Serbia’s President Vučić on the gloomy present.”Three or Four Months Away From a Big Global Escalation” “The train has left the station and no one can stop it.”

There is no more certain evidence of the failure of our democracy than to just note that we won’t even have the opportunity to vote for anyone with half this much acumen, heart, or human feeling.

God help us all.

I should have known this with more precision a long time ago.

The fat blue line on this map, particularly at the right, is the Rio Puerco.

The Little Colorado is the thin blue line, entering the channel just east of town.

And thereby, according to the official mappers, turning that whole channel into the Little Colorado River Basin, rather than being called the Puerco, which to me would make more intuitive sense.

The Puerco proper was the site of the greatest radioactive spill in history that you never heard of, just the other side of Gallup, some eighty-plus miles upstream.

That better image is from a Department of the Interior report on the Church Rock disaster and other man-made sources of uranium and radon poisoning.

The report suggests, in language that seems almost desperate to persuade at times, that the spill never really reached as far as Holbrook in dangerous quantities. That part is believable and marginally reassuring.

But places further upstream, like Sanders and Houck and Lupton and Manuelito, were brutally impacted.

There seems to have been a massive effort to play it down and to placate the Dine’ in particular, as that tribe was hit hardest. The report feels very like a part of that placating, to my ear.

In the grand scheme, the important part is that Navajo elders and children and people in general drank viciously radioactive water for some time after the corporation and its embankment failed.

If that part doesn’t move you, be advised that their cows drank it too, and that it is roughly likely that you ate pieces of their tainted flesh once upon a time.

This land we love is damaged and ruined for proper human habitation in a thousand ways, and most of these ways we will never even personally hear of.

Our bodies know anyway.

Fuck capitalism, and weep for the bad joke of democracy long since passed.

There is nothing good about any of it. You can warble all you like about liberty, but there is no real liberty when you don’t have the freedom to drink from the river without ingesting a serious cancer risk or hurting yourself in any of those other thousand ways.

The white man’s way is the way of death, for the native people sure, but even for his own children besides.

And he will tell you with a straight face that none of it matters, so long as his truck is new and shiny and his ranch house holds every creature comfort ever devised by the satan he actually worships.

That is the noble America I see, gazing out over the murdered pretty lands.

I worked hard and slow all day and went to bed at the perfect time.

I only slept for two hours, but it was a deep sleep and I was given this vision.

I was once more young and almost handsome in my way. On a college campus I think.

Or do I let it, and her, go?

Which thing would be more right?

Just a quick one for the reader that asked me the other day who I thought would win.

Glenn knows a hell of a lot more about it than I do.

Biden’s Approval Ratings Reach Record Low After Trump Verdict

On a surprisingly related note … No wait. I’ll save that for last; an afterthought …

Start instead with the movie called the Dallas Buyer’s Club, for which Matthew McConaughey won a Best Actor Oscar a decade ago.

I saw it. I liked it well enough even though it made me sad and angry.

Someone reminded me the other day that the unsung villain of the piece was a then-faceless bureaucrat who we now know today as Anthony Fauci.

I’m not saying you can’t be an LGBT ally or whatever, and yet still be a big Dr. Fauci fan.

But I will say that if you think you are both, you have to be absolutely swimming in a soup of cognitive dissonance.

Which is also fine, because almost everyone, especially the people still struggling to appear in any way normal, is doing the dog paddle next to you in the same fetid stinking imperial broth of lies.

On the radio today, the very NPR itself, I heard a story that said that 82% of Americans describe themselves as at least vaccine-hesitant now, after that god damned fiesta of crap for profit. That includes all the shitty rednecks you so loved poking fun at a little while back, but it also includes me and a whole lot of other people who still prefer to think for themselves, at least as a hobby.

It includes all those nurses and firefighters they fired in New York and elsewhere, for refusing their little jab too.

If you still prefer to take little mouthfuls of that popular normal bathwater soup once in a while, great. I am not qualified to be your nutrition coach, not even metaphorically.

I would only ask that you ease up a little on claiming that Bobby Jr. is a fucking antivaxxer and kook, or whispering with concern that the broken old coot in the pitiful Ozma t-shirt might be one too.

I would only ask that you remember that you are now a part of the mere 18% of We The People who routinely and reflexively swallow most of what they tell you, as Real, as Right, as the foundational basis of your increasingly brittle and doomed orthodoxy.

This isn’t just about the Vax.

It’s about the whole medical profession, and pretty much every other profession still extant within the small puma cage of late-stage capitalism.

It’s about Ukraine, and Russia.

It’s about the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The Chinese and the Taiwanese, and the wetbacks and the jihadis, both handcrafted products of the very Empire that now insists you hate them all.

***

Now the afterthought.

If you might be interested in a brief history of what this Democracy is really about, since it first came together as a full Imperium in the late 1940s, Jeffrey Sachs has you covered in the first 20 minutes, here.

If not … well, I might be forced to concede that there could be better ways to spend your time, or for me to spend mine for that matter.

It’s like I told her the other night through the tears sliding down my face gently without even a single sob.

I’m almost always right, baby.

Only it never has, and it never will do me one fucking bit of good.

C’est la guerre. Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi!

So what I did today, and about all I did, was I rambled on down to Flag and I picked up mah pickup. My analog security system did not initially allow me to jump easily into the driver’s seat. I had to go in through the passenger side, lean over and put the key in, then crank and pray.

She started instantly after the two weeks with not a touch on the gas pedal, even though she’s three hundred and five thousand miles old.

Next, I thought about whether she was in fact a she.

Prolly. I mean … it’s a ship, and ships are supposed to get called she, yeah?

I don’t really know for sure yet though.

These things take time.

But if it does turn out more male than female, I will love him with devotion just the same, for that one fast start and for so many other things besides.

I don’t care if that’s queer either, god damm it.

***

Driving that unlovable rental 6000 miles taught me a lot, about people.

There’s a very high percentage of worthless idiots out there, to judge by driving style, and also to judge by the customer service received or not received, en route.

I did my best the whole way to be philosophical and chill about it, and mostly I was successful in that attempt.

Today on my way back though, on my home turf, I was not entirely successful.

I grabbed my big town organic groceries and started back home happily enough.

Coming up out of town I encountered one of those dreaded types that loves to camp the left lane regardless of the situation.

Which I was still calm about, until I had passed the maroon on the right twice, given it enough gas to tip the speedometer to a hundred, and still … here he comes again, up on my ass but in left lane, driving just fast enough again to make it impossible to pass a truck on the right in front of me. So I braked, and I got in behind him yet once more.

I was annoyed by now, but still doing really well.

Then.

Without signalling, the truck swung over in front of him and damn near chopped the nose of his SUV off, very very close. So he slammed on the brakes, and I did the same, safe and legal.

I let him speed up and go away as I considered what to do.

Gingerly, I started to pass the truck.

I pulled up level with his window and paced him for a minute.

Then I leaned over with my fingers held an inch apart and I just stayed like that, speeds matched, until I was absolutely certain that he had to be seeing those fingers and wondering what the hell.

Then I turned one of the fingers up in the universal gesture of opprobrium.

As I blasted all the way past he let go with his stupid air horn. So I know that all of my message got through.

“You missed him by that much, dude. Fuck you, you stupid fucking fuck.”

After that I needed a little break, so I got off at the next exit, half-hoping he would be enraged enough to follow me. But he didn’t.

***

The exit I used is about 30 miles east of Prettytown.

The sign just says “Two Guns”, with the arrow.

Mainly it leads to a gutted and abandoned gas station covered in multiple layers of nice graffiti.

But being who I am, I have come to know a lot about this place. In the middle of the last century, it was a complex roadside attraction with a kind of zoo at the center. They for sure had a mountain lion, because you can still read that on one of the decaying cages. I shudder to think of that cat in such a tiny concrete prison cell.

Somewhere in the bowels of the Internet there’s a document that tells the early history of the place. I read it once. The collapse of the enterprise was due to a love triangle that resulted among the owners and at least one other person who worked there.

The crude .pdf also tells about an outnumbered bunch of Navajos who took refuge in a cave at the canyon nearby, and how the larger group of Apaches burned them out of it, way before there was a Route 66.

If I remember right the canyon is called Diablo.

Go do your digging and tell me if I do, please.

I’ve visited the remains several times over the years, and almost always I was the only one there.

Today that was very different.

I didn’t go very far into the scraggly network of dirt roads around Two Guns today. But even a casual glance showed a half dozen cars parked in scattered locations around the site.

Parked hard, as if people were living in them. I feel pretty sure that some of them were semi-permanent residents.

This is America in 2024.

What once was only wasteland for curious eccentrics like me is now a budding Bidenville.

I don’t blame Old Joe personal-like, any more than I blame the Commander for who he was and what he believed and preached as gospel all those years ago.

But the jury is in, and the flagwaving democracy greatest-country bullshit is just another lie in a long series of lies like so many caskets at Arlington, like so many cars parked out in Mad Max land in the hundred degree heat, each one full of bags that say Walmart on them.

If you think I’m the one bullshitting now, you go ask the ghost of Tom Joad.

Tell him I sent you, and tell him I said hey, old son.

Home again. Finally and for real, except for dropping off the rental tomorrow 90 miles away and a day late, and recovering the Lariat.

24 hours ago exactly I was 700 miles from here having Peking Duck with a loyal reader, and the subject of the Commander and his philosophy came up.

I said that I no longer had anything personal against the man, and that to the extent that my brothers and sisters feel that he did their lives good, I am actually grateful to him for that.

She said: You should say that More.

So I am.

I could hedge and qualify but that’s not necessary. It’s true. You have a pretty good sense of the nuances in what I feel, or if you don’t, I for one have always been more than willing to share.

On that prickly subject or any other, any time.

A quick hello from the top of Capital Hill, Seattle. The car needs to be dropped off and the pickup picked up on Friday. So one way or another, I’ll be back here on the regular come the weekend … I’ve missed you greatly and I have ten long days of footage for posting at the Patreon, once some vague form of editing can be completed.

I learned pretty early into this process that eating really well meant cooking at home.

Cooking well–smartly, efficiently, creatively–means generating a lot of dishes, even though I try with focused intention to do mostly one-pan or one-bowl meals.

Just now I was wishing for a dishwasher, for maybe the first time ever.

But I caught myself.

I don’t need another fucking large appliance from the Depot. The truth is I would love to have fewer of them. That’s what’s right.

However …

I could use a real pretty sink.

I could use a real pretty sink to turn the chore of dishwashing into a minor art of its own.

Yeah?

Me and Michelle Shocked, baby.

Me and all these god damn cats and Michelle OutAroundTheBend Shocked.

It’s 8:30 at night and I am home.

It feels like there is so very much to do before I can even get started on the

9 hr 37 min
585.6 mile

or

9hr 22 min
688 mile

first leg of the Grand Trip.

Including a good night’s sleep I pray.

We shall see.

So my question for you, dear reader, is simple.

Is this a Good Thing?

I think the way you answer says everything about the way you ultimately view this hypermodern emergent world.

***

I’m writing this a day+ early, because moving into Friday the 31st my life is going to get a lot more expensive and complicated for two weeks or so.

There will doubtless be a lot of good visual footage gathered, if not posted, during that time. As for my assiduous attention to the project here in print, it will doubtless suffer.

I will see you for honest and true on the far side of the maelstrom; inshallah.

As it says, I reposted that sweet little purple paisley tidbit just now.

Then I got to thinking, about the artists, the people who see it all with such clarity.

That clarity is just the first step on a rare and twisted journey.

Michelle Shocked saw it perfectly. But what she saw made her a full mental case, of no use to anyone, not even herself.

Prince saw, and it made him run for the sanctuary of a goofy little cult, knocking on people’s doors and making them flutter even if they had no interest in the good news of the Watchtower Society he was attempting to dump on their steps.

Even T.S. Eliot said fuck it and reversed course into a posing, urbane Anglicanism.

So first you must see.

And then you must learn to live with what you’ve seen, without flinching away, lest all the value of your insight be lost, devolving into a mere cautionary tale.

It feels to me like the people who can pull that off are very few in number; rare birds.

***

Sometimes I wonder if my ‘anarchism’ is just another flavor of cope.

I don’t think it matters much if it is, or if it isn’t.

cuz She can’t take you any way you don’t already know how to go.

Don’t you even think about letting me down, honey, but it’s okay even if you do, because.

I’m already metaphysically standing

On the Sardinian ground.

Biden’s WhiteHouse spokesmonkey, right now today:

“We can’t condemn Israel for this. It would be hypocritical. We do murderous Rafahs ourselves routinely; that’s just the way empire works, so man up you god-damned snowflakes.” (source)

And so of course the babykiller bombs will keep flowing unchecked.

What can a mere citizen even say anymore?

(I’m supposed to be packing right now but of course I have the headphones on listening in, and jesus motherfucking christ)

“Forage fish, also called prey fish or bait fish, are small pelagic fish that feed on plankton and other tiny organisms … They include particularly fishes of the order Clupeiformes”

• herrings
• sardines
• shad
• hilsa
• menhaden
• anchovies
• and sprats

Thus saith the Wiki. Digging deeper, the page on sardines says:

“Although they are not true sardines, sprats are sometimes marketed as sardines. For example, the european sprat, Sprattus sprattus, is sometimes marketed as the ‘brisling sardine’.”

Conversely, the page on sprats says:

“Sprats are sometimes passed off as other fish; products sold as having been prepared from anchovies and others sold as sardines sometimes are prepared from sprats, as the authentic ones once were less accessible. They are known for their smooth flavor and are easy to mistake for baby sardines”.

And indeed, some of the sardine tins I’ve been opening lately list the main ingredient as being sprats.

Who cares? I do, for a variety of intertwining reasons.

If you go looking for lists of The Best Fish for health (of both human bodies and the planet), you will find that ‘sardines’, anchovy, and herring–forage fish–always rate very highly, often ranking above otherwise fine critters like salmon and mackerel, because they are still relatively abundant, low in mercury, and high in essential Omega-3s and other good things.

And of course they are cheap. They are virtually always ‘wild-caught’ as opposed to farmed (there’s no money in farming them, and thus no point in it either from a capitalist perspective). And they have unmatched shelf life, which appeals to the half-ass prepper in me.

As I’ve begun to sing their praises, I’ve encountered a strong reaction that amounts to “Ewww!”. Okay darling, whatever.

Of course, unprepared and cold out of the tin, they are pretty eww, but so would be any beloved trendy fish at the top of your list.

Thus: I’m preparing them. Warming them. With care and intention.

I’m still in the process of perfecting that intention, that ‘recipe’ if you will.

But what I have so far is not too different from a crab cake, and in my humble opinion, superior to that traditional delicacy.

I think that when I get back, instead of re-joining Butcherbox and stuffing my freezer with cod and salmonburgers alongside the pork butt and fancy beef, I’m going to try simply investing in a case of quality forage fish, and caring for them purposefully at the stove one or two tins at a time, as a staple of the evening meal.

Along with the eggs, and the eventual beans and better tortillas when my waistline can afford carbs again.

Along with the intensively researched lunch salads.

On my way toward a practice of forever eating that is both enjoyable and sustainable, to invoke that broken word in earnest.

Sweet little Nikki Haley, the one that was supposed to save you from the Orange Satan (but fucked it up), is in Israel.

Signing bombs.

Modern American Imperialism Part 2: Building Eager Armies Helping Colonize their own Nations

It would be so easy, if We were just the good guys, full stop.

The process Berletic describes here doesn’t just happen to foreign kids.

With the necessary changes, it happened to you and it happened to me, and the ruling elite will do their best to make sure it happens to the next generation and the next, until the whole massive machinery of empire begins to crumble under its own weight.

Drowning in a tide of taxations and other rents that no one can afford any more.

Why are ‘we’ so unhappy, according to the polling, compared to the rest of the world?

George Monbiot says it’s because we are no longer citizens. Only consumers. On average we have no actionable power of any kind, and this is no longer a society.

The solidarity essential to well-being no longer exists, and pretending that it does, on Memorial Day for example, feels useless and even in some subtle way painful.

On top of which, anything bad that happens to you is solely your fault, and being poor especially.

***

The other one goes like this. You’re out in public somewhere random, and somebody asks pointedly: Can I help you?

But that’s not what they mean. They mean, rather:

What are you doing sniffing around here, pachuco?

It happened to me again yesterday.

This time I said, “I’m looking at the house here”. (It had gone up for sale.)

And when that had no apparent effect, I added with a dismissive smile, “So I guess that would be a No”.

The sour and suspicious old coot went away.

Unhappily.

And I spent the rest of Monday crafting a more perfect answer, for next time.

Did that make me happier?

***

The perfect answer looks like certain forms of salad, and fisherman’s eggs.

Something that we belong to.

And which belongs to us.

First, one on the question of who gets to claim to be the good guys.

Nothing very new there.

Second, on the aspirations of the rest of the world.

That part is where the change is coming hard and fast.

In botany:

“Peristrophe is also derived from Greek: peri meaning ‘around’ and strophos ‘a twisted band or belt’, referring to the bracts that surround and enclose the calyx”.

In literature, specifically Wicked:

” … rumors of strict court action against turncoats and peristrophists …”

Thus:

“One who engages the words of their opponent during an argument in a way that transforms the meaning of the words to support their own viewpoint”.

With elements, to my ear, of sophistry as well.

Brainstorm: Israel/Palestine – Who Started It?

One guy. Five hours. Disjointed. Weirdly brilliant.

I’m pretty sure you don’t want to watch it all.

I did though.

I even subscribed.

***

Somewhere around the three-hour mark, lots of things start to become more clear. In particular, the narrator’s day job as a tenant’s lawyer, and what that has to do with the mass evictions of Palestinians eighty and ninety years ago.

It helped me understand my own history, not as a member of the ‘working class’, but as an actual peasant.

SHOCK EMAILS released by FOIA about Dr. Fauci, other top officials

From the comments section below the video:

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” ― Mark Twain

Ayep.

Two modern doctors take on one old one, on such topics as whether an apple a day is still good for you like it once was.

Confronting Dr. Gundry On Lectins | Inflammation & Leaky Gut

Gundry is not one of my favorites. But …

I still like and trust him more than I do the young hotshots and their scientism.

It feels like all they want is the right story to tell their patient-customers in “a modern clinical setting”.

The right story is constantly changing “in the light of new evidence”.

The ‘right’ story is always years behind the real story. The young guns impatiently state that everyone (now) knows that the cholesterol scare was a blind alley, and that beta blockers don’t help cardiac patients.

Following ‘the science’ is a noble aspiration and all of us do it in our varying ways.

I’m happy with keto and intermittent fasting. But I’m closing in fast on the goals I used them to achieve, and already starting to re-evaluate other strategies.

In particular I’m really interested in the microbiome and the second brain of the gut.

Now that my own gut is less swollen and obviously pathological, I’d like to know what it looks like in a condition of thriving.

Digging in and trying to understand are their own rewards.

Gluten is just one of the potentially damaging lectins.

Nicotinic acid, as in nicotine, is also called Vitamin B3.

The more you know the less you know the more you know.

Modern American Imperialism Part 1: US Political Capture as a Game

Brian Berletic starts a new series about how modern colonialism and empire actually work.

A Review of Falling Down (1993), by the Critical Drinker

***

At first blush it’s just another way to go about getting good food:
https://amosmillerorganicfarm.com/store/

On a deeper level it might be an example of what Grace calls good capitalism.

On the deepest level it’s a story that connects organic living with questions of freedom in modernity, and even anarchic principles.

I heard about Mr. Miller’s legal troubles with the government on the Duran, from Robert Barnes, who is currently representing the farmer.

Mr. Barnes is pretty sure Bill Gates is the Antichrist, and I am pretty sure I agree.

He’s whittling on a piece of wood.

In some weird limited sense I am already living the anarchic life that I often profess as the antidote to it all (and somehow burgers of sardine are involved).

I got a feeling when he stops whittlin’, something’s gonna happen.

The Magdalenian is a culture of the Upper Paleolithic dating from around 17K to 12K years before present, named after the type site of La Madeleine, a rock shelter located in the Vézère valley in what they choose to call today France.

EcoNomy of ‘Subsistence’

‘There’s a key point in this video about why following-the-science in this modern world is not quite as brilliant a stratagem as it would at first glance seem’. (Like drinking from the river; like sleeping outdoors ‘in public’).

‘Don’t hold me to your dumb false standard‘ and especially don’t try to tell me that I should do anything, be anything; because that’s how people are you know, the good people, the ethical people, the normal people. It’s all bullshit my dear.

It’s what they want you to believe about the world, because holding on to dumb beliefs of that kind makes you easier to control and makes you a slave to them and their shit all over again. (Where I wonder would you really have stood on Vietnam, these 60 years ago gone by.)

When the project reaches its waypoint goal, I will ‘weigh the same as I did in college’, roughly speaking, though in-college was for me a state that straggled out over seven years and thousands of miles, not even counting the truck driving school.

***

I don’t know what I’m doing.

I am doing it.

These are the people we are so tremulously counting on
to shepherd this economy back to some semblance of normalcy and health.

“But please Captain Smith, I need to know Right Now what to do with these deck chairs!”

I swear to Christ I don’t fear Trump half as much as I do these sad lost Best And Brightest tools, with their Ivy League MBAs and JDs, with their pretty new haircuts and stylish sweaters.

God in heaven help us all.

https://www.patreon.com/vairtere

The decline of the US empire and what replaces it

In my unique circumstance this qualifies as tempting clickbait of a title.

I suggest revising it to read:

“If your Uncle Hank had grown up in rural Iran on the ugly end of the empire stick instead”.

Destroying US From Within: Dr. Jill Stein

… and her senior policy advisor.

Nima lets them talk and talk. I won’t try and tell you it was any kind of pleasure to listen and listen. But I’m … marginally glad I did.

I care about fewer and fewer things. Those student loan people, they can’t get blood out of a turnip and there’s barely anything to garnish anyway. Health care? Even if you find a way to get it around here, it sucks deeply and feels like a useless waste of time and money.

Maybe too I care less about dying itself.

The wars roll on endlessly, growing ever more horrifying and less justified, and the rich (including the politicians and the talking heads of the mainstream media) get obscenely richer.

Right after talking about how no one can afford rent, she stresses the importance of keeping electric car prices low.

That makes it feel obvious that she lives in the same bubble they all do, far away from the laundromat and the left-hand grocery aisle of overpriced toxic animal parts.

All that said, I do still care about genocide, and Biden and Trump and Kennedy have all made it very clear that they absolutely do not.

This woman is the only one running who will even dare to breathe the fucking word.

***

I won’t be the one starting the revolution, and I wistfully doubt that dear old Dr. Jill will be either.

Nevertheless.

My ear is to the ground, and I am preparing myself to be spiritually ready, should the right opportunity for it arise.

***

(Meanwhile)

The only age group that wants more of Biden is boomers, 65+.

A majority of Americans say major change is desperately necessary, with a solid core in the double digits saying that we have to tear the bitch down and start over. Whatever that means (I mean, I know what I mean, by that, but yeah).

And for some reason they don’t think Joe is the guy for the revolutionary rebuild.

Due Dissidence breaks it down.

]

And verily did they proclaim in unison unto the sage:

‘Keep His holy Name out-yo mafukkin mouth, Caananite’. –Deuteronomy 7, KJV

***

The sage, born of a lesser father, will try, to be considerate of your feelings on the matter.

But you’re not making it easy on him, kid.

INTERVIEW: Professor Jeffrey Sachs on Ukraine’s Failures, Israel’s War in Gaza, China, and More | SYSTEM UPDATE #271

Sachs is always worth watching and so is Glenn.

The Ozempic Craze with “Magic Pill” Author Johann Hari

I first heard about this fatburner medication from the nephew, right about the time I was starting keto. I hated the idea, and now I hate it worse.

But … Johann Hari could not say no to buckets of KFC until he got on it.

So I guess if you’re like him, it might be worth it.

I will continue to demur.

Russell Brand interviewed RFK and it’s a really good listen.

His Zionist views still make zero sense to me and are probably dealbreaking, unless the late polls show him with any kind of fighting chance at the end of October, in my state (because it’s still all about the Electoral College, because that’s the way Power wants it to be).

On everything else he says very unusual and interesting things that I mostly agree with.

At least we’d be down to funding one horrific war, to satisfy his rabbi friend I guess.

My hope is very marginal and I continue to vacillate between the feckless Greens and certain delightful dead people. Like Eugene Debs and Charles Bukowski.

A really brilliant analysis of lyrics in context, from Christofouru:

Blinken, Rockin’ in the Free World

I posted a pic sometime back of elite neocon and rules-based order broker ‘Tony’ Blinken jamming out on guitar in his shitty post-cool way.

Apparently he was at it again, in Kiev, with the guy who is only officially the president of Ukraine for the next four days, more or less.

This time he carefully chose that Neil Young song (separate covidian irony alert) about rocking and the free world.

Sure he did. Of course he did.

Alex Christofouru doesn’t think Blinken was listening very closely to Mr. Young’s lyrics, or what they really and actually mean.

Let me help refresh him, you, and myself.

Colors on the street
Red, white, and blue
People shuffling their feet
People sleeping in their shoes
There’s a warning sign in the road ahead
There’s a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead
Don’t feel like satan, but I am to them
So I try forget them any way I can
…
I see a girl in the night
with a baby in her hands
Under an old street light
near a garbage can
Now she put her kid away, she’s gone to get a hit
She hates her life, and what she’s done with it
That’s one more kid, that’ll never go to school
Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool
…
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, a gentler machine gun hand
We got department stores, and toilet paper
Styrofoam garbage for the ozone layer
We got a man of the people, says people for life
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive

Keep on rocking in the free world
keep on rocking in the free world
keep on rocking in the free world
keep on rocking in the free world

Anthony Blinken and his entire class, economic and political and Dem-partisan, don’t give one grunting shit about any of what that song is about.

He’s just cynically using the chorus, the title, to try and help prop up the propaganda, and the money-laundering operation, that makes him and his friends richer every day, over there fighting The Putin.

He’s gonna lose the war. But the darkness of it is that he doesn’t care about that either.

The point of ‘rocking in the free world’ is just to keep it going as long as possible, in order to wring out of Ukraine every possible drop of blood money before the whole thing collapses like twin towers, as it inevitably will, and sooner rather than later.

The young men of that country, the old men, even some of the women now, are being sacrificed to Moloch for gold, for car elevators, for lifestyles of decadent luxury far away from the killing fields, here in the home. Of. The. Brave.

This fucking clown guitarist/Secretary is one of Moloch’s favored priests for the crafting of this literally demonic ritual, this cheap perversion of good poetry for twisted ends.

Now my darling …

Explain to me all about how I have to vote for these evil motherfuckers come November, because orangeman so so very very bad.

And I in turn will explain to you the meaning of the Jeremiad, Chapter 5 and verse 21.

For some months, I’ve been telling myself that I need a better morning ritual.

A more thoughtful and meditative one that sets up the day properly.

One thing that means is: turning coffeemaking into a kind of far-eastern tea ceremony.

I feel pretty certain about that.

Then going on to live much of the ensuing day the same way.

I feel anxious sometimes for reasons like: There doesn’t seem to be any place in this town to buy a shot glass marked off in milliliter measurements; because in the ceremony the first cup needs to contain exactly 15 ml of keto-rich heavy cream.

So I even check the thrift store, unsuccessfully, and then I fret and write it down on the going-to-the-big-town list.

The anxiety is because I’m not immediately succeeding in living my life without anxiety.

Which is goddamn ridiculous.

Sometimes I am goddamn ridiculous.

***

Sometimes, I am a literal, verifiable and legitimate genius.

Winking with a toothgapped smile of pure honesty, I tell you sincerely that I know it can be very hard for anyone who isn’t me to see it, because I spend so much of my time down in the weeds, overthinking and boiling over noisily … ferociously experimenting in my fortress of solitude like a mad cartoon villain, or anti-hero, or just professor like the kind I once was out there in the world.

Or: spending too much of my libidinal bandwidth in spilling out dregs here, full of pics and links that, while often informative or entertaining, are actually tangential to the serious thrust of my thinking–thinking which only gets represented and symbolized by belletristic words once in a while, here, or elsewhere, or in real life.

Prologue aside, I’m going to tell you a (shaggy, raggedy) story about a very small moment of my genius, a moment that came after a period of many days. A week and more of mornings and afternoons in which I was intermittently manic about a certain small and specific thing.

About ten months ago, I got sick and tired of looking at my big flabby gut and decided to try to do something serious about it. Mainly and in brief, I accepted the Gospel according to the ketogenic low-carb diet, and its divine twin, Intermittent Fasting, eventually to the point of One Meal A Day, almost every day.

In the earliest days of my born-again conversion experience, the results were extremely gratifying and rewarding.

I lost an inch off my gut every month, down to the end of last year, six inches of it gone away for good.

***

That second part was supposed to be a long brilliant post.

It’s been sitting around in draft form for days.

Instead of finishing it, I am writing it down and letting it go.

That is the ceremonial thing to do, in this specific case.

***

Also I just realized that the coffee scale can measure in milliliters, so …

Right now I am fully embracing my inner Ridiculous Genius.

Source

I kinda forgot that roller derby even existed once.

On the other hand those cafeteria vending machines lined up in a row brought on instant flashbacks.

***

The main guy I recognized was the one that went on to play Bob Newhart’s dentist friend Jerry.

I think his name was Bonerz, Peter, which is now funny, that I think of it.

Also, was that gun man Peter Boyle? I think so. Guy must have been born bald.

***

Johnny. The photographer, the journalist, the cinematographer with the party, the documentarian whose platform is film, the Reporter–the Witness.

“… And that ain’t cool”, but nor is he uncool.

He is Medium Cool, not warm and not icy. That’s my interpretation of the title.

Do you have an alternative? I’ll bet you do and I’ll bet it’s better than mine.

You don’t share it though.

That is, maybe, the key difference between us.

Or maybe you share it on some heinous platform like Zuck’s, where I won’t go. Fucdo I know.

***

That nurse bird, she had a nice ass.

***

It was preachy, but in the sense that Martin King was too.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s a good one. It’s real art.

***

It was Dobular that reminded me it existed and that I could see it maybe.

They, DD, did two segments; the second one shorter, on the subject of DNC at Chicago, part two, this year.

***

I was a child when the first one happened and the skulls of the cool were cracked by Mayor Daley’s pigthugs. My parents had fled for the suburbs by then and so I never knew anything about what went down, until ten years later and two thousand miles to the west, when I read Abbie Hoffman and friends, who were there and were later tried in court, for the crime of being there.

I’d like to make up for my absence by going this time, this summer at the other end of life.

I don’t think that will happen, or that it would be anything like how it was, should be, if it did.

***

Watching the movie is a two hour commitment, even if you take the trouble to bust through YT’s age-restriction BS, but you can watch the man who made the film, Haskell Wexler, talk about making it, uninterrupted, in 15 minutes.

It’s a movie, filmed on location and in real time, in and around the 1968 Democratic National Party convention.

In Chicago.

You can watch the whole thing here.

I’m about to do that myself.

So far I’ve only got as far as the opening credits, and already I’m suffused with nostalgia for that place, and that time. I was very near the action.

I was six years old.

Later in the day, I’ll be back to share some thoughts about it.

I continue to think a lot about the amount and ways in which I do go rhetorically ballistic.

For comparison purposes, if you are generally for all these wars
(and generally view countries like Russia, China, Iran to be enemies)
… and … especially if you are a Zionist …

Then I would love to know how you feel about

Lindsay Graham’s latest foray into going (somewhat more literally) ballistic

*

Can you possibly agree with him, even if only on some emotional level?

Do you really think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified (I know for a fact that some of you do), and–thus–that dropping a few more nukes to clear up our problems, or Israel’s problems, or Ukraine’s, is equally justified?

Comments are open.

I’m sure they’ll be flooded.

Just before the Dawn, they say, it will get down to about 43 degrees.

Over the next few nights it will only drop to just under 50, and then just more than 50 …

The last half of May is the start of the warm season, just as the last half of October is the start of the cold here. After these couple of last cool gasps, we probably won’t see 50 again for five months, anywhere near Horsehead Crossing. Even when the monsoons decide to ride in on a chilly blast and blow wet, that’s still more like 60.

My single meal is concocted over the course of a couple hours lately. In the first hour, from 4 to 5 tonight, a big bowl of salad. In the second, 5-6, I just had four eggs. I’m getting really good at cooking them well all of a sudden.

Usually there will be real meat with the eggs, or a couple of tortillas. This evening there wasn’t. It seemed to be a matter of mood.

I’ve lost seven inches around the middle and I’m aiming to lose four more at least this way. When I get that far, I will have finally vanquished obesity officially and properly. My BMI will tip just over into the ‘normal’ range. I have no idea what I weigh right now, and I don’t particularly care. It’s that gut measure that matters to me; the number and all that it implies about the syndromes of metabolism.

At the start of the journey some expert equated my ideal belly size with 200 pounds even, for a maleish person of my lofty stature. I feel like it will be a little less, but I’m just guessing.

There’s a great big road trip coming up in a little over two weeks and I am already starting to prepare for it. I jumped-started the van today because I think that’s the vehicle that will take me on the first 90 miles, and the last 90 miles, of thousands of them all told.

I don’t want to go anywhere.

But since I am honor-bound to, I’m going to vaya con mi diosa, with calm and purposeful steps.

Is your mind going a mile a minute? Are you full of mental distractions constantly thinking about the past or the future? Do you depend on outside stimulation for your happiness—movies, gaming, shopping, drinking, smoking, or eating? These qualities of the mind are called rajas in Ayurveda. A rajasic mind is never at rest, it is always distracted, looking forward to the next activity, reward, or accomplishment. While rajas can be disguised as being passionate, people with rajasic minds really just long for peace of mind and a deeper, more sustainable experience of contentment.

—lifespa/Douillard

 

A sattvic mind is at peace, easily able to cope with stress, and content without the need of external stimulation.
A rajasic mind is only satisfied when externally stimulated and rewarded, or stressed in the way we can become when challenged.
And a tamasic mind is protective and withdrawn, even burnt out.

In nature, these three forces balance each other. Sattva balances out the stimulating forces of rajas, which create change, and the protective forces of tamas, which when out of balance can create obstruction.

The goal in life and in nature is not to be 100 percent sattvic,
but to bring rajas + tamas into balance with sattva.
(Living a life full of generosity and compassion can lead to longevity, boosted moods, a healthier immune system, and better gut health.)

—lifespa/Douillard, but a different article

 

rajah (n.) also raja,
“king or prince in India,” ruling either independently or as a feudatory.

1550s, from Hindi, from Sanskrit rajan “king,” related to raj “kingdom, kingship,” rajati “he rules,” and cognate with Latin rex, Old Irish rig “king” (from PIE root *reg- “move in a straight line,” with derivatives meaning “to direct in a straight line,” thus “to lead, rule”).

—etymonline

***

Without further comment? Yes … almost.

I am very definitely ruled by rajas; rajasic energy–it very strongly correlates to my mind with ‘vata’ energy as opposed to pitta and kapha. (I can sure see a parallel with kapha and the lethargic nature of tamas; I don’t know if there’s a similar connection between pitta and sattva.)

To live anarchically means to live without rulers, and to me that is the kind of ideal that can be aspired to, but maybe never fully reached–at least not ‘permanently’.

In the meantime, knowing one’s rulers inside and out is obviously gonna be real important. This is true in the societal/political sense, out in the world.

It is even more essential (I think) in the interior, intra-personal, spiritual way.

I study my Raja/s, my ruler, with great care and intensity of late.

(I think I’ll stop numbering these now … It will just upgrade to a kind of episode. Without Further Comment, or at least with not much.)

***

Glenn Greenwald, in a fast 25 minutes, lays out for us what’s really bad about the sudden new wave of censorship laws, particularly in the US and Canada.

***

Chris Cuomo ADMITS He’s Taking Ivermectin

***

Perfect example of … a smart, well put-together patriot who is nevertheless completely fucked up in the moral sense.
(I’m talking about the guy in the clip who speaks briefly at the very beginning of the video)

*

From later in the same footage:

Did it come from a broad?

The Crocus City Hall terrorist attacks took place on March 23.

Victoria Nuland suddenly left her government post at the end of March. The Ukrainian Interior Minister resigned abruptly in that same week.

None of which proves anything at all.

Just mulling.

A really good rant.

See, what I’m doing there is linking it off–mostly without comment, or even context.

That’s not challenging, either to write or to read.

Maybe there’s some hope.

For me.

As a … pundit, or something.

After all.

I had a great, long talk today with one of my most dedicated readers.

Hell for all I know she’s my only reader, heh.

She said some very nice things about the work I do here, and for that I am lifelong grateful.

She also said that reading what I do is real hard. Challenging work to read, just as it is to write.

True that and no doubt.

There are so many changes happening in my life right now and they are almost universally good ones.

I’m in a generous mood and willing to … consider certain alterations.

I know I’ve said in the past that I’m not going to talk about politics. When I said it, in all good faith, I meant it, and I did try. But I failed–you could even said I lied.

Today we start over in honesty.

I am going to write about politics, and related subjects like anarchism, and I’m going to keep doing it, without regard to the costs, fiscal or otherwise. If shit needs saying, I’m gonna be the bitch who says it.

But I will try to be a little more constructive about it.

Maybe I already have been, and no one noticed, not even me.

The main reason that being constructive is a whole ‘nother kind of hard is:

I live these days without hope, and I blame you all for it. You all, in the collective sense, humanity. You just don’t give me any rational reason to hope, you fickle selfish greedy narcissistic bastards.

However.

Living without hope turns out to be … not as bad as it sounds.

I’ve begun to see hope as a kind of drug, and to ask myself if I am not better off without it.

Could it really be kicked? Without dismal consequence? With conceivably even some benefit?

Not enough data to answer that yet, but, on a completely unrelated note …

I am down to two cups of coffee a day, and I had no intention at all of moderating my intake.

I just don’t need as much caffeine as I used to need, and …

I’m only drinking it for enjoyment now.

Maybe I’ve been on a similar path, with the hopium, and the copium. Maybe I’m still on the path, and getting further along it every day, barely noticing.

Tell me what you need to hear.

I won’t promise to provide it, especially if it’s bullshit.

But I’ll listen.

To you.

My audience.

raggedy, adj., from Old Norse raggaðr “shaggy”,
via Norwegian ragget (“shaggy”) and Old English raggig “shaggy, bristly, rough”

also:
“Ragged was used of the devil from c. 1300 in reference to his “shaggy” appearance”.

Conclusion:
Raggedy and Shaggy are the same word
with the possible whimsical difference that
I am a Shaggy Man, with a Raggedy Cat.

Why you want to eat plenty of organic leafy greens, and the best rule of thumb for if you need to take a chance on anything non-organic.

***
When even a dweeb the magnitude of Piers Morgan can beat you half to death rhetorically with one metaphorical arm behind his back, you’ve got some serious problems with the logic, the facts, and for god damn sure the morality

***

Is there such a thing as a good capitalist? Do these guys qualify?

***

When I said olive and avocado were the best oils (for cooking), I was half right. (I’m currently using olive [no/low heat], coconut [medium], and clarified butter [high-ish heat and primarily]).

***

Campus protests and Biden policy w/ Jeffrey Sachs (The Duran again)

For the three of you especially.

Scene: down in it, a couple of blocks, a third of a mile, from my front door.

On the left is the driving highway over the river (heading south 18 or 230 miles via US 180).

In the middle, same thing, only for pedestrians.

Straight ahead on the right-hand path is a second walkway.

It doesn’t lead over the river–or even down to it in any simple way.

It does go to the overall best nearby walk that doesn’t involve any driving at all.

En passant, I think I have finally figured out why I delayed for months in cashing in on my government check.

Early on I said it didn’t matter, because every month that went by meant having a slightly larger check in the end. So I waited, until things got uncomfortable.

Then I waited some more, and I told myself (and some of you) that maybe I had something I really wanted to learn about serious poverty, like I had experienced in my teens and early 20s.

It didn’t sound particularly convincing to my own ears even as I said it. Especially as my life went from just uncomfortable, to starting to come economically unglued.

But in a way … I think it was true. I just didn’t have a handle on what exactly it was I desperately hoping to learn.

I think I know now.

I think I was really deeply curious about who I could count on, when things were really bad–even who cared enough to listen to how bad they were getting.

Not that I ever asked for help. That would have invalidated the experiment.

I was curious about who listened well enough to hear me, and act unilaterally on a love for me, on … an honest impartial concern about how I was doing.

The results of the experiment were conclusive.

There are 3 people in this world who care about me to that unconditional extent.

I might extend that out as high as five people, if I was being magnanimous.

But three, really, and unreservedly.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that all three, or even five, are Patr(e)ons who are there for me every damn month. The amounts vary and are not important.

The consistency sure is though.

Life is damn good now and it’s going to get better.

The second monthly check arrived today ahead of schedule, and that money will cover June’s bills. On the same day, I paid off the very last bill of May, on the sixth of the month, without touching that fresh second check to do it. Without touching that May check, I bought green chili, and avocado, and I slapped forty bucks into my brand-new business checking account too, the first one I’ve ever had in my life.

I’m twenty-four days ahead of my bills, and this is the first time in five or six years that I can legitimately say that. (It was true for a while after I cashed in the pension too, but that was a specialized circumstance, not real life. This is real life. Except with no job necessary, and fuck yeah for that blessing, and amen.)

To the three of you …

Forgive me for any bullshit manipulation on my part.

I might at times have been guilty of that, though I can say with a clear conscience that I wasn’t doing it consciously.

More importantly, thank you for loving me, and for making me feel loved too.

That’s a gift that the Christ called a pearl of great price.

It can’t be bought, or paid for.

It is the currency of the true heart, and I am so very grateful to you for it.

As for the rest of the world, I’m grinning in their faces with my extremely modest pile of fuck-you money and my equally modest, almost monastic life.

You don’t get the saucy grin, though, oh no.

You get the authentic gap-toothed crooked smile.

Based on experimentation, at 5000′ elevation, it’s just a straight 425 degrees at 25 minutes per pound of raw, oiled, spiced pork meat on a rack, in Pyrex, in the oven. (The oil today was unrefined coconut, and the ending temp was just above 145, Fahrenheit, )

I got it at Sprouts. It was 3.2 pounds, $4.20 a pound, which is about 25% more than from Safeway, and there wasn’t anything on the package that even pretended it was better in any way (certainly not organic, for instance). For me this results in producing another good argument for getting my supply from ButcherBox. (Although officially organic pork does exist, for about 5x the price of supermarket slaughterhouse stuff.)

Today I ate half of it straight off the rack without anything else–a satisfying one-meal-a-day of a mere 1300 calories, and zero carbs.

The other half will be the basis for a chile verde. On a perfect Sunday the whole thing (less a few bites) would be a big pot of chile verde that would last all week. Doing it that way, there’s no sense in going to the bother of oiling and spicing the raw pork at the beginning, because any spicing can be done in the chile pot, post-roasting.

Vair-de-tizing

Chile (using a 16 oz. jar of 505, plus whatever hot peppers are around and quickly chopped)
Tomato or tomatillo (1 large red that was going overripe)
Onion (leftover half I had)
Garlic (2 cloves seemed right to me)
Cumin
Oregano
Salt
Black pepper
and (secret ingredient) a pinch of dried arbol if you like things very deeply warming + spicy hot

I threw all that in a blender instead of fussing with the knife, and poured it into a big pot over the top of 1.5 pounds cooked and cubed pork

… with just barely enough water to clean out the jar and the blender; plus a couple of fingers of the pork drippings that were still sitting there–I’m aiming for a very thickened product to go inside tortillas with melty cheese and avocado, no salsa or peppers necessary.

I’ll simmer that for as long as seems right because there’s very little science here and lots of art. Last time I made it too spicy hot for company, and chilled it down by adding an equal amount of just-cooked beans, doubling the recipe by combining the two recipes on the fly.

Here is a version that is far more pro and precise than mine.

Likewise, a chile colorado variant I’d like to try someday as well.

Karl Marx and Cinco de Mayo. By: Óscar Fernández

***

Aaron Mate’ goes on The Duran for the first time, to discuss the forever war.

***

The real evil has a nice haircut.

Success is rising within its system, recovering your soul, blowing the whistle on it, and disappearing.

Oh and the DemParty RepubliScam won’t save you from any of it.

My diet is circling hard back around to fish, and also to a muted and calm despair about all of the available civilized food supply.

We can eat much, much better, but it is nearly impossible to really eat well or right.

The YouTube experts all agree that farmed fish sucks, though only a few of them thoroughly understand why. Dr Chantel Elston is one of those few:

Marine biologist weighs in on the farmed salmon vs wild salmon debate

On land we at least have the comfort of Organic certification. In the case of seafood, whatever certs and catchphrases exist mean pretty much nothing.

Most certifying bodies I could find are fairly obvious scams run by Industry for its own benefit. Seafood Watch is very big on farmed shit, and the MSC cert is too. (See here for an example of slimy language–“wild-caught” means almost nothing, and now they’re inventing, without standards, stuff like “well, wild-capture at least” . . .).

This all leads to a situation where “DNA tests have shown that up to 43% of salmon in (US) grocery stores and restaurants are mislabeled when salmon are out of season. Of these incorrect labels, almost 70% were on farmed salmon labeled as wild-caught“.

There is no penalty to pay for the lies, of course. The lies turn into profits.

Stepping back for a moment to Dr. Telly’s video, we learn that:

Salmon ‘farms’ are actually crowded prisons, many of them constructed in the ocean itself.

There are frequent jailbreaks.

When they happen, the escaped farm fish start interbreeding with the few actual wild ones left, reducing their genetic fitness as wild things (and incidentally their nutritional value to humans). Moreover, sometimes this process is no accident at all.

The good doctor ends up concluding that we should just leave the poor goddamn fish alone and eat something else, though what exactly that might be remains vague.

Thus living in the Anthropocene Era is a desperately fraught thing. Much the same thing happens by land with GMO frankencrops invading neighboring non-GMO farms, and then to add insult to injury, Monsanto sues the real farmers for ‘patent infringement’ or some other made-up legalistic bullshit.

This is the inevitable logic of the capitalistic mindset, and of glorious Civilization itself.

In the next stage, they will try to convince you that lab-grown ‘salmon’ is a good thing. Seriously.

For myself, I’m going to provisionally trust the people that make the best noises, like Butcherbox where salmon are concerned. (Reminding myself in the process about what I said earlier about Jill Stein.)

And, I’m going to go the other way ’round and teach myself about the relative value, for now, of the sardine burger.

If you haven’t been keeping up with the stuff I’ve been saying about lowering carbs, ‘keto’, and intermittent fasting, this one might seem a little abstract or extreme.

What Happens If You Don’t Eat For 100 Hours?

18/6 intermittent fasting, up to One Meal A Day, is a really good start for a lifestyle (and I’m almost already there).
(What If You Only Ate Once A Day For 30 Days?)

I’m very inspired by this though, to consider longer fasts right now.

Maybe quarterly at the solstices/equinoxes–even 48 hours can lead to “dramatic” improvements–but 72 (“if we’re trying to reduce a disease”) to 96+ would be exponentially better, according to the Smartdoctor Stan who knows a lot more than me.

What Happens If You Don’t Eat For 5 Days? (same basic video, older version from 2 years ago)

***

As I’m watching these videos I’m simultaneously involved in one of the deepest sorting projects of my life.

Right now, subject to evolution, I’ve got four lists.

One is about bringing money/resources/energy in, and this is a short list, because I have that pension flowing in as a baseline, plus the vairtere/patreon, plus eventually revenue via anaprim/shopify, and the only thing beyond that that really needs consideration is a ‘job’ to possibly enhance the bringing-in. (I’d much rather grow a business, but we’ll see.)

Two is basically just a list of bills, things I have to pay out every month (or 6 or 12 months), and the point of this list is to push it as far as possible toward $0/month, even though I’ll probably never get all the way there. (Even fully paid-for land gets taxed just for existing, in this dumb-ass system of Civilized Property we live in.)

Three and four are about what the resources flow out toward maintaining and growing.
The 3-list is about the House(s).
The 4-list is about the Projects That Matter (there are a whole lot of these and so a whole lot of sublists).

All the crap in my house(s) are a reflection of these four things.

Most of the infrastructure, like a toilet and a stove and a stack of garden tools, reflects the third list.

Most of what takes up space that isn’t infrastructure, whether it is boxed or blessedly unboxed, reflects the fourth list (along with little bits of lists 1 and 2 that don’t take up much space).

***

If none of this is grabbing you or making useful sense (as it very definitely is to me):

Just start thinking a little more about why you eat, when you eat, and what you eat, especially as it relates to high-carb things like grains, starchy roots like potato, and high-inflammation seed/vegetable oils (the two best oils, olive and avocado, are both from what are technically fruits).

And prepare food for yourself, instead of paying someone else extra to do it, as much as you can. You will naturally know a little more about what is actually going into your body instead of letting some restaurant franchisee or Owner decide that for you–their decisions will almost always be based mostly on what nets them the most profit margin, and not what’s good for you.

Be well, darlings.

End of the Globalists w/ Jay Dyer

A wickedly fascinating interview on the Duran with a deeply interesting everyman philosopher.

The perspective here might be imperfectly labeled as Deistic, Natalist, and Traditional.

Not the sort of thing I am naturally drawn to at all, but … a really smart case being made for something that Ain’t-Me can be even more clarifying for an honest thinker than a perfectly resonant polemic. Hope that makes sense.

I do believe, for example, that modern paganism is less a grass-roots phenomenon and more an anti-philosophy that can prove very useful to the Evil Massa class–often likely to be tainted with an agenda that isn’t apparent on the surface.

At one point Mr. Dyer quotes a 14th century monk to the effect that Protestantism will inevitably lead to mass atheism, and I think there’s something to that as well.

Anyway, listen. If you scroll on by this one too …

Or if you actually watch and it does nothing for you … that’s fine.

But if you see what I see here, the value of it, well let’s fucking talk, okay? It’s not like we have all that much time left f-Chrissake.

Yeah, I get that you’re a Democrat and all, but I’m afraid that means nothing any more.

Help me out here. Are you a Bernie Sanders Democrat, or a Colin Jost Democrat?

Thanks in advance.

She’s headed back this morning and I am quietly digging out from all the different kinds of productivity, and the flurry of new offers, angles, and options presented by that bold and efficient production.

Starting with mere dish-washing, and ramping up in complexity from there.

The new front-runner in the coffee-creaming sweepstakes is called flax milk. Per pot, it has barely 20 calories compared to 360 for real heavy cream (although it does have a carb or two), and it tastes pretty nice. Still in the running: a certain spendy kind of almond milk, and the final experiments with unwatered organic coconut cream.

Do you care? I don’t know. My art is very self-centered these days; quite prosaic in most ways besides.

In some strange not-yet-settled sense, all that feels nevertheless like a moving-forward and possibly even like growth.

Time may tell.

***

Can’t vote Trump, ’cause Trump you know; nor Biden because he’s every bit as bad and maybe worse, plus being non compos mentis. Bobby Jr. is compromised by the Zionist lobby and Cornell West, most regrettably, has proven now that he’s at least not serious, and possibly an outright joke (same for dear Marianne, if she’s even still running; honestly I don’t even want to keep track).

That leaves either writing in a dead person (leading contenders at the moment are George Carlin and the veteran, Aaron Bushnell, who set himself fatally ablaze to protest genocide), or just flexing to the Greens one more time.

Jill Stein interviewed by Glenn Greenwald

At least she says the right things, and maybe that would be just a tiny bit better than saying fuckoff to fake-democratic elections altogether. I’ll be turning in a ballot regardless I’m sure, due to one ballot initiative or another,

So.

Consisting of three pieces.

A first venture ever in this life, into real Business Banking.

Initially, and very locally, that venture was a bust. But we decided to drive halfway to Silver on the fly, a 92-mile trip to Eagar, to push right past the bust and get it done anyway. Full success, eventually. We burned up three hours getting it right, but …

Driving together let us work seriously on the marriage for a long moment. That’s all I’m going to tell you about that.

Finally, another bit of driving, checking out the situation in Vernon on the way, down again into the biggest town in the county for a different kind of supplies.

That right there is $500 worth of a bathroom remodel–though to be fair, $80 of that is a new and very fancy kitchen faucet.

I have a big pile of grunt work to get started on in this fresh merry month of May.

I’m typing early to placehold and mark territory. It’s a big busy day that according to the plan will start with some revamped banking, involve those aforementioned tires at two different places, and massively restock my cupboards with new and better kinds of food and related things to ingest. All taking place in the context of healing in the relationship sphere.

Tomorrow is a lighter version of the same thing, centered around the collecting of specific items like valves and bulbs to remedy existing householder problems, and a hands-on investigation of deeper utility systems like undersink reverse osmosis. Not that I intend to spend that heavily. Yet. But the tint of the lists will look different, later in the week.

I’ll try to touch base with an amendment to this later. If that seems to be called for.

***

Called for (editing two days later):

It may be finally dried out down here, in the high desert …

But that late little blast of storm arrayed the Peaks in one last coat of glory that will probably last them until July or so. Happy dancing to all the katsinas.

At the very moment that my professional life started to crash and burn a few years back, my body developed a number of symptoms. The most obvious and pronounced was a deep chronic pain in my shoulders, one of them in particular.

With reduced stress, from not having a job or a bossMassa at all, it has slowly gotten a bit better over time, but I still have it.

Last night this Dr. Ekberg guy, one of my keto gurus, pretty much blew me away.

Is it possible that shoulder pain is not a symptom purely of political betrayal and stress, but additionally, maybe primarily, of poor gall bladder function?

He clearly thinks so.

I don’t know exactly how follow-the-Sciency this is.

But I am enough convinced of it to have already sought out some remedies that support improved gall bladder health. “Bile salts” is the generic name for the main one.

Another significant experiment, in this ongoing process of biohacking. There are a surprising number of them, and they have been preoccupying me to a surprising degree.

This is what you get for loving and/or reading this particular grizzled old coot.

Not endless discussion about the latest gall bladder surgery, or what the doctor said, or what I’m going to ask at the next appointment.

There are no appointments. I don’t make them and I don’t want to start.

There is pretty much no such thing as “health care” in America. There is only being “in the system” and the system the doctors run bears a striking resemblance to being “in the system” in the original meaning, the penal one.

No real medicine.

No real justice.

Endless appropriations instead for bombs and killing and corruption and weapons-maker fat cats. How you doing today Ukraine? (and how’s it going over there in apartheid land, you homicidal Zionists?)

This is our world in the Empire, as we transition from being The Leader Of The Free World to just another shithole on some continent somewhere.

In some weird limited sense I am already living the anarchic life that I often profess as the antidote to it all.

Yep, fresh tires for muh truck.

Same size as stock, but these are new, all-terrain, rated ‘five out of five’ in winter conditions, and part of the Eagle Peak OffRoad Series or some fluffy marketing shit like that, saith the manufacturer.

I paid for them myself, not exactly, but purely and fully, even so.

I walked regardless, straight from the front door to the new business banking spot and back (fill that thing up willya, anaprim.com), and it hailed or maybe just sleeted on me.

I’m ready for May.

On the bright side when I got home I was inspired to warm up my standard electrolyte mix, on the stove and with a little something from a bottle labeled Horse Soldier Bourbon Whiskey.

It’s supposed to clear off this evening and get up to 71 tomorrow. Meanwhile, maybe the toasty cozy evening in will provide an opportunity to get some video posted again at last.

***

By the way.

Charles Bronson’s father died when he was ten.

Right after, he took over his dad’s job in a coal mine and was paid a dollar for every ton he moved.

He didn’t speak much English then because his parents had been immigrants from Lithuania.

A while later he got drafted into WWII, and he described being conscripted as the best thing that ever happened to him–he meant that in the sense of personal economics and quality of life.

After serving, his first acting jobs were performed under his real last name, Buchinski, and the reason he changed it to Bronson was mainly about Senator McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 50s.

He was never a Hollywood star until he was 53 years old, and around that time he met a married woman, made her his wife, and went on to star in 16 movies with her.

In 1968 he starred again, utterly brilliantly, as The Good (with Henry Fonda as The Bad and Jason Robards as The Ugly) in a movie called Once Upon A Time In The West. They fail, to make them like that, any more.

“He’s whittling on a piece of wood. I got a feeling when he stops whittlin’, something’s gonna happen.”

The Old West metaphorically dies forever and freedom is forever wiped out by civilization besides, in that perfectly glorious scene, along with the Bad and the Ugly.

But Bronson and the Good he embodies both survive that ending.

Nobody ever watched his later efforts at film, and nobody ever read a thing he wrote.

Yet out to the West, even now, there’s a trail that leads

Somewhere.

“No, your other left, motherfucker!”
–my sister’s idea of what her GPS would sound like if I could be the voice of it

That made me laugh with more depth than I have in a while.

Love you sis.

They’re down the road again, drinking the best Anaprim coffee from the source. I’m alone again at the lovely crumbly casita, working on five hours sleep, but moderately and properly caffeinated myself, and feeling fine and fierce.

Now, onto hydration, walking, scheming, breaking lists into better lists, and doing it all in some more or less belletristic way as best I can.

As One Does.

Source, with the video

Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.

I’d take WhackyBobby in half a heartbeat, myself, and I don’t ever want to hear another word about fucking Trump and the nuclear codes, ‘kay hon?

I don’t feel too energetic today, but I do feel very clear-minded.

The clarity and what energy I do have is mostly being directed at a single point, and that is: Intermittent Fasting with One Meal A Day, and having that one meal be sorta the same radically keto foodstuff every day. Más o menos, it is a brunch taco thing, with multiple variations and invariably super-high quality of the ingredients. (Also a deep study of what exactly is the very best thing from many angles to cream coffee with, without breaking the fast too hard.)

In the morning I had an insight into something I’m calling Perfect(ed) Spaces, or zones, of the home(s).

The whole dietary thing for example is a large part of a Perfected Kitchen. To make a meal is to exercise the individual processes of food gathering, cooking, dish washing, and so on, and there are … better and cheaper and more efficient ways to implement those processes, as well as worse, more expensive and clumsier ways to implement them, ennit?

But What Is Perfect?

It is of course in the eye of the beholder.

I had a sister-in-law once who thought she needed very high vaulted ceilings to be happy and to live in her own version of a Perfected Space.

She’s divorced now and has zero reason to read my Spill, so I can safely call that idea misguided, even boneheaded and … slavery to a bougy trend she saw on HG-TV or some shit.

I believe that there could theoretically be an artistic or even spiritual reason for strongly desiring an extravagantly lofty space between one’s human cranium and the roof.

Like in a Cathedral; that would be perfectly legit.

But Shania’s reason wasn’t, in my very abnormal and opinionated secret opinion.

In other parts of my life I’ve seen related phenomenon. A predilection for simply consuming for the sake of consuming conspicuously, for example. (What exactly are you trying to say to the world, by wearing a thick gold chain around your neck and never taking it off? There could be a legit beautiful signifying going on, but it would take a bit, to convince me of that.)

Other times I’ve watched people with a shopping addiction arrange their spaces (or try to add to other people’s spaces) in a way designed to prove in some way that they are of a generous–and therefore loving–nature.

I’ve been guilty myself of traveling extensively for suss reasons sometimes. Reasons that were partly rational and purposeful, and partly designed to create a signal that said something to the world about me, even if it was only “Lord I was born a ramblin’ man, yeah”. But I still have to wonder: what the hell is the point of going on what the nouveaux riche call A Cruise, to anywhere?

These days I’m very much more of a homebody (even if some days the home is temporary and has wheels on it).

A homebody in part because I am the very furthest thing from Riche, but also because you cannot (no matter how hard you try) abide in Perfected Space in a motel room.

One of the central reasons that some ideas about perfection are twisted, wrong, and ugly is that they don’t pay much attention to lavishly spending all kinds of money. Thus they place undue value on *having* lots of money, to spend without thinking, and this is destructive to Soulfulness, in manifold and often subtle ways.

It pushes people in the direction of being self-absorbed, and … predatory, selfish, capitalistic, and vain about how smart they are and how hard they’ve worked to have all they now have as a result. (As if Bill Gates or Elon Musk were a billion times smarter than your barista, or worked a billion times as hard.)

Thus eventually it makes the same people more warlike too, in order to protect those gains, whether the gains are of money or stuff (‘capital’ gains), or of some kind of moral and intellectual Progress (we are more free! we are more just! we are the priests of american exceptionalism!)

You might even want to go to war just to spread ‘democracy’ (or capitalism), or to battle ‘autocracy’, ‘communism’, ‘sharia law’ and ‘islamic extremism’, or to knock off some socialist third-world leader who wants to Nationalize agricultural land, or resources like cobalt, gold, or oil–to nationalize is to take these things out of the hands of private owners and put them into the hands of ‘everyone’, (or the government, as the case may be).

This is (among other things) why it was said that it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into heaven.

It’s not an impossibility. Moreover, there is nothing inherently bad about filthy lucre, or even, necessarily, having piles of it.

But there is a tendency, in that direction … lottery winners are not, in general, the happiest people, and I don’t believe that has much to do with them not “working for it”. There are all kinds of nepo babies out there who didn’t work for it either–that’s probably true of most rich people, like Hunter Biden and like Donald Trump. They inherited, directly or indirectly.

I have an Imperial Fuckton more to say about Perfected Spaces, alongside musings on economic and psychological warfare and the true nature of things like real freedom, and actual happiness.

Let’s hold it there for now. It is four hours until this posts, and it becomes Thursday, and in those four hours I have a lot of perfecting to do.

In the meantime, consider every post here since April 21st, and especially those concerned with Civilized Lying, as discrete parts of a greater project that is trying in fits and starts to emerge into something of a whole, and maybe even some kind of manifesto.

Uniparty LibDem ‘morality’, sketched succinctly and clearly–a democracy in name only, that is way past saving with a performative bluish vote six months from now.

If you stand with Khanna and Johnson today, (with Joe Biden and with little Lindsey Graham), where would you really have stood on Vietnam, sixty years ago?

Nobody you are ever allowed to vote for, from the Presidency to the office of some rep in your local city or county, whether they lose or actually win, is ever going to challenge real power with the small piece of little power they got for being Democratically Elected.

Because they are well-paid one way and another, to change nothing that matters, and they are afraid, of what would happen if they dared to seriously try.

Maybe it wasn’t always that way. I don’t know.

It’s that way now, though.

And yes there are very rare exceptions sometimes. If I had ever lived in Seattle I would have been happy to vote for Kshama Sawant.

They will preach to you all day about democracy and saving it, but they will never tell you the simple truth that there’s no such thing as a democracy in a one-party state.

Electoralism means no more and no less than the football standings. You can care if you choose to, about who won on Sunday or on the first Tuesday in November, but either way it all just amounts to a sometimes pleasant and always meaningless diversion from your real existence. The country is going to keep sliding the way it’s sliding, which is downwards except for the billionaires and millionaires, whether the blue sock puppet or the red one takes home the trophy.

I hope the moon is shining bright upon you in this darkness.

Michael Franzese, once a cut-throat mafioso, interviews David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’, once a different kind of homicidal maniac, on the subject of each of them becoming born-again Christians in prison.

As a pragmatic matter I’m glad of it. The Jesus, He made the world a slightly better place maybe.

As a pure matter of philosophy, I see it–even granting that the conversions are as sincere as they seem–as trading in one kind of broken-headed crazy for another, that just has slightly less dire side effects.

Christianity, Scientology, Zoroastrianism, Mormonism, becoming a no-matter-who Democrat or a MAGA Republican or a compromising Green, embracing an economic true-belief in free-market capitalism or maoist communism or just chasing dollars and poon until you die …

Same shit.

Don’t seek faith.

Seek real freedom.

Amen.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime!”

“We must Save Democracy!”

So very many reasons, spewed forth from the sewermouth pieholes of blue millionaire spokesmodels in cable news and the rest of the mainstream bullshitters, about why Trump is not the answer, about why he is the embodiment of Orangeman Bad.

So few of those reasons having anything to do with anything.

But this one–this one actually does.

Graham convinced Trump on $61B

Mr. Hardheaded Businessman is just as much a gullible tool of the elites as any of those talking heads and dependable liars. The queer puppet known as Senator Lindsay fed him a line of shit on behalf of the war machine and those who profit from it. And old Donald chewed it up and swallowed it like the credible naïf he is in the end, taking up the causes of the PMC and the Massas when it really finally mattered.

He’s probably still going to win, without your vote and without mine.

But just remember that these bills that just passed with his consenting nod are Joe’s bills, and that the old fool of an incumbent, and his bad cops, are in no way the lesser of evils.

Bobby Kennedy might well be the whackadoodle antivaxxer Zionist you want to paint him to be, honey.

But I’m still looking for a place to throw my useless protest vote.

So he’s not all the way off the table yet in this house. Sorry.

Not sorry.

I worked hard and smart, the last couple of days, sleeping just five or six hours but successfully pushing away the urge to nap in between anyway. As a result, of a Tuesday morning, I am taking my coffee with no MCT oil, and with coconut milk instead of heavy cream, because although it has a trace of carbs it has about a fifth of the calories, and serves the same function.

Out beyond alternative coffee creamer, I also have fresh plans about what else to routinely ingest, in terms of things like tortillas, and the base of protein–more eggs and fish, a fair bit less of red meat and probably being focused on much higher quality, instead of the lowest price.

I’ve come to believe that my main health issue (yours maybe too, statistically) is a cluster of issues collectively called “metabolic syndrome“, in combination with insulin resistance, and that these things are best remediated by continuing to evolve these plans, using strategies that are sometimes in direct conflict with the scientistic ‘prevention’ advice in that link.

These diet and related lifestyle strategies are effecting changes in every other aspect of my living besides, in at least two directions. Upstream of them, my meditations on the lies of Civ are crystallizing into a deeper understanding of the centrality of Class (power, ‘equality’, money, ‘success’) in how the world really works. On the downstream, the overstuffed piles of crap in my house continue to ever so slowly melt–I’m much more inclined in any given moment to just throw shit away. (‘Huh. These last few packets of Emergen-C don’t actually do much for the taste of my electrolyte water, aaand checking the ingredients, they’re mostly maltodextrin anyway, which I definitely don’t want. Trash!’) … like that.

Further and further away from this shit and all it represents.

Down through the rapids and closer and closer to the vain but warming hope of some uncertain thing like this instead.

I’m throwing those images out too, straight into the recycling bin of a kind of art, not because it helps, but because it is the right thing to do in the moment. The right thing is to figure out what a Wagon Farmhand might truly be, moving up the wash, further from the hiss and from slavery and the bad rich corrupt cops that run the society I’ve been born into.

In the midst of working smart and hard I spent a few minutes starting to write a short story about Thoth, who might or might not be my brother.

Tracking the one true Muse down into the Bonfires of the Bronx.

Trampling barefoot these grapes, of wrath.

***

I also listened to a season’s worth of podcast about Peter Bogdanovich, because I’ve never seen a movie he directed that I didn’t like, and because more than one of them I’ve loved dearly. Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show leap immediately to mind.

From that experience and the rabbit holes it led to, I mined out a few more lies drilled into our heads by the rich bad cops until we learned each word of them in our tortured hearts, and believed them without question, becoming accomplices in our own individual enslavements.

Lies such as: pairing off into monogamous heterosexual partnerships is normal (as in, it happens to most people) and correct, and worth aspiring to, and right.

I have been so beaten over the head with that one; with the related ones about what a man is supposed to be and especially in relation to a woman. Christ I’ve been so … warped by it.

Maybe it was true for a moment in Dubuque or some idealized Pocatello for five minutes in the dead center of the 40s or 50s.

Among the creatives, in and around Hollywood and New York and probably most places, none of it was ever the norm for a moment.

Infidelity and Divorce, Bisexuality and the Homo kind too, dozens of sexual partners, vast yawning age gaps (especially older men with younger women), polyamory in the context of both open and supposedly closed marriages. Separate residences, spreading one’s seed across the earth and bearing multiple children with numerous partners (here’s looking at you, my father, my uncle, and at you Clint Eastwood and John Lee Hooker too).

‘Perversions’ of every color.

All of this much closer, to The Norm, to what was the case for most live people most of the time, probably for most times in an oh-so-civilized western society.

I come out of it saying, almost shouting, once more in yet another context: Don’t hold me to your dumb false standard!

And especially don’t try to tell me that I should live up to it (should do anything, be anything) because that’s how people are; good people, ethical people, normal people.

It’s all bullshit my dear.

It’s what they want you to believe about the world, because holding on to dumb beliefs of that kind makes you easier to control, and makes you a slave to them and their shit all over again.

I Ate 100 EGGS In 7 Days: Here’s What Happened To My CHOLESTEROL

There’s a key point in this video about why “following the science” in the modern world is not the right thing for a truly smart person to do.

Why? Because science is made up of studies, and if even the most rigorous study doesn’t show the results that the funders and Owners of it want that study to show …

It gets buried instead of promoted, out to other scientists, much less to the media that you end up reading, about whether wine or coffee or covid shots are good for you.

For this reason among others, nine out of ten studies never get published.

So when you Follow the other 10% that do, you are in fact not Following Science–you are only following the Science that the people with the Deep Pockets want you to follow.

And thus you will be led astray.

More: What If It Was 5 Eggs A Day (instead of 15), but For 30 Days?

***

Today the Supreme Court hears a case on whether governments can ban “sleeping outdoors in public”, even if there are no alternatives for shelter. The link is to a nice ‘balanced’ take on that story.

I don’t feel very balanced about it though.

Maybe that’s just me.

In the latest episode of The Rewilding Podcast we find out what modern-day hunter-gatherers think about the idea of going to war, or ‘dying for your country’ (thanks for your service and all …)

And, as a bonus, about the idea of going to dental school.

The whole thing is good but I’m linking you to the timestamp near the end where these specific things are discussed.

What is a Subsistence Economy and What Makes Them So Resilient w/ Dr. Helga Vierich

What I love about conversations like this is that they don’t really have anything to do with labels (“I’m an anarchist! A green one! A primitivist!”), or anything to do with prescriptions for utopia either. (“You anprims want everyone else to die!”)

All they’re about is calmly noticing how deeply and maybe irretrievably fucked up our allegedly civilized and corporatized lives are, and talking together about how we might live differently, and better, against all the odds.

Starting with the radical act of stopping ourselves from buying shit, or as Helga says, even food, to the extent possible in any given life.

You heard that they finally figured out the scheme to shovel $60 billion more ‘at Ukraine’.

Maybe you cheered.

79% of that money is going straight to American industrialists, aka Eisenhower’s ‘military industrial complex’.

Source: The not-Speaker-for-too-much-longer called Mike Johnson

Please don’t worry about him, though. He’s set for life, being the hero who passed the bill that was 80 percent pure pork, another “ten percent for the big guy”, and then the scraps which will do the people of Ukraine exactly zero good, and probably a whole hell of a lot of harm in the end.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

–W.B. Yeats

Despair makes young US men more conservative ahead of US election, poll shows

A very insightful seventeen minutes of video from Due Dissidence.

I would add that for men in general, the answer is not so much retrenching into America-First (and keeping-what’s ‘mine’) as it is just saying fuck it, outta here, to the whole idea of trying to go on living in this hateful and hypocritical mess of a society.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“They have tricked you into thinking
that choosing your own Massa
is the same as being free.”

from Jones Plantation, a film allegory talking about voting, slavery and ‘democracy’

Damn straight. But that’s not why I’m here now.

***

The wall panels are basically just glued up there. There are cute little framing pieces (top center) that it seems are just glued too. Behind this, so far as I’ve dared to go, there’s just regular drywall–obviously it’s been cut though, doubtless for accessing the guts of the water system just like I need to do.

So far so good. It might be that since the panels are not actually the wall, I can tear them away and still not open the pipes to the frolics of kittens in the middle of the night.

(I take my waking slow.)

Also, if my luck holds, I might not have to spend $45 apiece on new panels. When I’m done, I can smear on drywall patch and paint, right? Maybe.

I wonder why the original wallcutters didn’t do that themselves; hmm?

My wonderings will be addressed in time with the experience.

***

As the film trailer indicates, I’m finding myself in strange corners of the Internets, trying to have something interesting to listen to while I work.

Strange corners of my own archives as well.

Here for instance is a picture I took deep inside the Carlsbad Caverns toward the end of last year.

Speaking of lily white and squeaky clean.

The new young pretty blonde articulate head of NPR is an absolutely perfect example.

Her role is to take a perfectly good and even laudable theory (relativism, in this case), and turn it to the service of a perfectly evil end. The clickbait headline gets it almost right:

NPR’s New CEO Is The Epitome of EVIL!

No, guys. Sorry. She’s not evil, per se, although she’s very definitely not one of the Good People as she would like you to believe she is.

What you mean is that her career and her life’s work consists of taking (even good or at least good-sounding) ideas–and perverting them to do the devil’s own work.

And now she runs, for fuck’s sake, poor old broken NPR; gods help those poor deluded fools.

***

I want to point out two other theological points on which I find myself a little off the beaten path compared to the people I listen to regularly and admire in the alternative media. Both of them are more concrete than this one above–maybe I got myself a case of, um, different Truth. (Which by the way is not the same as ‘alternative facts’.)

The host here, Jimmy Dore, is more or less on board with the idea now that climate change is a hoax being foisted upon us by the billionaire and PMC classes, for their own profit, and to get the masses comfortable with the idea of having less and less. (Climate Czar John Kerry criss-crossing the globe in his private jet going to meetings where he bloviates about the average person’s carbon footprint and how that is what’s killing us all. ‘It’s not a Chinese hoax. It’s an oligarch hoax.’)

Most of the people I listen to regularly have evolved similar views on the climate question.

They’re not all the way wrong. They’ve just reached a consensus point of being half-right.

I believe that climate change is very real.

I also believe that our real hidden Masters, and their lavishly paid spokesmodels like this new NPR head, are absolute experts at taking real truths and twisting them to fit an agenda that Power can slap average people around with.

If you watched Planet of the Humans, you know very well that people like Al Gore and Bill McKibben are making truckloads of money, decade after decade, by preaching about things like solar energy and electric cars.

But spending big on a Tesla or an acre of windmills for your home is not going to save you, or your children, or anyone else.

It’s just going to make the fat cats fatter and enable a robustly greenwashed version of capitalism–which idolizes overconsumption and endless growth. The ideology as Ed Abbey said, of the cancer cell.

There’s another example hidden in there too. The planet really is vastly overpopulated with human animals. It’s an undeniable fact, and just like climate change, it will have to be reckoned with someday, and that reckoning will be a real catastrophe for a whole lot of people.

Doubtless it will be much easier, in broad general terms, on the rich than the poor.

Maybe John Kerry’s kids will continue to jet around the world even as it burns below them.

But the fact that self-serving rich people preach out of one side of their mouths about the climate does not make the whole thing a hoax in any way at all.

***

The other big thing right now is the gender binary.

The alternative media, prodded along by stories of doctors and shrinks making tons of money from peddling trans solutions to confused and vulnerable adolescents, and stories about idiots wanting to fuck up women’s sports by competing against women while wearing large hairy bodies, have retreated into the gospel of only two genders. ‘You’re a boy or you’re a girl, end of story’!

Horse paste, bitches.

Like any proper woman, and no official man ever, I personally wear two X chromosomes, along with a Y hanging around that makes me tall and rather more muscular.

I am literally, chromosomally, and god bless us scientifically a third gender.

I don’t want to use the other bathroom. I don’t want to ‘identify’ as a woman, even though I have every biological and moral right to do so. I don’t want to play in the WNBA.

Gross doctors and whimpering teen victims don’t turn transgenderism into a hoax, and no amount of shrill stories can make the hardcore gender binary into anything even close to a Truth.

That’s all I have to say today by way of the promised second example.

***

One more thing, speaking of NPR.

I heard a quick hit today on their air, during the state news, about the BLM trying to open up some of their allegedly public lands to Restoration Projects, and I thought: Well damn, maybe that’s a way to live on, remediate, and actually help those abused parcels to be restored to something a little more … Anaprim, yeah?

I was dreaming of course.

The short version is that this is just a big pissing contest between extractive capitalists like ranchers, and woke capitalists like ‘solar energy companies’. The corrupt reds versus the corrupt blues.

How nice it would be to live in a world where we could settle some of the homeless among us, the tired and the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, out on pretty but greed-damaged land, and everybody could anarchically win.

But that’s neither real nor true.

Longer version follows, with a link to the full story.

***

BLM to finalize rule allowing federal leases targeted at protection of natural areas
BY: JACOB FISCHLER – APRIL 18, 2024

… It also creates two new types of leases focused on protecting natural areas. The BLM already leases parcels of land for extractive industries including energy development, mining and livestock grazing.

The rule is likely to set off a conflict in Congress, where Republicans immediately on Thursday renewed their criticism of President Joe Biden’s conservation policies.

In a deviation from the March 2023 draft rule that proposed a new category of conservation leases, the final rule will allow two new types of leases: restoration and mitigation.

Restoration leases will be “a tool for investment in the health of our public lands” an agency fact sheet reads. Lessees would be empowered to work to restore lands, including those impacted by other uses.

Similarly, mitigation leases would be a tool to offset the impacts of other BLM land uses. The agency said an example could be a solar power company that has a facility on BLM land may receive a mitigation lease to restore nearby habitat to mitigate the impact of its development.

The rule is in line with BLM’s multiple-use mandate that requires balancing energy development, mining, recreation and other uses on the nation’s public lands, the agency said.

(Fuck your mandate with a sharp stick, bureaucrats.)

***

The Mountain Pact, a coalition of local leaders from Western states, released a statement praising the rule.

“The BLM’s Public Lands Rule highlights the need for the agency to work with local communities to focus on the conservation of land, water, and wildlife to ensure communities can protect future access to federal public lands while combating the growing impacts of climate change,” Patrice Horstman, the chair of the Coconino County, Arizona, Board of Supervisors, said in the statement.

David Willms, associate vice president for public lands at the National Wildlife Federation, said in a written statement the rule gives BLM “new tools to restore and conserve degraded lands, while supporting robust local economies. The rule will help the agency identify intact landscapes that wildlife depend on for survival, which will ensure that they thrive for decades to come.”

***

Republicans on the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee approved a bill, sponsored by Utah Republican John Curtis, last year to block the rule from taking effect. The legislation has not received a vote from the full House.

“This rule from the Biden Administration undermines the very people who rely on our federal lands for ranching, grazing, recreation, and beyond,” Curtis said in a Thursday release.

******

Soooo much difference between the Crips and the Bloods. Soooo very important to vote for the good people and frown at the bad ones, and to point and laugh at the crazy ones from some other underpowered gang.

Talk about your shithole countries.

This place sucks ass six ways to Sunday.

You run along and do-right and vote your troubled conscience now, pumpkin. If I don’t come back soon tell them to look for what the coyotes left of me up the wash, and I’ll be happy to never have to listen to ‘the news’ ever again.

Maybe you care and maybe you don’t.

I’m very interested in the question.

Holding On To The Empire

The scintillating point in the first half hour is that We Can’t Make It Here Anymore.

It starts in school, where we graduate a shrinking number of engineers relative to the emerging world.

Then those engineers are incentivized to make apps for phones instead of anything real or consequential.

They go to work for companies that care about nothing but profit, and those companies set up the rules so that it’s illegal to not-profit for a higher cause, like back during the good war.

They vote for whatever buffoon promises to keep this gravy train running for them all, regardless of the consequences.

They become influencers who care passionately about things like abortion and who can use which bathroom.

The world moves on behind them and then past them.

We’re living it right here now today.

I don’t hate the Chinese immigrant who took my job.

No, I hate the man who sent my job away, all lily white and squeaky clean.

Oh no, his kids won’t bleed in the war that inevitably crashes the hegemony.

They say some people just want to watch the world burn.

Some days, these days, I can see where they’re coming from; where they’re going to.

From the previous picture you can see that behind the toilet is drywall …

Which I don’t want to have to cut into, unless it was strictly necessary.

It isn’t.

This is the other, ‘living room’ side of that same wall.

You’re looking at a 4×8 piece of thin wall paneling, which is worth about $45 at the current brand-new price. I will likely be paying it, for at least one panel, because this is how I’m going to get into the heart of the utility known as running water, and replace the pipe and the valve and the hose behind the toilet.

Even if I didn’t have to do it this way (though I believe I do), I want to expose what is under this existing panel to my own personal inspection anyway–to finally have a complete understanding of how water enters the house, gets routed to sinks and the shower and all the rest, and then is drained away down to the sewers after being used, to wash bodies or clothes or dishes, or evaporate from the AC unit … or whatever.

There’s another exciting possibility, down there at the lower left.

Whoever put this system together long ago wanted a bathtub, just like I do.

I deeply doubt whether they actually ever had that functionality. Because … shouldn’t the tub drain be much lower, and the hot and cold water faucets higher? I hypothesize thusly, but maybe ripping out the panel will enlighten me on that score as well.

I will then have the basic knowledge necessary to begin planning for that hot dream of a long soak in my own place (if not yet the resources to make that dream a reality–someday).

Among other things, God alone knows what else is going to need to be replaced underneath there, and what that might cost.

I would tear down the panel today and start to find out, except for one thing, named Lexi the very curious Cat.

Instead I’m going to go do my walk, and meditate upon what I can do about that problematic little furball at this very early preliminary stage of the Project.

Rightbaby, I’ve put my finger on the ultimate issue WRT the utilities problem.

It is: that the water to the toilet can’t fully be shut off from inside, because this valve and hose are not completely holding it back, and need to be replaced.

It’s very likely that to do that, I’m going to have to go into the wall.

Then one fine Wednesday I will need to

–call the city to come shut off water at the main (they forbid owners doing this themselves, although I would very much like sometime to install another valve this side of their meter to regain my independence …),
–dry up the toilet manually and then remove it,
–determine exactly what new parts are needed and run 50 miles to obtain them,
–come back and install the new parts of the system, and,
–call the city to come turn the water back on.

None of that has anything to do with the blockage in the sewer/drain system that started all this. So while the toilet is safely pulled, I will simultaneously need to diagnose and remediate that whole thing, which may turn this into a two or three day job.

Not to mention that during that time with the toilet out of my way, I will very much want to re-patch the wall, paint it, and lay down the very first of the new flooring, around the base of it, Pergo at 2.29 per square foot at the least, although I could start with as little as 16 square feet, forty bucks worth for that part, not counting the cost of things like moisture barrier, caulking, and Henry’s Feather Finish (and/or Unipro) for liquid leveling of the ancient plywood subfloor.

Yeah.

It’s no walk down the wash. It’s no gloriously trendy vanlife conversion.

But it needs doing and there’s no one else but me to do it.

Out beyond Rafah and Damascus and Ocheretyne, this is what my real life consists of now.

The Biggest Mistakes Everyone Makes When Cracking Eggs

Toilet Seal Replacement – Wax or Danco?

How To: Choose the right flooring for your home (laminate, and maybe specifically Pergo–it’s waterproof)

How To Prep Wood Subfloor for Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring for Beginners

I’ve been studying my utilities. Where they come into the house, what walls they flow down inside, and what needs to happen first to fix the existing problems.

I have a pretty good sense of the gas and the electric and the water.

But I still need to understand the drainage systems.

And what to do about flooring.

Yes really.

As in: the rules-based international order. I’m sure you’ve heard the term flung around. There’s always Wikipedia, but maybe you want to know what it actually means.

David Cameron is here to explain.

The rules don’t apply to the people who make the rules.

Corporate media is chock full of spin right now, about Israel’s glorious defense.

Here’s what actually happened:

“The Dome” COMPLETELY FAILED! – Scott Ritter

The headline is clickbait, but in the important senses, it’s also true.

The “99%” of missiles that were shot down were mostly decoys.

Iran did not use its most serious threat, i.e., hypersonic missiles. But it did show what would happen if they did. It’s not a secret or a guess anymore, what would happen if Netanyahu expanded his bloody and lopsided little war against the babies of Palestine.

We wouldn’t have to argue any more about whether Israel had a “right to exist”, because …

It just wouldn’t.

***

On a more personal note, six-year-old Hind Rajab is my sister now and for always, even though she’s gone now.

Her story is here. It’s posted on Rumble because YouTube doesn’t want you to know about her. Go straight to the ten-minute mark of the video if she’s all you want to know.

The Ukrainian 25th And 67th Brigades Will Be Disbanded.

I’ve been watching the “Special Military Operation” very closely for over two years, and most of those two years it has been about as exciting as watching paint dry.

That is starting to change very rapidly.

The new general of generals for the plucky little defenders is finding that his troops are becoming insubordinate, and refusing at last to fight and die in hopeless battles like the one about to go down in Chasov Yar.

I would probably do the same in their shoes. Things are going from bad to worse like a downhill snowball gathering mass, fatefully.

His response has been to sack commanders, and now to dissolve groups of soldiers (the story of the 67th brigade is especially interesting) and salvage what he can from them.

Meanwhile, the witless President of France is rattling his saber and threatening to invade.

Meanwhile, the Empire is deadlocked over how many more billions to pump into the debacle, mostly to its own contractors and donors, before everything comes crashing down.

Meanwhile, some hockey team made the playoffs, and Iran bombed Israel back last night.

Meanwhile, I reached a state of detente and grace with my own plumbing and electrical systems here in the casita far away.

The weekend was neither fun nor productive in any usual sense. I worked hard, but not very smart, for about 36 hours. ‘

I did learn some things though.

… regarding the intermittent cleanwater flooding of the bathroom, from the bottom of the toilet.

It seems, after all that, that yes, the seal does need to be replaced. Eventually, so will the shutoff or faucet valve at the back of the tank, and both of those small jobs will require shutting off the water (and that means that on shutting-off day, I should probably replace the kitchen faucet too.)

But neither one of those things was really the source of the ultimate problem.

Instead, somewhere down deep, there’s a partial obstruction of wastewater exiting the house down one of the sewer lines.

The only part of the infrastructure that creates a serious problem is the clothes washer. What happens is, when it tries to expel a tub full of rinse water in a hurry and all at once, it can’t. There’s instead a lot of backpressure exerted. The shower upchucks itself, which is slightly gross though not catastrophic.

But the other weak point is that toilet seal, and that’s semi-catastrophic.

I was mopping it up with towels, and then washing the towels. In the washer.

Thus, I created an endless and problematic loop.

It was (new hypothesis) in fact clean rinsewater that was really flooding the floor, via the sketchy toilet seal.

It took me a ridiculously long time to work all this out, and to be enlightened: the very-short-term solution, I now believe, is to quit doing loads of wash on-site.

Since I quit, a few hours ago, no problems. I’m also fairly sure now that I can turn the water supply to the toilet back on (using the ancient knob carefully), and use it as per normal without further incident.

Same with the now-recleaned shower.

Midafternoon Sunday, I did some reconnaissance on the old laundromats, and cashed in the first five dollars ever of my first socsec check on quarters. If I’m willing to haul wet clothes back home to my fully functional dryer, it shouldn’t be too much fuss, should it?

Truly fixing things right will be, though, for sure.

I think I’m going to be absolutely okay with that.

Maybe at length I’ll even get a bathtub out of the ordeal.

That would be a little slice of heaven.

So disinformation is Truth, that helps people We don’t like, or gets people (justifiably) upset.

And if you spread such truth, we won’t hesitate to throttle you, ban or shadowban you, or otherwise limit who can even see your words and thoughts.

Okay! At least we now understand the rules of this ugly effed-up game.

More. (The conclusions at the end are themselves [in my view] upsetting truths, hereinafter known as wholesome and delicious disinfo.)

Orthodox Israeli scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) was once asked whether he would consider living outside Israel. Leibowitz allegedly responded that, no, he would not, one reason being that Israel was the only place he could live where he never had to celebrate Purim.

Thus he never had to read the Megillah nor drink to celebrate an act of bloody revenge — that time we killed Haman, his sons and 75,000 of the Jews’ enemies throughout the ancient Persian empire.

In typical fashion, Leibowitz cut to the chase. Purim is essentially about the celebration of violence.

Let us not forget that on Purim we drink to celebrate blotting out the nation of Amalek …

Shaul Magid, March 10, 2014, in Forward Magazine (“Jewish. Independent. Nonprofit.”)

I was inspired to search out an Israeli perspective on this by something rather shocking that I heard Scott Ritter say.

And though his soul might be less than pretty on any number of levels, it’s hard to see how he’s fundamentally wrong in the end.

The events of the past six months have begun to convince me that I can indeed be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic (a race thing) or even anti-Judaism (a religion thing). I can legitimately hate Netanyahu. I can legitimately hate that half, or two-thirds, of Israelis who voted for him, and even now still support the policy of apartheid and genocide against the Palestinians.

Beyond all that theology, I have come to believe that the evil attack on the Damascus consulate was a last-ditch attempt by Netanyahu to try and provoke a retalitation that would drag big old America into a wider war against Iran.

And further, that due to an unbelievable degree of restraint on Iran’s part (despite the token show of missiles happening today), that this last-ditch effort is going to fail.

Both Bibi and dear fuddled Joe Biden are very much out of good options; damned whether they do or don’t.

Which makes these first pretty days of true spring into a very, very dangerous time for the human world.

An especially good episode of Christofouru’s podcast.

Realistically cynical takes with regard to the Ukrainian adventure, the possibility of war with Iran, and the chances that Old Joe will free Julian Assange by way of throwing a bone to the same youngish and leftish types in the electorate that hate him over the genocide.

***

His friend and colleague Alexander Mercouris also puts out a show daily, typically twice the length and less easy to listen to (he’s a rambler and a bit of a repeater). Today he made the point that the tail called Israel and the wagged dog that sponsors it have been desperately trying to provoke Iran into doing something stupid (most recently by a terrorist bombing of its consulate in a whole third country), and that since Iran continues to live virtually unprovoked even so, the Israelis might soon attack Iran directly, out of some evil form of frustration.

***

Their collaboration project is called The Duran. Often here they are interviewing third parties at length, and there are some brilliant interviews. IMHO.

***

There’s also The Jimmy Dore Show, and its increasing cross-pollination with the gentlemen from Due Dissidence.

And rounding out the best of the daily best is Glenn Greenwald’s project, System Update.

All of the links above go to the versions on Rumble, rather than YouTube, but to the best of my recollection all of them except the last one are also still available on YT. I would just rather do the bulk of my viewing on not-YouTube, when and where I can.

Keeping up with all these shows leaves me vulnerable to accusations of being one of those witless old people that spends all day listening to propaganda of the MSNBC or Fox kind.

If you are inclined to thus accuse, well, be my guest. And I will be yours, in the matter of continuing to do what I do without living in fear of being such a stereotype.

I do walk, you know. And I’m rabidly keto, and a content creator as well as consumer … I’ll be me. You be you. And not much of it will matter in the end anyway.

X (Twitter) declares “War” on Brazil

Elon Musk DEFIES Brazil’s Censorship-Crazed Supreme Court Justice!

Or, if you want the best understanding of what this has to do with the censorship situation in America:

Elon Musk Goes to War with Brazil’s Censorship Regime

This is a petrified log, about 40 feet long and about 25 miles from my house.

This is an Aubergine Mesa Trail, about a mile long and about 25 miles to my door.

And this is the seed of a plan.

It will cost 20 or 25 dollars in gas each time to get out to these places of extraordinary beauty, do my daily hoof there, maybe film while I’m at it.

After today I am no longer destitute, but still, seven gallons worth is too expensive for everyday.

Maybe more like once every week or two, I’ll be able to afford it for a night, or two. (There are very limited truck-camping options and I have at least one very limited truck-camper.)

I can and will spend on that much, and make the most of it, and fill in with walking the Leroux or the Colorado Pequeno closer to home for average quotidian purposes. Yea, even unto the Fragment and the more citified ducks.

Whatever it takes.

Always striving.

The secular religion of the Commander offered the son (and the daughter) of man a choice between becoming a leader in the System or becoming a mere follower of it.

There was also a third choice, but it was false–only a crusty gag; to wit:

‘Lead, follow, or … get the hell out of the way!’ (of the System and Its priorities).

Most among us chose the Leadership path, as obviously more rewarding. Some followed, for a time, and then veered into the lead to varying degrees for varying segments of the life journey …

In practical terms I myself Followed–not without surliness, and most definitely with the intention that following was only a means to an end.

The end was the promised land of Valhalla, of permanent and enduring Helloutta, The Way.

With firm politeness I turned down every chance I was offered to join the Leadership.

I followed the follower’s end until it was finally and truly a dead one. (The System grew up around me even in the remotest places I’d deliberately chosen, until nowhere could be found an option any more to be anything but a good submissive follower or a bold leader fully embracing the System in all its satanic glories.)

In the stasis that resulted I became obsessed all over again with refining and defining what it meant to grasp the joke option with seriousness, with tracing the exact location and boundaries of the hell-out, of the Way.

Hell-out is also helot, from the Greek halonai: “taken captive, conquered, imprisoned, enslaved”, or maybe at best reduced to a kind of spartan serf.

But I would argue that a better word for it is lumpenprole, which the man who coined the term said meant “the rabble, poorest of the working class,” and “who make (he further sniffed) no contribution to the workers’ cause”.

Partly this is because I see the dedicated Followers, and most of the Leaders too, as the real slaves. The house negroes on the plantation called the System. And while Karl Marx (and maybe you too) would violently disagree with me about that, I have Malcolm X on my side, so I say:

Whatever, Mr. Manifesto.

I consciously choose not to be defined as a ‘Worker’.

Thanks anyway.

But enough about me.

I’ve been selfish just like daddy was.

This is a letter to you. For you.

***

The System did not work for the first father, for my father. He did not work for the System.

Amen.

I am my father’s first and only legitimate son, the only one to bear both his names, and though we all were, each and every one, accursed of his seed, I alone still bear that curse.

When I die, it dies with me. I am the last.

Because you were saved.

Redeemed.

In the blood of the Commander and the blood shed of his System, and by his self-fulfilling Philosophy that transcended all Jehovahs and the divine right of all usurping mortal kings.

Brothers. Sisters. Countrymen.

Lend me your ears.

Brutus says that Caesar was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honorable man.

(Now then let it work
Mischief, run thee
underfoot; take thou
whatever course thou wilt.)

***

Those for whom the System works–those whom It advantages–are bent by It to see It favorably, and to wave away any discussion of Its potential faults, and even (perhaps especially) suggestions about Its fundamental unfairness and immorality. Even Its evil.

The more the System sees fit to reward people, in terms of economics and creature comforts, the more likely it is that those same rewarded people will be happy with, praise, and defend the System regardless of its failings. (“Common pleasures to walk abroad and recreate yourselves”, in the further oratory of Mark Antony.)

The more likely they will be, to fly Old Glory from their porches on the Fourth.

And to believe against the evidence of their own senses that this is still a democracy, and thus believe their vote somehow still matters.

The lesser the rewards, the more the dissatisfaction and discontent.

Fewer and fewer people are becoming less and less advantaged, regardless of how slavishly devoted they are to the System and trying to become leaders of It, or followers within It.

At the same time, the gap between the rewarded and the unrewarded is growing ever more vast.

Forty hours a week at average wages no longer buys you a roof and a pot to piss in, in most cities and states. You need to be rewarded more amply than is common, just to survive. And gods be praised–you have been. You have a house, and it is a nice one, doubtless well-deserved.

Meanwhile: Wealth of Top 1% SOARS To $44 TRILLION (for comparison, the GDP of the entire US is 25 trillion). The top ten percent own 67% of all wealth.

And if an honest parent cannot feed their kids, well, that’s just a damn shame. They should have studied harder, or been born luckier.

This is what best explains Trump.

It’s not that the People are stupid, lazy, toothless, incestuous, deplorable, and dumb, out there in the red states, even if there may be a grain of truth in these propagandist stereotypes that have been relentlessly beaten into your head in a thousand ways usually too subtle to notice.

It is that, on the one hand, that they are simply not finding a way to attain the kind of rewards they’ve been led to expect for selling their labor and souls to Moloch the Lord of the System … and on the other hand, the kindly facade of the Empire has steadily and relentlessly crumbled away.

“The american People are starting to feel the pain“, the same pain that their owners have endlessly inflicted on the rest of the world behind their backs for their entire lives in the name of security, democracy, and hegemony.

It is the pain of the People, inflicted by the System, that will lead to the Orange Man’s second term seven months from now.

We know now, what the System has been doing all over the world for decades, mostly to poor, brown, and powerless people in order to amass ‘our’ wealth and make possible ‘our’ god-granted standard of living. (And the hicks want their cut just like we demand ours.)

We know now, that It lies–they lie, those leaders of leaders–as a matter of habit.

We know now, that the System murders without apology or even conscience when it suits the interests of the System to do so. That we are owned by psychopaths.

We know now, that the rulers of the System, ‘our’ rulers, are all of them ugly stupid hypocritical Massas or house slaves, and sometimes we might even feel a twinge of guilt for sharing in that very hypocrisy.

This knowing can’t be reversed into unknowing no matter how hard we try.

So even the most blessed of us fly our dirigibles in a thick fog of cognitive dissonance, every endless day and every long night, a shuddering vortex of a very civilized madness with no way out. It gets hotter and hotter, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.

We buy pretty things. We try to steer to the pretty places and float up the cliff faces.

What pain of it our brains can’t handle goes into our feet or our lungs or our eyes, and then right back into our brains anyway like an addictive spike shoved deep in the medulla, a prisoner’s shiv that we personally crafted and sharpened with love.

***

Falling on a termite.

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral.

Yo bring it on down.

For this one day.

Afghanistan War Whistleblower Roundtable

The only really legitimate way to Work Within The System is to resist from within, and to be willing to call the System on its bullshit when that becomes necessary.

The two men on the panel here did that, in the context of the Afghanistan misadventure.

There are many really golden moments here.

As when they mention that most of the people they knew who also did right “are working at Hobby Lobby now”. If they’re lucky. Plenty of them are in prison. (While the guilty and those too cowed to do anything but shut up and follow get promoted.)

As when they mention that the evil of the System evolves: We don’t have Vietnams anymore; we have proxy wars instead, with the same goals, for the same reasons.

The System is built to keep the System running the way it has always run, for the benefit of those who have always run it.

Get in their way, pay the price.

Fail to get in their way and you have to live with that.

Those are your choices in our brave modern land of liberty.

South winds 30 to 40 mph
with gusts 55 to 65 mph.

hurricane-force wind
US:hûr′i kān′fôrs′ wind′
‘wind, not necessarily a hurricane, having a speed of more than 72 mph’

Some of the shingle sheeting ended up on the ground.

And the Starlink blew off the top of the van. The dish hit the cement. Without much optimism, I crawled back out into the storm and screwed it down this time. It’s working fine.

Good job, Elon.

While we were spending our moments trying to not get blown away, the rest of the world kept rolling along. For now.

My dream died, and now I’m here

I feel you, sister.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a real woman and a real physicist. She is geographically and temperamentally German. Her talents took her to universities and research foundations, not just backwoods community colleges. All of this is to say that she and I have almost nothing in common. Except: that we both once believed in Academia as Sanctuary, which used to be a rational and dare I say scientific belief–and both of us were caught in the cultural undertow which made that hypothesis false in the end.

Jose Vega Is Going To WAR With The Democratic Establishment!

Mr. Vega is a 25-year-old man from the Bronx, who sees far more clearly than most anyone else his age I’ve ever heard. Myself included.

Our diagnoses and prescriptions are not perfectly aligned. He retains some faith in democracy and especially the electoral process. He is a believer in civilization and progress.

But I hope he wins.

***

Biden (finally) says support for Israel is not guaranteed, after strike on aid workers

Or to put it another way: “Biden Is Pissed” at Netanyahu!” Says U.S. Official; pissed because even that sluggish malfunctioning old brain is beginning to realize that Israeli atrocities are going to cost him a second term.

All atrocities are not created equal of course. Biden, and the Western media writ large, are saying nothing at all about Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus (a violation of the Vienna Convention to pair well with the many shits they’ve taken on the one from Geneva).

Hospitals being leveled only results in more clucking and hand-wringing.

Thousands of dead Palestinian babies? Man, that’s gotta be tough.

But now that Bibi has murdered seven white western liberals, that finally moved Biden all the way to issuing a strongly worded letter.

Like the spineless pawn he has been all his life.

Joe, if you actually wanted a ceasefire like you say, it’s really very simple.

Seventy percent of the munitions being used to murder innocent people come directly from America. The rest, ‘we’ just help pay for.

Stop sending the bombs, Joe.

The killing stops the moment you do. Fuck the mealy-mouthed admonitions and the grave looks on your drooling face.

Stop sending the bombs.

Oh wait, you’re not doing that.

You will not do that, either.

Not for aid workers. Not for mass genocide. Not for dead kids.

I’d be willing to bet that if Israel bombed a US warship and killed 34 American troops, (oh and thank you so much for your service) you’d keep right on sending bombs anyway.

Because that is what the America you rule stands for, and has stood for these fifty years and more.

No, you ugly bag of doddering shit. You don’t get my vote. Not ever again. Please pass that sentiment along to handsome gavin and little petey bootygig too.

***

Meanwhile, questions are emerging about the organization who got bombed, killing those seven.

Why Palestinians don’t trust World Central Kitchen

I’m not going to go into it too deeply now. But I will say this much.

The next time you find yourself wanting to send money to an NGO of this kind, much less hungering to head for Poland and become a Aid Worker yourself …

For the love of God, understand in some very deep way who you’re helping to fund, or working with, and who else is funding them, and exactly, precisely Why.

The British and the Russians combined forces two centuries ago to defeat Napoleon and save Europe.

So why then has England viciously hated Russia ever since they were both monarchies in the 1840s?

It turns out that it is exactly the same reason that the US hates China now.

Basing his remarks on a book from 1970, Professor Sachs explains both phenomena to you in four minutes.

***

Which may lead you in the direction of starting to believe that the Empire is already at war, with Russia, with China, and with Iran besides.

A couple of weeks back, “a high-ranking delegation of US officials“, a real cracker barrel of a brain trust, visited the African country of Niger, with the purpose of insisting that Niger quit playing nice with Russia and Iran.

The Nigeriens (as opposed to Nigerians, from Nigeria) responded that the US was not the boss of them.

When the Americans chuckled and continued to insist that they sure were, Niger told them to get the fuck out.

Not just the high-ranking officials. Oh no.

But all 1000 US soldiers and half as many ‘Pentagon’ spooks, who had taken up residence in the country to keep an eye on the interest of US corporations there–for the last twelve years–business as usual for the Empire.

Surveying the diplomatic wreckage, US Ambassador to Niger Kathleen Fitzgibbon commented that ‘Washington’ had ‘taken note’ of the unhappy ‘decision’, and that she would be “coming back with a plan” on the specific “methods of disengaging” to be pursued.

No word yet on whether that will include shutting down their military base in the country, per the wishes of the Niger government, but said government quickly scheduled lots more meetings.

With Chinese diplomats, and “executives from the China National Petroleum Company”, an enterprise that has “invested billions in Niger’s petroleum industry”.

***

I think the Americans and the other Western powers should get used to this sort of thing happening in the global South.

Fifty years ago, the Americans would have assassinated the head of Niger’s government for being a commie.

Twenty years ago they would perhaps have designated the country as State Sponsors of Terrorism or some shit.

Today, with the unipolar moment fading fast, Air Force press flack Major General Pat Ryder resorted to heel-dragging, telling the media that there have been “no decisions made at this stage on the movement of US forces”.

***

Breaking: Biden’s deeply stupid Secretary of State, in Brussels for the 75th anniversary of NATO, announced that Ukraine will be joining that alliance, for sure, at some unspecified future time.

He doesn’t seem to realize that if his announcement pans out, there won’t be a Ukraine.

That in fact we’ll be lucky if there’s such a thing left as Omaha, or Yekaterinburg, or a human being that doesn’t glow in the dark.

Enjoy your evening, my dears, because god only knows how many of them are left.

(in the time of chimpanzees)

We had a father, who was a failure as a father and even a failure as a man, in spite of many manly qualities. Most especially …

The System did not work for him. He did not work for the System.

So, he never had much money. What he did have he spent badly, and his wife and children suffered for that, and for other reasons too, none of which reflected well on his character.

He had little proverbs he used to quote ad nauseum.

The one I’m thinking of was usually prefaced by him saying that it was invented by his parents.

In his telling, his parents spake to him thus:

“Well, Lawrence, if nothing else you can always serve as a bad example!”

Haw hardy haw.

In the end, it was no joke at all. The prophecy was precisely fulfilled.

He and his life were exactly that bad example, and amounted to nothing else ever.

He lives in our collective memories only as a cautionary tale.

None of us were stupid and we listened very carefully to the cautions in that paternal story.

***

Then one bright shiny day a bright shiny new adoptive father suddenly appeared as if by magic.

The System worked very well for this man, The Commander.

He worked for It, too.

In return It gave him not only plenty of money, but a trophy besides. Promotions and honors. A great big house unhappily called The Battleship, in which to abide, and entertain.

A modest secular glory. A bust in bronze, in front of some library.

Finally he ended up running a college for them, one that trained pilots and other kinds of aviation-adjacent worker bees to work in support of Itself, by which I mean in support of the self-perpetuating System, elsewise called Empire.

All of this was 40 years ago.

But in generational terms, in human hearts, it was only yesterday.

***

I was impelled along this line of thinking by something Keaton Weiss said recently.

He didn’t say it well, so I’m not going to link it or even quote it exactly, but the germ of the idea was a pure brilliant insight.

In my role as belletrist, I’m going to polish it with a purpose. In paraphrase, it goes like this.

“Those for whom the System works–those whom It advantages–are bent by It to see It favorably, and to wave away any discussion of Its potential faults, and even (perhaps especially) suggestions about Its fundamental unfairness and immorality. Even Its evil.”

(“Well, the Democratic Capitalist American System isn’t perfect, you slobs; It’s just more perfect than all the others.”)

Once that much is seen, it seems so obvious, and so vast in implication.

***

The first father, the bad example, hated the System which never advantaged him …

going so far as to convert to a religion in which the System was the fruit of all evil, literally ruled by Satan.

Unfortunately it was also a religion of great moral timidity, and so while it encouraged its adherents to stay far away from The World and to participate only minimally in the System, it also preached the importance of rendering Caesar’s things to Caesar most of the time.

Thus, while most of the beliefs given to him by the religion worked for him, they gave him no legitimate outlet for his rage against the System … against the Devil. He … rendered, and he raged hotter still.

The rage came out instead through battering his wife, and abusing his children.

Unsurprisingly, when they grew up, none of them chose to continue practicing the timid and self-contradicting religion.

Besides which, since he was a natively conservative Republican, they all became, more or less, liberal Democrats. (But not, god forbid, revolutionaries.)

And most of them followed the new and improved commander father into the secular creed that worshiped the System, and preached the gospel of going to college, and working within It, and reaping the advantages that cooperating with It brings.

And of course defending It from the slanders of all hérétiques, great and small, whether those slanders were accurate, or could be dismissed as quackery; merest conspiracy.

Possibly even no more than sour grapes, whimpered by losers, don’tcha know.

***

Sí, cariño, soy un perdedor.

Ahogándose con las astillas.

Things are gonna change.

I can feel it.

Source

I can but pray to nameless gods, that there are those among you who are part of that fourteen percent drop, and not still so blind as to be among the fat third of Americans who even now suffer so deeply from cranio-rectal inversion as to approve of blatant and unrepentant genocide.

As the story points out, anything less would in fact be very Republican of you, and I know how much you would hate being tarred with that brush. You would, in fact, have to admit being on this one issue at least to the right of one Donald J. Trump.

By now even Kamala Harris has been sent forth to make weak faces of concern and vague noises of disapproval, so it might be safe for you to do the same in polite company.

Just do keep in mind that despite these grunts, whoever is really running the show in that brutal fetid administration just sent Israel a couple thousand more neighborhood-destroying bombs, along with 25 shiny new fighter jets, in plenty of time for the planned bloody adventure into Rafah later this month.

And, that both these stories are brought to you by the show informally known as Two Jewish Guys From New York Sitting Around Hating Themselves.

“Founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, World Central Kitchen (WCK) is a nonprofit organization that is first to the frontlines providing fresh meals in response to crises. Applying our model of quick action, leveraging local resources, and adapting in real time, WCK has served more than 300 million nourishing meals around the world”.

This is from their YouTube channel.

So is this.

How WCK teams support Ukrainians on the frontlines of the war

This might have been the ultimate feel-good story.

Until last night.

Tell me, my doves.

Did those seven humanitarians have anything like a “right to exist”?

Will you continue to shrug and cluck and make justifications about why their murderers should walk free and alive on this dark earth?

On the night before the payment (by which I mean the half-payment) was due, I was informed it would not be made on time. Thus in turn, naturally, mine won’t be either.

I don’t know what that will cost me, since I’ve never once been late before, but I reckon I’ll be finding out soon enough.

Probably about as much as a bag of cat litter bought on credit costs after all is said and done.

I do know that it left me feeling very done with blindly trusting anyone for anything, and I’m expecting that feeling to linger with great dependability for quite some time.

Moments later it started to rain and shortly after the rain began to freeze.

The next day I couldn’t trust the weather service either. I did go out, during the hour-long window they said it would be dry. It was not.

So instead of walking I went to the clean-water machine. It ripped me off for a dollar. It was not my very last dollar. Just the second to last.

That is not hyperbole.

The sun began to set.

In response to the gathering darkness, I did not make almond milk. I can’t afford almonds. But I did fry up a pound of buffalo hamburger and thought nice thoughts about the ones who had left it here. That was a good transaction. Pure keto too.

Skinnier and skinnier.

Then I fed all her cats, and Kali, and Riley the preening in-between boy, and I put myself to bed once more. Although I still did not have a replacement for the down quilt that one of them destroyed, I slept a very long time and I think that had something to do with the depths of my mood; tragic and wrong.

A week from Wednesday, which is ten days from now, things are alleged to start getting better.

Ten days is the farthest in advance that the weather people predict.

They say there will be a high of 62, sunny skies all day, and a low of no less than 36.

So, they say.

You are free to call him crazy on the Jab, whether that’s true or not.

I am free to agree with you about his deeply shitty policy on the genocide in Gaza.

But now he is saying things that no one else has dared to say in our lifetimes, because the last people who dared to say them, like his father and his uncle and Martin King 60 years ago, were murdered.

Because the people who own me and you as slaves didn’t want them to be known.

RFK Jr: The War Is A Money Laundering Scheme

In response you want me to join you in laughing and pointing at him for being a loon, and you want to me to join you in voting for another four years of the demented murderous slaveowner-in-chief.

With a great effort of politesse I will restrain myself from just telling you where you can shove that shit.

I will instead just say: No my kittydove.

No … thanks.

None.

“When there is occasion for my brains to think, they think, but I would be ashamed of my brains if they kept shooting out thoughts that were merely fears and imaginings, such as do no good, but are likely to do harm.”

–The one Scarecrow, speaking for myself

***

“I won’t say he is a husband to be proud of, because he has a mixed nature and isn’t always an agreeable companion. There are times when I have to chide him gently, both with my tongue and with my broomstick. But he is my husband, and I must make the best of him.”

–says the wife, Amee with a perceptible sigh about her life’s lot, in A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, Assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, Who is of course the Rainbow’s Daughter

***

Meanwhile there are the musings of the Shaggy Man, also of my self,

A boy, a man of tin or not, a Lady, a Gump, or a fairy witch

***

can dream of it.

For the last week I’ve not known how I could cover one last bill, of one hundred and sixty dollars, due on the 6th, when the flow of dependable money does not start until the 10th.

That’s how close to the bone it’s been for the last few months running.

Just now this evening I was struck by a thought: when, exactly, will the Patreon money of a little more than $160 pay out this time?

The answer is: the 5th.

So I send up a deep prayer of gratitude on the night sky to my rare Patrons.

I’m going to just make it, to the finish line, with my creditworthiness intact.

Only because of you few people and your generosity of spirit.

Thank you.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman via JD and Nigeria Today

Spread democracy harder, baby; fly that flag proudly.

While the People of the world will still let you.

Please listen most closely to what he says about corporatists as the new emperors.

Then recall the term Mussolini invented to describe the merger of the corporation and the state.

You may be forced to conclude that while the Nazis lost that good war, the fascists are with us and ruling all of our lives right now still, a lifetime later.

Then we have the insane performance at Monday’s State Department press conference by flack Matthew Miller. I repeat the question I raised in a previous article — What did the U.S. Government know and when did it know it? Miller’s “confidence” about who was not responsible is total bullshit.

In my 35 years holding clearances and dealing directly with the aftermath of terrorist events I cannot recall a single time that we had advance information about an attack that enabled us to pronounce within minutes of the attack who DID NOT set off the bomb, hijack the plane or shoot up the dance club. Yet Miller, who is a calloused liar, insists Ukraine is innocent and relies on tautology to make his case.

—Larry C. Johnson
Sonar21, 25 March 2024

I don’t believe in the legitimacy of any authority, from God on down to the darkest depths of hell here in the Empire or the shittiest hole of some other alleged country.

I don’t believe in countries.

I don’t think hierarchies or borders exist in reality; only in the minds of people, and that belief in those things, like a belief in Santa Claus, are planted in people, by other people, for purposes of reinforcing those at the top of the imaginary hierarchies and on the ‘right’ side of the lines drawn with sticks in the sand by monkeys.

I do not give my consent, to be governed.

I withhold my signature from this social contract thing.

We The People rule nothing.

Your democracy is a lie.

Capitalism means that a profit margin is built into every missile and tank and bomber, and into every ‘vaccine’.

It means that the more these weapons are used, the more will be replaced, and the greater the profits flowing to the minions of Satan.

The war machine is a self-perpetuating fiction with real and dire consequences.

Meanwhile on the ground: dog meme, cat meme.

Meanwhile on the ground the sun is shining brightly at last.

They say it will be that way for the next four days.

Sometimes they are right.