Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter plans flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on … Continue reading After and Before →

If it's pointed out to you, while you rumble along the tracks, you can just see the field where the Sacramento River Cats play in West Sacramento, which is where now the team once called the Oakland Athletics plays, apparently quite badly, and although they are officially only called the Athletics--no city name attached--the uniformed, … Continue reading A review of being talked at about Oakland by the car attendant of the California railroad museum’s 45 minute excursion train ride through West Sacramento →

Han Kang’s We Do Not Part is a novel about Han Kang remembering having written Human Acts, a novel which I remember remembering a lot better than I remember reading. I have things I say about that novel, of course, because I remember saying them seven years ago, when Human Acts was the “hey, the … Continue reading We Do Not Part (except when we do): A review of forgetting Han Kang’s Human Acts. →

I didn’t say anything back to the guy who had just gotten out of his parked car and cursed at me; in my memory, raised my hands, palm-up, in a kind of IRL ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ though with, perhaps, probably, less of a smile. I raised my eyebrows, in my memory, as if to say “look, man, … Continue reading A review of being yelled at by a guy whose defaced Tesla you were just seen photographing →

Remembering that there is no meaning in the world unless we put it there, by our choices—and that without taking action, and without pushing (with moral force) our subjective will into an uncaring and absurd world, freedom is ultimately meaningless—I decided to go to Berkeley Bowl at 4 pm of a Sunday afternoon. If you … Continue reading A review of going to Berkeley Bowl in that cursed moment in which sunday afternoon becomes an evening of the soul, in all the moral peril that implies →

Historically, Trump’s only close to redeeming quality has been that he spends a lot of time shitting on rank and file GOP politicians in such ideologically incoherent ways that it becomes self-defeating. But while there’s something vaguely pleasing in watching GOP senators beg him for scraps--does the king know what his counselors are doing in … Continue reading Another week of bad things spraying us in the face. →

By total volume, the defense department’s newly-announced budgeted $400 million for armored Tesla vehicles doesn’t really rate when compared to the “$13 billion in federal contracts over the past five years” that Musk gets from SpaceX and other companies (and is probably less important than things like eviscerating the SEC so as to kill, for … Continue reading A Review of the Worst Fucking Things Those Fucking Guys Did Just in This Past Fucking Week →

AI tarpits. Pete Hegseth’s venmo. RIP Professor Ogot. “How a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance. The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago”: The fusion of Austrian economics, techno-libertarianism, and Yarvin's critique of … Continue reading I will not tell “the birds” to “go”; neither will I have the mad hubris to command the earth to circle the sun, links →