(For any regular readers of this blog, I have been working on part two to this post but I’ve mostly been trying to accomplish getting out of bed and maintaining some structure to my days since April when I wrote it. And, there is a lot of information that has proven to be challenging to condense in order to present a coherent narrative with regard to what “influencing” and subsequently mindless consumerism and the destruction of independent spirit has done to us. Hopefully a little blogging on the latest developments in a case I’ve followed for the better part of the decade gets my rusty gears unstuck.)

Donna Adelson’s trial for the murder of her former son-in-law, Dan Markel, who was married to her daughter Wendi Adelson (still an unindicted co-conspirator) started in earnest today in Tallahassee, Florida. Like her son, Charlie, she will be swiftly convicted. The evidence is overwhelming and the state’s opening argument closed the case already; pretty much any observer will question why she brought it to trial. And, like Charlie, it’s clear in communications open to the ears and eyes of the public she thinks she will be walking out and floating back down to Miami.

As I wrote in my post from 2023, there are legitimate ways to attack the state’s case. Charlie’s lawyer, Daniel Rashbaum, did not seem to explore any of them. He was paid at least one million dollars with Donna’s team raking in the multimillions no doubt. And, like Rashbaum, they are relying on narratives their clients want to put forth that flat out ignore the mountain of circumstantial evidence any normal person would see as damning and unrecoverable without some sort of technological challenge. A glaring example is chipping away at “clarified” recorded audio the state presented in their case in chief against Charlie, technology I have not seen in court before. Hiring experts and doing a full review of the discovery is outweighed by private plane and yacht rentals it seems.

The irony to that probability is that Charlie and Donna would likely give their blessings to such activities. That is the reality they inhabit, that they should be believed for who they are, their connections, and the money they can throw at people. In jail phone calls following his conviction, even as he came to terms with his sentence of life imprisonment, he urged his parents to calm themselves using benzodiazepines. It is surmised by observers that he communicated through their attorneys that Donna and his father, Harvey, should flee to a non-extradition country to escape prosecution. They were apprehended days after Charlie’s conviction hoping to board a one-way flight to Vietnam. Donna was hauled away in cuffs and Harvey went back to his high rise to fester alone in misery wondering when the knock on the door would come for him. On Tallahassee law enforcement time, it hasn’t come yet.

Incredibly, her attorney Jackie Fulford, a disgraced former Florida circuit judge, offered not much more than a performance during her opening statement, attempting to emotionally manipulate the jurors, gallery, and prosecution by discussing how wonderful a man Markel was and how loving and caring Donna is which is wholly belied by her venomous words and actions. More or less, Fulford says she’s an old granny, how could she even?

Fulford went on to avoid saying he was murdered, rather having his life taken and being killed. In other words, a steady drip of psychological manipulation and warfare that Donna and Charlie were quoted with urging Wendi on in email communications as her post-divorce and custody litigation dragged on.

The courtroom tactics so far have consisted of defense by ambush with Fulford and her co-counsel Joshua Zelman making untimely objections, stalling, and stonewalling. On top of that, presiding Judge Stephen Everett has already had to warn Donna against emotional displays which are pathetic and unbelievable, not a tear in sight. Harvey for his part offered a little smile and creepy two-handed wave upon seeing Donna in court during a pre-trial motion but he can’t turn that frown upside down today, for some reason. That’s because it is clear it was over before it ever began.

Ruth and Phil Markel, descendants of Holocaust survivors who landed in Canada, have been prevented from seeing their grandsons for a long time. Shockingly, the state of Florida has not made any meaningful attempts to have them removed from Wendi’s custody in all this time since the murder was carried out in 2014. Though she remains unindicted, she is still at risk of being prosecuted for her perjury throughout the multiple trials the state has called her to testify in. The lies have progressed and changed shape over the years as she has smiled and laughed away during these apparently joyful occasions of murder trials in which her family members are slowly being buried.

All in all, strange scenes from a once entangled, grossly enmeshed family that has now disintegrated because the incestuousness couldn’t stand in trying to pull off torture, conspiracy, and finally, murder. They could have continued living their comfortable South Florida lives their Holocaust survivor ancestors could only dream of, but their Zionist conditioning, beliefs and connections to Israel wouldn’t have had it any other way, it seems. They are but one fractal pattern of what the Nazi-Dixie colonial outpost was set out to do to Jews and Judaism at large as a bonus to the destruction of Palestine and the Levant and they don’t see it. More money, more dirty deeds, more manipulation of anyone standing in their way will never fix what they refuse to address.

Unfortunately, most watchers don’t acknowledge this ideological phenomenon, nor would they admit it if they wanted to. Not as things stand. Their actions and consequences the public pays for cannot be separated from the whole, from the world-changing, humanity-destroying Holocaust happening before our eyes, and it’s a disservice to the public to ignore that.

The biggest fear of an Israeli is not a nuclear Iran; neither is a rain of missiles from Hamas or Hezbollah. It’s definitely not the global economic downturn or global warming. The only thing that Israelis are terrified of is of being a “frayer.”

A frayer is a kind of sucker on steroids: The one who is taken advantage of, the one who leaves money on the table and the one who follows the rules to his own detriment.

I have been trying to write something on a person who I consider to be the ur-influencer, one Mikayla Nogueira. She is now past the stage of being a baby demon one shudders to name at all and has moved on to being a full-fledged Babylonian whore. The difficultly for me lies in trying to explain all the ways in which she is an awful individual while the language to make sense of the larger phenomenon she represents – that is, feminist analysis – has been gradually drained of all meaning and demonized itself.

Nogueira has called herself a makeup artist, but I suppose she would be more widely known (relatively speaking, ha) as a beauty influencer-content creator and got her virtual limelight start on TikTok, another entity I am reluctant to type or speak of. However, she is now a sort of brand founder (backed by venture capital) – a type of transition TikTok is eager to advertise about their Kontent Kreators – which I will get to later on. She apparently worked a few months at Ulta, quitting as the plandemic was in full swing (lately she states she was fired) and in recent months has claimed a title that the corporation never offered to any employee. This is typical of her – if her lips are moving, she is lying. If her camera is working, she’s shapeshifting by the hour. Who and what is this creature, how can she even be described?

Why do I even know of this person? you might ask. I am not a TikTok user, but as with so many things intended to infect the wider internet and our brains (4chan, for example), the videos that emanate from it are unavoidable if you want to participate in the virtual public square at all. Well, first off, let me admit to my indulgence in cosmetics and my occasional foray into the world of “influence”, usually by accident. I do not believe that I am a hoarder or purposefully wasteful, but since getting back into it a decade ago when I was working on some fun Halloween lewks, I became a hunter for simple skin tint that’s not damaging, a lip stain, and an affordable yet highly-pigmented eyeshadow palette. These items were rare back then but have been produced at a shocking rate as we’ve been filed away online. Perhaps the biggest success story of digital selling is the beauty industry, which is in fact very ugly. And there is quite the irony in applying more and more to one’s face as we’ve been cut off from public life.

On that note – only a partial digression here- personally, I have not been able to move on from 2020. It has been 2020 for the past five years as far as I’m concerned. More accurately, I’ve lost pieces of myself and my autonomy that I am afraid of never being able to restore, and that I need to reconcile, because I was in reality robbed of them as we all were. At the same time, the existence of internet influencers as a profession meant to hound us all and drive us absolutely mad gives the impression that they’ve always been around, but really it’s been since the advent of covid. Only five years, you could say, since time has felt like it was frozen.

So I receive the suggestion to view certain influencers in different feeds, as I assume any reader can relate to. Nogueira came up in my feed one day a couple years back and “it” gave me the most fascinatingly horrifying fright like I had never experienced before. The short video started with her un-shellacked face, an unfortunate looking one at that, covered with acne and scars with her bloodshot eyes bulging whilst yelling at the audience in the fakest Boston accent that would put Ben Affleck to shame about whatever product she smacked onto her face at the same time. Then she moved onto a full-coverage foundation, and then we see a cut to her completed eye makeup that could have won a drag queen title in the 1999 Kansas City club scene. I immediately blocked her YouTube account that has a modest following unlike the millions she allegedly garnered on TikTok. She is the strangest industry plant I’ve discovered to date, so her “engagement” includes a lot of fake accounts and bots.

After the initial shock wore off, I realized I had to know who she is. Since I have a mostly un-influenced search engine, the subreddit criticizing her existence that is simply entitled r/MikaylaNogueira popped up first. Videos critical of her were abundant as well. The subreddit is tightly moderated, and comments from people with newer Reddit accounts and those displaying “fan behavior” are quickly auto-deleted, and these users are threatened with a permanent ban if they persist. (The point of the former is to discourage “bandwagoning” behavior so that the subreddit is taken more seriously and not strictly seen as a “hate” page.) Fat- and body-shaming are discouraged as well, and while there is a lot of gossip that may tend toward what has been coined as the “bitch eating crackers” syndrome, there are some insights to be found and a burgeoning, larger analysis of the beauty industry in whole. Still, Reddit is overall a surveillance system, so you have to wonder where this is all going.

Other platforms where other proudly self-described influencers criticize her, and admittedly do it fairly well with at least partial understanding and awareness of how the larger industry is situated, disturbingly makes it still feel like a trap. It seems we are doing endless circles in trying to pin down these slithering worms sent out by intelligence agencies and their backers in part because, well, they are largely seen as not that important (feminine time suck) and regardless of where one stands, more product is amassed, and it doesn’t matter which kind or brand. It keeps you in. Heads they win, tails we lose, is one way to look at it. In any case, I still find it important to explore – who is making all this product? Where on earth does all the waste go? Who is benefiting? Et cetera. What brought us to this many-headed beast known as Mikayla Nogueira? Because she is absolutely abhorrent while daily demonstrating a type of profound self-hatred advertised as cynical self-interest that I don’t think has been seen before in brand-making and perhaps exclusive to online “influencing”. More on that next time.

Do you think these mopheads think twice about their productions once the work is completed and the checks are signed? Do they have any kind of fondness for it? Memories? Do they give a shit at all, is what I’m getting at, when they are the avatars for such piss like this-

I haven’t watched it and I won’t because I already know it’s a waste of my finite time on earth. Why would I, the poster tells me everything I need to know. These overexposed real-life clowns don’t do anything original or thought provoking. They’re both shit-eating humiliation fetishists who get off on stoking resentful white supremacist sentiment for the hell of it. Neither of them are stupid but they are irredeemable parasites.

The first film was a cringe fest meant to appeal to, I don’t even know who – nixonians? I did actually watch it, so I feel confident in saying I found it to be forgettable and just the most cynical, disorganized, and nihilistic thought bubbles strung together to form a “movie”. Phoenix can act, but he doesn’t have to any more, and I’m very much over the complex-radioactive-“unknowable” psychotic thing he does. We get it and have seen it in enough iterations already.

Gaga, on the other hand, cannot act. Who is telling her she can? Is it a bit she is in on? I loved A Star Is Born with Judy Garland more than I thought I would, so out of morbid curiosity, I watched ten minutes or so of the 2018 version. Gaga’s acting was not pleasant to witness, and she came across as awkward more than anything. (Not to mention Bradley Cooper’s presence who just makes me stabby.) Then I found out she actually practiced the accent she used in House of Gucci which I refuse to subject myself to at length.

She recently revealed that playing Patrizia Reggiani, the Italian socialite convicted of hiring a hitman to assassinate her ex-husband, Maurizio Gucci, was a process of “becoming” rather than an “imitation”. She told Vogue that she stayed in character for 18 months, speaking with an accent for nine months of that. “Off camera,” she said. “I never broke. I stayed with her.”

Like, really? It sounds like she’s channeling a stock pile-pack of “accents” that can just be labeled as Foreign for all anyone cares. It’s so common in Anglo crap and one of the reasons I tend to be out of the loop on so much, unbearable like nails on chalkboard. It’s unconvincing and insulting, this inconsistent and unsettling Italiano-Russian-Indian-New Jersey ayy I’m walking here thing. Though she’s certainly not the first to do it, it’s remarkably awful and embarrassing to think about anyone who considers themselves an artist committing it to film, yet she has loads of defenders. I don’t get it, I find it to be shockingly bad.

So the the only explanation I can come up with that makes any amount of sense to me is that these are two “working actors” who enjoy being shit-eating sadomasochists and degrading the rest of us with their shit shows. I understand these are vehicles to telegraph ruling class fantasy to us greasy, unwashed useless good-for-nothings who can’t even carry out a protracted anything and the utility of reading them as such, but I’m too tired to care and pay close attention. It’s so obvious from the advertisements and menacing publicity alone, especially as the full-scale assault continued to rain down on Gaza at almost one year exactly when the film was released. Most importantly, to me, neither of them need to continue, yet they do. For this, I am happy to read it was a commercial failure.

And for that, they humiliated themselves for nothing even the rulers cared about, those they dedicated their mugs and public image to in their pursuit of complete conquest. Phoenix continues on, suggesting he could be someone who would really try to fuck a computerized smart house and the internet of things connecting it complete with literal clown paint (or at least as an inspiration for “incel” psychopaths) and Gaga as inflatable escort on the spot with work that has aged her beyond her years. I don’t know that she can go in on that eye adjustment again without some ocular damage.

There is a real shared madness between the two offscreen and all their sponsors and enablers vying for relevance under a ruling order that plans on cutting them off, perhaps sooner rather than later if the destruction of even the heavy hitters’ abodes in Southern California is any indication. Again, their persistence despite their combined net worth being in the hundreds of millions points toward a limited number of conclusions about their motivations – disdain and hatred for, and mockery of, their audiences that reflects the demo- and genocidal order they advertise for without shame. May the whole Pentagon-Hollywood operation also go down in flames this year, and not just as part of planned demolition, but due to continued public rejection of their obscenity. Ruling class propping up of their previous mediocrities and letting this fall flat without extensive PR maybe points to a concern about their protestations about us fools even existing being “too much”.

The other day I read quickly in my Facebook feed that Mebane, North Carolina, will become home to the first Buc-ee’s “convenience store” (nothing about this seems convenient, even to its, er, “fans”) slash travel center in the state. In fact, expansion of I-40 to accommodate its alleged 25,000 visitors per day (!) has been underway, seemingly in starts and stops familiar to most of us governed by corrupt departments of transportation across the country, since late last summer-

There has already been some grading work done and electricity added at the site off Interstate 85/40 to prep it for Buc-ee’s.

Mebane Mayor Ed Hooks said in the next few weeks that the North Carolina Department of Transportation will soon get to work on the project that will help Mebane handle the traffic Buc-ee’s is expected to draw.

“There’s already been a lot of surveying done, so they’re on the verge of getting started with great anticipation by a lot of people, and we’re excited about it,” Hooks said.

A couple of things pop out as remarkable just at first glance: travel centers used to be constructed to make long-distance travelers’ and truckers’ lives on the road a little easier, even in their pursuit of profit, and not for a cult following (WHY!) to shop ghastly branded merchandise-knick knacks; and this is pushing forward as the official response to the situation in Western North Carolina stagnates and more inhabitants are sucked into the abyss of destruction and neglect – more accurately, state- and federal-sanctioned depopulation. Like with the fires that recently blazed through Southern California, drones of branded climate-concerned doomers and scolds appeared at once to tell us this was climate catastrophe doing its thing and doing nothing else of note for people who are still suffering, who still haven’t been able to account for all their dead months after the fact.

But some more serious people – actual activists – have not only offered a fuller analysis of the toll on the environment in total, but they also worked extensively to try to prevent this expansion into North Carolina at all. From the above-linked 7 Directions of Service article that cited Buc-ee’s expectation to see 25,000 patrons a day, they explain that

Studies show emissions from the concentration of just 200 running vehicles can create harmful conditions for breathing. Buc-ee’s 25,000 estimated daily visitors will result in an air pollution hot-spot. The location is home to multiple schools, a church and low-income neighborhoods, and is already overburdened with heavy air pollution from semi-truck emissions and Stericycle, a medical waste incinerator…

The entirety of the great Occaneechi Trading Path ran from Virginia to Alabama, and a significant section of the path in Mebane, NC is threatened by Buc-ee’s.

The Occaneechi Trading Path was more than just a means for trade for Southeastern Native American communities. It was a way of sharing language, stories, technology and culture…

Buc-ee’s inescapable billboards and cheap trinkets will only draw visitors away from downtown. As one elder put it, “when tourists are shopping at Buc-ee’s, they’re not shopping in Mebane.”

Hopefully their efforts will prevail in the end as the above-quoted article from Fox 8 News dated January 2, 2025, seems to fret about the project being announced a year ago with little headway. It goes on to quote some alleged locals-

“Just ready for it to be here. There was a lot of opposition about it, but I visited one. We spent two hours at the one in Georgia,” said Joseph Holt, a resident.

One woman said she enjoys visiting Buc-ee’s in Florida, and she looks forward to having one around five miles away from her.

“It has everything … I like their snacks. I like their deli. I like their candies,” said Loretta Jeffries, a resident.

Does it really take so little for fellow citizens to erase the downtrodden from their minds in pursuit of…snacks and candles? How does one shop a convenience store for two hours? Another item of note is that it took Texas courts to rule that Buc-ee’s couldn’t force at-will employees to pay back bonuses without an unconscionable notice given, or even if they were fired:

If you quit or get fired in less than four years, or if you don’t give Buc-ee’s written notice at least 6 months before quitting, you have to pay back all of the retention payments you received, plus interest and attorneys’ fees.

In other words, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

That was the basic deal in Rieves v. Buc-ee’s, a case decided by the Houston Court of Appeals (14th District).[1] Rieves, the employee, received about $67,000 in retention payments, paying federal income taxes on them, but quit the job three years in. Buc-ee’s sued her to recover the $67,000 plus interest and attorneys’ fees.

The native elders are telling us the way if we only listen, but I don’t know that it will work out for these confused pale faces. If lengthy comments sections on Facebook are any indication, there’s not much more than grunts of agreement and anticipation over barbecued pain mounded on the whitest bread of mass-produced buns when Buc-ee’s is slated to come to town. This too is part of the degraded environment in whole, as we all are, and which we must recover from and defeat.

But the Buc-ee’s trance is strong, like with Target stores, and so many of these large retailers sucking up space and resources. I saw someone remark recently, semi-seriously at least, that Target locations seem to induce a psychosis in their “regulars”, and that maybe there is a substance spread beyond their brightly-colored, intense advertisements that pop up everywhere now virtually the minute you speak of their existence, like some demon force awaiting the next host. Indeed, I have been perplexed by this phenomenon of dedicated Target fans who will spend hours looking at, once again, candles and assorted cheaply-made goods as a hobby. It disturbs the soul as they mow down populations in the name of growth and “job creation”.

Sometimes language fails me in describing the overwhelming dread I feel when consciousness-destroying forces descend on us with cartoon mascots. To question this infantilism in common virtual forums draws out people who seem possessed by the ideation of Disney resorts and other soothing childlike avatars to sell them on destruction of humanity. You’re told you’re “weird” for seeing a serious analysis through, but resistance is never futile, and occurs around us daily if we look further than the foul sting of soul rot these headlines and proposals are meant to frighten us with to the point of total inaction.

Content notice: discussion of violence against children including sex abuse, murder, and dismemberment.

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A couple of years ago, photos an old friend was tagged in popped up in my Facebook feed. They were from a joint party celebrating a birthday and a divorce. She was the incipient divorcee and not the birthday gal. Though I am a divorce enthusiast, I couldn’t help but twitch with a bit of heartache for her two young sons surely rocked by the covid program. I was around when they were both born, and they were such sweet babies. Everyone was so happy and boisterous and busy around them. Just lots of love they could count on from the moment they could perceive it.

Yes I know it happens all the time, and often for the better for children caught in the middle of miserable relationships. Regardless, it is a rupture, and I imagine it can be difficult for a young person to try to process feelings of betrayal over guilt. The former, rightly or wrongly, is something that a child is entitled to feel in such a situation. An oppressive, backwards regime has ruled over us so long it instills guilt in the most vulnerable for the direction of world events, so that often gets heaped on them now, and even dealing with it has been “normalized” by the psych wing of the MIC. Your thoroughly un-christlike entrance into the world didn’t change anything and fuck you.

And so Gen X are slackers, Millennials are pussies, and Gen Z are hopeless subhumans. Everyone is beaten down for thinking and making a way toward self-determination, so why try. There are funko pops and adult coloring books and meal services and a whole lot of other shit to distract us from that. It’s so backwards but fully reversible. Who will try? Scores of adults failed their children in multiple ways during covid. Were there enough parents who resisted, and where are they now- mentally.

Regardless of what that may mean politically at this juncture, putting yourself ahead of your children in a typical situation where you, the adult, have had all the advantages and opportunities to understand what covid is in age of full apocalyptic disclosure is selfish. I’m not saying it necessarily makes one a bad person- it’s just not a decent thing to do to a vulnerable fellow human who relies on you for their every need, but if you are a bad person in the eyes of your offspring, then you probably are. Maybe you can redeem yourself during the next cataclysm, but it’s not about your petty shit or only getting a blow job quarterly or whatever. We’re all supposed to be the adults, and it’s not fucking cooties, spacecraft, “undocumented people”, or cow flatulence. For fuck’s sake.

A newly installed female internet-influencer holiday ritual is to come online and lay in to your complaints about your male partner’s laziness with regard to anything domestic. Just let it rip. It’s very weird – for all this filming and editing, you could talk to your partner about it. Set a schedule, make lists, divide and conquer. I’d assume that’s a possibility to try if you’re putting all their shit out to stink in front of millions virtually. Perhaps not so much for members of the target audience, so it can be viewed as a part of this omnipresent infantile indoctrination program continually humming along and fueling every resentment possible that we don’t know what to do with.

There are aspects of housekeeping and caregiving that should be taken for granted. It should be simple; grievances and resentment over chores and just the basics of loving and caring for a helpless human you created should not be so bottled up so that violence erupts, and I don’t think it should be for leaving for not figuring this out. It’s uncomfortable but maybe you’ll have to talk about vacuuming and pre/postnuptials rather than bickering about the personal loan you took out for Disneyworld.

Anyone who places no value on your labor even when you are legally entitled to it sees you as an object and worse. These are not people to have in your life in any way, and that is it. I hope more women who’ve put up with this for too long have figured it out yesterday after the wave of domestic violence we saw increase during the lockdowns. So here’s to an influencer collapse in 2025, back to satan’s anus with them.

Things can be so easy and wonderful, but the path is treacherous, and it doesn’t have to happen with all these faux complications and anxieties that allegedly make us into “adults”. No one has a proscribed love language, neurodivergence is meaningless, and ASMR sucks.

So I could write a long time on grandmothers, a lifetime probably. I knew one of mine growing up who doesn’t fit into molds of yesteryear as presented in meme and short video format as recalled on the internet. The other was deceased a couple of decades before I was even a glimmer and I had one picture of her I sat and stared at for hours as a child, just wanting to know her. Okay, there I go again…

But my maternal grandmother was not the idealized domestic goddess like a lot of these cook influencers like to project about grandmas in general. The latest snippet I saw was about ermine icing which led with “your grammy may have made this”. No, she did not. She did very few things “from scratch” which endeared me to her as much as I am culinarily inclined now. It has nothing to do with my grandmother in some “homey” sense outside of the economic strides she took as a wage-earning working woman.

My grandmother was a master at finding the best hot deli sandwiches, large New Yawk style pizzas, and picking up a greasy sack of “crumbly burgers” that I have worked at recreating as an homage to what I knew as cuisine at grandma’s. She worked a tedious job and made six children, taking advantage of the booming economic situation around her to not focus so much on perfectly crafted meals at home. She could boil a potato, make a gravy, and she and my grandfather would work on a Thanksgiving turkey together. The next day my grandad would make some old fashioned grits for breakfast, as salty as he was, with the biggest slab of butter running all over, and I couldn’t have asked for more. I miss them both so much.

Her family still in the Appalachia would send cooking pamphlets from their get togethers occasionally. Squirrel salad anyone? Mind that I was an 80s child, not far from such necessities. Not for me, and she was happy in the city as far as I knew, never having to worry about dicing up roasted squirrel.

Though there was one delicacy we both enjoyed that other family scoffed at, and that was what is often called the ambrosia salad. It was a bit of a weird mishmash of jello, whipped cream, pineapple, shredded coconut, and mini marshmallows, but it can vary, apparently. Sometimes she threw in chopped celery! She and I were the only ones who really liked it, and I savored that she and I would giggle about it together, knowing it was a seasonal indulgence no one else “got” besides us two. So she would come out in her completely utilitarian apron she put on once or twice a year to tell me it’s ready with eyerolls from the others.

Our birthdays were days apart after Thanksgiving and I will never forget that silly little thing we shared. She gave me the most memorable birthday gifts in my childhood in a nonchalant way that belied how generous she really was. Not perfectly picturesque to put into a meme that gets millions of views and her life and journey was not one that fits into these narratives about how feminism has “worked”. We’ve regressed so much without working women who were also matriarchs like her getting the recognition they deserve for reproducing and providing – for making a life for generations after them through poverty and struggle. No, my grandmother did not make ermine frosting.

A tweet that caught my eye –

"And they worshiped the dragon which gave power unto the beast, and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”"

(note: am atheist but metaphors kinda relevant)

— Holly Jo (@KellyJo1822) September 30, 2024

It’s interesting to me that a self-identified atheist would find this relevant. What’s “the beast”? I really only think you could find that relevant if you think all this shit going on is supernatural or above [organized] human ability. As much as I am fond of calling a deserving someone evil or a monster, I don’t actually believe such bad actors are some other species. And “the beast” isn’t either- it’s a highly organized network of [nominally human] beings exercising the power they’ve amassed for fun and ultimate victory, though I think the overindulgence in the sheer sadism of it all is going to be one of the biggest downfalls in the end.

I consider myself an irreligious person but I believe we are made in the image of God, Allah, the supreme being. I think this approach has served me well in life in that I don’t think there’s any ability within me that isn’t in another. A couple other influences I hold dear- idolatry is wrong in large part because it is impossible, and therefore, a waste of precious human energy; we have free will by virtue of being born human. So “the beast” is realizable in anyone as well as being of the best of humanity in solidarity with those who have done more than many of us could ever imagine. To have the ability to be here at this juncture. No one still standing can blow that.

I don’t understand why an atheist wouldn’t come to the same conclusion because by their metrics there’s nothing we shouldn’t be able to tell about humans, the physical world before us and what we know to be true to touch, sight, and sound. How can a beast come to be? Is what I would like to ask of anyone using this phrase. The “simple beasts” who need taming as many have it, the masses.

The southeastern US disaster is a lesson to all of us hearing reports out of Lebanon and Palestine at the same time. It’s coming for us all. As things stand, we have to prepare to be prepared to pay it in blood when it’s our turn.

There is a meme rattling around some tubes of the internet that claims “boomer” parents are less likely to watch after or babysit their grandchildren unlike their parents – greatest and silent generations I think – with whom millennials and gen x’ers spent a greater amount of time during their childhoods. I have no idea if this true at a population level, if there are statistics or studies to back this up. It was true for me at least, and I suspect that there has been an intense amount of data gathering to help make this a viable meme among people my age and from generally similar social strata.

This divergence is chalked up to individualized narcissism and selfishness, and merges with another generational meme about how gen x’ers were neglected en masse as children. Some very obvious developments are turned around and weaponized on everyone these memes are meant to resonate with: grandparents didn’t have to work until they keeled over dead like they do now; children of people who survived wars and did everything they could to save and make a nest egg found themselves occupying a new social and class position, able to demand, think, and expect more – with assassinated and then coopted political leadership that followed, many turned transcendental and worse; although it was more acceptable to be a neglectful or absent parent, children of boomers didn’t have to perform labor like their grandparents likely had to for entire family survival and had the freedom to roam, explore, question – to have their own lives.

I’ve had plenty on my mind since I last blogged an entry here but have busied myself with other things, physical work and continued artistic pursuits mixed in with smoking some mellow grass in the evenings gifted to me and reminding me of the old days, to avoid writing about any of it. However, a tweet authored by @fugioutliberem regarding the ghastly and newly enacted surgical castration law in Louisiana stirred a certain sort of emotion within me this morning related to an incident from my adolescence I have been thinking about recently-

I'm sorry but this is IN FACT barbaric actually and it wouldn't be resorted to if sex abusers weren't ACTUALLY abetted at every level of society because people are fucking cowards, incredible reality-deniers and isolaters of people who tell the truth. Obviously I don't care abt https://t.co/uJHcaggRbu

— is/ra/hell destruetur. (@fugioutliberem) August 6, 2024

Her phrasing of “cowards and reality deniers who isolate truth tellers” resonated with me so much I finally cried about this memory this morning. It’s been a long time coming and it felt necessary. Isolated as I may be for taking on many challenges in my life in pursuit of justice, I count my blessings, and always think forward to the next I can affect in some way. My little-big cat, the innocent little soul she is, huddled close as I shed some tears, then she relaxed on one of her many loungers as I read some more chapters of 2666 aloud to her. (Though after reading one sentence that spanned four pages, I now recall why I failed to finish it the last two times I cracked it open. I tried to move on to some of Chekhov’s short stories, but she is not interested. I really think she likes epically long stories better. But anyway.)

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