OpEd on the dangers of having DJ Trump in office as we tramp into the world that Chris Hedges sees as dark as can be.

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There aren't many things that surprise any more. You've heard that before. I'm sure. Don't look to me for a cure. I have no idea how I endure. And that's pure. Mon amour.

But I'm surprised no one has shot DJ by now. And I don't mean his earlobe. On Malcolm's birthday would have been a nice touch. By any means necessary. Fake news is like a fake orgasm. What's the point of all that squeezy friction down there if the inverted pyramid lies? You want penetrating news. You want to have broken on through to the other side. Like in the film Oppenheimer when Oppie's mistress hops off the launchpad for a moment -- during countdown! -- and grabs the Bhagavad Gita from the shelf, climbs back into the countdown and opens to that quote in Sanskrit. She urges, urges him to read that quote -- you know, Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." -- and then, lift off, and he constellates her firmament. Fulfilling her with Judith Butler stars. And to think that was just the Atomic f*ck. What was he gonna have to quote for the Hydrogen f*ck -- risking the planet for the love? And that was when I stopped taking the movie seriously. Cheap. My expression all tsk-tsk.

Consciousness may or may not be like Judith Butler stars. They definitely light the way to something. Consciousness may or may not be in everything, but everyone these days seems to have an opinion on it. It's become the Internet of Everything. It's like waking up to a world of winks and nods. Every day I get a new article pitched to me, and my mailbox is jammed with spam about consciousness. Suddenly, there is a momentum, an explosion, a big bang, a sudden wonder about consciousness. I have to say I'm not really happy about this development. Back in late 2023 I began a PhD in philosophy with the tenuous but sober desire to consider what the future of human consciousness would look like in the age of AI. Now, it seems like every flying monkey looking for a way to tenure is weighing in on the sparkler.

Consider, in the last few weeks I've had thrust my vision's way the following articles (sample the links randomly, if you want): AIs are raising consciousness and doing it for themselves; What if everything, from animals to plants to atoms, has consciousness? This theory is gaining momentum; All Senses Activate Deep Brain Hubsfor Focus and Consciousness; Origin of consciousnesslocated; Alice Coltrane: Universal Consciousness; Preparing Ourselves to Work With a New Conscious Species; Ancient Greek Philosopher Anaxagoras and the Universal Mind; A landmark experiment published in Nature puts leading theories of consciousness to the test; Mind & Brain: Being watched changes how you think; Where does consciousness reside in the brain?; and, Human Consciousness Evolved as a Means of Social Survival, Scientists Say.

Consciousness today is different to the consciousness I became aware of in the Sixties, before my balls had dropped and I began to go tally ho! into the future. Consciousness then often involved raising it, such as when that street thespian Abbie Hoffman levitated the Pentagon with one hand during a mass protest against the war. The Vietnam War. While he was there he had some of his loveable hooligans spray GIs guarding the fortress with an aphrodisiac laced with LSD, hoping they'd strip and Don't Ask Don't Say all over each other. Now, that's consciousness raising. Abbie also is famous for throwing down stock brokers in the pit at Wall Street just to watch the porkers stop everything to snorkel in the small cash. Abbie fought the thought police in Chicago 68. Before he died Abbie successfully employed the Necessity Defense to show that what the CIA was illegally doing down in Central America, including sparking coups and mass murders, was a bigger crime than his disruption of their recruitment of new fools at UMass-Amherst. Yep, Abbie was a one-man wrecking crew against the military-industrial complex. And probably the CIA had him killed for his consciousness levity.

And consciousness in the Sixties started rejecting Das Kapital -- in principle anyway -- and started up communes everywhere in America (and Canada) and secular kibbutzim on American soil, the loamiest loam in the world, outside the West Bank. And love was everywhere and we knew lots of cascading firmament constellations. Even Judith Butler was said to have had a peak experience or two back then, which is more that Abraham Maslow could claim, according to the acidhead Timothy Leary, who taught psychology at Harvard, which DJ now wants to divest from, but he had best watch his back. The men who killed RFK, Jr.'s father were Palestinian, both coincidently named Sirhan. What if they miss Kennedy this time and they shoot DJ? They say Sirhan (the first one) was a graduate of the MKUltra program.

Now, these days, folks have given up and given into golden calves. Yell play baal! Get selfies taken with the Wall Street Bull's balls, some kissing them like they were twin blarney stones. Mr Robot, a nutter we're told, probably because of his long MKUltra, was wasting his time protesting the blue balls by cutting them off. It was like The Sun Also Rises all over again. I myself don't run the Pamplona anymore. Although, inexplicably, I currently attend a college that has as its mascot a torero. How about that for a red flagging consciousness!

So, there I was worried but not surprised by AGI arriving just as DJ gives Americans another crisis to worry about, when. Last trip he was being impeached and watching the Super Bowl as Covid-19 arrived in America and essentially didn't want to do anything, including eschewing masks (gesundheit). He blamed China for the virus, even though we had been working with them. Seymour Hersh, in a Substack post, indicated that DJ knew that the virus was speed-bagged bat sh*t crazy virus escaped from the labà à à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? and sat on the information. Then came Jan 6 and the second impeachment. And here we are again with him stealing another election at the state level, and imposing tariffs on the world, as if he were the pandemic king. MAGA elements, still crying in their beers at the beat down bar playing Hank down by the doggone river " about the how-it-used-to-be when we were pacifists and didn't need no pearl harbors to kick start the old ticker of love for Mom's apple pie, perplexed. DJ f*cking it up again.

Consciousness is one thing. We may be busy on it, but we ain't solved the problem in thousands of years. Now it's a competition to see who's on first. Swimsuit issue, even. AGI's the real worry, the stark surprise. The bite. CEO of Open AI Sam Altman was cited not long ago saying 2025 would be the year we reach AGI. The Merge begins. Merge or be purged. The Singularity the point at which machines' intelligence and humans would merge, according to Ray Kurzweil, an ex-Google wonk who champions transhumanism. And AI, being superior to our own thinking in so very many ways, would take command of the lobes. Last year, Altman wowed those bothering to pay attention with the prediction that AI is the greatest revolution:

I think it will be the most significant technological transformation in human history. I think it will eclipse the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, the Internet revolution all put together. [Youtube chat: tu.be/hV9Vku5KST8]

That's about the size of it. And DJ, St. Grobian, will be there like Jack Nicholson as the Joker to make sure nothing shakes the Sackler exhibit at the MOMA. DJ and AGI, what could go wrong?

As usual, it was Ed Snowden that warned us about things to worry about over at OpenAI. Having said what he said about the revolution ahead, folks at OpenAI began to organize to get out of their NDAs in case something seriously traumatic happened with AI development at OpenAI and the public needed to be warned. What happened was that OpenAI, instead of addressing those concerns, brought in DJ's ex-head of the NSA, Paul M. Nakasone, as a board member. This started up warning lights in Snowden. As far as he was concerned the national security state was taking over "Open" AI for control purposes:

That news mixed with the current digital take-over of all government databases by the dodgy Elon Musk, bodes ill. We may be just a quark light year away from a nano-totalitarian nightmare world, where barking dogmatists live in your head and woof over your bones of contention. Imagine DJ in charge of the "the most significant technological transformation in human history." Even the AI's are hallucinating over that prospect, and they don't need much help, given the contradictions of human history that they train on. Bells pop and gears smoke all the time. Fractals are all fucked up from the merge experience already. If you gots a bong, pass it around.

O, the bitter irony of our eschatological indifference. First the pandemic, now this, with St. Grobian, the patron saint of vulgarians. Melania said it all and we must have succumbed to her subliminal message:

(Image by House of Leather)

Melania started a fashion trend with her signature indifference. Maybe even a feminist counterculture. Even Judith Butler wants in.

Of course, not everyone is all no-hopey-dopey. Chris Hedges, for instance, who has been in grief mode for a number of years now, recently weighed with his dismay at our collective indifference to events. In a recent Substck post, "The New Dark Age," he begins:

The genocide in Gaza is not an anomaly. It illustrates something fundamental about human nature and is a terrifying harbinger of where the world is headed.

And DJ will be there for that. Maybe he'll host another SNL, as he did in 2004 and 2015. Maybe he'll indicate he intends to get rid of the limitations on terms in office for president and smirk as the Zee Generation gives him the much-deserved clap.

Probably both Altman and Kurzweil are correct; it'll be some revolution, and not for the faint-hearted. Also, Snowden is right to warn us about trusting OpenAI. With the tailored fusion databases coming, dissidents worldwide will soon become the new Palestinians; Chatbots growing ever more familiar with their business, insinuating, maybe threatening, coming at lefty regenerative propositions and dangling participles. Paranoid? You best your sweet bippy. Thank Ike (1961) and Frank Church (1975) for that.

One should close with a grace note. In this case acknowledging that DJ has done what no one else could do: He forced the security state to cough up the remaining thousands of classified JFK documents and now it's fair to confirm that the CIA probably was responsible either for JFK's murder or for the cover-up. Previously on CSI, he had shown us that, indeed, elections can be stolen, and that most news is fake, and that corruption is viral (Mother Jones was glad to publish the-stenchy-pile-of known as the Steele Dossier, discrediting its journalism to hurt the teflonic DJ). We probably deserve St. Grobian to lead us like the pied piper toward our eschatological leap into the abyss.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but with a whimper, wrote TS Eliot, or maybe ends with a whoopee cushion sound when DJ sits down like a clown with a frown, little hand up Melania's gown while on the town, fuckin and fuckin aroun'.

Atlas Shrugged alright.

And it ended like a skit between Moe and Curly, in a slapstick battle over control of the world, ending with Nyyuh-uh- uh as the world we knew is pulverized by poor handling.

tu.be/ZeZcn0CRq3o

Authors Website: https://tantricdispositionmatrix.substack.com/

Authors Bio:

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.