by bill | Sep 26, 2025 | Bread and circuses |
I don’t necessarily want to make this a regular feature of the blog, because, you know, my blood pressure. And also because I know I’m being manipulated — back at the start of TFG’s first term, Bannon the Hutt talked about their strategy of “flooding the zone,” i.e. doing so many awful things on a daily basis that we lose our minds trying to keep up.
But still.
Today’s big story was the indictment of James Comey, who as FBI director seemed to go out of his way to torpedo Hillary Clinton’s campaign and usher in the dystopian hellscape we live in now. You almost have to laugh, except that this is of course blatant fascism, given that there really is no case against Comey, only a desire to make him suffer. It is worrisome, though it appears to have a strong possibility of backfiring when the case gets laughed out of court. Indicting is one thing, convicting quite another; if they actually manage to put him away, it will be time to panic for reals.
But for my money, the real outrage of the day is this:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced that he has decided that the 20 soldiers who received the Medal of Honor for their actions in 1890 at Wounded Knee will keep their awards in a video posted to social media Thursday evening.
I mean… Wounded Knee was a massacre. We should remember it always, but nobody talks about it on a daily basis. Why even bring it up except as a white supremacist dog whistle? Sorry, excuse me… they stopped using the dog whistles along time ago, it’s just the regular whistles now.
Remember when all Pete did was get blackout drunk, grope some poor random woman, and show up late for his weekend shift on Fox News? Me neither, cause I had never heard of the cat back then. If only we could go back.
by bill | Sep 23, 2025 | Bread and circuses, Whatever Else |
So yesterday we were treated to the edifying spectacle of That Fucking Guy and That Fucking Kennedy going on TV to announce that they had figured out what causes autism, and that it’s Tylenol.
I am not making this up. It really happened, unless I had some kind of psychotic break, which is always a possibility… and who could blame me? But as I sit here typing this, stone cold sober in a quiet room, I feel fairly confident that the world has lost its mind, not me.
I did not watch, of course. I try to keep my distance from anything involving either of those guys, and especially anything that has both of them together. But I did end up seeing some clips on the comedy shows and whatnot, and while there was some amusement to be had in watching Dear Leader struggle mightily with the word “acetaminophen,” it mostly just ended up confirming my belief that at some point we slipped through a wormhole into a more absurd universe where the United States of America has turned into the Grand Duchy of Wackadoodlestan.
The other big story of the day was that ABC decided to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air, which seems like… how you say… good news. I almost don’t know how to process it. For the record, I like Jimmy just fine, though I rarely watch his work — keeping up with Colbert and The Daily Show and John Oliver is quite enough — but anything that pisses off El Presidente while planting a flag for free speech is OK with me. I will watch his monologue tonight, maybe more than once; I want to see that YouTube number get up into the gazillions.
I was in a good mood this morning till I decided to check the news. There I learned that Orange Boy was giving a speech at the U.N., and despite my best work with the remote, I ended up seeing some of it. The ignorance, the arrogance, the outright hostility toward pretty much the whole world… it’s still shocking, though I guess we should be used to it by now.
Welp. As usual, I feel a little better for having vented. I’m going to go for a walk now. Hope your day is going well.
by bill | Sep 18, 2025 | Bread and circuses |
I’m never quite sure how I’m going to react to the news these days. Sometimes it’s grim bemusement; sometimes incoherent rage; sometimes resigned determination to survive until all this is over. And then some days I just want to bang my head against the wall until the brains come out.
Today has been one of the latter.
The Outrage du Jour is that the Fourth Reich managed to get talk show host Jimmy Kimmel booted off the air for really very mild comments about the recent murder of Charlie Kirk. Someday, I hope, all that will look like word salad and we’ll be able to laugh about the dark turn things took for a while. In this moment, though, it means that the regime gets to check yet another item off its Fascist Wish List. The fuckers really want to control everything, and it’s not at all clear who’s going to stop them.
Sometimes I wish I had a bigger platform for my venting. And then sometimes I run across someone who does have a larger platform and does a very good job of expressing what I am clumsily trying to express, and I am heartened. Today it is a piece called The United States of Snitches by David Roth. I highly recommend reading it. Meanwhile I am going to go lay my head someplace soft where no harm can come to it,
by bill | Sep 7, 2025 | Read it in books |
Books Acquired:
Fogtown, Peter Plate
Books Offloaded:
The Caltraps of Time, David I. Masson
Progress Made:
The White Album, Joan Didion
Fogtown, Peter Plate
And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields
A Soviet Heretic, Yevgeny Zamyatin
Books Finished:
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
The Caltraps of Time, David I. Masson
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
Messages from a Lost World, Stefan Zweig
It was a good reading month, with some long sunny days to work with. Also these are the dog days of media, which means that though the fascism continues apace (evil takes no vacations), there was less content to consume, leaving more mental bandwidth available. (For Colbert and The Daily Show to take multiple weeks off in the middle of all this seems like dereliction of duty, but I guess they’re entitled to their R and R.)
I finally got around to Kingsley Amis’s most famous book, which was a lark from start to finish, the kind of book where you keep saying “Well, just one more chapter….” As with his other books, the setting — in this case a provincial English university — is foreign and sometimes disorienting, with a complex set of customs and mores. But it doesn’t matter; the main character (referred to throughout, for some reason, by his last name, “Dixon”) is a relatable misfit whose personal and professional misadventures are highly entertaining.
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