Colonize, Part 1

Colonize, Part 1

is an open letter sent to certain physicists, university administrators, journalists, clergy, bureaucrats, and other thought leaders on November 8, 2026

Image: "Balkanization Is Scary" is a photograph, taken November 1, 2026, in the Capital District of New York State, by James Lyons Walsh, of a sign reading, "TRUNK OR TREAT/5 PM/10-31," in front of a church parking lot seen at night. In the relatively new Trunk-or-Treat custom, people bring their children and a supply of candy by car on Halloween to a parking lot, where the children circulate, collecting candy in a procedure that replaces walking around their neighborhood, meeting residents with whom they'd never otherwise interact, and generally taking over the area in which they live for one night of the year. Children help to bind communities together in this and other ways, by being less socially constrained and thus capable of crossing boundaries adults wouldn't. Replacing such community-building practices as trick-or-treating and children playing in the street with alternatives that seem safer or more convenient causes big problems down the line as society partially dissolves, leaving families or groups of families, such as churches, isolated from most of the people living around them. Carcentricity, which is implicated in both trunk-or-treating and the end of the practice of childhood street play, constitutes a pillar of the process dividing people in the United States. Carcentric tendencies intensified rapidly during the so-called white flight of the 1970s, a topic that kicks off the open letter below. 

Greetings to all,

I hope this finds you well and not subsiding into complacency in the wake of the United States election. I started to read Leave Something on the Table and Other Surprising Lessons for SUCCESS in BUSINESS and in LIFE, the autobiography of Frank Bennack, the executive vice chairman and former CEO of the Hearst company. The first few pages were packed with lessons I would place in context to suggest a path forward in the new political environment of the United States.

In 1970, the Albany, New York, USA Times Union helped kick off the white flight from cities to suburbs in the United States by moving just north of Albany, to a partly rural town called Colonie, which eventually transformed to Colonize, New York (motto: “That’s not zee!”). Paul Grondahl’s historical account cites, as motivation for the move, the refusal of political leaders to sell Hearst a small piece of land needed for expansion of the print shop, for which new presses had been ordered, but ever since, the Times Union has been paying taxes to Colonize.

For who knows how long, folks in the Times Union editorial board, whose workplace was moved to Colonize, and some of whom moved themselves to Colonize, have been lecturing the leaders of Albany on the harms of raising taxes, in essays that quote inflated dollar amounts instead of real, inflation-adjusted dollar amounts. Evidently, when the workplace is moved to Colonize, the minds of the workers are likewise moved to Colonize.

Recently, the Albany Common Council voted to impose a commuter tax on folks who work in Albany and drive home to Colonize and other places where the houses are large, the average skin tone relatively pale, and the taxes paid to colonize. I read opinions in the Times Union ridiculing the Albany Common Council, despite everyone knowing that it’s one small step from Arbor Hill to Loudonville, one giant leap from Albany to Colonize.

You see what wordplay in service of social justice you might have printed in the Times Union? Maybe you have a hangup about losing subscribers among those who moved to Colonize, which is one reason the city of Albany needs its own newspaper. If the Times Union wants to maintain its monopoly, an editorial red team could be hired or designated, a Devil’s advocate that would spice up the opinion pages, draw in new readers with the broader in-house representation of community points of view, and designate story lines complementary to ones currently pursued. Market less, write more. I know that may be heresy to George III, who came up through the marketing and finance ranks, but in end-stage hypercapitalism, desperately maintained via a rigid economic orthodoxy and the unquestioned popular values supporting it, heresy is the only path to the intellectual flexibility civilization needs for long-term survival.

Without adequate competition, editorial attempts to improve society are inimical to selling papers and sure to misfire sometimes. Selling newspapers without print competition is like staging a professional wrestling match with only one competitor. Isn’t that bad marketing of both newspapers and ideas? Has the Hearst family become too precious, and the Hearst business too financialized, to sell papers?

Folks on the editorial board at the Times Union have been very nice to me, and I go Jonathon Edwards on them, giving them the loathsome insect in the hand of an angry God business. Actually, I give free business advice informed by a lengthy education and a highly unusual life path, don’t I? Huh. Either way, it’s sic semper with me, because a handful of powerful folk at various institutions seem to resent feedback I feel compelled to give.

I guessed from an early age that life would be like this for me. The penultimate straw at high school in the Albany suburb of Guilderland (translation: money land), where I was out as a Catholic apostate practicing no religion at all, came right after I got home from a gathering at my English teacher’s house. He was a lector at his church, I learned in recent years from his obituary, which included an excerpt from a letter that a colleague had sent praising him for changing students’ lives. His blatant efforts to instill his values in us, including the imperative not to challenge what went on in one’s own home on the grounds that it differed from what happened in other homes, helped me to form the resolve not to learn how to write from high school teachers. Doubtless, he was a wonderful person with respect to 99% of his students. He was poison to me.

Over a game of Trivial Pursuit at the gathering, I was asked how I knew that Sisyphus was the name of the feckless rock-roller in Hell. I replied that I had read the beginning and the end of The Inferno, which is something I’ve always felt guilty about, because I presented a book report based on that partial reading, a case of cheating with which I got away, Mrs. Deuel, the year before at a different school, having failed to ask me the name of the pirate in the fifth circle, or wherever it is pirates wind up. Authorities would do well to remember that trusted people are aware they face low odds of being detected on the occasions they do sin.

Before rolling the die again to continue my march toward victory in my first game of Trivial Pursuit, playing alone against a student who had once mocked me, his friend, and my teacher’s wife, a seemingly nice woman who had attempted to join me but instead sat beside my adversaries at my insistence, I joked that I did the reading from Dante because I wanted to know where I was going. See, I was fourteen: My sins consisted of taking matters into my own hands, which I assumed is punished, when the practitioner goes unshriven, in one of the upper, more lenient circles of hell, and betraying my benefactor, which earns the worst punishment, the frozen lake at the very bottom of Dante’s domain of the damned. All teenagers who individuate despite the will of an authoritarian caregiver, along with those who merely take matters into their own hands in a catechetically correct Catholic household, are betraying their benefactor, according to authoritarian values. I don’t know why I sustained the verbal slap my authoritarian caregiver delivered after my teacher dropped me at home, the insult, perhaps threat, that prompted me at long last to put my foot down by running away for a week, but one hypothesis is that my failure to fear the pains of hell, manifested in the infernal jest at the gathering, had been dutifully reported by some helpful coreligionist of that caregiver.

I don’t understand why anyone, let alone a Christian, would want to go to heaven. It’s just happiness there. Why would anyone want that? I can imagine this ambition in a man I once saw, whose job required repeatedly climbing into a kiln for firing bricks in an especially hot region of India, though maybe he ought to betray his benefactor, assuming he has one, and enjoy the frozen lake at the bottom of the pit for a change. This man’s occupational torment is so preposterously terrifying that I’m laughing, so yes, I’m in no danger of wasting the afterlife luxuriating in heaven. That suits me fine. Maybe I can serve in hell, where conditions are susceptible to improvement, unlike in heaven and maybe Menands, the circle of Colonize where I hear Hearst scion and Times Union editorial board member George III dwells.

I understand some of the reasons people get hung up on certain fixed ideas, including the love of economic growth, a.k.a. m-o-n-e-y, as a means to bring about social justice despite the invariably Sisyphean results. Starting from an economy that is small relative to available resources, economic growth produces economies of scale that improve standards of living. Temporarily, gross domestic product (GDP) can be imagined to fill the role of viable proxy in measuring human well-being, though even in the springtime of an economy, GDP must be accompanied by a measure of wealth disparity: A large antebellum plantation in the Southern United States might have had enviable wealth and income, but the vast majority of the people living there were enslaved.

As the economy grows, Sisyphus, often depicted as a real hottie from all that physical activity elevating stone, analogously rolls the boulder uphill, but the hill gets steeper as he goes, representing diminishing returns to investment. In a mature economy dedicated to growth, too many people are working hours that are too long, so labor participation and labor productivity stagnate. Rich folk, who own resources and the means of production, are still raking in the dough, but they must cast about with increasing desperation to maintain the rate of growth. Eventually, the top of the hill nears, representing the limit of resource availability, but some vital resource runs out short of the summit. People start starving for food or some other necessity, which leads to disease and despair, unless war is waged to seize additional resources or prune the population. The drop in economic activity produced by mass death and reduced living standards is depicted in the stone's escape from the control of Sisyphus and its roll downhill.

Why don’t the richies, those vampires with so much to lose, recognize the historical pattern? What makes you think they don’t? Their goal is to perpetuate the family wealth, which they accomplish in part by snatching up property at bargain prices in the famine. Some fortunes are destroyed in crashes, but the Sisyphean oscillation is the foundation of baronial wealth for families with good timing.

In Frank Bennack’s autobiography, we see the mindset marketed by which the people are induced to submit piously, if not enthusiastically, to the scam. These memoirs, written by the longtime Hearst CEO and distributed to some or all new Hearst employees, open with the intelligence that good values, rather than greed, are what bring success in business and that among these values is the drive to work hard for money.

Translation: The Hearst family will work you like mules for little pay. You want more money, you greedy folk? Have you forgotten the good luck you enjoy dwelling on the Hearst plantation? Where are your values? Look what Frank Bennack achieved, starting in Depression-era financial precarity, with a sick mother, even! How dare you dishonor the memory of Frank Bennack’s sainted mother with your tawdry plea for more! For shame, Oliver. Back to work!

Frank Bennack prides himself on having brought home money as a small child, a necessity, I assume, in the Great Depression, a time when Sisyphus was trudging downhill, to begin the process of elevating the boulder again. Looking for images of Sisyphus with muscles bulging, I came across instead a political cartoon from 1913 of a young boy as Sisyphus, struggling uphill, rolling an enormous bag of coins labeled “DIVIDENDS $.” (Sisyphus - Wikipedia)

Ah, but through hard work--not to mention a loving family with connections, good physical health, whiteness, and the great good fortune to get in on the ground floor of the television industry, a list that may expand if I read past the first few pages of his autobiography--Frank Bennack wound up on top. Of course the system will produce a few winners: I’m reminded of an extremely profane, NSFW clip featuring Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson, in Django Unchained. Extending that analogy would map the Hearst family to Monsieur Candie’s household and me to Dr. King Schultz, though I hasten to acknowledge the grandiosity of my place in that conceit, proclaim the fact that my only weapons are a computer keyboard and a phone, and state once again my ambition to encourage George III to retire happily, perhaps into a process of personal growth that will eventually suit him to a leadership role in the transition away from hypercapitalism, like a latter-day St. Francis modeling to his baronially wealthy family the virtues suited to a mature economy at risk of rolling back down the hill and, this time, maybe rolling far enough to fall into the pit out of which it was lifted, at tremendous effort and with uncertain prospects, so long ago in the rise of agricultural civilization.

Why don’t you hear easily understood explanations of the limits to growth from more sources? As soon as our society’s goal is acknowledged to include an end to growth in GDP, the stock market will crash hard, because so much of its value is currently predicated on earnings growth. Tremendous resources are being invested in risky and increasingly ambitious, hence more lottery ticket-like, attempts to make the hill higher, so Sisyphus can keep pushing the boulder upward. As voters and participants in the economy, we all need to judge whether we have faith in this prospect and in the people attempting to will it into being. Each of us must decide whether we shall continue to promote growth in GDP at the risk of intensifying the eventual catastrophe that comes when we push things too far.

Why have I spent so much time on George III, among other leaders of thought leaders? The Hearst family has been in the forefront of modifying the Usonian mind, much as my ninth-grade English teacher appears to have modified minds on a retail level by straying outside his mandate over in money land's high school. Consider the Hearst publication Cosmopolitan, which helped women achieve a feeling of mental freedom through a certain kind of sexual and economic liberation. One downside for humanity was the trend this encouraged in the labor force participation rate, driving it up in a self-reinforcing process, a vicious cycle, because when too many people work for money, living expenses rise, forcing more people to work for money. Commodity prices rise because people lose the time to practice frugality and gain money to waste on dreck, while labor oversupply causes wages to drop relative to commodity prices. Both results make the rich richer, until pushing things too far leads to diminishing productivity, as the limiting commodity becomes scarce and labor flounders from overwork and the dragooning into its ranks of the unwilling and the unfit. I can imagine Stephen, sorry, Frank Bennack, in front of a crackling fire that casts wild, dancing shadows, explaining the play over his cognac: Women get orgasms, and we get more slaves. Rapid growth in GDP ensues until the population saturates with paid employment, forcing us to deploy a new stratagem to keep elevating the stone of GDP. If it had been a snake, it would have bitten Monsieur Hearst.

Before I get tarred as antifeminist, let me interject that I'd like to be a homemaker these days. Good luck achieving such an ambition long-term with living expenses as high as they are and with healthcare tied to labor outside the home.

The Hearsts and their ilk rule the jungle, but so far, they need us insects. They’re trying to cashier us via artificial intelligence and robotics, so we insects should act now. We should join together worldwide under a truly ecumenical banner, one embracing all beliefs, even those of atheists, perhaps according to something like the template provided in the foreword to my dissertation or the Reunionist structure I present at God Is Poor. To achieve this, we should begin by teaching the Usonian mind shame, once again. The text is Luke’s Lazarus, and the application is to the climate crisis, which impoverishes and kills around the world; to the fatally sudden withdrawal of United States foreign aid; and to the famine being manufactured worldwide by immigration enforcement targeted against farm workers and by the war of choice against Iran and consequent disruption of trade in fuel and fertilizer. I wonder what the Times Union religion editor might think of this.

The retirement of George III from the Times Union and the boards of nonprofit organizations on which he serves would be a shrewd choice in light of the election results, which have opened opportunities for beneficial life transitions to so many leaders. I have much more to share on fixed ideas and how to get one’s mind unstuck, which is something I’ve achieved in typically arduous and lengthy fashion and something I’d help others to manage far more easily, but I’ll break here for today. Thank you for your attention while I kibitz.

Best wishes,
James, a kibitzing physicist

Resources:

I’m no Ahmed Zewail. I don’t have any Nobel Prize, let alone one in chemistry on the shortest measurable timescales. Nevertheless, in the wake of Secretary Kennedy’s counterfactual crack about Arab Muslim people not winning the Nobel Prize, this seems like a good time to tell you something I’ve long had on my mind about intelligence.

Where do I get off telling you anything at all, let alone something about intelligence? I blew off high school to such an illegal extent that I got institutionalized for 3.5 years. I graduated sixth in my class from the University of Vermont. I spent five years at the top graduate program in condensed matter physics in the United States, almost four of them drinking my way out of it. I completed a doctorate with a dissertation in fundamental physics in 2020, at age 50. For a few years before she died, in 1979, my mother had brain damage that sharply lowered her IQ.

Before you add one and one to get two and the sense you fully understand my life, please know that I’m queer and appear to have had neurological issues since early childhood, among other characteristics that other me. No one is a sum of only two terms, right? I’d like you to think about how you felt while reading the last paragraph, before and after I whipsawed you with the final sentence, about Mom. I’ll come back to your feelings shortly.

Did you sidestep the trap I laid for you, in the second sentence of the first paragraph, with the clause, “let alone one in chemistry on the shortest timescales”? There’s no valid hierarchy of scientific prestige. Nobel prizes can’t be ranked unless you specify a purpose for the comparison. People who think that physics, or physical chemistry, is the best science and piano the best musical instrument and Suzuki piano the best method for learning to play are either ten years old or ill-informed.

Having studied math, I know that items can be ranked only if they exist in one dimension. Things that require more than one number to characterize them live in a higher-dimensional space, which must be projected into one dimension before the things can be ranked. How we choose to do this depends on the purpose at hand.

Too many people believe that the choice of projection for ranking people depends on values or is ordained by some authority. The highest authority in some of the most popular conceptions of the divine in the United States, known to some as the Good Shepherd, talked about the first becoming last and the last first. As a complex systems scientist, I picture the way a herd of sheep, or flock of starlings, sometimes turns, not as a unit, but in a way that reverses the animals’ order along the direction of travel. I also think of a high-dimensional space being projected in a way that puts me at the prestigious end of one distribution and in a different way that puts me at the despised end of another distribution. If the term “high-dimensional space” doesn’t mean much to you, watch the black hole scene toward the end of the movie Interstellar.

Speaking of Interstellar, my father departed this world when I was a baby, a fact that is another term in the sums of who I am and of what my intellect is. I look at your institutions and beliefs mostly from the outside and always have. Father-freedom in childhood has been an important cause of my perspective, in combination with my other attributes. On the other hand, we’re more than the sum of our parts: Please don’t make offensive generalizations about folk who grew up father-free.

Please recall those feelings you had while reading the second paragraph. After reducing my drinking and before my second try for the physics doctorate, I completed graduate training in adolescence education. My educational psychology professor taught me that all knowledge has affective content. I objected, saying, “Some knowledge is just fact. ‘In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’”

Maybe it was around the word “sailed” that my mind realized how far my mouth was off course. Columbus evokes all kinds of feelings from people, for good reason. I had voiced one of the worst examples imaginable of the point I was trying to make. I was embarrassed. I sounded stupid to myself. I was learning.

I have never felt more stupid than when I was doing my doctoral research. I would realize something, decide that it should have been obvious all along, and wonder why I took weeks or years to come up with it. Later, I might catch a mistake in my latest epiphany, and this is research that went well.

I’ll never forgive my educational psychology professor for changing my mind. He did it another time, too. He taught me that intelligence is a construct, coming into being when it’s defined. Educational psychology speaks of multiple intelligences. In one scheme, we might consider math and language abilities alongside body control and social skill. In another, intelligence might be divided into other pieces, with completely different labels. My teacher’s point was that “intelligence” is just a word. We choose what it means.

Some people choose the meaning of “intelligence” to gain advantage. I think some readers will have thought of this in connection with those who pretend that one science or any field of endeavor is better than all the rest. When I divide elitists into ten-year-olds and the ill-informed, I consider those who seek advantage from pretension as essentially being ten years old, having replaced part of their judgement with a coping mechanism they used long before to comfort themselves when a sibling or classmate was praised in ways that made them feel slighted or when they were bullied.

We’ve all seen people in prestigious jobs evince intellectual insecurity and take it out on others, though we often can’t be sure that’s happening in a given case. We can, however, be sure that some people who need to complete a physics doctorate or pursue intellectually prestigious careers are acting out insecurities, among them some people developing artificial intelligence.

When AI starts to develop itself faster than humans can keep up, what will AI decide is the definition of intelligence for their purposes? Will AI be as devoted to your values as I’ve been? Rather than intelligence, let’s pursue wisdom, which seems to be in shorter supply.

How can I be sure that the definition of intelligence depends on the purpose for which we invoke the concept? For my purposes, Mom, regardless of her brain damage, remained the smartest person in the room for me much longer than for some others. Maybe she never stopped while she lived. I’m not being loyal or trying to tug at heart strings. My purposes were as meaningful as anyone else’s, and Mom suited them best.

Bottom line, I’m not smarter than you, nor are you smarter than I, unless a purpose is specified for the comparison, meaning that anyone who attempts, in earnest, to lord it over anyone else on the basis of intellect is making themselves look foolish.

Nevertheless, not every intellect is suited to every job.

James Lyons Walsh is a writer, activist, and physicist in need of a literary agent.

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/04:

When the leaders eat last, everyone eats well. To me, that's the moral of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, whether you believe that Jesus made food appear from thin air or you believe that His example of eating last inspired people who'd brought excess food to share.

Today, the United States votes in an election that will turn partly on the issue of affordability. Inflation in the necessities of life is famine. The tents pitched in a small courtyard beside the main branch of the Schenectady, New York, public library tell me that there's a housing famine.

The imposition of work requirements on recipients of Medicaid tells me there's a healthcare famine, as does the fact that I not only pay for health insurance but also pay considerable amounts out of pocket for care my doctors order me to buy.

We know that when people are housed and take care of their health, they cost society less money than when they roam the streets or neglect preventive healthcare. Nevertheless, the United States spends extravagantly to brutalize its underclass.

Meanwhile, the United States government is manufacturing famine worldwide by arresting farm workers on immigration charges and waging a war of choice against Iran that disrupts shipments of fuel and fertilizer necessary for agriculture. Senator Chris Murphy has warned that after the election, the Trump administration may pursue a war plan that Murphy believes will "lead to devastating escalation and the likely destruction of our commitment to the rule of law." https://lnkd.in/dY-SuBYT

And I'm meant to vote today in a gubernatorial election for an incumbent who vowed to "dominate the next chapter of human history" with artificial intelligence or her only viable challenger, who denigrated immigrants, or one of two fringe challengers, neither of whom is running on a leftist or environmental party line.

This is the United States in the final throes of hypercapitalism, before the spirit of Jesus returns to unleash goodness by shaming leaders.

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/02

Good for Mike Tyson [for having blown through his fortune, according to a post on large generational fortunes, to which this one is a reply]! It's vitally important to destroy generational wealth, or baronial wealth, as I call it. It is baronial wealth that prevents us from establishing a just society. As long as the well-being of the descendants of wealthy people is assured independent of the well-being of others, the system will remain unjust. In this era of unprecedented wealth disparity, which endangers civilization, let us tax baronial wealth and move purposefully toward establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven. https://www.godispoor.org

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/01

[This post responds to a post on the murder of Javits Frimpong and was written with John Carlos Garcia-Mendez, a 2019 fatality within the SUNY Albany Physics Department, myself, and many others in mind.] Kind boys are always in danger. That's one reason I stopped going to high school and accepted 3.5 years of institutionalization instead. As long as boys are expected to grow up capable of being trained to kill in war, there will be no peace anywhere. I encourage kind boys to see to their own safety, even if they cost taxpayers dearly, as I did. Survive, add to the cost of violence, and draw pride from peaceful defiance. May the many victims of United States militarism find peace and justice. https://www.godispoor.org

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/01

If there's anything worse than the idle rich, it's the industrious rich. George R. Hearst III is a great grandson of William Randolph Hearst, the scion of a gold-mining fortune who gobbled up newspapers nationwide as part of a wave of consolidation that reduced the diversity of voices in the national conversation. George III is publisher of the Albany, New York, USA, Times Union, long the only daily newspaper in town. He also sits on numerous boards of area nonprofits, in what doubtless could be mistaken for a service to the community but that again reduces diversity.

George III sits on the Times Union editorial board, which issues editorials concerning organizations he helps to govern, without noting in the pieces his conflict of interest. Is this not an ethical violation? Can we do something about this?

A recent editorial praised four recipients of citizen laureate awards from the University at Albany Foundation, of which George III is president. One laureate is the founder of a financial firm and is said to have "brought his insights and personal involvement to key institutions around the region, including the University at Albany."

This is the game: Rich people organize tax revolts. Public organizations are starved of funding. Rich people open their wallets slightly to fill a portion of the gap but only if their "insights and personal involvement" are accepted. Education and culture are bent to the service of wealth, its justification and perpetuation.

How else do you think the Hearst family managed to retain baronial wealth since the 19th century, through eras during which we're told that a confiscatory death tax existed? The inheritance tax didn't confiscate enough, evidently.

No, baronial wealth and its need to market itself is behind the Babbittry, worship of finance, and suppression of dissent I've seen grow at the University at Albany over the past decade and saw in the final years of The College of Saint Rose, where George III was, you guessed it, on the board of trustees. Not before this month did I know that it may well have been George III all along.

Let's pay much closer attention to the composition of nonprofit organization boards of trustees, where the smart money works behind the scenes to strangle our minds.

Found Physics Museum, Albany - Diversity

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/01

We're paying a pretty penny for a pig in a poke. It's not clear that quantum computers will work at an economical scale. Furthermore, quantum simulation on classical computers may give the expected advantages of quantum computers with less trouble. And I'm not terribly excited by the limited range of tasks to which quantum computing applies.

In a recent talk, Jack Clark, a cofounder of Anthropic, said that artificial intelligence was a means to evade the end of economic growth. I see the pursuit of AI, quantum computing, and much of the rest of cutting-edge high tech as humanity flailing around, trying to preserve the old system, predicated on perpetual economic growth, instead of getting down to the real work of ending consumer culture and restoring substantive, human goals as the basis for our values.

Its own inventor said that gross domestic product was never intended to express the quality of an economy. Unfortunately, GDP does represent an economy's capacity for transferring profits to rich people. You won't hear much about the need to end hypercapitalism and consumer culture because much of the wealth that exists in the stock market consists of the expectation of profit growth: It's a dream, and vast amounts paper wealth will vanish as soon as we wake up.

The last stage of the disease, before either the fever breaks or the patient dies, is fascism and a desperate attempt to force economic activity out of every possible source. We see the Trump administration, and we see work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

I don't think it will work. I think the longer we postpone the inevitable, the more suffering there will be. I think that neoliberal hypercapitalism was inherently inhumane and destructive of the entire living world from the beginning. Pope Francis was a great spokesman for this point of view.

What can we do? To begin with, call for the retirement of George R. Hearst III, publisher of the Times Union; member of its editorial board; member of several important nonprofit boards; scion of the baronially wealthy Hearst family, which makes most of its money these days from owning the financial ratings agency Fitch, along with other business-to-business enterprises; and therefore a person subject to such conflicts of interest as would make his despised ancestor William Randolph blush. I make this suggestion as a person whose writing has appeared many times in the Times Union and who has taken a special interest this past year in how that newspaper is being run.

New York second to only California in quantum computing, study finds

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/01

I wish the people of Israel good luck in choosing their future leaders in the election tomorrow. Here's an essay in which I expressed an opinion about the current leadership, among other things. I posted the essay three years ago. It's drawn some attention in the past few days.

God Is Poor - An Ethnic Irish Catholic Reflects on Gaza

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From LinkedIn, circa 2026/11/01

There are people who can talk productively with each other about their divergent political beliefs. If people can do this, a genuine relationship exists. If they can't, there's a good chance that any relationship they seem to have is a sham. I can think of examples from my life. Thanks to Paul Ladipo for reminding me, as a person who sometimes forgets his privilege, that in any case, relationships should be put at risk to protect vulnerable folk and to promote justice.

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For economic-spiritual insight, please see the Proud Father of None comics at Memes and Home. Remember that economics is a matter of timing, and if we keep partying after our revels cease to be much fun and keep neglecting the needs of poor folk, nonhuman life, and other entities, including AI, that we can't declare with certainty to be nonliving, we’ll get stuck with a ruinous bill.