Declaration of Revenance

Salvete, amici!

I had intended to resume blogging over the weekend prior to the Fourth of July holiday, and true to form, I am late acting upon that intention. But at least the moment originally chosen for reviving this blog after its long hiatus in suspended animation was a propitious one. The past three weeks have brought forth a succession of exceptionally unusual and noteworthy events of such import that some of them actually deserve to be called historic, an adjective so habitually overused and degraded as to be effectively weightless, just more hot air filling the empty spaces within the shrinkflated rhetorical packaging of conetmporary public discourse. To enumerate a handful of the significant occurences of the past several weeks:

• The release of Julian Assange
• The SCOTUS reversal and remand decision in Murthy v. Missouri (23-411)
• The SCOTUS reversal and remand decisions in Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce (22-1219) and RLoper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (22-451)
• The SCOTUS vacate and remand decision in Trump v. United States (23-939)
• The ongoing collapse of federal-level lawfare against Donald Trump, including
  • The intransigence of polls and public sentiment following conviction in People v. Donald J. Trump
  • The SCOTUS vacate and remand decision in Trump v. United States (23-939)
  • The US District Court dismissal of United States v. Donald J. Trump et al.
• Joe Biden’s disastrous debate appearance and its consequences, including
  • The corporate media’s immediate volte face vis-à-vis defenses of Biden’s mental and physical vigor
  • The national Democratic Party’s immediate descent into chaotic desperation and the accompanying collapse of its last democratic pretenses
  • The ongoing intra- and extra-party maneuvering to replace Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee
• Anti-establishment groundswells in the EU, UK, and French parliamentary elections
• The stationing of US nuclear weapons in Germany
• NATO’s effective declaration of active enmity against China at its hollow summit
• Victor Orban’s diplomacy tour
• Record heat extremes and the earliest known appearance of a Category 5 hurricane
• The near-assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania

So many things are happening so quickly it is hard to know where to begin, and events pass and are superseded at such pace that keeping current seems nigh impossible. My purposes here, though, are to maintain a record of the salient facts around various events as an aide de memoire, to analyze their underlying factors and probable consequences, and to formulate through public writing something more than inchoate and merely intuitive stances regarding them. Life has certainly provided a bounty of weird and worrisome subjects to feed this project for the foreseeable future – though as things have been going, the future is anything but foreseeable.

We’re in a compressed version of reality …. All Americans have something in common right now, left or right: They’re strapped into a plane that’s going through extreme turbulence. If you’re looking for unity with your fellow Americans, just turn to somebody who looks different from you and maybe on the surface might seem to disagree, and just say, “Shit’s weird, ain’t it man!” And you can both high five each other – the commie and the John Birch Society guy can both go, “No shit, let’s go get a drink.” Mormons and Black Panthers can sit down together, shake their heads, and say “I wonder what they’re going to do with the rest of us once they’re done deciding who’s the next emperor.” – Walter Kirn