Not So Secret Origins

The bright, clean and elemental design of the posters somehow reflects and reinforces the genuine mythic status of the heroes. See the originals here.

Human Potential

Anybody who's paying attention these days has doubts about human potential but this will leave you 'Spellbound.'

Take a Good Look

At the end of that awful day 9-11, I sat on my deck, drained and shaken. Then I noticed the orange of the sunset and the swaying greenery of the trees and the birdsong, all indifferent to human folly. The Earth had not been knocked off its axis after all. It sailed serenely on, offering its unconscious solace. I felt better. "Beautiful Shiloh could witness anything," Thomas Harris wrote. "Its unforgivable beauty only underscored the indifference of nature, the Green Machine." It's a funny thing. Where Harris sees horror, I see redemption.

Fox News: Let's Starve the Kids

Here are just a few of the landmarks of American progress championed by liberals and opposed by conservatives: The end of slavery; women’s suffrage; the end of segregation; gay marriage; the end of prohibition; banking regulations to prevent economic piracy; prohibition of child labor; minimum wage laws; workplace safety regulations; the 40-hour work week; Social Security; Medicare and the forbidding of torture. 

Fox News, the fascist propaganda channel, is against all of them.

Verified Facts? Who Needs 'Em?

New panic wanted to fill immediate position. Ideal candidate will be trumped-up, distracting, alarmist, jingoistic and fundamentally speculative. Apply with references to CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Rebranding the Simian Sage

Heil Bush

By Dan Hagen

The Bush family PR hacks are busily trying to perfume the heaping shit pile that the fascist dimwit George W. Bush left on America’s front lawn so that his corrupt brother Jeb can run for president.

It’s a tall order. Why? 
Maybe because the GOP’s simian savior managed to demand that Congress fork over a trillion to his banking pals or risk martial law within days; lie the nation into a failed multi-trillion-dollar war; create a Grand Canyon of wealth inequality; fly billions of dollars in bundles of fresh hundred-dollar bills shrink-wrapped on pallets to Iraq so it could all "disappear" with no attempt at accounting; ignore vast numbers of Americans without health care; prance around in a ridiculous costume on the deck of an aircraft carrier declaring himself a victor in a failed war; watch the collapse of the national infrastructure; let a major city drown; spy on vast numbers of Americans; give away hundreds of billions in no-bid contracts to buddies who electrocute U.S. troops with their shoddy work; destroy the ancient legal civil liberty of habeas corpus; inform the Amish that God "speaks though" him; institute the use of torture as official policy; "deregulate" himself into the biggest global financial crisis in at least 80 years; cause the irreversible decline of America's world reputation and actually consider, with his vice president, ordering the U.S. military invasion of Buffalo, NY; failed to capture the masterminds who planned and executed the TWO terrorist attacks in the United States that he permitted to happen on his watch; and let his little pals at Enron create rolling blackouts in California before the whole corporation flamed out in massive financial fraud.

Those are merely the first reasons that spring to mind, of course. There are many others.

Fascism: What It Really Is

Mark and save. I think I need to have cards printed with this, so deliberately ignorant has out nation become on this topic. By design.

"Compassionate conservatism" was just a Frank Luntz-inspired propaganda term designed to disguise the fundamentally ruthless greed and power lust that lies behind contemporary American right-wing ideas, which are largely fascist.

I think the neocons started to sweat when people began identifying them correctly as fascists, so the Frank Luntz bunch decided to destroy the word "fascism." Make it mean everything so it means nothing. Simple. So we got nonsense terms like "Islamofascism" and "liberal fascism" -- anything to distract people from the reality of fascism, which is marked by nationalism, militarism, sexism, racism, repression of labor, worship of corporate power, controlled mass media, contempt for intellectuals and education, religiosity used for political manipulation, rampant cronyism and corruption, fraudulent elections, obsession with national security and the destruction of civil liberties. They can’t have people recognizing the suspects in that criminal lineup.

'Liberal Media?' You Do the Math

The Incorruptible Mr. Gore

Thomas Pryor Gore in 1929

The blind senator from Oklahoma, Thomas Pryor Gore, opposed America’s entry into World War I. He wasn’t blind to what the war would cost, finding no reason why young American blood should fertilize the soil of undemocratic, corrupt European states.

An Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce sent him a telegram threatening to defeat him in the next election if he didn’t support a declaration of war.

The senator wired back a question: “How many members of the Chamber of Commerce are of draft age?”

His principles cost him reelection, but inspired his grandson, Gore Vidal.

— source: “Gore Vidal” by Fred Kaplan

Almost Paradise

I love books and I love sunlight and I love cozy so I love this.

The Clarity of Your Example

And teach by the very clarity of your example.

“Remember that you cannot make anyone else change, you cannot force the world to change or coerce it into fitting your vision. You can change yourself, however. And when you do this, when you grant this freedom to change to yourself, you also create by your very presence, your very example, a space where others can choose to free themselves a little too.”

— Lao Te Ching