Why Are Fluke Multimeters So EXPENSIVE?

The answer may surprise you!

A multimeter is a little handheld device for measuring watts and amps and volts and ohms and shit. (I’m caring about them right now because I’m caring about solar, and, well, fixing my kitchen.)

For hardcore blue-collar boys, it sort of holds the same niche as a graphing calculator might for mostly white collar engineers. Or maybe an iPad, any more … even a fancy phone, for anyone more modern than me.

For decades, the brand of multimeter called Fluke has been the one to covet.

It costs two or three times more than even its best competitors, even though it’s not more capable, or durable, or pretty, and the company who makes them is going strong anyway.

The answer to why is an object lesson in how empires begin to sag under their own sheer weight, and always have.

We are of course on the cusp of learning personally all about some less theoretical aspects of the same phenomenon.

But this … is not a political post. I’m waxing whimsical, see? Alright then.

We can’t make it here anymore (unless “it” means weapons or blind immoral greed). But you, I, and all citizens of the Empire are going to have to learn how anyway, all over again, nevertheless.

Roughly translated, that is the opinion of the analysts at The Duran.

They say sure: Rampant inflation is inevitable, based on what the Empire has done already. But that’s just the start. They’re doubling down on both the European and Pacific fronts, making hot war with the other emergent superpowers much more likely, if not eventually inevitable.

The tensions involved will spill back over into the economic sector, in terms of manufacturing and trade. The flow of all that less expensive Chinese stuff routed to us through the Bezos will slow down and maybe get pinched off completely. (So no, young friend, I won’t be buying your Apple stock, sorry.)

The dollar will be eclipsed. Death will continue along its merry way. And: globalization as we’ve known it will come to an end. This latter is the most significant part.

What counter-globalism does to the Empire and its residents will be interesting. I doubt I’ll be around to see it play out, or the aftermath either, as the world begins to encounter the freight train of climate devastation. Perhaps that’s even a blessing.

Walk right up into a brand new day,
insane and rising in my own weird way.
I don’t wanna be the bad guy.
I don’t wanna do your sleep

Walk dance. Anymore.

–Everclear, “Santa Monica”

You shut your mouth! How can you say, I ‘go about things the wrong way’?

I’ll admit the part about fetuses was a little privileged of me, in the language of the day.

But not only would I never have to worry about pregnancy, I never had to even worry about impregnating, either. I know lots of people who would see that as some kind of tragedy–some have even said it to my face. I always saw it as liberating, a freedom to be a libertine, a freedom to not have to care … or rather a freedom with respect to what I have to care about.

The truth is that for anyone with the means, abortion always has been and always will be an option everywhere.

I am free to care less, about spawning or not spawning.

I am free to care more about the “anyone with the means” part instead.

In any half-civilized society, a woman would not only have the ‘right’ to end a pregnancy, she’d also be able to get it done without worrying about how to pay through the cervix to actually get one. She’d have the right to health care.

Sure I’m pro-choice. I just don’t see why I should only be pro-choice about this one little issue that doesn’t affect me.

I want the right to have my student debt forgiven after, say, thirty or forty years.

Hell, any debt.

I want the right to an appendectomy, without the pro choice being between dying on the one hand, and life-crushing, death-dealing expense on the other, as it must be in any obscenely for-profit system of ‘care’.

I want life, without enslavement.

I want real liberty, not this fake Malarkey they work day and night to cram down my throat instead.

The one thing on the list I do have, to a degree, is the right to pursue happiness.

But not the right to have the pursuit succeed.

That part’s on me, and of course it has to be, because my definition of happy is, in the details, unique to my self.

Also, the part about deciding whether I’ve caught it yet or not. I mean, literally no one else is qualified to say.

The way things stand on that is Yes. I’ve caught it.

Over and over again, before it gets away.

Elusive little fucker.

Through the silent night I worked, on a project quotidian and dull, but fulfilling in its way all the same.

Basically it involved emptying out most of the front room and making it look a lot more like the workshop I intended it to be. I relocated some book piles to the boudoir. I extracted a big useless piece of furniture and put it outside; we’ll see what hell that buys me great or small. And I made an unsorted pile at the other end of the house a little bigger and taller

So now the front tire of my spendy ebike is pointed diagonally at the front door, ready to roll with no obstruction, and my toolboxes are markedly more accessible.

I was kinda hoping that Kevin at the truck place would have called by now, so I could recollect the pickup and use it to get the overflow recycling out of here too. But he’s taking his time.

It’s just one of those things, like a Las Vegas wedding, a Mexican divorce, a solid gold Kama Sutra coffee pot OR

a baby’s arm holding an apple.

China buys oil from Russia in Yuan; Saudis wavering on the petrodollar
Gas will cost more. But celery too. And rechargeable batteries. Everything, because your $ is worth less and less.
Precisely because your leaders made the choice to go to war economically for the stupidest possible reasons.
This is Vietnam, except with cash power, and it’s your budget that will be coming back permanently in a body bag.
Think twice about buying those virtuesignally charity prints from the national geographic.
Consider buying rice and solar panels first, and don’t burn your notebooks.

And as for me.

I want to feel done with this.

I’ve been paying very close attention for years, and in the last couple, since I’ve had the time, I’ve intensified my study of the big picture. Macroeconomics. Macro … geostrategery. Internal Empire politics. I’ve refined my political bookmark list down to some very fine sources and I’ve watched them daily, religiously.

In the end I have a deep list of conclusions.

First. Everything they’ve told you and everything they will tell you is a lie.

I don’t mean this in the conspiracy theory sense. I’m content enough, to believe that the official story on 9-11 is basically and more or less what happened.

I mean the propaganda they’ve been feeding us since day one. With liberty and justice for all? Complete bullshit.

Who killed those people in Bucha? They know. They don’t want you to know, and they’re doing everything they can to make sure you never do. Who killed JFK, RFK, Malcolm, Martin? Same fucking story.

Everybody knows who killed Khashoggi the journalist, and that nothing will happen ’cause it was a rich man chopped him up.

Getting excited from any angle about electoral politics is perfectly analogous to masturbation. Getting behind a Bernie might relieve some stress and feel good for a little while. Beyond that it’s practically speaking without meaning.

George Carlin was right. They Own Everything.

What they own includes the brains of the majority of smart and generally well-intentioned people who live here, and not just trumpian deplorables, but pelosian libtards too.

Almost all of what these good citizens get agitated over is a pure deliberate distraction, from who won the Super Bowl to how easy it is or isn’t to get rid of a fetus.

A distraction from realizing just how deeply the game is rigged.

Political opinionating, including calm sane discussion of the ‘Issues’, is vital to the Lie of the oppressors.

“We” are not the good guys, any more than the Democratic party is the lesser of two evils.

All the little daily news-cycle ways these things are true can be interesting, but in the end all the little truths add up to a great depression.

If this depression is the price of staying actually well-informed, I don’t know if I want to be well-informed anymore.

I seek a separate peace.

So I’m going to try going back to watching DemocracyNow! every weekday, and only DN, and only the headlines on an average weekday. That’s ten or fifteen minutes, and not hours on end. That’s weekends off if I want them.

Let’s see how long I can stand it.

It Came From Phoenix

The Encapsulated Jewel

The sanctions included stealing half of Russia’s currency and running around the world trying to convince little countries (mostly unsuccessfully) that buying energy from Vlad was just too immoral.

They kicked him in the teeth for sure. But his pain is already fading.

The Sanctioner’s own pain is only just starting to ramp up.

Joe Biden will be fine. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, fine. Bezos and Musk, fine. All the people in the rich white suburbs around the beltway, with Ukrainian flags in their immaculate yards–fine.

Maybe you’ll be fine too for now.

The least of these my brothers, my sisters, maybe not so much.

The Empire’s imperialist project is beginning to devour itself. The economically defenseless will be chewed up first, of course.

By the time the Chomp comes for you it’ll be far too late to do anything about it.

Dream big radical dreams now.

The next two days will hit eighty, before things settle back to seasonal, about ten degrees less for the time being.

The space of winter winding down is like Byrne’s Heaven, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

That’s just the way it seems. Until I turn around and look at the slow organizational progress.

Today that meant squaring away all the bits of quitsmoke stuff and setting them up to be integrated into a day and then the next day.

And also this realization.

I have this unwritten rule that got into my head somehow that videos can only be about something exciting. Since nothing exciting is happening, I don’t make them.

But fanfare and hoopla and even … eventfulness … is the exact opposite of the kind of belletrist student-film I want to indulge in.

So the whole not-doing is based on some stupid illusion I don’t even believe in.

Very soon, small excitements will occur anyway.

What will happen then?

There’s no way to know except continuing to live.

Representative Maxine Waters, often portrayed as one of the good Dems, to a crowd of people at her own LA ’emergency shelter event’: “I want everybody. To go home”.

Random average American black woman in the crowd: “We ain’t GOT no home! That’s why we’re here!”

Maxine: (laughs in their faces at the good joke)

There’s more. Unbelievably, it gets worse.

See for yourself.

A short perfect encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with this shitty so-called democracy.

***
And yeah some other stuff.

Brian Becker: ‘The Government That Speaks in Our Name’
(The whole media apparatus wants you to weep for Ukrainian women on the edge of giving birth, so they find them, show them, and you do. When it comes to women who aren’t white, Palestinian women for example, you say to me: ‘Bruh that 70-year-old made-up country has a Right To Defend Itself’. Yeah. From thrown stones. From harsh words. With rockets, beatings, and bulldozers. Because those goons are our goons.
Major historical takeaway here.
1950s: Kruschev says, hey, let us join NATO. Eisenhower refuses.
1990s: Putin himself makes the same request. Clinton says no.
Watch the vid for the Why.)

Ryan Knight on Sabby Sabs: Democratic Myths and the Uniparty Reality

(The Invaluable) Max Blumenthal REACTS to Brie’s Interview w/ (another California faux-prog demRep) Ro Khanna

First it was Neil, and Joni M. even worse, turning from nuanced poetical genuine leftists into system lapdogs barking for censorship in the Rogan affair.

Now comes Sean Penn to pour darker salt in an even deeper wound.

I’ve watched him speak many times, particularly on his efforts to right his government’s wrongs in Haiti, and I was always favorably disposed to him.

In 2015, he unwittingly betrayed El Chapo into the hands of Empire stormtroopers–it’s a long controversial story with fingers pointed in every direction, but it’s clear that Penn was at least a useful idiot in the affair. He can be forgiven that much, especially since the only one directly hurt by it was a notorious Mexican drug lord.

But seven years on, he’s clearly lost his way, if not his freakin’ mind along with it. He’s mad at the Empire again, and over Ukraine too, none of which is surprising. But it’s WHY he’s mad that verges on insanity.

It seems that he’s livid at the Bidenistas for not going ahead with a no-fly zone, which they’ve prudently declined to impose for the simple reason that it’s the first step on the path to a third world war. With nukes this time.

So his brilliant solution is that billionaires–fascistic well-funded non-state actors–should be taking matters into their own hands, and buying a bunch of state of the art fighter jets FOR Ukraine. So they can, you know, put up their own no-fly zone … with no pilots trained to fly them …or anything …

The corporatism inherent in the idea is alone enough to make a sane person stare. But the problems with his solution don’t even begin to end there.

Since it’s not going to happen anyway, I won’t detail them and get us both riled up about nothing. You can dig if you choose to care.

I’ll just say: come home, Sean. Take a long deep breath, give up the war correspondent posturing, and put your good intentions to use here. Because the decline of the dollar and the Empire with it is going to soon mean that we’ll need your help every bit as much as the Haitians once did. What we’ll never need is your half-baked attempt to turn yourself into a battlefield strategist and procurer of arms merchants. So long as there is hate in the world, those industrial militarists will just keep getting fatter all on their own without your help.

Great Depression Cooking – Making Espresso with Sweet Crema

… is getting added to brown rice as a staple here now.

How-to

Soak 6-8 hours or overnight; yes it’s important
Rinse well in a strainer
the ratio is 1 cup to 1.5 water
Now bring to a boil …
simmer down and down, uncovered most people say
until all moisture is gone, it’s translucent/blossomed, or 15-25 minutes
cover and a 5-10 minute rest to steam it in the pot

I haven’t tried any of the below yet.

for tabouleh, add parsley, tomato, onion, lemon juice, and olive oil

QUINOA TORTILLAS *gluten free * no oil*
youtube.com/watch?v=R4WV-s-ZZn0

Healthy Quinoa Chickpea Bowl (Plant-Based) | Easy One Pot Vegan Recipes
youtube.com/watch?v=mPaJFxzwi-U

Tomorrow there are bulk quantities of organic pintos and garbanzos coming, and some red lentils to try, all being delivered off the back of a truck that will park in an empty lot across from the supermarket, and all the customers will gather to collect what they ordered. See azurestandard dot com.

She has shore power. I’m into this project about five grand total now, and the hauler is rebuilt like new, maybe better-than.

Except the interior of course, and that’s my job. Soon. The solar awaits, the fridge, a bedding solution, a cooktop, some insulation. It’s all here waiting, a big complicated puzzle to solve in joy.

In the meantime, the truck has joined the trailer in Kevin’s yard. He’s going to finish up with a comprehensive look at the truck’s part of the overall electrical systems. It shouldn’t be long.

I’m crossing fingers that the last burst of angry hail will give way now, to seventy-degree days and light breezes, the right kind of days for an unholy latter-day construction saint.

***

This is the original thumbnail for Caitlin Johnstone’s latest video:

Trigger warning. It’s about Ukraine, and I agree with her wholeheartedly–so that means you almost certainly don’t want to even hover the link, much less watch the whole six minutes.

But everybody loves Marcia Marcia Marcia jokes, no?

It was a t-shirt, sighted on the trip, worn by a hiking girl, and I liked that too.

There was a mad random hailstorm this afternoon which slowed down the progress of trash day.

There will be no mention in future history books of Mr. Smith’s roid rage against Chris Rock, but in what passes for the fourth estate today, the story is edging out Ukraine in popularity, and outrage on both sides. Lord be with us.

If it’s Joe or Kamala or Donald or that FL governor douche or Hillary again, any of those creeping meatball fucks, my vote will be pure protest, probably a write-in, maybe even for Tulsi because she’s the blind squirrel who finds the nut of truth once in every long while, as in her comments on Biden’s regime-change gaffe. If it was a gaffe.

Plus the eye candy factor, sure, I won’t lie.

I got the Starlink thing sorted out for now, and maybe the Azure Standard one, and that sweet balance transfer deal the likes of which we won’t see again.

I unboxed the arriving bedliner, as in pickup bed, and I sorted the recycling in grand fashion.

Tomorrow is reconnecting with those cargo trailer upgrade guys, because while the trailer is done (on their end), I want the electrical connections on the truck itself checked as well.

Things are happening even when it seems like they’re not.

Back three miles into town for Theia’s brew, and then back up the canyon and climbing up over the Rim once more.

We visited Dusty again, and picked Marmalade back up, because being in the System wasn’t working out for him. He has a room to himself here again now, for a while. Future is, so uncertain.

We got the elusive ‘intermediate’ lightbulbs. We got the hard-to-find little propane canisters for testing the new equipment. We got the vitamin stashes refilled.

At home the recycling overflows, and one more trip across (it costs close to fifty bucks now) may be necessary to alleviate that.

I now have a new coffee grinder. I now have a big stick that you put in a bucket to bring water as high as 180 degrees.

While we drifted in the elysian life of the creek with all the sycamores, history kept happening. Here’s the latest from Primo. This clip was in the video:

So the brain trust’s clarification, even, says Bad Vlad cannot be allowed power over his next door neighbors.

But the formerly unipolar Empire is very much allowed to exercise power even there, half a world away, or anywhere else it likes, because: American exceptionalism.

The most jaundiced among smart observers is wondering aloud now whether these people are deliberately meaning to crash civilization, in order to consolidate their power over everything.

While any subtle miscalculation means that they will be lords of a deadly glowing landscape, sovereign of radroaches.

No marigolds in the promised land.

Any man left on the Rio Grande, he’s the king of the world, as far as I know.

I am very much more of a Jerome kind of Alex, or even a Clarkdale sort, rather than Sedona proper. But this wasn’t my birthday, and so.

Recommendations, for the Vortex City.

Coffee: Theia’s. World class.

Breakfast: Breakfast burritos at Garlands, or I guess ‘Indian Gardens’ as it is now again called.

Lunch at the wineries: Ten years ago, there was no such thing as a potable Arizona wine. But they’ve been working on it, and the place to go is Oak Creek Vineyards, aka the Squirrel place, out in Page Springs. Honorable mention: Page Springs Cellars, where the wine isn’t as good and it costs twice as much, but oh god the ambience of that River Deck.

Dinner: Bison pot roast at the Cowboy Club. Magnifico. Plus, the sign out front says “High Desert Cuisine” and they mean it.

The U: Nine of ten boxes for fully equipping the cargo trailer tiny house. Only the fridge is still stranded in Prettytown, and that’ll be remedied soon.

The P: A couple of bags for a first stay ever IN the Oak Creek Canyon, and in fact literally on the creek itself.

I won’t recommend the place we stayed because it was the kind of lodging that only a fan of retro kitsch could love. But fortunately, we both are.

A driving day, and in the middle of it all I got to pet Dusty the prospective adoptee for a whole sweet half hour, while they were adding a new tire to my truck across the street. If it all works out as planned, this one will be the almost-new spare.

Tire, not cat.

Alex Christoforou made an interesting point on his Rumble channel yesterday.

For many decades in this world, the dollar was almighty and sovereign because it was backed by oil–the black gold standard.

This gave the Empire the ability to project power anywhere, usually without even having to fire a shot.

They used this power with savvy most of the time. No one cared, for example, if sanctions (a pulling-back of dollars) against Iraq or Cuba or Venezuela led to suffering and death there. Madeleine Albright, who went to her reward in the blackest depths of hell yesterday, is perhaps most famous for telling Leslie Stahl that her sanctions on Iraq, which no one argues killed half a million children there, were totally “worth it”.

Hey, baby, them that’s got the gold makes the rules, y’know? What kin ya do? The world is a rough place. Suck it up.

But in its jaded dotage, the Empire begins to think that its power is absolute and infinite.

There’s a war in Ukraine, but we don’t dare to face off in the air against a nuclear-armed Russia? No problem. Sanction the hell out of them and bring them to their knees! Declare total economic war and they’ll bend to the imperial will soon enough.

Only … it doesn’t seem to be working, even a little bit.

Okay, well … what about the Chinamen? They aren’t making the right kind of noises about the Russians, and it’s time they recognized who runs things around here. Let’s give them a taste of Sanctions! That should patch things right up!

No, Joe. It’s doing worse than nothing, you blind old fool.

It has in fact at last begun to backfire badly. The catastrophic results of your foolishness are being felt already, and it’s going to get much worse very quickly.

The other lesser powers in the world are fed up with the Empire’s bullshit. It was one thing to send Venezuelan kids to bed hungry because America didn’t like the cut of their leader’s jib.

But now they’re fucking with people who are able, and increasingly motivated, to strike back in mercilessly effective ways.

Joe let the Saudi prince off the hook for cutting up a journalist and packing his bloody remains home in a suitcase.

But the Saudi prince is an oligarch and an ungrateful bastard. China has already made what they think is a better offer, and sooner or later, the prince will take it.

When the petrodollar becomes the petroyuan, or the petro-ruble, or whatever else it will become, the power of the regular dollar in your bank account is going to precipitously drop with it, much further than it already has.

Meanwhile, back on the northamerican continent, look what Trudeau did to the truckers, on the Canadian side.

You won’t get off my streets? Fine bitches. That’s an emergency, and your accounts are frozen, just like that. You’re Sanctioned. That means that you’re broke. And by the way, we pulled your truck’s insurance too, so you can’t make any new money either.

The people on your side, trying to GoFundYou? That money is frozen too, because we own the tech monopolies.

If you think for one moment that your Empire Representatives won’t freeze you out too, the moment they have the slightest pretext of a reason, you’re living in a 1950s dream world.

In short, your dollars (even if they remain yours at all) are going to grow weaker and weaker as a direct result of your Empire neolib/neocon duopoly trying to go on playing King Shit in every corner of the habitable world for longer than you’ve been alive.

Go on and tell me now, how Hunter’s laptop is another nefarious Russian plot.

Tell me voting is important, and that blue no matter who is the only moral thing.

Tell me all about how Zalensky is a heroic freedom fighter and can’t possibly be a Nazi because … he’s a Jew! It’s so obvious!

Help me to get properly agitated about where trans women piss, or what sports they should be able to play.

Help me forget it all with a funny cat video.

Sell me on every angle of the big lie, as we watch your dollars and mine circle the drainpipe to oblivion.

I promise to listen attentively.

And even politely, for as long as I can stand to be polite about evil and what it’s done to our culture and our brains.

I tried to go to bed early to fix my schedule. It may work out for that purpose in the end, but in the meantime it turned into one of those fatNaps that produce amazing vivid dreams.

The relevant part of this vivid dream was that we hired Mate’ the younger, Aaron, to be our bus driver.

At one of the places he took us for coffee and a pit stop, there was a small room in the back where some of his art was hanging for sale.

Though I appreciated what was there, I didn’t like any of it enough to spend money on it. (I am, perhaps ironically, a hard sell on art for art’s sake–

As I was involuntarily awakening, I thought about the kind of physical art I would do, that would be better by my own flaky standards, and I had an idea.

I won’t detail it here because I don’t want to spend the creative power of the idea by talking about it too much.

But I will write down what I thought, for my own remembering and further consideration. “At leisure”.

Maybe someday the results will impress you or not. At any rate if you’re reading this in real time, early days, you are very probably just going to get one as a gift and be free to decide in your heart either way.

#LaptopFromHell : Glenn Greenwald On The Fallout Of Hunter Biden Story

This is the best work I’ve ever seen Kit Cabello of Hard Lens Media put out. He’s a Chicago boy, none too bright, with a penchant for pronouncing certain common words in such a tangled way that it almost amounts to a speech impediment.

But here he nails the facts to the fucking wall with style in spite of all that.

At the center of his piece, he showcases Joe Biden willfully and obviously (knowing what we now know) straight-out Lying to the American electorate on a debate stage in the middle of an argument with the Donald.

He lied because the truth would have doomed his candidacy, and maybe even (in a truly just world) sent him to jail for racketeering and corruption.

It needfully agonizes any rational person to say it, but this time, Trump was absolutely right. So was Glenn Greenwald, again. But the entire neolib Democratic establishment, including the parts of it who do ‘journalism’ (looking straight at you, ‘The Intercept’), including the silicon masterminds at Twitter and Facebook–they stood with Joe’s lie and amplified it, and brutally suppressed the truth and the very concept of free speech.

Now that the truth is out anyway? Nothing. Not a single retraction, not a single sheepish smile, not one word about how what they conveniently dismissed as “Russian disinformation” was in fact their disinformation.

It’s bad enough that they all agreed quietly to push lies.

It’s ten times worse that with the curtain ripped away, they just go silent and expect you to go on believing what they say.

But the real tragedy, one hundred times worse, is if you cooperate like a good little lesser-evilist, with that rotten expectation.

Maybe you believe what I say myself. Maybe you don’t. But I’ll say it anyway.

Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Peter Bootygig, Chris Hayes, Mark Zuckerberg, the Clinton tribe … they are not lesser evils. They’re only prettier evils, slightly less revolting but no less satanic minions of the corporate fascistic dark lord who ultimately runs your reality and mine.

Moreover, being able to say that out loud, at the exact same moment that the other half of this broken fake democracy is saying it too, in the form of Rick Scott and Darrell Issa making squeaky hypocritical noises of outrage …

That doesn’t make you a Trumper, my darling!

Acknowledging the truth does not mean you are deplorable–it may very well prove evidence of the opposite.

Please don’t cooperate. Please spit instead of swallowing.

That small act of rebellion may never do the least bit of actual good. I can’t even promise you that you’ll at least sleep at night, because it’s half past two in the morning as I write this.

I have promised you that I will try very hard to shut up about this shit and bring you a calmer, more zen-like literary experience about the minutiae of one person’s attempted answers to a world that just keeps nosediving towards the Devil’s own plan. I’ve kept that promise–in the sense that I have tried, really. I will keep trying.

I blame Kit for this lapse, blast his aggravating midwestern marshaling of facts. In retaliation, I’m not even going to stop to marvel at the way he neatly loops in our proxy Nazis, at the bitter tail end of his screed. Fuck that guy.

Eeyore Explains How The Empire’s Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost On YOUR Personal Norteamericano Doorstep

(You. Yes, You. Stand Still For It Will Ya?)

Maybe it’ll be every bit as apocalyptic as he says. Or maybe there will be a few years where it is only half as bad as that. Either way, I ask you to please imagine that you are your own great-grandparent, watching the sky darken with a Great Depression in the early 1930s.

If you knew, months or years before the Crash, what was coming, what would you do to make your life ready for it?

Where have you been, my darling young one? Where will you go, when the number is None?

My answer to myself, and my advice for what it’s worth to you. If anything.

Liquidate every asset into cash, and then as quickly as possible, turn most of that cash into real goods that will see you through the dark times in relative serenity and freedom from want, in a world where your dollars can’t buy real goods anymore.

Don’t pay rent for anything, don’t lease, don’t hold ‘securities’ whose value is purely theoretical, don’t own properties that you can’t sleep in–don’t trust a 401K or a pension or social security, at least not until you’ve first already acquired alternatives that possess intrinsic value in ways you can hold in your hands and put in your mouth, on the day that the Elons and the Bezos and the Clintons fly off to Mars or New Zealand and leave you standing there, in your underwear.

Stave off inevitable depression in any healthy way you see fit, but not at the cost of forgetting the sort of Depression your predecessors endured a hundred years ago. Rather remember the words of the prophet as written on the subway walls in the year I was incarnated to this miraculous disaster

An’it’sa Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.

For a month I had not heard from Kevin up at the RV place. My experience has been that he is a truly good man, and does truly good work, but just sucks at communicating. Which is fine, really–who am I, to be pointing fingers about that!?

After buying and buying all weekend, I had to go pierce the veil at last, and get an update. The news was stellar. All the work we agreed on was completed. Mainly: a complete new braking system, complete new coupler, a repack on the wheel bearings, and all lighting operational. So I paid him for that, and agreed to let him proceed with the much simpler (as it turned out) job of providing robust shore power capabilities to the cargo trailer. It’s supposed to be ready to pick up on Friday.

Not that I will sit home by the phone, this time, waiting to find out.

The exterior is done, the power system will be soon, and now it’s my turn to make the inside into an insulated, secure, and well-organized tiny home. I think I got this. We’ll see.

In the evening I visited Zillow to see what this house is worth now. The answer is that it continues to increase in value at a rate of about 3% a month, and will soon be worth double what I paid for it.

I made a Zillow account for the first time and ‘claimed’ the house, toying heavily with the idea of putting it back up for sale, by owner this time.

I haven’t pulled the trigger on that just yet. But here’s what I wrote under the part of the form entitled “What I Love About This House”.

***

I love it enough to be in no hurry to sell it, as evidenced by my admittedly ambitious pricing. I would never have put it on the market at all, except the Zestimate keeps going up so temptingly fast. In short, I am the opposite of that realtor’s favorite, the “motivated seller”.

I’ve described this place before as “the closest thing SandRock offers to loft living”. There’s a bathroom, a room for kitchen and dining, two small ‘bedrooms’ …

…and a huge open space in the middle for turning into an art studio, a workshop, a lab, or whatever is creatively relevant to your life.

It’s also very robust in electrical and security terms, and normally very quiet, unless the sound of church bells or trainsong is objectionable to you.

All of that taken together is why I chose to buy it, instead of a conventionally laid-out house. That’s also why I’m in no hurry to leave, at least until selling it would provide enough to re-invent the same open, creative, sanctuarial vibe all over again from scratch somewhere else.

If the inflationary cycle we’re just entering pushes the Zestimate past my asking price (and you can bet that in time it will), I reserve the right to ask for more. But you probably have some months before that happens … right? Just consider too what’s going to happen to mortgage rates, in the meantime, and do what’s right for you.

-30-

I spent thousands of dollars online this weekend. That’s never happened before.

Some of it was pretty mundane, like forty dollars for a 25 pound bag of pinto beans.

Other things, quite exotic, like the single largest expenditure, over a thousand for a kind of solar power system in a box. One that could fit easily into a cargo trailer conversion home. The second largest was a way of making hot water from that solar power, in part. The third largest, a mobile refrigerator, also eventually solar-powered.

I did this all in a rush because if I get the balance transferred by the end of the month, it will only cost 1.99% in interest for life. This means that when the Fed pushes interest rates above two percent, I can invest capital even in some janky little savings account, instead of paying off the debt expeditiously, and still come out ahead.

My only regret is not being quick enough to tack on another eight or ten thousand under the same terms, for a viable tiny house kit too. But what the city fathers in my little dream town consider viable remains somewhat murky to date. It’ll take time to tease it out of them, and until I do, ten grand is a speculative investment, not a prudent one. Zoning laws may be pro-property, but they are markedly anti-freedom.

Beans and rice and solar will remain solid bets, even when the un-petro’d dollars are only good for wiping your ass in the next crisis and shortage.

I don’t mean any of it in the prepper way. Living lightly on the land is living stylishly in a sense beyond the reach of glitz, glamour, and catwalks, and it will remain so regardless of how soon the next hammer blow to the working and non-working classes rains down.

The best pot money can buy.

The best rice money can buy.

The 732nd best kitchen.

The 29168th best chef.

But even so, it turned out pretty damn good.

I found her on account of she bought the same solar generator I’m buying, and she tested it by making a big budget pot of chili with it, which helped me decide.

Why am I choosing full-time nomadic life? Why haven’t I left yet?

I’m posting her for you today because she is the America I know in my bones, the kind of American that never sees air time, the kind of Midwestern American that Clintons find so deplorable.

She’s the living face of a “health care system” that is run for profit like everything else here is.

She’s the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with what this society does to average people.

If you think all this is her fault, the result of poor judgment or lack of intelligence or inferior character, I don’t want to talk to you. Because even though those things are almost certainly true in part, what do they fucking matter?

As you treat the least of these … remember that one?

Reacting to her story by coming up with grand theories about her failings is still victim-blaming.

You and I have it better than she does, and we have for a very long time. I know a lot of cats lately who have it better than she ever has in her life.

Of course I’m in no position to go around inviting stray mothers in, and the truth is that even if I was, I still wouldn’t, and: I don’t need to tell you why.

It’s just not instinctive, for those with a small margin of comfort, to put that margin at risk by taking on the responsibility of broken people, no matter how innocent, no matter how promising they might be. And that is doubly true living in the Empire.

Instead we comfort ourselves, through judicious charity funneled into organizations that seem legit, maybe by voting for the lesser of evils. By counting on the power of magical thinking to pull back a little hope into range of our hearts, while Rome burns hotter and hotter around us.

By offering remote sympathy that might even struggle to become empathy on a few rare occasions, which is all I’m really doing by spilling this today.

‘Petroyuan’ Could Further Shake the Dollar’s Dominance

When it happens, and some people are saying it will as soon as the end of the month, everything changes.

People will look back on the one-term Biden presidency as the point where American greed finally overreached all the way to the Russian border and ran itself right over the fucking cliff.

Don’t be worried about “paying $1300 more” for gas this year. Worry about five and six and ten-dollar diesel fuel for the trucks that bring you absolutely everything, doubling the price, of absolutely everything.

Worry about the dollar plummeting in value since it’s not the petrodollar any more, at the exact same time that inflation turns runaway, in a perfect toxic storm of capitalist self-cannibalizing.

Worry about what the capital machine and the Empire will do in your name, in a last-ditch effort to save itself.

Alternatively, stop worrying altogether.

Dusty, Tigre, and Marmalade all found slots in the foster system at the same time today and were suddenly gone.

On the obvious level it’s a huge relief. Two rooms are freed up, and so is time, and so is most importantly is the ineffable quality of mental bandwidth. It’s not a full return to normalcy, but it does roll the clock back to the point where things stood a few months ago at least.

I will miss each of them individually and in the collective too.

There is no such thing as a pain-free life. To love is to open oneself to loss.

There’s one more cat out there to bring in from the cold, a battle-scarred veteran we call Silver though he is black and white all over. He comes here twice a day on average and eats like this is the only place he knows for food. He’s lived with people and takes love easily, but now no one else cares for him at all.

One of the little rooms will doubtless be taken up by him soon. It probably won’t take three months to move him along to the sanctuary pipeline. But the ache of the heart will return for a time when he goes, just as with the three today.

If there was any additional legitimate indoor room to be had here, we’d already have added to the stupidly large collection of feline souls.

But it’s not good for the house, or the existing cat residents, or for the cats themselves to keep packing them in here.

This is the high hidden cost of trying to maintain a footing in the salvation business.

All RV sites are full hook-up, with wifi. Monthly Rate $400 (plus electric @ $.18KW)
–folk tale of the Big Ditch Peoples

I guess the reason I’m so obsessed with Donny O’DonL, son of Erml, is that until he decides to start speaking the truth, I will never have any hope of convincing you. The whole thing is a hefty longshot. He has a bigger thicker megaphone, well-funded brainwashing powers, and arguments you would naturally choose to believe anyway. I’m only another loser with a laptop; a beautiful one, but still.

So let’s forget all about Lawrence Lemon for one day.

I tried to make it all the way to buying a tiny house kit, but then my thinking shifted. If I could live there for 4-500 a month, have a job that was bringing in steady cash, and be present for the building of the house on the land from start to finish, things could change and even grow quickly. But it shifts my attention back to rigging out the cargo trailer first.

Deep in the weeds on things like solar and powering a fridge with it now. Therefore.

Russell “Texas” Bentley, A Matter of Life and Death

You can dismiss everything he has to say as platitudes, and be right.

You can still embrace the defiance of fear and not be wrong.

What’s important is not what he says, but how it makes you feel, and what it might motivate you to think, and do.

In the immediate term, my choice of what to do is post him, since he’s banned from the tubes, and even before the ban he was algorithmically suppressed to the point where you’d never see what he had to say anyway.

Of course that’s true of a lot of people, and I am only righting one small wrong because of the greater context, and because of who he is, and because of the potential re-framing power of who he is to give you a new look into the heart of your enemy.

Over the long blessed time that this house was pure sanctuary, and I would say even more markedly in the months since that ended, cooking has become very much more important to me.

During the jellyfish stinging madness of the last few days I put what concentration I could marshal into the question of tools for that cooking, both At Home (whatever that turns out to look like again someday) and in camp out on the heavy road.

I decided that in both scenarios, the main thing I lacked was what they call a dutch oven, a big pot that can double as a saute pan, a roaster, and a slow crockpot. Typically they’re based on good old cast iron, but most often they’re coated in enamel, which is basically glass.

The main advantage to enamel over raw cast iron is that acidic foods (including the tomatoes that are essential to my basic sauces platform) tend to destroy the seasoning layer you need to carefully and consistently build up on cast iron.

For the house we bought the absolute best dutch oven that money can buy, a Le Creuset from France.

For the camper I got one by Lodge for a third of the French price, mainly because I don’t want to cry four hundred dollar tears when I almost inevitably set that glass coating too close to a fire pit some day. If and when it does prove too delicate for living rough, I’ll replace it with something cheaper, like the nostalgic speckled stuff

… provided I can find a modern supplier that can convince me they’re really putting out a food-grade product …

… or maybe checking some thrift stores for old original ‘graniteware’.

Anyway, speaking of all these parallel concerns at once I want to recommend

Putting Together The Perfect Cookware Set | Healthy Cookware!

This guy is a little more bullish on carbon steel cookware than I am, but he’s also way, way smarter about culinary art than I’ll ever be, so he might persuade you (or me) about that question in time too.

Bonus: He’d also like to sell us on Easy (um, easyish) Coffee Roasting At Home For Under $20, and honestly trying it is sounding a little tempting right now, except for the part about buying green beans, special little bags, and a cooling fan all from Amazon; fuck that.

Here are your top three, maybe four, stories from the news at one o’clock.

Kyiv is about to fall. Some good rich white leaders met with the bad rich white tyrannical despot guy and urged him to stop his advance just short of total victory. They agreed to not release any more detail than that, so you, me, and all good rich white journalists can’t comment further, although the tone and subtext tells you all you need to know about how you are supposed to feel about it all. There are all flavors of human misery available in abundance, but shortages of food, water, and medicine. These conditions persist well beyond the fluid borders of the Ukrainian state, whatever that is, and are expected to worsen over time, and no one ever lost money betting on that, in lviving memory. I mean living, sorry. This is NPR News, from Washington. Insert significant pause here.

Meanwhile, the weather. There’s snow, which is normal for March, and something called a bomb cyclone, which apparently isn’t. It has an lushly evocative name anyway, perfect somehow for the times: O tempora, O mores.

Meanwhile, the sports. Some coach somewhere made a record for the most victories in some league. Well good for him. There’s a cheerful story of murican opportunity and success for you. Cienegray skies are gonna clear up. doubtless.

After that much I turn off the truck and therefore the radio and go back into the house to write you this.

Half an hour before that, I went truck in the first place because there was simply nowhere else free of noise and fuss, no place suitable for a fruitful awakening.

Outside, there were a few dogs barking, a few neighbors screeching, the sound of a vacuum cleaner, loudspeakers from the fairgrounds talking as they so often do about some competition involving horses and horsepeople, and even the weekly test of the air raid siren from two blocks over, every Saturday at noon.

Inside it was mostly just pure caterwauling. The fluffy inmates overflowing two and three to a cell, but of course every once in a while their shit has to be hosed out of the those cells and they have to be temporarily relocated, and they don’t like change. So basically, a loud series of futile riots.

I filled up my coffee cup, went out to the truck and cranked her over, and listened to the soothing white noise of FM static for a while. Between the big rumbling V-8 sucking down precious fuel, the tuner jammed between signals, and the windows rolled up tight, there was a respite that I had no other way to get without vacating the property, this property, my property completely.

In the end I had to do it anyway for a time. I bought the rice, the water, the tone probe for the electric job, and by the time I got back the noise if not quite every last bit of the fuss was passing like a storm.

Analysis and conclusions drawn: None, except … clean independent and especially serene space measured in the low hundreds of square feet is just as important to health and life as pure water, home-cooked food, and air to breathe.

Planning, scheming, and acting decisively in the direction of that truth provides a north star that will never go out of fashion and always be a good investment.

This ain’t no party.
This ain’t no disco.

You’re feeling it at the gas pump already.
The supermarket’s next, young lovers.

Trouble in transit. Got through the roadblock; we blended in with the crowd.

David Byrne has explained that he wrote this song, a whole forty years ago now, as a cutting parody against a paranoid prepper kind of mindset that sees everything as a threat to survival and thus is ready to sacrifice luxuries like love and art in the name of avoiding that threat.

In 1983, twenty years old myself, I was totally down with the meta-message and the subtext of that.

Twenty years later, when Talking Heads played the song at their Hall of Fame Induction in the wake of falling towers, the same.

Okay Boomer. Has that changed?

No. Not yet.

But in the weeks ahead it’s gonna. For me and for you too. Can you feel the disturbance in the forces, baby? Have you forgotten how to jump a freight and live in a boxcar?

You make me shiver. I feel so tender. We make a pretty good team. Don’t get exhausted. I’ll do some driving. As long as the fuel holds out, if that’s what it takes. Because we’re not bums. Luck will turn. A Christ or an FDR will rise from the dead and save our essentially good souls, because that’s how things work in the real world, ennit? The cream of justice, always rising.

Salvation myths aside, when these darker truths become self-evident, and you’re tempted to blame all your notebook-burning troubles on Bad Vlad and the Freedom Haters, remember the version Russell Brand told you about back there in the good old days of March, last year of our lord, twenty-twenty-two.

The threat to survival abides and breeds so very much closer to the sweet sanctuary we call home, home on the range or on the sinkhole coastline or down along the frontera where the fat federales are sweeping up the parched bones of skinny brown refugees by the dozens today and every day, just as they’ve always done in living memory.

And Jesus wept.

That Denisovan man, that wasteland man.

Just leave him alone like your mama said, and he will probably and usually and almost always do the same for you.

I’m not sure if that makes me a better man than Joaquin’s Joker, or worse. I’m not sure of much, because like the scripture tells us, in this world The Best Lack All Conviction. Honestly it’s been the same back to Socrates, though maybe not much earlier than that, if I am right, and we’ll never know.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned, in Diplomatic Sanctions.

Surely some Revelations is at hand? Well, we got this much:

“Batman: The Widening Gyre is the title of a six-issue comic book limited series released August 2009.”

It’s like Bob Ross always said, speaking of scripture. How’s that for a happy little accident?

Bob Ross beat the odds, and the Wasteland at its own game, eventually, after a long career of working for the Air Force in Alaska, his knowing eyes ever watchful for the bear across the Strait. How many of us will be able to say the same in the end?

If I were a rational man, I wouldn’t bet on myself to do it.

Fortunately I’m not.

So the one main thing left standing in the way of my oddsbusting, it lives poised between my very own eyes.

‘Just leave that man alone’, I can hear the mother say
… ‘Too long in the wasteland’s what’s made him that way’.

—JMc again

The location of the wasteland varies over time of course.

In the meantime, it’s relatively early to bed and thus presumably early to rise, because glorious Thursday awaits and that’s as far as I can get toward making sense for you tonight.

I think I failed to fully evolve into a modernity-compatible organism.

Also, my sanctuarial abode is overcrowded in time and space and that is not helping at all. A year ago I felt more evolved than I do right now. Right now I feel keenly the lack of a metaphorical and literal Room of One’s Own.

The only solution is to build another one, and maybe a backup too.

That should be my total focus. But life happens.

Forty eight hours ago, three outlets in the kitchen, of this original sanctuary that isn’t, up and died.

The most amazing thing is how little that mattered. I did lose easy existing access to the Instant Pot, which I’d been using to brew up almost daily batches of rice, or beans. But even that could be relocated if it had to be.

It’s true that the gas stove has to be manually lit now, and doesn’t tell the time in bright green LED numbers.

But the saving grace was that the fourth outlet in the kitchen circuit kept on ticking, and that was the one that the fridge was and is hooked up to.

This also tells the wise observer that the circuit and its breaker itself are not shot, even though it would probably be a lot easier if that were the cause.

So–no catastrophe, but still, it seemed like something should be done, didn’t it?

I briefly considered calling a qualified electrician, and then I watched a bunch of videos, and then I went to the hardware store and bought eighty dollars worth of outlets, tools, and associated supplies.

I came home feeling a kind of grim productive mania, I guess, but I ran into a wall of something. At first it was described to me as fear, but not my own fear, and then it wasn’t, and what is was, was and remains amorphous. But no less stultifying for all its lack of shape.

Anyway, I didn’t do anything real to fix the problem I no longer could bring myself to care very deeply about. I just pulled the fridge out into the middle of the room, and vacuumed the dust off the back of it, and the lost kibble from underneath it, and then I caulked the sink counter next to it for kicks, and then I made some basic dinner.

All day today I studiously ignored the problem, because as you know, Tuesday is trash day and in the words of Patti Smith, the transformation of waste is the oldest preoccupation of mankind.

And, I would add: Denisovan or not, evolved or otherwise.

Tomorrow is another Wednesday.

You don’t come down here. Less you’re looking to score.

You’ve heard since childhood about the Neanderthals, and none of it was very complimentary. Yeah they had bigger brains, but we out-competed them into extinction, yeah? So they must have been knuckle-draggers in the end, unfit for even the most menial modern service jobs.

Maybe you heard about the Hobbits too, aka Homo floriensis. Short little bagginsy dweebs from Indonesia, Polynesia, someplace like that.

After that it starts to get a little more complicated. It seems there was … something else vaguely Sapient living in the Denisova Cave until recently. In fact, they pulled DNA from the finger bone of a thirteen-year-old girl, enough to determine that her mama was Neanderthal and her daddy something else. A ‘Denisovan’, so-called.

Even that’s not the end of the story. We know Neanderthals and ‘humans’ interbred. In China there’s evidence that humans and Denisovans did too, as recently as several thousand years ago. Their progeny has been given the temporary designation of “Red Deer Cave People”.

People.

All we really know for sure is that things have been more complicated than we ever thought, for a long time. Maybe just not complicated in the brainfogging modern way. I’m sure that if interbreeding with a Denisovan is a pleasurable experience, modernity would have a law against it. Even if … hmm, maybe especially if, it were for the purpose of procreation.

But beyond that I offer the conjecture that Humanity, whatever it is, has reached the point of diminishing returns, and like capitalism, it is bound to crash under its own weight any year now. In cultural history terms, we’ve reached our Mannerist phase, and are just going through the motions.

As evidence for my theory I offer the following.

When polled recently, 74 percent of Americans (god’s own people don’t you know), say Yes–they would totally be in favor of imposing a no-fly zone over eastern Ukraine, as Ukraine’s own manly heroic President has been begging for, for days.

Seventy-four percent of Americans are either criminally stupid or suicidally insane.

You see, imposing a no-fly zone means shooting down planes that fly into that zone.

Russian planes, in this case. The planes of another nuclear-armed power.

If Russia imposed a no-fly zone in Baja California, and an American plane flew into it anyway, and the Russians shot it down like they’re supposed to in a zone they’ve declared no-fly … how do you think America would react?

We already know.

74 percent of them at least would be screaming for blood and war. Warm up them nukes, baby, and give Red Vlad a taste of his own medicine. Poor Bajans. Poor Ukrainians. I mean eastern Ukrainians, whatever. Kill for peace. It’s the American way. We’ll be greeted as liberators. It’s our job to make the world safe for democracy, even if we abandoned actual democracy for ourselves a couple decades ago at least.

But … dammit to fuck. I’ve done it again.

This is a story about the Denisovans, who, as far as we’ve been able to tell, never invented toothpaste, political parties, or nuclear weapons, and not one of them ever shopped at a Walmart, so what the fuck did they know anyway.

Breathe.

My favorite James McMurtry song is called Vague Directions, but he has an even better one (speaking unbiased) that is more than capable of making me cry for a lot of reasons.

We Can’t Make It Here Anymore

The title, which can be read two or three or four ways, is part of what makes it great. I’m thinking tonight of the meaning roughly equivalent to, Hey, there’s just no way anymore, for us to Make Things, in the way we used to be really great at.

The common wisdom is that manufacturing ‘went to China’. Which is true, and oversimplified. When I was looking for a welder, I came across a post from a guy who knew the real inside truth.

You can go read it in context of course. But I’m going to paraphrase most of it here anyway.

***

I used to make guns. Once upon a time I made a prototype shotgun, and I wanted to make more of them and sell ’em.

My partner and I couldn’t figure out a way to make it here in the US and sell it for less than $1500. So we went and talked to a Chinese government official in China, and he explained how things worked there.

You wanna built the crap version of your gun? We can do that and you can still make a profit selling them for $149.

But we got tiers. There’s a way to make a better gun that you sell at $249 and still profit.

Or, you take it to our platinum-level factories in a big city with a highly skilled workforce, and you pay them proper, and you get a top-notch product that you sell for $550.

Whatever way you choose, you make decent money and you thrash your American-built competition by a thousand bucks at least. And maybe if you’re smart, you’ll do all three at once. Price points, see?

“this is something Sam Walton figured out and how he was able to acquire say HP notebook computers that he could sell at half what Circuit city hadda charge for a similar HP computer.. but if ya put em side by side the wally world one will be lighter generally as it will use cheaper plastic chassis instead of sheet metal as a result it won’t be as well shielded as the CC computer etc.. it also might run hotter etc.. he would go to Sony, HP, IBM etc.. and put in a bid for what he was willing to pay for each device and to meet his price the manufacture has the device made at factory 1B instead of factory 3C etc…

the tools ya buy be it welders or vice grips might all be made in china BUT at what factory in china is the important detail… Lincoln welders might be made in Sheinghi while the Yeswelder is made in a very remote rural backwater”

***

So, the thing is, it’s not just guns and it’s not just tools either. From nails to freezers to auto parts to steel, that sound you hear is the globalized sound of two generations of American workers being flushed straight down the supply chain.

And, by the way, the sound of the Chinese beating the Empire senseless at their very own game, one steelworker, one furniture factory employee at a time.

The capitalists of any nationality do better than ever.

The workers, especially the ones who for whatever reason didn’t go to college and thus couldn’t end up in a paper-pushing white-collar and maybe even living-wage job–just fucking forget it. Maybe we can make you a barista while you’re young and pretty and perky enough. After that it’s the carwash, or the Taco Bell, or dealing Oxy and hijacked televisions out of the back of your rusty Corolla. And the finger of Bill Cosby wagging Shame at you, if you’re black. The whites are plenty capable of shaming their own, with discretion, with civility, with a precisely raised eyebrow.

This is a world without hope of a better life for the average person.

Why on earth would they not vote for Trump by the millions, when that cackling shitbag is married to the man who brought them NAFTA, and openly calls them deplorable for their failings?

Good old Joe promised enough to barely beat off a second term of Trumpism.

And then promptly reneged on every goddamn promise. Maybe his shiny new war will save him, maybe not.

But I’m drifting into politics. So let’s cut it off there for now. This is a story about buying a welder, when it’s way too late to just say no.

Just gang graffiti on a boxcar door, honey, never you mind.

On the Deuce-clubs roadside, waiting for my kale and espresso, I was thinking about what the political color of Vairterean Anarchy might be. It can’t be red or blue of course, nor even purple. The green thing is done to death and now represents not Mother Nature, nor even Jill Stein, but Howie Hawkins and that’s pretty ewww.

I was thinking orange might work, but then I checked it against the Wikipedia page on, yes it exists, Political Color. And yes, orange might be right path toward anarcho-syndicalism, but it’s also Christian-Democratic, and the color of the sellout NDP in Canada, conservative local imperialists in Israel, and ‘liberals’ against Catalan independence in Spain. So basically a bunch of tepid neo-libs at best. Giant Nnnope.

Of the common named colors, the least overused might be Grey. It can’t be straight-up Grey, thanks to those damn Confederates, but it turns out that there are a whole lot of variations on the theme:

Cinereous is a starkly beautiful damn word. And frankly it’s hard for me to imagine a better grayish than rose quartz, a mineral who I have long history with in the physical realm, plus, I mean … the barest hint of old-fashioned communist red? But the embarrassment of rich choices hardly end there:

So Silver is a gray … and fog too.

I was pondering all this just now and came up with a new meta-word, sister to the one I call Vaaair Terre.

Look for it to be worked in somewhere soon.

My political act for the day was to run down fortymile to the Deuce of Clubs and pick out my first angle grinder.

I looked into welders too while I was there, but it turns out that a Lowe’s is not the place to look for ways to work with metal. Wood yes, PVC and all that. But they only care about stocking even metal pipe inasmuch as it applies to plumbing.

I ate an incredible kale salad at the one place down there that almost passes for a foodie haven.

And I did get snowed on a little.

Then home and research. It turns out that traditional stick welding is still done the same way, and generally requires a heavy financial investment. Likewise for oxy-acetylene–I’m not running around gathering two tanks of specialized gas just to be able to lay down a couple of welds on the rack. But in addition to these old favorites, there are new kinds of welding; the MIG and the TIG et cetera. The cheapest most basic kind is called flux core. It’s basically a spool of wire that the machine melts into a puddle of joining through a thin nozzle, sort of an overblown soldering.

Harbor Freight carries decent flux-core welders for between one and two hundred dollars. I was all but settled on going that route, when I realized that a new wave of cheap Chinese alternatives was on the way. For the same pricing, there now exists something called a YesWelder (among other brand names). It’s essentially the same as the Harbor Freight models, but with the big difference that it will also let you perform the very basics of stick welding (and even, with some modding, TIG).

Not much information yet about the YesWelder FLUX-135, except the confirmation that the “new updated version 2 from 2021.11.15, capable of Gasless MIG, Stick, Lift TIG with additional WP-17V-10 torch”. So just maybe for once I’m in on the ground floor of something? Maybe.

***
Optional from Russell Brand
We’re Not Allowed To Discuss This

I think I showed him to you once before maybe, but it wasn’t a good picture. He was still in a lot of pain and still mostly lame from his pelvic fracture. In this neighborhood, innocents take workboots to the pelvis all the time, and it has a decidedly anti-photogenic effect. There has never once been a supermodel who went to high school in SandRock. Their pelvises are just no longer runway friendly.

But this is Dusty, mostly better now. It feels good, to feel better.

We had a talk, as you can see. It started out about chicken, but eventually it came around to the nominally political.

You know I held my nose and voted old Joe. Dusty didn’t vote, because as he pointed out himself: “WTF man, I was only a kitten, and besides that lesser evil crap is for the pigeons”. The usual half-ass excuses for disengagement and alienation, among the poor, among minorities, among the uneducated–and believe me, this cat is all three. Especially uneducated. Behind his back we call him “Short Bus”, and since he moved in my bong is totally unusable because of weeks of crusted catnip residue.

Anyway, neither of us are Trumpers. Neither of us is even vaguely right-wing.

But even so, for a multitude of cultural and racial and socioeconomic reasons, Dusty and I, just by ourselves, amount to a full half bushel of Deplorable. This measurement was confirmed in a detailed study by the Brookings Institution, which also condemned Dusty for never taking his two proper Covid jabs, much less a booster.

Once I even watched him chew up a perfectly good mask. And as for me I let him.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not a source of malinformation. This is all true. Don’t tase my Facebook bro.

Also, I still wear a mask, and not even the chewed one.

The think tank had harsh words for me anyway, because they said I wasn’t wearing one for the right reasons, and by their own lights, they’re right. I don’t wear one because of any medical concern, for myself or others. Dude it’s Omicron. I’ve had attacks of intestinal gas that laid me lower.

I wear one because I can’t believe I can get away with walking into a store in a right-to-carry state wearing a mask and a Glock-34, and no one calls the cops to report a robbery.

I also wear one because it defeats facial recognition software.

I do admit there are limitations to masks for anti-surveillance protest.

In fact, I’m probably more recognizable, since there don’t seem to be any other citizens here walking into the grocery with a mask that says, “Free Julian You Fascistic ShitLib Bitches”. I think I would have noticed, like a mortified debutante.

But still. Hiding my face makes me feel better. Maybe it is a little medical. Maybe after they start arresting people again for mask-wearing, I can wrap Dusty around my face and claim that he’s a comfort animal.

I don’t believe in the stars and stripes forever, and I don’t believe in working for the man, but I believe that might even amuse his furry little ass, although so vanishingly few things do.

When you are up to your eyeballs in sad neolib bullshit, it is surprisingly difficult to remember that your objective was to live free.

Free of bullshit among other things, or maybe just free of bullshit in all the manifold shapes it can unexpectedly metastasize, mutate, into, before you can say Jack Kerouac.

But remember-you-must, even so, with uncompromising tenacity, because the alternative isn’t a life worth living. If thy Maddow offend thee, pluck her from your feed. And so on down through all the variegated input streams of a modern digital life.

I think I found a way to remember, or at least to artificially and technologically remove some of the temptation to forget. It may well blow up in my face as things here are prone to be doing, but fuck it. I’ve had way, way, more than I could stand. I’ve been as good a boy as I know how to be, and by itself that wasn’t enough.

*I* was still not enough, to overcome it, with complete poise and grace, and for that as I said, I have no one to blame but myself. Mea maxima culpa, and cry peccavi too–let yourself be dazzled away from my failures by my thin veneer of latinate erudition and my mostly genuine humility, if you really love me at all, like a mother brother sister amen.

With luck this reaction will also chemically liberate you, my actual devoted readers, from the posts that are just me screaming back. Perhaps with the savage release of pressure I may be able to limit myself to a few singular and gemlike links offered discreetly, optionally. Afterthoughts in the footnotes instead of hyperbolic headlines beating you over the skull in a droning robot voice every other day.

I hope so. May my stern measures profit you, as well as myself, and I mean it honestly. We are all in this together, miraculously sentient or no. We all breathe the one planetary air, from Palestine to Petaluma; even the oligarchs, and we all could learn to breathe easier.

Breathe easier. Pet the one special kitty. Caress gently ‘ponst your attachment disorder, should you still be ill-fated enough to have one living on your shoulder angelically and demonically both together siamese twisted, hell-bent.

Breathe.

Breathe.

***

Good.

Now.

Living free.

It’s still late on Wednesday as I’ve begun this Thursday post.

With certain already noted exceptions, this evening has been my own blessed time free and clear. The actual Thursday on the edge of being born is my One Day of Pure Solitude in a very long time, and I don’t intend to waste it and most especially not on bullshit, singin’:

Fool.

You got two of everything, but you hang your head, just like you was down and out.

The shivery godspeed of bootstraps be upon me and this I pray.

Mr. William Blake is upstairs talking to god, and musn’t be disturbed even by waiting dinner guests.

Scripture reminds us that there are those who break and those who bend.

But I’m still the apple of my Mama’s eye, and I’m each and all my Daddy’s worst fears realized.

Breathe, and remember, old son who never did quite take to the way of the hunt.

You are right now, you always were then, and ’til the day you die you always will be The Other Kind.

The humans are on the whole not bad mammals.

Their major moral flaw as I see it is the enduring mania, the obsession, with determining the real identity of this mysterious, iconic Good Boy.

In the first place, the answer seems so blindingly obvious. Literally slobbering in their sheeplike faces. I’m sorry to growl. It’s just … frustrating.

And in the second: How can one make such a recurring study of a question, any question, and yet never arrive at the slightest hint of a satisfying answer? You would think they’d find it hopeless after a while and just accept the confusing nature of consciousness as a given, the same as any rational beast.

I really just don’t get it.

But .. speaking of acceptance … so long as the Ken-L-Ration and the beef bones and the tennis balls keep flowing like spice from Arrakis, I believe I can learn to live with a single peccadillo, no matter how large and baffling.

On balance, life is good.

You may recall the four day hole in the spill from a couple weeks ago. I’ve half-filled it with things I wanted to say without mucking up forward progress with the stupid lying politics of oligarchy. The posts live here and here, asynchronously, a bafflement to my many future biographers I’m sure.

In a related development, after a day and a half I had to power down the phone again for my own increasingly marginal sanity. Ya’ll go on ahead. I’ll catch up eventually.

***

Speaking of sanity, mine can survive on four hundred square feet if it has to, so long as those 400 are truly and solely mine. Thus my soul has whipped south again and settled on that as the new proximate target. I am a dodger of human bullets.

In yesterday’s sun I unbolted a cross member from the lumber rack with the intention of taking it to the House Depot and looking for whatever it would take to make a duplicate. I think this will include a Baby’s First Welder.

But today I didn’t drive down there. I did get as far as completely emptying this compromised house of all the waste, including the half of it that comes out of cat’s asses.

Now the sun sets slower and slower to the tune of a Steve Earle song
or two.

A few weeks ago the Chicano crackheads mysteriously disappeared.

And then, today:

“Can’t you at least drop me off at a motel?”

These are the first words I hear from The Alley. They are spoken by a man named Robert, a black man, maybe pushing 30.

The response is swift. “No! Fuck it! The cops are coming!”

These are spoken by a Navajo woman maybe twice Robert’s age. Let’s call her Paula Beebonnet. She has inherited the roach-infested tumbledown shack on the other side of my sturdy back fence, and an ancient car in even worse shape which she parks smack in the middle of the alley instead of in her drive, probably because her drive gate is falling off. She lives back there alone except for a pack of malnourished mutts with whipped expressions, and occasionally a boarder, like Robert.

The parading boarders probably account for at least half her income, the other half coming via handouts from the government and solemn white men in her church, who splash down the alley in their pickup trucks once in a while to gravely pass Paula envelopes of cash and then get out as fast as they politely can.

The boarding situations never last more than a few weeks, and they inevitably end in yet another visit to The Alley from the local Barney Fifes.

In fact, after an extended conversation between the alley and the shack’s locked front door, both Paula and Robert call the cops this time. Paula because Robert isn’t leaving. Robert because his stuff is locked up inside Paula’s car.

While we all wait for John Law (my own surveillance post is ten feet away from the action, hidden behind my shed), Robert phones a friend. The friend offers to take him to the mission, but Robert says he heard yesterday that the Asians who now own the yellow motel are letting people stay there if they agree to become unreported laborers on the ancient decaying property, a place which literally still advertises “Color TV!”.

Finally the cop shows up. He’s white and maybe 22 at best. His first words to Robert are:

“I thought I already told you to get out of this town.”

As Robert repeatedly tries to justify his continuing presence, the cop chants, Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit, to everything he says.

Maybe it even is bullshit. For what little that’s worth.

***

If I were a lesser artist, I wouldn’t be writing this down, because I’ve already posted today.

If I were a greater artist, I would turn this scene into a world-changing novel.

But just like Paula and Robert and Barney and the motel asians and the dearly departed drug dealers, I only am what I am.

So you tell me.

Is this a true story about diversity?

Capitalism? Modern love? Is it an invasion, or a liberation, or

a dance?

It’s sold already, was sitting in GA when it did, didn’t sell as a kit, and those are the downsides.

But it did push right up to the 400 square foot limit, it was extra tall without being two stories (which is very important), and it went for $8300.

Reservations and objections aside, I think I need to pitch something very similar to the zoning drones and just go for it.

This is the inspired Vairtere pulling up out of a steep dive.

The people of Donetsk, Kiev, and Democrat Twitter will have to do without me for a bit.

You, however, are invited to come along.

Imagine there’s.

Imagine that it’s 2014 again.

You’re a 53-year-old shitkicker living in Texas with the wife. You trim trees for a living.

On the other side of the world, your own government is overthrowing that of some country you’ve barely ever heard about.

I mean, yeah, again.

But this time the newly installed masters over there are honest-to-god fascists, and they are raining terror on their own supposed countrymen.

You happen to hear that in the far east of this country, a resistance is forming to the fascists in a pair of little backwaters called Lugansk and Donetsk.

What do you do?

Flip off that depressing shit and shift over to ESPN, right?

But if you’re Russell Bently, you instead sell everything, move across the globe, sign on with the resistance, and you stay eight years, and still counting.

It’s a little more wild a tale than even that, though, because Lugansk and Donetsk don’t even have what you’d strictly speaking call an army. Just a bunch of pissed-off citizens who don’t speak the same language as their new overlords, and want the jackboots off their turf. But the jackboots are not walking away. They’re staying put and killing your friends and neighbors. For eight years straight.

Get the interview with him from the Grayzone, because you sure as fuck won’t hear a story like this from your favorite millionaire cable spokesmodel.

In the meantime, if you want me to weep for the poor shivering denizens of Kyiv and Lviv, I’m going to do it. For you. For them. Without reservation.

Just kindly consider doing the same for the lady with one lone limb left to her by these bold freedom fighters you’ve been so cattleprodded to lionize and cheer on for days, when you see her face in the video.

If that’s too big an ask, just post a funny facebook meme about it, at least.

And if requesting that favor of you makes me a PutinPuppet or an enemy of ‘democracy’ in your eyes, well now.

I’ll just have to find some way to live with your scorn, won’t I?

“It is a sad thing not to have any friends. But it is much sadder still not to have any enemies.”
–Che Guevara, as quoted by Bently at the end of the interview.

Civilized Nations Kill With Sanctions And Proxy Armies

By the way. When I put these Invidious/yew.tube style links up, I’m doing it to keep you and me both at one remove from the Data Empire. It doesn’t always work seamlessly because the Data Empire strikes back. You can always click the ‘watch on YouTube’ link to the left to get a more robust but dirtier connection straight to the deathstar … the Switch Invidious Instance one to try an alternate route … Or just check for the name of Caitlin Johnstone, in this case, via your usual filthy but reliable channels.

To the extent possible and convenient, I will continue to try and link you instead to alternative sources for the same information, as I do by sending you to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble page, or Robert Durden’s Rokfin versions. Et cetera; thank me later.

Also: my phone is off for the weekend minimum. Nothing personal.

Of course I can join you in spending a couple of tears for scared or dead civilians in Western Ukraine.

It’s just that I have to wonder, why we’re doing it now, when no tears were ever spent for Ukrainians in the east. Or for the Yemenis. Or the Syrians. Much less the Palestinians, or for that matter the residents of Flint, MI. Each one of them victimized by the aggressions of much larger powers, often including (with money, weapons, and at least tacit support) the US. (h/t to Durden.)

I won’t bother you with the history you already know, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq, or in any of the giant fistfuls of places less infamous. I won’t repeat the tale of Patrice Lumumba.

A few months back our media handlers directed us to weep for Afghanis, with the implication that decades spent alongside trillions of dollars in nominally trying to make their lives better was just not enough.

So we wept on cue and then forgot about it. Next news cycle please.

***

Lord how I struggle to care less about any of it and return my attention to the clear air of the Palouse as a symbol, to the Rim as healing ideal.

It’s still not warm but the sun is on the road back to ascendancy. I went out and checked the tarp wrapped over the still-boxed rooftop tent, and proved to myself that no snowmelt had gotten beneath, because the worst enemy of an RTT is mold.

Praise His solar name, and self-pats on the back for me, for being wise in the tiny ways even if I’m still a glassy lotus-eating fool in the big ones.

To be fair to myself, I did produce some piles of writing during the wholly lost four days, though none of it was suitable for publication on account of it was immoral.

I really wish I could break the habit of needing to justify myself that way, but I seem solidly addicted to it.

The zen thing to do would be to notice the shame and ego of it, and notice, and notice, and accept it as experience until it drifts at its own pace into the ticking past.

I think I’ll try that, in the same way I’m trying wheat-free.

Maybe it will work for the rage-at-shitlibs thing. Maybe it will even work when a nominal progressive falls deep into the shitlib pit. Ah Kyle me boy, we hardly knew ye; noticing, noticing, accepting, waving goodbye …

Enjoy another look at Kyle’s fall PLUS a quite jaded look at the potential candidacy of our gal Marianne, but then join me in forgetting about the political for one day at least.

***

The best laid plans.

There’s a four-day hole there that is built of some depressive malady, likely linked to the attachment disorder.

The snowy, windy, bonechill days of no solitude roll on. Very little happens.

For today’s signature accomplishment, I drove down to the frontage road of the interstate in my literal pickup truck, and I sat for an hour watching while the bigger louder trucks of the People’s Convoy rolled past, flags flying, honking furiously at their supporters gathered on the overpass above them, and above me.

Why would I do that? I don’t even know.

I never once blew my horn. I don’t even own a flag and I don’t want to own one.

I just observed, and now I am reporting. Why?

I don’t agree with most of what these people say. As a group they strike me as a couple of notches stupider than average, and I find it probable that many of them are badly broken people. Perhaps …

I am reacting with empathy because I am in analogous ways broken too.

Perhaps it’s just that I love protest for its own sake … no matter how misguided I think what they’re doing is, I consider it preferable to sucking up the lies of the oppressors and regurgitating them as a substitute for thinking, or forming lucid opinions. It is in most ways preferable to buckling down and performing stupid human tricks every day for the enrichment of the professional and managerial class, and the obscene excesses of their bosses above them.

So I sit and watch what passes for a Resistance, blathering inanely hour after hour on their YouTubes.

And when they bring their show to my town, I naturally attend the performance. It’s the postmodern equivalent of going to the fair or the carnival when it comes near–you can’t not go, can you?

I went. I sniffed dyspepticaly at the honking of the ferris wheel. I held myself above the insipid flagwaving of the midway and all its rigged carny games.

But I went, and I observed, and now I am reporting.

Perhaps I am human after all.

It could happen.

2014: A Putin/KGB engineered coup topples the Mexican government. A pro-Russian puppet is installed in Mexico City. Later, it will come to light that the Mexican puppet’s cabinet was hand-picked by a woman in the Russian Office of Foreign Affairs, and her choices for the positions include fascists and Nazis too.

2015: Widespread rebellion erupts against the Russo-Mex regime in the border states of Sonora and Chihuahua, largely inhabited by English speakers with cultural loyalties to the US.

2016-2021: Mexico wages brutal war on its two breakaway provinces and its own people within them, bombing and killing a few rebels and hundreds of civilian Chihuahuans and Sonorans.

2016-2021: The US issues strongly worded statements against the southern Mexican regime, and warns that they consider the situation a threat to American security.

2018-2019: Russia invites the Mexicans to join the Warsaw Pact and begins pumping billions of dollars of weapons into Mexico. Russian ‘defense contractor’ stocks soar.

2020: The Russian opposition party attempts to impeach Putin, on the shaky ground that he is said to have delayed some weapons shipments to Mexico by a few weeks. The attempt fails on party lines.

2022: The American government formally recognizes the breakaway Mexican states as independent and then sends US troops into them to eject the Mexican forces, effectively deciding the outcome of the north-south Mexican Civil War.

The entire Russian-aligned state media erupts in outrage at American Aggression. But their ratings soar just as high as weapons manufacturer profits.

***

With luck, it will be easy for you to see what I did there.

I’m furious today, not with Putin or Zalensky. Not with White House spokesperson Jen Psaki or with the rich useful idiots of cable TV.

I’m furious with the good earthy liberals that listen to the latter and swallow what they’re told uncritically and whole, waving a flag and getting emotional about our brave veterans and sacrifice.

Because they’re far smarter than that–and I can’t understand why they would want to embrace such stupidly mono-dimensional views of any given situation, whether we’re talking about those poor women in Afghanistan, or the lesser of two evils, or the moral truths of this “invasion”. Or that “insurrection”. Or what the fuck ever … why? Why do you refuse to see self-evident truths?

Here is a huge body of contrary facts that you will never hear on CNN.

And here is a calmly passionate dissection of the truly putrid hypocrisy of my dear righteous Democratic fellow travelers.

That’s all I have to say. No, that is a lie.

Allow me to humbly amend that to: That’s all I’m going to say. Amen.

(as in: actual pre-Clintonian George McGovern-style Liberals)

“I don’t like to see myself as alternative. For heaven’s sake, I am a Harvard graduate, I’ve been a lawyer on Wall Street … I very much identify with the constitution of the US and with the good, American values …”
— Alfred de Zayas

He did all the right things. He wears a bow tie to teach. He looks like a somewhat humorless Bill Nye. He is offended, that all this buys him no respect and pushes him to the ‘alternative’ margins.

Because he is by intellectual honesty compelled, to recognize and offer the following.

NATO is a military alliance. There is no question on how the US would react if Mexico were to enter into a military alliance with, say, China. The US refusal to take Ukrainian NATO membership off the table was wildly provocative.

“I have no problem in saying that the United States is not a democracy. The United States is an oligarchy.” He’s moved on to Switzerland personally, which has an actual direct democracy.)

‘Spreading democracy’ is a smokescreen for spreading the (virulently oligarchic) economic systems of neo-liberalism.

Compare Ukraine 2022 to ‘the former’ Yugoslavia 1999. Were you howling about Serbian independence then? Even as cautious a centrist source as Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to the question, which begins: “The legitimacy under international law of the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has been seriously questioned”.

How do you feel about Catalan independence? How about for the Tamils? The Biafrans? The Cascadians? Now, how about the Donbass?

All else being equal, the only reason you care about ‘Ukrainian sovereignty’ is because some MSM jughead insisted you must, under the cultist Hillaritarian cry of Russia Bad, and if you think I’m exaggerating, show me all those times, dozens of them I’m sure, that you raged against the Putin machine before the Presidential election of 2016. (We didn’t get Trump because “Putin”, darling. We got him from millions of Americans completely repulsed by the heartless giant ball of shit the Democrats became between McGovern’s 1970 and the eight years of Obama. “Deplorable”.)

“There used to be many good people in the US government, and there still are. They’re just not in the majority.”

Post-Vietnam, post-Afghanistan, Syria will be the next place where routine US imperialism gone bad will end in disgrace.

The encirclement strategy NATO is using with Russia is also being attempted by the Empire in the case of China, giving both second-tier nations ever more reason to make common cause against it.

As a kicker, speaking from Switzerland, Professor de Zayas gives his opinion that modern Germany is a totalitarian state, and gives a number of reasons why he no longer accepts speaking engagements there.

***

There were still 20 minutes left in the video when I bailed to finally sleep. But you get the idea.

Yes all very heroic.

Except the picture was taken a year ago, and Our Hero was visiting the front lines in Donbass where he and his Nazi friends were shelling their own people. Go Team Z.

I was made aware of this fact via this article:
7 FAKE NEWS stories coming out of Ukraine

But if you go to the Dore video considering the article, you get Cenk emotionally tearing up at some other heroes who turned out to be alive and well in Russian custody. And a few other easter eggs.

You’re welcome.

Wheat-free and maybe even grain-free yepsure, but no corn tortillas? Riceless? Don’t know if I’m ready for that yet.

On the path anyway, with this recognition–all the sauces are tomato and onion mostly.

I mean the spaghetti sauce. The curry simmer sauce. The salsa, and with a heavy dose of green chili added, even the enchilada sauce.

Tomato, and onion, and chili, and some combination of spice and ‘other’ appropriate to the cuisine. Italian basil. Coconut milk, turmeric, ginger for curries. Cumin and cilantro and lots more chili for the Mex.

Maybe certain variations are prepped at the house before sojourn, and fridged for reconstitution on the road.

What is necessary in terms of that fridge and those stoves and the electrification to shore-power them or even eventually solar-power them can begin to take shape. It’s true that I’m tervigersating

***
Resauces

2-Ingredient Chickpea Flour Tortillas

Chickpea Flour Tortillas! Trying ElaVegan’s Recipe

Socca: the GF Chickpea Flatbread that will change your life

Italian chickpea flatbread – Farinata a modo mio… Farinata made My Way

VEGAN LENTIL FLATBREAD » Gluten-Free, Oil Free, Super Simple to Make!

Basic Onion Tomato Gravy Using Pressure Cooker

Hot 🌶 Sauce Made 3 different ways

All that dreaming was brought on by deep low pressure following a strange storm of snow.

Yesterday doesn’t count for anything because those stories all visited me in the afternoon of today. I’m lost.

This morning there was real drama in Ottawa on some soap opera level. The Loadstar truck left.

Eric the driver of it, who has been quite an occupation rock star, said that the government was threatening the bank accounts of 50 fellow Loadstar workers if he didn’t go, so he had to.

Which was completely believable on the face, but quickly raised a lot of messy questions. One, Eric had already quit the company. Two, he owned his own truck, so if the government wanted that iconic trailer gone, why didn’t he just unhook from it and let it go?

In the new-media frenzy of YouTubers, one guy walked over to Eric’s best friend’s truck nearby for some reaction.

The guy called Eric a pussy and said his story was bullshit. He offered an opinion that instead, Eric’s wife had threatened to leave him if he didn’t knock off this foolishness and come home.

He said he felt like a machine-gunner in a war, whose ammo man just suddenly decided to stop feeding him bullets. Betrayed by a brother.

In other news, there’s a US convoy supposed to start the 23rd in Barstow, which probably means it will come straight past the place I call house, formerly home.

Jovian again but she and I inhabiting. We entertained a bunch of Bernie supporters around the dining room table because he was giving a speech on the wireless. We had the wireless. It was brief and mostly painless.

Then we tried to figure out if the washer and dryer still worked, and the answer was Sort Of.

The electric bill came and in real life that one’s hers because of trailer cat heat. She freaked out because it was three thousand dollars. I tried over and over to say it wasn’t, it was three hundred. It didn’t work. Inconsolable.

Neighbors moved in. They had a huge dog and a glowing purple cat that went everywhere together and were friendly almost to the point of sentience.

Later the pets introduced me to their dense and dull facebooking owners who reminded me of extras from Idiocracy.

Later still we just moved to Finland for some reason but honestly I’m not even sure the girl was her or the boy was me.

Waking at sunset.

In rough grainy footage from 2014, here’s the comedian Hannibal dropping a truth bomb on Bill Cosby’s reputation. The explosion of that bomb had vast ripples. To date 60 women have come forth to charge America’s Dad with some version of date rape, and of course he’s been through court and is now out of jail on some rich man’s technicality. But it all started with a joke that had truth in it.

The most interesting thing about the joke, to me, is that Hannibal wasn’t directly coming down on Cosby for being a rapist, but for being a moral hypocrite.

“Pull your pants up black people, I was on TV in the ‘80s,” Buress said during a show at a Philadelphia comedy club, mocking Bill Cosby.

“Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby. So turn the crazy down a couple notches.”

Meaning: Bill Cosby was pre-rapist famous for a lot of things 15-20 years ago, but in the black community especially, he was notorious for blaming the victims for the crime. For calling them violent and illiterate and profane, and in particular:

“He also had harsh words for black men who don’t have jobs and are angry about their lives:“

“You’ve got to stop beating up your women because you can’t find a job, because you didn’t want to get an education and now you’re (earning) minimum wage,” Cosby said. “You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school, when you had an opportunity.”

So the subtext of Hannibal’s joke wasn’t rage against the rapes, so much as it was rage against Cosby turning himself into a shitty conformist, profiting by it immensely and famously, and then turning around and vilifying every black man who didn’t conform, and didn’t succeed, and wasn’t America’s beloved and secretly rapey daddy man.

I remember the time when he did so. Let me tell you, there were plenty of well-off people, black and white alike, who timidly and quietly applauded Bill Cosby for saying what he said.

Those people are trauma victims each and every one. They wear nice clothes. They live in big houses on nice streets. Their insipid core religion is about things like fantasy football and Mediterranean diets and taking the family to worship services at Disney, and they’re hollow as fuck inside. Victims perhaps in their own right, but maybe more like good Germans who went to work every day and made sure the trains ran on time, and were proud of their status as good, moral, hardworking people. Patriots. The non-iodized salt of the earth.

Being victimized by rape is a tragedy, and everyone knows that.

Being victimized by taking it up the ass since childhood from a broken system? Well now.

That’s a gray area, don’t you think?

Bootstraps, people, c’mon, get with the Program …

You’re peeking now inside the real black heart of what Eeyore calls the capitalist death cult.

To some greater or lesser extent, I’m a cult member and so are you.

Not just a cult member either, but fairly high-ranking at that. Neither of us is eating out of a dumpster or living in a Sentra.

I’m not trying to shame you or prescribe for you. I’m just stating revelatory truths, like Hannibal did 8 years ago.

My post-cult religion teaches me that good things can come of that.

So I’m living as if I’m moving toward those good things and maybe, theoretically, against the odds, some of them will come true.

***
***
h/t: W. Kamau Bell On Bill Cosby’s Legacy

Waking from a dream, but this time the plot and details don’t matter. This time it’s about where it led me, in the first coffee stage of the day.

Early on I scraped the bottom more than once. Sleeping on couches and in parks, all that.

When I, um, bootstrapped up out of that, I developed a theory. This theory stated that the First Thing was to obtain a Situation, by which I meant: a job, and a rental not too far from it, and a way of getting between them.

Grabbing hold of a situation is not a one-and-done kind of thing. There will always be a job that pays more or requires less hours for the same compensation. There will always be a better apartment, and maybe it will be on a major bus line. For instance.

So for many years I bounced around from job to job and place to place trying to perfect the mix. Sometimes the gambles paid off and other times not. I put a lot of effort into getting a college degree, in part so that my attractiveness to better employers would grow. Again the results were mixed–I did fall into the student loan trap, and eventually the trappers got serious, and that … is off-topic.

In the meantime, the Second Thing was to find, in the context of the present situation, a Girl. Mainly I thought of this in terms of pleasure. What it really was, was a search for Attachment in the midst of my ongoing quest for Autonomy.

When it worked (and with modest pride I can note that it usually did somehow), I was starting to claw up the rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Eventually I got a second degree, but that changed nothing. But becoming a qualified driver of 18-wheelers fundamentally did. My debt (leaving the unplayable pile of student loans aside) was wiped out and there was almost no need to pay rent at all. Finally a surplus of cash piled up, and that was amazing.

I used it to get the first van, and the first computer, and the first mobile situation, and wander. What I found was the town I wanted to live in.

But the money ran out and the perfect little town was not an immediately viable place to construct a new situation. I moved to Albuquerque instead, and found a good one, beating back 41 other competitors to win my golden refuge, back in the arms of a schooly mater. Pushing forty, my economic life was finally trending upward.

Let’s leave the bio there for now.

***

There’s an old saw in anthropology. It says: Startling but true! The average hunter-gatherer from back in the before times spent 20 hours a week at “work”, providing for him/herself the basic physiological necessities of life!

How that ever got calculated is a mystery to me–it doesn’t make much sense really. But … because it is a data point that supports many of the ideas I hold dear, I generally believe it anyway. Plus, I would argue, the old Way is not hierarchical. As a member of a small tribe, a lot of the higher needs were fully integrated into the process of obtaining sustenance. Taking down an animal in a hunt means food of course, but also grants both a feeling of accomplishment and prestige–maybe even something akin to spiritual fulfillment.

Contrast this with today where the “job” is, or is supposed to be, a wholly separate and compartmentalized thing-unto-itself.

Grabbing oneself a situation today means accepting alienation as a fact of life.

You don’t have a home, unless and until you have a disconnected alien job to pay the rent for it. There’s quite a lot of overlap between the homeless and the jobless, and even good compassionate citizens can feel some mix of scorn and pity for the “less fortunate”. Shrugging and sighing and spitting out some post-civilized truthiness about Ya Don’t Work, Ya Don’t Eat.

At some very basic level, this is a seriously fucked up system.

And by system I don’t mean only capitalism, but ‘civilization’ itself.

Your better anarchists have noted that Property Is Theft.

I propose a corollary which states that Civilization Is Slavery.

The project I’m undertaking might look like it’s about pickup trucks and nomadics and film making and profit.

It’s really an experiment in whether de-civilizing oneself is desirable. Or even, to any meaningful extent, possible.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that “Wookiee” is a racial slur, and that I’m going to have to personally cancel George Lucas for making it seem normal in polite company.

The word refers to the large, powerful, intelligent life form inhabiting the planet Kashyyk, xenophobic but compassionate primates who live long lives in dense forests by a strict moral code.

Personally I’ve decided to identify as an Apache Attack Wookiee, in part to reclaim that slur, in the same way that ‘queer’ is now a prideful term of art.

If you want to address me or my heritage politely, you may refer to either with Wroshyri, which in my own adopted native language translates as “Person/People of the Trees”.

I haven’t decided on my pronouns yet, so stay subscribed for that exciting development.

Thank you for understanding my evolving diversity and for holding back on your racist laughter until my back is turned.

I think I need a little more of this in my life.

And by ‘this’, I variously mean:

• Dirt roads
• Physical exertion
• Having a camera with me on dirt roads that require physical exertion
• Trainsong without horns, or at least not horns close by, because as scripture tells us, “everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance; everybody thinks it’s true”
• Capturing video, bringing it to clean robust hardware, and editing it with free and open source software
• Publishing video (this is my first public one ever), first on platforms I control utterly, and then selectively on ones that generate revenue (which won’t happen today, but is a priority for Soon)

Plus a whole bunch of stuff that I’ll think of as soon as I hit Submit, because that’s just always.

For the record, this is a first ride of a ‘Lectric’ brand E-bike, which we test drove at their Phoenix home base some days ago, and which costs $999 plus tax, and which arrived via free shipping yesterday. It’s a lot of fun to pilot, and although this is not a review, it seems sturdily built and worth the price both as a means of exercise here at home, and as backup transportation on the road in case the truck goes down–the electrified range on it is about 50 miles and it can be pedaled even with the battery at zero.

Crashed about 24 hours ago and slept for seven hours. Up about 8 am. Now it’s full circle to after midnight and only now is it becoming thinkable to rest again.

That is the nature of a day to oneself. It musn’t and can’t and won’t be wasted. No naps. Just steady focus.

Much later today is a mandatory run because the taxes have to be finalized and signed. So it’s shorter day than it should be though for a good cause. I didn’t tell you about my claims of deduction for all the business expenses. It was a hard thing to do because I’ve lived for so long keeping the very personal separated from the legal and financial. I didn’t tell you, precisely because it was hard. But I’m mending that failure as I type now.

I have a list. I have some plans for pushing in the right direction up until the last minute, and some grunt work laid out for the non-solitude beyond.

Camera manuals. Relabeled piles. Half an hour twice a day for Dusty because he’s otherwise alone in the room that has been his whole world this year. He’s better now, ready to move on, but the love keeps him mostly sane and I believe saner than he’s ever been.

After half an hour he’ll jump down off the lap and bed because it’s enough, for a while, and right in those moments we understand each other perfectly.

I’ll miss him.

Felinity.

Have The Truckers Won?

No, and I’m not sure we even want them to, in every aspect, but there are cracks in the wall they’re assailing.

In Coutts, Alberta, the truckers agreed to open one lane of traffic in each direction, so long as the provincial government agreed to wipe out the province-level vax-passport program. It happened.

A neighboring flyover province did the same without any negotiation at all.

You may well say: yeah, but the federal Canadian passport program still stands …

Which is true. Just like marijuana is still illegal, federally, in Colorado and all the other United States that have legalized … but it doesn’t matter, if there’s no local enforcement. In either case.

No matter how you feel about mandates, getting rid of passports can be seen as a positive thing. I certainly see it as so.

It’s now generally agreed that everyone will get Covid eventually. If that’s the case, trying to stop it from happening with mask laws or firing unvaccinated nurses is just dumb. A number of blue states south of the Maple border are acknowledging that and planning to drop their ineffective laws. Oregon. Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, on the rez, they cheerfully take your temperate from your forehead remotely just as they’ve always done.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to wear a mask everywhere because I actually like being a masked man, and because Covid isn’t the only thing I can catch from yonder great unwashed masses. I still haven’t had an episode of anything like a cold or flu for going on two years now. If it ain’t broke …

With the whole rationale for mandates crumbling out from under the feet of our dear leaders, they increasingly have no ground to stand on. Do I personally care if Justin Trudeau is punted out of office? No, because the Corporate Machine of Democracy will just replace him with something worse. Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden meant nothing and I’m quite certain nothing’s different up north, except that they have some degree of not-for-profit healthcare left over from the glory days before the billionaires cut the people’s breath completely.

I still support breathing, and protest.

For their own sake.

Keep on truckin’.

Two weeks since I’ve had an Alex day, but late in the afternoon I have one at last.

I don’t know exactly why they’re so important. I do know that they are.

As I do in any case I wander the property, noting what needs to happen. Unimportant things–rake here, polish there.

The important and the unimportant get boiled down to 100 square feet of office lab. To my right there’s a glass topped table where categories of the most important each have there own piles. Here are the bills to be paid. Here are the strategies for amplifying the cash available to pay them. Here is what my heart wants to do. Here are the organizational strategies for making sure it gets done.

It’s not as though it’s any quieter; in fact I am free to bellow, and let video streams pour out at full volume with no headphones.

I’m choosing each part of the noise, or to shut it off, and I am creating an environment conducive to thinking. It’s true that sometimes cats will be ignored, but they’re cats and they generally ignore me too. We understand. The atmosphere fills with felinity in the purest sense.

It’s a very good thing.

That’s not my title. I stole it.

From Russell Brand.

Some neolib dingleberry on Twitter, as part of the ongoing effort to smear Joe Rogan, put together a list of JRE guests, in columns marked “left-wing” and “right wing”, to try to demonstrate how Rogan has secret conservative leanings.

Unfortunately for his mission, he tagged Mr. Brand as a right-winger, and that was only the most stupid of several questionable choices on the list. Brand responds with mirth and thunder in the video linked above.

Not on the list was Jon Stewart, but:

Jon Stewart Supports Rogan! Opposes Censorship

So there’s that.

***

The bottom line is that left and right have ever less relevance and meaning anyway.

I continue to watch hours of live video from Ottawa, and other places like Windsor and little old Coutts on the northwestern border, as it spreads.

I agree with almost nothing that the protestors have to say about ‘communism’ or Antifa or anything else. I think that their ideas about Freedom are capitalistic and feeble-minded. I am, in very generic terms, pro-vaxx, and I don’t even care that much about their central issue of Mandates. And yet …

I am very glad that people are in the streets at last, and expressing their displeasure with neo-liberal bullshit of the kind embraced by the likes of Justin Trudeau and Joseph Biden, both of whom, for example, can’t wait to get into another pointless war over the Ukraine.

I’m glad, even though that puts me in the company mainly of the worst of american Republicans.

Glad for the same reasons I was over Occupy Wall Street, or Black Lives Matter.

The only thing I’d say to the well-intentioned and dare I even say good people protesting in Ottawa is that a focus on the streets around Parliament is a waste of your temporarily considerable power.

Move more of the trucks to the international bridges and watch your enemies on both sides of the border actually begin to squirm and finally agree to start talking.

No corrupt politician or corporatist on either side of the gives a goddamn about your opinion of them, or about anything else you The People think or say or feel. Your tears and curses mean nothing to them.

What they care about is money.

Start to strangle trade, and they’ll definitely start to care. Not because they feel any differently about you. But because the Beast must be fed rivers of green blood at all times, or it begins to choke.

I know you don’t care that that’s good for the environment. I know you don’t care that that’s bad for capitalism and empire. Fine. I’ll care about that half of the equation. Only embrace the fact that those bridges are the key to getting you what you want.

And maybe we can both find something to be happy about, for a change.

Canadian Firefighter FIRED for making this video – Peter van Oordt

I am now a former firefighter

Calm quiet versus …

Journalist Hammers State Department Spokesman Over Russian Lies

… the smarmy little spook.

Taking a stray named Marmalade to Prettytown.

Home to dine on 90-mile Oregano’s takeout. My staple is called Alfredo the Dark.

And then to slide toward fading with the quiet streets of Ottawa littered with big trucks and cop cars.

Which is to say, Fuck Trudeau, not because he’s a Communist like the protestors say, but because he’s not.

The pressure cooker does rice perfectly in three minutes. Started with jasmine. The experts say Basmati.

After that, for my first time, I used a ready-to-go Thai Coconut Chicken soup, and threw in a few serranos for heat.

It wasn’t great, but it was good.

Night two, adding a little basic Curry Paste made it twice as edible.

Tomorrow I’ll shop for real.

The most important base is coconut milk, though apparently some people use yogurt with success.

Then some veggies and herbs. I think my basics will be red potatoes, shallots or onions, chickpeas, and basil. But maybe also: snap peas, squash, tomato.

For optional meat, chicken thighs are widely recommended, though I’m interested in maybe a fish and fish sauce version too.

Then there’s spicing it.

Going with nothing but curry paste and the chilies is easy.

But building up from scratch might include: cumin, coriander, cardamom, turmeric, ginger, lemongrass, garlic, fennel, mustard seed, salt, pepper, soy sauce, ‘garam masala’. Cilantro root is said to be best, steams next, and leaves least.

And of course the serranos, and little thai chilies too, if I can find them.

I’m sleeping. I’m cooking. I’m eating.

This round of harsh night cold is said to be lasting about another week.

This morning in real time, the question was put to me:

‘What the hell is wrong with you!?’

The emotional toxicity of it aside, the query has a real answer. It is worth trying to figure out what that real answer is.

The working hypothesis to the experimental interrogation is something along the lines of, well, I have an attachment disorder.

As I wrote those two words I felt like they sounded familiar and so I went to go see if they were a real thing.

Result: yes. They were not something I can claim as original, as I had briefly hoped.

“An attachment disorder is a type of mood or behavioral disorder that affects a person’s ability to form and maintain relationships. These disorders typically develop in childhood. They can result when a child is unable to have a consistent emotional connection with a parent or primary caregiver.”

True enough, although explained that clinically, I think my diagnosis would be for a relatively mild case, and also for an unusually intricate form of it. Which is to say, I’ve formed and maintained, with varying success, a lot of relationships.

But there is also no doubt that my ability to do so has been affected adversely, by whatever the hell is wrong with me.

And that anyone who has ever left me a voice mail and waited days or weeks for it to be replied-to would agree.

***

Maybe it would be helpful to note that if you’re reading this, you’re not one of the people who are still waiting.

I went out and ate, came back and took a shower and some naproxen, and wrote the above. Then I sought solace between the sheets for a extended nap.

All of which did at least take out the headache, and left me on the far ponent shore of sundown.

***

I got to thinking about Attachment by watching and sharing this.

How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction – Gabor Maté

Mate’ says that our two basic human needs are for attachment and autonomy.

And that, when the two needs conflict, autonomy and trusting our guts will always lose out, because obtaining attachment is as basic to human survival as breath or water.

There are two other essential concepts in what he has to say here, and these are addiction, and trauma.

As I understand it, an addiction can be to anything or any behavior, but it will always be about recovering a feeling of love and belonging, the pleasure of being attached. It is always a solution in the short term, but it’s not an addiction unless it also has long-term negative consequences.

So: as far as I know, my deeply ingrained coffee habit isn’t an addiction, because there’s no downside. It’s just pleasure.

Trauma, says Mate’, isn’t what happens to us, but what happens inside us as a result. We become addicted to one behavior or another because the pleasure of that addiction effectively soothes the lingering trauma.

People don’t get addicted to solutions that don’t work for them. Only to ones that do.

“The loss of self is the essence of trauma.” Reconnecting to that lost self is the essence of recovery.

***

An hour after waking late, the cats are fed.

This includes the two real house cats, the three nominal indoor hospital cases, the two regular barn cats, and the black and white Syl who supposedly has a home on the next block, but is spending more and more time here where the kibble and the healing flow freely.

The films will flow too.

I also am fed, and caffeinated, and nictotined in the non-ideal way, and clean, and warm. And I have now spilled properly as I have all this year, partly because I have a loving attachment obligation now, to my very real patrons, and I’m taking that responsibility with great seriousness.

To the three of you in particular, thank you again from the bottom of my heart.

The primary argument proposed in the blue-no-matter-who days before the last Presidential election was that Hey, Biden and the Dems are a least a little better than Trump and his creepy cohort, right?

I was a tiny bit persuaded, then. But I just flat don’t believe it any more.

I could go down the line issue by issue explaining why–“kids in cages” comes to mind immediately–but things are much worse than suggested by any one of those smaller arguments, or even than fistfuls of them taken all at once.

Here’s why, in three quick acts.

I. What They Stand For vs. What They Claim To Stand For

At some point in Hillary’s 2016 run, her remarks to donor elites behind closed doors were leaked. The essence of her comments was: Look, boys. Don’t worry. When you see me promising liberal things to the masses, that’s just politics. But you know and I know where I really stand. No war machine capitalist, no greedy pharma exec, has a damn thing to fear from me. Nothing will change for you under Clinton 2.0 … I’m one of you, after all.

In 2020, Biden echoed her words to the same mega-wealthy donor class, again behind closed doors.

Here’s how it looks and plays out in the real world.

CA Democrats Squash Medicare for All Bill

California’s government is a Dem wet dream come true. They control more than three-quarters of the legislature, and of course both Senators and the Governor are Democrats.

They can literally do whatever they want. And for years, according to the Governor and many, many other politicians, Health Care for every Californian was top of the list. If the country as a whole wouldn’t find a way to pass Medicare For All, well gosh darn it, at least here in liberal Cali, completely controlled in every dimension by the Democratic Party, we can provide it for our people. Vote Blue!

It never happened, and it likely never will happen, under Dem rule. Not even in California. Not even with supermajorities in both houses.

You can’t blame that on a random Manchin or a lone Sinema.

Nor can you blame the state’s runaway homelessness ‘problem’ on some rotating villain, either.

Nor anything but the fact, as JD says toward the end of this video, that there’s one party, the Money Party, and everything else is just window dressing, branding, and choosing to Identify with a Team. Being a Blue Voter means no more and no less than being a fan of the Broncos or Bengals, or Coke or Pepsi, or Apple or Google, and believing that it does isn’t any longer a sign of moral superiority or an alliance with evil, full stop.

II. Censorship

Glenn Greenwald is smarter than you or me. At the very least, this is true when it comes to legal matters, and especially so when it comes to civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, starting with the First and most cherished Amendment of our alleged constitutional democracy.

Democrats Are Pressuring Companies to Censor For Them: a Violation of the First Amendment

An Amendment that is being actively undermined by pressure upon the tech companies, among others, to do the bidding of the “Liberals”. Speaking of …

III. The MSM

Back when I was a reporter, the term “liberal media” was acknowledged among us liberals in the media with a wink and a nod. Of course it was the truth–but only among we few and proud rank-and-file general journalists.

Even back then, the problem was that the media Ownership were business people, avowed capitalists and happy patriotic Americans, and so any hireling journalist who wanted to do anything more revolutionary than grind out a good living from the practice of Objective Journalism was just let go, or never hired in the first place.

In radio, where I worked, the landscape was dominated by people like Rush Limbaugh. But back then there were some challengers to that paradigm. NPR had yet to be co-opted, and the Pacifica Radio Network was a real force in many markets. Most notably, there was Air America, a commercial operation with lefty-flavored hosts.

But looking back, even Air America was playing it pretty safe. The big names to come out of it were people like Sam Seder and Rachel Maddow, figures that today are universally reviled by actual leftists with integrity.

So when those with integrity find ways around the manufactured Money Party consensus, the devolved fourth estate is the first dog in the pack to be baying for blood. When the Dem wing of the Money Party decides that Julian Assange or Joe Rogan is now an enemy, for whatever threat to the endless profits of the war machine or the pharmaceutical lobby they pose, the gloves come off and Rachel, or Morning Joe, or Don Lemon, or Anderson Cooper, or Chris Cuomo are more than happy to tell all good Libs what to think, about Ukraine, or Covid, or any other damn issue du jour.

They’re paid liars, and typically very well-paid at that.

Listening to them with any credulity puts you at risk for brain damage.

So … alternatively …

Glenn’s version: The Media Outlets Demanding Joe Rogan’s Removal from Spotify Spread Far More Disinformation

Jimmy’s version: Joe Rogan Responds To Critics & Spotify

Russell’s version, and please watch this one if nothing else, because it is absolutely 100% calm and rational: The Truth

I also have plenty more to say, and I sigh to think that at length I probably will.

But for now: Hold. Enough.

For a brief period in the early 19th century, in between the oligarchy of Spain and the oligarchy of Murica, this little scrap of land I inhabit and love was known as the Mexican Estado de Occidente: the “Western State”.

Although, as Wikipedia dryly points out, “the Yaqui, Pima, Apaches, and other (majority) native inhabitants” of it did not recognize Occidente, or the Mexican’s right to rule them from hundreds of miles south.

There existed a leader named Juan Banderas, a Yaqui, who was fighting the Mexicans up until 1833, at which time he was captured and summarily executed. In the next decade, America would steal this part of the land out from under the Mexicans, but the native Resistance would continue all century long on both sides of the Rio Grande and the alleged Border, or Frontera.

We know how it ‘ends’.

Most modern citizen-residents of Tucson or Las Cruces seem inclined to feel that this is the way it should have ‘ended’, or maybe even that this is the way things have ‘always’ been. Instead of an, er, Occident of History.

Anyway. I was digging around in the etymology of ‘Occident’ to try and decide what it was worth to me poetically, and I stumbled across this, under Synonyms:

English
Borrowed from Italian ponente (“west”), ultimately from Latin ponent-, ponens, present participle of ponere (“to place”).
ponent: The west; the area of the setting sun.

And even a quote, seemingly inspired by Milton himself, from a 1974 novel:

“There was an ambiguity surpassing conjecture in her eyes, and the wind rose up around us in that half barbaric Russian garden with its alien Diana blackened by snows and fierce ponent winds.”

So right now, after long years of considering such names as Aztlan and Deseret for my true home country, and having briefly been enamored of Occidente …

I’m calling her Ponent now.

And maybe even considering myself a Ponent too.

Alright. Figuring out this load strap thing can’t wait any longer.

Not as hard as I thought. I think that’ll make it up the ancestral hill.

While we were down there we test-drove and ended up buying a pair of e-Bikes too.

The basic outline of the Rig is therefore acquired, but completed, oh no. It’s get to work time. Starting with trash day and finishing off the Taxes; hardly the fun part, but it’s gotta get done to clear the decks. Engage.

Should the Left Support Nina Turner?

This too is an irrelevant but nevertheless interesting question. The presenter asking it pretty clearly comes down on the side of a No. Is it for good enough reasons? That’s your mission query, but only if you should decide to accept it, which you will probably decline, and in so doing prove yourself a better spender of time than I am.

I would, however, advise that this is worth the time:

PRIMO RADICAL #259: Robbie Jaeger

Two chubby white male nerds explain in truly exquisite detail why electoralism has inevitably become a dead end.

Unsurprisingly, it’s that most everybody, far down beneath the Nina Turner level, has got a palm out and expects, needs, it to be greased. The power elite are squeezing out their tubes of said grease judiciously, wherever there’s a danger that some alternative candidate, channel, outlet, or individual might actually attempt to effect real change. So nothing changes.

Consider the position of a young idealist for a moment.

She gets into a good school and studies history or pol sci or law. Or anything really. Probably this leaves her pretty deep in debt. Come graduation, the bill comes due and the pressure mounts. Her parents do whatever they can to help, but this means first of all helping her get a great job, and ‘great’ means, they hope, pushing six figures at the least.

Out of whose pocket will the six figures come? That ends up being the crucial question.

The normal answer is: the capitalists. Maybe it’s as morally foul as going to work for a defense contractor, but remember that we did theorize that she’s an idealist. So maybe it’s a ‘non-profit’, largely funded by, er, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. They’re good, right? She’s heard them sponsoring NPR … they’re the ones who “support creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world”.

And just look at their diverse, pretty Board of Directors.

Every single one of them was once just like you, young idealist.

You could become one of them, if you learn to play the game well and right.

Which requires investing your mind, soul, and time into the world as it exists, and accepting the System’s definitions of more just. More ‘verdant’. More peaceful.

And yet. Somehow ..

The six-figure success stories at NPR yammer incessantly about Russian Aggression, and most all of it is complete bullshit.

The six-figure success stories at NPR don’t have a word to say about American Aggression, the single most potent force in shaping the world for eighty years at least.

How many wars, how many coups, how many assassinations, and incidents of regime change, and attempted election-riggings has the Empire engaged in since your grandmother was your age?

Did they teach you, at that serene school, the name of Patrice Lumumba?

Did they teach you who killed John Kennedy, or Malcolm X, or Fred Hampton?

When they dump billions into Raytheon’s pockets for the whole time you’ve been alive, for the purpose of Saving Those Poor Afghani Women, did you buy the logic?

When they do it again in the name of Defending That Brave Ukrainian Democracy, will you buy it then?

If you take the Machine’s six figures, you’ll buy what they want you to buy with it. Upton Sinclair said it all:

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

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was just like you, a few short years ago.

But she grabbed the Machine’s six figures with both hands and she has no intention of letting go.

Yes, she wept on the House floor, with Nancy Pelosi’s finger in her face, as she signed on for yet another evil Machine vote.

She wept, but she voted with Nancy and Satan.

And with each vote there will be fewer tears, and Noble Young Alexandria will proceed along the enriching path until she looks and thinks exactly like her Mama Bear, the woman who in 1996 was waving the flag for Medicare For All.

That’s how Succeeding works here.

In the holy name of a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. Amen, and God Bless America.

Young idealist, I can’t tell you to not take their money. I don’t have the moral standing to insist. I don’t have your bills to pay, and I don’t know how much being able to afford a child, or a house in the Hamptons, means to you.

I can only explain to you what will happen if you do. The decision is yours by divine right.

As you choose, don’t just listen to your parents, or to me. Especially if you’re intending to be politically active, listen to Primo and Robbie Jaeger explain for an hour about how billionaires take a personal interest in corrupting your heart.

May it live forever unstained by their darkness. May you never vote for the ones who have fallen before you.

Sort of running a day ahead of myself: this was my Saturday.

I don’t remember if I said it, but I pulled the Rack off the Truck to prep them both for better cleaner shinier receiving of the Tent. The rust killing juice arrived yesterday, and tests show it’s working. So it was high time to finish cleaning out the back forty, run that rusted-out load to the dump, and then start on winter maintenance of the trees. Second load. As pictured. At the alternate dump for ‘yard waste only’. The old working Ford.

Now I can de-rust, prime, and paint the small bits that need white Rustoleum paint. And black for the rack … but … before that happens it’s the run to Hell Valley finally, Monday, for the tent, really. And a test drive of the e-Bike. Am I repeating myself? Probably. I know I’m looping recursive at least.

***

Then in the spaghetti dinner evening the fam text thread blew up about Mr. Neil Young.

I said my piece. I’m tired of talking. But I already had a bunch of links ready to go for your perusal or ignoring.

10 political notes from Neil Young (2014 and whether he’s ready for the country or not changes with the weather; welfare mothers are a dead link).

The simply moderately disdainful coverage from the nominal moderates.

They Neil Him To The Cross version.

In other somewhat screechy para-medical impolitic news. (The Canadian truckers come off much better, speaking for themselves, than they did in the distant orthodox opinion of our commie friend.)

You want disinfo, Get it straight from the Faucimouth,

and! you’ll never be rid of the Clintonian curse, and! if they hate Rumble and Substack so much, that’s the best evidence that they’re where anyone with a functioning brain stem will end up real soon.

Let do as thou wilt (and not what Joni Mitchell, Tucker Carlson, or Rachel Maddow thinks) be the whole of the law.

There’s no such thing as ‘American Foreign Policy’, argues Andrew Cockburn, in an interview with Aaron Mate’. There’s just money and power sloshing back and forth from one group of elites to another, depending on circumstance and weather.

The worst thing neoliberals could find to impeach Donald Trump for was slowing down a sale of Raytheon’s arms to Ukraine. It was unthinkable that weapons sales should be reconsidered even for a moment.

Aaron himself makes another great point: the chest-thumping over Ukraine is pointless, considered geopolitically, because no matter how many weapons get poured into the Donbass, the Russian military advantage is so overwhelming that if there were an open war, Putin would roll right over the Ukrainian little league team.

Unless of course, the arms sales themselves are the real point.

And the chest-thumping just moral posturing to justify them.

Which makes a hell of a lot more logical sense than anything being grunted out from the Beltway media right now, including our beloved NPR.

***

Earlier in the day I ran across a word coinage, the name of a mythical drug called Copium, which seems to be sort of both an anti-depressant and a painkiller.

Learning of the word’s existence made me re-think addiction a little.

What if … the priorities of the Empire we live in, and the quiet greed of humans everywhere, has led us to living in a world where it’s not possible to keep living without finding our own version of Copium, one that works for us?

John Lennon once suggested that for the working classes he sprang from, Copium was a cocktail of Religion, Sex, and TV.

Some people prefer alcohol or nicotine or crack or Qanon or some arcane little niche fetish addiction in the porn world.

The rich and famous get prescriptions written for them, and routinely overdose anyway. Prince. Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Some lucky people can get by with little more than an addiction to something the system tells them to want anyway, like more money for it’s own sake, or for garages full of expensive cars they drive once or twice and park forever.

That’s as close to Normal as it gets.

Like some high-minded idea of US Foreign policy, a modern addiction-free life is a mythical beast.

We’re all hooked on some version of Copium.

Addiction is a sickness, they tell us lately, and maybe it’s even true.

But maybe …

It’s not you that’s sick, or me.

Maybe it’s the world we’ve made for ourselves that’s diseased, and our addictions are just more, or less, destructive Copiums that let us try to manage the symptoms to get through the harsh days and long nights.

It’s been awhile since I checked in with my friend the Canadian Commie, and when I watched him again I remembered why.

I was curious about what’s going on with the Canadian truckers, thousands of them revolting against ‘conditions’ and vax mandates in particular. I was hoping to hear good news–was this the thing that might kick off a real worker’s revolution?

CC says it isn’t.

And I find his reasoning to be depressingly convincing.

It was much the same with his take on the Ukraine story.

This man feels right to me on more or less everything, but he’s not up to a thousand subs yet, and therefore his channel hasn’t even been monetized. Getting the last 87 that he needs is not going to be any kind of guarantee either, not with ‘capitalist death cult’ in so many of his titles.

Compare this with a characteristically jaunty Jon Stewart take on Qanon, in conversation with a similarly wired rogue of a BBC reporter. They’re thoughtful and mostly right about everything they say too. But the main difference isn’t one of tone, or Jon’s way with humor.

The main difference is that their cuts are skin deep, and they’re speaking first to entertain, and only incidentally to truly inform.

They have good fun with Qanon’s scatterbrained take on Hillary Clinton and Pizzagate, where she was supposedly keeping child sex slaves underneath a pizza parlor. (Spoiler alert: She wasn’t.) And, to their credit, they even briefly entertain the notion that Pizzagate was a parable of sorts.

But it stops there, with the recognition that the funny crazy people might have some kind of point …

And there’s no mention of the fact that the point is not just a parable. There are facts to support it, not just wrong guesses.

Bill Clinton was very, very close with Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s not just Epstein’s visits to Bill, though. It’s Bill’s flights to Epstein’s island on the Lolita Express plane.

What was he doing there, all those times?

If Q’s idea that the rich and powerful are running pedophile sex cults is so baseless and wacky … seriously, what was Clinton doing there?

It’s not the kind of question you’ll ever hear from the Jon Stewarts of the world. It’s not the kind of question you want to be asking if you want to remain a hero to average Democrats, or get your YouTube channel up over 300K in subs.

There’s some very fine line to be walked here, between truth-telling and making people feel good about themselves and their world. A line between naked fact and some reason to hope.

Between being honest and being successful.

There was a City on a hill.

There was Lady with silver hair and sparkling eyes.

It didn’t start out so nice though.

It started as these things so often do, in my rambling parent’s house, trying to get rid of piles of excess garbage. It began in giving things away and trying to recycle responsibly.

The new transitional world was made possible by the sudden availability of cheap and almost disposable cars-with-beds, from a kind of China.

They were long, narrow, white. Not capable trucks at all. Just little buses.

The bed was no king, just a cot that folded down from the side. Eventually I figured I had done enough dutiful good getting rid of the things no one wanted any more, and I drove the long white bed car down into to the city.

The living center of the city was a social club of sorts. It was a place where all the best people spent a majority of their time, interacting when they did so purely out of desire to interact. With each other. Anarchically. Because they shared a definition, of Best.

There was a bulletin board of opportunities. “Jobs”, situations for living.

One that caught my eye was a compound down at the beach. They were looking for club people that had long white bed cars and a desire to find a productive Situation.

The posting offered variations on a theme for becoming part of the project. Volunteers were welcome, but so was a deeper involvement. More involvement, more time, earned more recompense; for example, in the form of a non-moving place to stay and eat, at the beach project place.

There was no mention of a wage or in fact of money at all. The arrangement seemed more based on barter and everything seemed worker-owned, at least to new eyes from another world. And, there were many such situations, ranging along the coast, up the hills of the city, and far out into the real mountains beyond.

I sip my Equal Exchange and I consider what felt so good about it.

I felt valued and attractive to a wide deep group of people that I felt had value, and was attracted-to, friends and strangers alike. This transcended the familial and tribal, like anyone could become special suddenly and easily.

In this city and especially within the walls of the social club, Amour was foundational and poly and ubiquitous. I did fall in love, and there was no guilt about it.

Maybe the important lesson here is about staying unbroken by this world that exists, so that such a culture could emerge. Not that it will, ever, necessarily.

Just so that if it tried to, you and I would not naturally become part of what is trying to smother it in its cradle.

Yesterday in the RT, my dental hygienist was full of probing questions, about the cargo trailer and the youtube channel and eventually ‘what I was going to talk about’ in videos.

I said something like: It’s going to be like essays and less like advertisements for anything. It’s going to be art.

Then I told her I was feeling shy about relating such intimate things to someone I barely knew; that it was making me shy.

I think that kind of blew her real-world mind.

My teeth are really clean now. So, I’m dreaming big.

Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship

The reason that’s true is that the Algorithm quietly downplays dissident voices, not suggesting or offering them to your eyes. Even if you have the exact title of a video that the System doesn’t like, Goog/YT search will push it down the page when you search on it specifically. For example.

When the government or the powers that be wanted to censor in the old school, it went to court, and the court deciding was itself news, which gathered interest and publicity in itself.

Today you’re just throttled and silenced by software that was programmed by corporations with an agenda.

The actually free marketplace of ideas dies in darkness.

I literally laughed until I cried.

This tweet embedded in a meta-story which features a seven-year-old girl selling lemonade to pay the for-profit health-care system for her own brain surgery, and a troop of homeless Girl Scouts about the same age selling cookies at zero wages, while the top two dozen officials at the Girl Scouts of America (79% of them men, by the way) pull down hundreds of thousands a year, on up to three quarters of a million.

Judge Blocks Hospital Workers From Quitting Their Jobs

Welcome to the Land of Opportunity, darlings.

The Truth About Ukraine, Russia & War

When they say “Donbass Region”, you think: Arizona.

When they say “Dnieper River”, you think: Rio Grande.

Think different!

I used to enjoy the shopping process. Just like there’s no good substitute for in-person classroom teaching, there isn’t a good replacement for walking in to a well-stocked store with knowledgeable salespeople. (It’s the same for trying to do any real computer work on your own real computer, instead of a fucking phone with its head up the cloud’s ass, and no mouse or usable keyboard.)

But brick and mortar retail is a dying art. Today at the Home Depot, it was nearly impossible to find an employee, and whenever I did, they knew nothing and had no idea how to remedy that lack of knowledge.

Dear HoDepo. You’re driving me into the filthy embrace of Jeff Bezos. The details are too dull to reiterate, but you suck, dependably and repeatedly. Get more old mechanic kind of guys and pay them enough to retain them even under rolling pandemic conditions, or lose me forever. I’ve had enough of your nice but clueless high school kids and your grunting middle-aged metal shop rejects.

Even though Lowe’s is far more out of the way, I’ll give them a hard try next time, before I’m forced by circumstance to just give up and join the 21st century, at least when it comes to these kinds of purchases. A real canvas tarp for godssake, how hard it that?

Of course I don’t see buying lumber online, so maybe I’ll still be worth a fraction of what I was to you anyway.

I’m sure I sound antediluvian. I’m okay with that. For one day at least.

“You are free, to use this track for your project. But you must include the following in your video description“:

Music: Fragmented Pianos by Mikael Lind
Promoted by: https://cctrax.com/mikael-lind/fragmented-pianos/fragmented-pianos
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

(i.e., the license is CC-BY, and that means that that Attributing the work to the original author is the Only requirement upon a secondary creator for free use under Creative Commons. I don’t think the ‘promoted by’ line is even strictly necessary, but hey why not? And you might want to hear it.

Some more stuff …
Label: Post Global Recordings
Genre: modern classical
Date: November 2013
Country: Sweden

I checked several of the ’14-websites’ links in the article from yesterday. The ones I’ve checked all have some frustrations to their interfaces, such as also trying to sell you not-really-free music, or lackluster filtering capabilities, or giving you choices for filtering that quickly lead to a ‘no-results’ page.

Then you have to listen to the individual tracks and see what moves you and is suitable for the mood of the words and imagery that you’re conveying, and what doesn’t.

A long process. But … I mostly like what I see at CCTrax, and here is at least one example of liking what I hear there too.

Here’s another, useful if I ever sleep by the beach.

Music: Ocean (Original Mix) by Miroslav Wilde
Promoted by: https://cctrax.com/miroslav-wilde/ocean-ep/ocean-original-mix
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Label: kopoc
Genre: electronica, with a deep techno tag
Date: November 2015
Country: Russia
kopoc (Label) says: a heartful dub-techno work (soundtrack). While creating this music, I was greatly influenced by my trips to the sea. I wish you were immersed into the atmosphere of traveling alongside the endless ocean. Just enjoy it!

Now I know. Now you know.

I woke up this morning thinking about how the video-making project is related to, an extension of, a radio show I did in the middle of the night thirty years ago in Portland.

It was called: The Millennial Dawn, with your host Hollywood Evansaint Macavity. Macavity being one of the earliest known forms of Vairtere.

But it’s not the Dawn of the Millennium anymore. The Daybreak, maybe, but even then … we know now that it’s also the last millennium, of the human project as we’ve known it for ten thousand years at least. We live in the darkness After the dawn.

I started kicking around ideas and words, which is one of my favorite things to do.

Crepuscular is a lovely word and I always love accented letters …

Crépuscular Millénaire?

It’s early days and even before coffee this particular day; we’ll see.

But this is one tiny part of a tiny part. Just like with yesterday’s question of politics and language.

I looked next at music I could add in to videos that won’t result in a copyright strike.

Digging away some more, it does exist: The 14 Best Sites to Find Free Creative Commons Music

I’m a Digger. Digging is my life.

Then of course there’s the ‘setting it all up legally as an LLC’ part. And banking too?

The electrical on the trailer, now in progress, and the painting of bare metal on parts of the truck (the Evapo-Rust and the Rustoleum are bought but not yet applied).

The trip down to Hell Valley to pick up the RTT, and test drive an e-Bike six miles away from that, and maybe find a place in the big city to responsibly drop off e-Waste while I’m at it. Should I bring the trailer, to haul back the tent in, so it’s not in my way when I do the truck bed? Or could I maybe do the truck bed in the next eight days and leave the trailer at home? If so, I’d need to also teach myself the right way to use my new load straps.

Along with short self-paced courses in using the Garmin 890, and the radar-detector-slash-dash-cam, and the finer points of the GoPro. How do I zoom in, zoom out?

On top of the truck piece and the trailer piece and the YouTube piece and the legal/banking piece and all the rest, there are also existing pieces to maintain. For example, in the days when I performed the Millennial Dawn, I only even had a car sometimes, and if the car broke down catastrophically I just had someone come tow it away; and having it insured wasn’t even an option because I had no money for shit like that. Or a mortgage, or a mortgage and a new blank piece of land in a better place besides. Or a utility bill for an Internet Service Provider. A cell phone. Et freakin’ cetera.

I’m not complaining.

In many ways, I have honestly never been as happy as I am today.

There’s a big complex project happening, and no other human person is telling me what the project is, or how I should be doing it, or how I should be feeling about it as it evolves for better and for worse.

My “living” does not depend on anyone else’s opinions on those matters.

Life in the moment is, for all fleeting practical purposes, Perfect.

And. Complicated.

I watched maybe four dozen of the Matt’s Offroad Recovery videos.

Given the fact that they’re running a successful business in Hurricane, Utah, and given the fact that there are many tight familial and extra-familial ties in evidence, I would guess that there’s like a seventy or eighty percent chance that they’re both Mormon, and Trump voters.

But … no mention of religion or politics ever makes it into the final edit of their videos. I’m reasonably certain that that’s purely by design.

They have just under a million subscribers, roughly the same as the single most successful hyperprogressive politics channel (not counting the unusual case of Russell Brand), the one belonging to Jimmy Dore.

Taking a look far below these lofty subscriber counts, there’s quite a drop-off on the politics side.

The insanely good Bad Faith channel, captained by Briahna Joy Gray, has less than 60 thousand subs.

In spite of the fact that she’s young, black, pretty, smart, unfailingly respectful, and rarely fire-breathing, the YouTube algorithms screw her over hard, because her views offend the corporate hivemind and support everything they hate.

Primo Radical, who is who is none of those things (except smart, and with a few exceptions, respectful) has half as many, but in addition, the overlords are actively going out of their way to censor his voice, as seen in two of his most recent videos.

YouTube is Killing Primo Radical

My Week in YouTube Jail

There’s no logical or moral reason for this. His interviews are amazing, and often with big names, like multiple visits with Chomsky. I value his work highly. But the System wants him dead because they don’t like what he says, and eventually they’ll succeed. He knows it, and is in the process of transitioning to Rumble or Odysee or some other place that is, for now, more free–but also less profitable, counting perhaps on Patreon donations and the like to make up the difference and at least get him back to the poverty line.

At thirty thousand subs. and throttled in his view counts, PR brings the receipts to show that he’s making under $300 a month from his channel, which doubtless works out to half the current federal minimum wage per hour.

YouTube is listening to every word. I’ve heard many different creators call the Covid-19 vaccine “the jab” or refer to “the Rona”, or use nicknames for Julian Assange, because they know quite well that even saying the original proper words will bring them added scrutiny and set them on the road to demonetization or worse.

So as someone just starting out, with ambitions of eventually generating revenue in the $1000 range, I’m totally comfortable with self-censoring to a point, on the GoogleTubes only, in order to get there. I have at least this place, and the SubStack in my pocket, to say whatever I want to free and loud and clear.

Free Julian Assange. Free Edward Snowden. Free Stephen Donziger. Fuck capitalism, even my little capitalism. Please rest comfortably in the moral light even if you choose to run an adblocker on my vids, or use a proxy site like yew.tube … I do it myself, and I’m not going to be one of those hypocrites that run around whining about how you’re stealing from me by doing so.

There never have been and there never will be ads on vairtere.com anyway.

I’m looking hard at gaming the system. Maybe it’s true that the house always wins, but I’m going to try to drive the fine line between monetization and loss of soul regardless.

Enough for now. I’m totally comfortable with self-censoring to a point, on the GoogleTubes only, in order to get there. I have at least this place, and the SubStack in my pocket, to say whatever I want to free and loud and clear.

Free Julian Assange. Free Edward Snowden. Free Stephen Donziger. Fuck capitalism, even my little capitalism. Please rest comfortably in the moral light even if you choose to run an adblocker on my vids, or use a proxy site like yew.tube … I do it myself, and I’m not going to be one of those hypocrites that run around whining about how you’re stealing from me by doing so.

There never have been and there never will be ads on vairtere.com anyway.

I’m looking hard at gaming the system. Maybe it’s true that the house always wins, but I’m going to try to drive the fine line between monetization and loss of soul regardless.

Enough for now. I’m totally comfortable with self-censoring to a point, on the GoogleTubes only, in order to get there. I have at least this place, and the SubStack in my pocket, to say whatever I want to free and loud and clear.

Free Julian Assange. Free Edward Snowden. Free Stephen Donziger. Fuck capitalism, even my little capitalism. Please rest comfortably in the moral light even if you choose to run an adblocker on my vids, or use a proxy site like yew.tube … I do it myself, and I’m not going to be one of those hypocrites that run around whining about how you’re stealing from me by doing so.

There never have been and there never will be ads on vairtere.com anyway.

I’m looking hard at gaming the system. Maybe it’s true that the house always wins, but I’m going to try to drive the fine line between monetization and loss of soul regardless.

Enough for now. a month range, and therefore eyeing a modest target of, say, 125K subs over time, there are lessons here.

I’m totally comfortable with self-censoring to a point, on the GoogleTubes only, in order to get there. I have at least this place, and the SubStack in my pocket, to say whatever I want to free and loud and clear.

Free Julian Assange. Free Edward Snowden. Free Stephen Donziger. Fuck capitalism, even my little capitalism. Please rest comfortably in the moral light even if you choose to run an adblocker on my vids, or use a proxy site like yew.tube … I do it myself, and I’m not going to be one of those hypocrites that run around whining about how you’re stealing from me by doing so.

There never have been and there never will be ads on vairtere.com anyway.

I’m looking hard at gaming the system. Maybe it’s true that the house always wins, but I’m going to try to drive the fine line between monetization and loss of soul regardless.

Enough for now.

Electoralism, in terms of actually getting good people elected, is a dead issue. The game is completely rigged both inside and outside the D-corporate wing of the two-headed Ruling Party, and you only need look as far as the two Sanders campaigns, or the more recent Nina Turner situation, to know it.

There’s still one marginal reason to support candidates, and that’s to shift awareness.

This point, among many other interesting ones, is made eloquently by Marianne Williamson in conversation with Briahna Joy Gray.

The Green Party has completely lost its way, and even if that were not true, I can’t be a member any more anyway, because they fucked up their status as a real party in my state. I got mail from the voting people that said they were shifting me to Independent,

In advance of the midterms, I’ll probably go back to putting a D after my name, not because I have any use at all for that corrupt and vile organization, but only as a vehicle for launching protest votes from within it during primaries. Such as my Sanders votes. Such as, for anyone who primaries Krysten Sinema. Such as, for Marianne Williamson for President, should she run again, and it sure sounds like she’s gonna.

And should the People’s Party manage to find its ass, using two hands no doubt, I can still launch protest votes from without, in the General. Or even if they can’t, I guess–I could write in a dead hero of the class struggle. Here’s to you, President Charles Bukowski.

I swore an oath before I cast my Biden ballot last year. I said: fine, but unless you turn out to be for real, Uncle Joe, it’s a straight up No to you or your friend Kamala in ’24.

Shockingly! he turned out to be exactly what he appeared to be, a corporatist bag of shit, useless for anything that matters to me or my life.

I’ll be keeping my promise. Go Team Marianne, not because she has any chance against the forces of darkness, but because she at least speaks of hope credibly, which is more than I can say for any of the rest of the lying cuntwaffles doing political PR for the military-industrial complex from DC.

I’ve been binging on vid from the ‘Matt’s Off Road Recovery’ channel.

You might be interested in sharing my short-term addiction. Remember kids, the first taste is always free!

Jeep Swallowed By SINKHOLE!!

FBI WON’T SAY If Agents Were Involved In Jan. 6

Why the hell not, Feebs?

If there were no blood on your Bureau hands, then you could absolutely just say no, to simple questions like:

“Did any FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events of January 6th, yes or no?”

But for some inexplicable reason, their spokesdrones are unable or unwilling to provide that No.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but that strikes me as mighty fucking odd, if they were indeed blameless of the false flag charge. Why not just say No, even if saying it were an ass-covering lie? There have been plenty of people in recent years lying under oath to Congress, and none of them have been even charged, much less paid any price. Paying the price is for peasants, like Julian Assange and Stephen Donziger and any swinging dick trying to make a life for themselves on Taco Bell or Walmart wages.

Kudos to Ted Cruz (yeah, yeah, I know) for putting that question to the squirming deep-state press flacks.

Referencing the video earlier in the linked clip, kudos also to the allegedly dumb right-wing trump-nut crowd who sniffed out the Fed in their midst–the one who was actively inciting them to violence or at least trespass on the evening of January 5th.

A whole lot of little things, including getting Dusty the Hospital Room cat to the vet and back for, it can be hoped, his last time before adopting out. But the big thing in the center was dropping the trailer off at a supercompetent place where they will check it from stem to stern, from wheel bearings to upper flasher signals.

Eventually.

Because the motto of the day was: “We’re down to two techs”. I heard it more than once.

And I thought hell–I could do that job. I went to the We’re Hiring! page. It was broken.

Blame the Great Migration away from the employed life on the Rona. Blame it on laziness. Blame it on Biden, or Trump, or stupid broken application by cell phone, or capitalism’s unwillingness to pay a living wage. Pick your poison, but the change is real.

The people have always known that life is too short to waste it underneath a boss, but it didn’t used to be quite this bad, and there didn’t used to seem like there might be some other choice.

We sat home for a year and we watched people like this guy.

He takes off from his cabin in Labrador, Canada on a snowmobile. His dog is riding in his lap. Behind the snowmobile is one trailer full of his camping gear, and another behind it just for firewood.

He rides across a frozen lake to some impossibly remote forest covered in snow. Feet of snow.

He snowshoes out a square, 8×8, just to be able to pitch his tent. The tent has no floor. He will sleep on a cot, and his very furry dog sleeps on the mashed down snow, using the guy’s extra jacket for a pillow.

He unfolds a stove, to heat the tent, because the temperature is expected to get down to -15 below, Fahrenheit.

What’s for dinner? Chunks of moose. He and the dog share it.

For fun, he chooses to go out and live for a while in conditions most of us would find unthinkable. (Relatively speaking, some of us in the high desert have it easy.)

And … scattered throughout the video are discreet references to his outdoor gear company. I wouldn’t even call them ads.

I don’t think I’ll even go that far honestly. But I might put out a nominal line of coffee mugs and t-shirts. So that anyone who cares to can spend on a token symbol of the Vairtere experience, and signal to the world that they have belletristic ambitions too, or … whatever it is they want to signal I reckon.

Branding oneself as an artist is a tricky moral business ennit.

I ain’t no David Foster Wallace, but I’ll never be a Salvador Dali either. I’m not purity motivated, nor cash motivated.

I’m just here to do God’s work and hope She approves of my style, just enough to keep my snowmobile properly oiled.

A very long day of … Trucking.

But this is the same driveway I’m always talking about as a metaphor, going on midnight.

Hooked up, she takes the entire available space from the gate out to the sidewalk.

There are a number of droll anecdotes surrounding the acquisition and how it went and what it means.

I’ll share my favorite now, and that is:

The truck and the tiny home were both born in 1999.

They’re an ancient matched set.

Sometimes, the Light’s all shining on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately, it occurs to me.

It’s the Sunday of a three-day weekend. Tomorrow is MLK day and the banks will stay closed.

I’m standing on a street I used to live on two decades ago at the start of my experiment in middle classery, in Prettytown.

I’ve come back to look at an empty cargo trailer that’s there now. It’s about as old as the experiment, and it’s got oil stains on a crusty plywood floor. In addition to these failings, it’s about a foot smaller than I’d like in all three dimensions; height, width, and length. (On the plus side, it does have tandem axles, and bright lights, and a roof fan, and a triple tongue.)

I explain all this to the kid who now owns it. Besides all that, I say, I just bought a rooftop tent this week, and so, strictly speaking, I don’t even need the trailer.

So, I say, let’s work it like this … Leave it posted for a few days and see if you can get the price you want.

If that doesn’t work out, I’ll be your fallback.

Just know that if it ends up that way, I’ll come back with a lowball offer. I can give you 3K. (This is a third off his asking price.)

With zero hesitation he says: I’ll take 3K today.

I temporize. I say, well … if that’s how it is, I better hook it up and test drive it, at least around the neighborhood.

It rolls along behind the truck just fine. I come on back to the warehouse he’s living in.

I have a very good impression of him. Lord knows I’m no great judge of character, but I really like him, and I even believe his story, which implausibly includes a sick grandmother as the reason for his negotiation flexibility.

It has a license plate. He says he already has the title notarized. I slide toward a flaky yes.

Later in the evening, I spend three full hours in the Home Depot picking out materials for the truck and tent project, and during this adventure, I get his Zelle via text. It checks out; of course it does. I drive back to Basecamp A, at Sand Rock. Rackless, boxless, the old truck feels like it’s dancing down the road.

Tomorrow I’ll drive back, lay eyes carefully on that title, and take possession with one low fully electronic payment.

That done, it will acutely feel like high time to stop spending money now, and begin making it again, in the midst of these refresh and renewal projects.

But listen.

I’ve cobbled together all the building blocks of my ideal rig for right at a mere ten thousand dollars. I have a four-wheel drive truck. I have a crude approximation of a pop-up camper for its bed. I have a seven (almost) by fourteen (almost) office space room on wheels to pull behind it.

It’s true that it’s all twenty years old, except for the new RTT waiting for me in the Valley.

It’s also true that there’s a metric fuckton of sweat equity ahead of me that must be applied to pull it all together.

But honestly, this is exactly, exactly how it should be.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, no Senator’s son. It ain’t me.

No. My father started out beatnik like Jack Kerouac. Unlike Kerouac, he never wrote a successful novel, or any novel, any creative opus, at all. But like Kerouac, he slept rough and poor often, and suffered for his sins, and ended up drinking too much, and living stupidly Republican in his salty psychotic bones, and failing to support the multiple children he brought into this vale of pain.

Incredibly, they all ended up successful anyway, if you stretch the definition of success a bit to include his eldest living and legit, who always was a late bloomer, and whose face I study with mixed emotions sometimes in the mirror.

Dearly beloved. Thank you for being there for me even when I thought I didn’t need anyone.

The spring, the bloom time, is only just around the next corner of this two-lane ribbon of blacktop.

Promised update. Not only is Equal Exchange priced right and ethically pure in so many ways, but the coffee is really good, too.

Last night I tried the pods, and they were the best I’ve ever had.

This morning, the real thing fresh-ground and french-pressed, and while I can’t issue the same universal accolade (having had many fine coffees in my time), it’s top-shelf all the same. I’m enjoying it very much today, and will be for foreseeable future too.

And by the way, thank you sincerely to my Patr(e)on crew. You covered the budget for this expense with January’s payout, and now I can think of you fondly each and every morning whether I remember to naturally or not.

I plan to do a little raw filming today, for what will become the first video.

I also plan to pull the rack off the truck, partly for painting it and what’s beneath it, but also because taking it down will allow me to get a proper unvarnished Gross Vehicle Weight for the beast on my way into Prettytown tomorrow.

After the rack itself and the parts beneath it are touched up with paint, I can reinstall it and weigh again, to get legit payload numbers as I go. This won’t be an issue soon, but when the day does come to pull a trailer, in a month or a year, knowing all that will be critical for proceeding in a way, as they say, that is safe, sane, and consensual.

It’s rare for things to work out perfectly. But I am living ahead slow anyway. largely at peace within myself.

I made serious contact at last with the planner guy that’s going to help me expand my lot in Cienega by 50-100% for next to nothing. It’s a long story, but there was an adjoining chunk that was once set aside for a street that never happened, and probably never will.

There’s a rooftop tent waiting for me to come get it down in the Valley. The vendor declined to help me install it–short-staffed, they said–and I’m fine with that. I’ve got my measuring tape working overtime in the driveway and I’m looking forward to taking on the project myself.

Six miles from that place there’s the one where you go to test drive LectricBikes, the same place they build them.

The Lectric Bike is half of my backup plan, the part that moves, a secondary for the truck.

The other half of my backup plan has been a little yurt tent–the part that doesn’t move, a Plan B for the RTT.

But even though it’s beautiful and reasonably priced, I’m going to wait a bit on that one. Because …

She spotted, on her facebookMarket thing, a 7×14 tandem-axle cargo trailer for $4500 in Prettytown.

There’s one known thing wrong with it already, and that’s the fact that it’s only six feet tall inside. I wouldn’t be standing full upright in it. But I’m going to have a look at it Sunday.

I don’t strictly need it now, but I figure it’s worth 3K to me anyway if it’s not falling apart. So I’ll look grave and serious as I study and enumerate it’s flaws, and I’ll make that lowball offer, with an apologetic sigh that will be partly sincere.

And, either way, I’ll soon be building out my modestly glorious rig a step at a time, and gathering film while I do.

In the meantime, let yourself be soothed should you need it by the firelight and low voice of Kent Survival.

In the interest of answering the question: ‘So what if the truck needs a mechanic; where do you sleep then?’, I’m also looking at smallish yurts and foldable e-bikes.

At one point, Suggested For You kicked up a couple of videos I found instructive spiritually. I think they might both have been filmed in Virginia.

The White
A fine new truck, a spendy GFC pop-up, and in this video an additional $1000+ awning. The presentation style is YouTube standard, and the mindset is self-evidently self-satisfied. Comfortable, I guess.

The Black
This is not a lifestyle choice. There are tents, but this is not ‘camping’. This is a struggle for liberatory revolution and fighting the power.

In my own old pale way, when my little cinematic bits start going up, they’ll be less about product review, and more about the class war too.

Committed Art over commerce every time, so long as I can hold the line.

I took the next step tonight, and this is it.

Last month I got a pretty good deal on a truck, as far as I yet know. High miles, but with substantial replacement work done to the engine. A crew cab, with the minimal back seats and suicide doors. Most gratifying, an eight-foot bed behind the big cab (making the whole apparatus 20 feet in length), and of course it’s 4WD.

Then I needed a sleeping kind of bed for that pickup kind of bed, and that was a lot more complicated.

What I really wanted was a pop-up camper, which is just like an ordinary truck camper, but more like the height of a truck cap while you’re driving it around. It pops up only when parked wherever you’re making camp, giving it standing room and also room for a king bed to crash on.

For budgetary reasons I was hoping to find a used one. That plan fell apart because of a fixable reason (used ones that aren’t decrepit are rare), and then an unfixable reason–the old ones are heavy and mostly deal-breaking heavy for a half-ton pickup’s payload.

Next I thought I’d bite the bullet and just spend 10K, or even 15K, on a new one. The problem here is that even for those prices, there is no inventory sitting around. The lead times from order placement to actual delivery were going to be six months at the very least, and a year or more at most places. No way I was going to wait that long.

Plan C. Just three days ago, I was all set to buy a cargo trailer.

Plenty of space there, over a hundred square feet of unbuilt real estate to make into a tiny home, and almost no payload worries, because in any truck you can tow a whole lot more weight than you can plunk down in the truck bed itself.

There was a pretty good supply of used ones, but people are asking (and I have no doubt getting) only about a thousand dollars less than brand new, even for trailers that are four or five years old. So new it was, and somewhere between 9 and 10K just for that big shell, without so much as a camping mattress. But I was seriously ready to hit it.

The day after I settled on that, I got to thinking, while I wandered around my new old truck with a tape measure. Certainly buying a trailer didn’t mean that the 8-foot bed had to just be extra wasted space. The truck came with a big rack on it already, variously called a lumber rack or a ladder rack, and a big locking toolbox too. So I wondered if I could build on that, enclosing it to some degree … not creating a whole dreamy pop-up on my own, but something. Somehow, yeah?

I watched some DIY videos and came up with at least a roofish type platform laid on top of the lumber rack. That would still leave four sides to enclose somehow, and it would be barely tall enough to sit up in … hell I might as well just buy a truck cap at that point (three grand, less whatever I could get by selling the rack) …

But my mind kept coming back around to that platform, and the space above the top of the rack. What could I do with that?

Eventually I started thinking about a solution I had rejected a long time ago. A Roof Top Tent.

The truck bed is eight feet, but the rack is thirteen.

With the tailgate down that’s another two. Almost double the existing bed space. If only there were a way, to connect up eight or ten feet of the rack down to five or seven of what lay below.

What finally clicked was rotating the tent and annex. Most of the time when you see an RTT, they’re deployed like you see in the picture, with a third of the tent and the whole annex piece hanging over the side, because often RTT vehicles are quite small (like that Jeep), with limited roof space. But …

There was virtually no lengthwise constraint, on my big old truck, so …

What if the annex dropped into the truck bed, instead of going past the tires down to the ground? What if the ladder just took you down from the sleeping area atop the platform into the bed, and enclosed a good chunk of it in the process?

Yeah. It’s a hack, but a pretty elegant hack. Maybe. I think? Yeah, it could work.

So. You can pay four grand or more for the perfect RTT.

At the start I would have happily paid two, maybe two and a half, for a pretty good one.

But tonight I found an unspectacularly decent one on sale for a penny under a thousand dollars, plus another three hundred for the annex part. I researched the hell out of this particular model and the consensus was: Yeah, it’s no Cadillac, but it’s very close to just as good as the nicer ones costing two or three times as much.

The main thing I’m giving up is a hard shell that contains the folded up tent while you’re headed down the road. My new one wraps up into a soft-sided cube instead. I can live with that, for this price. Saving two thousand on that is two thousand I can spend on plumbing the rig with a hot water heater, a shower, a sink. Or solar power. Or two thousand to put in savings for building a house on the lot down in Cienega town.

I have a lot of ideas.

Soon I’ll be down in Hell Valley to pick it up and to try and talk the installer I bought the RTT from into sharing my vision, instead of trying to sell me an overpriced rack to replace the one I already have. I will bring my samurai face, and my cordless drill to the fight.

Then finally the fun part can get underway.

“To Newsweek,” (Jon) Stewart said, “Your business model is fucking arson … The kind of arson where you’re on the mountain and you’ve got fucking five minutes and you don’t know where the dogs are.”

Preach it, brother.

I heard about this one from Russell Brand. It’s a fluffy nothing of a story, but RB’s analysis is gratifying and prescriptive.

Leonardo DiCaprio Explains

His New Movie

The ice is finally beginning to melt for real.

This time when I took the same picture as eighteen months ago, there was a stupid new dog barking at me for it. I think we know what idiot voice that is, trying to stop me, right. My own.