Happy New Year! - AKA Three Months of Terror! & Joy!

 Ah, there's nothing like the stress of waiting for your work visa to come in, like the proverbial ship. Except it wasn't a non-existent ship, it was an inevitability. I couldn't have know that the whole time though. In the words of the inimitable Philomena Cunk, it was as culturally significant an event as the release of Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies.' That was the kind of thing that I needed to preoccupy me, lest I go crazy with stress.

But seriously...

The past 9 1/2 months have been some of the most life-changing months.

And now, I'm here.

I have my own place, in Grey Lynn!

And tonight I experienced some genuine Kiwi Karenism. Right here in the neighborhood.

13 FISHERTON STREET, GREY LYNN, AUCKLAND 1021 NEW ZEALAND

Tell everyone you know - serious grade A assholes at this residence. Seriously, everyone should know. The kind of rich white entitled assholes that have surveillance cameras and study them often. The kind that will send out their gym-rat finest to go harass the poor schmuck--me!--that just wants to find the right address. Yes, for a fucking Grindr hookup. Are you happy? I'm not ashamed.

I'm sure the fact that I was white had something to do with this fucking Karen-man finally relenting when I told him I was just trying to find a different address. "Have a nice evening," he says. GO FUCK YOURSELF, YOU FUCKING PRICK! You don't your god-damned cameras because you're fucking FINE! You will always be fine, you fucking twat.

I really hate people like this. And he had his Karen wife backing him up, gaining up on me. Fucking cunts, all of them. I looked up this property. It's going for NZ $3.87 million--$2.36 million in USD--just the sort of wealth that makes certain people into certain kind of assholes. The kind I had to put up with.

This post was seriously supposed to be much cheerier.

I promise to be more upbeat next time.

2QON2Q

 Two years ago today New York State went into lockdown mode. I was looking to this date, March 15th, as my sort of "free at last" day for months, and yet I still feel unease. Omicron is still ravaging many parts of Asia and the Pacific, and U.S. average daily deaths remain above 1,000. I wanted to have said that because it's officially been 2 years that this pandemic has gone on in New York (city and state) that it's time to go out and be free, masks be damned.

Two nasty variants had their way with those plans.

Also, Ukraine is being destroyed, with no end in sight to this madness.

Some freakin' times we live in, eh? To parents with newly born kids, I'm like, why?

Thirty Thousand Five Hundred Seventy-Three Lies

...and over 450,000 people dead because of the shit stain that was vomited up from the bowels of humanity, Donald Trump.

This Terrorist Attack Was Brought To You By Amway*

We just have to remember this one thing so as to keep our rage in check, otherwise we'll all go insane. And that's all I want to say before I leave this platform for good, although I use it more as a journal:  It's The Corporations, Stupid! Corporations are what write our laws, full stop. Corporations are what own and control 99% of our politicians. Don't like Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Mike Pence and Donald Trump? Blame Raytheon. Corporate interests are what drive ratings-based journalism to get us to be enraged 24-7, all the while raking in trillions in profits for far-away executives who care NOTHING about the welfare of people. You might as well add, "This Domestic Terrorist Attack Was Brought To You By...Betsy DeVos and her Alliance for School Choice, AND by: Betsy DeVos' husband, Dick DeVos, CEO of Amway...ALSO by: General Electric's NBC - watch The Apprentice, airing Thursdays at 9!" These are the individuals and entities who would destroy minds, or at the very least keep the public as uneducated and dumb as possible so as to reel them in to buy their products (as in watch their programs to buy the products that are sponsoring these shit programs), all the better for their profits! What better recipe for promoting a demagogue proto-fascist narcissist, eh?

I mean it. The events of this week demand our eyeballs be glued to CNN or MSNBC, breathlessly demanding us to be outraged, and outraged again, and outraged even more--again! No mention of what might be coming down the legislative pike that actually benefits most Americans in material, real ways. Um, I don't know,  like Medicare For All, Universal Basic Income, Universal Free Public Tuition? OR, the basic problem that plagues us all: our devastating lack of Government Capacity--that is, the ability of government to act efficiently and competently, especially in the age of Covid? (Yeah, thanks a lot, Maggie and Ronnie!) These are boring, unsexy topics that you will never hear discussed at length by Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Brian Williams, Chris Cuomo, or Don Lemmon. Not to mention Fox News, which hogs up way more eyeballs than we care to admit. And, of course, Phayzbik. You think this platform with its insidious algorithms helps?

Let's get real. There are no Celestial Hall Monitors Coming To Save Us, be it from the Democratic or Republican parties. We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, media companies and tech companies. We need to break up our corrupt two-party duopoly. We need to utterly destroy the fossil fuel industry or climate change will destroy us all. We need to focus like a laser on getting money out of politics. But we can't do that without an awareness that the corporate state is the one operating the strings of the Proud Boys, whether they even know or not. It is the corporate state that allows the manufacture of T-shirts that say 6MWE or display the Nazi Flag. Our First Amendment itself has been weaponized in the service of Neo-Nazis! Amend it fundamentally so that like in Germany, display of symbols of hate are banned.

*Editor's Note: This may be my last Facebook entry ever. Or it may not. Atlantic Magazine: hire me! Just tryin' to manifest:)

The Fake Ad-Taker-Downer Corporations That Created the Mob (aka My Farewell Facebook Post)

Reading about all this I'm rendered speechless, numb. It's enraging. But then I thought about what is shown interspersed throughout the article and it's s a symbol of something perhaps even far more sinister. It is the ads you see peddling crap you don't need or want, and the lie that somehow by clicking the 'stop seeing this ad' or 'report this ad' buttons that that will solve the problem, only it doesn't, and the ads appear again just as before. Corporations like Criteo who lie endlessly. It's corporations that are the root of our rot, selling people false hope, profiting off of their misery and setting up the conditions for resentment that vomit up a creature like Trump to come to power. That's why cretins like Betsy DeVos look at the events of yesterday and laugh all the way to their villas in far away places, gleefully aloof that she and her ghoul of a brother, war profiteer and nation destroyer Erik Prince, don't have to account for any of the misery they have caused. As with them, corporations have made themselves unaccountable co-conspirators to the violence on display, funding candidates like the snot-nosed Josh Hawley to be the frontmen in this grand scam. They fund endowments at Harvard, Yale and Stamford so scum like Hawley can go there and get cover for the bile they spew. Phaceboo* is another example of a vile corporation -- among the worst of the players on the planet stoking this violence through their algorithms which amplify hate and give it a convenient outlet. And we let it happen. And so this is why, after January 20th, I am deleting my Gacebück account and will be off it forever. Many of you I have already befriended in person and I have your contact information, and many of you I have become acquainted with online. I feel confident I will remain close with enough phazspook friends without having to rely on this garbage platform because I have made it a point to use the god-damned telephone or at the very least email and text to have real connections with you individually. And let us not be deluded that the statements we make so pompously, myself included, make a scintilla of a difference in effecting change. So, there we are. Bye, faysebouch, and bye, Barch Zukerbirgh, you evil fuck. May you also rest in hell.

If Wishes and Butts Were Clusters of Nuts...

 “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”  - a “senior Republican official” to WaPo

Wish fulfillment is a funny thing: maybe a sort of corollary to the five stages of grief, some weird combination of denial and bargaining. That is, if what is happening right now will have been part of Trump's final act as putative democratically elected politician: a coup. I mean, why wouldn't this go his way, as all else horrible and terrible before it has?

I come to this post-election-called-for-Biden-but-pre-consession moment with great trepidation and just a sliver of hope--the media is, after all, consistently calling Joe Biden the president-elect. All that's left to fret about, I suppose, is, will the Secret Service do their job, if it comes to that, and physically drag him out of the White House come 01/20/2021? Or will the military not go along with orders to stop Biden's inauguration and thereby keep the Orange Menace installed? 

The legal/constitutional avenue is all but blocked, and with that comes the question of how hard and with what tools does he flail.

Or does it end with a sizzle, a no-show at the Inauguration, a fleeing out of the country of the smallest man in world history. Add another asterisk to our Great And Powerful History as the World's Greatest Nation. It was always a myth.

In Which We Are Attacked By Us(A) - a.k.a. I Can't Breathe, a.k.a. Can Biden Save US(a)?

So many crises, so little time. Will Fortress D.C. morph into troops on every corner? Trump's bible stunt showed cowardice if anything, yet it was still brazen. Bizarre. Yet all autocracies are marked by the bizarre, as Chris Hedges points out.

We look to Biden for our electoral salvation. It's all we have left. Once again, some of the old guard come out publicly for the Dem (presumptive) nominee. And none of the actual elected thug-lick-cans do a damn thing to stop the orange blob.

The question will be how much this makes a difference. Plenty of mainstream Rs voted for Hillary but where did that go? I'm not going to be cynical here - Biden is NOT Clinton, and every election is different for obvious reasons. It's just that the old guard of the 'GOP' is a vanishingly small number of people who've been completely sidelined and whose credibility is shot to hell. Not unlike many old guard Dems, who seem to feel that not being Trump is enough to win. How'd that work out for us? No, if Biden's going to win it won't be because George Will, et. al. voted for him, it'll be because he managed to run a competent campaign that speaks to the actual things that ail us. Yes, and because Trump goes out of his way to be just such a monster, and that that speeding train has just started brakelessly down a steep hill with oil-slicked rails.