boscohorowitz
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“If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.”
— Thomas Hardy”“The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, “Western civilisation” or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation. — John Gray, STRAW DOGS”
“…it may be time to recognize the maximum power principle as the fourth thermodynamic law as suggested by Lotka. — H.T.Odum, 1994”
“The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise.
—Hazel Henderson”Mast head quotes from Dieoff Revived featuring that avis rara, Jay Hanson
“Coppula eam, se non posit jocularum. Alfred E. Newman” (masthead quote of my blog, which is not really worth looking at)
“What do you do when you know that you know that you know that you’re wrong? Sun Ra
Thanx for the living memory about How We Used to Live, afktt. Reminds me that even my Appalachian forebears had it better than the average Englander of the same milieu.
btw, I believe that the USA put men on the moon. Not that big of an accomplishment, which is probably why they chose to focus on it, I reckon. A giant space penis enlargement effort. Waste of resources but no big accomplishment.
USA gubmint not so good at acknowledging the finite nature of our resource base and taking meaningful remedial action. Or creating transport networks that maximize volume/reach, or a balanced and abundant agriculture able to pass the Seven Generations test, while minimizing resource usage. But in our culture, ‘resource usage’ is a subset of this delusionary/illusionary construct humans have called “cost” aka “how much $$$?”, ours being a culture based on magical thinking i.e., money. The love of which is *Jesus’s definition of the source of evil. So we have everyone driving everywhere in giant miniature cabins on wheels, going everywhere at once and in effect getting nowhere although the trip can be a fine movie. So long as you keep your eyes on the road and your left hand on the wheel… and everyone eating anything they could possibly imagine wanting and becoming bloated sickly neurotic housepets of their own keeping. Life in Atlantis sure has been weird. Wonderful, miracle-laden, insane,bedazzled, bewitched bothered and bewildered.
*Xtianity’s superhero in the Abrahamic theme franchiseWe keep a few hundred or thousand satellites in orbit and use them to guide missiles to within a few yards of their target… the moonshot was easy. Hoaxing such a thing would be much harder. Everybody but the USA Empire had reason to poke holes and prove the moon claim wrong. No one did. No one even tried. The closest was this: a Soviet denial that there was a race to the moon between USA and USSR
Long before face masks, Islamic healers tried to ward off disease with their version of PPE
What, no hijabs? (Which I’ve been mis-calling habibs for years thanx to ageing memory cells.)
I gather that NYC is donning their chin diapers again. From the article about this:
Imagine having his job.Head is a unisexual thing:
What would I call the current flocks of people divided into left/right<>vaxxed/unvaxxed<>Putin Is the Devil/Putin Is Just Doing his Job-Is a Savior<>global climate disruption is real/GCD is not real, etc., etc… ?
I would call it an Echo of Chambers.
As for Jamie Collum, MilliGenzies, and the chronic presence of the ooh-ooh melody; here we hear itin one of its countless reiterations. Not sure but I think it’s Kanye’s fault?
I’ll question whether compliance or non- creates more traffic accidents. I’d say that it comes down to who can pay the most effective attention to what’s happening ahead of their windshield, behind their rear-view, and especially what’s going on around their blind sides. Vigilance and caution are qualities that exist outside the rules.
If anything, I’d bet that the compliant are the more dangerous drivers.
“Bosco. I’m pretty happy. I feel the anger and all the stuff but the more of a nobody I become the less of a someone there is to care about. I’m just some guy with concerns and opinions. I like you alot and I like that you give a shit and that you are weird and wonderful so you go girl.”
Thank you, oxy. I enjoy your expressions too.
“the Cottagecore was interesting. Really ties in with the quiet quitting going on.”
Aye. I try to track what’s happening in the 40-and-under crowd since the future belongs to a) the young and able-bodied, and b) the old and wise — especially where the two intersect and cooperate.Since we homos are more irrational than not, I think it helps to understand what the younguns are feeling and why.
“I put down MY The Science™, he puts down HIS The Science™, and we wrestle each other, like civilized people?”
I say do it the civilized way if you like that kinda kink. 😉
“It’s Bosco-Tastic:”
Whatever that means? btw, my youngest son got the jab despite my urging him not to. Got shingles six months later. THankfully not the serious kind. (He has avoided the boosters, thank Allah.) I have a niece with 3 kids aged 5 and under who is a total vax-believer, and I can do nothing to stop it. Maybe I should send her a Xmas card from Germ telling how fucked she, her hubs, and her kids are? I’m sure that will help.
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Today’s Yogi tea tag tip: Without the storms and rain, life would cease to be.Relevant song: It’s, like, the weather, dude
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Xmas will let you know when it’s through with you. Until then, submit or die:
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Bonus Xmas music invasion: L&L The best in any art not requiring major athletic exertion are often old old old people…. you can hear the drummer’s wisdom in every brush stroke. He warn’t nearly as good when he originally recorded this tune in the early 60s for the famous tv cartoon.
And what have you learned today?, Teacher asks bosco. (And what’s with the eecummings name-spell?)
I’ve learned what I already strongly suspected but now adamantly believe: 99.9% (give or take a few) of people will double down on anger, blame, shame, depression, and commiseration thereof when challenged to do the opposite. Said double-down doubles down if the challenge attacks their sense of ego in even the slightest way.
Reliable as an atomic clock running on hot sauce.
eecummings? It’s an internet thing, Teacher. You wouldn’t understand, bosco replied, hoping to trigger a lightning flashto kill off the army of snow goons encircling the tree fort in his mind…
In which bosco experiences his own personal messiah complex moment (good buzz, that one, long-lasting after effects that only require one amply hydrate with humility after making a self-glorified arse of oneself, hallelujah!):
Fire, Another Seriously Good Drug… one we got collectively high on as an uber-species until the 21st century curtailed our supply…
“For any with interest:
Welcome To Jay Hanson’s DieOff Revived”
God bless you, sir! I had officially given up hope just yesterday or the day before on ever revisiting that alma mater.
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I honor the pain everyone feels here, including myself. I cry every day, often several times, for the countless victims out there. Well, I do. Especially the animals, who don’t even get the illusion of ‘voting rights’ or an American Dream facade painted over the bars of their slavery-for-slaughter cages.
But I’ll be damned (*literally, both here and now, and probably in some future consequence of being damned here and now, and maybe even in some afterlife scenario), if I’ll bend my knee to the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Outraged Misery. When Don Quixote tilted his lance at those ogreous windmills, I’m sure he was as fierce and angry as many of you here present yourselves. Even if he couldn’t win because a) windmills are huge and hard, and b) only Rube Goldberg could find a way to slay dragons by running into a windmill horseback carrying a big stick, I’m sure that his fierceness wore a great big shit-eating grin.
Until playtime is over, bosco of horowitz wishes you joy and peace despite the darkening rain and the pain in your hearts:
People Say Love Is a Beautiful Sin…
“Yes damned if you dont – damned if you do
I said the playtime is over here come the blues..”The act balances itself, SeaBirds. All we can do is accept and act within it. Grace under pressure is the grace that matters most.
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As for live roasts, some basic cooking guidance:
Before
After (a tad overdone… you just want “it” cooked until no red juices come out when you poke deep with a sharp stick)
The Library of Alexandria must burn every 1,000 years, said some literary smarty pants. Ancient literary smartypants recorded in text their fears that text would erode human memory. That they wrote these thoughts down perhaps displays their fears of an eroding oral tradition.
Before text, we told and remembered stories, ideas, histories. Considering how regularly the Libraries of Alexandria are burned, one wonders just how much (very, methinks) orally recorded information has been lost?
Today’s Yogi tea tag: What is yours will come to you. (One of my faves.)
Relevant song:Wishing On an Unknown Star
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Xmas wants to know ‘are we there yet?!?… are we…?’ (repeat ad indefinitum)
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Some might find interesting tangents of social exploration in this wiki article:
Today’s benighted youth don’t even get to dream the one house/two-car driveway version of the American Dream. Now they just get to paint the walls of their tinhorn studio apartments like the inside of a Thomas Kincade cottage:
Well, don’t everybody rush to misinterpret me at once. Take turns.And please, don’t let me stop you* from having a bad time.
I hear much talk of Orwell these days. Huxley too, but not so much, even as the concept of mass formation hypnosis, a very Huxleyian concept, is popularly cited to explain why the majority of people obediently submit to their own doom. I remember reading Brave New World at some early impressionable teen age. This passage stayed with me and probably explains the bigger part of why I dropped out of high school and ran away from society with a backpack and an imaginary friend (who? turned out to be me all along! who’da thuunk?):
“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.”
There’s a faint bitter pleasure in proving to oneself the accuracy of one’s worse impressions of others, but not nearly so much as being proven wrong. But I shall no longer try to convince y’all to be happy. Not everyone is up for dancing on graves although the entire planet’s surface is just that, especially the ones with fertile topsoil.
I will continue, however, to seduce you into being happy online despite your inclinations otherwise. TPTB release articles all the time citing studies showing that being online makes people depressed. The evidence is fairly unambiguous. Being online, whether one is mindlessly scrolling Instragram/TikTok or diligently writing meister-screeds at fora like this, makes us unhappy.
The logical conclusion from this is that being online is more of an addiction than a meaningful pursuit. I figger that since our chronic presence here demonstrates that we all suffer this terrible jones, let’s not entirely abandon ourselves to the downward negative internet addiction spiral of searching for an ever lower low (it’s a weird drug, the internet, jah?), we might as well try a bit of happiness between our bursts of outrage against TPTB, das sheeple, the fucked-who-are-so-vaxxed, and of course, the ever popular Anyone Who Disagrees With Us.
* Everybody Is A Monarch of Pain…… but we can share a bit of happiness between us commoners, maybe? (Just a thought. A mad man’s suggestion.) Don’t let it bring you up.
Advice toward what might be done about the wickedness of it all, along with some jollity, some joy for joy’s sake, an respite between the constant hellfire sermons where we can maybe dig some good gospel music or a decent potluck with fried chicken and banana pudding (Southern thing). Hell, we could even share meatloaf recipes! Like right here, right now, or at least the week after Xmas when you get some free time… oh wait. Xmas IS that time. Huh.
I don’t want to set the world on fire. I don’t want to make you change your mind about nuttin. I’m WAYY-yyyy too radical for that. I just want to see you smile.
Every Morning When I Wake Up I’m Still Dreaming…Don’t make me sick Old Man Xmas on you:
“Lucky I don’t have a lawn, kid, or I’d kick you off it.”Warning: this could be considered a bot trap, a kind of soulistical Turing test..
I try not to be demanding which is why I often stoop to nagging. Besides, lacking a baseball bat interface, demanding online doesn’t work unless one can successfully bludgeon someone’s ego into submission with just the right mirror of awkward self-discovery.
I have a major complaint to voice toward you major complainers.
Can we stop being a drag all the time? Can we stop wallowing in the horror of it all long enough to take a bath? Maybe a bath of smiles or mutual encouragement? Guy who runs this site, Raul, whom I wouldn’t personally socially engage with, not even with a frozen rope, is nonetheless a major mensch who lives in a homeland not too far behind Ukraine in being miserabilized into ever more desperate circumstances, who caters to our incessant bitching and bickering because it sometimes squeezes shekels into his drachma account to help keep the lights on here and feed some street folk grateful to have a tent to call their own. Also because he too feels a need to commune with people who grasp the harshness of our times.
It’s his home. We just hang out here.
Can we get the kind of valuable info Germ provides without being told that not only is the sky falling, it’s falling especially hard rain on the fucking vaxxed who are so fucking fucked?
Can we back off at least a bit from the Daily Hate of (insert currently fading global parasite/cabal thereof)?
Can we not call stupid imbeciles those who do not believe as we do ?
Can we stop spending and wasting your energy and ours on despising Nations X, Y, Z for being a little worse than us? Or insufficiently better? Or…
(Uh, Bill7, you just keep doing whatever it is you’re… uh, doing.)
Y’all are not cute when you do it; rather, you look kinda Klaus Gates Schwabbian and sound like Bill Gates doing voiceover for a bugfood-for-humans commercial aimed at Genzie vegans with a ton of guilt to feed: “After all the innocent animals you’ve eaten, don’t you think it’s time you atoned for your sins? Crickets: sure they’re animals not plants — but they’re too dumb to know the difference. Cr-ICK-ets!”
It’s like Trump Derangement Syndrome on VAIDS steroids. Bad Men BAD! BAD!!!!!! BBBBBAAAAADDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Jeez. You’d think that they’re killer robots… with laser eyes… not fucked-up psychotic human beings lost in their crazy shit hoping they don’t end up like Hitler in the bunker busting his teeth with a cyanide cap.
Humans do evil; it’s a fact. Sometimes the how and why of their evil aligns with a commentator’s favorite model of human sociopolitical reality. Great. Let me congratulate you all around:
Yes, you were right.
Yes, you are right.
Yes you’ve been telling us and everyone’s invisible friend the Hidden Truth since you first learned toeatread a cereal box.But you’re still being a major.fucking.drag, and that’s a drag, you know?
If we can see through all the viced-out and vaxxed-up plans of minion mice and mutant men as they gang agley, maybe we’re brilliant enough to notice that we’re still here, and still require sufficient reason to carry on to make it worth carrying on, especially when just plain old carrying one looks less and less possible? Ask the children of the homeless that Raul and friends feed.
There was a movie decades ago, a for-TV thing, I believe, where a character says, “Someone needs to just live. Along with the people trying to save the planet, right wrongs, all that, someone needs to just try and live. Decently, even well, if possible. But LIVE, dammit. So we don’t forget how, so we don’t forget what we’re fighting for and are left with only fighting.” (words to that effect; all I remember is “Someone needs to just live”, and his hand grabbing a bunch of grapes)
The Buddha spoke of clinging and how it promotes suffering. I find that we cling to cynical pessimism as much as we cling to credulous hope.
I’ll take credulous hope. Clinging to either leads to suffering, but hope at least gives you a good buzz before the inevitable hangover.
eugyppius speaks on Pandemicism and the Foreknowledge of the Virus Planners
“The mainstreaming and corporatization of the LGBT+ movement, I have been saying since 2005, will not only lead to ferocious backlash and violence, but eventually it will put us several steps back from where we were before Stonewall in 1969.”
bosco agrees.
Something-something abyss-Nietzche-peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat:
All the weirdness you’ll ever need:
Biden’s Nuclear Waste Guru Out of a Job After Alleged Luggage Theft
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HUman social psychology still seems most succinctly summarized with Monkey See, Monkey Do:
Beijing goes into self-lockdown
“After mocking for the US for 2 years for its “lay flat” (躺平) policy regarding Covid, Beijing has decided to lay flat. Adios central planning, back to personal responsibility.
As mentioned in an earlier article, the latest slogan being promoted is a rediscovered nugget of ancient wisdom: “每个人都是自己健康的第一责任人” – i.e. “Everyone is primarily responsible for their own health…. The result? Beijing has turned into a ghost city. The metro is empty. Malls are empty. Streets are empty – unless there is a pharmacy, a PCR test center or a hospital nearby. There huge lines are commonplace.”
A Beijing subway line on December 12th, 2022(replying to Polemos’ comment from the Tale of Two Narratives post): Well, we don’t exactly “let” the public die. The public does what it does, and consequences follow. I know: I’m public.
“The road to good intentions is paved with hell.” Bodishattvas walk on gilded splinters.
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Today’s Yogi tea tag: One who knows how to enjoy life doesn’t need riches.
Relevant song: Mother Nature’s Recipe
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Xmas music: Chilly Bethlehem
This one says ‘tomato’, that one says ‘otamot’. One relates to an existing thing; the other to an imaginary something-or-other.
I think it’s safe to say that Merkel liked Russian oil/gas. Hard to run any kind of modern government, good or bad, without adequate fossil fuels.
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It is interesting watching the changing of horses and jockeying for position relusting (typo stays) from Musk’s Twitter maneuver. A lot of “What’s it gots in its pockets”, a lot of counterpointed bluffmanship, a lot of squirming, and a lot of bullshit desperately trying to dam with damn lies the leakage of truth.
We should learn some interesting and unexpected things, for such is truth.
Meanwhile, the swamp trembles with the quivering awakening of demagogues soon to emerge and crawl toward the Oval Orifice (USA punk slang for the White House).
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Today’s Yogi tea tag says: You are unlimited.
Relevant tune: Capability
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Xmas counting down: Count ’em!
Five dog poop bags! (People are weird about dog poop and plastic bags. Weird.)
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Xmas roadkill from this morning’s doggie-walkie.
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In which it is shown that the legendary Led Zep had no clue how to play The Beatles, despite Plant singing his heart out. Not as Fab of a Four
“Know thyself.”
Let me stoop down a little further to it’s preferred level: I know you are but what am I?
But that’s far too personal. I prefer: I know it is but what is that?
my parents said know: loved the second poem.
Have a great cartoon on me:
Animated Soviet Propaganda American Imperialist The Millionaire COLD WAR CARTOON
They don’t make even remotely like that anymore, and Soviet prop cartoons were the best.
The first poem needs to marinate some more, I think.
“People should know by now that your enemy’s enemy is most often not your friend.Musk throws a few overrated managers under the bus – excludes the FBI managers – by releasing a few trivial emails about sensational events, then suddenly he is a saviour.”
If one is going to mess with the FBI and live to tell about it one must move slowly whether one is some straw man argument “savior” or just another rich berserker doing his thing.
Forever inferring motive about people we haven’t met and surely will is fun only if the inferrer doesn’t get so caught up in it that it paranoiacally insists that it knows what the rest of us poor deluded children with our puny insectile minds “should know by now”. That turns a bit of fun into a serious drag.
This creates in my mind another version of the “is it that evil or that stupid?” perennial question: is it that much of a drag or just another paid-unpaid troll and/or bot?
cuz it’s a real drag and I see it more and more and more all over the internet. substack comments sections are practically overrun with negative little shits telling everyone else how stupid and wrong they are (I bet they hire from youtube comment threads), also hopelessly fucked, so why not… I don’t know what the likes of aspnaz might recommend beside the usual autoerotic slur. Why, I used that very slut on aspnaz once, but that was when I felt that aspnaz deserved the respect of being treated like a human being rather than a trite cliche argubot. I could hardly tell the selfless to go fuck itself. Illogical, captain.
But it’s just a plain drag. Oh well. It’s not like I’m accusing aspnaz of conspiring with the FBI to spread toxic death-jabs across the face of the planet, just of being a right annoying bit of a tiresome ass. But that’s my personal experience of him. For all I know, he really is spreading enlightenment (if not joy) to the great unwashed masses, and I should be lucky to enter a chatroom with the likes of it.
Buit the best donut shoppe I’ve experienced in my life (family run Mediterranean operation) does marketing semiotics right:
Place has the greatest corner display. This is only a tiny top bit of it.
The donuts are the best I’ve ever had anywhere anytime. Chocolate donut hole more like chocolate truffles… only better.
I’d share their website but that would be so… commercial. But ask and I will tell.
Purloined Letter Marketing Porn (in which Starbuck’s dream mermaid is still as much of a prick-tease as She was in 1971. After all, “Our name was inspired by the classic tale, “Moby-Dick,” evoking the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.”
Moby wants some fishtail, says the market semiotics:
Sort of a fore-runner to sushi in that sense. Modern marketing is some seriously sick shit. By sick, I don’t mean that prurience is bad, but that saying one thing while meaning another is.
Another Top<>Bottom=Left to Right, but one rack below:
