Because it’s never not about Trump

15 August 2022

I swiped the above graphic from correspondent BA, who lifted it from Balance of Power, and I think it’s cute, and even apt in light of the current battle in The War on Orange Hitler. Still, I am put off by its singular focus. The crimes of the ruling class are vast and various, and El Donaldo’s constitute kerfuffles in comparison. Still, dead Yemeni children is sobering… Correspondent HJ goes so far as to recommend dusting off Ol’ Sparky as a solution to our “Trump problem.”

As I am opposed to the State administering a death penalty, in my ideal scenario, after their war crimes trials, Tjump, and Obama, and Dubya, and Bubba will all be cellies assigned to cleaning the restrooms in VA hospitals. (Of course, if they tried to escape, they should be shot down like the mad dogs they are.) Poppy is excused on account o’ bein’ dead, and Jimmeh should be sentenced to time served with his Habitat for Humanity gig.

Monkey Pox from the Spree

29 July 2022 — (meter stolen from Boudleaux & Felice Bryant)

I got schtupped real hard in Central Park.
The rave spilled out from the Ritz.
My boyfriend said, “You’re the best I’ve ever had.
Pay no attention to the zits.”

Pustulence! And weeping sores!
Now emerge on me!
Full blown Monkey Pox,
Get a fresh case from me!
Home grown Monkey Pox,
It can be yours for free!



17 May 2023 — (meter stolen from Sammy Cahn & Jimmy van Heusen)
Pits and asshole, pits and asshole,
Scrub ’em good so they won’t be a hassle,
To our tender senses!
Your poor hygiene can be offensive!
Try, try, try to do a good job,
It’s, so amazing.
You’ll find nothing’s so relaxing…
As, just bathing.
Oils and ointments, rubbing lotion,
Escape your troubles when you take the notion,
Of a brief vacation.
A soothing soak is medication!

Ending the F’eral Reserve

27 July 2022

correspondent Tyguop-Ojgezfe Wumim wonders what happens after we End the Fed. It seems like we’re dependent on their system. I wonder how long it would take, and if anyone is prepared for the chaos the transition will create.

There are a multitude of transactional options available with a robust de-regulated securities market and instantaneous communication. You may well be faced with the agonizing choices of GoldPass, The Confederate Mint, or DigitalExpress all vying for your trade, be they Silver Dollars, grams of gold, or the latest electric tulip bulbs. Greedy merchants and savvy consumers always find “… uh… a way.”

Wumim opines further: I’ve heard people talking about global resets and money magically appearing…I think it will be precious metals, clean water, and land.

I’m not so sure about magical reappearances, but I do know that there are already lots of gold and silver coins out there, and people will adjust to them as quickly as needed to get dinner on the table. Of course, all transitions are awkward and clumsy and uncomfortable, but practice makes improvement. Money is anything that holds value (beaver pelts, grams of gold, silver quarters, clean water, high test hootch, canned goods, ammunition…) and currency is anything that circulates in place of money. For millennia, after every fiat fiasco, we have always returned to gold and silver coin.

15 October 2022

In order for a State to “end inflation” it must nullify the unconstitutional legal tender laws, repudiate the F’eral Reserve, and reinstitute lawful money in the form of gold and silver coin. The US Constitution does not prohibit any of those acts, any more than it prohibits secession. But FedGov is still more heavily armed.

These comments are sponsored by The Confederate Mint (purveyors of metallic securities in gold, silver, copper, and lead).  For sample sheets of Metallic Certificates (total face value One Tenth Silver Dollar) send One Silver Dime plus a self-addressed stamped envelope; or 
Four United States Legal Tender Federal Reserve “Dollars”
in scrip, check, or money order, to Greigh Area Associates,
c/o
Gene Greigh // 401 Rio Concho Drive, #105;  San Angelo, Texas; 76903

Anarchists Rule!

26 July 2022

not a true story:
I tried using L’Hospital’s Rule once, but all the inches were marked “0/0”

a true story: Walking home from work in Corn Valley one day (ca 1984) I spied a large, spray-painted graffito proclaiming that “Metal Rules!” Lacking my own spray-can, I was unable to satisfy my urge to write “Gum Erasers!” and “Plastic Protractors!” next to it.

20 October 2022 (Happy Birthday Sugar!)

Most of us are pack animals. We are hardwired to help each other. That’s why it feels good to do good. Whereas, REQUIRING us to “help” or to “contribute” triggers our contrarian reflexes, and we look upon such external “obligations” as theft, aggression, or interference. This is why tax-funded “welfare” is universally disastrous.
correspondent Mypogdyf Mymink responds: “Individuals do not have the means to amass and distribute anything to anyone other than in their immediate circle. We will always need a government safety-net to make sure that the elderly and children do not starve. It’s not for lack of wanting to help, people simply do not have the machinery necessary. Without a uniform plan paid for by our taxes, people will begin dying faster than they already are from all the other causes. I am not some starry eyed optimist. I am a realist.
The machinery already exists in the form of communication and community and churches. Uniform plans are not suitable for unique circumstances, and taxation, supported by threats of violence, engenders more resentment than compassion, and also fuels widescale graft not feasible on smaller human scales. I am not some starry-eyed optimist, I am a starry-eyed cynic.

Bodega Blues

9 July 2022

(meter stolen from Richard Rodgers)

Blue Moon, I was a violent thug.
You left me writhing in pain,
and bleeding out on your rug.

My girlfriend wanted some Snack-Ums,
But her SNAP card had lost its charge.
The clerk said he could not help her,
So I thought I’d show him my dick was large!

update 220719: Murder charges against retail clerk Jose Alba, reports Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sigall, have been dropped. As a fellow drug dealer, I sympathize with Alba’s position, having dealt with some disgruntled clientele myself, but am thankful never to have encountered anyone quite so angry and out of control as the late and little lamented Austin Simon or his entourage.

Losses

3 June 2022

As a semi-accomplished auto-didact, I didn’t need PE to teach me “how to lose.” I’ve been losing all my life, even before the orchestrated torture of “Phys Ed” so it has been relatively easy to reconcile myself to the inevitable losses that any move entails. I may well file a futile claim once I get an actual intra-web connection. Meanwhile, because of my cybernetic (and other) deficiencies I am unable to save these files until I am reconnected to “the cloud.” The new “improved” computer doesn’t seem to carry a great deal of its own memory, so I’ve become externally dependent on the IT weasels who still yearn for revenge for their mistreatment in Senior Juniorhigh.

I was naive enough to believe that I could waltz into town, drop a wad of cash, move into a small street level house or apartment, and proceed therefrom to secure employment and to apply for (actual) reparations (aka “Social Security.”) Because EVERY rental agency demanded documentation verifying THREE TIMES the proposed rent as income, every move had to be performed backwardly and inside-outly. Presently, I am kneeling before my formerly efficient (but now crippled) word processor as I compose this form-letter and fear power outages deleting these words before I can print them several times.

11 June 2022

in re Job Number @#######, and Lot No. ######:

While I realize that I have surrendered any claim against your additional service, having taken receipt of my goods on the 14th of May, and being too tired and fatigued at the time to fully inspect delivery, I nevertheless entreat your assistance in my pursuit of one item. Subsequent inspections revealed a few losses, most of which are of too little value to warrant additional efforts, but one has great personal significance and I retain high hopes, though modest expectations, of its eventual return.

Because a few items arrived lacking the characteristic Orange Tags (Lot No. ######) my missing item MAY be tagged with any with any of the following Item Nos: 26, 38, 124, 137, or 143. Or it may not be tagged at all. At any rate, this cardboard box (a recycled Hershey’s container) of dimensions 7.5*8.5*11 inches WILL be tagged with my own reference number, DQN 032. I will cheerfully guarantee parcel postage for its return.

Furthermore, I also received, among a variety of other broken bits, a part of someone else’s delivery of Lot No. ######, Piece No. ### (blue tag) containing photographs of strangers, to me, but perhaps cherished loved ones to others. Please feel free to provide that aggrieved party (“Name?”) with y contact information.

13 July 2022

Have you seen these lost loved ones?

in hard money:
A set of Canadian Maple Cents, representing about Fifty Cents Canadian, and constituting Endless Hours of Curation.

in hard covers:
Tanglewood Tales (published in 1934), by Nathaniel Hawthorne, with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish.
Scavengers in Space (pub. 1958), by Alan E. Nourse
Brave New World (pub. 1980), by Aldous Huxley

in hard or soft covers, all by Robert A. Heinlein, various publication dates:
Assignment in Eternity, Beyond this Horizon, The Day After Tomorrow, Farmer in the Sky, Have Space Suit Will Travel, The Number of the Beast, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, The Star Beast, Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky, & I Will Fear No Evil

on newsprint and between flimsy paper covers:
most Silver Age X-Men issue numbers from 9 to 66, plus a few reprints from 67 to 92
Amazing Adventures 1 to 14, (reprinting X-Men 1 to 8), Amazing Spider-man 92, plus various late Silver and early Bronze X-Appearances in other Marvel mags.

on CD: The Beatles’ Anthology three release packages totaling six discs.
fortunately, I have a copy of my one disc edit of the most significant selections, but still… It’s the Beatles! (*sob*)

15 May 2023 — Just deleted from the comix file.
The GRAPHiC WORK of M.C. Escher
(Ballantine  1971)  —  tpb
*sigh* So the aforementioned “book” might also be this one. And this one may in fact be on its way to Earlie Riser, whose given name and own hand appear in said volume. That would be fitting, I suppose. In fact, that’s yet another way of finding a pony in this room!
Good show! (If fact.)
& while I’m here today, I just wanted to add that I’m loving Mark Waid’s take on the current World’s Finest, and even more so Dan Abnett’s retcon on early Mar-Vell (and Groot)! Folks are missing out by not heeding my counsel!

18 June 2023 — yet another…
Bite Me, by Christopher Moore. I know I’ve never owned a copy of Lamb (Moore’s great gospel of Levi called Biff), but I do recall getting a copy of Bite Me from correspondent BA. It seems until I actually look for them, books don’t appear missing. But Moore’s been in my head lately, and it just occurred to me…

8 July 2023 — Her second husband only had to lose Diva Dearest once. One day, sooner or not, Sugar or Bud will lose one or the other of them. But just once. I’ve already lost them both, and I will lose them again, whether they like me or not.

Tenth Amendment supports Dobbs

24 June 2022

Nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government authorized to regulate abortion (or other homicides), or larceny, or education, nor are such legislative prerogatives denied to the States.

By pitting the rights of mothers and their pre-born children to be secure in their persons, the Fourth Amendment cancels itself out on this question. Depriving a mother of her liberty without due process versus depriving the pre-born of life without due process defuses the Fifth Amendment defense. And the Ninth‘s protection of unspecified rights is too weak when attempting to counter the actual deprivation of life that every abortion necessarily entails.

addendum 220709 — upon reflection, it occurs to me that the Fifth also supports Dobbs, if life trumps liberty.

addendum 220904 — whereas the Third supports Roe, though tenuously, in its (admittedly more specific) prohibition of involuntary quartering and sheltering. I think many Rothbardians embrace this in spirit through their “Trespass Doctrine.” (I am rather less genteel than they and suggest instead that the rights of the host supersede the interests of the parasite.)

“Jews Will Not Replace Us*”

*objectively accurate motto of
The International Confederation of Shabas Goys

12 April 2022

Gilbert Gottfried, “the comedians’ comedian,” comic genius, and one-time wise-cracking Aflac flack was lost to us today. I’d like to think that he might have appreciated my original joke (above), as he was fearless, and he was committed to humor. He wouldn’t care much if people thought that he or I were anti-Semites (we’re not) and he would never demur from what he thought was the joke of the moment. “Hero” is thrown around way too loosely these days, but Gottfried WAS heroic. Real heroism requires personal risk, and he was never loath to put his smart mouth where the big money was. It cost him dearly in shekels, but it earned him the respect of his peers and his fans.

I will miss his wit AND his courage. It is in shorter supply today.

The Exaltation of Feeeelings

26 May 2022

The wise and witty Klint once said that instead of going with their feelings, people should go with their intelligence. He’s right, of course, but I wish he believed it. That would be a good idea. I should consider that, though it has been made clear to me that I have the power to compel (force? make? inspire?) people to “feel uncomfortable.” Since “words are violence” they are well within their rights to respond in kind.

The punk-assed bitch who murdered nineteen children and two of their teachers in Uvalde this month was a troubled soul. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to him and his family in this time of torment.” Raised in a culture that exalts feeeelings at the expense of reason, he concluded that the proper expression of his having been marginalized and having his identity denied by “The Right” or “Republicans” or “The Patriarchy” was to express the legitimacy of his feeeelings and to inflict immeasurably greater anguish on innocent strangers and their families.

Since “silence is violence” and since I’ve never validated his feeeelings, it could be my fault that this boy snapped. Who knows, I may even have “misgendered” him at one time in his life, in person, in print, or on-line. When our feeeelings are exalted at the expense of our manners, our obligations, and our duties, punk-assed bitches will spend their time hunting in free-fire zones like a “gun free” school, comfortably assured that no one is equipped to defend themselves.

230720 — in re Russell, above
“So you ‘re saying that ALL managers eat shit?”
Yeah, that must be it. I couldn’t possibly be referring to the stereotypical martinets who outnumber most other middle managers. I could only have meant ALL, but especially YOU.

Spec-Fic Conditioning

30 November 2019

One of Ray Bradbury’s greatest motives in writing speculative fiction was not so much to predict the future, he said, but to prevent it.  I flatter myself, and I declare that I am trying to follow in that tradition.  Not every future, of course, but some, and especially this one. There are better futures that I can imagine, but I’m not about to write about any of those.  Happy stories are boring.

One of the great benefits of reading spec-fic, according to Isaac Asimov, is that it trains the mind to appreciate unfamiliar circumstances.  Because we immerse ourselves in these strange worlds regularly, we can relate to all manner of unusual lifestyles, technologies, physiologies, and cultural norms.  Habitually relating to scuttling arthropods living on a neutron star, their majesties’ bucketeers, or the cyclical transsexuals of LeGuin’s left hand, we have rather less trouble adjusting to the new neighbors from strange lands abroad or who practice unusual rituals.

It makes us better neighbors, and it also makes us better historians.  “Presentism” tends to not color our judgment as much as it does most.  We judge different cultures and communities less from our own personal biases (“The way it’s s’posed ta be”), but from a broader view of ideological coherence (or its more likely absence).  Rather than condemning Jefferson or Lee outright on the sole basis of “owning slaves” we are able to place their behavior into a context that demanded behaviors from them that today’s society would not.  It’s easy to condemn Washington’s physicians who bled him to death, but like the cop who witnessed a “furtive gesture” towards the waistband, they were just following established procedure.  Today’s physicians might have saved many of the limbs that were amputated by Union and Rebel surgeons. 

And, conditioned as we are, we can see that today’s sensible statists who prefer central regulation to market discipline (or taxation to freedom, or protecting global democracy to non-intervention) can be easily substituted for the 1840’s main-stream anti-abolitionist who favored a more gradual approach to emancipation, rather than sabotaging the foundations of civilization. 

Slavery, and taxation, and conscription, and prohibition, and murder, all worked to the advantage of the established social order.  Prudent conservatives are loathe to tear down things that work.  And when it comes to the state and its prerogatives, most “liberals” are conservative, even as most “conservatives” are collectivist.  Readers of spec-fic, due in part to our peculiar conditioning, are generally both liberal and conservative, and rarely democratic.