Winter drifted past at 10h03 ET today, thus necessitating bloviation, whereof I am as constant readers know a past and present master. In this Substack increment: Epstein's two words' worth of the Joycean; a defunct Podhoretz as revenant from 1953; portentously recurring patterns emergent in Yijing.

Mariah Carey has her seasonal thing, I have mine; here, in its sophomore Yule apparition, the latter. Listen/download gratis! NOTE: Per my totally made-up tradition, the track will only be available 13 Dec.-5 Jan. Download it now if you want it for your XPmas-in-July do. Happy excess and license!

As so often haps with an Andrew O'Hehir piece, this reads to me like my brain contents on the topic transcribed. Quite gratifying that, of all available to rail at, the Epstein implicado he chose to lambast is the one I may hate the most. Now: favor us with a pasquinade on Ken Starr's "Hugs". (HUGS)

Liminality, thy name is the ungrasped interim of now (must sound better in the original Tibetan). At this sliver riving All Saints' and All Souls' comes my cross-quarter Substack blurt: Fama's twin sackbuts wind lexicographical alarums, Elno is warned not to abet tyrannic tech, and Yijing is creepy.

18.x.2025: No Kings @ 33.90°N 83.38°W (+/-). L., staging at home pre-event; r., at the demo. Democratic action pneumatic in both theological and mechanical senses!

Sol breaching the wafty brane twixt Virgin and Scales, I call to witness respecting Libra, from Marston's Iacke Drums Entertainment (1601), the (possible) Shakespeare-avatar Planet: " ... like a paire of Ballance,/Thou wayest all sauing thy selfe." Out now & free to read: my Fall Equinox Substack.

Found while researching vaiśyas ("Gammas" in Huxley) for a projected essay on Adam Smith's view that they, de- not prescriptively understood and in any culture, should never dominate government. Contested planetwide: originalisms affecting whether fraternity or cruelty will be repressed groups' lot.

Reprobating capital punishment, I no more want the legion MAGA scelerati executed after the trials and guilty verdicts than I do anybody else. But, for this alone, I DO want them under the jail, and by "jail" I mean a Supermax, and by "under" I mean beneath the subbasement. And in solitary. Forever.

I've observed from an intimate vantage the corrosion that the Calle Ocho Revanchistas' acid efflux can work in even the most liberal (in a Plutarchan sense) nature, even one yoked to a luminous intellect. So this deracinated cipher could never have been anything but wet for some substitute Batista.

I'm sorry Charlie Kirk's dead to the extent that I wanted him, along with the other masters and movers of MAGA misrule, alive to face trial if the fascists are swept away. (Fat chance of that: of the 70% of the electorate not aligned with ethnonationalist-falangist memelords, over half don't vote.)

birth schoolwork* work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work work retirement* sickness death _____________________________ * Nature and duration subject to arbitrary class/gender/race factors.

Now our definitive Horst Wessel. MAGA's vexillosexual version of the Blutfahne ceremony manifests in Trump's occasional lubricious flag-grind, so check that off your Fascism Bingo card. Luckily, they so far trip over their own braindead decadence whenever they try to gin up a Reichstag fire. So far.

@jimmy-jim-james.bsky.social : #6 « — mon semblable, — mon frère! » AMIRITE? Cheers!

My Lúnasa '25 Substack increment goes on and on about capitalism, the conceit monachic. Private substance is A thing, likewise deploying it in capitalization of commercial enterprises; «il est interdit d'interdire» and all that. But framing that ensemble as THE thing? «Non.» (Also: fortunetelling!)

Walküretagsgrüße!

This is our most esteemed symbol of gratitude. It is being awarded to @kevinmcfoydunn.bsky.social for bravery, for smartness and sexy efforts to advance our silly cause ! The efforts of Kevin will be recorded in the archives forever or until they unplug Bluesky.app

Git 'im, Whoopi. While you're at it, give Hakeem Jeffries some wholly-warranted grief for being a snitty priss about Zohran Mamdani. Y'know, I'm just as sorry as can be that the neoliberalism-infected Dem leadership is so fucking butthurt about burgeoning social-democratic trends in the party. Not.

Come now and let us reason together: Ghislaine Maxwell was immured for helping scratch the ephebophilic itch of moneyed XYs (maybe XXs too?) whose names would have appeared on the putatively nonexistent Epstein list. If really guilty, she IS the list. Wonder how many towels are stored near her cell.

Like living inside my head's political compartment; also, illustrative of why I despair of writing the like, and at the length, because (after Horace’s formula), in striving towards the concatenatedly comprehensive, he did and (in prose more baroque (it always is)) I would become sluggishly prolix.

Le quatorze juillet. It seems this image documents an actual ephemeral statue (in papier-mâché?) put up outside les Invalides for la Fête de la Fraternité of 10 August 1793; the engraver, sans prénom (as far as I can tell), one Citoyen Villeneuve. Les aristos à la lanterne et à bas les Fédéralistes!

This photo: to deploy in helplessness a hypershopworn locution, I can't even. More unoriginality: it's the lead photo for a parody in The Onion, it's a frame from Idiocracy; but real. (Apologies! The nausea hinders more nuanced expression.) Surely the Void's karmic weighting impends. As you were.

Indulging a wan but long-simmering access of pique, I just unfollowed some dozen wights. Chiefly people I know +/- personally who never reciprocally followed me after I initiated contact -- not all under the rubric, but most. They won't miss me. [Emblem from Paradin, Devises heroïqves (Lyon, 1557).]

Your filthy luste you colour vnder a courtly colour of loue, iniuries abroad vnder the title of pollicies at home, and secrete malice creepeth vnder the name of publick iustice. [Diogenes upbraiding the populace of Athens in John Lyly's court play Campaspe (1583). Print by Pierre Brébiette, 1620s.]

Imbedded in this piece on ethnonationalist spasms elicited by Mamdani's rise: a video (with titanic actress+ Madhur Jaffrey!) for a tune of his issued under the nom du son Mr. Cardamom. Matter aside, its mere existence sets up a direct sociopolitical agon with the said risibly-yawping bigots. Good.

"Centrism", falsely opposing left/collectivism-right/individualism, coerces putative contrarieties towards a zero point at which they arrive denuded of all but their limpest beliefs. Most hate the jejune result. Normies: "That proves it's great!" This strain + Yijing = my solstice squib on Substack.

To up the ante on her we’re-all-gonna-die blurt by impertinently (in both senses) prescribing her (and my!) Lord and Savior to people who want to live not eternally but just, like, maybe to 80 indicates that she has no fucking idea as to the appropriate bases of policy in a secular republic. Asshat.

Aided by the white supremacist Trump, a minuscule pod of the inveterate-if-not-congenital down-punchers that are racist Afrikaners (is that redundant?) essay, in simulating being punched down on, to pull off some major ingannation, but fail to cozen my denomination's leadership. +Deus vult, ECUSA!+

Note to all currently huffing fumum candidum with me: Leo I ... somehow? ... turned Attila around at Rome's gates, and Leo XIII is deemed the engineer of modern Catholic theory and praxis on social justice; so what may be expected of Leo XIV, who recently schooled the noisome Vance de ordine amoris?

My Beltane Substack entry treats of fate both projectively general and realizedly personal, that first in my obligatory Yijing scrying, the latter by way of a threnody for one of my oldest friends, he of those the one with whom I went through the most. And while he drew breath, he never let me down.

What I read about the currently-buzzy Klein/Thompson screed -- the involvement of the reflexively meliorist Ezra coloring my take from the jump -- sparks sour dubiety in me, but this is delicious: "When did the capital class get taken over by degrowther protectionists seeking 19th century autarky?”

Money quote: "[L]ike a Marxist...caricature of American politics: Democrats and Republicans...getting fashionably sloshed at a private club owned by a billionaire who donates to both parties, literally on top of a neoliberal think founded by a disgraced Wall Street guy who got a Trump pardon."

Recipe (for me, anyway) for a more enjoyable daily review of my "Following" feed: Settings > Content and media > Following feed preferences > Show reposts [DISABLED] Much redundancy pruned away thereby. I love y’all, but life is short. Dervişlere selam olsun!

Seen at the İmamoğlu protests.

Woke to news that the orange gobbet of fæx is hissy-fitting, in reaction to adverse DOGE-adjacent court rulings, about shuttering SSA, whence comes (back to me, I scarce need say) ALL of my income as a senior whose whole life has been spent in the arts. Just needed to get the obvious off my chest.

At the inception of astronomical spring, a new Substack blurt from me. (And: am I alone in suspecting that this late invention of "meteorological" season boundaries is part of a concerted effort to blur awareness of global climate weirding?) Emblematic porcupines! Yijing in Aries! (As ever, gratis.)

Happy 15.iii.!

Mr. Bunch's book After the Ivory Tower Falls anatomizes the means wherewith pluto-/theo-/autocrats, since 1933 bent on vaporizing the social-democratic inevitable encoded in pluralist popular sovereignty, hamstrung humane letters in the US to create a lab-grown technopeasantry. Always worth reading.

"...[T]he establishment's first instinct is to punch down on not only just marginalized groups, but marginalized groups that it counts as its own base, or did at one point, and then wonder why those people don't want to vote for Democrats anymore."--Usamah Andrabi, comms director, Justice Democrats

Boy, am I ever. See my comment on the substrate post for some ... ideas, shall we say? -- on the topic.

Wow. Even I didn't expect to get to the "collapse of the modern economy and return to subsistence agriculture" phase of the Trump coup within seven weeks of the inauguration. bsky.app/profile/ronf...

Note to a certain tyrantaster: "The chief feact of kinges, is to reiecte no persone, but to make all persones profitable to the common weale." A plurality doesn't cut it, Don. (From Udall's marginalia in the 1548-9 Englishing of Erasmus's Apopthegmata, in the section devoted to Philip of Macedon.)

Our largely congruent political philosophies aside, Andrew O'Hehir and I map over each other as writers apt to shoehorn a brief discursus on James Harrington (author of the mid-17th-c. democracy treatise Oceana) and an idiom at the diction level of "'Cool story bro!'" into the same piece. Ta, Andy.

Reading the MAGAts' plaints here bids fair to evacuate all the cognitive oxygen from one's mental space. Unparseably stupid the naïve majority of them, their bathyal abysm of dimness beyond plumbing by anyone (bad actors excepted) equipped to cross the short gap from principal clause to consequent.

Though ill-used by establishment Dems, we center-left and leftward have faute de mieux stayed in the much-rent big tent since '80, our team the while losing (mostly) or winning but underdelivering on public goods and human rights. Fixating on the "bipartisan" chimæra has set up both modes of defeat.

Noisy arriviste, resentfully exuding terror of relegation to declassé status without ever having been in the class. Though in post as rather deputy Führer than foreign minister, he reminds me of no dritte Reich figure more than Ribbentrop. He'd buy a title too if we did that sort of thing here.

Money quote: " ...[Q]uantum Trumpness: Trump isn’t 'for' or 'against' anything, in the normal sense of those words. He has taken Emerson’s nostrum about consistency being 'the hobgoblin of little minds' to its acid-flashback extreme: no consistency, no mind to speak of, but one hell of a hobgoblin."

BlueSky noob enlarging his post count here -- also a bit of getting-to-know-you action. Bagatelles, some dating to '87: 60% pistes inédites -- a found-audio artefact, an improv, a rejected multitrack demo for scoring a reggae Shaxper; plus a rejected TV theme and some love for Henry Purcell.

My new Substack entry awaits your jaded perusal and censorious dismissal: a curtly gnomic personal note; then Sparks mapping the mechanism of MAGAt psychology a half-century avant la lettre; and, bringing up the rear, the cross-quarter Yijing coin-toss (sorry, Canon Legge). Always free to subscribe!

A most exceeding sour amuse-oreille to cut the saccharinity of this last winter-solstice season before the end of days. Listen/download gratis! ($£€¥ much appreciated, tho’— must stump up for the rights.) Happy fucking holidays! kevindunn.bandcamp.com/track/bless-...