On Memorial Day Eve

Relax and be mellow - and melancholy if you've been reflecting at all on the extraordinarily shitty reasons for feel-good bullshit celebrations on a day intended to memorialize lives cut short in service to the venal ambitions of politicians bent on conquest driven by corporate profit.

Freedom rings loudly now
Listen up, hear the sound
Screamin’ as the shots ring out
That’s what freedom sounds like now

Beating drums, fathers’ sons
Teach ‘em well to kingdom come
Steal the daylight from the sun
That’s what freedom has become

Stand over the shadow of a man
Starin’ at his lifetime with blood-stained hands
What had you planned to say?

Underground, out to sea
Bodies come to rest in peace
Fighting for the right for more
That’s what freedom has in store

Asphalt burns the un-soled feet
Vacant eyes in defeat
Lost the thread on every dream
That’s what freedom’s come to mean

Stand behind the handle of a gun
Starin’ down the future, darin’ time to run
Like time could run away

Freedom’s blowin’ sadly now
Listen up, love came ‘round
Candles burn in memory
Freedom is a fading dream

A Sunny Day In Ireland

It's generally a lousy idea to put Human Rights to a vote, but in a country that's 85% Catholic, marriage equality is now the law in Ireland. 

Way to go, Irelanders.

With the world watching, the Republic of Ireland has become the first nation to enact marriage equality by popular vote.

The leader of the opposition, David Quinn, has already conceded the loss. “Congratulations to the Yes side on their win,” tweeted Quinn, who is director of the Iona Institute. And in a more lengthy statement Quinn is already pivoting to the next fight, saying "We hope the Government will address the concerns voters on the No side have about the implications for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience."

But today is a day of celebration for supporters of LGBT rights, both in Ireland and worldwide. The margin is still being finalized but all reports say Irish voters Friday overwhelmingly approved adding this language to the country’s constitution: “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.”

Coupla things:
While Ireland is the first to make it official by way of popular vote, they're the 19th country in the world to make Marriage Equality the law nation-wide.  USAmerica Inc (aka The Land Of The Free and The Home Of The Brave) funnily enough isn't among them.

And also too:

Irish people from all over the world went to great lengths and considerable expense for the  chance to go home and vote.  We've seen similar phenomena in South Africa and Argentina and Panama and Iraq and Afghanistan and Poland and Ukraine and Egypt - and we never see it here in the US.  I guess it's just another good example of how fucking exceptional we are.

Crumbling

hat tip = FB buddy LM-M

Basically - we don't wanna bust the biggies because that'll be bad for business; it could hurt some companies that are very important to all of us in a lot of ways, and could have a really bad impact on the economy as a whole.

By that logic, we don't wanna bust the meth peddler on the corner down the block because that could drive down the property values of the whole neighborhood(?)

World Music

By way of Little Green Footballs

DakhaBrahka:

Maybe I'm growing up or maybe I'm just getting weirder as I grow old, but even though there's a tinge of 1960s East Coast ersatz Bohemian (Faux-hemian?) in this, there's something I find compelling about it - and I'm not going to bail on it by calling it "oddly compelling".

There's just something kinda noble and soulful about talented people creating something interesting enough to get past the barriers of culture or politics or whatever.

Bonus - looking them up on Google and Wikipedia was worth the effort if only to have discovered there's a music genre known as Ethno-Chaos.

The world is out there - we should go take a look at it once in a while.

Today In Fashion

In the last dozen years or so, it seems like a bajillion middle-aged middle-class American men (guys with more money than either common sense or hair) grew goatees and started riding Harleys - evidence of how fucked up and phony we can get in our obsessive pursuit of a personal identity driven by the whims of fashion and imposed from the outside by marketeers bean-counters and peer pressure instead of reflection study and insight.

Or maybe I'm just feeling the effects of having binge-watched way too much Mad Men over the weekend, trying to catch myself up on a part of Cultura Americanus Vulgaris.

Anyway, along comes this - via KWTX:

WACO: (May 17, 2015) Rival motorcycle gangs turned a local restaurant into a shooting gallery Sunday afternoon and when the gunfire was over, nine people were dead and 18 were injured.

Early Monday, law enforcement had turned their attention to the risk of additional bike gang members looking to retaliate, and initiate further violence in the Waco area.

Sunday afternoon, Waco Police, assisted by Department of Public Safety troopers, police officers from several cities and deputies from the McLennan County Sheriff's Office were surrounding the Twin Peaks Restaurant, in the Central Texas Market Place after several people were reported shot during a rival motorcycle gang fight, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said.

Police initially said three gangs were involved, but later said factions from at least five gangs took part in the melee.

Police and troopers were in the parking lot trying to secure the area and protect citizens when a fight broke out inside the restaurant and spilled into the parking lot.

Swanton said the fight quickly escalated from fists and feet to chains, clubs and knives, then to gunfire.

Gang members were shooting at each other and officers at the scene fired their weapons, as well, Swanton said.

So - a few questions:

Assuming there're good-guy bikers with guns and bad-guy bikers with guns, which was which when the shooting started?

When the cops showed up, were they able to spot the good-guy bikers?  Or did they just assume everybody with a gun (but without a cop suit) was a bad guy who needed to be seen as a threat?

And when can we expect all you CosPlay Bikers to stand up and condemn the extremists in your midst?

The Bias Runs Deep

We learn that things are supposed to be a certain way, and it can be a ridiculously arduous task to un-learn them in order to re-learn them in a different way.

I understand it, but it still kinda pisses me off that we'll have to spend the next 30 years trying to undo the damage caused by the Political Psychology of the last 30 years and that it's more than a little probable that we'll just have to wait for the UltraCons to start dying off.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

One From That Stewart Guy

The Daily Show
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We're losing a good one.

(sigh) Hersh

Oh-fucking-dear - it might not be about what they told us it's about.

The Rude Pundit nails it again:

"High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy." Where Hersh goes wrong (and what everyone attacking the article follows) is pretending that his conclusion about President Obama and his administration making up a story about the bin Laden raid is earth-shattering. Christ, we just expect the president to lie to our faces. Hersh is living in a pre-Nixon era if he thinks we have that outrage gene anymore.

This is a nation that reelected the man who lied them into war. We are so apathetic that we just want to believe whatever story makes us sleep better at night. If we pull at the threads, if we start saying what the lies are in our "war on terror," there's a mighty big, comfy blanket that will fall apart. We will never allow that to happen. Truth carries a trigger-warning for Americans, so we choose to ignore it. Whether or not the real story is Hersh's, it sure as hell isn't the official one. It never is.

With all the bullshit faux-scandals and flat-out malarkey about Obama that the Repubs have been just making up, along comes a coupla items that're worth gabbing about (TPP, and now this bin Laden fantasy), and there's nothing  anybody has to say about anything?

I wonder why I'm not shocked that we are not shocked by any of this.

Today's Pix

Paid Up Patriotism

I've always felt uncomfortable with what seems like mandatory displays of patriotism - all the shit you see on Facebook and Twitter and on any given "news" show on radio or TV; and now including SportsBall events.  It's always seemed like I was back in high school in the late 60s, when guys wearing letter jackets were free (and encouraged) to beat up any kid who dared not stand up and sing the anthem or genuflect as the flag went by.

But not even in my darkest heaviest skepticism (some would say cynicism) did I ever really think we had sunk so low.

And I think it really sucks that we need Smedley Butler to come around once in a while to warn us again about the totally shitty misuse of any American soldier in service of wielding the political power necessary to pursue such grotesque profit at such an obscene expense.

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912.

I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916.

I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Today's John Oliver

Today's Deep Thought

Once upon a time we decided we'd do a little governmentin' to get Dow Chemical and Standard Oil and Honeywell (et al) to stop dumping all their shit into the water, and to stop filling the skies with lead and mercury and sulfur (et al) - we needed Gubmint to help defend us against Big Bidness.

(remember now - Dick Nixon put the EPA together, but it was Johnson's idea because he loved working with the windows open on a spring day in DC, but he couldn't stand the stench of the Potomac wafting in on the breeze)

Anyway, then we decided that was just too restrictive and job-kill-y, so we wanted Big Bidness to defend us against Big Gubmint, and we got all Animal Instinct-y and Free Market-y, and gee - looks like we're kinda back to where we started.  'Cept that now, it seems we'll be fighting to the death to decide whether Big Bidness or Big Gubmint will defend us against an evermore hostile environment.

Good luck, kids.  

BTW - I'm in the market for some old aluminum cookware, hoping to push my Alzheimer's onset up by a decade or two so I don't hafta watch this shit happen.

Tim Wise

Re: Cops beating on people - mostly people with dark brown skin, and the ridiculousness of pale people thinking they know much of anything about what it's like to live black in white America.

It is bad enough that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the proper response to police brutality, economic devastation and perpetual marginality, having ourselves rarely been the targets of any of these. It is bad enough that we deign to instruct black people whose lives we have not lived, whose terrors we have not faced, and whose gauntlets we have not run, about violence; this, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we currently claim possession solely as a result of violence. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation's founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George's palace, no horseback freedom rides to effect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others; here because of our insatiable and rapacious desire to take by force the land and labor of those others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Rather, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

 Read the rest of it at Alternet

Happy Day, You Muthuh

Today's Quote

Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge—even to ourselves—that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) --Carl Sagan 

I think of this quote pretty much every time I hear any "conservative" start to talk about almost anything.

Supply Side Economics & Trickle-Down
Religion
Nicotine isn't addictive and smoking's not really all that bad for ya
Tea Party
Antonin Scalia
Post-Racial America
Climate Change is a hoax
Tax Cuts boost government revenue
Cops aren't fucking us over
Freedom of Speech means billionaires should own everything
DumFux News
We were founded as a christian nation
Jade Helm 15

and on and on and on