Mistakes are made

Strikes bright white against wood and heft with slate.

Again, with the everydayness of imperial decline: or life in the algae and the claw of the republic. Homoerotic spectacles of simulated combat, or America: The Pete Hegseth Story.

What are the odds that ICE will invade the Obama Center over the weekend?

Will the Obama Center include an exhibit on how Barack forced Democratic candidates to drop out of the 2020 presidential race to give Biden the momentum necessary to kill Bernie Sanders’ candidacy?

Will it include information on how, after using grassroots organizations and mobilizing to win the candidacy in 2008, Barack and his team systematically squashed any progressive/left aspirations among his onetime base and then systematically marginalize all those who once had the audacity to believe that he represented hope?

Will it include information about how the veneration of our insurgent class of Tech Billionaires began with his campaign in 2008?

Will it mention that a public option in the ACA might have allowed people to access the care necessary to stave off the worst of the opioid crisis? Or that publicly funded health care might have prevented doctors from prescribing OxyContin like it was aspirin? Or that publicly funded treatment for addiction might have done something to prevent the ensuing mental health fallout which birthed our present psychotic dystopia?

Ceasefire is another word for market manipulation. Or, perhaps, the name of a new talkshow on MSNOW or on what used to be CNN.

Social reproduction by means of attrition: war and disease as the wave of the future of the visible hand.

I genuinely hate the Amazon ads that use that one Janelle Monae song. If only because I both genuinely like that song, and because, every time I see it, I’m forced to realize that Janelle Monae’s whole Archandroid/Dirty Computer phase was a Tech Industry come-on.

J.D. Vance wrote a book called Communion. It is a prequel to Disclosure Day.

The commentariat seems genuinely appalled that the US is going to pay Iran $300 billion for national reconstruction.

Germany would like a word.

Snapchat makes smartglasses look dumb.

At the end of the spring semester, Clark University in Dubuque, Iowa, closed its arts and humanities program, shuttering all departments concerned with literature or language, expressive culture, or the social sciences. This was done out of a concern with “cost effectiveness” and the imputation that these were not pathways to viable careers. Because, of course, the entire point of putting small Catholic universities in the Midwest was about preparing people for the workforce.

Today, Clark posted thirteen new full-time positions for coaches in its Athletics Department. Which is apparently both commercially viable and a pathway to career success.

The present administration at Clark seems largely ignorant of the fact that, it was as a professor of literature and writing at that university that George R.R. Martin first started to write what would become A Game of Thrones. Or perhaps they do know and they’re making a strategic calculation that IP based on genre fiction is on the way out in commercial entertainment.

Experts say companies who build machines used in Gaza demolition might be complicit in war crimes, reports the Guardian.

If only there were some kind of non-violent social movement that tried to pressure those companies for the complicity in the decades-long genocide of Palestinian life. One wonders what such a movement might look like, and how the world would respond to its righteous cry for human dignity, and physical, historical integrity.

There are two good movies about 9/11 and its aftermath and they are 25th Hour and Children of Men.

Twenty-six, forty-one