After this's all over, I hope the U.S. gov't bills Trump for the damage he's done to our reputation

[John]

At least I can keep trying to sedate myself. A coma would be better than living like this.

Your wife and kids need you to be present with them for whatever is to come. Don't numb yourself to the world so much that you can't feel your loved ones. I'm not saying you are, I just hope you aren't.

[friendship]

is this going to suck? you bet. are we all gonna die? eventually. in the meantime i need to scoop the litter box.

Spoken like the Buddha himself.

[dubkitty]

seriously though, my cat is diabetic and even with twice-daily insulin injections he pisses up an absolute storm. he's a machine that makes concrete out of clumping litter. it wasn't a pretty picture when i got back yesterday from seeing Michael Rother in New York City.

i'm sorry if i sounded overly dismissive. believe me, i know how you feel...after the inauguration i went into a black hole i only got out of by making myself work on the Hopf project guitar. i wasn't joking back in my early days here when i called it my Occupational Therapy. i'm only staying sane by avoiding news as much as possible. i've carefully curated my social media to keep that shit as far away from me as possible.

[friendship]

I'm totally serious! I've been taking refuge in Zen recently, and that really encapsulates some core teachings (as I understand them).

[BitchPudding]

Friendship is right. There's something to be said for mundane routine. What you said about having to change your cats litter box oddly sat with me. Hits the whole "control what you can instead of worrying about what you can't" mindset. I've been pretty doomer brained ever since 2020, so I gotta work at fighting that mindset. Only leads to spirals and binges on my end.

Seance, thank you as well for your words. I made a reading list out of the authors you typed out. I need to read some more books. So far I've been reading Thurston Moore's autobiography and a book on Anarchy called "Warlike, Howling, Pure" that takes Anarchy and connects it to spiritualism and religion. But I read way too slowly these days. Entirely cause of my phone and my own lack of self control. Its something I'm trying to change, so thanks for giving me some fuel to work with.

Apart from that, I'm just pouring all I have into my music. The response has been great so far. We just need the right people to hear us....
My dream has always been my north star, I'm just trying to cling to it as tightly as possible.

Maybe I'll be able to laugh more in time.

[Seance]

I made a reading list

Also worth reading is the Martin Ferguson Smith translation of Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
https://hackettpublishing.com/on-the-nature-of-things


I know from personal experience that some amount of filtering out the news media madness feels not only helpful, but necessary. But I would caution that when taken too far this is harmful. We can't just close our eyes and hope for this nightmare to end. They are "flooding the zone" in an effort to shut down our brains and our ethics and morality and put us into a docile state of discombobulated disbelief and exasperation.

In my opinion the best news source on American TV, the least tainted with "infotainment" and bias, is the PBS Newshour. And... you guessed it, there are active efforts underway by MAGUmplicans to defund and destroy PBS.

Libraries are under attack. An informed electorate is central to democracy. The core mandate of libraries and universities is to preserve information and to provide equal access to that information and their other services.

Reading, informing yourself, isn't about what to think, but how to think. Certain demagogues claim that libraries and universities are "indoctrinating" people—but what libraries and universities are actually doing is teaching people how to ask questions, thereby arming people with the tools necessary for critical thought—how to think, how to weigh a set of experiences or facts as recorded in history or the arts when a person is considering what to do in an important, real-life situation in the real world.

Which is what they fear the most: an informed electorate making decisions based on rational thought and not solely on emotion (fear, anger, hatred) and personal animus and stereotypes and prejudices that are based on one or a few bad perceived or real experience.

Anybody trying to crack down on what can be said or thought is a clear and present danger to this central pillar of democracy (creating an informed electorate).

So the solution is to engage with and protect the public institutions that store and provide information. Privatized information that is "owned" by some oligarch can be deleted or altered to suit their personal needs.

There is a fantastic 1988 short film by Richard Linklater in which he claims that the film's title is an "old Russian Proverb":
"It's Impossible to Plow by Reading Books."

But this isn't true. In China they not only invented a plow in the 1000s that a single farmer with a single draft animal could control in order to plow an entire field all by themselves, but they also wrote books about how to plow (with illustrations).
Robert Temple writes:
"By the end of the Song dynasty in 1279, Chinese ploughs had reached a state of development that would not be seen in Holland until the 17th century."

[Blackened Soul]

If I am elected supreme leader I will deport everyone that bought a maga hat to middle of Niger