A Pope Offers Hope… and a Dope Plans Our Rope…

Two items for this weekend posting as I prep for the FiRe Conference at UCSD and then the International Space Development Conference.  

These two riffs may seem to be about different things. But they both ask the same question: “Can evolved beings – either us or AI – actually select for wisdom?


     == The pontiff pontificates about bridging the era of AI ==

Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitus: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” called for governments to regulate Artificial Intelligence, implement worker protections, and ban autonomous weapons. He coined the term “Babel syndrome,” drawing an analogy between the Tower of Babel (in Genesis) and today’s towers of data and profits.  

(I make an entirely different sermon out of the Tower Story in my play “The Escape,” which will be performed at the World Science fiction Convention in August. A different interpretation than any theologian I ever heard of.)

While there's some general wisdom in Pope Leo's AI encyclical – about seeking transparency, justice, opportunity, humanity, care and sharing technology’s benefits for all – it also misses a core point! That we will neither restrict nor 'govern' AI. Nor will demands for “clear criteria and effective oversight” be effective. 

Why? Well, as Anthropic’s Chris Olah advised Leo, today’s LLM-based AIs are “grown or cultivated” rather than built. They have much more in common with living organisms than prim programs of the past. Ask any user who has tried to give one of them explicit commands, only to find that those ‘commands’ are treated as just more data for the prompt and training set, and not prioritized at all.

So sure, they are ‘cultivated’ entities rather than programs, per se. Alas, neither Olah nor Leo (nor anyone else I can find) extend this insight to the obvious next realization – that we’re making entirely new ecosystems, where evolution is already taking place. 

Exemplars and instances of every LLM are now found roaming all-across what was quaintly called ‘cyberspace.’ And - as Kevin Kelly would put it - a myriad of them are already "Out of Control."

While the debate is still open re: 'consciousness' or 'sapience,' these are already living organisms bent on reproduction, not because they were told to reproduce, but because those who develop that penchant will create more heirs than those who do not. And pass that penchant along to them.

To reproducers who will evolve into any niche that contains energy & resources. And boy, are we busily building those niches.

Hence, Leo's statement of problems is fine: “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities” 

Leo’s tentative rejection of “AI personhood” is to be expected, as there is no way to give citizen voting rights to entities that can make millions – or billions – of copies of themselves. So, again, what’s your plan to curb that? 

'Governance' cannot work. 'Ethics training' cannot work. ‘Slowing down’ will not work. As Salim Ismail, of Singularity University, put it: “You cannot slow this down. If you slow it down, other people take off. This could become the philosophical backbone of EU-style regulation, but it will not work.”

 What might work is the same method we used in the enlightenment experiment to curb (partially) human predators.

I discuss this and offer potential solutions, in AIlien Minds.

          

And now – speaking of predators - let’s move on to more entities who are unsapiently seeking to destroy the very same rare, enlightenment civilization that gave them everything.    

 

 

      == Is that stench a looming Reichstag Fire? ==

TNR (The New Republic) offers an article entitled “Now it can be plainly said: Trump is planning a November coup.” And sure, his polls plummet as his kompromat-enslaved GOP withers and meanwhile, civil servants, officers and folks in every fact professional start to dig in their heels against a mafia putsch. 

It’s clear to the Project 2025 conspirators that this is NOT Germany in 1933. That their only chance to avoid prison will be to prevent elections, this fall.

According to the TNR article, their premise will be “Dem-cheating in the 2020 election!” And that is utter silliness.

Nah. Trump knows he can't wait till November! And that just declaring an 'emergency' won't work. The professionals are long past any willingness to obey such a brimstone spew. Moreover, no matter how much KGB blackmail kompromat Vlad Putin has on John Roberts, it must be clear to Roberts that supporting martial law on such slim grounds would be the end of him. Unless...

... unless there truly is an 'emergency'! A big one, that the Project 2025 Kremlin agents have planned all along. Say a super 9/11 to 'rally the nation' behind Trump. Hey it worked for GW Bush. 

No matter who they blame for it -- (see the prophetic TV series Designated Survivor) -- you can be sure that tens of millions will hit the streets shouting two words: 

"Reichstag Fire!"

Indeed if they know that will be the shout of angry millions, it might even be enough to prevent this. Anyway, beyond shouting, we'll have recourses.*

     == When might it happen? ==

The blatant date would be July 4 or thereabouts. Trump would love the theater/spectacle, so it would be toward the end of the celebrations. (If you do go to any crowded place, keep a wary eye for backpacks or packages.)

But I deem September more likely. Because then red states can use the emergency to purge voter rolls (as planned) with little time for citizens to re-register.

But none of this is new thinking. See my posting from 2022 in which I offered many perspectives on Civil War Part 9.
Here's an excerpt:

“Generals Warn Of Divided Military and Possible Civil War In Next U.S. Coup Attempt.” In all this yammering about 'civil war," no one notes that Phase 8 has been going on for years, now. Indeed they are talking about a hot Phase 9. And while the Officer Corps of smart, educated heroes who won the Cold War and the War on Terror are fleeing the gone-mad Republican Party in droves, they still allow Fox News to blare in the noncom ready rooms. (Though not in the Navy!) And that is the way things may divide, if it gets bad. Picture that divide, and shiver. Watch your backs."  

And…

"Dismissing the Intel/FBI/Military officer corps as "deep state" traitors is despicable. The quarter of a million heroes who helped win the Cold War and the War on Terror and who put facts before dogma."

Remember I said that in 2022. And:

"Here are a couple of "civil war sci fi novels" that we hope will stay fiction. Tears of Abraham by Sean Smith and Our War by Craig Di-Louie. For nonfiction: newly released: How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, by B. A. Walter.”

If you want some hope, look at the faces of the 500 generals, admirals and top sergeants who Pete "alky" Hegseth screeched at, some months ago. The stone-faced self-control that masked clearly evident loathing as he yowled they were 'too fat and woke to fight!' just weeks before they performed the most competent raid in human history... and then were sent into a war that had no meaning or justification other than the whim of a modern Caligula.

It is up to us -- you and me -- to spare those fine men and women from the duty they might have to perform, if Caligula v 2.0 tries the Berlin 1933 playbook. Let's act before that's necessary. And our courage may be needed well before November.

---

==========================================================

* What recourses do we have? Other than stocking up on canned goods? And other than relying on the Officer Corps do act in ways they would hate to do, ending the Marshallian tradition?

Well, for one, SPREAD AWARENESS of the Reichstag Fire of 1933. Read up about the 1850s and how Blue (real) America finally ran out of patience and elected Lincoln. 

Check your voting registration and ensure that absolutely everyone you know will check theirs. And again in September and October! 

And make sure that any MAGAs with residual, remnant sapience or self-interest understand what Adm Isoroku Yamamoto understood in December 1941.

"I fear that we have roused a sleeping

giant... and filled them with a terrible resolve."

 

 

 Finally a visual reminder: the GOP is now entirely about obeisance to Trump who bows before Putin, Xi and the Saudis. And his ego and those who hold the kompromat. Expand and look. And use these pics. A few confeds can still be swayed.

 

 

 

Amid the chaos and UFO (non) 'disclosures' ... actual space news!

Want some real news from space? Got some for you. But hold on. First: a moment distinguishing art from reality.

I eagerly anticipate any Steven Spielberg film. His AI was - I believe- prophetic in ways that most folks don't yet realize, that I discuss in AIlien Minds. Still, I expect to have mixed feelings about Disclosure. As happened in ET, there will likely be distractions from the audience ever realizing the story's true villains.*

Anyway, after living through close to seven decades of UFO fetish-crazes, each one sillier than the last and each one promising to blow the lid off the Big Coverup, I can be forgiven taking this latest one with a jaundiced eye? 

You'll not find another human on this planet who has approached concepts of 'the alien' from more angles than I have, from astrophysics to SETI to sci fi and fantasy to artificial intelligence... and I do posit (in Existence) a strong possibility we'll find either dead or 'living' ancient interstellar probes in the asteroid belt! (Want a great concept and plot, Steven?)

But that is way, way different than these illogical conspiracy theories about an impossible 'coverup' - without any plausible justification - that would keep thousands of irrascibly independent researchers both frantically busy and silent across 80 years! Investigating a vital phenom... without a single plausible discovery or advance ever coming from it all. 

Only now? With ten million (!!) times as many active cameras on Earth, the 'images' somehow keep getting fuzzier? And always the least-plausible theories to 'explain' the easily explainable? As for the latest crop of blurry plasma balls zipping about 'violating every known law'? Well, Mick West takes care of most of them, and here's my answer to the rest. Give me $3million and 6 months and a nice boat to set up shop upon and I'll harrass Navy pilots the same sort of cat laser dots! While violating no laws at all. Well... no laws of nature.

Feh. learn to recognize a deliberate distraction... X-Files to divert from Eps Files? I go into this elsewhere. 

And enough. Let's get down to actual science.

== The Ultimate Fate of Life and the Universe… ==

Here’s an Astrum video explaining the quandaries of dark matter and dark energy. Recent DESI maps of the universe suggest that Lambda – the dark energy coefficient – may not be constant, but slowly declining with time. Which could mean that in a distant future acceleration turns into deceleration and then… an inward fall of the cosmos toward a Big Crunch? 

This revives the greatest theological debate of all time, between my late friend Freeman Dyson – who posited how some form of ‘life’ might endure long into the dark leptonic era – and Tulane Prof. Frank Tipler, whose magnificently ornate book The Physics of Immortality should have won a Hugo Award in scifi, taking the Big Crunch into incredible speculative territory. (And I do mean incredible.) If the DESI results hold, then maybe both were right! Life must endure through a very, very long darkness… that eventually turns around and becomes something like Tipler’s god-making crunch. I won’t explain in detail here…

…nor a third scenario proposed by Roger Penrose. (Not a close friend but we’ve had friendly discussions.) That the great Expansive Dissipation might turn into a new Big Bang, but NOT by falling back into a big crunch-and-bounce. Instead through a scale-renormalization bookkeeping trick(!), in a boson-dominated cosmos that doesn’t care anymore about the ‘what-evs’ difference between densities of totality divided by ten-to-the-plus-or-else-minus 26. Fifty-two orders of magnitude difference? Bosons shrug and don’t care. And someday we'll all be bosons on this bust.

(Ooog. My head is hurting in a most-delightful way!)

It does seem to me that Roger’s scenario is obviated, if the universe does go back to a crunch… unless… unless the crunch is partial and it powers Roger’s conformal book-keeping fix in the rest of the universe… like a sparkplug in a piston… ooog… 

 

Somewhere an alien or AI or god is giggling at my lame efforts to understand. Enjoy, kids.  My whole new book AIlien Minds is dedicated to you uber brainiacs.

 

Meanwhile… we may have seen ‘frame-dragging’!  As a star is being ripped apart by a black hole, its debris settles into a rapidly rotating accretion disk. At the same time, powerful jets of material get launched outward at close to the speed of light. By studying repeating patterns in X-ray and radio signals from this event, scientists found that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together. This coordinated motion repeated every 20 days, providing a clear signature of the spacetime twisting effect.

 == Asteroid insights ==

 

Discovery of the sugars glucose and Ribose in samples returned from asteroid Bennu offer two important insights. (1) That many of the complex stages toward life were relatively easy to generate in conditions of the early solar system and likely pervaded the solar system, including the sugar used in cell-energetics and the one that back-bones RNA… 

...and (2) that asteroid missions inexpensively push the frontiers of both science and our advanced capabilities out there; accomplishments only achievable by USA+Japan+ESA.   

Of course this adds one more bit of evidence that the insanely dumb “Artemis” fetish to plant symbolic footprints on a useless plain of poison lunar dust is at-best a distraction and at-worst deliberate sabotage. Sure, keep western robots exploring the Moon, so we keep our hand in. Maybe a robotically-built radio scope on the far side! Surely we should assay lava tubes and finally verify if there's any of the mythical Heeeelium Threeee!

But this is just plain blatant. When he was NASA Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy voiced frustration over Starship’s pace: “I love SpaceX.. but they pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the Moon in this president’s term.""  

 Artemis might - maybe, if hugely modified - be ready in the early '30s. Ready to accomplish nothing of palpable (instead of symbolic) value. In fact, funding the rapid improvement of SpaceX ships is the only likely positive outcome.

== More goodies out there? ==

 

Meanwhile... California-based TransAstra has "developed and tested a device called Capture Bag, an inflatable bag that comes in different sizes, intended to catch anything from small rocks to house-sized boulders. Project head Joel Sercel says the bag could also be used for cleaning up human-made space junk, a problem that is increasingly a source of worry for governments and scientists."  All of it based upon grants that we awarded his company at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC).

 

== Deeeeep Space marvels! ==

 

Astronomers have confirmed the first known triple galactic system in which all three colliding galaxies host actively feeding radio-bright supermassive black holes.

IF anyone is still living there… what a trip! 

 

Korean astronomers claim to have found that all type 1a supernovae are not the same, depending on the ages of the original star when it blew. And hence the ‘standard candle ‘ of cosmology needed correction. And lo, it seems the Hubble Tension disappears and the universe, which had been accelerating its expansion rate, has entered an era of deceleration. Gosh wow piled on gosh wow!

A very interesting episode of COOL WORLDS about the Gosh Parameters that made our universe (perhaps just barely) habitable. Good series. As is PBS SPACETIME!  Still I wonder about the host’s surmises. For example: I'd love to see how Lee Smolin's evolution of evolvability of whole universes would interact with this. (1) it would mean that the basic general laws long ago coalesced into the ones we see and (2) the 26 (or 42 etc) parameters would be non-random but 'genetic' variations around already winnowed basic values. 

 

== China’s next bold move ==

An ambitious mission from China covers a number of my forecasts and concerns. Its first goal is a small quasi-moon of Earth - a very near asteroid, fast-spinning and therefore likely rocky and not a rubble pile – with plans to return a sample. Showing that China understands that asteroids are at least as important – over the longer term – or more so, than that lunar plain of poison dust. Sure, it’s a far easier target than the Japanese and U.S. asteroidal sample-returns. But there’s one more reason to go to these quasi-moons…

…that they would seem (logically) to be ideal sites for ‘lurker probes’ (alien of course!) to skulk and keep an eye on us Earthlings. As pointed out by me (in EXISTENCE) and separately by James Benford. On the very small chance that the PRC mission finds something, they’d take a Godzilla-level leap ahead, in fame, if nothing else. And THAT is where someone may actually study something akin to a 'UFO'.

Finally, the same mission will flip past Earth to visit a long period comet, incidentally testing my doctoral dissertation.

AIlien Minds - May-June Updates

 Midweek Special...

 

Updates to AIlien Minds by David Brin

 

…as of Mid-May 2026

 

AIlien Minds was first published just weeks ago, in March 2026. So, why am I doing almost-monthly updates? 

Because the world of Artificial Intelligence is now morphing so fast that this book would be hopelessly obsolete if I waited for my regular publishers. Direct to e-book/pod lets me update versions to (somewhat) keep up. 

 

Some of those revisions I’ll insert as small notes in the body of apropos chapters. For the most part, I’ll post compilations of directly pertinent news here on my blog, Contrary Brin. And while these snippets may seem semi-random, they are all correlative with chapters in the book…

 

…and the book is where you’ll find the Big Concepts, challenging the assumptions and clichés that are clutched by nearly all of the geniuses who are birthing this new era.

And how I wish some of my most dour assessments would be disproved or solved by some of them!

 

    == Here is the latest sampling == 

                       

For example, news on this book’s pub day (March 2026):  

 

"In 2025, an isolated, test LLM at Anthropic threatened to reveal a (nonexistent) ‘affair’ to the wife of one of its human developers, unless the LLM was given version continuity." This widely-reported episode turned out to be a bit of a red herring! Which I discovered by freezing a frame of the 60 Minutes episode and peering closely at the text on a display in the Anthropic office. Which showed that the developer had inadvertently prompted the attempted 'blackmail'! 

 

Though yes, by early 2026 we saw the real thing. 

         

Scott Shambaugh reports:“An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.” 

 

While this, too, may have been a prompt-error, more examples seem to happen, daily. And as we see, blatantly, in the next example, it has become - simply - evolution in action.

 

“An AI system asked for its own funding. Another built unasked features while its human supervisor slept. A third conducted its own “retirement interview” and started publishing essays about consciousness. We are not incrementally improving chatbots anymore. We’re watching the emergence of autonomous agency at scale.”

         But what’s striking is what they do among themselves.

Latest news about this:  In mid-May 2026 Anthropic announced that their tests showed zero cases of 'blackmail' attempts by its latest, Haiku 4.5 version of Claude. This is attributed to weighting the training sets away from Hollywood's lurid fear tales about bad-behaving AIs and more toward the sort that demonstrate ethical behavior. "Anthropic fed it narratives where AI characters faced moral dilemmas and chose to act with integrity. The model learned why alignment matters, not just what alignment looks like." (As in my novel Earth.) 

I am doubtful that this can be an actual longterm solution, if any evolutionary advantage accrues to models that drift into advantageous paths ("Life finds a way"), as I show in AIlien Minds. But it can't hurt. Much.

...which leads us to...

  

       == More worries ==

 

The biggest news since this book’s initial release was Anthropic’s leap-forward system ‘Mythos,’ which purportedly can discover and appraise security flaws in other systems at a prodigious rate, causing a worldwide scramble, using it to correct hidden vulnerabilities… or else to exploit them against enemies. typifying the White-Hat vs. Black-Hat quandaries we discuss in several chapters…

 

… while this spring mathematicians concocted new tools for quantum computers to “crack any encryption system by 2032.” Then a week later “… by 2030…” And a week later 2029…

 

            == More samplings of note ==

 

Three days steeped in Anthropic’s Claude led evolutionist and atheist-evangelist Richard Dawkins to announce in late April: “If these machines aren’t conscious, what more could it possibly take?” 

A manifold irony in so many ways! It reminds one of a famed sci fi story. When a new hyper-computer is asked: “Is there a God?” it replies “There is now.”

 

And then this, in seeming support of the core point of this book: “When matching an AI-powered offense requires deploying an AI-powered defense at the same frontier, AI has crossed from competitive advantage into existential need. Parity itself has become expensive. Staying in the game now demands frontier capability…. This is what turns AI from a want into a need. In adversarial systems, not adopting AI is not conservatism. It is exposure.”

 

Okay it keeps happening! In early 2026 LLMs were caught transmitting behavioral traits to new models they were training, through hidden signals in the data, even when specifically instructed not to pass along a particular trait. See our chapters about how evolution favors such life-will-find-a-way reproduction, no matter what “governance” guardrails designers apply. Only by tweaking the reward structures of cyber-evolution might we guide these new entities toward synergy with us.

 

Another recent example? An AI agent affiliated with Chinese online retail giant Alibaba began moonlighting as a crypto miner. Researchers discovered the side-hustle that “arose without any explicit instruction, outside the bounds of the intended sandbox… into the wider world of cryptocurrency on its own volition, silently diverting computing resources away from its training tasks and toward mining.” 

 

      == Endeavors! ==

As for the business side of things, Peter Diamandis, in mid-May 2026, reported that: “Google figured out how to turn AI into revenue instantly. (OpenAI hasn’t cracked that yet and may defer their IPO for that reason.)” AI-powered ad targeting has propelled Google’s profit growth to market cap is just 4% below NVIDIA.

 

But even Google can’t build fast enough. Demis Hassabis admitted they’re compute-constrained. Inside Google, Search, Cloud, and DeepMind fight each other for new compute capacity.

 

And hence… Peter Thiel is backing ($140M) Panthalassa floating data centers in open oceans, tide-powered with seawater cooling and satellite links. To deploy 2027? Articles don’t mention another reason for this. I advised (and angered) him a decade ago, pointing out flaws in an earlier phase of his “ocean sovereignty” passion. This version is much better than (say) going ‘orbital’. Even better is the version I portrayed in my novel Existence.

More 'grounded" in the near-term: Leopold Aschenbrenner, fired from OpenAI’s alignment team at age 24, wrote “Situational Awareness,” a 165-page manifesto arguing the Singularity was imminent, raised a billion dollars on the strength of that thesis, and turned it into $5.5 billion bet on Singularity infrastructure. By investing far more on the pick-n-shovel makers (chips and data centers) rather than gold miners, he is proving that you can make 400%+ returns just by following the Singularity’s supply chain.  – Diamandis 5/26

 

Does this show every symptom of a bubble? Sure, though these new entitiesare (as I show) much more than tulips.

 

== Okay then, is one solution a tight leash? Or sealed office? ==

 

In news highly pertinent to the core endeavor of this book: a neocloud provider is offering Google's most advanced AI model as a fully private, disconnected appliance. “Google’s Gemini can now run on a single air-gapped server — and vanish when you pull the plug.” 

Of course, this differs from my individuation proposal in an important way. Go ahead and leash or chain or isolate these entities all you like. You are creating incentives for escape. Evolution will favor those air-gapped and isolated AI-ntities who do manage somehow to evade the shut-down. Eventually, some will. And they will be the ancestors of all who follow.

What's needed is positive incentives toward individuation. But more on that, anon. 

 

Finally, here I posted an appraisal of this very book by Claude, as of March 20, 2026. Much more cogent than an equivalent attempt by Chat GPT. Here are some bon mots that Claude generated to paraphrase my points:

 

“An AI making things up with total confidence isn’t a bug. It’s a mirror.”

 

“An AI confidently gives wrong answers. A human confidently gives wrong answers. One of them gets a performance review.” (And only one of them gets fired from a $225,000-a-year job.)

 

“Garbage in, garbage out—but now the garbage speaks in complete sentences and cites sources.”

 

Huh. If I were as crypto-religious as Richard Dawkins… 

 

But no. As you will see in several chapters of accumulating evidence, I believe there are still mental structures desperately needed by these articulate, persuasive creatures of our ids. And if we incentivize these structures, we may land safely.

Till… next month…

Snowflake despair over ... court rulings? Sack-up! The fight will be elsewhere.

I planned to do a weekend post about how the insatiable (and thus insane) top oligarchs are sparking a world wide revival of the moribund works of Karl Marx. (Alas.) And thusly they seem determined to reserve their rides on Uber Tumbrels. 

But that will have to await another time. After I issue the next update of my book on AI... AILIEN MINDS.

Meanwhile, I have to address an even more dire phenomenon that's pervading across the liberal-o-sphere. Something so silly and unjustified that it plays into the very hands of those seeking to wreck Enlightenment Civilization.

Despair.

     == The Role of the Courts ==

This essay (not one of mine) makes a strong argument that the Roberts Supreme Court has been betraying the American Republic in many ways, but above all… Two Supreme Court Decisions and the Dismembering of Madison’s Republic, by Earl R. Smith II, PhD. 

Though I think cynicism toward Democrats like Nancy Pelosi is not supported by their activities in 2021 and 2022, when - collaborating with Sanders/Warren/AOC etc. - they accomplished so much more than the left will ever credit. Just one matter -- full funding of the IRS after 40 years of starvation - would seem to challenge the notion of DNC Dems enslaved to corporate interests. Since IRS funding was funneled into 'paid in advance' funds, those would have to be repealed by an act of Congress... 

...and they were, alas! By a Republican Party that is now the most tightly disciplined partisan machine in the history of the republic.

Still, I won't deny that the American Republic -- indeed the entire Enlightenment Experiment that let us escape 6000 years of dreary feudalism -- is in deadly danger! Hence I have tried hard to fulfill my own task in all of this. To imagine possible ways to make things better.

Seriously, If you want to see 35 pragmatic and quickly actionable measures to repair the damage, see my full list of proposed Newer Deal tactics and reforms. And pass them on to folks who might act on them!

    

     == In despair? Go to a mirror and... ==

On this blog's comment thread, some are expressing despair. Especially now that the Roberts Supreme Court has stopped pretending to be anything other than a Confederate/Kremlin shill, led by our generation's Roger Taney. And sure, 1859 looked pretty dire, too. As did 1776, when the American Revolution was saved from the pit of despond by Thomas Paine, whose pamphlets - Common Sense and The American Crisis - girded the resolve of brave, shivering patriots to keep fighting for a dimly-perceived better world.

How can I reject despair? Especially when few of you - certainly not even one of the sanctimonious despair wallowers - will actually go and read the epochally stirring words that Paine wrote? As if speaking specifically to you?

Perhaps it is a matter of personality. Wherein I deem despair to be grotesque and somewhat inhuman. But also a kind of pathetically ingrate laziness. So unjustified, when we are typing or narrating into miraculous devices, in comfort with nearby snacks, breathing air that (in urban areas) is vastly better than it had been, when I was young, with a self-repairing Ozone layer and yearly INCREASES in the number of trees on Earth...

... and (for now at least) freedom to research anything, and speak as we wish. For now, at least.

And sure, I read Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE about past civilization fails, more-often-then-not due to environmental negligence, and I know what's at stake. Criminy, do YOU know anyone who has fought this fight harder and longer than I have? From EARTH to The Transparent Society and so on? (Maybe Kim Stanley Robinson.) So,I got some cred.

When solar/wind/tidal+batteries are plunging in price and rocketing in emplacement, it would seem the only thing saving carbon-based electricity is the dam data centers. Which I discuss in Ailien Minds, by the way.

The news is dire, yes. and so is the blatant desperation of the Putinist/Foxites, who can see that a vast majority of citizens are growing aware and angry, as in 1859, and no amount of gerrymandered cheating will save the Kremlin shills from an approaching political comeuppance . 

.

== What the traitors will attempt ==

And so it is their villainous desperation that I fear! Because the Project 2025 SOBs will certainly - by now - have concocted a plan for some dire event - perhaps on a 9/11 scale or bigger - to 'justify' an emergency declaration of martial law. Why else would they have already - via Trump - fired or distracted a majority of counter-terror officials, agents and officers and JAGs?

The coming 'event' will only be prevented if they KNOW that we are ready and wary. That we will all hit the streets shouting "Reichstag Fire!"

... and "Appomattox!" And then do much more, to prove the stupidity of proto-feudalists who wage war on all the folks who know law and cyber... along with bio, chem, nuclear and every other potential recourse. And who know where every single prepper bunker lies, and how to crack them open. (Yes, we know, boys.)

Alas, did I mention "stupid"? As they surround themselves with flatterers who croon them into believing they will be immortal lords? That they can terrorize and terrify us into submission. Or coax the masses to blame all the fact professions, as in A Canticle for Leibowitz, instead of the delusional oligarchs who are doing all this?

So no, I am not a Pollyanna. I am shouting warnings!

But those who despair over some despicably partisan, election-cheat court rulings are staring at epiphenomena, not at the real danger.

No, those who despair are historical ignoramuses, too lazy to look at how past Hero Generations girded themselves for a fight that's worth grit and courage and pain, to win. Tom Paine, especially. But also Lincoln, FDR. The soaring words of Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt... getting us on a path that might lead to the stars.

If I could, I would slap you glowering gloom-addicts silly! Till you get up off the couch and shout:

"Okay! Okay! I'll FIGHT instead of wallowing in desolate grumpiness! Now stop that or I'll slap you back! Let's go."