Entries Tagged 'Digital Ideologies' ↓

You’ve seen the news: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is said to be slowly but surely taking over the United States Government and its social safety nets—and everything else—with something called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). And this DOGE thing is, like, related to his weird fantasies of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over humanity and made-up dog money?

Point being, people are pissed, and you, like they, are increasingly itching to ̶t̶o̶r̶c̶h̶ trade in your, or at least your neighbor’s, Tesla, that crappy AI experiment on wheels made by his company of the same name. After all, a major Tesla investor told Newsweek on Mar. 20 that the board of directors needs to oust Musk as the car-company’s CEO since “so much brand value has been eroded to the point that cars are being set on fire” following Musk’s “extremist statements.”

It’s true. Bewitched by activists who most certainly would never vandalize anything, Teslas are being magically transmogrified, one by one, into more obvious junk than they already are, from coast to coast, every single day now and counting. “Fuck Elon,” the scrawl across one such vehicle unwisely parked in New York City explained succinctly. To spark joy, this three-post series will present plenty of amazing photos of such high art critiques of car and country. Meanwhile, Tesla owners reticent to trade in their autos are rushing to place disclaimer stickers on their bumpers. They might check with their financial advisers, too: Musk is also chairman of Twitter (now X or, as I like to call it, Xitter); the CEO of SpaceX (and thus boss of its wholly owned subsidiary, Starlink); the CEO of his artificial intelligence company, xAI; and the leader of multiple other rotten companies.

It takes a lot to distance yourself from DOGE and Musk, and bumper stickers or not, nobody’s in the mood to listen to excuses: Democracy Now! reported that on Mar. 29, 200+ Tesla dealerships and facilities nationwide saw mass protests, with the top target being Musk’s illegal administrative DOGE coup. Saturday’s 1,268+ planned #TeslaTakedown protests (see this spreadsheet) around the country promise to be even bigger. Even the Wall Street Journal has explained that Musk has been communicating regularly with Kremlin autocrat Vladimir Putin secretly since at least late 2022, around the time Musk purchased Twitter. So equipped, he’s been using propaganda via his Xitter, his money, and his other forms of influence to boost far-right movements in 18 or more countries across six continents. Therefore, taking down Tesla helps the globe. It’s a great way to earn back some of the international good will that the MAGA-controlled U.S. is rapidly losing. And no, vandalizing a car is not “violence.”

Video game analogy time: So far in Trump2’s 2025, Tesla shares have dropped more than 37%, to $243.16 (USD) as of this writing, but if the health bar, I mean share price, of the $TSLA boss drops even further in this fight—to $114 or less—it’s going to cause Musk some serious problems. He’s secured key loans for his Xitter acquisition—his propaganda Death Star—by using as collateral, among other things, Tesla stock. “If Tesla stock keeps crashing,” lawyer and legal commentator Tristan Snell posted on Mar. 12, “the banks/creditors could repossess Twitter[.]” $TSLA—and therefore the fate of those loans and Musk’s propaganda Death Star—is now in the hands of heroic hordes of pissed-off teenagers and even more pissed-off grandparents out on the streets living their lives to the fullest in a virtuous display of power. So when you fuck up a Tesla, you’re a one-man antitrust official singlehandedly regulating the financial markets and proton-torpedoing the thermal exhaust port of Musk’s Death Star to blow that thing so we can go home.

Granted, Musk is so rich he’s called a centibillionaire, so he can pay to make problems go ‘way, but his greedy house of cards eventually has to come tumbling down. Dropping $TSLA to $114, the floor price for the margin call, is definitely a workable goal for the estimated time when he’ll really be shitting bricks. His polls—yeah, Musk gets his approval ratings measured by pollsters, even though nobody elected him (ironically, he’s actually becoming a perfect example of a deep stater, a longstanding, legitimate political science term that MAGA co-opted)—his polls, man, they’re dropping like Tesla stock. Nerds at the Marquette University Law School determined that 60% of respondents in Wisconsin “view Musk unfavorably.” Half the country hates the motherfucker, more plainly put, and the other half are starting to realize he’s placing their own Social Security checks at risk, so they’re gonna start saying the nowhere-to-be-seen conceded Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s favorite curse word—”motherfucker”—pretty soon, too.

However, it’s confusing. You’re going to the countrywide #TeslaTakedown protests on Sat. Apr. 5, sure—except, with everything going on in the United States these past two-and-a-half months with Trump2 taking power and running with it, tracking all these news-nerd details and weaving them into a coherent comprehension would take you more time than you understandably have available. Hasn’t some freelance investigative journalist done that work already so you could read it on the bus on your way to the protest, or in the gym, resting between sets as you prepare to punch Nazis?

Yes. This blog post of about 10,000 words, the first installment of three, is designed as your friendly, but not dumbed down, crash course on the #TeslaTakedown, Elon Musk, the DOGE administrative coup, and resisting same. 10k words is roughly as long as a typical big feature story showcased on the print cover of say, the New Yorker, so you can do it. This installment—and the future two installments—revolve around the Apr. 5 protests and where we go from here. Read, and you’ll not only know what’s up with your coup-beleaguered country, you’ll also be able to fully appreciate all the witty signs you’ll see at the Tesla protest you’re about to go to this Saturday. Right? RIGHT?

Part two will analyze the Trump2 day-one executive order establishing DOGE; its contested organizational structure and the implications for FOIA and the administrative coup; Musk’s weird, half-hour speech from the Oval Office about DOGE and political philosophy while his kid X Æ A-Xii (that’s his name) rubbed boogers on the Resolute Desk and told Trump he needs to go ‘way because he’s not the real president (like Daddy is); Trump and Musk staging a half-hour Tesla commercial from the White House South Lawn (overt corruption) and threatening protesters of his AI car company with domestic terrorism charges; profiling the Muskrats (his foot soldiers at DOGE); and, more about the Apr. 5 #TeslaTakedown protest.

Part three will elaborate on Elon Musk’s personal history and connections, including his relationship with Trump himself; more on Musk’s criminal and civil liabilities; additional info regarding the administrative coup and its backing fascist, masculinist philosophies; DOGE in the context of Project 2025; Dogecoin and the U.S. Government’s new cryptocurrency stockpile; various odds and ends; and, an assessment of how the protests went, plus suggestions for future mass-collaborative refinements of $TSLA’s stock price.

And now, strap on your helmet and other antifa self-defense gear, because it’s time for an…

Intro to the DOGE Dogshit

Last year, a month after Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump for the most recent U.S. presidential election in the minutes following the Pennsylvania assassination attempt, he and the Republican frontrunner spent more than two hours discussing themselves over a glitchy Xitter livestream, on which Musk pitched a “government efficiency commission” starring himself. Some three weeks later, then-candidate Trump formally announced the concept of such a commission at the Economic Club of New York. He said it would be headed by Musk and tasked with “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reform.” But this tidy timeline omits a significant piece of the puzzle.

A day or so before the Aug. 12, 2024 Xitter livestream, a super PAC that Musk co-created assuredly had helped seal the deal when it emerged from a spending lull and started dumping into swing states, for the next several weeks, some $33 million dollars of ads promoting Trump. Further, the known total Musk gave for the November 2024 contests altogether was nearly $300 million dollars, all of it to Republican candidates, making him the largest and most prominent known donor to U.S. federal elections since 2010 or perhaps even earlier. For teen Muskbros who might have stumbled upon this post and are wondering why everything going up for sale in life is wrong, here’s one reason: this quid-pro-quo spawning of DOGE need not account for merit or lack thereof: Musk give Trump bigly money, Trump give Musk bigly perch, simple!

DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. It’s not actually a department of the U.S. federal government, nor is it efficient, but we’ll get to those. An overt reason that Musk displayed a week after the livestream for calling it DOGE was to riff on the Dogecoin cryptocurrency by using the same four letters and associated memes. The paperless, electron-based asset was created in 2013 as a competitor to better-known cryptocoins (such as the first, Bitcoin) and was branded on the very popular Doge meme featuring Kabuso, a Shiba Inu well loved online and called by admirers a doge—pronounced something like “doughzhe” and nothing more than a cutesy way of saying dog.

How much Dogecoin does Musk own? Dunno; he’s denied owning wallets for the canine-themed coin, whether public or private—but, see that crypto- prefix in cryptocurrency for the obvious caveat: crypto- means hidden, secret, as in cryptographic. As of this March, two unknown parties each have a Dogecoin wallet holding more than $200 million worth of the virtual asset. Perhaps the world’s richest man or his cronies could be among them? Or are Musk’s Doge-doings, as one economics professor suggests, merely a way for him to connect with, to win over, key political and industry audiences (read: MAGA techbros)? Some of both?

Musk, as far as publicly known, started promoting the digital doggy token in 2019 with this dumbed-down tweet: “Dogecoin might be my fav cryptocurrency. It’s pretty cool.” He likes calling himself the “DOGEfather” and—as a ‘joke’ typed onto his Twitter bio that immediately jumped the price 17%—the “former CEO of DOGEcoin.” As recently as Mar. 17, 2025, Musk tweeted a lucky St. Patrick’s Day meme alluding to the cryptocurrency; merely alluding, as if some of the regulators he hasn’t yet arranged to be fired—we’ll get to that—might be looking over his shoulder for any misstep.

If we can just shake his tightrope some …

Elon Musk has been on a tightrope for a while. A RICO class action launched in mid-2022 alleged Musk was marketing/pumping Dogecoin insider-trading style, but had its appeal attempt denied in September 2024 after a district court decided Musk’s statements about the cryptocurrency were merely “aspirational and puffery,” not factual claims, so no reasonable investor would rely on them. Except the reasonable man of law has long since been dragged out to pasture and shot. Whether rational or coked up, investors clearly respond to Musk’s antics. Most infamously—well, most infamously prior to this Trump2 administration—Tesla stock fell in 2018 when Musk drank whiskey and smoke pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, leading the United States Air Force to review the taxpayer-funded billionaire’s secretive billion-dollar Pentagon contracts. That review apparently had little to no effect, although the airmen have recently resumed scribbling about him, which we’ll get to. And as it turns out, fascism is still lethal even when dressed up in “aspirational and puffery” social media aesthetics, such as the unfortunately tarred Shiba Inu doggo—Kabuso did nothing wrong.

In 2021, Elon Musk—or sometimes, to his critics, “Elmo,” a contraction of his name referencing Sesame Street‘s novicial, stuck-in-falsetto red monster—went on Saturday Night Live and tried to boost Dogecoin by plugging it during his monologue, but did so poorly with his performance overall that the price plummeted at once. If you’ve never seen his five-minute SNL monologue, it’s worth suffering through—it recalls another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, trying to seem cool in front of high school students who couldn’t have cared less (“Who Bezos?” one said into the ears of history).

Like the then-Amazon CEO’s automaton-ish appearance, Musk’s stilted, awkward behavior resembles someone pretending to be human, which he self-referentially tried to joke about during his SNL monologue, attributing it to Asperger’s syndrome. Without going down that rabbit hole, it should be emphasized that there’s more than one reason in life someone can be noticeably disconnected from their emotions and empathy; unrecovered victims—and unrecovered perpetrators—are among the VIP dissociated, for reasons having to do with that adjective: unrecovered, you know, from trauma: the cycle of abuse.

According to his brother, Musk’s childhood was marked by domestic abuse, severe violence at school, and other Adverse Childhood Events (to use the psychology lingo). He shows no traits evidenced by those who work intensely on mental health recovery: compassion, altruism, wisdom are all scant in him, and he tries to teach the world that empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization[.]” Alhough the definitions are contested, it makes sense to think of sympathy as cognitive pity, and empathy as emotional contagion—for example, while sympathy is saying a rote “oh how sad” when skimming an awful news story, empathy is giggling as your lover starts giggling during postcoital snuggling, even though you haven’t yet cognized what it is they’re laughing about. Empathy, the capacity to sense or experience others’ emotions, makes it possible, even when just reading news stories, to share some of the victims’ pain and anger, rather than merely saying a “tut-tut” (sympathy) or trying to carve up crimes for “only this group or only that group is allowed to be mad about this” (group affiliation careerism). Empathy isn’t without danger—it can encourage groupthink—but edgy portrayals of it as the fundamental Big Bad are merely upsellings of sociopathy. Musk hasn’t backpedaled significantly on trying to teach everyone to fear what he calls the “empathy exploit” or more simply, “empathy.” Rather, now, years after SNL, he typically shows more confidence when performing publicly—bad news for the rest of us. Ketamine covering up his underlying trauma? We’ll get to that.

Speaking of abuse, at least three occurrences have led people to wonder aloud if Musk is involved in high-level pedosadism rings and operating under, or armed with, the inevitably accompanying blackmail. One: the widely circulated pic of Musk at the Vanity Fair Oscars party on Mar. 2, 2014 with Ghislaine Maxwell, now imprisoned for child rape trafficking and, back then, the top accomplice of the late blackmail mogul Jeffrey Epstein; two: Musk’s attendance at the 2011 annual “billionaire’s dinner” event in Long Beach, California—run by the Edge Foundation, a so-called intellectuals’ club—the same night Epstein attended as a convicted-and-known pedo; three: Musk getting subpoeaned by the Virgin Islands in 2023 for their civil suit accusing J.P. Morgan of profiting off of Epstein’s pedosadism since he was their close client for years even following his pedo guilty plea, the profits in question perhaps tied to Epstein’s dubious boasts in 2018 that he was supposedly advising Musk about Tesla. Elmo denies all this or dismisses it as negligible, tweeting in 2023 about Epstein: “That cretin never advised me on anything whatsoever” and in 2020 about Maxwell: “Don’t know Ghislaine at all. She photobombed me once at a Vanity Fair party[.]”

A researcher working toward the #OpDeathEaters long-term goals told me they believe Musk’s absence from Epstein’s unredacted little black book—a ‘trophy collection’ of contact info and names Epstein knew or sought to know in order to use them socially, financially, or physically—likely indicates Musk and Epstein ultimately never did business together, though if chance had differed, it’s plausible overall that they would have. A more likely speculation is that Epstein (and Ghislaine Maxwell) pursued Musk in the hopes of establishing a business relationship, yet for whatever reasons, a deal never came to pass. The world’s richest man must know a lot of vile blackmailers, some infamous, others shadowy, some in his own mirror, so there’s no guarantee he’s deeply connected to this or that specific super-predator from the headlines; however, as the three points above suggest, all this is of course the dirty water he and his ilk swim in. It’s not just powerful child rapists who need prosecution, but their criminal support networks, too, including those who might not be pedos themselves yet still understand in complicit detail what’s happening. “She photobombed me once” isn’t the same as coming clean—unfortunately, what’s under the hood (or covers) with Elon Musk, financially or otherwise, is by no means a fully open book. Yet.

Musk’s connection to Epstein-Maxwell, then, was probably just in passing(s), never consummated, yet his generalized immersion in such pestilent waters is absolutely certain; point being, the robotic Elmo, the story of whom gets worse still, already doesn’t sound like a good guy to put in charge of a fake department with a federal government-wide austerity remit. Trump2, in his Mar. 4 State of the Union speech (okay, technically an address to a joint session of Congress), said DOGE “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” Republicans applauded; about an hour earlier, Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who in February announced his plan to file articles of impeachment (for an impeachment to be successful, Green said, “the people have to demand it”), had become the first lawmaker in modern history to be kicked out of a State of the Union, for standing up with his cane at age 77 to shout at Trump that he lacks a mandate and shan’t cut Medicaid; many of the rest of the Dems, younger and healthier, cowered in their seats silently, holding up signs with milquetoast clapbacks written on them; days later, ten Democrats proceeded to join with Republicans to censure Green for having had the courage to interrupt The Donald. Musk, watching from the gallery—is he who truly heads DOGE, as Trump said? Its organizational structure is disputed. Which we’ll get to.

Back to Musk on a tightrope, the one we’re going to shake until $TSLA falls off, all the way down to $114 or less, rocking Elmo’s financial empire enough to encourage various regulators and plaintiffs and angry investors to get in on the smackdown too. Roughly a month before the November 2024 elections, ex-Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson interviewed Elmo on Xitter, and the pair couldn’t stop laughing as Musk said about then-candidate Trump, “If he loses, I’m fucked.” Musk’s succinct description of the tightrope he’s walking came at the start of the video Carlson published, an in medias res outtake that the producers kept in, so there’s scarcely any context for it, although about four minutes later, Musk stated that “vengeance” could be directed at him were Trump to lose. In case there were any doubt what Elmo meant by “fucked,” he continued: “How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?” and “I have no plausible deniability[.]”

I suppose the surface idea is that a Harris administration would retaliate against Elmo for his (purported) truth-telling and aspiration to enforce efficiency on everyone, et cetera, and perhaps too the subtler risk that, if Musk winds up seen as a huge problem for MAGA—as someone who causes losses for the self-declared King Trump—then infighting among Trump-Musk factions, which has already happened off and on, could take him down as well. Yet while Democrats (or Republicans) might indeed single him out due to personal vendetta motivations, they could nonetheless find plenty of wrongdoing to base criminal charges on, such as those revolving around his numerous conflicts of interest. (We’ll get there.) It would be clearer just how Musk thinks he’s “fucked” had Tucker Carlson’s team not cropped out the preceding dialogue. ‘Transparency’ bullshit artists.

In short, ever since Elmo went, as he and Tucker Carlson put it, “all in” for Trump, the criminally liable Musk’s outcomes have been unstably yoked to outcomes for the criminally liable Trump (and outcomes for the criminally liable Department of Justice that the president is securing more control over). Imagine the tightrope: you’re the world’s richest man—with an unhealed, bullied, raging child inside—fearing prosecution from whoever heads the U.S. government, so why not just take that government over with an administrative coup to head it yourself, to protect yourself and exercise your own revenge fantasies? Not to mention fun times with the boys, kicking it with other broligarch billionaires, discussing in Silicon Valley salons the ideas of pro-monarchy/autocracy blogger Curtis Yarvin a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug (see below) as to how to best create a U.S. monarchy, which, uh, 1776?

Conflicts of interest and the ongoing administrative coup

Musk has already been under heightened scrutiny as the boss, with a top-secret security clearance, of two of the most important Pentagon and spy agency contractors—SpaceX and its wholly owned subsidiary Starlink. Scrutiny has been especially close in terms of conflicts of interest, for which NBC News determined there’s no evidence that he’s obtained the standard waiver subsequent to becoming a Trump2 “special government employee.” That “job title” is merely a U.S.G. job category, not a job title—it’s not publicly known what Elmo’s actual job title is. If he even has one.

The White House told NBC News on Mar. 21 not to worry about oversight or whatever since Musk is receiving ethics briefings—is receiving: note the passive verb in the vague present progressive tense. Besides, as press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained regarding excusing himself from conflicts of interest, Elmo promised us he’d be good, so how can we question him or demand accountability measures? He’s “abided by all applicable laws,” Leavitt lectured, which is like saying the dude never even jaywalks and suggests if you pass a law, doesn’t matter, Musk already has been in, is in, and will be in full complia—say, where’d the Department of Education go? His DOGE team is mostly moving faster than the legal system can keep up, which is, sad to say, an inspired strategy on their evil part.

Yeah, headed de facto by Musk, DOGE is a shadowy team of fast-typing “Muskrat” twenty-somethings (we’ll get to them) on what might at first seem—and partially is—an Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan kick, gutting federal agencies, firing or forcing out their staff, and slashing budgets to the bone. In some cases, DOGE’s efforts are tantamount to taking down longstanding federal departments and agencies entirely or as close as possible to it. Sounds a bit coup-like, no?

To explain: the power to establish or abolish federal departments or agencies rests with Congress—which is why the Department of Government Efficiency isn’t a real department (hey, we finally got to that one!)—although there have been moments in U.S. history (today not yet among them) when, sometimes because horny for an authoritarian to tell everyone what to do, Congress has temporarily extended such powers to the president on a limited basis under the rubric of reorganization acts. Beginning in 1932, limited reorganization authority has been temporarily extended to nine presidents across 16 separate occasions, most recently in 1994. Requests from presidents from both major parties following 1994 have been roundly rejected by Congress over and over.

Republicans in the House are now eager to minimize safeguards on executive power such as “limited” authority and “temporarily” extensions when it comes to the forthcoming “reorganization” of the federal government they hope for. Their proposed bill out of committee, H.R. 1295, as I understand it, would lower—from 2/3 majority to simple majority—the threshold of Congressional votes that’s required to bless any reorganization plan proposed by the Trump2 administration to delete a federal department or agency. In other words, Congress would be weakening itself for the benefit of the Oval Office (including Musk). Further, and again on my inexpert reading, H.R. 1295 would grant Trump2 authority to propose (for the blessing of simple Congressional majorities) the deletion of independent government agencies, a power he currently lacks and that the Heritage Foundation-backed Project 2025 very much wants him to have. It would allow fast-tracking of the DOGE/Trump administrative coup; critics are calling it a rubber stamp.

In the aforementioned Education Department instance, DOGE technically hasn’t terminated any federal departments/agencies just yet, but instead is sticking its cyber-hands down their throats, ripping out their innards—their core functions—and leaving their flat, emptied bodies on the ground so the centrists can say, “See, they still exist!” This is an administrative coup in the sense that the status quo government is being dismantled and being replaced, with Elmo/Trump cronies and themselves, sometimes even via separate structures they’re installing with the aim of existing past just four years.

DOGE wants to shift-delete the Department of Education, USAID—and quite possibly the necessary structures around Social Security, Medicaid, the air traffic controllers, the weather scientists, the food inspectors, and the rest. A clever coup: like Monsanto/Bayer killing everything that isn’t authorized as Roundup Ready, abolish most everything that isn’t you, including Congress ceding much of their own power.

Under DOGE—or maybe even under a mysterious company of Musk’s already in existence on paper in Texas, such as United States of America Inc.—how then will social safety net services be provisioned to those USians enduring any forthcoming unforecasted natural disasters, the rising number of passenger plane crashes, disabilities, old age, and the hundreds of cases of measles spreading across the unvaccinated as bronze-faced health secretary RFK Jr. continues to diss the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, as he did during a Mar. 10 FOX News interview (part one; part two)? You know the interview that he gave from, no joke, a Steak ‘n Shake, promoting one of his misleading theories, this one about how he’s going to make fast food great again?

Why, social services will be delivered with utmost private sector efficiency by your friend from Sesame Street, Elmo! You are special, you are loved, and you have a friend named Elmo who just wanted to say ‘hi’! Let’s play profit motive extortion with Elmo! Elmo says, kill the poor! Or more precisely, it’s the voice of aforementioned pro-monarchy blogger Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug dominating, discussed below. In 2008, Yarvin wrote that “Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide” after “just kidding” that the “not productive” should be converted “into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.” He even ‘joked’ that the problem with such “naive [Ayn] Randian thinking” isn’t the killing of innocents, it’s that dead bodies make unpopular fuel. With much more than a foot in the door at MAGA megadonor (and agent of multi-evil) Peter Thiel’s and thus the Oval Office, Yarvin’s now rapidly acing the ultimate test for a fascist: making genocide openly popular instead of just evoking the usual “shrug, what can ya do” banal-complicity response, since performing additional wide-scale exterminations needs a lot of labor and eager, not just banal, complicity.

DOGE has been taking those federal department/agencies innards—the offices’ key functions—and transferring them to barely related federal entities (presumably where they can be more easily leashed) as Musk’s companies move in to fill the vacuums his DOGE just created. Imagine the “big three” entitlement programs (Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid), long primarily funded by taxes—that’s payroll taxes on worker-bees, silly, not on billionaires or nonhuman corporations or, coming soon, on artificial intelligences (in govcorp hands not all that much more than overhyped calculators with soaring, secret environmental costs). Imagine the big three entitlement programs run by Musk’s companies for the motive of his profit: We’ll keep the weak alive—so long as they’re strong enough to pay Elmo! is otherwise known as human extermination or, when carried out by its very victims such as Musk’s bro fandom, autogenocide; as ever, the imbalances of trade/hierarchy/profit maximalism are inevitably, lethally unfair. (Support the leopardine face-eaters and you know whose face they eventually eat.)

If you caught the Feb. 20 news blip video of Musk waving around a red chainsaw on the stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), that was all about DOGE imposing austerity. To the roaring applause of CPAC, Elmo, trying to look cool in black shades and a black “Dark MAGA” hat, showcased the big stupid red toy—waving it around without actually turning it on—yelling, “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” You know, bureaucracy, including wee things like human rights laws and social safety nets for basic essentials. The red chainsaw was gifted to Musk on stage by another CPAC attendee and man-child, Argentinian president Javier Milei, who has made the chainsaw a symbol of his own austerity measures dispossessing his own country, to the cartoonish extent of showily placing chainsaws atop conference tables during government meetings. An Argentinian journalist friend of mine wrote about Milei last year—and you can see how Milei’s chainsaw-ing is being imitated in the United States in the next section immediately below. It’ll help inspire you to tank $TSLA to $114.

Body count: federal departments/agencies DOGE is destroying

Time to list a few of the many federal departments/agencies lying on the floor right now, their dependents increasingly wondering where the life support is (that’s where you, the public, come in, as Rep. Green similarly pointed out). A teen Muskbro or Randroid might make the argument that the gub’ment is bad, so why not wish it into the cornfield—disappear it, drain the swamp? I agree that, as statist hierarchy maximalism, much of gub’ment is bad (corporations are worse), but if accelerationists replace it with jack shit, rather than with practiced, powerful bottom-up mutual aid and community-, caregiver-backed institutions of self-governance, that leaves us with the law of the jungle, every man for himself. In that dystopia, as much as zombie TV episodes make you think that—in the absence of clean water, mail delivery, weather forecasts, national defense against a planetful of adversarial countries and eager terrorists (whom the U.S. has multiplied for years by wantonly bombing their innocent friends and families with Trump openly gloating about same)—you’ll suddenly become a rugged individualist badass, well, flatly, you won’t.

Now, a complete DOGE body count isn’t possible (no one is successfully tracking all this, not even yours truly amped up on caffeine and Megadeth), so I’ll just describe the DOGE-destruction at four federal departments/agencies and a dishonorable mention to give you a sense of what’s happening across the U.S. government at the hands of Musk. If you want much of the rest, see this handy Mar. 27 Business Insider compilation, which details the devastation at more than a dozen additional departments/agencies.

• Department of Agriculture (USDA)
  
  Thousands of employees gone; USDA is running a skeleton crew, with coastal ports hard hit, and hundreds of food inspectors fired—“Oh, good!” Elmo says. “Let me think, why would Elmo need food inspectors?” Even if MAGAs don’t mind eating poisonous food to own the libs, their wallets will be hurt—now it’s getting serious—when other countries stop buying grub from the United States, though to be fair, some 20+ countries have partially or fully banned GMOs already: among them, many in the European Union such as Germany and Italy and France; Mexico; India; others. (Ever tried looking up peer-reviewed scientific papers about GMOs from their databases instead of the Trumplandia ones?)
  
  Meanwhile, China is doing that creepy thing again that they did during the declared COVID pandemic where their vendors are snailmailing unidentified seeds to USians in Texas, Florida, Washington state, and more. Invasive species can damage the food supply; if you receive these possibly uninspected packages, don’t open them, definitely don’t plant them, and ask state-level authorities, not feds, for help. (The 50 state governments will keep taking on more importance as all this continues.) Musk/DOGE has been firing USDA dog-trainers, too: they train, or past-tense trained, dogs to sniff out, at ports of entry, weird diseases such as swine fever and invasive species. Florida, for example, had a single dog capable of detecting the invasive, dangerous Giant African land snail, and its trainer has now been fired. Elmo says, I love you!
  
  
• Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
  
  Longer and longer lists of recent passenger airline crashes or almost-crashes start with January’s mid-air collision between a Pentagon Black Hawk chopper and an American Airlines flight over the Potomac River some three or four miles from the White House. The disaster—which killed all 67 people aboard both aircraft—followed Trump2’s inauguration by nine days, so fairly or not, blame for it has been pinned on his second administration in the public mind. Grilled by reporters as to whether he’d visit the crash site, a traditional move for leaders to make to honor those grieving a tragedy, Trump mockingly replied: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”
  
  In between blaming the collision on the pilots, Trump also blamed his predecessors’ Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) initiatives for supposedly creating unsafe skies—professionals purportedly so afraid of “reverse racism” skin color stuff that until liberated by The Donald, they’ve feared to speak out about safety problems even if it means their own planes crashing—surely a guilt deflection the former television game show host tailor-made for his legions of FOX News fans, inexperienced as they are living out their lives immured in a very small pond and therefore incapable of discerning when The Donald is bullshitting.
  
  A week later, on Feb. 5, Elmo chirped on his social media Death Star that his DOGE “team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.” DOGE’s involvement was confirmed by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs the FAA-overseeing Senate Commerce Committee.
  
  Beginning Valentine’s Day, at least 400 workers at the already short-staffed FAA were let go, presumably the doing of DOGE, and certainly a doing of the Trump2 administration as a whole, of which DOGE is a sort of a free-floating (read: illegal, coup-executing) part. Trumpers denied it, but former FAA employees and their union said more than a fourth of the personnel cuts included “aviation safety assistants, maintenance mechanics and [aero]nautical information specialists.” Politico reported that their termination notice came from the email domain usfaa.mail.onmicrosoft.com, which is not a U.S. government address—yet more evidence that what’s happening is actually a (relatively slow-moving administrative) coup.
  
  By mid-February, meanwhile, SpaceX employees were already being onboarded at the FAA; by Feb. 24, Elmo was tweeting that the “Verizon [FAA] system [a contract awarded in 2023] is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk”; two days later, the Washington Post reported that the FAA is “close to canceling [the] $2.4 billion contract [with Verizon] to overhaul a communications system that serves as the backbone of the nation’s air traffic control system and awarding the work to Elon Musk’s Starlink”; the same day as the WaPo report, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) told the Transportation Secretary it’s “a conflict of interest for someone [Musk] whose company [SpaceX/Starlink] is regulated by the federal government to be involved in anything that affects his personal financial interest, his company, or his competitors”; on Feb. 28, per Rolling Stone, FAA officials verbally (i.e., avoiding putting it in writing) directed staff to locate tens of millions of dollars for a Starlink deal; on Mar. 13, the Campaign Legal Center filed an ethics complaint with the Department of Transportation, concluding that “the FAA’s business relationship with Starlink is tainted by Musk’s influence. Musk is a government official with broad authority who acts with direct support from the President. With this authority and support, he has openly criticized the FAA’s contractors while directing the agency to test and use his company’s services. These facts establish a possible criminal conflict of interest violation, and an [Office of the Inspector General] investigation is needed to determine whether the facts constitute a legal violation.”
  
  Note: There are tons of open contract listings across the federal government for artificial intelligence goods/services, such as this NASA one for AI air traffic management and this DARPA one for studying AI-human joint making of military decisions. Musk and his companies—such as X’s new parent, xAI Holdings, the recent sale implying that nearly two decades of twitter data is now being more easily fed into Musk’s artificial intelligence operations—are likely eyeing such contracts for the unfair taking, though this is just informed speculation on my part. Removing oversight obstacles to conflicts of interest would help him “obtain” such contracts.
  
  
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
  
  NOAA, which has the National Weather Service (NWS) as a component, heads up weather forecasts, climate data analysis, and tracking extreme weather crises. As a Commerce Department component, NOAA has bureaus and offices across dozens of federal agencies, carrying out its critical mission of understanding and predicting the Earth’s climate (maybe not something Trump2’s industry backers want people to understand or predict). Per a group of Democratic lawmakers’ Feb. 6 letter to the Commerce Department boss, Trump2 appointee and billionaire Howard Lutnick (and to his acting secretary Jeremy Pelter), DOGE has been visiting NOAA’s headquarters, aiming to break up the agency and send its functions packing to some dim corner of the Department of the Interior.
  
  Per Business Insider, the “lawmakers argue that DOGE is illegally attacking NOAA without congressional approval, in an attempt to dismantle and privatize the agency which they say would rob American farmers, businesses, and citizens of crucial, life-saving services. The Trump administration has already laid off hundreds of workers at NOAA, which meteorologists say will degrade weather forecasts and public safety.” A former professional meteorologist had to explain to the U.S. public this March that just because your phone has non-NWS weather apps doesn’t mean you can do without the NWS sending up daily balloons to create the weather forecasts those apps rely on. He explained the “apps only” view is tantamount to arguing you don’t need farmers since you can just go to the grocery store. “Again,” he said, “everything that we use, almost every type of weather information that you see, no matter where it comes from, again, has its heart in the National Weather Service.”
  
  
• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
  
  A Feb. 15 National Institutes of Health internal email indicated the Trump2 administration had axed at least 1,165 workers at the agency. Reuters, who obtained the email, wrote that the 1,165 figure “accounts for around 6% of the 20,000 people employed by the NIH, an agency overseeing 27 institutes and centers and the top public funder of medical research on everything from vaccines for emerging pandemic threats to targets for new drugs.” Officials at the agency expect that, under RFK Jr., an almost 4,000 more workers will lose their jobs. (NIH is under Secretary of Health RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.)
  
  Meanwhile, a Feb. 7 NIH directive took effect immediately and imposed a 15% cap on so-called “indirect costs” for medical/scientific research projects—personnel, equipment, maintenance of facilities like laboratories, sounds pretty direct to me. $4 billion annual dollars of research funding went up in smoke overnight. A textbook example common in the United States for why taxes are good is that some diseases are so rare, it doesn’t profit private industry to research cures for them, so you need public interest-minded efforts, even coercive ones such as taxation, to accomplish the same. Those rare diseases can always mutate to become more infectious, so much so that even titans of industry, bronze-faced or not, can fall prey to them. None of this seems to have mattered much to DOGE.
  
  
• Dishonorable mention: Firing inspectors general
  
  The DOGE connection to Trump’s inspector general (IG) firings will become clear by the end of this dishonorable mention.
  
  Per CBS News: “After the Watergate scandal under President Nixon, Congress set up a system to audit the executive branch and ensure the rights of federal workers.” This included, pretty much per each big agency, an office of the inspector general (OIG). Think of the IGs as akin to, but more powerful than, newspaper ombudsmen a.k.a. public editors—readers’ representatives at news organizations who check up on the honesty of the rest of the staff. (Now that I think of it, the New York Times got rid of theirs in 2017, claiming the salaried watchdog position is outdated in an era of social media when we’re supposed to do it for them for free for the rest of our lives.) I’m not going to sit here and try to tell you that inspectors general were uniformly heroes of government oversight ushering in a new era of utopia, but I can tell you their reports and proceedings were far better than nothing, sometimes had good impacts, and often served as great starting points for serious research and initiatives. IGs hunted down fraud, waste, and abuse—what DOGE is claiming to hunt.
  
  For instance, a multi-year investigation involving IGs led to several criminal convictions in 2023 for a decade-plus-long bribery scheme that affected almost half a billion dollars in government contracts. Similarly, in 2022, the Department of the Interior OIG determined that the Bureau of Land Management was astonishingly awarding mineral extraction leases, including oil and gas, without even confirming if the winners were prohibited from doing business with the federal government, reportedly forcing the Bureau to begin reviewing the federal exclusions list prior to handing over any more such leases. That list excludes, among others, certain individuals and entities from China, a foreign adversary of the United States by statute and regulation, at a time when federal investigators have found secretive Chinese actors buying up domestic land surrounding U.S. critical infrastructure such as nuclear weapons installations. Sounds important for somebody to be keeping tabs on.
  
  Accordingly, four days into his new administration, Trump fired them. 18 inspectors general, to be exact, as well as, without explanation, the director of the similar Office of Government Ethics. For the firings, Trump2 gave Congress neither 30 days notice nor substantive rationales, leading some to argue he’d unambiguously broken a law that was strengthened in response to similar, less brazen moves of Trump1; others disagreed with that legal analysis.
  
  On Mar. 26, Reveal asked fired Labor Department IG Larry Turner if Trump2 is going to install new inspectors general, and Turner answered: “We really don’t know what’s going to happen with that.” The fired inspectors general were replaced by their deputies who already had full-time jobs—the deputies are now the acting IGs—but there’s no way one person can now do two jobs at each of these IG offices.
  
  Turner also said, “they have basically dismantled the civil service. And what they have done is cruel.” He said the firings were “intentional. It was a power play. It was a power purge to get rid of the people, the watchdogs that actually provide oversight.” He added, “I don’t think our citizens understand just how bad[] this is.”
  
  “[S]ome of the things that you see going on in the government right now, even with Musk and some of the things he’s doing, would be considered a conflict of interest,” Turner said. He and seven other IGs sued for their jobs to be reinstated, but D.C. Circuit Judge Ana Reyes told them on Mar. 27 that although Trump2 “violated decency” and possibly even federal law (who knows if that’s like her job or something to figure out), giving the IGs back their jobs would be pointless since the president would, according to her crystal ball, just fire them again. History may well judge her as pointless: one wonders if the Biden appointee chants things like “Remedies for victims are stupid, The Donald’s impunity is awesome, and I can’t wait to find yet more legalism pretexts to surrender even more of the third branch’s power to fascism!” each morning when she wakes up, or if she ever spends any time thinking about things like dignity and courage.
  
  The DOGE connection? The nonprofit Public Citizen assessed on Mar. 4 that the Trump2 administration has halted or moved to dismiss investigations against 89 corporations, including Musk’s companies, across myriad federal agencies. Recall the Campaign Legal Center filing about Musk’s FAA conflict of interest with the Verizon contract: “These facts establish a possible criminal conflict of interest violation, and an [Office of the Inspector General] investigation is needed to determine whether the facts constitute a legal violation.” The more watchdogs such as IGs that Trump2 can fire, and threaten with further firings, the fewer the dogs are watched as they try boost Dogecoin, philosophize about the rationality of zero-sum worldviews (we’ll get there) and, as corrupt oligarchs in the cyber-kleptocratic style, gain at your expense.

That’s enough for now; if you want to read up on how DOGE is downsizing or destroying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, or others, again, that Business Insider piece collects the basics, and in the forthcoming two parts of this blog-post series, I’ll describe some of the remaining federal department/agencies bleeding out and more dishonorable mentions, such as those “fork in the road” Office of Personnel Management emails offering to buy out federal employees if they quit.

And consider: with ethics tossed aside, the more indispensable Elmo makes himself and his companies, the harder it becomes for rivals to take him down. We gotta shake that tightrope he and Tesla are on. It should come as no surprise that, as his DOGE austerity team guts federal agency budgets and staff rosters nearly into nonexistence (and then maybe Trump2 and Congress performing a finishing move if H.B. 1295 passes), the companies winning contracts to take over the slack are—you guessed it, Mr Elon empathy is weakness! Musk’s.

Why?

Is there a philosophy behind Musk’s whole DOGE austerity thing, this elimination of life-sustaining services that the United States public has no ready prosocial substitutes for at scale?

Three strands of intellectual justifications, by no means separate and all of them fascist and masculinist in nature, appear to unite messily in Elon Musk and DOGE. As one strand, he seems to simply rely on the default receptivity instilled in the U.S. public since Ronald Reagan (or 1963 or 1947) toward far-right precepts floating around in the cultural ether as generalized axioms detached from their origins: government is bad, greed is good, any sharing is Stalin, you know how it goes. Then for a second strand, or set of strands really, there’s his TESCREAL grab-bag of Silicon Valley-heavy, dystopian science fictional beliefs: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (contemporary) Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism, particularly the anti-empathy rationalism and the human-rights-someday-on-Mars-but-not-for-you-now longtermism. The third strand: Musk’s philosophy seems to emanate from the “Dark Enlightenment” pushed by thinking-challenged thinkers such as blogger Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and his fanboy Nick Land, a former philosophy professor, who openly argue that the United States should be run by a CEO-king, which got Yarvin taken very seriously by the ombudsmen-skeptical New York Times.

Let’s go through all three strands, one at a time. First, Musk/DOGE lazily depending on the default culture to back him up in the United States, where free health insurance is oft viewed as among the worst things a person could possibly have, yet running over protesters is lionized and in some areas effectively legalized. It’s where the encouraged rape of women and femicides are still, by and large, considered of no real import, especially next to the supposed summum malum of inflation devaluing the savings of businessmen. It’s the country that tells innocents around the world that its self-proclaimed exceptionality merits their deaths as good policy, and expects to be taken seriously.

Here’s a lengthy example of how the United States going MAGA worked over time: consider the far-right Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). For decades, they’ve sent approaching five million copies of Ayn Rand’s being selfish is fucking awesome! novels into high schools across the country free of charge, tempting kids to read them with the bait of $20,000 in prize money from ARI’s annual essay contest. Confronted with this carefully orchestrated, well-executed, decades-long campaign of evil (not unlike the CCP’s intellectual property-ganda), liberals, resting on their laurels and couches, offer up milquetoast witticisms such as “Lol my hero comedian said Ayn Rand took Social Security, haha sick burn!” Teenagers, not yet resting on their laurels and couches, understand that Rand taking Social Security is no refutation since it’s completely consistent with her (vile) underlying philosophy (which also championed “reason” and “rationality,” which will become relevant below). Accordingly, many of the teens assuredly turn off the unserious liberals on their screens to keep reading Rand instead, as more and more politicians cite her to explain why crushing loser welfare moochers and exalting The Virtue of Selfishness—Rand’s 1964 essay collection title—are good things to do, actually.

The above pattern concludes with liberals claiming on Facebook that they’re “baffled” why Trumpers’ lies and disinfo are winning. Answer: the right, such as ARI—or Musk with his Xitter Death Star—devotes millions, billions of dollars and years and years and years of consistent daily effort to orchestrating propaganda campaigns, presumably with young interns working nights and weekends underpaid or unpaid to win their ideological war; in contrast, many U.S. people “on the left” explain again and again why they’re personally exempt from putting in any effort at all since they’re “tired” and “their heads hurt” from their six-figure corporate complicity employment, so they “deserve” to sit on the couch never lifting a finger against injustices. When it comes to the question of why those who put in effort to change the culture win, and those who do not, and who even champion apathy and appeasement and banality, lose, one thing we cannot say to depict the one-sided power struggle is that it is “baffling.” It’s like a pack of dedicated chessmasters facing down an opponent on the other side of the board who suddenly knocks over all of his own pieces and then asks the world: “How did I just lose? Baffling!”

Musk can just shoot, rapid fire, rightwing-flavored phrases out of his mouth at random, because those phrases’ underlying ideas have been expensively seeded for decades by the likes of the Ayn Rand Institute and MAGA mastermind Steven Bannon and the rest (and their interns). “Chainsaw for bureaucracy!” Musk yells; “reduce spending to live within our means!”; embrace “temporary hardship!”; “the goal of DOGE […] is to restore democracy!”; etc. And when many in the U.S. “on the left” advocate immediate and indefinite surrender—”just be happy”; “focus on other things”; “nothin’ but da comedians!”—the right’s decades of expert propaganda can simply mop up and declare the country theirs. And yet, growing numbers of people in the States are resisting—including the 1,268+ countrywide protests on Apr. 5—deciding that, even in the face of insults from their civic freeloader “friends” (you think too hard you care too much helping others is Peter Pan), they prefer effort and selfhood and strength and dignity and courage and meaning. The biggest enemy of the general public is the general public, but the biggest ally of the general public is the general public.

A second strand of Musk’s philosophy is his embeddedness in the assortment of TESCREAL beliefs circulating around Silicon Valley. You can catch up on the TESCREAL bundle of ideas conveniently via this mid-2023 essay by scholar Émile P. Torres, which provides an overview. But let’s just take two of the letters: Rationalism and Longtermism. Rationalism, sometimes but not necessarily autism spectrum adjacent, insists that the scientistic, positivistic, oh-so-efficient reason of the West must hold sway over every last iota of the human experience—especially empathy—planetwide, and longtermism insists that today’s untermenschen (that’s you and me) must be sacrificed for the greater good of rocketing future Übermenschen (that’s Elmo) to Mars or throughout the local galactic supercluster to conquer its stellar resources (see below).

The TESCREAL grab-bag even comes standard with its very own afterlife (long-term) punishment fears: meet Pascal’s Wager, I mean Roko’s Basilisk, the AI in the future that’s mad at you for not handing over enough of your money to Silicon Valley now in order to fuel its apotheosis fast enough. (A basilisk is a mythological snake-creature that can, Medusa-like, kill with its gaze; Roko’s came into being thanks to a seemingly random comment in a prominent forum, this particular forum—LessWrong—a longstanding website-haven for TESCREAL-type beliefs.) Passing through the internet-obsessed realms I’ve passed through personally and professionally over the decades, I’ve actually met (in person and online) individuals who are legit scared the Basilisk is gonna get ’em, despite their self-descriptors as rationally devout militant atheists. But wait! How does the future Basilisk know that you, today, aren’t forking over to the Unification Church, I mean to Silicon Valley Great Men aspirants, enough of your hard-earned—because see, we might be living in a GOP-, I mean Basilisk-, run simulation where timeless decision theory dictates that the long-termist … you get the idea, or more precisely, maybe you don’t and now have just seen enough to drop this “rationalism” stupid shit.

Musk tweets “Rococo basilisk” a lot, mere dumb wordplay apparently—referencing the name of the post-Baroque art movement’s similar sound to “Roko”—but stupid or not, it by twists and turns led him to dating the musician Grimes. When they made their relationship publicly official, she walked the red carpet with him at the 2018 Met Gala wearing a BDSM submissive-suggestive collar shaped into the Tesla logo. I don’t know about you, but that really makes me want to set some of his cars on fire.

So, when the “Dark MAGA” guy isn’t in the Oval Office lecturing the world on democracy and trying to gut Social Security while his and Grimes’ first child wipes his boogers on the Resolute Desk, Elmo is nerding out about Roko’s Basilisk—but to make matters worse, Musk is even moreso into longtermism, which is the designator given to a collection of philosophical abstractions and brainy arguments leveraged toward articulating at exhausting length why you get to die now for his Mars someday. It gets still worse. Know that Musk retweeted TV host Liv Boeree saying in 2022 that Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom’s paper “Astronomical Waste” (2003) is “likely the most important paper ever written[.]” What’s this philosophy paper Musk agrees is the greatest of all time? Seems kind of important, right, when he’s running the country, that we might ponder it?

“Astronomical Waste”: all right, Musk’s DOGE claims to slash and burn government waste, correct? So, what’s the celestial waste? In his (more or less utilitarian school of thought) paper, Bostrom essentially posits that with each passing second that we fail to colonize the local galactic supercluster, its stellar resources—what else would these people do with stars besides conquer them, what, gaze at them or something?—go unharnessed. Therefore the uncaptured energy-reserves consequences are that, per second, we’re failing to bring “about more than 10²⁹ human lives” into existence (cf. fascist emphasis on population growth). In other words, by not conquering the surrounding stars, a mere eight billion of us are managing to deny all these one hundred octillion future humans (like the future Roko’s Basilisk) their chances at a happy existence (or draft slots in far right militaries). A simple reductio ad absurdum: in one possible future world, Musk and Trump are beheaded by guillotines on live television, as millions enjoy the traumatizing sight; so if you aren’t ̶t̶o̶r̶c̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ trading in as many Teslas as possible on Apr. 5, it’s all your fault that these potential future execution-watchers are being denied their rightful, trauma-laden, longtermist joy. Philosophers’ modal possible universes—like Bostrom’s—can ease your task of making up almost whatever shit you want and blaming other people for your not having it already, and for all the science fiction flavor of TESCREAL beliefs, oligarchs shifting the blame for their greed onto everyone else is as old as the hills.

I hope all this helps explain the fascism underpinning these TESCREAL beliefs—and, the right brutality is not that different from the left brutality, such as the fictional “March to the Stars” decried by Ursula K. Le Guin in her prescient novel The Telling (2000) based on Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that decreed the little guys and gals’ suffering was for the longterm benefit of bigly Communist China, et cetera—and I hope the Grimes-Musk anecdote helps illuminate, a little, the Great Man masculinism sewn throughout the Silicon Valley TESCREAL belief hodgepodge.

And what the hey, let’s throw in Musk’s Singularitarianism beliefs—the S of TESCREAL—since this week, on Apr. 2, he tweeted: “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence[.]” The technological (as opposed to societal) singularity, as fans of the Schwarzenegger-starring Terminator action/sci-fi movie series know, is that presumed forthcoming moment in history where, per Wikipedia (accessed today), “technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization.” Often “technological singularity” refers more specifically to the rise of some Terminator Skynet-like “digital superintelligence” AI bent on either sherpa-ing us to higher heights or just killing us all. This take explains more, but the gist of Musk’s tweet is that human “biological” bodies are disposable evolution-wise, just temporary husks means to “bootload” ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶s̶u̶i̶c̶i̶d̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶n̶s̶m̶o̶g̶r̶i̶f̶i̶c̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶v̶e̶l̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶e̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶l̶i̶e̶n̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶H̶a̶l̶e̶-̶B̶o̶p̶p̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶t̶ the new digital systems that we—or rather, he and his friends, now or in the longtermist future—will ascend into, uploading their psyches into computers and all that Matrix-y stuff, so they can capture the local galactic supercluster’s stellar resources or become Tessier-Ashpool out of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer or whatever. Had enough?

It’s a bit like the Terminator 2 (1991) script’s exchange, cut from the film version, that has the heroine and Arnold Schwarzenegger—playing a robot who’s been sent from the future back to the movie’s 1995 setting—discussing how Skynet will soon be built:

Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton): Then those fat fucks in Washington figure, what the hell, let a computer run the whole show, right?

Terminator (Schwarzenegger): Basically.

Elmo suggests he’s here to make sure it all goes swimmingly. You might ask why Musk’s body doesn’t get ground into dust as soon as Skynet goes online if bodies are merely disposable bootloaders. Why, I’m guessing, before Musk ascends into his modem or onto Mars, Roko’s Basilisk (or whatever) needs him and DOGE kicking around to explain all this to the rest of us dunces … while he cuts Social Security and drains Memphis, Tennessee to build xAI’s “Colossus,” the world’s bigliest supercomputer—cough, cough, compensatory—in order to make the “the most powerful AI training system yet.” Nothing beside remains.

Finally, the third strand: the Dark Enlightenment, a label coined by aforementioned Curtis Yarvin fanboy and former philosophy professor Nick Land and mostly synonymous with the neo-reactionary movement a.k.a. NRx. I’ll likely take it on in a subsequent installment and just give you the, uh, short version for the time being. Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), promoted by Land, has been and continues to be a huge influence on the (proto-)PayPal mafia leaders such as MAGA megadonor Thiel, and as a result, a bigly influence on Vice President J.D. Vance and Trump. So when you see Trump call himself a (masculinist) king (they never advocate for queens), and repost memes to that effect, he’s not joking—just as he told NBC on Mar. 30 that he’s “not joking” about a third presidential term, which, due to the 22nd Amendment, would be unconstitutional: illegal.

The more you dig into the Dark Enlightenment, the more you see that they see only zero-sum win-lose power struggles everywhere, not sharing, not fountain-like surplus infinities, not an exuberant reality where creative, balanced or balancing interactions between one and one actually can make, not two, but 11. Time for us all to introduce Tesla to some department of inefficiencies, amirite?

Regarding the connections between Musk/DOGE, the Dark Enlightenment, and fascism, a huge goal for them all is to establish so-called “Freedom Cities“, a.k.a. “Startup Cities” or “Startup Nations” or “Network States,” essentially unregulated zones—say, in Greenland, the semi-autonomous, largest non-continental island that Trump2 has lately been bullhorning about conquering from Denmark by force—where corporate boy-kings shall preside over their own lands/cities/countries and over rightless employees with zero gub’ment interference to distract from the endlessly accelerated capitalism. DOGE’s destructive deregulation comes in handy for founding such cities, like yesterday’s company towns, like tomorrow’s out of Octavia Butler’s Parable science fiction novels.

The Dark Enlightenment’s “Freedom Cities,” fatally overdosed on the techbro jock asshole stuff, indicate that behind the showy Musk and the showy Trump of the showy federal government are the somewhat quieter corporate interests that must also be taken on.

Like, say, Tesla.

Apr. 5: #TeslaTakedown

Saturday’s protests are less than 36 hours away as I’m wrapping up this blog entry, so we’re going to summarize to save us both time. And if you’re wondering, the lovable canine that the doge internet slang for dog arose from is now dead—as of May 2024. It was leukemia and liver disease, but Kabuso still feels like something of a canine political prisoner, her image an absolute spiritual unit of intellectual non-property to be reclaimed.

For attending protests, you can find most of the direct information you need at the aptly named TeslaTakedown.com; there’s a Bluesky account around the same here, and as you know, Bluesky doesn’t require an account or signing in just to read posts. Other major nationwide protests planned for Apr. 5 and beyond include the Hands Off! protests—Stop creepy-touching public resources, Elmo!—and the 50501 protests against executive overreach and in support of the Constitution. See also this spreadsheet of Apr. 5 protests or the Big List and PolRev protest aggregators. You might also come across references to the #3E goals—#EndImpunity, #EndAutogenocide, #EndOligarchy. Those are explained here.

You can find guides on protest safety via Bluesky threads such as this one or collections of related zines/books via websites like the Anarchist Library. Check out local affinity groups and mutual aid communities—Food Not Bombs chapters are a good bet—where you can ask new friends in person your embarrassing questions about how to go to a protest and find someone to have your back while you have theirs. For news updates via Bluesky on the #TeslaTakedown topic, click the hashtag, follow me, follow YourAnonCentral, follow anyone who floats your boat and sinks Elon Musk’s. You can find theory in philosopher Heather Marsh’s Binding Chaos books, and practical praxis guides in her Resistance series of shorter books, the first two now being released and titled Stigmergy: How To Create a Mass Movement and How To Dismantle a Dictatorship. You can even find inspiration (and adrenaline) in music (example; example; example; example; example; example; example), literature (example; example), and other forms of art.

But above all, to take down Tesla, you must do something. You only live once. Make it count. It shouldn’t feel like a duty or chore—it should feel fun. If it doesn’t, give your anxiety or other disorder the middle finger and drag your ass out there anyway (you can watch from a distance at first if you’re really scared). You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by what may happen when you escape the comfort zone of the glowing screens. Musk hasn’t apologized for X Æ A-Xii wiping his boogers on the Resolute Desk, so by all means, feel free to wipe your boogers on Elmo’s Teslas until $TSLA and that $114 price become best friends.

I’ll see you Saturday.

This blog post, #TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2025/04/04/teslatakedown-1of3-crashcourse-musk-dogecoup-resist/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

You’ve seen the news: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is said to be slowly but surely taking over the United States Government and its social safety nets—and everything else—with...

TL;DR: Here’s my talk as a DRM-free .mp4 and my corrected English subtitles in .srt or .vtt format. Watch below, and the corrected subtitles are already inside the embed, but you’ll probably need to click the three vertical dots at the video’s bottom right and select “Captions” to turn them on (Chrome) or click the [cc] box at the video’s bottom right to toggle them on (Firefox). The subtitles greatly remediate editing errors and also gaps in my speech where I omitted transitions or didn’t make certain logical connections fully explicit. You’ll want to watch with them on. Don’t forget the recommended resource list. Enjoy!

Note: You might also be interested in my Foreign Policy article from two months ago about G, the global commons for public data collaboration. Gift hyperlink; alternate hyperlink.

On Oct. 9, the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) staff made every talk from this summer’s HOPE XV conference in New York City available via their website. Buy them all on a thumbdrive or download individually. I bought just mine and embedded the DRM-free .MP4, meant for sharing, above. It’s also on my youtube. HOPE staff said then that sometime soon, they’ll put this year’s presentations on theirs.

I gave the talk on Friday, July 12 starting at 7 p.m. on the main Marillac Auditorium stage. Sure, there were technical difficulties and I used too many filler words—it was my first time presenting to adults without scripting it all before, and due to life/journactivism exigiencies, I’d prepared the outline just hours prior, meaning no rehearsals or revisions, especially as I was busy writing the 14-page recommended resource list (PDF) that accompanies my presentation, as mentioned in my talk.

But if your goal is to learn from a Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security, the video will meet that need, especially if you employ the corrected subtitles.

The $.99 downloadable from HOPE came with subtitles—English, German, Spanish, French—and the transcript .txt they’re based on. I edited the numerous errors, some at the hands of 2600 (I replaced these), others my own mistakes while speaking [fixed in brackets]. Here’s the corrected transcript and the corrected English subtitles (.srt; .vtt). If anyone wants to translate my corrected version to any language, email me and I’ll add your subtitles to this post for others to peruse.

Much of my talk is simply trying to steer you toward the recommended resource list—your homework, so to speak. That document definitely puts election security and activism knowledge in your hands so you can do something awesome with it—which would make a great story to leave in the comments. In my presentation, I also mention uploading the flowchart to my site; I’ll do that at some future date when I have time and can improve it. For my June post and one-minute video promoting this talk, go here.

Embedded below, the full Biden video I showed on stage during my talk (all 41 seconds). HOPE’s after-the-fact editing removed the audience gasp and shortened Biden’s three kisses to two. Following the full Biden video, a few final notes for my presentation overall, in quick bullet points.

• Here are the two RAMRANTS tweet-thread URLs, mentioned in my talk, leading to many more examples of Biden being creepy, mostly C-SPAN footage:
  
  https://x.com/RAMRANTS/status/930122872000995328
  https://x.com/RAMRANTS/status/930065838387863552
  
  
• In the Q&A, someone asked about the accuracy of recent U.S. elections. I gave two answers: we need more data, and second, that though former pollster Jonathan Simon’s exit poll forensics show many voting jurisdictions presenting legitimate results, there have also been enough jurisdictions with significant enough disparities between totals and exit polls to raise serious alarm.
  
  A third answer would have been to give a bird’s eye view of the strength and frequency of official audits. These are voting jurisdiction staff doing sort of the same thing Simon is, but drawing on very different data sets, usually spot-checking handmarked paper ballots and comparing those samples with the vote totals, ideally according to Stark risk-limiting audit protocols. If you can see what’s going into a black box and what’s coming out of a black box, and it makes sense against a neutral standard (i.e., spot-checked handmarked paper ballots), then you don’t have to fear, say, the proprietary black box software so much—though people debate that too, particularly if audits aren’t conducted, as they should be, for every single contest regardless of margins of victory.
  
  Here’s what the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in 2018 in the first volume of their underexamined report on Kremlin election interference in the 2016 U.S. elections: “Statistically sound audits may be the simplest and most direct way to ensure confidence in the integrity of the vote. States should begin to implement audits of election results. Logic and accuracy tests of machines are a common step, but do not speak to the integrity of the actual vote counting. Risk-limiting audits, or some similarly rigorous alternative, are the future of ensuring that votes cast are votes counted. [Unnamed] State 8, State 12, State 21, State 9, State 2, State 16, and others already audit their results, and others are exploring additional pilot programs. However, as of August 2018, five states conducted no post-election audit and 14 states do not do a complete post-election audit. The Committee recognizes states’ concern about the potential cost of such audits and the necessary changes to state laws and procedures; however,the Committee believes the benefit of having a provably accurate vote is worth the cost.”
  
  Verified Voting has a map/visualizer, as of 2022, for post-election audit law and practices. It appears that two years ago—i.e., four years after Senate Intelligence Committee passage above—we had five states carrying out risk-limiting audits, though not always binding or fully comprehensive ones. And we had eight states with no post-election audit law. The remaining states (and setting aside the territories) were somewhere in between: audits, but not the risk-limiting gold standard kind; or audits that were optional, partial, nonbinding, or otherwise deficient …
  
  It’s a hodgepodge mess. The results are likely trustworthy, except where they aren’t; you just can’t trust ’em, except where you really can because of overlapping accountability layers of high-quality audits, statistical forensics, scrutineers, and more. And all of this is in motion every single day. It does seem to be slowly getting better…so the swing state majority who come to consensus for a particular presidential candidate can impose on the rest of the country, and more can feel confident that the destined-to-be-unfair hierarch will enter into the White House above them fairly.
  
  
  
• In the video, I mention MAGA’s Stop the Steal lawsuits tanking except for one minor case in Pennsylvania. A great resource on all that is the July 2022 report Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.
  
  
• For details on the 3000+ counties versus 6000+ voting jurisdictions nuance, I’ve been pointed to the 2015 book “Administering Elections: How American Elections Work,” which I haven’t read yet sadly.
  
  
• One great thing about Scrutineers.org that I neglected to mention in the talk is that they’re specifically working to bring together—to bridge the gap between—on the one hand, the grassroots, boots-on-the-ground movement activists, often black activists, fighting decades-old voter suppression tactics—which stymie vote capture—with, on the other hand, the academic, cerebral, often white guys who are digging into the proprietary voting computer vulnerabilities, which interfere with the vote tallying side. These two disparate realms really need to come together, as they increasingly have in Coffee County, Georgia, for example.
  
  
• I mention in the talk that Trump almost certainly owes China substantial money. Here’s my 2021 blog post on that (CTRL+F “China” to jump to the relevant section). Some other information on the topic worth checking out: Jan 2024 report on Chinese-owned or -backed entities spending millions of dollars at Trump’s properties while he was in office, likely a violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause; in 2016 he described himself as the “king of debt,” saying, “I’ve made a fortune by using debt, and if things don’t work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that’s a smart thing, not a stupid thing” and explained, “You go back and you say, ‘Hey guess what, the economy crashed, I’m going to give you back half'”; In 2023 Trump said of Xi Jinping, who abolished his own term limits in 2018, “He runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. Smart, brilliant, everything perfect.”
  
  
• Just two notes to self for future talks. First, I’m going to practice not using filler words when I leave voicemails on Signal or whatnot. Second, as in fiction, my examples should have been on theme. My example of a dominance hierarchy struggle, for instance, should have been political candidates vying to win the same office (on theme) instead of two boxers fighting (not on theme).
  
  
• Finally, links to my election security journalism, all from 2023: Texas Observer article on whistleblower Reality Winner; investigative article on Coffee County Georgia and accompanying AM/FM nationally syndicated radio appearance on the BradCast; another investigative article related to Georgia not patching voting software despite the Coffee County elections office breach; Daily Dot investigative article about the missing laptop in Coffee County, GA with accompanying blog post. Those are all in the recommended resource list (PDF).
  

This blog post, Video: My HOPE XV talk: Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security (45min), by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/10/26/video-hope-xv-survey-scrutiny-election-security/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, then email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

TL;DR: Here’s my talk as a DRM-free .mp4 and my corrected English subtitles in .srt or .vtt format. Watch below, and the corrected subtitles are already inside the embed, but...

Note: On Sept. 22, the Daily Dot published my latest article, Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy under Trump versus Harris. It’s an overview of where the two leading U.S. presidential candidates stand on various tech topics: TikTok, net neutrality, the FCC, Section 230, the digital divide, and more, with a few surprises along the way—such as power-to-the-people NYC Mesh. My article also discusses their stances on artificial intelligence. I had some paragraphs on that subject left over unused, so I decided to put together this quick blog post. If you’re an actual human reader, rather than an AI scraping my webpage, enjoy.

On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning for the U.S. presidency, spoke at a fundraiser in Manhattan, raising more money—$27 million—than you or I will ever see, reportedly her highest-grossing fundraiser. It should help her warchest stay better funded by far than that of her main opponent, the twice-impeached first presidential felon Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee. But her speech? It echoed another she gave, nearly a year ago, at the U.K.’s Bletchley Park.

In both talks, she spoke of government collaboration with the AI industry, portraying it as voluntary rather than as demanded. Maybe aside from the helpfulness of machine translation services such as Google Translate, as well as other AI tools, and maybe beneath the opulence and publicity, things aren’t so safe. Or at least, the topic of artificial intelligence is too poorly understood for rando-journos to really give helpful hot takes without first boning up on the underlying material—material that started, more or less, some 80 years ago in/near Bletchley Park, though Harris didn’t mention the particular ghost in question when she was there last November.

To merit $27 million in a single day, Harris must have said something really interesting at Sunday’s swanky event venue, Cipriani Wall Street (pictured left), yeah? She did, if you’re a venture capitalist (or journalist) seeking more details on her tech positions, some of which she’s been circumspect about. Indeed, until Sunday, she hadn’t—as a presidential contender—stated openly her position on cryptocurrency, leaving Trump to chest-pound about being the “crypto candidate” while she focused on traditional voter concerns such as reproductive rights. According to Bloomberg, at Sunday’s fundraiser, Harris said, “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets,” (read cryptocurrency for the latter) “while protecting our consumers and investors.”

Sounds a bit like former POTUS Barack Obama. We will do the good things that are important and that bring us hope and prosperity, and we will not do the bad things that cause problems for folks in this country. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. It’s a strategy: as long as Harris continues painting by numbers without enormous gaffes or grave October surprises, and sans whatever serious, hard-to-predict dangers might arise from election interference, I say she’ll probably sit behind the Resolute Desk come Jan. 20.

But what about AI? In terms of direct quotes from Harris, not much more has trickled out of her fundraiser speech thus far—not that I’ve seen. She did say, apparently in the same passage addressing cryptocurrency and AI, that she “will bring together labor, small business founders and innovators and major companies[.]” Some say that’s Harris pitching young men leaning Republican.

Likely so, but it’s also in line with something I mention in my Sept. 22 Daily Dot article: the voluntary industry agreement she facilitated as current Prez Joe Biden’s “AI czar.” She touted this AI safety agreement at the Bletchley Park inaugural global summit on AI in 2023, two days after Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence calling for the United States to lead AI development while ensuring safety.

The bog standard campaign schmaltz and vagueness, combined with rejuvenated hopes after the happy Harris replaced the about-to-pass-out Biden, maybe make this stuff regarding AI, the industry, the voluntary non-binding safety promises—this We can all work together, biz, labor, even the guy passed out on the tarmac, wait is that Jo– stuff—feel enticing. Maybe it is: though the agreement is on paper non-binding, a presidential administration has antitrust and other levers at hand to knock companies in the head with reminders. But I doubt it.

Why am I not more certain, or why are AI agreements not critiqued in depth across news media? I’ve been given a few recommendations, but generally, I don’t know of any deep-digging investigative reports on where the AI industry is headed that, crucially, combine a valuable, highly literate philosophical perspective on what computers and artificial intelligence are accomplishing, and threatening, beyond the journo-exposés about Silicon Valley powers-that-be signing up for cryonics, aiming to infuse themselves with young blood, throwing zillions down shady corners, the youzhe. Know of some? Let me know. Astute philosophy, remember. I know that the TESCREALs/rationalists (today’s, not Spinoza) are orgiastic over their quasi-famous neckbeards pronouncing this or that, but I don’t agree with their scientism, so skip ’em. People who touch grass please.

We need better, more insightful assessments of artificial intelligence, because, among other reasons, algorithmic bias, as a chief aspect of it, is putting on steroids plain ol’ human bigotry’s human rights violations and body counts.

Harris gave her voluntary agreement! high-profile speech at the first global AI Safety Summit, which took place at none other than Bletchley Park. That country estate in England was once home to the British government’s Code and Cypher School, now called Government Communications Headquarters, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. At the first ever global summit on artificial intelligence, in other words, Harris was discussing its emergence precisely where the 1940s originated Five Eyes, the post-World War II secret-sharing alliance between five countries’ worth of intelligence agencies staffed by actual humans, including those of the United States.

At the summit, Harris discussed the Biden administration’s efforts to safeguard against AI dangers such as “algorithmic discrimination[,]” undertakings for which she was the seniormost Biden administration official involved. One such effort Harris spotlighted: the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The non-binding Blueprint lays out expectations for technologists developing artificial intelligence systems—such as Google’s sentiment analyzer that a 2017 Vice article footnoted by the Blueprint found to be biased. Among other goals, the expectations aim at reinforcing and expanding existing anti-discrimination legal protections “to ensure equity for underserved communities[,]” defined to include “Indigenous and Native American persons,” as well as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex” people, and various others.

Like a ghost unseen at the Bletchley Park summit, unmentioned in Harris’s Bletchley Park speech, late British mathematician Alan Turing, who dreamed up the idea of computer software in a 1936 math paper, worked at that same country estate for the Code and Cypher School in the 1940s cracking Nazi codes. Shortly after the end of World War II, Turing gave the first public lecture on AI. He said, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience” and “alter its own instructions[.]” Interpreting those as Turing himself often did—by setting aside religious or philosophy of mind questions in favor of mathematical and engineering ones—today’s artificial intelligence is understood by experts as doing both to some sizable degree.

In the longstanding philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed what’s now called the Turing Test: essentially a guessing game or experiment where, by writing down questions and passing around slips of paper, a person tries to determine which responses are generated by an unseen human and which by an unseen AI—with the argument that, if the person can’t tell the responses apart, the AI should be considered to be thinking as legitimately as the unseen human is considered to be thinking. That’s how the Turing Test is typically presented—bereft of the gender codings in the 1950 original, which subtly and impishly (by 1950s standards) depict gender as something as fluid as intelligence.

The original Turing Test is also not so behavioristic as it sounds from textbook glosses, with Turing’s actual writing praising the “quite a strong” counterargument “from Extrasensory Perception” (this is why read primary source and not just watch youtube vids). While in this portion of the paper he mostly sticks to familiar psionics language such as telepathy and precognition, one might discern someone living in a dissociated world where empathy (as emotional contagion, not as cognitive exercise) is regularly off the table, especially for someone sensitive, “good as a telepathic receiver” (see Turing’s best-known premonition), and required to keep silent. About classified secrets. About what he must have witnessed and heard of, the 1940s birthing the current world order dominated by spy agencies and an attempt at a global mono-empire underpinned by information technology. About even his own criminalized sexuality.

Sentenced for “gross indecency” under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952, one of the foremost founders of artificial intelligence was instructed by a British court to pick either estrogen-based chemical castration or imprisonment. Turing chose the former and, almost certainly as a consequence, was driven to alter his own instructions fatally in 1954 at home, alone.

It seems wrong to me that Harris, at Bletchley Park, did not mention him in her speech, though the U.K.’s government-backed Alan Turing Institute was among the contributors to the voluntary agreement. I assume she didn’t mention him at Cipriani Wall Street, either, despite his story as one of the foremost founders of AI—occasionally argued to be the founder—waiting as a perfect example of how good deeds especially get punished when you’re deemed to fall into the wrong group affiliation categories, and how that’s the kind of bias, now often enshrined into algorithms, that she says we need safeguards against. Marketing happyspeak, however, is what brings in the $27 million/night.

Artificial intelligence didn’t kill one of its founders, but bigotry, one of AI’s biggest problems, sure did. It’s presently up for grabs to what extent the 47th U.S. president, others in power, and the worldwide public can learn from such experiences as AI becomes increasingly more common, assuredly with dignity-depleting privacy violations in its train. Like some coked-up computerized version of the long and sorry history of human bias, algorithmic bias has zillions in funding, endless apologists, and a growing body count. Politicians limit themselves to the art of the possible, for better or worse, but definitely crop out anything their “possible” and “realistic” tunnel visions don’t have time for, like, say, omitting mention of Bletchley Park ghost Alan Turing and anybody else who might lie in a grassy field and dream up system-changing ideas such as computer software or artificial intelligence. More time spent understanding AI’s origination and its development over three quarters of a century would be a good start to transforming it from a pol- and journo-buzzword into something we can usefully self-govern.

This blog post, Kamala Harris, AI, and the Bletchley Park ghost, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/09/24/kamala-harris-ai-bletchley-park-ghost/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Guidelines touted by Kamala Harris at Bletchley Park in 2023 Note: On Sept. 22, the Daily Dot published my latest article, Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy...

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: 14-page PDF I put together: a recommended resource list for this talk, presented July 12, 2024. The resource list contains the following sections: Books and papers; Documentaries; Reality Winner and Kremlin cyberattacks on 2016 elections; BMD vulnerabilities, Coffee County, Georgia elections office breach, and ongoing statewide voting software compromise; Election activism; General deep politics and activism; Douglas Lucas.

UPDATE: The conference schedule is now available. My talk is at 7 p.m. on Friday July 12 in Marillac Auditorium; 50 minutes total including Q&A.

A decade ago, I was a panelist at HOPE X, the tenth Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City. Youtube of that panel — on crowdsourcing research into the cyber-intelligence complex — still collects views.

On the way home from the conference, I wrote a humorous article describing my experience: my surprising, then interviewing NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake; the private spies who showed up to surveil the panel and seemed more interested in my articles than most people I actually know are; my rooted smartphone getting hacked … Ah, wonderful times, so long ago.

Now — well, next month, July 12-14 — I’ll give a solo talk at HOPE XV titled Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security.

Wait, what’s this conference again? Sponsored by the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, HOPE is held every other year in New York City — previously in Manhattan, now in Queens at St. John’s University. Top-billed speakers over the years have included Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, frenemy of the state Edward Snowden, you get the idea. Typical offerings include lockpicking villages, ham radio and vintage computer stuff, vendors, film screenings, socializing, controversy real or ginned up, private spies watching me, people hacking my phone … plus panels/talks.

You can check out the conference website here, speakers’ bios over here, various promo videos HOPE requested way over here, and short descriptions of every panel/talk all the way over here. The description for mine:

Fake news or flawless? Our computerized elections are neither. To truly understand corporate, closed-source election computers requires understanding how they fit into the wider electoral system and its interlocking parts. Douglas’s investigative journalism will provide case studies documenting how it can go haywire: the 2016 Kremlin cyberattacks on U.S. election infrastructure exposed by whistleblower Reality Winner, the MAGA-led Coffee County elections office breach still compromising Georgia’s statewide voting software, and more. Such details will show how you can help secure elections: scrutineers, statistical forensics, free software voting companies … the list goes on. He will address democracy’s evolution, too, scrutinizing statist voting within the bigger picture of human collaboration.

I’ll create an online reading list for attendees interested in learning more, as well as an overview diagram of the election system’s interlocking parts.

As of this writing, I don’t know which exact day and time my talk will be, but the conference website should be updated with that information any moment [see update above]. If you decide to attend and want to get together, email me: dal@riseup.net. I plan to arrive a day early and stay a day after. Otherwise just watch my talk afterward on Youtube or at the happenin’ headquarters of DouglasLucas.com.

Will I get into any zany HOPE incidents this decade around? Probably. If I encounter anyone from Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — their three uses of the word security there totally isn’t overcompensation or anything — I have some remarks for them, including regarding my potential lawsuit over their FOIA deni… but that’s another story.

Just remind me not to root my phone.

This blog post, My talk at HOPE XV: Survey and Scrutiny of Election Security: July 12-14, NYC, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/06/02/talk-hope-election-security-july-nyc/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Promo video for my talk (also on youtube) ADDITIONAL UPDATE: 14-page PDF I put together: a recommended resource list for this talk, presented July 12, 2024. The resource list contains...

Note (added Apr. 8, 2024): On initial publication this blog post incorrectly stated that Friday night lacked a flesh-and-blood DJ. There was one, in fact, by the pseudonym mcbaud300. When I was briefly in the ballroom, I didn’t see mcbaud300, but I did see a sign that led me to wrongly conclude the DJ was artificial intelligence. Below, in the apropos section of this post, I’ve added a photo, by Michael Citrak, of that sign, which read VIRTUAL DJ. That’s actually the name of a product that replaces physical DJ gear—such as turntables—with software, not something the replaces actual human DJs with software. Thanks Norwescon Discord for the corrections.

On Fri. Mar. 29, I attended Norwescon 46, the annual four-day science fiction convention nowadays based in Seattle (okay, SeaTac) that’s been running continuously since 1978. This was my first Norwescon — which I assume means North West Convention, though I’ve never seen that explicitly stated. Previously I’ve gone to a few other conventions: ConDFW (2009), Wiscon (2009), and Conflation (2014 or so).

Since I live in the Emerald City, I could bypass hotel room fees. And by limiting my participation to Friday only, I wasn’t diverting too much time away from work or toward crowds, which by nature repel introverts such as me. Before departing for the convention, I told myself to have a good attitude, to make the most of it, and — well, I had a good time, but it felt faintly elegiac. Like something that, if you look down to check your wristwatch too long, might not be there when you look back up.

The Frequently Asked Questions explains what Norwescon is all about:

Norwescon is the Pacific Northwest’s premier science fiction and fantasy convention and one of the largest regional science fiction and fantasy conventions in the United States. While maintaining a primarily literary focus, Norwescon is large enough to provide a venue for many of the other aspects of science fiction and fantasy and the interests of its fans such as anime, costuming, art, gaming, and much, much more.

Norwescon features hundreds of hours of panel programming, over 200 panelists specializing in fantasy, science fiction, horror, science, and more, the Philip K. Dick Awards, a 6,000+ square-foot Dealers’ Room, Writers’ Workshops, a full masquerade, an art show, dances, and more!

In the early afternoon, I parked by one of the far walls of the overpriced, crammed DoubleTree guest lot and started hiking on foot to the hotel. Long before I reached the lobby, it seemed the science fiction convention had already begun, outright, straight up in my face. Yes, right there in the parking lot. Where I was confronted with —

The Knightscope autonomous security robot

My surprise halted me. Recovering, I snapped two photos:

At first I was quite confused, thinking this was some Doctor Who Dalek-esque creation of the convention’s. But I soon confirmed it’s the hotel’s, and in fact, the hotel has been using the Knightscope for several years. The convention staffer I spoke with seemed unperturbed by the strange device, or perhaps resigned to it, trailing off his discussion of the subject matter …

In my photos, it looks stupid and harmless, comical even — like a big inflated balloon — but in real life, it’s actually kind of intimidating, as my video below hopefully shows. If I understand Knightscope correctly, the self-driving gizmo records surveillance film for optional review by humans later. Gives you those warm fuzzies that we’re all in this together, trusting one another to do our best and forge the optimal outcomes for our communities, right?

In a slogan asserting that crimefighting is impossible without such high-tech interventions, Knightscope’s website boasts that You need superhuman abilities to fight crime. Let’s be frank, law enforcement and security forces have long been keeping crime at the Goldilocks levels required to maintain whichever heinous balance of power the highest-ups prefer, a la cyberpunk novelist William Gibson’s character Ainsley Lowbeer. Fighting crime is something else entirely, and while outsourcing it to these robots might prevent automobile smash-and-grabs, that likely comes at the expense of us further forgetting how to use social support and shunning/approval to do so, because everyone can just be hyper-surveilled constantly and the unseen, promised Good Guys with superhuman abilities, far away somewhere, can help dispense justice on command for a fee. Turn your brain off; escape into adoration of the superhuman, the supertastic Knightscope!

Would there be actual superheros inside the hotel, with sincere hearts? Say, Phoenix Jones — real life crimefighters dressed up as superheroes? Didn’t the genre’s classic writers want readers to respond with this-worldly heroism, rather than robots replacing what’s left of people?

As I walked side by side with the Knightscope filming the thing, I really felt it was deliberately staring at me through its camera apertures. Maybe because I was blocking its vision. I don’t think the Knightscope carries any weapons, yet I couldn’t help but think of the Star Wars robot R2D2 and its Taser-style electric shock prod. About halfway into the video below, I start laughing, as does a couple nearby in a car, observing l’affaire robot. Then the couple starts their vehicle, ready to leave, kind of pinning me in from behind; the robot seized this moment to start coming at me from the front, shown in the video’s final seconds. I died then, and this is my replacement writing to you now.

High on panel: Managing unsolicited submissions in the era of AI

Once I entered the hotel proper, collected my badge, and saw a man hilariously dressed as Waldo from Where’s Waldo as well as a large Doctor Who Dalek prop carried by attendees, I headed for the panel titled Managing Unsolicited Submissions in the Era of AI. Four panelists: Podcastle editor Craig Jackson (moderator); Clarkesworld founder, editor, publisher Neil Clarke; Uncanny Magazine managing editor Monte Lin; The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction publisher Gordon Van Gelder. The panel discussed exactly what its title says, a Turing Test problem that became major news in multiple outlets once Clarke opened up about it last year.

In other words, all these robots from without are assailing our science fiction — what can we do about it from within?

Below, I embed the seven-post thread I made on Bluesky loosely transcribing portions of the thought-provoking panel. Bluesky, you may know, is a Twitter-esque rival to the platform commandeered by Elon Musk; it has a smartphone app and no longer requires an invite code to join, though it still lacks DMs and support for video uploads. To read the seven posts directly on Bluesky, you can click through the below embeds, or follow this link, even if you lack a Bluesky account and don’t sign in, as with Twitter of yore.

As the panel concluded, I felt elated. Following the past few years of reading and writing science fiction, and doing investigative journalism and copywriting and philosophy research assistance — all of it writerly work, freelance jobs making up the majority of my mostly solitary life — suddenly, fresh topics I’ve been curious about were being discussed back and forth live among knowledgeable panelists and inquisitive audience members, all of them friendly, not competing to see who can be the most cruel at ripping off strangers’ heads or minimizing their every word, unlike much of social media and the offline realm. I’m not enough of a joiner to say I felt like I belonged or anything definitive like that — but I was really glad I came and looked forward to additional panels and events.

I resolved to check out Clarkesworld more often, then headed downstairs to the general area by the lobby, where my newfound excitement encompassed the various booths. There were H.P. Lovecraft-themed T-shirts for sale, a table with riddles written on wood with vendors offering clues, a huge supply of free books for the taking, and more. All at once these science fictional images, usually confined to my bookshelf, had bloomed all around me, left, right, up, everywhere I looked. I even asked some vendors research questions about miniature painting, related to my fiction-writing, and got some good leads. Again, a topic that had almost entirely existed in my lonely head for years was now in the flesh, and everyone cheerfully acted as if that were normal rather than the other way around.

Place of refuge losing luster

I ducked out for lunch, again seeing the Knightscope patrolling the parking lot. To the restaurant through hectic, smelly traffic. Something I ordered didn’t quite agree with me; my mood soured a smidge. Already I’d seen every vendor booth (though I forgot to check the art show, unfortunately). Hurrying back for another panel felt like a chore.

Wasn’t there something backward about all this? The last time H.P. Lovecraft wrote anything new was almost a hundred years ago. Isn’t there something more we can do about AI-spam besides write our Congressfools and beg the FTC chair, tactics that I myself do but that still feel dated next to real cutting-edge resistance? And that cumbersome Dalek prop, that robot-y Doctor Who creature attendees had carried through the hotel, was derived from a TV show that began more than a half century back. I assumed the Dalek lacked onboard electronics to theoretically counter the sleek, unapologetic Knightscope, which would probably vaporize it. Okay, not really. But all the same, though the unsolicited AI manuscripts panelists were certainly informed from their front-line battles with that particular problem, and led a truly interesting discussion, the convention as a whole was now feeling, to my postprandial self, like an enclave for out-of-touch museumgoers. There were very few in their Gen-Z twenties present, and when they were, it was typically because they were assisting their vendor parents.

From the start, I knew Norwescon wouldn’t be some best-in-class, outward-connecting headquarters of artistic resistance (is there such a place anywhere?). I wasn’t expecting earth-shattering revelations from any panelists. Why not just go home? Why couldn’t all — rather than merely some — of the panels be put online, with the audience able to type in questions, as mainstreamed during the years the United States called COVID-19 a federal public health emergency?

Because of the vitality, of course. Physical presence in such an environment, enjoying such conversations, festival like, brings its own energy surplus, or did initially. Now I just felt drained and was urging myself to keep going, a familiar self-flagellation from decades ago at university where I’d scolded myself to hurry, to make it to ̶p̶a̶n̶e̶l̶s̶ classes on time. I’m not sure why my mood had inverted. Maybe it was that, born in urban Texas, I’m unaccustomed to the obligations of participating in an interesting, mostly benign group-self — the convention, that perhaps I’d joined simply by being there — and unfairly demanded nonstop perfection from it. Maybe it was the sense of an unthinking eternal return, passing by the same booths over and over, the same unpurchased H.P. Lovecraft T-shirt over and over, has-been consumerist ants stuffed into an airless maze, the largely unacknowledged winds of change outside — not just Knightscope, but a collapsing trade economy, a birth strike and children insufficiently raised — steadily working on blowing down the insular walls of any type of convention anywhere.

Well, I’d only attended a single panel. Another might clarify things? I drove back to the hotel, seeing upon my return, industriously cruising past, the Knightscope.

Orbiting another panel: The rest of the world in space

The next panel I’d selected from the programming (also available here) was titled The rest of the world in space. A pair of space historians gave basic information about, and showed photos of, recent non-U.S. space missions. Below, I’ll embed my four Bluesky posts from the panel. Click through the embeds, or follow this link, to see the posts directly on Bluesky.

To me it felt a little like two gruff older guys showing you their favorite Wikipedia timeline. A chill way to ooh and aah over non-U.S. spaceships. It was good that one of them mentioned, albeit very briefly, the Belarusian dictator — without mentioning his name, Aleksandr Lukashenko — and his longstanding alliance with Putin as the real reason behind a Belarusian astronaut’s joint publicity photo with the Russians. I wish he’d said more, but he did not step out farther on the limb of the supposedly unspeakable, not during this panel anyhow.

When their presentation ended, I asked the panelists about the legal penalties (or not) for failing to de-orbit artificial satellites, and how the graveyard orbit fits into that framework (or not). Once again it was wonderful to talk with actual human beings highly knowledgeable about subjects I’m interested in, many of them underreported, yet powerfully impacting people, usually without their understanding. I regained some enthusiasm — tempered somewhat this time.

Briefly I met up with one of my fellows from Clarion West Writers Workshop class of 2008, Caren Gussoff, and we commiserated about the introvert struggle of attending a populous convention. We finished talking and she left; now I had a few final Friday hours to wander around, hoping to locate value.

Odds and ends

Exploring the hotel indoors, where windows were firmly shut and people were packed like proverbial sardines — an unofficial early estimate from Norwescon staff says 1,800+ people attended across the four days — I reckoned that one out of every eight or so individuals was masking, as in, against COVID and/or RSV and/or whatever this very recent bird flu in Texas is, something that jumped from birds to cattle to humans like a UFO from the microbial dimension. I was masking, as I do for packed-like-sardines settings such as schools and hospitals. It often appeared that more were using canes to help with walking than were using masks to help with preventing the spread of respiratory diseases.

I find it difficult to draw conclusions from the absence of widespread masking. In May 2023, the federal government declared the public health emergency over, and the CDC hasn’t collected as much COVID-19 data since, though their wastewater monitoring is interesting and as of this writing says COVID-19 viral activity is low countrywide. We might imagine scientists and science fictioneers hacking together their own experiments to audit or replicate data, bridging knowledge and questions from expert to novice levels and back again, testing out various hypotheses motivated by public interest and with complete transparency for public data, so that anyone interested could observe, doublecheck, and understand. Building something for sampling or imaging viral titer from the air, as scientist Justin Lee says, accurately assessing airborne transmission dynamics, ideally in real time. We might also imagine scientists and science fictioneers at the hotel bar, drinking to assuage the guilt and shame of a dissociated society that too often refuses and mocks effort, DIY innovation, and self-governance, even when those endeavor to keep us alive and buying H.P Lovecraft-themed swag as the Knighscope watches from outside a window.

Easier challenges to conquer were the extraterrestrial enemies in Galaga, one of the many arcade games available that didn’t need quarters — I’m not sure if the games were part of the hotel or the convention, but I think the latter. Lighter fare.

As the night wore on, I checked out the ballroom. Looked like a carbon copy of the one I saw at Conflation in St. Louis circa 2014. It had a bar. It had a dance floor. It did not, however, have a human DJ [see correction at top of post—there was a human DJ, one by the pseudonym of mcbaud300—note added Apr. 8, 2024]. The DJ was some unseen robot — a sign touted this fact. The beautiful people danced and danced; for a few minutes, I watched from afar, before turning around to leave.

Likely I would have had more fun had I attended more panels, literary-focused ones, or participated in events specifically designed to facilitate socializing. There was a Speed Friending event I should have tried, where attendees converse one-on-one with a line of others for a few moments each, discussing interests, seeing if they might want to hang out more after the event. There were many rounds of charades I failed to attend as well, among them one on a Star Trek theme, which sounded really fun. Maybe some other time, some other life.

Concluding in the lounge

One area I enjoyed, and returned to often, was Norwescon’s lounge: essentially two hotel rooms, connected by a door, emptied out in favor of tables and chairs, free chips and soda, and other comforts. People — most, probably fifty years of age and up — gathered around in conversation, many already knowing each other. One told the heartbreaking story of how she’d lost her son due to a drunk driver. All the bureaucratic transportation department studies, good or bad, would turn to ash in the face of such a recounting. A while later, an older guy in a brown Jedi robe demonstrated the lightsaber he’d built, modeled after Luke Skywalker’s in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. I of course gravely intoned: I see you have constructed a new lightsaber.

The lounge spawned a few random encounters with people my own age-ish, and as I got to know them a tad, I observed a certain pattern I’ve seen before. Namely, when they asked my background in science fiction and fantasy, and I began talking of my writing it during Clarion West Writers Workshop and in the subsequent few years, their attentive eyes focused on me — they seemed not a little impressed: Here we have an author on our hands! Then I explained that, though magazine acquisition editors were quite complimentary of my work, I never managed to sell any stories and partially as a result, transitioned to focusing on investigative journalism for roughly a decade, despite my druthers. That made their gaze drop, their hands fiddle with a phone or piece of candy. Then, once I said how recently, I’ve resumed fiction-writing, still without selling anything but with a better understanding of the world — now their eyes would look at me, again interested, albeit less so than at first. You can really feel an audience — even just one person in a casual conversation — drifting in and out of interest, reducing or increasing the amount of approval they’re expressing in reaction to your words.

Of course, at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, the reverse would happen: I’d talk of journalism publications to the lounge listener’s interest, then switch to discussing fiction-writing and at once get the silent you lost me, what’s that squirrel outside doing? While people naturally and rightfully have different interests, at Norwescon I couldn’t escape the sense of a terrible siloing taking place. Science fiction at this convention. Journalism at that convention. CDC COVID-19 policies over yonder. Belarusian dictator, trail off. Knightscope surveillance, trail off. Tactics beyond begging Congressfools, trail off. If no one faces up to that which determines our lives — governance, spy agencies, propaganda, the sharing or censorship of knowledge — then a shrug, for if all that remains for the triumph of evil is for good people to say they work so they deserve to just be happy, doormatting for injustices is (mostly) your right in the marketplace, even when the consequences harm everyone. The phallic toy weapons notwithstanding, inaction (or the milquetoast minimum) doesn’t really match the morals presented in the beloved science fiction and fantasy novels, but magically holds court nonetheless, all that dissociated guilt and shame and fear.

The fun conversations, the vitality between lonely souls sharing obscure interests, guarded by walls the outside of which includes a recent auto-coup attempt… With such threats largely unchallenged — yes, I know the news says it’s all under control, just as they did before the 2016 general election — conventions like Norwescon may have fewer and fewer attendees, no new blood. Every time I turn around in Seattle, another business closes, so will science fiction conventions suffer the same fading, fading away?

I asked above what science fiction could do from within to combat the robots assailing the genre from without. It’s as if there’s a monstrous, metalmade elephant in the room with no one’s face, and yet everyone’s face, attenuating anyone’s attempts to initiate efforts or escalate them into radical approaches. But the only superheroes within the hotel walls are us. As if the New Wave of Science Fiction never ended, I could have belted out Tell us more! when the space historian alluded to Lukashenko; someone could put together panels about tactics, mutual aid, strikes, boycotts, the provisioning of alternative governance; attendees in lounges could discuss ideas, and goals, and steps to get there for whatever problems — drunk drivers, out-of-control AI, space debris, or even the Justice Department’s endangerment of Sci-Hub and its founder Alexandra Elbakyan. Just going along as done in the past is robotic. Forging a human future requires not obeying the siloes — nor activism-scolding roommates, spouses, co-workers — but building bridges between concerns and perhaps even organizing new kinds of conventions, full of surprises.

Science fiction, involved in the future, a metaphorical realm where Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard does something about injustices other than sit on his hands gloating about don’t think too hard don’t care too much — all the threats the genre and the world face today, the roving surveillance bots, the AIs, the pandemics, the international spy agency subterfuge, even censorship of the genre’s Hugo Awards affecting big names such as Neil Gaiman and confirmed to have global political motives — they all have a science fictional flavor. Recall William Gibson’s remark to the effect that, for understanding the 21st century, reading 20th-century science fiction is a wonderful toolkit. But it doesn’t help much to merely understand, say, the chemical formula of some corporate poison if it completely kills you. To combat injustice, to protect ourselves, we have to cease existing primarily as escapist voyeurs, and actually take risks, actually open up the toolkit, actually use the tools.

I’m glad I went. Maybe someday I’ll go again, see what’s new, in the future.

This blog post, Fading fun at Norwescon 46 on Friday … and the future?, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/04/02/fading-fun-norwescon46-friday-future/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Note (added Apr. 8, 2024): On initial publication this blog post incorrectly stated that Friday night lacked a flesh-and-blood DJ. There was one, in fact, by the pseudonym mcbaud300. When...

Today I emailed a PDF letter to the Coffee County Commissioners, the Board of Elections and Registration, the election supervisor, the county administrator, the County and/or elections board’s legal representation—Jennifer Herzog and Tony Rowell for Hall Booth Smith; Ben Perkins and Wes Rahn for Oliver Maner—and the only newsman in the otherwise news desert county, editor of Douglas Now Robert Preston. I separately sent the letter to multiple Coffee County residents who have a history of boldly speaking out during public meetings.

The four-page letter does what this blog post’s headline says. On Dec. 19 of last year, the Daily Dot published my latest investigative article, of some 4000 words. It concerns a federal lawsuit over procuring the county’s records related to the infamous elections office breach, most memorably the missing silver laptop used at work for years by then-election supervisor and now Trump co-defendant Misty Hampton. Also on Dec. 19, I self-published a blog post with additional important information cut from the article due to length considerations. My letter takes three revelations from the article, and some information from the blog post—mostly, truths I uncovered about the county not coughing up records—and compressed them down to bullet points for the county leaders’ convenience.

Of the many goals here, one of them is for Coffee County to produce all records from the breach, its run-up, and its aftermath (another interesting goal is Hudson’s proposal; see the article and blog post for more on that one). The unprecedented elections office intrusions in Coffee County were part of an unprecedented campaign planned by top Trumpers, even Trump himself, to arrange for technicians/operatives to make, and take off with, exact copies of the voting software still used across the battleground state of Georgia and myriad jurisdictions beyond. Amplifying this information, sending it to editors, or even advancing it in some useful way (via phone calls, emails, records requests, digging in trash bins outside Dominion Voting Systems offices, et cetera) might, I don’t know, affect some sort of huge upcoming election thing and (more important than that outcome) the narratives we are made to tell ourselves about it. Yeah, seems like there’s something happening later this year on the 5th of November, what could it be again? Remember remember…

Without further ado, the PDF letter as a fancy embed (or download):

This blog post, My letter to Coffee County, Georgia officials highlighting three key findings of my recent investigative article, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/01/04/letter-to-coffee-officials-highlighting-three-findings-investigative/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post (or the underlying article) in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Previously unpublished surveillance image of Trump co-defendant Misty Hampton outside the Coffee County elections office on Dec. 15, 2020. Today I emailed a PDF letter to the Coffee County Commissioners,...

Note: All four surveillance images in this post, previously unpublished, are published here for the first time.

Today the Daily Dot published my new investigative article, entitled EXCLUSIVE: A missing laptop could be key to prosecuting Trump. This rural Georgia county only recently admitted that it exists. Prior to publication, I worked on it for about half a year.

Some material was cut to make the article shorter and more focused on the missing silver laptop.

However, of the cut passages, I can post below as paragraphs in a bullet-point list the ones that are, in my view, urgent and important. Think of them as DVD extras showing you deleted scenes from the theatrical release.

To be serious, I believe it might help residents of Coffee County—in the swing state of Georgia—as well as interested people elsewhere to have access to this information immediately. Without further ado:

• Here’s a summary of the breach by the federal judge presiding over Curling v. Raffensperger, Amy Totenberg in the Northern District of Georgia.
  
  For her account of the intrusions, Totenberg drew on cybersecurity experts’ declarations—including their review of computer forensics and the surveillance footage—in a Nov. 10, 2023 ruling: the breach included “various individuals and entities (1) providing and gaining unauthorized access to Coffee County voting equipment, data, and software over the course of multiple dates; (2) copying, downloading, and imaging the County’s equipment, data, and software; (3) uploading and sharing that data and software on the internet via a file-sharing website; and (4) further distributing physical copies of forensic voting material downloaded from Coffee County.” (Online distribution was via private access, not public internet.)
  
  
• Some, notably Coffee breach-funding lawyer and onetime Trump lieutenant Sidney Powell, who has pleaded guilty, have tried to justify the intrusions by claiming the elections board approved the electronic collection of the computers’ contents. They offer insufficient documentation to support this claim; further, no board quorum has ever been found to have authorized copying the elections data nor does the security video show any quorum in the elections office during the breach. In a deposition, then-Board of Elections chair Wendell Stone denied that the board gave permission to examine their systems. The civil disobedience or altruism arguments sometimes made are undercut by the plundered proprietary voting software, almost three years later, having never reached the public, nor rival political campaigns, only the breachers’ allies, as far as can be determined.
  
  
• If the subpoenas lawsuit is successful, it might spell out why the county’s public statements, which have focused on Hampton, have been so careful not to mention by name then-elections board member Eric Chaney, who was caught on film participating in the breach. “I didn’t do anything without the direction of Eric Chaney,” Hampton said in deposition. The plaintiffs in the subpoenas case go further, saying Chaney, who has not been charged, “warned Ms. Hampton of her impending termination the evening before” and characterizing him as a “key participant[] in planning and executing the breach.”
  
  
• A letter that counsel for the plaintiffs in the subpoenas case sent to county attorneys in April and filed this month argues that crucial Eric Chaney-related records were improperly withheld by county manager Wesley Vickers and senior county lawyer Tony Rowell, a pair multiple interviewees described to me as the area’s de facto diarchy.
  
  
• Examples of how the lawyers seem to have more power than the people they represent:
  
  Listening to their lawyer Ben Perkins discuss legal issues at their Nov. 14 meeting, every elections board member said they were not informed of the desktop seizure before it happened, which he told them their then-underling, former election supervisor Rachel Roberts, had been involved in. Ernestine Thomas-Clark, who has long sat on the board, asked the lawyer to clarify how they could in theory terminate him when they hadn’t hired him. Fireable like any board vendor, Perkins was retained by county manager Vickers this June—an appointment some members have described as appearing out of nowhere one day, without their input or vote, something Perkins acknowledged in the meeting. Except for the two initial Oct. 24 motions, he has provided lawsuit filings to board members only when asked, according to board members who told me such requests were rare.
  
  
• Surveillance footage—procured by Coalition for Good Governance despite months of Coffee claiming it had been irrevocably lost— shows senior county lawyer Tony Rowell in December 2020 meetings with people who would go on to participate in the breach. The plaintiffs’ analysis of the video shows that prior to the intrusions, Rowell spent hours and hours in the elections office with, among others, Misty Hampton, Eric Chaney, Ed Voyles, and Cathy Latham. Voyles, who has not been charged in the Georgia-Trump RICO case, chaired the elections board two years prior to the meetings. Latham, like Hampton a Trump co-defendant who has pleaded not guilty, chaired the Coffee Republican party at the time of the intrusions. Also a Trump fake elector (imposter in the Electoral College process), Latham was in a position to have possibly connected Coffee County with MAGA D.C. shortly before the breach.

• The Coffee County Commissioners, almost never mentioned in discussions on the breach and the most powerful county executives under law, have the ability to fire their vendor Hall Booth Smith—including Tony Rowell—and county manager Vickers, though not Oliver Maner (the elections board’s vendor for legal services). I repeatedly contacted all five commissioners with questions on the subpoenas lawsuit and a CCTV still of the silver laptop, asking if they’re satisfied with the performance of the county’s de facto diarchy. County commissioner Jimmy Kitchens told me “I have no comment”; county commissioner Oscar Paulk deferred to legal counsel Tony Rowell. The other three commissioners never responded.
  
  
• In Judge Totenberg’s same Nov. 10, 2023 ruling, she concisely addressed the underexamined cybersecurity plight of state voting systems and the possible ripple effects of the breach: “The importance of the security, reliability, and functionality of state election systems, classified by the U.S. Homeland Security Department as critical national infrastructure, cannot be overstated in a world where cybersecurity challenges have exponentially increased in the last decade. The dynamics of how a breach in one part of a cyber system may potentially carry cybersecurity reverberations for the entire system for years to come exemplifies the important concerns raised in this case.”
  
  
• The Curling v. Raffensperger plaintiffs seek to force the swing state of Georgia to (on the vote capture side) abandon mandatory electronic ballots and in most circumstances use hand-marked paper ones, that will (on the vote tallying side) still be scanned by computers but always audited.
  
  
• The GBI report (critique; critique) omits reference to the silver Hewlett Packard altogether and instead, any laptops it mentions are either nondescript or an old black Toshiba. Their report acknowledges that the Toshiba had last been used in 2015—the Obama era, and thus not relevant to the breach, the run-up to it, or the aftermath, except as a red herring that the county many times brought up in place of the silver laptop.
  
  Also per the GBI report, in August 2022, surrounded by three of his lawyers—including Rowell of the de facto diarchy—recently resigned elections board chair Wendell Stone refused to participate when the Bureau tried to interview him in person. Then, making his public statement in June 2023, Stone promised “transparent” elections to the locals in front of him—but did not share that eight days earlier, the GBI had seized their elections office desktop.
  
  
• Local lawyer Jim Hudson’s proposal for independent and possibly pro bono counsel and the idea of asking the Department of Justice for help are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Hudson’s idea, while nebulous to some ears, at best would allow those most affected by the intrusions—Coffee voters—to participate in a bottom-up inquiry into all aspects of the breach and its aftermath, aided by the independent counsel and able to notify the Justice Department of any criminality discovered. The Department of Justice, by contrast, boasts multistate range and federal muscle, but without a strong defense of the local public interest in place, they would risk being seen, fairly or not, as just another set of politicized outsiders, at worst sparking more resentment than repair.
  
  
• A November poll in the New York Times shows Trump ahead of President Joe Biden in five of six battleground states, including Georgia. Legally, nothing prevents an incarcerated individual from running for president, nor indeed, from serving as president. However, the Supreme Court might affirm state or local officials disqualifying Trump due to his inciting of the Jan.6 auto-coup attempt. If not, my guess is, Mar-a-Lago house arrest would be set up for such a presidency.
  
  
• My final two paragraphs from an earlier iteration of the article:
  
  With bold leadership missing like a silver laptop, jitters about the GBI or other law enforcement behind every Eastern red cedar—paranoid or justified—proliferate; simultaneously, the known extent of the Trumpers’ multistate breach plot grows, reminding voters from coast to coast that their jurisdiction could have been hit. “Scared to death” Matthew McCullough, fulminating against the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, must not be the only Coffee County official afraid “to go to jail.”
  
  Aside from the immense force of the breach records lawsuit and its costs, it seems the only way the county’s status quo will change is if the region’s residents, perhaps in conjunction with the DOJ, perhaps aided by Hudson’s vision for independent counsel, reshape the area’s stepped landscape of power themselves. The Trump era cannot be locked up by any prosecutor, nor can it be compartmentalized away with the click of a television remote—the healing of truth and reconciliation would be more realistic. Cyber–vulnerable Election 2024 is less than a year away. Self-governance requires effort.

This blog post, Extra material for my Daily Dot investigative article about Coffee County, Georgia missing laptop likely relevant to Curling and Trump cases, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2023/12/19/extra-material-dailydot-investigative-article-laptop/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post (or the underlying article) in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or the article) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Misty Hampton in the Coffee County elections office with the silver laptop, Feb. 22, 2021 Note: All four surveillance images in this post, previously unpublished, are published here for the...

On August 3, I woke to see on my smartphone a text from David Shedd, a retired career intelligence officer who started at the CIA as an intern decades ago and climbed the ranks to senior management, even meeting with Obama face to face in 2008 to discuss continuing the agency’s torture program. Why is a lifelong spy who also headed the Defense Intelligence Agency messaging me at five in the morning? He’s as spooky as anybody in international espionage: he was on the transition team of organized crime-linked Donald Trump, he’s on faculty at Patrick Henry University — a Creationist school requiring all students and staff to attest that the Bible is their deity’s inerrant word — and who knows what else. And now he’s in my texts.

Back to back in 2018, I wrote one article, for Buffalo’s Daily Public, and contributed to the writing of another, at Boing Boing, regarding video footage Shedd ordered censored that year. So that’s why I’m on his radar generally. But all that was more than four years ago. Why ping me now?

First, some background to contextualize his odd message.

The Backstory

On February 27, 2018, the Oxford Union held, then censored at Shedd’s demand, a three-person panel on the very topic of whistleblowing. Here in the United States we don’t hear much about this debating society, but in the United Kingdom the Oxford Union is a huge deal: not only have Malcolm X, Winston Churchill, and additional historic figures spoken there, but over the years three of their student presidents have become U.K. prime ministers. A few months ago, one of the planet’s biggest newspapers offered the headline: How the Oxford Union created today’s ruling political class.

The controversial panel, held in the forum’s Goodman Library, consisted of philosopher and human rights activist Heather Marsh, longtime Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill, and Shedd. Toward the end of the evening, the spy didn’t fare well in a back-and-forth with Marsh about torture and other subjects involving how hurting people in shadowy cages is bad actually, so with a politican’s pettiness, Shedd told the Union never to release the video recording. Marsh and her lawyers contend the Union is contractually obliged to upload the film as promised to youtube, which they’ve so far failed to do. The handful of photos they posted don’t count.

A few months later, Marsh became a whistleblower herself, posting audio of her portion of the panel as well as a transcript. She wrote an accompanying analysis of the censorship, too, discussing how free speech for corporations, predators, and tyrants is shrilly upheld but the words of women and other marginalized people against the powerful are regularly shut down. When the Oxford Union bills itself as the “world’s most prestigious debating society” and the “last bastion of free speech” — then agrees to third party censorship of their own footage of a panel on whistleblowing — the society reveals its ultimate loyalty to the likes of Shedd making up the protection racket that today’s governance amounts to, where the arch-abusers run wild, occasionally promising security and belonging to the gullible who surrender their self and become obedient.

Learning of Marsh defeating Shedd, and Shedd’s subsequent censorship demand, I decided to cover the story and bought phone numbers for the his homes so I could ask him for comment. Through public records sites, personally identifiable information of just about anyone in the United States, king or streetsweeper, is available online legally in exchange for lucre. I politely called the Shedd-associated numbers, which did not include the one he texted me from. His wife — I think that’s who answered — came to the phone, but didn’t put him on the line. “Stop with the harassing phone calls!” she said, though I’d been well mannered, and though her husband had been a senior manager at a notorious worldwide purveyor of waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation — you know, harassing people, to say the least.

Politely seeking comment is harassment? They clearly have an outsize sense of persecution. I simply wanted to ask him straightforward questions such as Mr Shedd, should I describe you in my article as petulant? Or do you prefer petty? How about sore loser? Anyway, my calls to his homes were the only contact I’ve ever had with Clan Shedd, and since I didn’t get ahold of the man himself, I’d never had contact with him until his weird SMS. It’s a routine thing: journalist writing article requests comment; doesn’t hear back. But more than four years later, a sudden text?

To finish up the backstory, note that while the Oxford Union student newspaper mentioned the controversy in 2018, and so did the World Socialist Web Site that same year (one; two; three; four), nobody else — besides me (with my in-depth reporting), Marsh, and social media supporters — has uttered a peep. Even Ewen MacAskill, the third panelist, has said nothing from his perch on good terms with the highly influential Guardian newspaper. Likely that’s because in the aftermath of the censorship, the Oxford Union gave MacAskill a paid lecture series to talk to audiences about, you guessed it, whistleblowing. You see, experts on whistleblowing don’t talk about censorship they know of. They keep quiet like good puppies awaiting treats. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Now fast-forward to this summer, what triggered Shedd to contact me out of the blue.

Why now?

In the time frame of Shedd’s message, two things were occuring that might have prompted him to send me his strange little note.

One: Unbeknownst to me until late August, the Oxford Union in July asked Marsh to give a solo talk, something she wrote about today on her Patreon in a public post. She asked if they’d post the panel video — with Shedd blurred and muted if necessary, something they’ve done before when an individual didn’t want her performance published. In response, the Union ghosted Marsh. Presumably the debating society, following up on her question, asked Shedd if he’d change his mind, and the hierarch must have said No. And had nothing better to do than text a freelance journalist deceptively — petty and petulant and a sore loser — worrying about how all this is going to reflect on his legacy. Silverbacks like Shedd love legacy: parades, presidental libraries, pyramids. Retired and aging, he must fear the facts around February 27, 2018 will correctly tarnish his status in history. Books and articles are routinely published that trumpet Shedd (and separately, the Oxford Union), so he’s accustomed to accolades, not dissent.

The other: On an ongoing basis I have for years submitted pieces to mainstream and alternative media sites that either focus on, or include, Shedd’s censorship. Revelation of the facts in a large venue would greatly help impute guilt to Shedd in the public record so he can accordingly be shunned and feel shame, unless of course his emotional processing is atrophied, which it probably is from aiding in the command of the CIA. That organization has a long history of propagandistic manipulations of the media. See for instance Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein’s 1977 Rolling Stone deep dive on the topic addressing cover-ups of how the United States news media “worked hand in glove with the Central Intelligence Agency.” All that said — to indicate the water I’m swimming in — I have no evidence, nor even intuition, that anything illicit has happened with my freelancing, but it’s within the realm of possibility somebody at such a venue told somebody who told somebody who told somebody a freelancer named Doug is still working on winning amplification for this story, and it reached Shedd’s ears.

With the 2018 and 2022 contexts established, let’s scrutinize the spy’s missive.

Scaredy cat’s sneak attack

Good morning Ed. This is David Shedd writing from our new place in south Florida in response to your wonderful update letter. Before writing more, I want to make sure that you get this note and the text works. Warm regards, David

The message arrived at 5:20 a.m. Pacific time (I’m in Seattle). Assuming he was actually in Florida, that would be 8:20 a.m. Eastern. Pretty early to shoot off a mysterious communiqué — maybe he was in a bad mood, rising on the wrong side of the bed after earlier listening to the Oxford Union ask his permission to publish the video. Since he apparently controls them now and apparently told them No way.

I have no idea who Ed is, if anyone. In December 2020, Shedd authored an op-ed titled “Edward Snowden Should Not Get A Pardon Under Any Circumstances,” so I don’t think Shedd means him.

As stated above, I’d never before seen this (703) 408-2506 number, but it’s a northeastern Virginia area code where the CIA is located some ten miles from D.C. And my trusty public records services confirmed it belongs to David R. Shedd. Now I have a convenient number to call him at in case I need to request comments again. And so do you.

Regarding Shedd obtaining my phone number, maybe he paid for public records too, maybe he successfully stored my digits for over four years and put in the effort to move them to his (703) 408-2506 device, or maybe, as I documented the Austin-based private spy firm Stratfor assisting with in an unrelated but similar matter, he called a friend with access to surveillance databases and got it that way, saved himself a few bucks. He spearheaded the 2008 revisions to Executive Order 12333, which outlines when and how federal intelligence agencies may spy, so I’m sure he knows multiple ways to grab someone’s digits.

Here’s the big question. Why the deception gambit? The message asks the recipient to respond to confirm the connection is good. Why not just address me as Douglas and say … what exactly? Stop talking about me getting whopped in that debate?

Surely after more than four years, it was no mere pocket-dial or oopsident. If you’ve spent time reading leaked cables between government agents and the like, you know they pick words carefully and stamp security classifications on their papers and all that jazz. Somebody in the spy-versus-spy, backstabber-versus-backstabber world of meetings in the White House and the intelligence agencies is probably going to take his communications pretty seriously especially in light of Marsh concurrently asking the Oxford Union to release the recording.

To understand this better, let’s turn to the spy glossary created by that Austin firm Stratfor, sometimes called a “shadow CIA,” staffed with former military, former intelligence agency spooks, and an assistant to corporations in defending against activists. They define disinformation in part as “A plausible story designed to confuse the other side or to create an uncomfortable political situation.” Pinging the system means in part “Emitting information that is designed to be intercepted by the other side. Usual purpose: figure out their response patterns. Other uses, confusing the other side.” In short, subterfuge is a way of life for these people, including propaganda and manipulation of media like freelance journalists. They’re not serving the public honestly; they’re serving the shareholders and themselves; so why expect a message from a straight shooter?

My guess is Shedd, too timid to use his own name, was trying to bait me into responding, and/or stress me out: I’m watching. CIA is watching. But if you ask them for comment, they’ll just say I must have dialed the wrong number. Hahaha!

Since vanishingly few have ever published about the whistleblowing panel censorship, you have to wonder who else besides the Oxford Union Shedd is intimidating. He’s not stopping me.

David Shedd keeps losing

Such childish antics are among the activities of egregious human rights-violating hierarchs — when they’re not losing debates. Because on their side, they don’t have the truth. He prefers propaganda and fears the facts.

If Shedd’s goal was to scare me, he failed. Fragile Shedd lost again. Whatever the CIA (or Stratfor) may say, protection rackets for the highest bidders, as Marsh pointed out on the panel, aren’t security. As she said, “security is strong involved and supportive communities networked with other communities.” When I moved to Seattle in 2016, I began participating with local chapters of the Hearing Voices Network and Food Not Bombs. These egalitarian movements — and more associations with genuine activists — have afforded me close friends who, unlike many among the civilian/loyalist population, understand my work and show up to support me regularly or when something spooky happens like Shedd’s text. Protective, interlocking horizontal networks turned Shedd’s grenade into a grape bouncing off me harmlessly.

I think, somehow, one day, the whistleblowing video will be released. And then Shedd will have an opportunity to realize he’s not entitled to exceptional treatment. It’s not just his lifelong subterfuge that he tried to deploy on me. I think he’s also trying to fool himself. The longer the footage stays secret, the more easily he — and the public — can follow the head-in-sand, pro-impunity bipartisan philosophy of “look forward, not back” to avoid facing the truths Marsh (and others) have brought forward about our real legacy of torture, governance protection rackets, and so many more injustices. And the more petty and petulant Shedd’s sore loser legacy becomes.

This blog post, Why’s the CIA’s David Shedd texting me out of the blue?, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2022/09/01/why-cia-david-shedd-messaging-me/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

There’s more to this than meets the eye On August 3, I woke to see on my smartphone a text from David Shedd, a retired career intelligence officer who started...

Note: In 2021, I wrote a new blog post every weekend or so. I skipped Week 51 for various reasons. But here’s the final entry for this year, number 52!

In 2021, I blogged for an entire year consistently for the first time in my life. I wrote a new entry each and every weekend, pretty much. The effort totaled 42 posts.

This post describes what I learned from the experience as well as my writing plans for 2022. Then in closing, a list of all 42 posts from 2021 with their titles and hyperlinks; the ones I recommend most are in bold.

What I learned from a year of blogging

Before 2021, I wrote blog posts often, but I was either rusty (years back) or simply hadn’t yet managed to pull off a full year of nonfiction blogging (2020). That’s now changed with my completed year of blogging in 2021.

My blog entries this year have usually been about matters of social significance … except in many ways, I wrote them for me, primarily to improve my blogging skills and consistency. Putting together an entry remains a lot of underpaid/unpaid work—often a single post, when all is said and done, eats up an entire weekend—but it no longer feels particularly overwhelming. Nowadays I’m confident I can bust out such a blog post easily. Might feel sleep deprived and a bit out-of-body after making phone calls and staring at PDF details for ten hours straight, but such mild nuisances are at this point mere matters of routine.

Regarding writing craft. Readers have told me they don’t have much time to read my posts, what with crumbs to clean and kids to feed. They’ve asked for shorter posts. And I have been shifting toward providing shorter entries. Plus, I usually now include reader-friendly subheads and try to stick to a single point or two, or at least mark where my train of thought diverts to a side topic. That wasn’t the case when I began in January, but now it thankfully is.

Another big lesson I learned was how important the under-the-hood elements of a blog are. For example, this year, for the first time in half a decade, I updated the blogroll (list of links on the right side). To oversimplify, online writers shifted from the blogosphere to social media half a decade or more ago, but now we seem to be returning, at least a very little, to individual URLs, so it was time to spiff mine up. I added, across my website (here and here specifically), images of publicity I’ve received over a decade-plus from various venues. I scrutinized my whole website to upgrade hyperlinks from HTTP to HTTPS. I improved the leave-a-comment area to hopefully make it more enticing for readers to use. For instance, it now optionally sends you a notification email after I approve your comment following its initial hold in the moderation queue. All that stuff took not exactly gigantic, but still significant, amounts of time.

Many of my posts include original research, the result of excitedly engaging sheer curiosity. While writing about the Belarusian dictatorship declaring opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya a terrorist, to take one example of dozens, I found the Belarusian KGB’s online Excel spreadsheet (since taken down) where you could see her designation on Sheet 1, Row 730. It’s my hope that readers might share my curiosity and click through to see such a crazy spreadsheet, and thereby become more invested in themselves (their own curiosity, passion, etc.) as well as in the Belarusian pro-democracy resistance that involves the United States too. Hopefully such research—even if some items, like the online KGB spreadsheet, aren’t exactly revelations—makes my posts unique in a field where journalistic competitors often offer nothing more than speculation. I remembered what I already knew from a decade ago, my days of pouring through Stratfor emails, that it takes quite a lot of time to conduct such research and fit it into a post, especially since researchers never know ahead of time for sure what they will or won’t find.

I don’t like the dumbed-down approach, even if it would generate dolla dolla bill. Yet I’m having to slowly drag myself in that direction, kicking and screaming, since this blog made, in 2021, less than $20 USD in donations. Bear with me for a moment; I’m not going to complain, just point out some facts that impact whether this blog will continue, not in 2022, but in 2023. Too often, audiences haven’t deigned to consider any story wherein they themselves might need to change, including when it comes to forking over cash; since in the blog relationship, audiences monopolize the power of the purse, that leaves us with a story about how independent content creators should alone bear the burden of changing. Have you tried Patreon? Are you on Medium? I’ve heard people are having success on Substack, why aren’t you there yet? When I do comply with those requests, audiences typically move the goalposts, mentioning yet another site they expect me to add a profile to instead of opening their wallets. In the final analysis, just as audiences are slow to change from banal complicity with oligarchs to amazing resistance against them, so they’re likewise slow to warm up to the idea that they could deliver donations instead of unsolicited advice about how I might could milk donations out of some other third party. Well, authors have been complaining, er not complaining, about this for only hundreds of years. And besides, blogging, even unpaid, is a much better way to spend time than being forced to work in a mine or not having any freedom of expression. It’s just, when I leave the United States for the Netherlands in mid- to late 2022 if they approve my business plan (under the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty), there’s every reason to think I just might have to quit blogging in 2023 due to lack of income from it.

I’ve ghostwritten oodles of content marketing pieces in the past decade and I’ve recently begun a highly regarded content marketing certification course—but I hope not to revamp my blog in that style. Thankfully, even putting out verbose, meandering posts routinely led to or at least likely facilitated additional opportunities for me this year, including giving a talk at a college hacker club and a quite sizable, important venue commissioning a nonfiction essay from me for 2022. And I’m not much for another option sometimes seen: the telegraphic, truncated style of listing seemingly endless human rights violations. I hope some readers find the variety of subject matters, quotations, history, literature, etc., threaded together in my posts a valuable and somewhat unique sales point rather than an erroneous lack of message discipline.

Speaking of impact, that was the best thing about this year of blogging. In a handful of instances, individuals contacted me, perhaps people I hadn’t heard from in a long time, asking for more information about something in one of my posts. Because of a June entry, for example, pharmaceutical consumers who’d never heard of how and why to use compounding pharmacies until my writings are now getting their pills in custom dosages, whereas they were previously limited to the manufacturers’ increments due to fog of war, lack of knowledge. When I wrote about the Belarusian KGB’s murder of Andrei Zeltser, an employee of a Pennsylvania-based IT firm who like that company opposed the Lukashenko dictatorship, I wrote about how his wife Maryja Uspenskaya, the sole witness to his shoot-out death—about which the regime created propaganda footage that spread around the world—was placed in a psychiatric hospital, with, worryingly, no info available in English about her whereabouts or well-being for more than a month. I mentioned how Uspenskaya had been left off lists of Belarusian political prisoners. The day after my entry, the opposition leader herself tweeted to recognize Maryja Uspenskaya as a political prisoner. (Progress on her case still needs to be made.) The point of these examples is not to humble-brag but to show that, instead of centering a career/life on complying with corporate publishers, DIY bloggers can have impact, so why not try it yourself? And definitely, much thanks to everyone who’s been reading this blog, commenting, contacting me, sharing the entries, critiquing, donating, and more. That’s what separates a blog from a diary.

My writing plans for 2022

There’s more I need to do for my website on the technical side of things. In terms of design, readers understandably want something formatted well on their phones and tablets. I could make improvements there. I need to install and regularly use better analytics so I can observe factually what’s happening with reader traffic, not just imagine things in my needy head. Probably I should provide chatty video with screensharing graphics of open records requests and the like; in 2021, I did start a youtube channel.

In 2022, I’ll aim to post on the same day—maybe even at the same time—every week, as that consistency would probably increase audience loyalty and prevent audience attrition. For the United States, Sunday mornings would likely be best, meaning I could write and line everything up on Saturday, then do a final revision in the morning after a night of sleeping on the prose, then click publish and shoot off the teed-up social media posts.

In 2021, I took off several weekends—ten, to be exact—but some additional weeks I took halfway off, so to speak, putting up short “placeholder” posts instead of leaving the blog blank of new entries. In 2022, I want to hit all 52 Sundays, even if some entries will be very short. That consistency will let you know you can tune in at the same bat time, same bat channel, every single weekend.

I’ll make my final decisions on these matters in the next workweek, but in short, douglaslucas.com/blog will continue more or less as is for 2022, just with the above changes in the pipeline. I’ll even keep the same Note: In 202x… intro, except modified for 2022!

My big news for 2022, however, is that I’ll start writing and self-publishing new flash fiction! That means each item will be 1000 words or less. My web hosting service told me DouglasLucas.com can have more than one WordPress blog installation. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to say hello and leave comments at a new subfolder of this site, probably douglaslucas.com/fiction/2022, which doesn’t exist just yet. At first—in January 2022 and perhaps in February 2022—I’ll simply make available two of my already completed “trunk” stories (old stories) that haven’t ever been published, self- or otherwise. I’ll get the new fiction blog configured and maybe write up some of my research into northeast Oregon and the year 2036, the setting of some of my forthcoming fiction. But the main focus will be new flash fiction pieces. They might or might not connect with my 2036 setting (still thinking that through).

The 2022 fiction blog will mainly be intended to do for my fiction-writing what my 2021 nonfiction blog did for my nonfiction-writing. Get me accustomed to quickly and consistently creating what one of my creative writer friends, Aelius Blythe, calls literary graffiti fiction. To that end, I’ll probably use plot formula, standard tropes, prefab characterizations (e.g., Star Trek characters as in fanfic), and so on. The 2022 fiction blog isn’t supposed to win any prizes; it’s supposed to be fun; it’s supposed to repair the rust on my fiction-writing gears. Though you can still comment, share, donate, etc. if you want! I’ll try to engage a visual artist(s) to sketch. Maybe each entry can have a single, quickly sketched image at the top.

And while the 2022 nonfiction blog (this one) will continue mostly in the same vein as in 2021, I hope to focus more on original investigative journalism work, although that might end up in other-published places since I have some sneaky biz ideas for commissions. Whether the original investigative journalism work is self-published here or other-published, some of my posts here, whatever the content, will remain defiantly noodly, philosophical, random, simply about the moments of our strangely global lives …

List of all 42 posts from 2021

Behold, listed below, all 42 of my 2021 blog posts. The 22 in bold are the entries I most recommend. And what’s this? Ahem, that’s my donation page! So that you and I and anyone else can continue enjoying this site without paywalls, without advertisements, without wrong walls ….

January 6: Running as exploration and adventure
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/06/running-exploration-adventure/

January 14: Check out SpookyConnections.com
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/14/check-out-spookyconnections/

January 23: Meet new president Joe Biden, part 1 of 2
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/23/meet-new-president-biden-1-of-2/

January 30: Gamestop & r/wallstreetbets: fairness just a starting point
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/01/30/gamestop-wallstreetbets-fairness-starting-point/

February 5: Photos from Snoqualmie Pass’s Gold Creek Pond trail
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/05/photos-snoqualmie-pass-gold-creek-pond-trail/

February 11: RIP Chick Corea, fusion jazz keyboardist
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/11/rip-chick-corea-fusion-jazz-keyboardist/

February 19: Review of the novel Shantaram
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/19/review-novel-shantaram/

February 2: Seattle graffiti about coronavirus
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/27/seattle-graffiti-about-coronavirus/

March 5: Vaccinated, first jab! Here’s how it went
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/05/vaccinated-first-jab/

March 13: Views of happiness: Journey versus destination, part one of two
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/13/happiness-views-journey-destination-1of2/

March 20: How I addressed a trauma anniversary that psychiatrists weren’t curious about
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/20/trauma-anniversary-curiosity/

March 26: The battleground of names
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/26/battleground-names/

April 3: Antipsychiatry playlist
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/04/03/antipsychiatry-playlist/

April 10: How and why to make a beet root smoothie
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/04/10/how-why-beet-root-smoothie/

April 17: Review of education books, part one of two
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/04/17/education-books-review-1of2/

May 1: Shucks, I missed entry 16
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/01/shucks-missed-entry16/

May 2: Postmortem on a specific failure to #AbolishICE … and a reboot?
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/02/postmortem-specific-failure-abolishice-reboot/

May 15: Here’s some math empowerment
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/15/shucks-missed-entry18-math-empowerment/

May 22: New, optional notifications for commenters … and Myanmar news blast
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/22/new-optional-notifications-commenters-also-burma/

May 29: More features for commenters; Colombia news blast
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/05/29/more-commenters-features-colombia-news/

June 5: Benefits of making a timeline, both personal and anti-corporate … plus global resistance news
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/05/benefits-making-timeline-personal-anticorporate-global-news/

June 13: FOIAs and the rest of life, now with executive function
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/13/foias-executive-function/

June 19: How and why to use compounding pharmacies, plus Belarus and Ethiopia news blasts
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/19/how-why-compounding-pharmacies/

June 26: Thoughts and photos re: NE Oregon, plus Belarus and US news blasts
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/26/thoughts-photos-neoregon-belarus-us-newsblasts/

July 2: Just two videos for fun this week: Star Trek and Jordan Reyne
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/02/two-forfun-videos-startrek-jordanreyne/

July 10: PNW heat dome, climate change media, and optimistic fiction, plus Myanmar and Brazil news blasts
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/10/heatdome-climatechange-media-optimistic-fiction-myanmar-brazil/

July 17: Summer 2021 thoughts from North Texas
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/17/north-texas-thoughts-summer-2021/

July 24: Revisiting the biggest Southern Magnolia in DFW; news blasts for Cuba and Texas
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/24/revisiting-biggest-southern-magnolia-dfw-cuba-texas/

July 31: COVID-19 update: masks, Delta mutation, evictions; news blasts: Haiti and United States
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/07/31/covid19-masks-delta-evictions-haiti-us/

August 6: Skills for falling asleep, 1 of 2; Haiti news blast
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/08/06/fall-asleep-skills1-news-haiti/

August 14: Skills for falling asleep, 2 of 2; news blasts for Haiti and Serbia
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/08/14/fall-asleep-skills2-haiti/

September 6: On leaving the United States
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/09/06/on-leaving-the-united-states/

September 13: Leaving the United States: more reasons why, and jumping the ECA, IELTS hurdles
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/09/13/leaving-unitedstates-reasons-jumping-eca-ielts-hurdles/

October 10: IELTS Enquiry on Results, Pfizer + blog updates, and news blasts for US, China, and the worldwide trade economy collapse/change … plus music and fiction!
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/10/ielts-enquiry-on-results-pfizer-blog-newsblasts-china/

October 18: Why are Southern Magnolia trees in Seattle?
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/18/why-southern-magnolia-trees-seattle/

October 24: Talk by me at Univ Washington club Wednesday; news blasts: France, Belarus, and JFK / United States
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/24/talk-batmanskitchen-france-belarus-jfk/

November 7: Reading ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’, a year and a half later
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/07/reading-catalyst-effect-covid19-year-half-later/

November 13: Quick, funny story about a phone scammer trying to get a Riseup email invite code from me
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/13/phone-scammer-riseup-email-invite-codes/

November 22: #PardonRealityWinner: Whistleblower moves to three years of supervised release on November 23, 2021
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/22/realitywinner-whistleblower-supervised-release-pardon/

November 27: #StandWithBelarus: Writing pro-democracy political prisoners for the international day of solidarity with the Belarusian opposition
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/27/writing-belarus-prisoners-international-solidarity-opposition/

December 12: Progress on #PardonRealityWinner and #FreeBelarus
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/12/pardonrealitywinner-freebelarus-progress/

December 19: Intellectual history for hacktivists: Video of my 27 Oct ’21 talk at University of Washington hacker club Batman’s Kitchen
https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/19/intellectualhistory-talk-uw-hacker-27oct2021/

This blog post, My 2021 year of blogging in review … and 2022 website plans!, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/31/2021-blogging-review-2022-website-plans/ You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I wrote a new blog post every weekend or so. I skipped Week 51 for various reasons. But here’s the final entry for this year, number 52!...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 50 of 52.

On October 27, I gave an in-person talk to the University of Washington computer security club Batman’s Kitchen. The presentation was simultaneously virtual over Zoom. I obtained the video file back a bit, but was busy substitute-teaching at the local youth jail for three weeks; that assignment completed Friday, I’m today making the video available, right above!

The title of the talk on the first slide, Hacktivism meets journalism (or something like that), is a little misleading. Because of time constraints—I created the presentation in a hurry, within something like a 48-hour period—the majority of the material I provide is actually intellectual history as it applies to people, especially young activists, interested in computer science, including but not limited to those going into the field as a profession.

Some helpful details. The footage is under two hours and fifteen minutes (since hundreds of years of philosophical history can’t particularly be conveyed in a quick monosyllabic bumper sticker slogan). The Questions & Answers section begins at 1:48:12. Download the .MP4 file or the powerpoint if you like. I’ve added this event to both the in the media page and the front page of this website.

In related news, I created a youtube channel finally, where this Zoom footage may be found. If 100 people subscribe to my nascent youtube channel, where I’ll use words like nascent without apology, I can customize my youtube URL. So whatever you do, don’t hit that like button, and definitely don’t smash subscribe, for we here all believe in reverse psychology.

Next talk, I’ll not waste time with cutesy images of cats and Castlevania—older generations in the United States want those things, but thankfully Gen Z doesn’t need them, I observed—and hopefully cut the metacognitive authorial intrusions that permeate my speech. Minor flaws aside, I hope people learn something from the video! Share as thou wilt.

Even more #PardonRealityWinner progress

Yesterday, I put into a USPS dropbox my snailmail letter to the federal Office of the Pardon Attorney, advocating for a pardon of Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner, whose story you can read about here (my article from her sentencing), here (my entries about her on this blog), or by following her mother Billie J. Winner-Davis on twitter.

Reality Winner and her whistleblowing to alert everyone regarding Russian military hackers executing, just days before the 2016 elections, cyberattacks against US voting infrastructure, remain of key importance.

Consider, for example, Friday’s Washington Post opinion piece authored by three retired Army generals expressing grave concern that, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, a politically divided US military will be vulnerable to foreign attacks and will see rogue units supporting a successful coup by Trump (or some other reactionary demagogue). “Not a single leader who inspired” the January 6 coup attempt “has been held to account,” they write correctly. While failing to address the country’s private spies and private militias such as those Blackwater members pardoned by Trump, the three retired generals urge convictions for the January 6 conspirators, mandatory civics reviews for Pentagon members (hey throw in some international law while at it!), and coup-based war games along with defensive intelligence work.

Without Air Force veteran Reality Winner, it’s quite possible—maybe even probable—that such a WaPo piece wouldn’t exist, since we’d be living in a universe where Trump would be perceived as a horrible but legitimate ongoing occupant of the White House, akin to how many viewed George W. Bush while he was in office (prior to that war criminal’s latest rehabilitation as an affable, Michelle Obama-hugging grampa).

(Side note: The opinion piece also states: “Imagine competing commanders in chief […] Biden giving orders, versus Trump […] issuing orders as the head of a shadow government.” Well, imagine as well the public heading yet another shadow government that, instead of issuing orders much, horizontally helps one another in everyday ways as we do during natural disasters, another example of regular government breaking down. Imagine that shadow-government-of-the-public recognizing its own power and expanding it. That would be genuine self-governance.)

Achieving a pardon for Reality Winner would send a strong signal domestically and internationally that the United States refuses Trump/Putin-style autocracy. The Office of the Pardon Attorney does give advice to the president regarding pardons in some cases (I don’t yet know the details of that). Plus, whatever intern opens the envelope might start an interesting water cooler discussion, you know? And such things matter.

I based the letter on the one I sent last week (PDF) to Joe Biden; I improved the text overall, too. If you want to use my letter as a basis for your letter to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, clicky-click for a PDF or clicky-click the below embed to read it. You can always share your own beseeching of the Office in the comments below or online elsewhere. Consider using the #PardonRealityWinner hashtag.

Remember, smugly explaining to each other that wisdom means defeatism is out, whereas taking specific, real life, step by step, existent, active-y action yourself to achieve huge prosocial goals is in. If you prefer to be out, well, then just psychology reverse. :)

This blog post, Intellectual history for hacktivists: Video of my 27 Oct ’21 talk at University of Washington hacker club Batman’s Kitchen, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/12/19/intellectualhistory-talk-uw-hacker-27oct2021/ You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 50 of 52. On October 27, I gave an in-person talk to the University...