By morning the radar was already showing band after band of rain squalls for hundreds of miles all the way from Las Vegas to Albuquerque. Here it hit hard with thunder and lightning in the early afternoon, and maybe it was the peak of the monsoon season. Here’s hoping for more though.

When it got dark tonight it stayed uncommonly humid, and I spotted the little hoppy frog again hanging out by the back door. He wasn’t quite as little. In my dreams he’s growing on a steady diet of houseflies and spiders. In my reality, he’s miraculously alive and that’s good enough.

The debacle of proxy war with Russia is devastating the economies of the West, and Europe is taking the early brunt of it.

Germany came out early waving the flag for sanctions–We don’t want any of that dirty Russian oil!–and now it is becoming obvious that this will mean no oil at all, or at least not nearly enough to get them through the winter still looking like a ‘firstworld’ golden billion country.

Faced with this epic fail of a self-administered gunshot wound, the brain trust of the transatlantic Empire is now working hard to solve the problem by … opening another front in the war, in the South China Sea. It has to be seen, studied, to be even remotely believed.

Xi to Biden, ‘You are playing with fire,’ as tensions over Pelosi’s Taiwan trip escalates

The way I’ve been hearing it, they pulled this exact same shit 25 years ago, except:

• The President was Clinton,
• the Speaker was Gingrich, and
• China couldn’t afford to play hardball then, either militarily or economically.

They can now, though, and they know it, and they are.

Why in the name of fuck would the brain-dead US President sent his dotty old sidekick to rattle sabers at another nuclear-armed country just as round one of his warmongering is in the process of kicking him square in his withered old ballsac?

I’m asking because I really have no idea. For once, my question is not rhetorical.

For your potential viewing pleasure:

The Entire Run of Rocky Jones Space Ranger (sci-fi TV series from the early 1950s)

37 episodes. Quite well done considering TV was only a few years into practical existence. The characters are sometimes multidimensional and the overall tone is optimistic. It was filmed a little too early for there to be any barely-disguised McCarthyism of the sort that would soon follow.

Behind the scenes of RJSR, from Wikipedia.

For me personally, the show’s greatest characterization is the minor player who goes by the name of Pinto Vertando.

His name is said to mean ‘vortexing paint’ which delightfully makes no sense at all, even in context.

Ukraine’s blacklist, as reported yesterday, is a pretty bad development for free speech and open discourse.

But it’s trifling when compared to what the UK is doing to one of its own citizens, the journalist Graham Phillips. Namely, putting him on the list of sanctioned persons, alongside a wide variety of mostly Russian ‘enemies’ who committed crimes like being members of the Russian equivalent of the Senate. iEarlGrey coverage again:

British Journalist Graham Phillips Added To UK SANCTIONS LIST

In brief, an individually personalized ‘sanction’ means that with no due process or even being charged with a crime, Phillips (who is out of the country covering the war as he has been most of the time since 2014) can have his house taken away, his monetary assets frozen, and his ability to live destroyed.

It has happened to plenty of Russians before, especially those living and doing business inside the UK–one of them owned a major soccer team. But whacking one of their own citizens, and a journalist at that is completely unprecedented and a very alarming sign.

In this country we have something called ‘civil asset forfeiture’, where the cops can steal your money or your truck on the side of the road at gunpoint simply based on the ‘suspicion’ that the assets came from ‘drugs’. They don’t have to go to court. They don’t have to prove you guilty. You have to try to prove your innocence, and even just trying that takes a lot of time and money. If you think I’m shitting you, please look up the term. It literally happens every effin’ day in the land of the free.

But … small saving grace … at least those cases are motivated by the stupid greed of evil cops, and not political malpractice from the lofty heights of a national government.

The Phillips case is more akin to what Canada did to the convoy truckers in Ottawa. They too were targeted economically for political purposes: insurance cancelled, employers threatened, donations seized.

As far as I’m aware, this level of injustice being perpetrated on people simply for holding anti-governmental positions, or committing acts of civil disobedience, hasn’t happened in the US (at least not openly).

But as late-stage capitalism morphs into fascism, and as the US begins to fall from the exalted unipolar heights of power faster and faster, and as the economy is torn up worse and worse by idiotic policies crafted by fools and knaves, they’ll bring the big hammer down on you or me without a second thought, just like happened to the truckers and is happening to Graham Phillips right now.

Since this story broke quietly, Graham’s channel hasn’t posted any new videos, but I hope to hear from him soon.

U.S SENATORS & CITIZENS Added To Ukrainian ‘BLACKLIST’

iEarlGrey reports on Ukraine’s new shitlist of people they want to see censored as ‘Russian propagandists’, for the crime of saying things the Ukrainians don’t like. The bad-people list includes a sitting US Senator, at least one former Congresswoman, a University of Chicago professor, the journalist who brought you Edward Snowden’s revelations, and a high-ranking former Marine named Scott Ritter, who wrote an open letter of protest to his alleged Representatives, as seen here.

Another source for this story:

Ukraine Gov Publishes Smear List Of “Bad” Journalists (Jimmy Dore with Aaron Mate’; and as a bonus here’s another piece featuring the pair from the same day on Syria and the way the world really works.)

I found myself in a pretty general online forum where people go to waste time. I was wasting mine too.

At some point some ancient codger (by which I mean my age or maybe a decade older), started bloviating about Kids Today, and eventually it all devolved into the tired obscene bullshit about how The Kids are soft, and coddled, what with needing safe spaces, and participation trophies … I know you’ve heard it all before in those very words.

Listen here Gramps, you smug self-satisfied toad.

I know you want me to stare deeply into the spiral of the Good War against the first Hitler, and believe with all my heart that Liberating Europe from his scourge gave the liberators a long lifetime of immunity against any other crimes they might commit. I know you want me to believe that America is still great, except for those damned commie teachers brainwashing all the children into helpless slaves for life.

Most of all, you want me to believe that you, you personally, are a good man and that everything you ever did was the right thing, and that your traditionalist values are the only thing that can save the land of the free in these dark times.

Perhaps needless to say, you can fuck right off and take your dirt nap at your earliest available convenience if you really want to make the world a better place.

Seventy-some years ago, specifically by May 8, 1945, America collectively did a nominally good thing, a good violent thing, against that ugly little Austrian and his jackbooted minions. The US played their part in helping Russia defeat the Nazi threat. (American military casualties in WW2: about four hundred thousand. Russia: At least seven million, along with another 10-15 million civilians on the side. Check it here.)

Three months later, on August 6-9, the heroes who did France and Italy a notable service suddenly twisted and morphed into the evil Empire we know today, via the mechanism of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

The imperial story has always been that the bombs fell because island-to-island fighting all the way to Japan would cost too many American military lives. There’s a grain of truth in that lie, like all the best lies we are taught.

At a bare raw minimum, it means that in the eyes of the Truman Administration, the life of one uniformed American serviceman was worth two or four or eight times more than the life of any Japanese civilian that got melted into puddles those two days–women, the young, the old, the infirm; whoever–the completely innocent and the arguably complicit alike.

This is the very calculus of evil itself, and anyone who wants you to take it as an article of mathematical faith is by definition playing for Team Satan. But, it gets worse.

According to one theory (I believe I learned it from Oliver Stone), the US in committing the atrocities wasn’t even doing it, primarily, to save some white lives at the expense of other yellower ones. They were doing it to save time, instead.

In Germany the race to Berlin between the Russians and the Yanks essentially ended in a tie, and they split the city.

But without the A-bombs, the race to Tokyo would have ended in a decisive Russian victory while the Americans were still carving their way through some jungle far to the south.

The bombs fell, according to this theory, because Truman needed Japan to surrender to him, and not Stalin. The price of that strategic victory in the very earliest days of the Cold War amounted to a couple hundred thousand civilians of the Jap persuasion. The cost of getting a leg up on the Russians was precisely a calculated genocide, along with the loss of the American soul and moral high ground unhappily ever after.

Anyway. Back to Gramps the smug self-satisfied toad.

He was only a child when the Japanese children melted into their sidewalks. He was probably every bit as innocent as they, but he had the advantage of being alive, and that was only the beginning of his blessings. His Empire had the whole rest of the world by the economic balls, and they built him a free public school where he could be taught that the Empire was always right–in Japan, in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Ukraine–at every turn of the military-industrial screw, he was on the right side of God’s plan, because in every case the real enemy was the horror of Communism, and very particularly the Communists that spoke in Russian.

When he got out of school, he got a great job supporting the right side, and it bought him a boat, and a summer cabin. His beliefs and allegiances put his two daughters through college for next to nothing. They bought him the very real Murican dream life.

He told himself loudly, and anyone else who would listen, that he was a good hardworking self-made man.

Meanwhile, for the generation that came after him, and the one after that and the one after that, the exact same Imperial system made it harder and harder and harder to be so blessed by the Sky Man with the fluffy white beard. The great jobs went away in most places, and the ones that were still there required ever more moral sacrifice, ever more turning of a blind eye to what was really going on.

The free public schools turned into less pretty camps where, yes, the kids still learned to read the King’s English and do their sums, sometimes, but also to be fully indoctrinated in all the ways We were, and continue to be, Always Right. In the richer suburbs to which the fortunate fled, it was always warm and bright, but as time went on, the camps in the rural and urban hinterlands got cold, got rats, and slowly started to crumble in both the physical and moral sense.

For average people and even just generally, life got more and more ugly and poor and bereft of value. We got franchises. We got smart phones. We got punked with trinkets like wide-eyed natives. Shit. What can you do? Vote blue maybe? MAGA it up?

The real money got sucked up higher and higher into the social strata, and most essentially of all it went to fighting endless wars all over the planet in the name of all that was good and holy–namely ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ and whipping the atheist Ruskies bloody, and … Profit. Profit, the goodest of goods, the holiest of holies.

It all ran on oil and the more we burned the hotter things got. The glaciers melted first. The icebergs went after. We sent scraps of money to save the poor drowning polar bears, and we went to the post office to send it in a GMC Yukon, because as goes General Motors, so goes America.

Gramps the Toad watched it all on a widescreen color TV and a little one he carried in his pocket these days.

What did he think about it all?

He blamed the millennial grandchildren, for their lack of character, for their needing a safe space, from time to time, to protect them from the horror show of a world he and his generation built. In the greatest country. With no health care, still … still, no health care as a human right!

I curse you Gramps. Not just because you’re an idiot, but because You’re choosing to be a fuckin’ asshole too.

You’re not going to have to live in the full hellscape you helped build at the expense of future generations.

You won’t live to see the evil Russians and the inscrutable Chinese take over your world before it burns, and they absolutely will. It’s already happening.

Keep telling yourself how admirably blameless you are and always have been. Keep blaming the confused poor kids for everything that’s wrong in your otherwise perfect dreamy life.

The bad guys are going to win, just like you and your bad guys did once upon a time.

The last sound you hear will be chickens, clucking home to a sorry roost that makes no one happy.

In the cool of evening rain I saw the first hoppy frog ever, on this thoroughly paved property most of a mile from the river.

If you made the ‘Okay’ sign with your fingers he would have fit snug inside the circle.

Three JDs for you to take or leave.

NPR Turns Against Ukraine
The Truth About Ukraine SLIPS OUT On CNN

The main point of these two is that the same people who got you wound up to support brave sovereign Ukraine a few months ago have now been given a cautious yellow light to start getting you wound back down. As for Why, that’s still somewhat murky, but apparently you’ll soon be allowed to call yourself a good American even if you don’t think Zelensky is the second coming of the Christ.

Putin Drops 2 Minutes Of Truth About America & Ukraine

I know there are many among you my dear readers who would like it if Putin dropped dead tomorrow. But if you can, put that propensity aside for a moment and listen to just a few of his words.

I think you’ll be at least a little surprised by how his worldview lines up with your own. As always, I carefully place the disclaimer: in the end, Putin is just another oligarch, one who happens to be Russian and not American or German or British. I will never ever try to sell you on Good Guy Vlad.

But if he ran for Senate in Arizona, I’d feel one hell of a lot better voting for him than I do having voted for that Sinema bag of shit, or even the hapless Mark Kelly.

This is the very shortest version of a speech he has been giving over and over for many weeks now.

Central to them all is this concept of ‘the golden billion’, as in a billion people out of trillions, for whose benefit the world has been run, for decades and in some cases centuries. I probably should do a post on this phrase, but for now it’s enough to know that he means the upper classes in America (one-third of a billion) and Western Europe (two-thirds of a billion).

Those of use who for decades have used six or seven times our fair share of the world’s resources per capita, and grew to maturity thinking that it was God’s plan that we were so blessed, that it didn’t hurt anyone else for us to be wealthy, and that if anybody were to threaten god’s plan, we of course were morally obligated to smack them down through assassination, regime change, ‘sanctions’, genocides, and increasingly endless wars all across the planet.

While kicking off catastrophic climate change along the way; oh well. But I digress.

Any conscious being with the slightest shred of soul left knows that the age of the golden billion is fast coming to an end, and that this practical fact is in general a step toward the light.

For us who have unjustly benefited from being raised dirty golden, it’s going to be scary as hell in some ways.

This guy they told you to hate isn’t the real target of your fears.

There’s your bosses, though, they count. The pumpers of the gold gravy train of evil.

But the real scary part is just other people, and in fact trillions of them. The sheer scale, of the great unwashed.

The five existing members of the BRICS economic alliance are already three trillion of them, and they’ve had enough of the game the way we rigged it. Who can really blame them?

BRICS is about to get a lot more members, because the Atlanticist billion has seriously and badly overplayed their hand this time. Half the world just laughs now when our leaders wag their fingers in their face and tell them to get on board with the latest round of sanctions.

I’ve gone far longer and deeper than I meant to.

This is a post about a frog.

For the second day in a row, I slept 1-9 a.m., although there was one gettingup at about the 6.5 hour mark.

It was all the more miraculous in that in between the cookings yesterday, I had a rather fat and illicit nap. I should have wanted to stay up longer, but I didn’t. The remote icy blessing of the Goddess is apparently upon me.

Her rain is said to be ready to fall upon us four hours from now.

I have two obsessive distractions to conquer or cope with before getting back to a fully intentional and productive life. The one I’m going to tell you about is that proxy war and how it is unfolding in real time on the ground.

Most mornings, this is the main list of links I follow.

Alex Christoforou
Alexander Mercouris
The Duran
These three are tightly linked. ‘TheDuran’ is just AC and AM in collaboration, sometimes with a guest. The guests range in quality from literally unwatchable to starkly and satisfyingly informative.
One recent guest falling into the latter category is iEarlGrey.

Where these first four are mostly about talking analysis, and about the big socioeconomic and geopolitical picture, the four below are based on maps, and the minute dissection of reports that tell of how the map looks right now in the moment from day to day. There are plenty of other channels trying to do the same. These are the best I’ve found.

Military Summary
Defense Politics Asia
War in Ukraine
New World Econ

I’ll leave it there, but the name of that last one is important. The old order is changing very fast and the proxy war is only a symptom of it. I propose to myself that tomorrow I go there, in a little more depth. The proposal is under review.

A rare instance of my favored WordPress software failing and eating a whole post with no backup. This is a sketchy reconstruction from memory and of course this time you can damn well bet I’ll cut it to the clipboard before trying to hit Publish again.

The waking was slow and delicious after eight straight hours, and took place between nine and ten in the morning, the interesting dreams lingering while the coffee brewed. A kind of minor miracle of perfection, which solved nothing, but made me happy to experience.

First time cooking black quinoa. And it was good.

First time cooking ‘cranberry’ beans, and it was a very nice experiment that went nowhere, since the pintos remain so basic and central–going nowhere is not a sin. Most of our lives is spent going nowhere, but if it tastes good then Alright.

A batch of rice soaked overnight for tomorrow.

The monsoon passed us by again, but speaking of tomorrow we’ve been promised an extended period of direct rainy hit then. Live bodies and dead soil hunger for the prediction of the oracle to be validated.

Creative talent doesn’t mean you actually have any fucking clue.

The same is true for raw intellect. There are plenty of ‘educated’ nominally bright but clueless people making sure the trains run on time in every country in the world. The Secretary of Transportation in the US is a glorious example.

Even worldly success doesn’t mean you know anything, except for how to move the economic levers around to your advantage enough of the time to prosper more than the guy trying to sleep in a bus shelter.

Ultimately there is no unit of measure for cluefulness, and no way to tell if you’re right about anything ever.

Sometimes it’s tempting to fall back on empiricism and the scientific method, because they provide the ultimate promise of understanding some limited part of reality in its totality. Either this frog is a vertebrate or it isn’t. Either this celestial body is a planet or a planetoid or something else. Science gives us a satisfying illusion of objectivity, more than art does, more than religion does, even more than money does.

In the end though it consists of higher quality smoke and better mirrors. They taught us about the big bang. Now they’re reconsidering. Who knows? Nobody ever.

I feel … that this is the main problem with having to be around people.

Everybody is so certain.

The more certain they can blindly whip themselves into being, the more likely they are to rise to positions as petty tyrants, when people collect themselves into corporate groups.

Accepting some version of reality and calling it Right is rewarded, at least if you pick the version they want you to pick. Working … it’s so dignified, ennit?

The best jobs are the ones where they leave you the fuck be.

The best relationships are the ones that are almost as good as being alone.

I made up that last line when I was 28, and when I told it to my paramour she laughed merrily, because she felt the same.

That was a good day, and being Right had nothing to do with it.

Amirite?

Hardly ever.

Stephen King Pranked Into Praising Ukrainian Nazi Collaborator

Totally worth a watch.

To his credit, after denying the whole thing ever happened, Mr. King finally expressed some embarrassment and admitted that he had no damn idea who Bandera was. In other words, he was just witlessly sucking up, to someone he thought was that heroic scrappy little President we all love so much.

In a related incident, Neil Young has quietly put his music back up for sale on Spotify, even though he has to share the platform with that evil Joe Rogan.

It’s just business.

Arch of Triumph

Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Real lives at the mercy of history.

As are we all.

(This post actually written on 11 August 22.)

Out on a quick gas and grocery run–the only time I listen to NPR anymore–they had a story about how the Hoovervilles, Bidenvilles, homeless encampments, continue to grow their populations, and continue to be busted up by police in some places, ‘forcing people deeper into the woods’.

American people. Your fellow citizens of this Greatest Nation.

Somehow they have millions to send Pelosi to Taiwan to wreak her damage. Somehow they have plenty for the FBI as they press their vendetta against Trump, knowing full well that ‘Voting’ and ‘Democracy’ will fail them catastrophically if they have to compete fairly against the Donald with nothing but a Biden or a Bootygig in two years.

There is always endless money too for passing wheelbarrows of it to their defense contractor cronies through puppet sinkholes like Ukraine and Afghanistan and Iraq that have nothing to do with the People or actual ‘American Interests’.

Yet never enough cash to house and feed the poor people here. Mothers? Children? Fuck ’em. Wire another billion to Zelensky.

This is the true American way, that I’m supposed to be so proud and grateful to benefit from. I continue to refuse.

There are two reasons no one ever moves to fix this.

At the level of the PMC underlings, the professional-managerial class, the individual fifty states (who, by the way, are mostly sitting on giant piles of ‘stimulus’ and Covid money and doing nothing with it besides sending out more fucking cops to harass the encampments)–a lot of people really believe that providing for the poor would only encourage ‘laziness’. Housing the poor is immoral in this view. ‘I got mine; I had to work so hard for it; why should I have to pay their way’.

At the level of real power, the people in the encampments serve as a warning to everyone else: step out of line, buck the system, refuse your vaccine, lose your job, and encampments are where you end up, bitches’.

This is our carefully designed ugly modern Empire world.

***

Before the ‘news’ came on, I listened briefly to some preacher, and he was telling the same story that Dylan’s lyrics tell:

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.”
Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

The preacher said correctly that the point of the episode was that God needed proof that his worshiper loved Him more than he loved his own son. If you ask me this is one shitty insecure pile of a divinity, but even that’s not the worst part of Christianity.

The problem is that no one with two brain cells to rub together believes anymore in The Resurrection in any form, much less in the promise of becoming a harp player on some heavenly cloudbase. There’s just no evidence of any kind for it, and as for taking it on “Faith”, that doesn’t even work when you’re trying to pick up an old F250 for the advertised lowball price–much less when we’re talking about prescriptions for morality and what is promised to happen to you after you die.

So instead we collectively hold on to all the worst parts of the ‘christian’ ethos, the innocent-killing old-testament parts, not because of the fake reward at the end, but because the worst parts serve the interests of our own inner worst parts. We forget all about ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’, because we’re too busy as a culture making sure that the kingdom of Hell within us is manifested all around us Now, in every subtle greedy way imaginable.

***

The buddhistic alternative that is keeping my mind together at the moment has a number of advantages.

Buddhism only makes one tentative promise. It’s about personal liberation in this world and not about the end of all suffering in some future theoretical one.

In pure form it’s not really even a religion at all. It’s just a description of the human condition and a suggested set of prescriptions for the problems our own natures cause us. It’s like Marxism that way, but without the dogma.

Might be that the Four Noble Truths are the only spiritual practice that is actually consonant with real anarchism.

Part of me feels like going on and on, but right now I want to duck my own thoughts and live in the present moment for a bit, ‘kay?

In the very near term stretching to the end of this year, I have one job, and its name is House: a set of walls, a roof, plumbed, electrified, and a Certificate of Occupancy to make it all ever so legal in the eyes of the Empire.

It is purpose and maybe even meaning. If necessary even this daily meditation must be sacrificed to it.

I don’t think it will come to that. I’ll backfill the last few days with draft posts already half-written. I’ll frontfill as tomorrow becomes today.

If I can, and I think it’s likely, but …

In the present moment there is only seriousness.

Convoluted namedropping in the title of a SabbySabs vid …

Kyle Kulinski RESPONDS To Joe Rogan Supporting Ron DeSantis

To set the scene, Sabby is a young black woman from Boston, and a working-class educator.

We can dispense with the Kyle part straight off. Whatever good he did as a co-founder of Justice Democrats, that was then and this is now, and now he’s on the far end of the mainstream, a proud champion of issues that are in general completely trivial and irrelevant. It’s hard to even listen to his bloviation anymore.

As for Joe Rogan, I’m not upset with him for saying nice things about a DeSantis. (Which maybe barely amounted to ‘support’, and were definitely not an Endorsement.) I’m upset with him for continuing to believe that it matters at all, which corporate-party puppet lives in the White House (or ‘represents’ you on the Hill).

In the end, I really just want to explain to my Dem-partisan loved ones just what kind of deep trouble this means for the party of the blue. The age of the neoliberal is coming to a crashingly spectacular close.

It absolutely should have been apparent when the arch-neolib Hillary lost to an ugly windbag game show host. But no. It was Jill Stein’s fault, it was Susan Sarandon’s fault, it was somehow Bernie Sanders’s fault even though he got on board like the good little centrist he turned out to be at heart.

In the long term, Biden squeaking out a win was probably the absolute worst thing that could have happened to the D’s–because it confirmed all their smug assumptions about half the country agreeing with their real agenda, when nothing could be further from the truth.

And then Biden made it even worse. After finally and messily pulling out of Afghanistan (a good thing), he continued to support the wrong side in Yemen, invaded Somalia, amped up the military budget even higher, sanctioned Russia in a flatly stupid act of economic warfare, and is now rattling sabers against China at the same time. As a result, the price of everything is mushrooming, it’s hitting the people in his base hardest, and he and his puppeteers give absolutely no fucks about that whatsoever. Way too busy spreading that military-industrial complex ‘democracy’ where they have no business.

Meanwhile, domestically, he did fuck-all for anyone. Please, please don’t what-about me with Manchin or Sinema. That’s just a perfect example of the rotating villain role popularized decades ago by the likes of Joe Lieberman. Biden didn’t provide, for example, any relief for student loan debt, although that’s one of the many things he could have done without Congressional involvement at all. Biden’s team didn’t fail on student loans “because Manchin”. He didn’t even try to address it, or many many other things that matter deeply to the lives of average people, because in the end the lives of ordinary people are not worth rocking the capitalist donor-class boat.

And now comes the willful failure to protect a woman’s right to choose, too. This time, the sting of failure is cutting very deep into the electorate.

His party is going to get absolutely destroyed in the midterms, and they will again fail to learn a damn thing from it.

In 2024 they’ll vomit up another uselessly imperialist assclown like Hillary or Biden, and Rogan favoring DeSantis more than two years out tells you everything you need to know about how that’s going to play in Peoria.

I’ll close with the comments of two people in the public section of Sabby’s video.

As someone who has been voting Green for years and is well left of the Democratic party, Desantis is leagues better than any of the Democrats being proposed. Pete? Kamala? Hillary? All to Desantis’ right on everything except woke, cultural issues.

Not sure I’d go that far, but how far I’d go is not important. There are plenty of people who feel more or less the same as this guy, and in aggregate they’re going to end up flipping the script on Lesser-Evilism. One of them says:

De Santis is better than what the Democrats offer, but that’s a very low bar. People looking for answers at the voting booth should look elsewhere. They might even do well to focus on election integrity so that candidates other than those selected by the corporate duopoly would have a chance.

Again–better? Not in my book, but … the most popular podcaster in the world agrees with them too.

Dem Darlings, all I’m saying is that you willfully underestimate the boiling rage out here in flyover country and in the inner city too, at your own partisan peril. Keep trying to cram the Clintons and Pelosis of the world, or their slightly younger versions (looking at you, Amy Klobuchar) down the collective throats of We The People, and in eight or ten years you’ll be as electorally relevant as the Whigs.

Just my two cents for a Wednesday.

Time isn’t money. Time is way more important than money.

Here I am trying to make it another three or four hours to a righteous bedtime and a restoring sleep worthy of someone much more normal than me, and that is the perfect timing to enjoy a sense of being up to speed at last.

I’m rationing out the coffee in sips, wanting to hit the finish line with exactly no energy gas left in the tank.

Part of the reason it has been hard to write over the last few days is that I have a big sprawling meta-theory developing in my brain (and it’s what I really want to talk about, but it … needs to be presented perfectly, and I am not feeling whole enough to play the song right).

This happens to me from time to time. The last big meta-theory, stated briefly, was:

‘Civilization was a wrong turn into a dead end for our species. The dawn of sedentary agriculturalism brought a lot of good things into our lives, including writing, but it was also the beginning of humans fucking themselves over once and for all and for good’.

The new theory is much less sweeping and grandiose, in that it deals with the last hundred years and not the last ten thousand. But of course I still think it’s right and complete and goes a fair distance in the direction of a grand universal theory of everything, which may or may not be my ultimate raison d’être.

Even so, I’m feeling it, and I mean it, and I want to spit it out right.

To tide you over … Rob namechecks both fascism and partisan Democrats in this one, but not capitalism. So there’s a little clue.

It’s July 4th: The News is Satire in America

The purely metaphorical Lake that fell out of the monsoon skies. In truth we did go somewhere good, without ever pulling out of the driveway. I’m talking about the fourth and writing on the fifth.

The fifth and I’m still not right bodily–I feel underslept and cranky because of it, not in the mood to put my true self down in typing; but attempting to power through anyway. Spiritually though, things are starting to look up.

I remind myself here that belletrism is not, and probably can not, be about explaining everything anyway. Which is good here, because I don’t even want to … but suffice to say, I’d already resigned myself to the idea of doing one thing unacceptable to my neo-paganism, namely getting a job, for the sake of getting a four-wall mortage-free place on that sweet raw already-bought land.

The epiphanic trigger was reconsidering another unacceptable thing–Renting.

It turns out that there’s this woman who locked her house in place right down there on Chihuahua Hill a few blocks away.

But instead of living in it, she’s literally off to Paonia and Peru for an unspecified length of months into the future, and wants to cover her expenses while she’s gone by landladying, and keeping the back bedroom locked up for her own storage locker while she’s gone.

She wants too much money for it, but it’s still a lot less than say … buying a doublewide outright. So paying her 5K worth (a tenth or a twentieth of what I really need) would give me enough time to earn that much back and more, and kickstart at least one fresh dependable income stream, and maybe even get started on a real non-rental house of my own while I’m at it.

Also she tentatively feels like kind of a kindred spirit.

Also, there was another semi-kindred here visiting long after the fireworks were done last night, and that was celebratory and confirming, that this new plan had some legs.

I’m still aching to sleep and fighting off the napping in order to relocate something that resembles a normal schedule.

None of that/this, is like me, but there’s nothing to lose because I’ve not succeeded in liking myself for a while until now.

The darkest day before a sort of dawn.

For at least a couple weeks, as my never-published draft post had it, “my head still ha(d) two big looming unanswered questions banging around inside of it”. The questions were about cargo trailers and doublewide trailers and tiny houses and that stuff–basically the tradeoffs among the potential methods for getting down to the last home city in some way very soon, if indeed that was going to be possible at all.

There were no answers that seemed quite convincing to me, and it was starting to wear down on me badly.

Can’t say I feel all that proud, about filling the days with chunks of detritus even if filling them at all is really the first thing … scrrape by.

JP Morgan Predicts Oil at $380 A BARREL

‘Predicts’ is a poor word choice. What JPM really said is that all it would take to get oil to $380 is for Russia to cut 5 million barrels a day out of their production schedule. For reference, the day this was posted, it was at $118. So should the evil Russians decide to exact a little revenge for whatever reason, that would likely mean gas at the pump going to $20 per gallon. And even if they did, it STILL wouldn’t be a ‘Putin price hike’, Joey.

The video might also serve as a good intro to the YouTuber know as iEarlGrey. He was getting by as an IT Tech in Britain, but could not afford to buy a house. So he took his show on the road east, and the Russians rewarded his skillset with a much better standard of living.

Independence Day – Is America Headed For Civil War?

Russell Brand. And on a related note, the question may well yet be answered with a yes.

According to a new University of Chicago poll, 28% of all Americans now agree with the following statement:

“it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government” … “Even among self-described soft Democrats, 19% said armed resistance may be necessary”.

There’s a bunch of other eye-opening results in the poll. One more:

“When asked if they considered the government ‘corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me’, 56% of respondents said they did. Democrats were the only group where the share of people who disagreed with the statement was slightly larger than those who agreed, by a two percentage point margin”.

I think the Dems are rapidly becoming the party of whistling past the graveyard, wanting desperately to think that things are fine (now that we’re rid of that Trump!), and that this is still the sweet land of liberty.

I have an opinion on that, but you know what it is.

Apolitical Bonus Round:

2 Ways to Quickly Regrow Scallions!

The basic idea here is that you take the roots piece of the scallions, the part you’d normally chuck, and stick it in dirt instead, where in theory it will grow back quickly.

I think I might try that.

Once again I’m trying to dig out from under random pieces of research in order to see the path ahead more clearly.

In that spirit, here are the two best quick-hit Jimmy bits of late.

Like Scott Ritter and a bunch of other high-ranking former military men you will never see on cable news, Colonel Douglas MacGregor has strong opinions about the origins, present realities, and above all the true purpose of the situation in Ukraine.

On a related note (related through the question of ‘sanctions’), the second video actually has a CNN anchor asking the very pertinent question: What do you say, Mr. Biden Spokesman Neocon, to those families crying Listen–we can’t afford to pay five or six or seven bucks a gallon for months on end; it’s just not sustainable?

I hope that the spokesdrone’s answer still has the ability to shock you. The rest, including Biden’s own predictably dismissive answers, are just standard gravy in the brave new world of your Empire.

I.

Escort interview-Valentina

Valentina came from Miami F.L.A.

Courtesy of a two-year degree in radiology, she has a day job that just covers her own bills in NYC.

But back home she also has a schizophrenic mother and a sister who can’t hack life either. Her ‘escorting’ money goes to pay their way, because there are gaping holes in the so-called social safety net of the Greatest Country, the capital of Capitalism.

Sex work in some form started for her when she was twelve. These days, she suffers from clinical depression, for some reason.

II.

Miss Mara

At the almost other-end of the sex worker spectrum, here is an interview with a woman who started as a professional Dominatrix and branched out to become not only a successful entrepreneur, but an artist as well.

There are clues in here that suggest an early life with distinct economic and social advantages, unlike Valentina’s, or mine, but in the end she is a cogent, articulate, and self-loving soul who only preys consensually on those who can afford it. If you must play, by the free market ways, there are far worse ways to do it.

This one gave me a bit of tepid and contingent hope for myself. I don’t think I’d cut it as a pro Domme, but I really do feel that if you’ve got to be a whore one way or another (and oh yes I do, you do) then this is the self-determining kind to be.

A couple days ago I brought forward for your consideration the interview with a man named Dirt. My feelings about him were of course mixed. On the one side there’s no way I could allow him to ever become a role model for myself. But on the other, I have to acknowledge that in spite of all his flaws, he has lived with more integrity and bravery than I ever have.

Maybe calling him brave is not quite right, just like calling him an anarchist isn’t.

Maybe I’m just envious of the degree to which he actually doesn’t give a fuck what people think.

Maybe I’m down on myself, because I still do, for some stupid reason I don’t understand–could be that in spite of all my rebellion I am still on some level trying to please a parent or the other parent or god or somebody.

Watching that interview sent complex shock waves down toward my core.

So naturally, like the shockwave addict I am, I watched more interviews from the same source.

Most of them are with people who are far more broken than Dirt, or even me, but you can see that for yourself if you dare.

The source is Mark Laita, and you can hear about him in his own words on his YT homepage:

Soft White Underbelly Intro Video

I’ve pulled a few quotes from this ‘mission statement’ video, and I’m going to lovingly critique them.

“These videos are meant to create awareness, of things that are broken in our country”.

So far so good, and I’m impressed by the simple acknowledgment of the vast swaths of brokenness that never make it into the media Matrix, and collecting examples of it all in one place. Or to put it alternatively:

“here’s a really good window into what’s really going on”

Yes. It is. In a way that NPR used to be in spots, before they completely sold themselves out to becoming a mouthpiece for White People Problems on the one hand and useless Orthodox Wokeness on the other.

At this point, by contrast, Soft White Underbelly is journalism doing what journalism is supposed to do.

But … we also get this.

“If we don’t look at some of these things, they’re just gonna continue to grow and get worse and worse
and I believe listening, understanding, accepting, and maybe deciding to do something differently
Might make a difference eventually.”

The key words are Deciding, Differently. =Difference.

But who decides, to do something differently, any Thing that crucially matters?

Not me, and probably not you either. We don’t have that much pull, not even as much as might be suggested by the lie of ‘democracy’ and phrasings like the Will of the People.

The way we already do things is exactly the way the Deciders want things done. It’s tautological.

So, barring some revolutionary change in the accelerating inequality, Worse And Worse is absolutely inevitable.

Late in the video, Mr. Mark Laita brings the rhetorical killshot down on himself, in a summary re-framing statement that goes:

“this channel is about helping our government figure out what’s wrong with our country”

It’s at this point that the inherent nobility of his mission crashes and burns for me.

Mark, Mark … god, don’t be such a libtard … they know. They know exactly what’s wrong, but they’re very well paid to speak and act as if it was all very right, or soon will be if people would only donate to them, or vote for this party or that and keep the game running and rigged just the way it is, except worse, and worse.

These broken people are not their acquaintances or co-workers, much less their neighbors.

The whole point of the game is to amass enough wealth, cachet, political and economic power to never, ever have to deal personally with these Fentanyl addicts and PTSD veterans, whose bones their money and clout are built over on purpose.

Even their kids will never go to those vulnerably public schools where mass murder is the fashion.

They won the game, they got out, they go to the gala balls in the highest fashion now, and their only job duty is to be a good little brick in the wall that stands exactly in the way of doing some thing or any thing differently.

Their performance evaluations on that job are written and signed by the donor class.

Kucinich was performing Below Expectations by wanting to Do Different, so he got his walking papers. Ocasio-Cortez: useful idiot, Meets Expectations, conditional contract renewal (and the same for the old Vermont Jew). Pelosi, Schumer, Cruz, McConnell–Exceeding Expectations, Meritorious Brickery; renewal and raises for them all.

The gap widens.

The system rots from within, just as the deciders intended.

Mark, I’m grateful for your witness and your journalism, independent of all that. Among other things, it’s more than I do.

The reason my tongue is sharp with critique is that the lives of your interviewees and their children and their children’s children are never going to get one damn bit better by the mechanism you’re apparently believing in, and offering.

No one in government, or with deciding power, is going to even watch your videos, unless they do it to get off on some twisted version of poverty porn in the dark.

I used to believe that witnessing and recording was enough. And I did hear what you said, about all the money you’ve raised for poor broken people too–I take nothing away from you for any of it.

I just want so badly to move things in the direction of doing differently … not for myself, not even just for all the people in that picture and beyond … but for everyone about to be born into this system, and every soul we’re about to lose to the long sleep.

I believe your heart is in the right place. I’m only asking that your brain follow it there.

Chris Hedges BREAKS DOWN The Biden Vote

Sabrina Salvati (SabbySabs) pulling clips from a much longer Chris Hedges piece with the intention of highlighting what our votes bought us, with special reference toward the end about what the duopoly is planning for the last remaining fragment of FDR’s social safety net, aka Social Security.

Yet I live inside the lie too.

This is the man I’d have been at forty if I’d dragged the other foot out at 21, and never gone back to ‘school’, that place that teaches you ultimately how to have middle-class vassal aspirations.

Interview with the ‘Anarchist’: His name is Dirt. Dirt says:

“If you’re willing to do anything for what you believe you quickly become the bad guy no matter how good what you believe is. All the fascists in history, thought they had this great Idea … and that everyone should Believe … we’ll MAKE them Believe, ’cause I’m RIGHT … and now you’re fucking Hitler. So I just want to opt out of all of that, you know?”

He’s a mess, and he’s not wrong.

It doesn’t matter all that much if your Idea is called Nazism or Christianity or American Democracy or Islam or Utilitarianism. You think it’s great … great. But once you start thinking everyone should, say, believe in Democracy and Capitalism, and you get hold of some money, and then power, you WILL force it down their throats for their own good, because after all you’re right! (And the anarchic Natives, the recalcitrant kindergartners or sophomores, are always ipso facto wrong.)

When you take it that far, and convert them at the point of a metaphorical or real gun, you’re Hitler. Even if you really are ‘greeted as a liberator’ by some toady percentage of your victims, as Bush wrongly predicted about the Iraqis, you’re still killing and supporting the killing and funding and collaterally damaging and maiming and orphaning and brainwashing in the name of woke prosperous liberty Jesus all over the world; and you’re sitting there believing it was for the best. ‘It’s not a good system, but gosh darn it it’s the best one there is, anyway’.

Unless, and this is pretty much and almost the only alternative, you choose, or have no alternative but, to be Dirt.

July 17, 2007

In response to a debate question about what he’d do to protect a woman’s right to choose, Candidate Obama says:

“Well the first thing I’d do as President is sign the ‘Freedom to Choose’ Act.”
(i.e., the codification of Roe into actual law)

21 months later, April 29, 2009

now-President Obama, sitting on top of Dem supermajorities in both the House and Senate:

“The ‘Freedom of Choice’ Act is not my highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose, BUT …
I think the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on.”

The promise: Vote for me–I WILL sign it and permanently protect your rights.

The truth: I don’t give a shit about your rights. What I care about is tamping down your anger and keeping you pacified and in a counter-revolutionary trance state of hopeful magical thinking, because that’s what my billionaire masters want, and what happens with your working-class womb runs a poor distant second to that priority.

Same with Biden and the Clintons and Pelosi and the rest. The lie is staring you in the face, and it is not the only lie, or even close to being the most important one. Just the one you care about this week.

The video of both statements is embedded here.

***

Don’t talk to me about the rule of law or will of the people, or how we might be losing our liberty. For the purposes that matter, it’s long gone.

Don’t talk to me about spending billions to protect that oh so sovereign ‘democracy’ in Ukraine, when we don’t have it in Flint, Michigan or Ferguson, Missouri.

And above all, don’t pragmatically school me about how I need to hold my nose and vote over and over for the lesser evil.

It is not now and it never has been lesser. Lies are lies and they oppress you and me and poor pregnant women alike. If you should try to convince me otherwise, like some Jehovah cultist on my doorstep …

… should you start waving that American or Ukrainian flag in a text thread I am compelled to read …

You’re only going to piss both of us off, and distract both of us from the actual brutal reality that confronts us.

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world, and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” –E.B. White

I am indebted to Robert Durden (as in yesterday’s link down in the comment section) for mentioning this quotation. I don’t think it’s a great insightful one, but it helped me frame a thought. Which was–the raging overtly political posts, those are the Save the World ones, and all the rest are some kind of Savoring.

The STW posts are flawed in a particular way, because I don’t honestly believe there is any chance that the world, the civilized human world, will be saved, or even should be saved. So … they’re not very productive except for providing a ventilation system for more or less justified rage. They say in essence: ‘Look. We done fucked up. Here’s exactly how. How bright and prescient am I’?

The savoring posts are on average not as technically proficient in literary terms, but they are innately more belletristic. They’re not as sharp, in either sense: not as stylish, not as deadly.

This is one of them.

I’m finally telling you about a truly good and truly noir bit of cinema.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

There are a lot of outstanding performances, but of course the best parts are saved for Orson Welles, who directed, and Rita Hayworth, who in addition to being a heavenly beauty and a complex soul was married to Mr. Wellse in real life at the time.

The man is of course a cryptic template for any man who ever wanted to create real art.

From the perspective of the patriarchal, the woman is the ultimate and iconic prize for actually creating it, and at the same time inevitably a Femme Fatale. I will leave it to more qualified sensibilities to say what else she was, except for this anecdote on her Wiki page:

“While Gilda was in release, it was widely reported that an atomic bomb which was scheduled to be tested at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands would bear an image of Hayworth, a reference to her bombshell status. Although the gesture was undoubtedly meant as a compliment, Hayworth was deeply offended. Orson Welles, then married to Hayworth, recalled her anger in an interview with biographer Barbara Leaming: ‘Rita used to fly into terrible rages all the time, but the angriest was when she found out that they’d put her on the atom bomb. Rita almost went insane, she was so angry. … She wanted to go to Washington to hold a press conference, but Harry Cohn wouldn’t let her because it would be unpatriotic’.”

Her rage points to the existence of a deeper thoughtful human being than the surface starlet status would suggest.

To choose a word, it’s Justified.

I leave you, on the other hand, something to savor. It’s a snippet of lyric from the only song in the film, sung by Rita’s character. It goes:

Comes a change in weather;
Comes the change of heart
And who knows when the rain will start?

The weather doesn’t stay the same. The heart … has its reasons, that reason knows nothing of.

Nobody knows when the storm will come and change everything, and not-knowing is an essential part of the unfathomable miracle we call our lives.

“God has allowed me to live for one more day, and I’m going to make it your problem”.
—shoe0nHead, the funniest non-comedian evarr

Oh wait. I did that yesterday. Dammit! All I was really saying is this. We got told that we had to vote Blue in order to save the country from Fascism. What’s Fascism? It’s the merger of the state with the corporations. And I am sorry to have to be the one to say it, but … the state/corporate merger and turning democracy into a puppet show is a deal that was done a very long time ago. Somewhere between Dwight David Eisenhower and before Goldman Sachs decided to back Obama, and funded his run. When he won, they hand-picked his cabinet, and even included some of their own on the final short list. It doesn’t get any more merged than that, and the impolite but proper word for merged is: fascist. I’m not wrong, but I am almost sorry, to be noticing now so very late in life.

Last time, their choice was Kamala. But alas. She was so unpopular, even in the black community, that they had to settle for handing her the VP and trying to set her up for ’24. In my humble and way too early opinion, that isn’t going to work out for them this time.

The best that can be said of Biden, Harris, Obama, or any Clinton of your choosing is that they are no more or less fascist than Donald Trump; no more and no less ‘authoritarian’. And of course, he has some icky phrases and gross tics and is ugly as a mud fence besides, but optics and crudeness aside … getting down to the economic realities that matter … it’s a distinction without a meaningful difference, and the People, most especially the better breed of lefterly-leaners, are waking at last and ever so drowsily to that unsavory but unavoidably self-evident reality. I’m just one of them, and I’m here to share the good bad news in the name of our feudal Lord, the one who has allowed me to live and post one more day.

***

Today is the last partial fragment of the first four-day chunk I’ve had entirely to myself in months. I did pretty good with it. The house is cleaner than it has ever been since I/we returned and unloaded into it. But cleanliness was only tangential to the real work of organization and life mapping. There is progress to report there too. Of course, the vacation-in-place wasn’t 100% serious. You know I’ve been watching a few old movies too.

Onward and backward to real life.

“American politics is best understood top down better than left/right” –Robert Barnes

I think this point is so very critical to understanding our lives in the Empire, and getting more important every day.

I’m just going to let the man amplify on his reasoning, and tell you about the statist/populist way of dividing things too.

ROBERT BARNES On Defending Alex Jones, Jimmy Dore For President & Free Speech (12 minutes well spent.)

Two amplifications of my own.

A lot of the same important points Barnes makes are said in a different way here. The main difference==where Barnes is Yale-educated, corpulently prosperous, and perfect in his production values, this guy is poor, crazy-looking, and overmodulated. But in their essentials, the perspective is the same, and I pretty much share them. That’s three American men in very different places in life, all drifting on the same basic tide.

I don’t think any of us will fall so far as to vote for Trump in 2024, but I can only really say that with certainty for myself. The point is that there are a lot of us feeling this way, straddling the line between generic liberal hate for the Donald, and the acknowledgement of the simple fact that good old folksy Joe, or Hillary, or Petey B. are in no way better, and maybe even a little worse, because their relative polish encourages the unwary to make this about “voting” between the nominal lesser of two evils.

During the ongoing January 6th hearing, I’ve listened to the shitlibs on NPR, and the people they naturally choose to interview and spotlight, going on and on about how what happened that day was such a threat, to Democracy, to the will of the people being done.

Hear me, Audie Cornish and the rest of you.

This is a capitalist empire and not a Democracy.

This is a merger between corporatism and the state, and that is exactly and precisely the definition of Fascism.

The will of the people, the demos, doesn’t mean shit to Donald Trump OR Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or anyone in between. They prove it over and over every day.

Cynically calling the government of this country we all love The Fourth Reich is hyperbolic. But it’s really not far off the mark, either.

There are so many people waking up to these facts every day.

Some of them will vote for a Trump. Some of them will vote third-party. Some of them will stay home.

Nobody thus enlightened is going to vote for Biden 2.0, not even if she’s wearing the designer fashions of Saint Michelle Obama Herself.

The point of the hearings is to keep trying to find a way to ban Trump from ever running again.

Because if he does, and the Democrats put up their usual puppet show, they’re gonna get smeared. Maybe even in the popular vote this time, but certainly in the doddering old electoral college.

To survive and keep being their shitty selves, they need a big wrench, of the kind they traditionally use to fix elections and change regimes in poor countries all over the world. Only one that will work right here at home.

There is no guaranteed ‘Hispanic’ vote anymore. There’s even less and less of a black one, because a certain percentage of blacks and Latinos alike can see how they’ve been done just as well as any white person.

Biden and the Dems have done absolutely nothing for the proletariat except get involved in yet another upward wealth-transfer of a war that is now coming home to roost.

We can’t make it here, Any More. Listen to the prophet McMurtry.

Every time I hear that song I am moved to the edge of tears, for me and for him and for her.

I hate my empire and I pray for the bright new day of the next American Revolution.

Whirlpool (1950)

An implausible plot is saved by insanely great performances by Gene Tierny and Jose Ferrer. Directed by Otto Preminger.

***

Rebecca (1940)

One of the most well-known movies of the 40s. I hated it. The main point of the tale seems to be that having a lot of money, particularly old money, inevitably turns people into self-absorbed assholes who have no idea how to live well. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Love you man. I know you love me too. But it’s also clear that you don’t approve of me. That’s okay. I am blessed, in the sense that I don’t need your approval, because my own opinion of myself and my opinions is both absurdly high, and self-sustaining.

Which doubtless is one of the things you disapprove of, and for sure is one of those tricks from the mixed bag I inherited paternally–I know that only makes it worse. C’est … la guerre.

Today I was posed ta pull down this big synthetic post, but I had fish ta fry, category Other. It’ll keep.

Instead, I offer to you 𝗦𝗵𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳 (1949).

It’s not a noir, it’s a jour. It’s noirish in its tensions, but not its morality. Its morals are true blue. I enjoyed it, but I think if I was a woman I’d have liked it even better, because the She is the only complicated character, and ultimately the only reason to watch. The men are pretty stock, unsurprising until the last three minutes at least.

No spoilers.

Onward.

Okay, I drifted dangerously close to politics yesterday, and today I’m going to have to double down.

On Tuesday I assiduously plan to reverse course on that again–I’m writing it in my head already–but when in the course of human events it becomes necessary, et cetera.

I’ve already said that I’m done voting for anyone running under either wing of the foul vicious Uniparty, and I stand by that. I read up and realized that this year, my state is swingy again, at least in terms of the whole ‘Control of the Senate’ thing, and I don’t care. Somebody please explain to me what Mark Kelly has done to change things in my life, or the life of any prole. I’ll listen, with an openly skeptical mind, but unless and until I hear of a single decent reason why I should piss away my vote on the centrist likes of him again, I just will. Not. Do it.

It seems likely, however, that in the ’24 Presidential, I won’t have to throw my vote away at all.

Mr. Jimmy Dore is said to be running for that office, under the banner of the thing they’re calling a People’s Party.

I don’t know if he’ll make it officially official. I don’t know if he will stay the course all the way to the end. I worry that if he really starts to make waves, they will find a bullet with his name on it somewhere, and I’m not talking about a soft Bernie bullet either. I don’t believe with any conviction that he’d make a good president, or that he has any substantive chance in hell to get within a hundred miles of the office in the first place.

None of that matters. He tells the truth about the rotten Empire and make-believe democracy and the crimes routinely committed in the course of Spreading It like a plague over the weeping earth for my entire lifetime and long before by Dems, Repubs, and even the old system-captured supposed Independent who broke our hearts twice over, promising a revolution that never came and died in darkness.

I want the volume turned up on that truth, and #Dore24 will crank it to eleven even if it does nothing else at all.

First I Heard Of It, at least beyond hopeful whispers, from Hard Lens Media.

What you’re going to hear from your Trusted Sources to begin with is that JD is secretly a right-winger. They say it already, all the time, about not just about him but anyone who leaks a little truth now and then, like Glenn Greenwald. It’s just not true.

When that doesn’t work out, and provided Dore is capable of pulling a few votes somewhere someday, they’ll fall back to calling him, and anyone who supports him, an evil Spoiler. I’ve heard it all before, up close and personal, as when some girlfriend of mine twenty years ago accused me of being personally responsible for the Bush crimes because I voted for Nader in 2000. (In a solid red state not named Florida, for god’s sake.)

Even if it turned out to be indictably true … I can totally live with being a spoiler. And you will be completely permitted to berate me with the fact, and never even think of blaming Debbie Wasserman-Schultz or Donna Brazile or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Joe Biden for anything ever, because unlike Mark Zuckerberg or the President who brought you America’s first ever literal Ministry of Truth, I actually believe in the First Amendment. So does Jimmy Dore.

I could go on, but I’m sick of my own voice for now, and besides, once I post this one I’ll finally be all the way caught up from my tragic and most recent lapse against my one true self-inflicted responsibility in this world. To date anyway. We’ll see how that goes, too.

I know you don’t care about what Vlad has to say for himself. In the main, neither do I. But …

Putin quotes Mark Twain …

I’m laying this down anyway, because of one arguably non-political or trans-political thing that struck me.

Alex Christoforu is droning on about the High Oligarch’s speech and what got said–at about 1:50, I startled, when he says:

“I would say that Putin’s speech was a declaration, to the world and to the old world order, the Western world order, that Russia is now Out Of The System. They are free. They’ve done it. They’ve managed to break out of the Western architecture, and they are charting an independent and sovereign course”.

There’s more and go listen if you want, but the basics are all right there in a few words.

This is what my own heart craves. Making that same declaration. Of Independence. And from exactly the same people.

Even more importantly, having that declaration be demonstrably factual and true–a new truth–perhaps even Self-Evident.

Eventually … it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the economic bonds which have shackled them to some Other, and to assume the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature entitle them. Even if they were born, and still are, wage slaves.

Whenever any form of government, such as the merger of the state with the corporations, becomes destructive of life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning, it is the right of people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new kinds of governance, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to insure their safety and their happiness.

When a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Over and over, we have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, but they have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity of our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

Like all such declarations, this one will most definitely not come freely or easily, and may even cost in blood of some kind. But still it was worth it then, and it is worth it just the same today.

The ungodly piles of money we sent and continue to send to the military-industrial complex through the poor dumb puppet state are an immorality worthy of King George.

The boomeranging sanctions were ugly and wrong by any measure, hurtful to those least able to bear them at home and abroad.

But perhaps history will see them as a fateful and necessary spark, of revolution at long long last.

Keep i On.

Most of the overtly happy moments of these weeks have taken place in that very same driveway, the concrete pad adjacent to the next-best house and home, but all the way in the back this time.

Out there at the patio table, I feel in odd moments that I’m living a life of luxury.

There is no pool; there isn’t even a hot tub though there should be.

But I have a chair, and I have fence enough that it doesn’t matter much whether I have clothes on or not.

I have an oversized insulated light metal mug called a Yeti–world class, found on the trip I resisted making.

Inside the mug I have the very best coffee in the world; single-origin organic from a worker-owned co-op.

In the very middle of being tangled up in blue there are these moments of feeling successful on some weird scale that has nothing to do with anyone’s definitions of success, not even my own.

During the last such moment I lounged there in my manly yet satin robe and it enhanced the feeling sweetly.

Feeling like the shaman chief of the birds that flew.

Then back inside to the bills to pay, the stupidities to sort out, the addictions, the scheming dreams-of-better that tangle.

If I could only stay in the present …

The now with no fear of past or future …

There is no better. There is no Rich, no triumph over death in the end.

But I want this other trailer … Most of all I want this tiny house on the land that is already mine, mine, mine.

I want that nest that is just enough and I want to migrate to and from it.

I want to put one word after another because that is the purposeful meaning mythos of a keepin-on bird.

I always did refuse to deal in slaves, saying no to the Chair position and so on, so nothing essential inside of me died.

Even though I did grudgingly sell everything I materially had, which is to say my labor, I was acutely aware of the sketchy and dubious bargain I was cutting and (maybe because of that) never did quite freeze up inside. Maybe that’s ‘integrity’.

At length, just when it looked like I may have danced with the Devil and come out clean and not-poor …

The bottom fell out, once, twice, and that life-altering third time.

What I withdrew from was the System. Partway at first, and then all the way, when I withdrew the pension plum.

I stepped nimbly past the soul death of vassalage. My insides though chilled stayed liquid instead of icing. I withdrew.

What good did that do me, tangled up in blue?

That is the question I’ve been wrestling with, with such sober seriousness, these last days and weeks.

That one and the sperg one–what is this V-syndrome that has shaped me thus?

The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on
like a bird that flew

You know I love Eeyore the Canadian Commie. I don’t watch him a whole lot anymore, for the kinda dumb reason that his posts have grown undifferentiated–most all of them are titled with some variation on “The Capitalist Death Cult”.

I learned what he meant by that and I agree with it generally. But I don’t need to hear it chanted every day.

I did stumble across his opposite number. Mr. JJ is a Vancouverite and paradoxically a self-described conservative. The fact that he’s gay only makes things even less traditionally integrated.

My political and philosophical beliefs EXPLAINED

He’s pretty self aware about how he got this way–Gay in Vancouver, but a conservative anyway …

FEAR OF AUTHORITY (middle class horror)

But his awareness doesn’t save him from what he became, for economics is still for the most part Destiny.

I’m gonna stretch a point.

The proletariat, or ‘working class’, are that vast majority of people in the world who have nothing to sell but their labor.

The wage slaves.

The ‘middle class’, the vassals, or as we call them today the ‘professional and managerial class’ have some little more than that. They have just enough to worry about losing, and acting so as to not lose it shapes every part of their souls.

Boiling that all down, the vassals manage the wage slaves.

What happens next? Dylan, in the role of narrator-prole, tells it like it is.

Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died

Tangled up in blue

Somewhere in here, fourteenfifteen, I made my first masala by accident. It was not a culinary triumph.

What I was really after was understanding.

The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes
Street lights share their hollow glow
Brain seems bruised with numb surprise
Still one place to go … Still one place to go

Understanding what a curry really is in the essentials.

It might be more about onion that you or I rationally believe.

So instead of smashing my head against the wall directly, which is resulting in nothing but clouds of blood in the water, let’s consider the big picture from some alternative angles.

“Fascism should more appropriate be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
–attributed to Benito Mussolini, was also is credited with coining the word Fascism in the first place.

Being proud of myself for conceptualizing my homeland as the Empire … was trivial and vain, because it’s not just any old imperial Empire, and the quote makes that abundantly clear. The power of the state and the power of the corporations is now merged. The trend is toward expanding the entanglement and making the two variants of power indistinguishable.

Call it feudalism, call it ‘democracy’ or capitalism, call it fascist by it’s proper name, call it an oligarchy as I am fond of doing … it amounts to the preservation of the pyramid as shown by whatever means necessary.

I have always been a peasant, I have always been a prole. In the days when I was an esteemed professor, it seemed for a time that maybe I was in danger of becoming a vassal. The last time I ran into a friend and former teacher who had known me for decades, she said, upon hearing about me buying a house and a car–“Oh yes I see. You’ve become middle class”.

Despite her fine mind and all her insight into me, she was mistaken. Even if I worried for a moment that she might be right, subsequent events made sure that my cream would not rise and that my handle on the first ascending rung was destined to slip away.

The way my society would see it, I became a failure. But in my heart I’m alright with all of it, and even soothed to a point. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Or to put it in less flowery terms, what would it say about the true condition of that soul, had I succeeded in the usual way inside a fascist empire?

I did always see professoring as nothing better than the best available compromise between sleeping in the park with my ideals intact, and succeeding by the standards of darkness and corruption.

I’m a shades of grey person, and this is not a shades of grey theory of my life. I’m aware of that.

Partly that’s why inquiring into my real origin story, and trying to suss out who I am really on some macro level is toxic for my mind and body right now.

I am fucked in the head, both beautifully and pathologically. I have Vairtere’s syndrome.

***

When the people who love me try to say why they do, they sometimes talk about my Integrity.

I know what the word means and it resonates for me. I feel loved when I hear it applied to myself that way.

I think it’s true as far as it goes, and I think it doesn’t go quite far enough.

It’s a recognition that I’ve been true to my alleged Self.

I got derailed and stopped because I was next going to have to ask myself honestly what that self was, and is; to define the beautiful and terrible disease of V-Syndrome that in turn defines me.

In order to honestly paint those definitions, I was going to have to talk about the parts of my psychology I inherited from my father. In order to achieve real integrity, I was going to have to admit just how like my father I was and still am.

***

But I can’t do it just now. The subject is radioactive and when I focus on it my brain has been shutting

down.

I came out of that ?Asperger’s? post feeling strong and fluid and productive, and then on the 12th in real time I wrote this:

So eventually I have to ask: What damn difference does it make, what we call a thing?

Then for 4 days I wrote nothing more. It is now very early on the morning of the 16th and I’m trying to complete this post.

Why did I get derailed and stopped there? It’s complicated, but I think it has a lot to do with that last mention of Integrity.

I was going to say …

I was going to say something about who I am with all masks off, and what that perception of integrity really means.

I have this insane skill with words. I know more of them that anybody around me, generally. Then, usually, I can easily use the right words, in the right order, to concisely convey what I’m thinking–sometimes even feeling.

This skill, alongside other factors, has led people, including myself, to think of me as highly intelligent. Maybe that’s true, maybe not … even putting aside theories of multiple intelligences. All on a spectrum, too.

The skill is also the one major thing that gives me the appearance of being relatively normal.

That appearance is definitely misleading. I am, in almost no way at all, Normal.

I am, in the modern parlance, not neurotypical. I am, to slap a temporary word on it, neurodivergent.

As in, “A neurodivergent person has one or more ways in which their brain functions outside the typical way”.

There are different kinds of recognized neurodivergence:

(clipped from: What are the different types of Neurodiversity? )

One in five Americans is dyslexic to a greater or lesser extent. One in ten has some kind of ‘attention deficit’. One in 25 is ‘dyspraxic’. I don’t fall into any of those categories. Nor do I have Tourette’s, or any of the less common types of neurodivergence.

That leaves the possibility of autism. I’ve considered it before.

I considered it again when I stumbled across this:

Could you be Autistic and not even know? | 15 Signs of undiagnosed autism

There was a lot of overlap between who I am and the 15 signs, but other stuff didn’t fit. There are MANY Internet videos along these lines, most of them published by people who say they have the condition themselves, and who you would basically never guess do. I guess they’re autistic but ‘high-functioning’, as popular academic language would have it.

So I tried again to figure out an answer by taking a test, and it came out like this:

“Well, it’s like this, son. You’re sorta artistic and sorta not. We’re gonna call you spergy. It’s sorta Autism Lite!”

In my ungrateful opinion, that is … worse than useless.

I have an alternative theory. It goes something like this.

In more than one way, my brain functions outside the typical (normal, healthy) way. So I’m not neurotypical. I am quite markedly ‘neurodiverse’.

But it’s not dyslexia or ADHD or Tourette’s, and it’s almost certainly not exactly “Autism” either.

I am fucked in the head, both beautifully and pathologically.

I have Vairtere’s syndrome.

***

One more little thought, on the question of whether these Spectrum Disorders are mental illnesses, or not.

The first two links I found on the subject don’t see eye to eye with each other.

One says:
“Autism is not a mental health problem. It’s a developmental condition that affects how you see the world …”

The other says: “Autism spectrum disorder is indeed categorized as a mental disorder—also called a mental illness—in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)”.

So what I want to know, Dr. Science, is, is Pluto a Planet?

We are now right up against the limits of the miracle of words.

It’s so very hard to realize that:

–You don’t win this game by getting richer, or even more ‘comfortable’

–You don’t win this game by making it to 99

–You don’t even win this game by making it to 99 in perfect health

–You don’t win this game period

–Because contrary to everything they ever told you, it’s not, and never was a game.

It’s a little unlikely miracle that after 13 billion years, you suddenly existed.

And were given this time to think and enjoy and aggravate yourself by reading some blog.

Before you someday go back to not existing at all.

Which nonexistence indeed might be a little tragic, if you want to see it that way.

But not a thing to be afraid of.

Because being afraid of some past or future … is just a waste of the miraculous time you

HAVE been given

for no reason at all.

The way to innocence,
to the uncreated
and to God
leads on,

not back,
not back to the wolf or to the child,
but ever further into sin,
ever deeper into human life.

Herman Hesse, quoted on the epigraph page of a book called At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, by Peter Matthiessen, published back when I was that child. In 1991 it was made into a film starring Tom Berenger, Aidan Quinn, Darryl Hannah, Kathy Bates, John Lithgow, and Tom Waits as the wolf.

I read it a long time ago and finished re-reading it last night. It is still a superb novel.

Afterwards, I went online to see if I could find the movie, which I’d also seen long ago. The only version I found was terribly cropped, posted in 360p, and voice-overdubbed in Polish.

I watched it anyway. It’s good enough that I cannot even imagine such a movie being made today.

We have fallen so very far from grace.

I say this sincerely–I have absolutely nothing against writing letters to Your Elected Representatives.

It’s much more than I ever do myself. So I have absolutely no room to talk shit. Flip me off in your mind when I do.

I will say this however.

1) Sending those letters is exactly what the Powers have told us to do all our lives, because …
2) The impact of it is exactly zero, plus a trigger to send out a boilerplate full of rhetoric.

Fortunately, the price to be paid for Participating In Democracy at this level is currently also near zero. So no harm done, to anyone anywhere.

Doing more is a whole hell of a lot of work.

And the more of that work you do, the steeper the price you will pay.

Meaning: If what you do starts to become truly effective, there are literally teams of highly paid goons out there who will use any means at their disposal to destroy you. It’s not paranoia. It’s how Empire works in the modern age.

Not only do your representatives and the shadow people who pay them well not care about you. They honestly don’t give a shit about piles of dead babies that used to go to poor-people public schools–any more than they ever cared about the much bigger piles of little brown babies that the System has stacked up all over the world for decades, in the name of spreading democracy and freedom.

If I may be allowed a small opportunity for prediction …

One of these days, the internal imperial rot is going to get SO bad that one of these incidents occurs, not in a movie theater or a gay nightclub or a public school, but in some place they do care about. A charter school. A private one lingering in a rich suburb outside the beltway. Maybe a private gathering of ‘donors’, like the one where Joe Biden whispered to the rich a promise that “Nothing Will Change” for them, just as Hillary and Barack did before him.

On an airplane. At a world trade center.

Only at that point will anything actually be done.

And you can damn sure bet that whatever it is they finally decide to do, it won’t be for the better, in my life or yours.

When I write up these descriptions of how things actually work, and fail to work, or I watch a video like that and learn more about it, I know it’s not going to do a lot of good either.

How do we root out obscene mountains of billions of dollars and the power that comes with them?

I have not one damn clue.

All I can say is that I am compelled to keep telling what I see.

When I talk about struggling to stop talking politics, what I’m really saying is that I want to SEE something besides politics, and talk about that instead.

The hard part is turning my eyes away from the global and political, and looking seriously at what’s going on in this room, and inside my self.

It’s hard because I’m not entirely convinced it’s right, but …

I do believe that as time goes by, it will more and more right for me.

My hard drive is feeling full and I feel sometimes like I’m living in a cubicle. These are mere metaphors that have nothing to do with any actual state of affairs.

But inside the metaphor, cream is rising.

“Most of your fears, most of your anxieties, very few of them are in the right here, right now. They’re horrible things that happened in the past, or they’re scary things that might maybe could happen in the future.”

“I think that’s the amazing thing about life. You can’t watch it again.”
“We are here. The chances of us being us … that sperm hitting that egg … is 400 trillion to 1. We’re not special, but we ARE lucky. We don’t exist for 13 billion years. Then we explode into this blob of thought, introspection, love, hate, fear, beauty, horror … for eighty, ninety years. Then we die and we never exist again.” (Gervais, with Brand)

So don’t live in fear and make the most of it baby.

Like this guy.

All I really want to know is, Why is this necessary? Why is this seen as anywhere near normal or good?

Even if you somehow think it is … why on earth would we need to pile another 40 billion, 60 billion in the last ten weeks, on top of it, to be able to deal with anything related to security or defense? Why would every single Democrat in the House vote for that compound obscenity, and leave any trace of anti-war dissent to 57 Republicans? And why should I vote for any of them ever again?

How can ‘we’ afford all that, and not be able to afford health care or a living wage or a single real step in the direction of slowing down the climate catastrophe? These people we gave the majority to … why do they not choose to end homelessness, with a tiny fraction of it?

Why are babies in this Greatest Country going hungry; what does this government have to say to their mothers, and why does the White House press secretary seem to have no heart or brain at all when asked that criminally obvious question? She literally answered by telling mothers with hungry babies to consult with their pediatricians, which is worse than useless, and doubly so to the ones who can’t afford luxuries like pediatricians.

***

Elsewise needing to get off my damn plate.

U.S. Marines’ Gay Virtue Signal Backfires

Uvalde Cops Threaten Journalists For Asking Questions

Biden To Hike Medicare Premiums & Funnel Profits To Private Insurers

Biden Travels To Saudi Arabia To Beg For Cheap Oil

Runaway Inflation Is About To Collapse The US Economy w/ Peter Schiff

Biden ADMITS Ukraine Will Have To Cede Territory To Russia

2022-06-03 – How to Speak to Zombies About the Ukraine War

Biden’s Visit To Saudi Arabia Exposes The Ukraine Narrative For The Sham It Is

Politics and policy driving the Ukraine project w/ Jacob Dreizin (Live)

“I don’t think there are any Russians.

And there ain’t no Yanks.
Just corporate criminals,
playing with tanks”.

—The Call – The Walls Came Down (1983)

Ohhhh Lord … They’re Not Laughing Anymore.

I would like it very much if you listened to Ricky Gervais for a few minutes. Nothing to do with the political for a change.

Ricky Gervais & Russell Brand

The part I want you to hear particularly starts at about 47:00, and it proves that Mr. Gervais is a particularly thoughtful philosopher. In addition to being pretty funny too.

Ever since I got back and posted those six days worth of links in a retroactive row, I feel like I’ve been drowning in potential material.

Right now I have twelve video links open and I’d love to share every one of them. But … other than the one I just burned, about Flow States, they’re all more or less political, and maybe a third of them are about Ukraine. It is, as you know, The Current Thing. Alongside Amber Heard and the shitty cop in Uvalde.

I have nagging doubts that you’d actually want to watch twelve minutes on the subject of “How to Speak to Zombies About the Ukraine War”, or even hear me summarize them in two sentences. My market research indicates that there’s a 63% chance that’d make you frown and turn away, and a 32% chance that it would actively piss you off.

And even beyond your reactions, I have reasons of my own for wanting to be less of a radical wonk, and more of a belletrist. Please know that I’m tryin’ for real, for you and me both.

The open video windows kind of make me feel all dressed up with nowhere to go.

So for now, I’m gonna just post the least topical and most philosophical of the bunch, from the esteemed Primo Radical.

How Personality Cults Prevent Real Change

It’s good. I liked it. You might like it too if you’re in some fine openminded state of mind, but the odds are against it. And that’s all I have to say.

Moving along.

How To Get Into The Flow State | Steven Kotler

I watched like twelve minutes of it. The first eleven struck me as pretty fluffy BS, even if it did feature rock climbing.

But finally at minute twelve Mr. Kotler said something really useful. Tight paraphrase:

“Most of your fears, most of your anxieties, very few of them are in the right here, right now. They’re horrible things that happened in the past, or they’re scary things that might maybe could happen in the future.”

Yeah.

Whenever I sat down with an evil Dean, or a false friend who happened to be a college president, I was calm and articulate and lucid, not afraid. It was only after bad things had happened and become part of the past that I feared them and even let them wreck me.

I was in a vicious street fight once with two raging drunks and never experienced a moment of fear (not even afterwards, because I won that fight). I was in a flow state, and all I cared about was hurting those guys badly, in order to protect myself and my fiancee’ and her son. The emotion I felt at breaking the big one’s nose was pure fearless joy and it lingered.

I have done okay at fearing the future less. Death is inevitable. Poverty is likely. So it goes.

Fearing the past less is much harder for me, though I feel kind of dumb just typing those words.

I think that this realization about the almost always fearless present will help me.

Though I still won’t be watching the rest of that video.

Please let me know if I’m missing anything good.

We drove past the turnoff to the town a few days after the shootings happened.

On getting back I watched a lot of things about them, and the aftermaths.

But this isn’t a political post really. The politicians are willfully useless when it comes to real change. It’s also no surprise to learn that these particular small-town cops and a lot of others are inept, self-serving, and very likely cowards too.

No, the real problem is with the assumptions we live by, built on lies and greed and fear. The system itself breaks minds, routinely and habitually. The shooters are “maniacs”. But no one asks why there are so many maniacs. There is more than one mass shooting a day in the Empire now; way, way more than in any other rich country.

WHY are so many people so broken? What broke them?

I’m all for reasonable gun control and background checks and all the rest of the prescriptions that never happen anyway. But honestly–even if they did happen, it would change very little.

Ban this, ban that–bullshit. It’s only a variation on Reefer Madness theme. You ban heroin, and every day people will still OD on something. You ban a video game or a comic book, or a novel, or a poster on Twitter–nothing changes. Prohibition does not work.

Why do people so badly need drugs, or illegal literature? Why do people feel so driven to take out their impotent rage and madness on killing other people?

Why is it that so many of these school shootings are carried out by people who grew up going to those same schools?

Why, in this System, do so many bright-eyed innocent children get the chance to get ‘educated’ and grow up, only to turn into murdering monsters … which of course begs the question of all the other quietly broken ones who live on without getting their day in the headlines, because they turn their madness inward and become suicidal rather than homicidal?

Why is death via bullet the number one cause of death among school-age children in America?

Fuck gun control, speech control, mind control, controlled substances–fuck the cops, fuck control period.

“But the world is full of bad people!” Not even including, of course, the ones who wear suits or get elected or just Succeed.

WHY is the world, and this world in particular, so full of people gone bad?

If you can craft a real and full answer to that, you’re spiritually miles ahead of Peter Arredondo and Ted Cruz and Chuckie Schumer and any policeman who ever drew a breath. And though it galls me to not be the smart one under any circumstances, you’ll be miles ahead of me too.

I’m getting back on track in real time. The gap in posts behind me will be partly filled with a few things, as I catch up, but the hole is not the priority. New June is the priority.

In essence I fell asleep near Dallas and am only fully waking now as I unpack at the once and short-term future home.

We had a wonderful experience again in Hattiesburg, MS and it briefly made me think about establishing an Eastern base just for parking an RV near there, or maybe up in the Ozarks. I don’t think that will happen, mainly because it turns out that on average, the price of raw land here in the Southwest is just dramatically lower than anywhere else, and the crowds are that much smaller too.

The visits in Florida were brief and satisfying. Her fam is not too hard to be around. Mine are a tangled delight. And for once there was even a mingling, at a cultural crossroads called Manny’s.

Also, I got my second pedicure ever, and I’m thinking as I age that it might have to be a yearly expense.

On the way home I was again impressed by the Atchafalaya, and by the west Texas hill country, though I will of course always be just a visitor in those places.

This time I also became trivially learned in the ways of El Paso and I am very grateful for that opportunity. This is a cultural Mecca only 150ish miles from my dream land. I will return here to shop sometimes, and have the perfect breakfast at the place called 2Ten. It was satisfying enough that we didn’t even stop in Cruces this time, the one city that is still closer.

And finally, there was a bit of ruckus at the sweet open lot in the little dream town.

Originally there were four lots in a row on the street, for sale by the same guy. I bought the one on the end outright, and she’s well into paying off the one next to it.

I had hoped that someone I love might grab up the other two, but that didn’t happen. I think the one next to us is still for sale. But the uphill fourth lot did sell, and whoever bought it dragged in an old doublewide with the windows broken out of it–a serious eyesore at the moment, but nothing a nice tall fence can’t fix.

The main reason it was upsetting though turned into a cause for mild joy.

We had been led to believe, by a Planner/Zoner exec no longer with the city, that any kind of trailer was not an option. So upon seeing one, we tracked down the new exec’s boss and got some clarification–in fact, doublewides are allowed. You have to pull any wheels off it, and provide it with skirting, and so on. But this changes much.

It means that–provided I could find a decent deal on a pre-owned manufactured home, and didn’t have to pay to haul it far–I could just about afford right now to put up a living space, without the troubles involved in building one from scratch.

Listen. I don’t want to live in a trailer. But …

If it’s a question of being able to be down there sooner rather than later, living at last on my own little spread, a mile from the Co-op and less than that to the sublime coffeehouse, and all the other long-dreamt things … fuck yeah I’ll live in a trailer.

It doesn’t have to be forever.

There’s still the second lot to build upon as we would like to build someday. Plus, if the taste of modest success comes my way, the trailer can be hauled away and replaced with something more stylish and sustainable.

And it can all go down, maybe, before September ends.

I’m putting this one last in the series of hole fillers because I enjoyed it most.

Chris Hedges was one of the serious good ones before Jimmy was a twinkle in YouTube’s eye.

Here he provides an overview of all that’s wrong with US, in view of the Current Things.

May you enjoy too.

The End Of The American Empire Is Here

Bernie and the Squad surrender to the war machine …

Mate’ and Blumenthal discuss the final dead end of the antiwar ‘left’.

Why is Biden doing this and why does no one talk about it?

A warning that you may actually be more confused about the answers to these questions after watching and getting the facts.

Biden DEPLOYING Troops to Somalia EXPLAINED (w/ Samar Al Bulushi)

Via Briahna and the Bad Faith podcast.

Could Trump have been pushed more Left than Biden?

Robert Durden argues, without a lot of success in my view, that it would have been more progressive to vote for Trump than Biden last time.

It’s tragic how close he manages to come to the truth though, even if he never quite makes it there.

Why this is really here is because of some thought-provoking throwaway lines near the end of the segment.

Seriously. If Rand Paul were running for President against ANY random bullshit Democrat of the Biden/Harris/Buttigieg stripe, wouldn’t it make more sense to vote for him, simply based on the fact that he would end this state of Forever War that’s killing us?

I think there’s a very strong case to be made. I’m not making it. I’m just reporting it.

Nancy Pelosi’s husband has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Courtesy of Russell Brand.

If the tragic wreck of Paul Pelosi’s Porsche in Napa doesn’t fill you up, you can also watch his piece on the slowly unraveling reputation of one Madame Hillary Clinton.

She Was In On It

The next six posts I wrote nothing for in real-time. These are backfill, culled from the caught-up reading and viewing after I got back to the ranch. They are the price for granting myself a vacation. This job is without traditional benefits.

***

Let’s kick it off with Cait.

People Who Defend Empire Narratives Are Really Just Defending Their Worldview From Destruction

“And if you’ve been consuming lies from the beginning of your education, that means your entire understanding of how everything works is built on lies.”

I.

I am avoidant of conflict, and also of commitment.

In fact, I mostly avoid relationships of any kind at all, at any beyond the waitress-kidding level.

But in certain cases relationship becomes inevitable.

This is the phenomenon known as family.

Family consists of that subset of humanity that you don’t get to decide about having, or not having, a relationship with.

Though you still do get to decide what kind.

At some point a brother may decide to be Done with a father.

Likewise with sisters and mothers.

They are still inevitably in relationship, but it may be described as strained or fraught, without inaccuracy.

II.

The first night here on the Atlantic shore I slept badly and woke up unwell.

The second night, this night, at 3 AM local, I am so much better. Again I went to bed early. But this time I slept deep and well, though not long, at least not for the first half.

Instead, in my deep happy sleep, I dreamed a long dream.

The premise was simple.

III.

I lived in a world-class college town. At once point it was said to be Princeton but I doubt it, and, it doesn’t matter.

The important part was that the Wise Man lived there too.

In the dream the part of the Wise Man was played by Noam Chomsky, but that is suspect and also a possible red herring just like Princeton.

The way it all worked was this.

The first few times you visited the Wise Man, you did so with a sponsoring friend, and you just listened. Maybe the friend asked questions, and of course the Wise Man talked–went on and on as he pleased once pointed in a direction.

You were thus vetted as a capable listener first, before you really had a chance to even open your mouth.

Eventually you were allowed to give answers, to the Wise Man’s brief pointed queries.

Here you were being vetted for some basic level of true raw intellect and for being sufficiently interesting.

If you did okay, you were allowed back as a sidekick type. If you did really well, you eventually got to have a visit of your own, and to ask the questions you were burning up with.

I think the first one I asked had to do with whether the universe had an end. And if it did of course, what existed on the other side of that end.

I have no memory of the answer, beyond a long vague fascinating drone that thoroughly covered the topic.

I asked what he thought about capitalism, and I got not an answer, but a performance.

The Wise Man pretended to be mildly insulted about the assertion that he might not deserve his modest wealth and his book-lined study. He had worked very hard all his life for it, he said, and his many books and publications spoke for themselves.

Of course there was no such assertion, and everyone present knew that. Everybody was way too smart to fall for this particular bit of distraction and diversion.

It was diverting, though, in both the light and dark senses of the term.

IV.

Then I woke up and I knew I had to somehow find this laptop and get it operational and write this.

It was no picnic in the park, without being able to turn on the light in this little motel room, I can tell you.

But I succeeded, and this post itself is my fresh hot evidence.

My publications speak for themselves.

V.

In closing.

Part of the reason I just had this experience was that in the hours before sleeping I met an old Wise Man.

I knew he was old because he even made me seem and feel young, moving slowly through his wizard castle and giving us all a tour.

I knew he was at least provisionally wise, because he gave the perfect answer to a personally interrogative question that has vexed me at times:

Are you retired?

He said in response, ‘Retirement is a word we use as a measure of being able to financially support ourselves without a job. And by that standard, I am not retired. I am only unemployed.’

It was a performance in response to a question.

VI.

So I’ll be using some variation of that, in the future, when vexed by the troublesome question.

The most existentially amusing part of this whole thing was the reason I was touring his amazing castle at all.

I was there because this particular Wise Man wanted a chance to hit on my Mom, and he finally had crafted that chance.

They are both in their eighties. She’s married to someone else, and this husband man was sitting in the same room.

They flirted most definitely and mostly discreetly, anyway. It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever witnessed.

VII.

And all that together gave me the dream, and the dream, plus a measure of commitment to writing, gave us this post.

For whatever that’s worth and to me it’s quite a lot.

That’s where I’m up too early writing this.

The Mountain Goats have an album of the same name.

It’s worth hearing.

We cut southeast across New Mexico and down around Clovis there are multiple huge machines working along the railroad tracks in the middle of a Sunday. East of there, up the track, there are something like a dozen long freight trains stopped dead waiting for them to get done whatever it is they are doing to fix things.

In rough Abiliene there is a pickup truck stopped at a traffic light. In the back window there is a bumper sticker. It says:

“I’m not gay but hey, $20 is $20.”

Kudos to that guy, whoever he is. That takes some stones.

Yeah.

I’ll just leave this here.

Naw, wait a second. I’m old and I have nothing to lose. So I’ll say it.

Fuck you, RoboTwink!

It’s not like this dweeb doesn’t know better. His father was a Marxist intellectual who most notably translated the works of the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, a man murdered by the dictator who coined the word ‘fascist’.

I’m sure Mussolini would have embraced Pete’s views on baby formula with a big black heart.

“I don’t know what the truth is
But I know that the truth ain’t what they’re telling ya.”

That’s the killshot sentence at the end of Russell Brand’s most recent brilliant take on what the hell Our Problem really is.

George Bush invades a Sovereign State on the other side of the world, under what even he later acknowledged were completely false pretenses, and the average American politician, newscaster, and citizen screams, “USA!” for years afterwards. He is handily re-elected, and if he hadn’t of been–no difference. John Kerry? A real statesman peacemaker there …

Vladimir Putin invades a country on his doorstep to counter a looming escalation in a one-sided civil war that would have resulted in the deaths of thousands of cultural Russians–clearly, the answer to that is that his leadership if not his life must be terminated immediately.

Barack Obama takes time off from drone-bombing, including targeting and killing a teenager with American citizenship for the crime of having a father who says unkind things about the Great Satan, to briefly invade the sovereign nation of Pakistan, over Pakistani objections, just to have the satisfaction of putting a bullet in the head of bin Laden. Yay! We win. There is a God!

Joseph Biden re-invades the Somalia evacuated by Donald Trump … Crickets, c’mon. No one gives a shit about Somalia, or how it got turned into a shithole in the first place. It’s not in Europe. They have no white mothers and babies to feature in propaganda puff pieces by Accredited Real Journalists. There are simply not adequate heart strings to play on. It doesn’t have a ruggedly handsome coke addict actor to sing The Hero Song about … It don’t sell the soap; fuck it, who cares?

All of these ‘leaders’ are vile greedy war criminals out to line their own pockets first and foremost. Then those of their children. Then those of their caste and class.

But I’m supposed to vote for this one and hate that one because … Because why again? Because the kids that are still in the cages? Because vagina? Because gay this or privilege that? Because Murica? Team Blue? Orange man bad? Russia bad?

I choose to just say no to useless voting on the one hand, and hate on the other.

The foreign policy of America has been outlined previously. It has nothing to do with my interests, even if I did theoretically benefit in some twisted way by being accidentally born into the six:40 Empire of Opportunity.

The domestic policy of the Republicratic Party also doesn’t concern itself with my interests in the slightest, not economically nor spiritually. One hundred percent of House Dems voting to ship forty billion more to be funneled through Ukraine and laundered back to their own caste and class–just like happened in Afghanistan for the last twenty years? Oh sure, I stand with AOC.

Girl don’t stand with me though.

Wait.

Forgive me if I sounded unwoke there for a second.

Diverse Squaddie VIMMENZ did not succeed, in standing for the world this Dalit boy dreams of in any night of his cheap-ass life, and she/they ain’t gonna never effin ever, and you can slap a drum track on that and drop the mic for good.

Yes, it’s everybody’s top-of-mind example of a shithole, but it turns out them unlucky negroid poors are sitting on a big pile of lithium ore.

And suddenly we have a reason to care about them again. Thank you Jesus.

A reminder that the last hated president pulled the Empire completely out of Somalia, after a destructive presence there dating back to 1993 …

… and that the current confused but beloved puppet in the Oval Office is shoving it right back in.

Kinda rapey, ennit?

So you know, it’s Thursday, Soliday (as I write this a little late), and two days from now the show reluctantly hits the hot road.

It means (if history is any guide) that my good steady posting will take a bad hit for ten days to two weeks.

I have a vague notion about posting a single pic or short vid clip per day. It seems like a workable plan, but in the words of the prophet, No plan survives contact with the enemy.

As a penultimate sendoff, I’m dumping a bunch of arguably interesting links in the comment below. I don’t have time to flesh them out, but I will put the best one here up top.

So as you know, the bobblehead neocons and neolibs that currently run things in Finland and Sweden are racing forward like viking lemmings to board the NATO ship as it heads over the Falls.

What you may not know yet is that NATO, being a military alliance, is naturally a full consensus operation. In other words, any member state can say no, to any other new potential member state joining.

This may explain for you that when the Putin administration was a new one, and he petitioned most humbly for Russia to please be allowed to join NATO itself, the Empire said oh hell no.

Basically the only reason NATO existed was to be a counterweight to the USSR. If the enemy joined in alliance and peace, NATO would have no reason to exist. And soooo many good jobs and arrangements would be lost. So of course they told Putin to fuck off.

So anyway. Noble allied Turkey took one look at the Finland/Sweden thing and said, hey wait a minute. Is that opportunity I hear knocking? Why yes it is. These goons holed up in Brussels, they really need our yes vote. So I think we’ll make them pay for it, and through the nose.

First things first, Sweden, you’re a haven for Kurdish separatists, the PKK. Those poor filthy Kurds are still sitting in northern Iraq dreaming about their own sovereign nation of Kurdistan, which … would of course include the Kurdish parts of Turkey. And they have guns. That makes them terrorists!

You have to call them that bad name, and boot their exiled leaders’ asses out of your Scandinavian terror paradise.

After that, we have a long list of cutting edge weapons we want from the US, and assurances that we’ll get parts and training for them … it goes on and on.

The thing is, Sweden and Brussels and the handlers back in Washington will be compelled by their own twisted desires, to give into these Turkish demands. Fuck the Kurds. Again. Amirite?

The PKK is watching the writing appear on the wall.

And they are far from the only people up there who are upset.

Honestly, one has to wonder. What is it that the oligarch classes in Sweden and Finland hope to gain, in exchange for sacrificing their neutrality, not to mention the Kurdish cause they were supporting with such brotherly love only weeks ago?

I don’t know, but I’d be willing to bet it’s a whole big pile of green.

And that is storytime for today.

Last night I finished off the Paring post and then published it, with the Formula one already written, back to back.

Writing the retrospective gave me an unpleasant flashback to the dark ages two/three years ago, but it wasn’t as brutal or insane.

It was hard to get to sleep, just like back then, but I finally did, unlike many times in those days. Then I dreamed about professoring and everything going wrong, but the setting and details were all very different and new.

I think part of the lesson this dream was trying to impart was: they never tried to ruin you, boy, for anything you did or didn’t do.

They tried to ruin you for what you are, and what you always were. What you will continue to be.

Mostly they failed. They did break bones. They succeeded in maiming.

But you are still here, bloody, and not too bowed. Kinda bent but we ain’t broken, so to say.

Before I woke up way too early, there was another dream, a coda, about a skittish scared stray kitten and its mamacat, tough and hissy and protective … but both of them wanting and needing and in some way asking for some sort of help and rescue.

For Sanctuary.

I came into the world just such a cat.

But even as a child I was struggling ineptly to be the strong one who makes and provides the sanctuary. As I was in the coda dream.

In both halves of me there has been an ever-growing rage, at a system in which there is no motive or incentive to actually change anything with regard to feral mammals of any species, humans included.

Most GoFundMe campaigns are for medical debt.

If you generously give to them for all the right reasons, your money goes to prop up and reinforce a fundamentally evil system and reward in the end the evildoers.

It’s very like voting blue.

When the story of my life is done and written, the one payoff for the reader will be in learning what became of the consciousness that lived it.

Did he remain a stray, wild free and hungry, or did he find housecat sanctuary? Or …

Did he somehow manage to become a provider of sanctuary, only for himself, or for others too?

I guess we’ll both just have to stay tuned.

The situation with feeding babies in this country is indeed a mess and a tragedy.

In my humble, nominally male, and poorly experienced opinion, there’s a deeper tragedy underlying the one all the journo-bots are nattering about uselessly.

My proposed deeper tragedy is this.

How did it ever come to pass that something as basic as the feeding of infants ended up thrown onto the brutal mercies of a capitalist machine?

For millions of evolutionary years, there was no such thing, and no need for … “formula”.

Even today, it’s not normally a necessity, provided the mother is rich enough to have the time and luxury for breastfeeding.

The LA Times reports that in rich West Los Angeles, 70% of babies are on mother’s milk. But in impoverished South LA, that’s reversed. The same percentage are on the now-scarce canned stuff.

Mostly, the rich babies are fed for free, straight from the mammalian tap.

Mostly, poor moms have to pay for formula because their time is not their own. It’s been sold off to an employer, so that she can afford things like rent. And … formula. The ‘convenience’, of some synthetic brew that will make a profit for someone, at her expense.

This isn’t about convenience, any more than paying twice as much for a plain gallon of milk from a ‘convenience’ store is about convenience.

She’s rushed. She’s harried and pressured from a thousand directions every day. This is about Survival. She can grab the milk, and the formula, and a Coke to slide down her parched throat, at inflated prices while her gas pump is ticking, far faster than it used to. The JiffyMart will even take her WIC card now.

Except when the ‘supply chain’ fails her.

We, and by we I especially mean people without much money, live in such a fucked up way on so many different levels that it is sometimes very hard to even see the fuckedness.

She is landless and unrooted and always will be, on the garbage wage she gets in return for her years. So, rent money turns into an absolute necessity, just like the formula.

There’s no place to garden at the apartment she can barely afford anyway. So it’s a grocery bill, and once in a while a treat for the kids at McBurgerland. It won’t kill them, at least not in the short term like starvation would.

She will never invest in a Tesla or a nice solar system because they cost too much up front. So: Electric bill, gas bill, water bill, sewer charge, sanitation pickup fee–at the very bare minimum. Plus some old car that breaks down and chugs a lot of ever more expensive oil and gasoline.

***

I wrote five more sentences at this point and then I trashed them, because they didn’t have that calm sound.

Anyway–you have my independently composed theory of the deeper tragedy.

If you want more data for testing its validity, I would suggest starting here.

Two weeks ago, vairtere dot com slash Spill, which is this newer volume of a project begun almost seven years ago, logged its one thousandth post. I noticed it and thought about saying something. Then I decided it was a pretty meaning-free milestone.

But today is an other kind. Meaningful? It is. To me.

Two years ago today was my last official day at an official Job. The last day I was what they call gainfully employed, or kept regular hours anywhere I didn’t really want to be.

On that day, I had no plans beyond getting the hell out of Dodge and putting a lot of miles between my consciousness, and that of a creepy venal landlord and a creepier asshole boss, and an unhappy existence on the wrong side of a border checkpoint.

I had shitloads of material crap to haul up out of the hole with me, and a lot of it was totally unsorted bulk baggage that didn’t even belong to me. (The new wife only had a fifth wheel’s worth of room to store anything, and that is hardly any.)

One good thing about all that (beyond the enormous relief I was feeling) was that I had a place to take the crap, with a little room even left over for my large physical person, and almost enough for my introvert’s mind besides. The house I’d left behind had steadfastly refused to sell in the three years I had sojourned in hell. The place this house was in would be hell too, for most normal people. To me it was Sanctuary, and a few clicks south of heaven.

It took three trips. One in a huge truck, one in a smaller truck, and finally one in my crammed sporty little red pearl.

Another good thing, very selfishly defined, was that the pandemic lockdowns and closures and protocols were only just beginning to ramp up then. Thus I came back to find the familiar world altered in ways that soothed my nature, which is even normally antisocial, but especially so then.

And Jesus Christ in a bucket, did I need soothing.

It might be a slight overstatement to say that I was brain-damaged. And it might not be.

I was certainly closer to mental dysfunction and illness than I have ever been in my life. My dreams were tormented and my sleep was correspondingly spotty. The exhausted wakings brought little relief. I was wrecked physically and emotionally and spiritually most of all.

The almost perfect mental quiet of the rough house in the nothing town was the only thing keeping me together. The quiet even had a literal analog–not many trains were running then, so there was far less trainsong–on an average day the biggest noise came from church bells tolling the enervated hours.

I had an earned lump sum of three month’s wages, because they typically pay professors out across the academic year, including the summer months I was only just entering. I had a brief grab at pandemic-enhanced unemployment besides, and after that some few more months of it, unenhanced. So no immediate money worries, and in fact no real current worries of any kind, which was just as well, because dealing with the ones in my rearview mirror chasing me like demon ghosts was everything I could just barely handle.

I found the corner where the outdoor tools had been heaped off the truck and I picked up the scythe first.

I went after the years of weeds with a vengeance, and I banged on them weeds just like they were the bosses’ head: Iiii don’t want to work. I just want to chop on the weeds all day …

I poured off good clean sweat, grabbed the rake next, and piled the tangled yard waste high.

I built a shed by myself from a kit because no one had a driver to spare to bring me one ready-made. That made more room inside.

I had some vague notion about getting another job. The closest I got was hauling Trudy’s cat to Indiana for a thousand bucks plus expenses. That didn’t come with a dental plan. True to my nature, I didn’t care about that, until I was crippled by a giant painful cavity in a wisdom tooth that should have come out decades ago anyway, had I been a judicious and normal kind of human-american soul.

But even an episode of brutal pain and expense wasn’t enough to get me serious about crawling back to employment, because the sweetness and healing of the long quiet hours was just too compelling to break.

At the end of last year it was mostly broken for me. It’s not a story I want to tell right now. It’s edgily fraught.

Suffice to say, the sanctuary is for the most part dust in a wind that’s moved on.

Somewhere in here I also want to make clear that all through this process, I have never for a moment been dependent on the kindness of strangers or anyone else. There’s nobody holding up my end but me. There has been great generosity of spirit and liquid resources amongst my patrons and family, and for that I am deeply grateful every day. And–ain’t nobody stamping the mortgage paid every month but the Bare Terre Hisself. It’s stupid and insecure to need to say it. But that’s fine.

All I’m really about now is re-creating full sanctuary in some form, and that’s where this whole truck and trailer and alt-stove and alt-shower and solar energy thing comes in. Thee Nomadix.

Once I have a mobile shell, I’ll move with that wind. Across to the state park system over the border for a time, perhaps, but …

For four hundred a month, I can park it downtown in my dream town, a mile from the empty lot that is mine, and for another hundred I can have onboard high-speed satellite internet, when Elon gets his shit really together, any day now.

Set up there so close, I will finally get a job. It will be one that I can leave utterly and completely behind me after every eight-hour sale of my labor. Other than that I truly don’t give a fuck what it is. Something at the college or slinging hash or sweeping up–it just has to be serene work with minimal managerial oversight and meddling.

I’ll get this work for the sole purpose of collecting money enough to build strong and legal final sanctuary, on the empty lot. I expect that’s about two years of wages worth.

Living and working right there, it would be easy to straw-boss the construction process too, or even do as much of it as I’m able by myself.

To close this retrospective reflection I want to share what paring is. It’s a very old concept in our ancient common tongue.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pare

It means so many seemingly different things, but I advance the theory that in essence, to pare is to prepare.

You bring a chili pepper home. But to make use of it, you have to wash it and pare off the ends–strip out the seeds and veins too if you’re a person who likes flavor but not much heat.

Maybe you peel a potato, maybe you make edible rice from dry rice.

It’s all paring, especially if you take something away from the thing you’re preparing in order to fully procure it for the intended purpose.

It doesn’t have to be food.

Trim away at the boxes of unsorted crap.

Reduce your material footprint to the essential things, whatsoever is honestly essential to you.

For the truly enlightened that might be a bowl and chopsticks, a flute slung across a shoulder.

For mere mortals like me, a large blank walled sheltered space, a Le Creuset pot, a computer running Linux natively, a toothbrush that electrically hums. Or even two such spaces, one fixed in a divine geography and one that rolls.

I think the damage to my brain or spirit is mostly healed now, after these two years. Not to say no mark is left upon me, or that there are no scars.

I’ll be alright, for a while.

With excruciating slowness, I am calming down.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing overall. I do know that when I think of you my reader, I fret a lot, about being such a downer all the time, and about beating you over the head with my intermittently justified outrage. Thus–I hope that regardless of whether my trend toward calm is an absolutely good thing, that it’s a bit of relief for you at least.

Out of the corner of my eye, while watching an unrelated video, I saw a headline from the AP. It read in full: “Israeli police beat pallbearers at journalist’s funeral”.

I didn’t search out the article. The headline alone, coming as it did from a theoretically neutral source like the AP, was enough on its own.

There can be no possible justification for the act it describes. But I’m not foaming at the mouth about that; I’m not even all that angry.

There’s more resignation than anger in me right now, and today’s post is an attempt to try to explain why.

I’ll start by laying down this familiar recent track. Like you, I am a citizen of the Empire.

This Empire of ours, using the pronoun advisedly, is six percent of the world population and that population uses forty percent of the world’s resources. The Empire’s foreign policy is to keep things rolling along in the direction of that brutally tipped ratio. The domestic policy is to keep you and I happy or even proud about it, and locked in the belief that we deserve it, because … freedom or something … It doesn’t matter. All that is truly necessary is that from time to time, you find your lips moving and forming words like, “Yeah, I know we’re not perfect and I know we have a lot of problems in this country, BUT …”

You are so free, to end the statement any way you like.

But all that is just recapitulation.

I watched a journalist truly dear to me, Aaron Mate’, interview another actual and serious journalist, Seth Something, about This War We’re In. (When I say ‘we’re at war’, these aren’t my words, but the recent words of highly placed Democratic politicians, for what that’s worth.) The Seth guy is not out on the radical fringe like myself or Mr. Mate’. The interview showed he was much more toward the thoughtful center, unabashedly slamming Putin for invading, even while acknowledging the US role going back years, and so on. I think you might like hearing him–he represents a perspective that is midway between my extremism, and the kind of extremism that tries to sell you on the 40 billion being a good thing, while holding up Zelensky as some kind of manly savior-hero of his good and faultless country of innocent white people.

Anyway. This isn’t about Ukraine. The interview sobered me, pushed this deadly calm deeper into me.

But the ground for that sobering was laid by something I’d watched earlier:

Why Iraq is Dying

Again, we have a very centrist source, laying out some very simple historical facts in a very rational way.

Before learning them, should you choose to, ask yourself: Why did Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait in 1990?

According to conventional wisdom, it was because Hussein was an evil madman bent on expanding his own little Empire. Perhaps that sounds familiar, in the modern context.

After learning them, you will be well placed to understand what Kuwait is to this day–surely “a sovereign state” per the standard of fact employed by the strict neutrals of Wikipedia. But much more besides. It was and is the invented creation of an empire, designed from scratch to be a power projection point “in the region”, and to keep the 40 or 50 percent of our world’s wealth flowing hard to the West. To look out, don’t you know, for Our Interests. Let’s say, our money, our freedoms.

But in order for Kuwait to be invented, it had to first be crudely carved off the haunch of the beast called Iraq, and then given away to a single family down there who were willing to play ball with the British.

Over the useless objections of an Iraqi king with no army or power.

Leaving Iraq with no deepwater port. Leaving what remained of Iraq to be artificially composed of three completely separate groups who hated each other.

By design, to keep them weak and divided. (Here you must shake your head gravely and sagely, muttering: Ah, them damn people’ve been killing each other for thousands of years; pass the damn pretzels.)

There are many, many other such “sovereign state” power projection points in this world. I could name you a couple of big ones, but let’s diplomatically leave that as an exercise for the reader.

We’re speaking here, as the title of the linked article puts it, about The Mechanisms of Western Domination.

The colonial mentality is often thought of as something we’ve outgrown, something that died out with our racist grandfathers, something icky and irrational.

No, my darling.

It is a living breathing killing thing and it is directly responsible for the magnificent Standard of Living we so cherish in The Land of Opportunity.

The Mechanisms of Western Domination directly make possible that glad lucky feeling in you, to have not been born in some shitty somaliland.

Those places are the exploited places, robbed of anything valuable and left to die. By the Exploiters.

By Winston Churchill and Barack Obama, in my name and your name.

The glad lucky feeling was planted deliberately in us. Someone must have been looking out for us, no? Was it god?

Secretly and truly, it was the opposite of god.

I have no interest in convincing you that Saddam Hussein was a great guy, a patriot, a freedom fighter. Nor his updated Russian replacement either. Nor that either of their invasions were ultimately morally justifiable.

I just don’t see any meaningful difference between those invasions and the Iraqi one, the Afghani one, the one in Vietnam or Korea or god help us Grenada.

I don’t see any meaningful difference between an invasion with tanks, or a regime change project of any bold or secretive kind–let’s incite a revolt here, assassinate a leader there, redraw a map, rig an election, bring down the mighty justice hammer of sanctions.

For the Empire, maintaining the 6:40 ratio is a question of By Any Means Necessary.

They need for you to believe that those means are just as necessary to your personal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as they are to Monsanto’s quarterly profits, or the maintenance of a billionaire oligarch class.

Maybe you do believe it. Maybe it’s even true in some twisted way.

Most people do believe it.

For many of them … it is true, in the way of a necessary lie.

And that’s why I’m calm today.

Because so long as they do, so long as It Is … there’s no real hope for this world.

My calm is resignation to these facts.

Yelling about them changes nothing and only makes my head throb and my heart break.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

Upton Sinclair said it before any of us were born.

“His salary” depends not only on his remaining uneducated about some Mechanisms. His salary also depends on the great machine of inequality, on a network of power projection points, on robbing Iraq blind and shooting it when it objects.

Madeline Albright said half a million Iraqi kids flushed down the shitter was worth it, and this is exactly what she meant. It was worth it because it paid her salary, and maybe ours too.

The world is indeed full of bad people. I acknowledge the fact.

Calmly now.

Why is it, do you suppose, that the red/white/blue empire is so concerned about Taiwan–especially considering that it formally recognizes the PRC as the sole legitimate China?

In particular, why would the Empire let a place like Hong Kong be reabsorbed into China with only muted formal tongue-clucking, but set up whole new networks of military alliance to prepare for the day Beijing moves on Taiwan?

When the time comes to shoot about it, you are going to hear plenty about defending the liberty of the brave Taiwanese against the Other Autocratic Regime. But just as in Europe right now, no one will be talking about why the Empire claims to have any security interest at all in a tiny island so far away, and right off the coast of its true major rival.

If China starting pouring advanced weaponry into Cuba …

We already know what would happen, because essentially it happened sixty years ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But our favorite Empire, pouring the same into an island just off China’s coast?

That’s already being painted as perfectly acceptable. This is the dictionary definition of hypocrisy.

Fortunately you are wildly intelligent enough to read this blog, and so you will know exactly why Earth’s two major empires will inevitably clash in this spot.

Taiwan, it turns out, produces 92% of the world’s supply of something all modern empires desperately need.

You have to watch the video to learn what it is, but I think you’ll find it remarkably entertaining anyway.

There’s nothing here to see. Don’t pay any attention. It will do your heart no good to pay attention.

But don’t forget to smash that like button!

She’s dead at 51.

She was a journalist sent down to Gaza to cover an Israeli “raid” on the Palestinians.

She and a colleague walked past an Israeli checkpoint in flak jackets marked “Press”.

Just after passing it, she was shot in the back of the head above the flak jacket.

The Israelis first claimed the Palestinians did it, and then quickly released footage in their own defense.

Which footage turned out to be quite bogus.

Now our dear NPR reports today that what happened is just another tragic, unexplainable mystery.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

But then again.

My Way is just the Matrix.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman Proves That We Live in a Simulation

Does he really?

Yeah pretty much.

You can see the soiless drifting dust of the alley. The hardy foxtail weeds, scrap twigs leftover from last year.

And three daisies.

The headwaters of Hah-quah-sa-eel, known to the colonizers as the river Gila, because every mother and every mother’s son could use a bit of soothing right now.

It’s as good as diamond rain and maybe even better in the right light.

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep. His brother Cain tilled the soil.

(Genesis 4, more or less)

***

Like my father before me, I am firstborn, tall and strong and not too hard on the eyes; make a charismatic first impression that doesn’t take long to wear off or down, and have a steel-trap mind for certain things, especially words.

Like my father before me, underneath the veneer, some ineluctable thing hides, in a shambles of a brokenness.

This was supposed to be a whole theory post, about firstborns and the mark of Cain.

But it got broke too.
Can somebody just put on a record, please?

Let me disclose something shocking.

In some very real sense, I don’t care about the abortion debate. I don’t care about the Ukraine or the fictional sovereignty symbolized by any made-up line forced into reality by the existence of border checkpoint huts. I don’t care about Will Smith, or Chris Rock, or addled Joe or evil Donald, or whether Twitter is owned by Elon or some other oligarch/fuckpile of oligarchs. I don’t even care about the poverty of children of Arkansas. Not really and truly and deeply. If I did, I’d be doing something about it, beyond hanging my self-worth and mission energy on the faithful rendering of rants like this one.

The truth is that it’s the very meaninglessness of all these things to what’s left of my life and days that makes it easy for me to obsess about them in episodic manic bursts.

Further, if you tell me that any of them somehow do matter to you my beloved, really, I’m going to be quietly skeptical of that pending further exposition, about how they matter to you, and what you’re doing about it.

What I do care about is diamond saturnine rain and pinto beans.

I care and I will never know why, about the Shaggy Man and the origin stories of Princesses and Goddesses alike.

I go back, to not caring, when it comes to the question of what kind of person that makes me.

***

I go back, to caring, when I learn little bits like this one:

“America is 6% of the world’s population that consumes 40% of the world’s material and economic resources”.

I have no damn idea if that’s still precisely true, or worse, or better. I learned it long ago. It was true then, and it has been roughly true for my entire life, as … an American.

It means: the other 94% of humanity has had to divvy up the remaining half amongst themselves, decade after decade.

So that we could have Freedom! To drive big cars with sexy tailfins down the great mother road. Or to take our sane savvy Teslas a hundred miles up the Interstate for Taco Tuesday–it’s the same thing.

So that we could have sock hops and flash mobs and a supercomputer in every pocket. So that we could have ‘democracy’ and pledge allegiance, so that we could pray freely and thank the Founders’ Jesus that he didn’t chose to fling our mortal bodies down in some resource-starved shithole on the other side of the planet.

I care about the Policy Objectives of my Empire, and I love you enough to tell you what they are.

***

The foreign policy of the Empire since at least 1945 is to keep that foundational statistic above locked into place, through regime change or covert operations or assassination of Presidents (Castro, Lumumba, Kennedy, Hussein) or sanctions or invasion or occupation or any variation of evil that leaves US with the lion’s share of oil or gas or rubber or lithium or cobalt or wheat or whatever else it craves. When the Empire talks about Our Interests Overseas, this is exactly what they mean. Resources need to keep flowing disproportionately into the System, and anything at all is justified in the name of keeping it that way.

The domestic policy of the Empire is more subtle.

The domestic policy is to keep you and me convinced that “we” deserve that lion’s share. We’re the smartest. We work the hardest. We’re the most free. We’re the democracy and democracy is God’s will–everybody knows that. Even the Shiites will of course greet us as Liberators, because what we bring is Liberty. And Justice too. For all. If we should stumble across an oilfield or two in the process, WeThePeople go right ahead and consider that the hand of Providence, clear proof that we are chosen by a will Divine. Just as he chose us to save the European homeland from the Hitlerman, and right the wrong of Jewish suffering by giving them their own sovereign country in some completely blank spot on the map, devoid of any resources or anything else save a few wandering heathens and savages. Just like America itself.

The domestic policy of the Empire is to put every tool at hand, from kindergartens to advertising agencies, to the godly work of making sure you know how lucky you are to have been born in the Land of the 40% of everything.

Like Albert said:

“Private capitalists inevitably control the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions … “

The domestic policy of the Empire is to thwart any source of information you might have, to reach any conclusion that doesn’t comport with the happy six percent owning half of Everything as god intended.

The Empire only cares about having anything and everything it wants, and making sure you feel the same, making sure you, and me, and Will Smith and Angelina Jolie and Sean Penn and Neil Young are all fully on board with that, because we are the blessed, and deserve it, and as for those other people … we shall choose their most photogenic babies, and bring them home with us to The Home Of The Brave, and make them part of the six percent who Jesus loves best.

That’s freedom, baby.

You will always be free to think and feel and say anything you like.

So long as it doesn’t traitorously challenge the Unequal Word, as the apostate Assange did, but don’t think about him.

Believe in me, and be saved.

***

I don’t care about Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is Satan.

I do care, and I will never know why, about the poetic sounds that snakes make while slithering in apple trees.

I’m not a professor. I’m not a success. I’m not as bright as I think I am. I’m not a journalist or a novelist.

I’m an old eccentric herpetologist and music teacher and that is my freely held delusion.

I am the Shaggy Man, and that is both my name and my job title.

I am irascibly and pettishly ungrateful about having been born into the six percent, and though I often wish my eyes sparkled with kindliness, they do not.

But I am grateful to the mother who bore me.

I am grateful to the selfishness of the schizophrenic father who donated the seed I grew from twisted.

I’m grateful for you.

The shattered and confused tone of this Wall Street article is pretty priceless. You can get a sense of it from the subhead, which seems to suggest that Francis has some kind of learning disability.

That’s not the story. The story simply put is that the Pope, like any thinking person not constantly brainwashed by the western media, suggested that the brave, innocent, freedom-loving government of Ukraine, and the imperial powers that put it there in the first place, might just possibly be as responsible for this war as your favorite Ruskie Supervillain and his hideous commie autocrat henchmen.

If you read closely you can almost feel the WSJ writers choking on the bitterness of this truth pill.

I suggest you don’t read it at all. Instead, check out a version of the story not told through clenched teeth.

It’s totally fine to dismiss me as a dreamy kook who just doesn’t live in the real world full of bad people. Often I wish it were actually true. It’s fine to dismiss Glenn Greenwald as a closet right-winger–he’s said he doesn’t care.

But seriously, my darlings.

Are you not even the least bit curious about seeing what our beloved Francis sees, and why?

Source and context, courtesy GG.

If I really were a Putin puppet, maybe I’d ask him nicely to invade Arkansas next, so that CNN would dress up in their pretend correspondent uniforms and interview some mothers and children there. Could your heart-strings take it?

I’m coming on down from this brief cycle of political ranting, which has been brought to you by the American Free Womb Association, our good friends at Pfizer and Lockheed-Martin, and in particular the sound of liberal american manhood crawling all over itself to try to prove what good allies they are to their wives, mothers, aunts and everyone else capable, though not always willing, to be popping out a fresh puddle of placental humanity into this vale of tears.

I started that sentence trying to change my own subject.

I failed.

Please pray for my sanity.

First let’s stipulate: Republicans bad, Orangeman bad, you’ll get no blowback from me on any of it.

But.

Roe v. Wade stood as a ruling for 50 years or so.

In all that time, the Democrats somehow never managed to get around to codifying the decision into law. It’s a thing they could still do, this week or next.

It won’t happen, precisely because enshrining a right to abortion into a legislated right once and for all, and taking the issue out of the Court’s hands permanently, would deprive The Party of one of their major scare tactics and cultural wedge issues.

What they’ve told you all your life is: If you’re pro-choice … you have no choice. You MUST vote blue no matter who, because the President appoints the Justices, and the Justices decide, about that abortion thing you care so much about.

It was a great game while it lasted, a real barnburner of a cowcatcher. Not the only one by any means, but mighty fine.

They’re on the scout for a few more such issues.

Gramps Joe thinks he might have a live one. You’re gonna freaking love Cold War 2.0.

It would be unfashionable to start yammering about the Red Menace or the Yellow Peril.

Even the Commie bogeyman doesn’t have the same motivational impact it once did. Any college-educated young person shrugs and says, yeah, they’re atheists. Okay. So am I.

So it won’t be democracy vs. communism this round. Instead, it’s “democracy” vs. “autocracy”.

Wikipedia: “a system of government in which absolute power over a state is concentrated in the hands of one person”.

Which is not the case in either Russia or China, but in fact is, in examples like our good maniac friend in Saudi Arabia. Who we will never be at war with, at least until he decides that petrodollars are a little too 1995 for his taste.

Also, democracy as practiced currently in the US is just a sick fucking joke played on the gullible.

In China, in France, in the UK and Canada, in America as in Russia, there is only one form of government in the serious modern world. A small group of economic and political elites run the show from top to bottom, for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else, with “parties” amounting to fashion statements and cultural signalling. The very moment “gay marriage” reached 51% approval in the polls, good old Barack was suddenly and totally on board–the issue made zero difference to the power structure anyway, so throwing it out there like a beefy bone was just a freebie in any case. Lookit everyone: Diversity! Never you mind about that little old Wall Street bailout! Or your own underwater mortgage!

Meanwhile, according to our Dear Leader’s own words, World War III is already happening. Ukraine is just the first battle. He said it plainly. Are you listening? He is preparing you for the many to come.

Doubtless it will involve great sacrifice for you and those you love.

Doubtless you will offer each sacrifice with a big full patriotic American heart because it is so worth it, at least to the bottom lines of those people that own you, and … of course, to what’s left of those values we hold so dear.

When your greatest sacrifices start returning home in body bags, things may start to look a little different, just as they did to a hundred thousand parents in the wake of Vietnam.

But sufficient for each day is its own trouble.

Matthew Six, verse 34.

A few random facts first.

Saint Obama could have slowed this train down. But he chose to roll over for Turtle McConnell in the matter of his nomination of Saint Garland, with barely a peep. Oh, and Guantanamo is still open too somehow.

Saint RBG could have, but she decided to bet the heavenly farm on Hillary winning, and she lost that hairy bet.

Saint Joe coulda. Remember all that chatter about expanding the court two years ago? It’s a shame he lost track of that one, along with every other good vaguely progressive idea he ever heard. He got a little distracted. 33 billion more for the Azov Battalion, please!

Tactically speaking, the nominal guardians of all that is good and holy around here are a clown car going nowhere.

But they are team blue, so they are spared all rage today.

Them facts are just sprinkles on the cupcake, though.

Crotchety geezer mode, engage.

I was born before there was a Roe v. Wade. I lived all my life with it. And god willing I’ll be here a little while, after it’s gone.

In all that time, regardless of the state of the law or our “freedoms”, abortion has never, ever, been illegal for rich women anywhere. Regardless of whether they lived in Montpelier, Vermont or Chickenfuck, Alabama, not a single rich woman was ever stopped from serenely terminating an unwanted pregnancy, in a clean well-lighted clinic in Basel, Switzerland, or some ironically named Virgin Island.

Most laws only hurt, or even apply to, the poor.

So I have a plan.

Let’s take that 33 billion, and instead of pouring it down the sinkhole of the latest unwinnable and purely European war, down into the pockets of alt-oligarchs at home and abroad, stoking the fires of inflation with stupid sanctions …

Every single American gets a week’s paid luxury vacation anywhere in the world. Even Basel, Switzerland.

In fact, let’s sweeten the deal, and say that in addition to a heated kidney shaped pool, and room service featuring a choice of osso bucco or organic polenta, everybody gets … health care! Up to a prudent point of course, because it’s not like it’s a human right or anything … let’s say 20K worth.

Or whatever abortions are going for in the more enlightened places these days.

Now.

If you are so Bidenista that you are compelled to mumble along with him something like “How ya gun pay for that”, even though I just told you how, I have a more modest version to offer.

You have to take a few more facts to get it though. I know, I’m a mean one.

There are 226 people working as executives for Planned Parenthood that make more than six figures a year, and some of them make more than seven.

But the average wage for a Medical Assistant working for the same organization, according to indeed.com is … $37,969/yr.

That’s all. I thought you should know.

So as a cheapskate alternative, when SCOTUS overturns, and the red state legislatures rush in to ban female choice, we put a contract out to bid, for a new breed of motorcoach carrier.

The routes will run, for example, from Utah to Oregon. From Texas to Minnesota. From South Carolina to Boston. Aboard these coaches will be red state refugee women, getting the medical care they deserve free of charge at blue state Planned Parenthood clinics.

They don’t get osso bucco, but Uncle Sam pays to put them up at, hell I don’t know, La Quinta. Something moderately civilized. The hotel chains will be tripping over themselves to get in on the action, so the government can negotiate prices, just like it is forbidden from doing for prescription drugs. I mean, let’s not make that mistake again; thanks again, Obama.

So there we have it. Either we have one week a year of socialist utopia, somewhere where that’s possible, or we have … budget humanitarianism, only for women of child-bearing age, ’cause that’s cheaper … OR ….

We keep voting for the lesser evil every four years and see where that gets us. The advantage of this popular approach is that we get to scream with impotent fury at those nasty dirty republican men, or Putins, or whoever, as they obligingly squat and shit all over the civil rights of us all, or the economic opportunities of the least of these among us, or even, I don’t know, the Gaza Strip, the Yemenis, downtown Kyiv. Pick your poison. We get to vent in livid outrage, prove ourselves to be the morally superior team, lose all the sleep we want, or just engage in the healthy exercise of railing about how the bad men are taking away the rights of women who will never be pregnant again anyway. Feels so fuckin’ good.

Personally … I want … to rail nevermore.

My own secret agenda, in proposing all these half and quarter measures, is to promote an American home where there is no such thing as a woman too poor to have human rights, because that’s what’s really at issue here–not this red/blue team sports bullshit, not this who-will-win the Fetus Football Super Bowl.

I didn’t tell you that right away because I knew what you’d say about me if I did.

This vision for the Republic For Which It Stands portion, of the thin strip …

So starry-eyed.

That poor addled dreamy boy.

Let him impress you just this once with his lantern-jawed pragmatism, his stolid well-reasoned contention that the Sky is the limit, that the Sky, in fact

Is Home.

“Things you do not expect to dig up from farmland: an ancient goddess with a penchant for wearing the severed heads of her enemies on her belt and then having enormous amounts of sex. That would be of course Anat, the goddess of beauty, love and war for many ancient mythologies, most notably the Canaanites”.

–from the description of This Video discussing a recent archaeological find

I’m passing familiar with this Goddess. She has dozens of forms and related names that arose and evolved over time (especially some few millennia back) and space (especially the shores of the Medi-Terranean), and even a clutch of more recent and less faraway incarnations. Sightings. Episodes.

The Wiki makes this briefly clear–“Anat, Anatu, classically Anath … ʿĂnāth; Canaanite: 𐤏𐤍𐤕 ʿAnōt; Ugaritic: 𐎓𐎐𐎚 … Egyptian Antit, Anit, Anti, or Anant) … is a major northwest Semitic goddess. Her attributes vary widely among different cultures and over time, and even within particular myths. She likely heavily influenced the character of the Greek goddess Athena”. And in considerably attenuated and bowdlerized manifestations, the Virgin Mary too, in the same creeping Western way that the local cavalry murdered a Native war chief and a quarter-century later named a county and a college after him.

I first knew her as Astarte and the first thing I learned was that she was an enemy Delilah who stood opposed to the patriarch Yahweh and all his good followers on almost every philosophical and stylistic point. For example, in the Genesis myth, Evil takes the form of a snake, but in the recently found sculpture, the snake is a prominent part of Her crown.

That was first-knowing, but nowhere near the last. Just the stories about her both ancient and modern are prone to turning what flows through your veins to ice.

I only heard of this latest discovery because I was scrolling the Rumble feed of RT. Which of course stands for Russia Today, an iconic example of ‘state-run media’, an honorific that of course also applies to PBS/NPR, although no one ever calls them that.

I don’t believe the hearing or the manner of it was any kind of coincidence.

Just as with what I’m reading now, which is a book called VALIS, by an author named Phillip K. Dick, who also wrote the original version of Bladerunner.

VALIS is set in our lifetimes; Bladerunner is the future.

The increasingly hypothetical Future.

Praise be to Ishtar.

This post named by the Spill’s #1 Patreoness, who is also celebrating a solar return today. Love you.

A gift for all.

Why Socialism?

This is the full text of the article from which the Einstein quote was pulled.

When we scratch at the papier-mâché myths of the greatest among us, like Al and like MLK we find class warriors. Socialists. Natural Marxists without portfolio. I don’t think that’s an accident.

I’m not in their league, perhaps in part because what comes naturally to me is instead closer to anarchism.

But I am listening with an open mind, and still trying to learn.

(No wonder they called the man a genius.
The lesson being that it is useless and dumb, to get mad at those individual citizens about it, whether they are deplorables or are quite righteously convinced of their own neolib enlightenment. They know not what they do. Hate the Game.)

I stole Al’s quote from the video linked below.

Biden* is dead wrong. DeSantis is right. Don’t worry, though …

No votes for either of them from me in any possible future. It’s the best I can offer you; apologies in advance. And of course, fuck all that shit; no player-hating; if thy eye offend thee, pluck a bitch right out.

* By which of course I mean not the man himself, but the elder abusing kleptocKlepopticYeahs who run his puppet show these days.

***

Today I began in fits and starts. I opened the gate. I dropped the ramp. Elliptically I convinced myself that it’ll be tall enough as it is, in spite of my head crashing against the pulley ten days ago. That’s not the door I’ll be using in the end. The door I’ll be using doesn’t exist yet. But that’s step two or three.

Step one. I tried to pull up the first big floorboard. One of the dozen or so screws was missing. All the others were either stripped or frozen, and the only one I actually extracted was broken off halfway down below somewhere.

I gave it an honest try and got honestly dirty, and then I said eff it, and hosed down each screw with WD-40 and closed her back up. But finding the can of penetrant reminded me that the front room, the workshop one, was close to done. I opened every box and can. Now it’s closer still, and done thoroughly and right to this point by several triangulating metrics.

Which is to say, the lost kitchen spare hardware now lives in a specific spot in the kitchen. The wrenches are sorted. There is a separate container that holds everything that has to do with Sanding.

Like that.

Perhaps it should have been the first video, but I wouldn’t do that to you or myself.

She told me today that we’re leaving in three weeks exactly, for ten days cross-country, and I didn’t like hearing it. Day in and day out I don’t want to go anywhere ever, except to unload the stacked mountain of recycling into Prettytown properly, or about as far the other direction to go gaze at a two-acre $2500 parcel out to Concho wistfully and for arcane reasons that make little practical sense.

Or down and down to the land I actually do own, of course, anytime.

In the meantime, I’m just going to live well and keep on keeping on. For three weeks. And then the visiting. And then ever after upon completion of the necessity so long as I can still draw breath from The Thin Strip. We are stardust.

I like watching the videos on planets and exoplanets and galaxies and nebulae, mainly because immersing myself in something like the origins of this solar system lets me have the delicious illusion of forgetting all about the thin strip of life on the third rock, and of course in particular the viral species that has come to dominate that strip in all the worst ways.

There are two errors in this perspective that make it into an illusion.

Firstly, a lot of these videos are all about various missions that have been launched in the last fifty years to study the Sol system and even beyond. These cost some millions or billions every time, and there’s a lot of people who say we should be spending the money some other way. I don’t have a strong opinion.

It’s true that megabucks for Jupiter is morally less defensible than, say, actually putting that money where our mouths are when we try to say that health care is a human right while living in a spacefaring society where that’s clearly bullshit …

But tripping off to Neptune is a better thing to do with that money than giving it to Zalensky via Raytheon, or overthrowing that government in the first place, or any of the other multifaceted misadventures of the military-industrial complex to the tune of trillions every year.

Point being–of course people and their choices are behind every beautiful picture of a newly discovered planet circling a star far away. You can’t even have ‘discovery’ without reference back to this thin strip.

The second thing is even more gnarly, and that is: even the hardest of these hard scientists is nothing more than a mythmaker in the end. Neil de Grasse Tyson can chatter all he wants about how the scientific method is, eventually, infallibly glorious and the crown jewel of our humanity. But there’s no proof, scientific or otherwise, that he’s right.

Turns out that as of last year, the big bang theory has fallen out of favor with the people at the top of science.

Just like Pluto was the ninth planet until these experts changed their minds.

Nobody knows Nothin’, baby. It does remain highly unlikely that Creation kicked off 6000 years ago, or whatever those less adroit mythmakers say. Or that the Diva known as God exists, or hears our prayers.

But that’s just like, my opinion, man. There is no god but Lebowski.

Yet … even this state of speculation and suspended certainty has some charm.

And it is soothing, to listen to the mythmakers intone and proclaim on their latest … theoretical creations.

I like going for a ride and wondering about how Mercury came to be.

I don’t know why I like it.

Doubtless the answer lies somewhere in biochemistry, eh?

No.

But that’s okay with me, this one day, amen.

It’s a small world after all, at least if you measure it vertically.

The crust of the earth on our little planet is between 3 and 44 miles thick.

The atmosphere … it’s harder to say, but one measure called the Kármán line is a little over 60 miles measured from the surface, to the start of space.

So the habitable zone of all life as we know it anywhere is this thin strip on and above and below this surface, less than 100 miles. Measured vertically.

Even that’s generous, because although life can theoretically exist at extreme temperatures down close to the mantle, or way far up in the outer reaches of the atmosphere, most life doesn’t.

It instead exists in an even narrower band, closer up or down to the part we stand on. A band smaller than the average Sunday drive. Maybe still miles, but maybe miles measured in the single digits.

I learned this starting here, and doing a little researching over and above.

Bonus fact.

At any given moment, tens of millions of tons of diamond hail is falling down toward the interior of Saturn. As it gets warmer and closer to what passes for the surface of the planet, it melts into diamond rain.

I never thought about diamond rain before.

An ancient old brick church.

In front it is now a vast apartment and the one I’m living in it. The sunny front room is the Bridge, marked with monitors.

Around the back there’s a marketplace with a dozen or more tiny shops, each selling the very best of things I need. I remember best the butcher and a couple pounds of fish wrapped up in white paper with a magic marker scribble.

So not just a pretty living place, but an ecosystem to go with it.

The produce of a dream that ends at seven o’clock in the morning on a bright Solitude Day.

In the real world, no church, only a blank slot of land.

Just within a mile of the Co-op.

My dreaming outpaces any reality.

But fully realized it will be quite close enough.

I don’t need you to worry for me ’cause I’m alright
I don’t want you to tell me it’s time to come home
I don’t care what you say anymore this is my life

Go ahead with your own life
Leave me alone

–B. Joel, in the year I graduated first

It may well be that this lyric is grunting exactly what Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ grunts; that it’s a tepid paean to male ego.

But I would propose that it is secretly saying the opposite, or at the least permitting the listener to acknowledge the existence of the opposite–that I do need you to worry for me but can’t afford to let that feeling loose.

Which would be both more poetic, and more true sometimes.

I bounce between the two poles. Neither is right, nor wrong, always.

There’s a longer version of this post yet to be written.

For now this will do.

If you have Sabrina Salvati, Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, and Glenn Greenwald on one side of any argument, regardless of what it is–and on the other you have MSNBC hosts, and chirpy little professional Democrats like Robert Reich …

Which side you choose tells you, me, and the whole world everything there is to know, about the true state of your mind and soul, at least politically and socially and intellectually.

There are plenty of people in the first group who hold smart views in common across a wide range of topics and issues. They generally have smaller voices, less visible platforms, and way less money.

In the second group, you’ve got a general consensus of half-informed partisans and well-greased career liars, who are wrong either because they are well-paid to be loudly wrong, or who hold neo-liberal views due to a reliance on a kind of comforting secular religion, based on blind faith instead of actual critical thinking–which, to be fair, they may simply lack the capacity for. It could also be a lack of time, or patience, or historical memory, or tolerance for bleak realities … it’s … a lack of something.

So here’s the test case that meets all of the above criteria perfectly.

If you’re reading me with uncommon alertness, and are plugged in and awake enough this week, you might already know the exact issue I’m dancing around; the particular issue addressed in the video.

Next week there will be another.

So yesterday I spent way too much time on my first real pot of Just Pinto Beans. Along about 11 pm they were done well enough, and they turned out pretty well. Next time I’m going to try the pressure cooker.

This morning I got to thinking about making chilaquiles, and as I researched it became apparent that what I really wanted was migas, instead.

In their most basic form, migas are just corn tortillas and eggs, just like tagos from the ancient days.

Consider this.

Put some chopped onion (I used shallot) into a warming oiled pan. Garlic maybe … the usual savory base.

Then cut up a few corn tortillas into bite size pieces and throw those in on top. I don’t think you can overcook them, but you can and possibly should try.

Scramble four eggs and dump those in next.

At this point I probably had the heat up too high, because the eggs cooked very fast and started sticking to the bottom. Less heat, probably more oil.

But it worked out for me anyway because I cooled things down with a half jar of green chiles. I’m not sure why, but this deglazed the bottom of the pan pretty nicely.

When the chile is warmed and integrated, put some beans in. I had those nice homemade pintos and maybe I put in a few too many, but saul good, man. A can of storebought is easy, and probably good enough. Even the organic is only two bucks.

Cheese over the top. Maybe at the same time as the beans? I don’t know. You’ll figure it out. This isn’t the recipe channel.

It is the discovery channel, small D.

Here are a few reasons why this begins to take shape as an ideal.

It’s cheap and optionally can be made with things that have a long shelf life, the eggs and cheese possibly excepted.

It’s healthy–wheat-free, gluten-free, and meat-free (though not vegan). The corn+pintos make a complementary protein over and above the animal ones.

It’s breakfast, a meal which I tend to prefer regardless of the hour; and spicy Mex besides.

It’s wildly flexible. There are a lot of things that would taste good in here that I didn’t list or use this time.

It doesn’t take long, and the fact that it’s a one-pot meal means less time wasted cleaning up. Also you only need a single burner.

And finally, this might be a little idiosyncratic and personal, but …

I love corn tortillas and prefer them over flour, for taste reasons and now also for health ones too. I eat them rarely though, because fussing with getting them edibly delicious is typically a one-at-a-time affair, and thus a major complicating pain in the ass.

This method gets around all that with simple elegance.

It was a very satisfying meal as both cook and eater. Philosophically. Practically. Even as a simple hungry beast.

***

I’m not done with flour tortillas though, because burritos are indispensable.

I’ve collected four alt-flours. Almond and coconut …

But even better, potentially, chickpea and quinoa. Better because these two items are already on the list of staples and things I can order in bulk (alongside the pintos, and brown rice). Making flour from them is theoretically one food processing step away in a pinch.

The testing will proceed.

Or, “Barb Aryan for you on Gate One, Sir.”

More murican torture life coaching.

My insurance company just sent me one of those cheery corporate personalized emails.

They wanted to let me know how much they care about me. Personally.

So, they were offering an online course designed to teach me how to drop my stress through reducing my screen time.

An online.

Course.

The very existence of the concept is stressing me out more than fourteen straight hours of YouTube videos about how to cook quinoa or cauliflower tacos ever could.

Speaking of political, subspecies non-overt:

If this is not the most American thing you’ve ever seen, bring on the competition.

Here’s the link if you want … personally I could only take about a minute of it, whereas the pic told me all I felt I needed.

And … admittedly … overt …

I honestly don’t know what the hell they’re doing to themselves, and collaterally us peasants.

I’ll put the rest of my mouth-breathing down in a comment to spare you.

Yesterday I went to the dentist and received a much improved report card, in exchange for all my moral dental effort of the past months.

The day before that, I went to Kevin’s and picked up both truck and trailer. They sit like omens in the driveway in the exact spot where I was first free, of being a professor. Five hundred dollars for an alternator on top of what was expected, and three hundred for a brake controller after all, and that’s the price of the game.

Today I spent my freedom and solitude putting my head back on somewhat straight, some kinda Jack Punkinhead; I did good. Fresh piles, fresh sortings.

Home is interesting and important. I have this one I’m inhabiting, and now I have parts of two more to complete, and maybe getting out from under this first one for a big profit when the two are ready. It’s a massively complicated multi-stage job and no one can do it but me.

Communication infrastructure, from a camera and a keyboard to a laptop and a Platform or three … keeping tabs on Elon’s Starlink Internet, and maybe his Twitter replacement too. (I had this thought that I could put all the overtly political stuff over there instead of here. Perhaps you’d like that!)

Both those things flow into building income streams of one kind and another, but revenue generation and allocation are their own independent issues too. Can I take a job there? At the University? Just think how much easier making a Home there would be, with that cashiering of my time …

Time itself. Was his demeanor. Which is worse–the tyranny of an alarm, or the tyranny of oversleeping? Time itself. Is all we have … literal truth.

Health, food, relationships, learning from Thich Naht Hanh …

Reorganizing and refining systems for all of the above.

Clearing the decks so these important things can rise to their rightful preeminence in my life, and the rest can fall to the sea floor and become scenic mud.

The time is. Eight minutes past.

You’re okay buddy it’ll be alright.

It’s eleven, fiftynine. And I want to stay alive.

In the 1990s, a guy named Gregory Maguire saw an opportunity I will always envy him for seeing before I did.

He realized that the copyright on the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz would soon and finally finally be expiring, thus freeing him to take it as an Ur-text of his own and completely re-imagine it. The result, often described as something like “the Oz story told from the point of view of the Wicked Witch”, ended up being called Wicked.

It’s really damn good. Not what I would have done, exactly, but hell–to the victors go the spoils, and this author I will grudgingly admit was a very deserving victor. Plus, he didn’t rest on his laurels, but produced three more Oz Revisited books, among others.

He has little to say about my Ozma, and nothing at all about my Shaggy Man so far as I know. I’m kind of grateful for that.

But he does consider Lurline, the ancient force said to be Ozma’s mother, and now whenever I’m asked about my religion, I can just truthfully say that I’m a Lurlinist, instead of snarking on about the Flying Spaghetti Monster like I used to do.

There’s win at every hand.

If You have any deep connection to Oz, or even if you don’t, I can’t recommend these books highly enough. They should infuriate, disturb, and delight you by turns, if my experience is prophetic. Savor and enjoy.

The third book, and remember that we’re only up to 1907 now, is called Ozma of Oz. There’s little mention made about the origin story of the fourteen-year-old Princess, but there are many passages thick with praise for her inestimable beauty.

It’s not a great book, and number four is worse, but the fifth one (The Road to Oz) redeems, in my eyes, by introducing another highly unusual and for me identifiable character.

The Shaggy Man is a beatnik or hippie type; way, way before his time, which in itself says some damn interesting things about the American subconscious.

Even more amazing is that Baum paints him in a largely sympathetic and even at times admiring light–not at all what we’d expect from the traditional interpretation of Traditional American values.

After Dorothy meets him randomly in Kansas, she does her best to show him the road to Butterfield as he asks, but the way is confused for them both by an unseen magic, and in the end it turns out that he only wanted to know which road went to Butterfield so that he could avoid that particular road. And now they are lost together.

“Will your folks worry?” asked the shaggy man, his eyes twinkling in a pleasant way.

“I s’pose so,” answered Dorothy with a sigh. “Uncle Henry says there’s ALWAYS something happening to me; but I’ve always come home safe at the last. So perhaps he’ll take comfort and think I’ll come home safe this time.”

“I’m sure you will,” said the shaggy man, smilingly nodding at her. “Good little girls never come to any harm, you know. For my part, I’m good, too; so nothing ever hurts me.”

Dorothy looked at him curiously. His clothes were shaggy, his boots were shaggy and full of holes, and his hair and whiskers were shaggy. But his smile was sweet and his eyes were kind.

“Why didn’t you want to go to Butterfield?” she asked.

“Because a man lives there who owes me fifteen cents, and if I went to Butterfield and he saw me he’d want to pay me the money. I don’t want money, my dear.”

“Why not?” she inquired.

“Money,” declared the shaggy man, “makes people proud and haughty. I don’t want to be proud and haughty. All I want is to have people love me … ”

In other words, I am happy and even a little proud to report that the Shaggy Man is a heartfelt Anarchist and Anticapitalist.

This holds both true and admirable for the author until near the end of the book, when Baum seems to lose the plot a little, or at least the spiritually political import of his ideas and ideals.

Introduced to the rich and royal splendor of the Emerald City, the ShaggyMan feels abashed and ashamed by his shagginess.

But Ozma in her wisdom has provided him a wardrobe full of clean and new garments of rich fabric, but cut shaggily like his old ones.

After one taste of that heady brew and those fancy threads, he’s begging to be allowed to stay forever in the fairy kingdom, and not ever have to go back to a materialist native land who never understood him and never would.

Shagginess is thus reduced from a rational response to an irrational economy, a rejection of progress and 19th century robber-barony, into a fashion statement and a consumerist dream. Thus, everything important and interesting about it is lost.

With a little thinking on the matter, I believe this is the perfect ending to the Shaggy Man’s origin story. The barely mentioned element of tragedy at the end turns his tale from a simple anarchic celebration, into a very useful cautionary tale.

There are times when I long for more money and more comfort in my life. I might well have gone myself to Butterfield and shook that man down for my fifteen cents. I’m not as good as the Shaggy Man in his original form. I’m not as good as Kwai Chang Caine, who would also neither give nor accept money for anything.

But in my heart of hearts, I believe pretty passionately that if I never had to want for anything–if all my material needs were guaranteed to be met in perpetuity with a grand and final retirement–then just about anything important or interesting about me … would be lost too.

I didn’t care for being a penniless hobo, it’s true.

I cared even less, though, for being respectable and what they call gainfully employed, which means being eternally answerable to an endless upward spiral of Boss Fools, from goose-stepping Chairs to well-dressed and genuinely evil CEOs.

The important and interesting things about me are all about how I’ve tried to square that wicked circle, and truly be free, not just from pinheads and their dumb daily demands, but from the Game itself, and the monopoly money it runs on into a million different dead end brick walls.

Without that ongoing tension and conflict threading through my life and words, I expect I’d be one damn boring read. So I’ve quit playing the lottery, and I don’t ever intend to travel to the Emerald City and be adopted, not even if I had an open invitation from the most beautiful Princess who ever lived.

When I was a kid, they put the film version of The Wizard of Oz on the tube pretty often. We had a fancy version of the hardcover book around too. The story was formative for me in a whole bunch of subtle ways.

Some time later, I became aware that there were sequels, and a lot of them, first written by Lyman Frank Baum himself, and then by many other authors deputized by his estate.

In the first paragraph of the first sequel, called The Marvelous Land of Oz, we meet someone new, an Oz native living in the northern Gillikin country. The character is introduced as “a youth called Tip” and the second paragraph says this boy lives with a sort of literal evil stepmother, a witch named Mombi.

Over the course of the novel, stuff happens and new characters are introduced–some old ones like the Scarecrow reintroduced–it’s a decent plot for a kid’s book.

But in the last few pages things get more interesting. Spoilers ahead. Glinda the Good Witch states the facts to Tip:

“You are not a girl just now,” said she, gently, “because Mombi transformed you into a boy. But you were born a girl, and also a Princess; so you must resume your proper form, that you may become Queen of the Emerald City.”

Tip, like the fine strapping adventurous lad he is, hates the idea passionately, but he ultimately drinks the potion, and consents to be laid upon rose silk cushions, behind significantly pink gossamer curtains, to change back into his original femme and fairy form.

Then they all lived happily ever after.

I have a million little things to say, tiny notes I’ve collected throughout the last 48 hours or so.

Maybe I’ll say them all briefly. Maybe I’ll try to find a connection between two or three. That’s always a goodness.

So is taking a lyric like a scripture to base a sermon on.

Come on aboard, I promise you you won’t hurt the horse
We treat him well, we feed him well
There’s lots of room for you on the bandwagon
The road may be rough, the weather may forget us

But won’t we all parade around
And sing our songs and wave our flags
A magic kingdom, greet us all hello
Greet us hello, greet us hello

That is REM, from their somewhat obscure collection of covers and oddities called Dead Letter Office. The song is just called “Bandwagon“.

People online will tell you all sorts of things about it–that it’s a sly slam at the band U2 for its preachiness about Faith, that it’s just making fun of the families that fetishize trips to Disney …

To me the perfect genius of the song is that the Bandwagon can be literally anything. Smoking pot with the cool kids as a teenager. Getting caught up in Scientology or Catholicism. Being a good citizen or patriot, so proud of your greatest country in the world and so willing to bomb that other Evil Empire over there.

It’s a satire of collectivism in any form.

These days, I’m more collective-oriented than I’ve ever been before.

But when this song was fresh and I was too, everything was about the heroism of the individual, and it was joyously easy to make fun of those yokel barn-raisers of any stripe, no matter how fine their clothes or how precise their diction.

I had no true friends and I had no family name, no colleagues or co-workers I gave one damn about, no co-religionists or comrades. Even my art was always going to be a thing I practiced completely alone, and my art was the most important thing. In theory ….

In reality the rent was just as important as the art. As must needs be, once You’ve been awakened from sleep in the park by a roving dog being “walked” off-leash by some rich collectivist asshole with a proper job to get to.

The migraine tensions between the necessary freedom to create and the necessary security of four walls defines my life to this very day, more than any other complex abstract reality.

Sometime in late October it gets cold enough here that the motivation for turning on the gas heat grows strong. Generally, the thermostat gets left a little above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and will stay there for the whole Cold Half of the year.

The autumnal equinox as classically defined in northern Europe is thus shifted a month later in this southerly climate, and this pattern will hold true throughout the year.

We celebrate the winter solstice mindfully in December, but properly in local terms that should be January.

Spring also comes a month later, and is defined by the fact that it stops officially freezing at night, or dropping below 32 degrees anyway. That’s the point we’re at now in mid/late April. Today, sunny and very windy with a high of 78. Tonight, 35. On Monday it briefly spikes into the eighties, but a week from today they’re saying only 67–even so, that 67 is paired with a 36-degree pre-dawn.

So again, it’s supposed to be March that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, but it’s April instead.

By late July, the regionally adjusted summer solstice, it’ll be hot, but not uninhabitably hot like down at one or two thousand feet. We’re almost a mile high and that means a saving grace of ten or fifteen degrees. I used to say you could count on ten days over a hundred, but as the climate fails it’s more like twenty.

The other saving grace is that many days will be marked by monsoon clouds building up in the afternoon and sometimes dropping blessed cooling rain that can briefly knock temperatures down into the low sixties.

I’ve lived through it all without AC, with only ceiling fans and windows open all night, shut tight against the solar warming as it returns in the dawn. But I did have a bathtub that year too, and dunking in it was a key part of the strategy as well.

By November we’ll be aching for that heat we cursed a few months before, and that’s the way of things.

The benefit of moving a little further south and going up a thousand feet is: cooler summers, with winters the same or even just a tiny bit warmer

Plus real trees. And the co-op for organics, one mile away instead of eighty-five. Fine coffee you don’t have to make yourself, necessarily. Birds.

Deer walking down Broadway in the nearly perfect stillness of a February night.

I stumbled across an interesting Indian news channel called CRUX. They were interviewing this John Mearsheimer guy, a professor at a major uni who is being pushed hard by the YouTube algorithm because he’s right in the political middle of the spectrum in the debate over the troubles.

In essence he says: This is a proxy war pure and simple, between Russia and the US/NATO.

The loser of the war will be Ukraine, because their country will be devastated no matter what.

The winner of the war will be … China.

Which is a much more sensible analysis to me than any amount of flag-waving, jingoism, self-righteousness, Putin-puppetry, or Putin-bashing we’re being fed by the propagandists east or west.

I have no more interest in scaring you with a Chinese dragon than I do in listening to brain-dead drivel about the bad Russian bear.

But that the stupid squabbling will only accelerate China’s rise to number one in the power rankings seems inevitable.

Biden’s presidency is going to be remembered as the turning point, not in building back better, not in making murica great again, but in the Empire losing its perch atop the unipolar, globalized world.

One batch of oligarchs slipping a little, a new batch of oligarchs made the new boss. A pox on all their houses, wherever they are, whoever they are. Don’t talk to me about freedom, or rule by the demos. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night, unlike so many of my cheerfully neotonous peers and countrymen.

Word Processors Are Evil And Should Not Exist

A normal person reading that title will think it nonsensical. MS Word or some Mac variant of it are central to a modern student experience, and that carries right over into most white collar drone jobs. Even among Linux users, Libre Office, with its ability to output .docx and other proprietary formats, is often seen as indispensable to being productive in a professional setting.

It only is if you let it continue to be the addictive shit DT describes.

There are so very many other examples of this in our culture, like the supposedly necessary evil of carrying a smartphone. Or maintaining a nuclear arsenal. Or shopping for a commercially produced tooth paste. Or engineering regime change all over the world, because it’s vital to protecting “our interests”.

So many lies little and big embedded from childhood into our assumptions, and injected deliberately, for the profit of someone else far away, so gently that the lies are like water to a fish.

When I was a teacher, the people who liked me told me I was Good at it.

But ‘good’ is a very loaded word in this context. Sometimes it fit, like whenever I wrote a new Linux class. But about half the time, I was teaching someone Photoshop, or Excel, or some other vast and costly piece of unnecessary garbage, complicit in the game and the lie. Over and over I compromised with evil in the name of making an easy, middle-class living.

Like most people do.

Until I couldn’t stand it any more, and they couldn’t stand me pointing out the obscene nudity of the Emperors that co-signed the paychecks.

Anyway: DT is telling the truth about this particular little slice of the satanic.

Now that I’m free of their Hell, for now, 99% of the time I use a very basic GUI text editor called Pluma. Tonight, always trying to be a better boy, I’m playing around with Wordgrinder again.

If you’re really hip, you’ll question me for trading in a GUI text editor for a terminal-based ‘processor’ and tell me to just finally go learn vi.

And I’d have to concede the validity of your damn point.

Mariupol to Russia, French journo says US Advisors are already running the war, and other stories.

A remarkably enlightening half hour from one of the Alexes at the Duran. I’ll say no more about it.

Meanwhile on the home front …

San Diegans moving to Mexico

Two minutes from the local SD news is enough to paint a stunning picture about why we can’t make it here any more.

Maybe it’s a shame that not all Americans live next to a border, and thus can afford a place to live, or afford health care for that matter.

The good news is that soon I will be one of those who do. Or almost.

From the place where my land is, it’s 88 miles exactly to the border checkpoint at Puerto Palomas on the other side of the frontera.

The little town’s official website says some amusing and informative things, like:

“The Mexican welcome wagon usually consists of street vendors selling bootleg copies of American-made movies, ‘designer’ sunglasses and wallets. Child ‘entrepreneurs’ make up the second wave with their little hands held out asking for your pocket change”. (This ain’t your murican chamber of commerce BS, baby.)

“Most US tourists come to Palomas to purchase low cost prescription drugs, get dental work done, eye examinations and same day purchases of prescription eye glasses … (or for the guacamole at the Pink Store)”

“You are more than welcome to drive your vehicle into Mexico, but most folks simply utilize the free parking lot on the U.S. side of the border and walk across. The parking lot is right on the border–as is Palomas”.

What they’re really saying at the last there is, you don’t even need to fuck with supplemental auto insurance.

Anyway. It’s about twice that far to Juarez, a city with millions of residents, if you count the American extension of it called El Paso. So if 88 miles to Palomas doesn’t suit, it’s not much further to get wider choices, in care or prescription drugs or generally less expensive shopping of any kind.

It’s 400 miles to the beachfront at Puerto Penasco, by the way.

I’ve had thoughts, about buying a second piece of land in a nearby but far less civilized place than the one I have. Mainly to evade the zoning restrictions, and just have a place to live out of a camper for a while sometimes. I wonder how difficult or (in)expensive it might be, to have that place be just on the other side of the alleged border. The usual places like Zillow aren’t making that question easy to answer, but if I find out I’ll let you know.

It’s a long slow night called back toward winter cold, though the longer trends run in a summer direction.

You may remember that the cargo trailer has been at Kevin’s shop almost since the day I brought it back to SandRock.

It’s been ‘done’ there for going on two weeks, but around that time, instead of picking it up, I dropped the truck off next to it, because she needed a new alternator, a couple of bulbs, and to be properly connected to the trailer’s electrical systems.

Yesterday the nice office manager lady called. It’s done! But oh … did you want a trailer brake Controller installed in the cab of the truck?

I said, well, I don’t understand why I’d need one … the trailer brakes are ready to go … right?

“Okay!,” she chirped, “see you in a bit then”.

I went up and Kevin was busy with a new customer. Young-Lady came out first. She said, here’s your paperwork–you owe us $676 and we’re all good.

I said: No.

The $676 was for rigging the shore power system for the trailer. So I owe you more than that. An alternator alone is going to be upwards of a couple hundred.

Um … oh …

And also, I said. What’s this question about a brake controller? Theoretically, why would I want one?

She had no more idea than I did, and decided that we should ask Grumpy Old Jeff. Grumpy Old Jeff said, you’d want one because you already gave us $1200 for completely new trailer brakes, and if you want those brakes to actually do anything, like, stop the trailer, you’re gonna need a controller for that to happen.

I think about there I did that nose-pinching thing.

In the end I was there for about half an hour, and it was almost a completely wasted trip. I say almost because I did get to talk to the shop guy who actually worked on the truck, and without any prompting at all, he gave me a very complete idea about what happened with every little single thing I had asked about when I dropped it off, right down to a throwaway question about what that little pigtail connector under the rear driver’s side seat did.

(He smiled and just said, The answer to your question is, it doesn’t do anything.
[But just now in telling the story, I had a thought. I’ll damn sure betcha that it WILL be the perfect place to connect up, say, a brake controller … ?] Sometimes all you can do is laugh.)

Long story short, I’m back on hold for a week or two, and until then I have been reassured completely that I live in the molasses utopia we know as the modern USA.