Early Onset of Night

Rising Dragon! China on equal footing with US!

Ahhhhhh! The Drudge Report, a right wing news aggregator site, is always freaking out about how powerful China is getting.

Like, OMG, dude. Fucking China!

Pretty funny.

They build our trinkets and gadgets and gizmos because they do it cheaply. In America, you have to pay a factory worker like 25 bucks an hour.

This country is declining because we want it to. We sold our soul for security and comfort. We turned our back on freedom because freedom is hard. Our government is little more than a symbol, much like the Queen of England. The real power lies with muti-national corporations. Welcome to the 21st Century, the Age of Corporate Feudalism.

We want everything as cheaply as possible. We are cheap people eating cheap, manufactured food devoid of nutrition but full of taste. We are a nation of demanding toddlers. Anyone who has ever worked in customer service or retail (more or less the only jobs left in the US) knows exactly what I’m talking about.

We buy water and then claim we don’t have enough money.

We are cheap and we get what we pay for.

girlvanized:

Yeah, I’ve been seeing it too, and it’s becoming too much.

I do my damnedest to take out of my lexicon things that are truly offensive. But there are sensible limits. When you police every single thing you say, you end up saying nothing. It becomes fucking “1984” style Newspeak.

I’m so fucking offended. These people don’t fucking know me. I could get fucking disabled stickers for my fucking car right now. I was running a three person household by the time I was fourteen because my mother was physically and cognitively disabled. I GAVE A LECTURE AT MY COLLEGE ON ABLEIST THINKING. And I get outright insulted? For this? Hate to break it to some people, but the progressive moment isn’t an exclusive club and they aren’t its exclusive members.

The “progressive” movement will never get anywhere censoring speech. This is why it never has gotten anywhere, not really. By controlling speech, you are attempting to control thinking and then you’re just another retard fascist fuck.

This is the kind of fake liberal shit I hate.

Words are harmless. Never give your power over to a word. “Nigger” is harmless. All words are just noises. Say a word over and over again and it’s meaning is hollowed out and it sounds funny, like a fart. It’s just noise.

Say what you want and fuck the world.

\m/

(Source: girl-non-grata)

elledark:

Americas New McCarthy’ism

One of the darkest and most shameful periods in Americas history was that of the ‘McCarthy Communist Witch-hunts’ in the 1950s. Joseph Raymond McCarthy, a bully and a drunk, was the Republican Senator for Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy made a name for himself by whipping up anti-communist hysteria in the country. He made wild claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States and he wielded great power.

Such was the climate of fear he created that just to be accused of being a ‘communist sympathiser’ was enough to ruin reputations and get people black-listed from their professions. The smears were used by corrupt politicians and big business, often in collusion, to settle scores. Ultimately a few brave people, at great risk to themselves, questioned the witch-hunt and the American people eventually sickened of McCarthy’s tactics. In the end his complete inability to substantiate his wild claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.

Fast forward 50 years and we find the hysteria of ‘Terrorism’ has replaced that of ‘Communism’. The same shadowy ‘enemy’ enviously bent on destroying ‘Americas way of life’ (for no obvious reason), the same endless state of war to defeat this ‘menace’, the same ability to justify any injustice in the name of ‘national security’, the same ratcheting up of state spying and dirty tricks, the same ability to taint anyone by naming them a ‘sympathiser’ of the menace. The stage is set for the rise of another McCarthy and cometh the hour, cometh the man. Take a bow Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Lieberman has gleefully become the public face of Americas persecution of Wikileaks. He has called for the infamous espionage law to be changed so Julian Assange can be prosecuted. He has leaned on businesses like Amazon and Paypal to make them pull the plug of Wikileaks. He has publicly and repeatedly equated both Julian Assange and Wikileaks with ‘terrorism’. This is the man who introduced legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship if they who give ’material support’ or ‘aid and comfort’ to the groups on Washington’s ‘terrorist list. ’Material support’ and ‘aid and comfort’ of course are frighteningly vague terms. In todays news Youtube has been officially leaned on and now let users flag and close down videos they think ‘promote terrorism’, which clearly will lead to abuse and vigilante censorship. Hysteria screams and reason is deafened.

If Joe Lieberman was some kind of malevolent maverick this might be less frightening but he’s not. He has power. He has juice. There is no-one in Washington,  in the Obama administration or opposing it, who is publicly challenging his poisonous attacks on constitutional rights and freedom of speech or his abuse of government power to strong-arm businesses into doing the governments dirty work for it. As in the days of the McCarthy witch-hunts, accusation is all it takes. If Joe Liebermann says you’re a ‘terrorist sympathiser’ then by God you are and you suffer the consequences. Screw the constitution and the justice system.

Leiberman is revelling in his self-appointed role as cheer-leader for Americas use of the ‘terrorist’ bogey-man to push ever further down the road to a fascist police state. The last ten years have seen them go a long way down that particular road already and many of the changes now seem irreversible. Thats the sad fact.

Meanwhile the ghost of Joe McCarthy stands in the wings applauding.

Ellie

envirolutionary:

This is as close to an atrocity as it comes my friends. 

One of the most common uses for Shark fins is Shark Fin Soup: 

Around 100 shark species are deliberately targeted by the fishing industry. Shark fins are highly prized for use in shark fin soup, a high status dish that can sell for £65 a bowl, especially in Asian countries where growing wealth has increased demand. As demand is met, sharks become overfished, fins are harder to come by and the soup is therefore even more of a status symbol. 

Conservationists estimate that about 100 million sharks are caught each year, many of them purely for use in shark fin soup. Hong Kong alone imported the fins of more than 28 million sharks in 1999. The sharks are caught, their fins are cut off and they are then thrown back into the sea where they either bleed to death or drown. Using DNA, it is now possible to identify shark species from their fins, a development which may be significant in monitoring the impact of this trade. 

(BBC Science and Nature)

“Sharks are the tigers and lions and cheetahs and leopards of the sea. And if we lose them—these top predators—there will be long-term damage,”

“They’re slow reproducing, late to mature, more like mammals than fish in their biology—and we’re completely trashing them.

“There’s virtually no management of shark fisheries around the world. We’re playing with fire,” - Knights, of Wild Aid (from national geographic)

 

ontologicalterrorist:

Hundreds of newly unloaded shark fins drying in the afternoon sun in a quiet street near Kennedy Town docks, Hong Kong. It is difficult to take pictures like this in countries such as South Africa and Costa Rica, where shark fin drying compounds are fortified with walls, barbed wire and security cameras. This is because shark fin traders are wary of theft and negative publicity. However, in Hong Kong, where crime rates are low and attitudes more relaxed towards shark finning, shark fin drying is brazenly done in public. According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 74 shark species are listed as at high risk of extinction 

Photograph: Alex Hofford/EPA

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