Hi DU [View all]

Last edited Thu Jan 22, 2026, 10:22 AM - Edit history (2)

Hi DU,
I posted a thread on Dec 23, 2025 where I mentioned filing complaints against a former employer and my contention that it is a part of this whole mess everywhere.

I use medical marijuana for a week once a month. I am usually sober except for Modafinil three weeks out of four and use marijuana once a month.

It does clean out my head and reboot my perception of reality. And it has been slowly returning to normal.

I have never had any mental illness. If I did, i would just get treatment and move on. I don’t see any stigma in that. But i do dislike the “stigma” argument used to attack human credibility.

My behavior has been odd after my last job because I find some specific strains of histrionics that American society or even any society broadly pretends to buy into annoying.

And I am not going to caricature myself because I was quite legitimately a terrible scientist. It could have been gold in the hands of a Hannitty or Project Veritas..Stoner Immigrant Charlatan destroys all of american science.

Well in fairness, that does apply as far as my fairly left-liberal natural science labs go. They were good scientists and mostly white, but probably not particularly endearing to Hannitty. As they would be hard to caricature overall and for The Spectacle, that isn’t very fun.

I actually really liked my academic colleagues. But we only ever discuss science since ..that is normal behavior. And private politics cannot that easily be translated into real world politics when you are just a random…Too groggy for Humor as a Defense Mechanism this morning.

Though they are too decent and bright to put it that way. My colleagues. But its also awkward..because..everyone is cool and its best to not talk and ..ugh. Hate touchy feely.

Anyway I also got ripped off my American computer science. So let’s call it a wash. I shall be cleaning up my journal.
I would never give up my anonymity. But I vaguely feel it should be less polemic and more professional. ;-/. I can’t remember everything I wrote. I probably didn’t mean them precisely that way.

But well..

I don’t often have a real world response to a lot that I see. George Orwell captured one part the body politic’s psyche with Boxer. Many of us who are neither very well off nor entirely badly off - that is-neither under nor over (but if anything as of now over not at all under privileged), rightly think that you have to fix your own issues before you take on society’s. I just don’t need a grifter aligned with AI to diagnose my problems for me and shove shitware onto my phone/comp etc.

Up to 2011, I did blame myself. I still do. Typing this is lower effort than working on this paper I have to wrap up.

The thing is I don’t ever do things for no reason at all. That is not how normal humans behave probably. But i completely lost my internal orientation in 2011 and have been desperately scrambling to move away from strategies I will not be able to pull off. I don’t come from people who go on tv much ;-/. I don’t think we could function well in a Panopticon.

It is not even histrionic. But people from my family have historically chosen to have fewer children and women have typically gone into the stem workplace starting from the seventies. And it wasn’t about status or trends. People in my family have what are known as “education” genes apparently. We like knowledge and understanding.

I have been a particularly poor representative of my family as a whole. My aunt was actually a famous scientist though in Canada not the US.
I try to hide this side from my family, colleagues snd even friends not because of the weed or anything I am particularly ashamed of, but ;-/.. I am a nice person as far as they or the broader public are concerned so it doesn’t really concern anyone I would engage with irl and as for people you would only deal with, with a lawyer in between or not at all, well I am not a person they would mesh with. But it isn’t all irrational and emotional. I know for a fact that the EECS dept I started off in was a rip off for anyone who isn’t willing to just pay a corporation to enter the US to then find a way to hang around. That’s the Cato-Koch view.

I was never a very good scientist, not because I am lazy/stupid, but because science is objectively a hard profession and I don’t have aptitude adequate to compensate for average to dated to outright lousy education systems (e.g. : EECS..they take 25-35 k from a student from India, but they won’t bother with an actual education). Thing is, I wasn’t just looking for a job. I am actually interested in understanding how the world works, but not on display or perfomatively. But for real. It is one or the other. Public speaking is a widespread terror because it is hard for most professionals to perform well under observation.


And I didn’t mean for internal polemics about tech to spill out. I especially try to avoid the circus on or off campus that passes for left.
That is not a fault of the left, but it is certainly a feature of human dynamics.

I am not very contemptuous of anyone. I wasn’t able to express myself well these last 14 years. The thing is, this is true in science and politics that things are generally terrible. So you look for ways..I have an instinctive startle response reaction to humans that is probably more common in other animals than other humans. I generally get along with people who like animals ;-/.
An animal behaviourist may well be a better fit than a standard issue shrink ..oh well…
It takes a while to know who you are in ways you never thought to articulate or define.
But while I am not a cynic, I myself am so inefficient etc that work or politics, on display even “Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn” gets stuck in Flight-Freeze-Fawn..heh.

I went to one of these schools: Cornell, Harvard, Brown, MIT, Stanford, Dartmouth, Upenn, Yale,

And that was like a blow to the head that I am
only just recovering from. But well I am still planning a less inept “escape” ..hell being other people and all ;-/. It is not entirely misanthropy though a few rare times irl it was.

I stay on the real (away from cameras or loudly and extravagantly anti-camera like presumably Jonathan Haidt..i l must make a short list of people i attack so it isn’t broadly an attack and ideally pick someone as awful and annoying as Haidt since he is unlikely to have Haidties who dox one..no accounting for tastes so one can’t be sure..man I was groggy..I didn’t mean to next recant my super secret strategies online..there is a non zero probability that someone conscious might read this..oh well..).

But on a practical note, I find all discussions and debates about tech and reality disconnected from reality and full of bullshit kayfabe and that’s not really my thing.

Altogether I need better conflict strategies. It is usually clear just after mj. I will always remember Yasha Levine as one of the few figures (the Greens aside..thats the home team) from the “Images of Adult People who arent Randoms” who stood out as very real, no matter what. He is so distinctly not bullshitting while truthful. He isn’t a good person performatively or to be popular..he just is and that’s not as uncommon in science and medicine and life as it is in this private sector/media etc crowd. And he is really bright..he and Evgenia don’t say the same stuff over and over.

That’s most people I follow. The sole plus of any unwanted attention (which in truth is all non-work and non-income related attention..good labs in science are low key ;-/…not all science influencer adjacent..not that there is anything wrong with that) is if it boosts journalists/non profits I support from DU/EarlG to Yasha or Chris Ketcham or Current Affairs.

And unfortunately for my little buddies Zuckerberg, Pichai etc I am not paranoid..just not a sucker. I was in an EECS dept and I am Green /an animal rights supporter, I know greed and grift sans a conscience when i see it. And Sinclair Lewis’ quote can paraphrase this: “when people try to take over all sorts of rigths for your property and street, it will be dressed up as concern about safety and security and about privacy being hyper privileged.”
That is nonsense.


I hate to be this unpleasant. I am DIYing my medications because unfortunately, with the exception of my medical mj doctor here and my first shrink who prescribed Adderall, I have not found any utilty in these coercive and unsolicited interventions and contact.
But ..I try to be cooperative, collegial etc ;-/.



But make no mistake about this ever, if you cost me time, health and resources over a lie or lazy thinking and not an error (including ones stemming from ..well the generally atrocious politics non-environmentally minded Cornucopians who however see junk that sells as something you cannot challenge..Idiocracy much?), there will be pushback.

I have respected the Limits to Growth all the way all my life and it is the only way to head off hateful austerity for even worse of people. I don’t impose limits o growth for others until it is invasive.


This is nonsense…some conquerors (Been reading Adam Becker’s latest book) which is apparently that guy Andreessen and ..anyway..it is all cracked.

I had an early headsup. And as of this date, the stuff that spills out misrepresents me to the extent that that is my reaction to Google,Facebook etc

For the rest, I have seen no indication that these world builders would respect the earth sciences or be that honest in general. And that’s lame and would not work with me.

I don’t come and take your stuff and you can’t have mine for presumably billboards and moonvertising or some sort of ghastly thing. I don’t want to pool in my assets for group decisions made by people whose scientific credentials are suspect. That is the gist.

I trust Dr Fauci or Francis Collins and scientists but they would be overridden going by how the world works.

All this has forced me to think about my ancestors ..i was reading a tongue in cheek piece by Ashlie Stevens.
The thing is, the gift of seeing this maniacal acceleration bts is only worthwhile scientifically or politically if your reality monitoring is really good.

I have to go work on that. I don’t really like leaving piles of confusing stuff online.
But please understand that The Marketplace has no say in my home.
We didn’t make this a green space in this urban jungle to host real world Angry Birds or to turn my home ibyo

I get that many people are successful in these professions in engineering and tech. But this is my home ahd there is no blanket right of way you can force on my property or contiguous using immigration, technology/“innovation and digital transformation!” etc as excuses.
That leads to legal precedents that are unsustainable for industry and for me.

I need to know where and when things affect me and there are always the courts. I am not particularly paranoid..if it was the normal routine level of nuisance as modernity it would be one thing.
But not a ripoff, pollution, extraction, extortion and coercion repackaged as something for a moronic ai llm thing or next level music and video etc. No.
This is my home. Not property to distribute to influencers and advertisers for a tech co and with a rather disgraceful feel of histrionics.

All these social media cos and a bloated entertainment sector warp the human brain’s perception of reality. Like Jon Stewart, Yasha Levine and the few public figures I pay attention to, I too think this shows how much of a failure it is - the media companies’ skill at honestly communicating reality to the average person. They are just mouthpieces for these sleazy industrial interests.

I cannot afford this. I “took the wrong turn” in theory at my last workplace, but the wrong turn really was ever going there at all. Had it not been for my main lab/colleagues, my best friend and my ex, I would have considered ever having visited America not particularly worth it rather than a wash overall…
It is decent here as well, but this is my home and only accelerations I allow will stand.

If there is no problem, cool. If there is, that is not good. To weave back to my ancestors;-/.. what stories i have vaguely registered didn’t indicate that my family was generally peacefully colonized. They didn’t seem that Gandhian either..I really don’t like how Google etc behave..It is mediocre kleptocracy not elite science that leads to such methods.

Well..that is goofy..hopefully a real dispute is not necessarily acrimonious or even necessary. But I have not yet made up my mind about precisely where the threshold for the banality of evil or even more unpleasantily, histrionically grifty and unprocessable things crossed or crosses the level, the sources and what to do about it. I have to work it all out.

You guys are my only forum and that’s my update. I would imagine that by now that makes sense.

Btw i wanted to be clear on this- I rarely personally experienced much racism or sexism or harassment even in this ott period. But that’s all the more reason it needs to be regulated properly..more encroachment and hand waving or worse taking people’s lives hostage systemically for wanting explanations and refusing to take a paranoid set of constraints as normal. Not that i want to follow any pre-existing script in responding. I think this restrictive, inagination devoid monoculture of corporate pap and shills for it ..


A factor that is confusing..people of my general type I finally understand, see the world as Real or as The World on TV or Online with this strict boundary where unless: 1) you commit a crime; 2) are the victim of if not a crime, some sort of grotesque fraud or 3) do something super awesome, your name shouldn’t be out there or in papers. I totally get the revulsion journalist/artist couple Yasha Levine/Evgenia Kovda (whom I have found very helpful over the years) feel around influencer culture.
I had swiftly concluded that it is definitely not the third (the awesome..) and my contention is that it’s definitely not the first or were that tje case, go ahead. I am agnostic on the second.

But I definitely will change my behaviors from here on out because it seems to be happening on autopilot. I had a pretty healthy brain in the July of 2011 and by Dec of 2011 I was a wreck.

It was this bad rollout of technology..or something like that. And I like my colleagues and don’t blame them ever, but I care very little about placating dishonest systems.

I will be okay because i was pretty healthy and I will get rid of annoying stuff. My life is far from the action and i like it that way.