gregg brazel :: labor & art

is anyone (other than the hapless taxpayer) still buying the national security farce? did you know that the tsa is now deployed on the roads of america, randomly stopping drivers? why?! that foul agency has not caught a single "terrorist" in ten years since it was spawned by the "conservative" cheney/bush junta. NOT ONE. but the boondoggle keeps expanding. it's all about fat contracts, power, control and intimidation. the thuggery of these miscreant perverts perpetuates the pillage and plunder by a ruling class elite of clueless sociopaths.

please don't vote for the "lesser evil" puppet clown in november... voting only legitimates their criminal activity and makes you an accomplice (see nuremberg rulings). and then they'll make you pay $4 million for their family vacation. i couldn't make this shit up.

"In a Hawaii Reporter story published last week, the total cost (based on what is known) for a 17-day round trip vacation to Hawaii for the President and his family and staff and security is an estimated $4,113,038." source

“They’ve rewritten the job descriptions so the people that used to do the work here — the union folks — don’t qualify anymore on paper,” said Craig Randolph, a Navistar design engineer laid off after 15 years at the Fort Wayne center. “So they’re eliminating the high-seniority, older employees like myself and replacing them with nonunion college kids — guys fresh out of school. And the taxpayers in Illinois are subsidizing the whole thing.” source

A key chemical of one of the most horrifying elements of the Vietnam War -- Agent Orange -- may soon be unleashed on America's farmlands. Considered by world nations to be a "Weapon of Mass Destruction" (WMD), Agent Orange was dropped in the millions of gallons on civilian populations during the Vietnam War in order to destroy foliage and poison North Vietnamese soldiers. The former president of the Vietnamese Red Cross, Professor Nhan, described it as, "...a massive violation of human rights of the civilian population, and a weapon of mass destruction."

There is no difference between this "1001 Best Gifts" from BB&B and a parody of consumerist excess. Hmm, how about an "executive standing valet" rack of wood and plastic for $99.99?

To make this poor-quality contraption, a forest somewhere in a Third-World kleptocracy was cut down and precious, irreplaceable oil was burned shipping the lumber to China and from that factory to the U.S. across 6,000 miles of Pacific Ocean.

We know this spindly piece of garbage will break in a matter of days, weeks or maybe if the owner is especially careful, months; then the legs will break loose of the base, the towel bar will pull out, etc. and the "we cut down a priceless rain forest to make this" piece of human handiwork will be put on the curb where a diesel-burning garbage truck will haul it to the landfill along with all the spoiled food Americans throw out.

My name is John Needham. I am a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, (BCo,2-12INF,2BCT,2ID . I deployed with my unit to Iraq from October 2006 until October 2007 when I was medically evacuated for physical and mental injuries that I suffered during my deployment. The purpose of my letter is to report what I believe to be war crimes and violation of the laws of armed conflict that I personally witnesses while deployed in Iraq.

Upon arriving in Iraq in October of 2006 my unit was assigned to the ¼ Cavalry unit at Camp Prosperity. In March of 2007 I was sent back to my unit, B Company 2-12 at Camp Falcon. It was at Camp Falcon that I observed and was forced to participate in ugly and inhumane acts against the Iraqi citizens in our area of responsibilities. Below I list some of the incidents that took place.

a design i'm working on for a canuck friend. she's part of a small group that is looking to build an off-grid survival shelter in the wilds of ontario. my purpose is to see that my kinfolk of the great white north ride out the reset in style. no small feat, that, but i'm not one to turn down a good challenge.

i'll be creating alternate designs (to be branded under my very own armageddon collection™ label) that will be radically different from this one. i'll pass them along sometime after the first along with thoughts on the alleged economy, perma-wars, and a fantastic assortment of crackpot 2012 predictions that will leave you in stitches. but wait and see. given the imminent and tragically unavoidable low brow farce we still adorably call elections, the coming year promises to be very high in entertainment value! so grab a good seat for the show, but don't forget to wear your vinyl wader + poncho combo as you surely don't want to get any of that stuff on you.

as for the linked drawings, feel free to borrow any ideas you like, including the entire plan... i'm a 100pc open source kinda guy. and as always, i'm available for consult should you be pondering similarly posh post-apocalypse accommodations for you and yours.

Mexico is being wrecked in what amounts to an out-sourced American civil war. Huge numbers of Americans use drugs, most assuredly including people on Capitol Hill. Moralists and the Feds don't want them to use drugs. Putting many millions of white users in Leavenworth would be politically awkward. So: Export the war to Mexico, which never had a drug problem. This solution is acceptable for white users, who continue to have ample supplies at high convenience and low cost. It is acceptable to the anti-drug industry, the cops and prison guards and so on, who get fat salaries, and to the narcos. It is a splendid situation all around, except for poor blacks and Mexico. About neither of which anyone gives a damn.

... Now, American politicians want to send the military to Mexico, and are doing it quietly in the form of retired or “retired” military types, DEA, drones, training, and all the rest of the now-standard camels' noses under other people's tents. These are the politicians, remember, who brought you Korea, Iran shortly, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Uganda, Afghanistan, and all the other well-conceived brilliancies of the wildly ill-informed. Add to this a comic-opera military that has never been able to beat bush-world peasants with AKs and a bad attitude toward invasion.

The reason for my boycott of Walmart is that beyond my sheer disgust with the ugly stores, the low employee wages and crappy merchandise made in China, I have seen with my own eyes the destruction the company helped wreak upon the formerly vibrant downtown business district of my hometown. As recently as the 1980s, you could still go downtown in Freeport, Illinois, and shop at locally owned businesses along the two-block pedestrian mall, and then grab a bite to eat or take in a movie, all without returning to your car. I even worked as a sales clerk for a little mom-and-pop unfinished furniture store along the pedestrian mall for about a year when I was in college. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a Norman Rockwell painting, but my job was far more pleasant than being a clerk at a big box store.

Then around 1990, Walmart built a store on the outer edges of the city, and today downtown Freeport is a ghost town full of empty store fronts, cracked pavement and no hope for the future. It is a pattern that has been repeated all over the country, and the fact that there has been so little protest, even among those whose towns have been blighted by this menace, just shows how sick our consumerist society has become.

the privately held professional sports racket needs to quit sucking from the public teat already. while living in chicago for much of my life, it was always profoundly nauseating to hear the bears' owners, the mccaskeys, start in with their whining every decade or so, threatening to move the team to gary indiana if the tax payers didn't cough up a couple hundred million to upgrade the billionaire family's private cash cow. it was always a stunt... no way were they going to build a new half billion dollar facility in murder city u.s.a. and so with the grease of skillfully placed "campaign contributions", they got their loot every time. a return on investment probably on the order or 10,000 to 1. if your goal is to maximize gains, there is no better place to park your capital than a politician's pocket.

but that wasn't enough. to stick it to the proles again, the free-marketeers used their ill-gotten public funds to increase the number of sky boxes and luxury seats (wooing the corpo bucks) while reducing the overall seat count, and finally gift wrapping the entire package by jacking ticket and concession prices out of reach of the working class people who got stuck with the bill. "capitalism" at work.

“America was not created to be a nation of followers,” Romney told his followers. The key to election seems to be to tell Americans how wonderful they are, stroke them like cats, avoid puzzling them, and keep saying “The American Dream.” Tell them that we're a country of rugged individualists, just like Davy Crockett and Dan'l Boone. Probably we should wear coon-skin hats.

Somebody asked Romney, will he attack Iran if it doesn't obey Washington? “Absolutely,” responded this apostle of the Church of Latter Day Pattons. Japan's oil comes through the Straits of Hormuz, which his hearers believe to be a brand of beef stew. No oil, no Japan. No matter. “The American People....”

I'm going to slit my throat... A country of 315 million, nuclear-armed, able to wreck other countries it has never heard of in minutes, and the candidates sound as if they were addressing a warehouse of stuffed animals. This is the best we can do?

...Syria is NOT Iraq, and neither is Iran. Both will be protected by both Russia and China which will make this most recent international crime anything but a cake-walk.

Most Americans have forgotten that China can down any satellite they deem to be problematic, with missiles from the earth. This can be done within an hour’s time, and we are powerless to do anything to stop such an action. Without global communications the US military is just another private-club playing at war with no way to get or receive orders, or supplies anywhere on this earth. And without these communications the US will go straight into panic mode because without computers there can be no cash, no banking, no fuel, no cell-phones – basically everything reverts to the late eighteenth century. Oh and for the navy that will mean they will be stuck in the water because everything there is also computerized, along with all of our weapons systems – so the American Luftwaffe might as well not even bother to take off.

The clowns and villains who run America have accomplished something really epic: they have vanquished meaning. Nobody knows what anything means anymore. Anything goes now. All bets are off. It's not reassuring. It leads to bad things happening like blood in the streets. When nothing means anything anymore, some people will actually strive, make an effort, to reestablish meaning in practical economic and political life, because civilized life is impossible without it. So, in those historic moments when civilization is suspended, people will work like hell to restore meaning. Sometimes though, like Germany in the 1930s, you discover that the suspension of civilization is itself intoxicating, and you ride with that for a while.

“I think that since our leaders are not going to address any of these problems then we really have no choice than to attempt to wrest the steering wheel from them.”

Everything. I believe that what’s needed is a radical solution, by which I mean from the roots upwards. Our entire political thinking seems to me to be based upon medieval precepts. These things, they didn’t work particularly well five or six hundred years ago. Their slightly modified forms are not adequate at all for the rapidly changing territory of the 21st Century.

We need to overhaul the way that we think about money, we need to overhaul the way that we think about who’s running the show. As an anarchist, I believe that power should be given to the people, to the people whose lives this is actually affecting. It’s no longer good enough to have a group of people who are controlling our destinies. The only reason they have the power is because they control the currency. They have no moral authority and, indeed, they show the opposite of moral authority.

check out the "black knight" insignia on this GovCorp fascist-mobile. these guys are not public servants. they are infantile control freaks, highly armed thugs, domestic terrorists, brain dead goons, enforcer drones of the corporate state.

The end of the age of petroleum promises another set of upsets on the same scale, but this time it’s not because some more convenient and concentrated resource has suddenly come on the scene. It’s because the world’s production of conventional petroleum peaked in 2005 and has been declining ever since. A desperate scramble to fill the resulting gap with what appear on the charts as "other liquids"—ethanol, biodiesel, tar sand extracts, you name it, if it can be poured into a fuel tank and burnt, it gets counted—has filled in the gap, at least for now, but all these "other liquids" require much more energy to produce than ordinary petroleum does, and of course those energy inputs aren’t accounted for in the totals. Thus, on paper, we’ve been chugging along a bumpy plateau for six years now, while in the real world—because of the rising energy inputs demanded by the "other liquids"—the supply of fuel available to do anything other than produce more fuel has been steadily sliding.

10. The mafia has a sense of honor. If they say they’ll do something, they’ll do it.

9. The mafia code-of-conduct is simple and clear, and unfettered by legal doublespeak and millions of regulations.

8. When competing mafia families go to war they don’t kill thousands of civilians as collateral damage. War is the health of the state but for the mafia it’s bad for business.

7. Instead of conducting the war on drugs and [on] the American people, the mafia is perfectly happy to peacefully provide high quality products to those who desire them.

6. When you buy protection from the mafia, you get protection. When you buy protection from the state you can dial 9-1-1 and die.

5. The mafia’s protection is much less expensive than the state’s. The mafia wants 10% – 15% of your profits, and the various levels of government want at least 40% to 50% of your profits.

4. Unlike the state, the mafia actually wants your business to succeed. They know that ruining your business means that you can’t pay for protection. The mafia imposes almost no regulatory overhead, nor do they require that you waste your time filling out zillions of self-incriminating tax forms.

3. The mafia won’t keep you from having a gun to protect yourself and your family. The state prefers that you be disarmed. The mafia will gladly sell you the means to protect yourself – and they won’t bother with a Brady check either.

2. The state wants to regulate what you do in your bedroom. The mafia will gladly sell you whatever you need to enhance your enjoyment.

1. Members of the mafia have a great sense of style, dress far better than government bureaucrats and are much easier on the eyes.

US military admits to guarding, assisting lucrative opium trade in Afghanistan

"We have an obligation to every last victim of this illegal aggression because all of this carnage has been done in our name. Since World War II, 90% of the casualties of war are unarmed civilians. 1/3 of them children. Our victims have done nothing to us. From Palestine to Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia to wherever our next target may be, their murders are not collateral damage, they are the nature of modern warfare. They don't hate us because of our freedoms. They hate us because every day we are funding and committing crimes against humanity. The so-called "war on terror" is a cover for our military aggression to gain control of the resources of western Asia.

"This is sending the poor of this country to kill the poor of those Muslim countries. This is trading blood for oil. This is genocide, and to most of the world, we are the terrorists. In these times, remaining silent on our responsibility to the world and its future is criminal. And in light of our complicity in the supreme crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ongoing violations of the U.N. Charter in International Law, how dare any American criticize the actions of legitimate resistance to illegal occupation. ..."

infectious sounds. relatable lyrics for those who've been there. is it just me, or is the vocal quality eerily similar that of young sting?

by morris berman

I got the idea for the book from a number of sources, but one of the most important was a book published in 2004 called Freedom Just Around the Corner, by Walter McDougall at the University of Pennsylvania, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. I want to stress that McDougall is a very centrist historian; there is nothing left-wing or radical about him. But in the opening pages of his book he says that what most characterizes America, going back to the late sixteenth century, is hustling. American English, he writes, has more than 200 synonyms or related expressions for the word ‘swindle’, and when two Americans get together, they pretty much understand that the other person has an angle or agenda and is trying to promote it. We are a people relentlessly on the make, we are all encouraged to develop “The Brand Called You” and market it. It reminds me of the comment made by the comedian Chris Rock, that in the United States, when you are talking to someone, you are actually talking to that person’s agent.

We Americans don’t realize what a strange, and indeed perverse, way that is to live, because if everyone is doing it, it just becomes normal...

...There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.” Frankly, if I could summarize the argument of Why America Failed in a single phrase, this would be it.

a documentary on the making of nevermind (now two decades old) with commentary by album producer butch vig and rolling stone's david fricke. here's a great quote from part two. i can remember back 20 years hearing this incredible song and album for the first time, and totally relate to what krist articulates so well here:

"the way that the lyrics blend with the vocal and the aesthetic of the song, it just creates a world of it's own. and so when you're in that world, i guess, you know, come as you are. and i'm not commenting on what that song's about, i'm just, that's the way i see those lyrics. it's like, oh yeah, that's beautiful, it flows really nice, and it draws you in. and that's the mark of any good art."

making art requires no schooling, it's best without any, imo. here's krist again, speaking of channeling:

"I remember Butch putting up the rough mixes after Kurt laid the vocals down, and he'd be like, "Listen to this song!" And he'd like crank it in the control room and would just be like, it would just come out, just like a barrage, like, "Wow, did we do that? How did we do that?"

i think anyone who's created a truly original work --in any medium-- relates to that sense of awe and wonder. the implications are staggering.