AAAAHH

According to the New York Times, Trump said,

“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’”

“We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

I wanted to hear him say this, but the article doesn’t mention the name of the podcast with former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino that Trump apparently said this on. Nor does it provide a link to it. Or a URL… that’s bad reporting! How can we verify this information ourselves?

I tried to search YouTube for the clip…

Oy vey….

I tried googling around. I found CNN… no sources…

The CNN video had a bunch of boring commentary surrounding the actual voice clips, but they DID have Trump speaking!

Here is the link: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/02/politics/video/trump-administration-republicans-nationalize-future-election-arena

Trump said it on The Dan Bongino Show here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4b0rso7ZqI0UEyGZHCNTfh

If some future person reading this finds the above links dead, well… there is a reason your teacher always told you to cite your sources. A link is a temporary thing! It is infrastructure that can fall apart as readily as a paved road will turn to potholes and gravel in a New England winter!

If you want to keep something, you have to download it, which is really the 21st century equivalent of cutting out newspaper clippings.

Regardless, I think the New York Times should provide a transcript of these conversations, if not a direct link or soundbyte.

When you block someone online, there is usually a good reason for it. Toxic behaviors begin to emerge when one uses blocking like a lightswitch.

And yet, this strange tooltip appeared at the top of my Discord window today. I have indeed blocked somebody recently… and Discord dangles the forbidden fruit!

“I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful, but they should be grateful to us. Canada lives because of the United States."

“Remember that Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Russia and China are described as our great “adversaries.” In this rivalry of “great powers,” the United States is supposedly defending the entire free world from conquest by the eastern powers.

I think it is very much in America’s interest to project this reality. A world on the precipice of war doesn’t have time to collaborate on a better future. Preparing for imminent conflicts from every direction does not allow for solar panels or housing projects. Conquest, industry, the extraction of mineral wealth! Rare earth! Oil! Supremacy in AI and Drone Manufacturing! Nuclear Submarines! Those things are valuable in a world at war. A world at war will suspend the liberties of free people in the name of security. A country at war will conquer its neighbor in the name of defense.

This is also the world described in 1984. Orwell’s London is under endless martial law because of “wars” with Russia and China. The citizens of Oceania (as the the American/English dystopian state is called) must be super patriots at all times to support the war effort. The war will never end, because the entire system of power depends upon it.

So, who should Canada be grateful to again? Certainly not to Trump. It was the generation before him (now old and passing on) that fought in World War II. While his peers were dying in Vietnam, Trump dodged the draft. While his peers were fighting for the end of segregation, Trump was being groomed to assume a real estate empire from his family. While Trump’s peers risked jail to build a better world, Trump was fighting his first lawsuits in court to deny black people the right to sign leases in his properties!

It is Donald Trump who needs to learn gratitude! His generation pilfered the Earth while the one before actually fought and died in the name of freedom.

At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Tuesday, prime minister of Canada Mark Carney delivered this speech:

It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry — that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

Well, it won’t. So what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem-solving — are under threat. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable.

A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.

And there’s another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.

Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty — sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum.

The question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must.

The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Now, Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security, that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, has termed value-based realism.

Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic. Principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights.

And pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.

So we’re engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.

We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.

We are building that strength at home. Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast-tracking $1 trillion of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We’re doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we’re doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad.

We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.

We’re doing something else: to help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry. In other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So on Ukraine, we’re a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.

Our commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering, so we’re working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic-Baltic Eight, to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground — boots on the ice.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we’re championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people.

On critical minerals, we’re forming buyer’s clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we’re co-operating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won’t ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naïve multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it’s doing is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.

But I’d also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.

This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.

Which brings me back to Havel. What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?

First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.

It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described, and it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion.

That’s building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government’s immediate priority.

And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it’s a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So, Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital talent. We also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but, a partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.

And we have something else: we have a recognition of what’s happening and determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is.

We are taking a sign out of the window.

We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine co-operation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together.

That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently, and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

Thank you very much.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

Meanwhile, the president of the United States rambles on about vaccines and conquering Greenland. Trump wants wants wants. Trump believes he is owed owed owed. He keeps a list of grievances ruminating in the back of his mind like a great steaming compost pile. Trump did not invent this — I believe that many Americans are raised to think this way, and Trump is simply an avatar of this discontent. The American mind and body, glutted by an endless supply of technology, food, and convenience, is fried beyond all ability to feel contentment.

I keep thinking about the analogy of the greengrocer with his sign on the door. It applies to many aspects of life. The world spins because, against all odds, enough of us collectively decide to get up every morning and be nice to each other. We go to work even when the job feels pointless. We go to work even when the job feels insurmountable. We shovel sidewalks and take out the trash every week. We say thanks and try to smile and make conversation with people we don’t really care about. By keeping up the facade of order, order persists. And we live pretty awesome lives despite our grievances, I think. I think American grievance is vastly disproportional to our lived reality, and so we allow our politicians to throw a geopolitical tantrum.

So, when the rules-based international order falls aside, it isn’t because it doesn’t work. If international law dies, it is because we gave up on it. I would like the United States to spend its resources defending the rule of law. But, as Mr. Carney says, America just isn’t interested in doing that. It just isn’t.

Instead of accommodating America’s violent greed, I hope the rest of the world will resist us. I hope this era of humiliation will not set the stage for a global order marked by back stabbing and war. I hope Carney’s words are not empty. I hope the world can continue to build toward peace even in the face of great powers vying for war.

I have never rooted for Canada before in my life… but my own institutions no longer reflect my values. In the absence of an America that stands for freedom & justice, Canada will have to do! Or Mexico, or Colombia, or Ireland. Or better– a coalition, a fellowship of countries willing to stand up to tyranny and uphold the law. If the United States must fall, I hope from the deepest places that a spark of freedom will persist through the darkness. Really, I don’t have to hope. Sparks dance brightest in the dark! And so long as man breathes, he will seek freedom. The destroyers will kill themselves, and sensible people will rebuild.

Images of a Microsoft Datacenter

Last year, I read (listened to) 6 audio books. My work, which for the last year has been either delivering mail or working alone at a fish operation in New Hampshire (and related commuting) has afforded me ample time to listen to media on my phone. In truth, my consumption of audio media is insatiable. I am happiest when I am deep into a nice long audiobook!

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Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Read by Cassandra Campbell

There is some scandal around this book, but I frankly didn’t know much about that when I listened to it. The scandal is itself spoilerific, so I recommend you do the same. My friend Alex recommended I read this book many years ago, and I finally managed to half-keep the promise to read it by listening.

The story tells of a child abandoned by her family in the marshes of the North Carolina coast (not Louisiana as I thought). She learns self sufficiency, hunting clams for money and boiling grits to eat. She evades capture from case managers and social workers. Kya (pronounce Kai-ya) eventually masters her environment and catalogues all the life of the marsh around her. The narrative occasionally leaps a decade forward in time to give us brief updates on a murder case that some cops are trying to work out. Push through those parts, they start to make more sense as the story progresses. When the two timelines eventually converge, the story hits peak tension!

The scenes of the swamp described throughout the book are breathtaking. As our heroine grows up throughout the novel, the book blossoms into a young romance. There IS a love triangle! There is segregation-era racial politics. The trauma of living alone in the marsh weighs heavy on Kya throughout the story, and every moment of happiness she gets to experience really uplifts you. I smiled to myself a lot while listening, and the moments of tension will have your butt clamped hard.

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Mistborn Trilogy (Graphic Audio) by Brandon Sanderson

Read by a full cast with SFX!

Love him, hate him, its Brandon Sanderson. I have tried to read his work in the past and it came off as simplistic and cheesy to me. That is, until I listened to this graphic audio edition of his Mistborn trilogy! With a full cast reading the lines for different characters and fight scenes animated with clattering blades and swooshing sounds… it’s like listening to an action movie. The simplicity of the characters doesn’t matter so much when the story moves and sounds like a film.

And underneath the action is a addictive fantasy world set in a sort of post-apocalyptic industrial city in a realm ruled over by an immortal god emperor and his army. The magic system is cool to figure out– gifted individuals can “burn” metals by digesting them in their stomach. Depending on the metal burned, a boon is received. Tin burners can heighten their senses. Pewter burners become physically strong and durable. Iron burners can pull metal toward themselves like Jedi. Steel burners can push themselves off of metals. Those who can burn all metals are called Mistborn, and they are extremely powerful.

Like Crawdad, this story features a young female protagonist left to survive on her own for years before meeting real friends and finding some romance. There are moments where you will be smiling to yourself like an idiot. There are also moments where you hear someone’s bones pop in their hand one by one as each finger is crushed.

Mistborn is metal as fuck. I love the inquisitors. The lore of the world gets deeper and deeper until eventually all the secrets are revealed by the third book and it wraps up phenomenally. Listening to it all unfold through audio is probably the best way to take it in. Brandon Sanderson finally got me!

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11-22-63 by Stephen King

Read by Craig Watson (with an afterword from the author)

This is Stephen King’s big time travel book. Did I know it was a time travel book when I picked it up? Hell no! I only knew that the book was sort of vaguely about Kennedy? Well yeah its a lot about Kennedy actually. More so as the story progresses.

This is also the first Stephen King book I ever read. I also assumed he was a pulpy sensational writer that turned out infinite pages of slop. Nope, Stephen King is the MAN! His writing is awesome! His characters are crude, very human. They have plausible desires and fall in love. There are SEX SCENES! There are shootings, brawls, getaways! A man looses the top of his scalp! These moments of excited are punctuations in an otherwise contemplative story about a teacher trying to be a writer while exploring an alien-yet-familiar world.

Embedded in this story is a tale of love that will have you almost crying (maybe I did cry a bit). There are a few arks to the story itself, beginning in Maine and eventually ending up in Dallas Texas. I won’t say more. Stephen King has a wild ride in store for you!

Craig Watson has a great voice for the story, and he even handles reading the main heroine’s lines very well. The story features quite a few regional accents including Maine and some southern drawls, and he takes them all on convincingly. I found myself wanting so much more by the time it was over. The whole book ends in a jiffy.

Jimla… JIMLA!!!!!

/ / / / /

Cloudsplitter by Russel Banks

Read by Pete Larkin

This novel presents a work of historical fiction about the life and family of John Brown, a man who declared war on the USA and ultimately met his demise by hanging after seizing the munitions factory at Harpers Ferry a few years before the start of the Civil War.

The story is told from the perspective of John’s son, Owen Brown, a furtive, lonely soul bound intractably in a strange love-hate relationship with his father.

John Brown the historical figure is revealed to be a man. Deeply devout, often contradictory and hypocritical, a father married twice who had to witness the death of 10 of his own children throughout his life.

I don’t know how appealing this book is to normal people. A lot of the story is about homesteading, actually. The Brown family is forced to pick up and move often, finally settling into the Adirondacks. The slow turn of the seasons brings new crops, fresh generations of sheep, cabins going up. Hides are tanned and sold to pay off debts that never subside. It is peaceful, in a way, but that peace sits uneasily against the backdrop of a political system preparing to explode.

The story has a lot to say about political violence. In the 19th century, Americans were grappling with a deeply divided congress over the twin issues of frontier expansion and the expansion of slavery with it. Does the institution of slavery justify violence? For John Brown and his family, the terrible job of fighting for the freedom of the enslaved black man seems unavoidable. The terrible purpose grows and grows until the first shot is finally fired. Tthe sentiments expressed throughout the novel are strangely very relatable, depsite taking place in a time period before instant communication over the internet. We are a people divided, both then and now.

Pete Larkin’s voice is deep as the earth. He is the perfect man to voice a devoted puritan farmer trying to do the lord’s work with his own two hands.

The future?

This year, I am already listening to a long podcast on the history of Taiwan. Not sure where else my interests will take me. All of the audio books from 2025 were so strange, yet they managed to fit together well. Good writing transcends genre! And a great reader can elevate any book into a masterpiece.

“Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had,” Donald Trump said speaking to reporters. “As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

“They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there.”

Maduro was a president who oversaw one of the largest mass exoduses of citizens from his own country of any since the expelling of the Indians. 7 million people left Venezuela, more than the number of Jews that died in the holocaust and almost as many as the population of New York City today. The resulting migratory crisis saw hundreds of thousands of people streaming north through Colombia, central America, and Mexico onward to the USA. I write a little about that situation here. The repercussions of Maduro’s reign are still felt today, which is ironic because the exodus of the Venezuelans is probably the primary reason Trump became president. Maduro sealed his own fate in a way.

America, of course, did everything it could to ensure that Maduro’s dictatorship would fail. Full sanction of its economy after Venezuela nationalized its oil production killed its economy. Having an inflexible dictatorship ensured Venezuela would be doomed never to recover. And now, American capitalism guarded by the US military gets to return and seize the oil for itself. Venezuela will be “prosperous” now that American companies get to have the oil.

Will Venezuelans see an improvement in their quality of life under the USA? Maybe. Afganistan saw an expansion of freedom when the Americans were around. Women were allowed to read and learn type shit. Then America threw up its hands and left, plunging the people into darkness again (women are discouraged from reading in Taliban Afganistan). America doesn’t give one shit if Venezuelans live a better life. This is just another action packed scene on Trump’s stage meant to beguile us. America will do whatever the industrial complex believes is right in Venezuela, and the people of Venezuela may or may not someday be free.

It is interesting how America has the reverse of Venezuela’s oil problem. Under Chavez, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry. In America, the oil industry has nationalized us. Trump speaks of private companies as “us.” When he refers to Chevron having a lot of oil business in Venezuela 50 years ago, he says, “We had a lot of oil there.” Rare earth minerals help “us” because they let “our” companies make more stuff and reap bigger profits and make more jobs so the money can trickle down. He keeps talking about the American oil industry as if we are all one big team riding the wave of their massive profits to heaven on earth. In Trump’s vision of the world, the companies ARE us. Their success and the wealth they generate define America, in the president’s mind. In reality, however, there is no “us.” We pay for a product that we don’t have a choice in using. We burn the fossil fuels we are sold because we don’t have a choice. The success of the company doesn’t improve our lives at all. We just keep burning and commuting till we die.

Trump suggests that America is not GREAT if it is not the undisputed master of all natural resources in the western hemisphere. The great big companies NEED to succeed, for they are too big to fail. As if the geniuses at these oil companies (logistical masters and not the hereditary inheritors of grand industrial estates) alone guarantee our freedom and way of life. And to Trump’s crowd, this greatness is worth violence! I have to say that this is a dogshit imperial mindset that turns every American into a schizophrenic speculator praying for the success of his corporate masters so that he may have a small piece of the wealth back for himself. In the imperial mode of living, killing and coercing people in other countries with violence is a lamentable but unavoidable aspect of reality. “Realists.” My friends, we do not eat oil. In fact, I reckon we produce enough gasoline locally to keep our engines running and our heaters online just fine. You know what does eat oil? The 8 massive floating war machines we have had parked outside of Venezuela since August.

The military buildup outside Venezuela was ostensibly for the purpose of the eventual takeover of Venezuela. Like the world watching Putin mass his army along the border of Ukraine, we all sat dumbfounded while Trump amassed military power near Venezuela. The US military scoped out its target and tested the boundaries of its power by murdering small craft on the high seas. Trump and his allies literally all caps tweeted that Maduro was going down over and over again. America is sleepwalking.

“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies – the biggest anywhere in the world – go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country.”

This mad insatiable thirst for an ever grander global oil market that turns a profit every quarter forever and ever will be the end of us! Basing the health and happiness of a nation on its ability to suck poisonous black ichor out of the ground is just so incredibly wrong. No good will come of this!

Environmental game: a game that relates to environments and the player’s ability to change it. Notice that I do not define an “environmental” game as one that is able to visually recreate the natural world we experience on Earth. Good graphics are trumped by sublime gameplay that manages to capture essential facts of life. Video games are like moving paintings in that way. Environmental games make us think about our relationship to the world around us. Of course, a truly realistic simulation… where one could live as they would in real life… such a simulated reality would be pointless! Realism is unnecesary when creating an environmental game. The gameplay itself conveys more reality than the mere visual experience.

Minecraft is a true environmental game. The player, Steve, can create and destroy freely. Through extraction of the land itself, Steve makes houses, farms, and machines. The game is played through the first person, which always endeared me about it. I would only use f3 third person mode for taking pictures.

Age of Empires is a strategy game about controlling little people on a map to build structures like houses, mills, and baracks. They can perform resource gathering tasks like chopping wood, mining, or even tending to a field of crops to make food. As the player extracts, however, the environment changes. Where green forests once stood, stumps and stubble remain. After a long enough session, the land is trampled absolutely barren. The flat expanse of a battlefield!

Factorio is another game that offers the player a third person, top-down view of the environment, but like Minecraft, the player is in control of a single body. As a castaway space traveler, you must mine metals and craft them into machines. All of the machines the player builds work together to create a giant factory whose fires run as long and hot as the player is able to provide it with fuel… coal, wood, oil, enriched uranium. The very process of extracting all this stuff drains the life from the world. And the native population, agitated by the cloud of pollution the factory inevitably produces (unless the player carefully manages their electrical consumption with solar panels and batteries..). Under attack by natives, like some horrific techno-puritan in marshes of Boston, the player creates ammo, rockets, explosives, napalm… not to mention great big walls to keep everyone out. A kind of global warming is built into the game to organically fuel the necessity to develop a military industrial complex that consumes and endless amount of material from the land.

I want to propose as an area of further inquiry: the bias that western colonizer nations have in making environmental games. Notice how my outline always surrounds the idea of extracting resources. The changes made to the environment in each of the games I listed above hinge on destroying the existing world in order to build an agricultural-industrial one. In Factorio and Minecraft specifically, the player generally plays completely alone or in a small group of friends. What is it about the story of a lone castaway transforming their lonely island into a productive distillation of home that so captivates us? Is the idea of settling and transforming a place an ingrained aspect of western culture specifically? JD Vance level question. A better question would be: are there people out there that make environmental games offering adifferent relationships with the world around us? Are there environmental/survival games where the player is not extracting from the land? changes our relationship to the natural world away from the idea of “extracting resources” altogether? Can a game be really fun if you aren’t constantly hacking at trees and smelting ores to fight beasts and monsters? The answer to these questions may present potential paths forward in the real world as well. Because a great environmental game should inspire hope, not despair!

A non-extractive but nonetheless environmental book I know of is called “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean Craighead George.

In this book, a boy goes off to the wilderness to get away from his giant, annoying family. He travels out to the Adirondacks many days hike from roads or towns. There, he isn’t frantic. There is no reason to build great palisades or battle with natives. He doesn’t even need to build a house; the hollow of a great tree is enough for him to sleep in. He kills a deer, just one, for meat and leather and befriends a hawk that becomes his best friend and hunting buddy. He hikes into town from time to time to see the librarian and learn how to do things. His greatest adversary, if they can be called that, are regular people. Rangers and men that would try to take him away back to civilization. It flips the survival genre on its head in a peaceful way. Man is not trying to recreate his agro-industrial life in the wilderness… hell no! This young man is trying to get away from all that and find some peace and quiet!

Are there games that offer this kind of gameplay? Peaceful survival gameplay, I guess you could call it. Can games like that be as fun as the hardcore survival games?

Created in May of 2024 following the victory of the Celtics in the 2024 NBA Finals!

Read it yourself lol https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/14/trump-arch-washington-dc-policy-chief

The original French arc was ordered to be constructed by Napoleon. Following Napoleon’s fall, France returned to a monarchy system after the French Revolution failed to achieve a stable Democratic system of government.

Trump Jr said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was prolonging the war because he knew he would never win an election if it ended. He said Zelenskyy was a borderline deity on the left, but argued that Ukraine was far more corrupt than Russia.

He also railed at the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, saying European sanctions were not working since they had simply increased the price of oil, from which Russia could pay for its war. He described the European plan as “we are going to wait for Russia to go bankrupt – that is not a plan”

– Guardian Reporting, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/07/us-may-end-support-for-ukraine-war-effort-says-donald-trump-jr

When Ukraine disarmed its nuclear weapons in the 1990s, it signed on to the Budapest Memorandum with the US, Russia, and UK as a security assurance against future attacks. Unfortunately, this document proved repeatedly worthless when in 2014 and then again in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine. The American response was, for a time, to prop up Ukraine with guns, bullets, anti-air weapons, and battlefield intelligence. It was a strict policy of the USA, however, that it would not allow Ukraine to directly attack Russia. Indeed, aircraft capable of bombing Russia and missiles capable of striking Russian soil were not granted.

Imagine a world where, upon the first Russian boot landing in Ukrainian soil on that February day in 2022, Ukraine responded immediately with B2 stealth bombers destroying large swathes of Moscow. Imagine the timeline where Russian cities met the same devastation as Ukrainian cities, and Russian citizens were forced to contend with the reality of war as directly as their Ukrainian counterparts. I think if that were even a possibility, Russia would not have invaded in the first place. Because if it had, Nuclear War would have quickly ensued, because Russia would be destroyed otherwise.

Unfortunately, we went through the Biden proxy war timeline. “Sanctions” against Russia by Europe and the USA merely solidified a new Eastern economy where China and India use Russia as a market. Europe itself cannot even ween itself off of Russian oil, so it continues to deal directly with Russia even as its politicians decry it. In short, the USA and Europe did nothing as Russia spent months amassing an invading force at Ukraine’s border. Putin was confident that sanctions and some tough battlefield losses would be all the pain he would experience from his attack. Since then, sanctions and tough battlefield losses are all the punishment he has received. Economic pain at home only helps Putin’s regime, which clings to power through the continuous inundation of his own population with fear and crisis.

Within a year of the start of Russia’s invasion, Republicans rallied with Russia and began denying assistance to Ukraine. Now, with Trump at the helm, the thought of a real military punishment for Russia’s invasion is a pipe dream. Trump is negotiating a settlement on Russia’s behalf that will see Ukraine disarmed and its territory cut apart and given over to Putin.

The only hope for Ukrainians now is that their spirit is stronger than the oppressors’ desire to possess their land. Like the Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation, the Ukrainians must be willing to endure hell on Earth to resist extermination. Is there a way out? I don’t know. Did the Chinese believe there would be a way out when the Japanese invaded in WWII? Did Europe believe there would be a way out during the Nazi occupation? Did Eastern Europe ever believe there would be a day when the iron curtain fell? Did the British hunkering in the subway believe they would ever walk free in London again when it had been reduced to rubble?

History shows us that incredible odds can be beaten when people resist conquest. The spirit of freedom is not so easily destroyed by despots. Even Putin’s Russia may someday collapse, as Stalin’s USSR did not three decades ago. Maybe within our lifetime, we will see Putin get what he deserves. I have a bad feeling, though, that American blood will spill to achieve that.

And to Trump Jr’s assertion that Ukraine is a corrupt state as contemptible as its invader…. HA! You cannot stand on the steps of the Kremlin holding up a sign saying “Putin Stinks!” without being beaten and dragged away to an arctic labor camp. The Trump family is not capable of understanding freedom. As a family of rent seekers, they see the subjugation of others into hierarchies and classes as the natural order of things. Freedom cannot flourish in America and the world until the Trumps are banished from politics forever. Like Midas, they would rather have a dead country gilded with gold upon every surface than a thriving, free America fighting for a better world.

Shin Godzilla is a 2016 monster horror movie from a long lineage of Godzilla movies stretching back to the original “Gojira” released in 1954. The plot is direct enough: a giant monster surfaces in Tokyo Bay, destroying everything in its wake. The Japanese military struggles to mobilize an effective force to counteract the beast, and devastation ensues. As a monster, Godzilla is horrifying in the same way that a great white shark is. White, unblinking eyes gleam out of an emotionless mask of a skull. Not quite dinosaur, not quite lizard, Godzilla stands tall and dark on the horizon like a pillar of volcanic stone. There is nothing cute or animal-like in Shin Godzilla’s rendition of the monster; all similarity to a dinosaur or alligator (so common in modern depictions of Godzilla) are absent. No, this thing is not a giant animal. It is a hulking, unfeeling colossus with a jagged maw and eyes that do not see. 

I’ll admit now that I have never watched a Godzilla movie before. I’ve seen Godzilla parodied and referenced in other movies. I’ve played some Godzilla games. But no, until I saw Shin Godzilla, I hadn’t watched a single Godzilla film. You know what I have watched? Neon Genesis Evangelion, the 90’s era mecha-anime about giant robots fighting space aliens. 

Shin Godzilla and Evangelion happen to share a director: Hideaki Anno. If you have seen Evangelion, then you will notice that fact immediately. The pacing, sets, and even the soundtrack in Shin Godzilla share striking similarities to the anime. In both works, a government agency is tasked with the impossible mission of fighting an impossibly massive foe. The members of Evangelion’s NERV battle gigantic angels sent from heaven to protect Tokyo. Shin Godzilla’s Japan Self Defense Force is tasked with protecting Tokyo from a giant walking lizard. Agents within both government agencies (Evangelion’s NERV and Shin Godzilla’s Self Defense Force) must work cohesively with each other as well as the members of other government agencies in order to discover the enemy’s weakness before it is too late. Truly, this movie is as much about the interplay of government agencies as it is about individual characters making decisions on-screen. The insides of offices are just as much a set piece as scenes of Tokyo’s destruction at the hands of Godzilla. That’s what Hideaki Anno is really good at: turning tactical meetings into exciting parts of the battle. There is usually a hype drum beat to complement the tactical action sequences.

(full soundtrack playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiONUl3B9po&list=OLAK5uy_mm0hs-zS7fdKdfdRwAbAixovax9k9YgB8&index=2)

The transformation of the government bureaucracy from bumbling/rigid to cunning/fluid across the film is clearly satirical. The Japanese government’s initial response to the emergence of Godzilla in the film is painfully mired in bureaucratic bullshit. From the start, while the monster has only manifested as a pool of blood beneath Tokyo Bay, the government is holding press conferences to deny the existence of a monster. Right up until undeniable footage of the monster is projected onscreen in front of the prime minister’s entire cabinet, they are denying its existence and formulating fake explanations for the phenomenon. When the monster swims up a canal and begins destroying boats, the government holds another press conference stating that, scientifically, the monster could not possibly support its own weight on land. When the monster indeed surfaces and begins destroying the city, the Prime Minister is only able to muster 5 measly helicopters in response. No use–not a single shot is fired. The Prime Minister calls off the attack when a fleeing civilian is detected near the monster. Choosing not to risk even one life by gunfire, Godzilla is able to make a getaway without being met with a single iota of military resistance from the government of Japan. The inability of the government to come to a single decisive response across its many disjointed branches comes off as comical if not horrifying. While people die on the street, politicians in offices bicker about optics and arbitrary rules of engagement with a monster. This part of the movie is very frustrating to watch on the first go around!

Some might call it boring, but the film is all about determined people working beyond the battlefield to win against an unstoppable monster. Scenes of destruction in the city are juxtaposed with well-dressed government officials studying, collaborating, and responding to Godzilla’s actions in real time. This was the set up in Evangelion too: the command center where the government coordinates its military responses is just as important as the battlefield. And when the monster eventually encroaches upon HQ, the two sides of the movie collide with devastation. Yes, the scene where Godzilla finally makes it to the heart of Tokyo is breathtaking in its portrayal of destruction. Like a nuke going off. One critic, William Tsutsui, writes: “Shin Godzilla leaves no doubt that the greatest threat to Japan comes not from without but from within, from a geriatric, fossilized government bureaucracy unable to act decisively or to stand up resolutely to foreign pressure.” Shin Godzilla turns bureaucratic inaction into horror.

There is geopolitical commentary as well. Throughout the film, America acts unilaterally to attack Godzilla. When Japanese munitions inevitably fail to penetrate the monster’s armor, American B-2 bombers fly in and drop bunker busters on it. The Prime Minister was informed of the attack, but did not himself call it. Nonetheless, he immediately holds a (you guessed it) press conference whose sole purpose is to justify the American intervention, as if the PM has to prove himself to his own people in the midst of a 9/11 level catastrophe. That Prime Minister fucking dies btw, he doesn’t make it to the end of the movie. In another scene, an American politician is counseling his envoy to Japan (a young Japanese woman), telling her, “Japan has grown up enough to have international trade deals on the sly.” America, of course, wants to control Godzilla, and possibly even helped engineer it.

Frustration turns to horror again as the world plans to nuke Tokyo in a last ditch effort to kill the monster before it can spread beyond Japan. This part is heart wrenching, and I’m not even Japanese. The thought of dropping thermonuclear bombs on a city, to sacrifice all those people and all that land just to maybe stop Godzilla, is a titanic burden. Doubly so upon a population that already bears the trauma of being nuked twice before. I found myself feeling profoundly sad at the possibility that this might happen on-screen… strange emotions for a Godzilla movie!

Yes, this is a strange movie. I have seen nothing like it outside of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Hideaki Anno is a genius! If you have the patience for a monster movie with comparatively little monster and lots of dialogue, you might just fall in love with Shin Godzilla like I did. Or, if you are like my roommate Max who prefers when monster movies get straight to the big fights, then you will probably glaze over for most of the talking scenes. That’s okay too, because what we see of Godzilla itself is incredible.

I won’t spoil too much here, but Godzilla’s design is awful in a terrifyingly awesome way. The monster actively evolves throughout the film, changing its genome in real time to go from a giant aquatic lizard to a freakish bipedal dragon from start to finish. Godzilla’s arms are small, almost vestigially weak hanging above titanic thighs that seem barely to heft the bulk of the beast from footstep to footstep. Godzilla’s skin seems to ooze like hardened magma. The monster has no emotion–its face and jaw appear fixed into an unblinking snarl as if they were literally caste from molten obsidian glass. The unblinking part is probably the most striking feature. Two fish eyes peer out of Godzilla’s head. They don’t rotate or look around. They don’t seem to track movement at all. Don’t be fooled, however. The capacity to annihilate all life lurks within Godzilla’s lumbering form. The shark metaphor is apt.

I will watch more Godzilla movies and see how Shin Godzilla compares. I have a feeling this movie is one-of-a-kind though.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/28/college-student-deported-boston-flight-thanksgiving

Can you imagine being ripped out of security at the airport and being sent to 3000 miles from home? Supposedly never to return without being able to say goodbye to your family?

And here is the official Halluci Nation version:

The Neon Nativez remix is my favorite, much higher energy. It brings the Wednesday Adams lines to the front with a crazy electronic drop after. The original plays it cooler and drops the Wednesday speech at the end with screaming.

I read recently that Thanksgiving as we celebrate it today was created by Abraham Lincoln during one of his famous proclamations:

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they [our freedoms] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

Thus, a national day of Thanksgiving was established to unify all the informal Thanksgivings celebrated in every state across the country. Lincoln did this to help heal the nation after the civil war killed over 600,000 American men.

In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

Lincoln extols the miraculous nature of American prosperity despite the ravaged of war. The Thanksgiving mythology of pilgrims dining with natives, then, either existed independently or was affixed later than Lincoln. Perhaps the entire story of the Massachusetts pilgrims was made up retroactively? People have probably researched this.

Either way, we can’t escape the story now. The first Americans would have frozen to death if it weren’t for the locals. I’ve read that the pilgrims broke into and raided the winter caches of the local Indians who were away from the coast for the winter in order to survive. What a sorry lot!

I also learned that Jamestown (started 1607) in Virginia was the first surviving British colony in the Americas, with multiple abandoned attempts to colonize coming before. The pilgrims that I am biased toward as a New Englander came after aboard the Mayflower, in 1620.

It is Columbus day in America, and today we remember the fateful (and for many, fatal) connection that was made all those centuries ago between the peoples of America and Europe. Though it was not the first time people from the East met people from the West (Vikings were chilling with Native Americans long before), Columbus’s journey marked the beginning of a new era of trans-Atlantic movement that spelled the end of Native sovereignty in America and the start of the long era of colonialism that we still inhabit today.

Some say we should not remember Christopher Columbus because he was a slaver and a crook whose actions lead to the deaths of millions of people. It is hard to deny that Columbus’s voyage resulted in the destruction of an entire hemisphere worth of culture. Yet, I appreciate that Americans have a day to remember their own history. Atrocious though it may be to so plainly acknowledge that the arrival of Europeans spelled the doom of millions, I think it is worth keeping that fact close. It is through destruction that we the people came into our own kingdom in the most beautiful land in the world. If we cannot appreciate the sacrifices, many unwilling, that went into building America, then we do not deserve America. Barbarians, the lot of us!

In a theme that builds toward Thanksgiving and comes to a head at Christmas, Americans have an opportunity to reflect on their wretched origins. And wretched they were! Starving immigrants packed into the belly of a galley, feeding on hard bread nibbled by pests. Starving immigrants that, once delivered, had to starve through a frigid winter in a land they did not know. For all the furor among Republicans against the encroachment of immigrants in our time, the American people were themselves immigrants from the start. Dirtier then, and a lot less intelligent too I bet. These immigrants required help to survive, and they got it (wretched as they were).

I get ahead of myself, though. Columbus day is first and foremost about that first fatal contact. What world did the explorers from Europe see? On this day, we must remember that the land was not empty. In fact, it was not even sparsely inhabited. Charles C. Mann wrote a book about this very subject called “1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.” In it, he looks to early accounts of colonists, explorers, and merchants to obtain an understanding of Native American populations during and before the arrival of Columbus. According to the account of a mariner named Verrazzano from 1523, the coastline everywhere north of the Carolinas was “densely populated” (50). Mann writes of Verrazzano being able to smell native bonfires for hundreds of miles off the coast. Their settlements marked the whole coast up to Massachusetts, smoke billowing. This is to say that before disease struck down much of the native population of the Americas, the land was actually densely populated. America has had agriculture, land management, and really civilization itself for many thousands of years before a European ever laid eyes on it.

The animal life of America during the exploration era was reportedly amazing. Mann writes of rivers near Boston bursting so full of spawning fish that they leapt out of the rivers and glimmered like a stream: “Runs of Atlantic salmon, short nose sturgeon, striped bass, and American shad annually filled the harbor. But the most important fish harvest came in late spring, when the herring-like alewives swarmed the fast, shallow stream that cut through the village. So numerous were the fish, and so driven, that when mischievous boys walled off the stream with stones the alewives would leap the barrier–silver bodies gleaming in the sun–and proceed upstream” (45). Today, freshwater spawns along the Massachusetts coast are so small that they are unnoticeable. Commercial fishing of alewives has been illegal since 2006 due to the depleted population and risk of extinction.

The vegetables need go without saying. The potatos, tomatos, carrots, and CORN that our cuisine cherishes and our diets depend upon are all, of course, the product of ten thousand years of domestication undertaken by native peoples.

And so on. The debt that Europeans owe Native Americans has been written about extensively, and I hope to write about it more. But Columbus day is really about contact. Wretched European meets wretched Indian. Or maybe not-so-wretched Indian. Maybe the Native Americans were the healthy ones– fit, eating well on vegetables and fresh fish, and living in a clean country. Maybe the Europeans, cloistered to ships and eating old bread, were the more wretched. Regardless, these wretched people were fated to meet, and their contact changed the world.

Columbus day is a great opportunity to explore the history of this contact. With greater empathy, we may be able to act better when the next contact inevitably happens. For it is destiny in this world that we will meet new and strange people that live lives alien to our own. The choice to make friends or enemies is ours. With a knowledge of history, we might be able to make the better choice. It is my hope that we will abandon superiority and choose peace with the new forms of humanity that we encounter every day.

~ ~ ~

Check it out!! VVVV

Mann, Charles. “1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.” Vintage Books, division of Random House, Inc. Second Edition. New York