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. 

Time Waits for No Trump

I want so badly for Trump to go away. I have for so long. Nothing personal but the harm is immense. The harm is the problem. So much and for so long and it seems he will never go away. But he will. Then it will be hard to believe. 

Ask Me No Questions and I'll Lie to You Anyway

Republicans aren't lying to us interactively and as a behavior they're out there constructing a whole parallel world of lies, lying as a state of being. Existential lying. You become the lie. Beyond that the lie has to consume everything around. They demand we live within the lie as well, because they're so fucking insecure and can't handle anything that contradicts their wonderful lies. 

Living in the U.S.A.

Trump and his enablers are destroying things so fast I think it can't go on and that there will be a collapse or an enforced reckoning. Then I think how long individuals, including Trump, remain alive and active in a badly compromised state and I'm not encouraged. They are parasites, vampires and sociopaths. It could go on for a long time no matter how they screw everything up. Killing a host as powerful as the U.S.A. could be tedious, agonizing and explosive all at once.

Morning Is Broken

Normally I wake up with a small sense of rebirth and a little bit of innocence. Trump and the Republicans broke it. I think about what they're doing and get mad. I know it's what they want and that it plays into their hands. It does me no good and I can't help it. 

Hedonic Destruction

Republicans aren't getting tired of rape and pillage the way one would expect. No satiety, so I suppose we're looking at hedonic destruction that might have started in a desire for retribution but morphed into pure enjoyment.

Not that there isn't someone in the background capable of organized thinking and intent, the super-rich. They are on-board with watching our society be destroyed. They decided they can weather it. They will rule over the ruins. 

Maybe the worst of all possible worlds is being made. Donald isn't a don, if you buy the mafia metaphor, he's a goon, and the government is populated with enforcers and thugs. A goonocracy, I guess, with goonocrats at the top. 

The super-rich are not goons. They might have converted to end-times fantasism, in there with their evangelical allies. Not wanting to see Jesus or believing He is coming, they are volunteering to stand in. For Jesus. 

I say they're all Satan. 

Fuckwad Needs Your Support

Fuckwad is nothing without backing. Glorious fuckwad. Fearless fuckwad. President fuckwad. 

How Do They Screw Us?

Let's count the ways. No, they're not itemizable anymore. Or it doesn't make sense to try. We work at cross-purposes with the entity that's there to make accountability possible. 

And possible for us to have decent lives, our government. Which isn't ours anymore. What to do? Get it back. How? I don't know. I have ideas, but the government is against us.

Which probably requires expertise. Combined with force, perhaps. Meanwhile, at a personal level, how does one arise every day and go on in the midst of this mess? I don't know. 

Chariots of Fiber

After taking forever to get past DSL to copper broadband I have fiber. Getting there was messy, the copper going in at the expense of a rich inheritor-of-money neighbor and the subs cut everything they could bringing it in including a high voltage buried electric line but I got hooked up for nothing. 

Then I paid through the nose. Two other wealthy or relatively wealthy entities near me got fiber by throwing money at it, $30K in one instance, over (reputedly, believably) $100K in the other. A company I never heard of began trenching in no end of conduit in my subdivision a couple of years ago. 

They then disappeared. I figured it was Biden money that ran out but no idea. Lately other crews, under another corporate name, showed up finishing the conduit down the public road and I got fiber. Still a drop wire to the house but I got it. I have no cell service at home so this connectivity is important. 

But it's fucking important for everybody. People can't have normal lives without connectivity. Kids can't be schooled properly. Republicans fight rabidly against it. You can always get Starlink at twice prices that are already too high. But Republicans want exclusion. And this is a southern white thing. 

Take It from a Democrat

Democrats were factionalists within their party, starting in the 70s, I believe, figuring out what they stood for in changing times. They supported a lack of factionalism for the country. Inclusion. Fair play. Limits to corporate power, private wealth and privilege. 

Republicans were the other way around. They became a unified fighting machine as a party but wanted factionalism for the country. Division, polarization and, ultimately, a class war. Republicans won. We're a mess. The U.S.A. is now a factional country. 

And China is a unified fighting machine. They mean to win. And they will. 

Democrats and the Meritocracy

Democrats might be as wedded to the meritocracy as Republicans are to religion. Religion is more relatable and inclusive, so Democrats are on the prodigy program. They remain unrelatable and wait for another Clinton or Obama to show up. 

They wonder why they lose voters who, on paper, should be voting for them. Maybe they should get their heads out of their asses. Principles are one thing, and they're good. But they don't win you elections. Empathy at that abstract level is good. 

Policies that don't fuck people and might help them, I mean. But you have to get elected to do anything. That Democrats suck at. They don't learn. They say Trump is a catastrophe. Look at who's at the microphone, though. Then they wonder why they lose. 

The 'rank and file' feels it more and more. The few leaders who do and express the anger and indignation the situation demands are resisted by the establishment. Republicans, awash in billionaire cash, appear less  establishment than Democrats. WHAT THE FUCK?

I'd love to beat some Republican ass in the elections. But there's some Democratic ass I wouldn't mind practicing on. Establishment Democrats need to fucking get out of the way. Corporate Democrats had their chance for decades. And look at where we are.

Transcendental Time

I was fine being immersed in time but now I want to get the fuck away. 

Bullet Points

Life isn't a presentation, and bounded by ambition.  

Night and Day

You aren't the one, Donald. You never were and never will be. Get the fuck lost, you loser.

A Question for Republicans

Republicans, how many people are you allowed to get killed before it counts? I mean in the Trump manifestation. Bush's toll is still going up but I'll not include that. Musk is on your tab. Shall we say a million? 

Make-believe

Republicans achieved escape velocity into unreality. They look on from such heights human beings are ants. Republicans think they're gods but they're devils. They belong with the rest of us. They're making shit up. Republicans are living a delusion. In which they're persecuted. So they attack. 

Medicrud for All

I'm confused. Are Democrats for 'Medicare for All' with actual, unbridled Medicare for everybody or some watered down shit. I don't trust them. Fault me for that. I dare you. 

Trump Triumphalism

Their revolution succeeds. So far. Republicans are reveling. The U.S.A. is reinvented. As what? As the Confederacy. As a racist, totalitarian state.

Trump, drunk on power. Absolutely smashed. Staggering. They all are, furiously yanking levers. Seeing people jump. Seeing people die. What a high! 

What a rush. Glorious victory. The forces of evil ascend, the same as always, always differently. Patterns emerge. Overreach. They're overextended.

A crash is coming. Helmets on! We will rebuild. But right now we're in the shit. 

Trump is Trans

Building on Trump's sophisticated understanding of 'trans' that it includes anything with 'trans' in it I declare Trump is 'trans' since he's transactional. 

Twenty-Mule-Team Moron

The societal suicidal impulse is increasing. Maybe more like murder. Trump always heeded the call of the ditch, his destiny and compulsion. Annihilation. His egotism demands company. He will take the country with him. He'll take the world, perhaps. Anything that he can. A galaxy if he can swing it. 

Trump will leave a legacy of devastation, as big as possible. Pack up his toys, go home to daddy. Daddy dead. Posthumously, daddy gave him a country to fuck with. Diabolical daddy. Trump doesn't choose the ditch. He's a sick fuck, he can't help it. Who empowers such a man? Maniacs. Crazies. Cultists.

Evangelical Christians, mostly. They allied with the rich. The rich are always with us. They will take whatever they can. Who would give it to them? Idiots and lunatics with grudges. White, southern, racist losers who want revenge. And to see the end-times, as an afterthought. Jesus and all. And all.

Meaning complete, disaster-movie devastation. Death, the ditch nobody gets out of. Nobody pulls you out, unless you believe in the resurrection. It's not enough they believe that for themselves. They are idealists and fanatics. Death for everyone! See you at the resurrection. If you buy into that. I don't.

Get in Touch

Mainstream Democrats are not cutting it. People are pissed and scared. The leadership offers explanations and analysis. The electorate wants to feel the outrage. They want to see indignation. I’ve got it to spare if they want it. Get in touch. With me, with the electorate, with fucking reality. 

On This Payday in History

Trump did what? What ripoff, shakedown and scam? It goes on every day. I think Trump became the biggest crook in history. Nobody compares. Great crooks typically worked at it and assumed risks. Trump shot his mouth off, became president and got granted immunity by political hacks on the Supreme Court. He's a crook by decree. A crook by executive order. 

Grifter-boy has gone scaredy-cat. People who steal that much fear retribution. They fear justice. They fear somebody taking their shit that they stole. One good thing. Trump enables us to see that America's super-rich are all crooks. They get so wealthy by stealing. Some rode the wave. Maybe they're not personally responsible. Still, that's our money they're sitting on. 

But I'm a Cheerleader

Karoline Leavitt thought she was special, exempt from the rules of Trump. Rah, Rah, she said. Sis Boom Bah. No matter what Trump did it was go team. He shit all over everything it was go team. He shit the world, go team. 

Some are more team than others. The Trump distractibility index is high. If it isn't right in front of him it doesn't exist. Object permanence is an issue. People are objects. An army of ego-strokers attends Trump. How to stand out?

Kneel down? It's been done. Every variation, manner and position, and with accoutrements. Pompoms, you name it. Probably things best not thought about. Our boy is so needy. Nobody gonna fill that void. Bye-bye, Karoline. 

They Are War

We've note that Republicans start wars, as a matter of witness. We have seen, we report. They engage in violence in other ways, the violence of deprivation, for example. Circumstances have nothing to do with it. They exaggerate or invent threats. They are violent people. They are war. 

The Unforgivable

Democrats, I believe, are on the leading edge of a reckoning. The old guard needs to get out of the way. Let me rephrase. Get the fuck out of the way. If you don't want to be remembered poorly leave entirely or support the hell out of Mamdani and those like him. Don't resist. Resist and you will be remembered as assholes, wimps and dicks. Dicks and limp dicks at the same time, if that's possible. 

The context is this, that we can't go back to normal. Normal is gone. Normal is done. The revolution has happened. I think irreversibly until we have an economic crash or a contagion or unprecedented fires and floods or whatever. Of course there might be a mix. What Republicans have done is unforgivable. For once we can't let them walk. And what are we coughing up? Newsom, no. Just no. 

Buttigieg better, but not for president. We need a warrior. We don't have one. Some Democrat might find his inner asskicker, you never know. It will have to be in response to some level of catastrophe, though, for the ground to be ready. Maybe someone will come out of nowhere. The U.S. has ceased to exist as a nation that fulfills its constitutional responsibilities to itself enough to confer legitimacy. 

We're starting from there. From scratch, in a way. We need to get that through our heads

Does Trump shit in the woods?

No. He shits in his pants.  

Real Butt Flavor

Republicans are particular about some things. Take ass. No artificial ass for them. They want original, unadulterated, gourmet Trump anus. Nothing else will do. 

Barren Trump

Trump is the Wasteland Man.  

What to Do If You Smell Gas

If you're around Trump, DO NOTHING. Do not laugh, cringe or smirk. Do not call 911, unless it's for you and what Trump will do to you if you are caught gasping, snickering or appearing offended. The dignity of Trump must not be impinged. He is magnificent. Nothing must be spoken against him, no allusion made to possible faults, or amusement had at assumed indications of confusion or alleged gaffs and improprieties. Whatever he does is great by definition, not omitting offensive smells. Your life might depend on this. 

The Package

I get a kick out of babies and how they are carried around like a sack of potatoes. Trump is nothing if not a huge baby, not to defame babies or impugn their innocence. Apparently Trump loves flying among all the ways his self-importance is ceaselessly massaged so it's great for once his mode of transport or delivery reflected the actual man in his unholy, malignant, me-before-everyone-else narcissism and neediness. 

An inert Trump-in-a-box is wheeled and toted around, capturing the blob in his glorious passivity and dependency. King Fuck-up pretends to be so powerful. Apologies again for associating Trump with babies. I love babies. They deserve better. And the world and humanity deserve better than Trump.

I Love Lucifer

Why don't Republicans just admit it, that they're all satanists? I think it would make them feel good. They're relishing doing all the evil. Think how fantastically powerful and mighty they would feel if they owned it. They could revel in the devilry. 

Bored Games

Republicans were afflicted with ennui. Starved for stimulation, maybe, sensing an end to their carbon blowout, the massive drunkenness of resource subsidies. They stood athwart history and yelled stop. 

That exploitation must go on. The rich must have more, even after fracking. They would find oil somewhere. Elsewhere. Anywhere. TRUMP! Trump will do it. It takes an asshole. And he has. 

Grand theft petroleum.

Fires and floods, fuck that. Or, bring it on. They have bunkers. The Putin Plan, perhaps. Oligarchy and apocalypse. Surplus of people. Thanks, robotics. Thanks, AI. They are expendable. We are expendable.

America Wants

America wants you tired, it wants you poor, it wants you huddled in masses yearning to breathe free.

Scalability

I ask myself if a person, a kind of person, is scalable. If they were everyone would the result be livable. If everyone were like them would it work. I don't know how useful this is, clearly the scalability standard can't be the only standard, but I think it counts for something. 

Cut Trump a Break

Look at it from Trump's perspective. He got more Americans killed by botching the COVID response than had died in all of America's wars since WWII, by a a lot. Maybe as many as were killed in WWII. 

Just by being a moron and an idiot. Those lost in his stupid Iran war aren't that many by comparison. Republicans reelected him. Getting people killed isn't a problem for them. Why should it be for him? 

The problem isn't Trump. Republicans created this. They could stop it tomorrow.

I Must Be Something Special

Rich techno-geeks get confronted with the conundrum and mystery of their obvious and undeniable superiority as established by their wealth and then, with the kinds of brains the have, analyze how they got there down to the first principle of their indisputable competitive excellence. 

They won. They are winners. But did they get the girl? Hmm. Once you're rich enough you can buy anything. You can buy the girl, but the girl is tainted with insecurity, having been bought. The thing can go several ways from there, probably none of them good but you never know. 

Look for compensation, a sure sign of insecurity. Compensation is trying to get even, to get out of a hole and insecurity is a hole. You suspect you're shit. You decide you're better than everyone else. Being better or worse isn't the problem, comparing yourself is the problem. Don't do it!

You aren't anytime else. There's an obvious limiting-case on the compensation scale, not to be named, but his need for reassurance to the point of adulation and worship is breathtaking, pathetic, and it would produce pity if he weren't fantastically vindictive, a crude form of compensation.

Back to the girl, Cheryl Tiegs was deemed an appropriate geek mate when I first began to observe this. Coming from the other end as a source of insecurity is idealism. The geek brain, gifted at abstraction, reverts to the perfect, platonic ideal of  'girl' or anything else, contributing to insecurity.

Comparison, again. 

We each have our own lives. Don't compare. Live your life, appropriately immersed in the wonder and miracle of creation which some people, again unnamed, appear to want to destroy because it's imperfect, extrapolating from their own imperfection with which they are naggingly familiar. 

No Room for Anyone Else

Republicans are insisting in the most forceful way, as eliminationists, that there's no room for anyone unlike them and they mean business. Call it overshoot, as I think it is. They feel the need to establish their absolute dominance and smash all resistance to the ground. Then, maybe, they'll lighten up and stop killing people for no reason but everything is on the table. 

This is Calvinist and imperial. Calvinist strip the meaning out of life give you back just enough to make it bearable, if you're lucky. Imperialists take all the money and resources by the assumption of arbitrary authority since they, too, are the elect in their own and favored by God. Then they give enough back to you to keep you alive, if you're lucky, in testament to their beneficence. 

Way to Go, Democrats

Democrats, different factions, fight for control of their party. Republicans fight for control of the country. Democrats can't decide what they stand for. Republicans are burning everything down. 

Way to go, Democrats.