1. Donald J. Trump thinks you are a moron. If you voted for him the first time, there's a good chance you're susceptible to the false comfort that comes from being deliberately uninformed.

2. If you voted for him a second time, you can nibble at the restaurant four-pack while scribbling on the menu, wondering if the yellow crayon tastes like pee (it does), but cannot be trusted with the Mega Box with the sharpener on the side.

3. If you not only voted for him twice, but 10 months in STILL support him, there is literally not a single problem in America to which your opinion is relevant.

4. You, like a rabid possum, are a danger to the rest of the herd, and should be abandoned in the woods to forage for garbage on your Personal Libertarian Time.

5. If you have recently been denied coverage, lost health care, are inclined to bitch about the cost of your premiums, or need a shot of insulin that does not require hitting Red 17 at the Circus Circus to pay for, fuck off.

6. Soybean farmer? Fuck off.

7. Tariffs crushing your small business? Fuck off.

8. Gay Conversion Therapy Graduate? Fuck off.

10. Lost a fortune on Don Jr. Meme Coin? Fuck off.

11. Rust Belt Manufacturing Job Casualty? Fuck off.

12. Joined the military but didn't plan on parachuting into Caracas? Fuck off.

13. Have no ethical qualms about grabbing random people off the street because at least you have a birth certificate? Fuck off.

14. Spent 5 years chanting at Q rallies about Worldwide Pedophile Rings but are starting to suspect your president/savior is at the very center of it? Fuck off.

15. Don't want to finance a gold-plated ballroom when you can't even afford that root canal? Fuck off.

16. Evangelical mystified why Donald J. Trump couldn't name a single book of the bible, and is never seen exiting church services on Sunday morning with his immigrant wife/beard? Fuck off.

17. Hate your $9 an hour job delivering paperclips in huge boxes to lazy turds for Jeff Bezos? Fuck off.

18. There are two things and two things only that Donald J. Trump has been correct about since 1986:

19. One is that the USFL was going to fail, since he single-handedly caused its failure, and even then was too arrogant to pull his money out in time.
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20. The other is that billions could be made and political careers founded on the assumption that there is no one in America more stupid than those who are certain of their intelligence.

Hey, I hope y'all will take a moment to read this interview I conducted over the last month with someone who, after a lifetime of devotion, decided to leave the Mormon Church. I think it's honest, genuine, and agenda-free. The only intention setting out was to provoke consideration, which I think both of us very much hope it will.
After the Charlie Kirk shooting, and the subsequent debate over the acceptable ways to process violence, politics, religion, partisanship, free speech, gun control, satire, apostasy, and propaganda, real conversations between divergently-viewed people are at premium market value, now more than ever.
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Thanks to the folks over at Everything Is Fine, the best Substack on Substack, for supporting the effort.

I recently lost two friends. But since this is not 1944, you should take that to mean they dropped me on Facebook. Despite regularly expressing my political views online, I go to great lengths to avoid beef in daily life. Which is probably less a matter of Zen equanimity than how overly distracting I find it to be on bad terms with good (or even bad) people. 
A month ago, I wrote about the Michigan Mormon Church shooting that immediately followed Charlie Kirk’s Utah shooting. Kirk’s murder was committed by a member of the church, while the Michigan attack was against a church; each necessitated discussing certain LDS (Latter Day Saint) beliefs.
The friends were Mormon women who felt I was mocking their faith. They were correct that the tone was not fully respectful, but on the whole I feel if a fairly sober and accurate recitation of some of the more implausible aspects of Mormon dogma is inherently a form of ridicule, it’s the responsibility of the church to address.

A few days later, my friend Diana texted to lend her support. She encouraged me to keep speaking truth to power, as well as to Joseph Smith. I particularly appreciated that sentiment since the last we’d last spoken, she’d been a devout Mormon. When I expressed my surprise, Diana recalled a breakfast we’d had a decade ago, when over waffles she casually referenced her faith, and I apparently replied, “Oh, so you’re in a cult?”
Yeah, I’m not proud of it either. An easy flippancy has served me well at cocktail parties and on first dates over the years, but has more often been the source of next-morning regret over a lack of circumspection. Even so, Diana said she thought about my comment for weeks. Apparently, no one had ever described Mormonism in such a way to her (face) before. Probably because she’d spent most of her life surrounded by Mormons. But that small catalyst (in concert with far more important real life v. doctrine issues) ended up compelling her to examine her faith for the first time — not for what she’d been told it was, but for what it might actually be.
And so we had this conversation:
Sean Beaudoin: You left the church.
Diana Easton (not her real name – she remains wary of retribution): Ha! It sounds so simple when you say it like that. But yes, after 44 years of living it devoutly, I left my faith.
Have you adopted a new one since?
No, I haven’t and I don’t know if I ever will. It’s interesting because I was sold on the LDS religion, believed it with all my soul for so long that when I came to the realization that a lot of what I was taught wasn’t true, it really broke my heart. It’s hard for me to want to invest that much belief and trust in another institution.
It’s impossible not to read that as pulling the plug on a long-term and possibly abusive romance.
You’re not completely wrong with that analogy. There are times when I look back at aspects of my life with fond affection and times when I look back and realize how little control I had over my own fate. How every little step I took was influenced by my religion. What about you? What’s your backstory on religion? Or your current story for that matter?
French Catholic, but basically raised by Bertrand Russell. I guess I see spirituality as a celebration of the math-defying odds of living in an airless vacuum.
Life on earth definitely feels very odd-defying.
I have to assume if there’s a creator so powerful it can summon an infinite universe from nothing (there is no such thing as nothing), humans are as incapable of comprehending such a deity as a badger is of having a nuanced take on Cubism. Who are we to give a name to this god, let alone presume its intents or desires? We barely understand our own conception of physics, and in a few decades it will be mostly wrong.
Yes, as I age, I have come to accept how little I know about everything, really.
The more I practice saxophone, the worse I get. It’s the first true sign of maturity.
You seem drawn by a desire to understand the Mormon church, or at least understand the people in it.
I do find it endlessly fascinating. To me, theology is a rudimentary form of self-comfort, really no different than a Sunday quart of Jack Daniels, or ordering candy from Amazon instead of walking to the store to get it yourself. Jeff Bezos, incidentally, fits nicely into the devil paradigm. I see the concept of “faith” as anti-intellectual, a strangling of evidence that masquerades as philosophy. In the end, true philosophy, if defined as a sincere attempt to understand a common existence, is the only real thing of value that we have.
Do you mean any faith, or organized religion? Or both?
Over two millennia a series of powerful & persuasive men have attempted to convince less-powerful & persuasive men that they alone could interpret the Will of The Creator. It’s mere coincidence that creators on the whole tended to advise that more money, power, and sex be showered upon their interpreters.
Isn’t it ironic that the way to be saved is very often lining some man’s pockets and offering deference to all his opinions?
Instead of irony, I’d say pathological criminality. And by the way, where are all our female religious grifters? Madame Blavatsky? Ayn Rand? Mary Baker Eddy?
We default to using the word ‘man’ when referring to good accomplishments: ‘doctor’, ‘scientist’, ‘inventor’. Let’s keep that same energy going for ‘pathological criminal’.
Fair enough. So what did LDS offer you while you still believed?
Hope and community. The arrogant idea that I knew what was going to happen after I died and that in the meantime God was going to take care of me while I lived. These ideas helped calm me in crisis and uncertainty.
I’m curious if you thought that same hope and comfort applied to all the world’s people. Like, did non-Mormons also have access to the afterlife, or were they screwed from jump?
We were taught that God’s spirit could reside with everyone, but that God’s comforter (the Holy Ghost) could only reside with those in the church, who had been baptized and given this gift. And therefore, it was our mission to bring everyone into the church. Yes, all of them. It sounds so illogical now, but I was taught to believe in miracles.
Did any of the more extravagant aspects of LDS doctrine ever bother you late at night?
I honestly didn’t think of anything as “extravagant”. Polygamy? A thing of the past and necessary, at the time, for the church’s growth. Temple rituals? Those are spoken of in scripture. Golden plates? Yes! The ultimate miracle for God to preserve his words. It was all very normal for me. I’d been hearing this doctrine since birth. And most of the more problematic parts of the history of the church aren’t taught to its members. We are taught not to look outside of the church for information about the church. In that way (in many ways, really) we are very insular. What are some of the more extravagant things you’ve heard about Mormons? They all sound so normal to me so it’s hard to pick out which ones make people raise their eyebrows the most.
Then let’s concentrate on one example: Anyone could (and should) legitimately pick apart Christianity for its endless contradictions, hypocrisies, cruelties, and self-serving dictates. But one defense is that its foundational dogma came from illiterate peasants in the Sinai Desert two-thousand years ago. So it seems implausible that when Joseph Smith was visited by the Angel Moroni in a boarding house in Palmyra, New York in 1823, God was still peddling the same goods.
Are you saying that it should’ve been vastly different? Because it got changed so much over the years? And if God was going to reveal the truth all over again, it should have been in its original form?
I’m saying even a lovingly withholding God should have delivered wisdom that accurately reflected the point his creations had evolved to. By 1823 we’d been through the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment and endless wars and royal ascensions, all the great thinkers, literature and art and music and science, everything that was experienced by Western humanity since Jesus Christ, but God chose to reveal to Smith the same vague dictates of two thousand years earlier, with a few self-serving tweaks.
Oh, so the exact opposite of what I said. Ha! Yes, I can see your point.
Like, why no gospels about Germ Theory? Or the Deuteronomy of Electromagnetism? Even a few pages of Methuselah ranting about Darwin and the evils of Natural Selection?
It’s hard to explain indoctrination to someone who grew up being taught to think critically. We were taught that God and his gospel is unchanging. That man may change and get more worldly, but God never changes. And we were taught not to question. This is the truth. This is how it happened. You believe this. And when you are literally taught it from the cradle it’s hard to deprogram yourself.
I can absolutely see what having experienced life within such a contained system would do to your critical thinking. It’s happened to me at times also, although I think as cultural dogma instead of faith-based. I look back at my younger self and often marvel at what I accepted as totally reasonable and logical behavior.
And the thing is, when everyone around you, people you like and respect, people who are educated and successful, believe it, who are you to question?
You said earlier, “We are taught not to look outside of the church for information about the church,” which to me is the definition of a cult. So…is the Mormon Church a cult?
I mean, my entire last couple answers make it hard to argue that it’s not. I never thought it was when I was in it. But now that I’m out I can see how it falls under the cult umbrella. The most prominent reason, in my opinion, is because of how controlling it is. Everything from what you wear, to what you watch, to what you consume, to what you think, is controlled by the religion.
It’s exhilarating to hear you express that with such self-awareness.
I’ve gotten a lot more self-aware in the last five years. I have a long way to go.
Now that you’re out, do you want a refund for all the tithing, given that LDS is the single largest private landowner in America, and its wealth fund, Ensign Peak, controls three-hundred-billion in assets?
My initial response to this question is to laugh, which is quickly transitioning into wanting to cry. I had no idea how much wealth the church had amassed when I was in. We are taught at least monthly how important it is to pay tithing obediently. How tithing is tied to blessings. I was literally afraid when I left the church that my blessings were going to dry up because I no longer paid tithing. Then when I learned about how wealthy the church is, I became angry that they require tithing from its membership, but I was especially angry that they required it from the poor. Now, yes, I’d love my money back, but I’d rather the church just use more than a tiny bit of its wealth to do good in the world. They could do so much good in the world.
Blessings for money strikes me as so obviously and deeply anti-spiritual, if not a flat grift, that it nullifies any positive aspects of the religion. But, as you say, even if tithing is 100% for the benefit of the supporters of the church and the grace of God, why is there a single homeless or hungry person in Utah? Why does Utah not boast the best schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, and infrastructure in the country? I mean, 300 billion is a very water-into-wine number.
The Mormon church could end world hunger. It doesn’t. It is a corporation and it runs like one.
All religions are untaxed, unregulated international business concerns with massive secret holdings controlled by Devil-tempted original sinners. What could go wrong?
Right?!
On more important footing, I believe I had the single worst plate of Mexican food of my entire life one afternoon in Salt Lake City. Can the Mormon church be held responsible for this?
From one Californian to another, you should know exactly where to get your Mexican food from and where not to. That one’s on you.
Explain Kolob to me.
Kolob? I wouldn’t really consider that a tenant of the Mormon faith. Maybe for the deep divers of the religion. From what I understand, it’s the star closest to where God resides? That is honestly all I know about it. Oh, plus it’s in a song we sometimes sang in our meetings. ‘If you could hie to Kolob’. We didn’t really spend much (if any) time talking about the concept of Kolob.
My understanding is that during The End Times/Rapture, God will pluck the Earth from the Milky Way galaxy and move it to the Metagalactic Center to place beside Kolob and Olibish, two planets near God’s throne. I also find it interesting that Kolob is said to have its own time system, and that one year on Kolob = 1000 years on Earth. I would be interested to know how and with what tools this time discrepancy was measured.
Huh. I have heard none of that. You know more about Kolob than I do, apparently.
And why do gods require the symbolic thrones of antiquity? What’s wrong with a nice suede Barcalounger?
That sounds like a more comfortable eternity to me. Can I join your afterlife?
Also, I’m pretty sure Donny & Marie’s classic album “Goin’ Coconuts” was released on Kolob Records, which sounds like a joke, but is not. Speaking of which, I can’t take any religion seriously that does not have good worship music. Everything from Santeria to Islam has beautiful instrumental and vocal composition as part of its tradition. Catholics have Gregorian Chants and even Evangelical Christians have Stryper, let alone all the fantastic Southern Gospel and Sacred Steel and Ray Charles. If Mormons don’t have boogie to offer, what do they have?
Mormons have the most boring, slow, depressing music ever. My husband and I used to look at each other during hymns and say, “If people were to walk into church right now, they’d think this was a funeral procession.” We literally said that on more than one occasion. Seriously, Mormons need a live band. It would help.
As I understand it, Mormons believe Jesus came to America after the whole Pontius Pilate thing was settled. How exactly did he get to Missouri from Nazareth?
Post-resurrected Jesus could do a lot of things that pre-resurrected Jesus couldn’t, I assume. He didn’t have as many limitations. He appeared to the Nephites in the Americas in his celestial state about a year after he was resurrected, descending from heaven. As far as I remember, Mormons don’t believe he visited the Americas straight from the Sinai Desert.
That’s super-interesting. Jesus, despite being resurrected in human form, is no longer human? I was once told by a devout co-worker that the Apostles built boats and sailed to America from Sinai. As it would be another 1,700 years before the invention of the chronometer and accurate determination of longitude, an Atlantic crossing seems unlikely. What does Mormon literature say about how the native populations greeted/interacted with Jesus upon his arrival?
Resurrected Jesus is a god.
A god, or THE god?
He is definitely not human. He is not limited by human restrictions. Your friend talking about the boats that were sailed over, that was pre-Jesus. He was either talking about the brother of Jared who built submarine style boats or Lehi and his family who built a big ship and sailed over. (Both of these are prophets in the Book of Mormon) Jesus didn’t come by boat. And the native population, according to the Book of Mormon, saw the nail prints in his hands and feet and worshiped him as the Savior they had been taught would come. He taught them and blessed them.
It would require a completely separate conversation, but I feel like I need to know pretty much every last detail about these submarine-style boats. In the meantime, did anyone ever talk about the less savory sides of Joseph Smith?
People sometimes talked about how other people talked about the less savory sides of Joseph Smith. The anti-Mormons. But within the church, no, he was a saint, a hero, “the person who, next to Jesus, did more for the salvation of humankind than any other person to walk the earth.” Not sure that’s an exact quote but that is definitely what we were taught. If there were whisperings outside the church about Joseph Smith being a bad person it was because the world loves to persecute the righteous. I’m curious how other people learned about Joseph Smith. He was just always a part of my knowledge bank.
Do you think there is any significant difference in the dogma/origin stories/metaphysical aspects of LDS and Scientology, or Christianity, or Islam?
To be real with you, I know very little about Scientology or Islam. I wish I did. I wish I had studied more than just my own religion growing up, but the LDS religion requires a lot from its members and it really is all-consuming. We are taught about our own religion over and over again. Never about outside religions. I’d love to hear some of the similarities you’ve found. Now, Christianity, that we consider ourselves a part of.
I’m curious why Mormons desire to be considered part of Christianity when their conception of Jesus is rejected by the Christian church. Is it an offshoot? A sect? In Islam, for instance, Shia and Sunni Muslims have been killing each other for a thousand years over a differing of opinion on who succeeded Mohammad. It would seem there was little room under the Christian umbrella for Jesus visiting America.
Because Mormons believe in the biblical Jesus. They believe in Christ and study and teach the bible. They believe that he was born of Mary and preached the gospel and was crucified and resurrected for our sins. But they also believe that after he was resurrected, he visited the whole earth, all God’s children. Not just one part. I personally think being a Christian is believing in Jesus Christ. So I think Mormonism fits under that definition.
Are there any ways in which your life is worse without LDS?
Very few. Maybe the strain it has put on some relationships with family members who are still in the church. I really do love my family so much and the decision to leave was never meant to hurt any of them. But I know that it does hurt them. I remember being where they are and watching people leave.
I’m very impressed by this commitment to follow your ethics and intellect in the face of what you’ve had to sacrifice in terms of friends and family. It makes me want to give you a secular hug and buy you coffee and an expensive pastry.
I will take your secular hug but I will reject your coffee. It is an acquired taste and after not drinking it for 44 years, I have not yet acquired that taste. I do love a good chai though.
That co-worker I mentioned earlier refused to drink coffee, but downed about a dozen cans of Mountain Dew per shift. He shrugged off my suggestion that the delivery system for the offending caffeine seemed beside the point. I guess that’s the perfect example of when the tenets of a belief system are available a la carte in terms of what is convenient to you personally, it’s all nonsense.
Completely. Even when I was in the church, I thought the very specific items included in the consumption guidelines (Word of Wisdom) and everything that was left out was nonsensical.
Let’s talk the geography paradox: there’s absolutely no chance you would have been Mormon if you happened to have been born in 1979 Syria. Doesn’t that make every other aspect of the religion arbitrary?
I believe that is absolutely true now. Back when I was in the church I thought I was so lucky to have been born into the one true religion on earth. But how egocentric was that?
You said you were taught that Joseph Smith “did more for the salvation of humankind than any other person to walk the earth.” I’m curious how that fits with Mormonism generally being restricted to Utah, and its missionary outposts. For instance, 1.5 billion Chinese seem just fine without Joseph Smith’s input.
Well, we were taught that it would slowly fill the earth until everyone had heard about it. That’s why they continue to send thousands and thousands of missionaries out every year to all sorts of faraway places to preach. But I agree with you, there are not enough Mormons and far too many non-Mormons to ever make a real dent.
Did a geographical God create the universe? If so, was it an easily distracted Mormon god who just happened to have a less omnipotent interest in Buenos Aires than Provo?
Have you even been to Provo?! No, but seriously, I have no idea who, if anyone, created the universe. I was so convinced for the majority of my life that I knew exactly how everything worked and how it went down. But I don’t. And it’s quite freeing to admit that. I don’t know and I don’t have to.
“I have no idea” is a refreshing comment in any discussion of religion. Or, really, on any topic at all in 2025 America.
I’ve definitely been using it more and more as I get older, even outside religion.
Along that line, what happens when we die?
I think this is the question that oftentimes terrifies people into staying in the church. Or seeking out religion to begin with. Because religion has the answer to this scary question. It’s harder to say, I don’t know what will happen after I take my last breath. It’s nice to have answers. It’s comforting. Maybe it gives people purpose or motivates them to do good. Maybe it just staves off fear or anxiety. But personally, I could no longer justify the harm it was causing me and my family. So what happens after we die? I can only hope for peace, in some form or another.
Beautifully said. Let’s finish by talking briefly about what you think of Mormonism’s political arm.
I was always taught that the church didn’t involve itself with politics. We were neutral. How laughable is that? You can take one look at Utah politics to know that’s not true. And prop 8 in California? Spearheaded by the Mormon church. Yeah, they are definitely neck-deep in it. I think it’s hypocrisy at its finest. I think they shouldn’t be tax exempt. I think they shouldn’t have a say in government. But … there are so many things I’m frustrated with in the political arena right now that this could be an entire interview by itself.
I feel like I should make it clear that I am neither atheist nor agnostic. Atheism to me contains a degree of certainty that is central to what I find so problematic in all regions, and I think Agnosticism is a coward’s way out. I aspire to be a Humanist, by which I mean someone who thinks we are all connected on the atomic level, the acknowledgement of which is in itself a pure spirituality, and also that it’s possible to embody a kind, ethical, and humane manner in every facet of existence without the consideration of a reward system in the afterlife.
I love that. That’s a beautiful way to live. I have taken to living this life as if it’s the only one I have. I used to live for the next life. Trying to earn my way into the best afterlife by doing everything that was required of me in this one. I have let that go and with that release have found a joy in the here and now. My relationships feel more meaningful and my care for others more genuine. My curiosity about the world and the people in it more sincere. Sometimes I’m sad that it took me so long to climb my way to the surface of my own life. But most days I’m glad it didn’t take me longer and I look forward to living.
Last thing: what would Mormon Diana have thought of my comments about LDS in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting? Do you think (I stand by my words) that I was being unfair or inappropriate? And what does non-Mormon Diana think of the same?
Mormon me would’ve been preoccupied with the few minor things you got wrong about the faith. I would’ve figured that because you got those things wrong you really didn’t know what you were talking about and you were being a bit glib and insensitive. Non-Mormon me, while very disturbed by the events, found your criticisms of the church fair and accurate in tone and message. I think the church should be criticized for those things and that the members should be taught the actual history and problematic beginnings of the church along with the things it continues to do that cause harm.
I am unbelievably pleased that you have made this change in your life! I actually found you to be pretty loveable as a full-time Mormon, but this version has the added benefit of a sense of relief that my ideas, ridiculous or otherwise, do not threaten yours simply by existing.
Thanks, Sean! I’ve always enjoyed talking with you and only ever felt threatened because you’re so damn smart. Never that we thought differently. But I do know what you mean. When one idea cancels out another, it’s hard to have honest, open conversations. Especially when one person (*ahem* me) believed she knew the answers to all of life’s mysteries. I’m glad to be on the other side of that assurance. It’s made me vastly more open-minded. Thanks for the kindness you’ve always shown me on both sides.
SB + DE: PEACE!

1. I’ve been reading about Quantum Mechanics and various conceptions of both the current state and (possible) creation of the universe for years. Mainly because it’s fascinating. And also that I often don’t understand a lot of what I read, until I’ve read it from many different sources and in multiple voices, and the concepts start to accrete like rust on the surface of my brain, and even then it’s a struggle. Which the stubborn part of me mostly likes.

2. Strangely, sometimes I almost GLIMPSE it. It’s usually fleeting, and if I try to put it into words, it’s gone. But for a second something is there, a highly pleasurable sensation, which turns to a combination of hope and frustration as the bonds between the molecules of comprehension once again fall away.

3. I’ve come to believe we are probably not evolutionarily equipped to understand the universe, or the math, or the dimensions we have grafted upon it to provide temporary structure/emotional shelter. It’s just not how our brains were meant to function. What we can’t understand is that maybe we aren’t supposed to understand. If we were capable of grasping the inter-dimensionality of time and space, for instance, maybe we wouldn’t be able to exist in the presumptive linear narrative and three dimensions in which we do. Not-understanding may actually be a matter of survival. Knowing could either drive us mad, or perhaps just pull the string of perceptual cohesion we rely upon, and unknot reality.

4. A quick way to come to terms with the pointlessness of contemporary politics, relationship woes, traffic lane fury, greed, bitcoin, ambition, accrual of objects, Nick Fuentes, the emptiness of theological creationism, the fraction of space and the blink of time we occupy, is to start reading about just the distance from the Milky Way to the next closest galaxy (Andromeda - and after that the much loved Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy). In that smallest of relative steps alone lies infinity. There are untold trillions of steps beyond that first step. In those unknowable trillions lies the brute, rote nothing of oppressive incomprehension.

5. Here’s a few things I’ve come to believe through study which would take forever to explain, so I will just state them. They can easily be looked further into. None of them are based in a subjective belief system to the degree that believing them benefits me personally in any way. They’re not conspiratorial or fantabulist or wishful or theological. In the end, they simply seem the most logical and plausible with the caveat that they are just as likely to be as wrong as all the deeply wrong things that we as animals accept as truths to make living for somewhere less than ten decades in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe emotionally manageable.

6. We are made of light. There is absolutely nothing solid in the universe. No one has ever actually touched anything. On the most micro level, electrons repel. Your neurons read sex as physical contact, but it’s the repelling force as the electrons near one another that feed the sensation to your brain. And 94% of the universe is made of nothing, at least to the extent that if you added up all the debris and stars and meteors and galaxies and black holes and nebulae and comets and cosmonauts frozen in forever orbits, and compressed them into a ball, it would be a mere 6% of nothing. We are actually made of quanta (groupings) of light. It’s possible that the universe is in fact a light projection with what we consider to be the past a Singularity, and the future an Event Horizon, which is really like a screen upon which consciousness is projected, and everything we imagine we are is a holograph. Which is not at all the same thing as Elon Musk’s Simulation Theory, which, much like Elon Musk, can only be proven by being unplugged.

7. Observation is what gives everything, from a molecule to a soaring vulture, reality. It is proven that the act of observation changes molecules, and even lends them mass. Casablanca still exists if you are not watching Casablanca, but if it is not being watched, Casablanca is either potential or memory. Our species, all carbon lifeforms, our combined observation of each other and everything around us, is what we take to be consciousness. There is nothing individual. We are symbiotic. We are one cohesive flesh potentiality. We are temporary, but we are also the exact same atoms that existed 13.8 billion years ago. We are in a constant flux of re-cohesion that gives us the illusion of narrative.

8. The universe is simultaneous. Past and future are a light cone pinched at the center that is not alterable, only observable. We are moving observers (our solar system is flying through space at 450,000 mph) which means that being still is an illusion and mapping set coordinates is false, if comforting, information. Our movement/directionality is dependent on our combined observation. Since time is static, and light is atomic cohesion giving the illusion of substance, gravity must be a dimensional force that bends both space and time.

9. Which means gravity created the universe. It did so because the universe is Light Potentiality, and gravity is the constant. Gravity is a law that allows for spontaneousness, for instance the perception of physics. Gravity is very likely a deity, although without all the holidays and golden crowns and velvet trappings. We are fundamental particles, the behavior of which is determined by one fundamental law, that the positivity of mass and negativity of gravitation cancel one another out, Which is another way of saying the vacuum and the potential, or the quantum fluctuation and the nothingness, or the male and the female, or the yin and yang, or the dark and the light.

10. Humans are both brilliant and unforgivably stupid because we all have set and contained groupings of information based on the entirety of our observances in any given second in which consciousness is possible. Basically, we all get 32 chess pieces on a board with 64 squares that comprise the evolutionary capability of comprehension in totality. Some people are better at pattern recognition and spatial awareness than others, but all intelligence and stupidity is interdependent. It is entirely possible that a profound appreciation of the pretty carved horse is a better usage of our incredibly brief existence than a brilliant strategic attack.

11. I am adding to this set of assertions, mainly culled from the writings of others and then grown like a mushroom from a moose patty in the quietly swaying forest of my brain over the years, that part of light/energy that we are comprised of is vibration. Our light CRACKLES. And a big part of that vibration is the freedom we have to order and re-order it. Which is why virtually everyone on the planet is obsessed with everything from rudimentary percussion to complex composition of music. Vibration is life! Music is sustenance. I personally believe music is pre-lingual. We learned to speak by playing snare drums to, and often at, one another. We twanged brontosaurus tendon in Db at our Fire Bois and Cave Grrls to woo them from the very first. Love is a harmonic communion, a melodic unison, a shared vibration.
​
12. Descartes was wrong, or to be fair to the man, Cogito Ergo Sum is widely misunderstood. The phrase should be, “I vibrate, therefore you are.”

“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff told The New York Times.

What Salesforce CEO Benioff, who looks like the player/coach of the 1972 Detroit Red Wings didn't tell the NYT, is that his Dreamforce 2025 Convention (buy nothing from them, ever) is next week, and so really, it's not so much about public safety, or the resurrection of San Francisco from the same bombed-out war-ravaged status as Portland/Dresden that he's selflessly insisting The Grifter address, it's 'cuz he doesn't want any potential buyers of worthless software mugged, panhandled, sold fentanyl, or dragged down to a drag show at Ginger's Trois (246 Kearney St.).

But what about three days later, when Dreamforce 2025 ends, and all the hungover/philandered attendees flock back to the airport, and the country's dreams dissipate with them?

"Whatever," Benioff said, doing a shot of Fetal Stem Cells & Red Bull brought to him by his lovely Vietnamese assistant, "We make it til Tuesday with no bad pub, the freaks can take over again with my blessing."

"Shouldn't a billionaire in a capitalist country whose very infrastructure allows him to accrue and then hoard such wealth, without being attacked by mobs of serfs with machetes, donate, say, 500 million of his own lucre to SF to hire more police, instead of siphoning off federal funds?" asked a slightly brown reporter, who was immediately maced, clubbed, and then tossed into an unmarked van.

When asked what should happen to the National Guard, after it had been illegally called out to the tune of sixteen million dollars per day, meanwhile trampling all over Posse Comitatus laws restricting the use of the US military against American citizens, the lawsuit and civil cases against which are even now being fought over in district courts in LA, DC, and Portland, simply to protect a bloated and unnecessary tech conference since virtually anything can be done over Zoom, Benioff lit a cigar with flaming bitcoin and said, "Those Guard losers can pick up trash, like usual. Hey, as long as the stock price bumps they can wing protestors in the legs with AR's like we did back in the old days!"
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As he stepped into his 8-door Tesla limo, Benioff was asked what the sales numbers of Salesforce might be when the country fully slides into Authoritarian Fascism, which at least in part is caused by a completely partisan militarization of certain cities as a precursor to a coming Martial Law, the fun-loving CEO with the best haircut since Vincent Price's pastry-challenged nephew Lenny Price tried out for the part of Van Helsing in "The Vampire Lestat", Benioff said, "People seem to forget that Mussolini was good for business. I mean, sure, he had some lousy ideas, but the pasta markets he opened in Ethiopia alone were worth a fortune!"

1. Well, Zuckerbook says I posted this 13 years ago today. What's so striking is, despite my inherent personal skepticism, I remember in a very raw and sadly painful way the degree to which I was convinced that, for the first time in my life, America was moving in a positive direction.

2. Which is to say, toward reason and stability and ethics and intellect and cultural openness and, yes, Hope with a capital H. If you had told me then, as I held my 7 year old daughter in my lap, that in 2025 we would be living in a genuinely Fascist Autocracy, I would have told you that you were a lunatic.

3. If only because there was no chance that America could simply roll over like a dying bison, sigh with regret, and allow the flies to descend.

4. And yet, that is precisely what has happened. The Lord Of Flies, throughout my childhood an openly ridiculed buffoon who helmed one business disaster after another, named Donald J. Trump, is, as I type this and to my burning fissile amazement, still president every day I wake.
5. People are being dragged out of their beds and zip-tied. ICE is on course to soon be larger than the US Marines. Colleges, Museums, and National Parks have been forcibly edited to suit a particularly false narrative. Foreign policy is being deliberately altered to suit Russian expansionism and weaken democracy in Europe. Anti-science initiatives are pushed daily, with the zombie corpse of John F. Kennedy's nephew at the helm. Congress has been reduced to a collection of powerless lab monkeys and sycophants. Giddily racist, white nationalist, and xenophobic utterances are celebrated daily. The Supreme Court is merely an evangelist arm of the Heritage Foundation, the same people who wrote, denied, and then implemented Project 2025.

6. Perhaps most distressingly, 150 million Americans blithely support these events, mouthing banalities about freedoms and speech and patriotism and America As An Ideal, while they drool all over themselves attempting to find ways to justify the artifice.

7. America is no longer a place, it is a concept. And that concept is a dark, masturbatory fantasy.

8. Unreasoning anger is the lifeblood of the movement toward authoritarianism, and anger, in the end, is just fear in a leather jacket.

9. There was a time, back in the days of Freewheelin' Barry Obama, when people simply held differing political views and even dangerously strident positions, which had to be accommodated as part of the pact we've made with ourselves, as the world's best, if not only, truly functional Social Democracy, in which every citizen has a right to their opinion.

10. That time has passed. No one has the right to support Fascism, no matter what shade of lipstick it wears. Abundant irony, top-shelf coffee, and clever sentences are no longer enough of a response. Unfortunately, the only way to fight Fascism is by force, if not outright violence. Is there still time for judicial, legislative, and force of Popular Will to somehow eke out a victory from beneath the jackloafers of Stephen Miller and what's left of the manipulated brain of Donald J. Trump?

11. I guess we're going to find out.

12. If you, today, this morning, still support Donald J. Trump because you think it'll help your stock portfolio, or a Woke Mob will force you to stop saying "retard" in public, or you have yet to admit to yourself that your son actually looks pretty fantastic in a lilac dress, you are a flat TRAITOR to any ideal you claim to possess.

13. It's real close to Man The Barricades time. Can't believe I believe that either, or what form it would actually take, but it's also very likely that The Remaining Sane Citizens Of America should have been out in the streets six months ago, and refused to relent until the unforgivable knee-bending to the forces of fatuousness, cretinism, imbecility, greed, dissimulation, propaganda, prevarications, myths, figments, and terminological inexactitude were cleansed away with the powerful antiseptic that brought about The Age Of Reason.
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14. Five-hundred years ago, true courage, fledgling science, unabashed secularism, and true enlightenment were afoot. We're doomed if we are unable to find that spirit again.

1. DAM FST blew by me at, shall we say, a high rate of velocity this morning. Normally I don't mind that action at all. In fact, I sort of love when someone eats up the fast lane, exploring their personal and spatial freedoms, testing momentum and friction and various quanta of acceleration like Sir Isaac Newton on a modified Kawasaki with glasspack exhausts methodically testing the movement of objects in space.

2. Someone else's proximal velocity also makes it, as Ike Newton will tell you from long experience, that much less likely I will get nailed by some cop with donut and attitude for my own reckless speed.

3. Except, in this instance, DAM FST came roaring up behind me at the end of a merge lane, where there really was not room for two vehicles, and so decided to cut around on the shoulder in order to attain exactly one car-length's advantage in ETA to destination, but then sat, like everyone else, in lazy village traffic.

4. In the automotive, therapeutic, behavioral, psychological, sociological, aeronautical, design, and proctological disciplines, this is commonly known as being "A Complete Douche."

5. Although you could make the case that the usage of "douche" as an adjective in itself, unless you happen to be twenty-two during the long summer of 1993, and you've just been verbally reamed by your manager in front of many queasily satisfied customers at Olive Garden, prompting you to throw down your alfredo-spotted apron and quit, is in itself somewhat douchey. Which, of course, in this context, makes it the perfect gateway into meta-ironicism.

6. DAM FST, who I glimpsed as he veered from the shoulder and back across gravel into my lane, was a forty-ish white guy with a shoebox of a head, Hedge Acronym ballcap, and a shiny Submariner-ish watch nestled low in abundant wrist hair. There was a pressed Brooks Brothers fresh from the dry cleaners hanging from the seat hook, and a tennis racket in an immaculate white cover propped in the passenger seat radiating the attitude of an exhausted and divorce-considering Muscovite wife.

7. So, basically, the dude was Chevy Chase from "Caddyshack" merged with Jared Kushner's predatory Saudi-vault gaze, with a side of ethnically cleansed Roger Federer and the interpersonal manners of Titus Andronicus.

8. As I idled, 5/8ths of an inch from his rear bumper, his vanity, and his vanity plate, few essential questions came to mind:

9. Was it possible that DAM FST stood for "Damascus Fist?"

10. Now, that would be awesome and mean the driver was the grandson of the little-known 70's wrestler and proudly Syrian foil of Andre The Giant, in which case, all was forgiven.

11. Or maybe DAMASCUS FIST was a proud and fervent participant in a sub-genre of romantic behavior generally frowned upon by scripture throughout the Abrahamic Religions, in which case all was also forgiven.

12. On the other hand, maybe DAM FST was shorthand for "Demi Moore's Forward Surgical Team" or "Douche As Mentioned in Florida Standard Time" or "Dean Martin's Field Sobriety Test" or "JC Van Damme's Follistatin Testosterone."

13. Unlikely, I thought, inching with the click of his left turn signal, making it imperative that I decode this person before they accelerated away from my disdain and, to a lesser degree, my OCD, forever.

13. Dampness? Damsel? Damnation? F. Scott Titzgerald? Flat Screen Television? Funter S. Thompson?

14. If you think about it though, it is kind of fascinating to envision yourself in line at the DMV, running through a last-minute list in your head of possible personalized messages, homages or references or puns, and wonder why anyone chooses anything at all.

15. Like, in 2025, barely afloat in the forced immersion of social media curation and internet self-branding, what are you, as an individual, really trying to communicate to the world with a rectangle of metal spot-welded to the back of your vehicle, which in itself already carries a distinct message in terms of style and coloration, but mostly More Wealth Or Less Wealth depending on the model?

16. Do you choose LNDCLLNG or JERRYCRIES or ZOROASTER 69 or CELEBRITY ME or MY CASH YOUR POVERTY or WARSAW GHETTO or HUG ME LIKE POMPEII or JOHN WYNE GACY or MILL E VAN ILL E?

17. Or, in a welter of pure ego and universal obliviousness, do you clumsily brag about your car?

18. Okay, so presuming it's DAMN FAST, let's look at the specs on the 2002 Mercedes SLK 32 AMG 2 seat roadster coupe (just guessing). Apparently, motivating the SLK32 AMG is a 3.2-liter supercharged, intercooled V6. It makes 349 horsepower and 332 pound-feet of torque. Based on the standard SLK32’s normally-aspirated V6, the AMG version adds, in addition to the supercharger, new throttle body, cams, valves and valve springs.

19. Fair enough, and hard to argue with. In fact, the dude's ride might even give my Extremely Powerful But Non Personalized Plate precision automobile a run for its money on a straightaway while betting pinks, and I imagine in any case it's really fun to drive, although I suspect I wouldn't fit in it very easily, and therefore would regard it as impractical for anything more than a short Steve McQueen burst across town.

20. I also wouldn't want to own the Merc on general principle, given its severe Teutonic/Blitzkrieg/Wernher von Braun baggage and Invasion Of Poland associations. But I admit that's like being a Loud Vegan and hectoring your dinner companions about the evils of GMO grapeseed oil all through the pasta course.

21. I love my father for many, many reasons, but at the moment one of the most convincing ones is that I recall, around the age of 12, asking him why he had no bumper stickers on his car. He looked at me, frowned, and said, "I am no one's billboard".

22. I pondered that for a moment, and then he said, "also, it's fucking stupid." Then we hopped into the blue Saab 900 Turbo and went somewhere superior.

23. DAM FAST eventually turned into a small shopping center with a nail salon, a teriyaki joint, and "Scissor Me Whiskers", which proudly advertised its services in the realm of bespoke pet grooming.

24. I turned in the opposite direction, toward home, and then, at some point later, arrived.
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25. There is no twenty-five.

​1. So this guy with two American flags mounted to the bed of his pickup drove it into a church near Flint and killed at least 4 people before dying in a firefight with police. Explosive devices were also found on site.

2. The man was a former US Marine who served in Iraq.

3. It happens that the place of worship's form of worship was the exaltation of Latter Day Saints.

4. So, a Mormon church. Just like the one that the shooter of Charlie Kirk attended in Utah, which is widely known to be as much of a hotbed of liberalism as Flint. No word yet from Kash Patel as to whether or not the shooter had a trans partner, or was part of The Radical Left, or if there was a mysterious note that was mysteriously destroyed, just like the one in Utah asserting these things, but that Kash Patel somehow got to read prior to its destruction, and also no word from the shooter's mom if he'd recently veered hard left in widely disseminated and unverified/unquestioned quotation marks.

5. With the usual deep display of empathy and a selfless attempt to knit a devastated community together, something he is both known and beloved for, Donald J. Trump said, “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America."

6. Which, of course, implies that the shooter was part of a larger liberal (likely based in Portland) conspiracy to drive trucks into Mormon churches in order to hasten a Pagan Takeover of the Most Christian Nation on Earth.

7. Which seems both an unnecessary statement to make as a Leader Of People, as opposed to a Leader Of Specific People Who Pass Muster, and absurdly speculative, even if it were not manufactured out of whole and demented cloth. Just like every daily utterance of The Grifter. But to be fair, part of The Grifter's genius is to grift so endlessly and repeatedly that you become inured to it. Or are ground down by its plumbless stupidity, which is basically the same thing since we all just need go on with our live or start Doordashing vodka by the crate.

8. It appears to me, conjectured with the exact same amount of knowledge that the President of The United States himself is currently privy to, as just another act of gun violence by a white male in a pickup truck with American flags mounted to the bed, pointedly bearded and comically rotund, whose motive will likely be conflicted, convoluted, substance-addled and/or mentally compromised, with no clear or convincing final purpose.

9. Also, is it worth asking if Mormons are in fact Christian, Christian-adjacent, or Not Christian By Design, if only to discern how widespread the intent of this false-flag Fringe Left attack?

10. While Joseph Smith did receive his revelation through a bedsheet (hung from the ceiling) as delivered by the Angel Moroni in a boarding room in Upstate New York in 1823, and was subsequently notified by the Angel Moroni about the existence of Golden Plates detailing the history of the Lost Tribes Of Israel, who once roamed America freely and with semi-Christian intent, there is otherwise a fairly wide divergence in doctrine.

11. After the fourth visit from the Angel Moroni in his modest boardinghouse room, Smith located The Golden Plates, which were buried in stone box containing many other interesting artifacts. The plates were written in "Reformed Egyptian", which is a language that does not, or at least no longer, exists. Luckily the box also contained a Seer Stone which could be used to translate them. And although Joseph Smith was desperate to immediately show local clergy, police, scientists, and teachers his amazing and possibly world-changing discovery, the Angel Moroni insisted that no one but Smith use the stone. He reluctantly agreed, and once the plates were translated, Moroni reclaimed them. Location of The Golden Plates and/or their overall market value is currently unknown.

12. Smith's translation ended up becoming The Book Of Mormon, which is plagiaristically not that much different than The New Testament, with the exception that it granted Smith the right to marry many of the women who lived in the same modest Palmyra boarding house that he did, and also a slight variance in dogma claiming that Jesus would one day return to Jackson County, Missouri to found a New Jerusalem. It's strange that speakers/writers of Reformed Egyptian were able to name Jackson County, Missouri so specifically, given that the America as we know it, with various states, borders, capitals, and interstates upon which one could drive a pickup truck with American Flags mounted on the bed to, did not yet exist.

13. Also, a big part of Mormon doctrine is the existence of the planet Kolub (called Kobol in Battlestar Galactica), which is sort of like a celestial B&B that hovers near the Throne Of God, which is next to another planet called Oliblish, which exists beyond the reach of telescopes in the Metagalatic Center. During The End Times, it is foreseen that Earth itself will be plucked from the Milky Way by God and returned to its rightful place next to Kolub and Oliblish.

14. Here's a true fact: The Mormon Church, entirely untaxed, is the single largest private landowner in America. They hold paper on nearly 3% of Florida, which, interestingly, is slightly larger than their massive Utah holdings. Their investment arm, Ensign Peak, controls nearly $300 billion in wealth.

15. So the question we need to ask ourselves now is, exactly how many hours is it going to take for Kash Patel to discover, in a mysterious stone box buried in the toxic soil of Flint, the shooter's Antifa Uniform, Antifa Handbook, Antifa-Branded Suicide Notepad, and signed 8" X 10" glossy of Greta Thunberg?
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15. My money is on fifteen.

1. I once posted this in relation to Henry Kissinger, about whom I said many things that, to be fair, weren't very nice while nevertheless being true, but it feels particularly germane on this rainy yet beautiful San Francisco morning in which a world with an astonishingly high level of ambient fascism continues to argue over the merits of glossing over the lack of merits of Charlie Kirk.

2. I used to chide people for using the term "fascism" so blithely. It's not fascist when the doorman won't let you into the club, or the insurance company yanks your coverage. It's actually brute capitalism. But I have come full circle on this, because I say with zero rhetoric or polemic intent - we are now living under fully Fascist rule. It's not a placard or a slogan or a bumper sticker, it's 2025 American Reality.

3. From any side of the political spectrum you could argue whether or not that is technically true, but it's an argument you'd lose. Or at least one in which you'd unwittingly be contending that fascism, in the end, is good for us.

4. So what is fascism, now that we've just branded and seared it into the hide our increasingly bovine leader? (If you're wondering, by "bovine" I literally mean dimwitted, increasingly laden with toxic milk, a cud-chomper, easily distracted by any blade of adulating clover, and very likely suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.) Let's use a few totally non-partisan definitions, which were basically the foundation of The Greatest Generation and everything it fought for, and see if it checks any current boxes.

5. For fascist governance to be accurate named, it has to involve Ultranationalism. See: mass deportations, pay-for-play visas, the demonization of Ukraine, the support/encouragement of fellow worldwide ultranationalists, sweeping tariffs, the shunting aside of NATO, border walls, and rampant pet-eating.

6. It requires an All-Powerful Charismatic Leader who demands obedience, compliance, sycophancy, subordination, ductility, self-abasement, and constant praise. See: any given day, Mike Johnson, the sidelining of Congress into a wet bar napkin, packing the Supreme Court, and The Atrophied Mind Of Susan Collins.

7. It glorifies militarization and colonial/imperial expansion. See: Greenland, Canada, the Gulf of America, The Secretary Of War, the annexing of Gaza to turn it into a theme park, the Hegsething of the armed forces, unneeded/unattended tank parades, occupation of cities in clear defiance of Posse Comitatus laws, and the fact that ICE is 50k signing-bonusing its way into soon becoming larger than the Marine Corps.

8. A rise of totalitarian behavior, which is more or less asserting government control of any and all aspects of society thought to be inherently independent as part of the tenets of that society. See: Jimmy Kimmel, Harvard, Voice Of America, PBS, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, National Parks, the Nexstar-Tegna merger, endless lawsuits, reporting restrictions, school curriculum mandates, Good Elon & Bad Elon, and the bootlicking acquiescence of Big Tech leaders, such as Washington Post owner Mr. Jeff Bezos, Facebook Sunglasses Dork Mark Zuckerberg, mouse-flogger and Disney apologist Bob Iger, and Ayn Rand fetishist Peter Thiel.

9. A Cult Of Personality fueled Propaganda Machine/Blatant Firehose spewing 24/7 resentment, division, and misinformation sharing a distressingly incenstual relationship with the Personality itself and not bothering to masquerade as journalism any longer, if it ever did. Plus, Rupert Murdoch: immigrant.

10. An all-access stratospheric moneyed class, including Dear Leader/Less-Dear Family themselves directing state, foreign, and economic policy toward self-enrichment. See Trump Coin, Trump NFTs, Trump playing cards, Qatari Trump Plane, Trump Golf Courses, Trump Secret Service invoicing at Trump Hotels, Trump Son Japanese/Indonesian business deals, Trump Daughter Chinese business deals, Trump Son-In-Law Saudi Billions, etc.

11. Ignoring, denying, or contravening court orders without consequence.

12. Mass incarceration, calls for increased punishment, the establishment of Big Business Penal Systems, holding centers, Alligator Alcatraz, El Salvador, Uganda, flouting Due Process, the FEAR SYSTEM of impenetrable lockdown bureaucracy.

13. Revenge and state power retribution personally directed toward political rivals. There's a thousand words, but two will suffice: Jim Comey.

14. The one central and grossly essential component without which fascism cannot exist: scapegoating of minorities/foreigners and casting them as directly responsibly for virtually all social ills, but in particular convincing the very dumbest/most easily swayed/least educated/least informed/most desperate/most socially closed/most religiously infatuated/most insular/most conspiratorial/most deeply afraid segment of society enticed by the candy that Mexican laborers are responsible for their impotence. See: MAGA.

15. Despite my tendency toward grim, adjective-laden cynicism under the guise of posts full of so many sentences even my family no longer reads them, you can be certain that we ARE under a fascist kleptocracy at the moment. You can be sure of it regardless of your personal politics simply by considering that the Donald J. Trump bogeyman of the moment is not only War Ravaged Portland (have you ever been to tiny, serene, hippie, wonderfully gourmand, music-crazy Portland? If not, you have no idea how demented the notion that it requires a few weeks of National Guardsmen occupation/trash pick-up to cure its arty-heroin ills), and (sigh) once again ANTIFA, an organization that doesn't exist, has no membership or leaders, raises no funds, spams you with no texts, and is basically a meaningless phrase standing into for a widespread disgruntled counter-cultural feeling that in some way threatens the stability of Donald J. Trump's incessant self-enrichment. Because he couldn't care less otherwise if black-hoodie dudes throw rocks through North Face windows during random protests. What bothers him is the name itself: ANTI FASCIST. Which, to be fair to Donald J. Trump, is sort of a ringing call to duty that does not particularly jibe with rape (metaphorically and literally) or embezzlement.

16. I am siempre antifascista, and have been in a general way since cognizant of the term, but more specifically since I read George Orwell's "Homage To Catalonia" while smoking pot on a sheetless mattress on the floor of a dorm, way back in Olden Times when our literary and cultural heroes did things like volunteer to go to Spain and risk their lives fighting pig-sodomizing Fascists.
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17. Can anyone with a straight face tell me these conditions aren't already being met, and have been more or less across the board for quite a while now? Friends, why don't we all volunteer to stay exactly where we are, right here and now, to gang together intellectually to fight the fascists bobbing like apples among us?

1. This morning I was cruising along Park Presidio Avenue, which, unsurprisingly, cuts through Golden Gate Park on the way to the infamously spectacular bridge that I now have the pleasure of crossing almost daily. I often giggle at how lovely it is, the luck and gratitude I feel just soaking in the Florentine light and beach-side cliffs and endless vistas.

2. Park Presidio is three lanes and heavily trafficked, one of the major north/south arteries in the city, so you could set a metronome and switch lanes without signaling every third beat and still not arrive at the toll plaza any quicker. There’s simply no benefit, except as an expression of masturbatory chaos tumbled like dice into the karmic universe, to drive aggressively.

3. Which is generally a nice thing, in an automotive sense, this inability to hustle or force the action. The commute is smooth. I have the window down, pleasingly polyrhythmic music accompanying the sound of tires on asphalt. It’s a chance to embrace (culturally appropriate) your inner Zen and consider a few lines of poetry without the unnecessary distractions of modern technology or the need to whinge about all the things life fails to provide.

4. And yet (you saw this coming like an anvil falling onto the head of a desert coyote) on this particular commute I was being heavily crowded by a black Audi. It roared up from behind, veered, ran a light, cut me off before the next, hemmed and hawed between a succession of cars and trucks and an Amazon van driven by what appeared to be Washington Post owner Mr. Jeff Bezos participating in an Employer’s Work Day event.

5. Yeah, you get this every once in a while in The City: some character hopped up on crank or estrogen or stock options or gaping emotional difficulties or a just-collapsed relationship, and it’s the sort of behavior one has to not only expect but be resigned to in a cosmopolitan area full of lunatics (in a mostly good way).

6. Therefore, it didn’t cause my atrial pressure to rise a single diastolic.

7. Until I noticed homeboy’s personalized plates.

8. What, I wondered, is SHEEXTRA trying to say? Is Dude a pimp letting you know it’s $500 an hour, but if you want kissing the full grand? Is it snippy parlance intimating sexy male fabulousness? Is it Melania, reminding the world about the unquantifiable limits of her prenup? A young woman asserting pride in having substantial back? Extra obvious? Extra tedious? Extra additionally supplementary? Could it be a veteran of the film industry who has posed in a million backgrounds on the sets of the films of Claire Danes?

9. Is SheExtra someone deeply, seriously, almost dangerously into olive oil and its imperceptibly virgin specifications?

10. I’m always wrong about modern slang, as my daughter has made a career of pointing out, but my understanding is that “extra” is not something one aspires to.

11. I have a curious nature, often to distraction, and as we crossed the bridge, SheExtra mashed the pedal and took off in the diamond lane.

12. Now, as I may have mentioned previously, I drive a very powerful and highly-tuned performance automobile of vaguely Teutonic associations.

13. SheExtra had it up over a hundred roaring past Sausalito, and by the time I found a clear lane, I was hovering around 118 just to make up ground, while also weighing the court-ordered penalty differential when clocked by radar above or below the arrestable Maginot Line of 120 mph.

14. Fourteen exists solely in order to affirm that I did indeed make up enough lost ground to take the pictures below.

15. In a moment of relative sanity, I decided it was unwise to snap a candid of the driver at speed, but I did get a good look.

16. Dude was possibly of Levantine extraction, had likely shaved an hour earlier and already had stubble, wore a black V-neck shirt that looked so luxuriously comfortable I’m guessing it was made of strands of woven fetal alpaca, and rocked cheap mirrored aviators.
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17. So, he could easily have passed as Carlos The Jackal if it had been 1974, which I suppose is Extra if viewed in a certain light.

18. Nothing really said “She” about the driver, except if he was 2025 Richard Gere doing the American Gigolo thing in Lauren Hutton’s Audi.

19. To be fair, he did have an undeniably Extra look on his face as I was forced to cut back across him to make my exit, and then power-slide down the ramp and up to the light in a clicking, steaming, screeching, somewhat sideways fashion.

20. I gave a guy sitting on a backpack at the intersection a five spot for doggedly continuing to revere the Grateful Dead.

21. I love California.

Nine FACTS, One LIE
the Cycle Of History edition
Issue #26

1. The only legitimate response to gun violence is to denounce it. The only legitimate continuation of such denunciations is to work to enact social and political change in order to reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Anyone actively celebrating murder, let alone a public execution, is very much due for a silent monastic retreat in the hopes of reconnecting with their humanity.

2. Killing Charlie Kirk was a deeply cowardly act, as is supporting or leveraging that killing for political ends, especially through the skinless abstraction that is social media, with any purpose other than to recognize the madness of the ways we continue to invent to end life.

3. Political Murder cannot be processed as having later justification. From Julius Caesar (how did that work out for the Roman Senate?) to William McKinley (how did that work out for the Anarchists?) to Fred Hampton (how did that work out for J. Edgar Hoover?), political murder is anti-democratic regardless of the accretion of anti-democratic views the person is seen to have held, or regularly disseminated. In the end, the indecency of heartlessness is apolitical, and there are no sentences that can be typed to cleverly analogize the fact that a man was shot in public with a high-powered rifle.

4. Even so, it is exactly the horror of that violence that demands we speak clearly and rationally about the context in which it happens, without apology or amelioration.

5. Charlie Kirk’s murder is not the random tragedy it has been repeatedly cast as in the last forty-eight hours, being neither random nor a tragedy in the sense that it was unforeseeable. Charlie Kirk’s killing was an unfortunate (for every single one of us) but cruelly mathematical outcome of a system of clickbait rhetoric and deliberate agitation that Charlie Kirk himself cynically manipulated.

6. That system, which Donald J. Trump has improbably turned into his only successful business venture ever, is Formulaic Divisiveness as Corporate Strategy with a heavily diversified portfolio of Hate for Profit. Charlie Kirk was salaried upper management, with a generous bonus structure of unearned notoriety that came as a direct result of consequence-free incitement.

7. The grim irony of Charlie Kirk’s statements about his willingness to accept (smirkily dismiss) “A few deaths” as an acceptable cost in exchange for the retention of his Second Amendment rights (which, incidentally, are not now and have never been in peril) does not warrant the glee it has inspired in his enemies, but remains the imbecilic utterance of a provocateur who, like all provocateurs throughout history, assumed that fame would keep them safe from those provoked by their words.

8. Cheering the ugly death of someone you disagree with politically is not the same thing as experiencing a certain Schadenfreude that, during this second endless presidency, there has just been a very public consequence to the many unforgivable actions of Donald J. Trump and the string of performative lackeys his words have given rise to. It’s only human. That doesn’t mean it’s good. And it also means, as usual, it is a Trump marionette who pays the price for The Man Who Pays For Nothing.

9. Charlie Kirk, a devout Christian, chose to overlook all the painfully evident failings of his leader - pedophile, rapist, thief, grifter, pathological liar and possibly The Least Christian Man To Ever Walk The Earth (and that includes Buddha, Pontius Pilate, and Charles Manson), in order to coattail unto power, and even worse, use his (highly successful) organization, Turning Point USA, to entice students with angry cheese beneath the spring of that irresolvable contradiction. This behavior, in places like Florida and Texas, is often called “grooming”. Charlie Kirk, it must be said, for ego and profit, was a political groomer of children.

10. You can make a lot of money in 2025 America by turning resentment into Dogecoin, but resentments do not simply fade away as the next profitable outrage presents itself, they burrow in like ticks, usually beneath the hide of the conspiratorial and imbalanced.

11. Articulating MAGA comes with a potential cost, namely that someone will take you at your word. Free Speech is not the constitutional right to angrily flail in public without retribution. MAGA, in the end, is an assertion by 33% of the American public of their right to have unsupported, plainly false, and demonstrably moronic opinions without acknowledging the legitimacy of others (elites, experts, Left Coasters, those who read and consider, the CDC, those who traffic in nuance, scientists, those aware of recent and past history) to contradict those opinions. Particularly with facts. Unthinking acceptance is MAGA scripture, and Charlie Kirk is an object lesson in the notion that every American has the ability, but not the bestowed right, to be incoherent in public.
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12. MAGA, when distilled down to its oleaginous base, is about creating a Post-Responsibility America. Which is okay, sort of, while you’re in power. But it is also why (claims of rigged elections, Jan. 6th, bald gerrymandering, voter restrictions, deportation, military occupations of cities, Hang Mike Pence, running for a third term) once having taken those steps, you can never relinquish power.

13. Frequently overlooked in the analysis of Charlie Kirk’s comments about the acceptability of gun violence in exchange for 2nd Amendment rights is that, at the end of that oft-edited sentence, he refers to those rights as “God-given”. The fact that Charlie Kirk may have been under the impression that there exists an interactive deity holding an identifiable position on access to the tools that most effectively end the lives of those it created in its own image, makes me think that Charlie Kirk was, in fact, completely insane.

14. Charlie Kirk was racist in the way of Donald J. Trump - confidently, effortlessly, continuously. He was also a purveyor of the Great Replacement Strategy conspiracy, along with Steves Bannon and Miller and other race-mongers justifying their own fears and impotence. This is worth mentioning in the context of flags being at half-mast this morning, and what the man stood for, and who exactly some of the nation is mourning.

15. Which is to say a smug advocate for an America that is no longer a Grand Experiment, but a casual list of grievances.

16. As the widely misunderstood and mistakenly fetishized left-hero Ché Guevara proved, you cannot line up and shoot enough peasants against a fence to change the course of cultural or political events to your liking. Only courage and truth and an unstinting rejection of hypocrisy can do that. Coincidentally three things that exist in an apposite dimension to the one Donald J. Trump occupies.

17. Apparently a twenty-two-year-old Utah man shot Charlie Kirk, at first glance seeming ripe for exactly the sort of influence that Turning Point USA peddled. His family had a dedicated Youth Pastor, and was turned in by his father. Does it need to be said that this man is no one’s hero, martyr, deep state operative, or tool of furtive political ends? He was almost certainly, as all assassins turn out to be, a contradiction, easily swayed and unhappy, who has learned well, from repeated Second Amendment examples, the one sure way to appear on Wikipedia forever.

18. Will Donald J. Trump now send the National Guard into Salt Lake City? Will he begin deporting Mormons to Samoa? The one thing we can be sure of is that he will suck as much personal benefit out of this death as he can, and milk the memory of Charlie Kirk for all he was worth, which in terms of functional government or healthy culture wasn’t much, but he will use Charlie Kirk like he uses everyone and everything he touches, as just another opportunity to capitalize upon.

19. Charlie Kirk made himself famous by being famously divisive, and also made a lot of money by taking stances that drove clicks and hatred in equal measure. For someone who purportedly loved Jesus, he did everything possible to contradict the central messages of Jesus as I understand them. He did not participate in civil debate, but worked extremely hard to paint himself that way. He essentially ran anti-intellectual hits on people who disagreed with him using a social media doxxing mob and anonymous threats. He was a calculating propagandist who, however unintentionally, ended up pouring the concrete of his own demise. The one thing we can all learn from the violent death of Charlie Kirk is that it’s a stark object lesson on why not to act like Charlie Kirk.

20. All that being said, Charlie Kirk’s family and friends no doubt loved him, and he might have been okay to grab coffee with if he winkingly turned off the schtick and was willing to simply discuss a few things. I would have liked to have done so. Was he as capable of listening as orating? Would he surprise and even amuse me? Would I learn far more than I imagined possible from him? Would he convince me that I was the one who needed a Point to be Turned?

21. Probably not, but in the end, if anything in this fractured, collapsing empire is ever going to change for the better, people need to acknowledge the person Charlie Kirk purported to be as well as the person who eventually walked off stage, while also remembering that he, like all of us, was theoretically capable of evolving.

He didn’t deserve, at the tip of a bullet, not to have the chance to.
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*As I finished typing this, it seems the shooter was a Far Right Nick Fuentes fan and gun enthusiast who killed Kirk because he wasn't racist/conservative enough. Go figure. I imagine right now a lot of people are deleting their retribution posts, for instance old pal Elon Musk, who yesterday called the democrats "The Party Of Murder