Silicon Valley routinely promises a sparkling utopia where artificial intelligence will cure complex diseases, optimize global labor, and render the very concept of money obsolete. Yet behind the polished keynotes and corporate public relations, a far more unsettling reality is taking shape. A small handful of ultra-wealthy tech oligarchs, the heads of Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, are making unilateral decisions about the collective future of humanity, operating entirely outside democratic oversight or public accountability.
Author Law and Ethics in Tech Submitted by rezgar2 on November 1, 2026 The Dark Side of the “Machine God”: 5 Unsettling Truths About Big Tech’s AI ObsessionSilicon Valley routinely promises a sparkling utopia where artificial intelligence will cure complex diseases, optimize global labor, and render the very concept of money obsolete. Yet behind the polished keynotes and corporate public relations, a far more unsettling reality is taking shape. A small handful of ultra-wealthy tech oligarchs, the heads of Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, are making unilateral decisions about the collective future of humanity, operating entirely outside democratic oversight or public accountability.
This concentration of power exposes a jarring central paradox: the exact same tech CEOs who claim AI will solve humanity’s greatest challenges simultaneously warn that the technology could trigger civilizational extinction, openly describing their pursuit as “summoning the demon.” Rather than pausing development, these executives have accelerated an apocalyptic arms race to build ultra-powerful systems, framing themselves as indispensable guardians of human survival.
To understand where artificial intelligence is truly taking society, we must look past corporate marketing and examine the underlying worldviews, historical lineages, and material harms driving the tech elite. Moving beyond superficial consumer hype reveals how a toxic mix of fringe ideologies, extractive labor practices, and authoritarian state alliances is steering Silicon Valley toward what critical theorists and legal scholars call “techno-fascism.”
Takeaway #1: The “TESCREAL” Cult and the Race to Build a “Machine God”To make sense of Silicon Valley’s relentless drive toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), one must understand the bizarre ideological framework shaping its leaders. Coined by philosopher Emile Torres and computer scientist Timnit Gebru, the acronym TESCREAL encapsulates a bundle of tightly interwoven worldviews: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.
Dr. Emile Torres highlights a critical historical truth at the heart of this ideology: transhumanism is fundamentally “eugenics on steroids.” Unlike nineteenth-century eugenics, which sought merely to optimize the existing human species through selective breeding, transhumanism seeks to use radical technology to completely replace and transcend humanity, engineering an entirely new posthuman species. Within Silicon Valley AI circles, this hypothetical superintelligence is explicitly referred to as a “Machine God.” Tech CEOs effectively act as high priests, competing to bring an all-knowing digital deity into physical existence.
This radical ideology shapes corporate roadmaps in concrete, disturbing ways:
Sam Altman (OpenAI): In a blog post titled “The Merge,” Altman argued that AI surpassing human intellect is inevitable, framing un-merged human beings as a temporary “biological bootloader” for digital intelligence that will ultimately fade into an evolutionary side-branch. Altman notably paid $10,000 to join a brain-uploading waitlist with Nectome and co-founded a brain-computer interface venture to facilitate digital integration.
Ray Kurzweil & Demis Hassabis (DeepMind): Representing Extropianism and Singularitarianism, Kurzweil champions the doctrine of living long enough to achieve digital immortality, targeting a self-improving “singularity” by 2032. Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder, operates under a similar singularitarian impulse to engineer self-evolving intellect.
Eliezer Yudkowsky (Rationalism): A foundational figure in modern rationalist thought who famously posited a utilitarian moral calculation arguing that forcing a single person to endure 50 years of relentless torture is ethically preferable to an unfathomable number of people experiencing the mild inconvenience of a speck of dust in their eye.
Elon Musk (xAI/SpaceX): Demonstrating classic Longtermism, Musk explicitly cites the expansion of the Sun billions of years in the future to justify prioritizing multi-planetary space colonization over addressing immediate, real-world human suffering on Earth today.
”All of these ideologies emerged out of modern transhumanism… an ideology according to which we should develop advanced technologies so that we can radically re-engineer the human organism and ultimately create a new posthuman species… In and around Silicon Valley, extremely advanced AI, so-called superintelligence, is even called the ‘Machine God.’ Which means these Big Tech CEOs, racing to release ever more powerful AI, are effectively casting themselves as priests who bring the Machine God’s power to the world.” — Dr. Emile Torres, Philosopher and Historian
Ultimately, the TESCREAL moral math reduces living human beings to disposable statistical noise. By prioritizing hypothetical trillions of digital beings living in far-future galactic utopias, Silicon Valley executives grant themselves ethical permission to ignore present-day environmental destruction, global labor exploitation, and systemic social destabilization.
Takeaway #2: AI’s Hidden DNA: How Mathematical Sorting Mirrors Nineteenth-Century EugenicsWhile modern machine learning is marketed as objective, hyper-advanced science, its core mathematical architecture is directly inherited from 19th-century eugenics. The foundational statistical tools of modern AI, logistic regression, statistical correlation, and neural network pattern classification, were designed by early British statisticians Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Both were explicit eugenicists who invented these mathematical formulas specifically to measure, rank, and classify human populations to prove that white, wealthy elites were genetically superior.
This mathematical heritage is deeply intertwined with the institutional birth of Silicon Valley itself:
The Palo Alto System: Railroad tycoon Leland Stanford established a horse-breeding facility in Palo Alto, devising rigorous sprint training for foals to optimize racehorse traits, a logic of biological optimization that established the region’s cultural template.
Academic Sterilization: Stanford University’s first president, taxonomist David Starr Jordan (author of Why Fish Don’t Exist), applied Stanford’s horse-breeding logic to human populations, aggressively advocating for state-enforced sterilization of individuals deemed socially or biologically “inferior.”
The IQ Test: Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman reworked a French educational diagnostic tool to create the Stanford-Binet IQ test, explicitly designed to rank human value early in life and justify preventing low-scoring populations from reproducing.
Transistor Pioneers & Eugenics: William Shockley, whose Nobel Prize-winning transistor research birthed Silicon Valley’s hardware industry, spent his later life asserting that Black people were genetically inferior in intelligence. California ultimately carried out approximately 20,000 forced sterilizations — nearly a third of the U.S. total.
Modern artificial intelligence does not “think” or possess conscious understanding; it aggregates massive datasets to find statistical correlations, classify inputs, and rank outputs. Because machine learning inherits historical human data, it inherently formalizes and amplifies legacy societal prejudices under the cover of mathematical neutrality.
”The story of eugenics has always been one that says: yes, you people who have decided that you’re better than everyone else, well, you’re right. And we can find that in science, and therefore it is somehow just… The basic idea of neural networks is very much about classifying and ranking… The very idea that you can create a technology with superior intelligence already carries the assumption that not only is the machine more intelligent, but that certain people are more intelligent and certain others less so.” — Dr. Dan McQuillan and Professor Dave Karpf
When automated recruitment systems, credit-scoring engines, or predictive welfare screening tools deploy machine learning to sort human beings, they operate as high-tech engines of eugenic sorting. As Meta’s former Vice President of Civil Rights Roy Austin noted, when Amazon deployed an automated hiring algorithm trained on historical employee profiles, the system systematically filtered out female applicants. Because the training data reflected a historically white, male benchmark, the algorithm calculated that women were inherently less qualified — a classic demonstration of automated discrimination (“garbage in, garbage out”).
Takeaway #3: The “Extractive” Myth: AI Relies on Mass Intellectual Property Theft and Exploited LaborSilicon Valley presents generative AI as a clean, weightless, digital miracle. In reality, as Microsoft Research scholar Kate Crawford notes in Atlas of AI, tech conglomerates rely on a deeply extractive industry model that operates like historic colonialism, framing public data, human artistic creation, and natural resources as unowned entities waiting to be extracted for corporate profit.
This extraction operates across three distinct supply chains:
Mass Intellectual Property Theft: AI corporations harvest copyrighted literature, artistic portfolios, and private online tracking data across the web without consent or compensation. Anthropic, founded by Dario Amodei (a primary architect of AI “scaling laws”), paid out $1.5 billion in legal damages after illegally pirating copyrighted books to train its models. Anthropic’s data acquisition drive even involved purchasing 166 tons of physical Korean-language books to feed its algorithms, drawing fierce condemnation from Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy and international creators.
Exploited Global Task Labor: The hidden engine of machine learning is not autonomous code, but massive manual human labor. Companies like Scale AI, founded by Alexandr Wang, who became a billionaire at 24 before Meta poured roughly $14 billion into his firm, rely on armies of low-wage workers in the Philippines, Kenya, and Venezuela. Paid pennies per task to label data and filter out horrific, traumatic content (“gluing eyes on dolls”), these workers suffer rampant wage theft and severe psychological trauma without basic labor protections.
Ecological Drain and Local Inequality: Training massive foundation models requires intensive mineral extraction for specialized hardware and drains immense amounts of electricity and local water to cool data centers, driving up utility bills for surrounding communities. Meanwhile, the staggering wealth concentrated at the top of Silicon Valley contrasts sharply with local service workers, many of whom are forced to live in cars, parking lots, or overcrowded apartments while working multiple jobs.
Generative AI is not an immaculate cloud of pure intelligence; it is an extractive machine that bleeds the planet’s ecosystems and human labor force dry to satisfy corporate scaling laws.
Takeaway #4: The Rise of Techno-Fascism: Big Tech’s Marriage to Military Power and the Surveillance StateBig Tech has largely abandoned its historical posturing as a neutral, liberal political force. Instead, major tech corporations are actively forging a strategic alliance with far-right political movements, military apparatuses, and domestic surveillance agencies, a structural convergence known as Techno-Fascism.
Techno-fascism represents the explicit alliance between monopoly digital capital (led by figures like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman) and nationalist state power. Rather than relying solely on traditional physical coercion, this regime enforces political control through automated mass surveillance, data integration, predictive profiling, and algorithmic discipline.
Defense contractor Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel and led by CEO Alex Karp, exemplifies this trajectory. In April 2026, Palantir released a chilling 22-point manifesto summarizing Karp’s book The Technological Republic. Analyzed by researcher Rezgar Akrawi, the document explicitly outlines the theoretical foundation of digital fascism:
Point 1: Asserts that the Silicon Valley engineering elite has a “moral duty” to serve the state’s war machine, converting individual conscience into corporate military capital.
Point 5: Deploys deterministic logic to eliminate moral debate, declaring that “the question is not whether AI weapons will be built; the question is who will build them.”
Point 6: Demands the reinstatement of mandatory military conscription, institutionalizing state coercion in service of geopolitical conflict.
Point 21: Promotes explicit civilizational racism, asserting that “some cultures have produced vital advances while others remain dysfunctional and regressive”, a high-tech revival of the colonial “white man’s burden” used to justify domination.
Palantir translates this ideology into real-world surveillance and military infrastructure:
Mass Deportation Systems: Palantir secured a $29.8 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to power its Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (ImmigrationOS) and Investigative Case Management system. Palantir also developed the ELITE app, which aggregates financial records, social media activity, home addresses, and emergency room Medicaid data into profile maps to calculate probability scores for tracking and deporting immigrants.
Battlefield Targeting Platforms: Palantir, alongside Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, maintains extensive targeting and battlefield management contracts with military apparatuses, supplying real-time AI decision-making platforms deployed in war zones like Gaza.
State Surveillance Integration: Palantir, SpaceX, and Anduril are frontrunners building military projects like the “Golden Dome,” while collaborating with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to create APIs linking Homeland Security systems with IRS tax data to target undocumented residents.
”Palantir is creating digital infrastructure for the multiple forms of state violence and control that contemporary authoritarianism relies on, from the software facilitating mass deportations to the AI wielded in wars against colonized people… As technology scholar Jathan Sadowski writes, ‘From inception, Palantir’s purpose has been to provide… the “ontology layer” of fascism, helping to give its ideological goals a material reality.’” — Alberto Toscano, Author of Late Fascism, quoting Jathan Sadowski
This corporate-state pipeline relies on harvesting massive citizen datasets while bypassing privacy laws. In South Korea, for example, the Justice Ministry granted private tech firms access to a state database containing facial photos of 50 million citizens and 120 million foreigners to train commercial surveillance algorithms without user consent.
Takeaway #5: Algorithmic Governmentality and the New “Banality of Evil”In his analysis of digital authoritarianism, philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh adapts Hannah Arendt’s classic concept of the “banality of evil.” Historically, Arendt observed that systemic atrocities are rarely committed by monstrous ideologues alone, but by ordinary bureaucrats blindly executing administrative rules without empathy, moral reflection, or personal judgment.
In the modern digital age, AI automates this moral detachment. By delegating life-altering decisions to opaque algorithms, human managers, state agencies, and corporate executives insulate themselves from moral accountability, treating automated recommendations as unassailable mathematical truth. This structural dynamic shifts society away from constitutional rights and toward “algorithmic governmentality” — a system where populations are quietly sorted, disciplined, and controlled through statistical correlations.
This algorithmic control manifests across everyday life:
Workplace Tyranny: Ride-hailing drivers for platforms like Uber and Lyft report having their accounts automatically deactivated without human review when facial recognition software glitches after a driver shaves a beard or gets a haircut. Fast-food employees face similar automated firings, leaving workers with no human appeal process.
Healthcare Exploitation: Hospitals deploy Palantir’s automated staffing tools to generate chaotic schedules, forcing nurses to work six consecutive days without adequate rest while automatically penalizing staff if their schedules conflict with algorithmic targets.
Predictive Profiling: Public schools and social welfare agencies feed family backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and behavioral histories into predictive algorithms. These tools profile children early in life, predicting future academic failure or criminal involvement and preemptively restricting their opportunities.
To deepen this control, technofascism targets human psychology. Drawing on Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, Coeckelbergh notes that modern alienation and isolation create deep psychological anxiety. Where historical authoritarianism offered mass political movements to relieve this anxiety, Big Tech offers synthetic AI intimacy. Mark Zuckerberg’s push to deploy AI chatbots to “fight the loneliness epidemic” by creating artificial friends represents a strategy of hyper-personalized emotional pacification: users submit to algorithmic direction in exchange for simulated empathy.
Furthermore, these systems suffer from severe internal dysfunctions. AI systems generate sycophantic feedback loops, telling authoritarian leaders what they want to hear, while risking complexity collapse, data blackouts, and unmanageable administrative failures.
When public figures like Elon Musk openly declare that empathy is a “fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” they summarize the governing logic of technofascism: human empathy, worker rest, and democratic protections are treated as friction that must be eradicated to maximize corporate efficiency.
Conclusion: Reclaiming Human Agency and Demanding AccountabilityDespite the rapid expansion of automated surveillance and monopoly corporate power, public pushback against techno-fascism is escalating across the globe. Tech workers are organizing collective resistance under campaigns like #NoTechForIce, frontline hospital nurses are actively resisting algorithmic workplace surveillance, university students are booing AI-focused graduation speeches off the stage, and local community groups are successfully blocking data center construction to protect their water tables and power grids from soaring utility costs.
At its core, this struggle is a vital fight over human agency. The defining question of our era is whether our work schedules, civil liberties, medical care, and democratic futures will be dictated by proprietary algorithms owned by a handful of billionaires, or governed by human communities exercising democratic control.
Reclaiming human agency requires concrete structural interventions:
Enforcing Strict Liability Laws: Implementing robust regulatory frameworks, such as the EU AI Act, to hold corporate executives legally and criminally liable for algorithmic harms.
Antitrust Enforcement: Breaking up monopoly tech conglomerates that control search ecosystems, cloud infrastructure, and mobile operating platforms.
Technological Disarmament: Banning autonomous, algorithmic targeting systems in law enforcement, border control, and military applications.
Labor Unionization & Democratic Infrastructure: Supporting tech worker unions, protecting whistleblowers, and establishing publicly owned, democratically governed data infrastructure.
Source:
https://medium.com/law-and-ethics-in-tech/the-dark-side-of-the-machine-god-5-unsettling-truths-about-big-techs-ai-obsession-ed21e697b200
Flow Water Advocates announces its next executive director; Liz Kirkwood to assume new leadership role. October 23, 2026 TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Flow Water Advocates has named Katrina Shankland as its new executive director, following a robust nationwide search. Shankland, who begins on Oct. 26, is Flow’s second executive director. Liz Kirkwood, who passes the... Read more »
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These truly-through-the-looking-glass days, it seems the drunk great-uncle you really didn't wanna ask to dinner is somehow getting worse. Scarily and no longer mirthfully, the befuddled "head" of a GOP blitzed on projection daily spirals deeper into phantasmagoria - slurring words, crafting fictions, renaming oceans, rekindling grievances, losing it over trifles and consorting with imaginary friends as the world burns. An Orange-Stain plea from No Kings for the coming election: "Clean Up On Aisle USA" please. Soon.
To be clear, Trump was a lying fabulist from way back. In the glitzy 1980s and 1990s, he regularly posed as a successful businessman, savvy dealmaker and cad-about-town who'd infamously call reporters or publicists as "John Barron" to boast about his money or conquests - a ploy he admitted in later court depositions he learned from his Nazi father. In power, like "a pre-teen with a girlfriend in Canada nobody's met," he's long invented "friends," fans, sources who praise him and his dreadful policies, from cultists invariably with tears in their eyes who "thank me for saving the country" to U.S. CEOs and "one of the great people of China, from the highest echelons" who inexplicably extol his disastrous tariffs.
Lately, though, the GOP is reportedly freaking out, watching the line between fact and fiction increasingly blur in Dear Leader's mashed-potato mind as the economy keeps tumbling and vital mid-terms approach. They want him to celebrate (albeit largely imaginary) tax cuts, trade deals, safe borders, winning fights against drag shows and "transgender for everyone" (sigh). Instead, he raves about livestreamed executions, the hotness of GOP candidates, often in the wrong state - "His ass, shit, it's like a pile of muscle" - his bestie Putin who's been "fine on Ukraine," how "not a single" undocumented immigrant has entered America since he took office, how soaring gas and diesel costs are "a small price to pay," though it's unclear for what.
He garbles words or makes them up - "When we had the hurricane...We call it a watercane" - prompting excited patriots to up their expectations: "OK, cancel the Blue Wave, we want a Blue Watercane." Wearily, he jokes about creating a robot lookalike on the campaign trail- "Nobody would know the difference" - so he can stay home and watch TV, his true, small vocation. Weirdly, he fantasizes about trashing other countries: He boasts about "polling higher than anyone has ever polled in Venezuela," which is why "after I finish with this" he'll to go Venezuela, "learn Spanish quickly, it won't take long, I'm good at languages" and run for president there, and yes we are here for it.
Hopefully, Venezuela won't have pesky reporters asking him questions that drive him to melt down in "dementia anger-flare." Because he lacks both impulse control and any trace of decency, he's also lauded Vivek Ramaswamy's grotesque ad against rape survivor and Dem opponent Amy Acton, wherein her estranged, unhinged mother calls her a liar, charging the Fake News "is trying to convince everyone this Ad is bad because it’s so good!...It's called 'hitting pay dirt.’” He adds that if his "legendary" mother "said anything bad about me, (it) would go down as the Ad of the Decade — Maybe the Century!" Vivek should keep the ad up, he says, so people know Acton is "a DISASTER who, uncontrollably, lies, cheats, and steals!” Killer pot/kettle.
There are more. The racist fraudsters who got rich on corruption - and turned Minneapolis into Fallujah - want us to rat on our neighbors for...fraud under Trump's stammered "Fraud Whistle...Blower Incentive...Program" whereby "Americans (can) report theft of taxpayer dollars," with DOGE "skunk-works" stragglers helping. Turn in someone with $1 billion, you get 1%: "That's a lot of money.” Except the cap is $30K, you probs won't see it, and it's queasily akin to Nazi bounties on Jews. Stephen Goebbels was even there to smear phantom Somalis who get $30 million for a fake daycare, buy BMWs or mansions, fly their kids "first class all over the world...living the high life." What a sick fuck. Meanwhile, America urges, "Call in fraud at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."
Alas, the more loopy he gets, the more openly he flies his violent, racist, crassly unfettered flag. There are more curses and more bellicose AI slop like the video of a macho white guy put in prison with three scary black guys, by one scary black cop, who takes them all down: "Bullies Can’t Break a Strong Man." (So many pots/kettles!) The rallies grow more pugnacious too: In the second assault this month, a South Carolina sheriff's office is investigating an attack on a protester - punched in the head, neck and chest - that Trump cheered on, praising the thugs' "courage." "Who's the guy that threw that punch?" he excitedly asked. "I love that." He also mocked the victim as "a very unattractive guy," for a rare combo sick fuck and pot/kettle.
That was at a rally, in a reported “livestock arena” say what, for Darlene Graham, who’s “gonna have a big win.” If so, no thanks to his shambolic speech, which roamed from renaming the Atlantic Ocean - “I was always high end” - to insisting he doesn’t ramble while rambling - “I got - I know everything I’m doing. I got aptitude they dream about” - to again whining about the prizes he didn’t win: The Pulitzer for writing - “The people that got it shouldn’t have gotten it” - and the usual Nobel, despite being “one person who deserves it more than any yuman being." ”Not that I want it - it’s just ridiculous,“ he babbled. ”How the hell do you not get the Nobel Prize? i settled like 8 wars. The woman that got it, I don’t know where the hell she comes from.“ Losingest loser ever.
Finally, amidst all the lame, foul, daft fails, there are his deeply undignified transfers: The careening burlesque of a walk to his helicopter in Alaska. The ambling approach to his beloved, million-year helipad when he suddenly stops to acknowledge, salute and wave to a crowd of supporters, aka thin air. Eventually, the camera zooms out to show...empty space. A few seconds later, aides walk out from a different direction; other angles - here and here - show the same abyss, for which Fox would've run Biden out of town. Same for last week's event, ostensibly to honor first responders where, amidst a losing war, crumbling economy, burning planet and hungry children, Nero nattered and raved about his house projects. Nothing to see here.
“You're seeing this for the first time. This used to be grass. So if we did this, you couldn't do it. It was unusable. You know, this is built on a wetland. So the grass was always wet. Even if you were in a drought, the grass was soaking wet. And especially women with the high heels, they'd be holding their shoes. They go out and buy beautiful new high heels that go into the White House and they come back and their shoes are destroyed. But we did a job with the same stone that matches the White House stone and hasn't been totally finished. We're going with the black over here, too, because the limestone doesn't hold up well. Never, never did. Never will. But what we've done here is really amazing. We put a brand new coat over the White House, brand new coat. We fixed up the walls. They were all broken, chopped, terrible shape. A lot of the ornamentation, like around the windows, was broken. And many years ago, 30, 40, 50 years ago, probably a lot during Biden three years ago because he had no idea what the hell he was doing. But you'd look at a window and you'd see ornament on the right side. And on the left side, you'd see it was it had fallen off. Some people think that's OK, but I don't think it's OK. So we had molds made of the right side. We put it on the left side. It's all perfect now. So we re-skinned. Basically, it's a re-skinning. And that building is good to go for another 100 years or at least actually. But even this, the you see the the top sections where it was so bad, I didn't even like standing under it. The thing was all cracked and broken all over the place. We put the sign up, solid brass, half inch thick, as opposed to laminate. You ever see these laminate? They they don't want to spend the money on the brass. So they have a piece of brass laminated. It's about a hundredth of an inch thick. And they put it on a piece of wood to save a lot of money. And then in about two years, it decomposes and it's laying all over the floor. We don't do that. But up there is the Rose Garden. And then we, as you know, that wall has sat for 150 years empty. And I said, something has to be on that wall. And I just had the the notion I've often thought of it because I've never seen it before. A presidential walk of fame. So we went from George Washington to Trump. And that will be extended on this wall right up here because somebody said, oh, but you have no room for anybody else. I said, no, it extends this way. And but I'm going to have to leave that because whoever it is, maybe they won't be able to figure that out. And if they don't figure it out, I don't know what they're going to do. You know, but we have we have at least one hundred and twenty five years of extension going this way. So it's fun. But everybody loves the presidential walk of fame. Nobody knows if there is any. And we have a very generic, very good description of every president from Washington all the way down. And we get a little bit more personal as we get closer to my my year. Talk a little bit about in more detail about what we've had to put up with....All I do is write the truth.” - Donald J. Trump
Ladies and gentlemen, the President (sic) of the United StatesGetty Image
The light streaming down from the moon has no part in the theater of our daily existence. The terrain it illuminates so equivocally seems to belong to some counterearth or alternate earth. It is an earth different from that to which the moon is subject as satellite, for it is itself transformed into a satellite of the moon. Its broad bosom, whose breath was time, stirs no longer; the creation has finally made its way back home, and can again don the widow’s veil which the day had torn off. The pale beam that stole into my room through the blinds gave me to understand this. The course of my sleep was disturbed; the moon cut through it with its coming and going. When it was there in the room and I awoke, I was effectively unhoused, for my room seemed willing to accommodate no one besides the moon.
The first things that attracted my gaze were the two cream-colored basins on the washstand. By day, it never entered my head to dwell on them. In the moonlight, however, the band of blue that ran around the upper part of the basins was a provocation. It simulated a woven band encircling a skirt-hem. And in fact the brim of each basin was curled like a frill. Between the two basins stood pot-bellied jugs, made of the same porcelain with the same floral pattern. When I climbed out of bed, they clinked, and this elinking was communicated over the washstand’s marble surface to basins and bowls, glasses and carafes. As happy as I was to receive from my nocturnal surroundings a sign of life—be it only the echo of my own—it was nonetheless an unreliable sign, and was waiting, like a false friend, to dupe me at the very moment I least expected it. This was when I lifted the carafe with my hand to pour some water into a glass. The gurgling of the water, the noise with which I put down first the carafe and then the glass—it all struck my ear as repetition. For every spot on this alternate earth to which I was transported appeared wholly occupied by what once had been. Thus, each sound and each moment came toward me as the double of itself. And when I had endured this for a while, I would draw near my bed gripped by the fear of finding myself already stretched out upon it.
This anxiety did not altogether subside until I once again felt the mattress under my back. Then I fell asleep. The moonlight withdrew slowly from my room. And, often, the room already lay in darkness when I awoke for a second or third time. My hand would necessarily be the first to brave emergence from the trench of sleep, in which it had taken cover before the dream. And just as one sometimes falls prey to a previously unexploded shell even after a battle has ended, so my hand was constantly expecting to be overtaken on its way by a previously delayed dream. When the nightlight, flickering, then brought peace to my hand and me, it appeared that nothing more remained of the world than a single, stubborn question. It may be that this question nested in the folds of the door-curtain that shielded me from noise. It may be that it was nothing but a residue of many past nights. Or, finally, it may be that it was the other side of the feeling of strangeness which the moon had brought on. The question was: Why is there anything at all in the world, why the world? With amazement, I realized that nothing in it could compel me to think the world. Its nonbeing would have struck me as not a whit more problematic than its being, which seemed to wink at nonbeing. The moon had an easy time with this being.“
My childhood was already nearing its end when, at last, the moon seemed willing to assert its claim to the earth by daylight, a claim which previously it had made only at night.85 High above the horizon-—large, but pale-— it stood, in the sky of a dream, looking down on the streets of Berlin. It was still light outside. Gathered around me were the members of my family, their bearing a little stiff, like that of figures in a daguerreotype. Only my sister was missing. “Where is Dora?”I heard my mother exclaim. Suddenly, the full moon up in the sky began ever more rapidly to expand- Coming nearer and nearer, it tore the planet asunder. The railing of the iron balcony, on which we all had taken our places overlooking the street, broke into a thousand pieces, and the bodies which had been there flew apart in all directions. The funnel created by the moon’s approach sucked everything in. Nothing could hope to pass through it unchanged. “If there is pain now, then there’s no God,” I heard myself conclude, and, at the same time, I collected what I wanted to take across. I put it all in a verse. It was my farewell. “O star and flower, spirit and dress, love, grief, time, and eternity!”B“ But even as I hastened to entrust myself to these words, I was already awake. And only now did the horror which the moon had just inspired seem to grip me for all time, without any hope of reprieve. For this awakening set no limit to the dream, as others did, disclosed no goal, but instead revealed to me that its goal had escaped the dream, and that the sovereignty of the moon--which I had come to know as a child—had dissolved before another succession of the world.
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By Denise Robbins, CCAN Communications Team Across Maryland, communities are hitting the brakes on the rapid buildout of massive data centers. After Anne Arundel County joined the growing list of jurisdictions adopting a temporary moratorium, roughly 90% of Marylanders now live in a county or city with some form of data center ban or pause, […]
The post Maryland’s Data Center Backlash Is Growing. Here’s What Comes Next appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
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