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Amway Without the Soap

May 8, 2026 5 Comments

If you’ve been hiding under a rock lo these many years, everything depicted in this video might be news to you. If so, I’d like the address of your rock, and want to sublet part of the shadow from you. Even if you are clued in, the refresher course they put under all these videos on RubeTube with a link to Wikipedia won’t do you any harm:

Sovereign citizen movement
Wikipedia • The sovereign citizen movement is a loose group of anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, vexatious litigants, tax protesters and financial scammers found mainly in English-speaking common law countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

If you’re wondering what Mexicans like to watch on TV, wonder no further. Most everyone here likes to watch Americans getting arrested. There are about a zillion YouTube channels that mimic the hoary original TV show, Cops, and I swear my friends in Yucatan watch all of them. In the first AirBnB we rented a couple of years ago, if you turned on the TV without subscription logins in hand, all you got was Cops dubbed in Spanish as the single default channel. As far as Mexico goes, there are no home grown versions of these arrest videos, because people don’t act like that here, and are mystified and modestly entertained by watching Americans fling their poo at the popo.

All the entertainment and commentary in these videos are the downstream effect of demanding that police wear body cameras all the time. It didn’t work out like they planned. Everyone still tries the I can’t breathe dindu nuthin’ dodge. No one’s buying it anymore, because there’s an almost unlimited supply of bodycam depictions of diddo everythin’. They show that American police are generally polite and professional, to the point of being overly deferential to raging a-holes, if you ask me. The cops seem mostly resigned to the “catch and release” program of the judiciary, and plod along, wearily asking, over and over, if any driver has a valid driver’s license, a current registration, and paid up insurance. They’re all hoping to someday find that single, elusive driver, every traffic cop’s white whale, someone who can answer, “Yes.”

So my Mexican friends are quite well versed in the art of PIT maneuvers, window breakage, generous applications of pepper spray, wobbly straight line walking, jerking eye motions, and fighting with the cops while declaiming, “I’m not resisting.” But they were all mystified by Sovereign Citizens. The Spanish subtitles are of no use to a Spanish speaker, because the English being spouted is of no use to an English speaker. The people are plain nuts, but they don’t appear to be like the usual meth-addled impromptu Grand Theft Auto contestants that the Arkansas state troopers are currently ramming at 120 MPH. So they ask me, “¿Qué onda?” What gives?

After some cogitation, I realized I had seen this sort of behavior before, but not where you might have expected to find it. Sovereign Citizenry is just Amway without the soap. I’ll explain.

Both sets of people construct an alternate reality, live in it, and expect the world to conform to them. IYKYK is the INRI nailed to the top of the cross they’ve fashioned for themselves. Amway people, and their MLM ilk, reject the fundamental laws of economics, entrepreneurship, success, and social relationships. SovCits reject the fundamental laws of, well, laws, along with all sorts of government authority, contracts, jurisdiction, and identity.

Common sense isn’t common, as they say, but it’s much, much less common in both sets of cults than among the genpop. For instance, common sense tells you that when two burly uniformed men carrying handcuffs, mace, pistols, tasers, batons, and a paystub from the local police station say, “You’re under arrest,” the appropriate response is not, “No I’m not.”

Both groups trump common sense with their indomitable adherence to Hidden Knowledge. They believe that ordinary people are trapped by their slavish idolatry of obvious rules, and the only way out is to learn The Secret Rules. Back in the Pleistocene Era before the internet, when people learned about things like this only by word of mouth, everyone eventually had a “friend” at work who invited you to a gathering at their house that was totally social, trust me, but somehow instantly devolved into a guy scribbling on a whiteboard telling you how much money you could make by signing up everyone you know by telling them how much money they could make, by signing up everyone they knew…. Then you all sold soap to each other to get rich. Or Tupperware. Or timeshares. Or whatever.

Now we have the internet, and hooboy, it’s the equivalent of a bosh cropduster. Not only can someone in Arkansas convince someone in Arizona that Black’s Law Dictionary is the new Holy Bible, they can sell them stuff directly and make money off it. Fictitious license plates. Weird ID cards. Books and reams of mimeographed law-talking-guy drivel to clutch while you explain to a judge why you’re not a person, you’re a Moorish National, even though you’ve lived in Oklahoma since the doctor slapped you, apparently much too vigorously.

It’s the ritualized documentation that both groups adore that makes their Venn diagrams completely overlap. Sovereign Citizens produce blizzards of pseudo-legal filings, affidavits, notices, stamps, and citations. You’ll often see their latest victims literally reading off a script while the cops roll their eyes and call for backup. MLMs are about the same, and produce plans, scripts, motivational systems, charts, seminars, books, and endless “training materials” that are little more than business plans for bothering your friends, neighbors, and co-workers. The worst of these people, which is generally a 100% tie for first place, drag their children into it, too, like the woman in the video. And when it fails (it always does), they’ll tell you that you didn’t do it hard enough, or maybe it’s just proof that the system is totally corrupt, man, and by the way, would you like to buy my book that exposes the totally corrupt system?

Both worlds generally operate best when they catch people who are having some sort of personal crisis. The SovCits quote every crazy pseudo-legalism they can dream up, but eventually the cops find out they simply have four DUIs, or fourteen speeding tickets they forgot to pay, or some other impetus to declare to cops, like Obi-Wan Kenobi in a trucker’s cap, that these are not the laws you’re looking for.

The MLMs appeal mostly to people who’ve run aground on the shores of regular commerce. Financial stress and loneliness is a powerful motivator to listen to someone who says they have the cheat code to that Sandals Vacation you’ve been dreaming of since you got laid off with no severance.

So it’s kinda fun to see a SovCit tell a policeman that he’s allowed to drive 90 mph in a school zone because he’s not driving in a car, he’s traveling in his vessel under maritime law. It’s less fun to try to explain it to Mexicans.

And for some reason, they never want to drive anywhere with me.

Ferry Cross the Mersey and the River Styx

May 4, 2026 5 Comments

You know, I saw this photo of Margaret Thatcher at the beach, and I got to wondering: is it possible that this photo was altered using AI?

Don’t laugh, it’s feasible. It’s layers inside layers. You don’t want to know who’s behind this sort of thing. For example, as you all know, the moon landings were faked. It’s also a known fact that legions of toothless rednecks are probed each year, and not always by each other. Occasionally it’s aliens. But trust me, the lizard people control everything, including those spaceships with racks of adult toys inside. If you check the Bilderberg filing cabinets, you’ll find a 100-year lease they took out on Area 51, written in Klingon.

George Bush controls the weather, I get that, mostly because Al Gore was too busy inventing the internet to stop him., The beings who look like iguanas if you scratch their latex skins off cover the rest of the waterfront. They’ll probe you, and keep you from finding out about their probe ships. No mean trick, that. You’d think you’d remember something along those lines. Just the bill for a colonoscopy sticks in one’s mind. But they could hide out on the far side of the moon, and we’d never know. Until we get there. You know, if they let us, eventually.

I urge my fellow internauts to be careful about what they see online, like this picture. The average person really has to become more discerning these days. There are four Trumps, everyone knows this, except Melania, I guess, or maybe she’s in on it. Most everyone is. Anyway, you don’t want to waste your time with some civnat on Rumble who thinks there’s only one. The only important thing is to determine which fake one is currently bombing Iran, or Yemen, or one end of the White House. It’s common knowledge among amateur geneticists that  the original one is in the freezer next to Ted Williams’ head.

I’m hip to these shenanigans, though. When I see a picture like Maggie at the beach, I don’t take it at face value. I do a deep dive. I’m no sheeple, people. I use my encyclopedic knowledge, gleaned from lord knows how many memes and comic books, to analyze a thing before I trust it. I’ll share some inside info with you fine folks, so you won’t be taken for a rube, and start voting Libertarian and stuff:

For starters, Margaret Thatcher is dead. The freezer with Ted and the third Trump from the left isn’t infinitely large you know, and I’m sure the secret cabal that decides such things, in between making Tom Cruise have sex with anyone but Nicole Kidman, would look at the size of Meg’s bouffant and figure, “She’s one of us, but we really can’t spare two cryogenic slots for one person?” So she might be really dead, not Epstein dead. If so, what’s she doing at the beach?

This might make a shallow thinker revert to: Hey, maybe that picture was taken before she died. Or, she’s obviously not alive, but propped up in a chair, like Biden was. Oh, you sweet, summer child. You can tell she’s really laying down some fat beats with the accurate position of those delicate fingers of hers. And since there aren’t six fingers on each hand, it may be an old Polaroid, but it can’t be an AI fabrication. The fellow in the left background has his left arm on his right shoulder, but that doesn’t mean anything. Lots of guys are like that. I went to school with a guy like that. My uncle has left-rightedness. True story.

You have to learn to dig deeper. Let’s zoom in on the bottom right corner. Do you see it?

Do you see it yet? No? Sheesh, OK, I’ll zoom in more for all the slow learners:

It’s dispositive. I know from years of looking at Bigfoot photos how to decipher these sorts of images. That’s a UL listing. Maggie was English, or British, or UKrasian or something like that. That equipment should have a British Standards compliance logo. If it was a product designed to meet standards issued by the British Standards Institution (BSI) for electronics, it would have a BS 415 for safety of mains-operated electronic equipment. It doesn’t.

The last picture is proof that the image was taken in the US or outlying islands, not the UK. I rest my case. It’s confirmation that Margaret Thatcher didn’t really die, and was whisked off for monkey gland treatments in the Bermuda Triangle, and now spends her time spinning remixes of Gerry and the Pacemaker records at parties for her Rosicrucian masters.

QED, I think.

I Scare Myself

April 30, 2026 3 Comments

There are certain levels of creativity that transcend technique.

I don’t like nearly all modern painters. But have you ever stood in front of a Van Gogh? It’s terrifying stuff. There is technique in it. He did his thing, over and over, always pushing forward, getting faster, further out, until he was simply expressing himself directly. He was deranged. If art is a look into another man’s mind, he gave us a peek into a maniac’s thought process. For example, you don’t critique his painting of the postman. You deal with it.

I think it’s twice as ghastly because he liked the guy. This is my friend. his fingers are turning into snakes. 

Just when you’re reeling from that sort of thing, he announces he can take it up a notch, or ten if you’re interested. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds got nothin’ on him:

Moving on, what, exactly, made titanic egoists like Hemingway, Joyce, and Eliot flop on the floor in front of Ezra Pound, and declare him “il miglior fabbro“? It’s from Dante, and means “the better craftsman,” or something close to that.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

—  Poetry (April 1913)

There’s audacity figured into all this. Some people are good at eliciting gasps. Pound sure did. But audacity alone is just shamelessness. Madonna and a million other talentless people show you what 100 % audacity and a certain moral flexibility, bordering on contortion, can yield. It ain’t art.

The video is Dan Hicks, along with some agglomeration of his Hot Licks. I’m not sure what it takes to put  yourself out there like that. He had the chops to be normal, but not the desire. He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever. At least he had time to break off rock music’s femur and beat it over the head with it while he was sailing along.

I got up at 3:30 this morning because I had to write something, or die trying. It was about the 1970s. In the dark, alone, sweltering in the silence, I scared myself, just thinking about it. I stopped for a moment to salute il miglior fabbro.

Y Te Da Felicidad

April 26, 2026 6 Comments

Well, they called it a Country song. I guess it was, at least before Freddie Fender got ahold of it. Then it became another country song. It had been recorded by a bunch of people, including Jerry Lee Lewis, but no one remembers that now.

The Freddie Fender version was a throwaway afterthought. A record producer wanted a version with Spanish lyrics mixed in, so he hired Freddie to sing it. “I was glad to get it over with and I thought that would be the last of it”. It made it to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1975, and was the fourth most popular song of the year. After that, pretty much no one knew Freddie had ever sung anything else. The music business is like that sometimes.

Signs, Wonders, and Ecuadorian Elvis

April 24, 2026 3 Comments

We have friends here in Merida. It was already a polyglot crew, but now we seem to have inherited a Poligano posse as well.

Poligano is a fraccionamiento, or perhaps a colonia in the northwestern part of the city. No one calls a neighborhood a barrio here. The older sections of the city are called colonias, and the planned developments are called fraccionamientos. Poligano isn’t much of either. It’s an area with a mix of building styles, almost entirely single family homes. It’s where real people live. Working class, and mostly poor. In many ways, it’s the polar opposite of the colonia of Santiago, where we live. We live south and west of the main part of the city, which we can walk to. Poligano is towards the northeast corner of the city. You can’t walk to anywhere from there but more Poligano. Our new Poligano friends exhibited a brand of friendship I recognize, but only dimly, like a black and white movie on a VHS tape. It has not been on offer in the country of my birth for a long time.

They are cousins of one of our original friends here in Merida. They have a big family and get together at the drop of a sombrero and party down. They decided to throw my wife a surprise birthday party. She never caught on, even after it was well underway, because she couldn’t envision something like that happening to her. It had to be explained to her that this party was in her honor, and these people had gathered to celebrate it, as if she were three years old.

Their house is one in an endless row of mismatched masonry dovecotes. It’s hacienda style, I guess, but only technically. The front of the house is a big iron gate, nothing more than a heavy screen. The front room is a garage, sort of, but garages are tiled here, and rarely used for parking cars. The streets are skinny and filled with cars that have seen better days, but will see many more days anyway. For instance, across the street was a glorious 1970-ish VW bus, painted various fetching shades of pink (by brush and roller). It had four flat tires. On either side of it were cars fifteen years newer than our old Volvo back in the states, so I’m not sure exactly what you can infer from that.

The garage had long tables set up in it, lots of mismatched chairs, and a television of the size that would make your children invoke the Geneva Convention if you tried to make them watch it. There were cheap speakers screwed to the walls, the ghost of boomboxes past, I guess, ready for a fiesta at all times. On the wall was a shrine to Our Lady of Guadeloupe, surrounded by Christmas lights. It’s a staple around here.

I tell you what, you have not lived until you are taken in, like stray cats, and eat tacos prepared in a kitchen with no running water (until it rains again, and the cistern fills up), and put yourself outside of arctic cervezas that sweat only a trifle more than you do in the heat. You dance and sing along with an Ecuadorian Elvis, hired to bring his karaoke machine and perform. Was he good? I told him that if he was around when my mates and I were still performing pop song covers back in the day, we’d have put him out front and in five minutes we’d make a grand a night, and two on the weekends. He replied that it wasn’t important, because he was an electrician all day, and didn’t need the money, really.

So Marcello the Ecuadorian Elvis sat on his drum seat throne, clutched his sequinned microphone, and held court for three hours. The crowd ebbed and flowed the whole time, extended family showing up, young men immuring themselves in some interior chamber and playing video games, venturing out for Cokes and cake. At one point, a handful of people were delivering a refrigerator to the house next door from the corroded bed of an ancient Datsun pickup, and danced and sang along on the sidewalk to some slice of Saturday Night Fever that Marcello was improving.

Ecuadorian Elvis was a riotmaster, and got each and every person to get up and sing, either with him, or against him, or next to him, but it had to happen. My wife, who is the shyest person on earth, manufactured the verve to sing Walk on By like the little angel she is. Then Marcello did the impossible, and made me bellow out New York, New York, because to an Ecuadorian, Maine is New York. I was informed that fourteen stray cats were found dead the next day, but I maintain the evidence of my guilt is tenuous at best. There was no indication that they took their own lives, for instance.

And lovely Elsie baked my wife a glorious cake and we all sang Happy Birthday in Spanglish.

We took an Uber home, late, the only long drive we’ve ever had in this town. The car was an MG of the sort you can’t buy in the US. It was an elegant four-door sedan, with leather seats, and the air conditioning set on stun. The city passed by, Egyptian-style in the side windows, an endless scroll of nightlife and fast food and cantinas, dog walking, lovers walking hand in hand, with scooters and buses fighting for primacy in the roundabouts, until we arrived home.

As we turned the key in our lock, the iron grates of the house across the street opened up with a metallic groan, a party with twenty people appeared seated in their garage, and an honest to goodness Mariachi band started playing.

It’s just like that here. Happy birthday, Mrs. King.

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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