Apropos

...of the rant below, I invite you to read this:

" 'We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,' said Gundersen. 'The data I'm seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man's-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can't clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.'

Japan's Nuclear Emergency Response Headquarters finally admitted earlier this month that reactors 1, 2, and 3 at the Fukushima plant experienced full meltdowns.

TEPCO announced that the accident probably released more radioactive material into the environment than Chernobyl, making it the worst nuclear accident on record.

Meanwhile, a nuclear waste advisor to the Japanese government reported that about 966 square kilometres near the power station - an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan - is now likely uninhabitable..."

The immediate managerial response to crisis, demonstrated again and again and again, is to lie about it. These are the people with the lawyers, guns and money. And their first instinct is to tell you that a catastrophe is no big thing. They've spent their formal educations and their careers accumulating power, influence, wealth and position. And they use it to lie to you. Not some of the time. Not over minor shit.

When it matters most. When it's about your health, your survival and the quality of you ridiculously brief mortal existence.

Because you don't matter to them.

Nuclear meltdowns? Inundated cities? Man-made flooding from reservoir releases? Toxic beef? Dying oceans? Rising seas?

You can go fuck yourselves. It's what they really think.

And remember when "well, at least it's not worse than Chernobyl" was like part of the by line?

Yeah, me too.

So, the next time someone tells you that you have to vote or die, or sign a petition to persuade Congress to do the right thing, or organize a free speech zone posing party for the local police, or get some mo'betta Democrats, or trust the Teap Arty to conjure an honest Republican, remember Fukushima. Or Katrina. Those motherfuckers have a first instinct. And it's to lie to you.

Let him make his appeal to your good citizenship. Let him finish massaging the soft pelt of the better and angelic natures the schools spent twelve years indoctrinating you to believe you possess. Let him wrap up and settle on his hind legs, confident that the colonization is going to do the trick.

And when the first turn of the self-satisfied smirk starts to pucker up those lying lips, punch that motherfucker right in the face.

A Nugget of Unavoidable Truth

There is this really simple explanation for why the ruling factions in the capitalized world don't do anything about pollution, food shortages, infrastructural decay, looming oceanic extinction, niche collapse or the human crises which follow upon environmental degradation. They don't have confused priorities. They're not backwards. It's not about balancing budgets or redirecting energies towards job creation and a revitalized manufacturing sector. They're not misguided. It's not because they're liberals, or conservatives.

It's just that...

...they don't care.

They don't care.

They don't care.

They don't fucking care. 

I'd even wager that they're banking on surviving as they reshape economies to triage the rest of us. Austerity is triage.

Austerity and militarization are about heading off our numbers before we really, truly believe we've got 'em going for us.

In the face of this observable condition, pacifism is moral abnegation. I'm not suggesting that non-violence is always useless. But, as Arundhati Roy sagely observed,

"Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”

The people against whom non-violence would be waged, in the "developed world," won't be moved by it. The non-participants who might change their minds won't be allowed to see it happening. Or, worse, when a successful and largely non-violent movement does succeed in effecting a change in politicians or ruling factions, it will be diverted away from social and economic alteration.

The produce of our collective labor is already being diverted from human welfare towards the dronification of the "homeland" because the people who write the laws and pay the bills intend to more directly police both their captive populations and the growing numbers they're already excluding. Labor works more for less, the rich get richer and their uniformed protectors receive larger budgets every year. It's naked expropriation, and they're getting away with it like never before.

Let's beat this fucking horse corpse to glue already: our earthly masters won't cut the war and police budgets because they need a corps of men with a proven ability to ignore their own humanity, who are receptive to belief systems which allow them to kill on command, and who have developed the capacity to harm others and justify it according to prevailing mythologies.

They need sanctioned killers because we are no longer essential but haven't the decency to just fucking die already. They need armed staffers because they don't need our mouths or our superfluous flesh and extraneous labor.

We aren't necessary anymore.

We aren't necessary anymore.

We aren't necessary anymore.

The last six generations of our labor have allowed them to construct a production, exchange and distribution system which will enable them to liberate themselves from our hungering stomachs, unskilled labor, the legions of urban poor and any lingering moral obligation to remedy the suffering of a burgeoning population of waste peoples.

This is war. It's war. It's a goddamned fucking war.

We have always had this war.

It's only now that they can really win it.

Please, please understand that if we fail to respond collectively, and soon, they will hand manage our annihilation. Or let the collapse of entire ecosystems do it for them.

They aren't dealing with the material and environmental consequences of the expanding capitalist closed system because they don't have to. We are the price they are willing to pay to negotiate their survival of their own onslaught against nature and humanity.

We are the bride price. We are the fucking dowry.

And they are going to pay it.

I swear to you, they'll fucking do it.

So what are we going to gods-be-damned do about that?

Some fucking protest theater? Some electioneering? Maybe a vote recall or a puppet parade? Pose for the police portrait takers? Beg for time on the teevee?

Or are we going to wake up before it's too late and treat our mortal enemies in a manner befitting...

...mortal fucking enemies?

Because they will triage the lot of us. And worse.

They really fucking will.

You Decide...

This:

"Louis Farrakhan, speaking at the American Clergy Leadership Conference on May 28, lambasted President Barack Obama over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military intervention in Libya, calling him an 'assassin' and a 'murderer.'

'We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart,' Farrakhan said, in a video making the rounds on the internet. But he has turned into someone else, Farrakhan told the crowd. 'Now he's an assassin.'

Or this:

"President Barack Obama told Democratic Party donors tonight that the bond between the U.S. and Israel is 'unbreakable.'

'The United States and Israel will always be stalwart allies and friends,' the president told about 80 people at a dinner for Americans in Support of a Strong U.S.-Israel Relationship. 'That bond is unbreakable and Israel’s security will always be at the top tier of considerations of how America manages its foreign policy.'..." 

I don't know why men such as Cornell West and Louis Farrakhan have to preface their condemnations with assertions about Obama's former goodness. I don't find it particularly credible. People who seek the Presidency and who have any chance of achieving that office probably have a good idea what it is they want and how they're going to get it. They know what the job entails, which is why a candidate with any chance of obtaining the position will so often run on his ability to be a good, dependable, patriotic Commander in Chief.

It's what Hillary Clinton did. It's what John McCain did. It's what Barack Obama did. I mean, this is a guy who literally practiced the role on his way to the office, and continued to perfect its outward appearances once he achieved it:

"Never a soldier himself, but suddenly their commander-in-chief, President Barack Obama wanted to learn the job from the ground up. 

Including the salute. 

Under the guidance of an expert, aides say Obama privately repeated his salute over and over again until he got it down. In a testament to how sensitive the White House is about the commander in chief practicing this basic military gesture, aides would not say who taught Obama how to salute. But every time he uses it, Obama is trying to convey an insider’s respect for the armed forces without saying a word. 

'That attention to detail, that focus on the outward manifestation of what we expect, is compelling,' said retired Gen. Paul Eaton, who advised Obama during the presidential campaign. 'Whoever worked with him on that did a pretty good job.'

Obama’s evolution as commander-in-chief during his first year in office largely involved proving that he was up to the job – that a 48-year-old former law professor and one-term U.S. senator who campaigned on ending the Iraq war had the resolve to lead the military through some of its toughest years in recent history..."

The guy didn't just want the job. He wanted the soldiers who would in turn take his orders to believe he was equal to the task of giving them. He wanted to simulate, and have them give their faith in return. He wanted - and it's no stretch to assume he still wants it - Uncle Sam's professional murder squad to read his gestures and bearing and believe deeply that he deserved the job of sending them off to smash, rape and kill.

I find that difficult to reconcile with a man of sweet and innocent heart.

But that's just me.

Also...

I'm not black. I don't know what it's like to have to convey to a domestically captured and oppressed nation forged and shaped by slavery, poverty, Jim Crow and the war on drugs how it is that the first Commander in Chief who looks like them is in fact just another Great White Father in all but appearance.

I can look from my relatively isolated position on the hybrid border between minority and parochial school cautionary tale and just come to the conclusion that Barack Obama made his peace with murder, war and oppression a long, long time ago. I can write something that flirts with insensitivity - perhaps, that he is Bill Clinton in black face - and put it down and move on because I don't have any history which defines my ratio of melanin per square inch of skin as a moral dilemma and a sign that I belong at the bottom of the heap. I belong instead to the tribes of the Noble Defeated, like Gaul under Rome, mythic Israel in Bondage, or the rump remnant of the Tsalagi.

Soon, I hear, we will be taking applications from among the leftover Palestinians.

Maybe it's necessary to argue that Barack Obama could have been a good man if only he'd been stronger, thereby placing his potential in competition with his kinesis in order to illustrate, by the very contrast in motion, that he's not a good man and therefore loses claim to the loyalty of a people.

I don't know.

On the one hand, we have Farrakhan's willingness to move from an imaginary Obama to the real one who so willingly murders the enemies of the monstrous American machine. On the other, we have Obama, who could if he wanted to say seven words and change the world:

"The Israeli occupation of Palestine is wrong."

I know he won't. People who want the job he has don't say those words. And they probably never will. Not even in the silence of their waking dreams.

Which leaves us, I guess, with wondering how an imaginary good man became the very real murderer we get to see on the teevee. If we're lucky, it might have us asking, perhaps, how we've never evolved beyond the belief that power corrupts.

Power doesn't corrupt. It's an attractor. It draws out those who want it, and maybe more than a few who need it.

You know how I know this?

Barack Obama could have won the job to lose it. He could have spent four years guaranteeing that no one would bundle him a hundred dollars, never mind ten thousand, ever again. He could have called the prison system what it is: a continuation of Jim Crow and a sustained, organized, over budgeted and increasingly privatized criminalization of poverty. He could have scheduled fourteen hundred and sixty separate press conferences, and devoted each one to a different discussion of the sad record of American history. The drug war. The fire sale of the Commons. The perils of regulatory capture. The militarization of education. Predatory insurance practices. The systemic and relentless religious, institutional and industry betrayal of women. Neoliberal structural adjustment as privateering. Environmental niche collapse. The dying oceans. The connection between markets and the death of the bees. What that means for hungry people everywhere. High sugar, low nutrient "affordable" foods and the sacrifice of two generations of children. Race. Gender. Class.

You get the picture.

He didn't do that, did he?

So.

You decide.

Was he a good man who should have known better, but was corrupted by power, or did he long ago make the choice to become the kind of man who could whitewash the brutal Israeli occupation and the American funding of it on his way to a thousand dollar a plate dinner and the dreams of untroubled sleep?

It's a Trap

That's what the Supreme Court is - ah, fuck it: that's what the courts are:

"The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a huge class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that contended the retail giant had systematically discriminated against 1.5 million of its female workers.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court said the suit could not go forward as a class-action claim because the plaintiffs could not show Wal-Mart had a common policy of discriminating against women. Instead, the company allowed individual store managers to decide on pay levels and promotions, the justices said..."

When a national chain centrally manages shelf leasing, marketing roll outs, floor layouts, on-time delivery, warehousing, employee codes of conduct, anti-union campaigns, advertising output and benefits packages, it's a single entity. But, according to the Roberts Court, when its various outlets hire and manage women, it's a thousand separate entities.

Huh.

I wonder if I can use that argument the next time the tax man comes for his bill. See, while I'm sleeping, eating, shitting or talking with my wife, I'm a single entity. But, when I owe taxes, I'm sorry to say, I'm dozens of separate organs and organ systems. Too bad for the tax man, but he's going to have to take up his argument with the export end of my digestive tract.

And in case you have any doubts about how much time and energy are wasted by groups and persons seeking sanction and validity on the way to court costs, legal fees and inevitable co-optation:

"The Supreme Court blocked a federal lawsuit Monday by states and conservation groups trying to force cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The court said that the authority to seek reductions in emissions rests with the Environmental Protection Agency, not the courts. The ruling was 8-0.

EPA says it will decide by next year whether to order utilities to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The lawsuit targeted the five largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, four private companies and the federal Tennessee Valley Authority..."

Courts: good for telling women to fuck themselves, and for rolling back rudimentary labor protections; not so good for keeping people from choking on the toxic waste of capital's energy sector.

But, it's not like we're getting the message, since it seems like our friends in the trade unions are getting ready to waste even more of their diminished clout and vanishing treasure, in order to "recall" a few token Republicans in Wisconsin. I'm sure their Democratic benefactors will reward them generously.

Sigh.

You want to win a struggle or two?

Give them sleepless nights, already.

Goddamn it.

 *

Post Script:

And while I personally find phrases like "war on women" troublesome (because, well, war is actually war and what's being done to women is far less obvious, and considerably more insidious), I understand why so many of them feel the way they do.

Until Their Dreams Become Blood Red Ruin And They Learn To Calculate Their Fear

Retail is a tough nut to crack. It has remained relatively impervious to unionization, in part, because its worker base is generally unskilled, hand to mouth labor. Especially in the case of big box chains which specialize in retailing household items marketed for consumption by people who live paycheck to paycheck, retail employees are sub-proletarian. They do not have skills with which to negotiate. Their labor does not produce enough profit for their employers that they can be remunerated with salaries that allow them to afford single family homes, and the amenities of middle class existence.

Target's management - national and local - understood this as it faced a unionization test case in the State of New York.

Target could intimidate its employees into voting against their own interests because Target has all the power. That's a fairly obvious observation. We're not breaking any new ground, here.

The takeaway:

"Some Target workers arrived to vote in free shuttles or with bus passes provided by the company. Target said free rides and bus passes were a way to make sure everyone participated."

And:

"...Target is clearly cognizant of the stakes. In advance of Friday's vote, the company has unleashed an aggressive anti-union push, distributing pamphlets and other propaganda to employees in recent days. Pro-union employees accuse the company of engaging in an intimidation campaign. In recent days, the UFCW has filed numerous charges with the National Labor Relations Board accusing the company of "unlawful denial of access to the store, unlawful dress code policy, unlawful no solicitation policy, unlawful use of social media policy as well as threats, interrogation and surveillance," according to the union press release. The UFCW claims the company has threatened workers with the closure of the store in the face of a vote to join the union. 

Target broadly disputes the union's accusations, asserting that it has broken no labor rules, while maintaining that it has merely sought to convey to its employees that they are better served through a direct relationship with the company, free of intermediaries. 

The company specifically denies threatening to close the Valley Stream store.

'We've never said that,' said spokeswoman Amy Reilly. 'Stores stay open when they're economically viable. We do close a couple of stores a year if they're not performing.'

But a pamphlet Target distributed to its employees warns that a closure is a real possibility. 'Will the story close if the union gets in?' the pamphlet begins. 'Nothing is guaranteed.'..."

Which is nonetheless, I guess, a significant comparative improvement over the lot of Brazil's lumpen-proletariat, which has been met with effective and coordinated militarized policing campaigns since the early 1970s, especially in the favelas of Brazil's largest cities.

Another campaign is currently underway, in advance of Brazil's contribution to the history of sport as a means of neoliberalization:

"Brazilian police are raiding another slum dominated by drug trafficking gangs in an ongoing program to bring peace to areas near Maracana stadium ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

Photographers and cameramen from The Associated Press on the scene have seen hundreds of police officers and troops invading the Mangueira shantytown, backed by helicopters and several armored vehicles.

Rio state public security director Jose Beltrame said in a televised news conference that police have taken control of the slum without exchange of gunfire.

Seventeen other shantytowns have already been pacified by security forces taking over the city's poor communities.

Maracana will host the World Cup final and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics..."

Of course, the justification for the milice seizure of entire neighborhoods is "crime" and "drugs." That's what poor people do, especially according to the shared canons of political conservatism, liberalism and neoliberalism. And there is a truth to be found within that assertion. Poor people live out existences defined as crime by law and custom. It is often enough criminal, or at the very least morally suspect, to be poor in the Western world.

In the US, the modern criminalization of poverty followed the ridiculously thin gains of the civil rights era, and was tested out (with  relish and abandon) upon the captive black populations of already ghettoized and economically isolated communities. Today, we call this the "drug war" while politicians positions themselves as "tough on crime."

If you are still reading, you likely already know this.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

We can, then, dispense with the preliminaries.

Until those who run things dream of blood red ruin, until they are plagued with nightmares that last beyond their waking, until they can no longer sleep for want of security, until they abandon all consolation for fear of retribution and betrayal, until they curse their gods and their pasty skinned saviors, until they learn to calculate not only their fear, but their cowardice, until they wake in the night and imagine every creak and groan of their homes to be the sneaking footsteps of those who would settle the score and finally, irrevocably deal them back the blood price of their gluttony, until every officer of every unit, station house and command refuses to report for duty in the face of unprecedented condemnation, until the board members and shareholders of every corporation open their statements and see only losses , until the lackies in the press and the aides to every politician tremble and piss their pants in anticipation of another morning of relentless unrest and agitation, until the banks burn and the malls are smashed for the raw material of barricades, we are not doing enough to push back - we are not doing enough to make it stop.

We aren't doing enough.

But we still have the numbers to do something about that...

Guess Who Is Reading Over the Beak of the Crow

Someone from here:

http://www.justice.gov/

Lovely.

Chicken Hypnotism

Chicken Hypnotism -

A la Wiki: "A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at its beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will remain immobile for somewhere between 15 seconds and 30 minutes, continuing to stare at the line.

This may not be clinical hypnosis, but instead a case of tonic immobility. Instead of a hypnotic state, the chicken's reactions are more akin to a turtle moving into its shell, or a deer freezing from a spotlight – a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit poorly."



Chicken Hypnotism:



Chicken Hypnotism:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
C#@k-Blocked Roundup - Tim Pawlenty & Herman Cain
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Chicken Hypnotism:


           
A la Wiki: "The United States military when trying to avoid divulging information gives reporters briefings with 20 minutes of intentionally dull PowerPoint presentations and 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone who is still awake. The presentations are called hypnotizing chickens."

Chicken Hypnotism:



Not Chicken Hypnotism:


LIVE STREAMING: Η Αγανάκτηση των Ελλήνων by News247

That is all.

"Sharia"

The Perry:

"I think in America from time to time we have to go through some difficult times — and I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don’t spend all the money."

The Bible (Mt 19:21, NASB):

"Jesus said to him, 'If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.' "

Let's just flush the toilet, already. The reason North American theocrats constantly worry "Sharia"* is because they fear the competition to their real and well funded project of theocratization. But, it's all in their heads. They're the only ones even remotely within reach of imposing religious law. There's no Muslim invasion navy. There will never be a Muslimy Red Dawn. The world's billion Muslims live an ocean (or two) away. And they are, as a rule, still burdened by the crises and problems of colonialism. They were the conquered peoples. Look at a world map. See all those Muslim majority countries. Former colonies and client states. Wicked dangerous, that Muslim thing...

In North America, the people looking to use the state to impose obedience to religious precepts and a religious worldview are Christians. And they can't even read their own Book that well, now can they?


* - As opposed to bugbear Sharia, actual Sharia is voluntary. Muslim theology excludes a priesthood which can impose a divine standard on the Ummah, or body of believers. Napoleonic and English common law, retooled after the fall of European colonial empires, have been mixed with Islamic jurisprudence, especially in Wahhabi Saudia Arabia and the degraded post-colonial states of the Sahel. To disastrous result.

According to nearly fourteen centuries of Islamic theology, jurisprudence, practice and debate, the "divine will" cannot be mediated by a priesthood. Islam lacks a sanctioned hierarchy. It is up to each individual Muslim to follow his or her conscience, which is the final arbiter for any Muslim person. Islam gives conscience the imprimatur of Allah. The Qur'an places the reception of Islam and the divine will entirely within the grasp of the individual believer, who alone must judge how best to live it. There are, obviously, communal standards, best understood as the collective sharing of the Five Pillars - but Muslims are not enjoined by a legal fiat, Sharia. Sharia is similar in function to Christian grace. God offers. The believer must negotiate his or her own acceptance of it. It has only, and very spottily, been reconceived as an enforceable state mandate following the collapse of the colonial system, and the failure of the first successor post-colonial states, whose leaders used the colonial law and enforcement apparatus available to them. Most of the world's Muslims still live as if Sharia is what it has traditionally been - the divine gift of God which the believer must judge and live by way of conscience.

Bachmann in Chains

I put on the stupid debates, tonight. Partly because I didn't want to watch the Bruins lose. Again.

Other than noting that Republicans bore me, and that it's sometimes very, very embarrassing to live in NH (as in, every election cycle), what hit my radar was...

...Michele Bachmann.

Michele Bachmann is not Sarah Palin. Palin does whatever the hell she wants to do, and she's obviously enjoying herself doing it. Certainly, she spends a lot of time interpreting her conduct and comments within a self-consciously conservative framework. In doing so, she's constantly rereading the text and the script to suit the needs of her immediate performance. Palin is a performer. A natural, at that.

Unlike Palin, who expands that framework and forces its adherents to adapt to her moves or condemn themselves to a contest with a chimaera, Bachmann has (at least in tonight's debate) taken a more genuinely conservative approach to the issues. Bachmann has bound herself to them, replete with sworn pledges.

Palin is a genius, in her own way. Palin mouths what her followers want to hear, and she talks in their idiom with practiced expertise - but she is not bound by their self-imposed moral restrictions, especially within the arena of contest she's chosen as her public domain. Palin uses her gender as wedge - as a motherhood position - in a constant struggle with a male dominated conservative hierarchy. Palin's womanhood is not bound to men. She is the prime mover, in her family. She is the breadwinner, and yet she's managed to avoid the pigeonholing of her conduct according to perceptions of her gender. Regardless of her stump speeches, her family values utterances and her lip service to the conservative social canon, Palin as an actual person is a remarkable deviation from that canon. She's not Schlafly's heir. She's an anti-Schlafly, doing all the public things which the back-to-the-household old guard have spent four decades railing against.

Bachmann is not Palin.

Bachmann is a woman in chains.

It's not in her approach to the issues which reveals her condition, or which held my attention. Her treatment of the issues was so much boiler plate. Without any indication of tone, posture, enunciation or inflection, it would be difficult to tell Palin and Bachmann apart on the issues.

Palin does not try to compete with her male counterparts on their terms. She's comfortable as a woman, and she's comfortable as a powerful woman. She commends her followers for their adherence to traditional gender roles, as she continuously violates them.

Palin doesn't compensate.

Michele Bachmann, by comparison, appears to believe those roles deeply. Which puts her in a noticeable bind, as was plainly evident during this evening's debates.

So there she was, on the stage.

Dwarfed by the man-troll and the two tall, smug man-boys vying for whitest, blandest mommy's dearest:

 

Looking tiny next to even the perpetually diminutized Ron Paul.

And Bachmann spent the whole night compensating. As each Republican man offered his prescription for completely savaging the commons, for privatizing everything from education to space to environmental protection, Bachmann took it further. She tried to out-man them. She pledged, and promised and took solemn oaths like a two dimensional cookie cutter king in some bad YA fantasy or fan fiction.

When asked by a local college administrator what ought to be done to return manufacturing jobs to the States, the candidates each talked about shrinking government, getting out of the way of business, trade imbalances and deregulation. Bachmann went for the inordinate, declaring,  

"Well, the United States federal government and the states have done numerous job training programs over the year with mixed results.  This is what we need to do to turn job creation around and bring manufacturing back to the United States . 

What we need to do is today the United States has the second highest corporate tax rate in the world.  I’m a former federal tax lawyer.  I’ve seen the devastation.  We’ve got to bring that tax rate down substantially so that we’re among the lowest in the industrialized world. 

Here’s the other thing.  Every time the liberals get into office, they pass an omnibus bill of big spending projects.  What we need to do is pass the mother of all repeal bills, but it’s the repeal bill that will get a job killing regulations.  And I would begin with the EPA, because there is no other agency like the EPA.  It should really be renamed the job-killing organization of America." 

As write this, literally as I type, Anderson Vanderbilt and his guests are gushing over Michele Bachmann, as a "surprise winner" of the debate, musing over how she spoke in clear, precise sentences. She had her points in order. She "peppered" her arguments with interesting facts and data and argued in a "rational" fashion.

In short, on how she argued like a traditional male candidate.

Those expectations are Bachmann's chains. Because to be taken seriously beyond this debate and from here on forward, she cannot give the impression that she lacks the solidity of the traditionally masculine role, and its associated traits of aggression and assertion. By assuming them tonight, she has set her own minimum standard. She was taken seriously on those terms, and a failure to meet them again and again will consign her to public failure.

As this campaign continues, these are the qualities which will isolate her against the background of her male competitors and within the environment in which they all share a less than congenial competition. The further she progresses as a serious competitor, the more likely she will fall into the trap which caught Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, assuming the mediated role of the harridan, the scold and the woman who forgot her place. As the woman-thing trying to be serious while the menfolk talk shop, and politics and the rough salvation of a womanly nation.

Unlike Palin.

Who is so much cagier than that.

Palin slipped her chains.

And tonight, watching Bachmann try to out assert*, out gun and out man the men, we got to watch her assume the weight of them voluntarily.

I felt bad for Michele Bachmann, tonight. Not because she was a victim.  She wasn't.  She held her own. I felt bad for her because, as she wrapped those chains around her own self, slipped the key into the lock and turned it closed, I knew that the press and her competitors would never let her take them off again...



* - I'm not suggesting that there are innate gender traits. I'm suggesting that Bachmann was attempting to compete with utterly traditional men by assuming traditionally masculine traits.

Enclosure

I don't really care much for government.

But, I think it's not only possible but necessary to separate public property, conceptually, from the sort of states we have, and which claim to manage and administer the Commons. These Commons, we should continually remind ourselves, our produced, maintained and often enough leased away using the capitalized receipts of our labor. This is labor which is doubly appropriated, first as wages which alienate our work from its products, and second as taxation.

I don't have a much in the way in developed thought on the subject, except to point out that privatization is a new phase of Enclosure:

"NEW YORK (Reuters) – New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced a pilot program on Thursday that would allow private companies to run public schools in some of the state's chronically underperforming school districts.

The public-private partnership would authorize school management organizations to operate five schools, and would target some of the 100,000 New Jersey students now enrolled in 200 chronically failing schools, the governor's office said..."

A Triumph for Something

From the Beeb:

"US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the death of top African al-Qaeda militant Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is a 'significant blow' to the group.

He and another militant were killed earlier this week in a shootout with police at a checkpoint in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, officials said.

Mr Mohammed was the most wanted man in Africa, with a $5m bounty on his head.

He was suspected of having played a key role in the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa, which killed 224 people.

He was also accused of attacking Israeli targets on the Kenyan coast in 2002, and was recently believed to have been working with the Islamist militant group, al-Shabab, which controls much of southern Somalia..."

From the SwoonPost:

"DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first U.S. official to publicly confirm the death of the al-Qaida operative behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

A Somali minister earlier Saturday said officials in that country have determined that a man killed by security forces on Tuesday was Fazul Abdullah Mohammed.

Now Clinton says in a statement while in Tanzania that his death is a 'significant blow to al-Qaida, its extremist allies and its operations in East Africa.'

She says it's 'a just end for a terrorist who brought so much death and pain to so many innocents" from the embassy bombings'..."

From the court transcriptions of the proceedings in which a tribunal or jury convicted Mr. Mohammed; or, from the video footage of him performing these acts; or, from the public testimony of witnesses; or, from his signed and witnessed confession:

[...]

And that's the thing, isn't it?

Without conceding the laughable claim that the death of a single man has in any way degraded the fighting and/or carrying capacity of the fictional international terrorist cartel, "Al Qaeda," we are yet again being asked by the corporate press and their state collaborators to just trust them on their assertion of fact, claims to validity and offers of truth.

Because, y'know, they were so wicked forthright and shit about anything over the last, I don't know, ten decades?

On the Arbiters of Social Memory

6/9/2011:

"A U.N. resolution justifies the targeting of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, a senior NATO military official with operational knowledge of the Libya mission told CNN Thursday.

Asked by CNN whether Gadhafi was being targeted, the NATO official declined to give a direct answer. The resolution applies to Gadhafi because, as head of the military, he is part of the control and command structure and therefore a legitimate target, the official said.

NATO has been ramping up pressure on the regime, employing helicopters last weekend for the first time against Gadhafi's forces. Explosions are heard often in Tripoli, evidence of allied air strikes..."

4/26/2011:

"The NATO-led military operation in Libya does not aim to eliminate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the commander of coalition forces said on Tuesday.

The Libyan authorities accused NATO on Monday of trying to "assassinate" Muammar Gaddafi after the coalition dropped at least two guided bombs on Gaddafi's compound in the heart of Tripoli.

"This operation is not about personalities or the change of the regime...This is about bringing an end to the violence,' Canadian Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard told reporters in a video link from his headquarters in Naples..."

3/29/2011:

"...But Obama did say that the coalition would not target Gaddafi, and that regime change by armed force – especially by American ground troops – was not an aim. "To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq. Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our troops and the determination of our diplomats, we are hopeful about Iraq's future.

'But regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya,' he said.

Instead Obama sought to justify the military attacks on Gaddafi's army by saying there was no doubt that a massacre of opposition forces and civilians had been prevented..."

3/21/2011:

"President Obama sent a letter to Congressional leaders spelling out his decision to direct strikes against Libyan air defenses over the weekend and citing his Constitutional authority for the military action.

President Obama held out the threat of targeting Libyan Leader Muammar Qaddafi personally Monday but said the U.S. would stop short of doing so -- at least for now. 

Instead, Obama stressed the importance of sticking to the mandate of the U.N. resolution passed Thursday, which focuses on preventing Qaddafi from crushing opposition forces in a large-scale massacre..." 

It's like they know they can get away with it, or something...

Defining Obama

Barack Obama is the president. It's his administration. These are his policies. He's the commander in chief.

His response to the crisis in Yemen - a crisis caused by the US backed militarization of the Yemeni state, transforming it into a dependent client in the War on Forever - is to...

...militarize some more.

This is his baby:

"The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials.

The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few options to keep the militants from consolidating power..."

He owns it.

The NYT piece is purest hookum, of course. It's propaganda. Since they are reporting on the story, it's not and cannot be a damned covert escalation or campaign:

"The recent operations come after a nearly year-long pause in American airstrikes, which were halted amid concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths that were undercutting the goals of the secret campaign. 

Officials in Washington said that the American and Saudi spy services had been receiving more information — from electronic eavesdropping and informants — about the possible locations of militants. But, they added, the outbreak of the wider conflict in Yemen created a new risk: that one faction might feed information to the Americans that could trigger air strikes against a rival group."

You know that constant political trope - the one about energy independence?

The NYT, in cooperation with the Obama Administration's covert super public campaign of murder by sky death robots, has perhaps inadvertently gone off script. The US government is working, has been working, and will continue to work with the most repressive, regressive and vile state in the whole region, in order to crush resistance to local allies of the US and Saudi Arabia, to murder dissidents, to punish militants who can no longer sit idly as their lives are squandered and their children further impoverished in order to keep Americans fat, distracted and up to their ears in toxic debt.

Because Saudia Araba, despite passing its production peak and with declining supplies and overstated reserves, still has a lot of oil. And the US martial behemoth - the largest single consumer of oil in the Americas - needs that juice. The American service, power supply and entertainment economy needs that juice. The plastics, medical and transportation industries need that juice.

For this reason, Barack Obama is perfectly willing to murder Yemeni children.

For this, Obama escalates direct US attacks, in full interventionist mode, in order to take advantage of stasis, crisis and instability engineered by the government of the US, and specifically the Obama Administration.

That makes Barack fucking Obama a very specific thing.

It makes of him a tyrant.

Not the socialist kobold of perfervid and moronic rightwing paranoia. Not the usurping black foreigner of fetid Birther fantasy. He's not a a caricature.

And I don't even mean or mean to imply that he's a domestic tyrant. He's not Roosevelt (either of them) or anti-Roosevelt. Because our sad and very real world isn't stupid, lazy, stupid, shitty Hollywood.

I mean tyrant in its native sense, of the original and hellenic intent.

A tyrannos.

A man who seizes or attempts to seize a polity in order to turn its capture to material advantage for a small group of oligarchs and timocrats.

Barack Obama is, quite literally, a tyrant.

On considering this sobering fact, an intrepid interlocutor might wonder on the urgent need of tyrants everywhere to sully the memories of the various iterations of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Such a one might wonder, but not too loudly.

Even a lazy observer can tell why...


UPDATE:

A whole lot of props, kudos and credits to davidly for rather insightfully making connections I failed to make.

Lupe Fiasco Gets It

(apologies for the social media stupidity embraced by the interviewer...fiasco handles it well, all the same)

Dick

Anthony Weiner's been a dick for a very long time. The kind of dick who racebaits his way into power. The kind of putzy shmok who does the usual New Yorker cover for all things dirty, underhanded and evil yon Eretz Yisroel way.  He's been a keen supporter of foreign occupations and wars, for as long as he's been a Congressman.

1. He played on white and Jewish fears of black people, in order to get elected. He used a particularly nasty episode in late New York history - the Crown Heights riots - to do so.

2. He's been a consistent supporter of the shitty little colonial garrison race state for as long as he's been in politics.

3. He thinks women - women he's never met, even - best serve his needs and purposes as unpaid dick voyeurs.

4. He married a well connected, independent woman in her prime - and then turned his unsolicited attentions to young, poor and single women who lacked the means to effectively stop him without first turning to powerful outsiders for assistance.

Maybe he was far more "progressive" than many of his counterparts.

Didn't stop him from being a dick, now, did it?

h/t to Margaret Kimberley, @ Freedom Rider and of the Black Agenda Report

A Melange of Maunder and Discontent

1. Below, in a predictable fit of vanity, writing about Al Gore's alleged incapacity to keep his manpaws to his pigself, I typed something which seems a wee harsh and misplaced, upon rereading it. Ragey irony doesn't work if loserman (me) forgets to hotlink the quote which inspires it.

This:

"The people who think Palin is a stupid dipshit are probably the same folks who took the educated liberal at his word and suspended good sense to believe that Weiner had been hacked. They're probably the same sort of people who believe that Al Gore couldn't possibly have groped and assaulted those lying bitch massage therapists..."

...works not at all when this:

"...those lying bitch massage therapists..."

...doesn't link to the comment thread, here.

2.) I don't know who Bonnie Fuller is. As she writes for the AOLSwoonington and presides over a webspectacle humbly entitled HollywoodLife.com, she's starts off with two strikes against her. For the third strike, you have to read her takeaway from the Wandering Weiner Carnival of Indiscretion and Riotously Tropey Self-Betrayal, which she addresses, irony free, directly to Weiner's wife:

"...Anthony Weiner's real problem was that he felt inadequate inside -- like the skinny, gawky, nerdy guy he once was, says Dr. Carle. 'Then he got into a position of political power, and suddenly women were flocking all over him, but he still felt inadequate. Communicating with these other women though would give him a feeling of power, that boosted his self-esteem.'

And then Huma, he got addicted to this high he was getting from flirting with the kind of women -- young and pretty -- that he never thought would pay any attention to him before he was a bigwig.

You -- you have to get him to actually dig into why he feels so negatively about himself or he will never overcome his addiction. And if he can't quit his urge to show off his genitals to strange women, then he can never have a truly loving relationship with you."

You getting this, kind readers? Weiner is compelled to sext his dickshop all around the country because he was once a geek but got power and is now playacting his triumph over geekitude by geek gawking his ganker to the lowest possible (free, unsolicited) bidder.

And it's his wife's responsibility to help him therapurbate himself into self-confidence and healthy self-esteem, so that he can dedicate his genitalia and his finer emotions, with abiding true love, to her alone.

Briefly - fuck that. If he can't keep his dick in his pants, that's his problem. If he goes further than that, it's really his problem, and I'll personally start up the legal defense fund for any woman who permanently deprives him of the true object of his affections. His wife doesn't owe him jack. It's not her job to save him. He doesn't even need to be saved. He's like approximately every single other man who got himself a position of power. He's a dick with the sanction to use himself badly. One day, he'll join the rest of his ilk, sputtering drunken muttered obscenities from collapsed shacks on the bottle strewn beaches of the former tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Mauritius, scheming their revenge against swarthy foreigners and revenant labor, as a punitive rising sea prepares to drink them in and forget them forever.

And here's the especially sick part of Fuller's presumptive and obsessed fan note a clef to Mrs. Abedin - if you replace the gender pronouns of her advice, it reads like the sort of postcard the now corpsified Mr. Comstock would have allowed to pass through the mail:

"And if she can't quit her urge to show off her genitals to strange men, then she can never have a truly loving relationship with you."

Porn's not something I pack into my bindle of sundries. I think porn is accident scene footage from a collision between the camera lens, fascist aesthetics and the late stages of sex hating taylorist capitalism. It's sex as degraded  and managed labor. But, but, but. I've known hookers, porn actresses and exhibitionists. They are, in fact, capable of deep and deeply emotional loyalties. Women and men can show each other their genitals and still retain the ability to love, clown.

3.) Melissa McEwan thinks Andrew Breitbart owes Anthony Weiner an apology. And no, this isn't fucking satire. She thinks that Weiner was exploited and coerced into making an ass of himself. You know, because it was Breitbart who took pictures of Weiner's dick and tweeted them into infamy. Fucking Democrats never learn, do they?

4.) Watch this. Then read this. You are already a better person than you were thirty seconds ago.

5.) Tim Pawlenty is supercaliragilisticespialidocious. Please, Timmy, please - make class war the center of your establishment backed campaign. If you do it over and over again, Timmy, I will send you my dollar. I promise it. Granted, you have to stick to the script, which has you portraying a hypercapitalist warhawk like Obama as the reincarnation of Frantz Fanon, but it's a small price to pay. Beat that fucking drum, Timmy. Because dem workahs is too stupids to notice how all your compatriots (Dems and Republicans) are busy cooking up punitive austerity. While you're at it, Tim - a reminder of what the class war looks like, in late capitalist America:

Ridiculously dressed and conspicuously wealthy nitwits gather to celebrate their de-classed obsession with plant fiber body drapings, studiously ignoring all the while the wage slaves and actual slaves whose labor buys them their affluence and their irrelevance.

Oh, unreal gods and imaginary fates, Timmy, please please please advertise class war as far and as wide as possible. And if you could be so kind, could you have Limbaugh and Hannity give you a hand?

Wherein a waste of a half hour, whilst I decide between oat bran and bran flakes, results in a moment of serendipity

Montag, who should write more, has a tumblr account and a quintillion tumblr followers. I don't really get tumblr, but repostedrebloggedrecreatedrespectacularized snippets of pop culture aren't my thing. I dropped windowpane to Siouxsie's voice coming out of a semi-portable, lost beneath a freakish moon in the woods of New England, but there's no combination of circumstances in which I can imagine compu-editing dramatic poses of her into non-terminating looping gifs.

Still, for kicks, wandering through Montag's tumblr followers is often rewarding on its own merits.

Especially today.

Because I found this, and it makes my old bones very, very happy:

Damn, that's good.

Crow's Corollary Number One

Anthony Weiner can do whatever the fuck he wants with his dick, as long as it's voluntary for all parties involved. For all that I care. And I don't care. I care about the involuntary, only in so much as I believe in the strongest terms possible that victims possess a material freedom to do extraordinary violence to their abuser(s), if they so need or desire.

Still, there's a maxim worth exploring here.

I'm a vain man, so I'm going to rename it pseudonymously something like Crow's Corollary Number One.

As in, corollary to the equally vain Crow's Law, which reads:

"Without some obvious use or abuse of mocking irony, it is impossible to create a parody of liberal self-betrayal that someone, somewhere won't mistake for conservative wishful thinking."

Anyway, the corollary:

Any time a man seeks political office or power, he is doing so with his dick out in front of him. (If he's a conservative, he's going to call that dickulation "Jesus" or "Family" or "Morality." If he's a liberal, he's going to pretend really, really hard that it's a solemn concern for the downtrodden, the oppressed and the poor. But, it's really about power. And for men who need to have power as an office, a position, a publicly recognized status, it's about the dick. Always.)

Men who plunge into the future dicks forward have no grounds for complaint when they catch them in the fencing. I can only suggest to passersby who happen upon men caught up by their penises, that when presented with the opportunity to do so, they give the fencing a good, solid shove...

Post Script:

Who is caught up in a dick scandal? The intellectual Democratic strategist. The big picture wunderkind with the shiny tactical brain (and an irrepressible penis).

Who walked away from a mediated attempt to paint her as stupid and ahistorical, riding higher than ever, and with almost no fallout or damage to her prospects and fortunes? The "caribou barbie."

The people who think Palin is a stupid dipshit are probably the same folks who took the educated liberal at his word and suspended good sense to believe that Weiner had been hacked. They're probably the same sort of people who believe that Al Gore couldn't possibly have groped and assaulted those lying bitch massage therapists...

The Only Just Response to Israeli Fascism is the Abolition of Israel

Gratitude to RealityZone for this video, which illustrates in moving picture the culmination of nasty Israeli Hitlerism:



Israel, as I wrote a year ago, is the last bastion of successful nationalist fascism. It is funded and kept in arms by the soft supranational fascism of the American corporate state. The American state embraces the liberal tolerances stolen and appropriated from the labor, civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements which it crushed and criminalized until it was prepared to incorporate them as a spectacular masks and tolerated identities.

The Israeli state is a Euro-American colonial garrison state. It cannot afford the tolerances its agents often pretend to represent as they lobby for arms and apology in foreign capitals; its primary population - an imaginary racial-religious construct born in the sordid pits of European nationalism - is inoculated against empathy or sympathy for the conquered peoples upon whose land and life blood it is daily built and expanded. This is done in Israeli schools, using Torah and Tanakh mythology as a replacement for historical study and inquiry. It is done in settler and sabra homes, in public displays of militarism, and in hundreds of synagogues. It is done during compulsory military service, complete with religious and ideological indoctrination, often devoted to maintaining the occupation of a conquered native people.

Nationalist fascism is its logical outcome, because it is and has always been conceived in terms of a racial and national project.

And as such, should be wiped from the face of the earth. As with all fascisms, it should be struck, resisted, overrun, decolonized and abolished.

By any means necessary. Without mercy or reprieve.

Finally

Hot damn.

I finally found a good enough recording of the theme song of this silly little blog (a sizable quote from which used to form its header):

Go here, kindly.

So here's a tip of the glass to the late Jim Dickinson, to his brilliant version of the song, and in total contempt of the Leadville police, anywhere and everywhere you can find them...


"...Now assholes and bureaucrats, take my advice...You’d better walk clear and you’d better talk nice...‘Cause we’re hot on your trail and we’re not on your side...Better forward your mail, shoot your wounded and ride...‘Cause when we’ve got all you desk jockeys safe behind bars...Claimed some of the neon, and some of the cars...Me and Billy and Oscar and the girls and guitars...Will be down in the gutter, looking up at the stars..." ~ James Luther Dickinson, The Ballad of Billy and

Palin

Liberals are easy to manipulate. They are, as a rule, more likely to "unite" over which enemies to detest than they are over policies and practices. Not that liberals do much uniting or unionizing. They're merit class townies, after all. Like their conservative opponents, they've got a vested interest in the right words. They believe in speeches and books that confirm a worldview which interprets the world as a management seminar. Truthfully, they have no control. Control tends to accumulate for people who have a different ideology, instead. People who believe that the extraction and possession of material, goods and labor is their right, and due. Liberalism is a sustained attempt to pretend to control in the face of its possession by others, and it differs from conservatism only in so much as its pretenses have slightly less Jesus, slightly more gay and a willingness to pretend that politics is ennobling. I think if you ask a conservative if politics are ennobling, in whatever idiom best suits the circumstance, you'll find that he or she is less likely to validate the conviction. Liberals, who are easier to manipulate because their view of society is generally more trusting, cease to be liberals at precisely the moment they stop taking the spectacle seriously.

Which is, thankfully, almost never.

Sarah Palin, who is no idiot, knows this. She understands which canons to violate while portraying herself, softly and with a deft touch her critics often fail to appreciate, as the lady protector of sacred canon. While she was governor of Alaska, she managed a resource extraction state as if it was an entertainment consortium. She did it well. It was also a job she refreshingly abandoned when it no longer served her needs. A bold move, widely criticized by people who no longer comprehend the body politic, but convince themselves and television networks that they do because they still know how to read the palm lines of the Beltway set. Perhaps she was bored with the role. If so, that's impressive. It takes a woman supremely confident in her own image, and how she manages that image, to dispense with position as a means to wealth and influence. This is a woman who reads the text of the American society better than her counterparts. She walked away from a position of power and influence, because it limited her prospects and her influence. 

I have no doubt that Palin is a vain, proud and profoundly self-centered woman. She's also a lot smarter than her legion of tsk-tsking critics seem to understand. And it's not that "the media" sensationalizes her. It's simpler than that, in fact. Her comprehension of the limits and uses of the medium of exchange exceeds that of the liberals who hate her, the conservatives who adore her and the network execs who sell Viagra off her back. She's in control of her own movement.

They follow her. Because Palin is post-modern. She's taken a gander at the fourth wall, winked her eye at the audience, and leapt off the stage. Which has only increased the size and scope of that stage.

I'm not jesting, here. Try watching Hardball or Lawrence O'Donnell on the teevee. Watch them without belief, reverence or seriousness. Do not take them at their stated face values. Laugh at them.

What do you see?

Embarrassing self-conscious performance art, as imagined by prolonged adolescents. Basic cable community television, with big box budgets and ad revenues. As soon as you laugh at them, you can see all their make up.

Sarah Palin is laughing. She's down in the seats, and she's laughing so hard the band has stopped playing.

And like a pyrotechnic gyrovague, she broke out from the cloister of politics the minute she realized her god was a god of wide open spaces.

The Palin Phenomenon explained?

I don't know. I'm almost vain enough to think so. But not completely. And not yet.

Trivial

A good way to trivialize your involvement in a movement is to take very, very seriously an unserious, ridiculously premised movie you have not yet seen. And then sit back and wait for your dittoheads to ditto you up some grim seriousness about a film they also have not yet seen.

But, in all seriousness, can someone please explain to me why it is that so many liberals and lefties try to find meaning in a product which is made, marketed and produced in order to distract?

Not that there's anything wrong with distraction. 

But...

Does it really matter if a movie is feminist, Jesus friendly, family values centric, pro-labor, anti-corruption or gay-positive? Isn't the scrying of films for [insert your preferred movement, ideology or faith] content not unlike the reading of patterns and futurity in Tarot cards or tea leaves?

Why do we look for meaning in movies?

Is it an indication of how powerless "the left" really is that it routinely produces culture obsessed midgets of conscience who misinterpret the obviously trivial as if it were central to the operation of the machine in to which the majority of us are plugged, often enough literally, a la that ass clown Zizek, or any number of cultural critics?

Tornadoes in New England

C'mon now.

I finally just got used to the replacement of Spring with Flood Season.

Now with the multiple deadly tornadoes spawned by fairly classic super cells?

Including one which ran from west of Springfield to almost Rhode Island?

A tornado watch as far north as Sunday River (Bethel and Newry, Maine)?

Fuck me...