Open Thread

just a sidenote or two on the dysfunctional partisan politics of failing capitalism and picking up the broken pieces

we’ve been waiting a long time now for the dominant ideology of neoliberalism (together with its subsidiary in geopolitics, neoconservatism) to collapse or fade or somehow pass away and so far, pretty much, nada

a feature of neoliberalism has been uniparty politics, which disables electoral “throw da bums out” dynamics. Obama nailed shut the left exit door on that one, and Trump has been the nail hammered into the right exit door. In the discourse a dialectic of left neoliberalism “engages” with right neoliberalism to cleanse the political imagination of any feasible alternative. (“Abundance”! . . . Publicly-owned grocery stores!???) Charges of antisemitism or sexual offenses and boatloads of Zionist cash to finance propaganda are deployed to eliminate or subvert any leadership candidates, left or right, while still on distant horizons.

“Radical” left and right, by which I mean to denote any thinking person outside the neoliberal consensus corral, are proving to be few and vulnerable.

I don’t have much intellectual sympathy with Charlie Kirk, Thomas Massie or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I recognize the strategic reality of their elimination from the field. In Europe, I have noticed how BSW was eliminated and how easily the German Greens were transformed into neocons. Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer are too absurd as dance partners, but their waltz is sweeping the floor. And, the Ukraine War goes on, dragging EU politics farther in authoritarian directions.

In the kind of terminally online American politics I am most familiar with, the weakness and vacuity of left politics is remarkable. Much of what passes for the liberal left has never even thought of getting off the neoliberal train — the boomers (“my peeps”) cosplay resistance at “No Kings” rallies with no self-awareness of how ridiculously useless they are.

The status quo in the U.S. seems to be pretty unpopular across the spectrum of political sentiment, and things [“the war(s?)” and economic trends] are headed south, but I don’t see credible leadership candidates, practical policy proposals or an ideological stance surfacing. As I said, I believe leadership candidates are being systematically eliminated from electoral politics. Opinion politics is harder to judge as legacy platform voices lose ground rapidly to online apathy and silo’d echo chambers. The trajectory of blogosphere voices into the podcasts and Substack era has always seemed fairly tragic to me. The demands of the attention economy on a writer or talking head influencer is a skinner box, training grifters in place of chickens, to perform for the webcams. But, the result is people more than ever can live with their opinions isolated in different realities. People lose track of the range and kaleidoscope of human ambivalence. That awareness is essential to the kind of democratic deliberation and horsetrading necessary to make something out of the fractured chaos at the opinion base of political prejudice and attitudes.

I don’t know if USAID was a self-sabotaging front for uncontrolled CIA interventionism and subversion, or an impotent hobby shop for self-regarding PMC humanitarians animating genuine but underfunded, ill-designed and ill-timed humanitarian gestures. Both!??

Similarly, I don’t know how real or “real” the COVID-19 pandemic and pandemic response was. I am an earnest realist and the sort of educated person, who wants to be well-informed on issues of public concern within the limits of my intellect. The many controversies lingering around COVID-19 policies leave me confused, fatigued and uncertain.

Just to be clear: I am giving this as an example of how political discourse has been disabled and not as an invitation to engage me on the substance of any COVID-19 issue. I don’t think I can be roused. The past rants combined with the dishonesties embedded in many canned doctrines have worn me down to the point where I cannot be mobilized. I haven’t taken a survey, but I am speculating that my “condition” is very common and effectively disables politics in this area. People, who think they “know” narratives that depend for truth on facts that ain’t so, just irritate people who find out the “ain’t so” part without learning anything to know.

Climate change politics has been a debate on the propriety of a pose of earnest alarmism for twenty-five years with no one learning a thing or persuading anyone to cooperate in effective mitigation. People just divide up, choosing an echo chamber that licenses feeling good about the bundle of attitudes you embrace. Greenwashing influencers find subscribers for “the channel” and that’s the end of it.

Recently I have been reading a book and an early 2025 Harper’s piece that seperately treat the US’s social, political etc. degeneration in the 1990s and the Aughts, it never hurts to see the progress downward in a now failed, brittle, on the verge of collapsing Toxic Capitalist project.

I’ll treat the 2 in chronological order. The first is Chuck Klosterman’s The 90’s: A Book, published in 2022, which I picked up at the time. I forget what I read by him previously, but I knew that he is a very good writer, similar to say the Essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan. I’m a Boomer born late in 1959, so I was coming up on 30 when the Zeitgeist changed to Gen Z, widely announced when Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” broke huge as a supposed harbinger of where the Z cohort would go.

Very different than those of us late Boomers, cynical and ironic, they intuitively knew that they’d been born in a time of decline, that the (stupidly) arrogant Boomers who sold out in the 80s and became Yuppies (my sister and her husband, money-making machines) hogged everything in the Reagan Era. I’m only 108 pp. into the 370 pp. (with index) book, he is incredibly granular and covers everything in amazing detail, I have to wonder if he did all the research on his own or hired others to cover some of it. Now, no mention of Seinfeld as far as I’ve gotten, but that encapsulated the late 90s and I’m sure he will cover it. Empty, shallow children in adult bodies, never learn anything or grow. I loved Seinfeld, Jerry was very lucky to meet Larry David, the one who really ramped up that show into the Anti-Friends!! Friends was white-centered, young people, the 2 dudes supposedly really dumb stereotypes but somehow in their 20s the 5 of them live in incredibly nice apartments in NYC, none of them were MDs or Lawyers, must’ve been trust-fund kids, or as the Asians say “Lucky Boys.” Homophobic as well, which the Gen Z crowd continued from the Boomers even after Act Up!! and Stonewall (long after, c. 68). This is a topic C.K. covers in depth.

Chapter 1 is “Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less,” they knew the post-Reagan US society would fuck them over, and reacted not with political activism or pushback (well, most of them) but with passivity and not giving a shit!!! A movie like “Reality Bites” shows the evidence. Attractive woman is pursued by 2 men, the older Ben Stiller who treats her well, and the younger, more macho Ethan Hawke who treats her like shit, so of course she chooses Hawke’s character. Canadian author Douglas Copeland totally covered their ennui and surrender in the book Generation X, tone oscillating “between wry humor & desperate pessimism.”

In the late 70s film Animal House, the villain, Dean Wurmser, gets the best line in on the nihilistic, wasted Delta Fraternity, “Son, fat, drunk & stupid is no way to go through life.” CK covers how the TV nostalgia industry was always focused back 2 generations, peddling utopian visions of younger viewers parents’ generation. In the 70s films like American Graffiti and the Happy Days TV series about the 50s, hot-rods, girls, innocent fun. My family watched that, the Fonz, a psuedo-greaser biker was the cool one, not too many if any black characters seen as best as I recall.

So other than Cobain’s Flannel (which I would never wear as I came up on 30, any more than I would’ve worn a Polo shirt in the Reagan 80s), I thought their aesthetic was pretty lame, except the ones who wore flamboyant 70s stuff, bell-bottoms and such, it wasn’t nearly as cool as Punk styles which they could’ve looked back to, but better than flannel. Oh, and lastly during the 90s giant hits like Cobain knew that music celebrity was useless and shameful. Kurt offed himself due to his “Professional Widow” wife, Courtney Love, and that knowledge, plus his severe health problems. (The book turned me on to a great music video from that era by Tori Amos, a lovely Pop Tart who wrote some great stuff, some not-so, a song with that title, purportedly about Courtney Love, but subtle enough that no lawsuit resulted.)

He covers the Tipper and Al Gore Social-Congressional Panic about music, especially about Black Music of course, political anti-Authoritarian stuff also urged to be censored, this is when they had to start putting stamps on “safe, respectable” music in the record stores.

Biggest victims: Totally apolitical, very raunchy and certainly without any “redeeming social value” 2LiveCrew, as they themselves admitted. Alongside, post Rodney King L.A. riots, Ice-T’s “Cop Killer”, simple message the LAPD can slaughter we young blacks willy-nilly but now we’re packing heat and will take you down with us, fair enough. The album with Cop Killer on it was sold by Time-Warner, became a massive scandal, he had to switch to a smaller label once T-W dropped him under pressure, and 2 years later when he re-released that Album, it omitted Cop Killer, the top hit single. But within a few years after that, the song was litigated at the Supreme Court, and they said it was clearly free speech under First Amendment protection, so the song could be covered on the radio again. And of course some white metal bands, like Metallica I think, were writing equally angry lyrics and even covered it.

I watched those incredibly stupid Congressional Hearings, my beloved Mad Comics were attacked in the 1950s before I was born, the Industry-run “Comics Code,” pushed by Sen. Kefauver, attempted to remove edgy EC impring (Educational Comics, run by the hippie-looking a decade early William S. Gaines) as turning youths into mass-murderers, Satanists, etc. Later Ozzy Osbourne allegedly put Satanic messages backward on his albums to goad young people into suicide!! Comedian Bill Hicks did a great routine on this at the time, oh I’m sure teenagers smoking pot in the basement are hand-directing their records backward to learn Satanism . . .

I had loved Frank Zappa’s music in the 70s, a cynical, brilliant, mostly anti-Hippie and anti-drug iconoclast, savored his interactions with Al and Tipper Gore. Al tried to kiss his ass, “I acknowledge a lot of your music is genius”, etc. but stupid Tipper resorted to silly innuendos, “What kind of Toys do your children play with?” The innuendo, as far as I could discern at the time was that he’d give his kids sex-toys, butt plugs and other sexual aids. He replied “normal children’s toys, of course” flatly, no need to act insecure or defensive over such a wide “swing and a miss.”

I highly recommend the book, will just give a few more chapter titles, check it out if you find it interesting. Chap. 2 is The Structure of Feeling (Swingin’ on the Flippity-Flop), the 90s ends with the start of David Lynch’s surreal supernatural horror series Twin Peaks on CBS (as best as I recall). He only got the gig due to the success of his first film, crime-centered Blue Velvet, set 4 decades in the past in 1950s small-town USA. Music like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album Blood Sugar Sex Magick. Stupid commercial decisions, Nirvana moves to MOR Geffen Records, run by a sleazebag who pays for rent boys, many of whom “commit suicide” after ending relationships with him, “jumping off” the tops of skyscrapers. Riot Grrrl movement, Bikini Kill and etc. (Pretty cool, more Punk than Grunge.) Seattle the kewlest place for Hipster Wannabes to move to.

No Chapter # [I See Death around the Corner] 3& 1/2 concise pages on Kurt’s Suicide and press about it.

3. “Nineteen Percent.” A deep dive into the political malpractice that was the 90s. George Bush Sr’s successful Gulf War [1], as Bill Hicks bitterly noted at the time, “That wasn’t a war, it was a shooting gallery from the air!!” In Desert Storm, US lost 148 soldiers mostly thru friendly fire, etc. Suckered Saddam (Admin member April Glaspie lied to him that they had “no interest” in his beef with Kuwait, stealing their oil via diagonal drilling), tens or 100s of thousands killed, the rise of Slick Willie due to GW’s effeminate “wimp” affect. By the election the War was completely forgotten, Baudrillard wrote that “The Gulf War Did Not Exist”, a book, not literally but still in terms of public attention true. Never got back to comment more on Sean P. Kelly’s takedown of Post-Modernism some weeks back, but I praised only Foucault there, and should’ve included Baudrillard, the 2 gold ingots in the swamp of PM mystification. I read him a lot in the irregular MIT-published Journal Semiotexte, 90% amazing and dead-on. The rise of Slick Willie and NAFTA, doom to the working and middle-classes and the peonification of Mexico’s economy. Ross Perot rightly bemoaned the “Giant Sucking Sound” from the South, a weird Conventional but also Populist crazed Texas Billionaire, threw the election to the Clinton Dynasty, people were tired of 12 years of Repug scamming, got light-Repug Clintonism and Dick Morris’ toe-sucking and “Triangulating!” going to the far right on most issues exept some “social issues.” But the Clintons were thoroughly Reactionary, Hills was a Goldwater Girl in the ’60s, thought those uppity blacks didn’t deserve equal rights (though she grew up in Chicago, later as Arkansas’ First Lady she would affect a Southern drawl), she also hated the “gheys” appeared on stage with her semi-matronly pearls and opined nearly a dozen times in a row, “I believe that Marriage is a Sacred Institution between a Man and a Woman”, those filthy Queers can have lesser “Civil Marriages,” not get the tax breaks and other advantages given to heteronormative folks.

Not-numbered [causal determinism] covers the 1st WTC bombing, killed only 7 people but the backlash from our support of Reagan’s “Freedom fighter” jihadis coming home to roost, presaging the False Flag that was the 2001 Saudi- & CIA-aided provocation for our (dancing gleefully as the Towers came down, on camera) Zionist friends. Actually Klosterman covered the rise of Kagan and the NeoCon class in the prior chapter, dilates more on that here.

I’ll end here and move chronologically to the Aughts in a future post, reading a great piece in an early 2025 Harper’s now on the full-scale destruction of the American economy and social order following the open Bush Steal of the 2,000 election supported by the Majority R’s on the Supreme Court. When your Elites openly want you homeless or dead, there’s nowhere to go for most but down.

I’ve been watching gas prices effects during the Iran war.

Pre-war, my area had the cheapest gas I’ve seen in my travels in the US–c. $2.25-2.45 a gallon. Go states east or north, it was about $.50 a gallon more expensive. In a trip out to MT/UT/Az/NV, if we found gas selling for $3.30 a gallon it was a bargain. But now, it seems that the gas prices from my admittedly limited travels are more uniform post-war than pre-war, there’s not much difference in price. Everyone is hovering about $4 to $4.25 a gallon.

How to explain this? The only thing I can think of is that the old pricing system (despite all the hoopla over ‘free markets’) was essentially monopoly pricing. In poorer, less densely populated regions like mine, the price was set lower to maximize the Margin X Volume calculation. In wealthier, more populated areas, where the volumes would be higher and more constant, the prices would likewise be set higher to achieve monopoly pricing.

If so, the war disrupted these calculations, forcing sellers to forgo monoply profits in poorer, more rural, areas like mine, to keep them in the wealthier and more densely populated regions where there would be more sales (and more profit). But it gives the lie about this all being due to “free markets” and competition.

Mago and Bruce’s comments reminded be of a Russia type joke. It went along the lines of:
The ____ are trapped following the experts. While we’re trapped in an endless warren of rabbit holes to fall into.

So responses to others before I resume with the US decline, 1990–2010 thread.

To Mago: got my June Harper’s a bit early, 1st entry in the Index is that per CSIS (not an anti-war source) the Trumpie’s spent $17.6 Billion in the first 2 weeks of the (lost) war. Unsustainable in the long term, alongside the coming oil and other resources & supply chain crashes from closed Hormuz Strait. That could’ve paid for 1,340,646 school children’s full year of education. Or covered $244,343 for all US public teachers’ salaries.

Not too O/T, 32,000 comments were made on DJT’s idiotic multi-million “Ballroom”, 1% of the comments were positive. But only 27% of R’s believe Trump’s failed attack on Iran believe it was to distract from the Epstein files. (Really just ‘coz Bibi demanded it.)

To bruce wilder, great comment, 100% there will be no “solution” and not even “minor reforms” via electoralism. Just more looting, economic inequality, homelessness and corporat crime across the spectrum. And as to your question about USAID, yes the answer is “both,” by design. Assuming elections take place and a Dimmiecrap becomes President, very unlikely there will be any prosecution of the Trump family’s well-documented looting, the support for the Zionist Entity will be nearly as strong (distinction without a difference, is 98% negligibly better than 100% support.) I’d like to think that the new Sebastian Gorka created Exec. Order about “Anti-Semitism” might not be enforced (hasn’t been widely so far, though Medea Benjamin and Hassan Piker with others may be called before Congress and jailed as “terrorists” for taking aid to starving Cubans . . . Would the Dimmies oppose that? Piker is a big time Dimmie promoter with a huge platform. 50/50 shot at best.

To Oakchair, great post as usual. You’re quotations are well-curated and spot-on, you and GrimJim always go there, to the place of full-on hideous truth, Finster as well. I don’t read ALL of your medical/Rx info because since my mid-20s I have known Big Pharma is a toxic spreader of poison and death, with most health problems I will go to something organic an real. E.g, cannabis is better if you are overly stressed, etc. Folk medicine will do you better, self-care, and the internet is mostly reliable and well-informed on the topic (if used with caution).

mago again: yes, Lago de Atitlan is beautiful, I have been there once. I passed thru Guatemala to Nicaragua when Elliot Abrams (still alive, a genocidal lunatic, serves both Dimmie and Rethug admins non-stop since ’83-84 when I passed thru Guatemala), I did not see the ongoing genocide of 200,000 Native peoples that had started some years prior when I went thru, kind of knew about it alongside El Salvador Death Squads, but too isolated as a vagabundo passing thru. The best thing about Guatemala on my way back North was I had a hot shower for the first time in nearly 3 months, the previous time was when I spent 5 days in Costa Rica to renew my Nicaraguan visa. It was heaven. The cold showers I would take in Nicaragua awful, although good for one’s health (resets your Vagus Nerve), I would start gasping for breath as soon as the cold water hit me, a shock to the system.

To bruce again, the public is so goddamn stupid, I despair. Finster calls this out, they won’t learn even when they’re getting kicked in the teeth, they pretend to themselves that everything’s hunky-dory.

Now to resume my post on “The Nineties”, I left out a few of the Naked Capitalism “orts and scraps”, which are: 1. Camille Paglia becoming a well-known “feminist” commentator. I confess that in the first year she was around her writing was mostly good, broadly Libertarian (not the Friedman-Ayn Rand crap, I mean the type seen in the rest of the world, leave me alone unless I’m really doing something wrong), but within a year her Contrarian streak pushed her to a Sheryl Sandberg like “Lean In” bullshit routine. Basically a decade later, her template for behavior with partners for both men and women was “Be completely self-centered and selfish and demanding of your partner, never give an inch, Hobbesian War of all against all,” the bad Nietzche that was seen in his early career.

I think I weighed in once on here about Paglia, some time back a year or more; pretty sure I was responding to a Sean P. Kelly post, I couldn’t believe he would credit her with anything beyond just reflexive anti-PC Trolling for attention. If I’m accidentally slandering SPK, I apologize in advance, it could’ve been someone else. Pretty sure it was the same man who linked to a longish video about this horrible Bridezilla, blond and conventionally gorgeous, large breasts etc. Her boyfriend was reasonably handsome and “a good earner” clearly, but before the Wedding she called him out in front of the audience, “You’re not working hard enough on yourself to be better, you’ll never be good enough for ME.” Well, humiliating but that dude dodged a bullet, imagine being ensorcelled and enslaved to a Bitch like that for decades!! Suicide would be self care.

Back to Paglia, I found a great critical post and shared it last time. I’ll share a former good friend of mine’s experience, he moved from Leftism to full on Fascism, is now a member of some NazBoy sect that worships both Hitler AND Stalin at once. (A little ideologically inconsistent, or maybe not? You decide.)

Even Jesus is hoist by his own petard on the “By their fruits shall you know them” point. So my friend grew up on the East Coast, his parents were well-off Quakers, radical pacifists. His dad succeeded as a professional painter, and his main teacher during the 40s was George Grosz, in exile in the US. But Keith was a vicious anti-Semite, hated many Jews (some with reason, probably not most), ridiculed others. An example, his girlfriend had a woman friend named Gravity Goldberg. She got something published in the area alternative newspaper but he would cackle and ridicule her first name (due to her last name, if she’d been Gravity Golding, a Brit name, no problem).

In the 90s, the last time I talked to him, he worked in Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s office as an Ombudsman, to help the community. But by this time he’d become Deutsche-obsessed, did a 23 & Me profile, bragged to me, “I am 98.8% German and the rest Scandinavian!!” Imagined he was a real Ubermenschen. He wasn’t, tall, gangly, skinny dude, at one time (before premature balding) very handsome, women would gravitate toward him (apart from Gravity G.) One time someone tried to mug him in a BART station in SF, he fell on the floor at the mugger’s feet, kicked his long legs into the air at him, and screeeamed!! The dude decided this was a bit much, scuttled away.

Keith as an Ombudman for Oakland did NOT want to help black people, any or all black people. The final time we talked was over breakfast in a tony Oakland neighborhood, Rockridge. He complained about the “lazy, worthless” black Oaklanders, none of them wanted to work, he claimed (completely contrary to the evidence of my own eyes, many black people working in my school district, only some of the Admin were lazy and real assholes), they just “want a handout from Uncle Sugar”, typical racist entitled self-wishcasting. He said they’s “all die out” from Darwinian competition, he was VERY careful to put this in the passive tense, it wasn’t that HE would contribute to their extinction (imagined), they would do it to themselves . . .

Some years later, while he still worked for the City of Oakland but Brown had departed for bigger and better things, a 2nd term as California Governor, his co-workers doxxed him for his online Nazism and racism. I looked for him at the fascist Charlottesville “Rescue the Republic” Tiki Torch event, but no sign of him. I think he was too white-collar and prim to mix with ignorant trash like the Proud Boys, would’ve made him uncomfortable as it would’ve if a Motorcycle Gang walked in the morning we had breakfast together.

Being doxxed, he tried a clever feint. He had a friend who owned or worked at a Bookstore in upstate Nyack, N.Y., his online profile falsely claimed he’d moved there. A mutual friend saw him one day on the street, he admitted to the deception. What’s my point? This asshole loved him some latter years Paglia, “she tells it like it is, women are mostly dumb bitches, a few are Alphas like me, but most are worthless.” He had a Chinese wife who worked in the Financial Sector, I had attended their wedding as a guest years prior, he was liberal about Asians, they’re “smart” and “hard-working.” At the wedding he was still a good Liberal, ridiculed his fat, Fundamentalist younger brother, “You hate gay people, despite the fact that Jesus never said anything against them, but Jesus did run down Gluttons like you, that’s a sin.” I was in the crowd at the main table who saw him do that, the brother had no self-defense, but people change.

Now a change of Pace viz The Nineties– It was a great decade for cinema, with the rise of Video Stores, the works of nerd cineaste fanatics like Quentin Tarantino. He does a piece on Pulp Fiction vs. the Tarantino-penned but heavily edited and changed by director Oliver Stone on Natural Born Killers. Both are filled with meaningless violence, ignorant criminal trash but Klosterman’s verdict is that PF was the far superior product, I somewhat agree, the variety of stories was greater, and some brilliant suprprises like the basement with “The Gimp”, etc. I liked NBK at the time it came out, it was a Black Comedy despite the body count, and said something about the Nuclear Family, which PF certainly didn’t touch.

Oh, 2 related notes– Back to Bill Clinton, CK notes that though he whomped the other primary candidates (not hard to do, the Dimmies ran the clownish, runty Michael Dukakis against Bush Sr. 4 years prior, even “I’m the most powerful man in the World, so now I say I will never be forced to eat broccoli again” could flex more manly than little Mikey Dukakis, dressed up in Military gear & a helmet riding in a tank, the former like the runt Zelensky in Ukraine. (Antony Blinken’s first political consultancy job, that tank gig he designed helped Dukakis get laughed out of office.) But Klosterman says Bill was considered a “weak” candidate, likely to lose by his fellow Dimmies. They thought they’d have to wait 4 years to take power, but not so. And so Bill begins a right wing admin of Hippie Punching, foreign wars and financial looting, thus leaves office with a good reputation after 2 terms, “a good economy” on the surface at the time.

2 more notes, then I’ll drop this to get to the Harper’s piece on the Aughts in a future post. (Got home after having my locked changed 2 days ago, old one broken repeatedly, “the inner chamber” the cause. Today, the door is broken!! Top hinge came off when I opened it, supposed Maintenance coming is already an hour and 25 minutes late, it is a Sunday.) CK’s film chapter shows the GOOD of the 90s, and the Bad and Ugly. So Rambo: First Blood Part II has a body count of 67 people slaughtered, 51 by Sylvester himself. But that’s okay to US audiences ‘coz “the anonymous victims often did not speak English”, brown or Asian people, their lives considered worthless, stand-ins for “gooks” in Vietnam, or Afghans or Palestinians, they’re not human, okay for a white colonialist to mass murder them, no worse than swatting a fly. In Chuck Norris’ Invasion USA, “around 146 people die”, New York Times passive tense when IDF or IOF is murdering women and children, it just randomly “happened”, no Agency behind it . . . In the moronic 1984 film Red Dawn, “118 people are killed, almost none of whom have speaking roles,” invading “Reds” so it’s okay. The US has been invaded so often, right? Uhm, maybe not, last real Mexican invasions of the US were 1915-19, “The Bandit Wars”, from Chihuaha and 2 other states, not a high body count. Before that, the War of 1812, Canadians grab big parts of the Northern US but can’t hold it, Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsuala e.g., but that was over 2 centuries back.

I’ll end on a high note though. Chuck lists the excellent and innovative movies of the 90s American market, and I can say that many were indeed fantastic: Travolta was a has-been, period of years without a major role when cast by Tarntino for Pulp Fiction, he paired well with Uma Thurman, revived his career. Danny Boyles’ Scottish film, Trainspotting, dark tale of the problems of drug abuse and criminal theft from an Ivine Welsh book, a huge hit, deservedly, even though subtitles needed for indecipherable Scottish lingo. PT Anderson’s Porn-world satire, Boogie Nights. Jane Campion’s “disturbing” The Piano, Vincent Gallo’s professional gigolo film Buffalo ’66. “Spike Jones’ & Charlie Kaufman’s brain-fuck Being John Malkovich”, stunningly off-the-wall. Sophia Coppola-directed The Virgin Suicides. (1st one on his list I hadn’t seen, not interested in teen virgin girls offing themselves.) Aranofsky’s “mathematically-obsessed Pi,” well CK could’ve done a bit more research there, that was a movie about Qabalah, abstract (but dangerous) alternative realities. Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, he started in the 80s but consistently brilliant & provocative. Christopher Nolan’s Memento. “Wes Anderson’s esoteric character studies”, not sure if this includes The Royal Tennenbaums about a tennis-pro family, but most of his stuff brilliant, great artificial color palette. The chapter covering this entitled “The Movie Was About A Movie,” postmodern navel-gazing in many cases BUT mind-blowing art in many. CK doesn’t list one of the BEST in my view, the Tech-Dystopian Strange Days, 98 or 99, instead of buying drugs one can jack a portal into one’s brain directly and relive another’s experience, great sex, or being tortured and dying (I wouldn’t want that one but it takes all kinds), etc. Oh that reminds me of 1983’s Cronenberg film Videodrome, starring James Woods and Debbie Harry, he rightly omits it as not of the 90s.

don’t worry, if its the most short term stupid thing you can do, the capitalist will do it.

after all, everything covered in this youtube, bill clinton and the capitalist already did it with china.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ1U1lP_wgM

BOMBSHELL: Using AI Costs Corporations MORE Than The Humans It Replaces! w/ Garland Nixon

Jimmy reports that — surprise, suprise! — AI is proving far more expensive than the human workers it was supposed to replace, with token costs for running AI agents now exceeding employee salaries—exemplified by Microsoft banning its own engineers from using Claude Code after invoices became unsustainable, and Uber’s CTO blowing his entire 2026 budget by April.

He notes that Nvidia’s own VP admitted that for his team, “the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” and that Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure while discovering that the economics don’t work.

Guest Garland Nixon observes that everything the ruling elite tells us produces the opposite result, and that companies like Microsoft don’t actually bet their future because they know the government will bail them out, noting that Dodd-Frank baked bailouts directly into the system.

Jimmy concludes that the whole AI narrative is “blowing up,” that the scam was never about efficiency but about surveillance and control (via data centers, UBI, and CBDCs), and that PolyMarket gives a 22% chance of the AI bubble bursting by the end of the year.

Russia still hasn’t developed an industrial-miltary-technological stack that is entirely independent of the US or ‘the west.’

Russia depends on components from companies such as Analog Devices, Honeywell, Microchip, Micron, Molex, Samtec, and Xilinx; Germany’s Siemens and Infineon; Japan’s Murata and Hirose; Switzerland-headquartered STMicroelectronics; and Ireland-based TE Connectivity.

To name just a few.

LifeElectronics LLC is just one of many Russian LLC’s and other entities that act as intermediaries for this ‘under-the-table’ procurement that bypasses the ‘sanctions’ we hear about it.

A Chinese company called HK JDW ELECTRONIC CO LTD is one of hundreds such Chinese entities that also act as intermediaries between Russia and companies such as Siemens, Infineon, Mitsubishi, FUJI, Hitachi, and other international brands.

Now consider that the US and ‘the west’ themselves are completely occupied by Israel and its agents and their own stacks are completely infiltrated by them.

Now consider that Russia itself is largely controlled by Chabad.

China?

China does lots and lots of business with the Zionist entity, including structurally-integral projects such as Haifa port to name just one.

https://jewishwebsite.com/featured/chinese-run-port-opens-in-haifa-new-port-also-in-works-in-ashdod/74640/

TASS: Another batch of Russian oil arrives in Japan amid disrupted supplies from Middle East

‘In early May, Taiyo Oil and Idemitsu Kosan told TASS about the purchase of a batch of Russian oil from Sakhalin. Japan has banned oil imports from Russia after 2022, but Japanese companies, at the request of the authorities, occasionally purchase small cargoes from the Sakhalin-2 project tied to LNG deliveries. Both Taiyo Oil and Idemitsu Kosan stated that this decision was made as part of diversifying supply sources. They did not disclose the volumes or details of the contract, but Koichi Hagiuda, the deputy secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), said later that Japan recently purchased around 720,000 barrels of oil from Russia.

In recent years, Japan has relied on the Middle East for over 90% of its oil supplies, most of which passed through the Strait of Hormuz. Tokyo has stated it is seeking alternative supply sources, but Russia has not been named as a possible supplier. However, Shunichi Kito, head of the Petroleum Association of Japan and head of the Japanese company Idemitsu Kosan, has mentioned Russia as a possible alternative supplier.’

https://tass.com/economy/2139167

Hmmmm:

Japan to send SDF officers to NATO Ukraine command for first time

‘Japan will for the first time dispatch Self-Defense Forces officers to the Germany-based NATO command for its Ukrainian mission, the Defense Ministry announced Friday, in the latest example of stepped-up ties with the military alliance.

The ministry said it will send four officers to the NATO Security Assistance and Training Organization for Ukraine (NSATU) — a command headquartered in the German town of Wiesbaden and launched in July 2024 to coordinate planning and arrange the delivery of security assistance to the war-torn country.

The officers will work with others to coordinate the provision of equipment and training for the Ukrainian military following Russia’s invasion of its neighbor in February 2022, while also serving as liaisons to partner nations.

The officers, two from the Ground Self-Defense Force and one each from the Air and Maritime Self-Defense Forces, will not be involved in actual combat operations.

“This dispatch will contribute to strengthening Japan’s own defense posture by learning lessons from Ukraine, including those regarding ‘new ways of fighting,’ while also deepening cooperation between Japan and NATO, given that security in the European-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions is inextricably linked,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/05/29/japan/japan-sdf-nato-ukraine-command/

A world ‘globalized’ by financial parasites is a stupid world, getting dumber by the second.

Putin continues to bow to Kirill Dmitriev and Elvira Nabiullina, both of whom represent the Russian oligarchs.

John Helmer recently reported that Putin ‘subtly’ offended the Iranians by claiming that Larijani had ‘passed away’ when he had been intentionally targetted and eliminated by the Zionist entity:

‘Putin was replying to a reporter who asked him to comment on the options in negotiation with Iran at the moment over safeguards for its highly enriched uranium. “Russia once offered its own export platform, the United States of America refuses. The Iranians say they want to keep the [uranium] too. Do you see a way out of this situation?”

“Everyone agreed –” Putin replied, “the representatives of the United States agreed, Iran agreed, Israel agreed. But then the United States hardened its position and demanded export only to the United States.

After that, Iran hardened its position, I was told, and then along came Mr. Larijani, who unfortunately has passed away. That’s a pity, he was a person with whom it was possible to conduct a constructive dialogue, he was able to listen, hear, respond to everything. But then he came and said, ‘No, you know, we’ve changed our position too. Now we are not ready to take out this enriched uranium anywhere. We offer Russia a new format of cooperation – to create a joint venture, but on the territory of Iran, and together there to dilute uranium.’

I said, ‘I don’t mind. The main thing is that this should defuse the situation. But it seems to me that no one will agree with this: neither the United States nor Israel. This has happened, and in this direction the situation has reached a standstill, frankly.”

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/79718

In the Kremlin record Putin has met Larijani four times – November 11, 2006; October 22, 2015; July 20, 2025; and most recently on January 30, 2026. The Kremlin communiqué for their meeting last July acknowledged the two men discussed “stabilising the situation in the region and resolving any issues pertaining to Iran’s nuclear programme via political means.” The January 2026 communiqué said they had met but nothing more.

Six weeks later, Larijani was targeted and killed in an air strike on Teheran on March 17.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed credit for the assassination. “This morning, we eliminated Ali Larijani. Ali Larijani is the boss of the Revolutionary Guards, that group of gangsters that effectively runs Iran. Alongside him, we also eliminated the commander of the Basij [Brigadier General Gholamreza Soleimani] – they are the gangsters’ assistants who are terrorizing the population in the streets of Teheran and other Iranian cities. ”

President Donald Trump followed the next day: “Their leaders are gone. I guess one of the — their top person [Larijani] was a — they say, a lot of people say their actual top was, uh, killed yesterday, along with somebody else [Soleimani], uh, that — who was responsible for the killing. The man that was responsible for the killing of 32,000 people over the last two weeks…Nobody wants to have — uh, nobody wants to have Iran or anybody, but nobody wants to have Iran with a nuclear — because these people are crazy. They’re absolutely crazy and they’re vicious, violent.”

Netanyahu’s word was “eliminated”. Trump’s word was “killed”. But Putin’s word was “passed away”.

What has Putin calculated he gains from falsifying the meaning of the killing and the Israeli and US officials who ordered it? The reporters meeting with Putin were unable to follow up.’

https://johnhelmer.net/vladimir-putin-passed-this-way-ali-larijani-passed-away/

So, this is a wink and a nod to the Zionist entity and its oligarch enablers inside Russia and the world over that Putin’s Russia is ultimately on your side depsite what we have to say publicly to appease the masses.

‘Passed away’ is analogous to how Jewish lives are always ‘slaughtered’ while Palestinians simply ‘die’ in the midst of the fighting.

There is no agency ascribed and that is by design.

Language and connotation are everything.

https://johnhelmer.net/vladimir-putin-passed-this-way-ali-larijani-passed-away/

The global game is rigged just like the US game is. And every other country.

They coordinate their votes like ‘the squad’ does, the dems do, the repubs do…so that there is no way to ‘throw the bums out’ – locally, nationally, globally…:

IMF AID TO UKRAINE – RUSSIA VOTES AGAINST, INDIA ABSTAINS, CHINA VOTES IN FAVOUR

https://johnhelmer.net/imf-aid-to-ukraine-russia-votes-against-india-abstains-china-votes-in-favour-and-other-secrets-lavrov-has-just-exposed/

Bruce Wilder

Much of what passes for the liberal left has never even thought of getting off the neoliberal train — the boomers (“my peeps”) cosplay resistance at “No Kings” rallies with no self-awareness of how ridiculously useless they are.

Damn it, Bruce. These “cosplayers” are putting their bodies on the line!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_police_shoving_incident

On June 4, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests in New York state, police officers from the Buffalo Police Department pushed 75-year-old Martin Gugino during a confrontation in Buffalo’s Niagara Square, causing him to fall to the ground which left him bleeding from the ear.[1] Gugino was seriously injured, sustaining a brain injury, and was still unable to walk nearly two weeks later.[2][3][4] He was hospitalized for nearly four weeks.

And all you can do is to sneer at them.

What have YOU done of late, Bruce, to help the country or the world out of this mess, save to diss anyone else who actually is trying to make things better? All I see is you, like Chris Hedges, is counseling despair while criticizing anyone who is actually trying.

Lenin talked about attitudes similar to yours:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Left-Wing%22_Communism%3A_An_Infantile_Disorder

Mind you, leftists who criticized communists had more genuine points of concern than style points or ideological purity.

I would also note about the two most significant presidents in US history, that Lincoln was criticized by abolitionists in 1860 and afterwards, and that FDR ran for the presidency in 1932 promising to balance the budget.

Wow, Dan Kelly, that was some masterful chronicling of interdependence and global manipulation. The barnyard is feeding from the same trough.

Just wanted to note that Putin has long been in the oligarchs’ pockets and a friend of the Zionist entity contrary to what much of the alt community would like to believe. Thanks for hammering it home along with all the other excellent connections you make.

Aside from the genuine actual factual things accomplished by No Kings demonstrations ( millions of people seeing millions of people see that millions of people are unhappy campers and are not alone in their unhappy camperness), any number of those millions of people can exchange views and especially personal contact information to begin organizing for doing this-and-that between demonstrations.

Anyone who is non-envious, non-jealous, non-spiteful and non-corrosive can see that and respect it. Of course those who are jealous, envious, spiteful, corrosive and who have precisely nothing to contribute to anything will, of course, have nothing to offer except to “sneer at them”.

Let them sneer. They reveal themselves to be what they are and they are clearly ” being all they can be” as the Army slogan has it.

mago, 100%. Guess what I bought from a Comic Store by R. Crumb in 2009, celebrating my leaving the Classroom and moving laterally (but up, slightly higher pay, 2 weeks’ extra work at beginning and end of school year). The store was on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, it was owned & run by an obese but clever man with a cane, Rory Root, said to have been the main inspiration for the Simpson’s “Comic Book Guy.” (But Rory was friendly, nice, not a bitch like CBG. Not exactly a lady-killer though.) Oh, also Rory had hired R. Crumb’s daughter Sophie as a clerk, checker, young and blonde. She was doing her own comics about living in a van nearby with her speed-freak boyfriend at the time, bought one, chatted her up in passing. Ran away to Berzerkeley while her parents living the life in beautiful Paris.

I bought “R. Crumb’s Sex Obsessions,” #ed Limited Edition oversized, autographed (ok, likely with a stamp) about his fixation on being a little runt obsessed by voluptuous women from early childhood. $1,000 per copy and well worth it as an investment, sure it is worth $5-7K now, would never sell it in any case. No heirs, so when I die will form a foundation, something to support Palestinian return or some-such. (Yes I plan to live that long.) Not entirely into Crumb’s Size obsession, as the joke goes, Girl, don’t you know being voluptuous just means FAT? Okay, I had a couple of Plus-Size lovers over the years, the first woman I ever lived with age 23 was Czech-Welsh, very full figured, and a nymphomaniac when we started up she demanded I bang her 3x daily. Since I was 6 months younger than her, no problem. She was crazy, she was with me on the trip to Nicaragua, we broke up pretty soon after I’d returned (she had less money than me, had to return after 2 months, I stayed a full 6.)

R. Crumb rules!! I swear I met him in 2007 or ’08, sadly I can no longer recall the name of the famous free, Radical Theater group in Berkeley that did shows every summer, starting in the 60s and running as late as 2012. In ’08 they had an actor who was the spittin’ image of Dick Cheney, so the show was about the Bush Jr. Torture regime. (Google absolutely refused to help me with this, must be an anti-Anarchist algorithm in their searches.) Dude was the spittin’ image of Robert, I asked him if he was so in a polite, deferential way, he demurred and I respected it, I know the Celeb fame drove him crazy except when large women would invite him to jump on their butts and give him a “horsey-ride.”

Can anyone remind me the name of this group? I doubt they’re around post-Covid, world’s gotten shittier.

( My mistake . . . Stanislaw Szukalski was Polish, not Swiss. How could I make such a memory misfire? Because Szukalski invented the strange doctrine known as Zermatism, and that triggered my memory of “Zermatt”, which I believe is a town or city in Switzerland. Hence “Switzerland” . . . ” Swiss” . . . “Swiss Artist” Sometimes the memory-recall process do be like that.)

Anyway, politics. I just found a Willie D Live recent video wherein Mr. D. begins by referrencing J D Vance’s unhappiness over Trump talking disrespectfully about Mr. Vance. He goes through examples and then does some political speculation. He speculates or theorizes that Trump will maneuver Vance and Rubio into having very low favorability ratings and will then try to maneuver the Republican Party and other Succession Arrangers into deciding that Donald Trump Jr. will be Trump’s successor as the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2028. It is just speculation, but interestingly argued and presented.

” JD Vance FURIOUS After Finding Out Trump Has Been Talking Behind His Back ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pA-1pXjL3A

I hope it happens that way. It would serve Vance exactly right. He dove into the dogtrump and rolled around in it to gain His Master’s Love, and he will smell like dogtrump for the rest of his life, just like Tulsi Gabbard will smell like dogtrump for the rest of her life. The moral is . . . if you see some dogtrump on the sidewalk, don’t step in it. And especially don’t roll around in it.

Here, from the interestingasfuck subreddit, is a map of Turtle Island ( “North America”) showing climate zone equivalents here to climate zones of other parts of the world. It is certainly interesting, and if deeply accurate in its understanding, could be quite useful to people trying to live their lives whatever “overseas climate zone equivalent” they are living in.

“A comparison of climatic analogues across the Northern Hemisphere”
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1tvbvox/a_comparison_of_climatic_analogues_across_the/

( I see that it includes Michigan and the land around Lake Michigan in the area it calls equivalent to the climate of India. That seems preposterous to me and makes me wonder how useful the rest of this conceptual map is. Maybe it is just fun to think about and play with).

Well! . . . when I exPAND the map I linked to just above so I can really read the names on it, I see that Michigan and the land around Lake Michigan is not labelled ” India”, it is labeled ” Ukraine”.

So the preposterosity disappears and was never really there, and the map could be conceptually useful to think about.

From the DamnThat’sInteresting subreddit . . .

“In 1204, a Japanese poet wrote in his diary that the sky turned blood red for 3 nights. 800 years later, scientists drilled into buried trees and confirmed: he was witnessing a catastrophic solar storm that would have fried every satellite on Earth today.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1tvt3of/in_1204_a_japanese_poet_wrote_in_his_diary_that/

@Mark Level, I know exactly the group you’re referring to, and I saw them perform a couple of times in Seattle, but like you I forget the name. The SF something something improv group is my best recollection, but that’s not close. If it comes back to me, I’ll let you know. Anybody reading this have any idea?
As if anybody’s reading this, but one never knows. . .