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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

But we know they killed him, too.

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

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

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

Monumental Oversight: Unveiling a Colossal Miscalculation | Scott Ritter

The two main reasons to sink into this hour are:

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

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

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

Happy blue Monday.

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

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

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

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

Women. And children.

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

No humanity.

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

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

Genocide is genocide. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing.

Nazis gonna Nazi.

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Gabor Mate: this is genocide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The video

The book being discussed in the video

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be better for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does America think it must?

Are we … exceptional?

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

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

It’s been that way your whole life.

It looks almost normal from inside the Empire.

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

Where would you have stood, on Vietnam?

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

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

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

There isn’t any doubt in my mind.

Look there, I signaled you my lovely Virtue.

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

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

Source

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

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

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

Potato, potahtoe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worldwide Peaceful Protests Call for END to Israel War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Land of the Free my burning bleeding testicles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First half at Rewilding: Peter Michael Bauer interviews Natasha Tucker

Second half at Primal Anarchy: NT interviews PMB

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

I will keep binging, and expanding my scope.

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

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

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

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

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

The basics, in my opinion, remain unchanged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world is still a beautiful place.

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

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

Anarchy now? Sure, I’m for that.

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

Abandon all hope, ye who dwelleth here.

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

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

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

Episode 27: Day to Day Rewilding

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

You might enjoy.

***

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

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

Winnowing.

Episode 25: What is Rewilding?

A different primal anarchy podcast with a different perspective.

My favorite answer to the title question …

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

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

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

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

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

This is the difference between a dog and a wolf.

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

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

Like back in the pre-civilized day.

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

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

So are we.

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

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

Instead of continuing to stuff our holes with that stuff.

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

Rewilding is simply turning around, reversing the bad course.

It is in a word to vertere.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best thing I found was this:

B&G Podcast 15: BAGR Roundtable Discussion

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

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

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

Something like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

I’ve been stuffing mine with a radical decluttering.

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

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

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

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

There is still a lot of shit.

But I have it by the scruff at last.

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

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

I laid down a fresh crop of rugs.

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

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

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

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

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

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

We sit together on the mesa and watch.

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

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

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

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

You turn to me and speak the words.

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

Of course they did.

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

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

The Work began again.

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

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

Theoretically I’ll get it right this time.

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

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

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

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

***

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

To be continued.)

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

That led to their fathers killing them as competition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our jobs.

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

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

It’s killing us, baby.

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

Our very selves included.

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

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

What do you do, with such a hole?

You try to fill it.

With … something.

Next time we’ll talk about hole fillings.

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

from the comments section here

An unretouched screenshot from this video.

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

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

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

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

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

Are evil oligarchs allowed to jam out?

Source

Sure. Willy Clinton had a saxophone.

But it will never make them cool even so.

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

***

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

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

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

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

That’ll do.

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

That’s alright Mama. Any way you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry to be that guy. Again.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

***

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

So I got that going for me too.

The title reference is to George Carlin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People like Ibram X Kendi.

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

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

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

Details and embellishment at the link.

Class consciousness and solidarity on the road to anarchy now.

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

Russell Brand has not been convicted of a crime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Short answer: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

At least … so far.

Give them time.

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

Democracy. So beautiful.

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

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

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

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

I said to her, look.

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

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

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

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

That expectation is only going to lead to disappointment.

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

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

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

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

I didn’t say anything.

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

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

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

***

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

No one is ever going to care all that much.

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

My father let that problem consume him.

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

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

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

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

***

It exists in me too.

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

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

Expecting nothing to come of it.

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

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

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

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

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

But really, I couldn’t help but wonder …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lots of them.

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

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

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

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

Anarchy now.

I got a text from some company doing political polling.

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck in all your future endeavors I am sure.

The situation is no longer intolerable.

The house is still just barely habitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I finished vacuuming.

Alli is down to one relatively clean catbox.

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

The glass might be half full.

Finally, my life is no longer clogged with crap.

Not even close to true.

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

I no longer believe in Progress.

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

Have fun with all that.

I am nothing but a Witness to incremental change.

Direct link

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

How We Got Here

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My own life is broken too.

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

Carry on, beloved.

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

I was used to paying 3 or maybe 4 bucks for it.

It costs Seven now. About double. It’s the same with so many things.

***

I’ve been good about No Restaurants, but I am lazy about cooking, so when I shop at the lone grocer I’m always looking for MREs. Meals Ready to Eat.

The main problem with them is the same as with dining out. You basically have no idea where the food came from, and you can bet that wherever that was, it was the cheapest thing available, and not organic, or grass-fed, or free of additives and filler.

But I bought some hot meatloaf anyway. About a pound of meat, a couple ounces of ketchup and bread mixed in I would guess, and $9 at the deli counter. I wolfed it around 6 pm last night and it was a soothing comfort meal that put me in the mood to sleep early.

Which didn’t work out in the end because this is the single worst weekend of the year at the ranch in Sand Rock. My house sits a block from the Fairgrounds, and this is the week of the Fair. So the normally barren streets are crammed with people who want to park in my driveway and go distract themselves, and the air is full of garbage music at unsettling volumes, and the ugly voice of the superpatriot shitkicker rodeo announcer.

But that’s off-topic.

Today I went back to the grocery to see how little I could spend on makings for meatloaf that wasn’t suss.

The hamburger meat was spendy, and the even vaguely natural versions were astronomical. I thought about some 30%-off stuff that would have run five bucks a pound, but it didn’t even pretend to being good, so I checked out the ground turkey.

$9.99 a pound for the organic. I was surprised they even had it, and I almost paid the price.

But then I saw that on sale, for the exact same price, was *3* pounds of decidedly un-organic ground turkey.

It was literally the cheapest meat in the store, at least this side of scrapple and hooves. $3.33 to fill oneself with protein and keto juice, provided you had a stove, and a skillet, and an egg to mix it with, which I blessedly do.

So I bought it.

***

Just before it rained last night (for the last time in a while, they say), I got almost all the big wide driveway blown clear of dust, new leaves, old leaves, and random cat dishes and toys.

The rain finished that part of the cleaning for me.

It’s looking pretty good; coming along.

Then I ate my pound of suss burger and tried to sleep with those mixed results.

Twenty four hours later, I’m back in a similar place, with a little more done. I’m scratching at several tall piles at once. I’m trying not to listen to Dildo the Cowboy yammer his flag-waving bull shit. I’m fully charging the headphones in the hope I can sleep with them on until the yeehaws shut the fuck up around one, two in the morning.

I don’t know if it’s a living, but I’m sure it’s a life, and not a lifestyle.

I wonder how much it would cost to turn myself into the guy that owns a bunch of storage lockers, and why I didn’t do that when I had the chance.

But I wonder idly.

And secretly, I know the answer.

Craig “Pasta” Jardula is subbing for Jimmy while JD is on the road.

In this clip, he’s talking about a recent lively debate between Krystal&Kyle and Briahna Joy Gray. BJG takes the general position of “they’re all the same”. K&K are quite foamy around the mouth about how much greater Joe and the Dems are–if you want talking points to convince people about why voting for the Joe wing is the right thing to do, Krystal and her new boy toy try to bring them by the dozen. It’s a gold mine for Blue no matter who. Enjoy.

But Briahna is smarter than either of them, and Pasta has twice the heart as he lays down his gloss on their conversation.

There are plenty of reasons to simp for the Dems.

There are no good ones though.

Krystal, a millionaire many times over, pretends to care so much about labor unions. Kyle pretends that the utter failure to provide any kind of student debt relief was just poor Joe being outplayed by the greater evil.

It’s all deep bullshit that changes nothing, and will change nothing. Due Dissidence demonstrated that in a much longer and even smarter way the other night.

One more reason to believe in truth, again, from Woody.

And, let’s see … Cornel just hired some centrist system shill, a Hillary bot no less, to be his campaign manager;

fuck, uh-oh, everybody can legitimately go into panic mode.

There, now.

Consider yourself duly informed, if you read this, if you clicked anything.

If not, I’ve done my bit for the day and the cause anyway.

It helps me, if no one else.

As I struggle to climb up out of the Catshit Bombhole of my enviromind.

What is the right construction? ‘Happy Nine Eleven’ doesn’t seem quite right.

In any case, let’s all celebrate the Patriot Act and the loss of our civil liberties with one from the late lamented John Prine.

But your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.
It’s already overcrowded
From your dirty little war.
Now Jesus don’t like killin’
No matter what the reasons for
And your flag decal won’t get you
Into Heaven any more.

Bonus content: Brian Eno – Don’t get a job

It.

All of it, but the last three posts in particular, and then some.

During that long drive down, listening to NPR when I could stand to listen to anything except the wind, I heard a story about how “scientists” had “succeeded” in creating artificial human embryos with no egg, sperm, or womb anywhere involved. O, Progress.

The main utility of these little monsters, it seems, will be in reducing the number of failed pregnancies and bringing more live babies to term, through a deeper understanding of in vitro fertilization and embryology in general.

There are already eight billion human beings sucking at Gaea’s tit, which should be more than enough to kill her one way or the other, and sooner rather than later.

But progress and science live in a world outside such concerns.

They will use the frankenchildren to make more and better humans anyway, and what is worse, most of those more successful human babies will turn into rich ones that suck up far more than their equal share of every kind of resource–because they don’t have or need IVF clinics in Somalia or Bangladesh. They have them in the suburbs of Atlanta and DC and London and Berlin, because that’s where the infertile overeducated wannabe boutique mothers with too much disposable income are to be found. Naturally.

NPR muttered dimly and briefly about the possible moral hazards.

But not the real ones like overpopulation or inequality. No, they were more concerned that God might not approve of vat-grown embryos being experimented upon, and stuff like that. That in His infinite wisdom He might find it … icky.

Beyond that though, they treated the news with optimistic applause, like the headfucked bluish drones they have dependably become over time.

***

As I mentioned, the other day Jimmy Dore interviewed Cornel West and there was no happy ending. James reflected on what went wrong, and tried to explain the source of his depressed disappointment with Dr. West.

The best analysis of the interview came from Sabrina Salvati … and I say that confidently despite the fact that I’ve only (so far) watched her first ten minutes.

In that brief span, she zeroes right in on what the real disagreement was between the interviewer and the interviewed. It comes down to a difference in perception about Trump and Biden and the parties they represent.

Jimmy says there’s no ultimate difference. Cornel objects, arguing that the Dems are still after all this time the lesser evil. Who are the worst fascists? Cornel says: Trump and MAGA. Okay, maybe, but … why?

It’s because, he says, that although the two parties are equally bad in real terms, the Trump faction is more fascist because, in addition to all the macro-shitty things both sides do … the Trumpists also engage in “the scapegoating of the most vulnerable”.

Dr. West, I’m still very likely to vote for you. But that’s a very thin thread to hang your distinction on, and as many people have pointed out, that thread does not come free, either–politically.

In other words, there is no electoral upside, and maybe a steep downside, to saying “Biden ain’t quite as bad”.

I don’t get why you would say it. I don’t get why your main spiritual advisor, the estimable Chris Hedges, would not try to rein you in on spouting such a useless, nonsense thing.

Unlike Jimmy, I’m not quite disappointed in you, but that’s because of how Sabrina opens her analysis in this piece. She says:

• “there is no hero coming to save you”
• “we have to save ourselves”
• “we have to help each other”
• “I’m not sad, I’m not depressed, I’m not heartbroken”
• “because I’m not relying on a politician to come and save me”

Preach it, sister.

We already made that mistake once or twice with the brutally disappointing old puppet man named Bernie. A lot of us made it to a degree with Obama before that.

We’d be fools to make the same mistake all over again with Cornel, or anyone.

Essentially, Jimmy and Sabby and Nick Cruze and all the other people shitting on Dr. West as a candidate right now … are in the right, intellectually and morally, and Cornel is badly mistaken. Even foolish on this score.

I can vote for him with a mind at peace anyway, because I’m not relying on even him, to come make everything right, and save us.

Thanks for the reminder, Ms. Salvati.

***

This runs a little deeper than politics for me.

I have so much respect for the Michael Moore who filmed Roger & Me. So too for Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Charles Bukowski, and the ability of James McMurtry to understand the dynamic of ‘We Can’t Make It Here Anymore’.

But no film or book or song, much less any politician, is going to save me.

No mother or sister or brother or pension or job or idea is going to save me either.

When the tacks are down to brass and baggie is down to stems and seeds, no one is even going to understand how to help me–the ones who even care to give it a shot are few and precious–and understanding, nearly mythical as it is, would still be no guarantee at all that helping me would be worth it to anyone in this dark and sober world.

They have problems of their own. Those problems take the priority, and almost always ALL the priority, over mine.

Love has nothing to do with it.

I got mine, pal.

Best of luck to you.

And I am forced into a place where I have to say the same in return, not just because I can’t afford to be an altruist, but because you lose respect for me when I am one. Even to a third or fourth kitten life.

So water your own fuckin’ plants.

Move your own self down the road.

Celebrate your own birthday and send me a funny .gif for mine.

I’ll be over here living the same, and we can call it even. No hard feelings. Vaya con su Diosa and I’ll be going over here with mine.

On the long way home, I started to make a little list in my head of the kinds of things I don’t want anymore. I’m already notorious, for example, for Not Flying, but that’s old news.

At the top of the list was No Renting again ever, and that includes motel rooms. Yes, there will be times when one’s own roof and one’s own bed will be too far away for them to be of use. In those cases, I need to be prepared to bring my own roof and bed with me. In practical terms this means giving up on trips to Greece or Poland; or even Hawaii, and in fact giving up on seeing Europe even once in my life.

My time is growing shorter. My space is growing smaller. That’s my responsive choice to those facts. A goodbye to the whole dream of Hemingway, and the one about the caves at Lascaux.

No Restaurants. This is a softer case. I will still let Single Speed make me a pour-over sometimes. I will not say no to Martanne’s or the Turquoise Room once in a while on a special occasion. But as a matter of daily life, I’ll source my own food and prepare it too–I’ll take the time to do that, and I’ll sacrifice the social aspect of eating out to my ideals.

I’ll need to bring knives and a stove to put under the rolling roof, somewhere in the vicinity of the rolling bed.

No Interstates. Again, of necessity, this is a softer rule. It’s a straight shot of 85 miles down an interstate just to get to Sprouts from here, and I doubt I’ll take the much longer route through the rez at 55 MPH routinely, just in the interests of purity.

But to get to Denver, or back from Denver, taking I-40 and I-25 may be the fastest way, but not by much. And the US Highways are better in every other way. Especially the one that runs through Salida.

And the Natural Grocers there.

And the permissible one night of free parking of a rolling bed and stove just up the road at the Poncha Springs Visitor Center.

Beyond these three big ones, there are others. I am, for example, absolutely sick of spending three hundred a month on my tobacco habit. There are also things that are must-haves, rather than Verboten, and at the top of that list is the Solitude that I have been starving for all these many months. I was an idiot to let things get that bad. A generous and compassionate idiot, but that was not enough to excuse the damage that I’m so assiduously and painfully trying to heal in these first few days back in SandRock alone at last.

Roger & Me is a 1989 American documentary film written, produced, directed by, and starring Michael Moore, in his directorial debut.

We watched a good piece of it in the cold wind at 9500 feet at the Monarch Motor Lodge in Colorado the other night.

You should watch it too, even though you are almost certainly never going to hear that advice …

Still, you should watch it too.

***

It’s half past four in the morning on a Friday, and I am

• awake
• alive
• alone

I’m rested and unwound and I’ve got this solitude in abundance at last.

Yesterday I started to clean all the cat bowls. That’s even less pleasant than it sounds. In the meantime …

Burning Man
Some brilliant analysis about what it was, and what it is.
The high point comes at about the twelve-minute mark, where a bright rich little Burner complains about having to hike out through six miles of mud. And then same said Burner is later proven to be a lawyer who spends his days fighting against the constitutionality of child labor laws.

The American inequality, encapsulated.

Market missile

When I was driving down the mountain I listened to an hour’s worth of breaking news on NPR about this tragedy of a missile killing 17 people in a Ukrainian market. There was never a hint of any explanation other than the Russians being responsible.

But now there is.

The Western propaganda, encapsulated.

Two of my favorite political people, natural allies in any rational world, went head to head and were not very good to each other.

First Thoughts on CONTENTIOUS Jimmy Dore Cornel West Interview

Those first thoughts are provided by the Due Dissidence guys.

My own: Jimmy’s insistence on Covid and Mandates being the One Big Issue came off as kinda dumb, in spite of his attempt to drag things like censorship and income inequality under that single big tent. It IS the One Big Issue on the Jimmy Dore Show, but TJDS is not the world.

On the other hand, DD’s Dobular made a really great point.

There is one half-ass reason left for voting for Democrats, and the reason is: Not Trump Not Trump Not Trump. It’s a shitty reason. It’s an insufficient reason. And if you try to use it to vote for Biden or Newsome or the Blue-du-Jour in 2024, you’re rationalizing, possibly brainwashed, and not smart. I can say that because I was exactly that kind of not-smart in 2020, so please don’t hit me with the umbrage stick, even under your breath.

The problem is that Cornel West still thinks that Trump is worse, and a “fascist”, as if we hadn’t been marinating in real fascism for decades, as if white supremacy were something invented by the Donald instead of advocated tacitly by our beloved Founding Fathers a few hundred years back.

Ask the Sioux.

The logic of this is that if West drops out for some reason, and his thinking doesn’t change, he will probably be forced by intellectual honesty to become just another BlueNoMatterWho drone, the November after next, and just as with Bernie, anyone hoping for real change will just have to suck it up.

Dear Cornel.

Brother Biden is not the lesser of evils. He’s the strawberry evil, and Trump is vanilla and that’s pretty much the end of it.

Incrementalism will change nothing.

We don’t have time for this shit.

Live free or die; nothing personal.

Love,

V.

PS: Here’s one more recent DD clip featuring the brainless stylings of one Kyle Kulinski, on what amounts to the very same West question.

PPS: Lots of clips of the actual interview, and analysis from a low-budget working class perspective, on Hard Lens Media here.

Residents of Lahaina are asserting, in public forums, that three weeks before the fires, an “emergency declaration” depositing all power regarding “housing” there in the hands of a single unelected official was issued by the governor of the state.

Fueling speculation that the big black fences which quickly surrounded the devastated valuable parts of the city were ready to go well in advance of the disaster.

It sounds like just another crazy conspiracy theory, doesn’t it?

Maybe it is.

Sure.

Maybe.

But we know for sure that thousands of people are still missing (meaning: dead), and that big media has gotten bored and wandered away from the topic, and that whole families were incinerated together in their cars trying to get the fuck away, and …

That, for some reason, doubtless related to ‘safety’, it’s already illegal to fly a drone over the very real black fences.

More Interviews With Actual Residents

In the land of the free and the not so often brave
There’s both love or money, now choose which you will save

(But… keep thinking that way and you won’t get nowhere)

Set to post as It becomes a september, whatever that is.

He didn’t walk and he didn’t pray on the last day of the august. He slept nine hours and posted three respectable-length videos that used up almost all the old backstash of footage from the month just passed.

Where the third person came from just now I can’t say. But the point is, something was done, a thing that can be pointed to, and even viewed on the rusting Internets. Maybe it amounts to art, but at least for sure it amounts to

Something.

THEY say, in a very unsteady and completely unverified tone, that ten or fourteen hours from now someone is supposed to be by, to yank forty-two feet of trailer on out of this forsaken driveway and up to some greener grass.

They say I should trail the trailer, in the Pearl, and leave the Pearl up there sitting next to it, and then wait there, for some unspecified but low number of days while they both settle in to the northerly soils.

And then I’ll be allowed to come back down; in a Sunday Morning Coming Down type of Way, in some expeditionary rental car.

Back, to the wreckage and the crapstorm tornado that was, will be, left behind.

It may sound like I am complaining, but in fact and conversely, I am almost completely done now with all the complaining.

Relatively speaking, I am asked to help much more than I am asked if I need help.

Recently, I was asked how it was going … I answered honestly.

And upon hearing my dismal report, my inquirer said: “Well if you’re asking for help, I don’t have any to give”.

I was not asking for help.

I have never, actually, asked this inquirer for help.

I almost never ask anyone, for any kind of help.

So it pissed me off pretty sharply for a moment.

I have to say that there are people who help me, often without being asked at all. Help regularly, even once a month like clockwork.

I am deeply grateful, to my Patrons past and present, large and small.

I am stunned by that kind of generosity, and delighted.

But, posting a Patreon link aside, I would never ask for it.

The reverse is not true. I am asked, and often.

I’m not sure why that is, or how karma exactly is supposed to work.

***

Rolling back south I will be seriously considering whether Autarky is the answer to all these inquiries, questions, and metaphysical conundra.

Matt Taibbi is a great journalist. Aaron Mate’ and Max Blumenthal are top notch. Michael Moore is good. But a short little gay guy is The Man. His name is Glenn Greenwald and he’s whip smart and almost always just Right, politically and morally.

As proof I give you his last two shows at the time of this writing.

Bernie Denounces Cornel for Spoiling Biden’s Chances—Completing (His Own) Transformation Into An Establishment Hack | SYSTEM UPDATE #140

GG doesn’t just drill Bernie for his failings and cowardice. He looks at the whole system that drilled Bernie first, shows how it works exactly the same in Great Britain, and then lets a talented young black woman explain why everything they say about voting third party is bullshit–among other deeply interesting takes.

Grayzone’s GoFundMe Frozen—Escalating Abuse of Financial System to Crush Dissent | SYSTEM UPDATE #139

This one is about the deliberate Unfreeing of the Internet to reinforce existing power structures. Really thrilling stuff, I’m sure you’re thinking. I thought it too. I was wrong. It is, and it matters way more than who you choose to waste your vote on.

***

Thus ends August. It was not a good month for me. I barely walked and I barely filmed and I didn’t edit and I just managed to barely hang on to my sanity most days. Retreating into a pattern of being here and spilling every day again helped, but only a little.

After today that pattern breaks.

On Friday morning I have a road trip of sorts, up north to the place where the Rockies meet the Great High Plains. It won’t be a pleasure trip. It will, though, upon my return, buy me some big wide open space for a time.

Space with which I will craft another good month, like June, the gods willing. A credible start to the fall and the year.

If I’m not posting every day here, it’s probably a good sign.

So don’t fret for me.

At least not because of that, okay? (And yes, I can see my stats here, and I know that I’m talking pretty much just to the wind, but that too is okay.)

See you on the other side.

Maui Residents Erupt In Rage

Related via tangent to yesterday’s post.

You will not learn about any of it, diligently watching CNN or MSNBC. The bosses of their pretty anchorpeople and spokesdrones don’t want you to know. Up and down the chain there, everybody’s been well paid not to give a fuck.

There’s no water. There is nowhere to spend the laughably insulting $700 relief checks. But what there is, is miles and miles of blackout fence around the whole perimeter of the fire. Already. See for yourself.

Is this … a crime scene? Or are they just getting ready to make it into one, even before caring for the dead and injured and homeless and hungry?

And oh–cops. Lots and lots of cops in uniforms no one recognizes, on top of the National Guard.

How long will it take, before your town becomes Flint or Jackson or East Palestine or Lahaina, and what will you do when it happens?

Thank capitalist Jesus this is still a democracy, whatever in His name that even means any more.

Ukraine is the kind of democracy where all the opposition parties and opposition media are banned.

Also, the kind of democracy where the leader announced that the elections scheduled for 2024 were going to be cancelled, because, I don’t know, democracy isn’t an appropriate form of government during wartime. Something like that.

Now that the war is going badly, and they are running out of men of draft age even though the draft age is a soft sixty, Zelenskyy has moderated his view on that somewhat.

Now he says he wants to hold elections.

But only if his friends in the West can come up with another 5 billion.

Because voting is a really expensive deal, maybe even more expensive should he lose.

This is a man who owns dozens of homes in beautiful places all over the world, and every one of them is a nicer house than yours or mine.

Even before the, er, special military operation began over there (the War has been primarily internecine or Civil since 2014), Ukraine was hands-down the most corrupt nation in greater Europe, and that is still the case.

Elections don’t cost governments five billion dollars.

But golden parachutes for Volodemort and his best pals do.

You and I should definitely pony up.

Because Democracy.

Source

Why Nonconformity Cures a Sick Self and a Sick Society

Yesterday’s video link is from Useful Idiots, and their very next show was called

‘How Both Parties Work for ‘Tyranny, Inc.’

This one includes a detailed explanation, from the POV of a conservative populist, about exactly why DeSantis is far, far worse than Trump could dream of being, for the average person. So you might like it for that.

I got pretty interested in what the author of Tyranny Inc. had to say. I went looking for more and found this:

Tyranny, Inc. | A Conversation with Sohrab Ahmari

Mr. Ahmari is a convert to both Catholicism and conservatism, so he is not someone I would normally find myself allied with.

But his critique of the culture is both smart and compassionate.

In essence–my words not his–this is an oligarchic fascist state. The people at the top of it have all the money, and maybe just as importantly, they have most all the jobs, too. They own the think tanks. They own the Congress creatures and the Oval Office and therefore they own the sham of democracy. They own your mortgage, and if your life deviates from how they want it to be, and what they want you to do with it, then in all likelihood you will starve, or have to sleep under a bridge, or buckle and start conforming again.

(I’m wondering idly here just how much addiction is nothing more than a running and hiding from these awkward, ugly, and incontrovertible facts.)

They put plenty of resources into convincing people that hard work (working for them of course) and abiding by the laws (which they wrote) are the basis of being a good person, and a success in life. This message sticks, because they own all the media, and by various mechanisms own the education system too.

And thereby, nine times out of ten, they own your kids.

Or … they will, someday, after college … and they can afford to wait.

Maybe you believe that abolition happened.

But Malcolm was right when he said that slavery was only refined and extended to include all the colors and flavors of humanity inside the Empire, and beyond its borders to the best they can manage it.

If you remain loyal to the Master, you’ll never know want.

Unless we define want not in material, but spiritual terms.

***

The traditional radical remedy for all this, out beyond picket lines and bread lines, is to seize control of the means of production.

It mighta sorta worked in Russia in 1917. But as we know, the Seizers just slowly evolve into the new Caesars. Communism is not the enemy of the People, but it is not, over the long haul, their friend either. It’s just a capitalism and authoritarianism with slightly better credentials.

Some time ago I quoted a long thing about it.

Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau’s revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx’s first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.

–Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance

So … solitude and Thoreau then, right?

When I first was reading Walden at fourteen or fifteen, my dumb-ass father sniffed that Thoreau could afford that shit because he had rich friends.

He was ugly and stupid and violent, but he was right, about that much.

I have myself a couple of rich friends, but not that rich. I call them my Patrons and I value them highly, but none of them are gonna give me a house in the woods out of the goodness of their hearts, or put the fish on my table.

I’d be embarrassed for them if they did, in fact, and even more embarrassed for myself.

Anyway, cozying up to friends that pay your way is a piss-poor infrastructure for solitude, and actually getting the hell out of the way.

When they invite you to dinner in the big house, you’re not really free to say no, I need my time and my own space, ennit?

Tragically messy.

***

It might seem at first like this whole years-long line of inquiry is a hollow dead end.

But do not despair utterly, my children.

The sage still has a plan for getting out of the ubiquitous deadness.

It surely will involve … obtaining some little sliver of the means of production. Not through seizure, which is stealing just like any property is (ask the Sioux), but through leveraging the scraps of assets left to me, and some intelligence and sweat equity invested besides, to try on a very small scale to beat the masters at their own fucked-up evil game.

There’s a lot of moral risk in that.

I’m not sure what else to try, though.

Wish me luck, the speed of the gods, and all the other things that don’t exist. Pray for me to go on walking in integrity, which does.

Let me tell you about these magic beans I have for sale.

***

Coda: Just some generic and fun history related to themes of slavery, hunter-gathering, etc.

Slavery – Crash Course US History #13
Age of Jackson: Crash Course US History #14
19th Century Reforms: Crash Course US History #15

The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1
Indus Valley Civilization: Crash Course World History #2

Last year, the wildly popular Pakistani Prime Minister was ousted.

He immediately claimed that the US was behind the regime change.

Now cables have leaked proving that allegation was spot-on.

Exposed: US Backed regime change in Pakistan

I’m sure he must have had it coming. For some reason.

Right?

You can tell me what the bad thing he did was, okay?

Next time.

I’ll be counting on you.

Oh, one more thing. If you could also explain to me why two of the journalists who received the leaked cables were suddenly murdered when they came to light?

And … which noble press-loving democracy pulled the triggers?

That’s be great.

I need reasons to believe. I need reasons to live.

But most of all I need to know why we are still the light and the hope of the free world, and how We are still the good guys.

Thanks my darlings.

The Governor went to Nantucket
Her friends told the kids they could suck it
The planet was burning
But the money kept churning
So Grandpa sipped wine and said fuck it.

Dem Donors FLIP OUT at Activists

If you’re even still here, you’re sick of hearing it from me.

So let’s pass the mic to pretty and talented actress Jennifer Lawrence.

Both Parties Are Hopelessly Corrupt!

Her subject is the rot at the heart of what’s left of ‘democracy’.

Enjoy.

(PS: I have no clue what happened to part 2 of this. I assume it’s behind some kind of paywall. Is that corrupt? No baby, it’s just bidness. America! Find it for me and I’ll post it. Even if she … 90 degree nosedives into Blue MAGA. I promise.)

***

I have a good friend and patron who told me once that she stays registered Republican so she can vote in their primaries and help weed out the worst of them. I have other patrons who, although solid Dems in recent years, tend in their hearts toward a natural conservatism.

This one’s for you guys. Go Vivek! (although he’ll go without help from me, given his dumb normie view of China and the simple fact that he’s an R).

Debate Debrief with Vivek Ramaswamy | SYSTEM UPDATE #137

You want to back an underdog who is looking more like a winner every week, dontcha?

You could do worse.

***

BRICS Adds Six New Members and now Controls 40% of Global GDP

One of the new members is Saudi Arabia, which means that this spells the beginning of the real end for the petrodollar.

Another of them is Iran, who a year ago were mortal enemies of the Saudis, until a peace was brokered between them by China. Now they are in economic alliance with both, and Russia, and India, and so on.

The so-called Pax Americana, the unipolarity of the hegemon, is dying swiftly, yet the Empire is still imposing sanctions for one reason or another on one-third of the world’s population.

And thereby it continues to blow off its own toes, diplomatically and economically, and if I may be so bold … spiritually.

This shambles is what the Biden presidency will be remembered for, long after Hunter and his dad The Big Guy are exposed and removed from civilized life.

Biden Greeted With Hostile Response In Maui

It was a long 13 days to the photo op, but the natives did not forget.

Trump Supporters DENOUNCE Capitalism and War

Not because they were tricked into it by some Daily Show media freak.

A bartender just asked them openly about what they really thought.

They told him.

I have a lot more in common with these average people with bad teeth in Eire, PA, than I do with any rich liberal blue-no-matter-who cowbell.

I hope you do as well, but that’s not up to me. Maybe your job is working directly for the evil bastard that owns the livery and the bar and the feed store and wants to own all the little ranches on the outskirts too.

Thanks to Due Dissidence for pointing this out.

No, Climate Change DIDN’T Cause Maui Disaster!

But late-stage techno-capitalism very well might have.

Is any of this true?

You don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe someday we will.

And knowing will change nothing.

Unless you and I rise up and force it to mean something.

My level of optimism on that occurring, among enough of us, and in time, is not high.

See the lilies of the valley. They toil not, they spin not.

They have no more defense than we do, against the bulldozers and the bred-in civilized greed of billionaires and paupers alike, and helpless shrugs of oh well, whatcha gonna do abouuut it?

***

Everywhere you go now, they are ‘understaffed’, and it’s not because of Covid, or some sort of generational character flaw, or laziness.

They’re understaffed because money is all that matters anymore, and organizations are unwilling–even unable, sometimes–to part with enough of it to employ and retain good people under tolerable working conditions at a living wage or anything like it.

Private enterprise in this country has always expected to be able to work people to death and pay them nothing–a working definition of Slavery of course, but even if you believe that abolition happened, think of Ben Franklin beginning his illustrious career as an ‘apprentice’ to his brother the printer. For what amounted to three hots and a cot.

Child labor was widespread before ‘Labor’ organized and bled and starved and died to end it, and other abuses, temporarily. Shit like that is making quite a comeback and that’s the truth even if McDonald’s is now paying 14.50 an hour (for twenty-eight hours a week so that there is no health insurance).

Try it yourself, Mr. CEO
See how far five fifteen an hour will go
Take a part time job in one of your stores
I betcha can’t make it here any more

All aboard the hamster wheel. That’s the only way to really get loved, you know.

When I was 23, government saved my life. They gave me a bus pass and use of a primitive computer for writing up a resume’. With that boost, I got a job at the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland.

With the insurance the job brought, I finally got the worst of my medical issues addressed, for pennies, instead of the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would be today.

With the paycheck I got a studio apartment. Steam heat. Two hundred a month, in Northwest Portland a block from the Quality Pie, in an area that is now gentrified beyond all human reason.

I went back to school, taking out loans for education, and forty years later there is still eleven thousand dollars of that left to pay. Uncle Joe will start wanting that money again come the falling of the leaves. I will become one of the 150,000 Americans whose Social Security checks, for god’s sake, are garnished for school debt.

None of that is the point.

The point is that there were a couple dozen of us shelving books at that library. Far more than were needed. You might have derided half of us as shovel-leaners and your scorn would have been partly deserved, but …

The fucking books got shelved proper, no matter what.

There was still such a thing as a Fire Lookout then. Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder both spent summers in high towers, scanning the horizon for flames, with enough time left over to produce great art, and enough money left over to eat well and take the bus home.

But fire lookouts are not cost-effective.

We can send up a satellite. We can do it with drones. To hell with the shovel-leaners. They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps.

On Maui, cameras captured in vivid detail the moments when the technology exploded and showered the dry forest with molten metal shards.

But no one was being paid to watch it happen. So no one did.

No one was even dozing in front of a screen in the middle of the night.

No one was being paid to walk the earth and do regular maintenance on the ailing grid.

No reason to waste money on that. What’s the worst that could happen?

It wasn’t climate change, in point of fact, that burned down Lahaina and killed all those people.

It was capitalism, reaching its tentacles into the public utilities, and the schools, and the libraries too.

It was efficiency.

It was hatred for the idea that someone might be getting away with something, by doing an easy job that left time to think while still actually paying the bills.

While we, the righteous, spun our hamster wheels faster and faster and tried to get

A head.

Biden Scandals & Trump Indictments w/ Robert Barnes

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

A few of the interesting parts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is full of shit too of course.

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

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

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

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

Abandon all hope, ye who dwelleth here.

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

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

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

***

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

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

Perhaps I can use the AAA to stop drinking.

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

***

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

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

***

Ten hours now.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it a Conspiracy? Is it “True”?

Fuck, man.

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

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

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

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

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

But it will also not change what I want.

Or what I don’t want.

To have.

More of.

This one, special ones, tomorrow and every day.

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

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

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

On The Beach (2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But ONLY because you’re you.

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

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

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

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

My favorite was the Peruvian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’ll be all for now, darlings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I digress like a fool.

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

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

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

Populist Anthem “Rich Men North of Richmond” Goes VIRAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me see if I can help, Bri.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kids, listen.

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

There is no God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Airman Robertson, “thank you for your service”.

Amen.

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

It’s so simple.

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

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

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

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

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

The quotation continues:

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

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

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

The buffalo were murdered to perpetuate its interests.

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

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

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

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

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

I mean you, and I mean me, too.

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

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

The casualties of which included our spirits.

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

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

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

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

Alabama Mom’s RANT on Cost of Living GOES VIRAL

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

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

Liberty and Justice for all my ass.

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

You and I live in a corrupt garbage country.

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

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

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

Today is the first day with a taste of it.

I am nowhere near strong thus far, but …

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

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

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

Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond

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

Abort, and codify it this time.

Instead just quote.

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

–Adam and Lilith, in Alphabet of Sirach

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

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

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

–Charles Bukowski, Factotum (1975)

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

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

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

–A. W. Tozer, Of God and Men

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

–Satan in Mark Twain The Mysterious Stranger

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

–Colin Wilson,The Outsider

Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau’s revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx’s first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual.

Curtis White, “The spirit of disobedience: An invitation to resistance

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

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

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

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

But he didn’t kill him.

***

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

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

Russia will of course be blamed just like Sirhan was.

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

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

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

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

It could happen, yeah?

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

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

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

I’ll tell you what I tell myself.

Hang on. Things will change radically and soon.

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additionally: Vicki Nuland Out Of Niger Now.

And no more dipshit corrupt senators in Taiwan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like I said: rationally.)

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

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

Note for note rhetorical perfection, typos excepted.

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

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

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

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

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

To the native peoples of Palestine, this time?

Maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re not even fucking going to slow down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A theory: You’re not afraid of fascism.

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

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

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

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

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

The moral is a moral of inevitability.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan is, to hike the wash.

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

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

The cuts freed up 113 billion in revenue.

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

Doubtless some kind of weird coincidence. Doubtless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you haven’t.

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

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

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

Of an America not quite so badly broken.

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

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

I think it sounds plausible.

So.

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

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

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

There are a lot of possible answers to that question.

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

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

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

In a … democracy.

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

I’m just asking.

Why G.Greenwald Is Increasingly Hostile to Democrats

D’accord.

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

But especially, more and more, not that one.

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

I can’t follow, where that leads you.

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

Not subdued. Just pointlessly untamed ennit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century

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

Yeah, I’d be up for that …

Fun stuff first.

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

Here he is moonlighting as a stand-up.

***

Seriousness.

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

Glenn Greenwald discusses these facts with reporter Lee Fang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all the time (source)

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

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

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

Dirty hands, clean money.

***

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Unfit To Serve

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

It is true that I was born broken.

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

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

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

Grey skies are gonna clear up.

I further admit that my attitude has sucked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you around maybe.

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

It interests me deeply though.

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

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

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

Do the variations matter, and how?

Just questions. No answers. No doctrine, today.

The real Ukraine, from a disillusioned insider.

Interview with a former Kiev diplomat

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

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

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

We exported the true american way wholesale.

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

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

Tucker exposes GOP

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

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

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