Midnight Special - Antiwar Edition
Why try to reform the democratic party by electing "progressives" when the democratic party is a war/imperialism party? Trying to
elect "progressives" who will not oppose imperialism isn't going to change that.
Why not try to reform the republican party, it's also a war party? What's the difference?
Or does the difference have nothing to do with wars and imperialism and all the accompanying death, destruction and trillions of dollars, because the two parties are both the same with that. Therefore that can be ignored and the democratic party supported because of the "difference? Do you know what I mean?
Better run thru the jungle.
[video:https://youtu.be/TyDQs0ajxEc]
[video:https://youtu.be/LQUXuQ6Zd9w]
[video:https://youtu.be/o9Y2gontVXs]
[video:https://youtu.be/QTJcV3B6iEk]
Comments
I noticed that at Davos the number one issue was
wealth inequality, not that they're going to be involved in doing anything about it. They're humans and there's that camel thru the eye of a needle thing. But little mention of the unreal military and police state that has emerged this century, which of course they need.
I think anti-imperialism and anti-militarism has to take a front seat. All things considered. It's all interrelated so there has to be a broader focus as well to change the power structure. Power to the people.
Trump and his supporters want to bring back the fifties. We need to bring back the sixties.
The only thing I remember
having read or heard (even that I don't remember) about the dinner of Trump had with Europeman CEOs - as described here was that some of the CEOs were embarrassed when they understood everything was captured on camera. So, may be we have to find those CEOs instead of listening to these - as to be expected - CEO serfs, who are full of praise.
I saw just one image of that dinner in the German media.
How reassuring that at least "some" feel a little "ashamed".
heh, what can we do to not get discouraged?
Political theater will hit a peak Tuesday night
when Huffman gives Trump the what-for from their chamber of horrors, thrashing him over and over with a wet noodle.
The city IT manager is "really hurt" by rhetoric? My god the Democrats have totally lost it, completely. Why they even exist as a political party I do not know. Greedy money grubbers, the Democrat Party of California is Republican, it is WAR from here to eternity for the proles. Wanna help destroy the planet? VOTE D! good luck
mushroom cloud
Edited twice already, ka-pow: to add link to quoted article,
and she is not listed here, or maybe just not entered yet: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/fort-bragg/Here she is I think, maybe: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/fort-bragg/lynda-davis/ [cut the snark]
When she was a "Tech Support Technician". omg wtf I am punching all the way up to technician now. good times
Tell that to those who wanna found New California.
They think teh libruls are ruining their state.
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.
New California, same as the Old California
if you ask me that is just rotating bosses. This place is a cesspool of capitalist greed. Yes, the neoliberal Ds have effing ruined it, after decades of Rs! "She can't take it any more captain!"
I am so done with capitalism it ain't funny. Would rather not kill what's left of our watershed, but nothing will stop it now I'm afraid. I mean, humans will be gone by the time it heals.
How did fire insurance used to work in California? Pay thousands of dollars to the same agent over 15 years, life of the mortgage, and as soon as you pay off the bank... CANCELLED! That happened to my gf on her rural property, it should be illegal. We half killed ourselves clearing around the house as CDF instructed, had water tanks with proper fittings, everything up to snuff. But it is legal for the Financial, Insurance, and Real Estate industries here to flat out steal money from their customers. D-Values for the win.
Now, after the wildfire disasters, they redrew the state map so everyone has "access" to getting royally screwed, practically.
Theater is right. The lies and absurdity will be too much.
Personally I can't fathom listening to Trump speak. I'd rather have a boil transplant.
There will be zero talk from the democrats about war and imperialism as usual. Actually, the democrats are now the lead war party as set up by Obama and it's Russia bashing.
Off Topic - yesterday, Jan 27th, was Holocaust Memorial Day
nobody talked about that here in the OT of yesterday.
I just wondered because yesterday night (Satureday night) I happen to watch several Documentaries on German Tv about issues surrounding the Holocaust and didn't know why. Some clips of them I wished I could show and translate to those here, who wonder how the human mind works to completely lose any sense of guilt towards what those human minds were supportive of. Today (Sunday morning 10:30 am) I read about it having been Holocaust Memorial Day. Ok. Nobody memorialized it here?
Often I wonder how one could just edit those doucmentaries I dream of putting either a trnnslation over the original sound of those documentaries or English subtitles. I guess it's illegal, but I also don't know how to do it. That was supposed my retirement hobby. ... I am going to learn it somehow, some day.
I also accuse the documentarian film makers to often not say, when certain clips were filmed, by whom and which parts of the documentaries are "re-staged". As I haven't seen many of those since I was not in Germany since 1982, I understand much of the material saw the light only many, many years after German reunification, some as late as 2011. I think it's necessary always to say during a documentary, who filmed the clip and when the clip was used for what kind of documentary news clip by which producer and when and where. Many documentaries are by now means transparent enough.
Just saying. Didn't know where to put this. Just chatting.
Another Off Topic remark
While reading the Quartz article about Trump in Davos, an ad (by accenture) caught my eye and I clicked on it.
Well, I simply found it too disgusting. The ad said as its headline:
Great CEOs, right?
The ad's article itself said something about Applied Intelligence .
Great, what kind of intelligence is that? Ahh, an Artificial Intelligence-Human Partnership. Great.
For that kind of dough wouldn't you sleep with a robot and its algorithms too?
heh, intelligence ... seems in demand these days, there are multiples and more than nine of them available.
Theory of multiple intelligences
So, my emotional intelligence tells me that I have a smart-stupid intelligence partnership that works simultaneiously, which prevented me to read through this whole shebang of intelligent psycho-babble.
I log off now. Good Day.
Wow, I fell into
that rabbit hole! Thanks, Mimi!
Fuck all war, Al. These fucks don't give a rats ass about the destruction they inflict, as long as They make a buck, it's all good!
And don't look for help from the world, they're infected with the 'American Disease' as well.
Stop These Fucking Wars
peace
Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .
Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .
If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march
From what I've read, the money corporations will save
from the lower tax rates of the taxscam reform bill will largely go to shareholders, executive pay and capital investment in robotics and AI, not labor investment as Trump's supporters so delusionally think. What they're going to do is "help" more humans become unemployed and obsolete.
true that, Big Al /nt
Anti-war whistleblower Pvt. Chelsea Manning
is running for a US Senate seat in Maryland. After she revealed the full horror of drone warfare, Obama had her tortured in prison for seven and a half years. When freed, she said that she had no regrets.
"Please clap." -- Jeb Bush
Is she antiwar/anti-imperialism?
And if so, why is she running as a candidate with a prowar/pro-imperialism political party? I did a little search and couldn't find anything that definitively said she's antiwar/imperialism.
This is what she said in 2013, I don't know if she's changed her tune since then:
"Manning’s letter said that she considers herself first and foremost a “transparency activist.” “I don’t consider myself a ‘pacifist,’ ‘anti-war,’ or (especially) a ‘conscientious objector.’ “Now – I accept that there may be ‘peaceful’ or ‘anti-war’ implications to my actions – but this is purely based on your [Wright’s] subjective interpretation of the primary source documents released in 2010-11.”
https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2013/10/09/chelsea-manning-rejects-antiwar-...
@Big AlAnd if so, why is she
I don't know if she has changed. A lot can happen with an additional 4 years of isolation, torture, and rape.
However, what is...disconcerting is the fact she is running under the banner of the party that did those things to her.
I'll always have respect for her releasing those documents and showing off the horrors of what we've done. But following her journey with the Dems? Can't do it.
@Strife Delivery
The best revenge is bumping them from power to take it over in order to undo as much of their damage as possible.
Edit: The Psychopaths/Parasites That Be utterly took over what was billed as 'The Party Of The People' - why shouldn't The People take back their Party, make it of, by and for the people toward doing the same for their various governments throughout their country? Why let them continue to dog-in-the-manger everything they've stolen from everyone else?
Especially as they've made it virtually impossible for parties outside the Two-Party corporate Trade-Off Scam to even begin to get everywhere, to the point where even the American public thinks of other options in relation to the two 'officially approved' ones, as '3rd parties' for which they dare not vote, in case the 'wrong' evil gets in?
Get enough Progs in, using TPTB's own system for good instead of evil, and then Fair Vote legislation and the like can be passed, enabling real freaking electoral choice and actual democracy in the US for the first time ever.
But it takes undeniable electoral landslides to overcome the routine and ever more blatant electoral cheating - and the fascist fist is fast closing to crush the last pretense of respect for basic human rights and the final chance of salvaging the dwindling shreds of the global life support system...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
i do know that the tankies on twitter
have been calling her, and her campaign ad out as 'fascoid', although i'm agnostic on that. and this seemed to confirm a lot of that for them, although some may disagree:
only a small portion came thru w/ the embed code; here's the tweet's url:
https://twitter.com/YouSeemFine/status/956378618959138816
nice rant, though, i agree.
Heh.
Well, she's not going to become a senator anyway. I guess I can see how she could fall for the wrong story with that case. But it's not a particularly good sign for her overall judgment.
big war = big money
...and that is it in a nut shell. We can sell arms to both sides and really generate some profit.
So here we are illegally staying in Syria, promoting the Turkish invasion there, as we pretend to care about the Kurds. How much news coverage have you seen? Who has called out the US our illegal actions? Who has reminded us that we broke international law when we invaded Iraq in the first place?
It is a corrupt capitalist system that has purchased our politicians (and political parties) and run the government as their own cash register. We are the terrorists!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
@Lookout
Whoa, albeit with deep respect, I must point out that it isn't 'we' who are the terrorists - it isn't the American people, it's the fascists running the US show, infiltrating government and embezzling the public funds, legal system and military, among everything else. The American people and country are being used, propagandized and drained by these and the suffering and abuse of much of the 99% is painfully evident, and worsening.
I don't know about you, but (while this is simply my opinion, of course,) I find it rather frightening that, just as TPTB et al used terrorism and other propaganda to convince many Americans to surrender their most basic human/Constitutional rights to a police state militarized against the population on this same terrorism excuse and to reject those objecting to this destructive ploy, TPTB et al seem now to be using public knowledge of their own corruption, suspicion of which to be applied to all Progs running against it from within, and strategic, plausible-sounding propaganda attacks 'from the left' against Prog threats to the fascist State to convince Americans to surrender what's currently almost certainly their last best chance among the options that mostly are too slow-acting in a rapidly worsening situation.
Certainly, parties outside the Two-Party Trap must be built, and any and everything potentially constructive attempted, but under current and long-running conditions, there's virtually no way of building a new/older small party in time to even make an attempt to get in on debates (how long has the Green Party been trying, with Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein some years back held captive, handcuffed to a chair by police, throughout an entire Presidential debate, upon her showing up at the Presidential debate site?) or any 'permitted' media coverage almost certainly limited to the odd derogatory/libellous mention, if any is made at all - or before the internet, a tool proven useful for promoting virtually unknown political candidates running independent of corporate funding and control, has been rendered useless as anything more than a surveillance vehicle for entertainment to sell advertising and propaganda, with all challengers of such propaganda and the fascist State labeled as RUSSIAN!!! traitors (or whoever's chosen for Goldstein's role at the moment) to be disposed of, one way or another, preferably in haste and secrecy.
The Republicans have long preferred and arranged low voter turn-out among those groups unlikely to vote for them; the Clinton-category CorpaDems share this tendency, (as well as the same category of paymasters,) with them. All they're evidently concerned about is some degree of plausibility/deniability/'optics' for claims of candidate (s)electee legitimacy or at least the perpetuation of the results of even the most obvious electoral fraud being 'left as a done deal' to be 'fixed later'; always jam tomorrow, never today.
It's interesting that there seems to be a propaganda campaign appealing to likely Prog voters, regarding 'boycotting' the rigged electoral system by not voting at all, this effectively limiting the electorate to those supportive of Party 'brands', and in much the same manner that the notion of a Constitutional Convention - long planned by the Trilateral Commission and pushed by such as ALEC, and apparently feared by some to become a 'run-away Convention' which apparently cannot be stopped or controlled once started - has been promoted among the American public as a good chance to rewrite the Constitution to reinforce public protections - which the self-interests behind the aptly named 'Con Con' push wish to write out entirely, since the The People's Constitutional rights and governmental limitations they've been ignoring still form the basis and direction of legitimate US law.
And TPTB know damn well that if everyone showed up to vote Prog only every election, to clean that toxic Swamp of corporate predators, this would be impossible to plausibly cheat the people and world of, and that by this, the corporate candidates could be entirely removed from at least one Party within a few elections and The People take control of government at all levels, enabled by The People's support, to work for The People they were actually of, at long last - so of course TPTB'd rather everyone but their various brainwashed Dem/Repub Partisan voters stepped right out of it to make it easy for them.
Such manipulation has worked so well for so long, the thought of the public breaking free when the goal of global domination appears so close is making TPTB more than a little panicky, as has been rather noticeable, and they seem to be making great progress at quelling it, by - between perpetual RUSSIA!!! and the like - using probably the only 'boycott' TPTB have probably ever initiated or supported. The Bernie phenomena was unexpected, unprecedented, unimaginable, and people must be prevented from electing non-psychopaths, wherever possible, to prevent democracy from breaking out in America.
In this case probably incidentally, the Poors are now cut off from Medium, from Caitlin and the rest, apart from 3 articles a month, as I depressingly discovered yesterday, in using two of 3 free articles; access to actual and essential information and free discussion for those needing it most is vanishing apace, even apart from censorship; in too-many countries, probably most people are either barely or not actually getting by and certainly can't spare a penny for access to anything on the internet when they can't cover basic needs and keep falling further behind. This will continue to worsen, in all areas, if the global draining process of this looting phase continues...
If the psychopaths/parasites in government are not pushed out and replaced by Progs eager to act in the public interest, The People will be permitted to quietly withdraw from politics in a political 'boycott' serving the corporate parties/PTB interests in being assured of absolute political/military control but assuredly not be allowed to build communities or systems outside of the goal of maximizing corporate profiteering, both of which - informed political engagement and any degree of independent solidarity among The People - TPTB have been so determined to eliminate in achieving Total Control over every facet of Life itself.
And we will not long have a global life-support system, never mind a safe anything in the interim prior to such as the remaining still-potable water and adequate global oxygen replacement running out. There's nowhere to safely hide on this for-profit murdered planet, not even for TPTB, were they capable of realizing it.
Will this promising beginning at solidarity among citizens - all desiring a decent life in a sustainable democracy, even if a number of views and various goals differ among individuals, as must be expected - simply be the final example of covertly propaganda-'managed' Progs, visionaries and all, splintering amid despair and squabbles to become disparate and powerless victims again, as the once-fertile world sinks into industrially/militarily poisoned and ultimately airless sterility? That's something only we can individually decide, even if acting en masse. Life on Earth is at stake, and may not last another decade, if The Psychopaths and Parasites That (shouldn't) Be are left in their usurped place to drag us all down on their short-sighted path to hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLZI2z19vbQ&list=RDyLZI2z19vbQ#t=38
Thinks he's off to heaven in his Cadillac coffin... but he ain't going far. Seems appropriate.
Also:
Apparently, the Carter Center has said that they wouldn't even try to monitor US elections because the election infrastructure is such that they cannot verify the vote. As we already know, the US comes in dead last among industrialized democracies for election integrity.
A landslide win by a Prog is required to be so obvious that it cannot be denied, and that means solidarity of, by and for various of The People running against the corporate interest/billionaire candidates selected to specifically act against the public interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHLGgKuuQbE
TPTB have their endless, ravening, pathological greed, where there's never enough, they must have it all and cannot bear that anyone else has anything else, not money, rights or even health and life, when not immediately useful to them.
All we can say is 'enough is enough'; otherwise, our silence will continue to be taken as inertia, much as the right of peaceful protest has been, where not co-opted, simply taken by the military response so typical of the fascism we need to recognize in order to overcome it by non-violent means.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
running for local spirit catcher
put out a net for those with burned wings. Soar that sore.
@QMS
Somebody who worked at a 1st Nation sweat lodge once made me a dream catcher; I'm trying to keep the good ones, for comfort...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
That'll cool your feathers!
Keep a kachina in the pillow for dream flavors
I should have written US MIC
I understand it isn't we the people, and I agree with your analysis.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
From an article in The Guardian:
Manning calls her politics “radical anti-authoritarianism”. Asked to explain, she grew animated, her voice crescendoing: “The United States has the largest and most expensive military in the world, but we always want more. We have the largest prison system in the world, yet we want more. We have the largest and most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world by far, and still we want more. How much is enough? That is my moment – we need this to stop.”
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/19/chelsea-manning-intervie...
"Please clap." -- Jeb Bush
Sounds kind of like Bernie Sanders,
Her letter I referenced above pretty emphatically stated she's not antiwar and nothing she said recently refutes that. I think it's a reaction to her releasing those documents to wikileaks about the Iraq war which she explained in her letter doesn't mean she's antiwar. She would fit right in with the hypocritical democratic party.
an addition a café commenter dropped in an open menu:
‘MSU scholars find $21 trillion in unauthorized government spending; Defense Department to conduct first-ever audit’, msutoday, dec. 2017
when nick turse (then at tom dispatch) dug thru the budget several years ago, he'd found the actual spending was about double the publicly stated expenditures.
Saw that. It's either fucked up accounting documentation
or they're getting extra, a lot of extra, money outside the budget process. My hunch is fucked up accounting, not that they don't get money outside the budget process, but I doubt they'd actually document the dispersal of black money.
But I haven't read their entire report.
@Big Al
What happens to all of that CIA drug money? Could such as that be laundered through this in order to help fund essentially private armies of terrorists, assassins, various pay-offs, etc.?
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.