Mykel's Inauguration Speech or You're Still Wrong!... Blog for November 2024

 

Mykel's Inauguration Speech ! or Mykel's November 2024 Blog: YOU'RE STILL WRONG

You’re STILL Wrong
Mykel's

November 2024 Blog/Column

Mykel's Inauguration Speech

[This blog was written between October 15 and October 21, 2024. BEFORE the presidential election]

My fellow Americans:,

Thank you from the bottom of my dark little heart. I proudly accept your choice of me as the first official dictator of the United States of America. [pause for applause]

Besides to all of you, I’m giving credit for my victory to the new and fairest of election systems: The Unpopularity Vote. As you know, I ran for dictator as the unpopularity default candidate. And this year, as most years, the majority of qualified voters either voted for someone other than the “winning” candidate or did not vote at all. That means the winner is a loser and I have won the office. My first act will be to abolish it.

Presidents… except for Jimmy Carter… suck. The presidential system sucks. It cannot be reformed, so I have abolished it. As your new dictator, there will, of course, be big changes. I want to talk about some of them now.

My first action as dictator will be to abolish that fuckin’ song with bombs and rockets in it. All that flag waving and hand over heart stuff. It will be replaced by the great Clash classic: I’m So Bored With The USA. Of course, there will be a spelling change: I’m So BOARD With The USA.

But that’s not the only change that I, as your new dictator will put into place.

For example, it’s clear that a large number of Americans oppose gay marriage. And, as your dictator, I will do away with that. But I’m not one to follow a good idea only halfway. I will also do away with hetero marriage. No laws will be made requiring or legalizing marriage. No extra government benefits will be given to married people. Marriage certificates will not be issued by the government. Divorce, like marriage, will be the province of religion. Should we have legal documents for first catechisms or baptism? Let the church (or synagogue or mosque) do its job. It’s no business of the government.

Of course, if couples… or groups… want to be married as the religious act it is, they’re free to do so. I see no reason why any gender shouldn’t be able to perform this act with any other gender. Gay marriages will be like gay bar mitzvahs. If you’re interested, find the right guy or gal to perform the ceremony. And POW you’re married... for whatever that’s worth… to you. The government will not be involved.

One place where the government WILL be involved is in education. Everyone has the right and the duty to attend public school. Church schools, private schools, home schooling… POW! ALL GONE! At least all gone as institutions REPLACING public education.

If parents want to teach their kids about a giant purple cabbage they call God, they can do it… but not on OUR time. Public schooling allows kids to experience people different from themselves. Different races, nationalities, colors, genders, ways of thinking… Parochial schools only separate kids… by religion. Private (pay) schools separate kids by family income. That will end.

Schooling will mean meeting Sammy from Siam and checking out the goods on Maya from Malaysia. If you want to send your kids to Sunday school… do it on Sunday. If you want special tutoring on the weather changing conspiracy… hire someone OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL. But, from now on, all Americans will share a common history, a common knowledge, a common understanding of the world and of each other. That’s what school does-- or at least what it will do under the Board Reich. I don’t get religious school, but if you want the vagaries of another system, you can have it IN ADDITION TO public schools, not INSTEAD OF those schools.

And speaking of schools… of kids… of God… God has done some pretty fucked up things. She has condemned all of us to a deadly ending. She has strewn her favors unequally. She has created AIDS and Covid (if you believe). But one of the few GOOD things she’s done is to invent puberty. There is a reason 13-year old Jews say TODAY I AM A MAN/WOMAN. God knows when it’s time to fill in the pubic hair and sends biological messages when that time comes. We should respect those messages.

We should know too. Instead of completely arbitrary drinking/sex/voting ages, why not listen to God? Childhood ends when girls ovulate and boys can spill the seed. Kids can see movie super-heroes slaughter dozens at 13… but they can’t drink a beer? That will end NOW. Children will cease to be children on their 13^th birthday. Their full rights will be bestowed on them when nature says they should be bestowed.

And now, my fellow Americans, let me focus on the idiocy of this election. History will decide if it was won or lost because of “the border crisis,” with both sides “acting tough” on allowing people to step over some line in the desert.

Just as teachers learn from their students. Large countries should learn from smaller ones. This election may have been won or lost because of border crisis stupidity. How do you end a border crisis? Easy! End borders.

Take a look at this PowerPoint map. Check out the border between Germany, France, and Belgium. In the 1980s, I lived awhile near where all three countries come together… in a German town called Aachen. I could (and did) have breakfast in Germany, lunch in Holland and dinner in Belgium… and walked freely… no walls, no immigration officers, just a little road… from one country to the next.

That’s the way it should be here. Ronald Reagan famously said to Gorbachev TEAR DOWN THAT WALL. Well, I’m saying the same thing… no, not saying but doing. NO WALLS! Boardian Rights of Passage® makes people free to move wherever they like. Cross from Nogales Arizona to Nogales Mexico as easily as I cross from Manhattan to Hoboken. No passports, no ID, no visas… just do it. Get it? A dictator can make the world a freer place than any so-called elected official.

Thank you for your attention and for your support. Enjoy the free booze (over 13 years old only) and the free food. This election cycle has been long and grueling. Luckily, it has been the last ever.

The next problem is debt. Joey Biden wanted to free students from university debt. BFD! What about credit card debt? Housing debt? Medical debt?… Fuck it. It’s all gone. As of today: NOBODY OWES ANYTHING. All debt is canceled… abolished. We start from zero… and move toward a GREATER society where we stay at zero for as long as we live.

If you have money now, you can keep it… but take it out of the bank… in cash. In the great move to FULL UNEMPLOYMENT, banks will be among the first to go. How many useless people just sit around all day shifting ones and zeros from screen A to screen B? Why not free those people to make art, music, sports, or babies? Old bank buildings will just provide that much more space to house the homeless.

Yes, first we stop credit cards and other instruments of debt. Then we enforce price controls… limiting what we need to pay. Think of how many jobs we can get rid of… no banks… no stock exchanges… no mutual funds… It’s just crazy that the presidential idiots before me wanted to create full employment, when the goal should have always been full UNemployment. Imagine spending more than half your waking hours doing something you hate… and preparing for that… and getting to it and coming from it. You don’t have to imagine it… you’re probably already living it. It’s crazy… and we’ll end it as soon as we can.

After we rid ourselves of banks, let’s get rid of guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers. What a bunch of worthless shit! Joe Biden knew that when he gave it away. His plan was to let the government pay the factories to make stuff that kills people. We don’t have to use it. We’re over that. Let others do it. People who kill people are the luckiest people in the world. We give them the tools. And help pay for them to do it. That ends now.

Yeah, we have some cultural changes to make. We need to stop praising veterans. The US has been on the wrong side of every war since WWII. And even in WWII our veterans committed some extreme atrocities… can you say Hiroshima and Nagasaki? 140,000 people smoked.

Veterans who “died for their country” are worshipped with their own national holiday… and those who made it out alive appear at home plate for baseball tributes. I say no. Instead of worshiping veterans, we should pity them. They are state-hired killers, most of whom do it in order to earn enough money tos live. Movies and TV portray them as heroes. The real heroes are those who refuse to fight.

During the Vietnam war, the government found that citizens don’t like seeing their kids returning from war in body bags. Joe Biden was smart enough to figure out how to keep building tanks and bombs… and giving them away for OTHER PEOPLE to fight wars… passing the body bags on to other countries and other fighting people. When armyless people fight back in the only way they can, they’re labeled terrorists. Is death by a plane flown into a building any less death than death by bombs falling from a plane flown overhead? Under the Board dictatorship, planes will be used to carry people and goods from place to place… that’s all. Tanks will be converted to rural/roadless food delivery trucks.

The death industry will itself die. Machine guns will be changed into industrial bolt setters. NATO will become a free trade zone… and free will mean FREE. FREE means you don’t pay! The ultimate goal is a free society, where you don’t pay for anything.

We already spoke about an end to passports, borders and WALLS. But where do we put all those people who want to escape from the climate change or criminal culture the US created in their country in the first place. We need thousands of buildings to house these people. Yeah, we’ll already have the banks, but that won’t be enough. Where can win find houses for thousands of others?

Yo, buckaroos...We have them already. Imagine hundreds of buildings wasted on people who don’t want to be there. No, I’m not talking about factories and offices. Those will ALSO be eliminated under the Boardian doctrine. Now I’m talking about prisons. You know, someone steals a wallet from Mr. Richguy. What is the resulting revenge? He loses his home if he has one. His job if he has one. He is confined in some hellish place, fed bad food, and when he gets out has no place to go and no money to live on except what he can steal from the next Mr. Richguy.

Jails must end… be turned into decent housing for anyone who needs housing. Right now the US has a higher percentage of incarcerated people than any other country in the world. Over a million and a quarter Americans are in prison. How do we end this? By ending prisons, obviously. How do we end cash robbery, internet scams, bank theft? By ending money, obviously.

I spoke about the need to create a society with full unemployment. How do we achieve that? First we cancel debt... that means stopping credit cards and other instruments of debt. Then we enforce price controls… limiting what we need to pay. But there’s more.

Right now the top 4 percent of Americans make as much money as the bottom 51%. And that’s just in wages. It doesn’t count investment income. If we want a country where equality counts, the fastest way to achieve it is to end the grossest inequality! That means ending money. How could we be the land of the free if we have to pay for everything? Again I’ll say it: Free means you don’t pay!

[applause]

See you in hell,
MB

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ By The Time You Read This dept: The 2024 election will be over by the time you read this. Whoever won, we lost. I expect the wars to continue with our bombs and dollars. I expect the rich to get richer and the poor to go to jail. I expect a continuation of identity politics, created (successfully) to divide people instead of bringing them together in the fight against the rule of money. Sorry, I don’t have a Greenland address… yet.

→ I Never Support A Winner dept: This year, as I have in the past several elections, I will have cast my presidential vote for Sid Yiddish. Thanks to our great electoral system, in New York, the only time a Democrat loses is when it doesn’t make any difference to the final ballot. For most of you suckers, if the one you voted for loses… you’ll be angry. If the one you voted for wins… you’ll be disappointed. Me? I won’t have that problem.

→ In case you didn’t get it dept: “Anarchism is democracy taken seriously.” is a great quote that I can’t find a source for. If you see tendencies of Bob Black anarchism and Marshall Tito dictatorship in my victory speech, you see right. You can read about some good dictators right here and you can read Bob Black for yourself here.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

LINKS

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

Here’s Ricardo Wang with a “micro-label” in Seattle “specializing in 8-track tapes and CDs. WOW! Check out one of their label staples: The Dead Air Fresheners.

Also on bandcamp: My very long time faves in NYC, the BLACKOUT SHOPPERS. Featuring pals Seth and possibly the next vice-president of the US

Sid Yiddish has posted a video of a show done for WZRD in Chicago. Great live performances, and if you catch the video around the 20+ minute point you might see a familiar face doing the lyrics to his songs (some unrecorded) as poetry. You’ll find it here.

And this sounds right up Sid’s alley. The Bilderberg Jazz Arkestra on Bandcamp!

Eric Grayson has an online music review zine, Sobriquet. Full pictures of the sleeves too! Something missing from too many zines. Sometimes you CAN judge a… er… book… by its cover.

Steen Thomsen is a Dane I’ve known ever since Lincoln was shot. I put his band THE ZERO POINT on the great WORLD CLASS PUNK Cassette for ROIR. It must be worth a mint now. I don’t have any left, I’m afraid. You can (and should) connect to the Zero Point on facebook. Tell ‘em Mykel’s blog sent you.

Sorry Dorothy, we are STILL in Kansas. And it’s as weird as OZ. Check out Bob Cutler’s DISTOPEKA.

You already know Murder & Mayhem zine… those guys who did the Mykel Board centerfold. (No genitals shown… and probably for the better.) Their online version is here.

The Clean Boys from Denmark are also longtime friends of mine. In Denmark we recorded as _{The Bend-over Boys}. Only one 10-inch available… but at least now I can say I have a 10-incher!

Finally, for this month, Margaret O’Brian asked me to include the site: anti-war.com They seem to be folks after my own heart.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com

I WAS FRAMED! or Mykel's October 2023 Blog/Column

 I Was Framed ... or Mykel's Blog for October

You’re STILL Wrong

or

Mykel's October 2023 Blog/Column 

I Was Framed!    

by Mykel Board

The instrument that measures all other instruments– the human nervous system– has its own laws, and one of them involves always seeing the results one wants to see until and unless something really startles the brain enough to reframe its experiences. --Robert Anton Wilson

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. --Edwin Baird

I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me. – Barbara Kruger

It’s slightly pornographic… or could be. Just three fingers... lady’s fingers clearly... but what’s between them? Is that a urethra canal? Could it be the centerfold of a “men’s” magazine? Will the Google gods post this behind a SENSITIVE CONTENT SCREEN? How about if we look at the picture another way? Maybe that can tell us something different about those fingers:

Flash to the motel room: The floor is bloody… The door hangs on one hinge… lopsided as if forced in from the outside… it was.. Lying on the couch is a woman… clothed only in her own blood. Her vacant eyes stare blankly at the ceiling. A man… scruffy… wearing a beat up overcoat... sits on a chair at the desk. On either side of him is a cop. One tall… macho looking.. a strong chin cleanly shaven. Squinting, the disheveled man can read DETECTIVE BASTINI. The other cop is somewhat shlubbier… beer belly just poking over the front of his belt. The name on his badge is not visible to the sitting man.

“You realize this looks pretty bad for you,” says Detective Bastini.

“But officer,” says the disheveled man, “you gotta understand. This was a set-up. I was framed!”

You got it buckaroos! I want to write about FRAMING! How our entire view of the world, of people, of good and bad… right and wrong... is all about framing. And framing is everywhere… what we see out of a window is framed… what we hear on the news… what we listen to in a punk club… what appears in store displays… It’s all framed. White-washing, green-washing, pink-washing, ad-washing, even face- washing… BUILD THOSE FRAMES!

Yeah, I’m going to repeat myself here. I often repeat myself. I often repeat myself. I often repeat myself. I often repeat myself. I often repeat myself. I often repeat myself. I often repeat myself. But in saying what I’ve said before, I’m going to frame it with a frame. Show how you’ve been tricked by what the frame let in the picture and what it kept out.

So says the Google search. I don’t have time to dig further because my stomach is begging for release… Last night was Drink Club and I’m paying for it now. Aaaahrgh! I feel like I’m being fist-fucked from the inside. The pain… the pain… the bathroom… the toilet… sit down… ahh… ahhh… aaahhhhhh! An explosion… splashing down with the force of a space capsule in the ocean. BLOOOF! BLOOF! BLOOOF! Feces-filled water splashes back up... dribbling drip… drip… drip back into the muddy waters below. No, I can’t see it, but I feel it… against both lower cheeks… and the back of my thighs. 

Ecstasy! Poetry in brown! I just sit a bit and enjoy it... closing my eyes to focus on the relief. Then the wipe… the double wipe… the pull up… What’s that? A hard-yet-squishy feel. I again pull down my boxers. A brown stain discolors the top… right near the elastic. A single dingle-berry... hanging by a hair… too high up to reach through the legs… still there. I have to go around the side… grope for it. Aaaah, if only I could pay someone to make sure I’d got the last one before pulling up. A pro to take care of errant hanger-ons… to save my underpants… and my embarrassment at the laundromat. But wait... a dingle-berry remover!!! I’ve created a job! All I need is someone to fill it. Get it? It’s easy to create a job, though likely it’ll be a shitty one. 

It’s the frame! If we only look at jobs… at how many people are employed or can be employed… we mistake the Mona Lisa fingers for the painting. If we frame it as happy people... fulfilled people… people able to live a good life… then Biden’s 6.6 million jobs are meaningless. 

MOST jobs are worthless. They contribute nothing and may do more harm than good. 

That guy sitting at his desk shuffling electrons to buy and sell stock… What does he contribute? The greeter at Walmart... the CEO of a tech corporation... the maitre ‘d at a restaurant… bookkeepers… corporate lawyers… insurance brokers… advertising copy writers… the list never ends. Framing “job creation” instead of “life improvement” skews the equation.

It’s sometime in the late 1970s. Milton Friedman has already won the Nobel Prize for his defense of the crime of capitalism. The local PBS station shows a short series where Friedman explains his theories.

A twenty-something me sits in front of the TV as Friedman walks around the streets of New York, talking to the camera. He passes a beggar.

“It seems cruel,” says Friedman, “but if we don’t support this man… if we don’t give him money… he’ll have to get a job. The state… other working people… will not have to pay for him”

I close my eyes… take a deep breath… wish for the beggar to jump up, slam a lead pipe into the back of Friedman’s head… grab his wallet and take off. “There’s your have to get a job, motherfucker!” And I smile.

I tell this story to my Ayn Rand-loving friends. “No Mykel,” they tell me, “That’s what the police are for. They catch the guy and throw him in jail.”

“Where he’s supported by the state… working people,” I answer.

WORK --more precisely HAVING A JOB-- is something that’s lauded by Communists and Capitalists alike. There’s dignity in having a job. And a gauge of any president’s performance is whether or not he creates FULL EMPLOYMENT! So, destructive and useless jobs are better than no jobs at all. NO THEY AREN’T.

Let’s move the frame. Let’s value the ability to enjoy life. The ability to help others enjoy life. Lets value a smile on a poor man’s face more than a billion dollars in Jeff Bezos’s pocket. If there were no garbagemen, who would take away the garbage?

Who takes it away now? Who removes the banana peels from your kitchen? YOU DO! The garbage is taken away because it needs to be taken away… not because there are garbagemen.

I can hear Literary Device complaining now.

“Forget about garbagemen, Mykel,” she says. “What about doctors? Teachers? Architects? Those things take years of study. Are you going to have everyone be her own doctor?”

“Not quite,” I answer. “But I can tell you that I get paid to be a teacher. It’s my job. I’d do it though, even if it weren’t my job. I love doing it”

There are enough people who love doctoring and teaching doctoring that –job or not– they’d do it. With so many worthless or destructive jobs gone, people will be able to do what they love. Think of all the kids that want to be doctors or firemen or athletes, but end up stock brokers or insurance salesmen as adults. Are they happy wearing their white shirts and ties... spending a third of their lives moving electrons from one computer to the next… I bet MOST people are unhappy in their jobs, especially the useless or harmful ones.

Move that VALUE frame. Value humanity... satisfaction... time... rather than having a job. You’ll get a much nicer picture.

FLASH TO The Every Little Bit Helps frame: I generate a lot of garbage. No, I’m not talking about this blog. I’m talking real, physical stuff. Junkmail… bills (always shredded and thrown out), old magazines, plastic containers from yogurt, deli sandwiches, styrofoam trays from frozen chicken… the list goes on. The only garbage separating I do is pulling out the deposit bottles and cans. I put those in a separate clear plastic bag and leave that outside for the street people who live on bottle and can deposits. Many of them are my friends.

According to Green Matters, only around 9 percent of goods separated for recycling are being recycled. But there’s the frame. If you separate your soup cans from your bleach bottles you’re part of that every little bit. You can go ahead and buy your Campbell’s 12 pack and your Costco size bleach bottle. You’re still doing your part. But if we expand the frame… include the rest of the Mona Lisa... we can see the whole picture.

We can see that there’s a relationship between feeling good about your consumption… and consuming more. It’s okay if I buy so much more than I need. More to throw away…more junk… I RECYCLE… so it’s all right.

NO IT ISN’T! Recycling encourages consumption. Consumption encourages waste (and corporate profits). In this frame, RECYCLING MAKES JUNK. Instead of framing the junk our consumption makes, why not frame the consumption itself? Instead of recycling, why not avoid buying in the first place?

FLASH TO the war in Ukraine. Oh, the bad guys invade. “We” have to help. It’s good guys against bad guys… a typical American frame… cowboy movies… war movies… comic books. The good guys need to defeat the bad guys… the invaders. Send in weapons… train the soldiers… beat the war drums… put up Ukrainian flags. Measure success like in a war movie. CHASE THEM OUT. MAKE THEM DIE. They lose. We win. What can be more American than “Winning isn’t everything… It’s the only thing?”

But let’s use a different frame. Let’s keep score… if score must be kept… a different way. Let’s use a GOLF frame, instead of a comic book frame. In golf, the lowest score wins. So players work hardest at getting the lowest score. How ‘bout if, instead of keeping score by advances and retreats and downed airplanes or destroyed infantry, we count dead people. The fewer dead, the better the situation. So if “we” want to get a good score, we provide negotiators instead of bombs. We offer cash, concessions, trades, to keep the number of dead low. We exchange the frame of winning and losing for one of dying or not dying.

NEXT FRAME INTRODUCTION: It’s called “pre-judgement” and includes one of my favorite idioms of the last decade or so. It too is an extension of the American good guy/ bad guy frame. That is, anything done by a badguy must be bad. If the cowboy wearing black picks up a a dog in scene one, he’ll shoot it in scene three. He can’t be NICE to the dog… he’s a bad guy. That phrase I love is Trump Derangement Syndrome

FLASH TO Miami beach: It’s crowded. Throngs wanting to get in their last wave before Hurricane Bruce slams the coast and ruins their fun. If you walk quietly in a corner of the beach, you’ll see what looks like a typical American family: a chubby balding man… gray chest-hair, a woman, obviously his wife, with bright red hair, obviously from a bottle. A boy and his younger sister play on the bright blue picnic blanket spread in the sand. The boy carries a plastic bucket and a little plastic shovel. The little girl is empty-handed.

If you listen carefully, you’ll hear that they are speaking French. Maybe they’re tourists. With a peal of kiddie-laughter the empty-handed girl grabs the bucket from her brother and runs toward the ocean. The brother gives chase, finally catching up and wrestling the bucket free. Then he pushes his sister who falls into the increasingly violent waves smashing against the shore. The girl washes out to sea.

“Aide! Aide!” screams the father, as the little girl is rip-currented further and further from shore.

Donald Trump, passing by, hears the shouts. Not taking the time to remove anything but his shoes, he runs to the water and jumps in. Powerfully, he swims out to the girl, grabs her around the chest and… careful to keep her head above water... brings her safely back to shore.

TRUMP MOLESTS TODDLER AT THE BEACH is the headline in The Times the next day… along with a photo of Donny Trump in the water with his arm around the girl’s chest.

For so many people, Trump is incapable of doing anything right… of doing a good deed. If it appears good… pardoning non-violent offenders, keeping the US out of war, downsizing The Pentagon… there’s always some reason it’s BAD. Getting out of NAFTA and TPP… disastrous trade bills that would have allowed international trade with no oversight. Slave conditions unanswerable by the US courts. President Trump saved us from them.

No he didn’t. Come the answers. Those were good for trade… come the TDS answers… except for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC who also opposed the treaties when they were presented by the Dems… those treaties are left out of the frame.

And finally… briefly… a pair of frames I’ve written about before: the GENDER frame and the RACE frame. Seeing abortion as “a war against women” where most of the anti-abortionists see a war against murder. Or seeing street crime and armed robbery as BLACK street crime and BLACK armed robbery instead of POVERTY-INDUCED street crime and POVERTY-INDUCED armed robbery. Framing… framing… framing.

So please… face the wall and look at that picture. Take it down… open the back and spread out the painting so the unframed parts become clear. Then REFRAME it, so those twat-showing hands become the Mona Lisa.

See you in hell,
Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ Framing Step-by-Step Dept: There’s a great step-by-step analysis of news- framing in the New York Times. It’s not published on any of the monopoly-internet sites, but you can find it here.

→ How you react DEPENDS dept: Many of you know that I’ve gone through radiation treatment for prostate cancer. Called Cyberknife, the treatment itself is painless, though expensive. But the cash expense is only part of the problem. I pissed in my pants on the way home from the last treatment. I’ve been wearing (and needing) DEPENDS ever since. I have daily brain fog and the only time I’m not tired is late at night when I should be sleeping. If cyberknife is recommended for you… consider it VEEERRRRRY CAREFULLY, before you agree to it. You have been warned.

→ Put A Bag On It dept: The Canadian Broadcasting Company reports that in an environmental move, rock climbers in British Columbia have been encouraged to use WAG BAGS, to shit in. The idea, you shit in a bag that contains deodorizing chemicals, and then carry the shit with you, out of the wooded areas where you dispose of it at home. Sure, that’s gonna happen. Yeah right.

See you in hell redux,
MB


THE NATION AGAIN

I’m a long-time subscriber to the The Nation. It’s the only lefty publication that I find myself not only agreeing with, but also getting inspiration from. Strangely, when I post this stuff on facebook, no one looks at it. My “friends” would just rather call me a “Trumpist” or a “Republican” for all the times I don’t follow the party line. If it’s printed in THE NATION, it should give me street cred, right? Yeah right.

I found, in an old issue, a great argument against those who charge “What Aboutism” when others make points about a parallel issue outside the frame. The author’s basic (and correct) point of view is that the anti-whataboutism argument justifies hypocrisy.
Then there’s Thomas Graham who spots a little more subtlety in the Ukraine war than the media and the current war-mongers are showing.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

Jason Rodgers sent me his book Invisible Generation… free! And I lost it. Jason, a long-time partner of Suzy Poe, has been bugging me to review it… and I can’t. So the best I can do is promote it. I have a lot of respect for Jason… he is a libertarian (in the best sense of the word), and a super-smart guy. When/if I find the book, I’ll give you some more details.

Video of the week: My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachlorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com

TOXIC or You're STILL Wrong, Mykel's Blog Sept 2021

 

You're Still Wrong: Mykel's  September  Blog... Toxic 

 

You’re STILL Wrong

or
Mykel's

September 2021 Blog/Column

A Toxic Environment!

by Mykel Board

“I’m not perverted, I’m just Italian.” --Andrew Cuomo

“No one should ever work.” --Bob Black

“Capitalism is slavery where the slaves have to pay their own room and board” –Mykel Board

“I had complained to friends that the Governor would go out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs” --Lindsey Boylan

=======================

“I can’t breathe!”

“Quick, clean out his nose… I can see it... filled with coal dust. He’ll smother!”

Cough… answer, “I’m not putting my fingers in another man’s nose! That’s disgusting.”

“He’ll die! Get it? He’ll die!”

Virgil knees on the filthy mine floor. Tentatively, he puts an index finger into Homer’s left nostril… scrapes it around… pulls it out… black with snot and coal dust.

“Now the other one, fast!”

Virgil pushes his finger into the right nostril of the man under him… twists… then back… and again loosens a pile of black dust. The tip of his finger is coated when he pulls it out of the man’s nostril.

“Now push on his chest… hard… make him breathe.”

Virgil puts a hand on either side of Homer’s chest… pushes hard… again… a thin stream of black drool oozes out of the corner of Homer’s mouth. Another chest press… another black drool down the side of the man’s face… then a cough… then another cough. Tears run from the corners of his eyes to the black ground beneath his head.

“He’s gonna make it. We’ll fix up a side-tipper and get him out of here on the tracks. The fresh air will bring him back.”

“Can’t we get him a doctor?”

“Are you kidding? The boss’d kill us! That’s just what we need... a safety-hazard report at some fuckin’ hospital. Joe Biden already wants to shut us down.”

FLASH TO a huge farm... hundreds of acres... somewhere in the West...strawberries. Bare-handed and bare-headed... dozens of workers bent over… stooped,,, to pick the berries. They too cough.

“Ay, madre-mia,” says a 22-year old Maria, just starting to show her pregnancy. She coughs.

“No puedo hacerlo mas. Voy a morir,” she coughs again. It’s the Round-up… pesticide...carcinogenic… dangerous to a fetus as well as to the mother.

No time to worry about cancer now... earn that $7500 for a year’s work. Bend and pick… bend and pick… bend and pick.

Ay, me duele la espalda,” she says.

“Shhh!” says the next worker. “Screw your back pain. You want to pay for that baby? You want to get pushed back to Mexico? Don’t complain! At least you have a job.”

She doesn’t know it yet, but she also has cancer. Her baby will be stillborn. 

And there’s this, directly from the internet

Amazon delivery drivers are reporting working ten to fourteen hours in a shift. This is in part because drivers are not allowed to return any packages from their routes, meaning drivers can make over 160 stops per shift.

With the Mentor app constantly monitoring drivers, every stop has to be accounted for. That leaves most drivers with no time to use the restroom on their ten hour shifts. Drivers need to use public restrooms such as ones inside grocery stores, so if their route does not include an area that has such a location, drivers have to make a long detour that could cost them their job. Because of these strict measures, drivers report using empty water bottles in their vehicles instead of stopping to use the restroom

LeRoy Jackson’s truckseat has molded itself to his ass. He spends nearly 14 hours a day there. On the floor, in front of the passenger seat… in a basket… half-filled with piss… is a jar. It’s that time again.

Pull over… hate to waste a minute or so… but if you gotta go… Could do with a shit too… but this rig’s got spyware up the ass. Too long stopped… not making deliveries… and you’re outta there.

Just a quickie… pull over… pull it out… just over the lip of the jar. Aaahh aaaahhh, shit. Filled the jar, spilled all over the place… and I got a delivery… 17 minutes to make it… computer checked. .. Better pull out... haul ass… Now!

Off the shoulder... into traffic… fuck!!! Nooo! Nooo!!!! BLLLLANNNNG!

Ellen’s face hurts from smiling. Bad jokes… send it back to the kitchen… too cold… too hot… “Miss… excuse me Miss!” She smiles. On her feet all day… rushing from table to table… balancing enough dishes to compete with a circus juggler… She smiles. $2.13 an hour, the U.S. minimum wage for tipped workers. (Look it up) plus what the cheapskates leave on the tables… That’s it. She smiles.

On her feet all day, Ellen comes home beat… ready to go to sleep… to hit the hay. She’s working six days a week to pay the $2000 a month she needs for her one-room NYC apartment. On the seventh day, she barely moves.

She puts up with the tugs on her skirt… the food complaints… the no tips for bad food as if she were personally responsible for the cooking. Sometimes she can wiggle her ass for a few extra dollars… or wink at a regular who stands so close to her when he speaks that she feels the saliva spray on her face. His handlebar mustache and affected cape make him look like a magician. If only he’d disappear. He’s there every day and she wants to kill him.

She’s a robot, she thinks. Same thing… day after day… no… I guess not... robots don’t collapse exhausted. Back to work… “Hey miss,” the tug on the skirt… the wrist-grab of the customer when she hands him the bill… the smile she gives in return. 

Hey you! Got it? Yeah you… you Karen… you whiner who thinks that being touched on the back is toxic. People die from their jobs… lung cancer, skin cancer, exhaustion… death… That’s toxic. Having a brain-dead job just to pay the rent. That’s toxic. Working with coal, asbestos, insecticide… that’s REALLY toxic.

But for you… another person touches you?… eeeewwww cooties. Joking about boyfriends? Intolerable! The job conditions have to fit YOU rather than the other way around.

Those at the bottom… the miners, the truck drivers, the waitresses... can’t just quit and find another job like you can… They die from work or they die from hunger… or a firing squad in a nation you can’t imagine. Or they suffer for two dollars an hour or whatever else they can squeeze out of people they hate.

Let me tell you… You fragile little Faberge egg… YOU are the toxic one. You are the one who has others shaking in their Nordstroms from fear of saying the wrong thing or touching you any more than shaking hands… and even that… don’t you just bump elbows these days? Doing push-ups? Oh, the horror!

Yeah you… You know how many people WISH they could get a $20,000 raise by fucking the boss? And you’re complaining that he asked.

Andrew Cuomo is rich enough to find other things to do. But how much fear is he bringing with him anywhere he goes. How much do John and Jane Doe fear from doing or saying anything inappropriate?

All jobs are bullshit. It’s the nature of work. Yours isn’t hunky dory? Then quit and get another bullshit job. Work 60 hours a week shifting ones and zeros from one computer to the next. As long as no one speaks to you.. or (Goddess forbid) touches you… you’re okay. Then the work isn’t toxic, right?

You wear a skirt and high heels to work… and (get this!) he looks at you!! How will you ever recover?

Do me a favor. Sniff some asbestos before you go to sleep. Do it often enough and you’ll learn a bit about toxic.

See you in hell,

Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

–> Can’t find a webpage dept: A great story on the deteriorating conditions in the mining business appears in In These Times the September 2021 issue. I can’t find it on-line, so try to get a print copy. Called Dying To Make A Living, the coal conditions the article reports on are just horrible. 
          Wait, a reader, Don Smith, has found a link to the article. Here it is: https://inthesetimes.com/article/contracted-coal-miners-illinois-injury-danger

–> Dying for a job dept: The World Economic Forum reports that more than 2.3 million workers die every year as a result of occupational accidents or work-related diseases. That’s the entire population of Houston, Texas... killed every year from WORK. The alternative? Ah, how many times have I referenced this? You should have it memorized by now.

–> Evil Governor dept: While the women of America are sticking their pins in Cuomo dolls, the former governor has used his last days in office to grant pardons to 22 immigrants who were at risk of being deported. "New York stands strong in our support for immigrant communities," Cuomo wrote in a statement.

–> Not related dept: This one is from the Darwin Awards… that distinguished group of intellectuals who award the prize to those who clean up the future of the human race by offing themselves in their stupidity. I like this one it because it highlights another pet peeve! Cellphone fuckin’ selfies. Besides describing the awardee’s adventures, the Darwin folks offer some great advice:

25 March 2017, Mexico: Standing on a truck on an airport runway, our Double-Darwin Award Winners, Nitzia and Clarissa, chose a regrettable location for a cell phone selfie. Ms. Corral, 18, and Ms. Miranda, 17, were attending horse races that were held on a track adjacent to the runway. The noise of the races and the desire for a new profile picture distracted the young women. They did not hear the motor of the descending aircraft, and the wing of the small plane that struck and killed them instantly.

People, wake up to the plain hard fact that a mobile phone is a deadly distraction! Mobile devices take our awareness away from the physical world, and the Darwin Awards archives are stuffed overflowing with testimony proving the tragic truth of this.

Cell phones will kill you! Put them away and allow your senses to receive input from tangible reality. Please share this regrettable cautionary lesson, a public service announcement, #yourdeathmatters

–>Speaking of cellphones dept: Apple will be putting spyware in its operating system. Ostensibly to combat kiddie porn, the spyware will be looking at your pictures and videos and reporting any nastiness it sees to “the proper authorities.” And what will it be doing with the information it gleans from those non-kiddie pix? Hey, what a coincidence, that Antifa demonstration I just filmed showed up at the FBI. Imagine that? How did that happen?
The Electronic Frontier’s details on this are here.

See you in hell, redux,

MB

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com