“Going Postal examines the phenomenon of rage murder that took America by storm in the early 1980’s and has since grown yearly in body counts and symbolic value. By looking at massacres in schools and offices as post-industrial rebellions, Mark Ames is able to juxtapose the historical place of rage in America with the social climate after Reaganomics began to effect worker’s paychecks. But why high schools? Why post offices? Mark Ames examines the most fascinating and unexpected cases, crafting a convincing argument for workplace massacres as modern day slave rebellions. Like slave rebellions, rage massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Going Postal seeks to contextualize this violence in a world where working isn’t—and doesn’t pay—what it used to. Part social critique and part true crime page-turner, Going Postal answers the questions asked by commentators on the nightly news and films such as Bowling for Columbine.”
“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
“I am alive, and drunk on sunlight.” -A Game of Thrones
——
“Most epidemiological studies have reported that higher (vitamin D) levels are associated with lower incidence rates of various cancers”
“Women with higher solar UVB exposure… had only half the incidence of breast cancer”
“(men) who had higher residential solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer”
“Higher solar exposure in childhood” was “associated with a similar reduction”
“Almost all laboratory studies” find “inhibition of growth of” cancer
High sun exposured “Colorectal cancer patients” had half the death rate, similarly with renal and endometrial cancers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19523595/
—
A large 20 year study from Sweden with a random selection found:
“avoidance of sun exposure… was related to a 60% increased risk of (all cause) death”
“the relationship was ‘dose dependent’”
“nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a similar life expectancy compared to smokers with the highest sun exposure”
Read the last line again, and do it a third time to drive the point home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/
—
A large long term prospective cohort study found
“greater average residential exposure to sunlight at exposure lengths of 1 year or longer was associated with better performance on global cognitive function, visual memory and associative learning” “as well as visual processing and sustained attention”
This relationship was dose dependent. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25336-6
—
“Sunlight has beneficial effects on cardiovascular risk factors independently of vitamin D.” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766556/
—
While Vitamin D levels are a good proxy for sun exposure this part does not make the whole. Exposure to the sun causes a host of biological effects unrelated to Vitamin D such as increasing Nitric oxide levels. This explains the paradox of why high Vitamin D levels via exposure to the sun are association with large health benefits while high vitamin D levels via ingestion have mixed results.
——
“The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun” –Thomas Paine
“The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.” –Fahrenheit 451
“Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!” –Lorenzaccio
Here’s a tiktok video from the maybemaybemaybe subreddit. It is making the clay for clay pots and then making the pots. I haven’t watched it all the way to the end yet, but it makes the level of work involved fairly clear. I don’t know what country this is in but it ” feels like” China to me. If so, we can’t say that China doesn’t work for what it has.
I have been thinking recently a lot about integrity and how the absence of integrity disables American (so-called) “democracy” — turning popular partisan politics into a tiresome, performative ritual of kayfabe drama.
I know several commenters here really enjoy participating, so they might want to skip this.
I ran across an interview with Barry Eisler, where he and the interviewer did an especially good job of focusing on how the mechanics of inside power work to make what politicians express in public so useless and meaningless to democratic choice.
Some years ago, I wrote an article for . . . the Guardian. And there’s an interesting story there having to do with Israel and U.S. government support for the government of Israel, which we’ll probably also wind up talking about, or certainly we could.
. . . . John Brennan’s CIA hacked into the computers of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s people, who were investigating CIA torture activities during the so-called War on Terror. And I was struck by the following: Dianne Feinstein was extremely angry when she learned that the CIA was hacking into the computers of her staff and committee that was investigating torture. You would expect her to be angry. I was angry too. And she made a speech where she listed her grievances, and they were quite serious. That was a violation of Executive Order [12333]. It was a violation of the separation of powers. It’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Very serious allegations. And as I listened to the speech, I was like, oh, she’s really throwing down. I wonder what sort of punishment or redress or whatever she is going to call for. And her conclusion was, and therefore, I demand an apology. And I was struck by that. What does that mean? These are crimes you’ve just articulated. You’ve accused John Brennan and the CIA of committing quite serious crimes, and you’re demanding an apology.
So the article that I wrote . . . compared the behavior of Dianne Feinstein, John Brennan, and our other rulers to something that I remember from The Godfather, the book and the movie, where Michael Corleone initially suggests that, okay, I know how to deal with this problem we’re having where our enemy is being protected by a New York police captain: we’ll kill the police captain. And the family consigliere, Tom Hagen, says, Michael, we can’t kill a police captain; the Corleone family would be outcast. What he’s saying, essentially, is that would be going too far, that the violation of the rules and the rest of the system of which we are a part would turn against us if we did that. And Dianne Feinstein, it was clear to me, had a similar notion.
None of these people think of themselves as crime families, although I think it’s useful to use crime as a rubric for understanding the way our rulers operate.
I think it intriguing that Eisler associates the Brennan / Feinstein incident with Israel in his own mind, but I don’t see where he explains that association.
[AOC is] obviously a remarkably talented person. She’s smart, articulate, and charismatic. Again, if you don’t like her, you don’t like her. These are just idiosyncratic reactions. It doesn’t really matter.
But again, I was impressed. I was impressed by what she was saying and the sorts of values that she seemed to have. And this happens to me every time I start believing in a politician. When am I going to figure it out? I don’t know. But I was like, wow, this is great. I’m really impressed. Subsequently, following her trajectory from rebel firebrand outsider, bane of Nancy Pelosi and all that, to Democratic insider. And I think it was the New York Times that described the progression this way, in flattering terms. What you could read is she’s been tamed; she’s been gentled. She’s part of the system now. And you could argue, if I were writing a nonfiction story of what is the apotheosis, or the nadir, of AOC’s political trajectory, I would identify it as being last summer’s speech at the DNC, where she claimed that Kamala Harris was working tirelessly to achieve a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. And I remember wondering at that point, how do you cauterize your soul sufficiently to be able to say something like that?
The interviewer, Nathan J Robinson, adds important context.
[Robinson:] So AOC’s trajectory is, as you say, deeply fascinating. You could tell two stories. One story is the sympathetic story, which says, okay, this is someone who is actually learning how the system works and how to operate effectively within it, which is the story, as you say, that the New York Times told. And then you can tell the story that a progressive supporter of AOC might have, which is, this is the co-optation process that occurs. . . . Ryan Grim’s wonderful book on the Squad . . . got kind of the inside story here. And it is, in fact, the case that as soon as she gets into power, she comes in with this staff that’s very confrontational, and they’re all ready to take on Pelosi. She joins the Sunrise Movement and their occupation of Pelosi’s office. And then it rapidly becomes clear that Nancy Pelosi has a lot of power, and that if you start tangling with Nancy Pelosi and the leading Democrats, they will just ensure that you get nothing—that you are never the head of a committee, that you never get to pass any legislation. If you piss them off too much, they will fund your next primary opponent, and you will be out of office.
And AOC has this moment where she purges her staff of some of the more confrontational people who are picking fights with the Democratic leadership. And you mentioned that moment at the DNC, which is, I agree, a real low point, because it’s an outright lie. They weren’t actually trying to facilitate a ceasefire. They were, in fact, blocking a ceasefire at the UN, vetoing it repeatedly, and Kamala Harris seemed fine with that.
Eisler and Robinson are focused on the “sociology” of inside politics, but what I focused on was how these insider machinations serve to insulate power from public opinion or, really, anything to do with voting or partisan contests. Why wasn’t Brennan punished back then? Why wasn’t AOC’s career ended by her lie about Harris? Some things to think about.
Here is a little posting saying how every single thing Trump did needs to be zeroed out and reversed and removed once he is gone. ( Wouldn’t happen under Vance, of course).
It is something the DemPartycrats could run on as a party if they wanted a chance at getting the ” Denazification and Detrumpization” vote. But if they don’t run on that, in hopes of getting the “meh” vote and the “we just don’t know” vote, they won’t get the “annul it all” vote. I suspect “the” Democrats will make choice number two. In which case, there will be individual Democrats worth voting for, such as Crockett in Texas and some others, but Democrats hoping to get elected on the strength of being part of “the” Democrats may lose.
Its hard to predict, but I suspect thatIF “the” Democrats refuse to run on denazification and detrumpization( under more palatable names if necessary), THEN they will lose in a landslide and we will have an overwhelmingly Republican House and Senate.
I recently received a set of questions from a dissident writer who I respect. Among those questions was : Like me you started out wanting to be a writer, correct? Why did you sour on being a writer? What’s wrong with that scene?Have American writers failed their audience, not that there’s much of one to begin with?
I find these questions thought provoking, and they’ve led to reflections on the state of the written and spoken word in contemporary times, along with my own relationship to the same.
Since Ian and many of the commenters on this site are of a literary bent and wordsmiths in their own right (write) I would like to open the discussion to any thoughts anyone might have to the above questions posed to me. Thanks!
I am in the Dublin Airport. I just went to use the lew. There were 2 symbols for men and 2 symbols for women at the respective entrances. I guess one was the English language symbol and one was the Gealic language symbol.
Pre-budget consultations are an opportunity for Canadians from across the country to share their ideas and priorities on how to better shape Canada’s future. Join the conversation by responding to our questionnaire below or sending in a formal submission both of which can be submitted until 11:59pm. EST on August 28, 2025.
Not all that hopeful that the banksters in charge actually listen to the hoi polloi all that much, but they at least make a show of it 🙂
The same molecule in your morning vitamin D supplement is the active ingredient in rat poison.
Not a similar compound. Not a chemical cousin. The exact same molecule: cholecalciferol. At 0.075% concentration, it kills rats. In your supplement bottle, it’s supposed to make you healthier.
This should be a simple story of dosage – but the more I investigated, the stranger it became. The vitamin D in supplements isn’t extracted from fish or produced by sunlight. It’s manufactured from sheep’s wool using benzene and chloroform in Chinese chemical factories. The same factories that produce industrial solvents.
The style of analysis employed relies more than I care for on a heavy dose of narrative “reasoning” including the trope of speculating on the experience of ancestors. But, he seems also to try fairly hard to stay with reality.
It made me wonder, as many of Oakchair’s comments do as well, about the quality of conventional scientific medical reasoning and judgment that is light on biological mechanisms and heavy on statistical association or correlation.
Is this Substacker, like so many, a compulsive skeptic, obsessed with “doing his own research”? Is it worth my brain cells to engage at all or should I lay back and trust the New York Times? These are the questions that us all in our Internet Age. I am sure AI will sort it for us soon.
Now, what if this back yard corn grower were able to get and grow the kind of corn shown at the start of this video titled: ” CONSEGUIMOS PRODUCIR 7 MAZORCAS EN UNA SOLA PLANTA DE MAIZ NATIVO CON NUESTRO SISTEMA ORGANICO ” ( which I think means something like ” 7 ears of corn on one plant through organic production”.
With a corn like this, you could get “the normal amount” of corn with 7 times less corn plants, each with 7 times more growing area for itself. That would give you the space to plant some squash between all the corn plants and a bean vine up each corn plant.
And if you wanted to grow more food in the same space, you could have various kinds of volunteer-reseeding semi-wildish greens plants growing in all the space between the corn, beans and squash. A much grander and more organized version of that concept is called Maya Milpa. https://www.marc.ucsb.edu/research/maya-forest-is-a-garden/maya-forest-gardens/milpa-cycle
You could shrink it down to this tiny back yard and call it micromaya micromilpa.
I realize that two comments this close in time is perhaps thread-hogging, but this thread is too good to let go.
It is from the Redneckengineering subreddit. It is titled: ” just gotta wait one more year”. The person involved clearly put a hammerhead over a very young sapling and kept it somehow in place so the sapling could “grow into it” and become a handle.
Here is the link. https://www.reddit.com/r/redneckengineering/comments/1myx9mo/just_gotta_wait_1_more_year/
Here is an entry on reddit called: ” $100 at the grocery store buys nothing anymore.”
It is on the inflation subreddit.
Here is the link. https://www.reddit.com/r/inflation/comments/1mzo6n2/100_at_the_grocery_store_buys_nothing_anymore/
I have to go to work in 2 minutes, so I can’t reply now. Tomorrow I am off work so I will visit my friendly neighborhood Peoples Food Co-op and make a list of what a hundred dollars will buy and then bring that list here.
The “redneck engineering” note brings a new aspect to the “Grandpa’s Axe” debate.
Anyway, I use “presearch.com” now. It is Google search without the Google UI. That is, it is google’s search database with the google UI as of, like, 10 years ago. I’m liking it! The core difference is that today, the big G finds a product most similar to your search words and then does a search on that product plus your words. Presearch just does your words. (I think.)
canopy
Going Postal
Mark Ames
from Goodreads –
“Going Postal examines the phenomenon of rage murder that took America by storm in the early 1980’s and has since grown yearly in body counts and symbolic value. By looking at massacres in schools and offices as post-industrial rebellions, Mark Ames is able to juxtapose the historical place of rage in America with the social climate after Reaganomics began to effect worker’s paychecks. But why high schools? Why post offices? Mark Ames examines the most fascinating and unexpected cases, crafting a convincing argument for workplace massacres as modern day slave rebellions. Like slave rebellions, rage massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood. Going Postal seeks to contextualize this violence in a world where working isn’t—and doesn’t pay—what it used to. Part social critique and part true crime page-turner, Going Postal answers the questions asked by commentators on the nightly news and films such as Bowling for Columbine.”
Oakchair
“If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
“I am alive, and drunk on sunlight.” -A Game of Thrones
——
“Most epidemiological studies have reported that higher (vitamin D) levels are associated with lower incidence rates of various cancers”
“Women with higher solar UVB exposure… had only half the incidence of breast cancer”
“(men) who had higher residential solar UVB exposure had only half the incidence rate of fatal prostate cancer”
“Higher solar exposure in childhood” was “associated with a similar reduction”
“Almost all laboratory studies” find “inhibition of growth of” cancer
High sun exposured “Colorectal cancer patients” had half the death rate, similarly with renal and endometrial cancers.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19523595/
—
A large 20 year study from Sweden with a random selection found:
“avoidance of sun exposure… was related to a 60% increased risk of (all cause) death”
“the relationship was ‘dose dependent’”
“nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a similar life expectancy compared to smokers with the highest sun exposure”
Read the last line again, and do it a third time to drive the point home.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26992108/
—
A large long term prospective cohort study found
“greater average residential exposure to sunlight at exposure lengths of 1 year or longer was associated with better performance on global cognitive function, visual memory and associative learning” “as well as visual processing and sustained attention”
This relationship was dose dependent.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25336-6
—
“Sunlight has beneficial effects on cardiovascular risk factors independently of vitamin D.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766556/
—
While Vitamin D levels are a good proxy for sun exposure this part does not make the whole. Exposure to the sun causes a host of biological effects unrelated to Vitamin D such as increasing Nitric oxide levels. This explains the paradox of why high Vitamin D levels via exposure to the sun are association with large health benefits while high vitamin D levels via ingestion have mixed results.
——
“The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun” –Thomas Paine
“The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.” –Fahrenheit 451
“Look at the sun! It’s dry, it’s dead, it needs a drink, it wants blood! And I’ll give it blood!” –Lorenzaccio
different clue
Here’s a tiktok video from the maybemaybemaybe subreddit. It is making the clay for clay pots and then making the pots. I haven’t watched it all the way to the end yet, but it makes the level of work involved fairly clear. I don’t know what country this is in but it ” feels like” China to me. If so, we can’t say that China doesn’t work for what it has.
https://www.reddit.com/r/maybemaybemaybe/comments/1my19oi/maybe_maybe_maybe/
canopy
https://x.com/clashreport/status/1958100672957632691?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1958100672957632691%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2025%2F08%2Flinks-8-22-2025.html
bruce wilder
I have been thinking recently a lot about integrity and how the absence of integrity disables American (so-called) “democracy” — turning popular partisan politics into a tiresome, performative ritual of kayfabe drama.
I know several commenters here really enjoy participating, so they might want to skip this.
I ran across an interview with Barry Eisler, where he and the interviewer did an especially good job of focusing on how the mechanics of inside power work to make what politicians express in public so useless and meaningless to democratic choice.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/barry-eisler-on-political-thrillers-aoc-and-how-the-system-justifies-war
Here are a couple of excerpts:
I think it intriguing that Eisler associates the Brennan / Feinstein incident with Israel in his own mind, but I don’t see where he explains that association.
The interviewer, Nathan J Robinson, adds important context.
Eisler and Robinson are focused on the “sociology” of inside politics, but what I focused on was how these insider machinations serve to insulate power from public opinion or, really, anything to do with voting or partisan contests. Why wasn’t Brennan punished back then? Why wasn’t AOC’s career ended by her lie about Harris? Some things to think about.
different clue
Here is a little posting saying how every single thing Trump did needs to be zeroed out and reversed and removed once he is gone. ( Wouldn’t happen under Vance, of course).
It is something the DemPartycrats could run on as a party if they wanted a chance at getting the ” Denazification and Detrumpization” vote. But if they don’t run on that, in hopes of getting the “meh” vote and the “we just don’t know” vote, they won’t get the “annul it all” vote. I suspect “the” Democrats will make choice number two. In which case, there will be individual Democrats worth voting for, such as Crockett in Texas and some others, but Democrats hoping to get elected on the strength of being part of “the” Democrats may lose.
Its hard to predict, but I suspect thatIF “the” Democrats refuse to run on denazification and detrumpization( under more palatable names if necessary), THEN they will lose in a landslide and we will have an overwhelmingly Republican House and Senate.
Anyway, here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news2/comments/1mxsy3k/annul_all_of_it/
mago
I recently received a set of questions from a dissident writer who I respect. Among those questions was : Like me you started out wanting to be a writer, correct? Why did you sour on being a writer? What’s wrong with that scene?Have American writers failed their audience, not that there’s much of one to begin with?
I find these questions thought provoking, and they’ve led to reflections on the state of the written and spoken word in contemporary times, along with my own relationship to the same.
Since Ian and many of the commenters on this site are of a literary bent and wordsmiths in their own right (write) I would like to open the discussion to any thoughts anyone might have to the above questions posed to me. Thanks!
Ian Welsh
Refresh your browser, comments were approved just before your ???? comment. All that happened is I was AFK from noon to 8:30pm or so.
mago
Thanks Ian. Much appreciated.
Curt Kastens
I am in the Dublin Airport. I just went to use the lew. There were 2 symbols for men and 2 symbols for women at the respective entrances. I guess one was the English language symbol and one was the Gealic language symbol.
Failed Scholar
A PSA to all the Canaderpians that read Ian, the deadline for public feedback for pre-budget consultations is August 28th. https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/programs/consultations/2025/pre-budget-consultations-2025.html
Not all that hopeful that the banksters in charge actually listen to the hoi polloi all that much, but they at least make a show of it 🙂
bruce wilder
@Oakchair
Re: Vitamin D
I found this Substack interesting.
https://open.substack.com/pub/unbekoming/p/the-vitamin-d-paradox-what-they-dont?
The style of analysis employed relies more than I care for on a heavy dose of narrative “reasoning” including the trope of speculating on the experience of ancestors. But, he seems also to try fairly hard to stay with reality.
It made me wonder, as many of Oakchair’s comments do as well, about the quality of conventional scientific medical reasoning and judgment that is light on biological mechanisms and heavy on statistical association or correlation.
Is this Substacker, like so many, a compulsive skeptic, obsessed with “doing his own research”? Is it worth my brain cells to engage at all or should I lay back and trust the New York Times? These are the questions that us all in our Internet Age. I am sure AI will sort it for us soon.
different clue
Here’s a photo of a little corn patch in a tiny-back-yard zone. It shows you can grow a little corn in a little space. It is titled: ”
“The house behind me grows corn in their backyard” Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1mz1us0/the_house_behind_me_grows_corn_in_their_backyard/
Now, what if this back yard corn grower were able to get and grow the kind of corn shown at the start of this video titled: ” CONSEGUIMOS PRODUCIR 7 MAZORCAS EN UNA SOLA PLANTA DE MAIZ NATIVO CON NUESTRO SISTEMA ORGANICO ” ( which I think means something like ” 7 ears of corn on one plant through organic production”.
Anyway, here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZcqJU0XUnI
With a corn like this, you could get “the normal amount” of corn with 7 times less corn plants, each with 7 times more growing area for itself. That would give you the space to plant some squash between all the corn plants and a bean vine up each corn plant.
And if you wanted to grow more food in the same space, you could have various kinds of volunteer-reseeding semi-wildish greens plants growing in all the space between the corn, beans and squash. A much grander and more organized version of that concept is called Maya Milpa.
https://www.marc.ucsb.edu/research/maya-forest-is-a-garden/maya-forest-gardens/milpa-cycle
You could shrink it down to this tiny back yard and call it micromaya micromilpa.
Here is a kind of corn seed for several ears per plant called Guinea Yellow which is available to American gardeners.
https://monticelloshop.org/products/yellow-guinea-flint-corn-seeds-zea-mays-indurata-cv
different clue
Here’s a photo titled: ” Uh oh, Maxwell at Chelsea Clinton wedding “, with Ghislaine Maxwell’s face conveniently red-circled.
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RareHistoricalPhotos/comments/1myz2mt/uh_oh_maxwell_at_chelsea_clinton_wedding/
I am sure that Epstein-Maxwell, the Dynamic Duo, serviced the Great and the Good of all parties. Every bit of the files should be released.
different clue
I realize that two comments this close in time is perhaps thread-hogging, but this thread is too good to let go.
It is from the Redneckengineering subreddit. It is titled: ” just gotta wait one more year”. The person involved clearly put a hammerhead over a very young sapling and kept it somehow in place so the sapling could “grow into it” and become a handle.
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/redneckengineering/comments/1myx9mo/just_gotta_wait_1_more_year/
different clue
Here is an entry on reddit called: ” $100 at the grocery store buys nothing anymore.”
It is on the inflation subreddit.
Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/inflation/comments/1mzo6n2/100_at_the_grocery_store_buys_nothing_anymore/
I have to go to work in 2 minutes, so I can’t reply now. Tomorrow I am off work so I will visit my friendly neighborhood Peoples Food Co-op and make a list of what a hundred dollars will buy and then bring that list here.
Jorge
The “redneck engineering” note brings a new aspect to the “Grandpa’s Axe” debate.
Anyway, I use “presearch.com” now. It is Google search without the Google UI. That is, it is google’s search database with the google UI as of, like, 10 years ago. I’m liking it! The core difference is that today, the big G finds a product most similar to your search words and then does a search on that product plus your words. Presearch just does your words. (I think.)