A good Day of the Dead and All Souls’ Day to all. My offerings, and please talk to one another; there’s a lot going down here that may or may not resolve soon.
‘Police shoot rubber bullets at Dakota Access Pipeline protesters’, RT 2 Nov, 2016
‘Obama says Dakota Access Pipeline may be rerouted after months of protests’, 2 Nov, 2016 RT
@greenpeaceusa 2h2 hours ago
“There are no safe options for “rerouting”. @POTUS the #NoDAPL fight can not wait!” http://bit.ly/2e3986K
from wsws, and may i say ‘kiss my grits, and suck it, trumpka, you sell-out’:
“Both Clinton and Republican Donald Trump are committed to expanding oil and natural gas production in the US, regardless of environmental or cultural considerations, or workers’ rights.
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, took a predictably reactionary stance on the anti-DAPL protests, claiming falsely that they were hurting workers in the area. Trumka released a statement defending the pipeline and attacking protesters for “hold[ing] union members’ livelihoods and their families’ financial security hostage to endless delay.”
Actually, it is Trumka and the lavishly paid union apparatus that hold workers and their families hostage to the profit motives of big business, not the protesters.”
World series championship, game 7: Go Cubbies! and phooey on the Wahoos! Score now: 5 to 1 Cubbies, top of the 5th.
“The Donald merely makes me nervous, while Hillary makes me want to take poison. It is the difference between an acid trip and death by sinus drainage. His truly great strength is that he is not Hillary. The election is really a contest between placeholders for conflicting interests, for different views of the world. Few would want either if there were another choice.”
~ Dmitry Orlov
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Drone overview of pipeline, what looks like the footprint of a future pumping station, and panoramas of the beautiful plains and Missouri River.
LaDonna BraveBull Allard in The Guardian:
Rosalyn R. LaPier
Why understanding Native American religion is important for resolving the Dakota Access Pipeline crisis
The only escape from the problem of evil for the sons and daughter of Abraham is death.
spectacular contributions, amigo; thank you. i liked miz laPier’s essay so much i read it twice. just as an aside, we live in the shadow of mt. hesperus (Dibé Nitsaa), one of the four points that describe the dinetah, although i don’t remember which holy people are associated w/ it. found them, but also this: “Monster Slayer is the protector of this mountain”.
ladonna bravebull allard is not only a force of nature, but holds a deep wisdom; too many quotable quotes, but the one concerning ‘if we lose this sacred place, we will not survive as a people’ made my heart ache.
oh, to be able to go and stand with them as protectors! they have lots of money, but not enough bodies, which fact any number of tweeters note w/ some bitterness.
i need to score a sound icon, but just the silent version of the aerial view was enough to show how hideously wrong the black snake is; my stars. you’ likely seen that an anonymous donor contributed two and a half million dollars for bail and legal defense. i hope that gift cleans up some of the dirtiness of that money.
“an acid trip”? Yeah, a predictably bad trip for proles.
i assume he’d meant a bad acid trip. and yes, for the rabble. is this the end times of capitalism marx predicted was inevitable?
Nope, more Engel’s barbarism. I thought Orlov implied Trump portends thrills and hallucinations, too.
ooof; i guess i hadn’t interpreted it that way, but you may be correct. but i guess i dunno engels, and so little marx. i failed southern dragon’s course at fdl.
“The 2016 election has boiled down to a contest between a billionaire demagogue who is encouraging fascistic and racist elements and a multi-millionaire reactionary who is the consensus choice of both Wall Street and the national-security establishment.” from today’s wsws.
you know, after i made the ‘comey cheat sheet’ diary, i’d clicked in and seen that the trotskyites had created one of the best. it ended w/ a plea to vote for white and comrade (?). but yes, they nailed it.
the psalms verses was apropos in so many ways; were ‘our people’ the israelites? i’ve forgotten what little bible i’d known. in some ways this massive protection is acting to restore pride and power in their traditional ways much as AIM did back in the 70s, isn’t it? they’d somehow twigged to the fact that the elders held the knowledge that could guide them, save them and strengthen them, especially in the face of such heavy oppression for so many centuries.
may the creator bless their efforts, and also each and every one of them. and may the ‘greedy guts’ capitalist rapers of the planet take note and stop all of this! buffy always says it right.
Trump is more than a demagogue and Hiltlery is worse than a reactionary.
i post this comment from wsws b/c, though we in life’s nosebleed seats are clearly unsure how much on the playing field is scripted or not, it’s obvious who wins the election: the ruling class.
(yeah for solar panels! let’s cut down all the trees so we can have more light for solar panels!)
Yet thou hast cast us off and abased us,
and hast not gone out with our armies.
Thou hast made us turn back from the foe;
and our enemies have gotten spoil.
Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter,
and hast scattered us among the nations.
Thou hast sold thy people for a trifle,
demanding no high price for them.
Thou hast made us the taunt of our neighbors,
the derision and scorn of those about us.
Thou hast made us a byword among the nations,
a laughingstock among the peoples.
All day long my disgrace is before me,
and shame has covered my face,
at the words of the taunters and revilers,
at the sight of the enemy and the avenger.
All this has come upon us,
though we have not forgotten thee,
or been false to thy TREATY [covenant].
Our heart has not turned back,
nor have our steps departed from thy way,
that thou shouldst have broken us in the place of jackals,
and covered us with deep darkness.
For our soul is bowed down to the dust;
our body cleaves to the ground….
from Psalm 44
Theistic demagoguery. Anger at god becomes a moral claim on god, “which is really an expression of love.”
This is how priests exploit a crisis.
Complete misread, Sir Rax. For anger at God, see Jonah fleeing God’s request to instruct the Ninevahians. This is recognition of incomprehensibility, the unknowability factor. Indeed a claim on God, but that is the beauty of being able to talk back to one’s creator. Which a lot of objects of art, great writing, actually do, come to think of it. Is that an expression of love? I see it as more an expression of independent non-slavery dialoguing.
I’m not sure how that becomes exploitation by priests.
I am not alone in this take. Can you not or will you not see the exploitation, comrade? In desperation, god having abandoned your righteous selves, plea further.
Their conquering god has abandoned them despite their entire righteousness. You may pretend this recording of cosmic bafflement to be a sermon on incomprehensibility but is instead a testament to obsession and obsequiousness (by which priests profit).
fun to jabber w/someone who hated yeshiva. the translation of the final verse you provided in bold Rax is perverse.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm%2044&version=RSV;WLC here’s the Vulgate of your bolded section: a facie inimici et persequentis.
no matter, there are certainly desires for revenge in that book.
let’s get in an argument over the bible & religion!
no thanks. i studied perfection in the form of my own soul to see the truth & never needed no bowing before no teachers, no priests, no nothing. never sucked an ounce of truth from my mama’s teat neither. too obsequious. i been believin’ in nothing since the day i was born. as for books…authors… authorities…
why don’t you just let jesus into your heart, Rax? you protest too much.
Clearly the version I quoted is apropos. Their humiliation comes from not being able to quell the derision of their inferiors.
You studied perfection in the form of your own soul? HA HA HA HA HA HA. Best to leave it there then.
Can’t; I enjoy blasphemy too much. No end to the Abrahamic bullshit, either, so my not so infinite jest will be long enough.
blasphemy? ooooh, look at the big scary words. Cock’s passion! what shall i ever do? ow, my virgin ears! the devil’s got holt of poor Rax.
please! hit the dimmer switch on your brightness! your originality is more than any mortal can handle.
No dimmer switch needed, You’re already blind as needs be.
these are great comments, jason, some of the best i’ve ever seen. and oh, lapier is: ‘Why understanding Native American religion is important for resolving the Dakota Access Pipeline crisis’, by Rosalyn R. LaPier, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies, Environmental Studies and Native American Religion, Harvard University, she Rosalyn R. LaPier receives funding from University of Montana. She is affiliated with Saokio Heritage the link thd gave up yonder. this is saokio heritage (pdf), creating a written language from spoken blackfoot, it seems.
whatever. thanks for the materialist demagoguery. i bet the sioux at DAPL can relate to the sentiment of this religious poetry, esp. b/c it’s about devotion to and being dispossessed from the LAND. but don’t let your beliefs stop you from seeing how other peoples in an entirely different place/time might relate to how the sioux and others today feel about their land. b/c of your highly refined beliefs. (i didn’t copy the whole thing for a reason: Zionism.)
as the pipeline developers do, deny the religious/spiritual component to this conflict & deny the sioux their own discourse & part of the emotional source of their resistance:
sacred
burial
ground.
Sioux! Hey you Sioux! stop resisting till you have sat thru Rax’s course on proper goodthinkery.
wide grin; thank you.
signed,
an apatheist
“i didn’t copy the whole thing for a reason: Zionism.”
HA HA HA HA HA.
The Sioux not likely to relate to this:
One aspect of LaPier’s poetry puts a crimp on Abrahamic bullshitters. “[P]laces were not just names and stories – their landscape itself was a living sacred text.” In other words, their souls are tied to the land and not stories of the nomad. But it is not crimp enough, because most of the bullshitted can no longer honor the connection between their own oppression and that of lesser souls.
Do you suppose LaPier’s plea will bring repentance from the UN pretenders?
Really! Comrade Rax is like the pipeline developers? HA HA HA HA HA. You are desperate, too?
Incantations will not stop crapitalism.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
who the fuck is Lapiers? does he counterpoise what you quote to “abrahamic bullshitters”? or is that your appropriation for an argument that he may or may not give a buffalo’s snort about? what does that word salad paragraph mean? (“their souls are tied to the land and not stories…” talk about authentic country gibberish. what’s tyin’ dem soles to da land? ancestral spirits? strands of horse hair?)
the opening of that psalm is an honest statement of the way conquerors feel. it’s not their violence that brings victory but the mandate of heaven. there’s nothing novel there. would you like me to show you chapter & verse where conquering Romans told themselves similar things? how about Chinese? or many others? oh boo hoo it bothers you. (if the Sioux “win,” will they offer gratitude to higher powers? will you go pee on them for it?)
The wandering Sioux & the nomad Jew probably should be comforting themselves w/ Marxist victory fantasies, i mean, narratives. so Rax won’t be cynical & snarky about them.
“Incantations will not stop crapitalism.” no, blogging will. esp. doubleplusgood blogging that gets Rax’s seal of approval.
no priests indeed Rax. no priests indeed. my heavenly manna is my smugness. thereon i feed all the day long. weekends too.
i don’t practice incantations against DAPL. but you know who does? yes, you do know. yes, Mr. Pipeline, go mock them.
the truth is no one has any idea what will “stop capitalism.” do they, Senyor Rax?
O. All conquerors recite generic Abrahamic conquerer bullshit? Please do, show chapter and verse where the Sioux said “Truly, our ancestors did not inherit the land” but with your right hand … blah blah blah.
Repeat Sacred Burial Ground three times while dancing on a toadstool … before the UN. Delusional.
No one? Well, they shouldn’t be wasting their time consulting you.
i never said the chinese invoke jehovah, did i?
if you know what will defeat capitalism, then by all means, share.
wait, wait, let me guess what tenet#1 is: listening to you.
like you are wont to do, you willfully misinterpret what i said. your hostility prevents honesty. sitting in the seat of the smarter than everyone scoffer. and spouting a whole bunch of bullshit.
and no one gets any points for arguing w/you.
What? You’re arguing for my benefit? HA HA HA HA HA HA. Try again, Heyzeus.
What do you have difficulty with? Show me where the Sioux said similar things to your “honest statement of the way conquerers feel”.
And the funny thing is, when were Hebrews running an empire like that of the Romans or Chinese? You don’t notice that such comparison is grandiose? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Jah, I think there is a clue in there.
i’m far from an expert or even a dilettante in native american culture.
but war was part of it. just like for everyone on this planet, as far as we know.
they invoked spiritual forces to aid them in war. not debatable.
now when they won, did they offer prayers of gratitude & thanksgiving to those spiritual forces whose aid they sought, or did they come back & say, “look at me, i’m a fuckin’ badass”? (in fact, they did both, at times.)
no, i can’t quote you chapter & verse on that. i didn’t know where to look to find native warrior prayers & customs that are pre-Columbian despite some trying.
do you?
——————————————–
as for the Hebrews, i’ll just quote Wittgenstein: you don’t know what you are talking about. they fought w/everybody who was anybody in the Fertile Crescent from the Hittites to the Romans and at times had their own little empire, w/slaves & conscription & wealthy aristocracy and all the wonderful things associated w/imperialism. you wouldn’t say Minoan Crete wasn’t a maritime empire just b/c it was small would you? the conquered would sure as hell disagree. chihuahuas are canines, too, you know? same behavior as the Great Dane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suovetaurilia
sacrificial rituals involving purification of farmland are made to Mars, god of war. why? “the blood of our ancestors is in the soil,” as per one native american prayer found on the innerwebs. b/c they fought & bled & died for it. (the prayers found here were written down in 160 BCE, blessedly free from the dread monotheistic bogeyman.it’s unsure how old they are in reality. there’s no doubt elements of them if not the whole thing that are older. and yes, the Romans put great stock in ritual incantation and look where that got them.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunning_folk
i bet native american shamans could dig it.
wooot! Curse broken! Cubs win World Series with epic Game 7
“Ending more than a century of flops, futility and frustration, the Cubs won their first title since 1908, outlasting the Cleveland Indians 8-7 in 10 innings of a Game 7 thriller early Thursday.
They even had to endure an extra-inning rain delay to end the drought.
Twenty-one other teams had won the World Series since the Cubs last were champions. They reached the top again on the 39,466th day after Orval Overall’s three-hit shutout won the 1908 finale at Detroit in a game that took 1 hour, 24 minutes — this latest Game 7 lasted 4:24, not including the rain delay.
Back then, Theodore Roosevelt was president, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii were not yet states, and the first Ford Model T car was two weeks old.”
poetic justice the cubbies beating the wahoos in ten innings. tahe that, ‘induns’!
that t-shirt is hilarious
bought one for mr. wd once upon a time after i’d shown him elon james white (twib nation) sporting one. luv the dollar sign in place of the feather.
soooo glad the cubbies beat them! there were a few ohio aim protestors at the first game in cleveland. ooopsie; i was born in cleveland.
For a very good update on TPP current standings in the world, I strongly recommend Jane Kelsey’s piece at thedailyblog.co.nz. Today, (Nov.3) it is at the top of the page. Comments are worth scanning as she does a short update on Japan and Malaysia there. Here’s one paragraph from the main text:
“. . .Getting past the second obstacle also requires something that was not in the ‘final’ TPPA text. There is a dangerous provision in the e-commerce chapter that says a country cannot require firms to use or locate local computer facilities inside that country as a condition of doing business (not including business conducted for the government). This means they can hold information in the ‘cloud’, which really means servers inside the US. It is then subject to its non-existent privacy protections and its deeply intrusive security laws, and to being on-sold as a lucrative sideline. There is no effective protection for privacy in the TPPA. . .”
She goes into further detail about pharma and financial that I found very helpful.
I should further comment that her piece arises because apparently the ramming through of TPP by John Key is occurring today in New Zealand’s parliament. It’s nice to be first in some things, but not this, New Zealand. Hang your head in shame, John Key.
on the phone, but:
(wallonia, state in belgium, knuckled after getting ‘a better deal’)
the last two days i’ve caught a bit of trump in florida on Fuchs newz. of course he’s promising to ramp up the police state. that’s the whole point of his anti-immigrant BS. he knows very well biz in the US demands the cheap labor. and his promise to ramp up the drug war: more cops. but it’s even worse. both b/c the MSM cultivates ignorance & dems purposefully cultivate the image of Dukakis/Daschel “whimps”, most of us have zero idea what the Obama admin is up to in the “pivot to Asia.” So when Trump says “we’ll stop China’s building of ‘fortresses’ in SE Asia,” he’s promising to continue and/or accelerate the policies of the Obama admin. “we need to rebuild our depleted military,” etc., etc. i’ve been bitching about Queen M.A.D. so long, and Trump is really unwatchable, that i’ve missed how truly despicable he is.
and the notion that Trump (or HRC) will do a damn thing to upset the ever-growing, all-devouring FIRE sector of the economy, so much BS. and his often-truthful attacks on HRC are all about HRC personally, not her as representative of a system wherein there are many, many, many people just like her. etc., etc. ugh.
Jah. Wolf Trump just do what the sheeps have allowed him to do. Now that the sheeps are roiling, does Trump pretend he’s identified the wolves’ weaknesses? No, he and Peter Thiel are going to eliminate all the bureaucrat-parasites, in service to all sheep!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Bloomberg article: Palantir Knows Everything About You
More, as they say, at the link.
ooof and whoosh, greyson smythe. guess you chose this 2016 open menu for a reaso, then; shoot…comrade rax was still here! wish i had any sense of what all those words in the bloomberg piece even mean, but…i sense they are ominous, yes? and palantir (named for the lord of the rings magic stones in the towers?) is invisible and hovers in the background? sorry to be such a thick-wit about it, but…there it is. ;-)
spying spiders are everywhere, aren’t they?
Yes, because it’s the most recent mention of Palantir that [eearch engine redacted] and I could find at the café…
One statement leapt out at me:
Life following art again… We gotta stop those artists from making things like Minority Report!
I’ve never heard the term “spidergram” before – and I checked Urban Dictionary, and they haven’t either…. As for the others, yes spying spiders everywhere – though Zuckerberg will have them all reigned in (or rather not) before Miss Muffet finishes her curds and whey.
Make that “search engine redacted”, and make the link this one: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/04/nerd-triumphalism.html
really you don’t need to be so diligent; the current open menu is always on the right sidebar under ‘categories’. pre-crime then, kewl. the workhorse over yonder put it up and chose these things to illuminate:
“Sankar, Palantir employee No. 13 and now one of the company’s top executives, also showed up in another Palantir scandal: the company’s 2010 proposal for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to run a secret sabotage campaign against the group’s liberal opponents. Hacked emails released by the group Anonymous indicated that Palantir and two other defense contractors pitched outside lawyers for the organization on a plan to snoop on the families of progressive activists, create fake identities to infiltrate left-leaning groups, scrape social media with bots, and plant false information with liberal groups to subsequently discredit them.”
“Palantir began work with the LAPD in 2009. The impetus was federal funding. After several Sept. 11 postmortems called for more intelligence sharing at all levels of law enforcement, money started flowing to Palantir to help build data integration systems for so-called fusion centers, starting in L.A. There are now more than 1,300 trained Palantir users at more than a half-dozen law enforcement agencies in Southern California, including local police and sheriff’s departments and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”
(as well as youtr project laser…)”
The article ends with an ominous quote.
“The world changed when it became clear everyone could be targeted using Palantir. Nefarious ideas became trivial to implement; everyone’s a suspect, so we monitored everything. It was a pretty terrible feeling.”
but yeah, i feel a few thought crimes every.single.day. and why the fuck would anyone use fleecebook, esp. now they fooking know? swear to the gods, the only way one can comment in on counterpunch columns is.. ta da!…fleecebook/fuckbook.
You’re missing all the Republican gloating about redoing the US political structure so that the Congress and state legislatures have the power. And guess who that power is going to serve regardless of who’s President.
The math is this. It takes around 175,000 voters to win a Congressional District. The multiple of that times Congressional Districts in the state to win a Senate seat (that 2,275,000) for NC for example. The FIRE sector buys out those seats with money and marketing heft. People power can change that only when it reaches those 175,000 per Congressional District critical mass. Taking state legislatures can be done with smaller numbers (and as the Koch brothers have found, less money to by them out.) No alternative party in North Carolina has ever come close to organizing 2 million people statewide. But if those who want to rein in the FIRE sector could muster that amount of people organization, guess what financially purchased shitstorms would appear. The last effort to get this sort of thing in NC was a black-white fusion party in the 1890s and 1900s. They won a few city councils and legislative seats. They were taken down systematically in the Wilmington Riot of 1898.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
But those numbers, not a President is what it would take to rein in the FIRE sector. Just not just in North Carolina–in enough states to create a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate (or a Senate majority willing to drastically rewrite the operating rules of the Senate). And control of the national security and law enforcement capabilities of the state at the federal and state levels.
It happens in a crisis or when organizers catch lobbyists and their clients napping and complacent or not at all. And when it happens, it is always a partial reform. Because the compromise of governance and who controls the raw force.
It is easier to become complacent when changes are happening slowly and unannounced.
so let’s suppose a miracle occurred & Charlotte or even some dinky town voted to prohibit foreclosure/eviction on owners delinquent on the mortgage payment. that municipality would be in direct conflict w/both state & federal law. and sooner or later the troops would roll out to force the municipality to comply.
you see this in marijuana laws. it’s great that CA, CO (cough, cough, w.d.) etc., have loosened or eliminated such laws. But these states are always in conflict w/the federales. and that shit, imho, ain’t going to be voted away. any direct threat to The State on the local scene must be ruthlessly stomped. there are practical reasons why the Feds don’t bust every joint toker; but the constant threat of enforcement, to be used selectively or collectively by the Feds is very, very valuable.
The State for Charlotte would be either the General Assembly or US Congress as administered by McCrory, Obama, and all the merit system/civil service personnel who deal directly with the citizenry. The rules the general assembly make and the rules that Congress makes are what gets cited when they come folks caught in the 10th Amendment gray areas, such as on marijuana prohibition. Oh yes, selective enforcement is very valuable; General Assemblies and Congress specialize in vague laws for exactly that reason. And the courts work off of that vagueness to create new areas of law and law enforcement. In this in a whole lot of states, the General Assembly of the state and the governor are more relevant than the feds. And the backbench, do-nothing shit-talking member of these legislatures are more valuable still. A good reason to vote them out periodically in order to get a similar but still less experienced one.
The real kick in the seat of the pants is that paralysis does not paralyze them; just gives them discretion in the absence of guidance. They can make their own laws. Clear prohibitions with definite sanction brings them back into line. Yes, the election to do this will be a hell of a fight. But elections are a hell of a fight (for little or no reason but fighting over immediate spoils) anyway.
i hear you. it’s better to have, e.g., liberal MJ laws than not on the state/local level. gotta start somewhere. i’m just suspicious of electoral politics, at all levels. we can keep voting people into office, or we can have a goddam proletarian revolution. bona fides proletarian this time, not like those last few times. night.
A lot of those bona fide revolutionaries you are waiting for are listening to Rush Limbaugh (likely not Glenn Beck at the moment), going to church, and voting for Trump as their mouthpiece by Tuesday. These shock jocks are not earning their keep through advertising or even audience size; they are being subsidized by people who want to innoculate the US proletariat white folk against librul, socialist, communist, and especially revolutionary ideas. I doubt if you will see the patriot Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man read on any of these shows. Although Glenn Beck might write a bowdlerized version of it.
Limbaugh started broadcasting before the Soviet Union collapsed. He didn’t stop just because George H. W. Bush was President; there were still Democrats out there. And they had to be painted the remaining elements of Soviet thinking. And it is no mystery how Limbaugh wound up on ClearChannel. ClearChannel was buying up small town radio stations across the country just as soon as the ink was dry on an FCC ruling that allowed ownership of more than just one radio station, without limits. And making sure that he kept his empire meant that Lowry Mays and B. J. “Red” McCombs, the principal players behind ClearChannel had to ensure that the FCC would never reverse its ruling and break up large media conglomerates, ruling once again that one-station ownership was the law. So of course, “small government” Limbaugh was their favored shockjock. And of course, they bought the stations that had white working-class or distressed audiences or religious broadcasting that appealed to evangleicals or pentecostals in rural areas.
Very interesting thing about the socialist and communist movements in the US. Horace Greeley published columns by Karl Marx before the Civil War and commentary on the Civil War by Karl Marx during the Civil War. John Nichols summarizes this happening.
http://isreview.org/issue/79/reading-karl-marx-abraham-lincoln
Not exactly a grassroots start to Marxism in America, is it.
The left before the Pinkertons and the Palmer Raids and the Truman-assisted Red Scare did have a presence in working-class communities, especially immigrant communities. Early left-wing organizers emigrated to the US for refuge from European monarchies where they were regularly locked up. They took jobs like most immigrants and began organizing in neighborhoods and at work until the boss saw what was going on. And then there were big rallies and protests and a rapidly growing movement. Enter the urban police, the Pinkertons, and a general panic among bosses and multiple uses of state home guards by governors. That is what set up Eugene V. Debs for his electoral strategy.
There was little organizing in the South; that fact was why New England mills started setting up plants in Southern states as early as the 1880s. And former planters in the South switched to being industrialists and financiers, Duke to tobacco, Cameron to finance and railroads, others to textiles. The implicit threat to use freed slaves as scabs is the structural reason there was little organizing in the South until the second term of FDR’s administration. And then only the communists were organizing desegregated union locals.
So exactly how do you see this bona fide proletarian revolution happening?
From a practical standpoint, it only happens if the frontier dynamic that divided the proletariat by race and set them against each other in shifting alliances with the powers-that-be is broken and they all stand together politically. How and when do you see that happening?
The real divide at the moment in this campaign season is between the professional class (the people who can control their salary and who have satisfaction in doing what they want to do) and the petit bourgeois capitalists (the people being squeezed by all those wonderful “productivity gains” in enterprises of scale, including the scale to buy your own lobbyists) being suckered by a bunch of casino owners and private equity billionaires. Those small town merchants and farmers are the opinion leaders for their communities in the current society. They see the government as the reason that corporations have invaded their towns in ways too difficult to compete with because of the scale bias that lobbyists build into regulations and the redlining of small town independent operators by the consolidated banking sector. Given the amount of effort these parts of the country have made to tart up themselves to attract relocating corporate plants, they now feel kicked out without payment. And the “played by the rules” political rhetoric doesn’t pull them in like it did a quarter century ago. On both sides, the actual working class is along for the ride and expecting little to nothing–except maybe a little respect by the folks they are voting for. The candidates themselves are media products, managed phantasms kept at a distance from dialogue, marketing artifacts of Bernys-driven culture.
The cruel fact is that the left and proletarians have never really gotten together to understand their values and situation. Tell me how Engels was not just another affluent liberal-guilt-ridden lefty trying to figure out how to get to liberty, equality, and fraternity (before that word got devalued) from capitalism.
Rax writes in like an abstract Cubist paints. i see the lines, read the words, but wth does that mean? thanks for interpreting. he should give up any doubts he has about glossalalia or the interpretation thereof.
wicked bad, it sounds. thanks for listening and reporting, though. so…i shouldn’t laff if he pulls a rabbit-win outta a magic hat, then? not’ the queen’ still appeals, though.
yes to your following comment. shorter: head: elites win; tails: elites win.
Trump told us a year ago that what he was going to do what stuff that would keep people watching him to find out what he was going to do and then he’d win. Who’s be chanting “Crooked Hillary” from the beginning? Think he was doing that to attract his white nationlist gun-toters? They already think that. Why do they need reinforcement?
What has happened is that he has kept the GOP united enough to want to win. Given it’s three internecine factions, that was not an easy task, but they wound up hating Hillary Clinton more than the other two factions. And the debates scared them into unity instead of demoralizing them.
Progressives, lefties — at this point less of a factor because of the failure of the third parties to organize effectively during the elections and to pick up ground in local and state elections. “Protest candidacies” really don’t work well without a huge base like George Wallace (and Strom Thurmond before him) had. And they only picked off a few states that seemed to accelerate who was already winning. (Truman in 1948, Nixon in 1968).
Trump’s appeal to the alt-right white nationalists (and not just the polite bigots of the Republican and Democratic parties) is to legitimize the red shirt voter suppression tactics he has threatened to use. That threat is likely as stunt to bring in folks who rarely vote but love his rhetorical toughness and political incorrectness toward all of the identity classes in liberal America.
H/T David Dayen
North Dakota’s public bank is funding the police repression at Standing Rock through $4 million loan to the State of North Dakota. Includes a brief history of the Bank of North Dakota.
No public bank policy or capital reserves can withstand an entire economic system beholden to oil.
no shit, really? font of insight. about beliefs no one has, questions that aren’t being asked.
The obvious eludes even you. Read the article and see if you find that criticism. No. It ain’t there.
I do desire we may be better strangers my slim thinking bane.
a world too wide for your shrunk shank.
you got a plan for taking on “the entire economic system”? or do you start somewhere? i mean, beyond, you know, the indubitable world-historical significance of your pwecious pwecious thoughts on this here blurgh.
HA HA HA HA. Now’s my opportunity to convince a philistine like you? HA HA HA HA HA HA.
i’d like this to be the end of this argument. the only thing i would add is that many first americans are christian, including some at standing rock, which thd had told us days ago. even peyote church follows ‘the jesus road’; now there are some pretty trippy prayers.
this is a good story about clergy who heeded the episcopalian priest john floberg to come to standing rock…burning copies of the doctrine of discovery, ‘a document that has been used to justify racism and enslavement of indigenous peoples since Pope Alexander VI wrote it in 1493.’
so good on them and their symbolically decolonizing first americans and aboriginals by way of their powerful social gospel.
“get a room you two. or an MMA-cage.” ok. flame off.
i’d prolly go w/ the MMA cage, but thanx. and it IS a great story above, written by a baptist minister of social gospel advocacy.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/24-Full-MMA-Competition-Cage-Hexagon-Shape-/162253712733?hash=item25c7132d5d:g:mvIAAOSwx2dYDwDY
Looks like we need a fundraiser for $6500.
crikey, there’s a 16 foot one for only $5500, ya big spender! i’d gladly put in one amerikan dollar (grin)
oh, and jason: it’s not that comrade HA HA HA HA HA didn’t deserve it.
Oy: “Public banking advocates, in particular, ought to emphasize the ways public control of state and municipal finance can fund new structures of work and production that neither exploit nor extract. That has always been the most powerful argument for public banks: that they can produce justice because as community-controlled entities, we can make them just.”
thought i’d check in w/ ellen brown at her home site on the issue, nothing there. but ooopsie; she does say ’ public banking is essential for capitalism to ‘run properly’. isn’t it already?/s
rebuttal to ‘‘Obama says Dakota Access Pipeline may be rerouted after months of protests’ silliness: ‘Obamamometer Whispers DAPL Sweet Nothings to Lure Progressives’, November 3, 2016 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield, naked capitalism (internal link to steve horn) did she used to be ‘jerri-lynn merrit?
My guess is the fig leaf is that the pipeline is not crossing rez land proper and that the desecration is a fait accompli. Oops.
One he is a lame duck, he could (probably won’t) just reject the permit to cross the Missouri River and tacitly communicate “Sorry to yank that $3 billion that you’ve already spent into a sunk cost.” That Texas guy Kelcy Warren would likely not find that amusing.
Who knows what is spinning out beyond the end of the election. The pipeline company is pretty rushed about getting it laid to the Missouri River before Election Day. So rushed they’ve gotten the cops and paramilitaries to clear the path for them.
i suspect you’re right. the haste of the race to be finished sincerely boggled the minds and spirits of the protectors, didn’t it? is dave archambault simply engaging in diplomacy thanking barry so often for his considerations?
how much of a fait accompli has it been in the graves and stones desecrations? i guess i’ve never heard.
another yuge lame duck issue is the tpp. hello, paul ryan? have you changed your mind yet? so bad that wallonia knuckled, and ceta has been signed into effect. dayum.
Diplomacy? Of course it is.
I suspect the fait accompli with respect to graves and stones is limited to the land needed for the pipeline right-of-way and the access roads. Without an actual survey of the damage and what remains, it is hard to tell. I find it hard to believe that the North Dakota State Archaeologist is not all over their butts but those guys are subject to a legislature’s or governor’s wrath and $3.8 billion indeed “doesn’t talk; it swears”.
Which reminds me,
It seems to be the anthem of this time.
laDonna wasn’t diplomatic at all, saying close to: “stalling works fine for him; he’s just kicking the can to the next prez”. now the bismark herald in their print edition (pdf’s i guess) quoted dave archambault as saying that he’s not against pipelines, but just wants this one moved north (iirc) of lake oahe. energy transfer spox says O hasn’t even talked to them.
anthem of the time, indeed; but it’s a silent film. you still w/o a chip, and if so, should i choose a talkie?
Ya mean ya can’t lipsynch the lyrics! Yes, put up one with sound.
North of Lake Oahe means Bismarck/Mandan–where the folks who are coming in riot gear (those that’re local) live.
But, yes, Archambault, I think, is tribal council with all the constraints (self-imposed or quietly communicated) that implies.
archambault is the standing rock tribal chairman, but imo, he either constrains himself or believes that pipelines in general aren’t objectionable. earlier today, after seeing your comment in email, i listened again to laDonna’s interview w/ the good man from TYT. i wish i could have been able to type more easily to transcribe, but she seemed solid on the truth that the protectors aren’t just doing this ‘for this piece of land’, but for all the water on the planet. that was when she noted that women, as in ‘the grandmothers) understand water, esp. as they give birth thru water, and made gestures of the tree of life, the roots, then speaking to the potential of poisoning all water down to the gulf of mexico thru rivers, streams. she forgot, or may not be aware of, how poisoning of ground water effectively does the same thing eventually.
but do ladonna and dave know that that fracked oil will be sent to texas refineries expressly to be sold to china, etc.? do they know that buffet’s already purchased all of the rail lines and tank cars to get it there in any event? who can say, but i hope that the greenpeace person there (i’ve forgotten her name) advocating to: ‘pull the permit’ tells them (esp. archambault) all of that.
well, anyway…end rant.
spencer ackerman: ‘The FBI is Trumpland’: anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaking, sources say’; Highly unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton intensified after James Comey’s decision not to recommend an indictment over her use of a private email server
oh ye gawds ‘n little fishes; he’s touting maddow on twitter. duz anyone really say ‘rad’?
The current backstory is this. The FBI personnel that Trump says are not happy with Comey’s failure in the summer to refer the case to a US Attorney seem to be good buddies with former US prosecutor Rudy Giuliani. Trey Gowdy used to be a US prosecutor as well; likely some other Trumper FBI in SC. Apparently this bunch has been leaking to their usual journalists in the NYTimes and WaPo and Trump’s letter to Gowdy and Chaffetz was intended to focus the media like a laser on the emails right up until election day.
Jason Leopold comes out with the story of how all this started with his FOIA of all, yes ALL, Clinton communications while at the State Department. Leopold has a story up today of how that unfolded and what he found in the emails.
So Spencer Ackerman sees Maddow as a useful journo to bring this story of the fight within the FBI to MSM-watching public before the election.
Still nothing to see here but the usual circus surrounding the Clintons. Sort of a restoration or counter-revolution after the Gingrich revolution if Hillary wins and especially if she wins big (increasingly slim, only a 1 in 16 chance at the moment).
Judges in NC, FL, and AR have enjoined the Trump campaign from voter intimidation (the legal terms are similar to those in the old Voting Rights Act). NC and FL early voting shows record turnout. No one knows how they are voting but black turnout in NC has been high and Latino turnout in FL has been high.
And there is a social media effort for Stein voters in swing states to trade votes with Clinton voters in safe states. Clinton voters run up Stein’s numbers in safe states and Stein voters in swing states vote for Clinton. The effort is seen as tactic to expand the Greens map while ensuring that Green votes can’t be stigmatized as electing Trump. Another little wrinkle is a very strange election, one almost as strange as that last World Series game.
dunno what maddow brought recently, but earlier she was taking some jests over crying on the air over the ‘stolen clinton emails’. so…i doubt your interpretation at first glance. not a big fan of ‘safe state voting’, myownself.
here’s the new leopold: ‘How I got Clinton’s emails;, Two years ago, a VICE News reporter helped set the Hillary Clinton email scandal in motion
and this just in:
https://twitter.com/JasonLeopold/status/794918569246998528
Of course, Giuliani changes his story. He’s smart enough to know that when placed in the context of the Comey letter, it raises all sorts of legal questions that any prosecutor who could indict a ham sandwich would love. And Rudy fancied himself that sort of prosecutor.
Maddow came to prominence on the radio network Air America. She fits in the ideological context of that whole crew from Al Franken to Chuck D. For her fans, she’s a big contrast with Chuck Todd and Scarborough. And all are limited by how far the boss lets them go. The key concept “a useful journo” for the sane calm review of events that Leopold’s article is.
Me, I want to see the Dick Cheney emails from his Energy Task Force and around the time of the start of the Iraq War. No doubt the ones between John Brennan and the Saudis would make interesting reading too. And whoever orchetrated Netanyahu’s invitation to Congress in the midst of negotiating with Iran.
yes, air america, i liked her. but as w/ so many librul big brands, war was fine if a dem did it. come to think of it, she may have loved the heroics of embedded journalists like richard engel, wasn’t it? well, anyway, he may be hampered by all the money she takes from msnbc. binging, all i found was that she sees the importance of the fbi as aiding trump in the election, even did the same gig on jimmy kimmell.
but she’s been anti-wikileaks from the start. yes, i’d love to see cheney’s task force emails, but what were the brennan hacks like? a fellah was arrested; were any of those communications published? how embarrassing i can’t remember.
but i do swear there are wikileaks concerning bibi being invited to the joint session (boehner, no?), and also some speaking about the queen and aipac, maybe fealty to israel, but this concerns ‘dems distaste for bibi’, never checked the hotlinks for authenticity.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4868812,00.html
i ♥ the indigo girls, i ♥ this project.
my music partner and i used to do a lot of their tunes, but this one i did solo for some reason. when i finally got that i would never grow up to be aretha, i’d next hoped for amy ray. vocals, yeah, a little, but my stars can she and emily play guitars! the lyrics are so fitting in light of their newest solidarity project. a lesbian christian duo. ;-)
“I used to search for reservations and native lands
Before I realized everywhere I stand
There have been tribal feet runnin’ wild as fire
Past life sister of my desire…
I said, “There’s prophets in the graveyard
(Now I walk in beauty)
Prophets in the graveyard
(Beauty is before me)
Prophets in the graveyard
(Beauty is behind me)
(Above and below me)”
(dineh beauty way chant)
Interesting liberated letter (FOIA?)
It seems that the land DAPL is crossing on the north side of Cannonball River is US Army Corps of Engineers land intended to buffer the lake.
The US Army Corps of Engineers called in the law enforcement who came with their fire-extinguisher-sized bottles of pepper spray and tear gas the other day.
It’s kind of interesting that the Corps has property that is not public access or that it can flag as No Trespassing on discretion.
wish she’d said how the letter was obtained. and yes, there’s a short film of the spider-cops teargassing protectors in the water at the top of the OP. under the tweet, someone said “more blue blankets”, and i’d guess the smallpox blankets were blue? for decades, ‘historians’ of a sort have been trying to call that a myth, but this fellow went thru microfilm reels (as part of the British Manuscript Project) of correspondence between lord amherst and col. henry bouquet concerning that scheme and siccing dogs on pontiac’s people during his “rebellion” in 1763. this rendering has them blue.
amherst nixed the idea because: not enough dogs. the author says he hasn’t found what might be the smoking gun, though. fascinating.
‘2 Police Officers Turn In Badges In Support Of Standing Rock Water Protectors’;
Redhawk writes. “You can see it in some of them, that they do not support the police actions,” water protector RedHawk writers. “We must keep reminding them they are welcome to put down their weapons and badge and take a stand against this pipeline as well. Some are waking up.”
bless their hearts; two…is a start.
https://twitter.com/0xUID/status/794579102724460544
more veterans are expected to get to standing rock on the weekend.
So gifting blankets with smallpox germs was normal as an act of war in a rebellion of indigenous towns against settler colonial expansion of the frontier or a proxy war with the French. That seems real.
Folks didn’t start having misgiving about “the only good Indian…” until the genocide was close to complete. The heyday of “Indian lore” was the Wild West shows, especially after Wounded Knee. And the immediate period before World War I was when many Anglo anthropologists, archaeologists, and students of native religion first became interested in indigenous artifacts and culture. Among the many who were enthralled by the now disappearing indigenous was Joseph Campbell, the scholar of mythology.
After the efforts of youth leaders in the early years of the 1900s to start a program to teach patriotism and individualism (self-reliance) to urban boys, the Boy Scouts of America was formed in 1910. And “Indian lore” was integrated into the socialization of American youth; the more proficient at the values of the Oath and Law were inducted into a pseudo-indigenous secret society called the Order of the Arrow, organized as a fraternity within Scouting in 1921. The secret society came complete with an “ordeal” and notions of brotherhood. And vigils.
Needless to say, the Scouting movement was part of the progressive movement of the time that began to focus on suffrage, war (after World War I), and human rights. Lord Jeff Amherst was not transgressing a norm, he was being very much within the norm.
And that norm was established after eighty years of slave raids, provoking internecine wars between towns, establishment of confederacies of towns, and shifting alliances so as to roll the frontier forward. In the case of Pontiac’s War into the Great Lakes region with Fort Detroit.
But in this period, Lord Jeff likely didn’t need blankets to spread smallpox except for the fact that he was in a hurry; the disease spread quite well by itself.
The good folks of Massachusetts have had a recent struggle with the legacy of Lord Jeff, which was resolved this year with Amherst College dropping its “unofficial mascot” Lord Jeff. It seems that that the history of Lord Jeff’s dallying with genocide is now accepted as authentic.
History is all a mess, isn’t it?
your final rhetorical question made me laugh; thank you. your mention of ‘the only good indian’ reminded me of course of fooking col. chivington of the sand creek massacre “nits make lice”. i’m really glad to know that amherst college has disavowed him, and that there is finally a national historical site commemorating the horrific massacre. all the while, black kettle had waved a white flag from a tipi, iirc. so hard it is to hear the screams of the women and children as i type.
joseph campbell; what a lovely man. your framing context for the boy scouts is totally new to me. there’s even a ‘skull and bones’ inner circle? wonder whose skull they might have sequestered? /s
last time i’d ever looked, the guesstimates as to how many indigenous lived on turtle island in pre-columbian times were so divergent that it caused me to think that unconscious (at the least) bias was at play. the ewer there were, the fewer who died, simple math. present day CA seemed to have experienced the highest number of tribes totally eradicated, though, as i remember it. the most first american slaves, too?
Just a little reminder for tomorrow.
Guy Fawkes-1605
Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot; I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
thank you, v arnold. i confess i’d had to hit the wiki and read a few current articles on guy fawkes. the theme ‘hero or villain?’ was well-represented. now a stooopid question: given the fact that his effigy is burned in the bonfires, does that mean most celebrate him a a hero? second question: if i had ever watched V for vendetta, would i know the answer? or is the famous rhyme the answer? “treason”. how insane it is that religious freedom (or not) is at the core of so much violence, both internal and exported, isn’t it?
nah. like most of the verbiage in the election campaign, V in the movie “V for V.” is an empty signifier for a vague “rebel against tyranny.” from the little i know of the actual guy fawkes, i think this was more part of the “rome vs canterbury” thing going on than anything else. sorry for the non-materialist analysis, but hopefully we are beyond blowing up parliament over that kind of stuff. the movie’s ok. by the guys who did the matrix…and 2 more matrix movies. you could read the plot summary on imdb & get it.
yep, catholics v. protestants. anon masks are fawkes. i did find this, though:
‘Million Mask March 2016 across the globe’, at RT
the zoom sounds grotesque; and i’m sorry you couldn’t even roll your eyes. i’d mistakenly thougght you were gettin’ primed for your conference call, rather that letting off some major steam. yep, gotta eat.
was the urine test by way of urinating on your laptop screen?
there are certainly some good things about the movie. quite a few, in fact. but the V guy tortures the main character so she can be “free,” of the fear of death or whatever (it’s not gruesomely displayed but i found the notion disturbing & ridiculous). and V effects a revolution against the brutal gov’t, gets what he wants & dies for it, but the main character, b/c it’s what “V would have wanted”, decides, aww, screw it, & blows up parliament anyway for no real reason. look at the fireworks. as the sect of semi-pelagians, i mean troskyites, at wsws would say: confused notions.
speaking of pipelines…here’s uber-fraud Elon Musk jabbering about how solar will allow us to sustain “our needs.” it’s a black comedy! just how much space for solar will we need Elon, to, you know “sustain our needs”? look at the 2:21 mark & tell me if that is not *one hemisphere* of the planet. well, give that little scene some credit for honesty. (Elon will no doubt vote for solar take over in the more “efficient” hemisphere, you know, the one w/Africa & S. America in it.) and at the 5:00 mark, all your little & not so little shopper/consumer trickets & doo-dads run on solar (oh the horror of not being able to boil water for coffee & heat the toaster *at the same time.* how did we ever make it out of the hunter-gather stage w/such whimpy whimpletons as part of our species?) “we are at the 1st stage of solar tech, it’s like when cell phones came out!” such a happy, cheery, clueless vision. no one show him photos of the adirondacks size pile of electronic garbage around the planet. and the audience…ugh. i was hoping one person (hey, cops are turning in badges [hallelujah], so one can hope) would raise their hand, just one, and ask: so why should anyone believe that this solar junk works any better than your POS tesla car?
capitalism throwing gobs & gobs at pointless, wasteful, destructive crap.
oh yeah: “we are outsourcing production to China!” these people are such morons.
lol³! exquisite rant as cliffs notes, amigo, this made me absolutely snort ‘n chortle w/ glee: “how did we ever make it out of the hunter-gather stage w/such whimpy whimpletons as part of our species?”
and third world kids search thru the mountains of our discarded tech stuff to eek out a living, and die of it. dayum. (and of course now i’m seeing the three great floating garbage patches that ail the seas; arrgh.) thanks for all of it, i might even watch; i did get a sound icon this a.m., miracle of miracles. may i say again: ‘suck it, bill gates’? no? okay, i will forbear it for once… guy fawkes day, and all. somebuddy help me on that, please?
“no one show him photos of the adirondacks size pile of electronic garbage around the planet w/the hordes of dispossessed scavengers for precious metals whose fingers have rotted off.” fixed. i gotta conf call on this crap in 5. happy seals clapping for Elon.
wish i could hear that teleconference, jason. i know you’ll say it right.
gotta eat. unfortunately it was via a video conferencing service called “zoom,” so i was not allowed even to roll my eyes. “to install the zoom application, you must allow Google to access your contacts, calendar, facebook account, voting, medical, and criminal records, and give a urine sample. the zoom provider may record all calls made via zoom. zoom operates only in a smoke-free environment.” my colleague, like lots of blind, chirpy people these days, failed to note that warning when he installed zoom. at the end of the conversation, he goes into a colossal rant about his supervisor. SUCKER!!! brave new retarded benthamite panopticon world, ain’t it? now w/more solar panels!
From a nationalist US perspective, indeed they are. But there are deals and there are deals. Musk is moving ahead on developing roofing shingle to turn roofs into solar PV collectors; other ambitious folks are betting on highway surfaces acting as miles and miles of solar PV collectors. Imagine the Chinese One Belt/One road rolling out these technologies as well as their silly high-speed rail technology.
Or the Saudis and Gulf States.
Imagine oil becoming an export good to the gullible who neither will conserve or change the technological paradigm away from the 1950s.
Through conservatism and corruption, the United States becomes the backwaters that Asia and Africa were when European powers first extended capitalist colonialism uniting a global society with transportation and communication and war.
Musk is going to create his foreign competition faster than he realizes. Much faster than Japanese semiconductors sucked out the US electronics industry. Much faster than Japanese automakers using Deming’s statistical quality control sucked out the US automobile industry. Much faster than Xerox’s Japanese parters took away the copying industry, which now is obsolete after computerized scanner/printers left it like buggy-whip manufacturers. Much faster than Indian, Japanese, Brazilian, Pakistani, Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, and now Vietnamese textile firms put idle almost every single textile plant in the Southern piedmont, the so-called Textile Center of the World. And much faster than Shenzhen fabricators sucked out the US chip industry and then the computer and telecommunications industry and Indian companies (Bangalore, especially) took away lots of market spaces in the IT industry.
Watch.
The US has destroyed a lot of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian infrastructure through war. But in so doing, the austerity the military demands has destroyed the fabled US infrastructure of the 1939 World of Tomorrow (actualized by the 1960s) by neglect.
Morons from the day they said that Jimmy Carter’s plan is to leave you freezing in the dark and stood up St. Ronnie and his Star Wars fetish.
I guess I need to go and read some Gary Snyder to prepare me for what is to come.
A week ago we were walking in the neighborhood with someone who knows the local wildlife in the outward bounding suburbs and the rural areas that they are replacing, and also the land that totally undevelopable even with the current terraforming construction techniques. We came upon some scat on a dirt road. She noticed it and got a stick to break it apart to figure out what kind or critter it was. It looked like dog poop but was filled with persimmon seeds. Her conclusion was that it was a coyote, an invasive but now top of the food chain species since wolves are long gone, bears are rare, dogs are confined to yards or taken to the pound, and feral cats are not quite top of the food chain. And we have had coyotes (and red foxes, and gray foxes) strutting down the streets and cul-de-sacs of the neighboring suburban nirvana to RTP not to mention the deer, soon-to-be-flattened opossums, and slow Eastern box turtles. And raccoons visiting loosely covered garbage cans, bird feeders, and especially hummingbird feeders.
Hunting season has started; venison for the freezer for lots of people. And people in environmental agencies are already freaked out about the barriers to the northern migration of wildlife species through interstate highways and urban neighborhoods in the very near future and planning wildlife migration routes and the necessary infrastructure (wildlife bridges over highways, connect open space, connections from one watershed to another) before we really hit the wall.
It is clear where the death wish for the Third or Fourth (which is it?) World War is coming from. The necessity of doing what needs to be done to deal with the consequences of massive folly.
oh yeah on the wildlife thing. i mean, fudge. what we gonna do? hard to imagine. coyote: it’s what’s for dinner.
“It is clear where the death wish for the Third or Fourth (which is it?) World War is coming from. The necessity of doing what needs to be done to deal with the consequences of massive folly.” unless doing what we did to get to world wars & bio-extinction was itself an expression of a death wish?
and is elon musk doing something different? the environment does not care whether the solar panels used to cover dallas come from detroit or shanghai. I watched that viddy of solar roofs (or is it rooves?) and had to laugh when that couple, 2 people! got into their giganto-mobile (tesla-powered!), w/another parked in the garage, and pulled out of a house that 15 ethiopian families could live comfortably in. large ethiopian families. or bangladeshi. or salvadoran. it was not a house but a plantation. for two people! (am i making too much of this? i don’t think so. musk wants a squeaky clean, “enviro-friendly” brave new world version of *today’s suburbia*. solar power dog poop scoopers.)
why is building solar collecting highways anything different than building the highways in the 1st place was? a colossal waste, a terrible ecological destruction, a social catastrophe (despite how cars=freedom, a traffic jam=liberty, cars are terribly disruptive to & isolating from communities), a spiritual blight & nightmare, expressing our belief in our separation from & superiority to the natural world (don’t get me wrong: the giddy thrill a car offers a teenager is great. but come on, let’s all grow up at some point, shall we? consumerism is infantilization) and complete thoughtlessness about resource use & social organization. it’s really nothing more than saying, “hey. we’ve got highways now. and they are great. let’s make ’em solar.” that’s the amount of thought that’s gone into this.
elon musk plainly wants to maintain “consumption levels,” and that’s why he’s a fraud (knowingly or not is immaterial.). it’s not his zeal for solar, really, that’s the issue. i like all this stuff but techno innovation is clearly not the problem. if the 1st thing and last thing a person doesn’t preach is massive, massive declines in consumption, they are idiots or liars or both. we want solar so we can keep going to the shopping mall? ugh.
anyway, i ain’t a physicist, e=mc2 & what have you, but the (carbon, natch) energy input to produce the equivalent of mass in solar panel infrastructure to the existing carbon energy infrastructure is itself a huge enviro issue, as the infrastructure itself will be, just like carbon-energy infrastructure is now, once it’s built.
cuz i think, at the end of the day, the end of the earth, it’s not about carbon energy use at all. it’s about waste. we could have a decent society w/10% (that’s a guesstimate) of the carbon use we have now, and no one would bother worrying about solar panels for a long, long time.
not to make this any longer, but Silk Road 2.0? more integrated consumption, Chinese ebay Ali Baba to the rescue!. productivity improvements under capitalism are really about more efficient waste, aren’t they?
anyway, happy time change!
I don’t disagree. Part of what I bundle as the March of Folly with a hattip to Barbara Tuchman’s history of the 14th century that came out during the Vietnam War.
Turkey teeters.
ay yi yi; 54 mins. i looked into their website, but no transcripts for any of their videos. drat! sibel edmonds though, eh?
Hmm, I haven’t quite made up my mind re: Edmonds and her credibility.
edmonds is certainly controversial, va (may i shorten your name?; i’m wd here), and the campaign to discredit her and block her testimony to the 9/11 commission and the senate judiciary committee was heavy duty. on scanning, her wiki page seems pretty even handed, and former cia agent philip giraldi did an interview w/ her that’s fairly concise, although reading the section of her wiki re: gladio b is breathtaking, in view of what we’ve learned as hidden truths of the empire and its client states.
“But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. What follows is her own account of what some consider the most incredible tale of corruption and influence peddling in recent times. As Sibel herself puts it, “If this were written up as a novel, no one would believe it.”
turkey, israel, payola to members of congress, destabilization of foreign nations, the whole common enchilada. kinda fun to read in a sick sort of way.
even if one only has the clinton foundation facts and emails to go on, they show that as well. and it’s supposed to be a philanthropic organization!
By all means, you may use va.
I guess what puts me off is her belief in the “truther” version of 9/11.
I will no longer engage that one way or the other.
Anyhoo, I do still follow her from time to time for an alternative POV.
As to operation Gladio; I was reluctant at first, but have heard very credible info from former gov’t operatives. Even the Italian government confirms its own involvement in and names Gladio as a fact..
dunno; when i look at ‘va’ now, it look like ‘virginia’. might have to return to v arnold. ;-) well, now, i hadn’t known she was a truther, and while i’d bet the farm that the ‘official report’ was a cover-up, the truth is still out there, but one would have to dedicate their lives to trying to discover it, and then…never really know. some man calling himself ‘public’ used to harass the bejayzus outta me at my.firedoglake for not believing. oh, well.
yuge deal news from jason leopold this morning:
Lol, Virginia; you choose (context should tell).
And I agree, “the truth” may never be known in its entirety.
At least in our/my life time, but I believe my lying eyes and that’s as far as I need to take “it” for now.
I refuse to engage that nonsense; it’s really that cut and dried for me.
Cheers wd…
bless my pointed little head, v arnold; i finally twigged why edmonds as a truther (if that means: an inside job) didn’t fit. one section of her wiki page was about her testimony that the fbi had been warned by an informant that al quaeda, then called the mujahideen, “planning to hit tall buildings in several states, etc. anyhoo, turned out there was a footnote to her site: “the fbi’s “kamikaze pilots” case“:
‘”The informant continued:
‘According to my guys, Bin Laden’s group is planning a massive terrorist attack in the United States. The order has been issued. They are targeting major cities, big metropolitan cities; they think four or five cities; New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco; possibly Los Angeles or Las Vegas. They will use airplanes to carry out the attacks. They said that some of the individuals involved in carrying this out are already in the United States. They are here in the U.S.; living among us, and I believe some in US government already know about all of this (I assumed he meant the CIA or the White House).’ [snip]
‘If I were you guys, I’d take this extremely seriously. If I had the same position I had in SAVAK, I’d put all my men on this around the clock. I can vouch for my sources; their reliability. Make sure you put this in the hands of the top guys in Counterterrorism.’ [long snip, then the finale]:
“A few days later, when I got together with both agents and Amin to go over an assignment, I brought up the topic. They avoided eye contact with me. I asked the agents what they were going to do; if they’d already done something. At first they were evasive. Then, after I insisted, one of them, Tony, said: ‘Listen; Frields called us into his office and gave us an order; an absolute order.’ I asked them what the order was. He said ‘we never got any warnings. Those conversations never existed; it never happened; period. He said this is very sensitive…and that no one should ever mention a word about this case; period.”
but yes, virginia, there IS a v arnold.
Hmm, I stand corrected on Edmonds.
Sibel works with James Corbett (Corbett Report) and he is a self identified truther; so, apparently I assumed she was as well, shame on me.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Cheers wd…
cheers back to you, virginia (j/k); i confess i’m unfamiliar w/ james corbett, but in the end, i haven’t followed sibel, so to speak; so many other things and journalists and sites to read.. but i did at least scan her wiki, and i’m sorry that i don’t retain what i read for more than ten minutes. oddly, it’s when i come lose to water that my memory (subconsciouslly?) pings. but was i thinking correctly that ‘truthers’ means is was all n inside job by…well, by some internal intelligence/financial faction? i’m thinking of the believable claim that sooooo many financial records of some sort…went up in ash.
Truther’s believe the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives placed in the buildings (aka, a false flag attack). They insist (wrongly) that the planes could not collapse the buildings without additional demolition.
It gets even wilder than that; but, I’m not going there. Many blogs have specifically forbidden (thankfully) any discussion of this subject. It can, and has gotten, get very ugly and that’s why I normally wouldn’t speak even this much on that subject.
I would agree with your above; the information was known and ignored, intentionally. This is as much as I want to indulge this subject.
Cheers
My fervent hope is that this does not start a discussion. ;-(
nope, it won’t, now that i know that i was on the right track. thanks for affirming it.