The Evening Blues - 1-26-18



eb1pt12


The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Odds and ends

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features a diverse assortment of music that I've run across while putting together other features. Enjoy!

The Sharpees - Do The 45

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

-- Urusla K. Le Guin


News and Opinion

If you don't want to see an obscene display of military madness, don't click on the link for the rest of this article. Let's just say that Tony Bliar is not the only genocidal lapdog in Merrie Olde England.

British Armed Forces chief prepares for war with Russia

General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff of the British Armed Forces, has declared that Britain must actively prepare for war with Russia and other geo-political rivals.

Carter, the second most senior figure in the Armed Forces chain of command after Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Stuart Peach, detailed the strategic planning of British imperialism to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and made clear that this has been formulated in collaboration with the United States.

Carter stated his enthusiastic agreement with the new National Security Strategy outlined  by US Defence Secretary James Mattis, citing a passage from his speech:

“We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we’re engaged in today, but great-power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security.”

Carter listed, “viewed from this perspective,” the threat posed by “increasing competition in the South China Sea; the potential grave consequences of North Korea’s nuclear programme; the arms race and proxy wars that you see playing out in Yemen and Syria, that perhaps stem from Iran’s regional aspirations. With Russia the most complex and capable security challenge we have faced since the Cold War superimposed on much of this, it would be difficult I think, on that basis, not to agree with Jim Mattis’s assessment.”

No longer were there “two clear and distinct states of ‘peace’ and ‘war’,” said Carter. “…[A]ll of these states have become masters at exploiting the seams between peace and war.” Inverting Clausewitz, Carter declared that any measure by an opposing power to defend itself, politically or economically, was simply war by other means. Virtually anything can now be designated as a “weapon” threatening the “rules-based international architecture that has assured our stability and prosperity since 1945,” he asserted. “What constitutes a weapon in this grey area no longer has to go ‘bang.’ Energy, cash—as bribes—corrupt business practices, cyber-attacks, assassination, fake news, propaganda and indeed military intimidation are all examples of the weapons used to gain advantage in this era of ‘constant competition.’”

A Year Ago, Maddow Explained How MSM Would Use Russiagate To Escalate Cold War

I was just reminded by a reader that a few days ago marked the one year anniversary of Rachel Maddow announcing on MSNBC that Democratic party-aligned media outlets intended to use Russiagate and the infamous Steele Dossier to pressure the incoming Trump administration into escalating the new cold war with Russia. A year into the Trump administration and we can see plainly that this new president is already demonstrably more hawkish toward Russia than his predecessor. ...

Two days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rachel Maddow did one of the innumerable tinfoil hat Russiagate conspiracy segments that have become the singular distinguishing feature of her career — but this time with a little twist. In an elaborate monologue that was only believable to people who desperately wanted to believe it, Maddow paced her audience through some information about the way the Soviet Union’s KGB used to gather compromising footage of rivals in order to sabotage them politically or blackmail them. Using the hilarious argument that the FSB is only two letters different from the KGB, the fact that Vladimir Putin was in the KGB, and the incredible allegations in the Steele dossier about Trump’s erotic romp with a gaggle of well-hydrated Russian prostitutes, Maddow attempted to make it seem perfectly plausible that this same president whose alleged affair with a porn star is being dismissed with a shrug by most Americans could be blackmailed into treason with a sex tape. ...

Maddow lit up with glee when talking about how much Russia hates the fact that Obama amassed troops along its border in the final days of his administration, and then made the claim that if Trump ever withdraws those troops, it will prove that Russia “has something on” him and is using it to blackmail him into compliance. “And here’s the question,” Maddow said. “Is the new President gonna take those troops out? After all the speculation, after all the worry, we are actually about to find out if Russia maybe has something on the new President? We’re about to find out if the new President of our country is going to do what Russia wants once he’s Commander-in-Chief of the US military starting noon on Friday. What is he gonna do with those deployments? Watch this space.”

Maddow spoke these words with an all-caps “WE’LL BE WATCHING” graphic displayed on the right side of the screen, plainly telling her audience (and the incoming administration) that if Trump doesn’t maintain Obama’s lame duck cold war escalations, it will be taken and reported as a sign that Trump is a treasonous Kremlin puppet, with no further evidence required.

Enemy Obsession: Twitter finds no 'strong evidence' of Russian meddling in Brexit vote

Memogate shows U.S. still has no idea what to do with Russia’s meddling online

Congressional Democrats declared the U.S. to be under “ongoing attack” from Russia via social media in a furious letter sent to the heads of Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday. The Silicon Valley giants, they demanded, must investigate yet another instance of possible Russian interference in American democracy and report back by Friday. Their freakout centered on a hashtag — #ReleaseTheMemo — that third-party research suggested was being deployed by the Kremlin’s infamous army of Twitter trolls and bots to “intervene and influence our democratic process.”

Yet the fury and accusations on Capitol Hill reveal a stark truth, experts said: Over a year after the U.S. intelligence community determined Russia had indeed sought to influence the 2016 American presidential election, nobody seems to have much of an idea how to stop a similar campaign from happening again — whether by Russia or anyone else. ...

Memogate stems from a a still-classified memo written by Republican congressional staff that, supposedly, accuses the FBI of an orgy of spying. ... The hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo exploded in Republican social media circles. But its engagement wasn’t, apparently, entirely organic. A tool set up by the German Marshall Fund called Hamilton 68, dedicated to tracking Kremlin-linked twitter accounts, registered a massive spike in the hashtag among Russian bots and trolls. That was enough to prompt the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, and the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein, to demand that social media platforms conduct an in-depth forensic examination.

Yet even the group that first registered the spike on Twitter called some of the media coverage on the phenomenon overblown, and stressed that only a fraction of the activity on Twitter could be attributed to Russian cyber bots. ... And there's the rub. Nobody — not the government, and not the social media companies — seems to really know for sure how much activity is being directed by real individuals as opposed to Kremlin-linked propaganda, said Ben Nimmo, information defense fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who tracks Russian propaganda efforts online.

Julian Assange asks UK court to drop arrest warrant

The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has asked a UK court to drop the arrest warrant that prevents him from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been living for five and a half years. Assange, 46, skipped bail to enter the embassy in 2012 in order to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault and rape, which he denies.

Though Swedish prosecutors have dropped the investigation against him, Assange will be arrested if he leaves the building in Knightsbridge for breaching his former bail conditions in the UK. Mark Summers QC told senior district judge Emma Arbuthnot at Westminster magistrates court on Friday that now that the Swedish case had been dropped the warrant had “lost its purpose and its function”. ...

But representing the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Aaron Watkins said Assange’s argument for having the warrant dropped was “strange and untenable”. He said it was an example of “contorting legislation” to get to a desired destination – that of Assange leaving the embassy.

Arbuthnot said she would give her judgment about the arrest warrant on 6 February.

Turkish offensive in Syria: President Erdogan visits troops on Syrian border

Turkey to U.S. troops in Syria: Please move so we can attack your Kurdish allies

The U.S. military is refusing to say whether it will move hundreds of its troops from a town in northern Syria after Turkey vowed to extend its anti-Kurdish offensive there, potentially bringing Turkish forces into confrontation with their American allies. “They'll stay or they'll go. Don't know what the answer will be,” Lt. Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, director joint staff for the U.S. military, told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday.

The status of the hundreds of U.S. troops in Manbij has been brought into question after Turkey vowed to extend its campaign against U.S.-backed Kurds from Afrin to Manbij, which lies further east. ... Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Thursday that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had asked President Donald Trump during a phone call Wednesday to remove U.S. forces from Manbij.

His statement came after a White House readout which gave a different account of the call, saying Trump had “urged Turkey to exercise caution and to avoid any actions that might risk conflict between Turkish and American forces.” Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag reiterated demands Thursday that the U.S. should “stop supporting terrorists” if it wanted to avoid a potential confrontation with Turkey.

Turkey Will ‘Target’ US Troops If They Keep Supporting Syrian Kurds

US-Turkey tensions mounting surrounding the Turkish invasion of the Syrian Kurdish Afrin District look to be getting much worse, with Turkey’s deputy premier Bekir Bozdag warning that the US is the one risking confrontation by supporting the Kurds.

Bozdag warned the US needs to “review its soldiers and elements giving support to terrorists on the ground,” and that US forces who continue to support the Kurdish YPG, which Turkey considers terrorists “will become a target in this battle.

Jewish Settlers Torch 100 of World's Oldest Olive Trees

Israeli settlers in the northern occupied West Bank have razed to the ground huge swathes of Palestinian-owned agricultural land in the town of Huwara, according to reports. The fields were set on fire by "masked settlers", Al-Resalah newspaper reports, who snuck on to the land and poured petrol on it before setting it alight. Around 100 olive trees were destroyed in the blaze, which spread as locals were prevented from attending the fire by Israeli forces.

Olive trees in Israel hold vast religious and cultural significance to both Jews and Palestinians. As well as being the livelihood of many Palestinian farmers, the trees are thought to be the "oldest on Earth" and are mentioned in the Old Testament numerous times. ...

The mayor of Huwara said that Israeli occupation forces prevented Palestinian citizens from reaching the lands in order to extinguish the fire. However the Jewish press in Israel is reporting that the cause of the fires is unknown and Israeli and Palestinian fire crews "worked together" to put out the blaze. The Jerusalem Post reports that police are investigating the incident.

Class Warfare, Alienation, & Capitalism

Revolution by Drone

When average Americans were oppressed in the 18th century, they knew where the plutocrats lived, and they didn't have military-style police forces holding them back. The Stamp Act drove the New York masses to ransack the houses of Governor Cadwallader Colden and the British major who was pointing army artillery toward the local town. Another mob looted the house of pro-English aristocrat Thomas Hutchinson, carrying away his fine furnishings and emptying his wine cellar in part of what the British called a "war of plunder" to take away the "distinction of rich and poor."

That doesn't happen today. The super-rich are safely ensconced in their gated estates with private security forces and 9-foot walls and surveillance systems and sniper posts. But now they have good reason to fear the future. We all do. The too-rapid evolution of intelligent machines, with the ability to make decisions that can impact human life, is bringing us closer to a man-made epidemic that we won't be able to control. As armed drones become tinier and cheaper and smarter and more readily accessible, they could launch the modern revolution of the undervalued human being. ...

Oppressed people won't be advancing on the well-secured houses of the rich and powerful. Instead, artificial intelligence (AI) may take the place of axes and torches. In a terror-filled scenario for the future, a tiny gnat-like micro-robotic creature, armed with a lethal explosive charge or an injectable poison, and programmed with facial recognition software that targets a single individual (even in disguise), may be released in the vicinity of that person and instructed to wait patiently, perhaps indefinitely if solar-charged, and to surreptitiously sweep in to the target's head to complete its deadly mission. Silent and unseen, unidentifiable and untraceable, it hurries away to self-destruct in the final act of a perfect crime.

Mention of such killer drones can elicit responses of disbelief or ridicule. But it's happening. Technology, as we all know, moves faster than expected, each day creating new apps and concepts that hadn't been imagined just months before. The specifications for these drones are all available -- or soon to be available -- to any skilled tech enthusiast. And to anyone with deadly intentions.

[The super-rich] should be afraid, and they should realize that the deeply ingrained feelings of disrespect and anger engendered by inequality have to be addressed, soon.

Sparking Far-Reaching Rights Concerns, ICE Now Has Powerful Ability to Track License Plates Nationwide

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now has access to a nationwide license plate recognition database—a trove of billions of records that's growing by the day.

The development, first reported by The Verge on Friday, sparks civil liberties concerns and comes as the federal agency appears to be ramping up its efforts to round up immigrants.

The database is not one built by ICE itself but by Vigilant Solutions, the reporting continues. A contract was awarded last month, according to documents posted online, but "comes after years of internal lobbying by the agency."

Vigilant Solutions says its license plate recognition tool can be used in several ways, including getting alerts when a specific plate—or a batch of up to 2,500 license plates—is seen; obtaining historical data on a plate's locations; and by looking up an address of a crime to see what vehicles may have been in the vicinity.

As DHS notes in a privacy update (pdf) posted days after the contract was awarded, Vigilant's data comes "from at least 25 states and 24 of the top 30 most populous metropolitan statistical areas within the United States," and is captured via "toll road cameras, parking lot cameras, vehicle repossession companies, and law enforcement agencies."

The privacy update further notes that "ICE may share this information with other entities such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Marshals Service, and state and local police departments in furtherance of criminal law enforcement investigations conducted as part of a multi-agency task force in which those entities are participating."

Despite Liberalizing Marijuana Laws, the War on Drugs Still Targets People of Color

The huge failure we know as the “war on drugs” is back in full force under the Trump administration, thanks in no small part to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s retrograde tough-on-crime approach to drugs. It’s not hard to understand why someone like Sessions, with a history of racism, would love the war on drugs: In reality, it was always a war on a very particular set of people — and you can probably guess who those people are. And yet despite Sessions’s best efforts, there’s been a lot of progress on legalizing marijuana; opinions are changing and, in a lot of places, so are laws.

At the intersection of these pushes to legalize weed and the so-called war on drugs, there are a bevy of major scandals unfolding, all of which are ravaging communities of color. And here’s the thing about these scandals: They can’t simply be blamed on President Donald Trump and his team. Instead, they’re deeply rooted in a bipartisan type of anti-blackness.

All of this talk of legalization and decriminalization gave me the wrong impression: I had thought that we were working toward ending the war on drugs. But arrests and imprisonment for marijuana possession are still in full effect — even in places where it has been legalized or decriminalized. ... The continuing arrests are part of a long pattern. From 2000 to 2010, an astounding 7,216,000 arrests were made in the U.S. for simple marijuana possession. How many lives were ruined as a result? How many people lost their jobs? Their right to vote? How many of those people lost their college financial aid? How many were jailed or sent to prison? How many of those people were moms or dads that were ripped away from their families?

What we do know is that they were black. In spite of countless studies showing that African-Americans and white people use marijuana at almost the exact same rate, African-Americans are 375 percent more likely to be arrested for it. In fact, if as few people of color were incarcerated as white people, America’s prison population would plummet by 40 percent.

Can anyone really believe this disparity is accidental? It’s not — that’s why it happens from coast to coast. America’s criminal justice policies — and their selective racial enforcement — are deeply rooted in racism and systemic white supremacy. This conclusion, thanks to Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” and Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th,” is more widely accepted than it’s ever been, but the scandal continues. And isn’t a partisan one.

Democrats DOUBLE CAVE On DACA! Trump Mocks Them

UAW officials will work for 30 pieces of silver:

Former Fiat Chrysler negotiator says FCA bribed the UAW to secure passage of 2009, 2015 contracts

In a plea deal revealed Monday, former Fiat Chrysler chief negotiator Alphons Iacobelli admitted that he paid out $1.5 million to top United Auto Workers (UAW) officials to “obtain benefits, concessions, and advantages for FCA in the negotiation, implementation, and administration” of contracts between 2009 and 2015.

The admission has thrown the UAW into a crisis since it demonstrates that all of the contracts negotiated by the union with Fiat Chrysler since at least September 2009, the time of the first payments, are tainted by corruption and thus legally null and void.

During the time when the bribes were being paid out, the UAW agreed to massive concessions, including the expanded use of lower-paid tier two workers and the hated alternative work schedule. In 2015, the UAW rammed through a contract that not only failed to restore past concessions but also maintained the two-tier wage structure and permitted an expanded use of super-exploited Temporary Part Time (TPT) workers.

According to the plea deal Iacobelli admitted to making illegal payments to the late UAW Vice President for Fiat Chrysler General Holiefield, Assistant Director Virdell King and three other UAW officials listed in the document as only “UAW Official-2, UAW Official-3 and UAW Official-4,” while stating that “other UAW officials” were also involved. The payouts included hundreds of thousands of dollars to phony charities set up by Holiefield and his widow Monica Morgan.



the horse race



Democrats Already Fighting Progressives In Primaries

Interesting interview, here's part of the teaser:

Dark Money, Not Russia, May Be the Best Way to Explain Trump's Win

Democrats' problems didn't begin when the Kremlin started taking an interest in American agitprop. In a paper out this month from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), UMass-Boston professor emeritus Thomas Ferguson and two colleagues, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, offer lots of evidence for new ideas about how Trump pulled off the upset of the century. Among other things, they assembled a massive database documenting a late, possibly pivotal infusion of shadowy, barely legal campaign cash—a.k.a. dark money—and detailed the candidate's own willingness to invest his personal wealth in a desperate final push. They also found he received a higher percentage of small-donor donations than Barack Obama did in 2012. They emphasized how much better American alt-right media operations seem to be at reaching Americans than Russians. And they bemoaned a long-term trend away from unionization in some of key swing states, where the emergence of a debt-fueled economy that didn't work for the middle class helped put Trump over the top.

Trump booed and laughed at in Davos for playing the fake news card

Donald Trump wasn’t finished when he wrapped up his pro-America speech to the world leaders gathered at Davos on Friday. The U.S. president held the crowd at the World Economic Forum with a continued crusade against the “nasty, mean, vicious and fake” press, and it was met with boos and laughter.

Trump told the founder of the annual forum, Klaus Schwab, that he has “always seemed to get, for whatever reason, a disproportionate amount of press of media.” When he was just a businessman, Trump said, he was “always treated well by the press, the numbers speak and things happen, but I've always had a really good press.” It was only when he ran for office, he said, that he “realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious and how fake the press can be — as the cameras start going off in the background.”

The comments came the day after news reports revealed he ordered special counsel Robert Mueller fired last June.

The White House asked to borrow a van Gogh. The Guggenheim offered a gold toilet instead.

The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh for President and Melania Trump’s private living quarters.

Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape With Snow,” the 1888 van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles, France, with his dog.

The curator’s alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet — an interactive work titled “America” that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

For a year, the Guggenheim had exhibited “America” — the creation of contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan — in a public restroom on the museum’s fifth floor for visitors to use.

But the exhibit was over and the toilet was available “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” Spector wrote in an email obtained by The Washington Post.



the evening greens


EPA Orders Testing for GenX Contamination Near Chemours Plant in West Virginia

The Environmental Protection Agency has asked Chemours to test water near its plant in West Virginia for the presence of the chemical GenX. In a January 11 letter to Andrew Hartten, Chemours’ principal project manager for corporate remediation, Kate McManus, acting director of the EPA’s water protection division, noted that GenX has already “been detected in three on-site production wells and one on-site drinking water well” at the company’s factory in West Virginia, which is known as Washington Works.

McManus also referred to GenX contamination near the Chemours factory in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where DuPont and its spinoff Chemours dumped approximately 200,000 pounds of GenX into the Cape Fear River since 1980, according to Detlef Knappe, a North Carolina State University professor who has studied the contamination. In that time, more than 200,000 people have been exposed to GenX in their drinking water.

“EPA is concerned that drinking water wells in the vicinity of the Washington Works facility may similarly be contaminated by GenX,” the letter explained.

DuPont introduced GenX in 2009 to replace PFOA, also known as C8, a chemical it had used for decades in North Carolina, West Virginia, and other locations to make Teflon and other products. Like GenX, PFOA escaped the West Virginia plant and seeped into local drinking water. The contamination — and the fact that DuPont executives knew about it and hid their knowledge — set off a mammoth class-action suit, which DuPont settled for $671 million.

PFOA, which has been associated with cancers, autoimmune diseases, hormonal dysfunction, and other health problems, was phased out of use in the U.S. in 2015. Though DuPont presented GenX as a safer alternative to PFOA, the chemical has been associated with some of the same health problems, as The Intercept reported in 2016.

In 2017, the oceans were by far the hottest ever recorded

This important ocean information was just released today by a world-class team of researchers from China. The researchers (Lijing Cheng and Jiang Zhu) found that the upper 2000 meters (more than 6000 feet) of ocean waters were far warmer in 2017 than the previous hottest year. We measure heat energy in Joules. It turns out that 2017 was a record-breaking year, 1.51 × 1022 Joules hotter than any other year. For comparison, the annual electrical generation in China is 600 times smaller than the heat increase in the ocean. ...

The authors went a bit further and investigated how the heat was input into the oceans by region. They found that in 2017, a lot of heat was deposited in the Atlantic and Southern Oceans. The authors also calculated that all this heat resulted in approximately 2 mm rise in sea level (as water warms, it expands and so that ocean levels rise).

Further consequences of this heating include declining oxygen levels in the oceans, bleaching of coral reefs, and melting of both sea ice and ice shelves (the latter of which which will also raise sea levels). We are observing these effects. Arctic ice is undergoing a long-term decline, and it’s possible the Arctic will become ice-free. Massive coral bleaching events have been recorded, particularly in the waters off of Australia.

Air pollution linked to ‘extremely high mortality’ in people with mental disorders

The risk of death for people with mental and behavioural disorders rises sharply on days when air pollution reaches toxic peaks, a major study in Hong Kong has found.

Researchers analysed a decade of death statistics and revealed a strong link, with the mortality risk rising 16% on the first day of haze and 27% on the second day compared to normal days. If the haze was accompanied by high ozone pollution, the risk of death increased by 79%.

The new research tallies with other recent work that has found links between short-term increases in air pollution and suicides. However, scientists do not yet understand how air pollution may cause these effects and they are urging more research, as well as immediate help for those at risk.

“First of all we need more support to those high-risk groups,” said Lin Yang, at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and one of the research team. “Currently we have a lot of social workers to give support to people with mental disorders. But they probably need to pay attention to the fact that haze events could be a trigger for acute onset of symptoms.”

“Of course, as a priority, what governments need to do is control air pollution. That is the best way to eradicate the problem – from the source,” she said.


Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

How the Pentagon Enlisted Trump to Continue Its Perpetual "War on Terror"

The Democratic Party Is Not Our Friend

New Orleans City Council Caves to Pressure From Jewish Groups, Rescinds Human Rights Resolution

Tom Perez, the Democratic Party’s Grim Metaphor

Stop Looking For Saviors


A Little Night Music

Maxine Davis - I Found A Love

The Sharpees - I've Got A Secret

The Spiders - I Didn't Want To Do It

Joe Lutcher - Ojai

Blanche Thomas - You Ain't So Such A Much

Jimmy Wilson - Strangest Blues

Jimmy Wilson - Jumpin' From Six To Six

Papa French & Blanche Thomas - Bald Headed Beulah

Wild Jimmy Spruill - Hard Grind

Mojo Watson - You Know You Don't Want Me

Lonnie "The Cat"- I Ain't Drunk

Lafayette Thomas - Deep South Guitar Blues

Lafayette Thomas - The Thing

Lonnie "The Cat" Cation - The Road I Travel

Jesse Thomas - Jack Of Diamonds


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Comments

Pricknick's picture

Thanks for all the depressing news that's new.
Fortunately, I and many others already know the shit that's happening otherwise we might lose our collective shit.
No blues for me today other than the sky.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

joe shikspack's picture

@Pricknick

hey, there was that bit about the guggenheim offering trump a golden toilet... Smile

have a great weekend!

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orlbucfan's picture

the old vinyl records and labels. Smile What can I say about the neanderthal lunatics running/ruining the show/world for the rest of us? One comment about Rachel Maddow. I am no homophobe, but there have been gays every bit as warlike as the straights. Great example: the Nazis around Hitler. Rec'd!!

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Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.

snoopydawg's picture

@orlbucfan

Her best days are when she was on Air America. The "life during wartime" was a great part of her show. She carried that over to her first appearance on Keith's show and then her show while Bush was president. She totally ran away from reporting on thhe wars after Obama became president.

I watched the video of her basically jumping for joy when Obama sent troops to Norway and the other countries that are on the Russian borders.

My other problem with her is that she prattles on forever before she gets to her point. In the video above she goes on about how Stalin used to get dirt on people so he could blackmail them. The last tiny bit of her show is about the troop buildup.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

heh. it was a fake out. she was never against wars. she was against republicans. and she used her megaphone and her phony morals to cynically manipulate people. same with olbermann.

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joe shikspack's picture

@orlbucfan

heh, what i've found is that social identity markers aren't really indicative of much when it comes to the elite. the rule of thumb seems to be that poop floats to the top.

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NCTim's picture

Recent finds, for Friday on the other side of the swinging door.

Thanks Joe!

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The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -

joe shikspack's picture

@NCTim

great stuff! i love that western swing piece by the time jumpers!

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Azazello's picture

Here's more discussion on the Mattis Doctrine, or is it the Trump Doctrine ?
Whatever you call it it's a Declaration of Perpetual War and it seems to me like it ought come from Congress and not the executive. I don't think this shit is covered by the current AUMF.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3CZAa4nUWQ width:400 height:240]

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

joe shikspack's picture

@Azazello

no, it is not covered by the current aumf, there is just no way for the language to be stretched that far without breaking something.

on the other hand, i'd bet that the dems would be more than happy to declare war on russia.

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JekyllnHyde's picture

It seems to me that it has gone sour.

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A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma

joe shikspack's picture

@JekyllnHyde

i think that it is beyond sour, now - but somehow still very white.

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LeChienHarry's picture

@JekyllnHyde

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You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again you did not know. ~ William Wiberforce

If you can donate, please! POP Money is available for bank-to-bank transfers. Email JtC to make a monthly donation.

Raggedy Ann's picture

When I read the piece about the rich folks living in their gated communities, I thought about Herr Drumpf's wall. Build walls around your friends instead - that's a great idea! They can afford to pay for said walls. Brilliant!

Happy Friday!

Have a beautiful evening and weekend, folks! Pleasantry

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"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

NCTim's picture

@Raggedy Ann walk into a bar. Smile

They stumble across a lantern and a genie pops out. "I will give you each one wish, that's three wishes total," says the genie.
The fisherman says, "I'm a fisherman, my dad's a fisherman, his dad was a fisherman, and my son will be one too. I want all the oceans full of fish for all eternity."
With a blink of the genie's eye, "POOF" the oceans were teeming with fish.
Donald Trump was amazed, so he said; "I want a huge wall around the US, so that nobody other than the super rich, CEOs, and Wall Street bankers are permitted in our precious nation."
Again, with a blink of the genie's eye, "POOF" there was a huge wall around the US with no one allowed inside except Donald Trump and his rich buddies.
The immigrant asks, "I'm very curious. Please tell me more about this wall."
The genie explains, "Well, it's about 250 feet high, 100 feet thick and completely surrounds the country; nothing can get in or out."
The immigrant says, "Good, fill it with water."

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The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Friedrich Nietzsche -

joe shikspack's picture

@Raggedy Ann

heh, i like tim's idea as to what a wall might be used for. Smile

have a wonderful weekend!

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Azazello's picture

General Sir Nick Carter is a raving loon!

“The parallels with 1914 are stark. Our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War--but we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia… I think, we need to prepare ourselves to fight the war we might have to fight… And I think the 100th anniversary of World War One gives us a great chance to actually think about what that war might look like.”

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

joe shikspack's picture

@Azazello

i toldja not to look! Smile

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divineorder's picture

The article of interest about the Dems are not your friend has some interesting comments as well. Thanks for the link.

Got some bad news on the Global Warmer today, gonna need a clutch and maybe some transmission work. The local mechanic we trust can’t do the work because the truck plus the camper are two heavy for his lifts etc. He found some one hour away that can.

How’s you camper project coming?

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.

joe shikspack's picture

@divineorder

sorry to hear about the global warmer's fresh list of demands. well, thankfully you didn't find out about it in the middle of nowhere.

my camper is currently winterized and hanging out in my backyard waiting for the weather to warm up, at which point i will try to load it into the bed of the truck, tie it down securely and go for a shakedown ride or three.

have a great weekend!

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The Aspie Corner's picture

The anger is being deliberately misdirected by those who hold Der Drumpf's Murika by the balls.

Hell, there are kids I would just love to slap upside their fuckin' head for whining that Star Wars and Star Trek were ruined by *gasp* feminism and EssJayDubyas (Because the character Amilyn Holdo had purple hair and a black woman and an asian woman had a lead role respectively). I prefer to call it appropriation of trends by the porky producers and just straight up bad writing.

If these kids were growing up from the 60s to the 80s in the heyday of both, they'd likely have identical complaints just based on the not-white-guys simply being there. Off topic, I know, but everywhere I look I see shit like this and I want to punch my monitor.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

joe shikspack's picture

divide and conquer is the way that business gets done. it has been working well for the ruling class since time immemorial.

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enhydra lutris's picture

post it by the maintenance monster. For grins, go to https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609626/the-biggest-technology-failure... and scroll down to EOS coins. Worthless, though probably covered by Clinton's "Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000", huge volumes sold for huge bux. People knowigly buying abolutiely nothing, no doubt in hopes of catching the next bubble.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

mimi's picture

Good late night to the US East-Coast C99p readers.(grrr, I mixed up the time zones again. It's early morning Saturday at the US East Cost and late night Friday in Hawaii) It's late morning Saturday here in Germany, and, well rested, I managed to read through the truthout article: How the Pentagon Enlisted Trump to Continue Its Perpetual "War on Terror"

At the climactic meeting on Afghanistan at Camp David in mid-August, from which Bannon was excluded, Mattis, McMaster and Dunford pressed their advantage. Trump's opposing stance to intervention dissolved completely. He did not question the generals' plans for the indefinite continuation of the 16-year-old war, which they presented as necessary to prevent ISIS and al-Qaeda from having a "safe haven" in Afghanistan. They also showed Trump 1972 photographs of Afghan girls in Kabul in mini-skirts to convince him that Western values could prevail in Afghanistan.

This paragraph really touched my heart and my mind./s So my answer would be: May be those skirts are too short on values other than get the little "choses des hommes" (as a french speaking niece-in-law from sub-Saharan Africa called you know ... the manly thingies) a bit of stand-up drive.

Jeez. God save us from the mini-skirts. Who would have known the unintended consequences of wearing mini-skirts.

Thank You for the EB tonight. I realize that people comment less and less here. I think we have to post some mini-skirt wearing EB reader images to encourage folks to "speak up".

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k9disc's picture

Great, I bet jeers from the Masters of the Universe really hurt lil Donny's feelings. He so wants to be a kool kid.

But is anyone surprised that the Davos crowd is supportive of the corporate media? I mean, they pretty much are the PR department for the Davos elite. They couldn't do their work without that "fake news", and they'd be far less wealthy if the press did their job.

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu