A Question

I have no expertise in artificial intelligence. There are plenty of experts around, and many of them are warning of the dangers AI to humans and the planet, so I yield to their expertise. What I do know is that the use and growth of AI data centers poses a threat to our water supply, to the electrical grid, and to the physical and mental health of people who live near them with deafening loud noise. It also poses a dire environmental threat, with the inevitable increase in the use of fossil fuels. 

As a sometime economist I know that AI has no solution, and will have no solution to the limits to economic growth, to climate change, to the depletion of resources, to the problem of desecration of the planet through wars and pollution, and to the ever-increasing glut of humans. These problems will fester on their own, and AI or not, we are facing the collapse of human civilization.

The U.S. has chosen to face these problems by electing the deranged and malevolent criminal sociopath Donald Trump as its president. Twice. This is real human beings using their given intelligence to choose a dangerous criminal to be their leader. Dear leader. It can easily be concluded that natural intelligence is threat enough to life on Planet Earth.

The best of human intelligence is fighting back. In Wisconsin’s recent primary election for governor, one candidate, Francesca Hong, ran her campaign promising to place a moratorium on AI data centers. She was the only candidate to make such a promise, and I voted for her. She was vilified for being a "democratic socialist," and lost to the establishment candidate, but by making the issue so prominent she painted the winner, David Crowley, into an electoral corner. In order to win in the general election he will have to promise the same moratorium as she did. I, for example, will let him know that I will vote for Alfred E. Neuman if he doesn't.

One question that has arisen, for me at least, is how easily corporations building AI data centers have been able to get city councils, county boards and other public agencies sign non-disclosure agreements when they approve the construction of these facilities. These are elected representatives of the citizens who routinely sign documents that hide the details of what they signed from the same citizens. They are also routinely being recalled by the voters for doing this.

So are all these local officials corrupt? How did they get that way? I suspect the answer is that AI corporations really, really, really want their data centers, and will use any means available to get what they want. When J. Edgar Hoover was director of the FBI he could not be fired by any president because he had compromising information on all politicians of both parties. He had job security for life, and any president who would dare to threaten this would find himself reading headlines exposing some past or present crime or indiscretion.

Nowadays, in the virtual multiverse in which we exist, anyone can be investigated and have embarrassing information made public.

I can give an example from personal experience. A relative, now deceased, was best friends with a Washington-based "right wing" columnist who had sources in the FBI. They had been spying on Dr. Martin Luther King for years, and discovered that he was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. They confronted him with this information, trying to get him to commit suicide. 

King was embarrassed for sure, but neither killed himself nor stopped campaigning for civil rights. He told the FBI agents that he was only human. So the agents from then on called him "Only human Martin Luther King." This was supposedly an inside joke that gave them derisive power over him. Whatever gets you through the night. 

This also supposedly gave the "right wing" columnist power over King, and by extension, my "inside knowledge" pretender relative, who took great pleasure in telling me this story. This, combined with enormous amounts of alcohol, got him through the night, and likely many more nights. He was a serial philanderer himself, so pretend superiority over Martin Luther King was totally in his mind. His "right wing" best friend, also long gone, is a sad footnote to history, and was lucky when he was alive not to be prosecuted for treason.

So what to do? The country is rising up against AI and its infrastructure of data centers. If blackmail is being used to get local officials to secretly approve data centers, citizens can prevent it by banning nondisclosure agreements. Maybe AI companies will respond by blackmailing everyone – they have the technology – but there are limits to criminality. At some point it won’t get them through the night.

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Here's a song. Eric Clapton. Dionne Warwick. Naked Eyes.

For some expertise in artificial intelligence. click here. Or here. or here. For an excellent conversation about AI and democracy from ABC Australia, click here.

Public Citizen has some good information on the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) grift, and what citizens can do about it.

Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV.

Some history of J. Edgar Hoover.

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Update, August 26:

R.I.P. Dolly Parton. Here she is with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. Here's another great song. Stairway to Heaven. Some fun with Doc Watson. She even did a version of Deportee. 

Dolly Parton funded research into the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. I was one of the beneficiaries. I was vaccinated with Moderna in 2021, boosted several times. It probably saved my life. I was infected with Covid in early 2022, tested positive, and it would have been far worse without the vaccine. The VA was one of the first health care systems to make the shots available. I used my own healing method, raw onions and garlic, for every meal for twelve days. It was a battle. 

Update, August 27: 

A story about exploited data workers. Another story about the need to regulate AI. Still another story, Platform Extractionism, about the low-wage AI workers in Venezuela. Robert Reich on how most Americans are getting poorer.

A story from June about Doom Trolling, how AI companies are promoting fear of their products in order to enhance their power.

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Update, August 28:

Some meme response to Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario.

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Update, August 29:

Electronic Intifada has a great interview with Eyal Weizman, Director of Forensic Architecture and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London. It is available on YouTube here. Or here, on the Electronic Intifada podcast. Weizman's book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,  is linked here. Or here.

Update, August 31:

Salon has a perspective on AI data centers.

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Update, September 3:

R.I.P. Gloria Steinem. I first became aware of her in 1968, when I bought a copy of New York Magazine on one of my weekend excursions to New York City. I was studying the manly art of projector repair at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and would escape to the Big Apple, sometimes visiting relatives in nearby Westchester County. She had written an article about learning to live with Nixon, and I was taken by the quality, mirth and insight of her writing, mixing personal experience with analysis, perspective and detail. My own writing has been inspired and influenced by her style ever since. That experience gave her a special place in my life, and over the years I have paid attention to and have learned much from her presence. 

An interview with Tennessee congressional candidate Justin Pearson, who is campaigning to put AI data centers under democratic control.

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Update, September 5:

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Update, September 8:

For a deeper look at the emptiness of AI frenzy, former Stanford student Theo Baker talks about his book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University in a recent interview with the Commonwealth Club of California.

Then there is Heidy Khlaaf, Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute, on the lack of security of AI, interviewed on Amanpour & Company. Among the things she has exposed is the use of AI in Israel's targeting of Palestinians in Gaza.

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Update, September 10:

Now we have an "insider," Jacob Coxon, former Anthropic researcher, giving dire warnings about AI.

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Update, September 12:

R.I.P. Wendell Berry. He was the quintessential un-AI naturally intelligent human being. There is a great conversation he had with Michael Pollan on the KQED City Arts & Lectures podcast, which can be heard here if you have Instagram. This panel discussion from 2012 at Berkeley is a pretty good representation of Berry's world view. PBS has a great documentary about Wendell Berry.

Now the CEO of Anthropic is calling for an AI slowdown. Should we trust him?

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Update, September 15:

Some things reach me more slowly than others. This interview, Gil Durán and Wajahat Ali: The Rise of "The Nerd Reich," from the Commonwealth Club of California, aired August 24. I have an alternate title: Creeps out to rule the world. They wouldn't be the first. They may be the last. This calls for a song.

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 Update, September 18:

The plot thickens. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have a new book, End Times Fascsism and the Fight for the Living World, warning of an alliance among  religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalists and tech billionaires that is hastening the end of the world as we know it. The authors are interviewed by Democracy Now in this YouTube video, or on the Democracy Now website.They are also interviewed on CNN. The Intercept also interviewed them.

More news on the criminality of AI corporations. Project Censored unmasks the 10 myths Fueling the Silicon Mirage. 

Then there is Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, mixing diplomacy with his billion dollar business interests.

ABC Australia has a podcast called "The Minefireld," and recently explored the question of opposition to data centers being good news for democracy.

In a strange twist of fate, the German government has been shown to be complicit in Israel's genocide in Gaza.

All of these criminal operations are doomed to defeat. I am amazed at the brazenness and sense of impunity. As Trump continues to fail in his various criminal efforts he becomes even more dangerous, especially with Iran. I suspect nuclear weapons are in the offings. 

Here's some news about Donald Trump.

Update, September 28: 

PBS aired the latest segment of Independent Lens, last night, a thorough expose of the artificial intelliegence grift

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Update, September 25:

Cory Doctorow has a different view of the AI threat. He also wrote a book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. Another interview can be seen here.

Meanwhile, Open AI hacked an Australian government website. No good intentions.

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Update, September 26: 

Trump, speaking before the United Nations General Assembly this past Tuesday,  threatened to "annihilate" Iran and "drive them into hell with no chance of survival." These are the words of a crazy person, but our news media - both mainstream and alternative - only describe him either factually or as outrageous. Or some variation. They don't dare, for some strange reason, to call him a crazy person, even though an average person who would make such threats would be confined to a mental facility or some other form of incarceration. The world's only superpower, run by a crazy person. At this point we deserve him.

I wrote previously about the danger that either the U.S. or Israel is likely to use nuclear weapons against Iran. Now that Trump is suffering defeat after defeat it seems more likely.

Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, filmmakers of NAZA. a documentary about the use of artificial intelligence in the systematic killing of Palestinians in Gaza, are being threatened by Israeli government officials with revocation of their citizenship. It is safe to say that they have a higher sense of citizenship, not limited to any "state."

The movie has caused great consternation in Israel, cognitive dissonance about what it means to be a citizen. This calls for a song.

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Update, September 28: 

PBS aired the latest installment of its documentary show Independent Lens last night, an expose of the artificial intelligence grift titled Ghost in the Machine. It also is available on YouTube. It covers the history of AI, its leading figures, the harm it does, and predictions of the future. The only surprise for me is how rooted the field is in eugenics, the belief  that human civilization can be improved, even saved, by selective breeding of those with "superior" genes and the sterilization and elimination of people deemed "inferior."

The show suggests the AI "bubble" is exaggerated, and that the hyped optimism is largely from tech entrepreneurs and co-dependent politicians. Most significantly, Sam Altman and Donald Trump. 

For me, the program was an inspiration. The rise of artificial intelligence frenzy has reached its peak, and is about to fall. Precipitously. Any movement that depends for its success on the beseechment of Donald Trump, sociopath, is on a path of humiliation and defeat. It cannot exist without increased environmental destruction and human misery. The water usage alone will put it in direct competition with the needs of people for clean water for drinking, bathing, cooking and recreation. The electricity demand is also in direct competition with the needs of people. The only way it can supplant these human needs is through force - a police state. 

It can be argued that the entire Trump regime is an experiment in police state in combination with lawlessness and theft. It is about to fail, and the AI bubble with it. 

The most fundamental error of AI determinism is that the frenzy is reductionist. It isolates itself from all other reality, only focusing on itself. In other words, narcissistically. In the AI belief system, it is the only thing that matters (and its accompanying money and power). Not only does nothing else matter, but it doesn't even exist. 

I can broaden the isolation of AI determinism to just one thing to show the fragility of the cult of belief. The economy. In order for AI to function and survive a healthy economy is critical. We have a barely thriving economy at the moment, threatened by the incompetence and criminality of its presiding manager - Donald Trump. Through his play-to-pay, grifting, tariffs and wars he is pushing the economy to a breaking point. It will break anyway. It has to grow infinitely on this finite planet in order to survive. Climate change, environmental destruction and decreasing returns to scale are all coming together at the same time. The first to fall will be the artificial intelligence false prophets (or is it false profits? ). Good riddance.

ICE Kills Again

When I heard about the ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston I was reminded of the time I moved there to do construction work. It was November 1980, and I was hoping to get some experience so I could move back north to qualify for union membership at much higher pay. 

I was hired by Joe Swartz Electric, Houston's largest residential electrical contractor, to wire houses for $5 per hour. Joe Swartz put 50 trucks on the road with three-man crews. It was backbreaking work, "production," as speed was of the essence. A crew of three could work up a street, rough or trim wiring four houses a day.  The houses were pretty flimsy, built on the Houston flood plain, easily damaged by the many storms that plague Houston. Some of them had a textured thick cardboard for siding, with a plastic coating. 

The building trades were divided by ethnicity, with "whites" doing the premier skilled work of carpentry, electrical wiring and plumbing, Latinos - Mexicans primarily, doing drywall, bricklaying (done in precast panels) and roofing, with African-Americans doing cleanup. The Mexican workers were fast, skilled and did quality work. The electrical wiring was done the best of the "white" trades - safe without cutting corners.

I was living in the Siddha Yoga ashram, which was on Garrott St., in the Montrose, Houston's gay neighborhood. When my fellow workers found out where I lived, life became dangerous. I couldn't say "I'm not gay, I'm following a guru," so I ended up quitting before getting beat up. I lost the job for being gay without being gay, another weird episode in my long, strange life.

At lunchtime various crews would congregate to eat together, and it soon became clear that the prejudice against Mexicans was intense. One guy, who apparently had recently been released from "Huntsville state prison," turned to another guy and said "You know, Billy Bob (or some such), I just about hate a Goddamn Mexican worse than I do a nigger!" It was for my benefit, having moved there from Michigan. It was so stupid I just laughed, which didn't please him. He also said to another guy, who had an Italian last name, "I hear you're a pretty good swimmer," meaning a wetback. 

In the middle of the same lunch session a 6 foot 5 or so chiseled Mexican-American-Gringo mix guy showed up, wearing cowboy hat and boots, and came straight to me, stuck out his hand, called me by name and said in a hard Texas drawl, "My name's Natividad! Glad to meet you!" Then he turned around and left. So classic. I remember it like it was today. The posturing tough guy, along with his buddies, cowered in silence. I never saw Natividad again. I wonder how his life went.

There was another guy at Joe Swartz just out of Huntsville, tied for the worst human being I have ever known. He told me the day we were sent out to do post-installation work "We have the Nazis and Klan down here to take care of things like that (black exercise of citizenship)." He didn't like my response, and life got tenuous. He likely ended up back in prison for good. His last name was Alexander, don't remember the first, in case you are curious enough to Google him. I tried, couldn't find anything. Law enforcement in Houston certainly has records of his life of crime. Huntsville too.

Houston would be a ripe place for ICE recruits, and likely many of them are indeed native Houstonians. Huntsville also would be a ripe place for ICE recruits. Klan Klaverns. Nazi Naziferies.

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Here's a song. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Bruce Springsteen.  Arlo  Gutrie. The Grateful Dead. The Doors. Another song from Bruce Springsteen. Still another from Bruce Springsteen. Live version. A message to ICE from Ireland. Carsie Blanton. Ben Grosscup. Lucinda Williams. Crowes Pasture. Mon Rovia. Mavis Staples, Kevin Morby, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. Another song from Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Pedro Infante. Ritmos Latinos. Los Lobos. Tish Hinajosa. Santana. Richard Valenzuela. Flaco Jiménez and Ry Cooder. Los Lobos. Texas Tornados. Freddy Fender. Los Lonely Boys. Trini Lopez. Another from Trini Lopez. An Iberian variation on Hotel California.

Witnesses have a different story from that from ICE about the shooting. Witnesses always have a different story from what ICE says.

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  Some explanation is called for. Everything happens in context. Joe Swartz Electric was no different. I did not mention the company to disparage it. The  management there treated me well, except for the low pay. Unions were nonexistent in the South, so wages  were low for everyone. The managers I dealt with were  two brothers, several cuts above the typical worker there. They hired people who walked  in the door, as long as they could demonstrate some knowledge of how to wire a house. 

 

Joe Swartz himself called me a couple of days after I quit, and offered me a better job at higher pay to work in the warehouse, lining out crews with spools of wire and other equipment for the day's work, cutting "home runs." I  declined, and didn't answer  when he asked me why I quit. He was a retired Air Force pilot, a full colonel, if I remember right. 

 

The reason I quit was not because of the hotheaded bigot guy or the criminally insane Alexander. It was because of harassment and threatening behavior from a transplanted  upstate New Yorker from the Finger Lakes region, and his sidekick, a, er, lower-class, poorly educated "white" guy. The New York transplant adopted the most exaggerated southern drawl he could, a complete phony. There was nothing I could do about it, so I left. The $5 an hour was not worth it.

 

After a short time working as a surveying rod man for the new terminal being built at the Houston airport, I started  substitute teaching  in the Houston public schools. I taught at Robert E. Lee High School (Renamed Margaret Long Wisdom), Jefferson Davis High School (Renamed Northside), the High School for the Health Professions (now named for heart surgeon Michael DeBakey), and my favorite, Lamar. Robert E. Lee was in the most affluent neighborhood of them all, and was the school with the most unruly students - children of wealthy "white" people.

 

I hated Houston, and left after only four months, joining the Siddha Yoga construction crew at  its main ashram outside India in South Fallsburg, New York, first as an electrician, then moving over to the plumbing shop. I stayed there until 1983,  then moved to Hawaii, living  in the Honolulu ashram. I left Siddha Yoga for good  two years later, went to graduate school for the second time, worked at the Omega Institute, and moved to Madison in 1993. 

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This song became my theme song for when I lived in Houston. It seemed to play on the radio while driving home after a day's work. It is my favorite Police song. Whenever I hear it I am reminded of the late afternoon sun reflecting off Houston's glass skyline as I drove home from Joe Swartz on I-45, the North Freeway. 

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I still have most of the tools I used when I was wiring houses for Joe Swartz.

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I have a couple of other Texas stories. Dallas and a West Texas wedding. 

Vichy Western Civilization

The criminal war against Iran will end as soon as Trump and Netanyahu agree on the timing. Trump has threatened the entire Persian civilization, adding that it would never be brought back again. He also threatened to blow Iran off the face of the Earth. There is only one way to do this. Nuclear weapons. Israel, entirely comfortable with waging genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon, has nuclear weapons, and has shown no restraint in wanton destruction of any country within its reach.

Donald Trump, deranged criminal sociopath, has no qualms about mass murder or any other crime against humanity or the planet. The only thing that would get in his way of approving the use of nuclear weapons is the possibility of it being bad for him personally. Not a particularly bright guy, he depends on advisors and cronies to tell him what he can get away with. Netanyahu, also a deranged criminal sociopath, wants to bomb Iran so badly he might drop the bomb regardless of consequences.

What could stop this dynamic? NATO? Not likely. Western Civilization is now Vichy to Israel. England, France, Germany, Italy and Canada all send weapons to Israel, though dwarfed by the U.S. Russia and China, both nuclear powers, might be a deterrent. I wouldn't count on it. The pope? He's trying. Trump insults him. It probably is inevitable, and will be the end of not just Iran, but likely every government in the Mideast and the Western world. The time to stop this madness was 1948. ___________________________________

This post appeared in today's Madison Cap Times.
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Here's a song. Mon Rovia. Mavis Staples, Kevin Morby, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. Chad Elliott. Gangstagrass. The Marsh Family. Nemahsis. RB Morris. Marianne Faithful. John Prine. Elyanna. The Waterboys. Crowes Pasture. Willy Porter. Ralph Stanley. Greg Brown.

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Some news from Gaza. As over there, so here.

The Part That Reveals The Whole

A Wisconsin disgrace has been in the news lately. On April 20 around 1,000 Protesters gathered at a  dog breeding farm near Blue Mounds, about 30 miles west of Madison, the state Capital, in an attempt to free an estimated 2,000 beagles that have been confined there. 

The dogs were bred to be subjects of research, both on the farm and through sale to university and other researchers. There have been reports for many years about the mistreatment of the dogs, from starvation, mutilation and surgery without anesthesia. Most egregious is the practice of "debarking," where dogs have their vocal chords removed in order to silence them. 

In typical fashion, protesters in April were tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, shot with rubber bullets and arrested by Dane County deputies. 

The dogs have now mostly been sold to rescue agencies, pending eventual adoption. The breeder, Ridglan Farms, suffered no criminal penalties, and remains in business. As long as animal testing in scientific research is legal there will be a market for live sentient beings. That includes humans, though not as zealously or ruthlessly as in times past. We now have the practice of informed consent, which, needless to say, didn't used to be the case.

I don’t see this as an isolated situation, confined to  industrialized cruelty to animals. We live in a mass system, a planetary glut of 8.2 billion people and counting. In order to accommodate such a vast number of people a method has developed that is known as industrialism. It began in the 18th century, when production shifted from small-scale, typically individual or family operations to mass production in factories and plantations.

Workers in the mass system are seen not as human beings, but as factors of production. They are components, and when combined with capital – tools, equipment, buildings - and land and management, goods can be made. When humans become no more than inputs to produce output they lose their humanity. At least to owners and managers.

This dehumanization in the mass system becomes generalized as we become more anonymous, mere faces in the crowd. Callousness ensues, and mass societies become indifferent to the lives and suffering of unknown others. In the industrial world just about anything goes in the drive for ever more goods and riches. The prospect of more keeps the system going, no matter the consequences.

The treatment of research beagles seems eerily similar to Homeland Security detention, where human beings are starved, crowded and mistreated in every way possible - similar to research animals. The brutalization and murder of protesters is similar to how the Ridglan protesters were treated.

We have nearly two million people incarcerated in this country. Officially there are 770,000 homeless people. 

Our foreign "policy" has been mass murderous since before WWII. Our latest adventure, at the behest of our client state Israel, is to surprise bomb Iran into submission. For some reason they chose not to submit. We are very slow learners.

A segment on my favorite radio show on public radio, Science Friday, offered some critical insight into this malaise. The guest interviewed was Daniel H. Wilson, scientist and science fiction writer, who also is a member of the Cherokee Nation. He offered this insight:

"So a common theme that was expressed by settlers whenever they came to North America, the first colonists, they looked out at these beautiful forests, and they compared them to the Garden of Eden. They were perfect. They were amazing. And it was clear that they were wasted on these primitive people that were actually living there.

And so I think that there’s a saying that’s appropriate here. Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I think that was the case for those settlers. They looked out at those forests and they saw magic, but what they were looking at was Indigenous technology. So the land had been manicured meticulously for hundreds or thousands of years using farming techniques, agroforestry techniques, and all of that stuff– I think that the key difference all of that stuff is not designed to scale up and out to feed an exponentially growing population. It was technology designed to create a sustainable balance.

And so I think to from a Western perspective, that just looks really inefficient, and that looks really primitive. And the reason is because they’re grading it on a different scale. How many millions of people will that feed? Well, it won't. It’s not designed to. It's designed to keep a certain number of people imbalanced to promote the long-term survival of that human population. And so I think that’s what defines Indigenous technology."

Therein lies the answer. Demass the system. Return to a human scale. Save the planet. This of course will not be easy, and will mean a lot fewer people. The population of the U.S. when I was born was approximately 139.9 million people. Today it is 348.8 million. But far fewer people is inevitable. Our mass, infinite growth productive system is doomed. World output is now $126 trillion. Using the rule of 72, output would be $252 trillion in 24 years if growth would continue at an annual rate of 3%. At a 2% growth rate it would double in 36 years. The system will demass whether we like it or not. 

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 Some elaboration on the treatment of protesters at the March 18 event. Some more elaboration on the result of the effort to free the dogs. An interview with La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, who was appointed to be the special prosecutor of Ridglan Farms.

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On the genocide front, Palestinians are routinely raped in Israeli prisons, some by dogs. This depredation is made possible by U.S. sponsorship - our Congress, president(s) and military industrial complex. 

I think the best way to understand genocide is as a path. Once you start on the path, you continue, going farther down the path until it ends. The Israeli genocide path will end, as do all paths. The sponsor - the U.S. - will end its sponsorship for one reason or another. We may run out of money and weapons. We may have different people in positions of power and wealth. Climate change may make sponsoring genocide the least of our proclivities. Israel, a rogue state, may collapse. The U.S., now a rogue state, may also collapse. 

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Here's a song. Alternate version. John Prine. Another from Merle Haggard. Tom Jones. The Dillards. The Byrds. Brandon Rickman. Jerry Jeff Walker. Warren Zevon. Still another from Merle Haggard. Alternate version. A song for dogs (and humans) to dream about.
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Update, May 13:
Brown University Holocaust and Genocide Studies professor Omer Bartov was interviewed on the NPR radio show On Point today about his book Israel: What Went Wrong? The book is reviewed in a number of publications, such as The New York Times and The Guardian. He puts the Gaza genocide in historical and moral context, showing the roots of Zionism, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the regression that culminated in the genocide we are now seeing. He predicts great difficulty in Israel as its reckoning approaches.

If you happened to watch the friendly interview with Benjamin Netanyahu on 60 Minutes this past Sunday, you might find this interesting.

Update, May 15:
I had forgotten a couple of experiences I had with animal research. In 1980 I was working as a patient transporter in the Radiation Therapy clinic at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. It was an easy job, only about ten patients a day to bring to the clinic on stretchers (known as gurneys elsewhere) and return them afterwards. Down the hall was the animal research facility, and every time I passed the place there was a cacophony of dog barking, howling, whimpers and whines. They were the pleas of desperation. I wanted to set them free. My dad raised dogs as kind of a hobby and to have his own line of hunting dogs.

I had become a casual acquaintance of a guy about my age who worked in the animal clinic, having much free time to roam around the area. He was probably the most negative person I have ever known, routinely complaining about some general malaise in society, though never specific. The one complaint I remember he had was "Why do they always have to throw money at problems?" A complete nothing complaint. Looking back on those times it seems pretty clear that he was suffering from depression, and hated his job. I don't blame him. He was facilitating the wanton abuse of animals. Last year PETA ranked the University of Michigan as the fourth-worst violator of animal abuse regulations.

The other experience was in early 1977, also In Ann Arbor, when I was driving a taxi. The cab company I worked for had a contract with the University of Michigan to drive 35 miles the Detroit airport to pick up shipments of rats that were used for research. I was given the assignment one night bring a load of rats to the U of M hospital. I was told I could decline, that some drivers refused, but I did it anyway, not yet being troubled by animal research.

The rats came in a large box, about 3 feet long by 2 feet wide, a perfect fit for the back seat of a taxi. There must have been about 25 rats in the box, all squeaking and scurrying around in the box. I loaded them up and drove them to the drop-off point at the university hospital.

Looking back on it, during the drive to Ann Arbor I became attached to the rats. They seemed harmless and scared, and I was taking them to their death. They were my passengers, "fares" as they were known in the taxi business. An ethic sets in when you drive a taxicab, where you kind of unconsciously become dedicated to giving your passengers a comfortable and safe trip to where they are going. Even rats. I never did another rat run. I quit the job not long after this, being hired by the University Hospital for the first of several temporary jobs. It was handy, living in an ashram at the time, working to pay the rent.
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Update, May 16:

Democracy Now had an interview Thursday with Molly Crabapple, author of the book Here We Live Is Our Country. The book is about the origins of Zionism, and how it was opposed by the Jewish Labor Bund in Czarist Russia, then expanding across eastern Europe until quashed by the Nazis in World War II.

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli is interviewed on Zeteo about how Palestinian prisoners have been raped in Israeli prisons since 1948, including by dogs.

Then, on Electronic Intifada, Adam Johnson is interviewed about his book How To Sell A Genocide, how mainstream U.S. media are complicit in giving Israel journalistic cover for its massive crimes against humanity. Here's the YouTube version.

Also from Electronic Intifada is a debunking of the reboot  of Israeli claims of massive Hamas rapes on October 7, 2023.

Identity Crisis

When I heard the news report that the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Congressional maps in Louisiana were unconstitutional due to racial bias, my first inclination was to be angry that it meant disenfranchisement for "black" voters. After a bit of pondering, though, I realized that I, believing there is no such thing as race, had no reason to be angry. Legislative maps that gerrymander to carve out "black" districts are based on the supposition that there is such a thing as a "black" voter.

I am old enough to remember when the term for people of African descent changed from "negro" to "black." It was in the early to mid 1960s, when politicians, journalists and various know-it-alls from the former colonies of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa referred to their indigenous subjects as "blacks." They didn’t need to refer to themselves as "whites" because they didn’t need to. They were the people who mattered, and the native people, the "blacks," didn’t matter, except as low-wage workers.

Then, as the Civil rights movement matured, more militant groups took up the mantle of "black" in a kind of reverse psychology, proudly expressing themselves as the embodiment of the most extreme skin tone – black. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) comes to mind as the leader of this linguistic change. He started using the term Black Power to promote advancement of African Americans in business, government and society in general. This was a fundamental departure from the assimilationist approach of Martin Luther King. 

No one is black. Some people with third degree burns that char the skin might have the appearance of blackness until healing takes place, but even that doesn’t make them "black." It isn’t who they are. No one is their skin color. People whose ancestry is from the continent of Africa, parts of Asia and indigenous Australia have a wide variety of skin colors that range from dark brown to not brown at all. In the United States of America they are all called "black" for reasons of convenience, stupidity and social custom. We define people here by skin color, by ethnic background, by education, by intelligence, by income and wealth, and by social position. And by any characteristic we can come up with.

The easiest and laziest classification is by race. That doesn’t mean race exists, just that it is what we use. It is so embedded that hardly anyone questions whether such a thing as race is a meaningful and useful narrative. Except, of course, scientists. Geneticists concluded long ago that the sorting out of humans into races is arbitrary, not based on evidence, and is therefore inherently, duh, racist. To believe that race exists is to be a racist.

A perfect case in point is former president Barack Obama. When he was running for president in 2008 he avoided the question for a long time, then bluntly declared himself to be "black." It was a political decision. He thought, correctly, that declaring himself black would attract enough voters who also thought of themselves as black to vote for him. His mother was "white." He could just as easily have declared himself "white," since in America you have to be something or other. He of course doesn’t look either black or white, so like all who identify with skin color, choosing one or the other is choosing something that doesn’t exist.

I, of Irish and Scot descent, would qualify as "white" by the usual mistaken identity. But just as no one is "black," no one is "white." Caucasian skin color is not white, but more of a "burlywood," "rosy brown," "tan," or "peru," and, like "black" skin, manifests in a wide variety of hues. Certainly not constituting a "race."

We also call other "people of color" brown and yellow. It all is so silly. I always bristled at the term “people of color.” First, because it defines people as “of” something, and then because the thing they are "of" is color. They are "of" their skin color. No matter that they exist in complete biological organisms. Skin color is all that matters as who they are.

Where this matters most is that by identifying other people by "race" means you also have to identify yourself by race. Identity, whether true or false, inevitably leads to the natural human tendency to find a way of feeling superior to those who identify differently. If through accident of history one identity becomes the one that dominates, other identities necessarily becomes the dominated. "Whites" dominate "blacks," "browns," and "yellows." And n’er the twain shall meet.

It is 2026. Racism, dominance and "othering" are the rule of the day. In what may be the saddest irony in human history, the "Jewish" state of "Israel," born as a gift in the wake of the worst "racist" mass murder campaign known to man, has devolved into a genocide state, and with full U.S. sponsorship. Politicians who vote repeatedly to fund Israel’s genocide couldn’t care less about Jews or the "Jewish state." They care about being reelected. By and large, they will vote for anything if it keeps them in office. Conforming with AIPAC keeps them in office.

So don’t be fooled by the hand-wringing among knee-jerk "leftists," "progressives," "liberals" and "Democrats." These are identities, not mutually exclusive, but conformist to the false ideology of "race." The sooner we give up on this bogus ideology, the sooner we can start healing our species of the division and hatred that plagues the entire planet. Gerrymandering by any political party is intended to keep incumbents in power, no matter the "race." Those who are divided among gerrymandered districts find themselves disenfranchised, and their skin can be "black," "white," "brown," "yellow" and any other color. One solution to this criminality is to amend the U.S. Constitution, making the gerrymandering of elections illegal.

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Here's a song. John Lennon. The Beatles. Bob Marley. Leadbelly. Koerner, Ray and Glover. Louis Armstrong. Gil Scott-Heron. Sam Cooke. Another from Sam Cooke. Another from Gil Scott-Heron. And another. Bob Dylan. Elton John. Bob Dylan.

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60 Minutes aired a segment titled "When the volunteer helping after a hurricane is a white nationalist," in which they reported on how "white" nationalists (Nazis of one stripe or another) are showing up after natural disasters to "help," more about polishing their images than lending meaningful assistance. 

I don't look at these people so much as ideologues as psychologically troubled. I was reminded of my years of substitute teaching. Every so often there would be a boy who didn't just misbehave, but was insolent and sometimes threatening. It could be in grades as low as seventh - 12 year-olds, but most often it was boys in 11th and 12th grade. They didn't mind being suspended from school, and that was often their goal. After troubled school lives they went on to troubled lives. Their personalities were like the "white" supremacists in the 60 Minutes segment.

Racism and Nazi-like identities fit their personalities, and in today's world of the Internet and easy communication they can easily find each other and organize into violent groups. They also are perfect recruits for ICE and other violence-prone law enforcement agencies. Belief in "white" supremacy - a belief in the dominance of something that doesn't exist - is a variation on what Marxists call false consciousness. I would place it on the low end of Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Another way of wasting your life.

Denouement

Robert Pape, University of Chicago political science professor, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago, titled The War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power. Last month he told us about the Escalation Trap, the danger that leaders who start wars get drawn into expanding them as circumstances don't go according to plan. 

Today it is reported that China is sending weapons to Iran. The plot thickens. The game is afoot. Meanwhile, Trump's wife is "throwing him under the bus," reviving his likely reason for starting the war - the Epstein Files. Rex Huppke of USA Today pointed out that she only defends herself, not Donald. It could be that the rats are deserting the ship.

No one could have predicted that the American empire would end this way. It has been a long time coming, starting well before I was born, and accelerating during my nearly eighty-one years of life. For a little context, the words of former Marine General Smedley Butler explains amply in his landmark book War Is a Racket, published in 1935. Here's an excerpt:

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Highly recommended reading on Smedley Butler’s life: The Plot to Seize the White House, by Jules Archer (out of print, but available in better public libraries).
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To show how successful empire propaganda is in the U.S., the "Democratic" governor of Wisconsin recently signed a bill making criticism of the state of Israel a crime. I wrote to the governor, Tony Evers, challenging his nasty decision. I haven't received a reply yet. Here' what I wrote:

From: John Hamilton
To: Governor Tony Evers (https://wi.accessgov.com/public/Forms/Edit/governor/879053df-1ad1-451e-b2fd-1932bcacb873/2)
Date: April 3, 2026
Subject: Wisconsin Act 143

Hello Governor Evers 

I voted for you twice, and wrote in praise of you a time or two, such as here.

I see you signed the Republican bill making criticism of Israel a crime. I hereby state that Israel is a genocide state, sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government, and now you. I am now a criminal, at least until this phony law is found to be unconstitutional by both the state and U.S. Supreme Courts. For you, of course, this will be a sad part of your legacy. For me, wartime veteran of the U.S. Army, saying a genocide state is a genocide state is part of my legacy. History will not remember me, but it will remember you.
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I had written the following to the state Senate in January, hoping it would deter them in their zeal to enact this phony law:

Wisconsin State Senate
P. O. BOX 7882, MADISON, WI 53707-7882

To The Entire Senate

Word has reached me that you are considering a bill to make "antisemitism" illegal. There are some things you might want to consider when studying this legislation. First, you might want to define what is meant by the word Semite. A definition from Wikipedia will suffice: Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, Including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. First used in the 1770s by members of the Göttingen school of history, this biblical terminology for race was derived from Shem (שֵׁם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis, together with the parallel terms Hamites and Japhetitites.

In archaeology, the term is sometimes used informally as "a kind of shorthand" for ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. Identification of pro-Caucasian racism has either partially or completely devalued the use of the term as a racial category, with the caveat that an inverse assessment would still be considered scientifically obsolete. Once you understand what is meant by Semite, you might also want to define what is meant by anti-Semite. It is a loaded term, but the legislation is intended to expand the meaning to criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine. If you vote to enact such legislation you will make genocide the official policy of the State of Wisconsin.

John Hamilton
Madison
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Neil Young. Graham Nash. Eddie Vedder. Steve Miller. Liam Clancy. A song for Trump.
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Update, April 13:

As I have written before, the president of the United States is criminally insane.

 
There were some very pertinent discussions on public radio today, starting with this program on the constitutional powers of the president on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Then, on NPR and WBUR's On Point, a much needed discussion of the real cost of the war on Iran.

A show on PRX, The World, hosted a discussion of the necessity of negotiating experience with Wendy Sherman, chief negotiator for the Obama nuclear treaty. What we have now is incompetent J.D. Vance, for whom everything he touches turns to shit. 

Or, maybe Trump sabotaged the talks. With help from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Some genocide news. Israeli plans for Lebanon.

The U.S. State Department is pressuring the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to ignore Trump's extrajudicial killings of fishermen in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. I suspect that this will fail, as the planetary tide is turning against Donald Trump.

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Update, April 16:

PBS's Frontline aired a new documentary about the ICE rampage, titled Caught in the Crackdown. It reveals in panoramic detail what we already know, that the ICE campaign is a criminal operation. 

NPR's On Point raised some New Questions for the Epstein files investigation. It suggests the reason behind Melania Trump's press conference was to fend off revelations about her past. YouTube offers more perspective, here and here. 

 On the genocide front, Israel is doing the same thing in Lebanon as it is in Gaza.

And, a cop in Phoenix was placed on administrative leave for provoking high school students to assault him during an anti-ICE protest in January.

Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Minnesota prosecutor Mary Moriarty announced a felony  indictment of an ICE agent for pointing a gun gratuitously at a U.S. citizen. The Ramsey County (St. Paul) Minnesota state's attorney is investigating possible kidnapping charges against ICE agents.

As for who is running the U.S. "policy" on the war on Iran, it is Benjamin Netanyahu, who Trump and J.D. Vance report to daily. Even Newsweek has taken notice.

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee and other prominent academicians are urgently appealing to congressional leaders to recognize that Donald Trump is psychologically unstable and dangerous, and that they invoke Section 24 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, as well as limit his powers to make war and use nuclear weapons.

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Update, April 21: 

There's a great interview on Dropsite News today, Diplomacy or Escalation? The Iran War at a Crossroads. Also on Dropsite, survivors of Trump/Hegseth boat strikes in the Pacific say they were kidnapped and tortured by U.S. forces.

Pete Hegseth is using a line from the movie Pulp Fiction in his pretense to biblical authority for his murderous campaigns around the world.

Hapless Trump, not knowing how to get out of his war with Iran, announced today that he is extending the "ceasefire."

Ms. Rachel is revealing that ICE is denying basic human rights to imprisoned children at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas. Learn more here.

 

Meanwhile, the genocide state of Israel marches on. No human standards. From The Guardian. More news from Gaza.

Al Jazeera reports that preliminary figures show 3,375 people dead in Iran, 2,294 dead in Lebanon, and 28 killed in Gulf states as a result of the US-Israeli war. American casualties are greatly understated, officially 13 killed, 380 wounded. Here's a list of those killed.