They had a bag of newborn’s names
alive in rows of bunkers
and hope in the image of a gremlin womb.
The spoons full of sex in their linen dreams
spun blender greens in apple juice
and peeled dead skin off the brink of a college.
Storms reeled through the ranks of days
dressed and covered, dripping . . . hungry. Still
in the rose-sugared Ambrose moment
he turned a screw, she washed a rag
the flicker flashed on tooth and vein.
Craving the passage of silence, they blew ghosts
onto cold windows. They pretended.
The curl of hips and thump of toes
the cling of cloth on promises
pressed prickled hope into the flesh . . .
. . . the forgotten leaves of their last winter.
Dogs tapped along the tile like broken metronomes.
Tongues muscled through semi-solid grammars.
Linen dreams and gremlin wombs held fast
against the soldier winds
as they grappled like lovers
to remember tomorrow.

This August, during the Michigan Primary, when Haley Stevens was up against Abdul El-Sayed for the US Senate seat nomination—which became a kind of replay of every contest between social democrats and the Wall Street/AIPAC Democratic establishment—the two Olde-Reliable establishment tactics employed against the social democratic challenger—around since the Sanders campaign of 2016—were (1) the claim that the social democratic challenger was not “electable” in the General Election, and (2) the sly mobilization of “the black vote” against the challenger. In 2016, the former and immensely popular President Obama actually did endorse Clinton, and in 2020, he did endorse Joe Biden against Sanders in the Primary. That was before Covid hit and things went totally to shit. This year, Haley Stevens pulled up old footage of her with Obama and put it in ads that suggested—contrary to the truth—that Obama had endorsed her against El-Sayed. She then flooded the zone—especially in Wayne County—with these deceptive ads in every medium. The killer endorsement in advance of the 2020 Carolina Primaries that blunted the momentum of Sanders against Biden was Representative Jim Clyburn, who showed up to actually endorse Stevens this year against El-Sayed. Clyburn has found his niche as the black-vote-whisperer from a deeply red state. This is a sensitive subject these sensitive days, but I decided to reprint this lengthy though piece from 2020, because . . . well, for one, it still holds water . . . and we’ll see the tactic again and again until it’s no longer effective. It has a history . . . let’s look.

—SG, 2026

In the United States, everything is about race. We are, after all, the inheritors of racial capitalism, of the racialized settler-colonization of this hemisphere, of racialized genocide and expropriation, of wealth built up on race-based slave labor, of racialized imperial expansion, embedded in a racial “progress” myth . . . and we live today with official xenophobia, stacked onto the history of the New Jim Crow of redlining and mass incarceration, of stubbornly well-sustained racial gaps on every social index.

Our public discourse is still white, phallocentric, imperial, and capitalist — this is part of what hegemony means, and why it’s so difficult to uproot. The colonizers oversee the development of land and labor; but they also oversee the colonization of our minds. White supremacy, male supremacy, imperial noblesse oblige, “social hygiene,” and the myth of progress are the epistemic architecture of capitalism past, and they echo. Historically speaking, white, phallocentric, and imperial practices underpinned the development of real capitalism.

Celebrity worship is part of that epistemic architecture, too. In a world with no afterlife, public esteem becomes a sort of desperate currency, a check written against the perceived nothingness of eternity. We worship celebrities, but also celebrity itself, something about which we can fantasize for ourselves and our kids. This is the world of modern simulation, our entrapment by modernity’s cold, sterile objectivism, and our attempt at an escape into representation.

The problem, from the perspective of some of us, is that social orders become self-organized within their hegemonic frameworks, almost like a biome wherein each organism finds its niche until the whole becomes cyclically stable. The difference being that capitalism is a biome that systematically destroys its own diversity — a slow suicide system.

When social orders are generalized across large scales, this niche-maximization (by post-subsistence people who have to seek out money to survive) becomes niche-dependency. I have my little spot, my little job, my little home, and I have to protect it to survive. In this way, I come to protect the larger social order by protecting my little piece of it, situated there in the “stable” whole.

Cognitive dissonance kicks in around the contradiction between my belief in some form of justice and my need to survive as a dependent within hegemonic structures. To live with myself I seek out narratives that seem to reconcile my actions with my sense of justice. I rationalize, extensively and elaborately, and find that I have now accepted, even naturalized and become an apologist for, the epistemic architecture of capitalism.

This phenomenon is even more powerful when we encounter actual people — who live in families, with obligations to others that further complicate the moral dilemmas of the subaltern. I could rebel, but what will that mean for my children? I think it was David Harvey who said something like, “The greatest force for working-class conformity in the United States was the 30-year mortgage.” Defy the establishment, and your children will suffer.

Within the United States, we can imagine—with a lot of caveats—that there is another nation (in the older sense of a shared history, language, and culture, not a nation-state) which we might call African America. As a whole, this nation has been very like a colony — colonies being subaltern social formations that are simultaneously politically suppressed and mined for profit.

Bear in mind that this is not a perfect analogy, and it leaks profusely with exceptions, but it serves as a thought exercise that—in spite of its flaws—provide us with insight and perspective.

World system theorists divide the world into centers, or metropolitan cores, and peripheries (colonies or post-colonies, where value is extracted under the supervision of colonial surrogates—comprador members of that same “community”—and extracted value, after the compradors are given their dividend, is returned to the cores where even the working classes can draw on an imperial benefit). There are also semi-peripheries — places like India, for example — where the colonial surrogates begin to amass enough power vis-à-vis the cores to begin building up a “middle-class” base of support for colonial and post-colonial ruling classes.

African America—as we now might imagine it—is further complicated by geography, because it’s an internal periphery (and, for some privileged few, a semi-periphery).

Peripheries adapt, and one of those adaptations is this development of liaisons between the white capitalist core and the most powerful members of the periphery—the compradors, or colonial surrogates—which develop into political alliances. There is no politics unconcerned with economy and no economy unconcerned with politics—which is why many of us refer to them both at once as political economy.

These alliances develop colonial surrogates along certain lines. In many cases, colonial surrogates become powerful in their own right. In the US, this often means “delivering votes,” in exchange for support of careers and pet projects. But again, we come back to that cognitive dissonance. If one is performing as a power-broker between the periphery and the core, that person needs a rationalization. No one, even the most cynical, believes he or she is a bad person. We can’t. We need rationalizations, and when there’s a threat to our sense of justifiable personhood, we can be quite aggressive in our own defense. People readily believe their own rationalizations.

Absolutely, one might become part of what I’ll call African American civil society for the genuine purpose of helping one’s community. The belief system of many subalterns can be aspirational. When you live in a stable biome, you seek out the niches that are available. Let me do a short excursus on this thing I call “civil society.”

Civil society has several meanings, but for our purposes, it means influencers. In capitalist society, there is a hierarchy of power. The ultimate power resides with the ruling class — the big bourgeoisie, the mega-money folks . . . in our neoliberal phase over the last four-plus decades, these are Wall Street types . . . or finance capital, to which productive capital has become subordinate. [add now in 2026, the tech sector —SG] These capitalists exist in a partnership with the state, in a state-finance nexus if you will. The state is the official arm of power with its legal monopoly on violence. So far, this class is a fraction of around one tenth of one percent . . . maybe less.

On the other end, there is the bottom 90 percent of the people have no appreciable power at all . . . unless they unite against the ruling class—the perennial dream of class warriors.

In between is civil society, or the retainer class. Civil society, this class of influencers, are in that zone between the one-percenters and the 90 percent. This civil society fraction (9.9/100?) is what stands between the tiny ruling class and that vast working class. They engage with the working class on behalf of the ruling class (knowingly or not) to prevent and-or attenuate any restlessness among the 90 percent that might threaten the ruling class. They influence the working class to accept and even embrace the existing hierarchies. Civil society does this through professionals of all kinds, and through media, universities, entertainment, think tanks, non-profits, churches, businesses, and charities.

I worked for and with non-profits for a while, and we were plugged into think tanks, other bigger non-profits, universities, churches, businesses and charities. Some do projects, some do issues. We did issues. One was money-and-politics (for which we received some of the actual “Soros money”), another was nuclear power, still another was Veterans For Peace, against war, yet another dealt with labor and environmental justice . . . all these are good things. In the current system, the only way to get the resources (money) to advance our cases (and construct a few jobs [niches] in the process) was by filing for corporate status as 501-whatevers. Availability, right? Maybe not, as we’ll see further down.

In subaltern communities — like our semi-notional African America — fewer people have the means and opportunity to get the formal education alongside the informal cross-cultural competencies of relative privilege to participate in African American civil society. Liaison with the white “core” is among the key duties and responsibilities of African American civil society, and it creates a kind of brain drain from the working class into this hazardous demilitarized zone of liberal civil society, by those of good will . . . as well as opportunists. There are many non-profits, for example, that are organized to answer real crises, crises created by the very structures whose epistemic architecture we’re obliged to inhabit.

All that to say, I am not conflating all non-profits. Some folks inhabit structures tactically for the purpose of deconstructing them. But in the larger scheme of things, where capital calls the shots, those initiatives that support capital or give it cover will be better resourced than those that don’t. The rest will be used as pressure release valves. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.

Historically speaking, African America — from Reconstruction forward — has struggled to exist inside a white supremacist nation-state—one that retreated for a few years but now seems determined to make a comeback. During Reconstruction, African American civil society germinated among self-help groups, schools, churches, funeral societies, cooperatives, and other formations. The general belief (with some major exceptions) was that African America might be eventually incorporated into the surrounding society as equals.

As Marx might point out, with no access to the means of production, however, upward mobility was restricted. The emergent African American sub-bourgeoisie did not control banks or factories, and so could only engage in entrepreneurial activities that remained dependent on credit from white financial capital and supply chains from white productive capital. Wealth within the internal colony was accumulated by church leaders alongside retail and service enterprises — barber and beauty shops, funeral homes, corner stores, etc. Big capital cashed in from afar, concealing their presence behind black bodies, but retaining the basis of power.

These were the upwardly mobile families that learned two things: first, you have to be able to work with suppliers (white folks), and second, your credibility depends on performing white respectability. The latter emphasis on respectability (in politics now) remains powerful today. In 1998, Randall Kennedy wrote about the struggle for respectability in African America:

A . . . core intuition of the politics of respectability is that, for a stigmatized racial minority, successful efforts to move upward in society must be accompanied at every step by a keen attentiveness to the morality of means, the reputation of the group, and the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment.

This kind of grasping at respectability, especially among people who are trying to “move up,” for whatever group in whatever time, is not primarily motivated by economic concerns; money is a means to an end, but the goals of making money are status, acceptance . . . and then power. Respectability has economic demands, i.e., fashion and consumption codes, which require the circulation and accumulation of money. Respectability, then, lives inside the architecture of capital, and its practical companion is consumption.

Complicating an already contradictory situation is the struggle of any subaltern community to overcome the dominant narrative of innate inferiority and its attendant self-loathing and loss of self-esteem. The fightback against these conjoined phenomena includes “proof of equality” strategies and the quest for paragons.

In a world of limitations, the most privileged, talented, and-or driven will press into whatever arena are most readily available. In the US, those available arenas for racial paragons have been entertainment — whether media or sports (often the same thing) — both of which remain dependent upon “white money.” Now, some few African Americans are now actual members of the haute bourgeoisie, billionaires, and identify with its interests completely, which means an interest in maintaining the stability of the very system where the more general economic and social subjugation of African America is built into its structures. (The mortgage bubble, for example, which grew under Obama’s first term, has a very outsized impact on African Americans; and when it popped, Obama bailed out Wall Street while African America lost an unprecedented amount of wealth.)

Politics has also become one of those arenas . . . Democratic Party politics, that is, for our day and age.

Barack Obama went to law school, worked in non-profits, and rose up as a political figure inside Chicago’s “Daly machine.” Comfortably bi-racial, with an uncanny practical political instinct, he fitted himself into that bourgeois racial demilitarized zone where the one-percent celebrates its own diversity without challenging the structures of capital still dependent on the broader stability inherited from racial capitalism.

Barack Obama became, as the first African American head of the American settler-colonial state, a racial paragon. And I cannot dismiss this . . . our own biracial children were buoyed by his victory, and it gave them — and millions of other black kids (including ours) — a refreshed sense of their own potential. Symbolism is not mere. It has material force.

Obama wasn’t only a paragon and a symbol. He fitted in with a form of African American political conservatism that is still dominant. BY that I don’t mean ideological conservatism—though there is some of that—but tactical conservatism.

Joe Biden’s candidacy is a perfect example or this. Black folks know damn well that Biden was one of the chief attack dogs against Anita Hill, that he was an apologist for racist opposition to busing, that he promoted the carceral state, that he voted consistently for war, that he peddled influence, and that he can drift into incoherence at the drop of a hat.

The political calculus — possibly from long association with the multiracial Democratic Party — is based on a linear-continuum theory of American politics. The theory goes: there is an ideological left, a center, and a right — equally populated by the white majority — and that to win against the right (read, hostile and racially malevolent white Republicans), it’s necessary (as a form of collective self-defense!) to have candidates that are marginally better than Republicans who can “appeal to the (white majority) center.” The thing is . . . Republicans really are and long have been—since Nixon’s Southern Strategy—dangerous to African Americans. This is not some irrational fear.

Black Democratic “conservatism” is a niche-protection strategy, and it’s generational. As a rule, the older we get, the more firmly we are committed to our beliefs and the more conservative we become with regard to dramatic change, or the threat of it. One thing that most, older Democratic voters agree on—white, African American, and other—is this linear-continuum theory of American politics. [←remember, written in 2020—SG, 2026] Because this was true during that generation’s most politically formative years.

The problem is that it was true only with respect to defeating the rightest right-wing electorally. This culminated with Bill Clinton, who, once elected, rode the speculative wave of the nineties to sustained popularity (a highly leveraged speculative orgy that went bust a few years later under Bush with little modification (see “mortgage bubble above), and it has not worked since.

Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton all crashed and burned.

Obama defied the trend with a powerful grassroots ground game and strong youth and African American support — riding Hope-and-Change to victory against dreadful Republican opponents who were strapped to the Bush II war legacy like a giant shit-bomb.

There’s no doubt that Obama is a skilled politician, as well as a skilled orator, and a man who, with his family, exudes respectability.

“They’re such a classy family.”

It’s a potent mix, and all of us can remember how people admired the First Lady’s social skills, civility, and decorum . . . which has come into stark relief now in comparison with Trump’s family of psychopathic opportunists, bimbos, mashers, thieves, and bullies.

The irony is that black respectability — once seen as a way of gaining white acceptance — has not won over all of “white” society except among the white liberals and white civil society that was already in Obama’s camp. As African America performed respectability all the way up into the Oval Office, the most reactionary fraction (and a big one at that) of white society has abandoned respectability altogether in favor of open fascistic intimidation and terror.

It was an easy transition, because behind the public political scenes, this intimidation and terror remained part and parcel of black life in parts of America, even with a select group of black leaders and influencers invited into the champagne rooms of the capitalist retainer class.

All of this is new and not new. There is an echo of the historic struggle within African America here, between the ideas and practices of accommodationists, separatists, and rebels — each of whom presented compelling narratives. If we think back to W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington, we can hear that echo.

DuBois embraced a race-conscious class struggle narrative. Garvey was one of several popular “black nation” separatists. Washington was an accommodationist. Of all these, it’s easiest now to denounce Washington (from this far distance) for being unmanly or whatever; but we have to bear in mind that Washington did not see the struggle as between rebellion and accommodation — as DuBois had framed it. These debates were backgrounded by waves of lynching. Washington saw the choice as one between accommodation and extermination. It’s never simple.

Right or wrong, this is the essence of tactical political conservatism. There are still black communities where this stark choice is closer to the surface than any white community can fully comprehend. White “progressives” would do well to get their teeth into this reality and not let go. There is a lot more to reasonably fear from dramatic change of any kind for subaltern communities than there is for white people drinking overpriced coffee as they discuss how they want to “build a new future,” engaging in facile and wholesale reductions of Obama to (oh, ick) a neoliberal. (Yes, he is, but there’s more to it than that!)

Surely we remain aware of the ways we who opposed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and critically supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 had to call out Obama and Clinton on their dreadful policies on the one hand, while defending them against attacks that were explicitly sexist and racist on the other.

It’s a delicate dance for anyone — especially white folks — to criticize Obama. Obama-as-paragon and Obama-as-symbol are not going away. Because, while it should not be a the only way we understand the Obama phenbomenon, it’s still crucially important. White progressives understand at some level that white people have less standing to judge on this account; but they often mistake this question of standing—because they have their own erroneous takes on “race,” a subject we’ll defer for elsewhere—for a prohibition against discussing race apart from their own (let me say, liberal) woke-takes. In fact, a deeper critique of Obama et al has to be understood and further elaborated as part of a shared, and yet unshared, political reality. Because the Democratic establishment is using the “black vote” against them, and will continue to do so.

What black and white share are a ruling class, money-dependency, and the state.

What is not shared, or partially-shared, is a great deal of lived experience.

Even in our multiracial family, the white folks have a different experience of the world outside our homes.

The background is changing. For starters, the capitalist end-game is coming into view right now — with runaway climate catastrophe less than two decades away, the house of financial cards growing higher and more precarious, and a resurgence of fascistic political tendencies (capitalism will always rely on the mailed fist in the end). The latter is mirrored by a growing anti-austerity movement around the world . . . and one growing inside the United States, embodied for the time being in the Sanders electoral challenge — essentially an anti-austerity campaign by another name. Anti-austerity — whether in Haiti or Spain or Ireland or Iraq or Sudan or Chile — means anti-neoliberal.

The present-day African American political establishment has been thoroughly incorporated into Democratic Party politics. The way up, through civil society, was a selection process. Whether through non-profits, small business, or the Academy, the way up is competitive. When I was getting paid with Soros money, we were in a cutthroat competition for grant money, even against our ideological allies . . . sometimes especially against out ideological allies. Upward mobility means pleasing the money-people, and pleasing the money-people means delivering something in return. You have to demonstrate your ability to persuade and organize a real base. You have to have influence.

It should be unsurprising that much leadership in black communities emerges from the church. Preachers are, by definition, influencers. Among black academics, business administration remains the most popular major.

Every gate upward is controlled by capital; and they make people compete with their peers to get through them. Here is a niche, if you can “earn” it. Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again. This demand to fit in is closely related to the respectability politics that was embodied by Obama, a veteran of non-profit-dom.

When Randall Kennedy — himself a promoter of respectability politics — described “the need to be extra-careful in order to avoid the derogatory charges lying in wait in a hostile environment,” he could have been describing what I saw in the non-profit world. Any black director was subject to the most vicious kinds of opposition research, something true in the larger political world as well. Any misstep drew glee from the right and “what a shame” horseshit from liberals. One particularly poisonous thing a friend described to me was how 501(c)(3)s that were floundering would hire a black female director. The gamble was (in the “social change” non-profits) that a token of diversity might improve fundraising, and if the already-failing project went belly-up, the white liberal funders could cluck their tongues and say . . . “What a shame,” meaning she just wasn’t ready, or some comparably insipid trope. The she would be saddled with the failure, while her white predecessors would have already been hired elsewhere.

Once you’ve earned it, be aware, you can always lose it again. That’s the white establishment’s finger trap. Remember, we can always shake our heads and mutter, “What a shame!”

All these interfolding phenomena, over time, have involved a trialectic between deterministic generalities and structures, particularistic histories and relations, and singular local realities, as well as the dominant perceptions and misperceptions of each era. Sometimes — in fact, most times — the perceptions and misperceptions are based on “legacy-thinking” that hasn’t caught up with existing reality except “at home.” Most legacy-thinking originates at home. That’s why belief systems are so generationally resilient. Our families were our first and most formidable interpreters of reality.

The power of legacy-thinking can be summed us thus:

I can describe with great accuracy what is going on in this room right now.

If I’m describing the town I live in, there are more legacy-thoughts — ideas about things I have formed earlier and not yet been disabused of — in my perception of the town’s realities.

If I’m describing the nation or the world, I have an even greater reality-deficit.

This spatiotemporal lag is something with a military analog.

In Korea, they fought using WWII tactics through serial failures, then in Vietnam, they fought using Korea tactics through serial failures, then in Iraq, they began using Vietnam ideas that resulted in serial failures, and so on. If the Peter Principle for bureaucracies says that “One moves up to his or her first level of incompetence,” then my own principle for these warfighting doctrines would say, “We always fail with the old tactics first.”

Legacy-thinking may be right or wrong; but what is right one day can be wrong the next. The antidote is more information in new interpretive frameworks.

The same thing applies more generally to us older folks — of all ethnicities — because we coast similarly into new realities with old ideas . . . new wine in old wineskins. President Obama’s popularity is based in part on this, too. Older white liberals are among the most ardent Obama-worshippers I’ve encountered. “He has such a classy family.” “He is so articulate.” (yup)

Older white liberals, however, are not in anyone’s gunsights the way black folks are in, say, today’s Arkansas or Mississippi. Their perception of Obama-as-respectable-paragon is not the same kind of paragon as he is in African America. White liberals approve of him because he is, for them, “one of the good ones,” meaning he fits white-established norms of education, polish, and respectability. He can be every white liberal’s proverbial “black friend.”

White liberals will never fully comprehend the attitude of self-defense that African America lives inside every day. African Americans cannot escape their “blackness” in an increasingly dangerous white world—especially the one dog-whistled by Trump—where the only political bunker seems to be the perfidious Democratic Party. And for white liberals, Obama cannot have the same meanings as he does for a people who are constantly bombarded with messages of inadequacy, who are starved for the counter-fact that a black man was once the chief-of-state for “the most powerful nation.”

Does all this lead to reflexive defenses of the indefensible? Of course. It’s an aspect of hero-worship that’s generalizable. On the other hand, what indefensible actions taken by President Obama were consistent with likewise indefensible actions by his white predecessors and successors? It’s a negative defense, but sometimes that’s what you have. And yes, Obama substantially strengthened the executive security-state power that Trump has now inherited.

Bringing me to our situation at the beginning of the year 2020.

We’ve emphasized race so far, but let’s not lose track of class relations. As I suggested earlier, the US ruling class is all about diversity these days. There is no problem bringing a few people of color, a few women, and a few sexual minorities into the ruling class. As long as they understand their duties and responsibilities. In fact, the more vulnerable on other accounts the better, because people are going to protect their niche . . . they will conform. They will not rock that little boat. And the boat they’re not rocking is built around a framework of structural inequality.

This year we approach a crucial election, faced in the immediate term with the necessity to rid ourselves of the self-serving pyscho-infant in the White House, and faced with the longer (but still short) term crises of resurgent fascism, climate destabilization, ecocide, mass migration, civil war, and financial collapse. (←little did I know then that the pandemic was at the door —SG, 2026)

Not everyone is aware of how immanent these crises are — in many respects they are already here. Ruling class perception managers are hard at work to provide us with the rationalizations we need to reassure ourselves that we are good people and that things will somehow work out. They’ve already been effective at convincing most of us that they are motivated by more than the desire to accumulate more, by some Pollyanna version of the common good (that only incidentally requires us to buy their shit).

The persistence of Joe Biden’s popularity among African Americans in the face of his personal history is in part attributable to his association in the popular imagination with President Obama. We already know, some of us at least, that the ruling class, embodied in part in the Democratic Party establishment, knows how to tip their spears against the left with women, sexual minorities, and people of color — how to weaponize identity. And that’s worked to a substantial extent. But just as importantly, or more so, Biden is the tactically conservative choice as legacy-thinking leads us back to the linear continuum theory of elections.

Seldom mentioned nowadays is that Obama tactically selected Biden as running mate/VP precisely to appeal to that mythical white center that leans slightly to the right. And this might suggest that it worked because of that tactic. It was not. President Obama was the beneficiary of a confluence of factors, including that phenomenal ground game, strong establishment backing, really incompetent Republican challengers, strong youth support, and record turnouts among African Americans. Given his margins of victory, that five percent that is the actual shifting white center — which includes the Obama-Trump voters. Obama-Trump voters are those who voted for Obama in 2008–2012 then switched to Trump in 2016.

The white-right-center represented by Biden was insufficient to account for Obama’s victory . . . but this 2016 defection from Obama to Trump (13% of Trump’s vote!) was determinative of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 debacle.

The reality, which flies in the face of our legacy-thinking, our old wine in the new wineskins, is that this fraction of voters, who rejected Clinton but would have substantially supported Sanders, and who finally voted with Trump, hated “free trade” agreements, had experienced decades of Democratic neglect and bullshit, and they registered their boiling resentment in a fuck-you-all vote for the Orange Baboon.

I believe to this day, as a resident of Michigan — one of those key states Clinton lost — Sanders would have defeated Trump. I believe he is the only candidate who can defeat Trump in 2020, but let me not digress. [I totally failed to anticipate Covid-19 combined with the efficacy of the “southern-wall” tactic —SG, 2026]

In 2016, Sanders may have lost to Clinton even without the DNC’s relentless cheating. We’ll never know. This year, he has a real path to the nomination. As of now, capital has no candidate. Capitalists are not cooperative. They are all spending most of their time figuring out how to seagull each other’s customers by any means necessary and drive competitors into bankruptcy. Capitalism is a blood sport.

We don’t see this clearly here, but during my many sojourns in Haiti, a nation with the population of North Carolina, this was easier to see because there were still two distinct opposing ruling classes . . . the land-bourgeoisie (grandons) and the merchant-bourgeoisie (compradors), whose rivalry actually included murder from time to time. Their very interests were antithetical. There was only one thing that could consistently unite them: assertions of popular will. Any time the great mass of Haitians became restless and started making demands, the grandons and the compradors went shoulder to shoulder in support of violent repression of the masses.

What the Haitian ruling class — divided most times against itself — feared was not (in my day) Aristide, the populist President who was elected twice and twice deposed by US-supported coups. Aristide was the point of attack, the head of the snake as they saw it; but the real fear was of all those people, millions of people seething with resentment and not a hell of a lot to lose.

What the US ruling class fears right now is not Bernie Sanders — who they do consider to be an existential threat. But their real fear is of us — a politically mobilized population. And as the social democratic rebellion expands, which it will ,being a youth-driven movement, capital’s perception of the threat will become more vivid and compelling. These insurgents, we insurgents, are already talking about wiping out insurance companies and fossil fuel industries, about breaking up monopolies.

At this stage, that has meant promoting the Biden-electability myth, the linear-continuum theory of elections and the black tactical conservatism that goes with it. They pump the bellows around this epistemic flame, and it’s holding a few lines . . . including the line in African America, especially African Americans who are over 40.

In 2020, this “Southern wall” has come up against a bloc of equal strength — the renewed movement-centric, multiracial, explicitly working class campaign/movement of Senator Sanders. The movement is heavily weighted toward the young, including substantial numbers of African American youth. (←oh, my unbridled optimism! —SG, 2026)

In February, the voting begins. If Sanders wins Iowa, then New Hampshire, he has a good chance of taking Nevada, too. Trends indicate that this is very possible. In South Carolina, Sanders has climbed to 20 percent as this is written, decreasing Biden’s lead (now at 27 percent). This is obviously the strategy of the Sanders campaign. Moreover, Sanders just broke the five million mark on individual donors in the last quarter of 2019, putting together almost $35 million in one quarter while Biden’s campaign is in the red.

In December, we saw the establishment media suddenly take notice of Sanders’ durability and strategic acumen. This is the media of the ruling class, the Svengalis of spin . . . or once they were. Even they are being hollowed out by popular exhaustion with thirty-five years of the same meaningless pap, but they still have a hold on those of us over 50 who still get most of our news from television.

Network media are kind of a barometer. That barometer just registered alarm. The ruling class is marshaling its forces. We already see a sustained and expensive campaign against Medicare For All. They are trying to figure out how to kill the Sanders candidacy without leaving their fingerprints at the scene.

This year, we can expect ex-President Obama, in accordance with all the norms of establishment respectability, to assist in the sabotage of the Sanders campaign. Big threats requite big guns. Obama is a big gun, especially on Super Tuesday when much of the South will vote at once.

Obama’s power is considerable, given his unshakable popularity among the majority of black voters and the fact that the bloc of black voters now has the limited but substantial power to select nominees and the unlimited potential power to stop the Democratic Party in its tracks. This power, however, is a based on mutually assured destruction — the Democratic Party as institution versus African America’s voting bloc . . . each can kill off the other by walking out. They are bound together, because they can no longer exist without each other, even if and when the Democratic Party establishment forgets most of African America once they’re in office.

The Democratic Party itself is an institution in deep crisis with a lengthening track record of political incompetency. Black leadership within the Democratic Party and its civil society cohort are now in the unenviable position — only years after African Americans gained real power within the party — of being locked into a room with a bomb . . . or a corpse. The real danger is that when this moribund party fails — barring a social democratic takeover and makeover — African America might be left politically homeless in an increasingly dangerous milieu.

The insularity of the ruling class translates into the ruling class perceiving “through a glass darkly.” As society becomes less stable — and we are inside a deep political crisis in the US — the old epistemic architecture shudders on its foundations. As of now, the tattered Democratic establishment (a party that is now broke and in debt) is seeking a new position — further to the right, of course, that’s their MO — alongside Bush neoconservatives. The new line is that of the national security state. MSNBC and CNN feature dozens of talking heads from the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency — a national security establishment with a long history in African America . . . as its implacable enemy. This is their answer to Trump. It’s not working. His minions do not follow the rules, and even the rule-breaking is a cause for celebration by the Trump cult — a huge rump of white proto-fascists, many of whom fantasize about race war . . . and even genocide.

Here is where the Democratic Party establishment strategy is aimed directly at another defeat in 2020 if they come to the fight with Joe Biden. Biden’s “moderate” appeal in the Democratic Primary will spin down and burst into flame in the General Election campaign. [Again, this prognostication failed . . . Covid-19 and Trump’s incompetent and incoherent response handed the game to Biden, then, in 2024. handed it back to Trump. —SG, 2026]

The electorate is not particularly political, not in the way people who read political blogs are. But as the grinding insecurity and subterranean anger of the post-2007–8 crash continues, it sensitized voters to political bulshittery. We’ve heard politicians spout glittering generalities and obvious equivocations while doing jack shit for decades. Part of Trump’s appeal, especially among that Obama-Trump voter fraction, but more generally as well, is what-you-see-is-what-you-get: that mysterious quality called “authenticity.”

Clinton failed the authenticity test in 2016. Kamala and Beto failed it in 2019. When and if Joe Biden goes up against Trump, Trump’s campaign will only have to run loops of his idiotic gaffes, punctuated by the fact that he used his power to enrich his family.

Once the Democratic Party’s stupid impeachment strategy of focusing exclusively a campaign finance violation in Ukraine — where the trail leads to Biden’s influence peddling — has been a gift to Republicans. Trump’s popularity has increased with this limitation strategy (necessary, because wider investigations open up questions about many, many Democratic party elected officials).

This strategy on impeachment will result in (1) pulling Democratic Senators running for the nomination, Sanders and Warren, i.e., off the campaign trail for the Senate trial, (2) forcing Biden to continue his indefensible defense of his own actions as a self-serving influence-peddler, and (3) giving the Trump campaign the beautiful gift of “Biden The Inauthentic” against whom they can run . . . and win. This is real, and it’s scary as hell. We are on the cusp of a dangerous war this moment because this jackass plays with the military like he’s a four-year-old general. He still has access to nuclear launch codes.

In the past couple of weeks, it has come to light that ex-President Obama’s surrogates have been linking in to the Warren campaign. As every tactic they’ve used so far to stop the social democratic rebellion in the party has failed, and as a Sanders victory becomes a real possibility, this sad vestige of an establishment has been forced to consider a retrenchment with Elizabeth Warren. Warren has repeatedly signaled that she is open to this approach.

Obama is likely reluctant to associate himself with any failed project, which is a tricky position today in the Democratic Party; but if Sanders walks into South Carolina with a big bag of delegates in his knapsack and pulls 25 percent (the split-and-share threshold is 15 percent), Obama might be tapped as the artillery cover for that retrenchment. If Biden appears to be dissolving, Obama might endorse Warren before Super Tuesday.

I’ve explained elsewhere why Warren would also be a precious gift to Trump, because — Pocahantas, Pow-Wow Chow, the beer commercial — inauthenticity. But these are the moves left for a disorganized army in retreat. I give an Obama endorsement of Warren a 50–50 chance, because a legacy is not something an ex-President wants to subject to any hazard, especially by submitting to be a cynical weapon in a losing battle — a person who might be reasonably held responsible in any degree for a 2020 Trump victory. (Yep, the Covid black swan make a monkey out of me and my prognostications. —SG, 2026)

There is only one candidate in the Democratic race right now who is most immune to the charge of inauthenticity: Bernie Sanders. He is also the Democrat who beats Trump in head-to-head polls among that Obama-Trump fraction — the fraction of Trump’s victory over Clinton. Of course, these voters are not going to the polls on Super Tuesday (with the exception of Minnesota).

Do I believe that Super Tuesday will determine the rest of the race? Yes, and no. Yes, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia are voting that day (March 3rd). African America will have a strong voice that day, as African Americans are a huge fraction of Southern Democrats. But the other states include Texas, a giant, and California, a leviathan. Sanders is very competitive in Texas and already dominating in California.

What does this all mean, apart from horse race analysis and who and what-to-others is Barack Obama? It means we have to patiently engage with our elders, white and black and other (I’ve not excluded “others,” but contained my focus to Obama and African America for this piece). We aren’t looking at just an election. We are looking for a strategic orientation that is aimed at rescuing the world from a calamity that is already a rumbling dark cloud on the horizon.

Capital will kill every one of us to stay in power, the most vulnerable first, and they will destroy a planet as well. Everything must be oriented on this. The election is only a first small but essential step, gaining a hand hold on the state.

African America is high on capital’s kill-the-most-vulnerable-first target list. That’s why I hope fewer and fewer people will listen to ex-President Obama; but we better understand his positives, his enduring status as The First, the Paragon, the Symbol. It’s not simple, and it’s never easy.

More on politics and tactics, because post-Primary election spin is getting on my last fucking nerve.

Spinning and worse . . . whining.

The powerful are exercising their power against us and it isn’t fair. Wah-wah-wah!

One of our granddaughters, at the ripe old age of seven, told her little brother once, “Life’s not fair.” (Ashamed to admit I had to suppress my laughter.) Seriously, a seven-year-old could understand this—albeit in a situation where yes she’d taken advantage of her little brother—and a bunch of grown-ass adults in the mediasphere of politics can’t seem to grasp it.

And do we have to spin? Just because the other guys do? Isn’t that just a weakened way of lying?

I know all the arguments . . . and the realities. It’s all driven by perception management and ceaseless competition. We can’t just unilaterally disarm on the psychological operations front. Blah-de-fucking-blah, blah, blah.

I mean, that’s what spin and push polls and all that other—let me just say—transparent bullshit is about. Fight for the engagement—the clicks and views and subs—to keep our propaganda organs alive. Nudge the excitement here, the “enemy’s” disenchantment there.

It’s dying down now as other flavor-of-the-day stories—weaponizing Jason Arday’s suicide is The (really execrable) Thing right now—but for a few days after the August Primaries, all we could hear in some quarters was whether Francesca Hong’s surprise defeat was a victory or a defeat for the leftish insurgency inside the Democratic Party.

Battle of the Spin.

As my dear old mother used to say, “Makes my ass wanna take a dip of snuff.” (←We Southerners says funny things . . . a really great meal might inspire us to say, “That was so good, itta make ya slap ya mama.”)

Nudge and spin affect me in that rectal-tobacco kind of way.

I understand correction and even unmasking the spin of others. But it’s like a fucking finger trap this shit. But in a way—no, not a way, in actuality—it means we have surrendered something approximating a moral high ground. We’re just as manipulative as the bad guys. ←This is how a milieu, a zeitgeist, ratchets us away from the truth . . . yeah, that little thing.

Maybe this has just revivified the ornery ops sergeant in my head, my past self who held to the more “silence and cunning” ethos.

I mean, mass manipulation reproduces and amplifies this compulsion to chatter. From a purely tactical standpoint—there, now I’ve gone and abandoned the ground truths on behalf of expedience—it’s fucking stupid. Why telegraph your punches? More to the point, why waste the energy?

I know the feminists and a few of the woo-woos are generally the only ones who ever cite Audre Lorde, the Grenadian feminist contemplative; but I read “The Uses of the Erotic” years ago (because I have great sympathy for certain feminisms), and there was some plain, let us say even thermodynamic, common sense in there.

She points out that “power,” or just energy if you will, is not infinite. Energy has to be husbanded. It takes energy to have sex, just as it takes energy to do the dishes or cut the grass. Each person only has so much of it. There’s a burnout boundary.

“This . . . requirement toward excellence,” Lorde wrote, “. . . must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others.”

I would add time as another key factor defined by its finitude.

It’s a raw calculus—as my old military calculi were. There’s this mission, stated in clear descriptive terms as a “desired end state.” To accomplish this mission, we have X number of people, with X amount of time, and X amount of various resources, in an environment that can be likewise described . . . and likewise an opposing force with its X, X, and X. There are always some unknowns and uncontrollables, which we try to minimize.

Sometimes, the initial attempts to accomplish the mission fall short. It turned out to be harder than originally anticipated. What one doesn’t do—or shouldn’t—is whine about it, or try to pass blame, and all the other shit I see on a daily basis by political commentators with their fantasies and agendas.

We used phonetic alphabet in the military, because voices are distorted on the radio, so we spelled shit out using a shared word-letter code. Sometimes we used the code along with known abbreviations. In response to someone asking if a transmission was clear, we would say “loud and clear, how me?” Only it was, “lima charlie hotel mike.” Sometimes we’d make jokes—”lickin’ chicken how’s yer mother?”

“Charlie mike” was understood as a directive: continue the mission. Subtext: “I don’t give a fuck that it’s harder than anticipated. Mission takes priority.”

Fall back, secure the rally point, assess what happened and why, change the tactics to suit the unanticipated and now known variables, make another run at the objective. As the old blues tune goes, “Cryin’ won’t help ya.” The levee’s down, figure the shit out.

Invest our energy not in spinning and whining, but for the charlie mike. Then bust out on them at the critical times with what they never saw coming.

That’s all. Just had to vent.

Peace.

FICTION INDEX

Kid’s stuff—two children’s stories

“Finding Chico”

A family’s dog disappears on Christmas.

“Sy-Ko the skwerl”

An unusual squirrel’s life near The Long Brick House.

Novels—the second is a sequel to the first.

Smitten Gate (genre—war noir)

Abner Dale, a soldier leaning into retirement, is going mad. Leaving behind a wife who’s afraid to live with him and a daughter who’s a biracial prodigy in grad school at eighteen, he’s posted to Afghanistan where he’s expected to fix a Special Forces detachment that’s become an incompetent criminal clique. Enter a frustrated and glory-seeking post commander who thinks Dale is just the right man to lead the dysfunctional team on a difficult operation. What could go wrong?

New Moons and Sabbaths (genre—detective fiction)

She’s a savant, people say. She speaks three languages and majored in philosophy at age fourteen. She’s half “white” and half “black” and dresses like a man. She’s an angler, a wildlife photographer, and a private investigator. She drives a pickup truck. Her name is Deangela Dale.

Eleven years ago, her father was killed in Afghanistan at the same time that a vengeful sexual predator destroyed her promising academic career, casting her into a dark valley of isolation and addiction. After clawing her way back to normalcy, her consummate desire is for some detached normality, a rail upon which she can ride out life’s little pleasures and disappointments without the grand dramas. As to her father, he’s gone, memorialized as a hero . . . and Deangela doesn’t want to dig up any graves.

Now she suffers another blow, the death of her beloved mentor, and she’s determined not to descend back into that well of despair. Recovering from this fresh loss, she’s approached by a hard-bitten stranger named Felix who hires her to investigate a corrupt policeman. The hitch? This cop was on the mission that killed her father. Reluctantly, she accepts; but soon enough the investigation starts turning up unwelcome questions, unwelcome answers . . . and unwelcome attention.

Felix is no mere client, the target is no mere cop, and deadly serious people in power will conceal at all costs the truth surrounding her father’s fateful mission. Felix may be walking her into another dark valley, the one from which there’s no return.

POETRY INDEX

In November 2022, I started to try my hand at poetry—something which I’ve long found intimidating. These are in chronological order of their composition. I generally spend less than a day in writing one, mostly in the mornings when I’m caffeinated up to my eyes and fresh off my own frequently disturbing dreams. (I dread sleep sometimes, and doubt I’m alone in this—it’s a terrific loss of control.)

Me the interval

After “Me the interval,” I marinated for months in my own sense of inadequacy. Picked up the quill again in October 2024.

dreamabout

Ave, the creature dying

Soteriology

Walking backwards

Flare

Daybreak

Half brother

Inkblot

haiku—first try (felt I needed some discipline)

haiku 2

2:47 a.m.

haiku 3

haiku 4

haiku 5

haiku 6

haiku 7

haiku 8

haiku 9

The Doggerel Seven

Veterans Day Song

haiku 10

it’s me

concrete feet

Robby’s girl

3-2-1

January

in all things gone

West Mountain Vega

against fear and space

it’s a good thing

America

Flood

Tomb

fallen

yours and mine and his and hers

runaway

feather

the house

jahmbi

Mayfly

abandoned San Lorenzo

jardin des rêves

in greener years

weights and measures

Private Greene

if you know

core drill

theodicy

lullaby

past present and absent

that world alive upon her

the smart ones

anesthetic

the gentle boys turned into men

Linen dreams and gremlin wombs

were some we’ve seen their dimpled years
whose tears had walked across a heart
before the mocking and the fear
struck the chisel at the core

the gentle boys turned into men
burned away by joyless love
like clay subjected to the kiln
of the prior and restless sect

before the blades and troubled nights
they slumbered light in shaded glades
before the guns and fights had won
before the amputations

the sorry-songs and penalties
long from the lost and dimpled time
bossed and stripped and armored up
harmed and harming by the script

the gentle boys in graveyard lines
like noisy wraiths with strip-mined eyes
of colorblind impoverished faith
all love a dull injury

some gray old men recount their sins
they cry alone for the bending
of gentle boys turned into men
and mourn this dispossession

others still from slave to master
mothers lost like wisdom teeth
diadem imaginations
rape and ravage worn like skin

clocks and injured schemes are stalking
lads in hazy prima vistas
gazing free and licking ice cream
peril curling ’round their feet

that which is wanting cannot be numbered

we sheltered once from comfort
from listless mitigation
tending every itch forthwith
each everyday deflation
we sing now of platitude
we cry for glittered twaddle
stage our practiced attitudes
and pray into a bottle

the angel red
on metal road
robbed our rage
and keyed a code

the mislaid seasons twisted
inward of unlighted box
the flights of fancy cancelled
and yes too, the flights of hawks
sing the songs of lydocaine
cry the streams of paneled hate
grip a handled seam of chalk
pray the lines that masturbate

in resting rooms
the angel black
writes comic books
of likes and lack

these pavement days in clusters
palpated like a notion
resurrect the unseen dawns
and taste of tanning lotion
we sing with autotuners
and cry on a foamy bed
land our planes on toilet seats
and pray to the ever dead

with plastic teeth
and sanded skin
the angel green
displays a grin

anesthetic microdreams
crossing canyons clean and cool
filter screens on headshop racks
rows of hatchbacks after school
we sing the tunes of temple tarts
cry for cartoon candy love
speak so lies don’t come apart
pray into a fashion glove

the Paxil map
will aim the way
along the dreams
of angel gray

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one of my favorite online resources. I recommend to to any and all. It has an entry on the topic of “free will,” one of those unnecessarily tortured subjects like the nature-nurture controversies which accompany it. The debates reoccur like a cold virus, season after season after season.

The reason these debates refuse to die is—as Stanford says early—the gravity of the consequences that attach to the debates. The debates are tangled up with metaphysics, ethics, and law—the latter of which deals in matters of crime and punishment, and therefore life and death.

So, free will or no free will?

Any time such a debate continues with no apparent resolution in sight, it means one of two things—perhaps both at once. Either the debaters are operating on what MacIntyre identified as terminally incommensurable premises with no language of transmissibility, or the terms of the debate are premised on one or more false dichotomies.

(Or perhaps the concept of free will is . . . leaky.)

Once upon a time, this was a religious question. I suppose in some respects it still is and always will be. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, can any of us as God’s creatures truly exercise “free will”? How can we be judged by God if we have no “free will”? You get the picture.

I’m going to back up here to will—just that, before all the “free” stuff. What the dictionary tries to boil down to three related things: will is (1) the mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action, (2) diligent purposefulness; determination, and (3) self-control; self-discipline.

The will aims at something, so it is preceded by desire. (Here’s my little e-book on Desire.) A person, for whatever reason, wants something. Without an object of desire, the will cannot exist—and so I’m going to say that direction, aim, telos, is constitutive of will without being will’s totality.

If you dissect a human being, that person is already dead (or better be). If you try to fit will into the dictionary boxes above, you rob it of its vitality. The three definitions of will above are different uses of the word. But when we take into account that desire—which aims the will at something—is potentially infinite, a bottomless pit so to speak, unless one also exercises his or her will against certain desires, which is a choice conditioned by self-discipline, all three uses of the word are in operation at once.

Desires can be shaped, provoked, manufactured. They can be attractions and aversions. They can bubble up from one’s “unconscious.” Ask any Lacanian, and he or she will point you to a strange little chart that maps this spooky terrain.

If we know not the origin of desire, are our choices free? But we digress . . . sort of. (Lacan was describing Lacan.)

My own little old-man test when encountering leaky subjects like “free will” is to ask myself, “Self, does this leaky subject exist on its own prior to an actual subject? As in a person-subject?” If the answer is no—which in this case it is—then I take that leaky subject out of the water and patch it up by re-attaching it to the person-subject. There is, in no case anywhere ever, a free-floating will. Even God’s will, however conceptualized, still has a personalized subject. There is my will and your will and his will and her will, but never just will—”free” or not. In fact, the noun will can make one forget for a moment that will is also a verb. Instead of my will and your will and his will and her will, we might better think in terms of I will and you will and he wills and she wills.

This may strike some as a strange thing to say, given that I’ve also repeated the claim that each instantiation of individual consciousness participates in a universal consciousness that precedes each instantiation—but let’s not be sidetracked. Consciousness is not synonymous with will, even though will presupposes consciousness.

Willing—as in I will and you will and he wills and she wills (Oh Lord, I just gave myself a Little Feat earworm*)—implies intent. I penned a little thing last year about Elizabeth Anscombe—well-know philosopher of intent—with regard to crime fiction, to which I’m terminally addicted. Crime—however defined—and its adjudication always revolves around questions of intent.

Manslaughter is homicide without the element of intent.

Sorry, I didn’t intend to back into your car.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Intent is a term pregnant with moral philosophy, psychology, and law—with desire, will, and ethics; but it’s also pregnant with literature, that is, with human weaknesses and limitations. We can intend to do things without fully appreciating the likely consequences. We can take intentional actions on behalf of desires over which we’ve lost control . . . or desires we don’t even recognize.

I might be of such a disposition that I can say intentionally say something obnoxious without realizing that it’s obnoxious, and therefore without intending it to be obnoxious. It may be the only way, given my disposition, history, and formation, that I know how to state what I believe to be the truth. (This is actually kind of true . . . for me.)

“disposition, history, and formation”

We all know how different people are from one another based on these factors. How one can be “willful,” another “weak-willed,” another who was “given the advantages of a good upbringing,” another whose upbringing aimed him or her at problems early, another “unable to let go of the past,” and so forth. Which is why this “free” business is kind of like walking through the boonies and suddenly stepping off into a boot-sucking mudhole. I mean, what the hell does “free” even mean?

By now, you can see that “free will, yes or no” is a non-starter. It’s like those questions I used to mess with my grandkids: “How far is it to the moon? True or false.” Or, “What’s the difference between a duck?” (Answers respectively: “All of the above,” and “One of it’s feet are both the same.”)

Will is just conditioned by too many things to be treated of independently, and “free” is one of the most elastic and abusable words in the English language. Are you free because you can do what you want? Or can having what you want make you a slave to your desires, unfree? Another old man test: ask the questions, free from what? and free to do what?

What kind of freedom? What kinds of things condition that freedom?

The existentialists said we always have a choice, even if one of those choices is suicide. They described freedom as kind of terrible. Stark-ass people, existentialists. Oh, and they’re always talking about themselves . . . because how does this terrible freedom operate with the variously disabled, the schizophrenic, in the face of ignorance? Each person is him- or herself one of the conditions of choice or freedom. Engels said that freedom is the recognition of necessity. More stark-ass shit, but no doubt certain kinds of knowledge or lack thereof condition the degree to which this or that form of “freedom” can be exercised.

On the other end of the spectrum are hardcore determinists, who claim that at some level we’re all on autopilot (except themselves, godlike somehow). Deep down everything is running like a machine and our consciousness of choice is itself illusory.

I give this stuff pretty short shrift, not only because it’s bullshit on its face—something even a child knows better than to believe . . .

. . . but also because it’s one of those horizon propositions. Like the horizon, you can never get there, because (1) it begs the question and (2) it’s inherently non-disprovable. As soon as one challenges this thesis with facts, the reply—a sophistic regression—is that the determining mechanism operates at the next yet undiscovered level. In some ways, it reminds me, in an impressionistic and not analogical way, of the theological doctrine of predestination . . . which puts us back in the leaky boat of “free will.”

I’m going to make breakfast now. I hope this clears things up.

*I’ll leave you with the lyrics to Little Feat’s “Willin’,” written by the late Lowell George.

I been warped by the rain
Driven by the snow
I'm drunk and dirty, don't you know
And I'm still... willin'
And I was out on the road late at night
I seen my pretty Alice in every headlight
Alice, Dallas Alice
I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads
So I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin'... to be movin'
Well, I've been kicked by the wind
Robbed by the sleet
Had my head stoved in
But I'm still on my feet
And I'm still... willin'
I smuggled some smokes
And folks from Mexico
Baked by the sun
Every time I go to Mexico
And I'm still...
And I been from Tucson to Tucumcari
Tehachapi to Tonapah
Driven every kind of rig that's ever been made
Driven the back roads
So I wouldn't get weighed
And if you give me weed, whites, and wine
And you show me a sign
I'll be willin'... to be movin'

Peace, y’all.

. . . which is not to say that their gains are irrelevant, or that the Democratic establishment is justified in its war against them.

I’m a socialist (of sorts), let’s just get that out there before I add that I don’t believe there’s any such thing as socialism, and there never will be; just as there’s no such thing as capitalism. At least, not in some stable sense that can be reasonably described either in history or in any presumptive future. We’ve all seen the diagrams attempting to explain these various reifications; but in every case, I can assure you, each component can be readily destabilized if not outright debunked by actual history.

The factors that inflect, deflect, and reflect in political economies are too numerous to count and too inter-diffused to parse without sacrificing granular and even certain more general truths. More than that, they’re comprised of far more than effective causation. So, as a socialist (of sorts), I can say, and as an American of quite long standing, the appeal of this reification—socialism—has a limited reach, and when put into the driver’s seat by successful political personalities—no matter how lucky or smart—it has an unknown but inevitable expiration date. I’m sorry that this is such bad news for the managerial mindset with its perpetual delusions of grandeur, but I’ve got tens of thousands of years of history and hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory covering my six on this unpopular assertion.

That kind of control is simply not possible. Never has been. Never will be.

Let me refer to something I’ve not seen covered in public fora. It’s about the recent and meteoric rise of China.

One major reason China has “leapt forward” has less to do with which “parts” of their economy are capitalist and which socialist—state intervention has been critical, of course—and more to do with the broad historical circumstances of China’s industrialization and development.

China started late, and while the Atlantic states were still saddled with their own longstanding industrial legacies, China didn’t have to adapt the old to the new. It just aimed development—relatively speaking—directly at the newer and more efficient. Sometimes, being late to the party becomes an advantage.

The DSA and the so-called “progressive movement,” while tracing their lineages with the same strangely obsessive enthusiasm of my old military units, are nothing like the old US left from which they try to pick and choose like their browsing for lunch at Golden Corral. They are, in fact, a new thing, in a time when the legacy political formations are running low on gas—in both policies and credibility.

I which them luck as they enjoy their outgrowth, but like China—with nothing resembling that scale—the DSA buildout can only continue until it hits those non-cooperative and intransigent material and psychological limits.

Social-ISM, advertised and even believed in as some homeostatic future, ain’t happenin’. DSA has both external and internal limits which is hasn’t yet reached . . . but will.

With those broad boundaries around my thesis, I’m here to beat my deceased mount again about how and why people ought to be thinking beyond DSA et al to match some of their most valuable goals to a much wider audience. During these heady periods (of like fifteen wins), it’s far too easy to imagine that what works in New York or even the purple pissed-off Michigan Primary translates into the same kinds of wins more generally.

DSA has shown remarkable success, but only when it was hyperfocused on the practical business of elections. I’ve been inside DSA, and from the inside it’s a performative sales pitch, wrapped in ideological blankets, and sitting atop a veritable powder keg of unexploded sectarianism.

You can look at the opening picture where members are voting at a convention, then look at the leadership pictured below, and a few things stand out. The leadership’s demographics are dramatically different from the general membership. The latter is still strong-majority male and, by my best estimates, around 80 percent “white.” No doubt, many of these leaders are as competent as any DSA leaders, but I’ve seen this kind of actual versus public demographic mismatch in leftist organizations before. It serves a dual purpose: internal affirmative action and misleading public projection. I n the latter case, the hope is that by “fronting the band” with underrepresented “cis-males” (←yes, DSA uses this bullshit category) and overrepresented “people of color/BIPOC” (see my takedown of this bullshit category here), this will encourage more interest and acceptance from the very “non-white cis-males” who are in fact “underrepresented” in the membership rolls.

In fact, “socialist” ideas have always held more appeal, numerically speaking, among white college-educated men and women, with males predominating. This doesn’t make socialist ideas white, male, or “elite.” Instead, it reflects a number of realities prior to politics that lend themselves to greater or lesser exposure to socialist ideas, greater or lesser willingness to embrace “risky” or unconventional ideas, and a greater or lesser subcultural affinity for the general metaphysical outlook of people who claim to be socialists.

Just as one example that includes this author, as a Christian, which is rarity among self-proclaimed socialists. When you look at the statistics for atheism, you find it trending in the US as majority male, majority college-educated, and majority white if we except “Asians” (what kinds of Asians remains unspecified in these studies which begs a great many questions) who are proportionally more atheistic, but bent politically toward business conservatism. In my own experience on the left from a couple decades ago, East Asian phenotypes were overrepresented, with Chinese and Korean ancestry predominating—among socialists, whereas African Americans were very reluctant to join socialist formations—the exception being my last affiliation, which grew directly out of a black nationalist/socialist amalgamation reaching back onto the 1970s. ←This never demonstrated any appeal beyond its own circles to the general African American demographic; and in my own experience, higher education and Christian affinity among African Americans have a strong correspondence.

DSA is not representative of the non-identitarian category of family. DSA is remarkably single. Almost three out of four DSA members have ZERO “dependents.” This datum corresponds to the average age of DSA members, which clusters heavily between 25-35 years old. This general age group, and not just DSA—facing economic precarity and a few quite justifiable fears about the future—is putting off making babies and families.

There is nothing wrong with DSA’s actual demographic makeup—it is what it is—even though they’re somewhat ashamed of it (having copped to the white liberal guilt thing), and even though DSA detractors, like Republicans and Democratic Party establishment types, cynically cite these statistics to deflect from their own actual elites. Yes, DSA is majority white, majority male, majority college-educated, but the data suggests they are clustered among those with college-educations who are downwardly mobile. A college education today has far less chance of setting one up to support a family than a retail job did in 1968. History shows that precarious middle classes are the motors of political discontent. This is the left’s hot demographic now, just as it was and remains the right’s.

The non-demographic predisposition of socialists is a quasi-paradox—these “collectivists” are—almost to the last man and woman—non-conformists. They’re risk takers in one sense or another, with a penchant for provocation, and many are keen to display or perform their non-conformities. (←youth thing) Leaving aside the fact that capital long ago learned how to co-opt and commodify nonconformity, once one leaves the urban milieu, displays and performances of non-conformity closes the door on political persuasion before anyone tries to knock. Young people can be very attached to displays and performances for a host of reasons, among them fashion, asserting one’s individuality through appearance as actual practices dissolve into technologic and technocratic homogeneity, seeking attention (general and sexual) among one’s peers, and virtue-signaling.

When I say—as a socialist who still has some slightly provocative tendencies—that DSA isn’t “ready” and that it never will be, I mean that DSA will never—as it goes in their own insider vernacular—”take power.” Even DSA icon Zohran Mamdani who now presides over New York City has been forced by reality—and to his credit has responded appropriately as opposed to ideologically—to adopt in practice a more realistic and effective “sewer socialism,” and leave The Revolution with the trots.

When I look at Jersey DSA’s ideological tendencies—which will ultimately come into conflict with one another—especially once the current civil war inside the Democratic Party is lost or won—I know from direct experience with the left, that the sectarian tendency among almost all “socialists” always eventually cause the fault lines to become full fractures.

My best hope for DSA, and I say this as one with sympathy for them in spite of many misgivings and disagreements, is that this struggle inside the Democratic Party will last long enough to continue consolidating their practices in the electoral arena—a practice that might hopefully might chasten (and mature) them. As a student of the Haitian Revolution, I know well how the fight against the French (as well as the English and Spanish) united Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe, who became enemies as soon as Napoleon’s forces were defeated.

I cited the example of today’s China, and how, as late starters, they encountered far less friction from legacy industry and infrastructure than their Western counterparts. This will continue until power shifts away from the West, especially the US, and re-concentrates eastward and southward in two or more new centers, with China as the industrial hegemon . . . I mean, China is already the industrial hegemon, whether anyone likes it or not.

At some point, however, the ripening of China will transition into rotting as we are now experiencing in the “developed” West; and this transition will be substantially worsened by the general and inevitably global phenomenon of ecologic collapse. (I wrote here about why international conflict forecloses in advance any reasonable hope of stopping thus collapse.) Likewise, DSA will come up against a kind of socio-ecological set of limits as well as its own internal (some might even say inhering) limitations.

I live in a small town in Southeast Michigan (20,000 more or less) an hour and fifteen minutes from Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor is home base for Huron Valley DSA, a large chapter that just had one of their own, Yousef Rabhi, elected as this college town’s new mayor. When we tried to start a chapter here in little Adrian, the meetings were small, undisciplined, and more concerned with getting a trans flag put up behind the library than they were in hitting the street to support the 2016 Sanders campaign. The chapter attempt came apart like a two-dollar shirt. Adrian’s not Ann Arbor, and the tens of thousands of Adrians—small towns of 20,000 or less and rural areas—are where more than 60 million Americans, as well as 39 million souls of voting age, live.

This is a socio-ecological limitation. The same goes for those in places where DSA has had successes. Among those who didn’t vote for DSAers, there are some who—for a variety of reasons, not all related to MAGA or the Democratic establishment—will never vote for a DSAer or a “progressive” candidate. This, too, is a socio-ecological limitation that might be overcome in municipal elections by local majorities, but not at the county, state, or federal level.

If we look at the recent successful campaign here in Michigan of Abdul El-Sayed for the Democratic nomination to replace Gary Peters’ US Senate seat, he never called himself a socialist. He never mentioned trans-activism or the several favorite (and stupid) DSA abolitions—abolish the police, abolish borders, abolish prisons, even abolish the family. He harped on four things: get money out of politics, Medicare For All, stop fighting Israel’s wars, and the one abolition movement that’s gained popular support—abolish Trump’s Gestapo-like ICE.

These are all now majoritarian positions among Michigan Democrats and Independents. Even a few Republicans! He’s a jock, a public health doc, and a personally very conservative married fella with two kids with no history of sexual incontinence. (Wrote about his challenges here.) His campaign motto? “Money out of politics, money in your pocket.” That’s some vanilla shit right there—and we outback denizens love us some fucking vanilla.

El-Sayed predominated in purple Michigan’s many non-urban areas typically ceded to the right . . . because he talked to them. (Few things here about Mamdani’s success in this regard . . . and about the DSA.)

Looking at Wisconsin, where Francesca Hong—a DSA candidate—is looking likely to win the Democratic Primary for Governor in another purple state. Hong, in my view, will have an even harder uphill slog than El-Sayed does here. A chef by trade, she’s an American-born Korean-American, with a potty-mouth by many accounts, who has spent the last five years as a Madison representative in the state legislature. She supports basically the same agenda as El-Sayed; she’s well-spoken hen she has to be; she’s calm (and more or less vanilla in her presentation). She’s adopted a strategy similar to Mamdani—wise decision.

Her drawbacks are (1) she’s fully bought-in and on the record with the politics of identity and (2) she’s an actual member of DSA—a self-proclaimed “socialist.” Any statewide race like hers or El-Sayed’s is going to be a squeaker. Winning the Primary is a different kettle of fish from winning the General. A mere thousand votes can be the difference between the road shoulder and the ditch. She’s downplaying identity and socialism in her campaign and focusing on the issues with good message discipline, but the opposition never forgets shit. Madison—another college town—is not Wisconsin; just like Ann Arbor’s not Michigan. One thing blowing in their favor for the time being is the colossal incompetence and plain reckless vandalism of the Trump administration—a conjuncture with an expiration date.

These two statewide candidates are about to test the socio-economic limits of DSA’s China syndrome (with a favorable anti-Trump tailwind). There will be cultural barriers, language barriers, education barriers, economic barriers, and deep spiritual barriers.

The thing is, Medicare For All (if it weren’t to include full-term abortion on demand and transgender “medicine”) would win this place hands down. So would campaign finance reform. And so would taxing the rich and getting out of Israel’s war. And only if it were NOT promoted as “socialism.” Which is why DSA will never be “ready” for Adrian.

DSA cannot and will not back down on unlimited abortion with which the majority of Americans disagree (most want to limit it to the first trimester).

DSA is subculturally bound to the gender insanity that would allow the further invasion of women’s spaces and sports by men, as well as the drugging and surgical mutilation of perfectly healthy young bodies.

DSA is an explicitly “socialist” organization, among which most of its members imagine some future steady state called “socialism.”

I’m a socialist as an historical and tactical necessity, and I think this is foolhardy. Moreover, if “socialism” is what many of the more Promethean socialists imagine, I’d rather live in a fucking mud hut in some godforsaken periphery than see their fully automated New Future—which is inevitably a dystopia—a horror show of shallow and compensatory consumer hedonism built on depersonalized dependency in a spiritual wasteland.

Fuck. That.

DSA’s internal/inhering limitations include most significantly its ideologically punitive subculture and latent sectarianism. Ideology produces its own blinders.

I watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Europe a few months back, discussing foreign policy in what was billed as her pre-presidential debut. I have seldom seen a more blatant and embarrassing display of absolute ignorance—I mean, on a scale rivaling even the Trump administration. In my piece on Political Deskilling, I wrote

Watching the recent appearance of pwog-heroine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Munich—where presumably she was auditioning for the Democratic Presidential Primaries—I can only conclude that she’s eminently unqualified for the job. That had to be one of the most ineptly disastrous “auditions” by any candidate since Donald Trump.

Apparently neither she nor her closest associates thought it might be necessary to actually know anything about history or the current state of international relations. A few uninformed moral bromides, a lot of hemming and hawing to camouflage her obvious ignorance even of European politics—while she was in Europe!—and a ritual denunciation of Russia. No mention of Europe’s economic woes, of Carney’s speech at Davos, of China, Trump’s tariffs, the Middle East, Palestine and EU complicity in genocide, the EU’s ever more fractious divisions, finding a settlement in Ukraine, the dangers of holding American debt, how the US might mend the fences torn down by Trump, the risks of military Keynesianism . . . nothing. She came off like a high school student. It was embarrassing to anyone on the so-called left. What we saw was what we might expect from a Clinton . . . or a Trump: displacement of the practical by the performative, displacement of the actual by the virtual, displacement of discerning speech by oral-formulaic “communication.” Only delivered like a nervous freshman who was clearly out of her depth.

The DSA, in this case, is clearly not ready. There is not a single DSA poobah in the country I’d trust with US foreign policy, the possible exception being Mamdani, and that’s because he was raised by the brilliant Mahmood Mamdani, who has actually spent a lifetime studying international affairs. Ideology is the mortal enemy of practical politics! Ideology is the intentional externalization of those very unfitting realities that eventually bite ideologues directly in their collective ass.

What we need—and here I’m fantasizing again—are people who can fill the niches where DSA will never fit. Independents who might be culturally conservative without being reactionary and yet economically social democratic. In my long form article called “Political status with an idea from an old man who writes in his basement,” I wrote

The trick, it would seem, will be to craft a majoritarian platform with enough key concerns addressed—concerns which are ignored or exacerbated by the two establishment parties—to overcome doubts and resistance on less urgent issues.

As to candidacies, I suggested in an earlier article that the core party commitments avoid the non-majoritarian potential hot buttons by firewalling the program, and giving leeway to individual candidates to diverge where and how necessary on other issues based on local conditions.

Yep, you might get someone who goes all Second Amendment and pro-life who supports campaign finance reform, Medicare For All, reining in Wall Street, and staying out of wars. If that candidate ran in my Second Amendment, pro-life Congressional district, where one of the most dangerous Trump sycophants in the country is as firmly rooted as a genital wart, I’d knock doors for the fucker—even at my advanced age. Because that would be the best chance we’ll ever have here of getting local Congressional support for campaign finance reform, financial repression, and single payer health care—the three most urgent domestic policies on the table—and halting our cruel, stupid, and budget-busting foreign military adventures.

This is a place where they need free healthcare . . . urgently. But don’t package it with puberty blockers or drag queens in schools or public parades with sexually explicit pantomimes. That shit is dead in the water (as it should be!).

DSA and the Democratic Party civil war are important! I’ve said it before. Fight the DP civil war like there’s no general election, and fight in the general election as if there’s no DP civil war. There is, in my estimation at least, no reasonable alternative. Send Hong and El-Sayed money if you have it to spare.

Meanwhile, be thinking about those other socio-ecological niches. It may mean dropping the reified New Futures and the ideologies; but it seems to me that here at least there is a prayer for some damage control and step toward toppling a few thrones.

That’s all for now.

Peace.

so I’ll shoot when I’m through
with a no-tell
hands held apart to ask
what is your question

you know do you not
the New York Times built an architect
with dissimilar words
on a disparate junction
always the smart ones writing manuals
slick as ripe papayas
panties slid down over cerebral hips
making miracles out of strife
in tall offices

the brightest brains held property
to forbidden conditions
engineered vestibule utopias
as the Navy
took Mark Twain’s uterus to bed
with chocolate corporations
its warm thighs
pressed onto cold porcelain
bright, savvy, keen, and beatific

all the mechanisms rehearsed
the learned communions
and therapeutic charismas
raised up from the fallen towers
the S&P 500 smelled
dispossession gratified by a fleshlight
bohemian lust
surplus spirit sold in the tabernacles
of slick divinity
sat on the ad-man’s face
to grind a remunerative bliss

with these opulent intellects
the smart ones did a long song
as Mumford died
in Sophia’s withered arms
and bashful guardians ate meat
and Princeton spread her legs
like butter sauce
for the throbbing ontology
of full-spectrum disorder
a podcast slipping the bonds
of starry religion and faulty art

the shrewd ones there on the mantelpiece
held in a common faith
assured by the bullets of restive captivity
hungry on highways of stimulation
ran campaigns
fucked like bonobos on telepathic agony
drove Robert’s rules like bored Maseratis
harvested pallid discontents
in the Temple of the Pious Pricks
. . . these smart ones . . .
built programs with jealous bows
shined machines with blood
and fashion sense

the smart ones are always me
(you know this)
exuberant in our perspicacity
somewhat exotic in our compatibility
we can feel each other up
like sly freshmen on a bus
drink Saturday on Friday
hire art directors and issue proclamations
blandish our hair-free genitals
with the rags of proximity
master the tongues of law
to deflect and make counter-accusations
with pecuniary restraint
(of course)

ascending along a corpus cerebellum
we tour the soiled boiler rooms and litter
the plastic trash of popular adjectives
the knowing looks of fine leather
here, look at these perfect teeth
a dental Stradivarius
below a zygomatic arch
this was one of the smart ones
or so they insist
chasing sex and shrimp sauce
along the polished corridors of lack
and punctured by uninvited dreams

“Flock cameras”—or Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) from companies like Flock Safety, Axon, Vigilant Solutions (a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions), Genetec, PlateSmart, Innova Systems, Rekor, ELSAG, Perceptics, and Jenoptik—are not designed to surveil your every move and store massive amounts of integrated data for techno-fascists and the state. They are designed to protect the public. The reason they are equipped with facial recognition, and that they are integrated to track your every move then store the data indefinitely . . . is for our own protection. These companies aren’t even really in it to make a profit, and the users aren’t buying them to violate anyone’s constitutional rights. The reason governments and private outfits have put up almost 100,000 of these things all over the country is that it’s all for our own good.

Do not do bad things to these cameras. I’m far too old now to not do these things, but I have some tips for people who are younger and healthier and may be considering not doing these things.

Do not join Facebook groups like Anti-Flock America if you are not capable of not doing anything except spreading the word on things not to do with regard to flock cameras.

Do not check out the Flock Out website for information on legal measures to fight flock cameras. They are for our own good.

Do not use VPNs with a Tor browser for additional security to research how flock cameras are vulnerable or to get in touch with “how not to do bad things” sites like r/FlockSurveillance.

Do not use VPNs with a Tor browser to conduct online reconnaissance using the Flockhopper ALPR map locator.

Do not follow any of the tradecraft guidelines outlined in the linked series “Off-grid” to HYPOTHETICALLY plan untraceable approaches and escapes for the purpose of destroying or disrupting flock cameras (or any other “underground” activities”).

Chapter 1—Becoming invisible (15 minutes)

Chapter 2—Cover stories (17 minutes)

Chapter 3—Non-technical communications (5 minutes)

Chapter 4—Vetting and cells (13 minutes)

Chapter 5—Cutouts (4 minutes)

Chapter 6—Planning documents (4 minutes)

Chapter 7—Counter-surveillance (7 minutes)

Chapter 8—Safe houses (10 minutes)

Chapter 9—Rat lines (13 minutes)

Do not, even if you can afford it, shoot a flock camera, after leaving all your electronic devices behind, from a carefully concealed position after planning an unsurveilled route to and from that position, with a precision long range pellet rifle using telescopic sights that you’ve carefully zeroed after purchasing it from a local vendor with cash (←also after having left your electronic devices behind).

Do not use flock cameras for paintball target practice from the backseat of a moving or temporarily halted vehicle bearing temporarily concealed plates and tinted windows, and wearing a balaclava to conceal your identity while you crack the back window open for the shot.

Do not “paint bomb” (paint over the lenses and solar power sources) flock cameras using long “window-washer” sticks or small drone, and to not do so, do not go onto your VPN/TOR connection for details on how not to paint bomb flock cameras. All it takes for not using small drones is not attaching a stick with a sponge not soaked in enamel paint (the hardest to remove).

Do not point your 532 nanometer green laser (purchased with cash at a local vendor or through a proxy buyer) at flock cameras, because these lasers damage flock cameras. As GuerrillaBrain @GuerrillaBrain says (and we reiterate NOT to do):

For those thinking of using a laser pointer on Flock cameras, here’s some useful info.

In general, camera sensors (CMOS, as used in Flock ALPR cameras) can be damaged by intense, focused laser light because the lens concentrates the beam onto the sensor, causing localized heating that can burn out pixels or degrade the sensor. This is well-known in photography and surveillance testing:

💠Low-power pointers (1–5 mW) typically only cause temporary overload/glare.
💠Higher-power focused beams (especially sustained exposure with a steady mount) can cause permanent damage to many cameras.

However, achieving reliable disabling in practice is difficult (requires precise, prolonged aiming, often at close range).

The limit for consumer lasers in the US is 5mw max, enough to mess up your eyes, especially the green ones, but not sensors. Also, the beam size, exposure time, and distance matters.

So, all of this to say that a sawzall is probably the better tool. This post is for educational purposes only. I do not condone criminal activity.

And neither do I. If you get one of these, only use it to fuck with your cats.

A “sawzall,” by the way, is a reciprocating saw—useful for all kinds of practical tasks around the home. You can buy both wood/nail cutting blades and metal cutting blades (useful for not cutting the metal bands securing various things to posts).

Some people might, for example, want to steal flock cameras. A two-person team, a quick ladder up at night, zip through the bands with the reciprocating saw, and haul ass. What I am saying is, “Do not steal or suggest that others steal flock cameras for valuable recuperable materials, like gold and copper.” And do not rehears your actions beforehand to work out the bugs . . . and do not conduct a thorough reconnaissance in accordance with the principles outlined in the “off-grid” series linked above. By not conducting recon and rehearsals, you are far more likely to not successfully steal a flock camera.

If you are ever called to jury duty in the trial of anyone who has done these terrible things, do not engage in jury nullification by refusing to convict the perpetrators.

Do not, under any circumstances, offer up false alibis for anyone charged with damaging a flock camera.

Finally, repost this brief to as many people as possible to ensure that a lot more people do not do bad things to flock cameras.

That is all. Just so you know what not to do.

Peace.

I live in Southeast Michigan. Last Tuesday, Sherry and I cast our votes in the state’s Primary Elections for US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed is an ex-jock—wrestling, lacrosse, and football—from Bloomberg Hills, a well-to-do suburb near Detroit. His parents are both Egyptian-born engineers. He went on to play lacrosse for the University of Michigan, where he took a double major in polisci and biology and graduated Phi Beta Cappa. He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor; but he practice, opting instead for epidemiology. He taught Public Health at Colombia, then went on to become Detroit’s Director of Public Health. He’s no slouch, this guy, so he challenged Gretchen Whitmer—our slimy bought and paid for Democratic Governor—in the 2018 Gubernatorial Primary, where he was trounced. This time out, everyone knows the story by now, he squeaked out a win against AIPAC’s golden girl, Haley Stevens.

Michigan tricks pollsters.*

The day before the election, pollsters were predicting he’d win by up to 17 points. In the 2016 Primaries, they’d predicted Hillary Clinton would beat Bernie Sanders by an average of 65-30; then Bernie pulled of 49.7 to Clinton’s 48.3. Clinton—after she, her big donors, and the entire party apparatus pulled every trick in the book to put Sanders down—went on to lose Michigan to Donald Trump. Not only did Clinton take Michigan for granted and fail to execute an effective ground game here; she was just an incredibly unlikable candidate—exuding that rehearsed, plastic, stage managed thing like a bad smell. Kamala Harris—who has the same problem—lost to Trump again in 2024.

The Stevens pitch to voters was that El-Sayed is “unelectable.” This unelectability strategy employed by people who go on to fail in elections is a favorite topic now among so-called progressives, who are riding high in the wake of El-Sayed’s victory. Coming on the heels of the Mamdani win in New York and several other races that have been taken by progressives and-or DSA-endorsed candidates has intensified their optimism; and I’m here to be the skunk at the party.

Last December, I posted an editorial piece called “I become nervous when Democrats think they’re winning.” I opened with

It is a proven fact that the American Democratic Party is the most adept political institution in recent history at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s a feature of technocratic senescence. One feature of this feature is the tendency to overestimate and overstate the setbacks of Republicans. Another feature is ignoring and denying their own role in the emergence and ascendance of the right. Democrats have been repeatedly humiliated, then subjugated, then colonized by the right since a B-grade actor named Ronald Reagan won the Presidency in 1981. The proof of this colonization is that Democratic President Barack Obama was—in every practical respect—a Reagan Republican.

I think we’re facing a dual and dangerous false optimism right now. Both Democrats and progressives are riding high; and the best hope we have for both the midterms and the 2028 General Election is for further inroads from the left inside the Democratic Party Primaries while at the same time going blue-no-matter-who in the face-off between Trump’s Republican cult and the perfidious technocrats.

Polls (← yeah, those again) show the Republican Party on the rocks right now because of its attachment to Trump, who has fumbled disastrously from the time he took office a second time. I hear all kinds of noises about “blue waves” again. Michigan Primaries aren’t the only place polls get it wrong; an I refer you back to what I said above about the DP’s talent for “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

First of all, people to not like the Democratic Party. Many of us who feel forced to vote for Democrats dislike the Party. Secondly, they have proven to be more effective at fighting their own left wing than fighting Republicans. That’s because they feel more threatened by their own left wing than they do Republicans. The left is out for their jobs. The Republicans are just a convenient foil for their careers. The worse Republicans are, the easier it is to continue to pursue their class interests and loyalties against the rest of us.

“Electability” in the Primaries. “Lesser evil” in the Generals.

In 2016, it was after the Michigan Primary in fact, if I recall correctly, blowhard Chris Matthews of MSNBC said the quiet part out loud in his panic over Sanders’ momentum. Paraphrasing, he said, “Maybe we should just let Trump win, then start over.”

I promise you, a similar conversation is happening behind closed doors at the DNC right now. They will—I don’t say “might,” they damn well will—quietly sabotage El-Sayed in the General, even if it means losing the Senate to Republicans. They could lose their jobs to El-Sayed. His opponent, Mike Rogers—a devoted Zionist like many high-level Democrats—is a fund-raising opportunity. You do the math.

El-Sayed losing in the midterms will validate their “unelectability” strategy against their own left wing. This is a better outcome from their perspective than winning back the Senate—which is never really won back anyway, because it always includes a half dozen or so Republicans in Democratic drag.

In Michigan, El-Sayed has an uphill battle; and I saw the first Rogers ads within hours of Haley Stevens’ concession speech. The message is “Abdul Mohamed El-Sayed [gotta include Mohamed] is dangerous.” Serial decontextualized clips of El-Sayed himself saying “I’m dangerous,” where he’d gone on to say “to special interests” or something of the sort. AIPAC isn’t done yet. It’s funded by billionaires, and Mike Rogers is going to be awash in campaign funds and heavily buttressed by “independent expenditures.” The motivator—always the Republican go-to—is fear. With heavy components of highly racialized islamophobia. I promise you, El-Sayed will be directly compared to Osama bin Laden at some point. The messaging people are working it out now. Republicans are expert racial dog-whistlers, but they won’t even bother with silent whistles this time. It’s going to be overt and harsh. Our best hope is that they overplay their hands.

Don’t count on it though. Because the DNC will be working with them behind the scenes.

To all you “progressives” who are high-fiving right now. You are not unstoppable. In fact, you are walking up to the stop-borders of your appeal and capacity right here in Michigan. This ain’t New York City. It’s not even our own Ann Arbor. (The same goes for Francesca Hong in neighboring Wisconsin.) Your past statements and your culture war nonsense is setting you up like a bowling pin hereabouts. (← Abdul does not have some of the worst, like “Abolish the police.”) Get ready for a trench war.

I’m still arguing for some independents. If we can find the money.

Peace.

* My best guess is that the Stevens black-voter strategy pulled her through. She’d flooded the zone in Wayne County/Detroit with bullshit ads that suggested she’d been endorsed by Barack Obama, and the Democratic establishment weighed in with its networks there. I did a very long analysis of black politics in the US in my series (links below) called “American black history & political strategy,” including the way the DNC weaponizes the “black vote” in emergencies here. Many older Wayne County voters are not heavy internet users. They still use landlines, and pollsters consistently miss them.)

American black history & political strategy

Part 1 (120 minute read)

Part 2 (120 minutes)

Part 3 (130 minutes)

Part 4 (120 minutes)

Part 5 (55 minutes)

Part 6 (120 minutes)

The shorter version is here at “History, narrative, race & CRT.” (130 minute read)

tldr folks, do not apply

Time to take aim again at one of those liberal shibboleths, this time the term, “people of color.”

I’m not cracking on people who use the phrase, because it’s entered the mainstream to the point that it’s a linguistic reflex. If you’re around people who say it, you’ll start saying it. I once used it myself, and I’ll explain why momentarily . . . and why I think we should rid ourselves of it.

The phrase was first employed—in a somewhat alarmed “white” context—in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in legal jargon, to wit: “any negro, mulatto, or person of colour.”

All my age cohort remembers growing up with the term “colored people,” which meant African Americans mainly, which transitioned from there into Negro (capitalized to differentiate it from its flat descriptive Latinate meaning as the color black.

Of course, then “black people,” few of whom are actually the color black, began just saying black people as shorthand for certain recognizable phenotypes, and that’s stuck in one form or another ever since.

Like the term “queer,” however, “people of color” has been more widely repurposed by identitarians—in my own experience at least—since the late 1990s and early aughts, in fact, right alongside “queer,” which incubated in the academy from the mid-1980s, then hatched into the first “queer studies” in 1999. ← I once used that term, too, because I hadn’t made the connection between certain vocabularies, and how those vocabularies smuggle in all sorts of epistemic errors that then contribute to faulty logic.

More recently, after some of the problems I identify with the term, i.e., homogenization of particular groups who took offense at being stacked into this linguistic landfill, “people of color” acted as the clique-speak pupa from full words to the abbreviation POC, and then finally into the liberal butterfly called BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, [and] People of Color), which nowadays is the code to go to certain meetings without arousing the suspicion that you may be . . . (shhhh) . . . backward . . . or worse yet some kind of a dreaded ****-ist or ****phobe—this being a contagion narrative that renders one untouchable and subject to social quarantine.

I use the word shibboleth quite precisely here. Permit me to explain.

Back when Mastadons crossed the Bering Land Bridge and I was a teenage soldier in the rain-forested mountains of central Vietnam, the running password to get around during certain nighttime combat emergencies was the word “motherfucker.” A running password is called that because you’re running back toward your own people and hollering the “running” password so they don’t kill your ass by mistake.

Motherfucker wasn’t the running password only because it was an appropriate and well-habituated phatic response to terror and confusion—we’d probably be yelling it spontaneously anyway—but because it was a very difficult word for Vietnamese to pronounce.

The word shibboleth was adopted from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament. Gileadites were in a war with Ephraimites, and like the Vietnamese difficulty with the word motherfucker, Epharaimites had a tough time pronouncing the Gileadite word shibboleth (which meant something like “ear of grain” in Gileadite), and so it became the running password for the Gileadites so their own people wouldn’t inadvertently disembowel them in the dark with a big halberd.

Where in 1968 Vietnam, during a perimeter penetration, you may have heard, “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker,” in 700 BC along the hills near the Jordan River, you’d have heard shouts of “Shibboleth, shibboleth, shibboleth.”

The definition of shibboleth now is “a custom, phrase, or feature that distinguishes one group of people from another, often used to identify insiders or outsiders. It can also refer to a linguistic, cultural, or social marker.”

This is how “people of color,” like a menu of other insider words, phrases, and increasingly moronic acronyms work for liberals . . . and unfortunately for far too many leftists who don’t seem to know any better (raises hand reluctantly to signify his own past). I say this not because I’m not a leftist of sorts, but because I am. (Y’all, stop that!)

I forget which philosopher said—and I’m probably doing a terrible paraphrase—that philosophy is an ongoing process of making distinctions. We’re not headed into the philosophical woods here, but it does seem to an opportune time to remind ourselves of the distinctions between general, particular, specific, and singular—distinctions that transfer well across many subjects and objects. In our case, we are talking about “people” or “persons” . . . “of color.”

I’m going to start backward, if you will, at the “singular” end of the declension. No actual singular person is either reducible or replaceable. You, dear reader, are uniquely you, in your own singular form, your own singular thoughts, and occupying your own singular time and place like Einstein’s stationary train with the rest of the universe passing, spinning, and shifting around it. You are, as you read this, conscious of this singularity, and you are the only person with direct access—via that singular consciousness—to the singular you. There are many other people who are in many respects similar to you, but there can be no actual replicas.

I can’t speak for you, but, as is my habit of self-plagiarization (because I have a lazy streak), I’ll use the example of “Janie,” which I’m lifting from a book about “the inner life of money” which I wrote some time ago called Mammon’s Ecology. (Some readers have seen the “Janie” example before, and I apologize.)

Abstraction can be understood as folding something into something bigger, or encompassing. You, the individually unique person named Janie in Oakland with her two kids and a job at the dentist’s office, might also be an American—but there are many Americans who are not Janie, a female—and there are many females who are not Janie, an African American—and there are many African Americans who are not Janie. Any of those latter categories wraps around the personhood of Janie and submerges it into a more abstract category. As a human, Janie is a member of a species, yet more abstraction—more encompassment. As a Homo sapiens, Janie is of the Family Hominoidea, the order of Primates, the class of Mammals, the Phylum of Chordata, the Kingdom Animalia, and then within the overall category life. Each stage in this taxonomy further abstracts Janie or encompasses Janie . . .

Abstraction is a trade-off. We get more clarity about what differentiates a category from everything apart from it, or conversely we demonstrate what joins more than one thing into a greater whole. Janie’s American citizenship qualifies her to vote, for example; and Janie’s status as an African American in a racialized culture creates a kind of solidarity—a political identity—with other African Americans that may (or may not) influence if and for whom she votes. But we also conceal/erase the differences between everything captured inside the abstraction. Janie can interpret her status as a mammal in ways that are helpful, for example, in determining certain valid medical generalizations. On the other hand, her status as a mammal does little to resolve her conflict with an insurance company, or help her figure out what to do with her visiting grandmother, or which movie she and her husband want to watch with the kids on Friday night.

The real danger of abstraction is that it can lead to lazy thinking in the guise of serious thinking, or worse, self-deception. Janie herself cannot be boiled down to any of those encompassing categories, nor is it advisable to uncritically project group characteristics on her. Janie is one generation from a Louisiana Creole family that lived near the coast, for example, and so she can catch and clean fish unlike many other females, she speaks a second language unlike many Americans, and she is Catholic unlike most African Americans.

Every social theory trades in abstractions, because these theories are concerned with humans as organized aggregates, not simply as singular persons. This is helpful as long as we don’t begin to impose the abstractions back onto the specific persons; and the way we do that is by shifting focus back and forth between the abstract and the concrete—called a dialectical (two-sided) approach—to make sure these two domains continue to agree, that the abstract and concrete constantly correspond to each other.

We say something about women, then something about Janie, then we see if these two statements agree. When they don’t agree, this contradiction is telling us there is something faulty about our assumptions or methods, or that we need to further specify our claims. There are sometimes exceptions that do not totally disprove the rule; but they do preclude us claiming the rule is absolute. If I say, “all generalizations are false, including this one,” then I need to revise my statement to, “Most generalizations are false.”

Janie’s a good example, because she is a “person of color,” which means only one thing really—not “white.” So, here’s my first complaint. The way to “de-center whiteness”—which is another Pörksenean plastic phrase from the same institutional universe—certainly doesn’t seem to be by making this very “whiteness” the master signifier—albeit a negative master signifier.

This is so plain to me that I’m a little astonished it’s not pointed out more often . . . and a little ashamed that I myself took a while to recognize what was right there in front of my face. You see, I was “inside” with my own coterie of insiders. It was my “motherfucker,” my secret handshake, part of my NGO institutional vocabulary.

I’ve had a wide and varied experience of life, during which I’ve come into close contact with a tremendous variety of people from around the world and even a great variety within my own country of origin. Contradiction, conflict, and even hatred don’t exist exclusively or even predominantly along a white-BIPOC axis. The overwhelming majority of people I see using this academy-NGO drivel are self-flagellating white people, or “people of color” who are themselves operating within the academy-NGO arena and employing the approved institutional vocab.

You should have heard the anti-Japanese statements I heard in Korea, the conflicts I’ve witnessed between native-born black folks here and African immigrants, and the struggles I saw in Eastern North Carolina when an influx of Central Americans began to move into formerly African American spaces. Does anyone remember during the LA uprisings, when Korean stores were smashed up? In 1985, when I was in El Salvador, the guanacos were still pissed at the catrachos over the “Football War” of 1969.

I was in the Army with two guys back in the 70s, one black and one chicano. They were best friends—I’ll call them D and G. D and G both liked cars. These guys . . . they were like total gearheads, with actual mechanical skills which they used together to fuck with their Mustang and Camaro respectively every weekend. They also both liked country music of all things. Ever so often, they’d fight like a married couple, and damn! did the racial epithets fly both ways. Later on, they’d kiss and make up, and it was all the Ford-Chevy dozens and Charlie Pride again.

I worked all around Latin America, and whether Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Mexicans, Colombians, Panamanians, Venzuelans, Costa Ricans, Nicaraguans, or Peruvians . . . they didn’t “get” the word Latino without a moment’s thought, whereupon they stood it against gringo—which meant Americans of whatever phenotype—because each “identified,” on that level at least, as members of a nationality. A Panamanian was a Panamanian, whether he or she was blanco, indio, mestizo, or West Indian English-speaking negro. Many with prolonged gringo contact—especially immigrants—learned “Latino,” which is gender specific in the particular, but used in the masculine form for the general. When the academy-NGO-verse started excreting the term “Latinx” to remove the Spanish gendering of language, which carried little to no ideological freight—come on, is gendering chairs feminine and spoons masculine really a problem?—there was a lot of pushback. First, you imperial fuckers are gonna reduce us to linguistics, and now you want to change our language?! Te jodas!

Now, I don’t want to be pedantic, but pedantry is where my argument must enter the arena. White is not—as a color—the lack of color, but all the colors of the visible spectrum at the same time. More to the point, however, white people aren’t white at all—excepting people with melanin disorders—but an array of complexions from bee’s wax to bronze, with undertones ranging from blush to avocado. If you see a “white” person who is actually white—and its not the ghost of Johnny Winter—check for motion. If that white “white” person moves, you’re looking at a mime. If he or she doesn’t move, call the coroner.

The color thing’s been around for a while now, just as the whiteness thing has. There are even intra-racial “color things,” as anyone who’s traveled to former colonies knows. In the US, bougie-wannabe black folks used to have clubs where they’d check you skin color against a brown paper bag to ensure you were light enough for membership. Whiteness has always been fluid. The word “white” meant “us,” as opposed to “them,” and who was included as “us” underwent shifts. Noel Ignatiev wrote a book once about How the Irish Became White.

The “color” thing in the hands of the NGO episteme harkens back to the preoccupation with phenotypes—not just skin shades, as we all know damn well—but whole constellations of outward physical characteristics. A Korean may have a skin color that matches a German, but height, build, facial characteristics, hair, and so forth will make the vast majority of Koreans and Germans distinguishable from one another at a mere glance. Phenotypes emerged over time from serial migrations, integrations, and isolations. I wrote a very long piece here about this. We’re still the same species, as rampant “interbreeding” has shown.

The modern concept of race that grew out of colonialism, then got itself reinforced by social Darwinism, suggested that race was some sub-special phenomenon—a convenient notion for plunder and the slave trade that has been given the lie by genetic science and dissolved in its relevance due to cosmopolitan rates of intermarriage. The Liberal “people of color” or BIPOC designation reproduces the phenotypic preoccupation—sans class, in many cases—with the virtue-signaler’s pluses and minuses reversed.

POC and BIPOC, like LGBTQIAWXYZ, has created a new membership amalgamation that completely ignores the particular, specific, and singular characteristics that constitute any actually living human being. I remember when the gender stuff took off, some of my “white” comrades on the left, who’d exclusively had “relations” with members of the opposite sex all their lives, suddenly declared themselves “queer” and “non-binary.” It was a way out of the bad amalgamation—cis-white-hetero.

In the case of Rachel Dolezal—a “white” woman who had her hair permed and dyed, her skin darkened but sprays and carrot juice—she claimed she was African American, eventually changing her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, in order to put in for jobs like teaching Africana Studies and running a local NAACP. When she was busted for her ruse, she went on to declare herself “trans-racial.” At least she escaped the cis-white-hetero detention hour.

Dolezal has been an embarrassment to a host of ideologues and virtue-signalers. Here’s a recent article on her latest evolutions from the Atlanta Black Star.

The whole thing is embarrassing. (Oh yeah, that picture before the big map? Of the grey-eyed girl? She’s Palestinian, hopefully not now dead under the rubble of an Israeli bomb.)

But but but . . . aren’t white people oppressing the non-whites? Doesn’t that give us a sanction to separate them? Sure, if you think that, apart from your desire to be with it or your desire to avoid censure, this kind of generalization is useful for anything at all. Myself, I don’t see it. Moreover, being “white” is not what makes someone a bigot or an asshole. Acting like a bigot or an asshole is what makes one a bigot or an asshole. (I’ve seen such among many so-called races.) The genocide in the Levant right now has been co-signed by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, and I’ve seen plenty of pictures of Latinos and African Americans among the ranks of those fucking ICE thugs who’re patrolling the streets to get their sadistic yayas out.

Yes, there are systemic factors that underwrite actual oppression—however one defines that. The most relevant of those factors is structured power, and the modern structures of power are based on accumulations of money. So, the most pertinent category of political struggle—if that’s where you want to go beyond performances of personal virtue—remains class. Class is multi-racial now across the board, which is why neoliberal assholes who gladly finance genocide will revert to bullshit accusations of bigotry—shouting “motherfucker motherfucker motherfucker” every time the class thing gets brought up.

So let’s keep it to the particular, specific, and singular, shall we.

Peace.

that world alive upon her
went cold in her arms
a cupful of scissors watched
with pens and markers too…
yes all her appliances
bonded and certified
gripped the hurried pulpit
finding men and anguish
and clean diaries

defective funeral sermons
weakened by hollow waves
ragged and reproached
in cider light and TV lore
permitted and possessed
every dead sister’s indulgence
each live one’s teeth
in uneven elocutions
on the bedclothes of an animal

she tried red moonshine
debated genital judgements
made tie-died scarves
and draped them over silence
numbered unknown lovers
in a rectory of abstraction
drank accusations from skulls
rolled boys like jolly joints
and pissed between parked cars

that world alive upon her
went cold in her arms
extended its blue tongue
pressed down with its liberty
like a graysick commemoration
as men threw stones at fickle stars
and orchids strangled mothers…
she stole a motionless trice
and shoved the trembling day

disclaimer—I’ve composed most of this in a state of sleeplessness during the past week-plus, due to circumstances that are uninteresting to others; but I apologize in advance if it’s klunky in places.

The provocation for this post was when, around July 26th and 27th, after the news hit of a simultaneous visit by Zelinskyy and Netanyahu to Washington on the 28th, just after one of Zelinskyy’s drones smacked into an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea. This confluence of events sparked a wildfire of breathlessly ill-informed and conspiratorial commentary and speculation—a perfect example of what I’d just written about on July 24th about “Hyperbolic headlines, panic, and sobriety.”

“Thus Israelis are trying to combine the wars!” “The Ukrainians are trying to combine the wars!” “Ukraine used the attack as a provocation!” “The Washington trip is a conspiracy in the making!” Dude . . . they were going to a funeral, that of the one attack dog they shared in common—Lindsey Graham. Of course, they each had their own agenda. Bibi’s facing an election on October 7th, and he gets photos with Trump every time he’s running—this time in a dead heat against Israel’s ex-military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. ← That didn’t go well, by the way. He got the photo…

…but Trump was in a very bad mood with Bibi by all reports, because their little war—in conjunction with Ukraine’s drain on US military resources since 2021—has dangerously depleted critical US arms inventories. Yep, the mighty USA is running out of ammo. (Watch Pete Hesgeth, folks . . . he may soon be joining Tulsi and Pam for a weird threesome in the outer darkness.)

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is beating Trump about the head and shoulders among the MAGA base on Israel.

The battle of wills . . . Bibi needs victory before October 7th, Trump needs the fuck out before November 3rd, because all the instruments agree that—for the Republican Party—November 3rd promises to be a dark, cold day indeed. (Trump’s psychology is constructed around “winning,” and a loss in November on top of the defeat in Southwest Asia would simply be too much to bear.)

“But but but . . . Russia is giving targeting intel to the Iranians!”

Yeah, they’ve been doing that since well before this war—there’s actually a formal agreement to that effect. NOT news, and not—as we’ll show further along—the reason for Iran’s enhanced efficacy in targeting US military installations in Southwest Asia. And the reason Ukraine shot an Iranian ship in the Caspian is because Russia has opened a new front there to landlock Ukraine—Odessa is in very serious trouble, so Ukraine struck back in desperation.

“But but but . . . Russia is using Iranian drones!”

Sigh. NOT not not news. Iran has been providing drones to Russia—cheap ones that work really fucking well—for quite some time. Need we remind? Ukraine has been using American munitions all along.

Damn, I needed to scratch the itch, but since I’ve gone there anyway, I may as well to drag an old contextualizing post back into the room—age warts and all.

Anyone who writes on current events, especially if he or she does so editorially, knows the dismaying reluctance to look back too carefully a what one has written in the past. The risk, of course, is only to one’s ego . . . facts and errors speak clearly about themselves.

Last November I wrote a helluva long piece called “Trumponomics”—an attempt to get my head (and the heads of some readers) around the unforced and potentially catastrophic errors of an American administration run by a greedy, malicious, and stupid man who has surrounded himself with sycophants and opportunists who are themselves greedy, malicious, and stupid.

The opening lines were…

The panic-mongers would have you believe that he’s on the cusp of becoming America’s führer, but I’ll be making the case that he’s not a would-be dictator, but the doddering head of a grubby criminal enterprise that exists only on account of bipartisan opportunism and abject political cowardice. Our so-called constitutional republic has never practiced truth in advertising, because it’s based on bribery and graft. How the fuck do people think we got here?

Politically, as the world is beginning to understand, Trump is a schlmiel—a bungler who’s a danger to himself and others—whose born-rich stupidity is amplified now by the signs of creeping dementia.

By that, at least, I stand.

I went on to mention his family kleptocracy and that of his own administration, to which he’s been pre-immunized by the Supreme Court of the United States. That’s not where we’re going. There are mountains of information and articles available on Trump & Co’s thievery.

This time out, I want to correct and extend based on what’s happened since the November article with a special emphasis on how the global economy and our incipient World War III are wrapped up in one another.

The first thing we studied last Autumn was supply chains. The tariff stupidity was peaking along with inflation, so it was on every American’s family’s mind who takes in less than $100,000 a year ← others, too, but less critically.

“Every household relies on supply chains,” we wrote. “Comestibles, fuel, clothing, power, water, hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.”

You get the picture on this supply chain thing. We all did after the pandemic, when these chains were fragmented, and container ships loitered for weeks in great herds off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Long story short—the chains are there—oil soon to be excepted—but they're more expensive. Trump’s recent visit to Detroit to crow about how he’s helped the auto industry was met with reality grievances about the tariffs on steel, copper, and aluminum feedstocks.

The Yemeni Ansarollah government, in response to a Saudi attack on Sanaa Airport last month, have choked down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait to Saudi oil traffic, further restricting global oil supplies. Trump let the oil companies draw down the US strategic petroleum reserves in response, and those same companies—seeing that oil was trading at better prices abroad—are exporting it. As this is written, the reserves are at their lowest since 1983.

The big story—apart from impending oil shortages—is the way the US economy has been taken over by so-called AI companies. Here’s the graphic from last November to get you oriented:

^^^ This, my friends, is what’s called a big fucking bubble. From November:

We just talked about bubbles, and even mentioned the “everything bubble,” which is a combination of overvaluations pumped by cheap money and sketchy credit: AI, the stock market (fluffed by AI), the bond market, crypto, private equity, gold, commercial property, and housing. Fuckloads of assets in a single enclosed space with the same liquidity supply. (Commercial property delinquencies right now are scaring the living shit out of those in the know.)

Degenerate gamblers Investors all doing the the sweaty mambo in the magical dance hall and eyeing the exits in the belief they’ll know when the DJ’s ready to head home.

In July 2026, a little thing called Kimi K3 appeared in public for the first time. Don’t ask me for the details and specifications—this is AI shit—but we can all understand the gross economic patterns emerging around it.

Basic basics. Artificial intelligence is not, in fact, either thinking or intelligence. It’s a bunch of machines processing algorithms. So called “machine learning” is in no way even approximating actual human intelligence, the latter of which is pared with physical awareness and consciousness—neither of which are properties of machines. Some people think humans are machines, which leads them to preposterous conclusions like . . . we can achieve machine consciousness (ignoring that sweaty, meaty first person plural that still sits behind the machines yanking its levers).

Machines aren’t learning, they’re integrating algorithms to identify and extrapolate patterns using statistics. One person said AI is sophisticated auto-correct. More data, more integration, more sophistication.

Even so-called “agentic” AI is processing algorithms, including algorithms directed to “take the next step.” (Step—attack a girl’s school. Step—leave the sandbox and start hacking everything.) Large language models (and so-called “large reasoning models”) are processing language using an ever increasing accumulation of data that appears to be “thinking” of a sort—calculating really . . . and in more dangerous cases, like shitty military targeting and Open AI’s program that went on a recent hacking spree, playing games.

Yes, this shit is powerful. Which makes it a dangerous tool in the hands of the powerful. I would argue that it’s just as dangerous in many respects as nuclear weapons. Like nukes, its forms all have material/formative substrates. Like nukes, it has become “necessary” within an actual martial arms race—weapons development. But enough of my doomsaying . . .

AI exists in layers. Bottom layer: energy. It takes a shit ton of electricity. Then it relies on chips, increasingly complex and miniaturized circuit hardware (that’s hit Moore’s Law, but that’s another story). Chips move the “information” (ever more granular yes’s and no’s) around. Chip designs are then nested in the infrastructure—now we’re moving from the energy-and-hardware into the hardware-and-design zone. At the end of the story—that is, application (games, weapons, mass production, coding, whatever). In between infrastructure and application are models. Models are “learning” programs—which have specific “architectures.”

The model is the AI brain.

These have been toll roads for the big US AI outfits. The biggest difference between Chinese and American AI is that Chinese AI is far more focused on the productive economy, whereas American AI companies are aimed at a rentier economy—collecting rents, or tribute, from users.

Bit more technical-metaphorical: each architecture is comprised of a bunch of mini-programs called “experts.” So, you can go into the virtual “office building” and hire whatever virtual experts you might need. If you pay X per expert and use 20 experts, then you pay 20X per visit. These fees are paid in “tokens,” with special “premium subscriptions” (rents) available.

The “experts” are actually spread all over the fucking place between energy-sucking GPUs in data centers. Collecting the experts employs selection mechanisms with “biases” and a bunch of other shit we don’t need to cover. This is an economic post, so we’ll just settle on these fees versus the ecologically devastating service provided.

(Make a note on GPUs—graphics processing units. Also, for the comprehensive rundown on the ecological impacts of these monstrosities, see Eric Kolasi and Jesse Damiani’s superlative research in “The Global Energy and Emissions Footprint of AI Diffusion.”)

[Graphics Processing Unit link]

Okay, now we’re going to return to “Trumponmics” and how China has consistently outmaneuvered the US, including Trump.

During Trump’s failed economic war with China last year—and even before Trump, from Obama on—the US has restricted Chinese access to AI hardware. American companies had the best chips, and with that advantage, they built out by using more chips and developing bigger data centers. They’ve been financing this with . . . promises.

Okay, this system/model whatever, it’s predicated on having the most advanced chips. But what the US restrictions forced China to do—because the AI race is also a business and defense race—was to improvise and get creative.

China encourages gladiatorially competitive AI start-ups. One of them was put together by a wunderkind software engineer named Yang Zhilin. The name of that company is Moonshot AI. They had neither the financial nor the technical resources of the Americans, so Yang’s team decided to focus on getting the greatest computing efficiency from the less advanced chips and a helluva lot less energy. On July 17th this year, Moonshot unveiled their new model.

Kimi K3—the new model—wasn’t the most powerful . . . but it was close enough. But what is was . . . was free. They called it, “The Biggest Brain, for Free.” Within hours, they had to close the doors because new users had tapped their capacity.

Not only that, it was “open weight,” a strange phrase that means, not only can users employ it for free, they can see how it works. You want to modify it and run it on your own server? No problem!

Oh yeah, if you’re just using it in that “hire the experts” way, it costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Compare that to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5, which costs $10/mit and $50/mot respectively. That’s why there were so many subscribers Kimi K3 in the first few hours that Moonshot had to pause.

Yes, Open AI and Anthropic still marginally “outperform” Kimi K3, in the most complex areas, but there’s that cost-benefit thing—few enterprises need the full power anyway—and the fact that, if they have the time and right people, they can download it for themselves and tell the American companies to go fuck a duck. Oh by the way, Kimi K3 outperforms the US models for the most common employments—common interrogatives, browsing, and recent news.

It’s a replay-plus of what happened when the Chinese released DeepSeek—an AI model—in January and caused a $50 billion selloff of US tech stocks. Stand by.

Trumponomics has the bluster and bully aspect with which we’re all quite familiar, as is the rest of the world. And they’re as fed up with it as we are. I wouldn’t count on any good will coming US shores over access to this technology, and what with the market being the market, Kimi K3—once scaled up—will be shutting down the US models in short order.

If there were concerns about American AI price-to-earning ratios before . . . imagine how investors feel right about . . . now. Stack on a helium shortage, courtesy of Trump and Netanyahu’s war, and the fact that the Chinese are still restricting sales of rare earths. Now, on top of all that, righteous American hatred of data centers is a political magma seam seeking a point for eruption.

AI had a shaky financial structure at the outset. In the “Trumponomics” article, we described circular financing—AI billionaires loaning each other money through their enterprises as a circle jerk.

The point for now is that AI’s not a metaphorical city yet; it’s a bunch of uber-rich, geeky fascist dudes who want to build a metaphorical city, with the promise to investors that everything will turnout like a movie with the ghosts of baseball layers where “if you build it, they will come.”

(They prolly won’t. I know I sure as fuck won’t.)

As of right now, AI investment—without which the S&P 500 would suffer the fate of the Hindenburg blimp—is, shall we say, circular.

It’s a bunch of companies investing in each other’s dreams, with only one company reaping any current bennies—NVIDIA, which makes sophisticated tech hardware.

The big cost, you see—if you haven’t figured it out already—is data centers . . . those entropic black holes that will eat through the environment as effectively as nuclear winter . . . just slightly more slowly. Seems that artificial intelligence requires tens of billions of dollars and all its destructive environmental entailments to simulate a fraction of what a three-pound human brain does, fueled by a plateful of potatoes and eggs.

(Yes, AI does some things fast . . . but speed is precisely the fucking problem.)

Investment gurus are ringing alarm bells right now. They’re saying that financial exposure to AI is such that if any major US AI hyperscaler cuts its capital expenditures—increasingly inevitable—the stock market will plunge like Greg Louganis off the three-meter board. As the previous chart on the US stock market shows, finance capital has become what some call “a single trade environment.”

The industry term “sustainable competitive advantage” comes to mind in the wake of Moonshot’s breakthrough.

Meanwhile, there’s us—the rest of us—trapped with these fucking psychopaths running a game where we’re left with a choice between financial collapse and ecologic Armageddon. Finance capital captures the economy. AI companies capture the financial sector. AI companies tank. There goes your pension. Yay, capitalism!

The boss class knows all this. I live in Michigan. Our chief executive is Gretchen Whitmer, a Democratic corporate hack who was recently outed by a hot mike on an airfield, talking to Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk about the data centers here which have aroused the ire of just about anyone who’s not invested in them.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” Chummy motherfuckers, those two.

At the center (see the diagam above) of AI’s financial circle jerk is NVIDIA.

Moody’s, the credit rating guys, is issuing warnings about NVIDIA. Since those warnings, credit default swaps on NVIDIA are breaking high jump records.

According to Wikipedia, “A credit default swap is a financial swap agreement that the seller of the CDS will compensate the buyer in the event of a debt default or other credit event.” A credit . . . event. Ha! Good one!

Investors are now betting against NVIDIA. Investors are beginning to acknowledge—in a serious way—that this industry is in a dangerous debt bubble. Now they want to borrow a lot more ($250 billion as this is written), and the sound of squealing brakes is echoing through Wall Street. If NVIDIA is downgraded, these loans become a lot more costly to insure.

This shit ramifies. As I am writing the draft (July 30), Google, Amazon, and Meta are at or rapidly approaching something called “negative cash flow.” They’re losing money. When this happens, a lot of people sit up and take notice. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs just demanded more collateral from hedge funds. Some suggest this may be the onset of the “unwind.” (← gotta love this anodyne terminology)

AI stocks fall → hedge funds watch value evaporate → banks say, more money to secure your loans.

I don’t care that big investors lose money. If it were up to me, they’d all be stripped of their assets and shipped to some barren little fucking island in the arctic. I not only don’t care if AI fails financially, I think the AI buildout justifies quite extreme resistance. I think the applications of this technology are overwhelmingly negative, psychologically, sociologically, culturally, economically, and spiritually. But as we noted, everything in the financialized economy is bundled together. We’re all lashed to this sinking ship (which suggests that the best course is to figure out how to untie the knots and build life rafts . . . but we won’t do that).

Investors around the the world and in the US just had a shock warning from Korea.

320,000 young South Korean investors had taken on tons of debt to buy into the AI hype, and they loaded onto the KOSPI—South Korea’s stock exchange. In South Korea, AI is also running the market. It has a bunch of “thinking” circuit breakers for trading, but they don’t only stop trading when the bears stampede through Seoul. They liquidate your leveraged stocks and leave you with nothing but your debts. This is what happened to the 320,000. Yes, there was some KOSPI in every portfolio around the world. Yes, Korea’s AI bubble popped. The equivalent of $250 billion in fictional value unveiled itself as such and disappeared like Kayser fucking Sose.

This, at the same time that Kimi K3 walked onto the field.

Two AI companies made up half of the KOSPI index. Now, there was a Korean peculiarity. In May, the government—alarmed by Korean investors running to US AI stocks—set up something to keep Korean currency at home, called the Single Stock Leveraged Fund. The SSLF is an unstable instrument—higher risk, high promised returns—that requires borrowing for “forward investment” for investors to survive. Just buy the two big Korean stocks (Samsung & SK Hynix—chip makers). For Korean young students and professionals, this shit was catnip. ($26.5 billion of the money was borrowed from the US, exposing the NASDAQ.) In July, the crash hit.

Moral of the story. AI hype overleverages and overvalues. Massive market exposure to AI is huge bubble vulnerability. Selloffs beget selloffs.

It’s not going to get better. Moreover, people fucking hate AI . . . and for good reasons. What’s been hyped as inevitable has been—in the case of generative AI—revealed as inherently malicious.

Going back now to credit. Moody’s has been sending out admonitions about AI leverage, but I like another story better—one uncovered not long ago by independent journalist Ed Zitron, when he got hold of Open-AI’s real financials. Everything we said previously about negative ramifications? Oh, it’s far worse.

American AI is losing money and borrowing a lot more money to lose more money and lying to investors. But until Zitron found the financials, we had no idea how much money they were borrowing . . . or from who they were borrowing the money they categorically cannot and will not ever pay back.

Less than 25 percent of American AI initiatives have actually returned on investment prior to the appearance of Kimi K3. Only rround 16 percent have actually scaled; and half of the data center projects have been delayed or cancelled due to a combination of public resistance and lack of funds. (Check out Vanessa Wingardh’s video summary.)

Data centers are mad expensive. When Moody’s looks at your credit, they see only what’s borrowed from banks (and in this case, from Silicon Valley itself). But the hyperscalers are borrowing a lot more off the balance sheets (← what Moody’s and others see) from private credit companies and from . . . here’s the kick . . . insurance funds. They may be understating their debt to investors by as much as $1.65 trillion.

Back in January 2022, a company called Apollo Global Management merged with Athene Holding—a retirement services outfit. Together now they are one of the biggest retirement insurance companies in the entire world, valued now at nearly half a trillion dollars. They ostensibly insure retirement payments. I give Athene $200,000 I’ve saved (yeah, right) before retirement. Athene invests it to make more money while we wait for me to reach retirement age. What Zitron found out was that Athene then passes the money to Apollo, who’s been loaning it out for fucking data centers. This isn’t just Apollo-Athene. It’s Blackstone. It’s KKR. It’s Resolution Life . . . and on and on.

All this (unacknowledged) risk is stirred together with your pension funds—not just private ones, but those for nurses and firefighters, e.g. In fact, all California public employees.

^^^Yeah!

Whatever “investment” rating Moody’s is giving these AI and data center development companies . . . investors should assume a much worse “speculative” rating. AI and data centers are a big fucking pig in a big fucking poke.

I’ve already referred readers to The Global Energy and Emissions Footprint of AI Diffusion” for the ecologic rundown on data centers—which is positively terrifying. But let’s look at the material limitations that correspond negatively to the bullshit artistry of the tech bros.

As Zitron notes, data centers are not what they’ve been advertised—“stable infrastructure,” like a hydroelectric plant or a road network. They are thousands upon thousands of GPUs (remember them?). Everything about the data center is built around housing, protecting, energizing, and cooling these GPUs. A GPU lasts somewhere between three and six years, depending on use. Then it has to be replaced. You have, conservatively, 100,000 GPUs in your data center.

(So . . . what exactly is the depreciation schedule on these already money-losing propositions? Well, we’ll explain.)

Kolasi and Damiani have already shown that the data centers anticipated to be online by 2030 will draw down the energy of India, the world’s most populous nation. Have a look at Jovan Hall’s podcast episode “The AI Data Center Boom Doesn’t Survive Basic Physics.”

The AI bubble is a major component of US financial vulnerability. It’s based on GPUs—long story short. They last about four years, and no one has to date made a dime renting GPUs. The AI sector is a great stagnant pond of depreciating assets. The music has stopped, and investors will soon be heading for the exits. Korea was just the beginning. The chip selloff is already underway.

The other two components are energy—related to AI, but a much broader problem—and the debt-inflation finger trap. Both of these—and we’ll take each in turn—have been massively exacerbated by the wars in Europe and Southwest Asia.

US growth numbers are fully dependent now on the AI buildout. Meanwhile, inflation remains persistent and promises to go up with continued fuel shortages—especially as strategic reserves are further drawn down. The Federal Reserve—now led by Kevin Walsh—just refused to hike interest rates, which is the only way it knows how to subdue inflation—which is far higher than official numbers which cut food and fuel out of the calculus—because raising rates would put a damper on “growth.” At the same time that without the AI bubble’s contribution to GDP, we’re already in a recession. Inflation rates are lying low; and growth rates are lying high. Effectively, we are already in a stagflated economy.

We said earlier that China channels advanced technology into production. China is, after all, the world’s leading manufactory. We also said the US is a rentier economy. This makes the US far more prone to what’s called capital misallocation—investing money into enterprises that are unproductive. Financial analyst Julien Garran now calculates that capital misallocation in the US is 70 percent of GDP. Four times as high as it was just before the 2007-8 crash.

In the background, US national debt is on the cusp of $40 trillion. This means that the annual debt service for the US government is more than $1 trillion—a whole extra defense budget. If US interest rates are lowered, fewer people want to invest in US debt, i.e., US treasuries. The US global position as financial hegemon is based on dollar hegemony, which is based to a substantial degree on confidence in US currency, as well as the sheer size of the US economy. Trump’s policies have undermined both, and he’s added $3.16 trillion in his second term. The dollar yield shoots up, because confidence in the ever more debased dollar goes proportionally down.

debt→debt service→borrow more→more debt→more debt service . . . the vicious cycle

Trump’s administration has to borrow more money now, in part because his War Secretary is asking for $1.5 trillion to offset the costs of our two wars—not just the direct costs, but the contracting costs to replenish critically low weapons inventories.

One is a US proxy war against Russia using US weapons and support and Ukraine’s conscripted blood, gladly deployed by one of the most corrupt governments on the planet. The other—the Israeli-US war on Iran—is a proxy war, for the US’s part, and only partly, against China.

We said above that the more effective targeting of US military installations by the Iranians was not just a product of Russian intelligence. In fact, Iran is now using China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System instead of the US-jammable-and-hackable GPS. China is also supplying Iran with materials for weapons production—as it did before the ill-advised war—and China buys Iranian oil. Which they did before the war. (The insanely leveraged AI buildout has been billed as an arms race against Big Enemy China, btw.)

The US is losing the wars on both fronts, but Trump is wedged in his ego and reality; and there’s really no end in sight. Meanwhile, the energy and helium shortages keep rippling across economies, with Japan—the US’s biggest foreign creditor—on deck for the next near-term catastrophe.

I’m saving another piece for Europe, so we’ll stop here today. I’m exhausted and my brain is numb.

Things are moving fast out there. Don’t make things worse with shortcut thinking . . . or panic.

That’s all for now.

Peace, y’all.

my past and present-absent kin
this dearth beyond the runnel yon
rippling black in the commas of thought
tucked in the stones of a vacant dawn

the hands, the smile and fallen flag
the jokes that lap along the shore
the rumbled roads in cedar swamps
the mem’ries dropped before the door

that April time, the battered breath
the coyotes hunting in the reeds
our eyes were gathered round the bed
our fingers counting wooden beads

beige willets walked the sodden sand
the hammerheads patrolled the coast
and sleepless mothers drove to work
when brother Glen gave up the ghost

Back in 1994, I was the “team daddy” (senior operations and intelligence sergeant) for ODA 354—an A-Detachment (“A-team”) in 3rd Special Forces Group that specialized in free-fall parachute operations (which we never used in any actual op). 3rd Group’s areas of operational responsibility were Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. The most common language the Group was trained in was French, and my second language was Spanish which was why I’d previously been assigned to 7th Special Forces Group with a AOR in Latin America. As luck would have it, when some computer in Northern Virginia decided to slot me with 3rd Group—against my will, I might add—I was made the senior non-commissioned officer for the one non-Francophone team in my company that specialized in Spanish. Our target folders were all for Cuba, and ODA-354 spent considerable time in working and training in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

There had been an American-planned coup d’etat in Haiti in 1991 to depose the populist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—who’d been elected in a landslide against the US-backed Marc Bazin. (Bad Haitians! Bad Haitians!)

The coup had soured over the next three years under the brutal regime of Haitian Armed Forces (FAHD) General Raoul Cédras and Chief of National Police (PNH) Michel François . . . to the point where the Clinton administration felt compelled to return Aristide in some manageable form to Haiti before popular insurrections could spread any further.

In August of that year, our detachment along with most of 3rd Special Forces Group were staged in Guantanamo Bay for a proposed invasion to unseat the very government the US had installed only three years prior. As an intel sergeant who’s anticipated this operation for several months, I’d undertaken a furious study of Haiti well before we left. Which led me to doubt virtually every intel briefing we received prior to the deployment, including one that featured some creepy evangelical preacher who told the boys that Haitians were devil worshipers who would disable you with “powders” when they shook your hand—he’d seen The Serpent and the Rainbow one too many times, I suspect.

I had a couple of subordinates, nonetheless, who took this bullshit to heart and began to fret about “voodoo” curses and powders and poisons. Added to that were typical medical briefings—about which I was also skeptical, having been a medic throughout Latin America—that were designed to instill a fear of touching Haitians, eating local food, in fact doing anything that might take one out of the perimeter. Like they’d never been in the tropics before . . . Haiti and Haitians were somehow carrying more virulent strains of everything than their neighbors in the DR.

Then came the ops briefs, in which all were led to believe that Cedras’ armed forces were laying in wait for us to put up a fierce scuffle—something I also doubted based on my own research, but in operations it’s always best to err on the side of not underestimating one’s potential foes (as we’d done in Grenada before they shot the shit out of us, and as we’d done again in Somalia . . . as Trump and Hegseth have now done with Iran).

I had two guys on the team—this is a Special Forces A-Team mind you, and I hate to burst anyone’s bubble—who put the powders and germs and black people with guns together in a kind of panic soup, and they started mouthing off about it.

“Oh why, oh why should we risk our lives for the sake of some Caribbean shithole! Oh woe is fucking me!”

I guess the past several years of serial adultery deployments to the Dominican Republic (on the same damn island) hadn’t sufficiently prepared a couple of these fellas for what they saw as danger and hardship . . . let me just say, what we were facing was hardly some great danger or terrible hardship. (The greatest hardship ended up being all the bullshit all troops are inevitably put through by deployment preparations.)

At any rate, I had a pat reaction to panic in those days.

It pissed me the fuck off.

There is no more dangerous a person in one’s unit, especially in the case of actual conditions of extremity, than people who panic. They overreact, they make stupid mistakes, they pull attention toward themselves and away from the problem at hand, and they infect others with their amygdalasia.

In reality, the more critical any given situation is, the more it demands sobriety. And so I had a harsh reaction to the fear-mongering on the team—something along the lines of “Put a lid on that shit, you Chicken Little motherfuckers”—which didn’t enhance my already flagging popularity.

Okay, story over.

Flash forward to today and something called the attention economy. Readers are familiar with its etiology in technofeudal content creation (like this article).

We’ve been placed in a Hobbesian competition for clicks that’s the metastatic version of the fear-mongering which has been around since time immemorial. The looming danger, the enemy at the gates, the falling sky . . . if you want attention, jazz everyone up on this shit, and rather than step back from it, some strange human death instinct kicks in that makes Very Bad News a flame to us, the moths. Not only are we pulled back toward it again and again, but we recruit fellow panickeers along the way. Panic becomes, like conflict and scandal and dope, a social bonding agent.

The metastasis of this phenomenon by digital platforms is turning people into enemies because it’s turning problems—real or imagined—into panics.

I’m not trying to underplay the many legitimate concerns we all have about our lives and the world more generally. Some are momentous. I’m saying that concern is best managed by sobriety. Don’t overstate, don’t understate, don’t jump to conclusions, find the real in its Goldilocks golden mean somewhere between a pink sky and utter doom.

Overstatement risks over-reaction.

Understatement risks under-reaction.

Before we let someone else cook us up a terrifying conclusion, maybe check out the ingredients.

Sobriety is taking the time to assess an actual situation, as dispassionately as we can, then taking account of what we realistically can and cannot do. Sobriety is accepting our own lack of either omniscience and omnipotence without being paralyzed by the reality that we aren’t in control . . . and remembering that the control others have, even the most powerful, likewise has real limits. This is a first step at staying off that emotional Super-Nitro roller coaster.

The bonus is that it leaves us far less susceptible to mass manipulation.

I’m one of those people who tries to keep abreast of current events—sans pop culture and fads where I can evade them. I’m far from alone in this. Unfortunately, I don’t have seeing-stones planted around the world for direct observation, so, like you, I have to rely on “sources.” We all know what a rat’s nest this can be, especially in our present Baudrillarian shithouse, where we’re bombarded not only with simulacra but tsunamis of intentional disinformation. And I’m not chucking stones across the parapet here at any particular political tendency—all of them are on the same fucking game.

It’s like there’s a war for attention fought with hyperbolic headlines, each tendency giving its own account of why the sky is falling. As if our culture hadn’t been neurotic enough!

There is plenty written about the knock-on effects of capitalism, but among them I think we should more prominently include mass neurosis. I mean, we all know how products are sold with insecurity—are my teeth off-putting? do I have a ring around my collar? will I get cancer for lack of fiber? Current events, the news, the many ostensible interpreters . . . these are commodities, too, peddled in a competitive market. And just like dental bleaches and air fresheners and nutritional supplements, the peddlers can improve their market share by boosting our anxieties, milking them, then carrying home the cream.

So and so LOSES IT! Such and such MELTDOWN! XYX is FURIOUS! Everything is FALLING APART! Yada-yada BACKFIRES! THE END of whatever! I’m not taking these all-caps hyperventilations from the bad people, but from some of the outlets appealing to my own political leftishness. Y’all, you’re acting just like the capitalists. You’re not informing, you’re marketing.

You know what’s non-competitive in this milieu? Sobriety.

The truth is—and this draws us into the deeps of psychoanalysis—we get off on strong emotions; and when our lives have been flattened and disenchanted, feeling strongly about anything can become an addiction. We get caught in that cycle. After each refractory period, we have to chase another orgasm, another meth bump, another turn, crest, and fall along the Super-Nitro.

There’s a mysterious pleasure hiding behind certain forms of misery and fear; and I’m not talking about the kind of fear and misery experienced by people in actual conditions of extremity. I’m talking about most metropolitan people who experience extremity only vicariously.

Likewise, I’m not discounting all the reasons many of us have to feel anxious these days. Our world really is, in many respects, destabilizing right now. We’re in debt. The walls seem slowly to be closing in. We’re unsure how we’ll adapt or even if we can. In some sense, perhaps we’re entering the panic cycle as a way of getting out in front of things. We believe that fear is our only preparation. Reciprocally, if we fail to fear, we’ll be annihilated.

I know of people who get pissed when you refuse not their concerns, but their panicky reaction. The level of panic becomes synonymous with the intensity of virtue.

We’re living in the whimper, and we need the bang. The drama! Because the whimper is tedious, drenched in pointlessness and ennui. Carrot—hidden pleasure. Sticks—meaninglessness and imaginary annihilation. And so we’re in some sense predisposed.

Sobriety, on the other hand, makes disciplinary demands upon us—emotional and intellectual. It demands a certain rigor. Sobriety is not sexy. Sobriety is not fun. Sobriety is not saleable. It’s saving graces, though, are (1) of a calm and efficacious perspective and (2) you are far less likely to react in ways that make things worse.

Peace.

Trump is dying—politically and physically. We can only speculate about which will be first across the finish. Will he be finished off by midterms or congestive heart failure? Who can know for sure?

His disapproval rate nationwide is closing in on 60 percent, and the Party’s being pulled into his toilet’s vortex. His approval among independents—now the biggest (non) affiliation—sits at 12 percent. His general approval rating, however, remains at 39 percent (^^^it’s the gaps that matters), meaning he still commands the cult-like loyalty of almost 70 percent of what remains of the Republican Party.

His would-be successors—and for the life of me I can’t understand who would want to inherit this shit show—are trying to figure out how they can (1) beat the other contenders, (2) retain the fealty of the cult, and (3) recapture the cat herd of independents.

Right now, there can be no long term strategy, because the American Caligula is committing one unforced error nearly every day, with his main advisors now being Stephen Miller and Benjamin Netanyahu . . . and so the shit show just keeps getting shittier.

The two main crown contenders are J. D. Vance and Marco Rubio, with heterodox Tucker Carlson watching from the sidelines. Vance and Rubio are like infantry soldiers facing a wave of attacks (in the form of all those unforced errors), who can only concentrate for the time being on taking out the nearest threats first. Survive long enough to at some point formulate a strategy in this increasingly uncertain future.

Tricky, to say the least.

Half of Trump’s remaining base are people waiting to be raptured. The other half is split between people too ignorant to know better, people too stubborn and stupid (← these two go together like milk and cookies) to admit they fucked up, and hidebound white nationalists.

The glue holding them together, apart from their idol—the bloated rapist, is a kind of vague fascistic impulse fueled by an unfocused resentment. The retention of what’s left of this base is as essential as it is troublesome. Marco Rubio’s south-of-the-border Cold War sensibility led him and Trump into Venezuela. Now he’s leading the administration’s attempted restoration of the Red Scare.

Desperate people do desperate things, and the midterms are the nearest and surest threat.

It’s no surprise that “Little Marco,” working for the same Donald Trump who once humiliated him, would attempt the reanimate the rotten corpse of Joe McCarthy. McCarthy’s Iago was Roy Cohn—the Stephen Miller of his day. Cohn was like Miller in his absolute and shameless malignancy, like Vance (as some believe, at least) in his closeted sexual orientation, and Cohn was young Donald Trump’s mentor in legal thievery.

Of course, Gusano Rubio’s proposed crackdown on dissent is centered around the narrative that Cuba (!) is some existential threat to the US.

Hitler’s “big lie” philosophy that no one believed anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously” has morphed under Trump (and now Rubio) into what I call the “stupid lie” philosophy—a lie so stupid on its face that it abracadara’s into existence its own special credulity. Rubio’s now trying on some fictional “leftist terrorism” hatched in secret Cuban rooms, to resurrect not only Joe McCarthy but COINTELPRO.

Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound.

I predict that this won’t light a fire under the Democratic establishment because they’re waging a kind of McCarthyesque campaign against their own left flank as it gains thousands of new adherents each day courtesy of Israel’s genocidal actions, AI data centers, and unsupportable medical debt.

It’s lit a fire under the remain, though, because the crimes and depredations of ICE have already mobilized popular resistance across the country . . . and so the foundation for resistance to this latest ploy is already in place. The Trump administration, and to a lesser degree the Democratic establishment, is trying to bail out a lake with a bucket.

Rubio’s been on this tear since April, when even Esquire compared him to the Stasi. The latest furor, however, was whipped up by his recent “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” I’m not sure why he used an adjective as a noun there, but it was a kind of conference, where he was accompanied by Stephen Miller, FBI Alcoholic in Chief Kash Patel, and (naturally) Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.

The pre-crime perpetrators of this “far left terrorism” are any and all who call themselves “anti-capitalists, or anti-imperialists, Communists, or anarchists, or Marxists.”

“Through violence and through terror,” Rubio bloviated, “they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.”

Okay, I’m trying to figure out when these folks “imposed” themselves on “us,” but maybe I’m blinkered by my own long and close association with all of the above . . . and my own current anti-imperial, anti-capitalist sentiments.

(My address is online, Marco . . . drop by and I’ll brew you a coffee. We can discuss the relative merits of Mambo and Salsa.)

You see, among the many hundreds of all-of-the-above with whom I’ve had contact over the years, the overwhelming majority wouldn’t know how to build a bomb or even handle a firearm. Shouting slogans was the outer limit of their potential aggression, and in most cases they were remarkably gentle and sedentary folks—animated at times in speech, but more at home with a quiet joint and some Miles Davis on the turntable. Most couldn’t knock the skin off a chocolate pudding.

At any rate, last week Little Marco and Company suggested that all of us were aiming to put you in a Gulag, and that the only solution (here’s that pre-crime bit) is to employ the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) to shut us the fuck up.

National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) was issued last September by The Donald to crack down on

anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Ostensibly in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the administration saw this as an exploitable moment. Coordination of the crackdown—which is destined to go down as another unforced error that strips off what’s left of Trump’s remaining and ever-more-reluctant libertarian supporters—falls to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF).

So far, prosecutions under NSPM-7 have fallen on a handful of ICE resistors—not great, but let’s not scream through the streets along a slippery slope fallacy quite yet. If and when these investigations expand, they’ll be met by legal challenges which the challengers will eventually win.

This is a SLAAP suit strategy, aimed not at the actual prosecutions—yes, they want them, but the courts are going to tell them to fuck directly off—but intimidation. As a pretext for election interference or cancellation, it’s even more idiotic than the threat to post ICE agents outside polling stations—it will generate more resistance than it yields in the desired effect (kinda like the tariffs, ICE raids, and Iran war are going right now).

It’s certainly not going to serve as a springboard for Marco’s leap at the vacant throne. If anything, it will tank his chances even more than J. D. Vance’s were sunk by his recent and humiliating appearance on Joe Rogan. Stand by, Tucker . . . here’s your shot.

Every stop needs pulling out to resist this horse shit, naturally, but in cases such as this, do not ignore the most effective weapon we have against this desperate-ass proposed crackdown: ridicule.

Yes, restate its dangers, but more importantly, more widely, more accessibly, and more effectively . . . meet The Very Serious Miller and Rubio with rotten tomatoes and cat-calls.

Treat them like you would an attack chihuahua, as the butt of jokes.

Expose them as the puffed up dweebs that they are.

That is all.

Peace.

Somewhere around 700 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, people—now boiled down to one vague character named Homer—transcribed what was likely a story already in circulation about a king’s journey, in which he was faced by many challenges, while his faithful but put-upon wife waited virtuously at home for a very long time.

We had to read this story when I was in high school. Everyone did, because it was part of the literary canon of Western Civilization, and having read it was believed to be one small step toward our incorporation into the Tradition. The interpretations of the story by high school teachers were generally wrong. Like a bad preacher who seeks to squeeze out a faulty exegesis of some gospel passage by telling a middle class story about his suburban fourteen-year-old’s latest “challenge,” our high school didacts lacked the erudition and imagination to step out of their own time to appreciate how utterly different people from other times and places were; and so they projected their own epistemic priors onto the story. This was not elaboration, as some comparative minded people may try to rationalize; it was outright error in which the truest value of Odýsseia was lost—a historical, metaphysical, and even phenomenological window into a lost period.

When I was attending the University of Arkansas at Monticello—a farm school in a dry county mere minutes away from both Mississippi and Louisiana—I was blessed to have a professor whose prickly iconoclasm had gotten him fired from more prestigious institutions and exiled to the Arkansas outback. His name was Frank Reuter.

Frank’s classes walked me through Beowulf, Chaucer, and Shakespeare—with the same message for all three. These people and those around them were dramatically different from ourselves or anyone we had ever known. Those differences were far more than cosmetic or material. The world around the long-dead was not only developmentally prior, it was something utterly alien to our untrained imaginations. My near instant affinity for Duden and Illich—with their strange history of perception—can be credited to Frank Reuter guiding me through the corridors of these alien worlds, where ever line in the literatures suddenly emerged as cohering evidence. There were dizzy moments when I was transported across the years by this newfound coherence. Suddenly, my own situation became strange to me—is ephemerality, its contingency, its vain and almost childish self-assurance.

Anachronism is a natural default. It has to be torn out by training, like ethnocentrism does, like the assumption that all other persons are (or should be) like me. It’s a wall where we may need a window for our best imaginations to thrive.

There have been 33 films “based on the Odyssey,” and every one of them has been—in terms of their metaphysical fealty to the original—complete bullshit. Not on purpose, and not only because literature doesn’t adapt seamlessly to film. No film for a modern audience, from 1911 to 2026, can present the truest and original world view of “Homer’s” epic—a deeply conservative story told in oral formulae from an aristocratic perspective 2,700 years ago—and still gain a popular audience. In every case, it was one of those high school teachers or bougie preachers getting it wrong.

This is why I don’t give a damn about the latest tempest in a teapot over the casting for Christopher Nolan’s movie, which I won’t be seeing, the marquee for which is already featuring characters that look like—well, Matt Damon and a bunch of the beard-balmed guys I see at the local gym, dressed up in Madison Avenue “Greek” costumes. I guess the controversy is about Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, where she sported modern black hairstyles appropriately altered for Hollywood-Troy. Too “woke,” or some shit. ← This is so far afield of my issue with “Odyssey” films in general, and in fact much of the way history and art is taught or represented in the media, that it just looks like confirmation of my grumpy antithesis. Like, this is your problem with a story that was totally retooled by Hollywood in the first place?

Yeah, I understand commerce and the ever more consolidated and just-plain-awful film industry. Spectacle displaces real creativity. Cash receipts trump originality . . . and meaning. Hollywood’s gonna Hollywood; capitalism’s gonna capitalism. Nothing to do about it but grouse . . . (that’s what I’m here for 😉).

For an alternative to all this estupidez, and a ray of hope, I refer readers to Romanticon, where Joe Cauley has just published an incredibly good film reflection on the 1992 non-blockbuster but fantastic film, Bad Lieutenant, titled “Pledging My Love.”

Peace, y’all.

I tried to answer all exceptions
roaming like ants in a top hat
a stovepipe free of foliage
me, a temple prostitute
they, like broken bells
you, the crown of a withered flower

we stumbled wet in cypress knees
a marsh of mothers’ milk
teeming with alligator dreams
quenched in qualms of ruby light
drawing marl sediments to pine
beneath a rove of cloven cloud

we, and the parched armies of time
through lust and gloomy revolutions
measured smoke with bread crusts
grief and fear with body fluids
hopes and crowns like crow flocks
fled, displaced to the distant oaks

I knocked at your damning door
they failed like fire on peevish wood
you, kicking through the hasty slanders
all toils, all pardons, all progress
fat with sound and grazing
wound down like dying doctrines

infallible light felled along the sight line
the charm and harm of appendices
a celestial neglect gathered on tongues
up and off and slept among fugitives
in shadows and modified instruction
browned as the grass on thirsty graves

a wounded maze of asphalt cracks
a sunken swamp of amorous eyes
ranked along our pious medicines
bias slender as a long lick north
scribbling at the feet of lost women
this peaceful night of green deceit

I leave you with the wind and hours
between the iron and milkweed
to feed that pleased and haunted will
light as the wet wanton dragonflies
desperate as trembling daughters
soused on vowels and high blue veins

you entertained islands among zephyrs
braided hair in chapel pews
sliced seven limes in a committee seat
climbed seven affable apprehensions
tuneful as a pewter mockingbird
singing, walking, immune to moments

sundials spoke, crept the strange line
of deeds and limbs and disappearance
deflected in the curled ribbons of knowing
by some election between denial and grace
we turned to debt and caffeine, and
groomed ourselves with lullabies