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.
1/i recently listened to tom murphy, recovering astrophysicist, talk on the "crazy town" podcast - it can be found on the "resilience" page of the post-carbon institute - in a sentence or two, the message i got from it is "you'll never get out of this modernity alive - but don't worry you don't need to and it is inevitably going away piece by piece at a time TBD" - murphy wants people to read "ishmael" by daniel quinn - so it seems clear to me that he doesn't think that any efforts to achieve a relatively smooth landing as the engines falter [metaphorically speaking], or even set up places that might be "saving remnants", are worth the trouble
2/over the weekend i had a good chat with grok about whether the trump regime are, politically speaking, "opponents" or "enemies" - grok began by saying "tending toward enemies but not there yet" but i brought up some stuff grok hadn't mentioned and got it to admit "yes, they are enemies of democracy and freedom" - and with that i realized that my affectionate and trusting relationship with my closest remaining friend from college days, a republican in ohio, was dead - i wept, and i also felt a sense of relief
3/over at x, ian welsh said "Cory Booker is still trash, and his filibuster is meaningless theatrics, not even holding up an important bill."
i disagreed: "Theatrics - yes. Meaningless - no."
as to booker's continued trashiness, i expressed no opinion there - in general, i think people sometimes repent and reform, as well as the reverse process - if todd rundgren's song "bardo" is right, one is confronted with all one's actions in the transition from life n to life n+1
1/i recently listened to tom murphy, recovering astrophysicist, talk on the "crazy town" podcast - it can be found on the "resilience" page of the post-carbon institute - in a sentence or two, the message i got from it is "you'll never get out of this modernity alive - but don't worry you don't need to and it is inevitably going away piece by piece at a time TBD" - murphy wants people to read "ishmael" by daniel quinn - so it seems clear to me that he doesn't think that any efforts to achieve a relatively smooth landing as the engines falter [metaphorically speaking], or even set up places that might be "saving remnants", are worth the trouble
ReplyDelete2/over the weekend i had a good chat with grok about whether the trump regime are, politically speaking, "opponents" or "enemies" - grok began by saying "tending toward enemies but not there yet" but i brought up some stuff grok hadn't mentioned and got it to admit "yes, they are enemies of democracy and freedom" - and with that i realized that my affectionate and trusting relationship with my closest remaining friend from college days, a republican in ohio, was dead - i wept, and i also felt a sense of relief
3/over at x, ian welsh said "Cory Booker is still trash, and his filibuster is meaningless theatrics, not even holding up an important bill."
i disagreed: "Theatrics - yes. Meaningless - no."
as to booker's continued trashiness, i expressed no opinion there - in general, i think people sometimes repent and reform, as well as the reverse process - if todd rundgren's song "bardo" is right, one is confronted with all one's actions in the transition from life n to life n+1