Scott Horton is a real dick, but in this context I found his assholery amusing, because he is right.

Again.

In my humble opinion.

Your mileage may vary.

"Captain Smith, where would you like these deck chairs?"

--apocryphally ascribed to a junior lieutenant on the Titanic

https://www.vairtere.com/spill/2024/11/23/hair-of-the-conditioning/

***

Dave Smith Quickly & Deftly Sketches Biden's Ukraine Psychosis

In addition to all the self-evident reasons to call Old Joe criminally insane over the past week, I have another small one that affects me personally.

One of the lesser bits of madness was "loan forgiveness" to the tune of billions and billions of dollars of "aid" that were (someday, theoretically) supposed to be paid back to US taxpayers after Ukraine pulled off the ultimate upset and won their war.

Meanwhile: I did pay back most of my student loans, and for twenty years I also worked in low-income counties for educational non-profits--which was supposed to earn me total forgiveness on its own, even before Biden was elected on a promise to clean up the mess.

Yet somehow they still say I owe them eleven thousand dollars ...

... and eventually, they're going to garnish my freaking social security check to get it.

I am not even close to being the biggest sob story out here either.

You have cash by the bucketload to give undemocratic despots like Zelensky, or serial-killer freaks in Israel, or Taliban gunmen in Afghanistan just for promising to be on "our side", yep, uh-huh.

But none to spare when it comes to Lead-free plumbing for poor blacks in Michigan and Mississippi, none for the victims of disaster in Lahaina or Burnsville, NC; none at all for any American to have affordable rent or actual health care or even so much as some shitty insurance. No. Your own poor citizens all still have to pay up, or go without, and some of them are little kids that will never recover from the deprivations.

Fat cats at home and abroad rake it in hand over fist, and the Nancy Pelosis of the world trade on the inside to amass fortunes because the good people of the elite coasts were gullible enough to re-elect her over and over until only zombie drugs and plastic surgery can keep her from looking like any more of a corpse than she is on the inside.

And the trees in their stately plantation rows still bear strange fruit.

Dark as night and pale as death and every shade in between.

***

US Military Power ROTTEN From Within. Collapse Immanent | Lt. Col. Karin Kwiatkowski

An insider’s account of the situation with the Department of “Defense”, which, it turns out, has very little to do with actually defending anyone or anything.

And by the way, Pascal, I know you’re not a native English speaker, but you mean: Imminent.

Immanence is a different thing, and it gets discussed over there at the Spill, not here.

Is … the idea anyway …

Well I've been out walking

I don't do that much talking, These Days.

***

And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go

May lie a reason you were alive, but you'll never know.

***

Between the life that we expected and the way it's always been

I can't walk back in again after the way we fight

When just outside there are people laughing, living lives we used to lead

and chasing down the love they need, somewhere in the night.

In the hard light of an angry sun, no one fucking remembers what was said, or done

Tender are the words they choose;

You win, I win ...

We lose.

--Jackson Browne, selected

Glenn Greenwald interviewing George Galloway.

Well worth the time.

Galloway once more airs his dependable description of the Labor and Conservative parties in Britain being "two cheeks of the same ass", and Greenwald confirms it to be no different here.

They also discuss how they both were long described as hard Leftists and are now habitually and thoughtlessly smeared as right-wingers--even though their own views on most things haven't changed at all.

I think I understand the mechanics of this one, thanks in large part to Daniel.

Thanks to him, I actually don't think any more that left and right are now degraded and useless terms.

Watching his video for all five little minutes of it, you understand what they actually mean and have always meant.

If you're a true Rightist, you stand on the side of Hierarchy, in the cultural sense especially ("our race is better and culture is more evolved"). "We were just smarter or maybe more lucky than those people, but those are the breaks; we are on top and that's the way things are supposed to be, and we of course should fight to keep things that way."

But beyond culture, the Right is pro-hierarchy in the economic sense ("of course billionaires have a right to be billionaires") and geopolitically--the unipolar hegemony of America above everybody else, now fading like fog, is naturally seen as a Good Thing, a right thing.

The Left stands against hierarchy and in favor of more equality. If you're a true Leftist, you witness the CEO at the top of the hierarchy making hundreds of times more money than "his" hourly employees, and you think it obscene and evil--"meritocracy" be damned.

This attitude is seen and feared as communist by opponents of the Left.

The more Left you are, the more equality you want, and that is why Anarchists, who wish for a world where everybody is more or less equal in every important way (exactly as it was for 95% of the history of the human species) are usually categorized as the most extreme of Leftists.

The American democratic tradition is an attempt to resolve that contradiction.

That's why most of us cherish it, more or less. What if (said the founders) we get rid of kings, and replace the hierarchy of monarchs with the rule of The People? What if the people decide who gets to run the hierarchy, through this rather complex system of representation we dreamed up and turned into this here Constitution?

It worked pretty well for a while, at least if you weren't a Native American, or a woman, or a slave ... gradually it even got a little better in some ways for some of those classes. Yay for slow incremental progress!

On out past the 1950s witch hunting of McCarthy on the right, and Murrow the leftist antidote as the prophet Daniel defines it, we are definitely living in a post-equality society.

The two parties have certainly embraced hierarchy totally, and are therefore classically right-wing. Capitalism has done the rest. There is no left wing, nobody to stand up for those on the short end of the equality stick, or the economic one, although they certainly both love to prate about how they are the only ones looking out for the little guy, the common man, the poor, the gay, the small businesses, the woman desperately wanting an abortion or the woman fervently praying that abortion be recognized as murder--the outsiders, however it is convenient to define them in the political moment.

Is it really so hard for you to understand why they are going to re-elect that very flawed and gross man who nevertheless tells them they are something more than a basket of deplorables, a toothless inbred useless waste of flesh living as grunting slaves to Moloch in between the Allegheny and the Salton Sea?

Oh, people, look around you. The signs are everywhere. You've left it for somebody other than you to be the one to care.

While your walls are burning and your towers are turning, I've got to leave you here, and try to get down to the wash somehow.

Greenwald and Galloway haven't changed their views. The system has shifted rightward past them.

Even a Bernie Sanders kind of socialism is not really leftist except on the margins, on issues like free and equal health care as a basic human right. Bernie Sanders and AOC will not use the word apartheid, much less genocide, to describe what's going on in Gaza, even though the most witless among us can see clearly that it is exactly that. They might want more "equality" of a carefully delimited sort here at home, but not for Palestinians.

It's pretty much the same in Russia or China. The just have different flavors of hierarchy, and different species of oligarchs from the more familiar Western sort.

Joe Biden can't credibly call Russia a communist threat any more. So he says that Putin is an autocrat, or, in a brutally ironic and laughable twist, an Imperialist. As if the US has not been the Imperial Empire for at least the last eighty years, and the British for a couple of hundred before that.

(An extended digression on the genesis of the problem in the Middle East [and similar interfamilial conflicts] is excised from here, and posted as a comment instead.)

May god bless the Comanche and the Sioux and the Haitians, and the Canaanites too.

May she bless you and me and every bloody victim of the Hierarchs since the dawn of their so-called civilization, and to its bitter end.

Oh people. Look among you. It's there your hope must lie. There's a black bird above you gliding in one place, like Jesus in the Sky.

While your walls are burning and your towers are turning, I've got leave you here, and try to get down to the wash somehow.

When my life is over, I'm going to stand before a better Father.

the Sisters of the Sun are gonna rock me

the water now.