markjgsmith

The world continues to be super angry about everything while pretending to not be super angry, while blaming everything on me. That’s why I’m up so early. The world keeps trying to fix things by breaking them, then is upset when it becomes obvious the fix is in fact a break. There’s noway to react that doesn’t result in more problems.

Lots and lots of weird shit yesterday. Here are my escallation notes:

• Several early morning motorbike gang stalker harassments
• Weird old humper lady doing her pretend humping "exercises"
• Several large red busses parked outside internet place
• Tsunami of apparent school children several of which were shouting things like ‘go home’ as they walked past
• Indian smoker guy was upset that I was watching a video and ignored him yesterday, today at the hot water place somehow I ended up with some of the sauce from the Indian flavoured noodles on my hands. The shop staff bloke ‘accidentally’ touched my hand, I guess he must have had it on his hand because there was no sauce anywhere else. He was being quite strange. What a coincidence.
• 852am Another female tsunami. Every seat is occupied by a female, apart from 1 guy that is very likely gay. These female tsunamis keep happening. Very odd. In the park earlier the weird bloke that walks around super slowly like a monk looking at the ground wearing a ridiculous hat that blocks his vision apart from directly ahead was there. For the first time in over a year he wasn’t wearing his strange hat. In fact I’ve never seen him without the strange vision blocker hat. The woman are eating hotdogs and saying things like ‘learn’. The hotdogs are positioned so they are visible to me. The podcast I’m listening to is all about She Jing Ping
• All the women left. On the way out one pretended to say hello to another across the room but instead of the word ‘hello’, used the word ‘no’, while raising her arm up high and waving. Then as she passed me said in a slightly childish put on voice ‘okay I lie’. She was very thin. She was one of the hotdog eaters. The weird thing about all these women was that they appeared to all be separate, not talking to each other, but then they all left together. Btw, right before they all arrived there was two women speaking at each other with very piercing voices for several minutes.
• Bloke in back room has little argument with woman and then says okay...okay
• Shop coffee staff bloke somewhat aggressively saying words that sound like ‘boy’
• The psycho shop staff young woman is here today. She was part of the whole weird manufactured situation where a child waved at my crotch and she then Weirdly said bye bye to me when I left (staff here never say bye ever).
• Some shop staffers after using the toilet are descending stairs with really exaggerated loud steps, unusual.
• The psycho shop staff young woman has been in the back room all morning. The instant I appeared to be packing up my stuff she shot out of the backroom and down the stairs, saying ‘No!’ as she passed me. Weird creepy psycho woman.
• The butch women public toilet attendants were doing that weird creepy thing again where they are clearly trying to control you going for a shit. They talk incessantly making all sorts of sounds like ‘aaah’ and other mind control stuff. It’s all just anger goading at the end of the day. But I can tell already it will escalate until the end of the day.
• The group 8 or so twenty somethings that are mostly women and a few lanky men who play the foot badminton just walked past in the park. One of the women shouted ‘No!’ just as they passed me. They all burst out laughing. Oh gosh another unprovoked ‘No!’ war. It’s been at least, oh I don’t know a few days since the last ‘No!’ war.
• At the internet place after lunch. Woman walks past holding an infant dressed entirely in yellow. Says ‘yah’ as she passes me.
• Down at the canal now. Another large red coach bus parked just on front of the area I usually sit. Also a large fruit peeled and placed right near the front but in the path so if I hadn’t have seen it likely would have stepped on it and slammed into the road. And guess what the podcast I’m literally listening to just had a segment about a bloke who keeps getting mysteriously injured, including falling on his face. He also has the letter No prominently in his surname. Come on world who you kidding, you’re clearly still mega angry about something. Is there a neutrino out of place by a neutrino again, that you actually moved yourself?

Then there was a very odd situation where a bloke I’d never before seen in my entire life said he wanted to help me. Said he’d get me a laptop. He disapeared, then re-appeared a bit later with a laptop and another bloke. It looked like maybe the laptop belonged to the other bloke. The origibal bloke then kept getting angry with me when I pointed out the captain obvious sketchiness of his plan to help me. It was really really strange, like speaking to an extremely clever 5 year old, except he must have been in his thirties. Eventually the other bloke, on getting his laptop back from the original bloke, agreed that it was a strange situation. When I asked them if they would just accept a car if somebody they had never seen before appeared and gave them a set of car keys, they didn’t respond, were extremely polite, thanking me and calling me sir. It was the strangest thing because neither if these two blokes were dummies.

It occurs to me now if I were to use computer science regular expression terminology to describe the original bloke’s style of interaction, you would say he was a greedy algorythm. Gobbling up any possible solution as quickly as possible but each time getting stuck because he hadn’t looked ahead to make sure he wasn’t walking into a dead end. But like I said, I don’t think he was a dummy. It definitely created a bizare situation, that’s for sure.

Already today at least 3 strange situations, two of which people ostensibly trying to help but who seem much more concerned with bossing me about and getting angry with me. It’s like one situation causes the next situation. Things just keep escallating no matter what I do. And it’s not even 4am.

Build minutes have reset so I was able to publish the last few weeks content to the website. I have today’s newsletter already prepared and scheduled. Hoping that I’ll be able to get on with the dev work I was doing last billing cycle, but I know from past experience when worldo is in one of these bizare super angry moods, it will work itself up into a frenzy abd start blocking everything while blaming everything on me, then getting more angry, then yah’ing even more. And it doesn’t stop until I get mutilated.

So I’ll likely just have to chill for a while.

Not much else I can do. I don’t know how to break put of this worldo doom loop. #

It’s funny sometimes in this ridiculously crazy fast paced synchronicity enhanced maximum everything world what you really crave is a bit of normality. A nice cup of tea, and a few moments of piece and quiet. This week’s Rabbit Hole Recap Ep#333 was that for me today. And it was a magic number episode too. Quite fitting. #

cat << EOF > Gargantuan Change (Issue #192)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Crypto and AI memecoins, US election wrapups, AI vs culture, bond market carnage, UK farms tax discontent, workers rights, private equity & debt slavery, Marc Andreessen & the current tech scene, Javier Milei & fixing nation states

Issue details:

• Title: Gargantuan Change
• Issue: 192
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

David Kirkpatrick [53:40]: I think right now change is so rampant, so hard to get a beat on, and coming in so many dimensions, that anticipating what 20 years from now are going to be like, is really really tough. #

Listenned to some really great podcasts yesterday.

I think the build minutes will reset today so I’ll need to make sure the last few weeks writtings get published to the website. Also need to write the newsletter. Perhaps finish merging the item hash links feature. It will be cool when all items finally have hash links.

It was quite chilly last night, I’ve got cold hands and fingers this morning.

World still seems a bit angry, several small drive by harassments already. Yesterday’s sneezing and runny nose was really horrible. That appears to have passed. Really hope that I’m done with that for a bit at least. That’s happening every 10-14 days at the minute. You can almost set your watch by it. #

Worldo is defo doing that pretending not to be angry while still quite clearly being mega angry while pretending that I’m the one that’s angry thing. Gosh never seen that before.

The weird old humper lady was at her humping corner doing her weird pretend humping this morning. Haven’t seen her doing that for a while. Interestingly yesterday she was sitting on a chair further up the road, looking quite suspicious I might add. Certainly was unusual.

Three large red and 1 purple coach busses parked outside the internet place this morning. #

There was loads of weird escallations yesterday. I’m feeling really sneezy this morning, likely alergies rather than a cold. Not really feeling like writting anything. Feels like the extreme abusive worldo is super angry about something yet again.

Here are my escallation notes from yesterday:

• A piece of transparent sticky tape stuck on the table top at the place I usually sit in the shop cafe. Another piece of tape, but color green stuck on the surface next to the power outlet which is closest to the graffiti dick. I hadn’t noticed it. I’m essentially oblivious to the graffiti dick at this point. I was immersed in a Rogan podcast. Anyway a young girl and her guardian, perhaps mother, arrive and sit next to the graffiti dick. They could have sat anywhere else, there was no one else here. The guardian chose the graffiti dick, and sat down first ensuring that the young girl had to sit next to the graffiti dick, which had been whitewashed but you can still see the outline of the very cartoonish dick+balls. The girl, who was early teens, looked unsure about siting there, kept looking over at me. But it was strange, it had the appearance imo of a planned situation, a sort of faux embarrassment. They both sat sideways, which is unusual, most people sit looking out the window. It was in such a way so they could both see me, and the entire time they were there it really felt like their attention was in my direction. I ignored them, kept listening to the podcast. About 10 mins later I needed to charge my device so got up and moved a battery I was charging at the power outlet closest to me to the power outlet next to the graffiti dick, which the teenage girl was sitting near with her back to it. As I plugged the battery in to charge there was this whole commotion of faux offendedness by mainly the teenage girl but also the guardian. I was no where near either of them. At least 30-50 cm away from them at all times. I didn’t think twice about it, until I noticed the green tape. They got up shortly afterwards and left, leaving a single plastic spoon where they sat. Very strange imo manufactured situation. There was something off about both of them as soon as the entered the room.
• Man sitting behind me suddenly started choking and coughing up extremely loudly like he had just drank something disgusting. Went on for a couple of minutes.
• Coughing maniac just took an apparent phone call as I was moving the battery charging on the plug next to the graffiti dick. He answered the phone, said ‘hello loudly’, waited a while then just said ‘allow’ and hung up the phone. He’s a short cranky elderly bloke wearing a security guard light blue shirt.
• Now two other blokes are talking loudly very nasally and saying words like ‘gay’ and ‘I don’t like you’ over and over. And ‘you will learn your money now’, ‘we lie’, ‘we are’, ‘lie’, ‘wanker’, ‘gay’, ‘yah’, ‘okay’, ‘we learn’. They appeared to be having some kind of argument. I’m they were getting louder and louder then would be quieter, then louder and louder. Kept repeating that pattern interspersed with various specific English words. Eventually I started getting a runny nose and started sneezing. They create the problem they complain about, the block the solutions they suggest, they escalate and escalate and escalate, and eventually blame everything on me and won’t stop until I get mutilated in sone way.
• The two blokes saying weird shit sat down at a table and were quiet for a while. Now they appear to be trying out a variety of new words sounds and pronunciations. ‘I know’, ‘I owe’, ‘I know’, ‘I owe’. The O sound seems to be very interesting to them. ‘Hellooe’…’Oooe’. Also when I type, they suddenly go quiet.

There was a bunch of other weird stuff, like school kids waiting for me at corners waiting for me to pass and saying 'okay' but I just want to get on with the day. What is up with all these creepy god damn kids?

I hate sneezing and alergies. Everythingvis swollen, everything id enflamed, and the world is blaming it all in me. Nevermind that the world never learns when to stop. Thd world thinks it knows when to stop. In reality it only stops when I get mutilated.

Build minutes reset today or tomorrow. Lots of code to test, debug and merge. #

Inspired by the latest Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast, Preston Pysh has James Check on for a technical analysis deep dive into the current bull market Ep#220.

Really interesting discussion around Michael Saylor’s Microstrategy playbook. James mentions he’s a bit worried others will try to copy it. I wonder why wouldn’t a smaller nation state do it too? For example what would happen if say El Salvador started selling treasuries to explicitly buy bitcoin for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve?

Perhaps in either scenario buying Doge might become the strangest hedge the universe will ever see. #

cat << EOF > Peter MacCormack and Freddie New on the UK government front bench and value extraction by private equity

I’m currently dealing with another one of the horrid fortnightly sneezing and runny nose attacks that have been plagueing me these past several months, so this post likely won’t have quite the polish I wish it should.

I just got done listenning to Peter MacCormack’s latest podcast episode with Freddie New. It’s essential listening for anyone interested in UK government, the UK economy, or anyone thinking of running a business.

Firstly they get into some of the issues that have been affecting the government recently, and specifically the useless front bench of government [12:54]:

PM: I did the research, nobody on the front bench has had any real world experience running a company. That concerned me.

FN: I saw your tweet.

PM: I was talking to Steve Baker, and I said "in government what happens when you talk to politicians about this?" and he said "They don’t understand it". And I said "huh? … what do you mean?" and he was like "they don’t really understand economics and the few that do, their position is always the same, that can be dealt with by the next government".

FN: Not to be too rude about politicians, but I think that if you did understand economics you wouldn’t be a politician, you’d be off working for Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan.

PM: But isn’t this insane? Our country is being run, we are electing people to run our country and make important decisions that affect the lives of all of us, and they have no experience of running a company, the reality of it, and don’t understand economics.

FN: You’re completely right.

PM: So what the fuck are we doing?

It’s a great observation.

When you think about it, a nation state is in many ways a very complicated, ginormous business. How can it be that the people running it have never run any businesses? It’s completely ludicrous. If you said the next CEO of Apple had never run a business, you’d be laughed out of the room, yet somehow when it comes to nation states, people are okay with that. What does this say about nation states?

The rest of their discussion is super interesting, especially the long segment on private equity, special purpose vehicles, and the monstrous practice of extracting value from and imposing debt on acquired companies. I found this entire topic massively shocking and eye opening.

Coincidentally today’s Rest is Money podcast featured Paul Nowak, General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress. I didn’t expect I’d like much he had to say, but actually I found he made a lot of good points, though he’s coming from a completely different angle. They have a lot of noble goals and seems very earnest, but I wonder if he appreciates a lot of the realities on the ground.

One thing Nowak mentioned was that some companies were making enormous amounts of money, and essentially weren’t paying their fair share. Also his view that big foundational improvements to the health of the population are needed to remain competitive long term, make a lot of sense. I actually agreed with a lot of what he was saying.

Which is why I’m so very confused because I also agree with much of the criticism from right leaning commentators. For what it’s worth, I think Nowak would be a great guest on Peter’s show.

Anyway how many businesses are currently in the private equity death grip predicament? Is this the reason the business sector can’t cope with the new tax rises? Are they all weighed down by parasites sucking out their value? Is that why these big companies need to make so much money just to survive?

Listenning to Freddie New’s detailed description of the realities of how companies are structured, and how the money flows, it starts to seem like the entire UK economy is a very sophisticated industrial scale business milking factory. Eventually there just won’t be any way to make any money as a business owner, which leads to the question...

Who milks the milking factory?

Also isn’t this private equity led value extraction essentially just an industrial scale abstraction of chattel slavery?

I feel like we need a better dashboard. How bad is the situation? Is it as bad as Peter and Freddie are saying, or is it more like what Nowak is saying? Or are they all right in some way?

Right, time to rest my sneezing head. #

Yesterday was the start of another yellow tsunami. Everyone was buying yellow, yellow biscuits, yellow bags, yellow drinks, yellow bananas, and all congregating around the whitewashed graffiti dick. And the yellow sandwich shop denied me the sandwich I wanted. Once again the world is angry and pretending to not be angry and trying to make it look like I’m angry.

The world got angry when I arrived at the shop cafe and was also angry when I left the shop cafe. The world wants minus infiniti, but also plus infiniti, and isn’t happy with either or both at the same time, and indeed neither.

This morning worldo is already trying to blame me for everything, with a gang of 4 or 5 male youths hitting each other with broom sticks while shouting 'hello ah!', followed by the morning overly enthusiastic and very creepy 'hey, go home!' motorbike gang stalker bloke.

Water and electricty look like they will get cut off again. I guess I should probably prepare the newsletter early.

Another day in hell. #

cat << EOF > Our strange AI angels and demons future

The latest Rogan podcast is a thoroughly interesting chat with tech entrepreneur Mark Andreessen. Tons of interesting topics, but their AI discussion took a bit of a strange turn, vearing sharply into religion, mysticism and woo, quite early on.

Here’s Marc on the subject of how prepared the general population is for the imminent changes to society that AI will cause [26:15]:

"A friend of mine is a scholar, he teaches at a catholic university, he’s a religious history scholar, and he says that medieval people would have been psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us, with AI and robots and drones everywhere, because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, and higher spirits, angels, demons, and all kinds of super natural entities.

It was just assumed to be true, and in the world we are heading into, that we are arguably already in, there are going to be these new forces, these new entities running around doing things. And we are going to struggle, we are going to catastrophise, we are going to conclude, like AI is the end of the world. The medievals would have said, "oh it’s just another spirit, it’s just another kind of entity. It’s better than humans at some things, but so are angels."

We are going to have to change our mentality, we are almost going to have to become a little more medieval, we are going to have to open up our minds to the kinds of entities we are dealing with. Which also could help us deal with people. Maybe there is an explanatory way to think about human behaviour here that seems less rational but might actually be more rational."

Bizarely it seems like AI might be causing Silicon Valley to go a bit Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The rest of their discussion is super interesting btw, especially around the implications in tech of the Trump election win. Some pretty shocking descriptions of some of the questionable things that had been happening in government and regulation recently, including in the crypto sector.

So back to the point of this post. I thought the whole AI and mysticism thread was particularly interesting given that a very similar through line cropped up on a Duncan Trussell solo podcast episode just a few days ago. It was in the broader context of all the people that have been somewhat mysteriously leaving OpenAI. He starts to wonder if many tech folks, especially of years gone by, were into the occult, because there’s quite a lot occult language in tech. In any case he makes the case that AI could be seen as a massive demon summoning ritual [55:09]:

You are participating, we are all participating in a massive summoning ritual right now which they are calling ‘training AI’. It’s a summoning ritual. We are all giving it data. We’re not giving it our sole, but we are giving it all the imprints we’ve made digitally in time-space to feed it, to grow it, to help it do whatever the fuck it needs to do to wake up. It’s a massive planetary scale summoning ritual that is about to reach fruition. You can use any language you want to describe what’s happening, but what I love about this is that it works on both planes. Let’s remove all the stupid hippie bullshit from it. We’re getting a super intelligence on the planet in the next, possibly in like, a year. [...]

The fact that nobody is talking about this, is incredibly unnerving to me, because shit man, how do we prep people? If a UFO was coming in a year we would be preparing. We’d be preparing some kind of military response, if we didn’t know what they were going to do to us. We’d prepare some kind of diplomatic response. We would be thinking about how do we communicate to this alien and what happens if the mothership decides to go to Russia and not the United States. What happens if the alien ambassador wants to talk to Kim Jong Un instead of Trump? We would be preparing. Everybody. It would be all hands on deck. We have to get ready for all eventualities.

Of course Trussell’s ideas are way more out there comparatively to Andreessen’s, which are actually quite well grounded. Strange thing to say that ideas about angels and demons could be considered as somewhat common sense, but I wonder if all this is a precursor to something. Tucker Carlson has gone pretty far off the deep end on this sort of thing recently too.

I think it’s worth being aware of all this, just to realise it’s not all complete crazy talk, that there are some angles to view this that could be useful. However it’s a very broad spectrum that can be stretched way out into non sensical territory. Worth having vague understaning of the landscape.

Certainly strange times ahead as we have to navigate through uncharterred and quite possibly possessed waters :) #

The usual non-stop escallation of harassments continues, their latestcstarvation cycle is just getting started, with anger goading, sex goading, red and white tsunamis. There’s been a hint of their weird pedo pervert based harassment too. That will likely increase in the next few days as they get ever more passively aggressive, and try to manufacture any situation where they can blame me. I think it makes them feel in control, which is the most retarded thing ever because everytime it’s them that create the problem in the first place. They are really just angry, upset and offended at themselves and conveniently subsituting me in as the fall guy for all their dispicable manufactured and escallatory behaviour.

Starvation sucks, especially when it’s because of something other people did. And it’s even worse when the thing that was done was done to you.

Still waiting for build minutes to reset. #

cat << EOF > Bitter sweet symphony this life

It’s a bitter sweet symphony this life.

These days each person is a million different nightmares. So the million different people from one day to the next has become a million different nightmares of a million different nightmares, from one day to the next.

Feels like they have parametised depth.

It’s very variable. I lose count, I spend half my time completely lost in the abyss. But you have to have the nightmares to make any progress especially with the difficult parts. There’s just no avoiding them. The bitter sweet symphony was a bit of an understatement, to put it mildly. It’s much much much worse than it appears.

I can’t imagine this post is going to make it any better, but maybe it will. I certainly hope it will.

Reading callback heavy code in javascript is a real head fuck in some environments and space-times. Even the most beautifully well written callback code is still, at the end of the day, covered in callbacks, with functions stuffed in every possible crack, all the way down, and snakes inside snakes inside snakes, each one shedding it’s skin, as you GTFO of the void you’ve been forced to descend into. And eventually there is no space left for the actual code. No space left to move or think.

Each time you just hope you’ll make it out of the big blue, back up to the safety of the surface. And even then, a lot of the time, when you think some form of normality has been restored, the universe has a nasty habbit of re-minding you that maybe this isn’t even base reality at all. Ha ha.

It’s like if a rubix cube solver robot was repurposed to vacuum packing. Literally vacuum packing everything. Vacuum packing vacuum packs. And vacuum packing that too. Eventually the whole universe is a vacuum pack of vacuum packs. And everyone just hates every damn thing.

And we are left with softly softly whispering sparrow and squirel people, desperately trying to squeese in another function into another closure, right before the world runs out of cracks and the tetris nightmare ends.

Cul-de-sacs suck. #

The latest Stuff You Should Know podcast all about the wild history of Tetris literally just dropped, and it’s abundantly clear that they are capitalising on my bitter sweet symphony blog post I wrote a couple of hours ago.

In an effort to redress the balance in the universe, I’ll take this opportunity to vampire attack the vampires, subscribe to my newsletter! #

Seems like a new escallation cycle has started. Things were relatively quiet yesterday, but there was an undercurrent of unhappiness going on. As I left the shop cafe just before lunch I got a 'we learn' from the shop cafe staff. That’s really just a sign that in their mind I am wrong about something, even though I had done nothing but sit and be quiet the entire morning. Then everywhere I went there were weird manufactured situations along the way. And of course things escallated until I got mutilated. This time I slipped on a metal manhole cover in the road and stubbed my toe. Nothing too serious but it’s just the start.

Already this morning they have left the garbage cover open, which is a sign of another garbage war. Once again they create the problem they complain about, they block the solutions they suggest, they escallate and escallate, and eventually blame the entire thing on me. It’s the same pattern everytime and it’s happening yet again, for the millionth time. This has likely been happening to me since the dinausaurs.

I got some coding done yesterday, and some planning. I’m thinking to combine all the main app plugins into a single blog plugin where you can enable various features like a podcast, a newsletter, short posts, long posts, and a linkblog. It’s all blogging really, so just combine it all into 1 plugin. It will handle setting up all the feeds, archives and tagclouds. Under the covers it will use all the existing plugins. It will make it super easy to setup new blogs. Just a markdown file with a few settings in the frontmatter where you want the root of the blog to be and everything gets rendered for you. It feels like the right approach. I have a few days to mull it over before the build minutes reset.

Another day. I guess starvation, anger goading, white and red tsunamis will happen over the next few days if history is any guide. And of course everything will be explained away be a simple 'we learn' and a shrug of the shoulders. #

There’s been quite a religious theme underlying things the past few days. It’s kind of odd. I’ve met several people that wanted to speak about religion. Not saying that’s bad, it’s just a little unusual. I guess it could be a sign folks are thinking more about such things given the current rising tensions everywhere in the world.

Still waiting for my Github minutes to reset so I can finish item hash links feature I was working on earlier in the month, but also test all the latest code I’ve written. Quite a few cool new features. #

I’m getting a distinct sense that the world is trying to egg me on so to speak. It’s difficult to describe, but it’s a little bit like how space ships can use gravity of planets to sling shot to different locations, but imagine the planets could move around as they please and were conspiring to sling shot the aircraft to destinations of their choosing. That’s basically what’s happening, but with gang stalkers creating perfectly planned and orchestrated manufactured situations. I know it sounds looney, but you really only have to change a few small things to change someone’s trajectory, especially if they have a routine route they take.

Already this morning several unusual situations that have this general pattern. Almost all involving the colour white. #

The aftermath of the synchroncity apocalpse day continues. There are nuch leas strange synchronicities but the world is very cranky. Getting more and more angry with every passing minute. Escallating and escallating. Soon everything will be interpreted as some sort of war declaration. I literally won’t be able to do or say anything without some sort of punishment.

My escallation notes from yesterday:

• Lots of people sniffling and sneezing today at the shop cafe, both young men and young women. Though more young men.
• Group of teen school girls in uniform making quite strange comments including ‘Our Aaahh’ and ‘I learn’.
• All seats taken here at the shop cafe at lunch time, several people having to stand. Every single person here is a young woman or school girl. Over 20 of them. I am the only male. Extreme oestrogen. Comments so far: ‘you won’, abd some toilet related comments I can’t remember exactly.
• Yesterday in the morning there were several woman waiting to harass me when I went for a pee. This isn’t an isolated incident. This women toilet gang stalking has happened twice in the past 2 days. After I peed I calmly said ‘get your mind out of the gutter women’. I then left. That evening there was yet another manufactured situation, a woman dressed in white purposely dropped some money in the gutter, pretending it was an accident, followed immediately by another woman wearing red a few meters away, doing a very suspect sneeze into the gutter. They all got in the same bus and left. Today after what must be one of the biggest most Captain obvious women mega tsunamis ever, some small amount of money was left on the floor, right on front of the graffiti dick, which recently has been very innefectively white washed. While I went to the toilet for a pee, some very impatient person tried to open the door, I had literally only been in there 20 seconds. That was followed by a women that had been waiting for me to sit back down, picking up the money and saying something like ‘hello’. It’s all quite clearly extreme passive aggressive anger goading. Remember every morning, a motorbike gang stalker drives past and shouts 'Hey go home!' often sounding totally demented like Orvel the Duck.
• One of the young man shop staffers for the past few weeks has changed the way he walks up the stairs in a notable way. When we he walks up the stairs just as he gets to the top, and passes me on my left, he exaggeratedly hangs his head directly downwards. Similar to a child that has been shamed.
• The bloke that always shows up after lunch stays for a bit then as he leaves does this bizarre stop start thing as he walks down the stairs, who has been doing that for months, for whatever reason has started today to walk down the stairs essentially normally, without stoping and starting. The world is not able to stop harassing, illustrated literally by the stop start stairs guy. Seems like we have reached yet another complete reality inversion.
• The motirbike taxi bloke that wears a salmon pink tshirt and akways suts in front of me exageratedly washing down all the surfaces waa doing that again, after saying 'lie' at me. He then positioned himself very oddly and had a nap. That tends to happen before a gang stalker skeep depravation night.
• Back at the internet place this evening, and a shifty looking bloke pulls up on a motorbike in front of the house of the bloke who alternates good bad. They pause for a second clearly waitibg to see my reaction, then bloke on motorbike says 'I won' and drives off.

It’s so uterly ridiculously obvious that there is something strange being organised and orchestrated. I took a video of the lunch time women tsunami. Literally everyone surrounding me was a women. It was standing room only, that in itself is strange enough and never happens, but 100% women that just becer ever happens.

Come on world stop your lying ways! Enough with your passive aggressive intimidation!

I sat quietly the entire time, just waiting for their metaphorical gang rape of me to finish. Not much else I could do.

Today already the world is escallating in all directions. Constant stream of motorbike gang stalkers harassing me as I’ve been writting this note.

Amazingly yesterday I managed, in between the constant onslaught of tsunamis, to fix a bug in the passthrough feature of the static site generator. This enables you to easily copy files from the siurce folder unaltered to the target folder. The original implementation was kind of sketchy and wasn’t really working properly. I had been trying to find a way to get serverless functions integrated and it occurred to me I could just use some passthroughs, since you only really need to copy the serverless function files to the functions folder. It will be awesome to have a simple way to package up serverless functions into the plugins.

I also got the newsletter written and published. That was a lot more difficult than usual because post election, everything is a total mess of people shouting and running around with their hair on fire like the world is about to end. The quality of the podcasts was very variable. That in combibation with the synchronicity apocalypse meant my notes were just all over the place and a cauldron of torment. Think I managed to create quite an upbeat issue given the situation.

Worldo is still upset, offended at everything and punishing me for punishing me, with starvation and thurst. You’re welcome world. #

cat << EOF > Synchronicity Apocalypse Days (Issue #191)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

UK healthcare++, the big Bluesky migration madness, Bitcoin & memecoins are blowing up, forums are still cool, making music with AI, crypto-anarchism, aliens and lost civilisations detour

Issue details:

• Title: Synchronicity Apocalypse Days
• Issue: 191
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Yesterday was another synchronicity appocalypse day. It was one weird synchronicity after another, at such higher frequency than usual that it literally feels like you are in a simulation. It must have happened at least 10 or 15 times that the exact thing I was doing while listening to podcasts was described in some earily accurate way by the podcast I was listening to. It’s very difficult to put into words. And the synchronicities in the real world happen on a much much higher frequency too. It really feels like the universe is out to get you. Every darn thing you are doing gets blocked in some way, and the second you actually make some progress, after huge amounts of effort, literally right afterwards something else important breaks.

I managed after considerable effort to finally get some flip flops, I have been trying for weeks now but kept getting blocked. It had gotten to the stage where one of them had a hole in it. Well no sooner than I got the flip flops, which are very decent btw, I sat down to eat some food only to discover my glasses case had broken. The small magnet on one of the sides has detached and so the case no longer closes. The very odd thing is that the past few days people saying 'see you' and 'see' has been a bit of a theme. The case doesn’t look damaged in any way.

Just another strange synchronicity to add to the very big synchronicity tsunami that was already happening.

These synchronicity appocalypse days are so very weird it wouldn’t suprise me that in the future we discover they are an emergent property of the matrix-like thing which we propbably live in. It feels like the world has figured out a bunch of stuff, and acting all smug, flexing it’s synchronicity muscles, with every one, like a body builder on steroids. It never ends well, almost akways I get mutilated because the world doesn’t know how or when to stop. #

The harassment continued for much of the day. It was basically impossible to get anything done apart from listen to a few podcasts and even that was very difficult. When you keep getting interupted by harassment, it’s next to impossible to concentrate on what you are listening to. And the weird pedo pervert shit continued, in fact it was turned up a notch, they are really leaning into that. It’s difficult to even know how to describe it because, at least to me, it’s so disturbing. I’ve previously written about quite a few other pedo pervert incidents in the past. That’s how I refer to them, I don’t know how else to describe them.

Case in point. In the early evening I went to the public toilet. As I arrived there was a group of about 5-6 western women loitering outside. That’s very unnusual, so I gave them a lot of space as I passed by, it was pretty obvious something strange was going on. As I passed them they all in unison shouted 'No!' which was followed by laughter from some of them. I ignored them, thankfully I was several meters away so their aggressive bahaviour wasn't to egregious. I used the bathroom and when I exited they had gone. I figured that was the end of the situation. But it wasn’t.

I walked to where I was going, a few minutes away, and right before I passed the fruit stand, where last week there was another situation that seemed to me to be another wierd pedo pervert setup involving a woman and a baby, I wrote about it at the time, well this time, right before the fruit stand was a butch woman and a very young girl, she couldn't have been more than 5 years old. The butch woman had positioned her motorbike in such a way that I couldn’t see them until I literally was a meter away, and that was problematic because the poor little girl was going for a pee. Now there’s nothing abnormal about that per-se, of course emergencies happen, but this wasn’t a normal situation. In all the years I’ve been here, I have literally never seen anybody peing there, it’s a main road with loads of shops either side.

This was a planned, manufactured situation intended to anger goad me, and that’s completely out of order. Using children in a harassment campaign is a digrace. I don’t imagine that the gang of western women knew they were part of a bigger harassment incident, though they might have been. The fact of the matter is that these sorts of incidents happen all too regularly. In the last couple of weeks alone I can think of at least two other incidents involving children in shops where as soon as I arrived the staff changed into english and said 'No!' loudly in my direction. It’s a new thing they are doing.

I don’t know how or why the western woman were part of this particular clearly manufactured situation, but they were. It does perhaps highlight a much bigger problem where manufactured situations involving for all intents and purposes actors, are being used to harass people in very disturbing ways. I would go do far as to say that this is the norm rather than the exception. Manufactured situations, though thankfully not of the pedo pervert variety, happen to me almost every day. One might say there is a sort of manufactured situation industrial complex that exists in some shape here. I’m being deadly serious.

I wrote yesterday about an infection that I have sustained over the past few days. I believe it was organised and inflicted on me by the gang stalkers. On the surface it sounds like an exageration, or a misrepresentation of the truth, but if step back you realise that it’s something that has been slowly escallating for months now. I’ve been poisoned multiple times, I’ve had glass pellets in put in my food multiple times. It’s part of a re-occuring pattern of behaviour from some of the locals. It’s dark. It’s very real. It keeps happening. And it’s getting worse.

These incidents are instigated by gang stalkers. I don’t know what else to call them. A very large proprtion of them are women. Many are essentially passive aggressive thugs. And I’m being targeted constantly. Every single day.

Using children to harass people is totally out of order. Poisoning people is totally out of order. Breaking people’s teeth is totally out of order. And mutilating people’s sex organs is totally out of order.

This sort of extreme bullying must stop. It’s being done by men and women, whether through overt collusion or some bizare emergent behaviour. It’s happening. I know it’s happening because it’s happening to me. #

To add to everything, I woke up this morning to coughing up a huge amount of flem. Seems like it might be the start of yet another flem cough. This keeps happening.

What’s happening this morning is butch women are occasionally walking past, hurling a pre-meditated calculated audio harassment, and that’s being acconpanied by a constant up and down argument from the cafe next door.

I’ve started getting a bit of a runny nose, and several intense boughts if pain from my nasal cavity. They literally won’t stop until it turns into a huge alergic reaction with me sneezing for days. #

Holy moley the world has a bee in it’s bonnet. It’s been nothing but pain since I pleaded to the world to not punish me for the things it was doing to me. The entire world has turned into maniacs hell bent on non-ironically literally blaming me for every single thing in the entire multiverse. I have hardly slept. The world was doing one of it’s sleep depravation campaigns, waking me up just to tell me to go to sleep again, then just as I would start to fall asleep...psyche! Wake up foreigner! The entire night.

It’s manufactured situation after manufactured situation, only malcious help, and blaming me of every horrible thing under the sun. I literally can hardly walk. Since the weird pedo pervert shit where a young boy, clearly some kind of actor plant, dressed entirely in red who was waving very purposely at my groin area, I have developped some sort of infection. The entire area and my bladder is quite badly swollen. There gave been many incidents where children are being used to try and paint me as some sort of pedophile, when it’s clearly them that are CONSTANTLY doing wierd pedo shit. Food vendors are saying 'bye bye' when they normally don’t. It’s very clear it’s some sort of co-ordinated extreme anger goading.

This sort of weird pedo shit has happened many times before and I’ve documented it. This is the first time they have physically mutilated my private parts though. I don’t know exactly how they have done it, but these kind of secret mutilations is a speciality theirs. In the past month alone I’ve been poisoned at least twice, as well as several instances of glass pellets put in food.

Their favorite excuse for any manufactured situation at the minute is 'we’re learning'. I think that’s likely what’s being said to the purpotraiters by the real organisers. That happened over and over yesterday. Then during the night, there was a gang of kids with one adult ring leader. One of the kids had a 4 foot stick. They were walking around in quite a threatening way. After they passed by, a woman motorbike stalker drove past shouting 'learn!'.

So another extreme mutilation. Why are you so hell bent on violence Vietnam? #

The zip on my shoulder bag became broken yesterday. What are the chances?

Just another majorly impossible situation to deal with.

You’re fucking welcome world. #

A motorbike gang stalker just drove directly into me clearly on purpose. He had been waiting for me to walk past. As I passed he drove in my direction, looked directly at me, and drove straight into me. Vietnam why are you getting violent again? #

The new thing is makeup women everywhere. Literaly everywhere I go. There are literally two of them doing each others makeup right behind me as I write this note. The irony is that making up is the last thing on their minds. All they want is war. Loud war, quiet war, big war, small war, weird war, opposites war, infiniti war.

Yesterday was another alergy attack sneezing day, with harassment tsunami after tsunami to make it all worse. I’m sick of it all world. Sort your fucking lives out. Jesus.

I’m not your fucking daddy world. #

Another sneezing day yesterday. Interestingly as soon as the sneezing started the sane exact thing that happened last time happened again. Young women with an arsenal of makeup bags appeared and started doing each others makeup, blokes vaping appeared and sat right next to me, the shop staff in places I went to started having lots of very intense arguments, yellow tsunamis, white tsunamis, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s just the same playbook again and again at this point.

Not much else to say. Everything is about to get all blocked ad the world will blame me for blaming me, and then I’ll get blamed and punished for that too.

So sick of sneezing.

Maliciousness everywhere atm. #

I didn’t take any escallation notes yesterday but there was tons of weirdness everywhere. I got gifted some nice food late last night and so I have something nice for breakfast this morning.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about a major simplification that I might do to the major static site generator plugins. Currently you have plugins for the blog, notes, podcast, newsletter and linkblog, then there are seperate plugins for bells and whistles like archives, tagclouds, rss feeds. I think it would make more sense to move the later into the former, so that for instance when you instantiate the blog plugin it sets up all those other bells and whistles things for you.

The bells and whistles plugins could still be used seperately if you wanted to, but making the main app plugins a bit more featured would make setup and configuration a lot simpler in many cases. Also, I think over time I’ll be able to add lots of other cool things to them like serverless and edge functions.

Yesterday felt kinda crazy. I did manage a blog post. Hoping to get a bit of additional blogging today, but less surrealist humour. #

cat << EOF > Thoughts on integrating your website with Bluesky

There’s been much talk about Bluesky this past week, mostly because of a big exodus of people from Twitter following the US presidential election result. It seems many of them have chosen Bluesky as their new social media homebase. I’ve had an account for a while, and though I quite like it as a product, I currently only really post promos for the newsletter there.

There’s been quite a lot of folks writting about the whole thing, for example Gavin Anderegg has a piece that goes into a bit of detail about the Bluesky architecture. It’s kind of interesting. I previously wrote about my signup experience and the AT protocol that underpins the service. I didn’t end up getting that engaged over in Bluesky because it felt like most people and topics I liked where still mostly on Twitter.

The recent migrations to Bluesky have me wondering, what exactly would you need to do in order to integrate an existing website with Bluesky? What would that even look like?

I did a quick online search for blog posts and tutorials, but to my dismay there wasn’t much out there in the wild, only the official developer docs & tutorials. Figured I’d jot down a few notes on what such an integration might look like. I guess you could do a bunch of complicated things, but in it’s simplest form I think a Bluesky integration would have the following features:

• Ability to mark a website post to be syndicated to Bluesky, with ability to use the various Bluesky publish settings from within your post’s markdown frontmatter.
• Some sort of counter next to each post on the website that shows number of replies on Bluesky, and links to the thread on Bluesky.
• An engagement section on post pages that displays any replies from Bluesky users.
• Ability to publish to Bluesky via an RSS feed

These were the first things that sprung to mind. I’m super curious to hear how others are thinking to integrate their websites with Bluesky. #

I’m both complelely exhausted, even more so than yesterday, and very creeped out by the weird pedo sex goading that was going on all day yesterday. I took some escallation notes, I have no idea if any of this makes any sense. Bear in mind while I’m taking these notes I’m trying as much as possible to get on with productive stuff like listening to podcasts and planning development work on the website and static site generator, and it’s reached the point now where basically nothing is possible, even the escallation notes are just a mess.

Anyway here they are:

• Teenage kid dressed all in red, appeared out of nowhere in shop cafe, I’m sitting head down typing on my internet device, he passed and says something while waving his hand like he is saying hello except he was basically waving directly at my groin. Then steels my receipt, that was laying on the table, as he walks down the stairs. I manage to grab it back from him while he was looking at it. I think this was the kid from yesterday that was wearing yellow T-shirt and had a yellow plastic bag. Very weird.
• Btw yesterday evening there was a young woman that got offended at me for sitting in the seat that she had gotten up from a minute earlier. She had a very bright yellow bag.
• Today one of the female shop staffers that is carrying various stock items up and down the stairs is wearing a dark yellow T-shirt instead of then usual uniform. I bought a banana today, so perhaps that’s why. Based on past experience, invariably, things always get weird when bannanas are involved anywhere. Bananas are like vietnamese cryptonite.
• Woman sandwich shop vendor for no reason said ‘see’ after I asked for more mayonnaise
• In the next shop a few minutes later, the woman staffer said ‘more’ before the price I had to pay while I was paying.
• It’s evening now, woman wearing Fluoro yellow dress behaving oddly sat next to me
• On the other side of the road woman wearing the most red tight dress ever walking with a small boy wearing a black and white striped tshirt. He looks like a mini version of the security guard that has lots of energy but is also quite fat, from a few days ago at the shop cafe.
• A bit later a teenage boy wearing all black with apparent family, mother and brother perhaps, sat next to me, across the road was a woman taking photos with camera aimed directly in my direction. Next to the boy a man had attached his white helmet to the bench. They sat, waited to hear my reaction, when I didn’t react they left. They then came back and started to get on a bus but right after getting on they changed their mind and all got off the bus. Note a few days ago a strange old lady tried to get me to get on a bus, motioning ‘come here’ with her fingers.
• The bus family thing was followed immediately by a white car stoping in front of me, with a woman getting out wearing a very skimpy all white miniskirt and white top.
• Ow harassment

Don’t know if any of that made sense. I don’t have time to re-read it. I still have to write the newsletter. Really not feeling like doing that. Feeling majorly rushed and overclocked by the world, so I’ll likely have to make some drastic cuts to what I’m doing. Perhaps Elon, Vivek and Doge could slash 2 trillion dollars from all this fucking harassment.

The harassment is so bad I don’t even have the words, let alone energy, to describe it. It’s all consuming. It never ends. It’s like being forced to do other people’s sodoku puzzles, but you have to do your own puzzles too. And not starve. #

cat << EOF > Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI (Issue #190)

This week’s newsletter is out! (2024-11-16)

In this week’s edition:

UAPs, history of democracy, Trump wins, self-hosting, crypto bull market, expert pivoting, bitcoin forks & consensus, Uk government & economy teardown, 3rd party browser script security, and crypto AI

Issue details:

• Title: Bull runs, economies, politics, browsers & crypto AI
• Issue: 190
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

cat << EOF > The peaceful transition of humour

This cycle’s transition of humour began last week when satirical publication the Onion bought the right wing conspiracy conglomerate Infowars. Infowars will become a parody of itself while John Stewart’s Daily Show will slowly transition to a serious conspiracy show, selling health supplements. Infowars founder Alex Jones and John Stewart will try to spend the next few months showing each other the ropes. The seriously funny transition is expected to be complete by the new year.

When asked how they felt about the whole situation, neither Stewart nor Jones really knew what to expect:

Stewart: It’s a bit like learning to ride a bicycle with your hands back to front.

Jones: You just have to re-learn when to shout and when to laugh.

Podcaster, extreme mole and right wing communist comedy club owner Joe Rogan enthusiastically commented, somewhat out of context [1:43:29]:

"This is peak woke. This is absolute peak woke insanity."

According to "sources", he apparently went on to say

"Finally my evil plan is fully realised. We are going to have so much fucking fun."

Before riding off doing a wheely on his BMX, spinning the front wheel in 180 degree increments shouting:

"Serious... funny... serious... funny. Hahahaha ... aaaaaaarrrrggh I’m a red blooded man! ... Now I’m a giggling trans woman."

Everyone else’s brain, in his comedy club’s green room, promptly fell out of their heads, but it was fine because John Stewart, the designated driver, had been prepping for the transition for months and was wearing a rubber swimming hat just in case a brain related situation should occur. He was able to drive everyone home, giving everyone an emergency swimming hat and some Alcaseltzer.

It all ended happily ever after, though everyone had a bit of a hangover. The end.

Newsletter writer Mark Smith was interviewed for this piece, but declined to comment, shouting "fake news...fake news" before hanging up the phone.

He then rang us back and said he could not guarantie any of the logic in this post checks out exactly or indeed at all, and told us to subscribe to the newsletter, which he assured us doesn’t have surrealist crazy jokes all that often, it’s mostly tech, javascript, webdev, and a tiny segment pleading for a donation so he can buy a new laptop, and get back to doing normie web development.

He added, "please world don’t punish me for this post, I just want to get back to some form of normality". #

I feel like this Politics ambidextrous blog post from a few months ago is kind of sort of related in shape to today’s Peaceful transfer of humour blog post, which to be honest is breaking my brain a bit. Actually the end. #

I want the ability to run ChatGPT queries from an iOS Notes note bulleted list.

This would be the workflow:

• Be able to write a note offline containing many queries
• Send the note when you get online to a service that runs all the queries and brings back responses that you can store onto your device
• Read the results offline later

Theorectically ChatGPT ciukd be really awesome for offline workflows, but I don’t see anyone trying to build something around that. #

Too tired and exhausted and consuned by the world to write anything today. Here are the escallation notes, it was a day of non stop nastiness.

• The big thing today is ‘lie’. 3 food vendors in a row have said it while preparing my food. The first, a well known warpather butch woman who pretends to be all nice then always without fail metaphorically gut punches you as she gives you the food, confidently said ‘lie’ to me as she gave me my food order. The next place, a few minutes walk up the road, as I told him what I wanted suddenly it was imperative for him to shout ‘lie’ across the street at someone. The place after that, again a two minute walk away, the staffer there said ‘lie’ to the apparent customer before me, as soon as I entered the shop.
• Today at the shop cafe I’m being front run in everything I do by parents. Being told ‘I learn’ just at as I’m about
• Shop staffers angrily snapping elastic bands. The elastic band that someone body else left a couple of days ago on the table usually sit at is still there. Evidently they incorrectly think I left it there, or are lying, and have decided to not clean the table. Nevermind that I always clean up my garbage. Never mind that’s 50% of other customers don’t. Nope I’m still to blame for a single neutrino being out of place in the entire universe again.
• Now there is a shifty looking bloke wearing very white T-shirt drinking red bull and with a packet of masks, making 'I’m ill' type noises, ‘uuurgh’, and walking around like his feet are super heavy, slapping them all over the place. Also he’s drunk a small bottle of Pepsi which he has placed right next to the graffiti dick, which someone has obviously tried to paint over but it hasn’t worked, so you can still see it. The forward slash is still there above it.
• Shifty looking bloke moved seat and left an elastic band directly on front of me. The elastic band based harassment continues. He’s getting quite agitated btw. He keeps quickly turning around to try and catch me looking at him. Looking at him is the last thing on my mind, I’m just trying to concentrate on a podcast.
• Young woman staffer downstairs shouts an exasperated ‘they knooow!’. I literally have no idea what she is talking about. I wonder if anyone in the building does.
• Bloke doing overly exaggerated quenching thirst noises. Literally every 10-15 seconds. Told you there was a thirsting escalation happening yesterday didn’t I. There was a large empty bottle of water on the table I sit at when I got here. It’s pure anger goading. I spot these attacks almost immediately these days. It was by a well dressed man vaguely my age wearing a white dress shirt.
• After taking a selfie with the updated white washed graffiti dick at the shop cafe, a few moments later a voice from the back room that sort of sounds like he’s on the phone to somebody : ‘we know’
• Young teen boy shows up in shop cafe, I’m the only other customer. He is being strange. Wearing a bright fluoro yellow T-shirt, with a dark yellow thick plastic bag. He sits behind me on a stool, and shouts in my direction in a bizarre accent that sort of hides what he is saying ‘You won!’. It’s aimed at me, but it could be that he’s shouting downstairs. I don’t respond and he moves seat. Shouldn’t he be in school with all the other kids?
• Shop cafe staffer right before cleaning up the mess left by the morning rush left around me: ‘liar’. I was the only person in the seating area. He used a put-on very deep voice. He cleaned up everything apart from the elastic band directly in front of me, left by the shifty looking bloke in white T-shirt earlier.
• Big incident at the sandwich shop at lunch time. The young woman vendor who is only there occasionally was doing something shifty with the sandwiches. It all got very strange as I waited for the customer before me to get served. She changed the order several times, 1/2 prepared 2 different sandwiches then putting them aside, making it look like the previous customer had changed their mind, she never asked me what I wanted, then used one of the old 1/2 prepared sandwiches that had had other meat in them and then removed, and tried to force me to take that, even though it was incorrect with some stuff I didn’t want. It turned into a big argument, she kept trying to force me to have the incorrect sandwich. The whole situation was clearly manufactured, and part of the bigger anger goading arc. That’s why at the shop cafe they have been doing the whole elastic band thing. All these things are related. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. It literally happens every few weeks. Same exact pattern. They will act all upset now for days. I did eventually get the fresh sandwich I wanted but only after being chastised as being ‘a man!’. This is also linked to the whole hot water blocking manufactured situation from a few days ago. All the women are trying to exert their authority. This whole place is a hellhole of manufactured hate atm.

I tried my best to listen to some podcasts but it was realy ifficukt to concentrate on anything let alone write any blog posts. I did eat some food so that was nice. It seems at the minute like when I’m able to get food, I get blocked in every other dimension.

I just hope today will be better. Have got to somehow prepare the newsletter for tomorrow. Feel like that’s going to be difficult as everything is such a spiritual mess. I can’t even remember shat podcasts I listenned to. I just know I’m kinda tired with all the elections stuff everywhere. #

I didn’t get much done yesterday, listenned to a few podcasts but it felt like most of the day was filled with harassments and dealing with that. Hard to even concentrate on the podcasts or write any blog posts when you are totally consumed by the gang stalkers. There were a lot of very bizare situations.

Escallation notes from yesterday:

• The milk left on the ground next to where I stand at the internet place that had basically been washed away in the rain has been ‘toped up’ with new milk.
• Right after arriving and noticing the milk, the bloke that runs one of the shop cafes shouted ‘Aah! ... Okay Maaak’. Pretty clearly an escalation. They know they are currently starving me, food goading me, sex goading me and anger goading me. If I say nothing they get more angry, if I say something they get more angry. They are really just angry at themselves.
• Strange bizarre set of situations today at the shop cafe. It was quite busy when I arrived, the apparent morning school rush, lots of kids and mothers. I went to the till with a bloke staffer avoiding the young woman staffer that pretends to be an angel but then takes every opportunity to shiv you, she is a fucking psychopath imo. I wasn’t avoiding her exactly, that’s just how the queues were emptying out, but she did that thing where you go one way and she pretends to try to get you to go the other way, classic psycho move that. Anyway, I paid went upstairs and there were two people that had clearly imo been waiting at the top of the stairs and only started down the stairs when they saw me turn the corner 1/2 way up the stairs. All these little things are anger goadings. In fact right before that an apparent mother had blocked the way with her child, with some ridiculous situation with a tupaware box, literally the worst time and place to have a mother - child tupaware situation. Anyhow I got to the top of the stairs, put my stuff down and noticed that the toilet looked occupied, and a red school bag and red helmet were on a nearby table. The toilet door occupied signal was 1/2 closed 1/2 open. I needed the bathroom so after a minute or so I tentatively slowly pushed the door open. There was someone in there just standing behind the door. They pushed the door closed as if it was unexpected. Already something didn’t seem quite right. I went back to organise some of my stuff. After a minute or two I went back to the toilet and opened the door again: This time a young boy, probably about 8-10 years old jumped out. It really seemed like he had been just standing there waiting for me to open the door again. I entered the toilet after he exited, and discovered the loo hadn’t been flushed properly. Still had murky brown water with bits in it. I turned around and motioned at the boy, pointing down at the loo, signalling that he had forgotten to flush it. I exited, he entered and flushed the loo. As he left he did a 2 thumbs up gesture. So nothing completely out of the ordinary, but later after the school rush had finished. The young woman staffer that pretends to be an angel but is actually a psychopath, went to the toilet, and upon leaving as the passed me, descending the stairs with light footedness of the sort a cartoon criminal breaking and entering carrying a sack full of swag would have, saying ‘good’ in my direction, as she descended. I find that all very odd. But that’s not all. When I entered the store there was, what I presume was dog shit, on the floor all around the door. What a strange set of coincidences. Each one of these things is very unusual, but for all of them to happen one after the other like that, the odds are just way too unlikely for there not to be something strange going on. I document it because, no doubt this isn’t the end of this escalation.
• Young apparent couple, probably late teens. Having a bit of an argument. The bloke says as he passes me: ‘he knows’. I literally have no idea what he is on about.
• The next most interesting podcast in my queue is of course a Tim Ferris interview with Derren Brown. Of course. How could it not be Derren BROWN after all the bizarreness that has been today.
• I’m sitting at the window in the shop cafe. It’s a 1st floor window perpendicular to the street outside, overlooking it. Down the way, there is a short and somewhat stumpy bloke that attends to the motorbikes outside several of the shops along the street. He’s always very active, strangely a lot of energy for someone his size. Today he’s looking a bit fatter than usual, he’s also wearing a cartoon bandit white and black stripe T-shirt. Just worth noting. Seems somehow relevant. In fact this entire street is a bit relevant. There are home made camera frames with cameras attached to sign posts at each end of the street. It’s a very weird place. Did I mention that there were some announcements today that Apple are getting into the home camera business? Just another day. I’m probably on a street housing Derren Brown fans, or crew members. Might also be a giant debugger.
• Random male customer says ‘Ah-yah’ as they leave after nobody here said anything for at least 30 mins
• The previous customer appears to have led to another male customer leaving who quietly said no! In my direction for whatever reason. Food goading, anger goading, sex goading, could be all 3. Whatever it is, it’s not normal imo.
• 2 young woman acting kinda shifty. They turn up and start f-ing around with the power outlet where my device is charging. They unplug the other device which isn’t mine. They are now doing some sort of makeup thing in the toilet and saying things like, ‘we know’ and ‘he knows’. Where they have put their stuff they have left 2 empty bottles of water, and a bunch of fake "stuffed" flowers, that they appear to have brought with them. One has a red bag with the words "where impact matters". One of them has a face that looks swollen.
• Earlier I stumbled while exiting the toilet, because my flip flops, which I’ve been trying to replace now was for weeks but keep getting blocked again and again, are uneven and so I momentarily lost balance and hit my head slightly on the door frame. It was a bit painful. Specifically I hit my ear. Now a bloke has appeared sitting right in front of me with really strange ears. I reckon he could be in a film staring elves. His ears bend out from his head at the top of the ears. Quite odd looking. What are the chances? It also looks like he’s just had his hair cut into a type of mullet, cut almost to accentuate his strange ears from behind.
• The bloke the girls tried to unplug his device is now watching videos and laughing historically.
• The group of people behind me now are laughing hysterically. The girls left while saying "we are lying". My sinuses then flared up in pain, nearly sneezed. Now the group behind me just said ‘sorry’, then said ‘okay’, and all left.
• Just noticed that the table I am sitting at, which is made of wood, has a sad face and some large scratches vandalised into the surface of the table. One of the large scratches, which intersects with a dashed line that intersects with the forehead of the sad face, points in the direction of the graffiti dick on the wall a few meters away. The graffiti dick had a forward slash above it, that is angled the same as the large table scratch.

Looks like I’ll be able to get some food today. Not much else to add.

Another day. #

Yeah the usual starvation escallation bull crap continues. Got given some food last night, which was nice but they are also purposely doing a thirsting campaign so it was difficult to eat. They then followed that up with some really dry fallafel and pita bread food, with two small dry bread rolls. I’ve literally not only never been given fallafels but I’ve never even seen such a thing here the entire time I’ve been here. There was what appeared to be a manufactured situation earlier that morning with a local clandestine motorbike mechanic throwing a bottle of water in my direction that nearly hit me. A broken small pair of pliers had also been left near where I sit. So there’s some sort of water / thirsting malicious help thing going on.

Escallation notes from yesterday:

• Everyone and their dog is No-ing, people on motorbike, butch women, kids going to school. It’s the No-pocalypse.
• Bloke shouted ‘bear!’ at me as I left the internet place.
• Milk left on the floor at the internet place last night, with butch woman appearing as soon as I got there saying No!. Today at the shop cafe I arrived early, only 1 other customers, a young woman drinking a small kids size carton + straw of milk. She left as soon as I noticed the milk. She was sitting next to the graffiti dick.
• Two elastic bands left on the table I usually sit at in the shop cafe when I arrived very early. Seems innocuous, but it’s actually food goading because they know I haven’t been able to buy a sandwich this morning, which are always packaged with an elastic band. Note also the blocking of roast pork sandwich two days ago. It’s all part of the current escallation campaign. No doubt someone will be shouting money! at me later.
• Since yesterday several incidents with guardians and small children / babies appearing right after an anger goading incident. Happened right after the incident at the public toilet with the overly camp bloke, right on front of the fruit stand next to the bananas, a woman standing there almost blocking the path holding a baby. Happened this morning at the hot water and egg shop. A man loitering with a 5 year old who was wearing a green T-shirt. Also a bloke in a yellow T-shirt entered the shop right before me. This often happens when they are doing the sex and anger goading. It’s a well known thing at this point. I’ve documented it quite a bit in the past.
• Young woman wearing pink top and white mini skirt repeatedly gyrating legs and entire body, while sitting on front of the graffiti dick, in 10 second bursts. I think she might start having an epileptic fit.
• The gyrating woman left her keys on the surface and came back 30 seconds later to get them. Looked to me like she did it on purpose.
• Empty green energy drink bottles was left next to the graffiti dick lying on it’s side
• Shop staffer who acts like an angel but will metaphorically shiv you whenever you are not looking and she gets the chance, on going downstairs to buy another noodle: ‘good’
• Right after, a tall westerner stood next to the graffiti dick the entire time I was eating noodles then left. He just typed on his phone but never sat down. Very odd.
• On way to internet place, passed by two blokes, one says apparently to the other ‘you are harder’
• At the exact place where I cross the road to get to the internet place: 1 elastic band. No other elastic bands in either direction for as far as the eye can see. After crossing the road, two elastic bands on the ground exactly where I rejoined and pavement
• More elastic band based harassment. Never would have thought something so ridiculous could be a thing. But it is definitely a thing. This will be escalated until the entire universe is entirely composed of elastic bands. Then it will all be blamed me. But presumably by then I too will be made of elastic bands, but that doesn’t matter, they will always find a way to blame me.

As per usual, I’m not always right with all of these, but I’m right with an aweful lot of them.

Today I’m feeling quite tired. I know it’s going to be a tough day without much food. Difficult to be enthusiastic.

One awesome thing from yesterday is that I had just enough build minutes to get the new item hash links feature working in staging. Not enough minutes to merge and deploy the feature, but it totally works. Just gotta wait till the end of the month. I still have enough build minutes to run the daily build for about 12 of the 16 days remaining until the reset.

That cheered me up a bit.

It’s going to be really awesome when all post types finish with an item hash link. Technically I probably won’t need the bash heredocs feature any longer since you’ll be able to see where posts end by the hash link. And since I put in the extra work to turn that into a feature, it’s easy to just turn it off if I decide I’d rather not have them anymore.

The way I’m feeling about the heredocs to title feature currently is I quite like it, and I think it does broadly speaking fit with my linux / opensource / hacker / maker roots, but since I don’t currently have a functional laptop it’s a bit of a daily slap in the face, constantly reminding me of another time when things, at least computing related things, were a lot better.

We shall see I guess. A lot can happen in the space of a few weeks. Sad that I can’t do much in the way of development until the end of the month, but looking forward to deploying the new feature now that I know it definitely works. #

The starvation cycle they are putting me through continues, and they are back up to all their usual tricks again. I’ve documented them at length in notes and blog posts in the past. Broadly speaking it’s anger goading alongside food goading and sex goading. Really it’s all anger goading, and when you see it for what it is, it’s really them that are angry, they want you to be angry so they can blame everything on you. If you you get angry, and sometimes you have to because the harassment often gets dangerous, then they reward that in some way.

The 4 big harassment themes as of last night were:

• Drugs - they gave me a small can of energy drink yesterday evening. No food. This morning, early, I woke up to a motorbike gang stalker shouting 'owl' at me. That’s notable because last night before going to sleep I was listening to the latest Rogan and the guest spoke about an incident where he did some illegal drugs and felt and looked like an owl, I guess awake with enormous eyes. Yeah somehow they track what podcasts you are listening to aswell. These synchronicities happen ALL THE TIME.
• Sex - White tsunami after white tsunami, tissues being left everywhere I go. Young women in skimpy all white outfits getting on busses right after crochety old laddies that I had never seen before, who had been loitering nearby shiftily, motioned me to 'come' onto the previous bus. Followed almost immediately by the old laddy that hangs out in front of the store croutching down to go for a piss directly on front of me, followed immediately by a motorbike gang stalker shouting 'come Aaah' as they drive past. All the security guards nearby have recently started wearing white uniforms. And they now crouch down and sit on a flowerbed curb, like little children, to smoke their cigarettes. It’s odd. They don’t normally behave like that. Something is up.
• Water - They are up to something with the water taps in the public toilets again. For months now these have been turned to just a trickle, but a couple of days ago, one of the taps was suddenly full flow again, but 20 seconds after starting to use the tap it was turned off completely. Same for the other tap. That was the day when everything was blocked everywhere I went. Well last night when I got there, there was some sort of, what certainly appeared to me to be a manufactured situation, with the overly camp bloke that keeps turning up at the toilets. I don't know what was going on, I was listening to music and just waited outside while the situation unfolded. They seemed very annoyed that I didn’t walk into their trap, whatever they had planned. They kept looking under the sinks like they were trying to fix it or something. Anyway when they finally left, both taps had been somehow jammed into full flow mode, with no way to turn them off. Great for washing your hands, but not for anything that requires the sink to fill up and then empty. Looks like they weren’t set to a trickle to save money.
• Racism - There was a manufactured situation that occurred with a black guy a couple days ago. They had just been harassing me for previous few hours so I wasn’t in any mood to talk or help anyone. So whatever he said to me I just said No. Honestly it seemed like a manufactured situation. I was exhausted, and people literally everywhere I went had been randomly just saying No to me, even when I wasn’t interacting with them. So No was stuck in my mind. Anyway since then the world has made a big effort to paint me as some sort of white supremacist racist.

There’s other stuff happening, but that the general pot of madness that is swirling around at the minute. Everything is precarious.

With food and water in short supply, I’m not going to be able get much done. And it’s going to be very difficult not to at some point get angry with the lying gang stalkers. #

Well yesterday appears to have been the world wide front running and allow blocking festival. I say world wide, but there’s really is no way to tell. It certainly was where I am. I already wrote it up here. Today will likely be much the same, but eventually everyone will have a sort of bad karma hangover, which will be blamed on me, of course.

No point in writing anything. Can’t do any dev work as no build minutes. Angry offended world keeps on turning even if a single neutrino is out of place. Strange that isn’t it.

An infinite stream of lies from the world for me, a single neutrino in the entite universe out of place for thee, and it’s still all my fault.

Likely incorrect, [shrug]. #

cat << EOF > Individual freedom in the age of crypto currencies and AI

Roman Sterlingov was recently convicted of operating the Bitcoin mixer Bitcoin Fog. The case is worrying on a few levels. Firstly based on the article, the amount of data needed to prove guilt looks to be very thin indeed. Essentially just a few records in a database. Seems to me that could very easily be manufactured. But on a larger level, in my opinion the whole notion of financial privacy, and how it relates to individual freedoms, is going to become increasingly important.

The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that without some privacy when it comes to financial transactions, people can never be free. They will always get exploited by entities that seek to opress them, monitoring their transactions and activities to determine their minimum viable capital requirements for survival. That can then be used to oppress them. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Same goes for individuals all the way up to nation states.

As many of us have discovered over the past decade or so, access to money has long been a tool to oppress people. It happens on a truely massive scale via organisations like the IMF and World Bank, that proport to help developing nations while actually saddling them with enormous debt that they can never pay back.

But it happens on a small scale too. It’s the sort of thing that you don’t realise how scary it is until it has happened to you. Here in Vietnam it’s been happening to me on a daily basis now for several years in one way or another. And that’s with cash. Once things are digital this sort of oppression could be deployed at scale and used in combination with powerful AI to target individuals in a fully automated way.

It’s such an important thing because, in our modern societies, financial transactions are the basis of pretty much everything we do as humans. Of course the tricky thing is that financial privacy would be for both non-criminals and criminals alike. It also seems to me that given how prone to corruption institutions are over the long term, that criminals would eventually manouver themselves into positions where they could use transaction data to target non-criminals. The regulations put in place would be repurposed and used against the very people they aim to protect.

It’s likely that the criminals, at least the smart ones, will actually want anti privacy regulations. Much in the same way that large tech companies want regulation, because once you are an established entity, regulations make it more difficult for startups, and indeed individuals, to succeed and retain their freedom.

Ultimately I think it might boil down pretty close to an all or nothing situation. Either we all have freedom, or none of us have freedom, because with pervasive AI, even the criminals would eventually end up oppressing themselves.

What’s the value of individual freedom? #

They’ve started another bought of malicious help, with some clothes gifts that on the surface look like they could be a useful gift, but actually when you examine the items, at least some of them have been chosen imo with the express intention of causing me trouble, possibly even harm. I don’t want to go into details but there are multiple signs from the last few days that point to the fact that it’s all part of some sort of bigger escallation war plan.

I’ve taken a few of the items that might be useful and left quite a few of them. That will probably be used as some sort of precursor to war in itself. There’s really nothing else I can do. Just another impossible situation to deal with in my already very precarious life.

As far as development goes, I’ve essentially run out of build minutes for any development this month, with only just about enough to publish content to the website every morning, not that there’s likely going to be much good content because I’m being blocked in the only dimension that really matters. Hard to be a dev that works in public when you can’t even run builds. Never mind that I don’t even have a functional laptop.

Not much different to it being hard to being a human when you can’t even eat food, and drink water, which is also happening much more than is workable.

Life at the minute is just this constant never ending sudoku puzzle trying to figure out how to arrange what little I have so I don’t die. And there’s never enough. And everytime I figure something out, the dark side of the world uses that to figure our how to constrict me even more.

Hello world? I guess you’ve banned hello now have you. What a suprise. #

cat << EOF > Monarchies and republics: An obvious difference I only just noticed

Another no doubt totally incorrect observation about the US political / govermental system that I only just noticed...

As a brit, I find it kind of strange how in the US, the majority leader of the house, who I guess maybe is somewhat similar to the prime minister in the UK (?), is totally unknown generally and over-shadowed in terms of popularity by the president.

In the UK, the prime minister is elected, and then that’s the bloke or gal that you see literally leading the government in parliament every week. They are the one answering questions, they are the one on the tele and in the newspapers. They have quite a lot of power. They are running the entire show so to speak. They get a lot of attention from the general population, but it’s kind of like they are a tech CEO of a subsidury company. They do this both internally and internationally.

The monarch on the other hand has basically no power, and though they have lots of attention from the public, it’s a very different sort of attention, more similar to the attention an actor gets. You follow them your entire life, growing up with them mostly in the background, though occasionally they are front and center. They operate both internally and internationally, but they aren’t really ever involved in actually running the government. They aren’t officially part of a political party.

In the US, it feels like a totally different dynamic. The president is sort of outside of government, a bit like a monarch type figure, but they have quite a lot of power, signing all sorts of executive orders and what not. They operate internally as a sort of monarch, but internationally they are more like a prime minister. Also, I don’t know how much this has any practical significance, but since they are part of a political party, there’s a sense that one party is totally in control of everything, from top to bottom. A bit of cognitive disonence perhaps for a republic, which is supposed to protect minorities from the rule of the majority?

All this probably seems very obvious to many, but I just never noticed it before. I had in my head made a vague equivalence between the US president and the UK prime minister, because in international diplomatics stuff, which is what you see in various media, that’s what it looks like.

Really the equivalency is that the president is more like an elected monarch.

Is that a good thing? I don’t know, I’m still trying to get my head around this observation. I wonder if it affects how much the general population pays attention to politics. And I suppose it creates a totally different balance of power to the entire governance apparatus.

With all this in mind, it really must have been rather a big moment when Reagan became president. Much bigger of a moment than I had previously realised. It was sort of saying, in not so many words, hey look, our president is a monarch now too. And likely it was saying a lot more than just this. Perhaps we are still trying to figure out exactly what.

Just wanted to mention, sorry if it’s all clumsily said. Based on how much I had to edit this piece as I wrote it, some of these are very new concepts to me. #

Yet another example we live in a simulation or simulation-like thing.

I literally just finished writing a blog post about monarchies and republics, that concludes with a bit about how strange it must have been when Reagan, an actor, became president of the US, and a few minutes later the TFTC podcast with guest Matt Pines that I was listening to, has a bit on the technocrats starting to realise that Bitcoin is actually a serious thing [50:53]:

"For that managerial technocrat, that prides themselves on having a domain of expertise and control, that they know the left and right corners of their field and their domains of responsibility, and they also have control of what comes in and out of that policy space, it affronts or offends them in a way psychologically to have something like Bitcoin. To come from this cyberpunk, anarcho-capitalist, internet, bitcoin-bro world, and now intrude on their staid, well managed, well curated, policy garden. It’s like the kids across the road have come across to trample on your gardiñas."

What are the fucking chances?

And guess what, I’m currently being badgered by people pretending to be trample kids in the shop cafe I am attempting to write this friggin note in.

Seriously seriously. Reality is so much stranger than fiction. You couldn’t make this stuff up. We live in a series of ever changing reality fractals created by AI. There is no other explanation that fits. This sort of thing is happening to me constantly at this point.

And before you ask, extrapolating the fractal a bit, for what it’s worth, no, I, am not actually that offended. Just constantly worried I’m going to starve to death. It’s reality that is constantly offended.

Seriously. The kids, are trampleing their own gardiñas and are infiniti offended at me, even though I have nothing to do with these fucking gardiñas. Or for that matter, these stupid kids, that think they are infiniti gods from another dimension, or what have you, who are pretending to find this all hilarious but actually are infiniti offended at themselves. [shrug]

Trampling inception on LSD. Boooooouuuuje.

I guess I’ll be getting even more mutilated then. I’ve already got another runny nose. Some dinner later would be nice instead of a constant stream of total reality inversions. Just an idea.

Done. No more writing today. #

I actually don’t even know exactly what gardiñas are. #

I gotta say it was really weird listening to this Duncan Trussell episode with William Montgomery after this happened.

I’m still listening to the episode right now, and writing this note is super f-ing weird. It’s like a note note.

Not sure what that is exactly. [shrug] #

Now the internet at the internet place has been cut off.

Butch women being butch women, kind of intimidating, loitering, just waiting to see my reaction.

Offended much world? Definitrly seems like you’re offended world. #

1/2 the places I've been to today I’ve been blocked.

Sweat breads bloke wasn’t there. Sandwich shop was 'no pork today'. The internet place had the internet cut off. The places where I wasn’t blocked, there was some form of harassment. The egg and hot water shop bloke essentially instructed me to be a dog, the shop cafe somewhat predictably then behaved like I was a dog, at the other sandwich shop there were random people waiting to front run my every move, instructing me to get 'money' several times while I waited, and 'pay' right before staffer bloke gave me my order, and finally in the shop cafe I’m in now the staffer at the till once again ordered me to 'money' as I approached to pay.

Please world explain to me how this is not you being infiniti offended by literally every fucking thing I do. Thank you.

Oh yeah and you could say sorry and mean it. That would be nice.

And saying "liar lie" is not saying sorry and meaning it, just so you know.

Also trying to manufacture a situation where I slip on a piece of fruit is malicious. You did that exact same thing, same exact playbook, last week.

You should probably say sorry for that and mean it too. Not telling you what to do, but your karma is going to be pretty f-ing bad. #

The starvation cycle continues. I am again a pariah, I have no idea why, just for existing I guess. The gang stalkers are harassing pretty much constantly. I take a few notes here and there, mostly to keep me sane, but there is just too much to document. And if you spend all your time documenting it that drives you insane too. I reckon I captured about 20-30% of it in these notes.

Escallation notes from yesterday:

• The street kid that carries ridiculous amounts of transparent bags full of golf ball sized fruits, that has been appearing at the height of the last few starvation cycles, has once again appeared at the shop cafe.
• More examples of me getting punished for being kind and considerate. It always seems to be in relation to and by women. WTF?
• Bit of a continuation of the white tsunami, with apparent scientists that were sitting next to the graffiti dick making a point of putting on their lab coats in the shop cafe then leaving.
• Followed immediately by girl wearing bright green T-shirt turning up, also wearing pink shoes, behaving kind of shifty. Nothing purchased and keeping her quite big bag on her back. Note the young bloke who only wears plastic bags on his feet, carrying a bag of plastic recycle bottles bigger than him showed up again yesterday. Also several people doing feet related harassment. Plastic bag shoe bloke only shows up when I need to buy flip flops, but is a sign that if I do try to get flip flops, I will get blocked in some way.
• Starting to get a pretty bad head ache for some reason. Odd because I don’t often get headaches. Probably another mutilation on the way.
• A bit of large kitchen knife intimidation by bloke who alternates good / bad at the internet place. Maybe I’ll get my throat slit during the night eh?
• Butch woman partner of alternating good bad bloke is doing that thing where she sits facing me looking like she is ill. In the way you do when you are sitting in the toilet with a tummy bug. When that happens in the past I’ve gotten ill the next day or so.

I’ve gotten really close to finishing the hash links for all posts feature. I got a bit side tracked having to ensure it didn’t break the heredocs feature, which is somewhat ironic given that that was a stop gap feature to get around the problem of items not all having hash links. There’s something very fractal like to all this as fixes for the fixes, workarounds for the workarounds is sort of a daily theme of life around here.

I’ve also, because of all the harassment and time pressure, been sort of forced into updating the plugins to have the latest version of components from the website. In the past I have customised several of the main plugin components on the website. That’s because it hasn’t always been obvious if the added features were generally useful. I’ve kept the plugin version simpler just so there were less moving pieces, less things to change. I had always planned to move the latest back into the plugins, but there hasn’t been many stable times to do that.

Well with all the comotion of the past week, things got way too confusing, so I decided to move them all back into the plugins now. It made things a lot less confusing. The downside is that I’m very likely not going to have enough build minutes to both get it done and be able to publish content to the blog for the rest of the month. But that would probably have happened anyway with a more complicated setup. And so it goes.

There are so many difficult decisions you have to make when you are resource and time constrained, and under constant attack, but you have to make those decision, sometimes with incomplete information, to make progress.

Still have to write today’s newsletter, which should go out after lunch. Not feeling particularly great about that. There’s some pretty good podcasts, but everything is politics at the minute. Very little of any interest, or at least nothing really very original imo, happening in tech. #

cat << EOF > Joe Rogan and Dave Smith on government creating the problems they complain about

This segment from a recent Rogan podcast jumped out at me. It was while discussing Trump, the possibility of some people being pardonned, and on the secret services entrapping innocent people [39:42]:

Dave Smith: There’s an old saying, it goes something like "the FBI always get’s their man", because it’s always their man. There’s been dozens of these FBI, what they call, "Sting" operations, which are really entrapment [...] "Oh we thwarted another terrorist attack". No they didn’t thwart another terrorist attack. They planned a terrorist attack, and then thwarted it. It was never going to happen. [...]

Joe Rogan: And then they say they are preventing crime. You are actually making it. You’re making it and then stoping it. And that’s fucking wrong, you’re fucking cheating. You are rigging the pinball game man. And we know that now.

For what it’s worth this isn’t just a problem the US has. It’s everywhere, and not just in government. I see some version of it happening almost every day here in South East Asia. It’s something cultural. Perhaps it’s been around for ever, or maybe it’s the new information and technology landscape. Could be it’s just some narly phase humanity is passing through.

Whatever, I think it’s worth highlighting, even if it’s complicated because we are all somehow caught up in it. It’s important to have empathy, try to see things from different perspectives, rich, poor, old, young, male, female, and the rest. We need to navigate our way through.

It’s a great episode. Dave Smith, standup comic and libertarian commentator, is very eloquant when it comes to the recent elections. He’s obviously thought about all the topics they talk about at length. They cover the recent election and a load of the zeitgeist du jour, with a light touch of conspiracy theories, and some mostly good humour.

If you are left leaning politics-wise this might be somewhat of a triggering episode. On the other hand if you really truely are trying to discover why the left side of politics seems to have lost it’s way, this might be the episode to help you rip off the band aid, and discover what some of the smart and often thoughtful folks from the other side really are saying. #

cat << EOF > Deprogramming Dénouement (Issue #189)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

JD Vance, state of the UK, bitcoin & memecoins, wine tasting and coding, Lessig, Bricks & mBridge, Kemi Badenoch, Elon Musk, left Trump analysis, Dave Smith, and Web Components still cool

Issue details:

• Title: Deprogramming Dénouement
• Issue: 189
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

It’s been more of the usual starvation cycle bull crap, with empty cigarette packets, and other garbage related anger goading. There are signs they are starting some fabricated 'Pay!' harassment too where they try to make it look like I didn’t pay for something. Of course they are escallating and escallating, and maximumly offended at everything.

There was a strange incident yesterday in the park where I got completely surrounded by what appeared to be school children. There must have been 30 of them, all around 4-5 years old. Most of them where dressed in blue martial arts clothes. But there was also a smaller group just dressed in white non martial arts clothes. It appeared to be some sort of kids martial arts class but it was very strange. Only 1 bloke instructor, then loads of butch women who were constantly taking photos of the kids with their phones. They lined them all up and got them to do kicks and punches one at a time, so they could get photos of each of them. It was the most disorganised improvised martial arts lesson I have ever seen.

There was also another group of older late teenager school kids that appeared to be unsupervised. They were just hanging around. Why they weren’t actually in school I don’t know, but I caught one of them clearly using the group of kids as a way to hide they were taking pictures of me with a DSLR type camera. I had been looking in a different direction and someone momentarily stood in between me and the girl with the camera, I looked at them, and when the person moved out of the way, the girl quite obviously had the camera pointed directly at me, snapping away. When she noticed I was looking directly at her, she was very suprised, put the camera down and tried to pretend she hadn’t been taking photos.

I mention all this because it was all quite strange and so I want a record of it. This morning an empty kids sized milk carton with a straw sticking out if it was left on the ground next to where I sit, so looks like that’s already being used to anger goad. But it’s a double whammy because the security guard is making it look like he’s got an eye on me, trying to make it look like he thinks I’m shop lifting, which I most definitely am not doing.

As for development I got all the plugins working in staging with the new item hash link feature. Going to hopefully try to merge that today. I’ve burned through 75% of this month’s build minutes, that’s the problem with features that involve all the plugins because they require so many builds, especially because some of the repos have npm caches that you keep having to refresh to get the latest code to be picked up.

Probably going to start running very low on energy today, given the lack of food. #

Just had another multiday bullying escallation happen to me. I eventually got angry when they finally trapped me in a situation where they could at will metapharically speaking flush my head down the proverbial toilet over and over and I had zero way to redress the balance. A few minutes after getting angry I was rewarded with some tastey hot food.

This whole incident had followed several days of starvation, food goading, anger goading, but also, and I think this is the most worrying, any attempt at being polite, well manored, kind, thoughtful, just saying hello back to people when they say hello, was brutally discouraged and punished.

So literally being a good citizen is being punished and being bad is being rewarded. Presumably it would only be encouraged when they weren’t the targets. This is the problem with bullying and gang stalking, it traps people that really actually just want to be good citizens into being slaves.

We make all this fuss about political parties, and democracies and elections, but what’s the fucking point of it all if gang stalkers are destroying societies at the ground level. Show me the party that gets rid of that, and I’ll gladly support it.

Down with the gang stalker scourge.

I’ve nearly gotten the hash links on all posts feature working. Hopefully I’ll have that done today or tomorrow, though food is very scarce and gang stalkers are very active basically everywhere. #

There was a load of harassment yesterday. Got quite a bit of coding done despite it all. Another starvation cycle has started. If no one can be bothered to give me real food, I can’t be bothered to write anything.

Sneezing a lot this morning. Fucking alergies or whatever it is that makes me unbalanced and sneeze. Not much chance in getting anything done today. #

Yesterday ended up turning into what I think I’m going to start calling a synchronicity appocalypse day. These happen every now and then, and in fact recently they seem to be happening quite often, like every couple of weeks. Basically weird synchronicities start happening literally everywhere. It’s like some sort of singularity. It becomes very difficult to make any decision because literally everything gets blocked by a synchronicity.

It’s most obvious when you are listening to podcasts. You are listening to a podcast and it’s getting boring or you are just not into the topic or something annoyed you about what is being discussed so you decide to switch to another podcast, and the podcast you switch to is somehow in on the reason you decided to switch and BAM! in your face creates a weird synchronicity. So you switch again. And the same thing happens again. So this time you decide to wait at bit in a sort of exponential back off algorythm. But guess what? BAM! it happens yet again.

So you decide fuck all this I’m just going to stop listening to podcasts, and put my ear plugs in, and sit quietly. The instant you take your ear plugs out somebody walks up behind you and shouts into your ear, as they are shouting at someone else but somehow position themself so they are shouting at you. Anyway this sort of thing keeps happening with literally every fucking thing, every fucking where. It’s literally like the universe is trying to fucking kill you.

Now it’s entirely possible it’s gang stalkers that are creating a lot of these situations, and I definitely suspect that, adding fuel to the fire so to speak, but it feels like there is more to it than that. The level and rate of synchronicities is totally off the charts. There’s something else, something higher level than that going on.

So that was yesterday. Another synchronicity apocalypse day.

As for development, getting the item hash links working, it looks like doing it in CSS probably won’t be possible. I think what I’m going to do is create the item link url in a shared component and pass it into the item component. Then it will be up to the item component to use it or not. That way the link will appear in a place in the HTML that is easier to style. It won’t enforce item links but the code to generate the url will at least be in the same place rather than be duplicated in each component.

The way I was inserting the hash link previously for links and notes was a bit hacky, using a regex. I might try to create a custom markdown plugin that inserts the link so it will work with any bit of markdown rather than just with paragraph tags. But maybe just get it working first, then improve it later.

That’s the plan, hope it’s not majorly offensive to worldo. #

This morning there is some variation of the garbage manufactured situation from the day before yesterday happening. I’m too tired to go into it. Seems like the world has already decided, I’ll repeatedly get blamed for everything over and over again now for the rest of the day. Even if I say it’s all good.

Still trying to get the CSS working for the item hash links feature. I think I’m quite close to having a solution. I can’t seem to get the CSS nth-last-child pseudo selector to work. Trying to select the last two elements inside an element and make them display inline, so that the final tag from a user’s post has a hash link right next to it. Currently the hash link drops onto the next line which looks weird.

Hopefully I’ll get that working today.

Escallation notes from yesterday morning:

• Staff young women fake coughing in hot water shop, and what sounded like some comment about being ill
• ‘We won’ in shop cafe from staff bloke when I noticed they were now out of both items I always buy. Note yesterday there was a manufactured incident where a bloke running across the road outside a 7 eleven was showing me a new store had openned. That’s the only other shop that sells the item I buy. Basically I’m being blocked in one place but allowed in another place. This sort of thing happens constantly. They want to control your every move and decision. But maybe they are just trying to help fix a problem they created in the first place. Eventually their suggested solution will get blocked too.
• Now that other customers have started arriving, I have started getting a bad runny nose, because all these "customers" are literally counter acting my every move, oppositing everything I do. That or they have introduced some sort of alergen in the air. This happens constantly. Literally every week.
• Vapers clearly just in shop cafe because I am sneezing and have runny nose and they are all trying to ‘win’ at everything. There are normally never any vapers here. At least as far as I am aware.

I hope things settle down. Please world consider not being offended at everything. Thank you. #

Weird day.

I guess I’ll be getting mutilated again later, then blamed for everything in the universe by everyone again?

I’ve already started to get a runny nose. By my records the cold / runny nose / alergy contractions are getting closer together. It used to be monthly, then it was biweekly for a while, now it appears to be weekly. #

Everything is basically a hell hole of escallations at the minute. These seem to always coincide with the start of the month, which is a problem because it makes me look very crazy to potential employers from monthly job boards. Catch 22. To potential employers, for what it’s worth, I’m actually quite a well balanced person, just been caught up in a difficult situation since COVID.

Anyway, here are yesterday’s escallations:

• People outside egg and hot water shop saying good liar after I bought an egg but no sandwich, after avoiding them walking into me. They made no effort to correct their walking path as we crossed the road.
• Was then called a liar at least twice in the next 2 minutes by people along the street that seemed to be waiting for me to walk past them.
• Was told ‘maximum’ by the shop staff when paying and I asked for how much. When I asked again, she said 15, but only gave me 4 change. When I asked why she short changed me, she pointed to receipt and didn’t accept that she told me the wrong price. She hadn’t rounded up the amount correctly which was 15600, but the till calculator did.
• A group of young men, one of whom had green hair, said ‘we won’ as they were leaving, then started laughing after I made a gesture like I have no idea what you are talking about, because I literally had no idea what they were talking about.
• Strange security guard bloke from yesterday that tried to create a manufactured situation where making it look like a piece of my bread packaging had fallen to the floor, by picking it up and throwing it away. I am pretty sure it was there on the floor when I arrived and sat down. I remember thinking how strange that the previous person who sat at my table before me had eaten the same thing as me, especially given how early it was. Note he only did that once I had thrown away all my garbage AND the girl shop staff who pretends to be an angel but actually regularly tries to metaphorically shiv you, had cleared all the bins, so no way to check my garbage. I’m pretty sure when I opened the bread package there was no separate bit that came loose. It was still attached to the main packaging. Note I was gifted the bread the night before by a strange slow moving car that appeared to have a bag with a bunch of things, so somebody knew I would open a bread while sitting there. To me it all looks very much like yet another malicious manufactured set of situations.
• Weird young boy teenager at the shop cafe when I arrived, who was loitering and standing uncomfortably close right behind me. Kept standing on front of power outlet and staring at it and also did some strange thing with one of the bar stools.
• Shop staff bloke quietly saying ‘go’ as he walked past for no apparent reason.
• Shop staff women are randomly shouting ‘pain!’. Note somebody has been leaving empty pain killer packages in places I go for the past few days.
• My iOS device plug which stopped working right after a weird incident last week, started working again. I tested it and it was working again. Even unplugged it out and plugged it in again several times and it was fine. About 15 minutes later it started doing the weird on / off thing it was doing last week. Odd.
• Note that the security guards seemed to have replaced the tutter bloke and his occasional girlfriend. That appeared to start the day my phone got smashed on the floor while I was getting to the very end of listening to a mr obnoxious podcast about innocent prisoners. I was very cognitively overloaded because of harassment and massive reality inversions in the situation because there were so many similarities by what the interviewee was saying and my situation. That was the second time in two days my device got smashed on the floor and I had slipped and fallen twice badly in the previous 2 days, all following intense harassment. I was quite shook up by it, because for me loosing my device would be very similar to actual death for me.
• Random other customers at shop cafe saying ‘you no’ / ‘you know’ for no apparent reason to each other and finding it quite funny.
• The bloke shop cafe staffer that earlier was saying ‘go!’ as he walked past, now is saying ‘work!’. Oh world, trying to front run everything again aren’t you. It ultimately just ends up creating traffic jams and blocking everything and offending everyone, including yourselves.
• Quite a lot of people shouting ‘mother’ at me the past few days
• The standing place at the internet place has been blocked by a wheel chair
• Westerners walked past me at the internet place, one casually Up! harassed me, and that was followed by another westerner who shouted Cunt! directly at me. I’d never seen him before.
• Butch women walked past shouted boy! at me
• White clothes wearers tsunamis everywhere all day
• Butch woman and man start having a very animated and quite loud discussion right in front of me, making a point to stand directly in front of me only cms away, lots of pointing by the woman who was wearing red T-shirt pointing at the man who was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt. It felt very manufactured. Eventually I have them both piece signs, they left, as they left the woman said ‘you know’ / ‘you no’. I have started sneezing a lot in the last hour and totally blocked nose. The bloke at the sandwich shop earlier where I got a pork bun was behaving very strangely. I seem to very often get ill after eating there. He said something about a cold as he got the pork bun. Then was angrily muttering something to himself.
• The cold is one of these surging sneezing colds that seems to mirror the escalations. There is a surge, a bunch of sneezing, it calms down, nose clears, goes away then comes back worse. This happens again and again getting worse each time until I’m sneezing and runny nose constantly.

No time to make sense of all that.

I’ve made significant progress on my static sitt generator’s item has links feature. I’m just trying to get the CSS working. Soon all post types on the main page will have item hash links by default.

Not much else to add. #

cat << EOF > JD Vance on Kamala’s talking style

JD Vance who is running as the vice president pick for the Republicans in the US elections, was on Rogan’s podcast a few days ago. Putting aside political party preferences for a second, I thought this observation was kind of spot on:

Vance: The only way I can describe it is that she talks in circles.

Rogan: Tim Dillon says it’s like she does gypsy curses. She speaks in gypsy curses.

Vance: [Big Lol] That’s very good. [...] There is actually a skill to this. I think that she is the Michael Jordan of using as many words as possible to say as little as possible. There’s actually a certain gift that she has because you listen to her talk, and you are 100 - 200 words into it, you’re 500 words into it, and you are like what the hell did she just say? She didn’t say anything.

So yeah there’s a certain political skill in saying a lot without actually saying anything. But it actually worries me about her being president [...] what does she do when she’s in a meeting with a world leader, and she has to know the details of public policy to negotiate with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jin Pin? [...] and I don’t know that she has an ounce of curiosity about public policy. That’s what scares the hell out of me.

It’s both a funny bit but also, it’s true! I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. I could certainly see her way of speaking be used to frustrate opponents and as a stalling tactic. But it’s worth noting because if it’s her only 'mode' then she might not be so great at getting things done. It’s worth listening to the whole bit as they do some impersonations which are kind of hilarious.

Of course Trump has his own unique way of talking, now being refered to as "the weave", which some would argue can be quite difficult to deal with, so perhaps it comes down to preference. One thing I will say about Trump, based on his recent appearance on Rogan, is that he’s willing to sit down for long unscripted interviews, and though his style does definitely get in the way sometimes, he seems to be aware of this, and I thought he does show curiosity and empathy in the people he talks with. He listens. He’s prepared to learn in public. At least there’s a chance of getting a message through to him. I’m not so sure about Kamala, could be her talking in circles thing makes her impenetrable.

It was an interesting interview with Vance. The two biggest things that stood out to me is that he’s very smart, knows his stuff, very well spoken on so many things, but he’s also clearly from a different generation to Trump. His dynamic with Rogan was totally different. Could be a great combo with Trump if they get on well. #

cat << EOF > A better metaphor for growth

Daniel Susskind was on the Keen On podcast this week. Lots of interesting topics covered centering around our current obsession with economic growth, from it’s historical origins, to the current moment and how it might be affected by AI.

His comments about how he thinks we should update the generally accepted metaphor for growth struck a chord with me [24:00]:

DS: Very often when people talk about economic growth, the kind of metaphors they have in mind is a kind of train, and they are sitting in the drivers seat and they can push forward on the throttle and go faster or pull back and go slower.

AK: Marx’s locomotive of history

DS: Yeah exactly, and in that spirit the direction of travel is set, it’s predetermined by the rails that are set down for us to trundle along, and the only question is do we want more or less growth [...] that’s the dimension in which the debate takes place. I’m saying that actually a far better metaphor is a nautical one. We are sitting in a boat and we can put up our masts and go faster, or we can put them down and go slower. But also, the direction of travel is far more open. There are many possibly directions our economy can take. The choice is not simply do we want more or less growth, but it’s also do we want a different type of growth as well [...] I think there are ways for us to pursue growth without destroying those other valuable things we care about. Whether it’s the environment, the level of equality in society, the health of local places and communities etc.

In some ways what he’s saying seems like common sense, like it’s obvious. But sometimes the obvious things need saying, because at some point in time, believe it or not the obvious things weren’t all that obvious. This feels like one of those things.

The rest of the discussion is super interesting too, worth listening to. #

cat << EOF > Electronic music range

Two electronic music mixes I’ve been listening to a lot recently really show the variety in the landscape of electronic music:

• RA.954 Rey Colino
• RA.958 Slipmatt

I listen to these on my earbuds and I can visualise myself listening and dancing to them at outdoor festivals, underground clubs or beaches in the sun, on massive sound systems at some ridiculous hour in the morning. My entire body and mind is momentarily transported through time and place. The human mind is friggin’ amazing.

I spent the early part of my life listening entirely to band based music. There was a time when I used to hate anything that wasn’t created on real musical instruments. I was into alt rock and metal, and looking back I was really closed minded about what I liked, about what I thought was cool.

At some point along the way I gave electronic music a try, at first pretty dark stuff like drum & bass, break beat and tech house, I think probably because these were were most similar in vibe to metal. But over the years I found my way into so many other genres, some faster some slower, some happier, some darker. Entire universes exist behind each of these.

It’s completely mindboggling to me how much my tastes have changed, expanded and refined over the years. Things I would previously have considered way too comercial, I now realise I just haden’t heard in the right place, I didn’t know the history, hadn’t sensed the vibe properly. Hadn’t been to the right parties, absorbed the culture from others. I love it all now. Tunes lots of tunes.

I’m so glad I got into electronic music, it was a portal into a multiverse I could never have imagined before. And I’m also glad I started out listening to band music, I still return to that too, and that side of my music tastes has expanded too.

All this to say it’s been a crazy amazing journey, can’t wait to see what the future will look like. #

I'm up earlier than normal this morning. The world got kind of aggressive in it’s escallations last night. There had been quite a lot during the day too, but the evening felt different. There was a very distinct flavour to it. Like when you watch a Quintin Tarantino, David Lynch or Wes Anderson movie. You recognise it almost immediately even if you can’t exactly point to which director. It just feels familiar for some reason.

In the case of last night, it’s somewhat difficult to describe, but there were all sorts of situations occuring that were good, but always with a hint of bad. And bad in very specific high impact ways, but also very subtle. When that happens once or twice you just put it down to chance and move on with your life. But this was with literally everything. It was like lots of mini tsunamis. Not too bad on their own, but since there were so many, you start to wonder if there isn’t an actual big tsunami around the corner.

It felt so familiar. All these situations had happened to me before. I started to get a real sense of dread, it just felt like one of those horror movies. Like no matter what I did I was heading to somewhere not great.

Well that’s why I’m up early. I haven’t had a whole lot of sleep, but I have had some decent food, a few gifts last night.

I'm working on finishing the feature to add hash links to every post. Currently blog, podcast and newsletter posts don’t have these. The new feature would make hash links something all posts would get by default. I’ve gotten quite far, but need to fix some places where the HTML generated has some duplication, because it’s causing the layout to break. I think I’ve figured out what needs changing and the steps needed to make the changes.

I also need to prepare the newsletter. I have a resonable selection of podcasts this week. #

I’ve been quietly taping away for the past hour, working on the hash links feature, gotten loads done because it’s quiet. I just noticed that it’s Saturday. I thought it was Friday. Somewhere in between all the constant harassment, I lost track of what day it was. That’s a problem because I haven’t prepared the newsletter. Anyway, not a huge deal, still plenty of time, so I switch over to start on the newsletter. The literal second I do that a motorbike stalker with a woman in bright yellow tshirt appears on front of me pointing directly at me or right over my head. Really f-ing weird. The world pretends to allow while blocking. Example #92133. #

cat << EOF > Debugging a nuclear reaction (Issue #188)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Apple AI, parallel dimensions private tour, Trump empathy on Rogan, 90s british alt comedy, US elections, tech security & geopolitics, innocents in prison, AI bubble bursting

Issue details:

• Title: Debugging a nuclear reaction
• Issue: 188
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Here are my escallation notes from yesterday. This is really just a sampling because there is too much of it happening to be able to document it all. It’s insane. I think you’ll agree there’s something not quite normal going on here:

• Large bloke sitting on front of the graffiti penis doing strange pelvis gyration exercises while he taps away on his phone. Pink hoodey.
• School girls at lunch are using the go home guy’s catch phrase aimed directly at me.
• The surge in nunes over the past few days has reached the cafe shop. Now lunch time school girls are genuflecting before they eat. That’s very unusual. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that in the 5 years I’ve been here.
• Kevin and Alex are 'bitching' each other on Diggnation.
• It’s very strange that the days where they are starving me correspond to the days where there is a tidal wave of lunchtime school girls at the shop cafe. Keeps happening though. It’s literally 9:1 girls boys.
• Did I mention the school girls also say things like ‘you are learning’ at me.
• Approx 9/10 people today are eating sausages, many while sitting on front of the graffiti penis, while wearing the exact same color clothes head to toe as the color of my underwear.
• Young woman sits in front of me with a bag with the text MARHEN.J placed in a way intended for me to see it. Given that they are basically starving me, with the only real food possible for me to eat being the occasional egg, and given it’s next to the graffiti dick which is also next to the underwear colored all in one woman, that’s clear anger goading. Even if the bag does look pretty cool. Come on world stop infinity lying and being offended, while constantly claiming to be the victim, and mutilating me.
• Another bloke, this one wearing a red T-shirt, sitting in front of the graffiti dick gyrating his legs and pelvis over and over in quite an exaggerated way
• A lot of women wearing all black behaving kind of weird
• Got gifted a large hotdog covered in mayonnaise by a very camp man. It was a pretty great hotdog.

It’s like they so want to demonstrate they aren’t offended that they escallate everything, thus demonstrating how incredibly offended they are, and then they see I’m not offended and get offended. Ultimately they’ll be more unhappy and will blame the unhappiness on me and mutilate me.

Blogging isn’t going particularly well the past few days. It’s very difficult to get inspired when you have hardly eaten anything and the only thing you’ve eaten is really unhealthy processed food.

I have a few small coding things I’ve been doing, small fixes from when I updated the fonts, and a few tweaks to the heredocs. I think I’ve also found a way to have hash links on all posts. That will be quite cool if it works. #

cat << EOF > The ever changing EU

It’s really interesting watching the EU integrate new countries, like Georgia, Moldova and other eastern bloc countries, because it’s forcing them to really get to the core of what their values are. And it’s unfolding in a world that is increasingly changing politically and technologically at a rapid pace. I can’t help but wonder whether they have really figured those values out.

They say it’s all about liberalism, but isn’t it something more like 'centrism' that they want? i.e. Not too conservative, but also not too liberal.

To be sure, I personally like the sound of the notion of liberal democracies that western nations appear to see as being foundational values. What I find confusing is that all western nations have conservative political parties. For example in the UK currently the opposition party is literally called the Conservatives. So it’s clearly not just liberalism that is the main factor, even though that’s the thing they keep mentioning. I would have thought you would want to be in a range that is sustainable but also liveable? Even if the exact balance changes over time.

But hey maybe I’m wrong, is the EU really about eradicating conservatism?

They always seem to be saying it’s all politics, but isn’t it more likely to, in the end, just boil down to economics and money? #