The Braincase Was Loose and the Rest Saw Pie Melting

Day after tomorrow is another personal holy day and I'd never forgive myself if I remembered and didn't post (and I didn't remember Auden's birthday and wouldn't have posted if I hadn't been reminded, fuck me). The last February 25 post will be the last February 25 this shitty blog is still alive. Here's a hint





Since I plan to leave it up top through the weekend (and may well fail) a grid below before the links go stale, plus this: Pash Katel celebrating in the US gold-winning ice-soccer team's dressing room (on your dime) as the overtime goal-scoring hero cracker-speechifies Stephen Miller's dream psyop hit. Dump is the idiot savant of lucky, though imagine how much fun it'd've been if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated, troops would be crossing the border as I type this. (On ice-soccer: I've been in Michigan motels when a state peewee ice-soccer tournament is a within 50 mile radius of the town, I guarantee you the ice-soccer dads are magafucks to a one, and their eagerly cracker-groomed kids the next generation). Here is my not-a-team's new crest

O, and Dump posted an AI video of *HIM* scoring the overtime goal, imagine how much more dumpmeltdown tomorrow night's SOTU would be if Canada had won, it still feels like a trainwreck a-coming, L wants me to watch it with her, I said yes. Reminder: Dump won with a US victory, he would have won more if if Canada had won on a controversial goal in which America clearly was cheated (and imagine if it was an African-Canadian who'd cheated America's white-to-a-man (do *not* underestimate how significant that is to too many American white men) ice-soccer team). The American Equation, sponsored by Shitlordco. Also too. There's new Hen Ogledd and it's gorgeous and angry and necessary:

Did you know that there is still genocide and ethnic cleansing continuing in Gaza and the West Bank?
"This same tactic to funnel outrage over intentional, lawless police violence into **more resources for police** was used in response to Bloody Sunday"
Crypto Chokehold			What is academic labor now?
"Every one of these guys is stupid. Every one. We may look back w disdain on the culture of the 50s and 60s but at least those buzzcuts & long skirts got us to the fucking moon"
Trump is destroying a public park so that he can build a luxury golf course for himself					The Nancy Guthrie Kidnapping Spectacle
The Supreme Court and the cordon sanitaire against the left
Some More Efforts, Comrades, If We Would Be Revolutionaries
Today in *I Will Be a Catholic Again Before I'm Ever a Democrat Again*
⮩	and I promise I will never be a Catholic again
Import the War, Export the Border						Maggie
AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains
Knotweed Factor			Hospitality and the Political
The de Sades Among Us					Danger Zone
Bodily Mutilation, and End of the Masculine West
Cult of the Bully				Trump’s FCC Chair Wants Networks to Run Nationalistic Content and Pledge Loyalty for America’s Big Bday
Something weird for the weekend					New Bill Callahan
Hollering From The Bottom Of A Wishing Well
Dumb waiter		Dumb waiter		At the movies w John Ashbery
More mysterious barricades					{ feuilleton }
The ravenous, radiant, Jim Harrison
Hear what happens when explorers of the ethereal collaborate
Forgotten Words: The Raincoats’ Three Lives
Power Pop Retrospectors (1974 – 1984)
Hen Ogledd was Friday's Bandcamp Daily story

A SPOT OF FRAZZLE AND THEN

Clark Coolidge

The braincase was loose and the rest saw pie melting
we'd have to come home to the lineaments of fire
a lot of squatting included with the sleeping
I imagine pennants with the clothing closing in
dimity fudge due to silence in the breccias
partial poinsettias they lived on Olive Street
inclined toward wicked pencils we stayed
us jamokes quite worn through and bundled
to blow things up beyond all proportion
and crow in wacky dingle a portion of cheek
dried in detonator the telemetry theater
now the cheese quarry its more than human wails
present time now added it's long past time
to get the gargoyles to descend a history of pokers
then someone up near the ceiling he turns and
silence in the Vanguard silence to bring things to
then someone blew it or is this the copper time?

to the dog chewing a sock

Even some of the people who post photos of stacks of fat novels with the tag line "last week's reads" on xhitter and skuebly now posting about the worse reading slumps of their lives so it's not just me, have I told you three times we are being reprogrammed, deliberately scrambled, stupidified? Strange, this past weekend, shitlord psyops took the weekend off, no new shittier than ever shitstorm, the hell we being set up for, see, said programming works, where the fuck is my fix? Not just reading slump for me - no reading slump, not as many grids per month and links per grid, it's what I'm thinking about, the reason I can't read, I need to do something when I should be reading a novel or poetry - I'm in a listening slump too, I knew it was me and not the new album but Richard Dawson's new album finally made its way into my brain, and Saturday I hit the basket of Emmitsburg 14 with my teebird teeshot and laughed out loud happily, remembered what that felt like and that I like being happy, it puts a Jane Kenyon poem in my head, today in my complicity

The Dark Enlightenment: the Tech Oligarch Ideology Driving DOGE’s Destruction
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
Shitlords and your arrest and indefinite imprisonment			⬆	⬇	Shitlords enshittifying your health care
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
THIS is absolutely happening in the near future
Surrendering to Authoritarianism
Running While Black, Latino or Asian American — Under Trump
This part of the Planned Chaos, wrecking everything, they told you the plan and said they would execute the plan from Day One w emphasis berzerk vengeance and sadism with maximum motive to make enemies cry and the opposition party in America wants to meat (sic) them halfway
"I am against playing dumb. Despite implicit belief to the contrary, there is no requirement within liberal theory that we must play dumb when people lie about or disguise their intentions. Hanania wrote a whole book, glowingly blurbed by Rufo, Cowen, & Thiel, about destroying civil rights laws"
Dude who's worked professionally for decades to make what's happening happen suddenly sad what's happening happening, never forget or forgive these shitstains
The Emotional Stress of Imperial Decline
"It's genuinely terrifying to see how the people who run America are completely out of their minds"
Rape Politics and the Authoritarian Right
White christer nationalists are psychotic and will kill us all
Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?
Trump’s Attacks on Big Law, Universities, and the Media Have a Common Goal: Silence Dissent Against Authoritarian Rule
Nationalism and Capitalism’s Ever-Spiraling Crisis
"an important thing about Elon's project is that it tries to get you to resent people (government workers, immigrants, educators, etc) who have a minute fraction of what he has, on the grounds that somehow they have too much and their wealth is obscene"
The more you have the less you fight
☝	"In any situation like ours, where a vindictive and dictatorial figure with no regard for law or morality is centralizing power in his own hands, it does not take a crystal ball to know how different groups will respond. It only takes an understanding of incentives, and of human nature. Here is one thing that I feel very confident in saying: The people and institutions in America who have the most will do the least in this fight. Do not be surprised when your search for saviors among the pillars of society fails"
Speech police				The Destruction of Gaza, Yemen And U.S. Free Speech Are Parts of The Same Project
Trump’s war on public education
The closing of the American minds
Georgetown Postdoc the Latest to Be Detained by ICE as Crackdown on Campus Speech Widens
Guilt by Association: when speech becomes terrorism
The Last Chapter of the Genocide
Is Israel the deep state?					Why They Deny It’s a Genocide
1srael doesn’t care about the captives. It always planned to reboot the genocide
1srael Makes Its Most Explicit Statement Of 6enocidal Intent Yet
"Israel is not safe for Jews. It's a death cult for Western imperialism that scapegoats Judaism"
Every single Democratic senator voted to make Marco Rubio Sec of State
"not fearfully compliant. Complicit. Columbia is a hedge fund where classes are taught. Trump gives them excuse to clean house, get donors back. Weiss gets to move on from the brilliant Trump tormentor Marc Pomerantz & start billing the tech bros. Their hand-wringing is theater"
Selfishly, this is good news for us for our upcoming annual two weeks on Mount Desert Island last week of July, first week of August cause Acadia trailhead parking lots usually jammed w cars w Quebec and Ontario plates, laugh
"Abundance Agenda can be best understood as liberals’ newest attempt to make sure Dems don’t ever try to go back to stuff like the New Deal"
Chuck Schumer is as shitty a human that walks the planet
Chuck Schumer is 2ionist 6enocidal piece of shit
The Democrats' Corporate Lawyers Get the Humiliation They Deserve
The Decline Of Western Civilization Via Soccer
The United States GDP divided in half						Maggie's
{ feuilleton }			Impossible? No: Eschatological!
The Vanishing White Male Writer?
☝	"This guy is Susan Sontag's son. He blocked me for being a "feminazi" on here once for saying the history of affect was gendered. There are so many layers of irony here. Anyway, if you're wondering why I never get to write a Sontag intro, he controls her estate"
How Krautrock Never Bettered Can’s Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi & Future Days

HAPPINESS

Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation

Trump crowned himself king yesterday and everybody yawned



Another clusterfuck spew of duh: getting harder and harder coming up with any insight on the clusterfuck that's even a smidgen different than previous grievous insights on the clusterfuck, on the shitlords running the world who can conceive of no greater goal than complete and ultimate wealth extraction and your absolute adoration have decided that the maximum wealth achievable only by making everything shittier 

All shitlord psyop narratives are ordained, designed, and implemented with primary goal of increasing fear and crippling anxiety in the herd for its subordination and exploitation. Yesterday RFK Jr announced a war on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs, no hiding behind a medical veil from your misery and fear, you peasant and pagan. You must feel the weight and power of your gods and worship in fear of their awesome and vengeful omnipotence. This motherfucker, for instance, this one too





That's my right eye as an avenging killer drone, I daydream of photon-torpedoing shitlords on their yacht decks. Almost 18 hours after Trump crowned himself king there is still no mention of it on the front webpage of the Washington Post and New York Times, and my Shitter and BluePlace timelines have precious few posts bitching about Trump's announcement of our new feudal authoritarianism. We are so fucked

Michael Gira is 71 today. I'm stupid for Swans, stupid, one of only a few bands in permanent orbit for the three rotating spots in my abandoned Sillyass Deserted Island Five Game. Play it loud, fellowmofo peasant pagan

The Purge of the Deep State and the Road to Dictatorship
"But we need to lose the theory that these Dems are “spineless” and just don’t understand how to wage political war. We know they can be vicious because we’ve seen them execute that kind of operation against the left since Ralph Nader caught them sleeping in 2000. We have seen them do it maliciously during Senator Bernie Sanders’s two primary runs. We saw Black and brown women stamped as “Bernie Bros” with enough, yes, ruthless, repetition to make it stick. We’ve seen President Barack Obama with all his rhetorical powers hector young Black men, but not aim his electric cadence at Musk and his Palo Alto brownshirts. It’s not that they cannot—they will not. When it was Sanders or an individual who demanded even a modest change in policy on Gaza, they brought out the knives. When it’s Musk and his apartheid army of incels, they wield sporks. Yet, as we keep seeing, spork fighting is demoralizing"
➥	Psst, they work hand in glove with the GOP for their mutual shitlord bosses, and Democrats' *Job One* is to protect the shitlords' left flank, sorry for the duh, I'm just seeing people suggesting Democrats aren't doing their job. They are						⇧
Wokeness Is Not to Blame for Trump
➥	"This rare cross-ideological alignment has created an opening for the Trump-Musk-Vance team, which, thanks to the Democratic pullback from “woke-ism,” faces scant opposition as it busily dynamites a civil-rights infrastructure built painstakingly over generations"						⇧
➥	"Democrats scheduled social media posts are so funny, always completely random, unrelated to what else is going on. Makes it seem like they are truly unaware of what's happening. It's 2025 and they're waiting to get the morning paper from a newsie on the corner on their way into the office"						⇧
Not 13 flags, not 15 flags, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" 14 flags
H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Perils of Forgetting
"In this extreme version of disaster capitalism, horror creates opportunity not only for the expansion of the United States but for the ruling family’s property development business"
The top criminal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington quit today, citing pressure by the Trump administration to open what she viewed as an improper criminal probe of a federal contract
"Israeli forces strapped explosives around the neck of an elderly Palestinian who used a walking stick and forced him to inspect areas used by Hamas before killing him and his wife"
⇧	"Soldiers put an explosive cord around the man's neck and forced him to scout buildings for eight hours. After his release, another division shot him dead						⇧
Forever War for Profit: The United States, Israel/Palestine, and the Global Corporate Security Economy
The Dangerous Game US Jewry is Playing with America's White Supremacists
"Zionist Shots Zionists - Both Blame Arabs"
America is a full blown kleptocracy
There’s One Federal Investigative Agency that Neither Trump nor Elon Musk Can Touch: It Just Opened an Investigation into DOGE
"i feel like this is evidence for my view that people experience trump through a strong form of ironic detachment. they literally do not perceive him as real"
⇧	Forgive me, I need to screaminly reiterate that these shitord-released crackers and christers ARE DOING EXACTLY WHAT THEY SAID THEY WERE GOING TO DO AND HAVE BEEN SAYING THEY ARE GOING TO DO SINCE ALWAYS						⇩
➥	Yes, shitlords implement disaster capitalism and disaster nationalism to extract max profit BFFS many of them genuinely believe this is true and see themselves as noble warriors fighting a holy war, BELIEVE THEM WHEN THEY TELL YOU WHO THEY ARE!						⇩
➥	"The West is obviously superior. We had a pagan religion infiltrate our universities and our society, and that religion basically said that everything good about America and everything that has actually worked… is bad.”						⇩
"Here's my prediction from 2008: "The days of a rational American empire are drawing to a close. We'll be forced to discard either the empire part, or the rational part. And based on 10,000 years of human history, I'm guessing it's the rational part that will go."
Trump's stab at Napoleonicity
"Billionaire finds it strange that people can't afford kids in a world where artificial scarcity intentionally withholds food, water, housing, healthcare, and everything else in a ploy to extract indentured servitude out of us all"
We might have to "shut down the country"
"Trump’s tariffs will escalate exploitation and desperation of US workers. That’s the point"
Conservatism and the Decline of the West
This is not a test				Which of course puts this song in my head and on repeat
"I’m deriving a certain grim amusement from the unnatural intellectual acts that right wing law professors with an eye to the main chance are currently performing, in the face of the most corrupt and most public quid pro quo in the history of the American presidency"
"I would read an intellectual history about how a body of thought that provided the ideological foundations for regicide got reduced to the means by which opinion columnists tut-tut activists for shutting down events"
The making of emergencies					Unhinged
"JD Vance Called Me a 'Dummy' for Pointing Out His Administration's Hypocrisy on Free Speech. I Guess the Truth Hurts"			We Are All Porn Actors
States and the Coming Scam-Apocalypse
Wrestling, cannabis, bitcoin and stocks
Inside Project 2025				"The usual dance of “moderate” Republicans complaining about everything they just voted for when it affects them. Rinse, repeat"
If You Only Watch One Thing Today, Please Watch This
"In the span of a day, Trump's "immigration czar" called for a criminal investigation of a member of Congress for informing immigrants of their rights, while Trump's co-president called for the imprisonment of journalists for basic video editing"
Libertarianism is a form of white supremacy
"Liberals hate socialists for the same reason socialists hate liberals: because socialists are the thing liberals pretend to be. Socialists stand for truth, justice, peace and equality while liberals only pretend to stand for these things, and they both know it. Liberals know their favorite political party supports war, militarism, oligarchy and inequality and is rife with power-serving corruption, and socialists know it too, so they can critique these dynamics in ways that have the unpleasant sting of truth"
How Biden set the stage for GOP budget cuts
"I want to thank Nancy Pelosi for her devoted work in keeping Henry Cuellar in office. If the Democratic Party did not support him, you might end up with a guy who always votes with Donald Trump, and that would be awful'
Today in I Hate Motherfucking Democrats	☞	"You passionately supported the premiere murderer of the overwhelming majority of these journalists: Israel. It’s astonishing you would have the audacity to tweet this given your personal role in facilitating Israel’s killing spree unleashed again our colleagues"
Two 66 year old Democratic senators announce they will not run for reelection in the 2026 midterms and it's not because the Democratic Party is renouncing its gerontocracy
Delaware Decides Delaware Law Has No Value
➥	Today's monologue: you do realize, yes? that smart shitlords recognize total catastrophic social breakdown hours, not minutes, ahead, and are working their three private jets and four luxury yachts and six Micronesian islands and two luxury bomb shelters to boom NOW!						⇩
I agree that the size of Juan Soto's contract is morally wicked but I don't think that's what these dopes meant in this headline
Reminder: xymphora			Profiles in polroonery
Maggie's		Avedon Carol's occasional links
The Eternal Mysteries of Red
Loose leash		Song and sadness			{ feuilleton }
Where did all the fiction in fiction go?
The Biggest Little Press in the World
Richard Dawson, his music as important to me at this moment in my life as any musician at any point of my life

A PLAGUE OF POETS

C.D. Wright

A question posed to Flannery O'Connor, as to whether writing programs stifled writers, drew the famous, tart rejoinder that in her opinion they didn't stifle nearly enough.

Even if, as it is often said, there are too many of us—poets, that is—that the field is too crowded (as opposed to too many hedge-fund managers or too many pharmaceutical lobbyists or too many fundamentalists), time, rejection, discouragement, and the inevitable practicalities and detours (some of them fortuitous), as well as wasted energy, the slow seepage or sudden shift of interest, premature death, burdensome debt or better offers, usually cure the problem of overpopulation. In other words, there are plenty of natural predators.