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When Clouds Appear as Mountains is Live!!

My first novel, When Clouds Appear as Mountains, is available in paperback and Kindle!

This has been a (non-continuous) decade in the making! It seems crazy that I’m actually finished with it. It is fiction, but it draws heavily from my life as a 19-year-old weirdo. It felt like I was living in the novel at the time, and after about a dozen re-writes, that novel has come to fruition.

Anyway, it has been a crazy few months since I moved. But now that this novel has been released, my solo band’s new album is out, and my guitar pedal company is becoming more stable, I should have some more time for more literary experiments (as well as time to start on the second draft of my next novel!).

Thanks for reading.

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Hollow US Politics

Biden is handing the election to Trump. Hubris may have him thinking that people care more about keeping Trump out of office than they care about genocide, but this is a false dichotomy. I think people care enough about this to vote for a candidate that openly opposes genocide.

Biden has trashed his credibility by aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza, approving new fossil fuels operations while claiming to be the Climate Change President, not following through on his promises regarding student debt, his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and playing a direct role in what will likely be known as World War III.

None of this is to say Trump would have handled an individual one of these issues any better. It’s just that that is the point. The Red team and Blue team have the same owners. They differ purely on domestic, social issues. But even then, it is more of a tone of voice that is different. Taking abortion as an example, there was a time not long ago when both houses of Congress and the President were all on the Blue team and yet managed to not pass any legislation to protect abortion rights while it was common knowledge that the Red team had been trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn the landmark decision with laser-focus for decades through their judicial appointments. The Red team is clearly up to no good, the Blue is subtly up to no good. Deciding who is the lesser of two evils has devolved into choosing how much poop you’d like to eat, with the tacit assumption that “none” is not a viable answer.

I have three baseless predictions for how things could turn out (this is also assuming Trump wins the primary or doesn’t admit he lost if he loses it).this is also just assuming Trump wins the primary or doesn’t run independently if he loses

One is that the parties realize that running to two most unpopular people on Earth is not a good decision (unlikely since that would imply we live in a sane society). This is more of a pipe-dream.

Two is that Biden and Trump both straight-up die because they have both exceeded the average life expectancy already (to say nothing of their actual fitness for office at the age, an age long past retirement for every other field).

Three is that more people than normal vote for third-parties. The Red team and Blue team seem to have no problem alienating large numbers of their constituents. Pollsters might not be talking about it, but what compelling reason is there to not vote for a third-party anymore? The two big parties are essentially wings of the same party, and that is becoming more clear every year. Even the name is misleading– “third” party makes it sound like there are two other choices that aren’t just the right and far-right wings of the capitalist empire party. They may disagree on whether or not to respect someone’s gender identity or to recognize the basic history of the US, but they are firmly in agreement that the US needs endless war, homelessness, and that short-term profit is more important than ensuring a long-term society.

Ugh. I think I need to get back to writing fiction.

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Australia’s Scapegoating of International Students

The Australian government, specifically the Labor Party, is grasping at straws. Rather than address the complex issues facing their society with solutions that touch on their actual causes, they have decided to rest the blame on international students.

It is telling that the vast majority of international students are from Asian countries. The rhetoric about international students seems like a thin veneer over a racist core.

While the referendum for an Aboriginal advising body for Parliament to be added to the Constitution should have been an easy slam-dunk as a basically symbolic gesture to one of the most grievously wronged groups of people on Earth, the Australian people showed the colors and chose oppression and racism. Since the referendum was tied up with Labor’s pursuits, its failure, they fear, symbolizes the end of their reign.

Their response to this, rather than reach out to their base and remain to true to what are supposed to be left-leaning ideals, they are appealing to the racism that voted against the referendum.

Cities like Sydney do not have enough places to house the population. Rather than reform their housing policies to incentivize affordable, decent housing built vertically to support an urban population, the government has decided that immigrants are taking too many places to live from “real” Australians.

Rather than addressing the complex causes of the “cost of living crisis,” they blame it on people from other countries abusing student visas.

Australia has a slavery and human trafficking problem. People essentially fleeing repressive governments have their desperation used against them, and are tricked into coming to Australia by companies promising a future they cannot deliver. One tactic employed is to get people into the country as students, and then once here, leverage that to get them into doing unskilled labor for little to no reimbursement. The latest migration policy changes can be seen, in some regard, as a limp effort to do something about this. By raising the English language requirements and requiring some evidence that student visa applicants are truly students, they could block these desperate people from being taken advantage of in this way. While this does nothing to address the fact that these are humans seeking safety that are being turned away, it makes it harder to abuse a student visa.

But they don’t stop there. Vocational schools are being outright closed down. This supposedly is because the dreaded international students enter into these vocations. But by closing the schools, this curtails pathways into the trades for everyone. It isn’t like Australia no longer needs trade-workers. Especially if there was any intention to address the housing shortages in any meaningful way.

There is another visa in their crosshairs, the graduate visa. The purpose of a graduate visa is to give recent graduates a shot at finding employment in what is likely a new field. After gaining some experience, other kinds of work visas are more accessible. It was already strange that this was limited to people under 50 before, but now this age limit has dropped to 35. While people abusing the student visa system to essentially get low-skill workers, those same people are not graduating from schools and seeking graduate visas to get the required work experience to qualify for a sponsored working visa; they are withdrawing from school and disappearing into what effectively amounts to slavery. Dropping the age limit to such a young age effectively makes it so that an adult seeking to change their career path should skip Australia, and does nothing to address the problems the government is “trying” to address. They cite wanting to keep people in the workforce for a long time as a goal, as if millennials will ever actually be able to retire.

They have also dropped the maximum age to apply for permanent residency to 45. These age restrictions read as if a bunch of 8-year-olds were asked at what age someone becomes old rather than engaging with reality.

If the Labor Party’s goal is to decrease immigration, then this policy is already working for them. I came to Australia to pursue a degree in law. While my initial interest in law was more focused on climate change, seeing the way Aboriginal Peoples have been treated here really motivated me to focus on human rights and providing legal aid for people who cannot afford a lawyer. This is a chronically understaffed field, as the work is difficult, and the pay is much lower than other fields of law. It is a role that is desperately needed in Australia. This change to the migration policy has cost them at least one of these lawyers, as I will be unable to gain the required work experience to get a work visa after my degree. There is no point in even finishing my degree here.

Australia, like most places on Earth, is also in need of nurses and other medical professionals. My wife is studying to become a nurse to help satisfy an actual need facing society, and Australia has consequentially lost a future nurse as well.

Other people pursuing advanced degrees are in the same situation. There are several vacanies of skilled workers which Australia cannot fill, and these policies, while freeing up a few apartments, will not fill those gaps in employment.

By scapegoating people from other countries (the majority of which are from Asia, those from the West are collateral damage), the Labor Party, aside from moving further towards right-wing politics and alienating their own voters, is poised to worsen all of their problems. International students, by the college enrollment, make up and significant portion of Australia’s economy. Schools will be losing money, and the result will damage Australian students. Australians will be simultaneously forced to both enter more highly skilled roles and more low-skilled roles. Australia has appealed to me before as it seemed to be resisting the urge to let politics become sports, where one team prevailing becomes more important than the actual work of government. And I was wrong.

In other words, this decision was short-sighted, cruel, and has left a putrid taste in my mouth. I worked hard to get here, I took on new student loans, and it has all been swiftly flushed down the toilet in an appeal to racism as part of a desperate plea to remain in power.

Good riddance.

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Failure?

The two most pressing issues regarding the continuation of organized human society have been known for decades. Very little has been done to mitigate them, and the question now seems to be which will destroy us first, the climate or nuclear weapons?

Fun fact! They can all represent the four horsemen of the apocalypse (double-featuring Death).

Climate catastrophe – Famine, Death

The ice shelves of West Antarctica are almost certainly going to melt – this is now unavoidable, even in the best case scenario, which we are not even on track to meet.

To avoid dramatic sea level rise, not only would carbon emissions need to stop immediately, carbon would need to be captured from the environment. No nation is coming close to completely cutting out carbon emissions (as even green energy, at the very lease in the creation of their infrastructure, requires mining and fossil fuels – at least with current technology). Carbon capture technology is still basically just an idea and not something which is actually ready to be deployed.

Even taking this recent study (linked above) as not being a perfect study, the West Antarctic ice shelf is not the only tipping point we are approaching. The Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025.

For all the chaos climate change has already caused and can cause (such as epidemics and famines), there’s a much worse option.

War, Conquest, Death

War does all sorts of awful things – one of which is contributing to climate change. But aside from that, it’s much more likely to just kill everyone, and rather quickly at that.

(Tangentially, war is extremely profitable – a short book written nearly 100 years ago reads like it was written this morning, particularly when rumors circulate that a nation has hinted that a war might stretch on for years)

The only thing I wish to delve into in relation to the latest atrocities in Gaza is that it brings the world closer to nuclear war, during a year where it was already closer than it has ever been.

The Doomsday Clock was set to 90 seconds to midnight at the beginning of this year – largely due to the war in Ukraine. Adding another conflict with a nuclear-armed power cannot help. The alliances and friendships between the nations involved does not help, either.

Unfortunately, it is not an exaggeration to say that an all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia would kill almost every human on Earth. The initial blasts would be dreadful, but their longer term impacts would lead to global food shortages – within two years, more than half of the people on Earth will have starved to death.

Should we just call it quits?

None of this is guaranteed to happen – some of these problems, particularly in relation to climate change, may be entering the realm of being too late to completely avoid, but these outcomes ultimately rely on choices which we all must make.

The primary way to avoid utter climate disaster is to move away from an extraction-based, consumption-based economy and to a form of organization that is not reliant on profit-seeking but on well-being.

A large issue with moving to this sort of economy is that there either must be a revolution, or those holding the reigns must act against their own greed. The problem with a revolution being that we must avoid the sort of thinking which created these problems – that is, at least in large part, patriarchal. A more gentle approach is required – and yet how does one gently forcibly replace the underlying ideology of society? Is there a gentle way to prevent recently displaced capitalist warlords from staging a counter revolution? This ideology needs some fine tuning. Time will tell if there is time for that.

If we are on a ship (which happens to have some organizational and equitable problems) heading straight for an iceberg, it is everyone’s best interest to divert from the iceberg and worry about the new course after immediate danger has passed.

This same solution (and problems with it) would help to avoid nuclear war. The only way to truly avoid a nuclear war is to dismantle nuclear weapons and for all parties to agree to never use them. This is easier to imagine taking place in a gentler society that is not based on competition and power.

What does it all mean?

Doodley-squat.

Human beings ceaseless search for meaning in a meaningless universe – it is Absurd.

Recognize that Absurdity and seek unity beyond it – that is the start of this gentle way, to see that none of us are truly that different from one another, we can all live better lives building each other up rather than tearing each other down.

I would rather keep trying and fail than to give up. Giving up will not solve anything. Being gentle is not the same as being weak.

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The Unspoken Requirement for Net Zero Carbon Emissions by 2050

Climate change is on track to be the downfall of our current form of society, in one way or another.

While media outlets and political bodies frame it as a simple issue of moving to green technologies, the reality is not so simple.

Moving to these technologies at the scale required to maintain the current way of doing things requires resources and minerals which are not readily available. Acquiring these resources, using the known methods with the stipulations imposed by our current economic system (in other words, doing so in a profitable manner) is environmentally destructive (although efforts are being made to change this, resource extraction is the definition of the exploitation of the Earth) and takes an amount of time that we simply do not have (unless there is a way to synthesize the minerals required to create solar panels and wind turbines, we need vast mining operations).

That isn’t to say it is impossible, but doing so would require methods which are not as profitable as current systems, and in a capitalist system, that essentially means it is impossible. If profit is dethroned from its place at the top of all priorities, the cost (including lost potential profits) involved in making these changes no longer will restrain action, and if a healthy economy is decoupled from one expanding infinitely, there is no longer an infinite demand for more resources.

As they say, infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Abundant resources seem infinite until they run out. Even the UN admits that reaching this goal requires a complete transformation of society, including economic systems.

Capitalism requires endless growth – if the economy stops growing, there is crisis. Capitalism is fundamentally not sustainable, and as long as humanity staunchly opposes the idea of moving beyond capitalism, we are doomed.

For example, an often discussed “solution” to the climate crisis is a transition to electric vehicles. The issue being that cars are fundamentally wasteful: at best, they require large amounts of a number of minerals which must be mined from the Earth, only to spend most of their time parked. The land they require for parking contributes disrupts ecosystems, the water cycle, and makes areas hotter. Additionally, electric vehicles aren’t exactly “green” if the electrical grids charging them are powered by fossil fuels.

While there are cleaner power sources, they also require minerals which are not always easy to obtain and not in infinite supply. They are also not built to last forever.

While this isn’t a call to stop trying, or not pursue the good because it is imperfect, it is a call to look at the material reality of the situation we are all living in. Several of the roadblocks to avoiding climate apocalypse are rooted in the economic system we currently live in.

There is no reason to stay dedicated to capitalism. It is not the natural way of things, and things have not always been this way. To allow the technology we desperately need to come to fruition before it is too late, we cannot continue to do things and live in the same ways as we have for the last one hundred or even two hundred years.

If we cannot create a truly sustainable way to move forward, then there is no solution. Moving backwards is not enough – people do not have the skills they used to have, most people cannot be dropped into a pre-industrial world and get by. Some amount of de-growth will be required (life is still worth living even without some of the modern luxuries), but without completely changing the path, we will end up back in this same place.

Ultimately, we need to move past capitalism. It is an economic system which has ceased to be useful and the continued existence of organized human society requires that we move on.

Industrial capitalism cannot save itself from industrial capitalism. We can either choose to put our continued survival above an economic system, or we can perish in the endless wars of resources, natural disasters, and unbearable landscapes to come.

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Initial Thoughts on Life in Australia

I moved to Australia with my wife in late June 2023.

In a word, it has been awesome.

I’ve lived abroad before, and am also well aware of the propaganda model of media in the United States, but the disparity between what is promoted as the most free and best country on Earth and the reality of how it compares to a “similar” nation is astounding.

Here are some broad-stroke comparisons with obviously lack nuance and, while based on some actual research, are primarily based on subjective observations and, for lack of a better term, vibes.

The US has a budget deficit of 1.4 trillion dollars. Australia has a 19 billion dollar surplus. These figures are dramatic enough in difference that it doesn’t matter which country’s dollars these figures are described in.

The US has crumbling infrastructure, even within its cities with the greatest public transit in the country. Sydney (the only part of Australia I have any notable experience in) has beautiful infrastructure and it is easy to live without a car – public transit may not be as robust outside of the larger cities, but I’ve never experienced anything close to this in the US, even cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago.

Australia has a 99% literacy rate with (if my sources are accurate) 54% of the population (age 25-34) holding some form of tertiary degree, the 9th most educated in the world. The US has a 79% literacy rate. I couldn’t find a source comparing the exact same age group in which the US made it into the ranking, but according to this, 37.5% of people over 25 in the US have graduated from some form of higher education.

Australia has universal healthcare for citizens and permanent residents, while in the US, a citizen getting a nasty illness and needing to pay for treatment can spawn at least one hit television series.

Basically, Australia spends a lot on social programs and yet ends up with a surplus. Any discussion on social spending in the US is shot down as something which is unaffordable.

I can listen to a conservative on Australian TV without feeling like I’m consuming poison. It even seems like the various political parties and people who subscribe to them can discuss things together without demonizing one another.

Voting is compulsory in Australia, and several states in the US are actively trying to restrict who can vote. Australia also has a ranked choice system, making it difficult for any “extremist” belief to gain much political traction. This is great for preventing fascism from spreading, but, unfortunately, until socialism loses it’s “extremist” public perception, leaves socialists struggling as well. Just because Australia will implement some pro-socialist ideas does not mean it isn’t still committed to capitalism.

Australia is trying to make amends for what they did to the people who lived here before colonization. It is common for large institutions to point out that they are operating on stolen land. There is still much to be done, but in the US, some states are putting up roadblocks to even learn that there is anything in the past to atone for.

People in Sydney say there is a cost of living and housing crisis, yet, compared to small town Virginia, it has been relatively cheap to live and easy to find an apartment. The way the media here frames things, it sounds like food used to be free here.

My wife and I will be attending some of the best schools in the country (which actually makes them some of the best in the world). Even factoring in the cost of living in Sydney, we will require less student debt than to just get the same degrees in the US from remotely similarly well regarded institutions.

It really is a shame I didn’t take some nationalist up on the offer to help me pack! For those of you in the United States, I would strongly recommend that you do.

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a dense kind of Helsinki

Kafkaesque sadness, saffron authentic dress,

I don’t know at all.

Kaleidoscope gig, functional jig,

Jacqueline and James halting on drum skins,

and Haskell-made programs.

Lakes lie fallow, leering and hollow,

Kermit dufs unending shallow sheep,

and Ekhafni escapes again.

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When I Fell Victim

[Sniff] Ideology.

Ideology runs deep. If you think you have no ideology, you are mistaken.

It has come to my attention that some things I wrote for last year’s non-fiction posts were steeped in ideology and at least somewhat reliant on propaganda which I had unknowingly digested.

For example, some of the things I wrote about Russia, China, and North Korea, could use further examination. The claim that they do not have good intentions is, frankly, baseless. While they certainly do have some problems regarding human rights, to highlight them alone tacitly implies that their “enemies” are meaningfully different in this regard. To go as far as to not even define what “good intentions” relies on simply eating out of the trashcan of ideology. A more accurate way of expressing what I was really thinking is that these nations have perspectives and goals which do not fall in line with what the United States wants other nations to do.

North Korea is an easy target, but this is largely because the Korean War has more or less been shoved own the memory hole in the United States. North Korea’s attitude towards the United States and their consequential desire for nuclear weapons (which, if they were a country which submitted to US business interests, would be seen as deterrent rather than war-mongering) only makes sense through the lens of history. The fact is the United States ran a genocide campaign in the Korean War, carpet bombing targets of no military value. The United States has “forgotten” about this, but this memory is very much alive and well in North Korea, and very much informs their foreign policy. Of course war is not something to be wished for, and nuclear war even more so, but see North Korea developing nuclear weapons as a bad sign is only half of the story. North Korea is sanctioned by the world and is trying to protect their own interests, and is operating from the perspective that, if well enough armed, they will no longer be considered a viable military target by anyone sane enough to actively avoid nuclear war. This is the reasoning behind basically any country to develop nuclear weapons, to create a situation where out-right full-scale war is unthinkable. Obviously, a better option is diplomacy, but it takes two to tango.

Russia is another easy target. Their war in Ukraine is unjustifiable, but that alone overlooks the complexity of the issue, including the role other nations have played in this conflict. For one thing, this conflict began much earlier than 2022, and the current media coverage overlooks not only this fact but how that conflict actually began with any amount of nuance.

And then there is China, who the United States seems dead-set on provoking a war with. Have you noticed how it seems China can only do wrong in the US media? They are either viciously adept authoritarians or bumbling fools. If the Chinese government prioritizes stopping the spread of COVID-19, then they are trampling on their people’s freedoms and are an authoritarian regime who just simply dislikes freedom. Yet when they ease up on their restrictions, they are a weak state that can’t handle a pandemic. Never-mind if the protests they did this in response to may have involved the United States government paying people to protest, or how their government met protest by listening to their demands rather than brutalizing the people. As far as US media is concerned, if China does something, it must be bad. If China has a weather balloon go stray, it simply must be a spy balloon. Even if it was a monitoring balloon, US officials have acknowledged the very real possibility that it was blown off course and not intended to spy on the US. Any other balloons detected are a threat from China and worth shooting down with missiles worth several thousand dollars–even if these detected balloons turn out to be 12$ hobbyist projects. The US was in such a hysterical state following the balloon incident that they were openly speculating that aliens may be responsible.

My previous “analysis” left out the nation which most countries see as the greatest threat to world peace, the nation with the most military spending, and the nation with the most out-sized military presence outside of their own borders as being a potentially bad sign of things to come. And that is because acknowledging these facts leaves the status quo, it is not mentioned day-after-day in the media, it is not refreshed in the mind of its citizens constantly.

Parroting the status-quo does not need sources, it is taken as “common sense,” while anything even one step removed from it requires pages of text to justify. Case in point: if I saw Mao was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths as part of a brutal regime, this is accepted at face-value. Refuting this point with what actually happened takes about 40 pages.

My article regarding the partisan split was missing a large enough part that it is worth writing another article specifically on it–that the gulf between political parties in the United States is largely imaginary. Yes, the people are polarized, but what both parties actually value and represent are capitalist business interests, they just focus on the handful of social issues where they disagree. In the United States there is a right-wing party, and a far-right party. You can you choose between the capitalist party and the other capitalist party. To be sucked into the illusion that these two groups really have that much difference between them is yet another example of eating out of the trashcan of ideology.

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Drawing Lady

The paper is off-white or maybe cream. She has a steady hand. The charcoal stains her fingers as she presses against the page. It makes a gentle sound.

She looks up from the page.

She returns her gaze down, and bites her chapped lip.

She struggles to understand why she struggles to draw a completely straight line. Her hand is going where she wants it to. But the line is always sloped one way or another.


	


	





		

		
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The Most Obvious, Most Troublesome Story No One Seems to Acknowledge
	


	
	

		

Despite what you may have heard, there conclusively was interference from Russia in the 2016 election. Aside from the FBI indicting several people, at least one Russian oligarch has admitted this.





Putin’s goal in this was to sow seeds of doubt in democracy. To show that one of democracy’s greatest weaknesses was among its guiding principles – government by the people. To show that the people cannot choose what is best for themselves.





Fast forward to January 2021 and people have been convinced that it was the 2020 election which was unfair, despite a lack of any real evidence, resulting in an insurrection. Fast forward to 2022 where the Republican party is focused on seizing what used to be non-partisan positions which in some way oversee election procedures, only to find that they actual do need popular support to gain power.





While things appear to be working out, we seem to have forgotten Putin’s role in this. Political polarization has increased, and along with it, hostility, and large swaths of the American population living in separate realities. No one seems to be talking about how this was likely Putin’s plan to begin with – to lead some to believe that autocracy has more merits than democracy. The right-wing of America, “coincidentally,” seems more and more on board with allowing Putin to illegally invade and annex portions of a sovereign nation, unaware of who may have lead them to this stance – that has been lost in the noise.





Part Nine of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.

	


	





		

		
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The Strangest Music I’ve Ever Made – The Oiloid Syrup Double Gem Story
	


	
	

		

It was winter.





I was living at my mom’s house in those days, out in the cornfields of Ohio. My bedroom was positioned so that rain would often beat directly against my window.





It was raining.





The rain was making such a pleasant sound, I decided I’d set my little voice recorder that I record music with next to the window.





But immediately after this, it felt like I should play some music. I had been very interested in lowercase music at the time, and I thought the rain and the sounds of me walking around and flipping switches would be interesting to hear. But as the moments passed, I was inspired to actually turn on an amp and play some guitar.





After a bit of playing around with pedals and my guitar, I kept the recording running while I did some cleaning up and sitting around.





This result was a little strange, but included vast swaths of very quiet, subtle sounds.





This is when things got weird.





In my editing software, I kept amplifying the quiet parts until what had been near silence was now quite loud. And all sorts of strange sounds emerged. Like the ghosts of robotic goblins or something. I was transfixed by this strangeness.





For song titles and the album name, I opened up a text-editor and just started randomly hitting keys. I looked for things which resembled words in the mess, and the final result was Oiloid Syrup Double Gem.





Part eight of Nine Months of Non-Fiction.