It makes me wonder:
You take a young guy like Don McGahn, working full blast in public to make the coup permanent -
Doesn't he understand that when his usefulness is over they'll kill him? These guys all seem to think that the refined, permanent plutarchic states of America only really needs a few people to run it.
I mean: Putin's got his dozens of pet snakes, but he used to have hundreds.
Most of them fell out of windows.
Or had other tragic accidents.

I have found the Kavanaugh theater program monumentally depressing.
Both sides. All of it. What it said. What it didn't say.
The bad faith, the gullible media, the
Whole
Fucking
Circus
pisses me off. What pisses me off the worst is that it is so much built into our current system of economy, politics, and technology.
I can't express how depressing I have found the whole program. Discussion. Interaction. Whatever it was.
I believe the women. Every word.

I'd suggest everybody stop, catch a breath, put Kavanaugh on the back burner, and think long term.
They wrote a plan in 1974 and have been executing it ever since. It started out all legal, selling a message and winning local elections, and the legal part worked.
--more I've written about it extensively, but if you Google "Powell Memo" and read it, it's simple and it worked.
Before then there was no Heritage Foundation or anything like it. There was no Rush Limbaugh.
He invented them.
The objective, clearly stated, was to save "our way of life"

Leaving aside for a moment the natural sense of annoyance that goes with watching Grassley suck up farm aid from the government, think instead about the clip below.
A thread. washingtonpost.com/amphtml/busine… 2. 150,000 "farmers" produce about 90% of the nation's soybeans.
The same number applies to almost any agricultural commodity.
Oh, and they only call themselves farmers when there's a reporter around.
The rest of the time they're "producers."

I spent today out piddling around on the farm.
I'm going to train Abe, the middle aged resident donkey, to pull a cart and light farm equipment.
Donkeys aren't like horses. Donkeys are the number one, still working, beast of burden and transportation in the world.
--more 2. Donkeys were the first beast of burden ever domesticated. Humans offered them a deal: pull and carry stuff for me, and I'll keep you safe, and feed and water you.
Work stock are no more abused than work humans are, and no less. Some get treated fair, and they're happy.

You in the mood for some pond story, with pics?
Pics upload slow from here, so it's a slower paced story.
I've never shown you this pond before. This is the "civilization" side of the property. As you can see. Neighbors. Houses. Roads.

I have some thoughts about governing and the people who choose to govern others.
Although it is rarely talked about, the whole point of politics is governing.
Thread, possibly long. 2. For whatever their personal reasons, all people who wish to be part of the government, any government, any place, any time, believe it appropriate that they should have power over others.

If I was a young man (30, 40, maybe even 50) I would buy one of these combines and raise my own wheat for bread.
Wheat can yield as much as 40 bushels per acre, with current averages just below that, but that's agribusiness, highly fertilized, chemical wheat.
20 bushels per acre is a realistic number for a small or subsistence farmer.

I said I would return to this topic, and here goes.
Another screen shot of the tweet I deleted, and some comments.
I tweeted, and deleted, the following: 2. Obviously I don't like Ann Coulter.
But.
I complain regularly about stochastic terrorism.
By the plain meaning of the language, this could be read as "I think it would be better if Ann Coulter was dead."
I wasn't thinking. I don't seek death for others.

About a thousand years ago I was listening to the Clarence Thomas hearings while driving from job to job. This will be by memory from that long ago time, because I don't have the patience to wade through all the transcripts.
--more-- 2. Sen. Leahy read something Thomas had written and asked him to account for it within the context of his current testimony, and Thomas said words to the effect of, "Senator, you need to consider the context. I wrote that to satisfy my employer, [politician X].

If I had a dollar for every time I heard some thumbsucker who gets paid to write or talk say, "We're such a divided nation. America has never been so divided," I could buy the next tool I'm drooling at.
No shit, Herschel.
--more-- rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mp… Rupert Murdoch and Newt Gingrich did it.
Newt probably couldn't have done it without Rupert, and Murdoch could have done it without Newt, but they're both in there somewhere.

I asked a rhetorical question: Why don't we fix it?
So... allow me to offer some answers to my question?

https://twitter.com/homemadeguitars/status/1042569017008041984

That question mark above makes the sentence strange, but there's no edit button. Oh well.
The first thing we would have to do is elect governments in at least 3/4 or so of the states.
State governments draw districts.
People want courts to fix this, but voters are the design unit

It's been out there for a long time but it's really hit me today:
The anonymous mob with their death threats is a specific tool of governance being used by the Republicoup.
Not once, in any way or any words, has any member of the Republicoup uttered the smallest criticism. Death. You may know the term "stochastic terrorism". It means, you don't know who will kill or who will be killed, but you know if you plant enough seeds of murder someone will die.
Whether it's a black kid shot by a cop, or a Muslim girl murdered,

I wrote this thread before my shower, and was thinking about it in there... So, building on the below:

https://twitter.com/homemadeguitars/status/1041830142077816832

OK, so I think Mitch McConnell is driving the bus. I think he's the top power in the ruling coup.
But he's not necessarily mapping out the route.
I'd bet one or more billionaires are doing that, are giving Mitch his instructions.

When I listen to the guest talking heads on @DeadlineWH or even @TheLastWord and they speak of Congress, they always talk in terms of elections and bases and cowardice and primaries.
Stop.
Think.
Some of you are aging.
There has -->never<-- been anything like this here.
Remember. This is not about losing primaries.
Yes, I realize that for years and years there has been a Congressional majority that pretended not to believe science. Lying, per se, is not new.
But.
It has gone crazy.
And the golden Dipshit *did not* cause it.

If you wanted to increase to death toll and dollar cost from weather events, there are a few sure-fire techniques.
First, and most certain of success, is to relocate populations and built environments into low and coastal areas.
--more-- Next most certain is to increase paved area, although this won't work with fire, for instance.
Flood and water events are particularly on my mind with this thread.
A guaranteed way to worsen flooding is to drain swamps and wetlands, and then build there.

I've been working with this washed--out pond for years. This is a kind of representative photo, not taken today. Last April, in fact.
Nowhere near that much water today.
A thread - just a story, you know. Here's that pic with pointers. The orange line points at the standing historic dam, at the wash-out point.
The red line points to some fill I put in some time before, last fall I think.
The purple line points to the mostly filled ditch that used to define the water level.

Just a little background, not often mentioned in political chatter:
The reason we hold elections is to form governments.
The reason we need governments is to provide services that individuals can't provide, and companies can't make a profit on.
That's the "for the people" part. For instance, if your town was under water, would you rather have a President who can make an inspirational speech, or one who could organize a convoy of food, water, and shelter?

This is a serious question. I'm not blaming victims, I'm wondering about the future as it is visible from here.
What can society - all human society - do about low-lying island nations and states / territories?
--more-- I mean, it would be nice if technological society decided to take some serious action to alleviate global warming, but we're not.
And it's already too late to save New Orleans. Annapolis. Puerto Rico, except the mountains.
It's. A. Done. Deal.
The ocean is coming. It doesn't care

Yes, the economy appears to be doing well.
For starters, the federal government will be spending about 4 trillion dollars this year.
That is 4 billion dollars, one thousand times. 4 thousand times a billion dollars.
That kind of money tends to buy a lot of stuff.
But... About a quarter of that money is borrowed. In other words, here's a trillion dollars that the govt is spending that didn't exist in the economy last yeat.
The magical appearance of a billion dollars about a thousand times over the course of a year will buy a bunch of stuff.
But.

Hurricane coverage frustrates and angers me.
As a culture we spend 365 days of every year doing everything we can to insure that the next hurricane will be deadlier than the last one.
Our entire system warms the globe making storms more powerful.
--more-- We build more, bigger, more expensive homes and businesses in the paths of every hurricane in history.
We create a society of more people jammed into less area, less robust, less resilient, as we depopulate and underserve relatively safer regions.