those with a taste for blue or belligerence

For the sake of argument let's say the Democrats *aren't* in on the obvious machinations to ensure the installation of King Trump, I... 

Have a gorgeous new Yo La Tengo song

• Our shitlords:  
• Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins
• First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality.
• Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.
• Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.
  
• Important question
  
• The Meatsack Candidacy
  
• Aspirational versus servant leaders
  
• Let us not hedge about one thing. And Trump all but confirmed yesterday
  
• Remember when Democrats confirmed lots of Trump nominated judges so everyone could go on vacation?
• Myths of American exceptionalism
  
• At the executed murderer's grave
  
• The end of the "rules-based international order"
• Deportation nation
• It's when it's, it's not when it isn't
  
• Where our stories chart
• Freedom, revolt, and love
• Oof 
  
• Jeff slow the fuck down
• The Math Campers
• Old Yo La Tengo

 

 

EXTRA HIDDEN LIFE, among the DAYS

Brenda Hillman

Sometimes  ,  when i'm

            very tired  ,    i think

 of extremophiles    ,   chemolithoautotrophs

       & others with     power for changing

    not-life into lives  ,    of those that eat rock

& fire in volcanoes   ,     before the death

 of the world but after   the death of a human

                              ,    of their taste

for ammonia or iron  ,     sulfur & carbon

                             ,   somehow

 enough of it to go on ...     As workers

          taste revolt       ,   they grow

at the vents of oceans   ,     turning mute vapor

into respiration            ,   changing unhinged

   matter to hinges        ,  near the rims of sea

trenches or the caves     ...     Our friend wrote

    of writers living              in gray hiding,

                            ,     of those who love glass

    & early freedom   ,    steep sand

  & late freedom       ,     sex among gentle

     or bitter grasses     ,   those with a taste for

 blue or belligerence   ,   obscure lives, she

called them               ,   the writers

    of radical mind     …

The living prefer life    ,  mostly they do

                         ,   they are ravenous

                         ,    making shapes in groups

    as the dying grow     one thought

          until the end ,   wanting more

              specifics   ,   desert or delay

          until the i        drops away into

          i am not here ,   the mineral other

pumps & vast vapors  ,    ridges & shadows beyond

            the single life it had not thought of—