The American “going postal” virus just spread to the U.S. territories in the South Pacific, after a gunman killed 4 people and wounded at least 8, including a group of South Korean tourists, before blowing his brains out at the edge of a cliff. Saipan is in the American-controlled Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, located between Hawaii and the Philippines. (more…)

This article was first published on Alternet.org

A group of water oligarchs in California have engineered a disastrous deregulation and privatization scheme. And they’ve pulled in hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars without any real public outrage. The amount of power and control they wield over California’s most precious resource, water, should shock and frighten us — and it would, if more people were aware of it. But here is the scary thing: They are plotting to gain an even larger share of California’s increasingly-scarce, over-tapped water supply, which will surely lead to shortages, higher prices and untold destruction to California’s environment. (more…)

The Tea Party blogosphere is all abuzz with whiny articles about how they’re being oppressed by “violent liberals,” and they’re using this video (which deserves a laugh track and Benny Hill theme song accompaniment) as proof of the Liberal Tyranny. I thought “liberal violence” was an oxymoron, a punchline in a Simpson’s episode. But maybe it’s finally coming true again, the rise of the gutsy leftie willing to fight after 40 years of leftwing slumbering in the face of relentless rightwing assaults. (more…)

How about this for a plan for sprucing up our nation’s crumbling housing projects: ship lazy black folks out to the subprime suburbs, privatize their apartment buildings and hand them over to real estate developers. That’s what T.A. Frank, a New America Foundation think tank shill, thinks Los Angeles needs to do with Jordan Downs, a notoriously dilapidated and crime-wracked project in Watts: (more…)

Sometimes you just want to see a lot of people die, but if you did anything about it in real life, you’d get entangled in a lot of red tape. So you head off to the cinema instead and watch stuff like 2012, which is really funny, in spots. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s nice line about the death of sweet, saintly Little Nell in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, one of the great tearjerkers of the 19th century:

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

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Here’s yet another depressing area in which Victorville excels: According to the latest Housing Hall of Misery stats released by the National Association of Realtors, the greater San Bernardino metropolitan area came in 3rd place in the race to the bottom of the biggest collapse in last quarter’s home prices. And while it’s not #1, the area did manage to edge out some pretty fast-crashing competition from the likes of Phoenix, Reno, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. (more…)

This story first appeared on Alternet.org

It was immediately obvious wandering through Berlin last weekend that the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall were in trouble.

In Alexanderplatz subway station, the main eastern transport hub, wall-sized billboards advertising the Fest der Freiheit — Festival of Freedom — were side by side with huge Burger King ads for a new grilled cheese snack. The tag line: “The Cheese Revolution.” (more…)

I’m morbidly devoted to the works of Charles Dickens. It’s a childhood aberration. At a young age I started reading whatever books were on the family shelves and bonded with Dickens and Twain before I had a fully formed cranium, practically. From them I developed a vaguely 19th century sensibility that’s been nothing but trouble. That’s how I come to ruin me-self. (more…)

One of the great ironies of the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago is that the East German protest leaders who led the uprising did not want unification with West Germany.

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I don’t want to go too deep down the Fort Hood Rabbit Hole Of Weirdness, so I’m just going to get off my chest some of the incredibly weird shit that’s being thrown around in the media to confuse us or throw us off. It’s looking pretty clearly like there’s a cover-up in progress, and not a very professional cover-up either. But the sad thing is that all the confusion and bullshit thrown our way will probably succeed in its goal of steering the public away from whatever it is the military doesn’t want us to find out about the shooting massacre.

Anyway, here’s my list of The Top Twelve Disinformation Tales to keep an eye on:

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This article was first published in Alternet.

It’s hard to pinpoint what’s the most shocking thing about Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage in Fort Hood, Texas. I’ll start with this: there’s nothing all that ground-breaking about it. Happens all the time, it’s just that we’re a nation of amnesiacs who forget all the unpleasantries, and refuse to learn the valuable lessons. [Just this morning, another "going postal" office massacre in Orlando, leaving at least 2 dead and 17 wounded. Early reports say the shooter was an employee.]  (more…)

Ames emailed me a New York Times blog post from last February by one Casey B. Mulligan–which may sound like a fictional baseball player’s name, but no, he’s real all right, just another in a long line of insane econ professors from the University of Chicago. In the blog post, Mulligan cheerfully announced that when it comes to commercial real estate, we’ve got nothing at all to worry about. There’s no danger of a CRE  crash, like the one we’ve experienced in the residential market, so we can all go back to being happy free market beneficiaries.

No CRE crash? Ha-ha! I just love these Chicago School alchemy frauds! It is truly a joy to see them make such fools of themselves on the permanent public record. And not surprisingly, although Mulligan struck out, he’s still at the plate, batting out barely comprehensible economic fatwahs for the New York Times like nothing ever happened—that’s the kind of free market a real Chicago School economist likes. (more…)

“Polidori once asked Byron what, besides scribble verses, he could do better than Polidori himself. Byron icily replied: ‘Three things. First, I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door. Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point. And thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.’”

OK, somebody go find a black goat somewhere, sharpen me a steak knife, and buy us some spray paint for a pentagram, ’cause we’re gonna resurrect us a champion who can kick the necessary ignorant Protestant ass and make it look easy. (more…)

Antiwar.com Radio’s Scott Horton takes time out from global issues to talk with Mark Ames on the battle on the home front: the American economy. Horton is a Libertarian and Ames definitely isn’t, so some sparks fly before the two find agreement on a few points: Ayn Rand is a fucking idiot, the billionaire parasites have to go, and the Fed needs to be bound, gagged, and locked in a box in the cellar. (more…)

Mark Ames talks with Ian Masters of Los Angeles radio station KPFK 90.7 about the billionaires who are plundering Alabama and the rest of America, and what can be done to stop it. (more…)