Talkin' Bomb Shelter Blues

Steal This Song

Our "leaders" and our craven media are once again trying to sell us on the idea of nuclear war as a do-able thing. This has happened before. Below are the lyrics to "Talkin' Bomb Shelters Blues", a song I wrote in the early 80s when the Reagan people (every bit as crazy and murderous as the Trump team) were trying to sell us on the idea of "refurbishing" our bomb shelters as a first step down the mental rathole of accepting the idea of nuclear war. 


Well I picked up a paper the other day
and was surprised to see the front page say
our bomb shelters were under stashed
in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

Our concerned president was underway
to try and get us citizens to pay
for a years supply of canned air and grits
so we'll be prepared for when the big one hits.
(y'know, everything that makes life worthwhile, canned asparagus, DVDs, condums…)

I remember bomb shelters from long ago
when folks were spendin' lots of dough
diggin' holes in their backyards and fillin' 'em with cement
and callin' 'em security, an investment!
(They'd take out loans on 'em, which is mighty strange when you think about it a certain way, but what's stranger was the banks would give 'em to 'em!)

Well, I put down that paper and I felt sad
it took a little while and I got mad
about all the jive that I have heard
'bout how the world has had it, so give it the bird.

There's Mister Big saying' bigger is better
and the bigger the big, well the better the better
and if we gotta fight big to get the better
lets all get fried in the glorious together!
(we'll make the whole world one big strip mine. Then we'll all be rich…right?)

And there's plenty of Doomsday tales for you
some comet's gonna split the Earth right in two
California's gonna shake of right about Texas
or the planets lining up for a big Solar Plexis.

And theres all those religions goin' round
circling' down on the ol' common ground
Say the end is comin' and it's comin' fast
so forget this world, save your spirit's ass.

But wait a minute…

Have you seen the sky turn grey and then turn blue?
Have you listened to the rivers and the mountains, too?
Don't you think there's something bigger here than me and you
tryin' to tell us get together before it's through?

And if they push the button like the sayin' goes
and the world turns on like a big light bulb
and you're down in some hole with no night or day
What the hell you want to live for anyway?
(sex?!)

So when you're talkin' bomb shelters, you're talkin' defeat
when you fix 'em up you can have my seat
I'll be up here tryin' to make ends meet
not down in some hole playin' hide and seek.
(I ha….ate canned asparagus!!!)

Any questions?

Remember Nuclear War?

Donald Trump Holding Court at Mar-A-Lago Grasping Golden Tomahawk Missiles While President Xi Jinping (in background) Runs Away

Leaked Virtual Brain Imaging (VBI) from Trump's thinking on April 6, 2017, compiled from state-of-art Ratheon Spying technology

Here's a quiz.

Do you know where your president was when he launched World War 4 (with North Korea and China)?

We know he launched World War 3 (against Syria, Iran and Russia) from his vacation palace at Mar-A-Lago (which, in Spanish means: "Sea-A-Lake" which is a perfectly normal name) while having a friendly visit with his friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, which is perfectly normal for "the Trump Era"[i].

While some expert pundits who are very impressed with the size of Trump's missiles are not sure whether there have actually been any world wars launched from vacation palaces since the days of the Louis the 14th (the Sun King) and his Palace of Versailles a few hundred years ago, they are comfortable with the notion that a U.S. president vacationing through existential world crises of his own manufacture is, in a word, normal. In fact, everybody who's anybody is valuing their "down time" over our species' survival these days. It's all the rage.

Just look at Congress, the pundits point out to their consumers (us). Right after World War 3 was safely launched from Trump's overstuffed throne, and also immediately proceeding their criminal embedding of a corporate fascist into our Supreme Court, this corporate, fee-for-use Congress went on their own vacations, leaving Trump at peace to start the military gears churning toward World War 4 (against North Korea and China).  

Pundits generally agree then, and it should furthermore go without saying to any premature Putin-lovers out there, that too many cooks spoil the broth, and that there is obviously no need for Congress to do any of that arcane and expensive advise-and-consent stuff. Why not save the taxpayers a few bucks then, and let the Congress just go home for a little golf or whatever, which of course should not include reaching out to their constituents (consumers) to gauge how We The People (consumers) actually feel about all of this perfectly normal stuff because, you know, reaching out is very, very expensive, not normal in the Trump Era and therefore no longer necessary.

So I want to be very clear here, that I also think all of this is very, very normal and that I really don't mean to blame those poor, overworked pundits and congresspeople for not doing their jobs during an existential worldwide crisis of their own making. After all, they earned their stock options just with their Gorsuch heist, don't you agree?

But something is bothering me, nevertheless, and I have to say that I'm still wondering where Donald Trump physically was when he launched World War 4 (against North Korea and China).

Did he actually have the audacity to launch two world wars from an overstuffed throne at his vacation palace? 

I know it's just a technicality now, because all of this is so very, very, very normal. But what I'm wondering is this: 

Are there any U.S. leaders not on vacation while they collectively threaten to fry our whole wide world including our children, grandchildren and hope itself?

All Hail the Sun King, then?

When America was Great
Atomic Annie bombing the Nevada desert because it chose to resist.

[i] Jeff Sessions, 4/11/17

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-border-immigration_us_58ecd3eee4b0ca64d9192852

Terrorism Defined

There's some confusion among media pundits in these Days Of Trump about what Terrorism is and isn't. 

Poor pundits! They've spent the last five months since the November elections practicing a peculiar brand of high-profile, full-body soul-searching, with the apparent goal of making sure that we, the traumatized public, fully appreciated that they were so wrapped up in their high-profile tele-world that they "didn't see Trump coming", and therefore didn't report the fact. This, in turn, has led to some of them, occasionally, reporting real news, which has been a good and refreshing thing.

All that has changed, however, and as always, all it took was a bombing. This time in the name of the suffering childen whom, just a mere month ago, the Trump Administration was actively trying to drown in the Mediterranean surf. How confusing it must be to the traumatized public to witness the all-knowing, big-souled pundits climbing back onboard the Empire Express for the mere price of 59 Cruise Missiles ($80 million or $1.3 million apiece) launched in the general direction of those same children who are supposed to be the missiles' beneficiaries!

Therefore, as a public service, I'm offering a simple definition of Terrorism, as short and as sweet as any definition our pundits and politicians have hard-driven into their speed dialing explaino-machines. Here it is:

Terrorism is not:

-A white man traveling from Baltimore to New York City to murder "blacks".

 

-An armed takeover of a federal wildlife preserve by U.S. Mormon white supremacists from Nevada.

-A U.S. white man murdering worshippers in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

-A U.S. sponsored, militarized and partially-privatized police force brutally repressing the free-speech rights of indigenous peoples in North Dakota.

-Anything a white man does or does not do.

Terrorism is:

-Something that a white man--or his allies--can bomb.

Sociopaths and their Fracking Frackers; Jobbing the Bakkan

"Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.”

                                                                                                Charles Ponzi, 1882-1949

Proprietary Capitalism is our modern, Bizzarro-world term for the relatively-old scheme of con artists separating “fools” from their money. It’s where We the People are not allowed access to the information we need in order to make informed decisions about industries who scheme to profit off of our ignorance, and it’s all the rage now. “Intellectual property rights” was the battle cry when Silicon Valley started cannibalizing its apple orchards and pooping out shiny gizmos, and now you see the shiny poop of intellectual property rights everywhere, on the chemical industry, on the privatized school industry, on the music industry, on everything. Our very culture has been devoured and “privatized” by the bastards in full view of everyone, a daylight heist, and our only questions seem to have been “How much is the next shiny gizmo going to cost and when can I get mine?”

Speaking of digestion: Consider all the high-priced claims of oil patch con artists about how the Bakkan oil patch and its lower intestine, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) are going to poop out endless jobs across the North Dakota plains and downward towards New Orleans and everywhere else the Black Snake slithers. (Eee…eww!) Jobs, right? Dirty jobs, but jobs all the same. Right?

Well…consider the words of a petroleum industry operative who spent almost four decades working for the likes of AMOCO, BP, and other suchlikes. Art Berman currently makes a living as an oil industry expert, a consultant and contributor for corporate news outlets on oil trends for the smart investor who desires to place her bets on the table where the money flows downhill, toward her. Easy Street, right? But wait…On March 1^st, Berman wrote in Forbes Magazine that:

           

“All major Bakken producers continue to lose money at current wellhead prices…there may be nowhere for the Bakken to go but down. Higher oil prices may not help much because the best days for the play are behind us. Future profits were sacrificed for short-term objectives that lost the companies and their shareholders money…investors should be worried. As analysts cheered the resilience of shale plays after the 2014 price collapse, nearly a billion barrels of Bakken oil were produced at a loss...vast volumes of oil were squandered at low prices for the sake of cash flow to support unmanageable debt loads and to satisfy investors about production growth.[i]”

Why is this not the news we as well as the low-lying investor should have been hearing since the pipeline was first announced in 2014? After all, wouldn’t Republican governors who would sing the praises of “private property” while simultaneously authorizing “eminent domain” seizures of the very same at least want to know that the whole scheme is based on an economic model that even Charles Ponzi couldn't job to the rich of his day? Why are we hearing instead about all the “jobs” that Ponzi's economic scheme will generate for all us poor folk now?

Silly you. You forgot about “intellectual property rights”, haven’t you?

“The Bakken play represents the fullest application of modern horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies,” Berman writes. But with a couple of downsides.

“There is no way to stay away from water and it is produced from day one in large volumes. The Bakken has produced 1.5 billion barrels of water along with its 2.2 billion barrels of oil over the decades. Where are they putting it and what does that cost?”

Indeed. Where are they putting all that water? And furthermore, what have they put in all that water?  Well, intellectual property rights dictate that these Lying Leviathans don’t have to tell you any of that, because the information you need in order to know whether or not you are being poisoned for the sake of someone else's quick buck is…get ready…private property!

Wow, and that’s the root of the other downside that Berman mentions in his article. Think of the underground fracking patch as a giant balloon with finite pressure and lots of holes being drilled into it. At first the additional pressure needed for oil to bubble to the surface is generated with the toxic, proprietary slurry mix. After a while, though, the pressure needed to make the oil bucks bubble out of any single well is generated more and more by the gas pockets that develop underground in relation to the environmentally-destructive fracking activities. From then on, as the patch gets more and more overdrilled (which the Bakkan has been) the pressure drops for all the wells and everybody’s oil money heads south of the Red Line. This is basic physics, and basic capitalism, never mind the environmental costs, which investors never do.

So, in the oil expert’s own words, while the very efficiency of fracking technology has led to the over-drilling and the rapid depletion of the field, “pressure data (of the over-drilled patch) is not publicly available and is needed to complete the case.”

Did you catch that? The evidence for depletion of the Bakkan oil patch, the very information we as a society (and she as an investor) need to determine whether or not the environmental catastrophe of the patch and the associated pipelines is in any way economically justified is proprietary, under the very same rules that has kept the details of the environmental catastrophe itself (the fracking mix, for instance) from us all along. It’s none of your business, the Rich Man tells us. That’s enough democracy for you. We’re running this country now, so run along and eat some cake.

Why is the Dakota Access Pipeline being built at all? Quite simply “…for the sake of cash flow to support unmanageable debt loads and to satisfy investors about production growth.”

It’s not for jobs. It’s not for “energy self-sufficiency”. It’s not even for any traditionally-defined version of free-market capitalism. It’s a Ponzi scheme where the Rich Man and the politicians in his pocket are the only beneficiaries and We The People and the Land are the chumps.

Nice, huh? And that’s not coming from cyber-left field. It’s in black and white, in Forbes, and maybe that’s the beauty of this horrible moment we have willfully visited upon ourselves. Black and white becomes color, at least it becomes the Bizarro comic-book world we should have recognized it as all along.

Let’s get real and get busy, shall we?

---

[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurberman/2017/03/01/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-the-bakken-shale-play/#620678491487

Qoute For The Day

Speaking of moon-deployments: here’s a quote-for-the-day.

“Are Republicans dismayed that they have put a loathsome, deranged, misogynistic, racist, psychopathic, uninformed, self-promoting, corrupt, insulting, genital-grabbing, conspiracy-theory-peddling, Jew-baiting, narcissistic-behaving, country-destroying, Putin-loving, generally disgusting, fascist, loofa-faced sh*t-gibbon into power in our White House?

No, they are not.[i]”

                      Dave Johnson, contributing blogger for the Campaign for America's Future.               

I think we should make every effort to laugh at fascists because, if for no other reason, they don’t like it, which may be as good a definition of fascism as any... 

...But we should also remember each and every time we laugh: there’s nothing funny about fascism.

It's OK though. It feels good and, unlike many of our unimaginative fellow citizens “across the aisle”[ii], we can hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time and still get something done.                           

---

[i] http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/02/18/isnt-just-trump-who-republicans-are

[ii] Wherever that is! Safeway??

I’m heading back to Standing Rock today, but let me first say something once again so it’s off my chest, again. Facebook is weird, and I’ll never figure it out. The main problem with it, other than that  obscenely-rich guys own these fundamental disconnects with reality that bode so ill for so many of us just when we need that reality so much, is that I can’t figure out who I’m talking to, or who’s talking to me. I know, you’re supposed to be able to “manage” that stuff. But I’m not a manager, never was good at being one and furthermore look what kind of trouble we've gotten into by falling for someone who was good at "managing" a Twitter account. That’s my story, then, and I’m stickin’ to it. 

That said, I've been rooting around in Facebook almost constantly trying to get a read on what’s going on at Standing Rock. I saw a video posted on Jan. 31 of LaDonna Bravebull Allard asking people to come stand with them. The next day, Feb. 1, I saw a video of Morton County police taking down the barricade that has been blocking Highway 1806 since late October (the one they erected) and arresting 70 people who were moving the Oceti Sakowin camp to higher ground. Then two days later was the video of Sacred Stone camp being raided by various law enforcement entities, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), who claimed the Standing Rock Tribal Council (Dave Archambault, Chairperson) had requested their assistance in "clearing" the camp.

That was Friday. On Saturday, Archambault posted and released a statement clarifying that, while they want the water protectors to leave peacefully, there will be no forceful removal of water protectors (i.e. an armed raid). He said they are "cleaning" the camps not "clearing" them.

After this post was a whole long line of posts, many critical of the council, some supporting, but many expressing as much confusion and dismay as I'm feeling at watching the infighting and potential unravelling of the most potent movement we have standing against TrumpCo to date, maybe for the last 200 years.

That's what's most disturbing to me. Human nature, it's so manipulative-friendly. We all know this and, in a nutshell, that's why I'm heading back. I'm compelled to see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears and not depend on divisive arguments to guide me as to what I should do to support this movement and make no mistake. We all have to figure out our way through this to support it. I wish there were 10,000 of us showing up and doing the same right now. There's been saboteurs and provocateurs within the movement from the beginning. Add to that that any time there's state/corporate sponsored violence against a group of people, there will be different reactions, and therefore plenty of room for the well-funded provocateurs to wedge the cracks wider and wider til they split. This is an old, old story.

Speaking of old stories, it's worth recalling the ones from that earlier movement we remember now as "the civil rights movement". There were similar brutalities, provocateuring and inevitable splits going on all the time. And that movement held together. Makes Martin Luther King Day a good bit more meaningful to me, seeing how hard it is, and how dedicated you have to be…to nonviolence, really.

As for the camps: yes they are a mess. Lots of stuff left behind. Lots of trampling. Yes it needs cleaned up and, if allowed the chance, that's what I mainly intend to do. I have a background in ecological restoration and anyone can pick up garbage. But to the Army Corps and the Morton County Sheriff's Dept. who are crying crocodile tears over the "pollution" from the camps making its way to the river, I'd like to say that yeah, it's a mess, but it's also a war zone, and not a war zone of our choosing. We are doing what we needed to do and that was the place to do it. As a restorationist who's planted trees at strip mines where the corporate owners skipped the country when the price of their precious metal dropped and left the cleanup tab for the rest of us to pick up, I would ask if Pegasus Gold (just for instance) was just doing what it needed to do because it had no other choice, and I'd also ask the Morton County propagandists whining about how much their share of the cleanup is going to cost them to compare how much it costs a local or state government to clean up a gold mine, or a coal mine, or a frackingv field after the REAL spoiled rich kids skip town.

News Flash: Culture Wars in Rural Areas Have Been Nasty For a Lo...ng Time!

Fishing on the Columbia near McNary Dam: Plenty of Room for Improvement

When you choose to live in rural America, which I have done for the last forty years or so, you tend to become a little myopic about which tools to use to fight the Beast with. This is only a musing, but it's something to consider as we struggle to swim against the vomit of this Beast which we're currently labeling Donald Trump. 

I came to this musing through an honest-enough process--vanity. I was re-reading my last post, and got the idea of wanting to augment Chief Leonard Crow Dog's statement ("We do not own the Land") with a statement by a "founding father". This is because of a quirk in my thought processes brought on from living as a progressive activist in an almost-exclusively-white American Rural Area where the hobby of channelling "founding fathers" while waving your pocket constitution in front of cowed county commissioners was all the vogue since the election of the country's first non-white president. If you have lived in an almost-exclusively-white American Rural Area these last eight years (and longer actually) you know what I mean, no matter your political flavor. As a progressive activist (otherwise known as an "environmentalist" or an "eco-terrorist" depending on your flavor), I naturally morphed into channelling "founding fathers" for my own purposes, especially since I'm the descendant of some of them myself, and these pure and simple idiots ('scuse me. I slipped there) were claiming to speak for "me". That's another post, and I'll get to it all someday. What's been happening here for 400 years or so has been huge and getting huger by the day now, don't you agree? Hard to keep up. The point is, I began collecting really cool quotes from dead white guys as a way to "reach across the isle", such as isles exist in almost-exclusively-white American Rural Areas (Safeway comes to mind but, again, another post).

Anyway, Leonard Crow Dog's words kicked in one from my collection, a nice little sound bite from Thomas Paine, a socialist by our modern definition:

“Man (sic) did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue.”

This, of course, got my "founding father" bell ringing on Paine's views of state-sanctioned religions, which seems particularly poignant when considering what so many of these pure and simple idiots (whoops again!) believe about what makes America, even by their own definition "America":

                                                                                                                      

“All national institutions of churches", Paine wrote in his "Age of Reason", "whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

That was pretty heady stuff for his times. But he nailed the lid on his popularity coffin by going a couple steps further with a quote you'll never hear at one of those prayer breakfasts Washington DC plagues us with at least once a year:

“It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes.”

If my memory serves, only six or seven people attended Paine's funeral when he died in 1809. He even pissed off George Washington, a fellow "diest" whose reputation Paine basically made with his pamphlet, "Common Sense". Good ol' Thomas Paine. I like to think if I'd have been one of my ancestors that I would have attended, and made it seven or eight. Never mind that, though. Good folks that I'm sure they were, my ancestors were busy moving onto the lands of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation in upstate New York that Washington had stolen and then gifted to Continental Army vets. Pilgrims like me really want to believe that we'd have acted better than our ancestors but, y'know…another blogpost.

All that said, I feel at least somewhat uniquely-qualified, now that my train of thought has headed down this "channelling founding fathers" track, to quote a couple other cool quotes from dead white guys that are rattling around in my head. I know…dead white guys! And I apologize, but it can't be helped. I'm paddling my tippy little canoe down a mere stream of consciousness now. 

The first is from Kurt Vonnegut, also speaking on religion and his own then-progressing world view:

 “If Christ hadn’t delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake.”

Actually, after two weeks of Donald Trump as president, I'm thinking about changing species myself. Not that that would help my own personal chances of survival. Not at all...but it's so embarrassing being human these days. I wish it were as easy as a sex-change.

The last is from my favorite dead white guy, Mark Twain, who puts the cap on it for me about bullying, toxic religions in general and the bullies who bully with them:

“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

'Nuff said for now, I guess. Just some meandering thought-channels on the floodplains of how our colonial icons have, from the beginning, shown at least the inclination to be of a mind with what Leonard Crow Dog says, and how, maybe, we can start consolidating that same mind to a single purpose now.

This pilgrim sure hopes so.