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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intro to the DOGE Dogshit

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

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

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

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

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

If we can just shake his tightrope some …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conflicts of interest and the ongoing administrative coup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body count: federal departments/agencies DOGE is destroying

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terminator (Schwarzenegger): Basically.

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

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

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

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

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

Like, say, Tesla.

Apr. 5: #TeslaTakedown

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

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

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

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

I’ll see you Saturday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just remind me not to root my phone.

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

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

Note (added 31 August 2022): Two philosophically minded Greek physicians, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, who lived around the second century AD, and Hippocrates of Kos, aka the Father of Medicine, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, would have made stronger examples of severe misogyny in ancient thinkers— read here to see why — but the philosophers I discuss below, Thales and Hippo of Samos, are revealing too.

Today the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, giving states the green light to criminalize abortion. Half the fifty states are now expected to do so. This is an authoritarian assertion of control over women’s bodies; it is forced childbirth for those pregnant.

Some 2600 years ago, the progenitors of Western philosophy walked around ancient Greece conversing with each other, their followers, and the military leaders who grew up with them as tutors. (Anaxagoras taught Pericles; Aristotle taught Alexander the Great.)

The received view sees these men, and their conversations, as the starting point of Western philosophy. The ivory tower, the think tanks, the intelligentsia all starts with them.

Even Supreme Court decisions, the justices’ clerks pouring through tomes in the library, are built on this intellectual edifice that rests on ancient Greek philosophers.

The ancient thinkers kicked off Western philosophy with masculinist bias. For those not familiar with the word masculinism, consider it the opposite of feminism. In The Creation of Me, Them and Us, contemporary philosopher Heather Marsh defines masculinist theory as “based on research that only includes men or is presented from an exclusively male point of view or which sets the experience of men as the normative standard.”

Read W.T. Jones’ five-volume A History of Western Philosophy, covering thousands of years, and you will see not a single woman is included in all those pages. That’s masculinist theory for you. The tomes discuss battle and blood and sweat, but nearly nothing about caregiving and reproduction.

When the foundations of the intelligentsia were being built in ancient Greece, how did masculinist theory arise? After all, women have been heard more and more lately through #TimesUp, #MeToo, and #OpDeathEaters; today’s ruling is a slap in the face, trying to turn the volume down on women and the topics often associated with them.

Thales: All is what?

W.T. Jones and others present Thales as the father of Western philosophy. In the sixth century BCE, he lived on the Mediterranean shores of what is now Turkey.

If you look at standard resources such as the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on him (provided by the University of Tennessee at Martin), you will learn the most important idea of Thales was that all is water.

His metaphysical theory — all is water — is classified as material monism. Material meaning he didn’t say all is something nebulous such as energy, but all is something definitively material, water. As for monism, that means all is just one thing. Unlike, say, Empedocles, another philosopher of the era, who reduced existence to four different things he called “roots,” Thales credited water alone with being the universe’s fundamental stuff.

In her highly readable book Thales of Miletus, philosophy professor Patricia F. O’Grady explains what all is water actually means. Thales envisaged water as a cyclical, pervasive medium. Cyclical like the water cycle: puddles evaporate into clouds which rain; the rain solidifies into mud and maybe rock that eventually liquefies. Pervasive as in water existing everywhere as a kind of backdrop from which familiar objects (trees, sand, etc.) emerge and back into which they dissipate as they move and change. Thales is awarded historical importance for his theory partly because it is held to represent the beginnings of looking at the world scientifically: attributing happenings to the natural substance of water rather than supernatural divinities.

That may be the complete story of Thales’ idea.

However, it is a speculative reading, but Thales may have meant his water to have semen-like qualities. This is not something explicit I have come across in readings on Thales, but a passage by the famous ancient philosopher Aristotle suggests it to me. (Thales left no primary source writings, so we depend on other philosophers, particularly Aristotle, to learn his views.)

Conjecturing how Thales arrived at his watery theory, Aristotle suggests Thales may have observed that “the semina of all things have a moist nature, whereas water is the first principle of the nature of moist things” (983 b27).

The “semina of all things have a moist nature” is a pretty evocative phrase: it says all things include semina, or seeds — seeds in a broader sense than just sperm — and that these seeds are moist. He then says water is the first (fundamental) thing, when it comes to moist items, which apparently include everything since all things have moist semina.

It also seems to me Aristotle, or Aristotle’s Thales, is trying to associate the two — the water and the moist semina.

Not so much a “I proved he certainly meant this” and instead a psychological reading, as in: Gee, what do you think these guys are really talking about here with all this stuff about moist generative seeds?

He may have just meant botanical seeds, or Aristotle may be suggesting that an observant Thales saw, ubiquitous, moistness and seeds — even sperm, which is watery. Maybe the metaphysical water of Thales was intended to be understood as sperm or more plausibly sperm-like, with motive and generative powers, as Thales imbued it.

I could be flat-out wrong. Thales’s word for water, ὕδωρ, does not mean semen anywhere in ancient Greek. But I think the Aristotle passage is pliable enough for us to consider that Thales might have connoted, not “all is semen,” but “all is water, which is a lot like semen.”

Aristotle’s hypothetical Thales going on about semina, and seeds (of some sort) somehow being relevant to his foundational water, suggests the founder of Western philosophy may have been arbitrarily prioritizing men, a way of making men’s seminal fluid close to the foundational stuff of reality. After all, why could it not have been vaginal arousal fluid or amniotic fluid? If Thales was giving his foundational water qualities of semen, that would mean other, non-semen things fall in approval by comparison. A woman risking childbirth, a dangerous feat, would not be of foundational importance, if what’s close to the most important thing (water) is semen rather than her fluids. And if so, that is the historical origins of today’s Western intelligentsia: masculinist bias.

(I should note there are probably other ancient thinkers with views about sperm that I am simply unaware of. I just happen to have recently studied Thales and Hippo of Samos.)

Hippo of Samos: Listen up, men produce the soul

Roughly a century after Thales, in the fifth century BCE, the philosopher and physician Hippo of Samos said something similarly prioritizing semen in his explanation of the universe. He is conventionally described as coming from the island of Samos, but in fact he may have come from any number of places in the ancient world.

The theologian Hippolytus from a few centuries later records in his book Refutation of All Heresies the otherwise unavailable words of Hippo of Samos: “semen […] manifests itself to us […] from moisture […] it is from this [i.e. the seed] that, [Hippo] says, the soul is produced.”

In other words, Hippo believed the soul derives from semen. Moist semen, if you want the details. The soul is not the entire universe, but of course the soul is rather important.

If we agree it is semen, and nothing else, from which the soul is derived, then we might look down on other substances. What about vaginal arousal fluid or amniotic fluid? These are not soul-producers, according to Hippo of Samos, but we nevertheless know their importance in reproduction. They are left out of soul-production by Hippo of Samos because of masculinist bias: he’s established an exclusively male point of view, setting the experience of only men as the normative standard. He’s arbitrarily left out vaginal arousal fluid and amniotic fluid (and other things) to focus exclusively on semen.

Again, these ancient thinkers are those held by the ivory tower to be their system’s origins. It’s a commonplace that an undergraduate philosophy degree is good preparation for law school, with philosophy majors besting other majors in LSAT scores. Learning that everything is semen or that nothing but semen has a role in producing the soul sends a clear message as to whose voices are to be heard: men’s. Moving from that in the classroom to law school to clerking for the Supreme Court … well, you get the idea.

There are probably other ancients besides Thales and Hippo of Samos who have outlined masculinist systems. In The Creation of Me, Them and Us, Marsh writes the opinion that women are “subjugated by nature” is “an opinion philosophers and scientists have pontificated about for centuries with long treatises on passive eggs and active sperm.” It seems injustices need justification; we give way too much honor to philosophers justifying the unjustifiable.

The eye of biology

A single man can inseminate many, many women. But if you want humanity to survive, you wouldn’t want your species to consist of a single woman. She might die in childbirth (which is more dangerous an activity than often realized) and at the very least she will have to dedicate massive amounts of time and energy to pregnancy and presumably caring for a completely dependent infant across years. So, multiple women are needed, whereas just one man can get the evolutionary ejaculatory job done. Therefore we have a glut of inseminators: too many men. But humanity has to make sure to have enough women. Ergo, women are of higher survival value to the species than men. This argument appears to me rigorously true.

From unheard to heard

When men do not hear women, they pay a price.

I have spent many hours in coffeeshops sitting with some male friend discussing Western philosophers. What about the ancient philosopher Anaximenes, a material monist who said all is air? Stroking our chins, wondering whether we’re made entirely of water or entirely of air, seems a silly question isolated people on thrones would talk to each other about if they are exempted from salt-of-the-Earth efforts such as domestic cleaning, childbirth, taking care of houseplants, etc.

Of course, intelligentsia paints a lot of prestige onto philosophers — think of elaborate printed editions for the complete works of WhicheverAncientopholes — and I haven’t had too much success convincing my guy friends it’s all a bunch of hype. There’s a kind of machismo of the intellect, I’ve read more Empedocles than you, which to many men is worth more than successfully repotting a houseplant for the first time (as I did today!) or planning a hike with a friend and her dog.

The masculinist intelligentsia has spent millenia downplaying basic activities of life, activities frequently associated with women. Look at billionaire celebrity Elon Musk, promising Mars without ever once discussing who will provide the caregiving on his spaceships. He is speaking of a masculinist space fantasy, like those old Arthur C. Clarke science fiction novels with familyless protagonists who fly around the universe and save it singlehandedly without ever needing to do laundry or cook a meal. Maybe those who say laundry and cooking are irrelevant are often those who have someone else to do it for them.

Too many of my male acquaintances who look up to the right-wing machismos, the Jordan Petersons, the berating ex-military youtube coaches, are the very same guys I know who are simultaneously in financial desperation, abusing opioids, and at risk of (or already committed) suicide.

It may seem dramatic, but it really is a battle between life and death. In her essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin explores her lack of interest in the warfare superiority stories told by the conventional sources, and her preference for stories about, say, gathering food with children:

(“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

Men can also feel disgust at bombings and delight at gathering food. We men need to stop telling ourselves the stories of masculinism and ask women what they know. Maybe someday men can provide traditional male virtues too, such as strength, in ways that are not harmful but helpful.

Resistance

Even amid the masculinist forces of hierarchy and war, to flourish in life requires growing, increasing one’s autonomy; the Supreme Court pushed women down today, taking autonomy away, but things don’t have to end here. The stakes are higher than many just seeing the headlines might know. For example, the National Right to Life Committee is calling for criminalizing aiding people in finding abortions. (Planned Parenthood and others currently continue to assist pregnant individuals in just that manner.)

In Mexico, the abortion rights movement took several years to build the capacity for marches, occupations, and even strikes, and it paid off: in September 2021, the Mexican Supreme Court decriminalized abortion across the country. Those in the United States may be unfamiliar with having a prosocial, genuine nation around oneself, and may be unfamiliar with the kind of work put in by such a people to win political gains. From Sofia Tafich’s excellent article “Abortion Rights Movement Grows in Mexico“:

on March 9, 22 million women participated in a milestone national strike, #UnDíaSinNosotras (A Day Without Us), to visualize a Mexico without women. No women in the streets, no women at work, no women in school, no women shopping, no women on social media. The business group Concanaco Servytur estimated that if every woman took part, their absence could cost the economy up to 1.37 billion dollars. Women who couldn’t participate for personal reasons were invited to wear purple as a sign of solidarity.

Instead of accepting defeat, individuals in the United States can join forces and escalate their efforts, perhaps starting with some of these tactics. Responding to the Supreme Court, Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner tweeted today:

let's shut shit down ladies

can the economy get worse? https://t.co/MlZqwkAhzS

— Reality Winner – Reez Nuts (@reazlepuff) June 24, 2022

Dethrone and turn the volume down on wrongly hallowed masculinist philosophers and academics — don’t be fooled by their weighty editions in fancy fonts — and turn the volume up on people putting in the work for great justice.

This blog post, Opposition to Roe v. Wade since the sixth century BCE, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2022/06/24/opposition-to-roe-v-wade-since-the-sixth-century-bce/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Note (added 31 August 2022): Two philosophically minded Greek physicians, Aretaeus of Cappadocia, who lived around the second century AD, and Hippocrates of Kos, aka the Father of Medicine, who...

Note: This post inspired by #OpDeathEaters, about which you can learn more here, including bona fides from the ivory tower.

Lifelong learning is something we should aspire to; adults often act as if they’ve got it all figured enough, but as the latest school shooting shows, we have a lot of work to do, particularly in confronting head on the awful things that happen to kids — and addressing them.

From regular learning to social emotional learning

Imagine elementary schoolkids practicing reading on a classroom computer. They get points upon finishing a book, and then their next book is at a higher reading level: it’s more challenging to decipher, with bigger words, longer sentences, and new punctuation marks. In contrast, adults often assume they’re finally on thrones forever, at a permanent level of knowledge and fit to judge anything that passes before them. If a difficult-to-read text comes their way, these lordly adults presume the writing must be poor and put the book down. How could it possibly be that their reading level still could improve further?

The same is true of ear-training. Little schoolkids are sometimes taught to recognize the sound of a major chord versus a minor chord. They’re awed to observe their auditory perception of music improving, much like someone with bad vision putting on a pair of corrective eyeglasses for the first time. But when adulthood arrives, well, exhausted wage-slaves are frequently boxed into making the choice they’ve watched their friends make. Kill curiosity! For sadly, it’s practical to do so, sort of. Don’t think too hard. Don’t care too much. The genius of a bop improvisation or a book using open rather than closed punctuation remains perpetually out of reach.

People need support and freedom to develop, even as adults. The oligarchs (name names!) undermining and blocking our growth as individuals and societies must be arrested, and their antisocial systems replaced with prosocial ones. The obstacles to doing so are far less about technical solutions and far more about, to use an education industry buzzword, our social emotional learning.

A look at two stories of trauma can convey a sense of the social emotional development required to free up lifelong education in safety for all. Education, knowledge: they lead to everything else, including gun-free campuses.

Seeking a savior from out the skies to answer his pleas

One of the key reasons we don’t rescue kids from danger is our habit of looking for messiah/savior politicians or celebrities who will do it for us while we munch popcorn and discuss the relative merits of their televised appearances.

I’m not immune to this. My close friends know that in the past year, I’ve gained a slightly embarrassing taste for autobiographies by the heavy metal musicians I idolized in my teens. It’s like Real Housewives, but dudetastic.

Last month, when no one was looking, I finished up Confess by Rob Halford, mostly known as the longtime singer and lyricist of Judas Priest, a very influential heavy metal band that began in Birmingham in 1969.

A common theme in Halford’s lyrics is messiahs, saviors who will arrive, likely on a flying motorcycle, to fix things for us (so we can keep doomscrolling). Consider these excerpts from his lyrics to “Exciter,” the opening track from Priest’s 1978 album Stained Class:

Stand by for Exciter
Salvation is his task
[…]
Who is this man?
Where is he from?
Exciter comes for everyone
[…]
He’s come to make you snap out
Of the state that you are in
Look around and make you
See the light again
[…]
Only when there’s order
Will his job be done.

[Exciter sounds like a strongman politician imposing “order.” right?]

Similarly, an excerpt from Halford’s lyrics to 1990’s falsetto freakshow “Painkiller”, the title track off Judas Priest’s 1990 album by the same name.

Planet’s devastated
Mankind’s on its knees
A savior comes from out the skies
In answer to their pleas
[…]
Flying high on rapture
[…]
With mankind resurrected
Forever to survive
Returns from Armageddon to the skies
He is the Painkiller
This is the Painkiller
Wings of steel Painkiller
Deadly wheels Painkiller

If we look beneath the shiny songs with shiny saviors, we can ask: Why might this theme be so prevalent for Halford? I’m not certain, of course, and things in life are rarely so direct, but I think it’s interesting how his childhood trauma fits with the lyrics of multiple classic Judas Priest songs.

Confession time

On pages 24-26 of the hardback edition of his autobiography, Halford discusses how, at approximately 14 years old, a pedosadist at an after-school program raped (“fondling”) him and some of his friends.

I was scrabbling around for information [about sex in general and homosexuality in specific], and getting nowhere. It was all a mystery to me. And what happened at my latest after-school activity didn’t help.

A small local metalworks began an informal scheme where kids could go down one day a week after school and learn to use equipment like lathes, vices, and drills. I suppose the thinking was that they would get ’em young and we might be interested enough to take up apprenticeships with them a year or two later.

Even though I had no interest in working in the factories—as I’ve said, the idea horrified me—I still went along with a couple of my schoolmates. It was only for an hour after school and, well, it was something to do. It beat being bored at home.

Unfortunately, we quickly found that the bloke giving the mini-workshops had a very different take on the idea of “get ’em young.” He wasn’t interested in teaching us the finer points of engineering. He just wanted to cop a feel.

The mustachioed, middle-aged bloke would show us how to make garden trowels or pokers for the fire, then hover over us. He’d give me a piece of metal marked with a pen line, tell me to file down to the line, and, as I filed away, he’d put his hand on my bum or down the front of my trousers.

The guy would walk round the workshop, from boy to boy, feeling us all up, and nobody said a thing. He never said a single word to us while he was doing it. It happened every week … and yet me and my mates never even discussed it. It was like it never happened.

I was struggling to come to terms with being gay, and while what he was doing didn’t arouse me—it seemed dirty, and sordid, and nasty—I just thought, Well, OK, is this what gay guys do? Is this how it works? It even made me wonder: Does this stuff go on in all the factories, then?

The weird thing was that we kept going, for six weeks at least. Fuck knows why. I just didn’t know what else to do. Then one week, after a particularly intrusive fondling, I mentioned to one of my mates on the way home that I was bit bored of the sessions.

“Me too!” he said, with what sounded a lot like relief. “Shall we stop going, then?”

“Ar,” I said [in Black Country accent].

And that was it. We never mentioned it again.

On pages 31-32, Halford describes in some detail how, when he started working in theater as a teen, he was raped by an older pedo coworker, and how, during that crime, Halford similarly experienced a child’s horrifying inability to understand, let alone stop, what was happening.

Did you notice how child Halford and his child friends never mentioned the fondling aloud to each other, and they stopped going to the pedo after-school program by discussing quitting it in an only indirect manner?

Dissociation is one term used for this. I’ve heard dissociation defined loosely as tuning out in the face of overwhelming emotion. Maybe he sang for decades of saviors because he hadn’t been able to process what had happened to him.

What happened to Halford (either time) is sort of what’s happening to adults today, except grown-ups have more choice and responsibility. Scary information about coronavirus—hey, did you hear about this company Center for Covid Control that’s a scam?—swirls around, and like the schoolkids at the metalworks after-school program, too many adults have trouble processing what is happening, and won’t even admit that much, Gollumizing about how their pain is unique and special rather than quite similar to that of everyone else in their town. After lengthy struggles, people might slip away from an abusive organization here or there, but the idea of going on radical campaigns against all of them is left to fantasy novels and video games. It’s just too much to face, or so adults typically claim.

Clearly nobody showed up to help young Rob Halford in the two very sad and infuriating situations. Not to idolize him or anything, but in the end he had to help himself, of course with assistance from his allies, by coming out as gay publicly in 1998, by releasing his autobiography in 2020, and so on. Don’t we all wish this could happen faster and we could work together? So we don’t have to look back, 15 years from now, saying I wish I’d known in 2022 that…

A look at another story, this one of non-trauma, shows how all can turn out very different.

Saving a Child’s Life

In January, the documentary filmmaker and former therapist Daniel Mackler posted one of his musing videos to his youtube channel, where he’s quite profilic. I find Mackler’s videos thought-provoking, although I disagree with some of his perspective, and I really appreciate the ones where he shares anecdotes and observations from his travels.

In the video, titled “Saving a Child’s Life — A First In My Life” and about 12 minutes in length, Mackler talks about saving a drowning kid out of a hot spring in the country of Georgia. Not only that, but he talks about the aftermath, how the child handled this trauma. I’ll transcribe the relevant parts below.

I was in the capital of Georgia, in Tbilisi, which from what I learned in Georgian means something along the lines of ‘hot water’ because there are hot springs […]

And one day, while I was sitting in [a hot spring], a father brought a little boy, and they were at the edge of the pool, and the boy was maybe four years old — three, four years old was what he looked like to me, but I was sitting there without my glasses, so I couldn’t see very well […]

I was just in my own world, I wasn’t really there to interact […] At some point, I was sitting out of the water, with just my legs in the pool, and I looked and I noticed that the little boy was there dipping his legs in the pool in the other side, and the father was gone. And I thought to myself, That’s not a very good idea […] but there were other people around […] I just thought, Okay, people are watching […]

So I just went back into my world; I was sitting […] eyes closed […] a little bit in lala land, it’s really hot […]

I look up and the little boy’s not there. […] He’s in the middle of the pool of water, under the water, but I’m really blind [with my eyeglasses off …] He’s waving his arms […] like he’s kind of swimming, but not swimming very well […] Nobody’s doing anything […] I’m seeing this kid move his arms and […] suddenly I realized, this kid’s not swimming [… I’d wondered] is this kid holding his breath and playing? […] Something in me, this little voice in my head says: Get this kid out of this water. So I jump in […] I’m like, Dude get in the water and get this kid out!

I picked him up and I realized: he wasn’t breathing. And he was pretty much limp. And I noticed his belly was all distended, with [hot] water in it […]

I brought him to the edge of the pool […] I turn him around, and I did the Heimlich Maneuver on his belly, not hard enough to really hurt him, but just to expel the water and it actually expelled the water first from his lungs […] and he coughed out all this water […] oh my God, he was drowning […] I turned him around to make sure he’s okay, and suddenly he vomited all over me […] he vomited all this yellow vomit all over me and into the pool of hot water […] he vomited some more […] suddenly the place erupted: people were coming over, and this guy who was in the pool also, he came over, and he’s talking to me in Georgian and Russian, and I’m trying to talk to this kid […] the kid kind of clings on to me like a little animal […] And I’m just holding him […]

The father was in the bathroom; he went to the bathroom and left his kid alone. Not a good idea! His kid could have died. So I handed the kid to him and the father took him and went off with the kid […] And then this guy who was sitting there in the pool started talking to me. And it turned out that the guy spoke Spanish. And I speak Spanish. He was a Georgian fellow, but he spoke Spanish. Well, he told me in Spanish, he goes, You just saved this kid’s life. And I realized it was true. […]

I suddenly just started crying. It was just overwhelming […]

The father came back [… he was from Moldova …] thanking me in Russian and shaking my hand.

And then the little boy came and he wanted to shake my hand. And I was worried that he’d be traumatized. As it turned out, I stayed in the hot water and just tried to skim the vomit off the water. And I stayed there.

The little boy did come back and he wanted to get in the water. And I talked about it with the guy who spoke Spanish. And I was like, This little kid, do you think he’ll be traumatized? And [the Spanish-speaking guy] wasn’t sure!

But what happened is the little boy did come in the water. But he kept taking water in his mouth *spit* and spitting it out, like in an arc! So I started doing it with him! And the two of us were doing it sort of as a game. And I realized, he was replicating his trauma. […] This little boy had no fear of me. And he wanted to bump me, he’d fist-bump me like a million times, he wanted to splash water on me. And I realized, he really loved me! And the thing is, I felt this! I loved him! It was like, you know, I don’t have children, but I do have children: and he was one of my children. It was so dear. […] If I hadn’t jumped in the water and saved him, if it had gone on for another minute, for all I know, he would have died […]

By playing with me in the water, by spitting the water out, and me spitting it with him, and us having fun, it was like he got back on the horse, as it were. And he made it his own experience. Where he made a new friend out of it! And I really don’t think he was traumatized by it! And that was so important to me; that was something that was very meaningful to me, because it’s a horrible and sad thing when a child learns very early on to become afraid of something that’s beautiful like the water. […] I don’t think this boy felt that, because he came [back] in the water. And he also learned that adults who are not his family, complete strangers, can be beautiful people, they can save your life.

Lessons from the two stories

When Halford sings of messiahs and saviours, it makes sense: for children. A kid of three or four doesn’t understand how to assess the risk of entering a hot spring. A kid of three or four doesn’t understand how to assess their swimming skills. A young teen troubled about sex does not know what is going to occur his first day at the theater or entering an after-school program. In Halford’s case, he was raped.

Who does understand these matters? Adults. Sometimes, though, out of our comfort zones, any of us can be surprisingly uninformed about what we will find. We might not know, right off the bat, know how we will find the inner strength to do the right thing. And there will always be for each of us consequences grave. Comfort zones cannot remain lifelong excuses. That’s because adults can, at least to a little degree, and then increasingly, self-direct, self-educate, and improve, especially when collaborating.

In most places people are taught collaboration means something extroverted and flashy: to succeed means to have a bestselling, raunchy book called Confess published. But it can also be “just” saving a drowning kid in a hot spring (and, as Mackler goes on to say in the video, making a new friend from the experience: the Spanish-speaker invited him back to his family’s house in a different part of Georgia, and Mackler took him up on the invitation a few weeks later, went and lived with the Spanish-speaker’s family for a while.) Or it can be both.

Since United States public education is on the ropes, possibly even disappearing, we really will have to teach each other, which, even though it’s the hard way, is in the long run, better. Confronting and openly discussing childhood trauma of ourselves and others is a good way to start.

This blog post, Replace dissociation about endangered kids with saving children, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2022/05/26/dissociation-about-endangered-kids-replaced-by-saving-a-child/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net. Also, gimme all your money!

Note: This post inspired by #OpDeathEaters, about which you can learn more here, including bona fides from the ivory tower. Students from Pathfinder K-8 walked out today to protest gun...

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...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 35 of 52. It’s Labor Day Weekend, so a Monday entry still counts! I skipped weeks 33 and 34 due to finishing up an intensive six-week course to (successfully!) become CELTA certified in teaching English to speakers of other languages.

Note: I have a post in progress about Afghanistan and radical mental health in the United States, connecting the two by discussing cognitive dissonance. As a result of my recent and current workload and that entry’s length, I haven’t been able to complete it, and now need to put together something simpler (this post) instead. I’ll get the Afghanistan and mental health writing up eventually, but in the meantime, I urge you to read the timely story of Cindi Fisher and her struggle to free her son Siddharta from Washington state’s notorious Western State Hospital. See here, here, here, and here.

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and moved to Seattle in 2016. That relocation was one of the best things for my life. Over the years, others from afar have encouraged me to migrate. Without their stimuli and the Internet, I’d have stayed in the Lone Star State, never participating in the Hearing Voices Network, never overcoming myriad challenges and increasing my autonomy, such as upping my cooking skill, substitute teaching for multi-month assignments in a huge city with a stressful crack-of-dawn commute, and dealing with painful social/emotional obstacles while interacting/transacting with people of wildly different demographics in a major urban environment. I’d have simply stayed a native Texan, brought up by prep school to belong to academia, isolated and not knowing it, locked in tunnel vision and praising the tunnel.

As I near six full years in Seattle, the time has come to move again — moreover, the time has come to leave the United States, even to get citizenship elsewhere someday. It’s a strange thing to do as a USian. In this country, no matter how much catastrophic medical debt piles up, no matter how many schools get shot up, no matter how often unemployment benefits cruelly expire, making a very specific plan for emigrating — as opposed to Just move to Canada! fantasies — is something you simply don’t hear about. Who does that? USians feel they’re already the most important country: not only the pro-Trump or neocon reactionaries, but also the faux rebels, who insist that if there’s a problem on the world stage, the US must always be the country most at fault. In other words, whether USians love the country or hate it, both agree that, regardless of topic, no other country can possibly be as important. Ever. In their eyes, history has come to an end. But most of the planet’s people live elsewhere, along with their changing cultures, changing languages, and the rest. It’s time to experience that; time for my own history to start a new chapter, while it’s still legal to leave.

But why, and how? On computer-y activist-y twitter, there are occasionally declamations by USians of how persecuted they are, and how special they are, and how they’ll soon leave the country for the better pastures they so richly deserve as rugged swashbuckling heroes and so forth. You’ll find that while I see terrifying political problems here too, my perspective is quite different! I see that for USians, who as a whole including me are to some extent quite tranquilized and emotionally + intellectually stunted (see arguments below), the idea of emigrating generally feels anxiety-producing, even downright scary — just try to talk someone here into renewing their passport, for instance. So I’ve decided to document my strange journey on my blog, full of specifics so maybe someone else will be able to figure out their own path to achieving the same thing someday.

This post is structured into why and how: First two little reasons why to emigrate, next two big reasons why, and finally two hows: a discussion of destinations I’m looking at, and then a discussion of practical steps I’m currently taking. Pertinent music before getting underway:

Little reason for leaving 1 of 2: across-the-board life improvement

In summer 2019, shortly before COVID-19 showed up, I visited Victoria BC (and a little of Vancouver) alone, and later wrote blog posts about it. One thing I discussed is how moving to a place that’s better or worse in whichever ways can dramatically improve or worsen your life across the board, as opposed to the individualization of social problems, also known as the fundamental attribution error. Or more plainly, as @debihope put it in 2010: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” Or, I’ll add, smog, sprawl, and so on. Imagine a bunch of variables:

a: safety of air (lack of air pollution)
b: savings on cost of living (lower prices and so on)
c: rarity of mass shootings
d: education level of the population
e: prosocial or antisocial behavior of the population
And whichever additional variables.

Then imagine each location as a combination of those variables. Fort Worth is the sum of its ratings for air safety, cost of living, frequency of mass shootings, education level, social or antisocial behavior patterns, etc. Seattle is the sum of its ratings for the same variables. Victoria, Vancouver, and more, identical. This is all very straightforward and logical; it might seem strange to USians only because every day the corporate propaganda is screaming that we’re the best, that evidence is what nerdy losers consider, and that problems are almost always congenital rather than almost always environmental (even one’s bodily host, full of microorganisms, can be considered part of your mind or soul’s environment, as this thought-provoking book discusses).

So that’s why moving to a better place can improve your life across the board, but even moving to a place with a lower sum rating can be an improvement in that it can strengthen a person if they’re up to the challenge — and the lower-sum place might have hidden gem aspects to it as well.

Little reason for leaving 2 of 2: recent news revealing the United States as a sinkhole

“It’s really heartbreaking to see children intubated by COVID,” a Texas pediatrician working in hospitals said last week, and the country has just surpassed 2/3 million novel coronavirus deaths with over 160,000 new cases daily largely due to the Delta mutation, but all the same, in southwest Washington state on Friday September 3, the fascist Proud Boys, all-male enforcers for Trump reminscent of Hitler’s Youth, were riled up by false social media posts by another far right group, Patriot Prayer, that wrongly claimed a student faced arrest for not masking. Skyview High School, Alki Middle School, and Chinook Elementary all locked down as Proud Boys tried to gain entry to school grounds. Teachers and faculty guarded doors to keep the Proud Boys out as school security addressed them (I don’t know the details of what exactly school security did). Among the work I do is teaching, including in secondary schools, and fighting off Proud Boys is not really how I want to spend my time as a teacher, a factor in my emigration goal. The eight-second video below (source) is from outside Skyview High School on Friday.

Saturday, September 4, 50+ armed Proud Boys were on the hunt in Olympia, the Washington state capital. Gunshots were fired (I’m not sure of the specifics), and a female independent journalist, Alissa Azar, was assaulted by the Proud Boys. Details are still emerging.

Hiding in a bar in Olympia. I turned a corner to 50+ proud boys who said there’s Alissa and ran on me completely alone. I ran as fast as I could. They caught me and pulled my hair and shoved me to the ground then bear maced me. People af the bad pull me in hiding here now.

— alissa azar (@AlissaAzar) September 4, 2021

Here’s a bit of an account on what happened yesterday…

I ended up alone and trying to leave the area. I had a group and safety… & just a block and a half away is where I needed to be. I was at an intersection about to cross but when I looked to my right I saw that large group https://t.co/uIopctCB87

— alissa azar (@AlissaAzar) September 6, 2021

Labor Day Weekend’s not over yet; there may well be more craziness from the Proud Boys forthcoming in the Pacific Northwest.

Turning to Texas, a pro-snitching, anti-reproductive rights law — the most restrictive in the country — went into effect there on Wednesday September 1 after the Supreme Court upheld it in a 5-4 “shadow docket” ruling. The law bans abortions once cardiac activity can be detected in the fetus, usually six weeks into pregnancy, typically counting from the first day of the last menstrual period (which might not be tracked or trackable, adding confusion and difficulty into the time equation). The Texas law makes no exceptions for rape or incest and relies on private individuals to enforce it; as the New York Times explains, it “deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or ‘aids and abets’ a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.” Snitches and bounty hunters. I wasn’t the inseminator, but as a quasi-supporter quasi-bodyguard against protestors decades ago, I accompanied a pregnant friend to a clinic for her abortion arrangements; such activity would now be “aiding and abetting.” As this five-minute Pussy Riot song “Hangerz” explains, “fundamentalist abortion-bans are about hijacking control and ownership of women’s bodies,” though some of the reactionary foot soldiers fighting for such bans may not perceive that frightening truth themselves.

What’s the “shadow docket” component of the Supreme Court ruling? The shadow docket is contrasted with the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” But wait, what’s a docket?

The docket is the official schedule of proceedings before a court. When I covered multiple federal sentencings of hacktivist/transparency movement defendants (such as whistleblower Reality Winner’s), I’d sign into PACER, the electronic system for accessing federal court documents, and take a look at the docket to see what time the hearing began and in which courtroom. The docket listed not only that info about the sentencing hearing, but also information about and links to each pleading (a written statement a party puts before a court) and much more, which I would read and write about journalistically. “Docket” more generally refers to the workload before a court, as in “the court has fifty zillion cases pending on its docket.”

So that’s docket — how about the merits docket? The Supreme Court’s merits docket is the 60 to 70 or so cases the robed, priestly, and surely heavily surveilled justices will consider each term, hearing oral arguments from lawyers and pondering the pleadings, to make rulings supposedly on the merits. The merits docket cases are usually scrutinized by scholars, sometimes broadcast by media, and so forth, hopefully aiming for an ideal of transparency, because thankfully some refuse to lose their curiosity about what the ruling class is up to.

The shadow docket, on the other hand, is a catch-all term for Supreme Court rulings that, with some variation, are typically accompanied by no oral arguments from lawyers, no reasoning from judges, no identification of which justices voted what, and are released with unpredictable timing. That unpredictable timing makes informing the public about them difficult. For example, not of the Supreme Court shadow docket but of something similar, in Reality Winner’s case, her exceptionally restrictive plea agreement — remember, her leak was a huge component in the story of how the United States was smashed (partly) by Russia, sometimes called the battering ram of China in this global transition from the British Empire to the Chinese one, and thus, her leak helped decloak Putin’s ally Trump, so her punishment has been unusually severe — wasn’t filed until the day of her sentencing, which made reporting on her exceptionally restrictive conditions impossible for the many members of the media attending the hearing: we were given no time to read the plea agreement closely before the news cycle moved on. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket is likewise difficult for scholars and journalists to review. There’s no time for amicus briefs or activists to arrange protests (or sabotage!).

Though the term shadow docket was coined in 2015, something of a shadow docket has existed ever since the Supreme Court has. For a long time, shadow docket rulings were primarily minor, anodyne matters, like granting a side an additional two weeks to file a motion because the top lawyer came down with pneumonia. Over the past four years — during both the obviously awful Trump and wrongly beloved Biden administrations — there’s been a dramatic uptick in shadow docket rulings from the Supreme Court, another sign of the law vanishing. Shadow docket rulings are used now even for controversial cases, such as the new Texas abortion law. (Read more about the recent use of the shadow docket, a major loss for accountability and transparency, in this February 2021 testimony to Congress.)

A two-minute Anonymous video uploaded Friday September 3 points out that the Texas tactic of circumventing the federal protection of reproductive rights by shifting anti-abortion enforcement from the state government to private individuals could be expanded to circumvent any federal protection, such that private individuals are allowed to enforce any new state law regardless of what federal law might say on the matter. Do you realize what an end-times move that is? No more constitutional protections from federal law; your neighbors enforce the local law, to collect bounties. The Anonymous video also announces Operation Jane, named after the Chicago underground abortion service started in 1969, to either take down online systems for snitching/bounty-hunting on Texas women getting abortions, or to poison the data collection by flooding the online systems with garbage information. Indeed, a website seeking snitch reports of people violating the new Texas law has already been spammed thanks to a viral digital protest, including one programmer creating a shortcut for iPhone users to easily submit worthless data repeatedly.

I could offer examples of the sinkhole United States forever, but let’s look at just a few things more, quickly.

Remember the coup attempt on January 6? “A failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Yale historian of fascism Timothy Snyder said this summer, referring to history and the very possible, perhaps even likely, scenario of Trump returning in 2022 or 2024, maybe by force. I recently came across a two-part interview with Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who’s given harrowing firsthand accounts of the coup attempt. The interview from July — part one and part two — is really worth listening to, because though our feelings on cops may be closer to this, Dunn seems a very straight-up dude, easy to empathize with, and his retelling of the insurrection is very expressive and evocative. (The Dworkin Report also interviewed lawyer Alison Grinter last month regarding Reality Winner’s commutation and pardon efforts.)

Remember, in this connection, the words of multiple Holocaust survivors in 2019 (Rene Lichtman, Ruth Bloch, Bernard Marks): ICE is equivalent to the Gestapo, and their current ‘detention centers’ really are concentration camps where genocidaires crush minorities. Replace “the United States” in your head with “Nazi Germany” and ask yourself if living in such a place makes sense. Even if privileged USians think themselves exempt from such matters, recall that in May 2020, during Black Lives Matter protests sparked by George Floyd’s death, the National Guard in Minneapolis swept affluent streets, yelled Light ’em up! and shot paint canisters at non-minorities for the “crime” of standing on their porches, as in this 20-second video (source) that the mainstream media later followed up on:

Big reason for leaving 1 of 2: Unreachable USians and their counterarguments

The above establishes there’s no way for USians to opt-out of having the increasing fascism arrive on their own doorsteps. But plenty of people have legit reasons for staying in the country. Maybe they’re the sole caregiver for a dear dying relative. Maybe they’re dedicated to a project such as cleaning up the Duwamish River by Seattle. I even read a curious story about a monk in his fifties, a psychiatric survivor, who, protesting the rush of technology, took a “vow of stability” never to ride in a vehicle or leave his city (save rarely and on foot), though the story of his (nonsexual) relationship with a 23-year-old woman is a bit odd; in the U.S., twenty-three is typically not the age to take such a vow, and the story treats her as his mere sidekick. Anyway, there are all sorts of understandable reasons a person might decide not to leave the United States. And other countries aren’t automatically perfect — for good or ill, there are coup attempts and actual coups all over the place presently: see yesterday in Guinea on September 5, or the likely Steve Bannon-facilitated one in Brazil tomorrow on September 7 for fascist Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. Whatever the case, each person’s life is their own to find their own path.

Still, there are common fallacious arguments against emigrating that I’ve heard repeatedly from USians and would like to address. These arguments arise in USian conversation when I bring up my goal of emigrating. The arguments make me feel like the majority of USians are unreachable on this topic, though judging from the programmer video above, the kids are all right; maybe I’m just getting old.

The most frequent anti-emigrating argument I hear in the United States is that it’s only a possibility for those with financial privilege. To be fair, this is not my best subject; nevertheless, there are certain awkward truths to be said. Since there are many who have willfully changed countries — including leaving the U.S. — while in poverty, the argument that emigration is only for the privileged is untrue, and speaks more to typical USian myopia. I don’t have the link handy, but I remember reading on r/IWantOut, a subreddit for emigration advice, of a USian in their late teens who sold everything and took a huge risk to just drop themselves into an Eastern European country, I think, and figure it out on the go. Lots of r/IWantOut posts share such stories. There are also many easy-to-find youtube videos of USians telling their stories of how they emigrated while similarly in poverty. Counterexamples, boom! With only $1000-$2000 USD in savings, which she calls a “pretty significant” amount, the woman in the video below moved from Chicago to cheaper Madrid to work as a teacher assistant, receiving a meager income (about $1200 USD per month). “It was one of the most amazing years of my life,” she says. “I’d recommend the experience to everyone.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38BcPsjLdJ0

I was stateless in your dumbass country and I left, what privilege did I have?

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2020

Millions have left, undocumented working class too, maybe your privileged working class simply doesn't have the backbone to do it. A lot of US ex-pats I've met live paycheck to paycheck but are much happier out of that hell hole.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2020

They have $ in capital, the number can be increased through the selling of assets; I've lived there long enough and around enough impoverished people to know most "working class" have access to move if they manage it correctly.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2020

Volunteering and hanging out with US activists has taught me that many of them are simply pretending to be poor (even to themselves); maybe they don’t have a lot of cash daily, but they come from highly professional families who deliver money to them regularly, or would in emergencies or if asked. “Emigrating is a privilege” often means rather “I don’t want to have a confrontational conversation with my family/friends on this topic” or “I must follow a bizarre Kantian imperative to never lie, so when my family asks, I can’t tell them I sold my guitar to get $300 for something they approve of, when I actually sold it to pay an Education Credential Assessment fee they don’t approve of; not lying to my family is more important than my life and dreams going permanently down the drain.” People, especially women, are constantly shamed for being bold and taking risks, and socially ‘rewarded’ — She is just so sweet! — for staying in servitude and remaining meek. So the “money privilege” arguments about emigrating are actually about those paralyzing emotions under the surface, I think, not about actual budget questions.

Further, as I experienced myself, those from upper class families in the U.S. are very often lacking in skills (paid caregivers did the domestic tasks when they grew up; parents or paid accountants did their taxes and paperwork; and so on). This sort of thing hits Reddit regularly, such as these stories of nightmare roommates not doing their dishes ever. It’s pretty inhibiting to grow up in a U.S. golden cage, especially since such families tend to endorse conventional psychiatry. Pedosadist Jeffrey Epstein arranged for psychiatrists to give his victims Lithium and Xanax for their tranquilizing/sedating effect; psychopharmaceuticals are a weapon of control that dull the moxie required to emigrate.

To counter these various discouragements, including the shaming, ressentiment-style crab mentality around emigration — if you can emigrate, it must be because you are bad since you have money, whereas I can’t do it, because I am good since I don’t have money — I’ve lately been thinking of inspirational friends and reading inspirational books. One friend I know simply refuses to pay her student debt (my heroine!). I also just finished reading the autobiography of guitarist, philosopher, and Paganini/Liszt-style showoff Yngwie Malmsteen (who could really use some intervallic additions to his playing such as fourths, sixths, sevenths, ninths, elevenths). In Relentless, Malmsteen writes about riding his motorcycle up and down the stairs of his Swedish high school as a teen. I was a bit like that as a teen, too. In Texas, such energy often means (at least for white kids in prep schools) getting psychiatrized, but for him in Sweden, he got away with it, then later, upon receiving an offer to play in a Los Angeles band, flew across the planet for the first time to this city he’d never heard of (pre-Internet days), bringing with him nothing but his guitar case with an extra pair of jeans crammed inside. He ended up living in a run-down warehouse for a while in a violent neighborhood, playing for cheesy Steeler and getting his bearings; it got him to where he needed to go next. And only yesterday, a world-traveller friend recommended to me Mark Ehrman’s book Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, which I haven’t read yet, but it looks great.

Even disability may not be an insurmountable obstacle to leaving. People who have been intensely psychiatrized may legitimately worry about family/friends calling the police and having them hospitalized if their plan to leave the country seems grandiose or otherwise insane. Breaking things down into plausible step-by-steps may help persuade policers, or another option is simply outwitting one’s opponents. It can be done. Witness the amazing book Bipolar 1 Disorder: How to Survive and Thrive by Molly McHugh, originally from the United States. Despite a history of manic psychosis, she slowly, after much trial and error, managed to get off her psychopharmaceuticals and travel the world with her son.

I had a creative writing teacher once who told the class he kept hearing explanations from us for why ideas put forth wouldn’t work; he then said, why not give explanations why they will work?

https://twitter.com/SpartaZC/status/1427163651576897539

The other counterargument I hear frequently is that, in the face of collapsing supply chains and rising fascism, a USian should stay here and fight. I hear it so often that I wonder where the phrase originates; USians never say they want to remain here and fight or stay here and battle. It’s always stay here and fight. The collocation appears in translations of the Iliad and the stage play Death of a Salesman. Vivid, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words like “stay” and “fight” are usually preferred by English speakers over Latinate clunkers like “remain” and “battle.” But I still wonder if there’s something more to the phrase’s frequency.

Anyway, let’s say I agree to remain here and bat — I mean, stay here and fight. What’s step one? The very first page of Sun Tzu’s millennia-old book The Art of War, studied by US generals, the KGB, and the Vietcong alike, says warriors must “determine the conditions obtaining in the field.” He asks fighters to consider, among other questions, “Which army is stronger?” and “On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?” I’ve never heard a USian, who insists we must stay here and fight, address such questions of Sun Tzu’s. At a glance, the Pentagon is stronger than antifa, since antifa lacks aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, and so on. USians generally lack discipline, too, since every day almost all down corporate soda and other junk food along with countless hours of corporate entertainment (eating healthy is disciplining and strengthening).

In short, if this is a US activist battle, where are our battle plans? Were I to spit the above paragraph at a stay-here-and-fight advocate, they might say, as if dismissing the entire subject, “antifa is morally stronger,” but Sun Tzu lists moral force as just one factor among others. Verily verily, a serious fight requires serious observation, planning, and effort. My observation is, in terms of a US football metaphor, the idealists and radicals in the United States are way behind in the fourth quarter, too far behind to rack up enough points on the scoreboard to win against supply chain collapse and fascism. Enough evidence of that for me is that Seattle activists I know refuse to factually assess the battlefield in the first place and rely on subtly insulting each other into agreeing that everything will be fine and those who disagree are simply being negative or uncool.

Lots of antifa and other activists in the United States are working hard, as social media sometimes shows, and I don’t mean to denigrate that effort. Maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth from particular experiences. But there’s definitely an unacknowledged deer-in-the-headlights thing going on with many of us here. And that naive attitude is part and parcel of how USians typically view life. In this amazing article for the New York Times, novelist Brian Morton writes:

Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price. But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Try explaining to the Proud Boys or the National Guard that antifa will win simply because your fabulous bumper sticker slogan says so — you may find their disagreeing force overpowering.

One last thing. We know reactionaries, whether of the neocon or Trumper flavor, believe all must be made equal: equally subject to their rule that Only he with enough moneytokens deserves to eat; all others must starve or hope for shameful charity. The US left also tends to believe all must be equal. When I tried to explain to a Seattle leftist in person that whereas in the World War II era, the country incentivized very cerebral people (physicists, etc.) to immigrate here, now it’s the opposite, it’s what’s called a “brain drain” where some of the country’s brightest, seeing the sinkhole, are fleeing to other countries where their abilities will be welcomed and rewarded. That has long-term negative consequences for the United States, y’know? But the USian I was explaining this to got mad at me: they said it was offensive to suggest that some people are smarter in some areas than others: the phrase “brain drain” alone was offensive. So it’d be hard to convince such a person to divide up an antifa army to put some on intelligence work (researching opponents’ street addresses and supply chains), others on street brawls, and some on both, because on the US left, everyone has to be as equal as the rightwingers insist everyone must be under the dollar sign. With that differences-denying kind of mentality widespread in the country, nobody can honestly evaluate the conditions on the field and win.

Big reason for leaving 2 of 2: growth through adventure

All the news, arguments, counterarguments, and counter-counterarguments can stack up like a gloomy list of gloomy factoids, some of them debatable or personal, but they ultimately matter little in comparison with my biggest reason for aiming to leave the United States and get citizenship elsewhere. That’s simply the drive to embark on a challenging adventure, to get out of my comfort zone, to stop metaphorically hiding under the bed, and grow/develop as a person. I’ve written about that in many places on my blog, and will in the future, so I won’t talk about it here much.

I will say, however, three things.

First, notice how many USians will downplay the importance of this cross-border adventure thing, yet play video games where they’re flying airships to new lands to have virtual adventures (or perhaps they’re reading or watching fiction with the same journeying tropes). So, it seems adventure, etc., is necessary in life, and hiding under the bed, perhaps as a good psychiatric patient, is a downward spiral that will be met with more pills and pats on the head from the authorities.

Second, psychologists have an interesting concept called flexibility of thought, or cognitive flexibility. Regardless of his brave youthful journey across the globe to Los Angeles, Yngwie Malmsteen nowadays continues to play the same tricks on guitar (c’mon, man, that trademark descending ostinato lick of yours? why not play it ascending at least once in your plentiful recordings? or try inspiration from a different classical musical genre such as impressionism?). Similarly, people everywhere keep hiding under the bed. This is a huge topic, but the idea is to have enough adaptibility to meet unfamiliar challenges. I’ve heard cutting away the safety net, having no Plan B, can really help, so that you devote all your time to your goal, but on the other hand, poor risk-assessment and foolhardiness don’t work, either. Just something I think about regarding emigration; I’m no expert. But I’ve long seen chest-pounding USians call themselves adults because they remuneratively serve corporations or their ancillaries on salary, yet be literally too terrifed to walk off a sidewalk or climb an enticing tree and sit in it. Hello, we’re losing our childhood birthright of curiosity and courage because of how we came to be ruled by Death Eaters.

Third, as USian leftists debate who is or isn’t privileged in this country, and typically prefer to hear the perspective of a union organizer down the street rather than indigenous people on the other side of the planet, the real tragedy is that USian comforts are provided by multinational corporations benefitting from destruction that turns people into refugees who must cross countries without any choice in the matter over whether they’re privileged or ready enough to leave their homes or not. USians seeing refugees on boats somehow still remain convinced they themselves are of a special, exceptional sort when it comes to emigration. Perhaps USians are different, at least in terms of our unadmitted social and emotional crippling…

https://twitter.com/AliMayyu/status/1423946781646200842

Salvation destinations

Enough of the why. Now for how.

Initially USians tend to approach the topic of foreign destinations as a fantasy and actually enjoy talking about it — for pretend. The stressful details of renewing a passport or taking an IELTS test go out the window and everybody daydreams aloud about which country they’d go to and why.

I’m thinking about going to a country where I can gain citizenship, but that might not be a linear process. Some countries are very difficult to earn citizenship in, for instance many European countries. So I might have to go to Country B first, perhaps to improve at a required language or improve employment history, before going to Country C and getting citizenship there.

Let’s indulge the make-believe a little, yet spiced with facts. Here are my current preferences/thoughts. Bear in mind that different places within a country are, you know, different. In the service of brevity, the below kind of commits the Star Trek fallacy of one p̶l̶a̶n̶e̶t̶ country, one culture.

Canada: This would be ideal for me in many ways. In British Columbia at least, I could visit Seattle easily and easily research northeast Oregon in person for my fiction project, too. The electrical outlets are the same, the bioregion, at least in British Columbia, is the same — same trees, same weather. Hearing Voices Network chapters exist in Vancouver and Quebec City. Sort of an easy, beginner way to leave the United States. I’ve heard rumors of an upcoming lottery draw of permanent residency Express Entry applicants, maybe as soon as late September, requiring far fewer points than the usual threshold. You get points by, for instance, having post-secondary education credentials, higher IELTS scores, or good full-time employment history. Frequently in the United States nowadays, paid-jobs that actually take more or far more than 40 hours a week are classified on paperwork as part-time, but the USian emigrant can (try to) provide a letter from the employer that the work was tantamount to a full-time job; I’ve heard from a recently successful permanent residency applicant that such letters can often pass muster. Full-time job offers from Canadian employers especially boost points. However, Canada, or parts of Canada, can be expensive, so I’d probably have to pour a lot of time into teaching, which might be a good idea for a few years as I continue to improve my health via a compounding pharmacy. It’s also a decent place to be vegan, I’ve heard.

The Netherlands. Rising sea levels aside, the advantages of this country and its Amsterdam capital city are fairly well known, belonging to the European Union being just one of them. It’s also where the Hearing Voices Network began, so — pending further research — I assume it’s a great place to continue escaping conventional psychiatry’s grip. However, I’ve heard the Netherlands is expensive, or parts of it are, and to become a citizen, you have to learn Dutch, which to me looks like long strange strings of letters, but who knows, maybe I’d change my Dutch-ignorant mind someday. Most importantly, there’s a Dutch-American[USian] Friendship Treaty that eases the path for self-employed US entreprenuers to live in the Netherlands long term. I’ll look into that, see what the possibilities might be for various types of online writing and/or tutoring businesses. It’s another decent place to be vegan, I understand.

Spain. Another European Union member, and currently tied with Germany for the strongest passport in the world (measured in terms of mobility), at least on this index. A big draw for me would be improving my Spanish from slow and clunky to fast and fluent. I assume (haven’t checked yet) that Spanish skill is a requirement for citizenship. There’s of course a history of radical politics in Spain (and dictatorship). I’ve heard it’s an okay enough place to be vegan, at least in certain cities. And it just seems really cool to me. I like making big decisions based mostly on intuition — like James McMurtry’s we mostly go where we have to go — not laundry lists of pros and cons, and somehow Spain just feels really exciting. It’s a challenge to get EU citizenship, though…but things happen? Spain may be expensive, and there are no Hearing Voices Network chapters there on this international list, but perhaps by savvy emailing I could find a chapter that does exist and just isn’t on the radar yet.

México. The US news claims there are many problems in México, maybe to scare USians off (I mean really, who the hell wrote this? I didn’t write the “scary” subhead tho…that was an editor). But even if there are some bigly problems — like, say, Proud Boys trying to bust into schools? — well, like I suggested above, regardless of the across-the-board life improvement idea, there may be hidden gems where not expected, and life isn’t about greedily grabbing comfort anyway. Plus, despite a narco-state, amazing social movements (see also the Mexican Supreme Court ruling unanimously to decriminalize abortion on Tuesday September 7). I could improve my Spanish and live cheaply, perhaps teaching English language leaners for a while at an established school (there are some interesting job listings presently that I think I qualify for). My Spanish would skyrocket, and so would my employment history, as a teacher I mean (what about writing?). It’s a little hilarious that despite USian chest-thumping about the strength of its almighty trade economy, and the supposed evilness of so-called Mexican illegals heading north, it’s perhaps more practical for some college-educated USians to get certain good jobs by heading south. With such an improved employment history, I could maybe go to Europe later. Sadly, there’s no Mexican Hearing Voices Network chapter on the international list, but the same emailing savvy might turn something up. I don’t know what veganism is like in Mexico, but hey, with all the corn-based chips and tortillas, at least it would be easy to avoid gluten! I think…

Some country in South America, esp. Argentina or maybe Uruguay. The ideas here would be to improve my Spanish, see different stars and a vertically inverted moon, and live cheaply thanks to the US dollar. I have a friend who moved from the US to Argentina and supports herself fully with online content marketing writing and some tutoring side jobs, in the US a pretty hopeless way to try to support oneself longterm except maybe in rural areas, perhaps with nontraditional housing (e.g., an RV), though maybe I’m unaware. I briefly met a Seattleite, big into queer community stuff, who moved to progressive Uruguay and seems to be doing well there. I’ve heard it’s hard to be vegan in South America, and that I might find it hard to make friends there, though of course there’s a lot of variety on a whole continent! Unfortunately, the international list of Hearing Voices Network chapters lists not a single one there. However, the aforementioned Molly McHugh, author of Bipolar 1 Disorder: How to Survive and Thrive, also wrote a book about living in South America, so I’ll have to read it asap!

Those are the places I’m chiefly considering. Two more quick resources. Nomad List provides dossiers on various worldwide destinations, detailing things like cost of living or Internet connectivity quality, and I’ve heard it’s a pretty accurate site. Then, Totalism lists unusual places to live, especially for Europe. Hackerspaces, intentional communities, punk houses, artist spaces, zones like that. I might be wrong, but I imagine doing well in such money-saving environments, as opposed to one’s own apartment, would require cut-throat social skills.

Practical, specific, actual, real-life, not-kidding steps

Like I said at the start, it’s time for me to get going, to emigrate. Hell, in the hours and hours it took to write this post, I could have already become a European citizen! That’s a joke, but…

I decided to just throw myself into the process, to complete some practical, specific, actual, real-life, not-kidding steps even if I don’t have a full picture. Besides what you might expect — looking at job postings, sites like Nomad List, and playing with Canada’s Express Entry points estimator tool — there are three things I’m doing.

First, I’m digitizing, discarding, donating, or selling belongings. The fewer objects I have, the easier it is to move. It’s taking surprisingly long, maybe because the items are laden with emotional meaning. I’m having to grab records from Texas, too. I have about half of the records I want from Texas so far.

Second, I’m having my Bachelor of Arts degree evaluated for Canada. It’s called Educational Credential Assessment. Canada wants to ensure non-Canadian academic records are truly equivalent to Canadian degrees, so applicants have to pay a fee to one of five designated organizations to have them assess the transcripts. I went with World Education Services, because they’re apparently the fastest, and I’m hoping to get an Express Entry application in before the next draw for permanent residency, which as noted above, may come later this month.

Third, I’m taking the IELTS general exam on Thursday. That acronym stands for the International English Language Testing System, and it’s pronounced EYE-ults. Even if an applicant is a native English speaker who’s putting together the next installment of the Oxford English Dictionary, Canada (and some other countries) want the person tested for English proficiency. IELTS is the predominant way to go about it. The higher the IELTS score, the more immigration points when your application is considered. I just booked the exam two nights ago. Since the IELTS isn’t offered in Washington state, and not nearby any time extremely soon, I’m suddenly going to the border town of San Diego to take it. So, now I have to cram. Maybe very little study time was a bad idea; when I took the GRE test trying to get into grad school, I flunked the writing section, multiple times! (Probably a blessing in disguise, because I don’t want academia to steal from me the joy of working on my fiction, nonfiction, etc.)

Anyway, it’s time; and on Wednesday, it’s off to San Diego, the border town!

… Maybe while there, I’ll just head south, never to return. ;)

This blog post, On leaving the United States 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/2021/09/06/on-leaving-the-united-states/. 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 35 of 52. It’s Labor Day Weekend, so a Monday entry still counts! I...

Note: In 2021 I’ll publish one blog post per week. Here’s entry 12 of 52.

In 2004, I began asking others to call me by my first name, Douglas. Before that, I’d been called a variant of my middle name (which I won’t share here for mundane privacy purposes). I wanted a fresh start, because I was just entering my first semester at a university, and also, I was annoyed by the various paperwork hassles seemingly everywhere when your legal name and the name you go by differ. For example, class rosters not specifying how you’re actually called encourage teachers to address you by what appears on the roster. Since many teachers labor under the unfair requirement that they educate very large class sizes, and thus face far too many students to always memorize the preferences of each successfully, try as they might, you as a student can go through months and months of unpleasantly trying to correct a teacher about your name, something that’s supposed to intimately characterize you. The indignity of being called wrongly is even more profound for those whose name changes signal giant shifts in their personhood, such as those who switch names as part of gender or religious transitions. Me, I just thought a fresh start and an end to the paperwork hassles would be nice.

It’s strange how names characterize us, isn’t it? Consider the eponymous name of the protagonist in the 1998 movie The Truman Show: unlike those around him pretending to be his neighbors, Truman is a true man. But names, at least when initially given, actually characterize the parents/caregivers, their aspirations for the infant who’s receiving some particular name in the first place. A sense of this reality is frequently missing from fiction, when authors pick a name to symbolize or allude to something about a character, rather than about that character’s parents or environment (including economic class). In other fiction, such disparities between a character’s true self and their name are portrayed, especially if the story involves a name change. While authors spend lots of time thinking over the given names characters go by among their peers, I think surnames in fiction don’t receive much scrutiny, particularly in terms of migration. If an author is writing a story set in 2030 in Nebraska, and currently in 2021 nearly all people alive with surname X live only in France, should the author provide backstory for why someone with surname X is living in Nebraska just nine years into the future? Or are surnames freebies for authors and readers alike? As long as it sounds good and plausible enough, maybe no bulletproof backstory is required. You could reduce such realism problems to absurdity by requiring an author depicting a coffeepot in a story to know how it got there, tracing it all the way back to the specific particles emerging from the Big Bang. On the other hand, books too often expect readers to assume narrators are white and show WASP-y names as the norm, presenting anything else as exceptions in need of explanations.

Since 2004, there’s been a certain discomfort with my first name, for many of those using it and me alike. I’m regularly asked the same question when meeting people: “Do you prefer Doug or Douglas?” The question stumped me for a very long time. Whenever I looked within, I discovered I legitimately don’t have a preference. Either is cool with me! So I couldn’t advise the question-askers, who as far as I could make out, wanted to be caring and accommodating. Just about every time I replied that I have no preference, the question-asker became frustrated. They said I should have a preference. But I didn’t. Maybe I hurt their feelings, as though they were going out of their way in offering to remember my preference, and my not having one stung like a rebuke, in some transactional world they exist in. Only this past month have I finally figured out something more about the question. I’ve been doing core strengthening in physical therapy to help with one of my legs (two surgeries on it in my life so far), and the physical therapist is extremely knowledgeable and competent. I like him, and I’m really grateful to have his excellent help. He told me he has a thing for trying to remember the best names to call people by. We were both a bit flummoxed by my lack of a preference between Doug or Douglas. I thought it over. I think the fact I get along well with this superb physical therapist enabled me to see something more about the question and my lack of a preference.

Here’s the answer, what’s been the answer all along: Doug and Douglas are the same name — just at different diction levels. Doug is informal; Douglas is formal. Compare “What’s up, Doug?” with “Listen, Douglas, we need to have a talk.” They’re the same name in two different forms. I don’t want to micromanage which level of formality my interlocutor picks for any particular conversation. I trust the appropriate diction level can just emerge naturally, simply from both parties’ interactions and the environment at large. Because I realized all this just a few weeks ago, I haven’t had the opportunity to test it out in real life yet. But the next time someone asks me, Do you prefer Doug or Douglas?, I’m going to tell them one’s for informal, the other’s for formal, and that they can select between the two as they think proper. I wonder what will happen. As long as they don’t call me Doogie.

A common thread in the above — asking others to use my first name (revealingly, sometimes frenemies from the past still don’t, pointedly refusing to honor my request); trying to justify to readers a surname’s presence in a geographic location and time period; attempting to explain to strangers that the two forms of a single name are for different diction levels — is a sense of individuals having to legitimize their names, and perhaps themselves, to others. Names are usually social, bestowed upon us and by us as we pass life down through generations. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, each character on an anarchist moon has but one name, handed out by a central computer registry to keep things organized. In contrast to this socially-focused system, in Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel More Than Human, there’s a gripping moment when the first character we encounter, a lonely outsider, finally names himself. Initially, “Men turned away from him, women would not look”; however, after roughly five years living and working with the Prodd farming family, he learns to speak, though “always he preferred not to.” Eventually the farmer Mr Prodd asks him for his name (get it? Prodd as in prodding him). Because he has come to trust Mr Prodd, he’s able to fulfill this request. He thinks that a name “is the single thing which is me and what I have done and been and learned.” Despite his growing connection with the Prodds, he picks the name Alone, which he can manage to pronounce merely as a single syllable, Lone. That seems very individualist, but he chooses a name only when someone else asks him for it, so it’s an event both personal and social. (The book later follows Lone gathering what Sturgeon calls a gestalt, kind of a chosen family, from other outlier outsiders.) Does a person living on a desert island like a castaway need a name at all? Might they forget their own name? Finally, look at the concept of true names in Le Guin’s Earthsea fiction. Characters and objects in that univese have two names, a common one that’s safely shareable, and a second, secret, true name that empowers them and gives others power over them if it’s discovered. In neither case, however, are the names chosen.

Online, as in certain types of radio communication, users choose handles, also known as pseudonyms or simply nyms. These lessen tendencies in conversation/debate toward the logical fallacies of personal attacks and arguments from authority, where interlocuters waste time saying “You only believe that because you are [insert identity attribute here]”, as in, because you’re tall/short/rich/poor/white/of color, etc. With nyms, individuals can choose personally meaningful ways to describe themselves, and the handles can become so meaningful that among those heavily involved in computers (or perhaps simply involved in online chatting), it’s common to go by the handles even in face-to-face conversation, rather than by legal names. Some users, in contrast, choose random characters (for example: ang) to identify themselves, not wanting to give their personal story away to strangers. And some change nyms frequently, rebooting their name over and over, trying to prevent others from assuming things based on what might have been past interactions with the person. When I play around with it, this aspect of computing (akin to writing under a psuedonym) can feel very liberating.

It seems names should be a touching aspect of life, and fun to ponder, but they’re commonly just another battleground. Picking a name can feel empowering (because how could an unchosen name really represent/express who you are?), while keeping a name bestowed by others can offer connection linking the past, present, and future together. Maybe, like successful accounts of trauma that provide healing, names need to be simultaneously personally meaningful, and effective and connecting in social contexts. Really thinking names through, as opposed to dissociation from life (“it’s all a blur”), as well as good relationships for experimenting with names, seem very helpful for individuals trying to determine what might be their own best path.

This blog post, The battleground of names, 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 a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/03/26/battleground-names/. 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? Please email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021 I’ll publish one blog post per week. Here’s entry 12 of 52. Screenshot of a tutorial for QBasic, a Microsoft programming language from the early nineties In...