Category: Writing

Past and Present examples of the writing of Sean Ongley.

  • Holidays of Doom

    Holidays of Doom

    My Christmas Vacation in the Era of the Quarantine

    When the first stimulus checks were cut, I decided to buy a car. There were, not by coincidence, lots of cars listing for exactly the amount of the check: $1,200. Many of them were fake listings. Some were just overpriced.

    I figured I would find something high mileage but good running in that price range, so I treaded lightly into the market.

    Ended up finding a 16-year old Volkswagen Passat in non-starting condition. The owner, I could tell, was a stand up gentleman. He was only getting low balls for $350. I offered $400 and he countered with $350. I sent a tow truck and had it delivered for $100. Didn’t even look at the car, I trusted the guy.

    I like to point out that the Volkswagen Passat has always been the Audi base model, mechanically speaking, since 1974. This model would be the A4 but with downgraded interior and body styles.

    I’m a dirt bag. It’s the nicest car I have ever owned. I had to fix it, that was the whole gamble.

    I put in a lot of time fixing it, and money, but it’s also a hobby, and even though I go nuts when repairs get complex, there is intrinsic and compounding value to the experience and education from it.

    This car drove me from Philadelphia to Tucson in the most direct route possible, through Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. I made this leg of the trip in three nights.

    Since moving to Philly, I missed every Christmas dinner in Arizona. I didn’t want to miss another one. I checked in advance to see if they were following gathering limit guidelines. They said no, and dinner was on as usual for whoever would show up. If you’re horrified by this, then I am sorry, but none of us got sick afterward.

    I made it at the last minute, in the middle of the meal. I would have made it to say grace but I stopped because I wanted to bring something — wine, pie, anything — but all I could actually shop for in the end was beer at a gas station.

    Hauling Through Texas

    My whole time in Arizona lasted just more than a week. I spent that week working on my car, hanging out with my parents, and visiting Ajo, where I spent New Year’s Day tripping on San Pedro juice.

    When I left, I tried to hug the southern coast through central Florida and up the East coast back to Philly.

    I wanted to do this road trip long before covid. I love road trips, but I also don’t want to fly right now.

    I hate wearing masks. I hate seeing people in masks. I think it is scientifically illiterate to enforce masks on people who are not sick. So when airlines say I’ll be put on a no fly list for life if the mask falls below my nose, I just can’t risk that.

    Two major differences between my hoped for road trip and the reality: I did not drive into Mexico and I did not want to visit California.

    California is only good for the friends I get to connect with, the live music and comedy scenes. With all that closed, then I would still see friends, but the atmosphere would suck.

    Lot’s of people that I contacted seemed paranoid about visiting with me in person, either because I was traveling or because they were enforcing a bubble for themselves. My counter cultural friends obey the government. My conservative relatives don’t. 

    It’s square to be hip, I guess.

    My 2020 new years resolution is carrying over to 2021. It was to obtain my first passport and at minimum drive through Canada along my way to Detroit, and into Mexico from Tucson. I applied for the passport in February, as flight restrictions were already underway. I had seen SARS and Ebola — even the anthrax scare — never did I predict something like this could happen.

    Canada extended their border restrictions when I was in Michigan this fall, so that screwed that. I was getting mixed messages about Mexico.

    Visiting a friend in Ajo, less than an hour from the Mexican border, I was told it was essential travel only, like Canada, but also that Puerto Peñasco, just another hour from there, was operating like normal, accepting tourists. I decided not to risk it, so I stayed in Ajo at a friend’s house and we took a trip with mescaline via the San Pedro cactus on New Year’s Day.

    The fact that we have fifty states where I can cross all of those borders freely from coast to coast is something that I cherish about being American. The privilege of an American passport for world travel might never be what it once was, but it is something we should care about as Americans.

    Even so, traveling our great country offers historic value and natural beauty. The laws and cultures between those fifty states can change pretty radically even as we share a national identity and powerful federal government.

    How each population responds to top down authority is revealing of the culture. Driving across 16 states over the holidays in the height of quarantine round two, it became perplexing to me. It changed all the time. The illusion of a scientific approach by economic restrictions is easier to see when you cross three state borders in a single day.

    If there is a scientific approach, it is in the very discontinuity of policy. I mean, eventually we can take all of the data and find correlations between outbreaks and public policy, and cultural attitudes. There remains a great deal of uncertainty about the efficacy of Florida’s strategy toward herd immunity versus the California lock down mentality.

    The data will tell us the truth around 2022. Only the analysis will probably differ wildly and further divide us socially.

    At the time of leaving Philadelphia, and in places like Baltimore, you still could not sit at a counter to have a drink or eat a meal. You must be in a booth or at a table.

    Thankfully, in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I landed after my first long driving day, I was able to belly up and talk to a stranger at the bar. When you go to a bar and you have to stay at a table, you cannot meet strangers. That is what they are trying to prevent, random contact with strangers.

    At a bar in Knoxville, TN.

    The stranger turned out to be a pilot. I probed him on the economic fallout of his industry and the pilot lifestyle broadly. He told me that the hours are difficult because the layovers are so brief. I joked that it encourages cocaine use, to which he confirmed that to be true.

    He had been furloughed. Work was picking back up, but he admitted that many pilots were taking shifts outside of the major airlines to get by.

    In Texas, the mask is largely optional, although urban centers always differ from country towns. In most big cities, even when the science says outdoor transmission is statistically zero, I find a majority of people wearing them outdoors, or while driving, alone.

    There is also a low-income correlation that follows the rural urban divide. In my neighborhood in North Philly, masked people are the minority, but as you approach the wealthier liberal neighborhoods, masks become ubiquitous. Almost everyone wears designer masks there, not disposables, like in the hood. When the CDC said double mask, they did that too.

    Crossing the imaginary line we call a legal border between New Mexico and Texas, it is like stepping from one world into another, like you would in The Twilight Zone. 

    In Roswell, New Mexico, a denser town than I had believed it to be, all restaurants were delivery and no-contact pick up only. Closures were rampant, things like, “Thanks for the 25 years in business,” were on marquees everywhere. It was the only state in which filling my own water and coffee container was banned. The sense of quarantining in a motel and getting the F out was real to me. I moved as swiftly as I could.

    There was no motel that I stayed anywhere that served any kind of continental breakfast, even though they advertised it every time. It is something that could easily be converted into pre-packaged foods, like small cereal boxes, wrapped muffins, fruits, and so on. I can give up the waffle maker, even though I love that. Nope, they are just too cheap to do it. 

    The motels are not competing anymore. Most of the discount brands you know are consolidated under Wyndham. Motel 6 has survived as an independent entity since 1962. Respect. But the idea of competition has largely fallen away in favor of consolidation, so nobody is incentivized to work out a solution to their breakfast. They just charge the same rate anyway.

    New Mexico strangled its economy while Texas let it breath. Arizona took the exact middle between those two extremes and yet there were restaurant closures all over Tucson. I always go dancing at Club Congress, but I could not this year. I haven’t been dancing in more than a year. Most businesses cannot survive, even with a stimulus, throughout all this.

    I went to Bourbon Street in New Orleans hoping for a party. It was pretty chill. Bars were ordered to close before midnight. There was live music though — something that has become a rarity. I found myself talking with these dudes from Austin. I was wearing an Austin t-shirt at the time because I had driven in from Texas that day, and it freaked them out. I am sure they were stoned. So was I, but my paranoia wasn’t in effect.

    I slept in my car in New Orleans. I had breakfast at sunrise at a diner, then walked around the French Quarter waiting for Congo Square to open up. This was a life goal, to visit the place where jazz was born. My second coming of age to music was jazz. It was rock and roll high school to jazz college. This site is a pilgrimage for many musicians.

    Myself in Congo Square, New Orleans

    I was also doing a bit of a conspiracy pilgrimage. I had already visited the grassy knoll and examined the angles from which Oswald allegedly fired the two shots that killed President Kennedy. The place is called Dealey Plaza, the “gateway to Dallas,” an historic site long preceding this unfortunate coup.

    While I was driving through Texas to New Orleans, on January 6, I was not glued to social media or television like most people. The capital was under so-called insurrection, but I was driving. I got some headlines but I didn’t need to stay up to the minute on it. That again goes to show how you can just live your life and all the hype in the news is sub-background noise. However, the response from the government could have far-reaching impacts, as they keep ramping up fears of biosecurity and domestic terrorism.

    Remember, governments do not exist to protect you. Free governments only exist to protect your rights.

    Grassy Knol, Book Depository, Locations of Shots Fired

    When I was in New Orleans, I neglected to recall the Garrison investigation into the JFK assassination. Oswald worked in that old voodoo town just preceding his time in Dallas. In fact, I had a book in my trunk that my Dad, who is not prone to conspiracy, gave me to read called Dr. Mary’s Monkey. If I had started reading that on the trip, I’d have checked out the other places that Oswald worked, in New Orleans, like the coffee plant. He also worked on a covert bioweapon lab in a small French Quarter apartment.

    In New Orleans, the monkey viruses that contaminated the polio vaccine leading to uncountable untimely deaths and disease were tied to covert cancer research projects that reveal just how sloppy and insane things are in the deep layers of government, and how its actions do everything but protect us.

    Following the death of Kennedy, there was a national effort by the Johnson Administration to develop a vaccine for the “cancer virus,” which turned out to be nonsensical. There is no cancer virus. I believe it was a smoke screen to vaccinate against these monkey viruses.

    In fact, there is no single cause, or remedy, for cancer. The trillion dollar research industry has generated extraordinary other results, including the DNA sequence, but no cure. I recommend watching Modern Times: The Way of All Flesh by Adam Curtis.

    I stayed on a coastal route as much as I could, seeing Biloxi and Mobile.

    Pascagoula, Mississippi

    Beaches are different everywhere you go. For swimming, most of the West coast is bitterly cold. Oregon, for example, is gorgeous pristine and natural, it’s wonderful to spend time there, but not to swim. It was the start of winter so I wasn’t about to swim or lay out a towel. The wind was piercing and chilly. It was cloudy. Much warmer however than the high deserts that I had just travelled through. The overnight temperatures in New Mexico in the winter can be brutal.

    Throughout Florida, masking up was not required. I did not visit any big cities there. People were relaxed and there wasn’t this air of impending doom. While many states were closing public rest areas, or shut off basics like water fountains, Florida rest areas are marvelous facilities. The first stop in the state has information kiosks showing just how far and wide Florida is and how much there is to do. I have an uncle that lives in the center of the state and I had my first visit with him in decades.

    Growing up in California with parents raised in the Northeast, I am trying to discover these people for the first time, even though many of them knew me as a boy.

    Despite the maskless, despite the gatherings, I didn’t see paramedics all over, I didn’t see people coughing and wheezing like the plague is nigh. I saw a thriving society.

    It’s like being in the South when there was a supposed insurrection at the capital. I was finding no connection to it with the people around me, yet some folks would depict Florida as some derelict infectious place. Similarly, the depiction in media of the insurrection is that we now have a domestic terrorism threat across the land. 

    The reality is that wherever economies locked down, homelessness is going up, retail is shuttering, murders are up, trash is littering the streets, and it is truly dystopian. 

    Florida has quarantined itself culturally and won’t allow the kind of behavior taking place in Canada, California, and Philadelphia to take root in their state. It’s clean, happening, and happy.

    If you’re in a place where they lock you down, the fear is born from the act. You participate in the idea that you should lock down, so you have embraced the fear. As soon as masks are normalized, you’ll begin to fear the anomaly, the breathing mouth with a face.

    Even the speakeasy hipster punk dance club in the hood that I used to go to locked down. They were already illegal. They started doing DJ sets on Instagram, the most corporate imaginable solution to this problem. There are no anarchists, just fashion gurus, on the left.

    I have been aligned with Noam Chomsky ever since I started smoking pot. That has not changed, neither the pot nor my core principles. What changed was everything around me. Pro-war, pro-debt, pro-discrimination, pro-censorship, pro-pharma, pro-GMO, these are all positions that are becoming normal among the Democrats. Chomsky is now a Tucson professor, in his nineties, and still the left hasn’t caught up with him.

    The left is going right and the right is becoming left. The infamous classical anarchist rainbow coalition former democratic party presidential nominee, Vermin Supreme, ran for President under the Libertarian ticket this time around. Although he lost the primary, his campaign manager, Spike Cohen, ended up the Vice Presidential nominee, running as a self-described anarchist.

    My views are aligning now with the supposed right wing, the Libertarian contingent that I observe turning liberal. In Chomsky’s youth, it was normal to hyphenate Libertarian-Anarchist. The union is making a comeback and it won’t surprise me if the Democratic Party becomes the right wing party, again, while proper left third parties rise up and challenge two party rule. It is a hopeful sentiment.

    There will be a liberal Republican who appeals to anti-war and free speech sentiments that will beat a conservative Democrat. Both will run on legalizing cannabis and limiting police. The Republican will celebrate the social equity we have achieved in the last thirty years. You’ll see.

    Anti-war, free speech, anti-discrimination, anti-GMO, anti-pharma, these are positions that are taking root in the new Republican mindset, a kind of people’s conservative. A majority of them already have homosexuals and people of color in their families. It is normal now.

    If I’m against taking an experimental vaccine by Pfizer, who is buying ads on the news networks from which I’m getting the coronavirus narrative, then I’m considered anti-science, when in fact, I am waiting for the science to come out.

    During the presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders pointed out that big pharma would be running ads on the news network carrying the debate, and that explained why the topics that affect them are not going to be considered by the moderators.

    Now Bernie Sanders supporters are begging for their freedom at the behest of Pfizer.

    So really, for me, it has always been about core principles and my political positions have to honor those.

    Maybe the solution is a free market health system, but the people are subsidized, not the industries. The Obamacare approach is typically oligarchic and while it helped me get free health care in Oregon, it doesn’t help the average person. Health costs went up while health outcomes went down. Life expectancy decreased following the enactment of The Affordable Care Act.

    Driving across the country could not have made it more clear to me how easily you can bend the will of the people with government policy and social pressure. It is because of these fifty states that our federal government cannot bend the whole population from coast to coast into a unified behavior. Someone accustomed to lockdowns and distancing in New Mexico might be appalled by the normalcy that is Florida. Many have fled the two big lock down cities, Los Angeles and New York, for Florida and Texas, to be free again.

    I genuinely used to believe that most people were good people, that people were doing their best. There is some evidence for it. I like to point to traffic. That we are all driving kinetic weapons in an orderly fashion and that most of us are following the rules demonstrates that we can work together to be safe.

    I don’t believe that anymore.

    The problem is what is in our hearts. Most of us are only behaving out of self-interest, and that is why you see all kinds of idiotic drivers, self-absorbed and hazardous. They demand that you put your trust in them, not the rules, to prevent accidents. Philly is straight up lawless.

    Martin Luther King Jr. Monument in Washington D.C.

    What history bears out and what is more easily observed every day is that people are mostly looking out for themselves, and they are inherently corruptible. That is the truth. 

    It takes special people to snap out of ego and join consciousness. It takes a real rebel to evaluate every narrative according to their own instincts and research.

    It takes strength to accept uncertainty. Our corruptibility is a mirror of our insecurity. It is easy to corrupt someone by appealing to their fears. You can manipulate someone’s behavior just that easily.

    This is why the old argument that a widespread conspiracy like faking the moon landing would be impossible. Too many people would have to maintain the secret.

    I don’t think so. All you have to do is work with the corruptible, then dupe the honest people. Then there are those who know but have no proof, they play along, to protect themselves. That is also corrupt, but in that self-protective way, they aren’t in on it.

    I’m not saying the moon landing was faked. I have waffled on that theory. Even if it was faked, that doesn’t determine whether or not we landed on the moon. Both can happen for their own reasons. Behind smoke screens there are mirrors, behind those there are doors. It gets nuts. But for me, it could not be more obvious that covid is exactly that. A maze of uncertainty whereupon the honest can corrupt themselves by playing along, because they can’t see the illusion. They believe it. This appeals to the idea that we are once again mostly good people, trying to do the right thing.

    It was a chance I had to take, driving across the country with my Volkswagen, in the middle of a supposed pandemic. The reality I learned was that there are no laws absolutely prohibiting free movement. I think some people believe that if you check into a motel in a state with a quarantine order then you’re obligated to stay there or something. No, this is all nonsense. The borders are open and people can move. This was always the case.

    Spring Equinox passed this Saturday, and we’re all looking forward to the post-covid world. Things are reopening and the vaccines are being jabbed into people.

    If all continues as it is, jobs will be created at record pace. The event industry employs millions of people. This alone will prop up the economy for a minute. However, there are bubbles and problems that cannot be ignored.

    That is for another day.

  • Hedging Against the Machine

    Hedging Against the Machine

    My first appearance on 2 Bulls in a China Shop!

    Two Sunday mornings ago, I joined a conference call with 2 Bulls in a China Shop co-hosts Dan Leeson and Kyle Hedman. The episode can be listened to for free in this post, and you can find a bunch of ways to subscribe at their official website.

    Dan is a friend from high school, one of the few that I have kept in touch with. If I was more active in high school, were I guided by my natural interests and talents in those years, we might have been in the same television broadcasting program in which students produced a morning news program that transmitted official school business. There would be many mornings in which I watched Dan deliver the news on our closed circuit television network.

    Today, he is a podcaster. I am a former community media producer and podcaster as well. We are discussing collaborating more on this program, myself a repeat guest perhaps focused on cryptocurrency. Both of us have been living the odd job life of going broke and pursuing music and random ideas. Many paths one summit, they say.

    Podcasting has been a new universe since the day I launched Horizon at End Times, in 2013, which was meant to be an artist-on-artist interview program, discussing topics from a creative perspective, providing commentary on the madness of our social and political times. 

    If there was a way to invest in podcasting, like an ETF, the market would have quadrupled over by now. In that growth, many podcasters jumped in and drifted off into the noise of obscurity. Dan and Kyle seem to be finding a way to pop their little heads above the noise. I look forward to joining them for their continued success.

    Before the pandemic, I started to write blogs aimed at capturing the lessons that I was learning in the process of investing my savings. It has been a year since my last finance post, a lot has happened, so I think I am ready to get back on that train and take it to the end of the line.

    One of the major educational processes that I went through was more vicarious than personal, as I persuaded my father to move his annuity fund into a personally managed portfolio. I gave him a number of good picks and jumpstarted his path to profit. This will be the topic of my next finance post.

    A Few Thoughts on GameStop and the Finance Economy

    The financialization of our economy is rapidly disrupting stock markets, monetary policy, industries, technologies, and truly the whole social fabric. To hedge against the machine today is to play the game and try to beat the machine using its own tools.

    The weekend that we recorded this was the one leading into a major market activism event in which GameStop (GME) grew by 222% over the week, and by 1,476% over the month, from about $19 to $312.

    There is nothing about GameStop that can justify this valuation, the company was disrupted by lock downs and was shuttering locations. Like record stores, the media can be transferred more efficiently online. Its revenues were only declining.

    That is why the market was broadly betting on GME to decline. There are ways to do this. One common method is options.

    I don’t play options. This is the casino aspect of our markets. I’m a bad gambler.

    I don’t like options. It turns stock valuation into a speculative game rather than a rational valuation based on revenue over loss, supply and demand.

    These are basically just bets that you place with regards to the movement of a stock, up or down. There is more to it but that will do. You don’t actually invest in the company like when you buy a share.

    Options are part of this story, but short selling caused this whole mess.

    Short selling is a little hard to wrap the head around, but this is a common bet in the big investor class, the hedge fund world. One of the best of all the analyses of this short squeeze event that I have heard is, ironically enough, from Speaking of Bitcoin podcast.

    Speaking of Bitcoin Podcast Explains Short Selling and GameStop

    The arrogant move on the part of the investor class was that GameStop was so heavily shorted that 138% of all available shares were being shorted. That means there were 38% more shares than exist floating and would need to be called if the price went up. This means that a large contingency of small investors could call the bluff and force their hand simply by going long on GME.

    It was a movement of retail investors organized on Reddit that forced this whole situation. These are regular people with brokerage accounts who jumped in as a swarm to drive the price of GameStop upward against the hedge fund bets locked and loaded to crush the company. Short sellers were forced to accept losses or hold the bet by raising their position. That is why it is called a short squeeze.

    Tesla is a company that picked up massive momentum in a short squeeze. The valuation is still inflated, in my opinion. Tesla might hold because the outlook for the company is much better than GameStop. Tesla is at the frontier of something while GameStop is comparable to Blockbuster Video or Tower Records, it is simply obsolete.

    The problem lies in the fact that Wall Street has the dangerous ability to crush a company and accelerate its demise. In a world where the balance of power isn’t so top-heavy, GameStop could carry on a number of years without even changing its business model, employing thousands of people, filling hundreds of retail spaces on Main Street.

    Anyone that educated themselves over the weekend will realize that the only position for GameStop ultimately is down. R/Wallstreetbets continues to call for a hold.

    Here is what I would have done, had I been following this Reddit forum. I would have bought GameStop around $20 and did the old halving on double strategy, so when it hit $40, I’d sell half of my shares and hold the remainder from that point until collapse. Even selling those shares at a loss would be a profit.

    Retailers should have liquidity as hedge funds eat the loss. This is actually a major transfer of wealth from the elite downward, largely into RobinHood accounts, Cash App, and other tools that are free and easy to use in the hands of the masses.

    This rare transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor happened on the platform named after Robin Hood, the mythic character that steals from the rich and gives to the poor. 

    Even for the platform’s coordinated effort to control the losses, at the behest of its financiers, enabled the situation by innovating a platform that onboarded millions of first-time traders.

    More importantly, it is a mass public education about big finance and how the dirty business works. There are now millions of people that just learned what options and short sales are.

    This is a peoples’ movement in the truest sense of it, as far as it looks from my angle. The more people that own stocks, the more the people have leverage over companies.

    Democracy is built into the market system. Rather than a single king own Coca-Cola, there are millions of investors that own it, and they can organize. Every stock counts for one vote and every year these votes determine major decisions.

    Millennials are jumping into the markets and today it might be possible for a social media group to remove a CEO, breakup accounting monopolies, inflate a stock, even short their own stock to buy up more shares.

    We are living in a world where personal finance is most likely to become more integral to people’s lives, just like social media, year over year.

    As jobs are lost to automation, even as manufacturing comes back to domestic operation, which it is, automation is changing the landscape of the now passing industrial age, and factories with great productivity will not employ people en masse the way industry did a hundred years ago.

    Social interactions are no longer limited by locality. Tribes form and coalesce in global ways with their own language, to make huge moves. GameStop is one example.

    Or this could all be a set up. It is easy to manipulate the masses into seeming social movements. History has repeated this over and again.

    Right now, silver is at an all-time high and the mainstream news is blaming the Reddit group. I look at the group myself and see flat denials that they are doing anything with silver. This seems like a tug of war, for real.

    The real ending to this story will be the bankruptcy and demise of GameStop, unless it can somehow receive a wave of support in real sales. Lots of naive first-time investors jumped in at the height of this stock and they will lose money. This will be a wealth transfer upward and sideways, from the most naive and late coming players to the game.

    But let the buyer beware. This is a free market, after all.

  • Hanging Out with Sam Tripoli

    Hanging Out with Sam Tripoli

    Life has been a truly winding road. There is some sense of validation that the struggles and the ego busting that I’ve been going through over the last year has a purpose. I found myself out of nowhere joining comedian and podcast factory Sam Tripoli for a chat. I had emailed him before, and tweeted with him, but I’m also just one bee in the swarm of many thousand of fans.

    I have been listening to his most successful show Tin Foil Hat Podcast, since 2016. It was easy to talk with him because I know exactly how his patterns and style work. He doesn’t know me but I already relate to him as I would a friend that I’ve spent many hours with. Kind of weird.

    Official Tin Foil Hat Podcast Logo

    Sam’s appearance at Helium Comedy Club was scheduled just before the second lock down in Philadelphia, in between two trips to Michigan visiting my grandfather, who died with Covid while I was there. Knowing I was going back for a funeral, I was dead set on having fun at that comedy show. I did quite a bit of drinking that night.

    The outside meet and greet was cool. I was drunkenly excited and in an emotional place, kind of manic, and I started talking about Scientology. He invited me to his Patreon show on the spot.

    Just over a week later, already back again from the funeral, we were on a video chat. Both of us were prone to meandering, and even though it is was fun, I couldn’t seem to guide the conversation in the direction that I wanted it to go with Scientology.

    I also wanted to reveal my theory as to what happened to my grandfather from PCR testing to hospital treatment conditions. That is kind of a big can of worms that I am reluctant to open up and I’m glad we didn’t.

    We didn’t really get to the Scientology stuff, so he invited me on to Zero, the spirituality show on Rokfin.

    We scheduled the show and I paced my day around the nighttime hour that we planned, but then he changed it all of the sudden when I was just sitting down for dinner. I almost postponed, because I had to eat and then get all of my stuff set up: microphone, stand, laptop, etc. But I got it together and rushed into the meeting.

    We start by talking about Scientology and then we end up going a few directions including the article that was fresh on my mind “The Tool of Predictive Purification,” in which I argue that the rock band Tool is an agent of the alliance to awaken consciousness against the force that seeks to control it.

    The show was good, he repeated off the air that I “crushed it,” thanked me for making it work, but ended up using it for his Patreon again. That was disappointing but I trust it is for the best.

    I never got to see the video for these because I didn’t have a Patreon account and they don’t keep videos over the long term. I support my podcasts in a different way, like going to the comedy shows in a pandemic and using promo codes for CBD. I joined only to grab a screenshot for my post. I was at least able to download the audio.

    If you want to hear the archived audio, you can join Patreon and subscribe to the Tin Foil Hat Podcast and search my name. Or you can listen to them right here (don’t tell Sam). Just click for the first one, and for the second one.

    I never took screenshots or pictures in person, so that is what I got. We might do it again, but nothing has been planned.

    Here are some past posts of mine about Scientology, there is plenty of reading in these three stories.

    Read “Combating Cults with Spiritual Skepticism”

    Read “Going Clear for Real”

    Read “ABC News Scientology Hoax Obscures Belgium Decision”

  • Through Media to the Self

    Through Media to the Self

    Part 1

    The Journalist Errant

    One of the first books I recall reading to educate myself on multimedia was The Gutenberg Galaxy, by Marshal McLuhan. The author that coined the term “global village” and “hot/cold media” should be every journalist and web programmer’s required reading, to build a clear foundation of what the hell they are doing. In this book, he analyzes Don Quixote as a character, and a story, in the early age of print media.

    The gist of it is, when Quixote set out to become a “knight errant,” he was reaching back to an older time, a time before the printing press when knights ruled the land by unwritten laws, when literacy was wholly uncommon.

    Hilariously written by Miguel de Cervantes, published 1605, Don Quixote is contemporary to the author’s time, and it is a fictional study on the psychological phenomena that trails the advent of major technological advancements in media. When a new medium is introduced, it changes media, and consciousness is affected. 

    I am currently reading both The Adventures of Don Quixote and Understanding Media, by McLuhan.

    Quixote and Pancho riding together. Original painting 1754, Hulton Archive.

    By the extraordinary power of this new form of media (mass-produced books) and its disruptive affect on the senses (oral culture versus literate, auditory versus visual), a regular householder in some village hallucinated himself into a knight and set about for a new life of heroic adventures and chivalry.

    The most famous scene in the book is within the first tenth of its volumes. That is when Quixote is fighting the windmills he has mistaken for giants, against the alarms of his squire, Pancho de la Mancha. Quixote is an older man, probably experiencing dementia, but a specific kind influenced by books. He believes in a world that he never lived in, because he’s become expert to it through books.

    I failed to recognize McLuhan’s lesson about Don Quixote when I engaged in the pursuit of starting an internet-based media corporation.

    The modern medium shift today is electric technology. The evolution of new forms of media resulting from the new medium has been rapid. From signal transmissions by wire, to radio, to cable television, and now fiber-optic internet, we are living in the equivalent stage today as Don Quixote was then, as the whole structure of society is being rewired, pun intended.

    We are changing and we don’t see it changing us until it has already taken a grip over our behavior.

    I reviewed The Gutenberg Galaxy, and the article is archived with the rest of THRU. To have the trail of my work from seed to flower and back to compost is a study of progress itself. The oldest posts there are mine, and very few have been edited since.

    About six years ago, all content original to seanongley.com was transferred, along with my dreams, to a string of sites that would eventually become THRU.media My dreams would be supported, if not complicated, by pursuing the dream of building Thru Media LLC.

    Today, I have personal insight into the media industry and the whole ecosystem that McLuhan saw coming is unfolding rapidly within my generation.

    I’m watching the Quixote effect take people down every day. I would say that my story with THRU is like my own knight errantry, my adventure where I had no calling outside the fire in my heart, no rules except the abstract principles of justice, driven by the affect of a major advancement in electric technology: The Internet.

    My Pancho was Kathleen Dolan. Unlike Quixote, I was in love with my Pancho, and we had a domestic relationship. Rather, she was that and my Dulcinea del Toboso, the subject of Quixote’s devotion and chivalry. As such, I both abused Kate by dragging her along into my adventures, and devoted myself to her, as I believed she was destined to be a great writer and that I was there to bridge the gap from bartender to Author.

    Kate and Myself covering Bernie Sanders rally, 2015, at Moda Center.

    I pulled a special little publication together with some big dreams, worked with other dreamers, and we took it on with a spirited campaign. We held ourselves to a standard that improved the quality of the content over time.

    We came very close to launching a successful company, but as I humbly tell my story, I hope to illustrate that I was trying to stand on the shoulders of giants. But they turned out actually to be windmills.

    Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

  • I Vote for Civil Peace

    I Vote for Civil Peace

    The Impulse to Hit the Road

    Election Day is today. Fears are at an all-time high. Tensions are raised but nobody is sure if the call to war is going to find movement. The present feeling of ideological tension just needing a little spark to flame a civil war has been expressed by millions of Americans — as though this is the only thing that we can all agree on.

    With this in mind, I decided that I couldn’t wait until after the election to put myself square in the presence of the great monuments of our great country. I have countless indictments against our government, nonetheless, I want to defend it and take a wide view to see its history and its greatness.

    I felt on Friday morning that I needed to take that drive to Washington DC. I debated with myself about it over breakfast, but I truly just saw myself there and thought, this is happening. I started working my way out the door around 10am. It was impulsive, so the things I lacked became self-evident later. I didn’t brush my teeth for 36 hours, for example.

    I drove more than 400 miles, from my home in North Philadelphia, to Washington DC, back to Baltimore, then to Gettysburg, then Harrisburg. The drive to a destination, for me, always needs much more time than the GPS tells me. I like stopping. I like knowing what there is on the road. I like to master my routes. 

    I can drive from Seattle to San Diego without a map, and I could take three routes doing it. The East Coast is my new frontier. Part of the excitement of living in Philadelphia is the positioning: The great historic cities are all a day’s drive from home. 

    The American history of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, they all began long before Washington DC. Philadelphia was founded as a British colony 108 years before DC, in 1682. It was the city that served as the nation’s capital in the beginning.

    Living in Philly as a transplant from the West coast I think helps me appreciate the deep history of this nation with Philadelphia as the real epicenter of it. Before DC, this is where laws were written. This is where stocks were traded. This is where currency was minted (and still is). It was the manufacturing and distribution hub of the country well into the Twentieth Century.

    As long ago as the battle at Gettysburg may be, it is relatively modern history. The revolutionary war could be viewed as a civil war, as the ties to Europe were much stronger and there was no national identity to speak of. They had to finally break with the kingdoms that ruled the colonies in order to set a course for self-governance.

    The Americas were first colonized in the Fifteenth Century. Global positions of domination change over time. Portugal is quite the example, having pioneered much of the New World and seafaring power of Europe in those pivotal year, it is today considered almost third world. It’s like comparing Yahoo to Google.

    Declaring independence from the dictatorship of those kingdoms was a revolutionary act that set Europe on a course toward self-governance. I have never seen a time when I am more concerned that this course could be going in reverse from Europe and Asia toward America.

    This country does in fact have a long period of evolution to look at, some excellent accomplishments that have lasting positive effects for the world. The contradictions lie all over the place too. The whole displacement of indigenous peoples, the protracted dominance of slavery as an economic model, the subjugation of the will of the people in other nations to satisfy the needs of private corporations, and the abuse of intelligence agencies in the name of national security. This is the kind of stuff that was in the back of my mind as I did my tour. This government has essentially become what it was founded to protect itself from. This ironically happened just as we unified as a people toward universal voting rights and ended the era of the state-regulated second-class citizen.

    The truth of this only evolved to reinforce that I care deeply about maintaining our union with the embrace of that darkness as part of the growth and our character as a people. It is the only way to heal and carry ourselves in the light of the best intentions of the people, which is self-governance.

    Getting to D.C.

    The intention of this trip was just to see those monumental sites in DC at the National Mall. Once I hit the road, however, I just wanted to keep moving. It was a solo road trip for peace, trying to find appreciation for the United States of America in my heart, to embrace whatever outcome there may be this week, then take the fight back to the power, not the people.

    I like driving. I like thinking on the road. I like taking a break from my home life, taking hours at the wheel to compress my thoughts. I like highways and small towns and counters at diners and bars. I like synchronicity and meeting random people.

    I arrived in DC a bit late, I knew I had to hustle to make the most of the sunlight. When I travel, it’s about walking. If I drive into a place, I find free street parking, typically, and walk through neighborhoods to get to the destination. Not every city works like this, but that is the spirit of it: Walking through the place to get a sense of its genuine character.

    I underestimated that city in many ways. It is much more dense and bustling than I expected of it. It has very recently gentrified. Her bad neighborhoods are pretty much wiped out, and that means displaced and relocated, ie gentrified. The trend to colonize and displace those of lesser means continues as a tradition in this country.

    There is no avoiding the fact that everything we have built in DC is a monument to genocide. That is the only way that it could have been constructed. The symbolism of conquest becomes more apparent when you are standing at the World War II monument in relation to the reflective pool in relation to Abraham Lincoln looking on toward the Capitol buildings with his massive shoe extending just slightly over the lip of the pedestal, as you stand below it.

    Walking from Mt. Vernon through Chinatown and then Georgetown University law campus, there was a totally empty outdoor Covid-19 testing and lab station setup. I checked online, it was supposed to be open until 4pm, but it was only 3:30. I spotted the capitol building down New Jersey Avenue. I headed straight for it.

    The United States Capitol and Supreme Court are across the street from one another. They are massive structures. It’s a lot of walking. The Supreme Court is at the east end of the National Mall, so I turned around and headed for the Washington Monument. You can enjoy a lot of views along the way. The Smithsonian building is a tremendous walking experience.

    Pushing on while trying not to spend much time on any of the wonders surrounding me all the time, I had the treat of walking through a marital engagement, a man proposing to a woman with the Washington Monument in the backdrop. I breezed passed them saying, “It looks like you two just got engaged!” He replied, “Thanks!” because was nervous as hell. He was barely present but at the same time totally exhilarated. I tagged that with, “Good luck!” I wish to hell that I never said that. Congratulations were in order!

    I was engaged to Kate exactly four years ago. I realized immediately that I had a twinge of bitterness in my heart, as I am a single man today. Love isn’t luck. It is careful work.

    There is dimensionality to the Washington Monument that doesn’t come across on television or in photos. There is a vast field between the monument and the reflecting pool, which is designed to reflect the monument. There is even another monument between them that I never really noticed on TV or photos, because it disappears below the line of sight from Lincoln’s steps.

    That monument is the World War II pool at the east end of the pool. There are dual structures, one is labeled Atlantic, the other is Pacific. On a side note, I realized upon seeing these columns that the Atlantic ocean refers to Atlantis. Weird. How did I miss that? Anyway, this monument is a huge structure and would be a site independent of the whole. In the whole, it is merely an adornment.

    What clicked more meaningfully to me was the connection of these structures to the reflecting pool and Abraham Lincoln and how these huge spaces shrink and become a unified image under the gaze of Lincoln at his monument. I haven’t researched enough of the symbolism of it to say what it’s all about, but for me, it feels powerful, meant to continuously reinforce the power of the United States.

    Lincoln is revered, I think, because we were in the midst of intense westward expansion during his time. The steadfast belief that took hold was the so-called manifest destiny of the American people to command both oceans. With the grandeur and purpose of spreading democracy and Christianity, the destiny was manifested under brute force, in an ends defeats means kind of philosophy. I would observe that this belief remains to this day and ultimately represents the same trend line all the way to Iraq and beyond.

    Lincoln essentially became the sole founding father of our modern nation. This is why he is so greatly revered, and it’s all in that pool. You may feel the energy of the triumph in the conflict in these monuments but it cannot be separated from the suffering. Lincoln caused extraordinary suffering and destruction by maintaining the Union. It could have been a peaceful secession, but his rule of law and force set a direction for this country that amounts to a single nation controlling all of the waterways of the world by the end of World War II.

    Pitting Power Against Progress

    There is beauty in this ugliness. First of all: We have this incredible land. We have this vast connectivity from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and Abraham Lincoln was the man that held it all together. This shit was on his shoulders. That deserves some respect.

    I’m troubled by the brutality of war and power. I have always been a peace activist. We do not have enough anti-war rallies anymore. We lost our steam in 2003 and never got it back.

    Standing under the boot of Lincoln in that moment feels like that of the boot of executive power. It feels violent in this whole context. Now, I can look at it other ways. I would say also that his foot extending off the pedestal brings him back to the level of a Man, from the position of idol. The National Park Service says that the monument depicts Fasces as a continuum of leaders that work toward the liberation, not subjugation, of their people. Funny how it is also the root word for fascist. And funny how Lincoln had to use brutal fascistic force to maintain the union.

    Leading to this moment of reflection with Lincoln, I have firmly decided that I want to maintain our union. I don’t want Texas or California or any other State to secede. Despite all of our brutal past, there is verifiable evolution toward justice. It gets tricky every step of the way. It definitely feels like we’re at the breaking point of another major step in the wrong direction.

    Without trying to be precise about it, this nation was stitched together largely by Christian zealots and the only people participating in democracy were property owners, and pretty much the only property owners were white men. The civil war forced the people to take a side, even if Lincoln used slaves as his pawn to win the union, which has economic interests at heart just the same, he still took that step versus the maintenance of slavery.

    The following hundred years were marked with continuous upsets to the white male status quo until finally, universal voting rights were established. The period that has followed looks like the gradual disentanglement of white maleness from the elite power hierarchy. There are absolutely more wealthy and powerful non-white non-male people in the country than ever.

    The conflicts in society fomenting and mounting up today are totally connected to the same thread of oppression that also tells the story of progress. The specific goals are getting looser and the demands more confusing. For example, non-whites in the 1960s were advocating for equal access to goods and services, the end to segregation, and the assurance of voting rights. That is a clearcut goal. Self-governance is meant to pick up from there. Today, it’s a little different. The system is unfair today due to classist structures that were waged against racial groups, but were redirected entirely to income-based groups. Racist structures are still haunting communities post-segregation, so the problems overlap between racial groups.

    The goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are shared with a huge level of support with whites. The obvious thing is police brutality, a scourge that takes all kinds of lives. Disproportionate it may be, it is still a shared problem. What people don’t understand, there are factions amidst that protest movement that are ideologically marxist, they don’t agree with classic liberalism, and would be willing to rewrite the constitution.

    At one time, all whites were better off than all non-whites. That is absolutely not true today. When slavery gave way and black folks entered the same status as the Irish, there were race riots over competition for work and land. Famously in South Philadelphia, after the Civil War, the Irish waged war on freed slaves, even though they shared a common systemic oppressor. They did not come together to fight against the same forces, they fought each other. Not having equal rights and protection under the law, they took their frustrations on each other. We are not doing well to avoid this cycle today.

    If whites and non-whites are fighting amongst each other about the same class struggles, then the fascists have already won. They don’t want us getting together to solve shared problems.

    Leaving the Lincoln memorial, I continued onto the White House. I had just enough sunlight to catch it. Much to my dismay, I began to see an alarming degree of fortification happening across DC. I really wanted to look across the lawn and wonder if Trump or any “important” figures were in there. But there is a barrier running all along the fence line of the White House right now. You can only see the upper half of the building.

    This was a sad end to my walking tour. As I headed back toward Mount Vernon, enjoying the old architecture splitting up contemporary glass jawns along the way, I noticed that everyone was boarding up their restaurants, hotels, and retail shops. Generally, the police presence in DC is high, but I could sense it was elevated, the giveaway being that for a substantial radius surrounding the White House, businesses are digging in and sealing up. 

    If only I had known, I would have launched boardupyourbusiness.com in February. I could have made a killing on this pandemic and civil unrest, specializing in boarding up shit.

    I wandered around DC looking for a good bar and food. I was annoyed with everything. It’s like Portland, it’s all designer with either chic patina or bold glossy finishes. I don’t like that. I like diners and old Irish pubs. So I pressed back to Baltimore. I ate fast food.

    Camping in Gettysburg

    Baltimore is a jaunt away from DC. I parked right at the peak of their central monument at Mount Vernon. I then walked up and down Charles looking for action. I go on intuition. Turns out this is a major connective nightlife street. There was live music going on, something I hadn’t seen since March. For a Halloween Weekend, however, it was very quiet. I had one beer and decided it would be smart to get a room between there and Gettysburg so I could have a good start that morning.

    I did what I often do, which is to drive around being dissatisfied with rates, then I sleep in my car or stay up all night. Or both, I stay up trying to sleep. That’s what happened. I rested my eyes in the freezing cold of my car in Gettysburg. I couldn’t bring myself to spend $80 and up. We’re talking about cheap motels. They weren’t cutting me any deals, because they were all well booked. I was happy to see that, just for the sake of economic activity. I wondered if people were traveling out of the cities in fear of riots, especially from places like DC.

    It was cold. It was dumb, attempting this without a blanket. My mom always told me to keep a blanket in the car. I laid there imagining the hardships of soldiers in Gettysburg. I imagined them weary and freezing in their encampments. Then I saw that the battle lasted for three days in July. Their hardships were, at the least, warm at night.

    At 6am, I headed for the nearest open diner. Covid hours have down stepped the 24/7 joints to more standard hours. The second diner of choice, in Hunterstown, was the one that was actually open. But it was top choice in retrospect. Perfect for sitting at the counter and listening to the locals yak, joining in a bit myself, as I like to do in diners. The food was good. The banter was ridiculous.

    Everything about Gettysburg challenged my expectations. I never researched the town, I just imagined it to be a tiny, old time boring place, crafted for tourist expectations. The battlefield, I imagined to be a relatively small field by modern scope, that you could easily survey from a single position. And at that point there would be a plaque, a monument, and the standard informational presentations you would expect from an historical site.

    Gettysburg is a modern little college city, dense at its center, but it becomes rural very quickly. This town has the most Biden/Harris signs I have seen per capita. The place is full of those little artsy boutiques and coffee shops. I doubt anyone in that diner voted for Biden, just a few miles outside town. The television ran Fox News. But none of them talked about politics.

    I can feel the national tension today in the City of Gettysburg. It is a microcosm of our urban and rural divide like I have never seen, because it is such a compact urban area that the same people passionately opposed to one another are also forced to cooperate. The people of Philadelphia don’t have to deal with the rural folk, and likewise. It’s a matter of scale.

    Gettysburg National Military Park is a sprawling area larger than the town itself. There are positions that can survey large areas, but even the highest points, like Little Round Top and Culp’s Hill, cannot take the whole area into view.

    The constancy of military units occupying this area and the intense clashes unfolding there is  effectively realized by the seeming endless trail of inscribed grand monuments to represent each battalion and squadron and individual leaders in the war. The vastness of death is clear, imagining instead of these stone blocks, a horrifying pile of bodies that would involve a reconnaissance and burial effort that would easily outlast the length of the battle. Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg Address” happened at the dedication of the national cemetery that November, four months after the battle. 

    Panorama of Little Round Top

    To imagine a contemporary civil war given the number of assault rifles in this country, the amount of ammo, the kind of house-to-house fighting that would result in constant quagmires in cities like Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, where territories can easily be fragmented up into factions, is to imagine the devastation of these historic sites. The same way that Syria became a proxy war of terrorist groups funded by governments, the conflicts here would be tied to outcomes desired by other nations like China and Russia.

    We are certainly in a make or break moment in this country. With or without a President Trump to worry about, the leadership and the political body that is meant to serve us has become so totally corrupted that most people are not excited with whoever wins the election. There is some extraordinary enthusiasm for Trump and I would rather tap into that than fight it.

    When I was protesting the George W. Bush administration with as much intensity that people have for Trump today, I remember this girl I liked that I was trying to date who was hippyish and going to Cal Arts suggested that a more effective way to reach him might be to send some flowers. I thought that was dumb. I get that now.

    People believe they are fighting with Trump for all kinds of liberties that are directly under attack by people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The exact same thing can be said of those who feel attacked by Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Everybody is correct about this. None of them have our best interests at heart. Choosing a side and defending one piece of shit against another is not the solution.

    There are values to both the right and left that make this country a very special place. The crisis in our whole social system is leading to the collateral damage of this nation’s spirit, its purpose, its economic power, and will ultimately lead to the failure of our military power. Public morale is a national crisis. People feel used, and lied to, and they point the finger at one another.

    The project of self-governance, allowing ourselves to love who we love, worship how we worship, speak what we believe, and defend these rights and our property against the tyranny of a corrupt state, by force, is what is at stake when we turn against one another.

    In the same way that I could never have understood the vastness of the battle at Gettysburg without going to the battlefield, we are going to sorely underestimate the despair and destruction that will come with a contemporary civil war.

    If that occurs, there is no way that The United States will survive and continue the progress it has made in terms of bringing about a nation of civil rights and liberties, economic mobility, and peacemaking in the world. Most likely, Europe and Asia will interfere in our domestic matters and prolong the civil war until staggering lives are lost, and at least they can come out on top and negotiate a reconstruction deal that would divide us into Eurasia. China would probably dominate the West Coast. Canada would move into the heartland. The Northeast and parts of the South would go to Europe. America would move into Texas, absorbing parts of the South.

    To me, preserving the manifestation of this nation’s culture from coast to coast is a worthwhile act of peace and democracy. It is the only way we can maintain that continuity.

    From a simple, selfish point of view, I love being able to drive from coast to coast as an American. I don’t want to need my passport to visit California. It would break my heart.

    Today, the nation will be tested. I hope that I don’t have to flee the city. I hope nobody riots. I hope it comes to pass and we learn to elect better leaders and challenge whoever is in power. War is not inevitable. If we choose to, we can evolve yet again.

    Regardless of who is in the White House, we have unfathomable challenges to deal with. This nation cannot be so belligerent in its foreign policy. We need the kind of diplomacy that brings about mutually beneficial trade deals that can lead to lasting peace and economic prowess. The people of this country cannot survive with endless debt from health and education costs. Police forces cannot go on with this oppositional relationship to the community they are sworn to protect. Inherently classist structures cannot remain standing lest we continue a kind of economic racial segregation that leads again back to the entanglement of education and policing that leads to ignorance which leads to the enabling of globally tyrannical behavior.

    The knot is indeed badly tangled. But I’m one of those people that takes the cord and straightens it out, then I coil it up correctly so that it won’t knot up again. That’s what democracy is supposed to be: routine maintenance.

    We have no real honest choice but to accept the results of this election and get back to work on correcting the course of this country. In theory, that is what our constitution, the basis for our system, is meant to do: self-correct.

    I truly just skimmed the surface of Gettysburg because I wanted to get home by the evening and it would be a long drive. I also wanted to see Harrisburg again, almost just to complete the patriotic ritual, to visit the capitol city of Pennsylvania, a state that is today considered a battleground for the White House, a state that I have deep ancestral ties to, a state that cradled the birth of this nation and has contributed incredibly to the social and economic progress of this country. It also acts as a conservative point of resistance. It is a diverse place.

    The media is telling us that Pennsylvania is the battleground state of 2020. I would believe it. I hope we do not host another Gettysburg. Businesses are boarding up all over Philly, partly out of fears of riots related to the shooting of Walter Wallace Jr. last week. Not a great lead-in to the election for Philly, but the police just keep blasting rounds off at the wrong time.

    I believe that if we can avoid civil war, then we can become a much stronger people. I fear that violent clashes across major cities would mark the end of the tradition of self-governance forever in this country, as we have already given up civil liberties in the name of national security. Such clashes would make it permanent.

    My vote is that we don’t do that.