So, a few days back, a follower on Mastodon (spit) posted this article from the Union Of Orthodox Journalists from May 2018, about a Ukrainian postage stamp series honoring great thugs — uhh, soldiers — of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) on its 75th anniversary. Yeah, that’s right, Ukraine fought proudly on the fascist side, and venerates these filthy bastards to this day.
Then, I had to ask myself — why no stamp with Zelensky? God only
knows they still loves them some Nazis over there, and I’ve pretty much
lost track of how many times Mr. Z has been busted doing happy-snap foto ops with Azov Battalion and Right Sector thugs showing off their cool 3rd SS Panzers and Waffen SS gear.
Welp… (siggghhh) another day, another US-cheered and instigated protest “movement” for “freedom” in China, slavishly “reported” by the US boss’ media. Hell, they’ve even got a cute gimmick and a cute nickname to go with it already. The “White Paper”
Revolution, the wags are calling it at the State Department, NED,
USAID, New York Times, Washington Post, and every goddamn cable news
network on Earth, and it’s supposedly all about some Ayn Rand concept of
“freedom” from the testing and quarantine requirements
of China’s largely successful public health response, which is aimed at
getting as close to completely eradicating the virus as they can get —
as opposed to the US, which abandoned the population to its own devices
to sicken and die of COVID19 to the tune of just over a million people
last year.
Freedom, my ass — the freedom of ignorant, Ayn Rand brutalists
whose twisted ideas of “bodily autonomy” include no concept
whatsogoddamnever of acting conscientiously or making small sacrifices
for the public good. It’s the freedom of selfish chuds who want haircuts
and ice cream, who want to be “served” no matter what the actual human
cost.
This astroturf circus isn’t about freedom, it’s about the likes of Tesla,
Intel, Apple and others who are impatient to literally work people to
death in China the way they have in the US for the past two years.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter, declared it a "free speech zone", started letting all the fascists back in and shutting down the Left, there was some understandable online rioting this week, and the predictable calls from America's boutique anarchist media to join an exodus to Mastodon. Oh, how I laughed.
So, late last week, Apple and Google finally got off their goddamn duffs and declared that Twitter would be shut out of the Google Play and Apple App stores if the enabling of fascist hate speech and harassment was allowed to continue. Musk, at his very Muskmost, announced that he would develop his own brand of smartphone whose App Shoppe would allow Twitter.
...which basically leaves Gab and Parler in a spot, when you think about it. Now, you don't have to go to some seedy, fringey fascist social-media site to spew your shit; you can just go to Twitter.
Y'know, it's truly amazing when clowns like these just come right out and say it, and seem so obviously bummed about it — like, just exactly Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is wrong with nearly 90 percent of the goddamn Earth, anyway? Can't they see we're fighting for democracy? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha hahhh.
Perhaps it's because nearly 90% of the Earth has already seen the USA in action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Korea, Guantanamo, My Lai, Abu Ghraib, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Cuba, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Perhaps it's because unlike nearly 100% of Americans, nearly 90% of the rest of Earth isn't a bunch of goddamn indoctrinated idiots. Does anybody here remember the "Coalition Of The Willing"?
I don't know about your city, but here in the tonier 'hoods of DC, the Little Free Libraries are a big thing. Sounds really sweet and noble and grassrootsy mutual-aidy n'shit until you get a load of what's actually in the goddamn things. It's basically the kind of instantly-obsolete stuff you used to see stacked on the sidewalk in front of the fence in front of the house with a little post-it note reading "FREE" — old college textbooks, trendy disposable political tomes, pseudo-academic shartage by "public intellectuals", cute trendy late '00s millennial YA novels, trendy child-rearing stuff, trendy self-helpy shit, people unloading all the John Grisham and James Patterson novels they bought to read on the plane... Sure as hell didn't see anyone giving away their copies of On The Road or To Have And Have Not or Sirens Of Titan or Ché Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries or anything, y'know...?
“…freedom has
many manifestations but the most important for many is the ability to
work for your benefit, for the benefit of your children and the want of
your country. Ukraine is a story of a future victory and a chance for
you to invest now in projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars to
share the victory of us… This will be your victory and a new success
story for your companies.”
—Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, 09.06.2022
I’ve seen some pretty goddamn unctous fotos in the news in my time, but none quite as revulsive lately as this tableau
featuring US stooge and Neo-Nazi Volodymyr Zelensky “virtually” ringing
the opening bell via remote video link at the New York Stock Exchange —
and none quite as apropos, given that shares in US “defense” industries
are hitting the stratosphere, and Ford and IBM’s infamous collaboration with the Nazis.
As reported at Grayzone and Multipolarista,
Zelensky’s economic “victory” is being won through the abolition of
labor protection in a program not unlike that instituted by Pinochet in
Chile in the 1970s, combined with some of that good old-fashioned
globalized IMF/WorldBank “shock treatment”. Ukraine is “open for
business”, the sonofabitch says — I don’t know about you, but when I hear one of these bastards talk about how his country is “open for business”, it’s time to look the hell OUT.
This crass stunt — along with Zelensky’s suppression of Left opposition parties and his repeated foto ops with Nazis—
would actually indicate that this is pretty much par for the course on
Wall Street, which never met a war (or a fascist) it didn’t like.
“We are pleased
to welcome President Zelensky virtually to the NYSE bell podium, a
symbol of the freedom and opportunity our U.S. capital markets have
enabled around the globe. We are honored the President has chosen the
NYSE to mark the kickoff of Advantage Ukraine and engage with the
world’s business community.”
—Lynn Martin, president, NYSE Group, 09.06.2022
…Smerconish
then asked, “What about our role as liberators?,” to which Waters
replied, “You have no role as liberators.” When Smerconish pointed to
the US intervention in World War II, Waters observed, “Thank God, the
Russians had already won the bloody war almost by then. Don’t forget 23
million Russians died protecting you and me from the Nazi menace.”
— Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters vs. CNN’s Michael Smerconish, 08.06.2022
In the past fifteen or twenty years I’ve seen some pretty sick-ass bastards’n'bitches
drop some sick-ass takes right out in the open, not giving a damn who
heard or cared and thinking that they were just the hottest goddamn shit
on two legs. I’ve seen George W. Bush sending thousands of Americans to
die for his lies and goading the Iraqis to “bring it on” from the
safety of the Oval Office. I’ve seen Hillary Clinton gloating over the
death of Gadhafi, burbling “we came, we saw, he died” and cackling like a
goddamn witch, and I’ve seen Hillary melting down over the 2016 email leaks and demanding the assassination of Julian Assange.
Nothing, however, matches the absolute rock-bottom bloody filthiness of a US-funded Ukrainian neo-Nazi outfit called Myrotvorets, which has also apparently claimed responsibility for the car bombing assassination of Daria Dugina (daughter of a noted Russian fascist type) about which the Washington Post made a right snotty show out of how few fucks they gave about it. These scum have compiled a friggin’ dossier on Roger Waters — y’know, Pink Floyd, that Roger Waters — and included him on their “kill list” for speaking out on Ukrainian neo-Nazism and human rights abuses, and the hypocrisy of US/NATO imperialism in Ukraine. Yeah, a goddamn kill list,f’crissake.
Above and beyond the comic-book bluster of Hilldawg and Dubya, the
bastards at Myrotvorets are actually claiming credit for assassinations
of dissident journalists, with the funding and blessing of the US, and are doubling down with threats against some of the most prominent dissident artists of their generation.
As an artist and political dissident myself — and as someone who’s
old enough to remember the night John Lennon was stolen from us — my
disgust is off-scale. Seriously, man. Roger Fucking Waters. Bastards.
If you #StandWithUkraine then THIS is what you stand with. Enjoy it.
…Some three
weeks after Schumer helped push the (Ukraine aid) bill into law, on July
14, Andriy Shapovalov, a Ukrainian civil servant whose salary was paid
for by U.S. taxpayer monies, convened a “round table” in Kiev on
“countering disinformation.”
Shapovalov,
in his role as the acting head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering
Disinformation, published a list of the names of 72 people whom he
accused of deliberately spreading disinformation about Ukraine.
Shapovalov labelled them “information terrorists,” adding that Ukraine
was preparing legislation so that such people can be prosecuted as “war
criminals.”
Yeah, kids, isn’t that a flabbergaster? One helluva humdinger of a doozy. I thought Biden — who never met a US war of aggression he didn’t like — had pretty much destroyed my Goofy Meter when he called Putin a “war criminal”, but this shit’s got Goofy Meters exploding worldwide.
Just so we’re clear — any journalist reporting the truth from on the
ground, any journalist or essayist whose reporting or opinions
contradict the official US/NATO Western media narrative? That’s right,
an “information terrorist”, a “war criminal”. Ben Norton?Aaron Maté?Rania Khalek?Alina Lipp?Eva Bartlett?Lee Camp? Yep, that’s right. Information terrorists, war criminals.
The Gallup numbers,
which I peeped not soon after, really drove the goofiness home. After
70-odd years of lies about Hiroshima, the Tonkin Gulf, My Lai, Cambodia,
Laos, the Drug War, Kuwaiti incubator babies, Iraqi WMD’s, Afghanistan,
Havana Syndrome, Russiagate, trust in US media is at an all-time low,
and I’m an “information terrorist” for doing these goddamn cartoons? I’M
a goddamn “war criminal” for calling out the US state and media on
their lies?
Bwah ha ha ha ha hah. The West™ can’t collapse a day too soon for me.
“Those who play with fire will only get burnt... We hope the U.S. side can see this clearly.”— Xi Jinping, to Joe Biden, 07.28.2022
Y'ever get Chinese carry-out and play that stupid game with the fortune cookies where you scribble the phrase "in bed" at the end of the banal faux-Confucian "fortune" in a childish effort to make it sound "dirty" somehow?
Oh, c'mon; I know y'all have done it. I've done it a bunch — and that kind of puerile, low-brow joke seems a fitting analogy to portray the arrogance, hubris, hypocrisy, belligerence, recklessness and straight-up stupidity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Provoke World War III If It's The Last Goddamn Thing I Ever Do Tour this week. It's as if her staff went out of their way to script the most irksome, provocative, sabre-rattling batshit takes they could possibly come up with for her, as if they just followed her around with an mp3 recorder and transcribed everything the old bat queefed out.
The really sad thing about Pelosi, Blinken, Biden and their ilk, though, is that they really, honestly think they're the greatest goddamn thing on two legs. They really do think people are impressed with this horseshit.
Still, as an American, I have to appreciate the Speaker keeping me briefed in on who "America" is standing with right now. Between standing with Israel, the Uyghurs, the Ukraine, and now Taiwan, it's looking like this "American" is booked pretty solid these days.
“You don’t need to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” said Biden in his opening remarks. “The connection between the Israeli and American people is bone deep... I am proud to say that US relations with Israel are deeper and stronger than they have ever been.”—Al Jazeera, reporting on 07.13.2022
"Bone deep"? ...as opposed to the connection between the Ukrainian and American people, which is more "skin deep", I'm guessing...?
Yeah, the sonofabitch said our connection to filthy, murdering Israel is "bone deep".
"Kristi Parrott is joining the Subcommittee on Environment from HBW Resources, where she lobbied Congress on behalf of an astroturf group for oil majors..."—Donald Shaw at Sludge, 07.01.2022
This was inspired by the lead foto in this article I caught at Sludge a few days ago.
This, kiddies, is the party people are expecting to fight for reproductive rights — the party who couldn't get you universal healthcare, or decent COVID relief, or housing relief, or an unemployment benefits extension during the pandemic, who's instead shoveling cash into a capitalist proxy war in the Ukraine, now signing up Big Oil lobbyists for the House Environmental Subcommittee.
If you think the DNC is going to lift a finger for women, or the working class, or the poor, or anyone else who's really struggling in this goddamn country, you're as stupid as you look.
Gropin' Joe has made it abundantly clear at the AFL-CIO convention a week or so back that he plans to beat that "Putin's Price Hike" horse until it's either dead or people actually start believing that horseshit. We promised Gorbachev we wouldn't expand NATO, then promptly spent the better part of the 1990s expanding NATO to Russia's front stoop and fomenting pro-US regime-change "color revolutions", but yeah, sure, Joe — it's Putin's war. Sonofabitch plans on distracting us from his horrid performance and our wartime austerity pain by blaming Putin for everything but the Mariners dragging ass in the AL West.
So — you heard it here first, kiddies. Supreme Court just stripped your reproductive rights? Putin made 'em do it. That asshole boss at Starbuck's who just canned you for union organizing? Putin did it. Those pals of yours who promised to help move that sofa last Saturday flaked on you? Putin. That raging hottie you've been dating for the past 2 months just put you in the Friend Zone? Yeah, that's right, my dude — fucking Putin.
Dude's been one busy motherfucker lately, gotta give credit where it's due.
"What is HIMARS?" asked an Al Jazeera "Explainer" feature about a week or so back, and it actually got me seriously wondering... what IS the High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System? I mean, like — what exactly the hell goes into this beast? Didn't take much searching and reading to reach the answer fairly quickly — our COVID relief, our universal healthcare, our minimum wage raise, our student debt cancellation, our eviction moratorium...
...and with that in mind, to clear up all the brouhaha about these death factories we're selling to the Nazi-infested Ukrainian state, I offer this meticulous infographic, precisely labeled, detailing the features of this helping hand we're extending to all those feisty little old Ukrainian ladies hunkered down in their basements, mixing up the Molotovs and learning how to handle an AK.
While y'all were hanging your Ukrainian flags out in front of your houses and putting little Ukrainian flags in your Facebook profile fotos and screaming about the dirty Rooskies and chewing rags over those poor little old Ukrainian ladies mixing Molotovs in their basements, this is what happened to your unemployment benefits extension and your rent relief and your eviction moratorium and your Covid "stimulus" and your healthcare.
Inspired by the top two stories in the Washington Post of May 20, above the fold like a shot and a chaser: we're pissing your healthcare away on a NATO/US proxy war in the Ukraine, and forget about baby formula anytime soon. Love that reference to "firm public support" in the Ukraine Care Package story. Bwah hah, "public support"... what do you mean "we", white man?
While I continue getting over surgery and tryna' get back into a drawing groove, n'shit... let's flash back to another war that Liberals of both parties lied, blustered and bullied their asses off to drag us into... originally did this for an immediate post-election protest response in DC; it got blastedall over, but I never actually did a blog post, except for this sloppy-ass blurb on my old static html site... so, here it is. Let's climb aboard the TARDIS, kiddies, and set the dial for the turn of the century:
---------------
After one too many mornings of watching Kerry and Bush piss-fighting over Kerry's war record, I was begging, desperately:
Somebody, Anybody – STOP THE TORTURE of American Voters!
So, I wake up one early morning recently; as usual, my wife's already awake and has NBC's "Today" jabbering on the TV. In the thinning fog of my fading REM state I hear candidate John "Lurch" Kerry being interviewed, and he's telling us how he plans to continue to uphold the corporate/military agenda, after which a Bush campaign ad denounces Lurch for being "too leftist". I think: jeezus, it's too damn' early for this shit. Lurch says he'll keep doing what the Chimp started, and the Chimp accuses Lurch of being too leftist, it's only 7:15am, and my brain is already hurting.
Somebody, stop this torture. Somebody make it stop. Somebody, make...it...sto-oopppppp!
They’re non-binary, declare their pronouns,
wave their trans flags high, wear their revolutionary cred on their
sleeves — and they’re ready to stomp down dissent at a moment’s notice,
and be “woke” as hell while they do it.
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot,
one nation, controlled by the media —
Information Age of hysteria
is calling out to Idiot America!”
— Green Day
In January of 2018, I found myself rooting around for alternative social media spaces shortly after receiving this note
full of thinly-veiled threats from Twitter regarding my following and
retweeting “Russian-influenced” accounts. All the cool kids got one.
That spring, after taking a quick peek at Gab (and a long, hot shower
afterwards), I was turned on to Mastodon by a fellow “Russian dupe” on
Twitter. It was during that first wave of Left voices and publications
being bounced off of Twitter for “Russian influence” — i.e.
contradicting the official US media party line. Of course, I got my ass
over there pronto and set up a presence. I didn’t mind that the traffic
was a bit thin; it was basically what Twitter would’ve been without the
trolls, bots, shills, spammers and Nazis — like, detoxed Twitter.
It was sweet for those first 3 or 4 years, speaking and creating
freely in that peaceful non-toxic space without the DNC trolls, clueless
celebrities, shit-take-dropping pundits and Nazi instigators creating
endless background noise, without the threat of mass reporting by DNC
flunkies. I grew to enjoy the light traffic flow, being able to
associate and converse with fellow Lefties, anarchists, socialists
without having to fight through the cacophony of Twitter. Even through
the percolating zaniness of this past January and February I happily
passed along the latest from Grayzone,MintPress,Breakthrough News,Multipolarista,Sputmik, and RT with no problems.
Then, after 30 years of US/NATO bullying, provocation, instigation and broken US promises,
Russia moved in on the Ukraine to de-nazify the place — and the
hysteria in the US, already surging to fever pitch, broke loose and
flooded peoples’ minds with a tsunami of Krazy surpassing even the
kraziest days of Post-9/11 and Iraq War v2.0. The Western bosses’ media
cranked the krazy up to 11 and busted off the knob. Meanwhile, I naively
thought Mastodon and the Fediverse would provide me with a “safe space”
to hunker down and shelter myself from the krazy.
Oh, what a goddamn idiot.
“Welcome to a new kind of tension
all across the alien nation
where everything isn’t meant to be OK…”
—Green Day
One morning in the middle of this past April, a couple of weeks after
returning home from a month’s vacation — and an entirely separate
adventure in krazy — I was greeted by this jarring message from the mods at mastodon.social in reference to my short series of posts containing quotes from and links to an article on Grayzone about neo-Nazi Azov Battalion involvement
in the Mariupol theater bombing …accompanied by the usual — and by now,
just plain banal — claims of sharing “intentionally false or misleading
information” in the Grayzone article.
Now, I challenge anyone reading this to have a look at the Grayzone
piece and show me anything in there that’s intentionally (or otherwise)
false or misleading or anything other than the posing of honest valid
questions, stating plain facts about neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine, and
reporting the real situation from “on the ground” in Mariupol. It should
be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the mods
at mastodon.social — along with virtually all US/Western corporate
media — have chosen to redefine “false and misleading” as “contradicting
the official US/Western media line”.
While not being actually thrown off of mastodon.social, I could sure
as hell take a hint, and it was at this point where — as Maya Angelou
reminds us — it was time to believe it when Mastodon showed me who they
really were the first time not just at mastodon.social, but at instances
all over the Fediverse. At the time, I also had a couple of other
accounts running simultaneously, at kolektiva.social and mastodon.art; I
figured it’d be a simple matter to just migrate my followers over to
kolektiva, put a redirect on the old mastodon.social account, and get
back at it.
Oh, what a goddamn idiot.
“Well maybe I’m the faggot, America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda —
Now everybody, do the propaganda
and sing along to the age of paranoia…!”
—Green Day
It was barely two weeks later when I got this curt notice from the mods at kolektiva.social.
Unlike the mastodon.social mods, the kolektiva crew’s irony-free,
catchphrase- and buzzword-packed missives — they actually said
“whataboutism”, f’crissake — were a little more old-skool McCarthyist,
blatantly accusing me of being “pro-Kremlin” for posting news items from
outlets other than Western boss media in “a very credulous way”. Oh,
how I laughed — as if they and nearly everybody around me wasn’t happily
guzzling US media hype and horseshit with off-scale credulity. The real
howler is that in the midst of all the Red-baiting, the kolektiva mods
openly admit that the RT and Sputnik reports were “more or less valid”
but — well, y’know, RT and Sputnik. That’s basically all they had — the
reporting was entirely factual, but it was Russian media, so they’re
giving me the equivalent of five minutes to clean out my desk.
Being asked to leave a Mastodon instance with a supposed reputation
for “revolutionary” thought, expression and action for posting content
contradicting official Western capitalist media pegged my irony meter so
hard it busted the needle off.
And this, kiddies, is why Mastodon takes the pipe big-time — not
because of the underlying principles or philosophy behind it, or how
their network is built, but the people. It’s a problem that’s plagued
online communities ever since the days of local BBS systems and Usenet —
people in positions of unaccountable authority. When you peel away all
the “cuteness” on Mastodon, that’s basically what you have left — people
just as heavily indoctrinated by Western capitalist media as anyone on
Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, happily inflicting the same kind of
damage on free thought, speech and creativity. All the federated,
decentralized, happy-time furry trans flag avatar “woke” goodness you
can slather on isn’t worth jack if everybody there is infected with the
same “disinformation” brain worms as almost everybody else in America
and the Western World™.
The real “cancel culture” isn’t about some trash-mouthed racist
comedian whining about being kicked off TV; it’s about the very real
suppression of dissident voices on the Left by corporate media and their
indoctrinated flunkies in supposedly dissent-friendly “free” spaces
like Mastodon — which I’ve now realized is basically Twitter, but with
dungeonmasters and “furry” art. Who need an AI — who needs an algorithm when you've got cadres of
thoroughly-brainwashed, free open locally-sourced, real 100% organic
humans beating down dissent in your space?
Take a look at this graph.Go on, kiddos — take a big, long, steamy gawk.
Same shit, different day: They can never afford housing, healthcare or education, but there’s always money for war.
Getting a single, lousy-ass $1400 “stimulus check” out of those
geezers on Capitol Hill was like pulling teeth. They never would extend
unemployment or rent relief for the people still out of work because
they were still in quarantine, or because the companies they worked for
went under during the pandemic — and the bastards’n'bitches still refuse
to discuss national healthcare despite this country being ravaged by a
worldwide pandemic.
Whenever it comes to funding national healthcare, or free college, or
subsidized housing, we have to have a “national conversation” about it,
we can’t afford it, we have to “make some hard choices”. But, when it’s
time to fund the Pentagon? No prob, guys, here’s $800bn. Wait, y’sure
that’s enough? How about an extra hundred billion big boys just in case?
Don’t let anybody tell you whose war this is.
It’s not for the Ukrainian people, or Democracy, or freedom, or Western
values, or any of that horseshit. It’s Joe Biden’s war, it’s NATO’s
war, it’s the EU’s war, Boris Johnson’s war, Emmanuel Macron’s war, Olaf
Scholz’s war, the IMF’s war, Wall Street’s war, Boeing and Raytheon and
Lockheed Martin’s war.
Inspired by the rip-roaring coverage of atrocities, war crimes, and miscellaneous ruthlessness by America's Official Enemy against the Ukraine in the very same corporate-owned Western media who worked itself to death to cover up atrocities, war crimes, and miscellaneous ruthlessness by the Earth's enemy against Iraq and Afghanistan — not to mention pushing the most insane-ass kind of comic-book lies about (ahem) Weapons Of Mass Destruction — about 18, 20 years or so ago. But, now...? Cripes, man, the Boss Media in the US and its "international community" are all about war crimes and atrocities and bombed civilians and the Hague n'shit. Wotta goddamn joke.
I shit you not, kiddies — if this were a foto of a similar scene in Gaza, of Palestinian women getting ready to resist the terrorism of the IDF and Israeli colonists, do you honestly think Reuters — and MSNBC, CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, all the usual suspects — would run some noble, heart-wrenching piece on ordinary women rushing to the defense of their country against invaders?
Naaaaahhhhhhhhhh. It'd be some horseshit about defenseless, peaceful little Israelis just minding their own while the mean, evil terrorist Palestinians try to resist the defenseless, peaceful little Israelis' attempts to drive them out of their homes and murder them.
The likes of Reuters didn't give a shit about civilians during the US invasion of Iraq, and they don't really give a shit now. They didn't give a shit about war crimes during the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they don't really give a shit now.
Well, I'll be goddamned. I thought she'd never die. I figured she'd made a deal with Satan — or was it Henry Kissinger? It's hard to tell these days.
The news bulletin didn't say exactly how she died, though I suspect some dippy chick from Kansas accidentally dumped a bucket of water on her shriveled-up old ass. According to her bio, she was 84, though to be quite honest, I don't think the old battle-axe looked a day over 200.
She said that the deaths of half a million Iraqis — at least half of them children — from US economic warfare was "worth it".
She said in 2016 that there was "a special place in Hell" for voters who wouldn't support Hillary Clinton.
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha haahhh, yeah. Special place in Hell? Suits me fine. I'll see ya' down there, BEYOTCH.
Y’know that stupid game you play with fortune cookies
in which you read the fortune out loud and add the phrase “in bed” at
the end…? Well, that’s apparently the favorite little fun game with the
brain-rotted US media with regard to China, especially at the Olympics
this past week — find any news of any positive achievement of or any
news that reflects well on China, and the US Boss Media will be right on
top of it with their shallow bitching and moaning about “human rights”, trot out their victims of the week, fling some over-hyped apocryphal stories around and wail “but at what cost”?
The front page of the Washington Post — where Democracy died
long ago and is now beginning to smell really pungent in darkness — put
on quite a show this past Saturday, pissing and moaning about the job
the Chinese did of keeping covid under control during the Olympics,
claiming that it “kept the joy out of the Games” and at “great mental
and financial costs”. It was a headline so galling that I had to just
kind of stand there in the front hall, slack-jawed, sputtering and
giggling as I read and re-read it.
I was almost in awe of it, somehow — a gaggle of hacks from a corporate mouthpiece in the seat of the US Empire, which had twice as many covid-19 deaths last week than China had all of last year,
is having a tantrum about China taking the steps any responsible
government should do during a public health emergency, filling its pants
about how it took the joy out of the Olympics. Myself, I think any
“joy” issues our friends here had came more from the shock of being
shown up by a Chinese-American who chose to ski for China, and by a
government which treats healthcare as a public good rather than a
commodity.
Yeah, shame those horrid, awful Chinese commies took appropriate
action to mitigate the spread of an infectious pathogen and took a
little bit of the “joy” out of it for you — not nearly as awesome as
here in the good old USA, where we’re joyful and free and lost nearly a
million people to covid19 last year.
…in which the spirit of Vincent visits my 19 year-old self, turns away even more utterly demoralized, and shoots himself again.
The technical part — learning the UI, how it integrated the Pencil,
all that theory-of-operation stuff — was the easy part; I pretty much
had the software down cold in 2 or 3 nights. Now the real work is
starting, which actually learning how to freakin’ paint.
Since I “officially” retired from the design biz, Mrs. F has had to
listen to me occasionally mumbling all dreamy about taking another whack
at learning how to paint — y’know, like a proper painter — some 35, 40 years after leaving school.
Setting up the new Mini and sorting out the Great Monitor Mystery was actually the fun, easy part; the real work started when it came time to start learning the software that would be replacing Adobe Creative Suite after 30+ years as an Illustrator and Photoshop ninja. I managed to faceplant a time or two on those proverbial stumbling blocks, but things ended up working out quite well, and I'm closer to getting back to producing cartoons than I thought I'd be at this point.
Schoolkids and teachers in the UK, Oakland and NYC are being clobbered, child infections are jumping, hospitals are being swamped, but the State and the media keep telling us that it’s “mild”
— over and over and over again, beating the word to death like a slow,
painful mantra, kind of like “Weapons of Mass Destruction”… or, perhaps
the end of a cigarette commercial in the 1950s or ’60s — “…and, they are
mild!”
Al Jazeera’s just precious as hell,
here. They really do think the Chinese are some kind of weirdos for
actually trying to eradicate covid — they had what… two deaths last
year? — while, back in The West™, we’ve thrown in the towel; State
spokespeople have laughed in our faces on live TV, and thrown the
working class to the wolves with a big, hot, sloppy slice of “learning
to live with it”.
It may have been a putsch from a Mel Brooks movie, but it was still a goddamn putsch.
And what is our so-called “opposition party” doing about it? From the
looks of things — much like reproductive rights — the Democrats have
absolutely no plans to actually DO ANYTHING about it other than dragging
their “investigation” out as long as they can so they can use it to
fundraise for the midterms and for ‘24, keep the Liberals in line, and
beat down the Left.
And speaking of beatdowns, why the hell aren’t Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz
in jail and expelled from Congress? F’crissake, they supported a
goddamn fascist putsch. They’re friggin’ collaborators. Hell, Greene
even gave a bunch of chuds a full recon tour. Why haven’t the Democrats
tried to have them expelled from the House and thrown in the goddamn can
instead of “reaching across the aisle” and all that horseshit?
It’s because the Democrats are collaborators, too.
Political cartoonist. Information terrorist. Old Indymedia dude. Dirtbag Leftist. Spaceflight geek, MSTie, Deadhead. Find me at flugennock at sinkers dot org.
In January of 2018, I found myself rooting around for alternative social media spaces shortly after receiving 
Setting up the new 
