wow new blog

I have moved the blog from the Google Doc to the Ghost. APPARENTly when the trial runs out it will cost me $108/year for this. That's a lotta dough. That's sushi money. Venmo me is the point. Or maybe it goes back to the google docs. or maybe Substack is free (bc it is owned by devils).

Things I have been Watching:

Perfect Days (light spoilers)

I cried more times watching this movie than any other movie. It was interesting to learn that Wim Wenders was brought out to Japan for the opening of these special toilets in Tokyo and decided to make this feature length film.

It wraps up after the credits with a definition of "Komorebi" - a Japanese word that means "sunlight filtering through trees". The movie frequently depicts the main character Hirayama appreciating this simple beauty, that nature makes for us without asking. Every morning when he wakes up, or when his cleaning of the toilets is interrupted, or on his lunch break at his favorite shrine, his eyes go to the leaves whispering above. I deeply related to Hirayama. It's weird feeling how close to the freedom and wonder and splendor of nature we are, all the time, and how peaceful and fulfilling it is to live among it and notice and study and love it is. Our whole world can seem to want to tear us away from appreciating this beauty, but it wouldn't be irrational to care more about one perfect place where the sun filters through the trees onto saplings taking root, or one perfect bathhouse than anything else life has to offer.

We have to appreciate the things we love while they are with us. They won't always be. Nothing is forever. But right now is right now. We live at the mercy of forces much stronger than us and we don't understand, that keep us from going crazy, that keep us alive. How lucky we are to be here at all. WATCH IF U WANT TO CRY AND PONDER THE BEAUTY OF LIFE

Madame Web (no spoilers)

I went in blind, no trailer, no backstory, and I laughed harder at this movie than any other movie. Truly, belly aching, doubled over, guffawing. Why?? Who??? How???? I recommend a viewing wholeheartedly.

Guns in Canada

On a more somber note I randomly saw a press conference from Ontario of the RCMP on Youtube announcing more than 200 guns had been seized in an operation with US law enforcement. Guns are everywhere, we can't stop it, no one seems to care. This is the banality of evil, of the terror we live in.

In 2010, ~10 millions guns were sold in the United States. By 2020, this had more than doubled to ~22 million guns. 2020 proved a peak, with sales receding to just under 18 million in 2023. Stats.

2010-2014 (5 years): ~64 million guns

2015-2019 (5 years): ~70 million guns

2020-2023 (3 years): ~60 million guns

Where do new guns come from? Most of them are made right here in the USA, but demand is so high we import millions as well.

Who buys guns? Crazily enough, 3% or so of gun owners in the US own ~50% of all the guns. Crazy gun people don't tend to have 10 guns, they tend to have 1,000. Guns are bitcoin. The value of your gun one day is $100 dollars, then a black president is elected, or a black states attorney, or a mass shooting happens again, and now your buddy wants to give you $400 for it. It is difficult to find people who are pro-gun who do not have some personal financial interest tied up in making them, selling them, or looking cool with them. Fucking with guns is fucking with a lot of peoples' money. A lot of people who have guns.

People who have lots of money love guns. Billionaires and political elites in the west (and Anti-west) relish in the capabilities of state militaries and security forces that preserve their fortunes and systems of power, the nuclear submarines roaming our oceans in silence. One level removed, multimillionaires relish in their own personal security forces - former special forces armed to the teeth walking in step with them on convention floors and watching the cameras on the grounds of the estate. One step further down, the DIY FIRE folk are prepping for themselves and their perfect husband wife children combo to survive nuclear holocaust on their handpicked secret ranch in Idaho, practicing with their $10k AR-1782748 super-smoker rifle on the hills out back.

One level further down, people are buying guns because they are afraid (or to hunt deer!). One level further down, and broke people are buying guns from straw purchasers because they increasingly live under threat of gun violence from other broke people and the police, and lest we forget guns can be a hack for instant money. In America, people will do anything to not be poor, including break the law. If you get away with it, you get away with it, and you can get away with it. If you don't, you don't. How much risk are you willing to take? For yourself? For your family?

Why are guns selling like hotcakes? Because guns are addicting. They create their own demand. The more people see guns being used violently, the more they think they also need a gun. The more people have guns, the more people will see guns being used violently, and so on. Topher MacDougal at the Joan B Kroc School of Peace Studies knows this. He wrote a whole paper on it that was published last March.

And because we allow it. Because it is legal and very profitable to sell guns like this. There is no liability for gun manufacturers, or for stores that sell the guns and bullets that kill innocent people. The liability for what happens is limited to the person pulling the trigger. Great news for gun companies and gun stores! Bad news for general social wellbeing.

Gun culture is omnipresent in America, by voters and officials on both sides of the political aisle, in nearly every community. It is propagated by people who believe something like this: I get to choose what is safe for me and those around me, and it is safe for me personally to have a gun. Any limitation of this is a violation of my freedom.

This might make sense to anarchists or libertarians or republican dum dums. It doesn't make sense to me. I think even gun nut anarchists would agree you shouldn't leave a loaded firearm around a toddler, or give your weird teenager who keeps talking about body counts one for Christmas. They believe the state should have no role in preventing that from happening, I see it as the only force that we can hold responsible for creating and enforcing the rules that could stop this from happening.

It's also clear the current situation is untenable. Hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen each year, and go from "objects we know who is responsible for" to "murder tool set loose on community" - many guns are bought legally and enter the underworld when they are sold inappropriately for cash on the street, the same way regular people buy and sell everything else. The problem of not knowing who has guns, the provenance of guns, feels gigantic when it comes to stopping and solving gun crimes. Crimes with guns are committed by people who should not have guns (except when people who "should have guns" still do crimes), who get guns from people who "should have" guns, who bought their guns because guns made them feel less safe, because people who should/should not have guns use them to do crime that makes us all feel less safe (or kills us, or paralyzes us, or fucks us up for life).

Guns are a horrible trap for poor people. Being the demographic most likely to be victimized by gun violence means the incentive is the highest to own a gun for self-defense, but being poor doesn't remove any of the barriers to lawful gun ownership (FOID cards, concealed carry classes, buying a gun through lawful channels). Over-policing makes it both more likely for residents of over-policed areas to interact with the justice system in a way that results in them being unable to lawfully own a gun, and more likely to be caught for unlawfully possessing one. Over-policing doesn't solve the root issue: some people are capital B Broke, and it's really hard to go from Broke to not broke.

It's not that guns can't be legally owned in a responsible way that results in people mostly not getting shot and killed all the time. "Look at Switzerland!" as any dog-whistling psychopath racist will tell you. Swiss gun regulations are a long wikipedia page, and it's clear regulators there would and do stand up to tamp down illegal gun usage. In Switzerland, a stolen gun is a big immediate problem to be dealt with. Broke people are a problem to be dealt with. Here in America, land of the lost gun, our legislators live in fear of getting shot and killed, and are unwilling to stand up to prevent it from happening. Or, they live in relative safety and have positions of power guaranteed to them by people with a financial interest in More Guns.

And that's the point. Republicans talk a lot about a couple of things. First - they are the party of patriotic law enforcement and military types, responsible people who want to keep us safe from EVIL. Second - the Demoncrats are engaged in conspiracy to overrun America with EVIL people. The hypocrisy of Guns Guns More Guns is clear here: why on earth would patriotic law enforcement and military types, I mean these are responsible folk, they want to keep us safe from Evil, why would they support More Guns?

Why would Illinois Sheriffs, for example, refuse to enforce a law requiring owners of certain firearms register their ownership with them? Because this would violate the owners' rights? I mean, this is a law, put into place by a democratic legislature - empowered to define limits on our rights, since when do you get to pick which of those limits you enforce? The Sheriff's answer is: we were elected to enforce the law as we see fit, don't like it? Vote us out.

Republicans are betting: guns are so popular and addictive, people will vote for owning them, even when guns kill some of them that will only make people want guns more and make limiting them more unpopular. The social fabric will decay, school shootings will continue, poor communities will stay poor (but now with more guns) and more people will die.

Just not where they live. Not on their streets, not in their neighborhoods, not on their big ranch in Idaho, and you can join them and live in safety, just move/vote for the big red R! That will enable them to hold power, amass fortunes more easily, and sit on those fortunes for longer. That's what life is all about, right?

Things I have been Reading:

Irak Profile https://www.gq.com/story/irak-legendary-new-york-graffiti-crew

Kunle Martins (Earsnot) is a personal hero of mine ever since I saw Infamy on Youtube (which was like, the Graffiti flick to end all Graffiti flicks) back when I was a baby child. You can read on in this profile of him and the other members of IRAK to find out why.

The article details how a lot of the OG IRAK people are gone now, but IRAK and Alife are still kicking as brands, with IRAK seeming to carrying clout among a more crime focused crowd than the Supreme store. Alife was always making pretty ugly stuff, but this was really the moment and the movement that got these awesome people from tagging the streets into making money in a legit more sustainable way while still tagging the streets for us sometimes, and we can all be thankful for that. These days I see some parallels in what Homerun is doing with Alife and IRAK back then.

Mark Benioff is buying his slice of heaven https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1232564250/billionaire-benioff-buys-hawaii-land-salesforce

Okay, background: Mark Benioff owns Salesforce. Not really, it's a public company, but he founded it so he benefits more than anyone else from this conglomerate. Unfortunately, by now, you probably have heard of Salesforce. It is CRM software company that once was famous for coming over the internet instead of on a CD. Now they own Slack, and lots of other things (buildings, etc) and have like 100 billion dollars in assets.

With all this money, what is Mark doing? Well the first thing you should know about Mark is he is a really nice guy. I think that is central to CEO personal brand building. Mark is super duper nice. He will help you. He helps people. He doesn't know why things keep getting worse, but he's in our boat helping us to paddle.

I think the flipside of CEO personal brand building is the reality of the CEO's life. For Mark, part of that is planning for his future sitting on his butt in Hawaii. Reality is: there are nice places to be (Hawaii, New Zealand, in a brand new house you designed) and not so nice places (where you live, by you). This reporting gets at the heart of the CEO's dilemma: how can you be so nice, but also want to be so far away from everyone? Are you giving up on us? - Mark is really touchy about this, even vaguely threatening the journalist. What is clear: he's comfortable picking winners (his friends and family on the Big Island) and losers (anybody who disagrees with him), and he doesn't want to get in a big messy fight about it please so stop asking.

If really rich people are giving up on the places regular people inhabit in favor of staking out forts on islands they think will be safe from violent overthrowing and nuclear bombs, we should be concerned. It changes their calculus as they run their "we need to do everything possible politically to maintain the status quo for the people I live around" models. Instead of protecting all of us, maybe they will leave us to the wolves while they drink Mai Tais with the chosen few. They can always come back when there are only ashes left and rebuild civilization, they are so good at building things. I think they would relish the opportunity, and that freaks me out.

Things I have been Hearing:

Living Proof NY link

I saw hella stickers up in NYC promoting this new magazine and podcast media venture focusing on Graffiti. Interviews with Kunle Martins and MIKE IRAK mentioned in the article above, among many others, make this worth checking out for in-depth conversations with people you just do not hear from like this usually.

The Team House link

This is sort of like a flip side from Living Proof - where Living Proof deals with people who conceal their identities because they face arrest and prosecution for what they talk about doing, The Team House is a podcast where special operators, spies, and other national security milieu come on to attach names and faces to the crimes of America around the globe. Both podcasts you hear insane larger than life stories, but on this one the stories come from state-sanctioned activities. One episode I recommend: Wesley Morgan, or Jeff Stein of SpyTalk.

The Last Cyber from Vice link

They people behind this Vice podcast recorded one last episode as the company imploded itself and were able to get it out on official channels before it was later deleted. Some very interesting and funny stories. Linked is a google drive recording from reddit, grab while you can!

How to Write a Joke with Cassidy Kulhanek link

It feels super parasocial to put this in here because these are people I have been in the same room with who do not know who I am, but I really like this new project. As a wimpy open mic comedian guy in Chicago I feed off the energy and insights of brighter, funnier, better people like Cassidy Kulhanek and her guests to inspire myself, even before this podcast! I want to be more like them, and hearing them talk about how they do it rocks!

New Section** Things I Have Been Feeling

The Joy of a Cat that Loves You

I love when my girlfriend's cat Chi Chi touches me and sits on me and asks without speaking to be pet in the way that she likes. When I see things about VR and Apple Vision, now I think: Your cat can’t join you in the metaverse. Your cat will not understand what you are doing. They cannot make an avatar. Take the goggles off, pet the cat. There's nothing inside those goggles better than this.

The death of Vice and fentanyl

Vice is gone, and I can't say I read it every day or wanted to be part of the buzz, I was too young anyway. But it feels intertwined with fentanyl. Vice was the publication of people who use drugs. Now, drugs can kill you. The cool things Vice got famous talking about no longer exist, the problems they wrote about are still here but worse. Some people got rich or powerful from it though, and can think about how to sit on that money and power forever now. That's what life's all about.