Like tears in rain.
I miss restaurants, sure, of course, but there’s take-out, which salves at least the most immediate loss (to me, of course.) —You know what I really miss? Busses. I got so much reading done on the bus.
—in the palaces of Kings, in the drawing-rooms and boudoirs of certain cities—
Even if these problems could be overcome, other barriers to integration would likely present themselves. Keystone transsexual activists are of generally of [sic] lower socio-economic status, and are probably reliant on their private dwellings for offline meeting. Additionally, while keystone radical deminists generally have homes with reception rooms, transsexual dwellings are probably much smaller (likely amounting to a studio flat or a single bedroom in shared accommodation) making the level of social familiarity required to be invited in unusually high. It is also possible that the private behaviour of transsexuals is so abnormal and morally depraved as to rule out accepting such an invitation [sic sic sic].
As such, no “inner sanctum” discussion has ever been observed, either online or offline. Likewise, no operative has succeeded in forming any form of friendship (let alone an intimate relationship) with a transsexual activist.
This time she went ahead of him and opened a door she felt must be to the kitchen. Light fell on desolation. Worse, danger: she was looking at electric cables ripped out of the wall and dangling, raw-ended. The cooker was pulled out and lying on the floor. The broken windows had admitted rain water which lay in puddles everywhere. There was a dead bird on the floor. It stank. Alice began to cry. It was from pure rage. “The bastards,” she cursed. “The filthy stinking fascist bastards.”
They already knew that the Council, to prevent squatters, had sent in the workmen to make the place uninhabitable. “They didn’t even make those wires safe. They didn’t even…” Suddenly alive with energy, she whirled about opening doors. Two lavatories on this floor, the bowls filed with cement.
She cursed steadily, the tears streaming. “The filthy shitty swine, the shitty fucking fascist swine…” She was full of the energy of hate. Incredulous with it, for she had never been able to believe, in some corner of her, that anybody, particularly not a member of the working class, could obey an order to destroy a house. In that corner of her brain that was perpetually incredulous began the monologue that Jasper never heard for he would not have authorized it: But they are people, people did this. To stop other people from living. I don’t believe it. Who can they be? What can they be like? I’ve never met anyone who could. Why, it must be people like Len and Bob and Bill, friends. They did it. They came in and filled the lavatory bowls with cement and ripped out all the cables and blocked up the gas.
Infiltration into large affinity group meetings is relatively simple. However, infiltration into radical revolutionary “cells” is not. The very nature of the movement’s suspicion and operational security enhancements makes infiltration difficult and time consuming. Few agencies are able to commit to operations that require years of up-front work just getting into a “cell” especially given shrinking budgets and increased demands for attention to other issues. Infiltration is made more difficult by the communal nature of the lifestyle (under constant observation and scrutiny) and the extensive knowledge held by many anarchists, which require a considerable amount of study and time to acquire. Other strategies for infiltration have been explored, but so far have not been successful. Discussion of these theories in an open paper is not advisable.
Don dances in the wet street.
Grad School Vonnegut got to Timequake, and of course to Trout’s Credo:
You were ill,
but now you’re well again,
and there’s work to do.
But—and I’m not nearly fluent enough in British fashion or football hooliganism or recent trends in international capital to unpack everything that’s going on in this ad; still—
You are as you have been,
but the world will never be again—
and yet, there’s dancing to be done.
I’m reminded of something I wish I could find, that Geoff Ryman said about his novel, The Child Garden, but it was some time ago, and I can’t remember the words; still, the gist of it was that dystopias are usually limited because they presuppose a here-and-now: as cautionary tales, they’re presented as problems for their protagonists to solve, worlds to be saved, not lived in, and how exhausting is that? How much better would it not be to write to draw to film to record a story about just living in the world as whatever it is it might be?
I know, I know: saving is what misers do. But I don’t know.
If it doesn’t happen, what we’ll see is a variety of predictable partial responses: unevenly distributed technological innovation, and cultural forms of quietism and accommodation. If we can’t really do anything collectively, people will try to live with disaster, internalizing and riding it rather than trying to change it.
Failsons & November criminals.
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! It’s the thirty-fourth anniversary of my radicalization, which I can date with such alacritous precision due quite simply to the fact that it in turn is due to a comicstrip:
It was more of a straw and a camel’s back than a short sharp apocalypse: and it’s not like there wasn’t then or isn’t even yet a long ways left to go (not too much later, I found myself at Oberlin, tut-tutting my fellow students’ embrace of John Brown, whom I, ’Bama boy that I am, took, at the time, to be a righteous but nonetheless terrorist)—but, but: I’d wet my feet in a Rubicon. We could’ve been making the world a better place. We chose not to.
Thinking about how much of what was then recent history I learned back in the day not from lectures and classwork, from school, but from nipping off to the library to dig through Doonesbury collections, augmented by archives of Feiffer and Herblock and, well, yes, MacNelly, one must have balance, one supposes.
Thinking about that because of what Pat Blanchfield says in this snarkily “Bruckheimer shit” walkthrough of the latest instantiation of the (wildly popular) (wildly deranged) Call of Duty franchise—
A quarter of a billion people, whatever, have played these games, um, and so many American men do, one of the few ways a lot of people ever learn anything even resembling, like, the existence of this history, like, for example, like, in the last game, we were in Angola, is through these games.
Sobering, and not just for the ideology the games are steeped in, Dolchstoßlegending this or that regrettably unpleasant incident from Yankee history into thrillingly deniable covert ops that left the world, our world, far better off than it otherwise could’ve been, and don’t you forget it—
not just the ideology, but also the technique: the hilariously toxic masculinity (when have you ever seen Robert Redford looking so ghoulishly rugged?), the conversational hooks and moral dilemmas drawn from grade-Z B-movie scripts (to say nothing of those meticulously recreated backlot backdrops), all the eye-snagging tics and dialects of body language drawn from deeply uncanny valleys, and touches like the robustly verbose commanding presence of President Dutch, who marches into an expository cutscene (after a prologuizing Gladio massacre) ahead of an anachronistic shaky cam—this isn’t the Reagan to be found in anything close to any actual history this world came up out of; this is a Reagan from a Saturday Night Live skit—
—(and also, yes, all the guns and the shooting and the extreme violence and all that stuff). —It’s, and I use the term advisedly, a cartoon: both in the sense that it’s deliberately, expressively, ruthlessly simplified, drawing power from its crudely broad strokes, and also in that it’s deliberately, ostensibly disposable: a work of paraliterature no one could ever take seriously, c’mon, a staggeringly elaborate, kayfabily po-faced act of kidding-on-the-square, a deniable covert op that leaves us thinking all unawares with precisely what it is we’ve been laughing at, for however long we’ve been twiddling our thumbs at the flatscreen.
Anyway. Down with all Commander Less-Than-Zeroes, wherever they might be found. Give me a November criminal any goddamn day.
When the operation of the machine becomes so odious.
“Everything that is happening to the men who knew Taylor is happening because prosecutors do not want to hold Taylor’s murderers accountable. This is what the system does when it does not want to secure a conviction. Prosecutors themselves try to poison the jury pool against their own case, creating avenues of doubt before any trial process gets going. They try to impugn the character of people who will have to be witnesses for the prosecution. They try to avoid doing forensic research so that they have no ‘hard’ evidence to present to the jury, should it come to that. And they try, desperately, to get anybody to speak out against the victim so the defense can use those statements against the prosecution at trial.” —Elie Mystal
Our Americans.
“The police officers stepped out of the room for just a brief moment, just outside the door. And I told the physician like, ‘Hey, I work here, I’m a nurse here.’ And that shifted everything.” —OHSU nurse and volunteer medic Tyler Cox.
Loudly with the quiet part.
Accordingly, I urge you to prioritize public safety and to request federal assistance to restore law and order in Portland. We are standing by to support Portland. At the same time, President Trump has made it abundantly clear that there will come a point when state and local officials fail to protect its citizens from violence, the federal government will have no choice but to protect our American citizens.
This, from illegally Acting Secretary Chad F. Wolf, to Ted Wheeler, desperately unpopular mayor of a city that’s been on fire for decades, which is news to most of us who live here, letmetellyou. —That “our” American citizens is a nice fucking touch, isn’t it? Let America’s Sheriff, David Clarke, make it abundantly fucking clear:
The question is when is government going to do something? Inaction is not a plan. You know what happens with inaction? People take the law into their own hands. Government is leaving them no choice. No choice. I don’t advocate for some of the stuff that’s starting to happen, but I am certainly done—I am through with condemning it. I’m done with that.
I’m just telling people, “Hey, you’re on your own.” Think about it, have a plan. Act reasonably. You have to act reasonably. Then you’re going to have to articulate what you did afterwards. But you can’t have government officials and law enforcement executives telling people, “Do not take the law into your own hands.” Well, you’re forcing them to!
And—wait, I’m sorry, but the utterly gratuitous comma splice from our Acting Secretary is just grating my eyeballs, and Christ, you know me, I’m the king of comma splices, but those two independent clauses, “President Trump has made it abundantly clear,” yes yes, and “the federal government will have no choice,” I mean, for fuck’s sake, those two don’t even articulate coherently as one sentence after another in a paragraph, much less as clauses enjambed by a comma! At long last, you murderous franchisees, have you no decency?
—Sorry. Where were we? —Ah, yes: the vicious fuckwad in the back of the pickup truck with the gun is one of “our” Americans, those of us he’s shooting at are by definition not, and he won’t even have to worry about articulating what he did afterwards, because the Portland Police Bureau did fuck-all to stop him, leaving him more than well enough on his own.
Hey. At least we’ve got Paris.
Ecophage.
Another way to look at their downward spiral is as a parable of a housing market that is not primarily intended, or even incentivized, to actually house people. “We don’t finance housing in this country,” says Ron Shiffman, a city planner and tenured professor at Pratt’s School of Architecture. Instead, housing serves as a “financing tool.” The market encourages buyers, whether Saudi princes or the owners of yoga studios, to treat homes like banks, as places to put their money, whether or not they actually live in them. It also motivates developers to build luxury properties with the highest returns, housing fewer residents. In New York, the pandemic brought the dangers of this system painfully to light, as mass economic devastation made many people, even landlords like Gendville and Brooks-Church, suddenly desperate for real-time shelter. “The housing market isn’t meeting the needs of people who are working, who are living, in New York,” Shiffman says. Brooklyn’s runaway success, it turns out, was built on an economic disparity so intense that it has created a microgeneration of gentrifiers like Brooks-Church and Gendville who are now being priced out themselves.
All those generic slender needles you see piercing the New York skyline, more and more of them every time you used to fly in to Newark, or JFK, in the Before Times, gnomons sweeping shadows over more and more of the streets you used to walk, those towers, every single one of them, are not towers; no one lives in them, as you or I understand living. They’re safety deposit boxes, for offshore billionaires who’ve never thrown parties in those penthouses—or worse, unthinkingly assembled byproducts of the financial eructations of distant hedge funds. (At least billionaires can dream of bit parts in the next Furiously Fast Impossible Mission.) —Have you noticed? Watching the teevee? All the shows filmed in the City: how easily, and how often, now, they can film on location, in great buildings with spectacular views. Somebody’s got to do something with all those empty floors.
Or used to have to have done, at least. Before.
“Plants” with “leaves” no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria” could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop—at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo” emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers.
La même chose.
“Portland is a place where rich ones run away to settle down and grow flowers and shrubbery to hide them from the massacres they’ve caused. Portland is the rose garden town where the red, brown, blackshirt cops ride up and down to show you their finest horses and saddles and gunmetal.” —Woody Guthrie
Move fast; break things.
One is not unaware of a certain disgruntlement in certain quarters regarding a certain operation to which one has recently bound oneself; one looks at the one hand, one looks at the other, one manages a shrug of a bromide, life is compromise, I don’t know. It’s another of those situations where the structure is such that your choice or my choice can’t make a dent in the structure, but it’s all the structure will afford any one of us. They’re burning the postal service to the ground to steal an election—you maybe wanna buy a book? Could help pass the time until a general strike’s declared.
Grimly rarebit—
sadly and but lovely relevant. [via]
Farm team.
Aw, hey, Trump and Barr needn’t‘ve worried; Portland’s finest can bring it all on their own!
Go. Move. Shift.
When the coronavirus pandemic hit Portland, the city substantially cut back on camp sweeps to allow people experiencing homelessness to shelter in place. With sweeps on pause, camps have popped up in unusual places, and some have grown.
Over at Street Roots, a photo gallery, of some of the things people can do when they have to do for themselves. —Meanwhile, in LA:
On July 31, the Friday night that California became the first state to surpass 500,000 Coronavirus cases, members of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) threw a party.
And of course it was crowded and indoors and without masks, because these are cops, but what on earth is the connection, you might well ask?
The gathering also comes just ahead of what UCLA Law Professor Emeritus Gary Blasi calls a “tsunami of evictions,” which, in Los Angeles, will be carried out by the Sheriff’s Department. The California Judicial Council recently advised that the temporary emergency rules preventing pandemic evictions could expire as soon as August 14.
Some residents don’t have to wait for “UD Day”—the resumption of evictions—to have their shelter disrupted by LASD. In response to the reports of the “LASD party,” LA Postmates Girl tweeted: “Conveniently, a massive homeless encampment that had been in front of #Sassafras for months (started when COVID hit) was just cleared up YESTERDAY.”
KNOCK.LA spoke with an unhoused resident who’d been displaced by the sweep.
“I used to stay right in the bar, I never got any notice, they woke me up at 7 a.m., and told me that I had 15 minutes to get out of there or they were gonna bulldoze my whole place, my whole structure,” the resident said. “They did it, they bulldozed the whole thing. And now they’re having a party.”
He continued: “The only encampments they destroyed were a few of them across the street, mine, and my neighbors right next door. And then one block up, they’re fine. They didn’t touch that at all. It’s crazy. And that bar’s been abandoned, and nobody’s been there at all for two months. All of a sudden now tonight they’re having a party, the day after they kicked me out. They were like, ‘yeah, they need this open now.’”
ACAB. Abolish prisons. Defund all cops. Policing delenda est.
A leopard’s spots.
The internet’s a-thrum with reactions to George R.R. Martin’s chthonic turn as host of the Hugo Awards, but you should make certain not to miss Jess Nevin’s take on certain strains of fandom as a Lost Cause.
Ineluctable.
On Friday, the federal moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages and for tenants who receive government-assisted housing expired. The Urban Institute estimated that provision covered nearly 30% of the country’s rental units.
[…]
By one estimate, some 40 million Americans could be evicted during the public health crisis.
While the majority of Americans continue to stretch paychecks and unemployment aid amid the coronavirus pandemic, Jeff Bezos added a whopping $13 billion to his net worth in just a single day.
[…]
With many Americans trapped at home amid the global pandemic, Amazon has seen a surge in usage. Government-mandated business shut downs as well as the fear of spreading and catching coronavirus have prompted many citizens to turn to online shopping more than ever.
Go, find an envelope. Scribble on the back of it. The population of the City of Seattle stands at 744,949, as of 2018. Let’s make the math easier: call it 750,000.
Average household size in Seattle is in the neighborhood of 2.12 persons per: 353,774. Again, in the interest of ease, and spotting the house, let’s call it 355,000 households.
Percentage of households renting in Seattle: 54%, or 191,700; let’s say 192,000.
Percentage of renters in the State of Washington uncertain about making rent in the pandemic, and facing eviction: 28%, per the map above. If we apply it to our estimate of Seattle’s rental households, 53,760—oh, hell. Let’s spot the house again. 55,000.
Average monthly rent in Seattle, as of June 2020: $2,200.
$2,200 times 55,000 equals $121,000,000, to keep the entire City of Seattle safe from eviction for one month.
Thirteen billion dollars, divided by one hundred twenty-one million dollars, equals one hundred seven months of rent for those facing possible eviction in the City of Seattle.
One day’s market fluctuation for one Jeff Bezos equals nine life-changing years for over a hundred thousand people.
We’ve raised over $300,000 within 21 days and frankly, this is too much money to reasonably spend. No single organization needs this much money to make a difference.
Every billionaire in this country is a failure of policy.
Every billionaire in this world is an affront to God.
Our crisis is a brand.
MARIA BARTIROMO
Secretary, we were just going through the situation in Portland. I want to get to the other major cities of our country and the violence happening there, but why can’t—before we finish on Portland, why can’t you just arrest the leadership in Portland because of their ignoring what’s really happening on the ground?CHAD WOLF
Well we absolutely are doing that. So we’re working with the FBI there in Portland, the US Attorney’s office there in Portland to address the leaders that are organizing this and then going after them. We’re also making arrests every night. We made more than seven or eight arrests last night and we’ll continue to do that, we’ll continue to hold these criminals accountable. If the city government won’t, the federal government will hold these folks accountable.
Leave aside for just a moment the head-spinning question of whether Chad Wolf ever got it through his five o’clock Michael Bay former-lobbyist shadow that the Fox News anchor meant arresting the Mayor, and the City Council, and not the good folks running Riot Ribs—isn’t it astonishing just how many constitutional crises we can be teetering on the brink of, these days? And never manage to tumble over?
ACAB. Feds GTFO. Defund the police. DHS delenda est.
Lownsdale Chapman Square.
ANGLE - CHAD WOLF ON THE STEPS OF THE LOBBY
CLOSE UP to the front row. CAMERA FOLLOWS.
WILLIAMS
It is oh-dark-thirty.He closes up the plywood over the front doors.
ANGLE - TWO LITTLE GREEN MEN IN CAMO
LGM 1 nods toward WOLF
LGM 1
(sotto voce)
So who is that?WOLF
Lemme' have your attention for a moment.ANGLE - WOLF ON THE STEPS OF THE LOBBY
WOLF (CONT’D)
’Cause you're talking about, what you're talking about, bitching about that bust you shot, some son of a bitch don't want to do what he's told... somebody don't want to respect you, some broad you think you got a chance with, so on, let's talk about something important.
(to WILLIAMS)
Are they all here?WILLIAMS
All but the FBI.WOLF
(checks watch)
Well, I'm going anyway. Let's talk about something important.LGM 2 gets up, walks to a rack of rifles and flash-bangs and grenades. He starts to take a grenade.
WOLF (CONT'D)
Put. That tear gas. Down. Tear gas is for closers only, you think I'm fuckin' with you, I am not fuckin' with you: I'm here from DC, I'm here from Trump and Barr... and I'm here on a mission of mercy...
(he checks notes)
You're with BORTAC? You call yourself a cop, you son of a bitch...ANGLE - LGM 1
LGM 1 gets up, starts for the plywood over the front doors.
LGM 1
I don't have to listen to this shit.WOLF
You certainly don't, pal, ’cause the good news is: you’re fired.
(pause)
The bad news is you got, all of you've got just one week to regain your jobs. Starting with tonight. Starting with tonight's riot... Oh: have I got your attention now? Good. ’Cause we’re having a little contest. And the fellow with the highest body count wins first place. First prize is a brand new Silverado. You wanna' see second prize?He reaches into his briefcase, takes out a cheap contraption of camo webbing and pouches.
WOLF (CONT'D)
Second prize is a tactical diaper bag. Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture, are you laughing now? You got violent anarchists coming at that door, seventy-two minutes, Trump and Barr paid good money, get their names, to bust them. You can't bust the anarchists you're given, you can't bust shit, you are shit... hit the bricks, pal, and beat it ’cause you're going out.LGM 2
The intel's weak.Pause.
WOLF
The intel's weak! The fuckin' intel is weak? You're weak. I been in this business fifteen years.LGM 1
What's your name?WOLF
Fuck you, that's my name. You know why, Mister? ’Cause you drove an unmarked van to get here tonight, I flew a Sikorsky S-76. That's my name, and your name is you're wanting, and you can't play in the man's game, you can't bust them, then go home and tell whoever the fuck your troubles. Because One Thing Counts in This Life: Get Them to Kneel on the Sidewalk Before You. You hear me, you pieces of shit...? I know your war stories. I know the bullshit excuses that are your lives. What do you know...? What do you know...He starts to write graffiti on the marble wall of the lobby.
ANGLE - THE LOBBY WALL
writes huge in chalk: "A.B.C."
WOLF (O.S.)
A.B.C.
A. Always
B. Be
C. Cruel, Always Be CruelANGLE - WOLF ON THE STEPS OF THE LOBBY
WOLF (CONT'D)
Always Be Cruel.
(writes)
A.I.D.A.
Attention, Intimidation, Detonation, Arrest.
Attention: Do I have your attention!
Intimidation: Are you intimidated? I know you are, because it's fuck-or-walk: you bust or you hit the bricks.
Detonation: Are you ready to blow shit up for Christ?
and Arrest?
A.I.D.A. Get out there, you got the anarchists coming in. You think they came in to get out of the pandemic? A guy don't link arms on the line ’lest he wants to get busted: They're sitting out there, waiting to give you their dignity... You gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?
Past his sell-by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf
addresses our Vezhlivye Lyudi.
