In an era of spectacular commodities, Mussolini offered fascism for communal consumption, and his aestheticized notion of politics governed the organization of the show. Mussolini’s solipsism, his aspirations to omnipotence, his moral independence, and his disregard for individuals’ values informed fascism’s orientations and determined its direction.

― Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy

+ Maria Greeley was on her way to work at the Beach Bar in Chicago when she was accosted by three ICE agents. Fearing she might be targeted by ICE, Greeley, who is Latina, had her passport with her, proving she was an American citizen, born 44 years ago at the Masonic Hospital in Chicago. The Feds looked at Greeley’s passport and said it was fake because she didn’t “look like” her last name. Greeley explained that she was adopted by the Greeley family shortly after birth. “They said this [her passport] isn’t real, they kept telling me I’m lying, I’m a liar,” Maria Greeley told the Chicago Tribune. “I told them to look in the rest of my wallet, I have my credit cards, my insurance.”  The agents still didn’t believe her and forced her hands behind her back and cuffed them together with zip ties. Then they interrogated her for more than an hour before releasing her, another American citizen subjected to federal cop abuse based solely on the color of her skin.  “I am Latina and I am a service worker,” Greeley said. “I fit the description of what they’re looking for now.”

+ Maria Greeley is just one of more than 170 American citizens–many of them beaten, tackled, tasered, pepper-sprayed, and forcibly dragged–who have been arrested and detained by ICE and Border Patrol, caught up in Trump’s mass purge of immigrants, according to a report by Pro Publica. Many of the falsely detained have been held in miserable conditions for days. At least 20 of them were children, most of whom were kept from contacting their families or lawyers.

Pro Publica: “At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”

+ ICE set up a raid outside St. Jerome Catholic Church in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, forcing the priest to issue a special warning to the congregation during mass. Right now, nobody wants to come out, because they don’t want to be deported,” a parishioner said. After the warning, several people living nearby showed up to form a human chain outside the church to escort people home. ICE still managed to arrest one person. “I think they’ve been casing the church,” a neighbor said. “The Mass times are down.”

+ On Tuesday, Border Patrol chased a car at high speed through the east side of Chicago into a neighborhood before crashing into the fleeing vehicle. Angry residents streamed out of their houses and began yelling at the federal agents who’d brought potentially lethal pursuit to their street, where kids were playing and people were walking down the sidewalks. A teenager threw an egg at the immigration cops, prompting an eruption of government-sponsored violence with clubs, plastic bullets, and tear gas. Chicago police quickly arrived on the scene in an attempt to calm things down, but 13 of the cops were soon overwhelmed by the chemical gas that Border Patrol had saturated the neighborhood with.

+ ICE raided a Walmart on E. 106th Street in Chicago this week. One of the agents chased down a young black man in the store for “running” during the raid and tackled him to the sidewalk outside the building, as a woman yelled, “He’s a U.S. citizen! He’s American! He’s my brother-in-law!” While he knelt on the man’s back, the ICE agent barked at people filming the brutal takedown: “Get the fuck away! Get the fuck away!!” The store was shut down for several hours. A customer told a reporter for a local TV station: “This is crazy, he [the manager] said they’re closed for some ICE stuff going on. I’m just trying to get some dishwasher liquid.”

+ ICE is becoming more like the IDF every day: An ambulance was summoned to the ICE office in Portland to treat an injured protester. But when the patient was loaded inside, ICE officers became aggressive, refused to let the ambulance leave, and threatened to shoot the ambulance driver.

Dispatch: “Copy, your attempt to transport impeded by… protesters?”

Medic: “No, not protesters, just the ICE officers.”

Driver: “Threatening to shoot and arrest me and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene—this is no longer a safe scene.”

+ The moment ICE arrested Robbie Roadsteamer for singing his version of Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy” with the Antifa Frog at the ICE jail in South Portland…

If you hate brown people

And you are a Nazi

C’mon, ICE, leave Portland…

+ On Sunday, ICE arrested a woman who was playing her clarinet on the sidewalk outside the ICE detention facility in Portland. The agents slammed the musician, who is the mother of a three-year-old, into the mud, stepped on her clarinet and strong-armed her into the gated facility. Nine hours later, at 2 am, her partner received a call from ICE telling him that she had been transferred across the Columbia River into a federal prison in Washington state.

+ Quinn Haberl teaches Orientation and Mobility (O&M) at the Department for the Blind in Portland, where he instructs the visually impaired on how to navigate around town using a white cane. Like the people he teaches, Quinn is legally blind. This week, he was among the protesters outside the ICE facility in south Portland when ICE agents tossed a woman next to him from her wheelchair to the sidewalk and then turned on him: “Agents picked me up and threw me to the ground. One of the medics did a full workup on me to make sure I didn’t injure my head on the concrete wall.”

+ Last Thursday, Josiele Berto got a call from the Everett, Massachusetts, police station to pick up her 13-year-old son. But when she arrived, she was told to sit down in the waiting area. After half an hour, the police told her that her son, a seventh-grader at the local school in the suburban neighborhood north of Boston, had been turned over to ICE. Berto later learned that he had been transferred to an ICE detention center in Virginia, more than 500 miles away. “My world collapsed”, the distraught mother told the Boston Globe. Later, the boy called his mother in tears, saying that he’d been sleeping on a concrete floor with an aluminum blanket. He is being housed with adults.  Berto has a pending asylum application. She and her son are legally authorized to live in the US.

+ On October 3, Subu Vedam was released from the Huntingdon State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, where he’d served 44 years for a crime he didn’t commit. His murder conviction had been overturned a couple of weeks earlier, when a court ruled that prosecutors had concealed evidence that would have proved his innocence. The DA for the county that convicted formally withdrew all charges last week. But before Vedam could taste freedom, he was picked up by ICE and is now slated for deportation to India, where he has lived since he was less than a year old.

+ Gil Kerlikowske, former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection: “ICE agents don’t have the training or skillset to conduct law enforcement operations in cities.”

+ Speaker Mike Johnson: “Most recently, the most threatening thing I’ve seen yet was the naked bicyclers in Portland who were protesting ICE down there. I mean, it’s getting really ugly.” ICE has killed at least two people who weren’t a threat and injured 100s more, but naked bicyclists are the “most threatening thing” the man who watches porn with his son has seen…

+ Apparently, Speaker Johnson doesn’t find this incident “threatening” to either American civil liberties or his conscience as a Christian: A 15-year-old autistic boy in Houston had been selling fruit by the side of the road with his family. When he took a bathroom break, he was nabbed by ICE agents and taken away to a detention jail. His family wasn’t notified of the arrest and had no idea what had happened to him. The boy was held in ICE detention for a week before his family could finally locate him.

+ Stephanopoulos: I asked if you agree with President Trump that Gov. Pritzker has committed a crime.

Vance: I think Gov. Pritzker has allowed a lot of people to be killed. I think that it’s disgraceful and absolutely should suffer some consequences.

Stephanopoulos: It’s really a yes or no question. Do you believe he’s committed a crime?

Vance: George, if you’re gonna keep on asking this question, I’m gonna keep on telling you he has failed to do his job and should suffer some consequences. He’s violated his oath of office. That seems criminal to me.

+ In the latest stern slap down of the Trump administration’s berserker tactics, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift the Temporary Restraining Order blocking the deployment of federal troops to Chicago. The three-judge panel, consisting of one appointee each by GHW Bush, Obama and Trump, ruled on Thursday that “political opposition is not rebellion.”

+ One of DHS’s primary “self-deportation” contractors is suing the Trump administration for awarding a $1 billion contract to an unqualified competitor whose CEO had worked with a leading DHS official involved in making the award. The suit alleges that the contract was “unlawful, rushed, and noncompetitive,” charging that DHS notified hand-picked competitors ahead of time, then set a 2-day turnaround for everyone else. The alleged self-dealing and bribery inside DHS and ICE appears to extend far beyond Tom Homan.

+ Fed chair Jerome Powell on the economic effects of Trump’s immigration policies: Powell on Trump’s immigration policies: “Stronger policy than most people had expected. We’ve seen a very sharp decline in growth of the labor force and in people entering the country … new people that come into the workforce create supply, but they also create their own demand.”

+ Remember that ICE raid on the southside Chicago apartment complex that Stephen Miller said was “full of Tren de Aragua terrorists” and should go down as “one of the most successful law enforcement actions” in US history, where swat teams stormed the building forcing all of the occupants (even children) outside, most of whom were cuffed and interrogated for hours. The military-style raid, which involved 300 federal agents and a helicopter, cost $10 million and netted 37 arrests, mostly undocumented people with no criminal records. How many were Tren de Aragua gang members? According to the DHS’s own records of the raid, precisely one. 

And that’s no surprise. Residents of the building told ICE and the press that they’d never seen any evidence of gang activity in the apartments. Which makes sense, since Tren de Aragua has been in decline for several years now and the total number of gang members in the US is estimated at around 1000. 

+ Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Miller’s contention that the Chicago raid was one of the most successful law enforcement operations in US history:

If this was Pinochet’s Chile, if this was Argentina under authoritarian rule, maybe you’d call it successful, meaning that they went after a few people in a building by absolutely terrorizing everybody in the building. There are about 130 people living there, a few of them being targeted, and everybody else—U.S. citizens, people with documentation who may not be U.S. citizens, and even undocumented people, who are not Tren de Aragua—were held for hours and zip-tied. This is the middle of the night: troops dropping—not really troops; they were agents—dropping from Black Hawk military helicopters onto the building, ransacking the place, breaking down doors and windows and so on.

+ A crime dashboard maintained by the DeSantis regime in Florida that tracks arrests of undocumented people shows that only 0.5% have a gang affiliation. These immigration raids are about going after gang members. There just aren’t that many. But the gang narrative is vital to scaring the geriatric Fox audience into rationalizing the ultra-violence of the ICE raids they see every night…

+ Chicago Sun-Times columnist Patricia Lopez: “Trump seems determined to punish the Windy City in a way that has little to do with immigration or crime and everything to do with it being a diverse, Democrat-run metropolis.”

+++

CBS News reporter: What is this, Mr. President?

Trump: It’s going to be built—an arc. Take a look at the location.

CBS News reporter: Yeah, no, I know where it is, but who’s it for?

Trump: Me. It’s going to be beautiful.

Reporter: The Arc de Trump?

+ Trump: “Who is going to be the head anchor at CBS? Not Norah O’Donnell.. Larry Ellison is great and his son is great. They’re friends of mine. They’re big supporters of mine and they’ll do the right thing.”

+ Pope Leo, quoted Hannah Arendt, in a speech defending journalism, free expression and fact-based reporting: Pope Leo quotes Hannah Arendt:  “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

+ Speaking of censorship, here’s the list of news outlets that signed and refused to sign the Pentagon’s new press (censorship) policy

Signed

One News Network

Refused

ABC News
Al-Monitor
Associated Press
The Atlantic
Aviation Week
Axios
Bloomberg News
Breaking Defense
C4ISRNET
CBS News
CNN
Defense Daily
Defense News
Defense One
The Economist
Federal Times
The Financial Times
The Guardian
The Hill
HuffPost
Military Times
MSNBC
NBC News
New York Times
Newsmax
NPR
PBS Newshour
Politico
Real Clear Politics
Reuters
Task & Purpose
Wall Street Journal
Washington Examiner
Washington Post
WTOP

+ Now that these reporters are no longer embedded with their Pentagon handlers, they’ll get out on the ground and do some real reporting.

+ Statement from the Pentagon Press Association…

+ Dark times in Bloomington, where the Administration ordered the editors of the Indiana Daily Student to print nothing but Homecoming coverage. No news. No editorials. Turning one of the best college newspapers into nothing but a homecoming guide. The University has essentially been taken over by the whackos in the State Legislature, who are gutting the humanities and now censoring the student media, a clear violation of the First Amendment. Read a letter from the IDS editors here…

+ IU grad Mark Cuban: “Not happy.  Censorship isn’t the way.  I gave money to the IU general fund for the IDS last year,  so they could pay everyone and not run a deficit. I gave more than they asked for.    I told them I’m happy to help because the IDS is important to kids at IU.”

+ Kate Wagner writing in The Nation on the University of Chicago’s gutting of the humanities: “The University of Chicago’s architecture once paid homage to the medieval trivium and quadrivium—the bedrock of the liberal arts. Now it pays homage only to money.”

+++

On Thursday, John Bolton was indicted for sharing classified documents. Here’s what he said 15 years ago about Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning for doing the same: 

Q. What do you think of Bradley Manning?

Bolton: I think he committed treason. I think he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. 

Q. What does that mean?

Bolton: Well, treason is the only crime defined by our Constitution. It says that treason consists only of levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. And he gave our enemies a lot of aid and comfort. 

Q. So what should happen to him?

Bolton: He should be prosecuted and if he’s found guilty he should be punished to the fullest extent possible.

Q. And what is that?

Bolton: Death.

Q. You think he should be killed?

Bolton: Yes.

+ Kash Patel’s FBI is now reduced to consulting with Glenn Beck, the man who falsely accused an injured bystander of being the “money man” in the Boston Marathon bombing, on Antifa. Beck “The FBI showed up to my house to discuss my TV show exposing Antifa’s network. If you are a member of Antifa or providing material or financial support for Antifa, I might be a little concerned because the FBI is DEADASS serious about investigating you.”

+ Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee says the Trump military occupation of Memphis “may never end.” “We have just begun. We do know this is going to last for months… In fact, I will tell you that it will last forever.” The US military is performing the function of the KKK during Jim Crow.

+ Moshik Temkin: “My best prediction is the Democrats will win back power in 2026 and 2028 and will then keep almost all of the authoritarian/militarized stuff that they are denouncing about Trump, all in the name of ‘bipartisanship and will then hand power right back to Republicans.” Hard to argue with this assessment and I’d add that they’ll likely use that inherited power against their own political dissidents on the Left…

+ The Trump administration is threatening to use visa restrictions and sanctions against nations that vote in favor of a plan put forward by the UN’s International Maritime Organization to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions by imposing a carbon emissions price on global shipping, a move supported by an EU-led bloc including Britain, China and Japan.

+ Trump threatened to yank the World Cup from Boston because its woman mayor stood up to him: “Boston has a bad mayor who at least is a reasonable IQ person. Most of them are low IQ. I mean, what’s going on in Chicago … ” The Mayor of Boston, Michele Wu, is Chinese-American. The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, is black.

+ WSJ: Prominent Trump supporters sold sponsorships to what appeared to be a U.S. Treasury event on AI headlined by Scott Bessent. It wasn’t. The fake Treasury event was set up by 1789 Capital, a venture capital outfit where Don Jr is a partner.

+ I’ll say this for the Italian neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, she wears her feelings in her facial expressions, often a contempt for Trump as he repeatedly tries to manhandle her in these photo ops..

+ Trump on Meloni: “We have a woman, a young woman who’s… I’m not allowed to say it…she’s a beautiful young woman. If you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the US about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances.”

+++

+ The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. The bottom 50% of America is worth $4.2 trillion. How long will this be tolerated?

+ In the last decade, the wealth of billionaires has swelled by $33 trillion.

+ As car payment delinquencies soar, an estimated 1.73 million vehicles were repossessed last year, the highest total since 2009.

+ After recently firing 5,000 of its employees, Verizon’s top “talent” executive, Christina Schelling, advises the jobless to work for free…

+ Soybean farmer on Trump’s bailouts: “A government payment is nothing more than throwing a dollar bill on a spilled glass of milk on your kitchen table. It’s designed not to make us whole as farmers, and that’s the biggest misnomer of all. We’re lucky if we get 3 cents on the dollar for a program that is designed to make up for a man-made disaster. This is a man-made disaster. This is caused by this administration and their actions.”

+ Bessent should be put on the FBI watch list for harboring an Anti-capitalist ideology…

+ It’s a strange kind of economic populism that mandates price “floors” instead of “ceilings.”

+ The orgy before the fall: The market cap of Nvidia (the maker of GPU chips for AI computing) is now larger than all publicly-traded banks in the US and Canada.

+ CNN: 40% of employees are reporting wasting an average of two hours at a time cleaning up AI-generated workslop.

+ America First*

Q: What is the benefit for the US in helping Argentina?

TRUMP: Just helping a great philosophy take over a great country … we don’t have to do it. It’s not gonna make a big difference for our country.

* (See fine print for exceptions.)

+ After Milei made his pilgrimage to the White House to pay tribute to Trump, Trump responded by doubling the size of the bailout to $40 billion. The Milei Miracle must be a rapidly cratering catastrophe.

+ Sen. Ron Wyden: “The Trump administration is using American tax dollars to fund infrastructure in Argentina because that’s where they’re all going to flee when we kick them out of office.”

+ Trump to Javier Milei: “Do you need any Tomahawks in Argentina? You need them for your opposition, I guess, because in this country, they use Tomahawks on the opposition. I don’t do that. I’m much nicer. The Democrats would use them if they had the chance. They’re sick people.”

+++

+ Politico’s summary of thousands of leaked racist and pro-Nazi chat messages between “young” Republican activists:

They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

+ Here are a few of the more rancid texts:

 “I love Hitler.”

“They love the Watermelon people.”

“Stay in the closet faggot.”

“Kick the bitch.”

“I’m ready to start watching people burn now.”

“You’re giving nationals too much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest.”

“Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”

“We got to pretend to like them. ‘Hey, come on in. Take a nice shower and relax.’ Boom–they’re dead.”

“I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkey play ball.”

JM: “The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman.”

AD: “Sex is gay.”

LM: “Sex? It was rape.”

BW: “Epic.”

“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked.”

+ Rep. Yvette Clark, chair of Congressional Black Caucus: “When we say white supremacy is thriving on the right, they call us reactionary… Give me a break. The future of the Republican Party proudly embraces bigotry that belongs in the past, and every American needs to recognize how dangerous that is.”

+ JD Vance’s attempt to distract from the public outrage over the “I love Hitler” TrumpYouth group chat: “Grow up! Focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats… The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys — they tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do.” Some of those “kids” hold public office and the Young Republicans National Federation is described as “the GOP’s 15,000-member political organization for Republicans between 18 and 40 years old.” Meanwhile, Vance and Trump want 12-year-olds tried as adults, including for capital offenses.

+++

+ Eric Trump on how the Trump family is “saving God”: “We’re saving Christianity. We’ve saving God. We’ve saving the family unit. We’re saving this nation. I mean, DEI is out of the window…You no longer have Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem. You no longer have Budweiser going woke as hell. All of this is dead. We have a return to people going to church.” Sure, Trump saved God from Antifa and transgender members of SEAL Team 6, but is he up to fighting Peter Thiel’s nemesis, the Anti-Christ? Especially if the Anti-Christ manifested in the human form of Greta Thunberg?

+ This week, Brooke Rollins, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, compared Charlie Kirk, the St. Paul of Prospect Heights, to Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owning Deist who fathered numerous illegitimate children through domestic rape while ardently supporting the French Revolution. I’d wager it’s not the deism or support for a leftist revolution she found comparable. That leaves…

+ Speaking of Kirk, Shane Vaughn, a podcasting evangelical pastor popular in MAGA circles, says that God permitted Satan to kill Charlie Kirk before Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson could turn the modern-day St. Paul against Israel: “God said, ‘No, not today. You’re too pure and you have too much influence.’” What a strange hermeneutical interpretation of the way the Supreme Deity of the Christian religion conducts his business…

+ Trump at the White House ceremony honoring America’s St. Paul: “I heard (Kirk) loved his enemies, and I thought, ‘Is that the same Charlie I know?’ I’m not sure. But I didn’t want to get into it.”

+ Alleged champion of free speech memorialized by deporting those who used it to criticize him!

+++

+ RFK, Jr., now in charge of the nation’s health policy, apparently believes pregnant women carry fetuses in their placentas, not uteruses.

+ A six-month-long investigation for Consumer Reports by Paris Martineau found high levels of lead in protein powders and shakes. The results of more than 60 lab tests of leading protein supplements showed that most powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than experts say is safe to consume in a full day, some by more than ten times. That explains a lot about the Manosphere.

+ Trump on No Kings protesters: “You see these violent incidents and then you see people holding this gorgeous sign, with beautiful wood and beautiful cardboard wood, everything. Everything’s perfect. Perfect paint job. And they’re all the same. You know that they weren’t made in the basement out of love. They were made by anarchists.” Perfectly made in the USA by anarchists, most of whom are lovers, especially when the love’s “free”!

+ Despite spiking demand, Nevada has seen the lowest electric utility price increases in the nation over the last twenty years (just +1.4%), owing largely to its massive investment in solar power.

+ A new report submitted to the UK government by its climate advisors warns that “heatwaves will occur in at least four out of every five years in England by 2050, and time spent in drought will double. The number of days of peak wildfire conditions in July will nearly triple for the UK…with some peak river flows increasing by 40%.”

+++

+ Félix Guattari: “Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don’t even take the trouble of expressing myself, so that when I reread myself, I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he’ll work it through.” There were times only minutes from deadline when I thought Cockburn must have felt this way about his most frequent writing partners over the years (almost always over the telephone with Alex doing the typing): Ridgeway, Wypijewski, Silverstein and me, especially before we transitioned him to the Mac and his scrawled-over, coffee-stained, type-written copy, smudged to the point of illegibility with engine grease and droppings from Percy the Cockatiel, burned up our fax machines from DC to New York to Oregon City…By the way, I think Guattari’s a riot, and so was Alex on most days.

+ Gustave Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet: “If you knew what I throw away, what a hotchpotch my manuscripts are. There’s a hundred and twenty pages finished; I have written at least five hundred. Do you know how I spent my entire afternoon the day before yesterday? Looking at the landscape through pieces of coloured glass. I needed it for a page of my Bovary, one which I believe will be rather good.”

+ Cardi B apologized for asking fans to buy her new album under these deteriorating economic conditions: “I didn’t realize how quickly they raised the rent prices. And I’m out here asking y’all to buy my album and shit. I’m so sorry, y’all …When I was looking at those rent prices, I was so fucking disgusted.”

+ Trump: “You build what’s called a reverse bathtub. And it’s not that uncommon, but it is actually a reverse—you, you seal it. The problem is, nature always wins. I know a lot about reverse bathtubs. I’ve done it, and it’s something you only do in an emergency.” A reverse bathtub is a bathtub that washes you with bullshit?

+ David Osland: “On the centenary of Thatcher’s birth, don’t forget that she called Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela a terrorist, General Pinochet a friend. And Jimmy Savile ‘Sir’.”

+ The poet Julia Alvarez to Laura Bush, after the former librarian from Midland cancelled a planned poetry reading at the White House in 2003 by Alvarez, Galway Kinnell and Jay Parini, having learned that the poets planned to speak out against the Iraq War: “Why be afraid of us, Mrs. Bush? You’re married to a scarier fellow.” Melania, of course, won’t have to worry about subversive poets, since the closet she’ll come to hosting any recital will likely be a Palm Court performance by Lara Trump, whose voice, despite being channeled through the most advanced autotuning technology, still comes out sounding like an opossum being waterboarded.

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Berlin Childhood: Around 1900
Walter Benjamin
(Verso)

Fighting for the Puyallup Tribe: A Memoir
Ramona Bennett Bill
(University of Washington)

We Will Not be Removed: the People of King’s School Park
Allen Weider
(Oregon State University)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Figure in Blue
Charles Lloyd
(Blue Note)

A Lifetime of Riding by Night
Rhett Miller
(ATO)

Disquiet
The Necks
(Northern Spy)

Plastic and Dumb

“The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we’re herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we’re supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can’t even piss when we have to. That’s how we learn to be plastic and dumb.”

– Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

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