Voting for System Change

#1 and #1

Recent reports of the IPCC have made it clear that neither Business as Usual (the path we are taking mostly, especially in the USA) nor modest efforts at decarbonization that have been seen globally (more in Europe and China than USA, especially under Trump) since the first IPCC report, are going to hinder the global climate catastrophe that is headed our way.  Such a catastrophe could end billions of human lives and cause untold destruction.  What's needed to prevent this now is fundamental System Change.

The exact kind of System Change required isn't spelled out.  But it's clear that one thing needs to go.  And not just for the climate, even more so for it's own sake, and that is Global Military Conflict.

This Global Military Conflict is driven more than anything else by Western Imperialism, which is primarily US and Israeli Imperialism.  Since Israeli Imperialism depends on US Imperialism, I'll refer to this as USrael Imperialism.

That actually is the #1 thing in the world which has to be changed.  Humanity could be vaporized in an instant with Nuclear War.  Our highest priority should be avoiding that.  Then comes the System Change required to spare us from catastrophic climate change, which is virtually impossible without #1 anyway.  #1 is where it has to start.

So, it turns out, the #1 and #2 most important things that need to be stopped in the world today are both USreal Imperialism.  It's #1 and #1.

Since Imperialism is an integral part of western Capitalism, and we live in an oligarchy which primarily answers to that Capitalism, it's no surprise that our nearly useless elections provide no direct way of ending it.  Both mainstream parties support USreal Imperialism to the hilt.  Just as George Carlin once quipped, "If voting made any real difference, we wouldn't be allowed to do it."  I don't entirely agree with Carlin on this, but allowing for artistic license, it's close enough, as I shall demonstrate below.  We won't get where we need to go by voting for a lesser evil, nor a greater evil either of course.

The Bahktiari Professor

Back in 2005 I met a retired professor from California.  He often self identified as Iranian but it turned out he was actually from a seasonally migrating tribe that lives within the territory of Iran known as the Bahktiari.  

At my monthly movie and discussion party I showed a documentary about the Bahktiari which he came to discuss with us.

At the time, all of my party atendees were enraged by George W Bush's War on Iraq.  The professor said to me:

You live in a Democracy.  Therefore, the war in Iraq is Your Responsibility.

I disputed this claim.  Firstly with the argument that the American public was led into this war with the lies of George W. Bush.  If George W. Bush had not been elected President, we likely would not be having this war.  I voted against GWB.  Therefore, I am not responsible for his having been elected President.  Secondly, I participated in two very large protests preceding the war.  It should not be pinned on me.

It's true, I could have done more to try to stop it.  I could have lit myself on fire in Washington DC.  But such things have not proven effective either.  I did about all a person could be reasonably expected to do.  Therefore, I am not responsible for it.

He was not convinced.

I could not have made this argument in 2023 as President Biden was supporting the Israeli War Machine in its genocide on Palestinians in Gaza.  Because, in fact, I had voted for President Biden in 2020.  I was very angry at Trump.  I am even more angry--disgusted really--with Trump now.

For 2024, there was no viable Democratic Primary process because Biden had (then) decided to re-run.  Not until the clock for Primaries had run out was it announced that Biden would not run again.  Instead, he chose Kamala Harris, and the Democratic National Convention simply ratified that choice, without any further input from voters or local conventions.

This deprived voters and alternative candidates to discuss the issues involved, including the Genocide in Gaza.  I believe this must have been the plan all along, to suppress open debate of the Biden's policies especially toward Israel (give them all the weapons they want).  Kamala Harris could have, she had every opportunity, but chose not to, distance herself from this policy in even the slightest way.  It is now believed by many including those who have studied the election results in swing states, that Genocide in Gaza was the one issue that cost Harris the Election.  (There was also an second issue wrt Inflation, which many analysts concluded was largely mistaken...there had been inflation previously, resulting from Covid and other things, but as a result of judicious Fed management and other things the last year's inflation rate had come way down...but voters typically can't make such fine distinctions, and in 2024 there was little more that could have been done about it.  But distancing herself from the Gaza Genocide was one thing that Harris could have done, that is she could have done it if she was not owned and operated by AIPAC Zionists.)

I was infuriated at the effectively cancelled Primary process and disgusted by Biden's full support of the Genocide in Gaza and Harris's promise to continue supporting the Genocide.  While it's true I did not expect Trump to be any better, I did not vote for Trump either.  I voted for a decent human being, Cornel West, who would not have supported the Genocide.  If I had to do it over again, I would have chose the PSL candidate Claudia De La Cruz since the PSL was more organized than West's adhoc committee and I now know I agree with PSL positions on all issues, including the US provoked War in Ukraine, better than with Cornel West.

Harris has been the #1 Democratic Party recipient of funds from AIPAC, receiving over $9 million.  By comparison, Lindsay Graham was cheap, he's only gotten $1 million, and Trump is the king of them all, receiving over $230 million.  Of all the Democratic Party hopefuls for 2028, only two candidates, AOC and Ro Khanna, have received $0 and Ro has signed a pledge.

Democratic friends, however, take my non-vote for Harris as making me responsible for Trump.  They sometimes see some of the faults with Democratic Party candidates (btw, Biden's history as Senator is almost too awful to recount, he pushed for the "Crime" bill of 1994, the banking deregulations of the late 90's, the War in Iraq, and many other things...and his Presidency was fairly undistinguished also in that every time there was a partisan issue, he let Republicans walk away with victories rather than apply LBJ like pressure to members of his own party...this was true even when Democrats had technical majorities in both houses...the only thing we "got" from Biden was basically the Infrastructure Bill, which has resulted in huge highway construction near me that seems excessive and outdated and does actually solve local transportation problems either) but say we must in effect vote for the "lesser" evil to prevent the greater evil from winning.

I have addressed these issues from both sides in earlier posts.  I strongly argued for voting for Biden in 2020 largely on this basis.  I argued these points in groups I was a member or organizer in.  But by 2024, Biden's genocidal record, which Harris vowed to continue, had reached the point of too much evil for me to support anymore.  And apparently many others felt the same way.  I believe there is such a point of no return, where Principled and Disciplinary voting is required, and that Biden/Harris had reached it.

Reasons for Voting

Voting is a relatively easy thing to do.  I don't see it solving any of the most serious problems we face (see #1 and #1 above, in particular).  But still it's worth doing, because it's relatively easy to do, might change things enough to be worthwhile anyway, and it is one important way we can express ourselves politically.  It gives us a lot to talk about with other people too (which, ultimately, I think is the most important thing it does).

So lets go through these reasons.  The first thing people think of is that voting is our "opportunity" to change our leadership, our future, etc:

Electing a different government official

The only vote you could cast that changes the outcome of an election would be the deciding vote.  This would mean that if you had not cast your vote, the votes would be evenly split, and your one vote would tip the difference over to one side.

The probability of casting a deciding vote is astronomically small.  Many very smart mathematicians have worked on this issue using different assumptions and come up with different results.  Not being mathematicians, we can look at their results as bounding the high and the low probabilities.  The low probability is 1 in 10 raised to the 2,569 power, ie, far far far less than one in a google (10 raised to the 100 power).  The high probability analysis calculated that an "average" voter in an US presidential election (the one US citizens obsess most about), not knowing what state you are in or the politics in that state, would have a 1 in 60 million chance, which is something like 4 / N where N is the total number of voters.

A fair minded study of these different results using only "random voting" assumptions puts the probability for an arbitrary simple election between 1 / 5N and 1/50N and that is if it is not already a foregone conclusion.   That means if there are 10 million voters, like a statewide election in Texas, your highest probability of casting a deciding vote is less than 1/50 million.

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/decisive-vote

The above writer also pays tribute to the "intuitive" estimate, which I used in an earlier essay (from some other set based mathematical analysis, though it came up with the intuitive answer by some coincidence) and that is 1 / N for N voters.  However, in nearly all cases, that will be an overestimate of your probability of actually making a change in an electoral result.

If you are unsatisfied by these probabilities, you can also check the results after an election, and I'm very confident you will always see that your vote made no consequential difference in who got elected.  You can point this out to your friends, though it is not likely that will satisfy them, because most people are so mathematically illiterate.  All this consequentialist voting stuff is really performative posturing dressed up as consequentialist.

In the state where I live, Texas, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that, for the foreseeable future, Republicans will win any national election.  A large majority of Texas voters are lifelong Republicans, and that is not likely to change in the next election.  Therefore the upper bound assumptions in the article linked above probably don't apply, and we are back to looking a probability of changing the outcome which is less than one in a google.

So voting with an intent to change the particular elected official, assuming you considered that important, is basically not worth doing.

Furthermore, with regards to the paramount issues of our time,  #1 and #1, it would make not make any difference at all because neither a Democrat nor a Republican would be likely to enact the System Change we so desperately need.  And this may be true on a range of lesser issues as well, though I am not claiming, as some do, in general, that it makes no difference at all who is elected.  There may be differences that you or I might consider very important, but your chance of changing even that result is still astronomically small.

Disciplining Your Party

While it is virtually impossible to change the outcome of an election with your one vote, it may be possible for a large number of dissatisfied voters to cause their own party to lose an election, and we might well infer that was what happened in 2024.  Disciplining your party for pre-selecting awful candidates is one important thing you can do, and it's basically cost free in states where the other party is almost certainly going to win anyway.  In this case, if you are even the slightest bit unhappy with the candidate of the major party you dislike less, you should always vote for the third party candidate who most satisfies you, even if they have no chance of winning.  If the candidate is on the ballot it will show up in the results, and the larger the third party vote for such candidates the more it will irritate your party leaders possibly to the point of doing things better next time, though I wouldn't count on that.  Sufficient discipline is the only way things could be changed to be even measurably on the System Change dimension through electoral politics.  More likely, complete Collapse (which is what I consider most likely of all) or Revolution will be required.  But rather than wait for those things, vote to discipline your lesser hated party, as well as your more hated one.

Expressing yourself

This is the simplest version of voting, and how I would explain voting, especially to someone who is not satisfied with the candidates of either major party.  VOTE FOR WHOEVER YOU WANT MOST.   The rest is details, really.  I personally came to this conclusion when I was about 14 years old, but then got sucked into political parties and all their nonsense.

But do vote, because it feels good to express your true feelings, and this is the one opportunity you have to make such a statement.  If you happen to vote for a listed candidate, your vote will show up in some (but not all) reports.  It will be seen by some.

Expressing your true feelings is also a way to find your true friends, though you might lose a lot of others.  It's a way to build a new party (I'm not holding my breath, but it's one of the few ways System Change could arise) and stuff like that also.  I was going to make other categories for those ideas, but they don't really mean anything unless you are expressing your true feelings anyway.  If you care about Palestinians, you might ask a Palestinian what they think about your voting choices.  Almost certainly they would prefer you not vote for a Zionist of either Democrat or Republican parties (for an example, see Sam Hussieni, an American Palestinian Christian who constantly rails against lesser evilism, and is now running as an independent candidate).

I never say such things as "both parties are the same" or "don't bother to vote."  I might or might not choose to vote for Democrats in lower races if they haven't as erred as disgustingly as Biden and Harris did.  I never say such things as "All Democrats are Evil" either.  I really liked Greg Casar, my current US Rep, and before him Lloyd Doggett, and my new likely Rep Joaquin Castro seems to be improving in that direction.  I often like Ro Khanna and AOC, and I'd likely vote for either one as President.  In some cases, I view my vote as a bargaining chip, which I'm going to keep in the air, feeling the movement thereof, until the moment I vote.  If they have pissed me off recently, I'll vote Green to get even.  But generally I don't like the fact that Greens do say things which I never say about Democrats.  And often they aren't really Socialists either, though they often propose Social Democratic programs, and oppose USrael Imperialism.  Greens in other countries such as UK and Germany are terrible, just as committed to Western Imperialism (and coddling Israel) as other parties, if not more so.

If voting basically doesn't change the results, donating small amounts to politicians doesn't either.  I've done some intuitive analysis to come up with the idea that it costs between $100 and $1000 to change one vote.  And it barely matters anyway.  And if you donate anything you will endlessly be texted and emailed by other candidates and causes begging you for money.  I wish I never had.  I donated to Bernie and had some fun with the Bernie movement, such as a Bernie appearance and door knocking with a friend, but it all came to naught, and now I learn that Bernie is a Liberal Zionist, who can't imagine Israel not existing and blames everything on Netanyahu.  He's shut down pro Palestinian protestors at his rallies.

Links

You might be able to read some of this paid post by Patrick Lawrence, who argues mostly on ethical principles rather than mathematics as I do.  I agree with him his primary argument and conclusion.  Here or elsewhere he also says that Biden was one of the worst Presidents ever.  I don't quite agree with that, though I'd put Biden in the lowest quintile, and it's a very low bar now anyway.  I wouldn't expect Harris to be any better than Biden was.  I suspect Harris would have been drawn into war with Iran just like Trump, because of all her Zionist backing, friends, and husband.

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/the-evils-of-lesser-evilism

Endless Drain Repairs and Excavations

 I've written about my disturbing experiences with under house drain repairs and the excavations they require here:

https://brickpoolhouse.blogspot.com/2026/08/drain-repairs-will-endlessly-drain-your.html

Cancelling Subscriptions, Recurring Charges, Etc

 It's damn hard to cancel subscriptions, recurring charges, etc.  And they accumulate like barnacles so fast your ship begins sinking.  I used to get these things when I felt strongly that I liked something, but long after I've lost interest the charges keep accumulating.  So I try not to, anymore

Yesterday I spent 25 minutes on the phone cancelling (I hope) an Angie's List subscription I had started in 2009 and didn't even know I still had.  I hadn't "logged in" in over 10 years.  When I called, they asked me for an email address which apparently wasn't a current one nor was it any of the ones I remembered.  Finally, I got to the right person who prompted me with the correct domain, then I could remember.  I also wanted a refund for the $47 annual subscription charge, which they said I would get in 3-7 days.  I didn't bother to tell them I had just canceled the credit card too, but I think I should still get the refund, ultimately, from a check from the credit card company because I also had a balance of points, which I had credited back to the card (that was the only "cash" option) so I now have a "negative" balance on the card already (which means they owe me money) and should therefore be sending me a check anyway in about 30 days.  We shall see.  I may have to call Angie's List again and ask if they will send me a check.  I would have never known I was still subscribing to Angie's List had I not called to cancel my credit card, then they told me about the charge (and I immediately paid it).  The card was set to automatically pay the minimum payment every month from my checking account, and I cancelled the last recurring charge I knew about a few months ago.  I might have to call the credit card company again too.  I hate making these calls.

I had just gone through an exercise of cancelling all my paid substack subscriptions.  It's not that I don't like them, it's that I now have to make a $640/mo payment on a home repairs loan (up from $540 for the past 1 1/2 years) and I now need to shake all the couch cushions as hard as I can.

But then, Kit Klarenberg sent me an email that my subscription was about to go away.  Conveniently, the message had a button "Click here to renew."  I hadn't been to visit Klarenberg's substack page (which is so well disguised you wouldn't know it's on Substack except from the domain) in months, so I thought clicking that button would bring me to his page and I could just ignore or cancel the renewal when I got there.  So I clicked on it, and immediately it brought me to his page with a box thanking me for renewing (but giving me no option to cancel that renewal).  I navigated around Klarenberg's page, then I navigated around my Substack home page, and could find no options to cancel any paid subscriptions.

So I asked Google, and it said "Go to your Substack Settings page and find the subscription you want to cancel"  But there was no tab named "Settings" on Substack.  There is a tab called Profile, which is a dozen pages long with endless options, but none of them related to Subscriptions.

Finally I went back to Google and read the help more carefully.  In fact, you don't log into Substack to make any changes, you must log into a separate URL called "Substack Settings". Conveniently, Google provided a link to that, then I could follow their instructions and get the subscription cancelled again before it auto renews tomorrow.

This time, Google had the correct answer, but often in the past the instructions on Google for doing something seem related to some older version of whatever and have nothing to do with the way it is now.  It seems to be that websites with paid subscriptions are constantly re-designing their interfaces so whatever prior knowledge you may have about cancelling subscriptions, or possible Google instructions to do so, are now out-of-date and it's nearly impossible to find the place where you can cancel subscriptions without help.

Fauci and the Lab Leak and Pandemic Handling

This is difficult to write about and think about because the politics around it are completely warped.  But I will try.

Republicans hate Fauci because:

1) Fauci insisted COVID-19 was a serious emergency that demanded serious measures including lockdowns and masking.  And sometimes Republicans believe that not only were mRNA vaccines ineffective against the the virus, they caused all the excess deaths from a virus that otherwise would merely have been a mild flu.  Republicans are wrong about these things.  

2) Some Republicans think Fauci was responsible for the creation of the very deadly COVID-19 pandemic (which contradicts the first part, so many Republicans don't get this far).  There may be some truth here because it is quite possible that Fauci helped set the ball in motion which ultimately led to COVID-19.

Democrats love Fauci because:

1) Fauci insisted that COVID-19 was serious (it was, of course) and demanded serious measures like masking and lockdowns (it did).  Democrats are entirely correct about this but often fail to see the issues in points 2 and 3.

2) Fauci epitomizes "Science" (but "science" is also people with self-interests and blind spots, and science is sometimes wrong).  That Democrats often reflexively side with Science, Medicine, and Law arises from a bias towards the PMC.  All these things are best understood critically.  (But this does not mean falling in line with cranks and charlatans either, we must be even more critical of them.)

3) The belief that there is no "scientific" reason to believe the Lab Leak Hypothesis (but the Lab Leak Hypothesis has not been disproven either, despite great efforts to do so, and many serious people believe it.  Fauci himself initially believed that the Wuhan Meat Market was only an "amplifier" of the pandemic which originated elsewhere, and Fauci this day continues to admit that that it is not impossible that the pandemic originated from a "lab leak"...which meant that someone in a lab first caught the disease from GOF boosted specimens they were working on).

Given that we just had a Senate Hearing in which Fauci refused to answer 100 questions about COVID-19 it might be interesting to see what all of those questions were.  But instead, the media and every source I can find is more interested in the politics of Fauci invoking the Fifth Ammendment when he was pardoned by Biden for activities starting in 2014.  I have not even found (yet) the questions asked in official Senate documents released to the public.

COVID-19 ORIGINS

Gain of Function (GOF) research on several risky viruses was banned in 2014, but the ban was lifted in 2017 because of "stricter oversight."

But starting in 2014, the NIH funded the EcoHealth alliance to study viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).  This appears to have been to evade the ban on GOF.  The research in Wuhan continued despite the ban up to the origins of COVID-19 and possibly beyond.

Because this research was being done in China, it was not affected by the ban on doing this research in the US, and also the later "stricter oversight" applied to doing it in the US.

It is known that WIV was doing research on Coronaviruses that could be characterized as GOF research (though perhaps not by certain definitions of that) in a BSL-2 laboratory (inadequate for the task and outside US oversight) at the time COVID-19 was released.  Therefore, a lab leak from WIV remains a highly plausible origin of COVID-19, and several US intelligence agencies (FBI, DOE, and CIA) concluded as early as 2021 (with low to medium confidence) that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak and they maintain these conclusions to this day.  The Lab Leak Hypothesis is not a crazy "Conspiracy Theory" believed only by kooks no matter how much some media and scientists say that it is.

We don't actually have enough detail to prove the Lab Leak Hypothesis because China has never allowed anyone else to see critical information about what WIV was doing in 2019, which itself is suspicious, because if this information were not incriminating they would have no reason to hide anything.  It is also known that several people involved in this research at WIV got seriously ill around the time in question.

Some, typically MAGA, believe that COVID-19 was a Chinese plot, but US involvement in funding similar research in Wuhan somewhat weakens that idea, as well as the fact that China itself was the first to have to deal with COVID-19 and lost lives and considerable resources because of it.  There have been others suggesting it was a US plot, and COVID-19 was simply "planted" in Wuhan to disrupt China, but once again the US suffered even more from COVID-19 so if it was a plot it was surely very inept.  These ideas that COVID-19 was a plot are examples of crazy conspiracy theories, but they should not be confused with the Lab Leak Hypothesis.

There have been panels of scientists (mostly virologists with vested interests at hand) who concluded the COVID-19 origin was not likely lab leak based on technical details about the virus and the Wuhan Meat Market, but those conclusions are not air tight, so a lab leak still remains plausible.  It should be noted that no "smoking gun" was ever found at the Meat Market or elsewhere.  No evidence of COVID-19 has ever been found in the wild, as has sometimes been done before with other pandemics.  All we know is that people in Wuhan were apparently the first to get it (though we can't be entirely sure of that either).  And, perhaps not coincidentally, Wuhan had the WIV which had been doing GOF research on coronaviruses.  That is a remarkable fact, actually.  Meanwhile, the animals alleged (but never found) to be part of a zoonotic transfer were a considerable distance away.  Why did COVID-19 not start there, among the people living near or capturing these animals?

Early on in the investigation of the origins of COVID-19, some scientists claimed that the structure of the virus could not have developed naturally, it clearly looked like a result of GOF genetic splicing.  Much of the research claiming zoonotic origin of COVID debunks that notion.  But it does not prove that COVID could not have been created by GOF research.

Fauci denies that this particular Coronavirus research being done at WIV in 2019 was funded by NIH, and he is correct.  However, previous research of that nature WAS funded by NIH through EcoHealth Alliance.  What WIV was likely doing in 2019 (and this is what Jeffrey Sachs, who led one task force investigating COVID origins said in 2021) was unfunded research in the anticipation of funding.  Like Dr Sachs, I have worked in science and I know this is how labs operate.  A cynic could even believe the real research is the "unfunded research," and when the funding finally arrives that research is now virtually complete, and the funding is then mainly used to start research seeking the next funding opportunity, in effect being the "unfunded research" for that.  Sachs himself, after leading a panel of scientists investigating COVID origins, came to believe in the Lab Leak hypothesis and has said so in papers and interviews.   He looks primarily to the fact that China has refused to give the details on the research being done at WIV in 2019 as evidence of a coverup.  Those who believe in Zoonotic Transfer have the sort of racist view that the Chinese are always this way.

Funded or not, the research which may have originated COVID-19 was done in a lab that had previously received NIH funding for doing very similar research, and they might have anticipated funding getting funding for that research too eventually.  If it hadn't been for the initial NIH funding, they might not have been doing that kind of research.

Because of the risks, and the ban on GOF research in the US, the NIH should not have been funding EcoHealth alliance to do the GOF research in China.  Fauci was head of the Infectious Diseases Institute of NIH, and he also reportedly had direct personal involvement in getting EcoHealth funded to do this research in contravention of the US ban.  Therefore Fauci himself helped initiate the research program which may have ultimately produced and leaked COVID-19.  Because Biden pardoned Fauci for all his activities going back to 2014 Fauci cannot be prosecuted for this.  He may have violated US laws, and, if the Lab Leak Hypothesis is true, he might bear considerable moral responsibility for COVID-19.

If I may, let me add one more personal observation.  People who are paranoid about germs do not go into research in Virology.  People who are paranoid about germs avoid going near Virology Departments.  Virologists tend to downplay the risks of the research they are sometimes doing, as they would almost have to do in order to do this research, and overplay the benefits.  It is not clear to this day that GOF research on viruses has done anything useful.  Vaccines, for example, are not devised using GOF research.  I first heard about GOF research in 2011 (in a Virology Department presentation btw) and I was immediately scared about it.  I've also toured a BSL-4 lab (very impressive) and a BSL-2 lab (not where I'd want to work on anything dangerous).

Pandemic Handling

Finally there is one small issue about pandemic handling that also involves Fauci, but has been so warped by the politics we can't get straight answers.  Many Republicans and especially MAGA are still convinced today that masks are useless (often along with the unfounded notion that COVID-19 was fake, and the mRNA Covid vaccines caused all the deaths).  This is bad, very bad.  But even Trump himself got the vaccine which his Operation Warpspeed had helped create more effectively than otherwise.  Though Democrats often dispute that Operation Warpspeed made the vaccine available more quickly, it specifically helped fund development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, which proved to be among the most effective or even the most effective, and if the independently funded Pfizer vaccine work had failed to be useful it might have taken far longer to get a useful vaccine without the Moderna one.  As it turned out, both vaccines became available at about the same time, sometimes giving the public a choice, and most likely cranking out shots more quickly than if it had been left to Pfizer alone.

Early in the pandemic, Fauci (and others) emphasized the importance of hand washing (which is relatively unimportant in the transmission of COVID-19 and many other infectious respiratory diseases) and did not tell the public that masking was a good idea.  This was not good.  (This attitude was and still is common among doctors--including my own PCP at the time--and even in hospitals.)  Later, when it was finally advised that masking was important, the public was prevented from getting highly effective N95 masks and instead told to use simple cloth masks, which are not highly effective and generally protect others more than oneself.  I see this as a grave error.  Instead, all measures possible should have been taken to ensure an adequate supply of N95 masks both for professionals and the general public.  There should have been an earlier Operation Warp Speed for making N95 masks as well as vaccines, and/or lifting sanctions to enable buying them from China.  I myself would never have appreciated N95 masks unless I had a friend touting them and giving some away.  Even today people wear lesser masks without much thought.  The government now recommends people use N95 masks in risky situations but has never made a big deal about it, as big as the deal to use cloth masks was during the peak days of COVID-19, so many people have never heard about it.

Interesting links

(I've only I'd kept track of them since 2020, I'd have a long list)

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ecohealth-alliance-has-hidden-almost-40-million-in-pentagon-funding/

https://organicconsumers.org/peter-show-me-money-daszak-pulls-big-bucks-through-ecohealth-alliance-risky-virus-research/

Jesus and "The Teacher of RIghteousness"

The story of Jesus recounted in the Christian Gospels could not have happened.  At the time of Jesus, the Romans were in full control of the region, through their prefects and the client king Herod they had elevated to the throne after defeating the Hasmoneans.  The Romans were meticulous record keepers, and they recorded none of the key stories in Gospel, including Massacre of the Innocents, the supposed crowds of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem, the judgement of Pontius Pilate, and the Crucifixion.  If these things had happened, the Romans would have recorded them, and they didn't.  So, these stories are all fiction, and they were likely invented by The Apostle Paul, and his followers, who founded a religion based on Jesus' resurrection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bWIY04BsAg

Paul's inventions came after the historically true assassination of James, the so called "brother of Jesus," who had a popular sect in Jerusalem that came to odds with the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus who ordered James's assassination.  Paul was a hanger in the court of King Herod Agrippa II who intended to marry someone there, and he claimed he witnessed the assassination of James, which is quite possible.  He certainly heard of it not long after.

But Paul's invention of Jesus didn't come from nothing.  He was aware of much that had been happening before the assassination of James.  He was surely aware of key ideas from James's sect, which had been becoming too popular for the likes of Ananus.  He may have talked with James, which is what the Gospels say, and even been a part of James's sect until James's death, after which Paul went his own way with these ideas.

Those ideas likely involved the teachings of a figure earlier than Jesus, The Teacher of Righteousness, the key figure in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Teacher was a much earlier figure, from either the first or second centuries BCE.  Millennialism was a primary feature of these teachings (also reflected in some of the Gospels) that the coming of God was at hand in about 40 years, and when that didn't happen many turned away his sect but others changed the story.  The Teacher was persecuted by "The Wicked Priest" in Jerusalem who is unnamed and historians can only speculate which one he is.  The Teacher was ultimately put to death by unnamed authorities.  This may or may not have been before the Romans defeated the Hasmoneans and replaced them with a client king, King Herod.

But along with the Millennialism, The Teacher taught some if not many of the virtues which would be familiar to Christians.  The followers of The Teacher, the Essenes, were a communal sect foreshadowing the later communal sects of Christianity.  This brings to mind The Sermon on the Mount, and in fact the Beatitudes have a striking resemblance to some of the teachings in the Dead Sea scrolls (eg, blessed are the poor in spirit), though the caves where they were found is some distance from the site traditionally believed to be where Jesus is said to have given the Sermon (near the Sea of Galilee).

One historian tried to advance the theory that The Teacher was Jesus, and this has never been very well accepted because the dates are so far apart.  But this is not what I am saying.   I am saying that The Teacher was likely part of the inspiration for the story of Jesus, which was an fictional invention of Paul and his followers.  The Teacher was probably also an inspiration for the sect of James, though James's teaching might have been quite different from Paul's and likely lacked key parts of Christianity like the Resurrection and the notion that Jesus was God.  Jewish Christianity which is said to have been the continuation of James's sect also lacks the idea that Jesus was God, merely an important human teacher, and Islam incorporates that view.

King Herod Agrippa II held that the assassination of James was illegal and Ananus was deposed.  Not long afterward, the Revolts were begun with Ananus as a key leader, and lasted for years until the Romans sacked Jerusalem (including destroying the Second Temple).  

The Romans seem to have sided with the followers of James in that even when Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem after the later Bar Kochba revolt, Jewish Christians were not.  Jewish Christians understood themselves to be fundamentally Jewish and followers of the Torah, as well as the teachings of Jesus, though they were excluded from both Judaism and Christianity centuries later, and many converted to Islam after that.

Passwords and other securanoia

 My security minded friend sent me another article today on how I should be securing my security cameras from unwanted watchers.  I replied thusly:

I keep inside cameras turned off when I'm not on vacation, and care little about the others.

I do not pay for monthly services and use my own local storage cards on my digital cameras.*

My analog cameras have a local hard drive for storage, and are all outside, but do have internet access except when the app sometimes mysteriously requires a password I can't remember.

My biggest problem is remembering passwords.  

Passwords and endless security measures I do not want cause me more grief than anything else and I hate being forced to change them or use passkeys or other additional security measures.  I can usually deal with two factor identification but sometimes it causes problems too.  I've always been ultimately able to access my credit accounts but always worry that at some critical moment I won't be able to.  I have never been subjected to identity theft and have never lost money to any kind of theft.  Once I lost my physical card and was able to cancel all the charges I didn't make, and another time I was billed for something I didn't order or receive but was able to get that cancelled too.  I have been ordering things online since 1996 and more than anyone else I know and sometimes directly from small companies.  I think more people are taken in by fishing scams that say you are being charged for something you didn't order, than are actually being charged for things they didn't order.

I worry more about losing access to things and quite often I've been unable to access my cameras remotely because the apps for the digital and analog cameras will unexpectedly require me to remember a password.  Keeping track of all my passwords has been very difficult even with a book dedicated to that.

I keep my computer hard drives unencrypted because my final plan is that all my creative works be accessible to my heirs and/or the general public rather than lost forever, but Apple keeps trying to force me, against my wishes, to encrypt them, which would mean they could be lost forever just for that reason.

No matter how many times I tell iCloud that Chrome on my Desktop Mac is a "trusted device" it never remembers that, and forces me to go through the Passkey/Password/2 factor identification dialogs every time I want to access my photos.  I then have to be very careful not to be sent down the Passkey rathole.  I presume this is a form of desktop warfare, and I think much securanoia is just that.  It's not really about keeping me secure, it's about forcing me to use some particular set of apps.

Passkey seems like the most dangerous thing of all because if I were to use Passkey for everything and I lost that, I'd lose access to everything.

*I did once enable monthly services.  That was on my November trip last year to California when I wanted to monitor my cats.  The AI on the monthly service plan never seemed to identify cat presence outside correctly and wasn't useful in finding what happened to my oldest cat a day after I left home that killed him.  I tried using my phone but quickly gave up.  By the time I got home and was prepared to more seriously use check it out from the comfort of my computer with a big screen, the data had 'expired' because it was older than the days allotted.  The only thing I was able to do was remove, save, and download all the data from my SD card on the outside camera which on which the raw video was still available.  But I found it's basically watch 24 hours of video and figure out what happened.  I can hardly do it for 10 minutes at a stretch.  So it was a waste of money to enable the monthly services for online AI, and it's not worth it to me to plug my existing 24 hours of video into a generic AI to figure it out.

Karim Khan

About the only thing we can be fairly certain of is that Karim Khan's replacement will drop the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.*  And that will be telling, since it was both Israel and US who have been pushing to get Khan removed ever since his warrant for Netanyahu, and Marco Rubio even said beforehand that the administration had was taking actions to get him removed.

(*And not Putin.)

Here's the most definitive report I've been able to find on the actual acts Khan is accused of actually doing (you have to really dig to find this):

https://apnews.com/article/international-criminal-court-un-misconduct-accusations-a275e676e074c00d34c769c8bbdf69d7

A later report from 2026 reports Khan was cleared by a 3 judge panel of any relevant misconduct:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-investigation-united-nations-4f01c8ce5259dc726a565ce9a7f0a37b

This often gets referred to elsewhere as rape (I don't think it rises to that) or sexual harassment (it could qualify for that, but I generally question the concept and the standard ultimately applied by IOS which is the appearance of impropriety which is a terrible slippery slope, along with the concept imbalance of power which generally ignores the often superior powers that women have).

1.  He is alleged to have asked her to lie with her on a hotel bed (she did so) and ultimately he "touched her sexually" (elsewhere it is clarified: her breasts).

2.  He is alleged to have asked her to go on vacations with her (I'd dismiss this as completely unimportant).  She apparently did not, in this case she would have had to say yes for it to happen.  It was reported she was often reluctant to say no because of the imbalance of power.

3.  He is alleged to have put his hand in her pocket (I would say, this is no big deal, though perhaps not completely unimportant, and we don't know the precise context).

4.  He knocked on her door for 10 minutes at 3 am wanting to talk with her.  (It should be remembered that she was a very close aide who made many work related trips with him). I would call this completely unimportant to the charges.

Two items that are borderline seamy, and two that are completely unimportant.  Of which we know nothing about the antecedents--things she may have said or done.  We more or less know the context: she was his closest aide on important trips.  

And we are not at all talking about what would unequivocally be regarded as sexual acts.

IOW, it is not the Khan did not stop doing things when he was told not to (ie no means no).  It is rather that he did not first obtain affirmative permission for doing a couple of things that may have appeared improper and two others that were not unreasonable under plausible circumstances.  Or that he could not have obtained suitable permission by any means because of the alleged "imbalance of power."  (I feel that both of these latter qualifications may be regarded as anti-sex.  Why cannot any two adults come to have sexual relations by mutual consent?  And in many if not most cases, men are virtually required to be the initiator.  That is the way mammalian sex works.).  It is telling that many of Khans greatest detractors are Israeli defenders, and Israelis have a long history of documented violent and forcible rape against Palestinians, and in those cases no means nothing.  We see this kind of beyond hypocrisy frequently among those who are the most obsessed and uncritical about things like sexual harassment.

And for these alleged misdemeanors, the warrants against the greatest criminal of our era will be dropped.  And meanwhile, the vast documented rapes by Epstein clients go uninvestigated and the vast documented rapes in Israeli prisons are accepted, demanded and even celebrated by Israelis.  The Gaza genocide and pogroms in the West Bank continue.

Now Khan could NOT be described as any kind of leftist.  He was a Tory from the UK who only issued the warrant against Netanyahu (and failed to do so for many others who might have qualified for conducting genocide) under a lot of pressure, possibly even including the pressure from the initial secret inquiry into his alleged sexual harassment which had already started.  He had previously and more quickly issued a warrant for Putin (which in my mind is specious).

Also, FWIW, Khan is a married Muslim (married to a UN civil rights investigator) with two daughters.  And himself a judge of considerable stature.

The aide who was allegedly harassed did not make these things public (which was when they really took off).  She refrained from doing so possibly because she was in favor of the warrants against Netanyahu.  It was two of her "friends" who heard about the matter who made it public.

This raises many possible ideas as to the context and antecedents of the alleged sexual harassment.  

Nowhere in the public discussion are the things she may have done prior to the alleged acts in question.

Journalist Patrick Lawrence calls this affair (leading to the likely dropping of warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant) a "Descent into Lawlessness"

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/further-into-lawlessness

Ultimately Khan was sacked not by a judicial process but by a political one, by the Assembly of States Parties, which was no doubt (see Rubio's comment) heavily lobbied, bribed, and or coerced by the US (which has observer status) into making the vote against Khan.  After actual judges had investigated the affair and concluded there was no there there.

Commentator Craig Murray has concerns about the affair but keeps hedging that we don't know the facts.  The problem with this copout is that we do know the allegations and even they are pretty weak tea.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/07/narratives-of-moral-conflict-karim-khan-and-delcy-rodriguez/

Murray's article may be far more interesting in his defense of Delcy Rodriguez who is now often demonized on the left for selling out.  He also uniquely points out that Venezuela is actually getting the money from oil sales, less a relatively small US fee, and of course with no control over where the oil is going, which is a violation of sovereignty.  He has been to Venezuela and talked to top officials.  Ironically, according to Murray, Venezuela is getting the money from oil sales far more quickly than when China was handling the process.