MATT TAIBBI—The article, which rails against the “warped idea of freedom… populism, and misinformation being sprayed all over social media,” reads like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger. It wasn’t long ago that a person couldn’t go outside without having the word “freedom” jammed in his or her ear, whether it was Mel Gibson yelling it over his hair extensions in Braveheart or Republican congressman Bob Ney engaging in a Pattonesque invasion of the House cafeteria so he could rename your potato-based side dish “Freedom Fries.”
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Yea, we like George Carlin. And we miss him. We miss him big time. For Carlin was honest, brave, gifted with colossal wit, and without a doubt the last of the great comedians whose natural shtick was not just “observational comedy”, but acerbic social and political criticism. Looking at the sellout court jesters we have today, the Steven Colberts, the Jimmy Kimmels and the rest, un unfunny predictable lot, just Imagine what he’d say about what’s been going on since he left the great stage. Think for a minute what he would ave done with the #metoo frenzy, and the many manifestations of pussified liberal culture, as he would have called it. Even the establishment-controlled Wikipedia has this to say about Carlin, the arch-anti establishmentarian:
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SHANE RYAN—So, again, in the absence any actual connection to actual Russian attacks on our grid, what on earth is Maddow up to here? Is she just using a nasty weather event to stoke the fear that Russia could make it worse? Because that’s definitely what it seems like she’s doing! And fearmongering on that level, with no evidence to support her wild speculation, is deeply irresponsible and extremely reminiscent of the conspiratorial ravings you’d see on Infowars or any other alternative right-wing media source. It’s building an enemy from scratch. Maddow’s insular red-baiting does no favors to anyone, on any side, and only encourages tribalistic thinking.
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MOA—Erdogan had planned to only occupy a 10 miles deep strip along the Syrian-Turkish border. Some 15,000 Turkish controlled ‘Syrian rebels’ stand ready for that. He would need some 50-100,000 troops to occupy all of east Syria northward of the Euphrates. It would be a hostile occupation among well armed Kurds who would oppose it and an Arab population that is not exactly friendly towards a neo-Ottoman Turkey. Erdogan knows this well.
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EDITOR—The obsession with chaotic growth and short-term profits combined with the complete corruption of the political system have finally rendered the environment defenseless against the worst excesses of the plundering corporate class. Meanwhile, the environmental movement —and the public at large—largely co-opted and in disarray, as witnessed the poverty of proper reaction in the case of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, seem overwhelmed by the enormousness of the assault. This volume by Joel Kovel is a welcome antidote to the advancing disease.
