The Anarchic State of Portland

A tiny contingent of anti-ICE protesters is camped out in front of Portland City Hall. Less than a dozen, either the hardcore or flaky fringe of the local protest community (if these are distinguishable) are pulling this unglamorous duty.

Abolish ICE PDX calls the protest a continuation of the blockade of Portland's ICE office, recently disbanded. After Saturday's near-riot in reaction to a right-wing demonstration and the ensuing campaign accusing Portland cops of excessive force applied with bias against lefty counter demonstrators, the goals of this siege are expanded to: abolish ICE, condemn the police and fire Ted Wheeler, our progressive mayor.

Protesters have a couple of hammocks strung up and are sleeping on the sidewalk--mingled among them the few homeless who always sleep on the sidewalk outside of City Hall. As a siege it isn't much, but their anger exceeds their size. Here they are trying to block the doors (two arrests were made):



I don't know how much harassment they give people during the business day, but at night they sometimes clash with random passersby, as one protester has since been arrested for striking a man with a pole after he complained about the blocked sidewalk.

One night this week I watched as a fat, middle-aged man with a "film the cops" t-shirt harassed a pizza delivery driver with his camera. A woman shrieked at him from the street. A few protesters lurked nearby as if to storm the locked building if someone should come to the door. The hapless fellow dodged a giant puddle of puke in his escape--he was in the wrong place.

Last Saturday's action has prompted the most recent anti-police narrative here. A protester has claimed some sort of projectile shot by police lodged in his bicycle helmet, but he apparently hasn't come forward.

A friend writes:

Was at court all day today, spent the time listening to the cops gossip. The antifa helmet with the flash bang lodged in it is total bullshit. It’s just the shell that’s in there, not the projectile. The guy won’t come forward to allow the helmet to be examined. They all know who he is, his name is “Lee”. Cops were somewhat pleased with Chief Outlaw seeming to have their back after Saturday, they’re used to getting no support whatsoever from any chief, she ain’t great but ain’t the worst.

Chief Outlaw's press conference was something of a pleasant surprise. She's at least a good spokesman and ably defended her cops--of course, this being Portland, she promised an investigation--by pointing out the hostility of the counter-demonstrators.

Indeed, my friend above appended this to his email:

Something funny one of the cops said was, during one of the more tense moments on Saturday, he heard someone tell him “look behind you!”, and he did. Standing behind him was Chief Outlaw, wearing an angry face, looking ready to clobber the next antifa that came her way, and she made eye contact with this cop, and did the angry black lady triangle finger snap, before she said: “Oh! It’s on!”. All the cops in the hallway busted up laughing.

Maybe she's an outlaw, of a sort, after all.

Another friend, recently alienated from the left by the anti-white indoctrination he experienced in college, was on the ground when Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson made a foray into the counter-demonstration. He was, of course, assaulted by antifa once the cops pulled Gibson out of there.



This is Pozland.

Cat Update

The blackberry thicket over the back fence erupts every summer with the sun after spending winter playing dead in thinned out, desiccated dormancy. Its tendrils make straight for the sun, spiked with thorns and up to a couple of inches thick; the larger ones bow under the height they achieve and dive back into the confusion.

A small evergreen is battling to overcome them as they wrap themselves around its branches as if to deliberately pull it back down to earth. Eventually it will grow large enough that its shade will kill off the thicket. Blackberry vines entangle its branches, pulling them downward. The picture of this creeping fight for life is suitably dramatic; two insensate, inexorable living things striving for the sun.

Another fence meets ours at a right angle. From here I can watch squirrels climbing through and down the trees at the other end of it, then hopping down and skittering the fifty feet or so to our fence where, after a quick check for the cat, they make a left turn and, coming to the end, leap onto a low hanging branch to continue their tree-hopping

In this way they manage to traverse long distances through city and suburb safe from predators. They must have countless regular routes such as this. I maintain our section of this critters' Ho Chi Minh Trail by trimming away the blackberry vines that bend around the top of the fence as if to take it down too in their mindless profusion.

Larger blackberry vines will attach themselves to the lower branches of mature trees and grow alongside, twinning them, as if adopting a strategy of concealment. I cut away a vine wrapped about the squirrels' branch, thinking to make it easier for them to climb on, and the branch, now released, sprung upward a foot or so. Now I'm not sure they can make the jump.

One of my cats--I'm always quick to point out I ended up a single man with two cats by accident when my daughter, their nominal owner, left home--has been holed up in there for two weeks, refusing to come out. If he's gone there to die he's going about it all wrong: when I come to the opening in the fence where I removed a board and call he answers back, from the impenetrable mass of thorny vines. I leave food and leave; he comes along and eats it once I'm gone. I spy him from inside the house. If he's not around I take the food away. If I don't the raccoons will eat it; I can tell because they leave behind a muddy mess wherever they go. Once I stuck my head in the opening to find two of them. They melted back into the brush. Throwing the muddied water in the direction of one of them I heard a splash; he'd fallen or jumped into the creek, the cliff-edge of which is hidden in the growth.

The circumstance became normalized, with me routinely putting out food. The cat started coming out before I left the food behind. He relaxed into this routine and started coming to the food before I left. I even petted him once--noting there was no indication of sickness. Even this hasn't managed to shed the fat off him. He allowed me to pet him, but I didn't try to bring him in until I decided the farce must end and I must, at least in this instance, finally do the normal thing--capture him and take him to the vet.

So I grabbed hold of him and maneuvered him through the hole in the fence. Somehow he ended up on my shoulder, upside down. He squirmed halfway out of my grip so I followed him to the ground and trapped him there. I had badly hurt both hands days earlier and had no grip strength in my left hand at all; trying to hold him to me using mostly my palms I wrestled with him until he slipped out from under me and back into the brush.

And there he remains.

On the Rightist Side of History

Israel makes it official

Israel passed early Thursday a controversial bill that officially defines Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and asserts that "the realization of the right to national self-determination in Israel is unique to the Jewish people," sparking outrage from Israel's Arab community and provoking concern from the international community.

Elsewhere in the same pages of Ha'aretz you'll find denunciations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cordial relations with Hungarian nationalist hero Victor Orban.

The old notion of a natural affinity of democratic states still issues from neoconservative circles, where it's used in bad faith to prompt wars ultimately on behalf of Israel, and is still bought-into by the great gullible center of respectable American punditry and politicians, but has never been particularly true. The real motive force behind democracy promotion has always been opening up of markets controlled by states resisting globalization. Let the multinationals and waves of migrants into your country, give Israel no trouble and a gloss of "democracy" will do fine.

Conversely, nationalism, being opposed to migrants and the exploitation of foreign companies--but not democracy, the way by which it is most often arrived at--is a problem in and of itself. Even a gloss of nationalism as phony as that of democracy in most places is a problem for the global order, in that it legitimizes this barrier to global capital and demographic molding.

There is a new global affinity, not promoted from above by leaders with questionable motives but emerging from popular will, toward nationalism. Eastern Europe, Israel, Russia, Trump's America, all have a natural, if limited, affinity that has more legitimacy and urgency.

Israel even codified its own form of manifest destiny

The nation-state law also includes clauses stating that a "united Jerusalem" is the capital of Israel and that Hebrew is the country's official language. Another says that "the state sees the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation."

 The problem with the fallacy of a natural alliance of global democracies is that national interest isn't changed by voting--on the contrary. Voters may occasionally be stupid, but they never would vote so clearly against their interests--for instance in the case of Angela Merkel's disastrous opening up of Germany to hordes of Muslim future voters.

Nationalism simply makes frank and clear the interests of a nation and thus allows it to pursue them. In a global community of nations forced to be (somewhat more) honest and upfront about their intentions we would probably have less war and less exploitation of weaker nations. The sort of thing democracy promotion was supposed to provide.

Sonogram, Cathode Ray

Love Letters

Actors reading the emails between Peter Stryk and Lisa Page. This should be adapted into a play.

The Chord, Summer Remix

We gather in shadows
Before screens of light
Beneath arcs of rhythm
Where stories dog-fight

Where nothing is warm
But all is just right
Energy generated, energy spent
And no end in sight

The sky overhead
Boundless, indifferent
Draws it in to no effect
As the sea swallows the shipwreck