Viva Vida’s
I was headed up to my favorite hiking trail today with Miles, my 100 pound yellow lab. The hiking trail is on the outskirts of town, about 14 miles away, so we drive, of course. It’s quite cold today, and the main highway between here and the park is a twisting, turning death race of a stretch of highway, which seems to only attract drivers who’s main ambition is to become characters in a video game. That’s on a good day. And since it was below freezing, highly windy, and the middle of the day, I took the safer option. State Route 315 with patches of ice is just stupid, so I took surface streets.
Along the way I passed this interesting business, and snapped a photo of it and sent it to my wife. In the last couple of years we have enjoyed trying veggie based meat options a bit. It seems like the smart thing to do going forward, since everything from fossil fuels to animal farts are turning our planet into a climate change adventure ride.
Funny thing though, just yesterday I learned that 2022 is the year that “Soylent Green”, the fictional future dystopian film about food material substitute made of humans took place. This evening when we looked at the website together, all I could think of was Soylent Green. Vida is butchering plants in there…is all I could think. Kinda funny, and kinda creepy.
Growing up in the late 20th century in Ohio which was on its comedown from the bustling 60s created a certain kind of sense of humor that you had to develop in lieu of going crazy. We had our view of it, and outsiders just used it as ridicule to make themselves feel superior, but this isn’t about those idiots. This is about the quirky perspective that one experiences, and the kooky sayings that developed.
One of those experiences is rooting for perennially bad sports teams. (Don’t glaze over yet. This is not about sports). There is a certain quirkiness that comes from these losing environments. One in particular is the dreaded “vote of confidence.” First comes some sort of mediocrity, or worse. Or, perhaps some incident that embarrasses the organization or the city. From that comes the discussion of whether some coach is on a “hot seat”. Then, three things can happen. A person with the requisite authority will either, ignore the situation altogether, and make no public statements. That is the best of all of the possibilities. Next is the firing. That would be the worst. And then, there is the quirky third possibility, which competes with the firing for worst, although it arguably is not. The third possibility is the dreaded, “vote of confidence.”
The vote of confidence is dreaded because, barring a miracle, which those of us in fly-over territory do not exist, barring that divine intervention, the vote of confidence is quickly followed by a firing. The vote of confidence only sets up the inevitable public relations embarrassment. It is sort of a way to say, hey everybody, look at this. Then, boom!
All of that is to say, Kosher just issued one of those votes of confidence yesterday, and boy, oh boy do I hope he is right! Here is Kosher’s actual quote, which is so frightening in this quirky perspective that I have to laugh just to keep from being scared shitless.
“I don’t think we’re looking at Naziism here per se, I don’t expect to see death camps, but we’re looking at an undermining of democracy that is that ruthless”
I don’t know why copying that made it so much larger, but it looks even more frightening that way, so I think I’ll leave it. And, I agree. I don’t think we are looking at Naziism…per se. Now that is a dreaded vote of confidence if I have ever seen one. “We are not looking at Naziism…per se.”
So, tomorrow I think I am going go check out some butchered veggie based meats at Vida’s. It’s 2022. We need to start looking for alternatives to meat, right?
01/23/2022 @ 3:20 am
China caps weekly policy easing blitz with fresh rate cuts —Reuters
Soon it will be morning. About an hour ago a-hem I ‘worked’ SPUTNIK within a somewhat fractured exchange to Kosher …
and who’s it ?grammarly? apparently smelled ‘SPUD’ chiseling hereupon until the 12th of never … whilst privately I had posited many here among us don white T shirts and stay on the line: territorial imperative (Premier Putin’s such a desk
jockey) Ukraine is another sovereign nation at risk…here’s some amore’ from my solitary confinement:
STARDUST SPRINKLE
& will there be Pyramids along the Nile
clear breeze, me: your special smile
beyond Rudyard’s last distant mile
no fear of rumble nor thump: shoulder blades
upon tight foam mat, slick to tongue & G hardwood
I am not your Lincoln’s ax, nor drivetime
ceiling wax, what’s going on? EVERYBODY
eyes right sound off now IN sync spammed
elbows on
gloss a sway that-away, keen caps yet
exposed ears vulnerable
no sound respectful of fear
hot souls, gleams particulate
windshield dust, last spring’s penned
tar swirl, impacted hobnails
mastic tape’s barcoded inner circle
and what must be a cloak and dagger
Lord, a pumpkin’s stem why would there
be tiptoe prints of sandhill cranes
rare as that elusive fine’ number
a cloud source, bird tabulations
tree ring counters — Che-ching
Gesu tight fistedly extending his navel air tour
that convertible cigarette ash ruining his Jerry Garcia
silk tie: paisley bright, aqua as the outer banks
en toto Gutenberg type dark as our sunrise golden
periphery when Norwegian farmers raise their
brows with yesterday’s IDEA
to sharpen plows
Like piccolo practice on Pearl Harbor Sunday
seas never the same
Our Pineapple Princess: hands on ears
bubbles disperse
depth charge
cognizant
Kingdom of
our strong
night nurse
01/23/2022 @ 8:50 am
That is rather brilliant, JPH.
01/23/2022 @ 3:12 pm
‘Aye-Eye Mr. B:
U kindred soul U!
please allow how lit the runway
in Madagascar is {LO;}
01/23/2022 @ 11:29 am
“We are not looking at Naziism…per se.”
Are we looking at:
The demise of the rule of law?
Bannon’s “deconstruction of the administrative state”?
American Democracy inexorably slipping into the tyrannical darkness of ‘tribal otherism’ and the insidious racist and bigoted autocracy that appears to be engulfing the globe?
No, Trumpism is not Nazism per se?
Not yet…
01/23/2022 @ 11:36 am
I agree, Ron. And this is not to disagree with Kosher’s statement. The point was to show how far we have fallen. A year ago, that statement could have been asserted more intensely. Now, it is as much of a hope as it is an observation. Where will it be a year from now? Are we drawing distinctions between Naziism and other forms of authoritarianism at that point? Will some of us be deported by then, or in danger of it? Probably not, right? We can be fairly certain of that amount of security…until we can’t. So, yeah, not yet.
01/23/2022 @ 11:44 am
Hate is not an ideology.
Hope is not a strategy.
Nazism is not a form of government or system of governance.
Nazism is a tactic.
01/23/2022 @ 6:48 pm
I feel way more pessimistic than I did a year ago. Biden is likely to lose in 2024 because he didn’t accomplish much. He didn’t accomplish much because he did not have a working Senate majority, only a cosmetic one, as a result of two Democratic Senators who have decided it’s in their best interest to pretend they’re Republicans when convenient. He’s being blamed for that anyway. What is scarier is that the Supreme Court has not prohibited state legislatures from legislating that they can essentially arbitrarily overturn elections. That means whoever’s in power stays in power in any given state and it gives a huge boost to the Republicans because Democrats have a tendency to respect elections. The press is bitching but it’s too little too late. While they were fucking around with scorekeeping their legitimacy was stolen among a great enough portion of the population to take away their electoral influence where it once mattered.
So I think we’re in trouble. What I don’t have a feel for is how far that trouble goes. It does not go to Naziism because not enough people are blaming any given group for enough to start massacring anyone.
When it comes to blaming groups, the group for whom blame is growing is mine. When this synagogue incident happened in Texas, the FBI really hesitated to label it as an antisemitic incident. There’s no other way to view it – people were taken hostage because they were Jewish based on a myth about Jews. Jewish life will get more dangerous, mainly in worship, sort of like latter day church bombings. Our model won’t be Pantaleo, it will look way more like Dylann Roof. The Roof murders resulted in Confederate flags disappearing from major retail and statehouses around the country within a couple of weeks. There won’t be a result like that. It will look more like what happened after Sandy Hook – a lot of hue and cry when incidents happen followed by nothing. On a local level it will lead to more municipal protection of synagogues. Even though this incident was from a Muslim terrorist, that’s not where the increased danger to Jews will come from. This guy was a European Muslim like the guys who did 9/11. If anything, American Muslim support for Jews in this matter will increase. They will understand very clearly that we’re in the same boat. That understanding so far has been mutual. In terms of the FBI, what is true is that the Texas incident did not emanate from American antisemitism.
Anyway, don’t expect death camps. That’s not what this will look like. For one thing, America has no Master Race.
01/23/2022 @ 7:23 pm
I mainly agree with that, but there are some important small differences.
The first is trying to make too close of a comparison to Naziism. Yes, in a very detailed analysis, it is not like the antisemitic trust of that era. I do think, however, that this is potentially as bad without the death camps. (Let’s keep in mind that we are discussing real worst case scenarios, and that alone makes it less likely).
Let’s leave aside the “master race” terminology because this wont be about provoking genetic supremacy, but rather power supremacy. To some extent, Americans are and always have been willing to let others suffer for the patriarchy to hold power. We are already abusing Mexicans and Central Americans on the Southern border in ways that we would not were they white Protestants. There are still many Americans who will tell anyone who will listen that George Floyd was in the wrong, and the Officer was not guilty of anything. There is also a large group of otherwise decent people who are sympathetic, but wont lift a finger to jeopardize their abilities. To pay their mortgages and boat payments.
We are on the verge of war in Europe, and who knows how big that could get. We have a reasonably decent economy right now, but let any black swan come along and cause a market crash, and more instability will ensue. So, we have war, pestilence, and famine. Death kind of comes along with all of them. In this scenario, the power group will be the wealthy, and the prey will be the poor. The scenario that concerns me is the possibility that it is not necessarily countries against one another, but rather oligarch criminals like Putin, Trump, and that crew, versus whomever the task of leading the free word falls to, whether President of the US, or some sort of American Che Guevara.
And if Americans are dumb enough to reject Democrats in 2024, those independents and Republicans will have no qualms about just enough 1950s style smiley faced oppression to turn a blind eye to keeping freedom alive. They’ve done it before.
01/23/2022 @ 11:54 pm
I think you’re right about smiley-faced oppression. That’s McConnell exactly and it could easily resemble McCarthyism. What may slow this down is sort of ironic. Oppression of this kind entails a strong central government with a lot of surveillance. A lot of the Right is phobic about that.
We are on the verge of a war in Europe because we’ve been stupid. I think our leadership thinks that Putin might be less serious than he lets on about Ukraine’s threat to join NATO. Putin is about as serious as we would be if Russia managed to build an alliance with Canada and station troops in southern Ontario and wonder why we were worried. Actually, more serious. We don’t have experience in living memory of our country being invaded. They do, and it cost them more casualties than any country has ever suffered in a war in the history of Earth. Like the Israelis, and for very similar reasons, Russia takes existential threats very, very seriously, and they would view an attempt to encircle them on their own border by adding Ukraine to NATO as an existential threat, justifiably so. We would be insane to push that button but I’m afraid we’re stupid enough to.