A tragicomic video on the absurdity of thinking that some sky daddy has given you the right to live on some piece of land. Americans support Israel based on that right, perhaps as a subtle way of justifying their own similar claim some three hundred years ago. Indeed those first settlers here in the new world also thought that God had steered them to these shores and that Manifest Destiny justified just about any atrocity including the wholesale slaughter the indigenous peoples, who no doubt thought some god had also granted them the right to live on these lands. Apparently those who buy into Israel’s sky daddy doctrine do not feel the need to respect other such claims. Maybe sky daddies are never more than political propaganda for the accumulation of resources.  And scarcity is the reality of the future.  Hearing voices anyone?.

So I was sitting in a local neighborhood cafe/bar during Friday happy hour, the South 4th Street Bar and Cafe, to be exact, enjoying a glass of wine and the ambiance of these last days of the warm season in Brooklyn. It’s a fine place to have an afternoon drink — a clientele with very few pretenses, no annoying hipsters, just local working people wanting to unwind from their jobs. And, let me add,  good music — the bartenders are renown for their sophisticated taste. Plus there’s the free Wi-Fi that brings in the many freelancers in the IT industry. In some ways the epitome of what Williamsburg has become, the good parts, anyway.

But I was not prepared for the new wrinkle, the new conversation that I heard, as three twenty-somethings sat down with drinks at the table next to me. It only took a minute to understand the scenario — a young couple meeting their stockbroker for happy hour drinks to discuss the performance of their investments. read more…

Do artists have a social conscience anymore? Or are they merely illustrators for the fantasies of the rich and powerful? Consider, for example, Shepard Fairey, whose (in)famous “Hope” posters played a major role in the mythology and media hype surrounding Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Since 2010, when it became clear to anyone paying attention that Obama was merely a black re-tread of G.W. Bush, the Williamsburg Observer has been calling upon Fairey to renounce his posters and take a stand against the blatant imperialism and domestic police state policies of Obama. Well, finally, it seems, Shepard Fairey has seen the light–and is willing to talk about it as he climbs into a limo with a date. Check it out in the video below :

A brilliant, dead-on take on the Obama administration’s continuation of the Bush Mob’s blood lust, and the unthinking support that so-called “liberals” give to this agenda of imperial warmongering:

One of the many deep ironies in the Obama administration’s push to escalate military action against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is that it will be allying the U.S. with the very terrorist militias that it claims to be fighting elsewhere: i.e., the “rebel” jihadists associated with Al Qaeda. Indeed, this strange and disturbing circumstance threatens to expose and dismantle the whole ideological edifice of the so-called “War on Terror,” and apparently, despite the usual corporate media Blitzkrieg, very few Americans are falling for the call to arms. Especially encouraging is the rejection of war within the ranks of the military, noted in photos being posted on social media. The Congressional vote on whether to authorize U.S. attacks on Assad’s regime has now been moved to September 11, in an apparent move to leverage the emotional associations of that date towards war. But the irony of the U.S. now supporting Al Qaeda may be too much for the public to bear:  read more…