PORT OF CALL? DEPENDS!

so…i guess the diaper swaddled commando-in-chief won’t be satisfied until the pyrrhic victory of navy service members (warfighters?) sporting Depends.

i see legos, mocking. i suppose i imagined an empire collapsing with more bravado—this is so inelegant.

BURN.HAM: “So, after fires 🔥 … come floods.” 🌊

perez hilton.

1://blackhat/blackjack/21.orca^2

CODE.POEM.1 WITH VARIATIONS 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 ,1.4, 1.5 & 1.6

1.1

HOW TO READ THE NEWS

c: it’s not that
the lettuce is sick—
the stomachs are:
read the news
in reverse
in up:\\side/down
land::


1.2

c: // Label: Initial program entry point
it.isNot(lettuce.isSick()); // Boolean check: false
stomachs.isSick() = true; // Assign state: the bug is in the host

// Command execution
Read(News).reverse();
ExecutePath("up:\\side/down"); // Mixed escape characters causing syntax path error
land::Exit(); // Scope resolution: calls function inside 'land'


1.3

// HOW TO READ THE NEWS

c:
if (!lettuce.is_sick) {
stomachs.state = SICK;
}

news.read().reverse();

// Escaped backslashes (\\) and path division (/)
void* location = (void*)"up:\\side/down";

land::


1.4

// HOW TO READ THE NEWS

c:
if (lettuce.isSick == false) {
stomachs.status = "sick";
}

News.read().reverse();

// Protocol connection and directory navigation
connect("up://side\\down");

land::

<algorithm>


1.5

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <algorithm>

// Environment state: The reality context people are unaware of
struct WorldState {
bool is_upside_down_land = true; // Most people don't know this is true
};

class NewsInterpreter {
private:
WorldState world;

// Rule 1: Subconscious remapping of decoy concepts to real concepts
std::string decodeHiddenMeaning(std::string text) {
std::string decoy = "lettuce is sick";
std::string reality = "stomach is sick";

size_t pos = text.find(decoy);
while (pos != std::string::npos) {
text.replace(pos, decoy.length(), reality);
pos = text.find(decoy, pos + reality.length());
}
return text;
}

public:
void processNews(const std::string& raw_news) {
std::cout << "--- RAW NEWS RECEIVED ---\n";
std::cout << "\"" << raw_news << "\"\n\n";

if (world.is_upside_down_land) {
// Alert the reader to the reality context
std::cout << "[SYSTEM ALERT]: You are in Upside Down Land!\n";
std::cout << "[ALERT ACTION]: Information must be flipped / read in reverse.\n\n";

// Step 1: Uncover true concept ("lettuce is sick" -> "stomach is sick")
std::string remapped = decodeHiddenMeaning(raw_news);

// Step 2: Flip / Reverse the information
std::string flipped_news = remapped;
std::reverse(flipped_news.begin(), flipped_news.end());

std::cout << "--- REINTERPRETED TRUTH (REVERSED) ---\n";
std::cout << "\"" << flipped_news << "\"\n";
} else {
// Standard reading if not in upside down land
std::cout << "--- STANDARD INTERPRETATION ---\n";
std::cout << "\"" << raw_news << "\"\n";
}
}
};

int main() {
NewsInterpreter reader;

// The headline distributed to the unaware public
std::string headline = "read the news: the lettuce is sick";

reader.processNews(headline);

return 0;
}


1.6

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

struct World {
bool is_upside_down_land = true;
};

class MindState {
private:
World& world;

// Inverts the specific concept when in Upside Down Land
std::string translateTruth(std::string text) const {
std::string decoy = "lettuce is sick";
std::string reality = "stomach is sick";

size_t pos = text.find(decoy);
while (pos != std::string::npos) {
text.replace(pos, decoy.length(), reality);
pos = text.find(decoy, pos + reality.length());
}
return text;
}

public:
MindState(World& w) : world(w) {}

void processNews(const std::string& news_feed) {
std::cout << "[PERCEPTION]: \"" << news_feed << "\"\n";

if (world.is_upside_down_land) {
std::cout << ">>> [BRAIN ALERT]: WE ARE IN UPSIDE DOWN LAND! <<<\n";
std::cout << ">>> Reinterpreting 'lettuce is sick' -> 'stomach is sick' <<<\n";

std::string true_cognition = translateTruth(news_feed);

std::cout << "[FINAL COGNITION]: \"" << true_cognition << "\"\n\n";
} else {
std::cout << ">>> [BRAIN ALERT]: TRUTH RESTORED. <<<\n";
std::cout << "[FINAL COGNITION]: \"" << news_feed << "\"\n\n";
}
}
};

int main() {
World current_world;
MindState person(current_world);

std::string news = "read the news: the lettuce is sick";

// --- PHASE 1: In Upside Down Land ---
person.processNews(news);

// --- PHASE 2: Truth is Restored ---
current_world.is_upside_down_land = false;
person.processNews(news);

return 0;
}

miracle of st. mary?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bIDm7dQ00so&pp=ugUEEgJlbtIHCQloAqO1ajebQw%3D%3D&ra=m

OH OH OH OH-ILLNESS!

ok so i know reading someone else’s ai search is boring however—here’s a theory i prompted on those food borne illnesses all in the news. i think they may be “caused” by the glp-1’s that the — (insert your word here) — are taking. food usually stays in your stomach 1-2 hours. the shot delays stomach emptying. this raises pH, but also negatively impacts your immune system. meaning: those shot or pill takers won’t be able to deal as well with food borne pathogens anymore. I AM NOT A DOCTOR // THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. i am just playing around with ai & we all know its tendencies.

how would having food for longer in the stomach negatively impact bodily processes like ph, immune responses, and other cellular systems that would normally activate in 1-2 hours after stomach emptying

When food remains in the stomach longer than usual, it alters the timing and environment of downstream cellular, chemical, and immune processes.
1. Stomach pH and Acid Regulation
* Prolonged Acid Production: The physical presence of food (distension) and protein fragments triggers stomach cells to continuously secrete hydrochloric acid (HCl) and pepsin.
* Heartburn and Reflux: When food sits longer, the accumulated acid mixes with digesting food to form a larger volume of acidic chyme. Combined with increased pressure inside the stomach, this higher acid volume increases the risk of gastroesophageal reflux (acid reflux/heartburn).
* Potential pH Buffering Issues: Normally, stomach pH drops below ~2.0 to sanitize food and activate digestive enzymes. If food sits for extended periods, the constant presence of unabsorbed nutrients can temporarily buffer (raise) pH higher than normal between meals, slightly impairing the stomach’s ability to kill incoming bacteria.
2. Immune System Responses & Microbial Balance
* Shift in Gut Microbiome: Slower transit time gives gut bacteria more time to ferment unabsorbed nutrients. While GLP-1 medications can increase beneficial species like Akkermansia muciniphila, severe slowing can lead to Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO), where bacteria normally restricted to the large intestine back up and multiply in the small intestine.
* Suppression of the "Migrating Motor Complex" (MMC): Between meals, the digestive tract performs a sweeping wave called the MMC—an "immune and motility housekeeper" that clears out undigested debris and excess bacteria. Keeping food in the stomach longer delays or suppresses this wave, making it easier for microbes to accumulate where they shouldn't.
* GALT (Gut-Associated Lymphoid Tissue) Activation: Over 70% of the immune system resides in the gut. Stagnant food or microbial shifts can irritate the gut lining, triggering localized inflammatory signaling pathways (such as TNF-alpha or interleukin releases).
3. Cellular and Metabolic System Shifts
* Delayed Incretin and Bile Release: Normally, when food enters the small intestine 1–2 hours post-meal, it triggers cholecystokinin (CCK) to release bile from the gallbladder and pancreatic enzymes. Delayed emptying postpones this signal, which can slow down fat absorption and alter gallbladder emptying (slightly increasing the risk of gallstones).
* Delayed Incretin and Nutrient Cascades: The metabolic cascade where cells signal satiety, absorb amino acids, and store glycogen is shifted on a delayed timeline. This isn't inherently damaging, but it flattens nutrient spikes into a slow, continuous trickle.


recently there is an influx of bacterial food infections in the news--let's hypothesize that a large majority of the population in the U.S. is taking semaglutides or synthetic hormones like wegovy and ozempic. are they potentially more susceptible then to food borne bacterial infections that may normally have not been a problem before?

Hypothetically, if a majority of the population were on GLP-1 medications like Wegovy or Ozempic during an influx of foodborne pathogens, yes, people would be systematically more susceptible to certain infections and experience worse outcomes.

While GLP-1s do not suppress the systemic immune system (like steroids or chemotherapy do), their primary physiological effect—delayed gastric emptying—fundamentally alters the body's first line of defense against foodborne bacteria.

1. The Stomach Acid Barrier is Bypassed
Your stomach is designed as an antimicrobial chamber. Its highly acidic environment (pH 1.5 to 2.0) neutralizes most ingested pathogens before they reach the rest of the body:

* Acid Neutralization: When food sits in the stomach for extended hours on a GLP-1 drug, the continuous presence of nutrients buffers and raises the stomach's pH.

* Pathogen Survival: Bacteria like Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, and Campylobacter are sensitive to stomach acid. A less acidic environment allows a much higher percentage of ingested bacteria to survive the stomach phase and pass alive into the small intestine, where they cause infection.

2. Slower Transit = Extended Incubation Time
Normally, the stomach empties food into the small intestine within 1 to 2 hours, and rapid intestinal transit helps push pathogens out before they can colonize the gut wall.

* Increased Bacterial Load: When food remains stagnant in the stomach or upper gut for 4 to 8+ hours, bacteria have the time, temperature (body temp: 98.6°F), and nutrient-rich environment needed to multiply exponentially.

* Lower Infectious Dose Needed: Bacteria that normally wouldn't infect someone because the body swept them away before they could multiply (or because acid destroyed them) can proliferate inside stagnant food in the stomach.

3. Severe Dehydration Risk & Diagnostic Confusion
If an outbreak occurred, GLP-1 users would face two distinct clinical complications:

* Compounded Dehydration: Both foodborne gastroenteritis and GLP-1 medications frequently cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. A foodborne infection on top of a GLP-1 drug leads to rapid, severe fluid loss, increasing the risk of acute kidney injury. 

* Delayed Diagnosis: Because "Ozempic side effects" (sulfur burps, nausea, abdominal pain) mirror food poisoning, patients are far more likely to dismiss early infection symptoms as routine medication adjustments, delaying proper medical care. 

4. Impaired Gut Clearance (Suppressed MMC Waves)
In a healthy gut, the Migrating Motor Complex (MMC) acts as an "intestinal housekeeper," triggering electrical sweeping waves to clear out undigested food and bacteria.

By constantly keeping the stomach partially full, GLP-1 drugs suppress this sweeping motion. This lack of motility prevents the body from naturally flushing out bacterial toxins, making the duration and severity of the foodborne illness worse.

who is angel archer

Does Silicon Valley dream of Philip K Dick?Illustration by The Red Dress

Financial Times US
Aug 08, 2026
Beset by rogue AIs, erratic billionaires and wild space fantasies, our present feels less like classic science fiction than the glitchy unreality of Dick’s 1960s visions. It’s time we woke up, say Henry Farrell and Dan Wang

Elon Musk took a giant leap into a science-fiction future this summer as SpaceX completed the biggest initial public offering in history. The rocket company had claimed it would help humanity ascend in stages from building orbital AI data centres to Mars colonies and eventually a “Kardashev IIlevel civilization” — one so technologically advanced it could encase the sun to capture its entire energy output.

Amid all the excitement, there were familiar notes. Silicon Valley likes to dress its ambitions in the glistening garb of science fiction from the 1950s, when authors such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke spun tales of humanity spreading through the stars.

But what kind of future are we really hurtling towards? Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be. It is Dick’s far weirder sensibilities that offer the better guide to Silicon Valley today.

Dick created queasy worlds where everything seems to teeter on collapse. His novels themselves often threatened to unravel — featuring convoluted plots, ideas sometimes leading nowhere and misogynistic portrayals of women, all wrapped up in unenviable prose. Drugs and financial exigencies help explain the rushed writing; he could not have worked on six novels in 1964 without massive abuse of amphetamines. Regular lurches into paranoia help explain why his legacy was uneven. The list of people Dick denounced to the FBI includes Polish writer Stanisław Lem, as well as literary critics Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson.

Dick died in 1982, mostly having failed to achieve significant literary appreciation. He was not a good writer for his time. But he is a great writer for ours.

Technology in Dick’s world is invasive and glitchy, sometimes telling us that it refuses to work, or holding us to ransom. At the start of his 1969 novel Ubik, the apartment door smugly demands a payment for opening and closing. The protagonist, after losing the negotiation, decides to unscrew the door from its frame, prompting the latter to threaten a lawsuit. When characters in Dick’s world yell at the TV, the TV sometimes yells right back. The speech modules of our personal devices don’t yell, but they are beginning to combine alert attention with dim-witted obsequiousness, anticipating our needs while profusely apologising for irretrievably wiping our database.

Machines can be mistaken for humans and humans for machines. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the basis of the film Blade Runner, human bounty hunters come to resemble the soulless androids they hunt down for money. In the movie, as in many of Dick’s short stories, they are unsure whether they might be androids themselves.

Dick’s fascination with the fragility of reality and what it means to be human stemmed from deep conviction and a mental breakdown. His speech-turned-essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” revealed that the two questions that fascinated him were “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Society is starting to grapple with AI psychosis, when people mistake predictive text algorithms for friends, boyfriends and girlfriends. Maybe they don’t want to know better.

Above all, it is Dick’s understanding of political economy that is urgently relevant today, as Trump-produced instability is compounded by AI-generated unreality.

An unholy tangle of elites tends to hover over every Dick novel: corporate titans who have created new technologies, property developers who own a chunk of Mars or a demesne in California, conglomerates managed by charismatic founders. Though some government authorities are checked out (replaced by androids), others run technology-fuelled police states that reduce citizens to bundles of data that can be monitored and eliminated.

These elites are smart and conniving but prone to a particular kind of selfdeception. They imagine that they are entangled in the plots of some mastermind who is even more sinister than they are. Dick’s most brilliant move is to reveal that the malign forces reshaping the world are in fact petty, self-obsessed and jealous beings.

In Ubik, nearly everyone dies soon after the book’s opening. The bodies of the former employees of Runciter Associates are stored in cryogenic facilities that allow them to imagine a shared world into being.

As they try to unravel the mystery of their death, the characters are devoured by a seemingly terrifying force. It turns out to be a rather disturbed adolescent demanding their attention. That may seem painfully familiar to Americans whose cable news and social media

feeds are all Donald Trump, all the time. A similar revelation anchors Flow My

Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). The novel portrays Jason Taverner, a celebrity and member of an elite that is genetically enhanced for brains and beauty. He wakes up one day to a world in which no one knows who he is. Taverner was undone not by one of his peers but by a troubled fan who has consumed a drug that warps reality. In our world too, the feedback loops of fame have become increasingly deranged. It isn’t just pop stars but venture capitalists and CEOs whose sense of the real is inexorably chiselled away by the attentions of their adorers and execrators.

The fusion of business and hallucination reaches its peak in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), in which a business tycoon returns from the stars, promising to fulfil the wishes of everyone who steps into the fantasy worlds that he has created. Eldritch’s every move threatens to destabilise the existing corporate and political order. Those who use his product, a drug called Chew-Z, find themselves plunged into worlds that revolve around Eldritch, infecting them with his blurred vision, alienation and despair. Though Elon Musk has reportedly been a prolific drug user, he has not yet released his own variety of dope.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Freeman Dyson speculated about megastructures that could encircle whole stars to capture their energy, before dismissing the idea as “a little joke”. Now such ideas inspire not just science-fiction novels but SpaceX’s business plans. Wild speculative fiction has become the fuel of wild financial speculation. Morgan Stanley projects that SpaceX’s revenue could reach $3.4tn by 2040, presumably the year that these particular stock analysts expect to retire. Investors are still shorting SpaceX despite it reporting higherthan-expected revenue this week.

Grand visions of technological transformation are everywhere, and everywhere they hide realities that combine extraordinary moneymaking schemes with bizarre beliefs. On the one hand, Marc Andreessen’s venture capital partnership funds gambling apps and a start-up promising to “cheat on everything”; on the other, the Silicon Valley Trump whisperer promises that our descendants will “live in the stars”, writing his own quasi-religious credo, complete with “patron saints”. Peter Thiel combines a superb record of picking tech winners with an obsession with the eschaton; he has brought his gloomy discourses on the nature of the Antichrist to the doorstep of the Vatican. Sam Altman says that thanks to AI, we “are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish”.

Yet it is perhaps Mark Zuckerberg who is trying hardest to build a universe that Dick invented as a cautionary tale. The chief executive of Meta is working on an AI version of himself that can interact with employees, perhaps so he won’t have to. Zuckerberg’s exhortations, however, have so far failed to win over Meta employees asked to allow all of their clicks to be recorded so that they can train their own AI replacements.

All of these are Dickish characters. We live in a future that he would recognise immediately. Billionaires have dreamt up alternative realities that they try to pull everyone into, constructing homegrown myths of religions from apocrypha. We are building AI that seems so close to human as to even confuse its creators, while it often fails at basic human tasks. The political order is trying to co-opt the rising business elites — or is it the other way around?

Dick’s political bugaboo of Richard Nixon may be farcically reincarnated as Donald Trump. The historian Gary Wills described Nixon’s personal tragedy of talent and resentment in his 1970 book Nixon Agonistes. Trump’s dark promises to restore order are not nearly as psychologically interesting, but they have been much more consequential in practice. Like Arnie Kott, the corrupt and venal union leader in Martian TimeSlip (1964), Trump has tried to turn back time and failed. The rest of us are trapped with Trump in his pretend universe where he won the election in 2020, while government policy falls into dank memes and decay. Instead of being made great again, America has become poorer, weaker and meaner. Our fate might have more dignity if Trump were less petty than he is.

Back in 1976, Ursula K Le Guin compared Dick to a “homegrown Borges”, whose subject matter was “reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation”. He would be better recognised had he not been trapped in self-created theological and existential labyrinths after suffering his breakdown in the 1970s.

We live once more in an era that doesn’t make sense, however hard we look for some grand order. Dick’s combination of verve and madness in confronting the problems of the 1960s — Vietnam, suburbia, the cold war, drugs — holds three key lessons for today.

First, our business and political elites are not paranoid enough, or at least not paranoid in the right way. Western leaders spend plenty of time fearing the designs of the fearsomely technocratic Chinese Communist Party. Though that may be merited, they should also dwell on far weirder threats: predatory imaginary realities, billionaires reshaping people’s information environments around their own alienation, machines that could be mistaken for human (and often are). Politicians obsess too much over ordinary geopolitics rather than the technologies and corporate interests that might devour their world.

Second, technology can still be an ally for human ends. Dick’s androids are not necessarily antagonistic towards their human progenitors. In Vulcan’s Hammer (1960), the novel’s equivalent of GPT-7 achieves sentient consciousness and decides to work with humanity in order to prevent the emergence of GPT-8. Dick’s aliens (his technological visions in another guise) tend to be friendly towards humanity; if they pose any threat, it is towards humanity’s political oppressors. Technology might be glitchy and churlish in Dick’s world. It also has a purposiveness that sometimes fits surprisingly well with people’s own purposes.

Third, and most importantly, these purposes should be built from the bottom up. We are confused by and entangled in the science-fiction futures that tech elites have dreamt up for us, demanding that we assent to their strange beliefs about humanity’s destiny amid the stars, the coming of the eschaton, the birth of conscious artificial intelligence, perhaps all at once. More traditional elites, with their self-serving nostalgia for a past world that was never as solid as they believed, aren’t any better as guides.

We need to find our way back to reality: in Dick’s description, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Dick’s last novel describes his own madness from the outside through the eyes of Angel Archer, the one sympathetic and deeply rendered woman in all his work. She concludes that the only way out is through holding on to what is solid, and building up from small relationships.

Salvation is found in the ridiculous and the small — in Ubik, God takes the form of a spray can. It is also to be found in the people around us. Le Guin says that Dick is like Dickens in treating the “honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people” as the bedrock of the world. The disturbed child in Martian Time-Slip begins to grow out of his madness when an aboriginal Martian brings him into communion by passing him a cigarette.

Much of what we used to believe in has gone away. Much of what obsesses us now might go away if only we stopped believing in it. The hypnotic powers of Trump and Musk are often a phantasm, losing their pull if people decline to be entranced.

Instead of gazing upwards to find our glorious cosmic destiny, we should be looking closer to home. What are the people around us doing to build things up, brick layered and mortared carefully on brick? How can we make solid connections between the communities we live in and the bigger structures of the world? How can technology be put to work for human ends, rather than becoming an end in itself? Those are the kinds of questions that helped guide Dick out of his madness. They can help guide us out of ours, too.

Henry Farrell is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author with Abraham Newman of ‘Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy’. Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of ‘Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future’

on 7/7/17 at 4:37pm pacific time you were removing a splinter.

—photos algo