Black Man Responds to Blustering White Oaf, Wins

Mockery and interruption and bluster are just symptoms of what a pathetic bootlicker Joe Scarborough has become. Go Michale Steele! 

I stopped watching this stupid show in June when they started to whale on Biden for his DISABILITY, a stammer (which I share). For not narcissistically reflecting their slick TV-ness back to them. 

I stopped watching legacy media altogether after the election. I had already quit the New York Times and Washington Post and on and on and on. I'll read local news. I'll watch new stuff like Meidas Touch (see my Substack post on that). 

But watch this. This is a cornered white man blustering because he doesn't have a fucking leg to stand on, while a Black man insists on the Truth. 

New York Times, MSNBC, you're all complicit. 

 

UFO as Hyperobject (new TV show)

 Dropping as we speak on Apple TV, it looks luscious. Episode 2 features the concept heavily. My pal Jeffrey Kripal is in it! 

My Music PhD Student Is Performing in Houston (please come!)

 Got this message from Tim Roy today. His music is haunting and brilliant. 

Harpist (and Rice alum) Hope Cowan will be performing my dissertation piece Valentina V. during her faculty recital at University of Houston on February 17, 2025. The event will take place in the Moores Opera House. We are collaborating with a professor in the theater department to execute the lighting component of my piece. Here is a link to the event on the UofH calendar:

https://www.uh.edu/calendar/index/.php?view=e&id=645887

Histories of Fascism Concur That This is How It Starts

 From today's Houston Chronicle. 

Steve Schmidt Gets It Very Right

 His view here is spot on in terms of what MAGA is offering. I would however be a lot more generous to the Democratic Party. What has happened here is a terrible combination of structural racism and propaganda, endlessly spewed forth from Fox News and Twitter etc. 

I would however however ad an extra caveat: I am at present reading Simone Weil and she is VERY interesting on the deficiencies of party politics. And I wonder whether what is happening is also to do with a moribund metastasis of party politics as such. 

Good Analysis

Jan. 6, Seen in Comparative Perspective, Shows How Far Democracy Has Declined in America by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The Outcomes of Self-Coups in the US, Venezuela, Brazil, and South Korea Tell the Story

Read on Substack

Freeze Power Usage

 Mostly wind. TX has a lot of wind power (and solar). 

A Great Episode of John Fugelsang's Show

 John is fantastic. He interviewed me about Hell a few months ago. This is a great recent episode, featuring Native American politics and Jimmy Carter. 

It's Worse If They're UNrelated

 The terrorist and terrorist-adjacent attacks--the man driving the car into people in New Orleans, and the man blowing up a Cybertruck (he wanted Democrats killed)--were from the same Texas Army base. Think about it--if they weren't related, it means we have a real big problem (they are related at a deeper or higher or more expansive level, if they're not contiguously related). 

Big Freeze 2.0

 It's very cold here. The Arctic came to say hi, because of global warming. It's colder than in London, which is right on the Arctic Circle. 

It's 30 feeling like 15F with the wind, which is to say, it's -1 feeling like -9C. 

It bothers me because it's global warming that sends the arctic down here, but also because in 2021 it was just terrible in my old house. It was so bad. My ptsd put me in a survivalist huddle mode. My house lost power for 3 days and it got down to 40 inside the house. Then we lost water. There was a terrible flood in the end because an idiot on the rental property staff had put a cap on a leak and that sent all the water into the basement!

A few weeks later, fluffy white mould was growing up out of the wood floor and black mold was coating the "mud room" (where you put boots and coats). A hot water pipe had burst and was making fluorescent goo ooze out of the outside wall. 

The property manager was walking by my window talking with his boss. "He will have to prove it's mold, by taking it to a lab. You can't really prove it's mold unless you do." 

I collected a sample immediately. How fucking dare people treat renters like this. 

A few weeks ago, I drove past the property to see that it had been razed to the ground. 

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I Just Switched from AAA to Allstate Car Insurance Because Black Lives Matter

 ...I had just found out that AAA discriminated against Black people during segregation, hence the Green Book that informed Black motorists of safe and good places and routes. 

But look at what they just said! It's good. 

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An Important Letter

 The good people who invited me to talk are being wonderful about it. You should know what's happening if you don't: 

This Is Incredibly Important

 ...if you don't about it already, you really must. 

Vought’s vision for OMB as presented in Project 2025 is “to basically change the plumbing so they can do whatever they want without any meaningful checks and balances” during Trump’s second term.

“I think that it's important to really make sure [Americans] understand what the plans are for changing the plumbing,” Olinsky said.

Samuel Palmer

 ...I'm not sure I could love the work of Samuel Palmer any more than I already do, but I'm willing to try. I just ordered this newish book about his work--I've loved it for so long, as long as I can remember. Age ten was probably my first encounter with his work, at the Tate Gallery in London. Before it was the Tate Britain...in 1978...

Writing a New Book

 ...and I'm writing it with Treena Balds. It's the sequel to Hell and it's called 

PARADISE

Yes that's right. Because the true opposite of Hell is not Heaven. It's Paradise. This is argued very closely in the book. 

The Awfulness of "The Public Square"

 I believe it was Num Skole who first debased a perfectly straightforward (if not to everyone's taste) concept, well worked out, called "the public sphere," by calling it "the public square." 

(Num Skole is my anagram of a well known very irritating person.) 

You've lost a dimension there, pal, in more ways than one. 

So when I read this in The Guardian: 

"Skye Perryman and her progressive coalition are preparing to fight in court and in the public square against Project 2025 and other foes"

I don't want to read further. 

The degradation of a philosophical concept to a pseudo-empirical image of a town square is ... really depressing. 

And town squares very much what we don't have, with people yelling insults at one another at light speed without consequence. 

Of course I was never ever so fond of the "public sphere" theory, preferring to use less geometrically hierarchical terms such as milieu. Squares have a front and a back and a center and edges; I guess spheres just have centers and edges so they're up on the deal but whatever. 

One Foucault scholar I remember mistook a translation of "milieu" as "sphere" as a Foucauldian Deep Thing about the geometry of social space, with predictably meaningless results. It was to say the least disillusioning to fact check the original French, live, while they were speaking. 

Suffice it to say, I really hate "public square." It's right up there with "deliverables."