The lovely tree-studded Bolshoy Devyatinsky Lane in Moscow is getting a new name. In a ceremony in early March it will be renamed Seth Rich Boulevard in Honor of Seth Conrad Rich, the slain activist who leaked the derogatory emails of the Democratic National Committee that proved election rigging against Hillary Clinton's presidential opponent, Bernie Sanders.

Rich was killed near the White House a year and a half ago. He was not robbed. He was conscious and speaking when the police arrived, but it is unknown what he said. The Democratic Committee worker was shot by an unknown assailant(s) just days before he was to testify in a lawsuit brought against the DNC for election rigging during the Democratic Primaries — and twenty days after it was learned that the downloaded emails were in the hands of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. The DNC has denied any involvement in his murder, which has never been solved by the police or the FBI, who are still in possession of Rich's personal computer..

TPTB have been suppressing class based arguments for a hundred years. With the demise of communism, the efforts of the corporate media to throw "class" into the "dustbin of history" have been unopposed, despite massive and ever growing class inequality. Economics has been twisted into a Manichean fight between laissez faire globalists and the demonized other, communists/socialists/New Dealers. This black and white narrative means that alternative worldviews are almost unknown.

(This is a reprise from 2013 that I’d run into accidentally while looking for a vignette of a salt-of-the-earth local neighbor, ‘Albert the Blacksmith’ that  I’d written years ago in order to send it to a friend from the Mancos Valley wayback machine…who is in dire need of some laughing time.  Just above it, and to the left, was this same title, and I’d looked at with a furrowed brow, as it hadn’t rung a bell with me…at all.  But when I read it, it seemed even more germane to the current mainstream, acceptable Amerikan zeitgeist than then.  I’ll modernize it at the bottom.)

Obama, in the final weeks of his presidency, created the Global Engagement Center under a truly Orwellian name bill - The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act.

Bloomburg has an article, posted today, How Steve Bannon Rescued Roy Moore’s Campaign Against All Odds.

Let's be honest: reality is hard.
It's difficult doing all your own thinking, and being ostracized for it.
It's much easier to just accept the mainstream consensus on DKos, or MSNBC, or Fox News, or Comedy Central, or wherever.

CNN, others hyperventilate over President Trump’s perfectly fine fish-feeding

Years ago I wrote an essay titled, "I just wrote a check for U.S. Imperialism and War". It was around April 15th of a year during the Neverending War Period, of which we currently reside, when I had to write a check to cover the federal taxes owed the previous year.