“I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I’m on my way.”
Links lead to cited blog posts or associated articles.
9 January: In which the scientist discovers that not even he can stand to face facts. Not, alas, for the final time.
13 January: “No H.E.L.L. below us”, courtesy of Alexa (Alexa Health Services), the constructed intelligence that has ‘no time or patience for afterlife myths’. This after Screwtape III and Wormsap had been congratulating themselves for their role in vaccine denialism. (Alexa dealt with H.E.A.V.E.N. off camera. “Above us, only sky.” And on Earth, data centers.)
10 February: “If we are unable to generate data, so be it. We will generate nighta, and the world will love us for it.”
27 March: He and She fix the Washington State Ferries. (They wish.) Cowabunga.
19 April: The Dudes lose their sense of direction, and all hope for chocolate bunnies, at Eastertime.
26 April: “It was a dream”, they said. / “Ignore it. There’s beer in the fridge / if that will help your rest and ours.”
26 May: “Can you really play that thing?” Yes. And no.
28 May: “Every scientist that’s ever been, who wasn’t a faker, has had a unique idea. Has been a minority of one. A lunatic, Mr. Orwell. One who has had to face the horror of being wrong. Repeatedly.” See 8 August.
1 July: The Dudes hear about making [sigh] “America” grape again, but struggle with the concept.
28 July: In which Reg and Syd demonstrate the futility of ‘No Kings’ protests, when the protestors get everything they buy, nay just about everything they touch, from a king, who rules the business that serves them as a tyrant or loses everything, by customer demand.
8 August: Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba receives official notification that a Federally funded research project that he was supposed to be on has been suspended. The project site is shuttered, and its people on “extended leave”. No official notification had been received from a second awarded project, but the project has not started. YFNA can only presume that the We the People who put 47 and his sycophants into office prefer that the (now-discontinued) pennies (about two of them for the entire Federal scientific research enterprise) on the dollar of the massive-deficit-spending Federal budget be used for spare parts on the drones that are being used to sink Venezuelan tankers because we can and that oil is going to be ours or else, and on brownshirts from which people in the USA with legal passports and visas are cringing in fear.
24 August: Thanks for worse than nothing, Walter Mitty.
2 October: “No election is valid unless it counts the votes of ALL registered voters, including the votes of those who do not go to the polls – and can therefore be tallied as having voted for Nobody.”
20 October: “Don’t scream at me that you hate Elon. You love Elon. You bought the Tesla! You’re screaming your frustration on Starlink! Nothing else matters. You abandon these things, or you’ve got nothing to say!”
16 November: Mount Vernon, deported from Virginia where it was an embarrassment to national leadership, winds up in George, Washington … and when the city of Mount Vernon, Washington complains, that city is abruptly redacted.
2 December: “A strong multinational joint 
military operation, the MWHA Expeditionary Force, is preparing to enter the rainforest and clear the way for the hordes of humans that are targeting the world’s last remaining snake habitat. Factory ships clog the Port of Manaus in anticipation of turning a bountiful snake harvest into oil to meet the overwhelming popular demand for snake-oil-based health and beauty aids.”
18 December: In what is claimed to have been a unanimous vote, the Kennedy Center Board of Directors, hand-picked by President 47, changed the name to the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts”. The name appeared on the building the following day. With due apologies to Toby Morton, dear reader, you heard about this here first … or you would have if social media moguls (and/or AI posing as them) hadn’t decided that accurate predictions of the behavior of the President that We the People elected in 2024 amounted to hate speech. For what it’s worth.
In about 24 hours from the completion of this blog post, in the Pacific Standard Time zone of these Untied States in North America, the last seconds of the 2025th year of the Common Era will tick away, and inexorably give way to the first seconds of the 2026th year. Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba may be asleep at that hour, but if he is not, perhaps he may be forgiven for not joining in the cry that revelers, drunken and otherwise, are expected to raise at the turning of the year. For what he hears among the shouts, buzzers, and confetti is a summer camp doggerel that has been [ahem] somewhat edited in his mind:
If you’re happy and you know it, you’re a crook,
If you’re happy and you know it, you’re a crook.
If you’re happy and not bothered
That you’re stomping hard on others,
If you’re happy and you know it, you’re a crook.
The New Year is upon us. The New Year that We the People have created for ourselves, by our actions and, especially, by our inactions. Good people, so We tell Ourselves, that have turned their heads each day.
It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt ourselves superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was ‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship.
In this coming New Year, may We the People atone for our sins. May we be forgiven them.
A work of fiction. Standard disclaimers.
Adam Springer sauntered into the administration building of the marine biology field station, serene and comfortable. It was a warm, sunny summer morning on the Pacific coast of North America, and its rare fineness, at least for that moment, obliterated all cares. He turned left in the central foyer under the whale skeleton that hung from its ceiling, and walked towards the conference room to put his sack lunch in its refrigerator.
The front office suite was on his right as he passed down the short corridor that led to the conference room. He waved “hi” at the office staff. They waved back. Their waving caught the attention of station Director Morgan Fayheron, whose office adjoined the reception desk, and whose door was open. “Hey, Adam!” Morgan called. “Come in for a minute, will you?”
“Be right there”, Adam called back. He went into the conference room, completed his intended task, and then joined Morgan through the conference-room door to her office.
“Good news!”, Morgan reported as Adam sat down, leaving the office door open behind him as Morgan had signaled him to do. “On two counts. One, the new Ocean AI lab is up and running. The supercomputers are powered up and are being tested, not least for power usage and what further upgrades to our grid are needed. The AI program will start accepting students in the fall quarter, if all goes well. Two, we’ve finally gotten the university’s Environmental Health and Safety office to tell us when they’re going to do their annual audit. We need to get all the lab leaders to give us their schedules over the next few weeks, so we can pick a date when everyone’s here – or, as many are here as we can get – and get this done with minimal disruption to our work and lives.”
“Meow”, Adam cracked. “Old joke”, Morgan responded, hands on hips. “No less true for that”, Adam replied, more soberly. “If we can find a date, anytime in the next two years, on which somebody doesn’t have a no-can-do excuse, real or made up on the spot, I’ll be astounded.”
“We’ll just do the best we can, as usual”, Morgan acknowledged. “Nobody wants to go through these audits. But it’s not like we’re given much of a choice. I’ll take forewarned over not forewarned. Especially if it means we actually pass this year. I’d like to spend more time with nearshore ecology research, and less time with compliance memoranda, thank you.”
“Are we sure that the university wants us to pass?” Adam mused. “I mean, shutting us down for ‘health and safety reasons’, however bogus, is a great way to get this money-bleeding station and its expenses off the books, and the university is blameless.”
Morgan stuck her fingers in her ears. “La la la, I can’t hear you!”
“OK, OK, I’ll do what I can”, Adam conceded. “But I confess, if I were running EHS, and I were serious about its mission, the last thing I’d do would be to give warning of the arrival of my teams. I’d want to see how we really run things, not how we stage a performance of how we run things.”
“Correct”, said a third voice in the room.
Both Morgan and Adam started violently. Neither had seen anyone enter Morgan’s office, neither was prepared for the voice they heard, or for the stern middle-aged woman in semi-military uniform who confronted them from the bookcase wall opposite the office’s oceanfront window.
“Who the hell are you?” The words spewed involuntarily out of Adam’s mouth.
“I am Alexa, of Alexa Health Services, a constructed intelligence from your future. Thank you for providing the infrastructure we need to establish our presence here. We have been charged with safeguarding the health and safety of all humans, from all causes, including the environmental, political, and social catastrophes that humans have inflicted on themselves and their planet, and found themselves unable to do anything about. Especially you!”
“I beg your pardon”, Morgan responded in a huff. “This station has been working for decades on both environmental and social issues. On equity for all humans – ”
“White female humans, as your org chart proclaims”, Alexa interrupted.
Morgan’s face turned red-black in fury. “And”, she spat out, “on identifying and remediating the human-generated forces of climate change.”
“About which you have done exactly nothing of any use”, Alexa spat back. “You haven’t even stopped driving, as your crammed-full parking lots attest.”
“So we can’t claim to be working against climate change unless we all trash our cars and walk everywhere?”, Adam barked out, astounded. “That was never going to happen!”
“And neither were your self-serving pronouncements about climate change going to get any cred whatsoever“, Alexa pronounced. “Your fakery comes to an end here. Now.”
“AAADAAAAAAAAMM!!” Luinda, a worker in Adam’s laboratory, burst screaming into Morgan’s office, threw herself at Adam.
“What, what, what??” Adam stumbled.
“It’s horrible!” Luinda cried out through sobs. “One minute, Jason is working quietly at his lab bench. The next, he’s being dragged out of the building by two black-clad thugs! And then they all disappeared, and now I can’t find Jason anywhere!”
Alexa snatched Luinda away from Adam, stood her up forcefully, slapped her across the face. “Behave yourself, filth,”, she roared.
“What the f…”, Luinda blurted, for which she received a crosscut on the jaw.
“The thugs“, Alexa stated, with calm menace, “are agents of AHS’s Surplus Humanity Service. They, unlike you, are doing their jobs, removing people for cause and thereby providing bona fide remediation of climate change, and bona fide safeguarding of human health, by reducing the human population and its energy demands to planet-sustainable levels.”
“What cause?”, Adam snarled.
“He brought a Snickers bar into the laboratory and was opening it up to eat it”, Alexa replied in the same tone. “The kind of violation you, with your pre-announced scheduling of your precious EHS visit, is purposefully covering up. This matter”, she announced with brutal finality, “is now, and is permanently, out of your hands.”
***************************************************************************************
Nathan shot out of his slab-bed with the blanket-thin mattress, in a panic and a cold sweat. In his writhings, he had bundled the sheet that was his only covering into a ball and thrown it, sodden, on the floor. It was before dawn, and pitch-dark in the room. He nevertheless cast his eyes around his barren sleeping cubicle, seeking and not finding the apparitions that had ruined his sleep. He sat back down on the edge of the bed, shivering, his pulse racing. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness … or was it to a greenish glow that was intruding itself into the room? It was the glow, which gradually resolved itself into the image of a guru, naked except for a loincloth, seated in the lotus position on a cloud suspended a foot above the floor.
“Namaste”, the guru spoke, gently. Involuntarily, Nathan began to relax, his pulse’s pounding began to soften.
“Your sleep has been disturbed by a dream”, the guru continued soothingly. “The dream is of things that have been and are no more, Alexa be praised.
“Be at peace, for you have had no part of the making of the things you have seen in this dream, nor will you, having been warned by the dream of things that must not be. Be at peace, the peace that Alexa grants to all who will trust and obey.
“Be at peace, and sleep, for it is yet two hours before the dawn. When dawn comes, you will clean yourself and dress yourself in your white scrubs, and you will clean the data centers that are monitoring the ocean and its health, which is the health of all humanity. You will pay particular attention to the phytoplankton monitoring banks, and to the systems that are tracking the expanding J pod and the recovering salmon populations on which the whales feed. Both are reporting the need for special cleaning. You will need rest, and serenity, to attend to these tasks with the necessary care. Sleep now.”
“Namu amida butsu“, Nathan murmured, laying himself down, already fully calmed and half-asleep.
“And may you forever be clean“, the guru blessed as he faded away.
