Article from Wikipedia about the Infamous “Clear Channel memorandum”.

This was sent to Clear Channel stations shortly after the September 11 attacks, and it suggested songs that were not appropriate to play on the air. Read through the whole list. It’s funny as fuck, and terribly sad at the same time.

Two of the most inspiring songs of all time, Imagine by John Lennon and Get Together by the Youngbloods were on the no-play list. I want both these to be played at my memorial service.

“Everybody get together, try to love one another” wasn’t a message our corporate overlords wanted us to hear right then. It usually isn’t, unless they can turn some profit from it. After all, the 34th of the Ferengi rules of acquisition says that “war is good for business”, and the 35th says that “peace is good for business.”

Of course with George Bush II’s sycophants trying to spark off another Holy Crusade, “imagine no religion” would be off the table. Same with “brotherhood of man” and “imagine there’s no country”, and “the world shall be as one”; such incendiary lyrics! Let’s not even get started about “imagine no possessions”, while Georgie was telling everyone to go shopping.

Day after Christmas, known as Boxing Day to folks in the British Commonwealth, I called my cardiologist’s office to report some issues I’d had during the previous week.

1. After riding a stationary bike for 20-30 minutes last Saturday the 21st, I started feeling like I was going to have a heart attack.
2. That I am perpetually fatigued. Simple things like doing the dishes, cooking, and carrying in a couple bags of groceries are leaving me exhausted.

So the receptionist dutifully notes down my issues. “We’ll have our triage person get back to you.” An hour or so later, I get a call from someone in scheduling. “Your doctor says you need to go to the hospital.” Of course, I’m thinking this is complete and utter bullshit, because that day I was feeling just fine. Same for the day before. But we (GF and I) talked ourselves into going to the ER anyway.

They ran a bunch of tests on me. “Your heartrate is normal. Blood pressure is worryingly low.” I didn’t think to mention that I’d popped some xanax before heading to the ER; that might have explained the low BP. I did a bunch of sleeping. At some point, my girlfriend wakes me up. “They want to hold you for observation and do a bunch of tests on you, including a CT scan on your brain.” And I’m like what the actual fuck? Brain? Whut?

The reasoning is that maybe my low blood pressure was due to a brain tumor. Maybe it is, but realize, I have a heart condition that is basically terminal. The last thing I care about is whether I have a brain tumor to go along with it. Metaphorically, suppose I was eating a slice of birthday cake made from rat faeces laden with hanta virus. Am I actually going to give a shit that the chef used some plutonium in the icing? Nope.

I’m a huge believer in science, though I think the obsession with medical testing is harmful to science. Hell, this is pretty much true of all data. We’ve got data. We have so much data that it’s coming out of our ears and assholes. What we don’t have enough of is logic, intuition, and critical thinking.

Worth mentioning that while I was in the ER, I got myself a referral to hospice, so I’m on hospice now. Hopefully I can live out the next months, years, weeks, days, or whatever I have left in some degree of comfort without playing this revolving door hospital game.

One skill I’ve developed over the years is slacker food prep. Because who wants to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, am I right? Sometimes you can get something really filling and flavorful with minimal prep time and few ingredients. It’s an added bonus when those ingredients are cheap.

Recently, I discovered the life-changing magic of textured vegetable protein A.K.A. TVP. It’s cheap, easy to store, and easy to prepare. So I had this thought the other night. Can I find some dried vegetables online and make a filling and delicious soup from them with TVP for protein? To answer that question, I went online and bought me a 2 pound (smidge under a kilogram) bag of dried vegetables. These were sold as “dehydrated vegetable flakes for making ramen or simple vegetable soup”.The mix I bought contains the following:

• dehydrated sweet potatoes
• dehydrated butternut squash
• dehydrated carrots
• dehydrated cabbage

And yeah, turns out that I can make a quick and tasty soup out of these and TVP. Can you boil water? Can you throw shit in a bowl? Then you can make this soup, and you can customize it to taste.

• Re-hydrate TVP per package directions. Probably “pour one cup of boiling water over one cup of granulated TVP”. That ratio seems to be universal. I used one cup of TVP for this initial batch. Put it aside and let it sit a while.
• Boil more water. The directions on my bag of soup veggies claim six cups of water to one cup of veggies. I suspect that either the OCR program on my phone is high on meth or the manufacturer’s directions are incorrect. Either way, this comes out fine for soup. So I boiled nine cups of water since I was going to use one and one half cup of dried veggies.
• For flavor, add bouillon to the boiled water. I use Herb Ox vegetable bouillon (I’ve used that brand for years). Despite the name, there’s no ox in it (thank $deity), and the ingredient list says it’s vegan. Add bouillon to taste and let it dissolve.
• Add dried veggies, and let sit for 15 minutes or so.
• Add TVP and stir.
• Season to taste. I threw a bunch of chili powder in mine because I really like chili powder. I thought about adding some other seasonings, but I was hungry and lazy.
• Stir once more and serve.

This made quite a bit of food. I had a large bowl this morning, and so did my girlfriend. I had another large bowl this afternoon. There is still some left in the container, but it’s mostly broth.

It would go very well over some brown rice, but I didn’t have any made. It’s quite filling on its own, however. And hey, not having any grain is better for my blood sugar. I’ll probably be playing around with other thickening agents. E.G., I have some ground flax seed that I’ve used for similar purposes. Or maybe masa flour (like I used to use sometimes in chili) would be good. Anyway I think I have a strong base for some quick and tasty food.

I thoroughly expect this post to get many people’s knickers in a twist. You know what? I don’t care. I may or may not have too many years to live. Do you think I am afraid of being cancelled? I’ve been an outsider all my life. I’ve been in emergency rooms with people telling me that I nearly died. That’s, like, the ultimate cancellation right there. Grim Reaper may cancel me tomorrow, forever. So read on and cancel me if you want, or agree with me. I don’t give a shit, because I live in the US and it’s a free country.

Here’s the backstory. I got permabanned for hate speech in r/politics on reddit.

I’m going to put on my prophet’s hat for a moment.

I think that if everything does not fall apart before 2028, we will have elections. But I also think there’s a pretty good chance that things will fall apart. That cold civil war we’ve been fighting since April 14 of 1865 might very well turn hot before 2028.

I’ve been reading Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor. Essentially this is a memoir of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

Thus far, I’ve had a few take-aways.

It is easy, and I mean super fucking easy, for one’s humanity to be stripped away. I generally have an optimistic view of human nature. But take a person and put them in hellish conditions, and oftentimes you will see the bestial aspects of human nature appear in short order. It’s not that humans are evil. We’re fragile.

Do read Ngor’s book, because he makes this whole human fragility point well and clearly. For that matter, I’ve read some memoirs of World War II concentration camp survivors and they make the same point. Anyway reading Ngor has me really rattled right now. So much so that I’m barely coherent.

Another take-away from Ngor is just how fucking quickly a place can turn from relatively normal to hell on earth. I say relatively because pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia had its share of problems, including a military dictatorship under General Lon Nol, following a coup against Prince Sihanouk. Oh, and it was also getting bombed by the USA during the Vietnam War. But compared to the hell instigated by the Khmer Rouge, it must’ve been paradise.

I can hope that if we do have a civil war here in the US, it won’t be anything like what happened in the Cambodian killing fields.

After all, there is an aspect of Cambodian culture that directly contributed to the situation. Here’s Ngor:

All that beauty and serenity was visible to the eye. But inside, hidden from sight the entire time, was kum. Kum is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge – to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury. If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is kum. Or if a government official steals a peasant’s chickens and the peasant uses it as an excuse to attack a government garrison, like the one in my village, that is kum. Cambodians know all about kum. It is the infection that grows on our national soul.

And here’s Ngor again, many pages later, telling us about the “Communism” of the Khmer Rouge:

I said, ‘But you make a mistake if you think the communists control their own revolution. Look at all the confusion when everybody had to leave Phnom Penh. All the unnecessary suffering, like the patients having to leave the hospitals. That costs the Khmer Rouge popular support. So does the lying. I tell you, the people at the top of the Khmer Rouge, like Khieu Samphan, are highly educated, but the people under them cannot even read and write. They don’t know where their revolution is going. They don’t even know they are communists.’

‘Of course they do.’

‘No they don’t,’ I said flatly. ‘When have you ever heard them mention the word “communist”?’

‘That’s true,’ said the paediatrician after a moment’s thought. ‘But then what are they?’

‘ Kum-monuss ,’ I said, and they all laughed. It was a play on words: kum, a long-standing grudge that finally explodes in disproportionate revenge, and monuss, meaning people. ‘That’s what they are at the lower level,’ I said, ‘ “revenge-people.” ’ All they know is that city people like us used to lord it over them and this is their chance to get back. That’s what they are, communist at the top and kum-monuss at the bottom.’

I have the impression that the inequality in pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia was at levels that my readers and I could barely fathom. Here’s Ngor once more:

The purpose of our outing was to gather wild foods. In Cambodia we have a humorous saying about food: ‘Eat anything with two legs except a ladder, anything with four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an airplane.’ The point is that when you live off the land you cannot be particular. The Cambodian peasants, who are geniuses at living off the land, sometimes eat termites for protein, though there are many other foods they prefer. Until the rains came – the rains arrived later in Battambang than in eastern Cambodia – there were no termites above ground anyway.

The mention of peasants who were geniuses at living off the land is, of course, a reference to the living situation of pre-Khmer Rouge peasants. At this point, Ngor – who was relatively well-off before 1975 – has been forced to adopt some of the survival strategies of those pre-Khmer Rouge peasants.

The USA isn’t Cambodia. But I’m sure we could make our very own hell.

I posted this to the Fediverse way back in late 2023. It was almost lost, because I switched Fediverse accounts. But thanks to the life-changing magic of archived PostgreSQL dumps, I found it. I’m putting it here for the sake of permanence.

I was capturing traffic being sent to my Raspberry Pi today, attempting to debug a SIP problem. And I noticed a really weird packet from someone’s Google Home Max on my network:

IPv4 source address: 10.4.20.172
IPV4 destination address: 255.255.255.255
UDP source port: 9487
UDP destination port: 9478
Data bytes as hex: 34373666366636373663363534653530343535663435373236393633356635373631373936653635
Data bytes as ASCII: 476f6f676c654e50455f457269635f5761796e65

So this is a packet containing a 40-byte payload, and the 40 bytes just happen to be ASCII hex digits. That string of hex digits looks suspiciously like even more text encoded in hex, and it is. The original string was: GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne.

Every minute or so, this device sends out a broadcast packet to UDP port 9478, containing the rather enigmatic string GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne encoded in hex.

That begs some questions. What the fuck is a Google NPE, and who the fuck is Eric Wayne?

For clarification, the line labeled “data bytes as hex” is the 40 byte raw payload of the packet, represented unambiguously as 80 hex digits. Then that 40 byte raw payload is a string of ASCII hex digits that decodes to GoogleNPE_Eric_Wayne.

After I made that original post, a friend speculated that perhaps NPE stood for “null pointer exception”, I.E., from Java. That theory holds a lot of water, because Google writes a lot of Java. But what does it have to do with Eric Wayne? Is Eric so bloody incompetent that his code is always throwing null pointer exceptions, so everyone calls him NPE Eric Wayne? I hope not! Is some component of the Google Home Max crashing every minute with a null pointer exception, and Eric is the guy who is expected to fix it? Maybe this is a debugging aid that got included in the published software by mistake. All I have is speculation for now.

I worked for Google in 2012 and 2013. I’ve never really written about my experience there and why I left. But I was inspired to do so by a conversation several days ago. The summary is that I could not, as a self-respecting Socialist, work for a place where the difference between haves and have-nots was so obvious.

It’s worth telling the backstory. The other day, I stumbled into a conversation on the Fediverse about someone who is fairly well-known in tech circles: Justine Tunney. The person who started the thread described her as “toxic”, and when asked to clarify, gave some examples, including this choice tidbit from her Wikipedia page:

In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.

That made me curious, so I went and did some digging. I turned up two articles about her involvement with Occupy Wall Street: this article from The Daily Beast and this article from The Nation.

Essentially, Tunney hijacked the Occupy twitter feed and tried to position herself as some kind of leader of the leaderless movement. She also dissed David Graeber, the now-deceased Anarchist intellectual and author, whom I deeply respect. Wow, this person sure does have one hell of an ego. The Daily Beast article also contained this tasty morsel:

Justine Tunney works for Google. Every day that she feels like it, Tunney goes to a playgroundlike office in Chelsea in Manhattan and eats her meals from the free gourmet rooftop cafeteria. She does her job and little else. On the beach in Puerto Rico this summer, at the wedding of two fellow Occupy veterans, she was working so hard on an algorithm designed to improve cloud computing that she lost track of time and got a sunburn.

“They basically bought my soul,” she says. But Tunney doesn’t seem to mind. “Google is the one company I don’t hate. I think Google is actually doing things that are making the world a better place.”

By now, I’m triggered. I used to work for Google! How does someone who wants to replace the elected government with a technocratic CEO and worships a behemoth with painfully sharp class distinctions manage to consider themself any kind of democratic socialist? That’s when I decided to write about my own experience in some depth.

Google has a very sharply delineated two-tier work force. There are the engineers and other highly intellectual sorts on top. I was in that group when I worked there, though I was on the low rungs of the ladder. Justine Tunney is certainly in this class and quite successful. At the bottom, there is everyone else: the people who make the wheels turn and serve the needs of the tech nobility. It reminded me of The Cloud Minders, an episode of the original Star Trek.

The perks of Google engineers are pretty widely known. There is the free food, all of the toys, massages, even laundry service. Aaron Swartz, another person I really respect, described the environment as infantilizing when he visited Google headquarters.

I love telling this story about the coffee machine. One day, I was working in my cubicle when my teammates mentioned that they were going over to the Android building to get coffee. They asked me if I wanted to come with, so I said “sure, why not.” “But what’s so special about the Android building, other than that the Android OS is developed there?” “It has a $15000 coffee machine!” I went, and I had a cup of coffee. And you know what? I honestly couldn’t tell you the difference between that cup of coffee and coffee that I have had from some convenience stores.

I like talking to people and hearing their stories. I’m a natural-born listener, and I probably would have excelled in psychology or the ministry, though I doubt there are many churches seeking a minister whose every third word is fuck and who is pervy. As for psychology, I am sure that no one wants a shrink who will tell them that life is indeed kind of pointless and at times terrible. Anyway, I met people from the servant class. I treated them with warmth and humanity (I hope), and I listened to them.

I remember one woman who worked in one of the cafeterias, preparing all of that free food that Google was famous for. She went to work early and left late, every day. There was no playground-like office for this woman, and in fact, most of her work was done on her feet. She was also paid substantially less than even the most junior of Google’s engineering staff. She always sounded very fatigued when I talked with her.

That’s when I realized it. I was working in a medieval hellhole, complete with nobles and serfs. The only thing that was missing was droit du seigneur, AKA jus primae noctis. That’s when I decided that I could not work there in good conscience as a self-respecting socialist.

This is from the spring of 2022, posted elsewhere and reposted here.

Last night, we went out for a meal to celebrate my girlfriend’s upcoming anniversary with her other partner. They wanted sushi, so we went to a local sushi place that had an all you can eat deal. They ordered the all-you-can-eat sushi, while I had vegetable tempura. Each of them ended up getting one more plate of food than they could eat.

As we were getting ready to pay, we were told that we weren’t allowed to take the leftovers home. We said that’s fine, but could they at least give them to someone? A needy person, one of the staff, whatever. The waitress responded with a no, followed by a very offended “You all know there’s a $12 excess waste charge? Don’t order more than you can eat.” My response was, “What are you going to do? Throw it away?” I followed up with a lovely poetic socialist tirade. How is it that there are empty bellies in a country where food is discarded? There are empty homes, yet people go homeless. We literally paid $12 to throw away food.

Somebody tell me this is peak capitalism and the madness will be over soon.

On the 7th of August, I had an appointment with one of my cardiologists. She told me that they wanted to do another procedure on me: a second cardiac ablation. This isn’t a cure. It’s a band-aid that can calm the ventricular tachycardia (VT), but they can’t make it go away permanently because of the extensive scarring of my heart. I asked her if she could estimate my life expectancy, and she gave me an answer: perhaps ten years at most. It wasn’t an answer I wanted, but it was an honest answer, and I appreciate her for not giving me any bullshit or blowing smoke up my ass. I went on to ask about end-of-life options. “Well, you can refuse treatment and we can deactivate your defibrillator.” I think in that scenario, I’d at least have palliative care. And to be honest, it sounded really attractive at the time. It still does, in its own sort of way. I was left pondering a deep existential question. Why should I go on living? Why should I risk a good deal of potential future suffering for a chance at a few more years of life? Realize that I’ve already been through a very traumatic heart-related episode. I was shocked some 17 times in an hour by the device inside me.

I’ve always wanted to try psilocybin, I.E., magic mushrooms. I put out a few queries to see if anyone might know of a source. No one did. However, taking mushrooms is legal here in Oregon, if done at a licensed establishment under the care of a facilitator. There just happens to be such an establishment in my city. I called them up. “It’ll be $1000 for a four hour trip with a dose of 18 to 25 mg of psilocybin.” This is way out of my price range, but a dear friend offered to foot the bill. I set up an appointment with the Salem Psilocybin Center. I told them that I had an upcoming surgery and that I’d like to take psilocybin prior to it. They were great. They found an open slot for me on Saturday the 24th of August, nearly a week before my scheduled surgery.

First of all, there is a lot of paperwork to sign: consent forms and the like. Realize that even though I might be the smartest motherfucker in the room, I am still blind, and therefore functionally illiterate. They use DocuSign. I was kind of hopeful, because I’ve been told that DocuSign’s accessibility has improved over the last few years. I tried unsuccessfully to sign all of the paperwork with multiple web browsers on desktop computers. Then I tried with the DocuSign app on two separate smartphones: my Android and my girlfriend’s iPhone. I had the most success with the smartphone app, but at the end of both attempts, I was told to either draw my signature on the screen or upload a photo of my signature. Neither option is particularly workable without help. Realize that I live with two other blind people, so I cannot get help from my immediate circle. They sent someone over to help me fill out all of the paperwork, and I’m glad of it.

One of the things I had to sign was a transportation plan. And in fact, the center offers the option of picking up a patient and returning them to their house! Wonderful! I won’t have to worry about how I’m going to get there. Someone came to fetch me on the morning of Saturday the 24th. I recall that one of the songs playing in his car was Truckin’ by The Grateful Dead. It’s a favorite. Then I hear the iconic lyric: “What a long … strange trip it’s been.” I cackled and observed that it was very apropos.

When I got to the center, I met my facilitator. I was taken to a room with some very comfy sofas. Another person from the center came in with the dried mushrooms in a little disposable cardboard bowl. There were either 7 or 9 of them. I don’t remember exactly how many. The other person and my facilitator watched as I consumed all of them. Apparently they need a second person to administer the dose, to make sure that there is no funny business. There was an almost ritualistic quality to the whole thing. I munched the mushrooms, which I found quite tasty. I’m a huge fan of culinary mushrooms, and these had a strong and earthy taste reminiscent of the mushrooms I love to consume for food. I remarked that when I was in college, I knew this woman named Alina who was a vegetarian, of Chinese descent, and who gave the best and most lyrical description of mushrooms that I have ever heard. She called them the meat of the Earth. I was also told the name of the mushroom strain I was taking: Shakti.

Once I had finished consuming the mushrooms, my facilitator helped me become better acquainted with the comfortable sofa. It was powered, with various settings! We found what was best for me: lying slightly reclined with a pillow for my head. I was also given a blanket. It was like being in a warm, cozy nest. The facilitator started some music playing. It was soothing and meditative. One might describe it as New-Agey kind of music.

I couldn’t keep track of time, but at some point close to the start of my trip, I began to feel some effects. I’d describe them as euphoric. I could hear every note of the music in slow motion. I felt as though the sofa was melting into me, or I was melting into it. The same held for the music. It was part of me, and I was part of it. I’ve had similar experiences in drum circles and at some Pagan rituals in which I participated.

Some time after this, the dreams began. I call them dreams, because I can’t think of a better term. I was dreaming wide awake. And I knew that I was in control as they played in my mind. I never lost touch with reality, not even once. I dreamed of people I had loved. I dreamed of places far away, of distant times and imaginary lands. People who know me know that I’m a fan of The Lord of the Rings. As I dreamed, I recalled a line from The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” I found this line incongruously hilarious and amazing, for reasons I know not. I dreamed that I was such a hobbit, living in my cozy little hole under a hill. I fondly recalled a father figure, someone who read The Hobbit to me when I was a small child of perhaps seven years. He used to call me his little hobbit and refer to my room as my hobbit hole. I had other dreams of possible futures and possible pasts, all pleasant, some of which are much too personal to put down in writing. This dream sequence played for most of the rest of my trip.

I took a bathroom break about an hour before my trip was supposed to end. This helped guide me back to the here and now. Over the next hour, the dreams slowly dissipated into consciousness of the world around me. At the end, I was left feeling better than I’ve ever felt, or at least, the best I’ve felt in a long, long time. I had an amazing period of mental clarity, lasting several hours. This was when I started to gain some insights into my own problems and circumstances.

I found the answer to the existential question that I had been pondering for the past couple of weeks, the same question that had given me some encouragement to start down the psychedelic path. Yes, I have a death sentence, and yes, I have some idea of how much time is left on my clock. I also have an amazing gift. I can choose to keep on playing the game, or I can choose to refuse treatment, thereby bringing the end of the game nigh. I have free will. I control the gameboard and the piece. Fuck it; I may as well keep playing. At least for now. One day at a time. I am also very fortunate to have so many people in my life who love and care deeply for me.

This was originally written shortly after the events in question, in July of 2023. It was theraputic to write, and it will be theraputic to publish. Be warned, there is some very raw anger here. The post scriptum is a followup written in August 2024.

I took 10 5 mg oxycodone tablets Saturday in a botched attempt to end my own life. It was an act of pure, unadulterated rage. The logic, if it can be called that, went something like this. I am hurting. I cannot hurt the system that is hurting me. So instead, I’ll deprive it of the opportunity to hurt me anymore. And perhaps I’ll also send a message. Obviously I failed. I spent Saturday afternoon in the ER. Sunday morning I puked for hours. I’ve spent good portions of the last couple days in bed, listening to Star Trek. I’ve also had dull generalized aches and pains. When I cough, my ribs hurt.

So how did I get here? I get a check every month from Social Security. It’s $1090, barely enough to live on, but I manage. This month, I only got $395.80. So I called Social Security on Thursday the 29th of June. “Apparently Medicare premiums were withheld from your check. We don’t know why.” So I called Medicare. “We didn’t withhold anything, because your premiums are paid by the state of Oregon.” (Which I knew already). “You should call your local medicaid office.” So I called them. “We don’t know what’s going on either. We paid Medicare. We called Social Security. We’re looking into it, and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came and went. I waited till Wednesday and tried Social Security again. “We don’t know what’s going on. I’ll get somebody else to look into it, and we’ll get back to you by Friday.” Friday came, with no return call. Realize that by now it’s been over a week since I first made anyone aware of what was going on.

I made one more call to my local Social Security office. “We don’t know what the problem is, but I’m sending a message to our processing center and hopefully you’ll hear from them in two weeks.”

By now I’m really pissed. At the end of the day, I started thinking. What if the local Social Security office is just uninformed? Maybe I’d get somewhere by calling the national office. So I did just that. I spent two hours on hold, listening to the most obnoxious cheerful muzak endlessly looped, and then someone answered my call. I repeated my story for the umpteenth time. “Yeah, this makes no sense. I don’t know what the problem is.” This was followed by a bunch of clicking as the dude typed on his keyboard. Five minutes later, he raised his voice to me. “You called our office earlier today?” “Yeah, I talked to someone here in my city of residence.” “Well, there’s a message out to our processing center. You just need to wait.” Dude was really fucking condescending and hostile. I hung up the phone. I’m surprised I didn’t lose my shit then and there, but the pump was primed for it.

This society is so fucked up. We literally have billionaires, people with more money than God, and you’re telling me that you’re gonna treat me like shit and kick me around over $700? Fuck you.