The Siren Call of Sports Betting and its Siege upon Men

I remember when I first started noticing “gaming” locations popping up. Or perhaps they had been there, but they started to get more obvious. The sort that had little betting machines inside and blighted the faces of already downtrodden strip malls. Flashes of neon that gave way to ever more glaring LED flashing lights, advertising the promise of instant money for the lucky, drawing people like moths to the flame. Fortunately for myself, I’ve never been someone who has been afflicted by the desire to gamble. It’s a vice that I’ve managed to dodge; I was always too nervous about the losses to enjoy it. I’ve been to casinos a couple times with friends, but at this point it was decades ago. I played a few hands of blackjack and went home.

Since this isn’t something I’ve ever particularly been interested in myself, it’s managed to simmer in the background along with other bits of life that don’t really catch my glance more than fleetingly. But even with my lack of interest, I noticed that there were more and more of these gaming places. And I noticed, as these things do, that they were always in parts of town that already implied struggle, in the company of other businesses preying on those who just need dopamine to escape for a moment from a life that is likely harder than it should be: cash checking places, pawnshops, and in more recent years, vape shops, all a motley crew of promises of escape or deliverance. It bothered me, to see the vultures of modern life feasting on the ever larger lower classes….or those who might make the slide from middle into lower, as is happening at a faster pace than it has since the robber barons of the Industrial Revolution.

I’ll interject here to say, I’m not condemning all gambling. I believe people should be able to choose their vices, and I think it’s probably fine in moderation. But we all know, moderation isn’t something that gambling encourages. The entire premise is a dopamine vacuum, meant to draw you further and further in. So what can be a fun way to relax with friends occasionally can quickly turn to playing with fire, for those of certain proclivities or predispositions.

In the county next to mine, there was recently a large casino approved to be built. The entire thing was a fly by night operation: 200 acres were rezoned by a local politician to become a casino, despite a huge amount of public opposition. The procedures were guarded and opaque, included cronyism between a father politician and his commissioner son, plus the added bonus of a large amount of “lobbying” money to the politicians that approved it (why can’t we just call “lobbying”, bribery? I mean that’s what it is. Talk about Newspeak…) The icing on the cake was intimidation for those who opposed the casino. The locals heavily opposed it and showed up in the hundreds to oppose the situation (way to go, fellow citizens!). Fortunately at this point, the lawsuits and scrutiny have stalled the project. There’s also the fact that in North Carolina, there are still many hurdles to building casinos, and hopefully they remain. The statistics about what happens to a community when a casino moves in are damning.

Casinos in small communities don’t tend to help much with the local community. They do bring jobs, but they are low wage jobs that don’t provide much more than grocery store clerk jobs or the like. For destination casinos in larger areas, there’s more of a net boon. Studies have shown there’s also typically a 10-20% increase in crime like robberies when a casino moves in. There’s also the sharp uptick in locals who end up with gambling issues: somewhere around a 10% increase. The money that the casino makes is typically not returned to the community in any meaningful way, though personally I do like how Native American tribes are able to make money in this fashion. I think there’s a sort of poetic justice there. Gambling shopfronts provide even less of a payback, and continually drain the finances of people.

Now we have the added burden of digital gambling on mobile apps, which is a newer and more insidious threat. If you combine the dopamine hits of the Skinner box from an online betting app, with the lack of transparency in odds, and you have one toxic cocktail.

To return to what started this discussion, the most recent financial cancer I’ve seen sprouting up is sports betting. You can’t watch any sports event these days without seeing DRAFTKINGS plastered all over, or the like. Suddenly it’s everywhere. This is because in 2018 the Supreme Court struck down Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which had effectively banned sports betting in most states. This decision allowed individual states to legalize and regulate sports betting. Since 2018, more than 30 states have legalized sports betting, motivated by potential tax revenue and economic benefits. The authorities are happy to capitalize on this revenue: in 2022 alone, states collected over $1.6 billion in tax revenue, and that number is just set to sky rocket. With the timing of regulation and the pandemic paired together, we had a perfect storm for this issue to proliferate. Those who are stressed, lonely, depressed, or anxious are more susceptible to the siren call of betting, and the pandemic brought all those issues to the forefront. And they still haven’t left.

As with so many issues these days, I’m so worried about the domino fall of problems for our society. People are afflicted with problems that our evolution just hasn’t equipped us to handle, and there are greedy people just waiting to take advantage of that. With our ever increasing online status, we are ironically feeling lonelier than ever. Social media isolates and enrages us. Mobile apps prime us to be addicted to dopamine hits in a way we never have before. The uber rich at the top continue to take advantage of us and siphon away as much money as they can, while distracting us from the fact that we get little in return: Amazon delivers us instant junk of increasingly worse quality, giving us shopping addictions to fit the need for consumption that influencers fan with flash in the pan trends. They’ve legalized more “soma”, as Brave New World would call it, in the form of legal drugs for escape. Our jobs demand more of us and surveil us in a way we never have been before (along with the rest of the surveillance in our life, and our data that gets sold to the highest bidder), meanwhile the wages have not kept pace with inflation. The noble class has managed to convince many of us the we don’t need to unionize or organize together to make our lives better, and our downward quality of life is evidence of their success. Since trading our pensions for 401ks (which, honestly, is just another form of gambling, but more sanctioned), there hasn’t really been much of an incentive for the average person to have loyalty to a company, and yet the sense of obligation remains for many. Since the outsourcing of production to other countries, we have been experiencing a long decline for every day Americans. Yes, of course, there are exceptions. But overall, when we had more jobs here, our lives were better. People got satisfaction from creating something they were proud of, and being part of a community that helped build it. When that got traded overseas for shareholder savings, we lost a lot of America. We just haven’t fully realized it yet. Sure, the owner of the company could now buy three yachts instead of two. But was that better for us all than having hundreds of jobs in a small town in America? I certainly don’t think so. I believe that on some level, in addition to siphoning away our sense of community and pride, along with our money, the unfettered greed of the rich has also led them to invest in ways to keep us unhealthy, unhappy, distracted, and exhausted. I know that’s a bit conspiratorial, but whether you believe that or not….doesn’t it describe us these days?

All of these issues are a ripe field for issues with sports betting. The amount of personal pride and identification that people get from sports teams is one of the few ways in America that I see a sense of community in these days. And now, sports betting is using that as another vector to lessen the quality of those fans’ lives. Those who are most likely to have issues with gambling are young men (and men in general), lonely people, those who are anxious and depressed, and those who have economic stress. Tell me that doesn’t describe so many in America right now.

We are at the beginning of this iceberg, it’s just now bobbing up to us. But in a few years, I think we will see insidious and disastrous effects from this. One of the worst things about gambling issues, is unlike other addictions, they can be hidden for a long time. They don’t change someone physically, and the signs are hard to see. In an age in which most adults are on their phones for hours a day, someone using that time to bet doesn’t look much different than someone just doomscrolling. However, over time the losses compound, and can ruin families. Suddenly, a man who was a great dad and husband, has lost thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it. The shame of this, and the realization that they won’t get it back, contributes to a higher level of suicides, which is terrible. At best, it’s a higher level of bankruptcies. And a family left with financial wreckage. I would also say that the proliferation of day trading apps (like Robin Hood) is a version of this issue: the financial pressure men feel in this era, compounded by high inflation and low wages, makes them think they can win big on the stock market. And sometimes, they do. But let’s be honest: the stock market is just another form of gambling, and can lead to the same losses, and capitalizes on the same issues.

Studies have shown that 44% of men say they feel it’s hard to watch a sports event without feeling the urge to bet. 51% of men polled said they would bet $10,000 on a game if there was a chance to win $1 million. 1 in 5 men are in debt due to betting, and a 1 in 5 allot a quarter of their paychecks to betting. And these numbers are just increasing, as the ads and apps get more prolific, and refine their methodologies to draw people in.

I firmly believe in free will. I believe that people should be able to choose to live their lives, good or bad. I believe that an adult should be able to do what they want, provided that they aren’t hurting or impeding someone else. That’s why I support transgender and gay people, any gender, I believe you should be able to choose whatever religion you want and not be able to force it on others. I believe you should be able to own guns if you have passed checks and store them safely, and are a good custodian. I believe you should be able to choose your vices. However, I also believe that the playing field is not even anymore, and the world has gotten complicated enough that industry can easily take away someone’s choice through manipulation, and that regulation needs to protect us. And in the era where it’s most needed, regulation is being stripped away. So now we can see with out own eyes the effects: the life of the average person is getting worse, year by year. And the rich are getting richer and isolating themselves in their golden cities more and more. At the inauguration a couple days ago, who had the front row seats? I didn’t see any of the people from the dozens of trailer homes with Trump signs in my area there; I saw billionaires. Their plan is working, and we are hurting.

Sports betting and its proliferation is an extension, and a symptom, of that issue. The financial disparity and stress of trying to live to the standards our parents easily exceeded has probably contributed to the fact that millennial men are most susceptible to sports betting apps. Once again, a tech cadre is raking in money while returning the minimum to those who provide it to them. So America’s communities now have men hiding financial distress from gambling; they can do that for a few years, but eventually it starts to catch up. And I am scared to see the decimation at that point. There’s already a suicide epidemic, particularly among men (I’ve lost several friends to it, sweet men with good hearts all), and this will only add to it.

If you are reading this, and you are a man, I want to address you directly. It’s a hard world right now for you. There’s false pressure to be alpha, there’s pressure to make more money in an environment that simply won’t support it. The noble class capitalizes on giving us the dream that we can all just make it and be millionaires…but they’ve taken away the means for that sort of life to be a possibility. It’s an illusion. I want you to know, there are many of us women who support you emotionally. Who see how lonely this world is right now, and how much pressure is on you. Who don’t ask of you what the world would have you believe we ask of you. Social media has made it so that the sexes are caricatures of one another, but I want to remind you that you are a person with complex feelings and emotions, and it’s okay to feel and express them. Most women aren’t chasing rich men with chiseled abs (though those women certainly are out there), just as most men don’t hate intellectual women who stand up for themselves, and only want perfectly primped plaything (though those men are certainly out there). Most of us just want someone who loves and accepts us, and can be our best friend. And despite what media and social media say, I recognize that the standards society sets for you are a false flag. Do your best to resist the dopamine pits of online life, and don’t get into betting as a quick answer. Resist doomscrolling and decaying your happiness and patience. Get fresh air, don’t be afraid to show your emotions and speak the truth. The only way we can get through these issues as a society is all of us together. The isolation is a tool meant to keep us weak, and we need to take that away from them. I am here if you ever want to talk, and I don’t buy into that whole “MEN NEED TO BE ALPHA ALL THE TIME” bs either. You are complex, you are an individual, and you can be different things at different times. Don’t let the people who take advantage of you mold you into who they want you to be.

Going forward, this crisis is still in its infancy, but there’s good news. We can still prevent it. Legislation to approve more gambling is still nascent, and there’s the chance for us to resist it. Look up in your state and your community what the status is, and start writing letters. In North Carolina, full approval for casinos is on hold indefinitely due to public pushback! I think that’s a huge step in the right direction. Raise your voice and make it heard, it does work. States fall for the siren call of lucrative taxes from betting. Sure, I get that. But I haven’t seen any highways funded by a casino, or a school funded by a casino (what DOES happen with the “education lottery” from Powerball, by the way?), and I certainly haven’t seen a park or hospital paid for by DRAFTKINGS. If they are so desirous of tax revenue, how about they do something like increase corporate taxes? Particularly on those who outsource jobs to other countries, AI, or robots? They don’t want to hear it because I’m not saying it with a bribe in my hand, but that would increase tax revenue AND not hollow out American communities. At least the robber barons of previous years had societal pressure that forced them to build parks, museums, and libraries in return for the fortunes they siphoned from their fellow citizens. I say it’s time to bring that pressure back, and improve our lives and communities at the same time.

Call No Man A Hero While He Still Breathes

Yesterday, Vulture released a very well-written, and very damning, article about Neil Gaiman. I highly recommend you read it, though it has terribly disturbing information. If you aren’t aware, Neil Gaiman is an extremely popular fiction author; some of his works of note are Good Omens and the comic book Sandman, both of which have active series on Amazon and Netflix respectively. He’s known for his stories with darker worlds and tones, worlds where danger is very real and spares no one (many of his stories are written, or partially written, from the perspective of children having to confront a terrifying world). His stories are unique, empathetic, and well-written. He’s been considered a genre leader for years.

The article went into allegations that have come out in the last year of sexual assault and abuse. It started with a podcast that interviewed his accusers, and then other articles and podcasts followed. Of particular note was Gaiman’s silence when the allegations were first made, and then his responses of regret…not, one will note, of denial.

In the literary world, the fall of this leviathan has been particularly shocking because of the lack of allegations previously despite an active career since the eighties (though the allegations do reach back that far), and the fact that Gaiman has claimed to be a feminist, and is known for championing women.

Unfortunately, as any female can avow, it’s not just men who have “creep” tattooed on their foreheads who are dangerous. And it would appear Gaiman is just one of the millions of “wolves in sheep’s clothing” that prey on women in this world. I fully believe the accounts of the women, and find them absolutely horrific. He clearly uses his power and wealth to find women he can manipulate and hurt, and does so with apparent abandon.

I don’t want to get into the details here too much, but some high level overview includes:

• Cheating on both of his wives, despite the second marriage even being open

• Regularly finding extremely young fans at events and coercing them into sexual situations. This in itself doesn’t seem too bad on the surface, until you read about the type of sexual encounters that Neil seems to thrive on: Extremely sadistic sex without consent or safeguards, especially with those not used to a BDSM lifestyle. If you use sadism without constraints or consent, that is just abuse.

• Abusing his positions of power to keep women in financial trouble in positions of weakness to be easily exploited (two of the women had agreements of employment with him, that he then ignored and abused, and willingly exploited their fears of him taking away their homes if they didn’t comply with painful sex that they said they did not want)

• Fostering a self-deprecating and “safe” persona for women, which was a front to prey on them behind closed doors.

• Committing abusive sexual acts to women IN FRONT OF HIS CHILD, who was awake and aware. Ugh.

And that’s just the surface. To be clear, there’s one discussion to be had about consenting adults in positions of different power and what they want (for example, an older and wealthier famous person being with a very young and broke not famous person). But that isn’t the discussion appropriate for this situation. Specifically at play here is the abuse, and the fact that Gaiman essentially copped to it all by saying he had “regrets about his conduct”. But not a denial.

I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman’s work since the mid-nineties. I first read the Sandman comics, then bumped into Neverwhere on my school’s library shelves. I read the story of a different London and loved it. The bits of history that were referenced, the odd and quirky characters, the darkness with bits of light: I was immediately enraptured. I then read Good Omens, the apocalyptic comedy collaboration with Terry Pratchett, and got completely absorbed by American Gods when it was released a few years later. There were always uncomfortable scenes, but that was part of what drew me in. Life has dark parts that we can’t avoid or flinch away from, and I liked that Gaiman’s writing acknowledged that. Sometimes the endings were happy, sometimes neutral, sometimes…dark. And that reflected life to me, with a bit more magic and mystery thrown in. I don’t buy the idea that some are touting now, that we should have seen this all coming because he had dark scenes in his books. Artists are capable of projecting darkness without acting on it, I always have and will believe that. Unfortunately, some of them DO. And, Gaiman is apparently one of them.

As a woman, this whole situation is so frustrating to me. I’m no stranger to people that I look up to letting me down. By your forties, that’s happened a lot to everyone. There have been so many falls from grace. But the fact that Gaiman had made it through my entire adulthood unscathed, had given me a sense of relative ease to his behavior (although I’ve been a part of this world too long to ever completely believe that any rich, powerful, famous man is incapable of terrible things). I’ve met him at a book signing in Chicago when I was in college. He was kind and warm to me, and flirted lightly about my unique name. I took my signed book and went home, feeling good about the whole thing.

Now, in this case I’m seeing most people believe the women, but I do still see some of that doubt that comes out every time a woman accuses a famous and successful man of horrible things. It amazes me that so many seem to think there is some huge advantage for a woman to accuse a man of sexual assault. The conviction rates are incredibly low: less than 4% in the United States. There’s only a 50% chance that there will even be an arrest. And according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, somewhere between 2 and 10% of sexual assault claims are false. Here are more statistics from RAINN, and here from the National Sexual Violence Research Center. The public loves to side with the accused (I think I hear more about “Let’s wait to see if they get convicted, innocent until proven guilty” far more regarding sexual assault than I do for other crimes), despite the overwhelming odds that A: The guilty will be proven innocent statistically and B: The odds are overwhelming that the accuser is speaking the truth. It’s no wonder that most sexual assaults go unreported. The accuser will likely be doxxed, her name dragged through the mud, she will be labeled and disbelieved and, the added bonus now: Relentlessly bullied online for being a female who has accused a man of doing what terrible men have done throughout history.

Like all women, I have had my fair share of terrible, unwanted sexual and sexist encounters. There was the government boss who had a one on one meeting with me to discuss “the future direction of my project”. The project was classified so he asked me to close the door. When I closed and turned around, he was standing right there, and tried to corner me and kiss me. I was able to dodge him and leave the room. YES, that really happened. This was a charismatic man who was liked and didn’t seem sexist. He was married. I didn’t report it, because historically at the agency I worked at, reports of harassment were statistically overwhelmingly likely to end in the accuser being fired, the accused having no repercussions, and the accused’s name would be drug through the mud. I had bills to pay and daycare to pay for, so I just made sure to never be in a room alone with him again.

There was the team lead who intentionally wanted me to spend days doing high-powered radio frequency testing when I was pregnant. This would involve being a few feet away from the sorts of radar and radio devices used on aircraft carriers for hours every day. I said no, it would be too dangerous and could hurt my baby. He got angry and shouted in my face about it. This is the same man who later tried multiple times to intimidate and corner me in rooms alone when he didn’t like that I stood up for myself. I went to HR (never do that, kids), and they sided with him. I ended up leaving the entire project, which I loved.

Once, when walking in Chicago in the evening in winter, a random nicely dressed man started talking to me while we walked down the street near one another. He was commenting on nice restaurants in the area, and since I lived the next block over I gave him some advice. I enjoy chatting with people, and was content to just chat while we were on the same path. While waiting for a light to cross the street, he told me, “You know in this light, you remind me of my daughter.” I smiled and said thank you.

And then he grabbed my shoulders and tried to open mouthed kiss me. I shoved him away and called him a pervert, and went home and cried.

A man tried to drag me behind construction barriers when I was walking to the library when I was 19. He just grabbed me without a word from nowhere. I fought and got away.

A man who owned a comic book and gaming shop I went to as a teenager asked me if I “Was into married men” at 18. He was in his mid-forties. I’d felt safe after playing games with friends in his shop for months, and was there by myself. I laughed at him, and he said, “I’m serious.” I said, “Absolutely not, no thank you.” And left.

Honestly, these are the most PG stories I have of deplorable behavior. I have others, but I don’t want to share them online. I commend the women who are brave enough to do so. And every single one of these stories has a man who I’m sure has plenty of people who would say, “Oh he would never! He’s a good man. A family man/upstanding citizen/good dude/goes to church/nice guy!” And the moment those “good men” got to be alone with a woman that they thought they could treat any way they wanted, they did. Or they tried their best to.

The thing about predators is, they don’t show who they are to everyone. They don’t walk around town with a lear on their face, with a smirk and greasy hair. They don’t come across as sociopaths. They have a mask that they show to us. There are so many decent and good men out there, and the predators don’t go up to those guys and say, “Bro, if I could get that girl behind a dumpster I’d rape her, amirite?” Brock Turner, one of the more infamous rapists, who literally raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster AND there were witnesses, got no jail sentence because the judge “didn’t want to ruin his life”. I’d argue that Brock Turner was the one who ruined his own life. But he appeared to be just a normal, preppy college student from a good family with a good future. They lurk among us, and know how to blend in and wait for the moment where they think they can get away with something. And they know the odds, and terrible to say, the world, are on their side a lot of the time.

We just elected a convicted sexual predator for President (again). As I write this, Pete Hegseth is being considered for SECDEF, despite convincing sexual assault allegations (and his own mother calling him a predator). At the moment, the public tide is turning in an anti-female wave on many levels. SCOTUS has stripped women of their body autonomy, and women have died from having miscarriages that they weren’t able to receive care for in places like Texas. Public perception and treatment of women is not at a great point. Mark Zuckerberg said he wanted “More masculine energy” at Meta last week, while Meta has a 2/3 male workforce. There’s a backlash currently in the public sphere against sexual equality. Part of that is because the more outrageous opinions get the attention, and our economy is in many ways attention-based these days, and social media makes us go down rabbit holes of same-thinking, which is not a good thing. Part of it is because the greedy rich techbros have realized that they need to toe the line and start speaking in bro-talk to get ahead in this next administration, which openly rewards kowtowing and crass speech (that’s a big part of it, just the greedy opportunism by the robber barons). But, a part of it is because even the good men are tired of being painted with the “All men are bad” brush, which I think is a fair criticism. It’s absolutely true that not all men are bad; most of them are good, I do agree with that. But part of being the “good”, is making sure to call out and acknowledge the bad. And for so much of history, the “bad” have been able to act with impunity. I think maybe there was a bit of an overcompensation in recent years, where some people got so caught up in being able to finally acknowledge that they had a hammer of righteousness for the first time…and they unfortunately started to see all men as nails. We need to be careful to always recognize and support allies, and I’m not sure that it was kept in sight as much as it could have been. So now we have further tribalized again. The pendulum has swung a bit back the other way.

One of the hardest things to do is reconcile the people we think we know, with the other faces that those people don’t show us. We all do this to some degree, it’s part of living in society. I certainly don’t show the same aspect of my personality when doing a briefing at work, as I do to my children, or to my friends when discussing Star Wars or another hot button topic. But we need to remember that those masks can cover far more differences than interpretations of decorum, or what language is appropriate for current company. It can be a mask that covers horrors. And it’s our job to remember that you never truly know all parts of someone. At the same time, it’s important to remember that not ALL masks are covering monsters. Some of them are just covering regular human foibles, and that’s okay too. We need to remember that it’s not men vs women, right vs left, traditional vs progressive: It’s good vs evil. And the evil ones are the ones who hide their actions from the rest of us, because they know what they’re doing. And in this case, the mask that I’ve been following for years is one of my favorite authors. And now I have to reconcile the monster that he was hiding with what I thought I knew.

I won’t be purchasing anything else that gives money to Gaiman while he’s alive. I don’t want to support a living monster’s estate. I do still plan to watch Sandman and Good Omens when they come out, because those have an entire ecosystem of jobs that I want to support. However, I am not planning on getting rid of my books that he wrote either. I believe that artwork transcends the creator, and I don’t believe that the things I took away from his stories stopped existing because he’s not the person I thought he was. But I’m not going to continue to fund his means of exploitation either, and I won’t be recommending his work in the future. And I do support the women who came out against him, and I appreciate all the other authors and men and artists who have come out in support of the victims.

The world is hard and getting harder, for most of us. I don’t think that’s going to let up any time soon. But in the mean time, what we can do is remind ourselves that we are all here together. And in a world of polarization and hateful speech, which seeks to isolate and anger us for clicks and engagement (everyone types more when they’re mad! Everyone loves being told it’s not their fault, it’s the other guy’s!), let’s try to remember that most of us are here to try the best we can. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed. But we need to listen to each other, even if the messages are hard. We need to find common ground, listen to the truth, and not surround ourselves with people just like ourselves. Men aren’t the problem; women aren’t the problem. Humans who wake up and choose evil are the problem, and the rest of us have to take uncomfortable steps to get ahead of them again. Maybe that means listening to someone who is saying a truth that hurts about someone you held in esteem. Maybe that means acknowledging that something about the world is not a good way to do things, even if it benefits you personally. And maybe that means acknowledging that simple answers may be attractive, but may not actually solve a complex problem in a country of 330 million, or a world of 8 billion. We just need to choose to move forward together, and make sure the company we keep is the “good” ones, as much as possible.

The Emboldening of the Robber Baron Class in a Burning World

So much has happened since we last spoke. If you’ve kept an eye on recent events, perhaps you’ve seen that there are some pretty large shifts going on at large, and in our ruling class in particular.

So Donald Trump is going to be President again. After the shame of January 6, and all the evidence that it was indeed a planned event (which was immediately clear if you watched on that day), I’m amazed that we have found ourselves here again. Slowly it’s occurring to me that the general populace is one that I’m struggling to understand. And yes, this is definitely a political post. I hate to do it, but I’m too patriotic to just keep my silence while our democracy dies. And not just dies, but dies in a really stupid and tacky way. Hollywood had led me to believe that at least evil empires have good style.

At any rate, that catches us up. So I will now move on to one of the main points of this post, which is the behavior of our oligarchs…I mean, tech billionaires…since Donald Trump won the election. If you look at the donations for this inauguration, many of them are not only made by tech companies (notably those who are most likely attempting to curry favor to win the great AI battle that is being waged), but also by the richest individuals themselves. The people who have been siphoning off the money of the middle class and reveling in the huge wealth disparity that has only grown enormously since the pandemic, are now revealing their true selves. No longer content to manipulate our lives from behind the scenes, they are now openly moving to the right wing and showing their willingness to bribe and bully. It’s like the robber barons of the 19th century, only much more tedious, poorly dressed, and without leaving us at least beautiful libraries. I’m amazed at the boldness of it all, particularly the salvo being led by Elon Musk himself. I only hope that the power dynamic of the two largest narcissists on the planet quickly spins to its inevitable centripetal blast, but in the mean time we are stuck with what must be the most tedious boors in our country’s history, running amok over ever aspect of American life.

This is a literal photo taken yesterday, January 7, 2025. It looks apocalyptic. I remember growing up being told that extreme weather and wildfires would increase. Well, here we are. Can we stop pretending yet?

Clearly we need campaign funding reform, but with a Congress that openly embraces corruption now and has no desire to limit its own gleeful dance on the graves of American values, I am not holding my breath. With the 250 million+ that Elon donated to help Trump win, he insured himself his place as First Oligarch. All we are missing to complete this charade is gold embroidered military suits with DOGE medals dangling from the lapels.

I’ve been amazed to see the crumbling of morality for so many Christians in this country, who openly embraced the least Christ-like character that could be envisioned as their moral leader. The fact that so many embraced him as a clear mascot amazes me. Honestly, if you were to lay his traits out and compare it to biblical passages, I’m surprised that I haven’t heard many Christians accusing him of being the antichrist; he sure seems to embody a lot more of those traits than any of the other people I’ve seen haphazardly slapped with the label.

So now we have at least four more years of this. With so many people claiming to have voted the clown car into office due to economic reasons, I can only hope that their eyes are opened when the terrible economic policies put forward (such as tariffs, which historically lead to depressions) hit them in the only place they seem to feel these days. By which I mean their pocket books. But it’s such a cult, that I really just don’t know anymore.

We are at a precipice for AI development and its very much needed safeguards. With the party that probably wants to ban seatbelts next now owning all aspects of government, it’s safe to say that this won’t happen. There are already huge effects from AI running rampant (on a side note, if you want to both laugh and cry at the current AI bots that Facebook is making to manipulate its users and ad engagements, please read this fascinating article). I know that there are many who think that the fear of AI is well overblown, and there is truth to that. But there is also truth to the fact that historically, humans are awful at preemptively solving problems, and instead often do too little, too late (each year is now warmer than the year before for this reason). What’s been terrifying about the generative AI explosion of the last year or two has been that not only does it threaten jobs, but it threatens the jobs of the educated and trained workers: writers, artists, software developers. Of course there is the argument that these tools can be used to enhance the jobs of those workers, and that’s certainly true. But it’s MORE true that they are being used to replaced the workers who have college degrees (and likely matching undischargeable student loan debt that enabled them to have those careers. If androids dream of stealing your job, can you declare bankruptcy for those loans yet?). In 2016 I called for the need for new legislation to start planning for Universal Basic Income, since tech would end up displacing humans in jobs (you can read that post here if you like), and we have done nothing. I still believe we should tax companies that use AI instead of humans to help fund UBI, but again, no movement. I also believe that we should cap personal wealth at 2 billion and have further profits from those individuals go back to the society that they whipped the backs of to take all that capital….but with a country full of personally disadvantaged millionaires who have no empathy for other people (meanwhile, they don’t realize they themselves are the people they refuse to help), our society is going to continue to funnel all of our money to the top until the ultimate goal of the robber barons is reached: 4 people will stand on a miles high pile of money and corpses, gasping the last bits of oxygen left from the dregs of a dying and burning planet, toasting that they finally achieved it all.

Do I sound bitter, angry, and sad? You bet I do. Idiocy is winning, the world is burning, meanness is overtaking kindness, and we could solve nearly every problem humanity faces with technology we have now. Instead, we are regressing at a breakneck pace, and I think that’s why you see madness everywhere you look. On some level, I think nearly every human is aware that this is not the way our world should be right now. I think that’s why they are sticking their heads in the sand, depressed and unhealthy, and looking for a new avatar of “the Other” to blame. Some days that’s women (I’ll never get over the fact that our rights are being taken away as we speak), some days it’s other races. Some days it’s immigrants. The people who view the 1950s as the perfect bastion of society are blaming “wokeness” for taking away the standards that the boomers had and then robbed the future generations of; they don’t even realize that it was the policies that they embraced that took away unions and devalued the middle class. THOSE were why life was so good for the average person, and THOSE are what they see as another impediment. Reagan slashed and burned the social net we had been building, and the remains have been getting hit with machetes ever since. It’s maddening. So now we took away pensions and the boomers are retiring with underfunded 401ks, and whatever is left is going to our bloated and rotten medical system to continue to ensure those masked thieves are able to post record profits. Convincing the American people that our healthcare system is a “free market” is the greatest trick the devil has wrought. How can you freely negotiate if your life and pain are on the line?

In a world of 8 billion+ people, there is no such thing as a “rugged individualist”. Like it or not, we depend on thousands of people to live every day. To order more poorly made trash for our houses to fill our empty souls from Amazon takes roads and underpaid drivers and modern day slaves who aren’t allowed to use the bathroom without chastisement; and now that’s not bad enough, so people are further eroding it all by ordering from Temu. Just put a workshop in your backyard and be honest about it. The infrastructure that we hate to pay for, like clean water and utilities, takes thousands of people. We need to take care of one another, and lying to ourselves about how much an individual can achieve in a world of entrenched systems that just make it easier and easier to crush regular people needs to stop. We live in a surveillance state, and the only thing Brave New World and 1984 got wrong was they underestimated how much how much we would give away. If we had a Congress that worked and wasn’t run by corrupt Octogenerians (LITERALLY living in memory care now for some of them), they would step in and limit how much companies are willing to hoard our personal lives and date like Smaug writ large. But we don’t move the ball forward these days, only back.

We need so much change. Having an entrenched noble class in Congress (you don’t think they are? Well they have dynasties. They all come out rich. And they never leave their positions. It’s like Weekend at Bernie’s in those halls practically) is killing our country, and having a media diet of biased lies and editorial-as-fact has put blinders on so many people. It’s hard to face a world that is so dark, so many people flock to the venue that tells them it’s scary because of the Other and that they truly are supposed to be the chosen ones. I get it, it IS terrible to see what’s happening.

So, here’s what could help:

• Term limits. I know they won’t do it, but we need it.

• Bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and make it 2.0 Reagan eliminated it in the name of deregulation; the Fairness Doctrine made it so that if an opinion was shared, then the other side needed equal time. We need that again, and we need to also make it so that opinion is clearly labeled, and we need to limit 24 hour news stations on how much they can report that isn’t just facts. If they can’t fill that time, they can just make documentaries. A diet of hot air is good for no one. We also need to make it so that if an opinion is online and has reach, like YouTube videos or podcasts, these same rules apply. Stovepiping of information is insidious.

• Tax companies who replace real workers with AI to pay for UBI. Start a UBI program. Our country is moving towards either making us all automatons or destitute; this would give us the chance to give people the chance to get on their feet, and hopefully we would get meaningful art again out of it all.

• Campaign finance reform. Companies should not be able to bribe presidential candidates. Or any other politician.

• No higher office held after age 65 due to cognitive decline. If you can’t fly a passenger jet for that reason, you shouldn’t be able to run the country. Trump is losing his mind, likely due to the angry strain of dementia that runs in his family. Biden is having problems too. Both of those are situations we shouldn’t have had to deal with. Not only that, but I don’t think people should be able to make rules for a world they won’t live to see live with the consequences.

• Remove the restrictions from No Child Left Behind that are now making it so that our kids can’t even read anymore. Allow teachers to teach without penalizing them with paperwork.

• Give us a true medical system. Expand our healthcare act. I find it ironic that so many people I know who have Tricare oppose the very type of system they are using. The other 34 advanced countries have worked out, and seeing GoFundMes for childhood cancer is a national embarrassment.

• Make privacy legislation so that data brokers are no longer giving our lives away to line their pockets. Once personal data is out there, it never comes back.

• Put caps on how much the highest paid earner at a company can make, compared to the lowest. Income disparity is a farce now. If someone at the top makes money and wants more, great. They just have to boost the salaries of everyone else who is holding that ladder up behind them. Pulling up the ladder behind them needs to stop.

• Actually pursue racketeering charges. Data shows us that so much of the inflation we are seeing is due to corporate greed, with the same companies wringing their hands to customers about prices simultaneously crowing about record profits to shareholders.

• National time limit caps on access to social media. At this point, it’s wrecked our society. It can still be fixed, but we need to cut the rot out. There’s a reason that China engineered TikTok with more insidious rules for Americans than for the version it uses domestically, and it’s working. Social media divides us, wastes time, stifles innovation, and ruins our critical thinking and attention span.

What else can we do? Well, plant an oak tree in your yard. Insects and birds are going extinct at an incredibly depressing rate, and oak trees sustain hundreds of other species. Plus, they are strong, they grow well, and we need more shade in this world that is getting hotter. Then go read a freaking book.

Things I’ve Learned

1. Loving people is brave. Loving people who aren’t like you is brave.

2. Forgive others.

3. Forgive yourself.

4. Always allow new evidence, even to the ideas you hold dear. Especially to those ideas. Be prepared to create a new hypothesis when you discover new evidence.

5. Meet others where they are; know that some people work for change and try to be better, and some don’t. Believe your instincts on who falls into which category.

6. Never stop learning.

7. Challenge yourself and your thoughts, especially if it makes you uncomfortable. That means you’re onto something and you should explore it.

8. The world changes, and that is often good. Sometimes it is bad. What you remember is not an accurate encapsulation of “how things used to be”, and it doesn’t mean it’s how it should be now. Nostalgia can be lovely, but it can also be dangerous.

9. Question agendas, especially in the ideas you WANT to believe. Particularly if the ideas are ones that put you in a positive position.

10. Speak to yourself with the same love you show your friends. Surround yourself with those who grow and learn and love. Be pro-human.

Roadside Picnic: Reflections on one of the most impactful books I've ever read

Now, I usually don’t claim to be an astrophysicist. Wait….no, I NEVER claim to be an astrophysicist. I mildly keep up with breakthroughs, read some books about it, and have been watching breathlessly, along with many others, to see the new discoveries of the James Webb telescope. I also admittedly have gotten a bit of schadenfreude to see so many scientific facts be upturned (or at the least, very heavily modified) in so brief a time.

Scientific thought is predicated upon coming up with an idea, figuring out stable ways to test an idea, and then we cling to the results until another experiment has an outcome that changes it. In practice, however, sometimes we become wedded to scientific facts that hang around a while, and have a bit of cognitive dissonance when those ideas are disrupted. That’s the human bit of us having it out with reality, and it’s to be expected.

Many truisms over time have been tossed out, and we adopt new truisms to take their place. But nothing is static, and all things change. Particularly in the scientific fields, as we get better technology and imaging, these disruptions still occur. For example, many people say that time travel is impossible; I assume that we just haven’t figured it out yet, and that at some point we will. It’s supposed to be impossible to travel past light speed, yet via quantum entanglement photons have been teleported 300 miles away in space. Nuclear materials can glow via the Chernikov effect, which is electrons traveling faster than light. We haven’t even figured out a unified theory of physics, the Big Theory of Everything (or Big TOE as I think of it), that explains both quantum and astrophysics. So sometimes, when people speak in absolutisms, it frustrates me.

Over the last few years, there has been an uptick in official UFO sightings. Many of them are drones or balloons, or even our old favorite, Venus. But, there is a sizable portion of them that…aren’t. They don’t have a rational explanation yet, and are being further explored. These phenomena have reignited our classic debate, “Are we alone in the Universe?”. And I’ve heard a very short-sighted theory that that answer is: YES. I just can’t buy that. With BILLIONS of stars out there, we truly believe we are unique enough to make that assumption? I understand that we can only see snippets of time; our telescopic portals into the past can only see the far distant things that reach us millions or billions of years later, traveling at the speed of light from that distant star or galaxy. But as good as the James Webb telescope is, I still feel like we are making vast assumptions with our little human minds, while staring at a small section of the universe through an empty paper towel roll, and assuming that we have it all figured out. For real this time. And that’s the best we can do, but sometimes we have a hard time admitting that it’s not omniscience.

The idea that there is no other life in the entire universe feels myopic. We make assumptions that life requires what most earth life requires to live, though the deep sea thermal vent ecospheres have proven even life on earth doesn’t require those assumed needs. I am inclined to believe that we don’t even know what we don’t know, and the discordance between the tiny and the large having laws that don’t match in the universe, is just the tiniest edge of things that don’t fit into our earthbound rules.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Douglas Adams had a particularly beautiful idea of a certain form of alien life in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. One of the alien species he came up with was a Hooloovoo, a “super-intelligent shade of the color blue”. That idea of life is just so, well, ALIEN from us, that I think it just might fit. That’s the closest we have come, in my opinion, to being in the ballpark of what life could be like. And we have a lot further to go.

This all brings me to, finally, the point. In fiction, we see all sorts of encounters with intelligent alien life. Abductions, galactic senates, bugs, grey men, reptiles, blue indigenous people being saved once again by poorly masked White Saviors in boring, overdrawn motion capture Ferngully knockoffs by James Cameron…the sky is, literally, the limit. But I found the most convincing illustration of it in the book I just finished: Roadside Picnic by the Russian brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, written in 1971. Clearly that was when Russia was still the USSR, which adds an extra frisson of interest to the themes of the novel. Heavy spoilers to follow, but the book HAS been out since its release in 1972, so I don’t feel to badly about it.

The concept here is that earth has been visited by aliens; they touched down in 6 areas, called The Zones, in an event known as The Visit. If this were a modern hollywood version of the story, those 6 zones would be communication portals setup to tell us universal truths: That we are unique because as a species we are capable of great goodness and great evil, that we serve a larger purpose, that the universe is waiting to welcome us.

This aint’ that story. Instead, in a far more interesting turn of events, the aliens dropped into the Zones, and left. We assume. I mean, we never even saw them. Instead, in a similar vein to HP Lovecraft’s masterpiece the Color Out Of Space, these regions are permanently altered regions of the earth that have odd artifacts left in them, and the aliens themselves passed through without even saying hello. Inside the Zones, strange artifacts are found that challenge space and time around them; they have incomprehensible uses, but as we do, humans in the regions around them have found these curious objects have extended life on the black market. In the towns bordering the Zones, a healthy smuggling market has flourished, fueled by the discoveries of the looters (called “stalkers”) who are brave, or foolish, enough to foray into the Zones to retrieve them.

The book is written in a very Russian style. It’s written with the opposite of the “info-dumping” that is so common in current fiction. We only uncover the truth of what has happened by tangential exposition from the main characters, who are Stalkers that live near one of the Zones. They are just blue collar humans, regular people trying to live in unreal circumstances, who stumble upon philosophical truths along the way. Again, it felt very Russian in this way.

The story takes place 20-30 years after The Visit, and we see how the world has changed. Some of the things left behind have been found to be useful to us; for example, there has been an energy revolution, and cars are now driven with adaptations of this alien technology. But as one of the characters says, any purpose that these items have, that we have found, feels like monkeys cracking nuts with sledgehammers. It’s not the items’ true purpose, but the aliens are so far beyond us mentally that we aren’t even close to truly ascertaining what their technology harnessed. We find that there are different theories about what The Visit was for; some believe it was to leave us puzzle pieces to assemble, so that when they return we can prove that we have passed the mental test required to join their number. Others believe that they are silently and invisibly infiltrating humanity. But the theory that seems to be most true, and the one the book is named after, is that we were just a way stop on their way to somewhere more important, so far beneath their notice that they didn’t bother to say hello. They essentially had a “roadside picnic”, where they adjusted their path on Earth, and left the refuse of what they didn’t need when they continued. From the book:

“A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.”

Their trash was so much more advanced than us that decades later we still couldn’t understand it (the mental image I had was from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, of the monkeys in front of the monolith); and perhaps they were right to do so.

This concept of alien interaction absolutely fascinates me. I take no solace in the idea that we are the cold, lonely intelligent life in the universe; on earth we are special, but in terms of the universe that’s a pretty inflated view of ourselves to take. It just doesn’t ring true. But this idea, that aliens are so far beyond us that we only knew of their existence because they tossed their soda cans and banana peels out the window as they passed, and they happened to hit us….this feels right. And fascinating. And unlike anything else I’d ever read.

The sparse ways in which we are exposed to the truths of The Visit and The Zones, against the backdrop of family life, the grind of making ends meet, the struggles with substances and other baser desires and encounters between police, felt so real. Inside the zone, the breadcrumbs we are given describe a place in which mysterious phenomena is haphazardly sprinkled among the abandoned Pripyat-like relics of abandoned human civilization. When the The Visit happened, plagues broke out in nearby areas. Even decades later, there are “bug traps”, concentrations of gravity that are invisible, but suck people in without a trace. There are “happy ghosts”, areas of heat shimmer-like movement that burn people to a crisp. “Hell slime”, a blue slime with blue flames that devours people and transforms anything near it into more slime. Then there are “empties”, copper disks that hover 6 inches apart, that can’t be pushed together or taken apart, that on rare occasions have a blue substance between them. The “golden sphere”, a large golden ball rumored to grant wishes. Additionally, the Zones distort reality and perception for anyone in them, and permanently affect the offspring born of those who spend time in it…even raise the dead. And for those nearby, they aren’t allowed to immigrate due to “bad luck” that seems to follow them.

The fantastic nature of the discoveries, with the simple human portrayals of how they are handled, feels so true and accurate. No matter what incredible advances we witness, our human nature absorbs it and continues on. That holds true for disasters and the sublime. One of the ideas a couple characters discuss is the nature and point of intelligence. As one posit has it, “Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.” In this modern time in which we both feel on the brink of breakthroughs and the precipice of doom, this feels even more poignant. This is a book that I will keep in my reread pile, and continue to mull over for years to come.

A Review and Reflection on the documentary Final Account

Last night, while making stuff and looking for something to listen to as I did, I found a documentary on Netflix, called Final Account. I hadn’t heard of it before, but from the synopsis I could see that it was interviews with Germans who lived in Germany at the time of the Third Reich. I thought that sounded interesting. Little did I know I would be absorbed by one of the most fascinating documentaries I’ve ever seen. I’m so haunted by it that I watched it again today.

I’ve made a study of World War II since I was in elementary school. I’ve read countless books about many aspects of the conflict: the underground resistance movements in Nazi occupied countries, fleet actions in the Pacific and Atlantic, Rommel and his tanks in Africa, the Blitzkrieg and miraculously timely leadership of Churchill, many accounts of the survivors of the Holocaust and their experiences. Some of it I’ve read from a strategic interest as someone who has always studied wars and how they have been one or lost; some of it I’ve read from a point of terrified fascination regarding how regular people can allow their country to do something so terrible in “modern” times. This documentary afforded me a new perspective, that I truly didn’t expect to get under my skin as much as it did.

Beginning in 2008, the filmmaker of Final Accounts decided he was going to go and interview German people who had lived within Germany during the rise of Hitler, and through World War II. He interviews individuals, usually one at a time, in their homes, and asks them questions in a largely chronological way. Many of them were children when Hitler came into power, and they recount their recollections of being part of the mandatory Hitler Youth organizations, beginning at age 10, for males and females. We see the warmth of the recollections of camaraderie and youthful excitement, and hear some of the trepidation in a few accounts regarding the discomfort as relatives perhaps questioned what was happening in Germany.

In those sections, I saw what I largely expected. There was discussion of how Jews were starting to be treated poorly in the earlier 1930s, and shame at some of that. Honestly, without examining my own perspective too much, I thought we would see some warm fuzzies at the lost activities of youth, but widespread condemnation of what the Nazis did after their full rise to power. And we do see that in part. But as the documentary progressed, and the recollections became those of no longer children but now active German adults in Nazi Germany, a lot more human nature showed itself on display.

Where the self accountability really began to diverge is when the subjects began discussing their recollections around Kristallnacht, November 9-10 1938. For those who may not be aware, that is the night that Hitler gave a fiery speech against Jews, and all across Germany a systematic attack against the Jewish people began. Many were murdered, more than 1400 synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were burned and looted (the term Kristallnacht, or “crystal night”, itself comes from the smatterings of broken glass across the streets of the Jewish neighborhoods), and more than 30,000 Jewish people were arrested. And what was fascinating, is while the documentary subjects had been forthcoming about seeing Nazi material and what they did in the Hitler Youth organizations, suddenly some of them were…mysteriously unaware. They claimed they saw smoke, but had no idea what it was from. They were taken to the neighborhoods to view the aftermath, but oddly didn’t know why they were taken there. Most shocking, was a man who when asked if he considered the burning of the synagogues a crime, candidly said, “No. No I don’t consider it a crime. I didn’t feel bad for the Jews.” Then we see him reflect further, and say, “Well I suppose technically it must be a crime. It was someone’s property, so I suppose technically according to the law it was. But I didn’t consider it to be.”

This cognitive dissonance is fascinating and unnerving, and it was just the beginning. What I realized as I watched, is that we were seeing the aftermath of decades of guilt, whether realized or not, and the coping mechanisms these people had created over the course of the ensuing 70 years. They could recall the exact marching songs for hiking in the woods as Nazi children, but couldn’t remember Kristallnacht. And this is the sort of refrain that would become increasingly common as we moved through the timeline of World War II.

When asked about concentration camps that were in the towns some of the subjects lived in, we see many claim to have had “no idea” what was happening. Meanwhile, their contemporary subjects are saying they saw plumes of smoke from 2 kilometers away from the ovens, they could see starving prisoners over the gates, they saw trains of people coming in and never trains of people leaving. They saw people being beaten and hanged. And to see these two very different types of recollection, was chilling and fascinating. Clearly there were many who chose to stick with the “company line” of ignorance, EVEN IN THE CASE OF SOME WHO WERE WORKING AT THE CAMPS.

Most the men interviewed were SS, and yet some of them claimed that the SS had nothing at all to do with the camps; that they were soldiers of honor who only fought for Germany on the frontlines. Meanwhile, as one of their contemporaries pointed out, sure there were SS on the frontlines. They were the ones burning entire villages in pogroms, and then sending the survivors in on trains. For those who aren’t aware, the SS were essentially the ringleaders of much of the exterminations, in many ways. The claim that they weren’t involved, would be laughable, if it weren’t such a dire subject.

One of the most impactful scenes to me, among many that I am sure will stay with me forever, is one of the former Nazi soldiers standing in the gated yard of a farm and talking about how the nearby camp had many prisoners. He offhandedly mentions that many of the prisoners would be found within the walls of the farm, trying to escape. He then mentions that it was his family farm. The interviewer asks him, what happened to those people? Oh, they would be rounded up, he says. And then what, asks the interviewer? Oh I have no idea. No one knows. No idea. The interviewer asks, how did they know that there were people hiding here? And we then see the answer, that the interviewer called and turned them in, get painfully and evasively answered. On display across his face, is guilt, defensiveness, evasion, discomfort, and the hints of self loathing, chasing one another like clouds.

There was one former Nazi soldier who seemed to me, have been trying to come a reckoning about his part. Unlike many of the other interviewees, he admitted that he was complacent, and that his complacency and the complacency of others like him is what allowed this to happen. We are shown a room with this man speaking to a group of young people with blurred faces. He tells them that he is proud that he served his country, but ashamed of what his country did. And in a shocking rebuttal, a young man in the crowd vehemently argues that he had nothing to be ashamed of. That this man should not be ashamed of fellow Germans, but instead of “Albanians who would stab you on the train”. This uncomfortable discussion happens, in which both men are arguing back and forth, with the former Nazi saying, You sound just like them! And to hear the arguments that Hitler used to justify his terror, come from the mouth of a young person in the current day, was absolutely bone chilling. I felt that the former Nazi in this scene had done the closest one could come to self atonement. He did not seek to skirt responsibility; he did not use the excuses that so many others did in their interviews, of “I didn’t know. It wasn’t me. It was others who did it. I had no idea.” He takes credit for both his actions and his inactions, and has decided the only way to make up for it is to educate others to try to keep it from happening again.

As I previously alluded to, I went into this, without thinking very hard about it, having expectations of how people would behave. And my expectations were woefully off in most cases. As I reassess the reality of how the former Nazis dealt with the guilt of the Holocaust, as an American of course I looked at it through that lens. In America’s history, there are many awful acts. The slave trade, the treatment of the Native Americans, manifest destiny, Jim Crow laws…there are many acts that are shameful in our past. Frequently, in thinking of how we as a nation parse that history without tearing ourselves apart, I have compared the shame of our sins to the shame of Germany’s. But it was only after watching this documentary, and being shocked by not only the denial and excuses, but also by the modern Nazi ideals raising their head again, that I realized an important difference I hadn’t pondered before.

In recent years, it’s been clear that in America we are still reckoning with much of our past. And we have our share of deniers, as well as those who stunningly think the past doesn’t deserve to be examined or taught, unless it makes us feel good. What I believe is an important distinction in America’s reckoning, that seems to have heavily affected the way some Germans process their sins, is that the issues in America’s past have been changed from within. We didn’t stop the slave trade because the rest of the world forced us; Americans decided it needed to change and it did. The Jim Crow laws and racial segregation didn’t start to change because the UN said so; Americans thought we could do better. But in the case of Germany, the Final Solution didn’t fizzle out at 6 million Jews, instead of all of them, because the German people decided they had had enough. It stopped because the Allies finally defeated Germany, and Hitler ate a bullet rather than face accountability.

I believe the most important thing to do when history is uncomfortable and shameful, is to shine a light on it and figure out why it happened, until we can be sure that we aren’t accidentally waltzing the same steps to a different song, and thinking we have come up with something new. When I was a child in school, the school system I was part of seemed to believe that too. I was lucky in that I was taught about the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, and how awful slavery was. But that is increasingly becoming a rarity in many parts of our country.

We need to be proud, not of the mistakes that we’ve made, but that we took the steps needed to start on the hard road to change. Because as this documentary helps to highlight, that is rare in human history. Most of the ugliest parts of history were born from the seeds of complacency and looking the other way. And from what I can glean, if someone comes in and forces you to change, it’s much harder to admit that you’ve made mistakes. One of the subjects, a literal SS officer, said he didn’t even blame Hitler for the Holocaust. He said, “Nuremberg said Hitler was guilty, but the German courts didn't. So I don’t believe I am guilty either, according to Germany.” That lack of accountability, wrapped in shame and evasiveness, is a poison that it would seem still needs to be drained.

I know that Germany has a nation has done many things to atone for what it did, and has made great strides to be equal and face down its past (in many ways, they seem to be doing better than we are at it these days). But the fears born of populism, the Other, and feeling unheard are able to combine into very heady cultural monsters, and they are never as far away as we think; particularly in the age of misinformation and a seeming lessening of critical thought. This documentary truly did a wonderful job of reminding us that human nature hates guilt, and it will take the grains of sand from a shameful past and use whatever excuse it can to coat them with pearls of complacency and evasion. And it’s a lesson we should all listen to. Please watch this very important film. It’s only on Netflix until March 1st, which is a shame. Because it’s truly one that should make us all examine what we think we know, and remind us of where true evil really lies: just around the corner.

If we could get past our past, what could we achieve? Semi review of The Rook

The title sounds a little larger in scope than I was going for, but I may explore that too.

I was recently reading a book, called The Rook, by Daniel O’Malley. I enjoyed it well enough, and may go on to read the other two in the series. If you haven’t read it, and you don’t want spoilers, you may want to stop reading (though to be fair, the book is largely used as a jumping off point for other musings).

The main character, as you will find out within the first few pages, is named Myfanwy Thomas, and she works for a supernatural intelligence agency in London. And she wakes up, not knowing who she is or anything about herself, surrounded in a park by dead bodies, all of which are wearing latex gloves. She finds a letter in her pocket from herself, saying that she knew this would happen in advance, and gives her instructions to find more missives, and we are off to the races.

I found this to be an interesting take on how to get the reader introduced to a complex world, though by the end it could get excessive (particularly since every time we read a missive to herself, at least in the Kindle version, it leads to pages of letters in italics, which was tough on my eyes). But what I found truly compelling, was the way that the main character’s personality is rewritten.

Having awoken in her “new” self, she has none of the shyness or timidity from her past. She has no memory of the life that made her who she was; she just has the skills and abilities from before, and the ability to progress on the path she was on.

I found this idea so intriguing. So much of who we are, and how we respond to things, is in response to the maps of our lives, and what we experience. That can be trauma responses, or positive responses…but either way, these lenses color how we react. Who could we be, if we could shed the skins of our past, and see things new? Wake up with the skills we’ve learned and the ability to use them, but essentially….get out of our own way?

The book, whether intentionally or not, makes the argument that we could be superhuman badasses. I like that idea. When I was a child, I was extremely shy. I’ve fought it my whole life, and also had a hard time trusting people. There are various pet reasons I’ve come up with for the reasons that I am that way, but the fact is, it’s never totally gone away. I’ve learned to adapt and overcome, but inside I’m still largely that child, and sort of have to convince myself to behave in other ways. If I had no memory of a lifetime of hesitancies around people, or having had my heart hurt by those that I allowed to keep it in trust, would I still feel shy inside? Or would that go away?

Over the years I’ve seen various papers that have shown me that much of the behavior I would assume is learned, is actually genetic. What a fascinating concept, to have bits of personality just be born into us via our genetic lotteries. But how much of that ends up being cemented into place later on by experiences and trauma responses?

Over the last few years, I’ve had the unpleasant experience that I feel many experience around this time, and that’s the death of friendships from our younger lives. Social media has given us the illusion that we can just find the people from our past online, pick up where we left off, and just continue to be friends, happily ever after. But as I’ve moved out of my thirties, unsurprisingly I’m finding that life is more complex than that. But as the branches of our trees of life diverge, and we become further settled into who we are as people, something odd happens. Sometimes it’s just that you realize you haven’t had communication in a while, and when you reach back out it feels…odd. Sometimes it’s that someone unceremoniously cuts you off. And sometimes as we see our paths take extremely different turns, we find ourselves not able to allow the same time to someone that doesn’t seem to have similar aspirations.

These transitions hurt. We can see sometimes where our trust and affection were unaligned with the person we directed them to, where we were taken for granted. And then we pick up and move on. But looking back through that experience, we can also allow ourselves to see in what ways we have changed, and I like to think in many ways it’s for the better. For myself, I think that I have gotten much better at realizing that not every person is worthy of taking my time. I no longer have that feeling of endless time stretching in front of me; I am cognizant of my own mortality, and fairly comfortable with it. And with that feeling, comes the recognition that I should not just waste the time I do have. I have also had enough experience with people I blindly trusted, to learn the hard way that I shouldn’t have, that I realize that even though I’d like to extend open arms to all who would seem to extend open arms to me…I cannot. That flame hurts, little one.

So in the case of refining my experience into distilled wisdom for myself down the road, the trauma that has resuscitated my hesitancy in some regards with people, has also served to strengthen the bonds with those I am closest with. I no longer give time and attention freely, but I am more generous with those that are worth it. That annealing of love for a more select few is a process of heat and pressure, but ultimately has resulted in relationships that are both stronger and more beautiful.

These situations have also made me truly appreciate how life is not black and white. For me, it is just full of seasons. Some relationships are good for a certain season of life, and it is good to embrace them before it turns, and then appreciate the time we were given. It’s equally important to realize that not all relationships are permanent, and that we can’t force them.

So if I could wake up tomorrow, and have no memory of my past, what would change? Well I assume I would be even more assertive. Perhaps I would not feel shy. But would I lose the wisdom that things like the trauma of changing friendships have left on me? Or would that wisdom be deep enough that it would sink in on genetic level? I don't know. Obviously it’s all just an abstract exercise of thought, but it’s been interesting to toy with it. Would I take the chance to shed the bruises of my history, to only take up the mantle of the knowledge and skills that I’ve earned? Would I still be me? I think no.

Although I might like to try for a day or two and see what I could accomplish.

AI And The Future of Humanity

Many years ago, I wrote a post about the future of work and the eventual need for a Universal Basic Income, due to the advancements of technology (robotic and AI) that would make human workers obsolete, or near obsolete, in various fields. Since that time, we’ve had illustrations of real life scenarios that UBI does work, and in fact makes the humans that are on it more inspired and creative. And, in a less positive light, we have very recently seen that AI is accelerating its takeover of humanity. Is that hyperbolic? Maybe. But I’d prefer to say it’s accurate.

In the last few months, there have been several cases of AI disrupting human spheres. We saw it in the form of “art” AI, which created artwork from text prompts input by humans. This immediately brought out an outcry, due to the artists that the AI had been trained upon, rightly pointing out that the AI was stealing their styles and giving nothing back. Now, has inspiration always been a nebulous and controversial aspect of the art world? Yes, indeed. Where does inspiration cross the line into plagiarism, or appropriation? These have been questions that artists have debated for years. But I believe it clearly crosses over into plagiarism when an AI bot wholeheartedly shoplifts an artists entire artistic DNA, with no attribution or payment. As though artists don’t struggle enough to make money after spending so much time and effort pouring their love into their craft…now they have HAL 3000 shoplifting the pooty too? When it takes literally the amount of time it would take to wish for a Djinn to make art of the subject of a wisher’s choosing, and in the exact style that a wisher’s favorite artist projects, we have a serious problem. This is already rocking the artistic industry, in that game studios are laying of pre-visualization artists (always one of my favorite kinds of modern artists, known for sweeping vistas and meticulously rendering fantastical worlds, among other things, and required to be intensely talented) in favor of using AI to generate pre-viz art. And will the money that is saved by axing those talented artists, serve to do anything but make the fat cats at the top further increase their financial BMI? Forgive me for being skeptical, but I doubt it.

In the same vein of AI disruption, we also have similar bots that are taking over the roles of writers (I promise this post has been poorly written by a human, and should handily pass your Turing test. Here’s a typoo to prove it) by using small prompts to write articles and stories. And ChatGPT is also coming for the techies themselves, in that it’s making large swathes of code writing obsolete, and can be driven by AI instead to write code in a tiny fraction of the time (admittedly it takes some handholding, but is FAR less demanding than the traditional code writing procedures).

So in the space of a few months, we have had huge disruptions to labor sets. And what’s unique about this particular tech assault, is that it’s upon traditionally highly skilled and learned roles. This isn’t just a robot replacing a hamburger flipper; these are AI not only replacing many people who have advanced degrees, but stealing their own work as the very means to do so. And in a particularly insulting twist, the AI is orders of magnitude faster at all of these things than a human could ever be.

So what are the implications? Well, looks like we are heading full long towards the part of late-stage capitalism where the 200 rich people with all the money leave Earth, and leave the rest of us underlings behind after we’ve been sapped dry of all our AI-stealable skills, to squabble over our Soylent Green crumbs. I kid, I kid. Sort of. To be sure, AI can be a tool to help us achieve great things. But it can also carelessly be used to irreparably damage us. And that sure feels like where we are right now.

To me, if the powers that be aren’t hearing alarm bells about the future of humanity and what we do, they just aren’t paying attention. Which, given the political antics of the last several years, wouldn’t be all that surprising. But let’s choose to be optimistic, and believe that there ARE people in power who want to help the human race still (and that they aren’t just the sorts who appear to be interested in that, until they can buy Twitter and show that they’ve chosen to throw it all in with the loonies instead. Ahem.) I believe now is the time to begin to throw together a plan to do something BEFORE everything gets awful for once. And what could they do? Well, I have three ideas that could mitigate some things.

1. Clearly we need to make it where if an AI dataset is used to train a plagiarism bot, the original artists/writers/etc need to be paid royalties from the organization that has created that plagiarism bot. Both upon initial usage, and repeated royalties upon reuse. The good thing about AI, is you have metrics that will tell you that information down to the Nth degree.

2. For every job that uses AI or robots to displace a human, there should be a heavy tax on that position, used to fund UBI for the people that have been displaced. That will make it so that digital slaves aren’t immediately so appealing, for doing the work of humans for the mere cost of developing them in the first place, and then making them Legion. It will also help to fund UBI for those people, so that they can retrain or otherwise lead fulfilling lives and contribute to society, instead of becoming destitute. I know that there’s the whole argument about “every time there’s a new technology, the people tied to the old one cry doom”, and that’s true. But when cars replaced horses, the people that shoed the horses could learn to work on cars. AI takes jobs, and leaves a vacuum that only AI moves into, at least for a huge ratio. And that just hasn’t been equitable at any other point in history.

3. For my most popular idea, tie the income of the people at the top of companies to the income of the people at the lowest tier. The C-suite characters would no longer be able to reap all the rewards from taking the profits from the humans that made the products, as we so so much now. Let’s say, no one can make more than 20 times what the lowest paid workers makes. I don’t buy that anyone can work 20 times harder in a position than someone else, and so many of our deep-seated problems come from the hugely disparate income inequalities that have occurred over the past several decades. If the people at the bottom of the pyramid are taken care of, we all prosper.

4. And as a freebie, let’s make it so that some projects are inalienably achieved by humans. We didn’t come this far just to let Pong’s great grandchild take it all away.

Are these ideas perfect? No. But at least they are something to talk about, which I am not seeing Congress do yet. And they need to start, yesterday, before this problem gets out of hand. Because it will, and very quickly. We are on the precipice of being able to make this world so good for so many, if we just continue to proactively take steps to solve problems before they are too late.

Manassas Viking Festival

This past Saturday, I did the first live selling event that I have done in several years. It was the Manassas Viking Festival; originally I was planning to do the 2020 show, but you know. The great time deletion happened. And it was great, I had the best time, and got to meet so many new people.

Meeting Customers In Real Life!

😍

Meeting Customers In Real Life! 😍

Thank you to every one who came and supported my business. Every single person I talked to was pleasant and nice, and it was just all around wonderful. To those of you who have come here after the show, thank you for stopping by! I am so glad you’re back :) Can’t wait to attend next year, and I am truly looking forward to my next event.

Me at my booth, having a wonderful time meeting you!

The Northman: A movie review

I knew I wanted to write something here today, but wasn’t sure what it would be. Further reflections on Ukraine? The immense consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of a very privileged and very flawed few, occurring at lightning speed over the last few years? And then it occurred to me: I saw The Northman a couple days ago, and clearly THAT is what you want to hear about tonight. So here we are!

Viking Authenticity 101

As soon as I heard that Robert Eggers was going to be releasing a Viking movie, I knew they had me. Let’s be honest: I can get enjoyment out of something with as much authenticity as Thor: Ragnarok, or the movie version of a text book come to life. I enjoy the myth and legends and intrigue around Norse culture as much as I do the authentic history. Horned helmets? I’ll take it! Formed leather armor with pelts? Fine with me (in fact, I HAVE MY OWN, have you seen it?? Because here it is)

Now just because I enjoy all those things, doesn’t mean that I’m not aware that the couple examples of horned helmets we have weren’t viking, and were ceremonial….I know that true authentic historical armor was likely to be chainmail or lamellar…and that the Vikings tv show isn’t exactly a documentary. But, I enjoy all of it just the same. And from the people I know who are from the Scandinavian countries themselves, they seem to hold a similar view.

BOOM. Historical accuracy in spades! ;) Don’t at me.

All that being said, I typically try to not find out much about a movie before I see it, beyond what is in the preview. I like to be surprised. Especially if I am actually going to a movie theater to see it, which I hardly do these days. So imagine my joy when I discovered how much authenticity The Northman sought to pack into its dirty and dark story. I won’t go into the plot here, more than to say it’s based upon Saxo’s saga…which was ultimately used by William Shakespeare as the inspiration for Hamlet. Take from that what you will.

So just to get this out of the way, the movie was fantastic. Richly woven, deeply researched, intelligently written, and superbly acted. I could watch it ten times in a row. And for those of us who carry a mental “Viking Authenticity” bingo card in our heads at all times, this is a blackout. It was truly incredible to see. To see authentic viking swords, along with seax blades and period accurate axes, was a Christmas morning. Spectacle helmets galore, and lamellar armor, if indeed armor was to be had (which frequently, in real life, it wasn’t!). The environment, shot in Northern Ireland and Iceland, was dark and dreary and metal, just like my soul. There was even diamond woven cloth on a priestess, oh my goodness.

But to me, I think the part that most blew me away, was how the true North philosophy of life was captured. As I have stated, I am fascinated by the Viking age (ha, clearly.) But I don’t take it as a way of life we should truly try to emulate. There are certain facets that can be taken, sure, but overall, the way Vikings thought is extremely alien to anything a modern Westerner would recognize now. To the Norse, the gods were alive and active; the veil between worlds was thin, and manipulatable by shaman and seers. Luck was a tangible commodity that attached itself to some people, and a sizable part of the human soul was carried in each of us by a female ancestral spirit. And all of this was referenced in the movie.

Do you want to know what the Norns have to say to you? Do you REALLY?? Be careful what you wish for, Bjork may just show up!

There were barrow dwellers and hallucinogens. Valkyries as the terrifying and powerful creatures they were, not as the sexpots with metal pasties that we so often see these days (though I enjoy those sometimes too!) And they captured one of the most alien ideas I have picked up from the sagas: the notions of motherhood and what they meant to certain female Norse nobility. One of the more horrific facts that one uncovers when learning about Viking histories, is that the bonds of parenthood could be very…fragile. Many children were largely raised by the community, and with the mortality rate being extremely high due to sickness, plague, famine, and everything else that could kill children during what was a very tough time to survive, and in austere conditions…well, parenthood could look very different from what we recognize now. There are tales of Kings sacrificing their sons to the gods, of children being abandoned during noble ransoms, of weak children being killed by their parents in a cruel attempt to strengthen their line. If you want some examples of viking mothers acting in these ways, just look up Gunnhild. Even these horrific views of parenthood were addressed in the movie.

Valkyrie as the terrifying creatures they were! Fierce and nonhuman

The Northman doesn’t shy away from what the Norse truly were, and it doesn’t sugarcoat them. We see the cruelty they could be capable of (yes, they would burn settlements. Yes, they were avid slavers, as was much of the world at this time). It unflinchingly looks into the past, and shows us what was interesting, what was horrifying, and why the world they lived in pushed them to these views and actions. It glaringly demonstrates how they could be both victim and perpetrator, capable of mercy and love and dark magic and hatred. In short, it’s a tale of humanity, of our love and cruelty, and how the seeds of both are entwined within our own souls. It was a fascinating movie, and the more I reflect upon it the more I love it.

FIERCE

Grab your towel and DON'T PANIC

Oh no. Guys, they're doing it again. The media is trying to get us to freak out about something, when we don't need to.

If you've turned on the news today, it's more than a little likely that you've seen reporting about "China meets with Russia as Russia asks for help". The clear message they are trying to communicate is, you need to worry because China is about to supply Russia with weapons and stomp Ukraine and it will be WWIII.

Here's the thing: No. First of all, China tried to have a low-key phone call....and we intercepted it. Oof, that's embarrassing for them. I love the irony, considering when the US was about to release all the intelligence about Russia's plans a few weeks ago (which I think was a beautiful and adept response, one of the best uses of intelligence I've seen in my lifetime. Talk about taking the wind out of Putin's sails and stealing his narrative! But I digress...), China warned Russia. And now, look at that, we pulled the old Kansas City shuffle. Not only did this throw their communications off and steal the narrative AGAIN, but it makes it less likely that China will open itself up to (clearly intercepted) comms with the Kremlin again. It's just so messy and distasteful for them, you see.

The imbalance of the SIGINT intercepts for Russia and China aside, and the fact that this means we can broadcast further communications between the two...China wasn't going to supply Russia with weaponry anyway. A flailing and failing Russia means a vacuum...which China would love to fill. And (thus far) China is into the long game of war with markets, not supplying weaponry. Let alone the fact that they would then be iced out of two markets that are much bigger for them than Russia...Europe and the US. The media would you have think that China would say, "Dude we've just been waiting for you to ask!" And no, not at all.

And Putin is aware of this. Which is why he asked....for MREs. "Can you at least hook me up with some crackers?" That's how poorly this is going for Putin. We all know it, the strategy is abysmal, the costs are far outweighing any possible gain Putin is going to get out of this, the logistics are a nightmare; this is why he's been sacking and arresting all his advisors and generals. Trying to shift the blame, because after all, Russians love to depose/sacrifice failed leaders. And if this isn't a failure of leadership on an Olympian scale, what is? He's trying to shove the internet genie back in the bottle and suppress a worldly Russian populace, while fighting a literal war with the worst possible optics; did you know that Russian use of VPNs has jumped by several thousand percent since he tried to shut them off? This isn't the age of your parent's totalitarianism. This is going to be a hard thing to enforce.

So now the news would have you worried about this alliance, but there's no THERE there. Don't let it get to you. There's plenty to worry about, but Chinese leadership being as ignorant as Russian leadership isn't high up there on the "likely scenarios" list.

New Russia, just like the old Russia

One of the stories in history I've always found fascinating, is that of the Russo-Japanese war, and in particular, the Battle of Tsushima, which occurred in 1905.

The Tsar sent the Russian fleet to attack Japan (and you'll forgive me, for skipping over A LOT here), after several large land battles. It was an aging coal powered fleet, but the Tsar felt they could beat the Japanese handily. He felt this way though he didn't know much about the Japanese fleet and their technology, though the Russian ships were coal powered and expensive to move, and they still used lanyard to fire their guns by hand (rather than fire them electrically); they also used conscripted and fairly unskilled sailors.

They ended up taking their fleet all the way around the horn of Africa to Japan. It took the the better part of a year to get there, and the already aged Russian ships were definitely not better off than when they left. They arrived, prepared to dominate the Japanese and show off the might of the Russian Navy to the world, and by extension the military prowess and might of the Tsar, Nicholas II. Russia's fleet had more ships, and they continued to steam ahead towards battle.

As they arrived at Japan, the Japanese with their smaller (but more modern) 30 ship fleet, within 24 hours sank the entire 40 ship Russian fleet, including their four battleships. They were completely routed. The Russians were forced to end the war in disgrace, and the Tsar never fully recovered his standing. The costs of losing the war resulted in famine and hardship for the people. Their leader had led them into a war they were poorly prepared for, in which their military showed itself to be weak and outdated, and as a result, in 1917 the Tsar and his family were overthrown and killed in the Russian revolution.

Doesn't some of this seem eerily familiar right now?

Russian trolls and bots, post-Russia's internet clampdown

I am absolutely fascinated by a phenomenon.

For years now, I've made it a hobby to notice Russian trolls and bots online (hey we all need our hobbies). It's a verifiable fact that they often peddle American right wing opinions and memes (sometimes with hilarious inaccuracies), and pro-Trump "stolen election" and pro-Putin content in particular.

Since Russia had most of its internet access blocked off, I immediately noticed a huge drop in inflammatory right wing posts online, in pro-Trump/Putin comments in comment sections, in nasty right wing memes being posted. It was honestly an instantaneous difference in the temperature of the internet. I even notice when looking at "reacts" on facebook, that those that mention positives with Biden no longer have the angry face first; they often have the love react first. This trend has been predominant in the last several days, and I am shocked at the instant changes. Obviously there are still angry trump supporters out there, but there is a marked difference in numbers online. I am sure it's not a coincidence. And it's just another fascinating facet of this time.

Also please check back, I’ll be writing my own analysis of this surreal situation with Russia, and the absolutely criminal invasion of Ukraine, later on.

The Last Duel (SPOILER RICH!)

I remember hearing several months ago (or years ago?? Time is so strange during plagues) about a new Ridley Scott movie coming out. I love his movies, and I heard that this one would have sword fighting in it, so I immediately was invested. Then, I believe, the next thing I heard was that Matt Damon would be starring in it, and that he would have a mullet. I don’t remember hearing anything after that.

The rumors were true.

Lo and behold, last week I learned that The Last Duel was available to watch on streaming. I immediately watched it (twice, if you want to get technical). And I loved it. First, my second complaint about the movie besides the mullet, was Matt Damon’s duel helmet.

What in the traumatic brain injury is that.

Now that those are out of the way, I’ll get on to everything else about the movie that I didn’t know. Adam Driver (of Kylo Ran fame), Ben Affleck, and Jodie Comer round out the rest of the main cast. The film immediately started with a duel scene between Adam Driver and Matt Damon’s characters, and then goes into three separate “flashback” sequences. This was a very unique approach, because (and, if you haven’t scene it yourself, PLEASE don’t read further, it has so much more impact if you don’t realize what is coming!) each of these sequences are of the same section of story, from the perspective of the three characters who experienced it. This was an absolutely fascinating way to tell the story.

I’m not going to rely heavily on recapping the plot, because I truly hope you watched it yourself (and, if you didn’t, please DO IT NOW). But essentially it’s the story of Matt Damon and Adam Driver and their battle camaraderie, their struggles with one another and power and pride, and the story of Matt Damon as Sir Jean marrying Jodie Comer’s character Marguerite. The lynchpin of it all is when Adam Driver’s character Le Gris shows up when Jean is away, and rapes Marguerite. She bravely tells Jean when he returns, and he decides to challenge Le Gris to a duel and allow “God to settle it”.

You will become so familiar with this shot.

Going into this movie, I assumed it was a rather typical medieval war movie, and I had high expectations since I think Ridley Scott is incredible at this. Master and Commander is my favorite movie of all time, so I assumed this would be an excellent historic war movie (clearly one of my favorite genres), and in that I was not disappointed. The battle scenes are visceral, intimate, and brutal. They truly didn’t disappoint. Of note is the scene where a volley of arrows launches in a forest in Scotland; I had to rewatch that scene several times just to truly appreciate how terrifying that experience would have been. As in Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator, the grace and glory of hand to hand combat with simple tools is stripped down to its essential and bloody truth: while I am fascinated by it, this is truly an awful and terrifying way to die. The Last Duel achieved this pared-down storytelling with aplomb, as before. He has not lost any of his brutal clarity in telling the stories of battles. In the final duel scene, you truly are left with a sense of what an eternity the microseconds of hand to hand combat truly encompass. It’s an earth shattering feeling that is well communicated.

THEY ARE NOT HAVING A GOOD TIME HERE

All of the above is exactly what I expected, and love, from Ridley Scott Films. I assume that there were many in the audience who were there for those exact reasons, as was I. Here’s what I didn’t expect: A complex and empathetic story of pride, power, and the powerlessness of women in Catholic France. I did not expect an entreaty that would show the perspectives of two empathetic male characters who have their own views and complexities, and the erosions and micro aggressions of their relationships over time. And I definitely did not expect to see the story of a woman doubted, loved but ignored and downtrodden, and her complex emotions in what to sacrifice and what to save, due to her position. I didn’t expect to see the complexity of Le Gris, who was intelligent and empathetic, even going to bat for his friend when his friend had wronged him. We see him viewing a woman that he “loves” through the lens of “woman as property”; a system that he was born into. He doesn’t realize the full horror of what he has done, because he is too blinded by his own position, power, and wants, to see the true impact of what he his actions.

The story of Jean as a less intellectual, but still intelligent and in many ways honorable man, again the product of his times and the systems in place, was equally fascinating. We see as he over time refuses to adapt or learn, but continues to see “wrongs” against him (without his own self at fault, of course). But we are still empathetic; he is built for a simpler world, and doesn’t understand that. We see his perspective as a man who loves his wife, but ultimately still lives in a world that values her as a breeder and property, and on some level, he sees her that way too.

And finally in the third iteration of the story, we see Marguerite’s own view. That of a woman who must bear the shames of the men around her (first her father’s treason, then her husband’s impetuous actions that result in his losses of station), who was raised literate and as an intellectual but lives in a home with an illiterate husband and a hostile mother in law. She is still happy and takes on the duties of the house as much as possible, but over the five years of her marriage that we see, she very much feels the weight of not having born an heir yet. When she has her child but feels the weight of possibly being burned at the stake depending on if her husband loses the duel (and therefore proves that she lied about the rape), she clearly sees how other women chose not to speak out.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie with characters so deeply and well written. In an era in which analysis of current events and others continues to grow flatter by the day, with little room for nuance or empathy, this movie upsets the status quo. It explains a horrific event, without justifying it. It reminds us that humans are ugly, beautiful, good and evil, often within the same skin. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Destroying Angel

Destroying Angel, one of the most deadly mushrooms in the world. It has an eerie almost glow to it; you can see it in the distance, with a cool white color that is almost irresistible. It's such a pure and attractive white, the name for it is perfect. Since it's part of the amanita family, the toxin is "amatoxin", which in this case it has in lethal amounts. If you were to ingest it, you would feel intense stomach distress in the next several hours; vomiting, diarrhea, severe stomach cramps. If you weren't to realize what you had eaten, that might be where you think it ends. But after that point, in about 8-12 hours, you would then experience liver and/or kidney failure. Over 68% of those who eat this mushroom, die from it. Most who do survive, need liver or kidney transplants. By the time the second set of symptoms show up, the damage has been done.

Eastern American Destroying Angel, benignly plotting your demise.

It looks so deceptively perfect; the telltale signs are the bulbous "vulva" at the bottom, the frail and delicate gills, and the "cape" at the top of the stalk. In the early stages it can look similar to a puffball, but if you cut them open, the inside of a puffball should look smooth, almost with the texture of a marshmallow. If it has any structure, it's not safe. The kids got a good lesson today in Mommy's Mycologia School. ;)

Note the pure, cool white color, and the bulbous “vulva” at the bottom, from which the mushroom emerged. The vulva is often buried so it requires some digging to uncover.

Bioluminescence? Yes please.

I love mushrooms. I think they are fascinating; they aren’t animal, they aren’t plant, they aren’t like anything else. So one of my hobbies is to just sort of find them and learn about them, when I have the chance.

Last night, while driving down the road, I saw these bright orange clusters of mushrooms by a golf course. We pulled over and I took pictures, sure that I had found Jack O’ Lantern mushrooms, and in October, no less. They were gorgeous and vibrant, and I took some photos and we left.

Today I learned that they are bioluminescent. I find bioluminescence to be one of the most beautiful and mysterious things you can find in nature, so tonight we went back to the golf course, and I grabbed a clump of them (I am sure they will be mowed tomorrow). I took them home, not sure if we would see the elusive glow or not. And to the amazement of my kids and I….we did. So I went and got out my camera, and took a few low light photos of the first time I’ve witnessed bioluminescence “in the wild”, if you will (as opposed to in a museum or aquarium). I loved it so much that I wanted to share the experience with you.

Afghanistan

For the last few days, I've been parsing and categorizing my response to seeing the rapid collapse of Afghanistan after our withdrawal. And to me, it's been a bit more rapid than I expected, but absolutely what I've assumed would happen for the last 20 years. I remember when we invaded, saying "I want to know what our exit strategy is, or else this is just another Vietnam." Turns out that's exactly what has happened. Afghanistan has a very long history of being nearly unconquerable. Genghis Khan was successful, but only because his army permanently moved in and never left. In fact the Hazara people literally look different than other tribes, due to their Mongolian heritage. But the Romans, the Russians, Alexander the Great, and the United States, have all been defeated in trying to conquer Afghanistan. If only President Bush would have rewatched the Princess Bride in 2001, and remembered the all important maxim: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."

I hate that we weren't successful, and the good lives that were lost. But I don't see it as a surprise at all. America is not good at ending wars. I think the ending of World War II gave us hubris for the other conflicts that we entered in the 20th (and beginning of the 21st) century. You cannot force a people to choose what they don't want. And with Afghanistan, though there are many people there who are good people, there still weren't enough to fight against the inertia of thousands of years of tribalism and war lords. Which we should have been well aware of, and many of us were....but the top brass and politicians, chose to deny this.

I've seen people asking why we didn't maintain a force there, like we did with Japan and Germany. The reasons for keeping those bases were strategic, to keep footholds in Europe (against Russia) and in Asia. Afghanistan really doesn't fulfill that need. And with the cost of a place that has NEVER been stable, the maintenance is too high. Japan and Germany had successful economies and stability; Afghanistan doesn't and won't. We would pour far more into the bribes needed to keep the wolves off in that region, in perpetuity, than we would gain strategically. Attacks on the Green Zone never stopped. The prices never stopped being paid by American personnel. The same can't be said of Germany and Japan. I fully believe that if we were to wait ten more years, we would just spend trillions more that could be spent here, with the same result.

At some point, you have to disavow the sunk cost fallacy, and withdraw. Should that have been done at a more measured pace? Sure, of course. At the least we should have had a solid plan on how to get our allies out, who would surely be sacrificed.

But I ultimately believe we were well past the point where we should go. And I've spent my whole career involved in that war, it breaks my heart that we weren't able to save the good people from the bad; I hate how many of our friends and coworkers were lost in the prime of life, for the glory of a politician's lost cause. I hate seeing the equipment that we left to try to do the right thing, get taken by the Taliban (just like what happened when the Russians left). I hate seeing a new vacuum for bad actors come into existence. But I hate even more, that our past leaders thought that the risks of fighting a new war for bad reasons, were worth it. Because, as a 19 year old, I knew how it would end. You can't tell me they didn't see it too. But too many people wanted to get rich at the top, and didn't pay a price. And from the good old adage, Never let a crisis go to waste, they didn't. So I hope that the leaders from 2001 and on get accurately called out for wasting blood, time, and money, for the most predictable end all along. And the death of hope for a people, that was never going to be. As a nation, I hope that we can learn some lessons about fights that are worth the cost, and that you should never enter a room without knowing how to get back out of it again.

How I really feel about billionaire joy rides to “space”

I usually find space and flight among the most inspirational things there are. I love the idea of humanity exploring and learning together, I think it's great that Space X has made using reusable rockets an achievable thing, and that it gives us data we can use in so many ways, and helps advance science and exploration.

That said, the billionaire boys club dick waving contest has been so depressing, I've avoided watching the launches. Here are these jerks that underpay the people that built their companies, racing to get to the very tip of space (technically the outer atmosphere), meanwhile the earth is burning, melting, and flooding, racing to prove that....well, they just can. Jeff Bezos, one of my least favorite humans, literally said he started Blue Origin because he could think of nothing else to do with his money. 😑 No wonder his philanthropist ex left him. I have never seen a better case for taxing rich people than these antics.

How about helping to build the infrastructure of the country that your company has used every single day, Jeff? How about building hospitals? Fighting vaccine disinformation? Building a tool to detect deepfakes? How about paying for childcare for your workers? Making it so they don't pee in bottles at work because of how totalitarian your warehouses are? You could build roads, put ENTIRE cities on new forms of power, help clean plastic out of the oceans! Make desalination plants for the west coast! ORRRR.....make a giant dick that doesn't even really make it to space, spewing an atrocious amount of pollution for no net scientific gain, and look like the biggest dork I've ever seen while doing it. Literally the only good thing about this to me has been seeing Wally Funk finally make it to space. Did you know that to Jeff Bezos, spending $80,000 is the equivalent of you or I spending $1. THAT'S how much money he has. I think it's fine to have millionaires, I still think they should be taxed and we need to close the loopholes that make it so they don't pay taxes at equivalent rates like the rest of us, but I think it's immoral to have billionaires. It's the sign of broken systems and broken people. You really have to have greed to make billions of dollars, and keep it. And I know, Jeff Bezos has given away pittances to people. But he has kept a LOT. And spent billions more on this useless stunt.

The world NEEDS help. America NEEDS moral leaders and business leaders. And this just AIN'T IT. Do better, jackasses. Regular people are the ones whose shoulders you stood on (and, faces, in many cases); why don't you try doing things to help us, instead of making the most ironic and crappy representation of leaving us behind to die in our petty poor people filth that you can.

Mort by Terry Pratchett, and a general reflection on Death

Since I read War of the Worlds when I was in first grade, I’ve been a science fiction and fantasy fan. It doesn’t take much poking around my interests to see that I’m an avid reader. Back around 1999, I read Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s collaboration, Good Omens, and subsequently loved it. I also truly loved the TV show version, which we all know is a dicey gamble at best, when it comes to transferring the written word to the silver screen. It was witty, irreverent yet respectful, and thought provoking about the most serious topics, in the most fun way.

However, it pains me to say, that’s as much Terry Pratchett as I had ever read. I know, I know! I KNOW. This was largely due to the fact that he’d written so much, I just didn’t really know where to start. There are plenty of guides online that told me what to start with, but they all differed, and I was paralyzed by choice. I’ve known this whole time that i was missing out, but hadn’t remedied it.

I finally bit the bullet a few weeks ago, and read Mort. I loved it. It makes Death someone that you would actually not mind meeting, scythe and all. Considering the fact that mortality is inevitable, I find this a very comforting anthropomorphization of an idea that modern Western culture seems to have done its utmost to avoid. I find memento mori to be a thing our current culture lacks, and through Death in Terry Pratchett’s books, and Death in the Sandman books, I think there are two very healthy ways of approaching the unavoidable specter of….well…..Death.

Frontispiece from Folio Society’s beautiful edition of Mort by Terry Pratchett

“THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.” -Death, Mort

I love this quote from my In-Laws: “One out of one dies.”

They say it whenever life is just a bit stressful, or problems are a bit too big, and every time it makes me feel better. I hear that there are attempts to expand the human lifespan to 150+ years, and all I can think is, BLECH who would want that. I certainly wouldn’t. I intend to enjoy life as much as possible while I can, and then embrace the big nap when it’s my turn. I hope that I’ve left a legacy and stories to entertain and make my loved ones proud, but I would have no desire to outlive my natural life. And I think that’s a good thing.

Over the past year, there has been a lot of insanity from a lot of people. In many, many ways. And I think a part of that, has been a primitive reaction to having to stare death in the face. Many people have managed to run from the idea that yes, we all will die. If you buy a certain type of protein shake, or do yoga, or follow the right directions, on a primal level, it seems that we bought off on an idea that we could delay, or entirely ignore, the inevitable. And we couldn’t. And this past year, that came and looked us right in the peepers, and we couldn’t look away. So a lot of people just….lost it. Maybe they flipped out and got themselves banned on airlines when they were asked to wear a mask. Maybe they punched someone over a parking space. Or maybe they just decided that rather than cope in a healthy way, take a vaccine to keep themselves and their loved ones safer, they would….decide that it was all a big plot to implant magnetic microchips or whatever, brought about by….checks notes ….ah yes, satanic baby eating lizard people.

So rather than double down on crazy and decide to jump into the deep end of lunacy to avoid confronting that death comes for us all (though there are certainly ways we can mitigate some of the means, but not the end result), I try to face it. I take the Victorian approach. I like to look for beauty in graveyards. I enjoy watching movies with heartwarming death themes (thank you, Tim Burton); and now, I’ve fallen headlong into Terry Pratchett’s Death representation. I think it’s scary because it’s unknown, but I think it’s futile to fear what we can’t avoid. So we might as well humanize it, since it’s a truly human experience.

Death from the Sandman Comics. She so cute.

I’m just another mortal here, doing a slow shuffle on this coil, but I’m doing the best I can. So much of what motivates us is fear. Not necessarily conscious fear, like “Oh no I’m going to be late if this light doesn’t change” fear. But rather deep seated fears about love, death, judgement, and rejection, that usually wrap themselves up and dress themselves in the clothes of more mundane things. And I think that the more we can drag those deep seated fears out and name them to ourselves, the more we have a chance at happiness, and sanity. So if you’re looking for a way to do that, I highly recommend reading Mort by Terry Pratchett, or the Sandman “Death” comics, because it’s a way of making something we can’t avoid a bit less scary, naming it in a warm caring light, and taking the chill off.

Hard Truth Thursday

The internet, as the internet does, is handwringing about Gina Carano (who played Cara Dune in the Mandalorian) being let go by Disney, for divisive and false public social media posts. This got me thinking in general about some of the current flavor of “Modern Problems”, and I came up with a short list of (possibly) hard to swallow facts.

HARD TRUTH THURSDAY:

1. MLMs are not your "small business", and if you sell for one you don't "own a business".

2. Gina Carano was not a good actress anyway. But she was good at looking badass and standing around, I'll give you that. If she was lead in a series, it would have been a bad series.

3. "Free Speech" means the government can't punish you for expressing your opinion, not that other people have to applaud you for shouting terrible ideas in a public forum, or that companies have to keep you employed when you violate the rules you agreed to when you were hired, against shouting bad ideas in a public forum. Express controversial ideas in private if you don't want repercussions.

4. "Something seems fishy" doesn't discount peer reviewed studies and I won't agree that it does. Your poor instinct doesn't trump facts.

5. We as a species look for patterns where there are none. If you see a bunny in the clouds, that doesn't mean there's a bunny in the clouds. If you think you see a conspiracy with lack of true evidence upon inspection, then you don't really see a conspiracy. Stop guilelessly believing that the world is like the plot of a Dan Brown book because it's a more interesting story and easier to draw on paper.

6. Just because you can put together words and use oxygen talking about something that you don't understand, doesn't mean that the words you say have equal value to an expert who DOES know what they're talking about. Keep your mouth shut if you are trying to discredit things and can't prove it. It's exhausting and the same four people liking and agreeing with you, doesn't mean you're right. It means they are ignorant too.

7. Pick up a book. Turn off reality television. Don't listen to biased talk radio or 24 hour news. It affects your cognitive ability in an obvious way and it shows. ANALYZE.

And with that, have a nice Thursday :)