Monthly Archives: June 2020

Summers in Anhedonia are so goddamn hot, dear reader…it’s ridiculous.  And people just walk around acting like nothing’s wrong.  It’s perfectly obvious nothing is supposed to actually live here.  Maybe the spiders and scorpions and buzzards and shit, but intelligent life?  Fuck no.  Yet here we are.
I got a lot of words down, in spite of the atmospheric fires outside.  It’s funny…other writers and artists I know who live in other parts of the world where there are actually seasons, they all disappear into their studios at the beginning of November and sometime near the end of April they emerge with a new book or album or whatever.  Exact opposite here.  I’m not going outside again until Halloween.  It would be nice to be waving a new book around when that happens.

N.P.: “The Sea King” – Żywiołak

I’ve heard quite a bit about my recent posts labeling the Black Lives Matter organization as dangerously hypocritical and egregiously fraudulent and serving only to assuage the self-loathing of Guilty White Liberals while not only doing nothing to actually preserve or improve black lives, but actually doing the community a shameful disservice, in some cases actually costing black lives.  Most of the feedback has been supportive, sometimes asking for further development or clarification, which I’ve been happy to provide.  There were some negative voices and those were completely emotionally driven, devoid of any coherent rationale, rhetorically childish, and composed entirely of ad hominem attacks demanding apologies and threatening nebulous, often patently imaginary reprisals.   It was all rather amusing.
Anyway, I think I came up with the best way to effectively address everyone involved.  I propose a simple exercise.  I’ll include gaudy screenshots to “show my work” and so literally anybody will be able to follow along.  Ready?  Okay.
First, head over to blacklivesmatter.com, the official website of the BLM organization.
Then scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the “Donate “button.  Before clicking on it, you should know that once you do, you will no longer be on blacklivesmatter.com.  You will be sent to a totally different website.  Any ethical website knows to notify the user when sending them to another website and they do so via a box that requires your clicking consent.  You will receive no such notification here.
So clicking on the “Donate” button appears to open the BLM donations page, but, as mentioned supra, if you take a look at the URL, you are no longer even on the BLM website, but now on something called actblue.com.  But never mind that.  That’s not important.  What’s important is that you see that if you donate money, they pledge to “end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people [sic], and end white supremacy forever.”  Noble goals all.  Head to the bottom of the page.
At the bottom of the page, there are several suggestions for donation amounts, or, of course, you can enter your own amount.  If you care to make a donation, by all means do so.  I know several of you already have.  Picking an amount and clicking the “Continue” button takes you to the transaction page where you enter your card number and all the details.  But if you continue to the bottom of this page without donating, you get to a section called “Contribution rules.”  This contains information that all PACs are legally required to display, namely how to access a copy of their latest financial report, which here you are given a phone number and email address to deal with.  Most large charities choose to make their latest financial report (along with all previous financial reports) its own easily accessible page (because if someone who is considering making a donation wants to see exactly where their money will be going before donating (due diligence), it’s a good idea to make that information readily available)).
You can call or email to request that a copy be sent to you, but since this information is required to be public, there are several websites that publish various PACs’ financial information.  I picked opensecrets.org.  So if you look up actblue, you get a result offering you their financial information for the 2020 election cycle.  Brilliant.  So to find out how the money is spent, click on “Recipients.”
You may have to scroll down a bit, but you’ll get to Top Vendors/Recipients.  This is how the money donated to actblue is currently being spent.  Behold.
Well, shit.  Black lives seem to be a bit underrepresented in the Top Ten.  So who all’s here?   There’s Bernie (not black) and Biden (not black)…Liz (not black) and Pete (not black) and Amy K.(not black).  Andrew Yang (not black) got a little love.  Even Amy McGrath’s senatorial campaign got paid.  But this is BLM money.  If it’s just going to finance various democratic presidential campaigns, fine, but where the hell is Cory?  Where’s Kamala?  Just about everybody else is there…they got a Taiwanese guy, and a Native American lady.  It’s almost as if they intentionally left the black candidates out of the Top Ten.  That’s just not subtle at all.  They’re not even pretending.  At what point on this list do black lives start to matter?  Sure as hell not in the Top Ten.  Maybe its after the first…how much money is that…hold on…sorry, I’m terrible at math…let’s see…carry the 7…okay, so black lives matter, just at some point after the first $698,721,410 has been spent.
So there are two possibilities.  Either people who intend to donate to BLM have no idea this is what’s going on and are being misled and defrauded into donating to a lot of non-black candidates and entities, or people do know that this is where the money’s going, and rather than donating directly to the Biden campaign as they were going to do, they make the same donation through BLM, thus getting to virtue signal to all their GWL friends about how woke they are while knowing their money is still going to the same non-black cause or candidate they were going to give to anyway.
Again, this is blatant symbolism over substance.  The Message: I gave money to Black Lives Matter.  The Actual Really Real World Reality: You just donated to some white dude’s presidential campaign.  This is harmful because this entire transaction has taken place with the donor walking away feeling as if he has actually made a difference, but now that money that could have been well used by any of the myriad legitimate charitable organizations that have long track records of direct help and measurable benefit to the black community will, once again,  get nothing.
N.P.: “Dein Gott” – Stahlmann

The good news is I slept my ass off last night.  And this morning.  It was glorious.  The bad news is the day got away from me and I’ve been behind schedule for most of it.  And that condition has only gotten worse as the day has worn on and I’ve failed to catch up.  Alas.  Forsooth.  Et cetera.

N.P.: “The Great Deceiver – Shitmix 2007” – Mortiis

I was up all night writing, dear reader.  Literally…I watched the sun rise.  I was reminded of how disgusting sunrises are when you’ve been up all night.  Anyway, I’m beyond exhausted and must now collapse.

N.P.: “Indigo Eyes” – Peter Murphy

The single biggest problem with the Black Lives Matter organization is not its blatant hypocrisy (though that is rife).  Like all contemporary mob movements, it’s emphasis is entirely on symbolic efforts rather than any actual, helpful change.  There is, of course, a reason for this: it’s easy to get Guilty White Liberals to spend their entire day making empty gestures…these gestures cost nothing in either money or time, but make the GWL a chance to be seen “fighting for the cause.”  Whether its toppling statues, burning buildings, giving copious donations to BLM, or putting stupid black squares on one’s social media pages…all of these do exactly nothing to actually address any issue of racial inequity, but it sure makes the GWLs feel good about themselves, and it goes miles to assuage their irrational and misplaced guilt.  I have been lectured by I can’t tell you how many highly educated GWLs about “white privilege,” and yet, to a person, when asked if at any point in their own academic career, did they offer their place in their cohort and/or their tuition to a black person, the answer is no…in fact it has, on occasion, been, “Well, no…of course not.”  if pressed on the issue, the explanation is typically some rather pathetic rational involving the GWL getting a degree will improve their societal position and thus enable them to help facilitate societal change more effectively, or some similar drivel.  Which, is, of course, bullshit of the rankest vintage.  What they are saying is, “It is absurd to think that I would suddenly abandon my plans to get through post-graduate school and just give away the $250,000 i took out in student loans to someone else.”  And they are right…it would be absurd.  These people complain daily about massive student loan debt, and that’s what their paying for their own education.  It is unimaginable that they would spend the rest of their professional lives working menial jobs to pay off someone else’s quarter of a million dollar student loan, no matter what color they are.   So the pattern quickly emerges: empty gestures made very publicly that benefit no one but the guilt-ridden psyche of the person making the gesture, while doing nothing in the way of real, meaningful, significant change.
The real danger from this hypocrisy is that the empty gestures make the GWLs feel as if they have done their part, and this feeling is validated by other GWLs and the BLM organization as well.  And the entire “movement” will soon fizzle out, and the GWLs, having satisfactorily assuaged their guilt after a couple of weeks of black squares on their social media and maybe a sizable and very public donation to BLM, will go back to their little suburban lives until the next cause to which they can pay pointless lip service to comes along.  And not only will the actual black lives that rhetorically matter will, in actuality will have been made worse.  To wit:
Early on in the pandemic, it became obvious that COVID-19 was affecting the African-American community disproportionately.  Yet just weeks later, in the middle of the same pandemic, BLM was openly encouraging African-Americans to take the streets in massive protests: no social distancing, few masks, and a whole lot of shouting. So in this case, the meaningless symbol is the protests, but the actual Really Real World Reality: thousands of black lives being unnecessarily exposed to a pandemic-level virus, about which one of the few things that is known for sure is that it hits black people harder than other demographics.  For a group that hides behind the name Black Lives Matter, their blatant disregard for the well-being of actual black lives seems a tad—inconsistent.
Now there is a county in Oregon which has ordered that white people must wear masks any time in public, and non-white people don’t.  Out of “concerns about profiling.”  Yeah.  This is absurdly illegal, obviously, but never mind that: here, the meaningless gesture is declaring that black people don’t need to wear masks.  The Really Real World Reality: mandating white people take reasonable precautions during a pandemic to stay healthy and alive, but black people?  Nah…don’t worry about it.  Go out there into the pandemic and breathe deep.  Again, for people who can’t stop screaming about how much black lives matter, it’s almost like they want more cases of COVID-19 in the African-American community.  Like they’re encouraging risky behavior.  Of course, bigger numbers would be good for the message.  But here’s the exact same county order with the context of BLM taken out: “there is a pandemic that incidentally affects black people disproportionately, so to mitigate the disease, we are ordering only white people to wear masks.  It will save lives.”  Had it been stated that way, the order would be decried as the most blatantly racist governmental policy enacted in 50 years.
I live in an area with extremely high fire danger.  Because of this, there are orders that residents must maintain 50 feet of defensible space around their houses (meaning removing leaves, dead plants, anything that fuels fires).  Doing so is good for individual homeowners as it greatly increases the chances that their house won’t be burned to the ground, and its good for the community and state because it greatly reduces the risk of the massive wildfires that plague the area every summer).  Fine.  But fire, just like The Virus, affects everything is can, regardless of the color of the people involved.  If this same order only applied to houses owned by white people, I would hope the outcry and outrage at such egregious and callous racism would be deafening.  But if the order is couched in the BLM message, then apparently it’s some kind moral victory…sure your house burned down, but, you know, if you want to make an omelette, you’ve gotta break some eggs.
This Symbolism Over Substance could potentially decimate the black community, undo the progress the African-American population in the United States has worked for generations to achieve, and leave the community even more hopelessly marginalized than they were before the GWLs of BLM arrived to “help.”

N.P.: “You Haven’t Done Nothin'” – Stevie Wonder

Today was just weird.  And rushed.  Didn’t get nearly enough writing done.  But I’ve cleared the schedule tonight and tomorrow…going to see if I can actually finish some things.

N.P.: “Witness 4 the Prosecution (Version 1) – 2020 Remaster” – Prince

Second verse, same as the first…another productive day, but never productive enough.  Still writing the two books, still keeping up with the money-making work, still working on saving the world…but it’s a hectic schedule.  I so need an assistant.

N.P.: “Love You To Bits (Bit 1)” – No-Man

Another productive night and day, dear reader.  It’s frustrating…there is so much to write that even using dictation, I don’t have nearly enough time to get everything down.  And new projects and ideas are still coming in constantly, so that pretty much no matter how much writing I do, I have more work at the end of the day than I did at the beginning.  The workflow that has developed lately is writing/dictating from 22:00 – 02:00 (or whenever I collapse), and then editing that the following day.
On top of that, the world very obviously needs saving right now, so I’m trying to work that into the schedule too.  I’ll get to it…don’t worry.

N.P.: “World Destruction (Meltdown Remix)” – Time Zone, John Lydon, Afrika Bambaataa

Yesterday was the summer solstice in this shitty hemisphere, which made it the longest day/shortest night of the year, which, as you can probably imagine, was disgusting to me.  Given my contempt of the sun, the summer solstice is traditionally the shittiest day on the Gallaway Calendar.  The only good news is that now that we’re on the other side of the Stupid Solstice, the days will now get slightly shorter every day until we get to December 21…the longest night of the year, when I traditionally perform an incredibly lewd goat dance celebrating the Cold and the Dark.  Tick tock.

N.P.: “The Bible is Bullshit” – Corporate Avenger

Another good day, another great word count.  I’m working on something else, for here, and it’s taking longer than expected.  I’m not sure when it will be done, but I’m going to push for tomorrow or the next day.  No promises, but I’m trying.  It’s nothing that’s new to you, dear reader, but it is something that needs to be read.  Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it have been proving themselves illiterate dolts lately, but, you know…still gotta try.
Okay…back to work.

N.P.: “Oh, Pretty Woman” – Palast