Listen: you need to look at the election results and all the opinion polls and all of American history, and you need to really, truly understand something and stop denying it:

Either this is exactly who we are and always were, or there never was a "we" in the first place. "We" were always ignorant bigoted Jesus freaks. For most of American history, the number of Americans who *weren't* could fit in one average Western state, with room left over for parking. For every Allen Ginsberg there were a half million Lyndon Larouches. Don't you forget that.

Look, the one thing I've learned in my life is that you cannot trust systems to protect you. You should be able to but you can't. You always have to have a backup plan for when systems fail - governments, corporations, whatever. You cannot rely on competence or even good intent. America is going to be a very hard place to be vulnerable from now on, probably forever. They're dismantling the bits of the government that take care of citizens and strengthening the ones that ensure profits. Not just America, either. Everywhere. Even Labour is doing it here.

Hey, has anyone seen Democrats around anywhere? Because I haven't heard A FUCKING THING FROM THOSE LOSERS SINCE THE ELECTION. They don't even have the balls to pretend to be an opposition party anymore. They just gave up and gave the store away apparently. Nobody is coming to save us. Nobody is coming to save human rights, to to save democracy, to even be dissenting voices. They learned NOTHING from these fucking Nazis, not even dirty tricks. All they see is that they don't have a majority in Congress and that's their only trick.

The problem with letting capitalists run shit is they think everything can be conjured out of thin air like money is, that there's such a thing as bear and bull markets for freshwater and a stable climate that you can do accounting tricks to get more of. That's why they're dumb. And you can only try to explain the limits of growth for so many decades before you have to conclude that these are people who can't learn, who are literally uneducable, but are allowed to control things other than whether they shit their own pants, which is a horrifying thought.

So a story for you: when I was a kid I wrote for a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was a cyberpunk magazine, and someone once told me that "for six months it was the coolest thing in the entire world", which was true.

That someone was Neil Gaiman, when I interviewed him. I met Neil when I was twenty, and very much exactly Mondo's target audience. Here are two photos that give you some idea. I wanted to be a William Gibson character so bad it hurt. Here's two pictures taken that year to give you some idea of how cool I thought I was.

Some of you seem to think LA has copious storm/rainwater that the lazy local government just lets wash into the ocean willy nilly. This tells me that you've never spent much time there and don't listen to 70s MOR radio.

The amount of rain required to maintain agriculture without irrigation from rivers is 21 or 22 inches per year. A desert is anywhere that gets less than 10 inches per year.

LA County, on average, gets 12 inches a year. It's mostly semi-arid and, if it's not desert, it's close.

I have been thinking about this for many years, and I truly believe the future, at least for a while, lies in climate nomadism: people and commerce constantly moving ahead of the storm (or drought or fire or flood). There's already precedent in North America with snowbirds. By snowbirds I mean the folks, mostly retirees, who live in RVs and migrate to warm climates in winter and cool climates in summer. God only knows how many there are already, but I'd estimate it's in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. They're the future.

Look: it truly deeply sucks that all of these people lost their homes, but it was simply a matter of time. That was obvious to me even as a teenage kid, the first time I drove up Mulholland. The hills above LA might as well be a sand mandala made by a Tibetan monk. Everyone wants someone to blame, probably mainly for the insurance claims, but it's no one's fault. People built thousands of houses and luxury estates in a dry tinderbox they thought was an oasis because they had really good landscaping. But it's not and never was. It's desert.

One thing I'll never budge on: if you don't read books, you're probably not really worth paying much attention to about anything but pop culture opinions.

If that sounds "elitist" to you, you're probably not a reader, so why would I care what you think? You'll never convince me that reading is a class thing. If you can afford a video game you can afford like fifty used books. Project Gutenberg has 75K+ free books. Libraries are free. And then there's Z-Library *cough*. You can afford to read books.

One of the most interesting things that happened during the pandemic that we all conveniently forgot was how absolutely terrified governments and industry were when we stopped spending all our money buying consumer goods from them, so much so that they gave us money to spend. Remember those stimulus checks? "For God's sake, here, buddy, here's $1300, just spend it on anything!"

Imagine if we'd all just banked that money the way rich people do with their profits. That would have been hilarious.

This is a really interesting interview. I'm not sure I agree with every point in it, but I'm not sure I don't, either. All of these ideas are worth consideration, especially how we understand what "progress" is. It makes me think of visiting Kibera in Nairobi in 2013.

https://twitter.com/glassbeadsdev/status/1870789693140537848

What struck me most was the lack of sadness. These were some of the poorest people on Earth, but they were just people doing people shit, mostly just chill or happy. And that's not the narrative we're given, which is that poverty = misery. It can, but not always and not everyone.

When the system closes every door that allows you to proceed successfully into and through it, I figure you got three options:

A. Accept the boot on either your throat or your tongue.

B. Burn the motherfucker down.

C. Walk away.

Which will you choose? Elections don't have to be falsified to be rigged so that someone wins no matter what the outcome, like betting on both bear and bull positions - or donkey and elephant positions.

And that someone is never you and never me, is it?

I was thinking about what @TurtlesongFarm was saying about hope, and essentially how it's the wall between uneasy order and riots. And he's right. (I think you're a he?)

Do you know the myth of Pandora's Box? As punishment for Prometheus stealing Olympian fire and giving it to humanity, Zeus has the gods create the first female human, who is named Pandora - beautiful and devious and stupid. She is presented to Prometheus's brother, Epimetheus, as a bride.

I tell people the same thing here as in America: you have to be able to survive if the system breaks down for a day or a week. Beyond that it gets trickier, but everyone should at least be able to handle a week. That means food, water, heat, power.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/… You can get solar generators now relatively cheaply, especially if you're willing to buy used, as I did. You keep it topped up and maintained. Will it work as well here as California? No, but you know what really doesn't work well? Not having power at all.

Reading an interview with Nick Cave where he talks about God. I'm an atheist but I understand, because I'm also a mystic and I've spent all of my life trying to see God, or something like God, in the universe. I devoted a great deal of effort to trying to find purpose. I mean, I come on here and I say fuck a lot and talk about climate and politics, and I think even many people who know me in real life wouldn't imagine I've read Meister Eckhart or the Upanishads or the Nag Hammadi codices or Rumi or Alan Watts or Nietzche and Camus.

People here ask me a lot what I miss about America. So I think about it a lot. I miss the food and the wide open spaces, especially the Mojave Desert. I miss my Toyota pickup truck with the camper shell. I miss my friends.

But really, that's about it. Everything else I have. Everyday life in Britain is basically the same as America, but slightly less aggressive and fraught. Everybody goes to work, but they also have mandatory vacation time. Nobody stresses about medical bills. Nobody gets shot - when someone even fires a gun it's national news.

*cracks knuckles* glad you asked! Let's start here, by health index. As you can see, for 2023, America didn't do so hot. Doesn't even crack the top 30 and does slightly better than Uruguay. (Canada just squeezes in at 29.)

numbeo.com/health-care/ra… x.com/ReallyTyWilson… Or how about life expectancy? Ooooh, you're likely to live longer in Albania and Panama than in the US. Of course, they don't shoot up their grade schools every week or think vaccines are made by Satan in a laboratory in Hell, so maybe that's it.

worldometers.info/demographics/l…

So in of Landman, Billy Bob Thornton's character has a monologue about how wind turbines aren't really green power and all clean energy tech is useless. And it sounds really authoritative in an Arkansas drawl, like he's just laying out the plain facts that city folks don't get. After watching all of Yellowstone, I've noticed Taylor Sheridan does a lot of this: his salt of the earth protagonists explain the truth of how things really are to flighty hippies who ain't got the common sense God gave a gopher.

It's funny, but it's horseshit.

It is amazing that the uncurious and disinterested have so many champions to defend them from my scorn, especially since you clearly don't consider yourselves amongst their number. Or do you? Those of you calling me an asshole and a fascist: are you dumb motherfuckers yourselves? Or are you simply offended on the behalf of theoretical dumb motherfuckers... which is not you, of course. You're curious and clever, but how dare I suggest that anyone else isn't curious and clever? What possible evidence could I have to support that assertion?

The older I get, the more I realize that most people absolutely live in a mystery. They don't know how anything works except whatever thing pays their bills and maybe one other thing they like, and that's it. They know what they see on TV and TikTok and social media. That's it. They don't know how a coffee maker works and they don't care. Same thing with their car, the electricity in their outlets, politics, anything. Things just happen and they don't know why and they don't want to know. They just want the things they want to happen to happen.

I bet I could do a chart of likes and retweets of my posts and show you how even people who generally agree with me hesitate when they see the word "socialism". It's like a lot of you still can't quite bring yourselves to go that far off the script. "Capitalism sucks, but...." I'm not a full bore communist. I think there's a place for capitalism in society... just not in the driver's seat. Socialism for the necessities, capitalism for the luxuries, I think. But people don't seem to understand what that means, unsurprisingly.