Never been one to let the carrier drop

You’re being blinded by the news, by the mesage you’re being sold. In fact you are richer than a midevil king. You have access to *insane* amounts of resources. For a pittance a month you can have access to most of the music catalog of humanity. For *free*, you can check out more fiction and nonfiction from the library than *existed* in 1800. The Wikipedia and other similar resources offer almost unlimited access to collective knowledge. Youtube offers more video that you can imagine, and the ability to broadcast yourself. You can send a packet to anywhere on earth, almost, in a few milliseconds. You have access to a huge variety of food, both prepared and raw ingredients and even seeds.

Are you as rich as you could be if we had a perfectly designed resource allcoation system? No. But NONE of the politicans are talking about redesigning our resource allocation system. They talk about the three major families of systems that exist as if those are all there is, and they talk about capitalism as if it is the best by far and to be adhered to religiously. But we have not even begun to grok what a truly advanced resource allocation system might look like. Money is *pathetically* bad.. it repeatedly encourages us to destroy real value to make paper dollars – it throws away enormous amounts of metadata with every transaction. We can do so much better if we try.

Also, you are alive in one of the most exciting times to be alive in. We might for the first time see something smarter than a human on earth. We might also see fusion tapped for energy – and once you have energy aplenty, it’s a very low bar to talk about feeding and housing everyone. There is the real possibility of a much better world.. or a much worse one. The people selling you hate, the people encouraging you to feed the wrong wolf, the people selling the idea that being empathic is “the woke mind virus” and needs destroyed.. the people who are upset by transgenedered people have not even begun to use their imaginations. It’s likely that in the near future, if we can develop neurological software or man-computer interfaces, we can not only change your experiential gender at will, we can let you wear the body of a cat, dog, or dolphin in terms of your conscious experience.

So don’t let our leaders sell you the idea that you are downtrodden. Are there problems? You bet there are, but Donald Trump isn’t even talking about them because he has no idea how to solve the real problems in front of us. What he’s done is make up a bunch of problems, and also encourage a bunch of destructive behaviors that will make us all far less wealthy.

According to https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/06/kevin-hassett-stock-market-crash-not-part-of-trumps-strategy.html, Trump claims he is *not* trying to destroy the stock market. Now the one thing we know about trump is he *always lies*. So apparently.. he is.

I was present at the 50501 protests in Seattle. No one paid me to be there. I doubt if, aside from the musicians, there was *anyone* being paid to be there. I think it shows just how deeply addicted to Ketamine and out of touch with reality Elon is that he thinks there are paid protesters. No, Elon, the only people being paid are the people you pay to vote – in any sane world, what *you* are doing would be far more illegal than paying people to protest.

So, after repeatedly chanting “Lock her up” because Hillary ran her own email server, Trump’s team has been caught using Signal for their war planning – and including journalists in the distribution list. The easy thing to say here is “Lock him up”. Trump should start every rally from now on with “Lock me up! Lock me up!”. It would be the appropraite thing to do in any case.. we can clarly see from $TRUMP that he’s totally ignoring the emoluments clause.

It’s scary, living under a rapidly deteriorating fascist dictatorship. It’s even scarier because so many right wingers are convincing themselves that it’s not really what’s going on. Partisan loyalty apparently includes ignoring bullying, bad behavior, ignoring the rule of law, etc.

I worry about leaving the country- I have plans to visit Iceland this summer, but Robert Reich points out Trump has disappeared people on their way into the country. Part of the problem here is that apparently there are large number of people just as awful as Trump and quite willing – even eager – to do his bidding and participate in evil.

So, one thing you can safely say about DOGE, the cryptocurrency. It is headed for zero. It has a *unlimited supply*, with a fairly high mint rate. It was originally intended as a joke.

One thing you can say about DOGE, the government agency, is it is also a terrible idea. Musk is the poster child for Dunning-Kruger – we’re talking about the guy who thought you could have a 600 mile long evacuated above ground tunnel, among other things. He also doesn’t understand that the more people you make homeless and hungry, the less wealth we as a species have. DOGE is also likely to destroy many useful functions that the government performs.. protecting our bank accounts, protecting us against bad loans, protecting us from e coli, protecting us from predatory corporations who otherwise would destroy all the land and poison all the water to make a few bucks.

Musk himself has says there will be some hardship. I vote all Musk’s money be taken away and he be forced to live with the hardships he is causing.

I realize it’s going to take me some work to get my email all off of Google, not to mention all my drive documents and all the other things I’ve come to trust them for.

However, their choice to change the Gulf Of Mexico to the Gulf OF America indicates their willingness to kowtow to our current, obviously evil administration. The message is clear. They’ll probably give out information about you happily. They cannot be trusted.

So, I’m having a very hard time taking Robert Reich seriously. He’s talking about oligarchy, but he’s clearly got no shortage of money and he does things like posting things on “How to stop trump” – that are behind a paywall. If making money is more important to him then stopping Trump, clearly he doesn’t really think Trump is the threat that he claims him to be.

In other, more disturbing thoughts, clearly Trump and the republicans do not plan on there being any more elections – or if there will be any, they will be heavily rigged. Otherwise they’d understand that we can now do everything they are doing.. that every check and balance they have smashed we can now ignore as well.

So, I hear that Trump fired the federal judges that were investigating them. The president *should not have the power to fire judges*. The president should *be investigated for doing this*. Of course, we all know Trump belongs in the slammer and that the Republicans have become the most epicly corrupt party in American history – helped with a a nonstop lies and propaganda news network (Fox)

So, Trump is talking about ending FEMA in favor of having individual states have their own emergency management systems. Now, this clearly is going to lead to a much less efficient system, because most of the time most states don’t need emergency management but when they do, they’re going to be in the middle of fires, hurricanes, etc.

Bear this in mind, Republicans.. as your house burns or is wiped away by hurricanes or whatever.. and it takes far longer than it used to to get help, and the help is less effective and less coordinated.. Trump is making things worse, because that’s what Republicans do, especially lately.

My hope is that all the many, many MAGA-ites being hurt by Dear Leader will remember getting their face eaten and in the future vote against right wing stupidity. Of course, odds are no, because Fox will continue to hold them in thrall.

I was talking about Mitch’s blatant cheating to pack the supreme court and someone on Quora pointed out that the Democrats started the move down the slippery slope with Harry Reid. Well, yes, okay.

It occurs to me that one thing politics needs very badly is a truly nonpartisan body that exists only to make sure that both sides (or all sides, if we could leave this two party stranglehold behind) follow the rules. Someone who can give a black card to Mitch – or to Pelosi – or to anyone who tries to tilt the playing field.

I’m not sure how this would work – it’s clear the people don’t care about fair play at all or they would never have elected Trump (of course, we don’t know that they did – one reason I wish we did have blockchain as one path of our voting process is we could test vote aggregation for honesty, something we cannot do now)