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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t want to go anywhere.

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

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

—lifespa/Douillard

 

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

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

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

—lifespa/Douillard, but a different article

 

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

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

—etymonline

***

Without further comment? Yes … almost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

Chris Cuomo ADMITS He’s Taking Ivermectin

***

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

*

From later in the same footage:

Did it come from a broad?

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

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

None of which proves anything at all.

Just mulling.

A really good rant.

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

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

Maybe there’s some hope.

For me.

As a … pundit, or something.

After all.

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

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

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

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

True that and no doubt.

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

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

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

Today we start over in honesty.

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

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

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

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

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

However.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m only drinking it for enjoyment now.

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

Tell me what you need to hear.

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

But I’ll listen.

To you.

My audience.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

For the three of you especially.

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

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

In the middle, same thing, only for pedestrians.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I know now.

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

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

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

The results of the experiment were conclusive.

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

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

But three, really, and unreservedly.

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

The consistency sure is though.

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

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

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

To the three of you …

Forgive me for any bullshit manipulation on my part.

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

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

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

It can’t be bought, or paid for.

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

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

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

You get the authentic gap-toothed crooked smile.

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

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

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

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

Vair-de-tizing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Marx and Cinco de Mayo. By: Óscar Fernández

***

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

***

The real evil has a nice haircut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are frequent jailbreaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Be well, darlings.

End of the Globalists w/ Jay Dyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks in advance.

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

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

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

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

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

Time may tell.

***

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

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

Jill Stein interviewed by Glenn Greenwald

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

So.

Consisting of three pieces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Called for (editing two days later):

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

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

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

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

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

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

He clearly thinks so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No real medicine.

No real justice.

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

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

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

Yep, fresh tires for muh truck.

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

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

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

I’m ready for May.

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

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

***

By the way.

Charles Bronson’s father died when he was ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere.

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

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

Love you sis.

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

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

As One Does.

Source, with the video

Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope.

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

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

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

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

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

But What Is Perfect?

It is of course in the eye of the beholder.

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

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

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

Like in a Cathedral; that would be perfectly legit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s that way now, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same shit.

Don’t seek faith.

Seek real freedom.

Amen.

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

“We must Save Democracy!”

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

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

But this one–this one actually does.

Graham convinced Trump on $61B

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trampling barefoot these grapes, of wrath.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perversions’ of every color.

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

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

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

It’s all bullshit my dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thus you will be led astray.

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

***

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

I don’t feel very balanced about it though.

Maybe that’s just me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe you cheered.

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

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

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

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

–W.B. Yeats

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

A very insightful seventeen minutes of video from Due Dissidence.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

(I take my waking slow.)

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

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

My wonderings will be addressed in time with the experience.

***

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

Strange corners of my own archives as well.

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

Speaking of lily white and squeaky clean.

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

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

NPR’s New CEO Is The Epitome of EVIL!

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

I believe that climate change is very real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

The other big thing right now is the gender binary.

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

Horse paste, bitches.

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

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

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

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

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

***

One more thing, speaking of NPR.

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

I was dreaming of course.

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

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

But that’s neither real nor true.

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

******

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

Talk about your shithole countries.

This place sucks ass six ways to Sunday.

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

Maybe you care and maybe you don’t.

I’m very interested in the question.

Holding On To The Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world moves on behind them and then past them.

We’re living it right here now today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It isn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then one fine Wednesday I will need to

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

The Biggest Mistakes Everyone Makes When Cracking Eggs

Toilet Seal Replacement – Wax or Danco?

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

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

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

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

But I still need to understand the drainage systems.

And what to do about flooring.

Yes really.

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

David Cameron is here to explain.

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

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

Here’s what actually happened:

“The Dome” COMPLETELY FAILED! – Scott Ritter

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

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

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

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

It just wouldn’t.

***

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

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

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

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

That is starting to change very rapidly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did learn some things though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus, I created an endless and problematic loop.

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

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

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

Same with the now-recleaned shower.

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

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

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

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

That would be a little slice of heaven.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An especially good episode of Christofouru’s podcast.

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

X (Twitter) declares “War” on Brazil

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

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

Elon Musk Goes to War with Brazil’s Censorship Regime

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

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

And this is the seed of a plan.

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

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

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

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

Whatever it takes.

Always striving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever, Mr. Manifesto.

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

Thanks anyway.

But enough about me.

I’ve been selfish just like daddy was.

This is a letter to you. For you.

***

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

Amen.

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

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

Because you were saved.

Redeemed.

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

Brothers. Sisters. Countrymen.

Lend me your ears.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what best explains Trump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Falling on a termite.

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral.

Yo bring it on down.

For this one day.

Afghanistan War Whistleblower Roundtable

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

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

There are many really golden moments here.

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

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

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

Get in their way, pay the price.

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

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

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

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

Some of the shingle sheeting ended up on the ground.

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

Good job, Elon.

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

My dream died, and now I’m here

I feel you, sister.

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

Jose Vega Is Going To WAR With The Democratic Establishment!

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

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

But I hope he wins.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the spineless pawn he has been all his life.

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

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

Stop sending the bombs, Joe.

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

Stop sending the bombs.

Oh wait, you’re not doing that.

You will not do that, either.

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

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

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

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

***

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

Why Palestinians don’t trust World Central Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Not just the high-ranking officials. Oh no.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

(in the time of chimpanzees)

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

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

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

He had little proverbs he used to quote ad nauseum.

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

In his telling, his parents spake to him thus:

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

Haw hardy haw.

In the end, it was no joke at all. The prophecy was precisely fulfilled.

He and his life were exactly that bad example, and amounted to nothing else ever.

He lives in our collective memories only as a cautionary tale.

None of us were stupid and we listened very carefully to the cautions in that paternal story.

***

Then one bright shiny day a bright shiny new adoptive father suddenly appeared as if by magic.

The System worked very well for this man, The Commander.

He worked for It, too.

In return It gave him not only plenty of money, but a trophy besides. Promotions and honors. A great big house unhappily called The Battleship, in which to abide, and entertain.

A modest secular glory. A bust in bronze, in front of some library.

Finally he ended up running a college for them, one that trained pilots and other kinds of aviation-adjacent worker bees to work in support of Itself, by which I mean in support of the self-perpetuating System, elsewise called Empire.

All of this was 40 years ago.

But in generational terms, in human hearts, it was only yesterday.

***

I was impelled along this line of thinking by something Keaton Weiss said recently.

He didn’t say it well, so I’m not going to link it or even quote it exactly, but the germ of the idea was a pure brilliant insight.

In my role as belletrist, I’m going to polish it with a purpose. In paraphrase, it goes like this.

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

(“Well, the Democratic Capitalist American System isn’t perfect, you slobs; It’s just more perfect than all the others.”)

Once that much is seen, it seems so obvious, and so vast in implication.

***

The first father, the bad example, hated the System which never advantaged him …

going so far as to convert to a religion in which the System was the fruit of all evil, literally ruled by Satan.

Unfortunately it was also a religion of great moral timidity, and so while it encouraged its adherents to stay far away from The World and to participate only minimally in the System, it also preached the importance of rendering Caesar’s things to Caesar most of the time.

Thus, while most of the beliefs given to him by the religion worked for him, they gave him no legitimate outlet for his rage against the System … against the Devil. He … rendered, and he raged hotter still.

The rage came out instead through battering his wife, and abusing his children.

Unsurprisingly, when they grew up, none of them chose to continue practicing the timid and self-contradicting religion.

Besides which, since he was a natively conservative Republican, they all became, more or less, liberal Democrats. (But not, god forbid, revolutionaries.)

And most of them followed the new and improved commander father into the secular creed that worshiped the System, and preached the gospel of going to college, and working within It, and reaping the advantages that cooperating with It brings.

And of course defending It from the slanders of all hérétiques, great and small, whether those slanders were accurate, or could be dismissed as quackery; merest conspiracy.

Possibly even no more than sour grapes, whimpered by losers, don’tcha know.

***

Sí, cariño, soy un perdedor.

Ahogándose con las astillas.

Things are gonna change.

I can feel it.

Source

I can but pray to nameless gods, that there are those among you who are part of that fourteen percent drop, and not still so blind as to be among the fat third of Americans who even now suffer so deeply from cranio-rectal inversion as to approve of blatant and unrepentant genocide.

As the story points out, anything less would in fact be very Republican of you, and I know how much you would hate being tarred with that brush. You would, in fact, have to admit being on this one issue at least to the right of one Donald J. Trump.

By now even Kamala Harris has been sent forth to make weak faces of concern and vague noises of disapproval, so it might be safe for you to do the same in polite company.

Just do keep in mind that despite these grunts, whoever is really running the show in that brutal fetid administration just sent Israel a couple thousand more neighborhood-destroying bombs, along with 25 shiny new fighter jets, in plenty of time for the planned bloody adventure into Rafah later this month.

And, that both these stories are brought to you by the show informally known as Two Jewish Guys From New York Sitting Around Hating Themselves.

“Founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, World Central Kitchen (WCK) is a nonprofit organization that is first to the frontlines providing fresh meals in response to crises. Applying our model of quick action, leveraging local resources, and adapting in real time, WCK has served more than 300 million nourishing meals around the world”.

This is from their YouTube channel.

So is this.

How WCK teams support Ukrainians on the frontlines of the war

This might have been the ultimate feel-good story.

Until last night.

Tell me, my doves.

Did those seven humanitarians have anything like a “right to exist”?

Will you continue to shrug and cluck and make justifications about why their murderers should walk free and alive on this dark earth?

On the night before the payment (by which I mean the half-payment) was due, I was informed it would not be made on time. Thus in turn, naturally, mine won’t be either.

I don’t know what that will cost me, since I’ve never once been late before, but I reckon I’ll be finding out soon enough.

Probably about as much as a bag of cat litter bought on credit costs after all is said and done.

I do know that it left me feeling very done with blindly trusting anyone for anything, and I’m expecting that feeling to linger with great dependability for quite some time.

Moments later it started to rain and shortly after the rain began to freeze.

The next day I couldn’t trust the weather service either. I did go out, during the hour-long window they said it would be dry. It was not.

So instead of walking I went to the clean-water machine. It ripped me off for a dollar. It was not my very last dollar. Just the second to last.

That is not hyperbole.

The sun began to set.

In response to the gathering darkness, I did not make almond milk. I can’t afford almonds. But I did fry up a pound of buffalo hamburger and thought nice thoughts about the ones who had left it here. That was a good transaction. Pure keto too.

Skinnier and skinnier.

Then I fed all her cats, and Kali, and Riley the preening in-between boy, and I put myself to bed once more. Although I still did not have a replacement for the down quilt that one of them destroyed, I slept a very long time and I think that had something to do with the depths of my mood; tragic and wrong.

A week from Wednesday, which is ten days from now, things are alleged to start getting better.

Ten days is the farthest in advance that the weather people predict.

They say there will be a high of 62, sunny skies all day, and a low of no less than 36.

So, they say.

You are free to call him crazy on the Jab, whether that’s true or not.

I am free to agree with you about his deeply shitty policy on the genocide in Gaza.

But now he is saying things that no one else has dared to say in our lifetimes, because the last people who dared to say them, like his father and his uncle and Martin King 60 years ago, were murdered.

Because the people who own me and you as slaves didn’t want them to be known.

RFK Jr: The War Is A Money Laundering Scheme

In response you want me to join you in laughing and pointing at him for being a loon, and you want to me to join you in voting for another four years of the demented murderous slaveowner-in-chief.

With a great effort of politesse I will restrain myself from just telling you where you can shove that shit.

I will instead just say: No my kittydove.

No … thanks.

None.

“When there is occasion for my brains to think, they think, but I would be ashamed of my brains if they kept shooting out thoughts that were merely fears and imaginings, such as do no good, but are likely to do harm.”

–The one Scarecrow, speaking for myself

***

“I won’t say he is a husband to be proud of, because he has a mixed nature and isn’t always an agreeable companion. There are times when I have to chide him gently, both with my tongue and with my broomstick. But he is my husband, and I must make the best of him.”

–says the wife, Amee with a perceptible sigh about her life’s lot, in A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, Assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, Who is of course the Rainbow’s Daughter

***

Meanwhile there are the musings of the Shaggy Man, also of my self,

A boy, a man of tin or not, a Lady, a Gump, or a fairy witch

***

can dream of it.

For the last week I’ve not known how I could cover one last bill, of one hundred and sixty dollars, due on the 6th, when the flow of dependable money does not start until the 10th.

That’s how close to the bone it’s been for the last few months running.

Just now this evening I was struck by a thought: when, exactly, will the Patreon money of a little more than $160 pay out this time?

The answer is: the 5th.

So I send up a deep prayer of gratitude on the night sky to my rare Patrons.

I’m going to just make it, to the finish line, with my creditworthiness intact.

Only because of you few people and your generosity of spirit.

Thank you.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman via JD and Nigeria Today

Spread democracy harder, baby; fly that flag proudly.

While the People of the world will still let you.

Please listen most closely to what he says about corporatists as the new emperors.

Then recall the term Mussolini invented to describe the merger of the corporation and the state.

You may be forced to conclude that while the Nazis lost that good war, the fascists are with us and ruling all of our lives right now still, a lifetime later.

Then we have the insane performance at Monday’s State Department press conference by flack Matthew Miller. I repeat the question I raised in a previous article — What did the U.S. Government know and when did it know it? Miller’s “confidence” about who was not responsible is total bullshit.

In my 35 years holding clearances and dealing directly with the aftermath of terrorist events I cannot recall a single time that we had advance information about an attack that enabled us to pronounce within minutes of the attack who DID NOT set off the bomb, hijack the plane or shoot up the dance club. Yet Miller, who is a calloused liar, insists Ukraine is innocent and relies on tautology to make his case.

—Larry C. Johnson
Sonar21, 25 March 2024

I don’t believe in the legitimacy of any authority, from God on down to the darkest depths of hell here in the Empire or the shittiest hole of some other alleged country.

I don’t believe in countries.

I don’t think hierarchies or borders exist in reality; only in the minds of people, and that belief in those things, like a belief in Santa Claus, are planted in people, by other people, for purposes of reinforcing those at the top of the imaginary hierarchies and on the ‘right’ side of the lines drawn with sticks in the sand by monkeys.

I do not give my consent, to be governed.

I withhold my signature from this social contract thing.

We The People rule nothing.

Your democracy is a lie.

Capitalism means that a profit margin is built into every missile and tank and bomber, and into every ‘vaccine’.

It means that the more these weapons are used, the more will be replaced, and the greater the profits flowing to the minions of Satan.

The war machine is a self-perpetuating fiction with real and dire consequences.

Meanwhile on the ground: dog meme, cat meme.

Meanwhile on the ground the sun is shining brightly at last.

They say it will be that way for the next four days.

Sometimes they are right.

At first, the government of which we are citizens immediately pointed a finger: It was those bad Islamic people!

Which seems maybe true to a point, even though the perps ran, instead of blowing themselves up, and were clearly motivated by a piddling amount of money, and not by any sort of jihadi ideology.

The real question of course is who paid out the money, and cached the weapons, and so on.

The government somehow has an immediate opinion on that too. Their strongly voiced answer: Not Ukraine!

No answer at all, really. How could they know that?

The situation is complicated by the fact that the same government are habitual liars–one only has to look as far as the Nord Stream pipeline to know that much.

In the coming days, the Russians will no doubt find evidence for a different and more real answer, or at least a more evidence-based one.

The West will reject that evidence and claim that the autocrats of Moscow are the liars.

At which point shit will really hit the fan.

I am watching with interest and I hope you are too.

Crocus City Hall, ISIS-K, and Russian retribution

Two Jewish men sitting around talking about how Biden’s Israel policy is going to get us precisely four more years–of Trump.

Segment starts here.

To those of you my beloved who are still too Zionista to use that G word, I have a question.

Are you for a two-state solution?

Are you for a one-state solution?

Because your friends over there in the Holy Land are not for either of those things.

The Israeli government prefers a policy of occupation, oppression, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing until the end of time, over and above a democracy of one or two states.

Is that what you prefer too?

I’m asking for a friend and that’s a lie.

How France F*cked Africa

over the course of the last several decades and right up to today.

It’s not just France.

This is what Empires do.

Haiti, Facts and Fiction

I try to stay informed. But all I knew from fragments of NPR was:

–“Cannibal Gangs!”, and

–“They call him Barbecue because he burns his enemies!”

Both of which are garbage propaganda.

Of course.

Listen and learn.

***

PS:
The truth is now flooding out in a rush …

In this clip you can see the supposed cannibal leader (who in fact was a decorated cop until he ran afoul of the elites) speak for himself.

Assuming I didn’t burn it up months ago
(A hella large assumption) …
Thanks for your patience.

The Reality of Hunter-Gatherers w/ Dr. Robert Kelly

Fresh episode of PMB’s podcast from a couple of days ago.

The guest is a very credentialed academic anthropologist who knows a great deal about hunter-gatherers.

Listening made me feel like I sort of do too, because I felt qualified to disagree at times. But in general it was really good to measure my own big-picture take against a more official and respected one.

Peter said that he sees humans as problem-solvers, and The Doctor shot back amusingly that while that is true, they are also very much problem creators.

I would say they’re both markedly more optimistic for humanity than I am most days.

So maybe the conversation could be useful in taking the sting out of some of the things I say.

I’m just optimistic enough still to say: I’ll see you tomorrow.

I’m not quite on break, but I’m not alone in meatspace for a few days. In the meantime, enjoy a potential new logo.

The impact that NOT taking the Covid vaccine had in my life | Do I regret it?

A young girl from Spain, and from a big extended family, chooses to be the only one to never get jabbed, and pays a predictable price.

You and I might be smarter than she. Or then again, maybe not.

***

The “Abandoned & Creepy” Wizard of Oz Theme Park: Land of Oz

Not quite as who should say abandoned, in the classic sense.

It’s in North Carolina. I think that once upon a time, I visited the ski area next to it, without ever knowing it was there.

A fascinating tale for reasons that are obscure to me.

I could say the same about my attraction to Lurlinism too.

Numbers add up to nothin’.

End of a saga discussed at length some time ago in that most infamous of text threads.

Neil Young Comes Crawling Back To Spotify

I guess I’d still be curious about how many jabs and boosters Neil himself took, or his new wife Daryl Hannah, or his autistic child. But as the video points out, none of that really matters, because the musicians-against-JoeRogan crew never actually had the legal ability to “pull their music from Spotify”–they didn’t own that intellectual property any more.

Or in some sense their own souls.

Like the rest of us oh-so-lucky enough to be born into the big capitalist empire, instead of, you know, one of those shitholes.

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
–Amendment 1

U.S. Congress Votes On TikTok Ban

I don’t imagine you want to go deeper, but just in case: Bipartisan House Vote Pushes Deep State TikTok Ban—Who Really Benefits?

Unrelated I’m sure: ‘If anything happens, it’s not suicide‘: Boeing whistleblower’s prediction to family before death

I can’t get to sheep.

Because nah, I’m dreaming hard about the imprecations of diving in
too deep.

He did a version of it on the teevee. It was about people turning away from people.

You’ve a talent for a sneer; living in a van down by the river, that Farley thing,
I say to you: Nah. You have motivational speaking all wrong, mate; it is, rather:

Traveling

I have a talent too. For waiting, slipping up, and playing the fool. Where no one is screaming …

(In the moment I have more Kombis than I can pilot alone and none of them is one I can be taken into, much less given breakfast.)

Where no one is. The place called helloutta. It has always been my guiding metaphor. Turning away from people because they are too much to deal with, and yet I dream of

she took me in
and gave me breakfast

more and more.

I have a portrait for you, of the artist as an old man. Several of them posted now, but another one, about a guy eight years older than even me.

Colin Hay: Waiting For My Real Life

In it you will also meet Cecilia Noël: Peruvian, breakfast chef, and a sort of ghostly imprint of what I feel the lack of now.

What will I do this year?

In it you will also hear someone say:

People that are committed to telling their stories and having their expression irrespective of the number of people in front of them is a very powerful thing.
You have to follow that path.
You have to follow your vision.
You can’t shortcut your vision if you’re searching for truth, through art

I hope I can do that, and not

Well you must gonna be play cricket this year then are you John?

Nah. Nah. Nah.

The number of people in front of me is probably about two, and that counts myself.

You must be the other.

I know that must feel like a thankless job a lot of the time.

So thank you twice over
For being my other.

And sorry twice as hard, for being such an idiot as to get drawn in on the subject of an election in which no matter who wins, the People Lose.

We are on the brink of nuclear holocaust, darlings. We don’t actually have time to worry about which vampire to vote in as the belle of the motherfucking ball.

Source
Exegesis

I’ll try to remember that myself, and do better.

I don’t care for Trump, or the FoxNews-era Tucker, or for black-lady conservative Candace Owens.

Candace Owens Schools Chris Cuomo About Vladimir Putin

But if all you have on offer instead is Biden/Harris, Anderson Cooper, and dear Chris Cuomo …
It’s not only no, dear heart, but hell no. They’re not even lesser evils anymore.

Then when you and the NYT hold RFKjr and possible running mates Jesse Ventura and Aaron Rodgers up to me in a way that already assumes that I’m thoroughly propagandized and ready to start screaming shrilly that they’re crazy! Mad! Off the rails! Impossible!

… Your assumption is simply incorrect.

I don’t know much about Rodgers, except I guess he’s supposed to be half-Trumper or something. Whatever.

But I’ve listened to hours of Jesse Ventura, and I don’t think he’s one bit crazy, even though he certainly looks the part most of the time. I agree with him on the substance of most things.

As for RFK, I guess you’re a-flutter because he’s an evil “anti-vaxxer” (you can let me know if my assumption in turn is also incorrect). I’m not going to get into that too deeply here, but I’m pretty sure you’d dismiss me as one too, if you understood my views on the subject. So that doesn’t bother me.

I would have a very hard time voting for Kennedy based on the things I’ve heard him say and watched him do on the question of the Israeli apartheid state, and all those thousands of collaterally damaged and collectively punished (to death) children in the open-air concentration camp in Gaza.

Putting that single issue aside reluctantly, I believe RFK is the very definition of the new lesser evil.

Does it not appeal to you at all that he might actually begin to effectively challenge the dark powers that murdered his father, and his uncle? … and still to this day subvert ‘democracy’ and the will of the People at every turn?

Standing on the same side of the cultural line as those forces, and wanting me to point fingers and laugh and WTH with you at poor crazy Junior, from over there …

No, that ain’t happening, sis.

Nevah nevah evah.

Sorry for the buzzkill.

The writing’s on the wall, Wanda
Come read it come see what I say

These two performances encapsulate perfectly what aging is; in what ways it matters and what ways hit don’t.

I suggest you turn on the closed captioning so to get every subtle flavor of the lyric in both.

In the first, she is about 20.

In the second, somewhere in the vicinity of 80.

“For the love of God, you oughta take pity

on yourself.”

Well now a-course …

You can’t always get what you want my little hardheaded honey, or all of it, or exactly.

Maybe the process of Try Sometime doesn’t get you juiced up the way it used to, but I dunno nothing

About what to do
About that
From over here.

Over from this dish and side, I don’t need a guide.

I already know The Way. (Sometimes it gets so bad that I am the Way.)

It took me thirty-one and three-quarters years to become of age, become anything Of A Man at all.

And precisely that long all over again, to become what I am, which is a Lion with that very same Thorn in his bloody paw.

I’m afraid there’s no denyin. I’m just a dandy lion. But I know for sure that someday

Each rabbit shall show
Respect to me
The chipmunks gen-u-flect, to me
Though my tail shall lash
I will show Compash
to every living thing …

What makes a king, out of a slave? What makes a sign say
Burma Shave, what

makes The Dawn
come up like

thunder

Roll credits

Mebbe I’ll see you back here at this wall late tomorrow night

Perhaps from now on, when I’m tempted to go off on a rant, I’ll just stop myself and point you back here.

We should both be so lucky, no?

“The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election.

They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else.

Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.

***

Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.

Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie.

They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet.

They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world.”

https://substack.com/@caitlinjohnstone

***

When I do rant, all too often … I’m really just pleading with you to ask yourself with complete honesty whether “too many people have been successfully propagandized” might possibly, theoretically, by any long stretch of the imagination … apply to you.

If not, well okay I guess–nothing really left to say.

It applied to me for a long time and in some visceral ways it still does.

Part of why I write about this stuff is because I’m trying to wake myself the fuck up, too.

***

I wrote that one coming back up out of a quick black depression, 24 hours worth, Sunday night until Monday night. I’m adding this part very early on Trash Day, after sleeping it off more or less succesfully.

There were three things that sent me crashing down from the great high of the Hidden Cove walk, and the first of the three was editing the video of the walk itself.

As I pieced it together, I wasn’t happy with myself, and in particular with the way I relate (and have always related) to this society. In taking that long, long walk into the depths of the local outback, I should have found a perfected form of Sanctuary.

What I found instead was quite shocking, and I related to it badly, on film.

I found the Interpretive Sign, and the awkward benches completely out of place, locked up where no one was supposed to see them, but I was seeing them illegally anyway.

I was angry … that so much of our collective money and effort had been expended way out there, and that so much additional effort had been expended in making sure that almost no one is being legitimately allowed to enjoy the result.

But instead of feeling my own anger, the righteousness of it, or doing anything about it, I was only concerned with whether I was going to get in any kind of trouble (and that was cowardly, lion).

It was a much more serious and consequential version of the same paranoia I had felt over the asphalt thing. I’m still processing it.

The second reason was a long conversation with my brother, a conversation mostly about the state of my marriage, which is tragic and wrong.

The third thing … the boxes … as I start to finally unpack them, start to sort them …

The new sense of the house as open and airy and free starts to crumble, at least temporarily. I start to feel hemmed in again by Stuff, but this time it’s my own stuff, and I don’t have any else to blame for how much of it there is or that I don’t easily have useful places to put it all.

I know that’s pretty abstract.

(I have for example, three very old, very nice sleeping bags. I have used exactly one of them, exactly once, in twenty years. I have them but I don’t have a sense of where they fit in or how they belong to me do you see? Does it matter? Do they matter? Do I matter?)

Somehow I’m thinking of the old saw about revolutions; that they don’t occur when things are really bad. They occur precisely when things are getting rapidly better, and people feel a rush of delayed hope coming out and being expressed too fast for comfort, or rationality.

I just kept working the best I could, and toward the end of last night I walked out to check the mail, and of course the envelope with the special government code that is supposed to solve everything was sitting there, like an omen.

I went straight to their site and entered it in the proper place. They had a long list of questions for me.

The only one that was hard to answer was: When did you get married?

I put down that it happened on my anniversary date, which I do approximately know, in 2016. (So yes it’s the end of May, and in ’16 as best as I can calculate, and the question turns out to not matter anyway, because I’m not applying for a spousal benefit.)

But I’m only three-quarters sure that this was the exact truth.

Somewhere in yet another still-unpacked box there is a paper that gives the date definitively, alongside massive expensive piles of unlooked-at photographs …

I felt dread, at the thought of unpacking the one before that, and that box itself, and the one after that.

I will do it anyway. In my own good time, and manner. Will it help?

Perhaps, perhaps, perrr haps.

Now there is dawn from the darkness, and a thing we call a Tuesday begins.

The particular cat named Riley is feeling needy, as he has for many weeks now.

Yet on the bright side, he has learned to purr easily and often.

I should like to get him to teach me.

Linda: The Basics

Linda Ronstadt – Sings Standards

Linda Ronstadt & The Nelson Riddle Orchestra ‎- What’s New

Linda Ronstadt – Someone To Lay Down Beside Me

Tony Bennett – Bewitched, bothered and bewildered

Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue

Most of the time I like chicken just fine. Nine times out of ten, if I’m walking into a serious Mexican restaurant, I’m praying they serve pollo asado/asada and my heart is glad when they say yes, and they’re not out of it yet, today of blessed days.

But on the tenth time, I will want and possibly need something like a pork chili verde.

Cooking for myself at home, that’s maybe five out of ten times, that I’d prefer it most.

Also. Out past the bird, the pig is by far the cheapest meat in these disgustingly inflationary times. Pound for pound, on an average day in the tragic local market, it is half the price of beef and sometimes half the price of regular cow hamburger. Thus …

I have been buying and cooking and eating a lot of it and I’m going to share my rapidly developing method to do the same, dependably to perfection.

First off, get a roast. The bigger the better, and the cheaper too. Even a smallish one (like three pounds) will feed a smallish person for days.

I don’t know anything about the different cuts–can’t much tell the difference between a shoulder and a tenderloin, in deliciousness. I’m shopping on price. So if you have any ideas about the superiority of one part over another, please educate me back.

Get it put in your fridge right away and make sure the package won’t leak. You do not want to be cleaning up greasy and possibly harmful pink juice from half your shelves in there (ask me how I know, or just imagine). What I do is leave it in the plastic grocery bag they give me at the unenlightened rural place here, but if your market is saving the planet (or just decreasing their own margins), figure out some other way to keep it from making a mess.

When you’re ready to cook, set the package in your empty sink.

Decide on your baking/roasting dish. I have a Pyrex one and a metal rack that fits inside it exactly.

Cut the package open in the sink bottom and consider those scissors (or that knife) to be fouled–don’t use it for anything else before a thorough sterilizing. Lift the naked chunk out of the packaging carefully with your hands (just one hand if you can manage it) and throw the packaging directly into the trash bag that you smartly had sitting right next to the sink. Set the whole chunk in place in its baking dish. Now your hand(s) are fouled too. Act accordingly.

Done right, this means that you’re only touching the raw meat once (optionally once more at the spicing stage), and the only other necessary cleanup is to the bottom of your sink, which is easy.

Oil and spice your roast.

Some people insist on rubbing these items into the meat, and maybe that’s better … but it creates more mess than I want to deal with. I just drizzle a cheaper oil (avocado instead of olive) and sprinkle the spice powders (for me that’s just salt, pepper, and cayenne or whatever’s hot). I do both sides–touching the meat once more to flip it–but that’s the second, optional touching.

With clean or re-cleaned hands, put your baking dish, with the roast, into a pre-heated oven.

You are totally done with the hard part, not including dishes.

Now … some people say it’s just twenty minutes per pound at 375 Fahrenheit.

Others say go to 425 for the first 15 minutes (I do this) and then drop to 375 for the remainder of the hour (or whatever pounds times 20 minutes works out to for you).

At this point you’re supposed to be done according to the Chefs of the Tubes. That’s fine, if you like your pork rare … personally I find a pink center on a pork roast to be gross and maybe even dangerous.

So at the appointed time, I stick a meat thermometer into the middle. It will generally read about 130 (eww). I crank the oven back up to 450 at this point, leaving the thermometer stuck deep in the center (it’s the old manual-not-digital kind). I leave it until the internal temperature is well past 150 and on the way toward 160.

Somewhere in the 155-160 range I shut off the oven, pull the baking dish out, and clean off the thermometer (it’s going to be hot enough to roast flesh, obviously, so be careful with your own).

Next, even though it’s messy, I’ll gently transfer the smoking roast to a second (serving-style) dish, with spatula and fork or whatever works. You want a dish with sides, rather than a flat cutting board, because once you cut in, in a few minutes, there’s going to be a lot of juice flowing out. Try to have the burning hot dish as close as possible to the cooler serving one, so you don’t have to balance a multi-pound roast on a spatula halfway across the kitchen.

I rest the cooked meat briefly and then cut the whole in half ASAP to triple check, visually, that the whole thing is well-done to my satisfaction.

Then I cut another piece from the center and try not to burn myself eating it hot–sopping up some of the pan juices in a decadent paroxysm.

My general practice is to then stuff myself full immediately, and share cooled bits with whatever lucky creatures are around.

You want to get the roasting dish (and/or rack) into hot soapy water as soon as it’s safe, to minimize on scrubbing time and dishpan hands.

When you’re full to the gills, or as full as you feel like being, store what’s left, back to the fridge, for later, in whatever form is best for the way you eat. I like to have sliced and diced little chunks for creating amazing tacos the next day and the day after that too.

Regardless of whether it is anywhere near a Tuesday.

i got a Deal for you.

You keep me this up, this buoyant, this inspired … even without any more money or success …

and my heretical honey, I’ll quit my chatter about getting a fuckin’ day job.

Shake.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.

… so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

Everly Brothers – When Will I be Loved 1983

Comparing this version to the source material from 23 years earlier, it’s easy to see how even the creators of the song were influenced by Linda’s approach to it. She made it better.

So bless her, for that among other things.

***

It’s been a long elliptical and enjoyable loop into … sources, even if it did end up in the dire straits of a latter-day Yoknapatawpha on the macro level, and some personal cattiness on my part, on the micro.

I don’t know whether that bitchy side of me is unhealthy, exactly, but I’d rather have my head in some other space early on a Sunday.

So let me loop again, back onto my own crafted sources, influenced by a story I heard on a repeat episode of This American Life yesterday. It’s a tale of literal heresy, not just against the Commander or a not-better Father, but against the Lord Hisself.

I dwell in the sometimes radio-active fallout of all these people and all these things they made.

“one who
holds a doctrine at variance
with established or dominant standards”
(from Greek hairetikos “able to choose”; hairein “to take”)

Thus for now I decide against the petty parts of my self, but to nevertheless embrace that self as hérétique instead.

Possibly it is the most foundational or primordial of my identities, but it says nothing about what I am for, only what I am against.

What I am for requires at least one doctrine of my own, to have and to hold. Fortunately I have at least two, even if it is unfortunate that the alpha and the beta are sometimes at odds with each other, and not just with the omega.

• Anprim
• Belletrist
• ?

These variant doctrines I grasp so dearly are, as doctrines tend to be, very abstract critters, not at all like actual ducks.

In the con-crete world I have been opening boxes, some of which were sealed long ago.

It may be best in the moment to let the kinds of things I’m finding in them speak for themselves.

Except to say that over forty years ago, that tiny cast iron was one of the very few things I carried with me, in a small yellow backpack, when I left for good on the most serious hitchhiking trip I ever took.

And now I will make eggs in it again, not over a hobo campfire, but on a fine gas stove in a house that is older than I am.

I wake to sleep. And take my waking slow.

Sometimes.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

That’s a good song too.

***

In Order To Form A More Perfect Lyric

I filled their kitchens and living rooms
With my schemes and my broken wheels
It was never clear how far or near
The gates to my citadel lay
They were cutting from stone some dreams of their own
But they listened to mine anyway

I’m not sure
what i’m trying to say

Norwegian filmmakers driving through the South end up in Ferriday, Louisiana at the home of Jerry Lee Lewis and document a conversation with his sister, deciding in the end to title their movie:

Don’t Fuck With The Lewises

It’s a kind of horror film in the spirit of William Faulkner and Colonel Kurtz.

And it’s a counterpoint to the points of yesterday’s post.

Those funny sick people scattered out between the coasts. The ones that keep the fucking in the family, and can’t afford to go in every six months to have their teeth cleaned like you and me.

We are preached to steadily about their ridiculousness and failings, and taught to view them as an irredeemable basket of MAGA deplorables.

Could be.

But it doesn’t matter whether you aspire to be a good Christian, a good Buddhist, or just a good atheistic or agnostic humanist. When you encounter the damned, the slightly larger half now of We The People, you must approach them with compassion, with empathy, and with a spirit of forgiveness.

Maybe even a dental plan.

But you go on doing you, sunshine. I’m not reverend and I’m not here to preach.

Instead, here is a playlist to help you move in the direction of that spirit of something other than trespassing against those who trespass against us.

Or against our eggs, or something.

Namaste.

***

Jackson Browne: On Writing ‘Take It Easy’

Jackson Browne – Rock Me On The Water (Live BBC 1978)

Jackson Browne – Poor Poor Pitiful Me

Warren Zevon – Poor Poor Pitiful Me (The Original)

Linda Ronstadt 1997 – Poor Poor Pitiful Me (The Best)

Linda Ronstadt – When Will I Be Loved

Linda Ronstadt – WWIBLoved and a surpising cover as a bonus

Steve Earle and Aoife O’Donovan – “Willin’”

Little Feat – Willin’ (Both the original, and the best)

Both the singer and the narrator of the song are exactly the kind of fat, dirty, hairy flyover hillbilly slugs you’re talking about when you post your funny memes.

So is John Lee Pettimore, the proud veteran (and thank you for your service) of Copperhead Road.

I’m not so very different. I’ve been to Tucson and Tucumcari. Tehachipi, and Tonopah.

Seems to me like you probably have been too, though you chose to take the time to shower and shave.

I don’t think the real you really wants to be a Revenue Man, an Eliot Ness sworn to the service of the Satans who run this sad world.

So: one love.

Let’s get together and feel alright for once, again, this time.

One People against the real enemy, not the shoddy fake one our evil owners want us to blame.

***

One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
Hear the children crying (One love)
Hear the children crying (One heart)
Sayin’, give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Sayin’, let’s get together and feel all right
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks (one love)
There is one question I’d really love to ask (one heart)
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own?
Believe me

One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
As it was in the beginning (one love)
So shall it be in the end (one heart)
Alright, give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Let’s get together and feel all right
One more thing

Let’s get together to fight this Holy Armageddon (one love)
So when the Man comes there will be no, no doom (one song)
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
There ain’t no hiding place from the Father of Creation

Sayin’, one love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
I’m pleading to mankind (one love)
Oh, Lord (one heart) whoa

Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Let’s get together and feel all right

Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Let’s get together and feel all right

Well I’ve been out walking
I don’t do that much talking, These Days.

***
And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go
May lie a reason you were alive, but you’ll never know.

***
Between the life that we expected and the way it’s always been
I can’t walk back in again after the way we fight

When just outside there are people laughing, living lives we used to lead
and chasing down the love they need, somewhere in the night.

In the hard light of an angry sun, no one fucking remembers what was said, or done

Tender are the words they choose;
You win, I win …
We lose.

–Jackson Browne, selected

Glenn Greenwald interviewing George Galloway.

Well worth the time.

Galloway once more airs his dependable description of the Labor and Conservative parties in Britain being “two cheeks of the same ass”, and Greenwald confirms it to be no different here.

They also discuss how they both were long described as hard Leftists and are now habitually and thoughtlessly smeared as right-wingers–even though their own views on most things haven’t changed at all.

I think I understand the mechanics of this one, thanks in large part to Daniel.

Thanks to him, I actually don’t think any more that left and right are now degraded and useless terms.

Watching his video for all five little minutes of it, you understand what they actually mean and have always meant.

If you’re a true Rightist, you stand on the side of Hierarchy, in the cultural sense especially (“our race is better and culture is more evolved”). “We were just smarter or maybe more lucky than those people, but those are the breaks; we are on top and that’s the way things are supposed to be, and we of course should fight to keep things that way.”

But beyond culture, the Right is pro-hierarchy in the economic sense (“of course billionaires have a right to be billionaires”) and geopolitically–the unipolar hegemony of America above everybody else, now fading like fog, is naturally seen as a Good Thing, a right thing.

The Left stands against hierarchy and in favor of more equality. If you’re a true Leftist, you witness the CEO at the top of the hierarchy making hundreds of times more money than “his” hourly employees, and you think it obscene and evil–“meritocracy” be damned.

This attitude is seen and feared as communist by opponents of the Left.

The more Left you are, the more equality you want, and that is why Anarchists, who wish for a world where everybody is more or less equal in every important way (exactly as it was for 95% of the history of the human species) are usually categorized as the most extreme of Leftists.

The American democratic tradition is an attempt to resolve that contradiction.

That’s why most of us cherish it, more or less. What if (said the founders) we get rid of kings, and replace the hierarchy of monarchs with the rule of The People? What if the people decide who gets to run the hierarchy, through this rather complex system of representation we dreamed up and turned into this here Constitution?

It worked pretty well for a while, at least if you weren’t a Native American, or a woman, or a slave … gradually it even got a little better in some ways for some of those classes. Yay for slow incremental progress!

On out past the 1950s witch hunting of McCarthy on the right, and Murrow the leftist antidote as the prophet Daniel defines it, we are definitely living in a post-equality society.

The two parties have certainly embraced hierarchy totally, and are therefore classically right-wing. Capitalism has done the rest. There is no left wing, nobody to stand up for those on the short end of the equality stick, or the economic one, although they certainly both love to prate about how they are the only ones looking out for the little guy, the common man, the poor, the gay, the small businesses, the woman desperately wanting an abortion or the woman fervently praying that abortion be recognized as murder–the outsiders, however it is convenient to define them in the political moment.

Is it really so hard for you to understand why they are going to re-elect that very flawed and gross man who nevertheless tells them they are something more than a basket of deplorables, a toothless inbred useless waste of flesh living as grunting slaves to Moloch in between the Allegheny and the Salton Sea?

Oh, people, look around you. The signs are everywhere. You’ve left it for somebody other than you to be the one to care.
While your walls are burning and your towers are turning, I’ve got to leave you here, and try to get down to the wash somehow.

Greenwald and Galloway haven’t changed their views. The system has shifted rightward past them.

Even a Bernie Sanders kind of socialism is not really leftist except on the margins, on issues like free and equal health care as a basic human right. Bernie Sanders and AOC will not use the word apartheid, much less genocide, to describe what’s going on in Gaza, even though the most witless among us can see clearly that it is exactly that. They might want more “equality” of a carefully delimited sort here at home, but not for Palestinians.

It’s pretty much the same in Russia or China. The just have different flavors of hierarchy, and different species of oligarchs from the more familiar Western sort.

Joe Biden can’t credibly call Russia a communist threat any more. So he says that Putin is an autocrat, or, in a brutally ironic and laughable twist, an Imperialist. As if the US has not been the Imperial Empire for at least the last eighty years, and the British for a couple of hundred before that.

(An extended digression on the genesis of the problem in the Middle East [and similar interfamilial conflicts] is excised from here, and posted as a comment instead.)

May god bless the Comanche and the Sioux and the Haitians, and the Canaanites too.

May she bless you and me and every bloody victim of the Hierarchs since the dawn of their so-called civilization, and to its bitter end.

Oh people. Look among you. It’s there your hope must lie. There’s a black bird above you gliding in one place, like Jesus in the Sky.

While your walls are burning and your towers are turning, I’ve got leave you here, and try to get down to the wash somehow.

When my life is over, I’m going to stand before a better Father.
And the Sisters of the Sun are gonna rock me

on the water now.

But I don’t think this is good.

***

I was listening to yet another geopolitics expeert, an ex-DoD spook, and he goes on the record with a prediction at about 52 minutes in.

Specifically, that Ukrainian President Zelensky will be sent packing by the end of the month.

This month.

It will be interesting to see how that goes.

He didn’t make a prophecy on how long Biden will stay in the race or who will replace him.

Or one about when Israel will invade Lebanon.

Place your bets soon!

You can do it in the comments section here, for free.

I spent the day humping another load of her stuff to storage ahead of the storm.

This house is beginning to resemble home.

I gassed up the truck too and I’m hoping that’s the last thing I’ll have to put on a credit card for a while. The basic income people are still dragging their heels, but I’m still cautiously optimistic that they’ll pull their heads out soon.

I don’t mind the rain at all. The daytime temp tomorrow makes me pout some, but I’m showing the full context as a part of a prayer that my pout will be short. Seventy-two is warmer than we’ve seen since before Halloween. Even better is the promise of an overnight low dropping only to 40.

Soon the gas bill will be only the basic charge, and the electric too for a while, likely a long while, because I only really need AC two weeks out of the year or so. Unlike artificial heat, which is necessary to basic comfort from November through February at the least.

The solar blessing be upon us all.

The rest of this is just buzz-harshing that I wrote yesterday, so you can quit now if you’re not in the mood for that shit.

***

You know what the people of Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan have, that you, dear citizen of Empire, don’t?

Health care. For free.

If you’re very lucky, you get to pay for medical insurance, which is not care, and not free.

It’s just another tax on being alive. A “co-pay” with a deductible on top of what they take out of your check to begin with.

Like having to pay to have water pumped to your crib, and then paying a second premium for water you can actually drink.

Wait! I have an idea!

Let’s send another 100 billion (which we also don’t have) to them over there.

While our maddened veterans sleep on cardboard and 1 in 7 of our children are hungry.

Because Freedom! Murika boo-ya!

The Uniparty is the party of caviar (or at least ribeye) for those who live here and are successful enough to become oppressors themselves, quietly or openly …

… and fuck the rest up the ass, with a John Deere tractor of imperialism.

Just because you’re not being literally fuckraped, or cluster-bombed or ethnically cleansed, yet, sunshine, that doesn’t make you Free.

They won’t tell you that little secret on CNN.

Which is good, because that’s my job.

It doesn’t pay much.

But the working conditions are stellar.

RFK Jr. Closing In On Trump & Biden (but he will not bring salvation either)

An unbelievable story about a journalist being arrested and dragged to court in leg chains for the crime of saying the wrong flippant thing to bacon with a gun.

Oh, and the remarks happened three years before the arrest …

I guess he was covering the wrong things all this time and they finally decided to make an example of his reporter ass over nothing.

Maybe it’s not quite so unbelievable any more.

Julian Assange is dying for our sins.

***

As the big fat fascists grow more evil and afraid, the little and the good resist, and get braver.

Soldiers Burn Their Uniforms At Aaron Bushnell Rally

Always remember how the First Responder at Aaron’s suicide naturally responded.

He drew his gun.

On a burning, dying man.

It’s really hard to understand what the fuck is wrong with these people.

And I don’t mean the ones lighting fires.

I’ll say it again. I am no fan of the Donald.

But I am no fan of lawfare deployed against the will of the People either, whether against Julian Assange, Stephen Donziger, Alexi Navalny, Nelson Mandela, the January 6 Shaman, John F. Kennedy, or myself.

When the Colorado Supreme Court voted to ban Trump from the state’s ballot, the vote was 4-3. All seven members of the court were appointed by Democrats and presumably anti-Trump as well. But the four in the majority were all educated as lawyers at Ivy League schools.

The three that legally said, “This is stupid and wrong”, which it is, went to local and less prestigious law schools.

Does that tell you anything? Maybe?

Today all nine Supremes, the liberal women included, agreed with those three.

Darlings, my vote, and yours, will never count for nearly as much. But you should cast yours in good faith in November, and hope like hell it isn’t counted by a Diebold machine, or lost in the fog of war … I even promise to forgive you if you vote for that babykilling dementia case or whoever they prop up in his doddering place. We all make mistakes.

The real threat to democracy isn’t Raging White Rurals. It isn’t the Orange Man. It isn’t too many of the People being dumb or too pissed off to see straight.

It’s the minority that went to good schools, speak well and dress well, and somehow got convinced that their way is the smart way, the right way, the American way.

Rachel Maddow is way more of a threat to actual democracy than Joe Sixpack, or Joe Rogan.

Anderson Vanderbilt-Cooper never met a war he didn’t like.

Every single Senator is ugly and wrong and evil in varying degrees, and carries the blood of Palestinian and Iraqi children on their well-manicured hands.

In the unlikely event that there is a hell, to hell with them all.

SCOTUS Unanimously Overturns Colorado’s Ballot Ban

***

On an even brighter (electoral) side, abortion matters even less today.

An O-pill is shipping, which, according to NPR, will cost $20 a month and be available over the counter, no prescription, even to teenagers.

I’m sure it’s overloaded with civilized side effects, but then again so is womb-scraping.

Best of luck against the war machine to all the people out there, pregnant or not and regardless of whatever witless genocidal meat puppet they choose to vote for; Amen.

MSNBC Goes Full Racist on People Who Don’t Live In Cities

Yes please. Watch one minute of MSNBC for me. Just this once, and never again.

The scared little dweebs who wrote this book are ridiculous.

Most of the people I know out here in The Rural are pissed off, or completely disillusioned, or tuned out. Something like half of them are native, and the number goes well above 50% if you count the Hispanics or the Latinos or whatever we’re supposed to call mestizos from the south these days.

It’s still probably true that most people who don’t live in New York or LA or St. Louis are white, by a small margin. But nearly a quarter of all black voters now say they’d prefer Trump to Biden.

The dweebs are race-baiting. This isn’t about skin color.

It’s about class warfare; their privileged, supposedly enlightened class of elites versus all the very pissed-off people regardless of color.

And … “threat to American democracy”? You lying sacks of shit. You’re doing everything you can to kill democracy by hoping you can make it illegal for the icky guy most voters want to even get on a ballot.

I don’t like Donald Trump. He’s just another oligarch.

I don’t like the morons who tune their pickups to belch smoke.

I have little use for anyone who feels it necessary to be waving a flag all the time.

But these people exist, and they are supposed to be free to pursue their own happiness, and to vote for who they want to represent them.

If, in your case, that turns out to be the warmongering hypocrite of a vegetable puppet who now occupies the oval office, well … go with god, I reckon, even if that’s the political equivalent of driving a truck that smokes on purpose, making the world a worse place wherever you go.

Just stuff your 14th Amendment parlor tricks and let other people do the same.

I’ll be out here on the third rail, preaching the gospel according to HellOutta and a pox on both ugly houses.

***

(DueDiss coverage of that, and of Galloway, speaking of elections and horrifying incumbents unable to speak rationally.)

Manchester is the third-largest city in England and sits far to the north of London.

It’s been home to The Smiths and Oasis. Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto here and it also spawned A Clockwork Orange.

There are 650 representatives in the country’s whole House of Commons, and one of those seats, from the Manchester suburb of Rochdale, was just taken over by a man named George Galloway.

The entire British political establishment has their hair on fire over it. The Prime Minister went on TV in his anguish, over this one seat.

Because George is a very articulate spokesman for views the Uniparty there deplores.

Galloway respnded:

George Galloway: ‘I despise the prime minister’

That’s the raw interview from election night.

For background, JD has a great clip on the same subject.

While you’re over at Jimmy’s, I encourage you to watch a far lesser light, one Matt Gaetz of Pensacola, completely dismantle the American Secretary of Defense, who is thus outed as a spineless scumbag and hypocrite.

Enjoy.

Pretty soon we all are going to be able to make movies by typing them up ourselves.

I think you’ll want to watch this.

Tyler Perry PAUSES Studio Expansion After Seeing AI Capabilities

“I am the Witch of the North.”
“Are you a Munchkin?” asked Dorothy.
“No; but I am their friend, although I live in the land of the North.
…

“Who is Glinda?” enquired the Scarecrow.
“The Witch of the South. She is the most powerful of all the Witches, and rules over the Quadlings. Besides, her castle stands on the edge of the desert, so she may know a way to cross it.”
“Glinda is a good Witch, isn’t she?” asked the child.

–The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, 1903

The movie deceived us into thinking that the Good Witch in attendance when Dorothy and Toto landed in Oz was called Glinda.

But that’s not right.

Glinda was the Witch of the South, but the Witch who stole the slippers, gave them to Dorothy, and set her on the path called the Yellow Brick Road was of the North.

Her name was Locasta.

In the second book (1904) which should have been called Ozma of Oz but wasn’t, this is confirmed:

“In the South Country rules a very delightful Queen called Glinda the Good, who I am sure will gladly receive us,” said the Scarecrow, getting into the Thing clumsily. “Let us go to her and ask her advice.”
…
“Now,” said old Mombi to the Queen, “let your soldiers deliver up this girl to Glinda. She will think she has the real Mombi in her power, and so will return immediately to her own country in the South.”

In the definitive modern retelling, called Wicked, Gregory MacGuire reiterates the movie’s error, by making Galinda into a poor little rich girl from Gillikin–in the North. Why? Possibly because he needed the people of the southern lands to have no eminence, Witchly or otherwise.

To be Anarchists, of a rather Neolithic sort, and to be at length exploited by the centralized royal power of the Emerald City because their own State was … ‘primitive’.

All of this matters a great deal.

I’m just not sure yet why.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/day-everything-99422401

Bonus Content, Stolen Via Link:
The Ukraine War Lie Just COLLAPSED (Russell Brand)

How to buy the best olive oil

I watched all forty minutes so you don’t need to. The essence:

“Extra virgin” is equal to (first) cold pressed, and this is what you want.

Don’t buy anything bottled in plastic. Dark glass is the best. Personally I found my current oil in a metal container, which is not discussed as an option here. So if you have any clue about that, please share.

Check the label to make sure that the amount of trans fat in your oil = 0% … any other number means that it’s been adulterated, probably with an oil other than olive.

Look for an oil that says where it was “made in” or “produced in”. The opposite is “imported from”, which ends up meaning nothing. If an oil says “imported from Italy”, it might have been grown and produced anywhere.

For similar origin reasons, the best European oils will have a certification called DOP. There’s another cert called IGP which isn’t quite as good, but better than nothing. If the oil isn’t European, you should at least see an address for the producer, preferably a phone number too, and/or a website. Some of the fanciest oils feature a code you can scan with a phone to learn more about where it was grown and produced.

Speaking of certs, I would only buy organic oils personally, though the maker of the video doesn’t seem to be bothered either way.

The bottle should list the harvest date for the olives. A “best by” date doesn’t help, because it will probably be two or three years in the future, and that says nothing about how old it is already by the time you’re buying it. After opening, in any case, use it within months, and the fewer the better.

An ultimately less informative, but much more entertaining video on the same subject can be found here.

Let’s ramp up to it on the slow, by watching …

Four Democrats, on MSNBC, discussing why Joe is a No Go in their moral sphere.

This is the reality out here in the flyover, darlings.

But you, and I, and those four people speaking truth–we’re all just re-arranging deck chairs. We are discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

There’s nothing heroic in any of that.

But heroes do exist.

Aaron Bushnell was one of them, and he died for our sins.

This one is for my Dem friends who think that Greenwald has lamentably become a right-winger.

Here he systematically dismantles the odious worldview of actual right-winger Ben Shapiro.

I know this won’t allay your misgivings completely. But there are some additional advantages to this evidence, as when he compares The Ben’s ideology to that of Nancy Pelosi. I found that clarifying.

Finally, just to prove he’s still human and prone to imperfection, he closes the show by interviewing (and lavishing praise upon) one of those guys from ‘The Vanguard’. The Gavin one.

Who is a dweeb, and a drama queen.

So it goes.

Ukrainian document, via Glenn Greenwald, listing ‘pro-Russians’ in the alt-Western media; including Glenn Greenwald. There are lots more that didn’t make their list, but these are the household names, at least in educated households.

Not yet on this official list: DueDissidence, who had a very enlightening bit about who gets banned, or shadowbanned, and some of why. It explains very precisely why my attempts at self-promoting on Twitter, via Substack, are seen by almost no one.

Recalculating …

It still does not explain why YT continues to rip up my view counts on that platform.

At least not with the same precision, but …

I think that in my slow-witted way, I am beginning to get the picture.

Bassem Youssef, a self-described blueNoMatterWho voter, will sit this one out.

His logic is impeccable.

We know that getting an abortion has never been an issue for a rich woman, no matter where she lives. Back in the day, they’d run off to Switzerland for skiing and a bit of the vacuum.

Youssef says it’s still almost universally true in America today. If she’s low-income in Utah, California is waiting for her. In Arkansas, it’s about finding the road to Illinois.

But what if she lives in Gaza?

There, it’s not a matter of fussy laws.

If there is even an accessible hospital or clinic, it’s probably been bombed. Or surely will be.

The blockade is still in force too, like the Yemenis are saying. If she wants health care, well, that’s too bad, because those Zionists after all have a right to defend themselves.

From women pregnant or not.

From dead children.

Because those theocratic pioneer women in the settlements have a right to life.

And she does not.

Go back 34 years.

The Empire was in the driver’s seat. They didn’t have to promise to avoid expanding NATO.

But they did promise it, and then proceeded to break that promise over and over.

Until at last the engineered puppet regime in Kyiv said sure, we want to join the military alliance against Russia too, which would have put US missiles on Vlad’s doorstep, almost literally a gun to his head.

Now you know.

1:

It was Avdiivka, anyway. But in the wink of an eye it’s now once more Avdeyevka.

The reason I’ve been pushing the story hard is not so much because of its importance militarily, but rather–politically. The sudden collapse of the stronghold, according to people better informed than either of us, could well turn out to be the proximate cause for a coup, over there.

Chaos in Kiev follows chaotic retreat from Avdeyevka

I can’t help but wonder in advance how the Sean Penns of the world are going to feel about that.

***

2:

Even though our dear Marianne has dropped out of the presidential race, and even though the fatcat Obama operatives have proclaimed that there won’t be a real primary this year, there is still one semi-serious Democrat besides Ol’ Joe contending for that party’s nomination.

His name is Dean Phillips and he’s a congressman from Minnesota.

The bright and savvy Briahna Joy Gray had him on for an interview.

It didn’t go that well for him.

It will go well for you, though, if you’re not quite sure yet where to stand about recent events in the Middle East. Very clarifying.

My own current stance on the matter boils down to a glistening new slogan.

“Canaan for the Caananites“.

***

3:

Why are ‘we’ bombing Yemen?

Because they’re shooting at shipping.

But why would the Houthis be shooting at western shipping in the gulf?

If you were listening, they would be telling you.

“the attacks will continue until the blockade of Gaza is lifted“.

Which it should be anyway, right? Humanitarian crisis and all that.

But no.

Israel is bombing the Lebanon and preparing to invade Rafah instead.

Deepening the crisis.