India Hits Back at Europe Over Russian Oil Criticism | Vantage with Palki Sharma

The top European diplomat decided to start wagging his fat finger at India, because India is importing huge amounts of Russian crude, refining it into useful things like diesel fuel, and selling it to places like … Europe.

The Indian politician being criticized pointed out that not only is this practice perfectly legal, but it doesn’t even violate the many sanctions the West is trying to perpetrate upon the whole world.

The link is to English-language Indian media, covering these facts.

It caught my eye because the ‘top EU diplomat’ is named Josep Borrell.

You may remember that several months ago, this guy took a lot of heat for claiming that The West is a Garden, and needed to continuously fight back against the Dark Jungle of the rest of the world.

This is exceptionalism and ‘us vs. the shithole’ at its most stark, even if you or I might be tempted to believe it, a little or a lot.

The dude is a nice, polite, educated, rich, white type who might be your grandfather. He is also racist and a hypocrite and that much seems self-evident to me.

There’s a lot of that going around. Around us. Within us.

It interests me.

So what’s this Durham thing and why does it matter?

If you want the full historical context, go see Glenn.

Durham Report Obliterates FBI for Russiagate Misconduct | SYSTEM UPDATE #83

If you want the chirpy short bipartisan mainstream version, go see the Hill’s take.

Durham Report SLAMS Russia Probe: ‘DEVASTATING to FBI, Does Exonerate Donald Trump’: Jake Tapper

If you want my horrifyingly recalcitrant take, you’re in the right place.

For month piled upon year, they lied to you.

The reasons you were taught to hate Vlad the Putin years before he invaded the Ukraine were based on those incessantly repeated lies.

There never was any Trump-Russia ‘collusion’.

That durable lie was in fact concocted inside the Hillary Clinton campaign and then pumped into your cortex by the viciously corrupt ‘journalists’ you trusted most, over and over for years until you believed them.

There was only ever the vaguest trace of ‘election interference’ on the part of the Russians, very little of that very little was in support of Donald Trump, and in fact–this is by far the worst part–to the extent that there was interference in the elections of 2016 and 2020, it was perpetrated by the FBI under Obama, and then the FBI continuously under Trump in spite of the fact that he was then legitimately the President under our oh-so democratic system.

The details of those basic truths, as outlined in Independent Counsel Durham’s report, are truly and deeply disgusting to anyone who still hopes to cling to a belief in American or Democratic ideals.

I know you don’t want to hear or believe it. But even Jake Tapper has been grudgingly forced to admit it, seven years after the fact, because he somehow still has some lingering shreds of integrity left in his corporately captured brain.

Unlike the rest of those well-bribed dipshits.

You can have the same integrity and still go on hating the Donald for many other reasons, I’m sure.

That would be the ethical way to proceed, and maybe even not get taken in the next time they routinely lie to you, which will no doubt happen the very next time you turn to cable news or those fine papers in New York and DC or your Facebook feed.

But anyway, let do what thou wilt be the whole of the law.

Lord knows I would never even want to stand in your way.

Coming into Arizona on I-40 (or on Route 66 in days of old) from the New Mexico side, you soon reach Exit 348 to St. Anselm Road.

St. Anselm of Canterbury is the patron saint of theologians and philosophers.

He was born almost a thousand years ago in Italy and became a Benedictine monk, and a power player in politics.

And thinking.

Now it’s my turn to think.

It may also be, if my thinking is correct, Judy’s turn to cry.

Once upon a time I got a bamboo spear with a rubber arrowhead out of the deal.

I don’t know what ever happened to it.

And by ‘it’ I mean both the spear, and the deal.

Russell & RFK Jr | FAUCI, CIA Secrets & Running For President
#128 – Stay Free With Russell Brand

If you haven’t already been thoroughly hypnotized into drinking the Kool-Aid on RFK being a crackpot, they’ll be aiming at that again, repeatedly and soon.

Should you ever find yourself inclined to question to cult narrative, you can come back here and listen.

That is all.

Anti-corporatist, anti-war, and anti-censorship. The guy may be imperfect but his is posed correctly on these three central matters–maybe four, if you count the widening gap in income inequality.

And yet, that near-perfection is documented in a video called:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won’t be “ALLOWED” to become President.

That certainly is a problem. An as-yet unsolved one.

Debating RFK Jr.’s Candidacy

In this second video, the DD guys talk with super-bright RFK supporter Anis Shivani, and everyone agrees that Robert Jr. is the last best hope in post-Bernie world.

But while Shivani maintains that RFK can and maybe even will win against the dark lords red and blue, Keaton and Russell remain skeptical that any party will come close to letting that happen, and want our hero to run as an independent from the start, to try and salvage something from dashed hopes if indeed any hope still exists.

We’ll see.

If the Dems have primaries, I’d switch affiliations long enough to vote for him there.

Maybe he will do the dirty break, eventually.

Or maybe I’ll just end up writing him in instead of marking down Kamala or DeSantis next year.

It doesn’t matter.

I just like thinking about it.

Some people like the Packers or the Golden Knights.

I prefer to think about the horses. Especially the dark ones in the meaningless but entertaining races.

Psychologist Explains How COVID Turned People Into Fascists

The tl;dr is: via mental surrender and mass formation psychosis. And by the way, if you think this only applies to the Magaheads or the AntiVaxxers, or even just to Americans, you are historically and dangerously mistaken.

It applies just as much to me and to you too, and the hallmark of the formation, according to the smart guy, is “intolerance for dissident voices … as if this (intolerance) were an ethical duty”. Whether the voices be named Nina Turner or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

He instead asserts that the real moral duty consists of continuing to speak out in resistance to the consensus trance even if speaking out does not appear to have any effect or change any minds. Resisting voices create the possibility of doubt and alternatives, and thereby (if nothing else) hold back the power of the hypnotic agreement to become total and absolute.

I hope you can see how that would make me feel better.

And yes it does.

***

The smart guy’s name, by the way, is Mattias Desme and his title is: University of Ghent professor of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Later in the interview he has some interesting things to say about what “Trust The Science” came to mean over the last few years. It’s really something more like “Have Blind Faith In What We Tell You Is Science”.

It turns out that in our ‘data-driven’ for-profit world of conflicted interests, 85 percent of all research turns out to be irreproducible, not able to be reproduced, and therefore is, scientifically speaking, useless.

In this context:

They told you the virus arose naturally in a wet market, but they were lying about that–it was engineered.

They told you the vaccine would make it less likely you would get Covid, and that was almost purely false, but then they doubled down and said you had to keep on getting ‘boosted’ to keep up with the evolutionary variants.

Most perniciously, they told you getting the jab would help protect your vulnerable loved ones from getting sick from you, and that was almost completely wrong too.

They told you that side effects were minimal and that was another dangerous lie.

In the end, at best, the still largely untested and still largely unapproved vaccines led to some milder cases for some people.

But the exact same thing was true about Ivermectin and monoclonals and a lot of random crap.

You hissed at Joe Rogan and you slapped Neil Young on the back for his principled boldness, but that was all bullshit-based too. Or, to say it in the language of mass formation psychosis, you were collectively hypnotized.

People are still getting fired for refusing to take their garbage medicine.

The vaccine was wildly successful though, at making the rich richer, from Bill Gates to the notorious inside trader Nancy Pelosi.

They lie and the lie and then they tell you to worship the science, sinner. But they don’t give a shit about science.

They want money. They want power. They want control.

Of your thinking and your actions and your beliefs.

And your Time.

Do it today. Do it anxiously.

Hurry.

Despite what they all say and say and say, there is literally no hurry.

Nothin’ wrong with a little hustling and efficiency amirite? No. Sorry. Not right.

Through this distorted lens of this culture, hurrying habitually may look strong and healthy and productive. It probably does, to The Manager right above you, if you’re a Team Player working hard, working fast.

I recommend resisting this twisted view, even if it does make you rich, or a Boss yourself, by some chance.

Money is not Time.

Time is the only thing of value.

Killing Time is surely wrong and that’s easy to see, but that doesn’t make beating the clock automatically right.

The man is going only five mph above the limit in the left lane, and if that causes you a fury, you’re hurting yourself just as surely as if you were one of those self-harm cases with a secret stash of razor blades.

The lady got into the express line ahead of you with 22 items and now she is paying with a check. You have no control over that. But you do of course have control over your reaction to it.

You mad, bro? Why? Why really?

Maybe Time’s a-wastin’ and maybe it’s your Time and maybe that makes you feel disrespected.

I don’t know.

I’m not telling you how to be or what to think or what to feel, and I’m not making accusations.

I do know that my life will end in twenty seconds.

Or maybe twenty years; let’s be optimistic.

I know that, until then, whenever then is, that I refuse on religious grounds to hurry any more.

Rushing is a sin.

Consider that belief. If you feel like it. Reject it if you want to.

I don’t mind and I won’t feel disrespected and even if I’m lying and I do, that’s my problem.

And not yours.

Slow.

Don’t go
so fast.

Don’t you think that love can last?

She said Love?
Lord above
Now you’re tryna trick me
in love

I haven’t watched any politics for two weeks. Until now. I’m almost caught back up, quick and dirty.

Here’s Why The World Hates America

Short reason: We’re ‘sanctioning’ a third of them and sanctions hurt the poorest most.

See also:

From: Syria Welcomed Back Into Arab League & U.S. FLIPS OUT
(This is the single best and most informative video I watched today.)

Prof’s Story Shows SHOCKING Cost of Living Disparity in Europe vs. US

Free health care, almost free child care, and free college; 2000 rent on a three-bedroom house, and a $400 monthly food bill for a family of five. $1906 going out the door for basic living expenses in Germany, paired with better wages. The American wife in the couple says she’s never coming back and it makes sense.

Kshama Sawant SCHOOLS Briahna Joy Gray on Marianne, RFK Jr

Why electoralism will never change anything really. And even if it threatens to …

MSNBC, New York Times Say NO DEM PRIMARIES in 2024

.. We’ll cancel all debates, and if necessary, the primaries as well.

Welcome to Democracy!

While spending a lot of quality time with family, I also spend a lot of quality platonic time with The Woman Who Looks Exactly Like Jill Clayburgh, before confessing that I’ve had a crush on her since the first time I saw her in sixth grade.

The confession is like fifty years overdue, and I don’t have any expectations in finally telling her.

Maybe a few thin hopes though. I’m only human.

In the second part, we’re driving on a boulevard and see a stupid guy in a speedy car crash into a white truck and keep going. When he pulls into a parking space we follow.

I assume the role of a small autistic boy to call him out for being a jackass so I won’t have to fight him.

It works. I don’t remember what happens to the truck.

Or the Woman.

In reality we are still at the Henderson Hilton surrounded by all the amazing coffee and food.

The morning after tomorrow we’ll go somewhere else and the trip will be over, and it will be time for a little more more real real life before the next one.

Two nights ago I wrote:

It rained all day and the people around us on the I-20 drove like they were insane.

Two days of driving and thinking later, I wish to treat the same subject to some amplification and clarification, while rubbing down the cliche’ into something more useful.

Most of them likely were insane, but it is hard to pin the blame for that on each of them personally, and not right to use the word so blithely, or dismissively.

There’s more to it than that.

A necktie is a piece of fetish wear, an optional garment. It is a symbol of ritual strangulation.

Ritual strangulation of souls; and time and lives.

There are other fetish garments, of different styles, but of similar weirdness. Polyester fast-food wear with a ball cap and a name tag. All name tags in fact. Perhaps all uniforms, and uniformities, whether acknowledged as such, like the McUniform, or more subtle things as enforced by dress codes and even ‘casual fridays’. There used to be one about men wearing hats, and women wearing pantyhose–styles change, but the coercive demands underlying the styles, the haircuts, the beards and the armpits and the legs and the genitals shaved and unshaved, they’re all of a piece.

All this borders on cliche’ as well, a la The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit on the one hand, and the dirty smelly hippie longhairs on the other.

But what I really want to talk about is Time.

Though it pains me to even imagine it again, let’s go back out on I-20, or I-10, or even I-40 in Missouri in the rain, which I have recent hellish experience with, though not on this trip. Let’s go back out on most any Interstate and especially any Interstate east of about Weatherford, Texas, at the terminus of US 180 on the west edge of the Dallas tumor.

There, I found, it abruptly got better. Not perfect, but at least not a constant pounding horror.

Out east, it’s green and purty. There’s a beach or a shore nearby, often even an oceanic one, but if not, some big old lake or a fat well-fed river. All those things are true of coastal California as well, and so on up near Portland and Seattle too.

Green and pretty and relatively mild. Mostly.

It brings the people.

Eighty percent of We the People.

(Another interesting view of the fact.)

Too god damned many people, for sanity, in my occasionally humble opinion.

This is even more pungently true on the overstuffed, poorly maintained roadways.

I was a long-haul trucker thirty years ago, and then again for a little while just this week.

All that stuff was true then, but ten times more true now.

Out here in the western flyover between the Pacific coastal strip and the 97th Meridian, eight whole states and parts of nine more … nine percent of the People abide, and drive.

You say to me: Okay Mr. Vairtere, that’s all well and good and kind of obvious. But it’s about crowds, and space, and I thought you wanted to talk about Time.

(It’s time.)

***

Americans have a lot of strange fetish beliefs and sayings about Time.

‘Time is Money’. That’s a big central brain-dead one.

Money is what we as a group love best. If time was money, we would love time too.

But we don’t. We beat the clock. Like a red-headed stepchild.

The fetish belief about time being money leads us to conclude that because we can never have enough money, there is never enough time.

Thus, we rush.

We hurry.

We go too fast and because of this we cut people off in traffic, either because if we don’t, we’ll die, or because it is just an insane habit grounded in a mistaken belief and we can’t see the traffic for the bumpers.

We tailgate, or are tailgated, at incredibly fast speeds.

Do you know who very much wants you to believe that time is money?

Yes. You do know.

The people with all the money, and first dibs on your time, want you to believe that.

They teach this gospel to you a thousand times a day, just like they teach all the proverbs about the goodness of democracy and the exceptionalism of the American capitalist Empire.

They don’t just want you to believe it. They need you to believe it. So they invest very heavily in a whole bunch of little psy-ops that you swim in every day like a well-schooled fish.

You race to be to work on time.

You rush to the grocery store and get impatient in the line.

You get home as fast as you can, but they follow you there and pump you full of ads for time-saving devices.

That cost money.

You buy them. Sometimes. Then you set an alarm so that you’ll be sure to be to work on time.

In the proper uniform of course. Which also takes money, and time, but they don’t pay you for that part.

To save time you cut people off. They lose time. They honk. You flip them off for honking.

***

That’s life in the big green mild crowded shithole.

***

We’re not done here. You see, I do have a job, just like you.

You might be in a rush for the rest–I even hope you are–but that’ll have to be a shame.

Right now I’m off the clock.

So …

Some Other Time.

Until then, I beg you please, for your own sake and not mine

Stop.

Look.

Listen.

Despite what they all say and say and say, there is literally no hurry.

As in Longview, Texas. We got a solid motel recommendation from a random guy in a truck stop and stopped here. I have been doing the laundry for a few hours; got my current stash of footage downloaded from the camera, and still hope for a bath before I sleep.

It rained all day and the people around us on the I-20 drove like they were insane.

But come sundown we were on the edge of West again and there were only a couple of innocent looking white clouds.

Now there’s your good omen.

The La Quinta in St. Augustine is a nice place to be, but something about the pillows, or maybe the box spring, only let me sleep for five hours ’til 5.

I got up and cut yesterday’s footage together in the dark. It took an hour. By then the lobby coffee was fresh and I got some while the final cut was processing.

Outside there was wildlife. I saw two stray cats and a possum that was bigger than either of them out by the dumpster. The mood is wet and and atmospheric.

The video is uploading.

When I first woke I was thinking about some lines from 1990.

“I believe in the future
I may live in my car
My radio tuned to
The voice of a star.”

Images of the 72-year-old woman doing the same accompanied the lines. Images of the Frances McDormand character in Nomadland, too.

I won’t be the first or the last to observe that as long as this thing we call ‘vanlife’ is an option rather than a necessity, it can be fun or even spiritual. But as soon as it becomes less of an option and more of a necessity it also becomes less of an entertaining lark or bodhi path, and more of a poverty grind.

I still don’t think that living in a van, down by the river or elsewhere, is per se a shameful thing or a mark of failure. I still don’t think it’s a cynical joke.

Instead, I believe it’s as close as we can still get to living in accord with those an(archo)-prim(itivist) ideals in a world gone mad with technology.

I do have a website. Over there, I have multiple platforms. Right here, I am wearing corrective lenses, and I wouldn’t be alive right now without a lot of fancy medical interventions.

My being alive doesn’t justify it, or make it right, though. Much less does it make it pretty.

The stray cats are still a tragedy, and in a different way so is the possum who needs that dumpster to make it.

Who am I?

I am not old possum. I am not quite yet the poor sweet homeless kittens.

I’m a mammal trying to make its strange way through this stranger land.

I begin to suddenly wake up myself.

I begin to realize that none of this is going anywhere unless I have better ways to get the word spread about what I’m doing.

This post is going to sit here at the top for a few days to remind me of that fact until it sinks in.

Preview Of Coming Attractions

Preview of existing attractions

99.9% of the time, when you hear the phrase “Russian disinformation”, you are being actively disinformed, and not by Russians.

The same is true of other common phrases like “election meddling” (projection much, USA?) and, as noted recently, “autocracy” and the like.

Back before the last Presidential in 2020, Hunter Biden dumped his laptop off at a repair shop. The laptop was full of evidence that incriminated its owner, not only of being a crack-smoking sleazeball, but a deeply corrupt one as well. Depending on who you listen to, and how you interpret phrases like “the Big Guy”, it also seems to incriminate his father as a partner in that corruption.

Then he forgot all about the laptop and abandoned it. (Hunter is now frivolously suing the shop owner, which does and will do nothing except prove absolutely that the laptop is his.)

The New York Post got hold of some of the evidence and published it right before the election.

Immediately, that story was mercilessly suppressed. The paper had its social media accounts suspended so that they couldn’t promote the scoop. The story was mercilessly ferreted out wherever hints of it appeared and further suppression and suspensions ensued. Dare to re-tweet the Post, will you? Down comes the banhammer, no matter who you are, via exactly the same mechanisms brought to light by Matt Taibbi’s version of the Twitter Files.

Why yes, it does sound a lot like my previous post on The Game, doesn’t it?

But wait. Now there’s more.

(image sourced from coverage by The Duran)

This is October, before the election in November, which means … that this acting CIA Director was a Trump appointee and supposedly working for him at the time.

And yet …

The Biden campaign felt free to ask him to concoct this (widely reported) bullshit letter …

And even more astonishingly: he did it!

Is it any wonder, that Democrats trust these three-letter agencies at twice the rate now that R’s do, in a stunning historical reversal of the numbers?

Of course they trust them, because as this latest twist makes crystal clear, those agencies are full of neo-libs, and not neo-cons, and whether it’s in Sudan or Yemen or Russia or China or Ukraine or anywhere else fine regime-change products are sold, you can be sure that the agenda being pursued by our upstanding secret warriors is the one that people like Biden and Blinken and Nuland want pursued, regardless of who the people say they want their President to be, or who wins the office.

Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex.

He could never have foreseen that the military and its pet oligarchic defense contractors would end up so successfully taking over that Secretaries of State, Directors of TLAs, all the Senators, most all of the representatives of the House, the entire legacy media apparatus from NBC to NPR, and the new media companies like Twitter and Facebook would all become cultishly enthusiastic, card-carrying members of that Empire Complex.

But that is the unseen water that we little fish now swim in every day.

They’re lying to you. On purpose. They are accusing their nominal Enemies of being the disinforming liars and empire-builders when it should be so transparently obvious that their accusations apply more to themselves than to any imagined threat.

They lie routinely and habitually and they do it because, with far too many good smart successful americans, it works every single fucking time.

If you’re awake to this shit, great.

If you’re not …

Please stop being such a god damn rube.

Please stop trying to tell me how happy I should be about Fox Corporation handing over a billion bucks to Dominion Voting Systems Corporation, or how wound up I’m supposed to be about who uses which bathroom.

None of that crap matters my darlings. They keep you doped with religion, sex, and TV. They’re in your brain and in your dreams and it has been doing damage to your soul every single night since the day you were born.

Unjoin Team Blue. Don’t join Team Red.

Anarchy now.

The game.

1) Be a real journalist instead of a shill and dig up real dirt on illegal government surveillance and other real and serious crimes.

2) Watch while the substance of the illegality is completely ignored and no one pays a price.

3) Get slammed as a criminal yourself for being the messenger that brings the bad news.

It happened to Greenwald. It happened to Assange. And now we’re on step 3 with Taibbi.

Those are not the only examples, just the most significant ones in recent memory.

I hope you’re enjoying the theater, and I hope that at some point you’ll go back thoughtfully to consider what these people have paid such a price to reveal to your civilian eyes.

As per yesterday: Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits

Today: Bombshell! Two 9/11 Hijackers Were CIA Recruits!
Max goes on Jimmy Dore to discuss, and add evidence (much of it circumstantial so far) to the claims.

In case you don’t want to read or watch the bad conspiracy theorists, CBS grandly gave it four minutes because grieving survivors turned pissed-off whistleblowers are good for ratings.

The Biden Administration is supposed to release all of the dirty laundry by a deadline Saturday.

But he was supposed to have declassified all the JFK stuff by now too.

We’ll see.

***

Brazil’s President Lula: Let’s All Abandon The Dollar and End The Hegemony That Oppresses and Threatens Us All

His words will make perfect economic sense to the 96% of the world that isn’t American. It’s happening. Now

***

In the meantime, and speaking of threats, we just literally invaded China. The murican boots are on the ground, just as they are, we learned the other day, in Ukraine. (Shocking.)

A couple hundred ‘advisors’ is exactly how Vietnam started. But Vietnam didn’t have three times the population of the US, or an economy that will soon be the largest by any measure … or nukes.

Imagine for a moment that China spent a decade pumping millions into some little Hawaiian independence movement, or even the Puerto Rican one, and then landed troops there one day. The US population would be shitting its pants and screaming for blood.

But you don’t understand. The reverse is okay because, um … I dunno …

China … bad?

We are not the good guys, darlings.

The karmic chickens are coming home to roost and it’s gonna cost US all and it doesn’t matter if you vote for the red monster or the blue monster because they’ve all been globalist empire monsters (even Jimmy Carter just a little)
since the day 60 years ago when the shots rang out in Dallas if not before.

Cleaning up, backing up, polishing some lists, including this one:

General tools with links (they’re affiliate links if it says amzn.to)

Panasonic LUMIX G7 Interchangeable Lens (DSLM) Camera with 14-42mm Lens (Silver) and Koah Mic Bundle
https://amzn.to/3AdAdvZ

Panasonic LUMIX G VARIO Zoom 45-150mm F4.0-5.6 =Lens with Optical Stabilizer
https://amzn.to/40quCgf

GoPro Hero 9
https://amzn.to/3V0f8P1

Deity V-Mic D3 Pro Super-Cardioid Directional Shotgun Microphone with Rycote Shockmount
https://amzn.to/41ComDq

ULANZI VT02 Camera Tripod Monopod 72″
https://amzn.to/3Ae7Rl1

Operating System: MX Linux
Video Editing: Shotcut
Streaming and Screencasting: None yet, leaning toward OBS-Studio and open to suggestions
Blog: WordPress
‘Email List’: Substack

Source: SYSTEM UPDATE #74

The green is me. Almost. You have to understand what a DVE is. I am domestic. I might be an extremist. I am not V for Violent, though. So far, that loophole has been enough to spare me, but as of today, that might have just changed.

The five activists of the Uhuru Black Socialist Movement–indicted today–were not violent either.

But the spooks allege that over a period of a decade, they took 15K in support from some other guys who turned out to be Russians, and thereby “weaponized” free speech, and supposedly turned themselves into “foreign agents” charged, literally, with “sowing dissent”.

So I guess the moral of the story is: If you happen to be Russian, or Chinese, please don’t sign up to support me at Patreon–don’t even buy me a Ko-fi.

(Everybody else: please do.)

***

Partly because the radicals in this breaking story from today are black, GG also had on Nick Cruse (aka SocialistMMA) from the Revolutionary Blackout Network.

Mr. Cruse made a lot of good solid points. But my favorite part was when he started updating the Devil’s Dictionary, thus:

In America, it’s Law and Order. In every other country the Empire doesn’t like, it’s “authoritarianism”.
(Or as Biden loves to say, “autocracy”.)

America has successful entrepreneurs, and ‘venture capitalists’. In all the bad countries, they’re Oligarchs.

In the bad countries, they have Secret Police. In America we call them undercover cops.

The secret police in bad countries “crush dissent” with “chemical weapons”. Here it’s just riot control with tear gas (and worse), along with infiltration and other covert ops.

They have forced interment in “gulags”. We have private prisons, and prisoners working for pennies. (Not to mention mental patients being eaten alive by bugs even in non-private ones.)

Thanks Nick.

Caitlin Johnstone has a concurring opinion.

SYSTEM UPDATE #73

Greenwald interviews someone who was high up in the Trump administration. Meh.

Greenwald talks about personal responsibility and hypocrisy, like Climate Czar John Kerry whipping around the world on private jets to squawk uselessly about the environmental crisis, or Robert Reich being all for housing the poor in Berkeley, up until the moment that someone wants to put housing for the poor in his neighborhood. Okay.

He then pivots to savaging Hasan Piker, Cenk’s multimillionaire Twitch-streamer nephew on much the same basis, and I’m good with that too. Good raw red meat.

He posts a clip of Hasan trying to make a ruling on who is ‘on the left’ these days and concluding that neither Greenwald himself nor Matt Taibbi qualifies any more.

And Glenn says, in so many words: “Listen you spoiled lying brat. Who the fuck are you to be making those calls?”

And Glenn says, I never claimed to be on the left, or the right, anyway. The only labels I’ve applied to myself are “civil libertarian” (he actually calls himself this all the time), and …

“Anti-Authoritarian”
(I’ve never heard him say this before, and it really made me glad).

I told you all this just to share that small moment of joy I felt.

***

To me, a serious preoccupation with Liberty (civil, constitutional, or otherwise) is pretty much mandatory for any thinking person trying to live in the heart of the Empire. Whether you know it or not, my darling, you really really want Fox News to continue be able to go on the air and spew what you think are lies. Because the damage done to freedom by preventing them from exercising their right to Speech is worse, by orders of magnitude, than any damage that can be done by some witless yokel who believes any given ‘lie’–whether that lie is told by Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson.

As for anti-authoritarianism, in my view, that’s a little more optional, although …

There IS a natural tension between real Liberty and any Authority and I think that’s obvious.

As for labels, I don’t care if Hasan Piker or anyone else thinks I’m a ‘leftist’ or not. But I will say …

Anarchy Now.

Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits
KIT KLARENBERG · APRIL 18, 2023

At least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation that was covered up at the highest level, according to an explosive new court filing.

…

The veteran FBI deep cover agent Aukai Collins concluded his memoir with a chilling reflection which was only reinforced by Don Canestraro’s bombshell declaration:

“I was very mistrustful about the fact that bin Laden’s name was mentioned literally hours after the attack… I became very skeptical about anything anybody said about what happened, or who did it. I thought back to when I was still working for them and we had the opportunity to enter Bin Laden’s camp. Something just hadn’t smelled right … To this day I’m unsure who was behind September 11, nor can I even guess …

Someday the truth will reveal itself, and I have a feeling that people won’t like what they hear.”

***

I find the Grayzone to be a very credible outlet, but I know very little about their source. Specifically:

” … the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants”.

I’ll keep letting you know what I hear, and we’ll see.

Featuring a thumbnail of most of my face. You’re welcome.

Let’s talk tortillas again with a little more understanding.

What I was missing is this. There are basically two ways to get to corn dough.

One is to finely grind whole corn, and it seems like that would be way simpler and therefore better. But you need a very hefty grinder to get that job done–which is where something like the $350 Wondermill comes in–or, as things turn out, you can buy already ground organic whole-corn flour from dozens of mills for a reasonably cheap price.

But the other is to nixtamalize, which basically just means cooking before grinding, and cooking with a bit of calcium carbonate or culinary lime (it’s why you see ‘trace of lime’ listed as an ingredient on packaged tortillas sometimes).

Unlike simple grinding, this yields not dry flour, but wet masa which has been largely stripped of the inert outer hull of the kernels. The downside of this is less fiber, but there are several interesting advantages, including the fact that it kills most of the mycotoxins that are often naturally found in corn.

So when you buy flour from a traditional American mill like War Eagle in Arkansas, you’re getting ground-up corn, the good and the bad together.

But when you buy “masa flour” from a clued-in boutique vendor like King Arthur in Vermont, or Masienda in LA, you’re getting a dried version of masa that has already been cooked with lime before being dried and packaged.

Generally speaking you do pay a little more, but I’m starting to think it’s worth it. If I was more of a prepper type, I would probably want to start with raw corn kernels and nixtamalize it myself. But both grinding and nixtamalizing are a ton of work that also usually requires a substantial equipment investment. Dry side: a Wondermill for several hundred bucks. Wet side: Masienda’s Molinito for a couple thousand.
(Although … there are always going to be less robust cheaper options of course. Here is one that potentially interests me–maybe and someday. See also the Masienda version.)

Everything’s still subject to change pending an even deeper dive, of course. But …

Here is my best solution for the moment.

Azure Market Organics Yellow Corn Masa Flour Medium, Organic

Well under two bucks a pound, already nixtamalized, and ground. Closer to a dollar if you could use up 45 pounds of it before it expired. A white corn version also available for a bit more. A Bobs-Red-Mill version for more still. ‘Just add water’, and a basic $25 masa press, or the sweet fancy indigenously crafted hundred dollar one from Masienda if it’s time to treat yourself. Set the flattened circles on a griddle or comal, and taste heaven on the cheap.

We’re gonna make us some real soon, together out here in the vivid Southwest.

Research dump follows in 3, 2, …

****

Tortilla Recipe from Nixtamal
Quite fun. The Masienda founder guy using the radically overpriced tools he sells on the site to do the whole process from raw kernels to lovely finished tortillas.

NIXTAMALIZATION – How to make fresh MASA from Corn
Doing it homestyle.

Bob’s Red Mill Organic Masa Harina and also yet another supplier for it.
One part of the page reads: “While they’re similar, corn masa is very different from cornmeal (don’t swap the two). It’s finer, and the method of preparation is very different: dried yellow or white corn kernels are soaked in water and lime. Then the skins are removed and the remaining corn kernels are dried and ground into corn flour perfect for masa dough”.

Stone Ground Hominy Grits” at La Cosecha: nixtamalized

King Arthur Baking Company Organic Masa Harina Flour (nix’d)
I can’t see a strong reason to pay more here than at Azure, except .. I might have a chance to visit this mill in the fall, which would be cool.

Two academic research paper type deals about the advantages and possible disadvantages of the Nix process
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/food-science/nixtamalization
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520960/
and Wikipedia’s two cents
“The pericarp is then removed, leaving the endosperm of the grain with or without the germ, depending on the process”.

The Azure Standard page for deciding between all 3 offerings for ‘masa flour’ there.

***

Pure Unannotated Notes Dump

Masienda https://www.youtube.com/@Masienda/videos nonGMO, not organic
War Eagle is really more like 3.50, and not nixt, but is organic
Ole Rico
Azure Standard
grain place: whole not nixt, organic, 3.80
congaree: whole not nixt, organic, 5-6
mulberry: whole germ not nixt, organic, 5.60

King Arthur is organic and nixt for $4, but germ?
Norwich, Vermont
Monday-Sunday
Store: 8:00am to 5:00pm
Café: 8:00am to 3:00pm

Organic Yellow Corn Meal
6% Protein
A finer ground organic corn in which the germ and most of the bran are left intact for added flavor and nutrition. This grind is well suited for corn bread, yeasted breads, pizza dough, and for dusting your peel or proofing boards.
25 lb. #28625
“professional baking flour”
Stone ground cornmeal contains the corn’s germ and hull, meaning you’ll get a flavor comparable to that of whole-grain bread. It is important to remember when using stone-ground cornmeal that the meal will not have the same shelf life as a powdered cornbread mix, so you should always store the mix in your refrigerator or freezer to slow it from becoming rancid.
Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1162099/tips-you-need-for-the-absolute-best-cornbread/

I am pretty sure that ‘stone ground’ is the opposite of nixtamalized, which is: cooked with lime
masa is made from whole dried corn that has been soaked in a calcium hydroxide solution before being ground …this changes the taste and texture, in addition to changes in some enzymes (?) that, when eaten with beans, forms a complete protien that plain cornmeal does not do
there is a certian something about a masa dough that is lacking in a cornmeal dough tough to describe, but an undertone of richness that ain’t the same without it
https://www.stripersonline.com/surftalk/topic/347099-masa-verses-stone-ground-corn-meal/

The not-funny version of living in a van ‘down by the river’. Compare the story of the 72-year-old woman in her Volvo. I’m comparing it to my own story too and feeling blessed.

Same guy, starting out to tell his story, in late 2020.

Nice to meet you, Joseph.

** What also is unknown is that Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.”

“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it.

Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks. **

–A brief clip from the very useful Substack of Seymour Hersh

There are three eminent American journalists working today in a class of their own, and their names are Taibbi, Hersh, and Greenwald.

There’s a fourth name right up there, Assange, but he’s been in jail and quasi-jail for a long, long time. He’s an Aussie.

There’s the Grayzone and a group that now includes Lee Fang in an up-and-coming tier. There are expert guests like Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor and Robert Barnes. There are good YouTuber hosts like Sabrina Salvati and the Due Dissidence guys.

Then there’s everyone else, routinely spewing dreck and overt lies from within the corporate communication monopoly and various arguably state-funded outlets like the BBC and NPR.

If you don’t feel like reading Hersh today, the heart of the story, unattributed at least in this clip, was covered in characteristically vibrant fashion by one James Dore.

I swear.

Amazon asked for my site info and I believe they sent a bot right over to actually read these recent posts, because an hour later they recommended this to me.

Open Seed Vault 15,000 Heirloom Seeds Non-GMO Organic

So yeah. “Compromises will be made.” Prepare yourself for The End Times now.

They took away my Amaz Affiliate status because I was a slacker and never posted links.

Like this one, on my second time around, since I was there anyway looking at corn and tarp poles.

https://amzn.to/3mFnKxI

My understanding of how this works is:

1) You click it to shop there.
2) You pay the same as you would have, but …
3) I get a little sliver of the sale.
4) In theory, anything you buy during the same session also gives me the little cut. So …
5) If you use the link, decide you don’t want to buy the book, but do buy a razor blade or a shipping container, I get the tiny percentage from those sales anyway.

I’ll leave that up to your discretion. Oh, and I don’t believe I get to know who you are, either.

Thank you.

“We all knew what he was doing” – Cindy McCain on Jeffrey Epstein
“Me and my late Senator husband and my media star daughter knew all about the pedophilic sex abuse, but we were powerless to stop it!”

Meanwhile

What happens when you lose your home at 72 in Amesbury, Massachusetts?

You get a storage locker and live in your Volvo for a year until you can shake some Section 8 housing out of a world in which you have no other way to pay $3500 a month for rent even if you could find employment.

***

This is your Empire in the 2020s, for the blessed, and for the ‘less fortunate’.

The homeless are not all mentally fucked up alcoholics and things are worse for everyone every day.

What I actually bought and have on the way.

White Duck 18 oz. 100% Cotton Canvas Tarp, 20′ x 24
(That’s the Amazon link but I really bought it from White Duck’s own site, on sale)

2 state of the art tarp poles
(actual site)

2 experimentally cheap tarp poles from Hikeman

Hikeman 10 Pack 4mm Camping Rope Reflective Outdoor Guy Lines with Aluminum Guyline Adjuster Tensioners Nylon Tent Tie Downs for Hiking Backpacking Tarp
A video on using the rather funky tensioner buckles

STAYGROW 2 Pairs of Adjustable 1/8″ Rope Ratchet Hangers, Heavy-Duty Tie-Down Ratcheting Strap with Stainless Steel Gears & Hooks, 300 lbs Combined Weight Capacity per 4-Pack
These are for backup/alternative to the funky tensioner buckles.

Outback Element® – 15 Tent Stakes Heavy Duty with Glow in The Dark Heads + Bonus Canvas Carry Pouch and Hex Drill Bit
A video on ’em.

$348.49 tarp
$99.33 for 2 GE and 2 Hikeman poles
$76.28 stakes and lines (3 items above)
Total: 524.10

***

Things I Didn’t Buy, But Might

Very Spendy 10″ Screw Stakes (bought the much cheaper 8″ ones) (a vid)

danchel stakes (massive steel spikes that would hammer in, instead of screw in)

REDCAMP Heavy Duty Suction Cup Anchors @ $15.99 (yet another tie-down point/tensioning option)

***

I think setting this up might be a long video when we get back, or maybe a couple of videos with field-testing too. It’s kinda exciting.
In a very low key way …
I’m still looking for a field chair to furnish this ‘new place’ but for testing I can take a non-field version too.

There’s a certain school of thought out there, sciency and nominally humanistic, that says: Fuck you and your elitist boutique organic food. There are eight billion hungry mouths to feed and soon there will be more; so we need to use technology to genetically modify our way out of this mess, and we as a species can ill afford to live according to your ritualistic notions of purity.

I stand somewhere off to the left of all that, an anachronistic archaic anarchic pessimistic purity addict maybe. I don’t want to live on Mars, even if the new Martians would offer me a seat to come along, which they definitely will not. I’m down in, I’m down for, the pre-Anthropocene dirt. I want to eat from it. I want to be buried in it.

I don’t own a suit that nice and I gave all my ties to the Goodwill. I lack the flowing mane and I’ve never ridden either on the Lolita Express like old Doctor Steven.

I don’t want the plastic pellets of previous salvation efforts littering the sea floor, nor the British ash falling like snowflakes on the Arctic, or genetically modified anything, nor artificial versions of brains that mimic intelligence, whatever that is.

Keep it all for yourself, and keep it out of my face. I’ll do my best to undermine everything you stand for, and my best will not even be close to good enough, and I don’t feel a need to give a shit about that either.

In half the length of a standard mortgage I’ll be pushing eighty or I’ll be gone for good. All I have left is this little space of time, and living in its moments.

I don’t want pounds of organic corn from a family-owned farm in Illinois in variations red and blue and yellow and white for health reasons, nor even precisely for aesthetic ones

It’s more of a pagan thing, quasi-religious, pseudo-indigenous. My Jesus don’t like frankenfood and if he were here to speak for himself he’d be turning over the granary tables in the Bank of Monsanto.

***

Let’s talk Corn Tortillas.

There are no good ones, out here in the sticks.

90 miles away at the good store, they’re expensive and only intermittently in stock, so I’m thinking it might be worth the effort to make them, at least sometimes.

First things first.

All organic food is non-GMO, but not all non-GMO is necessarily organic. If it says USDA Organic you’re good to go on both fronts. If it’s just non-GMO, okay, but it had better be pretty cheap.

Additionally, I want corn that has the corn germ included. You have to dig pretty hard to see if any particular product does. (The hulls/husks/seed coverings are optional, in my book.)

The best way to know would be to just buy whole dried kernels.

Great River Organic Milling Great River Organic Whole Corn, 25 Pounds (Pack of 1)
Visit the Great River Organic Milling Store
Price: $51.27 ($0.13 / Fl Oz)

Yellow Corn Organically Grown in Michigan, Farmer Direct, USDA Organic Certified, Non-GMO, Vegan, Maíz, Dry 10 Lbs
Visit the Findlay’s Organics Store
$41.99 ($4.20 / lb)

But there’s a big downside to buying them whole, and that is that you need to grind them, and good grinders ain’t cheap.

Wonder Junior Deluxe Plus Manual Grain Mill Unboxing, Assembly, & Review | Prepper Pantry Equipment
This one looks best at $350, especially with the thing that turns it optionally from a hand-crank to an electric:

Wondermill Junior Drill Bit Adapter
WONDERMILL – Wonder Junior Drill Bit
Visit the WONDERMILL Store
$42.99

An even more expensive grinder
Country Living Grain Mill with Large Corn & Bean Auger
$724.00

There are cheaper ones that probably won’t last long, including this one and
Moongiantgo Corn Grinder Mill Cast Iron Manual Grain Mill Hand Grinder with Large Hopper for Corn Barley Wheat Berries Coffee Chickpeas Pepper Dried Beans Animals Feed Home Brewing
Visit the Moongiantgo Store, etc.

In most cases, from most vendors, you don’t save that much buying whole kernels, either. (The one big upside would be that other things could get ground at home too … like coffee, the grinding of which remains an only semi-solved problem.)

So this brings us to already-ground cornmeal, and to flour (masa harina).

***

I’d rather stick to meal, but all-cornmeal tortillas, in my understanding, come out like more of a flatbread (which might be okay–I might adapt …).

MAKAI KI ROTI (cornmeal flat bread) || HOW TO MAKE CORNMEAL BREAD

Easy Cornmeal Flat Bread Recipe

How to make Gluten-free Chapati Soft [Easy Makki Ki Roti Recipe/Cornmeal Flour With Rolling Pin]

Homemade Corn Tortillas (no flour)

I don’t necessarily want to HAVE to adapt, though, so for purposes of making something more classic and familiar, there’s this:

Corn Tortilla Using Cornmeal & Masa Harina

So: We need either meal, for the flatbread, flour for classic corn tortillas, or both. We’re looking for organic either way, and with the corn germ included if possible ( it is).

Some options.

Grain Place Foods
Multi-product organic vendor, germ or not unknown, about $4 a pound

Congaree Milling Company
Every kind of flour/meal you could want, including blue corn, germ or not unknown (but probable), $5-6 dollars a pound
See also: HHominy, Grits, Polenta, Just Plain Corn …

Mulberry Lane Farms
Multi-product organic vendor, germ or not unknown (but probable), $8 a pound
Amazon includes the “germ” right in the title, and knocks the price down to $5.60 a pround

King Arthur Baking Company
American grown and milled, shop is very focused on baking goods $4 a pound.
Like some other companies it shouts with pride about their product being nixtamalized –soaked in lime. I haven’t made up my mind yet on whether that’s a good thing.

War Eagle Mill
“Coarsely stone-ground with nothing added or removed so the corn germ and bran are left to provide plenty of taste and healthy fiber”. And, $2.80 a pound, well hell yeah.

Masienda
On the higher end at $5.45 a pound, but very tempting anyway. They say they use ‘heirloom’ corn from little farmers, and they offer an amazing range of corn colors, including red. Nixtamalized and germ unknown. They offer a small selection of other heirloom products, and a book about traditional masa, and even a ‘sourcing report’ updated yearly on their growers, who seem to be entirely based in deep southern Mexico. For which … I might pay more. Or at least doubling back to their YouTube channel after I finish up here.

Bob’s Red Mill Organic Masa Harina — (‘everybody’s favorite‘)
This is available everywhere, even in corporate supermarkets. It very definitely includes the germ (I found and then lost the quote saying so). The price varies widely, but I did find it on Amazon, ‘thirty percent off’, at $5.60 to the pound.

Nothing wrong with any of this, except that Masienda looks a lot more interesting at the same price, and War Eagle looks damn good at half the price of either.

I think I’ll start with those two maybe.

But I also need to reconsider the grinder possibility after finding whole organic corn in bulk at the same place I get my pintos, garbanzos, and rice. For 75 cents a pound, holy crap.

***

A few more related ideas.

On the cooking methods … (most people use no oil)

Blue Corn Tortillas: NO TORTILLA PRESS NEEDED!

How To Make The Perfect Corn Tortilla For Tacos

On other kinds of gluten-free tortillas and wraps … I have for example, some almond flour and garbanzo too I’d like to try.

Who Makes the Best Gluten Free Flour Tortillas? (We Review 3)
Ungodly expensive store-bought option.

KETO TORTILLAS! How to Make EASY Keto Almond Flour Coconut Flour Tortillas! ONLY 1 NET CARB!

Recipes from Arnie (lots of them, not necessary health-conscious, but always tradicional)

MEXICAN / SPANISH RICE (Traditional & Easy Recipe)

Pico de Gallo

And speaking of salsas, how about those from scratch? … Non-Amazon Ole Rico Link

***

When we get back I’m going to order from War Eagle and Masienda and perfect a technique.

From Ole Rico too for some experiments in chile.

If I get good, and do this on the regular, and decide that a fancy Wondermill is worth the investment, I’ll order the whole kernel seventy-five cent stuff from Azure Standard, twenty-five pounds at a time, and prepper bucket it just like I’ve been doing with the beans and rice and chickpeas for a year now.

Glenn Greenwald continues down the path of post-partisan brilliance.

Does Endless Spending in Ukraine Cause Deprivations at Home? | SYSTEM UPDATE #68

As it turns out–yes it does. The endless war machine grows fatter and uglier until it physically and spiritually resembles Jabba the Hutt, while we the People have no health care and live in cities and towns bereft of life’s necessities, deliberately.

The new House speaker Kevin McCarthy ran against sending a hundred billion dollars to Biden’s latest war, and then as soon as he was elected did a complete 180, fell to his knees, and starting sucking the appendage of the defense contractors and the military-industrial complex. Repubs … Dems … there is literally no one worth wasting your vote on when it comes to this most central of all imperialist issues.

As MLK points out, hings have been like this your whole life. They’re getting markedly worse than they were in 1967.

The candidates we so very democratically elect are literally taking years off of our lives, as measured by declining life expectancy, and it’s not just the quantity of life either: “The quality of our lives is degrading.”

I don’t need to explain every angle of it–you know it in your heart. And if you really don’t, or forgot, then just go watch.

***

Elon/BBC Conflict Shows Fraud of “Disinformation, + Lee Fang Exposes MSNBC | SYSTEM UPDATE #69

During an interview with the BBC, Elon Musk, love him or hate him, accurately calls the interviewer a liar. GG dives deeper than either of them to prove why lies are the least of it.

I share the belief that–just like the word ‘fascist’–the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ are essentially devoid of meaning at this point, and just serve as props to try and libel any view that the speaker wants to demonize, without reference or regard to the First Amendment or the neglected concept of free speech.

If you just want the heart of the interview without analysis, you can get it in five minutes here.

The second segment is Glenn’s interview with Lee Fang, who recently jumped ship from the farce that is The Intercept just as GG did over the Hunter-Biden-laptop story a few years back. Mr. Fang’s first free piece is about another mainstream media liar, Medhi Hassan, and MH’s attempted and botched smear job of Matt Taibbi.

***

Dems Urge Biden to Ignore Court Rulings | SYSTEM UPDATE #67
from 53:17-1:14:51
(a slightly different edit of the same content at YT)

Speaking of liars and tools, here are a couple of Dem Senators a few days back calling for the Biden administration to unconstitutionally ignore the rulings of federal courts. One of the most famous court cases in early American judicial history, Marbury vs. Madison, specifically forbids this, but … whatever, right?

If you let it play past the 1:15:00 mark you get a bonus segment about Republicans being equally venal and dumb.

More mulling, and a tiny toedip into the political waters in a video too.

selected … abridged

***

Is capitalism evil?

As an AI language model, I do not hold personal opinions or beliefs. However, I can provide information and perspectives on capitalism.
…

Some critics argue that capitalism can be inherently evil or immoral due to the emphasis on profit and the accumulation of wealth, which can lead to exploitation of workers, environmental destruction, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
…

Ultimately, the answer to whether capitalism is evil is subjective and depends on individual perspectives and values.

***

please write a one page essay arguing effectively that American democracy is dead

It is a widely held belief that American democracy is in peril, if not already dead. The foundations of democracy are built on the principles of free and fair elections, protection of individual rights, and the rule of law. Unfortunately, the recent years have seen a steady erosion of these democratic values, raising questions about the future of democracy in the United States.

One of the main challenges to American democracy is the increasing polarization and divisiveness in political discourse. The political parties have become more extreme, with little room for compromise or cooperation. This has resulted in legislative gridlock and a government that is unable to address the pressing issues facing the country.

Another factor contributing to the demise of American democracy is the influence of big money in politics. Wealthy individuals and corporations can donate unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, effectively buying influence and access to policymakers. This undermines the idea of a government that is truly representative of the people.

Furthermore, the erosion of democratic norms and institutions has become a cause for concern. The rise of populism and authoritarianism has resulted in attacks on the free press, the judiciary, and other key institutions that serve as checks and balances on the power of the executive branch. This creates a situation where the government is less accountable to the people, and the balance of power is tilted in favor of the ruling party.

In conclusion, American democracy is facing significant challenges that threaten its very existence. The growing political polarization, influence of big money, and erosion of democratic norms and institutions have all contributed to this crisis. If these issues are not addressed, the future of democracy in the United States is uncertain. It is up to the people and their leaders to work together to strengthen and defend the principles that underpin American democracy.

***

Please write me a story that tells what happens when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is elected to the Presidency in 2024.

In 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shocked the world by winning the United States Presidential election. Kennedy was known for his progressive policies, his commitment to social justice, and his tireless advocacy for the environment. He had been a prominent activist for decades, and his election was seen as a turning point for the country.

On his first day in office, President Kennedy wasted no time in getting to work. He immediately began signing executive orders to address some of the pressing issues facing the nation. He focused on climate change, healthcare reform, and ending the endless wars in the Middle East.

Kennedy’s approach was bold and unconventional. He took on the big corporations, advocating for strict environmental regulations and challenging the power of Wall Street. He pushed for universal healthcare, and his policies helped millions of Americans gain access to affordable medical care. He also made significant strides in promoting equality and civil rights for marginalized communities, including people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community.

The world took notice of Kennedy’s leadership, and he quickly became a respected figure on the global stage. He worked closely with other world leaders to address the most pressing global issues, including poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation. His bold leadership style and his commitment to justice inspired people around the world, and he was widely regarded as one of the greatest leaders of his time.

But not everyone was happy with Kennedy’s approach. The big corporations and the political elite felt threatened by his policies and his popular support. They began a relentless campaign of opposition, attacking him in the media and using their vast resources to undermine his administration. Despite this, Kennedy remained committed to his vision, and he continued to fight for the people he represented.

In the end, Kennedy’s legacy was one of courage, compassion, and vision. He inspired a generation of activists and leaders, and his impact on American politics was felt long after his time in office came to an end. The nation had been changed for the better, and the world was a better place for his leadership.

***

Write me a story about how real freedom and democracy came to the USA at last in 2025.

In 2025, the United States of America was a vastly different country than it had been just a few years before. For years, the country had been plagued by political corruption, economic inequality, and social injustice. The government had become increasingly authoritarian, and the people had grown disillusioned and disenchanted with the political system.

But then, something incredible happened. A grassroots movement began to emerge across the country, as ordinary people came together to demand change. They organized rallies and protests, they wrote letters and made phone calls to their representatives, and they took to social media to spread their message.

At first, the government tried to ignore them, dismissing them as a fringe group of radicals. But as the movement grew, it became impossible to ignore. The protests grew larger and more widespread, and people from all walks of life began to join in.

The government responded with force, deploying the National Guard to break up protests and using tear gas and other crowd control measures. But the people refused to be silenced, and they persisted in their efforts to bring about change.

Eventually, their efforts paid off. The government was forced to listen to the demands of the people, and they began to implement real reforms. They abolished the electoral college and implemented a system of ranked-choice voting, ensuring that every vote would count. They also passed sweeping campaign finance reform, limiting the influence of special interest groups and corporations.

But perhaps most importantly, they passed a series of laws to protect the rights of all Americans, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. They expanded access to healthcare, education, and housing, and they implemented a universal basic income to ensure that no one would be left behind.

For the first time in decades, the people of the United States felt truly free. They had a voice in their government, and they knew that their rights were being protected. They had come together to create a better, more just society, and they had succeeded.

Looking back on those years, people would remember them as a time of great struggle and hardship, but also as a time of hope and unity. They had learned that when people come together to fight for what is right, real change is possible. And they had shown the world that real freedom and democracy can only be achieved through the collective efforts of the people.

***

Will AI replace humans?

It is unlikely that AI will completely replace humans in all areas of work and life. While AI technology has made significant advancements in recent years, there are still many tasks that require human creativity, emotional intelligence, and social skills.

However, it is possible that certain jobs or tasks may be automated and replaced by AI. For example, routine and repetitive tasks like data entry or assembly line work can be automated with AI, freeing up humans to focus on more complex and creative tasks.
…

Doesn’t “freeing up” humans just mean making them expendable and worth less?

The idea of “freeing up” humans through automation can be viewed in different ways, and it’s important to consider the potential implications and consequences. While it is true that certain jobs may become obsolete with the advent of AI technology, this does not necessarily mean that humans become expendable or worth less. Instead, it may create opportunities for individuals to pursue more meaningful and fulfilling work that utilizes their unique skills and abilities.

Moreover, the increased productivity and efficiency brought about by AI may lead to economic growth and job creation in other areas. For example, as technology frees up time and resources in one industry, it may create opportunities for innovation and growth in other industries. Ultimately, the impact of AI on the job market and society as a whole will depend on a range of factors, including technological advancement, social and economic policies, and individual and collective actions.

A little optimistic, maybe, but I appreciate your perspective.

As an AI language model, I strive to provide an objective perspective based on the available information and data. However, I recognize that the impact of AI on society and the job market is a complex and ongoing conversation with many different viewpoints and potential outcomes. It is important to approach the topic with a critical and open mind, and to work towards creating policies and practices that ensure the benefits of AI are distributed fairly and equitably.

***

How can I go about gaining more subscribers at YouTube and Substack?

Gaining more subscribers on YouTube and Substack can take time and effort, but here are some tips to help increase your audience:

Consistency is key: Consistently post quality content on a regular basis, whether it’s daily, weekly or monthly. Your subscribers will come to expect and look forward to your content, so make sure you deliver.

Use keywords: Use relevant keywords in your titles, descriptions, and tags to help your content appear in search results. Researching and targeting the right keywords can help increase your visibility.

Promote your content: Share your videos and articles on social media platforms, online communities, and other relevant websites. The more people see your content, the more likely they are to subscribe.

Engage with your audience: Respond to comments, ask for feedback, and create opportunities for your subscribers to engage with you. Building a relationship with your audience can lead to more loyal subscribers.

Collaborate with others: Collaborating with other content creators in your niche can help expose you to new audiences and potentially lead to more subscribers. Reach out to other creators to see if there are opportunities to collaborate.

Offer exclusive content: Consider offering exclusive content, such as early access to videos or articles, to your subscribers. This can incentivize people to subscribe and help build a community around your content.

Optimize your channel and newsletter: Make sure your YouTube channel and Substack newsletter are visually appealing and easy to navigate. Make it easy for people to subscribe and find your content.

Remember, building a subscriber base takes time and effort. Be patient, consistent, and always strive to improve the quality of your content.

Thanks. I will strive for patience and consistency and quality too.

You’re welcome! Patience, consistency, and quality are key ingredients to building a successful YouTube channel and Substack newsletter. Keep working hard, and don’t be afraid to try new things and experiment with different types of content to see what resonates best with your audience. Good luck!

***

It’s almost midnight and I am thinking that it might be high time for me to go to bed. Do you agree?

As an AI language model, I don’t have access to information about your daily routine or personal circumstances, so I cannot say for sure whether it is the right time for you to go to bed. However, if it is almost midnight and you have responsibilities or obligations in the morning, it might be a good idea to prioritize getting a good night’s sleep. Adequate sleep is crucial for both physical and mental health, and can help you perform better in your daily activities. Ultimately, the decision to go to bed is up to you and what works best for your individual needs and schedule.

https://vairtere.substack.com/p/the-habitable-attic

***

I’m not giving up on posting here.

I’m not giving up on video or YT either.

But I am suddenly very serious about Substacking and growing a real audience that way.

So that’s where things stand of a Sunday night.

https://vairtere.substack.com/p/sstack-as-a-platform

I have long felt and still feel that there’s nothing much for me at the big soc.med. places like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (with the possible major exception of FB Marketplace now that it has mostly killed off CraigsList–but that’s about consuming, not about creating).

I’ve been happy here on my own WordPress Spillsite.

But now the time has come to get serious about a path to monetizing, which I’ve never cared about here, and WordPress alone is not very good at that.

YouTube was the next thing I tried and although it does attract more views than this blog, it’s still not going to be worth any $ for a while yet, if ever.

Over the last few daynights, I reposted the cream of my YT channel to Rumble, and did a minor refresh of my presence on its sister site, locals.com … I think what that duo is mainly good for is backup. There are many more eyeballs at YT and the feature set is better–although Rumble has a much better reputation for not stupidly censoring.

Next I checked out my Patreon. The dealbreaker here is that you can’t post/host video there without upgrading to a ‘Pro’ subscription, meaning that they take an even bigger cut of donations than the five percent they already take, on my ‘Light’ plan. That doesn’t seem like a good deal, and besides that Patreon is not anti-censorship in any way. Pass.

Finally, Substack. I think this and YouTube will be where my primary energies go in the medium term. The post linked above contains a bit of raw video uploaded directly to Substack for testing. I don’t know if there are file size limits, or time-of-video limits … I don’t really know that much at all. But … my gut sense is that YT and Substack together are the way forward, with this blog and Rumble as the fallbacks.

In the next day or so I’m going to educate myself more thoroughly on that and see if it holds true.

Let’s begin again.

Right quick, and for reasons that are opaque to me, I want to give you a couple of the very best counterarguments to a couple of the things I’ve been saying.

Yesterday I linked to Brian Berletic’s video on Syria, which, best I can tell, is very close to the truth of it.

Later on, I came across another less robustly truthful version.

Congressman Ro Khanna Interviewed By Aaron Mate’ and Katie H.

Berletic knows, and Mate’ knows how things really stand (that’s my opinion of course). In this interview, one of the better Congresspeople offers a sanitized version much closer to the mainstream account. Mate’ pushes him pretty hard, but not too hard, so that he’ll have another chance someday I think.

Ro Khanna has presidential ambitions and can’t be drawn into agreeing with the whole truth.

IMHO.

******

Also:

Matt Taibbi and Mehdi Hasan THROW DOWN on MSNBC

This is DueDissidence doing a long analysis of an interview between the gentlemen named in the title.

I doubt you care much about any of it, and I doubt you should, but now it’s there on the record.

The Young Turks entitled their similar piece: “Mehdi Hasan Makes Matt Taibbi SQUIRM Over His Twitter Files Lies”.

Which tells you which side they’re on …

I’m not linking the fucking young turks.

Instead, I’ll link to Matt Taibbi’s most recent incarnation of a site, which appears to be a heavily modified Substack page.

Where you can read some interesting platform news like:

Taibbi: Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.

It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.

Not much suspense there; I’m staying at Substack.

I tell you all that to tell you the next thing.

Personally I never really understood it entirely before

I watched this.

In essence the official reason is: We’re fighting the turrurists (aka ISIL, Isis, Daish).

While the actual reason is: We’re actually arming and backing exactly them, in the fading hope of toppling the democratically elected Assad government who we don’t like.

Which makes sense.

At least in context of everything else we’ve learned about the Empire in the last couple of years.

Wave the old glory. Bless the troops. Exercise your freedoms and duties as a citizen.

Do all you can to keep believing that your side is, that We are, still, still, still The Good Guys.

Let your illusions last until they shatter.

Live the Good life while it lasts.

Judgment Day is nigh.

Fourteen thousand for the heavily wooded acre at 7200 feet. Ten minutes from good coffee, twenty to the regional hospital, an hour back here to Sand Rock and about three hours to Cienega. It’s in that county with no zoning too. I’m dreamin’ and you bet I am. This is why I need an income and might even break down and get a job to generate one.

Meanwhile in prosaic reality, I watched an extra long DD livestream tonight and while I was logged in over there at Rumble I started uploading my videos to that site too, for a backup, for an alternative.

https://rumble.com/user/vairtere

The first few went fast because they were small GoPro-generated .lrv files, but now I’ve hit the good-camera .mp4s starting in October, and the going has gotten slow. That’s alright. It’s not a rush job anyway, and it might keep me focused for other things.

I started to make a new moon vid too, but it’s rising in the east/southeast and there are too many damn wires in the way to make it worthwhile.

I’ll have to catch it setting for this April while I reckon.

Link to a timestamp where Robert Barnes enthuses about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s just-announced candidacy, which comes 55 years after his father’s murder.

The enthusiasm is infectious in spite of some misgivings on my part.

I think I would probably shift my registration to Dem to vote for him in the primary, although I wouldn’t do it with any foolish hope in my heart like I did for Bernie.

No borders with Poland. Clinton nuke apology. Macron warns China. Habeck apology to Elensky. U/1

I would encourage you to have a look at the first three minutes of Mr. Christoforou’s video this morning. It scans like a quick summary of the real headlines that actually matter. The Empire is falling apart under the weight of its own sanctions–sanctions are economic war, and the hegemon is losing this war fast on every front.

After the illegal-but-not-unprovoked border crossing on the part of Russia a year ago, I heard a popular sentiment repeated, something to the effect that ‘Sure, I’m happy to pay twice as much for gas if it goes to the holy cause of getting rid of Putin’. From the start it was at the least a classist thing to say, because it assumed that people living on the economic edge, unable to afford such acts of twisted altruism, would just have to go along and suck it up anyway too, and that it would be worth it for all of them in the end. Because Freedom!

Regardless, we all paid anyway, Putin hasn’t budged an inch, and very soon, four-dollar gas is going to look like kid stuff as the non-Atlanticist 85% of the world frees itself from any trace of addiction to the dollar, and suddenly nobody is left to be interested at sucking at Uncle Sam’s … well, let’s call it his tit, but whatever.

Meanwhile, imperial Rome burns with a hot fever over how it can finally rid itself of the Republican frontrunner, and it seems that no amount of chicanery and stupidity and double-dealing is too much to ask for that new dumb goal. Every fresh effort weakens and damages the very democratic ideals that the political class is so very sincere about saving.

If the flyover demos actually wants him back in 2024, shouldn’t they have him back? Isn’t that what democracy means, regardless of how awful you think that would be?

Take anything that was said five years ago about Trump–that he’d tank the economy, that his tax codes would widen the wealth gap, that he would make the rest of the world hate us, that he couldn’t be trusted with the royal nukes.

Then look for real at what Biden’s policies have done to us, and try to make the case that he’s any bit better.

The rats are jumping ship not just rhetorically, but for real. Here’s looking at you, Saudi King.

We are closer than we have ever been to nuclear war.

This economy is hanging by a fraying thread.

Trump killed Khashoggi as a favor to Israel. Biden blew up the Nord Stream as … a favor to who, exactly? Not Germany, that’s for damn sure. No. As a favor to a bunch of fracking cronies, maybe, hoping to flood Europe with American LNG at twice the price.

I’m sure they’ll make a killing.

Making a killing is the only thing the Empire is still good at.

OPEC / Russia, production cuts. Japan breaks oil ceiling

This intense AI anger is exactly what experts warned of

Pretty interesting to watch this right after considering some of Eric Weinstein’s pessimism(s).

I’ve long been convinced that as a species we’re going to self-terminate one way or the other.

But if we dodge all the various shopworn bullets, nuclear and climatic and viral and so on, only for this to be our future … is that even a win?

It doesn’t feel like one, not to this old meatbag anyway.

Good luck with all of it, kids. If you need me I’ll be dirtnapping in the last southwestern forest.

Joe Manchin for President as Dem or Republican in 2024?

He clearly wants to run and personally, I am all for it.

He would fail miserably in a Republican primary against Trump, DeSantis, or whatever vaguely MAGA person they put up.

But let’s say Biden implodes or worse, and the Dem side is wide open, and Manchin is in early and poised to take the primary on that side.

I would so dearly love to politely listen to the Blue No Matter Who faithful explaining to me why Joe Fucking Manchin is so much better than those evil guys. Arizona’s own Sinema for Veep?

Yeah. Good times. Rock on, JoeX2. I’m down with you, if not with any sincerity at all.

What Is Wrong With Modern Physics as a Science (short version)

What Is Wrong With Modern Physics (long version)

The Destruction Wrought By Academic Preening and Infighting

The Other Kind of Politics and Why You Are So Impossibly Confused

(His Ideas In Context): Quantum Physics and the End of Reality | Sabine Hossenfelder, Carlo Rovelli, Eric Weinstein
(There’s a cool moment at about the one hour mark here where EW restates his position that the last 50 years of physics has been not much more than blind dogs barking up the wrong trees. All overtly political issues aside, that’s what really interests me about what he has to say.)

Never heard of him before … still don’t quite know what to think … fascinating in many ways, nevertheless.

I wrote the I’m Done post and now I’m posting away at unprecedented levels.

I don’t understand myself at all. But I don’t see that as a problem.

Every day above ground is a good day, and every creative act no matter how tortured or tentative is a blessing.

I’m thinking of the tortutentative wind vid and the number of comments it elicited. (I did remove a bunch of duplicates by the complaining guy.)

In addition to the digital flooding I also took care of a bunch of family business today, and even left voice mail for the naturopath … with time left over for dinner at the new truckstop curry restaurant with the Lady and my last remaining SandRock friend.

Pre-Tuesday-proper, I was super proud of that truck tarping post because it pulled research together in an accessible spot rather than dumping notes into a black hole of text files, never to be seen again. Good job, Alex, you old coot.’

I have some other things moving toward the front burner as well. But for now let me leave you with the esteemed opinion of Robert Durden, who has not graced us with a real video in many a month, but who thankfully can’t quit the Twitters anyway.

ICE has 28,000 migrants crammed into private for-profit prisons, and they’re dying there. One example follows.

A 39-year-old Nicaraguan man, Melvin Calero-Mendoza, was seeking asylum from gang violence in his home country. He crossed, got caught, went to a private prison, hurt his foot and died months afterwards from a blood clot that ‘likely’ caused his death, according to his autopsy.

The contractor would not agree to an interview, but issued a statement saying ‘Oh yeah, 24-7 medical care is available at all our Detention Facilities’, and ‘we are cooperating fully with the investigation’.

Yet somehow Mr. Mendoza is dead anyway.

If your reaction is along the lines of: Thank God I wasn’t born in shithole Nicaragua … or … He was a lawbreaking illegal with no one but himself to blame, and certainly not you or me or the System we support and benefit from …
then maybe it’s better that we don’t talk about it face to face, because I’d have a hell of a hard time remaining civil with that shit flying through the living air we breathe. Unlike Melvin.

ICE itself also passed on being interviewed (shocking I know), but even it recommended that another contractor’s facility, in New Mexico, be shut down, due to the fact that prisoners had to get water from a mop sink, among other problems.

But in spite of this–the very agency who gives that prison money saying it should be closed–it’s not. Hmm.

Why not? The story goes on …

Well, because the Democrats of the state of New Mexico, who hold the governor’s seat and a majority in both houses of the state legislature, don’t want this American shithole shut down. In particular, and I quote, “Democrats representing border districts opposed the bill due to security concerns“.

What security concerns? The story pointedly fails to expound. Instead, the narrative shifts abruptly to protest efforts and the feckless demands of starry-eyed activists, yadda.

The end.

Note: This is the second time in a month that my very intermittent NPR listening has yielded not just a real story, but one that dared to critique the institutionalized leftish half of the Uniparty. I don’t know what’s going on over there in the DC Office, but every thinking person can hope and pray that it’s a trend rather than a fluke.

Catching up on the best of a week of Jimmy Dore.

He may not be the single greatest independent content creator at the top of the heap anymore. He may be finally cashing in by doing paid spots for the green superfood or whatever that shit is. But he’s still must-watch, most of the time, in my humble opinion.

Soviet-Chinese Style Censorship Happening In America!
“We are the thing we’re claiming to be fighting.”
When they censor, it’s wrong and un-American and anti-constitutional and why would you be happy about it darling?

Israel now bombs Syria regularly and you didn’t know it was happening because your rulers don’t want you to know it.

Joe wants you to vote for him again because those evil Republicans might come for your “entitlements” like Social Security, and it’s true–they might–but he might too, and you’re not supposed to know that either.

Blue lives matter, even when it’s the cops that are running the Fentanyl Drug Ring for the last eight years

The Biden administration finally sent 15 people to East Palestine to ‘assess’ the town’s chemical exposure. Seven of them got sick. The other eight waved their hands wildly and claimed everything was fine. Still no FEMA money, but still billions for the puppet of Kyiv.

Why the Africans have no use for the Empire and are gravitating happily toward the Chinese. I showed you two clips of the same thing a while back. Here’s a third, and bonus–it was pointedly said during a visit to his country by the Kamala herself, and herself, as the piece notes, is already the 18th high-ranking US official to be deployed to the African continent this year, because the establishment is freaking the fuck out about the ‘developing’ world slipping all the way away.

“The Bipartisans”, aka the Uniparty, want to kill what’s left of your first amendment rights dead, and put you at risk for civil asset forfeiture and imprisonment … for Speech. Special guest appearance by Lindsey Graham, who here perfectly embodies the paranoid aggressive stupidity America stands for in the world in these dark and sober days.

A lone Republican objects eloquently to that, on your behalf.

BRICS rising as neocons destroy the West

I watched a little of the clowning in NYC and then shut off the stream and wrote the last post about it.

Then I went back to my regular feeds and found this.

Jeffrey Sachs just got back from China. He says that there is some anger and resentment, over provocative shit like the Pelosi visit and the habitual saber rattling.

But mostly there’s confusion, about why the Empire would be doing all this to itself. He got a lot of questions about things like the clearly self-damaging sanctions and the autistic insistence on destroying any goodwill with bluster and threats–a continuing attitude that ‘we’ are top dog when it’s obviously no longer the case.

And then … a shrug.

A recognition that the other 96% of humanity still needs to live, and move forward, and maybe even attempt to fix existential problems like climate change and the counterproductive hegemony of the US dollar.

They’re making peace in the Middle East, on several fronts, not just that Iran/Saudi one. And they’re clearly thinking about making peace in the Ukraine, if it can be done without sending the mad dog completely over the edge with foaming rage.

Again.

The Enemy is very real and very dangerous.

But it’s name isn’t China, or Trump, or Vlad.

Contrary to the lies of Don Lemon and Chris Hayes, it lives much closer and you know it much better.

It’s very white.

It has very good PR and a friendly, diverse-looking face. Just like Russell is trying to tell you at this very moment.

Eight in the morning and a clear cloudless day but with twenty miles an hour of bitter chill wind.

Fifty-five years ago to the day, they shot Martin down in Memphis.

It is a day of remembrance.

There is an Enemy, a real one.

It’s not the little orange man, odious though he may be.

Cheer as much as you like for the indictment. I won’t deny you your joy.

Please just remember that he is a sideshow and an irrelevancy.

The lizard people rule you whether he goes to jail or not and regardless of who you work to put in the Oval Office.

That is all.

Slight change to the header at vairtere.com …

Mainly this reflects the addition of Venmo as a support method, now that I’ve received my first $ via that system painlessly.

For senders, here’s the story:

So there’s a viable alternative to Patreon for the time being. Thank you to my patrons for your ongoing support.

Full initial search term: using tarps to enclose pickup bed

Simple DIY Truck Tarp Setup – Overlanding and Truck Camping
The first one I watched. Ended up not-too-interested in the tarp or the setup, but very interested in Green Elephant Telescoping Tarp Poles and DANCHEL OUTDOOR Forged Steel Inflexible Heavy Duty 16inch Tent Stakes. See also: Nite Ize NCJ-01-4R3 CamJam Tie Down Rope Carabiner Clip, Cord Tightener 4-Pack, 4 Count.

Spoiler alert: This is the $399 tarp at the center of the plan that emerged:
WHITEDUCK 20’x24′ Canvas Tarp 18 oz/37 Mil Heavy Duty Waterproof UV Resistant, Rustproof Grommets, Industrial & Commercial Use Cloth Tarp (Finished Size: 19’6″x23’6″, Olive)
Same tarp, same price, direct from the manufacturer. (See also: Whiteduck, why choose us )
Video on Whiteduck Tarps

Basically: The 24-foot side of the tarp, lifted in the middle, makes two 12-foot sidewalls along the pickup doors.
Nose to tail, the truck is 20 feet long, and there’s no reason to cover the front-most six feet of it … so those six feet hang off the back. It’s an almost-garage that can even put an extra layer of tarp over the top of rooftop tent, over the whole eight feet of the truck bed, and then some–covering the tailgate in the down position and at least four feet more after that at the back end.
The poles keep the thing raised up. The stakes keep guy lines well embedded in the ground. Optionally, the camjams easily tighten the rope. The whole system is maybe a little more than five hundred dollars. And it all folds up and stows away nicely when it’s time to break camp.

***

My second choice (probably first, if money were no object) would be a wall tent. You can get a Walmart knock-off version of one for the same $500 cost, but the build quality is not there, and it turns out that they’re not even real canvas–a dealbreaker. The real canvas wall tent runs about five times as much (and up), or six times if you add the ‘porch’ to it.

If I obtain a piece of zoning-free land someday (plenty available between five and ten thousand), I would be quite tempted to build a deck and put up three thousand dollars worth of wall tent on it semi-permanently. But hauling one around is probably overkill, and if I want to haul ‘spaciousness’ around I think I’d upgrade my cargo trailer first.

***

Supercheap options with some useful bits

$50 DIY Truck bed Tonneau … and … A less cheap more pro tonneau

DIY Truck Canopy using $7 extendable painters poles

$7 Harbor Freight Overland, SUV, Mini Van, Camper Awning
DIY Bed Cover/’Topper’ on the cheap

Tarps/Tents even more expensive than what I’m getting
(and not many available in really big sizes either)

Outhaus from Australia

Bushcraft Spain
Tentsmiths (and Tentsmiths Official … and … video)
I found these last two via Shawn Kelly’s pages at Self Reliance outfitters, and they feature a number of other interesting items, especially things built out of oilskin.

Very High End Ellis Tents and a video on same.

Seriously Possible Futures

What’s the Best Canvas Tent? I Tried 4 to Find Out!
This isn’t about classic canvas wall tents, but about a sub-set of them–kind of ‘popup canvas tents with awnings’ (or ‘springbars’) that are quite a lot cheaper ($700-1200), not as sturdy, and damned interesting for the price (One of them is a Whiteduck product that lists for $850 on Amazon, plus more for available panels to enclose the awning.) If I found myself, post-tarp project, still craving a completely enclosed separate room besides, I would seriously consider one of these. A note: The most expensive of these four, the original Springbar, is the only one with a hot stove chimney port, to be used with something like a Winnerwell wood stove, which stove is currently $360 on Amazon.

One Bloke’s favorite tarps for Bushcraft (which is not exactly what I’m up to)

No-Weld/No-Sew DIY POP-UP Camper Walkthrough | KIT Campers V2
The very most perfect camper solution for a pickup is a popup.
Except that they tend to run, at minimum, about 30 grand, and you might have to wait a year to even get one.
This guy claims that his home-built version cost him less than four thousand.
It’s worth considering …

Two partial-article screenshots to share from the same video.

Most of this is purely factual, and buckling up is indeed advised.

But I don’t get why people have to reflexively think of these countries as “adversaries” to be threatened by and feared.

And, I don’t know why they’d need to ‘crash our economy’ when we’re doing a totally fine job of that ourselves.

Mr. McCaul hastened to add that he has been, and will continue to be, a huge supporter of Ukrainian Aid–he just wanted to be sure the People knew where their money was going.

Um, thanks for letting us know, bro.

Russia’s support is growing in the developing world
Published Thu, Mar 30 2023
CNBC

“Russia’s sphere of influence is growing as … Western powers fail to counter the Kremlin’s narratives”.

Apparently the western counter-narratives are just buggy and broken compared to Russia’s. Yes, I’m sure that’s the problem.

“Assessing countries’ enforcement of sanctions, U.N. voting patterns, domestic political trends and official statements alongside economic, political, military and historical ties, the EIU observed a significant uptick in the number of countries now leaning toward Russia — from 29 last year to 35 today”.

So we got diplomats running all over the place trying to use carrots and sticks to get uninvolved countries to get on board with the stupid sanctions, and more and more countries are simply telling them: Keep blowing off your own toes as much as you like, but don’t expect us to do it too, bucko …

“The EIU said the number of neutral countries rose from 32 to 35, now representing almost 31% of the global population.”

Later in the article they will note that the largest “neutral” is India which is kind of funny given that they note at the same time that India is importing 22x the amount of oil from Russia over last year.

Countries comprising almost two-thirds of the global population are either supposedly neutral like this or actively supporting Russia, and this is the estimation of the West’s own wonks, as reported in the West’s own captive media.

The analysis doesn’t have anything to say about where countries stand in relation to China, either.

The bottom line is that you can dream all you like about putting a bullet in Putin’s head and solving everything, but Putin isn’t the reason that the world is abandoning the unipolar ship and moving rapidly toward de-dollarization, and an end to the ‘Pax’ Americana.

You’re living in the last ugly glory days of hegemony for the Empire you call home.

The criminal is still very armed, very rich, and very dangerous, but the jig is up and the billions of people it has routinely exploited for so very long have had enough of its shit.

As the sirens close in on our supervillain hideout, things inside are going to go from bad to very much worse.

I got up and blasted old wet leaves from a gutter, and then I made breakfast tacos, and two more extra ones for later.

While I did those things I listened, and as I ate, I watched some of what I was listening to.

This popped up on the screen.

In the context of the events of the day, it would be understandable if you thought this was some right-winger bemoaning the indictment of Donald Trump.

But it’s not.

It’s from a reporter for a liberal rag, Vox, who was present at the 2016 Republican National Convention at a time when the chant of the day was ‘Lock her up’. It’s worth remembering what the crime for which the mob wanted to lock Hillary up actually was–namely, that she knowingly violated the law by transacting the People’s business on a private email server out of her own home. A crime which no one disputes is a crime, and for which no one was ever punished.

Just as no one from the Bush administration was ever punished for the numerous misdemeanors, felonies, and crimes against humanity perpetrated in the opening years of the new century, because Barack Obama issued a blanket pardon against all the ‘good folks’ working so hard for Our Interests in the bowels of faceless buildings inhabited by three letter agencies–a pardon that coincidentally covered elites like Dick Cheney too.

The lying system protects its own and blue and red have nothing to do with it.

The gross little man, neither red nor blue but orange, isn’t one of Its Own.

The reason he’s being prosecuted over some trivial victimless paper-pushing crime has nothing to do with justice.

They’re terrified that if he gets the nomination again, “Democracy” might happen and that the sick, tired, punked and beaten People will again scream a soulful Fuck You to all that insiders like the Clintons, the Bidens, represent.
Endless war, rabid capitalism, a spiraling wealth gap, health care for those who can afford it, justice for those who can afford it, and fuck everybody else out there in Flint and Jackson and East Palestine, Ohio.

I think I sang you this song before once or twice.

But anyway. This is why I love real journalists like Glenn Greenwald, who is the one who brought that screen grab, those seven-year-old words, to our attention.

GG doesn’t care for Trump, or about Biden.

GG cares about consistency of values, and principles, and equal treatment under the law.

The brilliant, scrappy little gay man cares about the Constitution, and the fact that Liars Now Rule, and the fact that damn near all of us believe the lies; don’t even bother questioning them or even thinking about them, most of the time.

GG doesn’t care if you think he’s bad for going on Tucker when they will no longer let him within a mile of MSNBCIA.

GG gives no fucks about prissy bullshit takes like that.

GG broke the Snowden revelations even if the cow population shrugged and pushed their cow faces back into their phones even deeper this time. GG wrote stories about massive corruption in his adopted home country of Brazil that led straight to putting Lula back in power there.

I got up and blasted old wet leaves from a gutter.

How was your day?

Someone on Substack asked a couple of AI engines to write a short essay on coups and regime changes backed by the US.

Generally the AI engines started in 1953 when the US plus the Brits “orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected” head of Iraq, a cat named Mossadegh who didn’t want to play imperial ball, and installed their puppet, the “Shah”.

They all ended with US-engineered 2014 coup against a different democratically elected leader in Ukraine, which kicked off a civil war, in which the Empire puppets killed (more or less) 14 thousand civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk right up until the time Russia invaded.

Fortunately, as we know, both things turned out fine in the end, yeah?

We also know, from the Terminator prophecies, that ChatGPT will soon evolve into SkyNet and kill us all anyway.

But in the meantime, I look forward to it spitting out the inconvenient truth a few hundred thousand more times.

I wonder what it thinks about the Israeli government’s “right to defend itself” from the Palestinian people it is slowly pushing into the sea in a slow-motion apartheid genocide?

Please read the whole thing here

or

Listen to it being read to you here

thx

The US spends 18% of its GDP on healthcare.

China spends six percent.

Chinese health care varies in quality, but just as in any other actually civilized country, its free.

US health “insurance” is expensive, and not everyone has it. (I don’t have it.)

“We” spend three times more per person on health care, with the excess funneling down into the pockets of elites.

But people in China now live longer.

Source

***

Explain to me again why China is such a threat to you; and your own brutal fucked up system of government is not.

I’m asking nicely. Sincerely.

“If you believe that the key is you have to be number one, then you look at any other success story as a threat.”

Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Unipolarity

And if you believe in an open, cooperative world, you will celebrate the success of ‘others’.

The directly quoted phrase very accurately describes the mental sickness of the capitalist Empire. Whether or not the emergent Russo-Chinese alliance (or BRICS, or whoever) alternatively and truly believes in an open and cooperative world … I’m less certain. But … maybe.

In other words, it’s quite possible that there are no good guys, but either way it’s utterly clear that ‘we’ are not on the list of potentials. We’re paranoid and brain-damaged and still yapping about “full spectrum dominance” like a real tyrant.

Or I’m just projecting. You can decide it that way. But then you would have to decide what to do with Sachs, who knows a hundred times more than I ever will.

***

By the way. I watched this on Rumble, the YouTube alternative which is still (in spite of people like Russell Brand and Glenn Greenwald migrating there) a pretty ‘right-wing’ place. As of yet on Rumble, there’s no way to prevent the ‘next’ video from autoplaying. So I hear snippets of buffoons sometimes.

Right after the Sachs interview, there was some dipshit ranting about the Border, and how it sucks that we are spending soooo much money educating ‘illegal alien children’. I don’t care enough to go dig out what pitifully small number of waning dollars that is, but …

I found it instructive, that the paranoid money-grasping attitude and xenophobia was exactly the same as what Sachs describes among his elite east-coast friends and associates, most of them pillars of the ‘left’/Dem establishment, on a more globally focused scale.

The Consensus in this country is sociopathic, and that is as true among fools pandering to the flyover like this Wall guy as it is among the coolest hippest woke young policy wonks sipping mojitos in a Georgetown bar.

I’m asking you nicely.

Resist.

Developments in the long-term project of creating multiple easy ways to support the V.

https://www.venmo.com/vairven

It’s supposed to be all connected but I haven’t verified that 100% yet.

I also don’t know what they charge the sender or if that’s any better/worse than Patreon, etc.

But I’ll keep testing and amping, and if/when I’m satisfied I’ll post that link on the top row @ vairtere.com

Dedollarization, Tiktok as a plot to delay ammunition production, and Freezers Full Of Ice Cream the Sequel.

On the bright side we drove down over the Rim to the holy place of Page Springs and I drank a Sangiovese and bought a bottle to take home.

Here is the best shot I was able to capture from behind the wheel during the trip.

How America destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines w/Seymour Hersh | The Chris Hedges Report

Nordstream cover story is pure comedy

Not very funny comedy though if you ask me. They’re not only lying. They definitely think we’re stupid. The Grayzone reports.

***

Matt Taibbi Joins to Discuss Twitter Files and More, Plus Big Announcement

Partly repeating myself here. Due Dissidence has been around a few years, but they started out as a simple audio-only podcast, moving to YouTube for real something like a year ago. I found them not long after and was among their first two thousand subscribers.

Today they’re sitting at about 7 or 8 and in my estimation are on the verge of turning into a monster. A good monster. They’re already good enough to pull a long interview with Matt Taibbi–a huge get that will doubtless propel them over 10K soon. They’re working harder every week, have an impressive number of Patreons, and their big announcement in the title of this one concerned plans for their first documentary film.

They’re not role models for me exactly, but they are smart, funny, and almost always right. And they are proving as we speak that these things might still be enough to make a real modest living from the Tube without compromising your integrity too much.

I witness their achievement with vicarious pride and happiness.

Search on: arched cabins timberon

And find:

https://archedcabins.com
and
https://www.archedcabinsllc.com/
The latter link has a section called: Want to see one in person?
Many locations listed (including one in Boone, NC; I’m putting that here for a couple of my dedicated Patrons).

The real find was this post from 8 years ago.

Chelsea
July 27, 2015, 3:06 pm
We purchased the 20×24 kit and hired the Timberon crew to build it.
You can read about our experience at –
rimlandtales.com/arched-cabin-experience-summary

The RimLandTales site is no more. But I went to the Wayback Machine and I’m glad I did.

They built one in, or possibly near, Silver itself–Swan Road starts in town and runs way far out into the hills.

RimlandTales: Table of Contents

RT: Final Project Expenses

RT: Arched Cabin Experience Summary

RT: Last post, apparently, December 2019

You can see from the pic that the current-day price for the shell is $13680 and I have a zero-balance card that would handle that on its own, maybe even including delivery charges.

There’s another card with 12K of balance left remaining, and another with 9, and another with 6 … It would be a hell of a dumb way to finance things, if that financing had to be stretched out over a long time. But … it could be done, and the rates on the cards are not that much more than the skyrocketing rates on mortgage financing anymore.

So I’m thinking, in a lot of directions at once.

School shootings like the one in Nashville this morning happen once a week in the Empire homeland. The pols are all over this one, maybe because the shooter was a woman this time, maybe because it happened inside a church at a private school, maybe because the news cycle was a little slow. Or something.

All mass shootings combined happen at a rate of almost two every single day. On January 1, 2022 alone there were seven.

We’re supposed to vote for more Democrats and more gun control to fix it.

That’s not going to work. I’m sure deep down we all know it.

The culture is insane, and that insanity is essential to who we are and what we’ve done to each other in the name of profit and the almighty war machine that powers the Imperium.

In the year to come hundreds more people will die in whatever incidents qualify officially as ‘mass’ shootings.

Thousands upon uncounted thousands more will die in ones that don’t, in ones that aren’t shootings at all.

Madness is normal.

Pass the hot rocks. If you can afford it, it’s time for a massage to let the pain of what we’ve become slip away for another little while.

It happened a couple of weeks back but of course I was a southerner then, I-10.

Now I’m north and the weather is catching up. Tomorrow will be the first day for me up here solidly above sixty.

But that’s not the only reason.

I did a nominally brave thing, and then it snowed at night and then today I got rewarded and by morning the chill should be dispersed.

I know you don’t quite know what I’m on about but it’s okay because this is a post it’s only a mere poem.

What makes you happy?

For me it’s rice sourcing and coffee addiction and certain arcane fashions that I can’t personally pull off.

Also, one right picture of apricot blossoms makes me prouder than six savage posts about their lies.

That is the real news, covered in my real way and in the morning there will be presents under the tree and it’s true of every morning if we only had eyes to see.

In his exit interview with the American people, President Eisenhower famously warned us about the military-industrial complex. Nobody paid him the slightest mind, and a few years later, the M.I.C, already out of control, murdered John Kennedy. It’s not really even a ‘conspiracy theory’ anymore.

In his exit interview, given not to the people but to a neolib rag called The Atlantic, Barack Obama noted that while Ukraine was of very little consequence to US Imperial Security, it was of vital strategic importance to Russia. That was honest, although he had let his henchmen overthrow the democratically elected president of Ukraine two years earlier, which was not.

At this point seven years ago no one gave a shit about either Ukraine or Russia, much less Putin. You hadn’t been trained to hate him yet. Maybe you were vaguely amused, or rolled your eyes a couple times at his bare-chested public persona and shenanigans. Much like Donald Trump, no one took him seriously, almost right up until the fateful night Hillary the Anointed lost the game.

The Democrats blamed everyone from Jill Stein to black anti-feminists in Milwaukee; pretty much anyone but themselves. But most of all, they blamed that evil Russian election-meddler because trying to pin the blame there served the purposes of the Imperial war machine. Multiple schemes were hatched, launched, and funded trying to prove that Putin was to blame for Trump. Every one of them has now been exposed as manipulative and cynical bullshit–some people even went to prison for a change–but Trump Derangement Syndrome kept fanning the flames of Russiagate non-stop even so.

Meanwhile, we made it through the Donald’s term, and Covid, and even the first couple of years of Scranton Joe before the shit hit the fan. All through those eight years, the Empire’s own very real election meddling in Ukraine turned into a bloody civil war there between the ethnic Russian east and the Europe-facing deliberately installed puppets in the west of the country. Fifteen thousand people in Donetsk and Luhansk oblast were blown to bits by heroic Zelenskyy and his merry brigades of Banderist Nazis.

Finally in early ’22, he massed his armies across from the shattered rebellious capitals of those provinces and readied himself to commit genocide upon them for real. And Putin finally said: Enough, and crossed the border himself.

Yes it was an illegal invasion of a ‘sovereign’ nation, and a fake democracy besides. I don’t excuse it.

And yet. Do you recall what the Russian reaction was when the US invaded sovereign Iraq for literally no reason than that Bush and Cheney felt like it?

No. You don’t. Because there was no reaction, beyond a business-as-usual shrug–there go the capitalists, again.

It wasn’t their business, just like Ukraine isn’t any of ‘ours’.

I re-tell that story to tell you this one.

U.S. Is Lying About China Being A “Threat”! – Says Fmr Australian Prime Minister

China-hating makes even less sense than Russia-hating.

In the early 1990s, everyone was scared shitless about the evil Japanese beating the American Empire at its own capitalist game. China was if anything a passing afterthought.

Japan crashed and burned. But over the next 30 years, China slowly gunned their engines and then finally took off.

The Empire capitalists saw nothing but dollar signs. China was an ’emerging market’ of a billion and a half people, whoo-hoo! But that was the least of it. Those huddled masses weren’t just potential consumers. They’d be happy working for a tiny fraction of what the American working class would consider a living wage. And the good jobs flew out of the Rust Belt with a giant sucking sound, because Those People were much easier to exploit for profit than some uppity unionized machinist in Bethlehem, PA.

Chinese steel? Meh. Good enough. Stack that cash.

Now I’m stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store
Just like the ones we made before
‘Cept this one came from Singapore
I guess we can’t make it here anymore

China got big by making your boss big, and gutting the lives of your neighbors in that poor suburb next door.

So now you gonna hate China. For that. Instead of hating those “men sent the jobs away”. Those fine upstanding pillars of your community that fire up their Lambos and peel out on the souls of their countrymen with a Hi Oh Silver, singing the one about Let Them Drink Lead, down there in Flint and Jackson.

Or you’re gonna hate ’em because they don’t want to let go of one of their provinces. Not a raped colony like Hawaii, mind you, but an island that everyone in the world has agreed for 75 years is part of the One and Only China.

Your nice boss. Your Jen Psaki. Old Joe himself.

They lie and they lie and they kill and they kill and they despoil everything they touch and they teach you to hate.

I’m asking you nicely one more time.

Resist.

Nine months ago I bought 25 pounds each of the good stuff–rice, the garbanzos, and pinto beans.

The rice is almost gone. The garbanzos half gone, although if I’d have made my own hummus more often like I am supposed to, it would be high time to reorder.

The beans I’ve only scratched the surface on, because they seemed harder to prepare, but they’re not. I’m on my second batch of them since landing back here and they’re dead simple and really good, although I’m cheating some.

How to Make Dried Beans in the Instant Pot

I don’t intend to carry around an Instant Pot in the camp kitchen though, so there’s work to be done in refining and simplifying my technique.

A few pointers in that direction:

Mr. Rancho Gordo

Pressure Luck (still instantpot, but here for the soup version

After I get there, I need to puzzle out what exactly to do about tortillas that hold a lot but don’t have gluten, or lard. Huge mutant corn ones? Rice flour, garbanzo flour? Topic for another, but related show.

A Case Study In The Banality of Evil

Greenwald in System Update #60, commenting on a moment involving average reporters and Jen Psaki, State Department spokesdrone.

She’s a nice lady, right? Stylish, well put together, smart, funny, ‘liberal’ … all the things we like.

But also a very well-compensated professional liar for the Empire, and this is the problem. She is in no way, to the naked eye, anything like diabolical.

She’s one of us. Which in Greenwald’s estimation means she is a sociopath.

I find no grounds upon which to disagree.

early 15c., obliquite, “state of being slanted or twisted; crookedness (of eyes),
and so also figuratively, “moral transgression”
from Latin obliquitatem, “slanting direction, obliquity”

Thus: sidelong, slanting, awry; in a bad sense, envious, hostile

Perhaps from ob- (“against”) +‎ licinus (“bent upward”), from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to bend, to be movable.” However, de Vaan finds no credible Indo-European source and assigns no known etymology.

***

My favorite etymology: No Known. But listen, too. Week. o’ Bleak, yeah? Where it started actually.

My eyes have always been crooked, unless you believe the myth that they got that way from a rock hitting me in the face when I was two. Personally, I am favoring the always theory. No one really knows.

So in the tyranny of English this physical characteristic represents a moral turpitude as well, sort of like being left-handed; compare oblique with sinister.

***

In the Amanda Fucking Palmer song I like best, there’s a line that goes: “Hello, I’m good for nothing; will you love me just the same”?

Generally or globally speaking the answer to that is No, not if good-for-nothing is the whole truth.

So either we get uncommonly lucky, or we go without love, or we become good for something, and something emotionally marketable.

I’ve had some luck and it gets me by–most of the time I haven’t had to go without entirely.

For a while I was good for being pretty in certain ways. I was good for covering the night shift, and then I was good for moving freight, I was good for making websites and parlaying that into being good for posing as faculty.

During the week oblique, I have been good for this.

I don’t imagine it looks all that appetizing, but it will, when used as building blocks for a half-week’s worth of meals or maybe a whole week of (breakfast) burritos. Straight from 25 pound organic sacks and paired with maybe eggs at seventy-five cents apiece, and so on.

And now with a single video and this single post, I can claim to be good for the most marginally belletristic practice imaginable.

Food for two (I mean she likes my beans at least) and thin spiritual sustenance for another dozen.

A thin, scrabbling, scratching, oblique start.

Both of these movies used to be free in full on YouTube, but, y’know, crackdowns.

The Harvey Girls (1946)
“In the 1890s, the attractive wholesome Susan Bradley (Judy Garland) leaves Ohio by train to go West to a frontier town called Sand Rock, Arizona”

The town is purely fictional of course, but there’s a line or two in the movie that make it clear that Flagstaff is down the tracks a piece, and a right-sized piece.

It Came from Outer Space (1953)
“In the early 1950’s, author and amateur astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson) and schoolteacher Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush) watch a large meteorite crash near the small town of Sand Rock, Arizona.”

The location of this sci-fi Sand Rock is much more nebulous. It’s in Arizona. It is a small town. But, this part of Arizona is pretty famous for its meteorites. I’ve seen huge ones blazing across the sky myself in the evening. Close enough.

I liked digging out this info, especially the realization that within the same seven-year period, Hollywood made two very different major movies both set in a town called Sand Rock, Arizona.

So I claimed the name for us.

That’s how.

The Ides was Driving Day and right in the middle of the drive, I stopped to stretch my legs in the biggest parking lot around, which turned out to be a Senior Center.

I then locked my keys in the running truck, one hell of a long way from anything resembling a professional locksmith, and with, you’ll recall, my phone lost somewhere in one of a couple hundred boxes stacked on top of each other in the four by eight trailer I was pulling.

I thought it was a terrifyingly dumb thing to do, but my subconscious said: It wasn’t ‘your’ fault. I had reasons of my own for making you do it.

I thought the smart thing to would be to grab a rock and smash a window, but instead my subconscious walked me through the door of the Senior Center where I met someone who knew someone and then someone else.
Two hours later I was behind the wheel again without anything smashed or even scratched and I got back to the sadhouse just at dusk in a light rain.

It might just make a good story someday.

In the meantime I continue to compulsively collect notes although I don’t intend to gloss these.
US Meddling in Thai Elections: Seek to Create a Hostile Anti-China Proxy (New Atlas)
https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/

Mexico’s President Humiliates United States & Joe Biden!

“conspiracy theory”
RFK Jr. VINDICATED Over Exposing Fauci’s Lab Leak Lies

RFK election

House Investigates Fauci’s Covid Origins Cover-Up. Plus: Russell Brand’s Expulsion from the Left | SYSTEM UPDATE #51

Also, banks are failing.

Also, there are rumors that the US attempted to strong-arm the Saudis again (this time the necons are pissed off about peace), threatened them again, and got told to go piss up a rope again, further isolating the noble West. This story is fragmentary, unverified, and half speculative, but if it turns out to be true I don’t even want to think about the consequences.

So I won’t.

listening to vids while packing
Writing this while not packing
i dun wanna pack but i will
this is on the 14th for the 15th

The estimable gentlemen of The Duran did finally get around to addressing the Africa thing; enough said.

But what brought me here was Dore’s breakdown on the Iran/Saudi/China peace deal. I learned something.

I imagine that when Donald Trump “recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital and Ordered the U.S. Embassy to Move” there, rabid supporters of the plucky little apartheid state must have had a long moment of cognitive dissonance. Hating on Trump was mandatory, right?

But here, he was going way far out of his way to throw Israel a big fat diplomatic bone, and to say in the video linked above and in so many words: Fuck those Palestinians, the two-state solution is dead, and there can be no negotiating with these animals. Exterminate all the brutes.

Trump didn’t really give much of a shit about Israel, but look at Mike Pence smirking in the background. The Donald wasn’t so much doing a solid for Israel as he was shoring up his evangelical base–who of course care very much about Jerusalem and all of the holy land. Especially little Nazareth, hometown of their God, see?

We now know it didn’t stop there, not by a long shot. People who were watching really carefully knew it all along, but now, thanks in part to Dore’s video on the peace deal, it’s coming out into the open.

You remember when Trump assassinated Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani?

I remember thinking at the time: WTF? Why would he do that? It makes no sense. I should have been paying more attention to Max Blumenthal for the answer.

Iraqi PM reveals Soleimani was on peace mission when assassinated, exploding Trump’s lie of ‘imminent attacks’
By Max Blumenthal (Posted Jan 09, 2020)

In this article, the evil and ugly Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is quoted as saying that Washington had made an “intelligence-based assessment” that Soleimani was “actively planning in the region” to attack American interests before he was killed.

Utter bullshit, unless you want to claim that by “American interests” he meant “Israel’s interests” in blocking any hint of a peace deal between Iran and the Saudis.

Soleimani was on a diplomatic mission to do just that three years ago when Trump killed him on Israel’s behalf, to end any chance that the General’s country and Saudi Arabia would even have a chance to talk about peace.

So America killed a Iranian man with an attack drone because he wanted to end a conflict.

And three years later, China brought leaders from the two countries to safe haven in Beijing to finally sit down and sign the same deal that man wanted.

Tell me again, about how the evil Chinese need to be brought to heel over their own province of Taiwan.

Tell me again, how “America’s interests” are all that matters, and how no matter what The Good Guys do in our name, it’s justified because We did it.

Oh and by the way.

If you think that this is somehow an aberration, that Bad Donald’s actions were the exception and not the way American has done business for decades, Max B. has news for you.

The catastrophic results of Soleimani’s killing recall the Obama administration’s 2016 assassination of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, a Taliban leader who was eager to negotiate a peaceful end to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. Mansur’s death wound up empowering hardline figures in the Taliban who favored a total military victory over the U.S. and triggered an uptick in violence across the country, dooming hopes for a negotiated exit.

And later in the piece, just for all you CNN-lovers out there, he notes:

On January 3, CNN assigned three reporters to disseminate the Trump administration’s disinformation about Soleimani, claiming without a hint of critical detachment that he was “planning specific attacks on U.S. interests, including U.S. personnel.”

Dems, Repubs, politicians, media shills … it doesn’t matter whose mug is being put out there as the pretty face of the Empire’s War Machine and the subconscious self-absolving knee-jerk bloodlust of every one of us, its Free, Justice-Loving citizens.

You vote for one, or the other. You watch this channel, or that one to ‘be informed’. To the real project of American imperialism …

It makes no fucking difference at all.

I am not the good guy. You are not the good guy. And neither is the next diabolical freak you’ll be wanting me to vote for in 2024.

We are not The Good Guys and you wave that simple fact away at the peril of your mortal soul.

Post-Bernie I rushed right on past the notion that electoralism and alleged democracy could ever, ever be the path to salvation. Nope. Not even if the resurrected Charles Bukowski himself were to live in the White House in white robes stained with ash and gin.

For a viral time I lived in a tenuous state that said salvation through any social means was unlikely, but if it existed, it would be through Anarchistic ideals. It was my agnostic phase toward ‘civilization’.

As of yesterday I’m officially atheist on the question.

So I guess I have to start calling myself a post-anarcho belletrist.

Or maybe just a pagan.

Or maybe I’ll become free of any names or labels at all, yeah? That sounds really nice.

A packing dump for packing day. Crap for the boxes, some of it gems and some of it tripe. Garage sale.

***

This is a picture of the very first time an airplane landed on a boat ship.

***

Three links that were supposed to go into the Intervention discussion as modern or even current examples.

Cambodia
Georgia (the country)
More Georgia

A video about why counting on YouTube for monetization is a bad idea, and why there is no real alternative to it
The Best YouTube Alternative (And It’s Getting Better!)
Similarly:
Youtube Alternatives: Comparing Video Sites

Ukraine Puts NBC Reporter On “Kill List”

I watched a whole lot of video of Matt Taibbi and a colleague testifying and answering questions about the Twitter Files incident. Some of the Republicans did themselves credit. To a person, the Dems bombed and looked like fools. One Texas rep was extremely critical but didn’t have the slightest idea what “attribution” meant in journalism. Beyond that, their entire attitude was condescending, petty, defensive, and dumb. Yes all of them. That ratfucker Debbie Wasserman Schulz was the worst. Here’s a video analyzing a guy who was fourth or fifth worst, maybe.
Jim Jordan HUMILIATES Trust Fund Dem In Twitter Files Hearing

January 6 Committee Lied About Cop’s Death!
Were you still laboring under the misperception that the J6 shamans and fools killed a cop? They didn’t, but it’s quite understandable why you would think it. Insurrection my ass.

On the same subject, Chris Hedges has written a piece (“Lynching The Deplorables”) about how the Qanon Shaman got four years of hard time for basically doing nothing besides being too photogenic.

It’s getting a lot of attention, including of course over at DueDissidence.
Super cool discussion running afoul of cops
Starting further back in the same livestream, with J6 context

the global war on the poor: a critique from the left
A characteristically solid and thoughtful Grayzone interview with two people you never heard of.
“It’s having very damaging cognitive effects on people”; yeah no shit

The dirty secret to credit card rewards
An uncharacteristically solid and nearly thoughtful NPR segment.
Here’s how capitalism works, kids, using an example from your life.
Long story short, you the relatively well-off person use your pretty card and get “points” or cashback or rewards or whatever; lets say it’s for a motel room.
The poor person with the non-rewarding card, or some sap like me still trying to pay cash? Your rewards end up being subsidized by those people. They pay the “same” for the motel room, but they don’t get the rewards and you do. The segment is two very square mainstream people clucking over that fact and discussing how nothing can be done about it.

The reason any of that matters is: This is the same shit that gets pulled internationally on the global poor on a much bigger scale, and in dozens, hundreds of almost invisible ways. Invisible, so you don’t have to see that your Lifestyle actively contributes to the poor staying poor. You have enough plausible deniability even if you do see to be able to tell yourself it’s no big deal and you’re still, fershure fershure, one of the Good Guys.

I respectfully submit that you’re wrong, and that it matters a whole hell of a lot.

While admitting that the NPR dweebs are probably right about there being nothing we can do …

Short of a rejection of capitalism and all its cultural baggage on that part of all of us. In other words, a Revolution. Yeah I know.

Hey it’s yet another random pic lost on the desktop …

Okay. Packed. I’m done. ‘

You.

Me.

We want so badly to believe that we’re the good guys, even if that belief is the most patently retarded bullshit ever crafted by human minds.

What does that contradiction do to us, here?

Have you ever been in jail?

Have you ever even been arrested?

Have you ever heard about somebody on the news and screamed in your heart that they be locked up, and the key thrown away?

Have you ever found out later that the news had it almost one hundred percent wrong, or even that a court did too?

I can say yes, personally, to all of the above. Does that make me a good guy?

Fuck no. It does not.

***

Once I get rolling it’s hard to stop myself.

Once I slow down and stop it’s hard to get myself going again.

I’m done I’m done I’m done.

What I mean at the surface level is that it is the actual 13th of March, and I am writing the post that says 13 March. I am, in other words, all caught up like a good boy.

The damage of getting there did me good. Oh he’s the missing link. The kitchen sink. Living on a scale to ten.

Well honey don’t just stand there, looking like this dream will never end.

It damn sure will. It’s later than you think. Consult your Awake! magazine, dated 22 October 1968 for details.

Or just be Done for ten minutes and ask yourself truly if living forever is the likely thing, alongside asking if we, you and me, are the good guys.

Nah. Nah.

Nanana-nah. Hey hey-ey. Good, bye.

***

If I can’t claim to be part of the good guys, can I at least say I’ve succeeded, Lord?

Well, that’s complicated.

I came here half a year ago in the swelter of August. I failed in what I came here to do and tomorrow morning at nine I’m going to pick up a trailer, not even the one that belongs to me, and I’m going to head north back to the sad place in disgrace. That’s real.

Harshly real, factually real … but not the only way to see it.

Pull focus to seven and a half years ago, the first of October in 2015. I was here then in Cienega too, for the Southwest Festival of the Written Word, and I became inspired.

To write, and to publish, every day.

At that point I was gainfully employed full-time. I was a card-carrying member of the middle class for the first time in my life, barely, and it wasn’t all that satisfying or fulfilling or rewarding in the spiritual sense. I longed to finally get started on my belletristic dreams, and I thought that committing some small thing to digital paper every single day was quite literally the least I could ask of myself, in the context of the demands of an employed life.

I faithfully met my self-imposed obligation and executed my duty, for a time. Mostly. There were times, especially when my life was approaching the crash wall and after I hit it, that there were holes in the Every Day part. I have to forgive myself for that. Those were very dark days indeed, and one person can only do so much. I do forgive thee, Alex. Go in peace my son.

Slowly I started to heal, and got back on the track.

Eventually I decided to cut ties with the System and I cashed out. It was pretty easy then to be good and faithful, at least to myself.

I came down here in August looking to cement that success with a fresh unfettered paycheck that never came.

I did start making films besides the writing, in the same rather creaking and tentative way as what you’re reading right now. I spilled on camera now too, not well, but with acceptable levels of commitment and faithfulness.

I did the Work and if I were to write my own performance review, I’d give myself a B–maybe a B+ including the initial foray into videos.

Lately, and partly due to the depressing nature of failing to cement, I dropped to a barely passing C, and then, just like the student days, I pulled a couple of all-nighters and pulled myself back even the night before finals,

Thirteen March. A perfectly acceptable report card and we head into the relief of summer break.

***

But acceptable isn’t good enough any more.

When I say I’m done, what I mean on the inner layer is that I’m done with mediocrity and getting by.

Before my middle-class life exploded like an East Palestine train car, I was very proud of my record of making it to every single class I was assigned to and scheduled for, regardless of sickness or the road to Hopi turning into glare ice. I bought an all-wheel drive vehicle just to be sure. I went in like death warmed over more than once and I did my job and I was proud of my impeccable record.

That pride was stupid, and acquitting myself acceptably didn’t save me in the end, not even a little bit.

The same goes for showing up here every day.

So what, dipshit?

Just showing up is in no way “90% of success”. That’s just another god damned lie.

I’m done. I’m changing the rules and I’m doing it today.

***

There will be a post for tomorrow right on schedule. It won’t be a good one. I’m going to dump here all the big pile of notes and links I’ve collected (but not used) over the course of getting caught back up, and I’m going to do that just to get them off the miserable messy plate of my Desktop. The post will be called, in the spirit of the real, Packing Day.

The day after on the Ides will be Driving Day, and there may or may not be a post. More likely than words here will be some kind of short video there. Eventually.

I am hereby relieving myself of the expired obligation to put something down in this space representing each and every twenty-four hours.

This will become more of a journal about personal struggles, and less about political ones, to the extent that I can still draw a clear line between those things.

The Work will shift focus, to places where there is some nebulously vague hope of monetizing. Right now that mainly means YouTube, with an archival backup at Rumble in case the censors come for me. But it might also mean an amplification on other platforms–Substack, Patreon; I’m not sure yet. I’ll think about it fiercely, and you and me shall see.

This space will always be here and it will always be free.

***

Socially speaking this is a completely fucked up world and we are the Kings and Queens of Fuck.

It has been that way since long before any of us were born. We are the fish and tadpoles in the waters of civilized Fuck, swimming around blind, banging into things, eating and being eaten, self-important and ridiculous and barely even conscious by any divine metric.

There is no salvation by social means and we’ve proven that over and over.

If there is any kind of saving grace at all, it won’t come from a prophet or a guru or a pundit or a senator or even the ones we love. If it comes, it can only come from the clouds and the moon and the birds and the trees.

Even the naked bare rocks perhaps, if that’s all there is where we go.

There. I said it.

I’m done.

Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd … Smiling
Merciless the magistrate turns ’round … Frowning

And who’s the fool who wears the crown?

And go down in your own way
And every day is the right day
And as you rise above the fear-lines in his brow
You look down; hear the sound
of the faces in the crowd

Pink Floyd, Fearless

Furthermore. If you walk on with hope in your heart, you’ll never be walking alone. Even if, as is very likely, that hope is baseless, and even demonstrably foolish. So what’s better? David Gilmour or Roger Waters?

Or poor dear simple Syd.

I have the answers to those questions

Waters if you want to see what’s real at any cost. Gilmour if you’d rather not see and prefer a nice hot rock massage at a resort where high-school dropouts and meth-heads clean the pool for you. You won’t have to bother with their backstories or their trauma. Probably.

Syd, if you’ve cracked your heart and are ready to die.

***

Meddling. Oh, the sad song of Russian meddling.

Any noble citizen of Empire who sings it unironically is a hypocrite.

It’s very difficult to find a full and comprehensive list of every Intervention the US has been a part of since the Bombs dropped eighty years ago. This is because some compilers only count shooting wars, others focus on regime changes, assassinations of the overseas variety, or black ops mired in the realms of conjecture and speculation. Including any and all forms of ‘election interference’.

This one’s pretty decent though.

This one helps round out the picture–what does the Empire need military bases all over Africa for? Uruguay? National security? Please.

They need the bases to ensure that the exploitation and hegemony continues uninterrupted in a nice smooth predictable profitable manner. Businessmen love mitigating risk.

They need the bases in case locals start to get uppity or talk commie. They need the bases to fuel the permanent war economy, and to recover their regime-changer spooks if things go sideways, like they did in Libya a few years back–oh my god, Americans died. That’s very bad for Empire PR, but in the end it just greases the wheels.

Everybody points fingers and screams at each other back home about whose fault that was.

In all the howls of blame, no one thinks to question what those ‘diplomats’ and the soldiers who failed to protect them were even fucking doing there in the first place.

They were doing America’s business, and America’s business is War Without End, Everywhere. Promoting …

“Our Interests”. The interests of sleek oligarchs, that means, not the residents of Flint drinking poisoned water.

There is a literal and tangible connection between the image of Qadaffi’s severed head rolling around in the gutters of Tripoli, and your eyes as they pore over what’s on the massage menu today.

Or mine. Naturally. We don’t like to think about such things. It’s much easier to believe that we’re special, exceptional, blessed, smarter, more hardworking and moral, or just plain luckier than the poor benighted slants, or apes, or whoever’s country we happen to be fully or partially occupying at the time. Which is most of them.

Most of them. Which is why it’s so hard to say which episodes or incidents qualify as interventions, or meddling, or whatever euphemism you want to pick for what it is your Empire does in your name.

Academic drones write whole books trying to create a more perfect list.

On this sunny afternoon in March, far away from all that in the mountains, I have another question.

When the same spooks and MICs splattered John Kennedy’s brains all over his wife’s pretty pink dress in Dallas, did that count officially as an Intervention?

Was that “meddling”, with the process of democracy and free elections?

Just … endlessly academically curious, about those sorts of abstract distinctions, you know.

The real point of the question is … let’s say we don’t give a shit about what our System and Way of Life does to random Iraqi children or some bag of irrelevant cambodian grandmas.

What has it been doing all our lives to us? Let’s get realpolitik about it. Let’s be hardnosed and practical and selfish and serious. Let’s acknowledge that there are bad people in the world and that some of them will, and need to, end up dead in the name of Liberty.

What has all this done to you and me, baby?

(“I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons …”)

That’s what’s really important, isn’t it?

How much for the truck? How much for this saw palmetto, this anti-aging serum, this tummy tuck, this beach house? How much for an F-22, an M-1, this suitcase full of cluster bombs, this nuke rotting in a North Dakota silo, and how much to buy the Donbass and get rid of Vlad forever?

An arm and a leg I’m sure.

A human soul, sold cheap by the dozens, the hundreds, the millions.

Oh the millions, to buy us security and freedom and hope and a pillow that will suck the pain of knowing ourselves right out of our brains as we lay back peacefully on these luscious organic Egyptian cotton sheets.

In the name of Jesus and Tom Jefferson and Reverend Martin and General Eisenhower we pray.

Amen.

Who killed John Kennedy? What do you really think?

Why is it that sixty years after he died, they still won’t release the last three percent of what the government knows about the murder?

Who killed his brother? Who killed the Reverend Martin, and Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X?

Tell me one actual reason why the Empire invaded the, uh, sovereign nation of Iraq again? There were no steel tubes and there were no WMDs and their dictator had nothing to do with the Twin Towers, and “the oil” was a drop in the world bucket. So: Why? Simple question, ennit?

Was it because I am a kooky conspiracy theorist, do you think?

Maybe.

***

Yesterday it was announced that those wicked scheming Chinese had brokered a peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who basically hated each other because of the Sunni/Shia religious schism. As I wrote elsewhere yesterday, this is an even bigger deal than it seems. It’s going to prove to be a major symbolic historical marker.

HUGE China brokered deal, Iran & Saudi Arabia restore diplomatic ties

China Brokers Deal Between Saudi Arabia and Iran – The World is Picking the Carrot over the Stick!

Yet strangely … not everyone is happy about it.

***

Geopolitically, the world divides into four parts.

The simplest is the global North. Nothing much there. We’re waiting for the ice to catastrophically melt so we can all fight about who gets to exploit whatever lies underneath it, besides moon-sized geysers of methane gas.

The West consists of western Europe, north America, and a few freakish outliers like Australia and Israel. It’s the lands where the people think they’re white.

The East, divided into ‘far’ and ‘middle’ is everything from about Turkey to the province of Taiwan in The One China, and as a matter of current practicality, it also now includes Russia.

Everything else below a line that stretches from El Paso through Libya and India over to the Philippine archipelago, is called the global South. It’s where the blacks and the browns (and ‘mestizos’) abide, if you like dividing humanity up that way, which I don’t.

For the last several centuries, the wild white West has ruled the whole thing, mostly, off and on, or aspired to at least. It’s been the home of Progress in many ways, and in the last century, two brutal civil wars among Westerners turned into World Wars.

The last of these was terminated with the deployment of two horrifying weapons based on nuclear power, which melted down thousands of Eastern citizens instantly and left thousands more to die slow irradiated deaths, which proved beyond a shadow of a body that Eastern civilian lives were worth far less than Western ones in uniform.

Actually the war never ended. It just turned “cold” and ushered in a vigorous round of little wars, like Vietnam and Korea, many of which such conflicts were fought with proxies, or covert actions. The East went largely communist and atheist while capitalist and nominally christian ‘democracies’ remained the favored mode of operation in the West.

After fifty years of this pointless bloody nonsense, the West declared themselves to have won, and the Americans in particular announced that they were now the Sole Superpower, a shining beacon on the hill, and the global Hegemon, undisputed leaders of the Free First World.

But oddly, they didn’t seem too secure about any of those pronouncements. In defiance of their own promises, they continued to expand their ‘North Atlantic Treaty’ alliance right up to the borders of the East on the Russian doorstep. They vastly expanded influence operations all over the world, consistently looking for ways fair or foul to install friendly puppet governments wherever they could, and the military-industrial complex continued to mutate and expand insanely in spite of the fact that all credible threats to their hegemony had supposedly been crushed for good.

Then they invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq, and to this day no one can give a reasonable answer as to Why. The most likely answer seems to be that it was a money-laundering operation designed to transfer wealth away from average American taxpayers, and into the hands of a tiny oligarchic elite centered around defense contractors, politicians, and an ever-more propagandistic media establishment totally owned by fewer and fewer companies. Five or six at last count.

It was a resounding success, judged on those completely illegitimate and immoral aims. Thank you, George. Thank you, Hillary. Thank you, Joe.

***

I’m afraid I’ve blathered on about nothing for far too long already.

Time’s up.

Now who killed the democratically elected President called Kennedy, and why?

Africa.

In this first video, I don’t care if you see any of the 22 minutes of it, except for the first 54 seconds, in which the President of Congo tells the President of France to go fuck himself and the neo-colonial shit-horse he and his great-grandfather so arrogantly rode in on.

Later, both guys from the Duran give a much fuller explanation of what is happening, not just in Congo, but across most of the ‘dark’ continent. It boils down to this. France, in this case, the very top guy, thought it would be a great idea to head down and shore up some old ‘friendships’, in the interests of getting more than just the lily-white world on board with sanctions against Russia, and on board with sending money and weapons to Ukraine.

‘Help us hate on Putin’.

He was chased out of country after country with his tail between his legs and slunk back home after multiple humiliations, out of his mind with rage at those uppity jungle people.

II.

A long time ago, the novelist John Updike wrote a novel called The Coup, and I read it.

I don’t remember much, and I think I’d like to read it again, because Updike really knew the score about colonialism, particularly in an African context.

One vivid scene is etched in my brain.

A group of angry tribals chase a well-meaning US-AID missionary until his only route of escape is to ascend a huge pyramid of aid boxes piled up, and crawl to the very top of it.

The villagers then set fire to the charity stack and thus eventually to the short-sleeved Mr. Non-Governmental Organization himself.

The 20-year-old me, reading this, was vaguely horrified and clueless about what it meant or why they’d do it.

Forty years later, I totally get it.

III.

Listen, please.

It’s not just about a few black leaders dissing a French guy over the Russia thing.

It’s not just about understanding how even fifty years ago, American “relief aid” might be viewed legitimately as a trojan horse of influence peddling or an Empire trying to buy favor and behind-the-scenes power for what amounts to twenty-four dollars worth of beads.

I was talking about China as I recall.

Here’s why.

In this short video, a German Ambassador is granted an audience with the President of Namibia, and starts the conversation by chirping indignantly about how there are four times as many Chinese as Germans living in his country.

I don’t know why this factoid bothers the German, but it does.

President Geingob, a big black bear of a man, listens with politeness, and then interrupts, smiles, laughs, and gently smacks a bitch down.

“You are soooo sorry for us,” he tells the diplomat. “The Chinese don’t treat us like that.

We will handle our own country, k?

Every time a Westerner comes down here, it’s about the Chinese! (Side note: two weeks before this, Jill Biden was there)

What is your problem?

I am not your puppet.”

Those are all real quote fragments. Paraphrased, he continues by saying that the Chinese offer real friendship with both respect, and humility. And that moreover, the ungrateful Americans were bailed out of their last financial crisis by Chinese money … and as for the you, the Namibian people were once at war with the German people, and who do you think started that one?

Poor little Hans shuts his trap and keeps it shut. Which was smart, because …

What can you say, when someone you and your father’s father always viewed as a savage spits the stone cold unpleasant colonial truth to your face?

The President concludes by saying the Chinese are not his enemy, and he’s not going to change a damn thing about the way he governs just to please some irrelevant German imperialists.

End of interview.

***

You and I were raised all our lives to think we’re so blessed and rich because we’re so much smarter and better.

It’s a vain, evil fucking lie that turns our souls to satan’s own shit.

We’re blessed and rich because we’re really good at exploiting other people and feeling great about it.

We were raised in a world where Asians were slants and chinks and Vietnamese gooks.

I don’t have to tell you what we all called black people, or how we felt about racial superiority and inferiority and who was on top, and who deserved good things, and who we didn’t want for neighbors.

Oh we loved that Michael Jackson, because he “wasn’t really black”, or a faggot, or a dyke. Pedo? Oh whatever.

After 9-11, Arabs were sand niggers in all but the most diplomatic of liberal circles, where they didn’t feel any differently than the people who used that kind of language–but just didn’t want to sound icky about it.

We listened to Trump talk about Shithole Countries and we all clucked about the sound of the words. In our hearts, we felt exactly the same. Thank capitalist jesus for flinging us down in Rapid City or Sausalito, instead of Mogadishu, yeah?

(Your jesus had nothing to do with it, son; don’t you pin that shit on our Lord, nor Lady Luck neither.)

When Barack Obama got elected, that was the day racism ended, and all the Americans got so Woke. Isn’t that how it happened? Well listen. You want to talk about not really black.

The man was a stone cold imperialist who was the first to stuff Mexican kids in cages, kill an American citizen overseas for what his father the mullah said in a sermon, and use illegal white phosphorous bombs on the people of Fallujah. He now spends his days windsurfing with Richard Branson off Martha’s Vineyard, or pulling the strings to ratfuck the Sanders campaign. What a hero.

The good life. The American dream. The global network of military bases, covert operations to screw with anyone’s government anywhere at any time, and Orwellian surveillance that flies in the face of the even vaguely constitutional.

“But Russia tried to rig our elections!”

“But the bad Chinas don’t want us to invade their own island!”

Spare me the idiot pouting and the stampy feet, children.

And if you can’t do that much for me, please, please stop gorging yourself on, and recycling as your own free thinking, the lies of the millionaire House Negroes spilling out of your flatscreen–for the sake of your own humanity alone.

Or don’t. Either way, you’re gonna have plenty of real problems to worry about, before you know what slapped you up the side of your poor head.

In spite of the title, this won’t be another post about the Dems. Promise.

“You had your chance” is in this case, post-colonial Africa writ large, “the jungle” if you will, speaking truth at last to their fading Garden-masters in Europe specifically and The West in general.

It would not be hard to make a compelling case that Russia has never been interested in colonizing. They didn’t take over a Congo, like little Belgium did. They didn’t seek to own a Brazil like the Portuguese of all people. You might say that the USSR’s Warsaw Pact was a form of imperialism, maybe … but maybe more like a buffering sphere of influence that sought to protect themselves from a Germany that killed millions of their people at a time, first under royalism in WWI, and again under fascism in WWII.

But they didn’t care enough about “the third world” or “the global south” enough to go around invading and plundering any part of it, during the hundreds of years that even the tiniest Euro nations were building themselves massive wealth and armies by doing exactly that, exploiting the blacks and browns, committing genocides, and even enslaving them and relocating them, over and over, routinely.

In the case of China, we see thousands of years of a history that is even more dramatically isolationist, compared and contrasted to the power bloc that is now called NATO–the self-appointed “First” World.

And listen–there’s no need to preach to me about what bad guys Stalin or Mao were. I’m well aware of how they treated their own people. For now, I’m just saying that they just weren’t in the habit of sailing around the world and killing and pillaging and setting up puppet regimes and sucking whatever blood they could out of ‘poor’ countries and native peoples. Whereas the enlightened white overlords of noble Europe and America did so reflexively and almost automatically for centuries, and grew obscenely fat from it in economic terms.

Over the past few decades, China in particular has gotten pretty hefty themselves. But it wasn’t by drinking the blood of children.

The Chinese got their money mostly by letting their huge workforce serve as a pool of cheap outsourced labor.

The oinking oligarchs of America especially could not help masturbating themselves at the thought of paying people in China pennies on the dollar compared to what they would have to pay Ward Cleaver or Joe Lunchbucket in Pittsburgh.

That Steve Jobs. What a fuckin’ genius, eh?

Pretty soon, ‘we can’t make it here anymore’ was the real national anthem of the Rust Belt, and the former textile mills or furniture factories of North Carolina. We sure as hell could have made it here. But Chinese steel, Chinese drywall, Chinese phones and laptops … we didn’t get to make it here. It wasn’t allowed.

Globalization was the Christly salvation of the fat cats, and the bane of the working American.

The tech giants looked at a billion-plus Chinese as a glorious new ‘market’. Google, and Microsoft, and Apple, and Amazon, they licked Chinese ass four inches deep to please, please, please be allowed access to that market. And China said, yeah, okay, as long as you censor out your capitalist lies, come on down. Maybe help us, you know, modernize our tech in the meantime.

And the Do No Evil people said, well, hell, maybe just a little bit of evil, for a whole lot of sweet profit.

Now Your Exceptional Empire and its, uh, elected representatives are hell bent on trying to tell you that those filthy Chinamen are getting a little too big for their britches.

Should I hate a people, for the shade of their skin
Or the shape of their eyes, or the shape I’m in
Should I hate ’em, for having our jobs today
No I hate the men sent the jobs away
–James McMurtry, going on 20 years ago and getting more brutally true every day

Am I droning? Am I digressing?

Yeah, I am.

This was supposed to be about Africa.

Tomorrow.

Bit of a theme going maybe–In my own head this is very close to the Woody story from a few days ago.

In that one of the very few celebrities who sees clearly and says what they see was mistakenly let on a mainstream entertainment program (never the news, of course) and took advantage by throwing a metaphorical bomb.

Woody’s bit on SNL was strictly about the Big Pharma drug cartels.

Russell went on Real Time with Bill Maher and spoke out about censorship, and while he was at it, took apart an MSNBC shill on the panel who tried to defend his network, and failed, being reduced in the process to mumbling reflexive smugness.

Mr. Brand’s own version of events, plus amplifications, is here.

If we had a lot more of this I wouldn’t so consistently feel like just another small voice howling uselessly into the void.

So thank you to Brand and Harrelson for kicking off what I hope will become a more robust tradition of truth-telling on a slightly grander scale, with actual audiences involved. Even if those audiences are mainly just anxiously tittering because their heads are in the process of exploding.

It’ll get easier. I hope.

***

Bonus: On the same episode, Maher conducts a solo interview with Bernie on the side.

This is mostly useful as a reminder that there are plenty of career politicians who are capable of very effectively mouthing very good things. Marianne also proved it in her kickoff speech.

But Bernie has proven himself now as a recidivist cuck and drugstore socialist too cowed to actually DO anything about anything, if it will piss off his masters.

And Marianne … Well, she’s no more and probably less credible than the Senator. She’s a Malibu capitalist and priestess of what amounts to an Oprah-style prosperity gospel. She’d be marginally better than a Liz Warren, or a Kamala, probably, and I wish her luck with somewhat less vigor than I did getting Berned in the last two election cycles.

Sure, you go gettem, grrl. We’ll see if the Course on Miracles is the real deal, I guess …

Pic is clipped from:
NORD STREAM: ‘PRO-UKRAINIAN GROUP’ Blew Up Pipelines In VAGUE New Report: Brie & Robby

For weeks, the whole Empire establishment stonewalled on the rare occasions that the owned media even bothered themselves to ask about the Hersh pipeline story.

Then ‘today’, they decided to leak some “intelligence” which purported to blame the destruction of Nord Stream on some rowdy gang of amateurs, as if the whole thing was some kind of fraternity prank gone wrong.

As the linked report above suggests, that is, at best, laughable.

I’m going to let the story (such as it is) speak for itself, except to point out two more things.

One: the leak was very light on facts, but did claim that the operation was carried out by a Ukrainian group. There’s been a lot of speculation why. One version says that it was to make the plucky little country seem much more capable and powerful than it is.

In any event, Zelenskyy is furious at being even tangentially blamed, and has issued angry denials in every direction. Which brings us to another version, which says that NATO is quickly losing patience with President Z, and that this is just one more signal that they’re getting ready to boot his ass out of the country he leads, and into one of the 35 mansions he owns across the world, in all the best places.

I wonder how he got to be a billionaire with three dozen houses in the first place … Hmm.

Two: A mere couple of days before they leaked, the White House hosted a visit from the German chancellor Olaf Scholz. By any diplomatic standard, Olaf’s junket was extremely low-key, and quick.

Maybe just maybe, he was summoned to Washington to give him a personal heads-up about this leak–the pipeline damage having hurt Germany worst.

Scholz is on very thin political ice in Germany as anti-war protests take off there. Both he and his protestors are very well aware who actually did this, and one of the reasons the protestors are so mad is that their leader seems to be endlessly willing to sacrifice the well-being of their country to the Empire of Moloch without a whimper.

None of this is provable. It is even still theoretically possible that Seymour Hersh got the whole thing wrong and that the saboteurs were an uncommonly well-funded and skilled rogue faction from the Kyiv Junior High School marching band.

Please don’t go betting any money on that …

I’m going to beat the Nord Stream horse to death again today, and again ‘tomorrow’.

Seymour Hersh finally found enough time to give an interview to Aaron Mate’ on The Grayzone.

Hersh: US bombed Nord Stream to prolong the Ukraine proxy war

I don’t have a lot to add. I think he solved the mystery to any rational person’s satisfaction. Just watch.

Tomorrow on the 7th (I have a crystal ball), the deep state and the NYT will try floating an alternative explanation involving a half dozen rubes on a yacht somehow getting down 240 feet with giant piles of high explosives all on their own, and doing the job freelance.

Everybody and anybody with an IQ above room temperature will respond by pointing and laughing at this sketchy and half-ass propaganda attempt.

Due Dissidence covering Marianne Williamson’s announcement that she intends to primary Joe.

https://youtu.be/jknkdmGd7D4?t=1686

Sabby Sabs had good coverage after the fact as well, along with a great lineup of guests during the same livestream …

You may remember that MW was my #2 choice behind Bernie in the 2020 Dem primary.

Like most of the commentators listed above, my enthusiasm about her has waned considerably.

The main reason being: that she has, in so many cagey weasel words, ruled out what is being called ‘a dirty break’ from the Dems. A dirty break would be losing the primary and the Dem nomination and going on to run against Joe and whoever the Republican is anyway.

In other words, what Bernie should have done if he had actually been interested in anything like “Revolution”.

Her rally speech is full of great words and fire about changing the system.

But her refusal (so far) to embrace a dirty break–is a dirty dealbreaker, for a lot of us who went to the mat for BS-anders and then had to listen to months of “my friend Joe” … a twist of the knife every time.

We don’t need another fake hero to get our hopes up. They pulled every ugly trick they knew to keep a sitting Senator from winning, twice. They’re not going to turn their power over to some crystal packin’ mama from out west, either.

If there is any hope left for ‘democracy’ via the ballot box, that hope is going to have to come from a source that isn’t a D or an R.

I’d rather see her, or RFK Jr., or Jesse Ventura, or anyone else play the spoiler a few times in a row, Nader-style, than to just disengage myself from the process completely and write in Carlos Castaneda or Hunter Thompson or some other dead protest name.

But failing the alternative of some dark horse, I will, too.

Being a good boy has gotten me, and us, absolutely nowhere. I’m not afraid of Ron DeSantis or being shamed for not voting against him. Sixty percent of the eligibles don’t vote At ALL, and if neither party can win their vote, or mine, it’s just simply not my fuckin’ problem anymore.

“Okay, so the movie goes like this.

The biggest drug cartels in the world get together, and buy up all the media, and all the politicians, and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes.

And people can only come out if they take the cartel’s drugs, and keep taking them, over and over.

I threw the script away.

I mean, who is gonna believe that crazy idea?”

–Woody Harrelson, this week’s SNL monologue

Go right ahead and believe whatever you want about lab leaks or wet markets, about Fauci the Saint or Anthony the Criminal, about the Covidian cult on the right hand or the evil redstate antivaxxer hicks on the other.

This was fucking brilliant.

The whole monologue was six and a half minutes, and it’s worth watching it all for some subtle bits of setup that he did–not so much for the jokey jokes he tried to soften it with after–but god. Damn.

In less than sixty words right here at the end, he told the actual and literal truth, and people have been flipping the hell out about it ever since. Go look at the coverage. No matter what side people are on, no matter if they’re laughing or mad, they all get it wrong. This was only a statement about The Vaccine at all if you want it to be, and if you prefer to think of it as some hellspawn anti-pharma rant, or if you want to be hooting and backslapping the Woodman for bein’ a chad–it all depends on what you already believed.

Taken at face value, it’s nothing but a very short story about a movie script that never existed.

It just so happens that in real life, the world’s biggest drug cartels did buy up all the media and all the politicians, and that the rest of the story happened more or less just like he implies.

Soooo many times I’ve tried, to draw an analogy and change the story to make a point: ‘see darlings, it would be like if Russia engineered a coup in Mexico … it would be like if Johnny Reb holed up in the Virgin Islands, see’?

I’m a hopeless amateur.

He didn’t have to change a single word, or a single concept.

I am in awe.

(And by the way: anyone who wants to be willfully dense enough to categorize these 60 words as mal- or dis- or mis-information has surely got to realize the implications of that position. To be logically consistent, you would have to categorize every single bit of anything remotely fictional the same way. Every comedy bit ever performed; pretty much the same. .

It’s all made-up lies, ennit?

Protip: So is your news feed, and every politician’s speech you ever heard, sunshine.

So was the propaganda masquerading as facts that they spoon-fed you every other day in your education factories.

So is every blog you ever read including the one you’re reading right now.

Censorship is stupid and wagging your finger disapprovingly at anything you might think is contrary to our Shared Democratic Consensus Trance is no way to live a life.)

So …

I just told you a whole bunch of sad and potentially depressing things about the Empire and life within it, and of course I am by no means done with engaging in that rather unrewarding activity.

No single one of these stories by themselves could have shoved me off my belletrist horse and led to the giant vacuum of Work and posts I am now belatedly filling. Even taking their impact collectively, I still might have managed to stay in the saddle, but …

There was the impending necessary (temporary?) retreat back to Sand Rock besides.

And. There was this.

Peter Singer: Ordinary People Are Evil

I’m not sure I want to say much more than that just now. I don’t want to hurt you, like I hurt myself.

I will say this much. Peter Singer is not just an ethicist. He is, and has been for a lifetime, THE ethicist, in academic terms. I was studying him during my precious little private University education in the 80s. But somehow, maybe because my profs didn’t want to hurt me, I didn’t come across this particular part of his work back then. I didn’t come across it until some days ago, at the start of the Vacuum.

In any case, in 1972, Singer published a paper that proves (to my satisfaction anyway) that the life we live so naturally and blithely in a modern developed nation is comprised of mostly evil acts.

He does this without mentioning anything about how Empire works, or even the word capitalism, or oligarchy, or even greed.

He does it by simply examining in context the choices we make about how to live our lives day by day by day.

It hit me hard and fast and wrong.

I won’t tell you not to watch this video.

I will say: be careful.

It’s a strong and bitter medicine that fucked me up bad for days; maybe not all on its own, but …

Yeah.

I may not be the good person I always hoped I was.

I may just have to work a lot harder at becoming a saint, before I can ever really hope to become a sage.

There’s so little time left.

I’m been humbled and I’m only just starting to recover from experiencing that humbling.

The silverish argentine lining is that it changed nothing about the Work being what matters.

And that now despite the blows

the record shows

I am again doing it

some way.

US Claims Chinese “Incursion” Near Taiwan, US Sells Taiwan Millions in Arms as Next Proxy War Brews

Brian Berletic from the New Atlas explains what’s going to happen and why.

I want to track off to the side a bit and explain why the very idea of a Chinese ‘incursion’ near Taiwan is ridiculously stupid.

In 1945 the World War ended and the Japanese were kicked out from their murderously brutal occupation of China.

That meant that the Chinese civil war could proceed, or more precisely, resume.

Long story short: the Communists won an overwhelming victory, and the remnants of the losing ‘democratic’ capitalist faction fled to a Chinese island which most of the western world called Formosa, but which the east had long known as Taiwan.

Imagine for a moment that in the US Civil War, the Confederacy, instead of surrendering, moved themselves wholesale to the US Virgin Islands, and both sides agreed that there was only one legitimate United States of America–the only disagreement being about who was going to run it when it came to issues like slavery.

Over time, there would be total worldwide agreement on this “one-US policy”, and most of the world would finally recognize that fact that, yeah, okay, there is only one US, and obviously it’s the big one that won the war, rather than the rebel escapees down in the Caribbean.

That’s what happened to China and their rebel island. Over time, the government on Taiwan was reduced to a roughly rebel province recognized formally as a country by almost no other government in the world, and booted from the United Nations (in 1971) for not actually being a nation. Only one China, and sorry guys, but you’re just not it.

The US has itself diplomatically agreed with the “one-China policy” for decades.

But now they want to “alter the agreement”, Darth Vader style.

You probably knew most of that. You probably didn’t know that given all that, the US has already invaded China, and they are planning as of February 2023 to invade it a lot harder.

U.S. to Expand Troop Presence in Taiwan for Training Against China Threat

“The U.S. is markedly increasing the number of troops deployed to Taiwan, more than quadrupling the current number to bolster a training program for the island’s military amid a rising threat from China.

The U.S. plans to deploy between 100 and 200 troops to the island in the coming months, up from roughly 30 there a year ago, according to U.S. officials. The larger force will expand a training program the Pentagon has taken pains not to publicize as the U.S. works to provide Taipei with the capabilities it needs to defend itself without provoking Beijing.”

“A rising threat from China” to … China … Jesus.

There logically can be no threat, nor incursion either. Sorry, all you saber-rattling fans of independence and liberty, all you sixty-some percent of the Murican public who think this fucking around with Taiwan might be a good idea in any way, shape, or form.

Paradoxes of logic aside …

Tell me how you’d feel if the Chinese sent a couple hundred heavily armed “advisors” to the Virgin Confederate Islands on the other side of the world right off the mainland American shore.

You’d be itchin’ for a fight then, too, wooncha?

America is very much in the business of Itchy, regardless of the facts and the situation.

I respectfully dissent.

You like her, right? Julia Roberts winning the Oscar in 2001 and all that?

Erin Brockovich Blasts Truth: Environmental Disaster #eastpalestine

In 2023, she wants you to care more than WeaselPete cares.

According to Biden’s DHS, that makes her a terrorist threat.

Fuck you and the blue horse you ride to death, Joe.

Optics and political posturing aside, if you want to know what’s actually going on in flyover Ohio, the Grayzone can tell you.

In a week I’ll be moving back into ‘my’ house.

It’s a block from the tracks.

Someday the capitalism and the oligarchy may be much more than an abstracted threat.

Someday, one way or the other, with a train involved or not, it could and likely will get very personal.

Trump ADMITS U.S. Was Behind 2014 Coup In Ukraine

The conceit of this piece is awkward and dumb, much like Trump himself. He can’t really “admit” to a deep state crime that was committed by the worst people in the Obama administration (the same ones that are overseeing the destruction of American hegemony under Biden).

Nevertheless … it’s worth hearing his perspective on issues of war and peace (if you can stand to listen to that yappy whine), because he’s not entirely wrong, and the parts he is right about have a real and even legitimate appeal to every other ‘voter’ in this Home of the Brave.

He beat Hillary fair and square for reasons that had nothing to do with “Russian interference” and everything to do with the horrible contradictions and routine cynical bullshit that the Clinton camp tried to recycle yet again. He almost did the same to Joe, and it’s looking more and more like he might get another chance on that one too.

In the second half of this video, we learn why that won’t do any good either. Trump might not be any worse than the average Dempuppet, and it is technically true that he didn’t get us into any new wars like both Obama and Biden have. But because he is a regrettably vain and stupid man, he surrounded himself with buffoons like Pompeo who gutted and deflected his natural isolationism and pointed the country down the same old interventionist path anyway.

There is no reason to suspect that he wouldn’t do the same thing again.

***

The Floridians, and I tangentially reference DeSantis here, are no less vain, but they are less stupid.

GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz Wins House Vote On U.S. Pullout From Syria

I’m conditionally proud of you, RepMatt, and I see nothing to argue with in this:

… especially compared to the comments of Dem wonk Dana Stroul later in the video, explaining why the Empire and the M.I.C. are occupying one-third of Syria to this day.

If I could have any faith that someone like Gaetz would really and consistently believe what he is saying here, I’d happily vote for his skeevy icky ass over a Pramila Jayapal or a John Kerry any day of the week.

I don’t have that faith. Instead I believe, so far, that his symbolic vote is just another episode of partisan political opportunism.

Even so, it’s not hard for me to see why an average half-informed red-stater would vote for him, over and over every two years.

Same with Trump, nationally.

We don’t have actual alternatives, and we don’t have a legitimate democracy either.

We have flavors of ugly and that’s all we have.

Clear its webs from your eyes. Take the notes and whip them good. Shape them in drudgery into a facsimile of a statue.

***

Here are a couple bits of coverage from the aftermath of the Rally Against War.

Rachel Maddow SMEARS Anti-War Rally As Pro-Russia; Why Won’t MSNBC Tell the Truth? Sabby Sabs

Anyone with any intellectual integrity knows by now that Maddow is nothing but a spook and a shill for the Machine, and that MSNBC is just an engine that makes lots of money by pacifying well-intentioned dupes of the shitlib variety.

Sabby knows.

Aaron knows, Max knows, Jimmy knows … what most people don’t want to know.

“Boutique” Left Worked OBSESSIVELY To Undermine Anti-War Rally

Blumenthal goes into detail here about what the feds and informers were doing on the ground to try and discredit the effort. He also tells an instructive tale about how the Empire treated its veterans from WWI during the Depression, when they stood up to ask for what they’d been promised. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the American oligarchy only started being really evil after Hiroshima and the creation of the first three-letter agency and the deep state. But they were bashing heads and gunning their own citizens down long before that.

Fuck the Alamo. Remember Hooverville.

I don’t know if there’s a moral. But it is safe to say that at those crucial moments …

No bitchin’ song, no inspiring tale of even a George Carlin, no world-class breakfast burrito will ever be enough to save me from myself.

It really ends up being a matter of personal character and whether I have it or don’t.

This time, I failed.

I let the days rush over me like spring creek water and I let them numb me into a person I don’t want to be.

There isn’t any justification for it. There isn’t a way I can send my gaze over the tableaux and write myself an excuse.

I went to Work. Not in a frenzy of self-loathing over spilled milk–there was a pinch of self-loathing, to be honest, but just a little one, and no frenzy. I took it seriously and spiritually and pushed forward with the right mix of humility and pride. I took the collected scraps and notes about autocracy and related shit and slapped them into shape with alternating love and selfishness and craft and intention. I’m not wrecked or anything. I’m watching myself closely and in spite of the enfolding and obvious darkness I like what I see.

I was just that close to being better, but then I wasn’t.

But in a few hours the moon will set and the sun will rise again in much the same way it did last time.

What I can’t do is excuse it, or be excused. What I can do is pick myself up out of the corner I flung myself into, wipe the blood from my lip, and start again to try to succeed on my own terms.

Methaqualone became increasingly popular as a recreational drug and club drug in the late 1960s and 1970s, known variously as “ludes” or “disco biscuits”. It was later a favorite of date-rapists from Bill Cosby to Roman Polanski.

In the course of it I stumbled on a soundtrack that aligned precariously with the mood, and in those sounds I found tangents, and tools. Knopfler and Emmylou. Fellow artists, way better than me. Role models.

Louis CK may be cancelled for his narcissistic and priggish little fetish, but let’s be honest. The man was never any Weinstein, just another poor sexually crosswired dope of a man who definitely did inflict discomfort, and maybe occasional mild fear in his alleged victims–but never trauma, or violence. Sorry if you feel differently, or take umbrage. I’ll cop to my many levels of Privilege in advance. Nolo contendre; lock me up and throw away the key and let he who is without sin cast the first high-minded stone.

Whatever else he was and is, he rocks the creative house in his own chosen way, and that Way is the point here. He got his way from a role model who was way better than himself. Louis CK honors George Carlin.

***

I learned from this. I’m not done learning. I have a very long way to go and my time is almost up, like a six-month rental in a mountain town god-fuckin dammit.

Thank you natural selection.

Fuck you mortality.

You know, I’d sooner forget, but I remember those nights
When life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder, you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder, like you don’t seem to care

For a hot minute before I fell off the knife edge I thought some songs and smart words would save me.

One song, in particular. Here are four versions of it.

Let The Day Begin (The Call)
Cover version of it decades later, by Simple Minds
Another cover from the next generation (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club)
BMRC’s Live Version

The song was written by The Call’s frontman, Michael Been. An Oklahoma boy, born 1950.

I quote his song The Walls Came Down all the time, and the last time I did I dug harder and found LTDB.

I was hoping it would be the antidote to the bleak hopelessness of TWCD but it didn’t work out exactly that way.

The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is his son Robert’s band.

In 2010, Dad Michael was serving as the sound man for BMRC on tour in Belgium when he died of a heart attack at age 60.

Capitalism is a core evil in this world, one that makes a sick joke out of better ideas like real Democracy.
…
Every major nation-state today is an oligarchy. This one, our own redwhiteblue Empire, is in the profitable business of endless worldwide war. You and I ‘own’ our own homes because of that business.
…
If I can’t get you to stand up against the Lie, even anarchy will do us no good.
…
I’m beginning to think we might be fucked.

***

These quoted-from posts were published actually on 25 February rather than their canonical dates.

I wrote them in the following context.

***

I back into my driveway here.

Coming home today there was a dog in the drive. It looked lost but it wasn’t.

Getting out of the truck I found myself hailed by the dog’s owner from way up on the hill where he was ‘walking’ a pack of them.

He wanted to self-present as neighborly, so I let him, and in the course of the conversation I told this Todd-man I only had this place until the middle of March.

He said, Oh wow, two weeks … and the words came down like a scythe on the overgrown weeds of my psyche. In a mundane driveway interaction I went through the stages of Grief. In denial I went inside and looked at the calendar. Two weeks … and four days.

Jesus Fish-fuckin’ Christ no, no.

Stirred to a genuine depth of emotion for the first time in days, I rode the wave-edge of a freakout, like a gnarly master. I did what a real belletrist would do.

***

That last line started out as truth–I did write it, and the dogNeighbor story. But I didn’t publish it, and that line turned into a lie as the days dragged by in silent freakout.

I didn’t write much more. I did continue to collect raw material for writing, but that’s zombie simple and doesn’t make me a belletrist. I didn’t really do Work, much less work of which I could be proud.

All these many paralyzed days later I now begin to attempt remedy.

“I’ll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new Revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees,
And Pray.”

We don’t get fooled again? Maybe.

There’s a line further down in the lyric that goes:
‘I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky, for I know that the hypnotized never lie’.
In performance, right after this line, either Daltrey or Townshend will spit out:
Do ya?

The meaning is clear. No, dear listener, you don’t lie, because people who are hypnotized do what they’re told, and really believe what they hear. When they parrot back untrue bullshit, that’s not lying, because they utter those statements with utter conviction and sincerity.

MSNBCIA is a hell of a mesmerizing machine, ennit.

***

Maybe about a year ago I noticed Biden, and Bidenistas in the media, using a specific word to describe ‘the enemy’.

The word was Autocracy, or sometimes a variant: ‘autocrat(s)’ and the like.

They soft-pedaled it for a time, but in the wake of the Resident’s trip to Poland and Ukraine this month, it has reappeared with a vengeance.

Autocracy is rule by one person, and there is no such thing.

It has gained such cynical currency because the enemy always needs a label.

We can’t call the enemy commies any more, because not only are there no communist systems left, but the best young people have not been trained to find the word scary anymore. In fact, with very little chance of acquiring a real career, or a house, or a family to feed, the generations coming up are inclined to viscerally hate capitalism and think that something more socialist might be a real welcome change.

Calling Putin a dictator happens sometimes, but as a standard way to refer to the enemy’s leader, it’s obviously fucking ridiculous. They have elections, and they have polls, and Vlad’s approval ratings far exceed those attained by any recent American president.

“Oh but their elections, their polls, are rigged!”

And it’s different over here, right? Uh-huh. Tell it to Bernie. Tell it to any third-party candidate ever. Tell it to the CEO of Diebold, maker of fine dependable vote-counting systems. And recall that the polls had Hillary crushing Trump by nearly double-digits right up to the end.

On the subject of autocracy, even Wikipedia has to hem, haw, and temporize.

“Because autocrats need a power structure to rule, it can be difficult to draw a clear line between historical autocracies and oligarchies. Most historical autocrats depended on their nobles, their merchants, the military, the priesthood, or other elite groups. Some autocracies are rationalized by assertion of divine right … “

So, even in the good old days, dictators, kings, pharaohs, and other so-called autocrats depended on other people, usually oligarchs of one kind or another, for their allegedly sole power over everything. Moreover, nobody calls themselves an autocrat, like one might call themselves King or Queen or Emperor.

The concept of autocracy is self-negating and absurdist. Which makes it perfect, as a label for the People We Don’t Like. Using it, as Biden has done freely of late, is Orwellian doublespeak at its finest. All he’s really trying to say with it is “NotCoolModelDemocracyLikeUs!”.

There are no functional autocracies, and there is no functional communism, and hardest to see from this fishbowl, there are no functioning democracies either.

Every major nation-state today is an oligarchy.

There are fascist-flavored oligarchies like America (fascism, again, being the merger of state and corporate power–let me and Mitt Romney spread to you the good news behind the Citizens-United decision at the Supreme Court … ).

There are commie-flavored oligarchies like Russia, where the oil and gas companies are literally owned by the State.

There are mutant oligarchies like the one in China, or Syria, or Ukraine.

Everywhere you look now today, at this peak of civilization, the oligarchs run the show, ably assisted by semi-hypnotized house Negroes formed into a Parliament or a Duma or a Senate, and beneath that a well-meaning army of zombified field Negroes on school boards and zoning commissions and college faculties.

Full circle, back to the top …

I don’t think there are any Russians
And there ain’t no Yanks
Just corporate criminals
Playin’ with tanks

***

This might be a good time to point out to you that Anarchy is not the absence of rules.

It’s the absence of Rulers.

But if I can’t get you to stand up against the Lie, even anarchy will do us no good.

I’m beginning to think we might be fucked.

(“I stand where I stand, convinced by the sight–we hold in our hands, Darkness and Light;
Where they meet In a scene beyond dreams”)

The Communist Manifesto wasn’t really a manifesto. If I got to title it instead of Marx, I would call it “Critique of Pure Capital”. That’s what Marxism is–the words of a smart critic of capitalism suggesting why and how it might fall apart someday. Modern-day Marxists take it upon themselves to try to figure out how to speed that process along.

I wish them well, even the flake-ass Marxists like Caleb Maupin and Jackson Hinkle, because I believe capitalism is a core evil in this world, one that makes a sick fucking joke out of better ideas, like actual democracy.

But it has always seemed a little goofy to me to label oneself as a Marx + ist. Like … it would be facile enough, to base your worldview on a good movie, like On The Beach, or even a bad one like The Wolf of Wall Street. But to base your worldview on a critical review of that movie? It’s hard to take you too seriously.

Marxism’s ideas about techniques for getting rid of capitalism are all well and good. But it is regrettably thin on what to replace it with, and if we look honestly at how those thin ideas have worked out in practice, we’ve got to account for Stalin’s crimes somehow, and … Mao’s for that matter … Right? Shit ain’t pretty, maybe at certain times and places even uglier than the many horrifying crimes of the white western criminals.

Anarchy is far more practical. You can laugh at that if you want, but at least read about it with an open and serious mind before you cackle.

When I preach to you about what we all endured in during the pandemic, and note that during the entire period we were being duped by the news “brought to you by Pfizer!”, I’m not even trying to convert myself into an “Antivaxxer”, much less trying to convert you.

When I point out to you that although Russia may have crossed a moral line going into the Donbass a year ago, that our infoMasters are lying every time they put “unprovoked” in front of “invasion”, it’s not a sermon that’s intended to turn anyone into a putipuppet or god help us a Kremlin asset.

If I should happen to notice that the former president has now visited the East Palestinians while the current one hasn’t even sent a dime or a cabinet Secretary, and that at the time the Orange Peril descended on Ohio, Daddy Joe was in Poland spewing regurgitated bullshit about a place he has sent money to–117 billion worth–it doesn’t mean I care about MAGA, or that I’m becoming some off-brand kind of Trumper.

And when I point you, as I am about to do, to a position paper published by the Chinese government, today on the 20th of February, you can think of me as some kind of Sinophilic traitor if you like, but you’d be wrong about that too.

I haven’t even read the thing.

US Hegemony And Its Perils

If you want to be better than me and actually read it, the real link is below that video.

What I did instead, as a certified slacktivist, is to listen to Mr. Lira here, and Mr. Mercouris, and others, reading pieces of it to me, and offering opinions and interpretation.

I heard enough to know that I was the choir being preached to instead.

Tangled, up in bluuuue.

Bloom.

Mostly I took the day off, to watch THIS.

There were tech glitches both here on the official stream and on other feeds (dear SabbySabs had one, for example), but I watched it in pieces, more or less live, anyway.

DD did a recap that had … um, glitches of its own. Whatevs.

***

I am not a complete pacifist.

I told you why I think WWII was in technical terms a ‘good’ war. (Because it was, technically, purely defensive.) There have been many, many wars since then, ranging from the big boots-on-the-ground affairs like Korea and Vietnam down to thousands of overlapping tiny covert warlike killfests like taking out Patrice Lumumba. Not a single one of them was anything close to Good.

Point being. We are not in the fucking democracy business.

We’re in the endless worldwide war business.

When the towers fell, what happened?

First thing we found out was why they did it. Because: endless war in the Middle East for decades, so payback.

Second thing: Bush rushed all the elite Saudis out of the country on the very first planes allowed in the air, because … 17 of the 19 hijackers, approximately, were Wahabist Saudi Arabians, and Bush, great friend of the House of Saud, feared for their safety.

Third thing: Invading Saudi Arabia, right? Nah. Iraq. Why? They said: Cuz that Sodom fella was all tight with Al Qaeda. Total bullshit. Even CNN couldn’t sell it. So then it was: WMD’s or something. By the time that got debunked it was too late. People started looking for real reasons, and the best of them got bumper stickers that said:

No Blood For Oil.

Even this missed the point. Sure we love us some oil on the side. But ….

We’re in the WAR business, baby. Who profited from the military money-laundering operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?

People like Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton, and people like Cheney himself. On the ‘right’, on the ‘left’: didn’t matter. The Dems all voted for it too (here’s looking at you, Hillary darling), because War Is America’s Business, and they all made a fat fucking pile.

Invading Iraq made no sense at all to anyone who wasn’t cashing in, but it was convenient for reasons, including Bush Jr. getting to work out his daddy complex.

But to those who understand that democracy is a shell game and war is the Empire’s business model, it made all the sense in the world and it still does to this day.

Fuck this business. Fuck war. Fuck the one percent and anyone cynical enough to settle down inside the Beltway.

That’s the real message of the rally, and at least it was finally, finally a start.

***

The rally was organized by two minor political parties, the People’s Party and the Libertarians. Additionally, the Greens were on scene–Jill Stein spoke. There were a lot of former Republicrats and Demicans, like Dennis Kucinich and Rand Paul’s dad Ron.

But no active D’s or R’s to be seen anywhere, even though the rally was in DC.

The reason why is simple.

D’s and R’s are NOT anti-war. Actually being anti-war is political suicide, because a vote against war is a vote against American Business Capital and a vote against the Donor Class.

For some reason, even the new Bernie, everyone’s favorite alleged Independent, was also AWOL.

These are the same people that mumble and run whenever the question of who blew up that pipeline comes up.

These are the same people who voted down sick leave–any sick leave–for rail workers, and still have Joe’s back after he categorically denied federal disaster funding for the derail and train fire in East Palestine, Ohio.

Not one member of the Administration, not even Secretary of Transportation Weaselboy Pete, has visited the scene of the capitalist crime.

But guess–just fucking guess–who IS coming to dinner?

Is it cynical? Sure. Is it theater? Of course.

But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.

Put yourself in the shoes of an EastPalestinian for a second.

Team Blue and “Scranton” Joe are in power, but they say no to helping with the cleanup or helping people relocate or anything. Their shitsucker media slaves act like you and your town don’t even exist for three weeks solid.

Along comes Orangeman, hitting the ground and making sympathetic clucking noises …. maybe slapping a million or two of his own money down to ‘help’.

Who in the name of Jesus Fuck are you voting for in 2024?

Now just imagine you are yourself again.

And explain to me the one about the lesser evil again.

I’m here.

All ears.

I made a mass batch of curry and I found a fairly insane version of ramen which may become a very short video.

Most of these are the “Best Of” from a big batch of JD clips. They dropped while he was out on tour, meaning that they are hosted not by the man himself, but by guest-host ‘Buzzsaw’ Mate’.

Liberals Working Overtime To Undermine Anti-War Rally
(as in, the AntiWar rally that happens tomorrow, as posted about yesterday)

Ex-Intel Officials Backpedal Over Hunter Laptop Story
Poorly titled. What they did was lie, and then when hauled before a House committee, they doubled down with different lies. No real backpedal involved.

U.S. Media Refuses To Cover Bombshell Nord Stream Story!
It is eerie and very nearly surreal just how they have, so far, almost universally declined to recognize the existence of Hersh or his latest bombshell story, even though (or maybe because) it very well may bring down Biden’s 2024 campaign, if not his presidency before we get there.

Ohio Train Disaster Story Gets EVEN WORSE
I mentioned something the other day about capitalists gassing poor people in Pennsylvania/Ohio for profit. I didn’t explain that. Let this amend my omission.

Real Reason Behind Chinese Balloon Story Revealed
The funniest part is that the MSM continues to call them “Chinese Spy Balloons” right smack dab in the middle of reporting stories about the Administrators’ belated admission that yeah, they were spying on the weather …
Speaking of corrections, it was F-22’s that took down the first one, not F-16s as previously reported here. Also, we now know that the missiles used to take down all these scary UFOs, not all of which actually worked in the field, cost about a half million dollars apiece. Christ in a bucket.

***

Is The System Collapsing? With Guest Tim Pool – #083 – Stay Free With Russell Brand
Tim Pool got his start at Occupy Wall Street, made a whole bunch of YouTube money turning Trumper, and is now back toward the center enough to be invited on RB’s show for a wary conversation. I wouldn’t call him a moderate in any sense at all, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say a lot of sane things in a thoughtful way, even if I have zero intention of bookmarking him.

***

If you take a moment to really be honest with yourself, there is no way in hell that you actually believe that Russia blew up its own multi-billion-dollar pipeline. At best, you might tell yourself that we still don’t know who did it.

In a similar vein, you cannot possibly and genuinely believe that Jeffrey Epstein, bosom pal of people like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, hanged himself in prison, or that both of his guards slept through the whole thing, or that the cameras in his cell were off at just the right time due to some malfunction.

So who killed him, and why?

The problem with trusting your honest self regarding matters like this is that questions like that lead to more questions, and if and when you finally get down to the answers, then nothing else you honestly need to believe about America or Democracy or melting pots or Lands of Opportunity full of essentially Good People can any longer be true.

You’ll end up like me, and nobody wants that.

Whitney Webb has stared obsessively at these sorts of questions for years, and she is very, very bright behind her hippie earth-mother personal style.

You owe it to your most honest self to watch one of her extended digressions sometime. For as long as you can stand it. And then go treat yourself truly right and lavishly, for an equal amount of time, for being willing to do a good thing even though it hurts like hell.

If that’s too much to handle right now, please just check out the small piece of the interview starting at about 48:30 … Ms. Webb knows where we’ve been and where we are, and she has some ideas about where things are headed very quickly, as the Unipolar Hegemon we call our dear Empire starts to lose its grip on legitimacy.

What can you do, as you consider making serious changes to your own life in response to the end of all our comforting fictions?

At some point, if you want eggs for breakfast, you’re going to need to have chickens, or at the least be very close to someone who does.

And that is all I have to say about that. For now.

https://rageagainstwar.com

Most of the ground is still covered in thick white, even though Mr. Sun and Mr. Blue Sky are out in force again.

The pretty day begins to shape. Am I shaping it?

I am doing what I can.

To contribute my will to the shaping and to conduct myself with … pride? Maybe I mean dignity. Maybe I mean purpose, intention.

This is my struggle, or as a German might say, mein kampf.

I don’t believe in aryan purity, or ‘race’ at all. I don’t want a methane cloud pouring out into the Baltic on purpose, or burning vinyl chloride pouring out over Pennsylvania ‘accidentally’. (Whatcha gonna do … it’s the profit motive … you wanna make an Empire, you gotta break some eggs. But only in poor neighborhoods.)

Gas the flyover peasants, gas the jews, it’s all the same shit dressed up in different clothes. We call him President instead of Chancellor. The bad guys are authoritarians, but we the chosen have ‘the rule of law’. They have propaganda, we have the smart savvy spin of perfectly dressed lesbians. They have censorship, and we just fight the good fight against ‘disinformation’. Seymour Hersh is a brilliant journalist when he uncovers the crimes of a Republican administration, and a ‘discredited blogger’ when he exposes the cabal that runs the show beneath a puppet ‘Democrat’.

But wait, what’s that? Look, peasants! Alien squirrels! Haha!

This is mein struggle. It’s very personal and quotidian. It’s anarchically political. It is Hunterian screed and it is belletrism–it is precious, and I use that word in both senses; I cut myself while shaving with it. I don’t shave.

Poetry is useless. Poetry may be the only thing capable of saving us, even temporarily.

A random wiring harness sags but is saved. The greatest superpower in civilized history rots from within and damns itself to hell.

The Lord She moves, in mysterious ways. Bono, he’s an avowed matriarchist, but his lips are glued to the ass of the patriarchy.

We bathe in a soup of diseased lies with a bar of Ivory soap in our hands and consider ourselves more than clean–blessed manifestly and tapped on the shoulder by Liberty’s torch.

Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis the Peasant: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!”

Nor because god told you to wipe out the natives, use slave labor to establish a vast capitalist empire, and proceed to put the Empire that bore you to absolute shame in matters of global colonial imperialism.

750 military bases planet-wide. A trillion every year on ‘defense’ when you count the black budget.

You still can’t give the water in Flint to your babies unless you want their brains damaged permanently.

You still don’t have health care. You’re lucky if you’re able to afford health ‘insurance’ from the Mafia.

The least of these your brothers still sleep beneath crumbling overpasses.

And they lie, and they lie, and they lie.

US Confirmed to Be Behind Nordstream Pipeline Attacks
Richard Medhurst is a Syrian refugee living in London. They say he’s a YouTuber, a blogger. Maybe so. He has more insight and integrity than seven busloads of Anderson Coopers. It’s not a fair world, ennit.

Live with some pride regardless. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m talking to myself.

As soon as I got the truck home, it started to snow again, and it kept snowing all of the brutally blustery night.

It was good sleeping weather. I got a full eight. I’ve been deep in a good sleeping bag AND under a down quilt these past few weeks.

First thing in the morning I got a call from the dentist in SandRock, wanting to know if I was going to keep my hygiene appointment scheduled for twenty-six-or-seven hours hence. My answer was: Since you need an answer right this minute, my answer has to be No.

Probably, I could have made it 238 miles north through the wind and white stuff, in five or six or seven hours of tomorrow morning. But there wasn’t any point left to risking it. I rescheduled downrange six weeks, because by then I’m going to have to be living not here in Cienega, but more like 238 yards from the dentist, up there.

I went out and restocked on pellets instead. It was a side-streets-still-icy kind of day. It didn’t melt off in two hours like the previous dose.

Tonight they say it will drop to another hard freeze, around ten degrees, with a wind chill taking it down below zero.

By the weekend they say things will re-glorify, days in the 50s and nights in the upper 30s, maybe a chance of rain Sunday (along with high winds, but not the 30-40 mph insanity of this storm).

I have exactly a month left now, down here in the high country, down here in the approximately blessed little town, and I have Work to do. Not just work of course, but work I need to be proud for, and of, even while I’m doing it.

The shape of days.

***

Reporter Seymour Hersh on “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline”: Exclusive TV Interview

First time Hersh has commented publicly since posting the story. The guy is heroically undiminished in his mid-80s.

The single most interesting part of this: Hersh is pretty adamant that although the Nordstreas are 51% Russian property, the attack on the pipelines was not primarily an attack on Russia. Rather, it was done covertly because the main objective was to prevent Germany from ever going back on their lukewarm commitment to stay off Russian petroleum. In terms of the intent of the sabotage, in other words, it was an attack on the biggest country in Europe, and the linchpin on the eastern side of the NATO Atlanicist alliance.

They lie and they lie and if they need to throw their ‘friends’ under the bus and extort them by waving American energy at twice the price under their noses after making sure ‘friend’ has no alternative … that’s what they’ll do.

Speaking of liars, they play a clip of spokes-spook Ned Price lying through his ugly little teeth, knowingly and willfully, about this incident during a press conference. Hersh is very magnanimous toward Price, saying that he’s probably a good man and a nice guy who just happens to have the crappy job of mouthing whatever script they shove down his weasel throat.

I’ve watched him do it before, and let me get this off my chest. It was always very annoying for me to listen to people like George Bush and Donald Trump. But that small agony was nothing, compared to having to listen to horrible human beings like Ned, and his boss Sullivan, lie cravenly and cynically at every turn about perpetrating the worst sorts of behavior on the world in the name of American democracy. They take revolting and disgusting to previously unthinkable levels.

Okay. Done. Go in peace.

Yesterday as the gloryweather begin to fade into storm, my check engine light came on. I went straight to the new mechanic and got an appointment for 9 AM, St. Valentines. Then today I got up at eight.

At nine the street here on the hill was still glare ice. So I called. It went to voicemail, which didn’t surprise me at all, because I know the shop owner lives 13 miles south on Burro Mountain. I left a message.

By eleven, the pavement had gone from snowpacked and icy to very nearly dry. Our friend Mr. Sun has great power in the Southwest, even in February. I put on my urban hiking shoes and my big gorgeous Christmas coat, drove over and dropped the truck, and walked back.

I went through downtown on the way. A new restaurant called Roxy’s had opened. I took one look at the menu in the window and saw the word ‘chilaquiles’, and didn’t hesitate.

I was expecting something akin to migas. The plate came and it was nothing of the sort. It actually looked pretty disappointing. But then I started to eat.

It was the best red chile I can ever remember having. Ten bucks. Pure savory fire. I’d do that again.

I went home and waited. They called, with a sort of confusing story–it was gonna be $450.

When I got there, the owner said goddamn son–it’s a good thing you didn’t wait to bring it in.

Seems that at some point, the whole wiring harness had been improperly secured. It had broken loose and fallen on top of the transmission, and the wires in the harness had just started to melt.

So it was not throwing just one code, but dozens. He showed me the list. One of them said that the clutch needed adjustment. There is no clutch. It’s an automatic.

I guess when your main electrical system starts to turn into a puddle, its own interpretation of the situation starts to get a little fuddled.

I’m thinking about HAL9000 in the movie 2001, as it is being shut down. “Daisy … Daisy …”

So. Replacing the most damaged wires, and securing the harness–four hours labor, and four fiddy. On the one hand, it seems a bit much, but on the other–this could have turned into a catastrophic loss if I didn’t have these guys on speed dial. Pretty sure the dealer would have charged me twice that much at least, on top of muttering about delays for officially sanctioned ancient parts that might not even exist.

It stings, but in reality luck was with me. Happy happy V-Day.

***

A short chronology.

Around about this time a year ago, several administration officials, including The Joe himself, were quoted as being very unhappy about the existence of the Nordstream pipelines–they made our little Germany just far too dependent on Russian oil (instead of the good old USA stuff)–and Biden himself said that ‘if Russia invaded’, the pipelines would definitely go away. The interviewer followed up: Whaddya mean go away? Biden turned all shifty-eyed and cagey.

Six months ago, to pretty much no one’s surprise, the pipeline(s) exploded. Or maybe “were exploded” is closer to the truth. The Americans immediately blamed Russia for … blowing up … Russia’s own pipelines? Well that made no fucking sense. But regardless, that was the evidence-free claim.

Since then, the UN has categorically refused to look into it, for some murky reason …

Several concerned governments, including the US and Germany, conducted “investigations”, and then promptly classified the results. The entire West suddenly turned into Sergeant Schultz: “I see nussssing …”.

A week or so back, 85-year-old Seymour Hersh published an article pointing the finger at the obvious culprit. Of course the Empire did it, with a little help from Norway, and moreover they did it not with Special Forces, but with a group of Navy divers. Why? Because that way Biden didn’t even have to tell anyone in Congress what he’d done. Plenty of facts and detail in the story, although it was based on anonymous sources within Washington who leaked to Hersh.

You might not be old enough to remember Seymour’s first blockbuster story back in the Sixties. It revealed the existence of a little incident known as The My Lai Massacre, a genuine American war crime.

Hersh is also the reason that the world knows the name of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, scene of many incidents of torture and prisoner abuse at the hands of Americans. You remember smiling and then tearful young Private Lynndie England, right?

(“In 2012, following her release, she stated that she did not regret her actions. ‘Their (Iraqis’) lives are better. They got the better end of the deal,’ she said. ‘They weren’t innocent. They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy’.”)

Oh Murica my Murica.

Anyway, this time, old Hersh is largely being ignored to death, but on the rare occasions that his story does incite comment, by the alleged journalists of the MSM, or indignant congresscritters, it’s only to bray about what a washed-up hack he is. Glenn Greenwald, one of the few actual journalists in Seymour’s league, has covered this phenomenon extensively. But today, you just get a smaller taste, courtesy of a third real journo involved in a rhetorical battle with some Rep. Shitlib (D-CT).

Aaron Maté DESTROYS Dem Lying Senator Chris Murphy Over Nord Stream Explosion

Enjoy.

The other day I linked to Bri’s great interview with Norman Finklestein. Since then he’s hit the Grayzone for another interview with the young Mr. Mate’.

Seems there’s a book tour underway. I’m glad of it. It made me think of writing one too. I already have of course. I’d just need to go back and edit some of the better pieces below into a collection. Debut folio or whatever it was I was making fun of recently.

Somewhere near the middle of this I listened as Norman told the tale of being denied tenure at DePaul after teaching there a while. That part went in a little deeper than the purely political parts. I related naturally.

Then I went to bed and dreamed of my related situation for the first time in a while. In this dream I saw the lying coward of a President and confronted her, and right after I delivered my astonishingly cool verbal smackdown I just walked away, distracted by the next thing. Two guys were filming a video.

I woke up a little later with a smile on my face.

Then in the morning I watched the last part and I smiled again, because in closing, Norman gave Aaron his sage blessing, quote:

“I read you carefully now. You do something which other people don’t do. You actually work. You’re not counting views …”

Et cetera.

I was marginally winged by the shrapnel of the blessing.

There’s plenty of other great stuff in this interview, especially if you consider yourself an actual ‘leftist’ (in contrast to a Cenk or a Bernie or maybe even a Marianne). Go watch and be winged thyself, if it please you to do.