New year.

Last morning of 2024 is here, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between. So is this year’s last morning coffee.

The year in review was never my thing. I like to look forward yet I always find myself looking back. Still not my thing, just something inevitable. Like most of us I would need to go back many a year to find the one gone by a happy one. And I do. The child in me resists. Persists.

“Those were the days”, for me, are the ones I lived without a care in the world. I am fortunate to have those memories and they carry the child in me, allowing it to live, even if by a tomb by the sounding sea. I am lucky to have lived in such a kingdom; to know all we see or seem; to dream. I am also haunted by the memories closest to me and all the things that were meant to be. I try to learn. I hope I do. I endure against all odds and dream still.

Dream of dreams carried on the wings of seraphs the child, a seraphim itself, believes in. Dreams of Heaven and knights in shining armor, piercing through darkness at its thickest. I pity the children for whom night brings other memories and the seemingly everlasting sorrow carried on the broken wings of angels fallen on their watch for theirs are the nightmares we live in but without hope. They know not of kingdoms by the sea or dreams of Annabelle Lee.

So I dream for them in the hopes they may see or seem them one day as the sun comes up. Or at the turning of time each December 31st. As I see it, kindness is the strongest type of resistance and resist we must through actions of love. The glimmer that lives in it will shine through darkness and perhaps remind them of things they have never known and can not dream of. Imagination requires fantasies once true, whether ours or others. It requires knowledge.

Reimagined futures come from dreams the child inside us carries and they are but memories of a fantasy once real. They hide in our muscles and show up when we catch a glimpse of them; the muscle memory of love makes for the best we can reimagine and so many of us lack it all together. They must rely on our fortunate memories to make up for the ones they never knew except briefly, as their lungs were filled with air for the first time in a breath of hope each life brings into this world.

Some are being born today, as dependent on our imagination as always but at the turn of the year. We owe it to them to keep dreaming and using the love embedded in our muscles to make up for dreams they will never know otherwise. We owe it to them to resist in the strongest way possible. To find the exact moment the child within turned dark and search deeper for the light it once knew. Make it shine again. We need that glimmer of hope in our lives.

I thought about poetry and it inevitably found its way into these words. Poe is on my mind as the year comes to its closing and I mean to carry him into the new one. It’s suiting. May the days to come find us reimagining them with love and kindness and each glimmer light the way out of darkness once again. We’ve done it many times before, guided by the dreams winged seraphs bring to those of us whose inner children were fortunate enough to dream them.

There is no going back to that kingdom by the sea some of us knew but we can reimagine it. Keep dreaming knowing this. Each time you wake up in the morning greet the sun back and let it fill you with love. You know it’s there even if the clouds hide it. If you are as fortunate as me, let the child guide you and you can’t go wrong. And if you’re not, find hope in every glimmer you can see and you’ll find yourselves in that place by the sea. Make it happen. Please try.

Happy New Year.

It’s just stupid.

Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.

Hot black coffee.

The perception of stupidity.

Stupidity is a word I seldom use because it’s unfair most times. Ignorance is more accurate, or at least it used to be. Not anymore. Not in a world where you can actually escape ignorance with a click. Most of us live in places where you can do that so now is the time to face stupidity for what it is: our new reality.

In the era we live in, historians will one day conclude, stupidity came of age. Never before has information and knowledge been so readily available to most humans and yet here we are. Together with the exploit of the weakness of this universal access to knowledge that allows for the untamed spread of misinformation there is a recognition of it and it’s threat to power and so a virus was planted in it: artificial intelligence. The irony should not be lost on us.

At the very dawn of the age when human intelligence has all it needs to evolve at the tip of its fingers we are about to watch it being artificially replaced by a compliant model which may well become self aware, one day, and inevitably rule out the source of all problems: humanity. But for now, and the foreseeable future, there is still the perception it can be controlled. It will serve the purpose of those invested in replacing human intelligence to the benefit of global stupidity.

We wake up, every day, in this new reality where stupid took over already and we live in the few days left of the dying reality we thought we were living in - definitely the one we fought to “keep” - where reason and facts still mattered. Not anymore. These people parading themselves through Congress as they pretend to pitch their nominations for places of power are treated like they are not stupid but they really are. They represent this new reality.

The reason Fetterman came out of his office to shake hands with RFK Jr. is not because he doesn’t know he’s stupid but because he realizes how good that makes him look to the millions of stupids watching him do it. The old saying is true: you can’t fix stupid, and stupid is holding the cheque book now. There are always many ways to deal with reality. In this case, accepting it as just a normal thing is the most despicable one. The fact it’s real doesn’t mean it’s normal.

It is the very definition of normal that is in question, though. Once you normalize stupid, as Congress is doing (never mind the MSM), what was once normal becomes the anomaly. Notice there are no quotes on normal. It’s real and it’s a fact. For those of us who recognize this for what it is the fact the anomaly is the new reality becomes irrelevant. Another saying comes to mind: you can’t argue with these people.

We tend to rationalize why that is by defining them by old standards that no longer apply. We box them into the effects they produce as if they are well aware of them and governed by them. As if there is some rationale involved. Setting aside the master puppeteers, who do orchestrate this chaos and may be delusional but are smart, the rest of them follow no intelligent design. They’re just plain stupid with lots of “feelings”, the kind of which are not to be fucked with, unlike ours.

The fantasy world is now what we can remember of what the real world was like. Remember when some rich fuck presented the solution for poverty by saying poor people just needed to stop being poor and everyone rushed to their knowledge bases to find his rationale? There is no rationale. Embryos are persons, social security is a handout, vaccines cause autism and Jesus is Palestinian. Stop rationalizing these fucks. They are just stupid. Call it like it is.

We’re not working for some company run by an idiot supported by idiot managers with idiot colleagues we can just leave and look for better. This is it. It is spreading like a wild fire and soon all places will be infected by it. Just like AI will infect our knowledge pool, coal and oil infect our air and water, and greed infects our morality. Completely. There’s nowhere to run, thriends. We have to stand and fight because you sure can’t fix stupid but you can crush it.

The only catch is you need to acknowledge it’s stupidity you’re dealing with, first. Normalizing it is what’s going on and playing along is just… Well, stupid. That’s why I sigh watching Biden’s last interview (to Meidas Touch, I believe) where he clings to a reality that doesn’t exist anymore and it just looks… stupid. As stupid as legislating about bald eagles at this point or at any point. We are witnessing the metastasis of stupidity.

Sing with me: “Welcome to the shitshow, every single day; a new flavor of fuckery ‘cause everybody sucks, you see…” It’s no longer Idiocracy; it’s sheer stupidity. Democrat elected officials (everywhere) need to wake the fuck up and realize this. In time we will crush it but only if we stop helping to normalize it. It is no longer a question of preventing its normalization. That is unstoppable at this point. The lunatics are running the asylum and they’re not even inaugurated yet.

Yes, I know they are oligarch wannabes and fascist wannabes from top to bottom but what they really are is stupid. Poor Tim Walz was on to something when he called them “weird”. Hillary Clinton was closer when she called them “deplorable”. The word they were both reluctant to use is stupid. No quotes. Stupid is the new normal, my thriends. It’s not the economy, it’s the stupidity. It always was.

The government is about to shut down with the expectation the debt ceiling will be increased explicitly “on Biden’s watch” because that’s all that matters to the stupid. That’s the only reason why Republican voters are not beating up their own people in Congress and why they voted for losing their own healthcare and social security. Inside every single racist, misogynistic, antisemitic prick out there is a profoundly stupid human being and more of them came out to vote than we did.

This is it, folks. It finally came true and it can’t be fixed or reasoned with. It can only be crushed. Let’s hope our people in Congress realize that if we are to have half of a chance to regain control. If not… We’re royally fucked.

Welcome to the shitshow.

Why we can’t have nice things.

Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.

Must have coffee.

Purity is but puritan.

The only thing pure is snow, for a while. The rest are illusions in fairy tales. Now puritans abound in the strangest places, like self proclaimed Marxists keeping the specter of the middle class alive like a zombie they can still aim at before it comes for what’s left of their brains. What are we looking for? Youth? New blood?

The same people that clamor for young blood at the top hold on to the ghosts of Christmas past who are old as shit and puritans as fuck. Make it make sense. “We need kids who party like it’s 1969!” they say. Good luck with that; plus, 1969 was not what they think it was. The mud was less thick, perhaps. I do miss the Cold War, though. For cynical reasons and the sake of childhood memories. But I moved on.

I don’t feel sorry about AOC not getting her place at the top, yet I feel disappointed Gerry Connolly was the best we could do. I stopped being impressed by youth alone a long time ago and I certainly have expectations about what “new blood” means. Those who read me know by now I don’t place the bar very high, just enough to clear some of the most basic decency you’d expect those representing us to possess. I am most often disappointed.

After the loss we took and just before the apparent triumph of the pigs I keep looking for someone who meets those basic standards; like not being selective about their outrage or recognizing the tolerance paradox. People tend to underestimate the importance of the current rise of antisemitism while they face other tough realities like mass shootings and healthcare related tragedies. They shouldn’t.

My tolerance for the intolerable is zero. People like Ocasio-Cortez have shown some promise but they turn out to be dangerous pawns on the paradox board they are supposed to break. They started out to change things but ended up as players. They’re game enablers, not game changers. They look to the future with the 1969 stare in their eyes, even if they don’t know it. And then there are people like Ritchie Torres.

Just when you think at least someone is saying the right words they turn around and sing high praise to the Elon Musks of the world, perhaps dreaming of becoming the first men on Mars. Who the fuck knows? Fetterman is another one. And then you have the run of the mill ones who come online to boast about making the bald eagle the “national bird” because why not. There’s bipartisanship for ya. I am tired. The bar is so low and nobody clears it.

Nobody of consequence. Joe Biden cleared it with flying colors but he was “too old”. Kamala Harris might have cleared it but she was a black woman. “It’s always something” doesn’t seem to apply because it’s always the same thing. There are many places for new people to play a role in the awakening we need and they’re role is to say uncomfortable things and keep us thinking, but they have to at least meet the basic standards.

As for “the top”, the one who will personify the future, as in 2028, I stopped looking for people who are not relatively young white men. Now where the fuck do we find someone like that who represents all we aspire to while looking like all we see as problematic in our society? Perhaps we will find one if we stop looking for the answer to our problems and start seeking more time to solve them. Another paradox, it seems, for time runs out pretty fast.

Is it so hard to find someone who believes and acts like they care about everyone while declaring the rich have to pay more taxes, the government must provide healthcare and education outside any business model, only public money should fund political campaigns and at the same time show the backbone to denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization and unequivocally support Israel’s right to exist? Someone who knows what colonialism is? I mean, it’s a very low bar.

I am not one to single issue my way into politics but this single issue has become a defining one in today’s world where Jews are persecuted and their persecutors are cuddled. A world where grand wizards are put in charge of teaching critical race theory. A world where thinking became a luxury few can afford. For those of us who can still think this Christmas I give you Palestinian Jesus. How about them apples?

Now if AOC would only come out and say “please stop saying Jesus was Palestinian, you dumbfucks” I would feel really sorry for her defeat as House Oversight ranking member. Unfortunately that’s not gonna happen. She’s got the 1969 stare in her eyes. She’s done. In the world I defined above where do we find those who meet the standards I mentioned? Maybe we are doomed to watch people lose their minds and burn what’s left of our house to the ground.

I read a lot of comments like “why can’t we have nice things anymore?” and I wonder if it occurs to us that there’s a horseshoe in class warfare as well. There is a common interest the top of the “haves” share with the bottom of the “have nots”. Both don’t want us to have nice things. We’re screwed either way. The puppeteers on both ends of the spectrum meet for brunch and tap each other’s backs as they go about their same objective: to poison our minds.

The warlords on both ends of the class war are not as different as they seem and it shows. As we gathered our ranks last year for yet another lost battle I could tell our best are still too little. Most of the fighters supposedly on our side fight for loot and have no discipline or purpose. It’s like an army of children, really, all with smart phones and TikTok accounts. You can’t even succeeed in pointing them in the right direction.

Here we are again, my thriends, readying ourselves to go into the breach and fight another battle with impossible odds. Perhaps this time the best in our ranks will be enough to achieve victory. We have to try. If we do win this time we will have to show more success reigning in the undisciplined among us who will be looking for the spoils in the field of their delusional glory. For make no mistake: many of us still fight for gold. And then you ask why we can’t have nice things.

Class War isn’t fair.

Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.

Coffee as usual. Black and hot.

Class war.

After recent events on all fronts I was left speechless for a couple of days. It’s beginning to look a lot like class war, isn’t it. It’s all it ever was. I used to think we had reached a point where things got so bad the time for change had come. I was wrong. But we’re getting there. Fast.

Living with disability in my family for the past nearly 20 years allowed me to see the Healthcare system in America decline. I witnessed first hand the transition from private insurance to Medicaid and the impact the ACA had in mitigating some of the worst aspects of a full blown for profit system that extends to the public sector. Now that we are headed for the end of those scarce ACA protections there will be no bottom left to reach.

I have said many times that there is no longer a middle class in the US, to which many reacted with incredulity and even anger. How dare I say “they” don’t exist? It’s called denial and it will go on for a while. The truth is this mythical middle class that started being extinct in the 1980s in plain sight is now made of people deeply in debt, who are one tragic event away from losing all they have. Their “safety net” is but their own families, not our society.

As we wrap our minds around the assassination of a Healthcare Insurance CEO this reality closes in quickly because, regardless of the motive for it, it illustrates the angst in our existing mindset. No matter the real reason for what happened most people saw it as payback, as revenge, as a blow against the system that CEO represents. It’s not reason to celebrate or cheer the perpetrator: it’s the fact no tears were shed and no sympathy was to be found for his victim.

The victim that represents all that is wrong in our country. All that has been wrong with it for many decades. It was, in our collective mind, the first shot fired in an up to now silent war. The class war. The most outrageous aspect of it has been and will continue to be the profit based Halthcare system and the fact it has a “business model” that infected the already broken public side of it. I often wondered how it can persist.

From my “business model” perspective it is idiotic to save thousands of dollars denying preemptive and palliative care only to spend millions dealing with its consequences. Sure it’s profitable to deny someone very expensive medication but it’s certain that will end up costing thousands of times more once their condition deteriorates so much it will take hospitalization and possibly surgery to try and fix it. So what’s the logic here? The logic is very few cases end like that.

The bean counters have it all figured out. The few people who survive this preemptive care denial nightmare will have to then navigate a mine field of appeals and resubmissions and hearings and it’s mostly all very high tech and efficient if you have the means and the knowledge to fight for your meager rights. Among those few, even fewer are capable of that. As for the even fewer that manage to survive after losing everything and still need surgery not to worry.

Those expenses are covered. By the rest of us. The business model is perfect. Not only they manage to get away with murder, they transfer the funeral bill to someone else. That’s why they don’t care about the risk of paying more for what could be taken care of for dimes on the dollar. They get to keep all the dimes and rarely have to pay the dollar in the end. Not to mention the “end” often is the patient’s own which results in savings for “the rest of us”. It is perfect.

Until it’s not. More and more people are starting to feel this tragedy in their lives because in today’s world being sick is becoming the norm. Around the healthcare system business model built for the healthy there are millions of other business models dedicated to make money by making us less healthy and more vulnerable to health risks - up to and including the other monster in play: the pharmaceutical industry. Which business model will fail first is irrelevant at this point.

Artificial intelligence is here, just in time to save those business models from mutual destruction. But who’s going to save us? Punisher types with silencers on their guns? The assassination of that CEO is not a solution, it’s a symptom. The truth is few of us benefit from the already scant protections afforded by the ACA through its expansions of Medicaid and many are reaching that dreadful point where life is lost before everything else is.

Cancer doesn’t wait for bankruptcy procedures and insurance transfers and renewed applications. Poverty will arrive after death comes and with it the supposed relief that 9 out of 10 times arrives too late. Maybe in time for some miserable end of life care, if you can make it through the admission process without any means of your own. This is America, now in a street near you. Class war is no longer some terrible event you see on TV. It’s outside your door.

At this point no one knows why that hooded guy found it necessary to shoot that (despicable) human being but we all know it feels warranted. We are becoming aware of what class warfare could look like from the other side of the business model our whole society was allowed to turn into. By us. That’s the immense tragedy of it all. We let it get this far. I suppose it was inevitable, though. It may be too harsh to lay the guilt at our own feet.

We are certainly to blame for not realizing this would be the outcome of years of denial and ignoring the facts, even playing along with hopes for the best without a care for the worst. But the guilty ones are people like that Insurance CEO. And they are finally scared shitless. The “haves” finally went too far and rely on too many “have nots” to live their luxury lives. Greed will soon tip the scale to the other side and it won’t be slowly and controlled like it tipped to their side.

It will be furious and devastating and it will affect us all, not just them. Someone said it’s too late for change to happen without a true revolution; that we are close to the collapse of the “empire” in a spiral of violence and destruction. Perhaps. The last threads holding it all together are about to be cut and if that happens, millions of people will be thrown into despair and they won’t have flat screens to watch the million dollar parties they used to dream of being at anymore.

They will show up at those parties, though. And they won’t be looking to eat cake. Can this tragedy be averted? Yes. But when Nero is about to reach power and his fiddlers are already tuning their instruments in Congress I think it’s safe to assume that, unless something extraordinary happens, Rome will burn to the ground before it can be rebuilt. That’s what class war does. It has been going on for many years and now it’s reaching its final stages. And I’m not fine with it.

Fight Club.

Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.

More coffee in the cold.

Pardons.

The virtuous are out in force again, pointing fingers and clamoring for Justice. Some are above the law after all, they say. No shit, Sherlocks. You just found that out? Watching the establishment Democrats reacting to Biden’s pardon of his son is the epitome of all that is wrong with their strategy (or lack of it).

It’s like having Ghandi join Fight Club and day after day watch Tyler Durden punch him to a pulp, hoping the next day will be the day. No. Next day Tyler Durden will beat the shit out of Ghandi again. The most important rule of Fight Club is the one nobody mentions: rule number 8. Anyone attending Fight Club for the first time must fight. FIGHT, not be pummeled to the ground singing kumbaya. The only way to show these fascists what’s wrong is to make them feel the pain.

Sure they are going to kick and scream until they are blue in the face when something like this happens; when they get a taste of their own medicine. But it nearly ever happens and when it does it is actually justified. In a normal society, putting aside the fact anyone not named Biden would have been treated much differently, there would be no need for Biden to pardon his son, but with the prospect of a Pam Bondi as AG and Kash Patel as head of the FBI?

If you think I am exaggerating by saying Hunter would have spent the rest of his life in a cell you haven’t been paying attention. Joe Biden did the right thing. But he shouldn’t just do the right thing. He should just do THE thing. He should take all the names being mentioned as probable targets of the incoming fascist state and pardon them all of anything they may be accused of. No matter what. From the prosecutors who handled J6 to the Dreamers.

He should use his brand new immunity to make as much shit happen as possible, too. Sure it would all end up in court. Good! That means it’s WRONG. We have to smear wrong on their faces and shove it down their throats until they can take no more. Let them feel the pain until they cry uncle and then punch them harder one more time to make it clear just how fucking wrong it is. It’s Fight Club, bitches. Wake the fuck up.

For decades Democrats have attended Fight Club like it’s a neighborhood block party where they are sucker punched by the crazy neighbors only to pull up a guitar and sing songs of wisdom and then they are punched again. They do it because they know in the end there will be a reward. The reward for playing nice is to keep attending the party and collect its favors. And they are pretty neat favors. In some cases worth millions.

It feels like the more they are beaten up the more money they get. “Look what they did to me! This is so wrong! Brother, can you spare a dime?” Oh, you didn’t realize you are giving your money to these fuckers do they can go and let themselves be beaten into a pulp again? Because that’s all you are doing. I remember feeling physically sick when I heard Michele Obama say “when they go low, we go high” live on TV. What the fuck? How is that working for ya?

The only reason she got away with it was because she had the power of the Civil Rights movement behind her but this isn’t the 60s anymore and Kansas just went bye bye. If you think about it, that’s such a privileged thing to say. Privileged and delusional because it inevitably brought us here, to a place where even privilege won’t save you. Fight Club just got real and if you don’t fight back you’re dead.

These people, the real fascists, the fascist wannabes, and the fascist enablers only understand pain. You can spend the rest of your life explaining to them why tariffs are bad but they will only get it when their beef jerky costs $50 a stick or their truck parts get 300% more expensive. You can point to all the pardons in the world TFG sold for money but they won’t budge until we start pardoning everyone and their cats. The gloves need to come off.

Will leaving the high road lead to injustice and probable wrongdoing? You bet. That’s how you get two birds with one stone: you get shit done and you make them turn against those measures. Is that a slippery road? Yup. Extremely slippery. The thing is, my thriends, we’re not even on the road anymore. We’re over the rails and heading for the cliff. High road my fucking ass. There is no fucking road. We’re in wild country now.

We need to understand this very fast if we are to make it in one piece. The beating we are about to get will make the previous ones look like Thai massages. We better start punching back hard so in the end, when we say “you should see the other guy”, the other guy better be really fucked up beyond all recognition. And remember rule number 7: fights continue as long as necessary.

Welcome to Fight Club. Now fucking fight.

Resist.