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Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

Aug22

In the old campy sci-fi series “Lost In Space” from the 1960s, the Robinson family’s robot frequently threw its arms around shouting “Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!” to warn the youngest member of the family that something bad was about to happen.

And okay, I’m going to make give you a warning and this market call for y’all now.

In the summer of 2007, before the Great Recession fully broke, I saw two hedge funds totally collapse based on housing bond investments. Those bonds were very shaky. That, to me, was the beginning of the end of the bull run market of the 2001-2009 time period. Two major banks collapsed over the following 15 months – Bear Stearns (March 2008) followed by Lehman Brothers (September 2008).

In July 2026, an AI investment hedge fund, Situational Awareness, lost 78% of its value in 3 days. This, to me, is a trigger event. It’s time to pay close attention to markets.

Hedge fund collapses, when they happen, are normally caused by losses between 5%-20% of their portfolio. When a hedge fund collapses because of massive losses in the ranges of 80%-90% of assumed value, this means those assets are worthless! And there are hundreds of billions of dollars of such investments across the entire US, with many pension funds and 401Ks invested in such questionable instruments. How much of your money is tied up in worthless investments right now?

The US banking and investment industry has over a trillion dollars invested in AI alone. Every single day. the AI bubble is looking worse than the internet bubble of 2001.

Right now no AI company is making a profit. None, nada, zip. They are licensing seats at thousands of dollars per seat and still losing money! Does this remind you of the dot-com bubble of 2001? How many companies were going to make amazing profits “real soon now”? Goldman Sachs is predicting one AI chipmaker will see 180% growth in stock share valuation in the next 12 months. Where can such value come from if nobody is making a profit?

Another $650 billion is currently slated for investment in AI data centers from Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, and Meta alone, never mind the smaller players.

In the first half of 2026, AI investment in the US alone was $331 billion dollars in an industry that still shows no profits from any of its players!

Wired Magazine sounded the alarm a few years ago that AI is a bubble but now the signs are worsening that this bubble is close to bursting.

I don’t know what to tell you when Trump is wrecking the dollar, running record deficits, and US bond interest rates are rising dangerously (bond prices falling, in other words).

When bond prices fall and stock markets collapse, there are few safe havens left but this bubble feels like it’s close to going boom. And when it goes boom, with Trump wrecking the dollar and US Bonds, I don’t know how bad it can get but it won’t be pretty.

Please take care of yourselves if you have retirement investments. The market isn’t collapsing yet but there are strong warning signs all over. Try to evaluate where you want your retirement funds invested if you have the option and try to find somewhere safe because AI is not the safe or wise investment right now.

If Defending The Human Rights Of Any Group Is A Purity Test, Then You’ve Outed Yourself As Being Pro-Genocide

Aug12

I recently responded to a white cishet man who presented himself as a Democrat that trans people must forgive Representative Robert Vindman for voting against the safety of trans kids. Below is my response to him. I’ve linked the article that generated this response after said man said this was a “purity test” that would hurt Democrats generally.

Virginia congressman’s meeting with transgender Democrats erupts into profanity. Then he walked out.

Nobody gets to declare themselves an ally then betray that community. He betrayed that community, period, full stop.

Hopefully, he learned something in this exchange. Just because he is a loving parent doesn’t mean every parent is. He had actual trans people explaining this to him and he refused to listen.

I guarantee the entire LGBTQ community would have been up in arms if the bill had included outing gay kids because they’ve lived through this too.

LGBTQ kids are 5%-10% of the total under 18 population, based on different attempts to measure that number. Yet LGBTQ kids are over 40% of homeless children. Of the remaining 60% of homeless kids, the overwhelming majority left home voluntarily. Of that 40% who are LGBTQ, 99% left home because they were thrown out.

Vindman is refusing to listen to the lived experiences of trans people who came to talk to him. This is no different than a white man refusing to listen to the lived experiences of Black people and trying to justify a racist vote. It’s the exact same thing.

I want to ask you a question. Do you know what the Lemkin Institute is?

It is a private non-profit organization set up after WWII to try to identify and stop genocides before they become full blown mass killings. They have identified every single genocide in progress since WWII before it became mass murder. They also have never successfully stopped a genocide before it became mass murder because Western governments refused to act.

The Lemkin Institute has issued three separate warnings that the Trump administration is on track to commit genocide of transgender people. Such a warning has never been issued against the United States before. Yet now we have 3 warnings from the Lemkin Institute.

If they are as successful as they’ve been in the past, assholes like you will be erecting monuments to dead trans people saying “Who could have seen it coming?” and “I wonder what we could have done to stop it?” once this is all over.

Yet some huge number of trans people are going to end up dead if this continues down this road. And now we have Democrats piling on to the genocidal actions of the Trump administration.

Genocides start by identifying the target, dehumanizing the target, making them an enemy that the majority no longer cares about, separating them from the “good” majority (often for their own “safety”), and then eventually, mass killing them as a final solution.

The Trump administration is actively engaged in those first three actions listen above and Republicans across the nation are calling for trans people to be segregated from public life. Some are already calling for them to be “rounded up”. What do you think comes after “rounding up” trans people?

The only expectation I have from any Democrat is that they are not bendable on human rights. Because any Democrat willing to throw one group under the bus has proved himself willing to throw other groups under the bus.

Vindman is a privileged white man who refused to listen to trans voters or Black voters who tried to talk to him then tried to justify his actions against human rights as “being a parent”.

Fuck Vindman. If that’s the sort of Democrat he is, trans voters don’t need him as a representative, because, to us, he’s no different from a Republican.

And don’t bring up other rights and freedoms of other groups because if we’re being put in camps, what good are those “freedoms” to us?

The Cesspool of Hate and Bigotry Right Under Many Parents’ Noses

Jul31

Let me make some feminist observations coming from a place you probably wouldn’t expect to find feminist observations at all – online video gaming and especially massive multiplayer online video gaming (MMOs).

One game I’ve played is called Black Desert Online (hereafter abbreviated BDO). It has one of the most extensive character customization editors in the entire online gaming world. The character face alone has 39 separate small regions that can be adjusted in every conceivable dimension including the ears. The body has 19 separate regions adjustable via sliders and that’s not counting the hands, each of which has 3 adjustable regions per finger and the palm region which is a total of 51 potential adjustments across the body from neck to foot. (Toes are not individually adjustable.)

You can create a character template and then save it. You can share saved templates publicly. And shared templates can be named.

I’ve seen some incredible templates done, which look nothing like the default character that Pearl Abyss has created. I’ve seen hundreds of celebrity templates that, depending on the gender of the specific class (classes are gender locked), look like famous actors, actresses, sports figures, or even a few politicians.

But for all of this extremely creative work, we then find the other templates. You don’t find this with male gender classes, only female gender classes.

Templates in which the character’s breasts are so large you wonder how the character can possibly stand. Character templates with buttocks so large that you wonder if something is medically wrong with them. Character templates titled “Mommy”, “Waifu”, “Cutie”. There used to be a lot of “Ho” templates but Pearl Abyss apparently cracked down and forced those to be retitled or deleted. You do still see some character templates with “THOT” in them.

Another game I’ve played is Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). SWTOR doesn’t have character creators. You can basically choose one of 4 body types but you can make extensive face adjustments, just nothing like BDO. But SWTOR’s brilliance is that it has so many character outfits you can put your character into. Mandalorian armor sets (a few dozen choices), Jedi robe or armor sets (a few dozen choices), Sith robe and armor choices, several dozen choices that look like smuggler and bounty hunter type armor. And the beauty of this system is that almost any class can wear almost any outfit set. (A tiny number are gender locked.)

And given these choices, as a role-player, I almost always had my female characters dressed in full coverings most of the time. The rare time they were not was usually some in-character function, like attending a gala and wearing an evening gown.

And further, you can have dozens of potential companions in SWTOR to fight alongside you (one companion at a time but you can switch any time except in the middle of a fight). And many of those characters are female too.

So what do many of those female characters and companions get dressed in most often? The least covering most revealing outfits possible.

Then let’s talk about MMO game chat systems. Most MMOs have channels that are pretty wide reaching. In BDO there are several channels that reach the entire instance of the game world. In SWTOR there are general channels that reach wide sections of the game world. In WOW, there are general channels that reach wide segments of the game world.

These are a built in feature of almost every MMO in existence. And if you listen to these channels, you find yourself immersed in a total culture of absolutely pure misogyny and hate. Hatred of women, hatred of anyone not white (the use of the N-word is common), hatred of anyone who is queer but especially hatred of trans women and gay men, and more.

These channels are among the most toxic, abusive channels of communications in the world today. And none of these companies police these channels. No policing action is done. The most vile, hateful things are said in these channels.

There is non-stop racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic chatter going on in these game channels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week except when the servers are down for maintenance.

People talk about 4Chan and 8Chan as toxic places on the dark web but MMO game chat systems, and the cultures they create which are inhabited by MILLIONS OF YOUR MEN AND TEENAGE BOYS are conditioning these young men and teenage boys to become bigots in every part of their corrupt little souls.

Are there those that resist? Sure, but most don’t fight the tide. Those who don’t want to hear it, because they have no real policing powers and the owners of the games refuse to police their chat systems, usually just turn off global or wide reaching channels that becomes hotbeds of bigotry.

The online social media culture of hate and negativity that we see on Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, X, and other social media platforms did not arise overnight from whole cloth. It arose from these MMO game chat systems that have been unpoliced since the mid-1990s, places of toxic hate and abuse against anyone the majority deems “less than”. Then those people grew up and moved on to other social media where they brought their sense of entitlement, hatred, and bigotry with them.

You cannot clean up social media systems without first going after related communication systems like MMO game chat systems, the systems that start programming kids who are in their early teens to hate and mock anyone different from themselves.

And that’s going to require legislation that neither major party wants to touch right now.

Big tech is out of control, not just in AI, but in its open support of sexual abuse, its support of production of child sexual assault materials (CSAM), it’s production of openly racist materials.

If this is not reigned in on a society wide scale, it will destroy civilization. Elon Musk fears people of color and people of religions other than Christianity. He and his tech bros are a bigger threat to civilization than any other single factor right now.

Wrong Life

Jan28

This was written by a friend. I have attempted to strip any identifying information from the original piece to protect the author. It expresses how it feels to be transgender in America in 2026. Right now, in 2026, transgender people are the target of government genocide. Each step becomes more explicit. Each action becomes more violent towards the trans community. This is how The Holocaust happened. You are living through such a moment right now. What you do, other than just posting on social media, will determine what happens to trans adults and children in the near future. If you let them murder us without a fight, you are complicit.

Wrong Life

Every once a while I encounter a quote that brings me up short and helps re-frame how I see the world. Such is the case when I came across this quote by Theodore Adorno as I researched the rise of Nazi Germany, and the origins of the Holocaust:

“A wrong life cannot be lived rightly”

Out of context I interpreted it to mean that if a person is the wrong sort of life (e.g. Jewish, Sinti, disabled) nothing that person can do can grant them the grace of being “one of the good ones.” No matter their character, achievements, capability, “wrong life” can only have a negative value to society. The only way to balance the equation is to eliminate that wrong life and bring the sum to zero on both sides.

This thought stopped me in my tracks, and I could hear the paradigm shift without a clutch, because it explained everything I was both feeling, and seeing over the past year. It was the grand unification theorem of my inner world, and what I was seeing that was external to me.

I am wrong life. And despite my efforts to live rightly, it simply does not matter. Nothing I can do will change the equation, other than my eradication. Internally, this realization is what fuels my anger. I genuinely tried to be a good person and contribute in ways that are lauded in others. I’m angry at the breaking of the American compact that supposedly we should be judged by the content of our character, and not government fiat that people like me are incapable of leading “honorable” or “disciplined” lives. I’m furious at the hypocrisy and having wasted my life trying to earn a place in a country that ultimately decided I must be destroyed.

But none of it matters. My government, and the people that voted for it, have declared me wrong life, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. Indeed, the President explicitly ran on the idea that I am wrong life was a feature and not a bug. The GOP spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading the narrative that anyone who doesn’t want wrong life eliminated is against the herrenvolk.

At the same time, this sentence helps me understand why this level of bigotry reminds me more of the Holocaust than other civil rights atrocities in American history. For most other marginalized groups in American history it was still possible to be one of “the good ones”. For black people, there was room for acceptance of those who “knew their place”. Whites needed them for their labor. Indeed, the South fought the Civil War because they needed slavery for their economy. Japanese Americans were interned but allowed to fight in the European Theater of Operations. Hispanics were long used for their agricultural labor or valued as reliable Republican voters in Florida. Their lives had less value than other Americans, but it wasn’t a negative number.

Mine is.

And that’s the fundamental difference between the oppression and demonization of transgender people today, and the civil rights issues of the past. It’s also why the policies being enacted look far more like Nazi efforts to push Jews and LGBT people out of Germany as non-citizens of the Reich than previous government efforts to keep certain classes of people “in their place” as second class citizens.

This quote snapped into place why I have felt far more comfortable framing current events within the scope of German history than the US. It’s also the most useful framework for understanding why Republicans are targeting transgender people with literally over a 1000 bills per year designed to make life impossible enough that they either leave the country, detransition, or live in a country where they aren’t allowed to leave their houses for fear of arrest because a minor might see them in public.

They see us as wrong life. And even those who do not see us as such are willing to go along with it because it is the dark side of politics: it looks like the quick and easy path to power to take this position in public. Any Republican that does not behave as if transgender people are all wrong life is likely to be forced out of the party, and away from the levers of power.

I have expressed some of these frustrations before, and people have expressed sentiments along the lines of “well, I don’t think of you that way.” While appreciative of such support, they simply don’t matter because the people who express these thoughts have no institutional power. My own sense of self worth is completely irrelevant to this equation, and changes nothing in practice. Neither do the sentiments of people with no authority.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my sense of self-esteem, and what some powerless people think about me, is meaningless if my transgender son and I are spending our last moments holding our breath and trying to claw our way through concrete with our fingernails while taking a “shower” with 100 strangers. All it provides is a further sense that the situation is unjust. It does nothing to keep me alive in the face of a movement that controls the government and has officially declared us to be “wrong life.”

Only the government’s opinion matters. And no matter what I do, I cannot be anything other than wrong life in their eyes, and the eyes of the people keeping the government in power. That government has made it clear it intends to remain in power in perpetuity at any cost. I will always be wrong life if I remain in the United States. The only way to change the equation to zero without expiring is to remove myself from the equation the same way Jews did from Germany: by emigrating to a place where their lives can have some value greater than zero.

I want my life to have a positive value again as seen by the people who matter. I cannot express how much of a relief it will be when I do not have to spend every waking moment aware of being wrong-life. If you wondered what being trans in America is like today, here you find my soul laid bare in Hell.

Biology Is A Shit Show

Apr26

This has been posted elsewhere many times over the years and was composed by Rebecca Helm, a biologist and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina (at least at the time this was written).

Rebecca Helm, a biologist and an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville US writes:

Friendly neighborhood biologist here. I see a lot of people are talking about biological sexes and gender right now. Lots of folks make biological sex sex seem really simple. Well, since it’s so simple, let’s find the biological roots, shall we? Let’s talk about sex…[a thread]

If you know a bit about biology you will probably say that biological sex is caused by chromosomes, XX and you’re female, XY and you’re male. This is “chromosomal sex” but is it “biological sex”?

Well…

Turns out there is only ONE GENE on the Y chromosome that really matters to sex. It’s called the SRY gene. During human embryonic development the SRY protein turns on male-associated genes. Having an SRY gene makes you “genetically male”. But is this “biological sex”?

Sometimes that SRY gene pops off the Y chromosome and over to an X chromosome. Surprise! So now you’ve got an X with an SRY and a Y without an SRY. What does this mean?

A Y with no SRY means physically you’re female, chromosomally you’re male (XY) and genetically you’re female (no SRY). An X with an SRY means you’re physically male, chromsomally female (XX) and genetically male (SRY). But biological sex is simple! There must be another answer…

Sex-related genes ultimately turn on hormones in specifics areas on the body, and reception of those hormones by cells throughout the body. Is this the root of “biological sex”??

“Hormonal male” means you produce ‘normal’ levels of male-associated hormones. Except some percentage of females will have higher levels of ‘male’ hormones than some percentage of males. Ditto ditto ‘female’ hormones. And…

…if you’re developing, your body may not produce enough hormones for your genetic sex. Leading you to be genetically male or female, chromosomally male or female, hormonally non-binary, and physically non-binary. Well, except cells have something to say about this…

Maybe cells are the answer to “biological sex”?? Right?? Cells have receptors that “hear” the signal from sex hormones. But sometimes those receptors don’t work. Like a mobile phone that’s on “do not disturb’. Call and call, they will not answer.

What does this all mean?

It means you may be genetically male or female, chromosomally male or female, hormonally male/female/non-binary, with cells that may or may not hear the male/female/non-binary call, and all this leading to a body that can be male/non-binary/female.

Try out some combinations for yourself. Notice how confusing it gets? Can you point to what the absolute cause of biological sex is? Is it fair to judge people by it?

Of course you could try appealing to the numbers. “Most people are either male or female” you say.

Except that as a biologist professor I will tell you…

The reason I don’t have my students look at their own chromosome in class is because people could learn that their chromosomal sex doesn’t match their physical sex, and learning that in the middle of a 10-point assignment is JUST NOT THE TIME.

Biological sex is complicated. Before you discriminate against someone on the basis of “biological sex” & identity, ask yourself: have you seen YOUR chromosomes? Do you know the genes of the people you love? The hormones of the people you work with? The state of their cells?


Since the answer will obviously be no, please be kind, respect people’s right to tell you who they are, and remember that you don’t have all the answers. Again: biology is complicated. Kindness and respect don’t have to be.


Note: Biological classifications exist. XX, XY, XXY XXYY and all manner of variation which is why sex isn’t classified as binary. You can’t have a binary classification system with more than two configurations even if two of those configurations are more common than others.

Biology is a shitshow. Be kind to people.