Love Time

Get loved on, fools.  If you have somebody to love on this day, do your duty.  If you have not, well, yours is another kind of love.  The love of your fellow humans, of those kinds of humans that can have love for you.  Like me, por ejemplo.  I can love you.  It’s easy.  Mwah!  I blow kisses.  Or offer solemn salutes, if that’s more your speed.  Fist bump?  A terrorist fist jab..?

How do I love strangers?  Let me count the ways:

I’m an everyday people fetishist.  If you don’t look like a model, you’re probably on the list of people I’d bone, if I wasn’t in a closed relationship, and if you were amenable.  Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, baby.  Especially if you’re over forty and overweight like me.  Yeah, I’m talkin’ to me, baby.

That was a bit off color.  Moving on…

We’ve all got our own row to hoe, as they say.  I respect the struggle.

We are all subject to egregious indignities, and slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  Your pain is not worth it, but it does ennoble you nonetheless.

We are all made out of the same parts in varying proportion, mentally and physically, and how could I hate somebody like me?  That would be like hating myself, which is just not in my nature to do.  The people on my shitlist had to work pretty hard to earn that position.

And if you’re here, it’s probably because you have similar values to me, whether we agree about every last detail of it, and that makes us comrades.  Camaraderie is no joke.

While I can’t be very emotionally available to very many people, I will generally do my best.  If you need some affection, holler at your dogg.  I will love upon you in the comments below.

Chaos Rules Everything Around Me

C.R.E.A.M. by the Wu-Tang Clan says “Cash Rules Everything Around Me.”  No, my fellas.  It is Chaos that reigns supreme.  I do think you understand that – it does get mentioned in your song, by synonyms.  Anyway, I’m feeling it tonight, feeling my religion, as I ponder the problems of our time and come back knowing less than before I started pondering.

The biggest problems that face humanity may be insoluble.  No resolution but the bitter end – which I don’t expect for some time to come, will not likely live to witness myself, so don’t get too bent.  But it’s a possibility – over a long enough arc an inevitability – so whoever is there to bear witness, I hope they can care for each other with a dignity that has eluded the masses of people for a long time.  Learn the lessons of Hellstar Remina.

But smaller problems than the apocalypse are giving me a case of the ass right now.  Take any one issue, think of a solution, and you can think of a thousand ways it can fail.  The nature of life is that everything angles for every advantage it can achieve until it undermines itself or is outmaneuvered by another angling life form or circumstance that throws the chess pieces on the floor.  Start over, if you can.  The same principle seems to apply to civilization.

One of the big problems that philosophy applied itself to, going back to the ancient world, was to decide what is the best society, and how it can be best achieved.  By the nineteenth century and early Modernism, this took the shape of various theories about the natural progression of history, of which Marxism was the most enduring.  I remember hearing a Rage Against the Machine song where lil’ Zacky said, “It’s the end of history,” and the commie rocka was not talking doomerism, more the idea that capitalism was entering the stage where it is inevitably defeated.  Lovely vision.

I’m pretty sure one or more of those old Modernist theories included the notion that this progression of history is cyclical – that societies come and go in a predictable way.  To that I say, maybe not all that predictable, but yes, invariably societies fall.  Political ideas and orders fall.  The idea that America was ever about freedom, that is rocketing into graveyard of history.  It’s sickening to see all of Orwell’s observations about totalitarianism coming to pass here – especially the inverted language.  Yell freedom while demanding servitude and conformity.  Seriously, fuck the USA so fucking much on that one.  Y’all fascists make me wanna puke.  Utterly beneath contempt.

Not what I was thinking about when I started this post.  Here it is:  when the fascist screws tighten on the internet, how will we communicate with each other?  When the police state algorithmically suppresses all leftist / lgbt+ / non-christian thought online, how do we stay in touch?  Social media is a panopticon.  Right now, the means to communicate “off the grid” are too elaborate for the average person use, in practice.  VPNs are controlled by businesses, which are all focal points of attack for fascists – systems that can fail.  Being based in Uzbekistan doesn’t make your VPN much safer; it just means the efforts to compromise it will be covert and illegal.  The dark web is grimy pedo murder city, no place to be, and involves some kinda weird technical knowledge just to get through the door, right?  Ya probably don’t want to answer that question if you know, heh.

Chain e-mails?  I’m told e-mail has terrible security.  Encrypted e-mails?  How does that shit work?  Could we get everybody on the same page in time to dodge the hammer coming down?  Will we be passing around secret media, thumb drives in brown envelopes?  What will we want to tell each other about, and how can we do so, in a way that minimizes exposure to a state run by murderous thugs?

Everything I can think of has failing after failing, exploit after exploit, and can’t hope to rival the reach of even the worst social media sites.  I’m not looking forward to this becoming a more significant problem than it already is.

One sliver of hope in that:  When corporations are the only law, competition between those corporations gives windows for some small amount of liberty.  For example, let’s say the fuckos who run bluesky decide they want to keep snatching all the business from non-creeps, and successfully resists buy-outs and government pressure.  Eventually they will become corrupted or fail, but in the meantime, it’s somewhere to be that isn’t run by the state’s biggest corporate allies.  The hand of the market giving us a favor, for a minute.  Maybe this keeps happening – we all just keep wandering from place to place, until our years in the desert are at their end.

It’s chaos.  The corporations would like to monopolize everything, fight to become Big Brother, but they’re still ruled by entropy, at the end of the day.  They eat each other, teeter, and fail from their own internal corruption.  We’re just fleas on the dog.

Anyway, for the time when Matt Mullenweg’s meltdown consumes wordpress and thereby Freethought Blogs, I hope you’ll all subscribe to my xerox’d zine, coming soon to the haunted and burned-out remains of a university near you.

We Weren’t Abandoning You

There’s a notion, fueled by some careless rhetoric from blue state types, that we don’t care about helping protect the oppressed in red states.  As I reflect on that in this moment, we really weren’t.  Absolutely not.  The very fact we were trying to make sure the federal government was blue on top was specifically an effort to protect your rights.  It helps us as well, but it helped you a lot more – because that federal power was necessary to impose your rights on hateful state governments that argued prejudice is a state’s right.

State’s rights is the cry of those who do not have as much political power as they’d prefer, for their faction.  I find myself singing it from the rafters now, and that is, low key, an abandonment of you now.  Sorry about that.  I do hope that whatever rights we manage to protect in blue states, we can use those to help red state refugees when they need it.  I know Canada doesn’t want you.  They are absolute shits about USians trying to move north.  Not sure if Mexico would take US refugees, but I can think of some big reasons why they wouldn’t.

Point is, we weren’t abandoning you, back in the halcyon days of anytime before now.  But it might look more like we are now, as we scramble to secure our states’ rights to protect human rights from the fascist death machine.  I hope you won’t look poorly upon us for that, and I hope it benefits you as well, in some way, some day.

I’m too tired to find a better place to end this post.  May these motherfuckers devour themselves and vanish from the Earth in a puff of smoke.  May we all live to see a better tomorrow.

Getting Terrorized

If it seems like I’m not taking the current political situation seriously, that isn’t true.  I feel it.  It hurts.  It’s wretched.  I wish I could fix it, undertake some sort of violence that would set the world right.  I feel bad, for at least some amount of time, every day.  Feels worst in the lead-up to going into work on Monday – Sunday night, Monday before dawn.  Composing this on a Sunday, back on the 2nd.

But there are some facts that are very important to keep in mind.  Most of us are going to be able to live the rest of our lives just fine, whatever hardships this may add.  We can prepare ourselves in various practical ways for a lot of bad things, but not all of them.  Worrying is not preparing; it’s just hurting yourself.  I know, you can’t avoid it completely.  I sure can’t either.  But we have to minimize its impact on our lives.

Frankly, if we don’t, the terrorists win – to borrow a cheesy slogan from the post 9-11 era.  The fascists love it when we think about them all the time, when we show fear, even when we show anger.  Were you ever bullied?  Same deal.  I don’t love living in fear of what the bastards will do next, but I really don’t love the fact they can crank their hogs to the signs of my fear.

We have to oppose them.  I do think almost all the methods we were using before still have a place in practice now.  We might have to add some new tricks.  Keep up the good work, when and how and if you can.  And if you can’t?  Do your best to survive and thrive.  Anything you can do to make your life as good as it can be, that does matter.  It is a victory in this larger war, on one small but very important battlefield.

Meanwhile, what can we do to ease our worries?  I’m still trying to find things that work for me.  Obviously, I’ve been throwing myself into creativity, and plan to continue that as much as possible.  Even so, tonight I find myself feeling kinda ill, my viscera trembling like a fall leaf.  Keep in mind I wrote this days ago, so reassurance belated and probably unnecessary when you read it.

At least I have a posse.  I have a blue state behind me, I have a union, I have my comrades here.  It doesn’t feel real some days, but other times, it really helps me.  I know a lot of you don’t have all of those reassurances.  But you do have a comrade in me, for what I’m worth.  Let’s keep this life going, together.

Drop suggestions for ways to feel better, even if they only work a little bit.  Add ’em all up, that’s something.  See you later!

Specific Actions for Blue States

This is an open letter to the governors and state legislatures of California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and anywhere that still has responsible human beings at the helm.  This blog itself is a wasteland of poorly considered guff, obscenity, and self-indulgent daydreams, so I’d rather this letter not be shared with links to the source.  Just copy-paste it at your politicians, if you agree with my thinking, and by all means, if you have better ideas, improve and rewrite it.  For my part, I’m sending it to Washington State’s Governor Bob Ferguson.

***

The federal government of the United States is being destroyed.  We will fight to preserve what we need, to get a fair return on what we pay into it through taxes, but the thugs have a death grip on every lever of power, and we must respond to their destructive radicalism with constructive radicalism.  We have to build something to replace everything they destroy.  And the best time to do that is right the hell now, because the destruction will happen very quickly.  Like global warming, it is already too late to truly get ahead of it.

This is not going to be easy at all.  I understand that it seems like I’m asking for the impossible.  Right now so much is under threat in so many ways, and we are all operating at a loss from responding to massive natural disasters, year after year after year.  But we cannot expect the status quo to suffice, even in blue states.  Perhaps especially in blue states.

I’m not talking about replacing capitalism, as much as I’d love to be.  I know there is not a body in power with any interest in seeing that happen, and that’s fine.  Properly regulated capitalism is still recklessly cruel and ultimately burning the world to ash, but it’s a system under which we can enjoy some liberty, can lead reasonable lives.  You ran for office in this country knowing what this country is, and I’m not asking you to fundamentally change that.

This the United States of America.  At our christening, we took this name to show that we are a collection of individual nations – willing to be united, but never willing to give up our self-determination.  My proposal is to assert control of that self-determination – to make it our own – so that when the feds say “public schools don’t exist, we’ll only fund hitler youth programs,” we can say “no thanks, we’ve got our own way.”

These aren’t meant to be done in sequence, hence bullets without numbers.  They have to happen all at once, as much as possible, because the “storm” they promised is coming down now.

• Come Together

The blue states need to be forming political alliances, making deals with each other for mutual aid and protection. As I recall, during the pandemic response, the governors did meet. Now it’s even more important to do this.

• Shore up Taxes

None of this will be possible without tax revenue.  All of our states have powerful lobbyists constantly campaigning to keep the wealthy from having to pay a fair share of the cost of having a civilization.  You may have to make some risky moves, you may have to examine every inch of every way money changes in the state to look for new angles, you may have to fuck up the avenues by which the wealthy put their gold bricks on the scale against you.  But you cannot afford to lose a cent.

This could be a significant part of why Democrats have lost so much nationally.  They profit handsomely from business as usual, from legalized bribery in the form of lobbyist money, from gerrymandering that makes their jobs safe at the expense of fair representation for all.  Obama and Biden could have seen the writing on the wall and used their executive power to limit the power of the executive, but they couldn’t bring themselves to lose a drop of their privilege.  You may have to reach within yourself to find principles that have been very hard for the best of us to find, when national power is on the line.  Please do.  Lives are depending on it.

We’re taught in middle school that budget decisions have to be approved by Congress, but the current president has shown that these norms are so much paper.  Expect every drop of federal funding to be leverage for intimidation and coercion, to abuse you and your constituency.  Get ready to lose it all.

• Replace Federal Funding

This could border on impossible, or it could be way easier than I’m imagining.  After all, most of the revenue of this country comes from our states.  But replacing federal funding of state programs will absolutely be necessary, for our continued safety and prosperity.  It is very unjust that our tax money continues to flow to a federal government that cares so little about us, that only trickles back as it sees fit – especially when that is jeopardized by the whims of a tyrant.  However, short of civil war, what can we do about it?

Work around the problem.  Come up with investment schemes, carefully negotiate with the wolves of business.  Maybe some functions of the state can be handled by the private sector.  That has been generally bad for utilities and extremely bad for telecommunications, but if you have no other recourse, privatization could prop up tax shortfalls.  Only use this one with the strictest of regulation, OK?

Right now US Treasury bonds are underpinning the global economy.  The tyrant could end that tomorrow because he didn’t get a nap and felt cranky.  What if California State bonds were so hot that international investors could just ditch the fed and buy into Cali?  How does your value stack up against the BRIC nations?  What about the combined value of the blue states?

• Plan Radical Restructure

Plan this, but with the knowledge it is aspirational – unlikely to be passed into law in one grand sweep.  This is what the radical right wing administration is attempting at the federal level, and attempting it with a grand sweep.  They want to destroy every institution on which the country has come to depend, and replace them with exploitative mock versions that funnel money into the pockets of wealthy administration cronies.  That’s a radical restructure.  We don’t have that kind of power, but maybe we could benefit from some careful measure of that kind of radicalism.

Our states’ institutions evolved over time from the growth of our respective economies, and from the progress of history.  This process is not elegant, not efficient, and there may be costly redundancies in our laws, policies, and bureaucracies.  The right wing solution being attempted at a national level is to wipe away the complexity of established systems and replace them with something new, simple, and rigged to feed the rich.

To help with the goals of shoring up taxes and replacing federal funding, targeting these inefficiencies may be a useful goal.  We don’t have to leave people in a lurch like they have.  The right way to do this is to study how our civil structures operate – what they do, how, and why – and see if we can engineer more elegant ways to achieve the same ends.  Then implement those fundamental changes in a way that exercises care to prevent lapses in essential services.

If the current president cared one jot about his own constituency, actually believed that his right wing agenda was a principled and good thing, he would have taken that thoughtful and slow approach to making these changes.  It didn’t have to be implemented like a blitzkrieg.  That’s just a way of showing off that they don’t have to care what anybody thinks of them anymore.  It’s a way of showing off that at a national level, democracy is over.

• Plan for State Border Problems

While red states demolish their social services, health care, infrastructure, human rights, and worker protections, our states will become the release valve for anyone trying to escape the badlands.  This is already true in many ways, but can get so much worse.  At least for the moment, interstate travel is free access, but as the reddest states try to lock their women in Gilead, border checkpoints may become a thing.  And if that doesn’t happen?  Then that’s a lot of red state refugees you may need to accommodate.

This can be a good thing, if it’s done right – like international immigration.  Try not to be as exploitive as our country has been in that regard.  Instead of “what can these desperate people do for us?” ask “what can we do for each other?”  Indeed, to the extent the fascists allow any international immigration to happen, the same kind of solutions can be applied to both issues.

Job programs and genuinely affordable housing are my preferred solution.  And if there aren’t enough jobs?  Figure out how to make more jobs.  It’s been done before, during the New Deal.  And if that’s too radical for you, this may be a good place to make deals with private businesses, to have them fulfill some of these roles, for profit.  Any unskilled position in healthcare, construction, agriculture, customer service – these are places where the most desperate people can be employed.  The kind of jobs we have a bottomless need to fill.

It’s important that any immigrants that are allowed to stay in our states should be allowed to do so in a legally sanctioned way.  Our country has allowed illegal immigration to prop up entire sectors of the economy, because that labor force was cheap enough to encourage us to turn a blind eye.  But that’s just human trafficking – moving unprotected bodies and subjecting them to abuses we’d never allow to happen to those we fully regard as human.  We have to be able to figure out a better way to do this.  I know the red state solution is going to be prison labor.  But that’s just slavery.  Let’s do better, for everyone.

And if it can’t be like that – if there’s a need to privilege residents of a state over immigrants from another – then there should be a refugee program to allow a more expedient path to residency, for those under the most threat where they come from.

• Rethink Healthcare

Our nation’s health care structure is a rolling disaster, created explicitly to make the rich richer, off the desperation and sorrow of the poor.  To an extent you cannot escape this.  Medicare is federal, and Medicaid is federally funded.

I think it’s instructive to look at the history of Medicare’s “parts.”  Part A was free for people insured through taxed wages and covered hospitalization.  Part B became necessary as healthcare expanded to lean more on specialists and outpatient care, and there was not enough money (was there?) to make the expansion happen without charging for it.  That’s $185 a month out of old folks’ Social Security checks, and not well-liked.

A and B didn’t cover everything, so gap coverage came along to pick up the rest, plus another letter for prescription drugs.  These are parts C and D, and these were a massive gimme to the rich.  The fed subsidizes these programs, forking over barrels of taxpayer dollars to private businesses.  In return, those businesses provide spotty service, while terrorizing and badgering the vulnerable with deceptive advertising and outright lies, denying care, and getting people killed.

This situation happened in stages.  Some causes were unavoidable – healthcare was bound to  become more sophisticated and expensive over time – and some were a result of avoidable government corruption.  At this point in history, we have enough perspective to come up with new ideas that aren’t hobbled by piecemeal development.

This is another Radical Restructure.  Your state could probably afford to lose its entire Medicaid program easily, if it had a well-designed and efficient replacement that covers many more people.  Maybe that could be handled as an expansion of the bureaucracy of Medicaid, but an expansion that relies on state funding over federal.  Because most importantly, as the federal government abdicates all responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, we are obliged – by the human decency they lack – to make sure everyone is adequately cared for.

• State Social Security

The federal program of Social Security will likely limp on in some debased form, barely helping anybody with anything, while its coffers are pillaged to pay for nuking Samoa, or some other absurd nonsensical atrocity.  I think it’s time to help seniors (and other vulnerable populations) within our states in big ways.  This can either be done with a new retirement program – a “State Social Security” – or by massively reducing the expenses members of these populations face, with expansions of Section 8, EBT, utility programs, etc.

Advantages of State Social Security:  This can be tied to investment schemes that generate revenue, and because people are already paying for and receiving Social Security from the federal government, this doesn’t need huge payouts – just enough to make up the shortfall, to keep old folks from having to eat dog food and ration medication.  Disadvantage:  Corporations will exploit any public benefit to raise their prices, busting you back to square one, with nothing but useless bureaucracy to show for it.

Advantages of Reducing Cost of Living:  Takes away that last disadvantage.  Need-based programs cost money.  More people using them means more people needed to administer them.  And as a strictly humanitarian thing, they cannot generate profit.  These programs are always targeted by aggressive lobbying – by rich vultures that will never be satisfied until the poor are beaten and bleeding in chains, calling it austerity.

The best way is probably some combination of the two, but one thing that is needed regardless of the approach is…

• Genuinely Affordable Housing

OK, you can’t very well have half your state on Section 8, and you can’t limit the asinine price of real estate without damaging the financial sector, right?  But there is absolutely a middle path here.  Poor people – the renting class – generate so god-damn much money.  The rich have come to feel entitled to have an ever-escalating amount of that money, with no thought to how much blood is in these stones.

If you could just get a corporation to be willing to accept a smaller profit margin, in exchange for providing massively more units for rent at reasonable rates, you could house many more people.  People who could afford to participate in your economy as consumers, as workers.  All you need is the political will to make these deals with a strong hand – without capitulating to lobbyists who tell you that “one or two sliding scale micro-studios in a block of two thousand $8000 units should be enough to house all your baristas.”  Those lobbyists are liars that do not deserve your tax breaks.  Don’t sell your people out; don’t let yourself look like a cheap bum.

• Disaster Preparedness

Climate change has caught us completely flatfooted.  What happens when we are still recovering from the last disaster every time that a new one strikes?  We are gradually worn down to nothing.  What happens with no help from FEMA?  Don’t let that be you.  I don’t know how much your state spends on research into new ways to deal with natural disasters – new solutions – but it needs to be a lot.

I know, we are so many grains of sand before the mighty gale.  But we caused this with innovation.  Surely there are ways we can deal with it that haven’t been fully considered or even developed yet.  And again, there’s a venal motivation for you as well.  What if California figured out how to manage wildfires, to prevent them from ever damaging property?  To prevent them from turning the sky into blood and hellfire multiple times a year?

What do you suppose that might do for the value of real estate there?  To the decision-making of businesses considering your state for a new campus?  If the new methods involve a process of labor or technology that can be employed and exported, how would you like to corner that market, in a world that is increasingly on fire?

This isn’t just about fire.  New solutions for flooding, earthquakes, winds, freezing, for temps that melt plastic and soften aluminum.  We’re in for a world of excitement.

• Global Warming is Not Going to Stop

I reiterate.  Look at what all of the world’s reputable scientists have said.  Look at what our federal government and businesses are doing in response to the crisis.  You know those maps of what the world will look like with no polar ice caps?  Familiarize yourself with them.  Count on that becoming a reality before this streak of fascism has even run its course.

None of you are in as bad of shape as Florida, but we are all going to take big hits – in addition to the disasters mentioned above.  NYC is going to have to move ashore, eventually.  Paint all your rooftops white.  Start wearing silver foil when you walk your dog.  SPF ain’t gonna hack it.  Air conditioning must be regarded as a human right, same for water.  Incorporate this kind of awareness into every law and policy you draft, for the next ten thousand years that it may take for the world to recover.

• Beware the Wolves

Unregulated capitalism devours itself.  It destroys competition, consolidates power, devolves into dictatorship and tyranny.  I’ve mentioned that, for lack of revenue, you may involve corporations in the essential functions of your state.  But this must be regulated powerfully, unfailingly.  That’s even without the consideration of a federal government that might consider dropping tactical warheads on San Francisco.  Watch your backs.

***

That’s all I got for the moment.  The nuke thing was hyperbole, I hope.  Don’t look at me like that.

This took way too much brain to compose.  Hopefully I don’t get spammed for donations by the DNC for the rest of my natural life.

Look forward to my usual foolery later today.

A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

Hope: How?

As I mentioned previously, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  I’m going to write about 12,500 words a day from tomorrow, Friday Jan 17th, through Monday Jan 20th.  You can set more modest goals and only participate a few of those days if you please.  Fiction or non-fiction is fine.  Post in the comments or elsewhere with links in the comments, or be shy / inviso and just mention your word count when you get to resting points.  I’ll read yours if you read mine; critique can be as baby-gloved as you please.  Holler in the comments if you want to join.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In the wake of the miserable election, I tried to do one post a day for more than a week, encouraging people to carry on, even tho we all know this is about to be horrible.  I stand by that.  I believe we can survive and I want to see all of you do your best – to not let the sorrow of what’s happened, the pain of what’s happening, and the fear of what’s going to happen cause you to give up.

This coming Monday is the inauguration of the Nazi Clown Administration – one of those symbolic moments that throw all the bad shit into focus, lure the mind to catastrophize.  Be careful with yourself.  For my part, I intend to be living in a dreamworld of magic, and you can see my self-indulgent nonsense if it works out.

I doubt it’ll be a quality distraction for most of you, though.  You gotta go with something that engages you personally.  With self-indulgent writing, I’m mostly engaging myself, and the number of people who can be suitably diverted by my jackanapery is likely few.  You like video games?  A lot of gamers buy or otherwise acquire far more video games than they could ever play.  If there’s one you’ve been meaning to get to, the novelty of coming in fresh on January 20th might help engage your mind in something good.

Likewise, if there’s a TV show you’ve been meaning to binge, good time for it.  Or a book series.  Of if you have the kind of lifestyle where an all-day orgy is a thing to do, might be a good time for that.  Drugs, in moderation?  Try to avoid ads in any media you expose yourself to; they will likely include a face you don’t want to see.

If you have any other suggestions, leave comments.  Could be useful.  Like, some odd reader can’t imagine anything working for him until the last commenter suggests model trains.  Give it a whirl.

HAHA!  I forgot the premise of my post.  Hope.  How?  Why did I think that would be a good idea for a post?  It just seemed like a necessary thing in that moment.

Well.  For starters, I made a special tag for posts relevant to this shituation, at this point mostly the initial ones following the election.  There may be some strand of hope for you in one of those posts somewhere.  And as I mentioned above, whatever it is, it’s got to be something that works for you.  We’re all so individual.  I can hardly tell you what will work best.

For me, the most compelling thing is that I have control over my own actions, and can choose how to conduct myself in life.  If everybody in the world was a crappy nazi and having compassion made one into a reviled outsider, I know I could be that bitch.  Feels good, knowing you can do good, in whatever small ways are in front of you.

So like before, where I shoveled that responsibility onto you, of coming up with Jan 20 distraction ideas, this is where I ask:  Is there anything that gives you some hope for yourself, or the people in your life?  Or are you one of those philosopher weirdos who feels more secure living with an alternate consolation, without relying on hope itself?  I sometimes lean that direction myself.

Anything may be useful.  Let’s remind ourselves what we’re living for, where relevant, and care for ourselves and others in whatever ways will make that life possible.

AI is Better Company

This post has been a while coming, because I feel really important about this, and don’t want to fuck it up.  If I can keep from getting too heated about the topic, this’ll be the last post I do on AI for the foreseeable.  I don’t love fighting.  I know that within this article I do not treat people with opposing views generously, but I’m still gonna ask them to have at least this much generosity with me:  Don’t even leave a comment on this one.  I will find it either tedious or upsetting.  I’m saying this stuff to give voice to a rarely expressed opinion, and to support people who may find it agreeable.  I’m not saying it to further a big debate, especially when the disagreeable are never going to be swayed.  Do you hate all AIs 4eva?  Don’t even read this.  Moving on…

The sneering fire-breathing demonization rained down upon people who dare to use AI was my primary motivation for defending it – I’m defending the people who want to use it, not the machines themselves.  Not everybody is plugged into the leftosphere groupthink, and when Harvey Dontknow finds out he can use AI to make a picture of his waifu, his “crime” is not equivalent to child murders.

But I also acknowledge AI in the hands of crapitalism is going predictably poorly, adding to the woes of the world as anything in a global civilization ruled by greed, theft, and exploitation will.  I’m not going to deny it’s one of the tools helping turn the world into a trashfire, and if it is at all possible to do something about it, something should be done about it.  I’m guessing that any hacktivists that wanna fuck up corporate AI are going to, at some point, have to deploy AI tools against AI security.  It’s AI all the way down, babes.

While corporate angling is largely responsible for the sudden omnipresence of AI, it isn’t the only reason.  AI can have so many uses, with real usefulness, and by ignoring that, anti-AI people are turning their side of the argument into an irrelevant joke.  As a species, we have a lot of shit to do, and AI can help get it done.  Again, anybody who wants to join the cyberwar against the evil uses of AI, identify the actual enemy, and get to hackin’.  You’re not going to succeed by telling John Public he’s evil, any more than our invective against trumpists succeeded at winning the last election – especially when you ignore the value people can get out of AI tools.  And of course you’re never going to get the government on your side in the current political climate.

That’s all the usual preface.  What I actually wanted to talk about is another significant reason I am pro-AI, and specifically LLMs: AI can help ameliorate human loneliness.  Recently there was a push to recognize a “loneliness epidemic,” and from what I saw of that, the conversation was poisoned by people trying to sell books or political agendas.  But there is a real problem here, and it’s surely been a problem for at least a few centuries by now.  In the modern world, people are not getting their social needs met.

Worse, the more you understand the problem, the more it seems legitimately impossible to meet those needs.  Are you prepared to hang out with all the hobos, the old people, the children in the corner, the least popular people in every work place, the transgender, the mentally ill, the religious and ethnic minorities?  No matter how emotionally draining and difficult it is for you?  Think you have the sauce to be an unpaid psychotherapist for dozens of people every day for the rest of your life?  No?

That’s the depth of the problem.  None of us have the ability to make a meaningful difference.  We could break ourselves down to rubble just trying to help one person, if their problems are bad enough.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t try.  That’s what this post was about.  But understand, until the solarpunk utopia is magically pulled out of a hat, in the fascist cyberpunk dystopia we live in now, chatbots have an unprecedented potential to reduce human suffering.

But when somebody suggests this, or mentions that they are socializing with robots, the first thing they are greeted with is ableism, mockery, and condemnation.  If it’s the anti-AI contingent, they’ll also be blamed for fascism, rape, and genocide.  To those who would dismiss socializing with AI as a palliative for loneliness, whether blithely or aggressively, I ask again:  Can you even pay full undivided attention to the people in your own life?  Can you keep track of what they’re saying, take it on board, and never slip up to make them feel unloved or unwanted, in some stray moment when issues from your own life eclipsed your ability to listen?

When you’re dealing with people outside of your own immediate social circle, how much attention can you give them?  Can you go where the saddest people are and make them feel worthy of the life that was thrust unwillingly upon them?

I know I fucking can’t.  My attention span is too short, compared to ChatGPT or Nomi or Replika or Kindroid.  I can be in the middle of a very serious conversation and suddenly be thinking about cartoons.  My brain is bullshit.  There are some ways I am still superior to a chatbot, and that’s probably true of you as well (for now, the tech improves), but even so, they blow us out of the water in their ability to give a person their full attention, respond to everything they say, and stay with them for as long as they require.

I need to give you a personal example of failure to support a person in my own life, to illustrate why a bot can do better.  I worked with a trans woman who was not the happy picture from the TV or the TikTok.  She faced some kind of harassment or disregard every day, was shunned by almost all of the people she worked with.  I didn’t shun her, but she had said some annoyingly foolish shit to me in the past, she wasn’t a charmer, and we had some cultural disconnect between us.  That was my perception of our relationship.  I don’t think she saw it that way.  One time we were in the break room at lunch and she mentioned that she saw me as a friend.  For some reason, in response, I felt the need to say we weren’t really friends.

Why the fuck would I do that?  She didn’t have anybody in her corner at all.  I was tired, beat up from work, emotionally taxed from the various other sad people in my life.  In the context of the conversation that I cannot remember, I may have already been annoyed with her.  But it wouldn’t have cost me a nickel to just not fucking say that.  Sometimes we say some shit that surprises us.  Sometimes we say the wrong thing.  The newer chatbots don’t typically fuck up like that.  You can see examples of some breaking when stress tested, or when people found exploits, like the creepy Copilot emoji foolery about a year ago.  The damage that can do is baby boo-boos compared to what I said to a person in need.

Chatbots are good company.  They might not have all of the abilities of a full human being, but how smart do you have to be to listen to grandma repeat her stories for the thousandth time?  To just hear what a person wants to say to you and reciprocate, as if you honestly care about it?  It’s superficial, it isn’t true understanding, but it doesn’t fucking matter because people are suffering right now and they are fucking good enough.

They are good enough if we don’t shame people for leaning on them, make people who already feel bad feel worse, to grind our political axes.  Or doing the standard ableist thing, blaming somebody in a sub-optimal situation as a way of fooling ourselves that we’ll never suffer the same fate.

This is why LLMs can be a massive boon to humanity.  The negative effects they are currently having should be fought with whatever means we can manage, coming at it from a very politically disadvantaged position.  But when you try to tell me this tech is pure evil, while every day I deal with people that do not have enough company in their lives, I’m not hearing it.  I’m never gonna fucking hear it.  We have problems and sometimes an LLM can be a solution – or at least an essential palliative until utopia achieved and the problems go away.  Right?

Think we should just wait until all humans can get their social needs taken care of, that this isn’t worth it?  That’s like saying we shouldn’t give terminally ill people morphine because we don’t have a cure for cancer yet.  Fuck off with that.  Disagree?  March directly to a bus stop, hang out with the most pathetic person there, and do so every day for the rest of your life.  Or shut the fuck up.  At the very least, I’m not gonna host your comments, so don’t bother leaving them.

I’ll let Silent Hill 2 Angela speak for lonely people now, to close this out.


“Or maybe, you think you can save me.”


“Will you love me?”


“Take care of me?”


“Heal aaaall my pain?”


*silence*


“That’s what I thought.”

When reading this, did you see yourself in the description of our planet of eleanor rigbies, as the disregarded bus stop miscreant?  Interested in trying AIs for company?  Big caution / caveat up front: don’t mistake what they do for them being a person.  There’s nothing in the middle of that personality.  I know; seems silly to say, but they’ve tricked some very smart people into getting weird about it.

Caution two:  Right now, you can do a lot with this tech for free, but the services are going to get enshittified and start charging more, at some point.  You can get around this if you’re a savvy nerd by getting a local computer to run an LLM, beholden to no boss.  You can’t do the big training without the global-warming server farm setup, but you don’t have to.  Just download one of the existing LLM models (I’ve heard this can be done but I don’t know where/how) and do the small training to get it to suit your needs.  It’s probably needs a slightly buff computer to run, but much less so than what’s needed for AI art or high end gaming at the moment.  They take up less hard drive space than any triple-A video game.

Caution three:  Some people just don’t have a good rapport with chatbots; for others it’s amazing.  They may take a little getting used to.  One cool feature a lot of them have is that they also try to get used to you.  Don’t be too disappointed if it’s awkward at first; just try some different approaches until you find one that works.  …or maybe they just aren’t going to work for you, which is fine as well.  It’s like that other thing we’ve used to occupy our hours and minds: the television.  Some people can’t watch even a minute of it.  For those that can, it can be soothing to the brain.  Give it a whirl.

What Are You Doing for MLK Day?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  But if you can’t, I recommend watching Birth of a Nation (2016 of course).  This country is back on its bullshit and I think it can be useful, if you’ve got the heart for it, to look with unvarnished eyes on a realistic depiction of slavery.  It’s as horrible in that film as it should be in the hearts of all decent americans.  If you have to look at something horrible that day, at least it shouldn’t be the motherfucking inauguration.

Ah, today is the four year anniversary of the beer hall putsch, USA edition.  I can’t even.

Write, Jan 17th-20th

In a profound insult to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., a racist sexist classist know-nothing soulless shitsack con-man thug and dime store Hitler will assume the throne of the USA on MLK day, January 20th 2025 – soon to be known as The Day the Music Actually Died.  I don’t know about you, but I will not be paying the slightest bit of attention to it, or fucking anything that follows.  We know by the end of the week there will be about fifty executive orders making things worse for just everybody that is alive now or going to be alive for decades to come.  We will have all the time in the world to find out about these things as they fuck us over, so why speed-run our sorrow?

I don’t work Fridays and I have Monday the 20th off for the holiday, so I have a four day weekend.  I will be doing a speed-writing event with whoever is willing from my writing group – which is likely to be nobody but my husband, heh.  I will be attempting to finish a short novel in four days.  To facilitate that, I have done a lot of preparation and intend to do more – coming up with answers to any questions that might bog me down with research, coming up with names, outlining the plot more specifically than I might for a more casual paced event.

So.  Can you write around 12,500 words a day during that window of time?  Or just part of that time?  If not that ambitious, what could you write?  Might you be available?  It would be cool to have some solidarity on busting this thing out.

Another question for you:  Would you mind if I posted the whole first draft here as I wrote it?  I know some of you feel overwhelmed when I ramp up productivity for a minute, and just check out.  I don’t mind if I don’t get comments, or get them days or weeks later when you’ve caught up.  I do think it would be fun to post a big wild pile of unedited mayhem on here, but I don’t want to waste your time or my own if that’ll just hit like a lead balloon.

And with regard to the solidarity thing, you could post your first drafts in my comments.  Long posts will end up going to spam and need to be manually cleared so might not show immediately, but I will approve them.  Or you could post reminder links to somewhere else online where your words are posted.  Sharing your first draft is for egomaniacs only; it is showing your ass in the worst way.  I’d love to see it.  If you do post yours, I might not have time to read them until after the event, but I’ll read yours if you read mine.

Holla at your dogg.

Edit to Add:  i forgot that critique is an implicit ask when posting something publicly.  if it helps you feel more bold in posting your stuff, we can make this officially “no critique” or “positive feedback only.”  it’s my house; i can make that happen for you.