February 3, 2018

You maybe paying more for that newspaper

U.S. Slaps Tariff on Canadian Newsprint in January

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/newsprint_tariff_canada_layoffs.php

If you can get a newspaper at all, due to a severe shortage of truck drivers.

http://www.ttnews.com/articles/truck-driver-shortage-slows-operations-worlds-largest-newsprint-maker

February 2, 2018

Tonight's Vinyl Selection

Harvest

Neil Young

Young's most commercially successful album.

includes "Heart of Gold", "Alabama", "Old Man," and "The Needle and the Damage Done".

February 2, 2018

I wonder what the FBI's response will be

When the GOP wants something investigated.

"I'm sorry but due to funding cuts and lack of qualified personnel we're not accepting new investigations at this time."

February 2, 2018

Some hard hitting reality - the "social pathologies of collapse".

Let me give you just five examples of what I’ll call the social pathologies of collapse — strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society.

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough — but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse — it just doesn’t happen in any other country — and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

On Powerlessness and Indignity

Why would people abuse opioids en masse [in the USA] unlike anywhere else in the world? They must be living genuinely traumatic and desperate lives, in which there is little healthcare, so they have to self-medicate the terror away. But what is so desperate about them? Well, consider another example: the “nomadic retirees”. They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find — spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.

Now, you might say — “well, poor people have always chased seasonal work!” But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die — not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America — utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it — but comparisons paint a bleak picture.

Should the world follow the American model — extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue — then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food — junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk — that America has fed upon for too long.

Read the whole article - very eye opening.

https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235

February 1, 2018

Tonight's Vinyl Selection

On the Threshold of a Dream

The Moody Blues

I am such a die hard Moodies fan, and it's hard for me to choose my favorite album of theirs, since I love them all.

"Threshold" has to be in my top three. A fusion of classical, rock, pop, psychedelia, and even a wee bit of pop /soul on " So Deep Within You".

One of those rare albums where EVERY SONG IS GOOD.