I'm not one or either religion or astrology, but this astronomical event coming at the end of a solar eclipse a month before is troubling as eclipses are historically associated with historical events.

I wrote a polemic on Democratic neoliberalism. Please discuss.

https://mikebert.neocities.org/Democrats-doghouse.htm

http://theweek.com/articles/718558/conse...ree-market

Quote:After the 2012 election, national Republicans made a concerted effort to hack into Silicon Valley. The Romney campaign had just been thoroughly outclassed by Barack Obama's technology team. The GOP also thought Big Tech could help push its agenda on items both sides agreed on, including corporate tax and immigration reform. And it couldn't hurt to have closer ties with a sector of vast wealth and cultural influence to fill the party's coffers and up its coolness quotient.

But things are a little different in today's Trumpublican Party. In a tweet yesterday morning, President Trump again attacked Amazon...



http://theweek.com/articles/718558/conse...ree-market

In reactions to issues with little business impact, enough big businesses have left Trump's advisory councils that they are being disbanded.

To me, this is excellent news as the big businesses have just voluntarily given up their most important channel for influencing the administration.  It's just one battle, but in the war between the elites and the people, it's a battle lost by the elites.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/346827...defections

I call them as I see them.

Back in the 90s, I read about the Trans Asian Axis via a series of white papers by Yossef Bodansky. This was the first inking that, in fact, we did not "win the Cold War" and that the shape shifting Beast was regrouping for another round. Bodansky's concept was of an Axis inclusive of the PRC and various radical Islamist groups and nation states. It did not include Russia. In my own mind's eye, I figured that was merely an omission and it was only a matter of time before it would.

Along came 7/16/2001. Nestled neatly between the infamous EP-3 incident, and, 9/11. That was the day that in fact, the Trans Asian Axis officially came out as the Shanghai Cooperation Org. That was the overt, transparent arrangement. Below the surface I reckoned that the ongoing care and feeding of terrorism by Anti Western Fiends of The East had never ceased. Bodansky would soon be proven correct. Sadly, on the aforementioned 9/11 he was.

Back then, I never imagined that Kremlin (and other SCO?) ops would be able to penetrate our system more than they already had. Sure, they had their ops here and agents. Another day another spook. Still, I felt that our American values would not allow the sorts of chicanery that had created satellites and Quisling states in the past. How naive.

Now here we are. Such Ops have cultivated a branch of the National Bolshevik / Eurasianist menace right here in the good old US of A. Your own neighbor may now be caught up in this shit. The enemy is within the gates. Meanwhile, the Anti Western Fiends plot their "War Against the Great Satan." Build ups of strategic WMD destined to tear huge holes in Western defenses are ongoing. So it is a pincers movement. On half within and one half without.

To the Anti Western Fiends and their supporters here, there will be a fight. It is the coming 4T Total War. May the West, and Freedom, win.

http://observer.com/2017/08/charlottesvi...elligence/

'Although our country has always had white supremacists, Russia has given them renewed focus and energy, as well as a ready-made worldview. This take on the world includes overt white nationalism which despises the United States as a decadent and multiracial society. The Moscow menu suspiciously includes support for a range of foreign issues such as adulation of Bashar al-Assad and his nasty Syrian regime.'

'To anyone versed in Russian intelligence tradecraft, Spencer and those of his kook-right ilk who espouse nakedly pro-Kremlin views, are at least agents of influence, to use the proper Chekist term. However, there are connections between Moscow and the Western far-right which are more troubling than mere ideological fellow-traveling.

'In Europe, security services have tracked the activities of Russian military intelligence, known as GRU, and in recent years their operations have included violence. Russian football hooligans who caused mayhem in Europe last summer, leading to dozens of casualties, many of them seriously injured, included known Kremlin special operatives—some of them possessing GRU tattoos.

'More ominously, GRU has been training and arming neo-Nazis in Europe, with sometimes lethal consequences. Last October, a Hungarian policeman was shot dead by István Győrkös, a far-right radical who had been running paramilitary training camps for neo-Nazis from Hungary and Germany. Győrkös had met frequently with GRU representatives, and these war-games were clandestinely supported by Moscow, Hungarian security officials quickly deduced, with Kremlin officials even taking part in the “training.”

'This problem is hardly confined to Hungary. German counterintelligence has noted strange connections between GRU operatives and neo-Nazis in their country, using martial arts clubs as cover for recruiting Moscow-friendly radicals. Things have moved even farther along in Sweden, where a failed bombing of a refugee center in January turned out to be the work of two Swedish neo-Nazis who had received military training in Russia from GRU instructors.

'There are no publicly known cases of American right-wing radicals receiving terrorist training from Russian intelligence, but this may only be a matter of time. Across Europe, Kremlin ideological outreach to far-right circles has led to military training and the supply of weaponry. The weekend tragedy in Charlottesville was at least partly inspired by Moscow’s propaganda. If we don’t start to take this problem seriously, like Europe we will soon be facing more and worse extremism with a distinct GRU footprint.'

It's part of my tag line. I live it. 

=======================================

Punk ain't no religious cult
Punk means thinking for yourself
You ain't hardcore 'cause you spike your hair
When a jock still lives inside your head
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
If you've come to fight, get outta here
You ain't no better than the bouncers
We ain't trying to be police
When you ape the cops it ain't anarchy
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Ten guys jump one, what a man
You fight each other, the police state wins
Stab your backs when you trash our halls
Trash a bank if you've got real balls
You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen and cops
In a real fourth Reich you'll be the first to go
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
Nazi punks
Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
You'll be the first to go
Unless you think

============================

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...on/534198/

Quote:One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people...




https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...on/534198/

So that others might learn .... and ... for pure pleasure of venting.

What were your wrong turns in life?

What was wrong about them and what were the lessons learned?

What would your X year old self tell your Y year old self and / or, what would you tell up and coming Millennials and eventually, Homelanders. A few Homelanders are now approaching tweenerhood, which is typically where wrong turns start to happen. Some of my earliest wrong turns happened when I was 9.