- Fleabus last night, Best Cat Ever.
- I love outdoors in heat, people can vouch, finally in the 70s for her it rains all effing weekend.
- A Brief History of American Vigilantism: The state in a capitalist society exists to serve moneyed interests, so private groups likewise acting to serve those same moneyed interests will be afforded leeway, help, and a blind eye far more often than groups challenging those moneyed interests. This remains true even if those conservative interests are acting illegally, abhorrently, or monstrously; and even if those progressive challengers are following the law to the letter and behaving as saints. Since this is built into capitalism, it’s been the case since the transition from feudalism.
- Twin Insurgency, or: The Descent into Warlordism.
- Back to the 19th Century: The conservative majority on the Supreme Court today is similarly blinded by a commitment to liberty in theory that ignores the reality of how Americans’ lives are actually lived. Like the Supreme Court of that era, the conservatives on the Court today are opposed to discrimination in principle, and indifferent to it in practice. Chief Justice John Roberts’s June 2018 ruling to uphold President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting a list of majority-Muslim countries, despite the voluminous evidence that it had been conceived in animus, showed that the muddled doctrines of the post-Reconstruction period retain a stubborn appeal.
- Blinded? Muddled? Its worth reading, but "blinded," "muddled," no.
- Bad Theology.
- Helmetball Is Fear. (We did Beehive year two, it's.... frightening.)
- "I too grew up on the crime-ridden streets of Bethesda."
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- I am reading again - it'd been two weeks - de Norpois has just told Marcel Marcel's favorite author sucks and de Norpois tells Marcel he now understands why the lines Marcel wrote and gave to de Norpois to read suck too, so as always fine metaphors abound.
TO MYSELF
Franz Wright
You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger
with an overhead light on.
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,
the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living) and I am the rain
and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,
and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin—
and when you begin
to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:
everything’s going to be fine
I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich.