There has been many megabytes of pixels spilled, writing about the US exit from Afghanistan. The tragedy, if there is one, is that the US knew for decades that it was eventually going to have to leave, but hung around spending money and ruining lives, because of fear of embarrassment. That’s right: the response to fear of embarrassment was to embarrass ourselves fucking more. Brilliant.
The American justice system is in the process of hanging itself with a mechanism that it snuck in, in order to protect the powerful from – you got it – facing justice. [Read more…]
You already know I despise marketing, advertising, and the people involved in it. The reason is simple, as I have said before: in order to do advertising you generally have to promote something as being better than you know it to be.
Lately, there has been a lot of discussion about the US’ slide into fascism, whether or not Trump is a fascist, etc. It’s interesting, because yes indeed the US is on the cusp of collapsing from a pseudo-democracy into an authoritarian empire, but it also conceals a deeper problem. Namely, that the US has always been more or less fascist. I.e.: “I was fascist, before fascism was even cool.”
My experience with LSD taught me an unsettling thing: it’s so mind-reversing that there is a tendency to proselytize the stuff. It can be transformative, for some, though for me it just made the music fantastic.
I’m pretty sure they won’t listen, now.
Sorry, I was just practicing, to get the “standard media reporting tone” for new media (and some old media) reporting regarding variants of COVID. Because mindless panic is the order of the day. The Omicron variant is going to sweep down like the scimitar of god and reap us all.
In [stderr] I hypothesized that the republicans are “all in” on taking over the US government and mooting any remaining shreds of American democracy – thin and compromised as they are.
I came home from the shop last night around 4:30, while there was still some light; passing the turn-off into the neighbor’s corn field (they grow corn to attract the deer so they can shoot them while they eat) I saw a silver pickup truck parked back in the corner, which is the end closest to my property. Here we go, again.
It’s an interesting problem: if a federal agency claims the authority to regulate something, then they can be sued when they fail to discharge that responsibility effectively. My prediction is that this sort of thing won’t go far: there will be some new findings by the activist supreme court that there’s some theory like “qualified immunity” that applies.