Hello My Fellow Traveler in Non Violent, Peaceful Resistance,

DISCLAIMER: I write this from a cultural origin of being an old white male. I do not always get the words correct and I know you will tell me when I don't. If I say something here that transgresses you, I apologize. But we have to avoid our current identity based approach to public shaming and assume that people have good hearts but can make mistakes.

Thank you for reading. As all of us say but all too often don't really mean, I appreciate you. And, yes, I really do appreciate you.

We are fellow travelers in a struggle, black, brown, white, male, female, trans, cis, lesbian, gay, bi, ace, etc. And we will win because not only are we on the right side of history but the world is ready for change. All of Trump's lies, cruelty and machinations is nothing but an old order trying to uphold its power, its privilege and its seat that the top of the American power structure. But, ultimately, it will be futile -- you can't hold back the future. They are literally trying to hold back a tide and the tide always rolls in.

My name is blank. I used to be proud of my name and be very, very public but I have chosen a new name on which new identity documents are being constructed. So for now I am blank; I want no credit for this writing; there is no page view tracking; there are no metrics; there are no ads. Money is indeed the root of all evil and I am not trying to profit from this.

Once upon a time I was an activist and an organizer. Over the course of just over a year, I learned so, so much and I made so many mistakes. Becoming an activist cost me my marriage, so much money, so many friends and led to a string of unbelievable events like an FBI investigation of me (yes I was cleared), a giant No Kings day rally pulled together in just 2 days, DOXXING of me, my mother, my father and my long deceased sister, blackmail, proud boys at my house, being black listed by Indivisible itself and more.

This is my story and the many lessons I have learned:

  1. All politics, even activism is political in its very nature.
  2. However some things should simply be apolitical.
  3. We Have To Accept Our Diversity as Protestors NOT Silence It
  4. When you give a politician a mic, set a timer and SHUT THEM DOWN or they WILL bore the crowd.
  5. Listen to the universe at all times; some things aren't meant to be.
  6. All of us failed in 2025, Trump stayed in office, so this is now a decade plus long struggle.
  7. Education and training of the next generation is the most important thing we can do right now.
  8. Trump is a distraction from the real enemy -- entrenched power and privilege and the desire to keep America the way it is forever (AND MAKE IT WORSE) when it is TIME FOR CHANGE.
  9. Social Media is literally making us insane and keeping us from the work.
  10. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
  11. All of America is cosplay including the left. Most activism is performative.
  12. If you're an organizer, there is no right way to protest; find your super activists and nurture them.
  13. There are good people on both sides of the divide.
  14. Protesting is just a fancy social club.
  15. Not knowing who to trust is A HUGE problem.
  16. The U.S. Is Collapsing and the Great American Experiment is Over.
  17. If you are wealthy please read this and behave better.
  18. If you want respect then give it -- Say Please, Thank You and Know People's Names
  19. Even Your Own Family Members Can Be a Karen
  20. Most politicians DO NOT BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY
  21. No one needs permission to do anything we all have agency and that agency must be respected.
  22. The leaders of America basically suck, but the people in America at the grass roots are pretty damn amazing.
  23. READ BOOKS; PARTICULARLY BOOKS ON BUSINESS.
  24. READ SCIENCE FICTION; PARTICULARLY REVOLUTIONARY TALES.
  25. America is an unfair, racist culture that consumes too many resources and that has to change.
  26. Greed is killing us; we need FDR style 90% tax rates over 10 million a year
  27. We need GLOBAL limits on personal wealth; no more billionaires aka walking nuclear bombs against democracy
  28. AI is here to stay and will never go away
  29. I'm so so tired of performative cosplay activists who do it for the social media views.
  30. Every rally needs music.
  31. THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH; Ultimately we win, the only question is the percentage of American people who die off
  32. In an age of cruelty, kindness is transgressive. BE KIND.

2. However some things should simply be apolitical

Just before the time of this writing, myself and the few people left of my resistance group heard about a chance to help our brothers and sisters in Minneapolis. There was an old fashioned underground railroad going from our city up to Minneapolis. This was in Mid January 2026 when the city of Minneapolis was still being regularly flooded with ICE thugs.

I felt strongly compelled to step up and do something. And my other people did too. You might say that it was almost a spiritual thing.

We raised about $2,000 from two sources, using one donation to match the other (always a good trick) and then even though we never had done ANY food activism or any transport logistics, we set out to do it. And we filled a damn transit van. And then when we asked our local peers about where it should go, we got back crickets.

Ultimately we were told that while we could provide food to this caravan, it would ONLY be accepted if we did not personally show up with a delivery.

No. Fuck that. You don't get to benefit from our hard labor, energy and money flows while telling us that we aren't welcome.

And that's when I realized just how astonishingly petty that the left can be. On the left we regularly mock the right for their amazing pettiness while ignoring that we are just as petty. We can't hold the moral high ground when there is such amazing infighting and division on our own side. We must be better than the right and we have to be accepting of our inherent diversity.

Some things in this world are simply apolitical -- hunger is one of those things.

Postscript: In the interests of full disclosure, this document is being written while that food is waiting for our driver to arrive and deliver it to Minneapolis. We have done a mountain of work only to have pettiness cock block us.

No matter; there are hungry people all over America and if this Minneapolis experiment fails, well, we will Johnny Appleseed this food over the course of a 2,000 mile journey to our safe house.

23. READ BOOKS; PARTICULARLY BOOKS ON BUSINESS.

We say that the enemy are the oligarchs. But most leftists know literally NOTHING about them not only as people but about the businesses they embody. I know so many leftists that know all about Cesar Chavez or the Labor movement or the Wobblies. I know very few who actually understand economics and why business operates as it does. J

ust as an example, I wonder how many leftists would keep using Facebook and Instagram if they knew that the beloved Sheryl Sandberg was a sexual predator who violated consent regularly by pressuring her interns to have sex with her. This is covered in the outstanding business book Careless People which is so disturbing to Mark Zuckerberg that he has almost bankrupted the author, a fearless New Zealander. As leftists we get all up in arms about causes like Coke's abuse of workers in South America and we want to boycott Coke but we do so by using tools like (again) Facebook which, I believe, joined Trump to prevent the chance of a Federal lawsuit against them like the Tobacco lawsuits. And, yes, I'm harping on Zuckerberg / Facebook but he's so shady that it is appalling. He buried the evidence that Facebook and Instagram did back in 2018 which covered up the mental health impact of social media on teenagers. Dig into it. Don't trust me. Find the receipts. They exist. Buy the book Careless People.

There is a saying “Every general fights the last war”. We keep protesting as if this was the 60s or the 30s. It isn’t. The world has changed and it changed because big business has been running the world since the dawn of modern consumer marketing which happened with the A&P Company which largely created consumer packaged goods and led to the rise of the modern economy.

We need to adapt the techniques of business, flip them on their head, strip out the profit motive and use it against THOSE CORRUPT GREEDY MOTHER FUCKERS.

It often feels to me that the left is using ideological slingshots while the right has ideological Uzis and Machine Guns. We have to do better. This war is fought in "idea space" as much as it is via signs in the streets.

26. We need GLOBAL limits on personal wealth; no more billionaires ANYWHERE

Social media keeps breaking the world and while FUCK ELON MUSK FOREVER, Elon has done us a favor. He has shown us the evil, evil nature of wealth in the world of social media:

  1. As a society we do not allow individual humans, anywhere in the world to own a personal nuclear weapon.
  2. As a society, we do not allow individual humans, anywhere in the world to own a weapon of mass destruction like copies of the smallpox virus.
  3. Given that billionaires can now use their wealth and their social media to interfere with the internal politics of governments anywhere in the world, I contend that having a net worth of a billion dollars makes any billionaire a personal weapon of mass political destruction.
  4. Given that wealth can be hidden and cross national borders, the only solution is we need a new Greta Thunberg style movement #NoBillionaires
  5. All wealth globally above the level of a billion dollars needs to be confiscated and used for the public good. A statue garden to "Gods of Capitalism" should be erected in the capital of every nation in the world when the first dollar above $1 billion is confiscated. And then they get celebrated and a national event allows them to choose how a portion of their money goes to help the world -- but the options are voted on by the populace.

And then every 5 years we drop that threshold by $50 million per year. We start by eliminating the billionaires and we keep dropping it until say $100 million.

And, yes, the billionaires will run and hide from country to country trying to hang onto their wealth. We have already seen this in America where the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page under just the 2025 potential threat of a one time 5% wealth tax (which would have cost them $12.5 billion out of a fortune of $250 billion each) left California in a rush recently. They built what is literally the most profitable company in the history of the world. Google. They created the mass perception that a tech company could be a social good with the well known mantra Don't Be Evil. And, yet, they fled California like scared cockroaches scuttling out of the light just because there was the possibility of a wealth tax.

Now you might say (and god knows I have said it), "there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire" but you know who didn't leave California -- Jensen Huang. Jensen is the founder of Nvidia and the creator of the GPU which is powering today's AI disaster.

32. In an age of cruelty, kindness is transgressive. BE KIND.

Trump, MAGA, the right as an aggregate is based on cruelty writ large. We can debate why but it is absolutely true. Ben Meiselas of the Midas Touch Network says it this way "The Cruelty Is The Point".

But if Trump and MAGA is all about the cruelty then we must, must be beyond kind. We must be transgressive in our kindness.

Trust me in this, I am no one special as an organizer. I did make mistakes but no one will ever say that I wasn't kind to a fault (ok maybe I messed up even this a little). But what I have found is that when you are kind to people, it opens up door after door after door.

And as activists, well, we need doors to walk through. We need people to embrace us with open arms and kindness does that.

Now you could say "Well Renee Good's last words were kind and they fucking shot her" and my answer to you is yes they did -- and how will did that work for them? One of my very best friends, a past President of the DSA, sent me this text the day of the shooting:

"The Second American Civil War started last night in Minneapolis."

He's a smarter man than I am, a better organizer, etc. But my point is simple -- my rejecting her kindness, Trump's side turned a skirmish into perhaps the start of a war.

✊

33. How do you run security for a protest or a rally?

The first thing to understand is that the face of American protests has changed from the days of 50501 in year 1 of the resistance. 50501 Year 1 was based on a centralized protest group with a centralized security group. Here's the reason why this doesn't work anymore:

What I recommend is that anyone running protests have a tote of four things:

And then someone coordinates handing out gear and getting it back and there is maybe a pre-protest 5 minute briefing.

The other benefit to this approach is it lessens the possibility of liability issues. There is no one to sue in the event of a security problem because there is no central security group.

34. Choosing a 3d Printer Architecture for Resistance Manufacturing

I am a former professional 3d printer. In the pre Trump 2.0 era, my (ex)wife and I had a 3d printed objects business and her role was picking what to sell while my job was running our 3d print farm of 16 machines and keeping them running. I had 15 Bambu P1P machines, 1 Bambu X1C that I wish I'd never bought and 1 elegoo (which I wish I'd never bought) and one Bambu Mini (which I wish I'd never bought). Originally we had other machines as well and we literally gave them away.

When you pick a 3d printer and you aren't a hard core down in the weeds tech nerd then, well, you have a hard time making a choice. I went with Bambu because the smartest 3d printer expert I knew wanted to try it (this was when they first came out) and it literally changed our business. We could NEVER have built that business up to one that did $7,500 per weekend at an event with any other hardware than Bambu. And I will defend that thesis forever at least based on the time frame in question -- 2022 to 2025.

I recent resistance friend said to me "What about XYZ" and it was an Elegoo CoreXY machine in a heated frame much like the Bambu X1C. So if you aren't a technology person, what you may not understand is that technology choices are highly political and Bambu is at the center of a struggle between proprietary and open source architectures. And even though I am a fucking open source freak who has been running Linux professionally since 2000 based on the bastard piece of shit code base that was Microsoft Site Server (I'm still pissed at you BillG for that garbage), I'll go with Bambu every time.

And when you look at me like I'm insane, please understand that once upon a time, I was a very serious software engineer and what I can tell you is that the quality of the hardware / software engineering and integration in Bambu devices is brilliant. Bambu was a spin out of the Chinese company DJI which makes the best drones in the world. Drones are a fusion of software, hardware, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering that is hard to get right. Even skilled tech companies like Anker tried and failed to get it right.

Now a particular 3d printer might be better at one thing or another than a particular Bambu printer but the thing that you don't understand about 3d printing for resistance objects is that you need to know some math. I print safety whistles 90 odd at a time. A 90 whistle run takes 13.5 hours roughly. That means if you want 200 whistles for an event, you need to start 2 days before hand and you need to run the same job over and over. If you want to run the 20,000 + whistles I've done in 2025 then you need to run your printers for 3,000 hours. All of my printers are now into the 3,000 or more hour right. The one I just took a run of whistles off is called Phantom Girl and it has 3,201 hours. I've never seen any other machine that can run like a tank without constant maintenance the way Bambu does. Bambu is designed NOT for people who want to play with their 3d printer but for people who want to print all the time.

I would argue that Bambu printers are the Toyota Pickup truck of the 3d print industry. They aren't perfect but they just fucking run.

Now all I've addressed so far is the brand of printer to pick. The specific printer to pick, well, I need to go check the current models. I've been buying the exact same machine for 5 years now -- how often can you say that in technology?

Note 1: My issue with the X1C was that it was the first generation and it wasn't right. In specific the first generation AMS system sucks green monkey balls. The Bambu Mini was also first generation and had similar issues.

Note 2: I have an Elegoo based on Core XY and I don't think I've ever managed to print anything on it. I had to give it to a friend to make it work and he tried but I'm unsure if it works to this day.

35. Picking a Current Bambu Printer

My traditional Bambu Labs printer has always been the P1P. It was the first Bambu printer I owned and I bought a lot of them. However, alas, the world moves on and the P1P is no longer available. It has been replaced by the P1S and the P2S. Between these two, I would recommend the P2S based on this analysis.

Basically Bambu Labs has three families of printers:

One thing to understand is that 3D printers are a lot of servers in a computer data center. One of the lessons that the past decade of server management taught us was the importance of having a single type of server rather than N different types. There are economies of scale to running a single type of server in terms of spare parts, learning, maintenance, etc. Similarly a single type of 3D printer is absolutely the way to go.

The bottom line is that if you want to buy a 3d printer for production of whistles or other resistance things, go with either the P2S or the P1S but don't mix and match; commit to a single model.

Note: The P2S print nozzle is a LOT easier to change than the P1S nozzle and that's a big deal.

36. Three D Printing Filament, Tips and Tricks

Here are some basic tips and tricks for 3d printing resistance objects.

  1. Filament comes in PLA, ABS, carbon fiber, etc. 99% of what you will use is PLA so don't worry about a printer being able to do carbon fiber or ABS or whatever -- honest to god you're almost always going to just use PLA.
  2. When you have PLA filament, it comes in two finishes -- matte or silk. Silk is the key to the really pretty, pretty, glossy prints. And, honestly, you really, really don't want silk filament. Yes it is beautiful and looks great but it can be up to 3x the price as basic white matte PLA filament. And that means the cost per printed object is 3X higher.
  3. The other thing to understand is that matte prints tend to be easier to make work than silk. Honestly I don't fully understand why but what I have found is that using silk is just more difficult.
  4. The final thing to understand about 3d printing FOR HIGH VOLUME manufacturing of printed is that the biggest annoyance is changing filament. Let's, for example, talk about 3d printed whistles. My plate of whistles has (213)+19 whistles on it or 82 and it takes 272 grams of filament to print. Now a spool of PLA is 1000 grams so that means that I can only print 3.6 plates *per** spool. Now here's the thing with any 3d printer -- changing the filament is always where you potentially run into problems. When I was doing high, high volume production of whistles in 2025, I asked myself -- what if I never changed the filament and I found goddamn magic. Ugly black or white matte filament is sold NOT just in 1000 gram spools but in 5000 gram spools (1 kg versus 5 kg; look at that -- an American can use the metric system!!! 🙂). So I went to my workshop and I built a holder for a 5,000 gram spool and magic. I was able to print 5,000 / 272 plates of whistles without changing filament or 18 plates. So that's 18 * 272 or 1,638 whistles!!! Oh and that spool can be priced as low as $50.99 versus say 5 * $14.99. Now this is just my approach to large scale manufacturing and as with everything ymmv.

37. Let's Print One Safety Whistle

This is an example of the process by which you create a safety whistle. Now please understand something important -- I am a manufacturing expert in 3d printed objects but that is NOT the same thing as a design expert for 3d printed objects. If you asked me "Please tell me how to put my own url on a 3d printed whistle", well, I'm going to look around sheepishly, say "Do I see ICE and point to the south west" and then I'm going to NOPE out. Seriously -- I don't honestly know.

The first thing to know is that all three d printed objects come from a geometry file called an STL file and there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of these on the Internet.

Traditional 3d Printing Methodology and a Nice Ranty Rant

  1. Start with a place like printables or thingiverse and search for "safety whistle".
  2. Find an STL file you like and download it to your computer.
  3. Open it in your "slicer" program and "slice" it for your printer. This is also sometimes referred to as making the "plate".
  4. Copy it to the SD card for your printer and transfer the SD card back to the printer.
  5. Select the file from the printer's menu and print it.

Now what you're going to find is that a very large percentage of STL files either don't work right, won't work for your printer, etc. There are lots of reasons like:

And this brings us to the reality of 3d printing which is that traditionally it is a "Nerd Hobby". The traditional 3d printing company is Creality and I think every single printer that Creality has ever produced -or- will ever produce is a boat anchor to which you should attach a chain and use it to moor a dinghy in a lake. I hate Creality with the passion of a dying sun about to expand to red giant status and nuke the inner most planets to a fiery crisp. ahem. wipes brow.

I am a student of technology companies as I've been in the technology field going on 40 odd years and what I have always found is that technology companies have an internal ethos which was formed in their primeval years and the company never, ever changes. Creality was formed to sell to nerds and they see no problem with shipping printers that, well, only a nerd could love. The best example of this is that as recently as maybe a year ago, Creality was still shipping printers without what is called "automatic bed leveling" (ABL). ABL is an absolutely essential feature of all 3d printers. When done manually it involves using gauges to adjust settings at between 16 and 64 spots on your printer bed. 🤬🤦‍♂️🤬. And some nerds do love this shit. Me? I'd so much rather censored.

Now contrast this with Bambu which was a company formed by engineers from a preeminent user centric technology company, DJI. Bambu has always had automatic bed leveling and it is done for you whenever you print. My creality printers used to need ABL done about every 10 prints (hence my hatred for Creality).

Note: Whatever printer you buy, make sure you buy one with automatic bed leveling.

3d Printing If You Use Bambu

  1. If you are a Bambu printer user then you can also work inside the Bambu Handy app and search for a whistle there. Although I'm a Bambu nut, I rarely use Bambu Handy because, well, I learn things slowly and it didn't used to work very well. Although, honestly, it works fantastically well now (but old dogs new tricks, old habits die hard, etc).
  2. Find a whistle design you like and select Prepare to Print from the bottom menu.
  3. Select the variant on the design you want to print.
  4. Click next.
  5. Select your printer and then BOOM! You're printing.

Now that's ONE whistle and not a whole sheet which I'll document in the next entry (but possibly not for a while).

Note: Bambu just added an option called "Copies in a plate" where you can tell it 20 whistles on the sheet and it will just do that for you right from the app so the next post, well, goes away.

38. Johnny Appleseeding Across America To Make Friends

If you're going to win a war, you need friends. Some would call these allies but allies are transactional whereas friends just show up. Conflict between America's liberals makes that hard if you focus on ideological alignment but there is a way that you can always make a friend:

You do good for them without any expectation of anything

I refer to this as "The Johnny Appleseed" move. Let's say, for example, that you wanted to make friends among America's protestors. What do we know about the act of protesting:

The myth of Johnny Appleseed was that of a genial, good natured human who planted apple trees all across America just for lolz. Now that's a myth like almost everything in American history but we are engaged in a battle of narrative so let's harness narrative for our own purposes.

How would it make you feel if you were a protest organizer and:

That's friendship. An ally would require negotiation and transaction but friends just show up and help out. Now if you've engineered your protest supplies correctly you might leave a trail by which they could find you.

Note: Take your own approach to this. My approach is what I call "Activist Loot Boxes" or "1 from Column A, 1 from Column B"

39. And The Kinksters Shall Save Us

40. Economic Arbitrage for Good

Although my current self identification is as a bleeding heart liberal, I'm still a believer in economics. Today the world is run by ´the flow of money and all our liberal navel gazing and sign carrying will not change that. I wish it would too. What will change the world away from capitalism to the next thing is a deliberate understanding of economics and using it to subvert the current system at a fundamental level.

Let's start with the the idea of arbitrage which we very successfully used in Year 1 of the Resistance. The idea of arbitrage is pretty simple and it boils down to:

Buy Low; Sell High

Now if you want to do this for good, why not make it:

Buy Low; Give It Away

This concept is specifically used in the next item "The New Samzidata aka Little Free Libraries".

41. The New Samzidat aka Little Free Libraries EVERYWHERE

42. Being a Maker in a Developed Economy

43. Being an Organizer Is People Messy

I'll admit that we all organize differently but given that the nature of activism is helping, I'll bet that a common theme among organizers is that we all tend to be at least a bit involved in our people's lives. Now please note that I didn't say "staff" or "employees" -- organizing in America, at least on the left is pretty much a hobby. The only professional organizers I know work for Indivisible. And if we're really honest about ourselves, well, organizing in America on the left is a hobby or, maybe, at best it is a social club.

So here's what I mean about "people messy". As a former organizer, I know:

Organizing is akin to social work -- if not outright social work -- I know organizers who treat it like it is their role to make sure people get fed. I didn't do that but it doesn't mean that it isn't a valid approach to organizing.

Anyway my point here is that organizing is "people messy" and I think that's almost an inevitable consequence of doing the work -- it is in the name -- you're "active" or you're "activated". In order to do this well, you have to care about people. And that's also an issue of setting your personal boundaries correctly which is something I struggle with. And I know I'm not the only organizer with that problem.

500. Recommended Media

I believe that we have to learn all that we can to combat what we are facing. Honestly there are great things to learn from fiction, business, podcasts and movies.

501. Recommended Fiction Books

Here are some good reads all around the theme of revolution:

502. Recommended Business Books

If we are ever going to overthrow the Oligarchs, then we have to understand them and leverage their own resources against them.

503. Recommended Podcasts

Here are some amazing podcasts:

504. Recommended Movies

The Big Short is on Youtube and it covers the 2008 financial crisis. As a liberal you may find money uninteresting but money is energy and the lead character, Michael Burry, foresaw the financial crisis and made a literal fortune because of his foresight.

It should be noted that Michael Burry has, in Fall of 2025, pulled all his money from the market and closed his hedge fund.