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Mike Fish's avatar

It dawned on me, that although I never had the pleasure, Joe Arpaio, in the spirit of Barbie, proudly commissioned pink attire for desert tented inmates, right down to their undies. So funny for the “screws” to storytell about.

In that note, I’m out.

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Mike Fish's avatar

Well, I don’t know about the order of all things, but I confirmed that sequence is probably pretty relevant.

I skipped over Chrissie, and the webinar, and the rising tides (I had already watched this one, and the one with Carl), for now, and finished readin’, and got to them blues.

I got on this ride before eleven, and the bars closed about forty five minutes ago.

By ride, I mean hurricane Haeder. This latest storm has been going on for days now. But, starting off finishing up, with them bluesmen/women sure can skew a perspective. Starting with Sam Cooke, and Son House, and finishing with Pretenders, can evoke certain emotions, at least if the listener has really been in the gang in chains. In my experience it’s a hell of an experiment in forced integration, and bussing. (It’s how we get around). Though anytime I was ever outside the walls, my hands were shackled to my waist, and chains linked my ankles. Impossible to swing a sledgehammer. I’m certain of it!

So I think about the cell door keys, ringing louder today, than yesterday, and engage in a little chain gang nostalgia, and proceed to the webinar. If I had to sum up Nicaragua in a sentence, like your other acquaintance, I would have to go with: “Raygun, and all of his other stain sidekicks are some no good motherfuckers.” “What do I mean, you ask?” “Fantastic!” But, watching that webinar had a calming effect. Gave me another perspective, still.

Made me think about/remember Guillermo. He was a new cellmate I got, at Stanley. Replaced an Army Ranger/Blackhawk Down Somolia era/convicted pedophile/literate/sick dude.

Guillermo is/was a Cuban boat people, from the way back machine. It wasn’t no carnival cruise baby. The stories he shared with me is shit I can’t even imagine or comprehend. He didn’t have a political bone in his body. He was just here trying to scratch out a living. In all of these decades he never became “legal”. So when he leaves/left Stanley, he’s going to ICE. Fortunately, he’s got a twenty something daughter (at least four years ago she was), who’s a cop, who should be able to help him out. Yeah, the chain gang can be “the great melting pot.” In Stanley, I was in the barrio. Hosea, and Fuentes, and Paco, and Guillermo, and Toothless. Good dudes. I learned a lot. I wonder how they all are? I wonder if the soldier boy is excited all over again, about Barbie doll things, and cute little pink outfits? That’s another side of the chain gang. It’s not all black and white, in so many ways.

And, then I think about China, and what you said about learning. And, I have, and I am. And, then I think about the parts that deal with rail workers strikes, and I think about how pathetic it is that so few people are aware of the history of the Chinese people in the history of this transcontinental railroad, and the exclusionary acts, and all kinds of other dirty deeds. How can a people who have no clue of their own history, have a hope of understanding and appreciating a civilization as old as China? I know I wasn’t taught nothin’, except for bullshit. Che? Who the fuck is that? Castro? The devil. Guillermo? Same with the other two, you gotta live with a man to know and appreciate, and respect him.

So I got around to finishin’ up, with Chrissie Hynde.

I listened, and I said, “what is this?” “This ain’t no blues!” So, I went and I watched the original music video, and had me some mixed emotions. Fucking idiots running around in suits and ties, and we’re singing about the chain gang??!!!! It’s a good thing I’ve got a good sense of humor. Irony and satire everywhere I look. Like last night. Big blues show at The Garage: Bikes and Brews. I didn’t attend. I have absolute confidence that there was more than a few Barbie look alikes, and zero Son House impersonators. Playin’ the blues for that bunch, you might as well be speaking Chinese. Besides, thoughts of goin’ there were drowned out by the tinnitus, and them clangin’ cell door keys. I don’t imagine too many of them folks know them blues that Sam Cooke, and Son House was singin’ about. I doz.

Never got me one of them black letters in the mail.

Purnt near. They cut me loose almost a month early, after I fought like hell fer it. Momma, she died a couple weeks later. That’s twelve years ago, today. A few hours from now.

But, the one them bluesmen be singin’ about, well, I fought like hell, a second time, and I got me a little more time than a couple of weeks with her. That’s the chain gang blues, boys and girls, who haven’t had the pleasure. Twenty first century american style chain gang blues, anyhow.

But, that’s just the prison industrial complex part of the equation.

Can’t forget about those trafficked, human beasts of burden, workin’ them mines, diggin’ up all them precious elements, worked to death.

You know the type. Folks like them, that build them big extravaganzas, for soccer, or olympics, or other sports stuff, and whatever other audacious display somebody dreams up. Like, maybe, Barbie,

or a nuclear arms race. Hell of an Olympic sport. I hope they make it a marathon, instead of the sprint they seem to be trying to run!!! Hopefully, Biden falls down again. Wait a minute. Who’s he gonna pass the baton to?

Lotsa problems in the world. Difficulter still, with them chain gang/cell key blues ringin’ reel loud in ya ears.

On top of that, I got a buddy, goin’ to get a serving of that american justice pie, today. Every piece I ever had was sour as hell. Gave me a hell of a gut ache. I hope to purge that delicacy from my diet, permanently.

I just purged R.J. Reynolds, (again, finally) and I was a member of the Pepsi generation, young. Brand loyalty at infancy?

You keep on being that whirling dervish, talkwalker, and I’ll try to keep up, if’n they let me. I’ll get another reprieve, or not, soon enough. In the meantime, I’m gonna have me some of them blues, with my momma, and that other girl that I waited so long to come home to, and nothin’ but a hound dog. Good luck, and Godspeed, today. Wish I was there.

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Paul Haeder's avatar

It comes down to one person's bones. What is rattling and shaking those bones. What sort of hell to pay those bones have been through. What sort of mind warp the war on people drives into those bones.

Chain gangs and minimum security zones. I taught at La Tuna Federal Correctional, and most of the guys in my freshman composition class were there because they were MARKS. Marks of the money changers, who have a system of school to prison pipeline, or, small business to prison pipeline.

Seriously, most of them were there because they had some small business -- plumping, excavating, minor electrical, stereo installation, car detailing, window washing, etc -- and they even had spouses and some kids.

The idea of Prison and Snitch USA is to get under one's skin to expand the police forces, the court forces, the DA logs, all the prison riff-raff guards and secretaries and wardens and subwardens and groundskeepers, bail bondsmen, criminal defense attorneys, social workers, shrinks, drug and alcohol rehab services, etc. You see, snitchs, CI's, whatever, targeting small successful businesses, where cash is king, and alas, a drink here, a ball game there, a dinner with the family, and eventually, snitch a getting mark a to maybe "stash some stash on the premises, you know, a one knock off deal. And, here, how about a nice shiny GLock, you know, not for any bad stuff, but just carry it in your panel truck. We'll go target shooting one day. And, heck, just let me load that plumbing van with, oh, just maybe 2 or three hundred pounds of good weed. Wrapped and sealed, and, just drive along this road at dusk, and, in ten minutes, that $1000 fronted deal will turn into $3000. For three hours work. Take the wife and kids to Cancun. Go to Florida on us."

Then, DEA, ATF, Sheriff, what have you, a traffic stop, and there you are, owner of a drain cleaning business, with your cousin, held at gunpoint by masked feds, and, lo and behold, the panels are ripped off, the cash is confiscated, and the gun is put into Zip Lock.

"Plea, baby, plea, or you will not see that baby until he graduates from high school. Take the seven years, and it's easy time, medium security, just up the road, so the little guy can see daddy on Saturdays and Sundays. You even get to play tennis, run the track and take college courses with fucking wackos like Haeder."

War is a Racket, and Life in Capitalism is a Multilayered Byzantine RACKET. And we are in the racks, man, modern style, no longer Puritan style. Goods and businesses seized. And there are the banks, and the mortgage outfits and the real estate folk and the auctions and then the money changers at the bidding wars, looking to get that panel van and all those tools and that business for pennies on the dollar.

Sure, the American mindset is Barbie, and somehow the Oppenheimer Effect is well a pro-war movie effect, because it's all about Russia, now, and that little Cocaine David, all about those North Koreans and Chinese. It's all about us, USA, UK, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Australia. You know, the white white lands, where the real real people were exterminated .

This below, by Sy Hersh, in his arm chair, says some things about the state of the world:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made it clear before the Russian invasion early last year that he considered the bridge a legitimate military target. Ukraine initially attacked the bridge last October, using a submersible drone, but it was fully repaired within seven months. The most recent attack, by a pair of submersible drones, killed a couple who were driving across when the explosion occurred and injured their child. Damage to one of the auto spans was severe.

The Biden administration’s role in both attacks was vital. “Of course it was our technology,” one American official told me. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged—like a torpedo.” I asked if there was any thought before the bridge attack about the possibility of retaliation. “What will Putin do? We don’t think that far,” the official said. “Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision.”

Putin responded to the second attack on the bridge by ending an agreement that enabled Ukrainian wheat and other vital food crops, stymied by the ongoing war, to be shipped from blocked ports on the Black Sea. (Before the war Ukraine exported more grain than the entire European Union and nearly half of the world’s sunflower seeds.) And Russia began steadily intensifying missile and rocket attacks in Odessa, whose initial target list has expanded from port areas to inner city sites.

The official said there was a lot more than grain and sunflower seeds flowing into Europe from Odessa and other Black Sea ports:

“Odessa’s exports included illegal stuff like drugs and the oil that Ukraine was getting from Russia.”

At this point, with the Ukraine counteroffensive against Russia thwarted, the official said,

“Zelensky has no plan, except to hang on. It’s as if he’s an orphan—a poor waif in his underwear—and we have no real idea of what Zelensky and his crowd are thinking. Ukraine is the most corrupt and dumbest government in the world, outside of Nigeria, and Biden’s support of Zelensky can only come from Zelensky’s knowledge of Biden, and not just because he was taking care of Biden’s son.”

There are some in the American intelligence community, the official said, who worry about Putin’s response to the recent Ukrainian drone attacks in central Moscow.

“Will Kiev be next?”

+--+

Of course, Putin is a lawyer, and he always looked West, man, maybe even wanting some of the glitter of an Oppenhiemer premiere.

And so, criminals in low and high office, USA and now Russia, again, we are on their chain gang. This is not 5-D chess, my friends. Some interesting stuff here, from this writer, and who the fuck knows who he is, since Substack isn't always full of transparency:

Also, the grain strikes don’t even make sense as a tit-for-tat punishment/retaliation measure following the Crimea bridge bombing. Wouldn’t a bridge for a bridge make more sense? Bog knows, there are plenty of intact bridges all over Ukraine transporting supplies and equipment to the army in Donbass that remain untouched. Ukraine, it seems, can knock out strategic bridges like in Kherson and Crimea, but Russia can’t. Curious, no?

So, why do command/leadership centers remain unmolested by Russian missiles? Ah, you reply that this is simply not part of the grand plan, that the higher-ups know better anyways and that I’d better shut up or end up like Strelkov, right? OK, but let me exploit your knee-jerk defense of MoD incompetence by pointing out that Shoigu has already threatened to target Ukrainian leadership multiple times. So, clearly, the option to hit these leaders is on the table and is technically feasible at least, right? And yet, the latest threat fizzled out almost immediately after Shoigu issued it, proving that the Kremlin’s warnings are nothing but hot air. We have a very specific example here to analyze that everyone can understand so let’s do just that.

Q: Didn’t Shoigu pledge to punish Kiev for continuing to attack Crimea? And shortly afterwards didn’t Ukraine, defiantly, attack Crimea again?

RE; https://roloslavskiy.substack.com/p/another-russia-turkey-war-seems-inevitable

+--+

The chain gang is symbolic and sinister, and we see thousands about to die in the summer of 2023, you know, the heat, da plane, da plane, and the fucking tyrant Zelensky and his handlers and his boot lickers, just more for that criminal enterprise, and I wonder, really, how long it will take for the world to begin to absolutely go Paris on the thugs. USA, Turkey, Britain, hell, the Mossad and IDF and Jewish brigades and Airborne and SEALS and the Blackwater/Academi and the like have taught the people (slave patrols) cops how to tear down revolt. And those drones, man, those Microsoft enhanced police robot dogs, all the eye scans, facial scans, CCTV everywhere, that's the ticket, that's the chain gang.

Some of us are runaway slaves, but most of us are Barbie and Ball Game and Marvel Movie slaves.

Your almost 10 years in county lockup and state pen's, another form of another slavery, and once out, Toothless, they have you by the balls and short hairs and that ringing in the ear is all about . . . shit, they can swoop in and set you up again and put you into their Chain Gang. The Chain Gang for Geriatrics.

Fuck, why not barricade yourself in with canned food and five repeater shotguns, waiting for the euthanasia by cop.

But then there's the dog, that prince of a dog that gets rides around town like a Beauty Queen, the Cow Pie Tossing Queen or King.

Tomorrow? For you? We know what that might mean. And the atheist is sending goo vibrations your way. I gotta get ready for my friend, the almost murdered wife, DV, BWS, to read her impact statements, only to her avail, and the few in attendance who will be there to witness, bear witness.

BWS -- battered wife syndrome -- yet another form of multi-layered slavery!

Now, is Putin a slave to money, to oligarch, to a nuclear-tipped Zionist USA, who actually has the upper hand up there, where Sputnik once ruled, now that Bezos, Thiel, Musk is part of the DoD, that new mega-satellite-sphere which pinpoints even where Zelensky and Putin shit?

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