Ebbing compulsion to grid the clusterfuck, not worry I'm anybody the muskgestapo tracking (despite the tens of thousands of pings daily by googlebots and amazonbots and Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Singapore, Vietnam, and Russian bots, and, new in the last month, something called the US *ntelligence *gency, which pings me thirty seconds after every new post), but seething boredom at boring seething, impotent barking at my barking impotence. New for me, I assume it will pass - it has in the past when I had lesser strains - and this is not an announcement of anything except I release myself from the obligations to seethe and bark I never owed to anyone but me
For the past three months I've refused to buy more gouache and acrylic ink and clear elmer's glue and the ketchup-bottle squirters I use to apply the mix and will run out of everything before I buy more not because I plan to quit making these things but because I'm learning techniques in composition and application I wouldn't have in an age of surplus, an unintentional intentional subconscious fine metaphor abounding during Life in the Assholocene while simultaneously - and this is the good news - NOT thinking about quitting during an enforced period of painting (and forgiving myself the use of the verb *painting*) austerity. Strangest days of my life
"This argument comes up regularly, and it has nothing to do with how progressives are talking to young men. It has a lot to do with the way misogyny is normalized in homes and schools and churches"
"The message is clear: Symbols of Black power and resistance are disposable. Performative gestures are easy"
"It’s maybe the worst time to try to restart democratic liberalism from first principles, but it’s worth a shot, I guess. Unfortunately, liberals are gonna need to get way more comfortable with breaking the law for the sake of those principles and very quickly"
"$343K in one year to stand around at protests. He made more in OT than his base pay. You can have 2 teachers & 2 counselors for that money. The greatest domestic source of waste is police, but too many ppl are too racist to see that"
I've been in Athens three times, it's cool, Athens, and Athens County especially can't afford to lose $4M a year, we drove around southeast Ohio extensively when C was at Bamgier, it's beautiful but deep deep Appalachia poor
"If justice meant anything, a cop convicted of sex crimes would be headline news for weeks, but the right-wing propaganda machine won't touch it. There won't be any Fox News panels over this" because it doesn't fit their narrative"
The pathetic irony here is that if Democrats WERE the party crackerstanis claim they are with the legions of Soros paid mercenaries (he still owes ME money) Khalil's arrest would be a rallying event, not a We Are Concerned, Due Process, Please Go Away, pain in their ass
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"So ICE has effectively disappeared a student for protesting Israel's genocide, separating him from his 8 month pregnant wife. Pure fascism"
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"Since Obama administration, at least, leftists/radicals repeatedly warned that Dems pouring cash into ICE and militarized police was not just evil in its own right, but laying the groundwork for open fascism. We were dismissed, with various degrees of vitriol, for pointing this obvious fact out"
Where the fuck *is* motherfucking Obama hiding that no one can stick a microphone in his face and ask him about Khalil?
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"Joe Biden and every single liberal politician or media figure who demonized anti-genocide protesters as anti-semitic extremists, who called for or engineered mass repression of the campus encampments, is deeply complicit in Trump’s repression today. Absolutely shameful"
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"The leadership of the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress are from the state a legal US resident was just effectively kidnapped from by the Department of Homeland Security and they have said literally nothing about this"
"To my colleagues at Columbia: if you were wondering where the rubber hits the road, this is where the rubber hits the road"
"The White House personally ordering the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is the exact kind of thing liberals were screaming about happening to the fucking Lincoln Project or whoever if Trump were allowed to win. Except you don’t hear a single word from them because Khalil is Palestinian"
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"Columbia appears to have facilitated the state kidnapping of one of its students, illustrating once again that not only are elite universities not protectors of democracy, critical thought, and free speech but are—when conditions are right, as they are now—their direct opponents"
It does need saying that at this moment in America only people criticizing Israel are being deported, it's strange that's not strange
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"Again, if the Mad King can just disappear legal residents on personal whim, he can do it for any citizen of the Republic. And if he can do that, without consequence, then I have no idea why you still believe the 2026/28 elections are going to be free, fair, & competitive"
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"This is it. I know that sounds hyperbolic – or perhaps naïve depending on how far down the slide you think we are at this point – but this is in fact the turning point. The detention and disappearance and planned deportation of Columbia student and legal resident Mahmoud Khalil for invented charges at the order of the president will determine the near future and perhaps entire future of this country. Are we or are we not a country of law anymore? Does the Constitution still exist?"
"Trump is attempting to replace capitalism with corporate fascism/authoritarianism while juggling the tricky task of keeping his disparate benefactors happy with his performance and trying to silence any media that fails to fall in line"
"Bernie is attempting to rally the public while Kamala, Hillary and Obama hide from it, and Biden drools. And in three years, Bernie will channel all this energy back into the Democrat establishment that produced hollow corporate servants like Biden, Kamala, Hillary, and Obama"
Have I mentioned that motherfucking Democrats are the enemy, they are far worse than useless, they are fully useful towards and complicit in your enshittification and anyone who uses the word "useless" as primary description of motherfucking Democrat is either stupid or a motherfucking enemy too
It's the Democrats' genocide FFS, and if anyone is freaking the fuck out about Barnard it's emmeffing professional Democrats, if the guy meant what I said, yay, if he meant Democrats didn't crack down hard enough via mayors and governors against anti-2ionist/pro-Palestinian protests eff him
"Democrats aren't technically lying when they say they'll lose elections if they move left, because actual leftist candidates will be aggressively smeared as lunatics, Russian agents and antisemites to make sure they lose by the media, by the Republicans, and" (especially, Jeff adds) "by the Democrats"
Where is the resistance headed? And how does it get there?
Industry-Backed Legislation Would Bar the Use of Science Behind Hundreds of Environmental Protections
What Trump is trying to do to the Education Department, explained
Tesla Battery in Thermal Runaway Ignites Fire During Demolition in Dickerson
"Your regular reminder that it is NOT unethical for sex workers to out prominent prohibitionist clients. Their hypocrisy in trying to get sex workers harmed or killed, while also employing our services, invalidates our duty of discretion"
William T. Vollmann's A Table for Fortune is getting published by Arcade Publishing
WHO'S NOT SEEING DESTROYER WITH ME AT BLACK CAT IN DC IN OCTOBER 2025?
The first two songs pre-released off Destroyer's late March 2025 new album I liked but it wasn't the standard instant love, this new third one? LOVE!
THE VILLAGE OF SLEEP
John Ashbery
Why, we must dye it then –
Would I like to stay here indefinitely? We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode, it was all a blind running into the light – She couldn’t say the word for ‘fish’. Nor are his genes undone by what oafish submarines remain. Aye, sir, Captain Nemo, sir, we’ve spotted the junk in the roads up ahead. What! That spasm I created for my own diversion, now it’s clearly emerging out of the octopus drool that so long enshrouded it, while I, a nether spur to its district railway, am overrun with coughing doubt for the duration, yet here I must stand, a seeming enigma. Outside, life prattles on merrily, like an embroidered towel, and would probably be too weak to object if we decided to postpone the picnic until November. I hear you; the arches under the embankment are part of what I’m all about. I too was weaned from excess in some silvery age now lost in a blizzard of envelopes. How frostily jingle the harness bells! It’s all we can do to keep up with the dunce’s velocipede,
while in a neutral corner of the quarry the same binge of history is conning men’s eyes into dogged superstition. So we must make sport of it, reel in our catch while yet there’s time, but droplets are exploding in the gutter. The gambling ship ferried us away past larkspur, past concertinas, and the old name became visible again, briefly, on the building’s dusty façade. I
thought we’d lost you. No, I’m still here. Do you want to jump out a shy window? Little by little one took in the foxes’ keening: It’s all right, it’s sober, they chortled. This was just a plant, it counts only for the next time, and we in beach goggles, brilliant suspenders … The party beast in me says let’s abandon, cooler heads say dive, dive like a frog while famous night is coming on, like the blistered exterior of a sigh.
Was going to wait to post the grid below after tonight's State of the Shitshow speech which (has the potential to deserve its very own grid of outrage) I will not watch or listen to, have the grid now but not before a self-portrait of me vaguely remembering when I did not feel this ever-present frenzy of anxiety and seething that I will be living in a cardboard box down by the river by the time I'm 70 after my life savings and Social Security are stolen (provided I'm not first beaten to death in prison serving my life sentence for typing *fuck crackers* and especially *fuck christers,* you'd think my adamantly and relentlessly typing I. Hate. Motherfucking. Democrats (upgraded to MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS ARE THE ENEMY in the grid below) would earn me slightly less harsh daily beatings but my jailers will be weird and creepy grievance-filled vengeful and sadistic cracker and christer white men)
Is also my daughter's birthday present to be delivered when we're in Michigan the first week of April should the world still be here then, the above just one of the dozens of layouts the two pieces, both double-sided, can make. She won't see it here, she and my son-in-law established and have maintained a media blackout of Daily Life in the Clusterfuckaboomocene in an attempt to live a semblance of a quasi-normal life in the United States of Assholes so she most definitely no longer reads this shitty blog. At the other place I've stopped listing the ingredients of each hexjeff because fuck Jeff, that guy who keeps typing I am telling you three times we are being reprogrammed, doesn't he know that it's wrong, it makes him anxious
"There’s more outrage and media coverage over Trump shouting at Zelenskyy than Israel deliberately starving Gaza by withholding humanitarian aid"
People totally underestimate how much Trump deliberately and provocatively breaking kayfabe wins him adoration and devotion from Asshole-Americans and, as or more importantly, greases the normalcy of his daily fuckton of outright deliberate lies
"This cri de coeur from Rory Stewart, a fancy part of the Anglo-American establishment, shows how the 80 years of propaganda about America's love for democracy, etc. was less about fooling the plebes than allowing the people at top to live with themselves"
"We need a term for a cultural tendency, above all in drama, where the narrative tension depends almost entirely on the characters being unbelievably, unrealistically thick, obtuse, obdurate and incommunicative. Idiodrama? Thickodrama? Writersarelazyhacksdrama? I hate it"
"Major news organizations are making a conscious choice to frame Israel’s total violation of the ceasefire agreement as Hamas rejecting it. This is a demonstrable lie & has been through the entire duration of Israel’s war against Gaza. Israel is rejecting the deal it signed"
"Trump is definitely a victory for accelerationism. Harris would have dragged out the end of American Empire. So in a sense I'm very grateful to Trump"
"Just so we're clear, announcing that you will starve a civilian population in order to alter the terms of a ceasefire deal is a flagrant war crime of the highest order. You would not know that from U.S. headlines"
"Democrats are really going to get into the streets to prolong an unwinnable war but wouldn't be caught dead at a rally to stop a genocide that has resulted in the deaths of over 200,000, mostly women and children"
"After spending years of talking about how Trump is so corrupt, so monstrous, so misogynistic, to have anyone in our party suggest that Andrew Cuomo has a role to play basically makes our leaders look like cynical do-nothings who have no morals”
"The US MAGA Nazis have declared "open season" on US Republicans not loyal to the Trump regime or Musk. Calls them an invasive species in latest genocidal speech. MAGA is going for internal cleansing to remove any remaining opposition"
"I keep thinking of the hundreds of thousands of hardwood trees downed in hurricane Helene. If we have another hot dry summer, all that timber becomes tinder, & could ignite the largest regional wildfires of the modern era. When people say climate breakdown is a polycrisis, this is what they mean"
"Democrats fractured their voter base just to help a war criminal who actively wanted Trump to win the election. They sacrificed the rights of women, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people to facilitate a genocide and uphold apartheid"
"I will note that while Elon appears to be wearing a bulletproof and stabproof vest, the toddler Musk carries around as a human shield is not protected. Which would say a lot about Elon's priorities"
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