fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glasgow

Several hundred people gathered in south London on Monday evening to celebrate Margaret Thatcher’s death with cans of beer, pints of milk and an impromptu street disco playing the soundtrack to her years in power.

Young and old descended on Brixton, a suburb which weathered two outbreaks of rioting during the Thatcher years. Many expressed jubilation that the leader they loved to hate was no more; others spoke of frustration that her legacy lived on.

To cheers of “Maggie Maggie Maggie, dead dead dead,” posters of Thatcher were held aloft as reggae basslines pounded.

Clive Barger, a 62-year-old adult education tutor, said he had turned out to mark the passing of “one of the vilest abominations of social and economic history”.

He said: “It is a moment to remember. She embodied everything that was so elitist in terms of repressing people who had nothing. She presided over a class war.”

Builder Phil Lewis, 47, a veteran of the 1990 poll tax riots, said he had turned out to recall the political struggles the Thatcher years had embroiled him in. “She ripped the arsehole out of this country and we are still suffering the consequences.”

sagansense:

thepeoplesrecord:

I normally don’t use Tumblr for ranting, but being around family for the Holidays, I find myself so frustrated with the weird binary thinking of Western “patriots”.

People who think America is a great country with a great past that we need to “get back to”. Just. Stop. This country was built on the genocide of indigenous people, and built by a totally separate group of indigenous people who were stolen from across the ocean, all to benefit a class of white, capitalist rulers who have nothing to do with either the land or the stolen labor force. And neither the indigenous people who were subjected to a colossal genocide, nor the indigenous people who were stolen from Africa to build this country have ever recovered from what was done to them. And since rising to super-power status via military dominance, & economic/military coups, thievery, and colonialism across Asia & the Middle East, the nation has used its swelling conquests to fuel the strength of the empire, which continues to stretch across the globe to this very day.

There were never any good old days. America has never been good. Never. If evil exists, it’s the Western ideology that allows otherwise ‘kind’ and ‘good’ people to believe that this history & these current wars for domination aren’t enough to tarnish the entire history of this ugly country. How can people continue to swear fealty to the red, white and blue flags and sing songs praising this fucking country? I just don’t get it. And when I stop to think about it for too long, I get so angry. I want to shake everyone around me and ask “why?” or “how?” How do you differentiate between the morality of America and Nazi Germany? What about America seems better than Nazi Germany to you (really answer if you believe America is better than Nazi Germany, I’m genuinely curious what the line of thinking is)? If Nazi Germany had won their bid for conquest, don’t you think we’d all be singing songs and praising the Nazi flag, while talking about the importance of the great “founding” Nazi fathers?

Why do you salute the troops – who I don’t mean to demonize, who I genuinely pity, but who I also think are anything but heroes. Bullies, probably. Victims, definitely. But heroes? Really?! Give me a break! They fly around the world terrorizing civilians & political dissidents in their own countries. Yuck.

For decades, the ruling elite super-rich capitalists have been able to offer a standard of living to the working poor in America that is better than the alternative – living in the chaos and squalor that their own policies have created for the poor around the world. But in the age of information, can empathetic people really continue to support this country? We don’t have to. We can live a different way. We’re so far off from utopia but the conditions for a different world are so promising. The empire is seemingly stretched to capacity, and stretching further still (see the troops the U.S. is sending across three dozen African countries in 2013 that we posted about yesterday), class-consciousness and an awareness of the inherently horrible nature of capitalism in this country is higher than it’s been, maybe since the 30s. We can’t lose sight of the context of what we’re fighting for and what we have to fight against. Again, the conditions are promising; movements with the capacity to really affect global change are actually building and we have a responsibility to participate in them. Seriously.

-Robert 

normally not something I’d publish on this blog but considering the capitalistic holiday we are embedded in currently, it’s more than fitting & as far as I can see, there’s never a good or bad time to post or reblog this.

listen, like, reblog, share.

we-are-star-stuff:

Was Earth’s most devastating mass extinction caused by a single microbe?

Around 251 million years ago, over 90% of the species on Earth suddenly went extinct. Their killer may not have been a devastating meteorite or a catastrophic volcanic eruption, but a humble microbe.

The prevailing theory is that the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period was triggered by volcanic eruptions over a vast area of what is now Siberia. This led, among other things, to a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

But the scenario just doesn’t fit the facts, says Daniel Rothman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From his analysis of an end-Permian sediment sample from China, Rothman says carbon levels surged much too quickly for geological processes to be at work.

Microbes can generate carbon compounds that fast, though. When Rothman’s group analysed the genome of Methanosarcina - a methanogen responsible for most of Earth’s biogenic methane today - they discovered that the microbe gained this ability about 231 million years ago. The date was close to that of the mass extinction, but not close enough to suggest a link.

But Methanosarcina needs large amounts of nickel to produce methane quickly. When the team went back to their sediment cores, they discovered that nickel levels spiked almost exactly 251 million years ago - probably because the Siberian lavas were rich in the metal. That suggests Methanosarcina did trigger the extinction, Rothman told the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last week.

Other geologists remain to be convinced. “[But] it’s a fascinating idea that the evolution of a new life form led to an extinction,” says Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley. Today’s mass extinction of biodiversity is similar, says Barnosky, because it is largely driven by our species.

(Source: woodlvnds)