Right now, armed, unidentified federal forces are on the streets of Portland, abducting people off the streets and shoving them into rented vans. These federal goon squads are operating against the express wishes of the city’s mayor and the state’s governor.  Trump’s acting “Homeland Security” honcho, Chad Wolf, flew to Portland on Thursday to reinforce this uninvited armed occupation by the federal government. With solemn fanfare, Chad unrolled a list of “violent acts” by “violent extremists” to justify the Trumpist occupation: EVERY SINGLE ONE of these “violent acts” involved … spray-painting graffiti on a building or bridge. That’s it.  In recent

Friends and neighbors, the very last Lo-Fi in Lockdown is available RIGHT NOW for your viewing pleasure, 24/7, from here to eternity. So come join special guest stars Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck, Jim Driscoll, Sky the Wonder Dog and your host, Chris Floyd, for live music, videos (including the world premiere of a studio song by the Holy Fools) and one final half-hour fandango. It’s “Lo-Fi in Lockdown, Vol 3: The Last Hurrah.” Don’t you dare miss it!

Keir Starmer to sign up for unconscious bias training amid criticism (Guardian) I find it difficult to believe that a man as capable and intelligent as Keir Starmer did not know exactly what he was saying and why in his now infamous statement. He was consciously trying to have a “Sister Souljah” moment. But this is no longer 1992, so his deliberately Clintonian gesture produced far more pushback than he anticipated. Thus he resorts to “bias training” of the sort we’ve seen in, say, US police forces for decades, with absolutely no effect. These courses are performative gestures without substance. 

From recent Facebook posts: John Bolton and Mengele’s Moustache Let us all please, please understand: John Bolton is a war criminal, one of the most loathsome wretches ever vomited up by the corrupted, militarised power structure of the US elite. He happily, gladly, giddily went to work for Trump, knowing he was a corrupt, racist, authoritarian scumbag. His only objection to Trump was that the feckless casino boss was not quite as murderously, berserkly war-like enough to satisfy Bolton’s lifelong perversion for mass murder. Remember also: it was Bolton who, snuffling and shuffling as Trump’s dogsbody, personally eliminated the government’s

From recent Facebook posts: 1. Feigned Incompetence as a Cover for an Agenda of Extremist Evil (Williamson can hardly fiddle the science when he can’t count to two) In Covid Time, the UK government has become an endless freak show of third-rate goobers and bug-eyed extremists trying to hide their actual, unconscionable strategy – “Do as close to nothing as we can get away with and let the pandemic ‘cull the herd’” – behind a series of threadbare obfuscations which they don’t even try to pretend are true. You often hear people declaim in outraged wonder, “They simply *can’t* be as

Live music! Film clips! Guest stars! It’s a new half-hour of original Americana from Tennessee singer-songwriter Chris Floyd of the Holy Fools. So grab yourself your libation of choice and settle in for some soul-searching and barn-burning in the murky depths of Covid Time! Featuring the incendiary call to action: “Just One Plank (I’m For the Poor”).   

The vile, brutal inhumanity that lies at the core of the power systems in both the US and UK is being laid bare as never before by the pandemic. Today, the UK’s death toll from the virus surpassed Italy’s; but the headlines were filled with stories about a top scientist hit by a sting operation from the hard-right Daily Telegraph. He was targeted because he is seen by the increasingly Trumpist UK right as a figurehead for the lockdown, which the Telegraph is attacking with relentless fury. They cannot countenance any effort to save the lives of worthless peasants if

Test-Trace-Quarantine. Countries that follow TTQ have lower death counts from Covid-19 – and their societies and economies have stayed open. For a number of reasons – none of them good, and some of them malevolent – neither the United States nor Great Britain have followed this proven method of tackling the pandemic. As a result, thousands upon thousands of their people are needlessly dying while their economies have cratered, leaving millions of people in dire straits even as their respective governments, especially the US, disgorge vast mountains of public money to protect the private fortunes of elites and corporations. Lockdown

Here are a few Facebook dispatches from the last 24 hours of the ongoing collapse of the American republic: Donald Trump has just asserted, on national television, that he has total power over America and can rule like a dictator. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.” And what did the opposition party controlling the House of Representatives do in response to this authoritarian power grab? It announced that … it was going to extend its already month-long Easter vacation to May 4, “unless there is an emergency.” So let’s be clear about the Democrats’ position.