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Attention Kmart Shoppers…
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry.
makes one wonder how much of a dumbass Emily Blunt must be.
or if it’s dead-eyed transactionalism to be at the top of the list for reactionary militarism movies and TV and cake up.
if so, guess he’s not a fan of Vonnegut, because in the end we are who we pretend to be.
this is like reading one of those accounts of “how Amway ruined my life”, but right before the author realizes it was a scam all along and all that effort they put into it only served to destroy more lives.
anyway, strengthPlan more like weakPlan. boom, gottem.
places like that, where there is some enormous resource of high demand, burn away all the pageantry and scaffolding of political liberalism’s self-conception to reveal the shining, metal skull of capitalism and empire. they thrive in the distant fog of geographies distant from the glittering hubs of finance, infotech and real estate.
there’s this open pit mine in alaska (owned and operated by a canadian corporation, naturally, because canada offers the best protections from liability for mining of any corporate jurisdiction… though the land it is own is owned by an indigenous corporation). anyway, this one pit produce 10% of the world’s zinc. and it is also probably one of, if not the, most heavy metal contaminated places on the planet. though the commissioned investigations, studies and findings about this are consistently finding ways to contort what is obvious into some kind of muddled statement where maybe the mine is “ok for the environment, actually”. and any critical reading of the messaging and situation makes it clear the capitalists are saying anything to keep it open to get the next load out before somebody calls bullshit.
so, i didn’t know shit about New Caledonia and decided to dive a little, especially with the opening graf putting the “disrupted nickle production” on front street right there next to people dying.
from the article:
The most recent protests are centered on a draft constitutional change being examined by French lawmakers that would modify voting conditions in the territory. As of now, only people who have been in New Caledonia for a certain length of time are able to vote in elections, effectively excluding residents who came after 1998 even if they were born there.
more on the “modifying voting conditions” later…
from the natopedia, some additional context:
In the 2018 [independence] referendum, 56.7% of voters chose to remain in France.
In the 2020 referendum, this percentage dropped with 53.4% of voters choosing to remain part of France.
The third referendum was held on 12 December 2021. The referendum was boycotted by pro-independence forces, who argued for a delayed vote due to the impact caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; when the French government declined to do so, they called for a boycott. This led to 96% of voters choosing to stay with France.
huh, looks like the trend was pretty obvious and that the latest referendum was bunk… now let’s get back to the “modified voting conditions”
As part of the Nouméa Accord of 1998, the population of New Caledonia continue to vote in national elections—French president and National Assembly—but the number of people who can vote in provincial elections as well as independence referendums is restricted. This so called “frozen electorate” consists only of those who were already living in New Caledonia in 1998 as well as their children, with the condition that they lived continuously on the Islands in the ten years previous to each election. This effectively deprived of voting rights the later migrants and their children from European France as well as the important local community originating from Polynesia, in particular from Wallis and Futuna. Excluded voters amounted to 8,000 in 1999, 18,000 in 2009 and 42,000 in 2023. That last year, the frozen electorate numbered 178,000 while the total electorate able to vote in national elections amounted to 220,000, thus excluding one voter out of five from participating in provincial elections.
The refusal of the <<independentists>> to recognize the result of the third referendum, which they boycotted, led to an institutional deadlock as local talks ground to a halt, while the next provincial election—scheduled for 15 December 2024—loomed closer. On 26 December 2023, the Conseil d’État concluded that the current rules deviate in a particularly significant way from the principles of universality and equality of suffrage, by denying the right to vote people born in New Caledonia or who have resided there for several decades.
if you’d like the pepper the gumbo even more, check out the size and demographic characteristics of the french military presence there. On hon hon hon! Le cochon a faim!
and finally, let’s get to the center of this bon bon:
New Caledonian soils contain about 25% of the world’s nickel resources.
similar to the king who always shouts “I am the king!” …
the state that has to have constant affirmation of its right to exist… probably doesn’t.
only fools study the blade, anyway. my sixth demon poison dart technique has always been the ultimate martial power. the streets of Slough are MINE.
I saw this stat earlier:
In 2021, [metformin, the main treatment drug for type 2 diabetes] was the second most commonly prescribed medication in the United States, with more than 91 million prescriptions.
the entire US population is 330 million.
as ever, the analysis that libs find settler-colonial genocide acceptable (Churchill) as long as it’s not happening inside the imperial core (Hitler) to people that look like them, cuts through their tortured pseudo-ethical posturing like a laser.
great pic by the AP, open mouthed, aggressive angry, pointing and the lighting makes his eyes look like empty sockets of vantablack space, where all love and humanity go to die.
lol, “looks like” just playin’
unvaxxed, raw milk fueled loads - $5,000
fuck the tariff. US automakers obliterated themselves and are trying to make it a global suicide pact.
they turned into banks pushing financial products, cannibalized their domestic production capacity and undermined the social reproduction of their own labor force. they hollowed out their product value and, despite the relative power of organized labor in the UAW compared to like… everybody but cops, they gutted their workers too. i’m not going to let the crisis of US automaker capital formations be reframed as an attempt to protect american autoworkers or anyone in the working class. there might be an argument if 100% of these tariff revenues were going to renewable transportation infrastructure, but i would still call that regressive and perverse.
i understand the logic behind the UAW supporting the tariff and wouldn’t tell them not to, but it can barely even be considered a near term solution unless their contracts start pushing for
it’s pretty clear the capitalists have never given a fuck about long term viability of any of these organizations, so of course the only way they’ll make a good decision is if they are shoved to the side by the people investing their time and hoping for a future.
i don’t think a typical production worker gives a shit about who signs the check or who invented the technology, if the wage is right, the checks clear, and the work is safe. plants could be cranking out windmill dynamos, tidal turbines, solar panels, battery tech, grid connected vehicles, or cheap EVs. that is what is gonna do for us all.
i’ll probably be out like a candle in the wind #RIPMarilyn, but my mission would be to make it to the early riot days where scores are being settled. wanna make sure former scumbag bosses and landlords get got.
this is like a 2nd hand experience from years ago, so the truth is probably buried under bullshit, but anyway…
so this guy i’ve known since high school has always been an odd job dude to eek by. anyway, for a time he was apparently part of some federal sub-sub-sub-sub contract crew that would do some kind of cleaning/maintenance on old decommissioned missile silos out west. i don’t remember half the details (i think the pay sucked for what you were doing, fyi), but i want to say they would be on the job for like a week at a time at a site and that many if not all of these old deep sites have crazy flooding problems. even in arid places. like there are supposed to be sump pumps running to keep water from collecting, but when there’s no one around for years at a time, shit breaks. and the water was of course all fucked up like it is with any hole dug into the ground of significant depth (mine wastewater, HIGHLY reduced soils touching oxygen after billions of years of NO oxygen = acid acid acid), so it was like a whole deal to get that out in a way that did or at least appeared to comply with regulations.
anyway, doomsday bunkers are insane and it’s kind of wild how people assume that living in a deep hole in the ground would be a lasting survival strategy, when the last like several millions of years of mammalian biology and hundreds of thousands of years of homonid life has been preserved by doing exactly NOT that.
the point being, if you want to be a cool subterranean morlock type of guy (relatable), stay much closer to the surface.
antagonistic guerilla art idea:
set up chain link fencing or pedestrian barricades into small pens in public areas. like i’m talking 25 sq ft, like a little box. hang a sign that says “Free Speech Area” on it with maybe a ticker or decal of the local institutional authority (county/municipal government, state, university, etc). set them up over night and in areas with lots of foot traffic, but not blocking or even remotely hintering people. like totally tucked into a corner, but completely visible.
it would not be cheap, because that stuff can be pricey to lose and they will take it once somebody with enough juice realizes its fake… but it could last in place for a while and i think most people looking at something like that resent the shit out of it.
point of clarification: he was 38 when he first met/dated the 17 year old.
it’s an important distinction, between Christian-Zionism and Israeli-Zionism that seems to be lost or purposely obscured by democrats:
imagine forming a coalition with the heavily armed and powerful people who pray for your eternal torment.
my assumption is that university administration is banking heavy on participation in the graduation ceremony being seen as a crucial rite of passage and formal family event (your grandparents came in from out of town for this! we want pictures, don’t cause problems!).
which is probably a bit of a fool’s gamble, but less than i would imagine considering the changing demographics of state schools. they seem to be shifting heavily away from children of working class families and towards children of families with high net worth who provided some level of support for higher education to the student, and therefore give the family elders a perceived “stake” in the pageantry. especially since a lot of those kids might well be moving right back in with their parents after the ceremony.
when i first went to a state school in the late 90s, my cohort were almost entirely bozos like me on scholarship that saved up during the summer to cover food/expenses and had some family kick in help to cover shitty but affordable campus housing. when i went back to finish a decade later, most of the students were from rich families who were paying for everything. there were exceptions who were working like dogs + scholarship to get through, or the occasional non-traditional military on the GI bill. but aside from them, most had never had some shit job in a fast food joint or landscaping. the tuition, housing, and meal plans were all exorbitant and of “top” quality, because the state university was now a place that was marketed to appeal to high net worth families.
i gotta imagine that changes the calculus for a lot of students at state schools.
also, going to graduation is a bit of a self selection thing. not going means saving like $80 on the single-use costume and not having to sit there for like 2 hours or whatever and deal with traffic. it does seem to trend towards people who have family who want to cheer for them. even before this latest genocide, administration would lay it on thick that if someone was disruptive they would interfere with the credential in some way. which i am sure is bullshit, but empty threats can work.
for context, Lake Eola is the large lake / public park in downtown Orlando where they banned giving food to poor people. the climate of central florida is generally associated with not freezing to death, but the city’s institutions are very hostile to the unhoused, among others. as i understand it, there used to be some shelters and other service providing organizations in parts of downtown orlando, but they were all shuttered and dismantled to appease developers starting at some point in the 90s and through today.
orlando is also a poster child for the periodic destruction of black neighborhoods and communities through infrastructure projects and withholding of basic services, starting back in the 1880s. a more recent example is the interstate highway system, in a story that is common to many cities in the US, the federal project was used to obliterate black owned communities. however, unlike many of those stories, in orlando, the federal government preferred to run the interstate highway west of downtown. the politically connected white capitalists pulled strings and had it moved. similar efforts by the same interests managed to have shelters, clinics and basic social services all shuttered in what remained of the isolated black communities downtown.
orlando is one of the biggest and most egregiously evil shitholes ever devised by the mind of men, but the media is tightly controlled to maintain the illusion that orlando is a family friendly place to vacation. and i’m sure it is if you stay in an all inclusive mouse-themed resort well outside of downtown. but at the edges, the shadows where the illumination of glittering spectacle don’t quite reach, orlando is something else. hunched over, rent-burdened sub minimum wage service workers find pest-infested housing run by slumlords and police silently monitoring weekly evictions of entire families from substandard housing because they couldn’t come up with $1200 to pay for an SRO with no kitchen or fridge. orlando is a social murder machine fueled by the illusion that it is anything else.
people *own *cats? pfft. what else do they think they own, the wind? the sunshine? 
looks disgusting. the globs I squirt into my mouth while I lay on the couch watching TV probably wouldn’t even be that big.