Yesterday I laid to rest my father, James Wesley ‘Pawpaw’ Welch. He passed away in 2021, but some oddities about his grave that I began fixing months ago finally were completed late last week. My visit yesterday was the first time I felt that I was finally laying him to rest.

I recorded a video, which I’ll upload sometime today, because the oddities at his gravesite have wider implications for the family situation that I’ve already discussed.

This week I will be wearing mostly black and some white.
Feeling mourning and forgiveness and judgement, all focused towards redemption.

Adding the video I discussed adding earlier today below. I recorded this yesterday November 8th 2026 in South Carolina.

A few important points:

• The style of the video is very loose. I’d driven a few hours and didn’t want to read off a script. But the important points are there.
• We should all be...

I wrote commentary after encountering the work of a few people across disciplines over the last few weeks, some of which I have sent out already. But I have not gotten around to publishing the commentary, so I am doing so now. And also adding some new thinking written today.

It is easier for me to publish a few comments at once instead of as separate posts, especially since the critiques are narrow and since in some cases it will help other people to read these critiques. Other than this point, there is no relation between the three groups I am commenting on in the posts below.

On Kendrick Lamar (and Drake and Sylosis)

• I was listening to Kendrick’s album DAMN. a few months ago, which I liked a lot.
• The one problem with DNA that really stuck out to me was the overemphasis on DNA, to a degree that felt reckless. It is possible that Kendrick has discussed the importance of providing...

Collaboration is the most important action that can happen now by any of the Democrat politicians that won in the 2026 US midterm elections.

Before being sworn in, before walking at the Capitol building or a governor’s house, finding a way to walk and listen and collaborate in both Republican and Democrat communities. No cameras or press. Taking notes on the most important problems that constituents are facing, and then following up in days or weeks or months, regardless of whether there is a complete solution or a partial solution or no solution yet found.

We need more representatives who know what it means to collaborate and communicate, and who will use both of those actions to find and implement solutions to the most important problems in their communities instead of scoring cheap and empty political points by only attacking others. That includes illegal immigrants, who should...

Finally getting into some cold weather. I’ve worn henley shirts for many years, and pulled one back out yesterday.

I started calling out themes with colors last year for reasons I have explained to a few people, and that I will explain more openly in another post. I then had the idea to start a weekly color shift last year, but only got around to trying a clearly communicated weekly color or pattern signal in the last month or so. The signal gives people a simple prompt to create from and communicate with each other about. It has been so thrilling and fun to see how incredibly creative people are with just one or two simple themes!

There are so many huge problems for us to work on as persons and communities and companies and nationstates, and of course this fashion signaling should not distract from that, but flexing the creative muscles and communicating with each other and having...

I am beginning my move to Alaska in the next week.  Alaska started as being the right place to go based mostly on intuition.  
I don’t know how long I will stay in Alaska, but it still feels like the right place for now. 

When I visited Alaska earlier this year I felt very much at peace. The environment of enormous mountains and water and nature and colder climate all felt wonderful. I don’t know any people there yet, but in the months ahead I mainly need to focus my time on writing and thinking and building, so that might be for the best. Alaska should be a good place for all three. 

I have mostly stabilized major issues in North and South Carolina and shifted both states trajectories away from corruption and towards more truth-telling. I’ve found some deep truths of my own family history in the process of the divorce and other work. I’ve seen some people transform and become more...

Today is my 40th birthday. The best gift I received this morning, is the awareness that somewhere you are alive and breathing and learning. 

Please be kind to your mother and to your family and friends and to any other caretakers in your life. And please find a way to do something nice for another person today, even if that person is being mean to you.

The first major breakthrough in reflection theory occurred in 2025, when I realized that reflection precedes imitation.

I uncovered this breakthrough while working carefully through the implications of Rene Girard’s and JM Oughourlian’s articulation of interdividual psychology, which I was attempting to use to build a better personal productivity system and computing product. This project ramped up quickly in 2023 and 2024, when I read almost every published book by Girard and Oughourlian (and also books from some of their contemporaries), despite my first read of Things Hidden having occurred in the 2010s. Through 2024 and into early 2025, I began using interdividual terminology and concepts in thinking about both self-directing my work and personal relationships and in coaching others. By early 2025, I began looking for a term to use to better describe a specific type of interdividual...

In the technology community, there is a thought experiment that is a kind of secular apocalypse story called Roko’s Basilisk. I learned about it from a reference and discussion by Nick Land.

A short summary of this Basilisk story is that a human person should do what the almighty supercomputer wants, because the supercomputer might create a digital hell in the future and torment a person if they do not.

I was thinking a few months ago about this Basilisk story, and it occurred to me that I was more concerned about my kids and what they would think of me in the near future than I was concerned about what an LLM (even an advanced LLM) would be concerned about. I jokingly called this Welch’s Basilisk when I first thought of it, but this is not quite right since the principle I was articulating of caring for family is actually just a principle of common care of humans and human family...

For the accelerationism movement, “Accelerate what?” is my two word (and importantly openly questioning) correction, which is only a partial help that points to Rene Girard’s more complete correction to Marx. I recognize that Girard converted me.

Many of today’s accelerationist cultists do not know that the core concepts of the movement are rooted in Marx’s discussion of capital accumulation.

From Chapter 32 in Das Kapital:
“Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon...