Month: November 2024

Autopsy #2

The whole game of political analysis is about as useful now as a typewriter at a hacker convention—an artifact from a time when the masses had to nod their heads to a single “correct” interpretation of reality. But we’ve left that world behind, thanks to the glorious, unrelenting chaos unleashed by network technology. The internet has drowned us all in an endless deluge of half-baked hot takes and tribal chatter, obliterating any hope of consensus. So here I am, offering my own ladle-full of this anachronistic stew, trying to float a little meta-analysis above the wreckage. Most of this boils down to one thing: the internet and social media have become the de facto gods of our age. The real tragedy is the staggering amount of time and energy wasted pretending it’s still 1992—or, for the more optimistic fools, 2008. The Republicans, for now, seem to have a knack for thriving in this digital hellscape, but the cracks in their armor will start to show soon enough. Not that it does the Democrats any good—they’re stumbling around in a maze of their own making, blindfolded and clutching outdated maps. The whole thing is shaping up to be a slow-motion train wreck, but at least the popcorn’s free.

Dems in Disarray

The goal, it seems, was to engineer a grotesque, funhouse-mirror inversion of the New Deal consensus — to transform the Democratic Party into a gaggle of effete technocrats and coastal Brahmins, huffing their own fumes of self-righteous neoliberalism, while masquerading as the eternal party of FDR. And on the other side of the aisle, to whip the Republican Party into a Frankensteinian coalition of aggrieved working-class populists, evangelical zealots, and disillusioned minorities, bound together by nothing but a shared contempt for the smug elites who engineered their misery.

If that was the plan, then by God, the DNC has outdone themselves — a Machiavellian masterstroke of self-sabotage, like hiring arsonists to rebuild the house. They’ve delivered their base on a platter to a party that used to consider them Marxist bogeymen. And now, the GOP stands poised to wield multiracial, working-class rage as a cudgel, a political Molotov cocktail aimed squarely at the gilded towers of their former overlords.

This isn’t just a failure; it’s a tragicomic opera of betrayal and incompetence. Somewhere in the bowels of Hell, Rockefeller and Goldwater are sharing a stiff drink, cackling at how easily the game was rigged. And up above, the DNC’s Silicon Valley donors toast to their own irrelevance, congratulating themselves on their inclusivity as they usher in a new American oligarchy. This is no accident — it’s a deliberate mutation, a grotesque experiment in political Darwinism. And by all accounts, it’s working beautifully.

The problem with this whole “moderation” hustle is that it’s not just blind to the raw, bloody facts of the election we all just stumbled through. No, it’s worse—it chains the Democrats to a game where the Republicans always own the ball, the field, and the goddamn scoreboard, no matter how much wreckage they leave behind. It’s the politics of perpetual retreat, a coward’s strategy of chasing the shifting winds of “public opinion,” as if that’s some natural force and not a product of raw political muscle and propaganda.

What kind of sick “moral imperative” is it to win elections if all you’re doing is nodding along to whatever insane options the right shoves in your face? That’s not politics—that’s surrender. Politics is supposed to be about setting the terms of the fight, not groveling for scraps of approval.

There will be No Grand Narrative

There will be no grand narrative, no tidy storyline to tie it all together. The metanarrative is dead, blown to bits by the relentless, anarchic force of network technology. This isn’t a battlefield where competing explanations clash and the strongest one emerges victorious—no, it’s a madhouse where every story shouts over the others, and the idea of a “winner” is laughable.

Sure, you’ll find pockets of agreement—small tribes huddling around their shared interpretation of why the election fell the way it did. But even those fragile alliances will be under siege, gnawed at by the ever-present reality that the other tribes, just a click away, see it completely differently. Everyone knows everyone else doesn’t agree, and that knowledge eats away at whatever coherence might have existed. It’s not a debate; it’s a shouting match in a hurricane, and the storm isn’t letting up anytime soon.

News is Olds

News is finished. Or maybe it’s just drowning—suffocated under the sheer weight of itself. There’s too much of it for any of it to mean anything anymore. This election made it clearer than ever: the national elites—the media moguls, the talking heads, the narrative architects—don’t have a prayer of hammering their story into place. The narrative machine is broken, and no amount of nostalgia or corporate tinkering will fix it.

People don’t get “news” anymore; they get a steady drip-feed of microtargeted propaganda from a thousand different spigots, each tailored to keep them docile, enraged, or whatever the algorithm deems profitable. The genie’s out of the bottle, dancing around with a middle finger in the air, and it’s not going back in. Sure, plenty of people will try to stuff it back—earnest think pieces, toothless regulations—but it’s a lost cause. The old gatekeepers have been tossed into the chaos, and the gates are wide open.

The Post’s journalists turning around and begging readers not to cancel their subscriptions.

This isn’t the swagger of an elite class calling the shots—it’s the desperate whimper of people who know the game is slipping through their fingers. They aren’t running the show anymore; they’re scrambling to keep the lights on, praying the audience doesn’t leave before the curtain falls. It’s a sad, sputtering mess—one more sign that the old media world is crumbling into irrelevance, brick by brick.

Potemkin Village Man

Trump is just the shiny tip of a very ugly iceberg. He’s not the architect of this madness—he’s the inevitable spawn of it. A product, not a cause. He moves through the world like a carnival barker, performing his grotesque shtick with the (sometimes reluctant) backing of his entire party. Make no mistake: much of what he does isn’t even his idea—it’s their dirty laundry, hung out to dry in plain view, with Trump as the willing puppet.

Sure, he’s got that weird, almost hypnotic charisma that can light the fuse on any powder keg, but at his core? He’s hollow. A Potemkin village of a man. Less a leader than a mirror for the worst instincts of his followers, focused on applause like a junkie chasing his next fix. Power is incidental to him; it’s the adoration that keeps him going, a grotesque feedback loop of ego and spectacle. But the iceberg beneath him? That’s the real problem, and it’s not melting anytime soon.

MAGA Co-Opted

The so-called winners are already sweating bullets. MAGA diehards are frothing over Marco Rubio’s appointment like it’s some kind of personal betrayal, while Republican senators are fielding threats to install Rick Scott as majority leader. Over in the House, their razor-thin majority is already at war with itself, thanks to a pack of self-styled mavericks hell-bent on chaos.

This isn’t the disciplined, well-oiled machine they like to pretend it is—it’s a wrecking ball, swinging wildly with no one at the controls. And the “woke” MAGA crowd? They’ve been hardwired to sniff out betrayal everywhere, especially within their own ranks. It’s paranoia as an operating system, and it guarantees that even their victories will taste like ashes. This isn’t a party—it’s a demolition crew, and they don’t even trust each other to hold the sledgehammer.

Musk/Twitter

I’ve gone on record saying Musk runs Twitter/X with all the precision of a chimp with a chainsaw, and with no hope of actual growth. Turns out I was right—and wrong. Because growth? That’s a relic of another era. Musk didn’t need a business model; he needed a simulacrum of one. Something loud, chaotic, and self-referential. And he found it: a platform not to inform or connect, but to project. A neon scream into the void, tailored for Trump’s reality distortion field.

In this game, truth and utility are beside the point. What matters is the reflection in the funhouse mirror, the endless feedback loop where propaganda masquerades as discourse. Musk didn’t create this; he just leaned into it, cranked the volume, and called it a strategy. But for all his bravado, Musk won’t survive long in Trump’s shadow. Trump is the final arbiter of the spectacle, a man who devours symbols and spits out rivals. Musk, for all his posturing, is just another mirror—one Trump will smash the moment it stops reflecting him perfectly.

Credit where it’s due, though: Musk figured out that in this landscape, the appearance of power is power, even if it’s hollow. That’s the genius of his chaos. It’s not a plan—it’s a performance. And in a world where the symbol is all that remains, the performance is enough to keep the circus going. For now.

Trump Baroque

Trump will disappoint, but that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s astonishing that he still holds his cult-like sway, even after failing so miserably to “drain the swamp” in his first act. The man flamed out in 2020 with the grace of a toddler who just got their toy taken away, yet his followers remain hypnotized. That’s the thing about charisma—it’s not about delivering results; it’s about embodying the illusion of results. A mirage in the desert of despair, always just out of reach but somehow enough to keep people crawling toward it.

He’s not a leader; he’s a signifier. A blank canvas for his base to project their own fantasies of power, grievance, and redemption. He doesn’t need to fulfill promises because the promises were never the point. What matters is the performance: the bluster, the chaos, the endless loops of conflict that simulate action but lead nowhere. His next administration—if it materializes—won’t deliver anything beyond a grotesque parody of governance. Expect haphazard bluster, institutional sabotage, and an ill-conceived deportation spree that burns hot, fast, and predictably out of control.

But here’s the kicker: for some people, that will be enough. They don’t want a functioning government; they want the spectacle of its destruction. Trump’s genius—if you can call it that—is his ability to embody their anger, their fear, their contradictions, and turn them into a grotesque carnival act. He isn’t a man so much as a reflection, a funhouse distortion of the American psyche. The tragedy, of course, is that the carnival never leaves town. It just grinds on, spinning in circles, promising catharsis but delivering only exhaustion. And for those still entranced by the lights and noise, that’s all they’ll ever need.

Obama Punk

Obama Punk: A retro saudade for a future that never arrived—a nostalgia for the glowing promise of change still wrapped in the sepia tones of mid-2000s optimism. It’s a world humming with the crackle of hope, dressed in sleek, modernist lines, and tinged with the bittersweet ache for a parallel history where lofty ideals took flight and soared instead of stalling out.

Picture a clean, pastel-colored aesthetic: smooth lines, quiet neighborhoods, and the golden hour’s warmth over city streets. An America that could have been—a place of earnest possibility, of unity and empathy baked into the system rather than left to wither on the vine. It’s a world of cassette tapes, BlackBerrys buzzing with hopeful messages, and green-energy cars that glide through cities where everything seems just a little too good to be true. Obama Punk revels in the artifacts of this imagined past, holding onto the quiet dream of progress like an old photograph, worn at the edges but deeply cherished.

The soundtrack? Lo-fi beats blended with sampled speeches, stirring echoes of “Yes We Can” whispered over a gentle, futuristic hum. In Obama Punk, the world is retro but forward-looking—a vintage peace rally where no one was disillusioned. It’s saudade for an era that never quite crystallized, a longing for the dream that remained just out of reach, still shining like a beacon from a bygone timeline.

Obama Punk is a fever dream of lost futures—a flash of slick, neon-tinged nostalgia for the change that never came, bottled up like some wild American cocktail of hope, naivete, and pure saudade. It’s a bittersweet hangover from that brief, dizzy high when everything felt possible, back in the days of clean-cut promises and “Yes We Can.” But like all great American dreams, it soured quick, and here we are, left with the aching memory of something that never even existed.

Imagine it: Obama Punk lives in a retro-futuristic haze, strutting through streets lit by eco-friendly street lamps, listening to sampled speeches over lo-fi beats, and burning green energy in some utopian, never-built cityscape. It’s the nostalgic ache of a country that almost believed in something more—streets lined with solar panels, kids waving miniature American flags, and the endless possibility of unity and decency. But all of it’s just out of reach, fading like the last flicker of a half-dead screen.

In Obama Punk, the air is thick with saudade, that heavy-lidded longing for the world we thought was around the corner—a world where all that promise didn’t go belly-up in the cesspool of cynicism. It’s nostalgia weaponized, dressed up in pastel suits and thin-rimmed glasses, grasping at the shimmering ghost of a future that’s forever slipping away.

The soundtrack? Faint echoes of old campaign rallies layered under quiet beats, hopeful but haunting, like a broken record still trying to play the anthem of a nation that never got to hear it. Obama Punk is that strangest, most American sadness—a yearning for a time that never came to be, and the sick feeling that maybe, just maybe, it was always destined to end this way.

Trump Baroque

Trump Baroque is a gaudy, all-American fever dream—a steroid-jacked carnival of excess where reality itself is dragged into the ring, bloodied and screaming, and pumped full of the same greasy adrenaline that fuels WWE smackdowns, Real Housewives screaming matches, and Sopranos-grade betrayals. It’s not politics anymore; it’s a no-holds-barred grudge match, a theater of madness where every handshake is a power play, every insult a tactical nuke, and every victory tastes like a cold McDonald’s cheeseburger devoured under fluorescent lights at 3 a.m., with ketchup smeared on a golden tie.

This is not the natural order of things. This is a hostile takeover of reality—a savage, brain-splitting cacophony of narcissism and spectacle, where nothing matters except the show. The truth? Irrelevant. Integrity? A joke. All that counts is who’s screaming the loudest, who’s standing last, and whose name is lit up in gaudy neon on the side of the collapsing casino that used to be the American Dream.

The Trump Baroque aesthetic thrives on chaos. It’s a gold-plated nightmare, a carnival of grotesques. Picture a gilded Oval Office with more mirrors than Versailles, endless echo chambers reflecting one inflated ego after another. Picture backroom deals brokered over buckets of KFC, punctuated by fist-slams on faux-marble tables. Picture a mob boss swagger wrapped in a reality-TV sheen, where every betrayal is scripted but somehow still cuts deep.

The players in this psychedelic opera are larger-than-life caricatures. The Boss—part Don Corleone, part Vince McMahon—is the maestro of this deranged symphony, orchestrating feuds, firing off insults like cheap fireworks, and always keeping the crowd on edge. His inner circle? A rogues’ gallery of sycophants and backstabbers, clinking champagne flutes one minute and plunging daggers into each other’s backs the next. Loyalty is a punchline. The only rule: never let the spotlight leave your face.

Every scene is a spectacle. Every action is a power move. A handshake becomes a test of dominance. A rally morphs into a gladiatorial pit. The line between reality and performance dissolves in a haze of cheap cologne and sweat, leaving nothing behind but the faint, sickly smell of burned-out ideals.

And yet, beneath the absurdity, there’s a method to the madness—a perverse genius to the spectacle. Trump Baroque doesn’t just rewrite the rules; it burns the rulebook, tosses the ashes into a Diet Coke, and raises a gold-plated chalice to toast the chaos. In this universe, the only sin is to lose the crowd, and the only victory that matters is the one that makes the headlines.

So here we are, hurtling through a nightmare of our own making, trapped in a surrealist painting drenched in gold leaf and smeared with ketchup, where the stakes couldn’t be higher, and the absurdity couldn’t be louder. This is Trump Baroque—a vulgar, glorious, star-spangled apocalypse. God help us all.

The City of Ten Thousand Doors

The room has been thick with smoke, curling in lazy rings under the ceiling fans, the walls stained amber in the dim light. Tangiers has pulsed outside, the city flickering in neon, shadows shifting like restless ghosts. In the corner, beneath a cracked light, the boss has leaned back in his chair—Moroccan leather, worn with years, his fingers drumming on its arm. He has watched the young men across from him with a hard, steady gaze, reading them as if they’ve already confessed everything.

“You have thought I’m just another hustler,” he has said, a slow smirk pulling at his lips, “another man with hands in pockets, collecting my piece.” The men have been silent, their shoulders tight, but the boss has leaned forward, letting smoke drift from his cigarette. “You haven’t understood it yet, have you? What I do has gone far beyond money. Money has been only a shadow, an echo. What I have done here, it’s made something—call it order, call it peace, but it’s real.”

He has flicked his cigarette ash onto the floor, ignoring the tremor in the younger man’s hand. “If I hadn’t been here, things would have fallen to chaos. The souks, the ports, the whole rhythm of the Medina—everything would have unraveled. What I’ve built has kept this place together, ticked it forward like the gears in an old clock.” His voice has been quiet but sharp, cutting through the haze of the room like a blade.

“Now, maybe you’ve been thinking, if there’s no trouble, why would anyone need a man like me?” He has laughed, a low, rusty sound. “But that’s the trick, isn’t it? If I’m good at my job, then there’s nothing to see. No mess, no broken bones in the street, no blood on the walls. People start to believe there’s nothing wrong, that danger’s a myth.”

He has looked through the window, the lights of Tangiers spread below him like a map of possibilities. “But if something bad had happened? If I had let things slip even once?” His face has hardened, his jaw clenched. “Then they’d say I had failed, that I wasn’t worth the price. They’d forget the times I’ve stopped trouble before it had begun, the messes I’ve cleaned before they’ve spilled over.”

He has paused, smoke wreathing his face, an ancient calm in his eyes. “Do you understand the weight of that? To keep things balanced, never seen, never praised? To hold all the threads while people wonder if you’re even needed? That’s my trade. I’ve made sure that bad things haven’t happened. And that is my curse: the better I do my job, the less they see me, the less they understand what I’ve saved them from. But they come to me in the end, every time, because they have known—even if they forget in the daylight—how much worse it could be.”

The boss has shifted, leaning back as if to take in the whole room with one slow, sweeping look. The young men have sat tense, half-listening, half-staring at the haze of smoke. He has taken a deep breath, as though he’s about to let them in on some secret hidden in the foundations of the city itself.

“You see, people talk about technology as if it’s some kind of miracle, some guarantee of power,” he has murmured, voice like gravel rubbing against silk. “But I’ve seen the truth—no matter how powerful a technology becomes, it’s never more than an experiment. Always a test, always just a step out into the unknown. The fools in labs, the ones behind all those machines and wires, they don’t know what they’re playing with. They’re like children with matches, thinking they’ve mastered fire.”

He has laughed, cold and low, taking another drag from his cigarette. “Technologists think they’re gods, but they’re blind as anyone else. They can’t see the full picture, not until it’s too late. Every invention they’ve made, every so-called ‘solution’—it’s been nothing but a gamble. They’ve played with forces they haven’t understood, and by the time they’ve seen the consequences, it’s already out of their hands.”

He has looked each young man in the eye, holding them there as if weighing their souls. “Me? I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve had to see things for what they are, right from the start. Every move, every deal, every choice has had to be deliberate, no room for loose ends or blind experiments. The people out there,” he has gestured toward the city lights flickering through the window, “they think they’re safe because of some system, some clever design. But all of that, the order they take for granted—it’s only ever been real because I’ve made it so. Not machines, not technology, but flesh and blood, sweat and consequence.”

He has leaned forward, his voice dropping to a whisper, but with the weight of iron. “The men in labs can afford to fail. They learn after the fact, let their failures fall on others, make their adjustments. But here in Tangiers, in the streets, I don’t have that luxury. If I fail, the city burns. That’s the difference. Their power’s experimental; mine’s real.”

The smoke has lingered thick around them, the shadows pooling deeper as his words settled over the room like a warning. “So remember this,” he has said, a dark gleam in his eye, “whatever new marvels or toys they come up with, whatever promises they make—their games will always end in uncertainty. But what I’ve built, what I protect… that’s no experiment. That’s the line between order and chaos. And as long as I’m here, I keep that line.”

The boss has drawn a long, slow drag from his cigarette, and his eyes have softened, gazing out toward the window where Tangiers sprawled like a living tapestry. “This city,” he has said, voice a mix of reverence and resignation, “it isn’t some neat system, like those technologists dream about. No, this place… it’s like the wave and the electron. Infinite, changing, an experiment that’s always in motion, never fixed.”

He has looked back at the young men, holding them in the weight of his stare. “They think they can measure it, control it, like it’s some Western machine. But here? Tangiers is like the wind that rolls off the Rif Mountains, like the markets shifting each dawn, like the sea brushing at the rocks and changing a little each time. Everything here, it’s relationship, it’s the balance of people who’ve known each other’s families for generations. It’s not rules and systems; it’s baraka—the blessings, the weight of lineage, of blood and debt, of favors traded over tea, beneath the palm trees.”

He’s flicked his cigarette ash again, as though brushing off the technologists’ schemes, their neat little theories. “You see, in the North, they have their systems, their grids, their determinations. But here? Here, we have tajriba—a kind of knowing, a trust in the way things unfold, always close, never certain. And like the electron, everything depends on how you look at it, how you’re connected to it. You can’t hold Tangiers in your hand; you can only walk through it, move with it, be part of its rhythm.”

He’s paused, tapping his fingers on the table. “This place is indeterminate, like you said. It’s like the wave. One minute it’s a pulse of energy moving through the souks, the alleys; next moment, it’s gone, disappeared into the Medina’s hidden paths. It slips through your fingers like sand. And every day, every deal I make, every person I touch, it changes. Not in some simple, linear way—they don’t understand that. It’s like trying to catch a river in a cup. You only get a trickle, but the rest flows on, uncontained.”

He’s leaned back, letting his words settle over the young men, filling the room with a silence that has felt thick and heavy. “So they think they can impose their systems here? Control it from the outside? They’ll only ever see a shadow, a surface reflection, because they don’t have the connection, the roots. They don’t have the real understanding. You can’t build a city with formulas, with charts. This city’s made of whispers and debts, of hands clasped over coffee, of promises that outlast lifetimes.”

He’s taken another drag, and his eyes have drifted back to the cityscape beyond the window. “They don’t know Tangiers. They see the city, but not the experiment within it—the push and pull, the pulse beneath the stone, the spirits and ancestors, the ways that cross each other like the wind. And that’s why, in the end, this city is ours. Because we understand that it’s not a problem to be solved. It’s alive, like the ocean, like the mountain, like us. A living, breathing, shifting wave.”

Don’t Be Evil

A Journey into “Sustainable Malevolence”

It all started innocently enough, the way all these mind-numbing corporate revolutions do. A few high-functioning sociopaths in hoodies decided that the future of the world rested in the ability to “disrupt” industries at the speed of a startup burn rate. It started as a cute, nerdy motto on some engineer’s whiteboard—Don’t be evil. The whole place reeked of Mountain Dew and nacho crumbs, buzzing with caffeine-soaked zealots who thought they’d solve the human condition if they could just code fast enough. At first, it was all about changing the world. A noble mission. They slapped “Don’t be evil” on a mission statement like it was a badge of honor, a hollow signpost on the road to Silicon Valley’s self-congratulatory utopia.

But the wheels of ambition grind quickly, and Don’t be evil? That was just a vestigial relic from the halcyon days of self-righteousness, a bumper sticker slogan for naive dreamers who hadn’t yet tasted the bitter, blood-soaked honey of venture capital. Enter Be Slightly Evil, the inevitable evolution. A delicate balance of cynicism and just enough decency to stave off a full-scale revolt from the employees who had no idea what they’d signed up for. Be Slightly Evil—you know, just enough to squeeze out the competition without anyone noticing. After all, if you’re not pushing the moral envelope a little, are you really innovating?

Sure, they’d still slap you with a high five and quote some Gandhi, but only after they’ve sold your personal data to the highest bidder. The only thing more brittle than their “moral framework” was the endless stack of cash they were all swimming in.

Soon, that wasn’t enough. Break things, then sell people glue. It’s the Silicon Valley method—smash the system, then reassemble the shattered pieces with duct tape and bad algorithms, charging people a premium for the privilege. You launch a product, let it implode, then watch as the public scrambles to “fix” it while you rake in a windfall of investor dollars. Why bother with the pretense of ethics when you can manipulate the very essence of human nature to create insatiable demand for the broken fragments of society you’ve casually destroyed? Think it’s too cynical? Not in the world of venture capital, where broken things are merely future profits waiting to be monetized.

And when the cracks in the empire begin to show—when the cracks in your conscience begin to show—you don’t backpedal. No, you launch a new slogan: Be Evil on alternate Thursdays. This isn’t your grandfather’s evil. This is the sophisticated kind, the kind with a schedule, the kind that knows when to hide behind regulatory loopholes and when to send in the lawyers.

And of course, by “evil,” we mean anything you want it to mean: it’s a gray area, a malleable concept that exists in a vacuum, waiting to be molded by the whims of capital and then profit off the ambiguity. Define evil as a gray area, and suddenly the theft of personal data, surveillance capitalism, and the complete obliteration of privacy are just market forces. And if anyone dares point out the ethical quagmire, they’re just too simplistic, too binary.

Then came the grandiose excuse: Woke made me do it. The ultimate get-out-of-jail card. You didn’t screw over your users, mislead investors, or bankrupt small businesses in the name of profit—no, you did it because cause social justice warriors. Sure, you’re fueling the existential crisis of millions, but at least you were force into it. The woke wave was surfed, the words tossed out like the latest trending hashtag, just another weapon in the arsenal for controlling the narrative. It’s not lying; it’s reframing—taking a reality that’s uncomfortable and smoothing out the rough edges for the masses.

But it doesn’t stop there. Enter Evil Premium, the gilded ticket to access the high life of corporate malevolence. For just $14.99 a month, you can get exclusive access to an app that tracks your every move, or opt for “ad-free” villainy, where your digital footprints are archived for a higher bidder. Want to feel really nasty? Upgrade to our Enhanced Villainy package, which unlocks the deepest data reservoirs, gives you premium access to psychological profiling tools, and, if you’re lucky, a special invite to the annual “Corruption Gala” in Monaco, where they hand out awards for the most creative misuse of algorithms. It’s like a subscription service for your darkest impulses—a cult-like marketplace where moral ambiguity is the product, and every transaction is a step deeper into the rabbit hole of modern exploitation.

But the real money-maker? Weapons & Widgets, baby. A seamless integration of hardware, software, and pure, unadulterated greed. You don’t just sell people a phone anymore—you sell them the means to enslave themselves with a microsecond of gratification.

why sell glue when you can patent the entire adhesive industry? It’s innovation through monopoly, a corporate synergy where every unit is optimized for “value delivery” and every resource is mined for market control.

Maybe it’s a new gadget that can track your every move or a “smart” watch that tells you when you’re going to die. Everything’s a product, from oppression to surveillance, from addiction to submission. It’s not about selling you a better life; it’s about selling you the idea that life without the right product is meaningless.

And why stop there? Expand the evil empire with corporate synergy—the holy grail of modern capitalism. Launch “Weapons & Widgets” as a corporate synergy, and suddenly, your entire revenue model is built on the back of fear and greed. Think of it as a one-stop shop for every devious tool in the digital toolbox. If you can’t kill them with kindness, you kill them with precision data—because why settle for an army of drones when you can have an army of algorithms, all finely tuned to profit from the very algorithms that serve you?

Finally, the pièce de résistance: Sustainable Malevolence. Nothing says forward-thinking quite like a slick, marketing-driven commitment to continuing the cycle of destruction, but with a “green” spin. Instead of just spewing the usual PR vomit about “corporate responsibility,” you start pushing legislation that actively incentivizes sustainable damage. Who cares if the planet’s crumbling as long as you can profit off it? Co-host a legislation effort for “Sustainable Malevolence,” ensuring that environmental collapse and social destruction are not just consequences but business opportunities. In this brave new world, you don’t destroy just for the sake of profit; you destroy with a plan. You ensure that the ruins of the old world are carefully mined, repurposed, and recycled into the shiny new world you’ve created. A world where everyone is locked in a contract for eternity, and the only thing more toxic than the environment is the corporate bottom line.

There it is, in all its glory. The Silicon Valley blueprint for modern evil: An ecosystem of buzzwords, broken promises, and data-driven exploitation, all wrapped in a thin layer of technocratic jargon that would make George Orwell choke on his own cigarettes. Welcome to the future. It’s slightly evil, and it’s coming for you whether you’re ready or not.

Dispatches From The Edge

The Lithium Wars: A Modern-Day Game of High Stakes

It’s a strange new world out there, and it’s all spinning a little too fast. The old conflicts—the Cold War standoffs, the battle for dominance between Communism and the West—seem quaint in retrospect, almost like a sideshow at the circus of history. Sure, there were plenty of resources to squabble over, but nothing that could quite match the ferocity of what’s coming next. I’m talking about lithium, baby. And oil. The lifeblood of the modern world. The stuff that makes the wheels of progress turn, the engines of industry hum, and the money flow like whiskey in a Vegas casino. This isn’t some ideological skirmish anymore. This is about something far more primal, far more dangerous: survival in the age of machines.

And the stakes? Oh, the stakes are so much higher now. Lithium, that little metal that makes our electric dreams possible, is the new gold. The new oil. Everyone’s gunning for it, and the U.S. knows damn well what’s at the center of the map: Latin America, Africa, and the old playgrounds of geopolitics. Forget about democracy and human rights—that’s just the veneer. The real game is resource extraction, and if you can’t see that, you’re already a step behind.

But here’s where it gets even more twisted. We’re talking about a world where the lines are already blurred beyond recognition. The coming Trump administration—now there’s a wild card that makes all the old players look like amateurs. It’s not even about policy anymore. It’s about power. About flexing muscle in a way that feels almost… deranged. If you thought the U.S. was crazy enough under the last circus tent, wait until January 2025 rolls around. The new administration is already making noise like a meth-fueled warlord with nothing to lose. This is not a rational entity we’re dealing with. There’s no strategy, no grand design—just a hunger for control and chaos that could break everything in its wake.

So, what do you do when the stakes are this high, and the madness is setting in? You start playing for keeps. You go beyond economic pressure, beyond subtle sanctions, and you get your hands dirty. Covert operations, cyber attacks, proxy wars—all that old-school stuff that Washington used to dabble in but is now fine-tuned for the age of global connectivity. The fight for lithium won’t be fought on battlefields with tanks and bombs. It’ll be fought on the internet, in backrooms, and through the manipulation of governments that are all too happy to sell out their people for a cut of the pie.

And it won’t be pretty. This won’t be a clean coup. No, this is going to be a blood-soaked carnival of chaos, fueled by information warfare and corporate greed. The U.S. will encourage “revolutions” that will look like anything but—beautifully orchestrated, with the right slogans and the right spin, but underneath, it’s a power grab for the future of the planet’s most coveted resources. You’ll see “people’s revolutions” that are anything but. They’ll be corporate coups disguised as liberation movements, and they’ll be fueled by the most basic human instinct: the will to survive.

But here’s the kicker: the world’s already watching. They’ve got the Internet now, they’ve got social media, and they’ve got more eyes on every move than ever before. These “revolutions” won’t stay in the dark. The reality is too exposed, too visible. So, when the U.S. decides to ratchet up the pressure with the tried-and-true methods of destabilization, it won’t go unnoticed. That’s the danger. When the U.S. goes for broke in the fight for lithium and oil, it’ll be a bigger spectacle than anything the CIA cooked up in the 50s. And this time, there will be no clean slate, no quiet aftermath. Just a cascade of unintended consequences that will make the last century’s coups look like child’s play.

And that, my friends, is the powder keg we’re sitting on. Welcome to the modern-day scramble for resources. It’s more chaotic, more dangerous, and more unpredictable than anything we’ve ever seen.

The question lingers in the haze: Will all the lithium in the world bring speed or slow death? Are we barreling toward a future of hyper-speed, microchips blazing, building faster machines and smarter AI, unlocking some cosmic door to the godhead? Or is this just the start of one ugly mother of a bloodbath, a high-stakes looting spree dressed up as progress?

You’ve got all these tech prophets selling us the dream of transcendence, while the rest of us are left clutching the lithium-drunk promise of AI nirvana—a god in the machine, capable of thinking faster, smarter, harder than any of us ever could. But what if the real game isn’t some digital utopia but a ruthless, oil-and-lithium-slicked descent into tech feudalism?

Because look at the stakes: there’s no clean energy revolution without lithium, no AI empire, no smart cities, no next-gen gadgets feeding on the juice of progress. And that’s the trap, right there. It’s a war disguised as progress, and every nation with a shred of lithium in its soil is about to get hustled, conned, flipped upside down. We’re trading blood for bytes, and when the last of the dust settles, who knows what’ll be left standing.

Because the real fear, the primal dread at the heart of empire, is the terror of standing still. That creeping, suffocating sensation of being trapped in place, in time, in the relentless churn of stagnation. It’s the one thing an empire can’t tolerate. Growth is its drug, expansion its lifeblood, and the prospect of being unable to grow, of hitting a wall it can’t break through—that’s the nightmare.

Empires don’t just crave resources; they’re addicted to motion, to the endless forward push. The lithium rush isn’t about powering devices; it’s about powering the illusion of unstoppable progress. In the mind of the empire, being trapped is as good as dying. The real fear is the possibility that there are limits, that there’s a point beyond which it can’t stretch its tentacles, a place where growth hits the wall and stops cold.

So here we are, hunting lithium not just for the next AI godhead but to outrun that grim specter of stagnation.

We’re in full Wile E. Coyote mode here, legs spinning frantically in thin air, suspended over the void. For a split second, everything seems fine—until the empire looks down and sees there’s no ground left, just the endless drop to a canyon floor that’s way, way down there, hard as stone and coming up fast.

They’ve been charging forward, chasing the next resource, the next tech breakthrough, the next illusion of unstoppable growth. But all that talk of AI godheads, of eternal progress? Turns out it’s just empty air, a mirage to keep them moving until they’re way too far out. There’s no floor, no safety net, just a canyon that’s been there all along, waiting for them to realize that the game doesn’t go on forever.

And maybe this time, there’s no scrambling back to solid ground. It’s just a long, wild drop into the real consequences—the rock-hard canyon, not the high-tech fantasies they’ve been selling.

Narcissus and Psyche

In this analysis of Narcissus and Psyche, we will explore their stories through the lens of cybernetics, systems theory, and distributed consciousness. These frameworks focus on how individuals relate to their environment, the feedback loops they generate, and the mental processes that connect them within larger systems of interaction. Distributed consciousness suggests that different aspects of the psyche are not confined to a single, unified consciousness but are spread across various elements, each influencing the other. Through this perspective, Narcissus and Psyche can be seen as representing distinct, interacting facets of consciousness—self-absorption and relational openness—highlighting the complex dynamics that shape human experience.

For Gábor Bódy, the sky is not a backdrop but a plane of immanence, a ceaseless becoming, traversed and transformed throughout Narcissus and Psyche (1980). In this sprawling assemblage of period drama and mythic resonance, the figures of Erzsébet (Patricia Adiani) and Laci (Udo Kier)—Hungarian poets caught in the turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars—emerge less as characters than as virtual nodes. Their passions, their agonies, their gestures fold the historical into the mythological, the personal into the cosmic. The film’s title maps Narcissus and Psyche not as fixed identities but as refrains, expressive modulations of the eternal return of gendered becoming: woman as metamorphosis, artist as self-fracture. “I believe in neither the Roman nor the Helvetian God,” declares Laci, “only in the aesthetic and historic authority of the Greek-Latin gods.” Yet this appeal to an archaic authority is deterritorialized by Bódy’s camera, which captures clouds not as symbols but as pure flux: an infinite series of patterns, intensities, and movements, defying any fixed organization of the heavens.

Against the sedimented codes of his contemporaries—the slow, mordant gestures that would come to define Hungarian cinema—Bódy sets loose a machine of dizzying velocities, which J. Hoberman aptly describes as “products from an alternate dimension.” His earlier American Torso (1975) similarly refuses linearity, folding the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 into the Civil War through a cinema of temporal fissures. Here, the “light editing” method—scratches, exposures, disruptions—decomposes the filmic surface, producing not a narrative of history but a delirial archaeology of time, a flickering palimpsest that erases itself even as it inscribes.

In Narcissus and Psyche, Bódy radicalizes this process. Across its four-hour duration, the film oscillates between Napoleonic set-pieces and kaleidoscopic disruptions, each scene an assemblage of contradictory forces. Scrupulous blocking dissolves into anarchic editing, compositional coherence into machinic frenzy. This is not a cinema of equilibrium but of tremor, vibration, and excess. Bódy’s insistence on perpetual movement—on the trembling of every frame—anticipates his embrace of cybernetics and video, which he celebrated for their capacity to “represent chance.” His cinema does not narrate but diagrams, organizing chaos into the poetry of contingency. It is a cinema of the virtual, a praxis of the future, where history liquefies into an aleatory field of possibility.

• Narcissus would represent the dangers of a closed feedback loop that becomes isolating and self-destructive. In Bateson’s terms, Narcissus’ relationship to his reflection lacks any external validation or “other” to break the cycle. The mirror image feeds back only what Narcissus projects, creating a self-reinforcing loop that ultimately leads to his downfall. Bateson would interpret Narcissus’ fixation as an example of how a system that closes off from meaningful feedback eventually leads to entropy and collapse. Without an open system to allow for dynamic interaction and learning, Narcissus is trapped within a self-referential echo, illustrating the notion that mental systems require diversity and exchange to sustain themselves. Narcissus is essentially caught in a “schismogenic” process—one where the repeated interactions (his gaze) escalate into a pathological fixation.

• For Psyche, we could focus on her journey as an adaptive learning process within a dynamic system. Psyche’s relationship with Cupid is initially shrouded in mystery, and her trials represent different forms of learning and adaptation. Each task Psyche faces is a feedback mechanism that teaches her about herself, her limitations, and her desires. We see these tasks as a form of double bind, where she must navigate contradictory instructions or impossible choices (e.g., loving Cupid without seeing him). Her perseverance through these binds reflects an evolution of mind in the Batesonian sense—she moves through different stages of learning and understanding her environment, shifting from dependence on rules imposed by the gods to an internalized wisdom about love, trust, and resilience. Psyche’s journey thus represents an open system where feedback (each task) is assimilated, transformed, and adapted to produce growth.

In this sense, Narcissus warns against systems that close off from external interaction, becoming stagnant and self-destructive. Psyche, in contrast, illustrates a self-regulating system that adapts to new information, learning from challenges and maintaining openness to external forces (represented by the gods and Cupid). We can interpret her journey as a positive feedback loop—each task reinforces her capacity to adapt, grow, and learn, allowing her ultimately to transcend her previous state and reach a more integrated form of being.

In summary, using this interpretation would see Narcissus as an example of a rigid system failing due to self-isolation, while Psyche embodies the flexible, adaptive system that thrives by interacting dynamically with its environment, using feedback to achieve a more evolved state of consciousness.

Psyche’s punishment

Psyche’s story includes significant trials imposed by Aphrodite (or Venus in the Roman version). Aphrodite’s jealousy of Psyche’s beauty and her love for Eros (Cupid) sets up the sequence of punishments Psyche must endure. Each trial Aphrodite demands is designed to be impossible, reinforcing Psyche’s subservient and “inferior” status, and they are intended to keep Psyche from reaching her beloved.

We could understand this dynamic as part of a system of power and control where Aphrodite represents an entrenched authority figure attempting to impose limits on Psyche. Aphrodite’s attempts to control Psyche are an example of hierarchical structure in a system, with rigid boundaries where older powers seek to enforce their dominance over emerging ones.

From this perspective:

1. Aphrodite’s Punishments as Control Mechanisms: Bateson might view each task given by Aphrodite as a form of control intended to enforce conformity and maintain the established hierarchy. Each trial Psyche undergoes can be seen as a way of testing and reinforcing her “place” within the system. This dynamic mirrors cybernetic feedback loops where systems can become either adaptable or self-reinforcing. Aphrodite, as a representative of a “closed” system, seeks to keep the old structure intact and prevent new connections (such as the union of Psyche and Eros) from disrupting her status.

2. Psyche’s Adaptive Responses: In overcoming each trial, Psyche demonstrates second-order learning, where she evolves by interpreting her challenges differently rather than simply repeating old patterns. Each task she completes reflects her ability to adapt to a seemingly rigid system. For example, when faced with impossible tasks like sorting seeds, gathering golden fleece, or descending into the underworld, Psyche accepts help from external sources (ants, a reed, or divine interventions). This openness to assistance and flexibility mirrors The ideal of an open, learning-oriented system that incorporates external input, adapts, and grows rather than becoming fixed or rigid.

3. Reconfiguration of the System: Psyche’s final transformation into an immortal being, allowed by Zeus, can be seen as a reconfiguration of the hierarchical system. In the end, the “closed” system symbolized by Aphrodite’s dominance is partially dissolved to accommodate a new structure where Psyche, initially a mortal outsider, becomes integrated as an immortal, equal partner with Eros. Bateson would likely interpret this as a system that has evolved to maintain balance by incorporating new elements, adapting in a way that sustains the whole.

Narcissus and Psyche

In this terms, Psyche could be seen as the literal “psyche” of Narcissus—the adaptive, relational potential within him that he never realizes. Narcissus and Psyche are like two parts of a system: Narcissus represents the rigid, self-referential part that refuses to change, while Psyche embodies the open, flexible part that learns and evolves through experience.

If Narcissus and Psyche were viewed as two aspects of a single mind, Narcissus would be the isolated loop, endlessly feeding back on itself without external input or growth. Psyche, however, would be the part of the mind that engages with the world, adapts, and draws on new information to create meaning beyond itself.

Thus, in this framework, Psyche is what Narcissus’s psyche could be if it escaped its own self-imposed isolation. Psyche’s journey represents a mind that can learn, adjust, and expand—traits Narcissus lacks as he remains trapped in his closed system. If he could integrate Psyche’s openness, Narcissus might escape his self-absorption and connect with a broader, more balanced existence.

Greek Myths and Distributed Conciousness

Greek myths can indeed be understood as an example of distributed consciousness. Rather than having a single, unified perspective or consciousness, Greek mythology presents a universe where different aspects of human experience, emotion, and thought are distributed across a pantheon of gods, demigods, and mortals, each embodying distinct traits and drives.

In this sense, characters like Narcissus and Psyche can be viewed as parts of a larger, distributed psyche—each representing a unique aspect of human consciousness and inner conflict. Narcissus embodies self-reflection taken to the extreme, a form of consciousness that becomes so self-focused it loses touch with others and reality itself. Psyche, on the other hand, symbolizes a consciousness that learns through challenges, gradually developing resilience, adaptability, and connection. Together, they reflect a balance of forces: self-absorption versus relational openness, rigidity versus transformation.

In Greek myths, this distribution of consciousness means that no single character encapsulates the entire human experience. Instead, each god, hero, and mortal personifies a different facet—love, jealousy, wisdom, vanity, courage, etc.—interacting in ways that mirror the internal tensions and synergies within a single mind. When these characters clash, ally, or transform, they create a narrative representation of an inner world where different impulses and perspectives continuously negotiate with one another.

This distributed consciousness also reflects a worldview where human identity is not isolated but embedded in a broader web of relationships, emotions, and archetypal forces. Myths like those of Narcissus and Psyche can thus be seen as metaphors for the complex interplay within an individual’s psyche, showing how different “selves” or drives interact, conflict, or harmonize to shape our experience and behavior. Through this lens, Greek mythology captures the fragmented, multifaceted nature of consciousness itself, showing how meaning and identity arise from an intricate network rather than a single source.

Allies

The war drums are pounding again, but it’s not what you think—no bombs, no napalm, no screaming jets over the jungle. No, this is different. The new warriors are brandishing hashtags, Twitter threads, and microphone megaphones, going toe-to-toe on campus lawns, in café basements, and the thousand-panel Zoom calls. All of them ready to go to battle for social justice, as if change could be smelted in an echo chamber. But look closer and you’ll see the rot in the foundation.

Scratch the surface, and a strange cycle emerges—a “Check Your Privilege” routine as old as a decade but still as crude as the day it was coined. You see, every social movement that climbs on the back of a privileged ally is fighting a two-front war. They need the support—the cash, the clout, the white teeth on the magazine covers—but the privilege of their backers is a double-edged sword that wants to steer and dictate.

The privileged allies step up, smile wide and willing to help, but it’s never enough to just help, is it? They want to lead. They step to the front, commandeer the microphone, and assume the steering wheel like they’re the second coming of Moses. Feminist organizers tell men to stand back, Black organizers tell white folks to just listen for once—but the itch for control and the scent of power is too potent to resist.

The privileged allies can’t be sidelined, but they can’t be trusted to steer. A very real conundrum for the idealistic crowd. They know how to whip up a crowd, sure. They’ll get us to march for gay marriage, or defund the cops. They’ll plaster “BLM” signs on their lawns and sponsor hashtags in solidarity—but where does it lead? They’re good at stirring things up, no doubt about that, but then the wind changes, and they leave, moving on to the next cause du jour.

“Locusts,” one friend from the trans community called them. “They’ll swoop in, spark outrage, push the movement right to the edge of oblivion, and move on before the dust settles.” A harsh sentiment but perhaps true. Movements move faster than ever, faster than the people within them can adapt. A wild ride of impatient absolutism, driven by the bright-eyed youth, raging on social media feeds like they can end oppression by ratioing bigots and wagging their fingers at anything and everything but the wallet. They’ll march and cry, they’ll hashtag, they’ll organize their morally righteous committee hearings about justice, equality, and all that good stuff—just as long as nobody’s talking about money.

It’s a theatrical routine: Democrat-led, finely-tuned to stir emotions, but engineered to sidestep the most radioactive of issues—economic structure, financial power, and real accountability. They’ll gladly raise hell about pronouns, plastic straws, representation in Hollywood. But bring up the machinery of wealth, taxation, or corporate consolidation, and they’ll get all meek and contemplative, like they suddenly remembered they left the keys on the mantelpiece or something.

The left’s “teeth” are dulled from self-policing, from the endless lecturing that skates around class and cash. Instead, they’re content to keep up the performance, dancing around everything that could really shake things up. All passion, but no bite—just more handwringing, head-shaking, and high-minded outrage to distract from the fact that the real power structures remain untouched.

And then there’s a weariness creeping in, from the front lines where the “pikemen” stand, the ones who can’t afford to just pack up and move on to the next cause when it gets rough. The trans folks are starting to notice the game. “They placed us at the front, like some kind of disposable infantry, to soak up the backlash,” one of them said, with a tone that would make a bootlicker blush. “I just wanted my rights, a job, a safe place to exist. Now here I am, lecturing people on pronouns instead of fighting for healthcare, housing, basic dignity.”

The truth comes into focus—a bleak realization that maybe this wasn’t about the movement, that maybe it’s been more about stoking the flames of some social justice inferno than actually putting it out.

Trans rights? Sure. But did they have to die on the hill of high school sports? Policing? They went to war with “Defund” as their rally cry, and now every community leader is running for cover.

A trans friend summed it up in brutal clarity: “First it was Black folks on the chopping block. They botched the policing issue and left them to fend for themselves. Then they pivoted to immigration, and now we’re in the crosshairs.” The kind of hard truth that smashes in like a sledgehammer at 3 a.m. while the city sleeps.

MAGA

Scene: Suburban Kitchen – Morning

RANDY, a middle-aged man in a “Save America” t-shirt, stands proudly in his gleaming, newly remodeled kitchen, giving CARLOS, a stocky Latino man in a worn uniform, an enthusiastic handshake. Carlos holds a clipboard and offers a polite, guarded smile.

RANDY

(grinning, voice loud and cheerful)

Carlos, my man! Good to see you here. I gotta say, proud of your people voting the right way this time. We’re all about family values and hard work, right? That’s what’s gonna save this country!

(firm handshake, hearty grin)

You guys are waking up. That’s what this country needs, right? Patriots!

CARLOS

(nods, half-smiling)

Yes, sir. We’re just trying to do our jobs, support our families.

RANDY

Exactly! Hard work, family values—America’s about that. (pauses, chuckles) Anyways, the dishwasher’s been making a noise like it’s grinding up marbles or something. Think you can handle it?

CARLOS

(curtly nodding)

Yes, sir. Just here to do my job.

RANDY

Exactly! Anyway, my dishwasher’s been rattling like crazy. Think you can take a look?

Carlos opens the dishwasher, jostles a few parts with a screwdriver, but barely seems interested. Randy watches over him impatiently, shifting his weight back and forth.

Carlos kneels by the dishwasher, rattling around with tools. Randy hovers, watching him out of the corner of his eye, while scrolling on his phone. After a few minutes, Carlos closes the dishwasher door, standing up.

CARLOS

Alright, Mr. Randy. Should be all set now. I’ve run some diagnostics, cleaned up a few parts. You’re good to go.

RANDY

(grins and claps Carlos on the shoulder)

Just what I like to hear! You guys never fail. Well—since you got it fixed so quick, think we could knock off a few bucks on the bill? (smiling) You know how it is, times are tight.

Carlos hesitates, catching Randy’s expectant look, and nods reluctantly.

CARLOS

Sure. I’ll adjust the price.

Carlos scrawls a new total on the invoice and hands it over. Randy reaches into his wallet and pulls out a few crumpled bills, pressing them into Carlos’s hand. The bills are clearly fake—poorly printed, faded, and missing watermarks. Carlos glances at the cash, realizing he’s being stiffed, but says nothing, his expression unreadable.

RANDY

(winking)

Here you go, champ. Keep up the good work. You guys are really getting with the program. America needs that.

Carlos nods, forces a tight smile, and leaves without a word. Once he’s gone, Randy chuckles to himself, thinking he got a great deal.

Carlos nods and leaves, closing the door behind him. Randy shakes his head with a smirk and walks back to the kitchen, grabbing a glass from the cabinet. He pauses as he hears a low grinding sound from the dishwasher, then the motor stuttering.

RANDY

(annoyed)

Oh, you gotta be kidding me…

He presses the start button, but the dishwasher just groans louder and then clunks to a stop. before falling silent.

RANDY

(frowning, muttering)

What the—?

Autopsy

It was a spectacle of calculated chaos, the kind of grotesque carnival only modern American politics could conjure up. The New York Times, that towering cathedral of Establishment respectability, found itself fumbling with its maps like a drunk juggling road signs. The first map—a digital fever dream of small-dollar donations sprawling across the republic—painted an unsettling picture. Sanders’ grassroots army had swallowed the landscape like a wildfire. Their donations flowed like cheap whiskey at a VFW hall, drowning out every other candidate.

This was unacceptable, of course. The media mavens had a narrative to maintain, and Sanders’ tsunami of unwashed, idealistic fervor wasn’t it. So they made a new map. A cleaner one. A quieter one. One that didn’t include Sanders. Suddenly, the picture became palatable again—like swapping out a lurid Hieronymus Bosch for a soft-focus Norman Rockwell. The money was neatly redistributed among the chosen mediocrities: the “serious” candidates, the ones who wouldn’t rock the boat or upset the delicate ecosystem of cocktail-party circuit politics.

But the DNC wasn’t done yet. No, the fix had to go deeper. With the precision of a Vegas card shark, they worked their arcane rules and backroom deals to elevate not one but two of the least inspiring figures they could dredge up from their talent-starved bench. This was no accident; it was an act of pure cynicism. A calculated insult to democracy masquerading as strategy.

In one election, they handed the nomination to a stiff who could barely finish a sentence without stepping on his own shoelaces. In the next, they doubled down with someone whose charisma could be bottled and sold as a sedative. It was as though the Democratic Party had developed a perverse fetish for losers—propping up candidates so uninspiring they made a DMV waiting room seem electric by comparison.

And yet, the wheels of the machine kept turning. The pundits clapped like seals, the donors smiled through clenched teeth, and the voters were left holding their noses and pulling levers like prisoners in a Kafkaesque lottery. It was a system so warped, so grotesque, that only the truly insane could look at it and say, “Yes, this is democracy.”

Banana peel twice over moment for the Dems with their last-ditch attempt to defeat Bernie coming home to roost. Sad sorry-ass operation leaving us with Trump redux, which feels surreal. But that’s the absurd reality now—what could’ve been a reckoning for a failed system turned into the political equivalent of a three-ring circus with a tinpot dictator at the center. The Dems—still drunk on their neoliberal fantasies—did everything they could to kneecap the one guy who actually gave a damn about people, the guy who wasn’t afraid to throw punches at Wall Street, Big Pharma, and the whole rigged system. And here we are, left with a man who will give permission to corporations and banks to eat the world alive, all while grinning like a bulldog in a three-piece suit.

The Dems seem locked into this delusion, this desperate fantasy that they can just sit back and wait out the demands for real change, waiting for the next economic boom to somehow roll in and fix everything. They treat the issues Sanders raised—healthcare, living wages, housing—as if they’re optional add-ons to a system that maybe will take care of itself if we just leave it alone long enough. They’re convinced that another bubble will come, lift the economy, and make the demands for real reform vanish into thin air like a magic trick.

But here we are, still waiting for that “bounce back.” Still waiting for the economy to pull itself up by its bootstraps while the rest of us are watching the factory jobs disappear, our rents double, and our healthcare premiums rival the cost of a down payment on a house. It’s like they’re hoping for some economic miracle to save their asses, but all we’ve got is the same old tired song: “Just wait, just wait, the market will fix it all.” And yet, the market has never fixed anything. It’s only ever patched over the rot until the next crisis comes along.

Still waiting. Still waiting for that “bounce back.” But it’s obvious now: it’s not coming. And the longer the Dems stick to this fantasy, the deeper the hole they’re digging for themselves. Trump may be the symptom, but the disease is this profound refusal to face the future.

Look, the people—the disaffected, disenfranchised, and desperately ticked-off millions—were trying to send a message loud and clear. But the Democratic brain trust, the sanctimonious sages of the Party of Good Intentions, somehow misinterpreted it all. They thought they were putting a leash on fascism, but it turned out they were just muzzling themselves, eyes closed, hands over ears, la-la-la, while a political reality they refused to face bulldozed through their illusions.

Now here we are, as if in a cheap satire, where Trump and that square-jawed Vance kid—neither of whom have ever met a populist they didn’t want to keep at arm’s length—paid just enough lip service to anti-war sentiment and the working-class struggle that it landed. Turns out a hologram of populism, a cardboard cutout version, was still preferable to the Democrats’ corporate-speak. At least Trump dared to say, in his cowboy bluntness, that Americans should afford a house, a car, groceries. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris was out there with the “Opportunity Economy” claptrap, a slogan so stripped of substance it may as well have been lifted from a focus group in a Wall Street conference room.

And all these Democratic “geniuses” who thought they could outwit, outspin, and out-tactic Trump have now driven the country off a cliff. Ezra Klein—smug on the pages of every think piece and podcast—played his high-stakes game of chicken with Biden’s future, only to watch the train tumble off a different cliff entirely. The “smart set” wanted to replace Biden, sure, but only with their own pet project—a “safe,” “nuanced” alternative who could keep those liberal sinecures intact. But the result? Chaos. The one thing no one had the guts to predict was that people might actually just want to buy groceries and pay rent without a second mortgage.

For nine long years, the liberals had their noses pressed up against the glass, wide-eyed and bewildered, peering in at the spectacle of Donald J. Trump, America’s own mutant lovechild of P.T. Barnum and a Vegas slot-machine. Nine years of howling disbelief, of CNN-anchored freak shows and Sunday op-ed autopsies, trying to crack the code of this vulgar, neon god that had hypnotized half the nation. But despite all their think tanks, algorithms, and armies of degree-holders, they failed.

The Democrats, that party of enlightened ‘experts’ and effete, latte-sipping, Tesla-driving acolytes of science and social justice, were left flat-footed, clutching their Harvard diplomas like rosaries, chanting mantras of rationality in a nation half-drunk on madness. They have Ph.D.s, Nobel laureates, consulting firms worth more than most small towns, yet this grinning avatar of American chaos blew right through them like a Harley through a hedge. Trump, that carnival barker straight out of Twain, didn’t care about policies, platforms, or promises. He was there to burn down the whole damn tent, grinning with a mouth full of sparks.

And while they dithered, analyzing his moves like Kremlinologists decoding enemy broadcasts, Trump played his crowd like a fiddle. They’d call him a liar, and his followers would cheer louder. They’d point to his failures, and his supporters would laugh and raise their beers to the man who just didn’t give a damn. His appeal was primal, raw—he was a middle finger to the establishment, a bulldozer barreling through the polite hedges of educated America, taking out country clubs, college halls, and Congress in one rumbling joyride.

The liberal elites couldn’t figure out why he worked, and in their confusion, they ignored the biggest piece of the puzzle: Trump wasn’t a bug in the system; he was the system—blown up to grotesque proportions, dripping gold paint and loud as a brass band. He was the embodiment of an America that had grown fat, mean, and magnificently mad, willing to torch its own myths just to watch the flames light up the night.

And yet, the resistance that formed? A media spectacle. The talking heads, the armchair warriors of Twitter, with their hashtags and their performative outrage, cosplaying like they’re the French Resistance in ’41, missing the point entirely. #Resistance, indeed—resistance to what? To Trump? To fascism? Hell, half of them couldn’t tell you what they’re really resisting; it’s all just performance, filling airtime with self-righteous indignation.

The Democrats trotted out a candidate who managed to embody many of the worst aspects of both parties’ playbooks, yet somehow failed to win over even the moderate Republicans they hoped to sway. Here they were, with a candidate who, on paper, should’ve been right up the GOP’s alley: kept people in prison past their release dates, supported a foreign policy agenda aligned with a hyper-militarized ethnostate, and was willing to play nice with the Cheney wing of American politics.

But even that wasn’t enough. The Republicans, seasoned in the dark art of tough-guy politics, looked at this centrist Democrat and saw only a watered-down version of themselves—someone willing to flirt with their agenda but too polite, too careful, too unwilling to really pull the punches. The Dems seem unable to understand that it’s not just about policy overlap; it’s about conviction and unapologetic ruthlessness. They’re out here trying to present a “Republican Lite” option to a party that already has the real thing—and who are only too happy to go all-in with their own, bolder, brasher version.

It’s like they’ve forgotten that the GOP’s appeal lies not just in their policies but in their raw, unfiltered brand of politics. The Dems’ candidate, despite all the tough-on-crime rhetoric and hawkish foreign policy gestures, just didn’t carry the same swagger. Instead, they ended up alienating their own base and barely making a dent with Republicans, proving yet again that a lukewarm imitation won’t satisfy anyone.

In 2016, when the ACA premiums shot up 40% the same week James Comey made his move on Clinton, you’d think it would have hit home. But no, the Acela corridor elite convinced themselves it was the emails, the FBI, the Russians, the damn solar eclipse—anything but the reality that people are sick of being handed scraps while billion-dollar policy ideas make big promises and deliver squat. They closed schools, then claimed they were helping the working class. They promised affordability and served up slogans that wouldn’t fly in an undergrad debate class. They treated the working class like they’d sign off on anything.

And now we’ve arrived at the unavoidable conclusion: the people didn’t buy it. They could sniff the hypocrisy, the hollow talk, and decided, hell, we’ll take our chances with the reality-TV businessman who’s at least entertaining.

Remember Obama, that beacon of hope, the man with the golden smile who was supposed to be different, who was supposed to transcend all the swampy sludge of Washington. He had the whole country lined up behind him, all the goodwill in the world, and what did he do? He bailed out the banks, handed out blank checks to Wall Street, and made his Ivy League cronies rich. All those high-flying Wall Street wizards, the ones who’d gambled recklessly and left Main Street bleeding, got rescued—while everyone else, everyone who actually put Obama in office, got left holding the bag. Home foreclosures, lost pensions, layoffs—none of it mattered as long as the banks could stay afloat.

Obama had this chance—hell, he had the perfect chance—to put Wall Street in check, to stand with the people. But instead, he threw the working class to the wolves while claiming he’d saved the economy. His friends in high places rode high on the wave of that bailout cash, and we’re supposed to act like he had no choice? Like his hands were tied by some invisible law of the universe? Please.

And then people sit around scratching their heads, baffled, wondering how on earth we ended up with Trump? Really? After Obama’s big giveaway to the finance overlords? Trump wasn’t some inexplicable phenomenon; he was the big, ugly, neon-lit reaction to all the Democrats’ double-dealing and betrayal. Voters were tired of candidates who mouthed pretty words about “change” but handed them a bill for someone else’s yacht. They didn’t want to hear about “the long game” or “slow and steady wins the race” from a party that didn’t seem to care if they were winning or losing—so long as the right consultants got paid.

It was inevitable, really. The whole thing. The voters who lined up for Obama in ’08 felt their hope ripped out of their guts by a man they thought was on their side.

Yeah, and that’s the real kicker, isn’t it? The worst thing isn’t just that Trump’s a disaster on every front—it’s that he’s the license for all of it. The big banks, the corporations, the ones who’ve been shoveling wealth up to the top since the 1980s—they’re looking at Trump and saying, “Oh, this is our guy. This is the green light.” With Trump in power, there’s no more pretense, no more worrying about looking like the villain. The man’s practically begging them to go ahead, exploit as much as you can, take it all, and don’t even bother with the dress rehearsal.

This isn’t just about more inequality; it’s about a systematic breakdown of any semblance of responsibility. It’s an epoch of exploitation where the ones doing the exploiting have no interest in maintaining even the illusion of fair play. The veneer of decency, of corporate social responsibility, that’s all gone out the window. We’re heading into an era where the public face of business is a gleaming smile on a boardroom shark, and the lives of regular people are just another cost of doing business. Only now, no one’s even pretending it’s anything but a blood-soaked money grab.

It’s exploitation without even the grace of manners. At least back in the day, there were some unspoken rules—“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” “Don’t be too obvious about how much you’re ripping people off”—but now? We’ve entered a world where there’s no shame left in it. The rich get richer, the poor get crushed, and the ones left in the middle are too distracted by shiny promises of “tax cuts” and “jobs” to realize they’ve been handed a one-way ticket to nowhere.

We’re living through the rise of corporate fascism with a smile, the glee of deregulation, and a free-market wet dream where the only thing that matters is making a buck, even if that buck’s stolen right out of your pocket. It’s like a bad sitcom where the punchlines are just more suffering for everyone who isn’t sitting on a pile of cash. And the worst part? Trump’s got a whole cult of people cheering it on, convinced that somehow, this time it’ll trickle down.