Like many Americans, I suffer from the chronic problem of too much abundance -- that is, I could stand to lose a few pounds (not to mention some clutter). From what I see of people my own age or even five to ten years younger, I'm in comparatively good shape. But a few years before I hit that magic five-oh, I could feel the excess baggage taking a toll on my back and knees and joints. And it only gets worse.
The bright spot is that I've been able to stay in a pretty tight window for about ten to twelve years now, neither gaining nor losing more than five pounds. But I've been reading up a bit more here and there, trying to find relatively painless ways to take off that tonnage.
I am not a fan of fad or crash dieting, because you just end up gaining the weight back. It's about identifying the bad habits and routines in your day-to-day, and whittling away at them gradually, rather than trying and failing to dump them all whole hog overnight. One of the better books I've come across sums up its pitch in three simple words: Eat Move Sleep, as in eat less, move more, and sleep better. That's really all there is to it, and while it's simple, it's not easy.
People get distracted by the weird tax-exempt hypocrisies of, say, Catholicism or snake-handling evangelicals, but if 'murka has a state religion, it's the cult of self-help books. There are many pulpits and pastors and approaches, but all of them have the same basic angle: pull your shit together by identifying your bad habits, lining up some personal and/or professional goals, and start leveraging the latter to eliminate the former. That's really all most of these things boil down to.
People with bad habits know they have them, and want to quit them, but generally just don't know where to begin. All they see is an impossibly tall mountain, and that overwhelms the natural common-sense instinct to just take a first step, then another, and another, and so on. Again, we all know this, and it's all very life-hacky, but it's still true. Inertia is the real killer when it comes to bad habits. It's certainly possible to optimize your approach, but the bottom line is that doing anything is better than doing nothing.
Which brings me to David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, which I recommend if you never want to sleep soundly again. I'm not going to bother to review it point-by-point; suffice to say that it is very well-written and solidly researched, and a relatively quick read. He paints a picture that is grim and unrelenting and, most crucially, is already in motion.
What is not really discussed directly, but seems obvious all the same, is that population and consumption are the driving factors. There are geographic areas where we might be able to engineer ourselves out of some dangers, but climate change is really a result of a collection of bad habits that we have collectively, steadfastly refused to address. It is past time to address them, while we are still ambulatory.
I've said this many times before, but it cannot be repeated enough: humans' greatest strength -- our adaptability -- is our greatest weakness when it comes to climate change. We are habituated to assuming that we can figure out solutions to new challenges, because more often than not, we can, and at the very least we can adapt to new circumstances. This blinds us to the very real likelihood that we are on a path to having two-thirds of the world's largest cities underwater by the end of this century.
In great part, this is because our political system has become hopelessly gridlocked. The people who own the system have vested interests in using every last bit of fossil fuels they can, and they rent the politicians who will see to that.
It would be a simple matter to use all the tax abatements and such to assist these corporations into making the transition to renewable energy concerns, making money building windmill farms rather than explosive, polluting offshore platforms. They don't want to do that. Not yet, anyway. They don't need to: they can still drill and frack and refine for now, and when shit finally gets too hairy they can swoop in and profiteer from the re-engineering of the production and delivery systems. Then they'll take those tax breaks for the wind and solar and all that, thank you very much. How this all works is not a secret.
It has become a stock line to point out how Trump has been gaslighting America. That's true, as far as that goes, but I would suggest that the rot goes further, much further than the scumbag Republicons who enable and support every vile thing he says and does -- after all, most of it is just straight-up bog-standard country-club Republiconism from way back. The only difference is that Trump has realized that the best way to keep the extra-chromosome rube base foaming is to bring all the ethnic slurs from the golf course to the Twitter machine and to the high school gyms where he peddles his snake oil to the (m)asses.
The corporate media are definitely gaslighting us, you know, just as badly as Trump has been. He can't do it without them; most people do not read his Twitter inanities, and that's where the mediots are more than happy to jump in with their stupid panel shows and argue about What It All Means.
Do you need anyone to tell you what all this means? Didn't think so. Even the Ralph Wiggum types out there can spot an doddering racist time-share weasel when they hear one, especially when he refuses to fucking go away and has been peddling this schtick literally for decades. So there is no point in, say, CNN bringing on a useless barnacle like Salena Zito, to consplain what he meant when he told four American congressional representatives to go back where they came from.
Every day they do some lame variation of this idiotic nonsense, and every day someone out there keeps coming back for more. And companies keep paying for air time on these shows. Hmmm. Wonder if there's any connection in any of these things?
The Democratic Party leadership is gaslighting you as well. As I predicted months ago, that fucking turd Barr is quietly shutting down or starving all those SDNY investigations into Trump's career of criminality. Barr is dedicated to expanding "unitary executive" powers -- for chief executives from his party, anyway. Like all good Republicons, Bill Barr pretends to love this country, but makes no bones about despising its citizens who are not in lock-step with Orange Foolius' reign of error.
And all "Nancy Smash" can do is idly tweet and carp, crack wise and tell us plebes that we need to show up next year and vote this fucker out if we want him out. In other words, not only is she refusing to do her constitutionally sworn duty, she's blatantly denying the stated will of the voters. The so-called Blue Wave was an explicit rebuke of this administration's ongoing corruption and criminality, and a call to action now, not next election.
It qualifies as gaslighting because the Democrats' own logic doesn't square with itself -- they're happy to preen and fundraise over Mister Man wiping his ass with the Constitution every day of the week, and they'll tell you how urgent things have gotten. But the never seem to connect that rhetoric with any sort of action demonstrating a real sense of urgency.
Letters and subpoenas do no good when they are openly ignored and scoffed at. The law and the Constitution are just words on paper, if no one respects them enough to abide by them. This is where we are now, and every day the Democrats fail to take any meaningful action is a failure on their part. Not Trump, not Barr; they have been very clear on what they intend to do, and have set about doing it.
For some reason, Democratic "leadership" has instead chosen to persist in the notion that they can still work with Republicans. Maybe they need a couple more SCOTUS seats stolen from them before they get the fucking message. I don't know, and I give up asking. I honestly don't know right now if I'm even going to bother to vote next year, unless I can vote to get rid of Pelosi and Schumer and Nadler and the rest of these gutless assholes. They are doing nothing, nothing at all. Shame on them.
And we reg'lar 'murkins are gaslighting each other as well, with fake news, bullshit memes, empty infighting and virtue signaling, all of it. Every week contains something awful, and no one has the capacity for surprise or action anymore, just sputtering, impotent, performative online outrage.
At the very least, one has to wonder what the Russians' ROI is on their little troll-bot op in 2016. Pound for pound, it's probably better than the ROI Osama bin Laden got, perpetual security theater and paranoia with comparatively little effort. But the Russians did him one better, understanding that this country seethes with angry rubes looking for something to lash out at, and knowing exactly how to weaponize that. And they didn't even have to kill anyone -- you know, other than the dozens of journalists and lawyers they defenestrated and shot before they could talk to too many people about what they saw and knew.
All of it has toxified our environment. Nothing can get done or even discussed, again beyond the vapid panel public-consumption bullshit. Frank Zappa wasn't kidding when he said that politics is really just the entertainment branch of industry. It's all a distraction, and it turns out that all our disappointment and frustration and outrage doesn't actually do or change a thing. Voting doesn't matter either, if the people you vote for decide they don't want to do what you voted them in to do.
The world is burning, the political system is a monetized feedback loop for the net-worth bastards, and the peons just sit and wait for the next natural disaster, or the next outrage-of-the-day about a concentration-camp kid dying from cholera or loneliness or the dehumanizing indifference of the jackals who are paid to abuse them.
Keep in mind that the camps are just an offshoot of the privatized carceral state. Someone's making money off this, and you don't even need to guess whose campaign they contributed to, in 2016 and last year and next year. Where the hell do you think "General" John Kelly went? He wasn't quite through disgracing his uniform and service to this nation. There is always more to ruin and destroy, when one is so inclined and given practically unlimited power.
It just keeps rising, the literal and political flood waters, and we're all neck-deep and don't know what to do about any of it. Folks, I offer a humble suggestion: nothing. Like, literally nothing. Entropy. Turn it off, all of it. It's nothing but a goddamned lying noise machine anyway. What would happen if no one watched CNN or Fox or MSNBC or any of it? We wouldn't be "informed"? Okay, how well-informed do you consider yourself right now, and what can you do with any of that information?
In the spirit of Eat Move Sleep, I propose we adopt a similar approach with respect to addressing climate change: Breed less. Consume less. This does not mean some drastic zero-population type of thing, a full-stop moratorium on children and commerce. It means dialing it back a notch.
Ten percent is a good number to use as a benchmark; it's simple to calculate and represents a modest decrement to personal use. But collectively, such a number would have an enormous impact, and quickly, on the swirling environmental challenges that are gaining momentum.
It's not meant to be a perfect number, or even an ideal or maximum, and I offer no projections as to the estimated effects of doing everything less by ten percent. It's just an easy-to-remember number, and it will vary from item to item. So for climate change, yes, having ten percent fewer children and buying ten percent less shit you don't need anyway is a pretty good start, multiplied by a few million or a few hundred million.
But all the political bullshit, the corporate gaslighting between the mediot entities and the political parties they shill for, knock that out by fifty percent tomorrow, and I'd bet even money you hit ninety percent by the end of the week. It's very freeing.
Aside from some recent coverage of the California earthquakes and a few minutes of flood warnings in Louisiana, I haven't watched any televised news in weeks, probably since Memorial Day or so if I really thought about it. It wasn't an immediate, total drop-off, but scaled up very quickly. I'll read things to keep up on major stuff, but even then, not from a site that has a teevee channel or news program. That's just cross-promotion.
The stuff that's happening is infuriating, no doubt, but actively avoiding the crucible of constant corporate shit-stirring, all these mewling journamalists and congress-weasels who know goddamned well what their jobs are but refuse to fucking do them, just cutting back on that whole fetid ecosystem does wonders for your psyche. I worked up a list of new projects over the last month -- recording music, writing fiction, some graphic arts things -- do some yoga and meditation, reading more books, and it's amazing how quickly your mind starts releasing that clutter, all that miserable crap.
I'm still engaged in knowing about these things, but no longer engaged in caring. It's an important distinction, and one well worth cultivating. I am almost entirely certain that by the end of next year, this blog will probably no longer be a going concern, not only because the coming campaign is going to be a category-seven shitstorm, but because I really don't care anymore, in the sense that there is an outcome that I hope for, but no longer have any real emotional investment in, because there's just no upside to that anymore.
So far, we've all been cut a break because Trump deals in nothing but empty threats. Go ahead and make good on them, Fatboy. Kill off Obamacare and replace it with nothing. Build the fucking wall. Send ICE everywhere and anywhere, and round 'em all up. Maybe when Americans are having to figure out how to process their own meat, pick their own produce, clean their own hotel beds and dishes, and return to the good old health-care system, maybe a war with Iran to top off that shit-cake, maybe then they'll start to get what it's all about. Then again, this country has an average reading level of eighth grade, and doesn't read books to begin with, which means (as George Carlin pointed out) that half of 'em ain't even that smart. Maybe they never get it, because they don't want to.
In fact, the more this nation refuses to come together and put an end to these demons infesting it, the more I feel like maybe this nation deserves another four years -- at least -- of these cocksuckers. You know? At least forty percent of the people in this country are happy with the open racism, the corruption, the utterly incompetent trade and foreign policies. They are thrilled with the idea of governance based in nothing but pure spite. Or on the other side of it, all those assholes twisting themselves around to defend (for example) Pelosi's diffident inaction and intramural sniping, maybe they need to get another one snapped off in their asses before they understand that maybe she really is just Lucy Van Pelt with the fucking football.
Take a look at the photo on the right. You know who the woman is. The man is Nancy Pelosi's investment banker son, Paul Jr. The photo was taken at the roach-infested Maga-Lardo "resort" on New Year's Eve 2017. Still think Nancy Pelosi is on your fucking side?
I still think that blogs and individual Twitter feeds have value; they are like small businesses to me and it's difficult for me to shake my fondness for that sort of thing. Most of them are trying to fight the good fight the best they know how, and some are actually pretty good at it.
(Unfortunately, as I've pointed out in recent months, some of them have gotten their priorities unbelievably skewed, and seem to spend most of their time whining about how some Milo Y. professional shithead type got deplatformed for being an asshole, as if we should all be required to listen to these douchebags lie and bray their nonsense, or that any of it is even close in importance to, you know, children dying in concentration camps.)
Anyway, try it for yourselves, folks. Start with ten percent across the board. Chances are you have some sort of routine locked in, maybe watching or reading the coverage of Whiny Toddler's latest poopy diaper while you're eating a meal, or before or after work. Just change it up a little, and do it again tomorrow, and the next day. Get that under your belt, and then drop off another ten percent.
We all reminisce about how it used to be, that we weren't a nation of obsessives worrying about what next thing our "leaders" had done or were about to do. Well, they're not going to just give you your time and attention back, they can't afford to. It's their revenue model these days. You have to take those things back from them.
It's not as passive as it seems; baked into the whole thing is the pulling back of your dollars from these things that you find unacceptable. The companies who sponsor Fucker Carlson's White Power Hour, or Fox and Friends, or whatever -- deny those companies your dollars. Much more effective than [rolls eyes] voting for the same corrupt hacks every couple years who promise you one thing and then do nothing at all.
What the self-help industry is really about is understanding that the reader needs help because they have lost control over vital things -- health, weight, relationships, career. What happens to all of us at some point is that we butt up against obstacles over which we have no control, and so our subconscious mind gets demoralized, thinking we have no control over anything.
But we do have control over some important things: what we spend our time and money on, who we interact with, whether we want to continue these vicious cycles of abuse with the various Ike Turners (the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the corporate media, Facebook, etc.). Those things are important to you; in the end, they're all you have that's really and truly yours. Stop giving them away for no return. Start removing the assholes and parasites from your life.
Ten percent at a time.
The bright spot is that I've been able to stay in a pretty tight window for about ten to twelve years now, neither gaining nor losing more than five pounds. But I've been reading up a bit more here and there, trying to find relatively painless ways to take off that tonnage.
I am not a fan of fad or crash dieting, because you just end up gaining the weight back. It's about identifying the bad habits and routines in your day-to-day, and whittling away at them gradually, rather than trying and failing to dump them all whole hog overnight. One of the better books I've come across sums up its pitch in three simple words: Eat Move Sleep, as in eat less, move more, and sleep better. That's really all there is to it, and while it's simple, it's not easy.
People get distracted by the weird tax-exempt hypocrisies of, say, Catholicism or snake-handling evangelicals, but if 'murka has a state religion, it's the cult of self-help books. There are many pulpits and pastors and approaches, but all of them have the same basic angle: pull your shit together by identifying your bad habits, lining up some personal and/or professional goals, and start leveraging the latter to eliminate the former. That's really all most of these things boil down to.
People with bad habits know they have them, and want to quit them, but generally just don't know where to begin. All they see is an impossibly tall mountain, and that overwhelms the natural common-sense instinct to just take a first step, then another, and another, and so on. Again, we all know this, and it's all very life-hacky, but it's still true. Inertia is the real killer when it comes to bad habits. It's certainly possible to optimize your approach, but the bottom line is that doing anything is better than doing nothing.
Which brings me to David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth, which I recommend if you never want to sleep soundly again. I'm not going to bother to review it point-by-point; suffice to say that it is very well-written and solidly researched, and a relatively quick read. He paints a picture that is grim and unrelenting and, most crucially, is already in motion.
What is not really discussed directly, but seems obvious all the same, is that population and consumption are the driving factors. There are geographic areas where we might be able to engineer ourselves out of some dangers, but climate change is really a result of a collection of bad habits that we have collectively, steadfastly refused to address. It is past time to address them, while we are still ambulatory.
I've said this many times before, but it cannot be repeated enough: humans' greatest strength -- our adaptability -- is our greatest weakness when it comes to climate change. We are habituated to assuming that we can figure out solutions to new challenges, because more often than not, we can, and at the very least we can adapt to new circumstances. This blinds us to the very real likelihood that we are on a path to having two-thirds of the world's largest cities underwater by the end of this century.
In great part, this is because our political system has become hopelessly gridlocked. The people who own the system have vested interests in using every last bit of fossil fuels they can, and they rent the politicians who will see to that.
It would be a simple matter to use all the tax abatements and such to assist these corporations into making the transition to renewable energy concerns, making money building windmill farms rather than explosive, polluting offshore platforms. They don't want to do that. Not yet, anyway. They don't need to: they can still drill and frack and refine for now, and when shit finally gets too hairy they can swoop in and profiteer from the re-engineering of the production and delivery systems. Then they'll take those tax breaks for the wind and solar and all that, thank you very much. How this all works is not a secret.
It has become a stock line to point out how Trump has been gaslighting America. That's true, as far as that goes, but I would suggest that the rot goes further, much further than the scumbag Republicons who enable and support every vile thing he says and does -- after all, most of it is just straight-up bog-standard country-club Republiconism from way back. The only difference is that Trump has realized that the best way to keep the extra-chromosome rube base foaming is to bring all the ethnic slurs from the golf course to the Twitter machine and to the high school gyms where he peddles his snake oil to the (m)asses.
The corporate media are definitely gaslighting us, you know, just as badly as Trump has been. He can't do it without them; most people do not read his Twitter inanities, and that's where the mediots are more than happy to jump in with their stupid panel shows and argue about What It All Means.
Do you need anyone to tell you what all this means? Didn't think so. Even the Ralph Wiggum types out there can spot an doddering racist time-share weasel when they hear one, especially when he refuses to fucking go away and has been peddling this schtick literally for decades. So there is no point in, say, CNN bringing on a useless barnacle like Salena Zito, to consplain what he meant when he told four American congressional representatives to go back where they came from.
Every day they do some lame variation of this idiotic nonsense, and every day someone out there keeps coming back for more. And companies keep paying for air time on these shows. Hmmm. Wonder if there's any connection in any of these things?
The Democratic Party leadership is gaslighting you as well. As I predicted months ago, that fucking turd Barr is quietly shutting down or starving all those SDNY investigations into Trump's career of criminality. Barr is dedicated to expanding "unitary executive" powers -- for chief executives from his party, anyway. Like all good Republicons, Bill Barr pretends to love this country, but makes no bones about despising its citizens who are not in lock-step with Orange Foolius' reign of error.
And all "Nancy Smash" can do is idly tweet and carp, crack wise and tell us plebes that we need to show up next year and vote this fucker out if we want him out. In other words, not only is she refusing to do her constitutionally sworn duty, she's blatantly denying the stated will of the voters. The so-called Blue Wave was an explicit rebuke of this administration's ongoing corruption and criminality, and a call to action now, not next election.
It qualifies as gaslighting because the Democrats' own logic doesn't square with itself -- they're happy to preen and fundraise over Mister Man wiping his ass with the Constitution every day of the week, and they'll tell you how urgent things have gotten. But the never seem to connect that rhetoric with any sort of action demonstrating a real sense of urgency.
Letters and subpoenas do no good when they are openly ignored and scoffed at. The law and the Constitution are just words on paper, if no one respects them enough to abide by them. This is where we are now, and every day the Democrats fail to take any meaningful action is a failure on their part. Not Trump, not Barr; they have been very clear on what they intend to do, and have set about doing it.
For some reason, Democratic "leadership" has instead chosen to persist in the notion that they can still work with Republicans. Maybe they need a couple more SCOTUS seats stolen from them before they get the fucking message. I don't know, and I give up asking. I honestly don't know right now if I'm even going to bother to vote next year, unless I can vote to get rid of Pelosi and Schumer and Nadler and the rest of these gutless assholes. They are doing nothing, nothing at all. Shame on them.
And we reg'lar 'murkins are gaslighting each other as well, with fake news, bullshit memes, empty infighting and virtue signaling, all of it. Every week contains something awful, and no one has the capacity for surprise or action anymore, just sputtering, impotent, performative online outrage.
At the very least, one has to wonder what the Russians' ROI is on their little troll-bot op in 2016. Pound for pound, it's probably better than the ROI Osama bin Laden got, perpetual security theater and paranoia with comparatively little effort. But the Russians did him one better, understanding that this country seethes with angry rubes looking for something to lash out at, and knowing exactly how to weaponize that. And they didn't even have to kill anyone -- you know, other than the dozens of journalists and lawyers they defenestrated and shot before they could talk to too many people about what they saw and knew.
All of it has toxified our environment. Nothing can get done or even discussed, again beyond the vapid panel public-consumption bullshit. Frank Zappa wasn't kidding when he said that politics is really just the entertainment branch of industry. It's all a distraction, and it turns out that all our disappointment and frustration and outrage doesn't actually do or change a thing. Voting doesn't matter either, if the people you vote for decide they don't want to do what you voted them in to do.
The world is burning, the political system is a monetized feedback loop for the net-worth bastards, and the peons just sit and wait for the next natural disaster, or the next outrage-of-the-day about a concentration-camp kid dying from cholera or loneliness or the dehumanizing indifference of the jackals who are paid to abuse them.
Keep in mind that the camps are just an offshoot of the privatized carceral state. Someone's making money off this, and you don't even need to guess whose campaign they contributed to, in 2016 and last year and next year. Where the hell do you think "General" John Kelly went? He wasn't quite through disgracing his uniform and service to this nation. There is always more to ruin and destroy, when one is so inclined and given practically unlimited power.
It just keeps rising, the literal and political flood waters, and we're all neck-deep and don't know what to do about any of it. Folks, I offer a humble suggestion: nothing. Like, literally nothing. Entropy. Turn it off, all of it. It's nothing but a goddamned lying noise machine anyway. What would happen if no one watched CNN or Fox or MSNBC or any of it? We wouldn't be "informed"? Okay, how well-informed do you consider yourself right now, and what can you do with any of that information?
In the spirit of Eat Move Sleep, I propose we adopt a similar approach with respect to addressing climate change: Breed less. Consume less. This does not mean some drastic zero-population type of thing, a full-stop moratorium on children and commerce. It means dialing it back a notch.
Ten percent is a good number to use as a benchmark; it's simple to calculate and represents a modest decrement to personal use. But collectively, such a number would have an enormous impact, and quickly, on the swirling environmental challenges that are gaining momentum.
It's not meant to be a perfect number, or even an ideal or maximum, and I offer no projections as to the estimated effects of doing everything less by ten percent. It's just an easy-to-remember number, and it will vary from item to item. So for climate change, yes, having ten percent fewer children and buying ten percent less shit you don't need anyway is a pretty good start, multiplied by a few million or a few hundred million.
But all the political bullshit, the corporate gaslighting between the mediot entities and the political parties they shill for, knock that out by fifty percent tomorrow, and I'd bet even money you hit ninety percent by the end of the week. It's very freeing.
Aside from some recent coverage of the California earthquakes and a few minutes of flood warnings in Louisiana, I haven't watched any televised news in weeks, probably since Memorial Day or so if I really thought about it. It wasn't an immediate, total drop-off, but scaled up very quickly. I'll read things to keep up on major stuff, but even then, not from a site that has a teevee channel or news program. That's just cross-promotion.
The stuff that's happening is infuriating, no doubt, but actively avoiding the crucible of constant corporate shit-stirring, all these mewling journamalists and congress-weasels who know goddamned well what their jobs are but refuse to fucking do them, just cutting back on that whole fetid ecosystem does wonders for your psyche. I worked up a list of new projects over the last month -- recording music, writing fiction, some graphic arts things -- do some yoga and meditation, reading more books, and it's amazing how quickly your mind starts releasing that clutter, all that miserable crap.
I'm still engaged in knowing about these things, but no longer engaged in caring. It's an important distinction, and one well worth cultivating. I am almost entirely certain that by the end of next year, this blog will probably no longer be a going concern, not only because the coming campaign is going to be a category-seven shitstorm, but because I really don't care anymore, in the sense that there is an outcome that I hope for, but no longer have any real emotional investment in, because there's just no upside to that anymore.
So far, we've all been cut a break because Trump deals in nothing but empty threats. Go ahead and make good on them, Fatboy. Kill off Obamacare and replace it with nothing. Build the fucking wall. Send ICE everywhere and anywhere, and round 'em all up. Maybe when Americans are having to figure out how to process their own meat, pick their own produce, clean their own hotel beds and dishes, and return to the good old health-care system, maybe a war with Iran to top off that shit-cake, maybe then they'll start to get what it's all about. Then again, this country has an average reading level of eighth grade, and doesn't read books to begin with, which means (as George Carlin pointed out) that half of 'em ain't even that smart. Maybe they never get it, because they don't want to.
In fact, the more this nation refuses to come together and put an end to these demons infesting it, the more I feel like maybe this nation deserves another four years -- at least -- of these cocksuckers. You know? At least forty percent of the people in this country are happy with the open racism, the corruption, the utterly incompetent trade and foreign policies. They are thrilled with the idea of governance based in nothing but pure spite. Or on the other side of it, all those assholes twisting themselves around to defend (for example) Pelosi's diffident inaction and intramural sniping, maybe they need to get another one snapped off in their asses before they understand that maybe she really is just Lucy Van Pelt with the fucking football.
Take a look at the photo on the right. You know who the woman is. The man is Nancy Pelosi's investment banker son, Paul Jr. The photo was taken at the roach-infested Maga-Lardo "resort" on New Year's Eve 2017. Still think Nancy Pelosi is on your fucking side?I still think that blogs and individual Twitter feeds have value; they are like small businesses to me and it's difficult for me to shake my fondness for that sort of thing. Most of them are trying to fight the good fight the best they know how, and some are actually pretty good at it.
(Unfortunately, as I've pointed out in recent months, some of them have gotten their priorities unbelievably skewed, and seem to spend most of their time whining about how some Milo Y. professional shithead type got deplatformed for being an asshole, as if we should all be required to listen to these douchebags lie and bray their nonsense, or that any of it is even close in importance to, you know, children dying in concentration camps.)
Anyway, try it for yourselves, folks. Start with ten percent across the board. Chances are you have some sort of routine locked in, maybe watching or reading the coverage of Whiny Toddler's latest poopy diaper while you're eating a meal, or before or after work. Just change it up a little, and do it again tomorrow, and the next day. Get that under your belt, and then drop off another ten percent.
We all reminisce about how it used to be, that we weren't a nation of obsessives worrying about what next thing our "leaders" had done or were about to do. Well, they're not going to just give you your time and attention back, they can't afford to. It's their revenue model these days. You have to take those things back from them.
It's not as passive as it seems; baked into the whole thing is the pulling back of your dollars from these things that you find unacceptable. The companies who sponsor Fucker Carlson's White Power Hour, or Fox and Friends, or whatever -- deny those companies your dollars. Much more effective than [rolls eyes] voting for the same corrupt hacks every couple years who promise you one thing and then do nothing at all.
What the self-help industry is really about is understanding that the reader needs help because they have lost control over vital things -- health, weight, relationships, career. What happens to all of us at some point is that we butt up against obstacles over which we have no control, and so our subconscious mind gets demoralized, thinking we have no control over anything.
But we do have control over some important things: what we spend our time and money on, who we interact with, whether we want to continue these vicious cycles of abuse with the various Ike Turners (the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the corporate media, Facebook, etc.). Those things are important to you; in the end, they're all you have that's really and truly yours. Stop giving them away for no return. Start removing the assholes and parasites from your life.
Ten percent at a time.
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