eightpix

I cannot understate how shit Luc Besson’s Jeanne d’Arc film was. At least, in my memory. I know, I know; everyone’s got an opinion. These are my two cents. This movie really let me down.

The first teaser, which gave absolutely nothing away, was excellent. The cast was solid. I thought, cool, Besson is doing a period piece.

Wow, it was dog shit. Dustin Hoffman’s role helped. But barely.

It was up for international awards. Milla Jovovich went for a Golden Raspberry.

https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-year-chart

In August 1976, gold was $35/oz, close to its historical level. By October 1979, it was $380/oz, over 10× increase — peaking (for the 20th c.) in January 1980 at $668/oz.

20× return in 3.5 years.

Gold doubled again in value by December 2010, and again by January 2025 — to $2800/oz.

The all-time high, 20 October 2025, $4377.58/oz.

125× return in under 40 years.

I’ve seen it said: it’s not that gold has gotten more expensive. Its that the USD is debased as a currency against the dollar. The gold standard for USD ended in August 1971.

Diplomacy.

After 9/11, when the world weighed an invasion of Afghanistan, America could have skipped the invasion, taken the Al Qaeda leadership the Taliban offered up, and continued to seek O/UBL. A forensic investigation and specific arrests, extradition, trials, and convictions would have been much better than a disastrous 20 year war that accomplished two things: enriching military contractors and the impoverishment of a central Asian nation.

Diplomacy.

Deposing Saddam Hussein with the same type of pressure that, later, led to the ousters of Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Bashar al Assad. Some might say that 2003 created the pretext for the Arab Spring. I’d counter that time and tide created the conditions. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a pipe dream and an extension on the GWoT piggy bank.

Diplomacy.

Building a better, more sustainable future demands a move away from fossil fuels. Making driving, urban sprawl, warfare, agribiz, and Amazon packages into a socially toxic soup of ideas would have done wonders for green initiatives. Instead a turn away from the largest industries of the time was — and still is — regarded as heresy.

Team efforts.

When people see one another’s skills and can come to have confidence in and rely on each other, that builds bonds. Creative exercises are good ways to achieve this. Co-producing a play or video, painting a room, or making a meal (while not hungry, of course) could be methods that help kids to practice this. We take our kids camping and there are lots of ways for kids to work together and rely on each other. Also, opportunities to exercise independent competence and to do tasks that help the family.

Trauma bonding is a dicier strategy. Could work out. Could end in tears. It all depends how many times you want to have them survive a winter plane crash on a mountainside. By the third time, they’d probably catch on.

For anyone who hasn’t listened to ALL of the lyrics from that song, go. Do it.

Know what works better than boycotts? A general strike. Stop the economy in its tracks. Have a clear, articulated goal. No leadership. No one to arrest. No one to identify as a troublemaker.

The trouble, when systemic, is the system. A boycott is meant to strike at an individual or group of allied organization(s). A general strike is the last level.

Governments tend to be allergic to general strikes. Their reactions are heavy-handed, thoughtless, and reactionary. Howard Zinn recounts several in A People’s History of the United States. But, when primed and done well, it is a demonstration of political will unlike any other. It is a change agent.

I was in Guatemala in 2015 for the one-day general strike that led to the arrest of then-President Otto Perez Molina. His party had been funnelling tax revenues into a slush fund. Look up #noletoca and #LaLinea. He was removed from the presidency, tried, convicted, and served time.

The most expensive thing ever built and maintained is the International Space Station. At $160B over its lifetime, the ISS is a model for the excessively wealthy.

True, it is not primed for self-sustaining flight, and the quarters are very cramped, but a space-faring über-rich individual has to have a Plan B in case they’re not on the same continent as one of their “end of days” bunkers. Those start at $1 million and can run upwards of $300 million.

About the same time as the first private space station comes into service, we will also find that the rocket and tandem-independent space shuttle will also be feasible. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Sorry. Am atheist. Aren’t churches cults?

Unpopular opinion.

Allow me to rephrase: Churches aren’t cults, but they do worship a dead guy, an “I” in sky, and promise that “whosoever believeth” will not die but “have everlasting life.” Christmas, Easter, and Judgement Day — the big three.

This, on its own, sounds cult-adjacent.

There’s community, and I guess as long as someone says a prayer for you, remembers your name, or holds on to a record of your existence — I guess that’s something resembling everlasting life. Churches are good at keeping records. Sort of. Depends on what it is, really. If they want to forget, apparently, they will.

There’s also the proselytizing, “spreading The Word.” And the meetings — almost exclusively on the weekend!

Betting on chaos, destruction, reconstruction costs, insurance payouts/denials, and instability for a growing segment of the population made many people rich in the 15th to 21st centuries.

When you are both the cause and the beneficiary of this exercise, that is Disaster Capitalism — an extension of the Shock Doctrine.

The doctrine itself can capitalize on accidents, natural disasters, political instabilities, and economic downturns.

Disaster capitalism foments “accidents” (see: Beirut explosion), natural disasters (see: climate change denialism), political instabilities (see: School of the Americas), and economic downturns (see: the Big Short).

If I was going to sacrifice my integrity for money, I would start a church.

I might add, start good trouble. This follows from 5. above.

Hold your state and federal representatives’ feet to the fire. Protest injustice. Demand transparency and equity. Understand how your local community works. If it doesn’t work, build on that.

Always excellent, The Evolution of Trust, and interactive exercise in Game Theory.

Welcome to the Internet. Hopefully, I read as a good person. I am not a bot.

I lived as a young adult through Bush II. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Halliburton, Blackwater, and loads of corruption. It was tough to trust anything then. The goal was pure profit.

Apparently, Dubya was the warm-up presidency for this shit.

First, let me share a clip from Margin Call, 2011.

As long as the prevailing mode has been capital, there has been speculation. As long as there has been speculation, there have been lying liars who exploit the system.

The last few pump and dump bubbles he mentioned (1987, 1992, 1997, 2000, and 2008) are all market crashes I can remember. The market is a casino. Crashes since '08 include 2010 (Flash Crash), 2015 (sell-off), 2018 (cryptocrash), 2020 (Covid), 2022 (Ukraine War), and 2025 (tariffs).

These were once “once in a lifetime” events.

Second, everything in the world is designed to generate more:

• self-serving, self-centered, selfish

• short-term-focused

• extroverted, charismatic, vain

• action-oriented

• thoughtless

psychopaths and sociopaths. This ethos runs things because of profit motives, monopolies on the exercise of violence, and the development of contemporary morés rooted in exploitation, expropriation, and (deemed) externalities of colonialism. Identifying some humans as “the other” makes much more inhumanity possible.

So, I’m here to tell you, it’s real alright. What you’re feeling is real. What you’re feeling against is real. We are immersed in it. Algorithms are doing their best to lock it in.

Finally, what to do and who to trust.

Establish your own moral center. Decide what matters to you. Find those who are telling the most truth, especially when tested. Demogogues fall apart under examination. Lies fall apart when questioned. The unchallenged authority is no authority at all. Get the receipts; find primary sources as often as possible. Seek those who share at great personal cost.

For me, it started with Star Trek. Then, hip-hop. Then, journalists I could trust. Even films that challenge prevailing narratives. I read a lot of books from many perspectives.

20 years later, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Henry A. Giroux, Amy Goodman, Arundhati Roy, and Noam Chomsky have never wavered. Films like The Insider, Erin Brockovich, and The Corporation light a fire in me. I’m rewatched David Simon and Barry Levinson’s Homicide: Life on the Street and, hilariously, Murphy Brown.

Challenge the prevailing narratives. You’re not alone.

Julian Assange has something to say about this.

Edward Snowden has something to say about this.

Reality Winner has something to say about this.

Chelsea Manning has something to say about this.

Woodward and Bernstein had something to say about this.

47m here. This was my journey:

Remember that scene in Heat, where Robert DeNiro introduces himself to Edie at the café? Do that. Stay interested. This goes for everyone. Get to know people. Take genuine interest in people, uncover what excites them, and get them talking about their excitement. If you find you’re excited by the same things, great. If not, there are many more people to practice on.

Also helpful:

Read books written by women. Fiction, non-fiction, articles, TV shows, films… everything. Take on concerns as experienced by women (SA, undoing redpill /mensrights /manosphere, unequal pay, caring professions) as your own responsibility. You’ll do everyone around you a favour.

Care for other people — less insofar as what they can do to/for you and more about the ends they are in themselves. Keep up good relationships.

If she’s still around, and you have the emotional capacity to do so, call your mom or sister. Women like to know that their men can have a good relationship with a woman who is not a sexual object.

Finally, give a shit about yourself. Get better at what you want to be good at. Keep a clean living space. Eat healthy, get outside, and find enjoyable activities. If you plan on dating anyone, you’re better off knowing what you like so that you can share it. Then, when she shares what she likes, you can approach it openly.

I’m not a guru. I’m still working on this from within a long-term committed relationship. It’s hard. There will be closeness, rupture, repair, and growth in any relationship. The willingness to wash, rinse, and repeat is key.

If I said yes, I’d caveat that by saying, “we’re not special.” There’s no interaction, quid pro quo or otherwise, with whatever presence, energy, or overmind that I would conceptualize as a deity.

Not an architect. Not a creator. Omnipotence and omniscience defy temporality. There are, similarly, no subdivisions of the deity; there are no places that it is present, and others that it is absent. No underboss gods, angels, demons, heavens, hells, or purgatories.

The deity, in my understanding, is simply a unity: An answer to paradoxes, a solution to the incomprehensible, a layer beneath and above all other measurements, concepts, and capacities. A holographic whole that encompasses and inhabits every possibility. It is older than the universe and beyond our feeble attempts to comprehend it, let alone write its character and tell its story.

A bearded white dude who impregnated a virgin, hates masturbation, holds vendettas, destroys cities, sends plagues, and permits humans to hide from “HIM” in the garden of good and evil… it is all just silly by comparison. At that’s just from the tradition I was raised in.

I mean, a burning bush? Or tests of faith?

We, people and all other organisms that are aware of one another, need to get on with finding ways to coexist. Biodiversity is the scorecard.

/rant

The metric is biodiversity.

How many kinds of life are there, and are they thriving? What are the bottlenecks and boundaries for species that slow or stop their progress?

Well, as a living, all-consuming, extinction-level event, I’d say we are making the experiment more impossible. We are a confounding factor, a bias most foul, and the primary flaw in the experimental design.

If only there was guidance in terms of balancing our biological impact and capacity for sustainable development. If only there were some models that have and had worked for millennia. If only there were living groups who could share their wisdom.

If only.

So, for now, plunderous expropriation rules: violent, resource-heavy, rational modern warfare; apathetic, resource-heavy, throwaway consumer culture; and ignorant, resource-heavy, industrial machinations.

What could go wrong?

Nice to meet you, too. Thanks to 세종대왕 (Sejong Dae Wang, King Sejong) for creating a Hangeul, a stronger phonetic system. I look forward to its use for a long time to come.

IIRC, the food, therefore the word, was introduced to Korea. It is a transliteration. Like “tae-kwon-do” is a transliteration from the Korean 태권도 (taegwondo).

Note: Korean is not my first language. It is first non-English script I’ve managed to learn to read and write and makes me happy every time I interact with it.

My read/spoken Korean is atrocious and barely functions.

치즈 (chi-jeu)