Roaming Charges: Hate and War, It’s the Currency

Hate and war
The only things we got today
An’ if I close my eyes
They will not go away
You have to deal with it
It is the currency
Hate, hate, hate, the hate of a nation
A million miles from home

At some point, our oligarchs & their oligarchs are going to decide that sanctions on oligarchs are “counterproductive” and return to the tried-and-true sanctions on the poor, the sick, the old and the young. These sanctions will have no effect on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But they will make everyone feel better about themselves that they’ve finally done something. And they’d rather not know the consequences, thank you very much. But be assured that whatever the price–and whoever pays it–the cost will be worth it. Out of sight, out of mind.
It strikes me that we’ve entered a stage of history where there’s not one figure of international stature with clean hands who won’t be perceived as acting in bad faith to negotiate a peace settlement: no Mandela, no Tutu, no Hammarskjöld, no Pauling, no Ali, no Bertrand Russell.
There are at 48 major universities in the USA that sell advanced degrees (at $50K a year) in diplomacy or international studies and apparently they haven’t yielded one diplomat among them. Time to the let the Lit and Art History majors try to work this out?
A little appeasement is not a bad thing–if the alternative is nuclear war or even a wider non-nuclear war. I’ve always thought Neville Chamberlain got a bad rap. The thing that weighed most heavily on his mind at Munich was the senseless horror of WW I, because he’d seen the damage done and was willing to do almost anything to prevent a recurrence, with even more lethal weaponry. It’s the kind of thing that political leaders should think about. Stalin, no pushover, reached a similar conclusion. Ultimately, perhaps the war was inevitable, in part because of the way WW I ended and in part because of the nature of the Nazi regime. The fact that the caution of Chamberlain is condemned and the racism and belligerency of Churchill venerated is a warped lesson, reflective of our state of perpetual war. The world needs leaders who will seek every possible option for peace. Apparently, we have none.
I’m not saying you’d learn more about what’s going on in Ukraine by turning off all cable news, but your knowledge deficit would be much lower.

Vietor is the former spokesman for Obama’s NSC. Richard Engel is an MSNBC “reporter”. It takes something to get to the right of the Obama people on Russia, but this is no surxprise coming from him. Engel and Maddow wanted the US to go to war over RussiaGate, a non-scandal their network pushed more aggressively than William Randolph Hearst did the Spanish American War…
The UN is now a venue where wars get escalated instead of defused… “If [Putin] wants to kill himself, he doesn’t need to use nuclear arsenal. He has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in May 1945.” — Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations pic.twitter.com/KaN9NgZyP3 — The Recount (@therecount) February 28, 2022
The UN is worthless. The Security Council serves as a protective shield for the world’s biggest bloodletters and war mongers (US, UK, Russia, China, France, Saudi Arabia and Israel). Only the non-aligned nations have ever paid any kind of price. Instead of preventing wars, it legitimizes them. The Security Council (if not the entire UN) should be dispensed with. But if you’re going to have one, membership should be limited to the non-nuclear nations–representing the people (mainly poor) who have been terrorized by disputes between the “super-powers” for the past 75 years.
In an epoch where the major threats to humanity are transnational (climate change, pandemics, extreme inequality, Marvel movies), all wars are civil wars.
Look in vain in the US for a mass uprising against the war. Obama effectively killed off the anti-war movement in the US. What remains are the small pockets of dedicated Catholic Workers, Quakers and anti-nuclear activists who’ve been protesting at select street corners around the country every week since the Reagan era. Some people honk. Most drive right by…
How are the “nuclear power will save us from climate change” boosters feeling about their Satanic mills today, now that they’ve become targets of war in Ukraine?
Apparently Beijing, which is now asking the government in Kiev to help evacuate Chinese nationals, wasn’t fully informed about the scope of Putin’s invasion plans after all…

Nancy Pelosi announced this week that Congress would provide “any economic aid Ukraine needs.” Will it take an invasion for Pelosi to give Americans “any economic help they need?” (A recession and killer pandemic didn’t do it.)
Anyone who has looked at the ruins and civilian casualties in Syria from Russian and US “high precision strikes” knows they are anything but. If you want more evidence of how “high tech” weapons go wrong read Andrew Cockburn’s book Kill Chain…
“Thermobarbaric” seems the more apt name for these killing machines, oxygen-sucking firebombs which the US has also used from Southeast Asia to the Middle East….
The fact that America’s Pharmacy (ie, Tractor Supply Co.) still has trouble keeping up with the demand for Ivermectin but has plenty of iodine tablets on the shelves tells you that most people don’t really understand what’s at stake in Ukraine….
There was a column in the Washington Post this week expressing the mystification of military planners who consider ground wars obsolete–a relic of the 20th C. They say it’s unimaginable that a “modern” war–going city to city, house to house–could be waged in a country of 40-plus million people like Ukraine. It’s as if the US experience in Iraq has been completely forgotten, wiped clean. There’s no institutional memory any more, even from institutions who claim to be the memory banks. Especially them.
This offer would have been more attractive had they made it before crashing the ruble…

All wars are economic wars waged most relentlessly against the poor.
Whatever the global crisis, the US will try to make Cuba pay a price…(Cuba, by the way, did not vote with Russia on the UN Resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. Russia couldn’t even convince Nicaragua to vote with them.)
Imagine the USSR–even during its bleakest decade–only getting four votes (North Korea, Syria, Eritrea and Belarus) at the UN. Putin couldn’t even buy Nicaragua’s vote! The USSR at least presented itself as a defender of the victims of global capitalism. Today’s Russia is just another species of the same brutal neoliberal disorder. Putin’s biggest fans are on the global right these days, along with a few rapidly graying members of the old Sputnik Left.
The only sane votes at the UN were the abstentions cast by the 35 nations (led by China, South Africa and Cuba) who refused to join in a performative condemnation that will only serve to exacerbate a war instead finding a path toward ending it.

Why is Reich of all people surprised? While there have been several incarnations of “Russia” in the last 120 years the West played a huge role in creating this one. In the early 90s the Harvard Boys walked into Moscow almost unopposed and shocked the hell out of the economy, imposing austerity, privatization and deregulation schemes that gave rise to the oligarchs, impoverished tens of millions of Russians. The plan to privatize the public assets of St. Petersburg (neé Leningrad) was developed by Kissinger and Associates in concert with a young aide to the city’s mayor Anatoly Sobchak named Vladimir Putin. Frankenstein meets its monster.
The shock therapy regime imposed by neoliberal technocrats in the 90s resulted in the premature death of millions of Russians and, according to a Lancet study, reduced the life-expectancy of Russian men from 67 to 60 years. Austerity kills, here, there, everywhere.
Of course, it wasn’t only the neoliberals who helped shape Putin’s Russia, American evangelical Christians played their part.
What’s the over/under on the next Pentagon budget? Will it top $1 trillion?
What’s the over/under today on the next Pentagon budget? Will it top $1 trillion? .@SenSanders: “We are witnessing the most massive military operation in Europe since World War II. There must be no ambiguity in acknowledging that what the whole world is seeing today is nothing less than a blatant violation of international law and basic human decency.” pic.twitter.com/aPBcmWfyyt — The Hill (@thehill) February 25, 2022
Bernie voted for one of the other big post-WW2 European wars, the US bombing campaign against Serbia, prompting some of his most principled staffers to resign.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “I mean can you imagine if he [Vladimir Putin] went into France? Would they do anything to put up a fight? Probably not.” I guess this means the French Resistance will be blotted out of the Patriotic Textbooks of Florida. (Of course, it was the US who did nothing for four years after France, Luxembourg and Belgium were over-run by Hitler’s war machine.) This confirms my Blowhard Theory of History, which posits that the people who most fetishize “history” know the least about it, especially those, like DeSantis, who are products of Yale and Harvard (or both, in his case).
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume…. Pat Robertson came out of retirement to claim that Putin “is being compelled by God” to invade Ukraine in preparation for a massive End Times invasion of Israel. pic.twitter.com/Pmwybf57Ay — Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) February 28, 2022
America’s liberal celebrities are no more off the wall than Rev. Pat. Consider… I don’t usually post pictures of myself, but today is an exception. pic.twitter.com/IvuiH3QVZv — Stephen King (@StephenKing) February 28, 2022
A better message, Stephen: “I stand with the people of Ukraine and Russia and against both of their homicidal governments.”
Then there’s this from Stevie Nicks: “This is Hitler coming back to haunt us. In one evening, until now, an entire sovereign country has been full-on invaded. How dare he?”
Adorno said there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. He should have added that there can be no metaphorical Hitlers after Hitler, since each invocation of his name for the atrocity du jour diminishes the real horrors of his crimes and obscures the nature of the ones being committed before our eyes.
Then there’s this deranged fantasy from the guy who wrote “Sun City” and once led the Artists United Against Apartheid movement, who has apparently been spending too much of his Covid downtime streaming Red Dawn. I told him he should be watching On the Beach or Dr. Strangelove, instead.

Don’t just seize Russian yachts. Seize them all, starting with Bezos’s…
Wealth of the top 100 Russian oligarchs combined: $567 billion. (And most of them aren’t getting sanctioned, because they wealth is so fully integrated into western banks, funds, land and corporations.)

Wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates combined: $594 billion.

In addition to the 15 operating nuclear plants (plus Chernobyl), there are at least 20 endangered plant and animal species in the war zone.
The obvious question arises: what took them so fucking long?
We tend to think of Putin as a “master strategist” because of his career as a spy. But Putin was no “Karla.” His time in Dresden was largely spent clipping newspaper articles and trying to turn South American exchange students into Soviet agents, when all they really cared about was sex, drugs and rock and roll. He had little success, and according to Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face (which is both funny and chilling), grew fat, bored and unhappy. Putin really didn’t do much “spying” until he was recalled to Leningrad during the perestroika period, when he infiltrated local democracy & student movements. Like the CIA, the KGB was always more interested, and more effective, at spying on its own dissidents. He soon hitched his political star to the crafty law professor Anatoly Sobchak, who became the first elected mayor of St. Petersburg. Sobchak was a pal of Henry Kissinger and set up a “commission” in ’91 to “bring western money” into St. Petersburg. Putin did much of the deal-making with HK, meeting with him several times as they parceled out the assets of the city. The role Kissinger–whose hands have molded so many calamitous careers–played in fueling Putin’s ascent remains fertile ground for research.
According Gessen, Putin’s first executive decree after taking office was to grant immunity from prosecution to Boris Yeltsin, plagued by accusations of corruption and self-enrichment in the aftermath of “shock therapy.” The second was to rescind Russia’s old no-first strike nuclear policy, replacing it with a doctrine that allows the Russian military to use nuclear weapons “if other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted or deemed ineffective.” The laptop bombers–many of them musicians, celebrities, & MSDNC hosts, along with the usual coterie of neocons and Democratic politicians– calling for NATO intervention in Ukraine should have this act seared into their minds, what’s left of them.
Within two weeks of taking office as President, Putin had also increased the Russian defense budget by 50%, at a time when the country, plagued by debt and a moribund economy, could barely provide basic services to its citizens.
It’s important to remember that the crowd which led the US into the Iraq War were in previous lives Russia hawks who had to find a new target for their hawkery after the fall of the Soviet Union. (Billions upon billions in weapons contracts depended on their success.) Now they’ve flown back to their old roost. But the thing is: most of them know even less about Russia than they did about Iraq. And we’re beginning to see, once again, the dire consequences of their belligerent ignorance.
If Malcolm Gladwell and Alice Waters had a kid…

Dr. Strangelove: “I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy…heh, heh…at the bottom of ah…some of our deeper mine shafts. Radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep, and in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in dwelling space could easily be provided…”

Jesse Ventura, former Minnesota governor and current RT America talkshow host: “20 years ago, I lost my job because I opposed the Iraq War and the invasion of Iraq. Today, I still stand for peace. As I’ve said previously, I oppose this war, this invasion, and if standing up for peace costs me another job, so be it. I will always speak out against war.”
10.7 million: the number of children living in Ukraine.

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As I prepared myself (shrooms) to endure the hollow ritual of the State of the Union, I was reminded of the fact George Washington’s First Inaugural Address was written by James Madison. Congress’s Response was written by James Madison. And Washington’s rejoinder was written by…James Madison. At the operational level, America’s politics has always been a charade.
The invasion of Ukraine is illegal. It may qualify as a war crime. It may even be stupid and self-defeating on Putin’s part. But the one thing it isn’t is “unprovoked.” Biden’s team of war hawks has spent the last year (and most of the Obama years) berating, antagonizing and provoking Russia into doing what it just did…
The Ukrainian “people” should be wary about every time their name is invoked tonight and for what purpose they are being used…
It looks like the Biden Ukraine plan is to fund a decade-long war against Russian occupation, attracting a strange cohort of neo-Nazis, liberal interventionists and jihadis from Chechnya, Afghanistan and Syria armed with shoulder-fired weaponry, creating a kind of Mujahideen inside eastern Europe. The blowback will be “yuge.”
What’s going on with Pelosi’s forehead. It looks recently paved. With infrastructure money or stock trades?

I don’t think Biden scares Putin very much. Certainly not as much as he should scare the rest of us…
How many of the Members of Congress waving Ukrainian flags like pom-poms at a March MADness game could point to Ukraine on a map, within say, 900-miles (roughly the distance NATO has advance eastward since 1991)?
Every time Biden says, “Let me be clear”, you know he’s about to sputter something totally incomprehensible…
Schumer would have flunked out of the Cheerleading Academy, if it hadn’t been for legacy admissions….
Ted Cruz looks like one of the lizards that chased Hunter Thompson out of the bar at the Mint Hotel and Casino in Vegas…
I pity the ASL translator who is trying to convey the meaning of this speech to the hearing impaired…
AOC nodding her head and giving a standing ovation for …”tax cuts” for energy conservation. You’ve come a long way from the Green New Deal, baby.
Biden mumbles and stammers, stutters and sputters. But he can be very clear and precise when he wants to be. Case in point: “We should all agree, the answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them!”
With the lusty cheers from both sides of the aisle for Biden’s call to F the Police (F standing for Fund) perhaps a reality check is in order: in the last 365 days, cops in the US have shot and killed at least 1,017 people, including a 12-year-old boy Philly cops shot in the back around the time Biden was speaking. Does Biden think this number is too low?
Biden is still addicted to the drug war. He just can’t shake the habit.
Inviting people to the State of the Union as living objects for banal anecdotes, a stunt started by Reagan, only works for dramatic purposes if you remember and can correctly pronounce their names and they realize you’re talking about them.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still a member of Congress? Holy crap…
Biden: “Judge Brown has the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police.” Of course, she does!
By the way, Ketanji Brown is related to Paul Ryan, who introduced her during the confirmation hearings for her nomination to the DC Court of Appeals. We’re a nation of 330 million people run by a tiny network of inter-related powerbrokers. These incestuous power-loops aren’t just familial. If confirmed, Brown will become the fourth current member of the Supreme Court to be plucked from the DC Court of Appeals, as well as the fourth of eight justices appointed since 2000 to have graduated from Harvard Law. No wonder people believe that Free Masons and pedophile rings are behind it all.
Lauren Boebert heckling Biden when he was talking about his dead son (I think) is the most Boebert thing ever…so far.
Boebert: “Toxic fumes from weapons dumps are nothing. You should try Jayson’s pork sliders…”
I thought I hallucinated the last line of Biden’s speech. I thought he must’ve mumbled, “Get me out of here or get Corn Pop on the line!” But no. According to the prepared text he really did say: “God bless you all and may God protect our troops. Thank you. Go get ’em.”
I don’t think Biden mentioned the “soul” of America once tonight. Which was a relief. Did he fire Jon Meacham?
Aside from the welcome absence of “soul,” here are other matters of more import Biden left out of his speech: climate change, student loan debt, dental coverage, the public option, the IDF killing American citizens, homelessness, unions, Afghanistan, nuclear weapons reduction, Yemen…
Kim Reynolds, the Iowa Governor sent forth to deliver a response to a speech that most sane people turned off after five minutes, is no Lauren Boebert. Does she even own a semi-automatic?
Oh no, now Kim Reynolds is talking about the “Soul of America.” Looks like Meacham found a new gig.
Jefferson sent his clerk to present his State of the Union addresses to Congress. Biden should consider the wisdom of this option next year…

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In the wake of the George Floyd protests, law enforcement agencies across Minnesota developed a plan to spy on protesters and journalists. The surveillance program was called Operation Safety Net. According to MIT Technology Review: Documents unearthed as part of this investigation shine a light on secretive surveillance programs, new technology vendors, murky supply chains used to arm riot police, and several watch lists, as well as other previously unreported information. Taken together, they reveal how advanced surveillance techniques and technologies employed by the state, sometimes in an extra-legal fashion, have changed the nature of protest in the United States, effectively bringing an end to Americans’ ability to exercise their First Amendment rights anonymously in public spaces.
Equating the homeless with trash is the kind of Hipster Fascism we’ve come to expect from the greedheads who run Portland…

Ames Grawert: “Dropping in-flight masking even as we enter the second decade of x-raying our shoes and putting shampoo in tiny bottles would be just a perfect metaphor for everything wrong with American policymaking.”
The United States recorded more than 61,000 COVID-19 deaths in February 2022, making January and February this year the fourth and fifth deadliest months in the entire pandemic, exceeded only by the peak last winter before vaccines were widely available.
Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist Marjorie Taylor Greene has been palling around with lately, looks like the guy who had one-too-many hash brownies at Bible study… This is Nick Fuentes. He is a white supremacist anti-Semite. That’s not Twitter hyperbole, just a straight-up description. Here he is smilingly denying the Holocaust: pic.twitter.com/qJkhASjW6I — Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) June 29, 2021
Speaking of Nazis, as the Third Reich collapsed both the US (Gehlen network) and the USSR raced to recruit “ex”-SS officers to spy on each other over the course of the Cold War–some may still have been active in Germany during Putin’s years there in the KGB.
Russia’s de-Nazification efforts will turn out about as well as the de-Baathification project in Iraq. Instead of crushing them, it will almost certainly drive these movements underground, making them more radical, more violent and in some senses more attractive to the . If Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko couldn’t de-Nazify Ukraine. What makes anyone think Putin could or even wants to? As any survey of the US prison system will confirm, state violence creates Nazis, it doesn’t eliminate them.
Robin D. G. Kelley: “Fascism, it’s always about using nationalism, and the nation, as a bludgeon to generate support for death policies, on behalf of death governments. For violence and repression and exploitation, internationalism is the antidote, always.”
Charles Murray, come get your man-child… Tucker: It might be time for Joe Biden to let us know Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT score was. Why wouldn’t he tell us that… pic.twitter.com/boPHU5PnMd — Acyn (@Acyn) March 3, 2022
Then again the Supreme Court is not on “our” side and rarely has been. Check out this ruling against Abu Zubaydah, the Forever Prisoner, by Stephen F-ing Breyer…

The Strict Constructionists on the Supreme Court are going to decide whether the EPA has the right to regulate planet-killing emissions from coal plants based on their reading of the intent of a document written at a time when the big debate was over whether spermaceti or tallow candles burned the most efficiently. According to meticulous experiments conducted by the slaves of Mt. Vernon, George Washington determined that the winner was tallow. (You can’t say you’ve never learned any practical information from this column.)
I’m curious to see just how far our Originalist Court will go in their quest to divine the true intent of the Founders. Is it possible they may discover that the Constitutional Convention violated the Articles of Confederation and thus rule the Constitution itself unconstitutional? This was the view of two state delegations and several luminaries of the Revolution, including Patrick Henry and George Mason, the man Jefferson cribbed the preamble for the Declaration of Independence from. Why not! Even Jefferson thought we ought to hit the Control-Alt-Delete button on the founding document every 30-years or so. So bring it on! (Or as Biden says, Go get ‘em, Alito!)
Since the Tories regained power in 2014, there’s been a 60-fold increase in the number of people who have to rely on food banks to survive.

In my 63 years, I’ve never been told this once, as much as I would’ve loved to have heard it… Vance: I’m sick of being told that we have to care more about people 6,000 miles away than we do people like my mom… pic.twitter.com/7d5rbS5ImR — Acyn (@Acyn) February 26, 2022
How much of JD Vance’s hedge fund winnings are stocked in off-shore accounts…and by “off-shore” I mean South Dakota, naturally?
The Trump/Biden border wall has now been breached at least 3,000 times by smugglers. Let’s hope they left big enough holes for the jaguars and Mexican wolves to pass safely through…
You can’t call it “Trump’s Border Wall” anymore. Biden’s owned it for the last year. Not a mile of it has come down, except what’s blown over by gusts of wind. And his Supreme Court nominee ruled that its construction could proceed without abiding by federal environmental laws.
It’s impossible to have a real debate about anything in this country because absolute morons are running it on both sides.

I’ve been in the Dark Divide (between Mt St Helens and Adams) of the Cascades this week, deep in the heart of Big Foot country, conditioning myself for Nuclear Winter. I hear it won’t be nearly as bad as it’s been made out to be …
The latest evidence that electric vehicles are not a climate fix. In Norway, where 65% of all vehicles sold in 2021 were electric, oil demand has fallen less than 10% since 2013.
The latest IPCC report estimates that the planet lost 420 million hectares of forests from 1990 to 2020 (an area about size of India and Egypt combined). Despite carbon offsets, the net loss of rate forest loss remains about the same as it was in 1990.
Another key takeaway from the latest dire warning from the IPCC…

The report estimates that in Lagos the risk of exposure to extreme heat could grow 100-fold.

More: “Increasingly, the magnitude of extreme [climate] events is exceeding values projected for mean conditions for 2100, regardless of emissions scenario.”
The report concludes with this dire message: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”
Not worry. The approaching Nuclear Winter may yet save us…
Meanwhile, flowering plants are expanding their range in Antarctica: “The researchers found that Colobanthus grew five times faster between 2009 and 2018 compared to growth rates between 1960 and 2009. Deschampsia, meanwhile, really took off, growing 10 times more in the past decade than before.”
Yellowstone bison are migrating out of the deep snow of the park and right into a firing zone, where 900 of them will be “culled” (ie., killed, slaughtered, packed up for meat)…
After being slandered as the perpetrator of a string of break-ins around Lake Tahoe, a DNA analysis proved that Hank the Tank wasn’t the culprit. It’s time for a Bear Innocence Project…
Saw an ad for Chevron this morning promoting itself as the “human energy company.” Over to you, Charlton Heston…

287 pounds: the amount of plastics generated per person in the United States, by far the highest amount of any country in the world.
Germany recycles 62% of its plastic waste, more than double the European average of 30%. While China recycles an estimated 25%, the figure in the USA is a paltry 8%.
LeBron James on impact of the killing of Trayvon Martin on him and his Miami Heat teammates: “We were sitting in Detroit, and we were like, ‘Could you imagine if you sent your kid out and he didn’t return home?’ Send your kid out anywhere — go to a game or go to school or go to the store — and he didn’t return home? And it just, it struck us.”
Sam Elliott, whose mustache does most of his acting, unloaded on Jane Campion’s film “Power of the Dog” to podcaster Mark Maron. “What the fuck does this woman from down there know about the American West? Why the fuck did she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana? And say this is the way it was? That fucking rubbed me the wrong way…They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie.” Elliott grew up in Portland, went to David Douglas High School, then spent a couple of years in the Hippy Autonomous Zone of Eugene (aka, HAZE) at the University of Oregon before decamping to Los Angeles. Everything he knows about “the way the West was” he learned on a Hollywood film lot.
RIP Sally Kellerman, unforgettable as Hot Lips Hoolihan in Robert Altman’s MAS*H, a movie pulsing with all of the anarchic frenzy and acerbic cynicism of Heller’s Catch-22 that was AWOL from Mike Nichols’ torpid film…
Steven Soderbergh’s “Kimi” may be the best DePalma movie yet, including all of those made by Brian DePalma.
Two years before recording the best-selling jazz lp of all time, Miles Davis was ready to hang it up…

Q. What’s a rock and roll song with a great guitar solo?

A. The shortest one? Guitar solos ruined rock and roll.

A couple of weeks ago, I recommended Bandcamp as an alternative to Spotify. Bandcamp was just bought up by the video game conglomerate Epic Games (merchandizer of Fortnite). I apologize. Just go back to vinyl.
Lou Reed would have been 80 this week. We need this attitude now…

Power is Power

“What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”

– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

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