Open

20171207

To LOTE vote or Not to LOTE vote

-


Fascinating article, here, by Shawn King, about the Atlanta Mayoral race that points to the core of an old problem, mainly—to keep in tone with the Shakespearean reference of this post subject title—that there is something deeply rotten in the kingdom of DNC: a common liberal hypocrisy which, as it so happens, is unwittingly exposed in the way the article sees progressives as a frustrating problem out of step with the “pragmatism” of the corporate owned democrat machine.

While the author attempts to make the point that “progressives” haven’t learned anything from the last Presidential election, there is, quite ironically, a case to be made here that the article itself serves, as it turns out, as a most perfect illustration of how establishment liberals and DNC apparatchiks are the ones, in fact, who are stubbornly refusing to draw the lessons from the past, not through ignorance but through willful denial, and possibly some degree of self-delusion—though the DNC apparatchiks themselves (who have been actively purging progressives from the party), no doubt, know better.

The author portrays “progressives” as unrealistically demanding perfection and as being sore losers, then goes on to state that NONE of the candidates are perfect, so that the author can encourage people to give up their ideals in a way which the author thinks is more pragmatic and guarantees the continuation of the status quo of which the author is a member.

The truth of the matter is that there was no either/or there, and neither of the two candidates deserved any support.

The vivid exchanges and comments on the thread following the article are actually more interesting than the article itself, and are pointing out to an old festering wound that is not about to go away—while the DNC stubbornly goes on refusing to even admit it is ill and out of step with the zeitgeist of our times.

The Zeitgeist is with the movement that brought Obama to power. (A movement that, quite unfortunately, Obama failed to tap into once elected.)

The Zeitgeist is with the Bernie Sanders progressives.

Clearly, where the zeitgeist is not, is with the DINOs (Democrats in Name Only) of the DNC.

I have heard the oft repeated talking point that HRC won the popular vote. Which is factually true. Equally true, however, is the fact that, if one were to exclude California (which is but only one State of the Federation) from the count, HRC, as it turns out, no longer wins the popular vote (which, by the way, is why we have an Electoral College in this country—the other states of the Federation would not take it too kindly if California were to decide for them who the next president ought to be). The bottom line is that HRC managed to lose to Trump (aka "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory") and this is no small feat and certainly nothing to brag about, and, no, I don’t think that the Russians did it!


* LOTE: Lesser of Two Evils


MORE >

20171102

Squaring the Circle

-






Or ought Samhain to be celebrated, as some traditions would have it, on the night that the Pleiades star cluster culminate, on November 21?



Me? I am more of a traditionalist

Just waiting for the NEW MOON:





>

MORE >

20171002

Word up it's the code word

-


No matter where you say it you know that you'll be heard.


MORE >

20170911

IT




It's a story that has been told many times over under many forms, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s admonition about those who would "gaze into an Abyss," to Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or, in more recent date, George Lucas’s Star Wars epic space opera.

Joshua Rothman really does go to the heart of it, in his September 10, 2017 brilliant analysis of IT for the New Yorker:







In the final confrontation:





Did you get that Hillary Clinton?

"What's really needed is imagination."

The acceptance of Machiavellianism is a trap.



By the same token, this is why Georges R. R. Martin is NOT "the J.R.R. Tolkien of his generation."

Game of Thrones glorifies Machiavellianism (there are those who have referred to it as Campy Machiavellian Porn) and has no spiritual dimension.


MORE >

20170725

Valerian and the City of Planet Hollywood

-


My date (the cool girl I picked up at The Wulfshead, last Friday) and I were very, very, very lucky indeed, though we didn't know it at the time, to decide to go to the movie that night and be amongst the very few who got to see Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in full XD 3D at the Howard Hughes Cinemark wide screen auditorium (THE ONLY PLACE IN TOWN, and apparently, as it turns out, also possibly the only day, THE MOVIE WAS ACTUALLY FEATURED IN 3D ON A WIDE SCREEN, at the time of its release.



You can still see the movie in 3D, but, for some strange and baffling reason, well beyond my comprehension (I don't know much about Hollywood politics), you won’t find it featured on a wide screen anywhere in LA, and, for all I know, in the rest of the country either.

If I were to be pressed to speculate about this, and formulate some kind of an opinion, my guess would be that the U.S. doesn’t care much about cities of a thousand planets, all it cares about is Planet America, but that’s just my unqualified opinion and perhaps I am making too much of this—with my date being such a Francophile and me such a great fan of the Valerian and Laureline comic series, and all. What do I know?

According to an interview with Luc Besson, dated November 2016, Valerian had been scheduled for some time already to be released in IMAX on the 21st of July, and then, apparently, Dunkirk (which was shot mostly in IMAX) coveted the same date on the calendar and Valerian got kicked out of the IMAX theaters, as a result. Dunkirk also secured a quasi-monopoly on all the wide-screen theaters too (like, from what we've been able to tell, Cinemark XD and Arclight WS).

When asked, at the time, in that same interview, whether he had considered moving the release of Valerian to an other date, Luc Besson explained that they chose the date two years ago and that the movie was set to be released not only in the U.S., but everywhere else in the world already: "You can’t move just because one director comes here. So we will go 21st of July no matter what. But we are in 3D, so we have a 3D version and RealD and IMAX everywhere else in the world."

That said, it is unfortunate, in this great country of ours, that the film couldn’t be given a fair chance and got deprived of being shown in the format that does it the most justice.

One would think that in America, out of all places, the entertainment industry would not be so suppressively reductionist.

Is it naive of me to believe the world is large and complex enough to afford people more of a choice and that there ought to be more to planet Hollywood than just black and white, or the false dilemma of being made to choose between apples and oranges, or between Nolan and Besson, two directors featuring two very different kinds of movies?

Scott Mendelson at Forbes, had this to say about it:








MORE >

20170615

Doesn't anyone proofread anything any longer?




I know... I shouldn't let it get to me.

Just a couple of typos in Conn Hallinan’s otherwise well-written article, Europe: the Danger of the Center.

1. First paragraph:

Ought to read: “FIVE years from now”—and NOT “six” years from now.

The next presidential election in France is currently scheduled to take place in April 2022, with a second round of voting in the following May, if no candidate wins a majority in the first round.

2. 30th paragraph:

Ought to read: "Macron’s new centrist party, En Marche!, won, but mostly due to the anti-Le Pen vote. His program of austerity, restraints on unions, and corporate tax cuts is NOT popular with everyone...”, and most certainly not "is popular with everyone."

Duh! Like…obviously!

I am sure there are more typos, but those were the most glaring ones.

Great article, otherwise, by all accounts.

The author does take the time of explaining a lot about a not so simple situation (delving into some concepts, pretty basics, I am sure, to many informed readers, and possibly not so basics to Americentric readers when it comes to Europe in general and France in particular).

MORE >

20170504

Change We Can't Believe In

-


I am bestowing the much coveted Honest Scrap award to Jon Schwarz for this witty and incisive oped at The Intercept:



It’s tough to imagine any two human beings more different than Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

...states the author.

One’s black. One’s white. One writes books. One doesn’t read books and may not be sure what books are. One grew up on the periphery of the U.S. empire and it made him deeply cosmopolitan. One grew up in New York City and it made him a provincial hick.

One has the self-control of a 1,000-year-old Zen monk. One responds to any stimulus like an amoeba. One’s a slender athlete. One’s a fleshy endomorph with whorls and folds in his face like a Shar Pei.

But their elections have one critical thing in common:

They both came out of NOWHERE to become president, with characteristics that previously would have throttled their chances before they delivered their first speech in Iowa.

There’s no need to recount everything from Trump’s florid life and campaign that sensible people were sure disqualified him. But we’ve forgotten how the sensible people at first saw Obama in much the same way, and for reasons that went far beyond him being African American. He’d been a senator for just two years when he started running and would have to beat the entire party establishment. His father was Muslim. He wasn’t just not named Henry Smith, his middle name was Hussein. He’d even used cocaine, and openly admitted it.

Yet both Obama and Trump vaulted over everyone and everything into the White House. Tens of millions of Americans were willing to place their lives in the hands of political anomalies whose central pitch was that they would deliver profound change. The rise of Bernie Sanders, who’s proven that you can become the most popular politician in the country without owning a comb, demonstrates the same thing.

"What does this mean?" Schwarz asks.

I’d say it means that something has gone incredibly wrong with this country’s political system, that large numbers of us are desperate, and are willing to hand over power to absolutely anyone. That brings us to the peculiar reality that it’s not just Obama and Trump’s elections that had something significant in common, it’s likely their presidencies.

Obama said American healthcare was in crisis and that "plans that tinker and halfway measures now belong to yesterday." Obama was also outraged by pharmaceutical companies gouging Medicare.

According to Trump, "People all across the country are devastated" by the healthcare system, but if we put him in charge, "Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now." Trump was also infuriated by Big Pharma and just like Obama vowed to crush them.

Yet Obama delivered a halfway measure that tinkered with the problem, and never went after drug manufacturers. Trump is now poised to give America … literally the same thing.

Obama called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake" in 2008. In 2016 Trump said NAFTA had caused "devastation" and was "the worst trade deal maybe ever signed." But Obama didn’t renegotiate NAFTA. Trump just announced he’s not going to pull out of it, and it seems clear the odds of any real renegotiation are slim.

Obama attacked Wall Street, and so did Trump. Both then stocked their administrations with bankers.

And Obama and Trump both ran against the Iraq War, and both of their constituencies understood them to mean they would rethink our entire policy toward the Middle East. Both Obama and Trump then faithfully continued the Afghanistan War, bombed Syria, and helped Saudi Arabia starve Yemen.

Of course, "this doesn’t make Obama and Trump the same," Schwarz amends. "Obama’s policies made life better for many regular people at the edges. Trump’s will unquestionably make them worse — and that’s the best case scenario, in which he doesn’t accidentally terminate human civilization."

But it does mean that on the core issues of politics — the ones about which the one percent/globalists/Bilderbergers/disguised space lizards truly care — Obama did not produce genuine change. And, it now seems more and more likely, neither will Trump.


Given Trump’s atrocious methods and goals, it’s impossible not to take joy in this. “Now that we have vanquished the Dhimmicrats and cuckservatives,” Steve Bannon proclaimed, “we shall —” and then tripped on his shoelaces and fell down 97 flights of stairs.

We can’t enjoy this for long, though. If left unaddressed, the anguish that Americans demonstrated by voting for both Obama and Trump will not evaporate. I once believed there could never be a worse, lazier, more frightening president than Ronald Reagan. Then I was sure of the same thing about George W. Bush. Now I’ve learned my lesson. We have to get busy creating a place for this country’s anger and despair to be used constructively, or it will eventually birth something even worse than Trump.

What happens to an American dream deferred? We lucked out once when it elected Obama. We may survive it electing Trump. But if we keep deferring it, it is absolutely certain that one day it’s going to explode and take the whole world with it.


In other News:

- Esquire (Matt Patches) 05.28.2015:
Shepard Fairey on the Future of Political Art and Whether Obama Lived Up to His 'Hope' Poster


MORE >

20170501

Major Hellstrom

-
The resemblance is uncanny:



Not quite sure why that is—they both are sharp dressers?


MORE >

20170426

There is no cure for deluded

I read a Facebook post from an old high school friend that is selling his expensive boots for $100 cause apparently he needs the money.
The poor guy lives in Oklahoma now. He lived in Texas after leaving Illinois. Her was always deluded as all hell. We argued over his voting for that idiot charlatan Ronald Reagan. He was a big supporter this last election of the even more shitheaded Ben Carson.  Once Carson dropped out he became a Trump supporter. So all his adult life he's been a diehard republican.
 This guy doesn't have, and never had had much more than a pot to piss in. His parents never had much more than a pot to piss in and it was always a rental pot since they to my knowledge never owned a home. They would be homeless and destitute were it not for Medicaid and Social Security but they hate FDR.
 My old buddy a few months ago needed money to send his daughter on a trip with her drill team, I guess it was her drill team, to Disneyworld to perform.  He was scared she couldn't go cause he didn't have the money so he, like with his boots, went to Facebook calling for donations. I sent him a check for 75 or $100. Don't remember but I did get a nice thank you from his daughter. Truth was I would have paid for her trip if I had to. And I am fortunate enough, or smart enough, whatever, with my money to be able to pay for her $800 trip. I did good Democrat things. Was a union negotiating committee member and with support from my fellow comrades achieved pretty good pay and benefits so my brothers, sisters and I could pay for an $800 trip to Disney World.  Voted for people I believed had the best interests of Working Americans in mind. My friend did neither of these things. He hates Unions and Democrats. Repeats the tired republican bullshit about them destroying America and they're "Socialist."  Even though his parents would have starved or froze to death years ago were it not for that "Socialist" FDR and Social Security.
 Even living in the republican bastion of Oklahoma and still having to ask for help to pay his bills and give his daughter something he still blames Democrats for his lack of financial independence.
 I was more than happy to help my old friend out. By the way, he is an evangelical nutjob as well. But I do wonder if he would do the same for me, or anyone else. As a republican he could justify his lack of charity as tough love. No doubt he would do that. No doubt like his parents that profess hatred of socialism, he will cash his Social Security check and sign up for Medicaid. Quite frankly, after nearly 40 years of friendship with this guy. Being the one he could turn to. Raising three kids that talk to me. I didn't mention his Christian divorce and the children that don't talk to him. While certainly not wealthy I am financially secure enough to give an old friend $800 to send his daughter on a once in a lifetime trip while he can't. I figured my example and commitment to progressive policies would help him see the light.  But it hasn't. I am pretty confident my fellow Wulfsheaders that read this are wondering why I am still friends with this guy. I'm wondering that myself.  Unfortunately there are at least 50 million people like him. Diehard republican voting fools still waiting for trickle down to work for them. But counting on Social Security to keep them afloat till it does. But it's not socialism when a good Christian republican American cashes the Social Security check. At least that's what they tell themselves. These people lie to themselves to validate their blissful ignorance. There is no convincing them. Next time he needs money I think I'll send him a message telling him Trump and the spirit of Reagan want him to stand on his own two feet. It's all about personal responsibility. But I will send him the pictures of my kids at Disney World and look forward to his being able to pay his bills as soon as trickle down economics starts working for him.
MORE >

20170425

Centrism is Bogus

-


The best critique of centrism you'll ever read is a Twitter conversation, says John Aziz.

In the words of Jim Hightower:



The fact of the matter is Centrism is indefensible.

This is not to say that some—politicians, of course— have not made their career out of it, and highly successful ones too, at that, in their bid for office.

Of recent date, the ongoing French presidential election comes to mind:



There are those who have tried to defend it...



Tony Blair is right about one thing: It is indeed quite mistakenly that centrism is perceived "as a sort of splitting the difference between right and left."

It makes it seem innocuous in a misleading kind of a "fair and balanced" sort of a way. Which is the reason why political demagogues have found it so easy to sell as a bill of good.

Centrism is nothing of the sort, of course.

It is, in fact, much more violent and way more pernicious.



French writer and essayist, Éric Zemmour, commenting on the current French presidential election and the centrist campaign of presidential contender Emmanuel Macron, speaks of it as a "return to the Orleanism of the July Monarchy."



The video, a segment of content intended for broadcast on radio,  is in French (subtitled in French).



MORE >

20170419

Réfléchissez ! (Political Remix)




Hat tip to Zaid Jilany, who wrote a very thorough paper on the surging campaign of French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.





Jean-Luc Mélenchon famously told French télévision last year that were he the president of France, he would give citizenship and the Legion of Honor (France's highest order of merit) to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

It has been catching...


MORE >

20170417

Good folks, lock up your sons and daughters

 -
For a good laugh in the morning, read the Washington Post.

Case in point, this hilarious article, just published yesterday:



LOL! Reading WaPo's take on the upcoming French election, one would think that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is Atilla the Hun.

It is kind of amusing, come to think of it, how the same dynamic we had, here, in the U.S., is now playing in France.

Basically, the establishment, or the party of the status-quo (for lack of a better term) would rather, if it came to that, lose the election to the candidate on the right that they have been maligning as Satan incarnate (Donald Trump on our side of the Atlantic, or Marine Lepen, in France) than win with a "leftist", like Bernie Sanders in the U.S., or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in France. (The headline on the WaPo article originally described Mélenchon incorrectly as a communist. It was changed to reflect that he is a "leftist.")

And the reason is plain: propaganda-wise, for the apostles of the status-quo, a victory of the far right (or of, say, someone of a sulfurous reputation, such as Donald Trump) is always easier to explain away and dismiss: the establishment can blame the defeat of their candidate on the racists (and/or the misogynists), I suppose.

If a "leftist" wins, well then, how are they going to spin that? "The Martians did it"?

Besides, the unspoken secret (known to all), here, is that, ideologically, the establishment (all the so-called "centrists") has always felt more at home with the far right than with the "leftists".

MORE >

20170413

The Problem with the DNC

-


Oops! I didn't know we couldn't talk about Syria!



I don't know, perhaps the DNC splash page ought to be updated so that the faithfuls understand more clearly what their place is within the party.



It is possible that, when it comes to Syria, the DNC splash page about "getting the facts," "sharing your thought," and "holding Trump accountable" is no longer relevant.



There, I fixed it for you:


MORE >

20170412

A message from the DNC

-


MORE >

Heresy or Apostasy?

-


What?! GASP! How more blasphemous than that can one be?



Thanks for the heads-up, citizens!

That's right! Members of the Democratic Party, like Tulsi Gabbards, better watch their tongue, if they know what's good for them.



Woe betide the Progressives who gets on the bad side of the Neocons and their Clinton Democrats allies, for the DNC Inquisitors are notorious in their zeal.

The DNC Ordo Hereticus is the largest of the DNC ordos and its Inquisitors watch for insurgents within the Imperium's own party.



Although primarily concerned with monitoring the Ecclesiarchy, the DNC has expanded its jurisdiction to encompass the other perceived internal threats to the Imperium: witches, mutants, heretics, traitors and other "progressive" deviants.

Some inquisitors within the DNC have been specializing in the identification and eradication of rogue "progressives." They may have numerous cells of Acolytes at their disposal, which range from hive-toughened flamer squads, trained to purge large infected areas, to precision assassination cells, which remove and replace key political figures that have succumbed to the "progressive" lure.
MORE >

20170411

The Project For The New American Century is alive and well

-






I know... Tough, ain't it?

Not everything, you thought it was going to be, was it, sir? The office of the Presidency, I mean.

Or, maybe, not at first, that is.



But don't you worry about a thing, Mr. President, do as you're told, and nothing bad need happen to you.

Giving it enough time, the gentleman may even come to enjoy it. I mean, think of the glory, sir, being the commander-in-chief and all.



MORE >