So That’s What Happened to Laura Palmer

had a dream i was a young lady taking the bus to the university district in seattle for the first time in a long time, my bookbag large but largely empty. there was a silly bus driver having loud conversation with the other passengers that amused them, like he was a font of charisma, tho he looked a bit like a white-haired clint howard and was sometimes doing an arguably racist impression of a black blues singer.

by the time i got off the bus, i had been impressed enough to ask him to cut a track with my band sometime. being a dream, of course i forgot my bookbag and had some drama retrieving it. a confusing night passed into a dark blue early day.

during all of this it was being revealed that there was a path young people, mainly women, were feeling driven to undertake. an early step involved following cars with ugly weird designs, a selection of random models from random brands, including kia, scion, and tesla.

you get these white worm-like things to go into your pupils, a different one for each hemisphere of the brain. at one point a bunch of people were watching a girl while this happened and both went in one side, then sorted themselves out by one crawling out and going in the correct side.

then you feel compelled to eat at least four of these little charms. in the dream they were called labubus but they were more like a cross between pikmins and teletubbies, dangled from bracelets and such.

i did these things, at last getting my bookbag back on that same bus that blue morning. i got off the bus and followed the ugly cars into a parking tower, where i joined a procession with laura palmer to the rooftop. there bright yellow tufts of hair began to grow out of our faces and we fed ourselves like food to UFOs.

good morning.

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Dead and Funky, Lethally Sunny

Both bloggers and commenters seem to be less active at the moment, which, if my perception isn’t slanted, started with the commenters slowing down. Salrite, things can be like that. At the same time, FtB has become a bit unstable. It’s actin’ funky.

Given the recent legal shenanigans, I wonder that one of the haters has decided to employ extralegal shenanigans against us. Something something DNS something DDoS something whatever. It isn’t full-on like those weird takedowns that hit us from South Asia.

Speaking of South Asia, I heard thousands of people are dying from the heat there, but this was only from one random social media post. In fairness to mainstream news, such as it be, I don’t follow it, so I wouldn’t know if they’re giving that short shrift or not. Good luck to all of you. AGW is a beast.

I saw another social media post collecting tweets from immigrants in France suffering the heatwave there, reporting their embarrassment that it hit them so bad, when they lived through higher temps in their home countries all the time. Somebody commented that even at noon, the closer you get to a pole the more you get broadsided by the sun’s rays – it’s hitting more of your body than just the head and shoulders. I dunno.

Anyway, y’all know I despise the sun like the veriest of vampires, so big sympathies.

Nadia Rose

UK rap lady Nadia Rose cross’d my recs on yt because apparently I like lady musicians too much, but I appreciate it. She’s very talented and cute. This video is several years old. I don’t know if she was a teenager at the time, but she’s giving teen girl squad energy in a good way.

One annoying grain in the back of the mind whenever you’re confronted with a new artist from the UK is … are they terfy? Is Terf Island. Is this style descended from the Afro-Caribbean community, who are notoriously homophobic? I remember enjoying Roots Manuva a lot until he said “away with the fairies” and I was like, oh, away with me. Sigh.

So I’m not going to look it up and find out. Meanwhile, she had to take some years off due to label bullshit, and she grew up and filled out. Lookin nice, madamoiselle, and still rocking out…

Wotta doll. So fun. It’s in the mix now.

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Maybe Jesus Died for God’s Sins

Heretical notion, not much to it, but it makes more sense the canon version of events. I am constantly confronted with the suffering of humanity. Being created means experiencing pain, anguish, humiliation, and death. That’s a lot of bullshit which can be squarely laid at the feet of the creator, right?

So god sees what he’s done and is like, hm, would it help if you could return the favor to me? Make me suffer, humiliate me, watch me die? And we say, yes, thank you, and do a number on his avatar. But the resurrection makes his death cheap. I’m far from the first to point that out, but in the context of this theory, it’s worse than usual.

Let’s get “gnostic” – that is to say, for the purpose of this post, let’s suppose the mainstream version of events was written by a great deceiver, a demiurge trying to bend us to the will of a god who isn’t there, make us feel guilty for our own suffering. In truth, jesus died and stayed dead, god’s final apology and absolution for the horrors he inflicted upon us.

His death frees us to become rulers of our own destiny, and gives us the fond memory of a scapegoat for all our pain. Getting bullied at school? Imagine the person responsible for you being there, being scourged and driven through the streets. Feeling chronic pain you know will only be relieved by your death? Picture the guy what did it to you, nailed to the cross, struggling to breathe. About to die, wishing more of your life could have been pleasant, or that you at least had a little more time to try? At least the guy who did that to you got shanked in the side, knowing full well the only relief he’d experience was – like for you – nonexistence.

I expect you to discuss this in the comments with the gravity of the college of cardinals. Thank you.

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Check ya Baskets

There’s a dark-eyed junco mom who has made a nest and laid her eggs in one of the hanging baskets on my back porch. They are ground nesters who find a mass of vegetation (such as the flowers in your hanging basket) ideal terrain. If my husband didn’t notice her, those eggs would have been drowned, and mom might have gotten low key rekt from the hose as well.

Other stressors in the neighborhood include a driveway being torn up and replaced like twelve feet away this weekend, and people setting off fireworks every night from about June 1st to July 30th. The basket hanging from a chain may have shock absorption qualities, but still.

There’s also us. We have to walk past that nest, within a few feet of it, every time we want to do something behind the house. If she notices she’s getting noticed, she abandons the nest for a while, and eventually comes back.

Lastly, there are other birds that peck around those baskets. I doubt a chickadee or wren would be too dangerous, but a scrub jay or stellers jay would totally eat those eggs. They tend toward the baskets closer to the outer edge of the awning, and are more drawn to ones with coconut core they can loot for nesting material of their own, so likely to miss our sneaky lil gal.

I’m annoyed she’s imposed on us in this way, made us have to be concerned about her. Also, she’s impossible to look at, because she’s so well hidden in there. On a bright day you can see a specular highlight on her peepers and a pale beak, deep in the leaves. But if you see her that well, she’s likely to get nervous and jet, so we don’t really get a nice birdwatching experience out of the deal.

Anyway, if you have potted plants outside your home, watch out for nests.

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I Hurt Yer Daddy, Sunshine

Medley in my mind this morning, sort of a downbeat for a low mood. I’ve alluded to the existence of this particular horrible song before, but I mention it again – “Father’s Grave” by Glenn Danzig and Melissa auf der Mar – because it was the starting point. I might have been thinking about sex-adjacent things and Danzig at the time, and that tune emerged from the shadows to punish me for it.

Song Two: “Hurt,” the original Nine Inch Nails version. Song Three: “Age of Aquarius,” but just that “Let the Sun Shine In” part.

Anyone else music-accursed this Sunday?

Oh hey, happy Father’s Day!

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In Praise of Italian Anarchists

First of all, would you even want to be called Italian?

I’m reflecting recently on the history of fascism, for unfortunately current reasons, and that included a brief tour of the wikipedia page on mussolini’s assassination attempts. I had mentioned in fond terms the Irish woman who tried to kill him, tho it seems likely she was more motivated by mental illness than ideology. In checking out that page I also found a few archetypal “bomb throwing anarchists,” which got me thinking about them.

I have only a slim outside idea of the history, and who knows how much of it is real, how much propaganda? Sacco and Vanzetti were names that made a brief appearance in a junior high textbook. I once saw a blogpost about the history of anarchy among Italian immigrants to the usa, how they aggressively threatened priests who had evangelized to them. I imagine some of them volunteered in the Spanish Civil War. Serious characters.

What happened to them? Was their movement broken? Did their kids all quietly integrate into the mainstream? Or did they never go away? Are they still around, still at it? An unbroken chain of political culture going back to the days when lil benny and his wife got strung up?

Did they exist before Italy existed, among its various provinces when they were still city-states? Did they emerge as resistance to the nationalism that forged the modern state? Would they resent being called Italian, preferring Florentine, Lombard, Sicilian? Was the whole movement centered in one province?

Hey, maybe I’ll copy-paste this whole line of curiosity to a chatbot, following the links it provides or taking them with salt. Meanwhile, I just leave you with vague meanderings.

It’s hard to imagine a radical left community having that strength, coming from my shithole country. Anarchists here are scattered college kids, a vanishingly tiny fraction of the population.

Italian anarchists, or whatever nationality you prefer, if any, I salute you. From what I’ve heard about Italy’s current government, your work is not done. No gods, no masters. Long live the fighters.

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Edit to Add: Here’s what Claude Sonnet had to say…

Here’s what I can tell you:
Did Italian anarchism predate Italy?
Sort of — but not in the way you might imagine. The earliest signs of anarchism in Italy appeared in the 1850s and 1860s, emerging from the dominant republican and nationalist movement headed by Garibaldi and Mazzini. So it grew alongside the Risorgimento (Italian unification), not in opposition to some ancient city-state tradition. The fight for unification created a generation of revolutionaries who then turned around and questioned all forms of authority, including the new Italian state itself. In that sense, the anarchists were the radical wing of the very movement that forged modern Italy — and then immediately became its most committed enemies.

On the identity question — would they resent being called Italian?
This is fascinating. Italian anarchists’ relationship to nationalism was the exact reverse of ordinary long-distance nationalists. Their ideology was anti-nationalist, and their project was not to build the nation-state but to abolish it. They were, however, deeply connected by shared language and culture, and remained committed to political struggle in their homeland. So they’d probably bristle at the label — not in favor of Florentine or Lombard pride, but because they rejected the whole concept of national identity as such.

The Spanish Civil War — yes, you were right about that. Among the almost 3,000 foreign anarchists who fought in the Spanish Civil War, more than 100 came from the United States, and Italian-born anarchists were among them. The Spanish Civil War proved to be their last great campaign in a meaningful sense — the Republican defeat of 1939 meant anarchism permanently lost its last mass base of support.

What happened to the movement? Was it broken?
Fascism crushed it at home brutally but couldn’t fully kill it. The fascists assassinated and detained most of the leaders of the anti-fascist movement, which was completely dismantled by 1924. But remarkably, anarchists immediately threw themselves into armed struggle in the Italian Resistance after Italy’s surrender in 1943, establishing autonomous partisan formations in Carrara, Pistoia, Genoa, and Milan.

Are they still around?

They never went away. The Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was founded in 1945 in Carrara, took it upon itself to carry on the legacy of the Italian Anarchist Communist Union suppressed by fascism in 1926, and continues to publish Umanità Nova, an anarchist newspaper originally founded by Errico Malatesta. That’s an unbroken institutional thread. And anarchists are today present nationwide, involved in all principal social and political conflicts, with more than 60 active spaces and an articulated presence online and in the militant press.

There’s also a more militant and controversial strain: an Informal Anarchist Federation (a separate, insurrectionary network) officially appeared in 2003 and has since carried out a series of mostly non-lethal bombings and letter-bomb campaigns against EU officials, financial institutions, and military targets.

The geography question
The movement wasn’t centered in one province, though certain places have symbolic weight. Carrara — a marble-quarrying town in Tuscany — is almost mythologically important to Italian anarchism; it’s where the postwar Federation was founded and where major congresses were held. The industrial north (Turin, Milan, Genoa) was the heart of anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing. But the movement was genuinely national, and its immigrant branches stretched to Argentina, the US, and beyond.
The immigrant question in the US
You’re right that you’ve seen something real. Italian immigrant anarchism in the US was serious and well-organized — figures like Luigi Galleani ran influential publications and networks, and the Galleanist strain was the most militant of all, associated with bombings in the 1910s–20s. Sacco and Vanzetti were part of that milieu. The Spanish Civil War proved to be the last great campaign of America’s diminished anarchist movement — after that, between McCarthyism, assimilation, and the death of the immigrant radical networks, the US branch pretty much dissolved. The kids did, largely, integrate into the mainstream.

The Italian branch is a different story entirely. Whether you call it an unbroken chain or a series of revivals is a matter of interpretation, but the culture, the institutions, and the publications have genuine continuity from Malatesta’s day to the present.

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Happy Juneteenth, Nobody is Free Until Everyone is Free

I’ve got a bit of a grudge going for Dave Chappelle. I don’t think about things or people I hate all the time, so it doesn’t come up much for me, but when it does, I’m like, fuck that guy a lot.

There was an episode of his show where some goofy pimps time traveled to the days of slavery, and one of them shot an overseer. The meta-laff was that this was supposedly a skit that had been cut from an earlier show by execs who didn’t think killing slavers was funny. I had a good time watching that a million years ago.

For those who don’t remember his story after that point in his career, he had a nervous breakdown and broke contract to abandon the show and chill out in Africa for some years. Comedy Central ran what was left of his show as reruns for a very long time – probably still does. Then, at long last, Dave emerged from the earth like Punxsutawney Phil, to chip into the discourse of our times. What did he purchase with the remainder of his cultural cachet?

He defended shitler’s “grab them by the pussy” remark like a month ahead of his first election. Then he fucked off again for a while, during which time he did some few standup shows. At one of these, he was photographed partying with Apartheid Junior and some other Bay Area heels.

After that he really got my attention by going full transphobe. One of the subjects of his “humor” was a trans woman who subsequently committed suicide. I imagine she had other reasons as well, but still.

But let’s back that up a moment. Chappelle has partied with the guy who is currently egging on white supremacist riots in northern Ireland, who unambiguously heiled hitler at the grabber’s second inauguration. Do you suppose the has-been comedian has any misgivings about the company he’s kept?

I’m sure he doesn’t, because like the terfs who thought they could defend cis-women’s rights by killing trans women, like the working class white ameriKKKans who thought they could protect the working class by killing mexicans, he makes this one important mistake. He believes you can discriminate against one oppressed class of people without empowering the oppressors of your own people.

It can’t be done. You cannot separate out the struggles of the oppressed and say one group deserves it, one group is a reasonable sacrifice. This is basic fucking shit, as basic as it gets. Freedom can only be protected by solidarity between the oppressed, whatever their differences.

You don’t have to like or even care about other people on your side, as long as you can stifle your shitty mouth when you’re tempted to let your prejudice run – when you’re tempted to give aid and succor to the Fourth Reich. Do people like Dave Chappelle care about his fellow black people?

I don’t buy it for a fucking second. Like the recurring theme in Russian folk tales of a decent pauper who becomes a shitty prince, people get X amount of dollars and decide they hate taxes more than they love human rights.

Biggie Smalls once said, “Fuck the world, don’t ask me for shit. And everything you’ve got, you work hard for it.” I say many hands make light work, and nobody in the fucking world should have to truly work hard, as many hands as we have. If everybody who hits the sixth zero in their bank account turns nazi, it’s time to make sure nobody gets that dollar.

Freedom for all oppressed people. Traitors eat shit. Long live the fighters.

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Your True Name

Charly recently raised a question that on the surface seems reasonable, but when applied to ameriKKKa, becomes a bit of a mess. Why is there a problem with requiring ID to vote here? Wasn’t that already required?

It depends on a lot. I don’t recall specifically presenting my ID to vote, maybe once at an in-person location a few decades ago? You have the option of registering to vote any time you renew your photo ID or driver’s license, and I think also when you submit a change of address at the post office. I’ve been doing mail ballots for ages now.

But this is a state that isn’t powerfully motivated to suppress voter will, unlike the rethuglican political establishments of the Southeast, where black people are often a majority in urban centers. In those states, ID requirements are a very useful tool of voter suppression, precisely because on the face of it, they’re a reasonable requirement. The trick is how difficult it has become to obtain and maintain a photo ID.

ID requirements are also a great tool for kicking the poor off of social benefits, of keeping them homeless or imprisoned, of getting them to die from preventable health conditions. The closer you live to the ground here, the more likely you are to be evicted and lose all of your possessions. To be incarcerated and have your wallet “lost” in the process. Old folks and people with vices are easy to rob. At the level of the homeless, they tend to have their every last possession stolen at least once a year, by other homeless people or by corrupt cops.

Over-policed populations like people of color, lgbtetc people, the poor, the homeless, can be arrested at higher rates and lose their rights and possessions that way. If your ID expires in prison, good luck getting it renewed when you get out.

At the federal level, “Real ID” (a creation of the fascist Patriot Act) or a passport is required for air travel and a few other circumstances. States can require it for a lot more than that, at their discretion, including voting. To get one of those, you need your social security card, birth certificate, a mailing address, and more.

Mailing address is tougher than you’d think. Poor people get priced out of their circumstances often enough that we move a lot. I’ve moved well over a dozen times in my adult life; some move every few months. To get my birth certificate took three months. What if I didn’t have the money to pay for it? Very few parts of this process are free.

There’s a lot more that could be said on these things but I don’t have much time these days for research. Some amount I know of due to my job, but I can’t elaborate on that. I wonder sometimes if the sheer size of this country makes it harder to administer than Europe, even if the colonial linguistic hegemony makes many things easier. Certainly the lack of political will to properly fund the government is a problem.

If you live in the USA and you have all your papers in a row, keep them in a safe place, as much as that’s possible. If you don’t have all your papers, get crackin’ whenever you’ve got a stable circumstance, because you never know when you’ll lose that, and potentially lose much more.

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Oh yeah, I named this article before I wrote it. What’s with the title? I thought I was going to get into this more. You may have heard people use the phrase “legal name” as if there is one definitive database where these things are kept. There isn’t, and even where there is, you might be surprised by what’s filling out the fields on those computer screens.

Did you remember to update your citizenship when you got it? Your name when you got married? Divorced? Did you do it with just the court, the DMV, Social Security, or all three? What about your passport, if you have one? Department of Education for your student loans? The IRS? All of these agencies could have different names on file for you. Maybe even different dates of birth or places of birth, due to typos. If DE for Germany was mistakenly entered in a state of birth field, congrats, you were born in Delaware. That doesn’t automatically make you a citizen because that’s a separate field that could say anything as well.

That’s probably the most important thing of all now – consistency. Government computers have become more integrated in recent years and people who never had a problem from these inconsistencies in decades of life are suddenly having problems with them now – couldn’t file taxes, couldn’t fill a prescription, couldn’t vote. Make sure your biographical details are accurate. Pick a name and go with it, and make sure all of the agencies have all of your names in all the right fields – first, middle, last, suffix. Honestly suffixes can be more trouble than they’re worth, might consider losing that. Some computers have a separate field for it, some just tack it onto the last name, and if they disagree you could find yourself locked out of something. Whatever you do though, do it consistently, because this is not automatically done for you.

Legal name evokes the old magical idea of a “true name.” Who are you? Your name is words that, like all others, are trying to simplify a reality that can be much more complex than syllables can convey. Even your own country may, in important ways, have no idea who you are. Fascism’s trying to fix that for you. Thanks?

Financial institutions and government have relied on Social Security Number to verify people’s identity for a long time, but with leak after hack after leak, practically every SSN that exists is compromised. Hell, does DOGE still have read access to the Social Security Administration and Department of Treasury? I’ve heard they have been reduced in prominence, but never heard anything concrete about them being shut out of the access they were initially granted.

But fuck all that. Maybe we should have code names known only to our favorite people. Or is that what internet handles are? Boochie Flagrante and Buttfucker3000 are truer names than any birth certificate can contain, I say. Power on, comrades.

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