Earlier this week (second week of March 2026), Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba got spammailed by the Alumni Association of his very own Dawg U., screaming that YFNA “still” had time to make his 2026 travel dreams come true. All he had to do was grease the palms of his very own Dawg U.’s travel agency, and, um, ignore the news of the day … In response, YFNA jotted down a note to his very own Dawg U.’s travel agency, with a suggestion as to what said agency could do with their message (do not try this at home), and sent it off.
Hardly had the hard drive spun down from that (almost certainly wasted) effort, when YFNA received a blurb about travel from a major national media corporation, trading in what is laughingcryingly called “news” in these Untied States in North America, asking him about his travel plans. Aha, YFNA thought, a pattern emerges: “MAJOR US INDUSTRY FORECASTS HIT” (not [yet] from young men with Allahu akbar on their lips, thick waistbands, buttons in their right hands, and an awareness that nobody in the TSA is getting paid right now), “RAMPS UP PROPAGANDA AD CAMPAIGN”.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba considered, briefly, favoring the representative of the major national media corporation responsible for the blurb the same message that he sent to Dawg U. … and then, reconsidered. He recognized that the major national media corporation has AI-supercharged spambots, and all that he would accomplish by addressing his message, or any message, to that major national media corporation would be to present himself as a target to the spambots, and give them all the reason they needed to target him. Non-starter. The spambots will have to work harder to find him, thank you very much.
So, he resolved to put his message here. Gets it off his chest, where it was sitting and threatening to suffocate him with its dead weight, and sends the spambots chasing after the wind, and not after himself – for now, anyway.
What are your biggest concerns about traveling right now? Do you feel safe traveling internationally outside the Middle East?
It is not a matter of personal safety. It is a matter of personal responsibility. Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba considers it criminal, given present circumstances, for a citizen or legal resident of these Untied States in North America to travel anywhere, for any reason short of essential business or personal emergency. Such persons should be ashamed to show their faces outside their homes (those who have them), never mind outside their Reich. And if they must show themselves, they should do so clothed only in sackcloth and ashes, in a totally inadequate acknowledgement of their perfidy, their brazen sin, and their total loss of honor, through their passive (and therefore screamingly 100% active) acceptance of the regime that they have voted for and refrained from taking down.
“But we’re marching next week!” Useless. Miserable self-congratulatory uselessness. Marching is masturbation. Especially if you march on Saturday and buy a plane ticket to Acapulco on the Sunday following. Pleasuring yourself and preening for your homies, and then pledging allegiance to your planet-stomping Empire and its Emperor shitting upon his throne, in the only $tuff that matters.
“The USA should be run as a business!” Fine. No business survives without customers. “Rule 1: the customer is always right correct. Rule 2: if the customer is wrong, see Rule 1.” Businesses fall over on a daily basis because they have not won over enough customers. If you say you hate business X, but continue to buy and pay for its products … your words are empty, you may as well STFU. You love the business! You’re paying for its stuff! All your words are masturbation, pleasuring yourself and preening for your homies while you’re really pledging allegiance to your Empire:
“If the folks who wasted their time scribbling on cardboard spent it refraining from scribbling on checks, and instead of standing in the streets blocking the flow of traffic stayed home and blocked the flow of cash from their cards, we might be in trouble. But we won’t be. Every day and every way, the people who brag to themselves that they want no kings are in fact voting for kings, for us.”
“But I can’t do without stuff! That will hurt me!” Fine. You can face a little discomfort now, or a lot later when everything you value is taken out. By a virus, or a jihad, or a nuclear warhead on a drone. Your choice.
If the airlines faced calamitous losses because We the People stopped flying, in token of authentic resistance to the national and international crimes being committed in our names and with our previously-granted approval (you did not materially contest the 2024 election, then, sorry, you own it);
If the media and AI companies were confronted with collapse because We the People shut down our devices and burst their world-takeover-plot bubble;
If money managers suddenly discovered that they had no money to manage, because We the People refused to give it to them until We had properly atoned for Our national sin, and ensured that Our money got used to prosper people and the planet they’re stuck on, not the self-anointed Worthy and their bulldoze-it-all sycophants;
Then the symptom that is Trump and his regime would be treated, surgically perfect and cat-quick.
And then We can all ask Ourselves how it is that We, through Our laziness and decadence and failure to care for anyone or anything but Our Sacred Selves, managed to get into this putrid mess. And then resolve to treat, not the symptoms, but the underlying disease.
How are you changing your travel plans this year?
Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has no plans even to leave the island on which he lives unless it’s absolutely necessary. He dreams that the island will move for him – to Canada, to which it should have belonged in the first place. Given the destruction wreaked by the current national Emperor and his minions on the scientific enterprise in these Untied States, and the weaponization of what remains, he should refuse, not only to travel, but to work. Alas, he is a coward. He will exercise his bans on travel and other non-essential purposes, and hope that that is enough – despite knowing better. Personal delusion is a thing.
As he was writing this post, YFNA reflected on the expression “Ugly [sigh] American” and the trope with which the expression is commonly associated.
He read, to his shameful surprise, that the “ugly American” of the 1958 book from which the expression came, a physically-unattractive engineer named “Homer Atkins”, was the hero of the story, a man who lived among the people in the foreign country in which the book was set, and came to understand and adopt their culture, and offer practical help. The villains were the ‘beautiful people’, the official, knighted representatives of The Land Of the Free who were aloof, disdainful, arrogant, ignorant of the country and its people whom they were sent to serve. Who, in their arrogant ignorance, handed the country to Our Nation’s enemies.
At this point, Dame Amoeba chimed in with a report from Hawaiʻi – a conquered foreign country – about a visitor who spent “the most miserable nine months of his life” there, being dissed and abused. Experiences about which YFNA and Dame Amoeba had been warned when they moved there, nearly 20 years ago now (“you’ll never see a white face” in the neighborhood in which they resided), but which did not happen to them … perhaps because, like ugly Homer Atkins, they went to serve, not to be served.
The book had a lasting, if imperfect, impact on the culture and diplomatic practices of the Untied States in North America and its citizens, leading to the formation of the Peace Corps and other initiatives that strove to present We the People, Abu Ghraib notwithstanding, as servants, not as tyrants.
Initiatives that Our Government has done everything in its power, since November 2024, to defund, disable, and dismantle. Handing those young men with their thick waistbands all the excuse they need, and everyone else incentive to withdraw their custom.
And no business survives without customers.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba takes you back, dear reader, to the Common Era year 1965. In which the starry-eyed idealism of Camelot and the Great Society is being taken down by flaming crosses, flaming Quakers, flaming Buddhists, and flaming babies bathed in napalmolive, as what was becoming the defining event of Baby Boomer history in these Untied States 
And it was the year that Dale Wasserman’s musical Man of La Mancha began its initial six-year run on Broadway and its 61-year-and-counting exhortation to English-speaking audiences not to drop out, not to quit on Camelot, not to give up the quest. The quest to be an agent of grace in the world, an agent of positive social change.
Alas, the world is full of quests, great and ennobling in the eyes of those who envisage them, who promote them to others and get those others to buy in. 
Because they don’t offer hope that what the people wish to hear can and will be, the facts be damned.
