Month: June 2018

The unraveling of America’s tapestry … who done it first? Bum bah bum!

~ Jeremy ~ 1 Comment

 

If you scream loud enough that the left has become “unhinged” it must be so right? There’s an all out war to copy every goddamn talking point the left has ever called the right, and make it sound like a pejorative.

I mean, a self-admited pussy grabbing man who mocks handicapped people is cool right?

TrumpDisabled2.jpg

Gotcha-questions Sarah Palin and the screaming Tea-Partiers didn’t pave the the way for this “unhinging”.

The revitalization of Nazis, white supremacy, extreme religious zealotry did nothing either.

This running list from JOHN PAVLOVITZ seems to cover some bases:

Civility.

That’s the card you’re pulling now, Trump supporters?
That’s where you’ve landed?
That’s your go-to play at this stage of the game?
It’s a little late for you to roll that out now, isn’t it?

After voting for a self-proclaimed genitalia-grabber.
After he suggested dissenters at his rallies should be beaten up.
After hearing him call violent nazis “fine people.”
After he bulldozed sacred Native American lands and turned frigid hoses on tribe elders.
After he ignored mass deaths in Puerto Rico and vilified their public servants.
After he began dismantling protections to our planet and shrinking our national parks.
After witnessing Flint, Michigan go without clean water.
After watching exhausted refugee families stranded at airports.
After leveraging religion to justify all manner of discrimination.
After ignoring evidence of a Russian interference that threatens our national sovereignty.
After seeing ICE raids in hospital rooms and workplaces.
After his gross, reckless fabrications about Muslims and Mexicans and immigrants.
After witnessing him work tirelessly to take healthcare from the sick and the poor.
After he vilified kneeling black athletes and badgered their employers into silencing their peaceful protest.
After his unhinged Twitter rants against private citizens and their businesses, against celebrities and political opponents and world leaders.
After terrorizing teenage shooting survivors on social media.
After allowing the radicalized Christian right and soulless NRA gun zealots to shape national policy.
After sanctioning Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka and Jeff Sessions.
After retweeting the toxic filth of Dana Loesch and Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.
After celebrating while he’s alienated our greatest allies and aligned with malevolent dictators.
After your silence in the face of migrant children being ripped from their parent’s arms and placed in dog kennels.
After digging in your heels for the past two years on every bit of it.

Read on

Let your hunger be your motivation

~ Jeremy ~ Leave a comment

This piece written by Belgian soccer player Romelu Lukaku is a great read and an inspirational motivator. Check it out!

But I swear to God, I made a promise to myself that day. It was like somebody snapped their fingers and woke me up. I knew exactly what I had to do, and what I was going to do.

I couldn’t see my mother living like that. Nah, nah, nah. I couldn’t have that.

People in football love to talk about mental strength. Well, I’m the strongest dude you’re ever going to meet. Because I remember sitting in the dark with my brother and my mom, saying our prayers, and thinking, believing, knowing … it’s going to happen.

I kept my promise to myself for a while. But then some days I’d come home from school and find my mum crying. So I finally told her one day, “Mum, it’s gonna change. You’ll see. I’m going to play football for Anderlecht, and it’s going to happen soon. We’ll be good. You won’t have to worry anymore.”

I was six.

I asked my father, “When can you start playing professional football?”

He said, “Sixteen.”

I said, “O.K., sixteen then.”

Why won’t you tolerate my intolerance?

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Intolerance is all the rage!

It turns out that when you come to a multicultural cosmopolitan city with an open agenda of white supremacy, patriarchy and anti-urbanism, the native population tends not to like you. When you compound bigoted viewpoints with cruel and inhumane policies like family separation as a deterrent to reduce the percentage of American Hispanic population, you may find yourself unwelcome at Mexican restaurants. It turns out that when your sexual politics are built around retrograde beliefs in male dominance and superiority, empowered women (and decent men) don’t want to have sex with you.

The irony for conservatives here is that this is freedom of association. Conservatives have long argued for shibboleths like “states’ rights” and “religious freedom” as a code for giving bigots the power to refuse to serve and share space with racial and religious minorities, to refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings and make plates for black diners. Largely through the courts, America has rejected these arguments because minorities are protected classes who deserve freedom from discrimination–and conservatives have whined about these restrictions on their “freedom” of association in this respect for decades.

Read the rest of this editorial here.

Trumpists Are Suffering the Free Market Consequences Of Being Deplorable
by David Atkins

They say your media diet says a lot about you … Well … damn.

~ Jeremy ~ 10 Comments

This past week has been dedicated to photo editing. Between a 50mp camera and a 40mp camera, save times can range from 3 to 8 minutes, and my computer is not slow. It gives me time to blaze through different websites for stories.

Keeping up with all the fake news in the world can become a time suck. Here are just a handful of stories that have had my attention over the past few days.

14 Habits of Highly Miserable People

~ Jeremy ~ 2 Comments

1. Be afraid, be very afraid, of economic loss. In hard economic times, many people are afraid of losing their jobs or savings. The art of messing up your life consists of indulging these fears, even when there’s little risk that you’ll actually suffer such losses. Concentrate on this fear, make it a priority in your life, moan continuously that you could go broke any day now, and complain about how much everything costs, particularly if someone else is buying. Try to initiate quarrels about other people’s feckless, spendthrift ways, and suggest that the recession has resulted from irresponsible fiscal behavior like theirs.

Fearing economic loss has several advantages. First, it’ll keep you working forever at a job you hate. Second, it balances nicely with greed, an obsession with money, and a selfishness that even Ebenezer Scrooge would envy. Third, not only will you alienate your friends and family, but you’ll likely become even more anxious, depressed, and possibly even ill from your money worries. Good job!

Exercise: Sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, and, for 15 minutes, meditate on all the things you could lose: your job, your house, your savings, and so forth. Then brood about living in a homeless shelter.

Read the rest of the 13 ways to be miserable here.

Imagining outer space

~ Jeremy ~ 1 Comment

More below and can be found here.

Helios considers what the uncharted territories of outer space might look like. It was created as a passion project in my basement studio using various liquids and chemicals. It is staged as an audiovisual stimulus inspired by the aesthetics of vintage NASA space travel.

Having spent my entire childhood in an area lacking both basic infrastructure and light pollution, I developed an escapist obsession for watching the night sky and contemplating. I would constantly get on people’s nerves asking: “What do the limits of the universe look like? And what’s behind that?”

This is how I imagined it.

Music: Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Transition
Audio: Mission Audio from the Apollo 11, Day 3
SFX: Electromagnetic vibrations from Mars pulsating in various wavelenghts mapped as sound.

The thrill of abandon

~ Jeremy ~ 3 Comments

In a little bar in New York City back in 2012, our friends Becky and Luis sat with Tina and I over a couple of drinks and we discussed a dream possibility of staying at their friend’s farm house in the Loire Valley of France. They said the farm house was offered up for stay at next-to-nothing rates.

Becky and Luis brought it up.

T & I latched on like leaches.

It was one of those discussions that usually turn into a whole lot of nothing. The home was owned by their friend’s family.

Tina and I didn’t let it go. And we reached out to the couple and asked a few times, “Do you think we could really stay in that farm house?”

Between 2008 and 2012, Tina and I didn’t travel much. But that trip triggered a full-on travel bug infection.  Continue reading “The thrill of abandon” →