Friday, June 30, 2017

OMG! OMG! OMG!

Protect Your Pets
WELL 
A New Treatment for Dogs Scared by Thunder and Fireworks
By JAN HOFFMAN
A new drug, Sileo, has been developed to help with canine noise phobia. But you play the key role in making your pet more comfortable.

Trump Charged With Rape, Sodomy, Female Abuse, Hate Crime and Holocaust Denial!

U.S.

Trump Interrupts Call to Compliment Female Reporter’s ‘Nice Smile’

 

Establishment Neo-Lib-Cons Shocked, Call For Impeachment...

Again...

Yet...

Still...

etc

Syrian Warning Halted U.S. Nuclear Attack, Officials Say

White House Warning Halted Syria Chemical Attack, Officials Say

Photo
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, center, in Brussels last month. He said on Wednesday that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria “took the warning seriously.” Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s national security officials declared on Wednesday that a White House warning this week to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had succeeded in stopping a chemical weapons attack by the Syrian government.
“They didn’t do it,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters as he traveled to Belgium.

Monday, June 26, 2017

As Real As The Easter Bunny: The "Free Market" Delusion

We've all endlessly heard that the "free market" (formerly known as capitalism, before the system to which the term refers brought the label into widespread disrepute) is the only system consistent with "human nature," that is, that people allegedly act selfishly all the time. The only alternative to grotesque inequality under the "free market" is a Soviet-style dungeon state, which is no alternative at all, so stop complaining.

The main problem with this "analysis" is that there is no "free market," a myth that belongs up there with the tooth fairy in terms of its (lack of) substance . . . The U.S. did not develop its economy according to "free market" prescriptions. It developed the way every other developed country did - by radically violating free market prescriptions and using state power to protect its fledgling industries until they were strong enough to stand on their own . . . Anyone think we could have become a superpower by selling fish and fur on the "free market"? The only places close to "free market" conditions are Third world basket cases . . . Communism is another story, basically state-run capitalism, which developed faster in both China and the former USSR than in any "capitalist" country, but which obliterated personal liberty. Anyway, it should be obvious that in the era of "too big to fail" enterprises there is no "free market." The profitability of the big banks is directly tied to their guaranteed taxpayer bailout. So for you believers in the tooth fairy free market, stop being so gullible!

Furthermore, the idea that everyone acts selfishly all the time is just another pile of steaming bullshit promoted endlessly by "too big to fail" enterprises sucking on the tit of the Nanny State while praising themselves for "rugged individualism." If it were true, parents would steal food off their children's plates in order to "get the advantage" on their weaker competition. But how many parents act that way?

Sunday, June 11, 2017

Islamophobic Neo-Cons, Russophobic Neo-Libs: USA! USA!


All of us are potentially endangered by those driven to violent acts called hate crimes when committed by individuals,  but social acts of hatred and depravity are much greater threats and exclude none, no matter where we live or what moral, spiritual or market values we entertain.

Still reeling from recent bloody terrorist attacks in societies in which most people were previously shielded from retaliation for the horrendous violence they performed on foreigners, the world faces an even greater threat from an empire falling from global domination while its minority controllers manipulate their people into accepting behaviors which would call for clinical isolation or solitary prison confinement if practiced by an individual. The continued forcing of more citizens into an alleged asylum of near dementia endangers far more than what some of us call “our” democracy.

This manic state in which a minority believe themselves controllers of their nation’s material life has existed since America’s electoral origins, but we have always been under the domination of the wealthiest minority in the country and the national democracy thought to be “ours” by so many has never included a majority of our people. Even the most rudimentary understanding of arithmetic  - let alone history – reveals this fact without necessity for a degree in mathematics. In fact, any schmuck with a calculator can do the math.

There has never been a presidential election in the history of the USA in which a majority of the electorate chose the winning representative of minority capital. And most recently, while millions held their noses to cover the stench of voting for the despicable or the deplorable lesser evil offerings, far more voted for neither. 231 million Americans are deemed part of the electorate, which means being 18 and older and with enough mental capacity to select burgers, pizza, guns, tacos, pet food or political candidates at the market. If we can afford them. Of that number, more than 165 million chose neither the republicrat nor the demublican. That’s far more than double those exercising the alleged power of the majority and voting, as usual, in the minority.


Our alleged political democracy is even less so than our economy, which is really a dictatorship of a tiny minority. In fact, it’s even worse since all of us are forced into the economy and cannot choose to opt out, like voters, while its control falls to an even smaller cabal than the one running the political system. They are part of the same anti-democratic minority that dominates politics, but there is a bit more room for small entrepreneurs to get a foot in the door of economics than is possible in politics. There are very few gourmet-taco-street vendor political parties and those radical minorities choosing to contest for the presidency and national offices are given as much chance by the system as a mom and pop store has going up against Amazon or Wal-Mart.

The breakdown of the political economic system has been in process for hundreds of years, decades, or the past few months, depending on the consciousness and vocabulary of the critic, and has become so much more serious that minority ownership, and thus a major part of the manipulated-by-media public, is reduced to wondering which boogie man – Putin? Trump? Napoleon? – is to be blamed for the state of collapse. Thus the frenzy to impeach the rich, arrogant clod who got to the white house despite established power’s desire not to have him there. They first got rid of the potentially democratic menace of Bernie Sanders but were not equal to the task of dumping an even greater threat from one of their own whose arrogant and ignorant honesty strips the cosmetic façade from the ugliness of so much reality. The social disease revealed is too much for those who must label him a pathological liar because they cannot, refuse to, or are incapable of facing reality. This egotistical fool may well be the most honest resident we’ve ever had at the public housing we call the white house and that honesty is partly why established power views him as danger because he neither minces capital’s words nor even tries to cover up its horror with the usual political double talk that calls bloody murder peace and blatant dishonesty the truth.

Trump’s victory is making a mockery of the fiction of American leadership in morality, which serves as euphemistic foundation for the empire’s bloody horrors of mass murder and national destruction performed while calling itself global director of ethical culture and insisting the rest of the world follow its immoral lead. And getting even the previously thoughtful among its home population buying into the most inane explanations for why their world – the one called “our” democracy – is in a state of near collapse. It supposedly has everything to do with foreign intervention in “our” multi billion-dollar democratic process. You know, the one that reduces half a million citizens to living in the street while we moan about Trump’s sexism, or reduces 20% of our children to lives of poverty while we visit therapists to discuss our depression over Trump’s xenophobia, or stresses out a population that can afford to go into debt for luxury goods while most americans are in debt in order to survive. You know, that massive dysfunctional family that worships weapons, cosmetics and pets while nearly half its population is low income or poor? The one that’s saving refugees escaping wars we organize, finance, start, and perpetuate? It’s as though the people on the Titanic were at each other’s throats to get a new captain for the sinking ship. Maybe an African American transsexual Jew could keep it afloat? If a savior captain isn’t available, maybe some toilets shared by the crew and the paying guests will do the trick? One thing’s for sure: once we get rid of the Russians, the Koreans, the Iranians, the Palestinians, the Chinese, and much of South America and especially this captain, the boat will rise to the heavens and everything will be just fine.

America has become an even dumber reality show than the one that helped put this president in charge of the circus. Further comic relief from TV and cartoonist clowns won’t help. We need a transformation of our political economy that starts from the roots of the problem. They have to do with our origins, our history and our behavior, not those of particular CEOs of capital’s national corporation, and very little if anything to do with any foreign nation. If we’re even mildly serious about a threat being marketed as Climate Change, we’d better stop listening to the people responsible for it who offer toothless reforms like the Paris Accords, and work for the radical and revolutionary political and economic change we need to solve not only that long range problem, but far more short term ones that threaten us right now.