Monday, July 31, 2017
Various Tweets
The saddest part about people who wear flip-flops to church is they don't realize they're going to hell. https://t.co/nJ5jOvbfqD
— Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) July 31, 2017
This would be news to many churchgoers in Hawaii.
"One of the best pieces of writing I've seen on this subject in over 20 years" -> @RIchardHeinberg's latest, https://t.co/H85anSFgme
— Post Carbon Inst. (@postcarbon) July 31, 2017
It will never get old. I am humbled and blessed to be here. @POTUS pic.twitter.com/vCWM8b7ymy
— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 24, 2017
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Friday, July 28, 2017
Sarah Huckabee Sanders learns why you should never ever wear green on TV https://t.co/VqVt2Dq3XZ pic.twitter.com/wD9ftxGdON
— HuffPost (@HuffPost) July 28, 2017
Kunstler: This Week's Columns
Kunstler: The Value of Everything.
More here.
and
Kunstler: Words and Deeds.
More here.
The floundering non-elite masses have not learned the harsh lesson of our time that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, while the elites who create all this vicious crap spend millions to consort face-to-face in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard telling each other how wonderful they are for providing all the artificial social programming and glitzy hardware for their paying customers.
The effect of this dynamic relationship so far has been powerfully soporific. You can deprive people of a true home for a while, and give them virtual friends on TV to project their emotions onto, and arrange to give them cars via some financing scam or other to keep them moving mindlessly around an utterly desecrated landscape under the false impression that they’re going somewhere — but we’re now at the point where ordinary people can’t even carry the costs of keeping themselves hostage to these degrading conditions.
The next big entertainment for them will be the financial implosion of the elites themselves as the governing forces of physics finally overcome all the ruses and stratagems of the elites who have been playing games with money. Professional observers never tire of saying that the government can’t run out of money (because they can always print more of it) but they can certainly destroy the value of that money and shred the consensual confidence that allows it to operate as money.
That’s exactly what is about to commence at the end of the summer when the government runs out of cash-on-hand and congress finds itself utterly paralyzed by party animus to patch the debt ceiling problem that disables new borrowing. The elites may be home from the Hamptons and the Vineyard by then, but summers may never be the same for them again.
The Deep State may win its war against the pathetic President Trump, but it won’t win any war against the imperatives of the universe and the way that expresses itself in the true valuation of things. And when the moment of clarification arrives — the instant of cosmic price discovery — the clueless elites will have to really and truly worry about the value of their heads.
More here.
and
Kunstler: Words and Deeds.
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine — in this case, inexorably toward the restorative medicine of the 25th amendment. There is, after all, that hoary old artifact called the national interest lurking somewhere offstage aside of all this colorful mummery, especially as the Russian Meddling gambit appears to be dribbling away to nothing. It’s more than self-evident that poor Trump is in so far over his head that he’s come down with something like the bends, a debilitating systemic disorder rendering him unfit to execute the powers of office. Decades from now, they’ll say he had “the tweets.”
This is a melodrama of a type the world has seen before in a hundred royal palaces and other centers of mis-rule. The need to get rid of the head of state becomes so painfully self-evident that idle chatter about it ceases and all intention is signaled in mere eye-rolls, sighs, portentous glances, and other fraught devices of body language. That’s what’s going on now in the senate, the agency executive suites, the terraces of Martha’s Vineyard, and surely the hallowed corridors of the White House itself. One way or another, the knives are coming out.
The most economical script would have Trump graciously “resign” and be allowed to return to his familiar money-grubbing activities in real estate, where he can really only do harm to his own bank accounts and family posterity. Or, he could be dragged kicking and screaming from the premises, shall we say, and thrown to the bloodthirsty beasts of Deep State justice. That will not be pretty. Either outcome could provoke a lot of mischief “out there” among those who voted for him.
In any case, I doubt that the polity can take much more of Trump after Labor Day — and I say all this as one who was never part of the so-called “Resistance.” I’m not even very much convinced that getting rid of Trump and installing his stand-in, Mike Pence, will leave the government any less dysfunctional. After all, the nation is riding a larger and scarier arc of history as the techno-industrial fiesta winds down, with all the awfully disruptive consequences that implies.
More here.
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Two Things
I never cared for McCain, even back in 2000, when he was the maverick-y, supposedly moderate alternative to Bush.
But I always liked Bernie.
(Did you think I was talking about this one?)
But I always liked Bernie.
(Did you think I was talking about this one?)
More than a look! pic.twitter.com/Wsoex0VULr
— Seth Bringman (@sethbringman) July 26, 2017
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
Calexit Campaign Can Gather Signatures for Ballot Measure
The Sacramento Bee: "California Secession Campaign Can Start Gathering Signatures."
The Los Angeles Times Essential Politics newsletter: "Backers of Another Shot at a 'Calexit' Ballot Measure Can Now Gather Signatures."
The website of the California Freedom Coalition.
The Los Angeles Times Essential Politics newsletter: "Backers of Another Shot at a 'Calexit' Ballot Measure Can Now Gather Signatures."
Supporters of a plan for California to become independent from the United States are now allowed to gather signatures for their ballot measure.
On Tuesday afternoon, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra's office released an official title and summary for the initiative, now called the "California Autonomy From Federal Government" initiative.
The website of the California Freedom Coalition.
Sunday, July 23, 2017
Attack at June 30, 2017 Hilo Peace Vigil
I just found this while browsing:
http://malu-aina.org/?p=4782
Attack at June 30, 2017 Hilo peace vigil
For the record. At approximately 3:30PM June 30, 2017 a late model 4 door Honda, dark grey or black was parked at the curb near the Hilo Post office with a male driver (white, long haired and beard. Looked similar to Dog the bounty Hunter.) As I walked on the side walk back to my corner leafleting post from using the Post office rest room the man held up his middle finger inside his closed window. I didn’t react at all just kept walking. A little while later the car pulls up to the traffic light. I noticed the same man driving and holding his middle finger up again inside his closed window. I saw a woman in the passenger seat. The car was first in line at the traffic red light with me on the corner sidewalk. Then the man’s power window came down. and he said in a strong southern accent. “Since you hate America so much why don’t you just leave the country?” And then he opens his car door and I immediately moved north back down the sidewalk toward the post office. The man proceeds to yell (unintelligible) and then kicks down our plywood sign that says “Stop the Bombing.” He then gets back in his car and drives off. I didn’t get the license #. Malie Sellers and I were the only two there at the vigil at the time. Others had not yet arrived. Malie was down under the shade tree sitting in a chair quite a distance away and did not see what happened.
The times they are a changing and for the worst. I urge all who can to come join the weekly Hilo peace vigil 3:30 -5PM on Fridays at the downtown Hilo Post office with set up at 3PM. There is more safety for all in numbers.
Mahalo.
—
Jim Albertini
http://malu-aina.org/?p=4782
Attack at June 30, 2017 Hilo peace vigil
For the record. At approximately 3:30PM June 30, 2017 a late model 4 door Honda, dark grey or black was parked at the curb near the Hilo Post office with a male driver (white, long haired and beard. Looked similar to Dog the bounty Hunter.) As I walked on the side walk back to my corner leafleting post from using the Post office rest room the man held up his middle finger inside his closed window. I didn’t react at all just kept walking. A little while later the car pulls up to the traffic light. I noticed the same man driving and holding his middle finger up again inside his closed window. I saw a woman in the passenger seat. The car was first in line at the traffic red light with me on the corner sidewalk. Then the man’s power window came down. and he said in a strong southern accent. “Since you hate America so much why don’t you just leave the country?” And then he opens his car door and I immediately moved north back down the sidewalk toward the post office. The man proceeds to yell (unintelligible) and then kicks down our plywood sign that says “Stop the Bombing.” He then gets back in his car and drives off. I didn’t get the license #. Malie Sellers and I were the only two there at the vigil at the time. Others had not yet arrived. Malie was down under the shade tree sitting in a chair quite a distance away and did not see what happened.
The times they are a changing and for the worst. I urge all who can to come join the weekly Hilo peace vigil 3:30 -5PM on Fridays at the downtown Hilo Post office with set up at 3PM. There is more safety for all in numbers.
Mahalo.
—
Jim Albertini
Saturday, July 22, 2017
It's High Noon in the Himalayas: Asia's would-be superpowers seem destined to clash .@mihirssharma via Bloomberg https://t.co/xcCrfpsktb
— Sunil Raina (@linus_aniar) July 21, 2017
Friday, July 21, 2017
Kunstler: Meow.
Kunstler: Meow.
For all his blunders and stumbles in his first half-year as President (cough cough), Donald Trump seems to have more lives than Schrödinger’s Cat. Or maybe it just seems that way. Or maybe he isn’t really there at all (like the news these days). Maybe Trump only represents one comic probability in an infinite number of universes of probability, both comic and tragic. I begin to understand why the folks in Hollywood are having a whack attack over the chief executive: you can’t storyboard this bitch; it’s like leaving The Three Stooges on their own in a sound stage to re-make Gone With the Wind.
But then, you begin to wonder: is Russia really there, or is it, too, just another figment of possibility? Don’t try to figure that out by reading the oracular observations of The Washington Post. These days Russia seems to be at once everywhere and nowhere, like the Devil north of Boston in 1693. For example, this fellow Jeff Sessions. Have you noticed that his name rhymes with Russians? Hmmmm. And wasn’t he caught chatting with the Russian Ambassador at the very same convocation of Republicans that picked notorious colluder Donald Trump to stand for President? That’s enough of your damn evidence right there!
Yes, things are passing strange in the world’s greatest democracy these days. To me, seeing the thing through an historical lens, it’s looking more and more like the Salem Witch Frenzy meets the French Revolution with a spin of quantum confusion on top. Right now we’re in the first phase, sheer political lunacy. Beliefs have become ungrounded from the facts of life. The guy whom fate or a prankish deity put in the White House doesn’t even fit the template of the world’s most infamous heads-of-state. I’m sorry to dredge up old Adolf, but really, Hitler himself seemed to have a much firmer idea about what he was doing than Trump does.
The ObamaCare reform fiasco looks like a tipping point toward a strain of toxic political paralysis that might literally kill the government as we’ve known it. Over the many months of debate, congress never even got around to raising the salient issue: that the 18-or-so-percent of the economy “health care” represents consists largely of outright racketeering. Well, they sure blew that one. The major parties are disintegrating before our eyes, despite the seeming sense of decorum that senators present on TV. The public may seem to be mentally on vacation, snoozing on the beach in the midsummer doldrums, but something vicious is in the wind offshore.
I’d actually go further now than the “soft coup d’état” scenario that has Trump run over by the 25th amendment. It will happen, of course, but it will not satisfy anybody. Mike Pence will prove to be as ineffectual and unpopular as Trump, and he will be drowning in financial and fiscal problems, and he will get no help from the legislature in resolving any of it, and before too long there may be a general in the White House — or attempting to run things from someplace else, if he can. The whole nauseating spectacle will be attended by violent popular revolt of region against region and tribe against tribe in a great civil explosion of long-suppressed angst.
Too many nasty forces are vectoring in on the scene to overthrow the dream state America has been languishing in. Most of them involve money (or “money”) and the questions of how can we possibly keep paying for the way we live in this country, and who exactly has been fobbing off with the former wealth of every rusted and busted community in the land? It’s going to start in the stock and bond markets and it will be soon. And then the US Treasury will destroy the dollar trying (again) to save the banks. And the bank accounts will be frozen. And the loans will stop being paid. And the SNAP cards are going to stop working, and pretty soon the just-in-time deliveries to the supermarkets, and the resupply to the gas stations, and there won’t be much that Mike Pence can do about it. He’ll be shoved aside and the military will have to try to restore order in the land. When they do, it will not be the same land we sang about back in the fifth grade. Up in a cloud somewhere over Ohio, maybe, Schrödinger’s Cat will be gazing down on us, grinning.
For all his blunders and stumbles in his first half-year as President (cough cough), Donald Trump seems to have more lives than Schrödinger’s Cat. Or maybe it just seems that way. Or maybe he isn’t really there at all (like the news these days). Maybe Trump only represents one comic probability in an infinite number of universes of probability, both comic and tragic. I begin to understand why the folks in Hollywood are having a whack attack over the chief executive: you can’t storyboard this bitch; it’s like leaving The Three Stooges on their own in a sound stage to re-make Gone With the Wind.
But then, you begin to wonder: is Russia really there, or is it, too, just another figment of possibility? Don’t try to figure that out by reading the oracular observations of The Washington Post. These days Russia seems to be at once everywhere and nowhere, like the Devil north of Boston in 1693. For example, this fellow Jeff Sessions. Have you noticed that his name rhymes with Russians? Hmmmm. And wasn’t he caught chatting with the Russian Ambassador at the very same convocation of Republicans that picked notorious colluder Donald Trump to stand for President? That’s enough of your damn evidence right there!
Yes, things are passing strange in the world’s greatest democracy these days. To me, seeing the thing through an historical lens, it’s looking more and more like the Salem Witch Frenzy meets the French Revolution with a spin of quantum confusion on top. Right now we’re in the first phase, sheer political lunacy. Beliefs have become ungrounded from the facts of life. The guy whom fate or a prankish deity put in the White House doesn’t even fit the template of the world’s most infamous heads-of-state. I’m sorry to dredge up old Adolf, but really, Hitler himself seemed to have a much firmer idea about what he was doing than Trump does.
The ObamaCare reform fiasco looks like a tipping point toward a strain of toxic political paralysis that might literally kill the government as we’ve known it. Over the many months of debate, congress never even got around to raising the salient issue: that the 18-or-so-percent of the economy “health care” represents consists largely of outright racketeering. Well, they sure blew that one. The major parties are disintegrating before our eyes, despite the seeming sense of decorum that senators present on TV. The public may seem to be mentally on vacation, snoozing on the beach in the midsummer doldrums, but something vicious is in the wind offshore.
I’d actually go further now than the “soft coup d’état” scenario that has Trump run over by the 25th amendment. It will happen, of course, but it will not satisfy anybody. Mike Pence will prove to be as ineffectual and unpopular as Trump, and he will be drowning in financial and fiscal problems, and he will get no help from the legislature in resolving any of it, and before too long there may be a general in the White House — or attempting to run things from someplace else, if he can. The whole nauseating spectacle will be attended by violent popular revolt of region against region and tribe against tribe in a great civil explosion of long-suppressed angst.
Too many nasty forces are vectoring in on the scene to overthrow the dream state America has been languishing in. Most of them involve money (or “money”) and the questions of how can we possibly keep paying for the way we live in this country, and who exactly has been fobbing off with the former wealth of every rusted and busted community in the land? It’s going to start in the stock and bond markets and it will be soon. And then the US Treasury will destroy the dollar trying (again) to save the banks. And the bank accounts will be frozen. And the loans will stop being paid. And the SNAP cards are going to stop working, and pretty soon the just-in-time deliveries to the supermarkets, and the resupply to the gas stations, and there won’t be much that Mike Pence can do about it. He’ll be shoved aside and the military will have to try to restore order in the land. When they do, it will not be the same land we sang about back in the fifth grade. Up in a cloud somewhere over Ohio, maybe, Schrödinger’s Cat will be gazing down on us, grinning.
Thursday, July 20, 2017
The millennial left's war against liberalism https://t.co/y2p0oqkgIQ
— Andrew Hartman (@HartmanAndrew) July 20, 2017
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Leeches
One of my Russian host mothers (back in 2005) treated herself with leeches. Why? "Catherine the Great did, and she was a very smart woman."
— Christopher Stroop (@C_Stroop) July 17, 2017
On leech therapy.
Monday, July 17, 2017
Various Tweets
Most white DC residents (largely affluent transplants) have protested Trump. Only 16% of black residents have. https://t.co/WUTw1Bxc6o pic.twitter.com/yH3tjNNiM6
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 16, 2017
Going through the channels this afternoon, I saw Max was on Tucker Carlson:
If @Maddow wants to have me on to discuss permanent war and imperial delusions as @TuckerCarlson just did, I'm game https://t.co/PzmW8k0vLb
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 18, 2017
And it's not just McKeon or the GOP. Former Clinton/Gore/Kerry aides at Glover Park Group are helping Saudi Arabia get arms to bomb Yemen. pic.twitter.com/WO9RmPoX7D
— Jay Cassano (@jcassano) July 13, 2017
The return of Cold War kitsch: Wonder Woman II to take on the evil commies of 1980's USSR https://t.co/nRn8IBxn5m pic.twitter.com/KayXYQoBGx
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 13, 2017
My aunt sneaked me into Romero's Dawn of the Dead when I was a tween. It was unrated (X) and, uh, left a very strong impression on me. RIP
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) July 17, 2017
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Two Barbers
All they have in common is their surname.
NAACP’s Rev Barber: Form of Theological Malpractice That Borders onHeresy to Pray for Trump.#ccot #Bible #Prophecyhttps://t.co/ajv9hm6w0i pic.twitter.com/6avA77PTw4
— Prophecy Depot (@ProphecyDepot) July 16, 2017
Matt Barber: Trump Must Replace All Obama Hires With Conservative Christians https://t.co/wmu7KZvDoX pic.twitter.com/il6RbJTlaz
— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) July 14, 2017
Friday, July 14, 2017
Kunstler's Columns This Week
Lately, Kunstler has taken on the country's intellectual/chattering classes. To him, not only are they concerned with the wrong things, they try to narrow debate. Of course, I disagree with Kunstler's stances on gender and race relations. (He seems to think gender-variance is an example of modern decadence. But examples of such occur throughout history: Here. And Hawaii's own mahu phenomenon.) He is strongest on the importance of (cheap) energy to running modern civilization.
Kunstler: We're Good People, Really We Are!
The disgrace of America’s putative intellectual class is nearly complete as it shoves the polity further into dysfunction and toward collapse. These are the people Nassim Taleb refers to as “intellectuals-yet-idiots.” Big questions loom over this dynamic: How did the thinking class of America sink into this slough of thoughtlessness? And why – what is motivating them?
One path to understanding it can be found in this sober essay by Neal Devers, The Overton Bubble, published two years ago on TheFuturePrimaeval.net — a friend turned me on to it the other day (dunno how I missed it). The title is a reference to the phenomenon known as the Overton Window. Wikipedia summarizes it:
Devers refines the definition:
This raises another question: who exactly is in this corps of “respectable people” who set the parameters of acceptable thought? Primarily, the mainstream media — The New York Times, The WashPo, CNN, etc. — plus the bureaucratic functionaries of the permanent government bureaucracy, a.k.a. the Deep State, who make and execute policy, along with the universities which educate the “respectable people” (the thinking class) into the prevailing dogmas and shibboleths of the day, and finally the think tanks and foundations that pay professional “experts” to retail their ideas.
...
Here is an alternative list of matters [the thinking classes] are not generally concerned about or interested in:
•The energy quandary at the heart of our economic malaise.
•The enormous debt racked up to run society in the absence of affordable energy inputs.
•The dangerous interventions and manipulation in markets by unelected officials of the Federal Reserve.
•The extraordinary dysfunction of manipulated financial markets.
•The fragility of a banking system based on accounting fraud.
•The dysfunction and fragility of the American suburban living arrangement.
•The consequences of a catastrophic breakdown in the economy due to the above.
•The destruction of planetary ecology, threatening the continuation of the human race, and potentially all life.
More here.
and
(Note that I don't share his general pessimism.)
Kunstler: Holy Hell.
The abiding enigma of this tormented era remains: why has the thinking class of America abandoned thinking? The answer is: it’s the reaction to their own failure. Failure to do what? To produce the utopia that Gnostic liberalism promised — a perfect world based on altering human nature.
The result is an essentially religious hysteria, like the witch frenzies of Medieval Europe that were sometimes provoked by ergot poisoning — a fungus with toxic psychotropic properties that grew on the harvested rye, inducing frightful hallucinations in the villagers, who then lashed out at their perceived supernatural antagonists. Trump in our time is the ergot on the bread of our politics. And Russia is the witch.
Like other operations of the human mind, this collective fugue-state has a big subconscious module in it: the deep, poorly articulated fear that the signal notion of Progress behind progressive politics in the industrial era has reached a dead end. The world is clearly not becoming a better place, but rather reeling into disorder and ecological crisis, despite all the rational programs and politics of modern democracy, and political failure is everywhere.
More here.
Kunstler: We're Good People, Really We Are!
The disgrace of America’s putative intellectual class is nearly complete as it shoves the polity further into dysfunction and toward collapse. These are the people Nassim Taleb refers to as “intellectuals-yet-idiots.” Big questions loom over this dynamic: How did the thinking class of America sink into this slough of thoughtlessness? And why – what is motivating them?
One path to understanding it can be found in this sober essay by Neal Devers, The Overton Bubble, published two years ago on TheFuturePrimaeval.net — a friend turned me on to it the other day (dunno how I missed it). The title is a reference to the phenomenon known as the Overton Window. Wikipedia summarizes it:
The Overton Window, also known as the window of discourse, is the range of ideas the public will accept…. The term is derived from its originator, Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), a former vice president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy….
Devers refines the definition:
The Overton Window is a concept in political sociology referring to the range of acceptable opinions that can be held by respectable people. “Respectable” of course means that the subject can be integrated with polite society. Respectability is a strong precondition on the ability to have open influence in the mainstream.
This raises another question: who exactly is in this corps of “respectable people” who set the parameters of acceptable thought? Primarily, the mainstream media — The New York Times, The WashPo, CNN, etc. — plus the bureaucratic functionaries of the permanent government bureaucracy, a.k.a. the Deep State, who make and execute policy, along with the universities which educate the “respectable people” (the thinking class) into the prevailing dogmas and shibboleths of the day, and finally the think tanks and foundations that pay professional “experts” to retail their ideas.
...
Here is an alternative list of matters [the thinking classes] are not generally concerned about or interested in:
•The energy quandary at the heart of our economic malaise.
•The enormous debt racked up to run society in the absence of affordable energy inputs.
•The dangerous interventions and manipulation in markets by unelected officials of the Federal Reserve.
•The extraordinary dysfunction of manipulated financial markets.
•The fragility of a banking system based on accounting fraud.
•The dysfunction and fragility of the American suburban living arrangement.
•The consequences of a catastrophic breakdown in the economy due to the above.
•The destruction of planetary ecology, threatening the continuation of the human race, and potentially all life.
More here.
and
(Note that I don't share his general pessimism.)
Kunstler: Holy Hell.
The abiding enigma of this tormented era remains: why has the thinking class of America abandoned thinking? The answer is: it’s the reaction to their own failure. Failure to do what? To produce the utopia that Gnostic liberalism promised — a perfect world based on altering human nature.
The result is an essentially religious hysteria, like the witch frenzies of Medieval Europe that were sometimes provoked by ergot poisoning — a fungus with toxic psychotropic properties that grew on the harvested rye, inducing frightful hallucinations in the villagers, who then lashed out at their perceived supernatural antagonists. Trump in our time is the ergot on the bread of our politics. And Russia is the witch.
Like other operations of the human mind, this collective fugue-state has a big subconscious module in it: the deep, poorly articulated fear that the signal notion of Progress behind progressive politics in the industrial era has reached a dead end. The world is clearly not becoming a better place, but rather reeling into disorder and ecological crisis, despite all the rational programs and politics of modern democracy, and political failure is everywhere.
More here.
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Tucker Carlson vs. Max Boot (and Ralph Peters)
The satisfaction of watching a fanatical neocon like @MaxBoot be reduced to a sputtering mess is hard to match https://t.co/1ezswaYccX
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 13, 2017
Wednesday, July 12, 2017
Putin is a faithful, god-fearing man, but even the Russian Orthodox high priest doesn’t get to lead him by the arm. pic.twitter.com/FyOysNW4Ui
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) July 12, 2017
But would he be amenable to having a lei placed round his neck?
Monday, July 10, 2017
Garbage Collectors
Nancy links to and discusses an essay by a journalist who married a garbage-truck driver. Incidentally, last night on TCM they showed a Finnish movie, Shadows in Paradise, about a garbage-truck driver and his budding romance with a supermarket cashier.
Friday, July 07, 2017
Kunstler's Columns This Week
Kunstler: Lighten Up to Tighten Up.
Perhaps the presidency has been an overly solemn office since, oh, the days of Millard Fillmore, the dreary weight of all that mortal responsibility — slavery, war, more war, depression, yet more war, nukes, we shall overcome, terror, Lehman Brothers, Ferguson, Russia here, there, and everywhere…uccchhh….
And so, at last: a little comic relief. I mean, imagine Grover Cleveland putting the choke-slam on Thomas Nast. Dwight Eisenhower punching out Edward R. Murrow. Jack Kennedy applying the Macumba Death Grip to Walter Lippman. Nahhhh. But Donald (“The Golden Golem of Greatness”) Trump versus CNN! Now that’s a matchup worthy of the WWF Hall of Fame. I just kind of wish the big fella had gone all the way and put in Anderson Cooper’s mug instead of the CNN logo box. Make it truly up front and personal since, let’s face it, Andy has been the most visible conduit of Jeff Zucker’s animadversions.
More here.
and
Kunstler: Suicide by Stupidity.
One has to wonder, though, about the editors who serve up this baloney. Are they mere servelings of the Rand Corporation, Raytheon, and other parties with an interest in the war business, or can they possibly believe their own extrusions of fabricated agit-prop?
For instance, the imputed Russian “annexation of Crimea,” as if the place was some kind of nostalgic, sore-beset Ruritania of independent princes, colorful peasants, and earnest postal clerks cruelly enslaved by bloodthirsty Cossacks. No, Crimea had been officially a province of Russia since exactly 1783 — which was, by the way, the same year that the American Revolution officially ended via the Treaty of Paris.
After the Russian Revolution (1917) the Crimean peninsula became an autonomous province of the Soviet Union, meaning it remained a part of what was then Russia. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev turned the administrative duties over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was then also a province of the greater USSR, i.e. Russia. Through the entire modern era, Crimea has been the site of the USSR’s, and now Russia’s, only warm-water naval bases. Ask the average American college student why that is, and you will surely receive a blank stare.
Crimea is a peninsula on the Black Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean Sea. Hence Crimea’s strategic value. For a few short years in the 21st century, following the breakup of the USSR, the now-independent Ukraine had possession of Crimea and essentially rented the existing naval bases to Russia. That provided a much needed revenue stream for the struggling country, which was also utterly dependent on imported Russian natural gas supplies, which Ukraine had to pay for.
When the elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was overthrown in 2014, with the help of the US State Department and CIA, Russia was obliged to secure its naval bases in Crimea — where the overwhelming majority of citizens were culturally and linguistically Russian anyway. A referendum ratified the transfer of Crimea back to Russia. Apart from these procedural details, it must be obvious that Russia would never have ceded its strategic naval bases on the Black Sea to Ukraine, especially when that beleaguered country was being manipulated by the USA and NATO into becoming an adversarial presence on Russia’s border.
More here.
Perhaps the presidency has been an overly solemn office since, oh, the days of Millard Fillmore, the dreary weight of all that mortal responsibility — slavery, war, more war, depression, yet more war, nukes, we shall overcome, terror, Lehman Brothers, Ferguson, Russia here, there, and everywhere…uccchhh….
And so, at last: a little comic relief. I mean, imagine Grover Cleveland putting the choke-slam on Thomas Nast. Dwight Eisenhower punching out Edward R. Murrow. Jack Kennedy applying the Macumba Death Grip to Walter Lippman. Nahhhh. But Donald (“The Golden Golem of Greatness”) Trump versus CNN! Now that’s a matchup worthy of the WWF Hall of Fame. I just kind of wish the big fella had gone all the way and put in Anderson Cooper’s mug instead of the CNN logo box. Make it truly up front and personal since, let’s face it, Andy has been the most visible conduit of Jeff Zucker’s animadversions.
More here.
and
Kunstler: Suicide by Stupidity.
One has to wonder, though, about the editors who serve up this baloney. Are they mere servelings of the Rand Corporation, Raytheon, and other parties with an interest in the war business, or can they possibly believe their own extrusions of fabricated agit-prop?
For instance, the imputed Russian “annexation of Crimea,” as if the place was some kind of nostalgic, sore-beset Ruritania of independent princes, colorful peasants, and earnest postal clerks cruelly enslaved by bloodthirsty Cossacks. No, Crimea had been officially a province of Russia since exactly 1783 — which was, by the way, the same year that the American Revolution officially ended via the Treaty of Paris.
After the Russian Revolution (1917) the Crimean peninsula became an autonomous province of the Soviet Union, meaning it remained a part of what was then Russia. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev turned the administrative duties over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was then also a province of the greater USSR, i.e. Russia. Through the entire modern era, Crimea has been the site of the USSR’s, and now Russia’s, only warm-water naval bases. Ask the average American college student why that is, and you will surely receive a blank stare.
Crimea is a peninsula on the Black Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean Sea. Hence Crimea’s strategic value. For a few short years in the 21st century, following the breakup of the USSR, the now-independent Ukraine had possession of Crimea and essentially rented the existing naval bases to Russia. That provided a much needed revenue stream for the struggling country, which was also utterly dependent on imported Russian natural gas supplies, which Ukraine had to pay for.
When the elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was overthrown in 2014, with the help of the US State Department and CIA, Russia was obliged to secure its naval bases in Crimea — where the overwhelming majority of citizens were culturally and linguistically Russian anyway. A referendum ratified the transfer of Crimea back to Russia. Apart from these procedural details, it must be obvious that Russia would never have ceded its strategic naval bases on the Black Sea to Ukraine, especially when that beleaguered country was being manipulated by the USA and NATO into becoming an adversarial presence on Russia’s border.
More here.
Wednesday, July 05, 2017
Tuesday, July 04, 2017
Happy Fourth of July!
The Declaration of Independence in 76 Tweets.
Our July 4th special RWN is up, w/ @WilliamHogeland on the politics of American insurgency leading to Independence https://t.co/dl6frdXRmN
— The War Nerd (@TheWarNerd) July 3, 2017
Happy 4th of July: "official" release day for Gentlemen Revolutionaries! https://t.co/b2dtsECqFX @History_Bham @PrincetonUPress pic.twitter.com/dnRBUGaDTV
— Tom Cutterham (@tomcutterham) July 4, 2017
Reading for this July 4 Radio @TheWarNerd episode: "Declaration" by historian @WilliamHogeland https://t.co/KpJK2Nxr7k
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) July 3, 2017
My favourite thing about @WilliamHogeland's new book about war was its concern with the minutiae of paperwork. 📝 https://t.co/Z1dh4zyyib
— Tom Cutterham (@tomcutterham) July 3, 2017
Monday, July 03, 2017
Who Knew?
The Washington Post: "Who Knew? Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is a Harley Rider."
I didn't know till just now.
I didn't know till just now.
Max Blumenthal
3 July update: I asked Hattie her thoughts on Max:
Re: your retweet of this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/marcushjohnson/status/881712703424933889?p=p
What do you think of Max Blumenthal nowadays?
Posted by: Poppa Zao | July 03, 2017 at 02:26 PM
Hattie
Huh. He and his friends need to understand that only a broad center-left coalition can save us.
Posted by: Hattie | July 03, 2017 at 09:21 PM
----------
Will this develop into a giant West Side Story-style dance off between alt-left and centrist factions?
Re: your retweet of this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/marcushjohnson/status/881712703424933889?p=p
What do you think of Max Blumenthal nowadays?
Posted by: Poppa Zao | July 03, 2017 at 02:26 PM
Hattie
Huh. He and his friends need to understand that only a broad center-left coalition can save us.
Posted by: Hattie | July 03, 2017 at 09:21 PM
----------
Will this develop into a giant West Side Story-style dance off between alt-left and centrist factions?
Only someone who has never toiled at the lower rungs of the workforce would say something like this https://t.co/8oF3HrgYl6
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 3, 2017
Didn't you have a pretty pampered upbringing? Can ask your parents.I didn't.Maybe throw stones at someone who wasn't on public assistance
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) July 3, 2017
Didn't you grow up in Georgetown? You really want to compare notes on toiling jobs? Happy to do so.
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) July 3, 2017
No, I didn't. And why compare notes when your wholesale sell-out to corporate elites, Gulf tycoons & Likudniks is a matter of public record?
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 3, 2017
As a journalist, do some follow up on this. You can start by calling your dad.
— Neera Tanden (@neeratanden) July 3, 2017
Seriously, @MaxBlumenthal, stop shaming your parents. Remember where you come from...and how you got where you are. Because I do.
— Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) July 3, 2017
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