I am a communist. The only thing that has ever brought me "happiness" was sitting in a bare room that contained a box, and then having six timber wolf puppy new-borns climb out of the box to come find me to nibble on. Wolf puppies are born toothless, deaf, and blind. In two weeks, they will have their milk teeth. This was a wolf sanctuary. They wanted to play let's eat the homo sapiens sitting in our room by our box. They just didn't know what I was. A big dog maybe. A big dog has arrived to pet us. Let's eat him. So. In the moment. They had little pin-like teeth and ran around as if they were one big ball of wolf hair thumping around the room. They would run to the other side of the room, and then they would run back to me as if they had completely forgotten they had just met me. But who is this guy and he has no idea how to play. Let's go nip him. Then, they would turn upside down and pee. I had been sent to the wolf ranch as a reporter, and I was supposed to report on this new rowdy wolf pack. They wanted to eat my camera. I bored them. I wasn't fun. So they went and ate their box. The box was more fun than I was. There was a whole conversation going on between them that the reporter was not privy to. I had to return to my newsroom. I'm sitting there thinking: I just wanna be with wolves. I had never been that happy before. Or since. I am still learning how to play.
I am a communist. To rot or not to rot. The deviant is no longer my neighbor's hero. "But he's a businessman." He's a thief. A bear came down from the mountain (common) and the bear was most amused to see us picketing the Courthouse. Bears are curious. There was a demonstration here in Appalachia against the deviant. The bear was probably a spy. In my county in the Blue Ridge, this just doesn't happen. This is the South. It is still segregated. People had to confront their fears. I don't think we've ever had an outside agitator. Whatever that is. The Ladies Tea Society has a lot to talk about on Tuesdays. Eighty percent of the people in the demonstration were ladies. They made the signs (no profanity). Our biggest issue is that all the young people leave. There is no work here. There never has been. Coal was doomed the minute they dug a hole in the ground. We have tourism. See a bear, go home. People here do not demonstrate. It would be seen as disloyal. The high school has military recruiters. Ninety percent of our population is retired. Churches feed a lot of people. Everyone here knows what's coming. We export hundreds of tons of apples. We have miles and miles of apple trees. This year the food will rot. It is a huge loss for us. It is a huge loss for you whether you know it or not. There is hunger in Appalachia. Food being turned into garbage hanging on branches just shoves it all into our face. Kilmar Garcia's fate could be our fate, too. To rot or not to rot.
I am a communist. All is not okay. I took the black pill a while ago. Full stop. The vibe here is: Agony. I put my children on a flight out of this sick and sickening country. Daddy stays in America to fight. All is not okay. I will not have my children ruled by a psychotic deviant. This is my opinion and these days one is compelled to write: "Opinion is protected speech." Until now. The El Salvador Prison Gig means if you commit the crime of leaving the house, you will be brutally incarcerated. Have you seen the videos of ICE officers breaking car windows, and dragging drivers out of their cars. And then, those people vanish. Something is very wrong with the human race. Bad actors have lead us for fifty-thousand years. I do not know why. We are an unstable species. Predatory. Evil. Mean. Deviants hunt for their victims. It found us. It has fired its guns at the sky. That says everything. I do not suffer fools. A deviant bully on the playground at school targeted me when I was a kid. I told him not to do it. He laughed. After I put him on the ground and turned his face into a sea of blood, they had to drag me off of him. I was pounding his head against the rocks. My bad. They made me apologize to him in his hospital bed. My punishment. When he saw me again in school, he wet his pants. First, I had to invalidate his humanity. I wish they had never dragged me off of the little deviant. You might want to try the blue pill because you are going to need it. All is not okay. -- tim barrus
I am a communist. What does that mean. I don't really know. I am attracted to the idea that Capitalism has no heart in its cold and bitter soul, and having studied civil societies for a long time, I would argue that we are still living with political paradigms that straightforwardly embrace a slavery of the worker with whatever sweat can be sucked out by the kleptocracy of organized crime. There is no safety net. The rich want more. More. More. And we pay for it. It all begins then and there. It's easy to gut Democracy. What more do they want. Everything. They want everything. The appetite is surreal.
This time, they want to kill us if we dare to walk out onto a sidewalk, a car comes by with goons. Always goons. Always deviants. Always. Execution Folks just doing their job. Death always stalks Americans who deny in their day to day existence that death itself is real. We know loss is real. What comes next. Argument. How dare I call the conservative fetish for everything from genocide to rhetoric as their religious due. Religion is another whip they love flogging you with. I am begging to do a deep dive into what life was like for hunter gatherers. Pagans. Most of them were three feet tall. I want to know how they survived. Because I think that is going to be the place where we will find ourselves. I love how Ezra pulls Ross in with one word: religion. But Ross points out that Jesus was a radical. There was no Jesus. There is no god. The rest is self-inflicted madness.
I am a communist. How bad is it. Here's the list. Everyone is making lists. As if. It means anything. The problem is that all of the same crimes appear on all the same lists. They're everywhere. Alright, already. Making lists is now the status quo. It is not journalism. It is ruminating not unlike the bouncing, jumping marbles in our collective heads. A great example of how wise and powerful a list is. A list is not a gun. Limp noodle distraction. Tariffs are an obfuscation. I am a communist. You see money and greed (and you should). I see caste and class. I see tariffs as a legal way to starve us. Grocery stores will need smelling salts as we go into shock, clutching our pearls. We are still clutching our pearls, we are uniformed. Do you have any idea what the tariffs on South Pacific pearls are. We will pay the price of the ticket. We have failed. It's the worst deal in human history. But if the deviant can change your focus via bells, whistles, lies, manipulations and crimes -- Americans are humiliated, and they don't even know it. Quick, make a list. We eat what he feeds us. And he is feeding us a meal of haggis, and you will eat it because you are the little people of no consequence whatsoever. Serfs and slaves. The whip. You are not serious people. You have no agency. The Bill of Rights is now a bill of sale. Please stop saying we have plan B. You have nothing. Nothing. We are defeated. What we are left with are lists. We are pretending life is worth any denigration. -- tim barrus
I am a communist. The whole Let's Have More Babies fetish is a hay ride I cannot jump on. Babies in poverty is so unfair. We are worth more than that. Why is slavery always the answer. Just telling me that humanity will rot doesn't make it through the filters of all my second selves. Being in the here and now -- is all I can do -- and it takes power, love, apprehension, and cash. It's the cash part that gets tricky. I have a secret. I have this terrible habit, and moral failure, because I cannot help myself from counting cards. I have no idea why I do that. It might be the money. My autistic masks do work. Ross seems to have a question that I share. I go up to people and I ask them why they are here.
Not here at church. Not here at home with family. Not here at school. Not here at work. But here. On the ground. In the trenches. And why are you here at the beginning of the extinction. People look at me like I am mad. Bring it on. Sometimes, I ask them how much money they have. We are all waiting for Godot. Ross is here (not a criticism) to immerse himself into the glow of family, god, the house of god, and a vision of where the world is going. We do not agree. But I can recognize authenticity when I see it. I just can't share it. The reality is that my life, and the lives of many other people, get the rug pulled out from under them in that deliberate debate where icons reflect conflicts in values, yet you are alone in the here and now and drowning in the culture of hatred.
I am a communist. Finally, a voice at the New York Times is saying it. A mass civic uprising to overthrow the Deviant. I have one question. Where is Stormy. Where is General Milley. Where is E. Jean Carroll. Where is Liz Cheney. This is the short list. The long list will take some time as it is quite long. Stormy in particular has no one to cover her back. She's the lone wolf in this. She's vulnerable. Exactly, where does she go to hide. I see no evidence that Stormy is that demure. She fights back. Just surviving the Deviant is resistance. E. Jean Carroll needs to get on the bus leaving Dodge. Especially when the murder would be carried out by our own government. It is no longer a government. It has lost that distinction. It is organized crime. Why is it uncivil to talk about possible murder. The government has gone rogue. He wants to kill us. When are you going to believe it. Let's discuss it openly. Calmly. While we still can. They will grab you at a red light. And pull you out while everyone watches. And then ICE officers beat you with clubs. America stands by and does nothing. Brooks is saying this has to stop. "It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power." Amen, Brother.
I am a communist. This has nothing to do with being autistic. I am allowed to deal with both these things. Concomitants are the reality of luggage. What I see as reality is not what you see as reality. I can keep the mask on for about eight hours, and then it begins to disintegrate. I am compelled by capitalism's spin on what it means to be alive as compliant, soft, eyes to the ground, don't make waves, we are the dead, and we are the dead. We are also not alike. There is no autistic, neurological manifesto were people articulate their rights. I know this: I have no rights. I need a team of neurologists and lawyers just following me around, but can they ride dirt bikes.
The lawyers will be very busy. They all have one focus: We Will Tape Your Mouth Shut. Like I don't know that. I say and write things that makes the heads of Normals go around and around snorting steam from their nostrils. You calculate risk. I am not sure I know what risk means. I am not sure I care. My formative life was with Act Up. I learned, really learned so much with those guys. No one is talking about how antiretrovirals are made in China. Act Up is dead. Meds were always out of reach.
Kennedy will do what the Deviant tells him to do. Does that mean he would kill us.
Yes. That is what it means.
If the tariffs stick, and they will, each HIV pill will cost $100. This is a death sentence. The deviant has just killed hundreds of thousands of people. Americans do not care because that is who and what they really are. I have written seven books. The one I am working on today is called We Will Tape Your Mouth Shut.
I am a communist. This is the best thing Ezra Klein has done in his career. Some of us have been screaming this stuff from the rooftops. For years and years. No one listened then, and no one is listening now. I always thought there would be a big bang at the end of this sad, pathetic culture that has prostrated itself to a raving psychotic. That is not uncivil to say. Because it is a fact. All you have to do is look at the photos of those men in the prison. When I look at satellite photos, I think I see what appears to be a graveyard but I cannot make out headstones. The dead do not speak. And they do not bear witness. They cannot tell us what has happened to them. The deviant is legally liable for kidnapping. He is now the law. But he isn't god. This is what has become of us. You have no rights. Stop pretending you do. Accept responsibility. Americans are to blame. You didn't fight him. To fight him is uncivil. Bow and scrape. Now, you get what you deserve. Historically, there are analogies. Hammurabi, the sixth king of the Amorite First Dynasty of Babylon, ruled from 1792 to 1750 BC (middle chronology). He secured Babylonian dominance over the Mesopotamian plain through military prowess, diplomacy, and treachery times ten. Hammurabi required much bowing. Hammurabi required much scrapping. Hammurabi had spies in every room. Hammurabi required many heads. The deviant still needs us to validate him. Refuse to validate the deviant. Then, stand back. Watch him eat his hair.
I am a communist. When a system fails, we dig in. Those terrible screens. Those evil phones. Those addicted kids. What kids. Our kids. When I was in special education in a clinical setting, I had a group of deaf four-year-olds. By the time they turned five, they were reading and writing fluently. It's not that kids can't read. The problem is that you have to pit books like Ethan Frome against the Empire of the Backlit. Gaming produces a rush of dopamine that poor Ethan cannot compete with. I could see education teaching kids to read and comprehend what they are reading -- at the minimum of one entire school year -- and nothing else. By the time their brain hits sixth grade, they reset anyway to the default of males and females in the same room. Perfect for keeping females in their place. By sixth grade they forget everything.
Americans scream their children cannot read. I want to ask them one question. At what age did you start reading to your kids. Out loud. Were they two. Three. Be honest. Zero. Start them out before two or go home. After two, too little, too late. Reading is different. Reading lets the mind go places, math just isn't going to give you a bus ticket to Ixtlan, and unless you take the bus to imagination, how is it a surprise that we live in a world of plastic children who are treading water. One year of just reading. Then, hit them with writing, for the subsequent year. Just writing. Nothing else. I had to build my own school. Says everything.
I am a communist. “It takes a couple dozen people to say yes to make something happen, and it only takes one person to say no." I honestly thought the piece was articulating the machinery of book publishing. I remember when they would all scream at writers to not send them email. Email was beneath them. It interrupted their pretty day. I know they still hate email, but now they're telling us to never sent them paper. As soon as email came out, I started emailing queries to every last one of them. This time, government squirms. Governments create unintended consequences such as tariffs create poverty and inflation. A double whammy. Are we talking about creating a new government from the ground up.
Marx knew that Das Kapital was not a sprint. Jack Sullivan wants the payoff now so politics gets a star on his chart on the fridge.
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events (or the intervals between them), and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.
There is not enough time, Jake, to go around. All of us want more of it. The conscious experience. Be careful what you wish for.
What could possibly go wrong. Are we talking about reinventing the wheel. Are we talking about breakfast for kids. Yes. Yes. Yes. How can you take food out of the mouths of impoverished children to feed the rich would make Karl Marx roll his eyes to the sky. He predicted all of this. His writing became relevant with the publication of Das Kapital. Marx's work in economics has had a strong influence on modern heterodox theories of labour and capital. He is often cited as one of the principal architects of modern sociology. Jake Sullivan seemingly would have no connection to Marx. Yet both men were following and attempting (softly) to change not just procedure, but economics on a global scale. How do you make systems that work. For everyone. Conflict is the last man standing.
I am a communist. I like the sense of distance here in terms of stepping back, carefully. The background of the piece is telling me to be very wary because instability is unpredictability. The human brain is a predictability machine. It assesses risk. Here's one: I predict summer. The prediction risk is low. Summer usually pulls its slow length along. Prediction #2. Summer will burn. The heat will exacerbate heat for the sake of heat. I lied. There are more predictions. #3.) Something bad will happen. This is a big safe bet. No one knows what the bad thing will be. But we all know who we fully intend to blame. This year alone, I have literally faced hurricanes and big forest fires. It's not coming for you. It has you. Just look at the politics after any disaster. I am sick and tired of it. Something bad has happened, and it's called the Deviant. Deviants deviate. It's that simple. Prediction #4. Predictions matter. When we already know what we have just gone through, we can assume some predictability that it will happen again unless you start building real infrastructure. Real infrastructure means trust. We have all lost trust in America. It's totally corrupted and run by criminals. America is an idea. When we substitute ideas for courts, the idea of a republic, where other humans, other than yourself, vote on the issues brought before them. Like income distribution. I am only a communist in the sense of common decency serving as a venue for what is fair and equal.
I am a communist. I feel disoriented reading this. I was not educated at Harvard. I was educated in a grey depressed factory rust-town where the principal would shave your head if your hair touched your ears. That was the focus of education. Your hair and what kind of knife you carried. There is no such thing as an ivory tower or city on a hill. We were groomed for the factory rats. Harvard grads served as mostly second lieutenants in Vietnam. They were the managers. The grunt had a gun. The Harvard graduate had a helicopter. More grunts were killed than graduates.
The university has made a little show of announcing that students whose families make up to $200,000 won’t pay tuition. They've aimed at making Harvard more affordable, especially for middle income students. The goal is to make Harvard affordable. “Putting Harvard within financial reach for more individuals widens the array of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that all of our students encounter, fostering their intellectual and personal growth,” Harvard University President Alan Garber made the point that: “By bringing people of outstanding promise together to learn with and from one another, we truly realize the tremendous potential of the University.”
It's a little late. No one from my school even contemplated Harvard. It sounded like a fish market. Where is this place. Can you bring hookers on campus. The deviant wants to kick education into the gulag. Deviant University was closed. But we will end up with a lot of it because gunk sticks to the wall. It's coming for Harvard, too.
I am kinda stunned. For the last ten years, I have been writing a book about how do homo sapiens build back an entire culture. A bit dystopian, but grounded in reality. Everyone leaves their bunkers at the same time. I am afraid of Americans. I am terrified by Americans. You cannot trust an American. I built a bunker so I could describe it in the book. Just last week, there were 73 fires that formed a ring around our Appalachian village. Rain put out the fires. But my air filters didn't work properly, and although this was an experiment, smoke filled the bunker itself. I learned a big lesson. It can all fall apart in one second. When Hurricane Helene hit as a level five, the gigantic wall of water that hit us filled the bunker with water in under five minutes. Fire. Rain. Wind. Smoke. Flooding. The roads were down. Huge holes in the pavement. Cars going nowhere. You could not get out. Unless you had a dirt bike. I call the book Dirt Bike Town, and it's about a road trip that goes from bunker to bunker in a country that has been devastated. I have seen many bunkers. Including one that was built inside an ICBM missile silo. There is no romanticism going on here. ICBM missile silos leak water like faucets. That's a lake at the bottom of a very deep and very dark hole. From what I have seen, there are always problems that are difficult to predict. The idea that you will avoid any number of crises by digging a hole to only emerge -- exactly when. The pipe dream is an illusion.
I am a communist. I predict a world-wide depression that rocks the body politik. Politicians and religious leaders will call for war after war. We will revert back to the paradigms of the city-state. That themselves carve geo-politikal landscapes as territory that gets divided by families and tribes. Some will be narco-states. Reflecting the leadership of complete criminality. In order for your children to survive, your kids will need to become criminals. You will all kiss the ring. You have allowed one deviant, psychotic to dismantle the very notions of why you have a government at all. Whatever the venue turns out to be, government will continue to have one mission that supersedes all others. The basic function of where to put the dead. There will be a lot of graveyards. Diseases like cholera (there will be no one employed to fix water systems) will find our infrastructure to be inviting. We have a romantic hollywood notion of what dystopia looks like. Americans like clean clothes. Forget it. You clothes will be rags and you can't buy soap. There will be no money to fix roads. When trucking begins to disappear so will we. The aristocracy could not exist without all the worker bees. Most rich people think most everyone else wants their money and is cheating or robbing them. They Are Stealing And Robbing Us. They mean the Little People. When they punish us, we'll have to steal and rob more of them. Your caste and class systems are beneath contempt. He's coming for you, too.
I am a communist. I note that short term pain is code for something is going to be removed. For the disabled, it will mean food. It will mean medications. I know that is not what you want to hear. But the measuring itself is an institution of massive variables. I notice that there are many children playing in the hurricane rubble here in Appalachia. It was odd. No Head Start. Now, there's a great way to find and keep a job. Let's hope it's a safe rubble. Let's hope it will be a sane economic rubble when all the suits are done with their feeding frenzies. No Head Start means no food. Now, sit down with your 4-year-old, and you are going to tell them the story of how tariffs and bankruptcy after bankruptcy are two peas in a corporate pod. Money can be spread around in many ways such as indentured servitude and the whip. I mean, workers and supply and demand. Has any economist in the entire world ever even been in a slaughterhouse. How do you measure morality in a culture, anyway. You don't. You explain to the masses through bullhorns in helicopters that it's all for our own good. All you need to do is work harder. All you need to do is work faster. Who are these guys who think parenting and three jobs in the family is a game of economic musical chairs. It's always caste and class. Work harder with less. I am looking out of my little writing window, and those kids are out there in the incomprehensible rubble the adult world has made of things.
I am a communist. The deviant is the deviant because the law does not mean him. Or his vast army of toadies. The deviant deviates from the processes through which people are assigned a social identity as deviants by other homo sapiens. The deviant does scare me. There is one thing the deviant, himself, is fearful of: Words. He has no command of words. He wants you to believe two things: #1.) He is actually god, and god does not want us to have heath care, cars, speech, food, courts, education, rights, planes, or say bad words about Vladimir. Has anyone noticed that people are disappearing. They are simply not showing up. What happened. Do you lock your doors at night. Do you think a locked door is going to save you. You have just won a one-way ticket to Beautiful El Salvador. Americans do not believe that the deviant is coming for them. To kill you. To kill me. To kill your children. To kill my children. To just kill, kill, kill. NYT will push me into the street again for articulating reality. Like I care. Your deviant is not my deviant. I suppose the little people are supposed to stand by silently as the deviant kills us. Call it the wrath of God. Or. Get on the fucking plane. -- tim barrus
I am a communist. It all begins with razor wire placed around the perimeter of what they call a "Health Center." I wrote the book: Genocide. What I see is a build up to the main event. I am so happy face that the government has decided we could all go to Health Centers to be healthy. The media cannot find this story. Give it up. As a kid, we learned quickly how to scale a fence. Any fence. The people in this writer's group have great ideas. You are all expert at articulating the issues. But you do not get that it is too late because you cannot face the reality of death. You are looking at how to build a culture from the ground up, a ground that is currently smoking with battlefield toxicity. This is not a culture war. It's war.
But we need leadership. Get over it. None of you agree on what to do about it. We have writers who see the minutiae as symbolism. You are right to do that. But you are grasping at What Will He Do Next. You are ruminating. The problem is that you are ruminating in print which is not exactly transparent. It just goes round and round. I find that when homo sapiens do that, you fall through the ice you've been skating on. I am terrified. You do not agree with this. But I know for a fact, he is coming to kill us. The military will not say no. I am begging you, please, ask them. I take photographs. I never write about how I actually feel and am confronted with. Because it's dangerous. Imagine: Health Centers surrounded by razor wire. Why does a health center need quard towers. Arbeit macht frei. -- tim barrus
