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Apostate Blues

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Readers of this site generally accept the proposition that our American experiment in self‐government is taking on water.  I would argue that, all things considered, the ship is actually beginning to list heavily under the combined weight of a wholly unaccountable administrative state, a surreal burden of debt we will leave to our grandchildren as a kind of cynical stocking stuffer, third‐world education standards, tribal strife stoked by retail journalism, a new and prevailing cultural adulation of the victim mentality, meme‐think politics, and a Congress that is more or less directed by the parasitic whims of a guild economy.

 

Sunset 2030?

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Cardi B and Nicki Minaj are feuding. Stormy Daniels has described Donald Trump’s penis for us. A big storm in North Carolina demanded 24/7 coverage, even if reporters had to fake it. Meanwhile, in other news: The Shanghai International Port Group is expected to take management of a new private seaport at Haifa, Israel in 2021, bringing a Chinese […]

Repair As Rebellion

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  “…When fixing items is actively discouraged by manufacturers, repair becomes a political act.” — Stuart Ward, repair café volunteer My grandfather made his own electric lawn mower out of a pair of scrap metal blades and a washing machine motor that he pulled out of one of the machines at an apartment complex he owned, and repaired. […]

Come and Take It

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A bill disarming citizens is precisely the kind of nonsense one would expect to be issued from a group of people whose own solutions have been ineffectual since their inception, whose entire history is steeped in fraudulent claims of divinity, by unconscionable wars, slavery, and assassinations, and whose only real purpose from the outset has been to control the minds, bodies, and coffers of others by the precise application of fear backed by the threat of annihilation or eternal damnation.

From the Universal to the Particular

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Living in one place for any length of time supplies a kind of general knowledge, but that tepid way of knowing is often vague to the point of uselessness. I may be able to see and identify, for instance, the particular song of a western meadowlark, and I may thrill at the extraordinary memories it calls forth from my youth on the Great Basin desert, but other than the sound it makes and the emotionally pleasing memories stirred up in my brain, what do I really know about western meadowlarks?

First Person Shooter, Act Two

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For long‐term thinkers, the most alarming part of our failure to have the right conversation about the causes of predatory mass killings is that our civil liberties are put at risk.  The seductive anodynes put forth by short‐term thinkers require that law‐abiding citizens sacrifice their own freedoms in a well‐meaning but clearly improbable effort to stuff the predator genie back into the bottle.

First Person Shooter, Act One

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There can be little doubt that Homo Sapiens is the most dangerous predator the world has ever produced. We have enormous brains capable of building systems to overcome friction, the ability to accomplish complex planning within those systems, and opposable thumbs to assist in the execution of the plan. We have canine teeth and forward‐looking eyes. We are the most accomplished killers in the animal kingdom, exceptional when hunting alone, but capable of cooperating in large groups to make a kill.

From Backstraps to Beets: The Hunter‐Gatherer Blues

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We are, many of us, walking around with a veteran consumerist’s thousand‐yard stare, which can be seen clearly in the aisles of any Target or WalMart, where the shell‐shocked and emotionally flat‐lined queue up daily to buy mostly disposable products manufactured by sweat‐shop slaves in Chittagong and Rangoon. Especially when there is a “Fire Sale” or its cousin, the infamous “Year End” sale, and my personal favorite, the “Blowout Sale

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