We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction
of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak.
But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state.
Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up
or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power.
Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements
that follow us. It sustains another narrative.
It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist,
we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

Chris Hedges

 this is what benny does when i ask him to pose. dogs are natural philosophers, creative anarchists, and joyous dissidents. all praise for the dogs of peace.

 sorry, kids. the way is fraught with illusion, and there is no lesser evil, and the empire of genocide is coming apart at the seems. good luck.

 nemmind, henry's takin' the calico cat. 

 the dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. he is not seeking power. 

vaclav havel

 ruh-roh, a calico kitty is coming, and cutely!

 in fact, what i would say to my kids, if i had any, would be, embrace your inner curmudgeon, though it way not make for a life of ease, but i encourage you non-existent kids, to embrace your inner curmudgeon, with love and levity.

i admit i am a curmudgeon, in fact i admit i am an old curmudgeon, in fact i admit i have been an old curmudgeon since 3rd grade. i shall strive henceforth to be a curmudgeon with a modicum of levity. good luck to me.

yours, curmudgeonly.

We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

Chris Hedges

 Revolution is not, ultimately, a political calculation. It is a moral one. It is grounded in a vision of another world, another way of being. 

Chris Hedges

 Brand Obama was a marketer’s dream. They have reprised the same con with Kamala Harris.

Chris Hedges

 It is the obtuseness of the old regime, not the work of revolutionaries, that triggers revolt. 

Chris Hedges

 To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the global power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth — intellectually and emotionally — and rise up to resist the forces that are destroying us. 

Chris Hedges

 let's imagine the world without us.

it's a rigged game, and the results are everywhere, in flood and fire, in hunger, in forced migration, in genocide. how are we to adapt to the world we've made? artificial life? human ingenuity is a cancer on the earth. we're on an insane trajectory. earth will inevitably expunge us.
for the moment all we can do is strive for sanity. earth will do what it needs to do to save itself, after us.

 

 goodnight, moon.

 r. just flew overhead and saw the point, the park and vista homes. i could have waved from the fire escape.

 

 it doesn't matter what i think. it's a sick country.

 

call me the wanderer.

 

why were you born?

 

 the oligarchs would like us to think that no one cares about the world or the parks, but we do.

 i'm very happy to say that charlie was a good girl out of the crate. she's such a good communicator.

 we can have cop city, or we can have democracy. we can have genocide, or we can have democracy. we can't have cop city genocide democracy. it's indubitably obvious to the most casual of observers.

 rainbow sprinkler for benny.

 thanks to my secret collaborator. 

 benny got so excited when i came in he did a jig and yipped, then cried cuz he hurt his leg. he winced a couple times and looked at me and i kept saying you're gonna be ok (i hope) and 1/2 a block later he was.

regrets only to the genocide party.

 

 we could escape the evil empire if we stop voting for it.

i am personally offended by the way that blackness is being weaponized in this electoral cycle in order to justify white supremacist genocide in gaza.

-butch ware.

—jill stein. people power.

 

 we been rollin out genocides around the world a long time. it's catching up to us. the real criminal gangs are the red and the blue.

economic liberation will not be granted, it must be seized. 

-michael gallant

lester rodriguez, dow jones, 2022 (top image).

doug shaeffer, the obamachron, 2024 (bottom image)

 Let me say from the very beginning that we at Black Agenda Report do not think that Barack Obama is the Lesser Evil. He is the more Effective Evil. He is the More Effective Evil because Black Folks – historically, the most progressive cohort in the United States – and Liberals, and even lots of folks that call themselves Marxists, let him get away with murder! Yet, people still insist on calling him a Lesser Evil, while he drives a stake through Due Process of Law.

Glen Ford

 

Brecht left notes for his obituary: Write that I was awkward, and that I intended to remain awkward after my death. Even then there are still certain possibilities.

 word of the day, Verfremdung—making strange. word of the day, echt— real. making strange real.

 anyway, joy ain't a brand name one can vote for while you're making genocide, k?

imagine being a pebble, drifting with the tides, for millions of years.