RP Thomas/Talent City Hall

Thomas likes the lines in his photo.  So do I.


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Shutting it Down

(photo by RP Thomas)

“People have to go to the capital city,” said Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Rebellion Extinction and a researcher at King’s College London, who spoke to me from London. “That’s where the elite is, the business class. That’s where the pillars of the state exist. That’s the first element. Then you have to have a lot of people involved. They have to break the law. There’s no point in just doing a march. They have to literally close down the streets. They have to remain nonviolent. That’s absolutely crucial. Once you get violent, police and the state have an excuse to remove you. It’s got to be cultural. You make it into a sort of Woodstock affair. Then thousands more people come onto the streets.”--CH/RH

A new Woodstock is brewing. Or not.


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Satie

One of my favorite composers.


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31

Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd.

There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border.

Illegal crossings are not at “emergency” levels; they are at a fifty-year low.--PS

Paul Street is off to the races with his list of actual emergencies that destroys Trump's insane "national emergency" at the border with Mexico.


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She's Right

Ilhan Omar is bad-ass in a good way and we need more like her in Congress.

This piece centrally concerns Elliott Abrams, though my prediction of who would win the 2016 election was as wrong as the majority of prognosticators.

Abrams is bad-ass in a bad way and should be rotting in jail.


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Two Soldiers, Three Wars

The Great Con of American Patriotism.  A must read (or listen) at Truthdig's "Scheer Intelligence."






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Within Sight

The news, however defined, always contains a fair amount of pap. Since Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency, however, the trivia quotient in the average American’s daily newsfeed has grown like so many toadstools in a compost heap, overshadowing or crowding out matters of real substance. We’re living in TrumpWorld, folks. Never in the history of journalism have so many reporters, editors, and pundits expended so much energy fixating on one particular target, while other larger prey frolic unmolested within sight.--AB

I'll trust a retired U.S. military officer who has been there and done that before I'll trust certain hacks at the New York Times and the Washington Post.

It's odd, and it's right in front of our noses, but mainstream journalists have their hands tied. Any attempt to untie them will result in expulsion and loss, and of course most of them don't have the will, talent or vision to take on roles similar to Chris Hedges (ex-NYT) or Robert Scheer (ex-LAT), great journalists hounded out of their mainstream jobs who have reinvented their careers as writers grounded in dissent--and are the better for it one might add.


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The Dead Center

You didn't think the new useful Cold War II had any other purpose, did you?  Any political thought left of Hillary "The Cackler" Clinton's DNC is immediately branded "Communist."

This is the dead center's idea of strategic thinking.

On a good day, telly personality Rachel Maddow, carrying the message for the dead, might simply say universal medicare is a pipe-dream and leave it at that.  She's full of shit, of course, as are the old-guard Dems in general, led by the cauterized Speaker, Pelosi.

It's a mess, and guaranteed path to another term for you know who.  Ha ha.


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Halfwit Alert!

The Reaganesque slogan is a joke, ain't it?  Dignity at $7.25 an hour (national). Right. Another DNC-- groomed conman and insurance company shill tormenting US Americans.

Fuck you Sherrod!  Do the math, stupid.


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Bombs Bursting in Air

Super Bowl season is like the holidays — a celebration shared by people more accustomed to arguing than sitting down together. As one of the few transpartisan, mass media events left to our tribal culture, the biggest TV night of the year can’t help but channel the political tensions most of us endure all year long.--PC

The billionaire football owners (and Trump) are different than you and me, so what they think is good for their sport and the nation is different as well.

If you're like me, you'll watch the Super Bowl with an edge of embarrassment--for the commoners of the nation, and for the billionaires who are stupid enough to think that anyone other than the "deplorables" find their shit show entertaining, or otherwise of useful merit. You see, what they're selling is perpetual war, and if we know anything about war it is that it has no intrinsic value other than to stack up the dead. Among the dead will be innocent foreigners and delusional and jingoistic young Americans who trade in their shift at McDonald's for a life of heroic-global adventure and the opportunity to "kill, kill, kill" bad guys wherever they may live, usually in a ghetto someplace far, far away.

But don't dwell on it too much or you'll run the risk of missing an ordinary football game hyped to the ceiling with false meaning.

Pass the chips, please.

Your weekend reading.


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Plutocrats Stick Together

Friday, The New York Times continued its long, predictable tradition of backing U.S. coups in Latin America by publishing an editorial praising Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This will be the 10th such coup the paper has backed since the creation of the CIA over 70 years ago.--AJ

The New York Times always supplies the interventionist op-eds for the military-industrial complex.  It's what they do, have done historically, and will continue to do until people wean themselves off the outhouse rag and start thinking for themselves, i.e., quit buying the corporatists' spew.


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20th Century Blues

The greatest song by the greatest rock band alive (miraculously).

Watch it stoned.  Pretty darn cool.


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Another Coup in Progress

Once again it looks like the US ruling class is about to plunge its spear into the heart of a South American nation.

Sanctions, like those imposed on Iraq between the Gulf and Iraq Wars, are already softening up the prey for the final thrust; in all likelihood, the economic elites will send troops to Venezuela to fight for their cause, i.e., US hegemony.

Those same elites will call the action an "humanitarian intervention," as our boys and girls gun down Venezuelans in their neighborhoods, and get gunned down in return.

Our boys and girls have been indoctrinated and they will perform as "heroes" in the making.  Few will understand until it is too late that they have been used again, like all the others post WW II, to prop up the world's most violent nation-state in it's quest for empire.

And dumb-ass US citizens will let it happen.  They always do. They love it.


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Weekend Assignment

Read, read all of it you simple-minded knaves.  You have nothing better to do with your ignorant, wasted lives!






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Paul Street

An MSNBC roundtable last Sunday morning ended with a “Democratic strategist” offering curious commentary on what’s happened to the right- and nationalist-leaning U.S. and Europe over the last two years. Things were going great, the strategist said, under the leadership of Barack Obama, who embodied the best of enlightened Western civilization. Then Vladimir Putin came along and single-handedly ruined it all by passing Brexit, electing Donald Trump and fueling “populism” across Europe.

The suggestion begs a darkly interesting question regarding the nation’s reigning “corporate-managed democracy,” as Alex Carey calls it. Who’s more absurd: those who blame corporate-ruled America’s continuing systemic decline on a mythical invasion of Mexican and Central American rapists or those who point the finger at the supposedly all-powerful president of Russia?--PS

Trump has far too many halfwits, ignoramuses and frightened sheep convinced that the invasion of the criminally insane Latinos is imminent. The Russophobes are on their own.

All of it is, as Street says, absurd to the nth degree.


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