And Across Two Thin-As-Breath Lines: a Cocktail Shaker About the Same Size As a Body in the Foreground Gleams Quietly for $950 in Stenciled Silver Reflecting Nothing in Its Lucent Surface

L asked me to go to Saturday's No Kings! rally on Rockville Pike at the Strathmore campus so we walked the loop from our house. It was bigger, more festive and boisterous, than last October's. Multiple signs begged god to slump Trump over now as if Trump is the sole cause of the clusterfuck rather than a uniquely skilled and frighteningly effective shitlord weapon doing exactly what shitlords want, as if Trump dying will trigger a paradigm-shifting clusterfuck reset. An acquaintance (the mother of a kid my daughter went to high school with) from Garrett Park wondered why the ruling elite permit Trump the latitude to wreck the world, I... said nothing, I'm nuts, don't you know. Once home put on the album below this sentence and started working on the grid below this song

We are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths	ruled by motherfucking sociopaths We are	motherfucking sociopaths We are ruled by	sociopaths We are ruled by motherfucking	We are ruled by motherfucking sociopaths	ruled by motherfucking sociopaths We are	motherfucking sociopaths We are ruled by	sociopaths We are ruled by motherfucking
The Obama Problem	Gutter racism	SAVE Act is Christian Nationalism	Architecture of Managed Decline	The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish	Digging Up the Dead	AI's aesthetics of failure	Malignant narcissism has no limits
Failed assassination attempts, real and planned ahead	Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse	The Cargo cult of masculinity	Catastrophe markets	Middle-Power Multilateralism In A Hard Power World	Understaffing as a form of enshittification	Born with a Hitler moustache	Maggie
I KI	HA NG	TE D	M EM	OT OC	HE RA	RF TS	UC !!!
Capital's Veto and the Decline of Democracy	The gravest sin	Does the tail wag the dog?	Trump may be responsible for causing more deaths than any previous tyrant in human history	No Kings Protests Confirm Westerners Irrelevant in Fight Against Imperialism	Law Seeks to Ban Public Officials From Making Polymarket Bets on Upcoming Bloodshed, Because Apparently We Live in a Complete Dystopia	Exorbitant Munition Spending + Lack Of Success = Iran Is Winning	Avedon Carol
After Habermas	Eighteen	Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?	This is the road which my brother Elric totaled our father's 1968 Ford Torino woodie station wagon in 1978, half a mile south of where the cops found the bullet shells yesterday. Probably not connected	More on Habermas' legacy	On Heroes and Role Models	Trying to beat your opposition by becoming them is ludicrous	Clowns
MOCO/PG divorce?	I work in a brutalist building	{ feuilleton }	Intimate difference	Ravens and robots	Neverending stories	The strange world of Ladytron	Six dollars and fifty cents

THE THIN LINE

Meredith Stricker

Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced

with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation

from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January 29th,

for instance, bodies, many of them children, lie on the ground

They drowned in the canal trying to escape a weapons depot fire

and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted in straw and dust

near the feet of on-lookers whose cries we cannot hear

And across two thin-as-breath lines: a cocktail shaker

about the same size as a body in the foreground

gleams quietly for $950 in stenciled silver

reflecting nothing in its lucent surface