Many on the Right propagating conspiracy theories about “antifa” have also been stockpiling weapons while warning about FEMA death camps, martial law and erosions of Constitutional liberty. But as we saw during earlier Black Lives Matter protests and are seeing again now, many such individuals side with militarized police who are crushing protests. Using contorted conspiracist logic, it is the police and now the military who are preventing tyranny, and their victims who are actually the instigators of martial law.

Cip Gibbons, “Donald Trump’s ‘Antifa’ Hysteria is Absurd, but it’s Also Very Dangerous”

Should we condemn looting?

Jesus loved the erring into righteousness. His professed followers shut them out from God’s sunlight and torture them into degeneracy and crime.

Eugene V. Debs, in a letter to a Michigan prison inmate.

Talent isn't genius, and no amount of energy can make it so.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Can you really defend leaving [the Palestinains] under military occupation for another fifty [years]? If not, then the remaining alternatives are a two-state solution or a “one-state solution” in which Israel annexes all the occupied territories. But if Israel annex them then those five million Palestinian Arabs will be able to vote in Israeli elections … . Or else you don’t let them vote, in which case Israel becomes an apartheid state. This is why the zombie two-state solution keeps rising from its grave. Israel doesn’t actually have to get the Palestinians to agree, but it must keep talking about some sort of Palestinian state or else resign itself to being simply an ethnic tyranny.

Gwynne Dyer, The Trump-Netanyahu Peace Deal

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

Brockmire, “Disabled List”

Hardesty: That’s a god I could believe in. A baseball god.
Brockmire: Yes, yeah, a kind of god that demands that all his churches be parks.
Hardesty: A god that forces you to play outside on a nice day.
Brockmire: That doesn’t keep time because our actions should determine our fate, not some stupid clock.
Hardesty: A god who keeps us humble by making us play a game that’s steeped in failure.
Brockmire: Hmm. That’s the kind of god I’d worship.

There’s a shortage of answers in this world. It’s the fool who thinks he got them.

John Larison, “Whiskey When We're Dry”

When life gets rough and shit gets you down, don’t get mad. Get your loved ones, put them in a circle, pass around a jug of homemade alcohol and listen to some fuckin’ fiddle music. You can’t stay mad when you’re lit up on grain alcohol and there is a fiddle playing. You can try to be pissed off, but your toe’s gonna start tapping in spite of yourself.

K. Trevor Wilson, “East Coast Winter”

Oliver Lange, “Defiance”

He was in a fine mood, pleased by the formidable impression he imagined he would have made on any stranger who met him on the trail.

What is lacking in this country is a climate of unrest. A certain air of mewling discontent does exist, but it is too similar to the affectionate bickering young lovers indulge in as they jockey for the role identities that will endure between them for the rest of their married lives. Except for your criminal elements, who through circumstance or choice are the pariahs of any society, I defy you to find nowadays any of the implacable ferocity that must have been extant in the Jacobin, Cromwellian, pre-Revolutionary American and Czarist-ruled societies.

He wondered if he would have been more complete if as a young man he’d lost himself in something other than art. Law had always fascinated him, as had sociology. Certainly, at twenty, the huge energies he knew he had at his disposal should have suggested something more than this, nearly three decades of creative mediocrity. Did that explain his years of growing hostlity? The self-lubricated withdrawal that become hostile isolation? The increasing inability to discover anything gratifying in contemporary life? Did it explain the years of heavy drinking? The self-destructiveness? The fits of depression that became almost suicidal? Was it the loss of one wife by incompatibility and another by death? Was it the special hunch he’d had about himself when younger, that he was good enough to win at anything he tried?