This blog is one of the literary endeavors I have taken up in my retirement (and light work, too; see the schedule in the sidebar at right; time for sanity measures like coffee, and puttering in the garden).
I go into the reasoning behind this project in detail elsewhere (see “Why the Jackpot?”, “On Blogging,” and “On This Blog”, for the collective fix(es) we are in, the continued importance of blogging, and the editorial design of this blog, respectively).
In short form, in the Jackpot Blog I want to move out of social media’s dopamine doom loop — especially the “guns and gossip” doom loop that comprises so much of mainstream war coverage — back to “the blogosphere’s” surges of oxytocin, because I think that’s the only way we can think and feel, as opposed to reacting (and reacting to a user experience and media environment designed to prevent us from thinking and feeling). Thinking and feeling, as opposed to reacting, are in my view essential to making it through what is to come.
As you can see in the sidebar, this blog had a ten-month gestation period. There were a lot of reasons for that, mostly under the rubric of “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” However, I also needed to give the blog the technical capabilities to let me write in the way I want to write:1 I like footnotes and scholarly apparatus of all kinds, for example. I love taxonomies (see the tags). And I love entwinglement, where I can rove from topic to topic, spotting unexpected connections; hence the many tables with cells that are links to other topics and tables. If you want to see the level of effort involved, see one such table at the bottom of the About page.
Above all, I felt I needed to make one major story my own. That story turned out to be DOGE (the Department [sic] of Government Efficiency [sic]), which is worse than I ever imagined — posts to come — and my imagination is vivid. I’ll give more detail on my technical approach in a post to come, but I aggregated well over 1000 stories on DOGE, and tagged them heavily, so if you want to follow, say, “Edward ‘Big Balls’ Coristine” in his mad career through government, you can do that; and the same for over 900 other tagged individuals.2
Please poke around, and if anything breaks — or, more optimistically, you see something you consider particularly fine — you can tell me about it in the Contact Form, or leave a comment.
NOTES
1 And let you write the way you want to write. For example, on your account page, there’s a list of all your comments (and all your posts). It gets frustrating trying to Google for something you know that you wrote….
2 I’m that satisfied I’ve listed the vast majority of DOGEbags. Hopefully knowledge of their depredations and depravity will follow them for the rest of their lives, and my efforts will contribute to that happy task. Those few thousands had and are having a disproportionate impact, though, didn’t they?
Comments
Yes, it’s ambitious. But in my “retirement”, I do have other literary and artistic endeavors that I want to pursue to a successful conclusion. So when this horrid debugging phase is over, I hope to work only 9-5, and then have the evening to devote to other projects. Health does matter, and I’m focused on it.
Nearly 50 years ago a wise man told me that “All goodbye’s ain’t GONE”. I am glad to see this play out yet again in my life!
Glad to see you in the game— I was worried that you pulled a literary-version of Michael Jordan’s retirement from basketball to take up baseball, or worse, that you yourself had taken-up golf!
I am glad you are well and busy at work, and I really appreciate it that you’re showing the efforts that are going into building this blog. I recently started a one-off project on Substack and, although it will be nothing like what you’re doing here, you’ve already helped me out a lot by giving me much to learn from your site, ideas to work with as I build-out my page.
Approximately two years ago you posted some notes I had sent with regards to anosognosia: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04/200pm-water-cooler-4-22-2024.ht…
I had taken these notes because I was trying to understand the “whys?” of what appeared to be an elder-care issue, however, in July of that year I learned that it was much more than that, much more than what I understood or knew at the time (neglect by caretakers (willful), forgery, fraud, financial exploitation, and a lot more in the mix). And from that July onward, tangible evidence of past and present wrongdoings began to accumulate more quickly as ever more wrongdoings were being committed— increasingly hasty, sloppy-execution, and easier to identify as the perps grand-scheme began to see daylight and unravel.
Initially, I was the only one pulling on the threads in near-blindness, but this situation today is no longer a mere “issue” because it is now an actual court case, one with a rapidly increasingly likelihood of seeing additional civil filings, in addition to criminal actions, initiated. The work I began as a solo-effort is now a growing production of lawyers and others who specialize at untangling webs. My Substack will be more-or-less following this production as it progresses, not as courtroom or journalistic reporting, but more as a broad social commentary— artistically presented while remaining truthful to fact.. or so I endeavor. Mostly I want to have some fun with this thing, enjoy some schadenfreude, and maybe do a little good by helping a few others along the way.
My ultimate goal in this project is to melt a wicked witch, clip the wings of her flying monkeys, and to butcher sacred cows: a Medicare Advantage broker who killed her own mother by denying her care (for an easily treatable, and reversible, condition), the witch’s dupes and accomplices, and Medicare Advantage itself along with those who benefit from this scam by helping to facilitate it.
When it’s ready, I will send to you an invitation to the dinner-party.
Thanks ever for the inspiration and solidarity— I wish you success!
Your style of writing