The news of Rob Reiner's death has really shocked me like everyone else and I cried last night finding out. One of the worst nightmare tragic ways to pass through this world. He seemed to live a good and fulfilling life. Trying to do meaningful things and able to exist in a creative paradise and it was taken away violently and coldly. I guess the only consolation is he had many years that fulfilled all of these aims and dreams. I hope light and peace are on the other side of this cruel and callous plane. R.I.P. to him and his wife.

I'm rewatching all of Stranger Things with my mother to prepare for the finale and I couldn't help but think of how these fandoms are so awful to people, and the exposure these kids had to endure and the eventual turning and backlash, because people didn't like creative decisions made. They were angry. They wanted their time and money back, which you're not going to get, that's not how it works. So hordes of people not sure what to do with this uncomfortable feeling, they can't sit with and go off to their own spaces. They have to spill out and lash out they wasted an hour or 8 hours of their life for work they didn't like the end result of. I get that feeling, I've been upset by creative choice and such and vented. Yet there is this appetite in the culture for people to be demanding that they have been wronged. They have been burned. They have been betrayed of the end product that they wanted served for them on demand.

It floods in the formal media press pieces, to rapid over the top emotional complaints/rants on social media and that's how it goes but yet they can't even leave it at that, it's not good enough. Rapidly to the source, go onto these people's special social media pages and let them know. Who wouldn't fucking hate that? Why wouldn't people be resentful, check out or lose their minds and the grasp they once held onto with their creative work. Being an actor is like being spilt into a haunted ventriloquist doll the audience wants to never forget and continually interact and be entertained. 

I think of the actress who plays El on Stranger Things, Millie Bobbie's trajectory. The way she was turned on, dissected apart, and eventually despised far away from the clever fun kid rapping Nicki Minaj's Monster verse to eventually being sexually mocked and exploited, and told she's no good now, she's actually trash. She actually can't act we found out. 'I'm tired of her', etc. But outside of Millie it goes to all those kids, the older actors, the creators and other TV shows. Like the now despised Game of Thrones. 

'How dare this didn't work out the way I wanted this thing that I loved!? Well you know I actually hate it now. It's ruined! Toss it, discard it into nothing...What's next on the menu?'

Art isn't for you on demand. This has repulsed me over the past over a decade seeing this new kind of consumption for the audiences of these enterprises who become determined to bend art to their will from their favorite creators and creatives. 

'You need to rewrite this.'

'You need to re-shoot that.' 

'Re-record now!'

 'When that gets released again you need to remove this.' 

Chasing people over their social media platforms the fans demanding they want to the art they want from you, not what YOU yourself the artist wanted to put out.

'How could you disappoint us like this?!'

'The audience, you need to listen to your audience and fans! They are communicating their wants and desires outside of what you want to do, you the creator of ___. It doesn't matter they are in control now!' 

'You don't just need to listen, you have to directly cater or what good are you? You're not listening hard enough!'

'You didn't think of me in mind!'

All these giants and masters in the photography world who shaped it have been passing away rapidly the past few years. Martin Parr just passed away a couple days ago.There are no younger equivalents of these kinds of people and I find that scary for my medium. And the kinds of institutions, schools, donors, and media outlets that helped all of it exist has been collapsing with no equivalent either. Much art of the mediums photography, film, television, and music is in grave trouble. Photography is the most vulnerable because it has never been a large commercial enterprise on it's own in the way the other mediums are and the art world likes to keep photography at a friendly distance. More people photograph than ever and know less about the use and history of it more than ever. All the work that is being created to not even be properly archived. What a strange and sad time in this arena.

*12.20.2024, still tapping the sign 

It would be really nice and helpful and ever so insightful, if a mainstream publication could do an article of how digital storytelling with images, videos, and social media has created a time of mass radical empathy of regular citizens when it comes to Gaza. Would be so wonderful if a PHOTOGRAPHY or ART publication would care to do so. There is so much talk of the desensitizing of others through social media, and the final conclusion that somehow that's all social media can be when it could obviously go the other way also and it has. The Floyd protests was an example that everyone wants to memory hole cause it only went so far, because consciousness raised and empathy felt can only do so much to the people who hold the gavel over us.

Now we have the protests and outcry against genocide yet I get that is not comforting because it is not political power in the sense of stopping the bombs. However I think it must be acknowledged for the future, one we want for ourselves and the world. I mean for those of us who want good things. For the fascists & capitalists' (and collaborators) and their visions of the future, I hope your projects politically die a thousand humiliating and self defeating deaths. 

It's good to understand that what the powers that be/that are will want/do want to make sure people are stopped in their feelings and empathy. That those who are feeling for Palestinians yet also feel helpless in the horror of witnessing become overwhelmed, disorientated, and in despair, and disgust become burnt out and bitter from all the compassion they felt for others. There is a very evil man who positions himself as a philosophical nazi figurehead whom I won't even bother to say his name but wrote early on about it's not worth caring about the Palestinians and to not concern yourself with that. Though this person is on the far right this attitude is part of a larger project reaching across the political spectrum, to liberals who cry that Israel is one of the only beautiful and honorable democracies in the world, and those who say they are progressive and believe in propaganda that Zionisim is decolonization. 

When you care about a nation state more than a child getting blown up you lost your humanity.  Now you can go find it again but you have to admit it's lost before that, or you won't be able to adequately put it back in place. 

What are three things the average American loves? What are some characteristics that make up this nation and their inhabitants? Punishment, humiliation, and surveillance. Those are pretty top tier. Totally out of my hemisphere of what I desire to do and engage with, and the mark I wish to leave in the complex and ravaged timeline of the lifetime I am alive in.

 

The Holly and The Ivy (1952)

           

 Soylent Green (1973)

I think I'm cursed to be haunted the rest of my life by artists, especially photographers, mostly photographers honestly, embrace of Generative AI. I'm blessed to have at least done my photography studies years prior. What a curse on us all. And I will always have some hate in my heart for those who smiled and nodded along saying they were contributing to art with it (before these things go bankrupt and use up all the water and become surveillance and mass detention centers).  'What fun! Possibilities! Freedom! The great equalizer!' Asserting they are making important creative work with it, whining you should respect it on par with...No. 

One of the worst things is that likely I am at some point going to be forced to hold this knife and contribute to cutting through the fabric of humanity if I want to eat. Why are humans their own worse enemy? How do people hate other humans so much to have invented such evil? Why do so little see it with such education and supposed enlightenment or sensitivity? These elite freaks and the people they have coerced and brainwashed are going to destroy all our fucking beautiful land and resources, peoples' psyches, societal stability, all for the opportunity for people to view and create the stupidest, mediocre and evil shit you can imagine. And you're fucking applauding it proudly.

I feel like one of a few out here unfortunately who rail against this, have actual fear and rage and yes even some grief over it in the photo world. The cultural gatekeepers and such, and teachers and such, they don't care. They don't at all. They can't see it for what it actually is ironically for being translators, teachers, philosophers of a visual medium. You can't make this stuff up, willing accepting the sci-fi dystopia because they want a gadget to decipher.

A lot to say but so much in the meantime of each time want to go and write, yet the Trump news timeline waits for no one to take a breath. However.... wow New Yorkers 😍

My four blisters from canvasing for Mamdani was well worth the win and the days fretting over if it was possible in believing something hopeful being fulfilled. 

Fuck your bitter zionist racist bloodlust Cuomo and the billionaire ghouls eager to have funded you. 

To contribute in crushing an entitled predator with his greedy dreams of continuing his family's dynasty into the political dirt is heart warming indeed. 

💖

Oh New Yorkers you have the chance to do the right thing tomorrow/today and I happen to be here to possibly witness it in real time, to grind your parasite ex-governor into the dirt politically or do the worst thing....

I've done canvasing shifts and while they have been mostly positive yet you do get some people who look at you as if you just asked them to be beamed up onto on a spaceship. 

Cuomo I was thinking about it a couple days ago after observing his Instagram, that like is this even a real campaign or a money laundering scheme? Mamdani is running a marathon of a campaign while Cuomo is in one of those rowing boats in the Central Park lake waving at spectators saying it's fine everything is great. 'Here's a poll that says I'm only losing by 7 points now!' Maybe us Mamdani supporters will get shattered and the groping sex pest is on to something we don't know. Yet who thinks this creep is actually running a campaign that he believes he can win and doing everything possible? What are Cuomo and Trump doing behind the scenes and what lobbying job is lined up for him after he has lined his pockets from this?

I almost wish that so much wasn't riding on this politically, bigger than Mamdani, and yet that this what the fates have decided, so New Yorkers are you listening?

If you could allow the political powers that be to go after children, one of the most vulnerable and oppressed groups in the world, whom are trans, one of the the most stigmatized identities, than what's stopping them from coming after you eventually? Or if that doesn't matter, your loved ones? Do you people ever think for more than a minute? Or is it all reactionary panicking constantly under the guise of smarmy intellect, hierarchical games, and paper tiger morality for you?

I'm not sure what is exactly going on with the UK leftist political party that was supposed to be emerging.... but get your fucking act together and get in line. We don't have much of a line nowadays to waste. I don't get it, who cares about your egos (people please stop using social media as a call out for problems that need to be settled privately), humble yourself, eat some crow and get in formation. You just had race riots for Christ's sake. Your government is charging people with terrorism protesting for Palestine, you also got some disturbing online regulation laws you need to scrap. There is no time left, you are out of it, as are all of us who care to not see the humanity's ordeal go into the dustbin.

 This is a little late but the Palestinian journalists bombed on camera because of the suspicion of a "Hamas camera" means that photo world writers are going to finally take what is happening in Gaza seriously and confront it right? What meaning can the writings of the medium be otherwise if this is shoved away? This wasn't hesitated with, with the Abu Ghraib images, why should this be different? 

 

If the Democrats think abortion rights can be settled in the manner similar to a hostage negotiation to get their voters to compromise on this human right, they can think again and eat shit. I will watch that party burn itself to ashes in their billionaire donors' hands.

What will you the Democratic party, and your smug pseudo intellects, technocrat columnists, corporate neo fascists backing the professional 'polling tells us...' groups, and Weekend at Biden's collaborators say when abortion is banned? Maybe that's what is going on...they are waiting for the hammer to come down and they don't have the backbone or the courts or backbone to do anything about the courts, so they are repositioning. 

Could they be this stupid, certainly they could be this immoral but to be this politically stupid? I don't trust you politically whatever side you position yourself to be on if protecting reproductive rights aren't important to your political plans and fight. Women and girls don't need more sacrificing since the fall of Roe by the party that pleaded only they could restore the rights lost. And you wonder why people don't trust your party and/or hate the DNC? 

Would you Erza Klein and Neera Tanden like to explain your position by going to host townhalls explaining why we must give up and give in to welcoming politicians who are forced birthers into the Democratic party? Will the NY Times pay for that Ezra or you just want to stay huddled inside your podcast? Will Butcher Blinken be assisting you Neera, since you assisted him into a cushy position at Center for American Progress as he helped assist your genocidal boss into annihilating Gaza? Would you care to help incinerate the Democratic party as well Neera?

I am really baffled by this idea that Kirk was assassinated by Israel coming from left wing online media type figures. Like can you slow your roll or just stop the stupidity altogether? Occam's razor anyone? Do you think Butcher Bibi doesn't have other things he's concerned with, with a literal holocaust he is caryying out, then Kirk souring on him? That maybe he is giving condolences to suck up to all the right wing figures and donors? Do you think "we" the United States (and broader West in general) are the puppet of Israel or the one pulling the actual strings? As Israel is a colonial outpost for eyes, ears, and Nuclear weapons in the Middle East, and training ground for police, war games, and surveillance. It's not some boogeyman hands of the Elders of Zion conspiracy. The West want to rule the world and pillage it through colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, supremacy, and surveillance. Israel is the vessel for all of this. Ironically same people who thought people speculating Trump having any suspicious connections with Russia was dumb libs pacifying themselves, are the ones like 'Omg Mormon kid who loved guns a patsy for Mossad? And Candance and Tucker actually on our side?' Bfr. 🙄

No one who capitulated and humiliated themselves to sign up for honoring Charlie Kirk day, will help lead you out of this. That's all the Senate Dems by the way. We are in the wilderness and when you don't feel the road ahead is anywhere nearby, nor that it will lead eventually to good and fruitful prospects, people stop walking, stop aspiring, quit long term planning, halt their hopes and kill off their dreams. They merely get enough rest to rise and survive. Going further is too much strain on the heart and it's broken so much hasn't it? Too much of America exists in an inertia they themselves don't have the willpower to get up and move on from. We as Americans and the world had ten years to work this out and instead we ended up hauled into an active volcano.

I think very often of a quote back in 2015, of a man re-accounting being at a pizza parlor with the guy behind the counter looking at the TV watching Trump and saying it's over. 

The customer asked "The election?" 

The man responded "America."

If neither the party, nor progressive groups and organizers on the ground, couldn't organize to do everything to stop a comeback, well maybe the playbooks needs to start over. Yet we might not be granted that leeway nor time. However...Maybe...We are just another sorry arc in history and a blip in the tragedy of the human experiment. Perhaps one day people can take our sorry hard learned lessons and fight for everything they believe in and desire, when dangers arise in their own particular times and troubles.

Somehow we survive

and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.

Investigating searchlights rake

our naked unprotected contours;

over our heads the monolithic decalogue

of fascist prohibition glowers

and teeters for a catastrophic fall;

Boots club on the peeling door.

But somehow we survive

severance, deprivation, loss.

Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark

hissing their menace to our lives.

most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,

rendered unlovely and unlovable;

sundered are we and all our passionate surrender

but somehow tenderness survives.

Dennis Brutus

First they came for those Free Palestine people that were very loud and inconvenient, that were deemed expendable threats for state and higher institutions purposes almost 2 years ago. Then in the present day they came for one of the biggest comedians on television because he quipped in his monologue about MAGA online demanding their side had nothing to do with the shooting. Though not everyone knew the who and what fully, yet people in the frenzy make narratives and people react to them, even though Kimmel said he wished prayers for Kirk's family. If they can go after this guy you're not safe from getting a crack down. Wonderful! 

All the wealthy and bloated crybaby anti woke comedians/corporate comedy sports and LOL commentary mouthpieces, happen to be mysteriously silent on the firing and deflecting blame that what is occurring actually isn't! 

It seems like a lot of you are not principled in the slightest?  🤔

On another weird upside down note, some of the far right media figures are going with 'Charlie was maybe taken out by Mossad?', while their online supporters say it was the leftist trans agenda that did Kirk in. Strange and dangerous times. 

Very embarrassing people on the left flirting with the Israel angle, make it make sense. 🙄

"it's always two dumb bitches telling each other exactlyyyy…."

black-pilled by Charlie Kirk death seen as comedy, but not Gaza genocide as an ongoing tragedy

You were black-pilled by some people on social media happy/relieved/making fun of/not caring/not upset about what happened to Kirk but not the genocide going on in Gaza, that we ALL can see on our phones 24/7 for almost two years? And I'm suppose to take you seriously about this outrage radicalizing you when you don't take your own humanity seriously? 

"It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible"

 

As for both journalists and everyone else who were (and still are) acting like sociopaths the last couple days online....If you can't participate in talking about politics without endangering the lives of trans people maybe fix your hearts? Isn't Jesus about that? Wouldn't Jesus say 'I think David Lynch had a salient point there'? Why do you believe in Jesus anyway if you're so cruel? Are you waiting for him to save you? What makes your hateful self worth saving in his name? I'm not even religious like that and yet I think I'd at least be a better candidate for that kind of life. One of the best pieces of advice my father ever told me was to not trust people who say they know God and say they speak to him, those are things not accessible to us in this life. And yet I definitely know that man who left this mortal plane a couple days ago was not some vessel for God's love. The hagiography around him is shameless but I expected it though from his side, it's how it goes the myth making on that side, however some of you foolish liberals...

The treatment of trans people merely in retaliation to him is fucking sickening. For those of you who choose to remain this way, I hope the God you desire for acceptance and forgiveness and his love never finds you. That the God you crave looks down on you in disgust and mortification. That he recoils hearing your words and pleas to him, because he can't believe he crafted such vengeful abominations, that have the nerve to describe themselves as caring human beings all in the Lord's name. 

The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel

Maybe I'm being too dark in my speculations, but I wonder if we are in the early days of a militant anti-vax movement taking shape in the same way the forced birth movement manifested. People likely don't remember a lot of the violence and threats in the early years of Covid, screaming and threatening school boards kind of things. Plenty of healthcare workers were threatened and physically assaulted as well. A friend of mine who was going to an appointment for their Covid shot had it delayed due to a bomb threat called in. Almost a month ago a mass shooter attacked the CDC building in Georgia. I met a man at an event for Gaza and when we discussed Covid and masking, he told me how he was targeted with abuse at his job by customers just cause he masked. I consider myself lucky so far. Though I remember the glare of this older white woman Boomer cunt at the store staring at me from a semi distance like she wanted to rip my mask off, as if I couldn't do that there. She didn't notice I could see her inquisitive urgency to confront me, so I invoked a tight pointed angry glare in her direction looking past her. There was a man recently who I sensed he wanted to stare me down but I wouldn't let him dominate, yet these are very rare in such a long time span, but it's just so stupid it had to even happen. It's America, every man for themself, you all proved that to everyone. Well done, so mind your own business.

I observe a lot of anti vax-anti Covid-anti mask commentators on social media to the determinant of my psychological well being. They frighten me. The sheer idiocy, the risk they pose for public health, and the power in their determination to stop actual substantive  healthcare, medicine, and science. I don't care if it comes from good intentions or someone has some heart of gold. That's still a threat to my health and everyone else's. Many have characteristics similar to forced birthers. Driven not by knowledge but emotion and the desire to dominate and control others. Living in magical fantasies of good and evil, simple and easy, and no one can be wrong, only the bad people are wrong. They speak with such disdain and are so confident in their convictions, like religious zealots and just as dangerous. I totally see them getting onboard with doctors, scientists, healthcare workers, and researchers being targeted to be killed. I always knew America would not handle a pandemic well, I just had wrongfully assumed Covid would no longer be a problem five and a half years later. And now we are walking toward a whole slew of other viruses emerging breaking containment. Not only because of the 'I dug up my ex wife that I psychologically tortured for years' Kennedy, but because this country is chronically sick in individualism, cruelty, anti-education, anti-intellect, and anti-empathy. 

And a culture of:

 'Make Me Laugh On Demand!!' 

'Make Me Angry On Demand!!' 

'Make Me Afraid of My Neighbor!!" 

'Make Me Fearful I Beg You!!'

'Make Me Hate, I'm In Pain!!'

'Don't Tell Me What To Do, Just Tell Me What I Want To Hear, Right Now!!' 

*maybe I should have more sympathy for such a scammed and scared populace that make up anti vaxxer land, because healthcare is a Kafkian labyrinth in this country. And even with great healthcare it is a possible nightmare, that can be yanked out from under you at any time. What makes the best case for vaccines that it isn't a conspiracy? The wealthy and powerful want to live as long as possible and that only works with healthcare and medical advances. Medicine needs to be available enough to the rest of us peasants as well. But I know this rationale doesn't feel good to this crowd so good luck seriously, we are all going to need it and too many aren't going to be that lucky.

A couple weeks ago someone who was considered one of the nicest, down to earth, and good humored people, I found watches ICE Raids and protestors being run over. People you should look out for your brothers, sons, fathers, grandfathers, grandsons, husbands, uncles, nephews, and brother in laws. You want them to be a better person, a better man than that, right?

Now we can put to bed the baby argument of her promoting some trad wife aspiration from one photo put out. Also it's a low bar but so many pop stars and celebrities have abandoned supporting trans people and drag queens when they did before. So what wouldn't seem like much and pretty normal 7 years ago now is for lack of a more adequate term radical in the face of all the anti LGBTQ terror.  Less self-serving for a pop star (in contrast to those who used LGBTQ people in the past to prop themselves up) when it's a time where it really matters when politically trans people are being told to face the wall.

 

Will the left finally take Covid seriously as the greatest health crisis and health challenge of our time*? I don't believe so, but I'll never understand why. Covid conscious people on twitter can be inexcusable in toxicity and drama, but they are people who feel and have been cast out of society due to illness and disability, due to Covid itself many instances. Why not think of how and why they are that way, instead of using it as an excuse to not deal with what is in front of us all. I see all these people (and bots) online denying Covid loudly, angrily, melting down, and lol emojis about vaccines and masks. Yet people I talk to in real life seem to at least get it. Not that that's moved the needle. Did the anti vaxxers make some of the left so timid and neglectful of Covid or are they just like all humans in denial of the challenging things we face in the world, much out of our control. In one way I don't want to hear about Medicare 4 All without the acknowledgement of Covid but that would admit to mistakes and ignorance, and how many people are up for humility?

*outside of the brain worm Kennedy menace 

So the brain worm public health menace is trying to do what I feared and believed would come to pass, by taking away the Covid vaccine. This isn't solely on him though tbh. Fuck you and fuck your 'Covid isn't ACTUALLY real 😂 but it was a bio weapon meant to destroy us actually 😡 the vaccines are causing Long Covid checkmate lib 😎 but TRUMP created the vaccine and you better show him respect 😤... that's why it's time to hunt Fauci 👹'

People are hyper fixated with others' appearances in this country. While this could be applicable to other places, since I have only ever lived here, I'll just start my rant from here. Americans can't stop obsessing about if other people are overweight/fat, if they bend or outright reject gender norms, and/or being trans. There is an insatiable compulsion in the psyches of many Americans to say horrible and demeaning comments to these "others." Not just amongst themselves or their own hateful shithead circles, but to let these specific "others" know. These brave bullies have to make sure that these "others" need to be made aware they are abhorrent, should stay under the covers, or put a gun in their mouth. That they are unlovable and worst of all unfuckable, which is considered the greatest honor in America besides being wealthy and popular, to be seen as physically desired by anyone. A person being fat or trans really brings out the heart of an authoritarian in the most mediocre and meek American citizen. The policing and surveillance of people's bodies and appearances if you take a step back, should make you afraid of what that could mean for anyone. Especially in the year 2025.

What Trump is doing in DC is not a distraction or political theater, it is a plan, it is an end goal. They are literally rigging the maps for the House. Early 21st America in its end game, the orders carried out by a multiracial gestapo on top of it. 

 

From April 2020....can you believe how much this all did not come to be and what actually happened? And it's not even over.

The hypocrisy and smugness of liberal zionists' (or god forbid people who call themself progressive zionist) anger at MAGA supporters who are cheering on the ICE Raids and D.C. takeover, have no self reflection supporting what the serial killers of the IDF are doing. That what the IDF is carrying out is acceptable to you zionists, a necessary strategy for the morally bankrupt and vile homeland that comforts your fantasies. Coddles your small acidic hearts as better and more deserving, which you'd rather have than being seen as a human equal to the Palestinians, who are humans. What makes you better than the Trump supporters guzzling down ICE raid viewings for pleasure? You're not separate just because you hate Trump. You're both on equal low moral ground. You have no superiority. You should own that at the very least. Blatant hypocrisy fitted with denialism is ugly attire. Yet you all wear it well.

Imprisoning state legislators and coercing them to sign papers for them to be surveillanced by the police? And you're waiting for the mid-terms to save you? The fascists are also coming after the museums and what they want are those archives to destroy/hide/distort/and wash over. The fascists aren't concerned as coming across with overreach, they understand that many in the American public don't pay attention and are very uneducated, and even more so uninterested in education through something like a museum you have to explore and gain info from. Many Americans see education as manipulative, something that can change you and they don't want to be changed. They want to feel good through entertainment and not be confronted with tough questions or complex and discomforting knowledge. So we are kind of being cooked and boiled right now. 

People it's not coming, authoritarianism is here. I know those types who hate the cities and would like people purged. It's not just some stereotypical rural poor person who fears the cities that enjoys this, (though some do) but well off white small suburban enclaves that nod along and cheer it in their homes. Those well off areas will be the least policed because they are reliant on surveillancing themselves and one another. However those in small rural areas, who think they are living far away from everything, that the regime aren't coming for you one day, should snap out of your fantasy. Those who were captured into the anti government movement in the 90s in reaction to Ruby Ridge and Waco should know better, this is the moment you have all been fearing. The 'Don't Tread on Me' crowd seems to stand for 'I'm not lifting a finger to help anyone else, every man for themself.'

Want to know how fast a person can become a fascist? Ask them about cop stuff.

I was stunned coming across a recent video of a man who is an amputee in a wheelchair outside in DC with cops around him hanging out to like it's any other day, as the man is unmoving and has a bag over his head. Then learned that this was actually a thing, a spit bagging mesh torture device thing meant to dehumanize you from your fellow man that is utilized. Found out from reading some bootlickers on social media comments defending this. Imagine defending this! Why doesn’t everyone get to run around carrying this kind of bag in case someone is to spit on them with that logic. But somehow defund people are the real problem when it comes to the police. Police harass and torture people? More money! Police destroy people's lives and disable them? More and more money! Police kill them explicitly on camera for the world to see? A BRAND NEW training facility for them and their boys with state of the art cameras so we can watch and hear those harassment and killings in high definition! Want to know how fast a person can become a fascist? Ask them about cop stuff.

Eight years later and Charlottesville won and we are less prepared than ever. You can't blame the Democrats for everything, though you can certainly put more blame on the people who have more power than you. Lots of failure to go around though. Thanks everyone! 

 

The Democrat's complacency has frightened me more than the fascist regime. It's like they don't give a shit. They aren't even going to clean up the shit if they got back in power. You will be made to ignore and live with the shit. That you are asking too much for them to haul it out and clean it up. 

'You didn't give us the poplar vote for the first time in twenty years, and so now you are going to face the consequences you naughty children, so for next time you'll remember the lesson. For now eat shit!'

"We are the United States of Amnesia - we learn nothing because we remember nothing." - Gore Vidal

My input for Sabrina Carpenter and Sydney Sweeney "controversies" is Roe was overturned three years ago without mass protests and the Comstock Act is down the pipeline and no one has any plans or strategy to pushback. Some women hyper fixate and perform a constant drip of intense anger about pop culture and celebrities through social media because of the anxiety of how fucked women are. And I definitely know some of the women crying in these two social medias' comments saying they set women back 50 yrs,  defended Johnny Depp over Amber Heard back then. I can't get falling into the outrage cooked up by the advertising directors that hoped to unleash this discourse. The right just loves this because it gives them so much space and air. I think it's better if people stop reacting to everything celebrity as if our lives are dependent on whatever they do, especially when the government is being dismantled.

 

Isn't it ironic two of the biggest podcasters for independent media and comedy that flirted and endorsed that maybe Trump could work because 'I like his thing (and whatever money deals I am also funneling from this)... if you now what I mean' vibes, who have been big into conspiracy theory eco systems prior, have become part of the conspiracy of Trump trying to cover up Epstein, that these two are footnotes? Interesting twist of developments. 

Rest easy 💔

So many irreplaceable and monumental musical acts have left this mortal plane the past ten years and (nothing even a little bit comparable) no musicians/singers/enigmas exists to fill the absence. Was it the influence of a post WW2 culture and economy that created them, that a Reagan neoliberal world order also killed off eventually? Gen X is the last train of this artistic ecosystem.

If you let the Looney Tunes Q-Anon villain outsmart you in political moral theater when it comes to the genocide in Gaza, you need to rethink things. 

I have no idea still why so many cultural critics and gatekeepers of photography are intent on walking this medium off another cliff with Generative AI as they already helped throw our current photo landscape into crisis starting ten years ago giving themselves over vicariously to Facebook/Instagram. All print magazines shuttered and websites and abandoned one of the most interesting and free vehicles, blogs. So many are complicit in this not for nefarious purposes but the neglect. Yet we could learn a lesson and not throw it off course yet again with embracing Generative AI. And you absolutely do not get to say Photoshop is the same thing nor dare compare it to collage or digital art. But this is not what has happened. Now there are institutions and classes and degrees and teachers happy to push this along. All in the name of 'look at this neat trick.'

It's maddening but so many people lap it up with thousands of likes and starry eyed comments (though I do enjoy when regular people in comments on Instagram push back) and 'it's just like when painters were upset about the invention of the camera’? No this is devastating. And I'm not even talking about art here which it is devastating for, nor the environment which it is also devastating for, but even more important and this is a very important part of art is the caring about a semblance of the stability of society and people's collective well being. Is it "fun" to put a tool out into the universe that people can make fake photos and videos of people who didn't do the things that are in the images but no one can tell if it's real or not? Photography is really shattered and it's not because of this disastrous Generative AI tool and social media algorithms, but the people who are the heads of this medium embrace of all of it and demand little or no guardrails. With no second guessing of the disaster they have co-signed in the name of art.

(August 24, 2024) *just gotten worse

Lot of liberal 'FAFO!! 😂😂 MAGA 😎' messaging online is one of the worst things lately online. (Also I haven't formulated the words but feels sort of white supremacy seeing white people do that with Hispanic voters.) Too much moral posturing for those who voted for a candidate who was just as non committal into stopping genocide in Gaza as Biden was, and as much as I hate to say this whom was one upped by Trump (pretending for political points) showing more sympathy to the issue. Remember his saying how terrible it was Harris with the Cheneys. Remember how terrible and inexcusable and politically stupid that was of her? Trump is full of cruelty and shit talking but he was willing to go talk to people in Dearborn unlike Harris who would not even meet with members of Uncommitted. Had a staff give them a letter. Also Harris said that Trump had a point about immigration and she was going to be the one who was the "real" tough one and maybe his border wall was actually a good idea (!!!) 

These types of FAFO liberals should have a little more humility, not to excuse or coddle Trump supporters but you can't think that you are above making your own bargains politically. And people seem to forget this, but Trump explicitly and publicly backed away and denounced Project 2025, he did not run around preaching it like a sermon. It's important to remember you sound like those people who convinced themselves that a Covid lockdown happened under Biden and they were trapped in their homes for months, not able to freely go about. Now if one could read between the lines it was obvious Trump was going to do Project 2025, however oddly there was some leftists who thought that was liberal fear mongering. How mind boggling and stupid that was. Yet here we all are stuck with one another, with one anothers' blindspots, flaws, malpractices, messes, and lonelinesses. Anyway MAGA of TikTok type content and indulgence is not a path to go down.

You must see yourself as someone no greater than the cop or nazi who possess the lever of cruelty inside themselves that they finesse with regular practice. You just made different choices, you made different decisions to who you were going to be and followed that guiding path.

Let art live. Let it live in its mistakes, grotesque points, outdatedness. Let art be a mess. Let it be a disaster. Let it be wrong. Let it be ugly, immoral, dreadful, and pointless. Let art be a sea of failures. You will live.

 

I hope you don't fuck up NYC in today's mayor primary but though I love you dearly, you hold my heart closer than any other place, you likely will. All for rapid sex pest-Covid nursing home killer- blood thirsty for power Cuomo, who will sell you out to more billionaires to tear you up, be a right hand man to Trump for immigration and Palestinian protest crackdown, etc.

You will have done it to yourselves though. 

People throw away their futures all the time 🙈🙉🙊

*update June 25 12:37am, Eat shit Cuomo 👹

Well NYC you handed my pessimistic ass right back to me! Thank you 💕

Did a citizen surveillance culture over the last decade, that exploded in toxicity since TikTok and Instagram reels past five years, exacerbate conditions for a reactionary backlash? 

Zen Fascism @ 1:50, don't be the doomer the right believes you to be at your core, you're more human and layered than that

Mass protests against ICE before past Saturday, the No Kings one on Saturday, demands of the National Guard to take over, the most broadcasted dud of a military parade of a world super power ever recorded in high definition, political assassination attempts and assassination of (surprise) Democrats targeted by a Christian Nationalist who surprisingly not only didn't kill himself but thought he was going to get out of the country, Israel crying foul after bombing Iran and Iran responding to being attacked, Israeli Zionists crying out on social media 'We don't want to be Gaza.' Trump green lighting Iran war games....anything else? Oh yeah a mass database of everyone being scaled up!

*** forgot the Dem senator attacked and arrested and now one of the NYC mayor candidates the same

I was being a bit of a doomer talking with my mom the other day, if all those people out the streets protesting the ICE gestapo raids and wannabe Robocop armed military militias, if despite all this is it too late. She said that's what they want you to think, to give up. It's never too late she said. You can't think like that. It's hard, though I don't want to deflate people. (I don't want people to take my advice here.) I remember the Floyd protests very clearly though even if it seems most have tried to forget, that 'a better world is possible' as if it was never said before. I just wonder if people out there in the streets ever get a foreboding sense that maybe it will always be dark. Yet they still have to battle in a darkness maybe they cannot win, but if they gave in they would lose their souls standing and staying back. That would be a worse death for them. I read from an author I like where she was reflecting on mourning for a future more than a past, as she had pegged an authoritarian shift happening years before what is accumulating now. While I was reading and relating hard, and I loved the prose yet something else gnawed. I thought I don't want to be self pitying in a long term way like that. Maybe even considering what is going on with the Palestinians. While I was 'yes I do mourn the world that could have been, that we thought was promised,' this is not new or novel. What about a larger picture, what about those who were trapped in WWI or WW2 and they had their lives shattered and lost. Further back people whose villages were burned by invaders and conquerors, or plagues that wiped them away. Where these centuries past people didn't even live in a world where they could see and contemplate knowing the dreams lost in the way they are nowadays. More possibilities existed and taken. All over history people lost their futures. Very few fought in comparison to those who said 'no this is enough, I had enough.' They are the reason some of us try. Maybe they are the part of the reason we have survived.

There is a person from another art life many years ago I have been thinking about the past few months since I realized by looking something else up and stumbling upon their name that they have been deeply red pilled. I'm still in complete disbelief how this kind, empathetic, intellectual, creative and well educated person fell into it. I know they would have despised someone like Trump and all the personalities related to him back then. I know that much. Though maybe you only can know so much about a person because they have not fully formed into their final form. I would be horrified if they stay there but they appear happily entrenched, you wouldn't consume those kinds of people if you had any doubts in what you believed in. What felt and feels good what has brought you peace of mind. The fascist merchants who sell anger, fear, and conspiracy are some of these people's saviors. This is the answer they have been waiting forever for. What keeps me up at night helps them sleep. My suspect is the wellness to fascism pipeline had something to do with entangling this person in. Then life with much unknowns, disappointments, and calamities did its thing. 

The other people I've known who have gone down that route I wasn't fully surprised except a handful but this particular person's descent I will always find haunting. If it could happen to them, then who is safe? I was recently reading the Alice Walker essay for an assignment "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" and in awe of it's power and realizing this person who wrote this dragged themselves into these black holes of conspiracy to never pry their way out of. No one is safe. For many years as a kid I never understood the advice to be careful of the company you keep because of the influence it can have. I thought 'the worst would never happen to me!' How foolish youth is. My friend was not young though and neither was Walker when what occurred to them took form. Many in the population now are treading a lot of conspiracy pooled waters more the last 5 years and certainly more than the last 10 years. The desperation and appetite keeps growing. I observe a lot of spaces where climate denialists,  anti modern science, and anti Covid assholes lurk. LOL themselves to black pill under laughing emojis, and where do these people go in the years ahead, now some are bots but enough aren't. Are they being primed and dormant for now and the next crisis they can scream, threaten and attack those masked or god forbid a pandemic outbreak. The Republicans in our state put in a constitutional amendment to strip the Governor's powers if there was a state of emergency. Of course so few people know except the conservatives and they won.

One of the most important characteristics we can posses is to have some humbleness. To realize if you truly believe in critical thinking, intellect, love, empathy and commitment to these things that are paramount, you must let go of being so confident in 'No that's not me, that could never be me. I'm better than that. That's them over there.' smugness. I get it. I do but as bell hooks said we all have susceptibility to be co-opted. I think a lot about the terrors and grief I survived and wonder often how am I not the biggest conspiracy theorist. A therapist years ago said she would understand if I was the angriest person alive. For many years I was on fire. I was fortunate to walk out of it with my sense of wellness and sanity. I don't think you necessarily need to filled to the brim with trauma and rage to get sucked into what is basically darkness, a black hole but they have done a lot of studies that can make people much more susceptible. Something changed in their own universe that doesn't make sense anymore, the order of things are realigned and they have no control over it. I don't know what happened to this person. I didn't know them that deep or close enough. Ours was a short but meaningful timespan. I wish I had known. I don't believe they will return. I think this is a familiar story. The last ten years it's been a slow boil from numerous people who feel those they have known have drifted off and come back in a different skeleton. The last five it's been a larger amount, more vitriol, more out of control, more lost souls who were so hungry that fear and anger swallowed their world and all they have known. This is likely a shift that will be around for a generation. We like to believe art can save, artists know, but they are like anyone else. We must live with that humility.

- March 8, 2025. & March 26, * June 12-15, 2025

Everyone was waiting for the protest, the spark, the 'enough is enough,' the last few months. What would get people out there against this authoritarian take over. It wasn't 5051, the oligarchy tour, the electric car nazi and his bandits dismantling government agencies and hoarding all our personal data. It was images and videos of people being taken off the street in ICE raids and ripped apart from their loved ones for the "crime" of being undocumented, a green card holder, or suspicious looking. That was the breaking point of all the images and video circulating. I guess it was that simple and that horrifying. Everything else was abstract. I guess we will see how the summer holds.

If three or two years ago someone had said the issue that will unite large swathes of people around the world, that will have groups gathering and rallying weekly and daily in the name of freedom, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinians for over a year and a half, and Israel would become a pariah, no one would have believed that person. They would have sent them to an emergency room to check for vitals if person had eaten something poisonous and hallucinogenic, hit their head, or having a stroke. It's been kind of amazing; average people have shown on such a large scale a moral compass that have exceeded their own nation states governing bodies, media, educational and art institutions, etc. The younger generation here, left-liberal-center-right are actually united in this, in the majority. So, this write off that American Generation Z are actually BAD, as they are authoritative nazi bois and submissive trad girls bringing social progress to a halt (and not blaming the actual old generations for their shitty voting patterns still) is kind of a misleading narrative, it's more complex. If you can find people on this issue no matter their political identity, there is something there inside connected to human and collective wellbeing. Can the dem consultants get on board with that? It's likely why the dems don't want to organize the youth and focus on the podcasts. It's a radicalizing issue away from the system and sowing more distrust, this is bigger than the post 9/11 response. But regardless of this issue that goes beyond any electoral politics that it's penetrated such a deeply divided political culture everywhere besides the origins of the ethnostate empire, is nothing to overlook at all. Masses yearn for wokeness (aka social consciousness) and connection to one another, now it's a mess the hows and why's and can it work?, but something real is there. The numbers and statistics for support as well as people in the street, donations, think pieces, bodies on campuses that let themselves be targeted over and over, protesters arrested, people fired, people fired at and attacked, people on a small boat that was droned at twice the month before, and people cheer and rally and demand a world away...I mean who would have foreseen all of this?

On my mind lately is I think back to 2022 and the midterms and special elections and how I got wrapped up in false hope. Even while I was scribbling down in my one line a day journal about the smell of theocratic fascism on the rise a year prior before leak of Roe to be overturned, I was hoping there was fight somewhere that it couldn't just be me. So those things/events led me to believe something bigger was happening that was more powerful and stronger than these forces, that as a collective who cared we could feel it in the air, and we were inching closer at any moment... Yet in the end I've come to think of those events as red herrings. Not distractions in that they didn't matter the elections and amendments, but that it was not a true and complete picture. The bills and dismantling of reproductive and LGBTQ rights that were in so many states, and the book bans, that so much of this occurred with that barely any true fight or civl disobedience push back was the real tell. I feel really bad I fooled myself. I feel really bad at what did not occur. I feel really angry at the young women who just ignored it all. 

I feel bad I wanted to believe some men cared enough about their loved ones not being sanctioned to state torture and mass government control. Men just don't care in large numbers about women nor themselves, their feelings are all that matter to many of them and a cobbled pod of people they can barely open up to, they claim to love yet have such a tiring slog in expressing this in healthy, steady, and reliable ways (*). I feel betrayed by middle age and older white women, and those are the white women who vote most out of all. I feel a big fuck you to the Gen X and Boomer women whose time has passed for that ability and they fucked other women. Some of you are no better than the men in the man vs. bear scenario at the moral center. Your daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, girls as your neighbors, students, as your patients. etc., you fucked them over. I hope it haunts you but it won’t. A lot of older white women are captured into individualism they feel little larger care of others in the world, they mimic patriarchy in this way. They enjoy patriarchy in this way. Them against the world. 'Not my problem. (*)'

I also resent the reproductive rights movement for not preparing for this at all, even though they have openly written as if it was a good thing they had the foresight to see this years ahead of time back in 2022, and it’s like well what was your plan? To beat a drum, recite comedy, read a poem and honk at fake pregnancy clinics? Shame anyone demonstrating with more outrage? You abandoned the streets. You did. Shame on you.

 On another angle outside of the movement in moments misread and looking back in hindsight, I recall political commentators and critics that ‘oh now the Republicans have caught the car and it looks like there is a big price they won’t be able to afford.’ But too many couldn’t organize nor see the larger picture or feel or care about the danger top to bottom, seasoned to amateur citizens…So many gun to the face mistakes over the past ten years that makes me want to kick down a house.

* (*) recent

Yet I wrote almost all of that above a couple weeks ago before these protests against the gestapo been going on. It's hard to find a concentrated energy in this moment however for me, that doesn't feel it will eventually be a forgotten deflated ballon. I am moved and supportive but I rarely feel inspired. I went to a Palestine event which I enjoyed and I felt less alone, but once you leave it's difficult to keep that social energy up when you don't know anyone. We all are pulling at threads throughout our lives hoping we can find the right "way." But the fear of nothing there and the years of realizing nothing was actually there, no matter how hard I pulled or dreamed, puts in me in a position where the desire to tug a thread is not so enticing. And yet what is all this bitching and self pitying from myself when so much suffering is happening, people disappeared, family torn from one another, police beating the shit out of people as usual, people taking rubber bullets, a boat seized that was carrying humanitarian aid. Seized by the ethnostate guardians of the supposed best and most moral army in the world. I hope I find my people, I miss that tribe once upon a time. But I must remind myself the self pitying, no one is going to be drawn to that. I watched a Maya Angelou video recently and will badly paraphrase how it has struck and stuck with me,  she said you should carry yourself in the world the way people who carried and lifted you up throughout your life. Bring that with you. 

- Ms Rachel -

Ms. Rachel is literally a guardian angel and all you zionist pearl clutchers uncomfortable with her advocating can fuck off. As you would never be as selfless or brave beyond your own boundaries. You are bound by your own mental and spiritual borders, just as limiting as the land you claim will save and free you, all that at the expense of other people. Not that you see those people as people. You are troubled of the limitations of your own humanity and others can see that in a way that was not possible before. That's why you deflect, lash out, and threaten when people support Palestinians. You zionist pearl clutchers, genocide apologists and enthusiasts, know nothing of love, compassion, and humanity toward your fellow man. You have no moral high ground. We see through it all. Cry and temper tantrum into the wind but the average citizen of this world no longer cares of this rouse. Your commitment to this genocide means no one has to take you seriously again when you speak about kindness or human rights. You're bankrupt. You gave up. You rescinded. But the rest of us didn't. Children are being killed and starved, that matters more than the distorted fairytales you call history that are worthy of no respect nor to be wasted on honest ears and hearts. 

“The laugh out loud crowd don’t want to know anything new, just want life to be a big comedy reality TV show.”

- comment from a man named Bob Snyder on Facebook under a story NPR did “How is Sex Determined? Scientists say it’s complicated.” From March 12, 2025.

Excellent observation, worthy of Carlin. Facebook comments are infested with laughing emojis even for the most serious of subject matters. It's bleak out there and it continues to get worse and worse.

May is a curious month of political anniversaries in the last few years that kind of encapsulate this moment perfectly.

The Floyd murder and then uprising in response. The one 5 years later people act like nothing ever happened, acting like no one ever cared. 

The betrayal, disunity, and cartoon evil of the Amber Heard trial, leaving this woman to be tortured for the world to celebrate on TikTok. 

The leaking of Roe about to be overturned. And we see the response to that that should have been that never was....

Jordan Neely being strangled to death and people concluding that that was really ok even before the trial. 

May is a curious month of these tragedies.