I didn't want to retire, I said to Robert, a 50ish electrician from outside Dexter who I played a round at Hudson Mills yesterday, now I can't retire and never will be able to retire. Robert, who can huck it but can't putt (I can putt sometimes and huck never), said, I want to retire but know I never will and knew I never would but now know I never can. Earlier in the day L and C and me drove to the Detroit Institute of Art and paid full freight to discover their entire wing of contemporary art closed for refurbishing, what we went to see, check the website before going, dummy. Detroit's Hands-Off even started on Woodward in front of DIA, we didn't join. Robert's red discraft driver somewhere in the reeds below, he can huck but not always control
I hate going on vacation, like vacation when there, can't wait to be home though dread the drive tomorrow, fine metaphors abound. Robert, an equal opportunity loather, a Trump hater, a Democratic hater more, and I didn't talk politics once our mutual kinship in despising anyone and everyone in the ruling class and their henchmen established. If I come back this summer he said he'd take me to a Tigers game if interested (I'd mentioned I saw Tiger Stadium, or whatever they call the ballpark they play in now when driving to DIA), maybe, I said, no, I thought. He declared his red disc lost, played his next disc from spot he best guessed the disc flew out of bounds at, moved on. This was on shuffle on drive back to cottage
The DIA is right next to the Wayne State campus, I thought the ginormous cop presence was because of the Hands Off march that the cops were all on campus, not on Woodward Avenue, but no, here's why the cops were where they were
What if Trump's behavior isn't just personal madness?
"He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told The Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”
"The more important question is: How has this insane man managed to gain control of the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation? That, my friends, is the unfortunate outcome of an economic system that has so profoundly failed to enforce economic equality, and a political system that so profoundly failed to protect its democracy from the influence of capital that it allowed itself to be totally captured by extreme lunatics backed by extreme wealth. And here we are. The whole thing is most notable for its absurdity. If it’s any consolation, all the capitalists who led us down this road are going to lose a shitload of money. Ha ha, fuckers."
"So, let’s sum up. Peter Thiel believes he belongs to an elite group, often understood in implicitly or explicitly racial terms, that is entitled to set aside democratic governance in favor of pursuing a program of technological progress and national restoration. He believes the political means to accomplish this is through a charismatic leader with manipulative, populist appeals to past national glory and against parasitic immigrants and culturally decadent liberalism. For him, even the most milquetoast, reformist liberalism is “tantamount to communism.” He’s obsessed with romanticized fantasies of absolute power, domination, and control. He dreams of wielding the the national security state against enemies both foreign and domestic. He envisioned a kind of imperialist world-state controlled not through deliberative bodies like the U.N. but directly by the intelligence and secret police bureaus. He combines the ideology of white collar, petit-bourgeois intermediary class with its emphases direct management techniques and closely-held ownership with the grandiose, world-spanning designs of an industrial titan"
"One of the strangest emotional states in liberals is when they fantasize about a world that would only exist with a vociferous, partisan leftist ruling party in charge but they somehow think Chuck Schumer will do it instead. Once again: they never even fired the Post Office guy"
"The world that Trump is accelerating through tariffs is a world of militarist ethnonationalisms—highly combustible geopolitics and “fluid” alliances. Militaries will grow. Economies will shrink. And the victims of our policies will rapidly become more numerous. None but the oligarchs shall be spared"
How could so many people in the world’s richest nation be without enough to eat?
"Just to be clear: In Louisiana, the state where Bill Cassidy began the vaccination project he considers to be his most important contribution to public health, state employees are legally prohibited from recommending that parents vaccinate their children"
"The romanticization of Canada by Stanley - and so many others - is laughable & detrimental. As a scholar of fascism, he should know that much of the roots of contemporary American fascist thought are intertwined with the far right movement in Canada - which has become mainstream conservatism"
"I keep thinking about how terrified this man’s five year old nonverbal autistic son is and getting so mad I can’t see straight"
"The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met"
"Video obtained by @nytimes.com confirms the IDF fired on and killed clearly identified Red Crescent medics in Gaza. 15 were killed. Satellite pics analyzed by @ckoettl.bsky.social & @sanjanamv.bsky.social show the IDF then buried the medics andambulances"
Trump's ICE disappeared a 52-year-old mother from Westminster, Maryland
"There's a form of liberal whose self-image is about seeming "smart," who's unfailingly shilled for Dems & neoliberalism & who's been unrepentantly wrong about everything. They've enabled the GOP, they've helped ruin the world & they hate those who've been right the whole time"
"Corey Booker voted this afternoon to keep sending bombs to Israel, which is much, much more meaningful and important than a speech about values, even if it did last 25 hours"
I attended the burial of all my rosy feelings: I performed the rites, simple and decisive: the long box took the spilling of gray ground in with little evidence of note: I traded slow
work for the usual grief: the services were private: there was little cause for show, though no cause not to show: it went indifferently, with an appropriate gravity and lack of noise: the ceremonies of the self
seem always to occur at a distance from the ruins of men where there is nothing really much to expect, no arms, no embraces: the day was all right: certain occasions outweigh the weather: the woods just to the left
were average woods: well, I turned around finally from the process, the surface smoothed into a kind of seal, and tried to notice what might be thought to remain: everything was there, the sun, the breeze, the woods
(as I said), the little mound of troublesome tufts of grass: but the trees were upright shadows, the breeze was as against a shade, the woods stirred gray as deep water: I looked around for what was left,
the tools, and took them up and went away, leaving all my treasures where they might never again disturb me, increase or craze: decision quietens: shadows are bodiless shapes, yet they have a song.
Still winter in Michigan, 34 degrees and thundersnowing as I type this sentence, forecast is heavy rain through Sunday, we head home Monday morning, the fuck. Made it outside yesterday in sunshine and high 20's, hiked Waterloo's Sugar Loop with L (photo below) then played Red Hawk West
Played like shit but fun was had. Can't play outside today, at least not until maybe a window this afternoon, so here, links that have been collecting plus additions this morning. Only one encounter so far with a Pickup Truck-Magamerican, west on I-94 near Dexter, pissed I wasn't tailgating the Subaru-American in front of me, sped by me, gave me the finger, zoomed in front of me, tailgated the Subaru-American then slammed on brakes so I almost rear-ended him, gave me one more finger then sped off towards Jackson. Trump signs everywhere still planted in front yards where they were when I was here last October the week before the election. Hating you trumps everything, no self-sacrifice of personal wealth and comfort will ever change that.
Shovel on Sugar Loop, part of a giant mountain biking system, hikers go counterclockwise three days of the week while bikers go clockwise, hikers go clockwise four days of the week while bikers go counterclockwise, if I have to live in Michigan Waterloo is where I want to live, it's a fifty square mile anomaly of gorgeous in otherwise flat boring Lower Peninsula, east half of it in Blue America, west half in Magamerica. Fuck it, I'm going out in the rain. The two songs in this post off yesterday's Bandcamp shuffle in our drivearounds
With Section 230 Repeal, Dems and Media Offer Trump New Censorship Tools
"Liberals Believe In Nothing And Remember Even Less"
Study Shows the Nexus Between Corporate Subsidies and Corporate Malfeasance
"Gessen is correct about the secret police terrorizing people across the country, but 9 months ago they called a stadium full of “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs “even-toned” and “inclusive.”
"Cuba has been sending doctors all over the world for decades. They are highly trained, highly respected, and carry out genuine humanitarian missions. Rubio is attacking them because they proudly serve humanity and not money, which is a dangerous concept for the US ruling class"
"The Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate"
"When leading Democrats debate whether Trump is a fascist, they’re asking if he’ll change the voting system so that they can’t win an election again.1 When Marxists debate the same question, we do not isolate what will happen to the politicians from what will happen to society as a whole"
"Liberals’ proclamations of horror and outrage are not entirely insincere – how can they be considering the sheer bizarreness and surreal hubris of the Trump Administration’s shitstorm of slothful stupidity? Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable note of thou-protest-too-much in their railings, evoking a husband who screams at his wife because she left the rice out, displacing his real anger over the fact that she is sleeping with her co-worker, which he cannot express since he is busy sleeping with her friend
"Can't get over the IDF killing 15 paramedics in Rafah, attempting to bury them and their ambulance, claiming they were "terrorists" and then shooting to kill the rescue team sent in to find their missing friends"
"After all, leading the Democratic opposition to Trump—who, at least according to Antisemitism in America, is not an antisemite—is Schumer’s actual job."
"Like so much of contemporary liberal agita, this argumentation takes the shape of rote, formalist gripes over ideals of meritocratic professionalism, decaying norms, and the contemptible unseriousness of Trump’s admittedly grotesque hangers-on"
Broward County, Florida April 1 - A Sherriff Deputy appears to hit a child with his car and then tackles him to the ground
That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”
I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could
seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong? I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,
on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious. We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house, talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean. I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater
had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves.
Only two tablets now, both living, every other finished journal of my life I had not yet destroyed now disappeared, pages ripped from covers and fed into Iron Mountain locked shredding bins, I couldn't get them back if I wanted, and here's the thing: not one twinge of seller's regret. The living are dead as soon as last line filled, I've their replacements already though only one past half. I still make these
and don't see or want that stopping though I can now start *their* imminent shredding starting with, fine metaphor abounding, the weakest, most disposable, I mean, what the fuck am I going to do with boxes of these, shred NOW! before I'm shipped to my new permanent *AND* temporary home in El Salvador than make my survivors have to throw them out (and be forced to look at them), vital reminder:
Been a few years since posted that, it makes me uncynically happy, few things do these days. Going to Michigan Monday to visit our daughter and son-in-law is another, as always there are no plans to post and no plans to not post. I've long been told to avoid eye contact with white men in asshole pick-up trucks and white women in Jeeps driving batshit crazy, word yo, hoping for no cracker-encounters, but... hey! did I play this Lambchop song here recently, doesn't matter, I guarantee Lambchop will be played in the car to Michigan, around Michigan, then home to Maryland
Do you know there are people who don't get what's going on and why?
Ferengitriskelionocracy
< thought of that night before last
"It’s really strange how Trump figured out that Executive Orders are basically “longer tweets that drive giant media attention” and the media hasn’t figured it’s being played each time they report on these as if it’s Moses coming down the Mount with stone tablets"
⬆
Counterpoint - yes the media has, and it slavishly loves it
"Preserve this video of street-boy demeanor Trump Regime arrogance. It can be interpreted as an indeed creative declaration of war on Denmark/Greenland"
Snatching people off the street because of their opinion in Magamerica
Snatching people off the street because they are union organizers
"the funniest part of this era is that they’re disappearing people and plenty of folks are like “this is almost the end of democracy” like you need to collect all the McDonalds Monopoly pieces for it to count"
Another student disappeared by *CE, this time at the University of Alabama
"This is how the Gestapo will come for you, wearing hoodies and casually ganging up on a lone woman in the street"
Georgia Woman Arrested After Disposing of Miscarriage
How the fuck did hitlordsay not occur to me until (citizens are being snatched off the street, yo) yesterday?
Reminder: one primary purpose of snatching people off the street in the open when phones are recording is to create a honeypot for the Gestapo of people who scream in anger as much if not more than feeding the ravenous magaturds the fofa they crave
Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom
"It's hard to overstate how much contemporary evangelicalism has broken the brains of American conservatives, an ideology that allows you be ontologically righteous with no actual demands on you so long as you are a considered "a good Christian""
"There’s something so uniquely American about the first major scandal of this administration being the improper process in which people were discussing the war crimes they were committing and not the war crimes themselves"
"Both Obama and Biden bombed Yemen (and helped Prince Bone-Saw bomb it), slaughtering masses of innocent people. So why would the Democrats be upset about the bombing and slaughtering itself?"
Trump is tearing it all down—and weirdly, that might be the best shot we’ve had in decades
⬆
"The real scandal isn’t that Trump is wrecking the government. It’s that these institutions were already rotting from within—and Democrats like Schumer and Gillibrand were pretending it worked while defending the status quo behind the scenes. You’ve got Ruben Gallego out in Arizona holding $5,000-a-plate fundraisers while Bernie and AOC are packing arenas in the same state. No more hiding. No more pretending. The masks are off. Now we know who’s fighting for people—and who’s just trying to manage our decline"
"I cannot overstate how significant this is - while the national media is focused on the D.C. drama, a group of Democrats off the radar in a tiny state just radically shifted more power to the planet's largest corporations via world-changing legislation"
"I keep saying this but the reason members of congress want to stay in office until they die is they can't buy that kind of elder care anywhere else, even if they are rich"
"posting "these aren't very bright guys and things got out of hand" again isn't really doing much besides underlining how humiliating it is to lose every battle to clumsy idiots"
Democrats attempted programmatic post-neoliberalism inside a party that neoliberalism had hollowed out
One year from yesterday will be Frank O'Hara's centennial
Robert Ashley born 85 years ago today, much more music HERE
ANIMALS
Frank O'Hara
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouthit's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp cornersthe whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and waterI wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
Even some of the people who post photos of stacks of fat novels with the tag line "last week's reads" on xhitter and skuebly now posting about the worse reading slumps of their lives so it's not just me, have I told you three times we are being reprogrammed, deliberately scrambled, stupidified? Strange, this past weekend, shitlord psyops took the weekend off, no new shittier than ever shitstorm, the hell we being set up for, see, said programming works, where the fuck is my fix? Not just reading slump for me - no reading slump, not as many grids per month and links per grid, it's what I'm thinking about, the reason I can't read, I need to do something when I should be reading a novel or poetry - I'm in a listening slump too, I knew it was me and not the new album but Richard Dawson's new album finally made its way into my brain, and Saturday I hit the basket of Emmitsburg 14 with my teebird teeshot and laughed out loud happily, remembered what that felt like and that I like being happy, it puts a Jane Kenyon poem in my head, today in my complicity
The Dark Enlightenment: the Tech Oligarch Ideology Driving DOGE’s Destruction
Running While Black, Latino or Asian American — Under Trump
This part of the Planned Chaos, wrecking everything, they told you the plan and said they would execute the plan from Day One w emphasis berzerk vengeance and sadism with maximum motive to make enemies cry and the opposition party in America wants to meat (sic) them halfway
"I am against playing dumb. Despite implicit belief to the contrary, there is no requirement within liberal theory that we must play dumb when people lie about or disguise their intentions. Hanania wrote a whole book, glowingly blurbed by Rufo, Cowen, & Thiel, about destroying civil rights laws"
Dude who's worked professionally for decades to make what's happening happen suddenly sad what's happening happening, never forget or forgive these shitstains
"an important thing about Elon's project is that it tries to get you to resent people (government workers, immigrants, educators, etc) who have a minute fraction of what he has, on the grounds that somehow they have too much and their wealth is obscene"
"In any situation like ours, where a vindictive and dictatorial figure with no regard for law or morality is centralizing power in his own hands, it does not take a crystal ball to know how different groups will respond. It only takes an understanding of incentives, and of human nature. Here is one thing that I feel very confident in saying: The people and institutions in America who have the most will do the least in this fight. Do not be surprised when your search for saviors among the pillars of society fails"
1srael doesn’t care about the captives. It always planned to reboot the genocide
1srael Makes Its Most Explicit Statement Of 6enocidal Intent Yet
"Israel is not safe for Jews. It's a death cult for Western imperialism that scapegoats Judaism"
Every single Democratic senator voted to make Marco Rubio Sec of State
"not fearfully compliant. Complicit. Columbia is a hedge fund where classes are taught. Trump gives them excuse to clean house, get donors back. Weiss gets to move on from the brilliant Trump tormentor Marc Pomerantz & start billing the tech bros. Their hand-wringing is theater"
Selfishly, this is good news for us for our upcoming annual two weeks on Mount Desert Island last week of July, first week of August cause Acadia trailhead parking lots usually jammed w cars w Quebec and Ontario plates, laugh
"Abundance Agenda can be best understood as liberals’ newest attempt to make sure Dems don’t ever try to go back to stuff like the New Deal"
Chuck Schumer is as shitty a human that walks the planet
"This guy is Susan Sontag's son. He blocked me for being a "feminazi" on here once for saying the history of affect was gendered. There are so many layers of irony here. Anyway, if you're wondering why I never get to write a Sontag intro, he controls her estate"
How Krautrock Never Bettered Can’s Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi & Future Days
