top of the heap to third world status in one generation

[moose eater]

Teddy Roosevelt, 'The New Nationalism,' 1910

https://www.americanyawp.com/reader...eodore-roosevelt-on-the-new-nationalism-1910/

The speech shared with me by the EPA attorney at Occupy D.C.

Not sure this is the entire speech. May be..

Teddy wasn't a 'pinko commie', but sure as hell had a good idea of the influences and corruption brought by special interests affecting government, to (especially) include corporations.

Since the inception of the Country, folks have fought back against the corruption attempting to undermine the Republic. but in many ways, it sure seems like we ultimately lost... at least for now.

What might 'Big Stick' Teddy prescribe now-days?

 

[h.h.]

Saved from fascism by FDR, who has been cursed by deckstackers ever since.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/patrick-j-buchanan/did-fdr-provoke-pearl-harbor-2/

 

[Bobby Boucher]

Saved from fascism by FDR, who has been cursed by deckstackers ever since.

"When fascism comes to America, it won't be in brown & black shirts, it won't be with jackboots, it'll be Nike sneakers & smiley shirts. Germany lost the second World War, fascism won it." - George Carlin

 

[Gry]

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/patrick-j-buchanan/did-fdr-provoke-pearl-harbor-2/

Closing line, prior to the Buchanan credit, referred to spending a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.
Quite a source of illumination. Interesting citation.

 

[Gry]

America’s Invisible Pot Addicts

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/america-s-invisible-pot-addicts?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

[Bobby Boucher]

 

[Gry]

Have an image of an old time ball park in mind. Can see the ball soaring over the wall.
Can only imagine what it must have been like to pull that off with sixties technology.

 

[Tudo]

Have an image of an old time ball park in mind. Can see the ball soaring over the wall.
Can only imagine what it must have been like to pull that off with sixties technology.

Yup, amazing: BOOM!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udXnVPVGK2Y


and BOOM
https://www.mlb.com/cut4/mickey-mantles-600-foot-homer-was-debunked/c-269694684


My Dad brought my cousin Dennis and I to Yankee Stadium when we were kids and brought us there on "Bat Day" where they give all the kids a baseball bat ( try that nowadays boys and girls, yikes! ). First they gave me a Bobby Richardson bat which I complained and my Dad looked at the guy and said " give him a Mickey Mantle bat" to which the guy gave me a Mantle bat and gave my cousin the Bobby Richardson bat. We walked all around Yankee stadium and came to a locked door, it just happened to be the Yankee bullpen and I believe a new guy who was a "side arm" specialist named Mel Stotelmyre ( couild be wrong but that's what this old memory remembers ) was throwing a few as well as another fellow Whitey Ford.......we were led thru the bullpen and continued to walk around Yankee Stadium..........it's all gone and rebuilt all new and expensive now and the monuments...well can't see them anymore....


But we're not all gone.......not yet anyway

 

[h.h.]

Closing line, prior to the Buchanan credit, referred to spending a week with Mr. Hoover’s book.
Quite a source of illumination. Interesting citation.

Interesting take that the embargo placed on the Japanese was the slippery slope that lead us into the war.


Pearl Harbor wasn’t a full force invasion. They weren’t after land. As destructive as it was, they left. They were out to stop ships. They wanted to stop the embargo.

 

[Gry]

RAY McGOVERN: Thanks to a Soviet Navy Captain — We Survived 1962

Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov spared humanity from extinction on what has been called “the most dangerous moment in human history.”

Consortium News

Oct. 27, 1962, is the date on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine Captain Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov.
Arkhipov insisted on following the book on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59, who were readying a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task force near Cuba without the required authorization from Moscow.

Soviet naval officer Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. (Wikimedia Commons)

Communications links with naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov’s colleagues were convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of battering by depth charges from U.S. warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, screamed, “We’re going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not disgrace our Navy!” But Captain Arkipov’s permission was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the surface.
Much of this account of what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel Ellsberg’s masterful book, “The Doomsday Machine” — one of the most gripping and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages 216-217 the curious circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also required.
Ellsberg adds that had Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans), there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.
Equally chilling, says Dan:

“The source of this explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no submarines known to be in the region were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication on the cause of the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have been a medium-range missile from Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22 would lead to a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.”
​

‘The Most Dangerous Moment in Human History’
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, later described Oct. 27, 1962, as Black Saturday, calling it “the most dangerous moment in human history.” On that same day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an all-out invasion of Cuba to destroy the newly emplaced Soviet missile bases there. Kennedy, who insisted that former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Llewelyn Thompson attend the meetings of the crisis planning group, rejected the advice of the military and, with the help of his brother Robert, Ambassador Thompson, and other sane minds, was able to work out a compromise with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
As for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president had already concluded that the top military were unhinged Russophobes, and that they deserved the kind of sobriquet used by Under Secretary of State George Ball applied to them — a “sewer of deceit.” As Ellsberg writes (in his Prologue, p. 3): “The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A hundred Holocausts.” And yet the fools pressed on, as in trying to cross “The Big Muddy.”
Intelligence Not So Good
The pre-Cuban-missile crisis performance of the intelligence community, including Pentagon intelligence, turned out to hugely inept. The U.S. military, for example, was blissfully unaware that the Soviet submarines loitering in the Caribbean were equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes. Nor did U.S. intelligence know that the Russians had already mounted nuclear warheads on some of the missiles installed in Cuba and aimed at the U.S. (The U.S. assumption on Oct. 27 was that the warheads had not been mounted.)
It was not until 40 years later, at a Cuban crisis “anniversary” conference in Havana, that former U.S. officials like Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy learned that some of their key assumptions were dead and dangerously wrong. (Ellsberg p. 215ff)

Today the Establishment media has inculcated into American brains that it is a calumny to criticize the “intelligence community.” This is despite the relatively recent example of the concocting of outright fraudulent “intelligence” to “justify” the attack on Iraq in 2003, followed even more recently, sans evidence, falsely accusing Putin himself of ordering Russian intelligence to “hack” the computers of the Democratic National Committee. True, the U.S. intelligence performance on Russia and Cuba in 1962 came close to getting us all killed in 1962, but back then in my view it was more a case of ineptitude and arrogance than outright dishonesty.
As for Cuba, one of the most consequential CIA failures was the formal Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) of Sept. 19, 1962, which advised President Kennedy that Russia would not risk trying to put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. To a large extent this judgment was a consequence of one of the cardinal sins of intelligence analysis — “mirror imaging.” That is, we had warned the Russians strongly against putting missiles in Cuba; they knew the U.S., in those years would not take that kind of risk; ergo, they would take us at our word and avoid blowing up the world over Cuba. Or so the esteemed NIE estimators thought.
The Russians, too, were mirror imaging. Khrushchev and his advisers regarded U.S. nuclear war planners as rational actors acutely aware of the risks of escalation, who would shy away from ending life immediately for hundreds of millions of human beings. Their intelligence was not very good on the degree of Russophobia infecting Air Force General Curtis LeMay and others on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were prepared to countenance hundreds of millions of deaths in order “to end the Soviet threat.” (Ellsberg was there; he provides a first-hand account of the craziness in “The Doomsday Machine.”)
Where Did the Grenade Launchers Go?
I reported for active duty at Infantry Officers School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Nov. 3, 1962, six days after the incident. Most of us new lieutenants had heard about a new weapon, the grenade launcher, and were eager to try it out. There were none to be found. Lots of other weapons normally used for training were also missing.
After we made numerous inquiries, the brass admitted that virtually all the grenade launchers and much of the other missing arms and vehicles had been swept up and carried south by a division coming through Georgia a week or so before. All of it was still down in the Key West area, we were told. Tangible signs as to how ready the JCS and Army brass were to attack Cuba, were President Kennedy to have acceded to their wishes.
Had that happened, it is likely that neither you nor I would be reading this. Yet, down at Benning, there were moans and groans complaining that we let the Commies off too easy.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer from 1962-64 and later served as Chief of CIA’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and morning briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

 

[buzzmobile]

Awakened this morning to the Glass soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi.
I had somehow forgotten the effect of the film series.

https://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/

[youtubeif]PL0860055297FEA6A1[/youtubeif]

Powerful films that will rattle one's brain cells.

 

[Gry]

Kate Wolf
The Lilac and the Apple
[youtubeif]S67k3gvMwVg[/youtubeif]

 

[Gry]

Wonder how well ashtrays that look like cell phones would sell?

 

[moose eater]

Wonder how well ashtrays that look like cell phones would sell?

Not well at all, I suspect. Smart phones have become a God, to be revered.

Maybe a few would sell to those who've become completely disgusted with the social media age, and folks walking down streets staring at their phones, with their primary social interaction, up close and personal, consisting of bumping into each other physically, for not seeing even each other, due to being fixated on the tiny screens that run their lives.

 

[mean mr.mustard]

It might be a pain for a while, but I believe going without electricity would sort the dumb shit out of society...

Then we can start using it for anything but smart phones.

 

[St. Phatty]

Wonder how well ashtrays that look like cell phones would sell?

How about a cell phone that can also Vape - or be used as a pipe ?

 

[Gry]

How about a cell phone that can also Vape - or be used as a pipe ?

Would sure be an upgrade for me.
Getting to a point I detest them.
They humble me on a daily basis.
I see young girls with long plastic fingernails use them with precision.
No matter how careful I am, I hang up on people I care about , stick the phone
in airplane mode and turn the flashlight on with out ever intending to do so.
Have learned if I want speak with someone, I need to set the phone on a table top and not to touch it.

 

[Mr D]

Would sure be an upgrade for me.
Getting to a point I detest them.
They humble me on a daily basis.
I see young girls with long plastic fingernails use them with precision.
No matter how careful I am, I hang up on people I care about , stick the phone
in airplane mode and turn the flashlight on with out ever intending to do so.
Have learned if I want speak with someone, I need to set the phone on a table top and not to touch it.

The old flip phones can still be had for $30 brand new.

Employers learned quickly the value of smart phone as an electronic leash.

 

[TychoMonolyth]

I miss my razr.

 

[St. Phatty]

The old flip phones can still be had for $30 brand new.

Employers learned quickly the value of smart phone as an electronic leash.

I don't think the cell-phone is an improvement over land-line phones.

I paid $15 for a land line in San Diego in the early 00's.

Any phone company that charges $35 for a land-line is making a $30+ profit.

They can't charge depreciation on the equipment - unless they install a whole new set, financed with low interest rates =

tax savings from declaring depreciation on new, debt-financed equipment ... the strange world of 21st century Shit-Telecom.

Of course it is good that family & friends can have a cell phone when they're on the road & get stuck.

I still prefer the land line.

I got 112K over my last land line.