Crib Your Enthusiasm

Democrats are demoralized. They need to get over it. 

Derision Quest

Is there anyone Republicans don't belittle? They degrade us, degrade themselves and create circumstances that lock it in, a society that makes it as hard as possible to live a decent, moral life. What the fuck is wrong with these people? 

The Bad, the More Bad and the Inconceivably Bad

We don't need a script for that movie. Republicans already wrote it. 

A Loaf of Bread. A Jug of Wine. A Private Jet.

Their needs are simple. Once you have enough money everything is simple. You can buy anything. Nobody else counts, You've evolved into another species. You were meant to rule. 

Don't People Have a Choice?

Aren't people choosing to live like this but why the fuck would they? Or are they like a school of fish or a flock of geese that took a bad turn somewhere? What they're doing makes sense individually. It's what they've always done. 

It becomes clear something is going wrong at a larger level yet it goes on. Clear to whom? As far as I know it can't happen to a flock of geese or a school of fish. But it can clearly happen among people. Did the air or water change.

People are supposed to be possessed of individual will and judgment. You wouldn't know it the way they behave. 

Tourism and the Apocalyptic Mindset

Evangelicals experience life as a tourist trip, like on a bus, with individual and shared aspects. The trip ends and you go home to Jesus. You have no responsibility to the destination. Fuck that. It's not your problem. 

Asshole Convergence and Epiphany

Republicans have it covered. Assholes are drawn to the party like flies to shit. If you're not an asshole they make you one. Assholes seem to appear out of nowhere. From everywhere. There's so many of them. We should make it a commandment, 'Don't be an Asshole.' Maybe a subheading under 'Love your Neighbor.' 

None of that means anything to them. 

Axes of Evil

Internationally, it's hatchet-man. Home-front, hatchet-man. Trump is a one-trick guy. Attack! He's a coward and a thug. His emissaries are enforcers. He has capos for diplomats. He's a bully. He loves violence. Send in the goons. 

Medium of Exchange

Scott Bessent is determining the nation's monetary policy be seance, my sources report. From the spirit world. Shades of Nancy Reagan. So it makes sense that it doesn't make sense, if you find that reassuring. 

April 27, 2020

I have something interesting going on. My gun-nut neighbor has apparently gifted me an NRA membership as a form of harassment, knowing my opinion that average citizens should not be able to own assault weapons. I’m afraid I’m going to get a whole barrage of hateful propaganda and pleas for money in the mail and more as my info gets shared around among the reactionary right-sites.

It affirms, of course, our suspicions that those claiming certain constitutional prerogatives and respect for the law are lying — they are not, as they say, interested only in self-defense and atomizing small game but they are the aggressors and have no respect for the rules and the rights of others. This guy routinely walked his dogs through my place without asking me. No big deal, if you knew me.

He installed a gate on a common driveway without getting permission from the person with whom it is shared and who owns an adjoining lot, a bigger deal but not my battle. There are other infractions but I think you get the point. It is Trump on a small scale, a presumptuous, angry guy indulging his cowardly impulses, probably encouraged by the surge in intimidation going on around us but I don’t know.

He’s rich, by the way. He’s a diluted descendant of one of America’s most prominent families. I have a very limited interest in the gun issue and wouldn’t try to outlaw anything because it’s a losing battle. I’ve followed it some because a historian I admire has written (convincingly) about it but the whole country would go Waco if we tried to take away their guns. Trust me on that. They are insane about it.

I would try to reduce the violence by taking better care of everybody, against the grain of McConnell and the Republican establishment who are, of course, in the middle of the same stream of income as the NRA. I suspect the lie about the “right to bear” begat many others as an example of how determination and intimidation can work. For those who care, Garry Wills put the screws to the gun issue.

Addendum: The latest is that the neighbor has been throwing trash on my property which is pretty pathetic. He even threw an Amazon envelope over the fence with his name on it. Some kind of kitchenware, it indicated. Oh, well.

I actually don’t know how we are going to survive these people. Remember, my friends, our rights don’t extend to having an opinion on gun issue if you disagree with them …

August 27, 2020

Donald Trump’s Four Fiefdoms defined: Trump’s four fiefdoms are the branches of the government with the addition of the press. By mastering all of these he achieves complete and unaccountable control. The mastery is nearing completion pending the next election.

Contrast this with Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, empowering everyone. These extended the rights in the modern world to include those things necessary to start out even and succeed in some way — not merely to exist at the mercy or whim of some autocrat.

October 16, 2020

I just had an incidence of agreement with a Bible-believing Trump supporter. She’s the daughter of a neighbor whose dog I’m tending while they’re away.

She thinks Trump is allied with and presently leading forces that represent the end of life on the planet as we know it. I agree. We had our warm and fuzzy moment.

Then I realized she thinks it’s a great idea and is giddy with anticipation. She also acknowledged the polarization and hate. Obama started it all, she said.

January 31, 2022

Well, with Trump’s latest hate-mongering barrage it appears the quarter to third of Americans who support him no matter what can be classed as Manson Family members, at least in spirit.

Helter Skelter is back.

Good Morning, Suckfest

Every morning I get up and face another day of American evil and insanity. I have no idea what to do. 

How Many Asses Can You Have Your Head Up at Once?

And how many heads can fit up Trump's ass at once? In place of science it appears Republicans are striving to provide the answers to these questions of concern for the America people. The welfare of millions might depend on the result. 

I'll Never Fall in Love Again

With a country. With ideals. With decency. With kindness and hope. It hurts too much when it all crashes down. But I hear there's a place ...  

Lost Cause Comes of Age

The Lost Cause myth didn't go away it morphed into MAGA. Once that lie ruled the south. Now it rules the country.

Fat Elvis Phase

We're nearing the end of Trump's Fat Elvis Phase, to be followed by death and deification. Maybe Trump will die on the toilet, a fitting end, and the King will meet the King.

No disrespect to Elvis. He mainlined black music in America, a force for good if it was sad it was needed. Elvis in the afterlife is still a thing, sightings, apparitions and shit.

Trump is something else. He must be reviled in memoriam and his evil works undone. A monstrous monument, an arch, is coming. Trump is trying to stick us with him. 

Velvet Trumps will capture the tastelessness. All else must go, his presidencies declared illegitimate. Everything undone that can be, and Trump not revered but reviled.  

Fat Elvis Phase

We're nearing the end of Trump's Fat Elvis Phase, to be followed by death and deification. Maybe Trump will die on the toilet, a fitting end, and the King will meet the King.

No disrespect to Elvis. He mainlined black music in America, a force for good if it was sad it was needed. Elvis in the afterlife is still a thing, sightings, apparitions and shit.

Trump is something else. He must be reviled in memoriam and his evil works undone. A monstrous monument, an arch, is coming. Trump is trying to stick us with him. 

Pope James Bond?

There's a slaughter going on. Control freaks and aspirants to global conquest, Republicans are applying business principles such as vertical integration and supply chain optimization to this slaughter. Beyond that they're cynics and ideologues who are fighting to win at any cost by overwhelming their enemies, their fellow citizens, with their eyes on a Bond-villain's success.

World Domination.

They want absolute and permanent victory, with omnipotence. I think the Pope sees it for the moral monstrosity it is. He's not taking sides. Pure evil is not a side in a dialectical process ending in refinement and reconciliation. It exists outside of that because it exists outside of humanity. I can see how people postulated demonic possession. This sure looks and feels like it.

It's All Relatives

The New Testament proclaims that humans are one family, a call for an end to tribalism. Republicans are Old Testament and tribal. Kill your enemies. 

They were, anyway. They're going barbarian. Kill anyone you want. Destroy everything. Rape, pillage and murder. They will never come around on this. 

Innocence is Incriminating

Innocence is an unnatural state among Republicans, modeling on the 'total depravity' of Calvinism which is some sick shit. Nothing corporeal is innocent to them. Corruption is therefore reassuring. 

Real life. Anything less is unstable. Trust goes out the window. The governmental ideal is brutality of the Confederacy. Which is back. Ideals are for suckers, snowflakes and the 'woke' intelligentsia.

Never mind that woke doesn't exist, not like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters or even QAnon. Republicans are really fucked up about babies, bathrooms and some other things.

The more human the more it bothers them. Reminders that their beautiful, pure, immortal soul is carried around in a sack-of-shit body that degrades from day one makes them nuts. They have baggage. 

Innocence must be eliminated as a favor, service and good deed. As an initiation into the realities of life. Life is shit, an awful state in comparison with the spectacular purity of your immortal soul. 

All That Glitters Is Shit: A Syllogism

Glitter gets us nowhere. Glitter got us to Trump. Trump is nowhere. 

Lilies of the Field

Normal is gone. Rule of law, gone. Standards, gone. Social cohesion, gone. Giving a shit, gone or a liability. Republicans turned having a conscience into a ticket to disenfranchisement. 

I don't mean only voting. The franchise of humanity. They're invalidating our right to exist. Having a conscience becomes debilitating, as they intend it. Reducing expectations is the answer. 

Reduced to zero, not for giving up but for clarity. We have to build back from zero. Thinking otherwise isn't reality, it's delusion. Disorienting. They have their delusions. Break through them. 

They made their delusions the operating system of the society, by design. We can't participate in that, as a practical matter or as a directive. We must be as the lilies of the field, true to ourselves. 

Then we build back, but not within the context of a doomsday cult. Apart from anything it’s a way to save out sanity. Without it we are useless. I am useless, holding on, hoping to do better.

You Don't Build a Movement on That

Demolition. You don't build a movement on that. It's not a building thing. You hire contractors. Source it out. They come. They destroy. They leave. 

A Work of Great Stupidity and Malevolence

Trump isn't an evil genius or talented at anything. He's a loser and filled with hate. He despises life and himself. America had a class of haters and losers who latched onto Trump as their champion. 

End of story.

Influence Paddling

Republicans believe in violence, as an article of faith, like with Jesus for what that's worth. Not because violence is effective but because they think it's inevitable. They are preemptive people. 

I suppose they meant to spank Iran to exert influence. Conquest was not in the cards but Trump is a moron so, whatever. Any idiot would know Iran is not Venezuela. These are precocious idiots. 

People I know who know say Iran was getting the bang without the buck sitting short of having nukes.

Trump changed the calculus. I don't believe in spanking kids, though I've wanted to rough up a few. Spanking adults, humiliating punishment to induce submission, is Trump's personal shit.

Have at it, big boy, among your groveling government lackeys. What kind of fucking dunce believes it passes as foreign policy? The message is for everyone that can to get nukes.

That's where Trump has taken us. 

We're Number One

Rednecks are in the running for the worst people in the history of humanity. I think they win factoring in the good fortune of being born in America. What did they do with the good fortune? They cultivated a sorry-ass culture then rose up to destroy the country. 

Trump's admin runs on racism. They turn to racism to bolster the base because rednecks are racist pieces of shit and they always go for it. So when rednecks get jingoistic, rah-rah, we're number one, we can reassure them they are ... the worst fucking people ever. 

I Don't Want to be a Rock and Roll Star

Listen to what I say. Republicans think they've won. We are not competing. I am not competing. We don't see the world the way they do. Incidentally, our way is good for everyone and is sustainable. Their way is bad for everyone, even them, and isn't sustainable. Get it through your heads, you sick fucks. 

No, they can't.  That's part of the disease. We have to wrest control. It will be better for everyone. Republicans are meant to be wards of the state. Otherwise they destroy it. We will see to them, take care of them and treat them better than they will ever treat us. You see, we live in different worlds. 

Measles Deserves Respect

Republicans are the party of privilege, getting something for nothing. Anti-vax is another way to freeload. Only if enough other people choose vaccination can it work. 

Assuming they don't want to get measles. But they might because God made measles. Vaccines might be the devil's work. The devil is everywhere. Except for in them. 

Justice for Once

People condemn themselves by their behaviors. Everything flows from that. Discord, shame and social censure, condemnation, scorn and shunning, incarceration, exile and expatriation, whatever the hell. The entire Republican Party has condemned itself. 

Republicans have condemned themselves. We acknowledge that. Crimes have occurred. Punishment must follow. They must suffer consequences. And the truth come out. Justice for once must prevail. They've forgotten what it looks like. It's up to us to remind them. 

The End of the Fair

Civilization appears to have been a fair, in retrospect. Rides, competitions, amusements, performances and stalls where goods are sold. Not a party but better than nothing, maybe enabled by an age or period or era of unusually good weather. A 10,000 year bash is a good run. No complaints on my end. 

But the ICE age cometh, heralding the end of everything. 

I Guess We're Having Fun Now

Republicans are destroying absolutely everything they can get their hands on. I guess we're having fun now. We'll have to take their word for it. 

More Original

Originalism, I thought, was a constitutional philosophy without content, a smoke screen for doing whatever you want. A smoke screen or justification but transparently a ploy, adaptable ad infinitum. 

It has more going on than I divined, providing a rationale for devolution, for deconstructing the 'administrative state’ or whatever. It’s a form of relativism and can be used to chip away at the law.

Some laws are more original. Republicans hate the laws enacted to guarantee individual, constitutional rights across races and for women. More so races. So they're deconstructing the constitution. 

Eliminating what they don't like. 

That's an extension. Theocrats believe the constitution is Christian or only as valid as it is. Natural law, God's law, is more foundational. That turns out to be the law of the jungle. Arbitrary. Predatory. 

Exploitation, rape, plunder and murder. The 'law of the jungle' might be superseded by nonexistence. Originally the world didn't exist, having been created. Surely nonexistence is original enough. 

Wait, doesn't nonexistence imply materiality, in comparison with existence? They might be against that, wanting to get back to pure soul. Pure spirit. Don't count them out. They are fanatics. 

We observe they want to destroy everything and there is no end. Originalism might be a real philosophy. Or, just an instinct for or love of destruction. Annihilation, the path to purity as they see it. 

How Much for that Country in the Window?

Here's an idea. The U,S.A. is getting the private-equity, leveraged-buyout treatment so let's push for liquidation. If American billionaires can buy it, run it ass-deep in debt, raid the pension funds, sell off the assets and so on someone else can buy it as well.

The billionaires might bite. Because, pretty soon, the thing is going to fall apart. Also, the process has been illegal as shit so they might want to cash out against the possibility of a change of administration that ends with them all in jail and the seizing of the loot.  

Understanding

I worked hard on these issues, especially the word studies, but it's been a while. The Logos, I believe, is intelligibility. Without Christ the world will be unintelligible to you, to the point Christ is identified as intelligibility. That's an example, but my takeaway was that modern people must both drill down on meaning and let go of the need to place boundaries on words (and everything) and to strive for certainty. Or, strive at all because it implies a need or lack that's not there. We're born whole but flawed.

Literalism is an enemy, for similar reasons, presupposing something that's not true. Thematically and structurally I think the parables are the most important element in the Bible and that the Seed and the Sower is the most important of those. It says, shit happens, get over it. On multiple levels, like so much in the Bible, because we are seeds ourselves and we have seeds within us. The oak can't be implied from the acorn. What we can become can't be implied from the seeds within us but what's required is there.

The Garden of Eden story, I believe, is about taking things for granted, notably life, and losing perspective. Not accepting life on the terms to which it is given to us, as one part of creation and not as souls in isolation, and as a gift and with creation as a miracle we live within, for example. The apocalyptic elements, similarly, are about conveying the urgency of achieving the transformation because our lives are always ending. Not an urgency in time but existential urgency. Again, not taking stuff for granted.

Words have a semantic field or range of meaning. Words must be free and not corralled by us because it distorts meaning, a problem moderns have by the influence of the Enlightenment.

But even there we see that what they really discovered was indeterminacy, uncertainty and relativity. So I am, not a relativist, really, in the common sense, but a communitarian and contextualist because people are unintelligible in isolation. It's not that nothing exists outside of creation, we don't known that, be that we exist within it, as whole beings, but with elements that possibly transcend it. The 'truth' is always seen in a context of humility and humor which are expressions or an acknowledgement of human limitation. 

Trump's Monster Phase

Trump is going biblical. Not as a man of faith, of course. As a stupid, evil man. 

Florence versus the Machine

I haven't been there but friends back from Florence say it's been ruined for them, by some kind of growth or development. I believe it. Nothing resists the American plunder model. Or it takes some serious regulation and real effort, wherever there’s money to be made. 

Many unspoiled places exist, by remoteness or protection, and plenty in Italy. Let's all go there now, somewhere that hasn’t been ruined by profiteers. Or, if we get America back from the oligarchs, regulate the shit out of it. That’s an idea. Civility. Power to the people! 

Family Feudal

Republicans don't know or care where they're taking us as long as it has certain features, mostly a class of super-citizens whose ownership of of liquid and illiquid assets is so vast they control the society in cooperation with a smallish caste of others similarly rich. Robots will handle the equivalent of factory jobs on average. Functionaries, like estate managers, run the factories and other concerns, the status of those below devolving into that of servants or serfs. I'm not kidding. 

It's looking more like feudalism. They don't care. I suspect MAGA senses this in the lower parts of their brains that predominate and is okay with it, representing security in comparison with the horror of thinking independently and having their beliefs challenged or questioned and worrying instead only about harvests and who might steal their sheep. They're incomprehensible fatalists. There will be floods, fires and plagues. All cool. That's real life to them and God's purview.

Damn.

I think I lost my composure at 15 and am just getting it back at 70. Damn.  

Bootlicking Good

Republicans succeed by submission. By kissing ass. Then they celebrate by kissing ass. They probably kiss ass when we aren't looking and in ways we don't know about. You would think it's all they do. 

Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down to Me

Albanians made more of a fuss about Kushner building some shit than Americans are about Trump and his Republicans destroying everything. On balance Americans aren't feeling enough pain. Too many of them have been up so long they can't imagine how bad it can get. Many think they're down now but they have no idea. Give Trump some time. He's capable of destroying anything. 

Scumbags of the Confederacy

Mike Johnson comes to mind first, an absolute worm. Mitch McConnell, another worm. A killer worm, who took it up the ass from any corporation wanting a break and screwed average citizens at every opportunity. Candidates pour in. Tom Cotton. That fucking football coach. 

John Kennedy. Sessions, before retirement. The Tea Party and the Freedom (Treason) Caucus, full of southern scumbags, racist Confederate groups in spirit and effect, undermining the federal government seeking revenge for the Civil War and desegregation. America didn't fail.

The government got conquered, by the Confederacy. 

Moby Dickhead

Moby Dick is a story of compulsion, an entirely unfree state. Ahab fights against his fate in stalking and attacking the whale, not understanding he's free and doesn't need to be doing this shit.

Trump is more destructive and compulsive. He's fighting himself and his fate, not understanding he's free and doesn't need to be doing this shit. We're collateral damage, hostage to that fatalism. 

Out for Themselves

American businesspeople who drank the laissez-faire, libertarian brew aren't far removed from the mafia. They would say, everyone knows the risks. You lose your ass, tough luck. It's on you. 

In the mafia you can lose your life. Average citizens are enabling and insuring all this shit as we saw in the aftermath of the '08 downturn and before. Even the mafia by providing a society full of prey. 

Some of it is inevitable. But America maximized it, with an atomized society that rewarded predation and hyper-individualism that encouraged sociopathy. Everybody loses. What a cool system. 

The Coming Eschaton

A reminder and perspective for those immersed in the fog of the culture wars, the super-rich secured power by buying evangelical votes with promises evangelicals would get want they wanted. They wanted the U.S.A. reborn as a Confederate, racist dystopia, and to see Jesus. Evangelicals came to collect.  

Masked thugs patrol the streets and arrest brown people with needless violence, spreading fear and sending a message of hate and intimidation. Voting rights, never fully realized, are being eradicated. 

Racist dystopia? Check.

The way to see Jesus definitively and with conviction is to die. Evangelicals despise creation, all that temptation and imperfection. They long for the end-times. Evangelicals want to see the world go up in flames. Millions die? No problem. Part of God's plan. The world engulfed in war? Exciting. Cool. Provocative. The Middle East mired in strife with Jews involved? Extra cool, because it's prophecy. 

Evangelicals get to see Jesus? 

Not check yet. They're working on it. 

Pirates and Pissants

Republicans aren't even good villains. They're pirates and pissants. They bully and grovel at the same time. Plenty destructive, though. They've got the plundering down. 

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stupid, Resentful and Mean

Republicans conform to Lakoff's strict father model of the family and extend it to society. The tyrannical, abusive version of the strict father model. I can imagine the strict father model working out if it's applied fairly and with kindness. The abusive father model will not work out well. Abuse doesn't make people stronger it makes them stupid and mean. 

I Want People to Think Well of Me

Apparently it isn't enough. 

Self-Loathing Opportunists

I don't know how to take in Stephen Miller, how to process him. He's Trump's racism czar. How do you digest that? The category shouldn't exist. The position shouldn't exist. The man shouldn't exist.

He is an insult to humanity. The tension, that illegitimacy, makes him a monster, a pretender to humanity, begging for non-existence. Stay with me. A death wish isn't as strange as it seems. Or strange at all. 

He loathes himself. He has to. Should society grant him his wish, his baiting us and begging us to annihilate him? Functionally, yes. He shouldn't exist. He should be jailed. For life.

What kind of a society creates such a person, with such self-loathing and such a capacity for harm? And then places he in a position where he can injure and destroy the lives of millions of people. 

Fucking insane. We put these people in these positions, some unacceptably large percentage if not a majority of us. Who were they? The super-rich allied with white, mostly evangelical southerners. 

The rich are always with us. They, some of them, always want more. Evangelicals gave it to them for promises of a new age of racist tyranny, promises now fulfilled. Initially against the wishes of the rich. 

This is not about blame, it's about understanding and facing the responsibility of all of us. It's about seeing clearly the racism and tyranny Miller and Vought represent. Which we now see. 

The core of this is racism. The rich are swept along if not fully allied in it, biding their time and above all looking for opportunities to make money, as fucking always. We had worked this out. 

Controls were embedded in the system, a system both the rich and the racists hated because it constrained them, less so the rich until recently. Notably the racism was constrained by the Voting Rights Act. 

That was our government. So they felt compelled to destroy it. The lesson is we hadn't done enough to constrain the rich and the racists. So that's what we need to do if we have the chance again.