internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign Policy Guru from New York Times machine
I often look at streams of readers at *cutting edge* and *progressive* reading series, and the steady parade of unphotoshopped but pure shinefaces freaks me out. How is a scuffed fucker supposed to become pyramid success when already so obviously flawed? Every little known site avatar full of perfect white face with perfect MFA, and it's freaky. So to read about one of these *cutting edge* and *progressive* new world not-traditionalists being, well, just a deeply embedded part of the establishment, I don't know, it's already weird enough this collection of facts.
But what's weird as fuck is the mentions of Holden Caulfield in this piece. Holden fucking Caulfield. Now the internet machine has been great for clouding and fogging all things into conspiracies, to where everything is stupid and means nothing, and that way we can elect Donald Trumps and have robot planes bomb Pakistani weddings. But did you know that there are weird Catcher in the Rye conspiracies? That Sirhan Sirhan was carrying the fucking book when he shot that Kennedy bro. That the John Lennon murdered also was carrying the fucking book. That even Winona Ryder, when she got all weird and spaced out and was arrested for shoplifting, was fucking carrying that book. Now whatever, I can see somebody loving a book a lot. I love a couple of books a whole lot, so much so I buy used copies whenever I find them to give to other people. But if I was gonna go murdering somebody, I'd probably leave the book at home to be honest. And yet here are multiple instances of people carrying that same book when they do weird shit.
Well, even weirder is the secret yet allegedly based in truth notions that Salinger was on CIA payroll. But deeper than that is the connections (all of this is whispered, and obviously there's no proof to any of this, especially now that we have the internet fog and all proof is just a joke meant to obfuscate all shit into oblivion philosophies) the CIA is supposed to have to highly credentialed MFA programs, specifically (as I have heard) the Iowa Writer's Workshop. There was some article a while back I read about some novelist talking about becoming a spy, and I was like, "Holy shit, he's saying the conspiracy, but making it some 'hahaha, check out how strange my life journey has been' crap."
Now of course this is all nonsense, just gibberish by dumb ol' Raven Mack at his dumb ol' blogsite in the dusty ass corner of the internet on his 2004 ass looking website. But damn yo, read this article. This shit is reality. And we're supposed to be impressed by it. I don't get this fucking world, at least not the one put forth by those who are writing the history.

"You Want a Description of Hell?" Oxycontin's 12-Hour Problem from Los Angeles Times machine
So Oxycontin and it's parent pharma company have been taking heat lately in media for having a pretty strong hand in helping the latest heroin epidemic as much as any Mexican drug cartel. The sad thing is this only became newsworthy now that suburban kids are starting to OD. Oxycontin has been a huge issue in rural American parts of Greater Appalachia for a long ass minute. I know people who have been in that rabbithole (thankfully, so far as I am aware, none of them have ended up down the heroin route, at least not long enough for it to be obvious), some of them people I love. The issue is not, however, just a corrupt pharmaceutical company alone. They were able to game the FDA system because the system is designed for gaming. That is by design. This article is painting Oxycontin as an aberration, that the family who profited off of this - passing other dynastic families like the Rockefellers and Carnegies in the process - somehow is lesser than those other mentioned dynastic families, that rigging the system in the 1920s was somehow more pure and acceptable than rigging the system in 2000s.
I don't know, I don't really have anything specific I can say. I mean you have the earlier article about OBAMA'S QUIRKY NOVELIST SPEECHWRITER FOREIGN GURU guy, and Obama's health insurance plan is still touted, for some reason, by many, as a step in the right direction for our nation's broken health care system, as if having wolves circling the henhouse but then demanding all the hens pay into the wolves to trust the wolves to not eat them (for profit) is somehow fixing a fucked up situation. I don't get it. There were fucking opioid-related constipation drug commercials at the Super Bowl this past year - the most expensive commercial time on earth, a drug for a side effect symptom of opioid abuse saw it a worthwhile investment to buy that commercial time. You realize in terms of dollars and cents how fucking crazy that is?
People are getting eat up by this system. We are living in fogged times unlike anything we've seen before, and a large part of that is due to the progress of technology - both our social media as well as our pharmaceutical inputs (including through our *non-drug* diet). Fuck man, today's INTERNET READING LIST OF LATE is sounding like crazy man Alex Jones shit, but I don't know, the fog is fucking thick right now. I feel overwhelmed by it some days.

The Sacred Grain of the Northwoods from Roads & Kingdoms
The final of these 3 links for this morning is about wild rice. I was at the Trader Joe's yesterday getting myself some more European style yogurt containers for my cayenne yogurt drinks (just like Karoun's! but I did it myself!) and I laughed at the "cultivated wild rice" label on the cultivated wild rice. We recently had some bona fide self-harvested wild rice gifted to us from some people connected to that realm, and no shit, it has felt important to eat it right, like don't just whip it up with some black beans on a Tuesday afternoon.
I will be honest, I feel too fogged to write clearly about all these things today. But I live down the road from former dairy farmland now leased out to giant agri-business entities who plant slave corn or slave soy depending on the year. You can actually feel the slavery in the plants. I walk up there sometimes and vibe to them. (Perhaps you will find this crazy but) Plants have feelings. They do not want to be enslaved any more than pig farms are full of happy pigs dancing in happy circles as someone makes barbecue from them (as the label often suggests). But what do we do? We can wild harvest enough food to support all these people, can we?
(That leads to philosophical jump to tech industry shit like soylent, which itself is heavily invested in the philosophy of MAN HAS DOMINION OVER THE EARTH even if they took mystery god out of the equation. I'm not down with that. None of it.)
But the simple fact that wild rice exists less, for what seems to be fairly obvious scientific reasons, yet that is overruled by bigger interests, leaving original cultures at a loss for something that has far more than economic importance to them but spiritual significance, I don't know. We very obviously went wrong somewhere. We think economic significance enables a progressive replacement for spiritual significance. It doesn't though. This is why we might end up with a fucking President Trump, because people know the emperor has no clothes on, and they don't really care that the guy pointing it out is an idiot liar with a bad hairpiece. They're just going, "hahaha, no shit! Fuck the emperor!"
There is no way to tie all this together, but if you read the articles, it will tie together for you I hope. Those two words are important, too - "I hope". No empire is bigger than earth; this has been shown time and time again. And though many humans may die due to our greedy incompetence at living with the rest of the biosphere, some humans will survive, and adapt, and regenerate, and stack stones into cities and write words into prophecy. I maintain hope that all will work out, or at least continue, and all one can do is have hope and do their best to survive. But goddamn, the fog is so fucking thick...