When I was fifteen, I could totally eat an entire rotisserie chicken in a single sitting. I was also gaining height by inches at a time.

Isn’t doubling down on stupid takes a big masculinity flex in 2026?

All the alpha males seem to do it.

Around the time a 14-year-old Arab kid brought a clock to class and was arrested as a suspected terrorist, I wrote about this. At the time muckrakers were being called FOIA terrorists for daring to engage in public oversight of the government. Things were already getting pretty fashy, just in time for Trump to take his escalator ride.

At the time I observed that terrorist had turned into a generic derisive, the way gay was used in the early aughts or communist during the McCarthy red scare… which Trump and the Republican party seem to be trying to resurrect.

So yeah, it really doesn’t surprise me that the State Department is defining Antifa as a terrorist group and an enemy of the state. In this context, Antifa and terrorist don’t actually relate to their original meanings, but serve as a catch all to lend legitimacy when the regime wants to persecute its political enemies.

Much the way that anyone who opposed McCarthy could be investigated and tried as a communist, anyone who opposes Trump or MAGA or ICE can be investigated and tried as Antifa.

Some of that nonsense should get halted at the courts – ICE and the DoJ have already lost the presumption of regularity – but we’ve seen already protestors get disproportionately long sentences for alleged and minor crimes based on alleged association to terror groups. And Trump is still getting awful people confirmed to federal benches.

The ultra-wealthy are not only not geniuses, but they might be downright incompetent.

The most recent episode of How Money Works (here on YouTube) demonstrates this during the recent bonanza of tech layoffs (these include the AI layoffs, attributed falsely to replacement by AI automation).

The story it tells starts with the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, which lead to mass telecommuting and then the great replacement. The working class got a modicum of class consciousness since it was clear that their jobs were necessary and involved skills that would be difficult to replace.

The tech industry had developed its own culture from this and had gotten used to being able to openly negotiate their salaries, and the C-suite didn’t like that. In fact, the billionaire class openly resents the workforce on which it depends.

And thus, they laid off a ton of people. Too many, it turns out. It started with the RTO mandates, some of which were intended to incentivize workers to voluntarily quit. And some of them did. Specifically, the best and brightest talent were the ones most confident they could get work elsewhere at better pay that still allowed telecommuting.

So the billionaire class, via the great layoff, facilitated their own brain drain.

And now those same tech companies have found they’ve gotten rid of too many people, including essential talent that actually knew how to run the businesses (and the technology). So they’re now hiring them back. The greybeards are negotiating at an advantage, and are asking for higher salaries. And the ones that are no longer available are being replaced with rookies fresh out of college.

So yeah, the tech industry billionaires, out of pure vindictiveness, collectively fucked themselves.

I hypothesize our billionaire class got rich in their early careers through a combination of fortuitous opportunity, family connections, infusions of generational wealth and ruthless willingness to sabotage their peers. Then they were subject to years of sycophancy and cronyism where they were shielded from any criticism. They gladly assumed they earned their lot, and got there because they are brilliant. At that point, having immense wealth, it’s difficult to not fail upwards, and so they don’t actually see the difference between skillful decision-making and incompetence.

Sadly, incompetence with extreme amounts of money is very dangerous, and so we have the high lords playing their games of thrones and wrecking the world for the rest of us.

Vaccine denialism was a problem during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918.

In the eighties, I remember that Christian Scientists would refuse medical treatment for their dying children, choosing to pray instead. The kids usually died.

There was always a subset of the population who refused to acknowledge science or expertise.

These days, we’ve gotten rid of the government departments of experts that are supposed to advise our legislators regarding the consequences of the bills they want to pass. Instead they just listen to the lobbyists of the corporations who finance their campaigns.

Or in the case of Trump, his own imagination, since he hallucinates more than Google Gemini. A recent example is his belief that the CHIPS act requires the hiring of trans folk to run microchip-making factories. (It doesn’t. Also the rumor that he confused transgender with transistor is probably false.)

For most Americans, it would take a lawyer present just to know what is safe to do while under arrest.

The problem is, SCOTUS has already ruled on this in 1985, via the good faith exception. If a police officer mistakenly violates your fourth-amendment rights, but did so in good faith, then evidence of any crime found is inadmissible. It’s very difficult to prove bad faith, and officers have learned to lie to cover up, say, that they knew they were crossing a line, or were motivated by corruption, bigotry or ideology to fish for evidence beyond the scope of a reasonable search.

Besides which, I wouldn’t trust an officer to turn off data before combing though my phone, and the difference between what is on the phone and what is cloud data is transparent. They would absolutely have access to my entire email history of decades, and law enforcement has intrinsic personal cause to fish for criminal activity.

For one thing, collars is how police officers get accolades and promotions. And for another, there’s the matter of asset forfeiture. Police routinely will declare any open cash or valuable property as criminal in order to confiscate it. And it’s very difficult to get it back. In the 2010s some precincts already had the capability to empty pre-loaded credit cards, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they could do something similar with mobile payment services.

In the US since the aughts, law enforcement departments have regarded the public as enemy, and this shows up countless times in uncovered intra-department memorandums. It also shows up in precinct suspicious activity guidelines that are contradictory and include all possible forms of behavior (including inaction). It also shows up in police tools like poorly-trained detection dogs who signal at a 90%+ false positive rate, or the two-dollar roadside drug test that false positives on dozens of inert chemicals, such as donut sugar glaze.

In the twentieth century, I would hypothesize over 50% of our incarcerated are innocent, or are serving a sentence disproportionate to the alleged crime they committed. Of course we’re now in the era of random abductions and detention centers run by private prison companies.

Possibly not the best example, then.

It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
It’s fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.
You can get yourself clean
You can have a good meal
You can do whatever you feel!

Meanwhile, if they seized his phone and tried to unlock it without a warrant signed by a judge, that is a violation of his rights as per the fourth amendment of the Constitution of the United States. However, in the US presently, such violations are routine by law enforcement.

Some agencies insist suspects do not have access to those rights if certain conditions apply, such as being within one hundred miles of a US border (such as a coast), or being on a terror watchlist.

…Federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

Terrorism watch lists, no fly lists and government lists of cults and sects should not be legal in the US, as they violate the right to due process. Often there’s no reasonable way to challenge having your name on a list. It’s put there arbitrarily by a law enforcement officer without any oversight or process, meaning your name can be added again without restriction. And being on those lists often affects the civil rights to which you have access.

But then, the new regime is trying to strip ordinary citizens of their rights until we are all bonded serfs again.

They’re doing a lot to curb education now, and as it is, STEM and literacy are dropping hard in generation alpha.

But that also means the US master race is just not going to be able to compete compared to EU and China. If the US was stable, it would mean the US would turn into another North Korea.

But the US is destabilizing as we watch. We may end up in the same situation that Germany was in during the late 1930s, where they borrowed too much and run out of resources, and have a big ol’ army standing by; it’s time to get expansionist.

I think Chinese bombers over Washington blotting out the sun is the worst possible outcome, but it’s still on the table.

FOX News is possibly the most honed outlet of the massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and television viewership.

It offers a diet of fear, rage and bigotry, and then seasons it with red-pill conspiracy theories, implying that everyone else is lying to you, but FOX knows better. It encourages its viewers to reject all other sources, so that you’re watching news in a silo. Just FOX and you.

And this is the carrier by which it feeds you culture war and a narrow, extremist ideology.

And we know it works. Presidents, US Senators and Supreme Court Justices will regurgitate FOX talking points verbatim, using the very same words in the same order, when expressing opinions and passing policy.

We’ve known for a long time human beings are fallible. Fox Mulder tells Robert Modell his shoes are untied and he looks. Societies regulate gambling, outlaw false advertising, investigate confidence ploys, because we know humans can be tricked. Cybercrime divisions take phishing seriously because we know that the weakest link in the security chain is between chair and keyboard.

So it’s interesting that Ronald Reagan, as part of deregulation, had his FCC end fairness doctrine regarding news media, opening the gateway for conservative radio like Rush Limbaugh and eventually Murdock’s new project to change minds, the FOX News channel. We’ve known that humans can be sown into panic since Orson Welles’ radio drama of War of the Worlds.

So yeah, we’re being subjected to what is literal mind control, and our government isn’t doing a thing to stop it. But at the same time we’re in the age of prediction markets and online sports betting, and our respective protection bureaus have stood down, so it’s not exactly like our state is watching to make sure we’re not being defrauded.

To be fair, when I took Economics 101: Macroeconomics in 1985, there was a big point about how important it was to maintain a fairly even wealth distribution, with a discussion of how it is a very bad thing™ for all the wealth to consolidate at the top. (In the meantime, Reagan was gutting all the policies that were used to keep wealth distributed and preserve a strong middle class.) So this is something that anyone who took a basic college course should know.

In time, I got confused that presidents and legislators kept pushing supply side (trickle-down) economics and kept passing laws that allowed the upper class to keep more of their money, while leaving the lower and middle classes to languish, when I was certain these officials were educated (or had experts who were) and should know better. Then I worked out that they are just captured and corrupt AF.

Here in the States, AI romance is one of the few AI services common shlubs will pay for. Most users only use their free token allotment. Otherwise it’s businesses that buy tokens and drive AI profits.

And US AI offerings are still plummeting into debt, so any service that makes money is welcome. So far, AI workforce replacement costs more than human workers (by far) and does a poorer job most of the time. Hence Doctorow’s notion of a reverse centaur, the human employee that checks the machine’s work (rather than the machine checking and augmenting human work).

Also here in the States we have a culture war. Manosphere men (Incels, MGTOW, seduction culture alpha males, etc.) vote Republican, so influencers get infused with billionaire money. But women (even conservative women) find them insufferable. The battle of the sexes, like the war against trans folk, immigrants and libs serves to distract people away from class consciousness.

Zoomers are not having sex compared to prior generations at the same age, and an AI companion might be a serviceable substitute. They were already taking on waifus anyway.

The affordability crisis, poor job growth and poorer upward mobility also informs the lowest fertility rate in US history (below 1.6 which some think is critical). To be fair, US fertility has been below replacement for decades, and we made it up with immigration.

And it’s the ownership class most frightened by depopulation. Curiously they keep makibg policy decisions that are downright antinatal.

Seriously, we have multiple economists saying the only way out of this fine mess (and to save the world) is to massively redistribute the wealth at the top to the rest of the population.

There are a lot of pedophilia-adjacent paraphilias. It’s not just size difference.

There’s the fantasy of having a partner who is innocent and easy to dominate, as per the born sexy yesterday trope. Entire movies have been made about this.

There’s an intrinsic sexual attraction to youth, advantage of which is taken by the fashion industry, using children in compromising poses to market their wares. Underaged kids presented as sex objects has been an unregulated marketing tool for over a century now.

There’s interest in teen coming-of-age scenarios, cinema of which was rampant in the late 1970s to 1980s, which did not shy away from sexuality. Mass market erotica in the 1970s featured teen sex, which became more regulated in later years.

There’s those interested in child sexual experimentation. Children explore their sexuality with their peers, and this is regarded as normal and even healthy according to pediatric consensus. Here in the states, though, we’re puritanical AF, and it’s commonplace for parents to freak out when they catch kids (their own or otherwise) fooling around or exchanging peeks at their bits.¹ I can’t speak for causality but the US has an ageplay community that occupies its niche in the kink sector.

By far, (according to the very few studies we have on the subject) most people who have an interested in child sex or teen sex scenarios either don’t pursue to explore it at all, or do so with deliberate care to avoid harm and wrongdoing. Since the 1990s, the public has become more aware of the harm that can be caused by sexualizing children and teens before they are autonomously ready, and most folk instead seek to explore their own fetishes in safety with consenting adults. Sadly, there are predators out there, but like other violent criminals in the population, they’re the exception and not the norm. (At the same time, our society struggles to be sufficiently concerned about children’s welfare in general, with food insecurity, family insecurity, housing insecurity and healthcare insecurity being at critical highs in the US.)

Incidentally, for a while now, Twitter’s CSAM problem has gotten worse since Musk turned it into X. And xAI’s CSAM problem is significantly worse than those of competing AI services. Musk isn’t willing to correct either matter with additional safeguards or human moderation, rather just yells at his user base and points to the xAI ToS. And also Musk’s disclaimers about his acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein being only brief and casual are not convincing, and smack of protesting too much and too prematurely. (Kinda like Melania Trump’s disclaimer.)

¹ In the age of cell phones, police and courts of law will bust, convict and imprison underaged teen lovers who are caught sexting each other for creating and distributing CSAM, especially if those images escape into the public. Even if it’s of themselves. Even if they were originally intended to be private. A few states have since passed legislation to allow teens to sext each other so long as they show reasonable caution to keep their pics private, but in most states, police and school administrators still freak out over personal phone snaps of naked teens.

Infantino delicately informs Trump that he is not a part of the Fellowship.

Topical, though. xAI is in trouble for allowing users to create CSAM, but instead of adding more safeguards and moderators to the service? he’s just pointing to the ToS and yelling at users on Twitter.

Liz Cheney being president is not a positive. Non-whites and LGBT+ folk are still fighting for their rights and to get representation. No-bid government contracts are going to big construction and big military instead of big tech. Social programs are still gutted and dying or dead. Big religion dominates education. We’re still locked in a war in the Middle East or Asia. The world is still burning while the federal government still refuses to regulate big polluters.

There are multiple watchlists!

Rolex or Casio?