@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

I just posted this in joe's Evening Blues.

Kentucky native takes credit for gifting horse manure to Treasury Secretary

Here's a Christmas message from Robert Strong.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMvCnLpIC2Y width:640 height:550]

On Facebook and Twitter, Strong has been taking credit for the prank calling it an act of "rebellion" against the Republican Party's recent passage of the tax bill.

He even cites Louisville-native and American journalist Hunter S. Thompson as his philosophy behind the prank.

"All in a days work," Strong tweeted. "If the GOP can fleece the American people in such a brazen fashion, we must call it out in such a brazen fashion.Like Hunter S. Thompson once said, 'when the going gets weird, the weird turns pro.'"

#1 Total agreement.

@Mark from Queens then it can be heard. Maybe not understood, but contrary to the constant drone of control.

#1
"Cultural counter-programming," I like that.

That's a subject for another essay I've got in the works: how we can incorporate into our daily lives even just small acts of subversion, non-compliance, reverse or "people" propaganda. Incidentally, Emma Goldman spoke about the power and importance of Left propaganda.

At the very least a scrawl of graffiti or a bold non-violent act is an existential cry out, amidst this soul-sucking world of rampant, all pervasive commodification and consumerism - that we are human beings - not alone and not loans - who are not being treated as such.

There are many small ways to do one's part in getting the conversation going in a different direction. Levity helps too.

The time has come for us each to get a little bolder, within each's comfort zone perhaps. But I think we have to start taking more agency individually.

@Mark from Queens
the website for adbusters, adbusters.org .

#1
"Cultural counter-programming," I like that.

That's a subject for another essay I've got in the works: how we can incorporate into our daily lives even just small acts of subversion, non-compliance, reverse or "people" propaganda. Incidentally, Emma Goldman spoke about the power and importance of Left propaganda.

At the very least a scrawl of graffiti or a bold non-violent act is an existential cry out, amidst this soul-sucking world of rampant, all pervasive commodification and consumerism - that we are human beings - not alone and not loans - who are not being treated as such.

There are many small ways to do one's part in getting the conversation going in a different direction. Levity helps too.

The time has come for us each to get a little bolder, within each's comfort zone perhaps. But I think we have to start taking more agency individually.

@Mark from Queens

[video:https://youtu.be/BmRnajwILbo]

#2
Those are two heroes for the ages for sure. The latter of whose surname my son bears as his middle name.

When I think of Emma I think of the story of how she, held in prison on Blackwell's Island for a year, volunteered as a nurse and won the admiration of many of the street-hardened and abused women who came to be fond of her tenderness and radical theories.

Have you ever seen the Zinn play "Marx in Soho," the one-man play by NYC teacher and activist (and producer of the film response to the charter school puff piece called "The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman" and NY lieutenant gubernatorial candidate) Brian Jones?
Amazing guy, and excellent actor.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

'Austerity' is for the public chattels they bleed as desired for whatever they desire. Which happens to be everything for them alone, in the fast-approaching end.

Of course, the US PTB have no respect for any constitution, democracy or anyone's human rights. Parasitic psychopaths are defined by their characteristic lack of empathy, ethics and associated ultimate lack of longer-term survival sense, missing the 'human' parts of the brain which enabled species survival, even despite the tendency of psychopaths to take over unwitting societies due to their exclusively self-interested ruthlessness and cunning - and previous human inability to identify (apart from pathological attitudes and actions they'll attempt to 'normalize' within societies they've taken control over) and contain them, not having had brain scans to easily ID and keep them out of public office until recently.

If the frogs weren't already bubbling in the steaming Two-Party Pot, the information below - also somewhat reminiscent of what did and didn't happen in the Dem Nomination - would get the blood boiling. But the Hondurans are refusing to accept it - and are an example to the world. No wonder Total Information Control is being inflicted on internet users...

If the US population refused to accept suspicious electoral results and pacifically held firm against the imposition of another puppet anti-public-good candidate, this whole corrupt and deadly mess would lose its foundations, being no longer able to stand on the heads of its citizens while incrementally adding more sharpened studs to its jackboots to reduce them to mush.

Democracy Now! being on a total roll; I'd have missed all this following, if not directed there via a posting of another article of great interest in another thread, by snoopydawg.

This absolutely needs to read in full at source, if at all possible.

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/26/incumbent_honduras_president_dec...

Allan Nairn: United States Tries—But Fails—to Stop to Stop Hondurans from Protesting Election Fraud

StoryDecember 26, 2017

Guests

Allan Nairn

award-winning investigative journalist.

...ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s, in a sense, an intifada of Hondurans against election fraud. But, more deeply, it’s a class uprising against an oligarchy that the U.S. has been backing for decades. The U.S. first used it in the '80s to stage the Contra attack against Nicaragua. Honduras was their base. Now they say it's being used for the drug war. But it’s a de facto U.S. military occupation of Honduras, in a sense, since the U.S. has an actual base there, even though foreign bases are prohibited by the Honduran constitution. But as in, for example, the southern Philippines, where the U.S. also has military operating on the ground, there’s a wink and a nod from the central government. It’s very significant because Central America was devastated by massacres in the ’80s, perhaps 200,000 killed in Guatemala, more than 70,000 in El Salvador, similar numbers in Nicaragua, backed by the U.S., with the help of Israel, and the societies have yet to recover to this day. The gangs, the crime, the drug trade are all direct outgrowths of those attacks on civilians.

But, first in Guatemala, starting a few years ago, with a popular, middle-class-based anti-corruption movement that helped topple the U.S. backed president, General Pérez Molina, and now in Honduras, with this uprising against what appears to be a stolen election, there’s a revival, and an example, I think, for the U.S. and the world that even people when they are most beaten down, when many of their leaders have been assassinated, when many of their villages have been wiped out, as happened in Guatemala, they can still come back. The U.S. backed this election in Honduras of—attempted re-election of President Hernández, a re-election that is also prohibited in the Honduran constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: You mean he wasn’t supposed to be able to run again.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yeah. But he did anyway. All sorts of evidence of fraud came out. There was a tape where his people were talking about plan B for stuffing ballot boxes. There was a chat message, which I saw, from one of the electoral technicians, saying, “The fraud is now complete.” On election night, the manager of the contractor counting the votes actually briefly put out a message on Facebook saying “Nasralla, the opposition candidate, is the new president of Honduras. His lead is irreversible.” And then they just shut down the vote count and resumed it later, announcing that that lead had evaporated, and Hernández, the U.S. man, was the new winner.

Yet, they had to wait three weeks before they could formally declare that victory, because people took to the streets, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans all over the country—in many cases, some of the poorest people and working people in the streets taking the lead. And even many of the police rebelled. At one point, apparently, about 20 percent to a third of the entire national police force had gathered in bases, refusing, they said, to continue the repression, saying they were going to lay down their arms. In response, the military has promoted the leaders of the most brutal, most loyal units of the military police and those who come out of the U.S.-backed Fusina training course to be the new leaders of the military. They’re killing about one protester per day.

AMY GOODMAN: How many do you estimate have been killed?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it’s hard to know exactly, have been killed by the military. It’s probably 34 or more at this point. It’s, in a sense, an intifada in the streets. And a lot of the tactics they’re using are also reminiscent of the tactics used by the Israeli military. Earlier, you mentioned the shooting of tear gas into houses, the systematic beating of protesters. But unlike in Israel, where the army is deeply ideological, fully indoctrinated to the project of the government, in Honduras it’s only certain sectors of the army and the police that have that character. I talked to many, many dozens of army and police, and it’s clear that many of them don’t really like being dragged along on a reimposition of the Hernández government.

And if these demonstrations can continue, it’s not clear that this government can hang on, even with Washington’s backing. And this is just a remarkable breakthrough, not just for Central America, but for all of Latin America, but even on a world stage, because it’s another example that the strongest U.S.-backed powers sometimes can be defeated, they sometimes can be rolled back, and that the U.S. grip in the world right now is weakening. And just the stamp of approval from the Pentagon may no longer be enough to hold on.

AMY GOODMAN: Although despite the widespread protests and calls from the opposition party, the Alliance Against the Dictatorship, and the Organization of American States for new elections, and reports of widespread fraud and vote rigging in Honduras’s presidential election, the U.S.-backed incumbent President Juan Orlando Hernández declared himself the victor last week. ...

(Beth Hart wrote this song about Bush-2, who initiated the push on the TPP and allied corporate coups, traitorously handing rights of domestic and other legislation over from the people of unwittingly-involved countries over to ruthless outside self-interests in privately made agreements between those who had no right to do so, but figure that if they 'Big Lie' claim to have such non-existent rights to dispose of the rights, futures, democracy, countries and lives of others - which their public offices exist to nurture and safeguard against such attack/predation/theft - loudly enough, the sheep will passively accept their arbitrarily determined fate as disposable and dispossessed chattels within a corporate/billionaire-owned/operated State [in reality belonging to the inhabitants as a Commons in perpetuity] and can even be conned into supporting their own subjection and rapidly approaching doom-for-profit on the promise of [unmentioned as 'competitively' hazardous and insecure slave-wage] jobs for some, here or there.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgEBojCBOd0&list=RDcgEBojCBOd0#t=84

Beth Hart:-'Sick'

Personally, I find it rather inspirational.

#3 The GOP only wants to control the debt when it doesn't get in the way of their plans. Cheney said in 2002 that Reagan proved deficits don't matter. They've never let being budget hawks get in the way of being war hawks; mostly they just throw the deficit--and the debt--out there as reasons why we can't do things for anybody but the rich. Like all politicians, they love spending--spending is where they get their power from. They love spending as long as they're spending on the things they like.