5:2:22

"Imperialism never dies. It is timeless.

Despite endless media/intelligence anti-Russian propaganda 'a vast tapestry of lies,' to use Harold Pinter’s phrase – many fine writers have provided the historical details to confirm the truth that the U.S. has purposely provoked the Russian war in Ukraine by its actions there and throughout Eastern Europe, which the mainstream media avoid completely. This U.S. aggressive history against Russia is part of a much larger history of imperial hubris extending back to the 19th century. I will therefore here follow Thoreau’s advice – 'If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?' – since how many times do people need to hear lies such as 'Iraq has weapons of mass destruction' in order to justify wars of aggression around the world. The historical facts are very clear, but facts and history don’t seem to matter to many people. Pinter again, in his Nobel Address, bluntly told the truth about the U.S.’s history of systematic and remorseless war crimes: 'Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.' Which is still the case.

So time is my focus, for the last days have arrived unless there occurs a radical awakening to the obvious truth that the U.S. government is pushing the world to the brink of disaster in full awareness of the consequences. Its actions are insane, yet insanity has become the norm. Insane leaders and a catatonic, hypnotized public lead to disaster.

The last few years of the Covid-19 propaganda have served to further distort people’s sense of time, a distortion years in the making through the introduction of digital technology with its accompanying numerical time clicks and its severing of our natural sense of time that is tied to the rising and falling of the tides and the turning of the days and seasons, a feeling that is being lost. Such felt sense of time’s texture could be slow or faster, but it had limits. We now live in a world without limits, which, as the ancient Greeks knew, demands payback."

-Edward Curtin, "It's About Time"

Much of my chronically forthcoming book on time, Time Tells (delayed for various reasons and finally coming out this fall), is about what Curtin laments in his post. The loss of time, the predatory rule of digital law, the loss of a meaningful lived experience. "This arrangement has been called civilization." Civilization as cover up. This reminds me, again, of My April 11 post--art as cover up. Culture as psyop. What does it mean for a book to come out when the world as we know it is ending--or, god willing (if we really want to live, and be free), just beginning for the first time? People mistake these types of hard questions for cynicism, doom and gloom, but it is the opposite. Life has always been my dream. I am not nor have I ever been a careerist.

Matt Taibbi:

"Enjoy the ride, you knuckleheads. You built this roller coaster."