Entries Tagged 'UnitedStates' ↓

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 1984. Requests from presidents from both major parties following 1984 have been roundly rejected by Congress over and over.

Republicans in the House are now eager to minimize safeguards on reorganization authority when it comes to extending it to Trump for a different breed of “reorganizations” of the federal government they hope for. Their proposed bill out of committee, H.R. 1295, as I understand it, would lower—from a 2/3 majority in the Senate to simple majorities in both chambers—the threshold of Congressional votes on the joint resolutions required to bless any reorganizations plan proposed by the Trump2 administration to delete a federal department or agency. In other words, Congress would be sidelining itself for the benefit of the Oval Office (including Musk). Further, and again on my inexpert reading, H.R. 1295 would grant Trump2 the authority to propose (for the blessing of simple Congressional majorities) the deletion of independent regulatory 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...

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: In 2022, I’m once again writing 52 blog entries, posted every Sunday. Today: Post 2 of 52. Flash fiction by me will soon arrive weekly too, by February, with these regular nonfiction blog posts continuing.

Note: The photos in this entry are from this seven-tweet thread by NPR journalist Libby Denkmann who attended a student-led protest outside Seattle Public Schools headquarters on Thursday.

For one or more days this past workweek, according to data firm Burbio (accessed today), 6,003 public schools in the United States have been actively disrupted, defined as campuses not offering in-person learning. The country has around 130,000 public K-12s, but the Burbio statistic is still shocking. On Thursday, Seattle Public Schools said: “Due to very high absentee and quarantine rates, several Seattle Public Schools have either transitioned to remote learning or have been closed.”

On Friday, the Washington Post reported on the sickout movement: schoolkids countrywide, sparked by the increasing number of illnesses and deaths from the current Omicron mutation wave, are refusing to attend compulsory face-to-face classes unless adequate COVID safeguards are put into place. Many educators are sicking out as well; other industries are seeing their own sickouts, the term there referring to employees not showing up due to the ‘rona (current infection or risk thereof) and perhaps with r/antiwork-style resisistance thrown in too.

The Omicron wave has surrounded my own life. Here in the Emerald City, I’ve watched a friend suffer his own breakthrough illness from the latest variant in the last month; I’ve seen multiple businesses temporarily closing due to staffing shortages. (And during Spring 2021, a brave student in a math class I taught informed us she’d contracted a pre-Omicron version of novel coronavirus, a scary ordeal for her and the rest of us.)

U.S. authorities have provided the public with mere bargain bin quasi-solutions

Many of the public health measures in the United States are only half functional, akin to leftovers from the discount pile. School district spokespeople talk up ventilation and (years back) handwashing, but anyone who has entered campuses in poor neighborhoods knows about unopenable windows and empty soap dispensers. Meanwhile, The Center for Covid Control—accused profiteers running pop-up testing sites from coast to coast—has been reported, by health departments and city governments and consumers and journalists and others, to the Washington state attorney general, the attorney general in Florida, and attorney generals elsewhere for fraud, notably sending people invented test results while they were still waiting in line to produce samples. And the three vaccines offered in the U.S. offer only some protection (I received three doses of Pfizer), decreasingly so as mutations erupt continually, as anyone who has endured, or received a text message about, a breakthrough case realizes.

For USians, better public health measures found around the world feel shrouded in a fog of war. The multiple other vaccines planetwide, let alone the laws/pacts controlling who can ship them internationally, aren’t on the radar of the average stressed person trying to get by. Even the University of Washington nanoparticle vaccine (study in Cell), which should be making headlines regularly and prompting inquisitive auditing from investigative journalists, is largely unknown. That one, presently in stage three trials, aims to inoculate against SARS, MERS, SARS-CoV-2, and every other present or future coronavirus (and variant thereof) in the beta segment. (Orthocoronavirinae, to which the popular term ‘coronavirus’ typically refers, has 45 virii divided into four genera, one of which, and nowadays the most dangerous to humans of which, is the beta segment containing 14 of the 45 species.)

To date, official statistics suggest 5.5 million have died from COVID so far worldwide, not to mention long-haul and other medical problems confronting survivors.

Scientific integrity attacked

Who has the time and freedom to educate themselves on the COVID trainwreck such that herd mentality may be minimized? Very few have hours and hours available to conduct independent (and thus usually unpaid or underpaid) autodidactic research on an unfamiliar issue to an understanding approaching intermediate level or above. That leaves many to affiliate with a meme-simplified, speculation-heavy side such as right or left, vaxx or antivaxx, probably partly in hopes of cliquing up with others for sheer survival rather than mastering a topic in accordance with impersonal logic. There are professionals who in theory are paid to address crises expertly, but they succumb to untruth too.

Such politicization is evidenced, for example, in the additional information, released Tuesday, about emails involving chief White House medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci. You might recall that Fauci emails from the initial months of the pandemic were published in June 2021 in redacted form by Buzzfeed News (3234 pages of emails) and the Washington Post (866 pages of emails). Republicans on the federal House Committee on Oversight and Reform saw unredacted versions made available in camera by the Department of Health and Human Services and, while they couldn’t make copies, they were allowed to take notes on them, a task I assume done by skilled transcriber underlings.

The additional information newly revealed includes records related to a February 1, 2020 phone conference between Dr Fauci, his then-boss Francis Collins, and several of the world’s leading virologists.

It shows some of the world-renowned scientists believed, at the time, that it was likely the novel coronavirus was human-altered and that it may somehow have escaped a Wuhan lab. Virologist Robert Garry, for instance, wrote that he was unconvinced the pathogen evolved naturally. Evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambau wrote: “The biggest hinderance at the moment (for this and more generally) is the lack of data and information […] I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan.” There are no certain answers yet; just sufficient smoke to point to a serious fire of some sort.

Definitely the National Institutes of Health officials wanted an ass-pull cover-up for political reasons. Garry told The Intercept that after the call, he was advised not to “mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists.” Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier wrote in one email: “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular” (see also; see especially). Fauci’s boss Francis Collins advised the virologists to shut down talk of unnatural evolution or a lab leak—to protect “international harmony.”

By March 2020, Garry had changed his mind based on scientific evidence, coming to believe instead that SARS-CoV-2 likely developed without human intervention, but the recently exposed NIH officials’ insistences a month prior don’t exactly inspire trust in the intelligentsia, now do they.

Tuesday’s news connects with ongoing reporting from Vanity Fair about NYC-based EcoHealth Alliance and its pre-pandemic interest in working with Wuhan virologists (all institutions in China are mixed up with the Chinese Communist Party). In October 2021, the magazine reported the National Institutes of Health belatedly acknowledged EcoHealth Alliance enhanced the capacity of coronavirus to infect humans to such an extreme that the nonprofit had violated its own grant conditions by not reporting the danger they’d created. The same Vanity Fair piece discusses the grant proposal EcoHealth Alliance sent to the Pentagon’s research arm DARPA in 2018, recommending a partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to construct SARS-related coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens.

The connection between those reports and last week’s? Virologists on the February 2020 conference call expressed startlement at an unusual segment of the novel coronavirus’s genetic code: a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. A month later, in Nature Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal that’s part of the prestigious Nature Publishing Group portfolio, scientists on the conference call, including Garry, published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” in which they downgrade February 2020 suspicions that novel coronavirus was likely to have been lab-altered to possible but unlikely. I’m told that, in oversimplified terms, such virology research essentially entails comparing protein shapes of various virii strains to one another statistically to assess likelihoods of how precisely the pathogens may have changed or evolved over time.

Pointing to the Proximal Origin study, Garry corresponded with The Intercept about its report on this past workweek’s newest puzzle piece to say the March 2020 study reflects his revised view. In any case, the latest information involving the February 2020 conference call is a story of top virologists told to downplay their then-suspicions not for scientific reasons, but for political ones. That’s obviously bad for scientific integrity. And the March 2020 paper doesn’t rule out that SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through artifical techniques.

Shall we speculate about the origins of COVID-19? One possibility is that scientists pursued making coronavirii far more dangerous for whatever good or bad reasons, a practice controversial among scientists, and then SARS-CoV-2, perhaps enhanced in its danger to humans, slipped out of a Wuhan lab accidentally. Then maybe people associated with the research panicked, because money was being misused, and anything they might try to say to explain themselves would just sound nefarious. There’s no smoking gun; at minimum, it’s yet another example of opaque or mostly opaque systems impairing science and public health.

And we can all imagine less charitable possibilities.

Now what?

Weakening scientific integrity (requested cover-up) and radical science (transparency, intellectual independence) predictably worsens large-scale public health problems. That’s very evident in the somewhat separate but still COVID19-related case of Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Dr Rick Bright, if you study the formal complaint he filed in May 2020 (exhibits; some exhibits missing).

Politicizing science, as NIH brass sought in February 2020, certainly doesn’t help reveal the origins of the pandemic, one of the more recent iterations of the powerful’s longstanding and ongoing genocide of global humanity, particularly those disabled or dispossessed. Authoritarians don’t need to put soldiers on the streets (though they do that as well) to terrify or decrease populations when they can just ignore their public health needs from yachts.

Thankfully, the pandemic’s origins don’t need to be completely understood for clear-eyed students to fight for their right not to inhale this thing, something of extra importance for people blocked from nutritious food, aerobic exercise, or other boons strengthening respiratory and immune systems, as well as blocked from free quality masks, infection testing that actually works, and the legal entitlement (for those with disabilities, which is ultimately everyone if you think about it) to free appropriate public education that should include transparency for all of us to learn exactly what the powerful—both government and corporate actors—are doing to us.

Some but not enough educators have been supportive of the schoolkids, but will more adults support them as is their grown-up responsibility, and if so, how? I’ll write about that next weekend.

After all, why should children have to be the ones to do this?

This blog post, How attacks on scientific integrity necessitated countrywide school sickouts, 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/2022/01/16/how-surrender-of-scientific-integrity-necessitated-countrywide-school-sickouts/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning 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. Also, gimme all your money!

Note: In 2022, I’m once again writing 52 blog entries, posted every Sunday. Today: Post 2 of 52. Flash fiction by me will soon arrive weekly too, by February, with...

Note: In 2022, I’m once again writing 52 blog entries, posted every Sunday. Flash fiction by me will soon arrive weekly too, by February, after I finish figuring out the tech details of where precisely on this website I might place it so you can conveniently leave comments.

Last April, I wrote about how and why to make beet root smoothies, with such costly ingredients that even Michael Laufer, the (afaik) badass and classy wine connoisseur anarchist who teaches people to make their own s̶m̶o̶o̶t̶h̶i̶e̶s̶ pharmaceuticals, might deign to have a sip.

In that post, I explained techniques to save money, such as cold-calling companies and asking for a discount. That, in my own experience, can yield exasperated annoyance from customer service staff at one extreme, and at the opposite extreme, third-off coupon codes good forever. Another great idea is to join (or start!) your local Food Not Bombs chapter, where long-term volunteers frequently have brilliant ideas for grabbing free grub, among them identifying which restaurants share surplus food, locating which dumpsters offer scavenging divers the best cuisine, and more.

Today I’d like to tell you about this one time I got something for zero bucks from a corporation. Except it ain’t fancy feast.

Time for the trash can

The Internet of Things is the market segment for turning everyday consumer objects into online gizmos. If you fondly sing the praises of CRT televisions—no, not Critical Race Theory TVs, I mean Cathode Ray Tube ones—because they work unfailingly for half a century, and you correctly cast insults down upon giant flat-screen televisions that cost thousands but don’t work since they suddenly require downloading a patch from Samsung or some other corp, then you too know the pitfalls of the Internet of Shit.

Gizmo-ification of everything even extends to trash cans. Of course, finding a trash can for your kitchen at the thrift store is the best! But at embarrassing moments, I’ve dragged myself into awful domestic big box stores such as Bed Bath and Beyond (beyond … where?). Those shameful moments when I’ve been absolutely convinced I immediately need a towel of a certain color or some stupidity like that. Besides punishing shoppers with in-store video advertising so loud you can hear it clear across the building, a nightmare retailer of this type will showcase for you the very latest in consumerist horror.

Yes, I mean today’s trash cans, the Internet-equipped ones you can talk to.

Let’s get something straight. Such technology can be important for people with disabilities and for other situations that may not leap to the minds of the privileged. I’m all for such innovations and would love to hear about them in the comments. Lemme know if I’m wrong, but I somehow doubt the trash cans at Bed Bath and Beyoncé are the ideal options for such scenarios. And yeah, maybe a USian with a disability—like, say, infatuation—is driven to go to Bed Bath and BayBey because the legit need to impress a love interest has somehow got twisted into the anxiety-laden, bonkers idea that it all hinges on having that towel of the exact right color. We’ve all been there, mutatis mutandis, right?

That said, before discussing saving money on a trash can, let’s by all means inspect a newfangled, expensive trash can that talks.

Oh Goddess, please (don’t ever) trash me

Witness, if you will, the 58 liter, dual compartment, voice-activated, motion-capable, stainless steel—excuse me, make that brushed stainless steel—trash can a California-based company lovingly crafted just for o̶u̶r̶ ̶w̶a̶l̶l̶e̶t̶s̶ us.

Our world-class instance of talking trash above has on Amazon 5 stars after more than 10,000 reviews, which, the way things are headed, I may be adding to soon enough myself as a drunk but giggling ghostwriter. For the uninitiated, that’s writing fake reviews for dough, Mac. Gotta fund unpaid/underpaid human rights investigative journalism and random musings somehow, for example, with donations from people who have $200 trash cans and a sense of humor.

A three-star Amazon review by the mononymous, TP-astute Paul sounds, to be conciliatory, fair and balanced:

I love everything but the fact that you can not turn off the voice sensor. I play music in the background all day. The can open when it hears something close to “open can” in the music. And it happens alot. It will wear out real fast. There is no switch to turn off the voice sensor and keep the motion senor on. I can not find a microphone hole to plug it with tissue paper as a hack to fix the issue.

The $200 price tag does not include tax, nor your crucial rush-speed shipping and handling. And don’t forget the recurring expense of the bespoke liners—admittedly featuring swank double-seam construction and an even swankier perfect fit, to be sure—for which you’re gonna need to liquidate your entire cryptocoin portfolio.

By the way, California’s top-tier trash can company is called: simplehuman.

News you can use: today’s token-saving tip

As the renowned economist Snoop Dogg suggested implicitly in his scholarly, NSFW treatise Drop It Like It’s Hot—ticking my tongue like said rapper when that song came out in 2004, I practiced its beat on my shower wall for cumulative hours and hours, not knowing myself to someday become an aspiring if reluctant ace businessman aiming for European citizenship plus frugal trash cans—a scientific study (reportedly) shows handling cash is like snorting coke, and probably only partly because many dolla dolla bills are themselves contaminated with traces of cocaine. Illustrating unSnoopy high diction, the scientists of the latter link write dryly:

The contamination may occur through direct contact during drug trafficking with the same people handling the cocaine powder and the money; or rolling up the banknote for sniffing the powder through the tube formed.

[link added, obviously]

If subject matter experts reading this know the (likely news-savvy) researchers in question are lacking in scientific integrity and are as desperate for clicks as DJ Snoopadelic (and freelance bloggers), then please, correct me in the comments. Hiphop historians, I admit, I’m curious about The Snoopzilla’s personal trash can …

Anyhow, another way to ask corporations for freebies is to amuse them.

For example, this past week, akin to fond memories of Julia Child a century ago corresponding with her faraway penpal via slow snailmail across the Atlantic, I corresponded, via chat with support agent, with some outsource contractor as bored as I was. I needed to know if my auto insurance provided roadside assistance at no or minimal additional charge. I forget how it started, but she typed a lol; I sent a <3. I asked if her roadside assistance coverage included all of North America. “Yes, it covers the United States,” she said, PR-perfect. Hmm, I said, how about Mars? “That would cost millions to get your car up there,” she said, “and it would cost us millions to get our tow truck up there, so no :)” How about Jupiter, I inquired. She and I left it there—sorry, no wedding to invite you to—out of my perhaps overly cautious reticence, not wanting to creep out a random employee accidentally, though in my experience, internet customer service agents appreciate this sort of thing as an escape from raging Karens. And, to the point, they’ll not infrequently become far more helpful and suddenly drop, as though its temperature has been heated, a discount code. (Don’t try this, incels; learn how to take a shower first, then baby-steps from there.)

In terms of trash cans, not too long after the latest pandemic hit Seattle, I tripped over my trash can lid—which was on the floor from, essentially, pandemic stress incl. my unpaid/underpaid researching of the good DHHS whistleblower Dr Rick Bright (where the rest of those exhibits, Doc? Beware testing the patience of this otherwise supportive-of-you indie journalist, not to mention bewaring the possibility of a forthcoming appeal, after which comes a lawsuit in a summons carriage, where my pro bono lawyers at?). The lid broke. I despaired of buying or even finding another such flawless trash can. That beaut was dirt cheap, yet supplied all my funky kitchen needs. It didn’t have WiFi. And best of all, I didn’t need to talk to it, and it didn’t try to talk to me.

Thus, hoping for a free lid, I typed a politely obsequious message into the website of the Something Corporation, clicked submit, and promptly forgot about it. I don’t want to name the corp, lest I be accused of doing product placement—this is my real name byline website, where I aim to give you the truth, not my ghostwriting hack jobs, which hey, if you want those, email me at dal@riseup.net, yo! And let’s face it, I don’t think the Something Corporation wants to be on my blog, either, where I recommend dat research shizzle showing which corporate actors are connected to which others, etc. As for simplehuman, fuck them.

Here’s a slightly redacted version of what I sent on an April 2020 Friday:

Dear [Something Corp],

About 2-3 months ago, I bought my black [Something] trash can #xxxx at a small hardware store here in Seattle. I can try to find the receipt if you need it. I’ve been really excited about your product because not only did I not want a flimsy cheap trash can, I also didn’t want some ridiculously expensive voice-activated trash can either. I do not need to talk with my trash can! Yours is Just Right and fits my kitchen perfectly.

However, yesterday, due to covid19 stress my kitchen was a mess with random stuff lying all over the tiled floor, including the black lid to your #xxxx black trash can (don’t ask). Then I, while cooking, tripped and fell, like something out of slapstick, sending olive oil flying everywhere and my foot landing on your trash can lid, breaking it, including cracking pieces and everything. Sad face!

So I’m wondering if you could sell me a black #xxxx trash can lid independently of the lower section of the trash can. I took 3 quick pictures and stuck them on my website to show you what I mean, see links below. 1 of 3 shows the #xxxx black lower trash can body, which is still standing completely fine where it should be, just now sadly bereft of a lid. 2 of 3 shows the broken lid on the floor, complete with olive oil goo all over it. 3 of 3 shows the impressive damage I managed to do while falling, breaking off that black piece of the lid.

1 of 3: [deleted]

2 of 3: [deleted]

3 of 3: [deleted]

[…]

Soooooooooo how much would you charge me for just the black lid thingie to go on top of my black #xxxx, to replace my broken lid? How would payment be processed and so on?

Thank you very much,

Imagine my grateful surprise when on the following Monday I received a response. Behind the 1950s corporate mask of a writing style, you can almost see the employee (not a contractor, judging by his email addy) laughing, or at least smiling, as he beneficently elects to exercise mercy on behalf of the nonhuman Something Corporation:

Dear Douglas,

Thank you for contacting [Something Corporation].

Thank you for the images. As a general practice, [Something Corporation] does not provide replacement parts as products are manufactured and are sold as a unit.

However, as a onetime courtesy I have arranged to pull one lid from production. Delivery might take up to 14 days via UPS ground […]

Sincerely,

First M. Last
Something Corporation
E-mail: FLast@Something.com

“pull one lid from production” … I’ve always wondered what happened to the rest of that particular trash can, its lid perhaps raised away on a forklift-plus-pincer by a burly Joycean laborer and, like a commodity out of Das Kapital Volume 2, transported and transported, ultimately to land on the doorstep of my wizardly Seattle high castle. Maybe it’s at, if not Snoop Dogg’s, then First M. Last’s house.

In trash canclusion

Radicals made bitter sometimes assume corporations and their outsource contractor firms to be full of evil enemies. They are! But also, they’re full of bored people who might hate their CEOs more than radicals do. And besides, people aren’t static blocks. They might be an evil enemy in the morning, a bored boss by the afternoon, and a true hero in the night. And so on. Ideological purity doesn’t generate prosocial change—it’s at best just a stopgap measure that makes our social/emotional pain and uncomfortable questions go away … for the short run.

And besides, you really wanna save money on trash cans? Use old grocery bags. Even the smartest of us are sometimes stupid and in need of the genius obvious.

This blog post, Saving dolla dolla bill: how and why to overcome talking trash cans, 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/2022/01/08/how-and-why-to-overcome-talking-trash-cans/ You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning 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. Also, gimme all your money!

Note: In 2022, I’m once again writing 52 blog entries, posted every Sunday. Flash fiction by me will soon arrive weekly too, by February, after I finish figuring out the...

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...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 49 of 52. I skipped Week 48 due to day job time commitments.

When I was a teenager, one of my best friends and I would often go driving around in my car, wherein we’d discuss philosophy. We wondered aloud what our goals in life should be. This led to our silly word golzar from “goals are.” In the middle of the night, we’d point at the red lights of faraway radio towers—Golzarian outposts, you see, from the strange species of Golzarians who perhaps knew the answers to life’s mysteries—and try to drive to them in those days before GPS on smartphones. Once, we even saw strange glowing white lights in the distance, and drove, drove, drove till at three in the morning we found ourselves, laughing, on the doorstep of a Midlothian, Texas toxic cement plant.

Nowadays, as an adult in Seattle, my many goals are more clear, and maybe yours are too. On this blog I’ve previously covered both the pro-democracy movement in Belarus and the story of Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner. Those two situations provide two goals for anyone interested: freeing Belarus from the clutches of Europe’s last dictator Alexander Lukashenko and pushing the White House to pardon the Texas veteran and vegan who at a critical point in contemporary history provided hard evidence of Russian military hackers’ cyberattacks against US voting systems just days prior to the 2016 elections. In short, #PardonRealityWinner and #FreeBelarus.

Outcomes for the eastern European country, the young Texan idealist, and the United States as a whole are more intertwined than they might initially seem. Not to make too much of a Manichean, Cold War-esque binary, but today most BRICS states are headed up by autocrat strongmen, Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro; Russia: Vladimir Putin; India: Narenda Modi; China: Xi Jinping. The NATO countries including the United States have a lot to answer for, and if they cleaned house of their own war criminals, spies, and others acting with impunity, their credibility would correctly increase, but at least in many of these countries human rights are something you can openly fight for, usually (certainly not always) without suffering arrest, torture, etc. Reality Winner’s sacrifice as a convicted whistleblower provided key evidence about the autocracy of one of the BRICS countries, Russia’s Putin regime, working to bring Donald Trump and thus overt fascism to the White House.

Just as Putin pushes Trump in the United States, so Putin protects dictator Lukashenko in Belarus. Caught in the middle of the (oversimplified) binary in a possibly fragmenting Europe, Belarus now sees pro-democracy opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya seeking free and open elections for the country, elections in which, among other things, Belarusians would decide democratically on strengthening or weakening the ties between their country and the Russian government. But like the United States confronting Donald Trump and his quite likely return in November 2024, Belarus must throw off dictator Lukashenko first in order to achieve open democracy. Akin to internet packets and immunizable pandemics, superpredators and publics alike are presently all connected globally, and we must collaborate across the imposed borders—or else, worldwide overt fascism.

Supporting political prisoners who fight to achieve goals such as freeing Belarus from Lukashenko or exposing the Putin regime’s sabotage of the United States is crucial. They deserve it as individuals, and it shows others that if they similarly take heroic actions, there will still be support for them afterward if they’re arrested and punished. Belarusian or USian, these are all individuals who are being persecuted unjustly for their prosocial political deeds.

This post demonstrates the progress another person and I have made toward the two goals, partly in the hopes that our completed tasks may serve as a sort of model for anyone who also might like to work toward the same aims. Feel free to share your progress in the comment section or by email (dal@riseup.net), and I’ll include your efforts in my next progress entry on these topics.

#PardonRealityWinner: Rep. Filemon Vela, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Office of the Pardon Attorney, White House

Last Sunday, December 5, 60 Minutes interviewed Reality Winner, bringing a surge of interest to her case. You can find the aired portion and the extra portions here. I highly recommend watching all of the 60 Minutes footage: the part that aired is under 14 minutes, and the bonus clips are around four to eight minutes each. With one awful Trump administration behind us and another possibly on its way, the whistleblower who most proved that emperor has no clothes and who received the worst prison sentence ever for a domestic leak to the news press in return, should get more support.

Reality Winner was demonized in court because she knew how to change her sim card for her phone. She had to, as she was on our plan and upgraded or replaced broken phones while stationed in different states in the military.
Women aren't supposed to be independent.

— Billie J. Winner-Davis (@bjwinnerdavis) December 8, 2021

Rep. Filemon Vela. The first thing I did this past workweek toward the goal of this whistleblower receiving a pardon was phone the DC office of Filemon Vela Jr., a Democratic Congressional representative in the federal House. Despite military and veterans groups contacting his office repeatedly, he’s refused to meet with Billie J. Winner-Davis, the whistleblower’s mother, who’s part of his constituency. So he must need additional calls, more carrots, and more sticks. Links to transparency/reporting about whom he depends upon (his dependencies, to use a Linux-y word) would aid the effort as well.

I want to remind everyone that even though I made repeated requests, my US Representative @FilemonVela @RepFilemonVela REFUSED TO MEET WITH ME.
REFUSED!

— Billie J. Winner-Davis (@bjwinnerdavis) December 8, 2021

Actually, @FilemonVela @RepFilemonVela is Democrat.
His office had me fill out a formal request form, which I did & they ignored it.
2 Military & Veterans groups called his offices nonstop trying to get me an appt.
Our country is broken when those who work for us ignore us.

— Billie J. Winner-Davis (@bjwinnerdavis) December 8, 2021

When I called Representative Vela’s DC office as a freelance journalist mentioning the 60 Minutes interview and requesting a statement explaining why he won’t meet with Reality Winner’s mother Billie J. Winner-Davis, staff assistant Addison Sheppard, who answered, said “I will definitely let him know” about my question. I gave Sheppard my phone and email contact information and the deadline of end of business Friday December 17. “Awesome,” Sheppard said. “Thank you so much. I will definitely let the Congressman know.” While some may feel cynical, I am not easily defeated, so I’m looking forward to hearing Representative Vela’s statement.

Pretty much anyone can call Representative Vela in any capacity and push for him to explain himself and/or meet with Billie J. Winner-Davis. In fact, it only takes about five minutes to call Vela’s DC office! It might help you, as it helps me, to type out what to say in a text editor beforehand, and stare at it on a screen while holding the phone.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal. I also called US House Representative Pramila Jayapal, whose constituency I am in. Although I dialed her Seattle office during workday business hours, a recorded voice answered, saying “You have reached our voicemail. We are currently short staffed so please understand we may not get to all calls.” I’ve written before on my blog about the lights apparently turning off at the US federal government, such as at the State Department; Pramila Jayapal short of staff might be another piece of evidence indicating our politicians and their underlings are abandoning ship, though of course there are other possible explanations. I’ll call Jayapal’s office again this next workweek. Take a break from doomscrolling and maybe try it yourself, too. It’s fun, a politer and prosocial version of the prank calls many of us did as kids.

Office of the Pardon Attorney.

This past workweek I contacted the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the federal Department of, uh, Justice. First, I emailed them at USPardon.Attorney@usdoj.gov. I kept the subject line vague—”Regarding pardon application”—in hopes they’d read it instead of ignore something like “Pardon Reality Winner Now Now Now Now Now!” as an irrelevant comment from an irrelevant commoner. But your mileage may vary, and in fact, I think it’s best if these bureaucrats are hit on all sides with all manner/variety of content styles. Having fun is important! The body of my HTML email said:

Dear Office of the Pardon Attorney,

I’m a Seattle-based freelance journalist who reported in-person from Putingate whistleblower Ms Reality Leigh Winner’s sentencing. 60 Minutes interviewed Ms Winner (Register Number: 22056-021; released 23 Nov 2021) last Sunday, as I hope your Office had a chance to see and discuss internally. I’m writing to recommend you facilitate President Biden’s needfully forthcoming signature on her pardon application! After all, a pardon for Ms Winner would send an enormous domestic and international signal that the United States does not endorse TrumPutin-style autocracy. In the interests of justice and open democracy, the United States Government can and should pardon Ms Winner not just for her, as she so greatly deserves, but also for itself and for the domestic and global publics.

Sincerely,

Douglas Lucas

I’m not sure “needfully forthcoming” means what I wanted it to mean, but I suppose we’ll find out! Below my name I added my phone number since that helps demonstrate I’m a real person and not a bot or, in this instance anyway, a ghostwriter.

The Office of the Pardon Attorney’s website says “The President always retains the plenary power granted to him by the Constitution to pardon or commute sentences at his sole discretion, with or without the advice of the Pardon Attorney and Department of Justice.” That means this office does give the US president advice on whom to pardon. I wonder what that advice generally consists of; a good question to ask their public affairs people or submit open records requests about, along with any and all files they have related to Reality Leigh Winner, even if at present they might deny such requests due to ongoing blah blah blah. Filing requests still proves public interest in her case, right?

I called the Office of the Pardon Attorney too, and since no human answered, I left a voicemail to the same effect as my email. If you’re in a hurry, press 4 to get connected to that leave a message at the tone prompt, or explore their phone tree yourself and tell everyone if you find anything interesting. Another option I’ve yet to do myself is snailmailing them: US Department of Justice / Office of the Pardon Attorney / 950 Pennsylvania Avenue – RFK Main Justice Building / Washington, DC 20530.

The White House. Finally, I contacted the White House! I called 202-456-1111, but the recording said they take comments only between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Eastern time, Tuesday through Thursday. More evidence of increasingly, nobody home at the US federal government? Anyway, I sent snailmail as well. Surely Joe Biden himself will be hurrying down to the mailbag in a week or two to pick up my envelope and have a read. Either that or an intern might learn something new and exciting that prompts action. From my letter, or, say, your letter to the White House!

Here’s my full letter:

In the letter, I mention showing related video in my social studies classes (as a substitute teacher currently in a weeks-long assignment at a youth jail):

A pardon for this whistleblower who before the judge took responsibility for her action would send a very strong signal domestically and internationally that the United States does not support Trump/Putin-style autocracy. You of course met with Vladimir Putin last Tuesday, so you understand the gravity of the global situation. I showed my social studies classes the Reuters footage of that meeting. Students said Putin looked fearless and you looked scared. I hope you will pardon Reality Leigh Winner so I can tell them otherwise.

#FreeBelarus: Mailing Maryja Uspenskaya, Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada, and Sergei Tikhanovsky

On November 27, I blogged about my plans to write Belarusian political prisoners Sergei Tikhanovsky and Maryja Uspenskaya. I pointed out how for a month and a half, there had been no updates in English that I could find about the whereabouts and well-being of Maryja Uspenskaya, Andrei Zeltser’s widow who was the sole witness to his murder by the Belarusian KGB—the subject of Lukashenko regime propaganda footage that, as I researched, certain corporate media outlets republished in the United States uncritically while raising doubts about Andrei Zeltser’s (apparently US) citizenship, something that should have taken a corporate media reporter five minutes to confirm with a simple phone call. Maryja Uspenskaya (and presumably Andrei Zeltser) had been helping collect signatures for pro-democracy opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s challenge to Lukashenko’s faked 2020 presidential win. That activism seems to have been the cause of the attack on them by the Belarusian KGB, though there could be more to the story for sure. After the death of her husband, whose telegenic/demographic appearance should have ensured a huge news story in the United States especially given his employment with a (pro-opposition) Pennsylvania-based IT company, Maryja Uspenskaya was sent to a psychiatric hospital. The last English update on her had apparently been October 22. The day after I promoted my blog post on social media with the #StandWithBelarus and #FreeBelarus hashtags—I’d also noted Maryja Uspenskaya’s absence from lists of Belarusian political prisoners—the opposition leader herself tweeted that the psychiatric patient is (now) recognized as a political prisoner:

Maryia Uspenskaya is recognized as a political prisoner. She is the widow of Andrei Zeltser, who was shot dead during a KGB raid of their apartment. Maryia, as the only witness, was sent to a psychiatric hospital. As of today, there are 891 political prisoners in Belarus. pic.twitter.com/u3aul6Fa9v

— Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya (@Tsihanouskaya) November 29, 2021

Maryja Uspenskaya. So I wrote her! With another person providing some edits, a random friendly redditor translated my English letter, about 150 words, into Russian on my behalf, free of charge. I took the translated letter to the benevolent Alki Mail shop here in West Seattle. They sent it via the United States Postal Service. Alki Mail’s computer required me to give the return and destination addresses in English (not Russian); hopefully the snailmail still goes through. While US prisons do not allow snailmailers to include free stamps and other letter-writing supplies for their pen pals to write back with, apparently Belarusian prisons (and psychiatric hospitals?) do, but where exactly am I going to obtain Belarusian postage? The internet, of course. But I haven’t yet. Given time constraints, I decided to send my snailmail to Maryja Uspenskaya and Sergei Tikhanovsky anyway, despite the two concerns, since I can do more research in the future as to how to address the envelopes in Russian and how to best include Belarusian letter-writing supplies. Now, some outside Belarus write political prisoners via activist-run online services, but I wanted to send international snailmail physically myself as an interesting and tangible experiment. It was, however, expensive: $71.68 for a single envelope. Well, life is short, and this is fun!

Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada aka Akihiro Hayeuski-Hanada

Another person aiming to #FreeBelarus, who prefers to remain anonymous, found Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada to write by searching through Viasna’s database, looking for non-white Belarusian political prisoners. A son of a Belarusian karate coach father (Svyatoslav Gaevsky) and a Japanese mother (Tomoko Hanada) who’s a secretary of culture for Japan’s embassy in the eastern European country, Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada is an anarchist of about twenty-one years in age. He was beaten by the KGB and arrested for his participation in the August 2020 protests against Lukashenko’s faked election victory (the dictator has been illegitimately holding onto power in Belarus since 1994). Despite peaceful protest, Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada was charged under Part 2 of Article 293 of the Belarusian Criminal Code for alleged “participation in riots” and later in a separate criminal case under Part 2 of Article 285 of the Belarusian Criminal Code for alleged “participation in a criminal organization in any other form.” He’s also the recipient of a special scholarship fund for gifted students. You can write him by snailmail at: Akihiro Hayeuski-Hanada /  Zhodino st. Sovetskaya 22a / 222163 ST-8 / Belarus. Or, as the person who prefers to remain anonymous did, you can type a message to him via vkletochku, whose activists will forward your letter on your behalf, and optionally send back to you any replies. Below, a screenshot the anonymous person took of their vkletochku virtual letter to Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada.

You can find out more about Akihiro Gaevsky-Khanada here, here, or here.

Sergei Tikhanovsky. The husband of pro-democracy opposition leader Sviatlana Tikhanovsky and the father of her two children, Sergei Tikhanovsky is a popular vlogger in his forties who in 2019 started the youtube channel “A Country for Life” to advocate for a better Belarus. He was arrested right after announcing his presidential candidacy against Lukashenko in May 2020, at which point his wife Sviatlana stepped in to run for president against Lukashenko herself (she’s now exiled in Lithuania).

My process of snailmailing Sergei Tikhanovsky was very similar to my process of snailmailing Maryja Uspenskaya. The same random friendly redditor translated my English letter of about 150 words into Russian, with another person providing some edits. Then I went down to Alki Mail who put the letter into a USPS priority mail envelope. Same steep price: $71.68 USD. Same two issues: the Alki Mail computer (the software or the keyboard, tho?) required addressing the envelope in English and I had no Belarusian stamps or other supplies to insert into the envelope. Well, we’ll see what happens. Hopefully I get a letter back from him and Uspenskaya both!

Success is for those who seek it

Defeatism isn’t the flex the cynical think it is. If all the relevant legislative and executive federal bureaucrats are surrounded at work and at home every single day with crowds demanding a pardon for Reality Winner, things will change. If USians deface Belarusian regime websites, discuss books about Belarus (can anyone recommend good ones in English?), figure out ways to protect Belarusian political prisoners, uncover and object powerfully to connections between the Belarusian dictator and local companies, and openly determine what options will have the most impact in dethroning Lukashenko, maybe we won’t have to deal with TrumPutin in 2024 after all. And our sense of self will expand far beyond the usual walls.

There’s a cornucopia of wild daring tactics anyone can experiment with to pursue the two goals, #PardonRealityWinner and #FreeBelarus. Although it can be helpful and enjoyable to compare notes with others, to ask for and receive suggestions, to join letter-writing parties, or even to read and provide lists of ideas and steps, for huge goals like these, no individual needs to wait around for hierarchical orders, or to beg agreement for consensus votes, to make progress. To oversimplify, the indirect collaboration of stigmergy means picking goals and pursuing them as you youself see fit. That’s it. Just do it!

I’ll give the next-to-last words to Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, what she said in a 47-second video she uploaded in a December 11 tweet:

Recently, I heard from one foreign minister I’ve met “We did everything we could and nothing worked.” There was frustration and fatigue in his voice, unfortunately. But Belarusians can’t say We did everything we could and nothing worked. We cannot go home. Our home is taken from us. And until we get it back, we will not stop. Ladies and gentlemen, supporting democracy, supporting Belarusians is a process, not a one-time action. The international community is much more powerful than it pretends to be.

The same goes for #PardonRealityWinner: the international community can support her (including by sending emails and snailmails) from outside the United States, just as those outside Belarus can support the pro-democracy movement there.

This blog post, Progress on #PardonRealityWinner and #FreeBelarus, 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/2021/12/12/pardonrealitywinner-freebelarus-progress/. 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 49 of 52. I skipped Week 48 due to day job time commitments. Reality...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 46 of 52.

You probably remember the name Reality Winner and at least some of her story: in May 2017, when Trump fired then-FBI director James Comey for his investigation into the Putin regime’s interference with the presidential election on behalf of a certain cheeto-colored demagogue, a whistleblower in her twenties leaked a classified document detailing how the Russian military hacked US election systems just days before the November 2016 election. I reported in person from her August 2018 sentencing in Augusta Georgia, where, in the Trump administration’s first espionage case against a domestic whistleblower, Reality Winner was given the longest prison term ever for a disclosure to the media.

This week, news in the United States — whether social, corporate, or other — will likely focus on Reality Winner again since the Bureau of Prisons on Tuesday is changing her status from her current home confinement situation (began June 9) to three years of supervised release, phase similar to the more familiar, state-level term parole, which technically no longer exists on the federal level. Her ankle monitor will finally be removed. Recent and ongoing media of various types continue to focus on her case, especially this week.

As a result of the news, the public may have a lot of questions. This post provides an overview of her case, the leaked document and its implications, as well as the surrounding media discourse, plus definitions of relevant Bureau of Prisons jargon and a menu of actions you can pick from to help Reality Winner gain a pardon, the chief goal her family is calling for help with.

Who’s Reality Winner again? What was that document about?

Reality Winner is an idealistic, intelligent, and altruistic Texan. The two best sources of information about her as a person are probably the 2017 New York Magazine profile titled “The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread” and the twitter feeds of her family: her mother Billie J. Winner-Davis, her sister Brittany Winner, and her (step)father Gary Davis. If you’re interested, follow those accounts, or at least know how to search their tweets. A good rule of thumb for whistleblower cases: get your information not from the social-climbers and co-opters, but from their families, loved ones, and lawyers like Reality Winner’s attorney Alison Grinter. (The whistleblowers themselves are usually under gag orders.)

Winner is also an Air Force veteran who, at the time she snailmailed the restricted document to The Intercept, was working for Virginia-based spy contractor Pluribus International. You might know the US spy agencies — rebranded intelligence agencies especially following 1970s revelations of scandals such as Operation Mockingbird — are mostly staffed by contractors, whose trade secrets and other private properties are exempt from public oversight due to the laws of biz. In other words, the so-called intelligence community, its structure if not particular individuals within, is motivated not by public safety, but by profit and worse. For Pluribus International, the multilingual Winner translated into English surveilled terrorist communications from languages such as Farsi and Pashto. As Trump was firing Comey, a secret network board system, akin to a classified version of Reddit and accessible by Pluribus International staff, ranked a certain document highly, indicating wide interest in it.

The document, and The Intercept article about it, describes cyberattacks, carried out just days before the 2016 elections, by Russian military hackers against more than 100 local election officials in the United States and at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. In short, Winner gave everyone information required for self-governance, gave everyone necessary knowledge otherwise unavailable. That includes any voting vendor staff who, without security clearances, would not have been able to access such protective classified information unless it appeared in open discourse. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his personal website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Reality Winner “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.”

Such computer vulnerabilities ultimately show how state, corporate, or other criminal actors (or combinations thereof), anywhere in the world, can manipulate elections, anywhere in the world, to secretly condition the public into believing lies. As philosopher and former Wikileaks Central editor Heather Marsh explains in my article from Winner’s sentencing:

“This document is more than just evidence of Russian interference. In many ways, the US election is a high-profile, long-term investigation into the nature of how democracies work today. Opinions are manipulated by organizations such as Cambridge Analytica in conjunction with intelligence collection by organizations such as Wikistrat. These are problems which have plagued all democracies for years now–Canada’s 2011 voter suppression robocalls and Andrés Sepúlveda’s decade-long manipulation of Latin American elections are two earlier reported examples of modern election interference.”

Marsh’s quotation continues in my article from her sentencing. The public’s understanding of TrumPutin wouldn’t have developed to the extent it did, had Winner not gifted us (and Congress) with the secret document.

In that same article of mine, long-time elections integrity activist Bev Harris explains the cyberattacks described Winner’s in disclosure are part of the same cyberattacks that make up the last count in then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s ’12 Russians’ indictment against the Putin regime’s military hackers. The top prosecutorial agency in the United States issuing an international criminal indictment drawing in part from the deed of this imprisoned whistleblower, an individual in her mid-twenties wrongly called by that same agency’s lawyer Bobby L. Christine “the quintessential example of an insider threat,” suggests, as do many other things, that Winner deserved a medal, not a prison sentence, and at the very least deserves a pardon now.

Sinners in the hands of an angry audience

FOX News ran a paint-by-numbers campaign tarring Winner, the arguments of which are easy to dismantle. The TV hosts, typically on whatever forms of speed — just hit pause and look at their eyes; also, how do you think they manage to broadcast nonstop? — raged about how on social media, Winner called Trump an “orange fascist” and messaged her sister about hating America. Besides considering Trump’s actual fascism and horrible things done by the United States (for instance, by the CIA), just imagine for an analogy that you’re waiting at Discount Tire for the mechanics to finish with your car. In the morning, a caffeine-deprived mechanic in the back employee area, perhaps a decorated veteran like Winner, grouses to another mechanic about hating Discount Tire’s early start times and lack of vegan food in the break room. As afternoon arrives, the same mechanic and a third mechanic talk together about how the company does offer them good things too, including the opportunity to tinker with a steady stream of various automobiles. By evening, the mechanic says they have mixed feelings about Discount Tire and the company should make some improvements. That’s essentially what the comments of Winner and everyone else venting about politics on social media boil down to. It isn’t difficult for those outside tunnel vision to understand.

Meanwhile, on the mainstream US left, comfy members of the public have seemingly decided that nothing is possible except voting for evil on un-auditable computerized election infrastructure while making fun of whistleblowers’ unusual names. If horrific human rights violations happen every day and humanity goes extinct, well, the thinking seems to go, at least they got a few more moments to [insert distractions here]. Expecting lifelong entertainment, these audiences will get angry when instead they’re presented with education.

The duopoly stereotypes above are fortunately dissolving faster and faster as the public, especially younger generations, communicate interpersonally more and more, thanks to the Internet. However, the propaganda battles online continue, as does increasing authoritarian control of the online world.

Bottom line, fight for justice: don’t be a newb whose biggest ‘contribution’ this week is shitposting lazy remarks about Reality Winner’s excellent aptronym; instead, learn more about her case (below) and select a way to help her get a pardon (also below).

Recent or ongoing media offering more about the whistleblower and/or the document she disclosed

Reality Winner is the subject of Is This A Room, a new Broadway stageplay based on the transcript of her FBI interrogation, during which she was not Mirandized: she was not read her rights, not for remaining silent, not for a lawyer’s presence. This (il)legal sleight of hand was pulled off in the courtroom by the prosecutors denying the context and insisting Winner “would have felt free to terminate the encounter.” But the eleven FBI agents, each male and almost all of them armed, pressured her in many ways, tantamount to coercion, including by bullying her into the titular seven-by-nine-foot unfurnished back room she told them was “creepy” and “weird.” With her cramped into the claustrophobic space, they blocked the doors and proceeded with the supposedly voluntary interrogation. According to reviews, the stageplay — I’ve yet to see it — reunites the transcript and the context, helping to alter our crazymaking world into something new that actually drives people sane.

(Such isolation and control as the FBI agents’ is similarly employed elsewhere in our lives to produce bogus psuedo-realities. To take one example out of zillions, consider an antidepressant trial started when the COVID-19 pandemic started. How’s the confound of a terrifying pandemic removed from the analysis of the psychopharmaceutical’s efficacy? Likewise, the context of study participants being paid and promised better lives, is likewise snipped out by contractor scientists who sometimes even hold conflict-of-interest patents on the pills in question, since unlike salaried scientists, contractor scientists, akin to those contractors staffing spy agenices, are exempt from disclosure requirements, that is, transparency and accountability requirements.)

Is This A Room, 70 minutes with no intermission, runs at the Lyceum Theatre through November 27. Official website; buy tickets. The stageplay has received critical acclaim and sudden popularity.

Given the success of the stageplay, the Broadway Podcast Network recently launched a series entitled This Is Reality. With more on the way, they presently offer four full episodes, released between October 18 and November 17. I recommend listening for great, up-to-date information about Reality Winner, her case, and more, including how the 1917 Espionage Act, more than a century old, is used federally not to prosecute individuals for sharing military movements with foreign enemies, but to prosecute domestic whistleblowers for sharing restricted knowledge with the public (usually via the media), i.e. the enemy of authoritarians is the public, you and me.

The DC-based Dworkin Report, hosted by politico Scott Dworkin, cofounder of The Democratic Coalition political action committee, offers a trio of recent interviews. First, from August 4, an interview with Winner’s lawyer, Dallas-based Alison Grinter. Second, from October 5, an interview with the whistleblower’s sister, Brittany Winner. Third, from October 7, an interview with Billie J. Winner-Davis, Reality Winner’s mother who on social media fiercely advocates for her family every single day. Those Dworkin Report links have been going down sometimes, so if they’re temporarily unavailable, try elsewhere: first interview, second interview, third interview. Make sure you listen to Scott Dworkin’s interview of Billie J. Winner-Davis, the whistleblower’s mother. I’ll note two things about it. First, she calls upon Biden to grant her daughter clemency (a pardon is a form of clemency). Second, about Glenn Greenwald. After I spearheaded a successful effort to drag him in 2014 long before it became popular to do so (see here, here, here, here, and elsewhere), I switched to just ignoring Greenbacks, since that’s often the most effective way to turn someone’s volume down. However, Billie J. Winner-Davis says something in the third interview that I think is worth making an exception for, worth amplifying. Reality Winner was burned (arrested) as a source for The Intercept because (as the official story goes, anyhow), journalists there not only talked with government officials trying to confirm the document’s veracity (which is fine), but also sent them the document itself (which isn’t fine), enabling them to track the whistleblower down from various clues associated with the document. Asked about that, Billie J. Winner-Davis told Scott Dworkin:

“Glenn Greenwald is, I mean, he’s hard to figure out; he likes to use Reality to create, you know, a social media storm. But that’s what he’s doing: he’s using her. I wish he would just stop. You know, I have gotten so much support from people from The Intercept and from First Look Media who have reached out to me personally who have expressed the regret about what happened to Reality and who have expressed their support for her and for our family. Glenn Greenwald is not one of those people, and I just wish he would go away.”

I predict that during this new decade, revelations will arrive of popular US-based or US-ish lefty journalists being on the take (receiving illicit money from) the BRICS regimes such as Putin’s. Occasionally I look at job openings at tiny “radical news” outlets and see the high pay and think, yeah, this doesn’t add up. As Spock might say, simple logic. An important byproduct of Winner’s leak has been the reactions of others, exposing who cares about inflating themselves as Great Men while supporting red-brown alliance (red commies cliquing up with brown fascists as oft black-clad anarchists go on as DIY as ever) and BRICS interests (here’s looking at you, clan Assadnge), versus who cares about human rights, including for whistleblowers who are women (and thus too often downplayed or ignored), as well as open democracy over authoritarianism.

Another source of information: documentary filmmaker Sonia Kennebeck’s 93-minute movie United States vs. Reality Winner that premiered earlier this year.

Finally, my August 2018 article from her sentencing is the only detailed narrative from the courtroom, and one of the very few written detailed analyses, besides the original Intercept article, of the leaked document. I’ve also written posts about her case here, which you can find via clicking my blog’s Reality Winner tag. I have some additional unpublished investigative material I plan to pull together for release soon.

Frequently asked vocabulary

Like any bureaucracy, the carceral industry and the Bureau of Prisons in particular have their own specialized, intentionally impenetrable jargon. Since these terms will be thrown around this workweek — and in the future regarding other federal whistleblower cases — here’s a quick glossary explaining what the lingo actually means on the federal level and how it pertains to Reality Winner.

Note: To follow the below, it helps to understand the timeline of Winner’s imprisonment: after sentencing, she was moved to incarceration at FCC Carswell in Fort Worth. Then on good time earned, she was moved a little early to incarceration in person at a halfway house. Next, on June 9, she moved to home confinement, still considered incarceration, involving conditions such as a buzzing electronic ankle monitor, and requiring frequent reporting to the halfway house for drug testing and the like. Then Tuesday she’s no longer incarcerated, but on three years of supervised release, basically the federal equivalent of parole.

Now the definitions. On Monday I asked Winner’s lawyer Alison Grinter about these terms, but any mistakes are mine.

Supervised release) A period of time after incarceration that’s supposed to help prisoners re-integrate back into society. Sort of a midpoint between full Bureau of Prisons custody and living out in the free world. It’s close to the more familiar, state-level concept of parole, which no longer exists on the federal level. If a prisoner on supervised release is held to have violated conditions, the Bureau of Prisons can yank them back behind bars for the remainder of the sentence.

Halfway house) To be exact, halfway house is an umbrella term that encompasses a few different types of facilities. Generally, though, and in Reality Winner’s case, a halfway house means what the Bureau of Prisons calls a Residential Reentry Center (RRC), unsurprisingly run by a private contractor. Typically, federal prisoners go to these halfway houses directly after incarceration and physically stay there. Later, during home confinement, the prisoners frequently report to the halfway houses, which set the conditions of their home confinement period.

Home confinement) Still considered incarceration, home confinements see prisoners living at home with a heavy electronic ankle monitor. They’re expected to obey strict conditions and report to the halfway house periodically.

Clemency) Formally speaking, clemency isn’t a federal concept. Informally, though, it refers to the remedies an executive can give prisoners, among them commutations and pardons. Reality Winner asks for clemency, specifically (and more precisely) a pardon.

Commutation) A commutation is a federal remedy that essentially speeds up a prisoner’s sentence. A commuted sentence is stopped early; prisoners’ sentences are over sooner than they would have been otherwise. But with the behind bars, halfway house, and home confinement phases over on Tuesday, Reality Winner is no longer seeking a commutation; instead, she’s seeking a pardon.

Pardon) A convict receiving a federal pardon is no longer a felon; in the eyes of the law at least, they’re fully and completely forgiven. Yet there’s no federal expungement: the pardoned individual’s case still happened. The point of the pardon is that legally, any and all the felony conviction disabilities, as the adverse consequences are called, are removed. That said, what specific employers or apps choose to do regarding a pardoned former felon, may be up to them.

Expungement) This isn’t available at the federal level. Expungement is a state-level remedy. For example in Texas, an expungement (“expunction” in the Texas statutes) means files about a crime are destroyed and the offense is removed from the person’s criminal record.

Parole) A state-level concept. Parole technically no longer exists at the federal level; it’s been replaced by the concept of supervised release. For general audiences, though, it’s fair enough to imprecisely refer to someone’s supervised release as parole, but for the more exact among us, supervised release is correct.

Probation) This doesn’t relate to Reality Winner’s case. Probation is something imposed in place of incarceration. For example, at a sentencing, a federal judge might impose two months of probation on a defendant as opposed to two years in prison.

Office of Probation and Pretrial Service) Also known as the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services System, this is the bureau in the judicial branch that not only administers probation, but also administers supervised release.

Probation officer or supervised release officer) Employed by the Office of Probation and Pretrial Service, this person is the one making the day-to-day decisions about a felon’s supervised released conditions. Technically, they’re called a supervised release officer. They might refer to themself as a probation officer, given their employer. That may even be true of Reality Winner’s officer, despite her being on supervised release, not probation.

Those are the vocabulary terms for how the federal carceral system is supposed to work, although as a May 2017 article I wrote for The Cryptosphere shows, things may play out differently in practice, suggesting a strange mix of incompetence and/or decision-makers who aren’t on the up and up, to say the least.

#PardonRealityWinner

It’s important to recognize that even on supervised release and afterward, Reality Winner, though outside prison walls, isn’t free. Her felony record and plea agreement will continue to prevent her from fully speaking out about her case and the leaked document and its implications. On Monday, I asked Winner’s lawyer Alison Grinter about that adverse consequence of her conviction and the additional adverse consequences I describe in the two paragraphs below, but again, any mistakes are mine.

While Winner’s on supervised release for three years, she must obey strict conditions, which may vary according to her supervised release officer’s interpretations or caprices. To legally dispute the officer requires expensive, time-consuming, and stressful requests to the court in Augusta Georgia. Winner on supervised release has a curfew (can’t leave before 6 a.m. and has to be home by 10 p.m.) and must remain physically within the Southern District of Texas, though it’s the Augusta Georgia court that convicted her that ultimately calls the shots. The officer may choose to continue the surveillance of her smartphone. References in interviews to dating apps blocking her as a user revolve not around the supervised release conditions, but rather those apps querying databases and determining she’s a felon and thus barred from swiping.

Without a pardon, Winner will suffer what lawyers refer to as the disabilities of being a felon. For example, she’s banned from certain federal lands (the specifics are complicated). She’s not eligible for various federal benefits such as housing. She can’t own weapons (not uncommon in rural Texas), nor, in a strange provision, may she own body armor. Certain other countries may forbid entry or permanent residency to a U.S. felon. The list goes on.

A pardon would delete all of the above problems and restore Reality Winner’s freedom. It would allow her to share the full story. Like the full story, a pardon would also send an enormous domestic and international signal that the United States does not endorse TrumPutin-style autocracy. In other words, in the interest of open democracy, the United States Government has the need and ability to pardon Reality Winner not just for her, but also for itself and the public. Obama commuted the sentence of, but did not pardon, whistleblower Chelsea Manning; that suggests a pardon for Reality Winner can indeed happen under the Biden administration, but it will take significant effort.

Here are several ways to make #PardonRealityWinner happen:

• Correspond with the US Pardon Attorney by phone +1 202 616 6070, by email USPardon.Attorney@usdoj.gov, and/or by snailmail: U.S. Department of Justice / Office of the Pardon Attorney / 950 Pennsylvania Avenue – RFK Main Justice Building / Washington, DC 20530. It would be very helpful for them to be deluged with international messages explaining how a pardon for Reality Winner would improve the international standing of the United States after the Trump administration convicted her for keeping the investigation into Russian interference alive.

• Share articles and posts about pardoning Reality Winner, including in places other than your most familiar/comfortable social media sites. For example, during offline conversations, on social media sites you aren’t yet familiar with, via art such as graffiti or music, and so on.

• If you know more than one language, translate and share articles and posts about pardoning Reality Winner.
  
  
• Politely badger elected officials about Reality Winner, always pushing for the goal: pardoning her. Schedule appointments, call, donate a small amount to get them to actually reply (hey if corporate interests can bribe so can constituents). I’ve talked about Reality Winner with Kamala Harris at one of her campaign stops; I’ve talked to federal staffers, etc. If you haven’t done similar already in your life, you should, even just for the interesting experience.
  
  
• Anything else you can dream up. Don’t listen to the naysayers boasting of their cynicism to promise themselves it was wise to have given up in life. Beautiful Trouble is a handy resource book / toolkit for learning nonviolent tactics.
  
  
• Sign the online petition, but don’t let that stop you from doing any or all of the above.

This blog post, #PardonRealityWinner: Whistleblower moves to three years of supervised release on November 23, 2021, 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/2021/11/22/realitywinner-whistleblower-supervised-release-pardon/. 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 46 of 52. You probably remember the name Reality Winner and at least some...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 44 of 52. I skipped entry 43 due to travel in the last week of October. I took the photos herein from that trip. The coastal beach pics are off Highway 101 just south of Oregon’s city of Gold Beach. The forest ones are from northwest California’s Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. You can find more photographs on my instagram account. Enjoy; I sure did!

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization for the first time characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. Problems with the United Nations and its agencies aside, WHO is the authoritative international body providing global health education and coordination, a situation likely to remain until supranational power or the (hopefully informed) public replaces it with their or our next organization. Thus, its director-general’s written opening remarks from that fateful Wednesday’s press conference are quite historically notable. If you’ve never read them, you should; the document’s expertly composed and concise, put together in the heat of a very stressful geopolitical moment.

On April 25, 2020, philosopher Heather Marsh wrote a piece titled “The catalyst effect of COVID-19.” Her post too has had significant impact around the planet already, but if you’re from, or answer to, an intellectual background deriving from the last few centuries in Europe, you might find that assessment a little strange: How could something I’m not already aware of and that’s not on Netflix be important? I actually know an erudite, older activist in Texas who explicitly believes the corporate amplification awarded to Eurocentric thinkers, including Nietzsche, is based not on their demographics and proximity to power, but on merit. For such readers, consider it might be challenging to measure impact for an author who gets censored and who in 2014/2015 sparked worldwide and ongoing discussion of pedo human trafficking. Or just look at the academic credibility she already has. Or recall that the Communist Manifesto, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sent from London to the European continent behind schedule, wasn’t considered historically important until decades after the 1848 revolutions it was meant to influence. Not everything important is already in the important! section of the university bookstore, and who’s arranging the shelving, right?

Walking through the California state park marveling at the redwoods, I was having reminded of Marsh’s “The catalyst effect of COVID-19” due to a wonderful conversation that led me to put a two-and-two together in, I believe, a new way. I’d like to share that small insight. Plus, let’s take a fresh look at Marsh’s post (her glossary may help in reading it; the reading grade is pretty high). A year and a half later, have her predictions about how COVID-19 would catalyze the world come to pass?

Why the most radical transformation the world has ever seen?

The main of Marsh’s post starts with an astonishing sentence: “We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once.” Humans in today’s form have been around for hundreds of thousands of years—and now, the most radical transformation ever? Why?

My little insight answer—besides other factors such as election cycles—that I came up with while the interlocutor and I were hiking back from the redwoods to the de facto trailhead, is that we have two pan- things arriving together, one of them unique, for the first time in our history. As the globe has learned in the past two years, pan- means every, as in everyone and/or everywhere.

The first pan- thing, the unique one, is global communication. As opposed to feudal villages, where you might go your whole life knowing your entire town but never a stranger, we’ve now been approaching a point where everyone can communicate with everyone else, or at least try to do so. Many have made or hinted at this “Information Age” observation—whether that’s Marsh, journalist Barrett Brown, or simply Seattle-based heavy metal band Queensrÿche. Even Marx and Engels noted nearly two centuries ago the importance of “the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.” In 2010, merely six years after the introduction of Facebook in 2004, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said: “There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now that same amount is created every two days.” Some are still left out of this info-flood—perhaps people with developmental disabilities, or those doomed to spend their lives down in mineshafts, or others somehow blocked from or not desiring tech access. However, though estimates vary, social media platforms nowadays have billions of users, and that doesn’t count the tremendous amount of additional people if you consider shared accounts and shared devices.

The second pan- thing is the pandemic; humans have suffered pandemics before, but now everybody can talk about one of them—in real time. In the past, crises that have affected all have been too complicated or too removed to impact the daily experience of plenty of individuals such that they understand what’s going on. For instance, issues are around ozone layer depletion/recovery and the Montreal Protocol banning CFCs are simply over the heads (pun intended) of individuals unfamiliar with the subject: Something new will go wrong with the sky? Yeah whatever! Even the frustrating topic of money, seemingly universal, is pretty much irrelevant for decorative members of contemporary royalty, kept in lifelong gilded cages. Yet everyone is threatened by contagion; the novel coronavirus can infect anyone, no matter who or where you are. I imagine there must be exceptions, very few, to universal awareness of the idea of COVID-19 contagion risk (even if some disagree it’s a genuine risk), but—perhaps to the surprise of reactionaries—refugees near the Del Rio International Bridge between Texas and Mexico (a human rights crisis heightened in Sept/Oct of this year but existing previously and surely again) understood the concept of anti-coronavirus mitigation measures, and so do infants, in their own faint way, when they feel their parents’ stress or enjoy/endure longer, soapy bath-times. To sum up, basically everyone on the planet has some understanding, however minimal, that a serious pandemic, or the idea of it for those who (incorrectly) disagree it’s serious, is going on.

In short, for the first time in human history, rare exceptions aside, not only is everyone talking with everyone, but everyone is talking with everyone about a somewhat easy to understand problem that affects all: contagion, from a widespread respiratory virus. I think that’s one huge reason why COVID-19 is catalyzing unprecedented change. Humans are fundamentally driven by knowledge and communication, and are now equipped to share their actions, experiences, and ideas in hopes of overcoming the more or less understandable (if in some aspects shrouded in mystery) planetary crisis and any other crises that surface.

The key point: two rival economic ideologies converting into a single global mono-empire

After saying the thought-provoking lines “It is very tempting to stop everything and live in the moment, but some things need us to be alert, careful and creative. One thing I have been saying for years is the US, China and Russia (and others) are all headed for a major crisis in 2020 (which is here now!) and so is the world generally. While some states are undergoing terror and totalitarianism, others are seeing unprecedented opportunities for healing,” Marsh continues: “The key point is that we are scaling up into a mono-empire from a system of two rival economic ideologies (cold war communism and capitalism).”

In the United States, a younger person may be familiar with trying to convince a reactionary Boomer that capitalism is dumb. The reactionary Boomer might, well, react by saying: “A little stupid sometimes maybe, but communism is far worse, therefore capitalism is the only answer.” Reminiscent of former UK prime minister and arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher insisting that “there is no alternative” to market economy worth anyone spending any time on. If you try to ask Boomers not about capitalism versus communism, but rather about capitalism versus feudalism, or capitalism versus whatever’s coming next, you might get blank stares, or the conversation might improve and open up. Such dialogue demonstrates that Cold War-era USians generally see political options forever boiled down, as in Manicheanism, to two opposing choices: communism or capitalism. That vanishing, yet still influential, stage of history is getting converted, and converted fast, into a single planetary empire.

What is this global mono-empire of supranational power? International tech corporations manipulating, disappearing, and propagandizing knowledge or “knowledge” while permanently storing our personal data that joins other permanently recorded information for their management of a reputation economy that will continue and worsen the extermination of the poor (read more and evidence here). To know what to do about it, we need, among other things, to see what’s before our eyes, as Marsh’s post explains.

Three things to watch for: diminishing trade economy, law of the last circle, and escaping the mono-empire

Before getting started on this section proper, a quick vocabulary note. To read the below passages, as a kind of shorthand, you can think of an endogroup as, due to emergency conditions and fear/guilt symbiosis, affiliated people claiming they have an exclusive identity, idealizing an image (perhaps a leader or symbol), and believing an exceptional myth of their endogroup, while empathic and euphoric conduits to life outside their endogroup are blocked. Endosocial strategies are not necessarily bad, but endosocial extremism is. Endosocialism is contrasted with exosocial expansion, the “[u]ninhibited expansion of self through continual establishment of euphoric conduits through relationships, discovery, creation, spirituality, etc.” Exosocial expansion is something humanity needs more of. (Read Marsh’s book on self since it’s more complicated than this quick Cliffs Notes-style summary.)

Here’s the first thing to watch for from Marsh’s April 2020 post: dramatically decreasing importance of trade.

One, the [trade] economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality, as [trade] economics is. The crash we started the year [2020] off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted power structure [consider] with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.

I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about how the trade collapse/change is playing out in most countries, but I’m aware of what’s happening here in the United States and in a few other places. Of course USians have heard about supply chain problems, such as the article last month in The Atlantic titled “[The United States] is running out of everything.” Those in the know for the past few decades have acknowledged the taboo subject of how in the US, far from its intelligentsia able to remain forever smug about not signing portions of international law from a catbird seat position, will find itself increasingly dependent on, and unable to force compliance from, those it previously mocked (or invaded). USians might notice non-USians are more and more vocal on global social media every day, and that the centuries-old hell is other people Eurocentric philosopher tomes are not stopping, say, Myanmar rebels from sharing their news online. But like trusting Nate Silver in 2016 that Hillary Clinton would win the White House, many in the United States today promise themselves that we’re in just another merely temporary economic downturn. Instead, what’s happening will be far more transformative. I’ve started tracking this topic on my blog using the tag economics and the header “worldwide trade economy collapse/change.” You might consider that, as international experience demonstrates, USians are typically exceptionally helpless and all too often admire an idiocracy, especially when it comes to insisting social support is for only weaklings and imposing shame for it. But the US is going to need social support badly; and, the US won’t be able to provide enough of it from within. For more on this, and other topics such as the international implications of US federal FATCA law (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act), see my blog’s Leaving the US tag.

Verdict? Yeah, we’re seeing the worldwide trade economy collapse/change come to pass, even if arriving in a strange, slow-mo, lumbering Frankenstein’s monster sort of way.

Here’s the second thing to watch for from Marsh’s “The catalyst effect of COVID-19”:

Two, in accordance with the law of the last circle, also explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, places like the US, and China are going to try to fall back to old real or imagined endogroups such as those around states, religions, etc. as the economic endogroups weaken. We have already seen this in the global reversion to various forms of endogroups producing widespread nationalism, sexism, racism, religious cults and every other form of endosocial extremism. This will continue in some regions, and we are still at risk of civil wars and other endogroup atrocities from this.

The retreat to far-right demagoguery playing out in many countries currently is an example of Marsh’s law of the last circle; think fascist Jair Bolsarano in Brazil, for instance, or the likely return of Trump in November 2024. Revivals of authoritarian, patriarchal religion would be another example, as in the “Christian America” antagonists in science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1990s Parable novels, who decades before Trump, chanted “Make America Great Again.” Another example would be Steve Bannon allying with Moonie cults that literally worship assault rifles and are setting up compounds in Tennessee and Texas. A lighthearted and non-harmful example would be my reading the recent autobiographies of the heavy metal rock star men I grew up idolizing, when I’m tired, depleted, and want to turn my brain off before bed. We all employ various endosocial strategies from time to time, but endosocial extremism threatens atrocities, already existent or forthcoming, and threatens to block exosocial expansion.

Verdict? Yes, the law of the last circle is increasingly observable, with people retreating from the possibility of evolution by fleeing, in greater numbers than just prior, toward their former (real or imagined) endogroups.

The third and final thing to watch for from Marsh’s post is the global mono-empire, and how to resist it. The global mono-empire can be seen, for example, in Mark Zuckerberg’s October 28 announcement—in response to revelations, of the manipulation and misery of Facebook and Instagram users, that whistleblower Frances Haugen provided to the Wall Street Journal and the Facebook Consortium—that Facebook will rebrand to Meta. The prefix meta- means “transcending”; it’s seen in terms such as metaverse, metacognition, and metafiction. Facebook’s new brand identity, Meta, suggests transcendental improvement, but will mean only transcendence above that Cold War binary of capitalism or communism, into the global mono-empire of knowledge hoarding and manipulation (propaganda), permanent personal data storage (no privacy), reputation economy, and so on. Note that Facebook, and any future Meta, will (continue to) have users who think of themselves as small biz capitalist, state communist, corporate capitalist, anarcho-communist, or as humans equal to some other ideology, but it doesn’t matter, with surveilled fixed identities, they will all answer to these tech corporations … unless,

Thankfully, the public can also scale up with its pan- connections to each other, with regional communities interconnecting for mutual benefit while retaining insofar as possible, their own autonomy, self-governance, and cultures. The public can resist the global mono-empire, while supporting, or revoking support for, international, transparent, peer-promoting epistemic communities providing expertise with the help of knowledge bridges (decode that mouthful here). In her post, Marsh provides a 14-point list of opportunities activists can pursue to take advantage of the pandemic to achieve worthy goals. The COVID crisis is not only an opportunity for the global mono-empire, but also for us. For instance, one of her suggestions is, since public transit was becoming free of charge in many places, not to let it become unfree ever again. Seattle failed to accomplish that goal. During the early phases of the pandemic, the City of Seattle made bus rides free; then in later phases, the transit authorities said, time to return to paying bus fare. As far as I’ve been able to make out from my high castle, Seattleites hearing news of the upcoming change explained to each other they just knew that doing anything to stop it would be unrealistic, so the transit authorities said Wow that was easy and resumed charging money for bus rides, unhindered. And Seattle conservatives don’t care if bus rides cost money because they hate the idea of anybody (beyond families, churches, and other masculinist endogroups) providing or using goods and services for sheer fun, like basking in the sunlight that funds Earth life for free. (All of life is literally free; ultimately, the sun is paying for all this.) I don’t know what the status of the free public transit goal is outside the United States. Imagine if there had been just 14 journ-activists available, each one tracking a single of the 14 goals worldwide; then we’d know, and maybe more people would have been persuaded to understand and pursue the 14 aims! It can still happen, there’s some word that starts with d and rhymes with phonate that may be relevant. Regarding resisting the mono-empire, Marsh writes about the importance of her proposed global commons for public data (GetGee) and suggests using the news of supply chain problems to encourage, not development of evermore hierarchical forced trade dependency, but development of collaboration through networked fostering of strength and support. Check out her ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’ post for the other fascinating points on her list of 14 goals, which might call to mind, somewhat, how Marx and Engels created a 10-point plan in the Communist Manifesto (recommending for instance the abolition of all rights of inheritance) or the Black Panther Party put forth their 10-point plan in 1966 (demanding among other things an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people).

All of the above in one encounter

Driving back to Seattle, I parked along the way—somewhere off Highway 38 in southwest Oregon—to buy a cap for the air inflation valve of one of my tires. As the commercial jingle has it, I got in the zone: AutoZone! Therein I had a single encounter that encompasses all three points Marsh’s post recommends watching for.

A heavily tatted clerk rung up my tiny plastic bag of four tire air valve caps at the register and grumbled aloud about how AutoZone store staff (trade) is supposed to be a family (families are fine but converting workplaces to one hints of the law of the last circle) and how the other employees were letting him down by not coming in and working overtime (economic trade collapse/change, as r/antiwork posts from this month also suggest). Forgetting I was apparently the only dude in the store, and perhaps the whole rural red area, with long hair and an anti-COVID19 face mask on, I tried to make a joke about how the forthcoming zombie apocalypse might be filmed by Tarantino, you know, Quarantine Tarantino. The tatted clerk ignored me entirely, instead initiating a new conversation with an employee in the back (sticking with his workplace trade endogroup dominance battles rather than experiencing an emotional conduit with an outsider offering something punny). The tatted guy beseeched the second employee to come in as soon as possible for overtime. That other employee refused. The heavily tatted clerk began loudly bemoaning the general state of things. “I want to rejoin the Army,” he said bluntly. “I want to go back to Afghanistan!” Since his trade economy endogroup is collapsing, then it’s law of the last circle, at least in his imagination, reverting or regressing back to his former cherished endogroup, the hierarchical militia of Pentagon mercenaries he’d belonged to before. I punched in my payment card’s PIN and did the remaining button-presses, thereby entering my transaction and other personal data into permanent ledgers for manipulation use by the global mono-empire, regardless of whether the bureaus of that mono-empire advertise themselves to their populations as capitalist, communist, or perhaps someday soon, neither. When I left O̶m̶e̶l̶a̶s̶ AutoZone, I enjoyed the cool night weather (primary euphoria / exosocial joy), reminded myself to be grateful for the valve cap as I installed it and for my knowing how to install it in the first place, i.e. not being afraid of car maintenance as many are (gratitude, another emotion associated with exosocial interactions, in this case with older siblings who taught me car stuff), and finally, plain ol’ smiling and feeling good from this great trip I’d just enjoyed (rather than, as I know some do, including Western thinkers amplified by academia, arguing that happy nature hikes should be permanently off the table since the trails eventually come to a end, causing nihilistic sadness). Were the public having a blast sharing free essentials (among the recommended goals in Marsh’s post), providing for one another, as Food Not Bombs does (it’s real! it’s realistic!), I and others would be freed from unwanted paid-employment, and could more often enjoy examples, small or big, of expansive exosocial life.

Timelessness and chaos

Visiting the redwoods, you inevitably think of how these giant trees, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of years old, were here long before you were, and will be here long after you’re gone. A thought that might feel scary in an extreme endosocial headspace/environment, becomes natural and good in the exosocial great outdoors. Your time is part of, not some stupid endogroup cult, but the greater timelessness of Mother Nature.

In the United States, it can be common for activists to brag that any proposed change is unrealistic, especially if the origin of the proposal is not the usual vaunted Angry Intellectual Men. People telling each other (due to propaganda) that they just know of good change, that’ll never happen, is actually the only real obstacle. If people went out by the truckloads to catch invisible Pokemon a few years back, they can be convinced in truckloads to read books. Well, maybe. Among many other reasons, as a result of such US-specific barriers to activism (at least among my generation), I’m leaving the country, eventually, an aim of mine fans of this blog will be familiar with. It might take a while, and I worry over leaving people I care about in a metaphorical sinkhole they or those around them might not be able to see, but …

Elsewhere in the world, the COVID-19 catalyst effect might mean many people going outside and rediscovering efforts like Food Not Bombs, sharing food with each other in new and joyous ways. In the United States, movements afoot to ban dual citizenship, lock down borders permanently, and deprive residents even further of quality knowledge and trust might eventually mean something horrifying countrywide. Myanmar, and the open air prison of Palestine, a stage-setting for security forces training and live weapons industry advertising expo, come to mind.

Philip K. Dick also comes to mind, one of my favorite science fiction authors, whose stories have been popularized by Hollywood movies that strip out almost all his philosophical content and replace it with action heroes and fight scenes. PKD’s stories deal with questions around defining reality and acting authentically. Ultimately, he banked on the courage of the public and his “secret love of chaos.” Instead of picking identities demanded by the mono-empire’s drop-down menus, we can choose to change daily, or even moment to moment, in our chaotic world. You see a lot of that in the forest or on the beach. Crashing waves, bickering birds, falling trees. Slowly erranding slugs. Happily climbing humans.

I’ll give PKD the last word:

I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

This blog post, Reading ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’, a year and a half later, 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/2021/11/07/reading-catalyst-effect-covid19-year-half-later/. 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 44 of 52. I skipped entry 43 due to travel in the last week...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 40 of 52. I skipped weeks 37, 38, and 39.

Note: My two entries in August providing sleep tips (Part 1 and Part 2) recommended sleep lab founder Matt Walker’s book Why We Sleep. But it turns out the book is sketchy. In November 2019, Moscow-based independent researcher Alexey Guzey, who has a background in economics and math, posted a devastating critique of Walker’s bestseller, which Guzey put together across two months (and updated most recently in April 2021). I updated my two sleep tips posts with this information. I regret the blunder and suggest checking out Guzey’s critique.

When confronting a challenge, I often throw myself into it, paying attention to educational materials on the subject only concurrently, not in advance. It was this way with substitute-teaching or volunteering with Food Not Bombs. “Take these to the dish pit,” a Seattle FNB non-leader leader said during the last decade, handing me dirty trays as we cleaned a Thai buffet in exchange for surplus food to redirect to the dispossessed, including some of our own number. “What’s a dish pit?” I asked. Looking back, such incidents are amusing moments, but at the time, they can be embarrassing, painful. It’s what happens when you throw yourself into things. Thankfully, if a person sticks with something—and has an inquisitive, adaptable mind that stays out of ruts—improvement also happens.

For leaving the United States, I knew if I continued comparing countries via watching youtube videos, and kept on musing endlessly about possibilities, I’d never get anywhere (literally). That’s why, while messing around with Canada’s Express Entry eligibility estimator, I decided to, among other actions, just go take the computer-based IELTS General exam in San Diego to prove English proficiency as required of non-students seeking permanent residency in the northern nation. I crammed for two days and, as expected, aced the reading and speaking sections, but made a sole mistake in the listening part (you hear audio texts only once, so no wandering attention nor confusion with the test format allowed!) and—I bungled the writing component. Despite a summa cum laude bachelor’s—a double-major in philosophy and, wait for it, writing—and despite years and years of paid freelance writing, including multiple news media publications, standardized writing tests and I simply don’t get along. Long ago, I similarly bombed the GRE’s writing section, repeatedly! Yeah, shove it, standardized tests.

I took the IELTS General on September 9 (see previous post); my test report form, dated September 11, eventually arrived in my PO Box showing the following scores: 8.5 overall, 9 reading, 9 speaking, 8.5 listening, and 7.5 writing. Since higher IELTS General scores help a non-student migrant gain admission to Canada and a handful of other Anglosphere countries, I got grumpy about that last grade, and looked to see what my options were for vengeance.

Turns out, there’s a procedure called Enquiry on Results, or equivalently, for the sake of SEO keyword stuffing, Inquiry on Results or simply EoR. Within six weeks of a test report form’s date, an IELTS test-taker can get a section(s) re-marked, for, of course, a fee.

Anecdotal reports suggest EoR cannot lower your score; however, I couldn’t find official documentation from IELTS authorities proving that’s the policy. Google-savvy and forum participants suggested official documentation doesn’t exist, at least not online. I thought briefly about phoning the IELTS authorities overseas, but then decided, whatever, it fits my general knowledge of academia that it’s unlikely for EoR to lower my score, only keep it the same or raise it. Make no mistake, these myriad migration paperwork hurdles have the distinctive reek of academia/intelligentsia. Well, my destination thoughts were shifting from Canada to the Netherlands anyway. Better just to wing it, to purchase an Enquiry on Results for my writing section. YOLO!

I called the testing center and was asked to email the director with EoR in the subject line. I did. After some back-and-forth, my EoR request was officially in and paid for on October 4. Pretty ironic: the first task on the IELTS General’s writing section tells candidates to type an everyday letter, say to a newspaper or in order to complain to a company—and here I was, asking for that task to be re-graded, by means of me writing email letters with the testing center staff, communicating with perfect competence.

The higher-up graders re-marked my writing section and by email I received the new, or rather, not new, score in a PDF on October 6. You can see the outcome in the screenshot starting this post. My score didn’t change a smidge. Blegh. Vengeance denied. Had I prepared better, I would have spent more time with official practice materials or free/low cost courses specifically on the IELTS General writing section available on MOOC platforms such as edX, Udemy, Coursera, etc. Because as we all know, exams don’t evaluate your writing or English proficiency. They test how well you take the test. But the point was to throw myself into the actual emigration process. Psychology score, A+. Home economics score…F.

Well Canada, you and I had a few flirty dates, but it looks like there won’t be any more nights out on the town for the two of us. I don’t have enough points to meet your high standards. That’s okay, I have gray—oops, grey…er, grijs—in my stubble now; I’m no teen who can’t handle rejection. Besides, you have mining companies with active licenses for profiteering off the genocide in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. And your money-laundering transnational criminals in Vancouver are protected by Chinese spies. *Hangs up*

Personal update: Pfthird Pfizer Pfjab Pfgoing Pfine

This past workweek in West Seattle, antivaxx and antimask protesters waved signs during five o’clock traffic in my neighborhood. Aside from the bald dude in the, what’s that Dutch word, *scrolls up*, grijs hoodie, who, though he lacks camo pants, sorta resembles a typical contractor you’d find working for a company like Craft International (a merk firm and friend of spy biz Stratfor with a mysterious habit of hanging around events like the Boston Bombing)—I have no idea who the grijs dude is, just sayin’ he looks a bit creepy—it seemed a fairly ordinary group of Seattle rightwingers of the new school. I stopped my car in the parking lot behind these vaccine hesitant folks to get a photo for the blog entry you’re reading now.

Giving their respiration a wide berth, I walked to a suitable site to hold my phone up at ’em. Seemingly in unison, the women chorused, “Are you going to write about us?!?!” The ;) ;) @}->– @}->– flattery in their voices twisted this writer’s face into an involuntary smile. Like thundering storm clouds above a parched man in a desert dropping rain: acid rain. I told them Yes and continued thumbing my phone. Then one protester lady asked: “Are you going to write ill of us?” Interesting choice of words, there. They asked where to read, so above the noisy traffic I shouted: “DouglasLucas dot com!” Maybe they’ll comment and tell us more about Mister Grijs Hoodie.

A satisfactory photo achieved, I headed back to my car by the same circuitous route in reverse. I crossed the street. Suddenly I was passed by Mister Grijs Hoodie! He had his bald head down, his face sternly focused, and he was powerfully striding alone, whither I know not. I should specify, relative to being a Craft International employee (which I’m including almost entirely for joke and to link readers to stuff), it’s far more likely he’s a complete nobody, for instance a run-of-the-mill bargain bin patriarchy boss of some local Kik group for definitely-not-advisable hookups (read: loss-leads), which, as #OpDeathEaters has been pointing out since 2014, is, like, same diff, or can be, you know, more precisely, the everyday consequences of supranational pedo propaganda from above swamping populations with dolla dolla bill masculinist ideology rebranded to sound like freedom. Not to mention human trafficking. [Hey! Are you an editor or other potential payor reading my blog? Find academics vouching for #OpDeathEaters in that same diff link. That’s the completely contingent order of things—for now!]

A surprisingly high portion of the cars passing the protest were repeatedly honked in favor. Not surprisingly, those one-note vehicles tended to be jacked-up pickups with needless stickers of an out-of-character Calvin urinating. I saw only one person indicate disapproval: a driver doing their daily grind, gripping the steering wheel with one hand and with the other, like a time-warped Roman emperor, presenting an unmistakable thumbs-down.

The wild hyperlocal antivaxx advertising blitz appearing in my neighborhood did not detain me from getting my third Pfizer (booster) jab Friday, courtesy of my public education employment. Although I follow news on twitter, email lists, and elsewhere too much from my own good, even I almost missed last Monday’s study in The Lancet, among the globe’s most prestigious medical journals—a study written up by The Hill. To oversimplify, the research indicates Pfizer-BioNTech protection against novel coronavirus infection drops significantly—approximately in half!—four to six months after the second jab, with the specifics varying depending on the scenario, mutation, etc. Thus, boosters. As with, say, the tetanus shot. According to the CDC and FDA in September, certain Team Pfizer folks can get the third jab once a minimum of six months since their second jabs has elapsed. Hopefully better vaccines (here’s looking at you, University of Washington) will be approved soon and become widely accessible for all, so we can be done with these less than ideal, but still very helpful, interim measures.

I embed an image from the exam room not to boast, but to model good behavior, to encourage people to get vaccinated. Of course I know Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies have horrifying histories of wrongdoing (an easy peasy first stop, Wikipedia criticism section footnotes, when they exist), but the risks thereof are, in my case, far less than the risks of suffering COVID-19. The Pfizer press release about the third jab has the expected advertising but also a lot of interesting links for people who might want to dig.

I’m too exhausted by the coronavirus vaccination debate to go into more detail, but the big picture might be helpful: if you don’t experience something firsthand (while knowing what you’re looking at, too), you have to decide whether to trust information from others. Documents may be more reliable than most people, but even with documents, you have to trust they’re real and not forgeries. How do we accomplish this as humans?

Like we always have: with trust networks. As far as I know, that’s a term that kinda originated with cryptography, but the phrase intuitively makes sense, right? My unfairly overworked primary care physician, whose performance is usually stellar, recommended the bestseller Why We Sleep to me (see note above starting this entry). I assumed she had read it closely, when probably—I’ll ask next time I see her, because mapping trust networks, even for oneself, is of life-and-death importance—she heard about it on a podcast or something, while HIIT sprinting or Wim Hof breathing. I presume she then passed the recommendation from the podcast (or whatever) to me, and despite the intuitive misgivings I initially felt about Matt Walker’s marketing image, I got swept-up a bit in his glitz. I mostly listened to Why We Sleep, while driving or exercising, meaning I didn’t read individual sentences in print, a way of reading that makes it easier to be careful and critical. I just had it on in the background to learn by osmosis. So I got fooled.

From what I’ve read so far, Walker’s never directly acknowledged his critic, the Moscow-based independent researcher Alexey Guzey.

https://twitter.com/TheBoobla/status/1425379218171457541

Having read most of the devastating critique by Guzey, who ended up on international news himself to tear apart Walker, I lowered the glitzy guy’s reliability score as a science source in my personal trust network, and updated my blog entries accordingly. Actually, early on, I emailed Walker’s press person once or twice with various questions—on twitter, Walker goes by @sleepdiplomat, and says he wants to spread his message everywhere—and never got a reply; he could have been occupied, of course, but sometimes, mentioning my news publications gets me at least a politer version of He’s too busy for you (e.g., I’ll ask him!! <3 <3 <3 and then they never do). Based on how my primary care physician reacts when I ask her about this, I’ll adjust her trust network reliability score (especially on the topic of book recommendations) down, up, or not at all. Same for whatever podcast (or other source) she got her Why We Sleep info from. Unlike cryptographers, I don’t have actual numbers scoring people in my head (each person would have multiple scores, one per topic). It’s just something I think humans do all the time, semi-automatically, unless they’re effectively brain dead. (Oops, that’s rude to actual brain-dead people, who, uh, won’t be reading this.)

Imagine if IELTS and academia tested people, not on avoiding typos during unrealistic, one-shot English exams, but on the everyday life-and-death practice of adjusting trust networks. You know, critical reasoning and media literacy classes. In fact, spy agencies (public or private) use trust networks too. For a few years, I read thousands of Stratfor emails, and their staff was expected, when relaying to internal email lists the insights they heard from their sources, to give each source a letter grade to indicate their reliability (as well as other information about the source, the reliability of the particular insight, timeliness, and so on). There were similar trust network instances in the zillions of State Department cables and additional public, classified, or otherwise restricted documents I’ve read. We all do this when evaluating information. It’s just that the spies’ goals are antisocial, and mine, and hopefully yours, are prosocial. BTW, spying these days doesn’t merely mean cloak-and-dagger stuff, like car-bombing journalists critical of Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, as in this April 2012 conversation: a 24-minute excerpt of the bugged recording of Lukashenko’s then-spymaster was published by EUobserver in January 2021 here (see also the 12-page English transcript or the 8-page Russian transcript; this related DW article in English too). Spying also means high-level marketing crap like Stratfor employees writing the majority of this or that article released by your favorite corporate media outlets. That’s an observation still true yet a bit past its sell-by date, since now the Dems openly run CIA and military spy candidates; heck, might as well openly put them on mainstream media mastheads while they’re at it. (If your bar is lesser evil, explain it not to me, but imagine how you’d get ratio’d for explaining it to actual torture victims who use twitter.)

I’ll close this section with three more observations. First, I know wonderful people who are far too busy (perhaps a single mother or a prisoner with limited or no computer access) to do the countless hours of reading required to really evaluate, say, scientific papers. So they often have to go by, for instance, their affinity for a rando shiny podcaster, because again, we all use trust networks. What else are we going to do, not look up information, not sift through reading options by some means? I understand, but get slightly annoyed, when twitter radicals call these people fascists; in a remote-controlled (autogenocide) way they are, but that’s like shooting fish in a barrel, when radicals could try instead to save them from the peril (by aiming at the top authoritarians cuz else, regrowing hydra heads). Similarly for academics who’ve lived their whole lives in the ivory tower and have never stepped foot in a prison, long-term psychiatric lockup facility, non-Western country (me!), and on and on. We’re all in this sort of boat, just for different topics.

Second, a few short years ago it was fashionable in the hacktivism/transparency realm to fund vaporware websites with a Great Man on top supposedly to change things, but these vaporware projects didn’t employ trust networks (among other problems), just glitzy marketing. We were supposed to trust our emergency-based need to get wrapped up in trusting their machismo. GetGee, the global commons for public data, allows users to employ trust networks when looking at research.

Third, if disinfo feels hopeless, remember it’s startling how effective a) history and b) reframing things can be. For instance, if someone’s para about vaccine passports, you can show them international smallpox vaccination records for US citizens from more than fifty years ago, or reframe the concept by saying, hey, to go into a bar serving alcohol, or to pilot a two-ton metal box powered by explosions down the freeway, we have to show age passports. And yes, I know both the conventional and alternative medical industries can be untrustworthy (see links on my blogroll), everything around ‘securitized’ border enforcement too, and that COVID-19’s origins deserve more investigation; but, uninformed speculation is cheap and funding investigative journalism (which sometimes requires travel to do well) is expensive.

So yeah, I got my third Pfizer jab Friday, and Sunday, 48 hours later, pfno pfside pfeffects pfso pfar.

Blog update

Recently I received a donation for my blog from a reader—thank you! (Hic haec hoc, huius huius huius!) The donation encourages me to keep blogging. For anyone else who might be interested in donating, here are the donation options, to which I just added snailmail.

This past month I made tinkery updates across the website, mostly under the hood; some, though, you might notice. Do tell if you spot any problems or have any suggestions. I overhauled the blogroll (see right sidebar, up) for the first time in years and years. I replaced http:// links across my site with absolute https:// links. Digitizing my belongings to prepare for emigration, I came across a nice print ad for the 2017 bookstore talk I did, and added that to the in the media section, where it looks, um, good! I grumble about the monkey see, monkey do requirement of social proof in marketing (completely contingent social order…for now!), but, whatever, it’s good to have more, how shall I say, self-esteem or something like that, and enjoy these sorts of thingymaboppers, at least while I’m still a loudmouth resident of the loudmouth United States!

By the way, the bookstore I spoke at is called Burning Books; it’s in Buffalo, New York. After over ten years, they’re now expanding, more than tripling their floor plan and adding designated event space, all without leaving their location. Everything will be fully accessible, too. Below, their fundraising video and gofundme link.

Reminds me, YAC.News has a fundraiser going also, as well as a community Discord currently open to new users.

Because these blog posts usually take more than a day to write when they’re lengthy, and because offline readers have advised me that shorter posts would be easier for them to take in (time-wise), I need to figure out how to change this blog, and how to modify my time and energy investments in my overall writing more generally. A few weeks ago, I was working on a very long post about Beto O’Rourke and realized I really need to rethink my efforts. Diverting huge chunks of my time and energy away from my longform fiction- and nonfiction-writing goals to pin down, by skimming seemingly identical NPR articles at 3 a.m., the exact date the Del Rio international bridge closed during the ongoing refugee crisis, and who actually issued the order to close it (various local/regional mini-authorities stumbled over each other trying implausibly to claim the ugly credit in the media spotlight), is fascinating, but maybe not the best sort of time-sink every single weekend. I do enjoy writing journalism (especially were I able to do more investigative work uncovering as-yet-unknown ‘revelations’). And summarizing/analyzing other journalists’ work in reframed language weekly is, to borrow from Pokémon Go, super effective, biz-wise and persuasion-wise, in terms of staying in readers’ minds on a regular basis. For example, these posts not infrequently convert into incoming messages from people I haven’t heard from in awhile, asking me what’s up and what do I think of xyz popular issue. Yet such posts should just be a sole theater of war among several, not my only battlefield.

Then there’s the damage to psychophysical health from end-gaining (sacrificing healthy means to ensure ends are achieved, which might compare with emergency-based structures). To write something called lengthy, like this blog post, it helps the writer tremendously to keep the material in short-term memory (RAM for computerheads) while working. Especially if the content’s not strictly outlined (this piece is pretty outlined). The more creative, the more the creator needs to have all the data (even imaginative data) for the piece readily accessible in their minds, even to the point of boiling, such that the energy must be discharged (mixing my engineering metaphors). Taking breaks to tend to houseplants, do the dishes, or complete other sanity- and health-maintaining tasks risks losing the data’s salience. So you find yourself with a hacker hunch, crooked over the laptop, flies circling the sink, and Dutch roommates, if you have those, perhaps eyeing you suspiciously. Good luck with the 9-5 schedule, too. While potentially liberating, such pedal-to-the-metal practices can be risky, especially if an inexperienced and/or broke person doesn’t intersperse them with rest and/or has insufficient social support.

The problem is particularly acute for me in terms of creating a freelance/entrepreneurial business plan to meet migration requirements of the Dutch American Friendship Treaty. I haven’t picked the Netherlands for certain yet, but I imagine I will have in roughly two or three weeks, at which point I’ll buy a one-way overseas plane ticket months ahead of schedule to give me salient countdown timer motivation. (Psychology score, A+; home economics…) The business plan for writing in the Netherlands is mandatory. That’s why, despite frequent exercise and cooking super-healthy veggie-rich meals at home, I’ve been suffering moodiness and lethargy lately: much of it revolves around my fear that I’ll soon have to devote most of my time and energy, i.e. my life, to content-marketing, not the reading and writing I’d rather do. Though it’d perhaps be fun to run a content-marketing business in the Netherlands for vegan restaurants, free software firms, and antipsychiatry / critical psychiatry service providers called something like, Idealistic Content Marketing (how do you say that in Dutch?). With long-term substitute-teaching assignments and CELTA training, I was able to squeze some blog posts and fiction-writing in, but it wasn’t easy, and I found that eventually the employment system—at least in the United States—beats avocational activities out of overworked employees. Optimizing routines, honing goals + plans, and the like can help tremendously, and cutting costs through, say, miraculously finding good roommates, but, also, let’s not kid ourselves.

To close off this section, let’s consider how I’ll blog for this year’s remaining 12 weeks. The last post will of course sum up my 2021 year of blogging. The penultimate entry will explain with bullet points how I made it through a full calendar year, for the first time since 2013, without a manic episode or psych lockup. That leaves 10 weeks. Then there are three series I started in 2021 with a single post and never finished: Meet new president Joe Biden, part 1 of 2; Views of happiness: Journey versus destination, part one of two (this should actually be three parts); and Review of education books, part one of two (this should actually be four parts). That’s six posts needed to conclude those series. Leaving four weeks. I want to post about trees in Seattle, and maybe finish the Beto O’Rourke URL-as-tome. That would leave two weeks … I also wanted to do news blasts for Colombia, and I never finished with the Haitian presidential assassination news blasts, but no one has solved that murder yet, so nobody else finished the story, either.

Division of labor makes an interesting way to look at this business plan, life plan challenge. The titles change, but in the forms of media-writing I know, including print-only fiction and journalism, there are usually four roles in my experience (call them what you want): researcher at the most granular level, then writer, then editor, then producer at the most birds eye-view level. I need better self-production skills, so I imagine there’s, if not an app for that, then quality courses I could check out on the various MOOC platforms, and book recommendations I could ask friends/mentors for. Just not any books by disgraced sleep diplomat Matt Walker.

Maybe the best plan for my blog in 2022 would be the following formula, to which there could be occasional exceptions: one observation from daily life, one philosophical/political/whatever lesson drawn from it, and then an international news blast or two. Heck, maybe even a music and fiction section after the news blasts! (See, I keep adding stuff…) If anyone has thoughts, suggestions, or requests for this blog, I’d love to hear them!

News blasts: US, China, Worldwide Trade Collapse/Change

Get ready, because these are a doozy.

United States. On September 23, the Washington Post published a lengthy op-ed by influential neocon Robert Kagan, cofounder of the notorious warmonger thinktank Project for the New American Century. Kagan’s op-ed is titled “Our constitutional crisis is already here” (full text at Cryptome) and argues that, unless his health fails entirely, Trump will be the next Republican presidential candidate. Kagan says come November 2024, the United States will reach its biggest crisis since 1861, with widespread mass violence and a federal system breaking completely. He blames the cults of personality surrounding demagogues for the impending doom, and just like the Washington Post itself, he makes the evergreen claim that democracy will die, though Kagan prefers November 2024 as the date to put on the coroner’s report.

While we’re still forced to work, in some senses, alongside liberal states against outright fascism because innovative alternatives to the liberal order need greater amplification and effort and funding (and uh, commissions from editors) and knowledge of self, health, and wealth—the sneak attack, the edutainment style returns like that, my philosophy keeps it plain and simple, the kingdom of hip-hop is within you—it might be a worthy endeavor to introduce some rigor upon these sales slogans about democracies dying and failed states. Nation-state is an incoherent package-deal concept, but to roll with it for a while, the idea of an international order of liberal nation-states is typically traced back to 1648’s Peace of Westphalia. The Peace of Whatphalia? I must have been roaming the hallways that day in AP European History. What criteria must such liberal nation-state countries meet to count as successful or failed, alive or dead? There are of course readable scholarly books on such subjects, for those with time, i.e., not salaried at the Washington Post or Idealistic Content Marketing.

China.

Youtube offers plenty of videos from US individuals who’ve relocated to China as obedient reflectors, playing by the rules and keeping their mouths shut. Footage from these moneymaking individuals suggest they have a pretty good life in China, happy but helpless. Well, good for them. Now let’s talk about the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, and the propaganda war around it in the United States. Trump, who tweeted in April 2013 that China owns DC, won reactionary hearts by telling his followers he would resist the Chinese government’s encroachments on the United States, but he himself has been a bigly CCP beneficiary. In October 2020, Forbes put together a helpful guide to The Donald’s debt, which astonishingly totaled at least a billion dollars. (And you thought your student loan debt was bad!) The Forbes guide looks at multiple Trump properties, but let’s just consider the 1290 Avenue of the Americas location. More than two hundred million dollars for that New York City property came from the CCP-owned Bank of China. That bank says the debt was sold to Vornado Realty Trust. Maybe so. But without transparency, maybe Bank of China is still a creditor on the building, if say, after the sale, Vornado sold it right back. Opaque transactions we can’t audit don’t help explain. Whoever the current creditors are, guess when the debt comes due: November 2022, the mid-term elections. There are more connections between Trump and China, such as his pledge- and likely constitution-violating hiring of firms with majority CCP ownership in early 2017, and the eighteen trademarks granted to Donald and Ivanka Trump in late 2018 by guess who, the Chinese government. That’s the reality, while they’re telling their fans they hate China. As the top predators block their constituents on social media, they party together and laugh about you wearing their T-shirts, didn’t you know? Meanwhile the US left is misled by garbage-news from channels loyal to the CCP and Putin (see here and especially threads here and here). Note it’s both obviously bad Trump and wrongly beloved Obama who sided with Putin to bring us to this brickbat BRICS point. A busy and hardworking activist asked me the other day to explain what the problem with fake news website The Grayzone is. “Red-brown alliance,” I started off succinctly, meaning the longstanding and continuing pattern of Commies allying with Nazis (see news blast above regarding the thankless duty of grumbling anarchists, when forced to pick between the two, to support the liberal order over the outright fascists, while still shoving reframing, truth-bombs, and nonviolent/self-defense other bom—nevermind, into faces). Grayzone founder and head honcho, your local Assad apologist Max Blumenthal, successfully pressured the Southern Poverty Law Center to take down this article. I dare him to try my website, I’ve shielded myself with lengthy paragraphs! The article explains, on the Internet Archive at least, how presently, fascist propagandists like Steve Bannon use intermediatry hops to convert left-wing resentment (paging Nietzsche, or better, The Creation of Me, Them, and Us on the struggle between reflectors and negative images in Hegelian setups) into unwitting support for Putin-, CCP-, Assad-, etc. aligned talking points. As the first track of Lupe Fiasco’s Birth of the Cool album propounds, check your ingredients before you overdose on the cool. Might be a bit Tatmadaw when those discussing the CCP’s horrifying Uyghur genocide find themselves told by USians that it’s a “Karen” move to feel cross-border, cross-sect empathy: “Yeah, tell us again Karen, how the Uyghur genocide actually affects you” and the like. Nope, empathy across distances is a good thing. Finally, whataboutism is increasingly not accepted online, so I don’t have to put a long disclaimer in here about multiple awful genocides caused by the US.

Well, if there’s anyone still reading after that giga-paragraph, such was my understanding prior to this blast, so now we crank the volume! I’m basing the below largely on the September 28 YAC.news article, “Prelude to war: China’s plot for world domination,” and the links therein. Heather Marsh’s 2014 post “World War III: Pillage and plunder” provides some helpful historical background about power shifting from the British empire / Five Eyes / etc. to the Chinese empire, and then her 2020 post “The catalyst effect of COVID-19,” offers more crucial background, regarding the present attempt at a planetary mono-empire, transcending the Cold War binary and dangerously trying to sublate us all into obedient nothing-humans. Back to the YAC.news post.

The excellent article explains “China’s goal is global ideological and economic domination. To achieve that, it is spreading propaganda, expanding information operations, amassing economic and social influence, and sabotaging democratic political systems.” The article gives backstory and context such as “The CCP has had a monopoly on power in China since Mao Zedong first obtained control in 1949 after a grueling civil war. The CCP currently has more than ninety million members, not including non-Chinese loyalists scattered worldwide. Over 70 percent of the CCP’s members are men” but in 2019, more than 42% of new members are women, contemporary gender parity in joining authoritarian destruction. Here’s a key paragraph from YAC.news:

The CCP does not seek ideological conformity but rather power, security, and global influence. President Xi promotes China’s authoritarian governance as being superior to democratic political systems and seeks to spread “Chinese wisdom” throughout the world as a “contribution to mankind.” Xi speaks of China’s prosperity as proof that the path to prosperity does not lead through democracy. Unlike the United States and the fallen Soviet Union, China is currently not spreading its ideology through the installment of authoritarian strongmen or through military conquest. Instead, it promotes itself as “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence”. Chinese officials commonly speak of the “right” of nations to choose their political systems, often advocating the right of countries to be ruled by nondemocratic regimes. When paired with China’s economic and political measures China’s policy reinforces authoritarian regimes and weakens democratic systems around the world.

There’s much more to the YAC.news article. Chinese spies protecting Vancouver money launderers, CCP (and Russian) support for Assad and the Myanmar junta [also Lukashenko in Belarus, noted by YAC elsewhere], and People’s Liberation Army strategy—the PLA recently allied with the Taliban as the Chinese have been taking possession of abandoned US armament in Afghanistan, where resistance continues (now hear this and consider). In July, China threatened to nuke Japan. If you think you’ve heard bellicose rhetoric from Texans, watch the CCP video embedded below that went out to two million subscribers (source one, source two):

Speaking of war, note that like the physically unfit Trump, China is campaigning against effeminate men and other non-machismo experiments with beauty. China’s TV regulator this month banned the “abnormal aesthetics” of “sissy men”; in February, Wang Hailin, the screenwriter vice president of China’s National Film Literature Association, ranted in moronic binary form: “If a man pays too much attention to his outfits and his makeup, it means that he is trying to avoid responsibility and our society is going backward. …If we have more sporty and manly men, it means that our society is moving forward and improving.” Gee, so simple even authoritarians can understand it, unlike, say, cutting their toenails.

The Chinese government harasses Chinese nationals on Canadian soil. The Toronto Star reported last month that a Chinese student located in Canada retweeted three posts critical of the CCP or against its interests, from his fake-name twitter account with only two followers. That was all it took for the Chinese authorities to contact him (in Canada) and his family (in China) with threats. They told him to delete the posts or “face trouble.”

In November 2019, the Toronto Sun detailed how dozens of Chinese in the Vancouver area are getting in person visits on Canadian soil from “Chinese officials” due to their anti-CCP online posts. “When we meet in my office, they want the blinds closed,” Brad West, mayor of Port Coquitlam (just outside Vancouver), told the paper. “They’re that fearful.” He said the Canadian “government has been doubling down on the same approach [to this problem] for decades now and the proof is in the pudding. There hasn’t been a change and things have gotten worse.” The article concludes with the mayor saying, “Maybe I’m being too simplistic in thinking, but when dealing with a bully, there does come a point where you just have to stand up for yourself.”

Where else is the CCP harassing Chinese nationals? In the United States. In July 2020, Reuters reported on FBI director Christopher Wray’s explanation of China’s “Fox Hunt” program in an hour-long presentation to the conservative militarists at the Hudson Institute. The program sees Chinese citizens, some also US green card holders or US citizens, who are anti-CCP dissidents, finding themselves blackmailed on US soil—told “return to China promptly or commit suicide” for example—by CCP “emissaries” suddenly showing up and using the Fox Hunt targets’ family members back in China and even in the United States “for leverage.” At the Hudson Institute, Wray said there are “hundreds of [Fox Hunt] victims” in the United States, and the CCP forces use “a variety of means of coercion” against them. “If you use your imagination,” Wray said, “you’re not going to be far off.”

The FBI director points out that any Chinese company is required to give the CCP any information its requests on anything. That includes data of USians using Tik Tok, owned by a Chinese firm that tries to censor mention of the Xinjiang concentration camps where Uyghur and other minorities are incarcerated by the CCP for indoctrination, torture, rape, and death. The CCP has also created an international state-sponsored organ trafficking industry.

Canada and the United States aren’t the only places China’s influence activities reach. As linked in the YAC.news article, intelligentsia guy Larry Diamond and other intelligentsia guy Orville Schell, wrote a November 2018 report at the influential conservative Hoover Institution think tank, on the Stanford campus, about China reaching beyond its borders in nefarious ways. The report’s 48-page second appendix, titled Chinese influence activities in select countries, draws on typical intelligentsia sources (journalists, academics, bureaucrats, yadda) to list example after example of CCP influence and harassment operations in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Quoting from the second appendix:

China seeks to make itself more palatable to democratic societies by using many of the customary vehicles of soft power—such as state-funded research centers, media outlets, university ties, and people-to-people exchange programs […] In conjunction with the dramatic expansion of Chinese economic interests abroad, the Chinese government has focused its influence initiatives on obscuring its policies and suppressing, to the extent possible, voices beyond China’s borders that are critical of the CCP. Targeting the media, academia, and the policy community, Beijing seeks to penetrate institutions in democratic states that might draw attention or raise obstacles to CCP interests, creating disincentives for any such resistance. Chinese economic activity is another important tool in this effort. Beijing is particularly skilled at using economic leverage to advance political goals in the realm of ideas […]

[For Australia, for instance:] In June 2017, a joint investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media revealed that the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) had warned the major political parties that two of Australia’s most generous political donors had “strong connections to the Chinese Communisty Party” and that their “donations might come with strings attached.”

YAC.news published a separate article on September 21, “China’s war on global education,” which says: “The Chinese government is actively working towards undermining academic freedom globally. Currently the CCP is influencing academic discussions, monitoring Chinese students abroad, and censoring scholarly inquiry. Chinese nationals have reportedly had to alter their behavior and self-censor to avoid threats, harassment, and authoritative backlash. Individuals who show interest in democracy, pro-democracy movements, or criticize the ruling class are monitored and reported on by CCP informants and spies.” To help combat such CCP coercion on university campuses, Human Rights Watch in March 2019 issued a 12-point code of conduct (3-page PDF). It advises measures such as speaking out in defense of academic freedom, recording instances of CCP infrigements on same, disclosing Chinese funding, and more.

The September 28 YAC.news “Prelude to war” article concludes:

China is not only on the warpath to subvert democracy but also pervert our global social contract built around human rights which was designed to in theory protect us from the blood lust of tyrants after the second world war. While the weakening of the human rights charter has been underway for more than half a century by despots that go unchallenged or democratic countries such as the United States that violate it with impunity, China’s plot for power aims to outright erase it. […]

Any effort to combat the CCP’s growing influence and reach must start with cracking down on transnational organized crime, especially that originating from the Golden Triangle and being spearheaded by China-linked Triads. Aggressive anti-money laundering measures need to be put in place across North America and Europe to cut off CCP funding. Anti-money laundering measures must include an international crackdown on illicit or suspicious real-estate and luxury asset acquisition across major metropolitan cities such as Vancouver, Canada, San Francisco, U.S., and London, U.K, among many others. A serious inquiry and crackdown on the vast network of Triad linked – Chinese diaspora based businesses used as fronts for human trafficking, such as spas, beauty salons, and general stores is also necessary. Any effort to curb China’s dark money should avoid arousing xenophobic sentiments, which would only serve to distance potential allies and disenfranchised Chinese in diaspora leading them back to the grip of the CCP. Legislation must also be amended to hold politicians and officials found to be colluding with the CCP judicially accountable. Those actively receiving funds from CCP linked organizations while promoting the party’s interest also need to be subject to transparency measures and held judicially accountable if found complicit […]

In order to secure democracy journalism across democratic countries must regain independence from CCP complicit media moguls and sponsors. Civil society must also be given the tools and training to allow complete transparency on the whereabouts of its funding and any CCP linked connections of its most vocal members. In order to circumvent China’s financial grip, with the Belt and Road Initiative, on financially strained countries, wealthy democratic countries must provide, corruption free, infrastructure development. Accountability and an end to impunity for officials, royals, and wealthy individuals residing in democratic countries must also gain priority to counter China’s narrative of western hypocrisy and instability […]

Currently some democratic states have sent naval assets to the Pacific to curtail CCP expansionist actions however without serious moves at home China grows bolder and stronger. Ultimately if China’s plot is not stopped and democracy is not reinforced the countdown to military confrontation at a global scale is underway.

Go read the whole thing at YAC.news and follow the links, including those in that appendix, so that you remember not to forget.

Worldwide trade economy collapse/change

A year and a half ago, in her post “The catalyst effect of COVID-19,” philosopher Heather Marsh wrote: “We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once. […] the [trade] economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups [cults, to oversimplify] when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality [cult mindsets, to oversimplify], as economics is. The crash we started the year off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted [consider] power structure with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.” She then goes on to supply a list of specific opportunities that activists could pursue during the pandemic to establish/defend a world that’s much more exosocial [based on balanced, euphoric interactions rather than predatory, draining transactions].

In Seattle, when I stop by grocery store news-stands for a few moments, the papers are full of the latest headlines about the ongoing implosion of the trade economy. Maybe your area news-stands are similar. Even booksellers are affected, as Quartz reported on September 16: “Publishers are warning sellers and consumers that supply chain issues have forced a major slowdown in book production and threaten a shortage of certain titles for the rest of the year. Supply chain problems have touched almost every aspect of book production, storage, and delivery, mostly as a result of Covid-related bottlenecks. […] because many books are printed in China, the route from printer to the bookstore is currently fraught with bottlenecks. Port congestion, lack of shipping containers, a shortage of dockworkers, and trucking staffing problems are impeding the movement of books from warehouses to store […] publishing delays are likely to hit independent booksellers harder.” On September 13, Tubby & Boo’s, a New Orleans independent bookstore focusing on science fiction and fantasy along with titles of interest to queer communities, put together a 15-tweet thread detailing problems with raw materials, costs of production, distribution/circulation of commodities, and so on.

System collapse — that’s the warning from global supply chain workers according to a September 29 article posted by CNN Business. The piece centers on the joint open letter from International Chamber of Shipping and other shipping industry groups to heads of state attending the United Nations General Assembly last month. The industry organizations asked the UN “that our transport workers are given priority to receive [World Health Organization] recognised vaccines and heads of government work together to create globally harmonised, digital, mutually recognised vaccination certificate and processes for demonstrating health credentials (including vaccination status and COVID-19 test results), which are paramount to ensure transport workers can cross international borders. We also call on the WHO to take our message to health ministries.” The supply chains are expected to buckle further toward the end of the year when employment contracts come up for renewal.

What does trade’s downward spiral mean for how we organize ourselves? Today, wage slavery is compulsory: the completely contingent order of things—for now—is that almost everyone must pick between Employer A or Employer B or Employer C to toil for moneytokens, or feel shame for begging in a world where free essentials aren’t cheerfully shared, or die. Sometimes the authoritarians describe this wage slavery as freedom; other times, they admit it’s compulsory, as in late September, when Gary D. Cohn, chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, also an IBM vice president, told Yahoo Finance that “we need to force people, in many respects, to reenter the workforce.” For more on IBM’s witting complicity with fascists, read investigative journalist Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: How America’s Most Powerful Corporation Helped Nazi Germany Count the Jews.

I’ll try to make the worldwide trade economy collapse/change a recurring feature of my news blasts. If you feel dismay, remember, as John Donne (sorta) said in other words centuries ago, don’t respond by building emotional walls and blaming yourself for the corporate destruction making our lives difficult. I think I’m taking a little liberty with Mr Donne. Point is, reach out, talk about shame to throw it out the airlock, strengthen yourself, build bridges, and stick up for yourself and others!

Art Blasts: Theodore Sturgeon, Wanda Landowska

Since from now on it might be fun to include blasts, timely and untimely, about all forms of art, let’s look at some fiction and music real quick. Like trying to get a cranky vehicle started, I’ve been having trouble getting my own fiction-writing going as much as I’d like (although it is going, just slowly), so someone (Hoi!) recommend a while back that I do stuff about fiction to build up enthusiasm. Art blasts may help with that. This weekend’s are apropos of nothing; most aren’t timely at all!

Fiction, other) I have a friend who just published a poetry book, and another friend who just sold two fiction tales, but I haven’t read them yet. Sorry for the delay, y’all. I’ll get to your work soon!

Fiction, Theodore Sturgeon) One of my favorite writers is the late Theodore Sturgeon, mostly known for his stories of science fiction and fantasy. His work might be described as a bridge between the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction (circa 1938 – 1946), in which scientists like Isaac Asimov portrayed cerebral, familyless men exploring the universe and saving it nearly singlehandedly with hard rationality, and the New Wave of Science Fiction (1960s and 1970s), in which anti-authoritarian authors, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, focused on soft sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc.) and promoted/debated counterculture ideals. Sturgeon’s ponderings on love and his lyrical style, seen for instance in his screenplay for the famous Star Trek: TOS Amok Time episode, was a huge influence on the far more famous Ray Bradbury.

This two-minute, 2013 video from Open Road Media, which has been digitizing Sturgeon’s backlist, will vibe you with the author quickly:

The above Sturgeon video and facts have been familiar to me for a long time, but this past week I was delighted to stumble, for the first time, on the last issue of the Steam Engine Time fanzine, from March 2012, which contains a lengthy, well-sourced biographic and analytical essay on Sturgeon’s work by Matthew Davis, and ruminations on Sturgeon’s 1953 story “The World Well Lost” by Dick Jenssen aka Ditmar. Jenssen explores how “The World Well Lost,” written at a time when in the United States homosexuality was still voted by psychiatrists into being a diagnosable mental illness, shows bigoted homophobes as objectifiers obsessed with superficial appearances, while love is shown as a connection between what people have on the inside, regardless of the anatomy of their naughty bits. Before reading Davis’s essay, I already knew a lot about Sturgeon, but his piece told me things even I didn’t know. For instance, Sturgeon wrote for the black-and-white TV show Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), which predated The Twilight Zone. I love the latter, but have never seen the former, so I was startled to learn from Davis that Sturgeon wrote the very first Tales of Tomorrow episode, “Verdict from Space.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the full 28 minutes are on youtube, giving me something to watch asap!

Music, Wanda Landowska) At the end of Sturgeon’s best known novel, 1953’s More Than Human, he describes ethereal post-humans inspiring humanity, and one result of the inspiration is “a child Landowska listening to a harpsichord.” He means Wanda Landowska, Polish pianist and harpsichordist, born 1879, died 1959. If you enjoy Bach, as I do, you might be more familiar with the widely available interpretations of his music by eccentric and deceased Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Yet Landowska was very famous in her day, and still is among those knowledgeable on the musical era. Both keyboardists performed Bach’s 1735 Italian Concerto. We can use Gould’s popular interpretations as a sort of baseline to compare Landowska’s earlier interpretations against.

Same thing for Bach’s two- and three-part inventions from 1723, pieces I used to annoy my family with by playing them on the piano over and over. Both Gould and Landowska recorded the inventions, Gould in 1963-64 and Landowska in 1959. Hers are all up at the Internet Archive; his are all on youtube here. We might compare Landowska and Gould’s performances of a single piece from that set of compositions, the 13th two-part invention, in A minor:

Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have anything to say about Gould, Landowska, and JS Bach right now—I was just sharing. In future posts, I hope to share music by Debussy, Grimes, Queensrÿche, Savant, and others. It’s been a weekend of typing; now I’m at last spent of words. Until next time!

This blog post, IELTS Enquiry on Results, Pfizer + blog updates, and news blasts for US, China, and the worldwide trade economy collapse/change … plus music and fiction! 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/2021/10/10/ielts-enquiry-on-results-pfizer-blog-newsblasts-china/. 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 number 40 of 52. I skipped weeks 37, 38, and 39. Note: My two entries...