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2026-05-22
2026-05-21
Deweaponization Slush Fund
Trump has downshifted from trying to steal $10,000,000,000 from the treasury to actually stealing $1,800,000,000
Fun Fact: the actual amount is $1,776,000,000–touted as “the anticipated sum needed to address these issues” or an allusion to the 250th of the USA 🇺🇸 and “patriotism”?
The $1,776 billion matches the 1,600 people who attacked the Capitol during the January 6th insurrection and were pardoned and who will now be paid a million dollars each, and that's apparently what people are talking about, saying they will receive.
Deweaponization Fund main point may be “forever get-out-of-jail-free card” clause for President Trump and family
Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges and former U.S. Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn sued President Donald J. Trump, acting attorney general Todd Blanche, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today to block the creation of the fund to pay off those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The lawsuit begins: “In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” The suit continues: “The fund…is illegal. No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law.” Both Hodges and Dunn defended the Capitol and the lawmakers in it on January 6. Hodges was the man in the infamous photograph of the rioters crushing a police officer between metal doors. The officers claim the standing to sue because they have had to live with death threats and harassment since January 6 from MAGA Republicans and the plan to pay off rioters “will both compensate and empower the very people making those threats. Militias like the Proud Boys will use money from the Fund to arm and equip themselves. The Fund will grant their past acts of violence legal imprimatur. And, most chillingly, the Fund will signal to past and potential future perpetrators of violence against Dunn and Hodges that they need not fear prosecution; to the contrary, they should expect to be rewarded.” The lawsuit covers what actually happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, beginning shortly after noon, when rioters tried to break into the building to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president. “Hours of hand-to-hand combat ensued,” the lawsuit recounts, “as police officers tried to prevent the rioters from entering the building and killing elected officials and their staff.” On the west front of the Capitol, rioters broke down barriers made of bike racks, signs, and snow fencing and pushed forward to a line of police officers. “Rioters assaulted officers, sprayed them with chemicals, and hit them with pipes, tools, and the bike racks and stolen police equipment that were now strewn about.” After 2:00 the rioters broke through the line of officers, smashed windows, and forced their way into the building, opening the doors for their comrades. “As rioters stalked the halls, staffers, journalists, and members of Congress hid in offices, hoping not to be found by people screaming ‘hang Mike Pence!’ and ‘Where’s Nancy [Pelosi]?’” They forced their way into the Senate chamber just minutes after Vice President Mike Pence left it. Meanwhile, officers continued to fight against the advancing mob. “Rioters punched police, speared them with flagpoles, attacked them with tasers and stolen riot shields, and tried to drag them into the crowd. For three hours in the enclosed tunnel connecting the Capitol to the inaugural stage, rioters engaged in an almost medieval style of combat, pushing exhausted and outnumbered police to get into the building in a “heave-ho” rhythm, nearly crushing officers as they did. Through all of this, amid the fighting and screaming, flash bangs exploded, fire retardant shot into the air, and chemical spray filled the tunnel. Many officers were injured in this fight to defend this entrance, some gravely.” Hodges was “hit from above with a heavy object, kicked in the chest, and driven to the ground. Shortly thereafter a rioter grabbed Hodges by the face and tried to gouge out his eyes. Hodges shook him off, and eventually made his way to the tunnel connecting the Capitol building to the inaugural stage. There, he joined in some of the most furious fighting that day, as police tried to stop the mass of rioters from flooding into the building. In the rushing crowd of the mob, Hodges was nearly crushed between metal doors by the enraged attackers. He later said that he thought, ‘this could be the end.’” After several hours, national guard forces, including from Virginia and Maryland, helped the officers to get control and expel the rioters from the Capitol. The lawsuit recounts the events of the day in detail, making it clear exactly who it is that Trump wants to reward with almost $2 billion in taxpayer money. Hodges and Dunn are not the only people going after what is not just “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century,” but the most brazen act of presidential corruption in American history. By far. In the House, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) today introduced the “No Taxpayer-Funded Settlement Slush Funds Act of 2026,” which would prohibit the use of federal funds to pay off anyone claiming to have faced “weaponization” of the law by the federal government, including any of the January 6 rioters. “Congress must reassert the power of the purse and stop this brazen looting of taxpayer funds before this ‘pilot program’ for massive partisan corruption becomes the permanent operating system of our government,” Raskin said. Democrats also demanded the Department of Justice preserve any and all documents and communications about the agreement. Scott MacFarlane of Meidas Touch reported that even Republicans hate the slush fund and non-prosecution agreement, telling Nicolle Wallace of MS NOW: “There are so many Republicans coming out against this thing. It appears to me this slush fund is like as popular as poison ivy…. Nobody is claiming ownership of this thing. I have zero statements of support for this fund from any congressional Republican.” Yesterday, before news broke of acting attorney general Todd Blanche’s addendum to the original agreement, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Adam Schiff of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, sent a memo to the Department of Justice asking whether Blanche was following the advice of ethics lawyers in the department in his handling of issues having to do with Trump, as he had promised to do in his confirmation hearings. Lawyer George Conway posted that Blanche never intended to carry out that promise. It is clear that members of the Trump administration never intended to honor the Constitution or serve the American people, raising the question of what exactly they do intend. For Trump, making money is clearly a major part of it. The anger over the slush fund has pushed out of the news a growing outcry over the news from earlier this week that Trump bought and sold at least $220 million in stocks like those of Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft while making policy and public announcements that affected the value of those stocks. Trump is also into building monuments to himself in the nation’s capital: the repainted reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Kennedy Center, and the Triumphal Arch behind the Lincoln Memorial that would frame the home of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Arlington National Cemetery. Trump has paid special attention to the ballroom he intends to build on the site where the East Wing of the White House used to be, saying it will be done by September 2028. Republicans tried to get $1 billion put into a reconciliation bill to fund what Trump claimed was security measures for the ballroom. Unlike most measures that come before the Senate, a reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered and so needs only 51 votes rather than 60 to pass. But Democrats recently stopped that Republican plan by noting that Republicans failed to give the required instructions to all the relevant committees. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with them and said the request could not go into a budget reconciliation measure. Senate Republicans, who were uncomfortable with the request anyway, removed it. Trump apparently did not get the memo. Today he insisted that Republicans replace the Senate parliamentarian with a Trump loyalist. His social media account posted: “Shockingly, Republicans have kept the very important position of ‘Parliamentarian’ in the hands of a woman, Elizabeth MacDonough, who was appointed, long ago, by Barack Hussein Obama and a vicious Lunatic known as Senator Harry Reid, who ran the Senate for the Dumocrats with an ‘iron fist.’ Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans but not to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced?” He went on to demand the Senate force through the SAVE America Act that would significantly restrict voting and to call for the Senate to “kill the Filibuster, which would give us everything!” He went on: “If we don’t pass at least one of these two provisions quickly, you will never see another Republican President again.” But Senate Republicans are signaling they might not want to play ball with a president whose approval ratings showed up today at an abysmal 34% and who is demanding loyalty to himself alone, rather than working for the party. On Meet the Press Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reacted to the defeat of Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s Republican primary after Trump backed his rival by saying: “This is the party of Donald Trump.” Trump made that clear yesterday when, after waffling for months, he endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in a primary runoff over Senator John Cornyn’s seat to be held next week. Trump called Paxton “a true MAGA Warrior” and complained that Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Bloomberg reporter Steven T. Dennis noted that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico “has to be doing the happy dance.” “This is going like Dem[ocrat]s would have scripted it,” Dennis wrote. “A late Trump endorsement after Cornyn/Senate Republicans incinerated ~$100 [million] trying to nuke Ken Paxton as an impeached adulterer who violated ethics left and right.” House Republicans also have borne the pressure of Trump’s wrath. Yesterday representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), who helped to lead the charge for the release of the Epstein files, lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger in what was the most expensive House primary ever. Ed Gallrein, who won the primary, vows that he will do whatever Trump tells him to. Trump-backed primary candidates also won in Georgia and Alabama. White House spokesperson Steven Cheung posted: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. F*ck around, find out.” But as political commentator Jessica Tarlov noted, Massie’s district went for Trump by 35 points in 2024, but Gallrein won by just ten points after outside money spent an astronomical $35 million on the race when winning a primary usually costs between $100,000 and $500,000. Tarlov added that Trump isn’t offering much of a platform for Republicans to run on. She said, it’s basically “I want absolute loyalty. I want to trade stocks, make hundreds of millions of dollars. I want my 1776 fund to make sure J Sixers, you know, get the money that they’re owed. I want immunity for me and my family from an audit forevermore…. I want to get rich, and I don’t care that you are poorer.” — Notes: https://storage.courtlistener.  The BulwarkA month and a half ago, Donald Trump reached into his bag of negotiatin’ tricks and pulled out a few threats of genocide: If the “crazy bastards” of Iran wouldn’t “Open the Fuckin’ Strait,” the president warned, a “whole civilization” would die. Didn’t work then, but maybe second time’s the charm: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking,” Trump posted on Truth … 3 days ago · 737 likes · 379 comments · William Kristol, Andrew Egger, and Jim Swift https://poll.qu.edu/poll- https://www.politico.com/news/ Trumpstruth.org: X: SenWhitehouse/status/ Bluesky: gtconway.bsky.social/post/ juddlegum.bsky.social/post/ atrupar.com/post/3mmavmfpu5k26 steventdennis.bsky.social/ |
2026-05-20
模倣子 Synthetic Religion
Memetic Index - what purpose religion? - ideomemetic appeal - engineering non-violence - memeto-dynamics of group membership - priestly/rabbinical - The Big Other -
Was just having a chat with a buddy last night about “primordial religion” (and also “dogmatic efficiency”) or a perhaps more to the pint term is “minimal religion” or what does a religion minimally accomplish for a group of humans and what is the minimal and essential collection of memes needed to accomplish that function?
Will it inevitably snowball memetically, ie, accrete dogma and lose dogmatic efficiency over time?
It seems to be related to shame and empathy, providing a template for conformity, ie, what can an individual do in order to not invite immunomemetic overtures from peers?
This need is very real—the fear of the other. Anything that addresses this fear is worth paying a high cost, perhaps even the cost of what we see in religious adherence.
But does religion actually address this?
The dream is that a “minimal synthetic religion” could be devised to fill this need, fit well into our modern scientific and industrial reality (instead of the Stone Age proto-agricultural feudalistic reality that most current religions are based on)
The overarching question is “do humans need religion?” “do religions develop organically, spontaneously, inevitably?” And “if religions are somehow essential, what is their minimal memetic feature set or inventory?”
Assuming there’s something to this, ie, religion is somehow essential, will form organically in a vacuum anyway, feels some real need with some minimal memetic inventory beyond which leads to increasing “dogmatic inefficiency”, and so forth, the question is twofold—can we engineer a “synthetic religion” or “minimal religion” that fills these needs with minimal bullshit harmful mumbo-jumbo, and how do we engineer the transition from the current religions to the new one?
I’ve come up with a concept called “memetic tunneling”. I’ve been working on this idea in terms of “memetically evaporating” the particularly frightening religious fanatic sect in my town. More on this anon.
Another religion issue is dogma and magical or metaphysical thinking involvement and how memetic pairing works to marry normal life memes, rational stuff, to batshit 🦇 💩 magical made-up stuff, and the result is the creation and concentration of unreasonable and irrational power in the hands of a few over many. That mechanism seems inevitable, is almost certainly the root of “dogma creep” leading to dogmatic overload and inefficiency, and if that cancerous accretive phenomenon cannot be well understood and controlled, then there may be little point to an engineering effort.
To restate, think of dogma as the collection of the irrational, magical 🧙 memes, which have this radioactive ☢️ ability to pair with “real” memes such as the rôle of women, diet, treatment of children, dress norms, the attitude toward and treatment of outgroup members, proselytization, etc, in other words all the stuff that make religions distinctive and often scary.
Some minimal dogma is probably necessary to create group identity, ie, create a memetic inventory around which group members can cohere. But what is that minimum?
If we can posit a “minimal religion” then we can begin to think of a minimal dogmatic memetic inventory, which implies a maximal dogmatic efficiency, ie, each magical meme is doing maximal work, and additional memes degrade that efficiency.
It’s worthwhile to consider how efficiency of dogmatic memes is not necessarily related to sheer number. I could go on at some length about how the “God meme” is a central Pilar of Abrahamic religions, does a lot of the dogmatic heavy lifting, but is also a kind of memetic sledgehammer to which other cultures and religions employ the multiple scalpels to accomplish the same things with arguably higher fine tuning, robustness, etc
Of course language by itself has a lot of magical memetic properties, eg, it is often the foundation for memetic pairing, in addition to a crucial glue for human social groups, so it is like a religion
Right on!
Their dogma has a lot of crazy and harmful nonsense, but there is also the memetic engineering concept of “packing the meme space” whereby you protect the memetic inventory by creating a bunch of memes whose primary function is merely to take up space (since the brain can only hold so many at once). However, filler memes can mutate and become active, or pair with other internal or external memes, pulling more in and activating more (dogmatic) functionality and pathways
I wrote at least one essay on the function of
The priestly/ rabbinical class in terms of the husbandry of the memetic inventory of a religion
2026-05-17
模倣子 crumbling feminist narrative
Debunk feminist narrative
Crumbling feminist narrative
Feminist Future will be Brutal
2026-05-11
模倣子 Mortal Computation
Memetics index
I just had a flash about my own mental health issues that might have relevance to our discussions of consciousness
Imagine that some quantities of identity such as self-esteem (the right to be protected, participate, etc) or enjoyment (the right to pursue one’s interests, the right to feel that one’s own interests and enjoyment are existentially important, etc) are a kind of hypersurface.
So the “imitation” of actual mental health may be accomplished by a few points on that surface such as “I like movies” or “I like sports” or “I’m a good person/worker/Christian” or “I avoid situations where I might encounter conflict”
The problem is that such a hack is a sparse discontinuity and is therefore undifferentiable and not meaningfully integrable
That’s probably a whole tin of worms 🪱 unto itself, but let’s move
On for the moment
The “mortal substrate” question may rush to
The rescue here
* mortal computation, I think
I’ll have to listen to
That paper again, since more I think about it the
More I find the “mortal substrate” idea pseudo-argumentative and question-beggy
Like yet another “here’s another implementation difference so human consciousness wins again, nyah, nyah, nyah!”
Oh, just that the brain 🧠 implements consciousness one way, and silicon 🤖 is a different implementation.
But I think it does add “smoothing effect” which means you get a tighter approximation for less energy and hardware, your get some non-linearities (I always worry I’m misusing that term), which give you differentiability and integrability everywhere
While a digital or severely traumatized (human) gives you singularities everywhere
You can try to approximate it better and better with more test cases and mantras or whatever, but you always, and especially in those problematic edge
Cases you’re try to deal with, fix, close up, you get hallucinations, wrong answers that Just seem so dang right, or just non-convergence
The idea 💡 that a drug 💊 impacts the brain 🧠 in such and such a way does defeat the incremental neuron-with-chip analogy, but it also seems like a kind of red herring 🐟 or questionable-begging
The stuff they talk about with “mortal substrate”* strikes me as the presence of a kind of hysteresis in the wetware 🧠 (biological) substrate, eg, the more you think about a thing or skill, the more engrained it gets, whereas in order to implement this same kind of phenomenon, inherent in the meat-brain 🧠 🥩 platform, is actually quite expensive in the straight silicon 🤖 approach, requiring a lot
More hardware, more time, and thus more power to not even quite do it
A physics/mathematics question: do spaces where points on that space exhibit hystereses have higher granularity, or anything interesting?
I’m thinking along lines such as how even if the number of states is the same, the number of pathways whereby given states may be approached is lessened, which represents a higher level of learning
This idea of hysteresic N-spaces might have a lot of relevance to macromemetics as well, which should surprise no one.
Have you heard of Brain organoids?
I think that’s the term…
Had another listen. Is seems shot through with question-begging à la “why IS consciousness impossible to
Implement on non-biological substrates?”
More on that, later.
One thought is how trauma victims may look like allopoetic entities as wel, rather like factories, etc
More
On that…and ramifications for discrete manifolds and therapy directions
The landscape of a digital intelligence and a trauma victim’s perceptual/cognitive manifolds may have useful similarities, eg, their rigidity, propensity to conflations (hallucination), undifferentiability, and widespread singularities.
The podcast listed a final danger, ie, that not so much that we create a real intelligence but that we “computerify” ourselves in the process
I submit that this has already long ago happened, eg, with calling computer storage “memory” and such
Pathology and edge/corner cases shed light, showing that something different is happening behind the scenes, eg, dissociative disorder, trauma (same thing), amnesia, perceptual anomalies, addictions, etc
“Normie” reactions to and prescriptions for addiction and dissociative identity disorder ring like “that’s not how memory works” (because of course it works the same as a computer) or “just download better software/tweak some parameters” (because of course self-destructive/dysfunctional behavior is just wrong, bad code, and has no underlying bases that make any sense)
It might be useful to look at digital intelligences and trauma cases as sparse, punctilious spaces mapped onto hypermanifolds.
This has ramifications that may shed light on the nature of consciousness, the refinement of AI 🤖 and the treatment of dissociative disorders
More to come on this…
Therapists regularly corner patients around their irrational behavior, probably by forcing an alter to acknowledge his/her own limitations and logical inconsistencies as well as irrational fears (this is all part and parcel of dissociative therapy, among others)
It’s sometimes an “ah-ha” moment leading immediately to healing, but not necessarily, rather like an AI 🤖 who “hallucinates”
Alcoholics and other mental patients confabulate similarly, and I tend to agree that this is a better term than “hallucination” for AIs 🤖 but not for the reason given, ie, that hallucination is a “feeling” rather than an “action” and therefore beyond the ken of mere automata.
It’s also questionable that confabulation can be blithely classed as an “action” — another “computerification” (as opposed to anthropomorphisization which they incessantly worry about in the other direction) where a brain 🧠 function is tacitly classed as algorithmic… because it just “seems” that way. Analogies become models become descriptions, become assumptions about physical reality—we
Must be cautious in all directions.
They touch on this, ie, humans make the tests so that they alone can pass them, no animals or other designs allowed, and the term I was searching for is essentialism.
It’s like question-begging or putting up strawmen, but here more applicable perhaps.
I thought of another implication of the podcast…oh yes, I think I’ve got it.
It’s to Do with analogues between network behavior in response to increased load, how individuals in different cultures respond to questions when they don’t know the answer or when they know a bad outcome for the asker will not come back
To bite them * and confabulation behavior of AI 🤖
Computer networks respond to increased loads by resending and ultimately dropping packets. Packets travel by different
Routes when
Loads need to be distributed and arrive on different sequences and are reässembled at the destination, and resend requests sent for bits that didn’t arrive.
This in ways resembles the “many drafts” model of consciousness.
One question is whether to send a resend request, a send failure, or to confabulate a message, and similar questions exist on the sending side, respond properly/improperly to resend
Requests, ignore them, press on despite failure messages or lack of acknowledgments and keep sending more stuff, stop sending midway, or other such.
This is all Byzantine generals stuff, but how does consciousness deal with it? Like a fish 🐠 out of water 💦 not gracefully—just flop around or have a seizure and hope for a state reboot.
I subscribe to the notion, mentioned in the podcast, I think, that consciousness serves to “model” the information from the senses into some kind of set of expectations, on a many drafts approach applied to sensory input flowing in over a distributed time period, and when that expectation begins to clash egregiously with what is more and more continuing to
Come in, the consciousness starts to
Confabulate and ultimately falls into any of a number of usually well-know and unattractive failure modes (a psycho-cerebral 🧠
404 error, if you will 😜)
* Japanese may not tend to say “I don’t know” while Americans do, and may confabulate)hallucinate, and Americans may rein it in for more serious questions while the Japanese may actually go the opposite way, among
Many other scenarios. As frequency or difficulty of questions accelerates, confabulation or demurring behavior may increase or phase change
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