Friday, December 18, 2015

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Tender is the Night


When the man tried, he was great at everything: fighting, loving, drinking, dressing, pimping for once-in-a-century Presidents.


Of course, he was the greatest male pop singer of his century.









And -- when he tried -- Frank was one of the great movie actors of classical Hollywood.



Happy 100th Birthday.

Monday, December 7, 2015

Heaven. . .


. . . Is Eleven.

Heaven, the sun, the moon, and the stars . . .

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

When Paris Comes Home


Chris Hedges:
It is nearly certain that we will endure, sooner rather than later, another catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil. The blundering of our military into the Middle East; the failed states that have risen out of the mismanagement and chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan; the millions of innocents we have driven from their homes, terrorized or slaughtered; the bankrupt puppet regimes we have equipped and trained that will not fight; the massive amounts of munitions and military hardware we have allowed to fall into the hands of jihadis—thousands of them carrying Western passports; and the myopic foreign policy whose single tenet is that more industrial violence will get us out of the morass created by our industrial violence in the first place means that we, like France, are in for it.

All the major candidates for president, including Bernie Sanders, along with a media that is a shameless echo chamber for the elites, embrace endless war. Lost are the art of diplomacy, the ability to read the cultural, political, linguistic and religious landscape of those we dominate by force, the effort to dissect the roots of jihadi rage and violence, and the simple understanding that Muslims do not want to be occupied any more than we would want to be occupied.

Another jihadi terrorist attack in the United States will extinguish what remains of our anemic and largely dysfunctional democracy. Fear will be even more fervently stoked and manipulated by the state. The remnants of our civil liberties will be abolished. Groups that defy the corporate state—Black Lives Matter, climate change activists and anti-capitalists—will be ruthlessly targeted for elimination as the nation is swept into the Manichean world of us-and-them, traitors versus patriots. Culture will be reduced to sentimental doggerel and patriotic kitsch. Violence will be sanctified, in Hollywood and the media, as a purifying agent. Any criticism of the crusade or those leading it will be heresy. The police and the military will be deified. Nationalism, which at its core is about self-exaltation and racism, will distort our perception of reality. We will gather like frightened children around the flag. We will sing the national anthem in unison. We will kneel before the state and the organs of internal security. We will beg our masters to save us. We will be paralyzed by the psychosis of permanent war.

In wartime, public discourse emits the insane sputterings of King Lear: “Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” Demagogues bellow for more bombs and more enemy corpses. The military and the war profiteers provide them. The public cheers on the slaughter. Victory is assured. The nation rejoices when the newest face of evil is eradicated. But when one face of evil—Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Abdelhamid Abaaoud—is exterminated, another swiftly rises to take his or her place. It is an endless and futile quest.

Violence generates counterviolence. The cycle does not stop until the killing stops. All that makes us human—love, empathy, tenderness and kindness—is dismissed in wartime as useless and weak. We revel in a demented hypermasculinity. We lose the capacity to feel and understand. We pity only our own. We too celebrate our glorified martyrs. We endow our sanctified dead with the lofty virtues and goodness that define our national myth, ignoring our complicity in perpetuating the ceaseless cycle of death. Our drones and airstrikes, after all, have decapitated far more people, including children, than Islamic State.

Jihadis troll websites and the dingy corridors of housing projects outside French cities and in the slums of Iraqi cities looking for young people discarded by war and neoliberalism, just as Army recruiters sniff out our own discarded and dispossessed and send them off to fight. Disenfranchised youths, offered the illusion of heroism, glory and even martyrdom, promised a chance to be armed and powerful, are seduced by these scavengers. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe have been cast aside by globalization as human refuse. They are worth nothing to the corporate state. They are denied jobs, benefits, dignity and self-worth. They are easy prey for the siren calls of those for whom war is a lucrative business. They dress in uniforms. They surrender their individuality. They experience the intoxicating drug of violence. They assume a new identity—that of warrior.

By the time they see through the illusions and lies, by the time they grasp how they have been used and betrayed, they are broken, maimed or dead. No matter. There are legions behind them waiting eagerly for their chance.

We have lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq as a unified nation has been splintered into antagonistic and warring enclaves. It will never be reunited. We ensured that Iraq would become a failed state the moment we invaded and disbanded its army, police force and government bureaucracy, the moment we foolishly attempted to dominate the country by force—including our arming and organizing of Shiite death squads that carried out a reign of terror against the Sunnis. The Iraqi insurgents, al-Qaida and, later, Islamic State, easily recruited the masses of enraged dispossessed whose families have been torn apart since the 2003 invasion, whose childhoods have been colored by extreme poverty, fear, a lack of education and basic services and horrific acts of violence, and who correctly see no future under continued U.S. occupation. Islamic State now controls an area the size of Texas, carved out of the remnants of Syria and Iraq. All our air attacks will not drive it out.

The situation is no better in Afghanistan. The Taliban controls more of Afghanistan than it did when we invaded 14 years ago. The puppet regime in Kabul we arm and support is hated, brutal, corrupt, involved in drug trafficking and crippled by cowardice. It is also heavily infiltrated by the Taliban. The Kabul regime will crumble the moment we depart. Trillions and trillions of dollars, along with hundreds of thousands of lives, have been squandered for nothing, even as climate change moves closer and closer to ensuring the extinction of the human species.

We waded into conflicts we did not understand. We were propelled forward by fantasy. The occupation of Iraq was supposed to have seen us greeted as liberators. We planned to implant democracy in Baghdad and have it spread across the Middle East. We were fed the absurd promise that the oil revenues would pay for reconstruction. Instead, our folly spawned political, social and economic collapse, widespread poverty, massive displacement, misery and a rage that gave birth to radical jihadism in Iraq and throughout the region.

The disintegration in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan has forced us to form a de facto alliance with Iran to battle Islamic State and the Taliban. This disintegration has upended our goal of overthrowing the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad. We now function, along with the Russians, as Assad’s surrogate air force. And because Hezbollah fighters, whom the United States and Israel condemn as terrorists and have vowed to destroy, are integrated into Assad’s army, we also serve as Hezbollah’s surrogate air force. The Iraqi regime is dominated by the mullahs in Iran. The objectives used to justify these conflicts—including the promise to root out radical jihadism—have all failed.

In endless war, yesterday’s enemies eventually become today’s allies. This is a theme George Orwell captured in his dystopian novel “1984”:

    At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge, which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

This will not end well. The massive violence we employ throughout the Middle East will never achieve its goals. State terror will not defeat individual acts of terror. More and more innocents will be sacrificed, here and abroad, in a furious and futile campaign. Rage and collective humiliation will mount. As we continue to fail to blunt attacks against us, we will become more aggressive and more lethal. Internal enemies—especially Muslims—will be demonized, endure hate crimes and be hunted down. The most tepid forms of criticism and dissent will be criminalized.

We are hostages, like Israel, to an accelerating death spiral. Only when we are exhausted and depleted, when the numbers of dead and maimed overwhelm us, will this lust for blood end. By then the world around us will be unrecognizable and, I fear, irredeemable.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Rendezvous


Jim Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable:
For at least a decade, JFK’s favorite poem had been "Rendezvous" by Alan Seeger, an American poet killed in World War One. Kennedy recited "Rendezvous" to his wife Jacqueline in 1953 on their first night home in Hyannis after their honeymoon. She memorized the poem, and recited it back to him over the years. In the fall of 1963, Jackie taught the words of the poem to their five-year-old daughter, Caroline.

On the morning of October 5, 1963, President Kennedy met with his National Security Council in the Rose Garden of the White House. Caroline suddenly appeared by her father’s side, and she said she wanted to tell him something. He tried to divert her attention while the meeting continued, but Caroline persisted. The president smiled and turned his full attention to his daughter. He told her to go ahead. While the members of the National Security Council sat and watched, Caroline looked into her father’s eyes and said:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air-
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath-
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
After Caroline said the poem’s final word, “rendezvous,” Kennedy’s national security advisers sat in stunned silence. One of them said later the bond between father and daughter was so deep “it was as if there was ‘an inner music’ he was trying to teach her.”

The first 100 minutes from the CBS Network, 52 years ago:

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Gutless Wonders


Chris Floyd:
So France, still in mourning, welcomes refugees, while America's big swaggering he-man "warriors" quiver with fear and panicky bluster. What a sickening display of utter cowardice -- and rank, hatemongering ignorance -- we've seen in the past few days. No wonder so many of our rough-tough super-patriots need to strap guns to their groins in order to walk the streets: they are all, every one of them, sniveling little cowards. As for the gutless governors, shivering behind vast walls of armed security while they deny entry to the victims of terror and war, they are a shame upon the nation, a pack of sinister fools wallowing in moral filth. A wretched, heartbreaking spectacle.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Cui Bono


After months of Vladimir Putin and Russia's coalition-of-the-unwilling kicking Obama's Syrian ass, here comes ISIL / ISIS / (CIA) to save the day. Seven locations across security-obsessed Paris explode in carnage, perfectly timed, perfectly executed. Perfectly provocative. And perfectly believable -- if you can believe CNN or Fox or MSNBC -- that a rag-tag Islamic dirtband can pull this sort of op off, without the connivance or knowledge of MI6 or the Mossad or DGSI or NSA. Hence will come the re-push from the Western Capitalist Reich for re-control of the Syrian situation, with more bombs, more drones, and more troops.

A Parisian nightmare. And yet a daily nightmare for Syria and Turkey and Iraq and Yemen. But I suppose those dead do not eat the right sort of brie in the right sort of cafes.

Paris is burning. And Allen Dulles lives.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Absolute Zero


Ralph Nader and Chris Hedges talk about the Corporate Coup that's reduced the meaning of American voting to absolute zero.

Friday, November 6, 2015

The Wire Says Goodbye


Not only the best English-language television series ever, but one of the greatest works of popular art, in any form, from any time.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Treats





Friday, October 30, 2015

The Devil II


As Allen W. Dulles roasts in hell (or runs it), historian David Talbot speaks with Len Osanic and Jim DiEugenio on a terrific episode of Black Op Radio.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Up the Rebels

Chris Hedges and Dr. Cornel West, the New School, New York City, October 2015.

Friday, October 16, 2015

The Devil

"That little Kennedy, he thought he was a God." -- Allen Dulles
The most important political history in many a year was published this week by HarperCollins: David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. Talbot -- author of the magisterial and deeply moving Brothers (2007) -- uncovers the life and enormous power of the most evil American of the 20th-century ('though Ronald Reagan comes close), capitalist gangster Allen Dulles. Dulles, flat-out WASP Nazi and little girl molester, spent his diabolical career destroying democrats and democratic movements across the world (and most certainly at home). A short list: through Sullivan & Cromwell, he bankrolled the Third Reich's extermination of home-grown and international anti-Hitler conspiracies; helped destroy the post-World War II freedom movements in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, and West Germany; overthrew (or tried to) anti-capitalist governments and leaders in Laos, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Cambodia, Iran, the Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Brazil, Korea, India, Egypt, Haiti, Iraq. Dulles's crowning achievement: the murder of the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy; and two days later Kennedy's accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

David Talbot speaks with Amy Goodman.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Unto Others

One of 1000s of extreme human moments from The Wire:



Human moments. Not House Negro greasy-pole climbing moments featured in Orange is the New Black. (Four Emmy nominations in 2015 while even the show title is worthy of a Fashionista.) And surely no "How to Be a Hedge Fund Hipster" lessons, for all the office-operator mediocrities out there, bellowed about in Game of Drones. (Twenty-four 2015 Emmy nominations, a dozen wins, including Best TV Drama. Yuck yuck.)

David Simon's The Wire ran from 2002 to 2008. Number of Emmy nominations: two. Numbers of wins: zero.

Zero.

Friday, September 25, 2015

St. Francis

Who could have imagine it, prayed for it? More than 50 years after the death of Pope John XXIII (all three Witnesses for Peace in 1963 -- John XXIII, Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy -- would be dead or deposed within a year), 50 years of Paul VI's rollback of Pacem in Terris, the murder of John Paul I, John Paul II (the CIA Pope) and his support (née silence) regarding all things Reagan/Thatcher, all things corporatist and privatized, and fascist altar-boy Joseph Ratzinger ~ we have Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Pope Francis.

Who was it who said "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Look at the pile-on as Francis tours the world: over here we have Leftoids & Femoids bleating about sexual abuse of parishioners, gays, the separation of Church and State, gays, abortion, divorce, gays, and female ordinations. Over there we see Donald Tramp and the Fox News baboons howling about sexual abuse of parishioners, the separation of Church and State (from US reactionaries, no less!), abortion, divorce, and the Holiest of Holies: The Free Market. Yet to define the Catholic Church by the likes of its more recent Popes and their fellow pederasts is like defining togetherness along the lines of the Manson Family. In the face of virulent attacks from Rome (most of them directed by Ratzinger), the magnificent socialist liberations across Central and South America flow from Liberation Theology as does the continuing model of the Cuban Revolution.

The timing of the original attacks on the Church, ignited by the child abuse scandals, has always smelled. One thinks of Chomsky's defense of government: "There's a lot of things wrong with government, but what the US Elites hate about it is what is right: that government is reachable and controllable by the people, that it is the only weapon available against increasing privatization and inequality." The attempt to destroy the public face of the Catholic Church -- a jihad coincidentally began under the most extreme WASP war administration in US history -- emerged to destroy what is right with the Church: its remaining preference for the poor, its involvement with anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-capitalist movements across the world.

As far as is known, no part of the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the destruction of Palestinian and other Middle Eastern cultures, homes, women, children or old men. Nor is the Church part of the Holy WASP Capitalist Crusade against the world in places like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan or Afghanistan. (Or Greece.) Let's face it, the buggery of children has gone on forever in the hallowed halls of:

Yale Skull & Bones
The Council on Foreign Relations
The TriLateral Commission
Sullivan and Cromwell
The CIA
The Carlyle Group
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Presbyterians
Methodists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans

And all the other WASP bloodsuckers who have caused the deaths of billions of people over the past centuries.

So who could have hoped for someone like this Pope, a man who speaks of tenderness and modesty, the end of capitalism and corporatism, who embraces once again Liberation Theology and the Church's preference for the poor, who prays for the destruction of the "altar of money" and a return to a love of the earth.

Let us embrace him and pray for his safety and for the safety of all those he embraces.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Money Makes the World (Trade Center) Go Down


And yet another week of grease, lice, halitosis, body odor, shit, piss, bed bugs, scum, vomit, and how po' widdle us was attacked because of all we have; because of how jealous the low-life darkies of the world are of it.

Actually. . . .

Friday, September 11, 2015

Abby is Back

More beautiful and righteous than ever.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Then and Now


First Day of Elementary School, September 2010.


First Day of Middle School, September 2015.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Some Kind of Hero


A 21st-century movie and television culture (The Golden Age) has basically adopted the following persona: "I'm smarter than you are. I'm more educated than you are. I dress better and have far better taste in music and movies. I'm cooler. My career is everything, plus I've memorized every episode of Game of Thrones. I'm on my second divorce and my kids are everything, except when they're not. I Twit, Kindle, and Kopi Luwak. And you don't" with no janitors, nor watchmen, salesmen, grocers, bus drivers, plumbers, mechanics, railroad clerks, pharmacists, cloth cutters, electricians, security guards, pipe fitters or painters in sight (or site) . . . all around us nothing but TV children of Reagan, a generation faced with no draft, no economic hardship if they play the game well enough (and Golden Age binge-addicts do nothing but play the game), no industrialization, no assassinations, no race or gender revolutions, and remote control drone-wars with no body bags allowed to be seen. . .

Yet there is David Simon, our hero. Better than that: our Balzac.

10

While we're at it. . .

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Trump Flower

Monday, August 10, 2015

Noir ~ and How It Gets That Way


Per David Walsh and Joanne Laurer, at WSWS.

Perhaps the greatest noir of all:

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Dung

Chris Floyd.
We are living in a world gone through the looking glass when the most strident, unequivocal -- even scatological! -- denunciations of capitalism and its discontents are coming from … the Bishop of Rome. While Bernie Sanders pushes centrist notions as "radical" reforms and Britain's so-called Labour Party tries to recover from the defeat of Michael Dukakis -- sorry, Ed Milliband -- by kowtowing even more abjectly to corporate power (and demonizing the only leadership candidate not bending the knee to Big Money), Pope Francis is out there literally likening the capitalist system to shit.

Speaking in Ecuador at the World Meeting of Popular Movements, a gathering of groups representing the poor, the dispossessed and others pushed to the wall -- or off the cliff -- by the Davos Dominionists who now hold sway over so much of the world, Francis said that behind the neoliberal economic order, "there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called 'the dung of the devil.'"

I don't suppose we'll be hearing anything like from Hillary at her next Wall Street fundraiser. Francis went on to give a perfect description of the system that our bipartisan transatlantic elites have done so much to impose on the world -- by force or, as in Greece, by blackmail. Thus saith Mr Bergoglio:

    "An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home."

The pope, introduced by Ecuadorean President Evo Morales (who was sporting a Che jacket), kept hammering at a slogan that he said must undergird a new economic order: "Land, Lodging and Labor," guaranteed for all. Lenin would be spinning in his grave (if Stalin hadn't mummified him) to hear the distinct echoes of the slogan he coined just about 100 years ago: "Land, Peace, Bread."

In September, Francis is heading to Washington, where John Boehner may now be re-thinking his plans for a gala "inauguration-like setting" for the Pope's speech to the joint houses of Congress. Barack Obama too might find it awkward when he recalls the pope's words in Ecuador about the kind of liberty-stripping, corporate-coddling trade pacts he and Boehner have been pushing so relentlessly. Francis called these treaties by their true name: “the new colonialism," which, like Old Cloot himself, takes many forms:

    "At times [the new colonialism] appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain 'free trade' treaties, and the imposition of measures of 'austerity' which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor." (Francis also apologized for the old colonialism in the “so-called conquest of Americas,” and for the Church’s part in the many evils committed against the indigenous peoples by the European invaders and their successors.)

To escape the capitalist dung we’re now mired in, Francis called for a "truly communitarian economy" where "human beings, in harmony with nature, structure the entire system of production and distribution in such a way that the abilities and needs of each individual find suitable expression in social life." All this, plus guaranteed "access to education, health care, new technologies, artistic and cultural manifestations, communications, sports and recreation."

Ordinary people controlling, er, the means of production and distribution? Guaranteed access to all available social goods? Perhaps the pope should have borrowed Morales’ jacket for the speech. But despite the rhetorical resonances, Francis is no Leninist. For one thing, Lenin would never have accepted the idea that the kind of wholesale transformation of society the pope is seeking could be accomplished without a revolutionary vanguard laying down the party line. Yet Francis concluded his call to action with a remarkable statement from someone who supposedly has a direct line from God on how the world should be ordered:

“Neither the Pope nor the Church have a monopoly on the interpretation of social reality or the proposal of solutions to contemporary issues. I dare say that no recipe exists. History is made by each generation as it follows in the footsteps of those preceding it, as it seeks its own path.”

This actually might be the most radical thing that Francis said in the speech, although it’s unlikely that he grasped the deeper implications of the remark. For, taken seriously and literally, it not only undermines the doctrine of papal infallibility but the authority of any ideology or belief system, religious or secular. It looks not to divine truth or the putative laws of history or economics, but to the creative — and always provisional, ever-changing  — attempts of imperfect human beings to make something better of the turbulence of existence they are thrown into. (This creativity would include, of course, proposed solutions to such “contemporary issues” as contraception, abortion, gay marriage and several other “social realities” on which Francis still holds hurtful, hidebound doctrine-shackled views.)

Francis called the workers and peasants in his audience “social poets,” creating new structures, new realities, in the ruins that “the world market” has made of their lives and their societies. They cheered, then gave him a miner’s helmet, which he promptly put on.

It was perhaps the most noble — and hopeful — headgear any pope has ever worn.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Wonderful Life


Chuck Workman's earnestly detailed and paced picture (2014) of the art and times of George Orson Welles includes all the basic points and people one would expect. (Surprise guests include "critic" Elvis Mitchell, Steven Spielberg ~ the idiot who spent $55,000 at auction for a phony Rosebud sled ~ on Citizen Kane, George Lucas on Touch of Evil, and some crone named Julie Taymor on God knows what...) Yes, a rather straight and narrow glimpse of one of the most baroque artists of the American Century. Welles's life was a wonderful and necessary one, filled with miracles. So, good enough.

Monday, July 6, 2015

No!

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Home of the Frave

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

The Troika

Chris Floyd.
The people of Greece are being driven to their knees by a gang of brutal religious extremists, willing to destroy whole nations for the sake of something that doesn't even exist. Yet the 'civilized' world cheers these barbarians on as they despoil the cradle of Western democracy.

Greece is facing total collapse unless it knuckles under to the draconian demands of the bizarre cultists known as the Troika, a sinister union of three extremist groups (the I.M.F., the European Central Bank and the European Commission) who seek to impose their harsh and rigid way of life across the world. They insist that control of a nation's wealth be given over to a few powerful emirs and the Troika's favored moneylenders in its richer satrapies.

All measures designed to aid the common good and build a decent life for ordinary citizens are ruthlessly suppressed by the Troikaists. Public resources are forcibly sold off -- at knock-down prices -- to foreign interests or local lordlings. The fact that millions of people are left destitute, living diminished lives in crumbling infrastructure, growing sicker, weaker, more hopeless, even dying from want and neglect -- none of this matters to the ruthless fanatics. All that matters is obedience to their will, and adherence to the Troika's bleak and joyless system for the regulation of life, which its learned theologians call austerity.

The supremely comfortable, self-satisfied burghers and bankers who control the Troika's factions, along with their dutiful servants in government, are watching, impassively, as the Greeks twist and turn in the poisonous shirt of Nessus that the cult has forced upon them. Already brought low by years of austerity adopted by their leaders in a vain attempt to placate the Troikaist hordes at the border, this week the Greek people face the final reckoning: complete submission, which guarantees more ruin, or a terrifying leap into the unknown, refusing the demands and suffering whatever acts of revenge the Troika will wreak upon such heretics.

It's a remarkable situation. Millions of human beings are suffering, and for what? To repay a few powerful financial institutions for the loans they gave to the Greek government -- loans which, by odd coincidence, were actually spent almost entirely on servicing previous debt to those same financial institutions. Very little of it went into the Greek economy, as the NY Times notes. It was a case of taking on new debt to pay off old debt (a situation not unknown to many of us, I'm sure), as the country slipped further into decay.

Yet it was not enough for the cultists to loan money for Greece to give right back to them; they also required that Greece restructure its society, government and economy to fit the Troika's neoliberal straitjacket. Taxes had to be raised. (For ordinary folk, of course; rich Greeks -- like the rich everywhere -- can still use complex tax-dodging schemes to stash their cash offshore.) Government spending -- especially on such useless trash as pensions, welfare, education, healthcare -- had to be ruthlessly slashed. The labor market had to become more "flexible" -- that is, stripped of job protections and workers rights, making it easier to fire people or pay them less. Deregulation and privatization were also commanded.

But why? The ostensible reason was that these austerity measures would make the Greek economy roar like a lion in his prime. But even an economist is smart enough to see that making a bankrupt country even poorer and more desperate while preventing it from injecting bailout funds into its economy is a recipe for ruination, not a blueprint for growth. And the past four years have proved that Troika’s austerity sharia has not and cannot produce “growth” in a broken economy with 25 percent unemployment. (The same percentage as in the US during the depths of the Great Depression.)

And why this time limit on the repayment? Even on the relatively small downpayment (around $1.5 billion) being demanded immediately -- a payment that the bankrupt nation simply can't pay at the moment. Why not stretch the payments out -- way, way out, if necessary? After all, Britain only paid off its post-World War II rebuilding loan from the United States in 2006 -- exactly 50 years after it was given. Why couldn't Greece be given the time to work out its economic problems -- in its own way, without mutilating its society -- and pay back its debts over the long haul?

But of course it’s not about the money.  As many have already pointed out, the Troika knows that Greece is bankrupt and can’t pay back the money. (Unless, as with the UK, they are given generations to do so, on easy terms that don’t require them to bleed their people dry and gut their own society.) No, the current squeeze on Greece is about the system, the imposition of austerity sharia that is the lodestar of the Troika’s blinkered religious beliefs. If Greece will not accept the system, then it must be punished, it must be made an example. In short, it’s an act of terroristic PR, like the ISIS beheading videos: a warning that this is the fate of all those who refuse to submit.

What, in the end, is at stake? Literally nothing. Numbers on a computer screen. It’s not as if Greece has a hoard of German gold hidden in the Acropolis and won’t give it back. It’s not even as if the Greeks have warehouses full of banknotes that they can send back to the Troika. All of it — the debts, the loans — are abstract notions. The debt could be written off with the press of a delete key, or reduced by the subtraction of a zero or two on a digital spreadsheet. So could the losses of the lenders. (Although why shouldn’t the lenders lose their money? You put up your money, you take a risk, and if the venture fails, you lose. Isn’t that the ‘free market’ way? But of course there is no free market; there are only systems of exchange that powerful entities seek to control and manipulate to their advantage. There is no free market in any system where some enterprises are ‘too big to fail’ and must be bailed out by the sustenance of ordinary citizens.)

Money is a myth, sustained by the faith of those who accept whatever is the arbitrary measurement of value in any given time or society. (Beads, shells, axes, coins, ingots, strips of paper, liquid crystals dancing on a screen.) Yet throughout history, these myths have led to the deaths and despoliation of millions of innocent people. It is a myth that perpetuates inequality, servitude, suffering, and the dominion of a powerful few. The latest instalment of this ancient tragedy is being played out right now in Greece, where tragedy was born. And the extremism being displayed by the Troika is just as mindless, destructive and merciless as that of the violent Islamists that the ‘defenders of Western civilization’ have done so much to foment in their global power games.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

20th Century Americans


If there is a Noam Chomsky of American film criticism, it is WSWS's David Walsh. The economics behind the projects and the promotions are what Walsh is great at and he's recently written a rather unusual two-part essay celebrating Orson Welles @ 100. A must read.

Friday, May 29, 2015

Summer

Happy 98th Birthday.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Royal Flush

Friday, May 15, 2015

Podemos


A very bright light in the international darkness: Pablo Iglesias of Podemos.

Monday, May 4, 2015

Joy


"All great films can be divided into one of two categories: the agony of making cinema; or the joy of making cinema." -- Francois Truffaut
Welles's last completed film seems to be an answer to the question: "If the distinction between real art and fakery is one that can only be made by 'experts,' is the faker who outwits the 'experts' a real artist?" -- an answer provided by the movie's stars: Clifford Irving, Howard Hughes, Jorge Luis Borges, Elmyr de Hory, and Welles girlfriend Oja Kodar.

F for Fake (1973) is a magic box, a jewelled sanctum, the cave of Orson Welles's imagination: a privileged place of transmutation, memory, and contemplation -- its space opening and shuttering like a concertina or a zigzag screen, the director bathing otherwise uninteresting people and things in a joyous radiance, a harmony and exactness parallel to the satisfactions of the world. One measured voice, quietly and exuberantly telling why this light, this color, this sound, this intrusion is precious in the life of the mind and of the heart. Here we watch a consummate artist intoxicated by his found vocation. All Welles passions -- movies, theater, magic, circus, radio, women, painting, literature -- are fused. F for Fake is not his best film, but its aura may be his most romantic, not because of the content or the narrative thrust, but because it is the final courtship of an artist with his art.

Every filmmaker who has followed him has done just that: followed him, for he is one of the hinges of movie history: there were movies before him and movies after him, and they were not the same.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

The Touch

"What the camera does, and does uniquely, is photograph thought."
-- Orson Welles
Perhaps the strangest great American film from the classical period, made while the classical period was passing away. 1958, a year of movie astonishment, a year giving us more great or near-great American works than we've been given over the past 30 years combined: Touch of Evil, Some Came Running, Tarnished Angels, Bitter Victory, Man of the West, Bonjour Tristesse, Buchanan Rides Alone, Wind Across the Everglades, Paths of Glory, Vertigo: each work siding with -- embodying -- the eccentric and lawless, the sinister, the personal. During the Age of Conformity and Consensus.

From the first (legendary) shot, four minutes in length, Welles's Touch of Evil explodes with loathing, weirdness, and disgust as it heroizes the lonely fascist cop (in this case, literally a pig) over the organization man, he with the beautiful wife and the fetish for doing all things by the book. Not for a moment do we experience the world as does Mike Vargas. It is all Hank Quinlan: a Goya-like vision of an infected universe.

Good Welles friend Peter Bogdanovich and great Welles scholar James Naremore discuss the work.



Touch of Evil (1958)

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Thief of Hearts

In the theater, you know, the old star actors never liked to come on until the end of the first act. Mister Wu is a classic example -- I've played it once myself. All the other actors boil around the stage for about an hour shrieking, "What will happen when Mister Wu arrives?," "What is he like this Mister Wu?," and so on. Finally a great gong is beaten, and slowly over a Chinese bridge comes Mister Wu himself in full Mandarin robes. Peach Blossom (or whatever her name is) falls on her face and a lot of coolies yell, "Mister Wu!!!" The curtain comes down, the audience goes wild, and everybody says, "Isn't that guy playing Mister Wu a great actor?" That's a star part for you! -- Orson Welles

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Once in a Lifetime



The American Film Institute is neither a museum nor an institute, it is a mausoleum preserving in aspic every conventional, unexamined, and corrupt notion expressed about American movies and television since time began.

Yet even a busted clock is right twice a day . . .

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Lost and Found


Sometimes you get lucky. Three years before Citizen Kane (1941), 22-year-old Orson Welles directed a stage adaptation of William Gillete's 1894 comedy called Too Much Johnson. The production was to be an interchange between the live action in the theater and a projected movie. In a pre-Broadway test done in Stony Creek, Connecticut, mechanical problems prevented Welles's movie from being shown. The audience hated the show anyway. Broadway was canceled. And the movie was lost.

Until recently. Joseph McBride with the details.

Let us pray we can someday get as lucky with the missing 45 minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Inglorious Goobers

Chris Floyd, here are.
It's amusing to see how our staunch progressives -- who believe so deeply in a level playing field and fair play, who railed so vociferously against crony capitalism back in Bush-Time -- are now twisting themselves in knots to dismiss the stories about that long-festering font of corruption, the Clinton Foundation. Suddenly, what was once evil and corrosive -- peddling elite insider influence for private profit -- is just old hat, no big deal, business as usual. Indeed, Digby, the very avatar of "anguished support" (Tarzie's deeply apt description of our progressives' blind self-tethering to a party whose leaders -- like the Clintons, like Obama -- are so servile to Big Money and war profiteering that they make Dick Nixon look like Diogenes), points us to an "excellent piece" by the ever-overexcited Charles Pierce, esquire (sorry, I mean Charles Pierce of Esquire), which sounds this very theme.

Pierce, wearing his prodigious classical learning lightly, informs us that "every politician since Cato" has engaged in the multimillion-dollar crony fluffing and policy twisting that the Clintons have been practicing for years. This kind of thing -- say, taking more than $100 million in "donations" from an uranium magnate who then reaps gargantuan profits when the Clinton-headed State Department greenlights the sale that makes said magnate richer and gives Russia (led by a man that Hillary ignorantly likens to Hitler) control of one-fifth of America's uranium production capacity -- is just "business as usual," says Pierce. "Every politician" does this, every single one of them -- and has done since the high and palmy days of Rome. You may agree or disagree with Professor Pierce -- but no one can deny that this is a deeply informed, richly nuanced piece of analysis.

Pierce, renowned in progressive circles for his sharp-edged acumen, here plays the naif -- Goober Pyle Goes to Washington. He scratches his head like a simple, honest feller befuddled by the silver-tongued talk of fancy-pants nabobs, and says that, as far he can tell, the detailed stories in the New York Times and Washington Post are just peddling a nebulous conspiracy theory, something about how President Hillary would be beholden to foreign donors or that the couple were pocketing Foundation cash or something. This is not, of course, the import of the stories, which lies in their fresh confirmation and amplification of the Clintons' particularly successful example of elite influence-peddling. But a simple shrug of the shoulders blows this straw man away, and Pierce is off to the races in his time machine, reliving the false accusations that assailed the Clintons back in Starr-Time.

And of course, many of the allegations assiduously peddled by partisan operators and the respectable press in those days were false, or petty, or pointless. And yes, the Clintons beat the rap (except for Bill's law license), and ended up with Bill as the most popular politician in America (a rank he still holds, incidentally) and Hillary in the US Senate.

But all of this was a sideshow. The learned Theban of Esquire somehow omits some salient facts from his magical history tour. For even as right-wing agents were needling Clinton about failed land deals and Oval Office canoodling, Clinton was overseeing the deaths of up to half a million innocent children (and many more innocent adults) through the draconian sanctions he imposed on Iraq. This, even though Clinton and US intelligence knew in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all of its weapons of mass destruction. As I noted back in 2005, confirmation of this fact came from "from none other than the man in charge of the Iraqi WMD program, Saddam's defecting son-in-law, Hussein Kamel. Kamel's wealth of information on the destruction of Iraq's WMD 'was so extensive it was almost embarassing,' said UN interrogators."

This was not secret, by the way; it was reported in Time Magazine and other venues. And it was later confirmed independently by UN inspectors in 1998, who had verified the destruction of 95 percent of Iraq's WMD arsenal before they were stopped from finishing the job by Bill Clinton's four-day bombing assault on the country. Clinton justified the attack -- which killed dozens, perhaps hundreds of civilians -- by pointing to Iraqi "interference" in the almost completed inspections. The Iraqis were being quarrelsome, because they believed America had planted spies among the supposedly neutral inspectors. Clinton sternly denied such lies, and ordered the attack. (Conveniently, it occurred during his impeachment hearings.) However, just one year later, guess what: the UN admitted that, er, America had planted spies among the supposed neutral inspectors: "UNSCOM had directly facilitated the creation of an intelligence collection system for the United States in violation of its mandate."

Oh well. Bombing raids under false pretenses and the senseless death of half a million children due to sanctions based on "causes" known to be false -- I guess that's just "business as usual" too, eh Charles? As for Hillary's later vote to OK a whole war based on false pretenses (which, once again, saw the arms inspectors pulled out before they could confirm, again, the fact that Iraq had no WMD) -- well, hell, "every politician" since the dawn of time has done the same, ain't they, Goob?

But none of this matters to our progressives. Nor does Hillary's bloodthirsty record as Secretary of State, her vital role in the vast War Machine, ever pushing for more aggressive responses, for overturning governments (as in Honduras), for arming dictators (like her "close family friend," Hosni Mubarak), for targeted assassinations and drone attacks, for allying with extremists to reduce whole nations to chaos (Libya). Who can forget that moment when the mask slipped and Hillary revealed the true, brutal nature of our bipartisan ruling elite -- her gleeful exultation after Moamar Gadafy was sodomized and killed: "We came, we saw, he died!"

No, what matters is that Republican "ratfuckers" trumped up charges against the Clintons 20 years ago. (Charges that related only to personal and financial behaviour; the Republicans didn't care about the bombing and killing; they would've liked more of it.) The sleaziness of the Clintons' enemies absolves them of all blame, apparently. Any evidence of their corruption -- financial, legal or moral -- no matter what the source, is, ipso facto, nothing more than the noxious fumes of conspiracy.

As with Obama, there seems to be no crime or morally corrupt practice they will not countenance if it is committed by the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party. As Tarzie points out, they will "anguish" over their support -- both Digby and Pierce preceded their Clinton apologias with stern posts criticizing the drone attack that killed two al Qaeda hostages, and two other Americans said to be al Qaeda members. Digby took issue with the "targeted assassination" program and Pierce pointed out that the drone campaign only creates more enemies for America. But the fact that Hillary Clinton will certainly continue these polices -- and will probably intensify them -- doesn't stop the progressive duo from taking up the cudgels for her when someone questions her ethical and financial probity. The values and moral principles that underlie their attacks on the various depredations of the Terror War that Obama has expanded suddenly disappear at the first scent of partisan warfare. Their "ultimate concern" (to use Paul Tillich's term) is the political victory of the Democratic Party -- no matter what crimes and horrors its leaders perpetrate. However anguished their support, nothing will ever induce them to withdraw it.

There will be much, much more in this vein as the long, degrading freak show of the presidential campaign drags on. What our progressives once despised, they will soon defend. (As with Obamacare, which was originally -- and rightly -- scorned by progressives like Digby as an egregious sell-out to corporate interests and a death-blow to hopes for genuine health care reform, only to become a precious jewel to be adamantly defended against all attacks.) That thousands are dying, that extremism is spreading, that chaos is accelerating, that inequality is growing, that millions of people are suffering horribly from the deliberate choices of their champions does not, in the end, override their tribal instincts. And in this way, they help our rapacious elite insider to keep rat-fucking us all.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Freddie Gray and on and on and on. . .


On February 12, 1946 Isaac Woodard Jr., a black veteran who had served for 15 months in the South Pacific earning one battle star, received his honorable discharge. Hours later, on his way home, he got into an altercation with a white bus driver in South Carolina about the time allotted for a rest stop. The driver summoned two police officers, one of whom proceeded to beat Woodard with a blackjack so brutally that he was blinded in both eyes.

Also in 1946, Orson Welles appeared on a weekly 15-minute radio show called Commentaries. He read an affidavit from the NAACP signed by Woodard that described the incident, including Woodard's subsequent arrest and fine. Welles then gave an impassioned speech promising to root out the officer responsible for the blinding that is one of the most powerful pieces of political and social rhetoric one can hear -- impressive both as a piece of writing and as performance. Protests erupted against Welles. ABC fired him. It would be the last radio program the greatest of all radio artists would ever have.

As we celebrate his 100th-birthday, Welles's broadcast has never been as relevant as it is today.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

The Ecstasy and the Agony

One of the great conversationalists of his time in conversation with the worst talk show host of all time.

Orson Welles and Dick Cavett, July 27, 1970.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Libertards


The goofy Thom Hartmann and the great Mark Ames on Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and similar garbage.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Welles and War






How many of us have actually taken the time to listened to it? An astonishing piece of radio art, and perfectly believable as the source of mass 1938 panic.

The background.



All of Welles's Mercury genius can be found here.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Devil in the Details

The Washington Post:
Is Hillary Rodham Clinton a McDonald’s Big Mac or a Chipotle burrito bowl? A can of Bud or a bottle of Blue Moon? JCPenney or J. Crew? As she readies her second presidential campaign, Clinton has recruited consumer marketing specialists onto her team of trusted political advisers. Their job is to help imagine Hillary 5.0 — the rebranding of a first lady turned senator turned failed presidential candidate turned secretary of state turned likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. Clinton and her image-makers are sketching ways to refresh the well-established brand for tomorrow’s marketplace. In their mission to present voters with a winning picture of the likely candidate, no detail is too big or too small — from her economic opportunity agenda to the design of the “H” in her future campaign logo.
“It’s exactly the same as selling an iPhone or a soft drink or a cereal,” said Peter Sealey, a longtime corporate marketing strategist.

Monday, April 6, 2015

Mister Bonds


As the San Francisco Giants begin their quest for a FOURTH championship in SIX years (and as the LA Dodgers prepare to spend their 27th straight season in the baseball wilderness), let us celebrate the greatest (and most complicated) baseball player of the last 50 years.

Grant Bisbee with a fine appreciation of No. 25.

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Keeping On

Is 88-year-old Noam Chomsky, in two very recent talks.



Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Germanwings

Mark Ames's "Forbidden Theory":

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Ramsey Orta


Are free speech absolutists the usual wad of MSNBC-entombed office drones? True Brooklyn's own Rancid Honeytrap thinks so, in a political essay masterpiece.

Part One:
White Supremacy is having a good month: On March 5, the ACLU put its weight behind Pro Football Inc’s fight to keep its Washington Redskins trademark.  A few days later, legal scholars from the right and permissible left along with The New Republic scolded Oklahoma University for expelling two SAE fraternity members who led the sickening racist song immortalized on viral video. That same week, notorious Islamophobe Pam Gellar won her battle to force Philadelphia to display bus signs featuring a photo of Hitler and proclaiming “Islamic Jew Hatred: It’s in the Quran.” Five days ago, the ACLU filed a brief in support of Confederate flags on license plates.

Of course, for the self-styled First Amendment absolutists among us it’s not white supremacy that’s winning here, but free speech. “The first attacks on free speech always come at the fringe,” they insist. “That’s where it needs to be defended.” First Amendment absolutists have been saying this at least since 1977, when the ACLU won the American Nazi party the right to march through Skokie, Illinois, where an estimated one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor.  In the ensuing 38 years, civil libertarians have ostentatiously supported cross burners, churches that promote race war, right wing Christians disrupting Arab festivals, and picketers of LGBT funerals, admonishing as authoritarian anyone who thinks their view of speech rights is imprudently simplistic at best.

While white supremacists were having such a good few weeks spreading freedom for all, Ramsey Orta, the man who captured Eric Garner’s murder by NYPD cops on video, was still struggling to make bail. Orta is enmeshed in a Kafkaesque nightmare of sadistic state reprisal against his supremely brave, selfless and heroic act. A murdered black man and a latino in a cage for bearing witness to the crime is what you could call a white supremacy twofer, as well as a complete disaster for civil liberties.

As of this writing, the ACLU and its New York branch have seemingly done nothing on Orta’s behalf — searches on their websites don’t yield one mention — and as far as I can tell none of the First Amendment cult’s leading lights has written about it.  Orta’s civil liberties don’t interest The New Republic like those of racist frat boys. But at least Time.com won a World Press Award two weeks ago for a video consisting almost entirely of Orta’s footage and his words in voiceover. So — if you overlook how that award embodies the parasitic relationship of press to whistleblowers, rich to poor and white to dark– there’s that.

Though forty years of contrarian First Amendment advocacy hasn’t produced obvious benefits for the likes of Orta, it’s doing quite a lot for corporations, whose ingenious lawyers, after establishing ACLU-supported corporate personhood,  have found the First Amendment endlessly useful as an instrument of deregulation. I can’t do justice to the orgy of litigating going on in this realm, but here’s a sample: the National Labor Relations Board can’t compel your employer to hang a poster informing workers of their rights; however, your employer can lobby you on how to vote and when to call your congressperson. There’s an effort afoot to remake corporate lies as First Amendment protected opinion, and mandatory disclosures an unconstitutional burden. Considering corporate and shareholder demographics, corporate personhood is indisputably a win for white supremacy too.

Surely there is an onus on advocates to demonstrate that a tactical alliance with white supremacists and corporations, that clearly benefits white supremacists and corporations, produces commensurate benefits for people like Ramsey Orta.  But if you want to make a First Amendment absolutist lash out, lie or robotically recite bromides, just demand conclusive evidence of such benefits. They can’t produce it, because no such evidence exists.

There are some, like Radley Balko, who, when confronted with this, will insist that we should support racist speech on general principle, regardless of what it does for anyone else, but this is a justifiably tough sell. Surely if First Amendment victories for white supremacists or corporations don’t meaningfully fortify the rights of people of color and anti-racists, any engagement with their cause should aim toward their defeat. It’s a really rather bizarre state of affairs when reluctance to ally with fascists in pursuit of freedom strikes otherwise intelligent people as repellently authoritarian, but that’s the state we’re in.

I’ve discussed a lot of this before in various issue-focused posts. What follows is an attempt at a more detailed, general critique, which examines the folly of Free Speech Absolutism in relation to white supremacy. At the outset I’d like to make a few things clear. My objections to Free Speech Absolutism have very little to do with laws and regulations. I am extremely ambivalent about Hate Speech laws. I am less ambivalent about Hate Crimes Law, though I don’t like laws generally since their primary use is to oppress and discipline people with very little power.

My main objection is to the doctrine of free speech absolutism. In addition to directing the attention, resources and goodwill of decent people to organizations and individuals that would imprison and murder them if they could, it perniciously minimizes the genocidal and avaricious politics with which it makes common cause; it promotes a view of power and social change so ahistoric and infantile it qualifies as magical thinking; and it promotes libertarian as opposed to communitarian values and politics.  By virtue of this doctrine’s wide adoption and promotion by revered adherents, it has a uniquely corrupting effect on political discourse and practice as a whole.

As one would expect from an extremely dishonest doctrine that is taught in public schools and enjoys avid support across political lines, it serves power far more than it serves anyone else.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Repay


An astonishment during a time of near total lividity. Vince Gilligan's extension of his Breaking Bad masterpiece is quieter, slower paced, more lonely, less complex and intense, funnier -- and just as good. A miracle.

Here ex-cop Mike Ehrmantraut (immortal as played by the immortal Jonathan Banks) shows us what to do with bad bad cops.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Reasonable

Chris Floyd.
I was going to write a careful, reasoned commentary on this article in the Washington Post -- “War With Iran is Probably Our Best Option" -- written by a highly respected fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Joshua Muravchik. But in the end all I could find to say was this:  I hope this slavering, shrivelled-up, dead-souled little coward finds himself on the front lines of the war he advocates.

I’m sick to death of these timorous motherfuckers sitting on their well-wadded asses pushing for wars they’ll never fight. I want to see Muravchik standing on the Iranian frontier with a rifle in his hand.

I want to see him put his puffy gray face and his well-coifed hair in the line of fire. He’s so goddamned tough with other people’s lives. “Yes, we might absorb some strikes," he writes. He knows damn well he’ll never “absorb” a strike; that’s for other people, that’s for the cannon fodder this piss-ant empire sends to its wars.

No, by God, if he wants war, if he thinks it’s “probably our best option,” then let him drag his ageing ass over to Iran and put it on the line. Or else let him his shut his fucking mouth.

And I’m sick to death of the gilded robber barons like Jeff Bezos who publish bellicose bullshit like this day after day, wailing for war on Iran, on Russia, on Syria. I want to see Bezos in the front line too. Let him slap on some body armor and wade into the fight, in Tikrit, in Aleppo, in the Donbass.

He won't do it. Muravchik won't do it. None of them will do it. Every single one of our war-mongers and war-profiteers and policy wonks and politicians who endlessly call for war and war and more war, every single one of them would run a mile — would run a hundred miles — from the slightest threat to their own soft, pasty, well-protected persons.

They want OTHER people to die. They want OTHER people to kill. It makes them feel good. It makes them feel tough. It makes them feel righteous. It makes them want to run to the toilet in their sleek, comfy, carpeted office buildings and jerk themselves off at the excitement of it all.

Just as long as THEY don’t have to fight. Just as long as THEY don’t have to “absorb” any strikes. Just as long as some piece of riffraff does the dirty work for them.

I wish I could stand in front of this blood-thirsty coward and tell him this to his face. And then spit in his face. Then put a goddamned rifle in his hand and parachute him into Tehran. Go ahead, Muravchik. Go ahead, Bezos. You boys are so bad, you’re so tough, you’re so hard and hot for war. Go fight it yourself, you cowardly motherfuckers.

Sunday, March 8, 2015