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

uk-came-went-leaving-europe-in-a-mess