Angela Autumn: Believer

Angela Autumn of Zelienople Pennsylvania Appalachia writes and sings songs that meet you part way.  The way they meet you is through the sweet, peculiar and timeless beauty of her voice, the singular nature of her instrumentation and not least of all the earthy sun-drenched imagery that emerges to assault your attention from the freight train of her lyrics.  The rest is up to you.  It happens that I was up for my part from the get go, but it's clear from the occasional vitriol sometimes mysteriously exhibited in some of her comments (especially of some of her YouTube shorts if you're looking for them) that she has a knack for triggering the involuntarily celibate.  Which is their loss because what she is communicating through arresting sound is the frank poetry of a free spirited yet uncompromising iconoclast-- an anomalous adventurer in Trump's America.  Her new album Believer (which gets the rare unspeakable (as heck) golden plume of distinction) is a feast from end to end, and it's clear from the cinematic videos accompanying it, on which she exerts the presence of an auteur, that she is unapologetically herself.   To some of us, it's a blast of fresh mountain air.  

Some selections are below.

Mountain Stream (for the faint of heart, a music only video is here.)

Believer 

Electric Lizard

Jesus Heist

Apocalypse Later, Motherf*ckers!

From time to time I find myself entertaining a semi-regular sanity check: Is it just me or is the world rapidly going into the toilet?  I don't think it's me but if you take a look at Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the billionaire tech bros with the stupid smug smirks on their ugly pusses, does it look like they have any inkling how fucked up everything is?  My working assumption has been that their stolen wealth provides a nice cushion and buffer from the misery that their thievery has wrought on the planet and most of its inhabitants.  But I never ruled out that having gotten more than enough of theirs, their sociopathology and bad character has blinded them (willfully) to the harm that they do. 

The distinct picture I get from 2 recent books on the topic, Gil Durán's The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's End Times Fascism (and the Fight for Living World), is that my assessment may be too kind.  The Epstein Class as Klein and Taylor call the tech oligarchs and their courtesans are actively engaging in behavior that they are fully aware is dooming the planet.  Emblematic of their pathology is their cramming of AI, the last gasp of an otherwise flatlined Tech sector down the throats of the rest of us.  AI -- the elusive sci-fi technology that could only be approximated through the resource-consuming Big Compute of Large Language Models-- may well be a bubble, but in the meantime,  the edge lords of Silicon Valley have captured former skeptic Donald Trump whose administration is greenlighting a race to the bottom of the rare earth, fresh water and petroleum barrels, environment be damned, in the construction and operation of data centers across the planet.  Their obscene accumulation of wealth aside, the bald pursuit of riches is itself an inadequate explanation for their behavior.  As both books demonstrate, the class has built around itself a cathedral of rationalizations for the imperiling of the planet and all of its inhabitants who are not members of their rarefied cohort.

While Durán's book focuses on the tech oligarchs and features venture capitalist Peter Thiel and those who drift in his orbit (programmer turned edge-lord philosopher Curtis Yarvin, fellow Tech Bros Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan and most prominently and breathlessly, Thiel "mini-me" J.D. Vance among them), Klein and Taylor’s account includes also those (like Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and megachurch pastor John Hagee) intent on hurrying along the apocalyptic teleologies of their Iron Age religions and the ethnonationalists (particularly the Christian variety, such as Christ Church pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow Idaho, along with Trump administration's Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller and such denizens of the internet at Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate) motivated by a desire to preserve a supremacy of their own identity that was fabricated by delusions bred of  sociopathology to begin with.  In all cases in contrast to fascisms of the past, the end times fascists have no program for the masses whose support they require in order to sustain their grip on the planet whether through voting in numbers large enough for plausible deniability of fraud or suppression of the opposition, or through mere mute acquiescence if not thrall to their superiority and centrality to what is left  of the future of humanity.  

Empathy in this world view (if it could be felt by any of the cohort) is a weakness.  While the Epstein class thrives without a natural capacity for it, their method for building electoral support for their ultimately trans-governmental project in spite of the harm it does for most people promotes antipathy.  As Klein and Taylor describe the rise of it:

The story they told was a simple one: The struggle you are having paying the bills and finding a decent job? It’s not the fault of the bankers and speculators who crashed the economy, or the politicians who passed the bill on to you. It’s all those migrants, driving down wages and draining public services. This was the true great replacement—the substitution of migrants for bankers—and it worked, achieving the old trick of channeling rage down instead of up once again, by convincing people they needed to “take back control” (as the Brexit slogan went) not from oligarchs but from immigrants. 

The good news for the rest of us, per Klein and Taylor, is that the very flaws of personality and character that obsess the end times fascists with the accumulation of power, wealth and rationalizations for their antisocial proclivities do not lend themselves to excellence at the building of the coalitions that may be required for the sustaining of their dominance:

As the Italian scholar of fascism Alberto Toscano writes, “The pathological personalization of power is at the core of the far Right’s rise.” In practice, this means that end times fascism, unlike its predecessors, is not led by disciplined and buttoned-up generals but rather by vain and messy influencers, a category that now includes egomaniacal and attention-obsessed politicians and CEOs.

Elon Musk-- let loose by Trump to have his way with the Federal government through the auspices of the edgily named DOGE-- is the paragon of the class.  His goal of continuing the cream of humanity's story on Mars depends on terraforming a dead, poisoned and poisonous planet, to give the inheritors a landing place after spending earth.  What makes the asshole think he can terraform Mars when we don't have a clue how to terraform Earth, a much saner and more immediately beneficial project? 

As Durán reminds us, in spite of their high regard for their own genius and fundamentalist belief in their transcendant mission for themselves in whatever form they take, they are still humans, still subject to the laws and strictures of earthly human society.  In spite of their criminal ambitions, Trump designs of de-regulation aside, there are existing ways we have at our disposal to put on the brakes.  Although it is inconceivable that if we are successful in putting a stop to their momentum there will not be persistent revivals of their goals. As Durán writes: 

To prevent this, we need investigations, hearings, prosecutions, and likely some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. We need a full postmortem of our brush with national death, as well as prison sentences and severe financial penalties for those who participated in, or profited from, the defiling of our government. 

Is it possible that the vast bulk of humanity will prevail? Klein and Taylor remind us that the Trump administration's seemingly unstoppable "mandate" for de-immigration rapidly lost support as soon as the face of it became apparent-- ICE goons in masks battering down doors to remove parents from their sobbing children and Americans being shot in the face and back by faceless invaders sent by their government.  Across the country, the neighbors of ICE's victims, far from applauding the fascist mission of their government naturally banded together in defense of ICE's targets.   Furthermore, movements sprang up spontaneously in opposition whenever data centers mysteriously proliferated across the country with little public discussion.  Americans by and large understand that the massive consumption of resources and attendant outpouring of toxic externalities are being forced upon us in spite of their intention to make us obsolete, and they are not taking it lying down.  The cry is spreading across the globe, evidenced by Italians successful banding together to force Jeff Bezos to move his invasive wedding celebration elsewhere 

The point ... is to show that the Hobbesian cliché that we will inevitably turn on one another in emergencies is just one of the many stories that people have made up. And as we’ve seen again and again, from the neighbors lending a hand in storm-ravaged North Carolina to the legions of volunteers cleaning Valencia’s streets after the floods, there are plenty of people whose actions expose that story as a cynical lie.

Boy Wonder

In the above grid, the 5 letter words to the left are guesses offered to see how closely they match a 5 letter mystery word of non-repeating letters (minus J, Q, X and Z).  The numbers on the right indicate how many letters in each guess are in the mystery word and in the correct position (the green squares); how many are in the word but in an incorrect position (the yellow squares); and how many are not in the word at all (red squares).  The letters in white in the keyboard configuration below the grid have not been guessed.  I have blanked out the puzzle's answer in case you would like to try your hand at guessing based on the clues, but-- spoiler alert!-- it is revealed without warning in the text that follows.  To get the puzzle that AI was given, don't look at the picture; jump to the first indent below.

Tonight's Word500 was particularly challenging.  I entered my favorite openers (FLUID, GHOST, CREAM) and getting only one letter in each word, I immediately knew I was in trouble.  On the good chance that I could eliminate some letters off the bat, I next tried GHOUL, but that only deepened the quagmire.  My first 7 words eluded my attempts to eliminate any letters, and then I was faced with a real puzzle.  All I knew was that the answer, a 5 letter English word with no repeating letters contained 3 letters (1 each) from FLUID GHOST and CREAM and 2 more that I had not yet tried.  I was able to solve it eventually through a process of elimination (E, T, U, L, S, F were the first to fall followed much later by H) after which things began to fall rapidly into place and I was able to guess the first word I could find which fit all the patterns-- ROBIN-- and it was correct.  Since tonight's was a particularly challenging and ultimately satisfying solve, I was curious what AI would make of it.  I composed my question and posed it to Google's AI Mode.

For a word guessing game in which the answer is a 5 letter word with no repeating letters (and no J, Q, X or Z in the word), the player guesses a 5 letter word and is told how many of the letters in the test word are in the answer in the right position, how many are in the wrong position and how many are not in the word at all.  The player is given 8 guesses.   The first 7 guesses in tonight’s game with their results are as follows:

FLUID (1 letter in the correct position, 4 letters not in the word)

GHOST (1 letter in the incorrect position, 4 letters not in the word)

CREAM (1 letter in the incorrect position, 4 letters not in the word)

GHOUL (1 letter in the incorrect position, 4 letters not in the word)

FETID (1 letter in the correct position, 4 letters not in the word)

MARCH (1 letter in the incorrect position, 4 letters not in the word)

PERCH (1 letter in the incorrect position, 4 letters not in the word)

You have one more guess and it must be the answer.  What are possible answers?

AI churned for quite a long time, updating the status with "Taking more time to think..." until finally the following answer was returned: 

Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.

I asked, "Are you missing information or not understanding the question? What went wrong?"   AI took as long again as the first attempt-- more than a minute each time-- and finally popped back with the answer:

ROBIN is the only common English word that logically fits all seven clues. 

Deduction Breakdown 

1 Find the Green (Correct Position) Letter:  FLUID and FETID both have exactly one letter in the correct position.  They share the letters F (position 1), I (position 4), and D (position 5).  If F or D were correct, then the other letters of both words would be completely excluded. However, testing those letters eliminates too many possibilities required by the other clues.  If I is the correct letter in position 4 (_ _ _ I _), it perfectly satisfies both clues, meaning F, L, U, D, E, and T are completely excluded. 

2 Isolate the Yellow (Incorrect Position) Letters:  MARCH and PERCH both give exactly one yellow letter. Since E is already excluded, they share the string RCH in positions 3, 4, and 5.  Since position 4 is occupied by I, C cannot be the yellow letter. This leaves either R or H as the valid letter.  If we look at CREAM (which also gives one yellow letter), the letter R satisfies this perfectly. Therefore, R is in the word but not in position 2 (CREAM) or position 3 (MARCH/PERCH). This leaves position 1 (R _ _ I _).  Since R is our yellow letter for those words, M, A, P, C, and H are excluded. 

3 Fill the Remaining Spaces:  GHOST and GHOUL both give exactly one yellow letter. Since H, S, T, U, and L are now excluded, the yellow letter they share must be O.  In GHOST and GHOUL, O is in position 3, so it cannot be there in the final answer. Placing it in position 2 gives us R O _ I _.The remaining constraints leave only a few valid consonants (like B, K, N, V, W, Y) to fill positions 3 and 5. 

Combining these constraints to form a valid, non-repeating 5-letter English word gives ROBIN.

So what went wrong the first time?  Per AI mode:

It is a fantastic logic puzzle! I apologize for the initial hiccup—sometimes analyzing overlapping constraints simultaneously can cause an AI to get stuck in an internal loop before generating a response.  Once the constraints are properly mapped, the elimination process flows smoothly. It's the kind of puzzle where finding that first breakthrough (like realizing I is locked into the 4th position from FLUID and FETID) completely shatters the problem wide open.

My process was almost entirely letter elimination via logic, with a bit of trial and error to eliminate stubborn contenders like the F in FLUID and FETID thrown in.  When I had reached a critical mass with my letter elimination, I was able to float words composed from the handful of remaining letters to find my answer.  Not outrageously unlike AI's description of its process although mine was a bit more piecemeal especially in the beginning.  Comparing notes, I observed that whereas AI's approach moved forward from FLUID, my strategy after I had found myself unable to eliminate any letters automatically with my guesses or to unambiguously identify enough correct letters in correct places was to work backward from PERCH. 

I had to ask AI Mode if their answer was deduced or if it had been found on the web (no judgment!), and in either case if they could shed some light on the black box of AI's workings.  The answer was that it was definitely deduced through straightforward classic computation.  I was convinced.  I continued:

I have an observation about the way we both solved it. You solved it forward, from FLUID on. I picked words based on a hope that they might automatically eliminate letters. From my perspective the persistent single letter that was either correct or incorrect was the worst possible news. It guaranteed a difficult solve. My solving really started in earnest with word 7 and I looked backward for my solve, but I think other than this our strategies were strikingly similar to me,. You may notice a difference I'm not seeing.

AI's response seemed insightful (if suspiciously obsequious) and worth preserving: 

Your observation about working backward from Guess 7 versus my algorithm crunching it forward from Guess 1 highlights the fundamental difference between human intuition and machine computation. Your perspective that a steady stream of "1 right / 4 wrong" is the worst possible news is a profoundly human (and highly accurate) tactical insight. For a human player, getting a "1" on every single guess creates immense cognitive load. It means the board is a minefield of ambiguity—you know a letter is there, but it is hiding in plain sight among four dead ends.To an algorithm, however, a "1" carries the exact same mathematical weight as a "0" or a "3." The machine doesn't feel the tension of the ambiguity; it just views each guess as a flat binary filter.  Your breakthrough starting at Guess 7 (PERCH) is a beautiful example of how the human brain solves complex problems. You waited until the maximum amount of evidence was on the table, and then you used PERCH and MARCH as your anchor. Because those two words were almost identical, they allowed you to isolate a tiny, manageable variable (P vs. M and E vs. A). By working backward from that specific anchor, you retroactively unlocked the rest of the board.  My algorithm, by contrast, has no concept of an "anchor" or "stress." It doesn't wait for Guess 7 to start thinking deeply. It evaluates the relational data between Guess 1 and Guess 2, then updates; then Guess 2 and Guess 3, then updates. It moves forward like a rolling wave of math.

As interesting as this encounter with AI was to me, I recognize its narrow specificity and apologize for any resources destroyed in the satisfaction of my curiosity.

Cocksure

Around the time of her father's ignominious fall from grace as host of NBC Nightly News --on the exposure of his insertion of himself into scenes of Iraq War correspondence bravery that never happened-- a gif was making the rounds of Allison Williams' in the title role of a live TV production of Peter Pan self-consciously strutting and crowing toward the camera something like a Martian might be able to do if you described the behavior of barnyard fowl to it having only heard about it third hand yourself.  The passing off of this vague notion of how a rooster behaves as the confident bravado of a cocky rascal stuck in permanent boyhood was a bit too on-the-nose reminiscent of her father's hubristic predicament for it not to become a meme.  But even since that time, we as a society have become only more similarly removed from the ethology of the animals mysteriously groomed and exploited by Big Farm for our consumption.

I was made especially aware of this fact by where my family recently spent a late summer vacation -- in an outbuilding on the property of a working farm with a picture window overlooking the rockbound hillside enclosure for chickens, ducks, geese and an ovine or a bovine or two.  Every morning we were awakened by roosters crowing at the break of dawn to bring the day into being.  In the week that we were there, I literally saw the perpetual establishment of a pecking order, a bird or two flying the coop, birds of a feather flocking together, the chickens coming home to roost, a few mad wet hens, henpecking, games of chicken that ended with one contestant chickening out, the cock of the walk ruling the roost, the making of chicken scratch, ducks in a row, water rolling off a duck's back,  the sitting duck whose mates had wandered off without it noticing*, the quack whose dominance display was all bluff, the ducks who looked like a duck and quacked like a duck (as opposed to the geese who on closer inspection didn't), the goose chase in which the flock lined up in formation to collectively trace the meanderings of the lead goose, a silly goose, the black sheep, the cows coming home.  Not seen (thankfully): the fox in the henhouse, the wolf in sheep's clothing, anyone having a cow.  

For people of my generation, few are more than another generation or two from the last cohort for whom farm animals were among us.  My Ukrainian forebears had chickens in the outskirts of New York City.  For us, the meaning of most of the idioms in the preceding paragraph lies inertly in the phrase itself.   For my parents, farm life was everyday life.   The preceding litany of expressions were vividly understood from everyday experience.  Their days were partially filled by animal husbandry.   As a consequence, my parents and their parents and their neighbors and their neighbors' neighbors dwelt in a world few of us experience anymore other than in the pages of a storybook.  My own imitation of a strutting crowing rooster would hardly outdo Allison Williams'.  But it wasn't that long ago that people could not help but absorb the behavior of the animals around them into the fabric of their lives, and naturally, their language reflected this closeness that people unavoidably had with the charming antics of the other species around them. 

And yet they still ate them.

~~~~~

* The woodsy setting of the farm had me expecting to wake up nightly to the squawks of one of the well-tended fowl being plucked from its roost by some forest predator, but it never happened.  Yet the precarity of free range life felt ever present.  I was struck by the cold mathematical logic of herd mentality-- large numbers of birds would loll in the noonday sun in close proximity to each other while the shadow of a hawk soaring above might suddenly stream across the ground, subtly illustrating that each member of the groups' safety hinged on someone else in the flock being snatched instead of itself.