I write at 8 PM, twelve hours after waking from a long sleep. It’s been a day. A watershed day, and quite probably even a good one.

The first six orders of coffee beans are fulfilled, according to my storefront software. In the morning I will run to the PO and they will officially be on the way. That leaves three more to go (plus one for a t-shirt from Printful), and a total of seven more bags that need the roast process.

I know now that I can do that by tomorrow afternoon too.

The hardest darkest part, beyond just at last cracking the seal of the job, was finding out that my sixty dollar label printer is just a paperweight for now. But the workaround was simple–a little more packing tape carefully applied (NOT over the barcode, anywhere else is okay).

The best part was a comment from the Postmistress. When I told her that the packages contained coffee beans I roasted myself, she said, “Well that’s a skill!” … which some hungry part of me interpreted as ‘a real and plausibly manly skill’ …

… which upon reflection, I think, is close enough to accurate.

I am not just an artist now. I am a neophyte artisan and entrepreneur as well. I have a measure of purpose that does live inside me, but not just inside me. People have given me money. They have expectations. I have obligations. Not in the stupid please-the-Deam way that happens with employers. I am the employer. I employ myself. Essentially this is practical anarchism.

I still have to follow a number of the Man’s dumb-ass rules, but way fewer than I had to as a drone; even an elevated house-negro professor drone.

No one tells me when to Be At Work. I don’t need to smell a certain way. I can smoke vile weeds in my office if I want to, because it’s my office and not theirs. I am only beholden to the people who have trusted me with their fat cash money, and I’ll be responsible to them, twenty-six dollars worth of duty and value at a time, or whatever the number is.

I don’t have to write letters of recommendation for free, because I have no students and no colleagues trying to escape our mutual cellblock. I have no network.

My house smells like Nicaraguan chaff and hot caffeine.

I think it might work for me.

The Postmistress told me that there was a person here in town whose business was shipping manure.

And another person who only shipped sand from her backyard. (It was supposed to have rare minerals or something in it; the conversation was brief).

I don’t have any sand, but I’ve studied that riverbed and I know where to get it. If I need to …

I don’t need to, yet, but the point is: some people, some times, will buy anything.

I don’t know yet what-all I’ll be selling, but in the new year …

my product lines will expand, beyond t-shirts and the organic primo beans.

Solstice of winter bless me please.

Even at this late date I still don’t like Tucker very much, and he and I would still disagree violently on many things.

But Jimmy Dore and others brought him to the light in some important ways, and his Fox bosses kicked him to the curb, and made him think even more. He’s thinking hard, thinking well, and it’s interesting to listen.

He’s started doing his own stories with only a producer and cameraman in tow. He’s expanding out to a network (TCN) and enthusiastic about what he could achieve with a team of 50 or 100.

Even more significantly, Tucker Carlson (just like Glenn Greenwald) is convinced that the advertiser model of funding a news show (the way Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite did it) is dead, because advertisers can be pressured into not advertising, and that means censorship and rule by oligarchy.

What they call the ‘Subscriber Model’ is the only thing left.

Something less like NBC or YouTube, and something more like SubStack or a less squeamish Patreon.

(YouTube is cracking down on multiple new fronts. Trying [and so far failing] to ban adblockers, for example.)

They discuss why that isn’t perfect, and I’ll add a thing they didn’t mention. The System can still whack you at the credit card processor level, or freeze your bank account. It happens already and it will happen again and again.

Glenn has Rumble and Rumble is immune to it all, in the short term.

It will probably be the same for TCN, for a while yet. I don’t know if I’ll watch it, but I’m glad anyway.

***

(Same interview, on the subject of capitalism, as filtered through DueDissidence.)

Source

This guy can afford to take his sugarbabe to the Dominican Republic in the middle of his country’s valiant struggle for Democracy, because:

1) Recruiters there get paid major bribes to overlook the military-age sons of oligarchs,

while

2) Running ad campaigns and press gangs in order to fill their quotas in other ways, such as appealing to (or kidnapping) those too young, those too old, and lately even women, as cannon fodder for the money-laundering operation masquerading as a noble struggle.

The average age of the serving Ukrainian soldier is 43 years old and rising.

A holly jolly Christmas to us all.

It’s been a deeply unproductive and terrible week for me. You saw the six day hole in the Spill. You didn’t get your coffee yet. You know.

I think I am slowly beginning to understand it and I’m investigating ways to fix it. Things are a little better, very early on this Sunday morning.

I’ve been doing the keto and the intermittent fasting pretty militantly. I’ve done a minimal walk most days though not all. I’ve dropped at least four inches off my gut, and I found an ancient stash of jeans that were too small for years but fit perfectly now.

At the same time, I felt lethargic and found it hard to concentrate on the things that really matter. I’ve feared them, in some low-energy way. Early in the week I also started feeling very cold, bodily and in spirit too. Beyond all that, I didn’t feel like I was quite (all) ‘There’.

Based on that video and others, I came to self-diagnose as having a kind of the ‘keto flu’. Normally the symptoms are a drippy nose and tiredness. But some descriptions also match precisely the not-there-ness and the brain fog, which are the parts that have been hitting me hardest–even knocking me into a place of feeling and even being useless. Then that starts cycling viciously, and becoming self-fulfilling.

The answer and the fix seems to lie in the direction of medicating with electrolytes.

Yesterday was my first serious attempt to address the problem. I walked down to the market and got some basic salted beef broth. I’ve been warming it and adding lemon juice and apple cider vinegar and cayenne.

I can go through a quart in about fifteen minutes, and I have, more than once. It technically breaks the fasting and it’s worth it to me anyway at this point. I don’t feel chilled any more and even turned the thermostat back down, and took off a woolly layer. And I do already feel ever so slightly more present in my own skin.

***

What I know so far:

–Very low carb eating is doing lots of good things for my health.

–Despite the truth of the above, the way I’m doing it has left me electrolyte-impoverished and fogged my brain.

–I know pretty much nothing about electrolyte replacement, except:

1) It starts with salt.

2) Generally speaking, you want sea salt from ancient seas, mined from under the ground, rather than evaporated from the modern ocean–because modern seas are a cesspool of mercury, microplastics, and other bad shit that definitely ends up in average sea salt.

The list of what I don’t know is much longer. The prime example of this is that the basic salt/sodium electrolyte needs to be balanced with the one for potassium–but nobody seems to know what a good balance is, or even how much potassium human bodies need, or how to get it.

Our beloved government nutritionists say it’s 3500-4700 mg/day.

But the very same authorities have restricted potassium supplements to 99 mg per pill. (So fortyish pills a day, guys, really?)

A whole avocado, a potassium-rich food, has about 700 mg.
One fairly expensive specially formulated electrolyte compound on the market offers 140 mg per serving (in 1/4 teaspoon), as well as advertising itself as “low sodium” at 496 mg of sodium per the same dose.

I am not the only person profoundly confused by all of this, and the answers offered don’t alleviate the confusion much.

So far, I have found a moderately priced salt of apparently impeccable quality, and I have found this recipe:

Source

No idea yet what constitutes quality potassium or magnesium, or why she’s chosen these ratios … also no real clue on whether frequently added things like lemon juice or apple cider vinegar do any real good, or just make drinking salt water a little easier to take.

I’ll see what more I can figure out before I have a chance to shop at a good store in a week’s time, and meanwhile I’ll keep going with the cheap broth mixture, and the sliver of marginally fogless brain power it’s helped me claw back.

***
There is a whole cottage industry out there based on using electrolytes to treat keto flu symptoms, including the Fog. Most of it is quite expensive, and I still have no reasons to think the expense would make anything better..

1) The “Insurrection”

Everything You Know About The “QAnon Shaman” Is Wrong!

You don’t have to agree with him. But if you listen to him, I believe you’ll come away impressed on some level. He is running for state office here.

2) Tucker Carlson

“THIS Is Why Fox News Fired Me!” – Tucker Carlson

He had the most-watched news show on all of cable for years on end. I wonder why they axed him?

3) The Democrats

“I Fuckin’ Hate You” – Longtime Dem Voter To Democrats

A lot of fluff and content-creator infighting toward the end of this one, but the red meat comes in right at the start.

4) Statins (and your doctor’s advice generally)

Ep:337 CARDIOLOGISTS PROVE THAT STATINS HAVE NO BENEFIT Part 2

Well, not to you or me they don’t, but their bottom line is another story. Follow the science? After you, guys. An unusually socioeconomic perspective from the good Dr. Cywes.

Still colder, darker, longer nights. Yesterday I sleptwalked.

Finally I lay down and I dreamed of truelove. I dreamed that I was too broken to deserve her, but I put my feelings out anyway, and that she returned my smile all the way through, both of us.

Parental disapproval and moral misgivings of my own besides. Oh I was young and pretty in my way yet only a pollinator, only a moth before the nectar of her flower. Evolutionary.

No one deserves, least of all those who don’t put the signal, or can’t, or shouldn’t.

I am here. Down in the depths of the darkness and the cold.

I have taken steps to keep myself here and I have shunned taking steps that would get me out.

The furnace still works and I have my art to keep me warm. Sometimes that works.

A week until the solstice and it will be a good one of a different kind.

… are economic warfare.

28% of the world’s population (a conservative estimate) is subjected to this kind of warfare from the US. “Cuba has been under siege for 64 years, but there are 30 other countries where this kind of war runs broad and deep in 2023.

Being at war with the world this way will become the why and how of the end of Empire.

We are not the good guys.

I’m sure your savvy will get you through and you’ll be fine, yeah yeah yeah.

I’m sure I will be too, even lacking the simplest kinds of that savvy.

I’m not as optimistic for the kids though.

Not by a long shot.

***

And lest we forget about the other kind of Empire war, toward the end of the interview Sachs notes correctly that ‘just about every bomb falling on Gaza is an American bomb’.

The great weight of the military-industrial complex presses down on the least of these our brothers and sisters like a boot on a neck, and our comforts and vaunted standards of living are based on the leftover scraps of that big evil process.

But … don’t let that fact stop you from enjoying the occasional well-chosen comfort anyway.

DR. NADIR ALI | Why LDL Goes Up on Low Carb + Is LDL Cholesterol Bad + Risks of Statins

Cywes is still my go-to doc for this carbless thing, doubly so because of his emphasis on the addiction angle.

But these two are damn interesting too.

I guess if my LDL hit 4 or 500 I’ll have to think it over. But for now I’m just not going to worry, and I’m going to let my supply of supplements run down and spend the money on oysters instead.

PS:

I think I may well Add To Cart, once the ButcherBox fish starts running thin. Down below it says this stuff is grass-finished too. (You’re burying the lede, White Oak.)

It’s not a complete answer. You can’t make bone broth out of ground cow. But it’s better than the barely cheaper basic protein I can find local … pre-shipping at least …

Shipping is very much on my mind.

I may well roast tomorrow. But I still have to make the prettytown run before the end of Saturday anyway, because I effed up and sent my pretty labels there.

So the nine orders awaiting fulfillment should go out Monday if I stay on fire.

I’m dirty but I’m cleaning getting closer. Inches are coming off the gut.

I am the bison seen out through the leaded glass of a china shop.

At dusk I walked out to the sunset.

It is as they say in Italian, that it is Sweet To Do Nothing. I also found it really hard to do, the first time. Monkey mind.

Dreams and cats woke me extra early. In the night I was offered a job that I applied for eight years ago. I had included samples of my poetry in the packet, a thing I’ve never done in life. It was a library job, in Flagstaff, and I was very much the Portland city boy again. Haunting coffeeshops.

I smoked a self-insulting two, and sat with my cup. I had to turn my back to the screen. There is really only one place to sit but it does swivel and that was a blessing.

It did no perceptible good but I’m going to do it again.

Tuesday is trash day. Sometimes that gets prepped with dispatch. But sometimes it morphs into vacuuming day, which it did today, and on rare occasions it keeps morphing, into a reorganizational monster. That happened. It was actually pretty awesome.

Around three it was stabilized and the sun was shining bright. I showered and went out to pace and hunt.

The center of my days:

1) Get a mile walked.
2) Get a shower.
3) Cook or prep, and get fed well: the one big afternoon meal of carne and veg and no carbs.
4) WORK, on into the afternoon and evening.

Improbably, those boxes all got ticked again.

While I was walking I was thinking about how the days should start.

I want five minutes of doing nothing but mulling, before coffee or with the first cup.

I’m going to write this post at midnight on trash day, and then set up another one, blank, in case I want to write as I mull in the early morning.

Then walking as soon as it’s comfortably warm.

We’ll see how it goes. I got hopes.

Elites *All-Out Panic* Over Trump’s Skyrocketing Support | SYSTEM UPDATE

Joe Biden’s presidency itself is the wind beneath Trump’s wings for 2024. The People are sick of the decrepit man’s muddled proxy war in Ukraine, and even more pissed off about his unalloyed support for what’s being done to the Palestinians. Or rather, the Blinken’s and the Nuland’s support in his name–by now pretty much no one can be fooled into thinking that folksy old Joe is really running his own show.

Meanwhile, shit is falling apart on the home front, but that’s just the icing.

No amount of lying MSNBC spin can cover all that up anymore.

Greenwald points out that those Muslim voters in Michigan are not going to vote for Trump, and it’s unlikely that the disaffected black and Hispanic voters nationwide will, in any great numbers, either. But they don’t have to. They just have to refuse to vote for Joe. Staying home is the easiest thing to do.

IMHO, they will refuse. Just as I will. What are you up to?

I spent the whole day trying to get out of my own way. Results were mixed.

I have my distractions segregated now into a virtual machine running Manjaro over Runbox.

If you barely know what that means, that’s okay. You’re probably better off not knowing, but just possibly my knowing will buy me a little productivity. Not today though. I didn’t walk. I didn’t go out. I never even got the real pants put on.

But I did assemble and eat a giant salad and nothing else. And I got that VM engine purring like a kitten, after many hacked-up hairballs.

It’ll be good. Pretty sure.

It’s early on a Sunday night. Come early Monday morning I start again, and I understand how, and why.

Once again I’ve fought my little world to a draw, and together with remaining above ground, that’s a good day.

The title of this post is the same as the title of this video by Bauer (who I am going to just start calling PMB going forward).

His YT channel has been around for at least 16 years and he has about 750 subscribers.

This video is three or four years old and has less than 700 views.

These numbers are criminally low in light of the usefulness of his work. But that offers a certain twisted hope, for myself. I consider the guy an important thinker and even something of a role model, but if even he can be saying such meaningful things without achieving a mass audience, then maybe there’s nothing wrong with me after all. (Something like that.)

The first part of the video goes over what rewilding is from a few different perspectives, including the etymological. To be wild is to be willed. To be domesticated is to be dominated, and have one’s will tamed or even broken, as with a horse. Incredibly distasteful though it may be, you and I live brokeback lives, mainly because it’s much more comfortable and safe to be a slave, one way or another, to the oligarchs and to some notion of what it means to be … Civilized.

On this side of the glass, we live as beloved lap cats, while on the other side of the sliding door, out on the concrete inches away, there are free cats shivering, grateful for handouts but not grateful enough to surrender their wildness. (Just as I am grateful, to my Patreons, it occurs to me suddenly … )

***

This section is my paraphrased musing on the part of the video that starts here

What is Civilization?

Civilizations require:

–Writing, and math, both essentially evolved from methods of keeping track of how much grain and agricultural surplus is stored
(and whose Property it is; thus, onto money and economics and … )

–“Complex Political Structure … which is basically a way of whitewashing slavery, and hierarchy” (This is where centralized wealth and the unequal stratification into classes like peasant and noble come into the picture, and so on into self-justifying meritocracies of the educated and uneducated, the virtuous hardworking and the lazy losers, the leaders and the followers, et cetera)

Collapse (or Fall of Empire) occurs when people abandon civilization for something they feel is more advantageous, and begin to reconsider, for whatever reason, the bad bargain of Domestication, and instead adopt a more willed, wild, and autonomous way of living.

Otherwise known as Anarchy, or just Something Better.

To rewild is to abandon civilization, choosing not to lead, or follow, but to instead get the hell out of the way.

***

Bauer points out that there was no such thing as a ‘weed’, until the agriculturalists began to wage war on native ecosystems by struggling to convert them into neatly plowed and profitable fields.

In my own earliest writings on the subject, performed for a graduate class in Nature Writing, I made the similar point that our textbook on the subject only began with essays from the 1600s, with writers you’ve never heard of, and then moved from there to Thoreau and on up to Bill McKibben.

I postulated that the concept of Nature itself did not exist until that time. Before feudal estates and then the Industrial Revolution took hold of us like a mental illness, most everything was Nature, so there wasn’t any need for the word. Only after Anti-Nature grew and spread out of control did we need to point and say: Look, over there, at the remnant of unspoiled parts. Let’s call it Nature then. A Wilderness, a wildness, a National Forest or National Park, a posted Recreation site, a ‘game reserve’, a designated birdwatching area, or some wasteland that no one can figure out how to profitably exploit, not even with cows.

Now, Nature is little more than a trope used to sell hiking boots, Subarus, promises about freedom …

And, we pray, lots and lots of coffee and t-shirts besides, well and reverently aware of the paradox and the flaws in consistency without ever falling off, Dear Goddess, into full hypocrisy and greed.

Amen.

I’m doing alright. The days-walking streak stands at 2. It was a minimalist effort. I walked to the store and brought back celery, walnuts, and eggs. I didn’t snack, and while my carb intake is still technically a tiny bit too high, I’m doing very well on the intermittent fasting part. And another box came today. It had a thermal printer in it, which I grabbed for a cybermonday price, to print shipping labels.

While I was walking I met these guys.

***

I have another Rt66 ep for you too.

This one is mostly here because of the way it considers transience.

But … the writing is very intricate for TV sixty years ago … it’s colorized … all the commercials and previews of next week’s episode are included … and you’ll catch a glimpse of actors you recognize from very early in their careers.

Bonus upon bonus. Brought to you by Chevrolet, Bayer, and anaprim.com, makers of fine somethings.

Reconsidered for today.

Rewilding Lecture at Washington College (2012 Peter Michael Bauer)

Boiled down, it’s pretty simple.

Agriculture = Civilization = Hierarchy = Inequality = Slavery = Domestication = Property

We call the whole shitpile Modern Progress and have largely lost the ability to imagine that any other way of living could possibly be better.

You may well speak to me of medicine and literature and hygiene and rocketships.

I may well stipulate the glories of all that, and yet still be compelled to feel, believe in, and utter the same words as before.

Anarchy Now.

It’s all very much dreamy and utopian and hopeless and I’ll stipulate that too.

But you don’t recycle because it will save the world. You do it because it’s the right thing.

My suggestion is just to expand upon that principle until it affects everything.

I started a coffee business this week.

Coffee is an agricultural product and not even grown within a thousand miles of here.

Naming such a business after the theory of anarcho-primitivism is a pretty twisted joke really.

Which won’t stop me from trying to succeed. Nor will it make me a hypocrite.

At least, not an unaware one.

Me and the Earth Mother dance a dance of relationship status: It’s complicated.

I woke and the ground was wet, with the first winter rain.

Outside on the step there was a big box, slightly soggy, and it contained my first coffee roaster, my first order of green coffee beans, and some related accessories.

I put on real pants much earlier in the day because that’s part of my master plan, and then I took my first real official walk in months. The wind was chill, and tomorrow if I start a new streak, I’ll dress warmer, especially since by waking time we are supposed to have our first snow, on the first day of December.

On the way back home I bought my first real mailbox. It’s strange to realize that. I’ve had dozens of rentals with mailboxes, and I’ve had at least a dozen different boxes at post offices and mail stores. But this is the first place I ever owned. When I bought it, there was no mailbox, so I lived without one in this yard for more than a decade.

But Arizona changed its rule about addresses for new businesses. A physical address is mandatory and it can’t be a postal drop. Fucking statists. So, I had to fix that, if only for long enough to get their paperwork and sign it. I expect I’ll get used to the new normal, and I might even like it. It’s sure a whole lot cheaper than running into Prettytown on sixty bucks worth of gas, not to mention the ever-steeper price for the box service itself.

I installed it on a post that was there already. I used two long screws, and two bungie cords. I made a little card for it that says the number, and my name, and ANAPRIM.

I’m living just around the corner from the light of day. I can feel the deep dark solstice coming in soft and slow. When it gets here, there will be a turning. A vertere you might say.

The carb and nic addictions are the most obvious and urgent to address.

But there’s also the kinds of media I’m hooked on from the political to the pure storytelling.

I share with you here:

an episode and a good one of one of my favorite shows, a fine slice of junkie cheesecake.

It stars Martin Milner and I like him fine. But his character is a poor little rich boy, and he is the one that owns that iconic Corvette.

His partner, his bro, in the first couple of seasons was George Maharis as Buzz Murdock.

Murdock’s character is a hardcore prole, and thus I find him more relatable on some deep class level.

The background in both pictures is full of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe, and of course that really works for me too.

The writing in this one is simple and flawed, but we do get a real honest rapacious capitalist villain, a true American who at one point says that the essence of real manhood is never ever having Enough.

Which is exactly what we’re brainwashed to think is the correct attitude for a man in this culture, in a thousand subtle ways from the time we are born.

But in this one, that guy is the bad guy, and we are offered the alternative of Tod and Buzz as real men who are homeless, transients. Hardworking hunter-gatherer nomads (though ironically in this brave new world, they are the hunted) when they can find work, and paragons of a higher ethics even in between jobs.

Living in a van, as it were, down by the river–that thing Chris Farley taught us to mock, right before his arteries exploded.

Oversimplified or not, I can’t not like that. Maybe it will be the same for you.

Elon Meets with Netanyahu in Israel

Elon does not meet with any Palestinians. Or visit Gaza.

Elon is an oligarch, but he’s our oligarch, yeah? Or wait … you already hate him? Hmm.

Hating him is a flex and not very interesting.

Tell me your feelings about this Netanyahu instead.

Glenn and Norman Finklestein and Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate’ and his father Gabor have.

All of them are Jewish.

I’m more inclined to trust their opinions, though I remain open to hearing from Elon.

And you.

Source

Trump v. Biden: The Rematch

What reason is there to believe some things are conscious and not others?

… and …

Every cell in the body does what neurons do, meaning if brains produce consciousness your liver and your gut and your toe well might, too.

… and …

Somewhere back in the mists of time, some tens of thousands of years ago, the entire human species mutated and developed the capacity for symbolic thought. Art and religion happened, language evolved (and much later took on written forms like this). The archaeos sometimes refer to this as the Great Leap Forward, and say it happened about fifty thousand years before present–okay, maybe. Other people will tell you that God did it to us (see the book of Genesis), or the Aliens were responsible (see 2001: A Space Odyssey).

But if not, why did the evolutionary process make that sharp left turn?

Maybe the most profound question ever.

Also in this episode: what is hypnodermatology, and why do real doctors take it with utter seriousness?

The Criminalization Of Dissent

America’s spiraling of the drain, from McCarthy to Biden; or, Understanding What Has Happened To Your Country In Your Lifetime.

Be (one of) the first to get it here.

I can’t seem to figure out how to jump up my profit margin so anyone coming in through this early link gets a bargain!

Okay. Link fixed. This is straight to the store.

As in anaprim.com

Was born today

Of dreamhost and legalzoom and sweetmarias and shopify.

There will be more. I need labels, bags, boxes, a print-on-demand solution and much else, but first I need that roaster to arrive so that I have an actual value-added product.

As opposed to the Vairtere where my only product is reflection and musing.

Writing from the best wing of the La Posada Hotel in Winslow. I sunk down deep in the great big tub and soaked–even conditioned my hair, which is like a once or twice a year thing.

The sun is breaking through the high thin clouds and the wind is blowing politely.

I have a lot to be thankful for.

Tomorrow I’m going to need to get very serious about work. It’s Black Friday and I’ll be racking up some debt–with luck that will be for a savvy purpose, and not another pipe dream.

But either way. Every day above ground is a good day.

In the Dr. Cywes videos where he’s talking about carbohydrate addiction, there are parts where he also mentions other addictions, most notably to nicotine.

I sort of wanted to tie these in, a few days ago, but I wasn’t completely ready to do it.

Today I watched the first half of the JD/DueDiss hours, and wrote that other raging post which again explored the borderlands between politics and diet.

Tonight I watched the second half and I give you this.

I started this clip with a quick one-off Mother Theresa joke. Then JD switches the topic abruptly to his battle with quitting pot.

Things get a bit rambly for the next nine minutes, but unless you’re feeling really impatient I would say it’s really good context and well worth the listen.

The cig discussion proper starts at 2:49:08

***

The whole time I’ve been deep into the keto research, even before I understood it in terms of carb addiction, I was thinking about the Quitsmoke too. Diet is linked to politics and anarchic philosophy. But addressing the carb addiction, very valuable in itself, is linked to my desire to get unhooked from nicotine too eventually … my desire in fact to live free without any major addiction, whether it consists of comfort snacking or cigarettes or money itself.

Perhaps even to permanent habitation and a roof. Perhaps not. I’m never going to be Kwai Chang Caine, but I would consider it a blessing and an accomplishment to move myself much closer to that idealized and fictional character.

I want a taste of real enlightenment.

Apparently that will involve some sleepless nights, and it also sounds as if that may be the least of the horrors involved.

But I hear the readiness coming down the tracks; a dim premonitory vibration of a Jungian journey past the tunnels of avoidance.

Gotta say … feeling pretty gaad damn lucky right now …

What am I having instead of a cider or beer at dinner? Yep you got it.

After researching some other sources, I would not characterize red wine, even a dry one, as zero-carb, but rather low-carb, and some are very definitely better than others. And dry white as even lower. And brut champagne lowest of all, until we get to …

… raw spirits (especially tequila, vodka, and gin). Ounce for ounce, however, they are very caloric, and if they’re mixed into a cocktail then all bets are off. To counterbalance, there is such a thing as a virtually carb-free gin, and (lightened) tonic. For example.

I’ll take it.

***

Another video by a real doctor says people who are in ketosis get drunker faster (it has something to do with how much glycogen you have stored; pretty interesting really). So drinking only a little has very little downside beyond the excess calories, if, of course, drinking doesn’t set you off in any kind of addiction spiral.

Right now that’s making me wonder if there’s a correlation between the lightweights in the booze sense, and the lightweights I know who seem naturally blessed with skinny genes.

Are they already fat-burners? Mildly inebriated minds want to know.

On a strict keto and intermittent fasting regime, having milk in your morning coffee is not permissible.

The reason is twofold. First, a cup of milk has 12 carbs, and strict keto is under 20/day. (Even oat milk has about half as much as milk, so that’s out too.)

The other reason though is even worse. Drinking down three or six or twelve carbs breaks your fasting, and shortens your daily fasting window dramatically, even if you’re skipping breakfast in an attempt to keep it longer (up toward that theoretical ideal of 16 hours/day). The many hours of fasting matter at least as much, and probably more, than your carb intake, in terms of teaching your body to burn fat and reduce insulin sensitivity, not to mention getting un-addicted to snacking and eating in general.

But here’s your counterintuitivity for the day.

Not only are the MCT oil and butter in ‘bulletproof’ coffee carb-free and compatible with fasting …

But so are half and half, and even heavy whipping cream. Milk has a lot of lactose sugars. Cream does not.

Which … is amazing, and also happy-making here.

***

I’m definitely going to be sticking with the MCT, and as little cream as I can get away with. The butter is optional and I’m only going to use it when I’m uncommonly hungry in the morning, which is not usually true for me (though it was, this morning).

Thus, breakfast is solved, by bridging it away.

The main meal after noon is a massive salad.

The second meal, some hours before bed according to the protocol, is rich satisfying meat (maybe with a side of brussels, or mashed cauliflower), or … maybe bacon and eggs. I always did like breakfast for dinner.

***

I know a lot of you following along are thinking: jesus! Whipping cream, oils, cheeses, fatty meats–this guy’s cholesterol levels are going to be shooting through the fucking roof ennit?

I’ve thought it myself. It’s a valid concern and it could definitely happen.

I’ll keep track of it as a factor, and I’ll take the necessary steps. I’ve promised myself that if those numbers do elevate, I’ll jump on the god damn statins to bring them back down (this is a thing the medical establishment has been trying to get me to do for years, and I’ve resisted it).

But in the end I’m not too worried about dying a few years earlier from a heart attack, or dying a few years earlier at all.

If militant keto and fasting kill me, at least I’ll be leaving a damn good-looking corpse behind, instead of a puffy bloated one like most of my senior contemporaries–hell, like more than half of Civilized Westerners senior or junior for that matter.

This isn’t about how long I have left–that’s a pretty low number of years no matter what. It’s about the quality of those years and the ability to enjoy them without being a fat sick diabetic old man crippled by his own biochemistry and cognitive functioning. I’d honestly sooner eat a bullet than be that poor guy.

I’m dying to live healthy and free before I settle down for my inevitable dirt nap.

Radical measures are in order.

***

I opened my eating window at two p.m., just a little while ago. I have until ten to close it officially, but I’m going to try to do it by eight, or nine.

While I was assembling and eating my salad (and by the way, cold leftover brussels sprouts add a more agreeable texture than I thought they would), I was listening to Mr. Dore, who had finally consented to spending some few hours with the DueDissidence gentlemen.

Jimmy’s fixation for the day, in the context of my own obsessing over diet, was really interesting.

He was talking about the everyday societal lies, and why they tell them. For example …

The allopathic medicine establishment, and the US Department of Agriculture‘s advice on what to eat–the food pyramid, and the ‘balanced diet’ and all the other hocus-pocus–is bullshit that nobody but an overworked schoolteacher or an overpaid doctor could love, much less preach. Sure we have more or less blindly followed it, tried to follow it, for years. But what good has that done? We’re more bloated and sicker and more addicted, more depressed, even suicidal, than we’ve ever been before.

It’s not whether you snack on Doritos or carrots. It’s the fact that you’re snacking at all, and WHY.

That makes far more sense to me than their centrist ‘guidance’.

I really believe that there is no such thing as a “healthy snack”. I think Dr. Cywes is spot on, when he says that every snack, every time, is less of a dietary event and much more of an emotional one.

We’re fucking traumatized children, with our Venti cups of coffee-flavored hot milk, vainly trying to soothe ourselves with poisons.

It is in the interests of industrialized capitalist agriculture for you to eat far too much of whatever they choose to cheaply produce, especially if they can mark it up because “inflation” or the “supply chain” or whatever other scary bogeyman will keep you paying the most for the least benefit.

It is in the interests of capitalist medicine for you to get lots of regular checkups and tests and prescriptions at inflated prices whether you have the ‘insurance’ to help defray the cost of that a little bit, or must proceed directly into the hell of medical debt like half of your fellow Americans.

And then there was, as JD specifically points out, the whole thing about Ivermectin.

A dead cheap substance that’s been around for decades, widely prescribed for a variety of purposes for millions of people, and usually sold by the bucketload as a generic.

Their virus leaked out of a lab.

They raced to engineer some half-ass, untested, expensive vaccine for it and to mandate that vaccine on pain of losing one’s job or even children. Side effects like heart damage in young healthy men be damned, and if you’re not all the way on board, you’re a kook lacking in altruism, a heretic in the church of Science, a menace to society and probably a hick and a white supremacist besides.

When Joe Rogan mentioned that he was un-vaxxed, and had used Ivermectin, among other cheap harmless things, to quickly get over their virus, he was excoriated as a dangerous fool. The hollering about horse paste became a mindless shrieking wail.

Why?

Not because of science. Not because of someone’s endangered grandmama.

Because the profits were threatened, and that my dears is THE mortal sin within the Empire.

Pushing you far from that sin is the principal job of Education (I can attest to it as a violently educated human being), and the sole aim of the kinds of ‘news’ media they control–never forget that both the outlets you love and the ones you hate were for years Brought To You By Pfizer, they way they used to be brought to you by Chevrolet, and Marlboro.

Calling me a conspiracy driven whackjob doesn’t hurt my feelings.

I would rather trust my gut and listen with my instincts before accepting the gospels of the professional lying capitalists of any stripe or persuasion, in any country or corporation.

***

I’m coming to the conclusion that the difference between me and most of my related and unrelated contemporaries has nothing much to do with how smart anyone is, or isn’t. Moreover …

The one about people getting more conservative as they age is another cranky lie pushed out as part of a broader agenda. We don’t uniformly get more conservative.

We get to be more obviously and palpably who we always were.

If at some point you were told, by a teacher or an impressive commander, that the System works beautifully, for those who suffer its indignities and master their own flaws in its service, those who obtain those degrees … and then later you tasted deeply of comforts and rewards that powerfully reinforced that message …

Then yes. You will become more conservative, not in the right-winger sense, but in the sense of conserving your beliefs in that System, deepening your faith in it, casting aside as childish the people who would point out to you that out beyond the fruits of your considerable labor, the same System is rotten with lies and hypocrisy and even casual murder.

In generations past, if they told you that black people were lazy and victims of their own inferiority, you would accept that. If they later changed their story to say that there are good ones and bad ones in every race (whatever the hell a race is), you would accept that too.

If they told you that God hates Fags, sixty years ago, you would accept that. If your Obama said, welp, there’s 51% of the electorate who sees through that tripe, so now gay marriage is legal, maybe even eventually celebrated, you stayed on board. You Progressed, so thoughtfully, but without actual thinking.

If they told you this was a democracy, and that our war in Iraq, or Ukraine, was for democracy, and that even though there were no commies left the commies or the turrurists or the autocrats or whoever were still the bad guys …

You would accept that.

You would proudly or even smugly take the jab, and the boosters too.

For Science, with liberty and justice For ALL do you hear me?

Well maybe not quite all.

There’s a reason why the youngest people saw through the Vietnam lie first.

There’s a reason why there’s a profound generational divide on the question of our genocidal apartheid friends over there in Galilee.

They haven’t been incentivized either way yet. They haven’t had the chance to be rewarded, or to be punished in any meaningful way.

But you have.

I have too. It’s just that I’ve never been inclined to believe in the glory of the democratic capitalist System.

I never got much from the offered rewards. At sixtysomething I am exactly as poor as I was at twentysomething.

Perhaps I’m dumber. Perhaps I’m not well-adjusted, to the atrocities that make the system possible. Perhaps it’s a case of those old sour grapes.

Maybe so.

I have some other ideas on the subject, though, and I don’t need to make a long post any longer for you to know what they are.

Top shelf (and crisper): Real complicated salad, cheeses on the right

Middle shelf: Proteins; cooked salmon and turkey, raw beef and eggs

Low shelf: Tortillas. Guac and celery. Blueberries. All things that probably need to fade some, the way I’m using them–snacks not bridges. Also, coffee, which in the long run belongs down in the freezer with the reserve meat.

Not pictured: the door shelves with things like half and half, and apple cider vinegar. Avocados. Tomatoes. Olive oil. Spices. MCT. Lime juice. Brussels sprouts.

This is how it should always look, and especially at the end of a weekend, ready for the week to come. It’s been a lot of work to conceptualize and execute, and it will be even more important work to keep the dietary machine running smoothly.

Dear @robinmonotti,

You are so very close to seeing it clearly.

The key is in the fact that you put “civilization” in quotes.

Civilization is no mere myth. It is my life and your life whether we want it to be or not.

Western civilization is the purest form of the civilized toxin–that much is true.

The wars of the US MIC are the height of all civilization as it has evolved in the last ten thousand years, and the dark depth of the species sometimes called Humanity.

I agree with your conclusions, and with the implications for the systems of Education, mainstream journalism, and all other manifestations of the sick ubiquitous pontifications of Big Brother that are injected daily into the brains of The People.

Yours very truly,

@vairtere

Context: “The U.S. Profits From Killing Civilians In Gaza” – Palestinian U.N. Rep. (via TJDS)

Amplification: Ro Khanna Destroyed By Jewish Constituent
There are so many Jewish people explicitly abandoning Zionism right now. There are so many non-Jews who are still frantically clinging to Zionism. A world awash in cognitive dissonance.

The kneejerk ShitLib flex: Actor Michael Rapaport LOSES HIS MIND Over Gaza

Why most of the people you know and love are renting, and other musings on why the Empire System is the moral and political equivalent of carbohydrate addiction.

Restructuring of the Global Economy

Today was just another unseasonably warm lovely day around 70, and it’s 68 indoors this evening with no external fossilized help. But the leaves are mostly on the ground now and a new front pushes in tonight. The dawn should be rainy, and still above freezing outside; high of 62 eventually.

On Sunday the winds come to start piling up the leaves and to bring back nights that do freeze.

So today, already well stocked with meat, I bought from the produce aisle exclusively.

Here is my well-curated list of things for salad. The top end of it is perfect (low-carb micronutrient-rich things). Toward the end it trails off into items with a few more carbohydrates, but essentially delicious ones–to me a salad without tomatoes is pretty meh.

• Feta, and olive oil (using picual, plus balsamic), and I splurged on organic walnuts
• Romaine and/or arugula (also very permissible are lettuce, chard, endive, kale, mustard greens, sprouts and watercress)
• Celery
• Cabbage, green preferred (I’m trying Napa)
• Bok choy
• Cauliflower
• Cucumber
• Avocado
• Chili peppers (I got serrano, anaheim, and habanero)
• Onion (I believe white is said to be preferred but I have all three)
• Tomato
• Olives
• Slaw: shredded broccoli and dreaded carrot (mostly I got this for fish tacos)

Also falling into the Good camp, but not very salad-like according to my current tastes: zucchini, brussels sprouts, french green beans, mushrooms, eggplant, asparagus, and bell pepper

I could chef it up with things like eggs or ham, but my intention is for the salad to be the main dish, with a ‘side’ hunk of meat for the average typical hardcore keto dinner (with things like those tacos, and pintos, and squash taken off the menu short term, to be reintroduced in moderation over time).

All a work in evolutionary progress of course.

I also got rewarded by scanning (though not buying) in the meat aisle. They had store-branded organic turkeys. I saw a 13 pounder for fifty bucks, which is under four dollars a pound. I’m pretty sure that by the time there’s room in my fridge for such a monster, the option will evaporate, but …

The price of small town living.

***

Okay. Keto yes, (Intermittent) Fasting yes, low-carb high-fat plus veg roughage yes. Certainly if you’re on board with the Why of all that, and possibly even if you’re not–I have a guy you want to watch.

Dr. Cywes the #CarbAddictionDoc

He’s on board with the Why of all that too, but there’s a really important value-added bit that he uniquely brings to the dietary table.

Dr. Cywes thinks, and I am sharply inclined to agree, that Carbohydrate Addiction is a serious problem. For myself personally as well as many others. Maybe you too.

Here let me provide you with a crash course in his thinking from over the last five months.

Ep:306 FASTING ESSENTIALS ON A KETO-CARNIVORE DIET – FACTS V INTERNET NOISE

Ep:307 FASTING 2: INTERNET GIMMICKS – DON’T BE A VICTIM. SURVIVING, THRIVING AND BREAKING A FAST

Ep:317 CARBADDICTION PART 2: ROAD TO RECOVERY

Ep:331 KETO-VEGETARIANISM – EVEN CARNIVORES WILL LEARN SO MUCH
Especially useful if you don’t like the feeling that keto is too carnivorous for you.

Ep:332 CRITICAL INFO: HOW TO STOP SNACKING FOREVER
To me this is the single most important part of his value-add. He defines snacking as an emotional event rather than a dietary one, ties that in to the concept of carb addiction, and suggests replacing it with zero-calorie ‘bridging’ of fasting periods with things like coffee and tea instead of cookies (or even carrots).

Like many of his videos, this one is slightly marred by a gentle pushing of various powders and tonics, but I haven’t found it too hard to take, and he makes clear that they’re deeply optional. I like him, I think he’s really smart and practical, and I hope you do too. There’s a bonus in here for those of us addicted to other things as well (with a wink toward the Denver sisters).

I’ve been carefully studying the meat aisle at the sole local market.

The best bang for the buck is chickens, whole or legs or backs, for about two dollars a pound.

But of course these are factory-farmed birds with no suggestion of quality, no words like organic or free-range in evidence anywhere. Yesterday I found, for four times that price, packages of ground hamburger that had a lot of good words. Grass-fed. Certified Humane.

Of course these things mean next to nothing under the American regulatory regime:

Various sources estimate anything from 40% to over 70% of beef claimed as “Grass-fed” and sold to consumers in the US is not authentic Grass-fed. —source

Essentially, all American meat producers have to do to sell their products as “grass-fed” is to sign a paper that says they are. There is no governmental oversight or inspection. There doesn’t even seem to be an agreed definition of what it means, which has led to the invention of terms like “grass-finished”, meaning that cows allegedly fed on grass for 97% of their lives are NOT stuffed full of cheap grain right before slaughter to increase their weight–which is pretty standard practice.

Tongue in cheek, I might proclaim that it’s Anarchy out there. It’s not. It’s capitalism and it is chaos full of lies, but contrary to popular opinion that’s not the same thing.

So another word on the packaging of my eight-dollar hamburger was: Wagyu.

I had a very vague sense that this meant it was somehow Japanese and higher quality. I went and learned.

Is “Wagyu” ground beef a scam?

Answer: Not in Japan. But here, yes. A buzzword on the label at best, a scam at worst.

But I bought it anyway, with fingers crossed for hope.

On Nora’s advice, I tried to find a way to buy ranch-direct around here. There are possibilities, but generally you have to buy a whole cow at a time, and a big freezer to go with it, and cow or beef is the only option. Nope.

In terms of the good stuff, I am definitely at least 80 miles out into in a meat desert.

In the medium term I’ll need to get myself back on a ButcherBox subscription. It’s not cheap, but it is good. They can’t say ‘organic’ if it’s anything less–that one still means something real. And there are various independent certifying organizations that offer the possibility of trustworthiness, regarding things like the relative Humanity of the product.

***

There’s a story beginning to break about what really happened around the time Russia crossed the line into Ukraine. I learned about it here on The Duran, and it’s a big complex beast of a story, but I did some digging, and the basics are here:

Just one month after the start of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators had come very close to an agreement for a ceasefire and to an outline for a comprehensive peace solution to the conflict.

In contrast to today, President Zelensky and his government had made great efforts to negotiate peace with Russia and bring the war to a quick end.

Contrary to Western interpretations, Ukraine and Russia agreed at the time that the planned NATO expansion was the reason for the war. They therefore focused their peace negotiations on Ukraine’s neutrality and its renunciation of NATO membership. In return, Ukraine would have retained its territorial integrity, except for Crimea.

There is little doubt that these peace negotiations failed due to resistance from NATO, and in particular from the USA and the UK. The reason is that such a peace agreement would have been tantamount to a defeat for NATO, an end to NATO’s eastward expansion, and thus an end to the dream of a unipolar world dominated by the USA*.

The failure of the peace negotiations in March 2022 led to a dangerous intensification of the war that has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people …

*It’s ending anyway. All the mass death just put it off for a while, and that’s all.

I heard so many good smart people, heavily motivated by the Russiagate lie and by Trump Derangement Syndrome, screaming for blood, demanding Putin’s head on a plate, and proclaiming Zelensky a lion and a hero as the Reds intervened in the civil war already in progress for years in the Donbass.

If I had to boil down my message to them, I would want them to remember two things.

The Establishment and the Rulers lie to you habitually and manipulatively, and most of what you routinely believe is hypnotic bullshit and distraction.

And, regardless of who says what at the start of any war that’s happened in our lifetimes, the people who are steadfastly against ramping up that war from the start will always be right in the end.

Blessed are the peacemakers, and damned be the hawks.

I’m going to hold my tongue as long as I can at Thanksgiving, lest it too devolve into some kind of civil or uncivil internecine war.

You know what I think. Please don’t put me in the position of needing to proclaim it once more from the rooftops, over the turkey and stuffing. I’ll be as good as I can be, as good as you let me be.

The third episode of TRP is Bauer interviewing Nora Gedgaudas, a Portland nutritionist and neurofeedback expert, about paleo ways of eating. It’s helping me connect up all the keto stuff I’ve been into with my abstract political notions about green anarchy, and that synthesis feels important to me this morning.

She has an analogy that compares fueling the body to fueling a woodstove.

In making a proper fire, you need three things. You start with with scraps of paper or other tinder to get the flame to take quickly. Then you have small dry twigs and other kindling to get it going in a more substantial way. The third thing is the main fuel source, like a big chunk of log. So …

Tinder: white flour, bagels, pasta (high carbs)

Kindling: beans, whole grains, sweet potato, brown rice (moderate carbs)

Chunks: Eggs, dairy, poultry, fish, red meat (fats)

(Also, alcohol and white sugar are like throwing gas on the fire. She doesn’t talk much about fruits and vegetables, but the same principles apply. Blackberries and broccoli are relatively low in sugar/carbs. A dehydrated apricot or a potato, quite the opposite.)

She says that a typical modern Westerner is addicted to the carbohydrates and eats them compulsively and often. I think that’s right. Even though I’ve been conscious about what I eat for a long time, I still want to binge. A bag of organic popcorn. A couple of handfuls of raisins with my cashews. A half pint or a whole one, of coffee Haagen-Dasz. Sugars and carbs.

The fix for this, whether you call it Atkins or Keto or Paleo (or “The Primalgenic Plan” in Nora’s specific case) is to dramatically lower carbs in any form and teach your body to burn fat instead. In other words, feed the fire on big logs once or twice a day, and use the tinder and kindling very sparingly.

The thing I like best about her approach is that it isn’t dogmatic, but open to learning. She says that she started out with eggs cooked in butter for breakfast, but found out that neither one was good for her (food allergies or something). So now she has a duck egg cooked in ghee.

The thing I like least is that she’s very much bound up in the marketing, the looking good, and the traditional idea of what success is. (Puts me in mind of a certain friend of ours down in the Paradise Valley.)

I am embracing being an old and poor and ugly and honest and vulnerable kind of sage; just eating better and being more organized and trying to figure out a way to live without paper towels. So I’m headed back to the prosaic places like Bauer’s podcast, to feed my mind.

But if you want more Nora, I would start here.

The Rewilding Podcast, a crucial resource in my thinking these weeks, nominally lives on the website of its host, Peter Michael Bauer.

I noticed that the episode listings there cut off at Ep. 34 from September of last year, and I wondered why. It turns out that it’s just poor site maintenance, and that episodes have continued to come out about once a month since then, only just not listed where they should be.

Here is a more up to date listing:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rewilding-podcast-w-peter-michael-bauer/id1490811038

That also might make it easier for those applePeople amongst you to partake.

In the earliest episodes of TRP, Bauer talks a lot about what the word ‘rewilding’ means and doesn’t mean, and that’s been especially useful to me because I’m trying to name a project of my own right now–it’s a marginally capitalist project, and I’m very wary of slapping a label on it that pretends to be anti-capitalist for marketing purposes in that cynical and even evil way. (Here’s looking at you, “Cochise County”.)

Enough said about that for now. I hope you go listen.

***

On a related note, when I’ve researched on rewilding outside of Bauer’s protective definition, I found an awful lot of horrible crap that wants to sell me something. “Naturally”, right? Words don’t mean anything any more specifically because almost any word can be co-opted and gutted in the name of the profit motive. Just think of what “Democratic” meant once, compared to what it means in 2023.

It’s the same for anarchy and a lot of other things I hold more dear.

But …

In seeking out ‘the rewilding podcast’ this morning, trying to find the lost 13 eps, I also stumbled across this:

Rewilding Earth Podcast

I have not comprehensively vetted them yet for ideological purity (and yes, I know how dumb that sounds), but my initial impressions are pretty damn positive. They’re based in ABQ, focus on the Southwest mainly, and … check THIS out, damn …

I have some surly picky issues with the name Mogollon, too, but that’s what most everyone calls my one true stomping ground, from the outskirts of the Verde Valley to the exurbs of La Ciénaga de San Vicente.

So I am brimming, with calculated and careful optimism ennit?

Everybody knows that the American way of life would never have been possible without ethnically cleansing this continent first. The broken promises. The fake treaties. The smallpox blankets, and the wholesale massacres of both people and their food animals*; ‘Geronimo’ finally eastbound on the train a little over one hundred years ago, his Anglo name turned into a war cry for paratroopers and children. The county where Cochise was tricked and slaughtered named for him, thirty years later. The noble old Nez Perce warrior turned pacifist when all other options were dead. On and on.

The average American, more or less successfully living that way of life, can’t morally or psychologically afford to be too concerned about it.

Well, ya know, it was a loonngg time ago … less enlightened times … all the progress we’ve made since … maybe we are just better than them, anyway.

But what if I told you (insert Morpheus matrix gaze here) that within your own lifetime, your government ethnically cleansed another place, because they wanted to use the land of the indigenous for a massive military base?

What if you knew that, in the name of National Security and ‘our interests’, they scooped up every inhabitant from this place, dumped them on the beach hundreds of miles away, knocked over their houses and put that military base up before anyone could object, or even notice?

Okay … what if I told you that the military rounded up all their pets, and gassed them? Yes. Gassed the pets, so they wouldn’t be in the way of construction. Species cleansing to go along with all the poor brown people …

Would that bit about the furbabies make things more real? (It shamefully did for me …)

Watch it and weep, should you have any tears left over after the month that’s been.

The truth each one of us must confront if we’re honest is that it’s not just the ‘Homeland’, and the island of Diego Garcia, and the West Bank and Palestine generally. It’s standard operating procedure.

It’s what we just do, to ‘succeed’, to ‘spread democracy’ (i.e., capitalism with OUR capital, aka ‘the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’).

We invade. We cleanse those unfit to be our proles and slaves. We take their land and whatever bounty there is upon the land, from cadmium to bananas, and on the seventh day we rest, and pray to our loving God, and call ourselves his special favored children, the good people, the brave people, the land–no irony allowed–of The Free.

The land your house and my house sits on was stolen. Not by us–in fact, we’re paying mortgage bribes to the thieves, and taxes too–but by our glorious forebears and by this star-spangled System that we praise and bleed and pledge to every moment of our lives.

Oh say …

Can you even fucking see?

+++

* The hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as attempted in the modern world, is treated as a direct threat to all things civilized, because in certain particulars, it is. To the modern liberal sensibility–from the dullest local cop to even the good people of the World Wildlife Fund–there is no tangible difference between a hunter-gatherer and a poacher, or a rustler … hang ’em high, right?

This is one of the many valuable insights contained in The Rewilding Prodcast, Episode 2. I listened so you don’t have to, but it doesn’t mean you can’t.

I listened to the last few minutes as a way of wrapping up my day, and I thought …

For a while there, some feminists were trying to explain to us how important it was to call stewards and stewardesses Flight Attendants. That much is taken for granted now, but they also wanted us to call househusbands and housewives Domestic Engineers. Which didn’t … uh, take off in the same way.

What I am these days is very exactly a Domestic Engineer, but …

I am also in the same moments militantly against domestication.

A Rewilding Technician is an oxymoron. I hope that’s obvious.

Fuck it. Call me what you want; take that tone with me, missy–it’s all okay, at least for marketing purposes.

It’s easy to blame the other side. And for many Democrats, it’s obvious that Republicans are thwarting progress toward a more equal society.

But what happens when Republicans aren’t standing in the way?

In many states — including California, New York and Illinois — Democrats control all the levers of power. They run the government. They write the laws. And as we explore in the video above, they often aren’t living up to their values.

From the description of this video, published on the YT channel of The New York Times

You can’t afford a house, in Palo Alto or anywhere else you would want to live, because the good people who already live there, the deepest blue people of Blue No Matter Who, care much more about their own property values and bottom line than they do about you having a roof over your head.

This is the essential paradox, or hypocrisy if you like, of capitalism and the American Way.

I got mine, Jack, by whatever fatal means necessary, and you, my sweet huddled masses who I love so loudly on the NPR, can go pound sand.

Every thinking person knows exactly how and why Republicans suck. Almost no well-educated affluent liberal thinking person wants to think of their party as nothing more or less than the Uniparty, where there can be all sorts of distinctions without any real difference, but that’s the reality, and very few of those thinking people will entertain any notion of their own complicity in what’s really going on here.

From Boulder to Mosul, from Santa Fe to Kiev, from Boston to Kabul and Gaza and yes, any Somali shithole you were lucky enough to not be born in.

Square that circle within your own head, and you may even free your mind.

But it’s the pelvic thrusts, that really drive them insane. The pelvis is a bone, right?

Maybe you roast the bones first and maybe you don’t, but either way, boil it a while. Done:

Simple Tips for Stocks & Broths – Kitchen Conundrums with Thomas Joseph

From the angle of politics or maybe just green anarchy involving itself in the weirdest places:

Lead Contamination in Bone Broth

The cited study, from a decade ago, argues that even if you use organic meat and do everything right, you can be doing as much harm as good, and there’s no cure for it.

A commenter fires back: “Other research shows that grass fed free range beef broth made with reverse osmosis water and lead-free cookware had no lead”.

Maybe. But regardless:

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you eat, or how lovingly that food was grown or processed. Civilization has spread so many kinds of evil shit so far and wide that there is no longer any way of avoiding it. You can only mitigate the damage on the margins. Perfect organic rice from Texas is loaded with arsenic because decades ago those rice fields were cotton fields, and the arsenic used to ‘treat’ the cotton lingers in the soil regardless of ‘organic’. So you cross your fingers and buy Californian instead, and good luck to us all.

Meanwhile, microplastics in your drinking water now abide in your child’s liver, and it was your very success within the System that put those plastics there.

That’s what Anthropocene means. Nothing is pure, everything is fucked to some extent, and we did this to ourselves in the name of progress. Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven any more. Lifting yourself out of the proletariat so that you can afford to save yourself from the foundational badness of civilization is a fool’s errand. Absurdism is the order of the day, and that was inevitable even long before the bomb tests starting going off, beginning with Trinity, and Hiroshima.

***

Let’s begin again with the olive oil. The good news is that some stuff is better than others.

Best Olive Oils to Buy Right Now

My pick from their picks:

And now you know what I want for Christmas in my greedy grasping way.

The bad news is the same of course, and even worse (because: mafiaCapitalism), but I have video anyway because it led me down an interesting tangential rabbit hole.

Your Olive Oil is (probably) a Lie

The guy that did this video is fascinating. Apparently he’s a viral phenomenon and I’m late to the celebration of him, this Johnny Harris journalist person. He’s big enough that there are plenty of videos out there telling you why he’s bad–a liar, a thief, a grifter. Again .. sure maybe. But he’s doing a lot of things really right too, by my own personal standards of right, which as we saw yesterday is the only possible correct interpretation of Rightness.

In April, he released this:

How the USA Colonized the USA

It’s a concise explanation of how (and why) we fucked and continue to fuck the original human inhabitants of this place we call home.

It’s embedded in a Playlist that goes into much greater detail on the same subject. The playlist is called How The US Stole, and there are videos on how ‘we’ stole Hawaii, the Philippines, Oklahoma, Iraq, and lots of other places. Dude really gets it.

Months after the April video, weeks after October 7th, someone came along and commented on it thusly:

I came (to this video) after what’s happening in Gaza. I’ve noticed that they’re using the same tactics it’s make me so sad to know what’s happened to these beautiful people and their beautiful culture we must prevent it from happening again thank you so much I loved the way you showed us everything like document’s ,paintings that’s what I was looking for god bless you

The same tactics indeed.

A week or so after that, just a couple days ago, Johnny Harris came through for his commenter by posting another video:

9 November 23
The War is Spreading

The good guy rebels of the USA, the ‘colonists’, pioneered modern techniques of imperialism. They used them against their black slaves. They used them against the natives here on Turtle Island, and turned it into North America. They turned their attention to the rest of the world and finally became what they had always wanted to become: Unipolar Hegemon of the whole bleeding world, without significant remorse for any of it.

Their own upstart colony in the Middle East, the manufactured nation of Israel, is only doing what they learned from Daddy–kill and kill, and take and take, so that our lovely white sons and daughters can go to college and get good jobs, maybe over in the World Trade Center, or some other wing of the Empire, by exploitation and over all the little brown corpses of people who had the bad luck to be born in their way.

So that those well-dressed super-smart white children can study up on the beauty of bone broth and research what makes a really fine olive oil, while the olive trees on the West Bank burn and die, and the olive farmers are driven out of Eden and onto the scorched police state plains.

Tell me the one about shitholes again.

Tell me how blessed by birth you and I are, darling.

Don’t talk about complicity; you know how I hate it when you do that.

Yeah.

Parts of me hate it too.

But I can’t not say what I see with my own blinking third eye.

That would not be Right.

At the one lonely market they had no whole chickens, but I found a volume pack of drumsticks.

4.4 pounds at $1.79 equals just under eight bucks. For this price, forget organic or even free-range–the best they can say is: “minimally processed”, “no additives”, and “USDA prohibits the use or hormones and steroids in poultry”. Very comforting I’m sure.

The package wanted me to hit a QR code for recipes. I did not do that. I’m the kind of rebel who seeks culinary advice from random Germans on Googlevision. I tole you, tole you once already, Anarchy.

Melt a stick of butter in a bowl and spice it how you like. (Salt and pepper. Onion and garlic powders. Cayenne and oregano. Poor useless paprika.)

Brush one side of the drumsticks with the buttery mix. Put them in your cast iron skillet (with or without porcelain over it), brush the other side of them the same, fry them four minutes on each side, and then take them out of the pan.

In the warm fatty mess of the pan, brown a chopped onion and then toast some tomato. (The Germans say zucchini and asparagus too but I didn’t have them.) Add back the chicken.

Add some broth or even water to submerge the meat and vegetables. Boil it low for twenty minutes, covered, but turn the meat halfway through, at ten. (Optionally, use a meat thermometer to make sure the drumsticks are up near 160 Fahrenheit. In my pan on my stove at this elevation they were closer to 200, so theoretically, no worries.)

Eat.

But save the bones and scraps, and save the liquid stock from the pan. Because …

The main reason I ended up with drumsticks is because I wanted bones to make into broth.

I’m still deciding on How. The choice is essentially between the stovetop and a stock pot, or a pressure cooker, or a crockpot. My early bias is for the first one because it is the simplest.

But research is still in progress.

More later.

They’re really quite okay.

In the early days of September it became very clear that the whole month would be about nothing, except struggling to screw my head back on quasi-straight, with some semblance of mixed success.

In the week at the end of the month I performed a capstone project in that regard. You can catch a glimpse of it during the last ten minutes of that video, in which I monologued to someone unseen while I walked along the hundreds of feet of a windmill propeller being hauled by a big truck at a rest area in north-central Arizona.

I left the headscrew job halfway done, good enough, and moved on to the next thing.

October turned out to be about moving. First someone else, out of a storage locker, and then the extraneous stuff in my own house, into that same locker. Again the job got to a certain good-enough-for-now point and I … quit. Not completely, but the space was provisionally clear. Enough! For now.

So far November has been about starting to do the same for my digital space.

I have a brand-new fresh copy of a few operating systems, including this one, MX Linux 23, which is turning out to be the winner; again, for now. The month is only a third of the way through. The rest of it will be about the organization of data, and being, it is rumored, the ‘host’ for Thanksgiving, a title I deplore, but very quietly.

I won’t be passing out roasted coffee samples at the holiday. I haven’t even pulled the trigger on the roaster yet, nor set up the LLC, nor even completely named the project quite yet.

I did make drumsticks. The four indoor cats and the four outdoor strays are well cared for. I am beginning to understand what bougie really means, and the ironies involved in hearing the word tossed around as if it is a synonym for ‘noveaux riche’.

To the extent that any of us are riche at all, my pets and poppets, it is most definitely of the nouveaux variety, and some of us–well, I–are still back at the first square in a land called lumpenpatreon, and Sand Rock.

I’ve also realized that I don’t hate the Commander any more, like I did 35 years ago. I still hate the worldview and the smirking conviction that his own way, his my-way, was the only way for proper full humans to embrace. I still hate what he thought an education was for, and his blind absurdist loyalty to his own class, dressed up in a uniformed patriotism.

But I don’t hate him personally or viscerally like I certainly once did.

This is partly because I’m not ashamed any more of my own alternative way, as I once was. The preternatural record shows that I’ve endured some vicious blows, and also that more often than not, I’ve come correct. Which is the modest way of saying I was right, ya fuckers.

And, partly because it’s time to let the stupidity of the forefathers, all of them, rot away with them in their graves, because soon enough it will be my turn; Judy’s turn to cry.

If the land in Cienega stays nakedly unhoused forever, even that can I now live with. All that really matters is this moment and the next and the next, lived authentically in the present. If the truck aged 25 never gets its brand-new or rebuilt drive train, at least it can be parked with a beautiful copper plate to wear in the best fashion, and the Kalicat will go on a while longer letting me know that I’ve made a small difference, and the sisters of the Colorado and elsewhere and the little brothers will too, each in their very different ways.

Expectations have been scaled back, and even cut to the bone here and there.

That’s a thing, but not an inherently bad thing.

And so, yes, I can honestly tell you as the turkey is passed

I’m superfine; you?

This is Albert Camus, a real man, as quoted in:

Existentialism: Crash Course Philosophy #16

D’accord.

If he is right, and of course he is, then the first stage in utilizing my eight dollars worth of chicken parts is not just what I did with my random day in November, but the literal meaning of my life.

I hope whatever you did today to avoid an untimely death at your own hand was at the very least as meaningful to you, as was the cooking to me.

Down at the bottom are the proles. The proletariat are those who rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival–the “working class”. Those who cannot, will not, or do not succeed in finding a way to sell their time off into labor are called the lumpenproletariat, and in a modernized world they just find ways to die, instead of survive.

The whole point of life, to those who would urge you to “lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way”, is to ascend from the lowly proletariat into becoming something more bougie, probably by going to the very ‘best’ college you can get into, and leveraging your education into something that helps you climb the social ladder.

Originally, bourgeoisie just meant someone who was neither a peasant nor an aristocrat–most likely a merchant, maybe an entrepreneurial craftsman of some kind; a barber or a blacksmith. This “middle” class still sold its labor in a way, but not to a lord, or an ’employer’.

Today we would call these ‘semi-autonomous peasants’ the petit or lesser bourgeoisie, in contrast to the much richer haute bourgeoisie who run the culture, the show, and the whole world, and we assume that continuing to climb socially, from prole to petit to haute to aristocrat is again the whole point of life.

The Lenin of 1917 believed that democracy was bullshit because it always ended up being what he called “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”, which describes the situation in America in 2023 precisely.

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. –Emma Goldman

The bourgeoisie may squabble endlessly amongst themselves about fetus-killing or why exactly Trump Is Bad or what pronouns go with which bathrooms. But when push comes to shove, any bouge will line up mechanically, hand over heart as they sing the Anthem in a cultish drone, and cheer for whatever invasion, regime change, genocide, or other atrocity will advance “our interests” in Europe or the Middle East or the Taiwan straits.

Lenin wanted instead a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, but led of course by a vanguard of “professional revolutionaries” like himself. Nothing could have horrified the bourgeoisie more than the idea that, having spent their whole life force climbing up out of the prole swamp, they would end up ruled by the opinions and interest of their own cleaning ladies and manicurists. (We the People my ass, bitches.)

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. –Plato

This is why you should run far and fast from anyone who yells at you about you duty, your right, your privilege, your responsibility to vote. Old Yeller is a bouge who has benefited from the long dark dictatorship of its own class, just as Lenin said, and they don’t want things to change, though the more thoughtful among them will tell you that although Our System isn’t perfect, it is a more perfect, and a perfectible union, and that you should vote, and either lead or follow within it, or you ain’t shit, Jack, so get the hell out of the path of the march of progress. Especially if the state you live in might swing. Old Yeller pledges allegiance to a flag and isn’t the least bit troubled by the ironies embedded in the stars, or the stripes.

Our modern lives began in a world where the ever-just and godly dictatorship of the bougies was pitted in death struggle with the devolved and degraded champions of the nominal revolution of the proles. It was called the Cold War, and lots of proles died in it: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1.0, and less spectacularly in a thousand other holes and weed fields.

The Wall came down and the bouges declared themselves the victors of history and everything, except watch out for those wily Japanese, Chinese, whatever … they look poised to beat us at our very own game, the bastards.

Now we have hot war: Ukraine, Gaza; and they’re always looking for the next place. The only sure bet is that they will find it and send billions at it, along with less fortunate children to die in it.

“You can join the Air Force, or join the Corps, if you can’t make it here any more.” —James McMurtry

Make it on up that ladder to a better class of person, ennit.

We’ll have a bake sale for you if you come back missing a limb or two. Thank you for your servicing of us.

***

To be a proper borjois, or burgher, you have to live in the big town, at least until you can afford to escape the masses and live on your own island, or Connecticut, or Sausalito.

I live in a tiny raggedy interstate village with no Walmart or Starbucks; empty storefronts around the square and I don’t have a job, except this.

So I’m definitely a prole, and pretty damn lumpen at that.

Just to answer the titular question, as an aside to all my viciously literate expostulation on how this world really in fact works.

Palestine, Israel, and the US war machine | Dennis Kucinich on The Chris Hedges Report

I am gradually catching up with myself. My life abides in long arcs that bend toward justice.

It will all end badly because that is what happens to life and to lives. But in the meantime I begin to perceive how extraordinarily lucky I am.

In certain twisted but important ways, this is the life I always dreamed of living.

When I was fifteen, I thought the way to get there was to live in the forest and be completely mobile.

By the time I was twenty-three and finally got myself the medical help I had always needed so desperately, I had slept on the bare ground enough times to know that sometimes a place with a roof was a luxury worth trading my precious time-and-consciousness for, but I was still a complete moron about who I traded with, and how.

Losing my stupidity in slow degrees, I went to school. I drove their trucks. I went back to the one school, as a teacher this time and I professed what they wanted me to profess, during the time they paid me for, and what I wanted to profess when my time was more or less my own.

I worked and that worked, for a while. Then it stopped.

Tonight in Silver City where there is land but still no roof, it is raining. Here in the flat place with the roof, it is clear, the sun is down, and we are on our way to twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind out of the west and northwest. Inside it will not drop below sixty, and it will cost a lot to keep it that way, but I have the cash, in the very short term, and I have ways and wiles for keeping it just above sixty after that.

In answer to writing those words, the furnace comes to life for another pulse.

What I am doing, meantime, is backing up 300,000 files, even though only 3000 of them mean anything.

When it is all done, I will back up this file too, and that picture, and put them in their own folder called “9”, and put that in a different folder called 11, and 2023, and so on. There will be structure; there will be a record. I do this for myself. I do it for you.

Because the honest cold is finally here, the stray cats are sticking very close to the glass door, and not acting wild at all, though they bitch at each other. They know that if they’re cute and trusting enough, my hand will slip out through the side of the door and my hand will be full of treats they can turn into calories.

In this way, and for reasons that are often opaque, I pay it forward.

The last couple of days, I finally cracked the office, the lab.

Over and over I’ve been refining the front tool room and the kitchen and the bathroom and even the closet space; even the shed and the vehicles. But the heart of everything remained a scary mess.

Honestly it still is. Honestly, that’s changing.

This evening I decided to crack even the main computer, the System76 system I bought with pension money. I downloaded fresh versions of MX-23 and AntiX Linux 23 and got them loaded onto sticks for install. Right now I’m backing up my MX-21 Desktop to an external hard drive. When that’s done I’ll be moving over to the updated operating systems and making them work. Most of you will have the foggiest idea. That’s fine. I’m pretty foggy right now myself.

I’m living on pins and needles and the really important stuff is just barely getting done in time and the pretty important stuff hasn’t been getting done at all, because I’ve been shifting and sifting the crap.

I’m trying hard to fix it in my marginally stable way.

There will come a time, some months from now, when a sunny seventy-degree day is a distant memory to ache for.

This is that memory day. An hour ago we topped out at 77. The extended ten-day forecast says it might hit 69 if we’re lucky a week from now. But tomorrow night will brush up against the teens, and that will become more and more like the rule.

I did my best to take the blessing seriously. The screen door has been open to the air since 9 AM, and thus the indoor temperature is sitting at a fuel-free 71. The catboxes are clean. The trash is at the curb. I did some deep springlike cleaning in my office, dusting while the fresh air was warm enough to be let in, and I got a very respectable amount of organizing done at the same time.

My life is very very small and I don’t mind that so much any more.

***

I heard a thing today, that part of me did mind. It seems that a lot of the vanguard artists that succeeded in the Sixties and Seventies got to the top in part because they were funded to succeed by three letter agencies. Gloria Steinem says that Jackson Pollock, the drippy paint guy, and she herself, got plugged and promoted and got told that they were on her side, and that they loved that JFK just as much as she did.

But we know they killed him, too.

This makes perfect sense to me. They pump up businesses–that’s their job, ultimately. “Looking out for ‘our’ interests overseas”. Why not the better class of artistic ventures as well?

It makes my own failures a little easier to take, of course, so I shall choose to believe it fiercely.

I don’t always like the guy much. He’s often full of assholiness. But he’s right more often than he’s wrong, about Ukraine, and now he’s right about Gaza too.

Monumental Oversight: Unveiling a Colossal Miscalculation | Scott Ritter

The two main reasons to sink into this hour are:

1) You will learn about the complicated and ugly situation in Israel even before the events of a month ago. The President of the country (as opposed to the much more famous Prime Minister) has said that Israel was on the brink of civil war, and the reasons why haven’t changed. You’ll learn about them too.

2) You’ll be offered the strategic proposition that it is in Israel’s own best interests, never mind the victims of the slow-motion genocide, to immediately call a cease-fire and enter negotiations with Hammas. I believe that’s correct. Israel will never again be in as strong a negotiating position as they are right now. It can only get worse.

I’m sure it will. I’m sure they’ll ignore the good advice and blunder on down the path of Zionazism. I’m reasonably certain that they will drag other countries into the shitstorm militarily, and that might even include the American serpent, metaphorically tangling you and me up in this mess even deeper than we already are.

Happy blue Monday.

If there’s a bad guy in the back of the ambulance wagon, and you are the leader of the posse who is supposed to be bringing him to justice, and your solution to the situation is to vaporize the wagon with a missile, then you, my friend, would rightly be classified as a homicidal fucking lunatic.

And, you have no possible grounds for claiming that it was an act of self-defense. If you told a judge that you had “a right to defend yourself”, and that’s why you nuked the wagon, killing the first responders along with the guy you claim was bad, it would be an open and shut case, and that judge would happily sentence you to the maximum hard time.

Something of the same scenario is playing out right now in the court of public opinion.

Half of the people killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza in the last month have been …

Women. And children.

There are thousands of them. There are still live babies buried in the rubble with their arms sticking out, and the Rulers of the apartheid state have made sure that there is not fuel or electricity enough for any tool to try and free them. No food. No drinkable water.

No humanity.

Any old “YesBut” you can throw at me leaves you on thin cracking moral ice. That’s been true for decades. It’s more true now. And majorities across the world, even in the West, even within the boundaries of the formal Empire, are finally opening their eyes to that simple fact.

There’s less and less difference in people’s minds between the holocaust the Jews went through eighty years ago, and the one the Israels are perpetrating right now in real time with your tax dollars.

Genocide is genocide. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing.

Nazis gonna Nazi.

The Germans were a secular state, but of course they believed that God was on their side.

Israel is a quasi-democratic theocracy, run by Zionists, for Zionists, and fuck the savages who lived there before 1948, if they can’t be happy with their ever-shrinking reservations and concentration camps.

I want to know if that makes it better or worse for you. The comments section is open.

But before you even go there, I’d like you to see two video clips.

The first is from a Western Jew, a child himself of the Holocaust, and a brilliant philosopher of trauma.

Dr. Gabor Mate: this is genocide

The second is from an American black woman, a millionaire MSNBC anchor who can almost always be counted on for the shittiest neo-libtard take on any subject you care to name–except not this time.

SHE SAID IT: Joy Reid Calls Out WAR CRIMES on MSNBC

If, after listening to the wise man and the blind squirrel with a lucky nut, you can still look me in the eye and spout the same nonsense that has dominated the discourse for decades …

I just don’t know what to say to you any more. I despair of there ever being change; I despair for your soul.

Go with God in any case, and I do not mean some old testament Yahweh screaming of eyes for eyes.

Leading Expert David Talbot on Allen Dulles, Kennedy’s Assassination, & the Rise of America’s Secret Government
SYSTEM UPDATE #175

Two of the best journalists to ever live, in conversation about the story that defined our lifetimes more than any other.

Oh my fellow inhabitants of this Democracy, you can vote for whoever you like.

But if your candidate threatens to make a real and actual difference, they will be killed, and replaced with a machine hack who obeys the true masters. A Richard Nixon, a Joe Biden, a pretty Gavin Newsom–the face makes no difference. They will serve Moloch, or they will be slain.

Preach to me all day, about your vote and your freedom and the beauty of our flawed but proper System.

I will smile indulgently because I love you, but I will never drink that kool-aid, I will never take that vaccine, and I will always be sorry each time you make the other choice, in the largest of ways, or the very smallest.

On the 28th I did some serious thinking while driving, put in my appearance at the Festival and then drove down to Luna County to camp. Sunday the 29th, a short rough trip over to El Paso–the International Airport, the divine 2Ten coffeeshop, and out US 180 East to effect the discovery of Desert Haven, Texas.

The day after, we saw the caverns at Carlsbad and made a very long drive back to the ranch, through the hell that Albuquerque has become, sleeping at long last in the one big bed.

Today there was nothing beyond the unpacking and the decompress and the posting of the first of the trip vids.

It’s cold now and there’s a blessing in that too.

The video

The book being discussed in the video

I’m supposed to be glossing this and giving you my perspective, but you’re on your own because I have the Otherfish to being frying up, and already I’m going to be late to the Festival by the creek of San Vicente.

It’s Thursday. The connections between these sentences will be opaque. There was a bit of locally heavy rain and yesterday was the drying-out day. My kitchen is nearly perfected and there is a loaf of cold meat to sustain me. Over the weekend the nighttime temperatures are supposed to finally go off the cliff of winter and stay there for some months.

While that’s occurring I will be on the road.

In a perfect world I would leave early tomorrow and be down in the Cienega of San Vicente in time for the first sessions on Friday night. This is an imperfect world. I may and might spend tomorrow instead making ready in the deep way I tried to all week, and still haven’t.

The sessions I mean are part of the Southwest Festival of the Written Word, the only conference I still dependably attend anymore, in part because the 2015 version of the festival was the inspiration for starting this very project you are reading right now, a little over eight years ago.

In an even less perfect world I might not go at all this year, but stay home, prep for the cold, hunker down, and husband my thin resources (I use the word advisedly) with fierce finesse.

It would be better for me.

But I am assfucked with habit, nostalgia, prior commitments and obligations, and a witlessly misplaced sense of duty.

So probably I will split the difference and leave before the dawn on Saturday just ahead of the decisive cold front, picking my way past the Deuce of Clubs this time for reasons too shatteringly mundane to detail.

I still have not turned the furnace on, or even any little heaters. I just paid my gas and electric bills and they came out to less than one hundred dollars for October. I wish that would stay the same; it won’t. When I get back in some days the pouring front will have left it rather miserably cold in here and I will break down and start to burn some fossil fuel, dialing up the thermostat to minimum habitable standards while wrapped in layers of elderly cloth. I may even finally assemble and test the Chinese diesel heater–I may move myself largely into a smaller space and warm that, alternatively. I may at last pull the trigger on another lost zero-balance, and invest in that dreamy little coffee roaster as one of two steps I can take to start to remedy the situation caused by strangled trickles of income and the life they lead to.

In the meantime there should be some good road film and my heart cries out for editing and posting it where it belongs, in a timely and empowered fashion.

If you are in favor of sending yet more money to the Ukrainian and Israeli military machines, plus a fresh dose for getting ready to invade the Chinese island of Taiwan, then you are on the side of Team Biden all the way–he wants 106 billion more pushed through Congress for that complex purpose.

You’re also on the same side as Lindsay Graham of course.

But you may not realize that it also positions you as being for the exact same foreign policy as George Bush the younger, about twenty years ago. Your friend and mine, Mitch the Turtle McConnell, made that perfectly clear when he used the same term Bush did, to wave the flag for more of this bullshit.

The ‘Axis of Evil’ is alive, well, and apparently expanding and thriving.

Empire logic says that we, the Good, must do more and more and more.

Only … somehow … the American people don’t want to watch this shitty Marvel sequel. Clear majorities (outside the neocon professional and managerial class) are for keeping that money at home to work on our own vast and thorny issues, and to get out of the business of policing the world.

Why is it that no one cares about what The People think, in this fair and blessed ‘democracy’?

Weren’t the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a mistake based on lies and the interests of the elites? Do you believe that the new crop is any different?

Not deep down in your smart heart you don’t.

I’m well aware that Russiaman Bad. I understand that Hammas did wicked things, even if baby beheading wasn’t one of them, and even leaving aside all the evil that’s been done to the Palestinian people.

In the end I’m still left asking: so fucking what?

Bolivia and Malawi don’t think they have to run around the world with big guns and suitcases of cash trying to right every wrong, or even every thing that goes against the interests of their rulers.

Why does America think it must?

Are we … exceptional?

We are exceptionally crooked and hypocritical and bullying meddlers, maybe.

That didn’t start with Joe Biden, or with George Bush either.

It’s been that way your whole life.

It looks almost normal from inside the Empire.

Switch off that superfine mind for a second, and listen to your heart or your gut or something.

Where would you have stood, on Vietnam?

Where did you stand, on the Iraqi misadventure, and how do you feel about it now?

Is there someone else you’d really love to invade, or kill?

Or would you rather make a house for the woman with the sign, on the left turn island? Would you rather feed the hungry children of your neighbors?

There isn’t any doubt in my mind.

Look there, I signaled you my lovely Virtue.

I think it’s only fair that you show me yours.

If I had a song
I’d sing it in the morning
I’d sing it in the evening
All over this land

Source

I think the ‘social ecologists’ are absolutely right, like most leftists generically, in their considerations, as far as they go.

I habitually just don’t feel that they go quite far enough.

As represented by the commentator here, they see it the same, only in reverse: “Going So Far As”!

Potato, potahtoe.

I am anti-capitalist. I am, for the most part, anti-civ as well. But the quote is beating a straw man, because I for one am not ‘calling for’ shit, apparently or otherwise.

I don’t have a prescription to write for the mental illness of the civilized. Most days I barely have one to scribble for my own monkey mind.

I got no plan for Society. I got no candidate for you to send money to. (But check out my Patreon!) I got no possum, no rhetorical sop, no edgelord taters. No polemic, no school, no orthodoxy to balm your trauma.

I got this bandstand. I got a camera and sometime I might use it again.

I got a hammer, and a bell, and this here song to sing. It’s a hammer of theoretical justice. It’s a bell of marginal freedom. It’s a song about Love, between, my brothers and my sisters, all over this land.

Which extends out to Flint, and to Gaza, and Syria, and Yemen, and the Donbass, and way down deep inside every one of us.

Sing with me if you like my song. Click the non-existent like button if it stirs you up in a way you like. Comment, subscribe, all that; you know the drill. If you don’t like my song, go someplace where you can’t hear it, and take my most very civilized apologies with you when you go.

I know it’s very popular these days to fly a little flag in your social or other media. Whether that’s to carelessly ‘show everyone which side you’re on’, or in a genuine act of carefully considered solidarity–either way is fine. I’m not judging. At least not today.

In the spirit of doing my part, here is a resource that may be useful.

It’s in the public domain, and here is the source.

As to why you might want to fly this flag, as opposed to that formerly popular blue and yellow one, see here:

Worldwide Peaceful Protests Call for END to Israel War

And with that, I consider my own belletristic virtue to have been satisfied for one more lovely autumn day.

Montana for the Paleface Colonizers!
(It’s manifest destiny, sorry there Chief Joseph, you noble savage.)

Palestine for the Israelites!
(Apartheid since ’48 and getting worse every year; colonists again … )

And most dramatically of all: Germany for the Germans!
(In which the tribes dwelt amongst us and needed rooting out.)

Two million people plus, on the Gaza Strip, half of them babies; no water, no food, no care, no electricity. All cut off on purpose. Papa Bebe ordered them to leave, or die! Leave? But the whole country is sealed off, and there is no other country who wants to wash the runny poop out of Tel Aviv’s genocide diaper problem anyway.

Thank god we weren’t born in a shithole like that, amirite? Praise Democracy Jesus and the fact that we spread his good word to those biblical heathen lands.

I hope when I bite a bullet someday, the official cause of death will be listed as “they had a right to defend themselves”.

***

In other news, it is now officially a federal crime to make stupid memes about Hillary Clinton. The kid perp got seven months of hard time. For memes.

It could have been worse. At least his sister wasn’t gunned down while his house was being stolen by Zionist stormtroopers, or his big shaggy food supply murdered by the millions … and it’s not a concentration camp he’s being sent to, but a nice clean well-lighted corporate private prison! Good news, everybody!

Land of the Free my burning bleeding testicles.

I was in the hospital but then it turned into a crater, down in Palestine.

Now I’ll never see the final season of Better Call Saul, and I’ll never know for sure who blew up the NordStream pipeline.

I thought I would at least finally get to meet the Ghost of Kiev, but when I asked they told me he was a propaganda fiction, and therefore incapable of entering heaven, hell, or even purgatory.

If you were thinking life was hard, just wait until you get to the other side; jesus fuck man.

On the bright side John Brown and his body are both here, and Dianne Feinstein is not.

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.

A crossover episode between the two best (so far) Green Anarchy podcasts.

First half at Rewilding: Peter Michael Bauer interviews Natasha Tucker

Second half at Primal Anarchy: NT interviews PMB

I’ve binged hard on both of the projects, and not every moment of every episode of these two podcasts is fully enchanting, but … everything I’ve linked for you in the past few days is really good.

I will keep binging, and expanding my scope.

For instance: There’s a anarchical book review podcast called The Book On Fire. I’ve listened to exactly one episode.

It discusses a book called Against The Grain, which as you might imagine examines the relationship between piled up stacks of barley or wheat and ‘the dawn of civilization’.

The podcaster here is taking a break in a multi-episode examination of a related book (The Dawn Of Everything) written by ‘the two Davids’, Graeber and Wengrow. This book was huge a couple of years ago–I’ve mentioned it before, and linked a lot of interviews with Graeber in particular.

According to this episode, the Dawn book is essentially about trying to disprove the theory that sedentary agriculture leads directly to social hierarchy and the Divine Right Of Kings. The Grain book is more favorable to this theory, and the contrast drives the narrative here.

I don’t recommend listening, because all these fine academic distinctions are thinking games that don’t really matter, unless you love that kind of hair-splitting for its own sake.

The basics, in my opinion, remain unchanged.

When people stop moving and settle down, and start storing surplus calories in a granary, it looks like a good thing but it’s really very fucked up.

The human population explodes. Social hierarchies do emerge, and so does income inequality. Oppression and politics have a reason to form. The granaries become a way of measuring wealth, and for fighting wars for control over it. In short, civilization happens.

Most everybody cheers this right down to the modern day. Progress!

But these podcasts are anti-civ at their core, and so am I.

I love me some real science and I would never say no to, for example, quality modern healthcare, if I could find any. Even more deeply, I love words and written language, and those things didn’t exist five or six thousand years ago.

But all the nice things we got out of the granaries don’t counterbalance the untold human misery and injury to the Mother planet and her children that have come about as a result of that same “Civilization”. Eight billion people later, it’s going to kill us all dead, and in the meantime, a mother must warn her child against drinking from any creek or river no matter how sparkling, because it might have battery acid in it, or worse.

Even the tap water turned those trusting kids into permanent mental defectives in Flint, and they are not alone. No matter how healthy we try to be, we are all swimming in a nasty and toxic chemical soup like the proverbial fish who can’t see the water.

Civilization is not just the end of us, but also makes it damn near impossible to fully embrace what little time we have left in a doomed world.

The world is still a beautiful place.

The society of the civilized is an ugly hellscape filled with fools screaming at each other about red and blue, democracy and ‘autocracy’; every one of them scrambling after slave dollars by telling lies, and living lies.

There is a hole in every one of us, and the man with the key to the granary and the bank and the day spa, alongside his daddy and his daddy’s daddy, made sure that every baby is born with that hole, and that it is kept unfilled like a gaping wound. In you and in me.

Anarchy now? Sure, I’m for that.

But it will never happen until I can get you to believe in it too, and even if I somehow could (fat fucking chance) maybe it will be too late for any of us anyway.

Abandon all hope, ye who dwelleth here.

I’ll be in the kitchen, rearranging the canned goods and the toaster oven like so many deck chairs, wearing my chinese wireless headphones and listening to the very best people tell me what rewilding might be, amen.

Monday night. The Star Link is still down completely. The hotspot is about two gigs away from slowing to its barely usable overlimit crawl. Either way, the problem solves itself after Four. More. Full. Days. Because that’s toward the end of Elon’s shipping window, and because my phone gigabyte limit rolls over as Friday turns into Saturday. Taller clover, but until then, a severe and austere digital life. Monkish like the real one.

The damage might do me good. In one very important way it already has. Without this disaster, I never would have gone looking for fresh podcasts and I might never have heard Peter Bauer.

Episode 27: Day to Day Rewilding

Blew me away … a thing I haven’t said in a good long while.

You might enjoy.

***

My kitchen is all torn apart Like Carrier’s Proverbial Drywall.

It will come back together much more functionally. Already I’ve stripped out a box of my own B and C list stuff, a box of hers, and a crate of food I will never eat unless they close down the grocery store and the burrito place. There’s still far too much, but I am

Winnowing.

Episode 25: What is Rewilding?

A different primal anarchy podcast with a different perspective.

My favorite answer to the title question …

We are civilized, right? But a different way of saying the same thing is that we have all become Domesticated. Civilized sounds right and good. Domesticated makes us sound bovine .. or like sheeple.

In fact those are just two ways of describing the exact same disease that afflicts us all in the Anthropocene Era. And yes, I believe that Civilized is not just a condition, but a malady.

Refined sugar. Refined tastes in literature, music, art … One sounds bad, the other sounds like the highest good. Whether you call someone civilized or domesticated, you’re describing the same essential phenomenon.

And rewilding is simply the attempt to reverse the pernicious malady of domestication in various forms and fashions, in ourselves, in our lives, in our environments.

To be again wild means: to be Willed, to begin to recover one’s will …
because domestication is the process of breaking something’s own will, as a horse is said to be broken when it no longer fights its captor and master.

This is the difference between a dog and a wolf.

Most of us are housebroken dogs with a big hole in the middle of us where a wolf used to be.

We try to fill the hole with some god, or gambling, or shopping, or substance addictions, or some constructed self-identification having to do with our own smarts or our jobs, positions, money; or our’race’ or our ‘sexual orientation’ or … “I’m an anarchist”, or whatever, when the only thing the hole really aches to be filled with is wolfy wildness, self-determination, and liberty.

Like back in the pre-civilized day.

Deep inside this explanation in this podcast, the author connects the idea of domestication to the concept of Property, which, as one anarchist famously said, is also the concept of Theft.

My cat is domesticated. My cat is broken. My cat is Mine and the horse you broke belongs to you–you can sell it, trade it–it has no wild will of its own any more. It is enslaved.

So are we.

I know you hate that idea, brother. I do too. Hating it changes nothing.

Unless we can somehow make use of that hate to successfully continue rewilding.

Instead of continuing to stuff our holes with that stuff.

You and I will never reach the wolfish end state and finally Be Wild. It doesn’t work like that. It’s a journey and not a destination and we’ve been walking in the wrong direction for ten thousand years.

Rewilding is simply turning around, reversing the bad course.

It is in a word to vertere.

***

A note of caution at the end, as you consider whether or how to rewild.

If you’re doing it right, it’s probably going to be deemed illegal.

The state depends for its very survival on domesticated human beast-slaves. To really rewild is to resist and to try to reverse one’s own domestication and enslavement.

They’ll fight you every step of the way with every fucked-up tool they have, and they have a lot of them.

Watch your ass and don’t let them gun you down or trap you, wolf.

After I got back from the last trip, my Starlink sputtered and died. It’s about a year old. They diagnosed it remotely and said I’d need a new router. They’d be sending one for free, and even crediting me a month for lost service, but it would take a while to ship.

I switched over to my phone hotspot and went on as usual. A couple days ago I checked the usage on it and I was down to about eight gigs for the month. I normally use about three gigs a day, and that’s mostly watching videos, so to ration, I stopped watching videos, and sought out audio podcasts instead.

The best thing I found was this:

B&G Podcast 15: BAGR Roundtable Discussion

A half dozen of the leading luminaries in what is called variously green anarchy, primal anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism, which describes my political religion in a label about as well as anything can.

It sort of amazed me how un-pessimistic these people were; I almost found myself objecting at the sentiment that things could still change in time, maybe–an outside shot I guess. I still do object. But the simple fact that smart people who have thought a lot more deeply about the matter for a lot longer than I have could still have hope … well, it was secretly, privately heartwarming.

I guess their point is not so much that we might avert the final disaster and go on, but that … there is no other or better way to live in any case.

Something like that.

And, although these people were gathered to discuss a philosophy, they seemed remarkably allergic to philosophy writ large.

What matters is not what we think, but what we do. Out there in the real world, in its still theoretically wild pockets.

Fuck Facebook of course. But even … fuck Starlink too.

Real life is not what happens on our little techno-boxes.

It’s not even what we write, though they all are writers too.

It’s what happens when we try to resist being domesticated. What happens in environmental terms, and economic ones too.

But not about how much money we make. Economics in the original sense; how we live, how we keep house, or if we keep house.

What happens when we try to throw off the chains that bind us, have always bound us, the chains we can barely even see or believe exist.

We’re gutshot. There’s a hole in you. There’s a hole in me.

It was engineered into us, by the civilized, and by civilization itself.

What do you try to stuff it with, and what goes into your soup?

These are the important questions, but the civilized would prefer we laugh at them instead, and get back on our hamster wheels.

***

I’ve been stuffing mine with a radical decluttering.

That storage locker, the one I emptied out for money a few weeks ago, is now about two-thirds full again, but with shit that used to be cluttering up this oikos, my ranchita, my house.

It’s been work, but so long overdue, and satisfying.

As the shit drained away, the casa felt like there was twice as much autumnal air in it, and I breathed.

As space opened up, there was space to sort and junk more; an upwardly spiraling vortex of good started to emerge.

There is still a lot of shit.

But I have it by the scruff at last.

Mainly I need to finish off the room that is half kitchen and will be half roastery, and finish of the lab or office I’m sitting in right now. Those are the big jobs. There are little ones too, bed, bath, and beyond. Closets. Tools of a dozen kinds.

The tide flows out, and yet the boats rise. Magical.

I laid down a fresh crop of rugs.

I haven’t been writing or filming or doing one damn thing, not even the easy thing, about making money, but I feel surprisingly little guilt about it.

I’m drinking less coffee and more bone broth in the cool evenings which will soon become cold ones.

It’s been easy to get to sleep, and get back to sleep if I choose to after waking and pissing.

I live as these cats around me live, in the moment primarily, with manic and depressive interludes that also flow. I make sure they have food, and water, and whatever love they individually require.

I am blessed with the care of one lone correspondent, which is enough.

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We sit together on the mesa and watch.

From the west comes a band of warriors, moving fast on good horses, armed with bows, arrows, and the random scavenged thirty-ought.

In their path to the east, from the east, a wagon train, lumbering and slow, coming in to the territory to colonize and pioneer and tame these wild savage lands, even though they were already sparsely settled thousands of years ago by the grandfathers of the painted men on horseback.

The train stops. Atop one of the wagons, a hide tarp is pulled away to reveal a Gatling gun, the finest weapon yet produced by American ingenuity.

I’ll spare you the gore, but it won’t be long until the wagons start their journey again, past the littered corpses of the indigenous warriors and the dying cries of their masterless ponies.

You turn to me and speak the words.

“Well, didn’t they have every right to defend themselves?”

Of course they did.

It was kill or be killed. Own this turf or forever live without a home that isn’t a Reservation, or an open-air concentration camp on the shores of Galilee.

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Friday I drove. Saturday I slept. Sunday I drove. Today I went back to work, hard work, paid work; the boxes and the wholesale dumping and at some point the storage locker didn’t belong to anybody else. It was colonized. The job ended.

The Work began again.

Tonight, and tomorrow night, They say it will get down to 37 degrees, a shocking low for early October. It will warm again some in short order, but autumn is here and the hot days are gone. Highs near eighty, lows near fifty, and back to the academy in some metaphorical way.

Tomorrow is another driving day and I might not post here, or the next day. Sometime in the late week I’ll come back here to the rancho, and as I’ve long prophesied, life will begin again.

Theoretically I’ll get it right this time.

“Nobody gives a shit what you want, ya big fuckin’ pussy.”
–Traditional

I have wanted so very badly to be the one who finally opens your eyes to the truth of yourself and the world we share.

I use the word ‘badly’ there in the layered and poetical sense, because although there is some charity in my Wanting to awaken you, my Desire is of course for the most part badly–or more accurately selfishly–motivated. I feel better about myself when I can credibly play the sage, and so I attempt to play it, over and over, to decidedly mixed reviews.

Quasi-altruistic bestowing of blessings of this sort will be a recurring theme as we proceed.

***

(It was a long drive and I thought well and hard. This may well end up becoming a long piece or pieces. But I worked out the beginning of it almost word for word in the silence, and I wanted to post that much of it intact, in a timely way.

To be continued.)

***

The truth of you is that there is a giant hole in the middle of your being; a Void.

The truth of this world, especially this overdeveloped allied angloMurican First World part of it, is that the same Hole abides in the virtual solar plexus of every single one of us, right down to notable sages like me.

I’m not going, yet, to go too deeply into how the personalized but ubiquitous holes got there. Take them as a theoretical given if it helps, and if you have any interest at all in maybe picking up what I’m laying down.

Instead of yet another Genesis tale, about spiritual Holes this time for Christ’s fucking sake, I just want to share a story I heard the other day, about some mountain lions from Southern California.

For attribution’s sake, this is the story I was listening to, even though the mountain lion part doesn’t appear in the truncated version I have linked. That part appears as warmed-over Goldfarb as read by Vairtere. OK, enough.

***

“So what happened in the Santa Monica mountains, essentially, is that when that freeway went through, it cleaved the mountain range in half, and it isolated so much of the wildlife south of the freeway, especially mountain lions. See; there’s this little population of mountain lions that lives west of Los Angeles, a very urban area, of course. You know, these animals are living very close to the largest city in the country, kind of amazingly. But, you know, they’ve been totally cut off from other mountain lions by this freeway. They’re essentially in this little island of habitat, and that’s been disastrous for them”.

Keep in mind that Mr. Goldfarb’s book focuses very narrowly on the effects of roads on wildlife. He’s using this cougar population as a dramatic example, one among many.

The disaster of this one freeway, for these few lions, went like this. Suddenly the western cats lived on an island. Well, sure, habitat destruction and all that, but … so what? More room for exploding human populations, a little less room for some cats. Meh?

With the band isolated, there was no more way to inject fresh diverse blood from other bands into the gene pool.

When the young male cats started to get the itch to breed, they had nowhere to roam to in search of foreign pussy.

That led to their fathers killing them as competition.

The fathers then continued to breed, but with the only available females on the island. Their own daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters.

Inbreeding, and a deteriorating local gene base. Increasingly mal-adaptive mutations leading the population into what Goldfarb calls an “extinction vortex, this long-term doom spiral”.

One freeway. Just another road among hundreds of thousands. One isolated problem among many, for one specific tribe of charismatic megafauna close by a major metro that hungers for this kind of drama–so we know about it. We feel for them, just like good NPR listeners are supposed to, just like we should.

There are many more problems with how we live, and that we live, than there are roads. All the roads, taken together and in and of themselves, are a minor factor in our own inevitable long-term doom spiral.

The way we eat and the way it is farmed: the sardines of Portugal in little tins, the coffee of Sumatra shipped green by the ton to our eventual cups, the Monsanto fields our genetically modified corn grows in; Nutella, Hydrox, Doritos, Spam, and grass-finished free range sustainably harvested loin of beef.

How we warm ourselves, or cool ourselves, according to the season.

Where we jet off to on our doubtlessly hard-earned international vacations, and the true cost of how we get there.

Our wars. The US military is the single largest emitter of the gases that are permanently changing the climate.

Our jobs.

Our increasingly autistic and transgendered children pumped full of Adderall and testosterone blockers to just keep them marginally on the right side of sane, and the 50+% of adults who are also on head meds, for depression and anxiety and the blue shaking horrors of their corporate Empire.

The way we habitually do everything we do, the System we fly our flags for, is not just killing cute sea turtles and darling polar bears and some mangy cougars in their LA ghetto–not just faceless dark-complected babies by the half-million in Iraq.

It’s killing us, baby.

You don’t even have to believe in climate change to know it in your bones, that everything that everyone in the Big Club does, and most of what you and I do too, is slowly driving insane and murdering everything and everyone we ever loved.

Our very selves included.

The way we live rips a big hole right out of the middle of us.

You’re not allowed to talk about it in polite company but you know it’s there, hidden beneath your ragged t-shirt or your lovely designer blouse.

What do you do, with such a hole?

You try to fill it.

With … something.

Next time we’ll talk about hole fillings.

It is funny, but as a 75-year-old disillusioned, and disappointed American-born citizen, I now have many of the same emotions that I had as a young child when I realized that Santa Claus wasn’t real. To viscerally understand that this jolly man was just a story that I was told by my elders to ensure my good behavior EXACTLY parallels the mythos of democracy. It s a beautiful idea that has been manipulated, shat upon and exploited by a relatively privileged few for my entire life. It has taken three quarters of a century for me to arrive at that conclusion. I have been dragged kicking and screaming, digging my heels in all the while, towards the Machiavellian abyss of the present moment. Santa Claus isn’t real!

from the comments section here

An unretouched screenshot from this video.

Yesterday I made my run into Flag. The most important thing I got done there was slapping down eighty dollars for a Lifetime National Parks pass. I got a new bottle of MCT oil too. But the rest was irrelevant busywork for hire.

I got home after dark again. I crashed at ten and I got seven hours and that is supposed to be perfection. But the wind came up and howled and it drained me a little more. So I went back down for two more hours, secure in my dreams.

When I woke from that, the screen capture was the first thing I saw on my screen. Walking. Making a video in one’s own back yard. It looks like an AI pic, but it’s not.

Tomorrow I go back to a kind of work that drains a four or five day chunk of the sentient hours that are left to me.

On the fourth or fifth of the coming month my life starts all over again. I have plans for the time that begins there and then, provided that the creek does not rise, as they used to say.

Are evil oligarchs allowed to jam out?

Source

Sure. Willy Clinton had a saxophone.

But it will never make them cool even so.

Sorry, I don’t make the rules, Ant’ny, you foul goon.

***

Supermoonday was also the peak effort day for me in the recent little experiment in working to generate a tiny flow of Jacksons. I almost said income, but I’ll plead the fifth there. I hear them revenooers are hiring like crazy.

I worked a pretty intense eight-hour shift and I made the world a better place, in the getting rid of shit way.

Boss Lady didn’t get me coffee or food, and she didn’t tell me where the bathroom or the water was exactly. I pissed on my lunch break at home. She did continue to say she appreciated it, and I reckon that’s true after a desperate fashion.

My bonus was a twenty year old canister Shop Vac that seems to work. I also stole some expired extra fennel from her kitchen. There’s a nice extra sleeping bag that’s probably way too small from me. I plucked it from the scrap pile for the wife maybe.

That’ll do.

Tomorrow her movers are coming and that’ll dry up my monsoon of her dollars.

That’s alright Mama. Any way you do.

I got shit of my own to get tossing and moons of my own to go witness.

The whole System from top to bottom is run by oligarchs. I’m just a serf. You may be some kind of artisan or craftsman in some kind of guild, but neither of us has any real power economically or politically. We run nothing and we rule nothing and nobody calls us Excellency or even The Honorable.

Way down at the bottom you might have a little clutch of city or county councilmen. These guys are the “community leaders”. Maybe they own a big ranch, a big hotel, the biggest tourist trap around–something like that. They’re the leaders because they have the most money and influence in some fashion. Their biggest priority is overseeing the cops and making that just the right amount of powerless people are beaten, jailed, or otherwise harassed, to keep them in line.

Up at the extreme other end, you have the tycoons. Elon and Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and the Clintons. The big turd that runs Amazon and the Washington Post, the Beezus. All the weapons manufacturers. The biggest rulers.

There’s a level just below them, a special class of oligarch called politicians, who take their orders directly from the Beezus and his rich friends.

It’s kind of funny, about this second tier. In capitalist Democracy, you actually get to vote for them! Nobody votes on who is going to run Microsoft or GE of course. That would be commie and insane. But you’re supposed to get a vote on who gets to be the Congress drone oligarch who lives closest to you, or Senator, and who gets elected as upper class President.

It’s just as much fun as it was back in high school, and Joe Biden is our current homecoming queen. His oligarch project is running the little theater piece over there about some shooting match between evil bad Vlad and the actor in khaki who is homecoming queen at Kiev High, for the next few months at least.

The major advantage to this system for the oligarchs is that everybody in America High (go team red white blue!) takes this voting shit very seriously.

The people you vote for are supposed to be your “Representatives”, but that’s just part of the show, and a pretty sick joke if you think about it too much.

They never have and never will represent you. They don’t know what you want. They don’t care what you want. Even if they accidentally found out, not one of them is going to represent what you want, or work toward that. Thinking they might is complete foolishness and magical thinking (even though everyone out here, even me sometimes, does it anyway).

They already have bosses above them, with wants of their own, and by comparison your wants, needs, hopes, dreams don’t amount to a bucket of piss; Not to anyone.

The people who really run things keep you doped with religion, sex, and MSNBC, in the words of John Lennon, sort of.

It’s all a lame puppet show. Look everybody! They convicted Trump of, uh, something something errr … Look! They’re thinking about running Kamala or Gavin if the wheels really come off Joe’s cognitive functioning!

In the real world, none of this makes a god damn bit of difference, because every one of those little poligarchs is bought and paid for (Krysten Sinema), or will be soon enough (hi AOC, girl heir to Nancy the Pelosi), by the real oligarchs above them.

But oh the hoopla. Oh the spectacle. For some of us, it’s better’n Monday Night Football, or even pickleball.

Meanwhile, the gears of oppression grind so slowly, and so exceedingly well.

The junkies die and the veterans hold down their trenches still, at a big left turn stoplight on your daily grind of a commute.

But Mr. Vairtere, we have to vote for the good guys, because Abortion, because Mexican kids in chicken coops, because that orange one is just so vulgar and dumb and I hate him so much and my twisted sick fellow americans who want to elect him again, too.

Obama built the chicken coops. He promised, while campaigning, to codify Roe vs. Wade, and after the election said it wasn’t a priority, and it died.

For whatever reason, his bosses didn’t want it codified, so he tossed the idea aside and moved on, to rigging an election against old wacky Bern.

Representatives, my shiny chapped ass. Even when they accidentally do know what you want, you’re still just screaming into the wind, pounding sand, pissing up a rope, and dancing to the tune of your natural Masters.

Sorry to be that guy. Again.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

***

I’m becoming an expert about the different kinds of boxes, and packing tape.

So I got that going for me too.

The title reference is to George Carlin.

Generally speaking, unlike a majority of whitish folk my age, I am all for the concept of Reparations. Seems pretty fair.

But I do have a question, for the more fierce advocates of said concept, a la Marianne Williamson.

What is your position, O Fierceness, on expanding the concept to the indigenous peoples, whom capitalism and democracy perpetrated a genocide upon?

How about to Japanese-Americans like our friend Mr. Sulu, who were sent to camps in the 1940s, their homes and businesses seized opportunistically under false ‘security’ pretenses?

Or even to poor Appalachian whites who were exploited by the mining industry for generations, until they tried to unionize and died of Pinkerton bullet wounds instead of black lung?

My point here is that the class war is at least as important as racially-based atrocities. We all suffer when oligarchs are in charge of the economy and the government, and sad to say, they pretty much have been since the founding.

Dr. King, before they killed him for saying it, and for coming out against their stupid endless wars, thought so too.

There are plenty of dim race baiters out there, never able to hold a candle to Martin King or Malcolm X, who would say that my privilege is showing, or some crap like that.

People like Ibram X Kendi.

Who, it is turning out, is not a deeply honest and pure soul like the two gentlemen mentioned above, but just another dimestore con op.

That doesn’t mean I believe that all people who would try to put race, or gender, or sexual preference ahead of class are grifters. We can differ on the finer points without needing to resort to that kind of generalization … I’m almost sure of that.

That’s probably about enough out of me for one day.

Details and embellishment at the link.

Class consciousness and solidarity on the road to anarchy now.

If you’ve heard anything at all lately about Russell Brand, or about his platform of refuge on Rumble, and you heard it from the usual suspects, then you are naturally drowning in a sewage of innuendo, conjecture, and lies.

Russell Brand has not been convicted of a crime.

Nor has he even been charged with one. Nor arrested. Nor indicted.

The most intrepid of researchers has not been able to uncover evidence that any alleged victim has so much as filed a police report about him.

And yet, for reasons obscure to the naked eye, Russell Brand has already been severely and unjustly punished. His YouTube channel, with five million plus subscribers, has been completely demonetized, and that’s only the biggest piece of the pain that has been inflicted on him.

Naturally, he decamped for Rumble, and now the same well-funded forces that smeared him in the first place are wanting you to believe that Rumble is swarming with white supremacists, father-stabbers, mother-rapers.

It’s not. There are right-wingers. There are radical criticizers of the American Way. There are people who transcend all the bullshit labels, like Brand himself, and like Glenn Greenwald, who tonight provided an antidote to rumor and slander and libel here:

Using Russell Brand as Pretext, UK Govt & US Media Launch Multi-Pronged War on Rumble

Savor it like you used to savor your civil liberties, in the good old days.

***

The prof lady loves to chatter while she works. Eventually, inevitably, she set me off today.

I told her that pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into a losing bet in Ukraine was an excuse for corruption at the highest levels. I told her it was dumb. And I explained to her that, according to polls, the only fragment of the American population that still supports limitless funding for Biden’s proxy war, by a 74-26% margin, were self-described ‘liberal democrats’, the same liberal democrats who once led the opposition to wars in Korea, and Vietnam, and Iraq.

She, being very much the model of a liberal Democrat herself, spake back to me in righteousness:

“Well what would you do? Just let Russia run them over?”

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Well what if China invaded Mongolia? What would the Bolivians do?

The Bolivians would do fuck-all, because that would be none of their damn business, and none of their concern in any way, and Bolivians are rational people who act in their own rational self-interest.

Would that the poor benighted Americans could say half as much.

Would that the fragment of people still clinging to the idea that Biden, and Chuck Schumer, and Lindsay Graham are in any way the good guys in this melodrama wake the fuck up and get those billions and billions passed out to Flint and Lahaina and the Ohio rust belt instead of a gang of corrupt Nazis on the other side of the world.

Maybe it’s still a little harder to test your military-industrial war products out on poor black people, on your own turf, than it is to stick it to the Rooskies like it’s 1953.

At least … so far.

Give them time.

Good old American ingenuity will find a way, and they will let the ersatz freedom ring and ring in your ears until they start to bleed.

Democracy. So beautiful.

I churn on with my little, uh, side hustle, helping the professor move. It hit a small wall today, but that’s boring, and it will begin again tomorrow.

She’s the only person left in my current life who qualifies even remotely as a ‘friend’, and she’s moving away. I have my inamorata. I have my family. But after this my slate of friendship is wiped clean again.

The other day I showed up at her place with everything I needed to make coffee for myself, on her old mess of a stove.

She took it as a bit of a slight, maybe. She started to fuss about not having coffee for me, or food, or anything but jug water out of a plastic cup.

I said to her, look.

If you think about it, this is the third time in a long summer that I’ve helped someone I care about move.

There was the Mom-n-Sis. There was the wife. And now there’s you, ladyfriend.

This repeated experience has taught me a few things, my dear. The most important of which is:

If I expect anyone ever to consistently care about my projects, my priorities, my beliefs, my needs of the moment right down to caffiene, even half as much as I do myself …

That expectation is only going to lead to disappointment.

So to the best of my limited ability, I’ve stopped expecting, and to the side of that, I try and try again to quit bitching about it, because in the end I have no right to expect that kind of intensity or focus of caring–people, and even the people who tell me they love me, are dealing with their own shit, be it good or bad, and devoting themselves to trying to figure out what my needs are (in the absence of me ever talking about them, to boot), is … unrealistic at best. Call it narcissistic, at worst.

Hence, on day two, I’m hauling my own coffee into your house.

She was briefly thoughtful about that, and she said, I see what you mean.

You mean when they’re in the middle of moving and all.

I didn’t say anything.

I made some noises designed to signal that I was done talking about it.

I was thinking: No. Not just when they’re moving.

All the time. Every waking moment of this wide open space of a life.

***

I know people care, and even sometimes love for real, in my direction.

No one is ever going to care all that much.

The secret wish that they would is my problem, and a significant component of the Mark of Cain that I bear as firstborn.

My father let that problem consume him.

He wanted his needs to be not just lovingly met, but to be anticipated.

And when he didn’t get that wish fulfilled, he lashed out, often violently.

He believed that having a crowd of people around him, a woman and some children in particular (since his mother, his first choice, had long given up on him) to attend to his many emotional and physical needs was not only a necessity, but his right.

He was a selfish fuckin’ douche, and all I’m doing here is describing the mechanics of that douchery.

***

It exists in me too.

I keep a watch out for it and I pounce on the first vile shoots of the weed when I see them starting to grow out of my brain or flesh or mouth.

At worst, I come here, and Spill my guts about what I really want, and what I really need, or what I at least crave irrationally.

Expecting nothing to come of it.

Satisfied enough, when that singular expectation manifests as I imagined it.

Every day above ground is a good day, fleetingly rare and precious.

I’ve been day laboring. Today was a four hour shift. So, I commute to NPR.

During tonight’s broadcast a reporter mentioned that for prisoners, health care is a constitutional right. I assume that’s because if it wasn’t, that would be cruel and unusual punishment.

The story was about how, of course, they’re not getting it anyway, and dying untimely deaths from often very preventable maladies. It was shocking and heartbreaking radio.

But really, I couldn’t help but wonder …

Why is it that convicted criminals (including the many wrongfully convicted) are guaranteed health care … when millions of working, non-criminal citizens are left without even health insurance, much less real care?

This system is completely fucked up, and in many ways that has been true for two hundred years, straight through the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act, Vietnam, Iraq, and the latest adventure in the puppetry of warfare.

We don’t have money to house people, or feed them. We don’t have the money to give them health care. But oh Jesus forbid that the defense contractors in the Ukrainian money-laundering operation, because that’s what it is, should go a week without another billion dollar chunk of change jingling around in their pockets.

Or that we close a couple dozen of the 800 military bases the Empire maintains worldwide, in order to give a few graduates a way out from under their crushing student loan debt.

To the rich men north of Richmond, and the nice little Puerto Rican rising stars there too, I can only say:

Fuck you people. Fuck you with a ch**ns*w. You want to make the world a better place, do you?

Start in Flint. In Ferguson, Missouri and Jackson, Mississippi. Start in the burned out ruins of Lahaina, and over there in East Palestine, Ohio, where the train ran off the tracks and into a pit of silence after a few weeks.

You vote billions for the entire payroll of the plucky Kiev government. Yes, that’s right–it’s not just the weapons. Without US taxpayer dollars, zero accountants, janitors, soldiers, or Presidents would ever again see a paycheck in Ukraine.

There are prisoners in the jails and there are prisoners in the trailer parks, the people you are supposed to represent, who don’t have it half as good.

Lots of them.

No more votes from me to you until that basic dynamic changes.

No more loyalty, no more patriotism, no more hand over my heart for the Empire anthem.

I know it’s real cozy up at the Marriott and the Hilton. I know the ceviche and the crab cakes are to die for, uptown.

But you ain’t the ones dying, bitches, nor your sons in all those wars.

Anarchy now.

I got a text from some company doing political polling.

It said some stuff and it concluded by telling me that this was my chance to Get Involved.

That was the wrong thing to say to me right now.

I am already far more involved than I want to be.

I don’t believe for one second that Getting Involved with your company or PAC or party or cult or whatever it is will do me one damn bit of good in the first place, and even on the off chance that it might, I can’t afford it because my stress would be spiked simply by adding to my load of over-involvement.

So thanks anyway, and you are cordially invited to leave me the fuck alone to brood on my failures as a citizen and productive member of this shining Land of Liberty you got going on here.

Good luck in all your future endeavors I am sure.

The situation is no longer intolerable.

The house is still just barely habitable.

This morning, it being trash day, I got to the habitability project early, attempting (somewhat valiantly if I do say so myself) to address the bug-infested shithole that is the room set aside for the Contagious Cat, aka Alli.

In the time it took me to walk down the loft and grab the vacuum, the door had already been opened, and the contagious cat was out. I bellowed. It ran back in and all the non-contagious cats scattered. I proceeded with the vacuuming.

What I didn’t know was that the Bad Kitty, aka Lexi, had scattered not to the winds, but into the contagion room and under the bed.

I found out five or six minutes later, and used the vacuum hose, and more bellowing, to chase it back out into the house.

That may have been a stupid thing to do. Maybe I should have left Lexi in there. But I reacted on instinct, and whatever damage is done, is done.

My main fear now is that Lexi was in there (lingering in the still-unclean horror under the bed) long enough to pick up the virus, or even worse, to become a carrier and pass it to Kali or Riley.

I don’t need this. To me, being a cat person has meant, at most, Having A Cat, singular.

They like it much better that way too, and can thrive.

I finished vacuuming.

Alli is down to one relatively clean catbox.

The second one, still smeared with filth, is sitting on the hood of my pickup, waiting for me to decide how to deal with it.

Also sitting there are two timer-feeder dishes, filthy in their own way, the source of the bugs, which I thought had been cleaned up some time back.

That belief was mistaken. So many of my beliefs have been mistaken, and so many of my choices have been irrational.

Lexi still gives zero fucks–if I’m yelling, that’s my problem. Maybe that’s true. But I’m not going to believe it yet. I’m tired of holding beliefs and feeling them shatter. It’s making me old and burning up the fragment of life time left to me.

***

In less stressful news, I made seventy bucks yesterday helping the Professor Lady pack up for her move to Tucson.

I took the windfall down to Speedway and put every cent into fueling my truck, the one with the hood, which is now alone among the three vehicles left here in having a tank that isn’t near empty.

The glass might be half full.

Finally, my life is no longer clogged with crap.

Not even close to true.

But becoming more true, most days; Most days only the smallest bit, or even sometimes not at all.

I no longer believe in Progress.

You can keep your infant mortality rates and your rocket ships and your dentistry and your bullshit tales of pocket supercomputers.

Have fun with all that.

I am nothing but a Witness to incremental change.

Direct link

Yesterday I heard a flat statement that a quarter of American adults were going hungry (at times). When I went to see if it was true, this is what I found. I think we can fairly rate it Mostly True.

The statement was made in a throwaway fashion by the same Peter Daou that was just named campaign manager of Cornel West’s bid for the Green Party nomination–a very controversial move.

Daou went on Sabrini Salvati’s show to address the controversy and to try to prove that he has turned over a new leaf, and isn’t a careerist bag of shitlib any more. He apologized for being one, and it’s not the first apology for the same crime.

I am not particularly inclined to trust him, or to be as all-in as I wanted to be about the West campaign. We’ll see.

But I am inclined, in light of that one statement about hunger, to say in large part: Fuck Politics.

People are not just homeless around here, in a position where you can easily dismiss them as mostly addicts and head cases and cluck with a barely feigned sympathy and a shrug.

Long before they’re homeless, they’re malnourished, and stressed, and lied to routinely, and traumatized by capitalist neo-slavery, which turns them into addicts, and head cases, even if they have jobs, and a roof over their heads.

Even if they have kids who are going to suffer from all that too.

If you stood up to reality and were smart and worked hard and got out of that trap, by whatever means … I applaud for you, and I’m genuinely glad.

That kind of conditional life victory, though, will never entitle anyone to claim that the System works, or is good. It doesn’t, and it isn’t, for far too great a slice of We, The People. And not everyone who it fails is sick, or lazy, or of dubious morals, or of suspect character, or a loser druggie.

I believe that the System, and the belief System that supports it, is deeply and often intentionally evil.

You don’t need my permission to disagree. So I won’t give it.

Let do what Thou wilt be the whole of the Law.

***

How We Got Here

Source

There are so many stories coming down the pike about the fiction that is America right now that this one barely matters. It just caught my eye.

Jill Stein wanted to quickly get out from under being Cornel West’s interim campaign manager, and so she hired a douche who may well be an infiltrator for the DNC too.

The head of the UAW, who has a good reputation and is well-liked, suddenly announced that the strike against Big Auto would consist of only 8% of his membership to start with, and no one can figure out why in the hell that is supposed to help anyone but the worst fatcats in the country.

Is he a sellout? Is Cornel West even serious anymore?

If you still care about this crap in the least, DD covered those two stories and much more besides in their livestream this morning. Hit their YT homepage for more bite-sized versions; you can pick and choose instead of committing to listening for hours.

Slowly I begin to turn my heart away from that whole world. I am addicted to having it around like somber background music, but I can barely bring myself to umbrage lately, and maybe that’s a good thing.

It’s all broken beyond repair and putting my energy there is wasting it, unless something big should change.

My own life is broken too.

But I am repairing it, in my slow and stupid way, and by my own notions of Fix.

Carry on, beloved.

It’s probably been two years since I bought a jug of plain white vinegar to clean with. I have a lot of cleaning to do.

I was used to paying 3 or maybe 4 bucks for it.

It costs Seven now. About double. It’s the same with so many things.

***

I’ve been good about No Restaurants, but I am lazy about cooking, so when I shop at the lone grocer I’m always looking for MREs. Meals Ready to Eat.

The main problem with them is the same as with dining out. You basically have no idea where the food came from, and you can bet that wherever that was, it was the cheapest thing available, and not organic, or grass-fed, or free of additives and filler.

But I bought some hot meatloaf anyway. About a pound of meat, a couple ounces of ketchup and bread mixed in I would guess, and $9 at the deli counter. I wolfed it around 6 pm last night and it was a soothing comfort meal that put me in the mood to sleep early.

Which didn’t work out in the end because this is the single worst weekend of the year at the ranch in Sand Rock. My house sits a block from the Fairgrounds, and this is the week of the Fair. So the normally barren streets are crammed with people who want to park in my driveway and go distract themselves, and the air is full of garbage music at unsettling volumes, and the ugly voice of the superpatriot shitkicker rodeo announcer.

But that’s off-topic.

Today I went back to the grocery to see how little I could spend on makings for meatloaf that wasn’t suss.

The hamburger meat was spendy, and the even vaguely natural versions were astronomical. I thought about some 30%-off stuff that would have run five bucks a pound, but it didn’t even pretend to being good, so I checked out the ground turkey.

$9.99 a pound for the organic. I was surprised they even had it, and I almost paid the price.

But then I saw that on sale, for the exact same price, was *3* pounds of decidedly un-organic ground turkey.

It was literally the cheapest meat in the store, at least this side of scrapple and hooves. $3.33 to fill oneself with protein and keto juice, provided you had a stove, and a skillet, and an egg to mix it with, which I blessedly do.

So I bought it.

***

Just before it rained last night (for the last time in a while, they say), I got almost all the big wide driveway blown clear of dust, new leaves, old leaves, and random cat dishes and toys.

The rain finished that part of the cleaning for me.

It’s looking pretty good; coming along.

Then I ate my pound of suss burger and tried to sleep with those mixed results.

Twenty four hours later, I’m back in a similar place, with a little more done. I’m scratching at several tall piles at once. I’m trying not to listen to Dildo the Cowboy yammer his flag-waving bull shit. I’m fully charging the headphones in the hope I can sleep with them on until the yeehaws shut the fuck up around one, two in the morning.

I don’t know if it’s a living, but I’m sure it’s a life, and not a lifestyle.

I wonder how much it would cost to turn myself into the guy that owns a bunch of storage lockers, and why I didn’t do that when I had the chance.

But I wonder idly.

And secretly, I know the answer.

Craig “Pasta” Jardula is subbing for Jimmy while JD is on the road.

In this clip, he’s talking about a recent lively debate between Krystal&Kyle and Briahna Joy Gray. BJG takes the general position of “they’re all the same”. K&K are quite foamy around the mouth about how much greater Joe and the Dems are–if you want talking points to convince people about why voting for the Joe wing is the right thing to do, Krystal and her new boy toy try to bring them by the dozen. It’s a gold mine for Blue no matter who. Enjoy.

But Briahna is smarter than either of them, and Pasta has twice the heart as he lays down his gloss on their conversation.

There are plenty of reasons to simp for the Dems.

There are no good ones though.

Krystal, a millionaire many times over, pretends to care so much about labor unions. Kyle pretends that the utter failure to provide any kind of student debt relief was just poor Joe being outplayed by the greater evil.

It’s all deep bullshit that changes nothing, and will change nothing. Due Dissidence demonstrated that in a much longer and even smarter way the other night.

One more reason to believe in truth, again, from Woody.

And, let’s see … Cornel just hired some centrist system shill, a Hillary bot no less, to be his campaign manager;

fuck, uh-oh, everybody can legitimately go into panic mode.

There, now.

Consider yourself duly informed, if you read this, if you clicked anything.

If not, I’ve done my bit for the day and the cause anyway.

It helps me, if no one else.

As I struggle to climb up out of the Catshit Bombhole of my enviromind.

What is the right construction? ‘Happy Nine Eleven’ doesn’t seem quite right.

In any case, let’s all celebrate the Patriot Act and the loss of our civil liberties with one from the late lamented John Prine.

But your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.
It’s already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reasons for
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.

Bonus content: Brian Eno – Don’t get a job

It.

All of it, but the last three posts in particular, and then some.

During that long drive down, listening to NPR when I could stand to listen to anything except the wind, I heard a story about how “scientists” had “succeeded” in creating artificial human embryos with no egg, sperm, or womb anywhere involved. O, Progress.

The main utility of these little monsters, it seems, will be in reducing the number of failed pregnancies and bringing more live babies to term, through a deeper understanding of in vitro fertilization and embryology in general.

There are already eight billion human beings sucking at Gaea’s tit, which should be more than enough to kill her one way or the other, and sooner rather than later.

But progress and science live in a world outside such concerns.

They will use the frankenchildren to make more and better humans anyway, and what is worse, most of those more successful human babies will turn into rich ones that suck up far more than their equal share of every kind of resource–because they don’t have or need IVF clinics in Somalia or Bangladesh. They have them in the suburbs of Atlanta and DC and London and Berlin, because that’s where the infertile overeducated wannabe boutique mothers with too much disposable income are to be found. Naturally.

NPR muttered dimly and briefly about the possible moral hazards.

But not the real ones like overpopulation or inequality. No, they were more concerned that God might not approve of vat-grown embryos being experimented upon, and stuff like that. That in His infinite wisdom He might find it … icky.

Beyond that though, they treated the news with optimistic applause, like the headfucked bluish drones they have dependably become over time.

***

As I mentioned, the other day Jimmy Dore interviewed Cornel West and there was no happy ending. James reflected on what went wrong, and tried to explain the source of his depressed disappointment with Dr. West.

The best analysis of the interview came from Sabrina Salvati … and I say that confidently despite the fact that I’ve only (so far) watched her first ten minutes.

In that brief span, she zeroes right in on what the real disagreement was between the interviewer and the interviewed. It comes down to a difference in perception about Trump and Biden and the parties they represent.

Jimmy says there’s no ultimate difference. Cornel objects, arguing that the Dems are still after all this time the lesser evil. Who are the worst fascists? Cornel says: Trump and MAGA. Okay, maybe, but … why?

It’s because, he says, that although the two parties are equally bad in real terms, the Trump faction is more fascist because, in addition to all the macro-shitty things both sides do … the Trumpists also engage in “the scapegoating of the most vulnerable”.

Dr. West, I’m still very likely to vote for you. But that’s a very thin thread to hang your distinction on, and as many people have pointed out, that thread does not come free, either–politically.

In other words, there is no electoral upside, and maybe a steep downside, to saying “Biden ain’t quite as bad”.

I don’t get why you would say it. I don’t get why your main spiritual advisor, the estimable Chris Hedges, would not try to rein you in on spouting such a useless, nonsense thing.

Unlike Jimmy, I’m not quite disappointed in you, but that’s because of how Sabrina opens her analysis in this piece. She says:

• “there is no hero coming to save you”
• “we have to save ourselves”
• “we have to help each other”
• “I’m not sad, I’m not depressed, I’m not heartbroken”
• “because I’m not relying on a politician to come and save me”

Preach it, sister.

We already made that mistake once or twice with the brutally disappointing old puppet man named Bernie. A lot of us made it to a degree with Obama before that.

We’d be fools to make the same mistake all over again with Cornel, or anyone.

Essentially, Jimmy and Sabby and Nick Cruze and all the other people shitting on Dr. West as a candidate right now … are in the right, intellectually and morally, and Cornel is badly mistaken. Even foolish on this score.

I can vote for him with a mind at peace anyway, because I’m not relying on even him, to come make everything right, and save us.

Thanks for the reminder, Ms. Salvati.

***

This runs a little deeper than politics for me.

I have so much respect for the Michael Moore who filmed Roger & Me. So too for Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Bukowski, and the ability of James McMurtry to understand the dynamic of ‘We Can’t Make It Here Anymore’.

But no film or book or song, much less any politician, is going to save me.

No mother or sister or brother or pension or job or idea is going to save me either.

When the tacks are down to brass and baggie is down to stems and seeds, no one is even going to understand how to help me–the ones who even care to give it a shot are few and precious–and understanding, nearly mythical as it is, would still be no guarantee at all that helping me would be worth it to anyone in this dark and sober world.

They have problems of their own. Those problems take the priority, and almost always ALL the priority, over mine.

Love has nothing to do with it.

I got mine, pal.

Best of luck to you.

And I am forced into a place where I have to say the same in return, not just because I can’t afford to be an altruist, but because you lose respect for me when I am one. Even to a third or fourth kitten life.

So water your own fuckin’ plants.

Move your own self down the road.

Celebrate your own birthday and send me a funny .gif for mine.

I’ll be over here living the same, and we can call it even. No hard feelings. Vaya con su Diosa and I’ll be going over here with mine.

On the long way home, I started to make a little list in my head of the kinds of things I don’t want anymore. I’m already notorious, for example, for Not Flying, but that’s old news.

At the top of the list was No Renting again ever, and that includes motel rooms. Yes, there will be times when one’s own roof and one’s own bed will be too far away for them to be of use. In those cases, I need to be prepared to bring my own roof and bed with me. In practical terms this means giving up on trips to Greece or Poland; or even Hawaii, and in fact giving up on seeing Europe even once in my life.

My time is growing shorter. My space is growing smaller. That’s my responsive choice to those facts. A goodbye to the whole dream of Hemingway, and the one about the caves at Lascaux.

No Restaurants. This is a softer case. I will still let Single Speed make me a pour-over sometimes. I will not say no to Martanne’s or the Turquoise Room once in a while on a special occasion. But as a matter of daily life, I’ll source my own food and prepare it too–I’ll take the time to do that, and I’ll sacrifice the social aspect of eating out to my ideals.

I’ll need to bring knives and a stove to put under the rolling roof, somewhere in the vicinity of the rolling bed.

No Interstates. Again, of necessity, this is a softer rule. It’s a straight shot of 85 miles down an interstate just to get to Sprouts from here, and I doubt I’ll take the much longer route through the rez at 55 MPH routinely, just in the interests of purity.

But to get to Denver, or back from Denver, taking I-40 and I-25 may be the fastest way, but not by much. And the US Highways are better in every other way. Especially the one that runs through Salida.

And the Natural Grocers there.

And the permissible one night of free parking of a rolling bed and stove just up the road at the Poncha Springs Visitor Center.

Beyond these three big ones, there are others. I am, for example, absolutely sick of spending three hundred a month on my tobacco habit. There are also things that are must-haves, rather than Verboten, and at the top of that list is the Solitude that I have been starving for all these many months. I was an idiot to let things get that bad. A generous and compassionate idiot, but that was not enough to excuse the damage that I’m so assiduously and painfully trying to heal in these first few days back in SandRock alone at last.

Roger & Me is a 1989 American documentary film written, produced, directed by, and starring Michael Moore, in his directorial debut.

We watched a good piece of it in the cold wind at 9500 feet at the Monarch Motor Lodge in Colorado the other night.

You should watch it too, even though you are almost certainly never going to hear that advice …

Still, you should watch it too.

***

It’s half past four in the morning on a Friday, and I am

• awake
• alive
• alone

I’m rested and unwound and I’ve got this solitude in abundance at last.

Yesterday I started to clean all the cat bowls. That’s even less pleasant than it sounds. In the meantime …

Burning Man
Some brilliant analysis about what it was, and what it is.
The high point comes at about the twelve-minute mark, where a bright rich little Burner complains about having to hike out through six miles of mud. And then same said Burner is later proven to be a lawyer who spends his days fighting against the constitutionality of child labor laws.

The American inequality, encapsulated.

Market missile

When I was driving down the mountain I listened to an hour’s worth of breaking news on NPR about this tragedy of a missile killing 17 people in a Ukrainian market. There was never a hint of any explanation other than the Russians being responsible.

But now there is.

The Western propaganda, encapsulated.

Two of my favorite political people, natural allies in any rational world, went head to head and were not very good to each other.

First Thoughts on CONTENTIOUS Jimmy Dore Cornel West Interview

Those first thoughts are provided by the Due Dissidence guys.

My own: Jimmy’s insistence on Covid and Mandates being the One Big Issue came off as kinda dumb, in spite of his attempt to drag things like censorship and income inequality under that single big tent. It IS the One Big Issue on the Jimmy Dore Show, but TJDS is not the world.

On the other hand, DD’s Dobular made a really great point.

There is one half-ass reason left for voting for Democrats, and the reason is: Not Trump Not Trump Not Trump. It’s a shitty reason. It’s an insufficient reason. And if you try to use it to vote for Biden or Newsome or the Blue-du-Jour in 2024, you’re rationalizing, possibly brainwashed, and not smart. I can say that because I was exactly that kind of not-smart in 2020, so please don’t hit me with the umbrage stick, even under your breath.

The problem is that Cornel West still thinks that Trump is worse, and a “fascist”, as if we hadn’t been marinating in real fascism for decades, as if white supremacy were something invented by the Donald instead of advocated tacitly by our beloved Founding Fathers a few hundred years back.

Ask the Sioux.

The logic of this is that if West drops out for some reason, and his thinking doesn’t change, he will probably be forced by intellectual honesty to become just another BlueNoMatterWho drone, the November after next, and just as with Bernie, anyone hoping for real change will just have to suck it up.

Dear Cornel.

Brother Biden is not the lesser of evils. He’s the strawberry evil, and Trump is vanilla and that’s pretty much the end of it.

Incrementalism will change nothing.

We don’t have time for this shit.

Live free or die; nothing personal.

Love,

V.

PS: Here’s one more recent DD clip featuring the brainless stylings of one Kyle Kulinski, on what amounts to the very same West question.

PPS: Lots of clips of the actual interview, and analysis from a low-budget working class perspective, on Hard Lens Media here.

Residents of Lahaina are asserting, in public forums, that three weeks before the fires, an “emergency declaration” depositing all power regarding “housing” there in the hands of a single unelected official was issued by the governor of the state.

Fueling speculation that the big black fences which quickly surrounded the devastated valuable parts of the city were ready to go well in advance of the disaster.

It sounds like just another crazy conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?

Maybe it is.

Sure.

Maybe.

But we know for sure that thousands of people are still missing (meaning: dead), and that big media has gotten bored and wandered away from the topic, and that whole families were incinerated together in their cars trying to get the fuck away, and …

That, for some reason, doubtless related to ‘safety’, it’s already illegal to fly a drone over the very real black fences.

More Interviews With Actual Residents

In the land of the free and the not so often brave
There’s both love or money, now choose which you will save

(But… keep thinking that way and you won’t get nowhere)

Set to post as It becomes a september, whatever that is.

He didn’t walk and he didn’t pray on the last day of the august. He slept nine hours and posted three respectable-length videos that used up almost all the old backstash of footage from the month just passed.

Where the third person came from just now I can’t say. But the point is, something was done, a thing that can be pointed to, and even viewed on the rusting Internets. Maybe it amounts to art, but at least for sure it amounts to

Something.

THEY say, in a very unsteady and completely unverified tone, that ten or fourteen hours from now someone is supposed to be by, to yank forty-two feet of trailer on out of this forsaken driveway and up to some greener grass.

They say I should trail the trailer, in the Pearl, and leave the Pearl up there sitting next to it, and then wait there, for some unspecified but low number of days while they both settle in to the northerly soils.

And then I’ll be allowed to come back down; in a Sunday Morning Coming Down type of Way, in some expeditionary rental car.

Back, to the wreckage and the crapstorm tornado that was, will be, left behind.

It may sound like I am complaining, but in fact and conversely, I am almost completely done now with all the complaining.

Relatively speaking, I am asked to help much more than I am asked if I need help.

Recently, I was asked how it was going … I answered honestly.

And upon hearing my dismal report, my inquirer said: “Well if you’re asking for help, I don’t have any to give”.

I was not asking for help.

I have never, actually, asked this inquirer for help.

I almost never ask anyone, for any kind of help.

So it pissed me off pretty sharply for a moment.

I have to say that there are people who help me, often without being asked at all. Help regularly, even once a month like clockwork.

I am deeply grateful, to my Patrons past and present, large and small.

I am stunned by that kind of generosity, and delighted.

But, posting a Patreon link aside, I would never ask for it.

The reverse is not true. I am asked, and often.

I’m not sure why that is, or how karma exactly is supposed to work.

***

Rolling back south I will be seriously considering whether Autarky is the answer to all these inquiries, questions, and metaphysical conundra.

Matt Taibbi is a great journalist. Aaron Mate’ and Max Blumenthal are top notch. Michael Moore is good. But a short little gay guy is The Man. His name is Glenn Greenwald and he’s whip smart and almost always just Right, politically and morally.

As proof I give you his last two shows at the time of this writing.

Bernie Denounces Cornel for Spoiling Biden’s Chances—Completing (His Own) Transformation Into An Establishment Hack | SYSTEM UPDATE #140

GG doesn’t just drill Bernie for his failings and cowardice. He looks at the whole system that drilled Bernie first, shows how it works exactly the same in Great Britain, and then lets a talented young black woman explain why everything they say about voting third party is bullshit–among other deeply interesting takes.

Grayzone’s GoFundMe Frozen—Escalating Abuse of Financial System to Crush Dissent | SYSTEM UPDATE #139

This one is about the deliberate Unfreeing of the Internet to reinforce existing power structures. Really thrilling stuff, I’m sure you’re thinking. I thought it too. I was wrong. It is, and it matters way more than who you choose to waste your vote on.

***

Thus ends August. It was not a good month for me. I barely walked and I barely filmed and I didn’t edit and I just managed to barely hang on to my sanity most days. Retreating into a pattern of being here and spilling every day again helped, but only a little.

After today that pattern breaks.

On Friday morning I have a road trip of sorts, up north to the place where the Rockies meet the Great High Plains. It won’t be a pleasure trip. It will, though, upon my return, buy me some big wide open space for a time.

Space with which I will craft another good month, like June, the gods willing. A credible start to the fall and the year.

If I’m not posting every day here, it’s probably a good sign.

So don’t fret for me.

At least not because of that, okay? (And yes, I can see my stats here, and I know that I’m talking pretty much just to the wind, but that too is okay.)

See you on the other side.

Maui Residents Erupt In Rage

Related via tangent to yesterday’s post.

You will not learn about any of it, diligently watching CNN or MSNBC. The bosses of their pretty anchorpeople and spokesdrones don’t want you to know. Up and down the chain there, everybody’s been well paid not to give a fuck.

There’s no water. There is nowhere to spend the laughably insulting $700 relief checks. But what there is, is miles and miles of blackout fence around the whole perimeter of the fire. Already. See for yourself.

Is this … a crime scene? Or are they just getting ready to make it into one, even before caring for the dead and injured and homeless and hungry?

And oh–cops. Lots and lots of cops in uniforms no one recognizes, on top of the National Guard.

How long will it take, before your town becomes Flint or Jackson or East Palestine or Lahaina, and what will you do when it happens?

Thank capitalist Jesus this is still a democracy, whatever in His name that even means any more.

Ukraine is the kind of democracy where all the opposition parties and opposition media are banned.

Also, the kind of democracy where the leader announced that the elections scheduled for 2024 were going to be cancelled, because, I don’t know, democracy isn’t an appropriate form of government during wartime. Something like that.

Now that the war is going badly, and they are running out of men of draft age even though the draft age is a soft sixty, Zelenskyy has moderated his view on that somewhat.

Now he says he wants to hold elections.

But only if his friends in the West can come up with another 5 billion.

Because voting is a really expensive deal, maybe even more expensive should he lose.

This is a man who owns dozens of homes in beautiful places all over the world, and every one of them is a nicer house than yours or mine.

Even before the, er, special military operation began over there (the War has been primarily internecine or Civil since 2014), Ukraine was hands-down the most corrupt nation in greater Europe, and that is still the case.

Elections don’t cost governments five billion dollars.

But golden parachutes for Volodemort and his best pals do.

You and I should definitely pony up.

Because Democracy.

Source

Why Nonconformity Cures a Sick Self and a Sick Society

Yesterday’s video link is from Useful Idiots, and their very next show was called

‘How Both Parties Work for ‘Tyranny, Inc.’

This one includes a detailed explanation, from the POV of a conservative populist, about exactly why DeSantis is far, far worse than Trump could dream of being, for the average person. So you might like it for that.

I got pretty interested in what the author of Tyranny Inc. had to say. I went looking for more and found this:

Tyranny, Inc. | A Conversation with Sohrab Ahmari

Mr. Ahmari is a convert to both Catholicism and conservatism, so he is not someone I would normally find myself allied with.

But his critique of the culture is both smart and compassionate.

In essence–my words not his–this is an oligarchic fascist state. The people at the top of it have all the money, and maybe just as importantly, they have most all the jobs, too. They own the think tanks. They own the Congress creatures and the Oval Office and therefore they own the sham of democracy. They own your mortgage, and if your life deviates from how they want it to be, and what they want you to do with it, then in all likelihood you will starve, or have to sleep under a bridge, or buckle and start conforming again.

(I’m wondering idly here just how much addiction is nothing more than a running and hiding from these awkward, ugly, and incontrovertible facts.)

They put plenty of resources into convincing people that hard work (working for them of course) and abiding by the laws (which they wrote) are the basis of being a good person, and a success in life. This message sticks, because they own all the media, and by various mechanisms own the education system too.

And thereby, nine times out of ten, they own your kids.

Or … they will, someday, after college … and they can afford to wait.

Maybe you believe that abolition happened.

But Malcolm was right when he said that slavery was only refined and extended to include all the colors and flavors of humanity inside the Empire, and beyond its borders to the best they can manage it.

If you remain loyal to the Master, you’ll never know want.

Unless we define want not in material, but spiritual terms.

***

The traditional radical remedy for all this, out beyond picket lines and bread lines, is to seize control of the means of production.

It mighta sorta worked in Russia in 1917. But as we know, the Seizers just slowly evolve into the new Caesars. Communism is not the enemy of the People, but it is not, over the long haul, their friend either. It’s just a capitalism and authoritarianism with slightly better credentials.

Some time ago I quoted a long thing about it.

Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau’s revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx’s first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.

–Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance

So … solitude and Thoreau then, right?

When I first was reading Walden at fourteen or fifteen, my dumb-ass father sniffed that Thoreau could afford that shit because he had rich friends.

He was ugly and stupid and violent, but he was right, about that much.

I have myself a couple of rich friends, but not that rich. I call them my Patrons and I value them highly, but none of them are gonna give me a house in the woods out of the goodness of their hearts, or put the fish on my table.

I’d be embarrassed for them if they did, in fact, and even more embarrassed for myself.

Anyway, cozying up to friends that pay your way is a piss-poor infrastructure for solitude, and actually getting the hell out of the way.

When they invite you to dinner in the big house, you’re not really free to say no, I need my time and my own space, ennit?

Tragically messy.

***

It might seem at first like this whole years-long line of inquiry is a hollow dead end.

But do not despair utterly, my children.

The sage still has a plan for getting out of the ubiquitous deadness.

It surely will involve … obtaining some little sliver of the means of production. Not through seizure, which is stealing just like any property is (ask the Sioux), but through leveraging the scraps of assets left to me, and some intelligence and sweat equity invested besides, to try on a very small scale to beat the masters at their own fucked-up evil game.

There’s a lot of moral risk in that.

I’m not sure what else to try, though.

Wish me luck, the speed of the gods, and all the other things that don’t exist. Pray for me to go on walking in integrity, which does.

Let me tell you about these magic beans I have for sale.

***

Coda: Just some generic and fun history related to themes of slavery, hunter-gathering, etc.

Slavery – Crash Course US History #13
Age of Jackson: Crash Course US History #14
19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15

The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1
Indus Valley Civilization: Crash Course World History #2

Last year, the wildly popular Pakistani Prime Minister was ousted.

He immediately claimed that the US was behind the regime change.

Now cables have leaked proving that allegation was spot-on.

Exposed: US Backed regime change in Pakistan

I’m sure he must have had it coming. For some reason.

Right?

You can tell me what the bad thing he did was, okay?

Next time.

I’ll be counting on you.

Oh, one more thing. If you could also explain to me why two of the journalists who received the leaked cables were suddenly murdered when they came to light?

And … which noble press-loving democracy pulled the triggers?

That’s be great.

I need reasons to believe. I need reasons to live.

But most of all I need to know why we are still the light and the hope of the free world, and how We are still the good guys.

Thanks my darlings.

The Governor went to Nantucket
Her friends told the kids they could suck it
The planet was burning
But the money kept churning
So Grandpa sipped wine and said fuck it.

Dem Donors FLIP OUT at Activists

If you’re even still here, you’re sick of hearing it from me.

So let’s pass the mic to pretty and talented actress Jennifer Lawrence.

Both Parties Are Hopelessly Corrupt!

Her subject is the rot at the heart of what’s left of ‘democracy’.

Enjoy.

(PS: I have no clue what happened to part 2 of this. I assume it’s behind some kind of paywall. Is that corrupt? No baby, it’s just bidness. America! Find it for me and I’ll post it. Even if she … 90 degree nosedives into Blue MAGA. I promise.)

***

I have a good friend and patron who told me once that she stays registered Republican so she can vote in their primaries and help weed out the worst of them. I have other patrons who, although solid Dems in recent years, tend in their hearts toward a natural conservatism.

This one’s for you guys. Go Vivek! (although he’ll go without help from me, given his dumb normie view of China and the simple fact that he’s an R).

Debate Debrief with Vivek Ramaswamy | SYSTEM UPDATE #137

You want to back an underdog who is looking more like a winner every week, dontcha?

You could do worse.

***

BRICS Adds Six New Members and now Controls 40% of Global GDP

One of the new members is Saudi Arabia, which means that this spells the beginning of the real end for the petrodollar.

Another of them is Iran, who a year ago were mortal enemies of the Saudis, until a peace was brokered between them by China. Now they are in economic alliance with both, and Russia, and India, and so on.

The so-called Pax Americana, the unipolarity of the hegemon, is dying swiftly, yet the Empire is still imposing sanctions for one reason or another on one-third of the world’s population.

And thereby it continues to blow off its own toes, diplomatically and economically, and if I may be so bold … spiritually.

This shambles is what the Biden presidency will be remembered for, long after Hunter and his dad The Big Guy are exposed and removed from civilized life.

Biden Greeted With Hostile Response In Maui

It was a long 13 days to the photo op, but the natives did not forget.

Trump Supporters DENOUNCE Capitalism and War

Not because they were tricked into it by some Daily Show media freak.

A bartender just asked them openly about what they really thought.

They told him.

I have a lot more in common with these average people with bad teeth in Eire, PA, than I do with any rich liberal blue-no-matter-who cowbell.

I hope you do as well, but that’s not up to me. Maybe your job is working directly for the evil bastard that owns the livery and the bar and the feed store and wants to own all the little ranches on the outskirts too.

Thanks to Due Dissidence for pointing this out.

No, Climate Change DIDN’T Cause Maui Disaster!

But late-stage techno-capitalism very well might have.

Is any of this true?

You don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe someday we will.

And knowing will change nothing.

Unless you and I rise up and force it to mean something.

My level of optimism on that occurring, among enough of us, and in time, is not high.

See the lilies of the valley. They toil not, they spin not.

They have no more defense than we do, against the bulldozers and the bred-in civilized greed of billionaires and paupers alike, and helpless shrugs of oh well, whatcha gonna do abouuut it?

***

Everywhere you go now, they are ‘understaffed’, and it’s not because of Covid, or some sort of generational character flaw, or laziness.

They’re understaffed because money is all that matters anymore, and organizations are unwilling–even unable, sometimes–to part with enough of it to employ and retain good people under tolerable working conditions at a living wage or anything like it.

Private enterprise in this country has always expected to be able to work people to death and pay them nothing–a working definition of Slavery of course, but even if you believe that abolition happened, think of Ben Franklin beginning his illustrious career as an ‘apprentice’ to his brother the printer. For what amounted to three hots and a cot.

Child labor was widespread before ‘Labor’ organized and bled and starved and died to end it, and other abuses, temporarily. Shit like that is making quite a comeback and that’s the truth even if McDonald’s is now paying 14.50 an hour (for twenty-eight hours a week so that there is no health insurance).

Try it yourself, Mr. CEO
See how far five fifteen an hour will go
Take a part time job in one of your stores
I betcha can’t make it here any more

All aboard the hamster wheel. That’s the only way to really get loved, you know.

When I was 23, government saved my life. They gave me a bus pass and use of a primitive computer for writing up a resume’. With that boost, I got a job at the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland.

With the insurance the job brought, I finally got the worst of my medical issues addressed, for pennies, instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would be today.

With the paycheck I got a studio apartment. Steam heat. Two hundred a month, in Northwest Portland a block from the Quality Pie, in an area that is now gentrified beyond all human reason.

I went back to school, taking out loans for education, and forty years later there is still eleven thousand dollars of that left to pay. Uncle Joe will start wanting that money again come the falling of the leaves. I will become one of the 150,000 Americans whose Social Security checks, for god’s sake, are garnished for school debt.

None of that is the point.

The point is that there were a couple dozen of us shelving books at that library. Far more than were needed. You might have derided half of us as shovel-leaners and your scorn would have been partly deserved, but …

The fucking books got shelved proper, no matter what.

There was still such a thing as a Fire Lookout then. Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder both spent summers in high towers, scanning the horizon for flames, with enough time left over to produce great art, and enough money left over to eat well and take the bus home.

But fire lookouts are not cost-effective.

We can send up a satellite. We can do it with drones. To hell with the shovel-leaners. They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps.

On Maui, cameras captured in vivid detail the moments when the technology exploded and showered the dry forest with molten metal shards.

But no one was being paid to watch it happen. So no one did.

No one was even dozing in front of a screen in the middle of the night.

No one was being paid to walk the earth and do regular maintenance on the ailing grid.

No reason to waste money on that. What’s the worst that could happen?

It wasn’t climate change, in point of fact, that burned down Lahaina and killed all those people.

It was capitalism, reaching its tentacles into the public utilities, and the schools, and the libraries too.

It was efficiency.

It was hatred for the idea that someone might be getting away with something, by doing an easy job that left time to think while still actually paying the bills.

While we, the righteous, spun our hamster wheels faster and faster and tried to get

A head.