SUPREME FARCE

SUPREME FARCE

 There's precious little faith in the courts these days. Fundamentalists are destroying it.

 Alito Attacks Marriage Equality, COVID Orders, and Reproductive Rights in Speech

(Chris Walker, Truthout.org) 

"Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delivered an impassioned and alarming speech on Thursday evening that touched on a number of hot-button political issues — an unusual move from a Supreme Court justice that provoked sharp rebukes from a number of legal experts.

The justice’s words, delivered virtually as a keynote speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, made suspect warnings over encroachments on individual liberty in the United States. Alito criticized Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality, for example, and discussed his concerns over restrictions being issued by state governments in order to deal with the coronavirus pandemic."

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The United States of America is a cult. A set of strongly held beliefs based on myths and falsehoods. Its politics is simply a cult of personality. Our soap opera news services provide puerile entertainment, devoid of meaningful content, while moneyed interests pull on the strings of power without scrutiny or accountability. We no longer even expect our politicians to represent their constituents. 

The long anticipated corporate coup is here. If you don't like what your government is doing, blame the corporate donors that control it. And if you're hoping that law and order will save you from the ravages of criminal overreach, well, good luck asking cult members, with lifetime appointments, to curb abuses of power.

 The RNC and DNC are cynical mechanisms oligarchs use to con you into believing you're participating. Kamala Harris will likely, perhaps shortly, be our president. Biden was a prop, and not a convincing one. She dropped out of her primary before the orchestrated mass exodus, because her numbers were abysmal. So, someone who left the primary due to lack of interest in her campaign, will more than likely be our president. That's what happens when corporations are the parties. They do not run party elections like a company, they are companies. They love taking your money, but they only pay attention to the billionaires.

It's time to stop supporting the Duopoly!

Movement for a People's Party

Or there's this to look forward to:

EXTINCTION REBELLION

EXTINCTION REBELLION

  Is the human race run?

 * * * * * *

We're looking at Billions of People not being able to Survive'

- Peter Carter, Expert IPCC Reviewer

(Extinction Rebellion interview on YouTube)

"Peter Carter, M.D. and Roger Hallam discuss the science and ethics with regards to climate emergency for all of us struggling to understand what's actually going on, what needs to happen and what we need to do.

Every month now records and disasters are happening and we don't have the time to sit around and pretend it's all going to go away – because it's not and Peter’s mission now is to spread the full terrible truth about the extreme risks and magnitude of the global climate and ocean disruption emergency.

Peter Carter, M.D. is a retired family physician who practised medicine first in England and then on both coasts of Canada (in Newfoundland and British Columbia) for almost 40 years.

When his sons were born, Peter became actively involved in peace, environmental and sustainable development issues, especially as they relate to children's health. (Fatherhood created that urge to leave the world a better place as a legacy for his children.)

As a founding director of CAPE (Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment) and, more recently, as founder of the Climate Emergency Institute, Peter has presented on sustainable development, environmental health policy, biodiversity, and climate change and ocean issues at international science and climate change conferences in Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

Peter has been following the global warming and climate change research since 1988. His approach to assessing climate change is based on environmental health and human rights protection. He provides climate science information to several websites and organizations, and synthesizes climate change research for laypeople.

Peter was an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Climate Change Assessment (AR5, 2014) and the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5ºC. Also in 2018, Peter published Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival, which he co-authored with Elizabeth Woodworth."

The Childish Mania of Hope

CHRIS HEDGES: The Childish Mania of Hope

Corporate oligarchies throughout the world are destroying the natural world for profit. That humanity is part of the global ecosystem doesn't seem to have occurred to them.

We don't have to look up the term omnicide in a dictionary, all we have to do is look around us.

______________________

Chris Hedges on 'The Childish Mania of Hope'

(The Katie Halper Show on YouTube)

"Journalist Chris Hedges talks to me, Professor Gerald Horne and Nando Vila about "the childish mania mania of hope which is crippling and disempowering. Part of the problem is we're not adult enough to face what's in front of us and if we can't face what's in front of us then we can't respond in an effective and meaningful way." Hedges then reviews what's in front of us: "we're heading towards the collapse of civilization except for this time, because of the climate,  when go down the whole planet's going with us." On a lighter note, Hedges talk being a war correspondent, Gramsci, Aristotle and what James Baldwin teaches us about hate groups."

* * * * * 

Chris Hedges "The Politics of Cultural Despair"

(Media Sanctuary on YouTube)

"Author, activist and dissident Chris Hedges spoke at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY on October 16, 2020.  In this talk he examines the cultural and social forces that have given rise to extremism in the United States. He explores the myriad of factors that led to the proliferation of neo-fascist militias, extremist organizations, demagogic leaders, vast social divides defined by hate, a hyper nationalism and virulent racism as well as a mass media that has descended into burlesque and fans the flames of social disintegration.  Meghan Marohn moderates a Q&A following the talk."

 

MATCH GAME

MATCH GAME

I’m an old human who feels tremendous remorse that we, as a species, possess such a profound and suicidal lust to destroy the planet and ourselves. Comfort may still exist for many millions of the most well-off denizens of planet Earth, but the signs are there that this condition is evaporating.

The following gentlemen, much older than me, express their remorse over what we have wrought with enviable eloquence. Check them out and wonder how so many old farts are blind to, or uncaring of, their contribution to The End Times.

"If We Don't Protect Nature We Can't Protect Ourselves"

 (Harrison Ford | Extinction Rebellion)

“The Last and Most Important Advice I Will Ever Give”

(Dr. Meyer Hillman | Extinction Rebellion UK)

 David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet

(Attenborough Film.com)

"Celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough has a broadcasting career spanning over six decades. He has visited every continent on the globe, exploring the wild places of our planet and bringing the wonders of the living world to audiences worldwide through ground-breaking natural history series. His work includes: Life on Earth, Planet Earth and more recently the Netflix original documentary series Our Planet.

During his lifetime, Sir David Attenborough has seen first-hand the monumental scale of environmental change caused by human actions. Now for the first time, he reflects on the devastating changes he’s witnessed and reveals how together we can address the biggest challenges facing life on our planet.

Produced by Silverback Films and WWF, David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet shares Sir David Attenborough’s greatest story yet – his witness statement for the natural world and vision for the future."

HOME OF THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

 HOME OF THE BRAVE NEW WORLD

 The Rolling Constitutional-Fascist Coup in the World’s Most Dangerous Nation
(Paul Street at Counter Punch.org)

"Let us not pretend that the Constitution is our great people’s trump card in the struggle against Trump’s rolling white-nationalist coup or that Trump is not relying on it to stay in power. Or that Trump and his allies aren’t using the constitutional framework inherited from the profoundly anti-democratic 18th Century U.S. Founders to their authoritarian advantage.

In his haunting 1958 book Brave New World revisited, Aldous Huxley warned of a kind of fascism wherein “the quaint old forms – elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts, and all the rest – will remain” while “the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, and mind manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.” It was a poignant alarm to raise, but we should not underestimate the significant extent to which America’s “quaint old forms” – so quaint as to date from the time of horse-drawn buggies and Black chattel slavery before the cotton gin – are actively enlisted in the authoritarian project today."

* * * * *

Enough with the Holy Founders' Undemocratic Constitution
(Paul Street at Telesur English.net)

"Jefferson, Madison, Adams and other U.S. founders (including even the state-capitalist Alexander Hamilton) would be revolted by the crass commercialism and mass-marketed manipulation that lay at the heart of contemporary major-party U.S. politics.

Still, we should not imagine that the founders were champions of anything remotely like popular self-rule. Democracy was the last thing they intended.  Drawn from the elite propertied segments of late British colonial North America, the delegates to the U.S. Constitutional Convention shared their compatriot John Jay’s view that “the people who own the country ought to govern it."

A CONSERVATIVE ICON/MORON

 

William %uckley Jr.

A Conservative Icon/Moron

William Buckley Jr. was arguably the most articulate conservative commentator ever to appear on the boob tube. That he was an insufferable ignoramus makes watching him lose every debate a pleasure akin to watching the witch melt in The Wizard of Oz.

James Baldwin vs William F. Buckley Jr. (1965)

 

Gore Vidal vs William F. Buckley Jr. (1968)

 

Noam Chomsky vs William F. Buckley Jr. (1969)

 

BONUS VIDEO

Malcolm X’s Addressing Police Brutality (1962)

 

BONUS COMEDY VIDEOS!

 

Brilliant SCTV parodies of William F. Buckley, Jr.

 

Firing Squad: School Busing

 Firing Squad: Meat Loaf

INVERTED TOTALITARIANISM

Sheldon Wolin

 

 

Democracy incorporated : managed democracy and the specter of inverted totalitarianism

(Semantic Scholar.org)

 

"Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliche. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level. Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come. In a new preface, Wolin describes how the Obama administration, despite promises of change, has left the underlying dynamics of managed democracy intact." 

 

A Bill Moyers interview with Sheldon Wolin.

 

Sheldon Wolin: Fascism by Design 

(Sheldon Wolin - YouTube short video)

 

* * * * *

Sheldon Wolin on Corporate Influence on Democracy

(Bill Moyers interviews Sheldon Wolin - YouTube long video) 

__________________________

Paul Krugman unwittingly pulls the mask off modern fascistic imperialism.

NYT's Krugman Pilloried on 9/11 Anniversary for Claiming No 'Mass Outbreak of Anti-Muslim Sentiment' in US After 2001 Attacks

Anti-Muslim hate crimes soared after 9/11, and thousands of Muslims in the U.S. were detained—and some tortured—in George W. Bush's futile anti-terror dragnet.

(Brett Wilkins, staff writer, Common Dreams.org)

"New York Times columnist Paul Krugman faced withering criticism Friday after he claimed that there was no "mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence" following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

"Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly," Krugman tweeted on the 19th anniversary of the attacks that left nearly 3,000 people dead in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, and led to U.S. wars of choice in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in which at least hundreds of thousands—and perhaps as many as 2 million—people have died in predominantly Muslim countries."

* * * * *

Cost of war: 37 million displaced by the U.S. "War on Terror" since 9/11

David Vine - author

 "The United States of War"

on Democracy Now! 

September 11, 2020

(YouTube)

"American University professor David Vine is the co-author of a new report that found at least 37 million people in eight countries have been forced to flee their homes since the start of the U.S.-led, so-called Global War on Terrorism in 2001. "I think most people in the United States, myself included, have not really reckoned with the total damage that these wars have caused," says Vine. The U.S. currently has 800 military bases around the world, "more bases than any nation in world history," he notes. "These bases have not only enabled war, not only made war possible, but they've actually made war more likely — made war a far too-easy-policy choice."

__________________________

It's a myth that following 9/11 everyone supported a war waged against a vaguely defined noun.

I know I didn't and I remember I wasn't alone.

Protests against the Iraq War

(hyperleap.com)

 

We shouldn't be fighting people. 

We should be fighting against poverty and pollution.

We should fight to ameliorate the effects of climate change.

 

We should be fighting for a future.