Living on borrowed time now in the United States puts writer Brett McNeil in the mood for listening to the Stooges.

The nagging rasp of electric guitars suits my mood too, as I'm reading Black Earth, a Timothy Snyder book about the intentional experimental disassembling of nations and public order in eastern Europe, carried out by the Soviets and the Nazis in preparation for the worst things people were able to imagine for the lawless place that they had now created.

Also, I'm dipping into A World Apart, an account of two years in the Gulag, where author Gustav Herling says, "I became convinced that a man can be human only under human conditions." It's a stunningly straightforward standard for judging times and places where people have had to endure, isn't it? Choose, say, this section of that big city today and take a close look, I find myself thinking.

Also trying to stay in the habit of linking to indie bookstores rather than to empires when I link to a book.

Recommending a book to a friend? Send a link to an indie instead of an empire. For example, Prairie Lights Bookstore.

Right now I'm reading Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, in which Timothy Snyder tracks Hitler's method: dismantling nation states as prelude to carrying out his deeper purposes:

Prepare by filling the media with chaotic propaganda, draining the blood from civic institutions, then gutting them, militarizing law enforcement, normalizing violent methods of policing, leaving individuals and groups increasingly with no protection and no recourse, for example — all of which set things up for what he really wanted to do.

It's a method, which makes me think that our common representations of Hitler are a bit very-bad-guy cartoonish, while his methods are specific and powerful and can pop up in recognizable ways any number of times and places.

Blogger, poet, activist, and memoirist Stephen Kuusisto has portrayed America as a laboratory, a place where experiments are run on large groups of people. After reading his new post, in that spirit, I thought of one experiment America has been running for decades: How long can you bring tens of thousands of rural people into poverty and isolation, and how low can you make them go, before they rise in protest?

But Kuusisto, who I know from college days, often focuses on lives lived here by the disabled. (See if you can read his moving and instructive first memoir, Planet of the Blind, or his new book of poems, Close Escapes, without learning quite a bit on the subject.) Part of a recent blog post goes this way:

America is a biopolitical nightmare, one might call it a laboratory for the subjugation of human beings. This is why people in the United States can’t have diversity though they talk about it. Diversity without biopolitical awareness, without recognizing the role of the state in determining which bodies have or do not have value is just fluff. When will the Americas become a laboratory for freedom? I wish the wood cutter would wake up.

At the end of the blog post, Kuusisto shows how to tell in a flash exactly what bodies America values. Just check to see what bodies are being policed, he suggests:

Policed bodies are inherently devalued bodies. Black Lives Matter. Disabled Lives Matter. Women’s Lives; Migrant Lives—but not so much in the breech. ICE raids are what happens while we were busy making other plans. Apology to John Lennon ’s ghost.

The lab experiments are ongoing all around us.

“No more 1000 page bills passed overnight and signed into law the next day,” writes Dave Winer. Far-reaching items added and passed without being brought into the light of day for public consideration. That’s how the national Republican Party likes to do business.

The Indiana Republican Party, having carefully gerrymandered themselves an unchallengeable supermajority in the Statehouse, works exactly the same way. No need for anyone else’s opinion in the legislature. Clear evidence of this in the most recent legislative session.

More than two decades ago, my first blog posts appeared on the mchron.net domain whenever my copy of the pMachine web publishing software called up my newest pieces of text from its simple database. Guided by a templates with formats I chose for each page element (blog title, post title, author, date, etc.), pMachine assembled these pieces of text into a web page recognizable as a blog post. While a person with the password could read a new post in the pMachine dashboard, there were only two of us, and that wasn't the goal. An audience, if I could build one, was out in the world somewhere. The blog post's first meaningful appearance in the open, in the wild, was as a web page. The posts were available on an RSS feed too, but that wasn't the point. The web page was the point. My writing, files saved in my rented file space, running my paid-for copy of the essential software, and visible on my domain. 

I hoped to have multiple readers in my one location, visiting my web site, coming back most every day. Within the confines of my blog's main topic, in time some readers showed up. You could tell that they showed up because they wrote about what they read on my site. Still, it's impractical for readers to visit every site that interests them every day. We're busy people — on the to do list is at least one big item: Patch up a crack in the Liberty Bell.

Now, if I understand correctly, Dave Winer's new linkblog tool has shifted the rules of the game. A linkblog is essentially a short-form blog focusing on sharing links to notable pieces of writing elsewhere on the web. It's a kind of public service. But it's still a blog, like my old blog on mchron.net. Now, however, Dave has changed the first meaningful appearance part of the process. The point of the new tool is that first meaningful appearance of the blog's content is not as a web page, but as an RSS feed.

That means that the multiple readers don't have to visit the linkblog's website every day because it's not primarily a website. Readers don't have to go there every day. They can just subscribe to the RSS feed — just add the feed to the list of other feeds they regularly return to in their single piece of RSS feed reading software. Then, whenever they review their feed subscriptions, the new content will be there for, say, Dave Winer's linkblog and all the other feeds. Because it's RSS, the appearance of the new content is automatic.

[Rather like the way tweets of writers you admired used to be visible every morning when you turned on Twitter in the old days, before the site was trashed by tech geniuses who had no idea what the tools did or how they worked. Or maybe they knew but wanted them to stop working that way and only seem to work that way going forward.]

It must surely not be an accident that a linkblog whose deepest nature is as an RSS feed rather than as a web page reminds a person of the better days of Twitter. It's surely not an accident this new thing that reminds me of Twitter's better days doesn't require a tech billionaire's help or permission to operate — because it's RSS. I don't know what other tools will be required for the vision to be complete, but it's liberating to imagine the possibilities that are now unfolding.

In the 1760s, after the Seven Years’ War (called the French and Indian War here), Parliament sought to reassert and consolidate power over British colonies in North America. Parliament instituted new taxes to fund British military units stationed in the colonies and to free British colonial officers to govern without pressure from the colonial legislatures that otherwise supplied their budgets.

Leaders among the colonists saw these actions as a threat. They also came to see that creating and organizing political resistance is, in part, an information problem.  Francis Cogliano says that colonial leaders needed to gather and disseminate information reflecting colonial perspectives, to communicate grievances to a much wider population, to cultivate widespread support for resistance, to catalyze formation of citizens’ groups throughout the colonies, and to prepare for rapid communication in a new crisis. To have a chance for successful resistance to British actions, they needed to create the possibility of unified colonial response. They had an information problem on their hands.

The solution was a network of local groups called committees of correspondence:

After nearly six years of tension and conflict between Parliament and the colonies, a superficial calm characterized their relations by late 1770. Patriot leaders took advantage of the quietude to organize for what they believed would be an inevitable return to conflict. In September 1771, the Boston Town Meeting, at the behest of Samuel Adams, formally created a committee of correspondence which was to communicate colonial grievances to all the towns of Massachusetts as well as to people throughout the mainland colonies and in the West Indies and Britain and Ireland and to serve as the catalyst for the creation of similar committees throughout the colonies. More than half the towns in Massachusetts responded positively to the call to create their own committees of correspondence. The spread of the committees ensured that the Patriots, whose resistance had been concentrated in the cities, could now cultivate support in the countryside where the majority of colonists lived. The movement was so successful that in March 1773, the Virginia House of Burgesses recommended that each colony establish a committee of correspondence to ensure the rapid dissemination of information and a unified response in the event of another transatlantic crisis. The committees served as the propaganda and information-gathering counterparts of the Sons of Liberty. —Francis D. Cogliano, Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History

Political leaders in a time of crisis like the one — the ones — we face today have the same need for creating and organizing political resistance. If they don’t understand their work as, in part, an information problem, they don’t stand a chance, do they?

They say that five million people rallied and protested on No Kings Day. Is that a one-off or are structures that integrate that passion with information flow and organizational skill now being put in place for more activism, wider and deeper activism, going forward? I’m guessing that the Democratic Party doesn’t think very clearly, even now, about the information/organizing problem it’s facing. What’s the evidence that they do?

“All the books listed here are merciful. Please, start your own lists. Share them. The literatures of compassion are necessarily shared in a university without walls,“ writes Stephen Kuusisto. His list of books, his Syllabus of the Compassionate, is more than two screens long, plenty to start with in recentering our thinking on healthy terms of our own choosing. He urges people to start and share their own lists.

The genius tip we wish we’d known sooner, the pro-level move the industry doesn’t want you to know, the classic insider’s method made super easy, the jaw-dropping advice that will change your work life forever, the exercise that will let you channel the truly great, the prefab lingo that will save you from having to think.

“President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

That, of course, is nonsense. Think of the air and naval armada put in place for the invasion of Normandy, for example.

Surely Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine knew it was bullshit when he heard it. Oh, he heard it — they made him stand beside Hegseth as the Honorable Secretary of Defense said it. The evidence lives on in the transcript on the Department of Defense website.

It’s probably galling for military people to see the administration using them — their skills, the risks they take, their sacrifices — in the service of domestic political propaganda.

No honor in that.

A new website urges us to say lessons when we mean lessons, instead of saying learnings. Say no! to learnings is the site . . . George Orwell made a similar point in “Politics and the English Language” back in the day.

Back in the day  is a lazy way of saying in 1946. Orwell was pretty sure the way we say things matters.

Here are some reasons to say learnings:

It’s the cool new jargon in your profession and who doesn’t want to be cool? 

Jargon saves time — jargon appears to be clear and meaningful, even if it’s just a single word. Might not be, but why be picky? 

Maybe I like saying new lingo over and over as a form of shorthand rather than explaining things in sentences. Who cares if the other person can’t read shorthand.

New lingo feels good, it kind of tingles, and feeling good is easier than thinking clearly.

New words seem to have new meanings. It’s mean of a person to suggest that they may not.

Saying old or new jargon establishes a person as an insider.

Saying jargon establishes that person over there with the quizzical look as an outsider.

Holding public conversations in only one group’s jargon puts the world on notice that anybody else’s ways of thinking and talking aren’t needed to address the current problem. Experts tend to get in the habit of thinking this way. “So-and-so couldn’t possibly think about this issue clearly without a graduate degree in my field . . .”

“Yes, it’s true that some things are hard to discuss clearly without specialized language, but it’s not a good use of an insider’s time to teach that language to you, oh fellow citizens.”

Power moves through institutions and through entitled individuals who speak the right language. People wear their language like a credential, a badge. They direct traffic in the world through the pathways established by their language. Not your language. They may or may not have thought clearly or honorably about this. Nobody may have figured out how to hold them to account as well. To force them to try to speak clearly and honorably.