I can totally understand the reason to capture video and conversation during a medical consultation. As someone who has to see a dermatologist from time to time, I’ve had pictures taken.

The proper protocol is to get consent first, before donning the glasses or pulling out the camera.

And I bet that the perv glasses are not the best option for capturing data for medical analysis.

At that point, yeah, piracy is not merely action against subverted intellectual property laws but action against government restrictions on civil liberties.

It also means consuming restricted content is an act of political resistance.

For me, hopescolling (doomscrolling but looking for any reason to have hope) is a full time job regarding the political situation in the US. To that end, my regular resources are:

Ashley B: Ashley discuses US history, mostly black history, but not always, covering other issues such as J. Edgar Hoover, the scandals of past presidents, and black culture. She doesn’t hold back regarding the brutal details of slave history and post-bellum racial violence, and those videos can be tough to listen to.

Belle of the Ranch: The successor to Beau of the Fifth Column, Belle discusses particulars of current issues, explaining details of the economy, of the US war on Iran, and Trump telling on himself in his social media posts. While left leaning, answers a lot of comments from MAGA.

Climate Town Rollie Williams is a very watchable climatologist who covers issues of climate and government gone wrong, such as why Americans eat so much cheese, how the US doesn’t drive cars anymore (we drive Non-Passenger Work Vehicles, aka SUVs) and how the methane industry (natural gas) is the climate-killing dark horse.

Heather Cox Richardson: Richardson is a professor of American History at Boston college and does a lot of videos discussing current events and how they rhyme with past events in US history, which can be reassuring that we might actually get through this. I listen to her Letters From An American daily.

How Business Worked aka How History Works: This is the sister project to How Money Works (below). Which discusses history with a business slant. Recent topics of interest (to me) include No one wants to work anymore is a recurring theme and The Powell Memorandum and The myth of Hitler fixing the German economy. HBW is slightly longer form than HMW.

How Money Works: A (former?) finance bro talks about business and economic issues, breaking them down so that I (not a money guy) can understand them. Recent videos that are particularly edifying include why big tech now is hiring back its layoffs and how entrenched money is in US politics.

Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie: Jamelle Bouie is a NYT columnist who reads a lot of books, knows a lot about US government and has good insights into the thought processes of MAGA figures.

According to the (more sciencey) haunt investigation shows, most haunty effects are from old plumbing, inappropriately shielded magnetic fields, air pressure, and so on.

So if you fix all the problems in the process of replacing the house, such as modernizing the electrical wiring, then yeah, the venue will become less haunted.

If, however, you fail to remove the bodies, proverbially or otherwise, you’ll just piss off the ghosts.

I think part of the process is going to be the enshittification of AI services. (Temporary, until the technology for sustainable infrastructure catches up.) Tokens will cost a premium, and a lot of businesses that depend on AI will turn to China’s cheaper offerings.

Hobbyists will turn more to home-grown AI systems.

In recent news, Chinese AI is catching up to Anthropic. It’ll be interesting if the Trump administration tries to block the Chinese AI offerings in order to bolster US ones. Trump and the AI tech bros are familiar bedfellows after all.

I don’t know.

Both of my parents were alcoholic at the time, and were young (23 and 24 when I was born). The worst problem was neglect. Both of them had to work, and I was a stereotypical gen-X latchkey kid. I’ve seen millennial kids and zoomer kids suffering from the same circumstances in which their parents are exhausted all the time and just don’t have the energy to parent.

There was also domestic violence. I’ve also been sexually abused as a kid by more than one relative. Those are factors.

But then I was a weird sad kid at seven and was seeing school psychologists even in early grade school. I wouldn’t be diagnosed with major depression until I was an adult.

And I wouldn’t be diagnosed ASD until I was around 50. An assessment in April of this year returned that I am spectrum AF. But the symptoms were there even as a child. It’s just no one recognized it for what it was.

Also, I’ve just been diagnosed with low testosterone, and considering symptoms I’ve experienced all my life, I’ve probably been low-T for my entire adulthood. One of the potential symptoms is: severe depression. But again, I was sad as a kid.

So yeah, I might have grown up more functional had I gotten the support I needed. I’m pretty bright, and might have been able to get a degree with the right accommodations. Curiously, I’m not the kind of bright that my Dad is (a literal rocket scientist who worked for NASA and did sophisticated space math), so I felt like a dunce as a child. There’s definitely potential there that might have been unlocked if I had an awesome home. But I was definitely a fixer-upper from the day I was born.

Personally, I’m terrified that the massive, oligarch-sponsored, far-right propaganda machine that dominates US social media and television viewership, in fact, has the United States public by the balls, and is going to have unassailable influence on elections in the US from now on.

(And if the technology, borrowing techniques from marketing and industrial psychology, is not dominating the will of the lumpenproletariat already, it’s still being developed and eventually will.)

However, there are a lot of people whose opinions I respect, including historians like Heather Cox Richardson and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie (who is well studied in US history) who are optimistic about the future of the United States, and even think we can seize the country back from the oligarchy and restore free and fair elections in short order. (Albeit, for now, we’ll still be stuck with the two-party system we have. It’ll take a revolution of the people to change that.)

Meanwhile, Daniella Mestyanek Young aka Knitting Cult Lady is an experts on cults, including authoritarian cults of personality, and was an intelligence officer for the US Army, and according to her, cults of personality that are focused on a single person rarely survive the demise of the cult leader. They can if they create a doctrine of transition to a new leader (see North Korea) or from CoP to a cult of idea, but without preparation by the charismatic leader, they collapse.

And Young seems to know what she’s talking about.

She observes that Trump is entirely not cooperative about facilitating a transition, even to the point of publicly humiliating his natural heirs (that is J D Vance and Marco Rubio). It seems even that Trump may want MAGA and the Republican party to collapse once he is gone.

Work will still need to be done after Trump dies (or faces accountability and is imprisoned) and/or SCOTUS is banished like a demon possessing a child and free and fair elections are restored. We’ll need to confront what happened here in the United States, that we’ve been under the yoke of the ultra-wealthy, and of big conglomerate corporations, and need to ironclad our election processes and our regulatory bodies so that they cannot be subverted or captured.

Can we do this? I don’t know. Historically, the US has failed to follow through every step of the way, from quitting reconstruction to failing to try Nixon after Watergate to failing to address mistreatment of blacks, of the First Nations folk, of children, of immigrants, of every group we’ve exploited for labor and suppressed. But this time, people can get their information from the internet rather than merely through school curricula and published news. Maybe there will be enough voices to pressure change.

They could also remake the prequels and get some real writers on them and make them good.

Looking at Disney’s MCU ouvre, it’s a blend of hits and misses, so I don’t fully trust the company to not mess it up.

The sun will explode, but the process will take about a billion years.

One stratagem is to buy up the territory and then be mindful of the needs of those who are already on it.

The problem is, when we’re rich and powerful, it’s just way to easy to indulge our racist and classist proclivities, and then do a genocide.

Seriously, we humans just haven’t evolved past the bush tribes we were fifty thousand years ago.

I mostly miss that our society seemed stable at the time. I was wrong; for minorities it was still a shit show, but I didn’t know that yet.

Gaming got way better after around 2007, and Turtle Rock invented co-op multiplayer that wasn’t deathmatch.

While valid, the reason they’re encased in those big concrete pillars is to assure they’re safe for transport, and can survive accidents without leakage.

ETA: I should admit not ALL of our waste has been processed into vitrified HLW or packed for transport, but these processes are undergone before waste is shipped to a repository.

You’re right. John Oliver did an LWT segment on nuclear waste and how we have an overflow problem at many local sites, and meanwhile can’t get budgeting to complete the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. (It has some NIMBY problems, though it’s one of the most stable regions to put a deep geological repository.

But the storage overflow problem is approaching critical in some places. The US may not have enough repositories for nuclear waste, but we need them badly.

In the current era, I do not expect this situation to improve, and may get worse, especially since the regime is against renewable energy development.

I became a true believer in the pathway to a communist society. At very least I now understand how capitalism is so often doomed from within.

First, the struggle to make sure everyone has enough food, shelter, clothes, etc.

Then we have to get people to do the jobs no-one wants to do. Either we automate them or make the job tolerable. Until then, we might rotate workers in and out of duty, spreading the discomfort.

Then we have to adjust to the increased demand for some resources. Just as plumbing increased the demand for water (but also vastly improved living conditions) so will many other resources follow. Getting it all going while keeping it sustainable will be tricky.

And then, someday, maybe centuries later, post-scarcity communism. And according to the Fourth International–Posadists, this will be a prerequisite before we colonize space, or other worlds.

I think, once we regard greed and power consolidation as a treatable illness, human society can do this. But I don’t yet comprehend a complete path from here to there.

My wife telling me that she can’t deal with me anymore in November 2024. We were together for twelve years. TBH, I was also sore that Trump just won the election despite that Project 2025 was public knowledge, so I was super vulnerable already, and her departure pushed me into a long-term psychotic break.

I had been getting progressively crazier in the years leading to her announcement. My psychotherapist discontinued my service to go on maternity leave some years before and I had then moved to Sacramento. Then the COVID-19 epidemic hit, everyone needed psychotherapy and so they all stopped taking Medicare since their schedules were packed with better payers. And then they all burned out.

So I went without mental health care for years figuring I could deal better than those who are not used to being crazy. Evidently not so.

There are more factors. Her job in construction was going south so she changed jobs to a non-profit that helps victims of human trafficking (and is still brutally busy but is far more fulfilled by her work), and the income difference affected our lifestyle.

Curiously, when I saw it, I picked up that the guy was crazy and violent, and saw it as a horror film following the monster.

Years later, I’d learn that it was popularly seen as a white-guy underdog movie set (and produced) during the Rodney King crisis and the police war on gangs.

The world started getting really terrible around Trump’s first term and I just kept getting more and more depressed. I went from blogging a couple times a week to once a month to not at all.

Here

Unchecked, power consolidates. Marx notes in Das Kapital the Capitalist will always seek to capture regulatory bodies in the name of profit.

The goal, thus, becomes to distribute political power (including wealth) as diffusely and evenly as possible, and create a system that checks efforts from outside to attack and break its integrity.

The USSR was beleaguered from the beginning by sanctions by the rest of the western world, as pressured by President Wilson. As problematic as the Leninist model was, we don’t know how it would have fared if it were left to engage with the world on its own terms.