Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 35 of 52. It’s Labor Day Weekend, so a Monday entry still counts!I skipped weeks 33 and 34 due to finishing up an intensive six-week course to (successfully!) become CELTA certified in teaching English to speakers of other languages.
Note: I have a post in progress about Afghanistan and radical mental health in the United States, connecting the two by discussing cognitive dissonance. As a result of my recent and current workload and that entry’s length, I haven’t been able to complete it, and now need to put together something simpler (this post) instead. I’ll get the Afghanistan and mental health writing up eventually, but in the meantime, I urge you to read the timely story of Cindi Fisher and her struggle to free her son Siddharta from Washington state’s notorious Western State Hospital. See here, here, here, and here.
Outline of the U.S. superimposed on Mars pictured in outer space. Source, a Finnish tabloid in January 2021.
I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and moved to Seattle in 2016. That relocation was one of the best things for my life. Over the years, others from afar have encouraged me to migrate. Without their stimuli and the Internet, I’d have stayed in the Lone Star State, never participating in the Hearing Voices Network, never overcoming myriad challenges and increasing my autonomy, such as upping my cooking skill, substitute teaching for multi-month assignments in a huge city with a stressful crack-of-dawn commute, and dealing with painful social/emotional obstacles while interacting/transacting with people of wildly different demographics in a major urban environment. I’d have simply stayed a native Texan, brought up by prep school to belong to academia, isolated and not knowing it, locked in tunnel vision and praising the tunnel.
As I near six full years in Seattle, the time has come to move again — moreover, the time has come to leave the United States, even to get citizenship elsewhere someday. It’s a strange thing to do as a USian. In this country, no matter how much catastrophic medical debt piles up, no matter how many schools get shot up, no matter how often unemployment benefits cruelly expire, making a very specific plan for emigrating — as opposed to Just move to Canada! fantasies — is something you simply don’t hear about. Who does that? USians feel they’re already the most important country: not only the pro-Trump or neocon reactionaries, but also the faux rebels, who insist that if there’s a problem on the world stage, the US must always be the country most at fault. In other words, whether USians love the country or hate it, both agree that, regardless of topic, no other country can possibly be as important. Ever. In their eyes, history has come to an end. But most of the planet’s people live elsewhere, along with their changing cultures, changing languages, and the rest. It’s time to experience that; time for my own history to start a new chapter, while it’s still legal to leave.
But why, and how? On computer-y activist-y twitter, there are occasionally declamations by USians of how persecuted they are, and how special they are, and how they’ll soon leave the country for the better pastures they so richly deserve as rugged swashbuckling heroes and so forth. You’ll find that while I see terrifying political problems here too, my perspective is quite different! I see that for USians, who as a whole including me are to some extent quite tranquilized and emotionally + intellectually stunted (see arguments below), the idea of emigrating generally feels anxiety-producing, even downright scary — just try to talk someone here into renewing their passport, for instance. So I’ve decided to document my strange journey on my blog, full of specifics so maybe someone else will be able to figure out their own path to achieving the same thing someday.
This post is structured into why and how: First two little reasons why to emigrate, next two big reasons why, and finally two hows: a discussion of destinations I’m looking at, and then a discussion of practical steps I’m currently taking. Pertinent music before getting underway:
Son of Lonesome Dove novelist Larry McMurtry. “We can’t help it / We just keep moving / It’s been that way since long ago / Since the Stone Age, chasing the gray herds / We mostly go where we have to go.”
Little reason for leaving 1 of 2: across-the-board life improvement
In summer 2019, shortly before COVID-19 showed up, I visited Victoria BC (and a little of Vancouver) alone, and later wrote blog posts about it. One thing I discussed is how moving to a place that’s better or worse in whichever ways can dramatically improve or worsen your life across the board, as opposed to the individualization of social problems, also known as the fundamental attribution error. Or more plainly, as @debihope put it in 2010: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” Or, I’ll add, smog, sprawl, and so on. Imagine a bunch of variables:
a: safety of air (lack of air pollution) b: savings on cost of living (lower prices and so on) c: rarity of mass shootings d: education level of the population e: prosocial or antisocial behavior of the population And whichever additional variables.
Then imagine each location as a combination of those variables. Fort Worth is the sum of its ratings for air safety, cost of living, frequency of mass shootings, education level, social or antisocial behavior patterns, etc. Seattle is the sum of its ratings for the same variables. Victoria, Vancouver, and more, identical. This is all very straightforward and logical; it might seem strange to USians only because every day the corporate propaganda is screaming that we’re the best, that evidence is what nerdy losers consider, and that problems are almost always congenital rather than almost always environmental (even one’s bodily host, full of microorganisms, can be considered part of your mind or soul’s environment, as this thought-provoking book discusses).
So that’s why moving to a better place can improve your life across the board, but even moving to a place with a lower sum rating can be an improvement in that it can strengthen a person if they’re up to the challenge — and the lower-sum place might have hidden gem aspects to it as well.
Little reason for leaving 2 of 2: recent news revealing the United States as a sinkhole
“It’s really heartbreaking to see children intubated by COVID,” a Texas pediatrician working in hospitals said last week, and the country has just surpassed 2/3 million novel coronavirus deaths with over 160,000 new cases daily largely due to the Delta mutation, but all the same, in southwest Washington state on Friday September 3, the fascist Proud Boys, all-male enforcers for Trump reminscent of Hitler’s Youth, were riled up by false social media posts by another far right group, Patriot Prayer, that wrongly claimed a student faced arrest for not masking. Skyview High School, Alki Middle School, and Chinook Elementary all locked down as Proud Boys tried to gain entry to school grounds. Teachers and faculty guarded doors to keep the Proud Boys out as school security addressed them (I don’t know the details of what exactly school security did). Among the work I do is teaching, including in secondary schools, and fighting off Proud Boys is not really how I want to spend my time as a teacher, a factor in my emigration goal. The eight-second video below (source) is from outside Skyview High School on Friday.
Saturday, September 4, 50+ armed Proud Boys were on the hunt in Olympia, the Washington state capital. Gunshots were fired (I’m not sure of the specifics), and a female independent journalist, Alissa Azar, was assaulted by the Proud Boys. Details are still emerging.
Hiding in a bar in Olympia. I turned a corner to 50+ proud boys who said there’s Alissa and ran on me completely alone. I ran as fast as I could. They caught me and pulled my hair and shoved me to the ground then bear maced me. People af the bad pull me in hiding here now.
Here’s a bit of an account on what happened yesterday…
I ended up alone and trying to leave the area. I had a group and safety… & just a block and a half away is where I needed to be. I was at an intersection about to cross but when I looked to my right I saw that large group https://t.co/uIopctCB87
Click through to see her thread31-second clip (source). Azar can be heard screaming “get off me!” as Proud Boys chant “Fuck antifa!” and yell misogynist slurs
Labor Day Weekend’s not over yet; there may well be more craziness from the Proud Boys forthcoming in the Pacific Northwest.
The fairyfly, a type of wasp, is less than 0.2 mm / 0.005 inches long, about the diameter of a fine pen’s tip — yet the fairyfly has cardiac activity, a tubular heart on its back.
Turning to Texas, a pro-snitching, anti-reproductive rights law — the most restrictive in the country — went into effect there on Wednesday September 1 after the Supreme Court upheld it in a 5-4 “shadow docket” ruling. The law bans abortions once cardiac activity can be detected in the fetus, usually six weeks into pregnancy, typically counting from the first day of the last menstrual period (which might not be tracked or trackable, adding confusion and difficulty into the time equation). The Texas law makes no exceptions for rape or incest and relies on private individuals to enforce it; as the New York Timesexplains, it “deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or ‘aids and abets’ a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.” Snitches and bounty hunters. I wasn’t the inseminator, but as a quasi-supporter quasi-bodyguard against protestors decades ago, I accompanied a pregnant friend to a clinic for her abortion arrangements; such activity would now be “aiding and abetting.” As this five-minute Pussy Riot song “Hangerz” explains, “fundamentalist abortion-bans are about hijacking control and ownership of women’s bodies,” though some of the reactionary foot soldiers fighting for such bans may not perceive that frightening truth themselves.
What’s the “shadow docket” component of the Supreme Court ruling? The shadow docket is contrasted with the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” But wait, what’s a docket?
The docket is the official schedule of proceedings before a court. When I covered multiple federal sentencings of hacktivist/transparency movement defendants (such as whistleblower Reality Winner’s), I’d sign into PACER, the electronic system for accessing federal court documents, and take a look at the docket to see what time the hearing began and in which courtroom. The docket listed not only that info about the sentencing hearing, but also information about and links to each pleading (a written statement a party puts before a court) and much more, which I would read and write about journalistically. “Docket” more generally refers to the workload before a court, as in “the court has fifty zillion cases pending on its docket.”
So that’s docket — how about the merits docket? The Supreme Court’s merits docket is the 60 to 70 or so cases the robed, priestly, and surely heavily surveilled justices will consider each term, hearing oral arguments from lawyers and pondering the pleadings, to make rulings supposedly on the merits. The merits docket cases are usually scrutinized by scholars, sometimes broadcast by media, and so forth, hopefully aiming for an ideal of transparency, because thankfully some refuse to lose their curiosity about what the ruling class is up to.
Halls of justice painted green, money talking… apathy their stepping stone (music; lyrics)
The shadow docket, on the other hand, is a catch-all term for Supreme Court rulings that, with some variation, are typically accompanied by no oral arguments from lawyers, no reasoning from judges, no identification of which justices voted what, and are released with unpredictable timing. That unpredictable timing makes informing the public about them difficult. For example, not of the Supreme Court shadow docket but of something similar, in Reality Winner’s case, her exceptionally restrictive plea agreement — remember, her leak was a huge component in the story of how the United States was smashed (partly) by Russia, sometimes called the battering ram of China in this global transition from the British Empire to the Chinese one, and thus, her leak helped decloak Putin’s ally Trump, so her punishment has been unusually severe — wasn’t filed until the day of her sentencing, which made reporting on her exceptionally restrictive conditions impossible for the many members of the media attending the hearing: we were given no time to read the plea agreement closely before the news cycle moved on. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket is likewise difficult for scholars and journalists to review. There’s no time for amicus briefs or activists to arrange protests (or sabotage!).
Though the term shadow docket was coined in 2015, something of a shadow docket has existed ever since the Supreme Court has. For a long time, shadow docket rulings were primarily minor, anodyne matters, like granting a side an additional two weeks to file a motion because the top lawyer came down with pneumonia. Over the past four years — during both the obviously awful Trump and wrongly beloved Biden administrations — there’s been a dramatic uptick in shadow docket rulings from the Supreme Court, another sign of the law vanishing. Shadow docket rulings are used now even for controversial cases, such as the new Texas abortion law. (Read more about the recent use of the shadow docket, a major loss for accountability and transparency, in this February 2021 testimony to Congress.)
A two-minute Anonymous video uploaded Friday September 3 points out that the Texas tactic of circumventing the federal protection of reproductive rights by shifting anti-abortion enforcement from the state government to private individuals could be expanded to circumvent any federal protection, such that private individuals are allowed to enforce any new state law regardless of what federal law might say on the matter. Do you realize what an end-times move that is? No more constitutional protections from federal law; your neighbors enforce the local law, to collect bounties. The Anonymous video also announces Operation Jane, named after the Chicago underground abortion service started in 1969, to either take down online systems for snitching/bounty-hunting on Texas women getting abortions, or to poison the data collection by flooding the online systems with garbage information. Indeed, a website seeking snitch reports of people violating the new Texas law has already been spammed thanks to a viral digital protest, including one programmer creating a shortcut for iPhone users to easily submit worthless data repeatedly.
I could offer examples of the sinkhole United States forever, but let’s look at just a few things more, quickly.
Remember the coup attempt on January 6? “A failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Yale historian of fascism Timothy Snyder said this summer, referring to history and the very possible, perhaps even likely, scenario of Trump returning in 2022 or 2024, maybe by force. I recently came across a two-part interview with Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who’s given harrowing firsthand accounts of the coup attempt. The interview from July — part one and part two — is really worth listening to, because though our feelings on cops may be closer to this, Dunn seems a very straight-up dude, easy to empathize with, and his retelling of the insurrection is very expressive and evocative. (The Dworkin Report also interviewed lawyer Alison Grinter last month regarding Reality Winner’s commutation and pardon efforts.)
Remember, in this connection, the words of multiple Holocaust survivors in 2019 (Rene Lichtman, Ruth Bloch, Bernard Marks): ICE is equivalent to the Gestapo, and their current ‘detention centers’ really are concentration camps where genocidaires crush minorities. Replace “the United States” in your head with “Nazi Germany” and ask yourself if living in such a place makes sense. Even if privileged USians think themselves exempt from such matters, recall that in May 2020, during Black Lives Matter protests sparked by George Floyd’s death, the National Guard in Minneapolis swept affluent streets, yelled Light ’em up! and shot paint canisters at non-minorities for the “crime” of standing on their porches, as in this 20-second video (source) that the mainstream media later followed up on:
Big reason for leaving 1 of 2: Unreachable USians and their counterarguments
The above establishes there’s no way for USians to opt-out of having the increasing fascism arrive on their own doorsteps. But plenty of people have legit reasons for staying in the country. Maybe they’re the sole caregiver for a dear dying relative. Maybe they’re dedicated to a project such as cleaning up the Duwamish River by Seattle. I even read a curious story about a monk in his fifties, a psychiatric survivor, who, protesting the rush of technology, took a “vow of stability” never to ride in a vehicle or leave his city (save rarely and on foot), though the story of his (nonsexual) relationship with a 23-year-old woman is a bit odd; in the U.S., twenty-three is typically not the age to take such a vow, and the story treats her as his mere sidekick. Anyway, there are all sorts of understandable reasons a person might decide not to leave the United States. And other countries aren’t automatically perfect — for good or ill, there are coup attempts and actual coups all over the place presently: see yesterday in Guinea on September 5, or the likely Steve Bannon-facilitated one in Brazil tomorrow on September 7 for fascist Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. Whatever the case, each person’s life is their own to find their own path.
Still, there are common fallacious arguments against emigrating that I’ve heard repeatedly from USians and would like to address. These arguments arise in USian conversation when I bring up my goal of emigrating. The arguments make me feel like the majority of USians are unreachable on this topic, though judging from the programmer video above, the kids are all right; maybe I’m just getting old.
The most frequent anti-emigrating argument I hear in the United States is that it’s only a possibility for those with financial privilege. To be fair, this is not my best subject; nevertheless, there are certain awkward truths to be said. Since there are many who have willfully changed countries — including leaving the U.S. — while in poverty, the argument that emigration is only for the privileged is untrue, and speaks more to typical USian myopia. I don’t have the link handy, but I remember reading on r/IWantOut, a subreddit for emigration advice, of a USian in their late teens who sold everything and took a huge risk to just drop themselves into an Eastern European country, I think, and figure it out on the go. Lots of r/IWantOut posts share such stories. There are also many easy-to-find youtube videos of USians telling their stories of how they emigrated while similarly in poverty. Counterexamples, boom! With only $1000-$2000 USD in savings, which she calls a “pretty significant” amount, the woman in the video below moved from Chicago to cheaper Madrid to work as a teacher assistant, receiving a meager income (about $1200 USD per month). “It was one of the most amazing years of my life,” she says. “I’d recommend the experience to everyone.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38BcPsjLdJ0
I was stateless in your dumbass country and I left, what privilege did I have?
Millions have left, undocumented working class too, maybe your privileged working class simply doesn't have the backbone to do it. A lot of US ex-pats I've met live paycheck to paycheck but are much happier out of that hell hole.
They have $ in capital, the number can be increased through the selling of assets; I've lived there long enough and around enough impoverished people to know most "working class" have access to move if they manage it correctly.
Volunteering and hanging out with US activists has taught me that many of them are simply pretending to be poor (even to themselves); maybe they don’t have a lot of cash daily, but they come from highly professional families who deliver money to them regularly, or would in emergencies or if asked. “Emigrating is a privilege” often means rather “I don’t want to have a confrontational conversation with my family/friends on this topic” or “I must follow a bizarre Kantian imperative to never lie, so when my family asks, I can’t tell them I sold my guitar to get $300 for something they approve of, when I actually sold it to pay an Education Credential Assessment fee they don’t approve of; not lying to my family is more important than my life and dreams going permanently down the drain.” People, especially women, are constantly shamed for being bold and taking risks, and socially ‘rewarded’ — She is just so sweet!— for staying in servitude and remaining meek. So the “money privilege” arguments about emigrating are actually about those paralyzing emotions under the surface, I think, not about actual budget questions.
Further, as I experienced myself, those from upper class families in the U.S. are very often lacking in skills (paid caregivers did the domestic tasks when they grew up; parents or paid accountants did their taxes and paperwork; and so on). This sort of thing hits Reddit regularly, such as these stories of nightmare roommates not doing their dishes ever. It’s pretty inhibiting to grow up in a U.S. golden cage, especially since such families tend to endorse conventional psychiatry. Pedosadist Jeffrey Epstein arranged for psychiatrists to give his victims Lithium and Xanax for their tranquilizing/sedating effect; psychopharmaceuticals are a weapon of control that dull the moxie required to emigrate.
To counter these various discouragements, including the shaming, ressentiment-style crab mentality around emigration — if you can emigrate, it must be because you are bad since you have money, whereas I can’t do it, because I am good since I don’t have money — I’ve lately been thinking of inspirational friends and reading inspirational books. One friend I know simply refuses to pay her student debt (my heroine!). I also just finished reading the autobiography of guitarist, philosopher, and Paganini/Liszt-style showoff Yngwie Malmsteen (who could really use some intervallic additions to his playing such as fourths, sixths, sevenths, ninths, elevenths). In Relentless, Malmsteen writes about riding his motorcycle up and down the stairs of his Swedish high school as a teen. I was a bit like that as a teen, too. In Texas, such energy often means (at least for white kids in prep schools) getting psychiatrized, but for him in Sweden, he got away with it, then later, upon receiving an offer to play in a Los Angeles band, flew across the planet for the first time to this city he’d never heard of (pre-Internet days), bringing with him nothing but his guitar case with an extra pair of jeans crammed inside. He ended up living in a run-down warehouse for a while in a violent neighborhood, playing for cheesy Steeler and getting his bearings; it got him to where he needed to go next. And only yesterday, a world-traveller friend recommended to me Mark Ehrman’s book Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, which I haven’t read yet, but it looks great.
Even disability may not be an insurmountable obstacle to leaving. People who have been intensely psychiatrized may legitimately worry about family/friends calling the police and having them hospitalized if their plan to leave the country seems grandiose or otherwise insane. Breaking things down into plausible step-by-steps may help persuade policers, or another option is simply outwitting one’s opponents. It can be done. Witness the amazing book Bipolar 1 Disorder: How to Survive and Thrive by Molly McHugh, originally from the United States. Despite a history of manic psychosis, she slowly, after much trial and error, managed to get off her psychopharmaceuticals and travel the world with her son.
I had a creative writing teacher once who told the class he kept hearing explanations from us for why ideas put forth wouldn’t work; he then said, why not give explanations why they will work?
The other counterargument I hear frequently is that, in the face of collapsingsupply chains and rising fascism, a USian should stay here and fight. I hear it so often that I wonder where the phrase originates; USians never say they want to remain here and fight or stay here and battle. It’s always stay here and fight. The collocation appears in translations of the Iliad and the stage play Death of a Salesman. Vivid, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words like “stay” and “fight” are usually preferred by English speakers over Latinate clunkers like “remain” and “battle.” But I still wonder if there’s something more to the phrase’s frequency.
Anyway, let’s say I agree to remain here and bat — I mean, stay here and fight. What’s step one? The very first page of Sun Tzu’s millennia-old book The Art of War, studied by US generals, the KGB, and the Vietcong alike, says warriors must “determine the conditions obtaining in the field.” He asks fighters to consider, among other questions, “Which army is stronger?” and “On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?” I’ve never heard a USian, who insists we must stay here and fight, address such questions of Sun Tzu’s. At a glance, the Pentagon is stronger than antifa, since antifa lacks aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, and so on. USians generally lack discipline, too, since every day almost all down corporate soda and other junk food along with countless hours of corporate entertainment (eating healthy is disciplining and strengthening).
If this is a consular ship, where is the ambassador?
In short, if this is a US activist battle, where are our battle plans? Were I to spit the above paragraph at a stay-here-and-fight advocate, they might say, as if dismissing the entire subject, “antifa is morally stronger,” but Sun Tzu lists moral force as just one factor among others. Verily verily, a serious fight requires serious observation, planning, and effort. My observation is, in terms of a US football metaphor, the idealists and radicals in the United States are way behind in the fourth quarter, too far behind to rack up enough points on the scoreboard to win against supply chain collapse and fascism. Enough evidence of that for me is that Seattle activists I know refuse to factually assess the battlefield in the first place and rely on subtly insulting each other into agreeing that everything will be fine and those who disagree are simply being negative or uncool.
Lots of antifa and other activists in the United States are working hard, as social media sometimes shows, and I don’t mean to denigrate that effort. Maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth from particular experiences. But there’s definitely an unacknowledged deer-in-the-headlights thing going on with many of us here. And that naive attitude is part and parcel of how USians typically view life. In this amazing article for the New York Times, novelist Brian Morton writes:
Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price. But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.
Try explaining to the Proud Boys or the National Guard that antifa will win simply because your fabulous bumper sticker slogan says so — you may find their disagreeing force overpowering.
One last thing. We know reactionaries, whether of the neocon or Trumper flavor, believe all must be made equal: equally subject to their rule that Only he with enough moneytokens deserves to eat; all others must starve or hope for shameful charity. The US left also tends to believe all must be equal. When I tried to explain to a Seattle leftist in person that whereas in the World War II era, the country incentivized very cerebral people (physicists, etc.) to immigrate here, now it’s the opposite, it’s what’s called a “brain drain” where some of the country’s brightest, seeing the sinkhole, are fleeing to other countries where their abilities will be welcomed and rewarded. That has long-term negative consequences for the United States, y’know? But the USian I was explaining this to got mad at me: they said it was offensive to suggest that some people are smarter in some areas than others: the phrase “brain drain” alone was offensive. So it’d be hard to convince such a person to divide up an antifa army to put some on intelligence work (researching opponents’ street addresses and supply chains), others on street brawls, and some on both, because on the US left, everyone has to be as equal as the rightwingers insist everyone must be under the dollar sign. With that differences-denying kind of mentality widespread in the country, nobody can honestly evaluate the conditions on the field and win.
Big reason for leaving 2 of 2: growth through adventure
All the news, arguments, counterarguments, and counter-counterarguments can stack up like a gloomy list of gloomy factoids, some of them debatable or personal, but they ultimately matter little in comparison with my biggest reason for aiming to leave the United States and get citizenship elsewhere. That’s simply the drive to embark on a challenging adventure, to get out of my comfort zone, to stop metaphorically hiding under the bed, and grow/develop as a person. I’ve written about that in many places on my blog, and will in the future, so I won’t talk about it here much.
I will say, however, three things.
First, notice how many USians will downplay the importance of this cross-border adventure thing, yet play video games where they’re flying airships to new lands to have virtual adventures (or perhaps they’re reading or watching fiction with the same journeying tropes). So, it seems adventure, etc., is necessary in life, and hiding under the bed, perhaps as a good psychiatric patient, is a downward spiral that will be met with more pills and pats on the head from the authorities.
Second, psychologists have an interesting concept called flexibility of thought, or cognitive flexibility. Regardless of his brave youthful journey across the globe to Los Angeles, Yngwie Malmsteen nowadays continues to play the same tricks on guitar (c’mon, man, that trademark descending ostinato lick of yours? why not play it ascending at least once in your plentiful recordings? or try inspiration from a different classical musical genre such as impressionism?). Similarly, people everywhere keep hiding under the bed. This is a huge topic, but the idea is to have enough adaptibility to meet unfamiliar challenges. I’ve heard cutting away the safety net, having no Plan B, can really help, so that you devote all your time to your goal, but on the other hand, poor risk-assessment and foolhardiness don’t work, either. Just something I think about regarding emigration; I’m no expert. But I’ve long seen chest-pounding USians call themselves adults because they remuneratively serve corporations or their ancillaries on salary, yet be literally too terrifed to walk off a sidewalk or climb an enticing tree and sit in it. Hello, we’re losing our childhood birthright of curiosity and courage because of how we came to be ruled by Death Eaters.
Third, as USian leftists debate who is or isn’t privileged in this country, and typically prefer to hear the perspective of a union organizer down the street rather than indigenous people on the other side of the planet, the real tragedy is that USian comforts are provided by multinational corporations benefitting from destruction that turns people into refugees who must cross countries without any choice in the matter over whether they’re privileged or ready enough to leave their homes or not. USians seeing refugees on boats somehow still remain convinced they themselves are of a special, exceptional sort when it comes to emigration. Perhaps USians are different, at least in terms of our unadmitted social and emotional crippling…
Initially USians tend to approach the topic of foreign destinations as a fantasy and actually enjoy talking about it — for pretend. The stressful details of renewing a passport or taking an IELTS test go out the window and everybody daydreams aloud about which country they’d go to and why.
I’m thinking about going to a country where I can gain citizenship, but that might not be a linear process. Some countries are very difficult to earn citizenship in, for instance many European countries. So I might have to go to Country B first, perhaps to improve at a required language or improve employment history, before going to Country C and getting citizenship there.
Let’s indulge the make-believe a little, yet spiced with facts. Here are my current preferences/thoughts. Bear in mind that different places within a country are, you know, different. In the service of brevity, the below kind of commits the Star Trek fallacy of one p̶l̶a̶n̶e̶t̶ country, one culture.
Canada: This would be ideal for me in many ways. In British Columbia at least, I could visit Seattle easily and easily research northeast Oregon in person for my fiction project, too. The electrical outlets are the same, the bioregion, at least in British Columbia, is the same — same trees, same weather. Hearing Voices Network chapters exist in Vancouver and Quebec City. Sort of an easy, beginner way to leave the United States. I’ve heard rumors of an upcoming lottery draw of permanent residency Express Entry applicants, maybe as soon as late September, requiring far fewer points than the usual threshold. You get points by, for instance, having post-secondary education credentials, higher IELTS scores, or good full-time employment history. Frequently in the United States nowadays, paid-jobs that actually take more or far more than 40 hours a week are classified on paperwork as part-time, but the USian emigrant can (try to) provide a letter from the employer that the work was tantamount to a full-time job; I’ve heard from a recently successful permanent residency applicant that such letters can often pass muster. Full-time job offers from Canadian employers especially boost points. However, Canada, or parts of Canada, can be expensive, so I’d probably have to pour a lot of time into teaching, which might be a good idea for a few years as I continue to improve my health via a compounding pharmacy. It’s also a decent place to be vegan, I’ve heard.
The Netherlands. Rising sea levels aside, the advantages of this country and its Amsterdam capital city are fairly well known, belonging to the European Union being just one of them. It’s also where the Hearing Voices Network began, so — pending further research — I assume it’s a great place to continue escaping conventional psychiatry’s grip. However, I’ve heard the Netherlands is expensive, or parts of it are, and to become a citizen, you have to learn Dutch, which to me looks like long strange strings of letters, but who knows, maybe I’d change my Dutch-ignorant mind someday. Most importantly, there’s a Dutch-American[USian] Friendship Treaty that eases the path for self-employed US entreprenuers to live in the Netherlands long term. I’ll look into that, see what the possibilities might be for various types of online writing and/or tutoring businesses. It’s another decent place to be vegan, I understand.
Spain. Another European Union member, and currently tied with Germany for the strongest passport in the world (measured in terms of mobility), at least on this index. A big draw for me would be improving my Spanish from slow and clunky to fast and fluent. I assume (haven’t checked yet) that Spanish skill is a requirement for citizenship. There’s of course a history of radical politics in Spain (and dictatorship). I’ve heard it’s an okay enough place to be vegan, at least in certain cities. And it just seems really cool to me. I like making big decisions based mostly on intuition — like James McMurtry’s we mostly go where we have to go — not laundry lists of pros and cons, and somehow Spain just feels really exciting. It’s a challenge to get EU citizenship, though…but things happen? Spain may be expensive, and there are no Hearing Voices Network chapters there on this international list, but perhaps by savvy emailing I could find a chapter that does exist and just isn’t on the radar yet.
My future-o?
México. The US news claims there are many problems in México, maybe to scare USians off (I mean really, who the hell wrote this? I didn’t write the “scary” subhead tho…that was an editor). But even if there are some bigly problems — like, say, Proud Boys trying to bust into schools? — well, like I suggested above, regardless of the across-the-board life improvement idea, there may be hidden gems where not expected, and life isn’t about greedily grabbing comfort anyway. Plus, despite a narco-state, amazing social movements (see also the Mexican Supreme Court ruling unanimously to decriminalize abortion on Tuesday September 7). I could improve my Spanish and live cheaply, perhaps teaching English language leaners for a while at an established school (there are some interesting job listings presently that I think I qualify for). My Spanish would skyrocket, and so would my employment history, as a teacher I mean (what about writing?). It’s a little hilarious that despite USian chest-thumping about the strength of its almighty trade economy, and the supposed evilness of so-called Mexican illegals heading north, it’s perhaps more practical for some college-educated USians to get certain good jobs by heading south. With such an improved employment history, I could maybe go to Europe later. Sadly, there’s no Mexican Hearing Voices Network chapter on the international list, but the same emailing savvy might turn something up. I don’t know what veganism is like in Mexico, but hey, with all the corn-based chips and tortillas, at least it would be easy to avoid gluten! I think…
Moon seen from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere
Some country in South America, esp. Argentina or maybe Uruguay. The ideas here would be to improve my Spanish, see different stars and a vertically inverted moon, and live cheaply thanks to the US dollar. I have a friend who moved from the US to Argentina and supports herself fully with online content marketing writing and some tutoring side jobs, in the US a pretty hopeless way to try to support oneself longterm except maybe in rural areas, perhaps with nontraditional housing (e.g., an RV), though maybe I’m unaware. I briefly met a Seattleite, big into queer community stuff, who moved to progressive Uruguay and seems to be doing well there. I’ve heard it’s hard to be vegan in South America, and that I might find it hard to make friends there, though of course there’s a lot of variety on a whole continent! Unfortunately, the international list of Hearing Voices Network chapters lists not a single one there. However, the aforementioned Molly McHugh, author of Bipolar 1 Disorder: How to Survive and Thrive, also wrote a book about living in South America, so I’ll have to read it asap!
Those are the places I’m chiefly considering. Two more quick resources. Nomad List provides dossiers on various worldwide destinations, detailing things like cost of living or Internet connectivity quality, and I’ve heard it’s a pretty accurate site. Then, Totalism lists unusual places to live, especially for Europe. Hackerspaces, intentional communities, punk houses, artist spaces, zones like that. I might be wrong, but I imagine doing well in such money-saving environments, as opposed to one’s own apartment, would require cut-throat social skills.
Music video for “Another World” by French metal band Gojira (lyrics)
Like I said at the start, it’s time for me to get going, to emigrate. Hell, in the hours and hours it took to write this post, I could have already become a European citizen! That’s a joke, but…
I decided to just throw myself into the process, to complete some practical, specific, actual, real-life, not-kidding steps even if I don’t have a full picture. Besides what you might expect — looking at job postings, sites like Nomad List, and playing with Canada’s Express Entry points estimator tool — there are three things I’m doing.
First, I’m digitizing, discarding, donating, or selling belongings. The fewer objects I have, the easier it is to move. It’s taking surprisingly long, maybe because the items are laden with emotional meaning. I’m having to grab records from Texas, too. I have about half of the records I want from Texas so far.
Second, I’m having my Bachelor of Arts degree evaluated for Canada. It’s called Educational Credential Assessment. Canada wants to ensure non-Canadian academic records are truly equivalent to Canadian degrees, so applicants have to pay a fee to one of five designated organizations to have them assess the transcripts. I went with World Education Services, because they’re apparently the fastest, and I’m hoping to get an Express Entry application in before the next draw for permanent residency, which as noted above, may come later this month.
Third, I’m taking the IELTS general exam on Thursday. That acronym stands for the International English Language Testing System, and it’s pronounced EYE-ults. Even if an applicant is a native English speaker who’s putting together the next installment of the Oxford English Dictionary, Canada (and some other countries) want the person tested for English proficiency. IELTS is the predominant way to go about it. The higher the IELTS score, the more immigration points when your application is considered. I just booked the exam two nights ago. Since the IELTS isn’t offered in Washington state, and not nearby any time extremely soon, I’m suddenly going to the border town of San Diego to take it. So, now I have to cram. Maybe very little study time was a bad idea; when I took the GRE test trying to get into grad school, I flunked the writing section, multiple times! (Probably a blessing in disguise, because I don’t want academia to steal from me the joy of working on my fiction, nonfiction, etc.)
Anyway, it’s time; and on Wednesday, it’s off to San Diego, the border town!
… Maybe while there, I’ll just head south, never to return. ;)
It could be that my sense of humor is not always apparent. Source.
Note: In 2021 I’ll publish one blog post per week. Here’s entry 17 of 52.
From Los Angeles, July 2019, the Homeland Security Kills Rally. Photo by Ronen Tivony via Getty Images
This post is a reflection on my failed, and unfortunately short-lived, attempt to help #AbolishICE in the summer of 2018. When considering the horrifying cruelties of the camps of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency under the federal Department of Homeland Security, I think it’s important to look at the experiences of everyday activists and what we’re trying — or shrugging off trying — to do. Maybe then we can reboot our efforts and try again, better this time.
ICE camp in McAllen, Texas, I believe in 2019. Nietzsche wrote approvingly of “men without pity” in 1881: “it does not seem to them so unfair that others should suffer” In the video, the big cheese without pity is former vice president Mike Pence
For those who think calling the ICE centers concentration camps is extreme, consider the words of multiple Holocaust survivors in 2019 (Rene Lichtman, Ruth Bloch, Bernard Marks): ICE is equivalent to the Gestapo, and their current ‘detention centers’ really are concentration camps where genocidaires crush minorities. The sadistic abuse by la migra at these camps is well-documented here by Gabriela C. Romeri. Borrowing from her article, the DHS’s own oversight reports found that children imprisoned at the camps reported wide-ranging abuses: officials pointing their guns at the children, shooting them with tasers for amusement or punishment, hitting or kicking them, and threatening them with rape or death. Additional reported abuse included: agents stomping children; punching children in the head, sometimes repeatedly; kicking one child in the ribs; tasering several children; denying them food and forcing minors into stress positions. Further, children held in freezing rooms with no blankets, food, or clean water; forced to sleep on concrete floors or share overcrowded cells with adult strangers; denied necessary medical care; bullied into signing self-deportation paperwork; and subjected to physical assault and rape. Mothers of infants were denied diapers; trashcans were removed from crowded holding cells and feces and other fluids were seen along the floor. The Associated Press reported in September 2018 that federal Health and Human Services (somehow or supposedly) “lost track” of 1,488 migrant children — a number that must be no coincidence: 14 represents the Fourteen Words white supremacist slogan, and the number 88 is HH (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet), a common code for Heil Hitler. Furthermore, Nazis frequently combine 14 and 88 into 1488. Presumably many of the “lost” children were enslaved (trafficked). The pedosadist likes of Jeffrey Epstein do not obtain their slaves singlehandedly; the powerful trafficking networks are planetwide organized crime. They have to grab kids from somewhere, and ICE camps along with everything surrounding them make for perfect crime scenes.
What the IBM-Nazi collaboration says about the importance of knowledge control
It’s a little, but increasingly, known fact that the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), popularly recognized for products such as the Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer and the first-rate line of Thinkpad consumer laptops (prior to Lenovo acquiring them in 2005), aided Nazi Germany in carrying out the Holocaust. The collaboration, overseen by IBM in New York City, was carried out in Germany by IBM subsidiary the Dehomag Corporation. Dehomag’s punch-card tabulating machines, called Hollerith machines, were installed at the major Nazi concentration camps, where SS personnel, following training by IBM who knew what was going on, used the tabulators to track information on prisoners. Arrivals, transfers, deaths, occupations, and slave labor details were all catalogued on IBM Hollerith machines. The SS also supplied Reich central authorities in Berlin with that data on an ongoing basis.
In addition to the outright horror, killing millions relatively quickly is a complicated logistical challenge. As explained in investigative journalist Edwin Black’s book IBM and the Holocaust: The strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, the Hollerith machines helped Nazi leadership “prioritize, schedule, and manage the seemingly impossible logistics of genocide across dozens of cities in more than twenty countries and territories. It was not just people who were counted and marshaled for deportation. Boxcars, locomotives, and intricate train timetables were scheduled across battle-scarred borders—all while a war was being fought on two fronts. The technology had enabled Nazi Germany to orchestrate the death of millions without skipping a note.”
Example of IBM custom punch-card for the SS Race Office. (Source.)
The Reich using Hollerith machines at their concentration camps representated a huge, profitable commercial victory for Big Blue. Further, IBM didn’t sell the machines to the Nazis, but instead, merely leased them (as in today’s corporate software ecosystem where endusers rarely own much but typically just lease ‘their’ apps, ebooks, etc). The leasing arrangment forced the Nazis into dependency on Dehomag/IBM, just as individuals and schools/universities and evengovernments presently are dependent on, rather than governing over, Silicon Valley. In 1934, Dehomag’s director, Willy Heidinger, bragged (in a statement that emphasizes with astonishing bluntness the role of medical control):
We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation onto a little card […] We are proud to be able to contribute to such a task, a task that makes available to the physician [i.e. Adolf Hitler] of our German body-social the material for his examination, so that our physician can determine whether, from the standpoint of the health of the nation, the results calculated in this manner stand in a harmonious, healthy relation to one another, or whether unhealthy conditions must be cured by corrective interventions […] We have firm trust in our physician and will follow his orders blindly, because we know that he will lead our nation toward a great future. Hail to our German people and their leader!
Dehomag was directed from New York City by IBM head Thomas J. Watson. Between 1933 and 1940, Watson courted Nazi business and made Hitler’s regime dependent not just on the leases of Hollerith machines, but also on the unique punch-card paper IBM sold. When the Nazis ran out of that fluid capital, they had to replenish their stock of paper by going as customers to IBM, who, at the same time as its employees even had sales quotas for working with the Reich, somehow continually managed to evade the Treasury Department in D.C., a top-echelon bureau formally tasked with stopping domestic firms from trading with official enemies. Hmm, curious, that. The business between IBM and the Nazis kept going: Dehomag serviced/repaired the Hollerith machines on site at the concentration camps regularly. Even food allocation (i.e., who would starve and who would be fed) was managed by the Nazis using an IBM proprietary database system. Unless humanity elects to establish a universal database, a global commons, owned by everyone, for organizing and sharing public data, we’ll continue to have such opaque databases of proprietary control as the Nazi’s, where injustices occur aided by secrecy. (Of course, injustices also occur in plain sight, especially since nowadays people lack shame or a sense of duty to the vulnerable, and have trouble putting the disparate puzzle pieces together to recognize that their emotional responses have been conditioned from above; it’s ‘secrecy’ through flooding everyone with distracting trivia and corporate entertainment.)
Hitler and IBM president Thomas J. Watson (among others) meeting in Berlin, 1937. (Source.)
Did IBM face consequences? As World War II progressed, Big Blue sold Hollerith machines to the Allies also, playing both sides. After Armistice Day, no IBM executives were charged with war crimes, and their profits from working with the Axis were shielded from reparations. Not only that, but Hollerith machines were used to handle records at the Nuremberg Trials — Big Blue playing both sides and the referees too — and IBM formally requested compensation for its Hollerith machines getting damaged during the war. Legal cases since have had mild success but nothing full, due to reasons such as statute of limitations. IBM’s business steamrolled on: not as IBM contracting with the powers that be, which is the usual phrasing, but IBM (and big tech today) as the power that is, needing to trade its products somewhere anywhere, and looking down to the lowly governments below as dependent customers. Two examples follow. Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks’ The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974) — an interesting instance of a U.S-published book that has been censored; my paperback copy has black ( DELETED ) marks throughout — says “The first step in the [CIA’s] evaluation process [for obtaining a spy] is to run a ‘namecheck,’ or trace, on the person, using the CIA’s extensive computerized files located at headquarters in Langley [Virginia]. This data bank was developed by International Business Machines exclusively for the CIA and contains information on hundreds of thousands of persons.” Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock’s book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (2008) mentions IBM’s work “as a major provider of computer systems to the Pentagon and the NSA.” Have the highest levels of warfighters ever really been defeated?
What does all this mean — is it just a random contingency that tech companies happen to be so powerful, and is interest in the Internet and technology a mere “subgenre” of anarchism or activism, less important than, say, the heart-pounding physicality of black bloc streetfighters skirmishing with cops? After all, Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust, wrote “Make no mistake — The Holocaust would still have occurred without IBM. To think otherwise is more than wrong. The Holocaust would have proceeded — and often did proceed — with simple bullets, death marches, and massacres based on pen and paper persecution.” Is the difference merely something quantitative, that the technology enabled the Nazis to automate genocide and to massively multiply the killing, murdering millions relatively quickly with cold efficiency, beginning a new era of military intelligence, two words combined that can’t make sense?
Creepy Dehomag poster from circa 1934 reads in German: “See everything through Hollerith punch cards.” (Source.)
It’s more than quantity: the IBM-Nazi use of Hollerith tabulating machines were the contemporary beginnings of yoking genocidal domination based on knowledge together with mass data. Although you might debate the particulars, big picture wise, human behavior has always stemmed from knowledge: everything else is downstream. It might appear that the celebrity who’s the sexiest calls the most shots, but emanating like magic from the high, remote towers of the intelligentsia, the definitions of sexy and celebrity (and whatever else) are too often imposed, not from a community’s storytellers and mythmakers who must answer to their neighbors, but from above. Similarly with initial definitions and emotional responses around things like black blocs and cops. Community storytellers lack the amplification and computing power of the powerful intelligentsia-magicians. To outsmart, or route around, the force-multiplying technology wielded by the supranational powers (especially spy agencies), is like seizing a staff away from a wizard, or besting a wizard in spellcasting. If the public wins at this magical duel over abstractions (and the logic systems for organizing our abstractions and connecting them to the physical realm, i.e., software, networks, etc.), then control of mythmaking and other knowledge creation finally return to the public’s control, and hence the public regains control of all that which is downstream as well. That controlling the fount yields the most power must have been why, for instance, Winston Churchill was obsessed with, and kept close tabs on, the Bletchley Park professor types, including Alan Turing, whose organization after World War II grew into GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA; unlike many other British leaders in his orbit, prime minister Churchill intuitively understood how powerful this wizard-staff of software structuring of abstraction information was and would become. Computer software isn’t just goofy game apps on a smartphone: it’s ‘instruction tables’ (to use Turing’s phrase that later was changed into ‘software programs’) for logically processing information itself, and that can translate into knowledge itself, which not spy agencies from above, but the public from below, must control, if control over everything else is sought. Such a picture, introduced to the public from 2010 to 2012 by WikiLeaks Central (an adjacent but separate organization from WikiLeaks, including in terms of ideas and agenda), was challenging to see a decade ago, but based on offline conversations in Seattle anyway, with those roughly ages 25-30, I imagine many bright young people really into the Internet can see it more easily these days. It’s become all the more obvious, at least in broad strokes. Then again, it’s a picture that, though comprehensive and incisive, can quickly be overwritten for some when the louder, seemingly more accessible advertisements from various ideologies (e.g., Marxist groups) pop up, as they do nonstop here in Seattle, diverting people from taking on corporations and spy agencies (through mechanisms such as lawsuits, the Magnitsky Act, inventions, mutual aid infrastructure, etc.), toward smaller goals regrettably fleeting.
Now imagine refusing a defector from the IBM-Nazi collaboration
Wolfenstein 3d computer game from ’92. No information technology, no propaganda, just shoot, you grunt.
Pretend it’s the early 1940s and a higher-up at IBM’s German offices, perhaps one of the lowest executives in the C suite, goes to meet with the Nazis about more Hollerith machines they want for a planned concentration camp. The Nazis give him completed paperwork describing plans for the camp and what they expect from the Dehomag tabulators. Walking back to his office, our fictional employee, sickened by his collaboration with the Reich (sickening which began a few months back), decides to defect to the public. He worries passersby can see the growing sweat stains on his suit. Hell, he worries he’s going to bang right into another pedestrian, because he can’t focus on walking correctly for all the thoughts wheeling in his head: about the opposition newspaper he sometimes bought when no one was looking (telling himself it was out of mere curiosity), about an antifa group he heard gathered sometimes in the back of a nearby art gallery, and about his family, especially his son, who though ten and unusually talented at the violin — which won him enrollment at a special music conservatory — still has trouble reading simple German, and always seems disconnected from everything around him.
Antifa rally at Bunchenwald concentration camp, 1945. (Source)
That night, the defector pretends to his wife over the dinner she cooked that he has back pain forcing him to stand and not sit nor sleep. Then he stays awake into the small hours, drafting an anonymous letter stating his severe disagreement with IBM’s Dehomag. It’s something of a rant; it doesn’t mention the plans, nor does it make any threats to his employer. But it’s powerfully worded, and it does demand Dehomag drop its relationship with the Nazis. Between the lines, the letter conveys: Or else. He isn’t quite sure or else what, but then again, he’s now not quite sure how far he wants to go with this, or if he’ll chicken out and change his mind. Maybe it’s all just crazy thoughts arising from the back pain he really does sometimes have? And his son does love the conservatory — music is the only time he’s not spaced out. But the sun comes up and, after downing some coffee and putting on a suit without sweat stains, our defector leaves home for the office of the opposition press newspaper. His conversation with the editors, filled with specific details, lead them to conclude he’s telling the truth about who he is and the planned concentration camp, and the editors print his anonymous letter as soon as possible.
Switch from our defector focal character, to the back of the art hall, where indeed an antifa collective comes together the next afternoon. There are just three of them, one woman and two men, relatively inexperienced and young, not at all the hardened crew the defecting executive imagined. Perhaps against their better judgment, they’re proudly discussing the successful sabotage another antifa group apparently carried out last week, covertly cutting signalling cables. They lament reports of human cargo packed into freight cars, of people beat with batons. Then one of the men asks if the others saw the anonymous letter in the opposition newspaper. They haven’t, so the guy fills the rest in. He’s the most ungainly in the group, bookish and a little overweight. He says, “Through our contacts, we should find the person who wrote the anonymous letter, and help him break from Dehomag. He probably knows a lot. He probably has a lot of coworkers sympathizing with him. Fucking up Dehomag could really save lives, protect the vulnerable from the Reich.”
“What, are you joking?” says another of the men. “Those bourgeois businesspeople. They wear fancy suits, they have fancy salaries, and their kids go to fancy schools. I don’t want to do anything that benefits them.”
The ungainly guy blinks, staring startled at the other two as if they must know something he never has. Maybe the other man is simply dissing him in an effort to impress the woman (who’s turned aside to straighten a portrait hanging on the wall), but so petty a motivation is typically beyond his own rationale. He dismisses the possibility from his mind, which suddenly feels destabilized, dizzy somehow. There simply must be a logical misunderstanding somewhere. “No,” he says, “the beneficiaries of this effort would be the concentration camp prisoners, not the letter-writer.” The other man repeats himself: “I’m just not going to help those bougie business types.” Later the ungainly guy thinks, he could have added, The letter-writer is a means to an end: not palling around with him, but saving the victims. Besides, who knows what this letter-writer is really like; we have to find him first. Had he more social skill, he might also have said: You won’t try anything far riskier than trying to seduce women. The letter-writer opposing the Gestapo seems braver than you. But such conversational ability is beyond him, and his own background — his own suits and schools — hangs heavy in the silence. He stumbles away, not sure where he’s going, and realizes he could take a breather in the bathroom. As he opens the bathroom door, the other man heads for the portrait-straightening woman with a new grin stretching wider and wider across his face.
Who are your sympathies with in this admittedly thrown-together, cliche-ish story? I’d suppose people would support the defector, the irritatingly inept ungainly guy, the violin-playing child, and maybe the two women (although their stories are sadly only hinted at, if that).
From the 1988 NES video game Bionic Commando and my childhood.
But when something loosely analogous happened in summer 2018, when Microsoft employees anonymously told their employer to drop contracts with ICE, those I imagined would be sympathetic reacted in a way I didn’t expect. After reading the news of the Microsoft employees (presumably living in and around Seattle), I suggested to Seattle activists offline that we figure out who the anonymous Microsoft employees nearby were and support/encourage them in shutting down Microsoft’s contract with ICE. Perhaps we could bring them food, or introduce them to other activists, or something? I was shocked how many Seattle activists immediately balked at the idea of helping ICE camp prisoners by locating and offering strike support to rebelling Microsoft employees. The Microsoft employees don’t need their employer’s permission to cease coding and maintaining software platforms for ICE; they could just stop. But in that case, they’d definitely need support from wider society, which our conversation unfortunately quickly depicted as a bean-counting debate over whether the programmers, unknown to us personally, likely could or couldn’t afford to purchase their meals, rather than as an issue of support overall (including legal and emotional support and connecting with others). The balking activists cited software developers’ salaries and lifestyles as justification for choosing not to help ICE camp prisoners in this way. Decent disgreement might have been, say, if Microsoft drops their contract with ICE, wouldn’t la migra simply redirect to get the vanished help from another company instead, for instance Dell or IBM? Or, couldn’t Microsoft just hire more programmers to replace any striking ones refusing to code for ICE? Those weren’t the disagreements that happened. Despite posters in Seattle bedrooms calling upon viewers to #AbolishICE, deciding how to (not) accomplish that goal was based on affinity for apparently well-off programmers or lack of affinity thereof, as if abolishing ICE should be based on personality contests or who you would or wouldn’t go to a bar with. That being said, fortitude and social/verbal skill is required from anyone (including 2018-era me, who didn’t have enough of either) who suggests face to face that people collaborate in actually planning out and following through on doing something as huge as providing strike support to employees walking out on their jobs to challenge a Gestapo-like federal agency.
As the history of the Reich using IBM’s Hollerith machines shows, information technology is crucial in multiplying and structuring mass genocide, and in gaining control over the information associated with it, information people get used to and start taking for granted. Somebody should unplug that stuff, and not everyone in the world — of seven billion people, 190-odd countries, multiple major religions — is going to see eye to eye on lifestyle topics like suits and violins, and not everyone is going to come from the same background of economic class. Perhaps instead of using those differences as excuses for pettiness, we could use them as strengths. Am I missing something?
Unplugging the computer systems upon which ICE crucially depends would have, and still could, have a tremendous effect in fucking up la migra. I haven’t followed how the internal Microsoft rebellion has played out since the New York Times published the above-linked Microsoft anonymous employee letter in 2018, and I’m unsure what the present status of the ICE camps is. However, Reuters reported last month that the Biden administration wants to increase their funding by 22% supposedly to root out white supremacy, and I know from my day job that released children are making their way into the public school system, a system already overwhelmed for the usual reasons, plus trying to return in-person during coronavirus. I’d assume ICE camps are continuing as usual, and by default, I’d distrust messages from the blue religion saying all is well or will be shortly if we just trust the authorities, or messages from the red religion saying the White House is trying to overrun the country with terrorists by uncaging children.
As sources such as ItsGoingDown.org, Crimethinc.com, and search.twitter.com show, there are still people out there in the United States working to #AbolishICE in various ways. Focused on other concerns instead, I haven’t followed the topic as much as I should have. If anyone has any good leads on projects for abolishing ICE, or thoughts, please drop them in the comments.
Note: In 2021 I’ll publish one blog post per week. Here’s entry 12 of 52.
Screenshot of a tutorial for QBasic, a Microsoft programming language from the early nineties
In 2004, I began asking others to call me by my first name, Douglas. Before that, I’d been called a variant of my middle name (which I won’t share here for mundane privacy purposes). I wanted a fresh start, because I was just entering my first semester at a university, and also, I was annoyed by the various paperwork hassles seemingly everywhere when your legal name and the name you go by differ. For example, class rosters not specifying how you’re actually called encourage teachers to address you by what appears on the roster. Since many teachers labor under the unfair requirement that they educate very large class sizes, and thus face far too many students to always memorize the preferences of each successfully, try as they might, you as a student can go through months and months of unpleasantly trying to correct a teacher about your name, something that’s supposed to intimately characterize you. The indignity of being called wrongly is even more profound for those whose name changes signal giant shifts in their personhood, such as those who switch names as part of gender or religious transitions. Me, I just thought a fresh start and an end to the paperwork hassles would be nice.
Image from The Truman Show
It’s strange how names characterize us, isn’t it? Consider the eponymous name of the protagonist in the 1998 movie The Truman Show: unlike those around him pretending to be his neighbors, Truman is a true man. But names, at least when initially given, actually characterize the parents/caregivers, their aspirations for the infant who’s receiving some particular name in the first place. A sense of this reality is frequently missing from fiction, when authors pick a name to symbolize or allude to something about a character, rather than about that character’s parents or environment (including economic class). In other fiction, such disparities between a character’s true self and their name are portrayed, especially if the story involves a name change. While authors spend lots of time thinking over the given names characters go by among their peers, I think surnames in fiction don’t receive much scrutiny, particularly in terms of migration. If an author is writing a story set in 2030 in Nebraska, and currently in 2021 nearly all people alive with surname X live only in France, should the author provide backstory for why someone with surname X is living in Nebraska just nine years into the future? Or are surnames freebies for authors and readers alike? As long as it sounds good and plausible enough, maybe no bulletproof backstory is required. You could reduce such realism problems to absurdity by requiring an author depicting a coffeepot in a story to know how it got there, tracing it all the way back to the specific particles emerging from the Big Bang. On the other hand, books too often expect readers to assume narrators are white and show WASP-y names as the norm, presenting anything else as exceptions in need of explanations.
Since 2004, there’s been a certain discomfort with my first name, for many of those using it and me alike. I’m regularly asked the same question when meeting people: “Do you prefer Doug or Douglas?” The question stumped me for a very long time. Whenever I looked within, I discovered I legitimately don’t have a preference. Either is cool with me! So I couldn’t advise the question-askers, who as far as I could make out, wanted to be caring and accommodating. Just about every time I replied that I have no preference, the question-asker became frustrated. They said I should have a preference. But I didn’t. Maybe I hurt their feelings, as though they were going out of their way in offering to remember my preference, and my not having one stung like a rebuke, in some transactional world they exist in. Only this past month have I finally figured out something more about the question. I’ve been doing core strengthening in physical therapy to help with one of my legs (two surgeries on it in my life so far), and the physical therapist is extremely knowledgeable and competent. I like him, and I’m really grateful to have his excellent help. He told me he has a thing for trying to remember the best names to call people by. We were both a bit flummoxed by my lack of a preference between Doug or Douglas. I thought it over. I think the fact I get along well with this superb physical therapist enabled me to see something more about the question and my lack of a preference.
Here’s the answer, what’s been the answer all along: Doug and Douglas are the same name — just at different diction levels. Doug is informal; Douglas is formal. Compare “What’s up, Doug?” with “Listen, Douglas, we need to have a talk.” They’re the same name in two different forms. I don’t want to micromanage which level of formality my interlocutor picks for any particular conversation. I trust the appropriate diction level can just emerge naturally, simply from both parties’ interactions and the environment at large. Because I realized all this just a few weeks ago, I haven’t had the opportunity to test it out in real life yet. But the next time someone asks me, Do you prefer Doug or Douglas?, I’m going to tell them one’s for informal, the other’s for formal, and that they can select between the two as they think proper. I wonder what will happen. As long as they don’t call me Doogie.
Original hardback cover of Sturgeon’s best-known novel
A common thread in the above — asking others to use my first name (revealingly, sometimes frenemies from the past still don’t, pointedly refusing to honor my request); trying to justify to readers a surname’s presence in a geographic location and time period; attempting to explain to strangers that the two forms of a single name are for different diction levels — is a sense of individuals having to legitimize their names, and perhaps themselves, to others. Names are usually social, bestowed upon us and by us as we pass life down through generations. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, each character on an anarchist moon has but one name, handed out by a central computer registry to keep things organized. In contrast to this socially-focused system, in Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 novel More Than Human, there’s a gripping moment when the first character we encounter, a lonely outsider, finally names himself. Initially, “Men turned away from him, women would not look”; however, after roughly five years living and working with the Prodd farming family, he learns to speak, though “always he preferred not to.” Eventually the farmer Mr Prodd asks him for his name (get it? Prodd as in prodding him). Because he has come to trust Mr Prodd, he’s able to fulfill this request. He thinks that a name “is the single thing which is me and what I have done and been and learned.” Despite his growing connection with the Prodds, he picks the name Alone, which he can manage to pronounce merely as a single syllable, Lone. That seems very individualist, but he chooses a name only when someone else asks him for it, so it’s an event both personal and social. (The book later follows Lone gathering what Sturgeon calls a gestalt, kind of a chosen family, from other outlier outsiders.) Does a person living on a desert island like a castaway need a name at all? Might they forget their own name? Finally, look at the concept of true names in Le Guin’s Earthsea fiction. Characters and objects in that univese have two names, a common one that’s safely shareable, and a second, secret, true name that empowers them and gives others power over them if it’s discovered. In neither case, however, are the names chosen.
Internet Relay Chat, what I was doing in the nineties
Online, as in certain types of radio communication, users choose handles, also known as pseudonyms or simply nyms. These lessen tendencies in conversation/debate toward the logical fallacies of personal attacks and arguments from authority, where interlocuters waste time saying “You only believe that because you are [insert identity attribute here]”, as in, because you’re tall/short/rich/poor/white/of color, etc. With nyms, individuals can choose personally meaningful ways to describe themselves, and the handles can become so meaningful that among those heavily involved in computers (or perhaps simply involved in online chatting), it’s common to go by the handles even in face-to-face conversation, rather than by legal names. Some users, in contrast, choose random characters (for example: ang) to identify themselves, not wanting to give their personal story away to strangers. And some change nyms frequently, rebooting their name over and over, trying to prevent others from assuming things based on what might have been past interactions with the person. When I play around with it, this aspect of computing (akin to writing under a psuedonym) can feel very liberating.
Must everything be so stressful?
It seems names should be a touching aspect of life, and fun to ponder, but they’re commonly just another battleground. Picking a name can feel empowering (because how could an unchosen name really represent/express who you are?), while keeping a name bestowed by others can offer connection linking the past, present, and future together. Maybe, like successful accounts of trauma that provide healing, names need to be simultaneously personally meaningful, and effective and connecting in social contexts. Really thinking names through, as opposed to dissociation from life (“it’s all a blur”), as well as good relationships for experimenting with names, seem very helpful for individuals trying to determine what might be their own best path.
Note: In 2021 I’ll publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays. Here’s entry 4 of 52.Barely made it this time, on Saturday night!
Note: The second half of my two posts on Biden will come in February.
Note (added Sunday 31 January ’21): Motivations of the diverse r/wallstreetbets members can be found by searching the subreddit. From my readings of it, the community seems to largely share a disparagement of institutional investors, and a disdain for hedge funds shorting and destroying companies (not to mention their impact on the trade economy at large), though they sometimes admire various top dogs in the Wall Street world. To look further into the subreddit’s motivations and/or vibe, you might start by checking out the post histories of its members u/DeepFuckingValue, u/stonksflyingup, and the subreddit’s Ask Me Anything from Friday.My purpose is not to lionize these users, whose numbers are too large to permit easy generalization anyway, but to explain what’s happening and point to further texts that readers interested in the topic might consider digging into.
This past week, many among the now seven million-plus members of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets pushed a hedge fund, Wall Street financier Gabe Plotkin’s Melvin Capital, to close out its short position in the video game retailer Gamestop. With a few billion dollars, Melvin had bet against the beloved yet beleaguered Texas-based store. The subredditors persuaded each other to buy Gamestop stock en masse, boosting the price dramatically and causing Melvin to hemorrhage financial value. Plotkin’s peers on Wall Street then infused Melvin Capital with massive funds to keep it afloat, but the fund still had to flee the Gamestop battle. By then, Melvin had reportedly lost a stunning third of its assets, at the hands of average (apparently mostly U.S.-based) Internet users.
Following the same rules as the hedge funds, the subredditors won this round of the capitalism board game, thanks to their large numbers. Similar situations happen with unions. Corporations band together in cartels, increasing their number and power, to control markets; paid-workers unite in trade unions to (try to) control markets as well. Each side calls the other criminal cheaters, with the illegalities of the rich far outweighing those of the middle class and poor struggling to survive. Governments attempt to intervene as their donors and blackmailers wish, aiming to keep up the ongoing exchange of goods/services without which civilization would have to change paradigm.
Some of the subredditors are expressing surprise that various Wall Streeters aren’t taking their side. r/wallstreetbets has been stanning Dr Michael Burry of Scion Asset Management for a year-plus, presumably a partial result of the investor’s name recognition from the 2015 hit movie The Big Short. They are now realizing he’s dissing them publicly. That was on Tuesday, when in a tweet he soon deleted, Burry tagged the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement arm and wrote of the market battle: “what is going on now – there should be legal and regulatory repercussions. This is unnatural, insane, and dangerous.” Burry owned 1.7 million GameStop shares last September; assuming he hadn’t changed his position, the subredditors, without aiming to benefit him, just gave him a bonanza of nearly a quarter billion dollars, almost 1400% in four months, on paper anyway, and he still called for legal repercussions against them.
It looks quite like Burry can’t abide rubbing elbows with the several million ordinary people on the subreddit, can’t let his class status slip, despite them praising him for months and months and possibly handing him a gigantic windfall. No, Burry wants the rabble hordes arbitrarily blocked from doing what hedge funds like Melvin Capital or his do.
More big names than Burry are troubled that the public beat a hedge fund at the capitalism competition. Others of the ruling class are calling for an investigation into r/wallstreetbets, treating everyday folks playing capitalism like the game it is as a potential crime. Financial apps such as Interactive Brokers abruptly blocked the users’ ability to buy Gamestop shares (and other stocks also involved) and, it appears, Robinhood Markets sold away shares of users who’d bought Gamestop on margin, something reportedly permitted by their one-sided terms of service but in opposition to userbase trust. Like The Daily Show (corporate television) smearing Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011, the fourth branch has rushed to describe the redditors condescendingly (the audience for the news media are the politicos and intelligenstia of the status quo, not the public). The Biden administration, which as rent deadlines approach has yet to deliver the promised $2000 stimulus cheques, is “monitoring the situation.” But forces as disparate as Republican senator Ted Cruz and Democratic House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been lining up behind the subredditors.
The capitalists’ own propaganda paints them as shrewd alpha males who deserve their yachts and affluenza legal defenses as reward for their (or their parents’) trading skill, yet the moment unions or the public, following the rules, or at least the logic, of the money game, manage to exploit a weakness in the ruling class’s position on the game board, the powerful overturn that board and bring out force. Consider the disproportionate targeting that happens in meatspace. Fancy restaurants place tents and tables on nearby public grass by a sidewalk without significant hassle from the authorities, perhaps mere food safety regulation assessments; homeless people pitching a tent in the same spots will face violent sweeps from security forces. Well-to-do civic associations can shut down streets for parades, stopping vehicles, but Black Lives Matter protesters objecting to street executions by cops will be arrested or worse for doing the same thing, while reactionary legislators in multiple states strive to legalize running over traffic-blocking protestors. Thus, it’s not about who has the best knack for surviving and thriving in a trade civilization, because once the public discovers an effective tactic, the ruling class knocks them back down and then sets the board in position again, acting like everything’s back to normal business hours.
The illogic continues to the economic system as a whole. The dangerous effort of creating humanity in the first place by giving birth does not pay, but building tasers or using them to kill people, including those diagnosed with mental health problems, does pay. Less dramatic examples can be found too. Substitute teachers are paid to bone up on their subjects during certain hours of the day (planning periods) but not during other hours (evenings), and the students aren’t paid to learn. Therapists get paid to help clients overcome addictions, but aren’t paid to work to overcome their own addictions. An economic system is just a board game, often with moneytokens (or other tokens such as indulgences to buy from priests to get into heaven). If the board game doesn’t make sense, there is every reason to start playing a different one.
Fairness, but to what end?
To date, much of the conversation around r/wallstreetbets has focused on the lack of fairness in the financial system. Humans have an innate desire for fair treatment, as observed in experiments on primates, and more simply, as observed in children. Debates over whether $10/hour, $15/hour, $20/hour, or some other rate constitutes fair pay are perennial (why not an arbitrary amount like $50,000.000033785/hour?). For instance, James Joyce’s protagonist Mr Duffy tired of such predictable and myopic talk in the author’s short story “A Painful Case” published more than a century ago in 1914. People have taken for granted that a wage system is it, and got hung up on comparing who gets paid how much, for a very long time. But the understandable call for fairness is simply a starting point. Questioning and ultimately replacing the wage/trade system itself is more important.
Just because a game is fair, doesn’t mean it’s good. Bad games, neutral games, or good games can all be either fair or unfair according to whether the rules are followed, or not, by whichever sides. Like fossil fuel companies, Billionaire A and Billionaire B can compete in the capitalism game to see who can drive humanity extinct most profitably. Their capitalism competition can be played fairly, or unfairly, but either way, we all end up dead. In the hundreds of thousands of years of humanity (not just 2500 years back to ancient Greeks), we have organized the production and distribution of goods/services into multiple different economic systems across multiple different civilizations, with a variety of results. Those experiments wait outside the corporate media spotlight, so fixed as the news spotlight is on mesmerizing everyone with the vastly overemphasized war criminal politicians or those seeking to replace them with saleable identity labels. Further, the emphasis on left brain charts describing the production, circulation, and distribution of goods, from Royal Society fellows like Karl Marx (also a racist), merely scratch the surface of what’s going on with humanity. Underneath, we want not to hoard abstract money-tokens; we want to feel good, get to know each other and ourselves, explore, share, grow, and so on. It is possible to organize production and distribution in ways that respect this.
More detail would take too long for a blog post, so here are some suggested readings for people interested in this topic to pursue. As the trade system continues its slow implosion, and the oncoming effects of global warming increasingly throw lives into disarray, it’s a good time to explore alternatives. It’s not unrealistic; every day, people quit their paid-jobs to go shut down pipelines or reunite with nature or try any other number of outside-the-box ideas. Thus to conclude, the short list of texts involving economics (and the personal relationships and emotions below the surface level of existence described by economics) that readers might find helpful.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1985)
To know what came before, try Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers (1953, seventh edition 1999) and reading canonical economics texts firsthand. Those canonical economics texts can be old and written with archaic language and examples, so check sites such as OpenCulture.com to find secondary sources to help with understanding
Marcus Brancaglione’s Universal Basic Income (2016), translated into English by Marcio Rolim and Fabiana Cecin
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Here’s this week’s post, the one for Week 7…a few days late—try asking for a refund?
Note: This post obviously belongs, as Part 3, to a series of posts about my trip from Seattle, where I reside, to British Columbia in Summer 2019.Here’s the completedseries, a USian escapes the bubble: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and (forthcoming) Part 4.
Uh, USians…are missing almost all the world
When I was preparing for my adventure, my acquaintances, much like the border g̶o̶d̶ guard, asked me what I was planning to do. Would I visit the Butchart Gardens? “It is so lovely, and it looks much better during the day than at night, and [on and on].” Years ago, planning for a different adventure, a road trip across half the United States, I was asked my take on whether the route should have us see Nature or cities. “Neither,” I said. “We should see people.”
To learn what likely simpatico people in Victoria were thinking and feeling and doing, and to bring that psychic samizdat back to Seattle, I primarily had in mind, even from the early planning phases, three missions: 1) check out the anarchist bookstore Camas Books & Infoshop; 2) check out and participate with Food Not Bombs Victoria; and 3) check out and participate with whatever alternative mental health stuff might be springing up in the city. Much of my offline activism my first few years in Seattle involved Seattle Food Not Bombs (especially as a driver!) and working with folks in or around, uh, the Seattle chapter of the, uh, Hearing Voices Network, which as you know is the oldest academic honor society in the United States complete with secret handshake, engraved golden key, and notable members including US presidents and Supreme Court justices, Ursula K. Le Guin, Henry Kissinger, and me. Aiming to improve my irl understanding of subject matters like (radical) education, food security, and replacingdumbass psychiatry, I hoped to gain a bit bigger view of the world, to escape the typically reactionary USian default me me me dolla dolla bill lol unrealistic fake newslol me me medolla dolla bill — and also, to just interact with everyday Victoria people hanging out, the ordinary Victoria public transit system, and so on. That seemed far more valuable to me than tourist traps. In Seattle my hands have been nicely dirty with real life, so why would I not want that elsewhere?
So, this post covers those three — successful! — missions, each of which took place on a different day of my adventure. I didn’t take any photos of the missions, however, so throughout this Part 3, I’ll rely on others’ photos or funny images.
Find the real people? I’m not afraid to die! (Source)
Mission one: Camas, anarchist bookstore in Victoria (Wikipedia). They recently sent out this communiqué regarding supporting Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en camps’ resistance against proposed pipelines in the area, (Amnesty; blockades shut railways across Canada), which I unfortunately know little about. I walked to Camas from my hostel, something of a 1̶.̶2̶5̶-̶m̶i̶l̶e̶ 2̶.̶1̶-̶k̶i̶l̶o̶m̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ 2.1-kilometre hike one way. I arrived, looked around inside at several of the same books that already existed on my bookshelves back home, and got into a great conversation with a staffperson there. I told him about the drop in ambient anxiety in Victoria relative to the United States, and how I assumed that was due in part to the universal health insurance and the lack of mass shootings. He said he understood how I would perceive Victoria that way, but from his vantage point, everything seemed too calm. “Unrest,” he said, “is best.”
From the Camas Books & Infoshop websiteAlso from the Camas Books & Infoshop website
Camas is really cool. Relative to other anarchist bookstores I’ve been to in the United States, Camas much more strongly emphasized First Nations or indigenous related material. Were I living in Victoria, or staying for a longer duration, I’d go back to get some different books, meet people, find out about projects, etc. Camas is open daily. Fantastic. Just typing this, I miss it, and wish I were there chilling out in those chairs, reading a book, waiting for an intriguing passerby to inevitably come in and strike up conversation far more interesting than what I usually hear offline.
(In middle school, I drew anarchy signs into my handwritten name and drew them into the steam on the shower door at home. Maybe I saw them first on nineties electric guitars, or maybe on the ANSI art of bulletin board systems. That kid and this adult would get along well.)
Mission two: Food Not Bombs Victoria. Part of the global conspiracy to feed people. Gathering surplus food leftover from restaurants, distributors, and other sources, then cooking it and bringing it to a downtown park, on a shoestring budget, and sharing it with everyone, particularly people who might really need it. All the world has chapters, so if you’re looking to help someone yourself, instead of voting for someone to instruct someone to instruct someone to consider another vote or two or thousand about paying someone to instruct someone to pay someone to instruct someone to pay someone to pay someone to pay someone to maybe help someone someday — or not — and plus you can make friends and participate in your community…why then, go find a Food Not Bombs in your area or start one.
ALERT THE SEATTLE POPULATION IS SHARING FOOD ALERTFood Not Bombs Victoria, from their facebook page
Having FNB-ed quite a while in Seattle, I got in touch with the amazingly welcoming Food Not Bombs Victoria folks, because I was curious how FNB would compare/contrast up there. And I was hungry!
At an apartment, I joined a handful of cooks. Really cool, right, here I am in another country a few days, and already I’m in an apartment with a bunch of friendly local strangers, working on a common cause. And yes, as you might remember from Part 2, everything in this apartment was likewise smaller than the objects would be in the counterpart US apartment. As I recall, even the sink water handles were smaller! The donated food was gathered, I think, primarily from a co-op grocery. With what was then my usual klutzy difficulty, I helped make a salad with sliced cucumber, carrots, a little kale, some sprouts, etc., and another person made a dressing for it with vinegar and various oils. The rest of the food made was similarly standard FNB-style cuisine. We then transported the food from the apartment to the downtown square/park, Centennial Square on the Douglas(!) street side, where the sharing is held every Sunday — also where, years ago, Occupy Victoria encamped.
At the park, the meal was held under a large tree, upon whose branches an FNBer hung an impressively large Food Not Bombs Victoria sign. The black sign had a lot of colorful graphics and words on it (sorry, no photo!). If I recall correctly, Food Not Bombs Victoria also supplied some local literature, zines, etc. About 20 individuals dined on this most scrumptious meal. That included random businesspeople passing by, various park denizens (such as skateboarders), multiple homeless or traveler or otherwise off the radar humans, plus some FNBers who hadn’t cooked with us but wanted to hang out.
FNB Victoria implemented two good ideas others might want to pick up. First, not only did FNB Victoria bring to the park a box of clean, re-usable mugs, cups, bowls, and cutlery, but also, many, perhaps most, of those sharing generally already knew to use those implements and then place them back in the box after eating. These bowls, pieces of cutlery, etc. would later be washed by FNB Victoria and used the next week. Second, the sharers mostly arranged themselves in a lazy circle around the tree. As opposed to FNBers on one side of a table and non-FNBers on the table’s opposing side, FNB Victoria’s organically emerged quasi-circle seating/standing arrangement felt very not us vs. them to me.
Movie Monday in Victoria BC, 25+ years running. Website.
Mission three: Alternative mental health. Before ferrying to Victoria, I pinged my contacts involved in that movement, seeking suggestions for my trip. To my knowledge, Victoria has no Hearing Voices Network chapter, then or now, but someone did point me to Movie Monday. It’s a weekly series of eclectic and thoughtful films, often with presentations and discussions. Free admission, donations encouraged. The 100-seat theater is in the same building as a (now closed down, I believe) psychiatric ward. In 1993, Movie Monday coordinator Bruce Saunders was held at that ward, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Stuck there, he got the idea to show movies at the unused theater, because quality education and entertainment and conversation are as needed as food in life. He continues to coordinate Movie Monday, and it has been going for more than 25 years (listen to this seven-minute MP3 interview with him). The movies aren’t always about mental health topics and aren’t just for audiences interested in that subject. Movie Monday started that way, but has since expanded to other subject matters. When I went, we watched Six Primrose, about a food security project in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
After the movie, a short discussion took place among the audience. I learned about some resources, people, etc. for alternative mental health interests in Vancouver BC. Those I can pursue on my next adventure to British Columbia!
Waiting at the bus stop to return from Movie Monday to the hostel, I got into a conversation with a random Canadian woman also waiting for the transit ride. I tried to ask her questions about Canada, but she easily and repeatedly diverted the conversation back to the United States.
“Why,” she wanted to know, “won’t they fix their country? Or, why don’t they just leave?” (Apparently I myself had temporarily become a nomad, resident of nowhere.)
Although I don’t know all the answers to her questions, perhaps you reading know some of them for yourself. The best I can do for motivation at the moment is to compare my whole adventure to the excitement expressed in the amazing 2015 song “Go!” by the band Public Service Broadcasting, about the spaceflight that put the first humans on the Moon. Listen, and I’ll keep trying to talk USians into traveling with Part 4 of this series next week!
Reading Jonathan Simon’s Code Red or Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting or the Brennan Center for Justice’s “The Machinery of Democracy” impresses upon you the full knowledge that votes in the United States are typically captured (by touchscreen, optical device scanning ballots, or other) and counted (by Dominion, Command Central, or other) in pitch dark: by corporations and contractors running without transparency, with closed source. Often, not even election administrators can audit details.
Unlike Australians, Germans, the Dutch, and others around the world who vote on hand-marked paper ballots hand-counted in public, and who have successfully fought off the recent far-right electoral wave, basically nobody in the United States these days receives any hard evidence at all that their ballot scribbles/tappings mattered. If on Election Day your goal is to change electoral outcomes, rather than to merely perform a civic religion ritual, then of course informed action is required to safeguard election systems, though continuing to replace the whole current governance system itself would be wiser and here’s how that’s already underway.
Exceptions aside, securing elections means securing both vote capture (i.e., how your vote is recorded) and vote counting (i.e., how your vote is added to the totals, nowadays in secretive faraway computer systems) — so that there is hard evidence of both how your vote was captured and how it was counted. Interestingly, and unfortunately, in her tweet today Harris mentions only the vote capture part, and not the vote counting part.
With the topic of safeguarding elections likely to keep bubbling up throughout this year, it helps to keep in mind writer Jennifer Cohn’s advice that election integrity advocates diligently put the adjective “hand-marked” in front of the noun phrase “paper ballots” because:
Thx! We must now specify “hand marked” bc vendors have expanded the meaning of “paper ballot” to include crappy machine marked printouts w/ barcodes generated by universal use Ballot Marking Devices, (BMDs) that most experts advise against. #HandMarkedPaperBallots 1/ pic.twitter.com/FPA4N9U9p0
Kamala Harris’ tweet reminded me of Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner now behind bars, because in the past few years, public interest in the topic of elections integrity and hand-marked paper ballots (public interest partially required for a major politician to take on any subject) has certainly increased, partly a result of Winner leaking to the media intelligence revealing Russian military hackers executed cyberattacks against US election systems just days before November 2016’s voting. You can learn more about Winner’s case and supporting her clemency petition here or watch this CSPAN video to see how her deed kept Russiagate and elections integrity in the public discourse.
What most of all strikes me about today’s tweet from Kamala Harris is that the Bureau of Prisons, who currently confines Reality Winner, has denied journalists, such as CNN and me, access to interview her in person behind bars — so, who oversees the Bureau of Prisons (part of the Department of Justice) — the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, the latter of which Kamala Harris sits on!
“critical role in providing oversight of the Department of Justice…agencies under” such as the Bureau of Prisons
So with Kamala Harris’ tweet juxtaposed against Reality Winner’s story, we have:
1. US senator Kamala Harris calls for incomplete elections integrity reform
2. While the Bureau of Prisons is silencing the whistleblower who helped make that conversation possible in the first place
3. The senator in question, by virtue of sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is tasked with overseeing the Bureau of Prisons, and hasn’t done anything for Reality Winner (not that I’m aware of)
4. Even though I told the senator face to face about the Bureau of Prisons silencing Reality Winner at Harris’ September 27, 2019 event in Seattle
Underneath the glitzy world where a top senator grabs thousands of retweets by offering an incomplete solution to a problem, without assisting the whistleblower confined in silence for pointing the issue out … a public who knows better daydreaming that the thoughts and prayers of evidence-free voting will somehow victoriously sneak-attack presidential administrations tearing apart everything else, so why would they refuse to further corrupt the vote captures and vote countings …
Even though voting landslides might win elections (by overpowering whatever rigging is done), it’s still completely mandatory that we achieve public, observable vote counting, as WeCountNow offers, insofar as the failed concept of millions trying to come to consensus on topics that often don’t affect them much or at all and that they often don’t know much or anything about, is to continue. Help WeCountNow and/or join others in continuing to implement newconcepts?
There are various organizations ranging from FairFight to NAACP to NEDC to (probably MoveOn) and state-level orgs.
The problem is HOW DO YOU PROTECT IT?? We can fight voter suppression but votecount manipulation is NOT DIRECTLY OBSERVABLE. We do forensics – they shrug and yawn. pic.twitter.com/l5rcu8HBa0
As for Reality Winner: open, participatory governance means none shall be silenced and all must have the right to communicate. Otherwise, not everyone is included, not everyone’s input is available. Since the Bureau of Prisons has blocked journalists from interviewing Reality Winner, preventing the public from hearing her at scale, the current within-the-system remedies remaining are: apply again for interview access (the Bureau of Prisons told me they consider each interview request separately), try the judicial branch (lawsuits etc), or pressure the federal legislature (members of the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee seem the right place to start).
I’ll post more about my efforts toward interviewing Reality Winner in a few weeks. If anyone else makes related efforts, please let me know in the comments!
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays —or two days late when I’m busy talking into a microphone at federal Congresspeople and switching from cooking with Pacific Foods coconut milk to cooking with Aroy-D coconut milk, each of those matters more complex than they might initially seem. Anyway, here’s today’s post, the one for Week 5.
Note: My first two blog posts this year, and last week’s, have all been updated a tiny bit. You might want to check out particularly the updates to my post about Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner’s clemency petition.
Note: This post obviously belongs, as Part 2, to a series of posts about my trip from Seattle, where I reside, to British Columbia in Summer 2019.Here’s the completed series, a USian escapes the bubble: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and (forthcoming) Part 4.
You-ess-eee-in. U-S-i-a-n. You-ess-eee-in. USian. Got it.
After leaving the border station and entering Victoria, I was amazed at how calm everyone was around me, at the immediate drop in ambient anxiety relative to the United States. I wondered if this was perhaps due to my current location in a touristy area, right by the border station and downtown attractions such as the British Columbia parliament buildings and the surrounding fancy statues. Or if the presence of universal health insurance coverage, next to no mass shootings, and a pervasive metric system might deserve the credit. Before leaving in earnest the area just around the border station — much like putting your shoes back on once through the TSA pornoscope — I took some time to fiddle with my backpack and figure out my OpenStreetMap.
The first Mapsco, uploader unknown. Company seems to still exist
Yeah, my time in Canada began with tinkering with OpenStreetMap, a significantly helpful component of this adventure. Directions without Google is a thing. OpenStreetMap somehow reminded me of science fiction and fantasy maps. If you originally hail from Texas, as I gloriously do, you might remember those old Mapsco books allowing travelers to find streets on a printed grid to explore their hometowns. Maybe we’ve been mapping ever since we first figured out how, real and fictional worlds alike.
And if you are from VARN-4, you might remember this…OpenStreetMap: Clipper terminal, Victoria BC Here be no dragons
Backpack secured, map in hand, I headed for the hostel. Along the way, drivers moved their cars with infinitesimal slowness, stopping for anyone within kilometers who might be pondering crossing a street someday in their lives. I kept looking around, bewildered. Where was, where was… was… something? Something was missing. No edginess anywhere. I was looking around for the absent anxiety like it might have been an overshadowed tree or lost ballcap, as some think God or envy should be objects, and if you can’t spot them in a (tele/micro)scope, they can’t exist. All this made me smile. I continued forward. Along the way, I saw an officialdom building for tourists and went in. I asked to convert some of my US dollars to Canadian dollars and stared at the result in my palm. What, exactly, is a loonie, what is a toonie, why are prices typically rounded to .05 increments, what coins will the hostel laundry machines expect, and why aren’t there any cops anywhere?
Little details differed constantly from the United States, keeping me wide awake and very alive. Canadian bills are super thin, and all week, I thought I was going to accidentally tear one removing it from my wallet. During World War II, creeping toward a full century ago, my grandfather, a highly capable man who ‘did a thing’ (or ten), like operate a bulldozer and repair septic tanks and run a gas station and supervise a school, wrote to his local print newspaper in East Texas explaining in terms possibly considered offensive today what people on the other side of the planet looked like. Makes sense, right, what else were they going to do eighty-odd years ago in that Deep South pocket of Texas to determine how tall or short these mysterious faraway strangers were, besides communicate with traveling human beings about it, including those travelers who might at times use words considered in some lonely ZIP code to be noncompliant, or even worse, unfamiliar? Heck, maybe (hopefully?) things I’m saying in this post will strike knowledgeable others in the far future as backward.
Time marches on, and new challenges keep humans constantly adapting and growing stronger — plenty of people don’t want that. We USians proudly know we can ask corporate Alexa/Siri about, say, Canadian bills and come across information regarding their thinness and maintain the superiority complex we USians all seem trained to have about being very stable geniuses (as most of us hide under our beds afflicted with chronic helplessness). And yet that mild fear, all week, of accidentally ripping the Canadian bills made me, perhaps like Mary the Color Scientist, amazed at how much there is in this gigantic world, 190-odd countries and seven billion non-USians, that most of my offline acquaintances and I do not know, in any meaningful sense, sometimes not even at the googling, pixels-on-screens level, since to learn about something unfamiliar usually requires first hearing about something unfamiliar, and then not snarling: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.” If you have friends who will ask for the definition of an unfamiliar word when you use it, hang on to them…
Entering the hostel, I was met with a hilarious employee behind the desk, who was blasting Al Jazeera. In 2001 two US bombs destroyed an Al Jazeera office in Kabul, in 2003 a US missile attack hit an Al Jazeera office in Baghdad and killed a reporter, plus a leaked memo from a 2004 Blair-Bush II discussion, re: how about doing some more of that, was subjected to media gagging in the UK that looks to still be ongoing (source, source). Besides the moneychanger and the border g̶o̶d̶ guard, this was pretty much the first Canadian I would speak with at any length on this trip. And my country had bombed his favorite news network repeatedly. He was from another country originally and was eventually headed for yet another — migration that, while rarely spoken of or even imagined by hordes of USians (tons of exceptions), seemed a common feature of many I spoke with in British Columbia — and he’d passed through Los Angeles a while back. After I made my appreciation for Al Jazeera known, he passed on to me his conclusion from L.A.: “The United States has two types of people: the terrifying, and the terrified.” Nodding, I said, “And neither knows it.”
The hostel was really cool. I hadn’t quite known what to expect from online reviews and threads, as I’d never stayed in a hostel before, but everything went straightforwardly.
Nice place ya got there / we got here
A desktop computer offered easy Internet access, a lending library supplied books for half-asleep travelers to rest on their bellies while dozing on the couches, the few laundry machines were constantly in use by everyone, the kitchen had ample refrigerator space, cooking gear, and conversation, and there was a television room — I basically never watch TV, except maybe some downloaded Star Trek or Twilight Zone now and then, but I thought briefly watching Canadian news might be interesting. It was. The hosts discussed their differences with excessive politeness and grammatically correct, syntactically complex sentences. Changing channels at random, I finally understood why my decades-long Internet friend in the Canadian Prairies region had an email address ending in @shaw.ca. I mean, I knew Shaw Communications was a giant Canadian telecommunications company, but there it was, right there, a few y̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ m̶e̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ metres in front of me on an everyday Canadian television screen. While stereotypes of the dumb USian might come to mind, and I’m writing a bit like that for humor, during none of this trip did I actually feel stupid, not because of a superiority complex, but because everything seemed really fun and exciting to experience, to learn about.
My bed for a week
One practical tip regarding sleeping. At night, my backpack was locked up in a locker, right? With a padlock and key. So where would I put the key while sleeping? I didn’t want to give it to anyone or hide it. My only remaining option, seemingly, was putting it in my shorts pocket — which had no zipper. As I rolled around in my sleep, the key came out of my pocket a few nights, and once or twice almost slipped down into the crack between my bed and the wall. Tip? From now on, shorts with zipper pockets.
Vegan food from Green Cuisine
Early on, I checked out Green Cuisine Vegetarian Restaurant, where I finally experienced one of the most common observations about the United Status versus other countries, an observation that does actually penetrate the USian hive mind somewhat. Yes, I’m talking about portion sizes. At the Green Cuisine buffet restaurant and everywhere else in Victoria, the plates, the bowls, the booths, the bar stool cushions, and the derrières atop those bar stool cushions, were smaller than their USian counterparts. I think the degree to which I had packed my bowls (see photo) drew some startled looks from the polite staff! And it wasn’t just restaurants and derrières. Victoria’s office buildings were shorter, the bus stop benches were narrower, and the tiny lots of the very few car dealerships I walked past were rather apologetic for existing at all. Whereas North Texas is one sprawling mass of enormous strip malls and totalitarian car dealerships. Prices (adjusting for conversion) were smaller too. In Seattle, the equivalent of the pictured meal might run you up toward $20 USD or above, easy. In Victoria, around $10 USD. (Tack on an .05 for Canadian dollars…kidding.) And of course, I grew up where this $21 USD meal is normal (from Allen Texas, 2019):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoMMAlIll4A
I hasten to add that while definitely preferring Seattle to Texas, after moving to the US Pacific Northwest, I’ve come to appreciate many things about Texas that I didn’t appreciate while living there — but that’s a whole ‘nother k̶e̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶i̶s̶h̶ blog post, I reckon, y’hear?
Think about migrating, or just traveling, like algebra, where your geographic location is the term outside the parentheses, and it distributes to each term inside the parentheses, affecting each one. Since we’re living our best lives already, and we aren’t just daily growing stupider as we age confined in cubicles and helplessly hiding under our beds all day watching Frasier in the same ZIP code we were born in, certainly we all remember the distributive property in algebra:
5(a + b + c + d) = 5a + 5b + 5c + 5d
Similarly, geographic locations, starting with Fort Worth Texas:
Ft. Worth(a + b + c + d) = Ft. Worth(a) + Ft. Worth(b) + Ft. Worth(c) + Ft. Worth(d)
Seattle(a + b + c + d) = Seattle(a) + Seattle(b) + Seattle(c) + Seattle(d)
Victoria(a + b + c + d) = Victoria(a) + Victoria(b) + Victoria(c) + Victoria(d)
Now replace the variables a, b, c, and d with various conditions affecting your life, day to day and throughout your life span:
a: safety of air (lack of air pollution) b: savings on cost of living (lower prices and so on) c: rarity of mass shootings d: education level of the public, of professionals, etc. And whichever additional variables.
Which of course gives us:
Ft. Worth(air safety + savings on cost of living + rarity of mass shootings + education) = Ft. Worth(air safety) + Ft. Worth(savings on cost of living) + Ft. Worth(rarity of mass shootings) + Ft. Worth(education) + etc.
Seattle(air safety + savings on cost of living + rarity of mass shootings + education) = Seattle(air safety) + Seattle(savings on cost of living) + Seattle(rarity of mass shootings) + Seattle(education) + etc.
Victoria(air safety + savings on cost of living + rarity of mass shootings + education) = Victoria(air safety) + Victoria(savings on cost of living) + Victoria(rarity of mass shootings) + Victoria(education) + etc.
Surely you get the idea: while it’s great, in truth mandatory, to improve yourself in this or that regard as an individual, it can upgrade multiple factors impacting your life a lot faster by just picking up and migrating to a better place. As opposed to, say, the individualization of social problems or what’s sometimes called the fundamental attribution error. More simply, from the originator herself of a recent but already well-known quotation:
Obviously, life and locations can be a lot more complicated, and even those with a lot of say in the matter choose to live in certain places only for all kinds of reasons. Some of the most amazing people I’ve met so far have lived in the same house their entire life. Still, I think the above is very worth considering, with far more seriousness than it generally is given.
However, often it’s not logic, like that above, that moves us to make huge leaps in our lives. Instead, it’s our hearts, our dreams, our art… So to conclude this installment, I’ll leave you with the song “I’m Not From Here” from fellow Texan (I’ll always be one) James McMurtry. An excerpt of his lyrics for the song follows. Until next week.
We can’t help it
We just keep moving
It’s been that way since long ago
Since the Stone Age, chasing the great herds
We mostly go where we have to go
Last summer I took a trip alone from Seattle, where I reside, to British Columbia. That was my first trip by myself to another country. Gauging by the stress that multiple acquaintances say they experience when considering just looking at the passport application form, I am not the only USian for whom exiting the bubble of THE ONLY COUNTRY ON THE PLANET ACCORDING TO THE ONLY COUNTRY ON THE PLANET feels overwhelming. Thus, instead of immediately plunging into an overnight quest to visit all 190-odd countries in the world and get to know all seven billion non-USian human souls, I decided to start small: merely ride a Clipper boat northward and sleep in a Victoria hostel for a week, then voyage homeward via same ferry southbound.
Yeah, um, how do we pronounce USian, y’all?
Propaganda against leaving the States is everywhere, and conversation about doing so is nearly never heard, so the overwhelm among us peons is understandable. Stuffing my single backpack for the trip with shirts and books and cotton swabs, I feared the metric system itself might attack me: tape measures extending murderous meters, test tubes spilling lethal liters, and the foreign atmosphere itself pressing down on my skull with the weight of killer kilograms. After all, just watch this stunning FOX News revelation of “the global tyranny of the metric system.” I demand the United States give up the huge portion of its military using the metric system, its fully metric Big Pharma dosages, and its fully metric dollar amounts!
James Panero trying to keep from laughing at 0:27 ?
If scientific units of measurement weren’t going to undo me, maybe I’d get frozen to death by the National Igloo that Mike Huckabee as Arkansas governor sincerely congratulated Canada on preserving:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bCyy7q_ylc
However, I was ready to resist such fictional terrors. If dastardly, freezing decameters came at me hard, malevolently enlarging into subzero deca-space, I could defend myself, sweating wildly, swinging swords of middle school math, the unit converter app on my phone, or the Metric Act of 1866, which legalized the use of the metric system for weights and measures in the U.S. when President Johnson signed it, probably drunk and well on his way to becoming the first impeached very stable genius presiding over the world’s most sacred, most beautiful coun… Okay, I’ll stop shooting fish in a barrel saving fish in a peril and move on to the next crushing calamity faced by all USians who dare dream of, say, searching for paid-jobs north of Seattle by oh about 241 kilometers — I’m sorry! I’m sorry! 150 miles! 150 miles! I’ll be good! Stop threatening bodily harm to metric system advocates, fellow residents of the only intelligent country that has ever existed, the only intelligent country that will ever, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin…William Whipple? Uh yeah, also William Whipple, whoever he was…the founders, the Founders!
A slightly more highbrow fear came from the Hollywood-esque stories of beefy border agents versus millionaire heartthrob journadoodles — here’s the Committee to Protect Journalists’ 2018 documentation of dozens of cases of U.S. border dudes’ suspicionless searching and interrogating of journalists who color outside the (map) lines, most not wielding Oscars — but I took whatever precautions I could implement in the time frame I had, because an even worse fate would be hiding under the bed for the rest of my life. Further, beyond the glare of edutainment re: suffering journadoodles — JOURNALISTS, THE ONLY VICTIMS ON THE PLANET ACCORDING TO JOURNALISTS, THE ONLY VICTIMS ON THE PLANET — there are the almost 20,000 people since 2014 trying to cross borders who died in the Mediterranean Sea, to take one sole region recently, so cowardice would have been unjust to all of them. Think about it. Out of those twenty thousand people, imagine one who had really amazing sketch art to share, a fantastic decade-long relationship with an awesome cat to tell you about, hopes of walking around France, and that’s just .00005% of the individuals who died without a Committee To Protect People With Awesome Cat Stories Amazing Sketch Art and Hopes of Walking around France. Obviously the churnalism fan club will primly retort “First they came for the journalists, and after that, we don’t know what happened” which is as laughable as Huckabee’s Canadian National Igloo because once you turn off the roar of corporate media and the USian ‘anarchists’ who amplify corporations all day every day, you can hear your friends who are already trying to tell you what happened, to have a conversation about what’s happening you don’t need professional trade association membership or a New York Times subscription (to defeat their paywall, use your public library’s website, or simply turn off javascript). God, next, people are probably going to tell each other it’s unrealistic to go back to the days before individuals had to buy a credential for permission to tell someone Hi. Solutions should solve problems not for a guild but for everyone, and we can all already stop waiting around for a ZuckerBernie messiah, and just go right ahead, write teach speak learn sing cry laugh help heal hug. POINT BEING, in light of the much more serious injustices done to many more border-crossers around the globe, I made up my mind to just deal with any awful border shit that might happen and stop obsessing over encrypting my socks. [Note added 4 February 2020: This paragraph is a bit muddled, so just to clarify what I’m saying. Considering both the US-Mexico and the US-Canada borders, and both inbound and outbound crossings,there are definitely more than a millionborder-crossings per day.Yet from informal conversations, USians are scared to cross the borders because of news reports of border agent searches, seizures, and interrogations. Both the fear of crossing borders and the agent behaviors are getting worse. That strongly implies the news reports are not solving the problem, though they might be slowing down its worsening, which is about as exciting as the ‘healthcare cost climb slow down.’With a million border crossings per day, why not just go, fade into the huge numbers? Life is short. The authorities wrongfully seizing good journalists’ encrypted laptops, and the celebully journalists blaring about how awful it was they got asked some questions at an airport, plus the pathetic fan clubs reflecting both sides in perpetuo, drowning out others’ far worse border-crossing problems — including death — are just causing audiences to hide under their beds. Regarding solutions solving things for everyone, obviously regional variations are required; I just want to point out that journalists must not be gods with special border blockbuster movies or special snuggly beds to hide under. Free speech for everyone. Might lose my FOIA fee waivers for saying that someday, but the docs should be leaked and hacked out and otherwise publicized anyway.]
Hidden by mental walls, but clear as day, near downtown Seattle, the Clipper awaits
My alarm blasted me off early one Thursday morning in July, and after a giant breakfast, I walked to a bus stop, then rode the bus to the terminal. There the Clipper staff made sure I and everyone else had our passports. At the destination waited the real border security. The vessel was pretty empty, just a few folks on it, including me. Seated, I stored my backpack in front of my legs. It’s startling how central your backpack becomes to you (or at least me) on a trip like this: suddenly, it’s your mobile house, and everything about it quickly takes on outsized significance for creature comfort and safety. After a while, we were off into the Salish Sea, headed toward Canada.
Finally getting underway, for real, felt thrilling. I’d just walked a ways, got on a bus, walked a bit more, and all of a sudden I’m in the middle of the fucking ocean sailing to another country. Stuck-minds of a species that once migrated thousands of miles on foot insist invisible borders are absolutely real and natural and necessary, not just partitions for economic markets, then go escape into video games where they fly across mountain ranges in airships, then at night asleep, they dream of rocketing into outer space. Perhaps for many people, the biggest mental reference point for the concept of going on an adventure is video games. My trip certainly felt like one at times.
Departing the U.S. via the Clipper, July ’19
Scene from Final Fantasy 6 (Japan) aka Final Fantasy 3 (US)
One of the first super intriguing sights I saw: beyond, in what I think were international waters, container ships sat anchored out, waiting their turns to dock at ports. Usually you imagine some commodity, maybe a jar of pickles or a pile of steel, just magically existing wherever sold, no backstory to it at all, but now with my own eyes I was seeing these gigantic cargo ships floating in the middle of the ocean circulating commodities in containers around the world. A former U.S. Navy sailor told me later that years ago, newspapers printed shipping timetables for people on shore to find out when boats would arrive or leave (whatever newspapers were).
Approaching Victoria BC, via the Clipper, July ’19
Crew tied Clipper off so it stays put
Docking fascinated me. It took a sturdy crewmember two or three tries to throw the pictured cable to the sturdy guy on land so they could tie off the boat. That way it’d stop moving and we could disembark. The voyage of this high tech vessel weighing hundreds of tons that just sailed nearly three hours crossing m̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶i̶l̶e̶s̶ kilometers and kilometers and kilometers, still came down to a burly guy tossing a cable to his burly counterpart standing nearby. Once they finished, we headed into the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) checkpoint.
Crossing a border checkpoint alone for the first time in my life, I stood wearing my backpack in a very white room with humans sorted into lines, cameras staring at us, and a handful of y̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ meters forward, several CBSA border agents sitting up high on a dais-like structure, separated into little booths so they could interview us aspiring incomers individually. Behind me, a father tried to quiet his talkative children: “Shh! This is very serious!” I waited in line, doing my best to appear casual and calm. With all the earnest seriousness everywhere, a rogue thought suddenly impinged on my mind. What if — what if I yelled, “There’s a b̶o̶m̶b̶ balloon!” Everyone would break out into a panic as the b̶o̶m̶b̶ balloon e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶d̶e̶d̶ expanded through the very white walls, turning all into f̶i̶r̶e̶ fun! I started to giggle. I started to giggle some more. I kept giggling, and then I saw my hero, my savior. Along the very white wall to my right hung a clear plastic box from which brochures advertised to tourists. Immediately I grabbed one and began reading it with scholarly focus. Did you know the Butchart Gardens began in 1904? My giggles subsided. Did you know its Rose Garden has 280 different varieties of roses? I was breathing again. Did you know that for the safety and enjoyment of all visitors to the Butchart Gardens, selfie sticks are NOT permitted? Now it was time for the CBSA guard to interview me.
I walk forward.
I peer upward at the uniformed g̶o̶d̶ guard staring down at me. In a gruff voice, he asks me routine questions. Occupation, destination, duration of trip, how do I plan to leave Canada? Everything goes straightforwardly until I mention I plan to stay a week in Victoria and then return home the same way I got here, via the Clipper. Why, he wants to know, am I just visiting Victoria? Why not go elsewhere also? YEAH, DOUG, WHY NOT? Bewildered, I stand there. What even is the appropriate answer? My mind flashes to Aristotle’s four causes, four different ways to answer a Why question according to the long-ago Greek philosopher who traveled across countries himself, thousands of years ago:
Material cause: Indeed, my legs could transport me elsewhere, to another place outside Victoria, maybe even to the National Igloo
Efficient cause: His question was stimulating me to consider journeying to Vancouver also
Formal cause: I was trying to take things one step at a time, and wasn’t in any particular hurry to see each and every place
Final cause: The objective was a successful trip; would leaving Victoria and encountering scary road signs with kilometers on them impede or facilitate that?
I said something, quite truthfully, about how I was also considering checking out Vancouver BC. He stamped my passport and granted me entry.
Another gub’ment! With Anglophilic buildings
I exited the border station into another country. But what was this? Something was decidedly different in Canada, or at least Victoria. Evident instantly. Not just me; something radiating from the people around me as well. Everyone, so calm. Everything, so chill. The people were even walking more slowly. This immediate drop in ambient anxiety, relative to the United States. Was I in some strange dream world? Were Canadians or Victorians all on Valium or Ativan and not telling outsiders? Or is tranquility just what universal health insurance, next to no mass shootings, and the metric system result in? What on Earth was going on here?
I’ll continue the story with Part 2 next Monday. But in the meantime, you might enjoy the excellent talk below, just under an hour and a half, by punk singer Henry Rollins encouraging people to experience life in other countries. The video would be a fantastic one to show students or really anyone interested in this subject. Until next week!
Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, to be self-published every Monday. Here’s today’s, the second of 52.
Note: This post was updated Tuesday 4 February 2020, mostly to incorporate an updated version of my support letter. I changed “unusually severe” to “unduly severe” to better match the clemency consideration standards, I changed the reference to US citizens to US residents, and I added a line about our right to communicate, in order to connect Winner’s case with everyone else’s who’s being silenced anywhere in the world.
Reality Winner climbing a tree in Texas, Christmas 2015. Photo by Brittany Winner, her sister (Source)
Especially in light of current news, you should remember Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner, the Air Force veteran who in 2017 as an employee for a National Security Agency contractor leaked classified intelligence to The Intercept regarding Russian military hackers, in 2016, executing cyberattacks against more than 100 local election officials in the United States and against at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Reality “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.” These cyberattacks also constitute evidence in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s “12 Russians” indictment from 2018 and in his Mueller report from 2019.
For The Public, an online and print news outlet in Buffalo, New York, I reported in person from Reality’s final, August 2018 hearing in Augusta, Georgia where she was sentenced to 63 months in prison, the longest term ever imposed on a federal defendant for a disclosure of national security information to the media. That article of mine tells a great deal of her story and explains the importance of her deed. It quotes human rights activist and author Heather Marsh explaining that evidence in the leak helped generate the public support necessary for the investigation into not just Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election but more broadly into the nature of the world’s democracies today, an investigation that “could have quietly disappeared and the public would never have been any wiser.”
Reality Winner sketch art, from prison, of the Augusta federal courthouse. (Source)
Now, about halfway through her prison term, 28-year-old Reality Winner will very soon be filing a petition for clemency. If granted, clemency would result in her early release from prison, similar to whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s successful clemency petition. Reality is a vegan and is amazingly maintaining that while locked up, in the face of oppression; her release would mean, among other things, that she could once again access healthy food in line with her beliefs. Because there’s a long line of clemency petitions to be considered, and because Reality’s release date is at this point 23 November 2021, it is unclear which president(‘s staff) will consider her petition and when.
I wrote a letter in support of Reality’s clemency petition. Below, I’ve embedded my one-page, signed letter as a PDF. Further below, I’ve put the body of my letter with links added. The embedded PDF of my letter doesn’t include links, and it isn’t possible to clipboard-copy text from it, so if you want either, please refer to the further below section of this post where the body of my letter is repeated. Reading my letter will give you more information about her case and why I think clemency is justified. Also I describe briefly how Federal Medical Center Carswell, the prison in Fort Worth, Texas where she is housed, has blocked my efforts (and CNN’s) to interview Reality in person behind bars.
Best of all, you can write a letter in support of Reality’s clemency petition. On 11 January 2020, her team had 4,206 letters of support, a little more than 84% of the way to their goal of getting 5,000 letters. Reality was the subject of Chris Hayes’ weekly podcast on 7 January 2020, which hopefully should assist with getting her more letters.
We have 4206 letters signed so far! Can we make it to 5k before #RealityWinner's attorney @alisongrinter files her clemency petition?
You can either quickly sign online a pre-provided letter at the StandWithReality.org website by giving your name and email address, plus your county and state, or you can write your own letter and email it in to Liz Miner. Instructions and more information about both options are available here: StandWithReality.org: Letter of Support for Clemency. To share that webpage quickly, you can use this shortened URL, which leads there: Bit.ly/RWSupportLetter.
In her 1973 short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin describes a utopia built on the suffering of a single imprisoned person, and utopia residents who must confront that suffering only once and then decide whether to keep living in the wonderful city or leave. To a large extent, the Russiagate investigation is likewise built on a single individual now imprisoned. There remains an ethical imperative that this person, upon whose shoulders so much has rested, not continue to be ignored by so many and silenced and caged by the Bureau of Prisons.
Re: Reality Winner Clemency Petition
Dear Mr. President,
I write in support of the clemency petition of Reality Leigh Winner, a Bureau of Prisons inmate, register number 22056-021. For The Public, a news outlet in Buffalo, New York, I reported in person from Ms. Winner’s August 23, 2018 hearing in Augusta, Georgia where Chief District Judge J. Randal Hall imposed a 63-month prison term on Ms. Winner. Department of Justice attorney Bobby L. Christine described the punishment as the longest sentence ever imposed on a federal defendant for a disclosure of national defense information to the media. This unduly severe punishment resulted from Ms. Winner, an Air Force veteran and intelligence contractor with no prior criminal record, sending to the media classified intelligence describing cyberattacks by Russian military hackers against over 100 local election officials in the United States and at least one U.S. supplier of software used to manage voter rolls in multiple counties. The cyberattacks took place just days before the 2016 U.S. elections. With great idealism, Ms. Winner gave everyone information required for self-governance, gave everyone necessary knowledge otherwise unavailable. That includes any voting vendor staff who, without clearances, would not have been able to access such protective classified information unless it appeared in the public discourse. Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, wrote in a June 9, 2017 post on his personal website that the cyberattacks disclosed by Ms. Winner “illustrate the real threats and vulnerabilities facing our elections, and they point to solutions.”
Ms. Winner’s unduly severe sentence and unfair treatment behind bars is unjust to her and indeed, to all. She has a long, admirable history of public service: donating to poor families, volunteering for Athletes Serving Athletes, and more. Her ongoing confinement blocks her from continuing this service to the wider world. She is unjustly denied broad communication with the public by Carswell Federal Medical Center staff, including Warden Michael Carr. The staff has forbidden journalists, such as CNN and me, from interviewing her in person. They have provided no meaningful explanation for her isolation from the mass media. For months, my requests for meaningful details, and my requests for negotiations to meet any Carswell Federal Medical Center concerns, were ignored or subjected to run-around. In her allocution, Ms. Winner demonstrated her intelligence and perceptiveness. Caging her incommunicado harms her and deprives the public of her gifts. Everyone globally, in prisons or whatever other cages, must have the right to communicate, including to appeal for help from the world, as directly as possible.
Ms. Winner took responsibility for her action’s criminality at her final hearing. While sentencing her, Judge Hall indicated he saw no evidence she will become a repeat offender: “the Court has no sense […] that there is a need to protect the public from any further crimes of the defendant.” As an inmate, Ms. Winner has pursued studies toward her college degree and has worked several jobs within the Carswell Federal Medical Center system. She has served roughly half of her 63-month sentence already, and she has not had a single infraction.
I firmly believe a commutation of Ms. Winner’s sentence is in the best interest of the United States, U.S. residents, and justice. She and her loved ones suffer each day she is kept locked up. I ask you to grant Reality Leigh Winner’s clemency petition and her immediate release from prison.
(5 years and 3 months, to be precise.) Okay: Material the media outlet cut from my piece, plus bits of context:
Brown spoke with WhoWhatWhy earlier this week from jail to emphasize the dishonesty with which the authorities have prosecuted him. He referred to his sealed detention hearing, saying the FBI’s agent Allyn Lynd testified under oath that laptop evidence proved the writer admitted to SWATing (placing false 911 calls to get locked-and-loaded police commandos out to a mark’s home). Brown said that not only did Lynd get away with that false allegation—which was at least explicable in that it served as a chief reason the judge denied bail—but the agent also got away with the weird claim that the defendant had lived in the Middle East.
“These people, these prosecutors, these FBI agents have blatantly lied so much,” Brown told us. “They aren’t rookies; these are people who have been around for a long time. So what that tells me—what that should tell everyone—is that they don’t lie for fun; they do it because it works. And the question is, Why does it work? And how bizarre is it that these things work? There doesn’t seem to be any negative feedback to prevent an FBI agent from lying on the stand.”
[…]
The prosecution throughout has twisted words to manufacture a case against his work and, in so doing, a case against what 21st-century journalism stands to become.
Brown, some of whose first writing sales were to America Online during its days as an Internet service provider, has long championed the decentralized, archival Internet as a better means of knowledge-production than the hierarchical media ecosystem where authors and pundits can lie persistently without consequences not unlike his prosecutors. After all, the use of hyperlinks—the primary controversy in his case—allows scrupulous authors and readers to cross-check data and call out errors in great detail.
Once Brown heard of Anonymous and WikiLeaks in 2010, he quickly realized how his crusade could be amped up with access to top-notch secrets and newways to collaborate digitally. Soon he was giving more and more interviews to the traditional media—some of which the Department of Justice trotted out in court last December—explaining his political ideas and findings about the authorities’ information warfare projects and techniques. Meanwhile, in chat rooms and on social media, he was showing others how to mine state-held business registrations, trademark filings, and press releases so they, too, could turn Anonymous’s hack-leaks into actionable news and analysis. His audience grew and grew.
The government didn’tlikethat at all. Prosecutors let their motive slip during a 2013 hearing, as first reported by WhoWhatWhy. That was when the Department of Justice made a failed attempt to prevent Brown, while his case was ongoing, from criticizing anyone in the government whatsoever. (They did succeed in gagging him and his lawyers, for several months, from speaking out about his legal battles.)
[…]
Despite the Department of Justice’s hammering of him, Brown has remained steadfastly defiant. Reading his allocution, he told his judge, predictably, “I hope to convince Your Honor that I sincerely regret some of the things that I have done” but added with trademark dry humor: “Like nearly all federal defendants.”
Extra material for WhoWhatWhy “Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years, After Facing More Than a Century” article by Douglas Lucas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. It does not affect your fair use rights or my moral rights. You can view the full license (the legalese) here; you can view a human-readable summary of it here. To learn more about Creative Commons, read this article. License based on a work at www.douglaslucas.com. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license? Email me: dal@riseup.net.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
Email: DAL@RISEUP.NET (ask for pgp key or check keyservers if you want encryption)
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