June > Recent Status Updates

this ridiculous, debauched platform was one of the most powerful media tools that a power-hungry mogul could ever have in his political arsenal.

X…overrun by ads for scam dropshipped products and assorted bots (crypto, porn, inscrutable AI conversationalist); amplifying the posts of its angry right-wing owner and his dues-paying users; salting the discourse with bad information, AI-generated fakes, and bad-faith hysteria about crime and migrants; infiltrated by authoritarian foreign governments; presided over …24/7 by…

(1/2/2026) Violet is the great-grand-daughter of Harry?
Grandma Helen was the daughter of Ada and Harry?

(typo) Piers and Elli sat up, riveted.

(typo)…used for Julia’s tax filings and spreadsheet.
…
“Julia has made a lot more money than I, or the IRS, was aware….”

…feelings of autonomy, mastery and a purpose are what generate the best work, not higher levels of monetary reward.

(…the moment when I questioned a wishful solution reminiscent of my primary school indoctrination…) abundance is a social relationship, based on the principle that the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships.

… instead of an economy of researchers, tennis instructors, and Michelin-rated chefs, ours is predominantly one of side-street barbers, domestic servants, fruit-cart vendors, and Walmart shelf stackers.

…a lure…requires a choice….the best kind of voyeurism or the telling of a skillful lie.

James Bond…provides a window into the voyeuristic parts of a person’s soul. The parts that crave an intimate kind of escape.
As humans, we all crave escape…. It does not matter how much we accumulate oif any one thing, we will eventually be drawn to its counterpart. Too many thoughts, and we see an empty mind. Too much salt, and we crave the sweet. Too much wealth, and we feel lured to a simple life.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference

Thinking about history would force the leaders of the tech industry to confront uncomfortable questions about their own culture and the unspoken assumptions at work behind the grandiose statements they make.

“For all of these terms are neither old nor modern, but are simply the stilted stammering of people to whom God has denied real artistic talent and has given instead the gift of blather and deception,”

…1991….London.
…human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye.
…new fabrics of conjecture are knitted in the City’s shining cores, swift tireless spindles flinging off invisible loops in their millions, …data melts and mingles, churned by gear-work to a skeletal bubbling pumice, dipped in a dreaming wax that forms a simulated flesh, perfect as thought-

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

…what we lose when we only get what we want.

Specialized Plasma Exempting the Requirement of Men

White vets enact trauma; Khmer heal war wounds; Hmong remember fighting landscapes; Lao push the envelope.

…surpassing nature by giving spirit to a figure, and make it appear alive by making it flat.
…
Man is merely a fading stain on a wall.

Perspective is infinity brought within reach of all who have eyes to see.

Humanity has everything now…: power, prosperity, stability, longevity, leisure, charity, peace…
Happiness has taken the place of wealth as our prime measure of success, and envy no longer hungers for rare riches hoarded by the great, but for smiles and happy hours which all Earth has in infinite supply.

…when a black-hearted spinster lures a stray priest to her bedchamber to rape her soul and laugh, she is witch.

“…think about the fundamental paradox of our society? How they build a tight-knit machine of a state by breaking everyone down into solitary units, turned against each other? How you compel mass obedience out of the most individualistic drives of selfishness, greed, and fear?”

Join or die, the old rally cry.

Except we are not The Science, incentivized to trot out pat explanations cut from an intellectual cloth to suit the commandant’s doctrinal purse.

Safe Harbor:
p139 “…I see the line of cars with people marching to me, a dozen ships of ideas aiming for this shore again.”

The Blessing Tobacco

For that which humbles our sense of vanity prepares us to face that which insults our sense of honor.

… at least half of what a man hasn’t learned in his lifetime he could have learned with ease.…one of the insights that comes with age - when one understands the nature of discovery but no longer has the time or energy to submit to its splendors.

An accounting of his body’s failures slides down the back of his eyes, and he sees how far from grace he’s been made and planted.

The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is perhaps all that connects them.