AAAAHH

“They wasted our lives like pieces of scrap paper.”

“Never die for Emperor or country.”

– Mr. Sato, Japanese soldier during WWII

The people that fought and died during World War II are all mostly dead now. A few hang on, 80 years later, but there are not many today who are willing to hear their advice. Our modern world is slowly inching back toward the same impulses that lead to the horrors of the 20th century. Some countries, like Russia and Israel, have already succumbed and wage war with abandon. America is happy to watch and supply weapons, as we did 80 years ago before the violence finally found its way back to our shores and forced Americans to fight and die too. The folks that remember how awful the 1940s were are warning us about what is coming, but we don’t listen!

Joe Rogan has a horrifying prophecy that I hear bandied about these days:

“Hard times make hard men.
Hard men make easy times.
Easy times make soft men.
Soft men make hard times.”

The soft men don’t realize how good they have it. They don’t see their softness as a virtue. They want to be hard so bad that they’ll trade blood for it.

How long until the whole world is engulfed again? Why do we try so hard to justify conquest? Having a little piece of land cannot possibly be worth the death of an entire generation!

Palantir sponsors our government. How can our government be ‘independent’ if weapons manufacturers and data corporations are paying for it?

“In my dream, I saw him, the man without a head..”

An Australian woman online is creating electronic dance music about the online world. Her most recent song, uploaded today with a music video on YouTube, is a pumping track with simple repetitive lyrics about seeing a man on a screen in her dream on her screen. And so on.

I thought the song was a great background track to playing some Minecraft, but then I looked over at the video and was amazed. Watch it:

The music video opens with a VOD of a livestream of the artist using her computer. It seems like a sped up time-lapse of Ninajirachi mindlessly browsing and watching various YouTube videos across a few random subjects. Pure social media scroll. Then the lyrics kick in and suddenly every single lyric is being shown on screen via google images. What seemed like a slice of life VOD is actually a deeply choreographed montage set to the beat of the dance music and coordinated with the haunting lyrics. If you actually sit down and listen to the words themselves, they come off as creepy. The singer describes seeing a headless man she knew when she was 4, then 14. Slenderman? Or real life abuser? Popping up in the media feed for a moment like a jumpscare? Disappearing into a dream?

Ninajirachi has another piece of digital introspection in the form of her single “Fuck My Computer” in which she sings over and over again, “I wanna fuck my computer, ‘Cause no one in the world knows me better.”

It’s loads of fun! The dance music is addictive and repetitive like candy, with a tasty and relevant subject for the computer minded zoomer of 2025.

“When machines learn to feel, who decides what is human?” – YouTube Commenter

This morning, Republicans in the senate passed a resolution to cut $1 Billion dollars in funding that went to public broadcasting and another $8 billion dollars for foreign assistance programs. The cuts to foreign assistance originally included the deletion of PEPFAR, a Bush era program to provide global assistance to fighting the AIDS epidemic.

Republicans backing the measure to cut public broadcasting claim that these public broadcasting networks promote an “anti-right bias.” In short, Republicans disagreed with the content of the stories reported on by NPR/PBS and decided to punish these organizations by withdrawing valuable funds used to pay for localized journalism throughout all areas of the country. This is a shame because, while wealthy states with many donors can afford to keep their local NPR stations funded despite the shortfall in federal money, the poorest states in the country will be unable to pay the difference and will lose access to programming. Local news infrastructure (personalized to the state and even county level) will be lost, worsening an already dire crisis of “news deserts” expanding across the country. “News deserts” are regions of the USA that do not have local journalists covering state and county level politics or current events, leaving residents uninformed of news immediately relevant to their lives. National news, impersonal and often frustratingly beyond an individual’s capacity to influence, is not an adequate replacement for the loss of local news reporting. Republicans have decided, in short, to eliminate valuable journalism jobs in the most vulnerable regions of the country to save a handful of pennies.

NPR delivers the facts, even when they aren’t pretty. Republicans can argue that the reporting leans into issues of interest to lefties, sure. Lately, NPR has been covering the war in Gaza a ton (with emphasis on the massive civilian death-toll), and Republicans would probably rather some reporting that painted Israel in a more positive light. Fortunately for us civilians, politicians cannot dictate the news. NPR has a duty to report the capital t Truth: true information! If Republicans do not like what they hear on the radio, perhaps instead of trying to silence it, they should act to improve the world and change the headlines for the better. That is, in fact, the purpose of journalism– to hold lawmakers accountable to the material reality of the country, to shine light on corruption, and to depict the events of the world as they are. If republicans are upset by the goings on reported in the news; the endless Trump power grabs, the atrocious wars propagating everywhere, the lurking suggestion of pedophiles and Nazis underpinning our institutions of government…. well my Republican friends… act! We can’t afford to bury our heads in the sand. Pretending everything is dandy in the world won’t solve a damned thing.

This all goes without saying that NPR’s broadcasting is generally very good, positive, community-oriented, and educational. The quality of the productions both at the local and national level are really high. I happen to like NPR a lot. I listen to WBUR Boston (90.9) and NHPR of Southern New Hampshire (88.3).

I wonder, what would an NPR without an “anti-right bias” look like? What stories is NPR neglecting that Republicans want to hear? Is Fox News the model for conservative broadcasting…? The same Fox News that removed its stock ticker when the market slipped this year?

Why are we letting a war criminal visit the white house? Benjamin Netanyahu has accrued a lot of blood on his hands over 18 years of prime ministership.

Repeatedly closing off pathways to peace, his administration continued the blockade of Gaza to the point of war. To this day, his settlers continuously encroach upon the people of the West Bank, harassing and killing Palestinians for their land and building walled fortifications to keep the land for themselves.

I am not sure how Bibi can still smile and joke in front of a crowd. Is ordering killings that easy for him? Does the weight of his blood lust simply slide off, like droplets of rain off a tarp? He doesn’t seem to feel anything at all. He appears in public always smiling wryly, smirking over his detractors as if he is untouchable. His moments of solemnity are overdone, as if he learned how to mimic expressions of grief from old Hollywood movies.

The pursuit of a Jewish state (Israel: a place where one’s Jewish bloodline grants them rights over non-Jews) has lead to mass death. These people of the Jewish faith, once victims of brutal fascism under the Nazis, now revive the old doctrine of war to carry out their own deadly crusade in the middle east. Though for many this is a new conflict of the recent decade, the seed of violence first took root in 1948 when a group of Zionist Jews, only a few years within the wake of the Holocaust, decided it was worth picking up arms again and killing for a piece of land in what was then called Palestine. The killing started in 1948 and never stopped. As Israel continued to find reasons to go to war with its neighbors, its territory expanded. In that way, the legacy of death that Hitler began in the 20th century was allowed to propagate and flower anew into the 21st.

Thank you, Netanyahu! You have given us the gift of a war-blighted world.

Day 1 (June 2nd): Malden, Massachusetts -> Sunset View Farm Camping Area, Monson, MA

Car wouldn’t start, we replaced an ignition coil ourselves and got moving by sunset.

Day 2 (June 3rd): Monsom, MA -> Mt. Davis (Forbes State Forest), Pensylvania

Visited “Negro Mountain,” climbed the high point of Pensylvania

Day 3 (June 4th): Pensylvania -> Middlefield, Ohio -> Findley State Park

Met the amish

They shop at Walmart too

Day 4 (June 5th): Ohio -> Michigan (for weed) -> Indiana (Sand Dunes) -> Gabe’s House, Chicago (South Side)

Come on… feel the Illinoise!

Day 5 (June 6th): Gabe’s U Chicago Graduation

Ate an entire deep dish pizza myself

Day 6 (June 7th): Chilling in Chicago

Saw Aunty Sybil and Uncle Steve, dodged fare on train

Day 7 (June 8th): Chicago, IL -> Pella, Iowa -> Elk Rock State Park, IO

Dutch windmills and quilts

Day 8 (June 9th): Iowa -> Omaha, Nebraska -> Platte River State Park, NB

A blood red moon loomed over us

Day 9 (June 10th): Nebraska -> West Bend Recreation Area, Crow-Creek Reservation, South Dakota

Fields of grass that smelled like fresh bread, friendly Indians

Camped on the banks of the Missouri River under a bright full moon

Day 10 (June 11th): Crow-Creek Reservation -> Sage Creek Campground (Still South Dakota)

I will miss Crow-Creek ;_;

Day 11 (June 12th): Sage Creek -> Rapid City -> Mount Rushmore -> Crazy Horse -> Center Lake Campground in Custer State Park (Still South Dakota)

Fish leapt out of the water at sunset, giant black eagles soared over head

Day 12 (June 13th): Remained at Custer, SD

Stayed in Custer, climbed Black Elk Peak and reached the highest point in South Dakota

Day 13 (June 14th): Custer -> Rapid City (again) -> Oglala National Grassland, Nebraska -> Some campsite in Nebraska??

Met Robert Young Dog Senior, went to a gay powwow

Day 14 (June 15th): Random campsite, Nebraska -> High Point of Nebraska (looked like every other place in Nebraska) -> Cheyenne, Wyoming -> Golden, Colorado

Saw the Union Pacific in Wyoming, headed south to the front range of the rockies to stay in Golden for a while

Day 15 (June 16th): Stayed with Colin and Hunter in Golden

Day 16 (June 17th): Chilling in Golden

Biked 2000 feet up Lookout Mountain, Chloe climbed a 14,000 foot peak and survived

Day 17 (June 18th): Chilling in Golden

Colin gets into Melee

Day 18 (June 19th): Chilling in Golden

Day 19 (June 20th): Julian arrives in Golden

Biked up the South Table on a cyclocross bike, Chloe and Julian have a miserable backpacking trip in the rockies

Day 20 (June 21st): Golden, CO -> Arrow Head Campsite in Buena Vista, CO

Trump bombs Iran

Julian becomes the crew’s musician

Aaron drinks too much buzzball and pukes

Day 21 (June 22nd): Buena Vista -> Curecanti National Recreation Area near Blue Mesa, CO

Bluest water I have ever seen in my life (it was freezing)

Day 22 (June 23rd): Blue Mesa -> Black Canyon, CO

Camped in a ravine

Day 23 (June 24th): Black Canyon, CO -> Moab, Utah -> Islands in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park in Utah

Camped on the edge of the largest canyon I have ever seen in my life… and the grand canyon is apparently larger?

Day 24 (June 25th): All day in Canyonlands

Ate mushrooms

Day 25 (June 26th): Canyonlands, Ut -> Moab -> Salt Lake City, Utah

It’s like Chelsea but worse

Day 26 (June 27th): Salt Lake City -> Willow Creek in Wells, Nevada

Hang gliders soared across the horizon over salt lake

Said goodbye to Julian

Camped in a cow pasture

Day 27 (June 28th): Wells, Nevada -> Reno -> Lake Tahoe, California

Fucked a prostitute (legally)

Day 28 (June 29th): Lake Tahoe -> Palo Alto south of San Francisco

Lake Tahoe is a freshwater Caribbean in the mountains

Aaron decides he needs to make a family

Reconvene with Aunty Sybil and Uncle Steve

Day 29 (June 30th): Chilling in Los Altos with Aunty Sybil

Day 30 (July 1st): The Pacific Ocean

Aaron and Chloe will see the redwoods north of San Francisco and part ways at last….

From here, Aaron will go East again to Texas. He will spend the Fourth of July in New Orleans. Chloe will continue North to Portland, then Seattle, and possibly beyond to Vancouver. The fellowship is broken but will never be forgotten.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” – Christie Noam in the latest Trump Administration letter to Harvard

Just as Congress is in the midst of working out how to pass the Big Beautiful Bill to cut services like healthcare access in exchange for massive tax cuts for rich people, Trump throws another insane distraction into the mix.

Today, his secretary has declared that Harvard cannot admit foreign students and must expel its existing body of foreign students.

“This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.” – Christie

Trump is being very cheeky and having his secretary send the letters because he is a little embarrassed sending so many inquiries to Harvard, his crush.

Needless to say, it seems the federal government will soon be mustering an armed force to attack and expel International Students from Harvard University. A federal police force of brown shirts are on the prowl looking for unprotected graduate students to nab off the street and ship to Louisiana for processing.

Needless to say, the people of Boston need to be vigilant and actively work to protect their fellow man during these brutal times. We cannot hesitate to protect the ones we care about from being attacked and sent far away. Go to Harvard!

Exactly a year ago now, I was half asleep on a couch in an AirBnB motel with a busted leg in Wells, Maine. My leg was throbbing, half from a tiny stress fracture above my ankle and half from the effort of hobbling around in a giant plastic boot. The boot was sort of like a cast for my left foot that could be velcroed on and off for sleeping and showering. My doctor gave me the thing to keep me from walking on my busted leg. It didn’t work. Simply put, I was motivated to move and I could not be stopped.

I was visiting Maine that weekend to watch my buddy Liam run his first official marathon, the Maine Coast Marathon. The race is beautifully located right off the beach in Wells with the starting line placed idyllically at the end of a peninsula surrounded by beautiful beach houses on all sides. Unfortunately, this location made getting to the starting line very difficult. When we reached the point where cars could go no further, I set about hobbling down the half mile or so to try and catch Liam at the starting line. I made it maybe halfway before I heard the distant cheers and the wave of runners began to pass me. It was totally unlike the marathons I had seen in New York or Boston. Absent the massive crowds of cheering onlookers, this procession of runners was strangely serene. With nothing but the quiet sounds of lapping surf and sea air, the runners trudged forward in relative silence, smiling and focused on their singular task. I leaned against a fence and quietly watched them pass.

I eventually did see my friend and cheered him along. Then I faced the prospect of a long hobble home. The race soon passed me entirely, and a line of cars from the starting line began to form along the beach road. I held my thumb up to all of them, and somebody did end up taking pity on me and let me catch a ride. As fate would have it, it was actually an old friend from high school that picked me up (Alex Brovenov, if anyone remembers). He had his sweet old dog in the back seat for me to sit with. With his help and the help of some other friends in my company, I eventually made it back to the AirBnB and slept through pretty much the whole rest of the race. I then grabbed the Downeaster back to Boston and went off to NYC where I lost my wallet.

I distinctly remember not being able to sleep at all the night before Liam’s race. Besides the pain, I was stressed out about my leg. I was googling symptoms frantically, drafting emails to my doctor, and generally freaked out that I was doomed to a life of random minor injury that would prevent me from pursuing the active life that I had begun to dream about. I was a hobbling mess, and a pessimistic part of me thought I’d never recover. I hadn’t broken a bone before or anything like that, so I was unacquainted with the incredible power of the human body to heal itself. I was very naive about the body in general.

At a certain point in middle school I forswore movement for brain work, and I know now that this was a terrible mistake. The rewards of fitness are hard to describe but plain to see. You look good, you feel good, and you can tackle anything life throws your way. So many of my problems– hyperactivity, sleeplessness, depression, obesity– were symptoms of a lifestyle that denied my body its drive to move and play. After witnessing the Maine Coast Marathon, I dedicated myself to movement!

I started small. I did the stretches that the doctor told me to do to help build strength in my feet. I went out and bought a brand new pair of shoes with some cushion but not too much (this helped me more than anything else, I think). I started walking, and then by mid summer I tried running a mile. I started running a mile every day. I got a job as a letter carrier for the USPS and really started adding miles to my days. I’d come home from work and do a little running, and then I’d just relax. Like actually relax– watch TV or basketball or play games. Eating felt deserved. Sleep came very easily.

By December, I had lost 40 pounds and ran my first half marathon informally along the Cambridge promenade. I also had a fleeting romance with a woman from Al Salvador. The heart needs sustenance too. It was a magical Christmas season. Around this time, I set my sights on the ultimate challenge– a full marathon, 26 miles of running. I was going to run the Boston Marathon in April, my legs be damned. I quit the USPS sometime in February and dedicated myself to chilling and running, though I will admit I did a little too much chilling and not nearly enough training. Winter is a hard time for movement, I know that now more than ever. For the first time in my life, I desperately waited for the thaw. We got an honest to god winter in Boston for once.

Well, the snow did melt, as it always does, and I ran the Boston Marathon on April 21st, 2025. My quads were like cement afterwards and I could barely walk more than a hobble. But this time I knew I would recover and be stronger for it. I can do absolutely anything! I slept for two days and ate anything I could get my hands on. In no time at all, I emerged from my room to find a blooming world rife with flowers and bees. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at.

They weren’t kidding– eating right and getting plenty of exercise carries miraculous health benefits. My brain, now supported by a strong body, is capable of dreaming again. Pessimism feels increasingly childish to me. As people, we are capable of achieving so much in very little time. Those who can, should, to support those who cannot.

One year later, and I am back in Wells watching Liam run again. He is doing a half this time with his girlfriend– after multiple marathons and an ultra, he has nothing to prove to anybody and can run at his leisure. The weather is wet, but rain has so far spared us. A great fog descended from the sea to enshroud the starting line in clouds. I decide to jump into the race with him at one point and crank a few miles. I do some shopping too.

In a single year, I have achieved things that I thought impossible. I’m going to pivot now to strength training and see if I can’t sculpt a physique capable of winning the adoration of a beautiful woman. And maybe I’ll see you at the Boston Marathon next year!

The chapter titled “Getting By” in Robert Leo Heilman’s Book Overstory: Zero begins with an excerpt from a Development Report by a timber logging company in Oregon:

“While the 1979-1985 years were disappointing for wood products manufacturuers and workers alike, the net result may well have been a blessing in disguise for the survival and long-term health of the industry. Hundreds of inefficient sawmill, veneer, and plywood plants have been shut down. Others have been modernized and streamlined to achieve maximum return per unit of product. New products have been developed which require lower labor costs, cheaper raw materials, and results in a better value to end-user. The net effect is a leaner, more productive and cost-effective industry. One of the principle means of reducing costs, of course, is to lower wage rates.” ~ Development Report and Plan, CCD Business Development Corp. Roseburg, Oregon, July 1986

The author goes on to tell about his experience keeping his family alive in rural Oregon timber country during the economic decline of that period. At one point, the author is having a conversation with another dad while their kids played.

“My dad told me the other night that there’s a plan for this area,” he said as we passed the bottle back and forth. His father was an accountant and local business consultant. “He says the mills are going to stay shut until everyone who can afford to move leaves. The mills are all automating and whoever’s left will be the people who can’t go anywhere else and they’ll work for cheap […] I don’t mean to say that this recession’s all been rigged. They’re just taking advantage of it is all. They owners are all going to use it to get people to work cheap. Once everybody gets hungry enough, we’ll all take pay cuts just to go back to work. They’re talking about ‘cost effectiveness’ and ‘competitive wages’ and like that.”

The author surmises:

“There was an inescapable logic to what he was saying, almost like an algebraic equation: Hungry people work cheap; people who work cheap go hungry.”

The author gets by by purchasing a milk cow. He trades the raw milk for eggs and a little cash from the neighbors and they keep each other fed for a while. He notes that everything they did was illegal– they sold raw milk without permits, drove their cars without insurance, didn’t report odd job income, ate poached venison.

“When the unemployment checks ran out, our little towns started to empty.” Eventually, too many neighbors moved off to Texas or some other place to justify the feed cost and Robert had to sell the cow.

“By the fall of 1985, there weren’t enough of my friends still living in the valley to cover the cost of feeding my cow. I sold her and her calf at auction and waited for the trickle-down.
It was a long time coming, that trickle-down. Ten years later and we’re still waiting for it. The mills and businesses and government agencies recovered, but the recovery never arrived for the people who live here. For the first time in our country’s boom-or-bust economic history, business boomed while people stayed busted.”

Something spectacularly odd had happened to the timber town by 1985. In defiance of economic sense, the businesses churned back to life but the lives of the people left to work the mill towns were never the same.

“It was an odd sort of recovery. Employment rates, timber harvest levels, and emergency food use rose. The cost of cutting, hauling, and milling a million board feet of timber dropped and so did the wages and per capita income. Timber harvest levels of Douglas County were 400 million board feet higher in 1986 than in 1978 but produced $55 million less in wages. While the timber industry has become “leaner, more productive and cost-effective,” the people have simply become leaner.”

“I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.””

As Trump advertised during the campaign, his administration has moved to gain direct oversight over academic institutions across the country. The latest university to receive one of Trump’s letters: Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Download the letter here: DOWNLOAD

The letter demands that Harvard directly report to the Federal Government on all matters from hiring to curriculum content.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a nebulous collection of words at this point, is to be banned. It doesn’t make sense for an academic institution to ban the study of anything, really. A university dedicated to the discovering truths and exploring the universe should be free to facilitate the study of whatever its student body dedicates itself to. By having a say in hiring staff and student acceptance, the federal government will have an incredible sway in the ideological, political, and racial make up of these institutions.

“By August 2025, the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or
anti-Semitism.”

The Federal Government under Trump is also seeking leverage to censor criticism of Israel and to report the activity of students to the government. Already, we are seeing a drastically reduction in the amount of international students attending our colleges. This is a serious brain drain that undermines the free flow of ideas throughout the entire country. Especially when other countries, namely China, appear to be surpassing us in various fields of science and engineering, it seems it would be in our best interest to embrace our neighbors across the globe and try to learn from one another. Sharing knowledge between one another leads to incredible discoveries.

“By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse. This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate.”

The Federal Government also requests that an external party satisfactory to the president directly monitor the institution for “viewpoint diversity.” What does this even really mean? What diverse viewpoints are being stifled? Given the apartheid sympathies of Trump’s staff, he probably means Nazi viewpoints. Or anti-palestinian viewpoints. Are antisemites underrepresented at Harvard? Maybe there aren’t enough confederate sympathizers in Boston? Also, shouldn’t the viewpoints at a university be measured by their merit? Is this not Harvard University we are talking about?!!

“Harvard must implement a comprehensive mask ban with serious and immediate penalties for violation, not less than suspension.”

Feds want Harvard to attacs the right of individuals to wear face covering not three years after a deadly pandemic wiped out millions of people. The federal government wants harsh penalties on masking to prevent protestors for hiding their identities from photographs for ID purposes (which can be systematically scanned and categorized with AI). The voracious appetite to identify and store information about protesters in order to punish them draws to mind a kind of Neo Nixonianism– a paranoid government apparatus using modern recording technology to keep vast lists of agitators and ideological enemies to persecute. The letter also demands that students that partook in the Palestine protests following October 7th be retroactively punished:

“Harvard must investigate and carry out meaningful discipline for all violations that occurred during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, including the Harvard Business School protest of October 2023, the University Hall sit- in of November 2023, and the spring encampment of 2024. This must include permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student, and suspending students involved in occupying university buildings, as warranted by the facts of individual cases.”

Indeed, the thrust of Trump’s new surveillance apparatus is being tested on college students with visas as we speak. Social media accounts are being scanned and databases being compiled of students with any ties to Palestine or related movements. More than 80 students in New England alone have had visas revoked for no other reason than expressing the incorrect opinion online.

“SHALOM MOUHMAD” — A giddy white house social media staffer after declaring that Mahmoud Khalil had been detained and moved to Louisiana for protesting for Palestine on Colombia University campus. He was a student of Colombia University at the time.

In his official statement accompanying the arrest, Trump declared, “if you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.” This is a really strange way to to word this. “Contrary to our national and and foreign policy interests…” Not that slaughter of innocents is wrong? Or deeply un-American? Not that it undermines freedom and right to pursue happiness? Since when have people been subject to arrest for speaking against a policy interest? The federal government doesn’t exist to enact policy interests. It exists to uphold the unalienable RIGHTS of its citizens. Citizens in the USA have a right to think freely, to assemble and protest, and especially to express grievance with the government itself.

“Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead.”

Trump’s government first and foremost seeks to limit the definition of constitutionally protected citizenship so that it can treat larger swathes of the population as non-citizens. More broadly, this move to limit civil rights protections only to citizens allows a second class to form where non-citizens in the country are not treated the same under the law. Alongside Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, this allows the federal government to create a permanent class of non-citizens living within the country for perpetuity, as even the kids of immigrants will be denied the chance to become constitutionally protected citizens. On the global scale, it also implies that the rights imparted by the constitution are narrowly applied only to Americans of citizen status, and not applied broadly to humanity across the globe. Trump’s America is already taking steps to walk away from its obligations to uphold freedom and learning across the globe. In its place: conquest and colonization enters a new phase with psuedo-democracies like Russia and Israel using war as a means to expand territory while expelling/genociding existing inhabitants.

This is all quite a lot for a university to shoulder. If Harvard refuses Trump’s demands, they risk having billions of dollars in federal funding revoked. The highest level research in the country will be choked of funding.

And yet, today Harvard has decided to decline.

I learned today that two of my roommates have never really listened to Pixies. I then learned that one of them went to a Weezer show that Pixies opened for.

Pixies are an alternative rock band from the 80s and 90s. They are a band from Boston, getting their start in basement shows back when the city was affordable and hip and young.

Yep, that’s right. Pixies, the foundational band that inspired Weezer and Nirvana and the like, was born right here in Boston.

Wave of Mutilation is a song off their second album Doolittle (album cover with a little monkey on it). The song is about dying. My roommate that doesn’t really know the Pixies but still saw them live says he likes this song, but the “surf” version. Gave it a listen today while showering. Then I listened to the original and switched back and forth a bunch.

Boston isn’t the same city it was a couple decades ago. It has gotten hotter, more expensive. It isn’t easy for musically inclined bums to make a living here. I don’t know if it ever was easy, actually, but there are certainly less of them now. But people are still making loud music. You have to know where to look, but they are there.

Damn, drove my car into the ocean.

A graduate student at Tufts University was arrested yesterday by a plainclothes federal agent. The agent, dressed in a hoodie, approached her, ripped her phone out of her hand, then handcuffed her. She was taken from Massachusetts to Louisiana, where it is believed that the courts will rule in favor of the federal government. She co-wrote an opinion piece in the school paper

Department of Homeland Security argues that her activities conflict with the foreign policy interests of the United States.

The first amendment of the constitution reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

What are they going to do with her phone?

Mickey 17, the latest Boon Joon Ho film since Parasite (2019), opens unpleasantly enough. Viewers are immediately introduced to Robert Pattinson as Mickey being killed over and over again. He is an “expendable” on a space colony ship, which means that he is responsible for doing all the extremely dangerous jobs like exterior ship repair and… freezing to death in test chambers. Many of these jobs result in death. Thankfully for us, every time Mickey dies, he is unceremoniously reprinted from a machine that works more like a traditional laser printer than a hi-tech biological miracle. The human printing machine jams and stalls and unceremoniously plops the reborn Mickey onto the floor when the scientists responsible for printing him inevitably forget to pull out the tray. After birth, Mickey’s memories are reuploaded to his brain from a literal brick hard drive, and then he is put back to work.

When I say that the start of this movie is unpleasant, I mean it. Between the awful panorama of deaths and the grotesque human printing process, I admit I was squirming a bit in my seat and wondering if I had made a mistake choosing this film blind. But stick with the movie, because it manages to transition from horrific to sexy pretty quickly. Naomi Ackie’s character (Nasha) is introduced, and the two leads immediately begin a sex sequence overlayed by a galactic Trump speech. It’s hilarious, weirdly sensual, and a perfectly timed break from the drudgery of the film’s opening. We learn that Mickey and Nasha are going steady on the ship, making sweet love every chance they get and supporting one another through all the bullshit that the voyage throws at them. Maybe it is a little too sweet, maybe its even corny, but giving Mickey a sickly sweet romantic motivation is the glue that keeps this movie from being depressing.

While the film starts as a madcap space comedy, its depth as a work of science fiction begins to bear some teeth as the colonists reach their destination on a distant frozen planet. They send out Mickey to test the air, and he immediately contracts a pathogen that has him puking blood and dead in minutes. They send him out again to make sure. Then they use the results from these tests to concoct a vaccine. Then that vaccine fails so they send him out again. And again. Eventually, they get it right and the colonists are able to explore the surface of their new world without masks. Also there are aliens on the planet that look a lot like the spitters from Factorio. I don’t think this is a coincidence at all.

The implications of the human printing technology are delved into further when Mickey 17, who was supposed to be eaten by aliens, manages to actually survive and return to the ship. There, he discovers that another Mickey has already been printed. They immediately try to kill each other. An insane fight sequence that pins Robert Pattinson against himself unfolds, and one of them is nearly incinerated in the ship’s biological recycling system. This fight is really beautiful, two identical bodies fighting in the bowls of a ship, illuminated crimson by gaping pits of boiling hot lava. One Mickey pins the other, another goes for a death blow to the head. Finally, one of them ends up hanging for dear life in one of the pits. It’s like Star Wars Episode V redone, when Luke and Vader go at it in the Cloud City underbelly. Also, Robert Pattinson gets kind of scary and reminds me of Jim Carry’s The Mask.

It is during this fight that I lost track of which Mickey was which. 17 and 18 supposedly have distinct personalities, but I believe they get swapped at this point. Biologically, they are identical. Mentally, they are distinct in some ways, but they possess the same memories and motivations. The movie goes on to explore this double situation further, but I won’t give up all the juicy details. Two primary concerns emerge: there are multiple Mickeys, which is illegal in this universe, and the planet has other life on it that the colonists now have to contend with.

You’ll notice this right away in your own watch, but this movie is very political. Like, in an immediately relevant way. The leader of the space mission is played by Mark Ruffalo doing a hand over fist Trump impression the entire time. He espouses a doctrine of “Two Bodies, One Soul” that dictates that despite technological advancements that allow for an infinite number of copies of people to be created, humans only have one soul and therefor should only have one body at a time. The distinction is arbitrary of course. I wonder if any of the dogmas of our own time are arbitrary religious contrivances meant to hold back the chaos of rapid advancement? With science we can already manipulate embryos, change genders, and clone organisms. Many governments around the world forbid these practices out of fear of changing humanity. We can communicate instantly across the globe and associate with people in multiple continents at the same time, yet borders and countries still exist. Technology is not inherently liberating.

These questions form the basis of cyberpunk films like Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, which depict high tech societies that nonetheless suffer the same issues of systemic poverty and class inequality that our current world suffers. Mickey 17 takes on this tradition in its own way by revealing a world that is impoverished even in the face of miracles of science. The human printing machine is really an immortality machine, yet is is only used to reproduce drone humans born to die over and over again. The very fact that the human printer can bypass natural birthing is a major driver of its relegation to colonial work in the universe of the film. Mark Ruffalo’s Trump is obsessed with the idea of building a natalist colony that reproduces with natural sex.

The other concern of the ladder half of the film is the issue of colonization itself. The planet that the crew arrives on is, of course, loaded with natives. These natives aren’t animals despite their appearance. They are intelligent and can even be communicated with. The fact that the movie is able to contrive a translation device in minutes isn’t even very far fetched anymore– with AI, the obstacle of translation has shrunk considerably. Despite all of this, Ruffalo Trump is eager to escalate to annihilation. The crew prepares a toxic gas to eliminate the natives. Trump’s wife also circumcises the tails of one of the alien babies and eats it? I’m going to leave the inferences to you guys.

The climactic end of the film comes on fast with these two dilemmas at the fore: alien natives about to be exterminated, two illegal Mickeys about to be executed. I won’t spoil further. Things wrap up neatly enough, but the political questions at the heart of the film remain even after the credits role. In Joon Ho fashion, the ending is Hollywood in the least fulfilling way possible. The Korean guy is making fun of us again!