In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook.
Whenever the corporate media start saturation hagiography, I become suspicious. The non-stop lionizing of Anthony Bourdain is the latest instance that set off my dissatisfaction with the conventional narrative. For the record, I have watched some of Bourdain's stuff. I found him to be simultaneously arrogant and self-effacing, simultaneously leftish and rightish - an icon of the rebel consumer crowd that Thomas Franks pilloried so well in the 1990s. In short, To me, Bourdain was just another sardonic bit of consumerist froth with huge dollops of dishabille and attitude, which is so essential in our egocentric, look-at-me society.
I had this dream last night about being back in high school. This time around I had a special vision where I could see inside other student's souls. It was a dark, uneasy nightmare where I could look at other kids and get these visions of what they were capable of doing in the future. Not the good things, the bad things.
Something stinks to high heaven in Washington DC. I mean it stinks even more than the usual compost heap called DC.
I opened up my Twitter account and to what do my shell shocked eyes, do I see?
Creepy Uncle Joe is the ultimate insider of the Democratic Party establishment, so when he endorses someone you know that he's not doing you any favors.
So who has Biden endorsed? Darren Soto is one.
Soto is notable for only one thing - who he's running against.
The Hard Right, and many Neoliberal Centrists, say we can't stop using fossil fuels because of the economic harm that would create. But now we have evidence they couldn't be more wrong.
I haven't trusted John Oliver since he did a hit piece on Jill Stein last year.
So I didn't bother to watch his show on Venezuela, but I did watch this breakdown of it.
The oligarchs have been working toward this moment for a while now. They have patience and almost unlimited resources. The Koch brothers provide an excellent example of the way we are controlled by corporate interests. Then there's the Mercers and their insidious manipulation of the system for their personal profit. Can't forget Eric Prince and Betsy DeVos and their efforts privatizing schools and the military. Oh yeah what about Jeff Bezos and his corporate empire? …and on and on. These are our rulers. Let's learn a little about them and their strategies as we explore the weeks happenings.
Bernie is often criticized as being weak on foreign policy. When is the last time you heard a politician say anything this strongly anti war ?
Jimmy Dore gives Bernie major props.
I am on my phone, and I can’t get an embed code. I will embed this with my laptop later when morning comes..
It was fun to read this piece in the NYT from two researchers of suburban politics. "Turning Affluent Suburbs Blue Isn't Worth the Cost" argues that, in sum:
A heavily-biased poll says voters love the big GOP tax cut.
I ran a website for years called Equitable Principles.
This is a reply I made to my brother in an email. It was a conversation about a story how "high income earners are leaving high tax states". My brother is a conservative fairly right wing former republican (like alot of former democrats) who is strongly for limited government and taxes with the conservative belief that people should be able to "keep what they earn".
Pity the poor Pentagon. You can have too much of a good thing.
The War Pigs in northern Virginia have been so successful at blowing up innocent women and children around the world that they are running out of bombs.
Evening all. I don’t know if it’s true, but there seem to be more shades of green than any other colour.
Anthony Bourdain hung himself today in Paris, France. This tragedy has brought the issue of suicide back into the mainstream, where it will be quickly forgotten again, probably by tomorrow.
Hello there. I recently read some of the meta about what's been going on. One thing that caught my attention was the lamented absence of Hecate, Phoebe Loosinhouse, Dallasdoc and others people miss. I can't speak for them. No one person's reasons for writing or not writing on a blog are the same, even one with as generous a community as this one. But I can talk a little about the reasons for my own infrequent appearances here of late as compared to past years.
The most important issue to voters is health care and Democrats own this issue.
-- read Chris Wright's recent essay on Counterpunch, The Stupefying Mediocrity of Barack Obama. Here I will give this piece a go-over, pointing out its highly amusing word choices. It's not as if Wright is wrong, or as if his politics were suspect, or anything like that.
Wall Street is freaking out that workers are being paid too much.
You read that right.
Greedy workers who want to both eat and afford a roof over their heads are the problem with this economy. Workers are shameless. They don't care about the real victims.
(Cascadian National University Lecture Hall)
Billionaires Charles and David Koch own the GOP. But this election year they took time out of their busy schedule to publicly endorse Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.
For the first time since 1992 I wasted my vote - I voted for some Democrats.
Three of them. None of them got as much as 3% of the vote, but that's not the problem.
The problem was that I voted strategically. You know, "pragmatically". I voted for some Berniecrats in the hope that I could help accomplish something in the Democratic Party, rather than my normal strategy of voting 3rd party down the line.
I just read JtC’s rant and started to compose a comment.
President Trump is true to his word in one case.
No, he isn't draining the swamp. Washington has never been more corrupt.
What I am talking about is rolling back those free trade agreements.
