Motley Kamuka

I'm reading the flipping novel, and it's brilliant and confusing. I look things up all the time, and then I go down the rabbit hole of the internet, and I'm not reading the novel any more. I'm reading it slowly too, so I'm going very slow. There's a lot of poetry, and it's endlessly referential and encyclopedic. I'm on page 232 right now and I started on 12/17/22. I take breaks from reading it.  Spoiler? I mean this is just disgusting, revolting, and I'm not sure if smacking into it without a warning is going to be the worst thing in the world. Then I read the getting pissed on, drinking it, and eating shit section on p. 234-236. Yikes.  When I read that the Buddha at cow shit, and his own shit as part of his mortification phase, which he doesn't see as the path, part of his trying everything out to find the way, I wasn't so grossed out, because I wasn't imagining into the the scene.  The next day, tomorrow, Dark Side of the Moon turns 50...

Philomena Cunk is the comedic persona of Diane Morgan . She gets historians to play along with her silly questions, and she does a lot of history and then pulls up and jokes about it. Flummoxing academics isn't so horrible and they're obviously game for it. Sometimes it's not to funny, but sometimes I laugh. I laughed when she asked if the romans invented bleached assholes. She also said we know a lot about the Romans because of the Wikipedians. I thought that was funny. She's a cheeky Bettany Hughes. There's a show on Netflix: Cunk on Earth . YouTube : Cunk On Britain The Empire Strikes Back Cunk on Shakespeare .  Apocalypse . 

  In Defense of Nothing By Peter Gizzi I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do. I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also. I guess this highway will have to do and the cars and the people in them on their way. The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us. It’s hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine hydrogen & oxygen binding, it’ll have to do. This sky with its macular clouds also and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

What you're seeing is people being over exposed. Everyone has a venue for communicating their inner experience: Twitter is micro blogging. Facebook is for high school friends. TikTok is for dancing routines. Insta is for glam photos of influencers. Discord is for gamer conservationists. Blogging is for grandiose narcissists. I thought that because I saw a headline that Jordan Peterson "Jordan Peterson rails against ‘tyranny’ of paper towel dispenser". That is from the Independent in England. I read all the newspapers in England when I lived there, I love reading newspapers when I travel. I think I got the Independent fairly often. The Sunday paper was a real prize. I love reading the Sunday newspaper with all it's sections. I haven't bought a newspaper in years, and now I expect everything for free, and newspapers are dying. Newspapers are mostly about people trying to get away with grifts and exploitation, and celebrating them on the right and judging them on th...

NY Post : Censorship of Roald Dahl is more akin to China’s cultural revolution than supposed democracies. Um no. That is capitalism. The publisher and family want to sell books, so they're making them less offensive, the way the Seus family did. This gets conservatives all rankled up, they forget how much they love capitalism and the right to choose in business, and go off on inaccurate nightmare fantasies. Somehow democracy has to take care of this inaccurate fear, but I'll be darned if I can't just imagine the right getting their facts a little more straight and being less ideological, and political in the bad sense that they try to score points with false ideas.  In one country your have an autocratic government who likes to focus on obedience. In another you have a democracy that is about not harming people.  The right's love of painting left wing people in America as communists is pretty putrid, off, wrong, etc. Russia and Chiana's execution of communism wasn...

What do you think is the main lesson of the Jan. 6 committee? My main takeaway is how close we came. I grew up believing that our democratic systems are durable. I didn’t fully appreciate sometimes how fragile democracy is. But for the courage of a handful of people who elevated principle over politics, against their own self-interest, we could have had a different outcome. We could have had the will of the people subverted. That’s frightening, and we can’t take it for granted.” NY Times

They deregulated rail travel and there's a huge chemical explosion in Ohio. NY Times : Over 1,000 Trains Derail Every Year in America. Let’s Bring That Number Down. BBC : Ohio town reflects on chemical train derailment aftermath USA : Ohio train derailment fact check: What's true and what's false? "Thousands of fish are believed to have died from chemicals spilled due to the train derailment, but officials have yet to find evidence that nonaquatic [sic] wildlife was harmed." The Columbus Dispatch : 'It is catastrophic.' East Palestine train derailment, chemical burn traumatizing. It’s part of a larger problem .

“with its missiles and death camps and atomic bombs that sealed humanity’s suicidal covenant with technology—was civilization’s Brennschluss, and we have been in free fall ever since.” - Wired I picked out that word to get into. With this and other articles that come out regularly, I got to thinking about how Shakespeare as the knighted playwright of England, has people shift the purposes and misuse quotes because he is so revered. Is Pynchon America's version. I mean the writing is so obscure it's hard to imagine that possible, but with the regularly produced articles, it seems possible. "Pynchon teases out a hefty head trip of plots and subplots, introduces hundreds of characters, and riffs on rocket science, cinema, Germanic runology, Pavlovian behaviorism, probability theory, witchcraft, futurism, zoot-suit couture, psychedelic chemistry, and the annihilation of the dodo. But there is, amid the novel’s encyclopedic remit, something like a story." "Some Marxi...

I have a biography of him, I want to read. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was born in Augsburg Germany and died in East Berlin. 4/14/23: The Decision by Brecht is playing on YouTube . This is a Birmingham Opera Company production, available until 14 October 2023. Brecht wrote the play in 1930. It consists of eight sections in prose and unrhymed, free verse, with six major songs. Some critics have seen the play as an apologia for totalitarianism and mass murder while others have pointed out that it is a play about the tactics and techniques of clandestine agitation. "Four agitators are dispatched from Soviet Russia to foster revolution in pre-communist China. En route they meet a young sympathiser who offers to be their guide, but when they return to Moscow, they confess to his killing. When is it right to kill?" "Living through a period of intolerance and censorship in the 1920s and 30s, Brecht and Eisler were both banned by the Nazis. Later, in their new adopted home on t...

Politics is disappointing. I feel like certain stories are meant get up the ire of one or the other's side. I find George Santos an offense. The more information I get about him, the more upset I am that he exists in the Congress. I don't want to pay attention or fully understand shady act that he's documented doing. I just want him one. It's disgusting that he isn't gone.  I read the conservative side of Reddit too, and they're upset about the communications director getting snookered at times, about how they know Trump had 3 balloons fly across America during his presidency. She can't really say things, and it's a difficult job, not sure why she's not sputtering more. I don't experience that as a win for Conservatives, and that their ire should be up, but they believe the 3 balloon story is false, and she's bumbling on the falseness of it. I don't know maybe it was a wrong fact check, who could even know it's hard to know who to tru...

I read political stuff to look for names for potential Democratic presidential candidates not on my last list . Name and why I don't think they can advance through the primaries.  Mark Kelly  (58) I read one person thinks he doesn't want to run, but I think he's a strong candidate. Sherrod Brown  (70) Too old, sorry, we're trying to go younger. Gretchen Whitmer  (51) Probably too liberal, whips up conservatives. I think the first woman president will be Republican.  J. B. Pritzker (58) He looks like a gargoyle. People are superficial.  Andy Beshear (45) Weak on gun control.

I wonder at the current polarity in politics. It's not about government overreach, more or less, like when I was growing up. Reagan was an elderly man who saw the government explode. He thought maybe it was too much, not like when he was growing up. Smaller or bigger. The culture wars were not as pronounced, though I guess they were beginning in the rhetoric.  Now DeSantis is trying to be a thought police in colleges, schools and libraries, but to his mind he's just trying to be free of the liberal ideology. The culture war has advanced past the smaller or larger government to how and what the government does.  Both sides seem like flaming hypocrites to the other side. Conservatives think they're ridding the government of a anti-semite, when what they're doing is enforcing their politics. Progressive Jewish people don't feel protected from anti-semitism. But Ilhan Omar is pro-Palestine, and like so much in politics either you're a hawk or a panda. Either you hat...