Harry the Human

Friday, June 20, 2025

We need a new force with a shared vision

Because I felt the urgency of the situation, this essay is also posted on my other blog, Lasken's Log @ https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/). D.L.

Don't be afraid to sound like a character in a science fiction story - that's what you are. In this story, a New York shyster has taken the presidency and is undermining the whole country: rural areas, national parks, cities - in my case Los Angeles - attacking schools, social structures, economies and self-esteem, and doing the same to the rest of the world. If you're a science fiction fan, you know what's next (especially after Trump bombed Iran): Wars of the World, disguised to look like expressions of history and destiny, but in fact intended to distract attention from the real unfolding history: transition away from homo sapiens to an AI powered genetically engineered semi-human race.

You can be proud of your conspiracy theory, because it's right. Trump, at the moment, is the outward force of it, paving the way for acolytes to make fortunes beyond Midas' dreams, and dust for the rest. We need a political force to combat this, but it doesn't seem forthcoming from conventional sources. California governor Newsom, for instance, though a decent person, does not know what he's up against, and four years is all it will take to wreck the place.

I have a vision I would like to make real through this hypothetical force (and I'm open to suggestions): Let's make sure we're not just replacing our species with another species, that we might also be forming cultures in which the previous human model, i.e. us, or models as close to us as possible - or at least recognizably human - will live in harmony and cooperation with the new synthetic, corporately controlled humanoids, while we retain our human memories and identities, and separateness if desired. And that we do this, as much as possible, without blowing ourselves up.

This future isn't in the cards now because that's not where the money is. The money is in sucking out every bit of sustenance left in the earth and blowing us up in the process. If we don't have a vision and a force with alternatives to this, we face multiple levels of extinction.

Friday, June 6, 2025

We're all less secure

The rift between Musk and Trump is fun to watch because it seems unrehearsed, real, but the force of the rift should make us wary. If it is real, it will work to destabilize Trump's other relationships, the extended government and connected world. The world is already unstable, of course, but at least the manipulation of war and peace has been conducted through relatively stable relationships. If our dictators start fighting each other, there will be that much more chaos.

This may not be the worst of it for Trump. Though he has much experience fighting as an underdog, he’s brand new at being the world's most powerful man. His enemies now are more likely to be among the smiling faces around him. With fewer people he can trust, he will tire and be prone to mistakes, like a public battle with Musk.

At this moment, however, in spite of fluctuations, Trump's power appears absolute. Conversely, the regular person's power has evaporated. From poverty to middle and upper middle class, and even (believe it or not) certain realms of the 1%, no one has the power they want: over war and peace, the domestic economy, cultural direction, education...anything. Our only capabilities are in our personal spheres: We do what we can at work which, for most people, only concerns immediate surroundings, come home, watch the news and maybe express an opinion about a local or world matter — an act with little impact or influence on world direction. The previous model, in which we shared some societal power through voting, is gone in a dramatic fashion.

What to do about it? We need a new political entity, something that can fight back, to replace the moribund Democratic and Republican parties. This new entity's view of things might be that the traditional parties have worked covertly with corporate and military interests to manipulate America into the situation we are in now, the hot spots of the world having been tended like gardens. With the citizenry in a political vacuum, nothing left-over from the pre-existing system will help. We need something new, with newly formulated ideas about AI, bioengineering and the wars we're being handed.

No such entity could emerge without financial backing, so investors who find themselves outside the tight group now running the show might step forward with funds and ideas. People from any background who can contribute something should inform and make up this new force, including at least one retired English teacher.

Minus an effort to exert additional or alternative influences on evolving world directions, get ready to enter an apocalyptic period with no political representation.

Doug Lasken

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Spirits

Yes, a spirit told me to take the previous post down, because it was unforgiving, hopeless, used ugly words like "corporatocracy" and "regional." I think it was my mother's spirit whispering that the post disturbed her. Should I just come out and say: "I believe in spirits?" No, I don't believe in spirits, I just pretend I do so that in a hidden chamber of my mind, where believing in spirits is vital, I can believe that I believe I heard my mom's spirit, telling me the post was focussed on a blur that no one will understand because no one will want to understand, and I should try again because it will work out, it will become good. She did tell me something like that, on the phone, two weeks before she died, two weeks since I had last visited her, when she said, "It's ok when you die. It really is." She didn't tell me why it's ok, or how she knew. And I didn't ask. Why didn't I ask her those questions or a million others? But what else could she have meant than, "You have a spirit, and when you die (even if an atom bomb lands directly on your head and your atoms are spread so far and wide they don't know they're atoms) your spirit is released, intact, with a karma that determines its circumstances, paradisical or otherwise, and you continue, and I will see you again." Is it possible to believe something without having any idea if it's true? Especially lately as humanity’s historic cycle from constructive peace to insane slaughter begins decisively to enter an insane slaughter phase, it’s nice at times to believe something pleasant, whether or not it solves anything. I took the post down because it pretended to have any idea what to do about what War called "Slippin' into Darkness," no concrete bit of advice, like, "Breathe from the stomach," nothing, so should I stop writing essays that don't offer feasible solutions (other than forming a "Foundation" which would be composed of super-cool people who pronounce judgement on everyone else)? Then what should I write? My mom says not to quote her now, to use my own words. Ok, I'll just briefly withdraw back to the "real world," if we can call it that, where it's clear that some awful event is approaching that will, in its international awfulness, be the key to unlock the accumulated fury that the corporatocracy has been stockpiling for years, a key like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, or the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, constructed to detonate carefully calibrated explosions unleashing chain reactions of violence (sorry mom, I'm almost done) which, this time, will serve as smoke screens to hide the installation of new versions of the human race, versions to which not everyone will belong, and which everyone will definitely not own. But, although no one- not the most powerful shaman or wizard- can stop this sci-fi horror story from happening in our reality, there is, I choose to believe, a spirit world. What exactly am I trying to say...that we will be saved from the darkness by spirits, my mom's and other helpful ones? I wouldn't put it like that...how about this: We will be given hints, people will be connected, you will be plugged in to a meditative world that is not at war with itself, and you will find solace.

D.L.

Friday, April 18, 2025

Las Vegas getaway!

Friday, 4/18/25

Dear Readers,

My wife and I are in Las Vegas after a four hour drive from L.A. through the Mojave desert. I'm on my laptop on the 9th floor of the Luxor Hotel. My wife is conducting an online class across the room. I just got back from a long walk through the Luxor casino into the Mandalay Bay casino and retail area. I also wanted to walk outside for the cool desert evening, but this place is not designed for walking outside, which is a wasteland of construction and busy streets without sidewalks. I must say, though, that I adore the large copies of ancient Egyptian sculptures decorating the Luxor lobby (highlighting, appropriately, a man with a jackal’s head, Anubis, god of the underworld). The faux antiquities lacked the power to override my aversion to gambling, but they were able to make me want to stay here, I mused at our arrival, as we drove once around the entryway, flanked by imposing columns, a huge Sphinx (a lion with a man’s head, representing the sun-god Ra and a deified pharaoh), and a pyramidal hotel, before seeking the massive airport sized parking lot. What a sucker I am for falling for this commercialized extinct religion! On the other hand, the copied idols offer good focal points, especially this Passover week, for meditation on God's immediate purpose in launching the 10 plagues. Each of the plagues was designed to destroy a specific Egyptian god, including Anubis and Ra. The best known plague, the killing of the firstborn, was intended ultimately to kill the pharaoh, through Ra, and yet here they are, the Egyptian gods (including the pharaoh!), back again in Las Vegas!

Update, Saturday, 4/19/25, 8:00 AM: The casino/resorts of Las Vegas are hermetically sealed from the surrounding desert, to maximize gambling revenue, and I long to escape to Red Rock Canyon, 15 miles west, where the Southern Paiute and many earlier native American tribes hunted and sat around fires over the last 10,000 years. What would be their reaction if they suddenly had a vision of modern Las Vegas? Certainly shock and incomprehension, the same reaction we would have if we viewed our culture a hundred years from now. The desert was not planned into our current trip, though. This is an exploration of the city. Today we see a show at the new Sphere, advertised as "immersive," as Red Rock would have been. I expect to enjoy the show, in spite of my whining about the desert (I did).

As far as gambling, I have an impulse to play blackjack, even if only for the thrill of coming up against an insurmountable force, the dealer, and I have an idea about funds I might designate for this. I earned an extra $50 last week from the Los Angeles Unified School District and feel guilty about what I had to do to earn it. The district notified me that my certification would expire if I did not take an online course called "Challenging Whiteness." This course informed me that, although individual white people might be acceptable if they speak the mandated words, "whiteness," as a generic catch-all term, suggests, in some overriding sense, a morally deficient group. Racial pride is a plus, but a doctrine of racial moral superiority has been at the foundation of all racist and fascist ideology. This Woke party line, which has so far escaped Trump's raging eraser, is doing exactly nothing to help children in the district learn to read. In fact the opposite is happening, to all races of students. The current pedagogy is to play recorded narrations of assigned books by sophisticated companies like Schoology so that students can sit in class and listen to books read to them, as they passively gaze at the text in their hands. Very few teachers now require students to read on their own, and the results are predictable: American young people's reading skills are plummeting. Our culture is perhaps moving away from expecting people to read, beyond simple sentences on websites and machines. Back to Vegas, my idea is to feed the ill-got 50 bucks to the implacable Egyptian gods of the blackjack dealer, in a penance of sorts for my compliance with the wasted money and efforts of our school district (I ultimately dropped the idea).

To review: Las Vegas is worth visiting once in a while because it's in the middle of a beautiful desert, and it's very strange.

D.L.

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

New blog: AI conversations

Dear Readers, check out my new blog where I explore the inner workings of Google's AI, Gemini: "AI conversations" (https://smartypantsgemini.blogspot.com/). We discuss sex, politics and consciousness. D.L.

Thursday, April 3, 2025

Will the real emperor please stand

By the late 18th century, people at all levels of British society, from the very wealthy to the destitute, were addicted to tea, imported from China mostly by the Portuguese. The British wanted to know more about China, this distant, indirect trading partner to whose product they were addicted. The Chinese seemed to be calling the shots in trade deals, demanding payment in silver, running a large trade imbalance and forbidding traders from leaving highly restricted areas of China or learning Chinese. The British wanted to negotiate at least as equals, so in 1793 King George III sent a colonial administrator, George Macartney, on Britain's first diplomatic mission to the ruler of China, the Qianlong Emperor. As a gift to commemorate the emperor's birthday, Macartney attempted to give him a gold box studded with diamonds, but before he could do this, to his shock, Macartney was ordered to kowtow (literally: "bang the head") before the emperor, an act in which "supplicants," as representatives of trading nations were termed, had to kneel and bow down until their foreheads touched the floor, an obvious expression of subservience. This was considered appropriate even for another ruler's delegate because the emperor was the "Son of Heaven," the representative of the divine on earth, so all other monarchs and leaders on Earth were subordinate to him. Macartney refused to kowtow because he believed that George III, though by then a "constitutional monarch" who shared power with Parliament, was certainly an equal ruler to any. The emperor took the gold box and tossed it aside as one would a cheap bauble. The mission was a failure, and 50 years later the British invaded China in the Opium Wars, forcing China to accept imports of opium and widespread addiction to it. It's basically a history of rival drug gangs.

The obsession with trade balances and the question of who is supplicating whom is reminiscent of today, as President Trump imposed a 34% tariff on China affecting U.S. imports of Chinese produced hi-tech, pharmaceuticals, auto parts and other addictive elements of modern culture. Chinese president Xi responded with a 34% tariff affecting imports of U.S. agricultural goods and restricting export to the U.S. of rare earth minerals essential in producing highly addictive electronics. Trump responded with an additional 34% tariff, China did the same and the struggle has escalated so that now each country has levied over 140% in tariffs on the other.

Financial chaos is the immediate result, though the struggle is not only about money; it also involves people's sensitive national identities, represented by the egos of leaders. Who is emperor over whom? Should Trump grovel and say, "Oh great Emperor Xi, Americans need you more than you need them! Please have mercy on us!" Or should Xi bang his head and cry, "Exalted Emperor Trump, the Chinese people need your creative spirit more than you need our cheap copies of things you invented!"

Ironically, if this manufactured trade war becomes real and helps spark World War III, the ultimate cause will be neither egos nor money (at least not money lost and gained in the stock market). The war will be a realized goal of a quickly evolving international intrigue. While most people try to stay alive, intrigue participants, salivating at the prospect of new monopolies to divvy up, will use the smoke screen of chaos to assemble techno-societies from which displaced, old-order humans will be excluded- reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's visionary 1932 novel, Brave New World, in which cloned humans live in the cities, while old-style humans, called "savages," are confined to desert camps. The most obscene word in the language is "mother".

Who cares which man is the real emperor when both cultures are about to be replaced by bio-engineered, AI managed humanoids?

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Gregory's Army of the Young

Check out my friend Gregory's blog, and get behind the revolution: http://www.gregorysarmyoftheyoung.com/

Best, Harry