Do You Want to Go Down to the Pits of Yourself All Alone?

The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
"If you’re wondering why Andrew Cuomo is so soft on ICE—and why he hasn’t called for Brad’s release—you can just follow the money"
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
➥	"This is one of the most deranged things I’ve ever seen in American politics. Invoking Hitler, the Holocaust, and concentration camps to attack a progressive candidate for municipal office is just absolutely out of control on every level.
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
The shittiest people in the world hate and fear Zohran Mamdani
No, Zohran Mamdani is not going to save you even if he's elected
Todd Rundgren turned 77 yesterday and this is one of my 25 most listen-to albums (and C's, we listened to it LOTS on her college tours 16 years ago which I think about when I hear a song now)

"Just some creepy armed Mad Max guys trying to gain entry to Dodgers Stadium. ICE says it wasn’t them. DHS says they were Border Patrol. But honestly who the hell knows? They’ve given permission for any psycho to put on a ski mask, point a gun, grab people & throw them into an unmarked vehicle.
Masked ICE agents spotted swapping out license plates this morning in Bell Gardens, CA
"Rümeysa Öztürk wrote an op-ed critical of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. She was arrested by ICE and was in detention for six weeks. This white nationalist student wrote a paper that argued the Constitution applies only to white people. He won an award"
"Wild how the Fed chair saying that *entire regions of the United States* won’t be able to get a mortgage in the next decade barely registered as a news event"
A Story of War, Lies, and Holy Hypocrisy
➥	"When it comes to war, even Trump's biggest critics suddenly believe every word. And they're using the Old Testament as their targeting map"
Manufacturing consent? What consent? What manufacturing?"
➥	"It’s as if the more we’re active online, the more plugged in we are, the less power we have over the real world. And the assholes who run this place, old and decrepit as they are, seem to grasp this"
World War III and Other Simulacra
➥	"“America” is not the empire. “The Zionists” do not control the world. The USA and Israel are components of the global-capitalist empire. Israel is the empire’s Middle East HQ. The US military-industrial complex and its international partners are the empire’s muscle. The empire is conducting a global clear-and-hold op, neutralizing internal resistance, “restructuring” the territory it conquered and now occupies"						⮯
"The Israeli garrison state has made clear that it is not satisfied with overwhelming regional military superiority; it also seeks the permanent incapacity of its neighbours. Israel and its patron-in-chief will not tolerate a sovereign, independent Iran capable of constraining, however modestly, their freedom of action. This is not a diplomatic failure. It is the calculated foreclosure of diplomacy. Not a deviation from standard policy, but the logical culmination of a decades-long consensus in Washington and Tel Aviv: that no independent power in the Middle East should be able to escape the architecture of subordination"
➥	"Israel attacked Iran because it feared diplomacy might work. A nuclear deal could lead Iran to be integrated into a new Middle East and allow the United States to pull back from the region. The outcome that would most benefit America is the outcome Israel acted to prevent"						⮯
Israel’s War on Iran Is the Frontline of a US War on Multipolarity
"The violent new world being born is going to horrify you"
Israelis discovered international law after bombing 36 hospitals in Gaza
"Israel is a terror state. Boasting to the international community that you've distributed millions of meals to the starving population you keep in a giant concentration camp, and then shooting at them when they try to get to the food, is a daily atrocity beyond all moral comprehension"
The Key Nuclear Allegation that started the Iran-Israeli War was Coaxed from a Palantir Counter-Intelligence Algorithm
"Israel’s terror chiefs have been hiding in a tunnel built beneath a hospital"
TACO BOMBS IRAN	➥	"As best I can tell, the attack was ineffective and did essentially no damage. Even if it had, Iran’s highly enriched, 60% stockpile, had already been moved. I’ve seen Israeli claims they know where, but there’s a good chance they’re lying and if the Iranians are smart, they’ve split it up and made sure that only a few people know where each package is, and no one knows where all the packages are, which doubles as “if you hit it, you lose your spy
➥	Driving to Woodsboro yesterday morning I listened to Hegseth's presser, the Trump-drooling, by both him and Chair of Joint Chiefs, embarrassingly slobbering in praise for TACO, and knew at that moment that the mission failed
"NYT has more confirmation that Trump's decision to bomb Iran was motivated in large part by the way the Israeli strikes were "playing" on Fox News, which drove him to want credit for it"
➥	I think it has as much if not more to do with Trump, post-masturbatory parade ridiculed and mocked at G-7 and generally insulted more than at any time second term, wagging his dog
"It's hard to focus on Israel's airstrikes in Lebanon due to Israel's invasion of Syria, which is hard to focus on due to Israel's atrocities in the West Bank, which are hard to focus on due to Israel's genocide in Gaza, which is hard to focus on due to Israel's war on Iran"
Mike Huckabee Is A Deranged Armageddon Cultist
"This is one of the most sick, twisted, depraved massacres yet. Israel fired tank shells into a crowd of starving people waiting for food, killing over 50. They're not even denying it"
Today in Necessary Rhetorical Questions
Motherfucking professional Democrats hate this guy too
"It is important to understand that the Democratic Party is terrible at everything - enacting good policy, winning general elections, resisting Republicans etc - but it is the absolute world-historic GOAT at crushing anything & anyone who tries to change the party from within"
I HATE MOTHERFUCKING DEMOCRATS
➥	"By failing to adequately push back against Mr. Trump, Mr. Schumer and Mr. Jeffries are not only alienating an already alienated Democratic base. They’re squandering a unique opportunity to lure part of the MAGA coalition to their side"
"A secret group chat reveals that Democratic strategists plan to support the pro-crypto GENIUS Act for political gain, despite acknowledging it’s a Trump corruption giveaway"
➥	"18 Dems joined Republicans for a Crypto giveaway that endangers consumers, empowers Big Tech & literally legalizes Trump's crypto corruption. 18 Dems voted to give Trump the ability to profit off Crypto as President. Remember that when you see them at the next 'No Kings' rally"
"Another cop has been convicted of pedo sex crimes, but there won't be any panels on CNN or Fox News to talk about it because it doesn't fit their narrative, they're too busy punching down at immigrants, Arabs, and trans people"
*Late Capitalism* is an ambiguous term
I'm a late-end baby-boomer, born 1959, and my generation fucked, is fucking, and will continue to fuck this country up more than all other generations combined
"This is a long quote, but with the Democrats and Liberal-Centrists totally failing to understand right-wing populism and mottos like 'support our troops,' the quote is worth reading through
Supreme Court Not Sure Why You Thought the Equal Protection Clause Meant Anything
"if you want to get rich here is what you have to do. get elected to a local position as a republican somewhere, carpetbag if that's what it takes. and start making statements about executing ilhan omar and rashida tlaib, propose legislation to make donald trump's birthday a national holiday/Purge"
A 22-year-old college grad with no security experience is now leading a government terror prevention team
"Listening to WTOP radio this morning & they have a piece about the “dangerous heat” coming today. It’s going to hit 110-115 real feel temps in the Tidewater region & DC. No mention of climate breakdown. Never. Instead it’s framed as a rare event. We are being failed"
Finance and the Far Right					Over the brink
"Now more than ever, we need to break the New York Times' hegemony by relentlessly driving traffic to precisely the articles we most object to"
Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?
Maggie's		Semicolon Death			{ feuilleton }
"The Ocean Vuong takedown is its own art form, and this piece by Tom Crewe in @LRB is effervescent with contempt: "[Vuong's] language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm.""
➥	"Time spent on unpacking ocean vuong’s already over marketed and relatively measly prose is time wasted. Much as I love a takedown, I’ll never understand what makes critics think they’re doing constructive work when their subject matter can be found on the front table at any B&N"
about the heart, but different; or the space given by silence
Anne Carson on Language, Beauty, Words, Love, and More
A vouch regarding my Something/Anything claim to be one of my 25 most listened-to albums, said event was 45 years ago plus or minus

GRIEF LESSONS

Anne Carson

There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours

A Musk Ox Isn't an Ox at All But More Closely Cognate with the Goat

Well, I built another grid of mostly anger though I can honestly state that I chose not to post far more links than the number of links I did post





Haiku I made in 2014 I found last night in a box while looking for something else and now taped to the back of my office door where no one will see it but me, it is more true today than ever and is now Theme Haiku for the compulsive grids. When was the last time I wrote a haiku, the fuck, any poem? Too, day after tomorrow is one of two posts a year not tagged My Complicity and I want at least one day between an angry grid and a happy post, hey, there's new Tropical Fuck Storm, banned as Swans when L is in my car!

WE ARE RULED BY MONSTERS, YO
All cleared to launder monsters' $$
Planning for Trump 2028
☝	"DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes" (from 2 links below)
The Rot at the Core of “Democracy”
"Evil lunacy, the forms of comedy that become cruelty when acted out upon real people, is perfectly coherent. Trump is the most brilliant comedian on the American stage, and certainly the best comedian ever to become President. It only adds to his crimes that he brings evil to comedy, too"
"The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation"
"Always worth a reminder that Obama inherited ICE as a fledgling agency, increased its budget 300%, established a nationwide network of detention centres and expanded the 'secure communities' enforcement program from 14 counties under Bush Jr to all 3,181 jurisdictions in America"
Schumer: The Worst Possible Democratic Leader at the Worst Possible Time
☝	Vital reminder from the week after the election Schumer's first and only priority is protecting Wall Street and I bet Wall Street told him to pass this bill to buy them time to short everything before Trump tanks the market
As predicted above: "Four Megabanks on Wall Street Hold $3.2 Trillion in Uninsured Deposits – Which May Explain Senator Schumer’s Pivot to the GOP to Stop a Government Shutdown"
O, and Schumer is an insanely 2ealous 2ionist 6enocidaire too!
"The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse"
Where is Obama and why is he silent about Trump's coup he helped make possible and helped facilitate?
☝	No link, just a rhetorical question no one seems to be asking but me
But why do I seem to be the only one asking and why, in the big press stories about Woe are the Democrats Where Do They Go Now is Obama mentioned in the past tense if he's mentioned at all?							☝
"The secret-ballot vote to pick Connolly over AOC was 131 to 84 in a closed door Democratic caucus meeting, so it's not just Schumer who's the problem. Until Americans have a party that Wall Street can't control, we'll just get a new cast of sellouts reading from the same script"
Nationalism and Capitalism’s Ever-Spiraling Crisis
American Destiny? On Trumps 2nd term
"Never forget who laid the ground for Trump’s crackdown: Those who perpetrated the genocide and demonized students and citizens protesting against it. @KamalaHarris’ rhetoric here is indistinguishable from Trump’s"
It served Trump's purpose which is always his *only* goal. It wasn't sheer incompetence, it was a narcissistic sociopath who understands how info is fed into brains in 2025 and decided this stunt's upside outweighed it's bad and did it no matter the waste of water or the lie
"Liberal democracy was pretty good for a lot of people, flaws and all. It’s current competitors (U.S. neomonarchical protectionism and ethnonationalism for example )are uniformly awful and represent a new dark age of ignorance, mass suffering, and enslavement. This isn’t a hysterical prognosis. This is the cliff we find ourselves on, while the nominal opposition party shrugs its shoulders and reconfigures its investment portfolios"
Please stop telling me Bernie Sanders is an honorable human
"Democrats spent years babbling about a completely fictional conspiracy theory where Russians were blackmailing Trump with a pee fetish tape but haven't said a peep about the far more well-evidenced probability that Epstein recorded Trump raping kids in an Israeli blackmail op"
The Kingdom of Judea vs. The State of Israel
This Is Trump's 6enocide Now
Wildly Unhinged America Expands Orgy of Genocides
"The 2ionist project has gotten absolutely everything it could ever want in their unbridled massacres of starving people save for the love and approval of the rest of the human population of this planet, and it only drives them to new heights of sadism and barbarity
"New piles of murdered children in Gaza tonight"
Five things to remember as the Mahmoud Khalil case develops						ᐊ	I have a few quibbles with some of it but it is worth your time
Every Administration Since Obama Has Been Bombing Yemen, Yet…
Major new books about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans are reshaping the history of the continent.
Five years after the start of covid we still don't know the truth
Maggie's		White men (says this white man) are deeply fucked up and will kill us all. Deeply fucked up
newe	NEW FUCKED UP!				{ feuilleton }
A run-on sentence on Gabriel García Márquez’s delirious novel The Autumn of the Patriarch
The Limits of Coherence: On John Trefry's *Massive*
➥	I bought this as an object and object lesson not as a front-to-back read, to pick it up, feel its weight, see the font the lines the columns and hold it and read random pages, ten minutes a night, to not feel a need to make sense of it, holyfuck
Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?
BRYAN FERRY And AMELIA BARRATT Share Magnetizing Title Track Of Their Upcoming Album ‘LOOSE TALK’

BETWEEN US AND

Anne Carson

BETWEEN US AND

animals is a namelessness.

We    flail    around

generically      —

camelopardalis    is   what

the Romans came up with

or  "giraffe" ( it looked to

them  like a camel crossed

with a leopard ) or get the

category wrong — a musk

Ox  isn't  an  ox at  all but

more closely  cognate with

the   goat —  and   when

choosing   to    name

individual  animals  we

pretend  they  are   objects

(Spot) or  virtues  (Beauty)

or  just  other selves  (Bob).

Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin

Monologue is the grid except to say, as you try to imagine what would have happened had J6 been an attack on the capitol by black men try to imagine what would happen if George Soros was now combing through government computer programs deciding whether keeping you alive cost efficient. I'm going outside to play. Exene turned seventy yesterday and once upon a time X (who in one of the three best concerts of my lifetime burned Ontario Theater to the ground, burned it to the ground) was considered one of best, most important and influential bands in the world, youngsters

The Profound Loneliness of Being Collapse Aware
"Man with all of this entirely predictable shit happening, it's a good thing that Dems didn't make their face of the House Oversight Committee an unremarkable septuagenarian Rep with esophageal cancer"
Musk's Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government
"Ask yourself what you’d think about another country if a new regime quickly prohibited all government agencies from communicating with the public, then began deleting data from government websites that it deemed unacceptable"
"The sad truth is that Musk's greatest political threat in the near future will more likely come from rival oligarchs uniting against Musk's brazen hogging of the public jewels, than from the deeply corrupt & feckless Dem Party"
Tesla's new logo!	Elon Musk’s Cronies Locking Federal Workers Out of Computer Systems
Gaston Hall is 100 yards from where I am typing this. I knew this was happening yesterday yet did not massacre these useless motherfuckers. My apologies
☝	Today's monologue						☟
"Democrats are taking the path of Starmer’s Labour: crush yr left wing base, offer nothing substantive, and wait obediently for the GOP to wreck the country so - as the only alternative - they can pick up the scraps in a country that no longer expects anything from government"
"The Democratic Party grift machine’s commitment to never changing is really breathtaking
Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency
☝	"16 Democratic senators recently voted to confirm the Trump-appointed Treasury Secretary who just gave Musk’s team access to a Treasury payment system that disburses trillions and holds mass quantities of personal information"						☝
Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Revenge
"This is an open license to rob, rape and kill the undocumented (or member of their family), knowing they won't be able to report the crime. We've reached this hideous state in part because the Dems have adopted the GOP's extremist framing on immigration"
"We are actually living in a time where Christians see mercy as offensive, empathy as a sin, and diversity, equity, and inclusion as a threat"
Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
☝	"Anker’s analysis starts with the story of an epiphany: her distressing recognition that paradox has become a predictable intellectual reflex rather than a clarifying insight"						☝
"China hasn’t spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. China isn’t circling the planet with hundreds of military bases while working to destroy any nation or group anywhere in the world who disobeys it. China isn’t strangling nations around the globe with starvation sanctions for refusing to bow to its dictates. China didn’t just spend 15 months lighting the middle east on fire and backing a live-streamed genocide. China hasn’t spent the last three years endangering the world in frequently terrifying acts of nuclear brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower"
Today in Everyfuckingthing Sucks!						➡	Pr*ton mail too
"The coming attack on workers' pensions and social security will take place under cover of slandering "selfish boomers"
The Campaign to Destroy Public Schools
Tennessee GOP passes immigration law to criminalize elected officials' votes
"Trump and Allies Default to Racist Explanation of Deadly Air Collision"
Health insurers limit coverage of prosthetic limbs, questioning their medical necessity
"A 22-year-old in Wisconsin died after a severe asthma attack because he couldn't afford the price of his inhaler, which was no longer covered by his insurance"
"The nation's universities have committed intellectual and moral suicide over Gaza, and now they are a spent and broken force, sick with blind, anti-human bile, useless in any fight against fascism, for they've already capitulated to fascism's ultimate goal: genocide"
Israeli forces open fire at Palestinians around the buses carrying the released prisoners in Beitunia, occupied West Bank
"a seemingly universal sense, from dems to journalists to pundits, that because trump campaigned on doing illegal, immoral, harmful things it's only fair that he be allowed to do at least some of the illegal, immoral, harmful things unimpeded, he's earned it, and it is melting my brain"
"Political reporters are actively covering up Trump’s racism"
"good idea mr. democrat congressperson! protect the cop money! for swing votes! fucking useless"
"Ken Martin, who no one has ever heard of, was just elected chair of the Democratic Party. Ken Martin is of course a genocidal Zionist who has vowed that the US will forever and unconditionally support the Israeli death-cult"
"Ladies and gentlemen...the Democratic Party of Greenwich, Connecticut!"
"this is the Dems' plan—ooze back into power as the GOP fails, again. There's no big political reform project. Just waiting for the other side to fail. And it'll probably work. It's why no one who failed even bothers with the pretense of accountability"
"Welcome to America where our politicians will starve your children so much that they became easy prey for greedy corporations to exploit"
"Not one word in this NYT article to say that the US is occupying Guantánamo illegally, or to quote the Cuban government denouncing this move"
"Where Have All the Liberals Gone?"
Dialectical Optimism against BRICS‐​Head Nihilism
How Trump Seizes the Primal Power of Naming
On Trump and the endgame of neoliberalism
"There are plenty of other bad things to say about these people, but I'll start with how they are fucking idiots who think Trump will stay bought"
Fragile Leviathan?				Heil to the Chief
Portrait of a political party without a leader
What bias sees and whatnot					Fire & Spark
"One of the small dialectical pleasures still left to whatever intelligences remain unincorporated is to observe, in this moment, how deeply capitalists hate capitalism, with all its inviolable laws and contradictions"							☝
Signs Of Life In A Desert Of Death
"No Matter How Many Chili Cook-Offs I Win, Everyone Still Sees Me As ‘That School Shooter’s Mom’"
CLIMATE FOLKLORE IN *ALMANAC BEHIND*
Confession: I never, ever, liked short stories, freaking leprechauns and cursed garden gnomes, my fault, February is Lutz of Barthelme
The Polymath of Pittsburgh = Garielle Lutz
How Did Pink Become a Color?
Serious Music			{ feuilleton }			Vegetarian meatloaf
Robert Creeley and Company: Home Movies
rest in peace marianne faithfull thank you for the coolest picture of all time
Exene Cervenka's Personal Best
The Absolute Shit: Coil’s Scatology Revisited

V. Here Is My Propaganda One One One One Oneing On Your Forehead Like Droplets of Luminous Sin

Anne Carson

Like many a wife I boosted the husband up to Godhood and held him there.

What is strength?

Opposition of friends or family merely toughens it.

I recall my mother’s first encounter with him.

Glancing

at a book I’d brought home from school with his name inscribed on the flyleaf

she said

I wouldn’t trust anyone who calls himself X—and

something exposed itself in her voice,

a Babel

thrust between us at that instant which we would never

learn to construe—

taste of iron.

Prophetic. Her prophecies all came true although she didn’t

mean them to.

Well it’s his name I said and put the book away. That was the first night

(I was fifteen)

I raised my bedroom window creak by creak and went out to meet him

in the ravine, traipsing till dawn in the drenched things

and avowals

of the language that is “alone and first in mind.” I stood stupid

before it,

watched its old golds and lieblicher blues abandon themselves

like peacocks stepping out of cages into an empty kitchen of God.

God

or some blessed royal personage. Napoleon. Hirohito. You know

how novelist Ōe

describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke

as a mortal man. “The adults sat around the radio

and cried.

Children gathered in the dusty road and whispered bewilderment.

Astonished

and disappointed that their emperor had spoken in a voice.

Looked at one another in silence. How to believe God had

become human

on a designated summer day?” Less than a year after our marriage

my husband

began to receive calls from [a woman] late at night.

If I answered [she]

hung up. My ears grew hoarse.

How are you.

—

No.

—

Maybe. Eight. Can you.

—

The white oh yes.

—

Yes.

What is so ecstatic unknowable cutthroat glad as the walls

of the flesh

of the voice of betrayal —yet all the while lapped in talk more dull

than the tick of a clock.

A puppy

learns to listen this way. Sting in the silver.

Ōe says

many children were told and some believed that when the war was over

the emperor would wipe away their tears

with his own hand.