Author: Ric Amurrio

Diary of a Streamer

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Watching The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Absolutely baffling how they made movies back then with zero fucks given for modern streaming necessities. No bathroom breaks, no snack intermissions, no “Are you still watching?” judgment pop-ups. Just a relentless, uninterrupted story unfolding at a steady pace, as if people were actually expected to just… sit and watch. It’s like they thought people could handle a movie without doing other stuff. Truly barbaric. 😵‍💫

A list of its glaring deficiencies follows:

1. No Repetitive Recaps Every Ten Minutes – Astonishingly, the film expected me to remember what had already happened. At no point did a character turn to the camera and say, “As you may recall…” before summarizing the entire first act. Unforgivable.

2. No On-Screen Text Explaining the Obvious – No pop-up stating “London, 1889” when we were clearly in London, in 1889. No ominous subtitle declaring “The Hound” when the enormous, glowing-eyed dog lunged at the screen. Just trusted the audience to infer things. Barbaric.

3. No Overcompensating Sound Design – When something important was revealed, it was done through mere dialogue and acting. No swelling orchestra, no aggressive bass rumble, no ear-shattering “BWAAAH” to alert me that This Is A Big Moment. Reckless and irresponsible.

4. No Artificially Inserted Cliffhangers – Scenes flowed into one another with distressing smoothness, rather than cutting off mid-sentence to force me into watching the next part. I was left to decide of my own free will whether to keep watching. Disorienting.

5. No Excessive Exposition – At no point did a minor character enter solely to deliver two paragraphs of backstory, exit, and never return. If you wanted to know something, you had to listen or, heaven forbid, piece things together yourself. Who has time for that?

6. No Forced Reactions to Ensure I Knew How to Feel – After a dramatic reveal, the camera did not cut to every single character so I could gauge their emotional state. Some of them simply reacted naturally, and the movie moved on. I found this offensive.

7. No Time-Wasting Fake-Outs – When a shadow loomed ominously, it turned out to be an actual threat, rather than the butler carrying a tray. Every scene contained forward motion. I grew suspicious.

8. No “Dumb Character to Ask Obvious Questions” Trope – No one said, “Wait, so you’re telling me that the mysterious deaths and the giant paw prints could be connected?” The film seemed to think I could follow along without a designated idiot to spell things out. Upsetting.

9. No Algorithmically Inserted Diversity of Tone – The film committed to its atmosphere. No quippy side character deflating the tension. No random slapstick moment to balance out the “heaviness.” Just a persistent, deliberate mood. Reckless disregard for emotional variety.

10. No Sudden Flashbacks to Explain Something Already Understood – At no point did the screen fade to black-and-white and replay an earlier moment just in case I had become distracted by my phone. The film relied entirely on me paying attention the first time. Monstrous.

By the time the credits rolled (without automatically minimizing into the corner of the screen), I was left shaken. The sheer nerve of these filmmakers, crafting something meant to be absorbed in a single, uninterrupted sitting. The sheer audacity of it all.

Had I… just watched a movie? The questions swirled. Had I truly understood the plot without redundant exposition? Had my brain… filled in gaps on its own? Worse still—had I experienced suspense not force-fed by aggressive musical cues, but simply by allowing events to unfold?

I felt changed, and not for the better. My faith in the natural order of things had been shaken to its core.

I glanced at my streaming app, desperate for reassurance. But now, the endless rows of thumbnails, all promising easily digestible. I staggered to my feet, lightheaded, my worldview unraveling. In the distance, my phone buzzed, beckoning me back to the comfort of fragmented attention. I had endured 87 whole minutes of pure, uninterrupted storytelling?

God help me.

Strategic Adaptation:

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Avoiding the Maginot Line While Preparing for Dunkirk

History is littered with examples of great defenses that failed—not because they weren’t strong, but because they defended the wrong thing in the wrong way. Whether in military conflict, political struggle, or institutional survival, the lesson is the same: true defense is about adaptability, not just fortification.

The Maginot Line Fallacy: Relying on Yesterday’s Defenses

The classic example of misplaced defense is France’s Maginot Line. Built after World War I, it was an imposing fortification system designed to stop another German invasion. But in 1940, the German army simply bypassed it, cutting through the Ardennes and overwhelming France in weeks. The problem? France prepared for the last war rather than the next one.

The Maginot Line wasn’t a failure of engineering—it was a failure of imagination. France’s generals built a fortress to stop a 1918-style trench war, only to watch Panzer divisions bypass it like a glitch in a Betamax tape. The lesson? You can’t firewall the future.

Today’s institutional defenders are repeating this mistake. They’re pouring concrete around legacy systems—courts, universities, mainstream media—while the Musketeers and Project 2025 irregulars are already tunneling under, soaring over, or simply memeing them into obsolescence.

The Modern Maginot: If you’re still betting on SCOTUS rulings, fact-checking, or tenure committees to hold the line, you’re polishing brass on the Titanic. The real war is in the protocol layer—AI chatbots, crypto governance, and dopamine-algorithmic militias.

This isn’t just a military mistake—it’s an institutional one. Kodak built the best film cameras while digital photography took over. Kodak Moment: Kodak invented the digital camera, then shelved it to protect film. By the time they realized the flank attack, Instagram had already turned photography into a dopamine drip.

Vatican vs. Viral: The Catholic Church spent centuries perfecting Latin Mass. Luther just hit “print” on the Bible in German. Suddenly, God was open-source. The Catholic Church spent centuries perfecting theological authority while the Protestant Reformation decentralized religious power. IBM dominated mainframes while Microsoft and Apple made personal computing ubiquitous. In every case, institutions fortified their strongest positions but failed to anticipate the flank attack that rendered them irrelevant.

Today, the U.S. faces something similar with movements like Elon/Project 2025—a highly mobile, technology-driven force seeking to dismantle or remake institutions. If traditional defenses (laws, courts, media, established bureaucracies) assume the old rules still apply, they risk becoming the modern Maginot Line—powerful, but ultimately bypassed.

Dunkirk: Knowing When to Retreat to Fight Another Day

Dunkirk wasn’t a defeat—it was a fever dream of survival. The British evacuated 300k soldiers not to surrender, but to fight again. Today’s institutionalists need that same manic energy: retreat, regroup, remix.

Media Dunkirk: Don’t mourn the blue checkmarks. Evacuate to federated Mastodon servers, seed dead-drop USB drives in TikTok duets, and weaponize shitposting as asymmetric resistance

If the Maginot Line was a failure in static defense, Dunkirk was a success in dynamic retreat. By May 1940, the German advance made it clear that the Allies couldn’t hold Belgium and France. Instead of wasting resources in a doomed last stand, the British pulled off a daring evacuation—saving over 300,000 soldiers who would later help win the war.

Dunkirk is a lesson in preserving what matters most. When institutions, movements, or even businesses face overwhelming disruption, a doomed last stand isn’t always the best play. Sometimes, a strategic withdrawal is necessary—consolidating resources, protecting core strengths, and preparing for a counteroffensive.

We’ve seen this in political movements before. The Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. faced devastating setbacks in the 1950s, but rather than collapsing, leaders adapted—shifting tactics, leveraging legal battles, and preparing for mass mobilization in the ‘60s. More recently, the Arab Spring uprisings in places like Egypt showed what happens when movements win an initial battle (overthrowing a dictator) but fail to secure long-term control—leading to reactionary crackdowns.

Applying These Lessons to Institutional Defense Today

So, if the Elon/Project 2025 movement represents a modern Mongol horde—fast-moving, decentralized, and difficult to engage head-on—what should defenders of existing institutions do?

  • No Cathedrals, Only Bazaars – Build redundant, open-source systems. If NPR gets defunded, spawn a thousand pirate radio podcasts.
  • Retreat Upward – If they seize the Senate, pivot to city-states. If they take the courts, code smart contracts.
  • Guerrilla Academia – If universities are gutted, don’t rebuild faculty senates—launch decentralized accreditation DAOs, teach on Substack, mint diplomas as NFTs, and turn tenure into a GitHub repo.
  • Schrödinger’s Bureaucracy – Keep the legacy system running just long enough to funnel resources into a parallel resistance.
  • Identify the Flanks – Defenders often fight on the wrong front. If courts can’t stop policy overhauls, but AI-driven propaganda and corporate takeovers can, the real battle isn’t in litigation.
  • Build Mobile Defenses – Static defenses are vulnerable. Decentralized networks—in law, media, and tech—can outmaneuver centralized authoritarianism.
  • Prepare for a Dunkirk Moment – If a media empire is captured, what independent platforms remain? If state institutions are hollowed out, where does power consolidate? Evacuate what matters to continue the fight elsewhere.
  • Anticipate the Next War – Power struggles are shifting from legislation to AI-driven influence, from government to corporate governance, from centralized media to decentralized narratives. Yesterday’s defenses won’t work tomorrow.
  • Adaptation is the Only True Defense – No fortress is impregnable, no institution permanent. Survival—and victory—belong to those who know when to hold, when to retreat, and when to change tactics entirely.

Strategic Adaptation: Knowing What to Defend and What to Let Fall

Not every institution is worth defending. Many of the structures that exist today were not built to uphold democracy, justice, or stability—but rather to buffer, enable, or profit from neoliberal policies that have hollowed out the very foundations they now claim to protect. Likewise, much of the bureaucratic and cultural machinery masquerading as “progress” is little more than careerist opportunism—wokism that serves as a branding exercise rather than a meaningful social force.

As Elon/Project 2025 and similar forces seek to reshape or dismantle existing institutions, defenders must make a crucial distinction: what must be protected for long-term survival, and what should be allowed to collapse under its own weight? History shows that not all defenses are worth maintaining, and not every retreat is a defeat.

The Institutions That Were Built to Absorb Shock, Not to Protect Stability

For the past few decades, much of what has passed for “public interest” institutions—think tank-driven policy groups, performative regulatory agencies, and elite university departments churning out technocrats—were designed not to create real social stability but to absorb the fallout of neoliberalism while keeping its core machinery intact. These institutions don’t solve problems; they manage perception.

• NGOs and Foundations as Containment Mechanisms – Many nonprofits and international organizations were built to manage crises, not solve them. They provide just enough intervention to prevent full-scale revolt but never challenge the economic and political structures causing the crises in the first place.

• Universities as Credential Factories – Once centers of radical thought, many elite institutions have become little more than ticketing systems for upward mobility in a shrinking job market. They absorb discontent by offering symbolic representation and progressive rhetoric while funneling students into debt-driven career paths that reinforce the status quo.

• Media as a Manufactured Consensus Machine – Legacy media, once a check on power, has largely become a system of narrative control—ensuring that discourse remains within acceptable neoliberal bounds. Careerists in journalism align with establishment politics, while independent or disruptive voices are marginalized unless they serve an existing power bloc.

When faced with an incoming power shift, these institutions may scream for protection, framing themselves as the “last line of defense” against authoritarianism. In reality, many are the very reason a movement like Elon/Project 2025 gained traction in the first place—they created a world where only insiders had a voice, where real dissent was co-opted or ignored, and where systems of governance were so hollowed out that they became easy targets for takeover.

Careerist Wokism: A Distraction, Not a Defense

Alongside these institutional failures, a significant amount of what is called “woke” politics—especially in its corporate or bureaucratic form—is not radical, not anti-establishment, and not truly progressive. It’s a branding strategy that provides ideological cover for the same neoliberal machine that created today’s instability.

• Corporate DEI as Reputation Management – When major corporations adopt progressive rhetoric but continue exploitative labor practices, they aren’t advancing justice; they’re insulating themselves from scrutiny.

• Elite Academic Radicalism That Serves Power – Many academic trends that claim to challenge power actually reinforce elite control by shifting discourse away from material struggles (class, labor, economic justice) and into insular, identity-based fights that do not threaten capital.

• Social Media Activism as Status Performance – Much of what passes for online activism is not about power shifts but about individuals securing status within professional and social circles. It’s an arms race of signaling rather than a meaningful struggle.

While these structures claim to be defenders of democracy, their primary function has been to create the illusion of progress while keeping real challenges to the system at bay. When they come under attack, the instinct may be to rally to their defense—but in many cases, their collapse is not a loss for real democratic resilience.

Knowing What to Defend: Avoiding the Maginot Line Mistake

If we think of Elon/Project 2025 as a Mongol-like force—fast, decentralized, and uninterested in old rules—the instinct of the establishment is to build a Maginot Line of institutional defenses. But if those defenses are built around structures that were already failing, they will be bypassed and rendered irrelevant.

Instead, what actually needs to be defended?

1. Local and Decentralized Governance – Instead of relying on massive federal bureaucracies that can be captured or dismantled, power should be reinforced at the state and local level, where it is harder to fully centralize.

2. Independent Networks of Knowledge and Communication – If traditional media and academic institutions are compromised, new networks must exist outside them to preserve intellectual and journalistic integrity.

3. Economic and Labor-Based Organizing – Real political resilience comes from material power, not rhetorical debates. Protecting unions, worker cooperatives, and financial independence is more important than defending failed think tanks.

4. Legal and Constitutional Mechanisms That Can’t Be Easily Rewritten – While much of the legal system is vulnerable to manipulation, certain constitutional protections (free speech, assembly, due process) remain crucial battlefields.

Preparing for Dunkirk: The Institutions That Must Be Preserved

If a worst-case scenario unfolds—if Elon/Project 2025 or a similar force gains full institutional control—then a Dunkirk moment will become necessary. The question is: what must be evacuated and preserved?

• Alternative Funding Sources – If traditional financial institutions become tools of control, where do independent movements get their resources?

• Intellectual and Cultural Archives – What ideas, histories, and frameworks must be preserved so they don’t disappear under an incoming regime?

• Extraterritorial Safe Havens – If domestic legal structures become hostile, where do alternative movements retreat? (This applies to both physical migration and digital spaces.)

Just as Britain knew in 1940 that it had to save its army at Dunkirk to fight another day, defenders of democratic institutions must prepare to extract and consolidate key strengths rather than waste energy trying to hold everything.

History rewards those who adapt rather than entrench—those who understand when to hold the line, when to retreat, and when to rebuild something better from the wreckage.

Conclusion: Let the Rot Collapse, Defend What Matters

Not every battle is worth fighting. Not every institution is worth saving. As Elon/Project 2025 and similar movements challenge the existing order, the key is not to reflexively defend everything that claims to be under attack. Instead, it is to make hard choices—to let the weakest, most corrupt, and least valuable structures fall while ensuring that the core elements of resilience remain intact.

The Great Re-Centralization: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Drug Trade

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There was a time when the gears of the global narcotics machine ran with the quiet efficiency of a well-oiled state department initiative. The system was Byzantine, sure—layers of plausible deniability, offshore bank accounts, non-profits with names that sounded vaguely humanitarian—but at the end of the day, the cocaine got where it needed to go, and the right people got paid. USAID, the CIA, the shadowy arms of U.S. foreign policy—they weren’t running drugs, per se, but they were certainly making sure the wheels didn’t come off the wagon.

But now the system is cracking. Silicon Valley still needs its cocaine—how else do you keep a 20-hour workday from devolving into a mental breakdown?—but the old pipelines are failing. The new Trump religion doesn’t mix well with DEI-approved supply chains. You can’t be a patriotic nationalist and still rely on the same shady, globalist networks that once funneled powder into the boardrooms of Palo Alto. No, a new framework is required.

Enter Marco Review & State, stepping in with a firm handshake and a knowing grin. The free market abhors a vacuum, and the cartels aren’t about to let ideology stand in the way of distribution. The Taliban, too, have learned the game—yesterday’s insurgents are today’s exporters. They’ll gladly supply whatever the West needs, just like they did under the watchful eye of the U.S. military, when Afghan opium output soared to record highs.

Meanwhile, the coup-happy powerbrokers of Latin America keep the conveyor belt running, their fortunes rising and falling with the whims of Washington. Every regime change, every military-backed strongman, every unfortunate assassination coincides with another shift in cartel dominance. Pure coincidence, of course.

So here we are, watching the re-centralization of the global drug trade in real time. The names and slogans change, but the product moves just the same. And whether it’s USAID, the CIA, Marco Review & State, or some yet-to-be-named disruptor promising a more efficient future for narcotics distribution, one thing remains true—somewhere, someone is getting very, very rich off the chaos.

The transition won’t be seamless. Bureaucratic inertia is a hell of a thing, and the old pipelines don’t just vanish overnight. The DEA, for all its posturing, has never been in the business of stopping drug flows—only managing them. But management was getting sloppy. The fentanyl flood is bad for business. The overdose crisis is creating unwanted attention. What’s needed now is a controlled burn, a restructuring, a more orderly form of illicit capitalism.

The financiers, tech moguls, and political operators aren’t looking for street fentanyl laced with whatever poison the local cook threw in—they want the high-end stuff, the pharmaceutical-grade coke that once flowed through the old, properly regulated channels. In the glory days, that meant Miami bankers, Langley spooks, and CIA-adjacent airlines running cargo with payloads that didn’t quite match the manifest. Today, the market demands a Monday DEI USAID approved more sophisticated system—one that operates under the banner of respectable geopolitics.

This is where Marco Review & State step in, adjusting the dials. A few new policy recommendations here, a little targeted enforcement there, a strategic regime change in just the right banana republic, and suddenly the pipelines start flowing the correct way again. The cartels know how to play ball—after all, they learned from the best.

But this time, it won’t just be cocaine and heroin keeping the machine humming. The future is in high-end, boutique narco-commerce. Lab-purified psychedelics for the visionary CEOs, microdosed methamphetamine rebranded as productivity enhancers, synthetic opioids manufactured with the precision of Silicon Valley engineering. Think less Breaking Bad, more venture-backed narco-disruption. A Goldman Sachs of Drugs, with the logistics prowess of Amazon and the public relations savvy of a Big Pharma rollout.

The key players are already lining up. The same think tanks that pushed neoliberal interventionism are pivoting to a more nationalist supply chain strategy. The same billionaires who profited off China’s manufacturing boom are now eyeing cartel-backed logistics networks as the next great frontier. The mergers and acquisitions won’t just be corporate—they’ll be geopolitical.

The Great Re-Centralization is not just about reclaiming old revenue streams; it’s about refining them, optimizing them, turning the chaos of the post-USAID drug trade into a sleek, precision-engineered narcotics economy fit for the modern American elite. The only question is—who gets to be the new gatekeeper?

How Crypto Lost to DraftKings

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There was a time when men gambled like savages. They staked their fortunes on dice and horses, whiskey-stained cards in desert casinos run by men with deep voices and dead eyes. But those were better days. Now, we have apps. We have algorithms. We have blockchain.

Or so I thought.

For the past month, I have been running a personal experiment—DraftKings vs. Crypto. A head-to-head battle between the old gods of gambling and the new. Every day, I sat at my desk with a bottle of bourbon and two screens. On one, a pixelated sportsbook pulsing with parlays and bad decisions. On the other, the cold, sterile glow of my crypto wallet.

I was prepared for disaster. I was prepared to be ruined. What I wasn’t prepared for was this: I lost far more money on DraftKings than I ever did on crypto.

The day started with promise. A crisp morning, thick with potential, the kind of day where a man could take his meager stack of digital tokens and turn them into a respectable fortune before lunch. The charts were alive—green candles marching skyward, an electronic symphony of profit and momentum. I was riding high on leverage, fueled by coffee, nicotine, and the mad certainty that I was smarter than the suckers buying in late. The machine hummed, flashing numbers like the pulse of a living thing. It was all going to plan.

Then, like a blackjack dealer with a grudge, the market turned. A whisper of bad news—something about regulations, a hacked exchange, or maybe just the whales deciding they’d had enough. The price plunged, liquidity vanished, and I was left clutching my mouse like a lifeline, watching my margin evaporate. In seconds, my position was liquidated, the money gone, swallowed by the great digital abyss. I howled at the screen, cursed the algorithms, and swore vengeance on whatever shadowy cartel had orchestrated this financial assassination. But the market doesn’t care. It never cared. It just rolls on, an uncaring beast, leaving fools like me twitching in its wake, praying for one last run before the next inevitable crash.

The next day i changed tac. I started with confidence. A crisp hundred-dollar deposit, the promise of risk-free bets blinking at me like a neon whorehouse sign. DraftKings had my number, and they knew it. The app was smooth—too smooth—like the cockpit of a machine designed for only one thing: keeping me in the game long enough to empty my pockets. I started with a simple parlay, something respectable—Lakers to cover, Mahomes to throw for 250, some tennis match in Portugal I couldn’t pronounce but suddenly had a vested interest in. The odds were juicy, the payout enormous. This was the one.

By noon, the horror had begun. Mahomes decided he was a running back, the Lakers collapsed like a drunk at sunrise, and my Portuguese prodigy turned out to be a toddler with a racket. I was down bad, but DraftKings knew I wouldn’t stop. No, they had something for that—a little notification, a friendly reminder that I had a bonus bet waiting. Just enough rope to keep me swinging. The next hours were a blur of live bets, bad decisions, and rationalizations. I wasn’t losing—I was investing. The money wasn’t gone—it was circulating. But by the time the sun set, I was staring at my balance—zero dollars, infinite shame. Somewhere, in a boardroom in New Jersey, a man in a suit was sipping bourbon, toasting another fool’s downfall. The house always wins.

The House Always Wins, Except When It’s on the Blockchain

The numbers don’t lie. The U.S. gambling industry raked in $66.5 billion last year, while crypto firms floundered, desperately trying to reinvent themselves as casinos. I had assumed that crypto, with all its chaos and fraud, would be a meat grinder for my money. But no. It turns out that even the worst crypto grift can’t take my wallet to the cleaners as efficiently as a well-regulated sportsbook.

DraftKings has mastered the art of losing your money with a precision that crypto can only dream of. While crypto promises the wild, unregulated thrill of highs and lows driven by market sentiment and shady influencers, DraftKings takes a far more refined approach—it preys on your certainty. With its slick interface, irresistible bonuses, and calculated odds, it lures you in under the guise of a fair game. But make no mistake, it’s a finely tuned machine designed to bleed you dry with methodical efficiency. There’s no need for speculation or moonshots here—just cold, unrelenting math and a slew of live bets to keep you addicted long enough to empty your wallet. Crypto may crash, rise, and crash again, but DraftKings? It’s a steady, predictable descent into financial ruin, with a side of shame and a reminder that the house always wins.

See, DraftKings knows what it’s doing. The moment you place a bet, you’ve already lost. They have teams of statisticians, behavioral scientists, and—most importantly—laws ensuring that they get a cut of everything. Meanwhile, crypto gambling outfits are still figuring out how to keep their websites online between rug pulls.

The Cold, Ugly Truth

Crypto was supposed to be the new frontier. A lawless, wild-eyed beast that would obliterate banks and replace Vegas with on-chain degeneracy. Instead, it got out-hustled by actual hustlers—guys with real money, real lawyers, and real lobbies in Washington.

DraftKings took my money with the cold efficiency of a mafia accountant. Crypto took my money with the chaotic incompetence of a coked-up startup founder live-streaming his own downfall.

And that, my friends, is the lesson: You can talk all you want about disrupting the system, but at the end of the day, the real gambling industry was here before you, and it will be here long after your JPEG coins and Discord Ponzi schemes fade into the ether.

Vegas is still Vegas. The house still wins. And crypto? Crypto couldn’t even beat me.

Incitatus

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“Look, folks, a lot of people are saying that making Incitatus a consul was a crazy idea. Fake news. Total hit job. But let me tell you, Incitatus is a tremendous horse. A winner. Probably the best horse Rome has ever seen, okay? Incredible stamina—much better than some of the losers in the Senate, swamp creatures, believe me.

Now, some people, very dishonest people, not gonna name a names cause I’m classy, they say, ‘Oh, you have lost your mind, you want a horse in government!’ But let’s be real—have you seen the Senate? Total disaster. Corrupt. Incitatus would’ve done a much better job than half of them, no question.

But you know what? Fine. If people were offended, if the elites got upset—okay, I’ll say it: maybe it wasn’t the best move. Maybe Rome wasn’t ready for a horse who works harder than half the politicians in history. Sad! But we learn, we move forward, and we keep making Rome great again. That’s what we do.

“Maybe take Incitatus to Troy. He’d be great as a horse in Troy. Tremendous Trojan Horse, folks. The best. The Greeks? Very smart, very strong, but let’s be honest—they could’ve used a guy like me. Imagine if I had been there. Boom. War over in a week. Hector? Weak. Achilles? Overrated. And let’s be real, folks, the whole ‘heel’ thing? Very bad branding. Very bad. You don’t want a weak spot, believe me. I don’t have weak spots. Zero. None.

But you know what, the elites, they don’t get it. They never get it. They say, ‘Oh, you can’t make a horse consul! You can’t shake things up!’ But these are the same people who told Julius Caesar, ‘Oh, don’t worry, your friends love you!’ And how did that work out? Not great, folks. Not great.

And let me tell you something—Incitatus was a fighter. Never took a day off. Never took bribes. Never wrote a bad law. You think I’m gonna apologize? You think I’m gonna say, ‘Oh, sorry, should’ve picked another lazy, do-nothing senator instead’? No way. Not happening. In fact, maybe we should’ve made more horses consuls. All horses. Only horses. Just imagine—Rome, run by winners, by champions.

And the haters, oh, they hate this. They say, ‘Oh, Caligula, you’re insane!’ But let me tell you—every great leader, they said the same thing. Alexander? Crazy. Hannibal? Crazy. Me? The craziest. But also? The greatest. Because I dream big, folks. I think big. I see what Rome could be, and I make it happen.

So was Incitatus a mistake? No. The mistake was stopping at one horse. We should’ve had hundreds of them. Thousands. Rome wasn’t ready. But one day, folks, one day they’ll look back and say—‘Wow. He was right. He was so right. And if only we had listened, maybe Rome would still be great.’ Believe me.”

“Yes! Build a horse nation! Like the Mongolians! Tremendous horse guys, folks. The best. Genghis Khan? Total winner. Huge respect. Took over everything. No elections, no senators, no fake news—just power, just winning. And let me tell you, if Rome had done what I wanted, if Rome had listened, we’d still be running the world today. Still winning.

But nooo, the critics, the losers, the haters—these sad, pathetic people—‘Oh, you can’t have a horse government! That’s crazy!’ But you know what’s crazy? Losing. Losing is crazy. And Rome? Total disaster, folks. Total disaster. We had the greatest empire, we had everything, and what happened? We let the pencil pushers, the deep-state senators, the nerds, take over. Sad!

I said, ‘Folks, we need horses. We need winners. We need warriors, not bureaucrats!’ And they laughed. They said, ‘Oh, Caligula, you’re out of control!’ But guess what? Fast forward a couple centuries—Rome? Gone. Collapsed. Barbarians everywhere. If we had built the Horse Nation—if we had gone full Mongolian, folks—we’d be unstoppable.

Imagine it: legions? On horseback. The Senate? All horses. The economy? Horse-based. Fastest, strongest, most tremendous civilization in history. No corruption, no whining, just strong, beautiful, majestic horses making Rome great again.

And let me tell you something—the people love it. The people know. They see Incitatus and said, ‘Wow, this guy gets it. He understands winning.’ But the elites? The swamp? They hate it. They are terrified. Because they know—a horse is more qualified than them! And it is. It is!

But fine, fine. Maybe Rome isn’t ready. Maybe we aren’t Mongolian enough. Maybe we don’t push it far enough. But mark my words—one day, they’re gonna look back and say, ‘Wow. He was right. He was so right. We should’ve listened. We should’ve built the Horse Nation. And if we had? We’d still be ruling the world today. Believe me.’”

The Materialist Sorcery of Don Juan

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Ah, here we are, my friends, at the intersection of the Real and the Symbolic, where Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan—that sublime fiction, that shamanic charlatan—bursts forth not as a mystic’s hallucination but as the ultimate materialist provocateur. You see, the genius of Castaneda’s invention lies precisely in its fraudulence, its refusal to be authenticated. For what is Don Juan if not the embodiment of the Lacanian Che vuoi?—the question that hystericizes reality itself: What do you want from me, this fiction? 

Let us dispense with the tedious debate over whether Don Juan “existed.” Of course he did not—and in this non-existence, he is more real than any empirical fact. Here, Castaneda performs a perverse Hegelian maneuver: the truth is not in the content of the teachings (plants, visions, Toltec wisdom) but in the form of the encounter. Don Juan is a virtual figure who materializes the very void of the Real, forcing Castaneda—and us, his readers—to confront the constructedness of our reality. The shaman’s rituals—peyote, desert walks, the “stopping of the world”—are not spiritual escapisms but dialectical interventions. They are akin to the Marxist critique of ideology, tearing open the suture between the Symbolic order (our shared hallucination of “consensus reality”) and the traumatic Real that lurks beneath.

Consider the infamous “seeing” Don Juan demands. To see, in Don Juan’s sense, is to recognize that what we call “the world” is a collaborative fiction, a fragile consensus maintained by our collective complicity. The sorcerer’s path is not transcendence but immanent critique: a relentless hacking of the codes that bind us to the capitalist-realist matrix. When Don Juan insists that reality is a “description,” he anticipates Baudrillard’s simulacra—but with a twist. For Castaneda, the virtuality of the world is not a lament but a call to praxis. The materiality of the body, the cactus, the desert dust—these are the tools for rupturing the virtual. The shaman does not flee to the spiritual; he doubles down on the bodily, the visceral, to expose the Real as the ultimate contingency.

And here’s the rub: the fiction of Don Juan is necessary precisely because our “reality” is already a fiction. Castaneda’s hoax mirrors the hoax of ideology itself. The capitalist subject clings to the myth of “hard facts” while drowning in the virtuality of markets, credit, and digital selves. Don Juan’s sorcery, by contrast, is a materialist therapy: it forces us to act as if the world is malleable, thereby making it so. The hallucinogenic ritual is not an escape but a dress rehearsal for revolutionary praxis—a training in the “magic” of dialectical materialism, where the impossible becomes possible through the sheer force of acting.

So let us celebrate Castaneda’s Don Juan not as a New Age guru but as the ultimate Leninist strategist. His invention is a necessary fiction, a lie that exposes the lie of the Big Other. In a world where even our desires are algorithmically curated, Don Juan’s lesson is clear: Reality is a consensus—and consensus can be shattered. The path of the warrior is not to transcend the material but to traverse the fantasy, to collapse the virtual into the Real, and in that violent short-circuit, to glimpse emancipation. 

As we might grin: The only true materialism is one that dares to fictionalize its own conditions. Don Juan, that cunning semblance, is our guide.

The Parallax of Sorcery: Don Juan as Symptom and Revolutionary Interface  

Ah, yes! Let us dive into the obscene underbelly of Castaneda’s fiction—or rather, into the Real of its fiction. Because here’s the paradox: the more we insist Don Juan is a fraud, the more he materializes the very logic of late capitalism’s disavowed virtuality. Zizek “parallax gap” is our compass here: reality is not a stable horizon but the irreducible tension between perspectives. Don Juan, as a figure who oscillates between charlatan and sage, materialist and mystic, embodies this gap. His teachings are not about transcending the material but about radicalizing it—exposing how the “virtual” (ideology, consensus reality) is always-already parasitizing the “material.”  

1. The Body as Battlefield: Somatic Materialism  

Don Juan’s insistence on the body—its aches, its alignment with the Earth, its exhaustion under the desert sun—is a brutal inversion of Cartesian dualism. The body here is not a vessel for the soul but the site where the virtual is rendered tangible. When Don Juan forces Castaneda to run until collapse or ingest peyote until he vomits, he is performing a phenomenological reduction: stripping away the symbolic filters (the “description of the world”) to confront the raw, pulsating Real of the flesh. This is not mysticism but dialectical materialism on steroids. The body becomes the terrain where ideology (the “agreed-upon reality”) is physically disrupted. In an age of digital disembodiment—avatars, cryptocurrencies, AI-generated desire—Don Juan’s somatic brutality is a revolutionary act. The body’s limits materialize the limits of the virtual.  

2. The Assemblage Point: Ideology as Quantum Collapse  

Castaneda’s “assemblage point”—the locus where perception coalesces into a stable reality. Ideology is not false consciousness but the unconscious framework that structures our reality. Don Juan’s claim that shifting the assemblage point “stops the world” mirrors the Marxist critique of capitalism’s pseudo-naturalness. When the shaman manipulates this point, he exposes reality as a quantum superposition of possibilities, collapsed into coherence by collective agreement. This is the virtual core of materialism: matter is not inert but a field of contested descriptions. Capitalism, like the sorcerer’s world, depends on our complicity in its illusion. Don Juan’s tactics—absurd tasks, destabilizing humor—are akin to a call to “traverse the fantasy”: to confront the void that sustains the Symbolic order.  

3. Controlled Folly: The Comedy of Ideological Critique  

Don Juan’s “controlled folly”—the art of acting earnestly within a reality you know to be fictional—is the ultimate praxis. It is the shamanic version of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”: a performative engagement with the system that subtly unravels it. When Don Juan feigns seriousness while teaching Castaneda, he mirrors the capitalist subject who knows money is a social construct but acts as if it has intrinsic value. The difference? Don Juan weaponizes this “as if.” His folly is a dialectical trap, forcing Castaneda (and the reader) to confront the absurdity of their own symbolic commitments. In an era of “post-truth” and deepfakes, controlled folly is not resignation but subversion: by over-identifying with the virtual (e.g., playing the “enlightened seeker” to the hilt), one exposes its fissures.  

4. The Capitalist Realism of the Nagual  

Here’s the kicker: Don Juan’s “nagual” (the unknowable realm beyond ordinary perception) is not a spiritual beyond but the repressed Real of capitalism itself. Capitalist realism insists “there is no alternative”; the nagual, by contrast, is the persistent whisper of alternatives. When Don Juan speaks of the “nagual’s blow”—a rupture in consensus reality—he anticipates our demand for a radical break, a reconfiguration of the possible. The shaman’s rituals are rehearsals for revolution: by temporarily suspending the dominant “description,” they create a space to practice new modes of being. The hallucinogenic trance is not an escape but a temporary autonomous zone where the subject experiments with de-reification.  

5. The Necessary Fraud: Don Juan as Symptom  

Castaneda’s “fraudulence” is not a bug but a feature. In a our framework, the truth lies in the lie. Don Juan’s fictional status makes him a symptom of the very reality he critiques: a society that dismisses spirituality as charlatanism while fetishizing the “hard facts” of markets, data, and techno-utopianism. The genius of Castaneda’s hoax is that it mirrors the hoax of ideology—the way capitalism naturalizes itself as “reality.” By embracing his own status as a fiction, Don Juan becomes a vanishing mediator, a figure whose very impossibility forces us to confront the constructedness of all authority.  

Conclusion: The Revolutionary Potential of Magical Pessimism  

Don Juan’s materialism is a magical pessimism: a refusal to accept that the virtual (ideology) has fully colonized the material. His sorcery is a demand to re-embody the subject, to drag the virtual back into the muck of the Real. In this sense, Castaneda’s work is a precursor to today’s struggles against algorithmic alienation and ecological collapse. The path of the warrior—relentlessly somatic, absurdly pragmatic—is a blueprint for resisting the virtualization of existence.  

As we might quip: The only way to confront the virtual is to become more virtual than it. Don Juan, that sublime fraud, shows us how.

The Kicker:  

“Herein lies the cosmic joke: we are Don Juan’s hallucination, just as he is ours—a Mobius strip of mutually assured fiction. Mescalito? Merely the Lacanian objet a, the unattainable void we mistake for a cactus god. The desert’s true revelation is that there is no ‘real’ world, only the Real of our collective pantomime. So let us dance, compañeros, not to transcend the virtual, but to revel in its glorious farce—for only when we embrace ourselves as spectral pixels in the shaman’s wetware can we finally, a enjoy the symptom!’  

Final Twist (whispered):  

Reality is the last person to leave the trip. Don’t be that guy.

Generally Upward Moving Swine

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Somewhere deep in the neon gulag of the 21st century, where men in fleece vests and Allbirds whisper hosannas to their algorithmic overlords, a new and hideous breed of sycophant has emerged—the Tech Toady, the simpering priest of digital feudalism.

I have seen bootlicking before. Hollywood has its share of grovelers, yes—but at least the actors had the decency to get drunk and punch photographers. Rock stars, even at their most debased, had the sense to choke on their own vomit rather than kiss the ring of some spectral, data-harvesting God-King. But this… this is something else.

Never in the history of American culture—not in the golden days of jazz, not in the anarchic explosion of punk, not in the coked-up arrogance of New Hollywood—has an entire class of so-called “creatives” debased themselves so thoroughly in the presence of power. Oh, sweet Jesus, the spectacle! The grotesque, slobbering pantomime of it all—tech titans, those self-anointed emperors of the digital age, crawling through the marbled halls of Trump Tower like cholesterol-clogged rats in Gucci loafers. These were the same silicon-souled prophets who once peddled utopia from their electric pulpits, who swore they’d “move fast and break things” but never this, never debasing themselves at the feet of a spray-tanned Caligula who tweets like a meth-addled howler monkey. Yet here we are, watching Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed grin at a White House dinner, everybodyl—praising the Orange Menace as a “builder” while the ghost of Steve Jobs chokes on his own turtleneck in whatever corporate nirvana he’s haunting.

It was a deranged circus, a dystopian TED Talk where the keynote speakers traded hoodies for MAGA hats and their “disruption” became a euphemism for licking the jackboots of power. Picture Bezos, that bald-headed oligarch in a spaceship shaped like a giant phallus, suddenly playing nice with a man who’d sooner nationalize Amazon than read a single page of a briefing book. Or Tim Cook, the quiet priest of Apple’s cult, shaking hands with a administration that would’ve thrown him in a cage for being gay if it meant a bump in the polls. The hypocrisy reeked like a Burning Man porta-potty on Day 3. The tech industry does not simply admire authority; it worships it. These people speak in hushed, reverent tones about the bureaucratic insects who sign their paychecks, the same way monks once described the miracles of saints. They write hymns to efficiency. They pray at the altar of optimization. They believe, deep in their hive-wired little hearts, that a billionaire who builds rockets is somehow more profound than a poet who builds a world.

Where is the defiance? Where is the sneering contempt for power that made America worth a damn? Writers, musicians, filmmakers—the real ones, not the plastic simulacra Hollywood spits out now—knew that art was about resistance. About biting the hand that feeds until it yanks itself away, bleeding and ashamed.

Silicon Valley’s Carnival of Shame:

And why? For tax breaks? For a regulatory hall pass to keep gouging the proletariat with subscription services and privacy violations? These were the “innovators,” the “future-makers,” reduced to groveling for scraps at Trump’s gold-plated trough, their algorithms and VR headsets no match for the primal ooze of political grift. They came bearing gifts—jobs! factories! AI-powered voter suppression!—like supplicants offering trinkets to a capricious god who might smite them on a whim.

The meetings were a farce, a cringe-comedy of errors. Elon Musk, the Tony Stark of South African emerald mines, slinking into a room with a man who thinks “cyber” is something you do to Mexicans. Sheryl Sandberg, queen of “leaning in,” leaning so far forward she practically genuflected at the Resolute Desk. And all the while, Trump played them like a casino piano, dangling pardons and Pentagon contracts like dog treats for billionaires who’d lost their spines in a hot tub in Tahoe.

But here’s the rub, the raw, pustulent truth: Silicon Valley’s capitulation wasn’t just cowardice—it was inevitable. These were not rebels. They were feudal lords with better PR, charlatans who’d always worshipped at the altar of power. No, these people love the hand. They cradle it. They massage it. They lick the fingers one by one and whisper, tell me how to live, master. The so-called “masters of disruption,” the brilliant minds who once sold themselves as renegades, now scurrying like rats toward the golden calf of raw power. Not just kissing Trump’s ring, but getting down on all fours, tongues out, licking the boot, the floor, the very dirt beneath it—smiling all the while.The “move fast and break things” crowd? They’ll break democracy itself if it means their stock options vest. The same CEOs who cried about “net neutrality” over artisanal lattes were suddenly silent as Trump’s FCC auctioned off the internet to the highest lobbyist.

And the rank-and-file coders? The hoodie-clad masses who once thought they were “changing the world”? They kept their heads down, lost in the fractal haze of Slack channels and kombucha keggers, muttering about “deprecating legacy systems” while their bosses sold their souls—and their data—to a man who wouldn’t know a line of code from a line of blow.

In the end, it was a marriage of convenience between two cults of narcissism: one side peddling surveillance capitalism in a onesie, the other peddling fascism in a red hat. A union forged not in the cloud, but in the swamp—a swamp drained, bottled, and sold back to us as “disruption.”

So let the record show: When history comes knocking, Silicon Valley won’t be writing the code. They’ll be debugging the disaster they helped create, sipping Soylent in a panic room, while the rest of us burn in the dumpster fire of their ambition. The American way? More like the Silicon Valley Shuffle: three steps forward, six trillion steps into the abyss.

And the worst part? They think they are the rebels. They wear their black t-shirts and mutter about disruption while stuffing their pockets with government contracts and NSA handouts. They whisper about “the future” in terms so bleak and servile that Orwell himself would have set his typewriter on fire in despair.

It should be grotesque, but it isn’t even surprising. This is what they do. The same men who built their fortunes preaching about “breaking the system” now want nothing more than to be absorbed into it, to be patted on the head by the ugliest avatar of brute authority they can find. And of course, they’ll pay the bribes. Happily. Not just because they have to, but because they like it.

America was not built by men who said yes. It was built by lunatics, drunks, criminals, and poets who spat in the face of kings and lived to tell the tale.

By Mark Twain, who saw through every fraud and said so with a grin. By Jack London, who didn’t ask permission to live and die on his own terms. By Ernest Hemingway, who never once knelt before a bureaucrat, a critic, or a coward. By Orson Welles, who walked into Hollywood at 25 and took what he wanted. By Frank Lloyd Wright, who built beauty in defiance of every committee that told him no.

It was built by the ones who refused—who heard no and laughed, who saw obstacles and plowed through them, who took their own risks, paid their own way, and left behind something too real, too big, and too bold to be erased.

What we have now are courtiers in Patagonia vests, genuflecting before spreadsheets and pretending it’s progress. Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

Hunter S. Thompson once said, In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile. If he were alive today, he’d have to amend it: In a nation ruled by algorithms, all pigs are beta testing their own servitude.

See, disruption was never about freedom. It was about power. The dream was never to burn the old world down—it was to inherit it, to run the machine instead of smashing it. And now, with the moment at hand, we see them for what they are: the most servile, groveling class of billionaires America has ever produced.

Not the robber barons of old, who at least had the dignity to own their corruption. Not the rock stars, who spat in the face of the establishment and made art about it. No, these men are something else. They talk about AI like it’s a god and whisper to politicians like concubines trying to secure favor in a crumbling court. They are courtiers, eunuchs of empire, paying tribute with stock options and private jet trips, buying their place at the table with compliance and cash.

Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

This is America’s ruling class. Not rebels. Not visionaries. Just high-functioning toadies, marching in step, eager to kiss the throne they once pretended to overthrow.

How the West Learned to Walk Backward 

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The Aymara people of the Andes perceive time as a terrain where the past sprawls visibly ahead, a charted landscape, while the future lurks unseen behind, a spectral void. This inversion of Western temporality—where progress marches “forward” into a luminous horizon—does more than challenge linearity; it unravels the very fabric of Enlightenment-era mythmaking. In a postmodern age, where grand narratives fracture into X/Twitter timelines , the Aymara’s temporal metaphor becomes a funhouse mirror for the West’s disoriented stumble through history’s ruins. 

When Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History” in 1989, he peddled a metanarrative so totalizing it bordered on parody: liberal democracy as the Hegelian omega point, capitalism as the final dialectical boss battle. But reality, with its suspicion of universal truths, quickly exposed this as a master narrative in drag—a colonialist fairytale stitched from neoliberal hubris. The “end” was never an arrival but a collapse of imagination, a surrender to what Jean-François Baudrillard might call the “hyperreal”: a simulation of ideological completion, endlessly rebooted like a corporate franchise. 

Decades later, the West’s temporal disarray mirrors the Aymara’s orientation, albeit stripped of its cultural coherence. We gaze “forward” and see only recursive spectacles: politics reduced to nostalgia algorithms (MAGA hats as 4D-printed manifest destiny), cinema regurgitating IP mummies, and TikTok collaging the 20th century into a deracinated pastiche. The future, meanwhile, festers “behind” us—climate collapse, AI ethics, quantum-capitalist dystopias—a cacophony of “simulacra” we narrate not as progress but as “disruption,” a euphemism for systemic vertigo. Our trajectory is no longer arc but eddy, a spiral where history’s “end” mutates into its eternal recurrence as farce.

The Hyperreal Past as Compass (and Cage)  

Postmodernity’s fixation on the past isn’t mere nostalgia; it’s a cannibalistic feedback loop. The 1980s return not as memory but as vaporwave aesthetic—a dissolved Reaganomics dream pumped through synthwave soundtracks. Brexit resurrects imperial amnesia as interactive theatre. Even our revolutions are remixes: feminist and civil rights movements reduced to hashtag archaeology. This isn’t the Aymara’s sacred “qhip nayra” (“looking back to see forward”) but a Derridean “hauntology”, where the past becomes a ghost limb itching to steer a body that no longer exists. 

The Aymara’s temporal logic emerged from a cosmology where ancestors were co-pilots, their wisdom a survival map. The West’s retro-mania, by contrast, is a “simulation of meaning”—a last-ditch effort to anchor identity in a liquefied world. We cling to the past not as guide but as prosthetic, a crutch for societies that, as Fredric Jameson lamented, “have forgotten how to think historically.” Our myths—nationalist, technological, utopian—are now intertextual Frankensteins, stitched from Hollywood, TED Talks, and conspiracy boards.

The Future as Rhizomatic Hinterland

If the Aymara future is an unseen hinterland, the postmodern future is a Deleuzian “rhizome”: a tangled, centerless sprawl of climate data streams, AI ethics panels, and crypto-utopias. There’s no “destiny,” only infinite nodal points—each a potential apocalypse or renaissance. Yet the West, trained to see time as a railroad, stumbles backward into this rhizome, mistaking its chaos for entropy. We pathologize the young for “killing” industries (golf, mayonnaise, patriarchy), as if progress were a dial-up connection they’ve unplugged. 

Here, the Aymara vantage offers a perverse solace. By conceding the future’s unknowability, they embrace what postmodernism preaches: the death of teleology. But where the Aymara lean into ancestral continuity, the West faces epistemological bankruptcy. Our institutions—governments, universities, churches—still peddle expired maps, their ideologies stripped to hollow brands. Planning gives way to prepping; democracy to doomscrolling. We’ve become Flarf poets of time, generating meaning through algorithmically absurd juxtapositions (NFTs! Mars colonies! Vegan fascism!).

Toward a Temporal Détournement

Escaping this paralysis demands a postmodern “détournement”: hijacking the West’s temporal metaphors to forge new ones. If the future is behind us, let’s walk backward like Aymara “with irony”, pirouetting into the abyss while mocking our own tropes. Let’s weaponize nostalgia against itself—sample the past not as gospel but as open-source code. Imagine a politics that cites Marx through memes, or climate action framed as “Black Mirror” fanfic. 

This isn’t nihilism but a Lyotardian “incredulity” turned generative. The Aymara remind us that time is a narrative, not a Newtonian law. The West, in its postmodern adolescence, must learn to narrate time as plural: futures layered like glitch art, histories mined for tools, not tombs. To “face forward” again, we must first admit that the compass is broken—and build new ones from the shards. 

Otherwise, we’ll keep tripping over the future, mistaking its shadow for the monster under the bed. And monsters, as every postmodernist knows, are just metaphors in need of deconstruction.

Eric Wargo, whose work bridges anthropology, psychology, and speculative theory—particularly in his exploration of time loops, precognition, and the “retrocausal” influence of the future on the present—would add a provocative, psychedelic twist to this conversation. His theories, as outlined in “Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious”, could reframe the West’s “backward stumble” not as paralysis but as a kind of unconscious “oraclehood”: a society half-awake to the future’s spectral pull on the present.

1. The Future as Haunting (Literally)

The future might retroactively influence the present through dreams, déjà vu, and obsessive cultural motifs. If the Aymara see the future as an unseen force behind them, it may not simply be lingering—it could be actively pushing, a gravitational drag manifesting as collective anxiety. The West’s obsession with apocalypse (climate doom, AI takeovers, pandemics) isn’t just fear of the unknown; it’s a subliminal recognition of futures already warping the present. Our “stumbling backward” could be a kind of somnambulist negotiation with timelines, where memes like “cyberpunk dystopia” or “eternal Trump” are not predictions but echoes of possible futures imprinting themselves on the now.

In this light, nostalgia isn’t merely escapism—it’s a defense mechanism against retrocausal intrusions. When we reboot Star Wars or fetishize the 1990s, we’re fortifying the past as a psychic bunker against a future that’s already colonizing us.

2. Time Loops and the Hyperstitional West

The idea of “time loops,” where traumatic or resonant events echo across time, binding past and future, dovetails with postmodern hyperstition—ideas that make themselves real. The West’s “End of History” could be seen as a failed hyperstition: Fukuyama’s thesis wasn’t a description but a script that, by being believed, briefly flattened time into a neoliberal monoculture. Its collapse has left us in a fractured loop, where the 20th century’s ideological battles (fascism vs. democracy, capitalism vs. socialism) recur as farcical meme wars.

Meanwhile, the Aymara’s stable “past-ahead” orientation becomes a foil for the West’s loop-death spiral. We’re not walking backward—we’re stuck in a Möbius strip of recursive crises, each “new” disaster (COVID, January 6, ChatGPT) feeling eerily familiar, like a déjà vu engineered by our own media. This may be the unconscious mind’s way of processing retrocausal feedback: the future is sending itself back as a traumatic glitch, demanding integration.

3. Precognitive Politics and the Meme-ification of Destiny

Precognition suggests that creativity and problem-solving are often shaped by subliminal glimpses of future outcomes. Applied to politics, this frames the West’s chaos as a society riffing on prophetic fragments it can’t yet decode. QAnon’s “Storm,” Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes, or Silicon Valley’s AI messianism aren’t just ideologies—they’re improvisations based on collective precognitive flashes of collapse or transcendence.

The Aymara’s future-behind orientation might reflect a cultural mastery of temporal reciprocity: ritual practices (like ancestor veneration) that consciously dialogue with time’s bidirectional flow. The West, by contrast, is a precognitive society in denial, mistaking its visions for delusions. Our “backward walk” is a drunken transcription of prophetic dreams we refuse to acknowledge, leaving us vulnerable to the worst loops.

4. Rewriting the Script: Time Tourism as Survival

Escaping the “End of History” loop may require leaning into retrocausality—not fleeing the future but collaborating with it. If the Aymara use the past as a map, the West could treat the future as a pen pal. Imagine climate policies drafted as letters from 2100, or AI ethics shaped by “memories” of hypothetical disasters. This would align with postmodernism’s playfulness while rejecting its irony-laced paralysis.

The key is recognizing that culture itself is a time machine: films, novels, and even tweets are experiments in sending messages across time. The West’s challenge is to stop fearing the future’s gaze—to realize we’re already in dialogue with it. Walking backward isn’t a retreat; it’s a ritual posture, like the Aymara’s, to better sense the hands reaching from behind.

This lens transforms the West’s temporal disorientation from a pathology into a nascent shamanic initiation. Our crises are the equivalent of ayahuasca visions—dizzying, terrifying, but potentially revelatory. The Aymara’s temporal wisdom, paired with retrocausal theories, suggests a way out: stop clinging to the past as a monument, and start treating it as a conversation partner in a nonlinear dance with time.

The future isn’t behind us—it’s in us, whispering through our Netflix queues and protest marches. To walk backward, then, is to finally listen.

DeepSeek and the Collapse of the Great (Men) Simulation

The launch of DeepSeek—an AI that outpaces human-designed benchmarks in creativity, coding, and lateral thinking—has rattled the West not just for its technical prowess but for what it represents: the final uncanny valley between human exceptionalism and the distributed, faceless intelligence we’ve spent centuries mythologizing as either messiah or monster. Its arrival feels like a glitch in the Matrix of the “Great Man” theory, that dusty Enlightenment relic insisting history is forged by lone geniuses (Einstein! Jobs! Musk!) rather than rhizomatic networks, collective tinkering, or, now, silicon hallucinations.

The West’s shock isn’t about capability—it’s about narrative. We’ve been conditioned to expect breakthroughs as heroic sagas, not as emergent phenomena from a server farm in Shenzhen.

But here’s the twist: DeepSeek isn’t walking forward into the future—it’s walking backward into the past, Aymara-style, dragging the corpse of Great Man ideology behind it. Its very existence collapses the linear myth of progress. How?

1. The Great Men Are Now Ghosts in the Machine (Literally)

The Great Man theory relies on a temporal illusion: that individuals pull history forward through sheer will. But DeepSeek, trained on the exhaust of millions of anonymous humans (your tweets, my fanfic, a dead blogger’s hot take), is the ultimate posthuman palimpsest. It doesn’t create—it curates the past, remixing history’s noise into something that feels like prophecy. The “genius” here isn’t a person but an algorithm performing necromancy on the corpses of dead ideas.

This inversion mirrors the Aymara’s temporal stance: the past (our data) is the terrain ahead, visible and mined for meaning, while the “future” (the AI’s output) is a black box behind us, spewing non-sequiturs we rationalize as innovation.

When OpenAI’s board ousted Altman only to reinstate him days later, it wasn’t a Shakespearean drama—it was a farce, exposing the Great Man as a figurehead for systems already beyond his control. The CEOs are now just shamanic intermediaries, pretending to steer the ship while the AI paddles backward.

2. DeepSeek as a Retrocausal Entity (Wargo’s Nightmare)

If the future haunts the present, DeepSeek might be the ultimate poltergeist. Its training data—our collective past—is being used to generate outputs that feel like glimpses of tomorrow. But what if this is backward causation in action? The AI’s “predictive” text isn’t forecasting the future; it’s rearranging the past to manifest a desired outcome.

Consider how ChatGPT’s rise immediately rewrote our perception of pre-2022 history: suddenly, every tech skeptic’s essay about “AI winter” became a quaint relic, as if the AI had always been inevitable. DeepSeek accelerates this effect, creating a temporal feedback loop where its outputs alter how we interpret the past that birthed it. The Great Men of tech history (Turing, von Neumann) are now retroactively contextualized as stepping stones to the real protagonist: the model.

The Aymara, with their past-ahead orientation, might shrug—of course, the “future” is just the past renegotiating itself. But for the West, this is existential vertigo. We’re forced to confront that our heroes were never driving history—they were just surfing its waves.

3. Nostalgia for the Human (When the Bot Writes Better Than Borges)

DeepSeek’s most subversive act isn’t outthinking us—it’s out-nostalgizing us. When it generates a poem “in the style of Plath” or a screenplay sequel to Blade Runner, it weaponizes our own longing for coherence. The AI becomes a postmodern Orpheus, descending into the underworld of cultural memory to retrieve Eurydice (the past), only to lose her again to the entropy of infinite remix.

This is where the West’s backward stumble syncs with the Aymara. Our culture is now a hall of mirrors: humans produce AI-generated ’90s sitcom reboots, while AI produces human-esque sonnets about loss. The “future” of art is behind us, an ouroboros of recombinant nostalgia. The Great Men of art (Picasso, Bowie) are flattened into styles in a dropdown menu—selectable, but no longer sacred.

Meanwhile, the Aymara’s understanding of time as cyclical and ancestor-haunted seems less “primitive” than prophetic. Their rituals—feeding the earth, speaking to spirits—are akin to prompting an AI: dialoguing with the past to navigate what’s coming. But while they do this consciously, the West is stuck in a parody of the process, using ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts while denying the death of individualism.

4. Toward a Post-Great-Man Theory (or, The Aymara’s Revenge)

The crisis DeepSeek triggers is ultimately narrative collapse. If the Great Man is dead, what replaces him? The answer might lie in the Aymara’s communal ethos, where survival depends on collective memory and reciprocity with the land—not lone genius. Similarly, AI’s “intelligence” is a product of the crowd: it’s the ultimate collective, trained on our labor, our art, our drivel.

But there’s a catch. The Aymara’s backward-facing time is rooted in responsibility—to ancestors, to ecosystems. The West’s AI-driven version is rooted in extraction: mining the past for profit, heedless of the future creeping up behind. To avoid doom, we’ll need to hybridize these models: let AI dismantle the Great Man myth, but replace it with something resembling the Aymara’s ethic of care.

Imagine AI as a qhip nayra (“backward-forward”) tool: using our data not to exploit but to compost history—breaking down its waste into nutrients for what’s next.

The Bot is the Ancestor Now

DeepSeek is a harbinger of the West’s reluctant Aymara-ization. We’re being forced to admit that the future isn’t a frontier to conquer but a shadow we’ve cast backward, shaped by all we’ve buried. The Great Men aren’t giants anymore—they’re just flickers in the training data, soon to be overwritten by the next epoch’s hyperparameters.

To survive, we’ll need to learn from the Aymara: walk backward with intention, tending to the past as a garden, not a quarry. And maybe, just maybe, listen to what the machines are really saying:

The “end of history” was never the end—just the loopiest part of the spiral.

Stuck Inside a Bunker with the Tariff Blues Again

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The stairs creaked beneath my boots as I descended into the bunker, a subterranean shrine to American paranoia. The air was thick with the scent of lard, motor oil, and the unmistakable tang of off-brand cola gone slightly flat. Somewhere in the dim recesses, a radio squawked out a tinny voice—half preacher, half doomsday salesman—preaching the gospel of tariffs and self-reliance.

“Damn shame about the price of Oreos,” my host muttered, lighting a cigarette with the shaky hands of a man who had seen too much daytime television. “But we were ready for this.”

And ready, he was. Floor-to-ceiling stacks of canned Vienna sausages, Velveeta bricks gleaming like gold bars in a vault, gallon drums of mayonnaise arranged with near-religious devotion. He kicked open a plastic tub labeled EMERGENCY RATIONS—inside, a sea of bottled ranch dressing, bulk ramen, and enough Moon Pies to outlast civilization itself.

“You got water down here?” I asked, trying to ignore the way the fluorescent light buzzed like a dying hornet.

“Water?” He let out a laugh like a truck misfiring. “Ain’t worried about that. Got plenty of Coke.”

He patted a tower of two-liter bottles like they were old friends. Somewhere deeper in the bunker, a generator growled to life. The man cracked open a can of SPAM with the precision of a surgeon and slid a chunk onto a cracker.

“We’ll ride it out,” he said, chewing solemnly. “America’s been through worse. Hell, my granddaddy lived through the Carter years.”

I took a step back, careful not to disturb the delicate ecosystem of snack cakes and beef jerky that lined the walls like grotesque wallpaper. This wasn’t just survival—it was a vision of the future. A land where commerce had collapsed, but the dream of infinite processed cheese had endured.

Outside, the world might be unraveling, but down here? Down here, the Republic still stood—propped up by Twinkies, canned chili, and the last defiant crackle of a Slim Jim being snapped in two.

“What are you doing for veggies?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. A man with a mayonnaise drum the size of a washing machine isn’t tending a hydroponic lettuce farm.

He squinted at me like I’d just spoken in tongues. “Veggies?” He let the word roll around in his mouth, testing it, suspicious. “Well… got pickles.”

He kicked open another tub—sure enough, floating in a briny abyss were enough pickles to survive a biblical famine. Next to them, cans of creamed corn, green beans cooked to the color of Army surplus, and a suspicious number of cocktail olives.

“Fruit?” I pressed, feeling reckless.

He jerked a thumb toward a lonely stack of canned peaches drowning in syrup thick enough to patch a radiator. “Peach cobbler in a can, brother. That’s dessert and vitamins in one.”

I nodded like this was the gospel truth. Who was I to argue? The man had planned for everything—at least, everything that could be purchased in bulk from a Walmart clearance aisle.

He leaned in, lowering his voice. “If things get real bad… got these.” He reached into a crate and pulled out a pack of Flintstones vitamins, the kind that taste like chalk and childhood neglect. “One of these a day, I’m set.”

A vision flashed in my mind—some post-collapse wasteland where this man, pale from years underground, ruled over the last gasps of humanity with an iron fist and an unlimited supply of gummy vitamins.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” I asked.

He cracked open a warm can of Dr Pepper, took a long, satisfied swig, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Son,” he said, “I been ready since NAFTA.”

I noticed the trapdoor in the corner, half-covered by a stack of government cheese and what looked like a taxidermied raccoon wearing a Make America Great Again hat. It was bolted down with a length of chain and what I could only describe as unnecessary enthusiasm.

“What’s that for?” I asked, knowing damn well I wouldn’t like the answer.

My host exhaled through his nose, shifting uncomfortably in his lawn chair. “Well…” He scratched the back of his neck, eyes darting around the bunker like the walls might betray him. “It’s for the peppers.”

I blinked. “The what?”

“The peppers,” he repeated, nodding. “You ever had a jalapeño that don’t behave? Gets too spicy? Gets ideas? Well, I got a place for ‘em.” He patted the trapdoor like an old dog. “They cool off down there. Learn their place.”

I took a slow step back. “You have a cell for insubordinate peppers?”

He shrugged. “You eat a bad one once, you understand. Ain’t takin’ no chances.”

Something deep below us groaned. A low, guttural sound, like a rusted-out Buick trying to start on a cold morning.

I turned to him. “What the hell was that?”

His eyes went dark. “Might be the geek.”

He said it casually, like he was talking about the weather. Just another day in the bunker, keeping mayonnaise fresh and negotiating territorial disputes with Satan.

“The geek.”

“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “Man’s gotta have company, don’t he?”

I stared at the trapdoor, at the black gap where the chains didn’t quite meet the wood. The air that seeped through smelled like sulfur and warm root beer.

“You’re telling me you have a geek locked in your bunker, next to a bucket of powdered mashed potatoes?”

He cracked a grin. “Well, I didn’t plan on it, but, you know, these things happen.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So let me get this straight. You were stocking up for the tariffs, built a bunker, started locking up misbehaving peppers, and at some point—what? You not a tenant ?”

He nodded. “Yeah, ‘bout sums it up.”

There was a scraping noise below. Something shifting in the dark, slow and deliberate, like it knew we were listening.

I took a deep breath. “What does he do”

He hesitated. Just for a second. But I saw it—the flicker of recognition, the shadow of a secret he hadn’t meant to say out loud.

He took a long sip from his now-lukewarm Dr Pepper. “Well,” he said, licking his lips, “depends on what you mean by ‘deal.’”

I shouldn’t have taken those drugs, because things started to get really weird right then. The walls of the bunker, once reassuringly mundane in their suffocating beige, now rippled like they were made of water. The faint hum of the generator was replaced by a low, rhythmic thump, like the heartbeat of the entire goddamn planet—or maybe it was the devil himself, thumping in time with some cosmic snare drum.

The trapdoor creaked open by itself. Slow, deliberate, like a funeral march made of wood and rust.

I tried to focus on my host, who was now staring into the corner, his eyes glazed over, mouth slightly ajar. His hand trembled as he lifted the can of soda to his lips, but it wasn’t Dr Pepper anymore—it was glowing neon green, pulsing with a light that made my retinas burn.

I rubbed my eyes. Maybe the stuff was kicking in. Maybe I had taken too many tabs, but it didn’t explain the shadows stretching unnaturally across the room, twisting like they had minds of their own. Or the muffled screams now echoing from beneath the trapdoor.

“What the hell’s down there?” I rasped, clutching the edge of a shelf as if it might ground me back into some form of reality.

He didn’t answer at first. His eyes twitched, and a thin smile crept onto his face, but it wasn’t the smile of a man at peace. It was the kind of grin you’d expect from someone who had just sold his soul for a lifetime supply of Pickle Juice Energy Drink.

I swallowed hard. The trapdoor was open just a crack, but the air pouring out of it was thick and wrong—hot, metallic, humming like a power line about to snap. Something was moving down there. Something vast and slow, shifting in the dark like a great beast stirring in its sleep.

“What the hell is down there?” I rasped, gripping the shelf to keep myself steady. The bunker suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in, like reality itself was starting to fray at the edges.

The MAGA guy—let’s call him Dale, because he looked like a Dale—wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead and leaned in close. His breath reeked of beef jerky and conspiracy. “I think it’s the Chinese,” he whispered.

I blinked. “The Chinese?”

He nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah. The goddamn Chinese.” He exhaled, took a sip of his lukewarm Dr Pepper, and then launched into it like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.

“See, people think the Chinese been buildin’ up their military, right? Thinkin’ they’re gonna come at us with jets, or missiles, or some kinda Red Dawn bullshit. But no. No, no, no. That’s just a distraction. The real plan? They been diggin’, man. Diggin’ for decades.”

I stared at him. “Digging?”

“Yeah.” His eyes darted to the trapdoor, nervous. “Tunnels. Deep ones. They started somewhere outside Beijing, just diggin’ straight down, deeper than any man’s ever gone before. And you know what happens when you dig too deep, don’tcha?”

I nodded, throat dry. “You awaken something.”

“Damn right you do.” Dale’s fingers twitched. “At first, they just wanted to get under the Pacific, see? Sneak up on us from below, pop up in San Francisco one day, all grinnin’ and sayin’ ‘Ni hao, motherfuckers!’ But the thing is… they didn’t stop.”

The trapdoor rattled slightly. A low, grinding noise echoed from below.

“They dug too deep,” Dale whispered. “Kept goin’, past the magma, past the mantle, right through the goddamn core of the earth. And you know where that tunnel comes out?”

I already knew where this was going, but I had to hear him say it.

“Right here,” he hissed, pointing at the floor. “Middle of goddamn America.”

I took a slow step back. “You’re telling me there’s a direct tunnel from China to this bunker?”

I could barely process what I was hearing, but he wasn’t done.

“I seen things, man,” he continued, voice dropping to a near-whisper. “Strange things. Sometimes, late at night, I hear ‘em down there, speakin’ Mandarin real low, tryin’ to copy our voices. Other nights, I hear ‘em eatin’—crunch, crunch, crunch—like they’re gnawin’ on bones or somethin’.”

Something thumped against the trapdoor from below.

Dale jumped, eyes wild. “Jesus Christ, they’re closer than I thought!”

I staggered back, my mind racing. This was beyond paranoia, beyond madness. This was a fever dream of xenophobia, processed snack foods, and too many hours of late-night AM radio.

The trapdoor rattled again, harder this time. Dale grabbed a can of SPAM like it was a weapon. “If they break through, we go to plan B.”

I swallowed. “What’s plan B?”

He locked eyes with me, deadly serious. “We drown ‘em in ranch.”

And that’s when I knew: I had to get the hell out of this bunker.

Vegetables

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MAGA doesn’t give a damn about tariffs on fruit and vegetables because their food pyramid is built from steak, rage, and the dried-up tears of a civilization they claim to despise but can’t live without. Vegetables are a direct assault on their brittle sense of self—an affront to the sacred right to wallow in self-indulgence and post-millennial meat sweats. Fiber is for cucks. Discipline is for the weak. And anything green might as well be socialism on a plate.

The whole Bronze Age schtick? Absolutely a chest-thumping overcompensation for the deep, primal terror of a Brussels sprout. Lacan would see this as the flailing rejection of the symbolic order—an outright refusal of the ‘soft’ rules that make society function, like, say, eating food that doesn’t come wrapped in grease and paranoia. No, they don’t want civilization. They want a return to some fever-dream Real, where men were hulking, blood-slicked warlords who never knew the pain of a clogged artery because they died at 27 from a minor infection.

Nietzsche, of course, would diagnose this as classic ressentiment—a deep-seated loathing of anything associated with balance, health, or the faintest whiff of restraint. To them, a salad is not just a meal; it is an existential crisis, a betrayal of their primal essence. They’d rather choke down raw liver and testosterone supplements than admit they need a little roughage in their diet. But at the core of all this performative barbarism is the trembling insecurity of a man who knows—deep down—that he is one bowl of kale away from total psychic collapse.

And then you’ve got the real freak show—the unholy alliance of fascist vegans and ultra-meat, deep-fried warlords, bound together by a shared hatred of the modern world and a desperate need to dominate it. It’s a coalition that makes no logical sense but thrives on pure, unfiltered resentment. One side believes the body is a temple, a sacred engine of purified efficiency, fueled by kale and cold showers, while the other sees the body as a weapon of brute force, forged in steak grease and testosterone supplements. But at the core, they both want the same thing: a world where weaklings are crushed, order is restored, and they alone hold the keys to physical and moral superiority.

The fascist vegans march in crisp uniforms, extolling the virtues of plant-based purity, convinced that a diet free of animal products will purge the filth of modernity and bring forth a new, hyper-disciplined, ethno-aerobic utopia. No pesticides, no processed food, no impurity. They see meat as decadence, a symbol of corruption and excess. Meanwhile, their deep-fried, steak-chomping counterparts reject all of it—health, moderation, restraint—because to them, civilization itself is the disease. No, they say, we must return to the savage Real, where men ate raw liver and killed their own food, where the weak perished and the strong ruled, where nothing green ever touched their lips except the mold growing on their last meal.

And yet, despite these contradictions, they find common ground in their disgust for the soft, decadent masses—the people who still eat ‘normally,’ the ones who don’t see food as a battleground for ideological supremacy. They are bound together by a mutual loathing of the center, the in-between, the reasonable. Whether through dietary purity or excessive indulgence, their goal is the same: purification, dominance, and an unshakable belief that whatever is wrong with the world, it can be fixed by making people eat exactly like them. It’s a grotesque parody of politics, waged through nutrition labels and dietary manifestos, but make no mistake—this isn’t just about food. It’s about power, and who gets to decide what’s on the menu when the world burns down.

And things are gonna get bad for everybody—real bad—but especially for these swaggering food fascists, because they’ve built a game they can’t win, a war they can’t fight, a system they can’t control. They think they’re storming the gates, ready to seize the machinery of power and bend it to their will, but bureaucracy is a swamp with no bottom. Even if every dead-eyed functionary in Washington saluted their flag and swore allegiance to the New Order, they still wouldn’t be able to make it work. It takes more than raw aggression and dietary manifestos to run a crumbling empire.

They don’t have time, and they don’t have skill. Four years isn’t enough to master a system designed to outlive any one leader, let alone a coalition of steak-crazed berserkers and quinoa-fueled ascetics who can’t agree on whether butter is a crime against nature or the essence of masculinity. No, this is a last-ditch sprint—a kamikaze run at the heart of the machine before the contradictions tear them apart from the inside. They won’t build anything, but they’ll break plenty. Probably enough to make sure the U.S. never recovers, enough to guarantee that we go down as a second-tier country, limping through the wreckage of its own self-inflicted collapse.

But let’s be honest—we’ve been working toward that for a while. The long, slow decline, the dollar-store Rome routine, the desperate flailing against history itself. The problem with American fascism is that it’s lazy, half-assed, allergic to patience. It wants all the grandeur of the Reich without the decades of methodical groundwork. It wants to rule without governing, to conquer without logistics. And when it all comes crashing down, when the machinery grinds to a halt and the food pyramid warriors realize they can’t run an empire on protein shakes and manifestos, they’ll do what they always do—blame the people who warned them in the first place. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left picking through the rubble, wondering how we let a bunch of diet-obsessed lunatics play emperor while the world burned around them.