Embers of Rain Tamp Down the Shitty Darkness That Issues From Nowhere

Monologue, even more than usual, in the grid, though a Duh Thought Experiment: 

Consider the media response had a Democratic president spent $45 million on an laughably lame and ludicrously unattended vanity tank circle jerk for his birthday while millions of magachoads protested against him in countless towns and cities across the country, including the bluest of blue states, consider the media response had the two state senators and their spouses been shot not by a crackerchrister but a person in a Free Palestine Tshirt and antifa hat, I said to my polisci professor friend (this is true - I had thought of him earlier in the day when I posted a link to an article on bowling - it's in the grid below - and thought of the professor because the lasting memory of the class 30 years ago besides still being friends with the guy is he assigned Lasch's *Bowling Alone* (Lasch was right about our atomization, yo) when I ran into him on campus yesterday, blessed be Serendipity)





The above song related to the second blessed Serendipity of yesterday, believe me, you don't want to read about it even more than I don't want to type it, exactly two of us would get it plus a third if he read this blog which he doesn't know exists. I don't think it's a coincidence, I said, Trump asked Netanyahu to attack Iran before Trump's vanity parade because Trump knows the power of optics and had to know by two days before the parade the parade would be a flop and humiliation. Shit, said prof, I wonder when Trump contacted the Minnesota shooter via telepathy when exactly to go on his spree viz the parade. Vital reminder: Jefferson Airplane is criminally underrated, especially *After Bathing at Baxters*

Imagine the media response if a guy in a Free Palestine tshirt wearing an antifa hat drove his car into a crowd of crackerchristers
Gonna be the most viciously angry and savagely hot summer of our lives, yo, I said, and prof laughed, said, I thought you (everyone in the class did) were batshit crazy thirty years ago but you weren't wrong then and you are not wrong now, much as I wish you were
"Just IMAGINE if Iran or Russia or China told its citizens that they would be KILLED for throwing objects and hospitalised for harassment"
When We Are All Enemies of the State
US Empire’s Tactics Come Home
ACAB ACAB ACAB ACAB ACAB
Silencings: The Transformation of the American Public Sphere
ACAB ACAB ACAB ACAB ACAB
State & Police Vulnerabilities In An American Insurrection Scenario
"Democrats fought David Hogg harder than they’ve ever fought a single republican"
I guarantee top tier motherfucking professional Democrats are now spending all their time and focus on how to eliminate, as in disappear, the person they now view as more dangerous to their positions of power and prestige, even more than Tronald Dump, Zohran Mamdani, that's M-A-M-D-A-N-I
"it’s truly funny that a mayoral candidate is calling for less rent gouging & some free buses and these simple ideas have prompted the city’s entire media, political & financial elite to say that a communist revolution is ending democracy & collapsing the global financial capital"
⬆	The New York Times REALLY doesn't want Mamdani						⬆
Zohran Mamdani and Transnational America	➡	"Ghouls like Andrew Cuomo and his supporters seem to think political talent is making social media clips rather than the oratorical and forensic skills Mamdani has and that we traditionally associate with democratic leadership. I’ve been delighted to see Mamdani explain his positions and platform in language that is clear and complex. I’ve been delighted to see what a happy warrior he is, in the style of FDR, taking genuine pleasure in the give and take of adult argument and debate, speaking like a grownup, giving thoughtful answers rather than being caught like a deer in the headlights by idiot gotcha questions. I see him very much as the path to a future we can be hopeful about and excited by. That’s why I support him"
I guarantee you, guarantee you, bet you infinity digital beers, the day Israel bombed Iran to distract from losing the narrative on their Gazan genocide and the night before (as I type this sentence) Kim Jong Trump's masturbatory parade and magacirclejerk to himself top Democrats huddling to solve their gravest existential crisis since Sanders 2020. Mamdani, that's M-A-M-D-A-N-I							⬆
⬆	"The reason that the NYT editorial board, the Atlantic writing staff, etc hate Zohran is because he’s one of the only living progressive politicians with genuine intent of leveraging power"
Zohran Mamdani the gravest threat ever to American freedom!
Here is every US politician in Congress who currently holds stock positions in aerospace and defense companies that benefit from a war in the Middle East:
"Very shocked and outraged by Iran's upcoming completely unprovoked antisemitic attack on Israel"
Now That the Parasites Have Consumed the Host....
Refresher On The Rules For Discussing Israeli Wars
"And this continues to be NYT's front-page banner as its own reporters share videos of destroyed residential buildings in Tehran"
Meet AIPAC's newest & most expensive mouthpiece in Congress
"It's refreshing to see an American Zionist acknowledge that even their local political decisions are not based on concerns for the community in which they live, but on the wellbeing of a foreign apartheid state engaged in genocide"
Bari Weiss: Toady Queen of Substack
"Any mass media platform where center-right, pro-business politics isn't the dominant paradigm is inevitably going to be maligned in this way by wealthy and powerful people trying to dictate the contours of acceptable discourse"
Why Anti-Trans Campaigns Keep Returning to the Politics of Meat
Authoritarian-friendly Fifa fest shows why next year’s World Cup must be boycotted
"I'm glad Tim Kaine is doing this. But I mean...it's not true we learned nothing from the Iraq war. One thing we learned is that Hillary Clinton could vote for it & still become the Democratic nominee and Tim Kaine would be happy to join her on the ticket"
Fossil fuel billionaires bankroll the anti-trans movement
"Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton and Michael Dukakis — ie, all the living Democratic presidential candidates — have all been completely silent about Israel's attack on Iran. They haven't said a word"
⬆	But I bet many were at this motherfucking professional Democrat royal wedding
Really that simple				"People have really accepted the idea that you are only waging war if you are doing the offensive strikes. Defense and logistics are part of war also, just as if not more important. The US, Britain, and Germany are at war"
Building the American Brownshirts
The Greedy Hubris of a Repulsive Creep
Is Theology Dying?				Politics w/o purpose
A tour of New York’s gaudiest neighbourhood with the Marxist geographer David Harvey
Another Bullshit Night in Slop City
"when hillary tried this in 08 against obama it was a sign of desperation and she eventually lost the primary by double digits. this is actually a good omen"
The crisis of liberal hegemony
How Accidental is an Accident?
He went looking for something to feel good about
Maggie's		The allure of autarky
America’s most popular declining sport
Conversation with a Chinese restauranteur in a west central Mississippi town
New Pope Declassifies Jesus Crucifixion Documents
LIFE AFTER AHAB					{ feuilleton }
totally naked with wild dogs: an allegory
Joyelle McSweeney on Alice Notley
Kaufman & Reubens on the Dating Game			British Experimental Fiction
I was born without the Beach Boys gene, but if you were, Dave the Spazz has a playlist for you
Other people play a version of My Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game

UNCTUOUS PLATITUDES

John Ashbery

There is no reason for the surcharge to bother you.
Living in a city one is nonplussed by some

Of the inhabitants. The weather has grown gray with age.
Poltergeists go about their business, sometimes

Demanding a sweeping revision. The breath of the air
Is invisible. People stay

Next to the edges of fields, hoping that out of nothing
Something will come, and it does, but what? Embers

Of the rain tamp down the shitty darkness that issues
From nowhere. A man in her room, you say.

I like the really wonderful way you express things
So that it might be said, that of all the ways in which to

Emphasize a posture or a particular mental climate
Like this gray-violet one with a thin white irregular line

Descending the two vertical sides, these are those which
Can also unsay an infinite number of pauses

In the ceramic day. Every invitation
To every stranger is met at the station.

Every Day I Peruse the Box Scores for Hours. Sometimes I Wonder Why I Do It Since I Am Not Going to Take a Test on It and No One Is Going to Give Me Money

Furious and bombastic anger currently pulsing through Parkwood's neighborhood listserv! Montgomery County Planning already closed Beach Drive, the mainline into our neighborhood, between Cedar Lane and Knowles Road on Fridays so during both morning and afternoon rush hours not only do cut-throughs race down Saul Road (the road I live on - Momcat was killed by a speeding cut-througher) and Parkwood Drive, and the neighborhood's feeder roads - Rockville Pike, Strathmore Road, Knowles Road, Beach north of Knowles, Cedar Lane to Knowles, the Knowles-Connecticut Avenue intersection in downtown Kensington - totally gridlocked, it can take an hour for what would take five minutes with an open Beach, and last week on the listserv news that Montgomery County Public Schools, redrawing high school clusters with the addition of the rebuilt Woodward High School coming online in 2027, plans to route Parkwood students from Walter Johnson (a highly desirable school) to Einstein (a decidedly not), and then news leaked that Moco plans to shut down the entrance to Beach at Grosvenor Lane intersection for a year for a complete redesign that, when finished, will reduce accessibility to Beach to build two bike lanes AND eliminate the ability to go north on Rockville Pike from Beach at that intersection, so the current clusterfuck on Friday rush hours will permanently go from an hour long to two, and suck more once finished. Fuck the genocide in Gaza and the millerization of Authoritarianamerica, this the real shit



Estimates flying on the listserv on how much everyone's house just lost in resale value, the general concensus is 10% though some saying as high as 20%, and everyone convinced Moco will not reduce the value they use to calculate our property taxes. All agree changing the school boundaries from Walter Johnson to Einstein the kaboom - people really do choose Parkwood in significant part to get their kids into WJ - we did 33 years ago when we bought the house and C did indeed graduate from WJ. Frothing, the neighborhood, and calls to primary our state delegate and state senator and county executive rampant since none of the three have yet responded to the dozens of emails people report they have fired off. Half a dozen claim they will put their houses on the market within then next month before the news of the transfer to the Einstein cluster becomes general public knowledge. Don't tell anyone, we are warned, and if you must tell whoever you told to keep it to themselves, so please, you reading this, sssh, code red, top secret, take this to your grave

 



Moco has yet to call in the National Guard as far as I know, though we haven't firebombed a waymo yet (much less keyed the only cybertruck). I mentioned on the listserv the very serious warning my friend very in the know gave me to be very careful if anyone plans to be in DC anywhere at all this Saturday much less planning to protest this Saturday at Kim Jong Trump's military parade for himself, Trump has ordered cops to bash brains (and no doubt have goons in the crowds and on the streets and on metro), I was swiftly reprimanded by neighbors to keep politics off the listserv. I'm out of gouache, clear elmer's glue, both fountain pen and acrylic ink, canvases, and the faculty carrel I use as a studio now uninhabitable because of construction in the redesigned reading room beneath it, can't use again until August 1st at the earliest, so you may not be made to see more of above for a couple of months, hiatuses easier to comply with when forced than volunteered. Fine metaphors abound. Rest in Power, Sly Stone

We all live in the Vampire Culture now
⬆	"Fisher didn’t focus on the politics of the technology that created the Vampire Castle. But those technological politics are there. That’s because the Vampire Castle was built on social media, and social media has been engineered to create and multiply conflict, to trigger anger, to create division and strife, and ultimately to control and pacify us by getting us addicted to online interactions. That’s how these giant monopolies make money, it’s how they keep us on their platforms"
"Faced with the notion that their side of the argument is completely indefensible, morally, ethically and politically, columnists are now shifting to the tried and tested position that the people they oppose are actually uncool, preachy and, if you think about it, actually embarrassing themselves"
How data is the new weapon of mass destruction
"Liberals still haven’t come to terms with how much Obama’s betrayals created the conditions for Trump’s rise, nor how much his desire for celebrity has led him to disappear from a political moment that he pretended to worry about"
⬆	Where is Barack Obama?						⬆
"Protestors are caught in the paradox of protest in a fascist state: If you don’t protest the powers that be, they assume they’ve gotten away with it and will escalate. If you do protest, they use that as an excuse to escalate"
The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles
Has it occurred to most people that if Trump *is* dying and knows his timeline is short he'll infinity-speed up the violence and coup so he can attend his coronation before dying? adding, for a guy who exaggerated his height via shoes, steps stools, wratched-up chairs, and is so keen to poltically canny optics (to the people he's chumming), slumped? besides a woman? Something's up
⬆	Why are they fucking everything up?" smart people ask me, I say. they *want* to fuck everything up, dumdum						⬆
The weaponization of Waymo
"Imagine spending your whole life cos-playing and fantasizing about fighting the federal government sending troops in against its own citizens only to root for the government when the moment finally arrives"
A few words about “peaceful protests.”
"both sides literally support ICE and mass deportations. harris ran on 'we actually deported more people than trump did.'"
Democratic Leadership Get Out Of Your Town Car Challenge
"y’all are really losing the plot here. uprisings, riots, and militant standoffs with ice waste their time and prevent them from abducting our community. these aren’t just protests, they’re acts of direct action. this isn’t about optics. it’s about keeping families together"
These 75 Democrats joined Republicans to "express gratitude" to ICE agents and call for greater local and state collaboration with ICE.
"The LA uprising reveals, not for the first time, the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the Democratic Party. Note their muted response. They cannot support the anti-ICE protests, which is why you have these unbearable statements invoking MLK that are only ever trotted out to tell the brown and black dispossessed to ‘calm down’"
Problems of the rich					They are not scared, they are complicit
ICE cowards			Why Don't ICE Agents Quit?
ICE's War on Home	➡	"Such fascist theatrics are nothing new from Trump, and it is imperative to recognise that the United States’ recent crackdown on immigration began not with a Republican but a Democratic president. Under Bill Clinton, border patrol tripled in size to become the nation’s second-largest law enforcement agency; under Barack Obama, the budget for the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, began to outpace the budgets of the FBI, the CIA, and all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. During his two terms in the White House, Obama oversaw the removal of more than three million non-citizens, more than any other president in history"
Logics of escalation from Black Lives Matter (2020) to "No Kings" (June 14 2025)
"In a populous city in southeast Virginia, a Republican sheriff who calls himself “Detain ’Em Dave” is in a race to the right against a GOP challenger who wants more immigration enforcement. No Democrat or independent has filed to run"
I mentioned this a couple or so posts ago, but a good friend of mine in the know tells me a minor but important and significant purpose behind Kim Jong Trump's parade is creating a honeytrap for protesters, if you do go be careful, the plan is to batter people
"As Bertrand Russell observed, if reactionaries called for sterilizing the poor, liberals would insist on clean needles"
Your Reichstag Tuesday Recap
Study Says Ocean Acidification Crossed Planetary Boundary
When will a vital system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean collapse?
Climate capitalism won’t save us
He believes it is the extra fingers that makes this woman so fecund
Today in Rhetorical Questions: Why the BBC killed its Gaza documentary
"I cannot emphasize enough that the reason Trump has gone balls out to destroy science and medicine is the living Antichrist Peter Thiel, seen here in his regulation Himmler haircut.
⬆	Yes, that's one reason, and shitlords wanting you to get sick, suffer, and die another, but mostly shitlords want you dumb and ignorant and superstitious until you are useless to them *then* they want you to get sick, suffer, and die a miserable death
Governments overthrown with CIA assistance
"For the number of weird right-wing Pynchon readers who disagreed with my assessment of his thoughts on fighting back against a police state: please see this section of “A Journey Into The Mind of Watts”"					Absolutely right
Maggie's		The battle of Los Angeles
The Ancient Paths of an Iconic River
For the record, the Ohio is the greater river when the Mississippi merges with it at Cairo, and the true headwaters of the river that flows through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico (remember that dumb Trump fight?) is the Allegheny							⬆
dune's blue		{ feuilleton }			Small world of English
And who’s to help us now the old Queen’s dead?
On Marianne Moore			Proust's Jewish Question
Sly Stone and the Sound of an America That Couldn’t Last
Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs
The Rise and Fall of Sly Stone
Jesse played a bunch of Sly for Rest in Power on his show last night

BASEBALL & CLASSICISM

Tom Clark

Every day I peruse the box scores for hours
Sometimes I wonder why I do it
Since I am not going to take a test on it
And no one is going to give me money

The pleasure's something like that of codes
Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say
So as brightly to picturize Eurydice
In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day

The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi

And Should Further Seasons Coagulate into Years, Like Spilled, Dried Paint, Why, Who's to Say We Weren't Provident?

I don't know that I'd be as avid a discgolfer if I lived in Michigan. I played the 4th Best Disc Golf Course in Michigan yesterday according to udisc, out of 18 just one truly interesting hole, Number 17, and interesting only for its gimmick

Your teeshot MUST land in the circle - if you land outside the circle you take a one stroke penalty and play what is now your third shot from where the disc lies. I actually parked it and birded, my only one at that course and only my fourth of the six rounds I've played so far at three different courses. I've seen artificial islands spray painted around a basket at tournaments (I have not played a tournament in at least twenty years - they suck as an event and I suck as a player = no) but never a constructed island, I approve. And full confession - I can't huck 300 feet and of the 54 different holes on the three courses I've played only a half dozen or so are short of three hundred and almost all of them are open fields with trees only around the baskets. Maryland courses far more technical, much more wooded, they are as disliked by big arms as much as open field courses are disliked by noodle-armers like me. Fine metaphors abound. 

Leaving to play Rolling Hills south of Ann Arbor as soon as this is posted, there is an 18 hole regular course and an 18 hole putt-putt course, will do both, never played a disc golf putt-putt before, laugh. The two chipmucks who live under that deck of this cottage will not shut the fuck up, chirp. As predicted for this trip, Lambchop's been in my ears

And of course I collected links. Vacation has not helped break the novel-reading slump, I've tried a reread of Ishiguro's *Buried Giant* and first read, second try, of Faulkner's *The Hamlet,* nope. I can't escape the the clusterfuck, documenting it, it's like the tablets I keep, it's how I process. No Pick-up Truck American versus Subaru-American encounters to speak of on the road, conversations on the courses have been strictly disc golf related, the few I've had. No doubt professional Democrats plotting their Musk seduction attempts now even as Musk divorced Trump for not stealing more of your money than Trump already is. Going to Kalamazoo tomorrow for this with kiddo and her hubby, yay! No Destroyer this trip as planned except what comes up in shuffle, but a pleasant and unplanned but welcome Tindersticks binge, holyfuck, I forget sometimes how much I ! Tindersticks

Straight white male fragility is just getting more and more pathetic as it spreads
Straight white male fragility is just getting more and more pathetic as it spreads
The Defeat of The West And Its Dislocation
Israel is fully integrating its Gaza ‘food aid hubs’ into the genocide
Zen And The Art Of New York Times Headline Writing
Western journalists complicit in Israel's genocide will pay for what they have done
The Making of Our Political Panic
Palestine Solidarity Encampment Diary
Almost Every NYPD Cop Charged with Excessive Force During the George Floyd Protests Escaped Serious Punishment
The Trump Doctrine and the New MAGA Imperialism
Are medicine’s middlemen pharmacy parasites?
Your Call Is Very Important to Us
The Corporate Fear Campaign to Keep Workers Locked Into Their Jobs
Can't sleep, can't wake up					Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison
"Christian pornographer refuses to film sex tape for gay couple"
"Ladies and gentlemen…America’s most famous Democratic governor!"
"It only took 4 months for Biden/Harris officials to start using the Nuremberg Defense..."
Not just using the Nuremberg Defense, running a new scam behind it, the shit
"I think what the Dem elites have "learned" is that there are no career consequences for gross failure in elections or governing. The only thing they fear is being left out of the lucrative Dem Party donor-consultant networks that Abundance is written for"
The Problem Goes Well Beyond Biden
Centrist Democrats want a fight with the left
"It’s actually good that the Abundance Movement is finally being very honest that it sees unions and workers as the villains. There’s no pretense anymore. The mask is finally off. They are now screaming about their motives. So at least there’s no deception, which is good"
*This* (my congressperson) moco mofo
Of course this is professional Democrats first thought
"the more one's work is seen as socially useful, the more it is recognized as helping others, the less one is likely be to be paid for it."
Private Equity Vampires Suck
The Right-Wing Culture Warriors Who Are Becoming Federal Judges
Michael Ledeen Was the Forrest Gump of American Fascism
Michael Ledeen and the "left-hand path" to American Fascism
"The entire population of homeless Americans could be given homes & health care on what Elon Musk pisses away for fun in a year"
Where There Used To Be A Blawgosphere
SUNDAY NIGHT ‘TIL MONDAY MORNING: THE IMPERIALIST’S ONE-OFF AM RADIO SHOW			The poetry of blotches
Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty’s lifelong argument
notes from the quiet					Storyteller
On album art, Hipgnosis, and Fairport Convention
Richard Butler turned 69 yesterday and *Forever Now* must be one of my 15 most listened-to albums ever

ALCOVE

John Ashbery

Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, "mugwump
of the final hour," lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It's breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.
And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who's to say we weren't provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it's not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That's how we get around obstacles.