“The North Carolina National Guard said a Black Hawk helicopter crew was grounded after an incident in which they flew low over a Hurricane Helene donation and supply area, blowing over three tents and scattering items in the air. Video of the incident surfaced after the copter hovered over the supply area in Burnsville on Sunday”.

That’s the story. But watching the video, it appears that the NCNG is trying to accept the blame for the destruction of aid perpetrated by an unmarked black heli that isn’t theirs.

I don’t know what to believe and I’m not telling you what to believe.

I do know that I’m wasting no more tears on any selfless patriotic heroes for the next little while.

” … a telltale symptom of a dying Empire.”

–Keaton, toward the end of this one:

FEMA Secretary: Relief Fund OUT OF CASH Halfway Through Hurricane Season

Pair that with the spokesLiar KJP’s comments and handwaving, in direct contradiction: “Everything’s Fine!” and then explain to me again how these corrupt tools are what we have to vote for if we want to “save democracy”.

There’s less to save every day going by, under the rule of the very same self-appointed Saviors.

Chappell Roan Pisses Off Libs By Failing To Endorse Kam

I couldn’t name a single song by either Chappell or Taylor. So this is not music criticism.

It is to say that I choose Team C anyway, not only because Fuck The Government, but also because fuck the centrists like this one who went to Georgetown and throw around words like “horrific” and “privileged” without having any earthly clue what real horror looks like or what privilege even consists of.

Exactly like the well-paid White House spokesLiar screeching about “misinformation”, when it is clear to everyone in the room that she doesn’t know what it means, but desperately attempting to use it as a deflector shield anyway moments before hauling ass out of the briefing room, utterly humiliated and yet somehow still stupidly defiant.

America, everybody.

***

While we’re on the vitally important subject of pop stars and their political opinions, I might as well come out and endorse Waylon Jennings over Garth Brooks right now.

And I hope Neil Young will remember, a southern man don’t need him around, anyhow.

(You’ll have to pry my copy of Powderfinger out of my cold dead hands though.

When the time comes.)

Once upon a time it was in your interests and mine to believe in a jehovah.

But interests evolved, sometimes gradually and sometimes abruptly, and we both found new religions.

The Truth, The Truth. Who’s got the truth, and when, and why?

***

A year ago I thought it might be in my interests to make videos and post them on that Platform.

A month ago all faith in that idea was lost.

Today I’m re-considering the proposition with a cold and sober eye.

***

I spill therefore I am. It’s in my interests in the broadest sense, not so much economically as …

It’s central to my new and improved religion, and I have Faith in this Creed.

The Creed is the Creed it is, because … I believe

it is in

my interest to thus believe.

We care a lot, and it is a kind of crazy, finally, after all.

Crazy. Just like Willie told it long ago.

For thinking
that my love could hold you.
Crazy for trying, and crazy for crying
and I’m crazy for loving you.

Follow-up to a story briefly mentioned recently.

Censorship or Tech Glitch: Glenn Diesen Readmitted To YouTube After Channel Deletion

The deletion happened in a wave of clear censorship. Lots of other channels were not “re-admitted”. Does the fact that Prof. Diesen got his channel back mean that there was a tech glitch besides?

No one knows. The Googlebeast ain’t saying and never does and never will. Even Orwell would have to shake his head.

***

So much of what I am trying to say comes down to this.

Determining what your “interests” or mine really are is complicated, but a lot of it comes down to cold hard cash, or individual perceptions of what will put more of it into our pockets, or give us more “freedom” regarding how we might spend it.

Then beyond that we get slapped with this concept of “our” interests, which doesn’t exist now, if it ever did. For it to exist we would have to believe in an “Us”, and there is no Us; possibly not even a US, viewed from a purely functional standpoint.

Prof. Diesen’s interests (and “freedom”) don’t have anything (or very little) to do with the interests of the Beast of a Platform he is building upon.

Your interests as someone who might need an abortion someday (or feels intense identification or solidarity with those who could) has nothing to do with my interest in seeing the shitty system keep its shitty promises regarding student loan cancellation.

You might see Vlad as an impaler who wants to violate your way of life, or the similar way of life you want for someone dwelling in Lviv or Tblisi.

Whereas I might have more feeling for the Russian-speakers in Sevastopol who were persecuted (sometimes to death) by the western Ukrainian nazi-leaning groups who just happen to have been installed and propped up by people like Nuland and Blinken, professional-managerial ‘democrats’ who live lives that look a lot like yours.

I might choose to have more sympathy for the displaced and bombed people of Palestine.

You might get furious at the notion that “Palestine” even exists, and place your sympathies with the descendants of those interred at Auschwitz no matter what.

We see things the way we see them from the perspective of our Interests, or what we think our interests might be in some abstract or identified version of reality.

Do Lizard People run everything?

You might say: that’s too ridiculous to even treat as if it deserves a real answer.

David Icke might say: I have incontrovertible proof that they do.

I say: striving after the literal answer to the question is irrelevant either way–all I really care about is whether the metaphor fits well with the naked facts.

All three of us come to the question with our economic interests front and center, and if there isn’t a direct connection between the concept of reptile rulers and our wallets, then we approach it with a somewhat more vague idea of how things would look if there was.

So you choose to embrace the particular helicopter in North Carolina that was flown by Guardsmen.

So I choose to embrace the narrative of the particular helicopter flown by the guy who was threatened with arrest if he kept flying it.

Are you one of the good guys or not? Am I?

Goodness, in this sense, doesn’t exist.

Interests always exist.

“Our interests” differ, for pretty stark and practical reasons that are not hard to see …

if you’re choosing to honestly look hard enough.

(once more)

Very smart coverage of the hopelessness of the upcoming exercise in Democracy!

with special attention given this time to

–the hollowness of MAGA, and

–the death throes of valid american masculinity.

Never be that horse, amen.

***

Loosely related addendum: Sh0e has some pretty fresh takes on The Rise Of AI Girlfriends

“words that some of these people have never heard in their entire lives”

***

Source

What Would JC Do?

In the video about Being Tired that I linked the other day, the narrator invented an illustrative character called Johnny Caveman to describe the differences between how we live today and how we lived (throughout 95% of our time as Humanity) as hunter-gatherers.

As a shorthand for one of my core beliefs about primal anarchy, then, I have started to ask myself: What would Johnny Caveman do?

Faced with stark current realities, would Johnny Caveman Get A Job? Probably not.

Faced with modern pressures, would Johnny Caveman take any kind of supplements at all? I doubt it.

But would Johnny Caveman, dumped off in some big city downtown, go insane?

Very possibly. I mean … give me one good reason why he shouldn’t go batshit.

I know that I have felt increasingly less sane, whenever I have lately been forced to be around big crowds of people, even in a nice place like Pike’s Market in Seattle–and being exposed to crowding is only one small facet of the horrors of modernity.

Based on those kinds of experiences and reflections, I think I’m going to make the rational choice to allow myself the luxury of going mad, if and when I need to do so.

I’m going to stand there laughing hysterically and foam at the mouth if that feels like an appropriate response in any given moment to life in this hellscape we call Civilized.

I’m going to soberly and rationally choose to believe that our rulers are secretly lizard people, if that explanation makes more sense than any other–whether or not that much-mocked Lizard Conspiracy is literally true or not. The same with 9-11, what the hell. The same for UFOs and all those assassinations.

Now it’s not the only reason I’m making this choice, but I can see how it might have some advantages for our deal.

Specifically, if I’ve chosen the path of mental illness, then you can’t very well be pissed off every time I open my mouth and say yet another thing you think is outrageous, stupid, or whack.

Because of course it is–it’s nuts because I’m nuts. I’ve studied the way you’ve reacted before, to non-violent head cases like I plan to become, if and when situationally necessary.

You’re not miffed and cold-shouldered.

On the contrary. You’re supportive and sympathetic, maybe even to a fault at times, and I completely related to it too, almost as if I still had a heart and brain that weren’t so sick.

I think that might feel good for me. Better. Which sounds narcissistic, perhaps even a little sociopathic, manipulative … All kinds of Crazy like that, yeah? Perfectly legit.

I can just add those things to my diagnosis, and be grateful for the careful caring insights.

I know that you love me and want all the best for me, and especially for me to get Well Again so I can finally have a happy, and productive, and … adjusted Life.

Now I have to warn you; it could be a real long hard road, for me to get that Well.

I might have to take a few cats to the river and drown them, so I can once more be Normal.

I might need to say yes to orthodontia and therapy and getting my vaccines updated and regular haircuts and commercial flight and staying in resorts and getting back up on Zuckerberg’s platform, from my shiny iPhone and not some retarded retro Linux desktop for fuckssake. I might have to … take your guns away gosh an’ shut up with the mis the dis the ick information already, might hafta wear a mask when they tell me to–not wear a mask when they say masks are now the threat to Security okay yeah okay got it got it

I might have to register as a Democrat again, or at least become a respectable Lincoln Log Republican like that admirably successful businessman Dick Cheney, or his cute reformed little painter friend. I might have to start shrugging dismissively when the subject of genocide comes up, and learn to argue that what looks a lot like ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter is really, in Reality, only good old-fashioned godly self-defense.

Figure out what my pronouns are … Put a blue and yellow flag in my bio–or wait, is that still a thing? I’m so far far out of the loop … loopy … Anyway, a Science placard out in the yard, you know, “in this household we believe these lives matter”, however it goes, whatever. Grow deep in my faith that China capitalists are so much worse than the ones we grew here in the Home of the Brave, and fuck that Putin, to death I tell you!

They had all been warned.

I might have to stop believing that I’m some kind of sage, or artist, or misunderstood genius, or Johnny Caveman, Anachronistic Superhero. I might have to Get Real.

I’m sure it’ll all be worth it though. I Heed The Call.

So very

very sure

it will, i mean …

it must

it must, right

i mean noidea who ancient beardy guy on keyboards is but itsa warm m’heart that he was there,

representin

pour les grottes

The full video I snagged this screenshot from is full of exactly the same kind of good old neighborly country boys as the one with Jefe, posted earlier.

Only these shitkickers, deplorable though you may think them, are rapidly getting pissed off, and starting to become truly radicalized.

For the record, I don’t approve of calling Little Petey a sodomite.

But I approve even less of him holding power and wielding it like a venal selfish top in an abusive relationship.

In which Jefe, the canonical nephew, is appreciated.

Why I Left Matt’s OffRoad Recovery, first vid on his new channel.

***

I slept almost another full night’s worth on top of all that napping.

The Three-Indoor-Cat proposition is beginning to integrate itself.

Out in the yard I need to get on snatching up the LBK and getting him to the showcase in Flagstaff so he can have someone to love him proper.

And there’s the cheaper-internet guy coming on Tuesday and that truck to unload Wednesday.

None of it is Life according to the Plan.

I don’t mind. Every day above ground you know.

My sleep schedule has been far more stable than usual, for longer than normal.

Seven and a half hours, starting around 10 PM, for the last three or four days.

But even so, I spent a lazy Saturday napping off and on all day. It felt natural and right.

(A very interesting video on what might be going on: Why you’re so tired)

During the full siesta I hung around with my pal Max Blumenthal, noted self-hating Jew.

We visited my dreamtime kitchen, which I’d never seen. It was old-fashioned, very tiny and efficient. I fixed the garage door.

Then we went to a farm and surfed on the backs of small squat pigs. Very normal stuff.

Afterwards, Max made a video about it.

Just before I woke up to dusk, he was saying that my wife was the salt of the earth.

Apparently my subconscious thinks so too.

You may well be bored to death by my frequent posting of interviews with this man.

Why Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is NOT Voting for Trump or Kamala

But given the topic, and the fact that we are now within a month of the stupidest “most important election of our lifetime” of our lifetime, I thought it was worth posting one more, in order to say:

Professor Sachs is not some wild-eyed goon with an opinion and a tiktok account.

He has been very much a foreign policy Insider–for decades.

For that reason and others, many on the nominally liberal or progressive left don’t like or trust him. Not because he’s ‘turned into’ a moderate centrist tool of the state, you understand, but because in important ways he always was one, in spite of his fairly consistent dove-ish views on the question of war.

Either way. I believe he’s trying to be a good man and that he’s gotten better at being one over time. (I can relate.) More importantly … he knows a hell of a lot more about how the geopolitical world really works than you or I do, or ever will.

I’d have to dig to be sure, but I believe he voted for not only Obama but Biden too, in the spirit of that old-time lesser-evil religion.

The Dems have lost a lot of votes, among Arabs in Michigan, among black and latino and just young people everywhere, among old white men who bother to read carefully like he, and I–people sick of the bullshit and of the way They can always find an excuse for a war, and of perpetually living in an imperial war State … the routine banal human sacrifice that kills not only little brown kids over there, but all kinds of regular Americans one way and another right here.

And still, they say, it’s very close, “razor-thin margins in the swing states”, lord jesus.

Thus, apparently, things are going to be decided on the basis of issues that barely matter any more compared to that one: identity politics, culture war issues; whether to sacrifice Amendment One to our own fears of ‘misinformation’, whether to sacrifice Amendment Two to our half-rational fear of alienated outsiders living in this insanity being driven to mass shootings.

Amendment Four, of course, is long gone, and though it was deeply threatened under Bush Junior, it was our own dear Barry O who slit its throat for good.

And now we are treated to the horrifying yet predictable spectacle of Cheneys for the Kam, and everything old is new again.

I’m gonna miss that Bill of Rights thing. Nice while it lasted.

***

If you don’t live in a swing state, vote your true conscience, or sit this one out because your vote doesn’t matter anyway.

Following Jeffrey’s example.

If you do live in a swing state, vote your true conscience because duopolist democracy has rigged the game to the point where ‘who wins’ matters only at the furthest and most symbolic margins, when and if it matters at all.

Following mine.

Going Stein.

Not just that, but a 3WMan at the start of a three-day weekend–which is damn rare, when you don’t have a legit job.

Pascal again. Today it’s Neutrality Studies, writ large.

Alrighty. Look, saith he.

You cannot be neutral if you are not first independent. If you’re a puppet or a proxy or a satellite or colonized, you’re going to be pulled in on whatever side your master is on–you’ll Follow him/her.

If you are independent, and also truly neutral, then both parties to a conflict will expend some effort to pull you toward their point of view and position in that conflict.

It’s happened to you more than once, at the interpersonal and familial levels. (I’m sure examples will leap immediately to mind.) It works much the same geopolitically. According to Pascal’s Science.

When I cry Duopoly! and refuse to vote for either half of it, it doesn’t mean that I’m refusing to take a position. Quite the contrary.

I’m just taking my own position rather than that of a ‘party’, a position that happens to be shall we say … Non-Aligned.

To any demand, or coercive or cajoling pressure to move toward this side or that side … I have to say it like the man in the video says it:

“No, ain’t working for us. Over here, we do our own thing.”

The Armenian guy points out how sometimes “non-aligned” becomes a factional entity unto itself. Even a ‘movement’. That’s worth keeping in mind, belletrist. (Also, Pascal, I don’t really see how ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘self-rule’ are de facto contradictory at all, but let’s move on.)

That damn China. It’s the closest thing possible to an autarky within Modernity, and man does that inconvenient truth make the Merkins edgy. The Unipolar moment, ever since ’89, has never been a moment of peace–the Unipole has no damn use at all for peace–and as unipolarity hitches and seizes and dies it’s going to get much worse, before it ever, if it ever, gets better.

Tensions and conflict are nothing more than disguised opportunities for Exploitation. Just ask the Rand Corporation, or any wicked dipshit western think-tank you care to favor with your faith.

“You don’t want to be a tool.” Christ in a bucket what resonance that has, of a Friday evening where we all sit poised on the final brink ennit. Bet your Golden BMW on that little gem, speaking of faith.

We close with a question.

How can setting off exploding pagers in public and private places, killing children and bad guys alike in the process, NOT be an act of state-sponsored terrorism?

It’s rhetorical.

So you’re off the hook.

Maybe even entitled to be neutral, rather than a collaborationist.

That sweet ineffable place!
Where the rubber of cheering for another militarist neo-con
meets the manatee tears on the washed-out interstate road
over to. the asheville

(Happy ninth Spilliversary to us all my loves)

Ohhhhhh

Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
–Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift

Look out kid
They keep it all hid

Better jump down a manhole;
Light yourself a candle

It’s been a real productive kind of day.

I got up and reconnected the drain for the kitchen sink and did a big load of dishes.

Then I took a long hot shower.

And then, since that was all going so well, I plugged in the washing machine and trepidatiously ran a load for the first time in a few months. For Science.

There was some gurgling, to be sure, but no flood. Not even a little one. So I ran a second load to be sure, and shitfire, no more laundromats for this folksy Knucklehead. In the short term anyway.

There are still unanswered questions about the plumbing. They will need to be addressed, before I can feel good about going ahead with the install of the new toilet. But it’s just the toilet now. Life is going to be easier, this weekend.

After that I went out for water and avocados. I ran into Steakhouse Jake. We talked about Saint Julian, and Jeffrey Sachs too. Unlike ANY other person in my real life ever, Jake brings the subject of Assange up routinely (I think because I brought him up first, in class, back when Jake was my student). He asked me if I’d quit the YouTubes and I told him no, even though there was no video in September, I wasn’t done. I am admittedly not sure why I’m not done …

But we didn’t get into that, in the checkout line.

On the way back to the bunker I saw a random sign for a Senior Health Fair and so I drove to it.

Things were just about over when I got there. But this one big Christian and/or Mormon guy, older than me I’m guessing, rushed up with a paper he wanted me to fill out. The paper wanted to know if I might be interested in meals, served there at the SeniorCenter/FoodBank, at reasonable prices (I got the impression they were going after some kind of grant for that).

So I told the form that I was strictly organic keto, and unless they were too, I’d probably not make many appearances at dinnertime–once at least though, just to see.

I handed the paper in to the good man and I said Hey Good Man. I got a couple of buckets full of rice and beans and stuff that are more than I can eat. Could you make use of them here?

He said sure, bring ’em. So I did, right away.

As we were stocking his pantry with my dry goods, I asked him what else I could do to help.

He said there was a truck coming Wednesday at 9 AM and I could help unload it.

So I will do that.

That’s the job. Sorry not sorry for the clickbait title.

I’m looking forward to lumping freight, and to seeing where else these mysterious moments might lead.

The Less You Care, The Happier You’ll Be | Taoist Wisdom For An Overly Serious World

A lot of what friend Einzelgänger says in these 13 minutes is obvious truism, and yet there’s still a whole lot to unpack to my eye.

The Less You Care, The Happier You Will Be. Is that true? In essence yes, I think so.

Does that mean that the proper path for a human life is caring less and less until we stop caring at all?

I’m far less certain of that, far less ready to commit to it.

***

One phrase that jumped out at me while watching was “self-exploitation”. That is what we obsessively do most of the time, right?

But what if any one of us were useless, and thus without anything in our selves to exploit, ending the vicious cycle?

I don’t mind being poor nearly as much as I minded having to do all those ugly boring things required in order to be comfortable or ‘middle-class’.

My life is not problem-free.

I am not always (or even often) “happy”.

But this is, still, better.

In a sense I choose when to stop caring and be happy, and when to care passionately and thus be inevitably miserable.

As in the earlier post: going off into a brain-dead bliss while shooting up or snorting an old movie with only token attempts to critically analyze its message …

and then turning around to face the stupidity and evil in the Way we’ve chosen, and in some cases have been forced, to live, and becoming enraged by it, or scared of it, or profoundly sad about it, or all of those things at once.

I wouldn’t have nearly that much flexibility, or that many options if I was trying to hold down a job and be a useful and productive self-exploiting member of that very same broken society.

Or if I had a bunch of kids to raise instead of a few random cats …

Or if I was doing what it takes to be able to afford to drive a shiny new problem-free pickup truck, instead of a lovely old piece of cranky shit.

So I have intuitively (not-rationally) decided to become a lovely old piece of cranky shit myself.

I am living the life of a useless tree.

I am always striving after being honest about how I feel about that fact.

With reasonably authentic self-examined clarity I conclude that in the present moment

I’m fine with it.

It really was a Wednesday, but I don’t think that mattered in a significant way.

I could be wrong. But anyway, in spite of the name of the day of the week, I was not expecting to have spiritual assault and battery committed on me in the supermarket. By Wednesday.

Wednesday Addams.

First thing was, I saw an ancient Navajo man wearing a t-shirt that just said Wednesday, with a picture of Christina Ricci all dressed up in neo-gothic fashions below the letters.

I didn’t give it much thought until I cruised by the clearance rack.

On it, among the expired spices and unsuccessful gadgets, was a shelf of cereal.

WEDNESDAY cereal. For fifty percent off. With exactly the same graphic on the front of the box as the Navajo senior’s shirt.

I clipped a coupon for rib tips and headed out to the van to sit behind the wheel and ingest them.

I ate them and thought about things.

Conspiritually; theoretically.

There’s nothing too evil about either the Wednesday character or Ms. Ricci, as far as we know.

But the message being peddled by the capitalists who made that movie (or whatever it was), and who put that graphic on a t-shirt, and a cereal box–quite possibly a bona fide instance of serious, subtle, demonic influence.

It’s only a theory, but I’m betting it’s right.

I can say that having never seen WEDNESDAY.

I watched the original TV series, and I saw the cartoons in the New Yorker that came out even before it.

I watched the films with Raul and Angelica. I laughed, I cried.

I don’t need to see the latest re-tread to know what it, underneath the slick cardboard, is trying to sell me.

The meta-message of the Addams franchise is simple.

We know you don’t feel like the others. We know you feel different. You are different, darling, to the point of Special, and that’s why your life is so, so very hard.

Come watch this show. Come wear the shirt. Come buy this cereal: ‘for your kids’.

Do these things like a million other consumers will do them, because–and this is a solemn promise–Non-Conformity is, against all appearances, deeply cool. Beyond cool. Non-conformity is deeply human.

Come on aboard, I promise you. You won’t hurt the horse.

Treat him well, we feed him well … where was I? Something flashed in my eyes there a second.

A seventeen-dollar movie ticket and a bucket of stale popcorn will fix you riiiight up. You’ll still feel different, but life won’t seem as hard for a little while, because you will feel special, too.

Just like Wednesday Addams, professionally cool non-conformist.

It’s true that there is less spiritual nutrition in this message than in the popcorn.

But by the time the effect wears off, we will have the next product ready to go, to soothe you all over again.

***

Now I have to say clearly: There is really nothing seriously wrong with the message being sold to you here.

Non-conformity is cool. Non-conformity is a path toward becoming more human.

Or it could be.

If non-conformity genuinely consisted of goth fashions and spooky art-school takes on life, and if being cool dependably happened in a world where the many twisted kinds of humanity always triumphed, after much scripted adversity, over the boring conformists in a conclusive and (briefly) satisfying way …

We wouldn’t just have a movie here. We’d have a spiritual path, maybe even a religion.

I regret to inform you, sorry it’s my job …

It doesn’t. In fact, what this movie and this marketing campaign do is to sell you (through your feeling of being different) on a passive and safe version of non-conformity that changes nothing, either inside your heart, or out there in the real world.

Now you say to me: “Thanks Alex, you buzzkill fuck, for taking all the pitiful little joys out of my life and leaving me hung over like a sugarpoison junkie the day after Ice Cream Month is over.

What about your glorious Humphrey Bogart, asshole?”

I’m here to testify my lamb.

***

The meta-message of a Bogart movie is, believe it or not, pretty much the same, except that the demographic being targeted isn’t those who are angsty teenage girls, either literally or at heart.

I’m thinking in particular of Bogart as Sam Spade, because I watched all those movies, and read the books they were based on (penned by Raymond Chandler) avidly and seriously. But out beyond Chandler, as you know, I still watch Bogart–I posted a link to one the other day and I hadn’t forgotten it.

The message of a Chandler-Bogart movie, and most film noir in general is:

1) No one here gets out alive.

2) It can’t be won, the way the game is run, but if you choose to stay, you end up playing anyway.

3) Crime never pays, but if you’re only looking to get paid, you’re even worse than the criminals.

4) Damned if you can’t look a hell of a lot cooler in a trenchcoat with a cigarette even so. Here’s looking at you, kid. We’ll always have Paris.

Again: not evil. Not even, as far as it goes, “wrong”.

But just as Wednesday, in its portrayal of non-conformity, actually pulls our attention far away from the brutal truth of what it means to be a real non-conformist …

So too does The Maltese Falcon make thinking about any other option besides Staying and Playing Anyway literally unthinkable.

In the world it creates, you are trapped and doomed, to either being gunned down like a petty crook if you’re bad, or (best case scenario) learning to live with the searing pain of alienation, seeing too much, and loneliness … if you’re good.

But what about the non-Spade Bogart, like they did in Key Largo? Sometimes, the hero gets the pretty girl, even if she is, well, unripened, underage like Lauren Bacall was during filming. Surely true love triumphing over the bad men means that all the noir anguish and being Alone can be considered banished for all time?

Maybe.

But so far as the movie being made and sold as concerned, that spiritual triumph is strictly off-camera, and you yourself have to take on faith what happens to the happy couple as the decades unfold. As Time Goes By.

On that … you can rely.

I know it’s not much, and I’m sorry–for us both. I apologize to you.

I am sorry for myself, too.

And for that self-pitying foolishness among many other reasons, you can’t count on my beautiful words and insightful prose–imagine, not even that!– to save you either.

Alas, the real Bogart named names, when called before Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee.

Where have all the real, righteous cowboys gone?

Out to the West there’s a trail that leads … outside the Overton window Hollywood provides.

Or the one God sells.

Or the foul politician you’ll be voting for, regardless of their color, gender, or name.

The very best you can hope for is a frothing Jimmy Dore, or a razor-sharp Glenn Greenwald.

But your heart will still sink, when JD starts doing commercials for owning gold, and bitcoin, and the healing power of reverse mortgages. In this uncertain age.

It will still fall into your boots when GG starts talking about your busy, hectic schedule, in these dreadful modern times, and goes on to inform you in all apparent and credible sincerity that the cure for that is Field of Greens powder–he takes it himself, every day, and you should too with the promo code Glenn20, at checkout.

Do not choose any pale bloodless non-conformity as a basis for your life my love. It may even be far superior to a mortgage and two kids and grinding your nose off at the slave stone and then reversing that mortgage. But it can’t give your soul what your soul hungers for truly.

Fuck dietary supplement powders no matter who preaches about them as the means to secular salvation.

It’s a lie.

You’re up to here. With the Lie. The Lie is the water that is starting to boil now.

On a stove burner in a kitchen owned by the Lizard People.

As black or green helicopters circle overhead, loaded with more of the same water, bottled and clean–they’re giving it away. Selflessly. To those in need.

It doesn’t matter, can’t you see, whether the needy neighbors are frogs, or goths, or black with indian overtones, or orange, or detectives, or pilots of the African Queen.

We are all so in this together, we are, we ARE God pray for me in the midst of this madness.

All dark blessings on you, brothers and sisters, and even upon the undeserving, the belletrists, the heretics, the stateless palestinians both literal and symbolic, on ah fuck i mean

amen

Amen, I got carried away again. Will I ever learn? It doesn’t seem super likely.

Back on topic, I have another cox video for you today. Not one with Nicole, this time. Honestly I haven’t even picked it out yet; please stand by a moment. No goddammit

That is NOT it; will you FOCUS

Okay

Do you remember the day the lizards took their fangs out of the flesh of Assange and the silence roared like thunder, except for a nod from Fletcher? Saint Julian nearly died for your sins, and he finally spoke out today–barns were burned, but

But that’s not it either.

Okay. Here.

On Realising the Political is Personal, with Fiona Robertson

2018, Before the Covid Era. Six years ago. Let’s call it roughly the first appearance of anything on that page having to do with the sociopolitical world outside, as opposed to only the spiritual intra-personal world within.

Self-enquiry is still downstage front and center. We begin this time with defining it, as: Investigating “whatever our experience is in all its layers”. Especially the problematic experiences of our selves.

The Trauma.

Less than perfect certainty about our beliefs make us anxious; being certain (about anything, it hardly matters) provides a sense of security.

Yet without uncertainty we can have no experience of mystery.

Did we lose anything important when self-addressed stamped envelopes stopped being a thing? I think maybe so, but I am, rationally, not sure. If I did believe strongly one way or the other, and then I let go of that strong opinion, would I still continue to exist?

Seems probable. Is there such a thing as a belief you would be willing to die for? Is having one a good thing? Is lacking such a belief a good thing?

She had a moment, upon realizing that several of the most poor areas in all of Europe were in Britain, and that all of those poorest areas voted to leave the European Union. To Brexit. She was compelled by honor to ask herself why that would be.

Which reminds me of the current discussions about how self-identified Democrats now own 70% of all wealth in the USA now, when it used to be, they said, the party of the working class.

Finally there’s this.

It’s a hard thing, to go through life always being right, because you are then not free, but forced by the circumstance to constantly wonder why other people

are so stupid.

I think we can leave it sitting right at the place called word count 1900.

Current events are pushing me towards a particular theory, or way of seeing. Permit me to share.

The more we zoom out and look for clues and patterns in the larger world, the more depressing things get. (A History of Government’s DISDAIN For Free Speech)

Conversely …

… zooming in on the immediate here and now moves us toward flow, sometimes maybe even toward exhilaration, catharsis.

I spent the last part of my evening and the first part of my morning engaged in fulfilling a coffee order. So long as I stayed focused on that work, I was happy, or at minimum, pleasantly distracted by that complex and interesting process.

Much of that working time, though, was spent with headphones on, gathering information about the state of the wider world, where humanity (and especially the empire I live in) is rushing headlong toward complete disaster, contemplating the aphorism that World War III will be fought with nukes, and World War IV will thus be fought with sticks and stones.

At the micro level I could as a result share in the happiness that my fellow traveler, almost a brother, came through the disaster of Helene not only unscathed, but as a kind of heroic figure, engaged in helping others affected by the aftermath of the storm. (All that joyful weeping.)

But zoomed out, the mere presence of a military helicopter in one of the shared photos sent me spiraling back down into the abyss of knowing what is happening–what ‘my’ government is using that same kind of advanced killing technology for in parts of the world not so blessed of god, and has used it for, over the whole course of my lifetime and even before.

Choppering in clean water to the middle of flood-stricken carolina: well that’s good.

And yet the very existence of that chopper in the first place, the fact that we chose to build it and maintain it all through these years in preference to more human and humane priorities, brought flashbacks of Vietnam, and Somalia, and Kosovo, and Tripoli, and Mosul, and hundreds of places like these that we never even hear about, unless we actively zoom out and try to see the broader patterns.

Now you might be inclined to say that the moral of this theory is that the Intelligent thing to do is to take off the headphones, shut off the connection to the wider world, and just roast coffee.

Part of me agrees.

A more substantial part of me though says: fuck that, because that’s exactly what They want you to do.

Living the purely inner, spiritual, apolitical ostrich way, grasping after each hopeful beacon might make us feel better in the short term. But in the end it does no good, and cooperates with the evil, letting Them get an ever-better stranglehold on our souls.

Being a leader in the enterprise of hate? Worse than useless.

Following along, doing a job, going along to get along within it? Unthinkable, for those with any trace of spirit left. Both of the main alternatives above leave us Collaborationist at best.

Getting the hell out of the way, then … ?

Hmmm.

It is, no contest, the least of evils, in a three-way race.

Fresh theory.

They–fathers, lords, well-adjusted philosophers-of-the-Real to a man-jack–posited that arriving on this Earth, into this life and this culture, meant that you were faced with a choice of three forks in this corporeal and existential road.

But what if the triple choice was, after all that, just another god damned lie?

I can think of alternatives, within the metaphor.

We might go backward along the road we arrived on, back by choice to the non-existence we came from.

We might study the choice at length, and realize that there’s a fourth way, even if it appears to be nothing but a cowpath.

We might decide to … go off-road. Even if that might well mean abandoning all chance of Recovery.

Even if it meant choosing–embracing–something as awful as Psychological Suffering.

From near the bottom/beginning of the DeepStateConsciousness YT page:

Psychological Suffering as an Invitation to Wholeness

Richard and Nicole, Part Two.

This particular 63rd autumn, this specific 9th anniversary, blossoms in a harvest of turningPoints.

Faced with such emergent points, with these roads or false choices or real choices or these depressions or exhilarations or heroic overcoming or flying machine guns of imperial death, I say unto you truly today:

I’m not crazy (Institution).

You’re the one who’s crazy (Institution).

You’re driving me … no.

No.

You may well insist that the half-breed cow-path I’ve chosen is nothing but ugly badness, Mental Illness, and you shy from it, do your best to avoid it, cluck your tongue, look away quickly.

But I prefer to think Nicole, like R.D. Laing before her, has the better of it.

Getting well off the road is the only sane response to the insanity of what They have offered us.

It’s akin to getting the hell out of the way, only without the opprobrium and moral outrage they tried to load the question down with by using that phrase with such a sneer.

Abandoning roads altogether and wandering into the wilderness of the unknown alone is very surely a radical act, and almost certain to lead to a good deal of psychological suffering.

In the days to come, you’re going to be hearing questions that make you even more uncomfortable than you may be right now.

Was the Queen Mother the matriarch of a brood of conspiritual Lizard People?

Did I mean to type ‘conspiratorial’ just then?

What did Oz give to the Tin Man, and does ‘Oz’ in this context have more than one meaning?

Was that Twin Towers thing an inside job? Did ‘we’ really go to the moon? Who killed the Kennedys, and was Jagger right when he screamed about it being, after all, you and me?

Who are these voices who insist on chanting things I’d rather not hear and living rent-free in my head? Why in the name of all that is holy would I let them do that?

Does the Devil exist, and if so, is he by any chance the least bit, in any way … sympathetic?

Is what I’m saying … ugly? Am I, deep down where it counts?

What, if anything at all, is actually wrong with the sewerline, and is that too some kind of metaphor?

Are we good, in the center of our beings?

Is that all of us, or just some of us?

Was Samantha Stevens, or Elizabeth Montgomery for that matter, a Witch?

And …

Is paying the harsh price for looking deeper a bargain?

Or, as the commonly adopted and accepted wisdom would have it … a sight to be avoided at any cost as we seek to turn our eyes instead toward some heaven and live our best lives?

I did turn it off, sort of. I mean I stopped paying attention to it for a while.

I finished listening to that video I documented and ranted at length about yesterday.

Then after all that I took a shower.

For this post, I’m slacking off and taking it easy, with poetry instead of prose.

***

Went to the workshop
Took off the headphones
Took out a legal pad
and wrote this

The tall brunette mistress I tried hard to avoid
is me.
The tiny blonde woman I embraced once more this time
is me.

They were both rich
and I am not,
was .,.
not.

The lost blind man who was
not actually blind but really
was lost
is me.

I’m not fully convinced that the real people
I know, who also appeared in the dream
were me,
but again so far that is only a theory.

Was the dream a warning?
That my being Lost is Imminent?
Or a warning that your whole structure of living
and thinking means that you are?

Or a tacit acknowledgment
that yes, each one of the real people
who also appeared
is me?

Sometimes I am slapped across the face
by the impression that most of the minor characters
are aneffin’ waste of space
and bandwidth.

But if that impression is valid
and my lectodivine self-enquiry
is authentically performed, then
I am obligated by honor to ask whether I am, too.

Then after all that I took a shower.

If I am calculating correctly, it was the second one I’ve had since Company Left three weeks ago.

The first time, I was hurrying through it because I assumed nothing was different and that the water would quickly reach my ankles again, and threaten to spill over onto the floor. But … that didn’t seem to be happening.

So today, I took a much longer one, about twenty minutes, to idly test the situation. It felt nice.

There was no rising water at all. The shower … is draining.

There is a small chance that it’s draining through some introduced break in the line instead of to the sewer of course. But I strongly doubt it. The only things we messed with were directly related to the old toilet (which is still living out in the yard at the time of this report). As far as I know, the main drainage was unaffected by my wrangling of porcelain …

And yet that would almost certainly mean that the only problem that ever existed was with that old toilet somehow. That there never was a true blockage in the main line.

Or … that the blockage was far downstream, and that it’s been addressed finally by a team of those city workers who have been hanging around more often than usual, for reasons opaque.

Or … something something.

The next step I intend to take about the situation is to paint the ceiling.

I know that statement might worry you further about the current state of my mental health. But I wouldn’t worry, if I were you–which I’m apparently not, so you do as you think best with regard to worrying, and naturally, absolutely, everything else.

I can soothe you by saying that the plan makes perfect (possibly even rational) sense. From …
the perspective of the boots on the ground, which are solely mine, and typically moccasins anyway.

The next step I intend to take not ‘about the situation’ is to put on clean clothes and go for a walk. Right after shutting down the computer for real this time.

(“I have to admit that I’m crying too, but for quite different reasons”.)

I have to admit that I needed to turn off the phones just now.

***

Thus: Lectio Divina is one way of doing self-enquiry–there are others. Perhaps billions of them.

This is Richard Cox. He is the one interviewing Nicole, and the … proprietor? of the channel.

I know pretty much nothing about him, even though I’ve semi-divinely Read tens of thousands of his words in the past few days. (Also in passing, it occurs to me that you might could say the same about me about right now.)

I’ve been struggling much harder than you will ever know with the question of how to introduce his Œuvre to you.

This is Monday.

Which means there are still four days to go before the 9th anniversary of The Spill.

It feels as though The Struggle, the … jihad as they say, will be over by then one way or another.

In a whimsical sense it is already, by which I mean that although his oeuvre may still be an unrevealed mystery, the introduction to it was just completed in the last hour.

Perhaps it is time to turn off the computer as well, for a little while.

I heard her mention it here, in passing, by way of explaining how she first learned to meditate.

A different part of the page says:
240 views
7 years ago

***

I’m not sure I ever learned to meditate.

Maybe I should be interrogating myself as to why
though so far
that is just a theory.

Direct from the Latin and meaning “divine reading”.

In contemplative practice, lectio or reading is the first of four steps.

1) so … read, and preferably aloud.

2) Meditatio: “Allow the words to penetrate your awareness through use of your senses and imagination, your feelings and even visualization. Remain open to receiving a meaning rather than assigning one”.

3) Oratorio: Respond to any meaning that arises, using language of your own. Think of this as prayer if you want to.

4) Contemplatio: Rest in silence and in grace and in love, allowing what you have heard and felt to be absorbed. Let go of reasoning, thinking, and even feeling.

Silence is the ground in which this prayer takes root.

We must also recognize that this is what we are dealing when we engage with other people.

Throwing more and more facts is a useless strategy if our audience is fundamentally unable to receive them.

This is surely the meaning of The Red Pill.

It is symbolic of the aspect of our consciousness that will allow us to question even the most basic aspects of our reality.

To come to doubt the fundamentals.

To break everything down and start again.

To enact a paradigm shift, in our perception.

***

The above are not my words, but a verbatim transcription of the words of one Richard Cox.

According to the number on his page, less than 100 people in all of humanity have ever heard them before.

But now you are among them, even if you only ever hear them in your head as you read.

He’s speaking directly of the tragedy of us–you and me.

Spiller, and spillee.

I’ve been throwing facts at you, day in and year out.

Morpheus says to Neo: “I’m offering you the truth, and nothing more”.

But in our version of the story, Neo says back to Morpheus: “Who in the hell do you think you are, telling me you’ve got the truth, and I don’t?”

Tragedy, and the very essence of it, my One, from the Fishburne perspective, where I sit as I type to you right now and today.

I’ll be in touch again eventually, but first I may need some time to process this.

A little over a year ago, I started doing keto with a waistline of 46 inches.

By late January I had dropped it to 41″. Then progress slowed without ever quite stalling.

Mid-May: 39″.

Yesterday, an honest carefully measured 37″.

My goal in the beginning was 35″, but I’m not obsessed about those last two inches anymore. What I do care about is building up certain muscles (the abdominis transversus in particular), about continuing to eat low-carb but caring less about fat and more about protein, and most of all about having more energy in certain forms.

More motivation. More libido. Cultivating a state, as Mr. DeLauer put it in a video I watched today, where “effort feels good“.

That’s going to involve getting back on my meds too. The first few months of being off them (for financial and psychological reasons) were pretty painless, but the last couple–not so much, and it’s getting worse as time goes by.

Down in the poor skinny hole I’ve dug for myself, I am developing reasons for wanting more energy. Or more precisely, I want to move myself in certain directions that require the projection of greater psychic and libidinal effort (and having that effort feel good)

.,.

There are people in this world, near and far, who disapprove of me.

I have made a kind of sub-career of telling those people, in many elegant and erudite ways, to go fuck themselves. Paradoxically, this practice has sometimes drawn approval to me. I’ve been praised for my integrity, specifically, and for me memorably.

Fair enough. As far as it goes. It might be true that I am a little more integrated than most.

In this time of low energy though, I have reflected upon the disapproval of the majority, and taken their (often implied) criticisms seriously, instead of simply lashing back at them for being wrong in the head–which they still are, mostly–but maybe not entirely.

I think that in spite of the blessings of my real and imagined practices of integrity, I have been … how do I put it? Lazy? No, not quite. A-motivated, might be closer. Lacking in ‘moxie’, as one well-meaning critic once tried to suggest.

Yes. I can be fairly criticized, for being relatively low-moxie. I have, routinely, failed to take the initiative, to grasp destiny in both hands like the horns of a proverbial bull.

What I want you to understand today is that this failure is not entirely attributable to a lack of character over here on my side of the world, as some theatrically disappointed people would have it.

It has a scientific biological basis. It is rooted in the major medical condition that fell on me like a deeply mixed blessing, even before I left the womb.

I didn’t even start becoming a man until my mid-twenties.

It took at least ten years after that for my Maleness to become an accepted and acceptably real fact, to me and to the people closest to me.

In the decades between 16 and 36, it suffered a lot of neglect, from people who really should have paid more attention, cared more; and a fair amount of active damaging abuse (particularly from fathers, and would-be fathers, which may explain a lot to you about my attitudes toward paternalism, and authority, and those who would ‘rule’).

All during that time, almost every bit of the progress I made toward manhood I made solely and painstakingly on my own. Without help. Almost. I went to the doctor and admitted my shame. I kept the subsequent appointments, and paid for them. I crawled up out of the gutter of a long-delayed puberty, and I scratched up the cliff of trying, against the odds, to be a real man (sometimes to even know what one was).

All the while the casually interested crowd looked on, wondering what the hell was wrong with me and once in a while daring to mutter the question in coded language to my very face.

I can credit some of the women I was sexually linked to with helping in some small ways.

I can credit the career counselor who told me, at a risk to his own position: “Kid–somebody told you you were shit, and you believed them“. Thank you for telling me the truth you saw, you meddling jewish socialworking fuck. You were right, and it helped more than you will ever know.

But mostly, I got as far as I did toward becoming a man at all, and then my own man, all on my fucking lonesome.

The broken biology did not stop me. But it did slow me down, and it will always make it harder, every day until the end of my life.

I will keep on keeping on. (‘The only thing I knew how to do. Like a bird that flew.’)

I will keep on telling you to go fuck yourself, when you deserve it, which is regrettably often, and maybe now you will have a little more insight into why I say it, when I say it.

Maybe. In the meantime, just know that when you find yourself thinking sometimes that I’m a whiny little bitch, you’re not entirely, physiologically, wrong about that, either–congratulations on your perspicacity.

This is in large part why I am focused with such singular intention right now on having more energy.

Biohacking, diet magic, the new weight bench, getting back on the meds at any cost–all a part of this grasping, after having more. Not more fame, or money, or social credibility, and for godssake above all not more power, in the way very civilized people use the word.

Just more soul fuel–that’s all–and directing the jets of that newly amplified engine toward the right path, the road not ever taken, but taken now at last.

I only have the dimmest notion of where, if anywhere, it leads.

***

But if you invest in staying close to me
if you keep your faith in me alive
for whatever bent reasons of your own–

then we will find out together.

This is, in my opinion, a huge breaking story, which you will naturally hear nothing about from mainstream sources.

The head of the Centers for Disease Control from 2018-2021 was a man named Robert Ray Redfield Junior.

Being in that position naturally meant that he was routinely savaged by RFKJr. and other people you’ve been instructed to regard as lunatics, all through the Covid years.

Even so.

Two days ago, three years after he left that lofty position, he wrote an opinion piece which I will quote at some length:

“Across a century-plus of cozy courtship, the federal regulators have nearly married the regulated, especially in health care. Today, private industry uses its political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures. (RFK) is right: All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA’s budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies.

…

But it doesn’t stop in the health agencies: the U.S. Department of Agriculture is a captive of industry, too … the agency often favors large corporations over the interests of small farmers and the public’s health.

If we do not discover the depth of our corporate capture problem and fix it, we cannot truly address chronic disease in this country.”

I know that all you smart people I love already understood this, and that this actual fascism-by-definition, this merger of the corporation and the state in the words of Mussolini, infects and makes worse every aspect of our modern lives within the Empire, and far out beyond its borders besides.

As the piece was being published, Redfield went to lunch with RFKJr and said this to him:

The former CDC head, a noted virologist, doesn’t think Bobby is nuts, at all. Quite the contrary.

So if you’d like to cling still, to the belief that he is …

The burden of proof ball is now in your court.

***

Out beyond this smarmy victory lap I still can differ with Dr. Redfield, not because he’s wrong, but because his view of the problem remains professionally parochial.

Regulatory capture in the realm of food and drugs is a problem sure.

But only a symptomatic problem, not the cause of the disease.

The entire apparatus, here in the Land of the Free, is compromised in much the same way.

BOMBSHELL Report: Blinken CAUGHT in COVERUP of Israel Blocking Aid

This isn’t just about the Jab, or your Job.

This isn’t even about our complicity in genocide, per se.

The whole Pax-American project that you were sworn into as a devoted acolyte, when your teenage brain was soft, pliable, and desperate to trust again, the project that plucked you from the gutter and paid your mortgage …

It’s lies and bullshit, smoke and mirrors, baby.

It’s a bill of goods that you were sold hard, and you bought. You paid.

Everybody’s paying and paying, whether they bought or not. I’m here to testify.

And everybody will continue to pay until they’re rolled into their graves at last, declaring their nominally undying allegiance, and the pennies on their eyes.

Is that how you want it?

No. Not in the beating heart of your best self.

We need to figure out a better way.

For everyone and not just ourselves.

Good on Robert Redfield for at least learning that much in seventy-odd years on the planet.

And I thank him for his service–I forgot to mention that he too is a retired Colonel, even if that’s not the service I had in mind.

PMB’s greatest rhetorical/theoretical hits boiled down into a fast hour, via a conference in Portland a couple of weeks ago.

Subsistence as Resistance with Peter Michael Bauer

I didn’t know the sweet little nugget about the etymology of ‘colony’.

Gerald Celente is an Italian guy from the Bronx. He was born in 1946, and like me, after doing hard time inside the System, the best he could come up with was to become his own publisher.

I really enjoyed his takes, one of which was (deep paraphrase ahead):

They told your dad he needed to build a bomb shelter, and they told you to practice hiding under your desk, from Russian bombs.

They didn’t do it because they thought these techniques would save your precious life (because in hindsight that was some seriously foolish crap, and you’d be dead anyway).

They did it to scare the everliving fuck out of you and thus make you a slave to fear.

And thence, to them.

It was no different with those masks we wore for a while to protect us from Chinese bugs.

It is no different right now when they tell you who you have to vote for. From fear.

It will not be any different during the next real or imagined crisis they come up with.

This is the truth of it, and that truth has ramifications.

Can you see what they are?

***

Another, ’cause it’s just too good not to repeat.

Anti-semitic??

The Palestinians are the Semites, brah.

The ethnic cleansers in this case, since 1917, are Ashkenazis from Europe.

Where all the best colonizers come from, right? Ennit?

***

One more. See the vid for the context.

“Ya little bastid. You think I’m telling you what I’m telling you because I want you to be like me? I want you to become Yourself“.

I had a father once.

I just wish to hell I’d had one who could say a thing like that, and mean it.

Who Is Sending More U.S. Troops To The Middle East?

It ain’t Joe.

Is it his wife?

Why isn’t it the elected representatives of the people’s house as the founders intended?

Do questions like these even matter any more?

(And since there are no answers to them, here is some further speculation about what ‘your’ government is doing and why, instead.)

***

“Leon Edward Panetta is an American retired politician and government official who has served under several Democratic administrations as secretary of defense (2011–2013), director of the CIA (2009–2011) ...”

Panetta Calls Israel Terrorists

“No question,” he says.

Do you think he’s wrong?

What possible evidence would you have for thinking that?

Do what you like, doing it naturally. But if it’s too easy–they’re going to disagree.

It’s your life, and isn’t it a mystery?
If it’s nobody’s business, then (paradoxically) … It’s everybody’s game.

Who do you want? Who you be today?
And who is it really, making up your mind?

You want to listen to the man?
Pay attention to the magistrate
And while I got you in the mood
Listen to your own heart beatin’

Own heart beatin’

I’m alright; nobody worry ’bout me
Why you got to gimme a fight?
Why can’t you just let it be?
I’m alright

I’m alright

“.,. that although I am very far from infallible I am so close to always being right as rain.”

Inventation of a new punctuation variant. The parallipsis. With two ells, both because ‘ellipsis’ has two, and because the one-El version is already taken for something else by those damn literati.

***

I had another thought, about expanding my product line. I need to be able to leverage my credit while I still have it, investing wisely in stock that I can turn around for a profit, exactly like the coffee. Ghee that is both organic and grass-fed comes to mind.

But also, just transport. Living out here there is a regular list of things that I can get in a bigger town, but don’t often, because of the gas.

I can’t be the only one.

You could let me be the one to pickup and dropoff your dry cleaning, the vinegar that this Safeway would otherwise gouge you on anyway, the sink clips that are far too expensive at Walt’s from the ShowLowe’s instead.

Take your sick cat to the vet?

This may well turn out to be just another one of those ideas, plans, that seems shiny but turns out to lack sanity and the potential for actual success.

But another viable and realistic way does not exist, that I know of yet.

I need to keep trying anyway, and to keep trying without turning into a penguin.

***

Maybe you recall that time that 50 spooks signed on to a letter claiming that the Hunter-laptop story was Russian disinformation, and it turned out they all knew it was a lie in real time.

They wanted Biden and they got him.

Well now.

700+ War Machine Agents Endorse Kamala Harris (Dore)

The Security State WANTS KAMALA To Win (Greenwald)

… and …

Trump Shooter Ryan Wesley Routh Wrote a Letter. ‘150k to Finish The Job’

I wonder where this drifter would have got his hands on that kind of money. Hmmm.

Listen darlings.

You be you, even if that means voting for her. I’ve declined to disown you for worse.

All I’m asking is that you be fully aware, when you do, of the true nature of the side you are choosing.

The side that killed President John and Patrice Lumumba and Martin King and so many others, all the days of our lives.

It’s true that Trump isn’t better in any significant way.

Even so, I propose once more that he is looking more and more like the lesser, among grimy evils.

***

Related.

JD has a story on AOC coming out guns blazing against “disinformation”.

And then he plays a long series of clips of The Good People disinforming you over and over.

You’ve already seen many of these clips, whether you knew then that they were knowing, malicious, professional lies or not.

You know now.

Does your knowledge not change anything at all, my doves?

Deadline USA Humphrey Bogart 1952 Film in English, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter

I told you about FreeTube a while back. One of the nice things it does is aggregate the community tab postings on YT as well as the videos. I never would have seen this, if I were not using it.

The censorship of alternative voices is very real and getting more extreme by the day. The Good People all calling for an end to ‘malinformation’ and the like is having an effect out here. How you feel about that defines you categorically on a political level, even more than which bad choice you make at the ballot box in a few weeks.

(Don’t think for one second that this crackdown coming just before the elections is coincidental. That would be foolish, and that kind of foolishness is worse than being smeared as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, if you ask me.)

See also Kim Iversen’s take on the subject and please pray for freedom to ring, on the off chance that you value it.

“It would have collapsed on schedule if I’d lowered the temperature by forty degrees.”

English Drama Thriller 1951 – James Stewart, Marlene Dietrich, Glynis Johns

If Mr. Smith was a boffin scientist working in aeronautical safety 70 years ago, long before Boeing broke bad.

The book on which this was based was written by an interesting man named Nevil Shute, who also wrote the true classic On The Beach, which was made into a film at the end of the same decade just before Shute’s death, and just before I incarnated into this vale.

Calley Means says that the heart of the problem is Industrial Agriculture.

Here’s What’s So Messed Up About Bill Gates

That’s not wrong. It just doesn’t go nearly far enough.

The heart of the problem is: industrial anything.

And most especially: military-industrial anything.

No rulers for me, thanks. No industrialist, no bosses, no capitalists. No lieutenants and no commanders, to the extent such things are even possible in this shithole we laud as modern civilization.

Whether we’re talking about the damaged soil or damaged brains, the serious issues are all of a piece.

***

In New York City, a man is gunned down, by a cop, for jumping a subway turnstile without paying the three-dollar fare. That was “against the policy”, but the Officer did it anyway.

His wild shots entered the bodies of not only the suspect, but of a hospital administrator as well, and–irony of ironies–of a fellow policeman to boot.

Yes, he shot another cop over this three dollar bullshit.

And then claimed there was “a knife”.

Quelle surprise: They can’t find a knife.

The DEI hire of a mayor is lauding him for being A Protector. Really.

The subways are now full of Brooklyn protestors protesting, and being arrested for it.

And to put the cherry on top of it all … NYC paid out 1.5 Billion last year in damages for shit like this.

And they never did get their three dollars back on it.

Please explain to me how your lovely Free Democracy is not totally, off-the-rails insane.

The query is purely rhetorical.

This is a film noir.

But there was never filmed one lighter, in its dark heart.

Deported
1950 Film in English
Märta Torén (an Italian Contessa this time), Jeff Chandler (the antihero), Claude Dauphin

***

Losing Your Job For The Crime Of Doing It Right

Resonates here, Mick. The same axe fell here on the other side of the world.

I’d do it again and I know you would too. How else can a body play it, and still hold on to its vaunted integrity? This is the question of our modern times.

***

How Seed Oils Hack Our Brains & Poison Our Bodies

There are all kinds of food deserts.

Another present for you.

I’m not going to stop giving a small additional voice to people like Ray McGovern and Glenn Greenwald here, because what they’re saying is often crucially important, and I agree with the general thrust of their View of the World.

But I realize that listening to crusty old fucks like them and me can get to be a chore sometimes.

So here is a bright and photogenic young Asian-American man, in conversation with a pleasant Scandinavian interviewer, saying many of the same things in a condensed hour.

The US Empire Cannot Recover From This | Danny Haiphong

No rush, on thanking me, particularly if you find yourself gazing upon this present with a crinkled nose like a regifted fruitcake–I know many of you will; alas and apologies in advance for shitting in the punchbowl, as one does.

***

A bonus Western: South of St Louis (1949)

This is a very early ancestor of the trope of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a rare film in which Joel Macrea plays a less than totally likeable character.

And Alexis Smith gives a brilliantly advanced portrait of real and admirable womanhood, at least for 75 years ago, around the time of the blossoming of the Unipolar Hegemony.

***

Kansas City Confidential (Classic Film-Noir, 1952) John Payne, Lee Van Cleef

Crime and Punishment | English Full Movie | Crime Drama (for my fellow Raskolniks)

***

Scott Ritter is of the opinion that we almost all died last week. It may comfort you to know that he is just another crusty old fuck. But I bring it up because that’s what the Cassandra post was all about, way back then on the 15th of this lovely month.

***

People don’t change, and as for me, I change even less than most. I’m a little healthier now in my bodymind, but not much, and anyway you know that’s not what I’m talking about.

If you thought I was a cool guy when you were six, but you don’t now, well, what changed was, in the main, your perspective. If you worshiped the ground I walked on when you were twenty-five, but now profess agnosticism on the subject of my relative divinity, that’s due to some twists and turns in your spiritual path, and not because I’m much different than I was then.

The same is true on the subject of initiation, and … being ‘right’ in general, in my humble opinion. Which further is, these days, that I’m not anywhere near infallible, and yet most of the time I am, nevertheless, every bit as Right as Rain.

***

Kim Iversen on the practical mechanics of how the oligarchs use distraction to manipulate your mind. It’s perhaps pointless to mention it, but in this short clip she identifies herself as both post-Bernie and post-progressive. (So say we all. Or … I, at least.)

If you need more Kim, she’s on a tear and tour right now.

***

A nice example of how little ‘democratic freedoms’ mean any more these days, just in case the fact that both opposition media and elections are both banned in the Ukraine at present, and that our little friends over there maintain an active kill list for people whose speech they don’t like managed to elude your notice.
Rest in peace, Gonzalo Lira. Source

***

A Rising Young Star Inside The Democratic Party Firmament Quits It, In Despair

My favorite part is that her psychiatrist tried to talk her out of it.

My second favorite part is that her quit video got 30 million views.

Which leads right into my third favorite part: Ms. Barker giving up is proof positive that you don’t have consider yourself a loser or a social misfit to be on this path of honest reflection, nor to throw up your hands and then wash them, of these shitlibs pretending to care about the working class, for once and for all.

***

Besides watching pieces of all these things, I spent Sunday afternoon in serious meal prep. The process of basing a week’s worth of meals on a roast, and refining the recipe, is approaching a state of perfection.

The main thing I learned today was that a nine-pounder is just a little too big for both my needs and my kitchen.

It seems to me that Seven, or a pound a day for every day, would be the ideal thing for the present solo-flying circumstance.

Most of all I wish I could find grass-fed or organic meat in such quantities at any price. I can’t, locally, and it’s rare even with driving into Prettytown or Albuquerque. The time for turning again with hopefulness to ButcherBox or a similar remotely shipped solution is approaching fast.

Lord knows I tried.

You don’t need Netflix to chill in style. Most of that stuff is sugarpoison for the brain anyway.

There’s plenty of subtle propaganda in many (most) old movies too. But it’s much easier to see, and consider, and to piss out if it doesn’t suit you.

I especially loved the first one here for reasons not entirely clear to me. The characters are poor, and maybe you could call it a kitchen-sink drama.

That’s probably got something to do with it.

Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino & Claude Rains in “Moontide” (1942)

Sirocco FULL MOVIE | (Humphrey Bogart, Marta Toren, Lee J. Cobb)

Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida in John Huston & Truman Capote’s “Beat the Devil” (1953)

Affair in Trinidad | Rita Hayworth | Glenn Ford

Gene Tierney & George Montgomery in Henry Hathaway’s “China Girl” (1942)

William Holden, Nina Foch & Lee J. Cobb in “The Dark Past” (1948)

Sci-Fi Adventure Movie – Unknown World (1951)

This last is a good movie, but I especially enjoyed the first few minutes, on the state of Civilization as it was typically seen then. You get to follow the science for real this time, or decline to, as it were. I know you’ll make the right choices, and look both ways before crossing the street on rainy nights.

James Mason & Dan Duryea in “One Way Street” (1950) -feat. William Conrad & Rock Hudson (uncredited)

It happened here in a stylized version of this town that I visit often while sleeping. This time it was overcrowded, probably for the fair.

Apparently I spoke too sharply to a small rich Asian boychild who only wanted to talk my ear off and be friends or something.

His father dragged in a reporter for the local paper. But all I had to say was No Story and they all went away. I was shocked by how easy it was.

Later after the danger had passed I went back to make things right on my own.

It turned out that the mechanism for doing that was making sure he got the toy he wanted.

It was a bag, of bright colors, which said on it in big letters: Basura.

Which means Trash.

We all lived happily ever after, and when I woke up it was somewhat unexpectedly raining.

More coffee.

Hmm. Alright.

To get there and back is 3500 miles via Denver, which would run about $1400 in gas, but zero for motels doing it My Way.

At least one set of new tires and an oil change; figure another $800.

Twentyfive hundreds, with a tight budget for incidentals.

However …

If I’m transporting any passengers I’d likely need to bring the trailer for the extra sleeping berth. Tires for that beast, well I’d be guessing, but another $500 might cover it.

I’m willing to risk any breakdowns and just charge them to my groaning cards. I’m willing to cover a parking place if no safe free ones can be found within 100 miles of the Lake Michigan coast. That seems fair. Perhaps even magnanimous.

I will begin thinking seriously about a GoFundMe around Christmastime.

In the meantime, potential co-pilots are encouraged to apply early, so I can know what to ask for when the time comes–I mean, some might want a shower and a continental breakfast along the way too–and what names to ask for it under.

The civilized will say: Just fly for fuckssake! but those people are the same ones that heard about my keto journey and just told me to get on board with Ozempic, which demonstrated a rather total lack of understanding of who I am and what I’m becoming.

It’s come to the point where I feel the same regarding car rentals too I’m afraid.

You are of course always welcome to engage in honest dialogue (about anything anytime)–and even try to change my mind–but on that latter score I don’t feel sanguine about your chances, and my apologies for any character flaws or intransigence in advance.

As ever, god bless us.

Every one.

I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to Ray.

He was born the same year WWII started.

From 1963 to 1990, he served in the belly of the beast as an Intelligence Analyst for an agency whose name you would recognize.

The information and experience he gained from that led him to later form a group called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

He knows who killed John Kennedy.

He knows what these fools we call our leaders and leader-wannabes are really up to right down to today, and next week.

Don’t listen to me. I know it’s painful for you sometimes to even think about it.

Do listen to him, if you really and actually care about Knowing.

Or roll over and slumber.

Let do what thou wilt be the whole of the law.

Crime and Punishment | English Full Movie | Crime Drama

“There’s people I like
that are smart
that are saying this drivel to me
and then when you bring up a lie that is way more important …”

Yes. Resonance. That is how I feel. Too. ABC Finally Fact Checks A Lie. ‘So where the fuck are we right now?’ …

We are back, on a healthy circadian rhythm, for a hot minute. I celebrated the harvest moon eclipse and seasonal transition with a rare 10.5 hours of honest sleep all at once.

What I’m struggling to say again and still is that while I don’t consider myself a single-issue voter, The War Machine of empire is very centrally my most important issue.

It directly connects (in this one fevered mind at least) with why you are struggling with affordable housing, and why so many people are living under bridges, and why none of us have real health care (whether or not we have the fake insurance).

A cancer diagnosis is not an immediate death sentence in this modern day of Progress.

But the odds are overwhelming that if you get one, you will be utterly broke and cast down into poverty and debt within two years.

Not death. Just destitution.

That is the how ‘we’ choose to run things here.

You can say the same, about the destruction of the Bill of Rights, piecemeal, over the last 20 years, culminating in the current efforts to totally gut Amendment One.

It all circles back to the fact that we choose the Machine, and Death, over Life and Living, even as we dance to the lying tune of her Joy while stuffing the creamy sugarpoison into our mouths in ecstasy and celebration.

Those who scream loudest about spreading democracy scream in that same immoral ecstasy each time Power comes close again to assassinating a candidate and narrowing their own choice.

Before I was even quite born, President Eisenhower issued that warning, about the Military-Industrial Complex.

None of us heeded it.

A couple of years later they murdered the one man who could have heeded it effectively.

And then Martin, and Bobby, and Malcolm, and all the lesser lights too. Bang bang.

***

The whole basis of a modern State is maintaining a Monopoly on Violence.

It’s okay for them to exercise that monopoly and kill George Floyd and Palestinian babies by the truckload and the people of Flint in Michigan and any so-called President that gets in their way.

It’s not okay for you to even own this gun or that gun, because that violates the monopoly. Maybe you don’t have the right to an abortion either, but honestly: so what?

If you want one, you will get one. I mean by that an abortion, but the same applies to the guns.

Shouting yourself hoarse about either is exactly and precisely what they want you to do.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Keep your attention focused on the black woman puppet now, and Saving Democracy.

That’s what matters.

That’s right.

Be soothed.

Sleep well.

He believes with all his goofy heart, that so much could be solved by simply murdering Vladimir and Donald, no doubt very ‘democratically’.

He believes we are morally obligated to Help Ukraine. It’s not open to question. It’s simple good and evil in black and white.

In essence he believes exactly as you believe (not guessing here: I’ve read you say it more than once).

The difference being, he actually, apparently, allegedly had the courage of those particular convictions.

Who is Ryan Routh and What Are His Political Beliefs?

He believes exactly as the Most Respected Journalists you watch believe; as the Most Respected Politicians you embrace believe.

What Caused the Second Trump Assassination Attempt?

He believes in the blue and yellow flag of The Oh-So Free State of Ukraine, and although he thinks Trump is a fascist (whether or not he knows what the word means), he is totally comfortable getting in bed with real Nazis–people that every mainstream outlet openly called Nazis until it turned out they were on Team America, and therefore actually the good guys, see?

Sort of like when it turned out We could do business with Muslim Extremists in Syria and Iraq and all those other places. As Barry O said about the Bush war crimes, well, you know, all that bad stuff, it happened In The Past.

Second Trump Assassination Attempt Tied to Pro-Ukraine Extremism?

***

Thus far, there’s no conspiracy theory, just fact-based observations.

Did you know that the term “conspiracy theorist” was invented by the three-letter agencies to discredit those who suspected the truth about JFK in the Sixties?

Forgive the digression.

Forgive too the linking of … let’s call it sharp-edged speculation, below. Personally, I am more or less of the same mind as Mr. Metzger here.

Trump Assassin Connections To The C and the I and the A

Trump Assassin Was Radicalized By Corporate Press

It’s not all really even speculative, to my eye.

Enjoy.

Tonight after the partial eclipse of the moon (thanks for the alert, R), the nighttime temperature is set to plunge by 15 degrees over last night.

It won’t stay quite that cool for long of course. But it clearly marks the change of the season anyway.

***

This: Russia REVEALS Details About BRICS Future: New Membership Category

led me here

All I will say is that the season is changing in more than one way. I know it more or less worries you. Maybe it should, but I doubt it. I believe the things that should properly scare you are much closer to home. Which is, perhaps, just like my opinion man.

***

Closer to home.

What is this now?

Answers here and to be clear the arrows and the concrete pads scattered across the country are not the scary part either. Look even closer.

Perhaps even inside.

“Follow The Science”.

Okay. I’m willing. Because those words say: “Adhere to this rational abstract ideal.”

But that’s not what they mean, when you say them.

What you mean, as a practical matter, is much more like: Follow The Scientists.

Who are very human, and also often buried to their necks in conflicted interests that you can’t see, and that sometimes even they can’t (or won’t) see too.

They were wrong about almost everything, and a lot of them were corrupt besides, overtly or covertly.

How will that truth affect you the next time they try to scare you into compliant helplessness?

(Protip: the next time might have already happened.)

Sopranos Star Refused Covid Jab & Paid The Price! w/Drea de Matteo

Okay. Enough of that for now, Mr. Belletrisms. And as for you, dear reader, Ms. de Matteo is featured in several clips currently on JD’s channel, and they’re all worth watching–you do whatever you like. You be you. Always.

***

It’s three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and the post-Fair quiet seems luminous and preternatural. I’ve been up a long time.

All the laundry is done, except the shirt I was wearing while doing it.

All the water receptacles are full again, although under current conditions they will be empty in about 48 hours.

I just ate a whole watermelon because it was the last thing in the pantryfridge that was in danger of going bad.

Except for the knife and cutting board I used for that job, all the dishes are done and so I unbuilt the sink again. No more dishes will get done until I build it back.

Is there gas in the car? Yes there’s gas in the car. The people down the hall don’t know who I am, partly because there is no hall, and that makes me happy.

While I was out running around I had a thought, as sometimes happens.

I suddenly thought: This art you do is largely about the process of justifying your own existence.

I didn’t tell my brain to shut up. I thought about the thought, and concluded that there was truth in it, and that I didn’t actually even mind if it was completely true.

But.

I am bothered by the underlying premise, by the proto-thought, which is that some big part of me must believe that my existence needs justifying.

What would it look like to live life without the need for such a justification?

Would I still do art, and if I did, how would it look differently?

Would I still want so much to save your brain from the bad people? Would I stop caring about being that kind of savior?

Maybe I should try it for a while and see.

Maybe I should experiment, and follow … the science.

A fascinating discussion of why yesterday’s Cassandra warnings might yet turn out to be premature, from the standpoint of geopolitics:

UK Shocked US Missile Strike No; Blames Sullivan

On the MilitarySummary channel, there’s another bit of speculation on why the Atlanticists seem to be choosing to back down from hitting Russia deep at the last minute. It seems that the Houthi rebels down in Yemen flew a couple of Very Sophisticated Missiles right over the heads of two American destroyer ships and hit an airfield in Tel Aviv, the capital of the nominal state of Israel.

No one is sure who gave the rebels such advanced technology, but there are very few countries in the world who have it to give, and Russia is certainly one of them.

So, the theory goes, Biden is blinking and maybe even reversing promises to the hawkish Brits, precisely because he got Putin’s theoretical message: You wanna play hardball Joe? You wanna blow up my people? Well that’s a very nice puppet state you have down there on the Mediterranean … in fact you seem to be swimming in nice puppet states all over the world …

Wouldn’t it be a shame if anything happened to them?

You and I know so very little of the real dangers of modernity, or how many times we’ve come this close to wiping ourselves out by such escalatory bluster and bullfrog puffery.

Of course this isn’t nearly over yet, and this is just one little crisis.

But it seems as though we might have time to take another breath.

Don’t waste it.

I will try not to either.

***
PS: For the record, I wrote all of the above just before learning that the second would-be Trump assassin was a Russophobic whack job. It makes me wonder how many more Lee Harveys the Empire has in the chamber, and how many of them they’ll activate before November.

It’s interesting to me that the concept of a kitchen sink has been used in so many ways.

I ripped mine out last week and have been using the basin in an inefficient way. To me, it’s more important that a shower, a laundry system, or even a toilet when it comes to basic utility infrastructure. The first job now is to re-establish its viability using a brand-new faucet, all the old parts, and some fresh caulk.

This I will do in a much quieter neighborhood, because officially the fair is over, and that is a blessing.

Source, from this sad Friday afternoon just past

Meanwhile

UK missiles ready to strike Russia

U.S. Set To Allow Ukraine To Use European Missiles to Strike Deep Inside Russia

Slap my ass and call me Cassandra, but it’s not looking good out there in WWIII land.

Who was supposed to be the expansionist empire again?

Another young American woman activist has been murdered in cold blood by an Israeli sniper for the crime of protesting. Her name was Aysenur Eygi.

Short version of the story

Long version of the story

Your Biden-Harris administration has already signaled that they won’t do a damn thing about it.

***

With an effort, the house is nearly refugee-livable again, and I can start to think about getting on toward fixing it for real. The outdoor cats are freaked out, edgy, and scarce, because this is the week of the county fair and I live a block from the fairgrounds. In two days that annual hell will be done with for 2024. Spilling daily means never having to take questions about how I’m a-doing seriously, because if you wanted to know, you already would.

Richard D. Wolff & Michael Hudson (Two Very Smart Economists): Is the US Rapidly Approaching Bankruptcy?

‘The answer may surprise you’.

You cannot listen to and understand what these people are telling you clearly, and then come back around to the question of elections still believing that it matters, even a little bit, whether the reddish-orange guy or the blue lady wins.

All the little cultural hot-button signaling issues that you pray to and hinge everything on, like abortion and gun control and prayer in schools, are revealed as ridiculous distractions from the fact that you and I, We The People, are being systematically fucked, and don’t even notice because we’ve been taking that rape and exploitation all our lives.

This is the truth about what we call Capitalist Democracy.

Read it and weep, or just go on with your lives blind to it.

I’m sure it’ll be fine either way.

Candace Owens Calls Out Rabbi Shmuley in Epic Debate Rant

Wall Street Journal Peddles Phony Story About Nord Stream

How Democrats Lost Their Way
(A second piece of the Dore-Taibbi interview)
and on a related note

How Anti-War Democrats Became Bush/Cheney NeoCons
(The first thing posted by PrimoRadical this year)

For Those I Love Who Think Bobby Is ‘Weird’

Dick Cheney’s Endorsement Of Kamala Signals End Of Democratic Party

Dems Applaud Dick Cheney’s Endorsement of Kamala (Greenwald with the historical perspective; probably the most important video on this list)

Over to the Duke City. A night there. Another day getting back to the base.

That base and core is in a sad way. The surface layer is a tornado of neglected piles. The deeper layer is a tangle of deeper problems, laid bare now but still unaddressed.

I have a lot of work to do and it starts tonight.

Even though that’s important, it’s more important that I become a serious and attentive artist again here (and over there too).

We’ll start with cleaning up and cleaning out. There are of course a couple hundred unwatched videos and I’ll have the headphones on as I make all the things better. Here’s the first really good one, in reverse chronological order, to get things rolling

Jimmy Dore: Kyle Kulinski’s Transition to Shitlib Is 100% Complete (with Matt Taibbi)

On the first, which was the 6th, we mainly ran into Flag and shopped in a very focused way. I got a couple pairs of pants that fit well. But the star purchase, eighty dollars on clearance, was a really nice weight bench.

Also got the water turned off. Mostly. Long and opaque story.

Yesterday on the seventh was a very hardworking and somewhat depressing day.

I completely pulled apart the kitchen sink in preparation for replacing the leaking faucet–success.

I also removed the toilet, and found problems underneath it that I cannot easily solve on my own. I’m gonna need a plumber, at least for an hour or two.

Today was recovery mode. Laundry, and a whole lot of dishes cleaned very well, but without the aid of running tap water.

Tomorrow evening is Albuquerque, and the day after I come back here alone to try to rebuild my drainage utility from scratch, with a dose of professional help, and eventually get the new toilet installed, the water turned back on, and essentially resume some semblance of a normal-looking life.

Plus weight training.

May it all be as simple as finally typing it, and may typing it flow more easily and naturally than it has during this serious time; amen.

All things being equal, I too would prefer a woman President.

But things aren’t equal.

Every single last one of them that the System has offered up has been a bloodlust-crazed neo-con warhawk: Palin, Clinton, dear Nikki and now The Kam.

Trump’s record on this issue that matters most is better than any of them. Not great at all, just better. And Vance actually gets it. He is pretty close to an isolationist, and that is a better start than we’ve had in my entire lifetime and then some.

Do I care that he thinks I’m a childless soyboy cat lady? No I do not. I am one, and relatively proud of it, and he’s entitled to his dumb opinion on the issue. He earned it, by being an almost anti-war candidate.

In essence, the great orange satan is now the new lesser evil by a nose.

I don’t need to bother voting for him–he’s going to take my state’s electoral votes easily. I am once more ‘free’ to toss away my vote on Green Jill or the young soldier who burned himself to death protesting genocide. Rest his soul.

So …

Democracy, fuck yeah.

Technology has bypassed Roe v. Wade and if your concern is poor women having cheap, easy, and effective access to abortion, then fund purchases of those two new pills for them. They work and are not yet illegal even in the reddest states.

The answer to gun violence has nothing to do with banning more things, any more than the answer to hateful speech is censorship.

If you actually believe in ‘Democracy’, then work on bringing it back. You’ll have to account for the 50% of your fellow citizens who take stances at the polar opposite of yours on all these non-issues, instead of writing them all off as hicks and deplorables who are just ruining everything for everybody.

These boutique issues you cling ever-tighter to now don’t amount to anything practical any more. They’re only signals of a deprecated form of virtue.

And wacky old RFKJr is neither your enemy nor a real problem either.

If you want things to actually get better inside this evil empire and elsewhere in this sad world, work to stop the endless wars and the people who profit from them most.

For starters.

In the meantime we can work on deciding whether Property really equals Theft, definitely a topic for some later show.

Thanks for being there to listen. God bless us every one.

To the darling giftcarders–the umbrella is on the way and so are pics of it. Thank you!

I appreciate the wishes for a happy birthday. Please also wish for me the view above, every morning with my own coffee, french-pressed or poured over with care. That is what I’ll be wishing for, if not in the year to come precisely, at least soon.

The air in Silver

is very

very

clear.

American Settler (in Israel this time) Explains Why Colonialism Isn’t A Bad Thing

I’ll let Russ and Keaton (both also American Jews), do the talking about brainwashing this time, to spare myself the taint of ranting.

***

As for me on the homefront, the Albuquerque piece of the trip is done and the longer southern loop needs to start in an hour or two or three. Yesterday’s experience of going to the big city and dealing with people again was not a pleasant one. But it did feel rather revelatory and clarifying. There’s video for that. Eventually.

Four scoops and four minutes

Petrified Minerals

Sometimes upon waking I am struck with these fragments of crystallized imagery that don’t really fit in neatly anywhere.

A while back, somebody asked me if I ‘wouldn’t rather have a nice new truck’.

I answered. In real time and then again here, a bit sharply both times, defensively, as it were, on behalf of my ancient pickup.

But I have a fresh answer.

It is: yeahhh … sorta.

It would be great to go back to the days of a vehicle so nice and new that all I ever have to do to it is stick assiduously to the maintenance schedule and otherwise just jump in and go, without thinking (at least for the first 100K miles. And I think it would almost certainly be a Tundra.)

But.

I am absolutely unwilling to go back to doing what I was doing, in order to be able to afford such unthinking luxury, which consisted mainly of enslaving myself to some pile of bosses, and their schedule for my days.

So … my critics near and dear are right in a sense. I don’t deserve a nice new truck–I am completely unwilling to make the sort of devil’s bargains that would make me that kind of deserving.

Here’s what I’d do if I was.

Very first thing, wipe all traces of consumer debt, about 20K worth. Second thing, wipe out what’s left on my mortgage, another 50. Third thing: stoop so low as to kill the last ten thousand of student loan debt that Joe promised to pay off and never will. Not because I think I owe it–I don’t–I worked it off just the way they also promised I could. But just to never have to think about it again.

Then I’d be even, and I could start thinking instead about ‘what to buy’, and a new truck would not be near the top of that list.

A habitation for the land in Silver. Maybe 70 thousands worth of doublewide at minimum.

A brand-new cargo trailer, ten or twelve maybe (I already have all the stuff to make it habitable as well, and possess an old trailer besides, which even still would need a lot of work).

A brand-new engine for my lovely old Lariat, and a transmission to match. A few enhancements to the suspension; a transfer case … I don’t know how much that would all come to in today’s dollars. But that would bring me most of the advantages I would care about in a new truck, while maintaining the old-school cool, complete with a copper plate.

Would 200 thousand, or a quarter of a million dollars I didn’t earn thus make my life perfect?

It would, technically.

Would it make me free?

That is exactly the kind of great question I insist on having the time to ponder.

Instead of giving that very time away to a Massa, no matter how nice or kind or undemanding a Massa it might be, and no matter how many dollars self-enslavement brought in.

***

This is the theory part:

My Work is what I rather pretentiously proclaim to be my art.

But my job, I reckon, is to get as close to the kind of perfection described above as I can, on a budget of maybe half that much money at best. Even that would likely mean selling off this house, which is not quite a devil’s bargain, but maybe a kind of gambling at a casino owned by a lesser demon.

***

Today, I stand in the place where I live.

Tomorrow, I turn eighteen again.

I’m looking forward to a life well lived.

A short and sweet take on why this is a true duopoly (sorry Colonel), from a black man being persecuted by it actively right now.

The same point is reinforced by 200 High-Profile Republicans Just Endorsed Kamala!

Chris Hedges takes on Zion: ‘The Project Has Failed’

And Chris one more time. An Israeli airstrike kills two hostages and hundreds of Palestinians, without laying a scratch on the two diplomats it was supposedly targeting. Then, as the sole surviving hostage reports, they lie about it and try to use her story as self-fluffing propaganda.

She’s not having what you’re having.

This is not the first time this very thing has happened, with bombs your tax money paid for. It will not be the last, no matter who ‘wins’ in November. We all lose.

Because this is a colonial project birthed in genocide just exactly like America was.

It’s a shame, isn’t it, that we can’t see Palestinians as noble savages in feathered headdresses desperately fighting the inexorable forces of modernity?

Your bombs and your anchorpeople both make that impossible.

This is what we think of as Spreading Democracy and Freedom.

And it has been happening all over the world for your whole life.

This week I haven’t been much of an artist. There’s been a different job to do. I’ve needed to get a dead van roadworthy. It needed oil massaged into it, and some TLC.

I paid some other dues too, and there’s been a small catsplosion out there in the yard to attend to.

I also tackled another big hairy mess consisting of data.

I have two laptops in daily use. On them, and on scattered external hard drives and USB storage media, there were piled terabytes of … mostly crap, and the rest … archives. I have every post I’ve written in ten years of spilling and every video that I’ve posted in two years of filming and editing, but I also have complete shit like committee notes that I didn’t even care about back when the meetings were happening in olden times.

I haven’t dealt with most of it, properly, and I pray to god I never will.

But I’ve thrown it all into neat boxes, backed them up, and taken them to a specially designed space in the basement next to the furnace.

What is left as still relevant and useful is about a single gigabyte of files in neat folders, on a single GNU-Linux operating system. Thus:

It’s slightly more complicated than that, but not by much. There is, for example, a second drive on the same machine for mirroring updates of the same data (as well as all the basement horrors). There is a scrubbed 1TB external that holds a second copy of everything and a third copy of the actual important 1GB out of a thousand.

I’m pretty much ready at any time to nuke and repave this last Linux I’m writing on tonight, pull a fresh copy of that luscious creamy gig, and begin again fresh.

It happened very fast–mere days–compared to how long the same process is taking in the real world house. Mainly this is because digital basement boxes don’t take up physical space, or weigh anything, or take calories to move.

Even so, my kitchen is about 85% perfect now, measured by square footage.

The bathroom, well that as you know is a whole ‘nother story, and that’s next.

The bedroom is waiting for the sick cat who lives in it to be finally integrated into the General Population, and that story is one of authentic but incremental progress.

A dressing room. A workshop room. A shed or two. Onward, to the vehicles.

That’s the truth, of this life.

It’s been a good year.

In the next few days I will continue to post a lot of political junk you don’t care about, because that’s easy for me, and cathartic. I’ll be on the road, and I imagine that will produce footage of some interesting kind, to be cut into, ahem, Content, later into the month.

Thanks for sticking with me through this kind of problematic time–if you are–and if you’re not, well then, ‘you’re not hearing me anyway’, insert ambiguous emoticon here.

Zuckerberg Says Biden Admin Wrongfully Pressured Him To Censor Users

He did the wrong thing, around Hunter’s laptop and the entire ‘Russian disinformation’ meta-garbage story, and is now whining to Congressional Republicans about Pressure.

Which would be fine except:

Ongoing, Worsening Threats to Free Speech Over Israel Revealed (Different channel, but there is the little zuck’s face, right there in the thumbnail)

NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

It’s just the wrong thing in response to pressure about the Palestinians and their supporters now.

God preserve me from needing to have anything to do with this oligarch beast or his shitty platform, ever again.

Details starting to emerge about the arrest.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov ARRESTED By French Police For Free Speech

“Other people might have done bad things on your platform and we don’t like it.”

SNL’s Kenan Thompson Live At The DNC!

John Deere: A Proud AMERICAN Company (7.2 billion in stock buybacks, plus massive layoffs at the same time)

Telegram Founder Arrested For Pissing Off The Ruling Censors

Once More With The Weeb To Show You Kursk

“Perform for your contemporaries,
but what they require
not what they praise.”

–Friedrich Schiller, via Helga Zepp-LaRouche on Dialogue Works

In other words, eat your vegetables. (vairtere.com)

And make sure there’s always good coffee in your pantry too. (anaprim.com)

I’ll probably have still more brilliant yet self-serving advice for you soon.

***

So five of RFK’s brothers and sisters issued a statement denouncing him for his political views and methods today.

Learning this news felt so familiar. I can’t put my finger on it.

Human truth and you do you. Honestly. Seriously. Your opinions are valid, and noted, and I have, as I said, no desire to be a bad influence on you, or necessarily any kind of influence at all; insert the prayerhands emoji here.

The connections …

between Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski and Phillip Marlowe of Bogart fame

“The Sam Elliot character is there as a substitute for Marlowe’s narration.”

How I so love this kind of shit.

Speaking of narrators, Mr. SpaceFleeFilms is not very gifted at it. But as writer and editor–hell of a job. I really loved the way a lot of scenes from The Rockford Files just appeared without comment here. They gave the comparisons an almost universal scope.

From a certain angle, the war you are so anxious to avoid has already been raging forever.

It’s just a polite and ice cold conflict, often covered in Sprinkles, whatever they are, like Cuba was once covered in missiles.

The battlefield is inside you (inside us) and it can get pretty bloody.

When you pull off a tactical maneuver and win a fight, I cheer. I think We all do.

From another angle there is no war, perhaps because there is none worth fighting. It’s all tats, and tits, and not the fun kind.

Here on the Pokrovsk front, I got down and dirty with it yesterday. I cooked for real.

Shine up the battle apple anti-recipe book and I’ll show you how.

First you Sprinkle spices on your hunk of meat. I used salt and pepper and Arbol. Some people say you have to work them into the flesh, but I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, and it all worked out.

Then you grab the Le Creuset dutch oven you bought when the money was flowing like rainwater in the parched gutters, and you sear the hunk on medium-high on every side.

Cut two or three onions in half and put them face down in the pot. Use them as a trivet to keep the meat up off the surface. Add a box of broth.

You can of course add carrots and potatoes (root vegetables!) and all that at the same time, but I can’t, for keto reasons. So instead I poured the second half of the bottle of enchilada sauce on top, and then a whole stick of butter, and I put it in the oven on 300.

It was supposed to take about four hours, but I checked it after two and a half and it was way up above anybody’s idea of a food safety temperature. I let it keep going anyway, because I wasn’t done editing that beast of a video, and secretly I was hoping it would all fall apart to a gentle forking.

Complete success. But … I’ll say this, too. There is no point in going to all that effort for a two-pound roast. Next time I’ll do four at least.

As you savor the taste of victory, call your opponent out for peace negotiations.

Be generous.

The Golden Rule and all that.

Tonight there will be real tacos, not that shit in a plastic box from the Safeway deli.

Finally do not mistake this for Progress. That’s a whole different Episode.

We take as our text today the 11th Chapter of Luke.

I don’t consider this Spill to be “social” media and it’s the same for the little films, even if and when they do get posted to Google’s monster video platform.

The only social-media I really have consists of Family Text Threads, and, off to the side, a Twitter account that I mainly use to shitpost responses to those FTTs without actually contributing to sending the threads themselves in bad directions.

(Though I am tempted to do so often.)

That’s been working okay. But last night I was tempted again, and instead of just venting off at Twitter, I sinned and responded directly.

In penance, this morning I’m working on tweaking that system, to be able to use it as a more effective shield from personally committing exactly such Sins. (Religare is ‘to bind back’, and that’s what I’m doing, to and for myself.)

It starts over here on my own platform where I can say whatever I want, however I want, and do it in ludicrous depth if I feel like it (and clearly I do).

Twitter is an intermediate tool for converting a post here into a bite-sized format and a shortlink, which can be posted to the threads as a pointer to that full response.

The shortlink can finally be posted to a FTT–where it can be taken in by those who actually WANT my responsive takes, and blissfully ignored by the undoubted majority, who, I infer with all due gnashing–Don’t.

We’ll try this improved method, and see how it goes.

For purposes of this immediate case, to my brother and my nephew and my step-pater I will only say: This is all your fuckin’ fault, hermanos.

With the majestic magnanimity so characteristic of my venerable and noble soul, I forgive you your transgression. You may consider this forgiveness as well for never once ever stooping to entangle yourself in my work and art by so much as the price of a bag of magical organic beans. You do you, because what we choose to support or not with our attention and our spending is a grave and serious matter, between ourselves and god almighty above.

Back to real life with both sin and hard feelings expiated, at least as far as I’m concerned. Hallelujah from the baffled king. It should be a hell of a Thanksgiving dinner eh? Eh?

If you NEED a last word on the subject, there are at least two venues now where you can have it.

But the FTT is not one of them–I won’t respond to you there any more if I can at all help it–all I ask is that you consider your options in that regard with the same kind of social study and care I’m modeling for you here; and Selah.

It’s a podcast. It’s from NPR.

The subject of it is one I care passionately and deeply about. Wilderness. Wildness.

The first 3-minute teaser episode is mainly set in my wilderness, the Gila.

I should be very excited.

Instead I viscerally hated that first episode and I will not be listening to the two episodes they’ve posted after it so far.

If you want to know why you can refer to the video I shot coming up out of Riverton Wyoming a little while ago. I don’t need to say it again.

You may feel differently. I hope so. Enjoy.

That is all.

Recently I’ve contended that there IS no “Freedom” without being able to drink from the river.

Maybe you thought:
whatever dude. Water comes in pipes now. It’s better that way, join the 21st century.
Or maybe you thought:
whatever dude. It’s too late to bitch. Nothing can be done. What does it matter?

To the moderno-fatalists I have nothing to say–‘night’night.

To those who would claim that the Civilized way is better, I would say yes … okay …

Until it isn’t.

Until the piped water is full of E. coli, until the pipes leach lead and give kids brain damage, until you have to, in one way or several, pay for it.

For water. To drink.

Meaning that ‘working’ at a job (probably to make someone else rich) is suddenly Mandatory, assuming you don’t want to drink at gas station bathrooms, or die of thirst, and all because the river is full of killer shit.

Maybe you even like your job. Maybe you’d be one of those megamillions lotto winners who keeps right on going to that job every morning regardless. Which is fine …

But liking some form of enslavement still isn’t Freedom.

For that reason and many others, this is not now, nor has it ever been The Land of The ‘Free’.

***

This line of thinking was inspired (this time) by something I heard part of on the NPR while I was out doing laundromat laundry.

It was from a guy who lives in a part of New Orleans that gets frequent ‘Boil Advisories’ regarding the civilized pipe water.

He got tired of having to tune in to various places before knowing whether his water was ‘safe’ or a grave health risk.

So for the last seven years he has both filtered, and then boiled all the water his family pays for and then drinks. Filters, through a costly Brita. Boils, on a stove that uses gas he also pays for.

It’s not so very different here. I pay for and use tap water for cleaning and showering. But anything I drink comes from the reverse osmosis machine a mile up the road, at forty cents a gallon plus the labor of hauling it.

Why do we think this is even normal, much less ‘better’?

Answer it for yourself. I’m not going to digress in the direction of the brainwashing tangent just now.

You and I are among the blessed. We don’t live in that part of New Orleans. Or in Flint. Or Jackson Mississippi.

Or out on the Rez.

Blessed, maybe …

But still not ‘Free’.

You can’t be both socialized to be civilized …

and free at the same time.

You can’t be Well-Adjusted to an insane way of living …

and still function as a healthy autonomous animal.

I don’t care who you vote for, or if you vote. I don’t give a shit what you think about abortion or which bathrooms should have tampons in them or whether JD Vance is weirder than Tim Walz or Kam-Kam is still better than the orange one.

Tell me about your water.

Tell me when we’re eating today, and what we’re having, and about who we paid to butcher it for us and wrap it up in plastic like a serial killer.

If you even know their names.

Then maybe we can have a dialogue that actually matters.

***

I don’t drink from the river.

I pay a water bill every month and I pay at the blue machine, every few days.

That’s all more or less working, for now.

The problem is not getting the water. The problem, here at the house, is about getting rid of it after I dirty it.

There’s a blockage in the main drain, somewhere between the toilet (which is the final stop on the indoor sewage system) and the street.

So I am putting next to nothing down that mostly blocked system.

You might care about that, if you plan to visit soon. Here are some of the salient and current details of the modus vivendi around here.

1) The kitchen sink drains into a bucket, which I haul to the curb and dump after cleaning up the dishes.

2) The washing machine is not in use at all, which is why I’m hitting the laundromat.

3) I use the bathroom sink for handwashing and spitting out toothpaste, which doesn’t amount to putting much down its drain.

4) When I use the shower every few days I do it quickly. The water will come up to my ankles but then drain away in an hour or two, since it is by far the sub-system responsible for the biggest volume of wastewater at the moment.

5) Nothing’s going down the toilet at all. I will mercifully leave the details to your imagination.

***

It’s true: I don’t have to live like a refugee.

I’m doing it anyway. I have my reasons, which … Reason knows nothing of.

You will be too, probably, when you come, at least at first.

Perhaps we’ll work on making things better together.

For certain half-baked values of Betterness.

***

In more felicitous news, the revolution against the tyranny of the Sun King is underway as of this afternoon, and the prophets are saying that by tomorrow, the terror part of his reign may really start to fade for good.

Something to celebrate with sincerity I should think.

Economics Like You Have Never Heard It Explained Before. Janet Yellen goes to China to get them to keep buying US Debt. They say: Why, so you can put 100 billion worth of missiles on the credit card and then shoot them at us? Piss off, Jan. Bonus story on the subject of Obedience to Authority.

Roe v. Wade Is A Red Herring. There are at least two pills you can get in the mail now that terminate a pregnancy, even if it’s pretty far along and even if you live in one of those Deplorable states. It’s a hardcore liberal and co-creator of the Daily Show telling you this. “Pro-choice” is reduced to nothing but a politically manipulative virtue signal and a fishhook you should decline to bite on.

Kam says she’ll fix that rent thing right up, and bring down the price of eggs too. Of course we believe her, you goddamn authoritarians!

Finally, the tension between need to vote for her and the fact that the bombs will not stop flowing into Gaza either way may make your head explode, but smart activists gonna keep activizing regardless.

Sometimes, you don’t understand it because I don’t really want you to understand it.

Sometimes, I am trying to poke you toward reading it over and over, not like a blog post, but like a poem, and making your own understanding instead of accepting, indulging in, mine.

***

This is what I’m really good at even though I have no idea what it all really means
(and even though it is the farthest thing from what A Man is supposed to be good at)
(or what a Great Author is supposed to be either, by the lights of the civilized savants).

***

You know by now (I hope you do) that a belletrist is a sage practitioner of belles-lettres.

The French spell it: belletriste

But also, curiously

French belle “beautiful”
French triste “sad, sorrowful, gloomy, feeling emotional or mental distress”
and French tristesse “melancholy, sorrow, sadness”

So in some literal sense a belletriste …
is also and exactly an instance of “beautiful-sadness”.

***

I’ve tried six ways to say it already. Sure sure I’m happy, and whatever. But I have never been as filled as I am right now with the blues–with the painful sadness of human life

yours and mine and ours.

***

Jack Kerouac, who was French-Canadian, was aware of most of this and called one of his heroines Tristessa.

Jack Kerouac, in spite of early ambitions, was never a Great Author, and in fact his earliest work is unreadably bad (sorry, Ti Jean).

But he was a Writer (so fuck off, Truman Capote), and he was … a Belletriste.

***

I feel like that is a low bar that I can fully aspire-to

here in the Begin.

I’m sittin’ on my groceries ...

Rough but I’m pleasin’, dontcha know.

It’s meditation upon the crap you have,
the crap you don’t,
and what you do with it
or without it.

Yes I really am blockquoting myself. Can’t you see how hard I’m working?

In that spirit:

This is what I’m watching and by vague implication: how.

That’s
https://vairtere.com/1LastPanelBrowser/vidChannelsRegular.html
if you prefer to copypaste your links and of course you do.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Psychotic Reaction LIVE Oakland,Ca 1991

The Count Five with their original version of the same song.

I must have also dreamed that I blew into the psychedelic harmonica, ’cause I’ve been crazy as a potato bug all damn day.

And that is fine, since I long ago ceased to function as a responsible adult and as far as I can tell–this is the seriously weirdest part–no one even noticed, much less gave a shit.

The madness produced six new ways to watch videos.

I’ll tell you about one of them, but you’ll have to wait until the witching hour.

Nine hours and bless the magnesium.

Early in that nine, I was walking among the houses in the hills and it was raining harder. I sought shelter in the rusted hulk of a pickup truck. There was no instrument panel and the seats were only bare springs, but I was grateful to be not getting even more wet.

After a long moment I noticed that its engine was purring so quietly that the rain noise was almost drowning the sound.

I gingerly pushed down the clutch, put it in reverse, and then let up on it slow. To my shock and delight, the truck moved.

So I drove it the last forty miles into Flagstaff.

Was that a crime?

I don’t want to hear any more god-damned chatter about what we’re going to do today.

Okay Darling?

It doesn’t matter
at all
whether we’re on the road, journeying between Sequim and Salt Lake
or home, in Silver, SandRock, or Salida.

There are exactly two questions that matter,
and that is definitely not one of them.

The two questions that matter are:

• When do we eat, and
• What are we having?

I’ll try to explain this in general terms, and let you draw some inferences about why that trip was such a fucking disaster, and why our lives together often are too.

Begin again. It’s not even important on any given day that we’re eating healthy.

It’s very, very important that we know well in advance that it will happen, and, roughly, when.

It matters some that what we put into our bodies isn’t utter garbage–which probably means that it’s not from a restaurant, but rather prepared with intention and love at “home”, wherever home happens to be that day.

I’ll tell you this much. I am never again in my life going to eat another Eskimo Pie.

And I would be very, very okay if I never ate another In & Out Burger.

Or even another Chipotle bowl.

It’s not that any of those things are healthy or unhealthy exactly.

It’s that ending up eating any of them means that plans haven’t been made–or at least that the half-baked plans that were made Sucked.

No More Suck Plans. That’s the rule now and, sorry, it is Absolute. It is without exception. It is Rule One, every day, for me and for anyone who has some dubious notion that they might want to be with me.

The same goes, kinda, for when we sleep and where and how. But that’s a larger question and a battle for another day.

For this day, Friday the 16th of August, the two eating questions are plenty to take on for a start.

I’m going to be asking them of myself alone in the coming weeks.

For practice.

I’m not afraid of dying.

I’m only afraid of being or feeling incompetent,
at the art of moving, or at keeping myself comfortable or energized–
at a lot of barely definable things like that.

On bad days I’m even a little fearful of looking incompetent.

The fear of incompetence in myself also produces rage in me at the incompetence of others.

So between the two things I spend too much time being angry or scared or both at once.

The rattle in the suspension of my truck is an objective correlative for the fear of maybe not being competent at Moving sometime all too soon.

The hiccup in the air conditioner is the same for the fear of maybe feeling incompetent at keeping myself comfortable and energized.

On good days and parts of days I just stay focused on what I can do to keep myself being competent at all the many things.

Today was like that.

Mostly.

I had a productive day which included swamping out the shower stall, thus getting even dirtier for the purpose of finally getting myself clean.

Then weedwhacking my beard and washing my hair for the first time in about two weeks. (Being so very dirty was at last starting to bother even me.)

I was rewarded with an actual eight hours of sleep and a gentle waking: caffeinated even before the weekly noise of the trash truck shattered the relative neighborhood peace.

This morning I am roasting fresh Chiapas beans and dipping a toe back into these more digital waters. I generally block ads on all the browsers except Tor, but today I did see this one.

It struck me as an insidious consumerist ploy.

My head is in a strange place these days. You don’t have to tell me.

This is the antidote

In the end, Old Joe was a hard, hard No.

Not just for me …

but for so many people that after rigging two primary seasons in a row for him, the Elites had to scrap even that gerrymandered will of the people for some new untested antidemocratic scheme, send Biden packing, and install this alternative puppet at the head of their ballot line.

Kamala Harris exists in a newly manufactured space beyond Yes and No.

Kamala Harris exists in the space of You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me.

It’s no longer about carefully considering her policies (because she doesn’t have any) and making a rational choice between Okay, Yeah, LesserEvil on the one hand and No, Not This Time on the other.

She’s beyond all that.

If elected, she would be the first seriously WTF President in the history of this Republic-slash-Empire.

I don’t even want to go to the mind-numbing effort of wrapping my head around whether she’s ‘a little better’ or ‘a tiny bit worse’. She’s simply … the living political embodiment of absurdist.

A pitch-perfect rendition of what electoralism and late-stage capitalist Democracy have devolved into.

The VP candidates are far more interesting–two variations on the theme of white male working-class hero. I’m glad for that, and between the two I don’t have a strong preference.

I feel certain that anyone still reading me will find that itself absurd, but it’s the truth, out here in childless catperson land–sorry.

None of it in the end will make any difference to my life or hopes or dreams or days.

Maybe this is what beginning to live anarchically really means, feels like.

All I want for my upcoming 18th birthday are gift cards.

If you go Lowe’s or Home Depot I will certainly get a patio umbrella to replace the wind-shredded one. That’s what gave me the idea to post this in the first place.

But I almost don’t care where it’s from. Natural Grocers. Butcherbox. Sweet Maria’s. Those would be healthier for us all in the long run. But I can make even Amazon or Walmart work, somehow.

Your thoughtfulness is already appreciated.

Kisses,

v.

Living as a Wage Slave …
I had more money than time. So when the dryer broke, I fixed that problem with money–calling a tradesman, or buying something turn-key at Lowe’s, or both.

Existing as a lumpenProle …
I have much more time than money. So since there is a plumbing issue, I am spending time to fix it–a lot of time, because I have to work around it in very labor-intensive ways until I can find more time, all at once, a good large chunk of hours or days, to truly tackle the underlying issues.

This is not a great solution, but I think it has important advantages over spending money. The perceived or real advantages are what you would expect from someone who wants to get (and stay) the hell out of the way.

When I was a wageslave, that was classic Following. I obeyed orders and did what the PMCs said in order to get the money to fix the problems ‘easily’.

Often it seems like the best answer of all is to be a Leader (and of course that was what the commander was secretly implying in his pithy sermon).

But again I don’t think he was really right.

Trying to become a Leader is trying to become a Master, rich in both money and time.

Nothing wrong with that?, except all the many nasty things you have to do to get (and try to stay) there, including the brutal cognitive dissonance involved in Having It All while so many billions of others have nothing, and the ugly things that turns you into. Inevitably.

So no, I don’t want to be a LeaderMaster, and I sure don’t want to have to go back to following some fucking boss of a supervisor.

Theoretically there is some other clever way. But youTube millionaire didn’t work out, and coffee-roasting entrepreneur is even worse, in bottom-line dollars and cents terms, because I haven’t made back anywhere near enough to even pay off the roaster machine itself. So I’m paying interest on that debt, instead of making money.

So if there is a clever way around the harsh facts, I am still looking for it, and maybe I will be forever.

In the mean time

I am my own lumpen Plumber, and not naturally good at it, and learning to live with those truths.

Well you can’t have that, but if you’re ana-Merican citizen, you are entitled to a baby’s arm holding an apple.

***

In the most recent video I mentioned the sewer issue and proposed working around it by rigging an awning. Maybe I still will–it would be a very interesting path into mobile living–but in the short term I realized that I can use my indoor sinks with no downside, so long as I drain them into buckets and haul just the buckets outside.

My driveway is very clean.

Between that and the slow fade of 100-degree days in favor of the lower 90s, I am actually getting a whole lot of work done and the place is looking better to my prejudiced eye.

I’m reorganizing Stuff, and in the same multitask moments, completely overhauling my ancient hard drives full of data. I am acquiring things only with extreme judiciousness. I am getting rid of things steadily. I am refining what is still here with fierce care.

And, I know now that my first senior essay will be about ana-Prim, mainly the AnPrim that is political and existential philosophy.

You can follow along with, starting with this guy, who is very definitely anarchist, but also very clearly anti-primitivist. Will I end up agreeing with him? I doubt it.

He did make me real introspective though.

Maybe it will happen to you, right?

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
It says something other than what you thought it said.

The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)
A pretty flawed and loopy High Concept it is, per the Noam.

It started with the happy coincidence about root beer and black cows. Sometimes there is one sole creature that hears you, and it makes that person especially precious in the moment.

Glad you’re in the world Fletcher. Thanks.

***

The International Geophysical Year happened when my parents were marrying, four years before I incarnated.

It

was directed toward a systematic study of the Earth and its planetary environment. The IGY encompassed research in 11 fields of geophysics: aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, glaciology, gravity, ionospheric physics, longitude and latitude determinations, meteorology, oceanography, seismology, and solar activity. Because the IGY period was chosen to coincide with the maximum sunspot cycle, when solar flares and other disturbances are prevalent, research on the Sun was especially significant.

Twenty years post-incarnation, before I even became a Nightfly myself, Donald Fagen released a song about it:

I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)

… drawing on the title, with irony of course, of Louis Armstrong’s less cynical take on the same subject, of This World.

Standing tough under stars and stripes, we can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
…

Well, by ’76 we’ll be A-OK

To the song’s narrator, the 200th anniversary of the American Republic is still decades away in the shiny theoretical promise of things to come.

But to the one who wrote and sang the song, and to us, ’76 was already six or more years in the past, and he knows that the clear bright beautiful wonderful future never happened.

To drag in a completely unrelated lyric from a couple days ago, shining a light from the side, the relationship between the two, and between them and us, runs thus:

“Maybe we oughta help him see
The future ain’t what it used to be.”

(Maybe just maybe I oughta too.)

And then to the same sweet lullaby of a tune, the true darkness of the new techno-reality is hinted at, implied.

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We’ll be clean when their work is done
We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

Think of it.

The best and the brightest, the compassionate Visionaries, will program a machine to make all our decisions for us.

A Skynet.

And as a result, WE will be cleansed …

Bathed in the promise of the american dream; always Free.

Bathed in the blood of the lamb; forever Young.

You and I can read between those lines bitterly, can’t we baby?

There is nothing left but to mindlessly repeat the bland chorus over and over like drones, which is exactly what most people do most of the time. Especially during Ice Cream Month and any given Float Day …

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

If I were a great sage producing great art, like Fagen himself, I would leave it there.

***

But instead I’m going to fuck things up with one last small and indulgent observation.

Just before the Just Machine walks onto the stage of this song, there’s one last sliver of lyric slipped into the background vocals … one last barely audible false promise, of

(More leisure for artists everywhere)

Listen for it next time, because the Donald put it there for you and me especially.

For the artists themselves, who might be tempted to fall for the pretty Lies too.

For the actual compassionate visionaries, who are and will be so often tempted to succumb to the tempting surrender of giving up and leaving the drones to drone without cease until the end of time.

It helps me to see, and it helps me to say

Fuck that.

(Or: “Choenix for a Denarius”)

You know
I’m not on social media but
yeah to the extent I am, this is pretty much it–
Antisocial Media, and milk spilled straight from the spleen.

In the hot siesta I dreamed so hard
(revelations 6)
about an act of secondhand charity
that seemed to say everything. It was

an urn, for coffee with cremation.
As I would too in the Awakening
I refused the shipment
with big red angry letters

Written in my soul from me to you.

For an individual, the poverty threshold (a much prettier word than line, thanks guv) is $15,060.

The latest available Census Bureau data (2021) says 11.6% of Americans live at or below it.

‘Live’ here exists as a statistical category somewhere between still-breathing and thriving.

Don’t worry too much about the Detailed Science.

Like the inflation rate, these kind of horn-rimmed numbers are carefully baked half-truths even when it isn’t an election year.

Margot fucks up the lyrics a little Like One Of Your French Girls will sometimes.

Root beer. Right. For the making of your big black cow and the getting out of here.

When I woke up it was raining hard at last.

So let’s open our hymnals
for tis a gift to be simple
and free
and close with them right and plain

Hosanna.

I lived with them on Jovial Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafés at night
And revolution in the air

Then he started into dealing with slaves
And something inside of him died
She had to sell everything she owned
And froze up inside

And when finally the bottom fell out
I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keepin’ on like a bird that flew …

So now I’m goin’ back again
I gotta get to Her somehow
All the people we used to know
They’re an illusion to me now

Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they do with their lives

Me, I’m still on the road
Headin’ for another joint
We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point

of view.
Tangled up in blue

I have posted for real once this month. I may again soon, but for now I’m in something of a teleological crisis like any seventeen year old about doing what I do, and directing energy instead toward addressing some harsher details of my physical environment.

So enjoy this classic Hollywood adaptation of a John Steinbeck novel instead for now.

Thus propelled by the order, of the business
I continue to live
mostly in the material reality of my life
rather than the abstract reality of spilled attempts at essay.

I am beginning to understand the central importance of the boring cleaning parts to the flow of a life in the real world.

And why that might mean that I actually need a utility sink.

Sunday the fourth and although I have 2+ posts in the draft stage I got called in to work, which is to say that my sole proprietorship codenamed Anaprim got an order at last. A blessedly sizeable one.

So instead of authoring I fulfilled it smartly.

You may think of placing such orders as a perfectly valid alternative to feedback, and thank you. Patrons are off the hook in any kind of case, too. This is justice, or what is only fair, in my tangled calculations.

Here’s another misfit, another Jimmy Dean
Bet he’s got a motorbike; what do y’all think?

Bet if we be good we’ll get a ride on it
If he ain’t too mad about the future.

Maybe we oughta help him see
The future ain’t what it used to be

Tom Petty, “Spike“

She was long and tall, she was the queen of them all
I asked her to marry me, she smiled and pulled out a knife

The party’s just beginning she said: your money or your life
Last night, talking about last night

Roy Orbison (as Lefty Wilbury), “Last Night“

I can’t help about the shape I’m in
I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin

But don’t ask me what I think of you
I might not give the answer that you want me to

Peter Green via the 1969 incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, “Oh Well“

sure as a surgeon, you slipped your hand into the doorjam

blood coursing through the air
tonight
i know who i am

and i know who you are
or who you were just an hour ago
static interference on the radio tonight
i know what i know

quick as lightning you brought your hand back inside
and you shut the door behind you It’s too hot out there tonight

breath rising and falling
expansion and
contraction

why’d you tell me this?
were you looking for
my Reaction?

Word
Film
Love you Johnny.

***

I standalone beneath the moon by the crossing gate waiting on the double E and I murmur about my own exquisitely delicate alienation but you don’t hear it because I’ve alienated you and regardless Every day there is a new blank page.

I fill it like a honest gravedigger and I don’t know why
I tell you this but I do. Used to be sure I was very much
looking for your reaction but
that train don’t run by here no more

So that can’t be it but here i am again knowing who i am and shovel in hand like a surgeon

Brute Squad Descends On San Francisco Homeless

I want to hear what part you’re playing.

Are you the one whose home is being bulldozed?

Are you the truck driver, just ‘doing your job’ and trying to get by, or the cop just doing evil cop things for a living until the pension rolls in?

Maybe you’re way beyond the reach of photojournalists, possibly a PMC drone who can afford rent in the beautiful city, maybe muttering under your breath that it’s about fucking time they cleaned up the place for the sake of people like you.

Maybe you’re a real winner, a leader like one of the Supremes who said this was fine, or the Governor who ordered it done with no warning, or a MayorBreed who … “touts” this inhuman shit.

Or maybe you’re doing your bad best to just stay the helloutta the way of all of it.

Who would you be if you could be anyone, in this golden land of justice and opportunity?

major guiding beliefs and self-identifications, as in
–belletrist (as opposed to litterateur/auteur)
–anarchist (green/primal/paleo/whatever, and ‘rewilding’ too)
–hérétique (to grasp upon a heresy is literally a taking/choosing enabled by oneself)
and
minor crystalline images, like
–tears in rain
–šrdnn
–raggaðr
and things in between like the synthesis of the word and image “Anaprim”

The playing hypothesis is that they are ultimately all only organizational tools

Yeahbro. You said that already.
Okay. Next step.

***

Speaking generally, all of the beliefs/IDs above fall into the category of Art, rather than the other categories of Home or Money or Digilife.

… say what now? …

***

It’s ALL about organizational structures. And this is the 3digitalife one.
2Money is mostly digi too. 4Art is mostly digi too.
The only non-digital one is 1HomeRooms and the mob version of same.

This is the 3digitalife one.

GNU and FAIF and F/LOSS, Stallman and the GPL–go here.

Linux hangs off GNU, so you might then need to:
PandoraPlaylist: Introductory course on Linux terminal

Then pick a distro, like AntiX, and a desktop environment, like Xfce.

***

That is way more than enough I’m sure I already lost you; this isn’t about following you and the only tangent I want to go off on right now is that basing your life on a guiding belief or self-ID like ‘American’ or ‘coconut-pilled Democrat’ or ‘MAGA’ is dumb and beneath you–I mean, “anarchist” is way better but almost beneath me–pick your own, but pick better than that and eff the herd and what they think and I’m honestly very sorry to be such a naturalborn posing ‘hérétique’ douche but seriously eff capitalist sugarpoison icecream-month and the horse it rode in on too.

The color of blue.

The problem (you see it all in 3D).

By seven-thirty in the evening I’ve already been tired for two hours and that’s actually great, because it means I can crash hard and well and early.

But a few hours later, because I am old and very well-hydrated, I have to get up and piss, and sometimes the vivid dreams (also a good thing) result in my mind racing, so

that makes it hard to try to go back for four or five more hours of sleep right away.

Right now. At 10:47 PM.

When I ‘should’ be continuing to rest until 3.

I am here instead.

Meanwhile, out in this psycho-land of a culture …

It’s devolved into one side saying the other is weird, and the other claiming the other-other is cringe.

They are of course both perfectly right.

As in center-right.

The hardest part for me personally is when The Big Lebowski and ancient Luke Skywalker just jump up and embrace the cringy fringe as if that’s the cool thing to do.

As it used to be, once.

Just not like this, ever. Ever ever.

They finally get it and immediately, totally don’t get it.

It seems …

perfectly clear (you see it all in 3D) and absolutely tragic

To me.

The culture is unmercifully old now. And very well-hydrated.

She’s a lot like you.

The Dangerous Type.