1. Intelligent Palestinians, on the whole, hate their fanatical deathcult leaders. Intelligent Israelis, on the whole, loathe their weaselly clever but evil figurehead. Intelligent Americans, on the whole, despise their dimwitted and morally bankrupt president. Intelligent Iranians, on the whole, fear their theologically bent and duplicitous clerics. Intelligent Russians, on the whole, cower before their murderously calculating and despotic kleptocrat. 
 
2. Intelligent Ukrainians, on the whole, are aware of their leader's frailties, but admire him for his courage and humanity. 
 
3. Intelligent Republicans, who comprise about 18% of the Republican total, still find a way to hate all of the above leaders, except secretly Netanyahu, who they think will lead them to The Rapture regardless of what else he does, and Putin, who they admire for his can-do poisoning, plus Trump, who deep-down know is a dangerous rapist clown but in the end might save them a little cash, so whatever. 
 
4. Intelligent Chinese, on the whole, regard their leaders as a 100-year project, and so having emotional attachments one way or another is irrelevant, plus China is really twelve different countries cemented together by the pretense of Communism in the form of pragmatic autocracy, and so technically have not had an identifiable leader since being conquered by Genghis Khan. Intelligent Japanese would like to return to 1636 and be completely shut off from the outside world, free to worship an animist form of Shinto, plus Miles Davis. Intelligent Australians will never pay off the debt of Rupert Murdoch, and there are no intelligent Canadians, because in their pluralist neutrality and general good humor, not to mention excellent health care, intelligence is #33 on the list of Ottawa’s concerns. France (Voltaire), Italy (Caravaggio), and Spain (Lorca) are all governed by wine hangovers, and Germany is too intelligent for its own good, although to some degree still riding on the combined reputations of Schopenhauer and Hegel. 
 
5. All of Africa can be excused for continuing to reel from the endless colonial plunder of its resources and people. The conflict between India and Pakistan transcends intellect and is more a quasi-sexual dance. The Irish hate the British and the British hate themselves and the Scots hate everyone and the Welsh are left to stare longingly at Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man for someone to direct a little enmity toward. 
 
6. Brazil, it must be said, can be forgiven all, and is a country of pure genius. 

7. So, my friends, and otherwise reasonably aware people of the world, it is time for a long, hard gaze into the mirror of the allowances made to our collective personal comfort and the equanimity of small pleasures, while the worst people in the world were out there, busily, furtively, seizing control. 
 
8. To be fair, we were sucked into the idea that there was a natural and inevitable forward arc of progress, and that a combination of expanding knowledge and biological imperative would lead us to a wider, more workable understanding of the world. Let alone our individual needs and desires. Instead, it turns out we’re just as greedy, myopic, and ethically limited as the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago, except with better (arguably worse for being better) technology. 
 
9. And hilariously, those extremely advanced Persian Achaemenids, who were minting gold coins before anyone even thought of making up Jesus stories, and even more hilariously, very magnanimously freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity and allowed them to return to their homeland, is now modern Iran! 
 
10. The only question left, at this perilously late date, when we meet in the wee hours in the Castle Of The Deep State, with candles and sandalwood incense and Eyes Wide Shut masks, is:
“What do y’all want to do about it now?”

1. Did you know there were female gladiators too? Turns out there were plenty, among the biggest fans of WNGA being the emperors Nero, Titus, and Domitian.

2. Apparently these women sometimes fought slaves, but more often one another, animals, or dwarves. A big hit for the wealthy matrons of Rome was to show up to the Colosseum dressed in Threax (Gladiator) gear and swill wine/eat figs with which to maximize the revelry + buzz. "Achillea" was a highly popular figure, and obviously a feminization of Achilles, which is sort of like if we named our favorite female killer "George Washingtonia." Well, it's just another fold in the bloody voyeurism and death fetish of antiquity as channeled through the miracle of festival seating.

3. BTW, female Gladiators were called Gladiatrix, the plural of which is Gladiatrices.
Which is lexically awesome.

4. Have we talked yet about how truly and deeply (y)our president hates women? I mean, he hates all men that are not him as well, but you can spot in his hyena's eyes the special place of loathing he reserves for those he believes exist merely to service, or at least applaud him.

5. The Grifter, unapologetic about his comically regressive misogyny, was BORN to walk around in a toga and sandals. Let alone be primped and pampered and doted upon by weaselly sycophants (in Latin known as a "Vance", or "Cogito Ergo Lindsey Graham"), while rising to turn his thumb down (always down) toward the blooded sand, as the 1% cheers the death of another mortally wounded Gladiatrix. Which, yes, is a vital metaphor for anyone interested in resisting state control of their body (dressing room/Bergdorf's), let alone reproductive rights (Grab 'em by the ovaries).

6.  I would bet all of my worldly possession (but not the Luxman turntable) that Donald Trump paid cash for a half-dozen abortions during the 80's alone. Or at least had Michael Cohen do it. But much like how The Grifter courts Evangelicals with the greasy veneer of Christianity upon him while he does not in fact attend church, or when asked what his favorite book of the Bible was, with blank eyes but a straight face answered, "All of them", and who may be The Least Christian Man (Stormy Daniels) of the last two millennia, let alone claimed to walk on metaphorical water (fly over it in Epstein's plane) who has ever lived.

7. Yes, friends, it's a Libertarian world these days, where the primacy of The Individual in Randian terms is the center cog of a return to greatness, except, you know, for half the population too dumb not to not be female. In which case, USPS should still be razed and bid out to Enron, but want to head to your local (available in 5 states only) Planned Parenthood appointment without walking through a phalanx of chapter-and-verse quoting lunatics? Sorry, we didn't mean YOU control your body when blathering on about how we started a tech company without our parent's help and therefore are only responsible to ourselves, we meant WE control it, and by that I mean Peter Thiel, who is sort of the Quiet Elon.

​8. Hey, have you ever stared into the pure liquid hate in every blink of Melania's immigrant eyes, and wondered why she hasn't slid an oyster knife into The Grifter's ear while he slept yet?
In any case, if I had to bet my Luxman turntable on a Gladiatrix Spectacle, you can bet it would all ride on the First Lady, who has seen things even Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay never dreamed existed, and that was just the last time they had sex (how old is Baron again?) seventeen years ago. Melania makes Aileen Wuornos look like your Toll House cookie grandmother in comparison. I'm scared of her just typing this.

9. It's an obvious metaphor (this is the internet, what do you expect, Proust?) but we really are living in Spectacle Times, and it's becoming more obvious on a daily basis that it does not pay to sit in the cheap seats, or even at the edge of the canopy.

10. The sun, it must be said, does not forgive.

Next Week:  What we talk about when we talk about when Pam Bondi talks.

1. As I recently gave up halfway through “The Dark Tower,” I was reminded that, teenage zeal aside, on a sentence-by-sentence basis Steven King is a terrible writer. And yet, his ability to produce plot like a gold coin from a giggling niece’s ear, one that demands you find out how it resolves regardless of sentence quality, is a form of genius. The maddening desire to finish a piece of mediocre fiction may be the greatest skill any word jockey could possess in the end. At this point in my life, where I’m practically too distracted to finish a grilled cheese, the work of the genius recluse, with all its admirable descriptive flourishes and clever filigree that ultimately only looks inward, inspires in me an overwhelming desire to never-complete.

2. King Diamond, still touring, the Danish lead howler from Mercyful Fate, a band that made Twisted Sister seem like a bunch of dudes from Jersey who Actually Were Gonna Take It, at least if referring to free makeup samples from Bergdorf’s, is welcome over at Castle Beaudoin any time.

3. In 1933 King Kong was in love with Fay Wray, the jungle ingenue of terrestrial zoology’s favorite biplane-swatting megafauna. Mainly because of her explorer’s outfit, the tattered remnants of which explored flashes of bare thigh in every other scene and back in 1933 was the equivalent of a raunchy OnlyFans feed in today’s dollars. In 1976, our boy Kong doubled down on hapless Jessica Lange, reinforcing the notion that traditional manliness and stoic Cis-primate posturing will ultimately always prevail over nerdy/ethical cameramen (Jeff Bridges) and their willingness to defy corporate interests (Kong, in chains, brought back to America and anointed Gillette Mach III pitchman). In 2005, Naomi Watts reprised Wray’s Fay to generally stultifying effect, the movie unwisely gambling on the sexual magnetism between Adrian Brody and Jack Black.

4. On April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee, less than twenty-four hours after his “I Have A Dream” speech.

5. In 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a straight-sets singles match watched by 50 million Americans, held at the Houston Astrodome. While it was a seminal moment in both women’s rights, gender equality, and the mass de-closeting of lesbian sexuality, Riggs was a notoriously degenerate gambler with huge unpaid debts, mob connections, and a willingness to bet against himself. Although the fact that it was fixed, in a way, makes the payoff even better.

6. In 768, Charlemagne rose to become King of the Franks. His name was Carolus Magnus, Latin for “Charles The Great” or the Frenchified Charles Le Magne, which is amusing, as his father was “Pepin The Short” and his sons “Pepin The Hunchback” and “Lothair The Bald”. Charlemagne was also head of the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Holy nor Roman, really just the Caroliginian Empire, which is to say Germanic tribes/city states that took marching orders from Pope Leo III. Although he sure did Christianize the Saxons at the point of a spear at the Massacre Of Verden, in which fields of Pagan dead stacked three-high learned, as they took their last breaths, their lord and savior was not the modernish version of Odin they called Wodan, and so would no longer be sacrificing to The Irminsul, a rock pillar a whole lot like a cross, instead they would bleed into grass consecrated by a more loving + spanking new biblical theology. Charlemagne, at that point, declared himself Suzerain of Saxony, which is fun to type. Eventually he died.

7. Elvis “The King” Presley, in the Latter Fatter stage, had a special plane and on-call pilot whose purpose was to fly to Colorado to pick up his favorite sandwich from his favorite diner, one he regularly had a late-night craving for, called the Fool’s Gold Loaf, estimated at around 10,000 calories, which was a hollowed-out loaf of bread filled with a jar of jelly, two packs of bacon, and an entire jar of peanut butter. He was known, on particularly tough nights while strapped to the yoke of Valium, Col. Tom Parker’s aftershave, and Impossible Fame, to down more than one.

8. Freddie King is the greatest guitar player you’ve likely never heard of, and I could happily listen to the chickin pickin runs of “Hideaway” on a loop for six weeks straight.

9. Donald J. Trump is, to my everlasting dismay, my president. But he is not my king. If he’s yours, at this late date, at this point in time, after the towering Everest of readily available evidence pointing to his rare and dangerous combination of self-importance, cretinism, and venality, you deserve to be treated like the expendable serf that he regards every other person on the planet who is not Donald J. Trump as, with malice. Which includes both random lashings and Primae Noctis. Wake the fuck up.
​
10. Friends, today is a great day to get out in the streets and yell some. Venting against the madness is cathartic, and silence is pure testicular-free collaboration. There is no longer, if there ever was, a middle ground.

NF, One L
Issue TEN

1. Um, where’s the outcry from all the “Clinton is here to take your guns, John Kerry is here to take your guns, Obama is here to take your guns, Biden is here to take your guns, Kamala already took your guns” crowd? Where’s the Ruby Ridge fetishists and WACO conspiratorialists and Cliven Bundy supporters? Yes, deploying a battalion of US Marines against FELLOW AMERICANS to quell protest in an American city is EXACTLY why you insist on having guns in the first place, right? This is the epitome of why militias militia and shoot targets of looters on the range and store powdered Skippy in the shed and have sister-wives, right? To rise up against violent government overreach with the only means available to us, which is not voting, but the ownership of three plastic bins from the Container Store full of armor piercing bullets?

2. So Elon says The Grifter is in the Epstein Files, which we’ve all known for many years, so no surprise there, but that level of return artillery begs a simple question: Elon is implying that Donald J. Trump is a rapist, which we’ve all known for many years, but also a child rapist, an assumption which 39 documented flights on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” failed to contradict, but in saying so Elon admits that he’s known about it long before he started funding Trump’s campaign, so why is it just starting to bother him now? Getting in politics-bed with a rapist not bad enough vetting-wise to head up DOGE for President Harris instead?

3. Steve Bannon just called Elon a “South African grifter”, which is genuinely hilarious. Tesla contracts might be pulled as punishment (um, the word-for-word definition of Pay For Play), and maybe they’ll even grab his passport, paint him brown, and ship him to Robben Island. But even if not, look for a MASSIVE Rupe Murdoch-led negative propaganda shittrain to land on Elon’s hair-plugged head in the coming months. It might even turn out that his father was Willie Horton.

4. Small fact worth remembering: When Jeff Epstein was initially arrested and tried in 2008 on multiple counts of sexual abuse against dozens of teenage girls, the top federal prosecutor in Florida, Alex Acosta, gave him a plea deal that included, instead of a possible life sentence, a 13-month sweetheart work release. How could that possibly be? What precedent was there for the head of a long-term international sex trafficking operation being let off so lightly? In what some might feel is a surprising coincidence, out of nowhere, a decade later the very same prosecutor, Alex Acosta, was named Donald, J. Trump’s Labor Secretary! And people keep saying Donald J. Trump doesn’t pay his debts!

5. Hey, you know who was Florida Attorney General from 2011-2019, when a deluge of additional evidence surfaced about Jeff Epstein, but didn’t charge him with a single crime, and, in fact, he was only finally charged six months after she left office? Pam Bondi!

6. Who is Pam Bondi? Oh, just the grim-visaged praying mantis with a slick blond wig who is currently Donald J. Trump’s Attorney General, and therefore your (and my) upholder of the Rule Of Law! Probably just a coincidence.

7. Jeffrey Epstein, during his first trial, called Donald J. Trump “My best friend.” Really. Okay, anyone can say that about anyone else, under oath, it doesn’t mean it’s true, does it? It’s not like the “friend” as designated in that sentence bears any legal or moral responsibility, do they? I mean, if Bernie Madoff said, after swearing on a bible, that I was once his closest bosom buddy, would I be liable for payments to all the people he ripped off? Even if I flew around all the time on the “Madoff Express” with my pal The Bern, but had no clue at all where his billions came from?

8. Eight is speculative and might not actually exist.

9. Donald J. Trump will soon have a parade for Donald J. Trump that celebrates Donald J. Trump as a general concept, as well as Donald J. Trump’s birthday, plus tons of military equipment, at an estimated cost of around $50 million dollars. Donald J. Trump claims that Donald J. Trump is funding his own parade, which is widely disputed, but also means that political donations to Donald J. Trump will fund Donald J. Trump’s parade to the degree that it won’t later be found to have come out of a Pentagon Wrench Fund, including payments on his massively leveraged debt.

10. Will Jeff Bezos be there? Zuckerberg? The boards of Target, Delta, and every Sketchcoin Crypto company? Which favored oligarch will now sit in Elon’s Iron Throne? I’m giving 2-1 odds on Sheldon Adelson’s recently exhumed wife.

11. When you think about it, have you ever seen anyone mentioned, or even proposed, to be a private friend of Donald J. Trump? Just one single person who says, “Donald and I are good friends.” Is it also why he doesn’t have a dog, treats his sons like the backhand slap lackeys they are, is on his fourth 76% silicone wife, and has never shown a single human emotion in public except for avarice, dissembling, boasting, untalented lying, talented lying, anger, retribution, confusion, or the sneaking fear that deep down, there is no deep down to Donald J. Trump?
​
12. RFK jr. doesn’t count, Bill Barr has ghosted hard, and Pete Hegseth's only friend is an empty bottle of Kettle One.

1. Okay, okay, let’s just get this all straight: Elon Musk donated 277 million dollars to the Trump Campaign, the single greatest amount by an individual in American history.

2. Elon Musk, at least for now, at least on paper, is the wealthiest man in the world.

3. Elon Musk owns Twitter, which has 586 million users. For over a year, Elon Musk used his social media arm to shovel free advertising/propaganda for Donald Trump into the maw of 586 million people, and altered the site’s algorithm to promote those promoting Trump, which unquestionably altered the election results to whatever degree anyone wishes to throw graphs/charts/or percentages at.

4. The reason Elon Musk could do so is primarily because in 2010 the Republican Supreme Court codified the idea that money was free speech in the Citizens United decision. Money is not free speech. Money is a tool with which to sway elections in a way that far surpasses speech. Money is money that can be used to buy speech, which means buying up enough speech to restrict less-desired speech. So money, at least in terms of politics, is actually most effective as a weapon of silencing dissent.

5. If money were Free Speech, there would have been no reason for the American Revolution, to have left Britain, to purport that we live in a democratic republic instead of a monarchy, or to have any problem with living under the rule of kings, who as kings have all the money, and therefore all the speech, and so the constitution we spend so much time patting ourselves on the back for might as well be a $20 bill.

6. Elon Musk is an immigrant. Elon Musk is South African via Canada. Elon Musk’s grandfather was an avowed Nazi supporter who spent time in jail because of it. Elon Musk seems to have adopted his grandfather’s Nazi leanings, and isn’t shy about letting people know about them by, for instance, regularly giving Nazi salutes, supporting far right proto-Nazi German political parties, and promoting/retweeting accounts with Nazi leanings to his 200 million followers. Oddly enough, South Africa, home of mandated racial separation, was a haven for post WWII Nazis and their supporters to relocate. Like, for instance, Elon Musk’s grandfather.

7. Elon Musk, in exchange for his support of Donald Trump, was for the first four months of Donald Trump’s presidency made an entirely un-vetted, un-elected, un-confirmed by legislature or judiciary business figure who, instead of the president himself, was the most powerful man in the world.

8. As head of DOGE, Elon Musk was given unfettered access to vital personal and financial information of American Citizens. Elon Musk owns many businesses which are likely to benefit, when armed with the personal financial information of American Citizens, in any number of yet-to-be considered ways.

9. Elon Musk does a lot of drugs. Ketamine is apparently his primary jam. We know this because he talks about it freely, as do his friends and ex-wives, on the record, who have done those drugs with him. Ketamine is an equestrian veterinary tranquilizer that is said to put human users in a dissociative state. I have never taken Ketamine because, due to the fact that I spend a lot of my sober time attempting to be less societally dissociative, it does not sound like a lot of fun. Dissociation as recreation is therefore debatable, but I think both Republicans and Democrats can admit that someone who regularly chemically disassociates should probably not be wielding chain saws, celebrated for saluting Nazis, or allowed to carve up social programs on a whim.

10. The inevitable rift between Elon Musk and Donald Trump appears to have become flammable following Donald Trump’s decision to pull Musk’s right-hand-man, Jared Isaacman, from contention to head NASA. In a possibly unrelated coincidence, NASA is a government-funded space agency. Elon Musk owns SPACE X, a privately funded space agency. If Elon Musk’s right-hand man ran NASA, it is conceivable the information one is privy to while running NASA could be valuable to someone owning SPACE X.

11. In high-level academic circles this is known as a “conflict of interest.” In even higher-level academic circles, paying 277 million dollars to help someone get elected and then be awarded massive government contracts for your businesses, plus being given blind control to alter policy or arms of government without oversight, is known as “Cronyism”, “Pay For Play”, “The Antithesis of Democracy”, and even “Illegal”.

12. It is therefore a fascinating situation on any number of levels, the main one to me being this: Forget the 30% of MAGA that is clinically brain dead, why are all the supposed adults in the room, the America-first, freedom-loving, patriotic, founding father Republicans okay with any part of this anti-democratic travesty? Let alone all of it?

13. Elon Musk says the reason the Jeffrey Epstein files have never been released is because Donald Trump is in them.
​
14. There is no thirteen.

1. Noted gay icon John Wayne would have been 118 today.

2. Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison, although friends on set often referred to him as “Old Cameltoe”.

3. Why do we post arbitrary numerics online and without context, as if they held some larger meaning or clandestine knowledge? “Hammurabi of Babylonia would have been 2,477 years old today. Man, it really makes you think!”

4. John Wayne, at one time the global epitome of masculinity, turns out to have had some sexy gams on him, and if those Marions were waxed, dude could have been a rhinestone Jimmy Choo model.

5. While I definitely do not believe in or support cherry-picking the comments of (mainly) men from earlier generations/centuries outside of the context of their time and holding them to contemporary standards for any reason other than historical accuracy and general awareness, here’s a verbatim John Wayne quote that sort of defies time-travel or relative contextualization: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. I don’t feel guilty about the fact that five or ten generations ago these people were slaves.”

6. But, to be fair, he was great in “The Searchers”.

7. John Wayne famously dodged the draft. Or at least secretly and assiduously avoided serving in WWII. Although not as obviously fraudulent as your father paying a doctor that rented an apartment from him to claim you had bone spurs while playing on the Wharton tennis team, Wayne was indeed given 3-A status for “family duties”, even though he was drunk on set 99% of the time and unrecognizable to his children, burning through three marriages in the interim. A lot of men exactly his age and with the same familial status chose to serve anyway (oh, like Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, and Jimmy Stewart), but most American men who served did not also play war heroes in dozens of films and be feted by high society for decades because of it while hanging around the cabana in bootie shorts as artillery rained down upon Poland.

8. Just after Memorial Day, it is perhaps worth remembering that John Wayne was not the patriot he is still remembered as, nor a paragon of virtue, nor a cowboy, nor full of Grit, True or otherwise. He was a self-serving grifter with a lifetime of odious opinions under his Sans-a-Belt, whose personal and professional artifice was staggering in its enormity, and who reminds me a ton of someone, can’t quite put my finger on who.

9. In 1973, Wayne released a hit spoken-word record of a poem he wrote called “America: Why I Love Her.” On an aesthetic/craft level it is abysmal even by Rod McKuen standards, but the main dilemma is having to decide which is worse: the fact that he claimed to have written such mind-numbing pap, or the truth that he paid someone to ghost it for him.

10. This is not really about John Wayne as a person. We’re all deeply flawed and confused and entitled and crammed to the gills with delusions and self-rationalizations, flaws that most of us do not have to live down, or even try to make sense of, while profoundly famous. John Wayne was a guy who made a lot of mistakes and a blatant fraud, but he had friends and family and even though there’s no such thing as evil, he wasn’t evil, just misguided and self-indulgent and probably pretty dumb. Capitalism, this system we so revere, has almost nothing to do with economics and everything to do with applying leverage. The economic underpinning of the system CELEBRATES the application of ruthless leverage without penalty, and to some degree we all take advantage of it, because more than any thin religion, leveraging your circumstances to your own advantage is the true American Theology. And that’s exactly what John Wayne did. So, let's name another airport after him.
​
11. What this list, by number eleven, turns out to be about, is the myriad ways in which America never learns its lesson, or really anything at all, still mired in the stifling rule, cultural or political, of naked frauds and Grifters, none the wiser.

1. With the advance of technology that has destroyed a species-wide commonality of basic factual information, it is no longer enough to be a philosopher, to interpret the world. To do anything of value in 2025 that is not ultimately onanistic, one must alter it.

2. The process of “knowing” has evolved. To accumulate knowledge, one must presume the existence of a self, if only as storage unit. As we are unknowable to ourselves, and certainly to one another, a static receptacle or personality is a delusion. We are cyclical, in perpetual flux, there is no “object” or objectivity, there is no “subject” or subjectivity, there is merely experience, which is altered by its own contemplation, and therefore ever-changing.

3. We gain mass, in the literal sense of the weight of certain elements on the atomic level, and in the metaphorical sense of our own regard, in being perceived by others. We cannot control the perceptions of others, and so our own weight is unquantifiable, and as others are perceived while perceiving, they too are altered. “Weight” itself is a construction, solidity a fallacy, conceptualization random and randomly changing. There is only action.

4. Action is ultimately either creation or destruction.

5. Destruction as a creative force is temporal, not formative, and so ultimately slides into nihilism.

6. Creation is a series of inhalations and exhalations, an action that meets at the center of flux to spark inspiration, always either filling or emptying, always simultaneously birth and death. Art is transitory, meaningless and also the only source of meaning.

7. Theology is the attempt to explain creation without having the neurology to comprehend it, or the experience of its opposite to report back to the rest of the species for analysis, and therefore the perfect airless vacuum.

8. All religions are political systems of control. All political systems are created by man. Divinity as interpreted by man is a tautology void of existential worth. No political ideology has ever been put into practice as stated, immediately corrupted by men regardless of first principals or aspirations. Theologically mandated behavior is both contradictory and impossible to adhere to, which is its point. Individual shame at the inability to adhere to man’s pretense of interpreting divine dictate is a foundational control mechanism.
​
9. Communism, what it purports to be and how it manifests in practice, is just another religion. Democracy is an unreachable objective, the Republic is always the soon-to-be empire. Freedom has never explained what its possessor is actually free of. At least the capitalist system does not pretend to be anything other than the protection of wealth as concentrated in the few, and the worship of the celebrity of money. MAGA, in its joyful celebration of anti-thought, unresolved contradiction, repudiation of skepticism or analysis, and embrace of pure liquid stupidity, is perhaps the religion we have been carving into stone for millennia, and at this kinked-hose moment in the human continuum, quite possibly the one we deserve.