Yesterday, another Wildberries warehouse in Russia went up in flames. It almost doesn’t matter when you read that sentence, because a Wildberries warehouse is getting blasted by Ukrainian drones almost every day.

“Wildberries” is Russian for “Amazon.” It’s their version of the Amazon retail empire. They’re getting hit by Ukraine ostensibly because they sell drones and drone parts. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a wily fellow and certainly knows that disrupting the Russian version of Amazon is going to draw the attention, and ire, of Russian citizens.

I take no joy in the knowledge that blowing up warehouses is likely to lead to civilian Russian deaths.

But the Russian people are out of excuses. They have been willfully blind to Putin’s brazen savagery against their neighbors (and, in many cases, friends and family) for more than four years, just as our own population of MAGA clowns and drug addicts and deviants have been supporting the blatant and growing authoritarianism of a sexual predator posing as a president in the ruins of the White House for a total of more than six years.

Russian citizens have access to the same information we do, just as MAGA insurrectionists and Epstein cheerleaders have access to the realities behind their hero’s gruesome exploits.

Russian citizens cower under the excuse that their versions of Fox News create a news monolith on behalf of Putin that they can’t escape. Truthful information about Ukraine and Putin, though, is available via the Telegram app, which is almost as pervasive in Russia as Facebook is in the United States.

Dylan Combellick, who basically monitors the Ukraine War for a living, also reports that Wildberries facilities in Penza, Russia, and Sarapul, Udmurtia, also in Russia, were hit last night.

Ukraine isn’t just hitting warehouses. It’s decimating the Russian oil infrastructure that has propped up the Putin regime since it first invaded its neighbor to the west.

Every major Russian oil refinery has been hit, per United24, a Ukrainian news service:

• Omsk Oil Refinery: Russia’s largest refinery (22 million tons/year capacity); struck on July 6, 2026.

• Kirishi Oil Refinery (KINEF): Leningrad region capacity of 20–21 million tons/year; repeatedly targeted.

• Ryazan Oil Refinery: 17.1 million tons/year capacity; repeatedly struck, causing prolonged suspensions.

• Kstovo Oil Refinery (NORSI): Lukoil plant near Nizhny Novgorod processing 16 million tons/year; hit multiple times including July 2026.

• Yaroslavl Oil Refinery (Slavneft-YANOS): 15 million tons/year capacity; struck multiple times.

• Volgograd Oil Refinery: Lukoil plant with 14.8 million tons/year capacity; targeted in drone operations.

• Perm Oil Refinery (Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez): 13.1 million tons/year capacity; hit in late July 2026.

• Moscow Oil Refinery: ~12 million tons/year capacity; hit in multiple waves of strikes during summer 2026.

• Novokuibyshevsk Oil Refinery: 8.8 million tons/year capacity in the Samara region; damaged and partially halted.

• Syzran Oil Refinery: 8.5 million tons/year capacity in the Samara region; struck by long-range drones.

• Bashneft-Novoil (Novo-Ufimsky) / Ufa Refineries: Bashkortostan facilities processing over 7 million tons/year; hit in repeated operations.

These numbers and bullet points come directly from a Ukrainian news source, so it’s reasonable to expect a propaganda flourish behind them, but I fact-checked most of the incidents, and various other sources around the interwebs seem to confirm the numbers.

The reliable Combellick, who maintains a daily report on the Ukraine War on the Medium platform (with a decidedly Ukrainian slant), describes the most recent attack on Russian oil infrastructure:

The Lukoil-Permnefteorgsintez (PNOS) was hit by Ukrainian drones.

PNOS, part of the Lukoil Group, processes over 13 million tons of oil annually, produces high-quality gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation kerosene, and lubricating oils. The refinery is a key industrial facility in the region and one of the most technologically advanced in the country, supplying fuel to both the domestic market and export markets.

— Dylan Combellick

He also reports that the port in Taman, Krasnodar, a Russian oil depot that is used to transport oil, is on fire, probably from Ukrainian drones.

The attacks have resulted in queues at Russian gas stations that would look familiar to Americans who tried filling up during the Yom Kippur War and OPEC Oil Embargo of the 1970s.

The average Russian is now feeling the effects of the war in ways they can no longer ignore. Some of them are even fighting each other for gas, according to Combellick and other sources, such as Nadin Brzezinski, another reliable source on the Medium platform (also very pro-Ukraine).

Another reporter, and apologies for not remembering who, described the situation in parts of Russia as something out of a Mad Max film.

During the years since the war began, Ukraine has become a drone superpower. Its drones can, and do, hit deep inside Russia to the point where the Russian oil infrastructure is in danger of collapse.

Russia is responding by killing women and children while targeting apartment buildings from Kyiv to Lviv in Ukraine.

Like our own madman, Russia’s is becoming increasingly desperate as the strength of internal dissent grows and the vultures begin to circle.

In the United States, where our own madman has handed the keys of the Strait of Hormuz to a belligerent, tyrannical authoritarian theocratic regime, his own allies, even the crazy ones, are turning against him.

Alex Jones, who for some reason is still able to broadcast his mindless rants even after having his income sucked dry by the courts punishing him for unforgivable lies toward the victims and parents of Sandy Hook Elementary School, has joined a growing “impeach him” chorus within MAGA.

Today, Republican Senators, for now, gave up on trying to confirm the Predator-in-Chief’s personal attorney, Todd Blanche, although I don’t expect any resilience in opposition there. The fiend in the Oval Office will rouse himself from his sleep long enough to spew methane out of his mouth and do some kind of horrible thing to take our mind off it, and then Republican Senators will confirm Blanche, because that’s what cowards do.

Still, there are a ton of cracks in the walls of MagaLand, and the reason for this is that no matter how firmly piles of excrement set, eventually a wall with that kind of foundation collapses upon itself.

I won’t reiterate the various signs of collapse here. Most of you are inundated with enough Substack articles to know what’s going on.

The man is dying, and the only question remaining is how many people he wants to bring down with him.

We are fortunate, ironically, that he is fooling himself into thinking he’s built a legacy worth protecting.

But I don’t know that Putin is crippled by that same weakness.

Ukraine is winning the war Putin started four years ago. Its drones are sought after by every military in the world. The phrase “economic collapse,” in the wake of at least a million dead soldiers, is a legitimate one in describing Russia’s imminent future.

So the fate of this most dangerous hour probably rests in the hands of Trump’s closest ally, a man thousands of miles away whose grip on power is unknown. We can be sure, though, that the vultures are circling there, too. An authoritarian’s worst enemy is almost always his friend.

Buckle up.

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Chapter Three — Missing Pieces

If someone is chasing you, you better hope it’s not Charly. When Charly is hunting you, it’s more like a charging rhinoceros than a human or another vampire trying to catch you.

Charly has always been known within his vamp house in central Africa, the Ilunga House, as an indefatigable, incomparably puissant warrior. A little more than a century ago, he feasted on hundreds of Belgians when King Leopold controlled vast parts of central Africa as his own private kingdom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Leopold claimed full ownership of a massive African nation called the Congo Free State that he carved out of the jungle. There was nothing free about the place. It became the nightmarish backdrop to books like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

The only thing free about the Congo Free State was Leopold’s willingness to rip entire tribal nations and languages out of history books before historians had a chance to sit down and start scribbling. That, and his penchant for plundering the nation’s resources, turning valleys of gold into ruined gulleys full of blood, grieving widows, and broken, starving children.

The Ilunga House didn’t much care, but if they had any human allies in the region at all, it was the straggling survivors, not the invading Belgians. While the House feasted mostly on Belgians, they also kept the locals honest by occasionally feeding on them, too.

The Ilunga House, through feudal kings and their proxies, also convinced locals that central African vampires, the Banyana, were a side-effect of colonialism. This created a feigned alliance that made it easier for the Ilunga House to maintain significant landholdings deep in the jungle where the Belgians dared not tread.

Having a ten-thousand-year-old warrior (that’s Charly) as their knight in shining armor didn’t hurt. Charly ravaged entire Belgian settlements throughout King Leopold’s Congo strongholds. Europeans knew there was a fearsome power in the dark forests they tried to master, but they didn’t know what it was, or what to call it.

It was Charly.

Charly is one of the oldest living vampires on earth, if not the oldest. He’s one of the most ancient living creatures on Earth, too. He’s older than the giant sequoia trees of California, and he sometimes looms as large when he’s bearing down on you in a cold rain. He is powerful enough that he could have survived the Jurassic Age.

You don’t want a being like that chasing you.

He chased me to the SUV, where Owens was waiting outside with Cornelia, poised to fire her special bullets into whoever or whatever was pursuing me. Cornelia was a special gun, but as my legs pumped their way toward Owens, I wasn’t sure she could stop Charly. I was even more sure that I didn’t want her to.

“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. “It’s Charly!”

Owens steadied his aim anyway. He never listens to me.

“No! Owens!”

Two choices faced Owens as I neared him, my rampaging friend close behind. One, obviously, was to shoot Charly and hope it would at least slow him down enough for me to get into the SUV and get us out of there. Even under siege from Cornelia’s bullets, which were toxic to vamps, Charly would probably survive and heal quickly enough to hunt us down soon after falling. The other choice was for me to face Charly and appeal to what was left of his mind to end his attack.

By turning around in front of Owens and his beloved anti-vampire weapon, then turning my back on him to face Charly’s charge, I guess I was choosing option two for both Owens and me.

“Fuck, Atticus, what the fuck?” Owens blurted out into what was now a horizontal, freezing rain that sliced into our faces like tiny shards of shrapnel. Garrison jumped out of the SUV, too, holding a different kind of gun, maybe a Glock.

Charly reached me more quickly than I thought he would. I knew by his footfall that he was near, but he was upon me almost the instant that I finished my pirouette in front of Owens.

You might remember from my previous tale that I sometimes envied the short life of humans. At this moment in time, I was pretty sure that humans got a raw deal. I suddenly found myself wanting much more.

I thrust my hands in front of me in a feeble attempt to stop Charly from removing my head and launching it into the Appalachian foothills north of Atlanta. “Charly,” I said. “Wait, man, it’s me. Atticus.”

Charly’s laugh was uproarious. “I know that, you chicken shit.” His laugh thundered to the point where a pine cone from a nearby tree bounced off my head. He swatted my shoulders like the old friend he was. “I had to be sure it was you, bro.”

“The fuck?” said Owens.

“Yeah,” I said. “The fuck.”

“Long story, man.” His head bobbed around like a skittish bird on a cautious hunt. I wondered who he was worried about. Charly wasn’t afraid of anyone that I knew of.

“Well, fuck me, let’s get out of the rain.” I looked at Owens, then the SUV. “Will he fit in there, Owens?”

Owens laughed and opened the doors. We all climbed in, Charly last. Garrison took the driver’s seat and Owens the passenger side. Charly and I sat behind them.

“What was that all about, Charly?” I asked when we were all settled. I looked down. “I think I may have shat my pants.” I never tried playing the tough guy with Charly. Nobody did. And Charly knew better, anyway, than to think that I could think I could take him in a fight without a bazooka filled with magic vampire-killing projectiles.

Somehow, Charly was already sweating. He wiped his big bald head as he said, nodding toward the house, “If I tell you what’s up in that place, you won’t believe a word of it.”

“At this point in the timeline, Charly, I’d believe a singing goat was the president of the United States. Try me.”

“Umm. Okay. But you’re not gonna like this.”

Owens couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Fuck’s sake.” It’s a disease he has, I think.

“Out with it,” I said.

“They cloned Daphne, man.1 They fuckin’ cloned her.”

“You’re right on both counts,” I said. “I don’t believe it, and I don’t like it.”

“And I had to make sure it was you out there in the yard, you know?”

“No, I don’t know anything. And it’s getting worse.”

Charly shook his head. He seemed genuinely shaken. “So,” he said, “I figured I’d give you a scare. I knew the real you would run like the chicken shit you are.”

I wanted to smash his newly formed smile, which had morphed into the size of a piano keyboard, into a million pieces.

“Charly,” I said. “Be nice.”

He was beaming. Pretty happy guy for a dude who was afraid of clones.

“You’re fucking proud of yourself,” I added. I was insulted, but I couldn’t deny it was a sound strategy when he continued.

“See,” he said. “A clone woulda stood its ground. No history, no real knowledge of me.”

I nodded. “I still hate you and I always will from now on,” I said in a deadpan voice. “But, shit. Tell me more.” I wasn’t ready to believe his wacky story about Daphne, but the truth was, Charly was the last person to have seen her that I knew of.

“I don’t know what the hell is going on in there,” he said, looking in the direction of the house again as a flash of lightning lit up the grounds with a double strobe of light.

“Sounds like a battle of apex predators to me,” sneered Owens. Balls of steel, still, even after all he knew about Charly.

Charly, though, no longer hated Owens, so he ignored the remark.

Calming down, breathing more slowly, Charly said, “I moved in there a few weeks ago. I lost track of Daphne in the woods about a month ago.”

“You mean, the jungle? In Madagascar?” I asked.

“Yeah, uh-huh. Whatever. We were hiding out with a Kalonoro clan. And another one, I dunno man, snatched her? I don’t know what else to call it.”

“Another Kalonoro clan?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah. Something like that. They have this thing about newly turned vampires.” Charly shrugged. “They think they have special powers or something. Just old tales, you know? These old little vampy asses ain’t the most sophisticated dudes on the planet. But if they believe ‘em, they believe ‘em, right? So, they snatched her.”

“You might have told me sooner, dude. I’ve been scouring the fuckin’ planet for your ass for the last month and a half.”

“I’m sorry, Jade. I just got here last week. I tracked every scent in that jungle for a month. Getting you involved woulda slowed me down. I was sure I’d find her.”

I wanted to smack him again, and he knew it. He grasped my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “There’s nothin’ I wouldn’t do for you,” he said.

“I know.” I could feel tears trying to squeeze out of my eyes. “But now you’re saying they cloned her? Or someone else? I mean, there’s a big window of information I’m missing here, Charly.”

“Yeah. Well, me too. I’ve been at that house about a week, renting a room. I tracked them down. You know how good I am at tracking, right?”

I nodded. “No creature better in all the land.”

“I knew for sure wherever she was, it was somehow associated with that house. I smelled her scent. It was unmistakable.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Always has been. But wait. Before you go any further. What’s with the eye thing?”

“Eye thing?”

“Yeah, dude. Your eyes were all glazed over and black and shit before you started chasing me. That’s what got me scampering, you asshole, not because I was afraid of you.”

I was afraid of him.

Charly laughed. “You were so scared.”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little. So?”

“An old Ilunga trick. Works every time.”

Owens broke in with, “Can you two lovebirds try to get to the central issue here? Old Garrison here is about to fall asleep.” Garrison responded with a dirty look.

“Can’t really be hurried, asswipe,” said Charly. It felt like old times.

“What is the central issue, Charly?” I asked. “Clones? Daphne being kidnapped? What?” I was thinking about the woman on the table Owens told me about. “I mean, Owens, that was Daphne your police report was talking about, right?”

“Ya think?” Owens said sarcastically.

“Wait, what?” asked Charly.

“That’s why it would have been nice for you to come forward, you know, the very fucking second you got stateside?” said Owens angrily. “You were carrying a lot of information we could have used.”

“I was scared,” Charly said. That kind of comment wasn’t going to elicit a response even from Owens because it fell so far outside the zone of probability that it was impossible to react. Charly looked at me. “Scared for you. My best friend, ever, in all this world, and in all my years.” That was saying a lot for someone who’d lived 10,000 years. “I didn’t know what was wrong with her. Still don’t, man.”

“Wrong with her?” asked Owens.

“Yeah, man. I finally found her in the basement of that shithole. Lying on a fucking metal table. Staring straight up into the sky, saying nothing, her eyes wide open, no reaction to my touch. Nothin’. Until then, I heard or saw nothing from her. That’s why I didn’t tell you dudes. I mean, Jade, man, I was thinking that me coming back and telling you she got snatched right from under me would be worse than anything for you.”

“Let me handle my feelings, Charly. But go on.”

“Yeah, man. I know. I can be a dumbass sometimes.”

“Should be your fucking middle name,” said Owens. Balls of steel, that man.

Charly continued: “But I followed the wrong scent, Jade. The wrong fucking scent. That wasn’t her. Just, you know, smelled like her. And looked like her, except for the vacant, blank, comatose look.”

“So, this clone,” I said. “Is it in that house right now? While we’re yappin’ about it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Fuck me,” I said.

Owens was still pissed. “Who’s Chevalier?” he asked.

Charly looked at Owens. “So you dudes been tracking him, too?”

“Nope,” said Owens. “We just discovered how much we love sitting in SUVs for hours in Midtown neighborhoods eating donuts together in the freezing fucking rain. Fuck, man? How have you lived so fucking long with all that salt in your head?”

“Owens,” I said. “We were here for like, five minutes.”

Owens was pushing Charly pretty hard. Hard enough to make me wonder if Owens thought that maybe Charly was a clone. They always had an antagonistic relationship, but Charly reached a point during the Jerrold Mountain battles with the Wurdulac where I knew he’d throw his body in front of a train to protect Owens. Not that a train could hurt Charlie.

But this was a risky test, one that, if the clone responded by taking Owens out, would only prove that Owens was a smart dead guy.

But Charly was smart, too. Smarter than Owens knew. He smiled at Owens. “I see what you did there. These clones, dude, they have no personal history. You wouldn’t be able to piss it off this way”

Owens just stared.

“Good thing, too,” said Charly.

“Yeah, well,” said Owens. “That’s assuming I believe all this clone bullshit. But after Longtooth, I guess I’ll buy anything for now.” He still had a fresh scar in his hand from his coffee house encounter with Longtooth.

“And the Mouras Encantadas,” I said.

“Yeah, no shit,” said Owens.

Garrison then broke into the conversation. “Can we assign blame later?” he asked. “We need to sync up our stories. Charly needs to know everything we know, and we need to know everything Charly knows. Right now, it’s like we’re standing around shooting bullets into the air.”

Owens raised his hand. “I’ll go first. But first we need to decide what we should do about the Daphne clone, because she might not be a clone. Mr. Apex here might be wrong about everything.”

“It’s not her,” said Charly.

“You might be betting a friendship on that statement,” warned Owens, looking at me.

I shook my head sadly and choked out, “It’s not her.”

Owens nodded. “Then we should sit somewhere more comfortable and figure this shit out.”

The rain had dissipated, so after checking a weather app, we decided to drive up into Gwinnett to a steakhouse near Truist Park that Garrison knew well.

On the way there, Owens told Charly everything he had told me about the police report, and I covered everything I knew about the rest of it.

There were pieces to our version of the story that we knew were just sort of flying around loose with no connection to anything, especially the title frauds. But somehow, we knew everything was connected.

By the time Charly was finished with his side of things, some of it began to fall into place.

But I began to wonder if I’d ever see Daphne again.

Here’s a standalone short story, a noir romance, about Charly:

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Footnotes

Sometimes, it’s not about politics.

Barack Obama’s politics are far to the right of mine. Some of his policies, such as drone strikes in Afghanistan, made me want to scream into the night. As a president, he was a centrist. I most certainly am not.

If he emerged from a hot tub time machine into the 1970s, he’d be a moderate Republican like two other former Illinois senators, both Republican: Everett Dirksen and Charles Percy.

Sometimes, it’s not about politics.

Just before he won the presidential election, I believed him when he said he was a blank slate. That was typical centrist posturing, but it was honest. I squirted a few tears of joy on that election night. I had no misgivings.

Obama possesses a core decency that has been missing from American politicians for 250 years. He’s a unicorn. He’s the family man that no Republicans, who once claimed to own the mantel of family values, can even speak of in their current fugue of malfeasance, hate, and sex crimes as they continue to fall over each other in service of a man whose name is said to appear one million times in unredacted versions of the Epstein files.

Obama’s integrity is even more remarkable when you consider the nature of Illinois politics during his ascension.

If he’s a crook, he’s the sneakiest summabitch whoever lived and has earned every penny of his ill-gotten wealth.1 So even then, I’m giving him his props.

Also? I think we all know he’s not. And this is part of what makes him special.

Illinois politics was steeped in corruption during Obama’s Illinois political career

One of life’s great mysteries is: How did he do it? I’ve never read an Obama biography or autobiography except for parts of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Maybe the answers lie in one of his other books.

I won’t try to explain it here beyond some (mostly) guesswork at the end of this essay. Instead, I’m going to describe the cesspool from which he came so that you can marvel at his achievement and better appreciate how remarkable his political journey was.

In Illinois, 1,913 public officials ended up behind bars after federal trials in Illinois’ Northern District between 1976 and 2012.2

Four out of nine governors before current governor JB Pritzker found their way to the hoosgow.

Thousands of dollars were found in Secretary of State Paul Powell’s shoe boxes and various other hiding places such as strong boxes and briefcases in the 1970s.3

Illinois’ career Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2025 on ten felony counts for federal bribery and wire fraud. He was a fixture of Illinois politics during Obama’s days in Illinois politics, but Obama miraculously avoided the Madigan corruption machine.

Chicago and Illinois had already developed a reputation as a wild place for unrestrained political corruption under the Daly Machine, led by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who ruled Chicago with an iron fist from 1955 until 1976.

As Chairman of the Democratic Party, all roads to political success ran directly into his office, where favors, bribes, and ultimatums decorated the walls like Trump gold.

Daley was never convicted of anything. His son, Richard J. Daley, who was also a Chicago mayor, seemed much less interested in harboring corruptioneers. But hundreds of people surrounding Daley Sr. were jailed for various corrupt practices.

With that culture firmly in place, subsequent political bosses like Madigan fought to develop their own fiefdoms in the wake of the Daley empire, like Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Antigonus carving up the Alexandrian empire after Alexander the Great’s death.

Madigan came out on top, but the entire state became a cauldron of relentless crime and graft, with hundreds of corrupt politicians scrambling for as many illicit proceeds as they could get their hands on.

Authors Dick Simpson and Tom Gradel, who co-wrote Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism and Criminality, reported in that book that such a rate of corruption is matched only by Louisiana and Washington, D.C., where the population of affected citizens is much smaller.

I would argue that no jurisdiction in America can match the graft of the Illinois and Chicago Democratic machine.

I would also argue that Obama’s influence, in addition, of course, to more than a thousand politicians scooped out of the political swamp and thrown into federal prison, has led to significant reforms that have transformed Chicago and Illinois politics into something more benign. Today, Illinois more closely resembles the common kind of political graft we see in other states governed by one-party rule, rather than rampant crime everywhere, all the time.4

The gauntlet of Chicago’s Democratic machine

The gauntlet of the Illinois Democratic machine’s corruption that Obama had to work through is too large for a minimal Substack like this to fully document. Entire books have been written on the subject. I’ll cover a few highlights so you can get a sense of the political environment Obama had to navigate.

Michael Madigan

Madigan built an empire. An empire of crime. Not in the way Trump has. Not quite as much in your face, although he didn’t make much of an effort to hide things.

Madigan was Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1983 to 2021, except from 1995 to 1997, when Republicans managed to sneak in a couple of years as the state house’s majority party. He was the main tollbooth through which all Illinois politicians were required to pass.

The gates of the tollbooth were operated by cigar-chomping men with the kind of criminal connections that made federal prosecutors’ heads spin.

U.S. District Judge John Blakey said, while sentencing Madigan, that he was the “central command post” of a massive, ongoing bribery operation between mega-utility Commonwealth Edison and Illinois politicians lining up to grease their palms for favors.

Blakely wrote:

“It was a nauseating display … of perjury and evasion. You lied, sir. You lied. You did not have to.”

But the Commonwealth Edison bribery case was notable not for its corruption, but as being the one time Madigan was caught with his fingers in the cookie jar. He had established a sparkling reputation as a local prince of corruption long before his indictments.

Federal prosecutors were unable to obtain convictions on Madigan’s (alleged) full criminal career that most Illinois political observers would describe as a “yearslong criminal enterprise to enrich himself and his political allies,” in the words of pre-Trumpian CBS News.5

In all, Madigan and co-conspirator Michael McClain originally faced a 23-count indictment for racketeering, conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and extortion covering the majority of his years as speaker. Federal prosecutors were surely disappointed that they couldn’t obtain convictions on all of them.

Jurors also convicted Madigan on three counts of wire fraud for his attempt to buy a state board seat for Chicago Alderperson Danny Solis, who was himself accused by the FBI of funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaign funds into his personal bank account.

Chicagoans greeted Solis’s behavior with a shrug. It was business as usual; a typical alderman (that’s what they were called in those days, since politicians were mostly men).

Most importantly, Madigan was essentially the party boss during Obama’s Illinois political career.

Obama being Obama, he wound his way through the Madigan muck with a clever grace, which I’ll get into later.

Rod Blagojevich

Where do I begin?

Former Illinois Governor Blagojevich is also a unicorn of sorts. Somehow, he managed to transcend the criminal underworld of Illinois politics to create his own unique brand of what might best be called “criminal buffoonery.”

He went to prison like any good Illinois governor should, and was accused of a world of pay-to-play schemes, but America had a favorite: Using his office as governor to sell the United States Senate seat that Obama vacated, after winning the presidency, to the highest bidder.

It was such a terrific blend of criminality, brazenness, and silliness that Americans very nearly developed a sort of fondness for the guy, enough so that when the Grifter-in-Chief pardoned him in 2025, many of us felt a sense of relief that America’s silliest governor copped some forgiveness within the scope of this cold, cruel world.

Blagojevich served as governor from 2003–2009, the final two years of Obama’s term as an Illinois Senator (not U.S. Senator from Illinois, but instead a member of the Illinois Senate).

One reason Blagojevich was able to retain some affection from voters despite his criminality is that he was a progressive governor who helped set the template for Illinois’ current governor, JB Pritzker.

Blagojevich was ultimately convicted on 17 corruption charges. All Obama needed to do to avoid any accusations of connections with Blagojevich was avoid walking into the governor’s office for a chit chat, which Obama studiously did.

Edward Burke & Jesse Jackson Jr.

In the grand scheme of Chicago corruption, these two were minor players. But they were contemporaries of Obama. The temptation to hang with Jesse Jackson Jr., especially, must have been great, considering Jackson’s father’s legacy.

Jackson Jr., who was a U.S. Representative from 1995 to 2012, pleaded guilty in 2013 to wire and mail fraud for redirecting campaign contributions for personal use, primarily the purchase of luxury goods. He served 30 months in prison.

Burke was a career Chicago alderman, serving from 1969 to 2019. Like Madigan, he had a long, distinguished history as a career criminal whose antics were as well known to Chicagoans as Wrigley gum. Like any good Chicago Democrat, he was convicted of racketeering, extortion, and bribery.6

He was a local kingmaker, but Obama avoided Burke like he was a nasty pox specializing in explosive diarrhea.

Antoin “Tony” Rezko

There comes a time in most political careers when the lizard pays a visit and invites you into his den to dine with him on an endless feast of corruption. For history’s worst president, that moment came when he was a young real estate carnival barker in New York City chasing Black people out of his tenements. One day, one of Joseph McCarthy’s sleazy lawyers, Roy Cohn, paid him a call, became his mentor, and the rest is history.

For Barack Obama, the lizard was a real estate developer named Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Rezko ran a company, Rezmar Corporation, that interviewed Barack Obama when he was still a student at Harvard, where Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. Luckily for us, Obama didn’t get the job, and the young, ambitious scholar instead took a job with a law firm that focused on civil rights litigation, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.7

Although Rezko didn’t offer Obama a job, he did recognize some of Obama’s obvious traits and strongly encouraged him to look into a political career.

Whether Rezko had the same kind of intent as Roy Cohn did toward Trump is impossible to know. But it’s fair to guess that when someone encourages your calling, and then you become successful at that calling, a soft spot develops towards the person encouraging you.

All indications point, however, to Obama always taking counsel with himself first, and never letting one person control his destiny or play too large a role in his success.

This may have been his superpower as a young man, and it saved him from the snares that Illinois politicians might have led him into.

Rezko was a political huckster who made one of the first contributions to Barack Obama’s earliest campaign efforts via two food companies. It was a modest contribution, $2,000, but Obama was running for small potatoes: a seat in the Illinois Senate. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody cared.8

Although they remained on friendly terms, Obama never allowed himself to get caught up in Rezko’s world of graft, which eventually included the usual mix of wire fraud, bribery, money laundering, and extortion, for which he was indicted in 2006 and eventually convicted.

Later, Rezko grifted his way onto Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign finance committee, which eventually pulled in $14 million in campaign contributions, but he wasn’t the top dog there, and there are no known improprieties.

Reporters tried to cast shade on a real estate transaction Obama made with Rezko after Obama cashed in on book royalties. Obama purchased a home next to a lot owned by Rezko’s wife. The accusation: Rezko sold a ten-foot parcel of his wife’s land to Obama at a higher than assessed value to make Rezko’s wife’s land less attractive to local developers.

A bit of a stretch to call that corruption, but Obama conceded the point anyway in later interviews, expressing regret over the deal.

Can you imagine the current occupant of the Oval Office fretting about such things?

Reporters, and even Hillary Clinton (during their 2008 presidential primary campaign), tried to tie Obama more closely to Rezko, but failed.

Rather than view his relationship with Rezko from the lens of corruption, it’s more useful to view it from the larger field glasses of a young man veering out of corruption’s way, but being smart enough to slap the occasional crooked shoulder so prevalent in Chicago politics.

Rezko was as close to corruption as Obama ever tread, and that wasn’t very close.

Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel was the perfect partner for Obama during and before Obama’s presidency. He has just enough Chicago in him to be dangerous, but he doesn’t appear to possess the penchant for corruption most other Illinois Democrats have.

Personally, I think this is because he was a ballet dancer in his youth. He turned down a dance gig with the Joffrey Ballet in favor of politics, and somehow danced his way through Chicago politics, cozying up with Barack Obama enough to become Obama’s Chief of Staff after Obama was elected.9

Emanuel’s biggest crime is that he’s a Clinton corporatist. He started his political career progressively enough, as a political operative for Paul Simon (the Illinois Senator, not the singer/songwriter).

Later, he worked for Clinton, where he became deeply involved with NAFTA, which eventually became a war cry for MAGA, but was also frowned upon by many on the left.

Some would also call Emanuel a Zionist, but I don’t like getting into those arguments because that part of the world was ruined by Europeans after World War Two more than it was by the people caught in the conflict created by the Palestinian Mandate imposed by Great Britain and others.

Emanuel is certainly Jewish. His middle name is “Israel,” after all, and his father was born in Jerusalem, where he took a bullet during Arab protests for Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization.

Emanuel wants to be your next president, an unlikely event, mostly because his past associations with Israel will obliterate10 him during the Democratic primaries.

He’s now a fierce critic of Netanyahu.11 He delivered a speech earlier this month in Tel Aviv urging the withdrawal of U.S. aid unless Netanyahu’s policies are rejected by Israeli voters, but this is a bit like someone snatching a winning lottery ticket from its owner as she hands it to the clerk and then laying claim to the prize.

But during the Obama years, Israel wasn’t drawing the same attention as it is now, even though its apartheid-like policies against Palestinians were firmly entrenched. Israel still had the sympathy of much of the world, leveraged by support for those who argued that it was a nation surrounded by hostile neighbors.

In Illinois, Emanuel served as a political mentor of sorts for Obama, but he also served as a guy who’d take some of the punches aimed for Obama’s head, a task he also performed as Obama’s Chief of Staff.

How did Obama escape all that?

Picking the right people to chill with has always been one of Obama’s many skills. Rahm Emanuel might not be my idea of progressive politics, but he was a handy torch for Obama to carry into meetings with power brokers, and has stayed out of trouble.

When Obama found mentors, they were clean. Obama served as the main driver of a shadow effort by U.S. Democratic Senator Paul Simon, a man considered to have been of pristine integrity, to force state legislators to put together a set of campaign ethics laws for Illinois. The result was a new law called the Gift Ban Act. According to the political publication Stateline:12

The 1998 law prohibited politicians from using their campaign funds for personal use, banned fundraisers in Springfield during legislative sessions and required candidates to file their fundraising information online, so the public could see who was paying for a campaign before the election.

Nobody was likely more important as a mentor than Emil Jones Jr., who was the President of the Illinois Senate when Obama arrived. Jones was constantly in Michael Madigan’s face, but, more importantly, Jones acted as an armour coating for Obama when Obama was still green and learning the state’s political ropes as an Illinois senator.

He moved Obama through the line of hands you must shake in Illinois when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate. Obama needed Jones’ help, because he most certainly wasn’t going to get it from Michael Madigan, who feared Obama’s reform efforts.

Madigan campaigned for Obama’s opponent in the Senate primary, Dan Hynes, instead. This led to Hynes getting 63 percent of the vote in Madigan’s home 13th Ward of Chicago, to Obama’s 15 percent. But Jones said to Obama, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this.” Obama won the primary, and the rest is history.13

The combination of clean mentors and active efforts at election and political reform resulted in two simultaneous messages from the young, charming, ambitious, and funny politician from Chicago, Hawaii, and, through ancestry, Kenya: “I’m an up-and-coming politician you need to pay attention to, and I’m saying ‘no’ to the land mass of Illinois corruption.”

After he became the president of the United States, corruption in Chicago suddenly became taboo. Not nonexistent, but no longer the game that must be played to advance a political career. Obama became a new template. Citizens began to demand more Obamas and fewer Madigans.

What is happening on a national scale today will ultimately land in the same place. Americans are seeing Chicago-style corruption on a nuclear scale.

But they’re also furious. The blowback will send hundreds of politicians to jail when Jack Smith or someone like him becomes Attorney General/Jailer during the next administration.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll also get a new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court named Barack Hussein Obama.

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Footnotes

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The city of Chicago awarded a $13.5 million grant to Yellow Banana, a Cleveland-based grocery logistics company, to reopen six shuttered grocery stores.

The grocery stores served food deserts1 on the city’s south and west sides. Folks in places such as Chicago’s Auburn Gresham neighborhood on the city’s far south side were finally getting an opportunity to satisfy a long-term hunger for real food in real grocery stores.

The food deserts appeared when name-brand stores, including Whole Foods, pulled out of these neighborhoods. Whole Foods pulled out of a much-ballyhooed location in Englewood four years ago. It was replaced by a discount grocer named Save A Lot under a separate program set up by the city (one that is also in trouble).

After receiving its grant, Yellow Banana then contracted with Save A Lot to bring the six other shuttered supermarkets back to life.

All of these stores have one thing in common: They serve communities in Chicago in dire need of reliable, reasonably priced grocery stores. These are communities containing neighborhoods with a heavy dependency on the federal SNAP program, formerly known as food stamps.

But now, all six Save A Lot stores under the $13.5 million grant will be shut down on Saturday (July 25) unless an investing angel or other bright light swoops in to save them. The Save A Lot that replaced Whole Foods is also reportedly closing.

The primary reason?

The Save A Lot stores have lost 26 percent of their SNAP sales since the Trump regime gutted the SNAP program through the “One Big Beautiful Bill” of death (aka: One Big Bill of Death) passed on July 4, 2025.2

It all started with the decimation of the SNAP program

The One Big Bill of Death cut an almost inconceivable $186 billion from the SNAP program, affecting approximately 42 million people.3

The MAGA Congressional Republicans who wrote the bill then developed an onerous set of new requirements for receiving benefits:4

• Expanded Work Requirements: The bill raised the age limit for “able-bodied adults” expected to work to qualify for receiving benefits, from 54 to 64 years of age. Even veterans were affected. Anyone with four working limbs is now required to work 80 hours per month. Single mother? Too bad. Off you go. Chances are, you won’t make enough to cover child care. New rules now also apply to veterans, adults with children over 14, and the homeless.

• Food price inflation is no longer taken into consideration. The MAGA Republicans used the Orwellian term “Restricted Benefit Calculations” to establish cost neutrality in future benefit adjustments. In plainer English, this means that when prices soar like they have under the regime’s insane Hormuz Insider Trading War, there is no adjustment made for inflation.

• Legal immigrants and refugees seeking permanent residency and/or asylum, victims of domestic violence, and human trafficking victims were cut out of the program.

• State Cost-Sharing: The bill requires states to pay up to 15% of their residents’ SNAP benefits. This, in turn, has forced many states to look into imposing stricter requirements from its struggling citizens to minimize their costs. Red states, of course, were already eager to do so.

• Elimination of SNAP-Ed: Federal funding for SNAP nutrition and education programs was also eliminated.

Republicans warned us of these changes with their manifesto of hate, Project 2025, long before the election that saw 78 million people reject yet another overqualified woman as their president. [Page 300 of Project 2025]

Acknowledging that the extreme MAGA cuts to SNAP benefits have severely impacted these stores, Save A Lot spokesperson Sarah Griffin then hid under the standard corporate dodge of “financial headwinds” to explain the company’s exit from neighborhoods that desperately need grocery stores:5

“As a result of this [the SNAP reductions] and other financial headwinds, Save A Lot made the difficult decision to end our arrangement with Yellow Banana. Yellow Banana is exploring alternatives in order to keep the stores open. If they are unable to find an alternative, the stores will cease operations, effective July 25th.”

You might be wondering, “Hey, what about that nice grant they received from the City of Chicago? Aren’t there obligations?”

Indeed, there are. According to Peter Strazzabosco of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, the former Whole Foods store must remain open until the middle of this year, but that is covered under a separate program than the bigger grant. The six stores covered by the grant must be reopened within a year, although it’s unclear who is responsible for that and what the enforcement mechanism is.6

That Yellow Banana might be rotten

Unfortunately for people residing in Chicago food deserts, Yellow Banana appears to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Yellow Banana contracts with Save A Lot to run its stores, but it appears to be doing a terrible job.

How bad? Bad enough that Thomas Lys, a Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management professor, took a look at its balance sheets and said way back in 2024 (ancient history in our current beleaguered timeline):

“When I look at this balance sheet, it’s a company that’s not good at doing whatever it’s doing. I don’t see anything here that would give the people on the South and West sides any hope. Understand, all I know is what’s been conveyed to me. But this is a company that can’t pay $800 for its utility bill.”

The Chicago Sun Times identified this and other problems with Yellow Banana almost from the moment the grocery company entered the Chicago market.7

SNAP cuts affect every grocer in the United States

It’s fair to say that in the case of Chicago’s Save A Lot, the 26% drop in income generated through SNAP was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that camel was probably going down anyway thanks to Yellow Banana mismanagement.

But grocery stores not named Kroger and Albertsons often run on paper-thin margins anyway. That 26% loss of SNAP income would be substantial even for them. And the drop in SNAP income has affected every grocery and supermarket in the country. The biggest among them will respond by raising prices, if they haven’t already.

$100 billion in SNAP benefits go to 250,000 food retailers, comprising five percent of sales nationwide.8

The One Big Bill of Death has stripped the SNAP program down to a husk of its former self. The largest retailers can survive the hit. Smaller grocers can’t, especially if they’re running damaged balance sheets the way Yellow Banana does.

Say hi to your Walmart greeter

Walmart collects 24% of all SNAP spending, much of it from its own employees.9

In 2018, before the One Big Bill of Death, the nonprofit organization Big Hunger calculated that 202,500 Walmart employees received SNAP benefits, amounting to $618.4 million in corporate welfare annually.10

According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2020, “Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries in every state.”11

Although there are no reliable numbers in the wake of the One Big Bill of Death, we can assume that a good chunk of these employees will no longer be eligible, given that between 2 and 4.5 million Americans have lost their benefits, including one million children.12

For example, Arizona saw a 55 percent drop in food assistance from July 2025, just after the One Big Bill of Death was passed, to April 2026.13

I guess that’s one way to beat corporate welfare: Just cut everyone off.

I (and others) call it corporate welfare because SNAP has traditionally provided the side benefit (for Walmart and other large companies) of subsidizing their policy of paying workers low wages.

Walmart has since raised its hourly wages, but anyone who has fought with the welfare system knows that being knocked out of the pool of SNAP recipients with a somewhat higher wage has its drawbacks and can sometimes feel worse than before the wage hike.

Even the big chains are closing shop

Well, we’ve established that it’s just the smaller grocery stores that are affected by all this, right? Maybe a few food deserts get a little bigger? No big deal.

Apologies for misleading you, but that’s not the case.

Profit margins at even the big box stores are tiny. Overall, profit margins sit at around one to three percent, depending on which article you read.

Big grocery stores are disappearing, too:14

• In June 2025, one month before the Big Bill of Death passed, Kroger announced it would close 60 stores, 5% of all Kroger brand stores, during an 18-month period. These guys aren’t stupid. They read Project 2025, too, and they’re paid to anticipate government policy.

• Discount grocery chain Grocery Outlet announced 36 store closings in March 2026.

• Albertsons announced this year that it is shutting down about a dozen stores in several states and Washington, D.C. The megachain has 2,000 stores that it plans to evaluate now that a merger with Kroger has fallen through.

• In addition to stores carrying the Albertsons name, the chain has closed an Acme store in New Jersey, a Balducci’s in Connecticut, a Randall’s store in Texas, Safeway stores in Washington, D.C, and California, and two Vons stores in California. There are more on the horizon, as Albertsons is always fighting for its life.

• Dollar General ran a nice little “optimization review” (I love corporate speak!) in 2025. The conclusion? Close 96 stores, all of them by January 2026 (in other words, hurry!). It also planned to shut down 45 PopShelf stores. The company has announced that it plans to keep expanding, too, but the trend for them, like all retail, has been away from the food deserts that gave life to the chain in the first place.

• Texas’s beloved HEB is reviewing the status of all 440 of its supermarkets in Texas and Mexico. It recently stunned Austinites by closing the doors on a location in Austin’s Spicewood Springs neighborhood that had existed since the 1980s.

• Amazon is closing every single one of its 70 Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores, ending what it once called a grand experiment, saying in its corporate announcement, “While we’ve seen encouraging signals in our Amazon-branded physical grocery stores, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion.” Amazon, for now, is saying that most of these stores will be reopened or rebranded as Whole Foods stores.

• Southern grocery giant Piggly Wiggly recently closed a store in Phenix City, Alabama, leaving that small southern city’s 38,000 residents with one less decent-sized grocer to choose from. The company has announced the closure of stores in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Sumter, South Carolina, too, without explanation (oh, SNAP!).

• Winn-Dixie, claiming a rebranding strategy, slammed the doors shut on almost all its stores outside Florida and Southern Georgia in late 2025, including, according to mashed.com, “seven Harveys Supermarkets in Georgia and one in Florida, 12 Winn-Dixie locations in Louisiana, 18 in Alabama, one in Georgia.” Winn-Dixie says it plans to sell some of its closed locations to other grocery companies.

• Even Aldi is closing stores. One store, in Peru, Indiana, the heart of MAGA country, shut without warning, with customers finding out when they drove into the parking lot only to see a “closed for business” sign. Another store, in a north Milwaukee food desert, abruptly closed in January 2026, leaving many local shoppers without a reliable grocery store. The company had already shut down 30 stores in 2025, the first year of the One Big Bill of Death’s draconian SNAP cuts.

I’m not silly enough to claim all these store closings are because of federal SNAP reductions. Some of them are just standard comings and goings based on corporate whims.

But we know for certain that the decimation of SNAP has led several Save A Lot stores in Chicago to the verge of collapse. The company told us so in a rare belch of truth before smothering it with corporate-speak.

Other grocery companies, which also operate on profit margins thinner than a crazed president’s lies about reflection pools, are less likely to be as forthcoming. Instead, they’ll keep shutting their stores and blather about things like “market conditions.”

So it’s up to us to give them no benefit of the doubt, and evaluate the facts on the ground as they come in using our set of standards instead of theirs.

My set of standards is based on one thing: The vast majority of corporate CEOs are still, even after all we know about the child-rapist in chief, willing to give him cover as long as their bottom lines are protected by the massive tax breaks the One Big Bill of Death gave them.

Late-stage capitalism has drawn the battle lines clearly. Retail grocers will continue to build out ever-slicker stores with higher markups, in an effort to end the scourge of low profit margins. During this process, we will all keep paying more for groceries. And some of us will simply do without any real groceries at all, living on canned “food” products that are little more than ladles of corn syrup and food dyes.

Notes

Thanks for reading!

I recently received an “unsubscribe” notice from one of my cherished readers saying they’re leaving because they are looking for more hard news. My feeling is that there are plenty of Substacks out there keeping us up to date on today’s doomscroll. I’d rather avoid regurgitating the same 50 headlines I see in my inbox every day. It’s exhausting and fruitless.

Hopefully, you’ll find enough different stuff here, from satire and fiction to special reports that dig a little deeper, to encourage you to become a subscriber (paid or free) or simply share, restack, and comment. Thanks again!

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Footnotes

I just received an email from Author’s Alliance with the headline: “Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement Receives Final Approval.”

Nah, I’m not going to rewrite that just to show I am committed to original work. I think my readers already know that I am. Besides, how do I rewrite it unless I translate it to French or something? So I added a couple of words for clarity, and went with their headline.

If you’re not familiar with Bartz v. Anthropic, it’s the first big AI copyright case in the writing world.

Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude AI, got hit with a class action lawsuit claiming that it infringed authors’ copyrights when it downloaded millions of entire copyrighted books in violation of U.S. copyright law.

Anthropic responded to the lawsuit by claiming that its use of the downloaded “datasets” constituted fair use because it only wanted to train its models on the content for its LLM models.

The litigants, however, also accused Anthropic of piracy, partly because the sources of some of their downloads contained pirated works, in addition to works they legitimately purchased.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of authors Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief), and Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here) by three legal firms: Susman Godfrey LLP, Ieff Cabraser Heimmann & Bernstein LLP, and Cowan Debaets Abraham and Sheppard LLP.

Anthropic tried to get the case tossed into the legal garbage can by obtaining a summary judgment, but in June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California said, “Nope.”

He said that if the books had been obtained legally instead of pirated from various sources, Anthropic could claim fair use. However, he said Anthropic would have to prove it didn’t pirate the books. He then set a trial date for December 2025.

Rather than go through all that, Anthropic settled out of court. They didn’t admit to piracy, but they did agree to compensate authors for the pirated downloads anyway.

This means that if you published a book with a valid ISBN or ASIN (ASIN is, essentially, Amazon’s version of ISBN) downloaded by Anthropic, you could get part of the $1.5 billion cash settlement.

If you didn’t file a claim, however, it’s too late because all the filing deadlines have expired.

Disburse those funds!

Yesterday, the judge overseeing the settlement, Araceli Martinez-Olguin, ordered that funds be disbursed to writers.1

By modern judicial standards, Judge Martinez-Olguin acted quickly on the final settlement. And for good reason. She has bigger fish to fry, as she is now the judge assigned to a case filed by 12 states to block the Paramount Skydance acquisition of Warner Bros., an event that would put CNN in the hands of another Trumpanzee, David Ellison, and his über-rich yacht-racing father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison:

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

No Dancing For Paramount and Warner Bros., At Least For Now

California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined us last Tuesday to discuss the lawsuit filed by a coalition of 12 state attorneys general in a last-ditch effort to block the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. by Paramount Skydance Corporation. The Justice Department has already signed off on the merger. But the state attorneys general believe the dea…

Read more

10 days ago · 1032 likes · 44 comments · Joyce Vance

If you filed a claim, you can expect about $3000, minus whatever the publisher or any of your co-authors get (publishers get half).

It’s really not much money for a recent book. I had three books on the list of pirated books. They were all old nonfiction technical books that fell into both obscurity and obsolescence a long time ago, so for me, it was an easy decision to join the class of plaintiffs. It’s basically free money for me on a few dead books.

Some authors and publishers declined to participate in the class, which means they can file a separate lawsuit. Most notable is the Chicken Soup for the Soul folks. The way class action lawsuits work, if you join the class settlement, you can’t then turn around and sue separately. But if you don’t join, you can file your own, separate lawsuit.

If you filed a settlement claim, you probably did so through the claims administrator’s website. Presumably, you filled out the forms telling the administrator how you want to be paid. I chose Zelle.

If you don’t know your status, you can contact the administrator here:

1 877-206-2314
info@AnthropicCopyrightSettlement.com

Anthropic Copyright Settlement
c/o JND Legal Administration
P.O. Box 91204
Seattle, WA 98111

They’re responsive and will answer your questions quickly (I know from experience).

Notes

There are other copyright lawsuits in the works:

Master List of lawsuits v. AI, ChatGPT, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Midjourney & other AI cos.

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First Lady of Malignancy Melania Trump today announced that she would follow Spain's lead after it edited Trump out of World Cup celebration photos.

“Today I’m announcing that I will be editing my (gag! blargh!) husband out of all existing photographs on the internets. This will be my greatest contribution to society and you will all be happy!”

There was no comment from Trump’s propaganda network, True Sociopath.

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Buy it here!

Chapter Three of the Psalm of Vampires sequel, Vampire Elegy, is about to drop any day now, so if you haven’t checked out the first two chapters and the prologue, now’s a good time.

So far, we’ve learned that there’s a mysterious chap named Chevalier in a ghostly house in Atlanta. In his house lies a woman in a coma who seems to maybe, perhaps, possibly, suspiciously, even, resemble Jade’s love interest, Daphne, who we thought was incubating in Madagascar’s jungles among the dwarf vampires known as the Kolonoro after Jade’s other lady friend Moreland turned her.

Whew! I’m exhausted just reading that, aren’t you? This is why you should hurry and catch up. Lots going on!

Anyhoo, there appears to be a connection between Chevalier and a local title fraudster that Jade has a strong urge to drain, but we don’t yet know what that connection is.

Vampire hunter and Atlanta police detective Standmoore Owens and his vampire friend (that’s Jade — long story, but it’s all in Psalm of Vampires) have decided to check out the place in Chapter Two. It doesn’t end well.

Here’s the first installment of Vampire Elegy:

Read the Prologue

Here are links to the next two chapters:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

You can also find more of my fiction here:

https://www.ruminato.com/s/fiction?sort=top

Now, on to some indie writer promos.

Check out some promos from other indie writers…

Fallen: Complete First Book of the Series

by Patrick Abbott

Available in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. Read on your Kindle, phone, tablet, computer and more

**The Complete First Book. Books 1, 2, and 3 available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited**

Brendan Murphy nearly died fighting for his country. Now he’s trying to stop a war.

Five years ago, alien ship appeared in low orbit all around the world and stayed there, waiting. A highly advanced alien race known as the Sabia lingered with little contact with humanity, and the worlds’ governments have been eager for answers – and access- for years.

When combat veteran Brendan Murphy is wounded stopping an attack on a Sabia diplomat, he finds himself whisked aboard one of their ships and given medical aid. This rare opportunity finds him walking a tenuous line between burgeoning friendships and secret agenda that will test his loyalties and sanity in ways he can’t begin to imagine.

Check out more on Fallen, Risen, Dormition, and the upcoming finale Assumption.

Order on Amazon directly at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09ZB1K98K

Download Now

The Testament of Silence

by Evelin Kholeli

His Father’s War Was Fought with Guns. His Will Be Fought with Data.

A novel of blood and data.

Buy Now

St. George’s Church

by Grant Kelly

The Church Filled With Ghostly Watchers

Abandoned for decades and filled with eerie silent figures, St. George’s Church has become one of Europe’s most haunting and unforgettable locations

Buy Now

Notes

Blurbs of each book are written by the indie authors included in the post.

Inclusion of these books does not constitute an endorsement of any of the promoted books here, as I may not have read them. This promotion is part of a cooperative promotion by Indie authors. If you read one and like it, leave a comment! There are no affiliate links in this post.

I do not acquire any pennies for promoting these books. It’s strictly a cooperative venture between indie authors.

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Like most of you, I didn’t watch Thursday night’s train wreck where the Mad Clown drunkenly told us he was going to try to interfere with the Midterm Elections. I love my readers dearly, but you’ll probably never see a “I watched Trump’s speech so you didn’t have to” post. Like you, I value the remaining nuggets of my sanity.

However, unlike you, I have Dr. Harry Hemogoblin III on the Ruminato payroll. For every consultation, I send him a pile of Tide Pods, which he enjoys snacking on after a midnight stroll through one of the shadier parts of town.

Dr Hemogoblin is said to be a psychiatrist. Although this claim has undergone some dispute, I think he’s qualified enough to provide commentary, in the form of annotations, on the world’s first advertisement by a world leader for electoral interference.

So grab yourself a nice bottle of warm Malört (fellow Chicagoans know this fine beverage well), and let’s dig in!

The Transcript

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Prezident of the United States:

Musical intro for your enjoyment whilst reading the transcript and Dr. Hemogoblin’s annotations:

Good evening. Before we begin, I’m proud to report that our country is safer, stronger, and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is an understandable opening coming from someone who has added about $2 billion to his personal bank account since the destruction of the East Wing. So far, no lies! Drink!

Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster after the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types, and 11,888 murderers, many of whom killed more than one person.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

You’ll find that central to his many catalogued psychiatric disorders is a pattern of unprecedented lying. I once had a friend who hated his roommate’s dog so much that he peed all over the apartment and blamed the roommate’s dog. The prezident is a bit like that.

We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

First of all, I need to thank the amazing, incredible, testosterone-rich, and wonderful Charles Bastille for the Tide Pods. I may have eaten too many, however, because upon reading “We had transgender for everybody,” I rushed to the mirror on the doorway and dropped my pants for a looksee. Apparently, my naughty bits are placed exactly as originally intended. Not that there’s anything wrong with alterations, but “we had transgender for everybody” appears to be a bit of an exaggeration.

For a sanity check, I examined the rosters of every U.S. female professional sports team and found no men. However, I am willing to offer my services, pro bono, as a member of the Prezident’s Council on Genitalia Examiners.

Finally, as for the whole world laughing at us, they aren’t laughing now, are they?!!!! Drink!

Two years ago, our country was dead.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

One of many bizarre comments, even for this guy. I’ve identified this as a symptom of what some of us (me) in the pyschiatric field call, EverythingIsDeadolepsy, a rare disease thought to infect only one human at a time every thousand years.

Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This statement could be challenged by a review of world temperatures, but there’s no denying many of us have been under a very unpleasant heat dome of late. Drink!

America is respected like we have never been respected before.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I just got off a Zoom call with 8 billion citizens of the world who all said they’d like to see the United States sucked into a vortex and eaten by Canada, while a horde of zombies invades the place screaming, “Winter is coming!” In other words, the world not only does not respect us, they’re mad as hell for allowing all this to happen, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

We have more money being invested in the United States than at any time in the history of our country.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is a form of delusional projection. More money has been invested in him than in any president in the history of our country, so the patient here assumes that this means the entire country is receiving investments.

More Americans are working today than ever before. This week, it was announced that inflation saw the largest monthly decline in more than six years, just happened. It was just given out. The media reported it and we accept it, the best in six years.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

In the psychiatric world, this sentence is known as gobbledygook. The prezident appears to be surrounded by men with similar symptoms as he, because this was a vetted speech that passed the scrutiny of so-called speech writers whose command of the English language is, to put it charitably, questionable.

The tax cuts in our Great Big Beautiful Bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars, like with the provisions, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors, along with the interest deduction on a loan used to purchase a car, but only if that car is made in America.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I was just on a Zoom call with 200 million Americans. Here’s a screenshot of a reaction to the comment “The tax cuts in our Great Big Beautiful Bill are saving hardworking families thousands and thousands of dollars:”

And a 100 percent expensing for our job-creating businesses.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I just finished a Zoom call with 20 million business owners across America. Here’s their reaction to this comment:

Our stock markets are at their highest point in many years, but we can actually say of all time.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The unchecked urge to say something that we should never say, especially when untrue, is a form of Tourette Syndrome known as Orange Depravity Syndrome.

And your 401(k)s, pensions and retirement accounts are setting records every single day, the highest in history.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Personal note: My broker moved all of my stocks into an AI-based oil futures account that moves funds according to anticpated prezidential statements related to the Hormuz Insider Trading War. So far, so good. Drink!

For years we paid the highest price for prescription drugs anywhere in the world.

Now we pay the lowest price under my Most-Favored-Nations policy, because I was able to get the rest of the world and the pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly. Drug prices are coming down by 70, 80 and 90 percent. Trumprx.gov, this will ultimately reduce the cost of health care. You have to go to Trumprx.gov and take advantage of it.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Just finished a Zoom call with about 230 million Americans, and this was their reaction to “You have to go to Trumprx.gov and take advantage of it:”

But the cost of health care is coming way down because of what we’ve done with prescription drugs.

And with Trump accounts, every child in America now has access to a tax free investment account to save for their future. Billions and billions of dollars are being invested, put in by companies and individuals to take care of our children, so that at age 18, they will have potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account, and they’ll get off to a great start in life.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The failure to mention that they will all be dead and have no heirs is presumably a part of his unbridled narcissism.

So for that, go to Trumpaccounts.gov and sign up your child or any child you’d like to sign up.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I’m not a computer security expert, but I don’t recommend visiting any website with the word “Trump” in it, unless you have a strange urge to be stalked by a deranged Argentinian man:

Our previously wide open borders have been transformed into the most secure borders in the history of our country, with zero illegal aliens being admitted to the United States in the past 14 months. That is zero.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This seems like a moment to pause and count the dead.

Nobody thought it was possible. We had the worst border in the history of our country, and now we have the best.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I can confirm this. Some previous borders didn’t even include the Louisiana Purchase! And what the hell is this shiz????

Crime is plummeting nationwide…

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This brings us to one of the most fascinating aspects of the prezident’s personality disorder. He frequently calls others “losers,” and doesn’t like to be outdone by anyone. It is my theory, as the world’s greatest psychiatric mind, that the reason he has turned the White House into a global casino and crime syndicate is so that he can have the highest crime rate per capita in the history of these occasionally United States.

…with the murder rate at its lowest level since 1900 - or more than 125 years ago. We’re making a record investment in our armed forces, and we have the strongest and most powerful military by far anywhere in the world. I built it during my first term and, unfortunately, we’re forced to use it now. We won in Venezuela, which is now working with us to produce millions and millions of barrels of oil.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

There is a lot to unpack here. I’ll keep it short: “Hello, Cuba. Aren’t you glad you have no oil? Yes, the prezident has turned off all your lights through the embargo, but, and just trust me on this, things could be worse. Oh, and for those of you who can afford a boat, I don’t recommend boating in the Caribbean until Hurricane PedoPrezident has breathed its final breath.”

We are likewise winning big in Iran, and you will see the fruits of that labor very, very shortly.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

My son, Renauldo, has already cashed in on the fruits of that labor by hacking into my American Express account and ordering bizarre incarnations of Lego sets I never thought I’d see.

America is back and doing really well. But we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed, because no country can be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because, if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Ruh-roh. Here we go.

And that’s very simple — no trust, no greatness. For many years I’ve called for bold, swift and decisive action to protect the integrity of America’s elections. Every American deserves to know that, when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system, and that is to make that system secure.

One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.

This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes, like levels never thought possible, to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference. Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you, the American people — our beautiful, our great American people.

But that all changes right now. The documents we will release starting tonight have been gathered by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, a great group of people, along with the staff of the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, supported by our top intelligence agency chiefs who have all personally reviewed the findings we are presenting this evening and fully confirmed their authenticity.

You can see these documents for yourself at whitehouse.gov, that’s whitehouse.gov, go check it out. Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly, and that’s what we’re doing.

The documents cover five major areas of concern. First, they show that, over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The phrase we most often use in psychiatry for this is “willful stupidity.” This is complicated by the fact that the prezident most likely is aware that anyone can acquire U.S. voter files for a price, even me. In fact, I have done so. I then contacted all of them for a Zoom call. If you haven’t heard the sound of 220 million people laughing simultaneously, let me tell you, friends, it’s quite a treat.

That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening. This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.

Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the Deep State — a very, very famous group of people, in many cases — in our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible.

US spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020, when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data — think of that, tens of millions of voters’ data — in 18 states have been bought, stolen or hacked by China. Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The inability to let something go (aka, “obsess”) is part of a larger set of pyschological disorders that are well known within the prezident. These include:

Rumination: Repeatedly replaying past mistakes, conversations, or negative events without reaching a solution. It is very common in depression and generalized anxiety.

Obsessions: Intrusive, unwanted thoughts or urges that cause significant distress or anxiety. This is a hallmark of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), where the mind gets “stuck” on a fear.

Fixation: An intense, prolonged focus on a particular thought, person, or object (see Obama, Barack, Hussein).

Hyperfixation: A state of intense, all-consuming focus on a specific topic or task.

They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else. And to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress. In fact, all they kept saying is, this is the most secure election in the history of our country — a standard, very pat line that was divvied out to say.

The cover up of this colossal security breach is even more disturbing in light of the additional information showing that China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

The following paragraph is difficult to decipher, which is unusual for a scripted speech. It is possible that the AI Speechwriter software suffered a glitch:

They did not want — and they just didn’t want it. They fought like hell not to have it, Donald Trump to win, and for good reason. As the documents we are releasing show, CIA reporting explicitly stated, and I quote, in mid-2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president in an effort to reduce the US president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.

Isn’t that nice? Also, in mid-2018, China was working to influence the results of the US midterm elections and later the results of the 2020 presidential election itself. Separately, in mid-2019, the Chinese government’s strategy against the United States was focused on undermining domestic confidence in the US president.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I am working with collegues to define a new psychiatric disorder that officially names the disorder that would cause the prezident to release documents that demonstrate the exact opposite of what he says they do.

They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

A personal comment: Mr. Prezident, we do not need the Chinese to tell us you are the worst human to ever enter the Oval Office.

And they did everything possible to do exactly that. Going on this document says, and this is by the CIA, the strategy included efforts to use Chinese contacts with big US companies to influence US business leaders to turn against the president of the United States of America.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Let’s give the prezident a pass on his psychotic behavior here and just assume he has somehow missed the oligarchs lining up on their knees to… well, this is a PG-rated Substack, so I won’t continue.

The Chinese government sought to identify US journalists who had reported negatively on the US president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could and they didn’t care what they said. The Chinese government wanted US president to lose the next election.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

Ummm, Bastille, you are getting all this money from China and all you pay me is a few Tide Pods? You’re a monster.

And the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them. Charged them billions and billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs and built the strongest military anywhere in the world. We have the strongest military anywhere in the world. These are exact quotes from the CIA reporting. The name of the person doing the quote is now under review, but it gets even worse.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

I am confused by this statement, and am unable to provide analysis.

Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden. Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing.

These were briefings I would get almost every day; everything was kept out that was of importance. One email among intelligence analysts admitted that they had, quote, deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election. Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running, quote, a shadow government, unquote, to keep intelligence about China’s election meddling from becoming known and to keep it away from the honorable press.

Other officials who witnessed such efforts perceived the motivations to be blatantly political. Recently, we found significant numbers of burn bags information, and this is a group of bags that were used to destroy information, given by President Barack Hussein Obama to be burned, it was supposed to be burned.

These bags were supposed to be at a different level by different people, incinerated and checked, but it never happened. Maybe we got lucky. We believe this was not done on purpose, but rather through gross incompetence of the people that were supposed to burn the bags. But the findings are stunning.

Dr. Hemogoblin’s comment:

This is sort of amusing, but if you really enjoy fiction, I recommend you bookmark this Ruminato section:

https://www.ruminato.com/s/fiction?sort=top

The remainder of the speech is essentially a set of fictional scenarios disproven by years of court cases and investigations. There is no hope for the individual spelling out this stuff.

Today, I’m asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden. To fire those involved in the cover up and to file criminal charges, if appropriate, against these people.

Yet concealing China’s meddling was only the beginning. The third set of documents we are releasing proves that for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems, dishonest, almost all.

They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government knew that. Tonight, we’re publishing a series of previously classified US intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack. As one assessment states, we judge that the United States’ adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups have the capability to compromise US election infrastructure.

That’s unquote but that’s some statement, isn’t it, made by supposedly great patriots of our country? The document goes on to further state that, quote, we assess that centralized election-related data repositories, such as voter registration databases, poll books, and other official election websites are most vulnerable to exploitation, and adversaries could use this access to these systems to disrupt election processes within the United States of America.

Tonight, we’re releasing all of those findings and spanning from January 2020 to June 2026. This is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy. Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results on these terrible machines.

Today, we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela, and that’s exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020. And that’s what they did. This reporting included precise details about methods to regime develop, to digitally alter vote totals in ways that could not be detected, even with an audit, no matter how deep they went.

This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past. The fourth set of documents reveals that even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up. Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large scale voter registration operation in Michigan.

In 2020, Michigan State Police raided a Democrat Get Out the Vote Organization, corrupt group in Muskegon, and were so concerned by what they found. They were just so concerned, they couldn’t believe it, actually, that they contacted the FBI in Detroit. The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced.

Now this word from a Ruminato sponsor: Satisfy your craving for Tide Pods with our new flavors: gumball goobers, berry crunch, rainbow rinse, and for the adventurous among you, clove cannon! Available at a store near you.

In other words, it was pay, play and cheat. The FBI agents working on the case believe that crimes were committed, yet the Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it. Tonight, I’m asking the FBI director to ensure that the matter is fully investigated and to work with the Department of Justice to prosecute those responsible for any crimes.

Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.

Hundreds of millions of US voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.

And yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail. As one example of the insanity, California’s recent election for mayor of LA and governor, was held on June 2nd, long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago, on July 10th. Think of that, much more than one month.

Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There’s no third world country that has elections like we have.

In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about, because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot.

They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country and that’s true; you can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multibillion dollar in value airways for absolutely no money.

They pay nothing. All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting. They pay nothing for multi-billion dollar assets. Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.

Every American, whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, independent or otherwise, should be able to agree that we deserve the most secure, honest, and fair election system anywhere in the world. Secure elections should be a partisan — really, should just, we should be together Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody, and it should not be a partisan issue.

It should cause to unite us, not to divide us. This should be a cause, we should be united, not divided. In light of the brand new and irrefutable information, I have revealed tonight my administration is in the process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised by the People’s Republic of China and many others.

We will be working closely to mitigate any harm and we’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again.

Tomorrow, the Secretary of Homeland Security will hold a briefing to outline his department’s recent work confirming cyber vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems.

They are bad. We’re in the process of informing governors, Senators and members of Congress of potential issues in their states. If you look at voting today, it’s in such bad shape in so many states, and we are committing to fix it and we’re also committing to be working with those states and local jurisdictions to help them fix and patch known technical vulnerabilities before the midterm elections.

We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest. I’ve also ordered DHS to notify every state about noncitizens on their voter rolls and direct them to remove all ineligible voters from the lists immediately. But most importantly, addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act. How easy is that to do, unless you want to cheat.

The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad, and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way. This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID. How simple is that? Could I have your photo, please? Photo voter ID. All voters must provide proof of citizenship.

Are you a citizen of our country, please? And hopefully there will be no corrupt mail-in ballots, which, if you watched California and so many other places, mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt. So, you would have no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel if you’re going away on business or vacation.

These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I’ve mentioned. To all Americans, I ask you to pick up your phone tomorrow, call your Representatives in the House and Senate and demand that they pass the SAVE America Act without delay. Together, we will restore faith and confidence in our country, and we will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless our great military. And God bless America. Thank you very much.

R-rated final response from the Ruminato team: “Oh, fuck off, you nitwit.”

Notes

As a rule, I do not use AI for anything. I made an exception with the song because I was experimenting. Feel free to yell at me. I wrote the lyrics, but AI did the music. I am sorry. Also, I have posted it before. Sorry again.

Fun fact, though: After I created that little diddy, I saw that the Lego people who do Iran’s propaganda also produced a video with that same voice. Do they use Suno, too? The world wants answers.

Primary reference for some facts in this story: HCR:

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Chapter Two — The Stakeout

You’re probably wondering where Daphne is. Yeah, me, too.

Owens, Moreland, and I looked for her and Charly in Madagascar and even managed to meet with remnants of the Kalonoro, the local vampires who rule the parts of the Malagasy jungles where Charly took her to incubate after Moreland turned her.

The Kalonoro are tiny little vamps, no more than about three feet tall. The giants among them might reach four feet. They’re covered in hair that requires a little more hygienic attention than they seem willing to provide.

They also all sound like loud men. Even female Kalonoro carry a booming voice that could serve as a boat horn.

We were told that Charly and Daphne sequestered with a Kalonoro clan near a small village in the jungle, but that was the only information we were able to collect from the mysterious little creatures during our two-week mission.

Owens’ leave of absence from the Atlanta PD after the events at Jerrold Mountain and in Singapore didn’t last long. He had assumed he was on thin ice, considering he bucked just about every regulation on the department’s books, but instead he was credited with busting open the simple fact that vampires existed, something humans had suppressed for hundreds of years.

His entire world was one big high-five for months after that, but he wasn’t interested in accolades. He wanted to help me find Daphne.

I’ll never understand his turnaround. But there it was. We became much more than frenemies because of all that had transpired. We were friends. It was too weird to think about much, so I didn’t.

He’s still a vampire hunter at heart. His first instinct is to make us extinct.

I guess it’s a lot like war. We had gone to battle together, saved each other’s lives more than once, and bonded over a common enemy.

I still think he’s a bit of an asshole, but he’s my asshole, and I love him like a brother. His lifespan, though, is tiny. I won’t know him long. He’ll flicker out and die before I lose another hair. But this felt good, anyway. I’m always a sucker for a story of redemption. Aren’t you?

When he called me one late Friday afternoon, I figured it was important. We were friends, but not the kind who texted each other all day.

“We need to meet,” he said.

“Those aren’t the words I like to hear at the end of a halfway decent week,” I said.

“What if I told you I might, and listen, man, when I say ‘might,’ I mean that in its strongest sense of distant possibility, know where Daphne is?”

Owens would never joke around with something like that. He knew what she meant to me.

“I need to check out a house in Midtown,” he said. “And I don’t want to do it alone. For one thing, because everything indicates it’s a vampire den, but for another, Daphne might be there.”

I was too jaded to feel much excitement. Her disappearance had felt complete, as if someone had finished a mission designed to leave me with nothing but her shadow on every wall in every room that I would ever enter again.

That’s how it feels when someone you love falls away without warning. A part of them follows you, breathing upon your every move, sensing your next plan, your next thought, but unable to express themselves beyond a sensory perception driven by memory and a hunch that lodges in your head: “Hello, Jade,” she says, “No, not there. Try this instead.” This is done without words. It is pure contemplation, but it isn’t yours.

With that apprehension, I agreed to join my new friend.

When we met for coffee at Queen’s Coffee near Piedmont Park, Owens told me about what he called a spooky house, and someone named Chevalier.

“Technically, it’s not his house anymore,” I said after he finished the story.

“Huh?”

“Long story, man.”

“When has that stopped you?”

“Fair. Well, some title fraudster snatched his home’s title from under him.”

“Shit, Atticus, how do you snatch a title from a guy who’s probably not a legal resident?” Owens had taken to calling me by my real name. Atticus. Of the great Argeadai House of Vampires. Nephew of Alexander the Great. But, of course, Owens never mentioned anything beyond “Atticus.” In fact, I think he called me “Atticus” because he thought it would annoy me, since he knew I enjoyed using my adopted name, “Jade Mourning.”

I shrugged.

“How do you yourself, in fact, legally possess a title to your fucking grand estate in Buckhead? I’ve always meant to ask you, but it’s been so far down on my list of questionable shit about you that I’ve never gotten to it. Now it seems relevant.”

“Haven’t you ever seen those cheesy web ads that say, ‘These vampire real estate tricks will make you rich?’”

Owens rolled his eyes.

I continued. “Or, ‘this one trick will. . .”

“. . .Shit, Atticus, shut the fuck up. What do you say? Ready for an adventure? Hopefully something more successful than our last one?”

I didn’t know if he was referring to the Wurdulac of Jerrold Mountain or to a statistically significant portion of Singapore’s population getting wiped out by the Mouras Encantadas. Maybe both.

I leaned my chin on my hand and flitted my eyes his way. “You mean the one that forged this beautiful bromance?”

“What I’d give for a wooden stake right now,” he replied.

“You know that’s a myth,” I said.

“Worth a try anyway. Well?”

“Well of course. I’ve been miserable for months.” I didn’t tell him about the powerful urges I’d been fighting. I couldn’t talk about that with Owens. I couldn’t tell him how close I had come the night before to draining Billy the title thief. Owens couldn’t understand. But Daphne’s long disappearance had made me despondent to my core. That Charly, her protector during her flight to Africa, was missing, too, added to it.

“I guess here’s the thing,” I said. “I think wherever she is, Charly is. Your police report doesn’t seem to mention a guy the size of a Russian tank.”

“What about the dude in the kitchen?”

It didn’t sound like Charly to me, but I didn’t have a good reason for suggesting that. Physically, I could see why Owens thought it might be him. All I had was: “The first thing anyone notices about Charly, despite his ridiculous size, is the fact that his big black bald head looks like it’s about to uncap itself and blow a geyser of steaming sweat into the room.”

“I don’t think...”

“And he was in a kitchen, for fuck’s sake. If that was Charly, the guy filing the police report would have mentioned Charly spilling a pool of sweat onto the floor.”

“He fits the description, Atticus. And if he’s watching over her for some reason without letting us know, don’t you want to know why? Maybe she’s sick, or whatever, but this, this ain’t right. Something ain’t right.”

I nodded. “Okay. How do you want to handle it?”

“We do this the old-fashioned way. The police way. We do a stakeout.”

“I thought the police way was to bust in with guns blazing.”

“Nah, I think we gotta be careful here. We have no idea what the hell is going on in that house.”

I told him about the title fraudster.

“So, wait. You were gonna eat this guy and he turns out to be a guy who’s illegally gained title over the house where maybe Daphne is being held captive?”

“Stop calling it ‘eat.’”

Now it was Owens’ turn to shrug.

“Fuck’s sake, Owens. That’s insulting.”

“I didn’t have any of this fraudster info on my bingo card before our chit chat,” said Owens, dumping a pile of sugar into his newly delivered coffee.

No wonder humans have the shelf life of deer ticks, I thought, as I watched him pour the sugar. “So?”

“So, same plan. We do a stakeout.”

“Does this mean I have to sit in a car for several hours trying to make nice with you while you stink the thing up with human scent? I’m gonna need a hazmat suit for this.”

“I’ll wear cologne.”

“You hate cologne.”

“The bigger problem is that you’re not easy to hide. It’ll be like trying to conceal a purple giraffe.”

“In the movies, you guys always have a van with gizmos and dudes in the back. I could just hide there.”

“Not the worst idea. I can probably arrange for a department vehicle big enough to do the job.”

“With tinted windows, right? I love tinted windows.”

“The works, dude. All kinds of electronic toys.”

“I’m liking this more and more. But won’t a big ass Chevy Suburban with black windows be sort of obvious? The other thing you always see in movies is a work van of some kind. I think it should be a work van.” I thought about it for a minute. “But damn, I do love toys.”

Owens sighed. “I’m sure I can work up a van with a few toys in it and a company name on the outside. Just like in the fuckin’ movies.”

“It all sounds fun, but I have a better idea.”

“Oh, goody.”

“You and Garrison sit in whatever vehicle you decide on. And I act as a listening device. I can stand outside and listen in. I’ll catch 90% of what’s being said inside. They’ll never see me.”

“I think Chevalier is a vampire. He’ll know you’re there. You fuckers have a sixth sense about that shit.”

“My man,” I said. “I’ve been practicing stealth for more than two thousand years. I think I can figure out how to stay hidden from one vamp for a few hours. You sure it’s just the one?”

“All indications. Except maybe the big guy. Charly.”

“It’s not Charly. Okay, so two then. Not a problem. I think we have a plan. Plus, it keeps us away from each other, which is how we get along the best.”

“We should write a kids’ book about how to frenemy,” said Owens.

“We’re more than that.”

“We aren’t.”

“Owens, I’m the best friend you’ve never had.”

“No wonder I’m such a miserable son of a bitch.”

We did a little more planning, then the three of us, Owens, I, and Owen’s partner, Garrison, rode out to Chevalier’s place in Midtown that evening.

The house was a massive old Edwardian, but it looked like one half of the top floor had been cut in half vertically. The gabled roof on the home’s east side halted abruptly so that the west side of the roof dropped into what looked like new construction with a flat roof. The west side of the home extended nearly to one of two iron fences fitted closely together that surrounded the property.

Somebody didn’t want people knocking on the front door of that house. There were two gates, one for each iron fence, which were about three feet apart. Both gates appeared to be equipped with electronic and deadbolt locks. The exterior fence was lined with tall, pointed spires that looked sharp enough to use at the end of a spear.

It was dark outside, but I could see all that because two floodlights illuminated the upper half of the home. A set of light blue lawn lights lit up the ground.

Owens didn’t have time to work up a van in this short amount of time, so the three of us sat in a big dark blue Chevy Suburban with the kind of tinted windows I like. Garrison handed me a necklace with a small device attached.

He looked like he had lost fifty pounds. I barely recognized him, especially with his new Van Dyke beard. “It’s a little like a body cam, but we can hear you whisper. Don’t talk loud, cuz we’re wearing these.” He pointed to an earbud. “You’ll blow our eardrums out.”

“Ozempic?” I asked.

He looked at Owens, who shrugged. “Huh?”

“Never mind,” I whispered as I bent my head down to leave the vehicle.

“Hey!” Owens whispered loudly. “That’s not how a stakeout works!” I proffered a sexy grin and escaped the big SUV.

As soon as I closed the door, a clap of thunder echoed through the clouds above. A bolt of lightning struck nearby, immediately followed by another, more explosive thunderclap. I felt no surprise when all the lights around the house flickered out.

I grabbed one of the vertical rectangular bars of the gate and used my arm strength to help whip my legs over the two ten-foot-tall wrought iron fences, landing on the balls of my feet, my legs bent like a predator poised to strike.

I found it amusing that Chevalier had built the fencing to prevent human intrusion without any thought to a vampire hurdling his first line of defense. I assumed there would be more obstacles in my immediate future.

There was a fair chance he already knew I was there. There was an equal chance that he was like me, and any extensive video camera system he was using was mostly for show, not so different than my estate’s Calacatta marble floor.

A hard rain began to pelt my body. It only took a moment for the long drapes of my hair to soak through the back of my yellowing, faded Nirvana t-shirt. I whispered into the device, “Owens, you don’t have a weather app on your phone?” No response. I gleefully imagined his stream of epithets with Garrison helplessly looking on.

Through the driving rain, I noticed a figure dragging a body around the front corner of the house to the side. Only one person I knew was that large with the kind of agility he was displaying.

“Charly?” I yelled, forgetting Garrison’s request to keep it quiet. “Fuckin’ Charly?” I strode toward him, but he disappeared with the body around the corner like a deer escaping into a copse. “Charly, man!” I ran to the side of the house, my feet sloshing through an already flooded lawn of tall, unkempt grass. “Charly!” The storm made it difficult to track where Charly went.

When I reached the side of the house, Charly wasn’t there. I ran to the back in the pitch black of night. Strobes of lightning illuminated the old Edwardian like paparazzi bulbs lighting up celebrities. Even though I can see at night as well as any other nocturnal animal, the rain complicated things, making everything blurry. The flashes of light were welcome, but not very helpful. Charly had always been an elusive cat when he needed to be.

“I’m going in, fellas,” I whispered to the device hanging from my neck. But then I felt Charly’s unmistakable vice grip on my shoulder.

“For what?” he growled. I tried to spin around, but he held firm. I backed my head into his with a bang, then turned to face him after he released his hand.

“Charly, fuckin’ hell, man,” I stammered.

When I looked into his eyes, their yellow tiger sclera were gone, replaced by thick, dark film. The soft black marbles his eyes had become revealed no pupils. He glowered at me, hissed, showed his fangs, and I ran out of the yard toward the SUV, hearing Charly’s heavy feet in pursuit.

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I’m only a partisan Democrat because I have to be. There is currently only one legitimate political party, and even that is largely beholden to corporate interests. Aside from a few token guardrails, almost everything you see coming out of the Democratic Party requires a group chat with its corporate sponsors.

The other national “political party” is a crime syndicate that consists exclusively of insurrectionists, murderers, child abusers, misfits, thieves, and other criminals who do the bidding of a sick wannabe king.

A big reason for this decapitation of democracy is that, as you know, elections are dominated by money more than ever.

The electoral capitalization frenzy became endemic when the Supreme Court declared in Citizens United that corporations are people, too.1 That ruling made it impossible to run for office without massive budgets resulting in headlines like “record spending” during every campaign cycle.

Elections became sponsorships. If politicians were honest, they’d wear sponsorship logos on the front of their suits and dresses. Preferably on the crotch.

I lead off with this to point out that the insurrectionists who control all three branches of government benefit from a compliant corporate media that covered the recent passage of a reasonably decent housing bill by describing it as a Republican effort that somehow miraculously became a bipartisan one, even though their Dear Leader refused to sign it.2

What has been left mostly unsaid is that one of the bill’s most important provisions comes through an amendment authored and sponsored by Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, one of the few politicians in our broken system that we can say appears to be one of the good guys.3

The only impact Republicans had on this part of the bill was that they looked the other way and pretended not to notice.

Called S.Amdt.4343 to H.R.6644, or, more appropriately, “F*ck institutional investors,” it bans the purchase of homes by entities that own more than 350 single-family homes.4

That seems like a lot of homes for one entity to own. And it is. But before the bill passed, there were no limits.

When Senator Warnock introduced the amendment, he stood with supporters in Paulding County, Georgia, a rural county in the Appalachian foothills near Atlanta where corporate investors own nearly 4,000 single-family rental homes.

Metro Atlanta is even worse. There, more than 70,000 single-family homes are owned by large corporations or institutional investors. According to Warnock’s office, this amounts to one quarter of all Atlanta single-family home rentals.

The homes get rented out, refurbished and flipped, or, more often than you’d like to think, remain vacant.

In January 2026, there were approximately 4600 homes for sale in Atlanta, according to MLS data. One institutional investor, American Homes 4 Rent, owned 6000 single family rental properties in Atlanta in 2025.

The company’s financial reports make it clear that they specialize in the kinds of homes that young people would like to own as their first real estate purchase. The typical American Homes 4 Rent house in Atlanta is a 2200 foot, $235,000 structure.5

This kind of activity snatches homes away from young buyers. You wouldn’t be hearing so many stories about starter home buyers plopping down cash and pushing those who rely on mortgage loans out of the market were it not for these big companies eating up local housing markets.

Warnock admits his amendment to the bill is just the first step. Nobody needs 350 single-family homes. Especially private equity firms that use them as investment vehicles designed to shut out people looking for starter homes.

But the problem when cleaving that number is that there are a lot of small operations consisting of people who invest in two, three, four, or maybe five properties. For legislators governing a late-stage capitalist system, the question becomes one of where to set the limit. Ten? Probably not. Not in America. Twenty?

Hey, how about 350? So that’s the number they came up with.

The 3% fallacy

Opponents of the amendment have tried to argue that the nationwide rate of corporate or private equity single-family home ownership is only about 3%.

Numbers are not easy to reconcile among multiple sources, but recent trends indicate that private equity and large investors have been scooping up single-family homes at unprecedented rates.

Some estimates claim that institutional investors have bought as much as 40% of homes during the last few years. BatchData’s Investor Pulse Report puts the 2025 number at 34%.6

Interestingly, that same report headlines that institutional investors sold 23% more homes than they purchased. But digging through the data in the report reveals that most of those sales are to other institutional investors.

Most single-family rental homes owned by corporate investors, like in Atlanta, are starter homes rented out to the same people who would, in better economic times, rather take the plunge into owning their own place.

Protections against shell companies

You might expect that the first reaction from private equity firms will be for each of them to call their corporate attorneys and try to spin off a few thousand shell companies to deal with Senator Warnock’s restrictions:

“Saul, we’ve got 3500 single family rental properties in Chicago. How soon can you spin off ten shell company LLCs? 24 hours? Great! Make it so!”

But not so fast. Warnock wasn’t born yesterday. He grew up in public housing in Savannah, Georgia.7 He thought this through. The law specifically addresses the inevitable shell game. So he added language specifying the following rules defining an owning entity:8

The term ‘‘large institutional investor’’—

1. means an investment fund, corporation, general or limited partnership, limited liability company, joint venture, association, or other for-profit entity that is a legal entity structured in a manner that is not afore-mentioned that—

   1. is engaged, in whole or in part, in the business of investing in, owning, renting, managing, or holding single-family homes; and

   2. alone or in concert with 1 or more other entities, beginning after the date of enactment of this Act, directly or indirectly has investment control of not less than 350 single-family homes in the aggregate, not including any single-family home purchased in an excepted purchase made after the date of enactment of this Act; and

(ii) does not include any local, State, Tribal, or Federal government entity or instrumentality thereof.

There’s more in the Footnotes regarding how ownership is defined, too. Just click or tap the cute raised number!9 Footnotes are fun for the whole family. Check ‘em out.

Let’s talk about this

This is where you come in.

The only way to fight mainstream media’s right-wing bias and servility to the Trump administration is to help bring awareness of stuff like this to low-information voters who will be swayed by headlines like “Republicans Pass Housing Bill.”

How you do that is up to you. It can be as simple as just calling it Raphael Warnock’s Housing Bill. Nope. He didn’t write it all. But this was his amendment. In an era of disinformation, this is more than close enough.

Notes

I was hoping to release Chapter Two of Vampire Elegy, the sequel to Psalm of Vampires, today, but the narrator, Jade, is in Romania hunting down Andrew Tate and chilling with other vampires. He tells me that there’s a particularly harrowing bit of information regarding Charly he wants me to include in Chapter Two, but I can’t provide any more teaser than that because that’s all he said about it.

But you haven’t read the prologue or Chapter One yet, anyway, have you? Well, now’s a good time:

(I think the name is changing to something cooler, but not yet!)

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Footnotes

Hello, fellow agents of political misfortune (it’s turning around for the better, though!).

I’ve been in the middle of a move (done!), and am trying to crank out Chapter Two of the Psalm of Vampires sequel (a day away?).

In the meantime, I leave you with this self-explanatory image. I made it all by myself and everything. No AI, because I’ve been using Photoshop since it was Barneyscan.

If you don’t get the joke, you deserve accolades for avoiding the doomscrolling this weekend.

I hope you have a blessed day.

Notes

No AI. No reservoirs were drained in the making of this image.

Joke hint: The image is based on an image of Mitch McConnell and his happy wife, Elaine Chao, that some people are saying is AI. Laura Loomer, she of the “more insane than even other MAGAts” faction of the insurrectionist band of murderers, racists, crime families, and haters, is especially worked up over the image released by McConnell to prove he’s not dead.

This updated image is proof that the image is real.

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I contacted the Museum of Aviation’s Aircraft Exhibit Gallery at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia to verify this frightening turn of events.

I’ll update this post when I hear back.

In the meantime, graphics mavens on Apartheid Twitter had a field day, nearly doubling local electricity prices with AI while creating a series of responses like this:

And this:

The New York Times continues, ten years into the insurrection known as Trumpism, to carefully massage its headlines and story priorities to avoid the most important news story of this century: The takeover of the United States by a Christo-nationalist insurrection led by a psychopath whose mind is dangerously eroded, and whose best friend for years was a convicted sex trafficker and child rapist.

Every day should be filled with articles about this crisis. Every other event that occurs on Planet Earth should be relegated to Page Two status. Related events that result from the madman’s actions, such as the attack on Iran, should be labeled as the insider trading war that they are part of. It’s all relentless grift, and nothing more, although it has cost the non-Trump world plenty.

Other stories, like the extrajudicial murders of boaters in the Caribbean or the re-ignition of ICE’s war on American citizens,2 should fall under a new section of the newspaper called “Fascism Today.”

This is true for every news media organization, but it’s especially true for the New York Times, which tries to lay claim to the left side of the political divide.

Let’s look at what happened in Europe while the New York Times was focusing on what would ordinarily be a quiet shakeup in a Maine Senate seat that is probably not going to go the Republicans’ way no matter how the Times tries to wash it:

• As I mentioned, he said that the “Islamic Republic of Japan” attacked (aircraft carriers?).

• Once again, the mad clown had to be led around the rooms by European leaders gently pushing around a doddering, senile old man. There are videos and everything! It is embarrassing for a nation that calls itself the world’s superpower to watch foreign leaders lead our head of state along a kindergarten trail.

• He attacked Spain as a “wasted cause” and threatened to “cut off all trade” from that nation for failing to meet his idea of NATO’s defense spending targets. You can be sure that when Spanish bonds and the pan-European Stoxx 600 tumbled as a result of his spluttering, the mad clown’s grifty minions started vacuuming money. The New York Times barely mentioned the event, and made no noise about the connection to markets.

• He declared the U.S. ceasefire with Iran “over,” which immediately rocked equity markets worldwide and spiked global oil prices. You can be sure that his circle of grift cashed in on that, too. The Times mentioned market reaction, but buried it so much that nobody saw it but me and a few others who read past the first few paragraphs.

• He fired up his “I want Greenland” obsession again. European leaders mostly ignored him this time when he called Denmark’s resistance “a big problem,” the same way we ignore old drunk guys digging through dumpsters and screaming about Armageddon.

• The Europeans are now managing Trump like you’d manage anything else that is broken. They are withdrawing from every dependency on America they can. The Wall Street Journal, owned by one of Trump’s most important early enablers, Rupert Murdoch, has laid out the details. See the footnotes for more on this.3

• When Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reported to a roomful of NATO leaders that there were no refineries in Russia that hadn’t been damaged by Ukrainian drones, the grifter-in-chief, who never admits to backing the losing side, promised Zelenskyy they could clone American Patriot missile systems.

• I’m not sure if the business with Zelenskyy happened before or after the walking brain stem referred to the Ukrainian president as “President Putin,” an event which, sadly, might explain why he made the Patriot missile promise. It’s very possible he thought he was talking to Putin.

When these kinds of things are covered by mainstream media, including the New York Times, they’re treated as if they’re part of any normal diplomatic routine among nation-states instead of under the shadow of a gravely ill sociopath.

Their excuse is that they can’t demonstrate Trump’s mental illness conclusively. This is no longer merely a lame excuse. It’s a lie. The evidence appears before us every day, usually multiple times. There can’t possibly be a New York Times newsroom editor who can tell you with a straight face that Trump is sane or mentally fit.

The coverage of every Biden gaffe was wall-to-wall. The coverage of a dying, demented president’s mental and physical health is nil, even though newsrooms like the New York Times understand the gravity of the situation more than almost anyone.

There are a few journalists at the Times who manage to do good work anyway. One day, if we survive all this, we’ll hear their stories about how they managed to get their stories out of the sanewashed edifice that is the New York Times.

Until then, we continue to be no our own.

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Footnotes

The first movie made by Witkoff Kushner Productions explores the tender romance between a man suffering an unknown bout with death and his loving wife, who visits China when she learns that he’s been stricken.

Ruminato’s crack team of somewhat drunken journalists has obtained an exclusive look at the initial movie poster.

Notes

Image credits: Image of Elaine Chao by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Image of Mitch public domain via Facebook; Image of coffin licensed from Adobe Stock; image smashup by author. No AI. No reservoirs were drained in the making of this goofy fake poster.

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Until now.

The story of how I created an app that captures the images of these beings is one born out of an accident.

It happened during what some people call The Eradication.

Magic, the ultimate weapon of the resistance fighter, didn’t just start happening. At least, that’s not how I look at it.

When people began to download MagicAct and see real, live, images of angels and demons, a big segment of humanity began to tap into that part of our universe, a part of our universe that has always been there. The only reason it has been out of reach is that people didn’t believe.

People began taking pictures of the beings who are responsible for so-called coincidences. Next, they began to tap into their power.

It is giving us a fighting chance in this Eradication. It is giving us hope.

“It works like this.” I was showing it to Zor, who likes to say his real name is his online name, “ballsyUnicorn”, which probably tells you all you need to know about Zor.

I mean, Zor is the type of dude who spent hours online watching twenty-year-old girls dance on Twitch and OnlyFans, joining various streams of comments with remarks that didn’t quite get him blocked. That was before the Eradication started. You’d expect that a dude like that isn’t going to last long, but here he is. Sometimes you just never know what’s inside a person until a crisis hits.

I attached a lens piece to my iPhone. We — my company, were able to get it approved for sale by marketing it as a zone analysis tool. The little lens attachment was supposed to analyze a zone to determine the number of Eradication survivors, and send reports to The Bureau.

Some zones are supposed to be completely free of people, and the idea was that the tool would be used as a citizen’s spyglass of sorts. When it didn’t work as advertised, the government simply ignored it.

“We worked with these dudes out of Switzerland,” I was saying to Zor. “This thing captures at a frame rate equivalent to five trillion images per second. It can capture things moving faster than light into images.” My company wrote the software, the Swiss produced the camera and my friends in Bangalore developed the chip.

“So? I mean, what’s the point?” Zor. Always the deep thinker.

“Well, most phone cameras do about 120 frames per second. See, the device here encrypts flashes of light. Every time one of these coded flashes hits an object, the object bounces an image signal containing the same precise encoding. Then, all the image signals are gathered into one single photograph. You know, one frame. Then the chip inside the device separates all these signals into individual image frames.” Really fast, I didn’t bother saying.

“Outstanding,” said Zor sarcastically. He was probably trying and failing to imagine a girl dancing at the speed of light, and completely unable to see the utility in this.

Honestly? I didn’t see much utility in it, either. The project was a bit of a lark. Something to do.

Most of the things still happening on the internet were similarly random, happening through cell towers and neighborhood antennas strung up by the Resistance and torn down by the authorities and strung up again. It was all very clandestine. These days it is almost all gone, but not before the app had managed to accomplish its unplanned mission. The internet still worked. Things could go viral.

And they did.

And the angels have spoken.

Enough people bought the device and app that they began to take very interesting pictures and movies. Demons entering the mouths of their hosts. Or swirling wildly around people in motion as if trying to guide them. Crowds of them would gather around politicians and military personnel and the people who supervised the Eradication bots.

Some of the apparitions that were captured in these images moved without moving. If they appeared still, they were not, in truth, still at all.

They existed in one part of a movie in one space for an infinitesimal moment, then in another moment in just the slightest different position. It was as if they were part of an edited video. It was as if they were lifted out of their space and dropped into the same position, one millimeter apart from the original place.

But what they were really doing was moving from place to place at speeds we can’t see with the human eye.

These differences were only discovered through analysis by dedicated servants of a still uncertain cause. You couldn’t see the changes with the naked eye, not really. You needed video capturing software to find the tiny displacements.

I can’t tell you what inspired people to analyze these things. Maybe it was just the bizarre nature of the images. A good many people assumed they were staged. But the recorded sightings became so common that people realized that they were real.

The demons, especially the demons, were everywhere. Swarms of them, like a pestilence, haunting everyone and everything, twenty-four hours a day.

People stopped analyzing and just focused on shooting and distributing their shots over what was left of the internet.

Angels were seen, too, but they seemed rare. And, frustratingly, they didn’t seem to be interfering much with demonic activity. It was like they just allowed this invasion to happen. Most people eventually concluded that the invasion was simply a permanent presence.

One person posted an image of a huge angel, a grey man with a beard and a wildly colored costume, whose presence consumed an entire hospital room as he rested his hand on the forehead of a small child. It is said that the image made a million people cry.

It is also said that it was the beginning of the human migration to a place dubbed MagicLand. Not a place, a thing. A way to tap into the magic of the good souls of the universe. A way to fight back.

Thanks for reading! This short story is set about 2,000 years before the events of MagicLand.

I am working on two sequels at once: A Psalm of Vampires sequel and a MagicLand sequel. The first chapter of the MagicLand sequel will be available soon.

The Psalm of Vampires sequel’s first chapter can be accessed starting here:

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Buy MagicLand

There are still people defending Graham Platner, although not many. Most of them are named Graham Platner.

His former supporters have told him to please immediately leave Maine’s midterm U.S. Senate election. The world, after all, has had enough of 73-year old Susan Collins, and he has become a stain upon the effort to dethrone her as Maine’s forever Senator.

There are also a few voices (one is too many) claiming that Jenny Racicot’s rape accusations against Platner were politically motivated. That would be pretty weird for someone who agreed with his policy positions to do.

If a set of allegations were coming from the Republican operative, Lyndsey Fifield, who made some other accusations against him, I could see why people might hesitate, if only briefly, enough to dig a little deeper. But if Ms. Fifield’s story bore the characteristics of Ms. Racicot’s, that hesitation would die, too.

Buried in the news cycle is this key part of a story CNN released when it interviewed Ms. Racicot:

CNN spoke with two people close to Racicot who she previously told about the incident. One, a then-boyfriend who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that Racicot opened up to him about the assault when she had trouble with intimacy after about ten months of dating in 2023. It was clear that something had happened to her, he explained, adding that she told him a previous partner “didn’t take no for an answer” and had sex with her non-consensually.

“She didn’t say the word rape,” the then-boyfriend explained, rather describing the encounter to him as a sexual assault. “I think the only reason she didn’t use the word rape is because I think she felt weird because she was kind of dating [him]. If all that went down on a first date, I bet she would have called it rape,” he told CNN.

CNN reviewed a text thread from 2023 between Racicot and her then-boyfriend where he wrote “I know you were assaulted” in a message.

CNN sort of buried the lede in their story. An ex-boyfriend came to her side. There is substantial evidence that she reported the rape long before Platner became a political trendline.

Ms. Racicot herself seemed hesitant to make the accusations. You’ll find out why she finally did later in this short post.

Anyone who has experienced sexual assault understands her hesitation.

For those of you not familiar with the allegations, the TL;DR version of Ms. Racicot’s description of the events is that Platner came to her house dead drunk, raped her, then fell asleep.

CNN had to press her on the “rape” word. Because that’s the word survivors have so much trouble saying out loud. If you haven’t been raped, you might question why that is, but nobody who has been raped questions it. The hesitation comes from deep in the soul. It comes from a wound that never heals, no matter how much therapy, anger management, or drugs and alcohol are applied. It is a gash that bleeds forever, even when time reduces it to a slow, festering sore that occasionally opens up by a trigger, one that can surprise and startle even the mostly healed.

Her interviewer, Jake Tapper, asked if she now considered the incident a rape. Ms. Racicot said, “By definition yes, absolutely yes.”

According to the same CNN article, Platner has stated that he doesn’t remember that night. Yet he still claimed that the allegations are false after the megastory hit everyone’s newsfeed.

“Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false,” he said in a video statement.

How can an event you participated in but don’t remember be categorically false? If you remember nothing of a night, then anything said about that night can be true.

Dismissing an accuser’s accusations by instinct is predatory behavior.

I suspect that by the time I hit the “publish” button for this Substack, he will have quit the Maine Senate race, an important race for Democrats to win if they’re to retake the Senate.

After he quits, though, there are still important lessons. The biggest one I can think of is that we (men, especially) hold those red flags up higher when we see them.

Not too long ago, I wrote a Substack post about Platner that defended him, especially his Totenkopf, which is a common tattoo within the U.S. military.

Platner himself said that he had a severe drinking problem. So, number one, perhaps that should be a disqualifier. We’ve seen what active, rampaging drunks like Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth are doing. I’m a strong believer in recovery of all kinds. That doesn’t mean we should accept a past like his from a sitting Senator. Especially when the drunkenness only abated a few years ago.

Here’s where my mea culpa really comes into play, though. It’s called ignoring obvious warning signs. In my first article about Platner, I wrote:

Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat, who said she dated him casually off and on between 2019 and 2021, said the posts deepened her belief that he did not respect women. “When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

Instead of saying, “Whoa, stop right there, get me off this Platner train,” I did what too many of us do when we see questionable behavior from someone on our side of the political fence. I shrugged my shoulders and told myself that his alleged recovery from drinking had cured him.

Democrats are not like Republicans. Most modern Republicans would still be coming to Platner’s defense if he were on their side. His behavior towards women is a feature, not a bug. Democrats, however, are, rightly, throwing Platner to the curb.

I’m willing to admit to some desperation. The nightmare we are living under needs to end, but not at all costs. When I saw that the only report of any physical altercations involved a Republican operative, I suspected foul play by Republicans.

But Ms. Racicot's statement should have informed the survivor in me. Let’s again review what she said several months ago:

“When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

She was referring to numerous misogynistic quotes on his Reddit account. The red flags were there. I ignored them. Am I really that desperate to see MAGA defeated?

We all know how this stuff goes, too. The Republican operative, Ms. Fifield, said, “his offensive online posts reminded me of just how much he hated women.”

It won’t surprise anyone if she also has a more gruesome tale. Hopefully, she won’t need to tell it, since she clearly doesn’t want to. Hopefully, by the time you read this, Platner will have quit the race.

I’ll repeat my mea culpa: I dismissed a woman who said she was a Republican operative. Who also said he hated women. Why wasn’t my thinking aligned like this corrected line instead?

A Republican operative. Who also said he hated women

I take a tiny dash of comfort knowing that even Ms. Racicot hesitated at first. Per the CNN article:

“I really agree with his politics. I think we need someone with those political stances,” she said, adding that her shared political views were one reason she didn’t come forward sooner.

Then, she talked to Cheyenne Hunt, a Democratic-leaning social media maven who has helped expose sexual assault by other politicians, including former Democratic House Representative Eric Swalwell in a series of revelations that sent his political career into a permanent death spiral.

Ms. Racicot explained:

Racicot said Hunt provided a support network for sexual assault survivors that made her comfortable with publicly sharing her story.

“I’m getting the support now that I needed all along,” Racicot said.

This will sound familiar to anyone who has climbed the switchback known as sexual assault survival, where names and the word “rape” often become the last utterances from a survivor’s lips.

Now that the allegations have expanded and include support via statements made to Ms. Racicot’s friends before anyone knew who Graham Platner was, there can be no doubt about his future. He’ll return to oyster farming where he belongs. If we’re extra lucky, he’ll run into a hungry orca while pulling in a net.

Maine Democrats, who never seem to have a coherent strategy, will need to figure out a way to pick up the pieces and find another candidate. And do so in a hurry.

And, speaking merely for myself, I need to remember to hoist those red flags a little higher next time I see stories like Platner’s emerge from the cesspool of American politics.

Sources for this story

CNN report on Platner interview

Gordon, Allison, and Jake Tapper. “Woman Alleges Graham Platner Raped Her in 2021 While They Were Dating, Which He Denies.” CNN, July 6, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/06/us/graham-platner-racicot-allegation-maine-invs.

This outlines Platner’s specific positions (for reference):

U.S. Senate — Democratic Primary | Voter Guide: 2026 Primary Election * Maine
From Maine Morning Star | Policy and Politics for the Pine Tree Statemainemorningstar.com

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Footnotes

In the wake of a troubled nation’s 250th anniversary that highlighted its failures instead of its successes, it’s worth repeating.

Luckily, a photograph by Cheney Orr does it for me.

During the July 4 weekend, one lone woman rode a Washington, D.C., Metro train car. She had no reason to think it wasn’t just another day. She was heading to wherever she was heading. Nobody knows where. Nobody knows who she is.

Then, this happened.

Members of an insurrectionist group called Patriotic Front, too cowardly to show their faces, surrounded her. There were no known active threats of violence against her. There didn’t need to be. The hateful garb did that for them.

The look on her face became the iconic expression of a 2026 Independence Day holiday in the midst of insurrection. She became all of us, and we became her.

What’s beautiful about her expression is that it doesn’t display fear as much as it reflects our current battle. It reflects our war against the Christo-nationalist insurrectionists who have taken over the U.S. government.

It is a look of innocent defiance. For me, it has a look of “Sure, I’m scared, but don’t you even think of trying something.” It is a look that says, “Our whistles will defeat your guns.”

I suspect there are dozens of other ways we can interpret her expression. Only she knows what she felt in her heart.

Yes, we are all scared. But we are defiant. We are the rebellion against a king. We are July 4.

Sadly, because this is America, there will be a concerted effort, not just by doxxers, but by reporters from mainstream media, which regularly mainlines on America’s depraved celebrity culture, who will seek her out and try to identify her.

I hope they fail, unless she wants to be heard.

Meanwhile, we all gain from her experience. In one instant, she became an unwitting hero who probably just wants to be left alone. This makes her like all the rest of us, doesn’t it?

None of us wants what the diseased orange flesh in the Oval Office is offering. We want to finish our day in peace. We want to go to work, to school, to our dance and yoga classes, and talk about anything but him.

When you wake up in the morning, do you look forward to learning about the latest babbling from the lunatic in the Oval Office? Did any of us rush to YouTube or the news channels this weekend to hear the words of a toddler's mind speechifying at Mount Rushmore with stuff like this?

There is nothing like what we are doing. The birth and survival of the American nation under God is quite simply the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands ever. That is ever, ever, ever.

The only people interested in what he had to say were those eager to generate AI gifs of the toddler-in-chief in diapers. And a few desperate MAGA holdouts. And perhaps, if we’re feeling generous, a few psychiatrists and mental health professionals.

The Mount Rushmore speech was full of gems like this:1

Our rights here given to us by the God who made us and those rights shall not be infringed. Americans believe in self-reliance. We look at success with envy not, and I say that, some people are envious and some people are not. We are not, but with admiration and we earn it and we will always earn it and we will always respect it. We are an incredible, good, kind, and generous people, always ready to help a friend or a neighbor in need.

The First Amendment certainly protects the rights of an American President to babble incoherently.

But it doesn’t protect the rights of the Patriot Front to exist, much less speak its hatred.

A unanimous Supreme Court opinion in 1919, Schenck v. United States, made that clear. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the decision that freedom of speech and freedom of the press under the First Amendment did not exist in circumstances that present “a clear and present danger.”2

This is where I ask you to look at the image by Cheney Orr again.

It deserves this caption: “A Clear and Present Danger.”

Understand who Patriot Front is before you diss the “Clear and Present Danger” argument.

The lady in the photograph was surrounded by men covered in hateful imagery. The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s stalwarts against racism and now a target of the insurrectionist regime’s Department of Injustice,3 describes the hate group as follows:4

Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism. Patriot Front focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country.

Its imagery is an act of violence.

Vanguard America was a hate group that mostly broke apart shortly after the August 12, 2017, “Unite the Right” rally.

Insurrectionist literature is in boldface everywhere the Patriot Front is. Here’s a sampling:5

“The time of the Republic has passed in America as the system grows too weak to perform its duty. … The damage done to this nation and its people will not be fixed if every issue requires the approval and blessing from the dysfunctional American democratic system. Democracy has failed in this once great nation.”

“The American Identity was something uniquely forged in the struggle that our ancestors waged to survive in this new continent. … To be an American is to realize this identity and take up the national struggle upon one’s shoulders. Not simply by birth is one granted this title but by the degree to which he works and fulfills the potential of his birth.” — Patriot Front manifesto.

“An African, for example, may have lived, worked, and even been classed as a citizen in America for centuries, yet he is not American. He is, as he likely prefers to be labelled, an African in America. The same rule applies to others who are not of the founding stock of our people as well as to those who do not share the common unconscious that permeates throughout our greater civilization, and the European diaspora.”

— Patriot Front manifesto.

Patriot Front’s founder is an insurrectionist named Thomas Rousseau.

Rousseau was a member of Vanguard America, the group that led the charge during the 2017 Charlottesville riot. He helped lead cowards in masks toward the death of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer.

Heather died when another insurrectionist, James Alex Fields, Jr., under the leadership of Rousseau, barrelled his car into a crowd of protesters.

Fields is now serving multiple life sentences for his participation in the insurrection. The Insurrectionist-in-Chief would surely pardon him if he could, but Fields was convicted by a state court in Virginia. He also pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges.6

If pardoning him from those federal hate crimes released him from prison, we can assume the hater-in-chief would do so, but why bother? Fields is in for life on the state charges. A federal pardon will have no practical effect.

Patriot Front founder Rousseau has been explicit in his call to violence and insurrection:7

“Americans are members of the European racial collective. America is a people and a nation as an organic entity and the United States has engaged in a practice of giving citizenship to all manners of other nationalities and all manners of alien races. So, it is very clear that the boundary that the government has of what is and what isn’t an American is very different from the true definition and the true realization that it is a, as it says in our manifesto, that membership in the nation is inherited through blood. It’s not given through ink.”

The Patriot Front manifesto, written by Rousseau, calls for the creation of a white ethnostate in the United States. In other words, the Patriot Front is another Confederacy wannabe. There’s a pretty long list of those.

The young lady in the Reuters image was experiencing a clear and present danger when her Metro car was taken over by Patriot Front riders.

It doesn’t matter how innocent their travel to Trump’s empty festival in D.C. appeared to be. The imagery is the violence.

The imagery is the clear and present danger.

We need to stop being afraid of challenging the First Amendment.

It is not sacrosanct.

Especially now that the government itself has been taken over by insurrectionists.

When Jack Smith testifies in his 2029 confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Senators need to ask him if he’s willing to take these hate groups on.

And Congress will need to expand the court so that the corrupt, racist Supreme Court doesn’t stop him if he says yes.

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Footnotes

Alex Pretti, 37 at the time of his murder, was an ICU nurse who “devoted his life to serving veterans,” in the words of the Immigration Law and Justice Network.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said that Pretti was “someone who went to work to care for veterans, someone who was a valued co-worker, someone who relished and lived in this state in a big way, whether it was outdoor activities or being down there on the street as a First Amendment witness to what ICE is doing to this state.”

The insurrectionist government released videos at the time stating that Pretti was a domestic terrorist. He had no criminal record.

His family responded to the insurrectionist lies like you would have: “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting.”

Renee Good was also 37 years old when she was shot in the head by insurrectionist stormtroopers.

According to CNN at the time:

A mother of three, Good had two children, ages 15 and 12, from her first marriage, The Associated Press reported.

Her 6-year-old child’s father died in 2023, according to the Star Tribune. “There’s nobody else in his life,” the child’s grandfather told the newspaper.

Never forget.

Insurrectionists murdered the mother of 6, 12, and 15-year-old children. They murdered a loving mother named Renee Good.

A former neighbor in Kansas City called Good and her family “lovely,” CNN affiliates KCTV and KMBC reported.

She is “a neighbor who, you know, is not a terrorist. Not an extremist,” Joan Rose told KMBC. “That was just a mom who loved her kids, loved her spouse.”

On her social media accounts, Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom,” according to the AP. She recently said she was “experiencing Minneapolis,” posting a pride flag emoji on her Instagram account.

Both were people I would have liked to have known.

Today, I also honor the immigrants who keep this country’s promise alive. We must do everything we can to reclaim the importance of immigration in the United States.

I honor the ancestors of the slaves who built the economic engine that we still benefit from. We must do everything we can to reclaim the importance of civil rights and end racism once and for all.

I honor the Native Americans who lost their homes, lives, and livelihoods during the growth of the American empire. We must do everything we can to honor their traditions and help them retain sovereignty over their lands.

And I spit at the January 6 insurrectionists

Now to the headline.

Just a few days prior to Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. hoisted an upside-down flag at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, in protest of Biden’s election and in honor of the January 6 insurrectionists.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s Home on January 17, 2021

The historic “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a historical pine tree flag, now linked to Christian nationalism and efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was also seen flying at Alito’s vacation home on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, in the summer of 2023.

Representative Jamie Raskin reminds us about the revolutionary nature of the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which has since been co-opted by Christo-nationalists:

The Appeal to Heaven flag is arguably the most radical democratic flag in American history. It was flown by “Washington’s Cruisers,” Yankee privateers who practiced hit-and-run raids on British shipping during the Revolution. They used fast, lightly armed sloops to disrupt General Howe’s supply lines when he was close to crushing the American revolt.

The people who flew this flag fought against everything MAGA stands for today — one-man rule and a mystical cult of personality, state-enforced religion, and the power of financial oligarchs over working people. These Revolutionaries fought for the ideas that Trump’s monarchists detest: liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy.

Although the first recorded evidence of the upside-down flag at Alito’s home was reported as January 17, 2021, there were rumors and circumstantial evidence that the flag was raised on January 6 in honor of the insurrectionists.

The Supreme Court was in the middle of an important election case, Republican Party v. DeGraffenreid, involving how elections in states are administered.

Alito and the insurrectionists lost that case, but he went on, along with a 6-3 majority, to rule that Trump had full immunity for his actions inciting the January 6 insurrection.

Trump, of course, later gave immunity to the insurrectionists themselves by pardoning or granting clemency to all 1,600 insurrectionists for their attack on the Capitol building.

Make no mistake about where we are at this moment of American history on this, a ruined 250th anniversary of the birth of a nation.

The insurrectionists are in power.

There is no sugar-coating it. Everything they do, from the implementation of Project 2025 on down, is a reflection of this.

Today, there is no Republican in Congress willing to denounce the January 6 insurrection. Most of them openly embrace it.

This is not, as the media likes to call it, “The Trump administration” or presidency.

We are living under an insurrectionist government.

We can take some comfort that nobody seems interested in celebrating at Trump’s empty festival in Washington, D.C., but the hardest part of the battle against the insurrectionists who are in power begins now.

We will need an army of volunteers to reach out to voters, even if it’s one at a time, to swarm the polls during the midterms. Failure to take both the House and Senate likely means that the government that follows Trump's impending death will change the Independence Day holiday to January 6, Insurrection Day. They might even call it Trump Day.

If that happens, if you think things are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Chapter One — The Fraudster

Nobody can hide in a room better than a vampire. Especially when his target is an inebriated couple moments away from self-inflicted wanton violence.

I didn’t need to be inside the apartment. I could have stood outside and heard every word, but I wanted to try the new, although ancient, trick I learned at Jerrold Mountain.

Blending into a wall where the only decoration was an old Vargas girl print in a black plastic frame, it was like I was right there with them.

A woman named Marge sat on a couch in nothing other than unzipped distressed blue jean shorts, accusing the man, through a drunken lisp, of infidelity. The alcohol coursing through her veins next made a series of promises about the condition of the apartment that could never be kept. “I swear I’ll clean every day, Billy, every day. Even the fuckin’ piss you leave on the floor next to the toilet.”

Normally, I hate feeding on drunks. The alcohol doesn’t affect my body, but the taste of the blood is foul. I was about to make an exception with Billy.

My wall blend was making me weak, so I released it to become an ashen shadow against the unpainted drywall, almost as if you imprinted my silhouette with a dark newspaper halftone, but with no features, just a dark grey shape.

The arguing couple noticed nothing. The booze had put blinders on. Their only focus was their besotted mutual hate.

Billy drifted into the small kitchen to get another beer, screeching something clever like, “You bitch!” in the middle of his side of the mutual tirade contest.

Marge spluttered something about “You and your fucking titles caused all this bullshit” as I neared her, my full body, dressed in my favorite black tuxedo, now looming over her.

That silenced her. My fangs jumped onto her neck, but the wretched taste of her blood forced me to spit it out onto the stained, worn carpeting, where it would fit right in.

Billy walked into the living room and tried to deliver one of his smart one-liners, “Who the fuck are you?” as Marge’s body convulsed enough to break a few ribs.

“Oh, come on,” I said as I approached him with my bloody canines exposed. “I barely got enough to knock her out.” I looked at her, then Billy. “She’s putting on an act, isn’t she, Billy.”

“Who the fuck are you?” he tried again.

By this point, I was ready to turn him into human jerky. But then I remembered James Coates.

Billy’s fate would have to wait until I knew more. Out of respect for Coates, I lunged into Billy’s neck, fangs first, and took just enough blood to knock him out.

“I can’t feed on this shit,” I said as I wiped my mouth with the bottom of his black Metallica t-shirt. I spat the blood into the blank white canvas his face had become, his eyes closed, his mouth agape like he was waiting for an oversized baby spoon.

I first encountered Billy while emerging into a downpour with Moreland from a Midtown restaurant.

Short videos of her exploits in Singapore had turned Moreland into a major celebrity, which transformed her usually foul mood into a bedrock of steaming hate. Her first impulse, which she didn’t try to contain, was to lay waste to an entire hamlet in the north Georgia Appalachian foothills.

The good news for her victims was that she didn’t kill them by draining them dry. The bad news for neighboring communities was that the people she turned did not possess the most stable of minds, which led them to an epic rampage through nearby towns.

When I asked her why she once again violated her own policy of not turning humans, she hurled sets of invectives not suitable even for these pages.

I would have thought that turning a dozen internet influencers only to see them killed by Wurdulacs would have knocked some sense into her. She had taken that hard, almost like she had lost her own children.

As for turning people in general, Moreland had never been a fan. But maybe once you get a taste, you go back to it like a drug you never should have tried in the first place.

I wanted to confront her on all this. We normally never hesitate to get in each other’s faces or call each other out, but this felt different. Personal. I let it go.

Instead, I told her that she was also increasing her celebrity status and spreading vampire lore, a concept she had always fought. More cussing.

We were arguing about this while leaving the restaurant when I saw Billy slap a woman and push her to the ground outside a bar next door.

“Let’s drain this guy,” I said.

But Moreland wanted no part of it. “Let Darwin do his thing,” she said. “It won’t take long with that dude. Besides, I thought you hated boozy blood.”

So I bid her a fond farewell, found a dark corner in the bar, and watched Billy drink himself half to death. I counted five occasions his noxious mouth almost led to a fight before he stumbled out of the bar and into his car, a black Tesla showing its age, but apparently on autopilot, since he wasn’t weaving when he drove.

I had a hard time keeping up at one point when he ran into a series of green lights on the quiet, after-hours roads lit by amber streetlights shrouded by a soft drizzle. It’s not like in the vampire movies, where we’re a blur when we run. It’s physical exertion, just like it is for you. We’re a lot faster than humans, but I can’t outrun a car that’s doing forty.

Luckily, the Tesla hit another long series of red lights until it found his apartment building. I was surprised I was able to tail him on foot the whole way. I did it for sport, really, not thinking I’d succeed.

Now that I had, I wanted to learn more about him, so I pinned his address for later.

I visited him three times. Enough to know that he wasn’t worthy of the typical symbiotic relationship that modern vampires like me maintain with humans.

This guy was a title fraudster. I had no idea what that was until I overheard him talking to Marge about it while I lurked outside. You might remember from earlier tales that vampire ears are pretty fantastic, even though they’re not pointed.

The conversation started something like this:

Marge: “You need to roll up all those deeds into a package and sell them on the dark net, Billy. This guy Coates is onto you.”

Coates, it turned out, was a housing attorney and director of the Atlanta Housing Justice Project. He had uncovered nearly a thousand of Billy’s deed thefts, tracking them almost right into Billy’s computer.

Deed theft is easy. All a crook needs to do is forge their name on a home’s title and submit it to the local county register of deeds. Boom, the deed is theirs. Most county registrars don’t bother investigating the veracity of the title. They just stamp it, take their fee, and say, “Next!”

After the bad guy hijacks the title, they can sell the property, rent it out, or suck its equity dry with second, third, even fourth mortgages.

That’s what Billy was doing. It’s illegal, but you’d be surprised how many homeowners get scammed, especially in a big city like Atlanta.

Somehow, James Coates found out, probably through a victim’s complaint, so I visited Coates to ask him a few questions.

Coates ran his operation from a small office on Peachtree Street next to a dentist's office. Even though he looked a little befuddled at first, and even though I don’t think he’d ever talked to a vampire, the first thing I noticed about him was that he maintained a beautiful Afro that he must have borrowed directly from the early 1970s. It was a beast of a thing, big, round, perfectly sculpted, perfectly trimmed. An art project.

When I sat across his desk, I could still see the top of his magnificent black globe of hair, even though it seemed to add another foot to his six-foot frame. I detected a small loop of white thread that I desperately wanted to pick out of his hair with one of my long purple fingernails.

After our introductions, even though my eyes and nose felt hunger, I told him to relax, I wasn’t there to feed. Instead, what I wanted was for him to feed me information.

“Well, you know, this stuff is new to all of us,” he said confidently. I knew what he was talking about, but I asked him anyway. “This whole vampire thing. Don’t y’all worry about, you know, the backlash? You know it’s coming.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said. The press reviews on vampires had not been particularly glowing since the events in Singapore. “Short answer. No. Can you tell me about deed fraud?”

He did. When I pried information out of Coates about Billy, he wanted to know if I was working for Billy or if there was something else going on.

I assured him that I had no interest in supporting Billy’s scam.

“Are you… hunting him?” he asked. Smart guy. I lied and told him no, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. “It’s just that I’m sort of closing in on him. If you kill him, it might be more difficult to compensate people for their losses.”

Such empathy toward the soon to be dead, counselor, I wanted to say.

Like any good lawyer, he switched direction. “I’ve read enough about you, to, you know, sort of understand your species is divided into different camps. Just like us. And you seem to be one of the good guys. Are you one of the good guys, Mr. Mourning?”

“I dunno, man. I mean, I try? It’s complicated.”

Coates nodded.

I asked, “Do you think this guy’s money is locked up somewhere? Or is it fluid, in and out, living on the edge kind of stuff?”

“Well, that’s just it. Haven’t gotten far enough to tell. Hell, I’m just now at the point where I can present something to the DA, who, fortunately, I have a good relationship with.”

“Lucky you,” I said sarcastically.

He chuckled at that. “But what I’m presenting to the DA is just a bunch of forged documents. Not much more than that. I don’t know jack about his financial condition, what he does with the funds, how much he’s made off each scam. None of it, really. That’ll be the DA’s problem. I’m a civil attorney. I’ll sue this guy eventually. After the DA does her bit. Our organization has several clients we’re prepared to represent. But the criminal side? I leave that to others.”

“Sounds potentially lucrative for you,” I said.

“Not really. Fool’s gold. We’re a nonprofit.”

I knew that, I remembered that, but I was testing his face. I nodded. “No. I’m not going to kill him, Mr. Coates. Not if it prevents you from accomplishing your good work.”

He scowled. “I’m not sure how good it is. For every guy we catch, a thousand get away. It’s extremely frustrating. And easily fixed. All it takes is for the County to vet deed changes. Or better yet, for the state to impose some statutory validation requirements. But as you know, Fulton County is underfunded. They’d need a lot more than bake sales to add that capability to the registrar’s office.”

A simple feeding had turned into a bureaucratic quagmire. I didn’t know Coates, but I believed him. He was one of the good guys.

“Our humble investigative team did turn up one thing you might be interested in,” Coates continued.

I raised an eyebrow.

“As I said, I don’t know much about vampires. But we all now know one when we see one. Pretty much.”

“Yeah, sure. We’re all tall, but we’re not all purple. Most of us shed our skin so we can match the skin colors of the local population.”

“Well, I sort of knew that, but thanks for confirming. Anyway, one of the title frauds that has occurred is in a house where a local vampire appears to live. A fellow who goes by the name “Chevalier.”

I shook my head, not recognizing the name.

“The press has been very clear on this, but perhaps to assuage the fear of our easily frightened human population,” said Coates.

“An apt description,” I said. “Clear on what?”

“The press has probably stated a million times that there are only a few thousand of you left. So, I thought perhaps you’d heard of this Chevalier fellow.”

I had not, and I told him so. My mind went to work trying to guess which vampire house Chevalier was from, but without more information, I was stymied.

“Is he also a fraudster?” I asked.

“No, no. He appears to be the owner of a house that was defrauded. A title forge victim.”

It was difficult for me to picture a vampire as a victim of a petty human crime, and I told Coates this, too.

“Understood. He’s on the list I have of Billy’s victims, though.” Coates tapped into his computer for a minute. “Last year. But Billy hasn’t attempted to sell the property or acquire any loans on it, or anything of that nature. The title change is it, so far. Kind of a long time doing nothing in my experience. Something is stopping him. Maybe it’s as simple as he got a look at the guy, but dudes like Billy don’t make house calls, so that seems unlikely.”

I still didn’t know much more about title fraud than I knew before meeting with Coates, but I knew one thing for certain: It was time to pay a visit to this Chevalier character.

Thanks for reading!

You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited.

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Now that the Resistance has forced ICE and its companion stormtroopers from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into stealth mode such that they are no longer actively shooting protesters in the head, one would think, “Whew, glad that’s over.”

Right?

Nope.

The New York Times is telling us that more than 10,000 arrests have been made by regime stormtroopers in the last five days.1

Happy Fourth of July.

I’ll repeat that: 10,000 arrests. In five days.

Most of this has been through ICE.

The White House (Stephen Miller, probably) has issued another arrest quota: 2,000 per day. Miller had previously gunned for 3,000 per day, but despite the massive increase in resources, wasn’t able to hit that goal, in no small part because of Resistance forces in L.A., Chicago, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine.

The regime also found that shooting white protesters while chasing brown people around town didn’t sit well with the general public.

So they changed tactics, first by dumping the easy target, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, who had become a dog-killing South Park meme, and replacing her with the equally unqualified, but quieter Markwayne Mullin.

Mullin announced that the regime would continue to send stormtroopers out into various cities, but this time they wouldn’t provoke local populations by giving the effort names like “Project Bust Chicago’s Balls” or “Midway Blitz.”

They snatched a nun

The result is a quieter form of domestic terrorism. Stuff like this (quoting the New York Times):

In South Texas, Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun, was arrested on her way to church on Sunday morning, according to Sister Norma Pimentel, her colleague. Ms. Ugboaja is a local nurse who also helps at a parish in the region. Ms. Pimentel called local leaders after learning of the arrest, and congressional officials soon got involved and pushed for her release.

On Sunday, she was let go from ICE custody, and Ms. Pimentel was there to greet her.

Ms. Pimentel said that Ms. Ugboaja was distraught upon her release.

“It took her awhile to be able to talk — she was crying,” she said.

In case you glossed over it because you read things the way I do, with one eye toward the next article in the queue, let me repeat this:

They arrested a nun.

On the way to church.

It turned out her paperwork was in order, but that’s how ICE stormtroopers operate. They arrest nuns, then ask questions later.

It was only a few weeks ago that the mainstream media was sanewashing stories about the latest Republican government shutdowns. After a few strongly worded memos from Democrats, the latest one resulted in Congress authorizing $38.5 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 2

This funding was cobbled together in June under the Orwellian Secure America Act, also referred to as the ICE First, Families Last Act, according to reliable observers3 who don’t sanewash everything this regime and its compliant Congress does.

It is part of a broader $70 billion spending package shared between ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland Security.

The size of the stormtrooper funding package is nearly impossible for those of us dealing with basic living costs to comprehend.

In the original funding bill that Republicans cynically called the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress authorized $170 billion for border and immigrant expulsions for the next four years4

This is more money than every law enforcement agency in the United States put together.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice:5

It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.

It turns U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, which receives $49 billion, into the largest law enforcement agency in the nation, bigger than the FBI, which comes in at a comparatively meager $11.1 billion.6

The Brennan Center correctly calls the $170 billion in overall incarceration and deportation funding the beginning of a deportation industrial complex. I’ll call it the beginning of a prison industrial complex that the administration has already demonstrated a willingness to outsource overseas to countries like Libya and other dysfunctional, and often violent, foreign nations.

The never-ending case of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García is a highly publicized poster child for the regime’s behavior, but Stephen Miller and his fascist stormtroopers have been quietly sending Americans to concentration camps in other countries since Trump first showed up again at the Oval Office.7

The same tactics, but now with smaller, more tightly focused teams

Under new DHS chief Markwayne Mullin, stormtroopers have changed tactics. Instead of Operation Terrorize aimed at a city near you, the regime is spreading out its domestic terror across a wider net with smaller teams.

Nuns in South Texas. Fathers of terrified 13-year-old boys in Salt Lake City, where a 48-year-old Mexican man named Arturo was snatched from the streets while driving to a soccer game. Salt Lake City will lose his skills as a furniture maker, and mostly not notice, until it notices others missing, too.

While Atruro’s thirteen-year-old son anguishes about life without a father and his mother living in fear and misery, crops will rot in the fields, restaurant owners will jack up the prices of their food while looking for people willing to wash dishes for more than minimum wage, roofs will go unfixed, ever more construction sites will turn silent.

Eventually, the Resistance will figure out how to fight this. But for now, the losses are piling up again.

The good fortune of incompetence

The resistance does have one bit of luck on its side: The incompetence of the terrorists and insurrectionists we do battle with in the courts.

Others have documented the court record of the American Clown Show well enough that it’s sufficient to say here that they’re getting hammered on almost every front, aside, sadly, from the one at the highest level, the corrupt and complicit Supreme Court. I’ve talked about this institution before:

But lower courts have not been kind to the regime. Some of them have exposed the regime to such large degrees of malfeasance and corruption that the DOJ itself has had to issue the occasional mea culpa.

Consider the case of the Broadway Six in Chicago.

For years, the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office was one of the Department of Justice’s most successful and reputable prosecution units.

These days, it’s run by a Trump appointee named Andrew Boutros, who has, in the wake of a grand jury-rigging scandal, thrown 20-year veteran Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg (take note of the gender) under the bus by ordering an investigation of more than 100 cases she’s handled since 2007.

Technically, Boutros is the 42nd U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (often referred to as the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office by the media). He was chosen by the Grifter in Chief for the office in a bit of DOJ subterfuge involving an open-ended appointment that avoids that nasty business of Senate approval, although why the PedoFührer went that route is a curiosity, given that the Republican Senate would probably approve the clone of Al Capone if the Grifter nominated him.

Boutros oversees about 130 criminal and civil attorneys in the Chicago office. Most of these are career lawyers and prosecutors, including Sheri Mecklenburg. But it was Mecklenburg who was accused of grand jury tampering in the Broadview Six case.8

The Broadway Six were accused of blocking an ICE concentration camp transport vehicle, but the case was dismissed with prejudice (meaning it’s over) when Mecklenburg was allegedly discovered talking to grand jurors outside of grand jury proceedings involving the federal indictment. Federal prosecutors were also accused of additional grand jury tampering.

Now that Bouros has ordered a deep dive into Mecklenburg’s past cases, one of two things is probably true: Mecklenburg has a long history of jury tampering, and Bouros is a dedicated reformer, or Mecklenburg is a victim of a Trump appointee’s corruption and was acting on his orders, and he’s trying to bury her for it.

Bouros has the misfortune of being that Trump appointee and has, unlike previous U.S. Attorneys in the Chicago office, lost the benefit of the doubt by his association with the world’s most corrupt regime.

Joyce Vance repeatedly points out that judges and other participants in the U.S. justice system have long trusted the ethics of U.S. Attorneys and the DOJ, but that has changed under this regime.

We’ll find out how this plays out. Either way, the Northern District of Illinois is on its heels where it belongs as long as it keeps fighting against the people it’s supposed to protect.

The regime even tried to prevent a USMNT World Cup goal

I stole that line. I did. I’m not ashamed. I copped it from SF Gate, a San Francisco Bay Area digital news platform run by Hearst. Its headline:9

Donald Trump fought to prevent USMNT’s first Bay Area World Cup goal

How? Remember the Supreme Court decision this week that barely kept alive birthright citizenship, which is explicitly spelled out by the 14th Amendment, by a freaky 6-3 vote?

Well, that case was prompted by the Mad Clown’s attempt to issue an Executive Order squashing that amendment, which, if successful, would have presumably sent USMNT striker Folarin Balogun packing to Nigeria.

Balogun’s story is both interesting and fun. We should be embracing this kind of story with love and excitement during this 250th anniversary. Instead, we find ourselves doing everything we can to avoid TrumpleThinSkin’s various empty festivals.

Turns out Balogun’s parents were en route to England. Airline personnel, noticing that his mother’s tummy had the approximate shape and size of a dinosaur egg, prevented her from boarding a plane home from New York to the U.K., where she lived at the time.

So, luckily for some flight attendants, Balogun was born in Brooklyn instead of on a plane, and instantly became an American citizen courtesy of the same 14th Amendment TrumpleFilthSkin tried to destroy with his outlandish Executive Order.

Lucky for us, Trump’s effort failed as soon as it began, and Balogun is part of U.S. World Cup lore.

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Notes

For a truer picture of America, one Stephen Miller doesn’t want you to see, take the time this holiday weekend to read this review of immigration in America:

🎁 Ruminato Gift Link:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/01/us/america-identity-ancestry-census.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ulA.wyOc.SHwO8a_2IqDM&smid=url-share 🎁

Yes, I know. It’s the sanewash kings at the New York Times. But when they’re right, they’re right.

Footnotes

7

The regime at one time proposed sending Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, who has since been released, to Eswatini, a landlocked country within the borders of South Africa, a place where Ábrego García has no family or friends. The hard work of immigration lawyers saved him from that grim fate.

Kim, Minho. 2025. “Judge Signals She Is Likely to Order Ábrego Garcia’s Release Soon.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. October 11, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/politics/abrego-garcia-hearing.html.

On June 22, a federal judge (in Tennessee!) called Ábrego Garcia’s case “vindictive,” “selective” and “in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause” and ordered the DOJ to release him. The DOJ immediately appealed.

Staff, NBC Washington. “DOJ Appeals Dismissal of Human Trafficking Charges against Abrego.” NBC4 Washington, June 22, 2026.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/doj-appeal-dismissal-human-trafficking-charges-abrego/4120272/.

The Department of Homeland Security also continues to maintain propaganda against Abrego Garcia with the headline: THE REAL STORY: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 Gang member with a History of Violence

U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is an MS-13 Gang Member with a History of Violence | Homeland Security,” 2026.

UNSAFE LINK (visit at your own risk)

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-gang-member-history-violence.‌

Well, they done and did it.

They made a Hunger Games for Maga children.

The application process is now live:

https://freedom250.org/celebration/the-2026-patriot-games

Before I go any further, can I trouble you to spread the link around as much as possible so we can fill it with fake applicants? Let’s bomb the hell out of this place (no, Kash, not literally, dumbass). This is why God made BlueSky, after all.

Here’s the application portal link:

https://freedom250.org/patriot-games

I’ve included photos of the full form for your review before you risk losing everything you own by visiting the site. Aren’t I wonderful and amazing? Where else on Substack do you get this kind of assistance?

The Patriot Games Pitch

My annotations are in italics. The rest is all them:

As America celebrates its 250th birthday, the 2026 Patriot Games will bring together the nation’s most exceptional young athletes and leaders for an unforgettable competition honoring excellence and the American spirit.

And who among us doesn’t look forward to the idea of exposing our vulnerable youth to even more toxic mayhem, this time up close and personal!

The 2026 Patriot Games is a premier national competition featuring outstanding high school students from across the nation MAGA.

Male and female athletes will be selected to represent their home state or territory on a national stage as they compete in a series of high-intensity challenges designed to test strength, speed, agility, teamwork, resilience, and leadership.

Breaking news: I’ve received word that the agility test will involve a team of Trump regime personnel chosen by Susie Wiles to chase the kids around for a genital check to be sure they are what they say they are.

Over the course of the competition, athletes will face a series of demanding physical and mental challenges, culminating in the crowning of one male and one female Patriot Games champion.

Just being within 10,000 feet of the toxic orange sludge that remains of Donald Trump is enough of a mental challenge to last a lifetime.

Each champion will receive $125,000 in scholarship funding.

Breaking News: Ruminato has learned that the money will be donated to a trust fund in Donald Trump’s name and released if, after examining voter rolls, the winner passes further qualification requirements.

The 2026 Patriot Games will be featured as a nationally televised primetime event in August 2026, showcasing America’s next generation of leaders and athletes to audiences across the country.

The regime has blackmailed ABC, threatening to take away its broadcasting license if it doesn’t cover the games on ESPN and ABC.

Participation includes an all-expense-paid trip for each athlete and one chaperone.

The chaperone will be chosen personally by Donald Trump, and will be him.

Eligibility

• Must be between 14 (Dear Leader’s preferred age) and 17 years old. Eligible contestants must be 14 by June 1, 2026, and 17 or younger on December 31, 2026.
  Exceptions will be made for exceptional 13-year-old beauties, at the Dear Leader’s discretion.

• Legal U.S. citizen (we’ll check!)

• Resident of a U.S. state, territory, or tribal nation

• Student in good academic standing

• Additional eligibility details will follow

The additional eligibility details cannot be provided on a public-facing website without violating various federal statutes.

Wait. They’re gonna pick the contestants and expect them to be ready by August 9? They know it’s now July, right? No wonder Barron is already being declared one of the winners.

The application form

And there you have it, folks.

The Patriot Games, which will somehow be put together with fully vetted candidates by early August.

This means that the regime will choose candidates and make sure they aren’t loony toons armed with long guns and other weaponry in just over a month.

Something tells me that there will soon be Secret Service openings if that’s your jam, cuz they gotta be going crazy right about now.

Honestly, it’s almost enough to make me watch the damn thing. What a circus.

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