The Sky is Falling !!!

Okay, so the 22 Minutes piece isn't exactly high art, but you get the point perhaps.  Just fourteen years ago, we watched terrorists crash jet-airliners into and bring down skyscrapers in Manhattan, with thousands dead.  Watched people throwing themselves from windows to escape the smoke & flames.  It hurt.  It shocked.  It scarred us.  And we reacted in panic, rushing through new security-powers, turning ourselves into cattle in our airports, starting two wars, one of which hasn't quite ended even today, and the other of which helped birth ISIS.

We endured those attacks, far greater and more traumatic than those in Paris, and some of us at least, had mind to later regret our initial hasty rush to act, our temptation to give in to the demands of politicians who promised to keep us safe.  Our stupid willingness to give the terrorists exactly what they fucking wanted.  To be terrified into undermining that which makes Western society great, and waging what they could easily portray as a war on the Muslim world.

And now here we are again, having seemingly learned nothing in the years since.  We have even worse politicians calling for more extreme action, demanding that we surrender what remains of our civil liberties in the name of security.  We have the same incessant drumbeat for MOAR WAR.  And we have an even more lunatic bunch of fanatical crazies trying to goad us into the clash of civilisations they so desperately desire.

We overreacted then, and we're on the verge of overreacting now.  Calm the fuck down people, for all our sakes.

The White House on Dick Cheney & the Iran Deal

Missed this before now somehow.  The music sucks, and I kinda hate conceptually posting something from the White House itself, but the point still needs to be made apparently about the undead corpse of Darth Cheney, and other warmongering neo-con assholes like him, whether they be fellow Ford-admin. revanchists, radicals of the Newt Gingrich 'revolution' in the 'nineties, or latter-day hangers-on like Sarah Palin, that they have been consistently wrong on foreign policy, over and over and again, at the expense not just of the American pocket-book, and thousands of dead US soldiers, but at the expense of millions of civilian lives destroyed, damaged, or displaced, as one society after another is wrecked in their real-life game of Risk.*


* And no, the Obama administration is far, far from blameless, with say its similar reckless destabilisation in Libya & Syria.

Overcompensating

Lindsey Graham, the only one of these clowns that should have even remotely been considered as a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, looked and sounded quite sad to be up there in the kiddie-debates with his fellow losers.  But, what the hell is he trying to accomplish with these promises of endless war ?  We get it already, you're super-duper serious about foreign-policy because your answer to every problem is always Bomb, Bomb, Bomb !, and if the bombs don't work, send in the soldiers.  It's almost as if he's trying to compensate for...something; Who knows what ?

I guess some people out there were quite impressed with Carly Fiorina's performance (low expectations ?).  I'll say this for her: She wasn't standing on a box to make herself look taller.*


* Okay, those shoes may have slight heels, though I can't tell for sure.  She still comes across a hell of a lot more comfortable in her skin than Lindsey.

Madness

Well you lunatics in DC & the EU wanted a new Cold War, and now you have it.  Good news for the military-industrial complex.

MOSCOW — Russia's military will add over 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles this year alone that are capable of piercing any missile defenses, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday in a blunt reminder of the nation's nuclear might amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.

Putin spoke at the opening of an arms show at a shooting range in Alabino just west of Moscow, a huge display intended to showcase Russia's resurgent military.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg accused the Russians of "nuclear saber-rattling," and said that was one of the reasons the western military alliance has been beefing up its ability to defend its members.

So, something the Russians just announced in response to your recent promise of permanently placing more tanks and heavy artillery in Eastern Europe is the reason for you doing the same ?  What crazy circular logic is that ?  It's called tit-for-tat you fools.  And it's as stupid a game in which to participate as Russian roulette.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, briefing reporters via teleconference from Boston, where he is recovering from surgery on a broken leg, called Putin's announcement concerning.

"We're trying to move in the opposite direction," Kerry said. "We have had enormous cooperation from the 1990s forward with respect to the structure of nuclear weapons in the former territories of the Soviet Union. And no one wants to see us step backwards."

You lying sack of shit !  Sorry, but chutzpah doesn't describe it.  There just isn't a word sufficient for such shameless lying.  Not that our stenographer-media in the West will call him on it.

But now that the nasty Russians are building more missiles, you'll have to announce another escalation on your part, won't you ?  To which the Russians will respond, to which you will respond, and so on...

...Until mushroom-clouds grace the skylines of every major metropolis.  Whee !

A Perfect Circle: Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums

This one could/should maybe be saved for the next insane war, but, at this point, 'the war' is...every day.  And the need for reminders is perpetual.  So, given that it came up in the mix, why the hell not ?

Replacing the face in the last frames of the video isn't that difficult whether you replace them with that of Barry or that of Sir Plasticface.  Ever and ever as it was.

Dick Still Alive; Still a Dick

The more time passes since he left office, the more respect I have for George W Bush.  Seems like on some level at least he's aware what an incompetent fuckup he was, and how irresponsible it was giving over control of so much of his administration to recalcitrant Nixon/Ford-era assholes the likes of Rumsfeld & Cheney.

The latter fuckers...not so much.  I'm not going to quote or in any way reference the shit that occasioned this particular post, any more than otherwise, in regards to the shit that falls out of this particular asshole's mouth on a regular basis.  Suffice it to say that the day had a 'y' in it, and that this heart-dead motherfucker still lives and gets to shoot off his mouth with vile sewage while thousands of innocents remain dead, and millions or billions more may yet die before their time if this bloodthirsty lunatic gets his way.

Sleater-Kinney: Combat Rock

Since when is scepticism un-American ?

Not sure how I'd have got through the Bush years without the likes of Sleater-Kinney.  But then, what to say of the years since, in the inter-regnum till Uncle Barry hands the reins over to Hill' ?  It's one's thing to feel justifiable outrage when you think there's an alternative; another entirely when there's demonstrably nothing of the sort, when there is (as there has been most of my life), nothing but shit, slightly shittier, and shit-on-a-stick...  In 2016, America will elect as president either a) the most right-wing Fascistic Democratic politician, or b) a lunatic-fringe Tea-Party Republican who makes the most right-wing Democrat look like fucking Gandhi or Jesus.  This is representative of the totality of the options for most Americans.  And the options for most Britons are scarcely better.  Fuck us all.