Biden Scandals & Trump Indictments w/ Robert Barnes

A long and wide-ranging discussion of the American scene. Yes it is focused on what it says in the title. But those are not the interesting parts.

A few of the interesting parts:

–Fifty percent of young American men have no relationship or any real hope of ever getting one, because fifty percent of young American women are chasing after the most successful five percent of the men.

–The rate of rejection for car loans is the highest it has been in many years, because even the loosest lenders don’t believe that people can actually afford the price of a car, and they are right to doubt it.

–Among the general non-gentrified population, nobody can even afford a reasonable roof over their heads, even if they have a job, or two.

–There used to be a party for the working class, and they were called the Democrats. Now that the Democrats are the party of the comfortable urban gentry and the professional-managerial class, the working class has nowhere to go …

–Except maybe a slow but accelerating drift in the direction of Trump.

–Every time Trump is indicted, his poll numbers go up, and this is primarily because he’s not seen anymore as the sleazy real estate developer he once was, but rather as just another victimized punching bag of the system that created all of the above.

You’re welcome to keep on telling me how much you hate the guy, whether or not you have any real idea why, except that nice Mr. Cooper and smart Ms. Maddow, both of them multi-millionaires, keep telling you that only bad people like him, and anyone good is obligated to seethe with that hate.

They’re full of shit. There are a lot of more or less good people out here in Shitsville that like him, and there are more of them every day, due to the fact that no one else can even come close to credibly claiming to have their best interests at heart.

Trump is full of shit too of course.

But the average destitute unloved young person in this country has been living on the verge of being economically crushed for years, and now dear old Uncle Joe, the same man who once upon a time made it impossible to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy, is getting ready to reignite the meat grinder that this same system of ‘education’ debt has become, and push their hapless asses right over the fucking edge and out into the street.

Or maybe just into Mom’s basement for life, if they’re that lucky.

Will America be great again? Oh, I doubt it. Regardless of what you may think great is.

Instead, the great red, white and blue dumpster fire is at hand, and the flames that rage give not one shadow of a shit who you piously vote for, or denounce as a fascist, or what regimes you want to overthrow, or which version of the lying ‘news’ you choose to take seriously.

Abandon all hope, ye who dwelleth here.

As I sit to write it has yet to strike 9am, but already I’ve had the kind of day that is a half-step in the right direction.

Because I was up at 3, instead of going to bed at 3, and I got six hours by then, which might be enough to let me fight off the fatal urge to nap for the next eleven hours.

Because I already spilled well, and it led to an red-hot insight, about the Anarchic and its relationship not only to solitude, but to agnosis as well.

***

If I was set up to publish a drawing I would put those three things at the endpoints of a kind of triangle made from a capital letter A.

• anarchia (to live unruled or more precisely unrulered)
• agnosis (to not know)
• anchorite (“who withdraws from the world for religious reasons”);
  Greek anakhorētēs, literally “one who has retired,”
  agent noun from anakhorein ‘retire’ (from battle, the world, etc.)

Perhaps I can use the AAA to stop drinking.

Or build from those religious reasons and make it into a full Religion, for purposes of monetizing it (what other purpose could there be?).

***

Because I have already completed a proper walk for the first time in many many days, even if it was a minimal walk and even if the practice of early rising and early walking will go straight to shit tomorrow on account of the ongoing demands of cat care and social obligation; and stay shit, mostly, for the same poor reasons, until about the seventh of September.

At which time real life may be cleared to begin again.

***

Ten hours now.

Seventeen days now, until once again that life of purposeful religare can begin again and until the pilgrimage to monetization can begin for the first time ever.

We labor under the illusion that if we pay enough attention, we will understand what is going on in the world. I mean this in the geopolitical sense, but I think it applies to a lot of areas beyond that. Our “media” is a twisted joke, and watching CNN for example, to try to understand how and why those people burned to death in Maui, or what is happening with the fracturing of unipolar power, or climate change …

The millionaire talking heads ooze certainty while knowing nothing (and/or spewing propaganda), and so by watching them, we feel good and informed, while knowing nothing (and snacking down hard on what they spew).

***

When the Wagner mercenary group launched their “coup” a few months back, I watched amazed on Twitter while the blue-and-yellow-flag types cheered and crowed and heralded the final end of Russia. Even in those very early moments it was crystal clear that they not only knew nothing, but had zero interest in being informed. They wanted to wallow in the glory of their team, and to interpret such “facts” as existed in a way that meant they were going to win, and thus continue to feel … cheap glee.

At the time I felt something like pity or a kind of reflected shame for them.

Months later, there is still very little in the way of hard facts.

But there is a new theory, spreading from dusty internet corners of analysis, on what those facts might, possibly, mean. It’s fascinating.

The theory says that the whole scenario was essentially a psy-op, designed to give false comfort to the enemies of the Russian state, and (more importantly) giving its leader the pretext to “banish” Wagner to Belarus.

Thus positioning the mercenaries directly to the north of the Ukrainian capital and forming, potentially, one claw of a massive pincer, comprised of Wagner for offensive purposes, and the Belarusian army on defense.

I feel no glee, in considering this theory, but it is … intellectually coherent, and thus analytically satisfying.

Is it a Conspiracy? Is it “True”?

Fuck, man.

You don’t know and I don’t know, and …

Knowing anything about anything is a lot more rare than we consistently pretend it is.

If I want more cake, and there is more cake, I mostly certainly have more cake, or fish, or leafy greens.

What I will never want is more of hearing what I’ve got to have more of.

Hearing an opinion on what I’ve got to do … probably won’t make me mad or make me hate or offend me or set me off.

But it will also not change what I want.

Or what I don’t want.

To have.

More of.

This one, special ones, tomorrow and every day.

Peace. Quiet.
Space, to live. Wind. Sky.
Things growing in the earth.
Pleasure. Languor. Clean water.
Uncompromised and abundant mental and spiritual bandwidth.
Organic celery. The sturdy cast iron and porcelain pan on my stove.
A purr. A sleep. The Work.

The opposite of what I want:
Motel rooms. Gas stations. Interstate highways. Planes.
Guided tours. All you can eat (since Sweet Tomatoes is dead).
Corporate coffee.
Corporate anything.
The Anthropocene.
Fuss. Bother. Rush. Anger. Yapping. Screeching. Barking.

I suppose there’s more on both lists, but that’s the basics and I only wanted to spend ten minutes on the question so … done.

On The Beach (2000)

A deeply flawed remake of the brilliant original filmed forty years earlier.

I love that old film because of the way it makes me feel, and want to live.

This newer version still has that, but as a pale echo. The ending is a cynically tacked-on ‘happy’ one (in a film about nuclear holocaust and human extinction), and the very last line of dialogue is a blatant lie that annihilates human agency, in the name of some warped hollywoodland vision of what ‘love’ is, or to sell tickets, or whatever.

Also:
The original book by Nevil Shute, read aloud.
I listened. I get why it inspired a movie in the first place. The On The Beach of 1959 will still always be the canonical version of the story for me.

That guy who has everything
or nothing
or something like that.

https://www.sweetmarias.com/virtual-gift-card.html

It’s as inexpensive (or not) as you want it to be. You can rest assured that he’ll love it. And it’s easy as sin.

PS: Whether you contribute to the cause via this method, or some other way (dear Patreons), sometime in the coming weeks you’ll be getting free freshly roasted samples of … AnarKahveh. Or … whatever I finally decide to call it. Feel free to let me know if you have a preferred bean origin, roast level, or whatever … I’m going to need to experiment with a few things anyway before opening the enterprise to any wider public. Also, I won’t be selling ground coffee, because my target demographic would insist on grinding their own anyway–but if you don’t keep a grinder, let me know, and I’ll be happy to chop it into utility.

But ONLY because you’re you.

I don’t think I’m going to make a habit of writing here about what I’m learning about coffee. I think that will mostly be the subject of a new second YT channel, twitterpresence, etc.

But I am learning, fast and hard, and I want to tell you one quick thing.

When I spent that short week in Nevada a few months ago, I stumbled across a place called Mothership Coffee. The thing I loved best about it was that they had a menu of about ten different varieties of bean, and the menu was specifically designed for someone who wanted to order a pour-over.

In the course of the week I went through most all of that menu, about ten individual orders with beans from all over the coffee-growing world.

My favorite was the Peruvian.

Now I am in the very early stages of beginning to understand why it was my favorite.

First, most Peruvian coffee is grown up high at altitude, around 5000 feet it seems.

This means a denser bean–I won’t go too deep in the weeds, but for my taste that density is a good thing. It tends to mean bright clear flavors as opposed to the rich earthy ones you would typically find in lower-density, faster growing coffees farmed a couple thousand feet lower in places like Indonesia.

Dense high-altitude beans also seem to prefer being roasted lighter, and that works for what I want in more than one way. For example, light roasts also favor sharper flavors as opposed to smoother ones. And darker roasts mean more clean-up inside the roaster, because the oils in the beans come further to the surface in the late stages of long, dark roastings.

Finally, it makes perfect sense to me that I’d want to be up high, and that I would prefer that my coffee was from up high too. It’s a nice little additional symbolic piece.

I can get organic Peruvian beans in a raw green state for a little over six bucks a pound, in the ten-pound quantities I currently buy (pre-roasted) for personal use (for about $10-11 a pound). If I buy fifty pounds of the same, hoping to be able to roast and sell that much, the per-pound price is closer to five dollars.

I have a good electric starter roaster picked out too, for $500. My thinking is that spending two or three times that much doesn’t really buy me all that much, and spending eight or ten times that much for a real commercial roaster (plus the gas to fire it with) is ridiculous when I don’t even know if this enterprise is going to fly yet.

That’ll be all for now, darlings.

BROKEN COFFEE ROASTER – Media Company First – “VLOG 10”

Even if your name is Sistah Longs-Peak, I don’t care if you read this, or watch the video. I just need to post it, and respectively, post about it.

The guy in the video, Rob Pirie, doesn’t seem to be the kind of person I would easily grow to consider a soul brother. Coming back the other way, I’m not sure he would like what or who I am or represent either.

I say that because of things like this quote of his from the description below the video:

“After reading a book by Grant Cardone (The 10X Rule) it got me thinking …
If I 10X’d my output and focused on quality content, consistent output, and tons of useful/educational info then sales would increase generically”.

So first off, he means “organically”, not generically, but that’s just me being a pedant.

A bigger problem is that I’ve never heard of Grant Cardone before, and from this one reference, I can say with reasonable certainty that I don’t want to hear any more. My life has been way too full already of Rules that will supposedly explain and simplify everything, and they almost inevitably turn out to be cynical lies at worst, and half-truthful folksy wisdom warmed over like so much hash, at best.

And, I don’t believe I need to hear a whole lot more from either party, especially if either is the sort to take it for granted that “10X’d” is a natural or reasonable verb formulation for a grown-ass man to be flinging around casually. It stinks of wild-eyed ambition for the sake of ambition, with underlying notes of banana, propane, sawdust, and erratic education experienced through a formative lens of desperation in a culture where banality and ugliness are rewarded with success, while truth and beauty end up in some stream-choking landfill under a discarded leaking refrigerator.

I digress like a fool.

I think he’s right, in the main point of the video, about the first step in selling jewelry or coffee or t-shirts or a YouTube channel being to make a brand, and to promote that brand.

Not happy about the fact. Maybe even hate the fact. Still think it’s mostly true.

My brand will be art and anarchy and my coffee will be the very best.

Populist Anthem “Rich Men North of Richmond” Goes VIRAL

Smart and accurate analysis of that sleeper hit song we talked about.

How The Wind Industry Is Behind The ‘Imminent Extinction’ Of North Atlantic Right Whales

The species is down to 340 souls total, and dropping fast. So it’s a story, on “The Hill”.

The first co-host and interviewer, Robby Soave (no really), is of the opinion that species die all the time in the name of human progress, and So What?

The reporter who broke the story and is on as guest sees this as just another reason why we should be going hard into nuclear power (and fracking!). To save the whales. Makes total sense, right?

Anyone with half a brain will have to be content to be represented by the always well-meaning Briahna Joi Gray, who is earnest and confused: “I’m just trying to figure out where this ends, logically”.

Let me see if I can help, Bri.

The whales will not be saved by nukes, or anything else. They’re as good as dead, probably sooner than later.

Similarly, We the People will not be saved by wind power, and day after day, we will continue to burn more and more fossil fuels, in spite of the threat of human and cetacean extinction, never mind the polar bears and the turtles with straws up their nose, because as a collective System, we are stupid and greedy and addicted to “Growth”. Of capital, above all else.

What nobody seems to really get is that climate change is pretty much just a fashionable new theory about how things will collapse in on themselves.

In a month or two, the human population of the planet will hit 8 billion.

The North American continent, with its wildly extravagant lifestyles in ecological terms, accounts for about 1/20th of that number.

There is no such thing as a “sustainable” way of living that can “sustain” that many people, or anything near it, and population growth is continuing to accelerate just like the burning of dinosaurs, and ecological disaster itself.

If you still believe that somehow the species will Technology its way out of demise, you haven’t seen Planet of the Humans–and they don’t want you to. Why on earth would an environmental documentary be aged-restricted on YouTube, like porn or gory scenes of war? (alternative link)

Because we have to keep lying to the children the way we were lied to, in order to spare them from knowing the fearful truth of what we’ve done to the world they were supposed to inherit.

Kids, listen.

Santa Claus is a pedophile, like Jeffrey Epstein and his friend Bill Gates.

There is no God.

Any time you’re getting sold on the benevolence of an old man with a grey beard and magical powers, they’re trying to brainwash you into accepting paternalistic domestication to the will of real old men like Klaus Schwab, Josep Borrel, Warren Buffet, and kindly old Touchy Joe.

There is no obvious good reason why you should take my word over the word of your parents.

Just think about it, and if you get the chance, hug a whale before its too late.

The FBI Just Pulled a Ruby Ridge 2.0 – The Execution of Craig Robertson

Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old Air Force veteran, was killed during a raid on his home in Provo, Utah, last Wednesday. FBI agents went to his home early in the morning to arrest him for some shit he said online about Joe Biden.

Because they had been investigating him for months, the Feebs knew very well that Robertson was “a homebound, overweight man who used a cane to walk”, and therefore posed only the feeblest of real threats, at worst.

They drove a tank onto his lawn, broke his door in with a battering ram, and rained bullets into the breach until he was thoroughly dead.

Airman Robertson, “thank you for your service”.

Amen.

The State is that … which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area …

It’s so simple.

A cop has the right to shoot you. It’s a discretionary right, and used whenever that high school diploma badgeholder decides it should be.

If you shoot a cop, though, even if you were in fear for your life … game over.

The state does everything it can to maintain a monopoly, over the use of force.

If you use it, on anyone, they can and do punish you, starting with depriving you of your freedom to move at will.

Morally speaking, the State itself is a hypocritical monstrosity, not a mechanism for ensuring life, or liberty, and not compatible with pursuing one’s own happiness, in spite of their pretty constitutional words.

The quotation continues:

in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.
Source

They coerce you as a matter of course to pay for the right to live in their horrifying system by their ugly rules, which change to suit their needs.

Capitalism, communism, fascism, socialism, democracy all matter far, far less than Statism. They’re just flavors of it.

The buffalo were murdered to perpetuate its interests.

To say nothing of the free indigenous peoples whose economy and very ecology depended on those big shaggy beasts.

The buffalo had to be wiped out because they refused to be domesticated.

The same was true of the man they called Geronimo, and thousands like him.

They domesticated actual human beings to serve as farm labor down south, and serve the vittles on silver platters up north of Richmond.

Today in this Land of the Free, everyone is domesticated.

I mean you, and I mean me, too.

We agreed, implicitly or explicitly or both, to play nice with the oppressors. The Massas. The owners of the big house.

We made our own little killings, on the backs and by the terms of their mass killings.

The casualties of which included our spirits.

“The system isn’t perfect, but it’s by far the best one–suck it up!”

Do you still cling to that shit, or is it clinging to you?

The song about the Rich Men North of Richmond was a male West Virginia take.

Here is the same take, from the perspective of an Alabama woman.

Alabama Mom’s RANT on Cost of Living GOES VIRAL

The people who don’t live in a nice pocket suburb are very pissed off.

I haven’t heard any good explanations about why they shouldn’t be.

Liberty and Justice for all my ass.

Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Any More.

You and I live in a corrupt garbage country.

Mr. Greenwald explains why that is true and why you, probably, viscerally and reflexively, choose to believe that it is not.

Special Prosecutor Appointed for Hunter Biden—What This Does and Doesn’t Mean | SYSTEM UPDATE #129

“Each day without solitude weakened me”, c’est vrai, Hank.

Today is the first day with a taste of it.

I am nowhere near strong thus far, but …

I’m not old or broken enough yet for the weakness to be a permanent state.

Here’s a country song for you. Seems like it’s gone violently viral. Linking it for you should not be considered an endorsement of the sentiments within.

But there’s a lot of truth in it anyway, and people are hungry for that.

Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond

and nine. “There are days when I would rather not have this blog due to the nature of the subject matter present. Today is one of those days. This is only because I would rather spend a thousand days dealing with …”

Abort, and codify it this time.

Instead just quote.

While God created Adam, who was alone, He said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone. He also created a woman, from the earth, as He had created Adam himself, and called her Lilith. Adam and Lilith immediately began to fight. She said, ‘I will not lie below,’ and he said, ‘I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.’ Lilith responded, ‘We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth.’ But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the air.

–Adam and Lilith, in Alphabet of Sirach

Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.

–Francis Bacon, Essays, XXVII “On Friendship” (1612)

I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.

–Charles Bukowski, Factotum (1975)

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

–Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Scribner, 1963), p. 11

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.
“The thoughtful soul to solitude retires,” said the poet of other and quieter times; but where is the solitude to which we can retire today? Science, which has provided men with certain material comforts, has robbed them of their souls by surrounding them with a world hostile to their existence.

–A. W. Tozer, Of God and Men

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

–Satan in Mark Twain The Mysterious Stranger

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting – are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

–Colin Wilson,The Outsider

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

In thirteen short minutes, Jeffrey Sachs explains what really went on over there from 2014 to the present day, and as a bonus explains what is transpiring right now in Niger. And even beyond.

It’s an intellectually satisfying and morally disturbing little tale. Enjoy.

The bullet that killed Robert Kennedy, the one that exploded in his brain, was fired from behind, under his ear, close enough to leave powder burns.

Sirhan, standing some feet in front of him, did shoot him.

But he didn’t kill him.

***

When the heroic leader of Ukraine is martyred, please remember RFK.

Larry Johnson, formerly of the relevant 3letter agency, says that this latter-day martyrdom is more imminent with each passing week.

Russia will of course be blamed just like Sirhan was.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that version will be called a nut job.

What I’m telling you now is that if Russiabad wanted the Z-man offed, he’d have been offed a long time ago, and not after his country was already on the glide path to becoming, some hundreds of billions later, a historical footnote of a rump state.

Will you be weeping next to Sean Penn when it happens? Will you call for blood and retribution and revenge and assassination without thinking twice?

Maybe they’ll let him retire to Miami and save us all that thinking.

It could happen, yeah?

Or, why I’m suddenly bad at returning phone calls, etc., again, like the bad old days.

It’s because I’m getting maybe five or ten percent of the restoring solitude I need to function, and I’m running from any interactions in a vain attempt to just keep an even keel.

The bedroom is full of nonstop interaction. The second bedroom. The bathroom. The phone, the trips, the yard.

I’ll tell you what I tell myself.

Hang on. Things will change radically and soon.

In the meantime, my apologies to each and every one of you I’ve successfully managed to neglect, no matter how very near or very far.

Source

Once upon a time, ‘liberal Democrats’ stood united against War.

And for things like … railroad unions. A living wage.

But this is Biden’s war, and no American child’s boots have been on the ground over it, so far, thank God. Just millions upon millions of our moneys, and piles of old tanks and shit.

Maybe that changes things in ways I don’t understand.

I used to be a liberal Democrat, more or less, but I barely even know what it means any more.

I definitely don’t want more money going over there when it’s needed here and will be more needed soon.

Additionally: Vicki Nuland Out Of Niger Now.

And no more dipshit corrupt senators in Taiwan.

Fix Flint. Fix Jackson. Fix the borderlands. Feed my sheep.

Maybe then we can talk some more, about dirty little adventures in democracy.

Fitch LOWERS U.S. Currency Rating, Cites “DETERIORATION” in Governance

The petrodollar will soon stop being the global hegemonic currency, and the financial geeks who watch things closely know that.

What it means for those of us on the other end of the scale is that the only thing we have to sell–our time and labor–will not buy as many eggs per hour. That, on top of ‘inflation’.

It means a lot of other things too, and none of them are good, from a perspective inside the Empire. But that’s the one that will hit home most starkly.

Another day, another coup in some random African country you and me both have barely ever heard of.

Why coup in Niger matters:
Uranium, France, & Russia using soft power+Wagner to build anti-West bloc

(Those of you who hate on Russia … I would just ask you to hate them for rational reasons like these, instead of running around with your hair on fire because MSNBC told you to.

Don’t hate them because they’re ‘expansionist’, because they’re not. Don’t hate them for ‘meddling in our elections’, because in essence they didn’t, and certainly not any more than we fuck with theirs.

Above all, don’t personalize your hate and call for the assassination of Putin, because that just makes you look like a drooling simpleton, and you’re not.

No, hate them because they do exactly what the beloved West does in the name of democracy, which is play geopolitical power games without any rules at the expense of ordinary people.

That is, should you feel compelled to hate at all.

I do, sometimes. Fuck rulers, whatever their names and stripes. Sure, fuck Vlad. Fuck Joe and fuck Donald and fuck your CEO, in the ass, with a stick.

Like I said: rationally.)

The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
–Commissioner Pravin Lal, “UN Declaration of Human Rights”

Source–(and if you watch the whole thing you get to see Christoforou get hit on, in broad daylight on a street in St. Petersburg, by a flirty MILF, as a bonus)

Note for note rhetorical perfection, typos excepted.

Reminiscent of Woody’s ‘drug cartel’ story in his last SNL monologue.

You absolutely can not have it both ways, Ant’ny. Please pass the word.

Listen to a few minutes of honesty from Max Blumenthal, an American Jew …

RFK Jr. Agrees To Interview w/ Max Blumenthal About Israel

Then tell me again the one about Democracy and spreading it.

To the native peoples of Palestine, this time?

Maybe.

The environmental crimes we continue to perpetrate every day in the name of propping up our lifestyles of ugly stupid excess are pushing us faster and faster toward multiple catastrophic tipping points.

The poor dump their dead washing machines in the desert creeks.

The rich detonate a Hiroshima’s worth of explosives every week to speed up the strip mining of Appalachia.

The US military is, to this day still, the worst carbon emitter in world history, month after month.

These and other heartwarming facts are common knowledge for those with eyes to see.

Jimmy Dore and Robert Kennedy just had a detailed conversation outlining them.

We’re not going to screech to a halt at the edge of the cliff in a moment of Hollywood drama.

We’re not even fucking going to slow down.

We’re headed over that edge, at full steam ahead.

As corny and crazy and conspiratorial as it sounds, The End really Is Nigh, for the apex primate species, for you and for me and for everyone we’ve ever loved; for all the darling domesticated dogs and cats and emotional comfort pigs too.

Please don’t explain to me who to vote for.

Please don’t ask me what I’m going to do to improve myself.

Please don’t tell me what it means to be a real man or a hero.

I don’t have time to listen to any of that because I’m working through that last hard stage of grief.

A theory: You’re not afraid of fascism.

You’ve been marinating in real fascism half your life or more. It’s comfortable.

It’s even comforting. Fascism signed your paycheck, and paid your mortgage and just maybe it relieved your children of all student debt.

What you’re actually worried about is called populism, sometimes also referred to as a functional democracy.

Wherein there are more voting truck drivers, more voting fry cooks, out there in the deplorable flyover, than there are well-composed and college-educated good people like you. And the ‘Hispanics’, of course, who were supposed to be voting in a bloc with you and redefining the electorate, instead of turning their coats and reverting to their generally native and naturalistic conservatism from Miami to San Diego.

They want more of the Donald and every time he takes another indictment, sure, you’re cheering–but his poll numbers go up, again.

The moral is a moral of inevitability.

We of the Empire spend all our money spreading this alleged democracy at the barrel of a gun all over the world. We pour it into the Ukrainian proto-demos, a place where they have a very real kill list, opposition parties are banned, the news is banned unless it’s state-approved, and where the President puppet just announced that next year’s elections are cancelled, because, you know, Russia bad.

They’re going to have an election next year in Russia though.

And before you start pontificating at me about how rigged it will be, talk to one average Russian, or look at one poll, or at least confess knowing that our own sovereign elections are substantially less than pure–to say nothing of the elections we routinely rig in other countries, such as the one in that very Ukraine in 2014.

Meanwhile at home that same democracy rotted away to nothing. Yes, under Bush and Reagan. But just as fast or faster under Clinton, and Gitmobama, and the crackhead Hunter and his dirty dad, the Big Guy of Ten Percent fame. Sure, you can vote. For Kodos or for Kang! For Frick, or for Frack. They’re all paid for already by people who make in an hour what you make in a year.

You are the frog and the saucepan she’s up to a rolling boil and still you cheer each time the MAGA guy takes another shovel to the face from the DOJ or some other arm of the justice! system equally crawling with corrupt filth maggots who went to the best universities.

You’re cheering for the subversion of the will of the people. Those bad redneck hicks over there with all the guns and all the babies. Well, the allegedly white babies, at least.

Have a real good time there with your hootin’ and hollerin’ and slapping each other blue on the back.

I’ll be down the dry shit creek with no paddle and a twenty-year-old pair of hiking boots.

See ya when I see ya, up around the bend or down at the bottom of the flashing flood.

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

I am the criminally vulgar sun on rain day
and the airy heir
of
nothing (in particular)

The plan is, to hike the wash.

The plan is, to have just enough of a hit single to be able to build the factory,
then settle into it and learn to live with the fact that I am
crap at most other things.

In March of this year the poorest ten percent of Americans, 30 million of them, got a robocall from their government, telling them that their monthly food stamp allotments were being slashed, at a time when food prices were spiking violently upward.

The cuts freed up 113 billion in revenue.

In the same month, a Congress full of shitbags voted almost unanimously to send almost exactly the same amount of money to the noble and valiant freedom fighters of the most corrupt (and deliberately corrupted) country in what passes these days for Europe.

Doubtless some kind of weird coincidence. Doubtless.

Warmongering Is KILLING The U.S. Middle Class – RFK Jr.

That story is the central point of rfkjr’s interview with Jimmy Dore.

One the one hand we have the evil problem of ‘income inequality’, which really means the brutalizing of citizens without money via a shotgun spread of mechanisms, like medical debt, and various kinds of loan debt, zealous ‘law enforcement’, inflation, and the shredding of the already threadbare safety net.

On the other is the Machine of Permanent War conducted everywhere by covert means and through 800 very expensive military bases all around the world.

The two parts are of a whole. They are two heads of the same red white and blue hydra.

It is heartening, in a limited way, to hear how clearly Robert Kennedy sees this, and to hear him articulate it so well.

I won’t be switching my voter registration to vote for him in the primary, if there even is a primary, as I did for old weaselly Bern.

I’ve taken my little purity pledge. No fucking D’s, and no fucking R’s.

But you haven’t.

Listen to him at least for these twenty minutes, as a concerned and enfranchised citizen.

If you can honestly prefer the moral illness of the Biden administration to a Kennedy, well, go with god, I guess.

If you can’t, then maybe send the man a few bucks, and dream.

Of an America not quite so badly broken.

I heard a scrap today; I don’t even know how true it is.

The source, a credible journalist, claimed that every time they stick Trump with another indictment or subpoena, his polls numbers go up.

I think it sounds plausible.

So.

Based on that information, and the results in 2016, et cetera … what might be your evolving stance on this democracy thing?

If it turns out that a majority of Americans, as defined by the Electoral College, really and truly do want him to win the big race again …

What basis might you have for cheering the attempts at lawfare to prevent the will of the People from being fulfilled?

There are a lot of possible answers to that question.

But if all you’ve got is, as someone very close to me recently offered, a feeling that you want him out and gone …

I’m sorry, but that is self-evidently not good enough.

Your feeling does not have higher standing than the will of the People.

In a … democracy.

That thing we were supposed to be saving, by voting for the joe, right?

I’m just asking.

Why G.Greenwald Is Increasingly Hostile to Democrats

D’accord.

The path out of the black forest at the end of Empire is transideological and no ‘party’ can invoke it.

But especially, more and more, not that one.

You’re free of course to disagree and brand yourself officially as a happy part of the corrupt and corrupting Establishment and keep supporting the kinds of fools and tools that, in the end, are too.

I can’t follow, where that leads you.

Instead I’ll be doing nothing to improve my situation, a mile or two down Vagrant Creek.

Not subdued. Just pointlessly untamed ennit.

Oliver Stone is another person I agree with more often than not.

So I was very gratified to hear him say that he made a mistake, just like I did, in voting with gritted teeth for Mushbrain Joe last time. (Which doesn’t make either of us MAGA toads, just for the record.)

Together we can ask in wonder why in the name of heaven Biden still refuses to declassify the parts of the JFK file that would inform us why a President was murdered sixty years ago, and maybe give a clue as to why his brother, and Dr. King, and Malcolm, and Fred Hampton, and others, got the same bullet treatment in the ten years following November of 1963.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t think they’ll be revealing that the murders were done to protect our sacred democracy in the land of the free.

In your heart you must know that everything has been wrong for your whole life and that it was made so purposefully.

And that settling for being comfortable in your capture is not the moral response to that world-defining truth.

Nothing I, as a double Gentile, can add to this would make any difference. The video is complete unto itself.

I am interested in the candidacy of rfkjr, but only about half as much as I might be, because I agree with this rabbi and a lot of other semites, and disagree deeply with the tool of a shmuley that Robert Junior is so insipidly cozied up to these days. In the meantime I will stand off and wish him well as he seeks to reclaim and rehabilitate the completely co-opted party of his assassinated father.

On Friday, instead of posting early as he usually does, Christoforou got his vid up well into the evening–maybe eight PM in this time zone.

Ritual and habitual, I watched, even though doctrine says I should be getting ready to bed down by then.

It was especially unusual for me to be watching a video on Rumble instead of YouTube that time of night, because as far as I can tell, there is no way to stop the Autoplay of another video on Rumble. So I avoid putting on headphones and letting somebody’s talk drift me to sleep. Except on YT, where I usually pick out some kind of hypnodroning ASMR for that purpose.

But I was on Rumble, just up and listening, and doing other computer things when that video ended. So the next one played.

I didn’t know it yet, but the next one would keep me awake and alert, right to the end, another hour later.

It was an episode of Kim Iversen’s show. I don’t usually seek her out. But this time, she said … ‘our guest is Bret Weinstein, yadda yadda, and he’s written a book called

A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century

So … a political discussion about the deterioration of the nation … through the lens of hunting and gathering?

Yeah, I’d be up for that …

Fun stuff first.

Max Blumenthal is one of the only real journalists left. I’ve learned a lot from him.

Here he is moonlighting as a stand-up.

***

Seriousness.

The non-voting rep for the Virgin Islands, the one in the US House, had deep personal ties with J. Epstein. So did a lot of big banks and bankers (no surprise on the last part, right?).

Glenn Greenwald discusses these facts with reporter Lee Fang.

Three experts tell you why dropping nuclear weapons on Japan was the right thing to do.

One expert on why the other experts are wrong; and also what got left out of Oppenheimer.

he built an empire out of the desert
out of the dust and the sand, just like las vegas
but he never took the rap that the mafia did

I’m not upset with you, personally, for your daring to succeed in your leading and following.

Collectively it might be a little different, but I know you and you know me. So if you can bring yourself to fail once, in being upset with me, for choosing the third way and being so vocal and militant about it, then maybe we can at least call things even and feel some peace.

and he thought the indians were some lost thirteen dudes
but he didn’t treat them any better
and they were never on his side

As for ‘letting’ my wife do what I thus far refuse to do, the depth of misunderstanding here is multi-layered and, well, amusing. I’m not interested in Letting, or holding the kind of lordship that letting necessitates, and that’s a good thing, because if I were, there would be no peace ever, under any terms, in a house like this.

they drove their pickup trucks out into the desert
into a ditch along the side of the road
and acted like they were drunk

all the time (source)

On this occasion I declare that this is the best and most rational response I can come up with, too.

It does require a pickup truck. It does require desert, and maybe a ditch. But that’s all, and I am blessed with both those things. If necessary the ditch can be arranged.

Maybe the hardest part is the acting drunk all the time without actually being a drunk, but I’ve practiced at that diligently as well. When you see the people cluck silently and start to shake their heads, start to think what a shame it is, you know you’ve done the job well.

Dirty hands, clean money.

***

Behold, the noble savage, stripped of his grace and stripped of his living, fallen so very low in this decadent time.

It’s a dirty old world, and there but for the grace of white jesus go every pale tie-wearing american one of us.

It’s been stressful trying to figure out what to do as the money evaporates, but I’ve finally cracked the code and I’m so happy to share my good fortune with you.

It seems that all you have to do is paint, and hundreds of thousands of dollars will start rolling in.

It doesn’t matter if you have no talent. It doesn’t even matter if you’re a crackhead pedo degenerate.

Source

Just do the righteous god damn Work of Art, and not only will you always have plenty of money, but your legal troubles will also just magically go away.

I wish I’d known this sooner and saved myself all that grief.

Of course I’m going to invest everything that’s left to me in canvas, and tubes of pigment, and brushes.

***

The word on the street has been that I’ve been down on myself, it seems.

It is true that I’ve failed repeatedly and that I’ve not been shy about admitting it, or describing how it happened.

It is true that my self-description has boiled down to:

Unfit To Serve

and that I’ve been vocal about all of what that means; unfit to be a Master or a house negro or even much of a field hand in the usual sense.

It is true that I was born broken.

But I haven’t been adamant enough that I considered myself broken in a beautiful way.

If you would rather hear my opinion on what an outstanding genius I truly am, I’d be happy to shift those gears and strike an accordingly cheerful tone about my own worth and image.

Plus there’s this painting career just over the horizon, and I’ll be damned if the success that brings to my life won’t improve my charisma and my grace and the way I sing my song.

Grey skies are gonna clear up.

I further admit that my attitude has sucked.

But don’t read that to mean that my attitude about myself has sucked. Far from it.

I’m broken, but I’m a beautiful lovely genius and everybody wants to be around me all the time.

As for those that don’t, well, fuck them–they won’t get paintings, or even the opportunity to buy them.

I won’t stoop so low as to sell my Art to bad people, or even dumb ones.

They’ll have to get along without my lovely smile, and I’ll be putting up locking bars on the windows, and an intercom system at the door, to make sure I never have to deal with their like even once more.

Sin against me in haste and repent at your leisure, m-f-ers. I’ve got paintings to paint, and caviar to swallow.

See you around maybe.

I won’t have a lot more to say about that, today.

It interests me deeply though.

We know that all governments, societies, whole cultures lie routinely to protect and propagate themselves, and especially the people who benefit most from the way Things Are. They lie to you in kindergarten, and they lie to you as they slide you down for your dirt nap, and at every point in between. I think more people are waking up to that, and I hope so. I feel like I certainly am.

But the substance of the lies, the rationale behind them, is a useful thing to know, for the lied-to.

Why did the Reich want to reinforce the idea, among its prisoners and citizens alike, that Work equals Freedom? Why do other reichs and theologies do the same right up to this day, and what are the varying definitions of work among them?

Do the variations matter, and how?

Just questions. No answers. No doctrine, today.

The real Ukraine, from a disillusioned insider.

Interview with a former Kiev diplomat

The most interesting thing about this is that it explains so much more than that broken and bleeding proxy country.

With a few minor details changed, this guy might be any worker drone in Washington, or New York, or Denver.

It’s not what we did to some faraway place … that place is just another place, where the serious work of Empire happened to be going on, to enrich the fucks that own and run us all.

We exported the true american way wholesale.

It turned out just as ugly and stupid in Lviv as it does in Clovis, NM.

A graphic representation of what the monsoon looks like. It’s struggling to re-establish as we speak.

Tucker exposes GOP

We can all enjoy the Pence candidacy going down in flames, right? Watch it happen in the first few seconds of the video, with ammo from his own rocket launcher.

The hard part is that you have to like Tucker just a little bit for setting him up craftily.

The rest of Mr. Christoforou’s daily is pretty good too.

The habit of nothing.

Let me tell you how things are.

I know that’s a big request, and it’s a dangerous one too, because it could easily turn out that I’ll take that permission and merely indulge myself with it, and then you’d be bored and potentially pissed off with yourself.

Nevertheless, opportunist that I am, I will take your continued presence as a tacit acceptance of your willingness to Let Me Tell You.

How things are.

In May, we had an unusual early period of monsoon here that lasted a couple of weeks.

After that, it went dry, until the normal date for the start of the real monsoon had passed, and then well passed. It varies of course, so it’s hard to put a number of days or weeks to it. But … it was late.

Then a few days ago it looked like it was finally here. The days were warm, but there was a telltale buildup of clouds in the afternoon. The day before yesterday it actually rained; not a lot, but enough to call it rain instead of sprinkles.

Yesterday the clouds came, but too late and thin to do any good, so it went up to 103 degrees.

For the next four days it is forecast to get steadily worse. No clouds, and finally up to 105, with the night time temps crawling up until it won’t be less than 70 in any part of the 24 hours.

Very likely it will be the most scorching four days of the year.

I’ve filled the water jugs and I am up long before dawn and I feel ready, and as if there will be siestas.

When I woke it was too early and I didn’t have the feeling I would be able to sleep again right away in the proper slot–this has happened often since I started walking.

So I came here and wrote.

There was a phrase ringing vividly in my ears as I woke, and sat to type.

The practice of nothing.

I don’t understand what it means, though it sounds ominous and full of portent and kind of Zen at the same time.

I have a vague hope that the four merciless days will bake it into something comprehensible and maybe even useful.

Let me ask you to pray and practice nothing with me.

If you were in the House with him, how would you vote?

Which side will you be on this time?

Source

The side of the stupid ugly Republican, or the side of the good guys whose policy specialization for seventy years has been the blowing off of little brown feet?

And, you know, ‘abortion’.

Source

If you think it’s a trick question …

You’re right.

It’s a trick system.

The good guys are “hoping to harness anger”. Yours in particular.

Are you pissed off yet? Will you spend that rage on their behalf like they want you to?

The hero, over there in the Ukraine, he always needs more, and this time it’s artillery shells. Critical shortage.

Old Joe threw up his hands.

We’re out of those, he said. We gave you all the ancient stock. We gave the MIC billions to make more. But it’s gonna be slow, because we don’t really manufacture much any more.

In the meantime, what we do have is these cluster bombs. Take them, with our blessing. Go, team.

Cluster munitions have been banned by half the countries in the world. But not this half.

The Cambodian Prime Minister, over in the other half, objected.

He said he still has people dying all the time from previously unexploded cluster bomblets from a whole lifetime ago, when the good guys were fighting a different illegal and immoral war against, uh, ‘communism’.

Old Joe shrugged.

They do this with your money.

They do this in your name.

They do it to Cambodian kids and they do it to the wrong kind of Ukrainian kids now.

Eggs cost you ten bucks now.

Yes, these two things are very much related.

All of it sucks.

Sanity is a Christmas bonus granted to good slaves.

May your day be … nice.

In a dream I was living for awhile in a motel room in Wickenburg.

But I was living there as if it were instead: Wiccanburg.

I had a sheet of paper in my typewriter at all times in case a poem needed writing.

It often did.

A talk, from last month.

The whole hour-plus is worth it, but if you only have a few minutes, please at least start here.

Jeffrey Sachs, maybe the smartest and most humane servant of the American big house ever, starts the clip by pleading with his friends in Europe to not follow the US off a cliff, or even start to become what the US already is.

He is old, and clearly a little tired; bereft of any more optimism, but he still speaks the truth and tries to appeal to the best in us regardless.

Perhaps you will listen as I chose to, for whatever point-free reasons of your own that evolve.

Marxism is a critique of capitalism, but not my critique of it.

I’m not a Marxist for one simple reason.

A Marxist wants you to think of yourself as a worker, and to stand in class solidarity with other workers–Unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, and all that.

The problem with this formulation, from my perspective, is that identifying as a worker means you already identify with the conditions of your enslavement–you accept that you are a slave, to the wage at least, even if as is likely you commit to changing that grim reality in some way.

This may very well be a much more realistic view of things than my own.

I accept the costs involved in my deficit of realism.

I do live under a system that runs on coerced labor, and legalized enslavement.

I have spent years picking massa’s cotton and that’s the truth.

A Marxist would say that running away from the plantation and into employment at a machine shop in Detroit is an act of progress toward freedom.

I see Alabama chains and Michigan chains and I can’t tell the difference. My eyes, you see, not so good.

His vision is acute, hopeful, and aspirational.

Mine is chronic, static and merely poetical.

We both hold stock in the revolution, and maybe even have faith in its promise.

He just wants to get there by seizing control of the means of production.

Whereas I want the buffalo back, and all the Cambodians and Iraqi children and the girls who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to be resurrected into a paradise earth where rulers are extinct instead of polar bears.

How Endless War Bankrupted the US While Inflicting Mass Suffering at Home

Mr. Greenwald comes very close to the heart of the matter.

The wealth of the People and the People’s lands, across the nation and all over the world, is sucked up by the tentacles of the Moloch Empire and used only to feed its foul self and its most loyal house servants.

Meaning, if you go to college, you might end up qualified to work in the Big House, and not the field.

The buffalo had to die because they, and the land on which they subsisted, were allowing people to live in real freedom. In England the same lands in Common, the Common Wealth, was gobbled up by their own version of the local machine. Colonialism everywhere insured that the evil process was repeated wherever people lived under no one’s thumb.

Once their ability to live free was eliminated, they became slaves, whether they were red or black or white.

Slaves to the wage, slaves to the bossmaster, slaves to the gods of Mammon and Moloch.

The machine will be fed first, whether the slaves eat at all, or not.

The machine will be housed in oligarchic opulence even if slaves sleep under bridges, and when they certainly do, the compliant slaves will murmur about how tragic it is that the poorly compliant slaves are drunks and substance abusers and lazy, and crazy.

Sanity is a precious luxury bought with bits of your soul.

Sanity is a Christmas bonus that you get for being a good slave.

The wars will continue regardless of how many slave legs are shackled or blown off; how many brains are vaporized.

It’s non-negotiable.

It’s harshly obvious by now that distractions like abortion and wokeness and weed and whoever is selling you Bud Light this month mean absolutely nothing compared to the conditions of your enslavement and that of everyone you know.

It doesn’t matter at all if the nice old blue fool or the ugly old red fool is said to be your elected leader, because the legalized slavery and the wars for the sake of war will go on and on and on until you’re planted in the ground, and on past that until the machine burns itself and your children and the whole world alive.

There is one issue.

It is called: the economics of killer capitalism.

Everything else comes later and is subsidiary at best.

He’s whittling on a piece of wood.

I’ve got a feeling when he stops whittlin’

something’s gonna happen.

There are a number of ways to try to make a living out of taking a trip to the Big Bend.

The best of the worst:

Nine thousand views over the last five months. Be young and extroverted and do it in a Subaru.

The American middle ground:

Thirty thousand views over the last three months. Be older and relatably richer and do it in a Class A motor coach.

Or just sell yourself without remorse:

Half a million views in under two months.

Be networked and carry a lens the size of your arm, and do it in whatever the sponsor, GMC in this case, tells you to do it in, because that’s how the sausage really gets made.

***

I don’t know if I can explain it clearly.

But I am definitely unwilling, and possibly unable, to be a success in any of these ways.

There will be no soothing music.

There will be no shots from a drone.

There will be precious little clicking upon my thumbnail, and rounded off, zero thousand views of my moviefilm.

The man in the street
dragging his feet
don’t want to hear your bad news

You do his nine to five;
drag yourself home half alive
and there, on the screen–

A man with a dream.

***

I heard it was you, though rumor is a fickle Mistress.

Where I am is what I am used to. I can work around 10 or 14 one hundred degree days, and at the other end of the year, a couple of icy snowstorms that melt off the next day.

I do dream about it always being perfect, and I do dream about making that happen by becoming semi-nomadic.

She wanted another trip, so I said okay.

Let’s go where it is worst now, so that we know what it’s like in the nearby places where it’s the best in January.

An average winter day, way down at the Big Bend, the high might only be sixty. But the low at night only drops to 38, and that is cheap to remedy, compared to 51 and 22 in SandRock, or 49/27 at Cienega. You might make it, with no pellet stove to feed either.

Out there, even when you get up to 4500 feet on that average day in January, it doesn’t drop below freezing.

It’s a critical ten degrees of extra heat that comes for free.

Also, they don’t care if you are staying warm in a nomad rig instead of a house, and the land is still very cheap.

You could, were you prepared for it, live almost as if there were still buffalo, which is to say: very nearly free.

Free as in beer, gratis; free as in freedom, libre … I’m finally starting to see that there isn’t as much difference as I once thought.

Once I would have thought it unacceptably ugly, too, and far too far from the lifesaving hospitals and coffee made for you by poor little wage slaves.

My thoughts on death and servitude are changing along with my ideas about freedom.

Some rich people will pay a quarter mil for the privilege of dying in a tin can in the middle of nowhere.

If I can do it for 400 an acre …

I just might.

Not in July, though. I do still have some standards.

I am not on Twitter to win arguments, or followers.

I am not there to grow within a small community of the like-minded, or even comrades.

Neither am I there for the lulz.

I’m on Twitter for one reason, and that is to be in some way sufficiently interesting that:

–people will land on my profile, and
–perhaps see a link to this blog and/or to a video I posted, and
–watch and be a small bit more interested,
–as in enough to comment, and subscribe
–so that I can get to the 1000 sub monetization plateau, and
–start making tiny scraps of coin,
–so that I don’t have to go back to working for someone else.

My politics are the politics of economic freedom, first for myself, and then of course for the other enslaved too.

It really is that complex and simple.

Get up at first light, currently about three thirty in the morning hours. (In the winter you can sleep in until it’s warm out.)

Spend too much time in waking and preparing the buttered bulletproof frenchpressed caffiene.

Head out before the dawn anyway.

Walk. A minimum of a mile, to the unpeopled places, and speak. Film. Consider what this job really is.

Back home, splice the footage into a vid. Publish it. Promote it, in the tiny evolving ways you know.

Stop promoting it. This is harder than it sounds.

Resist, however, the urge to rest. It’s only 7:30. You can’t eat for another four hours and you can’t sleep for another twelve, so make productive use of the hours that are left.

Begin to invent what ‘productive use’ means.

I walk, I think, I film, I speak. Therefore … what?

Holsum Entertainment For Those Up Very Early With Me … video link

Just Passin’ Thru Man: So what about you, then … what have you been up to?

V: In a couple of days, I will have posted a walking video every single day for a month.

JPTM: Wull, yeah, but what do you want to do? (Like for a real job, or manly pursuit.)

V: I am doing exactly what I want to do.

JPTM: Ya mean ‘Nothing’? Hur dee dur.

V: …

V: Ya bro.

V: That’s exactly what I mean. Sure.

***

The Lord God: ‘If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat’. I decreed it, on my Proverbs Twitter.

V: But I am working. Just not for you, or the Man. I showed you on my Leviticus Tube.

Speaking of your Twitter, didn’t you once tweet “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, because of this the world hates you” ?

The Lord God: Everybody makes mistakes, son, and you’re making a big one.

V: Can I take my gun up to heaven? I’d rather not take a bullet from Your peacekeeping force.

TLG: …

They can always fly away from this rain and this cold …

Video Link

Start with the Telegraph Road. I’m just going to post the most relevant parts of the lyric. Go listen to it all.

Well a long time ago came a man on a track
Walking thirty miles with a sack on his back
And he put down his load where he thought it was the best
Made a home in the wilderness

And the birds up on the wires and the telegraph poles
They can always fly away from this rain and this cold
You can hear them singing out their telegraph code
All the way down the Telegraph Road

…

Toward the end of the song Knopfler turns inward to how the System affects us personally even in our most quiet and intimate moments.

Now you act a little colder like you don’t seem to care
…
But just believe in me baby and I’ll take you away

And there we are again. Away. From all This.

The hell out of the way. Just have faith in me to make it happen honey, and everything will be alright.

Or not.

***

So that’s a song, trying to grapple with the same questions. Next let’s do a novel. This one’s complicated.

I’ve read the twenty long books of Patrick O’brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series several times. I love them, for various reasons. The first book has been filmed and you can see a relevant clip of that here.

In one of the later books in the series, Aubrey and Maturin spend a considerable time ashore at home in England. A subplot develops in which Jack Aubrey is not just a sea captain, but lord of a particular rural demense, and therefore a member of the Commons. He spends a vast number of pages explaining to his friend Stephen Maturin about how the feudal System still works in the countryside, and on one level it’s horribly dull reading. But now I have a reason to care.

In the end, because this is a novel, Jack casts his vote, and it is decisive, for the ability of the little people to take a good part of their living from the land.

It’s the right thing to do.

It’s fiction, though.

***

And a film. Any decent western will do, but I choose one of the best.

Once Upon A Time In The West

In this one, Charles Bronson is the Good, Henry Fonda is the Bad, and Jason Robards is the Ugly. It’s a story of the coming of the railroad to the wilderness and how that coming changes everything. In the end, spoiler alert, the Ugly, the man who represents getting the hell out of the way, is gutshot, and quietly dies. For the sins, of the rail, and of the Lie of Progress.

Dire Straits has a song by the same name as the film.

Sitting on a fence that’s a dangerous course
Oh, you could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west

That’s enough backstory and prep for now. I need to get myself ready for first light and try to tell this all again.

38 impressions on a post to here which redirects to YT. Six link clicks off them.

Doesn’t mean decisively that the videos were watched six times. But I did see at least one of those happen in real time.

So: sure seems worth it.

Geronimo: How We Got Here, Why It Sucks, and Some Suggestive Provocations For Getting The Hell Out
Video Link

If you read, even at the Wiki, you’ll see:

“earning him the title of the ‘worst Indian who ever lived’ among settlers”

“FBI called MLK ‘the most dangerous Negro’ to ‘national security'”

“Businessmen soon had the idea to have Geronimo serve as a tourist attraction, and hundreds of visitors daily were let into the fort to lay eyes on the ‘bloodthirsty’ Indian in his cell.”

Also, they killed all the buffalo on purpose, to starve out free native peoples.

We’re not the revolutionary heroes. We’re not the good guys.

We are not the people we think we are.

Dolores O’Riordan – Go your own way (Live on Europe2)

Or maybe you’d prefer the original original.

This video has many names. One of them is: Let’s Go Down To The Woods And Play, Pray pray For Brighter Day

Or you might say, Just Around The Corner From The Light Of Day.

I mean they both end in Day. Days split up into present passing moments.

Am I sage yet?

A Week Out From The Barest Hint Of Monsoon, I Mean …We Hope It’s Only That Long, Cowgirl

Quick one. Linking experimentally.

I’ve admired Jimmy Dore since before he had his own show, and was doing Aggressive Progressives on TYT.

I still do, in spite of his occasional bad takes (and the stoned out of his gourd on-air moments).

I admire him even though he has a blue checkmark now (a thing he used to routinely make fun of people about), and even though he has starting doing in-segment ads for some green superfood powder. (I saw, dismayed, that Glenn Greenwald had done his first ad ever, for the same powder. They must be paying these guys a fucking fortune, that they’d trade even a little bit on their cred that way.)

Today, I cut down my list of the people I am said to be ‘following’ on Twitter, but Jimmy is still on the new short list.

This afternoon I was having a kind of unintentional day off, and I put up a post about the weather, and it was dull, even for a post about the weather.

Three minutes later I checked my new streamlined ‘following’ feed page and I saw that:

1) JD had posted (a one-word tweet of Wow, plus someone else’s retweet video), and,
2) No one had replied yet.

Dimly sensing an opportunity, I rushed to type the first thing I could think of, which turned out to be: “Will be expecting coverage, James”, plus winkyface emoji. If you think that’s about as exciting as the weather, I forgive you, because I feel the same.

In the picture, there are three lines of data in gray. The bottom one is about my boring weather post. What you see there is that no one has replied to it, retweeted it, or liked it, and the number 16 is for how many ‘impressions’ the post has–the number of times Twitter even offered it to anyone’s eyeballs at all.

Those low numbers are completely normal for a noob like me with 15 followers.

JD has half a million, and you can see how that changes things. As you can see from the top gray data line, his post of “wow” plus vid had been seen 42,000 times inside of half an hour, generating 96 replies and almost a thousand likes. An hour later, that grew to 134,000, 199, and 2367 respectively.

It’s the middle gray line that interests me. It shows the coat-tail effect of a nobody posting early, in the thread of a somebody.

Just being somebody-adjacent for those few minutes made it almost 50 times more likely that Twitter would show you my post. Two of the 764 people who did see it thought I was such a talented wit that they hit the Like button for me, woo-hoo!

You would think that my little game of timely opportunism was gonna be good for my, uh, brand.

Here’s why you’d be wrong to think it.

An hour into the adventure, I had over 1500 impressions, and the same 2 Likes.

But none of the unprecedented 1500 were motivated to even reply, much less follow me, or even visit my profile, where they could have theoretically been tempted to evolve into traffic to my YT page, watch a couple of vids, subscribe there …

Which is, I’ve said, the whole reason I’m bothering with Twitter in the first place.

To grow the Youtube channel to the point of monetization and start eating off the scraps Google would thus throw me for my efforts.

This is problematic, to an existential depth.

I know for a fact that Twitter has gained me a couple of YT subs, but so far that’s literally it. One or two, in exchange for days of effort and 300+ posts of my own.

Until something changes the game, it’s not a game worth playing, in strict cost-benefit terms. In … labor or capital terms. I speak here only of Twitter. Making and posting vids, and paragraphs like these, are their own reward.

I’m not giving up just yet.

But I do need to remain focused on what matters, in the days I have left, and I’m starting to believe that Elon’s Folly might not be in that category.

It’s ten fifteen in the morning and the vid is already almost uploaded.

That is promising. Promissory. Goodominous.

The very heart of what I care to share, even if it is me telling you about my vivid detailed dream and you indulging me in that.

I have use of you, my pretty.

And your little dog, too.

See also: The Mous covers Hey Ya

The YT and the TwitVairtere are now poised in balance at 14 subs each.

A mouse just made me glow, and I don’t even care if saying so makes me cheap or dumb.

https://twitter.com/mousdrvr/status/1671988047628627969?s=20

Yesterday’s thumbnail so you can see it.

" I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.”
Federico Garcia Lorca

— Papa J (@72MichiganPapa) June 20, 2023

vernacular (adj.)
c. 1600, “native to a place”
from Latin vernaculus “domestic, native, indigenous
from verna “a slave born in the house rather than abroad” a word of Etruscan origin.

Used in English in the sense of Latin vernacula vocabula, in reference to language.

As a noun, “native speech or language of a place,” from 1706.
So:
–(of language) native to a place (opposed to literary).
–expressed or written in the native language of a place, as literary works: a vernacular poem.
–the language or vocabulary peculiar to a class or profession

As in ‘the Tri-Cities’, ‘the back forty’, ‘the Inland Empire’, or ‘Appalachia’.

@yopasta on @theconvocouch with some hard questions for @CornelWest

and a critique of his positions from what we might call the post-Left.

Very grateful to Craig for sharpening the Doctor’s countenance.

L’enfer, c’est la autres. Clear and true enough.

Il y une couille dans le potage. ‘There is a nutsack in my soup’.

We have an issue here.

The inside baseball on why Cornell West shifted his candidacy away from The People’s Party and decided to run in the Green Party primary instead.

Featuring the thinker that made it happen, the estimable Mr. Chris Hedges.

Here’s Why Cornel West Switched To Green Party In Presidential Campaign

Personally speaking he would have been my candidate either way. But the switch makes it much more likely that others will feel the same, and it also raises his chances of victory from zero to … well, just above zero ….

One of these days we will eventually get a chance to see who RFKjr and Marianne really are, too, depending on who they chose to endorse a year from now, if not sooner.

The same will be true of the Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna types in the House. The Nina Turners of the world.

And maybe of you too.

If I love you now, and I do, I will love you then either way.

But please, just for me, at least consider the question with an open heart.

(PS: I still believe that american electoral democracy is a bad and sick joke, and I will never put myself in a position to get burned again like we got burned with the Bern. But right now my vote and your vote don’t matter at all. This is a choice to embrace a Just Above Zero possibility and I’m taking it.

After the 2000 elections I took a lot of alleged blame for voting Nader and ‘electing’ George Bush, even though I didn’t live in Florida. I rejected the allegation then. I will be happy to cheerfully reject it again should anyone be tempted to try and pin DeSantis or whoever on me.

True blue Democrats: You want my vote? It won’t be free this time, and that is the whole story. Earn it Joe. Or, alternatively, fuck right off. It makes no difference to me either way.)

What happened in the years before you and I were born, and …

How it relates to these years before we depart.

Security guarantees w/ Jeffrey Sachs

***

I really enjoyed visiting downtown Farmington.

Here’s why, for me, it isn’t perfect.

One: It’s 45,000 people and growing fast, which, though small, is still about three times bigger than my ideal. This leads to knock-on effects that you can easily discern by just putting ‘Farmington NM’ into a YT search box.

Two: All through the charming district of galleries and shops, they’ve decided to pipe in an assortment of classic rock songs which range from the overexposed to the dumb and gross. Doubtless there’s been a deal made, with some radio station or content owner to do this. It sucks. I would have filmed a lot more if it wasn’t there trying to copyright-strike me.

Three: The boomtown element. We had a lovely shady parking spot on the side street running along the best gallery, and when we were done walking and returned to the car, there was a capitalist dude walking up and down the shade yammering about deals into his phone, oblivious to the fact that we were doing our own research and enjoying the cool leafy place before he fucked it up. Really this could just be described as another knock-on effect I guess. Or a function of 45K being too many people in one place.

All that said, it was still much more spirit-lifting than a whole lot of other places, and the price of living there is still shockingly reasonable.

For she and I, Farmington was a pleasant surprise, and not at all necessary to any future planning.

But unlike us, people I care about are still looking and trying to figure it out.

So I keep looking, for those fellow travelers, and for the addictive fun of it.

Let’s try this another way around.

How Many People Is Too Many? It's A Charming Place, But Flagstaff Is …

https://t.co/0aWzufVp9R

— vairtere (@vairtere) June 9, 2023

Or this?

https://twitter.com/vairtere/status/1667035227926003712

Tucker Carlson spends the first short episode of his new online show primarily ripping the shit out of a rancid Republican, Linsday Graham, Graham’s dear friend the heroic president of Ukraine, and even Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley. I doubt that would have flown far, on the air of his former employer.

He concludes with the assertion that democracy is dead.

He even works in a mention of UFOs.

https://rumble.com/c/c-3216216

I am very much going to miss hating the little dweeb he used to be.

I spent more time on Twitter than I ever have before in a single day.

I responded to an RFK post, in which he was down at the border in Yuma commiserating with some very pale-looking farmers about how annoying it is to have brown people pooping in your beanfields.

In happier news, Cornel West is running, and has released a thumbnail of his platform.

I provide it here to you out of the goodness of my blue heart.

The artist who styled himself ‘John Denver’ once sang of coming home; ‘to a place he’d never been before’.

The artist who styled himself Alex Vairtere is doing it the other way around. Home, to an old decrepit familiar place.

Don’t think for a moment that I’m abandoning my dreams and plans of La Cienega, a town I fell in love with long before I ever even really saw the dusty, broken, unattractive mess by the Interstate called Holbrook.

It’s just that those plans can now ripen in their own good time, without urgency, just as they have been since late in the last millennium.

For the first time ever in this lesser place, I am not just happy, but almost content with what I already have.

In a way it’s been happening for days, but that deeper contentment bloomed fully on this day, down by the overgrown tangled thickets, down by the waterline, a mile and a half or two from this place where I plug in this computer and make the tacos and lay down my head at night.

The Big Ditch Park down there is a beautiful thing in its way.

But one thing you won’t find there is solitude.

It’s a park, and people love to go to parks, especially ones with good walking paths and running water.

Where there are people in numbers, there is no solitude.

Today I walked the goat trail past all the broken liquor bottles, and pushed through the brush and stepped over the broken barbed wire and slid gracelessly down the riverbank, and I was quite perfectly and ecstatically alone in natural reality. Just me murmuring words into a camera, and the birds talking their inscrutable song talk.

The healing in it was nearly as potent as being able to look up and see the mountains looming above.

Later on I went out for a drive just to the water machine for three more gallons, and on the way back I spotted this.

It’s a little visually confusing to look at because I was shooting into a window at sunset, and the top half of the image is dominated by a reflection off the glass, showing the sun going down and what is behind me across the street.

But the coffee and tea news on the bottom is clear enough …

Also, it seems they will have begals.

Cranky boy became mildly muddy boy.

In between: ceviche.

Every day above ground is a good day.

I don’t care about your position on abortion, feminism, trans athletes, or what Bud Light or Target are selling or not selling, or how.

I don’t care what you think either way about masks, vaccines, Anthony Fauci, or the lab leak theory.

I don’t care about your fake corporate slogans about diversity, or whose lives matter.

I don’t care whether your favorite propaganda outlet is NPR or Fox.

Put a D or an R after your name and see my interest in you evaporate, vaporize instantly like a Yemeni child.

Defund Raytheon. Defund the apartheid state and the indigenous genocide in Nazareth.

Defund the bombs and Ukraine and the bombers and the little adventure in Syria.

Close the 800 military bases.

Hell, close half of them, and we’ll talk.

Until then, you and your party and your candidate, all of you, can keep it out of my face and fuck right off.

All my life, I have been habitually and chronically Tangled Up In Blue. But man I don’t like being depressed. I was, for a couple days. Maybe I still am, but probably not. Forgive my incoherence. I just woke up.

From a long Saturday afternoon of napping, like some average boring drunkard or drone.

***

A couple weeks ago I decided to radically change the way I ate, tentatively embracing the gospel according to keto, and the faith of a short tight eating window every day. That’s all to the good. So is the inspiration put a Walk at the center of every day. For that I’ve been faithful, and rewarded.

The first couple of walks, I just walked. The third one I made a little film about, and it did … ‘really well’.

I have some videos that tank–four views, five views–and I rush them off backstage to an orphan playlist in shame.

Mostly I have my core of ten or eleven peeps who show up to watch dependably, and I’m so grateful for that and for them.

The first local walking video went up over seventy views fast, but even more gratifying was that people were actively liking it, and even commenting, and in one blessed case Subscribing–the holy grail.

For a hot minute I let myself think I had cracked the code, and reached over into the promised land of Doing Well By Doing Good, as the influencerati and other dislikable people might say. I felt all artisinal. I felt as if by opening myself up and letting go of some paranoia, I was not just going to be doing The Work, but maybe even getting paid. Man it felt good.

The second video slipped back to an average number, though at least the comments kept coming. I rallied my inner troops, and started to game and get clever. I read the evidence correctly, surmising that if I added “things to do” to the name of the town, it would jack the Algo, put me up higher in the search, and build the truth of my vids into something more … palatable to the wider markets.

Gaming it worked and pushed me quick in the direction of 150+ views.

They were not, though, quality views. More often than not, people weren’t watching after the first thirty seconds had rolled by, and the comments section went bone dry.

Things just got worse from there; or rather more specifically, went back to average, in spite of the fact that I was working (and walking) my ass off and posting every day. I’d even played the face-reveal card repeatedly, and still … the larger world yawned and clicked away.

I walked further and further, raging, until I was pooping in the woods. And then it started to be too much for me–couldn’t get back to sleep, burned; obsessed over people that have wronged me in stupid petty ways, or just failed to live up to a higher standard.

Knowing full well that the latter group included myself.

Finding the southwest floodwall road really was a success.

But it failed to translate. I failed.

I didn’t want to make a video today. I didn’t want to walk.

I forced myself to do a basic mile and a half anyway, and I filmed some, and got in the car and filmed more. Then I came home ‘like always’ and chopped it into twenty minutes of movie.

After six hours, two people have viewed it and I think that counts me, and the wife.

I went face down into the pillow and slept and slept in a paroxysm of escapist fat-napping until after sundown.

It’s 9:30 PM.

I know acutely who I am. I know, in rough outline, what my Work is.

It’s still easy for me to be calm and almost serene. It’s more of an effort now, to feel strong and tall.

I don’t know what side my bread is buttered on.

I am holding on, to a house that holds on to me, and all I can think about now is turning it into a liquid asset and then a home, some other where, in that better promised land place.

I’m angry that I’m even thinking about getting another fucking job (rage against the machine), and I’m afraid when I think about even applying for one. They might say no again and I already know what a double-blow to my pride that has ended up being.

There must be some way.

That is the mantra of my faith as the third cross-fades gently into the fourth.

Hunting and gathering was humanity’s original and most enduring successful competitive adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of human history.[3] Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in most parts of the world.[4] –Th’Wiki

“Displaced” = economic warfare
“Conquered” = regular warfare

‘Hunting and gathering was humanity’s … most enduring successful competitive adaptation’.

Which is kind of amusing in light of the fact that settlement and agriculture are typically painted as exactly that.

Civilization and progress, versus the poor benighted anonymes of dark pre-history.

Maybe it will prove so. The jury is still very much out and the verdict is far from written.

“The Anthropocene Era” is usually said to have begun around 2000 A.D., and I used to say that too.

Now I believe nothing special happened in 2000. We just started to notice that the adaptation of civilization was perhaps not nearly as enduring, or successful, as previously believed.

In that sense the dawn of the Anthropocene can be seen as precisely The Beginning of the End.

Nothing more and nothing less.

Today’s walk was by far the earliest, and the longest, of the week-plus streak.

Right at the start, I saw the sign, a sign that actually encouraged trespassing. “Recreation Area Entrance”, is how it read precisely. So that was nice.

There was an Unexpected Meadow in the middle of the fresh tierra too.

After a long time the floodwall ended itself and the next attraction was a wash, an arroyo. I went down into it trying to find a way over to the truckstop. For water, I said, but really I was beginning to need a bathroom for something other than a casual leak.

I didn’t find a way up out of the wash in time. Instead there was an epic flood. From my guts.

It looked like a big old coiled rattler when I got done.

I sacrificed my underwear because there wasn’t anything else to wipe up with.

I felt so much better after, and right away I came across those lovely flowers, and then the other sign, the carefully done handmade one that made me laugh as soon as I saw it.

All of these things made me feel as though I was on the right path.

It was an effort to get all that way back home to the ranch, back2theBase, but I accomplished that too and I still feel that way.

Is there more going on here than ‘good diet and exercise’, or is it just that these things really do matter more than they ever taught me?

I don’t think I ever saw anybody in my natal home exercise even once, and of course we ate whatever we could lay our hands on.

Also, some bills never did get paid back then. But somehow I learned much earlier what a terrible idea that was.

Some of those bills are still not being paid.

But that’s not the case in this house, where I am responsible for seeing that they do.

On time.

Every time.

Just as with the state of my bodymind, only I’m just starting to wake up to that fact, and smell the … flowers.

Exclusively. For about a week now.

Plus the walking every day and the biking in between, but mostly …

It’s about the intermittent fasting, and only eating really good food in an eight-hour (max) window each day.

Yesterday I got done with the Work about 3:30 and as I was finishing up my stomach growled. I said to myself, analytically, ‘Oh, I guess I’m hungry’.

But then my right brain chimed in and said: No you’re not. And it was right. I wasn’t. What I was, was in ketosis, burning fat instead of food because I hadn’t eaten in something like fourteen hours.

I did eat a few hours later, when I really was hungry.

One day soon I’ll check the waist number again to see if it’s doing any measurable good.

You are on a summer road trip to the dry sunny West. Eightyfive miles over the Arizona line, you exit and find yourself staying downtown at a motel that lacks one of those No Train Noise signs and is in fact right next to the tracks.

Although the accomodations are less than ideal, you find yourself staying night after night. Maybe you are hypnotized. Maybe you are somehow metaphysically trapped. Maybe it’s just time for a change.

Day after day you begin to walk the surrounding areas, carving your own paths past the blockages and around the no-trespassing signs, doggedly trying to outfox the fences of the ranchers and the city and the railroad bulls and break through to an exit from the town that is not an interstate or even a state route.

Today, this is what you providentially saw.

At the gasping end of May, this is what you literally found.

and also.

Nightcafe is an AI image generator service that makes a point of wanting you to engage.
So I did.

Somehow I knew you’d be interested.

Long story short, I made my way to dezgo dot com because it didn’t require cash or even signing up for an account.

I put in some keywords. In this case I think it was something like:

route 66 several buildings crumbling pavement derelict abandoned desert southwest town road sign restaurant gas station motel train tracks truck clouds in a sharp crisp photorealistic style

Then I picked a ‘model’, tweaked a few settings, and got … this.

A couple other favorites from various places …

***
***

*********

******

******

All very related to the ongoing project:

*********

******
-30-

After walking, posting, and filming, we drove over to La Posada for a gourmet celebration dinner at La Posada and the Turquoise Room.

I still don’t believe in eating out. But it was amazing, and I don’t think I could ever say no to it.

Churro Lamb meatballs and tepary bean hummus with piki bread from the Rez country. Wine from the Willamette. The most amazing marg ever, made with This.

That place is pure Oasis in every sense.

All it takes is one or two real artists.

Well, and a little equity too.

You don’t want to fuck with me, officer.

Yes I’m old, and dressed like a poor man.

I’m on foot instead of riding in a shiny car.

But I look like this and act this way because of my choices.

I have a shiny car. I have a big truck. I have a van with a bed in it, and a cargo trailer, and even a house.

But wealth made me fat and I’m walking to get rid of it.

The fat. All that comes with it too.

I am filming this interaction, as is my right, as a still marginally free citizen of the state that bought your gun.

Your shiny gun.

Your Indian killer gun; your geronimo-deporting badge we don’t need no.

I don’t want to fuck with you.

You don’t want to fuck with me even though I am not that guy.

In spite of my appearances, I am not one of the vulnerable droids you’re looking for. To fuck with the way you and your kind do.

So just be yourself. Your best self.

And resolve to not end up reflecting on this day ruefully.

When I say Request Password
I don’t care how you do it
Or even if you do it. But …

There’s a pretty good chance
I’ll deliver it up without
fuss or comment. If you do.

Really it’s a kind of
experiment in ways to post
with a certain granularity.

I still think that Insulin Sensitivity is a key, and I still think burning fat (“keto”) is important.

But I’m finding reasons to believe that the latter-day extreme diets are not the best answer overall.

I think the most important piece is a short eating window and a longer daily period of fasting.

Limiting calories matters for longevity, and moving (as in walking) is essential.

***

I think that I’m going to shift away from grains and even beans to a point.
And replace a lot of them with fish. Especially salmon. Especially high-quality canned salmon for price reasons.
In particular, I’m not going to stop eating pintos and garbanzos, but over time I will probably eat less of them.
I may not refill the bulk rice bucket.

On the tortilla front I’m going to investigate almond flour versions very closely.

On fruits, I’ll probably be sticking to berries.

Lots more avocado. Some sauerkraut. Goat cheese. Back to the MCT oil.

And lots and lots of vegetables, especially of the above-ground variety. As in: celery over carrots, for dipping up that partly wicked hummus.

It started here.

How to build a Tire Table for smaller SUVs or Crossovers
(as opposed to a ‘Tailgater’ tire table for 150+)

A tire table is a piece of shaped metal designed to fit over a tire and slide out into a flat surface. It’s a good idea and a low priority.

It did lead me down a distraction alley about camping in very small vehicles, and in particular:

Subaru Sleeping with Carson (using a crosstrek as a camping platform)

That’s a YouTube channel. If I were a better person I would link it. Anyway, Carson has a two-piece camper insert.

Longest Folding Sleeping Platform for Car Camping Ep. 24

Compact Storage for Car Camping Ep. 28

It’s not a completely novel idea. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52YaEo48OTA

If you have, at minimum, a sleeping platform in your car, you’ll want to study other essential items to use it.

Honey and Me (Honey is her 1992 Toyota motorhome)

How to Make Reversible Window Covers for Your Car Camper — CHEAP and EASY!!!

You CAN Poop And Pee In A Car Camper – Car Camping

***

I love the concept. But just as with the guy I saw in Silver with the fancy bike-based rig, tiny-car camping is not a thing that would work well for me. I want to carry more stuff with me than that. The Starlink alone would take up a major chunk of the leftover real estate in a Subaru, and … I ain’t pooping in one either. Not even me.

If someday we do buy a newer Crosstrek, and if that Crosstrek could be set up to tow a trailer with a mattress in it instead … then it would move up to a Maybe, maybe.

But if I were driving a larger SUV, like, say, hmm … a Jeep Grand Cherokee? I could see an internal folding sleeping platform as very nearly viable.

Until then, it’s one more interesting idea that I don’t actually have to think about, once this post is done.

Hundreds Of Undercover Feds Were In The Crowd On Jan 6th!

They lie to you.

“Free Range” Chicken Label Is Complete Bullsh*t – Reveals Undercover Video

They lie routinely, and it’s not just ‘free range’ that means nothing. The same is true of ‘pasture-raised’ (in spite of what Dore says–I looked it up), and grass-fed … and even though you can buy perfectly certified Organic Non-GMO rice, it still could be legally loaded to the germ with poisonous arsenic, if it was grown in dirt that used to grow cotton, as is often the case in places like Texas and Arkansas.

I still cautiously and tentatively trust well-soaked certified organic rice from California, for example.

But I’ll be honest and say I’m having some issues, even there.

I blame the keto freaks on the YouTubes.

They’ve got me half-convinced, against my will.

I’m not going all the way down the rabbit hole here today, but the basic argument in its logical-conclusion form is that while human bodies need carbohydrates, it’s quite possible that eating them is unnecessary and possibly harmful.

This late-stage version of the widespread argument claims that even without taking in any carbs (including all grains, cereals, and beans) through diet, the body is fully capable of synthesizing the carbohydrate energy it needs from high-fat things like good meat, and nutrients from things like good vegetables.

And that therefore, layering my beloved pinto beans on to my beloved corn tortillas is a bad idea, spiking insulin and blood sugar unnecessarily, and letting the body run hot on carb fuel, instead of burning fat like it arguably Should.

Even that much is reasonably convincing to me. But that’s not the end of the harsh news, from my religious perspective.

If you were a hunter-gatherer before civilization and the Fall, you wouldn’t have been eating much in the way of beans or grains. Corn for example did not exist. It’s precursor plant, teosinte, produced cobs about half the size of your pinky finger, so gathering enough of it to be a dietary staple was just not going to happen.

Throughout human pre-history, in most places, you’d be eating mostly a plant-based diet of roots and stalks, flowerings and vegetable matter, supplemented seasonally by things like berries, and of course whatever meat you had the skill and luck to obtain through the hunting part.

You’d be burning whatever fat you could get, rather than running on the glucose of carbs constantly like we do in our hypercivilized modern way.

Excess fat on the body was pretty rare. but when it existed it did so as a survival mechanism, a stored reserve against lean times.

A morbidly obese modern human can be storing up to a million calories in their body for lean times that never come.

I probably have a hundred thousand at least in the tank myself.

Carbs are relatively cheap energy. Even with buying organic, beans and corn flour and rice in bulk will run you somewhere between two and five bucks a pound.

This morning, with all these factors on my mind I took a healthy walk to the grocery (a walk while still fasting, as the theoretical experts agree is best), and studied the meat section.

It’s the only grocery in town. They have a whole wall of meat of course. Only a tiny fraction of it even tries to pose as healthier than average, and for most meats there is literally nothing labeled organic.

I bought a pound of “100% grass fed US Angus ground beef” with a certified-humane label. Eight dollars.

I also bought ‘wild-caught’ salmon, 1.25 pounds for 13 dollars (10.40 a pound).

The cheapest thing I could find was organic ground turkey at about $5/lb. and the most expensive was ‘grass-fed’ (percentage of grass to grain unknown) lamb, at somewhere around $14. I didn’t find any specially-labeled pork or chicken.

As a very general rule, therefore, calories from quality fat costs two or three times as much as calories from quality carbs.

As an aside, that would correlate obesity with poverty, and 50% of all Americans now qualify as obese.

But even setting cost aside, I’m not entirely sure what to do now.

I do know that vegetables are going to be a much bigger deal in my life, and that gluten needs to go down to zero.

I do know that a walk like the one I did today will become a more regular thing.

Beyond that …

I will probably (and grudgingly) need to find a way to make beans and corn, and rice, less of a staple in my diet.

I will probably end up eating more meat than I have in a long time.

But a satisfyingly comprehensive big-picture solution is, for now, eluding me.

I’m going to work on de-cluttering today, and let the factors and possibilities ferment in the back of my mind.

RFK Jr. and Vaccines: What Counts as a Disqualifying “Red Line”?

Glenn starts out by saying he’s not an RFK fan, because RFK is a Russiagater among other things, but that he intends to interview this candidate himself soon.

But with the logistics out of the way, he goes on to sharply criticize his friend Krystal Ball for her knee-jerk crazifying of Mr. Kennedy, using examples.

It’s really informative and enjoyable, and more importantly a great case study for questioning your own assumptions.

By which I also mean my own assumptions.

Clutter is trauma, and clutter is indeed boxes of crap, but … not just boxes of crap.

Source: Crappy Childhood Fairy

There’s such a thing as mental clutter too. I’m feeling it in the moment. I’m pushing through in my way.

In addition to looking at is this way I’m also looking at it from the point of view of insulin resistance and fat.

More about that soon.

But …
You’re mistaken.
I do have work though.

It’s true that it doesn’t pay … yet … and that it may never pay.
It’s also true that almost no one has the least respect for this work
and that to my great moral chagrin, some days I don’t even properly respect it myself.

However.
It is work.
It is The Work.
It will survive the drought of your respect
just as it survives mine, on those some days.

I am holding up my end, paying my own way, completely and totally.
I haven’t even been late on any payment for twenty years.
Beyond that, I am free to volunteer my considerable and sometimes even unique skills and my time for good causes.
Like taking a big moving truck across the country and offering to do it again, uncompensated.
Like watering an old friend’s plants in exchange for a pound of coffee even though it’s not worth it, in dollars.
Like driving down to shuttle another home and accepting a sandwich as payment for the labor of that day.
I expect that this will continue to be true a good long while into the future.
If it doesn’t, fret not, I will most certainly take the necessary steps to remediate that.

I put a ragged-ass roof over my own head.
And not just my own.
I put food in my own mouth.
I keep my ragged-ass vehicles operational.
I don’t renege on my obligations and particularly not those I place upon myself voluntarily.

If you disapprove of any part of the way I run my life or what I do, that’s your business.

Just don’t try to make it mine. That would be inappropriate.

And probably irritating.

I choose to not waste timing caring, beyond normal civilized polite token care, about your appraisal of my modus vivendi.

Whether that opinion is dubious, or even whether, as is rarely the case, that opinion admires.

I mean … thank you, if it is the latter rare case–bless you in fact–but one thing I cannot currently afford is to pay out much attention to anyone’s murmured estimation of me or who I am or my choices.

Positive or negative; good or bad.

I’m laying this down for specific quotidian reasons, of course.

But I’m taking the time to bother with it now so that it always lives here to point to, should it become necessary.

Oh it will.

EXCLUSIVE: RFK Jr On Covid, Ukraine, Border, Nuclear Power And MORE | Breaking Points

Just another RFK interview. Pay me no mind.

This one is particularly interesting because the primary interviewer, one Krystal Ball, was married a week or two back, and married by a clergywoman named Marianne Williamson.

Who I am quite certain she would prefer, as a dark horse Democratic candidate, over Mr. Kennedy.

That doesn’t come up, though.

Let’s say that Krystal is right, at the end of this, and that RFK is a raging kook on the subject of vaccines.

My question is: Even if that were true, so what?

In every important way, Kennedy is an improvement over even Bernie Sanders.

You definitely cannot say the same about Marianne. Much less Biden of course.

Which also very probably means he doesn’t have a prayer.

But hey. A boy can dream.