Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Christmas: FKB

Not a Christmas show, but very much in the Christmas Spirit. "Bud the Philanthropist" from April of '57.

Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Message from the Devil


Courtesy of Chris Floyd:
“You are taking a path into darkness. It began years ago, with your acceptance of crimes and inhuman practices on a vast scale. In the late 20th century, your leaders once confessed on national television that they had killed 500,000 innocent children with death-dealing sanctions — then declared this atrocious massacre was “worth it.” Yet there was no outcry, no outrage, no uprising, not even a peep of protest. Indeed, the leader who carried out this massive slaughter of innocent children ended his reign at new heights of popularity and forever after was considered a beloved elder statesman. Your next leader lied brazenly to start a war that killed a million innocent people and led directly to decades of murderous instability in numerous countries. He too ended his days in wealth and comfort and public regard. Your next leader refused to prosecute the crimes of aggression and torture openly committed by his predecessor; instead, he continued his practices, enshrining many of the heinous practices into settled law, waging undeclared war in more than half a dozen countries and personally signing off on extrajudicial murders every week of his reign. By this time, the moral degradation of the people was so complete — they had countenanced, cheered or ignored so many crimes and so much corruption on so many levels — that they easily fell prey to a voracious, half-crazed demagogue and the forces of fascism, feudalism and lawless rule that he brought into power. This was the nominal end of your democracy, but it was already deeply rotted from within — rotted by your years of turning a blind eye to monstrous crimes committed in your name by both factions in your power structure.
“Because of your shameful acquiescence, your shallow understanding of the forces that ruled you and used you and manipulated you, your bedazzlement by public image, your astonishing credulity at the transparent lies and hollow, sinister pieties you were fed, we, your descendants, have lived in squalor, rancor, violence and despair all our lives, for generations. There is no hope for us unless you abandon your slavish ignorance, your adherence to partisan fantasies about the factions of the power structure that rules you and rise up to overthrow it. Instead bring fearless clarity to bear on the reality of what you have accepted. The murder of 500,000 children. The millions murdered in the wars you started and the wars bred by your wars. Assassination. Torture. Dehumanization and demonization of your fellow human beings, both at home and abroad.
“It is your acceptance of these things that has brought you to the final turning point represented by a berserk demagogue’s rise to power. Now there is nothing left for you to do but resist: resist with all your might, with every means at your disposal — but always, always, with the full knowledge of how you came to this place, and your own connivance and collusion in this descent. Keep this in mind as you fight, so that it doesn’t happen again. You are not exceptional, you are not plucked out by God for special favor: you are human beings like all the rest, and like so many human beings in so many societies down through the ages, you have failed to look your own evil in the eye, you have failed to confront and condemn acts that make you shudder with horror when you hear of them committed by  other nations.
“Own this knowledge — this terrible, tragic knowledge — and let it guide as you fight the putrescence that past crimes have now brought gushing forth, and as you build something better in the aftermath. Otherwise, you are lost, and we are lost, the world itself is lost.”

Monday, December 12, 2016

Krazee


Maybe the funniest character in maybe the funniest cartoon series ever, her full name is Goo Goo Ga Ga and she is IN-sane.

"Go Goo Go" from November of '05.

Friday, December 9, 2016

God Speed

John Glenn, RIP.

Friendship 7.



The following year, two months before Dallas, at the United Nations:



National Security Action Memorandum 271, 10 days before Dallas:
MEMORANDUM FOR

The Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

SUBJECT: Cooperation with the USSR on Outer Space Matters

I would like you to assume personally the initiative and central responsibility within the Government for the development of a program of substantive cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space, including the development of specific technical proposals. I assume that you will work closely with the Department of State and other agencies as appropriate.

These proposals should be developed with a view of their possible discussion with the Soviet Union as a direct outcome of my September 20 proposal for broader cooperation between the United States and the USSR in outer space, including cooperation in lunar landing programs. All proposals or suggestions originating within the Government relating to this general subject will be referred to you for your consideration and evaluation.

In addition to developing substantive proposals, I expect that you will assist the Secretary of State in exploring problems of procedure and timing connected with holding discussions with the Soviet Union and in proposing for my consideration the channels which would be most desirable from our point of view. In this connection the channel of contact developed by Dr. Dryden between NASA and the Soviet Academy of Sciences has been quite effective, and I believe that we should continue to utilize it as appropriate as a means of continuing the dialogue between the scientists of both counties.

I would like an interim report on the progress of our planning by December 15.
The proposal died 10 days later.

Glenn Redux

Pure exhilaration, from Phil Kaufman.

Friday, December 2, 2016

And Now. . .

Chris Hedges:
We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.

When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?

Our ruling mafia will use the crisis much as the Nazis did in 1933 when the Reichstag was burned. It will publish its own version of the “Order of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.” The U.S. Constitution will be in effect suspended. Personal freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom to organize and freedom of assembly, will be abolished. Privacy will be formally eradicated. Search warrants will be unnecessary. America’s emergency decrees will cement into place what largely exists now. When they come, the loss of freedoms will be openly acknowledged and made permanent.

Anyone who is not white or “loyal” will be attacked, first verbally and then physically. Everyone will be constantly watched. The prisons will swell. Militarized police will no longer be confined to operating in marginal communities. Lethal, indiscriminant force by the state will be common. The courts will condemn with little or no evidence. The press will utterly unplug itself from reality and speak to us as if we lived in a functioning democracy.  Academics will burrow deeper into their holes of obtuse jargon and quantitative irrelevance. The last remnants of our labor unions will be crushed. Religious institutions, as silent about the evils of corporate capitalism as Goldman Sachs, will take the safe route of spirituality and piety rather than social justice. The lawyers, courts and law schools will serve the law even when the law overturns our constitutional rights by judicial fiat and is a tool of naked repression. Hollywood and the rest of mass entertainment will churn out the usual tawdry fare of sexually explicit and violence-drenched spectacles. The military “virtues” of hypermasculinity and patriarchy will be celebrated.

There will be rebels. They will live in the shadows. They will be the renegade painters, sculptors, poets, writers, journalists, musicians, actors, dancers, organizers, activists, mystics, intellectuals and other outcasts who are willing to accept personal sacrifice. They will not surrender their integrity, creativity, independence and finally their souls. They will speak the truth. The state will have little tolerance of them. They will be poor. The wider society will be conditioned by mass propaganda to write them off as parasites or traitors. They will keep alive what is left of dignity and freedom. Perhaps one day they will rise up and triumph. But one does not live in poverty and on the margins of society because of the certainty of success. One lives like that because to collaborate with radical evil is to betray all that is good and beautiful. It is to become a captive. It is to give up the moral autonomy that makes us human. The rebels will be our hope.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Comandante, Farewell

Two from Oliver Stone.

Comandante (2003)



Looking for Fidel (2004)

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Men and Not Men

  

From March of '16, upon the arrival of Obama in Havana:
The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

Tourism today, in large part, consists of viewing the delights of our landscapes and tasting exquisite delicacies from our seas, and is always shared with the private capital of large foreign corporations, whose earnings, if they don’t reach billions of dollars, are not worthy of any attention whatsoever.

Since I find myself obliged to mention the issue, I must add - principally for the youth - that few people are aware of the importance of such a condition, in this singular moment of human history. I would not say that time has been lost, but I do not hesitate to affirm that we are not adequately informed, not you, nor us, of the knowledge and conscience that we must have to confront the realities which challenge us. The first to be taken into consideration is that our lives are but a fraction of a historical second, which must also be devoted in part to the vital necessities of every human being. One of the characteristics of this condition is the tendency to overvalue its role, in contrast, on the other hand, with the extraordinary number of persons who embody the loftiest dreams.

Nevertheless, no one is good or bad entirely on their own. None of us is designed for the role we must assume in a revolutionary society, although Cubans had the privilege of José Martí’s example. I even ask myself if he needed to die or not in Dos Ríos, when he said, “For me, it’s time,” and charged the Spanish forces entrenched in a solid line of firepower. He did not want to return to the United States, and there was no one who could make him. Someone ripped some pages from his diary. Who bears this treacherous responsibility, undoubtedly the work of an unscrupulous conspirator? Differences between the leaders were well known, but never indiscipline. “Whoever attempts to appropriate Cuba will reap only the dust of its soil drenched in blood, if he does not perish in the struggle,” stated the glorious Black leader Antonio Maceo. Máximo Gómez is likewise recognized as the most disciplined and discreet military chief in our history.

Looking at it from another angle, how can we not admire the indignation of Bonifacio Byrne when, from a distant boat returning him to Cuba, he saw another flag alongside that of the single star and declared, “My flag is that which has never been mercenary...” immediately adding one of the most beautiful phrases I have ever heard, “If it is torn to shreds, it will be my flag one day… our dead raising their arms will still be able to defend it!” Nor will I forget the blistering words of Camilo Cienfuegos that night, when, just some tens of meters away, bazookas and machine guns of U.S. origin in the hands of counterrevolutionaries were pointed toward that terrace on which we stood.

Obama was born in August of 1961, as he himself explained. More than half a century has transpired since that time.

Let us see, however, how our illustrious guest thinks today:

“I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas. I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people,” followed by a deluge of concepts entirely novel for the majority of us:

“We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans,” the U.S. President continued, “Cuba, like the United States, was built in part by slaves brought here from Africa. Like the United States, the Cuban people can trace their heritage to both slaves and slave-owners.”

The native populations don’t exist at all in Obama’s mind. Nor does he say that the Revolution swept away racial discrimination, or that pensions and salaries for all Cubans were decreed by it before Mr. Barack Obama was 10 years old. The hateful, racist bourgeois custom of hiring strongmen to expel Black citizens from recreational centers was swept away by the Cuban Revolution - that which would go down in history for the battle against apartheid that liberated Angola, putting an end to the presence of nuclear weapons on a continent of more than a billion inhabitants. This was not the objective of our solidarity, but rather to help the peoples of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and others under the fascist colonial domination of Portugal.

In 1961, just one year and three months after the triumph of the Revolution, a mercenary force with armored artillery and infantry, backed by aircraft, trained and accompanied by U.S. warships and aircraft carriers, attacked our country by surprise. Nothing can justify that perfidious attack which cost our country hundreds of losses, including deaths and injuries

As for the pro-yankee assault brigade, no evidence exists anywhere that it was possible to evacuate a single mercenary. Yankee combat planes were presented before the United Nations as the equipment of a Cuban uprising.

The military experience and power of this country is very well known. In Africa, they likewise believed that revolutionary Cuba would be easily taken out of the fight. The invasion via southern Angola by racist South African motorized brigades got close to Luanda, the capital in the eastern part of the country. There a struggle began which went on for no less than 15 years. I wouldn’t even talk about this, if I didn’t have the elemental duty to respond to Obama’s speech in Havana’s Alicia Alonso Grand Theater.

Nor will I attempt to give details, only emphasize that an honorable chapter in the struggle for human liberation was written there. In a certain way, I hoped Obama’s behavior would be correct. His humble origin and natural intelligence were evident. Mandela was imprisoned for life and had become a giant in the struggle for human dignity. One day, a copy of a book narrating part of Mandela’s life reached my hands, and - surprise! - the prologue was by Barack Obama. I rapidly skimmed the pages. The miniscule size of Mandela’s handwriting noting facts was incredible. Knowing men such as him was worthwhile.

Regarding the episode in South Africa I must point out another experience. I was really interested in learning more about how the South Africans had acquired nuclear weapons. I only had very precise information that there were no more than 10 or 12 bombs. A reliable source was the professor and researcher Piero Gleijeses, who had written the text Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, an excellent piece. I knew he was the most reliable source on what had happened and I told him so; he responded that he had not spoken more about the matter as in the text he had responded to questions from compañero Jorge Risquet, who had been Cuban ambassador and collaborator in Angola, a very good friend of his. I located Risquet; already undertaking other important tasks he was finishing a course which would last several weeks longer. That task coincided with a fairly recent visit by Piero to our country; I had warned him that Risquet was getting on and his health was not great. A few days later what I had feared occurred. Risquet deteriorated and died. When Piero arrived there was nothing to do except make promises, but I had already received information related to the weapons and the assistance that racist South Africa had received from Reagan and Israel.

I do not know what Obama would have to say about this story now. I am unaware as to what he did or did not know, although it is very unlikely that he knew absolutely nothing. My modest suggestion is that he gives it thought and does not attempt now to elaborate theories on Cuban policy.

There is an important issue:

Obama made a speech in which he uses the most sweetened words to express: “It is time, now, to forget the past, leave the past behind, let us look to the future together, a future of hope. And it won’t be easy, there will be challenges and we must give it time; but my stay here gives me more hope in what we can do together as friends, as family, as neighbors, together.”

I suppose all of us were at risk of a heart attack upon hearing these words from the President of the United States. After a ruthless blockade that has lasted almost 60 years, and what about those who have died in the mercenary attacks on Cuban ships and ports, an airliner full of passengers blown up in midair, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of violence and coercion?

Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this dignified and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights, or the spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education, science and culture.

I also warn that we are capable of producing the food and material riches we need with the efforts and intelligence of our people. We do not need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, as this is our commitment to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet.

Monday, November 28, 2016

Who Needs the Beatles?


Famous Red Hunter interviews the greatest Red of the 20th Century.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Revolutionary

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Forgive My Grief


The greatest revolutionary leader of the 20th Century is dead.

Fidel Castro embodied with burning passion the values of communion, courage, joy, humor, compassion, sorrow, remembrance, true justice and -- perhaps most important -- HONESTY. Comandante Castro, for all the Cold War nonsense regarding East vs. West and North vs. South, was the greatest Christian leader of his time: Christian in fact, in deed, in thought -- rather than the vampires and their minion who have so degraded the term.

How many people throughout history have been blessed with the guts, strategic brilliance and cunning to become their nation's leader? And blessed with the deep sympathy and understanding of the powerless, the weak, the sad? Fidel Castro was one of the great intellectuals of his age and one of the great political historians. (Imagine the United States being led by a combination of Malcolm X and Noam Chomsky.) Comandante Castro was a man who could have used his power to be just another exploiter, pimp, or baboon -- instead he chose to be a protector of all those needing protection. And yes, by any means necessary. Yes -- any means! Why give up the weapons of violence to the scum of the earth?

In the Big Dark of the American End of Empire, it is very easy to feel a daily despair. Think of Castro: his humor, outrage, faith, brilliance, and total honesty. One example:
"The fascists stop at nothing. They try to find the weak spot. They invent the most ridiculous lies. They try to create terror and unrest among the people by telling the most outrageous lies. Their appeal is always to the gutter instincts: hatred, fear, racism, economic insecurity, selfishness, ignorance. They feed off of keeping people stupid. They resort to every method they can think of. And what do fascists do when their own institutions no longer guarantee their domination? How do they react when the mechanisms they've depended on historically to maintain their domination fail them? They simply go ahead and destroy those institutions, without a moment's look back. The fascists stop at nothing."
In body, Comandante Castro has passed from us. In spirit, courage and passion -- he will live forever. Viva Fidel! Venceremos!

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Why?

The conclusion of Oliver Stone's "JFK -- To the Brink."

Monday, November 21, 2016

Mortal

The most extraordinary Presidential speech of the 20th-century.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Prelude and Post


The 1960 campaign.



The 1964 Democratic Convention's tribute to the removed leader.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Friday, November 11, 2016

Why?


Professor Richard Wolff explains.



And Glenn Greenwald.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Ding Dong The Witch is Dead!

Diana Johnston:
“There’s no place like home.”

That’s the lesson. Even when home is Kansas.

The real meaning of this election is not, as bitterly disappointed Hillary supporters still maintain with tears in their eyes and fear in their throats, a victory for racism and sexism.

The real meaning of this upset is that Wall Street’s globalization project has been rejected by the citizens of its homeland.

This has major implications for the European nations that have been dragged along into this ruinous project.

Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the military industrial complex and international finance capital.  She designed herself to be the figurehead of those forces, as queen of regime change. She aspired to be the one to remake the world in the image Wall Street dictates. It was a project enthusiastically and expensively supported by the one percent who profit from arms contracts and the trade deals they write themselves for their own interests.

To distract from the genuine significance of her candidacy, the Clinton campaign appealed to the desire for respectability of educated city dwellers, portraying Trump supporters as racist yokels motivated by a hateful desire to scapegoat minorities as revenge for their own inadequacies.  They were “deplorables”, and you wouldn’t want to be one of them, would you?

Trump was sexist, because he referred to certain women as “bimbos”.  Elizabeth Warren called him out for this, on a platform where Hillary sat listening, mouth wide open in delight – she who had referred to Bill’s girlfriends as “bimbo eruptions”.  Sleaze and hypocrisy drowned out policy discussions. The worst the Clinton campaign could come up with was an eleven-year-old locker room exchange – just words, hardly comparable to Bill’s chronic actions.

Still, millions who were taken in by the Clinton campaign line are devastated, terrified, convinced that the only reason Trump won was the “racism” and “sexism” of that lower caste in globalized society: white heterosexual working class males.

But no, Virginia, there were other reasons to vote for Trump.  Racism and sexism are surely low on the list.

Trump voters were scandalized by Hillary’s lies and corruption.  Many of them would have voted for Bernie Sanders if they had the choice.  That choice was taken away from them by Democratic Party manipulators who were sold on their own advertising campaign to elect “the first woman President.” A brand new product on the Presidential election market!  Be the first to vote for a woman President!  New, improved!

Bernie’s success already showed that millions of people didn’t want that woman.  But the Democratic Party manipulators and their oligarch sponsors went right ahead with their plans to force Hillary Clinton on an unwilling nation.  They brought this defeat on themselves.

Contrary to what you could believe by reading the New York Times, there were even intellectuals who voted for Trump, or at least refused to vote for Hillary, for the simple reason that Trump appears less likely to lead the world into its third and final Great War.  He said things giving that impression, but such statements were ignored by mainstream media as they worked overtime to inflate the ogre image.  No war with Russia?  You must be a Putin puppet!

Trump voters had several reasons to vote for Trump other than “racism”.  Most of all, they want their jobs back, jobs that have vanished thanks to the neoliberal policy of transferring manufacturing jobs to places with low wages.

But racism is the only motive recognized by the globalized elite for rejecting globalization.  British citizens who voted to leave the European Union in order to recover their traditional democracy were also stigmatized as “racist” and “xenophobe”.  Opposition to racism and xenophobia is the natural moral defense of a project of global governance that deprives ordinary citizens of any important power of decision.

This extraordinarily vicious campaign has brought out and aggravated sharp divisions within the United States.  The division between city and countryside is most evident on the electoral maps. But these real divisions are exacerbated by a campaign that portrayed Donald Trump as a racist madman, a new Hitler about to bring fascism to America. The antiracism of this campaign, denouncing “hate”, has actually spawned hate.

No, Virginia, Trump is not Hitler.  He is the Wizard of Oz.  He is a showman who pulled off an amazing trick thanks to the drastic moral and intellectual decline of the American political system.  He is neither as dangerous as his opponents fear, nor as able to “make American great again” as his supporters hope.  He is the Lesser Evil.  What will become of him in Washington is anybody’s guess.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

You're Fired!

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Word

Monday, November 7, 2016

Barrel Bomb


From Chris Floyd:
Well, here we are: at the bottom of the barrel under forty feet of slag. Tomorrow, we’ll know our fate: the five-alarm fire of Trump Rule (oh, how those police unions are chomping at the bit!) or the Clinton Age of Hyper-War (oh, how those neocons are chomping at the bit!). In either case, the entrenched coagulation of corporate interests and war profiteers that have strangled the peace, prosperity and prospects of the American people will not be budged an inch. The change that people are so desperately hungry for — so hungry that that some of them might well elect an Establishment insider whose sinister clowning makes him appear to be a ‘rebel’ — will not come. Thus their bitterness will grow deeper, more sour, erupting more and more often in physical violence: from militarized police against protestors, from Trump-empowered racists (if he wins or loses), from extremist militias, from angry, maddened people on every side. And of course there will be more — much more — of the horrific, never-ending, globe-spanning violence of the bipartisan Terror War that churns on and on, no matter who is sitting temporarily in the White House.

There’s no use in pretending that’s not what we face. But there’s also no use in pretending that this situation is somehow sui generis, some terribly unlucky conflation of unforeseen circumstances coming together at this particular time. It is in fact the culmination and embodiment of the deliberate choices of the most powerful forces in society: the choices to enrich themselves beyond all reason and extend their military and economic dominance over the earth.

It doesn’t matter that many if not most of the practitioners and functionaries of this system “believe” in its rightness. It doesn’t matter that brutal neoliberal nostrums and extremist imperial notions have become religious dogmas for those who see themselves as the “meritocracy.” It doesn’t matter if the leaders and factotums genuinely believe in the “exceptionalism” they preach or if they are cynical power-seekers. It doesn’t matter if they actually believe their rapacious financial machinations are reflections of the “natural law” of the “the market” that will eventually benefit all, or if they know themselves to be what they really are: ugly souls disfigured by greed. The end result has been the same: a long series of deliberate choices by a bipartisan elite that have hollowed out the lives and communities and futures of millions of Americans, and created a living hell of war, ruin and hatred over much of the earth.

This is a system that has delegitimized itself, a system that has undermined its own institutions. Through its own actions, it has rotted out the foundations of trust and reason which once upheld it. Some might say, “Oh, but there’s been a decades-long, concentrated effort by right-wing billionaires and corporate forces to foment ideological and religious extremism to undermine the legitimacy of secular government, which might restrict their profiteering or let more people have a share in power.” And that’s true. But it’s been accompanied at every step by the collusion and cowardice of the putative opposition. The so-called New Democrats, exemplified by the Clintons, jettisoned concern for the common good to embrace “centrist” and “technocratic” policies: i.e., to adopt the neoliberal dogma that unbridled pursuit of private profit by a connected elites will somehow, someday, lead to general prosperity. The idea that the party should fight to improve the lives of ordinary people in the here and now, to fight for their quality of life in a genuine, substantive way,  came to be seen as old-hat, a quaint and fusty notion of has-beens and dreamers who didn’t understand the way the world really worked. A true, savvy “moderate” knows you must compromise every ideal, show yourself to be a willing and avid servant of the monied interests and the militarists, in order to gain power so you can … make a few cosmetic changes around the edges, a few little social improvements here and there (but only — of course! — in “partnership” with private interests), but never, ever challenge the system at its core.

This is the only deal in town: outright, unvarnished right-wing rule, or simpering, cowardly “moderate” management of a violent, rapacious system. That’s been the choice on offer since 1976. That’s the choice on offer today. The only difference is that the system has metastasized to a monstrous degree over the years: lacking any genuine opposition, the system has grown more violent, more rapacious.

Establishment collusion — and Democratic cowardice — finally and completely degraded and delegitimized the American electoral process 16 years ago, when the Supreme Court — with two members who had direct family ties to the Bush campaign — stopped a recount that would have resulted in the actual winner of the election to take office. This outrageous action was accepted by every single organ and institution of the American system. (With the momentary exception of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose members tried, in vain, to get a single Democratic senator to challenge the result.) Instead, Americans were encouraged to applaud the fact that power had changed hands “without tanks in the street.” That is, we were to celebrate that an actual coup d’etat had taken place before our eyes without the slightest show of resistance.

Once in place, the coup regime — staffed at the highest levels by extremists who a year before had publicly called for a vast militarization of American policy and society, even if the public had to be “galvanized” by “a new Pearl Harbor” — led the nation into a disastrous war based on false pretenses, a vast crime that not only killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people but has led directly to unbridled turmoil, extremism, conflict and corruption around the world. The elite-supported coup regime instituted torture programs and death squads, and launched an orgy of war profiteering unprecedented in world history. The regime then presided over the worst economic collapse in generations.

Not a single member of the regime was ever tried — or even investigated, at even the most preliminary level — for a single crime committed during its time in power. There were no high-profile Congressional investigations into the hideous carnage and ruin and instability they wrought; not even a “Chilcot Commission” into the origins of the war, as the UK belatedly launched. Instead the regime’s leaders and top factotums were heaped with honors and wealth. Today their endorsement is eagerly sought — and gained — by the “progressive” Democratic candidate for president.

In 2008, the desperate electorate turned to a figure presented to them as an outsider who would at last bring real change. He had the trappings of difference — a black man with a Muslim name, who spoke eloquently of peace and social justice, who most people thought was far to the left but voted for him anyway. But Barack Obama was of course a meritocratic “centrist” to his core. Riding an enormous wave of popularity, and a strong Congressional majority, he proceeded to … bail out Wall Street fraudsters and finaglers with tax money and create a health care system based on the plan of a rightwing think-tank that prioritized corporate profit — and probably killed the chance for a genuinely public health care system for generations, if not for good. He also doubled down on the Terror War, expanding it to more countries, extended Bush’s death squads, helped destroy nations like Libya and Yemen (thus spawning more chaos and terror), expanded illegal surveillance of the populace (and the world) to an extent beyond the wildest dreams of the Stasi or KGB. And after saving Big Money from itself and securing the guaranteed profits of the healthcare-insurance corporate complex, he spent most of his time on the domestic front trying to strike a “grand bargain” with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Again, all hopes of any real change were thwarted. So now the nation swings from being ready to embrace a perceived leftist to the brink of voting in a bellicose rightist as it seeks the genuine change no one will give them. Of course, after the scorched-earth tactics of bipartisan neoliberalism and the inevitable moral degradation and brutalization that comes from year after year after year of vicious aggressive war, the choice for Trump is more nihilistic. It’s as if people believe positive change is no longer possible — so let’s tear everything down and see what happens. (This is the actual, open philosophy of the Breitbart gang, who are now directing Trump’s campaign.)

Even if Clinton wins, this nihilism will still be rampant. And given that she happily embodies the bipartisan Establishment now roundly despised on all sides for its many depredations, the nihilism will grow even worse — especially as she has given no indication whatsoever that she will even try to make substantive changes in the neoliberal-militarist system that is strangling us. Quite the contrary.

So yes, this has been a campaign like no other — but mostly because it has brought the systematic decay of the Republic into the sharpest possible relief, and has shown, more clearly than before, that the neoliberal-militarist ascendency offers no hope for a better life, a better world; indeed, that it offers nothing at all — except more violence, more bitterness, more ruin, more degradation for us all.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

Murder Cow



A masterpiece from Justin Raimondo.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Collaborators


Our great political theologian, from six years back. And never so prescient regarding November 8th.



The accompanying essay.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Satan vs. Satan

On the election, here are.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Miranda Juju

Monday, October 24, 2016

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Mister Clutch

Kershaw comes through again:

Career Regular Season:       ERA 2.37  WHIP: 1.007
Career Post Season:            ERA 4.55  WHIP: 1.157
Career Elimination Games:  ERA 6.28  WHIP: 1.447

Truly, Clayton Kershaw is the anti-Bumgarner.

And congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers -- with all that hedge-fund money and all those insipid fans -- concluding their 28th consecutive season in the Major League Baseball wilderness!

With #29 coming up!

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Who's Next, Michael Jackson?

Bob Dylan is getting the Nobel Prize for LITERATURE?

David Walsh has a few laughs.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The Way We Live Now


From the Playboy Club, San Francisco, May 1970, the great Mort Sahl on Nixon/Agnew, JFK, CIA, Jim Garrison, Kent State, and that most cowardly brand of collaborators -- Hollywood Liberals.

Mort from EJK on Vimeo.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

State of Grace


She returns us to an age when Americans could look up to screen visions and ghosts with awe, wonder and appreciation. Unlike our current dreary marketeer non-cinema where almost all releases seem calculated to squash anything that might stir envy in the iron hearts of the narcissistic and the mediocre. After all, anyone can be Jennifers Aniston or Garner.

Who can be Kay Francis?

As a comedienne she was almost as great as Lombard. And sexy as hell. Her liquid voice is as languorous, warm, and dark -- dark as dark blood -- as are her movements. Eyes which are clear pools of light, reflecting how much love is coming toward her. Yet she was boxed in, mostly playing two types: a woman dying young; or an uptight Professional -- doctor, reporter, fashion editor, pilot(!) -- before her time. Or both. So her wit is mostly wasted. Within these types she is often the normal partner left for someone more exciting. Who would ever leave Kay Francis? (All nods to Lubitsch, but certainly not for Miriam Hopkins.) Besides Trouble in Paradise (1932), her only great film, she was rarely lucky with directors.  A (bad) Vidor, two with Borzage, several with Michael Curtiz. Otherwise, hacks.

Perhaps because she is echt Deco, she cannot be placed outside the 1930s. She is too still and melancholy for screwball. And even her late 30s works -- Confession (1937), King of the Underworld (1939) and In Name Only (1939) (how in the world can a movie with Grant, Lombard, and Francis be so dull?) -- stiffen her up. Yet even there (most everywhere), when betrayed or spurned, she lapses into a sort of somber exclusion, away from the world, away from the movie, a curious communion with forces only she feels, a sort of mystic, dark state of grace. She is a miracle. There is no one else like her.

* * *

We all know Trouble in Paradise, so let's look elsewhere. Tay Garnett's One Way Passage (1932) is a sort of pre-code, early talkie version of Tristan and Isolde, almost ruined by the non-comic antics of Frank McHugh. Almost. William Powell is a death row inmate recently escaped from San Quentin, at last caught up with in a Hong Kong bar, and incarcerated aboard a ship heading back to San Francisco. Kay Francis is on the ship, with her doctor; she is dying. Via some nice story turns -- and a moving subplot causing Powell's SF detective jailer (Warren Hymer) to also fall in love -- we are given Francis at her most ardent and beautiful. Strange and amorphous, she yearns through the trouble like a warm, glowing cloud blown in the middle of a storm. And Powell is worthy of her.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

What Were Their Names?


Their hopes? Their dreams? Their loves? Their mysteries?

WHAT WERE THEIR NAMES?

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Bred in the Bean


'Though the plot turns on a $25,000 contest prize -- big moola in 1940 Astoria, Queens -- no one in Preston Sturges's Christmas in July is defined in the least by money. They aren't defined at all. Milkmen, barbers, bakers, cops on the beat, working-class barmen and pool players, nurses, laundrymen, bootblacks, the kitchen help, taxi drivers (of the most non-Scorsesian sort). Salarymen and their secretary girlfriends. Radio announcers and company Presidents. If judged, judged by how good they are at keeping the craziness going. At times almost achingly tender toward the "poor," the movie's classes don't exist. Hardboiled and sweet-natured, here no one takes anything from anybody and no one means anyone any harm. (In this way would Sturges cover the class waterfront -- working here and in The Great McGinty, upper in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, middle in Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, all three in Sullivan's.)

Dick Powell and Ellen Drew are the middling center of the Sturges whirlwind ~ dervishes captured and spun by Victor Milner's brilliant black-and-white (at times figures seem set in relief like reverse etchings on a silver pot) and Ellsworth Hoagland's blistering editing, in what seems like a race to steal the picture: Demarest as Bildocker, Pangborn the announcer (in such a warm and elegant radio studio), Alexander Carr as store owner Schindel, Harry Hayden as Mr. Waterbury, Ernest Truex as Baxter, and (the winnah!) Raymond Walburn as Dr. Maxford. ("Maxford House -- Grand to the Last Gulp") And Sturges lets the supporting players in on the game: Maxford's pretty secretary (Kay Stewart), Dick (Rod Cameron) the Baxter office wag who starts the plot (and who looks lots like John Candy's kid brother), the neighborhood cop (Frank Moran), Mr. Schmidt and Mrs. Schwartz, Sam the colored floor-sweep (Fred Toomes).

A 65-minute world of slogan contests in which everything happens. From 1940 -- an astonishing year for American movie comedy, on the cusp of world war: Christmas, His Girl Friday, The Great Dictator, My Favorite Wife, The Bank Dick, Philadelphia Story, Remember the Night, The Great McGinty, Shop Around the Corner.

And how 'bout that Davenola!

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Great Vibrations


Bobby Hutcherson passed on August 15th at the age of 75. Ken Laster with a beautiful 90-minute farewell (beginning at the 11:30 mark) to the supreme vibraphonist in all of jazz.

Monday, August 29, 2016

When We Were Men

Harlem, 1959

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Vanished


The decade began with John Fitzgerald Kennedy; it ended with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Yet -- compared to the political cesspool we're all drowning in today, a cesspool which has spat up the most loathsome and criminal candidates in United States history, the Presidential campaigns of those years clearly retain a connection between what Americans voted for and what they got. Yes, American politics even in the best of times was mostly a war among (usually hidden) elites, yet previously with enough cracks in the system to allow for true citizen influence. Now the cracks are all paved over, paving done by (among others) a Wall Street pimp and Drone Killer -- King of the Nowhere People -- who sucked many of us in eight years ago; or by a cranky gutless old man from Vermont, who conned many youngins throughout 2016. Now it is Endgame, the moment totalitarian corporatists have been moving toward since November 1980: a world with an absolute connection between wealth and political influence; a world with no connection between public needs and public policy. How tragic the American Democratic Experiment will soon result, less than 250 years after it began, in the most total of totalitarian states, one where the air we breathe, the water we drink, the hopes and dreams we have for our children will all be commodified. . .

But not then, not yet. Theodore H. White was the establishment's favorite political reporter during the 1960s, most certainly because none of his books mention 1950s culture and the sexualization of what was pretty neutral stuff pre-rock and pre-TV, nothing about the rise of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, nothing about the Dulles Brothers(et al), nothing about the vast nationalist movements across the world, nothing about the militarization of the society, nothing about the rise of the Western Cowboy economies (space, oil, weapons, big agriculture), nothing about class, nothing about capitalism itself or corporations (the words "capitalism / corporation" are not mentioned in any of his four books, totaling more than 2,000 pages!), and nothing about the slow takeover of media by the far right. His Making of the President series are fables about good men and bad men struggling to succeed in a system recognizable in the front pages of the New York Times, as well as from all elementary school books. As are the television documentaries made from White's volumes. . .

Produced by David Wolper, financed by Xerox, narrated by Martin Gabel, the movies are shadowless, from a time when the shadows were sometimes dominated by the light.


1960

1964

The Campaign.



The Democratic Convention's moving tribute to the removed leader.

1968

Thursday, August 11, 2016

John Birch Lives


This is what the Democratic Party has become.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Antidote

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Turn of the Shrew

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Good Boys, Good Girls


Four shorts from the late Abbas Kiarostami.

Bread and Alley (1970)



Experience (1973)



Two Solutions for One Problem (1975)



The Chorus (1982)

Friday, July 22, 2016

Antidote

Monday, July 18, 2016

Changing the World

Like the greatest novels, or paintings, or pieces of music, Kiarostami's films have an intellectual weight, an emotional intensity and a truthfulness that give them almost an intimidating quality. Rigorous, but lively, austere, but not ascetic, his films are both of the world and apart from it, accepting of what is beautiful in life and critical of everything false and cruel. The experience of Taste of Cherry does not end when one exits the cinema, as is the case with the majority of films, even many so-called art films. The work continues to inspire thoughts and feelings, to challenge one intellectually and morally, for days, perhaps forever. This is the sort of film that changes people.
-- David Walsh
Walsh's full and moving tribute to Abbas Kiarostami can be found here.

Taste of Cherry (1997).

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Bern in Hell

Paul Street says it.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Fundamental

The greatest two-way player in NBA history. And the greatest teammate.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Take Five

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Mailer on the Clintons

A lion speaks of pigs past and future (and other things), from March of '98.

Wednesday, June 22, 2016

LSP x 2


Why has Lumpy Space Princess been so ignored during the last few seasons of Adventure Time? ~ seasons clearly taking a perverse pleasure in putting Finn the Human and Jake the Dog further and further away from places, characters, and situations which made the show something beyond oddball: community, the adoration of quirks and uniqueness which comes of friendship, Finn’s love life, Jake’s new fatherhood, Marceline, Tree Trunks, Princess Bubblegum. The recent seasons have been pretty much all oddball. Few of the major characters surrounding Finn and Jake have been featured. What has been featured are curious figures we have never seen before (or will see again): James Baxter the Happy Horse, a large tree, the forever screeching Earl of Lemongrab, Finn’s hat, the Great Bird Man (not Chris Anderson), and a place called Puhoy. Almost no members of the Candy Kingdom or its many lovely princesses. And no LSP.

She's the funniest and dearest character on a very funny and dear show. With her pale-purple and lumpy body and star-implanted forehead, her Valley Girl personality and voice, she loves to eat almost as much as she hates her parents. She is lonely and needy and always cute. And very obsessed with her ex-boyfriend Brad.

Whom we meet in “Trouble in Lumpy Space,” where LSP accidentally bites Jake’s leg, causing him to turn into Lumpy Jake. So Finn must save him as LSP and her BFF Melissa only care about making it to the weekly Promcoming Dance.



My favorite episode in the series is “The Monster”: LSP runs away from home, joins a pack of wolves (who at last figure out she’s not a wolf and try to eat her), escapes the pack, finds a tiny village with lots of crops, eats all the crops and so is proclaimed a monster by the tiny villagers, sees the light and returns home.

Lucky parents.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Every Tuesday Morning

The Great Black Hope, every Tuesday in the White House:



Easily the strongest and most complex American fiction film on the corporate-vampire cesspool from which 9/11 was born, there's not a chance in hell that Stephen Gaghan and George Clooney's Syriana (2005) would be considered for production in the Land of the Drone Killer, a one-eyed land where fascist midgets such as Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Beau Willimon (ooh la la), Seth MacFarlane, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff stand tall. George Clooney (George Clooney!) now begs for financing. And the immensely talented (and brave) Stephen Gaghan? Hasn't made a movie since.

From the Golden Age of Bush/Cheney, Syriana.

Friday, June 10, 2016

Belated 90th


Steve Allen, Burt Lancaster, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Tony Williams and lots of smoking: "All Blues" from 1964.

Miles at 90.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

The Murder Pimp

Wall Street house nigger Barack Obama committed his latest act of Aggressive War by assassinating Taliban Emir Mullah Akhtar Mansour -- incinerating him not with one drone strike, but with four.

Thomas Gaist with a deep and brilliant two-part analysis of the murder.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

In the Land of the Pygmies

The dead, of course, cannot defend themselves against the exploitation of their lives and activities for utterly rotten purposes. Inevitably, President Barack Obama took the occasion of Ali’s death to present an unsuspecting public with another example of his almost supernaturally sinister hypocrisy and cant.

In a statement, Obama asserted that Ali “stood up when it was hard; spoke out when others wouldn’t. His fight outside the ring would cost him his title and his public standing. It would earn him enemies on the left and the right, make him reviled, and nearly send him to jail. But Ali stood his ground. And his victory helped us get used to the America we recognize today.”

As though Obama, the ideal president for spies, policemen and investment bankers, would know anything about “standing up” and “speaking out” when there might be a price to pay. Has this individual ever taken a single step, twitched so much as a muscle, without ensuring himself well ahead of time that it would find approval with the powers that be?

It is a remarkable commentary on the putrid state of the media and public intellectual life in America that Obama can make such an astounding statement without anyone calling him to order. The US president praises Ali for being prepared to go to jail—this from the relentless, vindictive persecutor of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden! Dead and buried opponents of imperialist war are so much less threatening!

“Muhammad Ali shook up the world. And the world is better for it,” asserted Obama, the dispatcher of drone strikes that terrorize entire populations, the presider over “kill lists” that spell incineration for men, women and children in various parts of the globe.

One element of Obama’s statement did ring true: his obvious astonishment at Ali’s willingness to sacrifice career and income for principles. This speaks to a wider and genuinely disturbing problem: how is it possible that we are forced to look back to the 1960s for examples of political courage of this kind?

The United States has been at war with the rest of the world for a quarter-century. During that time, innumerable athletes, actors, musicians, artists, scientists and others have received honors at the hands of Bill Clinton, Bush and Obama, each president guilty of policies leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of human beings or more. Not a soul, as far as the public is aware, has turned down an award, spoken out at the White House or generally repudiated honors from one of these blood-soaked administrations.
-- David Walsh


Sunday, June 5, 2016

American


Compare this man (and his time) with the 21st-century BrandLetes who've stuffed their mouths full of cash while keeping them shut tight as the US devolved into the corporate totalitarian war state it so proudly is today. Beyond his heroic stance -- throwing away his heavyweight title and risking years in prison -- to not participate in the US genocide in Southeast Asia, Ali died without ever allowing his beautiful image to be used in a piece of market pimpery.

Man and King: 1942 - 2016.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

They Wear a Yellow Ribbon

Paul Craig Roberts:
It is extraordinary to see the confidence that many Americans place in their military’s ability. After 15 years the US has been unable to defeat a few lightly armed Taliban, and after 13 years the situation in Iraq remains out of control. This is not very reassuring for the prospect of taking on Russia, much less the strategic alliance between Russia and China. The US could not even defeat China, a Third World country at the time, in Korea 60 years ago.
Americans need to pay attention to the fact that “their” government is a collection of crazed stupid fools likely to bring vaporization to the United States and all of Europe.
Russian weapons systems are far superior to American ones. American weapons are produced by private companies for the purpose of making vast profits. The capability of the weapons is not the main concern. There are endless cost overruns that raise the price of US weapons into outer space.
The F-35 fighter, which is less capable than the F-15 it is supposed to replace, costs between $148 million and $337 million per fighter, depending on whether it is an Air Force, Marine Corps, or Navy model.  A helmet for a F-35 pilot costs $400,000, more than a high end Ferrari. (Washington forces or bribes hapless Denmark into purchasing useless and costly F-35s.)
It is entirely possible that the world is being led to destruction by nothing more than the greed of the US military-security complex. Delighted that the reckless and stupid Obama regime has resurrected the Cold War, thus providing a more convincing “enemy” than the hoax terrorist one, the “Russian threat” has been restored to its 20th century role of providing a justification for bleeding the American taxpayer, social services, and the US economy dry in behalf of profits for armament manufacturers.
However, this time Washington’s rhetoric accompanying the revived Cold War is far more reckless and dangerous, as are Washington’s actions, than during the real Cold War. Previous US presidents worked to defuse tensions. The Obama regime has inflated tensions with lies and reckless provocations, which makes it far more likely that the new Cold War will turn hot. If Killary gains the White House, the world is unlikely to survive her first term.
All of America’s wars except the first—the war for independence—were wars for Empire. Keep that fact in mind as you hear the Memorial Day bloviations about the brave men and women who served our country in its times of peril. The United States has never been in peril, but Washington has delivered peril to numerous other countries in its pursuit of hegemony over others.
Today for the first time in its history the US faces peril as a result of Washington’s attempts to assert hegemony over Russia and China.
Russia and China are not impressed by Washington’s arrogance, hubris, and stupidity. Moreover, these two countries are not the native American Plains Indians, who were starved into submission by the Union Army’s slaughter of the buffalo.
They are not the tired Spain of 1898 from whom Washington stole Cuba and the Philippines and called the theft a “liberation.”
They are not small Japan whose limited resources were spread over the vastness of the Pacific and Asia.
They are not Germany already defeated by the Red Army before Washington came to the war.
They are not Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, or the various Latin American countries that General Smedley Butler said the US Marines made safe for “the United Fruit Company” and “some lousy bank investment.”
An insouciant American population preoccupied with selfies and delusions of military prowess, while its crazed government picks a fight with Russia and China, has no future.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Never

#NeverHillary

Friday, May 20, 2016

Why Not?


This is why not: Andrew Levine with the revolting answer; and Rob Urie on the leading proponent of reactionary violence in the world today.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

Galant' Uomo


He was the first.

Mark Lane 1927 - 2016

Saturday, May 14, 2016

The Spurs Without Tears


Matt Moore:
No tears.

There would be no emotional outbursts, no big scenes about what this failure feels like or what the future holds. The San Antonio Spurs didn't look inward or down after their Game 6 113-99 loss to the Thunder on Thursday. The Spurs were eliminated 4-2, failing to reach the conference finals for the second straight season since winning the title, and losing in the postseason for the second time in five seasons to this young, emotional, athletic team from Oklahoma City. The end comes with questions, and the weight of those questions was evident the entire night even as the Thunder ran away with the game.

Was this the last game Tim Duncan will ever play? What about Manu Ginobili? Is the era over? Do the Spurs finally need to get younger? Are changes necessary after 67 wins and a historic season that saw them lose only once at home in the regular season?

With 3:12 remaining, the Spurs had cut it to 11. From the other vantage point, the Thunder had let a 26-point lead slip, and the crowd was about to have a collective panic attack and crumble into the fetal position. One more big play and the panic was going to start to infect OKC. Kawhi Leonard ran the pick and roll, and Old Man Riverwalk, the Big Fundamental, caught the ball and drove the lane. Then this happened:

Duncan's face as he walked off the floor was a haunting reminder that eventually everyone has that moment where they just can't do what they used to.

After the game, when asked if this was Duncan's last game, Gregg Popovich was coy, jokingly asking the reporter if he knew something Popovich didn't know, and simply saying Duncan played well in Game 6. (He did.) Duncan did what you expected after the game. He said he would think about it after he left the arena.

We've thought this was the end of San Antonio before. The 2011 failure to get out of the first round. The 2013 Finals, maybe the toughest loss in NBA Finals history. This felt different, but so did those. Maybe Duncan will simply return, maybe Ginobili will, too. What's clear, though, is that as great as this Spurs team was in the regular season, it was not ready to face the elite teams.

The beautiful ball movement that has sent basketballphiles' heads spinning was gone, replaced by isolation grinds which the Thunder snuffed out and manhandled. The scoring balance was absent as the Spurs turned again and again to LaMarcus Aldridge, who had two great games and then returned to just being a mid-range shooting power forward, high in volume, low in efficiency.

And then there was Kawhi Leonard.

Leonard's season was phenomenal. He was among the elite in efficiency in every type of play-set he interacted with, offensively or defensively. He was a great spot-up shooter, isolation scorer, pick-and-roll player, slasher, cutter, post-up player and he defended every man, woman, child, wildebeast, mountain lion and mythical creature he was tasked with on his way to Defensive Player of the Year.

However, if we're going to hold these elite players to high standards, Leonard's game has to be examined. Against the Clippers in 2015 he faded over the course of the series, taking less and less of a role before San Antonio was bounced in Game 7. He was solvable. Against the Warriors this season, he failed to assert himself.

Against the Thunder, he had his games, but over the course of the series his impact became less and less. On Thursday, Leonard finished with 22 points, on 23 shots, and really only started trying to exert his will when it was too late. He had just nine shots at the half as the Thunder ran up a 24-point lead. That can't happen if Leonard is going to be the best player on a title team, the guy they lean on. The Thunder, fittingly, took a very Spurs approach to guarding Leonard and Aldridge. No matter how much individual success they had early in the series, OKC kept throwing tough, physical defense at them with Serge Ibaka and Steven Adams on Aldridge and Andre Roberson and Kevin Durant on Leonard. It wore them down, it wore them out, and in the end, the cumulative effect was too much.

The team that always defined itself by its scoring balance and poetic flow found itself stuck in the mud, spinning its two-star wheels helplessly. This was Aldridge's first year in the system and though he was the marquee name of the summer, this team's future is built around Leonard. His early success came as a utility man on the 2014 title team. The jury is still out on his tenure as a star player. Leonard is still phenomenal, still growing, and with how many close games this series had, it's entirely possible that if Leonard did enough the series could have bounced their way.

But it didn't, and on some level, either the Spurs have to return to the balance they had before this season's revamped attack (which was designed to counter the Warriors) or Leonard has to rise above. He has improved every year, but this shows that even he will have to deal with the setbacks every young player -- he's only 24 -- has to go through.

Heavy is the crown.

As for the Spurs' longtime ruler, the greatest player in franchise history, Duncan said nothing Thursday night, as he has said nothing so many times. He is timeless, ageless, speechless, his only expressions coming in disbelief at a foul call he disagrees with. (And he was still making those faces in Game 6 all the way to the end.) Tony Parker sat at his locker and stared straight ahead. Duncan stared straight ahead as he answered the media's call on whether this was it for him. Manu Ginobili walked down the hall toward the bus, embracing Patty Mills as they walked side by side.

From Popovich to Duncan, and Danny Green in between, the Spurs were the same classy organization they've always been. They showered the Thunder with praise, answered their questions dutifully. Then they left.

When asked about his conversation with Popovich, after which Duncan returned for the fourth quarter, Duncan said: "He asked me if I wanted to play and I told him I wanted to play and I always want to play, so he said to go for it. That was the end of it, so I stayed out there the whole time."

Manu Ginobili on if he'll retire: "I'll take my time as always."

Kawhi Leonard on Duncan as a teammate: "He's been a great teammate to me. Helped me grow up a lot throughout my years. We'll see what happens."

So no. No farewell tours. No emotional goodbyes. No tears. If this is the end -- and as always, assuming that it is should be considered folly with this seemingly immortal squad -- it comes with the same quiet dignity that has brought them so many championships, so much success, so much respect.

However, no matter how long it takes, or how far away from the spotlight they'll go, the Spurs will face a process that Tim Duncan described when asked about his future.

"I'll get to that after I get out of here, and figure life out."

After such an amazing season, and with such high hopes dashed, the Spurs are left to do the same.