smells like dead things

I'm glad to report that Jim Kunstler has returned to us, and wrote a great column this week.

Not that he's gone anywhere. It's just that his wonderfully named blog, Clusterfuck Nation, has been uncharacteristically horrible lately. Last week he reached a new low when he chose the transgender bathroom controversy as his topic. I found the result unreadable, and nothing from April or May is up to his usual standard.

Kunstler does his best work when his topic is free ranging and improvisational riffing on the Great American Meltdown. That's what he returned to this morning, and it's an approach that produces paragraphs like this:

Things go eerily quiet and still before the California primaries. At this stage, the two major parties have discredited themselves so thoroughly that a necrotic stink wafts around the election of ’16. Who put that road-kill possum in Hillary’s podium? Why does Donald look every week more and more like a lurching Golem? The parties are rudderless. Their leaders range the decks like wailing revenants. It’s as if the mortal remains of Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan have come from the grave to eat the brains of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Reince Priebus. The rectified essence of every zombie fantasy churned out of Hollywood seeps through the capillaries of the dying political establishment, as it stews and ferments and waits to be loaded on the garbage barge of history.

The questions posed therein are purely rhetorical, and answer themselves. Hillary herself is the dead possum, and Trump looks like a "lurching golem" 'cause that's eggs ackley what he is.

It's great to see you back, Jim. Your country needs you, more than it could ever know.

weekend cat blog

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_) º(signed)º S@MM¥

Looks t'me like Sam's RR.

(olyeuse kids know what RR is an abbreviation 4, amirite?)

ЛСД

I thought I'd provide little more 2day about LSD generally and Hofman's "bad trip" specifically. I was especially interested in the art work I put up yesterday. and no more than began researching it before I found out it's got a history.

Wikipedia recounts "The celebration of Bicycle Day originated in De Kalb, Illinois, in 1985,[9] when Thomas B. Roberts, then a Professor at Northern Illinois University, invented the name "Bicycle Day" when he founded the first Bicycle Day celebration at his home. Several years later, he sent an announcement made by one of his students to friends and Internet lists, thus propagating the idea and the celebration."

As you can see, both these versions of the original Bicycle Day artwork were used to decorate 25 hits of blotter paper LSD.

The problem I have  with this image is it conveys none of the fear or paranoia Hofman experienced that day, and chooses instead to picture only the idealistic qualities of LSD.

Over the years  many artists have taken a stab at updating the original, & this one does convey just a hint of the menace Hofman felt that day. But my favourite is still the LSD monster (see yesterday's Catboxx), for the way he told it, Hofman's bike ride home was truly terrifying, with the ideal part of the trip coming later that day.

woo hoo woo hoo hoo

"He turned on, he tuned in, and he has finally dropped out: Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who invented LSD, and experienced the first “bad trip,” in 1943, has died at the age of 102. That’s 873 in freak-out years." (Item from Whatever it is I'm Against It blog)

A little over a year prior to my birth in 1944, an an unknown Swiss chemist experienced history's first bad acid trip. As with most such trips, he had no idea what was happening to him, or why. 

On Monday, April 19, 1943, Hofman deliberately took .25 mg (250 micrograms) of the drug after experiencing minor effects the previous Friday when working with LSD, probably resulting from tiny amounts of it entering his body through the pores.

"What happened on April 19 became known to the psychedelic counterculture as Bicycle Day: Hofmann's wild, two and a half mile cycle ride home - no car being available because it was wartime."

"I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. I asked my laboratory assistant to escort me home. On the way, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly.



As he rode home, the pioneer tripper assumed, as have generations that followed, that everything would be OK once he got there, but alas, it was not 2 B. "My surroundings had now transformed themselves in more terrifying ways. Everything in the room spun around, and the familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms. They were in continuous motion, animated, as if driven by an inner restlessness."

His wife and kids were away on vacation, but a neighbor stopped by and brought Hofman some milk. He quickly gulped down more than  2 liters.

"...the neighbour was no longer 'Mrs R,' but a malevolent, insidious witch with a coloured mask...Even worse than these demonic transformations of the outer world, were the alterations I perceived in myself, in my inner being. Every exertion of my will, every attempt to put an end to the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of my ego, seemed to be wasted effort.

"A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind, and soul. I jumped up and screamed, trying to free myself from him, but then sank down again and lay helpless on the sofa. The substance, with which I had wanted to experiment, had vanquished me. It was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will."

A few hours later of course, everything was hunky-dory, the demon invasions were over, and life very curiously returned to what passed for normal during the 20th century and WWII. This is something subsequent generations of trippers have known: If you drop a tab and your home is invaded by  raptors which tear you to pieces then eat you, don't worry; ain't no big ting brudda. It's all in your mind, so just give it a couple hours.

References

The 4th para is in quotes because it is taken in its entirety from this article in the Guardian (UK)

The quoted material following para #4 is from Hofman's autobio, LSD: My Problem 
Child.

A note on the artwork. This piece was originally executed as the cover for a 12" LP. 
LSDemon – 666% Under Voice Records and Monstruo.ink Crew presents 666% the debut release by LSDemon (Freak AKA Alejandro Aguilar), a darkpsy producer and graphic artist from Costa Rica. The sound on this release is dark, mischievous, and powerful, featuring music created in the last two years. Establishing a theme, the front cover was done by the artist to introduce us to the psychedelic trip we are about to embark upon.

shrillery hillary

Below you'll find a 2008 essay by the great researcher, writer, and blogger, the shadowy WIIIAI. I find this even more pertinent today than it was 8 years ago, and wonder whether Mrs. Clinton has filled the gaps in her knowledge during that time.
(For the link to the original article, click on the title below.)

Hillary and Jeanette

Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton was campaigning in Montana and made an ill-informed mention of Jeanette Rankin, who Montana elected as the first woman member of Congress in 1916. Hillary said it just goes to show that men really will vote for a woman, since women didn’t have the vote in 1916. Except that women had in fact won the vote in Montana in a referendum (of male voters, natch) two years before. This is not just a minor gaffe about Montanan history but a gap in Clinton’s knowledge which illuminates a few things about her.

First, Clinton is a female senator, and an aspirant to be the first female president, who evidently in all these years has never been curious enough about the first woman in Congress to learn more than a tiny bit about her. Hillary doesn’t really consider herself part of a feminist history, doesn’t recognize that she stands on the shoulders of those who came before. She thinks she got where she is entirely by her own efforts.

Clinton evidently thinks, wrongly, that women in the US received the vote in one fell swoop with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. In the same way as she remarked that while the civil rights movement may have organized and agitated, the real victories for African-Americans only came when Lyndon Johnson decided to push for them, so the decades of hard struggle by women to achieve political rights, including state-by-state (and territory by territory) suffrage campaigns like the one that Rankin helped lead to victory in Montana but many more which did not succeed, are completely disregarded and unacknowledged by Hillary, if she even knows about them. She does not understand how much organized, grass-roots effort over many many years it really takes to effect any sort of change in this hide-bound country; the only lesson she really learned from the failure of her health-care plan in the 1990s was that she, Hillary Clinton, did not have enough power. Her comments last week (this week?) denigrating party activists suggest that, like Bush, who remarked that “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections,” she too has an impoverished view of the day-to-day role of the citizenry in democratic governance. Not that Obama is much better in this regard: when he leads chants of YES WE CAN, he does not mean to empower his supporters to do anything beyond getting him into the White House and then dispersing to their respective homes to quietly await the flow of manna and all things good from his capable hands.

Considering that Rankin is also known for her principled pacifism, having cast one of the few votes against American entry into World War I – which was also her first vote in Congress, and therefore the first vote cast by a woman in Congress – and the only vote against war with Japan in 1941 (she only served two terms in Congress: she was not re-elected in 1918, though mostly for reasons other than her position on the war, and not elected again until 1940; crappy timing, really), had Hillary known more about her, she might never have brought up her name in the first place.

american Гласность

First rule of tellin the truth is, you got to know what it is B 4 U can say it out loud.

So what is the truth about Vietnam and Campuchea (Cambodia at that time), about Nicaragua and El Salvador, About Iraq, Iran, & Afghanistan?

Ask the question of yourself honestly, and if you give an honest answer as well, you'll know what we must do.

Revolution now.

friday cat blogging

The Friday cat blog is published this week on Friday. That means right now now.

    Sammy et les deux oiseaux

            
What a concept.

pоссия vs usa, part the infinity

Three years ago Kit and I caught a black bear eating berries in the back yard of our Port Ludlow, WA condominium. By the time she got her camera the thing had turned tail and was running for all he was worth. She got a good shot of his fleeing backside.

Now comes the same situation a few thousand miles to the east. This fellow awoke to find a black bear rummaging in his garbage. As you can see, the Russian bear is a little more determined than his US counterpart, but, unfortunately for him, so are the Russian humans.

Total score for both these encounters is:
Human beings - 2,  Bears - 0

And the international tally is 
Pоссия - 1, USA - .5

(I had 2 give us 1/2 pt for being willing to scrap; unfortunately, the bear was not.)

...even the butler...

Headline at Yahoo:

Former Trump butler calls for Obama's execution on Facebook

This story keeps getting more ornate hourly. Definitely entertaining, it reminds me of an old Dylan lyric...

Even THE BUTLER, he's got somethin 2 prove; & U ask why I don't live here, honey, how come U moved?

history's victims

Spoze yr neighbor gets himself one of those tripod-mounted 50-calibre rifles that shoots an exploding slug bigger than yr thumb & sets it up behind the curtains in his front room.

Spoze you tell him y're a little nervous about him having a weapon like that locked & loaded in yr near vicinity, and he tells U, "Hey, don't worry about nothing, man, it''s purely 4 defensive purposes." Would U say "All, righty, then," and walk away?

I'd B more likely 2 remind my neighbor dude that WMD by definition cannot ever B for "defensive purposes only." l would also B at some pains remonstrate with him that IF his freedom to own a piece of mobile ordnance interferes with my freedom to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then his freedom must and will go.  

This is essentially the nature of the conflict between Russia on one side and the US And EU on the other.  "These  are  Anti-Ballistic missile doodads we're setting up in Romania and Poland" says the US. "& we can't use em for offense,"

So, are these anti-massile installations a threat?  Does a bear live in the woods? Is the Pope Latino? Is a frog's bunghole water-tight? 

Considering recent (within the last 100 yrs)) history, how can the US can pull such a stunt without getting laughed out of the game?  Remember 1962-63, with its enraged discovery that the Red commie bastard Nikita Kruschev had missiles "Parked right on our doorstep, in Cuba!"?

I don't think I need to belabor the point with redundant explanation in order to make it clear.

It's just that some peeples have really inexcusably short memories.

photo: anti-American merchandise on sale at Chisinau, Moldova.

grils 'n' the hood

She looked almost pouty/butthurty when defending her BFF Hillary, who's been getting ganged-up-on by all these evil politicians such as the T****-monster or big, mean Uncle Bernie at the same time.

 

But Mrs. Alan Greenspan, AKA Andrea Mitchell got no sympathy from said grouchy old Nuncle, who in so many words told her where she might more appropriately put her sympathy. "Don't moan to me about Hillary Clinton's problems" was his perfect rejoinder to the tears of this suffering elitist, for if Mitchell represents NBC News, she represents the topmost .01% of US money even more; she is literally married to the American Brahmin Caste.

"Andrea, in every state we've won -- in 19 states -- we have had to take on the entire Democratic establishment," Sanders testifies just  before his "Don't moan" bombshell. If anyone could talk about being unfairly attacked in addition to being ignored, marginalized, and ridiculed by asses, it would be the man from Vermont. He doesn't want or need sympathy either, but he will get pissed if you keep hammering him with this butthurty shit long enough.

enough already

On a Monday when there's very little other news, the internet has been transformed into "All Trump all the time."

I don't plan to read any of it, and won't write another word about him until after the big erection in November.

I've had enough of the antics of this counterfeit presidential candidate. I don't know what the American journo establishment is thinking,
but by devoting all these pixels to the Trumpovitch, they're showing themselves 2 B as used up and irrelevant as the politicians they cover.

Today we see the prices of all commodities
including oil and precious metals slipping a little, but not enough to cause concern. No news is good news, of course, but when you can't escape this 
Great Puckered Asshole even on the finance page, it's time 2 pack it in for a while.

yr weekend animmo

Saturday night is crap TV, so it's evolved into video game night around here.

Because of this, "Friday cat blogging" has metamorphosed into "weekend cat blogging." 

Carry on.

photo: © Kit Brice

knuff!

The media, including Mr. Maher, have written Bernie off. Big Mistake. We had ye TV on last night for a couple hrs & never heard him mentioned once.

The California primary is a month from today, and this contest is NOT over until the corpulent female chirps.

last 6

6 More months & this election goes in the can, may be.

There are some signs that this may not be concluded by the orderly process we've grown so used 2, this time around.

Украина в головном мозге

It's sooo difficult for Americans to keep up with what's going on halfway around the world, in that massive land called Asia, a part of the globe that most of us have only vague, and somewhat fantastical views of what's happening there.

Americans who think about Russia/Ukraine/the Caspian Region, believe what they're told, i.e., that the Putin regime is "murderous," as our president characterized it in a speech a couple days ago, and that the Ukrainians are a plucky little nation standing up  against the big, bad, red, bear.

In fact, just the opposite is true.

That kind  of talk is a lot worse than mistaken, because it turns the situation on on its head. Back on March 5 when Hillary C. compared Putin to Hitler, she showed the extent to which American politicians can get it wrong, when they're dealing with a passive and ignorant electorate.


If there is a neo-Nazi government in the east, it's not  Russia;s but Ukraine's. This man, Andriy Parubiy, is the new co-speaker of Ukraine's parliament, (rada). A website dedicated 2  "antifascist resistance in Ukraine" repeats the well-known roster of facts about Parubiy, who  was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, (1991) a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians. The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party...

Nuncle Sam sure knows how to pick em, ja? Throughout our postwar history, it's our friends rather than our enemies who've led us 2 grief, starting and ending with those Zionist ideologues in Tel Aviv, but with lots of room in between for generals like Thieu & Ky, Pinochet in Chile and now this paramilitary junior nazi in Ukraine who appears to be our  own product.

Ukraine isn't a country at any more; it's just one more product of US foreign policy, the same policy that gave us the Republic of South Vietnam and democratic Iraq. I don't have time or energy to write the full story of this sad state of affairs, but you'll find the BBC's accurate timeline here.

sunday kat

Sundays on the sun porch.
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