Many Happy Returns

 "I want the whole man!"--Ian McKellan

I would tell you that I have been stalled for many days on a Substack piece about the McCormack Oz race which I would like to finish, with hopefully some relevant insight, before the November election results are tallied, with a Shapiro victory most likely assured as Wolf’s heir apparent, but this is only a partial truth, while I reflect on Patrick McGoohan’s Number 6 caught in a rubber room, an analog rubber room, for making a disruptive choice which the MI6 of nearly 60 years ago didn’t like. McGoohan didn’t create The Prisoner as a critique of the British welfare state, but the boomerang nature of The Village is a great deal like being a rat in a maze of the Commonwealth’s static, and blisteringly deadly Waiver services. Like Enka Kohat's Shubert of 21 years ago, the mind attempts to rally around the cauterized despair burbling about like raspberry jam, knowing it’s doomed, resisting electro shocks, brainwashing, various ruses designed to make the agent believe he can outwit the closed circuit cameras, and those malignant capture balloons, no realism here in this 17 episode carnivalesque farce, but The Prisoner is violent, paranoid, anticipating Guantanamo Bay despite its cartoonish exaggeration. The series withstands age even with the knowledge that the Soviet Union is dead, in definitive terms. While I am surprised at the quick success of Zelenskyy’s counteroffensive, any student of modern Russia knew Putin was in trouble when Shoigu couldn’t bring about Kyiv’s collapse. However long it may be until Putin is deposed, or not, this sinking writer doesn’t think Ukraine is entirely free from the threat of the Russian Bear, but the nail in Stalin’s coffin has been sealed, We can breathe a small sigh of relief.

Earring in the Naval

 

Constantly Maligned, the Fang's in Travis Kauffman's Foreaem

"They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgement.-- Zora Neale Hurston

The word I would use is elegiac, as opposed to Poniewozik's elegant, in a description of Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs, whose title itself suggests something which is a knock off of an original. I would also suggest that it is fine for viewers to be mystified by how these short movies link together to make an anthology.  The strongest of them is the episode “The Royal We,” which the NYT features in its still photo of Kerry Bishe on a cruise for modern day survivors of the original Romanov family, of whom her husband happens to be one. Kerry, as Shelly, is simply an all-American girl, bohemian enough to get stoned over pizza in her off hours, trying to sort out her husband Michael. Corey Stoll has to suffuse himself as the missing link, tying the knot between Nicholas as the disconnected Victorian Czar about to be sacrificed for the new world order of egalitarianism which we’ve all learned since is a utopian fiction, and the sobering existential angst of the Slavic dark side to brutality. To break away from Shelly’s festering befuddlement, Michael leans into jury duty, and this has its own grotesque allure. You might reflect on how “The Violet Hour” leads to a pregnancy. Aaron Eckhart, despite ostensible star power, behaves like a sheep dog in it, his pleasures as furtive as Stoll’s remorse following on its heels. I never engaged in due diligence on Eckhart following his incisive energies which makes In The Company of Men such a powerful nihilist statement, but Weiner allows the actor some autobiographical footnotes which I certainly found more convincing than his character’s overflow of sexual conquest in the guise of an American dilettante. Ines Melab does better constructing her road map with Keller than as the distressed Tunisian Hajar about to hurl into social alienation but for Eckhart’s bumbling nonchalance finding a cornerstone of appearance and propriety for the sake of what appearance and propriety entail. In its way it’s a more sophisticated upgrade on the Florrick’s marriage of convenience revealing that relationships are more complex than mere residual unhappiness of a mistake.

The dowager wearies of The Good Wife as a foretelling of a Hillary presidency ghosted into a backlash upon which Trump capitalized, and may leave off where it is, with Peter in his effervescent governorship, Alicia with her self-assertion, and Will Gardner on his rampage towards Josh Charles’ exit from the series, effectively killing it. Isn’t Will a senescent liberalism in decline as well, or Diane Lockhart? What concerns me more than Mueller’s quest for integrity, and possible failure to bring down Trump’s crust of an old boys network, is what this undercurrent of appeasement toward Putin is supposed to yield. Its five day old war with Georgia reestablished the Russian Federation as "as a military power" in the words of Sarah Pruitt. Even before Putin emerged after Yeltsin, how was this ever not the case, even with but a limited tutorial available on the Crimean War with the British Empire, before revolutionary dissents within Russian amassed under Lenin? American media figures with access claim that Michael Flynn allowed himself to be orchestrated by Russia’s imitative propaganda machine, which can mimic the western press so cleverly as to not have a valid issue to raise now and again, but even if we accept, as per Obama Administration issues with temperament, that Flynn is a cracked vessel, he spent his career in military intelligence. If were going to think along nice big and easy puzzle pieces, then the argument can be made that contemporary civilization is yoked to the US Russia and China. If their interests were aligned than the rest of Europe might be a mere pacified inconvenience. Matthew Weiner’s fourth episode, “Expectation” entangles itself in a web of mendacity ending in an emergency surgery for gallstones. Telling, in Weiner’s polite request that we apply ourselves.

Gillespie’s Oblique Defense of #MeToo

A friend says Chris Janson's 'Take a Drunk Girl Home' perpetuates rape culture even as it appears to attack it. She think it implies sexual assault can be accepted or even excused during "boyhood."  What do you think? https://t.co/YzIku4jvhS@BroadusErinn

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) August 5, 2018

My sudden surge of page views from Ukraine at the mention of Mawson Dave may have led to a certain Slavic misapprehension. In reference to my last post, I was not indicating my approval of Dave’s work with Syrian relief efforts, only that this low key social media user was more on par with an affinity in terms personal attractiveness over and above my present-day direct care worker, nor am I attempting to ostracize him beyond anything other than the usual digital dissonance making me feel worse for the inability to connect, as opposed to its inverse: I am alone in this near total new found helpless and lack of control, my limbs now beginning to tremble, and Mawson came and went beyond my ability to fathom, tainted around the edges with a tinge of suspicion. I may have earned some brownie points with ant-war humanists in my earlier posts when the out-lying areas around Damascus were beginning to slip beyond Assad's control, but the realities of Hezbollah and ISIS at each other’s throats, with the Russian army engaged in strategic asset protection, does nothing to restore geopolitical stability, or raise the ghosts of massacres, such as that in Hama, under the father. Barely governable deserts are a mirage of benevolent compassion, at least when we examine the number of expendable citizens in the name of authority and power. If the al-Assad regime didn't lose credibility in my pulsating cerebral student days, at this point the current regime is a mere marionette. I give it up, allow it to evaporate within the current administration's disciplinary maneuvers against chemical attacks. It led to the martyrdom of Mevlut Mert, the futile murder of a Russian ambassador, and why we even characterize it as a civil war at this stage is beyond me.

I take some issue with the student's Quora post that Putin wants "a multi-polar world". The Georgian conflict, the backing of the separatists in Ukraine, these are pacification efforts even in the newfound disorder of a kleptocracy.  Against this backdrop, my additional acquisition of Muslim accounts beyond my remaining Turkish followers was done so with unease, inclusive of a Saudi princess named M, who wisely only tweeted hello. What she offers to me in terms of perspective remains inexplicable. I surmise, however, that the gateway account for these Islamic followers is Angela Stewart, a reasonable facsimile of  a moderate medical paradigm progressive, even as I finally lit a short fuse with Reason and Nick Gillespie, the expanse man of all causes. I pushed back against the columnist above in relation to women and personal conduct, and this is not blaming the victim. If I had told my direct care worker in April not to fondle me out of pity, I could have let him go before we bonded in this semi-aquatic fashion of the familial and the erotic in which I always lose. In the mechanical essence of it, sexual intimacy with him would be a mere ineluctable progression, but also an act of self-hatred, romantic inclinations dead but dead alive, one and the same. Every time he clocks out I hope I never see him again, I don't believe in it, us, his limited ability to apply himself, the fatalistic indifference to Ralph Ellison, for instance, and the novelist's influence on Obama.

Orthographical Scraping

Not their technology, our technology!-- Jason Cope

I freely confess that my page views from Russia perplex me. They surge in my darkest moments, engaging in confirmation bias or astonishment, even ridicule, perhaps exploitation, then recede when I have a valid critique, or perhaps to them, I am a unique specimen, the now wavering invalid who defied Google, the Philadelphia police, University of Pennsylvania’s psychiatric procedures, and my rental agent, only to fall to family and a shyster excuse for a wheelchair technician. Such largesse would not be granted to me in the post-Soviet Putin era, not being an apt love interest for the traitorous Edward Snowden, but whatever is going in the globe’s largest, but sparsely populated nation, which could be quite easily defeated by the Chinese military, something which I am sure our intelligence agencies know better than I on the sheer strength of numbers alone, I was not manipulated by Russian propaganda during the election cycle. Like many in the right wing, Trump was not my first choice during the primaries, but I was then an independent, and do not engage in backing a particular political horse, state or nation-wide, all that often. Trump prevailed, and I was actually going to throw my vote to the libertarians. Instead, I took pity on my aunt. I concede, during my unhappy engagement with Yabberz, that some of the spin on the Clinton Foundation may have been doctored, but this was not an influence on my vote. That goes to Monica Lewinsky and the Starr Report, because it is just possible that we would have been just that more vigilant about the rise of Al Qada and Osama bin Laden had we the people not been in an uproar about impeachment and sexual impropriety during President Clinton’s second term.

Now, the dowager defended Bill in her communities, as the Senate voted down the House articles, but in the aftermath of two decades of terrorism and failed neo-conservative warfare, I put the onus for this on the Clintons. Had the Clinton administration heeded the rising temperature of Islamic radicalism, GW would not have had a rationale for Iraq 2.0, in our failed game of chicken with Baathist prawns. This is how my pyramid is built, and continuously disappointed, my gravitation toward anarchy no better or worse than what has gone before. District 9 remains my favorite niche film in the science fiction genre, and I’d argue that it isn’t quite as ironclad for progressive tolerance as meets the eye, though it never references apartheid overtly, because native black South Africans inhabit an anomalous place in the energy of the documentary narrative. Regardless of Blomkamp’s intent, we come away uniquely challenged by his unique little gem: first contact might neither be as transcendent or malicious as the industry often feeds it to us. Arrival tilts its axis on the same pole, and opts for the benevolence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Starman, never quite considering Blomkamp’s striking thought that we’d wind up with Serbian camp conditions instead. Having been around since Khrushchev and the fabled shoe tactic, I have no love lost for collective state models, nor modern leftist cult style corruption which results in the death of Putin's opposition. I have been disenfranchised by corruption on the American left, and while I may not be the enemy of Slavic mindsets, don’t presume I am your appeaser either. Implosive anger such as mine often leads to attacks on the social altruism towards which we naturally incline, such as those striking Austin. I’m quite aware of that, though in this case, if law enforcement is correct that this involves music industry figures, that adds up to quite a bit of specious hemlock. So we wait and see, wondering if Greg Abbott will have a political life after his tenure.

That Nick Gillespie liked two of my tweets since I started supporting Reason isn't a job contract, and it doen't mean Brian will green light my next pitch. The magazine is just this side of too California for my tastes, but since I desire to keep exploring libertarian themes, it is nonetheless a small hope against alarm at the occasional spastic tremor.

The new procrastination

He misinterpreted the gesture.-- Stendhal

None of over-saturated with the thousands of articles since September 11th, 2001 can find either much solace or new insight from Simon Cottee's opinion piece in the LA Times, which I just tweeted. We've heard it all before, and if Niall Ferguson's insights on why empires decline still has any merit, those of European descent have lost their nerve to deploy military trained personnel for pacification, with the exception of Putin's appointee's, but even there, Vladimir is the Personality Cult of the Jackass Czar. He invaded Georgia nineteen years ago and was mercilessly lampooned by none other than one of my favorite columnists to defend, George F Will, and for any student of European history, this has an eerily familiar ring to the political mockery bestowed on Nicholas II, and his father, by the western press, which subsequently stopped laughing when the Bolesheviks took over, and since the former KGB clerk is their legacy, we can only wonder what methodology will supplant Marxism. Despite Xi, despite party control, executive enforcement of collective distribution has run its course, and now it seems a substantial minority simply want to return to Voltaire's small scale expectations, including me. I just want to go home and never talk or engage another nigger again for the rest of my hellish medical model brutish life, and for that, I had an email forwarded by Cripland to the FBI. Corruption, being what it is, has immediate access to legal representation, only, I can't go home. Can't do it to either of my surviving siblings, and my father is a lost cause, keeping my mother's nursing colleague afloat, my stepmother, who should have died two years ago, but what to do? No one takes the bull by the horns and has the courage to withhold the expensive medical treatments now bankrupting domestic GNP's. The Guardian itself knows Britain's NHS is in trouble, acknowledging American insurers are ready to swoop in, and the Semitic resentments of North Africa and the Fertile Crescent think that violence against legacy of Western hegemony will achieve what? Shift the axis back to Persia?
But in the mode of joining them if you cannot beat them, I would if I could. I'd annihilate NCIL, and in particular, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, if I had the means and the methods, and use my death penalty trial as grand political theater like none other, but no one takes me seriously, and that is the ambulatory safety valve.

Istanbul, Weather vane

It was not so long ago that Americans such as I witnessed a Russia, if not in the second act of the Bolshevik Revolution, was at the least doubled over by a herniated disk, courtesy of glasnost. It is sufficient, in this context, to weigh the President-Elect's remarks about Putin as not entirely inaccurate. The former KGB clerk is a wily fox, getting bit on his ass by Erdogan's colorful bipolar method of governance. It impresses me immeasurably that Mevlut Mert  martyred himself for a lost cause, for believing in Obama's "red line" that, oh, wait a minute, the Land of Oz was but a poor girl's ennui on the plains of Kansas, and the Ottoman's poor imitation of a secular empire in an equally corroded Islamic mindset needs a dose of political lithium, evidently. I am running up my last few MB, since I have no funds to roll to the ATT outlet where I could work, mind, but have no money now to haggle over wireless upgrades on my old PC's, and since I am running them, don't have a great deal of time, but both Putin and Erdogan are so clever they are out maneuvering themselves. I know the Turkish foreign service did a double take. I know Iran and the Russian Federation are having a slurpee over the beatitudes woven into the price of Syrian stability, but don't ever forget what constitutes true heroism. Regardless of what I do about my personal situation in the next few months, I'm out of time: safe bathroom transfers are the stubborn persistence of bio-kinetic memory, and if I refuse to obey re-certification, I am essentially giving the ambulatory world what it wants: my enslavement so serfs can earn low wage groceries, but like Mevlut, some principles are worth cutting it short, going down on your own two feet. That is rebellion that never forgets, the kind that changes world order. Stand up to the state. This young man did something that could change history faster than 20 truck wild terrorists. 
History may be doomed to repeat, but never in an exact correlation to the heyday of Marxist theory at its worst.

Food Poisoning, Entrenched

"I'm sorry if you felt ill treated,"-- the undoubtedly committed volunteers of Bacopa

Editors. I did not feel ill treated. Publishing a writer is an arbitrary business, more so in the age of digital do it yourself files, looking at my non fiction collection in despair, just prior to logging on, sick to my stomach, if I growl in illegal and heinous fashion toward Putin's overly long tenure at the helm of the Russian Federation, perhaps I could outwit the FSB assassin (hypothetically, I know the Russians who view me are perhaps only trolling for propaganda) into dumping their plutonium capsules into literary advisors offices. I raised my voice about the poetry editor only because I am a one woman spastic who spent four hours formatting a small selection of my lighter unpublished pieces, and regardless of the fact that I read their guidelines and saw the guidelines I wanted to see, after years in the independent zine morass, it took the poetry editor seconds to ding me. That is the only reason I wauled, and the poetry editor's ranking over seer and I had a polite e-convo. The end, now all the sudden an anonymous voice pricks the scab. Editors. I am sick to my stomach. Unusual, perhaps the carrots. Handled the toilet twice in so many hours just as if I was a decade younger, also unusual, adopted new bathing tactics, however long  this lasts, still tricky. I'd like to blame Hermine, but think my heart is giving out, don't particularly want any saving grace from cardiology.

If I substantially revise my bylines for my wee small volume, whether I do it myself or fast a contest fee, throw in a few of my stronger blog posts, also revised, and in a quixotic move, add my two published short stories in the back, is that fair, to substantially alter the content to suit my aesthetic voice over past editors? Josie Byzek doesn't count here, and if the last picture I saw of her and her partner was Ginny, then perhaps there are a few Protestants left who by definition have to swallow humility when they transform facially into a jackass. Editors. Not to mention names, as I desire to remain on The Freeman's good side, my wauling about that was over my rush rush when I had, apparently, drifted into another topic. I wasn't mad at them, but me, for failing the bar, which is of another kind, as I have nothing to prove in literary terms. My CV is four pages of a lifetime, as I weaken and sicken and need to find a stable space. It will begin to cool in a few days, hopefully. For our purposes, I released myself from the original Gojira in my last hour of holding myself awake, asking what the fuck am I doing I'm not writing a dissertation on Godzilla as a coping mechanism for  Hiroshima; I will, however, study Honda's nightmarish early anime seriously another time. Rodan is sickening, and yet I studied every Japanese male, wondering which of them wouldn't lose face with my shins clamped around their buttocks. Perhaps it is a summer cold. I'm off to bed, after I look up the shit on ISBN numbers.

Back Again Itinery

I had to reboot over the audio, and have nothing to post really, my legs thick, losing water weight at the end of summer, pondering my fate as I close my fifty fourth year. My father's house cleaner is due to visit to "assess" my unit, and if you want the truth, fuck that, though she sounds totally harmless. I want to leave where I live, despite everything, even the probability that I'm signing my death warrant, and I'm going to ask this woman if she'll help me pack, whatever she assesses, with my aunt and her shrieking ugliness. I'm so sick of people, spinning like weather vanes. My entire family knows full well they hate public housing, but because I'm a cripple, oh, it's good enough for me. I'm tired of Marie. I'm tired of my dead mother's voice, telling me to be reasonable, that I'd love it here, that they give concerts. I'm tired of rationales, trying to defy my own biology, even my lack of social media popularity. I'm infected, indeed, placate twitter with sugared civility, sis a seethe, not that the connections are useless, and some of the disability account holders, perhaps they feel sorry, maybe believing I'd be happier in Sydney, or Estonia. Helpific, last I checked, follows me, but again, what would I do as an emigre in the Baltic states? I logged onto their website, typed a profile, and with no prompts required, feel like a damn fool. I like them though, would undoubtedly be happier with no Africans in sight-- aren't I awful, simply incorrigible? What would they call me? väike fašistlik? How would I get there, with what, especially with Putin's eminent domain issues? Slavs. Damn me if I comprehend their mindset, personality cults, collective dissidents, as it were. I may not get the Menippean aspects of Bulgakov entirely. He is a bit of a puzzle, but even the good doctor knew, how and where we live is rooted in a great deal of vanity and cruelty, and I'd raze every damn government housing authority to rubble if I had the power, which begs the question of what I'd do next, even if I did not create this account to dismantle policies, or even to write about remaining bedridden for the remainder of my life in this tough Southern European body as opposed to deciding it's time. I've scaled back on that discussion, despite recent events. I don't believe in it, never did, but the alternatives in my case are fairly dire, unless, and the unless is what's lacking. People I actually like who would dare not to leave me at the mercy of punishing indigence, and I know it's a lot to ask of those appropriate to my station.

Harambe's Canonization

"For the first time ever, we have got proper references to good government, the rule of law and access to justice."-- David Cameron, 2015, essentially meaningless

Depp is barely six months younger than the dowager, and his eyes would get him past the gateway to a really good, hard, fuck on the carpet, the type of fucking which leaves fantasy bruises on underarms, and no, for this sentiment to be presumptuous would necessitate canceling out Depp's intuitive interpretation of marginalization. He gets it; his only role in which this is nearly invisible, to the point it might take a viewer 15 minutes to realize who Pacino was playing off of, (not paying attention to the credits) is the older Brasco, a great film which would have been impossible for Pacino to make without Coppola's genius proceeding it.

The killing of the grizzled dog in Secret Window is a tactless Stephen King cliche, one designed to move the needle on a presumably sympathetic protagonist, though again, one has to wonder about Hutton's mature casting choices as a supporting actor, aside from his need to make a living. It does, perhaps, effectively trigger shock when a superstar gets eliminated suddenly and quickly in a movie, as in City of Industry, but against Rainey's dissociative  cunning, Ted is a throwaway character here, a more dominant alpha male who is out maneuvered in a sordid culmination of violence which no one believes. Depp is too cute, as the female postal actress exclaims for the fandom contingent. Designing a movie to be a send up of pretension doesn't work if the suspense is muted by an exposition which plays itself out like a box of chocolates. Cellophane is meant to be distracting. Putin also tries to have the same effect with images, and British satirists went after his picture calendar with pleasurable release. George F. Will needs to get real, however. The United States will not go to war with the Russian Federation over Estonia, however IIves may extol the virtues of autonomy. Even conceding that Russia is resurgent, nothing is ever quite the same as it used to be, and Vladimir cannot reassemble the Soviet Union, even if the sovereignty of Ukraine is also marginal, at best. The world has changed, as the downing of Metrojet 9268 proves. To the effect that countries are still countries, as opposed to cash cows for conglomerates, Putin controls a large landmass with a very sparse population density, which speaks as loudly as any open secret on doping. The US, and Europe, to a lesser extent, also undermines Russian pride, and in a carry over from Crimean conflicts in the 19th century, Slavic mannerisms are still aped by proper Caucasians for lampooning purposes. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending Putin's trollism, but my suffering as an American on the margins at the hands of descendants of Africans is verifiable; not that much has changed since the days of Ellison's tokenism, practices to which Africans still subject themselves to in contemporary Russian schools, whose architecture is subject to flammable hazards, making the oppressed as expendable, once removed, as they always were. To take a page from Zbigniew Brzezinski's mindset, all the Chinese have to do is apply pressure on the Slavs from the South, pushing upwards. Asians have the numbers to spare.

Countries need alliances, no question of that, but cutting through the thickets of Donald Trump's muzzle flashes, there is a relevant question to be had, namely, what the fuck is NATO good for? It hasn't resolved anything running around Afghanistan trying to exterminate corrupt primitives.

Twinkle Toes with Bulgakov

"Do you believe no human is worth saving?"-- Jeremy Irons

Foreign analysts can lead one to blossom provocative ideas of which you can almost convince yourself to attempt, like cashing on the new age of polemical half truths by our adversaries. I was going to contact the fabled genesis heir to the KGB and place myself at their disposal to troll a web of lies in exchange for a transfer out of the 202 housing system, and still might do it, since finding work at home is difficult, but then reassessed, why would Russian Federation handlers treat me any better than Philadelphia's minority power class, tethering themselves to state rock candy? What could I convey to the FSB that wouldn't lead them to turn my missives over to the FBI, and what would earning myself a federal file achieve, in the attempt to deploy Slavic cronyism to give myself one last boost? The only thing I have that RT media would value is a verifiable life of white indifference in institutional depositories conjoined to black violence and mental health dysfunction which has broken me down, on top of my chronic incontinence. One also assumes being a petrol state is not the highlight of the season, as a 44 dollar barrel of oil is still low, despite the Canadian crisis. Sometimes I tend to forget I'm a writer first, and that this account hasn't down anything for me except to enrage decency, and, conversely, lead to trivialization, much like Niven's caviler reversion to form at Seberg's instigation in Bonjour Tristesse.

Sagan's work is a mid century take on social manner, catty ploys, people not knowing what to do with themselves, youthful angst breaking the yolk of restraint to carry the first real wounds of growing up.

I've always been an online junkie, but these days, it is quantitatively different. We fear moral majorities of a different sort, and if Google wants my scar tissue out of the way, if my intense stride is unacceptable, aren't they doing the right thing, if all the years of abuse and failing against poverty in part due to corruption, hasn't taught me acceptance, but transformed me into an equally failing warrior? I'm so over extended that the private space every writer needs, whether pure reporter or not, is creched into a treble. This isn't particularly beneficial to twilight, in whatever way we sip the cup of cessation. A developmental mastermind is a contradiction in terms, isn't it?

Exploring the Option

Mmm. Part of Act's problem is the fact that weapons manufacture is a money making industry, however astute the analysts are in assessing potential conflict. Certainly the Russian Federation can reignite the Cold War, but as the ruthlessness of the IS group illustrates, the technical ease of mobility, excepting the invalid class, threatens all state models, none of which are as secure as they seem, not even Canada, with its territorial expanse equivalent to the US, which points to how science fiction writers like Daniel Keys Moran may not be so far off the mark.

His Last Dancer franchise, for those not in the know, was about forced global hegemony under the UN, clones, and cyborg AI's gradually taking over. Unwittingly, spastic purchased the last novel in the series, and know only that the United States was the last sovereign territory to fall, defeated by French forces, (oddly enough). A little too melodramatic for my taste, and I could not enter into all the concluding story lines, but for a wildly vacillating future dystopia, Moran's dismal voice was a lens over my own. For all we know, France may indeed be the first to advocate the death of territorial sovereignty. If the third world war is an advent, however, I am not sold on Putin's paranoia or Xi Jinping's muscle flexing being the primary trigger to put an end to the global leadership of the US. Libya might have a domino effect on Egypt, Erdogan may push to expand Turkey's regional dominance, as it may be under a nationalist Muslim banner, but is neither Sunni nor Shi'ite, moving my pieces on the board with the same fallacy toward predictable scripts, but one thing is certain: State governance is being outstripped by meta data, which presents its own vulnerability.

Stockholm Material, Prescient Palpitations

The notion that the future is hidden--that prediction is the realm of seers, necromancers, and other unsavory types--is part of our cultural heritage. NC Dalkey, Rand Corporation.

The fact that I referenced a Baltic residency in Stockholm this morning doesn't necessarily follow that traumatized subconsciousness had intimations of the sword wielder to which I woke on France24 news feed this evening, but duress usually recognizes itself in the snap of another's desperation. A UN undersecretary, also appearing on France24 three months ago, said the disabled are often lost in this debate, and there are reasons these voices are often so muffled. Standards of objective analysis.

Helpific, for instance, has nothing to do with the self-justification for Russia's military expansion, nor apologias for the assassination of Putin's most steadfast opposition, coming forth from the Kremlin. I am the one who collapsed one into the other, limiting the establishment's ability to take me seriously, since Estonians seem collectively endearing and should welcome NATO's protection, but why don't we see more reports about the disabled in Europe, in comparison to their American counterparts? Bedcause Angela Merkel uses supported employment factories as a form of silencing dissidence?

Merely asking the question, is Vladimir Putin a war criminal? Fleet Street is courageously hitting this harder than mainstream media at home, but Obama and Cameron would sooner bake fecal bricks than unite with Erdogan in a  hawkish alliance against Putin's program, following the heels of Hitler's playbook, even if the battlefield is increasingly under the direction of Google Earth. How does the search giant get satellite access?

War is terrible, creating sometimes excruciating collateral damage, but it is also sometimes necessary, which is why the Defense Department should hire more civilian disabled contractors. We're willing, sometimes as ruthless as KGB clerks with maverick smiles.

Diabolical Frames

Helpific began to follow me on twitter, the micro-blogger wanna be conglomerate, and as usual, I plodded out a profile on the site without formally translating the requests for help nor entering one of my own, befuddled as to what Estonians or Russians would believe themselves capable of doing for an embittered American on the other side of the world, then pomdered the rise of Putin cronyism, tickled my fancy with the notion of soliciting a contract in code, then thought of the FSB alerting the FBI to my account, considered the irony of that. Yet there are provocateurs who waste Putin's opposition for the sake of a unified Russian federation, and Armin Mueller-Stahl has to reflect with some accuracy how the Slavic triad works, an extended association of family and connections.

Zsolt Bugarszki invited me to post on Helpific, but I'm not sure a criminal solicitation was what he had in mind, nor am I partial to Baltic collectivism, the bear lurking on the eastern front, as another one bites the dust. I have to make coffee and set my alarm, get to bed earlier this morning, having rescheduled my evaluation for another power chair which your taxes shouldn't have to foot, but even my desire for illegal retribution to balance the scales hits the blank slate of not knowing whom to trust to attempt a quid pro quo.  I'd have to risk something myself in return, in lieu of  offering federal reserve notes.

Zsolt told me the site is in Beta, probably not a bad idea, in the long run, and since we're on the subject, this local meet up raises the usual material versus intractable ethical conflict. I may follow Richard Dawkins. I may learn from him and may even agree with him that Catholicism has a mild polytheistic doctrine, but we'll destroy ourselves if we believe we'll eliminate anti-social behavior through neuroscience. I'm really happy that I am not going to be around to witness how we convert the human animal into porridge, our species knocking itself off without the benefit of an asteroid.

Closer Look at the Fault Lines

In this great tradition of the eminence of detail, all the minutiae of Christian education, of scholastic or military pedagogy, all forms of  'training' found their place easily enough.-- Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, p 140

It is difficult to remember how frightened we all were in the year after 9/11, and most analysts believed, at least before the timeline became cogent, that Muhammad and his protege signaled the dawn of a new era. As far as mass murders go, Muhammad was atypical, not an impulse spree killer like the Aura shooter. The discipline he displayed was true anarchy against the state, at least initially, and biography is a bit disingenuous with its quick facts. Muhammad was a solder first and foremost, and then a domestic terrorist in the last months of his life, and probably has more affinity with Lee Harvey Oswald than we would care to credit. Both men were molded for the sake of the national defense, and both the assassin and the serial sniper had a degree of temerity rare when it comes to treasonous behavior, if one accepts that Oswald was a lone actor.

This is the price we pay for being the sole animal able to manipulate biology and body to the aerodynamic extent that we do, as Foucault's analysis explores, a homosexual so fascinated with control and assembly, ironically to pay an exorbitant price, perhaps unwittingly, for his own sexual desire.

The digital age has made us aware, conversely, of how rapidly we're superseding our own bipedal engineering, toppled in hubris by complex financial instruments and proxy conflicts which could trigger global aggression of some sort, especially as Turkish destabilization is not a headache NATO needs on its plate. Not that anyone cares what an impoverished spastic thinks, but it might be time for NATO to close ranks against Putin's recidivist incursions. Russia is hardly in a position to re-establish its Soviet empire, and could be stopped with a firm display of unity and muscle. Let Isis have what it wants. The US made Iraq ungovernable in an ideological argument with extremism that it failed to win, hence, let the new Islamists create their modern caliphate. They'll evolve. Everything does.

Sister Trolling

Medium keeps its contributors informed about page views, and I suppose, because I was posting off the cuff, my comment on the Ask Ethan post about black hole theory correction picked up over a hundred views. I took some physics at Temple University and nearly flunked out, but this doesn't mean I despise the study of space. Most of it is counter intuitive even for the mathematical minds which grasp it, but what I meant, without entirely understanding extraordinary mass condensation, is: If we presuppose universes repeat themselves due to impaction, consciousness doesn't seem to repeat with it. I do not feel loss of identity when my cellular waste builds in my colon and discharges. We do not remember the squeal of pigs being electrocuted for their succulent flesh once we ingest pork, so information is in fact lost on a biological level. Information is lost on a cultural level as well, and we'll never learn as much as we need to to defeat destructive capacities of entropy. We're apes. Smart apes, the most dangerous species yet encountered, but apes, slightly better engineered, and while the equations may have been proven through induction, language itself imposes its own limitations.

Whatever the viability of theories on black holes and strings, motion and matter does not think about itself in those terms. Holes, strings. Simple implements of mammal amusements. Are physicists going to argue that energy is a living element? Stars are a chemical process, partial oxidation, partial hydrogen bomb. They aren't conscious, they aren't minds with directional intent. We'll never comprehend why particles and waves exist, why they create chemicals, nor why chemicals under the right conditions ingest themselves and reproduce, nor even define thinking. Thoughts have no mass. They evolved with the basic plankton brain, but do not exist. The only evidence we have for thought are the images of brain activity, but brain activity is not itself evidence of directional imperative. For that we have DVD teleplays.

Beneath opens with an interesting premise, seems to have a touch of after.life to it, which I admire intellectually, and then decelerates into a creature elimination film whose denouement shrivels on the vine. What is mildly intriguing about the script is survival guilt conjoined to the moral lesson of medical model brutality, not something burn victims with chronic irritation need to view when they feel their life slipping away, toying with the fact that familial bonds are the best humans can do, but with denial being necessary. Beneath the surface, sisters hate each other, whatever tender moments between them. My sister and I have a multitude of stakes within our defense mechanisms: shared abuse, a sister who should never have lived.

The disabled community makes excuses for those with minimal awareness, but I am going to be cruel. People like my sister Michelle should be put down. She lived 22 years in hell, even if she did not know it. Toward the end she struggled with constant lung fluid, and my parents did the right thing, but were wrong to let her live at all, and I'm making this assertion with my mother's sister free to read my link. I love my aunt, mind, but Disability In Arts is in part a last will and testament by a woman in a precarious position who allowed her life to be destroyed by intensely disappointed emotional investments in people and indoctrinations, a woman more than likely to be defeated by the metastasis of dubious African American competency, which has infested Western standards beyond repair, although it is true the citizens of Rome waited Hannibal out, and whatever the tactics of the general on his elephant, went on to rule the world. The European Union should fly the Syrian refugees to Russia.

If Putin is supporting Alawite ruthlessness with material, then let the leader of the Russian Federation handle the consequences.

An Alibi for Boris Nemtsov

"The man in the hut can hurt you."-- Bill Maher

If I approached the FSB and attempted to negotiate with them, I still face the same difficulty I would if I approached a gang affiliate. I work on the assumption that every African American has closer ties to someone willing to shoot, and someone able to shoot, than I do, but with that as a given, I simply lack the knowledge as to where to find ruthless people, not that those who've humiliated and abused me are substantial. Eight years on Page and Norris Streets, and all I have is a Paratransit driver who one day showed me where he used to deal drugs. I would not recognize him if I saw him again, and he has moved on, if he did not get murdered himself.

Then you have to consider the contractor, the stresses you'd bring to bear on the individual, how you could be sure they would not kill you even if they took out your target, or didn't take out your target, the pieces grow exponentially.

And what would FSB agents do once they found out what I wanted, handle me or refer any effort on my part to the FBI, and then the Philadelphia police would laugh, because the cops know how often they've restored me to a wheelchair in 20 odd years, not that police themselves cannot be bought, but my leverage is small potatoes. People tend to leave spinsters alone. We're unpleasant, but that wouldn't necessarily make me an asset 

If I had the ability to tell Vladimir Putin anything, I'd tell him you cannot gun down opponents indefinitely. It makes Russia look as backward as the political cartoons depicted at the end of the Victorian era, right at the outset of the great war. No one will ever know the truth about Nemtsov's killing. Putin's protestations may be genuine, or they may be plausible deniability. Either way, the man is as inept as the cronies holding him aloft. 

But I'm still turning it over. To echo a former supervisor's question: What would I have to gain? If my body is in the preliminary end stage of a chronic condition, not much personally, but NSCIL, which like everything in the US, is the national independent living center association, knows full well that corruption runs rampant in IL. The federal mandate acquired leads to complacency, and sometimes, if you want an omelet, you need to break some eggs.

Decent Breakfast

The plot twists in this Vares episode were as obvious as any equivalent American procedural. It was the actors who were unsettling: the wounded doctor in gauze shaking like a coward while his patient with stymied suicidal impulses kills his wife, and the Finnish Godfather, whatever he should be called. It is perturbing that Eastern Europeans look like a society under post traumatic stress, never mind the narrative. The men look blasted by famine, the women malnourished,, weary and gaunt if attractive, pallid and pasty like stale dumplings if homily and obese. This is Vladimir Putin's claim toward a resurgent Russian dominance?,

This is what the U.S. has to look forward to while progressives keep surging relentlessly? In all this time I've been raising my voice, I've raised it because the system invested in me up to a point after my life long paces in a strenuous institutional model that make Angstrom's reopening of the gulag, this time for corruption rather than dictatorship, seem like a weekend holiday. I do not need to keep revisiting what I've told you about, trying to be a competitive employee in power chairs on buses, Septa's Paratransit curtailment using a bidding contract with this venerable institution to do it. I was a patient at Moss briefly, hoping they could undo some of Shriner's aggressive surgical damage to my feet, but the doctors were concerned about the already significant loss to my educational calendar, so all bets rested on my astute and clever acumen, and we've seen how that has fared in my greater Delaware Valley journey.
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Such a bleak assessment of the human condition. Finland, of all places. The Swedes? They lie just to cash in on crime drama television, but what Majek dredges up to imitate hard boiled noir feels like an authentic disparity indeed. The loss of all hope crushes the spirit, and I've taken this blow (childhood institutionalization) by blow, (family mental illness and death of siblings) by blow (domestic abuse) by blow (city governance corruption) and my foreign viewers must be amazed that I'm a disabled American who is still vested in the exceptionalism of the United States. Philadelphia has its own subjugation tactics in relation to mental heath and chronic conditions. It is a wonder I just don't fold up the damn tent. I've never had a vacation, not of my own making. Padre took me to the Poconos as a kid and it was a disaster. I had stress incontinence without having the classification for it back then, my sister Stephanie screamed when our father left the room, as she often did back then, my dead brother Nicky stole the waitresses tips, and now I'm telling my HUD contracted landlord with their hypocritical Protestant exploitation ethics that they are going to compensate me for years of duress. How deep does the damn sinkhole go.

Hot Air

THE revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk-- the Economist, world authority.

I always do this. Convince myself to stay up and work after cat care, eating, defecation-- which always tires me-- and then manage to fritter my weariness away on an overly focused awareness of the tinnitus giving my ear drum a steady buzzing. The one PBS segment for which Miles O'Brien has my gratitude is his short piece on tinnitus. I do not know if I revolt after this post and push myself, but people, the one division between spastic brain damaged viewpoints and ablest viewpoints which may never be overcome is why you engage in such unnecessary behavior.

This balloon crash is an entirely manufactured tragedy, much like the deaths in Ukraine, which should not be happening. Those 14 page views from Ukraine sober me, because I have a distaste for Euro-centric sectarian deaths, and may get myself in serious trouble by giving Russian security services and the EU a piece of my mind. I'm a powerless, defenseless, unhappy writer living in one of America's oldest cities founded by Quakers, and I receive 14 page views from an Eastern European country killing itself over Russian hegemony and western capitalism. This because I am acerbic and callous, but not acerbic and callous enough not to condemn the Russian Federation for the deaths of Litvinenko and Berezovsky. Their murders represent a misguided savagery, even in a world where brutality is contingent, but not the way Putin's actors go about it. I joined a Linked In group, and if I get active on the site, I'll probably be banned due to this blog-- not that I think much of Linked In. It is less confusing than Google Plus, but what of it. Relatively educated people can be inane.

All technologies have risks, but hot air balloon gliding is an absolutely unnecessary form of flight.

Shards and fissures

I used to believe I'd automatically get myself excluded from the established press if I told the truth about inherent bias, but it is something of which most readers are suspicious of already, not without justification. Let me give a for instance. Eugene Robinson yesterday faults the administration's liberal self-righteousness in villainizing Putin's provocation in the Crimea, and indeed, Eugene's voice sates progressive outrage with the Bush Administration's 9/11 overreach. Nothing wrong with pandering to a liberal base trying to shore up a fading promise Barack Obama represented. If candidate Obama had not aspired to the presidency, one can speculate what he might have done as an inspirational leader on a more nuanced platform.

Like Robinson, I actually remember Grenada. I can neither affirm nor deny that it was an appropriate domino effect for Reagan era spheres of influence, but citing the US incursion on the petite Caribbean paradise doesn't explain Ukrainian turmoil. Neither does citing America's systemic destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. There is a minority viewpoint which doesn't equate Putin with Mussolini, which is not to be blind to modern Russian brutality. I am not unaware of ugly brute force in Russian penal systems, but this doesn't preclude Vladimir from acting out of legitimate national interests.

In that vein, plagiarism is not quite the crime journalists make it out to be, and that was what I was driving at in my column about fraud in my Examiner piece on Glass's inability to acquire a legal license. The editorial chicks who deign to approve or reject my pieces for a certain degree of promotional status didn't like it as newsworthy commentary. Certainly their prerogative, though I stayed up all night researching it, debating a call to the bar association contact. I am on to a thesis which matters, at least in relation to veracity. I do not believe my finished product, as such, does all that badly getting me where I want to go.  

I have to watch a very young Peter Falk play a spree killer for Hitchcock again; it was an interesting rationalization. Past informing the present; Falk did not mind spoofing himself, but he never played his audience false. I miss him. He loved life, tumbling with adversity and coming out of it with a twinkle in his eye. Tassoni had the same propensity toward sardonic affection in his gaze.