Good morning, friend, how are you today? All well? I am good. I maxed on out on cash in No Man’s Sky. I didn’t know you could do that. But apparently you can only have 4.2 billion units and then it just… stops. I had a lovely delivery of 1.2 billion units worth of stasis devices to sell, and I sold them and I was so excited to see my net worth increase by 25% and more than one billion units but… I just didn’t get any money for them. The marketplace still took them, I just didn’t get paid. So I went to the space station and spent 2 billion units upgrading every storage space on my awesome S-class guppy-like space ship, and then thought “Cool. Now I am not maximumly wealthy. I will return to work and strive to make four point two billion units again.” And then I just… went back to work. This is now my official platform for my campaign. Americans can max out at four point two billion dollars. After that, all the money you make is taxed at 100%. Maybe, like, 105% just to be safe. You can spend your money, then make more again to get back up to $4.2 billion, but after that, no more money for you. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Mimi Parker from Low has ovarian cancer and they had to cancel their European tour to accommodate a more intensive treastment regemin for her and I hope, hope, hope that Mimi is okay, Mimi comes out of this okay. I cannot imagine a world where I couldn’t see Low live and I stuopidly skipped the last tour. I have been seeing Low live for almost my entire adult life. It’s… a part of me, really. Mimi is awesome and I want her to be happy and healthy. The world is a better lace with Mimi Parker in it.
Lotta people getting in touch yesterday agreeing with me about the Westworld finale, that was very validating, thank you. I am super bummed because this finale has ruined my momentum and re-watching the whole series, I’m on Episode 8 of Season 2 and I want to at least clarify my memory about all this sublime nonsense but I’ve not gotten there yet, but that finale was so disappointing I don’t know if I can drag myself over the finish line. But than you for your emails and texts on this subject.
Today are the primaries in Wyoming and Alaska. Poor Liz Cheney is probably going to lose today, but what are you going to do. Thank you for your service, it is heartening there’s a single person in DC who, you know, votes their conscience, even if it gets them kicked out, and even if their politics don’t necessarily align with y9ours, to say the least. The Alaska primary is interesting because Alaska has ranked choice voting. The Democrat should at least get through a couple rounds but ultimately is probably going to lose to either Sarah Palin, god help us, or Nick Begich III, whose dad had the seat before Don Young got it. His dad died in that most Alaskan way, in a plane crash with the US House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. Well, I suppose that last part isn’t very Alaskan. But the plane crash is. There are, not surprisingly, conspiracy theories that the crash was the work of J Edgar Hoover. Wouldn’t shock me. That guy was a lunatic. Man. You want to see the fiction of America’s democracy laid bare, read a biography of J Edgar Hoover. A holy terror at the heart of American government for 40 years about which no president could do a thing. More depressingly, each and every president, rather than exicising the cancer, decided they could use Hoover to their ends, having him wiretap and blackmail their oppomnents, thus being roped in and compromised. Every president!
I am now about halfway through Nixonland, so 3/8ths of the way through Rick Perlstein’s 4-volume history of conservatism. If there is one chief takeaway from these books, it’s that America has always been nutso. Trump was nothing new. Or, rather, a lot of it wasn’t new. His utter incompetence and complete lack of a pretense to actually governing were sort of new. Ish. And there are some new things, in the world — most notably school shootings. But so much of what we think is new has been the American way forever. Every president was corrupt! Every president committed tons of crimes! JFK? Tons of crimes. LBJ! Crimes all day! Nixon, well, we all know about that. Crimes crimes crimes. But beyond that, all this talk of civil war with the Trump search warrant. Small potatoes. The civil war vibes of the 60’s and 70’s were out of control. There was a single month in 1969 where there were twenty bombings in New York. There were Portland BLM-level riots in dozens of American cities, with much more carnage. A riot in Newark lead to the police indiscriminately killing more than sixty people.
Millions — millions! — of Americans did a nationwide work stoppage. A thing I never knew about. All these libs these days calling for nationwide strikes, I thought they were living in a fantasy. But we did one! In 1969! It was amazing! Nixon committed crime after crime trying to stop it, but he failed. It was a massive success.
Then Nixon did his “silent majority” speech and support for the Vietnam war went up more than twenty points.
Austin mass shooting. Riots at the 1968 convention. More than a hundred thousand people marched to the Pengagon, right up to it! Abby Hoffman tried to levitate it. There was another anti-war march in DC, hundreds of thousands of people, Coretta Scott King, spoke, the major networks didn’t even cover it, at all, because Nixon whined that they weren’t being fair to him boo hoo. So they just.. ignored it.
Nixon nominated two straight segregationist racists — corrupt ones to boot! — to the supreme court. I guess that’s one difference from today: the senate did its job and rejected them both.
I haven’t even gotten to Kent State yet.
Oh Kissenger and Nixon sabotaged the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam war, for months, while LBJ was president, because if LBJ achieved peace Nixon was convinced he’d lose. Thousands of dead on their hands. No one learned about this till the 21st century. That’s a thing that I think people don’t factor in when they remember the sixties — so much of the horror, so many of the crimes, they were unreported at the time. No one knew about Newark, no one knew about Paris, no one knew about massive marches in dozens of cities. They only knew about the riots, and then Watergate, a fluke only in that it was the one time Nixon finally got caught.
Maybe that’s the difference. Trump was such a neophyte baffoon, and our press really is far, far more tenacious, that he couldn’t get away with things in the same way. I mean, I’m sure in twenty, thirty years, we’ll learn new horrors about the Trump adminstration, but not in the same way that bad shit about Nixon, LBJ, Reagan, is still coming out.
Jane is getting very good at her scooter. She is still scared to go down hills fast, thankfully, but she’s getting pretty good! We tried to get her into it too early but now she seems primed for it, that is nice. Yesterday morning she sat next to me and made charts on the computer in Pages.app and then insisted we “do words” together, where I type everything we say.
"Hi Jane!" Daddy said.
"I am making a chart right now!" Jane said, looking at her chart on her computer. "hee hee huh huh huh. My outfit looks so cute."
"Did you have fun at the fairy party yesterday?"
"Yeaaaahhh! Heh heh heh. I DID have fun at the fairy party." Jane answered. Then she squeezed her hands together and then laughed some more "heh heh huh huh hee hee huh."
"Are you excited to see mommy in fifteen minutes?"
"Yeeaaaaahhhh! Huh huh huh huh heh heh heh Did you make a typo? Did you make a typo?"
"I DID make a typo," Daddy said.
Jane is very obsessed with typos. I make a lot of typos. I am no court stenographer, I’ll tell you that much.
All right a shoegaze playlist for you today. Couple oldies — one of my favorite BJM songs from my favorite BJM album, and a cut by Black Hearted Brother, a criminally underrated album from Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Marc Van Hoen of Seefeel that came out in 2013. It was Neil’s return to form on the shoegaze front, and is just fantastic. Unfortunately for Black Hearted Brother, but fortunately for the rest of us, Slowdive reunited just months after this album came out, and everyone forgot about it or didn’t notice it, but I still love that record so much. Also some oldies (ish) from Ringo Deathstarr, Majesty Crush and Lush.
Whoops I made at typo on the playlist date! Forgive me.