…literally as well as figuratively, and as the Disposable Underclass and ‘the Woke’ might more clearly see it:
Wildfires consumed 9.7 million acres in the United States in 2017, almost a record, according to wildfiretoday.com, although not al data is in yet. Sure, a heating planet and drought conditions were the key reasons, but wildfire today also mentioned decades of fire suppression (a political decision), fires too large to fight safely, slow attacks on new fires due to lack of personnel, and a (my words) broken fleet of contracted air tankers that has been slowly being repaired as of 2014.
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the Columbia River in Washington State is still leaking radioactive contaminants into the watershed, then into the ocean, radioactive airborne plumes galore, (cost for clean-up at $114 billon in 2014). But hey, after the many recent disasters, failures to prevent worker safety, WA state just passed a bill to ‘help more ill Hanford nuclear reservation workers qualify for state worker compensation may soon be headed to the governor’s desk to be signed into law’ (Note: not a federal bill, including respiratory, neurological and chronic beryllium disease, beryllium sensitization and multiple cancers.
A citizen effort is afoot in Cancer Alley, specifically St. John the Baptist Parish, to force petrochemical companies to clean up their air after reading that a 2011 EPA report showed that residents of six parishes were 800 times more likely to get cancer.
Global air temps in 2017 were the highest ever recorded, even with no El Niño effects, and carbon ppm have already exceeded 408, resulting in increased weather disasters and fires. Methane gas releases are packing a huge punch as well, indicating as I understand the experts: at the accelerating rate, in eleven years carbon will hit 450 ppm, game over. Then the ‘unless…’ pies in the skies come in….say from the Kings of Davos private/public partnership ‘fixers’.
And yet the climate destruction was pretty much locked in before Donald F.U. Trump came to power and denied climate science, although his policies on drilling, fracking, military build up will surely hasten the planet’s demise. The COP agreements were strictly aspirational and unenforceable, just as the Ruling Class would prefer it, of course.
In the US, wealth inequality is worse now than in the former Gilded Age, and ranks 4th highest on the GINI coefficient (income disparity) charts, below Chile, Mexico, and Turkey. The Bidness Buddhas at Davos were keenly concerned, a mean to train the Rabble to serve the Masters of Capital post-robot takeovers of menial jobs, like…nursing, virtual docs, and other servo-bots..
Tens of millions of Amerikans are living at or below the poverty level, although numbers are hard to come by, given the many ‘experts’ disagreeing on the definition. Who would lie about their finances on a Census Report? But even among those who are employed, a high percentage live paycheck to paycheck and have no savings for emergencies, and many are without access to health care, and are dying of it. More and more are hungry, or ‘food insecure’ in technocrat-speak. Homeless numbers are also hard to come by, but at least many hundreds of thousands, and they are increasingly stigmatized, preyed upon, and criminalized.
But speaking of Bidness Buddhas and health care, how does this CNBC headline grab you? ‘UnitedHealth, CVS plunge on Bezos, Buffett and Dimon plan to improve US health care’; The three companies, led by Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett plan to develop ways to improve the health of their employees.
But not to worry, Sergeant Dow Jones opened today at 26,121; it’s all right, ma: we’re only dyin’!
Congress has a current approval rating of 16% (Gallup), but duopoly heroes will emerge, and the money will likely flow into the midterm candidates. Speaking of which, it’s hard not to eat this reasoning with a spoon (triple grin):
‘Russia is aiming to interfere in US midterm elections, warns CIA chief’, Mike Pompeo says ‘I have every expectation that they will continue to try’ to meddle in House and Senate races in November.
“In the BBC interview at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Pompeo said he believes that, despite cooperation in counter-terrorism, Russia is primarily an adversary and there has been no significant reduction in Russian attempts at subversion in Europe and the US.
However, Pompeo also said Chinese efforts to exert covert influence over the west were as much of a concern as Russian subversion. He told the BBC the Chinese “have a much bigger footprint” to do this.
“Think about the scale of the two economies,” he said. “The Chinese have a much bigger footprint upon which to execute that mission than the Russians do.”
Indubitably, my dear Watson; the game’s afoot!
Steven Rosenfeld at Alteret reminds us to “pay close attention to his [Herr Trump’s] next big priority—an infrastructure plan—which, over time, could eclipse the trillion-dollar giveaway to the rich in the GOP’s just-passed tax plan.
And track the response from Democrats, who will have to decide if they will back a plan drafted by privatization proponents, or if Democrats will represent the public and say no to years of paying off infrastructure bonds sold by Wall Street—tax free to investors—but eating up future tax revenues while imposing new user fees like highway tolls.”
He also notes that the Rand Corp. is very bullish on the plan; garsh, small wonder…
Billionaires-for-charter-schools seem to be having their way with a different sort of partnership: our tax dollars fund their charters, while billionaire-class puppets sit on the boards and make decisions. I’m certain that Calvnist Ed. Secty. Betsy Davos, (pardon, I mean ‘DeVos’ and her hubbie are thrilled! As a major proponent of school vouchers, she’s on record as saying she want to use schools to ‘Build God’s Kingdom!’
As far as the current manager of the Imperium, Herr F.U.Trump is following in Barack F.U. Oboma’s footsteps as far as the criminal level of the unitary executive goes, and is doubling down on O’s wars and visibly fomenting for moar wars. Threats of war and military might seem to be this administration’s form of diplomacy, as in: ‘Do this or that, we’re gonna fuck you up!’…and he seems to see more troops as a jobs program. But then, an all-volunteer military with such enormous signing bonuses…actually has been such.
Meanwhile, what the D team has to offer in the way of pushback to His Nibs is the McArthyite #MeToo movement, and the D-team voting signups at the J20 Women’ Marches, not his actual policies, especially in the Power of the Purse to wage war, I mean: ‘Protect the Homeland!™. As far as Schumer trading funding for T’s ‘wall on the border’ for maintaining Obomba’s DACA, I dunno where all that is now, given I’d seen a headline to the effect that “Schumer’s changed his mind.” From my place in the cheap and cynical seats in the bleachers, ‘saving DACA’ wasn’t really simple virtue-signaling by the’Party of the People’, but had elements of the burgeoning demographics of Latinos, said to surpass Boss Man Whitey in 2045. But that’s just me, see?
And of course: the totality of Russia-gate, with so many moving parts my head spins, an all the key player’s (or alleged players) names just don’t stick in my mind.
Meanwhile, with alley-oops from the D Team, FISA 702 is still the rule of the land, as other acronym agencies (DHS, FBI, DEA, FUK, etc.) swap what their spies find out and about concerning dissidents, Putin lovers, peace lovers, Muslim rights activists, and tra la la. This of course includes the execs of Twitter, Facebook, Google and Youtube hiring armies to root out and delete anything that doesn’t fit within the hegemon’s ‘faith promoting’ war, Empire, and US nationalism and jingoism.
Ach, I’d forgotten that PropOrNot was a WaPo/Bezos program:
‘Oliver Stone leads tributes to Robert Parry as shady US lobbyists PropOrNot dance on his grave’, via RT. Now I have no idea how or why ‘Oliver Stone leads’ comes in, but there was no way I could possibly click in, either. Fuck them, if they did, though; prolly on Twitter.
Side Note: the List seems to have short forms and long forms, but clicking into the Wiki, I was musing as to why the fearless investigative journalism of The Intercept hadn’t made the list. The sole reference in the Wiki I found was that Glen Greenwald had griped about Naked Capitalism having been on the list, lol. (Yves Smith threatened a lawsuit, the site was…removed, as was Counterpunch.)
Now some Ds did offer some resistance by letter to this penis-measuring button news: ‘US ground invasion of North Korea needed to secure nuclear sites, says Pentagon’ Pyongyang could use chemical weapons in event of conflict, warns defence department, UK Independent.
As is often said, Empires in their death throes are at their most dangerous and erratic, sensing they’re about to be toppled with new alliances, both financial and geo-strategic.
Meanwhile, according to Nick Pemberton at Counterpunch, the 2020 campaigns for Prez have already begun, at least he reckons so: in his ‘Sanders and the Empire’ After wandering around old Dobbin’s barn for a bit, noting he’d worked for him, etc., he gets down to it; this is the pithiest graph, and I agree wholeheartedly:
“Freedom is not an existential question. Anyone who calls out Bernie for what he really is—an apologist for American Empire is framed as a purist. But that’s far from the truth. Bernie, on a global scale, is an extremist on foreign policy. Compare him to other leaders around the world and he is right wing, plain and simple. He would continue to violate international law. When he does question the American military his tears are for the American middle class and our tax dollars. What really separates Bernie from his political competition is that he has a realistic plan to save this Empire. Mainstream Democrats will continue to split the gap between rich and poor, and Republicans will do this without blinking. What Bernie offers us is a chance to save our Empire. He will restore the American middle class. And when he saves the American middle class, revolution is an impossibility.”
But what slayed me is that at the top of his essay he’d touted St. Tulsi Gabbard for 2020, with no analysis of how or why she’d be different. Oh well, so it goes…
And of course there are those who maintain that it really doesn’t matter who occupies the White House, as the shadow government/deep state really runs it all anyway. Me, I still wonder how many shadow governments exist and compete at certain points in time.
Andre Vltchek ask some good questions, offers some great observations in his U.S.: War Dog Wants to Bite, but What and How? a few outtakes:
“It snaps left and right, and periodically it is even trying to bite a piece of Moon off. But the Moon is far, too far, even for the best armed and the most aggressive country on Earth.
Iran is much closer, and so are North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Russia, China, Pakistan and other nations that have managed to land themselves on that proverbial shit list of the neo-colonialist World Order, manufactured by the West.”
“He is also offending and intimidating millions of Latin Americans; people of the Western Hemisphere who have been, for ages, falling under the infamous ‘Monroe Doctrine’ of U.S. foreign policy. The summary of that Doctrine has been basically this: do as we say and what is in the interests of the West, or we’ll overthrow your governments, murder your leaders or even directly invade your shores. Now ‘illegal immigrants’ from these countries are most likely going to have to leave the United States. Because they are poor (logically they are, after centuries of oppression and terror from the North), because they are not white, and because they are ‘uneducated’, or in summary, because they are not ‘Norwegians’ (the Manager would prefer Norwegian migrants).
Insulting people and nations is one thing, but bringing the world near a nuclear war is something quite different.”
“The dog of war is searching for some weak point, where its fangs can begin tearing flesh apart. But suddenly, it seems that there is none. All points are hardened, tough.
Russia and China are standing firm and tall, their diplomats literally humiliating their counterparts from Western Empire by composed, powerfully sophisticated and refined behavior. But the militaries of both peaceful but mighty nations have recently been on constant alert: ready to defend their own people, and humanity.
Iran and North Korea are not yielding either. Syria is beginning to rebuild, despite the fact that the subversion, armed and supported from abroad, has not yet been fully defeated. Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia are still there, standing upright, definitely not on their knees.
Suddenly, no one is ready to surrender. This is the first time in history that the Empire has faced such scorn from the rest of the world.”
“In the West, he is not the first Manager of this sort, and he is not the worst. He is part of that long tradition of tyrants. And this tradition has to stop, very soon, in order for our Planet to survive.
These are brutal, dangerous and testing times. The ill, aggressive monster should not be allowed to totally destroy the world. Those who are already standing, should never surrender. Others should join. The survival of our civilization is at stake!”
Amen, brother Andre, although I admit I’m agnostic on ‘the survival of our civilization’ thing…(h/t Mahatma Gandhi) Also, I reckon he’d forgive me for (ahem) borrowing so much of his essay.
Meanwhile, the militarization of police departments is increasing, killedbypolice.net reports that 113 US citizens have already been killed, Herr T now owns close to ‘Don’t be too kind loading prisoners in cars’ (a reference to Freddie Gray’s grisly death by a ‘rough ride; in a po-po van, I assume?), the Rabble Classes still labor for the Man for pennies a day in the mass incarceration cradle-to-grave complex, and T’s ceded his foreign policy to his generals and special ops/mercenary teams around the planet.
Yeah, this House is on Fire; but not all are aware of it yet. What might be the spark that lights a revolutionary movement globally? A modern day slave rebellion as occurred in Haiti in 1791? It’s hard to se it beginning in Amerika; the worst trend I see is that all of this hideous war/no peace/capitalist class ugliness has become normalized, reified to an extent, like the slowly increasing the flame to boiling pot that never flips out the frogs.
Soon come, soon come the day
This tinderbox is gonna blow in your face
I don’t have the gift of the prophecy
Telling everybody how it’s gonna be
I don’t have the gift of the prophecy
Telling everybody how it’s gonna be
There’s a wild fire catching in the whip of the wind
That could start a conflagration
Like there has never been
This house is on fire
(cross-posted at caucus99precent.com)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
aaaaand…speaking of bidness buddha bezos:
lol, speaking of bidness bezos:
Lo, here I hang, charg’d with a world of sin,
The greater world o’ th’ two; for that came in
By words, but this by sorrow I must win:
Was ever grief like mine?- G Herbert, The Sacrifice
——————————
But the green paradise of childish love,
Of races, songs, and kisses, and bouquets,
Of fiddles shrilling in the hills above,
And jars of wine, and woods, and dying rays —
But the green paradise of childish love,
innocent paradise of furtive joys,
Is it far off as India or Hong Kong?
Could it be conjured by a plaintive voice
Or animated by a silver song —
That far off paradise of furtive joys?- Baudelaire, Moesta et Errabunda
(speaking of plaintive voice & silver song, nice N Merchant btw.) We’ve talked about this before but you could read whole libraries of commentary from dickheads like Buffett & Gates, or rather their lackeys, & never find one iota of expression of grief or acknowledgement of the unfathomable loss to the world caused by capitalism. mass murder of the natives, e.g., is just a glitch we are working on. this bright new sparkly future ain’t gonna build itself with a bunch of whiners moaning about blacks in prison. we are working on it, man! give us a chance! almost 400 years of slavery, prisons, Jim Crow, etc., but we are almost there, almost crossing the Jordan.
somebody like Buffett will likely never feel a moment of remorse till the guillotine is hanging over his head. “Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements, surely!” Dickens, Two Cities (yes, i’m reading that now. never read it before.)
my stars, the g. herbert poem is from 1633! i’ll add:
‘For thirtie pence he did my death devise,
Who at three hundred did the ointment prize,
Not half so sweet as my sweet sacrifice:
Was ever grief like mine?’
nice on the baudelaire, too.the middle eastern flavor of the song makes it even more enticing, an yes, her voice plaintive, supplicating w/ a withheld rage, i think. turns out she recorded it in 2001. yes, the bidness buddhas chant: give pence and pounds a chance! and again, right on cue:
‘Google Weighs Unusual Bid With Giant Oil Firm Aramco to Rev Up the Saudi Tech Sector’; Saudi firm has sought to wean itself off oil; a deal with the California tech behemoth would help; feb.1, WSJ
microsoft and amazon are makin’ deals w/ KSA as well, but day-um, it’s behind a paywall for me already. yanno, our partners in peace, i mean war, on yemen and elsewhere.
and ‘Tillerson raises prospect of Venezuela military ouster of Maduro’, reuters, feb. 1. this just after the ‘tyrannical human rights abuser’ announced a pre-sale of cryptocurrency to do avoid the lethal sanctions put on VZ and cuba. but you can bet your sweet ass the cia isa ll over the protests and moves to urge the military not to sae him, as they did chavez.
cool dickens quote; i would have thought i’d read it, but as ‘monseigneur’ is unfamiliar, i may not have. ‘…so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! oooof.
three more from the twittersphere:
jezum crow and and OMG, look at who came in on the west wind! fun as all giddy-up video, but please say you’ll come back, as i have some parallel hilarity from mike pence on VZ while trying to topple one of the remaining bolivarist nations over again…and again…as obomba had. ‘VZ is a national security state issue for the USA!’ stuff. and it will take some time to dig them up from a cross post at another site. for now: oy, do i need a rest!
but dennis for ohio gov? oh, my: bless his heart, may he rule ohio one day! now they may forgive him foe knuckling to obomba on single payer, given that now: ‘libruls and progressives’ suddenly love the ACA!
so nice that you’ve saved this diary from being a single commenter; this place is dead as the tombs lately… best to you, jacob, wd.
Hey Wendy!
The internet gets weirder every day! First Don, and now the Poppy-Bot!
lol, looks like a flowery version of a pink pussy hat, which was the fake left’s #mcResistance! some of my friends and relaitives ‘marched’ and told me ‘how empowered’ they felt. couldn’t say how, but…that’s not important: they just did goddammit! poooor poppy!
on edit: really i was just watching the stupid bowl in minneapolis to see a city under siege by legions of nat’l guard and po-po cuz: ISIS. iirc, your fave justin bieber’s doing half-time show. j/k, timberlake again, w/o the janet jackson breast uncovering… gawd’s blood. at least it ain’t miz 1% fake black panther again…
Behold Katie Roiphe’s heroic nonconformity with the mob…
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/02/the-other-whisper-network/
i admit i’d had to look up roiphe, but good on her. creepy quotes and attacks galore. given its length, i began scanning, and as far as i could tell, only two names were familiar to me: valenti, of course, but the ever-odious rebecca (oh, rancid left; sure obomba made some mistakes…) solnit. but i didn’t see that she’d mentioned margaret atwood: ‘Celebrated author Margaret Atwood challenges #MeToo’s lynch mob justice’, wsws.org
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/01/23/meto-j23.html
someone at the café (tarheel dem?) had offered on a diary i did at the beginning of the ‘movement’, that the results might end up being the opposite of what was intended. but what’s going on now is quite removed from actual ‘rape culture’, isn’t it? but never fear: Oprah is dialing for dollars to make sure working class womens ain’t gonna get sexually harassed no more, nossir! and the crowds went wild!!! O for Prez!
on his tour of ‘our backyard’, on aug. 2 rexxon invited the VZ military to overthrow him.
“US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has suggested Venezuela may face a military coup.
Mr Tillerson said the US was not advocating regime change and that he had no intelligence on any planned action.
But he said that historically the military in Latin America has often intervened in times of serious crises.
Mr Tillerson joked that Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro should seek refuge in Cuba. “If the kitchen gets a little too hot for him, I am sure that he’s got some friends over in Cuba that could give him a nice hacienda [villa] on the beach,” he said.
“In the history of Venezuela and South American countries, it is often times that the military is the agent of change when things are so bad and the leadership can no longer serve the people,” he said.”
when having announced an EO for further sanctions on aug. (obmba’s weren’t adequate to the task):
“”But they stop short of cutting off U.S. imports of Venezuelan oil that are crucial both to Venezuela’s economy and U.S. oil refiners.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence had signaled the upcoming move earlier, tweeting that the U.S. “will not stand by as Venezuela crumbles.”
“The birthright of the Venezuelan people has always been and will always be libertad,” he wrote, using the Spanish word for “freedom.”
can we hear some har, har, please? last thing the ruling class of amerika wants is ‘liberty’ in the socialist nations… now at the time, ‘trump hadn’t ruled out military options’,
cuz pence and the ruling Imperium know all about libertad! at least the US-approved puppets, like temer in brazil, hernandez in honduras, post US-approved putsch, etc. can we hear a little har har here?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-imposes-sanctions-on-venezuela/
who is in & who is outside The Family? the sheeple are expected to view the USG/Nation as they would their own family. w/in the bounds of the family, one is expected to be a boy scout. towards those outside the family, as long as they are viewed as a threat, one can do pretty much anything one wants towards them. to protect the family. the worst crime is against the family; against an other, it may be no crime at all. them imigants ain’t in the Family so destroying their water on the border is no wrong at all.
this is not only complete ethical confusion, but the people who own & run this country do not look at the people of this country as part of The Family. it’s all ideological bullshit. the people of the country are slaves, many enslaved by consumerism, with some few being self-congratulating house slaves.
so we’ll get this gigantic display of troop love, all one big family, today at halftime & throughout the show. reality being quite something else.
what this “family” dynamic means for most people is being conditioned to look the other way, rationalize, justify, etc., the crimes against the many in order for them to care for their own families. By neglect, by willed ignorance, by propaganda, consumerism, etc., by the slave-like constraints of employment, one develops the instincts to look the other way.
and so in our national reportage of crime, the worst is the crime within the home. it’s the ICE officer who molests his child that is the criminal, not the one destroying water bottles in the desert, sex crimes being worse than murder. hell, Law & Order made decades of television out of this BS.
—————————
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/On_the_Concept_of_Irony_with_Continual_Reference_to_Socrates#Friedrich_Schlegel
“…one must bear in mind the many degradations that have crept into a multitude of life’s relationships and have been especially indefatigable in making love as tame, as housebroken, as sluggish, as dull, as useful and usable as any other domestic animal – in short, as unerotic as possible.”
even before we get to ethical considerations, the capacity of eros to rupture boundaries must be suppressed at all costs. that billy might not look at the rio as a boundary to love for Rosario/a must be distracted, tortured, educated, inculturated, out of him on day 1. the “animal” nature of human love must also be stamped out. like, apparently, all things animal.
smarter people than me can talk about N.O. Brown’s oregano & Marcuse and such. my 1st thoughts run to the Godfather flicks. Kate is there to have Michael’s kids. if she refuses, she’s out of the family & deserves nothing more than having the crap beat out of her. all relations are ultimately utilitarian, even w/in the family. Pretenses to love, ethical behavior, etc., are means to an end. but even if one is on board w/Uncle Sam’s goals, betrayal is always possible. b/c there is no family at all.
sorry, comment is kind of a mess…
ach, bless your heart for bringing another and excellent comment, you wizard of words, literature, and philosophy. may i beg off for now? got lots of prep to do ahead of mr. wd’s birthday tomorrow, although i did get his buttahmilk pie baked earlier. but oh, my, i’ll bet that stupid-bowl will get everyone saluting and sieg-heiling!
and oof, even the link looks kinda complicated for me. but irony is one of my favorite subjects, so i’d kinda like to pay attention, grok what i’m able…
oh I’ve found jumping into the concept of irony (the concept, not the book) is useful for people who think language works like the phone book. like certain students. “hey kids! you know words can mean more than one thing?!?” so it’s on my mind. and sitting on the bus I looked at the wiki page on “the concept of irony.” ;) see how smart I is?
“do we now understand how the “ocean of space” is not really an ocean? that it’s a metaphor?” crickets in the temples of the mind.
happy birthday & mazel tov.
you do be indeed ‘smart’ past your self-deprecation. ;-) i’ve looked for years for john irving’s defintion, but have never found it. that’s troubled me, but it was close to: ‘life (or a situation) didn’t bear out what it promised incipiently’, and it worked well enough that mr. wd and i have become major fans of the term over the decades. it helps us laugh a bit at night before we zleeep. or did we choose what we did as ‘promising’, thus the failures, such as raising two adopted chirren, one ute indun, one black/azteca…would further…something?
but i’d refer us to uncle albert’s parallel universes, and notion that time is not linear, but happening at once (humans need it otherwise), as well.
perhaps riffing off your earlier comment, we’re watching an interesting film i like a lot: a feminist version of the jacob and esau story. i forget its name, of course, but it has a bit of an echo into the future for the next diary i hope to bring alive.
sleep well, darlin’, and i’ll pass your wishes along to mr. wd. ‘Aquarius’: ‘and peace will guide the planets…and love will fill the stars’ etc ;-)
Happy Birthday to mr. wd. Same as my mudder’s. Also, today is the Berlin Wall Equinox: the upon which it has been felled as long as it stood.
mr. wd appreciates your good wishes and j’s as well. turns out he turned 70 today, ack! and wtf? are our bywords today. but even worse (and far more important, lol) is that it also means that i’m not far from that milestone myownself, arrrggghhh!
good wishes to your mum, as well, herr davidly. i’d had to look it up: berlin wall stood from 1961-1989. can’t do the math, but i reckon you’re right about the equinox. ;-)
Well, it’s retroactively recognized. The actual equinox was when it came down, I suppose.
that would make sense, wouldn’t it? i just couldn’t do the math. well, simple arithmetic w/o a pencil and paper. ofm; it’s gonna be tax time soon. last year was the first in two decades i didn’t get our returns back with a stamp saying: YOU FUCKING IDIOT! i’ve started putting a cover letter on our forms saying: BRAIN DAMAGED HERE! GET OVER IT!
Ofm re. taxes, indeed. After too many consecutive years of receiving an initial response to my submission asking me, basically, to explain how I make ends meet (the first time going to the office in person, all nervous with a stack of invoices & expenses, whereby I essentially said, ‘But I’m here, aren’t I?!’), I now, too, put a cover letter w/ my filing that says, ‘Look, I know I’m poor, but I live cheap. Just fucking file the shit and leave me alone.’ Okay, that’s hyperbole, but you get the drift.
i get the drift indeed, mein herr davidly, and love the parallel solidarity. the big book says (beyond don’t fold, spindle, or mutilate: “do not put a cover letter over your forms!” (i admit i usually try to make mine funny, too.)
this actually is a pretty brilliant thesis. boiled down perhaps to: the nation as a family to most citizens, thus attacks on ‘the other’ are rationalized (esp. by the lobotomized by all those ingredients you name. pt II: the rulers don’t reckon most of us are family, ya suckers.
the riots in philly after the Big Win last night most sites had as ‘rowdy’, ‘philly cleans up after superbowl fetes’, yanno. but if blacks had done it…riots! looting! plundering!!!!
i’ll try the irony links after some toast. ;-) is it still raining in oly?
on post-toast edit: ooof, far to much for me on that page to read if i want to get a new diary up, but thanks for the ‘crushing eros at all costs’ thesis.
i hung out in the only smoking bar around to watch the 2nd half. I admit it was an exciting game. but the 50 year olds around me screaming “fuck you tom brady!” (the QB for New England) & their general zeal for Philly were a puzzle. speaking of being earnest:
and who says enthusiasm & prophecy is dead? are there no seers of visions? no tribunes of the masses?
anyway, I find myself quoting from Apocalypse Now sometimes these days. “Shit. Oly. I’m still only in Oly.” the words that came to mind at the ritual to close the game, the night and the season were Chef’s, “I know what’s going on here. It’s pagan fuckin’ idolatry!” the way they were passin that gold trophy football around, kissing it, fondling it, fawning over it. and the inductee into NFL Valhalla, Redskins Darryl Green making it into the hall of fame, the present generation of warriors cheering him on to immortal glory. but what w/all the concussions & knee injuries I don’t suppose a slave is needed to remind these triumphal heroes, “Remember: you are mortal.”
I missed the halftime & the pregame, though I wouldn’t say I missed them, if you know what I mean. all the troop love in the air to blow smoke over the actual condition of the troops on the ground. etc., etc.
managing the populace is like managing a really cantankerous, malfunctioning, boiler. sometimes you got let the steam off. like in Philly. nothing else to be done. sometimes you put the whole city in lockdown, like at the super bowl.
anyone, I surely didn’t grok all the Soren k stuff. if you were cooking my eyeballs, they would have been heavily glazed.
sorry. the guy in the video is an Olympic medal winner & personal trainer to someone I know. really want to punch him.
well, dude; guess i have to say you knew what you were in for, and you got it! yeah, i wouldn’t mind takin’ a poke at that jerk myownself. ;-) how many wives/husbands have been belted on accounta their mates’ teams lot the big game? sorry ya dinnae miss half-time (so to speak), though.
mr. wd and i figured it would at least be kinda fun if the ‘patriots’ dinnae win. don’t quite grasp your (i assume) tweaked quote from AN, i admit.
but yeah, i had to follow the wiki up a mile to discover that it was indeed a batch of soren k thinking. heavy going stuff.
“I didn’t get outta the 7th grade for this shit! All I wanted to do was fucking cook!”
Shall I fall down before a block of wood? Isaiah 44. No, but if i gild it & make it look like a football, I can hug it and kiss it and pet it & love it. Stitches it has, but it passes not. Seams it has, but it handoffs not. those who touch it become like it, even more so those who drool over it. (cf Ps 115 on the worship of idols)
Google has more or less recently made claims to universal translation software. the debabelizer. a computer will tell us what words mean! istn’t it ironic…wonder if those translations will be in the public domain? does google ever lie about anything?
I was thinking of another line of chef’s, right after the pagan idolatry one, while watching the game: “I thought if I died in an awful place, my soul wouldn’t go to heaven.” walking over unmarked graves & being corrupted without realizing it. those frickin commercials & the infantile enthusiasm on display on TV & in the bar. ugh. the hoopla, the guns, the grunting & strutting & gloating over cruel triumphs, the commodity fetishization, etc., etc. I don’t know if nature paints like a harlot hiding the charnel house within, but the NFL sure as hell does. all of it is “preying on garbage.”
why do y think they call them balls ‘pig skins’? and yes: ‘google is not what it seems’ (assange) but srsly: ‘debableizer’ or is that your jesting term? but not: ‘schmitelator’?
excellent x 2: “I don’t know if nature paints like a harlot hiding the charnel house within, but the NFL sure as hell does. all of it is “preying on garbage.”
dunno what this might mean in the end, but good! perhaps more cia going? i read a headline that amerikan troops in iraq are heading to…afghanistan. lots to mine, plunder, and rape there!
I first heard debabelizer in 1997. where u been?
I don’t know what darpa, I mean goog, calls its software, AlphaGo or some crap. I got in an argument, excuse me, a discussion, cuz we don’t have arguments, except over pronouns, over google’s claims about its new s/w. I forgot to ask what his/her/its/their pronoun was. I bet it’s a problem for goog too. I asked him/her/it/them if he/they/it/she could create an experiment to challenge, if not falsify, Alphabet co’s hive mind claims to universal translation s/w. naturally, (s)he/they/it retreated squirming to his/her/its/their safe space. j/k. but he was a bit scandalized that I dared to challenge google, while we were watching a game of Go. computers mopped the floor w/all human takers, whatever their pronouns, on Go a few years back. so how dare I question google?!?
you know exactly where i’e been: in bumfuck, coloraddy. what in the name of sweet fanny adams are Go computers that clean floors and wall?
but can we skip back to the stooopid bowl, please? check out thsi headline at trnn: ‘Ram Truck Drives Over MLK’s Legacy’; Dr. Gerald Horne discusses a controversial Super Bowl ad which used King’s famous “Drum Major” speech to sell Dodge Ram pickup trucks, which seemed exceedingly tone-deaf given King’s fierce opposition to capitalism and consumerism
tone deaf????
what won’t capitalism crap all over?
Apropos of the obviously analogical moment, now available on Netflix, and it’s GREAT!
holy crow, jacob. i hate to reduce it to a cliché. but ‘awesome’. herr davidly (upstream) comes here from berlin; he might be able to tell us what the words are. unless you know. aren’t you purdy multi-lingual? is it set in the 1940s or so? the shadow dancing reminds me of thailand, and of course ‘cabaret’.
what a treat; thank you.
This music appears with subtitles in the second episode of the amazing series Babylon Berlin on Netflix. All 16 episodes now available!
https://www.netflix.com/title/80136321
ah, we wouldn’t know what do w/ a netflix, rutabga, we’re that tech old school. but it’ll hit the SW co interliberry loan circuit some day, and we’ll for sure get it. fantastic, it is, and how could ya not love the pasties!
i’d sent this thread to gasket saying ‘guess who showed up?’ and that i’d meant to end it to her anyway, as it was she who’d turned me on to natalie merchant so many years ago at TPM. never heard back, but i sure hope she’s doin’ okay in thee tough times.
xox,
wd