Trump and Hegseth sure do like the word, “lethal.” But it’s a meaningless word in the context of the modern world. How did U.S. lethality work out in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did all our warships and our stealthy fighters and bombers and our highly trained soldiers win us anything even marginally resembling a victory in those two countries? The four-year anniversary of Russia’s war against its much, much smaller neighbor, Ukraine, is fast approaching. How’s that working out for you, Vlad? Scheduled your victory parade for Red Square yet?

What the hell is happening over there in Ukraine? What the hell happened to us in Iraq and Afghanistan? With all our wealth, all our technological superiority, all the weapons systems we have spent decades building and equipping our army and air force and navy and marines with, why weren’t we able to roll into Afghanistan in 2001 after 9-11 and kick ass and take names and get our revenge and declare victory and get out of there? Why was “shock and awe” in Iraq such a dud?

I read something the other day that said a main battle tank like the U.S. Abrams facing enemy drones is estimated to have a 75-minute lifespan on the modern battlefield. Those Abrams we sent to Ukraine? They’re either dead or useless. Same for Russia’s main modern battle tank, the T-90. According to an authoritative Dutch open-source intelligence site called Oryx, it has been visually confirmed that Russia has lost 187 T-90 tanks since the war began in 2022. The Ukrainian army has destroyed them with American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles and another missile made by Sweden, the fire-and-forget NLAW. Ukraine has also used drones to destroy Russian tanks, dropping small explosive warheads down the commander’s cupola, or using drones to put anti-tank mines in their way.

I spent a few hours this afternoon reading the latest update on the Russia-Ukraine war from the Institute for the Study of War, which follows the war using open-source methods and reports from the battlefield gleaned from sources in Ukraine and Russian military bloggers. Scrolling through the ISW report, dated October 21, what you see is a depressing tableau of a pitiful helpless giant nibbling at Ukrainian front-line defenses all the way from the border with Russia to Kherson in the South.

One paragraph of the ISW report of the Russian fight for Pokrovsk – one paragraph – reads like this: “Russian forces attacked near Pokrovsk itself; north of Pokrovsk near Rodynske; northeast of Pokrovsk near Sukhetske, Krasnyi Lyman, Novoekonomichne, and Mykolaivka; east of Pokrovsk near Myrnohrad; southeast of Pokrovsk near Promin and Lysivka; south of Pokrovsk near Zelene; and southwest of Pokrovsk near Zvirove, Kotlyne, Udachne, and Molodetske on October 20 and 21.”

Expanding on that paragraph, ISW reports that a Ukrainian drone battalion commander described street to street fighting with small groups of Russian soldiers attacking Ukrainian drone operators and mortar crews one by one with “small arms.” ISW reports like that one go all the way from Kupyansk in northern Luhansk through Donetsk and outside of Bakhmut – remember Bakhmut? They’re still fighting a few miles outside of that piece of flattened Ukraine. And down the front lines the fighting goes, through Zaporizhia all the way to just outside Kherson.

Here is a description of a Russian assault on a town called Orikhiv in the Zaporizhia region: “Artillerymen and drone operators of the 4th Military Base (58th CAA); drone operators of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, including its 417th Reconnaissance Battalion and Unmanned Systems Company; and Molniya-2 loitering munition operators of the Russian Chechen Vostok-Akhmat Battalion are reportedly striking Ukrainian positions and forces near Mala Tokmachka.”

Got that? “For loitering munitions” read: drones. For “Unmanned Systems Company” read: drones. There are similar descriptions of actions by Ukraine’s forces. The war, along a front that is more than 600 miles long, is being fought with drones, mortars, artillery, and occasionally rifles. It’s modern, but it’s not. War today is still bullets and artillery shells and rockets and explosions and death.

So, we have one of the world’s big powers, a country with as many if not more nuclear weapons than the U.S. has, a country with a zillion barrels of oil under its ground, one of the countries that defeated the Nazi war machine, and what are they doing? They’re flying armed drones over Ukraine. They’re shooting mortars at positions held by Ukrainian soldiers that are so deeply dug-in that there are few, if any, casualties. Russia now has somewhere in the vicinity of 600,000 soldiers in Ukraine, many with training of only a few weeks.

Russian losses have been staggering. Politico reported last week in a story titled, “Russia bleeds troops for microscopic frontline gains,” that Russia has lost “281,550 soldiers in Ukraine in the first eight months of this year, according to a document that Ukrainian intelligence says contained leaked Russian data.” Based on Western intelligence estimates, The Economist estimates that there have between 1 million and 1.5 million Russians killed or wounded since February of 2022. The British Ministry of Defense estimates that about 250,000 Russian soldiers have been killed.

Those Russian soldiers were killed in the kinds of attacks that I just described happening all along the front lines. Ukraine can be said to be winning its war against Russia, even as they lose a kilometer here, a village there, because they have turned a 600-mile front line into one gigantic Battle of Bakhmut. Russia attacks and attacks and attacks again, all along the front and after two or three months, ISW reports that they now occupy this village in the north or that village in the south that less than a thousand Ukrainians once called home.

Meanwhile, Russia is sending rockets and drones into Ukraine by the hundreds on a nightly basis. They hit a kindergarten in Kyiv last night. ISW reports that Russia is carrying out “acts of sabotage and hybrid operations” in Poland and Romania and elsewhere in Western Europe. Russian operatives are attempting to booby-trap supply shipments into Ukraine with explosives. They’re flying jets over Estonian airspace. They’ve flown armed drones across the Polish border.

This is the war being waged by one of the world’s alleged “superpowers.” Their rockets destroyed a kindergarten. Armed Russian drones are flying into apartment buildings in Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson. They are killing Ukrainian civilians every single night. Russian soldiers are being sent to the frontlines with incomplete uniforms having spent less than a week shooting their AK-47’s in training. It’s no wonder that they are dying and being seriously wounded by the hundreds of thousands. Politico reports that Ukraine has recently captured 2,300 Russian soldiers. Almost 34,000 Russian soldiers are described by Russia itself as “missing.”

What happened to Putin’s big attack on Ukraine? His generals told him he would take Kyiv in five days. Today, restaurants and movie theaters are open in Kyiv. The government is functioning. The same Ukrainian president whom Putin thought he would force from office is still the country’s leader.

After nearly four years.

Warfare for big countries has become one huge Vietnam. Spend hundreds of billions. Commit millions of troops. Blow shit up. Invent and put new kinds of weapons into the war. Play the game of catch-up with remote controlled drones and computers that hack the enemy’s defenses. Shoot more artillery shells. Fire more missiles. Blow more shit up.

Where is the victory? Where are the Russian flags over Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson? What is Putin doing on the phone with Trump? He’s demanding that Ukraine give up territory that he cannot take having spent the lives of nearly 300,000 Russian soldiers this year alone. Trump, to his everlasting shame, actually listened to him in Anchorage, and then turned around and told President Zelenskyy what Putin said. Then he lectured Zelenskyy at the White House last week, telling him once again that he would have to give up Ukrainian land that his army has fought over for four years.

What kind of war is this? For Russia, it’s a losing war. For Trump, it’s a war that he cannot “end” in the way he thinks he has “ended” all the other wars he has hallucinated on his way to his hallucinated Nobel Peace Prize.

This is what happens to countries that have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out whole populations and turn tens of millions of square miles into inhabitable wasteland. They sit on those stockpiles of unusable bombs and missiles, they waste hundreds of billions on “defense” or on “war” in the way we wasted money and material and the blood of our human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Putin has wasted his soldiers and his rubles in Ukraine.

Then, Putin attacks his neighboring country, and with itchy fingers and visions of camouflaged sugarplums in his head and nothing else to do, Donald Trump goes to war against his own citizens. He commits tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars and his uniformed and armed soldiers to the streets of his own country.

That is what our military is doing today. Its soldiers are bopping down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in a cartoon version of a parade. Its generals are flying to a theater somewhere in Virginia so they can be lectured to by two cartoon characters in ill-fitting suits babbling about beards and haircuts and pushups and winning elections that were not won. Its soldiers are picking up garbage and raking leaves in its nation’s capital.

This is why big countries should not go to war. They will lose because the leaders of their armies are delusional ignorant fuckwits with too many gold bathroom fixtures and too much desperately unearned self-importance. It’s a recipe for disaster, a gigantic display of powerlessness by the powerful, and it’s happening right now in Ukraine and in the streets of the United States of America.

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They started by banning the teaching of critical race theory. Then they didn’t want to hear the word “slavery” anymore. Then it was DEI, anything that touched on the diverse history of our country. No more Black History month, no more talk about Tuskegee Airmen or the women who were crucial to the Manhattan Project. Whole shelves of books were removed from libraries.

Now the assault on our history by Donald Trump is being done with excavators that are ripping, crushing, and destroying by board and nail and wire and window, the East Wing of the White House.

Here is a list of recent presidents who somehow got through their terms in office without ordering the wholesale destruction of the building where they lived and worked: Harry Truman; Dwight D. Eisenhower; John F. Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson; Richard Nixon; Gerald Ford; Jimmy Carter; George H. W. Bush; Bill Clinton; George W. Bush; Barack Obama; Joe Biden. There were some minor changes – FDR put in an indoor swimming pool that later became the press room; Truman added a bowling alley; Gerald Ford had an outdoor pool installed; Jimmy Carter built an outdoor tennis court; Obama transformed the tennis court into a basketball court.

None of them drove two excavators onto the grounds of the White House and started ripping down its walls and windows, as Donald Trump began doing to the East Wing yesterday.

When Trump announced that he would construct a 90,000 square foot ballroom on White House grounds, he promised that the White House itself would not be touched. “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it but not touching it — and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of,” Trump told reporters in July. “It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

He was breathing unassisted at the time of that statement, so of course he lied.

The changes Trump has made to the White House could be charitably termed for recreational purposes. Trump ripped out the grass and flowers from the Rose Garden, paved the place, added outdoor tables with yellow-striped umbrellas and renamed it the “Rose Garden Club” where he has held dinners and lunches for members of the House and Senate from the Republican Party, and a dinner for billionaires who have promised donations to his ballroom.

That last event, by the way, is what is typically called a fund raiser. There has never been a fund raiser held at the White House previous to Trump’s September 15 “Legacy Dinner” for 130 business leaders and wealthy donors.

It’s always been something of an anachronism that the White House serves as both the Executive Branch headquarters of the government and the home of whichever president is in office. Great Britain is the only other country where the leader of its government lives and works in the same building, 10 Downing Street in the nation’s capital, London. You look at photographs of the interior of either the White House or 10 Downing Street and they show a rabbit warren of small offices, some of which are windowless, that house the people who work for the most powerful person in either country.

Trump appears to be in the process of transforming the White House into Mar a Lago North, adding gilded gimcrackery to the Oval Office and other rooms in the building. He bragged recently of replacing the floor of the interior passage leading to the Rose Garden with marble tiles, claiming that the previous floor was made of “Home Depot tiles that were cracking and 30 years old.” The artist’s rendering of the proposed ballroom shows a high-ceilinged space the exterior of which some architects have predicted will “dwarf” the rest of the White House.

The White House, it goes without saying, is not owned by Donald Trump. It belongs to the federal government and has traditionally been referred to as “The People’s House.” Numerous stories about the destruction of the East Wing have pointed out that Trump completely ignored the usual process, involving the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission on Fine Arts, for approving changes to the White House. Believing he can do anything he wants, anytime he wants, to anything or anyone he wants, Trump didn’t ask anyone for permission to alter the building which was built by the second president of the United States, John Adams, and was first occupied by Thomas Jefferson in 1801.

But that’s history, someone else’s history. Donald Trump doesn’t care about history. What he cares about is money. Here is what Trump said today at a luncheon for Republican Senators at the so-called Rose Garden Club: “You probably hear the beautiful sound of construction to the back. You hear that sound? Oh, that’s music to my ears. I love that sound. Other people don’t like it. When I hear that sound, it reminds me of money.”

Then he told another lie, because he is Donald Trump and he was still breathing without assistance: “In this case, it reminds me of lack of money because I’m paying for it,” he said.

What he’s going to use his Big Beautiful Ballroom for is fund raisers and state dinners. For Donald Trump, who has been selling access to himself at private dinners for one million dollars a head, even the state dinners will be fund raisers. He’ll charge countries who want their leaders to be honored at the White House, and he’ll sell tickets to people who want to attend the dinners and kiss his ass. He’s going to tack a gaudy, disgusting display of bad taste onto the history of our country and make billions of it. He’s Donald Trump. It’s what he does.

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Today is Tuesday, October 21, 2025 and the Republican Party continues to be completely fucked. Smiles, everyone! Smiles!

Because they had no plan other than, “Fuck you, Democrats!”, Republicans walked into a funding fight with no real exit strategy. For some insane reason, they believed they had the stronger message. They really did not. “We love firing government employees, fucking over blue states, and refusing to give tens of millions of people back their healthcare!” is the Cybertruck of political messaging minus the exploding battery.

Oh wait, we’ve reached the exploding battery part:

Three weeks into shutdown gridlock, some Senate Republicans are expressing openness to a controversial solution: nuking the filibuster.

“I know that’s being discussed,” Sen. Susan Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, told NOTUS. “I am a strong supporter of the filibuster, but obviously I’ll look at any plan that anyone puts out in order to reopen the government.”

Senate Republican leadership is not into this idea, but an increasingly vocal and growing number of Republicans are pushing for it.

What’s happening here? A few things. The massive No Kings rally on Saturday has the GOP rattled. They were assured it was going to flop or be violent or no one would notice. Instead, over 7 million people showed up and the entire world saw a peaceful protest…against Trump and his entire party.

That’s 2 million more than showed up in June and getting awfully close to that critical 3.5%. That would be the historic threshold where 3.5% of the population engages in protest/civil disobedience and governments fall.

At the same time, Republicans are running out of track for the Trump Train. This week and next, millions of Americans are going to get letters from their insurance companies. These letters will explain how much more expensive their premiums are going to be without the ACA subsidies that are expiring. Social media will be flooded with enraged Americans who will demand those subsidies back, and even more Americans pointing the finger at the party refusing to renew them.

Hint: It’s Republicans. Republicans are refusing to renew them.

The easy way out would be just to restore the ACA subsidies and Medicaid funding. Republicans will still get 90% of their cruel budget passed and take the big W for fucking the country. But they can’t DO that because compromise is weakness and fascism will never compromise blablabla.

Remember, the regime’s illusion of total power has to be maintained at all times because without it, everything falls apart.

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But why won’t Republicans flex their muscle and do away with the filibuster? They’re all about power and abusing it, right? Well, as I keep pointing out, Republicans are not convinced that Donald Trump can seal the deal on his authoritarian takeover:

Removing the filibuster has long made Republican senators queasy. While all senators acknowledge it would be easier to pass bills with a 51-vote threshold versus needing 60 votes to move legislation, Republicans are well aware Democrats would use a simple-majority for bills if they retake the majority.

“Bad idea,” Thune told reporters of getting rid of the filibuster as he walked into his office Monday evening.

…

Speaker Mike Johnson has been more careful, arguing in a press conference earlier this month that he would be “deeply concerned” if Democrats used a diminished 51-vote threshold to turn the U.S. “into a communist country.”

I cannot stress this enough: This is not what a fascist regime convinced it is winning acts like. Vladimir Putin does not give a flying fuck about what the opposition party will do “if they win” the next election. Viktor Orban doesn’t give a shit if the rules would give the opposition party the chance to remake the country. Xi Jinping doesn’t lose a moment of sleep wondering if he’s making a mistake by setting up a system that will allow his successor to move China in a way he wouldn’t like.

But Republicans are extremely concerned about this.

Again, the filibuster is the only thing keeping their party from extinction. A new Voting Rights Act alone would be a death sentence. The day the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court announce they’re taking the new law under review, Democrats would announce that they’re expanding the Court by 5 seats and, gee, are you SURE you want to review that law, Chief Justice John Roberts?

So, yes, Republicans are acutely aware the filibuster is all that stands between them and oblivion in a single election cycle. If they really thought they would never have to face another real election, they wouldn’t give a shit. They would just nuke it and pass whatever budget they want. They would outlaw abortion nationwide. They would make contraception illegal. They would criminalize homosexuality and transgender people. They would make it illegal to speak any language except English. It wouldn’t matter that the public would despise them because who cares? Elections don’t matter anymore!

But they clearly do matter and Republicans are very much convinced they will not be in power much longer. As badly as they want to load that gun and pull the trigger, they know THEY KNOW, deep in their shriveled little hearts, that soon it will not be THEIR finger on the trigger. And while they’re a long way from being able to pass laws to fully cement their power, Democrats can easily pass just two or three to cement theirs.

That’s what happens when you turn your party into a minority party cesspit of white nationalism and fascism that can only win by rigging elections and gerrymandering. If elections become free and fair, really free and fair, you lose everything. That is what Mike Johnson and John Thune fear above all else and why they’ll resist nuking the filibuster. The end of the filibuster is the end of the Republican Party.

The problem, of course, is that Donald Trump doesn’t give the tiniest of shits about the GOP. He wants what HE wants and who cares what the consequences are later? That means eventually, Trump will almost certainly order Senate Republicans to end the filibuster and end the shutdown. Then Thune and his party of craven cowards will either have to obey their god emperor and destroy their party, or save themselves and risk his wrath.

Or, Senate Republicans could finally negotiate and end the shutdown like adults, which would preserve their party and let them take the brunt of the blame instead of their beloved master in the White House. They may even come out with a bump in popularity for working to preserve healthcare for millions of their own voters. Weird to think Republicans actually doing something to help their base…

But all of this is in the future. Hopefully, the not-too-distant future as the shutdown is set to begin its fourth week on Wednesday. A lot of people are hurting, the fallout from the shutdown is spreading and impacting the economy in increasingly damaging ways, and with the economy already collapsing, this can easily push it into a freefall.

Republicans keep talking about how this is going to go on until Thanksgiving or after, but that’s a bluff and/or a desperate bid to keep the House from reopening so they can’t vote to release the Epstein Files. But in reality, time is almost up for the GOP. The question now is what will they do to avoid the doom of their own design speeding towards them at high speed? Watch this space.

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Fascism hates organized protests. Over 7 million of us showed up, and the fascists are afraid. They fear US. Keep the fascists afraid by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun. There are 13 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

That’s how much it’s taking to power the composition of this column. The LLM – Large Language Model – being used is in my own head. I think I’m safe in saying that no amount of Artificial Intelligence – AI – could write what I’m going to write sitting here at this very instant.

Let’s take the above paragraph for example. I used the word “composition” in the first sentence. I could have said construction or the writing of, or I could have gone way out there and used the word creation. I could have said writing this column rather than sitting here writing at this very instant.

But then I would have lost the little scene-setting that’s in what I wrote, describing myself as sitting and putting you in the action with at this very instant.

Those were choices I made that comprise what you’d call my style, I guess. I don’t think of myself as having a “style” of writing, but people have told me that I write conversationally, so I guess I’ll take that, because when I sit down to write, I think of it as talking to another person. That the other person happens to be a reader is what makes writing what it is: the transmission of ideas by arranging letters into words and sentences and putting them down on paper or, these days, on the screen of a cellphone or computer. It’s the same thing, in the end. Writing uses language to convey information, description, emotions, anger, delight, confusion – you name it, writing does it.

See that word “language” in there? I was curious about why artificial intelligence was described as coming from, or amounting to, or even being a “large language model” until I realized that it is really just a system that has gathered information in the form of language and organized it in such a way that it can be regurgitated as the second word in AI, intelligence.

It’s not intelligence, however. It’s other people’s words repositioned from the documents and information channels they were derived from into a new form that derives from an algorithm that uses previously gathered information produced by a person or a set of persons to get to a desired output or outcome. Looked at another way, it’s a fancy search engine that doesn’t just take you to source documents where information resides, but “scrapes,” an AI word that perfectly describes the process, information from those sources and puts it together for you. In other words, it’s a second step in search, in that it arranges information as well as presents it.

I’ll give you a good example: One of the big AI systems, ChatGTP or OpenAI, could have probably produced some version of what I have written in this column so far, but it couldn’t have come up with the idea for this column.

I spend most of the hours of every day doing that part of the job – coming up with the subject of the column I’m going to write. I don’t even really think about what goes into that process, but I do know what doesn’t. I don’t write what I think people will want to read, because I don’t know the answer to that question.

Which raises a possibility: If I asked an AI system in the middle of the afternoon, about the time I usually come up with the idea for my column, to write a column for me, what would it do? From what I know of AI, it would scrape my previous columns for patterns of subjects, probably coming up with “politics” or something similar. Then it would scrape my Substack data to see what went over best in previous columns by measuring numbers of views, and comments, and replies to comments. To the extent that AI could, I think it would put a number value on comments to measure what was popular and what wasn’t. Then AI might have enough data to produce a subject for a column and write it.

But I can guarantee this: No AI system would have put a headline on a column on the subject of artificial intelligence using the words “grilled cheese sandwich.”

The truly extraordinary difference between ChatGTP and yours truly is in the fact that the AI companies I’ve already mentioned, along with Meta and Amazon, are currently in the process of building facilities around the country so they can do some version of what I have just described. Have a look at what it is taking OpenAI to build just one portion of what they are calling its flagship Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas. They have leveled 1,200 acres of land on which the complex will sit when it’s finished. There will be eight buildings, each holding 72 racks of servers containing a total of 60,000 Nvidia GB 200 chips. The eight buildings, when they’re finished, will consume about a gigawatt of electricity. That is more electricity than is consumed by the city of El Paso, with a population of about 680,000 people. The Abilene AI data center will be powered by five – that’s right, five – new gas-fired power plants that will be built all around Abilene and will use natural gas that comes from fracking wells in the Texas Permian oil basin.

That’s just one of the OpenAI Stargate projects. They will be building two more similar facilities in Texas, one in New Mexico, one in Ohio, and another in a Midwest location that hasn’t been announced. OpenAI President Sam Altman announced last month that the entire Stargate project will cost $500 billion and will consume 10 gigawatts of power. That’s enough to power New York City – the entire city of 8 million people that sprawls over 475 square miles. The thinktank RAND estimates that AI data center demand will be around 70 gigawatts of electricity by 2027, and 327 gigawatts by 2030.

As you can imagine, new demands on the electrical grid by AI data centers are sending electricity costs ever upward. Nationally, electric utility prices are up six percent. Prices near AI data centers have increased 15 percent. A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as a city of 100,000 residents. Even Donald Trump’s Department of Energy estimates that by 2028, AI data centers will consume 12 percent of the electrical power generated in this country. This at a time when Trump is closing every renewable energy project that has been touched by federal funding, including wind, solar, and geothermal.

There are things artificial intelligence can do way, way better than human beings. AI systems can crunch through zillions of numbers to solve problems even computers can’t solve, like looking for variations in genes that cause cancer, tracking them down to single genes in single types of cells. All of it can be done much faster than such problems have ever been solved.

But while we’re marveling at the genius of AI, we should remember that NASA built the rockets and landers and everything that got us to the moon using slide rules that were held in human hands, and measuring tapes were used in constructing it all. The calculations necessary to build the St. Louis Arch from both bases at once and have the arch meet in the middle within a tiny fraction of a millimeter in the air hundreds of feet above the ground were done with slide rules. Thomas Pynchon wrote “Gravity’s Rainbow” on a typewriter. James Joyce wrote “Ulysses” in longhand on large sheets of paper because of his failing eyesight. Neither wrote their masterpieces in buildings that covered a thousand acres of ground and used enough electricity to power an entire city.

Tracy just brought me my nightly cup of coffee made with an electric coffee maker, and I boil the water for my iced tea with an electric kettle, and we use a gas stove to cook our grilled cheese sandwiches, and a refrigerator kept the cheese cold, and I’m writing this on a computer that is plugged into an electrical outlet in the wall. So, power from the electrical grid was used in the production of this column.

Google just told me that there are 100 trillion synapses in a human brain. That’s a piece of information that I didn’t find using my trillion, because it wasn’t there. But now it is in my brain…at least temporarily…and it’s written down in this column. Later tonight, you’ll be able to Google my byline and Substack, and you’ll find a link to this column, so the information about the human synapses is up there in a data cloud somewhere, and from the descriptions I read about the way AI works, it will be “scraped” and added to the banks of Nvidia chips in Abilene or in Meta’s new data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana – only 92 acres were necessary for Meta’s air conditioned and water-cooled banks of server synapses.

It looks from the expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars and the consumption of dozens of gigawatts of electrical power that artificial intelligence will be with us for a while. I find myself asking Google’s AI function questions that yield answers that lead me in turn to sources of information that I use to write my column. Tracy reminded me this afternoon that the capability of the computer that I write on every day, similar to ones I’ve used to write for several decades, now exists in the palm of my hand. It is possible today to access the product of all those AI data centers using a cellphone. It could be that during the same amount of time I have walked the earth, all those acres of data centers will be torn down, and artificial intelligence will come directly from a hand-held device that will make our phones as obsolete as a slide rule.

Here’s hoping that we won’t lose wisdom at the same time machines gain processing power, because the whole thing, from earth movers leveling ground to steel beams and aluminum siding to steel racks and servers and computer chips and the electricity to power it all comes from one place: our human brains, backed up by whatever of our souls is left after we have delivered ourselves upon this earth.

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Within ten minutes I regretted my decision to walk to Creedon Street in the outback town of Broken Hill. At first, I thought it was the shoes. Stupid things I’d bought on the internet, they were little more than plastic-coated cardboard soles strapped to my ankles with nylon laces. The desert sand scratched between my feet and the sole, painfully reminding me I also had no arch support. There were spiky bindis the size of small tarantulas that I knew from experience to step around. They would pierce those stupid shoes – and my feet.

My destination, Creedon Street, was a site for public housing. There, families were crowded into an environment that one woman told me had been ‘set up to fail’ in the 1990s when authorities sought to move Aboriginal people out of the Sydney suburb of Redfern in time for the 2000 Olympics. As well as uncomfortable on my feet, the walk there was also boring. Broken Hill has fascinating architecture, extraordinary cultural heritage, a buzzing art scene and plentiful pubs (though fewer than the 70 it once boasted). Whether it was the day or the route I am not sure, but none of this seemed evident as I trudged. My allegorical ambitions dissipated with every boring block. I’d imagined myself like philosopher Michel de Certeau, for whom ‘walking in the city’ helped understand the relationship between our agency in everyday life, set against big structures like capitalism, which I was in Broken Hill to think about.[i]  But as the dry, hot sun seemed to suck the life from me, walking in the desert seemed more like a parody of de Certeau’s agency. I soon feared it might also be making a mockery of my own intellectual pretensions.

Like others in this age of polycrisis, I wanted to think about the historical entanglements of race, labour and environment. Historically these have often seemed at odds. We see it where workers oppose the end of coal or logging, and when environmentalists fail to acknowledge that such people have a legitimate need for a job – and when the ‘true’ working class is imagined to be white and male. By walking I hoped to think about, perhaps even to feel with my body, how race, class and environment might be brought together in everyday life, via a shared history and politics.

Broken Hill seemed a good place to do it. The town, like many outback cliches, is like one big allegory for Australia, especially for our history with capitalism. I started my walk at the Trades Hall, the pride of Broken Hill and a historical touchstone for Australia’s union movement. Like sentries guarding against the labour rabble, however, directly across the road stand seven carved white busts depicting the ‘syndicate of seven’ who founded Broken Hill Proprietary, BHP. They were visible from the front door of the Trades Hall. On this street, the main symbol of labour literally opposes seven key founders of Australian capital.

Other representations of working-class politics in Broken Hill are nearly as ubiquitous as the dust, which is perhaps not quite as red as the town’s political history. Capital too looms, as present as the massive heap of slag (the by-product of mining and smelting) towering over town. These great black piles of the debris of industrial mining are known as the ‘line of lode’. It is spectacular in a Tolkienesque kind of way, though where we might expect the Eye of Sauron there is instead a memorial to miners killed extracting lead, zinc and silver from the hill. Next to the miners’ memorial there is the empty shell of what was once a world class restaurant.

Not everyone survives capitalism.

When I finally arrived at Creedon Street, hot and irritable, there was nothing to see. It was just another street, not noticeably different to the thousands that I felt I had stumbled through.

I chided my subconsciously racist self. What did I expect, non-stop corroboree? Perhaps I was guilty of ‘poverty porn’, taking my excessively educated arse where it did not belong, seeking to exploit First Nations suffering for intellectual gain.

Face-palming, I took stock. I noticed that the street was right on the edge of town. Behind that row of public houses was nothing. Stony desert littered (charmingly, in fact) with rusting junk.

This seemed important. I’d been talking to teachers’ aids, employment centres and the local high school careers advisor, himself an Aboriginal man, who all told me that young Aboriginal people often experienced racism, particularly when they seek employment. The geography of town seemed to bear this out: the town centre celebrates labour on every corner, but when a place was built purposely for Aboriginal people to live, it was far from the town’s working-class centre.

I took this to be a symptom of what settler-colonial studies historian Patrick Wolfe called the ‘logic of elimination’.[ii] Of course, some Aboriginal people did and do work for big capital and small capital, and some were and are members of Broken Hill’s famous union movement. But any sense of the centrality of First Nations claims to land and sovereignty posed – at least in recent decades – a threat to the Broken Hill establishment, and by extension to the rest of us.

First Nations sovereignty is by definition hard for a settler colonial society to acknowledge. But it is the truth. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were here first. Sovereignty was never ceded. This is First Nations land. Acknowledging this beyond the words we use at meetings, extending it to our hearts and practice demands something like turning the still-colonial world upside down. And from the centre of the battle between labour and capital, it seems easier to push the question, and the people connected to it, to the margins.

Creedon Street, by this logic, was certainly not aligned with those founders of BHP, whose profit relied on supplanting First Nations economies and claims to land. But why was Aboriginal sovereignty not, on the whole, protected by the Trades Hall?

Feeling stupid, I turned right and walked along the street, soon arriving somewhere familiar. The closest famous landmark to Creedon Street was the cemetery.

Broken Hill cemetery might be one of the most important in Australia. The burial site of revered members of the Australian union movement, the cemetery is an important monument to colonial and working-class history. Black crosses of the religious orders who sent teenagers from Ireland to serve in the outback offer a poignant memorial to what must have been an utterly dislocating experience. Artist Pro Hart’s grave is there, a massive, crazy expensive, marble thing engraved with his signature golden dragonfly – recently defaced by vandals. But the cemetery is mainly a memorial to labour. A pamphlet guides visitors to graves of historical significance to Australian unionism. Headstones list labour leaders’ CVs, while others honour the Red Flag Forever.

It is an outback cemetery, so small cages cover many graves, protecting burials from animals. Protecting the dead this way seems some sort of perversion of what sociologist Max Weber described as the ‘iron cage’ of capitalism.[iii] Capitalism failed to protect workers from the lead dust or the work that maimed, killed and riddled many with diseases, often deadly. But now, iron cages protect the dead.

The cemetery reminds us that capitalism kills.

Up on the line of lode, the miner’s memorial documents the tragedy. In 1887, capitalism killed 21-year-old Samuel Spears, who tumbled down a ladderway in the pursuit of ore that would profit BHP shareholders. Spears was already not the youngest to die since the discovery of ore on the broken hill in 1883. Just a year earlier, John Vaugh, aged 14, fell down BHP’s ore heap, to his death. The following year, 25-year-old Charles Apple died in a rock fall, 36-year-old Alfred Neiring died in an explosion of shot and Alfred Polgreen, 21, was killed by a rock drill.

Mine safety improved, largely by union agitation, supported by local medical practitioners who helped alert the public beyond Broken Hill, to the dangers of industrial mining. The resulting public pressure drove engineering innovation and safety procedures. Many safety measures were hard won by strike action, like the number of minutes workers were to wait between blasting and heading back into mine shafts newly polluted with lead-laden dust.

Such improvements were far too slow for 16-year-old Charles Shannon, who was electrocuted in the BHP mine in 1910. It did not help Ronald James who at 18 years old was also electrocuted in 1979, as was 22-year-old John Collison in 1988. Mining in the 2000s slowed to such an extent that homes in Broken Hill could be purchased on a fairly modest credit card – and meant there were no deaths to record. When mining resumed, so did death. Capitalism killed again in 2007, when 30-year-old James Symonds was crushed by machinery. So was Andrew Bray, aged 47, as recently as 2019.

Capitalism kills, and the working class unites against it.

The graves of union leaders at the cemetery not only remind us of this, but they also act as a kind of mirror image to the mock graves that union members made of ‘scabs’, who refused to join strike action, in 1909. A photograph of one of those graves reads “Here Lies Peter Corney 1909 Scab”. Imagine Peter Corney’s trepidation, seeing his own name on the tomb. His death, however, was fictional. It was a tough strategy, but one that highlighted the value of solidarity as the only path to improved working conditions, and perhaps more broadly to liberation itself. For those listed in the miners’ memorial, death was not a ploy, but a central logic of the operation. Human lives – their lungs, their broken bones, their hopes, even just their time, so precious and short as it is for us all – was exchanged for profit.

This profit was not only the foundation of big mining in Australia, but it also underpinned the fledgling stock exchanges, and large finance enterprises like Collins House in Melbourne. Added up, exploitation pays – but only for a few.

Since colonisation, a significant portion of the middle class has considered education to be the answer. In the 1990s it became economic doctrine, systematically shifting the population to ‘better’ jobs. And yet for those of us in white collar work it is little different. Capitalism colonises every moment of our lives in the name of a rewarding, and often well-meaning, career. While industrial accidents are less common for professionals, ever-increasing productivity demands and decreasing autonomy under a managerial class is also killing us slowly – if perhaps mainly spiritually – as it converts our very selfhood into profit-making stuff. Even when the surface seems cleaner, the logic on display at Broken Hill applies to us all.

[i] De Certeau, Michel (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life Berkely: University of California Press.

[ii] Wolfe, Patrick (2006) ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ Journal of Genocide Research Volume 8, No.4, pp.387-409.

[iii] Weber, Max (1904) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Vintage Edition, 2002. The ‘iron cage’ was not what Talcott Parsons’ famous translation of weber’s ‘shell as hard as steel’. Like others I have used it here as it more evocative of what I mean, and possibly what Weber meant too.

Hopped on with my fellow Gen Xers, and this morning to rant about the host of shitty things the Trump regime has done in just the last week. From Nazis to mass murder to the dumbest kind of fascism, it’s been one fucked up week.

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