Going back almost five years ago now, when things began to hit the fan, I experienced a moment in my driveway, in which I told myself that I was no longer The Professor. It was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure.

The terror part led me to cling hard to that identity anyway, for another three years.

But two years ago as Covid ramped up, whatever I was clinging to came apart in my hands and I fell, down deep into whatever it was I was fearing most.

Today I stood in the same driveway bereft of all identities and the politics that come with them. I was just some human bean.

All daily bullshit and frustration aside (I’m listening to the song of Dusty the Broken Stray Cat in his hospital room), I’ve never been happier; never been more myself.

I woke up today to the realization that in addition to the grubstake I have left, there’s thousands of dollars in two-percent-for-life money available to me right now, and that deployed judiciously it could be a deus ex machina that pushes me a good ways down the path I want to take.

And also that seeking after a ranger job this summer is a path that could be walked simultaneously …

But anyway. The details are dull and must be dealt with sternly.

I can feel the modus vivendi trying to blossom.

“Pushing back is not a good move, if your livelihood depends on it”.

–Tara Henley, in CBC Journalist Quits in Protest of Repressive & Politicized Newsroom

What she means is that if you’re scared of losing your job, in journalism or similar white-collar creative positions, you’re going to say only what They want you to say, and never say what they don’t.

Ms. Henley is in particular railing against the stupider kinds of wokeness up in Canada, but her interviewer Mr. Greenwald went through the same thing before the last Presidential, when his handlers at The Intercept forbade him from doing journalism about Hunter Biden.

Unwilling to sell out their principles for the sake of a well-paid gig, both quit and offered their words direct to the public via Substack, and other relatively independent platforms like Rumble.

My own story is nowhere near as heroic or principled, but there are parallels that I see more clearly as the months pass.

The next solstice in the summer, it will have been two years since my love affair with fully employed middle class existence ran off the road, and one year since I made the decision to break with the Systems completely.

There is a darker part of me that constantly berates and critiques its host ego for not doing a better job of crafting alternatives quickly.

But I know I did the right thing two years ago, and a year ago, and today.

And I know that’s eventually going to bear lovely belletristic fruit.

That’s the point of my life, and my faith holds that my living will take care of itself one way or the other.

What brand is the best enclosed trailer?
forum query from ‘Contractor Talk’

Enclosed Cargo Trailers – Your Buying Guide

Cargo Express Customizations

Two disparate cases in which Trump sissied out on doing the right thing, to preserve his own skin from the corporate interests which actually run the Empire.

The Semi-Inside Story of Why Trump Refused to Pardon Snowden and Assange

Why didn’t the ex-Prez pardon either Assange or Snowden though he had strong reasons for wanting to do it?

TLDR: Because the average Republican senator, beholden to the military-industrial complex, would have stepped aside and let the Dems destroy him if he had.

US war lobby fuels conflict in Russia, Ukraine, and Syria: ex-Pentagon advisor

Trump also wanted peace in our time, including Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawal, and cooperation instead of conflict with the Russians.

The same forces cut him off on that one too, according to this bulletheaded Pentagon drone Douglas Macgregor.

He paints a picture for us, of how there was very little difference on this score, from Obama to Trump.

Biden barely comes up, because he’s irrelevant, incoherent, and obviously a pawn of the same forces. It hardly merits discussion.

I have this truck now and although it needs a lot of little attentions, it’s capable of doing the job I need it to do for the next year or two.

At the point where I start thinking about grafting a bedroom and office onto it, there are issues.

The cheapest quickest thing would be put some old four-thousand dollar pop-up camper on it, but the damn things are quite heavy, and don’t provide much actual space anyway.

Spending three or four times as much on a nice light modern extendable pop-up is what I would love to do best, but the lead times on these beautiful spendy units range from seven months to a year, which means I couldn’t get started on nomadics for real until summer or even next winter.

So in recent days I’m leaning very heavily toward towing something instead.

Towing is an interim solution, because the ultimate dream is to have one truck that contains its own bed and can take it up any road at all. Dragging your house behind solves most any payload problem, but there are even paved roads I love and need that would be nightmarish with forty feet of rig (a 20-foot truck and a 20-foot trailer). But even so, towing is where I’m headed to get things going quickly.

Is there such a thing as a True HALF TON TOWABLE Toy Hauler? Yes! The 20′ ATC Game Changer Pro

Most modern ‘toy haulers’ are trailers with a minimal living quarters in the front half and a wide open space aft. This is ideal for me, although I wouldn’t be hauling snowmobiles or ATVs, but a well-appointed open floor plan office. ATC seems to be the premier company for building them. New ATCs are ungodly expensive, and used ones seem to be quite rare, but even so, the ancient toy-H approach is one possibility, to get started.

The second possibility is an enclosed cargo trailer. This seems the most practical, because even though rigging one out to live in would be a ton of work, the basic shell can be had for under 10 or 11 thousand new, even in maximum sizes. And used ones for less, of course.

The third route is plain old travel trailers, which generally speaking are cheaply made and cheap to buy too. The issue with these is the opposite of the blank space of a cargo trailer–they’ve done the work of things like electrical and plumbing already–but the question is how well that was done, and what to do when it breaks.

So maybe I’ll find a travel trailer and rip some stuff out. Maybe I’ll find a cargo trailer and build up from scratch. Maybe I’ll find a perfectly valid cheaper T-hauler for cheap. Or maybe I’ll stumble across some half-finished project that is a hybrid of any of these

https://westslope.craigslist.org/tro/d/durango-tool-trailer/7426408975.html … CT, lacking in width

https://lascruces.craigslist.org/tro/d/santa-clara-travel-trailer/7427391189.html … TT, many unknowns

https://prescott.craigslist.org/tro/d/prescott-valley-1996-haulmark-6×10/7428211884.html … CT, lacking in width

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/tro/d/phoenix-trailer/7429096742.html… CT, lacking in width

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/tro/d/phoenix-travel-trailer/7420277756.html … TT, unfinished

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/tro/d/buckeye-2022-cargo-mate/7417922750.html … CT, just wide enough but possibly a dealer lowballing

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/nph/tro/d/peoria-1999-tahoe-toy-hauler/7417447525.html … T-H, though very old and potential structural problems due to water damage

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/tro/d/wickenburg-2012-kz-sportsmen-classic/7427080933.html … TT and maybe the best value in tonight’s batch, see also https://www.rvguide.com/specs/kz/travel-trailer/2012/sportsmen-classic/14rb.html

This is my brain life in the first days of 22.

On the first page of equalexchange.coop there are two phrases in particular that made me click and eventually buy.

JOIN US IN BUILDING A DEMOCRATIC FOOD SYSTEM, and
AMERICA HAS A MONOPOLY PROBLEM

So it turns out that yes it’s organic .. it’s way beyond just fair trade (being a worker-owned organization), and … though you’re strongly directed toward buying in bulk (the 5-10 pound range), it ends up being a lot less expensive than most boutique coffees (such as the most excellent Caffe Ibis).

So I have ten pounds on the way, along with a batch of those K-cups, since she prefers that modality to my elaborate french pressing.

I’ll let you know how this experiment works out.

Carpets of snow in the morning six inches deep, starting to liquefy as soon as there’s sun.

A ramble to the far end of town to see how it handles on shady side streets.

Glorious sunshine that never quite melted it all.

Lorraine’s Transmissions is now offering propane tank refills.

Home with chicken wings in the still-abundant but curiously weak solar radiation.

Prepping the outside for six degrees tonight.

This is the day that it is no longer obligatory to spill every single day, because if there’s time spent collecting footage, or using the new free and open source video editing software, that counts more.

“But I don’t give a fuck
‘Cause I’m in my truck
and I’m off to the ro-de-o”
–southwestern folk song

The night of the transition of the year will also be a transition from mild weather and clear roads, to ice and then single digit Fahrenheit temperatures.

Once more I run the white truck a few blocks to the store to make ready for the storm.

On the way back I flip on the NPR for just those few minutes, and the mainstream media lottery brings me this.

Mary Louise Kelly, interviewer: “Given your work in election security and freedom, do you ever worry that January 6th was just a dress rehearsal, and that next time the coup might be real”?

Beltway legal egghead academic: Oh dear me yes. We could lose our whole system of democracy and free and fair elections, so easily. You’re right to be very afraid. The barbarians are at the gates.

So … a few things …

First off, let me be clear. I’m not for bloodshed, not even of random bacon drones Just Doing Their Stupid Jobs, if it can be avoided.

Secondly, the democracy is already gone, because the way things work now, you only have the choice to vote between Frick and Frack, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. This applies not just to the presidential race, but all the way down to your local dogcatcher ballot. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez beat her corporate mannequin of a centrist opponent by preaching revolution, but the moment she sat down in her comfy new office, she just turned into him anyway, for all the purposes that matter.

The minimum wage is still unlivable. The health care system is still criminally and purposefully broken. No one with a student loan has gotten any relief, despite the fact that either Biden alone, or the majority Democratic congress could wipe it all away with the stroke of a pen. Even the last flimsy hope of a child tax credit has been ground under the fancy heel of the real masters. The kids are still in their cages down south.

The candidates, and their shadowy donors, and their hired academic goons, and Mary Louise Kelly, and the entire professional-managerial class, are deeply invested in believing the huge Lie that this is still a democracy, and that Americans are still free, and if we could only control a minority of unvaccinated redneck trumpers properly, everything would be good and normal again with the cozy confines of the Empire.

The corrupting lie, that that average person is so much better off being governed by the perfect hair of Gavin Newsom, as opposed to the doltish dead eyes of a Ron DeSantis … Oh darling vote blue. No matter who.

From California to Florida, your normal sucks ass, America, for most of your citizens and for most all the citizens of the world too.

Saving or going back to your normal is not a thing most sane people would waste anxious energy on.

The complete moral failure of the Biden presidency will inevitably mean that this new year will sweep Republicans into Congress en masse, and the result of that will be … nothing. Oh sure, a few more women may lose the right to an abortion, or a few more transfolk will find it harder to find a place to piss or play basketball–but that shit is just emotional window dressing compared to the economic reality of daily life. If you’ve got enough money, believe me, abortion will be easy, and so will the kind of proper medical care that all but guarantees no more unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Nothing will change, just as Biden promised his rich backers verbatim.

In light of that, all through 2021, I personally have prayed for a real coup. Not against the allegedly democratic process or the hapless fools that supposedly run it, but against the plutocrats that actually do.

It didn’t happen. I doubt it will, anytime soon. There’s every indication that We The People are far too dispirited and broken for anything like that to happen on a mass scale.

2022 for me will be a year of quiet personal revolution. No protest sign, no war paint, no crowds.

A revolution based on the look of the sky and the shifting timbre of the wind, and on a tentative experiment in nomadics and cinema.

This week the my-time is cut to 24 hours and it starts right now at 12 minutes to 1.

But in the end I only slept it through.

I won’t even tell you about the dreams, because they were absurdist frivolity, except for the part where knowing the score makes you good money on easy terms. The theme of this year is: If you invest wisely enough, there’s never again going to be a need for any bossman.

Twenty twenty two will see if I’m wise, or if that’s actually true.

A minute ago there was a big complex post here, but it got eaten in a software glitch.

In bitter retrospect it might be just as well.

The salient facts that it tried to paint were:

The sleep has been overlong but laden with mostly good dreams, and

Even through the razor tongue and bedhead: I feel pretty.

“Every other week I need a new address.
Landlord landlord landlord clean up this mess.”

—X the band

Sliding Back 2 the Base just ahead of the storm winds, suddenly there’s no distraction and nowhere else to go, so the repressed opinions and emotions finally have to be addressed. Spilling about that would be awkward at the least; possibly immoral.

So I will note that the ancient sacred lyric is not only apropos to the present moment, but it also refers to the theoretical curing power of the 14-day stay limit, as found in most national forests and state parks and even BLM lands.

There are ways to live rent-free on ‘our’ public lands, and even as an anarcho-primitivist I’m in favor of the Every Other Week rule, because it enforces a migratory mode of existence. For the people that disagree, there are the LongTerm Visitor Areas down in the Mojave. Beyond even that, there is Slab City, as there should be.

There’s not enough of every option, but they are a good start.

so bold for another Monday.

The coffeehouse pictured in yesterday’s post (the first post I wrote this morning); it’s a very holy place and it’s only been Here a short time.

This morning while I was there writing I covertly watched something interesting.

The guy who built it up suddenly and magically last year with his wife (I think his name is Dale) was sitting with a clutch of old guys, and, sounded like, pretty smart thoughtful guys. They were talking about HUAC and that J. Edgar guy. Stuff like that. But it seemed to me that Dale’s mind was elsewhere. He was doing the conversation because … he wanted to sure, but also because it’s a now a part of his job, mission, and business. He left after a few minutes.

Later on I headed out to the benches kitty-corner from the place, for a little distance and perspective. A Tacoma pickup rolled up and rubbed the curb something cruel. Dale was behind the wheel.

Some other guy walking two dogs up the street witnessed it, and apparently felt he knew Dale well enough to counsel him against doing that to his tires.

Dale stood in the street talking patiently to the guy, about how the tires were just about shot anyway and getting replaced this week.

It spoke to me, about the quotidian perils of minor celebrity.

In the video I’ve shot so far, I don’t show off my face. Maybe I will eventually. But even if I don’t, people (in massive numbers, I have to hope), will learn the shape of my truck. Recognize my streets and stomping grounds. Maybe run their eyes over a vanity copper license plate that says Vairtere, or something like it. I’ll have to deal with the same well-intentioned sort of thing, though doubtless on a more cryptic and modest scale.

If I demur or shy, people, don’t take it personally please.

The cat is named Dusty and he’s with us because he was assaulted, by a human, quite possibly with malice, and needs some nursing for a hairline fracture of the pelvis. He’s a good boy. If you want him and you’re committed to love living here, he’s yours.

A perfectly mobile post, only my second one ever, only seven or so hours tardy, and of necessity short because typing on a phone is barely tolerable for the length of a text message.

A quick visit to Lake Roberts.

But really the main thing was a walking gather of footage. Pushing my body up that hill was hard because it’s rusty. The same was true for my voice, my spoken thought.

It will change in practice.

You could be thinking: all well and fine for some young rootless buck like the Mav.

Or: all well and fine for a crusty old fuck like Vairtere who loves the idea of existing anarchically free so much that he’d give up essential civilized comforts.

What if I’m a young beautiful professional artist and businesswoman who likes the finer things?

Okay. She’ll count down the raw diamond life numbers for you step by step.

I’ve Lived in a Vehicle for Three Years. I Now Have $150K

I’m beginning this late on the Eve, but I’ll finish it on the Holiday proper, just over the midnight line.

Because it’s the right thing, in the currently abiding west-jerzian aesthetic, and also because tomorrow is a travel day, which makes it a whole lot less likely that I’ll spill properly during it.

You know I own a sliver of a lot on the very edge of the town I consider the dream land. There’s nothing on it but weeds and quail and rocks and roadrunners, and it may be so for some time yet, but it lives exactly where I always said it should, one mile from the fully co-operative health grocery on the other side of a casually vibrant little downtown.

Tomorrow I’m going to take the Ró Iezabelle truck down there and introduce it to this land, and the land to it in turn. This trip is an eddy in someone else’s current. I didn’t plan it, but I plan to make the most of it, and to be at least the one in the driver’s seat this time.

In practical terms that means charging the batteries of the pretty new video camera overnight, and being ready to extemporize an episode on the spot. Maybe it’s the first episode, or maybe not. That’s not important. Doing the work and having the footage; that part is.

In the first part of the long journey ahead, the big one that will transcend all day trips, it’s not going to matter that there is only quail on this lot and no adobe casita.

This is because the journey of a hundred thousand miles begins on the back of a steel camel, full-time if necessary. I believe in the short-term future I may live in my car. My radio tuned, to the voice of a star.

There are, still and even at this stage of societal decay, a hundred thousand places to park a home for free for a week or two at a time.

But in practical grown-up terms, just a parking place, no matter how lovely or remote or far from the madding crowd, is a temporary home without amenities or comforts, and so it can never be home in any sustainable sense. It lacks a consistent, reliable, non-flammable source of power, at least the way things are so far. But even with that solved, it lacks a good supply of potable and sometimes heated water, in quantities that would allow for a bath or a shower, or any easy way to run a load of laundry, or run a big fridge, or water a garden even if you somehow onboarded one.

Even if it provides free Rent in the strict Bob-Wellsian sense, in other words, this chimerical free place to park will never include, or be able to replace–the Utilities.

Free rent, in the narrowest sense, does exist. Free utilities … just don’t.

However.

There are a few ways, provided you have the right tools beforehand to make use of them, where the complete Rent-plus-Utils package is available for a couple dollars a night. I’m talking about a modest rolling penthouse apartment with all the comforts of home, that can literally be parked and powered for as little as $135 a month every month of the year, with no landlord, no leases, no tenant’s association, no yappy neighbor’s dogs to dream of shooting, and no need to be locked into the system or a job you hate with every stressed and straining muscle of your hurting body and mind.

If you’re interested in that extraordinary deal, go back to Bob’s playlist that I non-linked in my post of a week ago, on the 18th, and check out the New Mexico State Parks video on that playlist. Honestly this is so utterly amazing when you dig down into the details that I’m afraid to whisper its name too loudly.

But let’s say you don’t like the idea of being limited to state parks in NM for a year or two or three. (I am, quite a lot, but I understand of course.) Maybe a spectacular National Park is more your speed. Please have a look then at:

America the Beautiful National Parks Discount Pass

In this version, you can have your Rent/Utils package set amongst world-class scenery like the kind found at the Canyon, or Zion, or Yellowstone, or Yosemite, or Acadia up in Maine. It’s going to run you a little more than five bucks a night, in large part because the Feds charge separately for electric most of the time. The population density will go up, because these are places everyone wants to see–there are tradeoffs beyond the modestly increased expense.

Indeed there’s nothing stopping anyone from staying at an NM State place for two weeks, spending two weeks roughing it off the grid, and then heading up to have a splurging holiday somewhere fantastically gorgeous and only a little more expensive.

Once, I stayed in the smallest scrap of a room they had inside the historic lodge at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, and it cost me close to $300, ten years ago.

That same cash would last me weeks on end just down the road on the same rim, in my own home, guaranteed to be free of Covid, knocking maids, and the couple ten inches away from your sleeping brain knocking the headboard into yours in a paroxysm of orgasmic delight.

And if a George Bush or a Donald Trump wins again, you can drag your bed across either border and actually make good on that ‘Fuck this, I’m outta here’ thing you said more than once back in the day.

Listen, my dear.

I have, at this early stage, no intention of living the nomad life until the end of my days.

I have no intention of leaving that pretty lot in that pretty town to the quail alone forever.

But I am intensely motivated, for reasons ranging to the philosophical to the financial, to explore every aspect of it, and to document that exploration in the ultimate creative act of self-expression; in the additional hope that said self-expression itself can economically power the years that remain to me. (No more Deans, no more chairs, no more bosses ever.)

In these few holy days at the end of a year, I find myself feeling that this is my way to make the world, my little slice of it, a better place for myself, my spirit tribe, my kindred and maybe even my species.

This is not a manic phase.

This is vivendi welling up from within my heart, and this is my hand shaking for all the good and bad reasons as it dares to reach at last for something more.

Ah, the serene spirit of the holidays.

Here’s a cheerful story, and I mean that with no irony. It’s about a far better role model than Tony Soprano.

Catching the guy who stole 20 things from me

Please watch it either as mindless CSI entertainment, or to restore your faith a little in parts of humanity, and even in the talent of cops to do the right thing, at least when all their work is done for them by a particularly resourceful victim.

That hero reminds me of Mav–remember Mav? A few weeks ago I told you about Mav the Slacker who bought a truck, lived in and out of it awhile, filmed the thing, and became a YouTube millionaire. It was a moment of inspiration for me. But Cody in this new story, who goes by Whistlin’ Diesel, is Mav on a whole ‘nother level.

In three days this thing has 6.2 million views, off a subscriber base that already had three million.

If he wasn’t rich already, this would do it, but he is rich already. Rich enough to push $1400 in damages back into the hands of the thief’s wife, who is crying while her moral cretin of a husband stares on at the scene blankly, knowing his whole character is now documented as garbage for the whole world and his own family to witness. With a high-ground shake of their heads, or in shame and gratitude, or whatever. Even Johnny Law is deeply impressed.

I don’t really need or maybe even want millions of views or subscribers, which is good, because it’s highly unlikely that my path will bring those things to me.

I’d very much like to go for some fraction of that, and be an acquired taste for a narrower niche audience, and tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while remaining somewhat personally enigmatic and far from the kind of fame that gets you recognized at a glance.

I’d like to take the natural folksy Bob Wells idea of freedom and built on its implication with a razor-sharp insight or two, in a low voice that soothes, while I tell you both elevating and disturbing things at once in the manner of a Steely Dan song.

Belletrism.

Good dear Bob has been at this for years and has made it up to half a million subs, and one supporting role in a Frances McDormand film.

My ambitions are even more limited.

I just want to do good art and pay my own way with it, and leave behind a vapor trail of actual good to gently blanket this very wicked world.

The solstice is over. Christmas is here. The brave new year lingers around the corner.

Get your head out of your own ass, Alexander, and begin to peek out from this sedentism coma. It’s been a long time coming: and it’s long overdue.

My one whole day this week for myself alone. I buckled down trying to make the most of it to push myself forward to a better life.

I worked the house and I worked the desktop of this laptop which was in way worse condition than the house. And the non-virtual desktop beside me that mirrors it.

While I did these essential things, I watched most of what is available on the Tubes in clip form of The Sopranos, which is a twenty-year-old show now and one of the few premium ones I had the chance to watch a lot of, in those days.

This put me in a tough guy mood of course.

The fourth thing I worked on a little bit was the truck. I’ve been trying to find a locking gas cap for it, and I went to the two tiny auto parts places here, searching one out.

All the two places had in stock was the same identical plastic piece of crap that failed to work when I bought it and took it straight out to the parking lot to try on.

The second place said they could order a real metal one and it could be here the next morning. I told him great. He asked for my phone number. I gave it to him. He said, you’re not in the system. I said, yeah, I know, and that’s how it’s going to stay.

He did the retail fluster and said he couldn’t order it unless I signed up to be in the system. It was a safety thing, he said, but I refused to bite down on that cruelly tantalizing bait.

I said, well, that’s too bad. Just give me my money back then. For this crap you sold me that doesn’t work, and we’ll call it good.

While I was waiting for him to try and process that through his brain and his terminal, another guy was having another conversation with another guy, and mentioned he was the one who did locks around here.

I asked him how much it would be to just install a lock on the gas door, and he quoted me a number about half of what the damn metal cap cost.

He gave me a card and I tucked it away with my refund in my big shirt pocket like some kind of shitkicker Paulie Walnuts.

All throughout the incident, I refrained from beating anyone to death with a tire iron, or blowing off any kneecaps.

So I’ve got that to pat myself on the back for in this holy season of the birth of our, uh, lord.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tells Shocking Truth About Anthony Fauci

You can say, as many people have, that RFK is a crank or a loon and especially so on the topic of vaccines. I don’t think so … but okay, maybe.

One little data point in this interview can’t be hand-waved away ad hominem though.

The US Empire is 4.2% of the population.

But that same country of four percent was the home of 20% of the worldwide total of COVID deaths.

Eight hundred thousand of us are dead already. That’s one out of every 425 citizens just dead and gone from this virus. The equivalent of 267 World Trade Centers, or fourteen and a half Vietnam Wars.

I want to ask: what the hell is wrong with us, that the same virus that exists in Sweden and Nigeria and Singapore can kill so many more of us–but that may be a loaded question. So let’s just ask instead: What is different about us, that the virus was so very much more deadly and devastating here?

We will each come up with our own variety of explanations for that.

I have mine and they’re close enough to RFK’s that I don’t need to bore you with them here.

On a related note:

Jimmy Dore & Graham Elwood Debate Vax Mandates

Two friends of thirty years standing, each of them bright, compassionate, and with serious leftish credentials, disagree violently at times over whether the government should coerce or compel people socioeconomically to take the jab.

Way back when, we could have essentially the same argument over laws mandating the wearing of motorcycle helmets. In that case I would say that society does have the right to mandate helmets, because while it’s true that you have every right to splatter your own head all over the highway, you don’t have the right to expect that your fellow taxpayers are going to pay for your expensive paraplegia, or to bear the sole burden for raising and educating your ill-considered spawn for the next twenty years either.

In the case of vaxxing though, I think the situation is much less clear. The risks and benefits of vaccination are not well understood. We are talking about mass scale medical experimentation, and we are talking about whether the government could ever have the right to coerce a medical procedure.

If you think so, you have a lot of smart people, up to and including Noam Chomsky, on your side.

Personally I am not yet convinced.

I voted for Joe. I took my jabs. I’ve been a good doo-bee, but my patience for this shit is worn paper-thin, and for the moment I have no use for a series of boosters stretching over the horizon into infinity.

I got the truck back on the exact right day, for better and for worse.

For worse, I got nothing out of the truly witless and half-ass “inspection” except a battery, a high-beam bulb, a bill for five hundred bucks, and a visible reluctance on their part to further care about an old truck at any price. A follow-up talk-only visit to the Dealership was almost as bad, except it was free, and one earthy old bitch in Service (she used the word on herself, in a public cackle, so I’m blameless) mentioned the U-Pick-It on my way out the door.

The U-Pick-It turns out to be a massive junkyard out toward Winona on the edge of the rez.

And I believe the E.O.B. had a really good point about that being the very best way of all to obtain parts for making the truck a little happier both cosmetically and maybe eventually mechanically too.

For better, I got the truck back. On the solstice. It’s all mine, it technically and marginally has a clean healthy slate, and I’m going to run it 240 miles down to the promised land for the holiday the christians prefer.

My head’s clear too. I’ve been fussing over whether this is the forever truck, or a flipper, and the clear solstice answer is: It don’t matter, Jack. The mission is clear. One way and/or another, get a bed in the bed soon, for something south of five grand and over a period measured in weeks not months.

Go forth and do the movies.

Because, you know, they got some money out there and they’re giving it away.

I’m gonna do what I want and I’m gonna get paid.

I know karate; voodoo too.
I’m gonna make myself available to you

I got some dragstrip courage
I can really drive a bed
I’m gonna change my name
To Hannibal or maybe just
Alex

A little over twelve hours from now, about the time the sun is getting around to melting the ice in the stray cat water bowl, the solstice happens officially; eight fifty eight in the morning.

I have always thought of the winter solstice as a thing that happens in the deep of a cold night. So this is it, or, the next closest thing. This is the most holy evening in my pagan calendar. This is my Christmas.

There should be candles lit. There should be structured contemplation. There should be an abiding spirit of tranquility and repose. In reality there are none of those things.

For a long week and more there’s been the jagged tension of mostly pointless argument and a fundamental difference of opinion about things that are anything but pointless, though they might seem it. A week ago I was handling it gracefully, in quiet solidity and that fierce mien when appropriate. On the darkest night I’m cold when I don’t need to be. I feel imbalanced, not to a hip-breaking extent, but as if gravity’s shifted just a bit.

It’s entirely possible that this is the true and real spirit of this holiday.

You know I bought a truck, and today the mechanic’s verdict came back. It’s in very good shape. It needs a battery, and it needs a small oil leak traced, but they couldn’t bring themselves to charge me more than 400 dollars for any of it, inspection and all.

Even so, what seemed like an extraordinarily great deal is now only a good one, maybe even only fair in the best sense. That’s because the “new engine” 30 thousand miles ago was a lie.

There was extensive engine work done, those two years back when the original owner still held the key. But it seems the heart of the truck was not new, and not even rebuilt, but the same block and basics that have been running for almost three hundred thousand miles now.

I’m imbalanced, about what to think and do about that.

The realist in me says: Flip it. The price of used vehicles and especially trucks has been accelerating for some time, and there’s no reason to think that I couldn’t turn it around for a thousand or two worth of profit.

The romantic says: We know her bones are good. There’s no rust to speak of. So what if it needs an actually new engine a year or five from now, and a transmission the year after that? You’d still have 4WD and a longbed, mechanically updated to perfection, for 20 or 25 percent of a new one … and your aesthetic is a classic one. She matches it. Fall in love.

But More Than This …

There’s a critical and growing need here for getting a roof on her and a sleeping bed in her. The mountain is calling and I must go.

So the next step isn’t becoming a used car salesman and starting over.

It’s locating a used version of that camper shell and having that opportunity to bug out, and bug out creatively with a camera.

There is no perfect rig, but right now I don’t have a Rig at all, only a collection of tools and a garage sale puzzle with pieces missing.

I aim to fix that first.

What if there were no Motel Sixes to drop forty bucks a night on, ever again–what if they just didn’t exist for you to give your money to at all?

What if there were no more mills turning trees into disposable products like a plate made of paper, or a rolled product for dry-wiping your butt?

Provided you had a good roof and running warm water on demand and some pipes configured in just the right way, and a couple of beautiful forever plates to eat from for the rest of your life, and pipes configured to clean those few permanent plates …

The absence of cheap motels and Chinet would only serve to make the world a better place. Not just your world, but all of it.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDWe0DeV3D3wFED1xL0Tfi-Cmr3gXMQ6E

I’ll have more to say about this, but I wanted to get it out there and stay spilled.

If you’ve seen Nomadland, you already know who Bob the Narrator (of this playlist, not the movie) is–an old, strong, shaggy, and possibly divine force for good. Mainly. Mostly. IMHO.

One of the videos on this list was deeply game-changing for me today.

I heard a thinker named Kahmali Rose being dismissive of the term “anarcho-capitalism” in a way that was clarifying for me. In broad paraphrase, he* said:

What’s unique about capitalism is the employer/employee relationship–just as the uniqueness of feudalism was that a whole lot of serfs were ruled over by a couple of Lords and Ladies at the top. In capitalism the hierarchy is taken for granted, and is almost a part of the natural order. If you’re good enough and smart enough and work hard enough, you get to become a capitalist and have employees and make a whole lot more than they do–your wealth is created from the labor of others. If you’re dumb or bad or lazy, those character flaws doom you to wage slavery for life, and that’s the best-case scenario.

An-Archy, conversely, is living with Rulers and therefore without Hierarchy.

So ‘anarcho-capitalism’ is internally contradictory and ultimately nonsensical.

In the abstract sense, I have no trouble at all imagining and warmly embracing a world without hierarchy. I think life would be better for everyone, even the deposed rulers, eventually.

I also have no problem acknowledging that some people really are smarter, or work harder, or are better at warfare or pole-vaulting or accounting.

But I reject the implicit assumption that these god-given talents, or man-made bootstrapping characteristics, mean that anyone should be able to pile up a billion dollars while others go hungry or homeless.

I reject ‘meritocracy’ because no one is entitled to define merit.

A child is useless as an employee or a worker, to start at least. A cat will always be.

In the case of the poor meritless cat, I’m willing to concede that sterilizing it is the right thing.

The logic of capitalism says the same should be true of the child, unless the child can prove that it will have some level of ‘merit’, someday–which means that it should be able to be Employable, pulling its own weight, and having the ability to put its excess labor value into the hands of its betters.

In the practical sense, living under the very blueprint of a capitalist system, I know that I can never shake completely free of hierarchy.

When I went down to register my new freedom machine at Jacob’s DMV office, I did so only to lessen the chances that all of my freedom, as well as my machine, will be taken away from me completely at the end of some cop’s gun, for failing to acknowledge the state’s hierarchical demand that I cough up cash for the privilege of owning some limited and contingent slice of an attenuated freedom.

Probably it will work out better this way, but that doesn’t mean it’s Right.

Philando Castile paid for his registration, and pulled over when the lights came on behind him. He did everything right. A cop killed him anyway–in political terms he was deprived of both life and liberty. In these kinds of graphic ways, and a thousand subtler ones that are harder to see, the hierarchy routinely sins and murders.

Jeronimo Yanez was the officer who shot Castile, and he was acquitted of all charges, because according to the logic of capitalism, he did absolutely nothing sinful. He had merit, as a useful tool of the people who own and rule everything. He carried out the logic of their will, like any good serf should.

Do I even have to mention the capitalist logic of the last 80 years of the Empire’s wars?

The only way to solve these manifold intractable existential problems is to abolish hierarchies that inevitably result in domination, subjugation, oppression, colonialism, and enslavement.

It won’t happen in my lifetime, and it may not ever.

But that doesn’t make fighting back toward that noble end anyway Wrong, either.

• Kahmali was sitting next to a sign that read “Black Trans Lives Matter”, so I may have the pronouns wrong here. No disrespect, but I’m not running around the nets trying to track down the correct ones, especially since he wasn’t making a point of it anyway in the context of this conversation.

In the future you will see a formulation from me that says:

Alex Vairtere (pronouns: ve/ver/vis)

You should be as lax as I’m being here, about applying that.

Which is to say that I like these constructs to the extent that they subvert the assumptions around binary gender, but if you detect any religious fervor around pronouns from me, it will be the same kind of religious fervor that I put forward when I talk about worshiping the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If you think Julian Assange is some kind of criminal or traitor, or if you don’t think his case matters in the grand scheme, Glenn Greenwald would like a word with you.

UK COURT APPROVES BIDEN’S EXTRADITION REQUEST FOR ASSANGE

If you don’t have time for an hour of Glenn, I encourage you to just check Julian’s own words, clipped in at about the 41-minute mark. He says, in essence, the following.

Every single war the US has waged in the last 80 years at least, every one of the regime changes and police actions in your lifetime and mine, has had no legitimate basis, and was fought for the sole purpose of sucking up wealth from the American working and middle classes and transferring it to the pockets of greedy and evil military-industrial elites, D and R alike.

No WMDs. No red menace. The cherished freedoms of Afghani women, nothing but window dressing designed by the satanic cult that runs every aspect of your life, grinding off your own freedoms one roe and wade and dollar at a time.

The Empire goes to war only to make certain that the same people that killed JFK get ever richer on your dime, so that their overfed spawn can run off to the best universities and perpetuate the rot.

Please remember that simple fact when they starting telling you why you need to send your dollars and your children over into some bonecrusher machine in Ukraine or Venezuela or the South China Sea, because they’ll be doing it again any day now. The reasons they give you for the necessity of ‘sacrifice’ will be damnable lies every time, just as they always have been, and if you swallow them you’re a goddamn fool.

Julian Assange is only guilty of letting you know that truth, and he has already paid a ruinous price for it.

The news you watch every day won’t tell you that, because they themselves are greedy and evil asslicking corporate elites that are paid well to pretend to think, while serving the Moloch machine of your real plutocratic government. Even the nice smart lesbian. Even the friendly nerd. Even the black guy.

Even the demented uncle and his ethnic sidekick the upright prosecutor.

A pox on them all from the boardrooms to the broadcast studios.

And free Julian now.

Around 2 a.m. the power went out, which is a fairly loud affair around here, with battery backups and the alarm system going off. Then another brownout five minutes later.

Then the front reached us in its rush, and the temperature plunged ten degrees, the wind kicked up twenty more miles an hour, and outside it came down … sleetily … not hail, not snow, just a fine frozen rain from the heavens.

I went to bed, to listen to it and be cozy.

This morning it’s back to a seemingly untroubled blue, 23 degrees but feels-like 13.

The covenant promises temperatures in the 50’s later, and then the same for days and days until the Solstice or even Christmas.

Talking about the weather is the privilege of old men, but I covenant with you that I shan’t overindulge it anyway.

Eleven thirty-four and I have my space again. Getting to that point was exhausting, but I’m putting more coffee on right now. My mien is fierce.

So it’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about this glorious build-back-better Human Infrastructure bill, yeah?

That’s the one that began life as a 16 trillion dollar gleam in Bernie’s eye called the Green New Deal, the shrank to a Bideny 10 trillion that still had some good things in it for me personally (about 20K worth); dropped to 6T and then 3.5T and then 1.7, and as of today is suspended in midair as it heads straight over a cliff with the ‘child tax credit’ falling out of it on the bloody way down to zero.

Being mad at Joe Manchin about it is worse than useless. He always was and always will be an evil toad, and he’s just doing predictable evil toad things. The rest of the story from Robert Durden:

Turns out the Squad NOT “Holding the Line” has consequences

Yes I’m pissed, and yes it’s mostly about my own momentary moral struggle. No I don’t actually expect anything better from politicians, even if they are inevitably co-opted completely fake ‘progressives’.

This is nothing more than an appendix of catharsis.

Adding in JD’s take on the same, a few days on.

As I write this at 1:30 in the afternoon, it’s a sunshiny sixty-degree day.

But the wind is already up to twenty, twentyfive, and there’s unsettled weather in the air. I am not just talking meteorology, either.

Once it dumps the main snow on the mountain tonight, it’s going to accelerate to highway speeds across the flat scrublands that pass for my home in these dark and sober days.

So fast, in fact, that there’s talk that the air might not have time to freeze out here. It may start as a torrential rain. Which might be far worse, if it does freeze eventually as predicted. Black ice.

I won’t be going west into it in the morning as I’d planned. Not with a truck I don’t know well yet.

Lingering in the gusty air is the unspoken opinion that I’m being far too cautious.

Maybe.

I took my paranoid ass to the grocery instead of the gas station.

I’m looking forward to hunkering down as the atmosphere howls darkly.

Yes, home is where the heart is. Eventually.

Tonight, home is simply where the hearth is, and that’s more than good enough for me.

Chipped off one more little thing that mattered. I went uptown to see Jacob, the guy at the DMV, and gave him some money to make it all legal. Registration, paper in hand, metal in the mail. Title, print copy in the mail. Alas, still three years to go before they’ll let me hang a copper plate on her. I can wait.

Got it home and emptied the bed of the stuff that wasn’t mine. Didn’t quite make it as far as pressurewashing the Chino crud out of the bed, but tomorrow is another day.

I wanted to call her Rocinante but it’s been done to death, so I’m working on something cleaner.

It took me literal years to commit to naming myself Vairtere.

For this naming it’ll be more like weeks, maybe days if I’m lucky.

Ró …

A very ancient sound coming down to us through Danish and old Norse from the very Proto=Indo-European original: *rē(w)

Meaning calmness, quiet, tranquility, peace, repose, rest.

Which is certainly where all good things begin.

I made very scant progress today. I sacrificed the hours on the altar of the innocent feline; a shuttle run to a faroff vet for cats not even mine. Although I guess they are, in the most technical sense, community property.

I did use the truck to perform the shuttling though, and while I said that it was because it might be the most reliable vehicle on the property, it was, between you me and the Divinity, mostly because it’s the vehicle that is infatuating me right now.

It hasn’t even been to the vet itself yet, and the tiny things that need fixing continue to pile up.

This is a spill, and because of that it is composed of minutiae.

Even the truck in and of itself isn’t that important.

It’s a pretty tool, being groomed to play its important part in a broader greater mission.

Until the fuel cap and the power steering pump are replaced, until a few scattered electrical issues are addressed, and most centrally until there is enough roof on it to accommodate a big fine human bed that can be parked almost anywhere under southwestern stars, it’s just another commuter bus for medical transport of the furry and underprivileged.

In which group I must grudgingly include myself; mee out; prowwwl now?

When I committed to daily spilling in the first place, my thoughts went something like this.

I’m a full-time drone cog and that eats up so much of my mental bandwidth that I’m not in a position to be a real, full-time … artist, writer, belletrist, whatever it is that I’m going to call myself someday.

But the very least I can do is put down a few words that symbolize or at least tokenize that dream of living as I was meant to live, and do it every day.

It went on like that pretty successfully for some years. I definitely tokenized, sometimes I symbolized, and occasionally I transcended all of that and made real art in spite of it all.

For the year and a half of the lockdown and its aftermath, however, I have not been a drone cog in anyone’s machine.

In the rare instances that I was marginally Employed at all, it was via the black market, and I’ve been blessed to have no boss anywhere outside of the ethereal heavens. Life has not been a cakewalk. But the mind-chewing waste of bandwidth we call a typical Job, or even a ‘good’ job like professoring once was has not been any sort of issue. In other words, I’ve been free to live like the artist I claimed to want to be. And I truly believe that this is the greatest gift of all–to live as if one has no anxieties about the roof over one’s head, or what’s in the fridge today. Even if that means a life of layered sweaters and virtual ramen sometimes, so what? You’re free, bitch! and under that circumstance, there is NOTHING to complain about.

Well, except for the corporatists ruining democracy and pissing on all else that is holy or even sane, but … you know what I mean.

When I do get pissy, about those avatars of evil or anything else, it’s not been in the spirit of real political wokeness or anything noble like that.

It’s evidence that I haven’t really been doing what I should be, in spiritual terms.

Or to put it another way, spilling daily was right for the times five years ago, but it’s insufficiently ambitious for my beautiful life as it is right now.

Over the dark year, my ambitions have been nebulously brewing and mutating, but they didn’t reify until very recently.

Today was a red-letter day in that process of reification.

I bought a truck.

In time the mechanics of that will become self-evident, and the weird plot twist I just threw at you will make a little more sense.

If this were still pure spill, I’d be telling you about the trip to go look at it, the process of getting it home, how much I paid, who the seller was, and all of that.

Instead I’m giving you the first installment of many in my effort to explain WHY I bought a truck. And a weatherly video camera, and a bunch of other little things.

It’s all quite mad of course. But trust me when I say there’s method in it.

And please don’t touch that dial.

The 1-thing I got done today was heading down to the 50-mile bank and yanking as much cash as I’ve ever had in my physical hands at one time, because tomorrow we’re headed down to look at a truck, and I think this will probably be the one.

It’s not an impressive amount of money, because I only want a truck that is old enough to be working class, and just new enough to be viable, reliable.

While I’m on that adventure, I recommend watching this.

Glenn Greenwald & Cornel West Debate Identity Politics & Culture

You’ll be doing yourself a favor to fast forward through any parts where the meta-host, Jackson Hinkle, is talking, because his takes are dopey sludge.

But Cornell is the beating heart of all that is right in the world, and Glenn Greenwald is an acidly brilliant observer of it.

Enjoy.

“Feel Like You’re Failing At Life?! This Will Help!”

Nine minutes of Russell Brand and Elizabeth Day in conversation about breaking our addiction to negative mental patterns.

Yes, I’m thinking of the northern wing in particular.

But not exclusively. Thinking of my own self among others too.

Annual Write Up On What I’m About And What I’m Doing Here

Not by me, but by a part of the We called Caitlin Johnstone.

Demographically, she and I have almost nothing in common.

Politically and existentially we have a lot. She may prefer ‘socialist’ where I prefer ‘anarchist’, but after a certain elevated point in the walk I don’t think those labels differ very much.

What matters a little more is that she is … more pure, in her project, in her solidarity of common purpose.

Though we are kindred, I am decidedly more alienated and free of optimism, in mine.

Another way of saying it might be that I’m evolving toward an art that is not Committed in the Sartrean sense of historicity and communal or class spirit.

In content terms, my methods will be more filmic and less cerebral.

I’m leaving two examples of what I mean here, but these examples are anti-examples.

youtube.com/watch?v=outCvcQCmFw
youtube.com/watch?v=fJbK7_ZKV-A

I’m not hotlinking them because I don’t care if you watch them or not. They’re notes to self, about what not to do, and their aesthetics and technique frankly horrify me.

I’m guided, rather, by the beauty of belletrism.

I have no interest in identifying as a vlogger or a vanlifer.

I’d rather just be the doggedly gentile southwesterly Leonard Cohen.

Carl Sagan testifying before Congress in 1985 on climate change

You’ll recognize some of the faces in the hearing. Carl laid it down and they had to hear.

The only question is why it was worth it for them to listen and do nothing and worse.

More than 35 years ago, when it might have done some good.

In the morning word came through in the hardest, stupidest way that the kid with the cheap Silverado had reneged and sold it out from under us.

That reignited this pissed feelings from the night before, but not to any serious depth. I never loved that truck anyway. It was just real cheap and I had to hope for it.

So errands. Back to the ranch. Holiday trip, finis. Now such bits of gravy that were found in a week-long recuperation and recovery from it. Spotty. Off-topic if there is such a thing. Let’s go.

By which I mean the recovered experience of driving like a working class hero, something I’ve not done in decades, until today.

First you have to haul all the shit down to the kombi solo in the cold.

In between loads, you check the cold oil, the transmission fluid hot, and the other vehicular liquids in either state.

There was a quart of oil and a pint of power steering missing and needed all told.

I fixed that on our way out of town. It’s amazing how good diagnosing and fixing things can feel sometimes.

There was an overcrowded creamery with cheap cheese worth every low penny and not much more.

There were tense exchanges over underpowered networks struggling to get through as we left Kanab for the last leg.

Finally there was respite in Page for the night.

No religion no sex no TV.

A working class hero is something to be.

Too early the next morning we drive toward the glowing promise of a wildly good breakfast experience.

They seat us lightning quick, and in the little half-section where they do …

It took me ten or fifteen seconds to start to hear the music behind it.

“Traveling in a fried-out Kombi
on a hippie trail, Head full of zombie
I met a strange Lady. She made me nervous.
She took me in and gave me breakfast.”

Yeah. Oh yeah. Need a fresh first GoPro pic of that one for sure.

For the freshly evolving version of that somewhat daily spill.

So in that spirit let’s break it down.

A Kombi in the lyric is slang for a kind of van, but in the new context it means any Kombination of bed and wheels. Fried-out might specifically mean ‘overheating’, but here (and not in this restaurant), it’s about warmed ample grease.

The hippie trail is eternal, and what our heads are full of could be mary jane, or a lot of things, all of them psychoactive but not all of them drugs.

Trailhead is in the sound but not the syntax.

The waitperson wasn’t nearly strange enough, no Mombi alas, but the nerves jangled anyway with creative excitement.

The breakfast itself was one of my favorites ever, and that’s saying a lot. It and the glorious L.L. Bean outlet alone provide the only two valid reasons for me to ever want to go back to the Park.

But Kombi is at the heart of everything right now.

Later in that tranquil change of pace day, we met owls, but I only have footage of ducks for some reason.

In that contrary spirit I offer a bonus track.

The dogs were unmannered; the heat didn’t work too well, but shit waited until Friday to really hit the fan.

The same day the kid went berserk, I froze my hands at Bridalveil Falls. They chapped and broke and I’m wearing the scars all over my body still. I think it’s called chilblains. Maybe it’s shingles. We called it the Klingon disease because I had a line of bumps down the center of my forehead.

Half Klingon half Vulcan, in the navigator’s seat while Sister Law drove, we found a corporate coffee franchise and then drove through downtown Park. That was the best of it. The Blue Iguana Mexican restaurant in SL,UT was good food but also the scene of a criminal posing that everything was fine, when it was the very opposite of fine.

After dinner we went into a huge crowd of the witless for some damn basketball game.

All I have to say about that part is: Never Again.

No more crowds.

Truck bed. Instead.

The first time I ever et one that was Smoked.

It was good and fine, but not as good as the company.

Tomorrow there’s talk of hikes with waterfalls.

It’s time to pay those Dec bills.

It’s time to hike the waterfall and then go back home with new glasses and probably not a truck yet.

Finding the path into mr. ranger mans employment.

Finding the way to turn this new Gopro into art and a fair amount of money besides.

‘We fought a good fight and left the world a better place for the children’.

At least that’s the dream.

The Great White Shark, an E-350 van, floats like a leaf on the wind rolling down the blustery Interstate.

It’s all I have time to tell you today. But the Eagle has landed, up in the snow touched north, and we are all together, and cozy, and that’s a blessin.

Didn’t lay hands on the truck at least not yet; rust never sleeps among the deep poor, and our current seller is among them.

Did get the fancy camera, and spent the whole evening at home trying to figure out how the firmware updates on it, and associated idiocy. But it’s working, and this day, as we wind north for family and holiday, I’ll test it under disparate conditions.

The last of the tomatoes, basil, mint were plucked over the weekend because the hard frost came last night. Today the leaves are falling like girl rain, for the same reason.

The harvest was timely. In addition to pulling the camera and the tomatoes and the patreon, I placed in the root cellar accounts at stripe and paypal, youtube and rumble, liberapay and protonmail.

Today we’re leaving on the holiday road.

I want to launch on the solstice.

I told you a year ago that there would someday be access to a way to support this, and me. A purely voluntary and optional method of course. Today it happened.

https://www.patreon.com/vairtere

I noticed that my motivation finally congealed on 22 November, which IIRC is Kennedy Assassination Day.

WTF kind of omen is that?

Doubtless a ripe one.

Thanks for standing by me.

The Rittenhouse Verdict by Glenn Greenwald. A concurring opinion of course, because smart tracks smart.

Let that be that. Fuck babyface, and fuck the whole subject. There are important matters to consider.

Let me introduce you to Mav.

Twenty-fivish, pretty-boyish. Of average intelligence and self-esteem, frequently questionable tastes, a self-described introvert but well-socialized. No discernible political consciousness of any kind. Sounds like he grew up comfortably (at least one Mexican seaside resort vacation as a kid), became a competent lake fisherman, made it through college on a wing and a prayer, and worked some basic shitty jobs he hated, just to get by, just like every other swinging dick in this place.

He had ‘savings’, but the cash stack trended downwards, and was nearing zero when he decided to take on a fat car payment, truck actually, on credit, and hit the road. This was somewhere around two years ago, almost certainly pre-pandemic. With the acquisition of the truck, and the decision to explore the truck-camping lifestyle, the modest view counts for the videos on his YouTube channel exploded. He seems to have spent plenty of time at the parental home in Minnesota, but maybe half out and about, making these little films without urgency from time to time.

I only met him myself because I was looking for information on the reality of winter camping in a rig like that. I found this video, from March of this year. Twelve quick minutes on the story of what happened when he decided to camp in four feet of snow up above Golden, Colorado.

Over eight. Hundred. Thousand. Views.

If you watch the video carefully you can discern at least two other collateral income streams. He does a little influencer-style advertising for Bespoke. And he mentions and promotes mavmadeit.com, where he apparently sells things he’s … made.

But that’s just gravy. He has over a million subscribers now.

I wasn’t paying attention to the view counts, until he put this out a couple of weeks ago:

I saved $400k living out of my truck

My first thought was ‘clickbait bullshit, no way’. Is he talking about not paying rent, and the savings of that?

Well, no.

I believe him now. I think he made close to half a mil, mostly on these whimsical little slice of road life vids, in a couple of languid years that happened to be filled with people forced to stay home, and feed their content hunger for weeks on end.

They watched because he was living a life they all wished they could dare to live.

Right now tonight, though it strains human credulity and any notion of godly virtue, this punk is sort of turning into my role model.

Shh, shh, just listen.

It’s true that Mister Mav is young, hot, and pretty, and equally true that I am none of those things. Except just a tiny bit hot still, to a very narrow and specialized demographic.

It’s also true that I have no stomach at all for filming every aspect of my personal life, or, if we’re being real, for even showing my face that much, or at all, and especially on the Internet. My introversion, my camera-shyness, is feral and likely rabid.

The majority of people visiting this spill don’t know the name my Momma gave me.

But conversely I do have a few things in my favor. I’m not gonna brag on most of them. But if nothing else, let’s say that I don’t need anywhere near two hundred thousand dollars a year to live the way I want to.

I don’t need a million views.

A small fraction of that would suit me fine, and put me where I need to be without worry.

This truck thing is part of it. But so is the land I bought for cash. So is free and open source software, and other less tangible manifestations of anarchy.

The poetry of lightning pushing the edge. The juniper, the mullein, the coatimundi.

Captivated and cinematographed with a sound track of murmurs.

Sure I could write it all down.

But I have, and a lot of damn good that’s done me ennit. I think it’s part of why I failed at it for weeks.

I think it’s time to make some movies. For financial reasons and artistic ones alike. Even for a long-delayed spurt in personal growth.

That’s what I’m thinking.

This is the Spill.

Like Fitzgerald like fine wine.

I’m looking at the pretty brand-new popups on the manufacturer’s sites and realizing that the least I’d have to spend on one there is 10K. Bump that to 15, 17 for one that comes with electric pre-wired and a few reasonable amenities.

I’d pay it for sure, but something seems wrong about it, in the light of going so retro and inexpensive on the foundational truck.

There is such a thing as a used aftermarket for the camper piece too. It’s scattered and fragmentary, but it made me start thinking differently.

Just like I’ve spent months honing my truck search strategy and patiently waiting for the best, maybe I could do the same on the camper side. Get something older or incomplete for half or a third of the price.

Package it together with real love, as if I intended it to be permanently mine.

And then, maybe, if things keep moving in the same direction, liquidate the enhanced asset for enough cash to go to the next level–a slightly better truck, a way better home shell. Until some approximation of perfection is reached.

A kind of job, that I really believe in. A kind of investing that doesn’t aim to make rich people richer, but provide … housing, options … to people who really need them, and don’t have my skills.

An enterprise that is both charitable and profitable, with my labor and knowledge as value added.

Is it a plausible way to make a piece of living?

I don’t know. I want to know.

I don’t share the general political worldview of Kyle Rittenhouse.

I doubt I’d like him, or Jacob Angeli either, in that ‘over a beer’ way.

But like them, I am working class and angry at what this alleged experiment in democracy has become.

I rage, that things are this bad and absolutely destined to get worse, because enough good people do nothing or worse, over and over again, and so the worst people keep winning.

If there’s any justice, it’s only once in a while by accident.

I have no use at all for the well-coiffed millionaires of Fox or MSNBC. They’re getting rich by propping up a rotten status quo, and pretending that somebody else is the problem.

Tucker Carlson doesn’t care about freedom.

Rachel Maddow doesn’t care about democracy.

They’ve got theirs, and fuck you. Your role is to behave and cooperate with the System that privileges them. They’ll use their superfine brains night and day to keep it just so.

There is zero difference between “MAGA” and “Blue No Matter Who”.

In the underlying essentials, Trump and Biden are blood brothers and fraternal twins.

Robbing and oppressing the domestic and global underclass is their collective life’s work. Clinton. Bush. Obama. Bobbleheads. Pawns of Goldman Sachs. Friends of Jeffrey Epstein, until they had to have him put down to protect themselves.

If we could melt them all down in a radioactive cooking pot nothing would change. The system would just grow new ones.

Old boss, new boss, somebody will still be willing to sell their soul to Satan. Here’s looking at you, Sinema. Jayapal. Mister Ro Khanna.

The total cost of housing every homeless person in the country would be about 20 billion dollars.

The system doesn’t want them sheltered. The pittance of dollars is irrelevant. You need to be kept in line and show up at your job on time, and if there was a safety net, you might think twice about that shitty deal.

If you end up sleeping in the park or in your car, it’s because of the flaws in your character.

That’s what they’ll do anything to keep you believing.

It’s the start of the weekend. At the start of the week, thanksgiving week, I’ll be testdriving another truck. Unexpectedly, it’s a Chevy this time, from 1999, 286K on the odometer, and if there’s no rust I’ll be buying it, because $4500 passes for a really good deal right now.

A new engine is about 6K installed. A new tranny, 2K. All the other pieces, a lot cheaper than that. So no matter how bad it gets, I could have a new old truck for less than the price of a shiny new piece of Kia or Spark or whatever the low end of the vehicle food chain is these days.

And then one of these pop-up campers for the bed.

Because whether sleeping in my car is a product of my character flaws or a rigged system, I intend to do it in elegant retro style from now and forever after.

Yes Boss. The government handshake
Yes Boss. The crusher of language
Yes Boss. Mr. Stillwater,
The face at the edge of the banquet

Song dogs barking at the break of dawn
Lightning pushes the edge of a thunderstorm
And these old hopes and fears
Still at my side

Jacob Angeli Chansley grew up in Phoenix and went to Moon Valley High.

When he was 18 he joined the Navy and served two years aboard the carrier Kitty Hawk.

Two years in he told his bosses that he wasn’t going to take a vaccine intended to protect him against anthrax.

They psych-eval’ed him and diagnosed him as mentally ill. But for some reason they didn’t tell him about that diagnosis. They just stepped him through the administrative process to get rid of him as fast as possible. Uncooperative. Surly. A whack job. But somebody else’s problem now.

He went back to Phoenix. He made some videos. He wrote two books. He became an activist against what we’re doing to the climate. He became a Trumper. He was never charged with anything; had no record of any kind.

Early this year he went to the Capitol.

“He later said police had initially blocked the crowd from entry, but had then specifically allowed them entry, at which point he entered”.

Specifically: “Angeli said that he believed he did nothing wrong, telling NBC: ‘I walked through an open door, dude.'””

There is no evidence that he committed any violent act against persons, or property. However, “In a January 14 court filing, federal prosecutors said that Angeli had left a note on Pence’s desk in the Senate chamber that said ‘It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.'”

We can only pray that this particular shamanic prophecy rings true, for Pence, for Pelosi, for Trump, for Bezos.

For his non-violent crime of “obstructing a congressional proceeding”, he was sentenced yesterday to 41 months in prison, and a lifetime of ridicule and hatred from shitlibs.

May they enjoy their Schadenfreude.

May justice for all become real, someday.

TYT sides w/Rittenhouse! Agrees It Was Self-Defense!

Sounds like there was a quick spike in the epidemic of white on white violence that day.

And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
–Jonah 2:10, KJV

He spake thus. When you see the 5.4L 3-valve V8:

That’s the thumbnail from this video. Another, from the same guy, reiterates. “I love this very beautiful old truck of mine. But please, please, if you value your sanity and financial health, don’t buy one”.

A different voice says, “I did it anyway and I’m glad”, but he had the twin advantages of only paying 20% of what’s being asked for the truck today in the first place, and doing the job in a world where ‘supply-chain issues’ were a theoretical construct for bored economists.

It’s really kind of heartbreaking to walk away from this pretty thing. If I were a better capitalist, I would buy it anyway and ask even more for it–that cutthroat investment strategy I mentioned last night. But I don’t want to live like that.

(Some more bits of leftover research you don’t actually want to follow.)

Soon, I hope, I will end up downshifting a model year or two and marrying something more like this Vegas hottie. Or maybe an Asian girl named Tundra, or Titania.

After that, the popup is a kind of rig that sits in the pickup bed, and drives around daily looking more or less just like a shell. But once you get it out there to the back of beyond, it pops up in seconds to something more like a tiny home.

That has been, and remains, the vehicular and second-homey plan.

There’s movement on the second brain front too, but that’s a topic for another show.

So much so much but here’s the main thing.

As the mountain sun faded I drove a red pickup for test purposes.

It wasn’t a stick, or a longbed; it had no cool suicide back doors.

But it was a V8, and oh lord lord, the holy grail, an Fx4. That means enhanced suspension and skid plates, the trim that makes it ideal for rough lonesome roads. It was very clean.

She wanted $7500 in pure cash only. This was a good deal to all appearances, but not a workable deal, especially since she explained that there was just no way she could let it trip off for a day to the mechanic. Red flag for the pretty red pickup.

She says she’ll let us know if it still is up for sale in the morning. The implication being that one of her other suitors might be carrying around thousands of dollars in a brown paper bag. Maybe.

Here’s the thing.

If nothing else, it’s an investment opportunity.

I’m pretty sure that if I gave her seven and a half, I could turn around and put it back up on the same site for Nine, and find a buyer at that price easily. The used car and especially truck market–like the market for rents and mortgages, like the market for fuel and food, is accelerating wildly.

I could be happy enough with this truck myself. I could learn to love it. It sought to charm at first sight and it succeeded pretty well.

Or it might be an entry point into something else altogether. A wheeling kind of dealing.

I haven’t explained to you yet why I even want one.

It’s because I want a bed I can take anywhere, way up the worst roads. A thing called a pop-up camper, mounted to the bed of a pickup, is my current ideal way to get there.

Owning such a rig might be an early qualification, or perq or something, for this Mr. Park Ranger job I have in my head for the other side of winter.

As midnight approaches, I don’t care whether this truck ends up being the One.

There will be others. I might pay more for them for no reason other than an overabundance of caution. Maybe there will be more miles on the one I end up with, but on the other hand maybe it’ll offer a manual transmission, too.

The idealized vehicular world teeters and totters.

I’m trusting in some god thing to supervise the transaction, amen.

In the midst of the crash I got serious about my partitions, and for now I’m working everything off a 12 of 48 GB lovely one, with almost a terabyte of storage locker behind it barely touched–4/835ths, by one measure. An absurdist fraction.

Where does the mind end and
the rest of the world begin?

A frothy fluffy little philosophical question that I think ends up mattering a great deal.

Your brain lives inside your head, and only there. But where, love, is your mind at?

Let’s start with this idea that you can have a second brain, an add-on garage to your first one.

That’s what a cellphone is to the average, and a real computer to the rest. Secondbrainers say: upload and offload all that noisy distracting data to your device, and free up the original brain for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, such as they are in these devolved days.

The concept offers itself as new and revolutionary. But an earlier and better version of second-brainerism has been around for 25 years or so, courtesy of Messrs. Clark and Chalmers …

It’s called the Extended Mind Theory, and it accounts for artificial silicon-based data stores, but also points toward a lot of other things Out In The World as extensions of: the brain, maybe, the mind maybe. Consciousness?

Rupert Sheldrake picks up Chalmers and Clark and runs with them.
Short version
Long version

So do, more recently, the advocates of the Second Brain as a ‘productivity tool‘.

An amazingly high number of these are young, rich, and even doctors or students in medical fields, the example above included*.

Nothing against these folk really, but I was pretty off-put by a lot of this approach, especially when they started talking about how second brains can be put to work as ‘profit funnels’ and other capitalistic shit like that. As always, I’m fine with money and having it. But only to a point.

I still wanted to Build a Second Brain, though, and it was hunting for software to help with that, that led me down this rabbit hole in the first place.

I found something more compelling to me. It’s called Zettlr.

In my NSHO, Zettlr isn’t yet fully realized software. But just as with the AntiX operating system, which appealed to me for reasons related to the fact that the developer calls himself anticapitalista, Zettlr’s developer drew me in with this:

Developing (Free, Libre and) Open Source Software (aka FLOSS) is a Political Act

You bet your ass it is. Even using it with some religious feeling is, too.

Very early days, my Zettlrish second brain looks so:

You can only see the highest level … it’s very incomplete … and I’m not even convinced that this path is right.

But I am on it.

This post will be the first one to go into my shiny new second brain under a new Daily Spill category.

Prayers are welcome for the neurological health of both mindnets here.

The problem is complex and has multiple etiologies, but I believe the important one is that the quick spilling daily is no longer appropriate to the situation. By itself.

i oughta, i oughta, long form and substack.

Also the cinema is the future.

i could tell you about the selfinduced datacrash and maybe someday i will.

But it was as much a symptom as a cause of the fail.

It turns out this strip of land would add 50% to the lot that is already bought; it turns out that getting the zoning lady to respond about what can be legit built there is going to take some grinding little work; it turns out that I’m pretty after all and virulently attractive without trying or even knowing.

All that before checkout at 11.

It turns out that the River is only 4500 feet and all the little trump towns are the same elevation as this one where the old house waited patiently for me to arrive in the dusk.

There is my dream city on the hill.

There is the high place where the other river cascades down the far hill something like 70 miles north.

I hold silver luna in my heart.

I can do this and I can be this.

Ten a.m. with John Fayhee and Joshua Wheeler, essayists, not bad. Fell asleep listening to poets whisper to me in a nice late morning nap. After noon, face to face in the garden at Light Art, we listened to Eve sing and that functioned perfectly as a closing ceremony.

Late in the evening, sustained by this perfect chill night air, I am clawing my way back to relevance in my own eyes.

Saturday’s first hour brings us Carmen Tafolla and then Beate Sigriddaughter reminds us that flowers don’t market themselves or even notice if anyone notices them. Two real poets.

Then, 34 people in the Environmental History panel.

Phil Connors, 20 years a fire lookout on the Gila.

Jack Loeffler is a coruscant mind and especially when you consider it’s been around for 85 years. Headed Upstream: Interviews With Iconoclasts, from a radio series he produced way back.

Laura Paskus wrote at the precipice, NM’s changing climate and she is Enviro reporter for NM PBS.

My favorite session, until you count the open mic at TranqBuzz.

Where we met Ashlee and the delicate German psychic.

You can definitely see your enthusiasm within the paintings you write. The world hopes for even more passionate writers such as you who are not afraid to say how they believe. At all times go after your heart.

That’s my latest comment, and thank you, random spammer.

***

In 2013 they had the first Southwest Festival of the Written Word, and I wasn’t here for it. But I was in 2015, 2017, and 2019. Now it’s on again, and I’m 4 for 5.

It’s not a real Festival this time though. It’s mostly “Zoom” calls and in some ways it’s worse than not having one at all.

Still I persist.

The keynote was attempted by Rick Bass. I respect him as a writer, and now, paradoxically because he sucked at zoomcalling, I have more respect for him as a person now. From time to time he flashed a false and uneasy smile that said, to this observer, that this was a payday and not a whole lot more.

He has his environmental battles up on the Montana frontier. I wish him well in speaking for the doomed trees.

Beyond that he said to Show Up and Keep At It, and maybe that’s the only advice there really ever is.

Midafternoon, I have respect for Denise Chávez.

Finally we came to the main event, called Writing and Activism, and it was brutally disappointing. The message seemed to be that activism consists in giving more literary awards to minorities. No mention of the burning planet or income inequality.

Sergey, if I want to hear bullshit about Winning, next time I’m going to a Charlie Sheen conference and drinking the tiger blood. Yours is too tepid for my particular form of secondhand vampirism.

In between sessions, I continue to be nourished by this landscape, including the tiny sliver I am now said to own.

Somewhere recently
For various values of ‘recently’
I said something like:

Whenever you prate ironically about Horse Paste, you’re not being too funny and you’re not displaying your intellect in a good light. Mainly you’re just sounding brainwashed by someone else’s power and agenda.

I want to amplify on that a bit.

I think the same thing can be said about repeating the talking point that goes: “Follow the Science”.

What if I said to you: “Follow God’s Will” (‘seek his protection’, ‘leave it in her hands’, or whatever).

You’d be right to react ironically, of course. To begin with, you’d have to ask: Oh yeah? Whose God?

If you counsel me earnestly to just follow the science, I am similarly compelled to ask …

Whose science?

How about Bill Gates’ science? He’s rich so he’s smart, ennit?

I don’t think I have to detail the … economically entangled problems with that.

But what if you said, look, asshole. Science’s science. You know, the thing that’s saved us so far, in the gospel according to Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Let’s just go with a nice safe mainstream choice and say, Saint Anthony Fauci’s science, as told to CNN or some other temple of Rational Reason.

Then I might say back:

Fauci Contradicts Himself Non-Stop Over Covid Advice

On one level the video is pure comedy. It’s really funny.

But the serious part is that there’s no such thing anymore as pure objective disinterested bloodless godless Science. If there ever was such a thing ever.

We live in an Empire that is thoroughly altered by money and who has it and who doesn’t; by Das Kapital. This applies to you and me, and equally to all the well-fed scientists, to the administrative spokespersons, the millionaire cable anchors, and all the way up into the priestly domains of Saint Fauci.

If someone is implausibly but actually not motivated directly by money itself, they’re still going to be diverted from some purely abstract ideal of the scientific by associated factors, like fame or reputation or an inherent need to support the Machine that’s been so good to them. The hand that feeds.

The hand of the pharma lobby or the hand of the Democratic Party or the hand of Apple or Google or Facebook or Lockheed Martin.

The hand of the evil duopoly in the political sense, and the hand of the corporate master in the economic one.

If untainted pure Science exists, I’m still waiting for it to show its face, and I expect to be waiting a long damn time.

I’m not an anti-vaxxer, baby.

I got my twin jab the minute they put it out there.

I wear my mask in public religiously, even now.

I’d consider a booster, or two, if I can come to believe that it would do anything for me, or mine.

A good, team-playing boy, who even voted for Team Joe over that bad creepy disbeliever, that heretic against the System and all that is civilized, and rolled up my good boy sleeve when I was bid.

But I choose to question whatever I hear, even if it falls from the lips of a high priest.

And my advice is Follow Your Own Truth and not one handed to you by Zeus or Jake Tapper or four out of five doctors, even if they call you a barbarian or a potato-head or a trumper red-state dipshit, yea, even if you are one truly.

A decent sleep of five consecutive hours finally, and lush vivid dreaming.

Two images in particular I want to share.

***

Out in the rolling part of the Midwest somewhere, maybe Missouri or Western Nebraska, there’s an older couple living a land poor life, which is to say they have a lot of acres, a single modest angle, each other and not much else.

The angle is this. They get paid a little bit for letting water from somewhere else, alkaline water, rush down over a part of their land that is covered in small trees called Arkansas cedar or something like that, maybe four or six times a day.

This process purifies and enhances the water in some unspecified way. It’s then pumped back uphill and collected and carted off to be used in some other unspecified place. They get a stipend for controlling the flow and maintaining the pumps and the like. They also get their water table refreshed by the excess to some small degree.

The moment of water release is a spectacle to behold. The rest of the image is conversational.

This angle and the associated modus vivendi is not for me, but it’s exciting anyway because it’s a beautiful life and they are good people on some fundamental level.

In this dream the whole family is around, so it’s about the past and community.

***

In the second one I begin alone so it’s about potential futures.

Still searching out the angle that is right for me, I go to that sweet town where I really do own a scrap of land outright now in the alleged Reality.

I find a week’s worth of temp work building trails or some such and it’s for the Feds, in the Park Service.

On the last day it switches gears. It’s raining and I’m doing clean-up and maintenance on a tiny downtown warehouse with a bunch of useless records in it that have to be kept anyway.

As that Friday ends, I meet the boss lady. The work has been both satisfying, and in her eyes satisfactory, so she tells me I can come back next week. I’ll be her “projects guy”.

I don’t have any idea what that means and maybe she doesn’t either. The pay isn’t discussed, nor benefits, but everyone present believes it’s going to work out fine, on an interpersonal handshake kind of basis that barely exists in the modern world.

An honest week’s work, maybe the first one in twenty years, more on the way, and I go up to the public library.

If I’m going to be living here at last I need to understand what I can recycle and how that works in this town. Especially about the glass. Do we do glass here?

So I go in and strangely there’s no hint of looking for an angle here. I don’t know why, but although this is a natural and historic place for me to be employed gainfully, that’s not who I am anymore. I’m not a young digital reference librarian. I’m an aged junior ranger. I’m the Projects Guy now.

I’m the patron. I ask my question. But it’s not that simple. I don’t think it ever gets answered.

Instead I find myself in a lively smart conversation with a small posse of people who are, currently, young digital reference librarians.

I build to a point in the conversation in which I aver that I’m a romantic and not a rationalist. I explain why.

My soliloquy is met with quiet approval and maybe even an addictive taste of admiring awe.

These people will be friends someday.

The recycling glass will find another way home.

***

I don’t have any good reason for being this far behind for the first time ever.

I don’t need one, except maybe for myself.

This is Friday in Reality too and on this Friday I’ll settle that issue. Satisfactorily if not satisfyingly. I’ll clean the warehouse, backfilling from copious notes.

In about two weeks I’ll be back there on another Friday for the Written Word fest, the fifth one ever, my fourth one, and the place where this all began in 2015. By ‘this’ I mean the whole concept of Spilling daily.

This whole business of becoming not-a-prof, and instead the projects guy. As an angle.

You just need to know who Caitlin Johnstone is.

There Is No ‘Good’ Form Of Capitalism

Talkin’ About Armageddon

Shitlibs Literally Think Jimmy Dore Is Causing The Apocalypse

“Yesterday” I was at Zion in Utah for the very first time, and ‘today’ marked a deeper return visit to the North Rim that wasn’t as deep as it might have been.

It should be red-letter, there should be an epic poem in honor, et cetera.

There’s not. There never was. The way I am, the way I was raised, all holidays are arbitrary. Celebrating them is collaboration with the cultural system, and I style myself the ultimate rogue. Look how pretty I am.

Instead, two weeks to the day later, I’m still retconning, still making up ground.

I owe at least two major calls to beloved, in addition to the as yet still missing fourteen posts. I have three or four envelopes sitting here still unopened, and I have the tedious guilt that goes with all of that, a guilt that proves I’m not as cool as I’d like to be.

By the time my major mass present arrives finally–“tomorrow?”–I’ll have made serious progress on the digging out, like some emotionally snowbound moral yeti.

Maybe even a little toward living the life I dream of, where I always know the right thing to say in the moment as things are happening, and can factually prove that all bosses are lepers in the eyes of god.

Nobody can legally press charges on me for lack of ambition, ennit?

Si.

When Hunter Thompson, at the peak of his powers, was surgically dissecting The American Sickness through the lens of the Nixon years, he felt compelled to invent whole new rhetorics of hyperbole to paint the evil he was witnessing first-hand.

He cribbed from Dante, he summoned Hieronymous Bosch. When it seemed over the top, it was only beginning to scratch the surface.

But back then, in the uneasy years of my first full decade on the planet, a cold hope still breathed.

All it would have taken was one decent man like George McGovern to turn things around with a relieved breath of narrow escape, or so it might have seemed. HST believed it, at least to a point.

But McGovern lost in a landslide, Kucinich never got off the launch pad, and Bernie Sanders dissolved into a puddle of muddled good intentions and pragmatic haplessness that smelled like something you stepped in and regretted it instantly.

Machine politics did take a breather from outright domestic assassination after the horrors of MLK, the Kennedys, and countless other attempted and actual murders. But bullets were replaced with ploys no less deadly to the democratic project or the vain hopes of the working classes.

Obama the “community organizer” wiped his ass with his promises.

Most lately the people were offered a presidential choice between a nouveaux-riche racist goon and a brain-damaged imperialist on loan from the financial sector, formerly known as The Senator From Citibank.

There’s no reason for electoral hope or turning the ship around, any more.

The capitalist death cult is literal and real. We boil slowly in a fossil fuel soup, and it doesn’t even matter that much, because our lives are rarely worth living now anyway. People fall off into poverty and die unremembered, for profit. There is no health care, for millions, or shelter, for hundreds of thousands. National media preaches a narrative that the unvaccinated should die, and no one bats a fucking eye.

China waits patiently for the crumbling to reach a tipping point.

The evictions proceed while the Savior Squad performs satanic theater for a day or two and then disappears, reappearing on the other side of the stage in dresses that cost a year’s wages for the average drone.

There are so many cold cases in the files of the greater American crime, but a day of reckoning and atonement draws ever closer, riding into Omaha on four apocalyptic horses.

The American Century is twenty years in the rearview mirror, but still there are eight hundred military bases in nearly every country in the world, burning up the revenues stolen from the pockets of the workers, trillions upon trillions, year after year. But look–here’s a song about Wet-Ass Pussies for you.

Are you not entertained?

The worst of it is simply this.

If collaboration with the system has brought you a good life with plenty of money in it, you’re going to support that system implicitly.

You’re going to weep for the few brave service men and women lost in a random incident at the tail end of a fucked-up war, but you won’t even see the thousands upon thousands of civilians routinely blown up whole families at a time with bombs manufactured next door to you and delivered by your neighbor Chad, the friendly drone pilot who always has time for a driveway smile.

You’re going to vote, and bloviate on the importance of voting, even when there’s literally no one and nothing to vote for.

You’re going to quack brainlessly about horse paste, your lips moving in sync with Rachel Maddow’s, whenever somebody questions Fauci’s blatant lies, or the government starts leaning authoritarian on the question of what people should be forced to put in their own bodies.

You’re going to cheer when your social media company abusively censors free speech, if you find that speech the least bit dubious or threatening or, you know, trumpy, oh ick.

Because the system has rewarded you for rewarding the system. It educated you well. It paid you well. It made you an ‘opinion leader’ and a swing voter, and every commercial you see is going to be aimed straight at your brain pan and model the life that’s yours, right down to the furniture coasters on your couch and the brand of car you can afford to drive.

Everything’s fine. Everything’s great.

Except for THOSE people. The deplorables, the red-staters, the anti-vaxxers, the January-sixers, the people who see the police as a deadly enemy, instead of the defenders of your property rights.

Defund them? Absurd. They’re our protectors, our boys in blue. Without them … anarchy!

Anarchy, my dears, is governance without rulers and their hired goons, not governance without rules.

Maybe just maybe, a life without rulers would not actually be to your liking.

I respectfully dissent.

Watch as Obama National Security Officials, Led by Ben Rhodes, Get Caught Lying in Real Time

Glenn Greenwald is never harmless, and that’s why I love him best, no homo.

This time he’s serving as both our memory and our conscience, particularly with regard to the case of Ed Snowden, the saint without honor in his own country.

If you’ve swallowed any piece of the shitlib narrative on Snowden and his consequential revelations of routine crimes against the people, this eighteen minutes has the potential to serve as an antidote for the poison.

Why is Ed still legally boxed into a Moscow apartment?

Why is James Clapper not rotting in jail?

Answer these questions to unlock the unpleasant truth of “your” faux-democratic Evil Empire of a country, this poor land where capitalism went to bloom into fleur du mal and latterly enter its death cult phase with a terrible awesome shuddering groan.

The best I managed was to keep watching some faves, as the wet wash became the dry laundry and got folded.

Bree is still hardcore fave. I respect her more each time I see her, even as she handles the Bad Faith show all alone in this phase of the indefinite hiatus of one Virgil Texas, which might or might not have creepy undertones.

I relate to you in some ways Virgil, but the longer you stay away to more it looks like you’re an optional accessory, to the far more put-together Briahna Joy Gray. It would be nice if I missed you more, but I don’t.

Dating on the Left: Would You Date a Kamala Harris Stan?

Learn with me: Apparently ‘Stan’ is what the kids are saying to mean ‘fan’ or ‘devotee’.

A Kami Stan is someone who would have voted for her in the primary, if such a mythical voter-beast existed, in spite of her blatant opportunism and imperialist law enforcement fetish.

Could you possibly date someone like that? I say ‘you’ because dating isn’t a thing in my life and won’t be for the forseeable future, if ever.

The whipsmart ladies discuss. Most can’t imagine allowing a KamiStan into their beds.

It’s entertaining harmless diversion, as far as I can tell.

“Today” was the first of two back-to-back episodes where, unhappily, there were only two days between the end of one trip and the start of another.

Two days will never be enough to recover Home fully. Count yourself lucky if it’s enough to get even the laundry caught up.

The trips were fun and useful, but my art suffered grievous harm. This is where I really went off the rails with staying current this time.

Lesson learned. Don’t do that shit to yourself, manchild. The beauty of living this crustacean existence is that you don’t have to, and the only downside is having no one else to blame when you do.

“Yesterday”. On the morning after the JD live show we woke up in a fancy Vegas hotel we didn’t pay for. No crime was involved in the situation. This time.

We did some stupid ineffective things like cash in the ticket for correctly predicting that the Bucs would win the basketball thing. It cost $20 to make $50, which is a pretty great rate of return, but not nearly as great as one might have hoped, given the natural odds. I might just be old and sour, though. Hooray for us.

At the far end of the Strip chores, I again tried to contact the owners of a Class C Motor Home, a Tioga, that I’d spotted for sale online at an amazingly low price, around 12K. I told them we were headed over to the town of Blue Diamond, where the ad said it lived.

There was still no response, so we drove out and covered every street of the tiny town by wheel. It was damn cute.

Finally we spotted it behind a garage in a great big yard.

We went over to the one restaurant, called the Cottonwood Station, and tried one more time to call.

The food was really good. But, still no answer.

Regretfully, we did a couple more shoppy chores and visited the kin once more before heading for home.

Let me tell you why I wanted a Tioga and why I don’t anymore.

I wanted two things. One, to have a second vehicle so that if my aged hatchback broke down I’d still have something to drive. Two, for the bed and associated amenities, especially in case I get one of those sweet federal park ranger jobs in the spring and could use the RV to shorten my commute dramatically.

Well, and for having fun with too.

I believe I’ve found a better and maybe even cheaper way to get all that.

For six or eight or ten thousand dollars, I can find an old pickup, with good clearance and four-wheel drive. Second vehicle objective solved, more usefully and elegantly.

For another six or eight, I could also put a brand new engine in it, if it starts to show signs of unreliability due to advanced age, like I am myself. Or put some overload shocks on it, or one of those cool fat boondocker bumpers with a winch and a light bar. Anyway, it could be done piecemeal, and as-needed.

But the coolest part is the heretofore unexpected existence of something called a pop-up truck camper.

Most truck campers suck ass; tiny on the inside, too big on the outside, expensive, and harmful to vehicular stability.

A pop-up, though, bolted to a pickup bed, lets the truck be shorter on the road and taller when you’re stopped and want to use the camper space.

And, they’re pretty cheap, at the low end, still under 10K in at least one case even brand new. And, they can be obtained on that lovely as-needed basis

So maybe as little as 6K to start. Maybe as much as 20K+ over time. But a go-anywhere bed to take a pilgrim far away from the hell of other people, even in its primitive state driven off the lot, and a real home away from home, eventually, maybe.

At the very least a machine to take dead tree limbs off to a proper resting place, drag a washer or dryer back from some faraway fancy store in the big city, or keep a supply of bricks in to improve traction over a winter road, unloading them into garden spaces come every spring.

Like it? I do.

“Last night” I took some loved ones to go see Jimmy Dore.

Somewhat unexpectedly, a lot of his act focused on the medical uses, and politics of, a drug called Ivermectin.

I’m writing this almost three weeks later, but here’s an interview on the subject that might be of interest to you.

Ivermectin: An Honest Look (The Good, Bad, & Ugly)

I’ll doubtless have a number of posts on the subject as I catch up from the early part of the holiday season, whether I want to or not. But in the meantime, here are a couple of points, Following the Science and all, to keep in mind on the stupid public debate.

1) Even if you’re double-jabbed, as I am, you can still get Covid, and this is going to be more and more true as the virus mutates past Delta, and on to Lambda and Mu.

2) Even if you’re double-jabbed, you can still shed the virus to others. Some studies even say that you’re more lethal if you’re vaccinated.

3) So please keep wearing your fucking masks, even if almost no one else is.

4) Ivermectin has nothing to do with preventing you from getting the virus. It’s a possible treatment for the worst symptoms. It’s unproven to be effective for that purpose, but studies are underway, and there is plenty of circumstantial and real-world evidence that it might help, and can’t hurt, if taken as prescribed by a doctor. A human doctor for humans. As it has been to millions of people over a time span so long that it’s no longer under patent. And therefore very cheap.

5) And therefore completely uninteresting for capitalists, and the corporate media you inject into your bodies and minds every day.

6) Therefore. If you parrot the words of that corporate media on the subject, you’re not sounding smart, you’re just sounding brainwashed. Specifically, every time you say “horse paste” or “horse dewormer”, you sound like a tool. And god kills a socialist kitten.

Hope this helps.

Written the NightBefore. Tomorrow is Saturday and I’ll be hard out and about on the roads for it, and Sunday, maybe even Monday.

So I’ll update this if possible, and consonant. Such things usually aren’t.

After the weekend there’s about a 2.5 day break to recover, and then back north for a familial week in the Utahs. All in all it might be a while before I’m back and cooking the next turkey, before real life in a new time makes the scene.

Hold tight and be well.

Good (Jordan Chariton)
LIVE: Richard Wolff DEBUNKS Economic Comeback Nonsense

Better (Jimmy Dore)
The Squad Are “Useful Idiots To The Establishment” says Chris Hedges

Best (Brie Joy Gray)
Chris Hedges & Richard Wolff: Have Bernie, the Squad, & the Institutional Left Failed Us?

South of the Ruperts and Aseems of the world, Hedges and Wolff (along with a few others like Cornell West) are the best we have.

I’m going to keep listening to what they have to say, and passing it along, but I’m going to care less, because in the existential sense time is very short, and our fates are sealed, and there is a life to be lived beyond the sound and the fury.

I kept going down the Rupert Read Road and found this:

On liberatory philosophy and politics in the time of civilisational crisis

Four incredibly smart people, Rupert, a Finn, a Palestinian, and an Indian, discussing the imminent collapse from a mainly philosophic standpoint. I love the things they take for granted as facts, like that the modern world is an institution where the patients are insane, and the caregiving administrators are even more insane–The Cuckoo’s Nest as a documentary about modernity. We’re not arguing about guns or abortion here. We’re talking about what actually matters, and starting from a place of common understanding about where we really are.

The best part of it was being introduced to Aseem Shrivastava.

I’ve linked his three best pieces by timestamp and annotated them. I hope you enjoy. Namaste.

21:25-40:00

We have no idea what freedom even is. How the Enlightenment collaborated in the current destruction. The project of modern civilization ended in 1914–we’re living in the post-apocalypse now. The american giant is bleeding out. “Liberty” is the consolation prize for losing actual freedom; true freedom cannot be an individualistic process (and later this viewpoint is called “ontonomy”). What do you say to someone who knows everything, but is insane? Everyone is necessary, even though no one is indispensible. Tagore prophesized eco-disaster a hundred years ago.

1:31:43-1:44:20

Possibilism. Is progress necessary; desirable? Pro-science but anti-scientism. How war erodes freedom. The differences between techniques, technology, and technocracy. The relationship between technology and colonialism. Your cellphone is a baby spoon.

1:55:10-1:58:03

Our gazes are turned away from Paradise. “Let heaven exist, even if our estate be hell” (Borges), and quite a lot more from the world of belletrism, including the spiritual truth behind Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.

(A little more, for reading, here:

I have not undertaken any journey. The journey has undertaken me. )

(image swiped from Crash Course Geography #14)

We don’t have done it because if we had we would have by now. The train is rushing over the cliff and still the ruling elitist and the average man are working together, shoveling coal into the firebox, frantic as lemmings. The world we’ve built does not deserve to live forever.

Even if we quit praying to fossil satan here and now today, cold turkey, there would be thirty years of hell in the not-wilderness of the Anthropocene age.

That’s not happening, and it won’t tomorrow either.

Listen to this man.

Shed A Light: Rupert Read – This civilisation is finished: so what is to be done?

Please. Listen to the first five minutes, and then stop if you want and can.

This lecture is given to a respectfully somber group of students.

A year later, having answered his own question about what to do by becoming an activist with the group Extinction Rebellion, the same man is on a BBC Panel, taking questions from the people.

BBC Question Time | Dr. Rupert Read | Extinction Rebellion

This is the truly horrifying part.

The evil politicians on the panel with him are one thing, to be expected, bad faith incrementalists looking out for their own short term.

But the people! The ordinary everyday thinking feeling British people …

There are 10 or 15 percent of them who get it really.

But that fraction won’t be enough to stand against the mobs in the theater seats, the majority wagging their finger at the prophet because some theoretical workers may have been inconvenienced in their commute by the Ex-Rebellion direct actions.

This majority has internalized capitalist insanity, swallowing it whole and serving as nominally human hosts for the parasite’s eggs. Watching this is to watch the hatching.

Jeremiad; Lamentations. This is why our grandchildren can’t have nice things. Like the chance to grow old.

If you want, you can continue to follow the evolution of one man’s thinking to the brink of the COVID era:

Chatter #120 – Rupert Read on Parents For A Future and Extinction Rebellion

And beyond even if you like. It’s out there.

The death spiral will not be mitigated.

After all this, the prophet still believes, not in stopping the train, but in ‘transformatively adapting’ to the process of the train cars flying independently through the air, decoupled and rolling head over caboose. Even this marginal adaption, he argues, is unlikely to happen. But “we should still give it our best shot”.

I’m frankly slack-jawed that he hasn’t simply given into despair.

The one eventual point where his vision and mine align is that large scale government is and will continue to be useless on any larger question of destiny.

Consider, my nephews and all the young people, not which film to download next, not where to get the best hot wings, not what will look good on your resumes, but where and how you will grow your own food, find your own water, defend the lives and virtue of your own loved ones when you are as old as I am today.

I won’t be here then. I only have to worry about the next couple dozen orbits around the sun, at the very most. It makes no difference where I set my thermostat between now and then, no difference except how I feel about it on some abstract level of morality.

How do I want to feel?

I want to feel like I would if I was living in that other world we might have built, of mountain road and oracles in the park. I want to live the dream.

The outskirts of some glorious dreamtime city, part Flag and part ABQ, but bigger and more vibrant than both put together.

In the mountains, within the Peaks, we were alone together, driving dirt roads and no one up there like the old days–Senator Highway magic. Down closer to town though there were caravans. Some had all dogs. Others had meals laid out banquet style on flatbeds.

I guess that made us hungry so we (by we I mean everybody) went all the way down and found a restaurant. While we were pushing tables together, and bringing chairs, at one moment I realized I was bringing the wrong kind of chair. That triggered a desire in me to want to be alone. I started in the gift shop looking at hats, but they were wrong too, so I went out.

Lots of strange interesting things happened. A post office packed with two whole rooms full of people waiting in line, and no masks. (That made me want to get back out too.) A right turn onto a barely recognizable Carlisle Boulevard. A national election happening that no one seemed to care about–I was trying to get results on a transistor radio.

Can you see the patterns like I do on waking? It was a better country by far. I was the same person.

Eventually I arrived at the crux. It happened in a public park. I ran into a very ancient black woman I’d known before, and as we exchanged pleasantries I began to realize that she loved me unconditionally and that she always had each time I’d encountered her.

(Maybe she was the Oracle and maybe She was God, but all I know for sure was that she was the Other and too good for this world; just right, for that one that I dream about.)

I had a guilt for not staying in touch with her (in truth I don’t stay in touch with anybody) and it made me very talkative. I was trying to make up for lost time. At some point we were briefly interrupted by another woman, white, who said she was my doctor and that she had some test results to discuss when I found time. I knew she was right but it was like I was meeting her again for the first time, and she took her dogs to some other part of the park.

I turned back to the Oracle and she looked concerned, asking me about the tests and my health.

I launched into it, maybe a little reluctantly, but full bore while I had the chance. I told her the truth.

I told her I was born with a hole in my head. (That’s as good a metaphor as any, for the reality.) My condition, the reaction of my parents, these shaped me fundamentally …

I told her about being a golden child genius and skipping grades and all, about being my own kind of broken angelic superstar. There are no lies in that.

But I didn’t grow up in that world of free mountains and vibrance and oracles, I grew up in this one over here. Now the superstardom feels like another time and another world, because, well, it is. The river flows.

Coming down from the mountain to chat with conditionless love in the park, now I am briefly the belletrist again. I can’t hold onto this feeling, but I can capture it in the amber of prose. I can honor the gift.

I do what I can because it is what I can do.

It’s never enough to satisfy me or anybody. This lesser world I live in was always more sparse, and it’s drying out fast on every level.

Today I am Eliot without the dumb religion. Today I am Pound, without the fascistic sympathies.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you something less, but for a lightning flash of today I can tell you something so much more. Mira, mira, look. See.

Ryan Grim Interview About Strategy Differences

I was not expecting to see Ryan Grim being interviewed by Franc Analysis. I’m glad it happened because it really made me think.

Grim works for the billionaire-funded Intercept, an organization co-founded but now reviled by Glenn Greenwald, and also sometimes co-hosts The Hill as the ‘leftist’ half of the left/right pairing of talking heads. He was on Jimmy Dore once and they had a rather brutal falling-out.

Franc is far younger, far poorer, and far more radicalized, famous mostly for not being afraid to shove a mic in the face of politicians at rallies and so on and saw away. He did a very good job under these circumstances, going after Grim with questions he’s probably never been asked before.

The best part of the interview is the last ten minutes, where they inconclusively debate “electoralism vs. direct action”. Franc thinks voting and sending money to pols is pointless and over with. Grim sees it as the last best hope.

A lot of the best leftists see Grim as a shill for established power, either deluded by his own prestige and success, or maybe even a plant for some nefarious three letter agency. It’s easy to believe, but if it’s true, he’s an incredibly smooth one, as when he says here flat out that ‘billionaires shouldn’t exist’, even though one signs his checks.

His best answer to Franco about why people should keep investing in the lesser of two evils was to point to the iffy promise of the “3.5 billion (human) infrastructure” bill. He’s right. Personally I have a lot on the line with that bill, and my fingers are hard-crossed that the Dems push it through.

But for a best answer, it still sucks. So yes, I get health care finally. All that means is that a sliver of the pork in the bill falls to me for a change. It’s still just pork.

It does nothing to change the facts of Empire or imperialism. It does nothing to bring a federal jobs guarantee, or even throw a bone in the direction of a living wage. It does nothing to slow down the twisted logic of capitalism, and it would do too little too late to affect the climate catastrophe that looms over us all.

Both parties to the duopoly that rules our lives are useless for solving anything that fundamental or real. Franc and the more enlightened members of his generation are absolutely correct in asserting that fact.

I’m very dubious and fatalistic about the idea that ‘direct action’ will solve anything either, but some form of it is the only real option left. It’s that bad option, or nothing.

Let’s hope it can be done non-violently. Let’s hope that the smarter people continue to reject Grim’s ambivalent prescriptions, and to embrace Franc’s. Let’s hope that hope still exists at all, for any reason, on any front, and that we’re not pitched into a neo-feudal lockdown at the same time we’re burning and drowning and taking down every last vestige of charismatic mega-fauna with us.

I’m a belletrist and I pray for the tigers, even though god isn’t listening.

The last word on Afghanistan goes to … Brie Joy.

Imperialism or Isolationism: Is There No Alternative? *

A really smart woman with an eye for picking really smart guests. So much more thoughtful and palatable than the BoyTubers with similar views. And maybe most importantly, so much soul, so much heart.

She boldly brings up the Marianne mess and takes it for granted that MW was off, but acting in good faith.

Her mind is our tenuous hope.

* Another Invidious link. I’ll try to post the titles verbatim, so that they’re easy to search out on YT over time–in case you prefer to sip that platform direct for some reason, or for when the proxy goes down in the short or long term. (Google/Alpahbet has a long history of trying to quietly crush any projects like this one that try to circumvent their profit model.)

So I’m flanking Marianne to the anti-imperialist left, and here’s Unapologetic outflanking me.

Should Biden Get Credit Or Blame For Afghanistan?

I did slow-clap for Old Joe and I’ll own that, even if I did inoculate with the irony of there still being seven or eight hundred Empire bases all over the world, or a thousand maybe if you include the ones not on lists.

His take is probably riper than mine.

By the way. I’m in the middle of setting up some new operating systems on a very lovely new computer, and since I haven’t done that for real in a while, I’m stumbling across some new tools, many of them related to privacy. There’s a very good looking new browser out there called LibreWolf built on a Firefox base (so extensions like the indispensable Ublock Origin will work with it no fuss).

On a related note, the video link above doesn’t go straight to YouTube like usual. It’s routed through an instance of a YT proxy called Invidious. This is a huge step forward, and early testing indicates that I’ll be using it regularly myself, and therefore using it here for linking out too.

Please check out the Silkky Cloud for more valuable tools of the same nature.

“Shut the fuck up” exceeded my mandate. I regret it; I retract it. Bad Vairtere.

She followed the advice to a point anyway, deleting the stupid tweets and going to ground for a few days to reconsider, and then came out swinging again, which was the best thing that could have happened in the end.

She brought on Laura Jedeed, a veteran of the undeclared war, and (mostly) let her speak instead. That was valuable and good, and even dare I say charming.

There are still some parts in the middle of this interview where I disagree with her, but I can do so respectfully now. In particular, she takes some time to soothe her vet guest by trying to say that it wasn’t all for nothing. But in the terms she means, of course it really was all for nothing, and the temporarily and marginally improved lives of Afghani women were by no means worth all the death, let alone two trillion dollars.

But I know she’s saying what she’s saying in the interests of healing the now. We should all be so essentially good in the heart.

I love you, Marianne Williamson. But right now your genuine identification with and compassion for the women of Afghanistan is making you into quite the useful idiot.

You don’t understand that the very imperialist and interventionist policies you’re supporting today are what put the Afghan women in the crosshairs in the first place.

You don’t understand that this Taliban you’re willing to bend your antiwar principles for today was created by the american capitalist machine that you want to put back in action against them.

(Bonus coincidence: The ugly face of Bill Kristol appears in this video as the flag-waving imperialist, the very same Kristol that Marianne’s twitter thread on the subject springboards off of approvingly.)

Marianne, when you literally changed your vote to be pro-M4A right in the middle of a debate, I fondly found the witlessness of it charming.

Even now, I sympathize deeply with your momma-bear instincts regarding the innocent and the helpless.

But you don’t fix imperialist hegemony with more imperialist hegemony, even if and when you dress it up in the language of love.

The motherfuckers had two decades to save your sisters–our sisters. They spent 300 million dollars a day for twenty years enriching themselves and amplifying evil with your very cry on their lips.

By your standards and mine, the whole thing was a dismal failure.

What is your proposal for trying again? I’m asking honestly. More of the same? For how long? At what cost?

Pull back. Stop looking across the world. Look to the women around you, living in their cars and under bridges, unable to feed their own children because the Machine has cast them aside. Feed them. House them.

And then come back and we’ll have a nice long talk about how we the Americans, out of our own abundance, can best go about fixing the problems of women in Peru or Afghanistan or Tanzania.

Until then, do us both a favor and shut the fuck up. You don’t know what you’re talking about, and this time it isn’t charming at all.

The taste of overthinking is salty, dry, and intermittently savory. This year there’ve been times when I couldn’t sleep.

But now the nights are cooler; yesterDay was 20 degrees cooler, and I’m living at the other end of the spectrum. Sleeping is the default. I go down for a quick nap and wake six hours later.

It’s beautiful. I chose to get up at 5:18 am.

There is a lot to do, and making money somehow is first on the list.

Here’s a story about why that’s harder than ever. Arizona’s Nurse of the Year just quit her good job, because it was killing her. “You just have … such anger, at the System …”

Yeah.

I have nothing to complain about personally. Life is amazing. For now.

JimDore, LeoCohen, transgenderism, and that one library job.

My mind, only just over the edge into marginal sleep, feels agile and active and bright. In bed I smile, and finally give in to waking.

I’m not unsympathetic to the women of Talibanistan, but listen. 300 million dollars a day, every day, for twenty years. What did it buy?

A massive culture of corruption in the middle of Asia. A pumping up of the military-industrial war machine …

… and yet another lesson that it’s never a good idea to ally with and have your bread buttered by the cold-hearted wolf of a capitalist machine.

They’ll always break your heart and your bones in the end and it’s true whether you’re a translator or a woman, in Kandahar or Kalispell.

The US President is under fire for keeping his promise to get the fuck out of Afghanistan after 20 years, but not under my fire.

Instead I say to Mr. Biden: good job, Joe.

One down, 799 to go.

Postscript:

Jackson Hinkle had a shitty take about Kyle Kulinski’s shitty take about the whole debacle.

Jackson’s own live chat had it right …

Auntie Ann says: ​Okay, I really tried to listen to you & give you benefit of doubt but you just suck. your fake beef with Kyle is not the story.

Amen to that. Your beefs, manufactured or otherwise, are never the story. Your number of subscribers rising while his are falling are never, ever, the fucking story.

Jackson did have one good point, and that was: Biden himself didn’t actually choose to withdraw completely, “embassy guards”, evil mercenaries and all. The Taliban decided that part for him. That is why half the Congress on both sides is mad at him.

That is, I think the reason that Kamala says:

“They will not pin this shit on me!”

No clue, by the way, whether that has any truth to it or not. It just sounds true.

I have to backslide a minute though.

About five days ago and by an unexpectedly large majority, the Senate passed a first version of the “Infrastructure Bill”.

Kyle immediately gave this two bright squirrel eyes up:

SHOCK: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Passes w/ HUGE Bipartisan Support

In fairness, if you watch the whole thing, he does eventually point out some potential downsides, but he calls it a win and buries the lead quite deep.

What he doesn’t mention is that this bill is supposed to be Old Joe’s signature piece of legislation, his legacy, his making up for all the short-shrifting bullshit of his first presidential year, like never even trying to grow the minimum wage, address climate change, or deal with the for-profit health care crisis in the middle of a pandemic, much less corporate rule of everything else besides.

Joe originally floated his dream as costing 10 trillion, and that might have been a good start. But what the Senate passed, this major bipartisan victory, amounts to a tenth of that, completely fails to notice the “human infrastructure” side of things, and reportedly includes a lot of giveaways to the rich, like privatizing big pieces of that critical infrastructure, and gutting certain data privacy protections in the fine print. Which is why it got 19 Republican votes.

Senate Democrats Pass Terrible Infrastructure Bill That Benefits Rich

Mr. Kulinski quickly followed up with a look at a better version of the bill as proposed by one Bernard Sanders:

Bernie’s $3.5 TRILLION Reconciliation Bill Dissected

Yes. Much better no doubt. As far as we know, still no minimum wage, or student loan relief, or renter’s support, or WPA-style jobs programs … but … there’s plenty that’s good. (On a personal note I’ll point out that it would give me Medicare five years early, which is a far cry from M4All, but a selfish blessing nonetheless.)

Perhaps even better is that the shitty Senate bill has engendered a certain outrage, finally, in the Squaddies and allied pieces of the “progressive” wing of the blue-colored half of the one party to rule them all. They’re making the right noises at least, when it comes to there being ANY human infrastructure spending in the final version of Uncle Joe’s legacy achievement.

Moreover, even Chucky the Snake Schumer is making the same kind of noises:

Have Senate Democrats Approved a $3.5 Trillion Spending Plan?

(This is based on an NPR story, and I learned about it from Franc.)

So is there really reason for a tentative and circumscribed hope?

I’m not going that far, because I don’t have to, and I am so tired of having my hopes lifted up only for them to be dashed again.

It feels better to think about trucks and the different shades of home. But … we’ll see.

The Cuervo Gold. The fine Co-lumbian. The working boy sometimes just has to choose. So

The furnished apartment. Someone else chose where the windows went in. Their chosen bedspace might be a little small, but it’s a bedspace right now tonight, with no effort, no extra expense, and no waiting for your own self to carve and clean and choose.

Or:

A hard steel prison box with no windows at all, until you do choose where they go, and how big the bed, and which direction it points, and look at those nice flattened wheel wells even–nothing and nothing is in the way of Perfection, except time and money and effort.

*** Who am I. ***

I tried to decide which was the smart thing and which was the brave thing this time, but the rubric doesn’t fit with precision; even that has to be built from scratch this time either way.

Life isn’t hard the same way it used to be. It’s a different level and sort of difficulty.

What we (and I do mean we this time too) know is that there’s essentially no way to lose with the Tioga. It’s worth more than they’re asking already.

Also, it’s parked near the Red Rocks outside of Lost Wages, NV.

And we will be there anyway, in a little over ten days.

If the god decides that it sells before that, okay.

But if it’s still available then, we’re going to make a play.

I think that’s all for now and I hope you’re enjoying the respite from politics. I sure am.

Ancient, but very low miles. Completely built out with kitchen, bath, heat/AC, and a hitch.

Newer, but many more miles. A blank interior shell to be worked; much ‘stealthier’.

The useful interior space is roughly the same. The price is identical at around 17K before negotiation. They’re both Fords.

Who am I?

Four grand, 133K miles.

Adding the Box …

This Aerocell is the Cadillac of boxes. I have no real idea what it would cost, but I’m guessing maybe 10 grand more installed (I know there are options, like how the back door opens and closes, and also whether there’s a side door too. Round numbers it’s 135 square feet of living space, or about 10% of what I’m used-to in a static house.

So where do you get them?

Here’s what I know.

The link at the bottom goes to a map that looks like this:

So driving to Texas? Seems weird, but okay. There are several alternatives.

One is just to buy a U-haul with a box already on it, instead of a chassis. No doubt the cheapest, because the box also has 133K (or whatever) miles on it too. Inventory on 17-footers in decent mechanical shape is very low, and the asking price has spiked to about 10-11K

The second is to buy something similar, already put together (or assembled to order). For example, here are some from that nearest Unicell dealer in Texas. That particular idea is probably too expensive, since they’re all new trucks, but there’s also sites like RV-Trader (and a million more) that have ones in all stages of newness/oldness.

Three: A Ford Commercial Truck Center, that is closer than Texas, but not an Official Unicell Dealer. Does it matter? I doubt it. There’s one in North Vegas and one in Henderson, and the disadvantage here is that they seem to have no actual trucks sitting ready for purchase, except pickups.

US Ranks DEAD LAST In Healthcare Study

Last, among the 11 richest Western ‘democracies’.

Last, in the same study, since 2004.

Last, in the infant mortality rate.

Last, in life expectancy.

First, (wait, what? We’re #1!) in how much we spend, coming in at 17% of US gross domestic product.

How are you going to pay, for universal health care? You already are, you poor sap. Through the nose. It’s just that the money isn’t buying you health care. It’s buying “insurance”, buying the private, for-profit insurance mafia one hell of a return to shareholders and other fat cats and leeches.

“Half of lower-income U.S. adults in the report said costs prevented them from receiving care while just more than a quarter of high-income Americans said the same.” (per The Hill)

The full report from the Commonwealth Fund is here:

Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly
Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries

On the way to viewing this story, I saw an unrelated headline. Some Republicrat was whining about how “Wokeism” was killing us and giving China an accelerated edge in the superpower race over the next few decades. Which they’re absolutely going to win, for all the good it will do them …

It’s not because of wokeism. It’s not because they’re comin’ for your guns. It’s not because of the trans kids or the Urbans or the Mexicans or the Jews.

It’s because of the profit motive, capitalism, imperialism, and the inevitable mass personal corruption they breed.

It’s your boss that’s killing you, and the nice lady over in HR.

It’s your bosses’ boss and so on up the chain. It’s Bezos Christ and everyone politician he owns jointly or outright. It’s your grand-niece the mountain-climbing pharmaceutical rep, and your grandfather’s robust stock portfolio.

Keep on rockin’ in the free world, ya’ll. I’ll pray that you don’t have to sleep in your shoes tonight.

PRIMO RADICAL #242: Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald is both incredibly smart and deeply principled.

In the first half of this interview, he outlines what the real differences are between (to be reductionist) the Jimmy Dore Left and the TYT left; the real source of the conflict and drama there that’s spiked since the last holiday season.

In a word it’s about their different relationships to Imperialism.

He tells a story about what went down in the Intercept’s virtual newsroom the night they drove old Hillary down, and Trump won.

Everybody on the staff was a leftist of some kind, and nobody was happy to have the Donald in charge. But that night lines were drawn.

A small but determinant majority of them were awash in guilt. Had their own criticisms of Clinton contributed to the disaster? Had they edged into sexism in their coverage of the election?

This self-blame changed the Intercept forever. Its editorial positions drifted ever more in alignment with the Democratic Party.

The same thing happened over time at TYT and a lot of other places, and ‘blue no matter who’ was birthed.

I think this is a really good and important point.

Purely from the point of view of anti-imperialism and rage against the Machine, there really is no marked difference between Trump, and Obama/Clinton/Biden. It’s one party with two heads, and when Biden told his big donors privately that ‘nothing would fundamentally change’, he really and truly meant it–both at home and abroad.

His thumb remains on the Yemenis for the benefit of Raytheon. His thumb remains on the American working class for the benefit of Amazon and McDonald’s and anybody else with pockets deep enough to feed the Dem gravy train.

The same is true, about the kids in cages. The same is true, if you actually believe that black lives matter. The same is true about climate change, and Snowden and Assange, and dozens of other things. A little window dressing here or there aside, nothing changes and there’s not enough difference to bother with.

Now, if you’re primarily motivated by certain culture-war issues–Abortion rights, let’s say, or where trans people are allowed to piss–then sure, there are differences, and I can see why they matter to you.

Personally I just believe that none of that stuff amounts to much, when we’re on the verge of burning or drowning to death, when we continue to have what standard of living we retain by each being good little capitalists and refusing to see that our Brita water pitchers run on the blood of the working class all across the country and all around the world.

Electoralism matters very little any more. Direct action and activism, a bit more than that–maybe a lot more, if you’re serious.

But most days the best I can do, and maybe you too, is to live lightly on the planet, heedless of the hefty consumerist beasts that live to the right and left of you.

That’s not going to change anything either.

But it’s the right thing to do.

Snowden EXPOSES Apple’s Plan To Surveil Your Pics & Texts

I don’t have a lot to add right now.

You don’t need to hear my jeremiad on the subject again.

Take it for what it’s worth.

All through the cold war and right up until today, the US Empire has claimed to stand for Democracy, and against Communism.

First of all, this is a false dichotomy. Democracy is supposed to be Rule by the People, and is a purely political concept.

Communism is an economic one, and its proper economic opposite is Capitalism. Strictly speaking it has nothing to say about Who Rules.

For this and many other reasons, the whole Democracy vs. Communism thing is a sham and a distraction.

From an anarchist perspective, this is very easy to see. But in the real world and for the average person, it’s pretty muddy. The People of America only dimly began to see it after a dozen years in Vietnam. The People of America in general still don’t see it after twenty years in Afghanistan.

Why were we in Vietnam? Why are we still in Afghanistan? I’ll accept almost any answer, but if you think it has anything to do with spreading Rule by the People, you’ve been hopelessly brainwashed by the self-justifying culture you grew up in.

The Empire’s war machine deployed around the world, most recently in Biden’s air war in Somalia, not only has nothing to do with democracy, but the Empire itself is no longer ruled by its people in any even marginal sense.

Putin is not a good guy. The leaders of China have their own crimes to answer for. This or that tinpot dictator around the world are probably just as bad as your media tells you they are.

We the people are no better anymore, and by most metrics over the last 75 years you could easily draw the conclusion that “We” are even worse.

The allure of the idea of democracy is that everyone has an equal say and an equal right to rule; that the collective will of the good honest farmers of the interior midwest and their better-dressed coastal brethren will result in liberty and justice for all.

There is neither liberty nor justice for all here. You don’t have an equal say. You have no sliver of a right to rule.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The flaws of democracy are magnified a hundred fold when it is paired, and tainted with, capitalism.

The most blatant and disgusting example of this is in the Citizen’s United case, in which the Supreme Court held that Money Equals Speech: thus, that using money to buy elections was protected First Amendment activity.

But that’s just one particularly horrifying example of how American Values per the Bill of Rights have been twisted into unrecognizable shit by the proponents of rule by Capital, which is to say the plutocrats who rule you themselves.

Nice people. Well dressed. Stellar hygiene. Polite. Mostly white. Highly educated and well-spoken …

And utterly corrupted by self-interested evil.

They own everything. They own you and me both.

Our Revolution Head Defends Against “Pragmatic Progressives” Re-Branding

You have to be pretty much obsessive about this shit to even decipher that headline. Allow me to sketch.

“Our Revolution” is a group founded by Bernie Sanders in the wake of his first failed presidential campaign, to further his stated goals both electorally and at the grassroots. I think their main function initially was to funnel small-donor contributions to the Sanders campaign.

As everyone knows, that campaign died, or was murdered, twice. In spite of the massive small-dollar totals (just like happened to Nina this week), the revolutionary zeal was killed off by a combination of big corporate and PAC money, and insider Democratic Party chicanery.

After both losses, Sanders succumbed to the Blue No Matter Who thing, and refused to even pressure Clinton or Biden for anything, in return for his endorsement. Which led even a moderate like Kyle Kulinski to call Sanders a cuck, and led vast numbers of Our Revolutionaries to lose all hope in this bullshit one-party-with-two-heads mockery of democracy that we live under today. And to swear off Democrats, as well as Republicans.

The ‘Our Revolution’ organization was left holding this bag of shit, and recently decided to try again, but Different. The Revolution being killed dead, they made the dubious decision to rebrand as the “Pragmatic Progressives”.

I don’t know of anyone who thought that was a good idea. Granted, I don’t listen anymore to pragmatic self-styled progressives like TYT or David Doel anymore, so my sample might be highly skewed. But literally, I heard not one voice raised in an approving cry for the idea that Pragmatism is the answer to anything, going forward.

Obama embraced pragmatic progressivism, and so did Hillary. They were center-right politicians at best, and they always will be, and there’s no hope at all to be found there.

Anyway, Jordan Chariton of Status Coup interviews the shiny new head of the PP in the video. He listens politely, but he doesn’t seem very convinced, and certainly his comments section is about 99% armed with pitchforks against the new would-be leader’s shiny new positioning.

My own opinion is this: Sure, guy. I’m willing to be convinced. Again. Maybe I’m a sap, but just as I said with Nina Turner’s race–these people haven’t proven themselves to be liars and shills yet. So go ahead. Convince me, not with your words, but your actions. Yes I’m skeptical. No my mind is not closed. Shoulder the burden of proof, and SHOW me that there’s some sliver of salvage to be had from any kind of Democrat–I really mean it. Please, please do.

In the meantime, expect no donations, expect no votes–prove yourselves first, demonstrate with practical evidence that you’re not a gang of cucks, a chummy club of fake working-class persons like one Alexandria the Bartender from the Outer Boroughs, a counterproductive bag of dicks willing to throw the proles under the bus for a mess of pottage and poorly mixed metaphors.

I want to be wrong about you. Swear.

***

Mike Figueredo Goes After Jackson Hinkle For Criticizing Nina Turner

Same war, different theater.

Figuredo of the ‘Humanist Report’, like his fellow Canadian David Doel, has lost a lot of cred with me over the course of 2021 especially.

His main snipe at Jackson was that, well, Hinkle supported Tulsi Gabbard, and Tulsi is a known transphobe.

I don’t like transphobes, or any kinda phobes, either. But seriously, Mike, fuck you and the identity politics you rode in on.

You’re sitting up there in the great white north on a big comfortable cushion of free health care, and taking potshots at a 21-year-old from SoCal who wants a better Murican life and has a very mild disagreement with you about how best to get there.

What of serious questions? What of the climate, and the endless wars of Empire, and most especially what of the root cause of most of what ails us, the widespread and pandemic embrace of the capitalist model that sends the Bezus into space while ripping down the tents of the homeless?

If Tulsi Gabbard wants to actually address even a few of these issues in a sane way, I’m voting for her over anyone holding federal office today.

Hell, if Rand Fucking Paul was promising me to just bring ALL the troops home, I’d take him up on that, over a cloned neo-liberal careerist like Kamala any day of the week and twice on Tuesday, even if he believes that Denny’s has a right to deny service to black people.

If Marco Pindick Rubio was credibly going after the health fraud industry, or talking real economic populism and a living wage, I’d have to think twice about it, even if he wants to pose and growl like a rabid bunny at the island of Cuba.

If Mike Pence would only …

Okay, that’s going too far.

But you see what I’m saying, I pray.

The D and the R only differ on the transitory cultural issues, and on those issues, my heart is of course with the anti-transphobes, and the pro-choicers. But it’s simply not enough anymore.

Where do you stand on the capitalist menace that will kill us all?

Even dear Liz Warren couldn’t get that one right.

Slowly and slowly, step by step, the Squaddies are proving themselves on the wrong side of it too–if not outright against what the people want, yet, at the very least too inept or venal to do anything about it.

Co-opted by the Machine.

And god love Sister Nina, but even in a little old congressional primary, she toned it way the fuck down, to try and edge herself inside the system for a toehold. It’s not proof of corruption, but it didn’t look good, from the standpoint of what the Machine might end up doing to her sooner or later either.

Nina, run against the corporate Dem as an Independent, for the very same seat in the general, and impress me with your true colors.

Or don’t, and let there be no doubt what they are. Leave no doubt about whether two-party electoralism has any chance ever, of keeping this train from plunging off God’s own cliff in the next generation.

I so want to believe in you. Help me, just a little, to do that.

Brace Belden is an interesting guy for several reasons, many of which are detailed
in this very brief video.

He’s a young working class San Franciscan, micro-famous but still poor.

He volunteered to fight the blossoming Sultanate in Syria for six months.

He was a heroin addict, and a union organizer at Anchor Brewing.

He co-hosts True-Anon, a smarter and roughly leftist version of Qanon in podcast form–the initial basis of the pod, and still a major focus, is the misadventures of one Jeffrey Epstein, and since that evildoer’s suspicious death, of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s procuress.

Following up on any of that should lead you to some rather interesting places.

In that same vein, here’s Kyle again, preaching in the vein of:

Cori Bush WINS & FORCES Biden’s Hand To Extend Eviction Ban!

The good news is that Cori bought herself back a small measure of cred.

The bad news is that this isn’t much of a win, because all it does it put things off until October, during which time the renter’s debt still keeps piling up–and meanwhile, the nascent energy that surrounded this issue was utterly diffused by Biden’s desperate deus ex machina. The one campaign promise he’s kept faithfully is that nothing will change.

If you’d prefer to go back to the warm confines of total despair, you can turn to Max Blumenthal’s abortive attempt to get a straight answer out of Representative Bush on this selfsame subject.

Choose wisely.

Speaking of faded hopes, Nina lost. Her campaign was crushed by the machine.

Why Nina Turner Lost & What To Do About It

I post Kyle’s take not because I agree with it, broadly. But because he’s still more hopeful than I am, and more moderate, but still within the realm of righteousness.

I can’t expect you to live on a diet of nothing but darkness after all.

The video is officially called The New Left, but that term was used up before any of them were born.

What it really is, is a congregation of young and relatively ideologically pure persons, hosted by one of their own, the estimable SabbySabs, who is also a member of a loose group known as the Fred Hampton Leftists.

Closely related: Sabby’s chat with Afeni (also of FHL I think).

I won’t quite say these fresh voices give me hope, because I honestly don’t believe hope is warranted or rational in the end. But god damn if they don’t make quiet desperation a whole lot easier to take.

I wake, decently rested, before the dawn, before four.

There’s an image in my mind of a day spent downtown, some open ground with casual access to a public, to both sun and shelter. I don’t seek out converts. I let my signage speak silently, while I write. It happens a few blocks from the co-op, across from the community radio station, underneath the cottage business in a strip mall that used to be the downtown Chevy dealership time out of mind.

There was a guy I watched in Albuquerque when I worked and lived around the Uni.

He was a militant nudist, always wearing the bare minimum for clothes, his bicycle and its trailer always festooned with placards about gay rights, vegetarianism, and various elaborations on a kind of Thoreauvian socialism. The one time I spoke to him he told me that he rented a room in somebody’s house a few blocks away. His was a low-impact life based on a well-considered orthodoxy. He was living his own true self.

My vision for my own life in waking was something of the same kind, only more given to subtlety, and grounded in the land I do now own, whether property-owning is consonant with my values or not.

A vintage stylishness to the clothes. Meat, in moderation. A ripe hetero connection too.

***

Earlier than ABQ, in a broken time in the Hell Valley, there was another trope man. This one was clearly an aging trust fund baby and he’d given his life to the bottle instead of a vision. He rode a bike too. He’s the example of how not to do it.

***

There’s a night vision version too. Little Toad Creek for one drink maybe.

There’s almost no coverage.
Unapologetic again, then, because he’s a rare exception.

Biden Won’t Stop Millions of Evictions During A Pandemic

During the debut marches for Medicare4All (M4M4All), exactly one squad member showed up anywhere, and that was Cori Bush, for a photo-op. There’s apparently no video of her confrontation with the independent press.

During the debut marches against mass eviction, it was AOC’s turn to show up long enough to take pictures with those that still somehow love her. There is video this time.

As for the Unapologetic take on Nina Turner (her primary election takes place Tuesday)–If I lived in Cleveland, I’d be compelled to vote for her, even though she’s a Democrat, because she hasn’t straight-up proven yet that she’s a careerist tool like the rest of them.

I can’t vote for her anyway, so it’s something of a moot point.

Anyway, I encourage you to listen to the rest of his rant, because I can’t see anywhere else where he’s even a little wrong.

Medicare4All March (The allegedly left politicians ignore it.)

TYT Attacks Grassroots Healthcare Activists (The allegedly left media sneers at it.)

Mr. Dore is a rabble rouser.

But if you’re rabble, and I definitely am, that’s not a slam, but a good thing.

Color me roused.

Okay … overheated, maybe even.

***

In one of the videos I’ll post below, a smart woman tells us that the current unrest and splintering in what passes for the far left has its roots in the failure of the Sanders campaigns. Hope blossomed briefly and then was cut down harshly … a recipe for bitterness and anger.

I think that’s right. It goes a long way toward explaining why the Medicare For All marches were so poorly covered and attended, as in the first video above. No one with any power promoted or even mentioned them.

The second video is again wide-ranging and broad, but the preacher-fire is directed at the ‘independent’ media enablers.

From there let’s start at the far corporate Dem end. Here’s what Nancy is up to these days

Pelosi Kills Student Debt Relief With Right-Wing Talking Points!

She’s not even trying to make sense. She doesn’t care and she doesn’t have to.

My favorite factoid about student debt is that it the President doesn’t even need Congress to wipe out 100% of it. It’s in easy range of a single executive action.

But Biden and Pelosi are of a single hive mind here. Better that millions of students should be chained to the debt wheel for life, than that a few bankers be inconvenienced, or go a little soft in the profit.

Fucking disgusting. As with “health care”, or health “insurance”, America stands alone in the modernized world. If you’ve got the brains and the stamina, your college is free in the civilized world. You go on to become a doctor or a scientist and give back. Everyone wins.

If good jobs now require college degrees, why is higher education not free like K-12 anyway? You know why. Colleges, like pharmaceutical and oil companies, are big profit centers for the elites. They’re a part of the gravy train that only flows upward. The kids pay to play, and IF they’re lucky, they get to stay in line and keep paying, once they’ve got to be highly qualified drones to staff the lower echelons of the machine.

From there we upgrade a half-notch to my own dear Senator Sinema, seen here sticking a big fat knife in an already gutted ‘bipartisan’ bill on infrastructure. Our newsreader mentions in passing the other senator from these parts. He’s a bit behind, picking out his dagger still. Fuck you both. And thanks, Bernie, for trying and failing uselessly again, anyway.

Here’s Sanders STILL refusing to say one bad thing about good friend Joe, and taking offense to the suggestion that there could be any other way to see him.

This clip is interesting from the media angle too. Just as there are hopeless cases among the politicians, like Mama Bear Pelosi and the turncoat Sinema, there are plenty of ‘leftist’ content creators where hope is dead too. The whole TYT network. The large idiot Vaush. The degraded new version of David Doel. In print, the Dave Weigels and Ryan Grims of the world. All of whom sometimes say the right things, and all of whom are deeply committed (judging by their words and actions) to stifling real dissent and upholding business as usual. By which mechanism they too keep themselves lavishly fed.

Just as Bernie is as far left a figure as can be countenanced politically (because they know he’ll be a good boy in the end, no matter how unjustly they beat his ass), so too Krystal Ball is as far left a media figure as can be taken seriously by respectable people. I like her. I even like her substantially flimsier sometime-cohost Kyle Kulinski. But Kyle has proven repeatedly, and Krystal alas proves here too … they’ll let the supposed best of the powerful off the hook when it comes right down to it. That was a softball interview, dressed up with a splash of maternal toughness, but … no real threat, to entrenched oligarchy. Inoffensive, to the point of irrelevance.

In Bernie’s vicinity, sometimes, there’s the “Justice Democrats”, the “Squad”. There’s enough about them woven into the videos above, and the one to come, to suffice, but if you really must …

Finally. For those of us let down by old Bern, for those of us revolted by the class treason of AOC and her new wave coven, the great non-white hope of the day is one Sister Nina Turner, currently running for an open seat in a district centered on Columbus, Ohio.

And Here is my new favorite video, by my new favorite voice in left-space, explaining why it might be wise to exercise a good measure of caution to temper that hope. And a whole lot more besides, featuring the aforementioned Krystal and Kyle, and the sincerely endearing softly sung protests of Briahna Joy Gray, bringing the spectrum to clarity on both the media and politics halves of the equation.

And the video creator’s name alone:

Unapologetic

I think that’s a standard we could all be proud to adhere to. I certainly intend to keep trying.

Medicare4All March (The allegedly left politicians ignore it.)

TYT Attacks Grassroots Healthcare Activists (The allegedly left media sneers at it.)

Mr. Dore is a rabble rouser.

But if you’re rabble, and I definitely am, that’s not a slam, but a good thing.

Color me roused.

I don’t agree with him on everything, intellectually. But we have perfect consonance, emotionally. Life in the Empire, never a pretty thing, is slipping faster and faster into irreversible insanity. He, and I, live in a state of perpetual incredulity and rage about this fact–or more particularly, all the little facts as they manifest this basic truth.

It is literally insane that in the richest Empire the world has ever known, with plutocrats treating themselves to joyrides in space, that something as basic as health care is run as a business–an incredibly lucrative business–and that at least 30 million people have to live without it, because they don’t have any money.

Tens of millions more are underinsured. I’m shelling out two grand a year for a shitty stopgap plan with a 3K deductible. Unless my body goes to hell, I’ll never get near that 3K, because it’s just too much, on top of another $100 a month for necessary but uncovered meds. I can’t afford to get sick, and pretty much no one else can either. Except, you know, if you work for the government in DC that steadily denies that benefit to everyone else.

Tens of millions more are carrying medical debt, enslaved to the insurance plantation owners while the interest piles up.

This is just one little piece of the madness.

Layer on homelessness, and the coming eviction crisis.

Layer on murder cops and mass incarceration in for-profit prisons. Kids in cages. A system of all the justice you can afford.

Layer on endless wars, and the fact that good-guy Joe, while he somehow can’t afford student loan relief or single-payer health care or a living wage for working people, CAN afford to start up new bombing campaigns in Syria and Somalia, for reasons nobody even pretends to understand, and to wag his bomb finger at Cuba, Venezuela, for reasons nobody even pretends to think are valid.

Layer on the prosecutions of Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, Steven Donziger, and Daniel Hale, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, who said, in an epithet that applies to all these cases:

“When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.”

We damn sure are. Criminals in the pockets of bigger criminals. And you, YOU, pay more in taxes, by percentage, than Rocketman Jeff or any billionaire.

It’s trivially simple to find reasons for raging against this completely corrupt, greedy, and self-evidently immoral machine–this “democracy”. This capitalist and imperialist and fraudulent Home of the Brave.

A majority of Trump voters are rightly enraged at what this system has done to their lives.

Generally speaking, they don’t understand much, about the mechanics or the reasons why America sucks so bad now. Trump himself publicly embraced his “low-information” supporters. The liberals all rolled their eyes, called them dumb, or evil, or “deplorable” (nice move, Hillary) and pushed them even further away.

But dumb as they might be, they’re smart enough to know that the policies of Democrats contribute equally at least, to greasing the skids of the Machine. Just like their supposed enemies with Black Lives Matter signs in their dark hands, they’re plenty smart enough to know they’re suffering, and that it hurts the same through eight years of Obama, or eight years of Clinton.

Voting for some other dumb white person in the form of the Donald was less a vote for a Wall, or against abortion, and more a vote against the architects of their misery. A big old fuck-you to all the smug Hillarys of the last fifty years, who looked at their pain and turned their heads away, back to brunch with their friends, the other capitalists.

Make America Great Again, in translation, means: Stop fucking over my life at every turn. Send me a doctor. Give me a job that doesn’t eat my soul and exploit my labor, which is the only thing I have to offer. Quit sending my sons off to your oil wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and sending them home in body bags, or enslaving their futures by suckering them into student debt if they show the least spark of promise. Get your fucking hands off the second amendment, because this shotgun is the only thing I have left that makes me feel like I have any god damn power at all.

How did the Dems react to that?

Oh it’s Jill Stein’s fault. Oh it’s Russia’s fault.

No bitches. It’s YOUR fault, for turning this whole mess into wealth and comfort for yourself, and letting your chummy corporate devils sodomize everyone else for decades on end. For pushing the myth of meritocracy and justifying your own rising boats as the natural order of things, instead of the completely unnecessary and catastrophic moral failure that it really is.

For not even bothering to campaign in Wisconsin because fuck those yokels.

For mercilessly crushing any dissent within your own ranks with dirty tricks and nepotistic bribery. I’m talking Bernie. Twice.

For refusing to even legalize weed on the one hand, while getting offended when anyone says an unkind word about your own venal, stupid, ugly hedonist of a crackhead son on the other.

So yeah.

I will again withhold my vote from Trump or whatever other foul piece of evil shit the Republicans vomit up next time.

But also from Petey or Kamala or whatever freshly scrubbed face the Dems prop up as the new Director of Marketing for your deeply evil empire who can’t be satisfied with just putting the hurt on brown people around the globe anymore, but somehow needs to repeatedly ruin people’s lives and then expect those same people’s votes as their due.

No more allegedly lesser evils. No Sinemas. No Kellys. No collaborators, no more votes for anyone who gave away their own votes to Pelosi as speaker without asking for any concession for the people in return. (“Justice Squad” my fat white ass.)

(“Two-party” system, my sweet Aunt Fanny.)

Well ..

… I ran that one clear off the rails.

Starting with the Dore clips was supposed to lead me into a measured critical look at “the Left” in both politics and media.

Tomorrow.

Trigger warning. You might not wanna. Password is just

x

It was my day, for some reason, to suddenly be pelted from many sides at once by smart people, people I nominally trust, who also have concerns about the COVID vaccines.

Every single one of them said: “Look I’m not an anti-vaxxer and here’s why, etc., I just am not too sure about this particular round of half-ass partially-approved governmental shit going into my body, and here’s why, etc.

One was a double-vaccinated extreme-left podcast host who said (on Joe Rogan’s show) that his reactions to the second shot, like a stiff neck, have never gone away. (At the end of this clip, Rogan also has a great take on the current state of the average American brain.)

One was a former Philly nurse and current desert naturopath, whose take was essentially: I’m not telling you what to think or do. But this shit is not for me. It’s a drug of fear. YouTube yanked her video for that. But you can watch it again here. (In fact, though I know her personally, I’ve never watched a single one of her videos before this one–I was drawn in by the censorship angle.)

The others I saw were second-tier in terms of my trust level and how much I like them in general. But even so, I detected no lack of sincerity or brains.

So now I’m second-guessing for the second (major) time this year.

The first was with voting for Biden, and I can report that I regret doing it; wouldn’t do it again if I had it to do over. He would have won without me and I’d be a little morally cleaner if I hadn’t.

This one’s different for me though. I got the shots without thinking too hard: they were down the street, and free, Okay. I had no significant reaction, and in fact I haven’t been sick since the lockdown started, which is a huge blessed relief. I was able to drive across the country two months ago and hug all my Fam with a clear conscience.

Personally there’s been no downside to any of that, so unlike with President Alzheimer, I’m calling it a win.

But there’s a little more to it than that.

See you tomorrow and sorry for the cliffhanger. It had to be done.

Once upon a time at my last best undergrad school, I dove deep with the whole Sartre/Camus thing, and existentialism more broadly.

I always liked the little Algerian better than Jean-Paul. Part of the reason for that was Sartre’s insistence that all art be political on some level. “Committed” literature, in the case of us word peoples.

As a belletristic partisan, I didn’t feel that was a necessary dictum or a useful restriction to put upon myself.

Nowadays I feel something else. Not the opposite, but off to the side.

I drove by the half-dead little cinema in this town, which I’ve entered a few times, (including to see Snowden), and glanced up to see what was playing now.

Black Widow.

For a number of inexplicable and explicable reasons, the words grabbed my eyes hard. They really should have been enough to get me to pay, to go see it.

I won’t.

Why not?

Because the current cash crop of Hollywood … big budget superhero movies … are not politics or art or cinema or anything else worthwhile. They’re nothing, except perhaps narcotics for slaves, to put them into a trance and then a fitful sleep, after a long day picking silicon in the fields of their capitalist masters.

I’m riffing there on Edward Abbey, who once said that rock and roll was music for slaves. While conveniently neglecting to mention that his preferred forms of classical were very much music for oppressors.

I forgive Abbey his prejudices, and hope he will look down from Valhalla and forgive my headbanging trespasses in the spirit of detente’.

You can’t not want music, anyway, of some wrong kind or another.

Anyway, I will probably continue to watch Marvel movies only in motel rooms when there’s nothing else on, rather than actively supporting them by buying a ticket.

I’ll shop at Amazon only when I have no other choice, and only walk into a Walmart when I’m dragged in.

I’ll still favor the music of Leonard Cohen and kindred spirits, because that’s music for the slaves in revolt.

I’ll still believe that all art, and all commerce, is political whether it sets out to be or not.

First. We take Manhattan.

Then we take Scarlett Johansson
.