RE: Post July 4th

 

Good evening, denizens of the internet. It's been a long time since I've written any blogs, and it's good to be online tonight at 2 in the morning, jotting down thoughts and ideas. 

    First, post July 4th, I can't help to have the blues. Yes, life is good, as long as you don't weaken, but looking at everything in terms of our government, our environmental challenges with global warming, job security, and even just basic life's necessities like rent, food, and gas, its like Americans have really been pushed to the farthest limits. The War with Iran seems to be winding down and there's security and so called peace talks but nobody really knows what's going on for sure with this current second Trump administration. Trump has become the ultimate right-winger's dictator. 

    Everyday, there's some new scandal involving Trump, what he's doing, this and that, and almost every other day you see it on the news TV or even news online headline readings, and you just know that any one single incident of these are grounds for removal of the Presidency, termination of the Presidency from him, and impeachment. The fact that nothing happens and he walks away unscathed is a stain upon the US Constitution, which is not being upheld by this current administration. 

    But the main problem I have with Trump is that he's become a fascist demagogue controlling a vast amount of the US population through Fox News, social media, cable news media, and a vast array of extreme right wing MAGA republicans, who seem to not only be extreme right wingers that want a fascist dictator strongman, but who may unknowingly and begrudgingly be doing harm to the US constitution, government, and even ethics itself. 

    Think of all the right wing MAGA idiots out there, some of them I've physically encountered myself in the workplace, on social media, and various personal associates of mine. Most of these people aren't complete haters, they love America, some of them are racists and nationalistic, but you'll find that among the extreme right wing in any country. A lot of the MAGA crowd people are simply not guided by the facts, reason, evidence, and proof. 

    Instead, you'll find that the MAGA population have a limited worldview, they all watch from the same news media sources, they don't read books unless its some sort of Ayn Rand. Once you get to know them individually you find that some of them have some sort of vendetta against certain things of the world: they hate immigrants even if they are immigrants themselves, they have low information tendences, they watch Fox News and listen to right wing podcasts, and almost all of the information they get from these sources are all very much low information things. For example, a right wing podcast would talk about something Biden or the Democrats did a few years ago and say what a controversy it was, and that it went unreported. I see that type of thing from the MAGAverse all the time. It's a cheap, crappy tactic. 

    So, forgive me if I'm watching England destroy Mexico during the World Cup 2026, and right after the Fourth of July, forgive me if I feel that a sense of right wing extremism of imperialism has taken over the day. Those weird Ayn Rand kids from the early 2000s I used to disagree with in history class are loving the Trump era. But I think for those of us who know better, who had to work harder, who had to learn much more, and struggle and persevere more, those people, those are the people know that something is not right. But hey, that's not to say that you can't have an easy life and still be cognizant enough to know that this second Trump administration is hastening the destruction of the American experiment. 

      Okay, so I'm kind of rambling a lot about Trump tonight. But even bigger than Trump himself is the cult of personality that surrounds him. Isn't it a little strange that people who like Trump seem to love everything about him and his close government officials praise him like a lapdog? To quote Adam Schiff, here is a guy who's using the highest office of the land for his own, private, personal, political gain. That being said, I worry about the future of this nation, if it will really still stay a nation in the same characteristic sense that it always has been, but for those who know, we know that the American experiment was never supposed to include everyone, all the time, and allow everyone the right to vote. So there's a bit of a sour taste to this year's Fourth of July. Consequently, I spent the Fourth just chilling by myself, reading Kafka's first unfinished novel entitled Amerika [with a k, ironically], and its funny, because I find myself feeling like the young German immigrant who just freshly arrived in America, because I find that my country, this modern America, is almost alien to me, and a lot of MAGAverse people probably wouldn't want to allow me to be in it and living a good life while they are struggling. 

    That's a lot to unpack there. So yeah, I've been bummed out with this Fourth of July. I've been trying to put more of my focus into my reading, continuing to read the western canon as well as history, philosophy, artbooks, and books on culture and ideas. I've found that with this job having less hours, it's given me a lot more time to work on my personal pursuits like reading, music, gaming, walking, and listening to music for relaxation. I've found with this job budgeting is a lot harder, but who knows, perhaps this is good for me, having less money to spend and go crazy going out all the time with. Next time you see someone giving cash to homeless person, stop them and say, 'Don't delay the revolution!" 

    Lastly, with all seriousness, I think the comedown on AI is coming because now we're at the point where most Americans are realizing that although the stock market is focused in on AI, the truth is that AI wasn't really what it was supposed to be. It's rather a lackluster tool to generate ideas based on words, most are our advanced AI are chatbots, regurgitated language and ideas from the internet, or who knows from. AI video ended up being a bust, and AI generated video content isn't that fun, creative, or exciting. AI chatbots tend to be useful only for specific things but not things that most average people need them for. For me personally, I've found a lot of creativity and utility in using AI for images and I've sort of gotten a thrill out of doing that since the beginning of AI image generation, but in terms of actually doing anything serious with AI or AI actually becoming a mainstay in peoples' lives, or even buying a CHATgpt subscription? Forget about it. More and more Americans are realizing that if you couldn't do it without AI, having the AI won't really change much for you, in a sense, the AI is overhyped, overplayed, and its so 2000-and late, as the Black Eyed Peas song goes. 

    If you read through this, you're probably pretty smart and a bit of a reader. How does it feel to be smart and read things? Keep playing on the A Team, folks. Thanks for reading. Below are several of the AI images that I've had a lot of fun creating in terms of the word descriptions used to create them, a lot of my prompts are sometimes tons of paragraphs long, much like this sort of spontaneous dialogue online here. Watch this space.

The Proletariat Christmas

The last two weeks have been pretty rough at the retail gig. The holidays have come and gone, save for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. It's been rough. That's a phrase I've been saying a lot at work. I'm just a little stressed. That's another likely quote. How do you fight back against this stress, this holiday frenzy, eating away at the core of modern American society? 

Well, the thing is, you just have to rise above like the Black Flag song. Inevitably every little thing in our lives affects us at least somewhat on somewhat of a scale. One of the best pieces of advice my manager at work gave to me was, "no matter what happens, just go with it." At first, this sounded to me like a plea of defeat. But then you put it to practice and see how useful it really is. 

There are two kinds of customers in retail work: assholes and friendly people. There is no in-between. You might think you're a tough guy and that nothing anybody says to you can ever affect you but in reality, every interaction we have affects us in some way, however small, or large.   

Think of all the people you've met in retail work [if you work in retail] that you've ever had contact with.  Most of it is overwhelmingly positive, at least for me. I'm pretty much something of a celebrity at my job, just for the sheer fact that I'm a unique personality [I talk a lot to people about books, music, guitar] that people never forget me and want to talk to me more the next time they come in. I think that it just shocks people that I'm a big black dude that shreds the guitar like Hendrix and reads Heidegger. They will never meet a black man quite like myself ever in their entire lives. In that sense, I'm something of a novelty. The other side of it is the depressive, melancholy that comes with the retail experience. 

A large chunk of that melancholia would be bad interactions with customers. Customers who are overwhelmingly rude, customers who want to take advantage [return things with no receipt, demand cheaper prices, yell if it doesn't go their way, etc], upper management that tries to tell you how to do your job even though you've been working there longer than them, and the rest is just low-level grunt work that gets old fast.

There's also a sort of late-night depressive side of retail. When you work 430pm-1am 5 days a week for seven years straight you start to find that you're thinking more about the darker side of life at the later hours of the shift. Ironically it's at these hours that I feel the most awake, the most alive, in a sense. When I come to realizations. 

But wait. Here's the good news. This is happening to other people too. Not just you. The modern American workers need to rise up in solidarity. The middle-class, upper-middle-class, and rich people with their nice cars, their mocha frappuccinos, their office jobs, and their gym memberships know nothing of the true struggle of the proletariat.  If it were up to them they would stay rich and you would stay poor, indefinitely. And if you don't recognize this truth, then you aren't one of us. 

This is why it is so important to have a worker's movement in America. The modern American worker is losing so much right now. The rich are so happy with their fancy video games, their pornography, binge-watching their favorite Netflix TV shows. They know nothing about what it's like to be a true proletariat. 

The next worker's revolution is coming sometime. There will be no video games, pornography, or Netflix in it. 

The revolution will not be televised. Say goodbye to the bio-mass.