it's such a lovely notion.  and yet i have to ask

(any uppity primates

i happen to come across)

why must they go on telling themselves

(in the blessed blink of fleetly passing

narrative declarative years)

that they own these

astonishing spaces

they settle in,

exclusively?

shant they ever wonder whether his feet were cold?

"She asks me to kill the spider.
Instead, I get the most
peaceful weapons I can find.
I take a cup and a napkin.
I catch the spider, put it outside
and allow it to walk away.
If I am ever caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time, just being alive
and not bothering anyone,
I hope I am greeted
with the same kind
of mercy."

― Rudy Francisco, Helium

you know your conscious conscience isn't wiggling all its cylinders when...

so today Alfonso and i have something special we'd like to share. sort of an inspired adding thereupon; a flaring sharing, a ghosted hosting, a toasting roasted post.  and though we'd never use the term "empire simp" to describe our protractedly distracted brethren marinating their entire lives in the corrupting influence of the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised, on every framed box and weaned screen the empire hands out, nevertheless we simply couldn't help but be inspired, as is our curious wont, by our down under sister's latest piece.  so we went and made our very own list of our top thirteen bestest favourites, sprouted from "30 Signs You Might Be An Empire Simp," sort of a self help checklist for the faith based followers of domination addiction's we-own-the-world-and-make-up-the-rules-everyone-else-has-to-follow super-power affliction (who i believe are mostly still calling themselves "Democrats," these archly conformist days, despite all the evidence to the cognitive dissonance curdling contrary.)

well, that's enough ado then.

here we go...

you know your conscious conscience

isn't wiggling all its cylinders

when...

uno) you’ve ever believed for even a single second that the US government gives a fuck about Muslims in China.

dos) you understand the last time there was an actual foreign military threat near what the US considers to be its "borders," it responded so aggressively it almost ended the world.  and yet you seem to expect Russia and China to meekly accept the relentless heaping of seamlessly teeming rampant military threats all along their borders.

tres) you think being anti-war means putting a Ukraine flag in your Twitter bio (whatever that is.)

cuatro) you think Vlad the Putin, (who stays up at night hating "us" for our alleged "freedom") stepped in to stop the ongoing (studiously ignored by the media, fascist) murder of the Russian speaking populace of those independently minded sections of Ukraine who refused to go along with the Victoria Nuland concocted (we have it on tape) coup that stole democracy from Ukraine back in 2014 (thus, by the by, handsomely enriching the unbridled war monger puppet's son, which to help the imaginary "Democrats" win their imaginary election the fixing of agenda called "the news" willfully refused to report) because he is obtusely evil and hates this thing called freedom (and, like all cartoon Hitlers, wants to take over OUR world,) and the US has been pouring weapons in this whole entire time (managing, win-win, to starve its social uplift) because it loves Ukrainians (even though its ceaseless provocations are sacrificing them in droves - and even though it's henchmen have now taken to complaining those postcard minions are too "casualty averse,") and also, of course, because it wants to protect what its childishly simplistic outrageously insulting soulless zombie operatives (masquerading as diplomats) so arrogantly bandy about as "exceptional" and exemplary "freedom and democracy."

cinco) you can listen to the unhinged puppet's Blinken Nod talk without wanting to throw trash at his head.

seis) you think the US also loves Australians, and that's why it's filling the outback with war machinery as it spares no expanse to ramp up its next sacrificial theatre.

siete) you refer to the NATO thugs as a “defensive alliance,” even though, entirely unprovoked (except for the interests of British oil and French domination,) they destroyed the most prosperous nation in Africa, to stop it from launching a new African currency that would have freed Northwest Africa from the French purse stringed yoke, allowing its curried extremists to descend Libya into an open slave market, (where some of the formerly most liberated women in the Arab World, who used to get free college and health care, now can't leave their houses uncovered,) and spewing the gun control toting, stability enfabled mislabelled Democrat's bristling pimped weapons all across the North African Sahel, raking a terror free zone into a colonially "protected" shrapnel exploding hell on earth.  (and you also manage to overlook the the-world-is-our-global-battlefield mafioso irony of calling it "The North Atlantic Treaty Organization" even though its vicious, bullying sights are now set on China.)

ocho) you’re more interested in Trump’s mugshot than the western-backed atrocities in Yemen, or, say, the starvation sanctions wracking Syria (which contemptuous "freedom's" uninvited rogue invaders continue to steal oil from, bloodied hand over high-tech fist.)  i could fill a whole page with this one, for the progressively militarist CIA-embedded brokered donkeys' Not Trump puppet has kept all his consistently precedented predecessor's illegal sanctions in place, on at least 30 nations.  this new form of colonial piracy is just as calamitous as outright war, in which, for example, the bank accounts of poor Afghans have all been stolen as a weird kind of revenge, to punish them, i suppose, for not succumbing to the "freedom" fiefdom's brutal sway.

nueve) you find protests (however concocted) in places like Iran, Venezuela or Cuba infinitely more interesting than protests in places like France, Haiti or Chile.  and when the CIA unleashed the very same extremist Uyghur terrorists it had trained up in its assault on Syria (in a failed attempt to topple one of the seven governments slated for regime change prior to 9-11, per the letter revealed by a US general on the air) back into Xinjiang, smack dab in the middle of the new silk road the capital of capital (given their cringing fear of honest competition) was trying to subvert, and they promptly started blowing up police stations and murdering people, and the Chinese government decided to try to "re-educate" them, and the "liberal" press chimed in with their conservative mirror images, bleating about totalitarian governments, it never once occurred to you that maybe, just perhaps, the perpetrators of such appalling wounds might really not be entitled to an opinion about how their once and future would be victims choose to deal with the terror flung their way.

diez) you oppose guns except when they’re being used to kill foreigners overseas.  (now that that job has already been accomplished satisfactorily here, thanks to the American Revolution, which actually commenced when the British outlawed slavery and forbade any further Westward expansion; the resulting revolutionary freedom to kill eventually managing to wipe out enough language families and cultures to hide an unseemly genocide under the proudly independent "protection" racketed patriot bracketed presumptuous and smug narrative shuffling rug of "the homeland.")

once) you’ve ever accused anyone who criticizes US foreign policy of being a Russian or Chinese stooge.  (though i do get how it's possible to confuse an insistent focus on honesty with being "unAmerican.")

doce) you’ve ever accused someone who criticizes Israel of being an anti-Semite.  (all this stoked focus on the Nazis' atrocities from eighty years back, and here we have a modern day pure race brutalising the "other" which "freedom's" "representatives" trip over themselves to support.)

and, well in time for Hallowe'en (which always lives in our hearts,)

good old number thirteen (Alfonso's absolute favourite)...

trece) you think it’s okay for the US, in either its blue or red guise (the only options, naturally, it would ever allow you to redundantly "vote" for) to keep waging wars, destroying nations, starving civilian populations with economic sanctions, instigating proxy wars, arming neo-Nazis and violent jihadists, staging coups

and persecuting journalists, because if it doesn’t do those things the world might

be taken over by evil tyrants.

- a wisened mouse and the wily elf, himself (decorating a down under sister's blister.)

well, that's the lot.  thanks for stopping by.

[inspired by Caitlin Johnstone's "30 Signs You Might Be An Empire Simp"]:

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/30-signs-you-might-be...

[ p.s. the visual aids are, ever so obviously, by the wondrous Mister Fish.]

"Obliterates the Police Narrative' said the headline. in the autopsy released, evidence of Little Turtle's execution is "overwhelming." so my starry eyed brother Tortuguita "never fired a weapon." those 57 bullets riddling that impossibly slender body were NEVER fired in "self-defense," as claimed by the police,
those profit ridden, "defense" bidden,
"exceptional" "upholders" of "law."

and so, (reiterates a tattered heart)...

just one more sterling example
of
that mainstream gleamed,

pridefully rampant,
(reflection undampened)

"right" & "wrong" seamed,

heedless disinclination
to
own up to our own.

beyond Covenant School. beyond assault weapons. beyond politics.  there’s a deep interplay with hell in the American social structure.  gun control, however sensible and sane, WON'T transcend it.  mass murder emerges from an unexamined, unaddressed dark spot in the collective human consciousness.  it can be described in one word: DEHUMANISATION.

not just a loner’s psychological flaw: but the denial of humanity (partial, any and all) to chosen "others." 

projection's fell phenomenon embedded in the social norm.

we have enemies.  we need them.  we kill them.

we go to war.

“wearing camouflage pants, a black vest and a backward red baseball cap, the assailant walks through rooms and hallways with a weapon drawn.”

the killer, whatever his specific “motive,” was playing war.  he had, in his mind and heart, dehumanised the occupants of Covenant School. this is the game...

the nation hooded one,

“USA! USA!”

played every day.

(why, say, can you hear

through our bomb bursted air

the national anthem fight song?

"glory hallelujah"

telling us "our god"

smote the "sinners"?)

*

mass shootings?  they’re everywhere.

when the "good guys with guns"

(that's "us" of course)

wage war,

noncombatants fall.

what could be simpler?

they die you see,

all those "bad" guys

laid out for us by Hollywood,

the Russians and Orcs and Klingons,

"savages" and "Injuns,"

"terrorists" and Muslims,

the yellow peril of slant-eyed Chinese....

and, say,

a bunch of nine-year-old children,

magically morphed into collateral damage.

*

we make this world ourselves,

you and me,

every time we follow
that
bouncing ball

(swaying into sprawl

domination affliction's
conflicted
pall);

the starless midnight

might made "right"

"siding"
a
memory holed

freedom to murder doled

exclusively souled

entirely imagined "history."

*

we make this world ourselves,
you see,

each time we close
our eyes

to proudly sing

'tis of "we"

(on our "inherited"
stolen "homelands"
of
Hawai'i,
Northern Mexico,
Puerto Rico,
Turtle Island,
and
Guam)

from see to seized sea...

(noosed around China)

eyeless teamed "Americans"

"we" as far
as
"we" can see;

crowned in "good"

just like our parents

taught us to be.

*

we make this world ourselves,

(all of "us,"

you see)

whenever we consent

to the loss
of
our
humanity.

*

- (a poem paraphrase

knitted from the writings of)

Robert C. Koehler

(and the once and future sensibilities

mused in an elf, himself )

unholy daze (an observance)

nigh on twenty years ago, the capital of capital's "freedom" fiefdom

unleashed an unlawful aggression avalanche

in a cruel and unprovoked war-for-profit

against the human beings in Iraq.

and still, rogue "democracy's"

distracted and distressed,

memory hole digressed,

"self" obsessed,

denial rivalled,

tribal bibled

red & blue enablers

crown thine

arrogant and unrepentant

international crime ridden

SuperPower addicted

domination afflicted

profit syphoned

nation hooded

warfare sanctioned

(election immune)

rampant and relentless

cult of control

enfolded

predilections "good."

hundreds of thousands dead,

some two million disabled,

nine million displaced,

countless people tortured,

traumatized,

or otherwise harmed

in ways unseen,

environmental devastation,

thievery, occupation,

and embrace of torture as policy

in a whole cloth pride plied

"exceptional" belied

War FOR and OF Terror;

an entire generation raised solely in only war.

(and thanks to punishing

the brave defenders of Fallujah

with depleted uranium,

a greater proportion

of birth defects seeded

in spreading freedom's

forsaken wake

than the lesser degeneration

of we-make-the-"rules based" disorder

managed to plant

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

combined.)

*

do you honestly believe the stolen "homeland" has values?

(we could grade on a curve, say,

obviously leaving out

the capacity for loving

others as ourselves...)

*

why look, that fellow,

second from the right

in an Abu Ghraib

lineup.

he's had a recent haircut,

i expect.

but,

saints preserve us,

isn't he

the

Son of Man?

*

- Evan Hawthorn, a day after the ides of March, twenty years on

seriously, Dmitry

so i won't wish me' darlin' peeps a "happy new year," in as much as those of you who know me know, it's not in my druthers to willfully add to the mined and pummelled (in two apparently competing flavours,) funhouse funnelled, sugar coated simmering of bloated delusion the mainstream boasts of soaking its sorted and toasted faith based followers in, and, obviously,

time itself being based on narrative illusion,
no arbitrarily declarative "year"
could possibly be "new."

but i did want to go and share this fabulously optimistic pithy remark i picked up from one of my frowned upon, unAmerican sources, wherein the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council under that ultimate in cartoonish evil's unpeopled steeples,

who haven't yet accepted that resistance is futile,

bizarrely objecting to base reviling's piling
weapons on their borders year after year,
insulting them at every opportunity,
religiously refusing to engage in diplomacy,
and zealously fomenting vicious coups
amoungst their nearest neighbours,

having (naturally enough) therefore
been summarily reduced
by our dictated press
in America's skewed dearth
of reality banality

from a hundred and forty four

million living and breathing human beings
into
a single demonised super villain
who lays awake at night
hating us for our freedom​™,

Dmitry Medvedev, (as i was saying before i musingly digressed)

observed just yesterday that ​for Russia,
there will be no restoration
of normal relations with the West
for years or even decades to come:

"from now on we will do without them until a new generation of sensible politicians comes to power there​."

seriously, Dmitry,
do you honestly expect

a SENSIBLE crop to sprout

in the domination addicted,
respect for others interdicted,

moral compass smashed,
humanitied connection
relentlessly dashed,

memory hole pocked,
the very notion
of
responsibility mocked,

Hollywood crowned thy good
and
camel stye stocked,

unprofitable progress
dependably blocked,

imaginary sky god
belligerence blessed
and
audience identification
puppetry caressed
with
a self-focused zeitgeist that has to be best,

utterly reflectionless West?

- Evan Hawthorn,


(on the very latest "first day" he's happened thus far to come upon.)

well, judging from this photograph, i expect it must be just about time for the incorporated

profits funding democracy's™ "representative" senate to send another unanimous love letter

to "our very special friends" at new normal apartheid's occupation central.

ain't it wondrous to have the freedom to root for whichever bystanders,

(like say, obviously, the Ukrainian and Israeli ones)
nation hooded domination addiction's election immune "interests"
actually count as people?

* [explanatory note: in case you're wondering, the photograph shows yet another injured Palestinian child being carried to a hospital following an Israeli air strike on Gaza City.   the Israeli government (seriously, i'm not kidding you) actually refers to this as "mowing the lawn."

- Alfonso the Mouse (who ever so loves giving credit where it's due. 🐁)] *