“I’m offering a descriptive observation, not a positive normative judgment. Truth exists. Truth matters. Even if Alex Jones’ broadcasts are dreamscapes of spleen, they have real-world effects. Some people take them literally and act accordingly, as we’ve seen as the parents of murdered children tell their harrowing stories of the harassment Jones encourages. And a society where words are unaccountable, where language is just us finger-painting with our own shit, is ungovernable and unlivable.The point is that courts are ill-equipped to deal with people like Alex Jones, and people like Alex Jones are ill-equipped to deal with courts. Jones’ catastrophic testimony in his own defense illustrates this. Jones struggled to fit his bombast within the framework of the law, within the distinction between fact and opinion. It’s a bad fit because that’s not how he uses words. If Jones had been honest — an utterly foreign concept to him — he might have said ‘I just go out there and say what I feel.’ The notion that Sandy Hook was a hoax is a word-painting, a way of conveying Jones’ bottomless rage at politics and media and modernity, and he can no more defend it factually than Magritte could defend the logical necessity of a particular brushstroke.” Mr. Pope Hat

“At a breakneck pace — and with lots of cable-news-y crosstalk — the pre-launch event unfolded at Gallup headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Thursday morning. There was some interesting stuff said about trust, objectivity, profit models, and social media policies! But, inevitably, it was Carlson’s inflammatory comments that caught much of the attention. Why was Carlson invited? To those who said the invite was to build pre-launch buzz for Semafor … well, I’m writing about the fiasco now, so congratulations. But if Semafor and Knight’s stated reasons for inviting him — to have a conversation about the future of news and get answers to ‘hard questions’ — were the actual benchmark, Carlson’s presence was a miserable failure. Smith kicked off the conversation with Carlson — who was phoning in from a clothes closet decorated with Ringling Bros. Circus and ‘Roosevelt Dead!’ posters — by asking him whether he thought ‘white people were superior to other races.’” Sarah Scire

“There may be no more hilariously inspired character on television than ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Colin Robinson—a bald, bespectacled, blandly dressed dullard who’s actually an ‘energy vampire’ that drains his victims by literally boring them to death. Living in a Staten Island house with three traditional ancient bloodsuckers—Kayvan Novak’s Nandor the Relentless, Matt Berry’s Laszlo Cravensworth, and Natasia Demetriou’s Nadja of Antipaxos—Robinson is the odd man out, a new-world loser who’s the sort of tiresomely annoying drone that’s instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever worked in an office. Monumentally lackluster, he’s a unique spin on the age-old vampiric archetype, a creature of consuming weariness whose every banal utterance is apt to put one to sleep, make one roll their eyes and groan, or flee in desperate search of alternate company.” Nick Schager

“The great consideration which ought to influence us in the use of the present moment is to arise from the effect which, as well or ill applied, it must have upon the time to come; for though its actual existence be inconceivably short, yet its effects are unlimited; and there is not the smallest point of time but may extend its consequences, either to our hurt or our advantage, through all eternity, and give us reason to remember it for ever, with anguish or exaltation.” Dr. Johnson

“If it doesn’t matter in 5 years it doesn’t matter.” – Cher

Let him rave on so that men will know him mad

Now that the news cycle had turned into an all new season of Storage Wars let’s take a minute and view a couple of things that happened recently that you might have missed.

The high and/or low point of the past 30 days (depending on where you stand) was the accidental discovery of how rhetoric works in modern American involving those who should know better. Case in point – The Knight Foundation’s funding of the Carlson Tucker fiasco listed above. For those of you not in the business it is a glaring example of what’s wrong with the business. Ask anybody who cranks out words for a living and they’ll tell you that what you call “bias” is your problem. The real and very serious problem is the Capital-J journalism types (CJJTs) who run the group think. Most of them work for newspapers and the rest are their NPR toadies. As far as they’re concerned newspapers are the only real source of information while all other forms of distributing the news are little more than ouija boards and Magic 8-Balls.

And how do you enter this elite?

In addition to working at a major daily paper you also have to be fully in touch with your inner mutton chops and frock coat which is how the whole Semafor fiasco rolled out. The august gents (yes gents) of the CJJTs, the editors, publishers, op-ed stalwarts, and media pundits had the bright idea that they could get to the bottom of this Carlson Tucker business. In this room the many compatriots, stout lads one and all, would once and for all suss out what this man had to say. Certainly a room full of such men, stout lads one and all, who have stood – man and boy- before the mast for lo these many years doing yeoman like work, would be able to find out once and for all if this fellow was half the bounder the wags say he is!

The highlight was when the guest of honor let this one go –

“100 percent of the people I’m mad at are well-educated white liberals. In my mind, the archetype of the person that I don’t like is a 38-year-old female white lawyer with a barren personal life.”

At this point you’re saying, “Somebody paid for that? Dude, the guy’s on tv five nights a week. You could have stayed home and watched.”

Saying the CJJTs brought, as the saying goes, a bag of marshmallows to a knife fight really doesn’t cover it, does it?

More like Carlson Tucker did a professional job – he showed up and did what he gets paid to do. What’s confusing is how the CJJTs, professionals one and all, seemed to miss that point.

What were they expecting?

Meanwhile a week or so later Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Alex Jones, “This is not your show. Your beliefs do not make something true. You are under oath.”

In other words – don’t practice your profession in my courtroom, Mr. Jones.

The point?

Bluster has been the engine of American discourse for quite some time and in the past few weeks we’ve learned that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Like the assumed political beliefs of the voters of Kansas, bluster might not work as it’s supposed to these days. Earlier this week a study from Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and Microsoft Research found this –

Finally, we found an imbalance between partisan TV news channels and the broader TV news environment. Our observations revealed that Americans are turning away from national TV news generally in substantial numbers — and crucially, this exodus is more from centrist news buckets than from left- or right-leaning ones. Within the remaining TV news audience, we found movement from broadcast news to cable news, trending toward MSNBC and Fox News. Together, these trends reveal a counterintuitive finding: Although the overall TV news audience is shrinking, the partisan TV news audience is growing. This means that the audience as a whole is in the process of being “distilled” — remaining TV viewers are growing increasingly partisan, and the partisan proportion of TV news consumers is on the rise.

So how you watch tv is like saying you are what your eat?

Hard to say, but bluster isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Rather bluster has shown up on a few doorsteps in unexpected ways as of late. Maybe nothing will come of it, but it has been interesting to see how bluster has played out in what’s normally the slow time for news.

Oh and one other point on the Jones trial regarding the texts – this from Wired:

“(Legal) Screwups are so common that there is even a special federal rule for it. Recent years have seen everyone from Apple to Facebook to federal agencies screw up high-stakes discovery disputes. When a document is accidentally handed over, you can actually ask for it back, and the other side has to pretend they never saw it. But a screwup on the scale of Alex Jones’ lawyers is a whole other matter. The memes about his lawyers’ staggering ineptitude are richly warranted. It’s one thing to hand over a text message that should have been held back—it’s another thing to hand over two years’ worth. And when lawyers screw up, they have only a limited window to fix the error. With Jones the messages are so damning that it’s unclear whether they were ever legally protected to begin with, because no matter what you see on TV, lawyers aren’t allowed to help clients lie or commit crimes. If a lawyer sends over an email where they are giving a client advice, they can often get it back, but when the email shows the client is committing a crime, like perjury, that’s a different matter.”

If Apple and Facebook can’t handle a secure transmission of digital information then we’re all screwed.

BOY HOWDY!

Last week in the dead of the night, a fashionista on the BBC said this was the most dreadful summer for fashion. Per her people did little more than put on their clean bucket hat when the left the house and called it good. Oddly, the next day I got an offer for a bucket hat that would have the name of my high school and mascot so that I could wear it to the fall football games. Two problem are attached to that. First, I don’t live anywhere near my hometown anymore and secondly an Unincorporated Rio Blanco County School Distrct R-5 K-12 Cattlemen is gonna take one big-ass bucket hat.

Not long there after another fixture of my teen years reared its ugly head.

Ready?

Creem magazine is making a comeback.

Why?

God only knows.

I had no idea it went away and died a slow and undignified death similar to Penthouse and The National Lampoon. In my youth I avoided Creem as it always seemed to have a picture of KISS on the cover. By the time KISS arrived I found it to be little more than greasy kid stuff – Lou Reed’s Rock and Roll Animal with training wheels. The Perfesser says I let my surface impressions guide me in the wrong direction as the best reason to read Creem was Lester Bangs.

Being unaware of what he wrote I decided to spend $5 at the used book store on Lester Bang’s Greatest Hits rather than subscribe to the all-new Creem for $5/month. The books includes the review that got Bangs fired from Rolling Stone as publisher Jann Wenner thought Bangs had treated Canned Heat in an unusually cruel manner and portrayed the band in a negative light.

All packed into six tight paragraphs.

Overall Bangs comes off like an iconoclastic provocateur who went after every big name of the day save for Wet Willie. (No, Really.) In the mid-70s his take down of The Beatles, who said were little more than dried out husks only a few short years after breaking up, Bangs said, “But it’s okay. Because I would not indulge in those kind of ten-year-cycle Frank Sintra-Elvis Presley-The Beatles who’s-next-now’s theories that have been so popular lately.”

Forgot about that one didn’t you?

The every-ten-years thing was about as stupid as the classified ads in the college paper looking for people to gather signatures on a petition asking The Beatles to reform. In my teens there were no end of people looking at every new thing coming down the pike to see if The Next Beatles had arrived. By 1980 – we can only hope – they gave up.

Having said that – in our next installment I will explain how Curtis Blow was The Next Beatles.

“Twenty-five years ago, while in Tokyo directing an opera, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog turned down the offer of a private audience with the emperor of Japan. ‘It was a faux pas, so awful, so catastrophic that I wish to this day that the earth had swallowed me up,’ Herzog writes in the preface to his first novel, The Twilight World. Nonetheless, his hosts wondered whether he might like to meet some other Japanese celebrity. Without hesitation, he asked to visit Hiroo Onoda. Even if you don’t recognize the name, there’s a good chance that you are familiar with Onoda as a legend, a symbol—what we might nowadays call a meme. A lieutenant in the Imperial Army during World War II, stationed on the Philippine island of Lubang, he kept fighting long after the Allied victory, until he was finally relieved of his duties in 1974.” A.O. Scott

“When Elizabeth Anscombe gave her first lecture at the University of Oxford in 1948, on Protagoras’ doctrine of belief, the authorities worried that female students might be corrupted. Not by the thrust of her talk, but by her trousers. The clerk of schools wrote to her, insisting that she come to the university in a skirt.Every week he lay in wait, refusing to let her enter if she was improperly attired. Eventually a compromise was reached: they gave her a changing room containing a skirt (and a decanter of sherry as a bribe) and said she could arrive in trousers provided she appeared before students in the skirt. Anscombe agreed — and then wore both. Iris Murdoch, Dublin-born, later a famous novelist, won a scholarship to Badminton School (where she wept so copiously that a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Iris was formed), and another to Oxford, where she joined political campaigns and wrote a prizewinning essay on ‘If I were foreign secretary.'” John Walsh

“The wildest affairs happen at Fincadelica, a 300-year-old, 21-acre ‘magical, free-flowing concept estate inspired by nature and tranquility’ that Segev stumbled upon in 2019 and revived alongside the Israeli diamond dealer Mati Rachminov and businessman Shai Bencazir. The asking price is around $68,000 a week, a package that includes nine luxury suites, farm-to-table food, a soundproof cave club and a Lakota tepee complete with a resident shaman. ‘When it’s free, during low season,” Romano says, ‘they light up the cacti fields for parties, as well as fields of crystals. Then waiters serve San Pedro chocolate mousse on platters.’ The mousse is mixed with peyote, a cactus-based psychedelic.” Elena Clavarino

“Religious manias no longer feature in Norwegian life, unless you include the church burnings committed throughout the country by satanist death-metal cultists between 1992 and 1996. Poverty, which greatly factored into the (Norwegian) witch hunts (c.1500-1550) – not only in Norway but across Europe and colonial America as well; virtuallly no person of substantial wealth was ever burned as a witch – is likewise not a big Norwegian problem at the present time. Thanks to North Sea oil. Gary Hoisington

“P(reident Richard M. Nixon) was fascinated this morning to get a report on the Kennedy Center opening of the (Bernstein) Mass last night…he paused a minute, this was over the phone, and then said, ‘I just want to ask you one favor. If I’m assassinated I want you to have them play Dante’s Inferno and have Lawrence Welk produce it.'” H.R. Haldeman

“The liar, and only the liar, is invariably and universally despised, abandoned, and disowned: he has no domestick consolations, which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity, where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues; but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist. It is the peculiar condition of falsehood, to be equally detested by the good and bad: ‘The devils,’ says Sir Thomas Brown, ‘do not tell lies to one another’; for truth is necessary to all societies: nor can the society of hell subsist without it.” Dr. Johnson

Only landlords, bandits, revisionists, back sliders, and imperialist running lackey dogs go out in the noon day sun

You know, in light of everything that’s been going you’d think that it’s not a good time to be giddy.

Know what?

I’m so giddy I can barely contain myself.

Why?

Back in the 00’s during the time of peak Bloggitysphere I said that if America had anything like China’s Cultural Revolution it would come from the conservative movement.

Thank you Eric Greitens!

As the modern conservative’s role model once said, “By gar, the critter went and done it!”

Moving along – now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned let’s look at what did and did not happen.

– Per th’ Tweety angry women were going to take to the streets and burn down all the Catholic churches in their path. This didn’t happen and it would have been quite the undertaking given that we have as many locations as 7-11.

– The useless argument for court packing came up. It has never been a favorite of mine. If the guy Alaska Wolf Joe calls “President Joe Brandon” were to float the idea then half of America would go ballistic thinking he would appoint Cher, Sean Penn, Jane Fonda, and Hillary. But if that didn’t come to pass until Trump came back or was so far down the line that a Trumpist president were in office you could wind up with even more fire breathers on the bench. So go ahead – pack away, but you have no guarantee you won’t be worse off than when you started.

– For years I thought that once Roe was turned back to the states it would be the end of the GOP as it would take away their lynch-issue. Lately it’s become too obvious that when the make-believe issues run out of steam there’s always the old standbys. Even if a state bans abortion it doesn’t mean the local pols won’t claim that the libs are ready to swarm over the border and use George Soros’ money to put an abortion clinic in every WalMart. If that starts to fade then there’s always somebody coming for your guns.

Dance-with-the-one-who-brung-ya politics.

Old school, but effective.

– States are trying to stop the sale of Plan B pills and limit the ability to seek an abortion in another state or country. The subtext is to criminalize as all the options.

Hard to say how all these things will be enforced.

You could try to put a National Guardsman on every street corner.

– For years the average conservative used to have this trope where if someone he or she didn’t like said something they found icky then you – as a lib- had to believe that same thing too. Sorta like, “Well, Al Sharpton said (whatever) so that must be a central tenet of your belief system as well since you’re both left of center.” Now no matter what Greg Abbot or Ron Desantis might say they – as Republicans – have to believe it.

Or else.

– Speaking of Hanoi Jane – she has no influence on how all of this plays out. For that matter Hilary is probably in the same position, but that didn’t stop either of them from taking up a new careers as Internet trolls.

– And while you weren’t looking Clarence Thomas assumed his new role as Supreme Ayatollah.

Shit’s getting shoved into high gear right this very second. He’s gonna hit the ground running. With the possible exception of Loving v. Virginia, Clarence is ready to revisit every decision going all the way back to when John Jay first warmed up a seat on the bench. If there’s ever been a time when one single man could remake America this is it.

Why?

Because unlike the other 2/3rd of our government he doesn’t have to deal with those pesky voter people. He doesn’t have to worry about them showing up on election day or even doing what he wants them to do.

If successful America’s Khmomeni runs the risk of making any future Trumpist president little more than the head of a caretaker government.

So in summary – Roe v. Wade was overturned and no matter what happens next the consequences could cut both ways. Neither side’s rock-solid weltanschauung is likely to change. The 50 years leading up to RvW being overturned proves that ideas are sticky things.

No matter where those ideas come from.

For he to-day that takes algebra with me shall be my brother.

Time to clean off the desk.

In no particular order –

– The next post should arrive much more quickly as I’ve been through a crash course on the intersectionality of policing, homelessness, and petty theft which also touches on Chesa Boudin’s outster.

– The guy from high school took a flier on dropping by to catch up. It seems he was more than a bit put off by my email response. The note wasn’t rude or curt, but it did come off very, “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line for the next available representative.”

It’s a gift.

– The third season of The Boys has the fanboys’ unders in such a tight knot that blood no longer flows to their lower extremities.

Why?

It went and done caught the politics.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years it’s pretty damn obvious that Homelander is Trump while The Deep and Cassandra are the stand-ins for Jared and Ivanka. Starlight is Liz Cheney and Noir is most likely Pence.

But is Paul Reiser supposed to be Roger Stone?

And I really should take back what I said about living under a rock. This season it would be easy to get distracted thanks to the extreme violence, gore, flashback to Nicaragua in the 80s, what used to be called “softcore” porn, and a special appearance by the Solid Gold dancers.

– Normally I would post something around Memorial Day to observe the anniversary of this page. Couldn’t do that this year as we were in Ohio and after we got back the news cycle kept moving too fast to get an adequate take on things. Despite being in Ohio for a very short time I learned that I could never live there as I do not own the requisite riding mower nor do I have enough tattoos.

After 22 years of doing something like this page on and off it’s more of a hobby than anything else. Sorta like having a 1969 Mustang fastback in the garage only without having to worry about the dang thing rusting thanks to the moist climate up here in the Damp North Woods.

Back at the start the total readership wasn’t even the size of a college radio station’s listenership. During the TypePad years it grew to the point where the audience could be described as paltry. After all that it’s shrunk once again to its original size. Sure, you can grow an audience with things like Medium, Substack, or one of the other hosted services, but you also have to consider what those will do to your dignity.

As Deniro says at the end of Casino, “But in the end, I wound up right back where I started. And why mess up a good thing? And that’s that.”

Right?

Sending this one out to Joe Altio.

Listen along while I think some more about flying the flag upside down on the 4th.

“Tested whether or not occupants of a public territory use their temporary ownership to retaliate against intruders. Three studies showed that drivers leaving a public parking space are territorial even when such behavior is contrary to their goal of leaving. In Study 1 200 departing cars were observed. Intruded-upon drivers took longer to leave than nonintruded-upon drivers. In Study 2, an experiment involving 240 drivers in which level of intrusion and status of intruder were manipulated, drivers took longer to leave when another car was present and when the intruder honked. Males left significantly sooner when intruded upon by a higher rather than lower status car, whereas females’ departure times did not differ as a function of the status of the car. In Study 3, 100 individuals who had parked at a mall were asked about how they would react to intruders. Compared to what they believed other people would do, respondents said they would leave faster if the car were just waiting for them to leave, but they would take longer to leave if the driver in the car honked at them.” (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) Barry Ruback and Daniel Juleng

“In Elysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a Vatican-trained exorcist and professed expert on spiritual warfare, who lectures and tweets about the “demonic” forces of our times. It might surprise you to learn what these latter-day Regan MacNeils bedeviling our safe suburban homes are: Black Lives Matter, Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and wokeness. And this cleric is not the only exorcist very publicly conflating the Evil One with the left, real and imagined. Last fall, a Portland archbishop led a procession into a public park, where he conducted a Latin exorcism to dispel the evil spirits left by racial justice activists. The very same day, a San Francisco archbishop performed a similar rite at the site of a felled statue of Father Junipero Serra, an eighteenth-century Spanish friar whose missionaries forced Indigenous people to convert to Christianity, whipping and torturing many to death. Flanked by rosary-praying nuns, priests, and laity, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone asked God to “purify this place … purify the hearts of those who perpetrated this blasphemy.” He later called upon authorities to press felony and hate crime charges against the Native protesters who toppled the statue. Audrey Clare Farley

“There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the Earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.” Ezra Klein

“For a good Fox News story you have to adopt the mentality of an Irish street cop. The world is a bad place. People are lazy morons. Minorities are criminals. Sex is sick, but interesting.” Jess Carr

“At eighty I believe I am a far more cheerful person than I was at twenty or thirty. I most definitely would not want to be a teenager again. Youth may be glorious, but it is also painful to endure… I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. (Picasso once said: “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.”) By this time I had lost many illusions, but fortunately not my enthusiasm, nor the joy of living, nor my unquenchable curiosity.” Henry Miller

“Thank you for your letter of 10th January. I would be useless at this debate primarily because I have been dead for 24 years now. Apart from that, I hate scientists and I hate artists. In fact, I hate everybody including you, do tell them that is why I’m not at the debate.” Spike Milligan

Puss Rock is what happens to rock & roll when you give it a bucket of ice cream, a few doses of teenage angst and make it watch the first three seasons of Friends Did you know, Train, poster children of puss rock, have more than one song? Me neither. Billy Sayer

“When the power of birth and station ceases, no hope remains but from the relevence of money. Power and wealth supply the place of each other. Power confers the ability of gratifying our desire without the consent of others. Wealth enables us to obtain the consent of others to our gratification. Power, simply considered, whatever it confers on one, must take from another. Wealth enables its owner to give to others, by taking only from himself. Power pleases the violent and proud: wealth delights the placid and the timorous. Youth therefore flies at power, and age grovels after riches.” Dr. Johnson

Chariots of the Clods

This was the week where mysteries arrived, but their conclusions left much to be desired. Early in the week a quandary arose when two pairs of pants coming from the same manufacturer,which were located in the same warehouse, had to come in two separate shipments, arriving on separate days from separate carriers, and eventually arriving in very different looking packages.

Security reasons?

Who knows?

Worse yet the highly anticipated government no-bullshit UFO report was released which concluded, ” Welllll maybe …maybe not… who’s to say?”

Like you, I would have loved to have been there to throw out the first, “Oh sure, that’s what they want you to believe!”

In all fairness the thoroughly …meh report was a big step up from blaming it all on swamp gas, pleurisy, and weather balloons. If nothing else we may have come far enough that we are no longer held hostage by that post-war committee of experts (Margaret Meade, David Foster Dulles, Arthur Godfrey et al.) who told Ike to keep his mouth shut because people would loose their spit if it got out that there’s life on other planets.

How much life?

From the New Yorker, 5/10/21:

Among the other speakers was Clifford Stone, a retired Army sergeant, who purported to have visited crash sites and seen aliens, both dead and alive. Stone said that he had catalogued fifty-seven species, many of them humanoid. “You have individuals that look very much like you and myself, that could walk among us and you wouldn’t even notice the difference,” he said.

Fifty-seven varieties of aliens?

That’s gotta give the marketing people at the Heinz Corporation pause for thought.

While the answer was disappointing it was hardly unexpected. As someone who has spent that last year asking our local department of transportation when the hell they were goning to be done tearing up our street I came to learn that all of their many, many answers fell into one of three categories – wishy-washy, noncommittal, and unnecessarily obtuse. You eventually give up asking as you swear you’re dealing with someone who got a masters in government obfuscation.

No, the real pests were the ones who wanted to rain on this parade. City workers I can deal with, but these morons raised blisters on my ass.

From The Daily Beast 5/25/2021:

“There’s no doubt that this mainstream UFO disclosure push is offering a convenient distraction for the Deep State to turn our attention away from important issues like the Scamdemic and the election fraud getting exposed,” Jordan Sather, a UFO and QAnon conspiracy theorist, complained on social media network Telegram on May 19.

Sather, who has griped that interest in UFOs has just become a way for left-wing “social justice warriors” to “virtue signal,” typifies the response. At a moment when longtime UFO promoters are soaking in the mainstreaming of UFO discussion, many conspiracy theorists on the right instead see the sinister hand of a global cabal at play.

Conspiracy theory hub InfoWars often posts articles about UFOs. But more recently, InfoWars has started to see the prospect of extraterrestrial revelations as a deep state plot. In an April video, InfoWars staffer Greg Reese posited that the UFOs were being faked using technology from inventor Nikola Tesla and the Nazis, with the ultimate goal of faking an alien invasion to enslave humanity in “the most dire false flag imaginable.”

Upset?

How could you not be?

This was our time, the geeks, the dweebs, the people who grew up with glasses, and braces, and far more acne that any one person deserved much less needed. Our long hours of sitting alone in our rooms in our younger years lead many of us to be self-educated UF-ologists. We’re the people you sat next to or in front when Close Encounters first hit theater. We were the ones who snorted, and guffawed and said, in something far louder than a whisper, “Oh not that one again!” Sure, you were annoyed, but what you didn’t realize at the time was that you knew us quite well in teen years.

How?

Because we were The People You Pants’d. (TPYP)

And you owe us this one.

Why?

Because TPYP are the very people who shape America’s leaders.

Think about it. There was always that kid in math class with an uncanny natural aptitude for the stuff. While he couldn’t do anything about being desperately near sighted he could do that (x-y) shit in his sleep. Through no fault of his own he’d begin a school day with a perfect score on the algebra pop quiz only to end the day by having his pants pulled down around his ankles just before being pushed into the girls’ locker room.

And who put him there?

America’s future leadership.

America doesn’t have The Playing Fields of Eaton to build its elite. Instead we have those who would rain down terror on band geeks, audio-visual aids, and the cast of the spring musical.

If you don’t believe me look at that Kavanaugh guy or maybe that Carlson Tucker character.

You can’t tell me those two didn’t cut their teeth by giving the first-chair clarinet a swirly.

That said – we all have to cut the Carlson Tucker guy some slack. He too wanted to know what was going on with the UFO report which brings up the point – that while Gruppenführer Sather can fuckin’ go to hell for trying to steal this moment – there are certain aspects of the current conservative POV that apply here, primarily their critique of the media. Much of the buzz around this topic came after the usually staid 60 Minutes devoted an entire segment to modern Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Looking back you’ll see that the report only examined sighting on both coasts thus reducing it to something – once again – that avoids what some call America’s “fly-over country.”

God knows, those of us who grew up in the middle time zones know all about UFOs and their mysterious attraction to cattle. No one in all of this even once mentioned what the locals call, “foolie bidness” with the cows. While 60 Minutes got all hopped up on Don Winslow and his pals they failed to mention the years and years of newspaper reports where some poor farmer or rancher found one or more cows dead with a substantial portion of their intestines and anus removed with surgical precision. That gave some us the idea to set up lawn chairs in some pasture. Then when the saucers came we’d wander over and very politely say, “So …uhh, Mork? Mork is it? Just a little advice – that’s not where the prime rib comes from, k?”

Thanks for stopping by.

Where were we?

The point is – this is (OK was) our moment. We endured your noogies and locker-room rat tails so just let let us have this one. More importantly – let us have this one when it comes back around again. The maybe/maybe not shit isn’t going to resolve anything. Right now everything is still in play as it was after alma mater put their stamp on the Blue Book project. We’re not going bother you while you look for Chinese bamboo fiber on Arizona ballots so just just leave us alone to contemplate the words of a wise man who once said, “Every one of you listening to my voice, tell the world, tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”

“I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.” Gustave Flaubert

A couple of years before he died, Kurt Vonnegut said that when he was well into his 60s he came to the conclusion that he was never going to change, he was who he was, and that’s how he was going to stay until it was time for the grave. He said that he had made peace with understanding who he was and how he would go forward from there.

I came to the same conclusion when I was nine.

For example?

Over the years I learned that you don’t have to change, you just have to wait it out. Others dive head first into personal conflict and expect you to do the same. They jump into the fray in one of two ways. One is to be like Homer Simpson when he said that at the first sight of lightning to grab a piece of sheet metal and run under a tree. The other method is to act much like the Crocodile Hunter guy who used to get all excited and yell things like, “CRICKEY! That one of the world’s deadliest snakes RIGHT OVER THERE – I’m gonna go poke it with a stick!”

Me?

Stand under the eves and let the passing shower play itself out.

Sturm und drang is for other people. Several who took me to task came back around over the years for not getting involved in some reality-show worthy conflict later circled around to say they were sorry and they should have thought harder about the people around them and not the events that were unfolding. Invariably in each case I have heard them out and then smiled warmly and said, “Who’d you say you are again?”

Why the sudden reflection?

It’s the 20th anniversary of this page and the 18th of the Typepad beta test.

No, really.

While I have not blogged consistently over all that time I have done it for longer than one month. Anybody who gives up after that short a stretch is not going to get a “Take me to your leader!” when the aliens finally show themselves, he’s gonna get a “Puny human!”

Moving along-

If anything I’ve learned that there’s no reward in maintaining a personal blog other than to blow the cobwebs outta my brain. God knows, there’s no money in it and as I said in an earlier post – my past is nothing you can make a buck off. You need to some pretty interesting tales to tell if you expect a big payback.

Like this:

Deacon was born in France in 1881 to rich American parents, whose stormy relationship culminated in Edward Parker Deacon shooting his wife’s lover dead; Gladys was 11. Her mother, Florence, canceled her lunch the next day but was not noticeably inconvenienced by the scandal. It also seemed to have had very little impact on Gladys. From an early age, she was fiercely original and defiantly independent, not qualities that sat comfortably in the world of the useless rich in which she was forced to make her way.

And I don’t care how much revenue is involved, I’m sure as hell not going to deconstruct Naomi Wolf’s pelvis.

Rest assured that just because AWS raised my monthly fee to publish this nonsense to $4.86/month from $4.10 I will not be coming to you to make up the difference.

With that it’s time to sing along. If you don’t know the words just tap your foot to the sentiment.

“Consider the claims about a left ‘monoculture’ that have recently become fashionable in right-wing circles. Fancy new terminology aside, anyone who pays attention to discourse on the right should instantly be able to recognize this as a superficial variation on a line of criticism that has been in circulation for years: that Democrats, socialists, communists, liberals, progressives, and so on are basically all the same thing. This is not some groundbreaking new insight; it’s what your grandpa has been posting on freerepublic.com for decades. So we should not be surprised that the standard responses to criticism of the DemoCommies still apply to the new “monoculture” phrasing: liberalism and communism are in fact very different and oppositional ideologies and it is just a game of semantics to conflate them. More to the point: there are millions upon millions of people who would fall into this super-category, and it is both unfair and unreasonable to take all of these individuals with their idiosyncratic perspectives and ideas and shove all of them into the same box. If it’s wrong to say that everyone on the right is (for example) a fascist, then for the exact same reasons it’s also wrong to say that everyone on the left is guilty of fascist-jacketing.” Carl Beijer from Hippie Punching 2021

“If it was not clear already, one stinging lesson from 2020 is that our countrymen are not buying what the online activist class is trying to sell, no matter how morally righteous their doctrine may be. Whether this will somehow change, and the country can be governed like a graduate seminar on critical race theory, remains to be seen. What is apparent is that, should that profound shift come to pass, significant and growing numbers of nonwhite, non-straight, non-Christian people will ardently oppose it.” Thomas Chatterson Williams, Harpers Feb 2021

“For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be ‘rigged.’ His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol. The democracy campaigners watched with alarm. ‘Every week, we felt like we were in a struggle to try to pull off this election without the country going through a real dangerous moment of unraveling,’ says former GOP Representative Zach Wamp, a Trump supporter who helped coordinate a bipartisan election-protection council. ‘We can look back and say this thing went pretty well, but it was not at all clear in September and October that that was going to be the case.’ This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.’ That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures. “ The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, Time Magazine Feb. 4, 2021

“What Trump recognized was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and ‘SJWs,’ opposition to the popularization of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military, the rights of male undergraduates to engage in fornication while intoxicated without fear of the Title IX mafia. Whatever their opinions might have been 20 years ago, in 2021 these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever GamerGate was about. On economic questions their views are a curious and at times incoherent mixture of standard libertarian talking points and pseudo-populism, embracing lower taxes on the one hand and stimulus checks and stricter regulation of social media platforms on the other.”I have come to think of the people who answer to the above description as “Barstool conservatives,” in reference to the popular sports website, especially its founder and CEO, Dave Portnoy. For many years the political significance of Barstool was implicit at best, reflected mainly in its conflicts with Deadspin and other members of the tacitly liberal sports journalism establishment.” Matthew Walther, Rise of the Barstool Conservatives

Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?

Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?

Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?

“I have, indeed, not found among any part of mankind less real and rational complaisance than among those who have passed their time in paying and receiving visits, in frequenting public entertainments, in studying the exact measures of ceremony, and in watching all the variations of fashionable courtesy. They know, indeed, at what hour they may beat the door of an acquaintance, how many steps they must attend him towards the gate, and what interval should pass before his visit is returned; but seldom extend their care beyond the exterior and unessential parts of civility, nor refuse their own vanity for gratification, however expensive to the quiet of another.” Dr. Johnson

Can I keep ‘im, Pa?

This was the week that I got an email from a cousin who was born about a half dozen years before the arrival of the Boomers. His note read, “Pardon me for saying this, but I can’t help noticing that your wife doesn’t use our name professionally.”

Sent a short note back that said, “She doesn’t use it unprofessionally either. Truth be told she’s been using the name she came with for as long as I’ve known her.”

Befuddlement ensued.

Over the next few days and an exchange of 10 or so emails I had to give up and send this article as an explainer.

You might want to have a look at that last link as it will come in handy later because it’s time to talk about that Wanda show.

Did you see The Wanda Show?

I came to it late which meant I had to go into the basement and find Mom’s old laptop and the older iPad. Once those were rounded up I switched on her new laptop and this computer. I had six screens going all at once so I could bird watch it like the kids do.

Why come to it late?

Trepidation.

Growing up in the middle of nowhere meant that we got ONE whole channel of television. That channel was an affiliate of The Tiffany Network, CBS which meant a very steady diet of Lucy, Dick van Dyke, and Andy Griffith. Not that I had any expressed vehemence at the time, but it is true – familiarity breeds contempt. Not only were they on at night, they circled back around every morning starting right after Cap’n Kangaroo and winding up just as the soaps started. Before I was 10 I could watch as little as 30 seconds of any Lucy episode and say, “It’s the chocolates one.”

The one with Lucy in the football helmet?

We’d never seen Superman.

The classic sitcom aspect made me, as Mom says, hinckey about wandering into WandaVision. I had fears that sooner or later we’d have to see Ellie May fetching Ultron out of Miz Drysdale’s rose bushes or an Easter egg featuring Arnold Ziffle as The Herald of Galactus. Adding to that was my disgust at the last episode of Lost. After all those years the very special two hour finale turned out to be little more than Sister Perpetua’s first-grade pep talk about Limbo, a theological concept based on mid-20th Century dance craze.

Why put the time into these long form series if you’re only going to be pissed off at the end?

Why not spend the time taking a nap or watching something like the old Mission:Impossible or the original Hawaii 5-0, shows that had to good manners to finish up after only an hour?

What turned me around was Emily VanDerWerff’s review,

She writes:

We live in a world that is dominated by the belief that we can come up with one single theory that unifies everything so that we no longer have to worry about mystery or figure out some stuff for ourselves. From “the ending, explained” videos to QAnon, we are living amid a paucity of mythos and an overabundance of logos. Our culture is spiritually and morally empty, and one of the foremost ways to refill those reservoirs in our very core beings is through storytelling and art. We have increasingly lost sight of that, and I don’t know how we’re going to get it back.

That WandaVision was a sometimes-meandering journey through the ways art can help us heal has been held against it by too many viewers. But maybe that was the point. Art is so often a message in a bottle, something an artist or group of artists makes to say, “Hey, here’s how I’m feeling. Do you agree with that?” WandaVision rediscovered that quality in the sitcom reruns that made us feel joy and solace and community, then tried to pay it forward. After all, what is art but our spirits, persevering?

Here’s where clicking on the Generation Jones link will come in handy.

Being Generation Jones and growing up with only one tv channel created a great many problems in junior high. By at least the eighth grade you’d get parked in some airless room with a city slicker born on the front end of the Boom who knew what it was like to have so many tv stations that you couldn’t count ’em on only one hand. Having grown up with a front row seat on Hogan’s Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, and My Favorite Martian we were more than a little incredulous when the teacher said, all creative effort is art and all art has a message – art is here to teach us something about ourselves.

At first I was willing to give these people the benefit of the doubt because for all I knew they might be talking about the game shows. That all went out the window when they’d started passing around mimeographed sheets full of Simon and Garfunkle lyrics as we were about to go on a search to find out exactly where Joe DiMaggio went. That lead to the eventful moment a couple of days later when Colleen Callahan thought she’d jump ahead of us. She raised her hand and said, “My mom says he married Marilyn Monroe!”

Proving that Sister Charles Loretta was right when she said to never let your parents do your homework.

Where were we?

If we accept Ms.VanDerWerff’s premise that WandaVision is an examination of grief then WandaVision might be the most subversion piece of pop culture to date. Here the sacred Marvel continuity has been weaponized. The average Comic Book Guy winds up getting immersed in the works of Elizabeth Kuber-Ross. Either it blows right past him or he has to go deal with – what Mom calls – his butthurt.

That means WandaVision might be the most subversive piece of pop culture since Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Moving along –

Mommie Bloggest

Unlike many of my ilk I have no trouble surfing right-wing media because – unlike them – I do not fear that a mere glimpse of such things will turn me into a pillar of stone. About the only RWM I won’t look at is the NewsMax channel since those people look like they got their lighting gear off a clearance table at Best Buy.

There’s a difference between happy, shiny people and really shiny, shiny people.

You shouldn’t have to put on #5 welding googles to watch tv in your own living room.

From Jonah Goldberg’s Friday newsletter:

Let’s talk about blogging.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to take a seat on the porch next to my rocking chair as I regale you over mint tea about the Golden Age of Blogging. Suffice it to say it was a big deal for a short period of time. The first big disruptor of traditional media was probably Craigslist because it derailed the classified ad gravy train. But, on the content side, blogging was almost as significant.

I have a lot of fond memories about the blogging era. I’m very proud of the fact that The Corner over at National Review was my idea. But then, earlier this week, I had the opportunity to record an episode of Jay Nordlinger’s Q&A (coming out soon-ish, probably). It was a fun conversation, and it continued for a good while after we stopped recording. During the post-pod discussion, I had a small epiphany: Blogging deserves its fair share of blame for much of the craptacularity out there in the media space today.

For people of my generation, this is pretty counterintuitive. The debates of the blogging era feel like witty intellectual badinage around the Algonquin Roundtable compared to the poo-flinging, boorish brabble of the Twitter age. But if you think of “microblogging”—the dumb technical term for sharing your worthless thoughts on platforms like Twitter—as a natural evolution from blogging, its sins become apparent.

Not that I really want to sit and recall those days either since I was frequently mistaken for what was then known as a “mommie blogger.”

No, really.

Despite the many posts about politics, football betting, and the arrival of newer and more obtuse French postmodernists, what little readership I had was fixated on my time as Mr. Mom since I used to write about my ongoing battles with the student teachers back when Alaska Wolf Joe was only a puppy. Back then the student teachers were all childless, but they knew far more about parenting than I did since they had masters degrees.

Listening to Mom holler loud enough to bust all the windows in the maternity ward? Staying up with him all night with him when he was sick? Getting up hours before dawn to get to the mall to get that one present Santa just had to bring?

Piffle.

What did I know?

I only had a BA.

Fuck me.

Compounding this forced march down Memory Lane was not one, but two articles about mommie bloggers that surfaced in the past few weeks.

From the 2/8/21 edition of The New Yorker:

(Glennon) Doyle, who is forty-four, has always espoused experiencing vividly all that is beautiful and brutal in the world. “Life is brutiful,” she wrote in her first book, “Carry On, Warrior,” in 2013. At the time, she was married to a man, and “Christian mommy blogger”—her least favorite sobriquet—was a pretty accurate description of her job. Her blog, Momastery, offered readers a look at her life as a progressive Christian raising three children which was intimate, unguarded, self-revealing. “I found my thing: openness,” she wrote. “I decided that’s what God wanted me to do. . . . I was going to make people feel better about their insides by showing them mine.”

From Graydon Carter’s AirMail:

In the wake of her hit show Desperate Housewives, Felicity Huffman was making a name for herself off camera as a counter-intuitive D.G.A.F. (“Don’t Give a Fuck”) mom expert. Her vehicle was the Web site What the Flicka? (Flicka was Huffman’s nickname growing up), which she’d started in 2012, just after Desperate Housewives—for which she won an Emmy—went off the air. Huffman realized how many women out there sympathized with her character on the show, Lynette Scavo, a harried working mother. Why not cater to that crowd and give herself a new marketing platform, not to mention a place where she could vent and wax on about her own real-life parenting woes?

Everybody pretty much knows what became of Ms. Huffman. Ms. Doyle OTOH divorced her philandering husband, overcame a substance problem, became a hot topic in Oprah and Elizabeth Warren’s inner circles, while marrying the former forward for the US Womens National Team, Abby Wambach.

Nice to know one of us mommies is doing well.

Please don’t get me wrong – while being mistaken for a mommie blogger was annoying there was a great deal to be learned from the other mommie bloggers who followed my page.

They had lots of great skin care tips which came in handy.

Dragging your knuckles in the winter months can leave them all rough and sore.

But enough of all that.

Let us now stick our asses in the snow and dance in the way of my people.

“People fib. Most keep it at exaggeration—a hardscrabble childhood, an illustrious ancestor, a perfect S.A.T. score, a close call in a war zone. It’s more problematic—or pathological—when they make things up entirely. I had a high-school classmate who bragged about having a handsome, aristocratic English boyfriend, and when it came time to produce him, claimed he was killed in a double-decker bus crash in London. (When she grew up, she worked for the C.I.A. Or said she did.) Where is Hillary/Hilaria on that spectrum? Hard to tell, but there doesn’t seem to be a venal motive behind the imposture. She wasn’t pretending to be from Spain to disguise a low-class background, get a job as a bilingual teacher, or qualify for an E.U. passport. She wasn’t taking anything away from anyone; presumably, she just wanted to make herself seem more interesting and exotic. It’s bizarre, and maybe a little borderline, but nobody got hurt. So, how do you say in English, mucho ado about nada?” Alessandra Stanley

“In its variety, the Substack corpus resembles the blogosphere. It is produced by a mix of career journalists, bloggers, specialists, novelists, hobbyists, dabblers, and white-collar professionals looking to plump up their personal brands. … A Substack newsletter is both a product and a portfolio: a way to make money, but also a venue for displaying personality, intelligence, and taste. Read enough of them and certain patterns begin to emerge. Newsletters in the business and tech categories tend to adopt para-LinkedIn tics. They are often studded with Twitter screenshots and lists of links. Single-sentence paragraphs appear frequently, as do uplifting rhetorical devices. (‘Imagine a world where you had a personal board of advisors—the people you most admire and respect—and you gave them upside in your future earnings in exchange for helping you. . . . Imagine if you could diversify by pooling 1% of your future income with your ten smartest friends.’) Just as there is ‘podcast voice’ —that inquisitive, staccato bedtime-story cadence—there is Substack tone, a semi-professional quality suited to mass e-mail. Some newsletters convey intimacy, in the language of psychotherapy and self-help, but their style is more polished and structured than that of the looser, rangier blogs of the early two-thousands. ‘Maybe Baby,’ for all its vulnerability, is also aware of itself as a commodity, dialled in to its audience. Still, it’s nice, from time to time, to receive a chatty, engaging, personable e-mail from someone who doesn’t expect a response.” Anna Wiener

“It’s the work of a true supervillain—the most Andy Kaufman–esque move any musician has made over the past few decades, and certainly one of the most entertaining stories to emerge from rap’s subterranean. But in Doom’s telling of the events, fans weren’t being cheated out of the true Metal Face experience. Rather, they were seeing what that experience was all about. ‘I’m a director as well as a writer,’ the rapper/producer told HipHopDx in 2009. ‘I choose different characters, I choose their direction and where I want to put them. So who I choose to put as the character is up to me. The character that I hired, he got paid for it. There’s no impostor.’ Doom found the outrage funny, and mused about sending out a white guy or the Blue Man Group to take his place. A decade later, he would still occasionally dispatch fugazis, including Hannibal Burress at Adult Swim Festival in 2019. Others may have viewed the mask as a crown, but for its owner, there was little precious about it.” Justin Sayles

“Today my possible Historical Reconstruction Associate is Mr. Haberstrom, founder of Burn ‘n Learn. Burn ‘n Learn is national. Their gimmick is a fully stocked library on the premises and as you tan you call out the name of any book you want to these high-school girls on roller skates who will fetch them for you.” from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

“It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.” Dr. Johnson

Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you seen Lydia?

Various thoughts on last week in no particular order.

– This was the week the midway caught fire.

How so?

For years I’ve been saying that you’ll completely understand American life once you accept the fact that the major corporations are to America what the church was to Medieval Europe.

Got that?

The endless outrage, the culture wars, the cable channels are nothing by sideshow attractions. While everybody is busy guffawing at a picture of Michelle Obama morphed into The Dog Faced Boy the real action is in the big tent.

Like what?

Oh, I dunno … maybe how the Chinese are offering negative interest rates in Europe to attract them away from our lending markets or maybe how Brazil because the world’s largest supplier of soy after Mr. Tariffs Fan got busy. Or maybe everybody should have taken the hint when the big corps told Arizona THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO to recognize MLK Day or they’d bring no investment to the state.

How did The Right lose the battle against gay marriage?

Because there’s a market in that.

Granted, it’s a small data point, but the concession-ish video came out after the National Manufacturers condemnation and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial calling for resignation. Those might have gone unnoticed in all the commotion and it’s probably just a quirk of mine that I even brought it up.

– Normally you’re supposed to say, “At the risk of repeating myself…” but at my age it’s expected.

Slothrop’s Proverbs for Paranoids. (From Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon)

1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

2. The innocence of the creature is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.

3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

4.You hide, They seek.

5. Paranoids are not paranoids because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

This week was about about number three and number five. Next week will be all about number four.

– The Right should be less concerned with its online platforms and more concerned about their methods.

Why?

Seen this guy?

From The Arizona Republic:

For the past two years, Angeli had become a fixture at political rallies, marches and protests. Besides his attention-getting outfit, Angeli has a booming voice that, without need of amplification, could be easily heard among a crowd.

The Republic interviewed Angeli during 2020 as part of a series of stories and a mini-documentary on the Patriot movement in Arizona, the increasingly powerful right-wing of the Republican Party. Some adherents, including Angeli, promoted conspiracy theories including the baseless idea known as QAnon.

Angeli, 33, lived in Phoenix, but it was not clear what he did for a living.

He was listed on a webpage as available to hire as a voice-over actor. He also conducted online courses in shamanism. He also said he volunteered for an arts organization in Phoenix that worked with at-risk youth.

While working with at-risk youth is admirable, the larger issue here is that Mr. Angeli has brought an end to several of the tropes that powered the conservative movement. Thanks to him you can’t really point at old hippies at some sort of protest and have a good giggle nor can you make fun of Burners, Dead Heads, New Age suckers, yoga fanatics, or anyone else you consider a left-wing loonie without that same left-wing loonie looking you in the eye and saying, “Like your guy is better?”

– And that’s the problem isn’t it? There’s no cohesive conservative philosophy or generally agreed to policy points, is there? Who is your Burke? Where is your Mill?

Previously “owning the libs” didn’t matter because 95% of the time us libs had no idea what you were talking about. The rest of the time you’d go hatin’ on Hilary or get bent out of shape about some Hollywood celebrity and we’d just quietly shake our heads and under our breath repeat the words of one of your favorite ex-president, “Well, there you go again!”

Now?

Own away.

Pardon us if our only reaction is, “Cool story Bro, can you get me Antler Guy’s autograph?”

– This isn’t so much about last week as last year. It rambles, it wanders, but by the end you understand what’s happened in our isolation and how some of us should not be left alone for too long as we start to think for ourselves.

From Burning the Furniture by Elua Biss:

In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing. The soft colours of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I don’t find it beautiful. “The desire to consume is a kind of lust,” Lewis Hyde wrote. “But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”

There but for grace of God…

Around the start of last month someone recommended CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders. the book starts off with a series of short stories about people who work for rundown amusement parks and beat-up tourist attractions concluding with a post-apocalyptic novella. The signature piece revolves around the man who has to make sure CivilWArLand is historically accurate. Most of his time is taken up trying to keep the park’s two main attractions – a diorama describing how the Eerie Canal was built and propping up an attraction showing Chinese immigrants building the cross country railroad. Sure, there’s Civil War re-enactments every weekend, but accuracy is out the window as the park is constantly at the mercy of marauding raccoons and drunken teenagers. Nothing can be done because in this story – as well as the others – calamity and tragedy arrive in the same number and velocity as German artillery shells in the Ardennes. No help comes from the top. Throughout the whole collection the bosses are described as violent, drunk, on the brink of nervous collapse, or someone to be avoided because of his stints in prison.

But in each and every case the boss is always referred to as either a beloved or influential member of the local Rotary.

That got a double snort and a hearty guffaw out of me as the local chapter has been after me for the better part of 20 years. I can always spot a Rotary noob – he’s going to land a big fish to impress the others and that big fish is me.

As Bugs Bunny once said, “Poor little maroon.”

But I digress.

Saunders is a worth successor to Nathaniel West. Saunders breakneck speed and dark humor are something to behold. His end piece, the novella, Bounty was interesting reading given not only last week, but last year. The story revolves around a Flawed and his sister. Both are in an amusement park that keeps The Flawed, i.e. genetic mutations, on display for the ultra-wealthy to enjoy. In this America very little is left. The land and water are so toxic that the population is riddled with The Flawed. Waves of death have reduced the Northeast to an empty wasteland and the government exists in name only.

Slavery is once again legal. The central character’s sister is sold off to an well-off undertaker and carted away from the amusement park. He escapes to go looking for her only to discover that America is now populated with nothing but middle managers, self-help gurus, and parenting experts all of whom live in squalor. Nothing gets done because no one has the skills to make anything better. Even the remaining entrepreneurs outside the enclaves of the rich are helpless as their endeavors are similar listed to the one above – girls on roller skates fetching books. Their businesses don’t really help anyone and the only people who are sold on the businesses being a good idea are the entrepreneurs themselves.

CivilWarLand is a series of vignettes where we see what it’s like to have the inept, the overwrought, and the none-too-terribly-bright in charge.

Watching things unfold last Wednesday you have to wonder if this is where we’re headed.

Strictly as an aside –

On New Year’s Eve the family of Daniel Dumile, 49 released a statement saying he had passed away at the end of October. He was better known to the world as MF Doom.

A few years back Alaska Wolf Joe was going to a summer seminar on the other side of town. MF Doom was our car tunes for a good portion of the summer. Doom has a remarkable grasp of pop culture. While other rappers sampled famous songs he sampled the incidental music from Charlie’s Angels and pulled audio from Hanna-Babera’s 1960s version of The Fantastic Four. One tribute talked about his early years and his deconstruction of minstrel shows and similar pop culture racial stereotypes.

So there you go – deconstruction of forms and acknowledgement of The Spectacle.

I didn’t expect to be a Situationist in my old age.

Oh well.