Thoughts in these dumb times

Not the billionaire pedophiles, not the rich assholes flying and chumming with Epstein, not the academics who hobnobbed with him after they knew what he did, not the politicians from either party who flew to his island, not the Orange Shit Stain in the White House. Fuck all of them. Only the victims count.

Trump is someone who has shown, over and over again, that he's willing to throw ANYONE under the bus if it benefits him. So why is he so eager to protect people in the heavily redacted Epstein files? Who's this guy protecting?

Independent institutions. That's it. Have that, and all the benefits will follow and you'll be able to have nice things.

Ever noticed that the dudes who ask this as a jab against trans people are themselves terrible at distinguishing between a girl and a woman? Is it any wonder that so many of them turn out to be pedophiles? And the ones who aren't pedos are still led around by the ear by their Orange Lord who bragged about walking into young girls' changing rooms. It's a lineage of evil that accuses others of doing what they themselves are doing or are into or are willing to overlook (just ask Trump-endorsed Mark Robinson, the Republican who wrote in the chat spaces of porn sites that he enjoys transgender porn and is a "black NAZI"). Trumper Evangelicals are probably the worst. They support the most disgusting, grifting, money grubbing, sacrilegious piece of crap ever to assume Presidential office. Many of them have stopped reciting certain of Christ's teachings at sermons because those teachings are now considered too "woke". In other words, the Orange Parasite has ...

Trump is a literal criminal who bragged about walking into girls' changing rooms, pardoned a literal drug trafficker, pardoned a ton of rioters who assaulted hundreds of police officers on Jan 6, and whose son and favorite attorney are both fans of rapist, serial woman abuser and grifting piece of shit Andrew Tate, but there are tens of millions of grown men and women who refuse to use their logic and common sense and who are too dishonest to admit that they're in a cult of personality, are convinced that he's anti-crime, pro-cop, and protects women and girls. This isn't just stupidity. A stupid person can still crawl out from underneath whatever stupid thing they believe. These people are functionally mentally retarded, and I don't use the word "retarded" here in a derogatory, schoolyard playground sense. I'm saying that if you can't see that a felon who pardons other felons isn't anti-crime, then you're not just stupid, you're literal...

I feel like the people who look past every disgusting and fascist thing that Trump does are the sorts of people who, no matter how many appeals to ethics or facts could be assembled, couldn't be convinced that the My Lai massacre was evil.

Are we supposed to have religious instruction in public schools to inculcate so much morality into children so that they too will grow up to be con artists who boast about walking into girl's changing rooms and who lie about losing an election and then pardon terrorists who assaulted hundreds of police officers? What good is your religious instruction if Trump is God's vessel? Can't God do better than this piece of shit? Why do you feel the need to drag your own deity down to Trump's level? Or is the fact that Trump is a piece of shit the reason you love him so much? In that case, why should anyone take YOU or your beliefs seriously?

The golden age of action figures was arguably in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan deregulated the advertising industry and lifted certain restrictions on advertising to children. This led to a proliferation of TV cartoons, such as The Transformers, that were geared towards selling toys. One of the mottos of that particular series was "Till All Are One." I don't know about you, but that sounds a little bit communist to me. The Autobot faction were the good guys, and their ethics centered around selfless devotion to protecting humanity. They were not financially driven. They weren't concerned about making it big on the stock market or becoming billionaires, though their alt forms were often of sports cars and the like. But their core moral message was selflessness (I'm not getting into a debate here about what counts as "real communism", whether the USSR was "actually communist", whether Reagan was justified in his anticommunist stance, etc etc. I...

There are still many people who believe that the "Roswell Incident" involved the recovery of a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. They vociferously deny that it could have been a Project Mogul balloon (newsflash: it was). Similarly, the Westall school case in Australia was likewise also the result of a balloon, but adherents of the ET angle ascribe all kinds of amazing "facts" to the case that to their eyes obviate the possibility that it could have been anything other than the sighting of alien craft. Interestingly, in Curtis Peebles' "Watch the Skies!", a USAF study is described in which pilots were sent to zoom past balloons. Lo and behold, they looked like flying saucers. More recently, military footage of a Hellfire missile was shown at a Congressional hearing on UAP. The "UFO" is a balloon, possibly launched by the Houthis. The US used a Hellfire missile because it was probably the only ordnance available to hand in the vicinity durin...

Marjorie Taylore Greene's recent denunciations of Trump have drawn the typical infantile man-child backlash from the orange shit stain in the White House. She is reportedly getting death threats against herself and her family from members of the shit stain's brainwashed cult of dopey man children who want to turn America into a Russian swamp and a "Christian" nationalist dictatorship. Some in the GOP have warned that Greene could be a canary in the mine, portending further retirements from the party among Representatives who, for various reasons, have had enough and don't want to keep going along with whatever Sleepy Don tells them to do. Of course, it's these invertebrates who facilitated Trump and gave him a pass nearly every single time. Now the monster they helped create is coming back to bite them. Kudos to Greene for speaking out on the Epstein files, the victims of Epstein, affordability, Israel, the divisive political climate in in the United States, a...

Rewatching the documentary "Mirage Men" (based on the book of the same name by Mark Pilkington; it might be the other way around, with the book being based on the documentary) I was struck by something: Richard Dolan claims that the US government has managed the narrative around UFOs so that people can be inoculated against the topic and to treat it with ridicule when it's brought up. By associating UFOs with entertainment and movies, the public is thereby primed to dismiss out of hand reports of UFOs. But what about the competing hypothesis: that the government is drip feeding us information about aliens (again, through the medium of entertainment, to acclimate us to the idea of ET visitors) so that when the big reveal is finally done (that the government has been hiding evidence of aliens or that aliens are coming to Earth, or even that their technology has been captured) we won't panic and we can handle it? One hypothesis says that we're exposed to the partial ...

Steven Greer, one of the most prominent Disclosurists, claims that the US government and private military contractors are in possession of alien technology that could usher in an age of free energy and thereby a profound social, political and economic transformation for humanity, and that the truth about this tech is being concealed for this reason (so that Big Oil, the military industrial complex etc. can maintain control and continue to rake in profits, etc.). This would imply that the aliens themselves are peaceful and have superseded their own social and political problems and have achieved a more morally advanced society than we have, since they are advanced enough to not only have that technology but to use it to visit other star systems.  But Greer also claims that the inventions of people going back a century or more have been suppressed because these inventions offer free energy. The inclusion of the alien myth seems rather redundant here, but it also evinces a tension in ...

No one's coming to save us. Not Jesus, not an imam representing Mohammed, not space aliens, not any political leaders. There are exceptional individuals throughout history, but institutions are the real key. Institutions are the arenas in and mechanisms with which problems can be hashed out and solved, disagreements air peacefully, where power is shared, distributed and curtailed, where expertise can make itself felt for the greatest number of people. However, we do need leaders who understand this, for only such leaders will utilize institutions properly and defer expertise and authority to them in the appropriate way. The most important thing, from a broad contour point of view, isn't whether any particular policy is correct or not, but whether we get to keep our democracy and maintain the institutions that are its bedrock. Without that, we will devolve into personalist rule by demagogic despots who seek only after their own power and adulation.

We're living through a time in which positive feedback loops (but of bad things) are amplifying hate, division, inequality, racism and ecological destruction. Trump, but also the general wash of exclusivist authoritarian ethnopopulism around the world, is the backdrop. AI is the accelerant. Full grown men who simp for the orange felon are the foot soldiers. This is a Singularity of sorts, just not the type that the cyberpunk subculture would have been proud of. Technology is enforcing dystopian surveillance and exploitation instead of freedom. Here are some of the elements in this autocatalytic cycle of shit: * Authoritarian populism and its disdain for liberal democracy, norms and civility. * The dude-bro podcasters (Rogan, Pool, Fridman etc.), some openly selling MAGA cultural wares, others feigning "I'm just asking questions" while platforming all manner of post-truth slop and opposition to expertise and science. * AI being leveraged to encourage people to become d...

Trump and, to a somewhat lesser extent the MAGA cult that he leads (and to a somewhat lesser extent again, the MAGA brand per se) seems to be in favor of national self-immolation for its own sake, for aesthetic, mythic and psychological reasons, evincing a deep pathological strain within the American body politic. The disaster this "President" has inflicted on the United States and its prestige is likely to be generational and possibly not something that it can ever recover from. Cruelty and lack of empathy has erupted from a corner of the American soul like effluent from a broken water main. Trump did not invent this, but he was an accelerant of this trend. However, the longer he stays in power, the more he becomes a cause rather than an effect. It will take a lot of dedicated work and level headedness among those who believe in democracy, institutions and human progress to put the genie of this dark political alchemy back in its bottle. Whether we can may well determine the...

Any of these by themselves would likely have profound beneficial effects. If they could all be implemented, they would have generational significance in restoring public confidence in government in the United States and would go a massive way toward fixing much of its dysfunction: * Expand the Supreme Court to 2X or 3X its current size. * Impose age limits on public servants and elected officials. * Institute universal health care. * Institute a concerted, nationwide drug treatment program. * Restore the $10,000 limit on individual contributions to political campaigns to help get big money out of politics. * Ban elected officials from owning stock. * Abolish Presidential pardons. * Abolish the antebellum turkey leg known as the Electoral College. * Institute a genuine Green New Deal to break America's reliance/addiction to fossil fuels and to make America the world leader in green and alternative energy technology, practices and implementation. * Ditch the waste, fraud and abuse th...

The Rapid Support Forces, an evolution of the Janjaweed militias that were previously used by the Sudanese regime to suppress rebellion in the Darfur region, have in the past month carried out possibly more than 60,000 murders in the city of El Fasher (ironically, the RSF, along with the regular Sudanese Armed Forces, took part in the coup against the previous dictator Omar al-Bashir but were unable to come to an agreement about how to configure the country's security forces. El Fasher was the last stronghold of the current government in Khartoum). Satellite images show scores of locations with L, C and J shaped objects 1.3 to 2 meters in length, consistent with people being executed. Arguably, the atrocities were enabled by the world's lax response to Russia's rampage in Ukraine and Israel's rampage in Gaza. The RSF likely saw that crime pays and were emboldened to carry out what may turn out to be the worse atrocity of the 21st century. As we experience democratic dec...