i.e. people who read Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes. ;)

I don’t know who/what that is.

I’m more like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY4z7_kcxjw

Would you actively call up murderous thieves and criminals and con-men to tell them everything about you and your friends, let them in on your every conversation, even tell them your exact location and even your innermost unuttered thoughts, constantly?

I don’t see why it’s more sane to do it passively, letting the corporation and their spook friends conveniently do that for you.

I used to work in advertising [before Bill Hicks saved me, just as I got into TV adverts]. I was “just doing my job”, to the best of my ability, to serve my client, maximally manipulating minds, perverting perceptions, preferences and purchases. This was years before smart phones. My meagre team of two still managed to shape public perception, changed the culture. The things I would have done had I had the data available via the spyware so normalised today. The things I would have done had I had the millions of resources the corporations and governments have. I avoid such because I’m effectively a whistle blower for the advertising industry, and reformed abuser of peoples minds. And I’m of sufficient ethical and moral fiber to have got out. The ruthless psychopaths who are happily still doing it, are not going to hold back. Hijacking peoples minds, their perceptions, their preferences, and not just their purchases, but their purpose, is frighteningly easier than you (have been conditioned to) think. It’s much harder to de-program people back into a cognitively-competent free-thinking de-hypnotised state. It’s easy to subliminally suggest associations, drip-fed over time, without them realising. “90% of advertising is wasted” we used to say, before it was targeted. And that was fine. That was still sufficient efficiency. The other 90% wasn’t for you, it was for other people. None of it was really wasted, if it was done well. Would you actively tell an advertiser, a mind-manipulator, a con-man striving to serve their master who wants to extract all wealth from you and exact total control over you, everything about you? If so, the hour may be later than you’ve been led to think.

The fear of what other people think is a powerful induction to get people even more easily manipulated into group-think. Then advertising/psyop costs drop dramatically. People succumb to mass-formation, where they police each others thoughts for the advertiser/psyop-agency. This is the psychology of totalitarianism, not just so duped to be so suggestible, but in a runaway state of delusion where any and all atrocities are seen as necessary virtues in service of “the one true way”, with the limbic reactive portions at the back of the brain responsible for fear reflex have completely taken over from the forebrain where more reasonable responsible creative and critical thinking can happen. And a mobile phone can easily be used to actively emit inaudible frequencies to tweak these brainwaves, much the same as sound therapy works, but when it’s also able to actively read the feedback from all the biometrics, it’s like a cold-reading conman with thousands of times more information and insight into what your inner experience is than the most competent and ruthless mentalist. Able to play you better than Vanessa Mae plays the fiddle. A little nudge here, and there, a script to respond to this or that thought had with this or that association… and all the billions of resources to deploy it…

No I don’t have a mobile phone. I know what I would have done with it when it was still “just my job” to maximally manipulate people with it. I know (just some of) what potential is probably being used. Heck, just look at the groupthink and silly notions like fearing emancipatory-potentialled open-web technology such as the fediverse as if it’s the big scary deep dark-web… Cui Bono? Ever had the experience of receiving an advert for something you’ve been speaking about? Or how about just thinking about? But that’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Maybe the corporation cares. And maybe somehoe the psychopathic structure, and the psychopathic self-selecting, somehow did not happen for the bits that reach you, and everything’s fine.

If everybody else around went and jumped off a cliff, would you follow?

Better jump. Wouldn’t want them to think you’re insane for not jumping with them.

I want their trials to be seen by her.

Thanks for that.

Isn’t that what you’ve just done?

Was that an intentional joke?

I’d rather look to egalitarian emancipatory remedies, than dwell on defeatism and succumbing to ploys of "pitchforks vs torches, or opposaming in service of the polluting oligarchs and kakistarchs.

Avail the suppressed clean emancipatory techologies, abundance is restored, people no longer feel the economic duress, “it’s easy to be an angel in heaven”, and we’ll see “it takes a village”, and can all eagerly help care for the ever dwindling “unwanted kids”.

This is not your boomer’s “poor”.

And then some downvote those trying to fight it. Boggles the mind.

They’ve got the poison, they’ve got the remedy.

We were foolish to peg our power to our labour/servitude/slavery. No path to emancipation like that. Pegs us to our abuser driving us all to doom.

We were foolish to accept being called “ordinary people”. That basically means we’re ordinance. Cannon fodder.

“Worthless eaters” some in the ruling class call us.

We can still mend this.

Even the richest can be better off (and not join the extinct) with the clean emancipatory technology being de-secreted and utilised. As it shall, either sooner, in wise foresight, or later, in desperation.

No “reverse physics” required.

One idea among many:

Restore cannabis.

It cleans air 7 times more than pine forests.

It’s not just the carbon dioxide that comes into contact with the chlorophyll in the leaves. It’s all the terpenes (and other aromatics and pollen) it pumps out too. Meaning it cleans the air high in the sky.

And atop that, it can replace many polluting technologies. Oil and deforestation (like for farming), for a couple hot examples.

Even making limecrete housing, instead of offgassing carbon dioxide and causing loads of carbon dioxide during production like concrete does, it’s actually carbon negative, in production and throughout its lifetime, sucking up carbon, further hardening over time.

Similar gains with bioplastics, graphene, paper, fabric, rope, medicine, food, etc.

It can grow in a greater range of climates than any other useful plant. We could re-green e.g. the entire sahara, the australian outback and the southern half of north america. And it’d increase the soil quality readied for other vegetation within a year or two.

And that’s just one idea.

Our problem is not physics, it’s psycho-socio-economic.

If the new solid state battery from donutlabs is legit, that could indicate the trickle of cleaner technologies coming, perhaps even towards availing of the emancipatory technologies that have been suppressed for the past century or two. Many an untapped potential. Even just the more mundane better known, like thorium reactors. We have so much headroom without the crooks keeping us down and dirty.

Sure… could take that impression. Or… consider:

Patent Office whistle blower Tom Valone revealed at energy conferences in the early 00’s that by the year 2000 there had already been over 3000 free energy device patents secreted. (… That’s abundant energy without pollution.)

• “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller

Follow the tech arc from Michael Faraday through to Nikola Tesla (passing by the Sonora Aero Club and Charles Dellschau’s drawings of what they had in 1850 (the early state of the art of what would become zero-inertia propulsion (like the foo-fighters and “the bell” (“die glocke”) in (and before) WW2))), you may find many more examples of technologies we’ve been denied.

Consider even the lies they {Ed Bernays (who inspired Hitler), Harry J Anslinger and Randolf William Hearst} spread to convince us our most useful resource, Cannabis, was instead a demon called “Marijuana”, depriving us of the most nutritionally complete and balanced food source for humans and livestock, that can be even eaten without processing and cooking, can last for many years, can be grown in the same soil for 20 years without rotation before depleting nutrients, cleans the air over 7 times more than a pine forest, makes 7 times as much paper as trees and the paper is stronger and lasts for hundreds and even thousands of years, makes fabrics more versatile than cotton with none of the pollution and easier and without slaves, and it even can produce oil fuels like diesel, alcohol fuels like petrol, and even cheap abundant easy graphene to help make solid state capacitors and photovoltaics etc, as well as making super strong limecrete and bioplastics and on and on it goes. And I haven’t even mentioned medicine and spirituality and fun yet, which it’s the best at and non-lethal. All unsurprising since humanity have been in co-evolution with it, cultivating it the longest. The first writing we still have on paper, was on hemp paper, about cannabis, as a medicine. It’s the main ingredient in the holy anointing oil. Salvation’s return is the restoration of cannabis/hemp. No wonder competing industries sought to eliminate the competition, keeping us dependent on their inferior products, and wage slavery.

Consider these two quotes together, and who said them:

• “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity… anything you can imagine we already know how to do.” — Ben Rich, former Head of the Lockheed Skunk Works
• “It is easier for us to pay a private contractor to re-invent something so it will come out at a lower classification level, than to try to declassify it.” – Bennett Hart, then Deputy Director of the National Reconnaissance Organization

If we release all the emancipatory technologies the corporations have been sitting on to keep us hog-tied to their polluting and inferior technology for impoverishing rents, we’ll have dispelled the circular argument that we need a cull of the human population (like the top line of the Georgia Guidestones or some interpretations of Bill Gates’ reductive equation suggests).

It’d even avail all space to us (space, that’s expanding, faster than we could fill it). And to populate Mars, Callisto, Ceres, etc. And to create vast spinning tube orbitals for 1G almost wherever we want. And it would let us build interconnected forest-arcologies, creating a vast forest arcology-scapes, allowing over 300 trillion humans to live here on earth, in abundant nature.

Not saying we should.

Just saying we have so much more headroom with proper resource management, without the crooks holding us down just so they have more than us. Egalitarian proliferation of the (currently suppressed) emancipatory technologies would have even the richest be better off.

Or we could just keep sabotaging ourselves, sabotaging the survival of the species, held under duress to be complicitly committing ecocide, pretending things are harder than they are, just to help maintain the billionaires’ rigged game. :/

It’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want:

“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we … kill those people. “Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.” – Bill Hicks

But don’t worry, someone recorded it for posterity.

Link?

(Was it in the article? I failed to find…)

[With the help of an LLM] Here’s a few worthy quotes:

[Edit: Thanks Susaga for pointing out the LLM lied. Hah. LLMs. Can’t trust 'em. Good lines, pity they’re not true quotes.]

“To be my own master. Such a thing would be greater than all the magic and all the treasures in all the world.” — Genie, Aladdin (1992)

“You think you’re so clever, but you’re just a cowardly, backstabbing, murderous lizard!” — Simba, The Lion King (1994)

“A true hero isn’t measured by the size of his strength, but by the strength of his heart.” — Zeus, Hercules (1997)

“I won’t be a pawn in someone else’s game!” — Pinocchio, Pinocchio (1940)

“You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” — Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh (1966–1977)

“I’d rather die tomorrow than live a hundred years without knowing freedom.” — John Smith, Pocahontas (1995)

“You can’t own a human being!” — Dr. David Q. Dawson, The Aristocats (1970)

I still feel the pain of the time I spent over an hour back and forth websearching, consulting with an LLM, doing calculations in ghci, for a reply to a 3-4 hour old post on intelligence, and by the time I was ready to send my reply…

It was gone.

It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?

Some other young ones in irc:

• [2026-01-18 17:01:33] <rensenwxre> I’ve used emacs since I was 13/14, 20 now
• [2026-01-18 17:02:11] <rensenwxre> My girlfriend also used it for a solid while, she’s 22
• [2026-01-18 17:02:19] <hodapp> so I used Emacs when I was ~15-16 but really never learned it well, then didn’t touch it for 7-8 years

11’s still the number to beat, if we’re counting “playing the Emacs Adventure” (which of course we should).

13/14’s a solid young use.

I think we’re starting to show emacs is not just for “old brain”.

forever

and shall always be

Does feel a little weird that I’m older than emacs.

Yeah, I saw that (~ my guess, he’s about 40), and it lands on a similar sentiment as this guy (~ my guess about 30).

I’d rather DJ-Shorts’ Flo