Digging at Some Obscure Pebbles with My Shovel

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"
Oligarchy in 21st Century America
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.”
The Normalization Of Autocracy
"A group of messianic psychopaths is trying to rig evolution to permanently provide themselves dictatorial power. Let me explain…"
Why Autocrats Hate Their Capitals
"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"
Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement
Fighting *lon *usk, One Tesla Dealership at a Time
E*on M*sk and T*sla: A resource list for activists
"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"
2008: the year Obama fucked-up EVERYTHING forever, An Oral History
"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"
In Trump’s Dragnet				The War on Whatever
"Democratic Party Leaders and “Free Speech” Warriors Shrug as Trump Deports Dissidents"
They Are Going to Take Everything If We Don't Stop Them
"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
Method in Trump’s Madness, Contradictions in Trump’s Method
14 Gaza aid workers found dead and buried, hands bound
US Blames Hamas for Israeli Execution of Palestinian Medics
"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"
Gaza Journalists on Israeli Hit List Refuse to Stop Reporting
"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."
Israel’s latest vision for Gaza has a name: Concentration camp
"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
Why Did the CDC Bury Its Latest Measles Forecast?
Advertising makes you unhappy by design
Looking into the sun			Maggie		{ feuilleton }
The Return, part two			Sir!	What's on teevee tonight?

CROSSROADS IN THE PAST

John Ashbery

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.

Have You Forgotten What We Were Like Then When We Were Still First Rate

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						⬆
no longer effectuates agency priorities
"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
ICE Makes Another Student Disappear
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
Eff be eye be Hitlordsay opcays
Is today's monologue > a rhetorical question? >	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							⬆
"From vandalizing Teslas = terrorism to talking about Teslas = terrorism"
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""
The Shooting of Gaza’s Children
"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"
Democrats Rage Over Yemen Strike Leak, But Not at the Strike Itself
"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?"
Selling war where it counts, in DC metros and buses
Which US puppet will lead Lebanon's financial reconstruction?
Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
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"						⬆
⬆	There is not going to be an election in 2028						⬆
MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS ARE THE ENEMY!
⬆	"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"						⬇
The Existential Threat of Ultra-Billionaires
"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"
You, dear civil servants, are the canaries in the coal mine
"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
Neoliberalism and Its Hegemonic Crisis
The difference between Democrats and their base and Republicans and their base
Bernie and AOC sheepdog for the Democrats
WHY THE WEASEL TESTICLES?
William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an American Epic
On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s prescient novel *American Abductions*
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 mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

to the dog chewing a sock

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
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
Shitlords and your arrest and indefinite imprisonment			⬆	⬇	Shitlords enshittifying your health care
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
Surrendering to Authoritarianism
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
The Emotional Stress of Imperial Decline
"It's genuinely terrifying to see how the people who run America are completely out of their minds"
Rape Politics and the Authoritarian Right
White christer nationalists are psychotic and will kill us all
Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?
Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
Nationalism and Capitalism’s Ever-Spiraling Crisis
"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"
The more you have the less you fight
☝	"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"
Speech police				The Destruction of Gaza, Yemen And U.S. Free Speech Are Parts of The Same Project
Trump’s war on public education
The closing of the American minds
Georgetown Postdoc the Latest to Be Detained by ICE as Crackdown on Campus Speech Widens
Guilt by Association: when speech becomes terrorism
The Last Chapter of the Genocide
Is Israel the deep state?					Why They Deny It’s a Genocide
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
Chuck Schumer is 2ionist 6enocidal piece of shit
The Democrats' Corporate Lawyers Get the Humiliation They Deserve
The Decline Of Western Civilization Via Soccer
The United States GDP divided in half						Maggie's
{ feuilleton }			Impossible? No: Eschatological!
The Vanishing White Male Writer?
☝	"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

HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Thirty-Two

Thirty-two

One of two posts a year not tagged My Complicity

I see her in ten days and then for a week!

Thirty-two

THE WRITER

Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.