(time for something on the lighter side; please feel free to add anything that tickles your fancy.)
(above via RT)
‘UC Davis defends paying to remove pepper-spray references from Internet’, latimes.com Their defense? “It worked!” #ByeByeLindaPateki
Oopsie; ‘Cloudy with a chance of Humvees’; it was raining Humvees last week when a US Army training exercise at Hohenfels military base in Germany went wrong. Three military vehicles detached from their parachute systems and crashed violently to the ground.”
Come on; in all fairness, just three of ‘many, the proud, and the free’ hummers….
Occupy newsletter: ‘Only Bernie Sanders Can Break the Power of Capitalism in the U.S!’
‘Obamacare Adviser: UnitedHealth Is Pulling Out Because Patients Were Too Sick’, dailycaller.com (spit-take worthy)
George Clooney: “Would you like to come to a fundraising dinner? Tickets are only $353,400 (bleacher seats may be somewhat less).” Later: “Isn’t big money in politics…obscene?”
‘Socialist Senator Explains the Difference Between Democrats and Republicans’, Mike Whitney (video)
“Should older people have their vote weighted less than younger people?
“The case is simple enough. The older you are, the less time you have, the less stake you have in the future and the more you are likely to make short-sighted decisions which favor yourself.”
Yes; clearly, each vote cast by a citizen over thirty should count as 3/5 of a vote.
‘Beware of scarlet hair’: According to Breitbart, a rightwing blog read – according to some experts – by people who aren’t very bright, redheads are more likely to be terrorists. The site notes that white “Islamic extremists reported on by the media are 15 times more likely than the general population to have red hair”. The rationale for this, Breitbart writes, “at least according to some experts”, is the “bullying and persecution [redheads] endure early in life”.
‘Secretive group of Hollywood conservatives suddenly dissolves’. Related: Doctor Phil McGraw says Angelina and her father can be reunited now, on his show (or Oprha’s) if they’d like. (He’s not a real doctor…)
Wot? No Depends, Mr. President, you ageist so-and-so? (won’t embed)
Related, and hint: not so much:
Because nothing says Grand Canyon love like crap fighter jets screaming overhead:
Big Bird: The Bern is the word… (h/t: Bruce)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
The longer the “robots are coming” meme goes on (like the Picturephone before it), the more I wonder what exactly robots are to be used for except advertising “the robots are coming”. Mr. Tycoon’s main use of his crew is to say “I’ve got enough money to blow it on this shit.”
Koch’s want to mine the Grand Canyon for uranium. I guess when they are done there, they’ll want to mine the Great Smoky Mountains for gravel and timber the redwoods and sequoias. And Trump would put a casino in Mammoth Cave.
Article on Hillary Clinton maintains that she’s a sucker for a guy in uniform. Jack Keane (Institute for Study of War) and David Petraeus are two of her best buds when she was SoS. Shades of Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great.
Was waiting for the little Bernie to land on Big Bird’s podium.
The response to Prince’s passing has been stunning in this neck of the woods. Lots of middle-aged grieving white Southern women. Scared of transgender folks in their restrooms in one post and going on about Prince in the next.
The Intercept has covered the coup in Brazil rather well. Dilma’s mistake was to buy the austerity argument for a brief period of time; brought down her popularity to where Congress was not deterred from moving back to corruption and tyranny. Brazen procedural maneuvering.
Zebra swallowtails have gotten their fill of pawpaw leaves and now are coming out as butterflies.
i was attempting to satirize the ridiculous, both headlines, opinions, and ubiquitous themes afoot. ian’s wasn’t current, but fit in rather nicely. but yes, a headline line: ‘ anti-bathroom choice white southern women in deep mourning for prince’ would fit right in.
as does obama in london: “i’m not here to tell you what to do about #Brexit, but if you vote Leave, you’ll go to the back of the queue”. ooof, it’s possible his mission will backfire, save for the jonathan freedland fans (like bloomberg): “‘It took Barack Obama to crush the Brexit fantasy”. guess he told them. ;-)
‘a sucker for a guy in a uniform’: generalissimo clinton? don’t know if it were the kochs earlier, but yeah, uranium mining at grand canyon and fracking at chaco canyon have gotten into the energy news mix for the past six months or longer. the dineh are furious noting that as peabody coal goes bankrupt, nothing that the company ruined on the rez will get cleaned up.
eeep, i had to look up mammoth cave to discover its location. all i know about that man is by way of headlines. his election might hasten a people’s revolution; that uniform-lover might just get protected like O. meh.
ha; i have been following the soft coup in brazil, but not the intercept. one came in on pop resistance, and i wouldda gone with: ‘six intercept journalists pen article on dilma’, lol. it almost made me go looking for how many journalists Pierre has corralled. ;-)
i could watch that video six times in a row…oh wait: i did! fancy the time that person put into it to make it so perfect; my stars.
gorgeous butterflies those are, those splashes of red are fine. we have tiger swallowtails here; well, every once in awhile.
big bird, the mr moto photo, the death of prince, and robots. if robots can carry bags, they can also carry guns. we already know what happens when/if the robots take over: unneeded labor=unneeded human. what’s the physics measurement for work? is it watts? i say for every kilowatt of work a person produces each day, they get 1/5 of a vote.
they played west side story the other night on TCM. i’d never seen it, just heard highlights. “officer krupke, fuck you” is heard in contemporary productions. around ’70, ’71, the fbi sent bernstein phony letters w/titles like, “From a concerned jew,” b/c lenny was hosting fundraisers for the black panthers in his home. among other stuff they did to him. officer fbi, fuck you.
1/5 of a vote at each biennial election, that is.
foot-pounds, but you may have been transposing on purpose. we also know that drones are robotic, yes? now japanese humanoid robots may be able to serve without spilling, so shoot without asking might be next. or sentient enough to fight their overlords.
but those tycoon’s bots were ugly as all giddy-up, and fancy that the ‘girls’ wore dresses, not just some little r2d2s. my stars. there’s a tweet in the text at RT that’s truly cringe-worthy, though.
interesting math on votes, but can you explain your thinking? is it based on the fact that the more actual work a human does, the less they’re paid? “no, no!” we hear, “thinking takes lots of energy!” (calories, i reckon they mean)
and why leonard bernstein and West Side Story? but what interesting history; i never knew. brando, yes, a few others…and panthers. yes, i left prince off this post because: not funny, eh?
These CHINE$E ♀b♀ts $MELL like the next Ms O’GenY $ELLOUT ( eg., http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132×5009279 ) Product PU$H for institutionalizing Hillaridiot RodMan ClintAns in place of US constituents !
i suppose i opened the door on candidate issues, but mainly by way of satire, or so i’d hoped. cripes, bruce, that was from 2008, and i dunno if t’s true. DU’s layout makes me almost have a brain seizure. but she may be about as teflon as the big dawg, no one who supports her seems to give a fig about all the foreign donations their foundation got that allowed her state department to approve, say, billions’ worth of fighter jets to the saudis. no one cares about her massive lies about not being a key figure in the cou in honduras, nor her key part in overthrowing and killing gadaffi in libya.
and yep, that clusterfuck is due to go to the UN again for ‘intervention’. (claim: ISIS!!!) this time, obama is said to be pushing back on the notion, as is the african union. but clinton’s generals that tarheeldem mentioned are bullish on it, along with the generalissimo, it seems.
but if ya wanna talk china, this almost split my sides, speaking of ‘compromised NGOs. from a rather funny commie’s twit stream:
here’s one of the mark weisbrot pieces on dilma i’d mentioned up yonder, too. lawdy, what a desperate empire.
oh, no i wasn’t j/k on misforgetting the measurement of work (what’s it in the metric system? what’s a foot, a pound? jewels or something? force = mass x inertia?) yes, voting should be based on quantity of work. be helpful if we had some uniform, objective measure of what “work” is (or maybe not; there’s a subjective component), rather than work=kissing the boss’s ass.
a friend of mine from hong kong told me during the tianamen sq uprisings the remnants of brit colonial rule in the civil service in HK all on cue started rabble rousing to get HK to revolt from china b/c being ruled by white people is so much better. of course, immediately after the revolt was crushed, foreign direct investment in china skyrocketed. a gov’t that crushes its people is good for bizness, too.
listening to some classical choral music on the theirtube this a.m. they *must* put in a charmin toilet paper commercial or an ad for how much sex you’ll get from buying a lexus. can’t have an experience of any kind that isn’t commodified and mediated by consumerism, replete w/reminders of who owns society & its cultural products.. “McDonald’s proudly brings you tonight’s full moon & meteor shower.” obviously this applies to other kinds of music & experience, as well. bernstein, one among many, his experience w/the cops reflects this dynamic in living color.
your ‘McDogfood proudly sponsors’ was sheer delight, jason, and reminds me so much of the ads on the mysteries we watch on pbs. ralph lauren, viking river cruises, etc., all opulent enough to make ya reach for a barf bag.
yes, joules in the IS system; i looked at wiki, but rather confusing equations. but see, if work were valued, it wouldn’t be this way, would it? the entire capitalist system is based on that fact. our Betters were brilliant enough to use Levers to accomplish that work, or wheels and pulleys, so should bet to ‘earn’ a thousand times more than the average grunt, yes?
and what’s more efficient than a hostile corporate take-over, stripping all the pension funds, selling off anything of value, and trashing the company? sorry, schmucks; but O just created 114,000 new jobs, mebbe you can get one if ya ain’t too old. otherwise: Walmart Greeter.
fascinating view of hong kong from your friend; that NEO piece seems to say much the same. obama to macri, the same. the new soft coup in VZ: the same. bidness, bidness, bidness, Investments!!. but O is off to germany to schmooze merkel about the TTIP/tafta, ‘n talk ‘libya/isis’. good gawd all-friday, why is the EU kowtowing to turkey so vehemently, though? the world is insane right now, and plenty of working people are catching the drift. i had to laugh that at the BAR version of chris hedges’ piece on #solidaritySpring or whatever, he only ever mentioned ‘neoliberalism’, not capitalism itself.
do you have an active sound card on your computer? i’d been wanting to feature a 30 minute interview with a man from ‘friends of congo’, very replete with colonial history, but since april 12, no one has transcribed it. another of our friends says he can borrow his wife’s laptop when necessary. this qualifies, imo.
yes, i have a sound card. but for how long, o lord? how long? ie, my PC is old.
the disney-fication of culture.
the actions of the EU, caught b/n the US & Russia & the US & its middle east allies, are mystifying, aren’t they? eagerly, willingly participating in the destruction of their own societies. but doesn’t the US do the same to its citizens, etc.? allying w/the US, how could Europe do otherwise? at the heart of capitalism is nihilism, anti-life, hatred of the world. everything that exists exists to be converted via its destruction into something that does not exist: money.
i realized this mornin’ that it was a stupid question, given you’d er…brought the crawley song. how long, how long? yes. perhaps you can score a couple of those new jobs so you can buy a new one…on time.
more ‘threatening news’ for the Imperium (the teaser): “Two days ago, in Moscow, the foreign ministers of India, Russia, and China released a joint communique outlining areas of trilateral agreement between the three countries. As I discussed in The Diplomat, the three countries have met annually since 2002 to discuss issues of regional and global importance. While the trilateral hasn’t addressed the issue in the past, this year, the three foreign ministers included the South China Sea disputes in their joint communique. Specifically, the portion of the communique on the maritime disputes there said the following: Russia, India and China are committed to maintaining a legal order for the seas and oceans based on the principles of international law, as reflected notably in the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS) ”
(just deleted a bunch of psycho-babble about ‘Our Leaders’)
but this piece says 90,000 demonstrated against the ttip in hanover saturday ahead of O’s embrace with frau frumpy. it looks a bit disneyfied, too, but then it was meant to. ;-)
the US seems to be trying mightily to pry india from its BRICS-ish orbit. not w/o some success. Modi? gah, what a jerk that guy is.
worse than a jerk from accounts i’ve read. but yes, trying to recall O and modi, i went to AJE and found this fukkery, speaking of gah+ and ‘bidness’. it says that AJ ‘america’ is closing down. is that AJEnglish, i wonder, or just USian news? i do remember that glenn greenwald did a bit of a hit job on, but i can’t remember why.
what did i read about modi and the elephant in the room not long go? (kashmir)
yes. pakistan & india facing down each other w/nukes over & in kashmir?
I can’t quite put my finger on why this deserves to be here, but something about this (from scoop.co.nz) tickled my funny bone. Maybe it’s not amusing if you’re not a kiwi:
“Minister recognises World Intellectual Property Day
Tuesday, 26 April 2016, 10:35 am
Press Release: New Zealand Government”
Sort of goes along with the ‘bots in a bar’ theme?
it’s hilarious, juliania, and fits right into the theme. i looked up the WIPO site, and while it’s full of capitalist non-comedy, the stress was on “the role that intellectual property rights (patents, trademarks, industrial designs, copyright) play in encouraging innovation and creativity.”
well, there’s quite a list of activists and hacktavists who believe in yanno, ‘liberating’ software, university research, and secrets. but we were speaking earlier on the thread about work and pay, etc., and i found this on david graeber’s twit account, quite to the point. a lot of the essay was weak-sauce, but i clipped a couple paragraphs:
““Maybe this is also a clue as to why the innovations of the past 30 years – a time of spiraling inequality – haven’t quite lived up to our expectations. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” mocks Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s resident intellectual. If the postwar era gave us fabulous inventions like the washing machine, the refrigerator, the space shuttle, and the pill, lately it’s been slightly improved iterations of the same phone we bought a couple years ago.
In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate. Imagine just how much progress we’ve missed out on because thousands of bright minds have frittered away their time dreaming up hypercomplex financial products that are ultimately only destructive. Or spent the best years of their lives duplicating existing pharmaceuticals in a way that’s infinitesimally different enough to warrant a new patent application by a brainy lawyer so a brilliant PR department can launch a brand-new marketing campaign for the not-so-brand-new drug.”
phooey on thiel, of course. but he’d borrowed from, and linked to, this 2013 essay of graeber’s: ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’: Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you weren’t doing that thing you do 9-5? Anthropology professor and best selling author David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue – everyone who’s employed should read carefully…
See, in New Zealand these days, there’s property, and then there’s property. . .
“Prime Minister John Key told TV One’s Q+A programme that the government could use a land tax to restrict foreign investment in residential housing under any re-negotiated free trade agreement with China…
But the Prime Minister said, “at the moment, we’re not trying to stop the investment coming in.” [Also Scoop]
here ya go, juliania. didja hear the one about the robot monk spreading Buddhist wisdom to the digital generation?
Thanks, wendye! Buddhists are nothing if not practical! I almost forgot – came here this afternoon to link this video:
https://www.rt.com/in-motion/341158-rally-against-rousseff-impeachment/
May not be thousands as they say, but those young ladies banging on – tin cans? Petrol drums? did warm my heart. That’s how I felt about Kennedy too – he warmed our hearts, and whether it was genuine or not, we felt it. Perception is nine-tenths and this was not run of the mill imperialism in my view. But maybe you had to be there.
i howled that the video of the robot monk answering questions jerked and repeated at the end, just as a chinese bot might do. (japanese ones seem far more sophisticated, for lack of a better term.)
acch, so many pink tide soft coups underway, there, chile (complete for now), VZ, (come on, brain…). well good on them; telesur has some video, too. i’ll look soon. hadn’t been getting comments from the café, so i seem to be behind.
I am relaying a message from wendye here – will also put it on the latest thread to reach folk – she’s having modem trouble today, so absence signifies the frustration that goes along with that – all necessary spiritual vibes will hopefully accomplish what my non-expertise in the matter could not do – modem to wendye!!
I know she would not feel hopeful on the following front, but always the optimist me – I would say this is the only hope to get something from the Sanders campaign that actually means something – and all signs are that it will NOT happen, but it doesn’t hurt to say it should:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/29/the-push-to-make-sanders-the-green-partys-candidate/
thanks, ww; the vibes must have helped, at least for now. must have what kept my dogged determination going, switching out wires and whatnot of two wifi modems until finally…one permutation worked. odd, all of it.
heh, that’s either the second or third column lindorff’s written in the same vein. i’d seen a tweet from march that stein had reached out to his campaign, never heard back. i dug out coverage about it, plus a new very enigmatic tweet from april 26 saying she’d reached out again, no details. yes, its a potential duopoly-buster, but hardly the Revolution. ;-)
but she seems to have two twit accounts, and on this one, she’s still lambasting the bern for his militarism, etc.
which brings me to a recent piece at wsws.org: ‘Sanders backs Obama “kill list,” troops to Syria’
“There is a list of people that the US government wants to kill, and it goes about doing it. Would you keep the kill list as president of the United States?
Sanders: Look, terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves. I think as Miguel said, though, it has to be done in a constitutional, legal way.
Hayes: Do you think what’s being done now is constitutional and legal?
Sanders: In general, I do, yes.”
war on terr’a terr’afying, wants new aumf to fight isis/isil, whatever. dunno how she could really be so Green pragmatic as to join with him, down to ‘stepping aside’ to allow him top spot on the ticket, but none of this would happen until after the dem convention, if i catch the bern’s drift. the trotskyite’s wrong, though; that interview with him on with martha radditz said much the same.
moar headlines of the lighter sort:
RT: Wee the People: LGBT community crashes America’s two-party toilet system
also RT: The devil you know: John Boehner calls Ted Cruz ‘Lucifer in the flesh’
guardian: I hate Donald Trump’s views. But his tenacity inspires me
RT: Communists ask Putin to deploy missiles to Cuba in reply to Pentagon’s Turkey expansion
last but not least, because mr. wendydavis goes a bit bonkers over understanding what a hashtag signifies: John Stauber:
#FeelTheBern Goes #UpInSmoke
craziest award? also counterpunch: Could Voters Opposed to Both Clinton and Trump Team up Using VotePact?
Not to neglect tickling my fancy (see earlier post) here’s a delightful fancy tickler:
Can anything be done to rescue the traditional postal service? In Finland, postal workers facing redundancy as a result of falling mail volumes have suggested a novel solution. They’ve suggested offering other services, such as mowing peoples’ lawns, on the side :
Posti Group, the main state-owned Finnish mail service, has an idea to make some extra cash fast: Starting May 17, they will mow people’s lawns once a week for up to 130 euros (about $148) a month. And, it’s tax-deductible. “The idea for the lawn mowing service came from mail delivery employees,” Anu Punola, Posti’s director, said in a statement. “We believe many customers will be happy to outsource lawn mowing when we make it convenient for them to do so.”
With its already wide reach, Posti hopes this lawn mowing pilot program, running through August, will help transform the postal company into a more service-oriented company. Finns will have the option between two services, either 65 euros (about $75) for 30 minutes every Tuesday or 130 euros (about $149) for 60 minutes every Tuesday. They picked Tuesday because it is a traditionally light mail delivery day.
[Gordon Campbell@scoop.co.nz]
i’d wondered why you’d mentioned ‘tickling your fancy’ on your previous comment, as it was on an Open Menu (i think).
but how fun, and how different the post office indebtedness must be in finland. in the US it’s because congeress has required by law that the PO
fund its retirees what? sixty years in advance?. another con for privatization, of course.
i admit i haven’t kept up, although it all infuriated me a few years ago. #WhataCon
http://savethepostoffice.com/