. And guess what? We intend to continue running it. 
Now is that is alright with you, if we do that? 

most of the time

the mask

The long delay in the U.S. reaction has led to a urgent need for personal protection equipment. The result is a new 'wild west' where stealing and cheating to get PPE is the new norm:

• German army loses 6 million face masks in Kenya - Nation.ke
• Trump Administration Uses Wartime Powers To Be First In Line On Medical Supplies - KHN
• Coronavirus: US 'wants 3M to end mask exports to Canada and Latin America' - BBC
• Trudeau threatens retaliation after Trump keeps shipment of masks intended for Canadian doctors - Independent
• Coronavirus: Turkey seizes hundreds of ventilators paid for by Spain in move ‘bordering on criminality’ - Independent
• US Leads Global Wave of Nations Stealing, Seizing and Diverting Coronavirus Equipment - Orinoco Tribune
• US accused of seizing face mask shipments bound for Europe, Canada - DW
• Million $ checks exchanged on a McDonald's parking lot to get masks:
  Illinois adjusts on the fly to meet medical supply needs in a coronavirus ‘Wild West’ - Sun Times
• The Feds impounded the masks Massachusets had ordered. Twice. So MA they had to use alternative ways to get them:
  A Patriots plane full of 1 million N95 masks from China arrived Thursday. Here’s how the plan came together - Boston Globe

munchkin

I hate him.....

"...the fellow running Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, has been implicated in so many scandals. I wouldn’t want him in the same room with my kid’s piggy bank.....This is the man President Trump wants to hand out billions of dollars to corporations and to Wall Street, a guy up to his neck in various conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and ethics lapses."
    -- Bill Moyers

not happening so far

Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone. 
    -- the Financial Times editorial

waxahatchee

stuff

“Never die over stuff. Society can collapse in an instant. Accept the truth, pivot and never look back. It’s the difference between life and death. Never risk death over a stupid china cabinet.”
    -- unknown

Deuteronomic Code

Do you want to shampoo
Do you want to sham pee
Do you want to sit six feet
From me
And watch the news of the plague
On the TV
Or do you want to do do do
Do the Deuteronomy

Deutero, do you know what that means?
It’s Greek — meaning second, or next
And nomos, the law — this law’s wrecked
So, what’s the next law?
Wait and see
Housing all will soon be free
Do do do
Do the Deuteronomy
With me

Who will plant the crops
Who will pick the fruit
Who will bring them all to you
And me for free
The army will
You will see
Do do do
Do the Deuteronomy

Wait indoors for nine months time
The length it takes for a baby to arrive
For a new life to form
For a new world to be born
From these old rooms
From these cocoons
These chrysalides
Let’s do do do
Do the Deuteronomy

    -- Elliot Sperber

we're in good hands

"COVID-19 emergency spending bill: $250 billion for direct payments to Americans, $250 billion for expanded unemployment benefits, $4 trillion to bail out corporations" 

at least we got radar love

culling the herd

the pandemic “...from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”
    -- Jeremy Warner, economics columnist, Daily Telegraph

I’ve got bad news, haters: Waiting for my generation to die is not a viable political option. Millions of us will still be voting in 11, 12, 15, 20 years, as we lose our last chances to save the planet and prevent economic collapse. This planet’s chances may breathe their last before we do.
    -- Richard Eskow

covid-in-the-web-of-generations

your random downer

.....unless it is abolished, capitalism will not disappear when boom turns to bust.  Instead, energy-starved, growth-less capitalism will turn catabolic.  Catabolism refers to the condition whereby a living thing devours itself.  As profitable sources of production dry up, capitalism will be compelled to turn a profit by consuming the social assets it once created.  By cannibalizing itself, the profit motive will exacerbate industrial society’s dramatic decline.

Catabolic capitalism will profit from scarcity, crisis, disaster, and conflict.  Warfare, resource hoarding, ecological disaster, and pandemic diseases will become the big profit makers.  Capital will flow toward lucrative ventures like cybercrime, predatory lending, and financial fraud; bribery, corruption, and racketeering; weapons, drugs, and human trafficking.  Once disintegration and destruction become the primary source of profit, catabolic capitalism will rampage down the road to ruin, gorging itself on one self-inflicted disaster after another.

    -- Craig Collins

four-reasons-civilization-will-collapse

another blank screen

So yes, I think it’s very possible for Biden to beat Trump. Because for so many people, it doesn’t matter what Biden says or doesn’t say, how incoherent he is, how many outright lies he tells, how atrocious his record is or how diligently he is serving the domineering elites who have blighted our society to such a degree. It doesn’t matter that he has made it clear that he is not going to do anything about climate change, student debt, the healthcare crisis, rampant militarism, police brutality, economic injustice, low pay, ICE, and on and on. What matters is that he is a fresh screen where our most unworthy fears and unrealistic hopes can be projected, for a time; where we can forget, for a time, the massive disasters that are looming ahead and pretend that things can somehow go back to “normal.”

    -- Chris Floyd

as-ye-sow-joe-shall-ye-reap

from Cafe Domenico

The liberal class in America is now highly disturbed and disoriented by the instability of “facts,” the “two sides to every argument” and ”fake news” of neoliberalism’s brave new world. So much so, they will act as if all the error is on the other side, with those who will not listen to science, or reason. Really, though, this betrayal by fact-based, media-propagated “truth” is something we had coming. If liberal society had, after outgrowing religion, kept ears and eyes open to the artists and poets, mystics and prophets, and turned off the microphone on the MSNBC babblers and game players, we would have been better equipped for defending humanity against the increasingly violent forces of dehumanization. As it is now, humanity depends upon each person to be a hero in its defense; and this has to be our cause, over mere survival.
    -- Kim Domenico

liberals-explain-things-to-me-my-soul-rebels

notes from the Biotariat

while reading this poem still won’t be the same
as storming a bank or a parliament
you may yet be reading this poem
to a group of people with whom you will presently
be storming a bank or parliament.
    -- Stephen Collis, excerpt, To the Barricades (2013)

We are fortunate to live in a nation where one of its foundational texts allows for on-going revolution. If we truly believe in the exceptionalism of this country, now surely is the time to act on the opportunity bequeathed to the people of the United States by the Founding Fathers. Is it too soon, in 2020, to anoint Bernie Sanders as the agent of the revolution’s second coming?
-- John Davis

bernie-and-the-biotariat

we are all Russians now

 There’s only so long you can keep pinching your nostrils as you cast that noxious ballot for yet another chest-thumping, business-as-usual Republican from either party, before you suffocate altogether. Or you can join us Russians on the Dark Side. We have vodka on tap, not to mention endless reserves of pessimism to get us through the eternal winter of every American election cycle. We also know a thing or two about how to deal with crowned heads of state.
    -- Jennifer Matsui

masterfully-baiting-the-reds-for-a-dicks-re-election

the heart of darkness

“No light, but rather darkness visible.”
    – Milton, Paradise Lost

russkies

The Ex-Terr GooGoo Eyes “The Russkies Did it!” Plot

The Ex-Terr saucer folk
Thought they’d have fun
By floating a balloon Yolk
Painted with GooGoo Eyes
From one of their ships

To Startle the masses from the Skies
Ahh, how it worked, alas!
How it freaked out the Mass!
Who flooded Social Media
And pages on Wikipedia

Till the Gummint was so frightened
They stationed Nukes o’erhead
And the Ex-Terrs themselves
Grew fearful with dread

So they plotted a scheme
To blame GooGoo Eyes
On a Russkie ruse!
“It Was the Russkies!!”
Blared the News

That the Russkies, to sow Confusion,
And to make us think that the Sky
Is Just a Crazy Illusion,
Placed GooGoo Eyes on high!

Plus they scammed the Mass’s Mind
Like a dirty cantaloupe rind
How that crafty Russkie Shoat
Was telling us how to Vote!!!

La Trahison! Ahh, Treason!
And the Lack of Reason!
The Russkies, from a Space-Boat!
Interfering with our Vote!

THEM DANG RUSSKIES!!!

    -- Ed Sanders

the fix is in, No. 2

"At least I’m not a communist."
    -- James Carville

The fact that MSBNC is already so desperate to kill the Sanders’ candidacy in its cradle that they’re willing to exhume poor James Carville, dress him up in his least filthy rugby shirt, stick a baseball cap over his skull to keep the children from shrieking, and prop him up to babble at Joy Reid is one more signal that the fix is in.
    -- John Eskow

what-will-you-do-if-the-democrats-steal-it-from-sanders?

the Resistance ®

Yes, that’s right, Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire Republicrat oligarch, has mobilized a guerilla army of overpaid PR professionals, Wall Street sociopaths, liberal racists, and anti-outdoor-smoking fanatics, and is steamrolling toward the Democratic convention to buy a brokered nomination and save America from “Putinism.” He’s had it with you sugary-soft-drink-drinking, chain-smoking, gun-toting, Oxy-gobbling, Hitler-loving, Putinist peasants and your infatuation with Donald Trump. So he’s decided to transform the entire country into a sterile, upscale, fascist themepark where you can rent a studio for $3,000 a month and the cops keep “the darkies” in their place, like he successfully did to New York City.
    -- cj. hopkins

subcomandante-bloomberg

the fix is in, No. 1

The Democrats will likely have a brokered convention. If there is no candidate who gets a majority in the first round, hand selected 'superdelegates' will also vote. They will select the candidate the party's paymasters want. They may even try to rerun Hillary Clinton through this backdoor.

All candidates but Bernie Sanders seen to be fine with such anti-democratic schemes. When the moderators asked if the candidate with the most delegates should automatically become the party nominee the answers were:

- Bloomberg: No
- Warren: No
- Biden: No
- Buttigieg: No
- Klobuchar: No
- Sanders: Yes, the inclusion of superdelegates is not indicative of a democratic process.

moonofalabama

Super!

In 1980 the Democratic Party’s Hunt Commission recommended that 30% of all the Democratic National Convention delegates be reserved for members of Congress and state party chairs and vice chairs.  These are the superdelegates.  That 30% figure was originally implemented at 14% but by 2008 the percentage rose to nearly 20%.  Their purpose was ostensibly to provide leadership, but in practice it was to maintain orthodoxy, serving as a check on primary voters who might make the wrong choice.

In 2020 there will be 3,979 delegates to the Democratic National Convention who will be selected as a result of primaries and caucuses. To win the nomination one needs 1,991 delegates. If Bernie Sanders does not get to this number by the first round, the 771 Superdelegates will get to vote, and he will need 2,376 votes to win.  Fat chance!

    -- David Schultz

bernie-sanders-and-the-revenge-of-the-superdelegates

just bend over and take it

Do as we say. Just do it. Just bend over and let us install a nice moderate psychopath, and this will be over before you know it. Relax, take a deep breath, and think nice, pleasant thoughts until November. Dream one of those wacky dreams you airy fairy hippies are always having, like having a real healthcare system or something.
    -- Snooty McCentrist

do-the-sensible-thing-and-nominate-a-moderate-rapacious-psychopath

luna

the long dark

We are in the Long Dark now. Both hope and despair are the enemies of our survival. We must live in the awareness that we might not see the light come back, without ceasing to work — with empathy, anger and knowledge — for its return.

We must be here, in the moment, experiencing its fullness (whatever its horrors or joys), yet be elsewhere, removed from the madness pouring in from every side, the avalanche of degradation. We must be here, now, but also in a future we can’t see or even imagine.

We must see that we are lost, with no clear way forward, no sureties or verities to cling to, no roots to anchor us, no structures within or without that will always keep their coalescence in the chaotic, surging flow.

We must live in discrete moments of illumination and connection, pearls hung on an almost invisible string winding through the darkness. Striving, always striving, but not expecting; striving without hope, without despair, without any certainty at all as to the outcome, good or bad.

These are the conditions of the Long Dark, this is what we have to work with, this is where we find ourselves in the brief time we have in this vast, indifferent, astounding universe. As I once wrote long ago, quoting the old hymn: “Work, for the night is coming.”

    -- Chris Floyd

stolen lands

"It is clear that selling off and privatizing America's public lands has been part of the Trump administration's agenda since day one. Now, with the completion of historic rollbacks to public land protections, all at the behest of their corporate pals, appeasing anti-public land zealots is next up on the list. This is another indicator that if President Trump and Secretary Bernhardt [Interior] are given enough time, the wholesale transfer and privatization of America's public lands will happen in the blink of an eye. Once our public lands are gone, they're gone for good."

    --Jayson O'Neill, deputy director, Western Values Project

wholesale-transfer-and-privatization-americas-public-lands

BORTAC coming to your town soon

In a move that appears destined to escalate tension between the White House and opponents, President Donald Trump is reportedly deploying Customs and Border Protection tactical units across sanctuary cities in the U.S. to assist with arrests of undocumented people. According to the NY Times, agents from the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC) will spread across the country to cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, and Newark, N.J. to work alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. 

trump-deploys-heavily-armed-border-patrol-tactical-units

a horse in a hospital

your Trumpness

There is no Trump, only Trumpness; a dense, sulfurous fog that hangs over the earth and eats at our sanity like it was a bowl of pretzels to snack on during Super Bowl. He is capitalism as it gnaws at its own flesh, having devoured everything external to it. His tweets are the cuckoo sounds of the Doomsday clock striking midnight at every hour. Trumpness itself is the unmentionable gas released from the corpse of Empire. Its colored contours no longer a map but a blinking grid that traces a transnational supply route through melted ice caps encircled by war ships. The world is his plague ground.
    -- Jennifer Matsui

the-doomsday-cuckoo-clock

meanwhile....

owl

The Rage of the Barred Owl

When Moon unmasks your naked face
And gilds your gun with diamonds green
I mark your progress from afar.
You stumble toward my roosting place,
Studying your tiny screen,
Tracking  an  artificial star.

You killed my wife some dawns ago,
Fooled by your telescopic sight:
She was a Northern Spotted Owl!
You threw her feathers in the snow
No measurements of  weight or height:
Bars or spots, murder most foul!

Management stalks through the trees
Plying the Endangered Species Act
And shifting its dynamic core.
We will be gone when, by degrees
The  soil will  sicken, parched and cracked:
Then fire, desert, nothing  more.

I, Owl, now curse your species’ birth:
No Permit comes from Mother Earth.

    -- Ellen Taylor

energy flow

We tend to think of the world in terms of stasis and not process. And in our zeal to halt our runaway energy consumption, we act as if the goal was to conserve, accumulate, and stabilize energy use when in fact humans, as part of nature, evolved and exist alongside other life forms in a way that is designed to maximize collective energy use, flow, and movement. It has got to the point now that we won’t even let our trash degrade. We make things from plastics that last for tens of thousands of years and then bury them underground where nothing can break them down. Vast islands of plastic are floating in our oceans, nearly immortal. The net effect of all this is that planetary energy consumption is actually slowing down, with disastrous consequences.
    -- Thomas Nail

At the start of the most recent post-glacial period (the Holocene) there were six trillion trees on the planet. Some humans groups are responsible for destroying half the Earth’s forests, which make up 80% of total planetary biomass.

We need to increase the activity of the largest consumers of energy on the planet; not humans, but biodiverse forest ecosystems. Planting and preserving more trees will not only reverse the effects of climate change and increase biodiversity it will also increase planetary energy use.
    -- ibid

the-earth-is-dying-but-not-fast-enough

truckers

Kirk

During the blacklist, I had friends who went into exile when no one would hire them; actors who committed suicide in despair … I was threatened that using a Blacklisted writer for Spartacus — my friend Dalton Trumbo — would mark me as a ‘Commie-lover’ and end my career. There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I am so proud of my fellow actors who use their public influence to speak out against injustice. At 98 years old, I have learned one lesson from history: It very often repeats itself. I hope that Trumbo, a fine film, will remind all of us that the Blacklist was a terrible time in our country, but that we must learn from it so that it will never happen again.”
    -- Kirk Douglas

hypocrites-mourn-the-death-of-kirk-douglas

feel the Bern.....one last time

....there is a difference in kind between Bernie and the other Democratic candidates, a difference unlike the differences among them. It’s the difference between a principled Social Democratic program to meet human needs, based on and supported by a mass movement, and a program of neoliberal tinkering to protect profit-making possibilities, based on and supported by capitalist donors/the donor class.

His nomination would be a radical departure and would radically disrupt the Democratic Party and the whole political game, and he would have a great chance to win, opening new and substantively different and left, social-democratic possibilities in the U.S.
    -- Jim Kavanagh


bernies-last-dance-with-the-dems


If Sanders wins in 2020, it would be the first time since the 1970s that a new president wasn’t worse for planet and people than his predecessor. This is the point that I feel some of my radical compatriots are missing. Collectively, we would be taking a step in the right direction. Yes, it would be a small step, and no, it wouldn’t be a “revolution” but it would be something and we’ve had nothing—or less—for far too long.
    -- Kollibri terre Sonnebrunne

2020-presidential-election-really-is-different

Impeachment? Doh!

What are the larger implications?  For our own nation this buffoonery has reinforced a near universal conviction that our government, our system, our whole culture, is dysfunctional, derelict, and unredeemable.  Americans have no idea what can be done about it, and can’t face the fact that nothing can.  The cognitive dissonance resulting from maintaining the gospel of exceptionalism as all the evidence screams nonsense has raised stress to intolerable levels where they will remain.

Europe, Asia, and the wider world are mesmerized by the spectacle of a thrashing, blundering monster, lost beyond recall in gross irrationality and solipsistic madness, but capable of working horrors yet unknown in the throes of its devolution.   The raving lunacy of our highest, most powerful officials would be risible if it were not seriously, potentiall fatal for those who must watch the loons goad the supine world toward death and extinction.

    -- Paul Edwards

american-burlesque

the shadow...................

Impeachment, the Iowa disaster and petty show acts will not win an election against Donald Trump. While they do not drive away core Democratic voters,  they do make it difficult to get the additional votes that are needed to win. Many on the left and the right who dislike Trump will rather abstain or vote for a third party than for a party which is indistinguishable from the currently ruling one.

Meanwhile Trump hauls in record amounts in donations and, with 49%, achieved his best personal approval rate ever.

Either the Democrats change their whole course of action or they will lose in November to an extent that will be breathtaking. It would be well deserved.

    -- Posted by b on February 6, 2020 at 15:57 UTC, Moon of Alabama

the-democrats-deserve-to-lose

the shadow....

The force accused of sowing the confusion and disarray surrounding the first Democrat Party contest of the 2020 election season is a dark money Democratic nonprofit called Acronym. It was Acronym that launched Shadow Inc, the mysterious company behind the now-infamous, unsecured, completely unworkable voter app which prevented precinct chairs from reporting vote totals on caucus night.

The exceptionally opaque Acronym was itself created with seed money from a Silicon Valley billionaire named Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) who has financed a series of highly manipulative social media campaigns. 

sabotage-iowa-caucus

feel the Bern

With more than 97% of the precincts now reporting in Iowa, Sanders—despite many mainstream media outlets and pundits treating Buttigieg as the winner of the contest—extended his popular vote lead in the state to more than 2,500 (44,753 to 42,235). With state delegate equivalents (SDEs), the current totals show Buttigieg now maintains only a three point lead—550 to 447 (one-tenth of a percentage point.)

bernie-won-iowa-trending

the shadow

A precinct chair in Iowa said the app got stuck on the last step when reporting results. It was uploading a picture of the precinct’s results.
The chair said they were finally able to upload, so they took a screenshot. The app then showed different numbers than what they had submitted as captured in their screenshot.
    -- Jeff Zeleny, CNN

Democratic operative Tara McGowan is denying that her high-profile liberal firm ACRONYM played a role in the Monday evening caucus debacle, claiming that her firm was merely an investor in the company Shadow Inc., which developed the app at the center of the controversy. But internal company documents, a source close to the firms, and public records show a close and intertwined relationship between Acronym and Shadow.
    -- Lee Fang

iowa-caucus-app-shadow

python

have a cuppa tea

"England is not much any more"
    -- Charles De Gaulle

Sixty years ago, De Gaulle, who envisaged a European confederation as a way to achieve independence from the American liberators (who came to stay), saw very clearly that the U.K. would be America’s Trojan horse in the European community. That is called vision, the quality of a statesman – a breed that seems to have died out in the West.  He opposed British membership as long as he could, but the American influence was too great.  And curiously enough, the ardent European federalists joined in promoting British membership, seemingly unaware that such membership was totally incompatible with the political unity they desired.
    -- Diana Johnstone

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threat assessment- W76-2

The USS Tennessee left a port in Georgia last month, and Hans Kristenson of FAS said Wednesday that the submarine is the first U.S. ship to patrol with the W76-2 on board—an occurrence which arms control groups says will make nuclear war more likely.

The warhead has an explosive yield of five kilotons, about a third of the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945, which killed 80,000 people instantly and tens of thousands later from radiation exposure.

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American West

“The beautiful old gnarled trees are devoured  in the mouth of the mobile mulcher, knocked down and chewed up, defecated out its ass-end in fragments. The howl and whine of the engine and the spinning blades, the torturous topping of the trees, the cracking and crushing of trunks and limbs, the shattered spitting out of beings alive seconds before – it is almost too much to bear. What’s left is a flattened, denuded, tread-smashed wasteland, a bombed Dresden of pinyon-juniper.”
    -- Christopher Ketcham

Ketcham urges you to enter the public lands and find out the truth about them. You will be shocked. You will find desert and steppe full of oil and gas fields; mines of coal, copper, silver, and gold “stabbed into cliffs and mountains”; loggers clearcutting forests; livestock ranchers overgrazing grasslands and slaughtering wildlife; and the government carving roads for all business, domestic and foreign, to keep exploiting our public lands for private profit.
    -- Evaggelos Vallianatos

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blast from the past

Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius created the first model of CO2-induced climate change in 1896

When [Arrhenius] was done, he made a striking prediction: If you doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it would raise the world’s temperature by 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. Remarkably, that analysis holds up pretty well today, even in an age where climate analysis involves far more information and variables and are crunched by cloud supercomputers. Despite having done his work by hand, using data that even he regarded as woefully inadequate, Arrhenius reached “a conclusion that millions of dollars worth of research over the ensuing century hardly changed at all,” as Isabel Hilton wrote in 2008. The era of modern climate modeling was born. …[Arrhenius] expected it would take 3,000 years — fully 30 centuries — for CO2 levels in the atmosphere to rise by 50%. Instead, [they] shot up by 30% in only one century.