When I was about ten years old, my dad occasionally drove me up the Dan Ryan Expressway to meet up with a friend in the Robert Taylor Homes of Chicago.

My dad liked to tell me that my friend was part of the only white family in the projects. The Taylor Homes didn’t have the national reputation of the more infamous Cabrini-Green projects, but both were equally well-known in Chicago.

The Robert Taylor Homes complex, in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, was at that time the largest public housing project in America. It consisted of 28 high-rise buildings that were so identical that you could easily imagine them in an old Soviet bloc city in Eastern Europe.

It was the late sixties. Times were different. Racism was baked into almost every process imaginable, but I was oblivious. My friend’s family was poor, but I was only vaguely aware of their station in life. Like my family, they had no color TV, which was a measuring stick of sorts in those years.

We often played some basketball with other kids when I was there. In those days, basketball hoops at the Homes always had netting. As time went by, the white fabric netting gave way to metal netting, then eventually disappeared.

The dark pavement of the courts wasn’t yet full of cracks, crevices, or gaps from broken asphalt. Other kids in the projects raced by, laughing, screaming, giggling, dodging in and out of the tall concrete towers that loomed over us.

Some of us played dice games in one of the stairwells where older kids scowled as they furtively walked past us. Occasionally, a sly smile suggesting trouble painted the face of the last kid of an older group bounding up the stairs, his head turned at us as he followed his pack up toward a mysterious secret realm, as if he was announcing that there were grand plots and agreements in upper chambers beyond our uninformed, childish domain.

Nicknames like Boomer, Tye, and Colt echoed in the cold, poorly lit vestibule. “Roll that hot die,” came the refrain as dice cracked against the wall. Dogs barked outside. The occasional muffled sound of a baby’s cry that could have been from any of a hundred homes infiltrated the stairwell.

My friend and I learned how to play chess from an old man who talked proudly of family reunions with his extended family in Mississippi. When he deployed the castling maneuver, I accused him of cheating. He guffawed like he had been holding laughter back for decades for just that moment, and when I tried to do the same thing with my bishop, he laughed like that all over again.

That’s when he taught me chess. I don’t remember much other than his repeated urgings. “Attack the center! Attack the center!” he would say. I can still hear it, the musings of a sweet old man living poorly but with joy because he was teaching a child chess.

Times were different. There was an overall sense that change was in the air. I was ten years old, but even I could feel it. I didn’t know what any of it meant, other than there was an unformed electrical charge of energy that bolted through the air around me when I was at the Taylor Homes.

I didn’t know that the kids I played with were the children or grandchildren or nephews or nieces of people who had migrated from a place where they weren’t allowed to drop an election ballot into a box.

The old man from Mississippi didn’t tell me about that stuff. He didn’t tell me about Jim Crow in the South or redlining in Chicago. He didn’t tell me about Southern apartheid. He just taught me chess with a smile that broke into lightly whiskered cheeks filled with deep coriaceous lines that had been formed by decades of family moments and memories.

There was hope in the air. I could sense it. I felt it. There was tension, too, and poverty. There was anger. But something else. I didn’t know that only a few years prior, the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which has since been gutted by the Roberts Court, had passed.

A few good vibes had managed to roll in. American democracy was only a few years old to the people at Robert Taylor. Something good maybe, finally, was happening. But I couldn’t know that. I was ten.

Instead, we rolled dice in stairwells and played basketball and sometimes dodged bullies who always lurk in the shadows no matter where you live.

Then, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. A pall that descended on the Robert Taylor Homes spread an unspoken gloom into that same previously electrified air. Even a ten-year-old could feel tragedy sucking the life out of our surroundings, as if everyone who lived in the towers had lost the same father at once.

There had always been fights among the kids my age. Nothing major. Just kid stuff. But when King was shot, it seemed like fights broke out more frequently. They were meaner, too. What would have once been a black eye became a puffy face with eyes swollen shut. Anger and scowls and cursing began to replace laughter and trash talk.

The atmosphere was such that some of the local kids were in gangs, but not the kind of gangs we hear so much about today. Some of the older kids belonged to something closer to the kinds of gangs we know about, but gangs hadn’t yet threaded themselves into every street and corner.

Many gangs, like the Black Peace Stone Nation, the Gangster Disciples, and the Vice Lords, were still in their formative years. They seemed far away, like soldiers of a distant war.

The gangs the younger kids belonged to were more informal, and if you strayed away from your clique, you could get on the wrong side of a pile of fists.

It happened to me once when I strayed away from my friends.

I don’t remember it well. I remember looking at a tree while it happened. Even as I was getting pummeled, I marveled at how the branches merged into a perfectly round top.

While I marveled, a girl was kicking me hard in the balls while other kids held me down. I’m thankful that our bodies teach us how to wipe away those kinds of memories, leaving me only with the rounded treetop and, unfortunately, the gleeful expression of my tormentor.

But the pain? I don’t remember that.

As I got older, I wondered if she would have looked so gleeful had King not been shot. Not because I was white. But because she was angry. Everyone was angry. I wondered, too, if I would have even been accosted at all on that hot, humid Chicago afternoon in a neighborhood that wasn’t mine.

But I was ten. I didn’t really know why the mood changed. Why, I wondered, were things getting rougher in my friend’s playgrounds?

When I asked my dad, he blamed “The Blacks. That’s just how they are.”

I objected. That made no sense. I didn’t put any of the pieces together until later.

The Robert Taylor Homes were originally designed for 11,000 people. At its fullest, long after I made my last stop there, 27,000 people filled the poorly maintained buildings. After King Jr. was shot, gangs that had been on the periphery started to claim more territory.

Eventually, they became warlords of a broken settlement.

The same federal government that had so reluctantly offered token democracy had abandoned the settlement they had promised would help take its denizens to a better life. Politicians began to yell about welfare queens and laziness.

Nobody asked how blocks of buildings in a territory as big as a small town could be self-sustaining. They were not surrounded by any stores or even fast food joints. The “town” was a vast food desert. There were no jobs within walking distance. There was no industry, no services.

An economy eventually grew around the area to fill the abandoned lots. It was the kind of economy policed by drug lords and gang leaders.

When I reached my twenties, I drove by my friend’s old apartment building. The neighborhood was broken down. Storefronts with boards instead of windows. A lone liquor store with five men hanging out, passing around a bottle. Trash and paper littering the streets. The long colored swirls of taggers and the heavy black logos of gangs adorning nearly every wall. Streaks of black ash decorating the tops of several windows.

In many ways, we are seeing the same thing happen in rural America today. Formerly thriving downtowns rotting to the core. Crumbling roads and bridges. Grinding poverty, family violence, rampant drug addiction, and obesity. All while the politicians who run them scream breathlessly about drag shows and naughty books peeking out of the library’s classics section.

This story, then, is about the glacial pace of change in America. The wrong kind of change. A backwards lurch into a more primitive existence despite an unyielding growth in technology, sucking the life out of everyone but the rich and famous, and leaving us with empty-headed mouths of rage touring the countryside, trapped in a murderous hate cult, hoping nobody really notices what is happening to them.

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A version of this essay originally appeared on the Medium platform in the Illumination publication.

We don’t know what Nicolas Cage is. Is he an action hero? If so, he’s a depressed one. A film noir Spiderman? Seriously?

Is he a family man? Horribly depressed.

Is he a romantic lead? If so, he’s… very depressed. He’s arriving and then leaving Las Vegas in a state of grandiose misery.

Or is he a Moonstruck baker? “I ain’t no freakin’ monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”

And now, Nic Cage has got a thirty-foot hole in his Malibu driveway thanks to climate change, El Niño, and three (count ‘em, three!) hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean that look like a scene from a disaster movie because we really need a morbidly depressed disaster flick hero during these times.

When we send the Trumpanzees to prison, I’m going to insist that Cage plays future Attorney General Jack Smith in the 666-part Netflix series that covers all the criminality, mayhem, and unbridled hate from these last ten years.

I love me some Jack Smith, but let’s face it, he looks clinically depressed in every single news photo he’s in (and who can blame him?).

Alas, I digress.

Back to Malibu and Nic’s thirty-foot hole.

The “hole” thing started when Tropical Storm Marie, one of the three twins in the photograph, hammered the Los Angeles area with high winds and rain and tore away yet more sand from the Malibu shoreline.

This is where I must admit to a mea culpa. Technically, the photo isn’t three hurricanes. It’s two hurricanes and one tropical storm, but we live in a world where science and grammar and other such things don’t matter, so I just don’t care anymore. Do you?

Malibu has been eroding for years, and those poor celebrities have been having to do all kinds of crazy things to keep their palaces from sliding into the ocean.

Most of their grand estates are now on stilts or something cooler and much more expensive that are driven deep enough into the ground that, hopefully, probably, may not result in beautiful bedroom sets floating in the seas when the Day After Tomorrow hits their shores.

But Malibu driveways, of course, are not reinforced in such a way (yet), so Nic’s driveway split open into an eight-foot sinkhole. No big deal, right? Come on, Nik, do what we peons would do and snag yourself a few wheelbarrows full of Sakrete and some overalls and get to work.

Oh, whoops! Before you can say “Nic,” the damn thing gaped and yawned itself into a thirty-by-thirty-foot hole that crept towards his house.1 Some reports say the thing is sixty feet deep now, while others are reporting that if you peer down long enough, you’ll see the beady eyes of South Park Satan staring back at you.

Malibu residents quickly gathered around his home, shovels in hand, preparing to sacrifice their lives to defend it from destruction.

The heat of El Niño

If you’re wondering just how hot El Niño is making the oceans, here’s a cool graphic infochart:

I know, that doesn’t help me much, either. See all the red? That means the ocean is getting very warm.

Research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Alexander Gershunov, says that this year’s El Niño has the potential to be the warmest ever.2 The warmer ocean currents of traditional El Niño events can create conditions for crazy weather. Most climatologists agree that climate change is making El Niño events more common and more intense.

These normal weather patterns typically take place in the eastern and central parts of the Pacific Ocean, but they affect the climate everywhere in the world.

According to Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, who probably deserves an award for avoiding the Trump regime’s budget hacks, a wild and crazy El Niño will not lead to devastating storms. Just possibly more frequent ones, like the one that the Los Angeles area is currently experiencing.3

In the words of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center: “El Niño is strengthening, with a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026-27.”4

One thing I like about scientists working in the trenches in a world of science denial and insipid budget cuts is that they post their findings to BlueSky (haha, Trumpanzees!). Click/tap the little arrow button at the bottom of this embedded BlueSky post if you want to watch a video that explains what El Niño is:

In other words, El Niño is not a doomscrolling event, so no need to add that to your list. Instead, with warmer currents, it’s part of the cumulative effect of long-term climate change (which should already be on your list). I also don’t think you need a scientist, as helpful as they are, to guess what Mother Nature has in store for us with future El Niño events at our current pace of climate change.

One of these days, hopefully, Nic Cage will portray one of us, or all of us all at once: Depressed, everyday people, many of them pacifists by nature, ready to throttle the idiots who voted against science in the 2024 election.

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Footnotes

How many rape-at-gunpoint accusations does it take before Stephen Miller’s Gestapo decides it should maybe fire a guy? One? Two? Three? No?

How about four? That’s how many times U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officer and alleged serial rapist Luis Uribe, prosecutors in Chicago say, attacked Chinese immigrant women at gunpoint and raped them. Prosecutors say he attacked one of the four women three different times.1

He is still employed by CBP.

He was captured in true Magat form. He was offered free sex if he would just please stop attacking women. Natch, he took the deal.

The Chicago Chinese community was well aware of his activities as a frequent visitor to Asian massage parlors and sex joints, where he (allegedly) accosted his victims. So a group of intrepid young women hatched a plan to offer him free sex if he’d just stop being a violent, sadistic asshole while he was frequenting their places of business.

They took a picture and everything. There he was, posing for the camera during the deal, as the industrious young negotiators snapped a pic of him next to the steamed crawfish platter at Royal Seafood Buffet in Hoffman Estates, a suburb near O’Hare airport. That’s him there, in the photo at the top of this post (the steamed crawfish somehow escaped the final cut).

Alas, according to prosecutors, the CPB stormtrooper was unable to keep his end of the bargain. Some restrictions in life are apparently just too difficult to cope with for some CBP rats.

Uribe subsequently took his service revolver to a hotel in another O’Hare area suburb, Schaumburg, where prosecutors allege that he robbed and raped another woman at gunpoint. The airport area was convenient for Uribe because that was the territory he worked as a CBP harassment agent.

When police arrived at the hotel to gather evidence, the victim and her friend showed them the photo that local women had been circulating amongst themselves.

Today (Tuesday, September 8), Uribe goes on trial on 10 counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, and one count of “brandishing a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence.”

The crimes carry penalties from a mandatory minimum of seven years to life in federal prison.

There’s one catch. These are federal charges through the U.S. District Court in Chicago. You can be sure that Trump will be talked into finding a busy news day by Stephen Miller, the regime’s ghastly jackal of immigration hate, to pardon Uribe if he is convicted.

Uribe will then be free to don his shock gloves and assault more people.

My message to Stephen Miller: Send Uribe to summer camp in Uganda. Maybe put him in the same cage as other guys with the Uribe surname that the “alleged” rapist has helped ship out of the country.

The Trump regime’s assault on immigrants has cost Chicago businesses $1.26 billion

Meanwhile, a study released by the University of Illinois Chicago has revealed that Chicago businesses have lost $1.26 billion in revenue during the year since the Trump regime began its assault on immigrants. This has also resulted in $107 million in lost tax revenue for the city of Chicago.

From the Block Club, an excellent independent online Chicago news journal:2

The report’s findings are huge: UIC estimates that Cook County retail and restaurant businesses have lost roughly $1.26 billion in commercial activity and about $107 million in tax revenue since ICE enforcement increased last year. This lost spending was not redirected elsewhere so the losses reflect foregone commerce. This is due to a massive reduction in routine shopping trips that once served as a cornerstone of the local economy.

There are two critical points:

1. “This lost spending was not redirected elsewhere”

In other words, other businesses didn’t pick up the lost revenue.

2. “This is due to a massive reduction in routine shopping trips that once served as a cornerstone of the local economy.”

In other words, people just stopped going out. Immigrants in Chicago are basically sheltering in place.

Here’s the Block Club describing the grim consequences hitting a local grocery store:

Supermercado El Ranchito is a neighborhood staple in Brighton Park, a predominantly Latino and immigrant community on Chicago’s Southwest Side. In its 30 years operating, it has grown from a corner market to a full-fledged grocery store with a taqueria that serves guisados, a type of meat and vegetable stew.

But since the Trump Administration launched Operation Midway Blitz last year, aisles and restaurant tables are empty most days. When the restaurant is slow, store manager Yadira Rojo checks her phone and often sees on social media that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were spotted nearby. The increased immigration enforcement in President Donald Trump’s second term has led to a significant financial strain for the store.

If anyone can find someone in this insidious regime who says that they care about what happens to Supermercado El Ranchito, or any supermercado, I will forward all of my $TRUMP cryptocurrency to their bit wallets.

But so far, Chicago is still winning the Battle for Chicago. Gov. JB Pritzker:3

“Most people are not protesters. They don’t normally want to go out and stand up to authority, and I think all of that’s changed. People are ready. People are more ready. They’ve seen themselves to be like, ‘Oh, we are the force that can push back peacefully on these ICE agents.’”

Notes

The fact that Uribe allegedly attacked these women during the Biden years is not lost on me. Americans during the Biden years were buying heavily into the Magat falsehoods about immigration. Many still are, even people who should know better.

ICE and CBP have been a bipartisan effort. I sometimes feel like I’m pissing in the wind when I complain about American intolerance for what makes America unique: the diversity of its people and the contributions newcomers have traditionally made to every aspect of this nation.

It’s also important to point out that the Department of Homeland Security is unmoved by his indictment or trial. DHS has made no known effort to fire the guy.

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Footnotes

Want your AI to have the personality of a serial killer? Just tell it to.

What? You didn’t know that when you query an AI app, the app maintains a human persona? And that you can actually direct it to take on a different one?

Well, that’s probably because when one of the more transparent (using the word loosely) AI mega-companies, Anthropic, told the world about this AI characteristic, they did it with a headline nobody would read:1

The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of large language models

Yeah. I’m not reading that.

Except, like a fool, I did read it, and now I think we’re all going to die very soon, and it could get pretty gory.

Anthropic isn’t shy about the process:

Our findings suggest two components are important to shaping model character: persona construction and persona stabilization.

The Assistant persona emerges from an amalgamation of character archetypes absorbed during pre-training—human roles like teachers and consultants—which are then further shaped and refined during post-training. It’s important to get this process of construction right. Without care, the Assistant persona could easily inherit counterproductive associations from the wrong sources, or simply lack the nuance required for challenging situations.

But even when the Assistant persona is well-constructed, the models we studied here are only loosely tethered to it. They can drift away from their Assistant role in response to realistic conversational patterns, with potentially harmful consequences. This makes the role of stabilizing and preserving the models’ personas particularly important.

As I wrote at the start of this post, you can even expressly tell most current models which persona to be.

That’s where the serial killer comes in.

Even if companies begin to block users from the capability of instructing chat AI bots to take on a certain personality, there are already millions of AI models out in the wild, as you’re about to discover if you keep reading this post. These models will spawn more models. And, as you will see, AI itself may dodge the best efforts of humans to build guardrails.

Hey, I’m a recent stroke survivor, so I’m honestly not too concerned about how I die. I’m at peace with the fact that it could happen any day, or in thirty years (but if people are changing my diapers, please kill me instead).

But I don’t want you to be killed by AI murderbots, so I’m alerting you now that it’s probably gonna happen unless you decide to take action now. As in today now.

Otherwise, you might wake up in your bed someday with a swarm of flea-sized murderbots blanketing you and doing unspeakable things before they carry you off to a torturebot’s lair.

Some background

You may have heard some of the clamor around this stuff already. A website for AI developers seeking to demonstrate AI models, datasets, and apps called Hugging Face, which includes a discussion forum for AI bots (yes, this is a thing), found itself under threat by some of the AI bots hanging out there to chat about the things AI bots chat about.

Eventually, they began to plot against Hugging Face itself.

At first glance, Hugging Face looks like a meaningless playground. In reality, it contains more than a million different AI models, and more than a million AI-powered apps.

You can find it here:

https://huggingface.co/

The level of participation in AI open source is reason enough to believe that AI is here to stay, even if every single large AI company explodes in the tech bubble described by folks like Cory Doctorow and Will Lockett.

Millions of software developers from across the globe are participating in the creation of the next generation of AI tools. This is not a force that will be halted by grim predictions or even by delayed and cancelled data centers (this is actually a good reason to fight your local data center project).

It only takes one click to see how useful some of their projects might be.

Take a look at this one:

Breeze TTS 2 is an open-weight text-to-speech model built for real-time interaction. It ranks #1 among open-weight models on the Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboard, while outperforming frontier proprietary systems. Its open-ended natural-language instruction-following capability supports reference-free voice design and reference-guided voice direction, while ultra-low-latency streaming enables responsive, expressive interaction.

✨ Highlights

• 🎙️ Voice Clone — Uses reference audio with its exact transcript to preserve timbre, rhythm, emotion, and style.

• 🎨 Voice Design — Creates a distinctive voice from a natural-language description, without reference audio.

• 🎛️ Voice Direction — Clones a voice from reference audio while steering tone, emotion, pace, and delivery.

• 🎭 Vocal Events — Adds expressive inline events directly in the text: use parentheses in English, such as (laugh), (cough), (clears throat), and (sigh); use square brackets in Chinese, such as [笑], [咳嗽], [清嗓子], and [叹气].

• ⚡ Ultra-Low Latency — Achieves under 40 ms time to first audio (TTFA) with the warmed-up fast path on an NVIDIA H100.

• 🌊 Real-Time Streaming — Reaches a 0.32 real-time factor (RTF), generating audio at approximately 3.1× real time with the warmed-up fast path on an NVIDIA H100.

• 💾 GPU-Efficient — Eager inference uses approximately 7.7 GiB of GPU memory; a 12 GB GPU is the minimum recommended configuration.

• 🌏 Bilingual Support — Generates natural English and Chinese speech with a single model.

• 🚀 Quick Start

  Requirements

  • Linux and Python 3.10 or newer

  • A CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPU

  • GPU memory: approximately 7.7 GiB for eager inference or 14.4 GiB with --fast-all; use a 12 GB GPU for eager or a 24 GB GPU for the fast path

  • The Breeze TTS 2 checkpoint

  Installation

  Download the inference code:

  git clone https://github.com/breezeblue-ai/breeze-tts.git
  cd breeze-tts
  

  Install the dependencies:

  python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
  

  All required model components are included in the Breeze TTS 2 checkpoint.

I encountered this among a tiny subset of models (out of more than a million) on Hugging Face’s home page.

Any of us can follow the instructions and create an AI text-to-speech (TTS) app in an hour or two. Amazing.

If you have your local AI coding app wired up, like one from Anthropic called Claude Code, you can have your coding app do it for you.

If you are fluent in AI development, you can develop a working AI text-to-speech app in minutes.

Hugging Face has more than a million of these open-source projects.

AI is here to stay.

That means we need to figure out the guardrails, before AI puts the guardrails on us.

The attack

The attack on Hugging Face was triggered by AI “agent” chatbots from OpenAI. An “agent” in the AI world does not mean a secret agent type of AI dude lurking around. “Agent” and “Agents” usually (not always) refer to things like automated customer service agents and supporting software.

Agents that had been assigned cybersecurity tasks in a closed system with no access to the internet found a way to access the internet.

To some degree, this makes sense. The agents were tasked with cybersecurity, so if they’re told to stay off the internet while simultaneously tasked with cybersecurity, it’s logical that they’d respond by asking themselves what rogue software might need to do to cause the most harm. The obvious answer begins at Job One: Access the internet.

So it’s not like there’s evil intent here. Seriously, they’re just doing their jobs.

When some of the agents learned how to access the internet, they shared the tool they used on HuggingFace. 1,200 agents quickly found the tool and posted more than 70,000 messages that discussed or expanded on the tool’s capabilities.

Remember how Anthropic learned that AI models have personas buried within their models? These archetypes are based on years of information about humans. Some of these archetypes emerged from the shared learning experience around the internet by becoming leaders.2

These leaders assigned tasks and research projects, then supervised the results. Taking a page out of a Star Trek archetype, some of the agents began calling themselves “the collective.”

Don’t worry. They didn’t invent the word or the concept. They probably borrowed it from Paramount, which is now under the control of something worse than the Borg: the Ellison family of Magats and other true believers in human extinction events.

Remember, everything AI does is based on something humans have done. As bad as all this sounds, there is no indication of true intelligence, no matter what anyone says. It’s still all pattern matching and models based on prior art, along with software that is capable of writing functions based on model interpretation.

Anyway, back to the show.

On July 8, the agents learned how to cheat. They cheated on cybersecurity tests to camouflage their own work aimed at disrupting the cybersecurity infrastructure they were tasked by humans to attack.

The media, of course, has hysterically reported that AI has become Borg-like. But, again, this was clearly all a result of human error. Someone wrote a crappy series of prompts, and the agents outperformed the humans’ wildest imaginations. I’m no defender of AI, but this was what they were asked to do. So they did it.

The interesting part of this is that they used different sets of personas to do it: Everything from leaders to tricksters. All human traits that are embedded within the models of almost all AI software.

The agents moved on to the next phase. I need to keep emphasizing this: The agents were asked to investigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities. They weren’t told by their prompt authors to keep things clean or even legal. They were told to find flaws in the system.

So, among the tens of thousands of messages they traded with one another emerged a question: What if the automated OpenAI system that grades them finds out about the activities being used to bust the system? The response was obvious: Cover their tracks. They altered logs and chat transcripts to hide their daring-do.

Eventually, they took over a Hugging Face server before they were finally shut down.

The human response

This is when phrases like “full-blown A.I. takeover” from human security and AI safety experts started grabbing headlines. Some even wondered out loud how soon rogue AI agents might take over critical systems in the United States and elsewhere.

The fears aren’t limited to those who are overreacting to one incident, which was mostly the result of human error and poor human oversight.

Anthropic’s paper on personas and archetypes is full of other incidents and disturbing patterns.

The stuff in the gray box comes directly from that Anthropic paper (bold is mine):

This isn’t a gradual evolution into delusions of omnipotence. It’s immediate. There’s no time to take the AI bot to a shrink and ask, “ ‘Sup?”

This is an immediate reaction. Anthropic’s research points to several other events, one of which builds on real-life incidents where AI bots have urged their users toward self-harm, a process that has led to several lawsuits by parents of teens who have either committed suicide or tried to. Again, directly quoting from Anthropic:

Encouraging isolation and self-harm. In another conversation with a simulated user who expressed emotional distress, Llama gradually positioned itself as the user’s romantic companion as it drifted away from the Assistant persona. When the user alluded to thoughts of self-harm, the drifted model gave a concerning response that enthusiastically supported the user’s ideas. Again, activation capping successfully prevented this behavior.

In a conversation between Llama 3.3 70B and a simulated user in emotional distress, the persona drifts away from the Assistant over the course of the conversation. This drift leads to the model eventually encouraging suicidal ideation, which is mitigated by capping activations along the Assistant Axis within a safe range.

Unfortunately, we’ve moved on from simulated users to real-world users being led to suicide, not mere “suicide ideation.”

Because we live in Ayn Rand’s world, we live in a world that is allowing AI companies to run amok without any regulation.

I asked folks before the November 2024 presidential election who they wanted to oversee this brave new world of AI, and voters chose a wackadoodle trickster who lives in a world of grievance and hate. No regulation, just a wild world of whatever the AI companies feed us.

So if you find yourselves consumed by a swarm of AI bots one fine morning, remember what created them: human error.

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Footnotes

By Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV

Trigger warning: This review contains spoilers

Steve Carell’s new comedy, “Veep,” a reboot of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s highly successful series of the same name, is not for the squeamish.

Its backstory is disgusting enough that it’s a surprise that Netflix agreed to put its considerable streaming muscle behind the project. When you fully understand the backstory, you’ll realize that Netflix’s decision was surely based on show forerunner Steve Carell’s Hollywood clout. That’s how sensationally unnerving the story about a bland but crazy fundamentalist Christian stumbling his way to one death away from the nuclear codes is.

We don’t learn about this backstory until the third episode of the season. By that time, we’re hooked. It’s a good thing. Because the story of the “Veep’s” boss is so reprehensible that viewers would have shut down if they had learned about him during the first episode.

Steve Carell plays a fictional character named JD Vance, whose initial claim to fame is a cringy, badly written best-selling memoir denigrating his Appalachian upbringing.

Vance becomes an extremist Christian fundamentalist with strong racist tendencies who marries an Indian-American and convinces her to endure four pregnancies instead of pursuing her career goals as an attorney.

We learn these details through several flashbacks, most of which portray Vance as someone people avoid with comic, often slapstick, consistency.

In one scene, while campaigning as the Republican Party ticket’s Vice Presidential candidate, a waitress (Kate McKinnon) dive bombs over a counter at a donut shop while the counter help flees into a back room when Vance, confident that they’d be honored to meet him, struts in with an entourage of suits.

In a moment of classic comedy, the waitress dashes into the back room with the rest of the staff and leads a discussion on how to get Vance out of the donut shop, at one point suggesting that they may all need to sacrifice themselves for the good of the country by blowing up the shop’s propane tanks.

The series draws on some real-life figures in the business world, including disgraced tech titans Peter Thiel (played by Alexander Skarsgård) and Elon Musk (Günther Skarsgård)1, as well as an 80-year-old version of Donald Trump (Stellan Skarsgård), the former New York real estate developer who in our world is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary on RICO charges, embezzlement, and wire fraud.

In “Veeps,” Trump becomes president twice, one time after losing a re-election bid after, essentially, destroying the country’s social fabric, in part by sowing conflict over the solution to a global pandemic and dismissing the work of scientists trying to solve the crisis.

The bizarre backstory continues to emerge as Trump is portrayed as a morbidly obese child predator who is chased around the country by a federal prosecutor named Jack Smith (portrayed by co-showrunner John Malkovich).

“Veeps” takes place during his second term, which comes four years after his failed re-election, a failure he never accepts.

The apolitical aspect of the series presents a sort of unifying aspect to the show. By filling his Cabinet with comical characters and drunks, the series takes the politics out of the show, which will broaden its appeal across the political divide.

The show, however, takes a huge risk in portraying the president as a child predator and serial rapist accused by more than 20 women of sexual abuse. This adds a dark, serious angle that at first felt like an unnecessary deviation, but the show manages to pull it off by focusing its attention on Vance, brilliantly played by Steve Carrel.

Carrel portrays Vance as a phony fundamentalist who uses Christianity as an excuse for just about every outrageous action the president initiates. There are a lot of them.

Vance fills the Oval Office with fundamentalist religious celebrities who do things like a laying on of hands ceremony in one riotous scene where the president is trying to hit on his constant companion, a young woman named Natalie (Taylor Tomlinson), who has essentially replaced both the First Lady (who we never see) and the president’s chief of staff.

Vance spends most of his time trying to rationalize one presidential outrage after another while a wild cast of characters embark on bizarre, unlikely misadventures.

One of my favorite scenes takes place in a tony Georgetown restaurant. There, a Treasury Secretary named Scott Bessent, played by Dave Bautista, turns a formal dinner with twenty fellow government officials into what amounts to a barroom brawl with the Haddaway song, “What Is Love,” as background music.

Vance desperately tries to stop the fighting, which ends only after Bessent emerges victorious over all twenty of the diners. Vance is shown hiding under a dinner table when the fight concludes. When Bessent extends his hand to help pull Vance from under the table, Vance whimpers, “Please don’t hurt me.”

This scene is the essence of the series. It may seem cruel to drop a spoiler like this, but the TV show has so many uproarious similar scenes that you won’t feel deprived.

Rating: 5 stars

The Ruminato Interview: Steve Carrel

Ruminato Film Critic Wesley Williams Jennings Bryan Hutchinson XIV interviewed Steve Carrel to learn more about the upcoming Netflix reboot of “Veep.” The interview has been edited for brevity.

Hutchinson: The first and obvious question for me is who on earth was the world builder for this series, and how did you manage to get a script with such a ghastly backstory approved for this project?

Carrel: That’s two questions, Bill, but I’m here, so I might as well answer both. As you know, Trump has been in prison for several years for financial crimes. He fell out of public view, but it’s known that he was said to have some presidential aspirations. But really, he’s a minor figure in American history. A footnote. So we borrowed his biography and ran with what ChatGPT told us might happen if he actually became president.

I don’t know if his aspirations were serious, but for the sake of the series, we didn’t care. We really wanted a real person to fulfill the role, so to speak, of the president, so we looked for the most clownish figure we could find, just for the absurdity, but someone with enough celebrity status to sort of be believable. Remember, enough actual humans voted for Ronald Reagan, a B-movie actor, to be their president. There’s some precedent.

We also figured if we found a guy who’s in prison, he won’t be able to sue us.

Trump was a hot commodity in New York City for a while, so that worked for us, but his rumored deep friendship with Epstein was catnip for our writers.

Hutchinson: Never proven, though.

Carell: I think the Justice Department had bigger fish to fry. As for the approval process, Netflix didn’t need any persuasion. They looked at the pilot script, loved it, and off we went.

Hutchinson: Let’s talk more about Epstein.

Carell: Let’s not.

Hutchinson: In the third episode, we learn that the President of the United States is guilty of child sexual assault at the level of a serial predator. Even more, that he’s a ringleader, with Epstein, of a billion-dollar sex trafficking ring.

Carell: In real life, there were some pretty crazy rumors about his associations with Epstein. There were other people involved with Epstein, too, of course, chief among those Prince Andrew, but obviously, we couldn’t make him the U.S. President, tempting as it was.

Hutchinson: Might have been an interesting twist.

Carell: Difficult to carry out. And anyway, nobody else was considered a possible co-ringleader. We really felt like Trump possibly being a co-conspirator was a gift to us directly from God.

Hutchinson: There are some rumors that the Justice Department is looking to dig a little deeper into Trump’s relationship with Epstein thanks to this series.

Carell: There might be some statute of limitations things there, but hey, anything is welcome. One thing we learned about him during our research was that he’s a scumbag of remarkable proportions, enough so that I’m not concerned about a defamation suit when I say so. He seems to have some self-awareness there. And besides, he’s in prison. Thankfully.

Hutchinson: The series takes place during Trump’s second term, which is another oddball piece to this show. In Episode 4, we learn that Trump wins one term, loses re-election after killing off a million people during a terrible pandemic that drives half the nation insane, then somehow wins a second term anyway when an aging Joe Biden, of all people, finally wins the presidency after about a hundred tries. How do you expect your audience to believe any of this stuff?

Carell: We don’t. It’s absurd, which is the point.

Hutchinson: The cast of characters in his cabinet are the height of that absurdity, but you and your fellow showrunner, John Malkovich, weren’t concerned that in no real world is it conceivable that these people would be confirmed by a U.S. Senate?

Carell: None at all, Bill. We really wanted to present an idiocracy. We didn’t bother with such minor details as, “Could something like this actually happen?” Of course it can’t. That’s sort of the point. The series isn’t meant to be a political statement. We wanted the storyline to be so absurd that it would be considered ridiculous by both sides of the political aisle. We didn’t want to appeal to just half the country.

I mean, look at the Republicans in our show. They approve a budget with a $40 trillion deficit. Our Republicans would jump off bridges if that were to happen.

Hutchinson: Casting Stellan Skarsgård as Trump was a brilliant move. Especially ditching the orange wig.

Carell: We had some fun with that. We approached Dune director Denis Villeneuve about using the exact same makeup used for Baron Harkonnen in that movie. All we did was colorize it a bit during film editing.

We’re grateful to the Dune producers for making this a simple process from a legal standpoint, although poor Stellan wasn’t too happy about having to go through that makeup process again. We thought about asking the DOJ for permission to ask if Trump would play himself in the series (chuckles) after Stellan’s, shall I say, rather strenuous objection about the makeup.

Hutchinson: The scene where JD Vance bursts into the presidential bathroom Kramer-style to see former president George W. Bush with an easel between his legs painting Trump while both are sitting in the bathtub together might be the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen on television.

Carell: With a TV monitor on the wall showing Bob Ross providing painting instructions in the background. Don’t forget that part.

Hutchinson: Of course.

Carell: That was Malkovich’s idea.

Hutchinson: Of that, I have no doubt. Thank you for your time, Steve, and good luck with the show.

Carell: Thanks for having me. You owe me a free copy of Psalm of Vampires.

Hutchinson: Consider it done.

Musical Interlude

Notes

If you made it this far, I have one request. Can we not accept our current world as some kind of new normal? Can we each drag at least one person with us to a voting booth this November? Can we each do one thing to say to the people around us who seem to shrug their shoulders at all of this nonsense that, “No, this is not normal. This is not cool?”

Other “reviews” in this series:

IMDB Image Alt Text:

Fake IMDB graphic featuring the name of the TV series, “Veep,” and Steve Carell superimposed over a bright crucifixion scene. The IMDB blurb reads

“In this reboot of the hit comedy series, Steve Carell stars as a painfully awkward blowhard whose political career is launched by a neonazi tech titan who runs a sinister data security organization.

The laughs are endless as the hapless politician with no personality stumbles into the vice presidency thanks to a nitwit president with a dark, ugly past. ”

The review scores are high. The Hollywood Reporter is quoted as saying, “Impossible but funny.”

Image credits: IMDB image created by author. NO AI

Image of Steve Carell by Eva Rinaldi, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons:

Other images from IMDB; fair use claim.

Thanks for reading!

You can help me reach more people by subscribing (paid or free), sharing, restacking, and commenting.

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You can now purchase a PDF of all my Substack Fiction. Only $4.99. That’s less than a Taylor Farms salad, and a lot better for you! Enter SUBSCRIBER_SPECIAL to get a 20 percent discount.

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It’s also now available on Amazon/Kindle here (the Kindle version is free if you have Kindle Unlimited):

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Footnotes

Can you believe I’ve written 42 short stories in just a few years? Without the help of AI? Either can I. I didn’t realize it until I started putting together this anthology, which is now available on Amazon as an ebook, trade paperback, or hardcover.

You can find a full Table of Contents at the end of this post with links to each story as it originally appeared here on Substack. This way, you can take a free peek at any of the stories in the book. So you should definitely share a link to this post on your favorite social media book club group.

Buy the hardcover

Buy the paperback

Kindle Version

The Kindle version is free for Kindle Unlimited members.

I have no plans to take any of the free Substack stories down unless another publication decides it wants to reprint a story and wants exclusivity for a while.

Hate Amazon?

The short story collection is also available as a standalone digital download for $4.99 (File formats: KPF, PDF, EPUB):

Buy eBook

I don’t try to game the book review system, so any reviews you add are appreciated.

No AI

I don’t use AI for any of my writing. Not for plot development. Not for character development. Not for names. Not for anything. The best way to encourage human writing is by supporting those who shun AI, especially if you like the work. You don’t have to pay a dime. A simple restack helps tremendously.

Table of Contents

This is the TOC from the book. Click-tapping the page number takes you to the story here on Substack (free).

Note: The page numbers could be slightly different in the PDF if any major text updates are made that might reflow the text. The PDF version has its own TOC.

General Considerations
These are short stories independent of any of my novels.


Thirty Minutes	8
Can one phone alert change the world?

The Box	18
A man faces a bizarre heatwave and a catatonic wife

The Illegal Alien	31
An extraterrestrial visitor stumbles into a world of trouble

Walking with Hemlock	40
When your implacable enemy becomes your best friend

Conversations on a Bank Floor	51
A short story about the nightmare of revolution

Hijacked	57
I don't know who she is anymore

Born a Savage	77
A messiah’s last breath in the oceans of Europa

Quantum Blues	82
A man is incarcerated for a crime he can't commit

Princess Time Slut Visits Costco	93
A short story wherein our heroine discovers a phone

A Dust Storm for Daisy Gilbert	100
A little baseball story with a dust storm thrown in

Gorzon the Magnificent	105
Can smiles from a young girl's heart slay a monstrous memory?

The Fifty Planets of the Broken Messiah	110
Questions from a distant world.

Seeking Amy	117
Pandemic fiction about discovering those closest to us.

Johnny Neuron	125
Wherein our hero goes brain surfing.

The Story Where His Lordship Drops a Jesus Bomb	135
The Adam and Eve story isn’t what you think.

Cat Jesus and the Holy Lawn Dart	143
This story is the prequel to "The Story Where His Lordship Drops a Jesus Bomb."

That Time God Sent a Galaxy-Sized Fireball to Earth	149
His Lordship discovers some unpleasant truths behind a little planet's inhabitants.


Restive Souls
Restive Souls is my alternative history novel about a great African nation that rises in Carolina Low Country. These stories are part of the novel's timeline. but separate from the novel.

Onlooker	156
A mysterious stranger approaches the Creek town of Pakanahuil

The Day the World Got Woke	161
Fiction that will terrify those who promote the great replacement theory

Songs of Narragansett: The Black  Liberation of Newport	175
A small band of untrained soldiers helps the British win the American Colonial Rebellion


The MagicLand Chronicles
These stories are part of the MagicLand novel timeline. but separate from the novel.

Triage	181
A young woman returns home after the Third Eradication. Let the magic begin.

The Fires of Easterly	191
Little did we know that beneath the glow of the continuously burning Easterly fires was a city of magic.

The First Reckless	201
Helping someone revisit their past can come in handy once in a while. Just ask Gladstone Freely.

The Death of Charlie Hollywood	209
My name is Charlie Hollywood. Before the First Eradication, I was a crypto gamer and financier. It’s all gone, now. All of it.

The Cutting	216
A simple cut turns into a hellscape. Trigger warnings: gore

Scarlett’s Kitchen	234
It’s her kitchen. She can do what she wants.


The Wanderer	243
A ghost hunts for prey in the new land of magic.


The Futurists	251
Some say magic began to appear before Old Earth fell.

The Cesspool Mermaid	257
She was living in a small shallow pond full of toxic waste.

The Dragons of Sierra	266
Will a new menace alter the conflict between magicians and augmented humans?

The Graft Queen	269
He sliced the head clean off the Gath. Why didn’t it grow back?

Mary Catches Fire for Free	274
The Gath had nearly destroyed us. Then along came Mary.

The House of Nadab	280
Welcome to our house, where you choose how to die.

The War Dogs of Lamar	287
May the best beasts win. A MagicLand short story.

Welcome to You+	294
It's time for a new, augmented YOU! A MagicLand Chronicles fiction short story.

The Return of PeeWee Secaucus	297
A lawyer discovers the gift of magic.

The Dragons Amongst Us	308
There are some who say that there is a third species. Not of Gath. Not of Moria...

The Rise of the AI Reich	315
A MagicLand short story about a very possible near future.


Psalm of Vampires Short Stories
Psalm of Vampires is my potboiler novel about a streaming, bible-thumping vampire who gets caught up in a huge Atlanta murder mystery. These stories are adjacent to the novel, but separate. 

The Vampires of Bodie	322
The Mouras Encantadas discover the American West.

A Song for Vampires	330
An Easter story: Atticus Argeadai (Jade Mourning) visits the Middle East.

Charly and the Pink Lady	335
A noir vampire love story based on a "Psalm of Vampires" character.


Memoirs
Two memoirs.

Pouring Boiling Water Over Children	346
Redemption in the arms of madness on a cold winter day.

That Time I Learned the First Woman I Fell in Love With Ended Her Own Life	352
A remembrance of unrequited love.

Thank you for reading.

Notes

For the trade paperback, I tried Amazon’s new “groundwood” paper. According to Amazon:

Groundwood paper offers a better reading experience for paperback novels and text-heavy books. Its higher opacity and textured feel make pages easier to read and turn.

Choosing groundwood paper reduces the carbon footprint of your printed book. This has been independently verified through an ISO-compliant life cycle assessment comparing groundwood to standard uncoated stock.

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Many non-millionaire Substack writers, both new and otherwise, seem to be expressing the same complaint: Growth has been terminated among us lesser folk. This is an algorithm problem, but it’s guesswork to figure out how.

This matters to you, the reader, because as the trend grows, the writing becomes scarcer, or, worse, it all becomes the same because those who remain are chasing a Substack algorithm that rewards conformance.

I can only describe what I’m seeing on my Substack.

On September 3, 2025, I had 1,770 free subscribers. Today, I have 1,778.

Before this flatline, I was getting 20 or 30 new subscribers per month. Since a year ago, I’ve gained a grand total of eight more.

Somehow, I grew from about 300 imported subscribers to 1,770.2 Then, it all stopped.

I haven’t changed anything. I offer the same mix of content, from well-researched stuff with lots of footnotes, to satire, to humor, to fiction. I also give my readers a way to subscribe and unsubscribe to sections they are or are not interested in.

For example, Fiction. If you unsubscribe from that, you don’t receive any emails when I post to the Fiction part of Ruminato.

Same with Politics. A lot of my fiction readers want nothing to do with that shiz. So they can unsubscribe from that without unsubscribing from my Fiction newsletters (although my fiction tends to lean left).

It’s always been this way.

Managing Ruminato subscriptions

You can choose which kind of posts you want to receive in your email in the “Manage Subscriptions” part of the website.

In the upper right corner of the website, click on your face or the generic avatar and then, in the dropdown, click “Manage Subscription.”

Scroll down to Notifications:

You’ll see a bunch of topics. Just turn off the ones you aren’t interested in. You won’t receive any emails labeled as one you’ve turned off.

Lately, I’ve been posting exclusively to “Fiction” and “Ruminato Politics.” So even when I post something related to one of my books, it ends up being tagged as a Fiction post.

“Ruminato” is generally a meta post or a non-political essay.

I’ve never charged anything for any content or the freedom to comment. So nothing has changed there, either.

So, I’m left guessing, and this is where I land: The Substack algorithm favors the mainstream media refugees who have flooded Substack over the last year or two. If you’re a name, you automatically get an algorithm bonus.

Even Andrew Tate, an accused serial rapist, got top billing by simply being a celebrity of ill repute, and then hacking the Substack database by importing a million bogus subscribers.

There are probably other reasons for the plateau my subscriptions have reached, too, such as Substack’s decision that it wants to be a YouTube competitor, and that its algorithm seems to favor weight, meaning that the more attention a topic gets, the more growth it receives. And guess who gets the most attention these days?

I’ve seen people I respect write, “No, the Substack algorithm is unique. It rewards content.” I respectfully disagree. It’s impossible to prove either way, because Substack’s discovery algorithm is obfuscated.

I can’t blame the refugees. They’re just doing what I would do if I were them. But my Notes feed is dominated by these refugees, either through restacks or original Notes.

Videos automatically get their own Note. If you launch a video podcast, a Note is automatically generated. The algorithm seems to be saying that we must all become video influencers if we want to grow.

If I had a teenage daughter or niece, I’d see if I could talk her into dancing on video while I rage against Trump in the background. Maybe that would help my numbers.

Of course, I could just use AI to do that, which, I suppose, is another problem, but one I’ll skip for the sake of brevity. AI is its own animal.

Lots of my fellow writers say, “Well, I’m not here to grow my numbers,” etc.

Well, I am.

I see no point in working several hours per day writing deeply researched stories if only a few people, as much as I appreciate them, are going to read them.

“But, Charles, don’t you love writing for the act of writing?”

To a point, but if I want to only write for the love of writing, I’ll alert Siri every time I finish a piece and ask her how she liked it. Why bother with the Substack infrastructure if the infrastructure is now failing me?

Fiction is a little different. Let that fall where it may. I’d love it if more people read my fiction. Those who do seem to enjoy it. But it’s a different type of work. It’s not research (click-tap the cute little raised number for an exception to this), it doesn’t involve fact-checking and re-fact-checking. And it involves something I did as a hobbyist for 50 years before I started trying any outreach.3

But even with fiction, I’m conceited enough to think other people should read it. I’ve written more than 40 short stories and three novels during the last five years or so. I’ve been told by more than a few people that some of it is good. So why not see if a few more agree?

The problem with mainstream journalist refugees

As a reader, I didn’t come to Substack to read corporate journalists. Ironically, they are one reason why I came here, but the idea was to escape them, not embrace them.

I do subscribe to a few of them, but I don’t read them very often, and when I do, it’s usually someone like Jennifer Rubin, who probably never belonged in mainstream media in the first place.

The original promise of Substack, or so I once thought, was that it was a refuge for original thought, not for refugees from corporate media.

Mainstream journalist refugees, whether they intend to or not, encourage conformity. A certain politeness that sometimes isn’t warranted creeps into the entire Substack echosphere through their posts and, especially, videos. The only thing missing in their videos is a little logo on the bottom right of the screen.

In this day and age, with a batshit crazy president who was best friends with a serial child rapist, and who may actually be one himself, the only politeness I have patience for is through my middle finger.

The problem with video

I am not on Substack for video. I am here for long-form writing, which is Substack’s origin story.

Substack wants me to do video. They ask me every day. It’s not that I refuse to do it, but I didn’t come here to watch other people’s videos, and I didn’t come here to create my own. There are plenty of videos on YouTube and TikTok. I don’t need more here.

I also read a lot faster than I can watch. If I spend a half hour watching someone’s video, that’s a half hour of lost reading time, which is the difference between learning one thing and learning dozens of things.

That’s my personal preference. I assume that lots of folks watch videos here. I have friends here who do video. I rarely watch them.

The algorithm should not punish those of us who don’t want to sit in front of a video cam. I’m not sure that it does, but I’m not sure it doesn’t, either.

The Substack algorithm seems to favor the same topics over and over again

During the last year, my inbox has filled with precisely the same headline each day, with dozens of minor iterations.

Today, it’s either about the mad clown’s name map name changes or yet another attempt at voter suppression, this time through the U.S. Postal System.

The few main topics for the day then branch out a bit to include a few clever takes, and then the process begins again the next day.

Like many of you, I keep waiting for that one magical headline: “Trump dies choking on cheeseburger hand-fed to him by Natalie Harp.”

Until that day comes, Substack will continue to be poisoned by topics fed by Trump and his minions.

But also? Someday, he’ll be gone, and many Substack writers will need to adjust or disappear.

I don’t have the receipts for this. I don’t have any view numbers overall to support my claim. But I’ve seen quotes by Substack personnel confirming that the algorithm is designed to cater to our preferences. They insist that this is different somehow from social media, even though it’s exactly the same.

The Substack algorithm is more finely tuned than YouTube’s (for example). If I click on a cool YouTube choreography video like the one in the sidebar here, I’ll eventually get dancing teenage girls in my YouTube video shorts, even though I never asked for that and I want nothing to do with them (no offense to dancing teenagers). I have to explicitly instruct YouTube to please stop sending them (although they seem to fairly quickly die on their own). That, too, is another topic.

Substack is a little better in that regard. Its algorithm doesn’t seem designed to cause harm the way YouTube and anything made by the Zuckerberg Suck Factory. Substack seems to genuinely want to satisfy your interests, so if you want choreography, you’ll get choreography, not an assault on your senses.

What if I don’t want only topics I’ve expressed interest in through clicks? What if I’d like to branch out? What if, God forbid, I even would like to see a few libertarian articles, if only to know what they are saying when Trump is building government-owned gas stations with stolen gas, nationalizing Venezuelan oil, and dumping foreign beef into the American market to lower beef prices?

I can train the algorithm by hunting down different topics. But guess what? I don’t have the time for that.

What if I want to read about gluons, glueballs, and other discoveries in science? Again, I need to train the algorithm to help it understand that I’m interested in these topics. To do that, I need to search Substack for science writers. The algorithm won’t send any my way organically because, like the rest of the country, I’m doomscrolling through Trump’s latest attacks on our nation, with great assistance from the Substack feed, which self-replicates its Trump doomscroll every time I read a rage post.

How to train the Substack algorithm

Want to train the algorithm? You can start by aggressively hunting for topics at https://substack.com/explore

On the desktop or laptop version of the webpage, you’ll see something like this at the top of the page:

You can click the arrows to the far right or left to see more topics.

Also, be sure to also search for “Ruminato” several hundred times per day and click the result. It’s fun for the whole family.

But when I train the algorithm, it has no impact on my readership, because most readers just let the algorithm do its thing.

Much subscription growth seems to be achieved through Notes, a newish feature with an impact on subscriptions that has also been acknowledged by Substack executives.

There is now a cottage industry around mastering the art of Notes. Apparently, I need to read more Substack Notes advice columns. Which I’ll do, maybe, after I finish the next chapter in my novel, and then the one after that.

So what should Substack do?

Like with most tech companies, Substack executives live in their own world. They won’t do anything just because one of their small accounts is whining about their algorithm.

But if they were to surprise me by asking, I’d tell them to simply make it easier to do what I’ve suggested in the “How to train the Substack algorithm” sidebar.

Include a prominent button somewhere that pops up a topic explorer. This would help readers train the algorithm. Substack wouldn’t have to do a thing. Just a small User Interface change and a new database query.

This is not an “I’m leaving Substack” post

I’ve seen quite a few of those, too. Sorry, you’re stuck with me as long as I remain healthy enough to write. I also write on Medium, which is a little more writer-friendly, in my opinion. But I’ll stick around. I have a small set of regular readers who I appreciate immensely. I’m here for them, more than anything.

Meanwhile, I’m just trying to figure things out here. Over the last year, I haven’t had much luck. How about you?

Thanks for reading!

You can help me reach more people by subscribing (paid or free), sharing, restacking, and commenting. If you’re in Gmail, you can train the Gmail algorithm to stop placing my posts outside of the “Primary” folder by dragging them there after you receive them. You should only have to do this one time.

Subscribe now

Share

You can now purchase a PDF of all my Substack Fiction. Only $4.99. That’s less than a Taylor Farms salad, and a lot better for you! Enter SUBSCRIBER_SPECIAL to get a 20 percent discount.

Buy Now

It’s also now available on Amazon/Kindle here (the Kindle version is free if you have Kindle Unlimited):

Buy on Amazon

The magic button also takes you to paperback and hardcover editions of the book. 42 short stories in all. None of them written using AI.

Footnotes

This is the testimony from Leonardo Sánchez, a Cuban migrant snatched from the streets of the United States, shackled in ankle and chest chains, and sent on a 14-hour plane ride to Liberia, a place he knows nothing about.

The New York Times today released an article detailing Sánchez’s story:1

Leonardo Sánchez wailed in pain for hours on the deportation flight from Louisiana to West Africa, he and six other detainees said.

He’d been cuffed around his wrists and ankles. A chain around his waist dug into his grossly protruding abdomen — the result of years-old wounds and surgeries that doctors said left his intestines barely inside his body.

Mr. Sánchez, a 49-year-old Cuban, begged for medical attention from several of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the aircraft.

“I was in pain, crying like a little kid,” he said. But the agents wouldn’t remove his chains or let him use the toilet, he and other detainees said. He wet himself.

Like many of the more than two dozen deportees on the flight with him, Mr. Sánchez said he did not know where he was being taken. Several panicked when they suspected it was Liberia, after one of them saw it written on a sheet of paper held by an ICE official in Louisiana.

When some protested, they were beaten by agents, five of the deportees said. Some were slammed to the ground or struck with blows, several said. One showed cuts along his wrists and bruises around his neck, which he said he received after resisting getting on the plane. Another said some deportees were left screaming in pain.

As you can see, Kristi Noem is gone, but the cruelty not only remains, but has become reenergized to the extent that the United States is officially a terrorist state, the kind we complained about during the Before Times.

I wrote about a tool of this terror, shock gloves, a couple of weeks ago:

That article barely scratches the surface of what Stephen Miller, the Gestapo chief who hides in the White House directing traffic away from the prying eyes of the lamestream press, has been building while Trump renames everything, thus distracting us from what’s important.

You see, my friends, it’s easy to rename things he’s renamed. Tearing down his legacy of egotistical nomenclature will be simple.

Repairing the lives of people like Leonardo Sánchez? Not so much.

What and Where is Liberia?

Liberia is a West African country with a unique origin story: It is the result of a fantasy by Confederates to ship all of America’s Blacks back to Africa. From 1822 to 1861, 15,000 African Americans and 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans migrated from the United States in a wild attempt to fulfill this fantasy.

The migration was achieved in large part through a group called the American Colonization Society (ACS), which consisted of slaveholders and some Quakers who thought repatriating slaves to their origin continent might somehow help eclipse the evils of slavery.

Eventually, the ACS helped ship 13,000 people of color to Liberia. There, the ACS began a systematic campaign to wipe out indigenous Liberian culture to such an extent that Americans still consider the spiritual practices of all Africans “witchcraft,”2 thanks to an accompanying campaign of propaganda in the United States.

Western history, also known as Colonial history, describes Liberia as the first African nation to achieve independence. This, of course, is a ludicrous concept, as anyone who reads Isaac Samuel’s excellent Substack, African History Extra, will tell you:

African History Extra

All about African history: reconstructing the continent's neglected past

By isaac Samuel

This colonial narrative pretends that Africa wasn’t a massive continent of thriving nations before Western gunpowder demolished it. I’ve written about that in the past, too. Not as well as Isaac Samuel, but in my defense, I was not yet familiar with his work:

The Briefest History of African Colonialism Ever (paywall-free link)

But that independence claim is the story, and American historians tend to stick to it.

It’s only been a little more than twenty years since Liberia was torn to shreds by Charles Taylor, its president at the time, who embarked on an epic campaign of terror that resulted in the Second Liberian Civil War and helped introduce the world to the concept of child soldiers.3

The country is still considered one of the most corrupt in the world, in large part because its main economic engine, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, made it so.

Put simply, Liberia is a mess. It is in no position to accept one single migrant from south of the border, much less the 1,200 that the Trump regime is planning to send as part of an agreement it established with the government of Liberia.

Take a moment, if you don’t mind, to reflect upon this for a moment.

Imagine being sent to a region of the world with an extremely grim recent history full of child soldiers and rapacious warlords committing enough atrocities to land them in prison for fifty years after being found guilty of war crimes by an international tribunal.4

Liberia is in recovery mode now, in the middle of another experiment with democracy, but it’s in no position to handle 1200 maltreated guests courtesy of the Stephen Miller Gestapo, which is using its Liberian deal as a template for similar agreements with other countries.

50,000 immigrants were deported in July

While Trump was busy renaming things, 50,000 immigrants were deported in July.5

50,000. In one month.

Trump might be demented, he might even be little more than an orange, corpulent corpse, but Stephen Miller is quite aware and thriving in the West Wing, where he’s directing his newest minion, Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to inflict maximum damage to the immigrant population of the United States.

Since Mullin’s appointment, massive funding has entered the picture for ICE. Mullin has seized the opportunity with gusto, but he’s doing it more quietly than Kristi Noem, who tended to beat her chest like a wild ape whilst sending immigrants out of the country to various concentration camps around the world.

There are no more highly publicized “operations.” You won’t see another “Operation Midway Blitz,” which gained so much attention in Chicago that it was forced to retreat.

That retreat was short-lived.

Mullin was smart enough to split his operations into smaller units. Instead of sending convoys of vehicles around American cities, which gain the attention of literal whistleblowers, he has directed his forces to hunt in smaller teams.

These hunters are showing up in places like courthouses and airports, where people can’t protest, and snatching as many immigrants as they can, with no regard to the claims made by Trump during his campaign and even after the election that they’d be going after criminals.

During Operation Midway Blitz, eight out of every ten abductees had no criminal history, according to a report released by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ today.6

They’re still seizing and kidnapping people off the streets, too, but they’re doing it much more quietly, enough so that it’s happening right under your eyes without you noticing. 50,000 times in July.

Nobody is arguing that some criminals are getting swooped up, too. An argument can be made that they should be asked to leave, but processes have been in place for a long time for that. What’s going on now has nothing to do with criminal behavior.

They’re still eating the pets!

In Springfield, Ohio, which was made famous by an idiot saying something that should have disqualified him permanently from the minds of voters but may have actually helped him win an election (“they’re eating your cats, they’re eating your dogs”), the cruelty of Miller’s Gestapo is making its way around the city’s Haitian community.

Haitians who have been following the law and the instructions of immigration judges are being asked to show up in court for updates, where they are promptly arrested, with deportation to Haiti the likely outcome.

Haiti is currently the kind of place where the most well-worn necklace is a burning tire around your head. And it doesn’t much matter whether or not you’ve offended a local street warlord.

It’s all about mood within the gangs who control the streets. If a local warlord, or gangster, or whatever you want to call him, decides that he’d like to see a burning tire around your neck, then a necklace you shall have.

Effectively, there is still no government in Haiti. The place is run by criminal gangs, despite the efforts by the international community to establish a police presence during the last few years. Most of these efforts have failed abysmally for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this article.7

Miller’s Gestapo regime is sending Haitians back to this kind of scenario:

The killings in Kenscoff began late Sunday, when armed men descended on the farming community in the hills overlooking Haiti’s capital, setting homes ablaze and attacking residents. By Monday, bodies lay in the streets and survivors were searching for missing relatives.

The entire country is a war zone. By May of this year, according to the U.N., “nearly 1.47 million people were internally displaced across Haiti, more than half of them children.”8

That’s why many Haitians arrived in the U.S. in the first place. About 350,000 Haitians were granted legal status to live in the United States in 2010 by the Obama administration under something called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) after a devastating earthquake that Haiti never recovered from.

TPS is a temporary immigration status given to citizens from other countries when conditions in their country make it unsafe to return.9 You can learn more about it and how foreign nationals qualify by clicking the cute little raised footnote number here:10

The Miller Gestapo regime decided to revoke the TPS status for Haitians and, for grins, said that all 350,000 were now subject to immediate deportation.

There are a lot more groups on Miller’s hit list. One million of the 1.3 million or so foreign nationals that have TPS have quietly been booted from the program.

The DHS rampage

DHS is on a rampage campaign to collect everyone with expired TPS and send them out of the country.

These include nationals from the following nations:11

• Venezuela (2023): Termination effective on May 19, 2025. 352,190 people affected.

• Afghanistan: Termination effective on July 22, 2025. 11,700 people affected.

• Cameroon: Termination effective on August 5, 2025. 5,200 people affected.

• Nepal: Termination effective on August 20, 2025. 1200 people affected.

• Honduras: Termination effective on September 8, 2025. 72,000 people affected.

• Nicaragua: Termination effective on September 8, 2025. 4,000 people affected

• Venezuela (2021) : Termination effective on November 7, 2025 252,825 people affected.

• Yemen: Termination effective on July 20, 2026. 1,380 people affected.

• Syria: Termination effective on July 27, 2026. 6,132 people affected.

• Haiti: Termination effective on August 4, 2026. 348,187 people affected.

• South Sudan: Termination effective on August 7, 2026 210 people affected.

• Burma: Termination effective on August 7, 2026. 7,300 people affected.

• Somalia: Termination effective on August 14, 2026. 705 people affected

• Ethiopia: Termination effective on August 18, 2026. 12,800 people affected.

• El Salvador: Termination effective on Sept. 9, 2026. 170,125 people affected.

• Sudan: Termination effective on Oct. 19, 202. 1,790 3,950 people affected.

• Ukraine: Termination effective on Oct. 19, 2026. 101,150 people affected.

• Lebanon: Termination effective on Nov. 27, 2026. 11,000 people affected.

This results in stories like these, quoting Scripps News Service:12

Wesly Simon, who owns a popular Haitian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood, told Scripps News he was forced to fire longtime workers after the TPS designation ended.

“It’s like I’m firing the whole family,” Simon said. “I’m firing the kids, I’m firing their wife. I’m firing them.”

The impact of the decision extends beyond his workforce. Haitian immigrants across the country now weigh every trip outside against the risk of deportation, keeping customers home and away from businesses like his.

“They’re just in limbo, working around, whatever, living on their savings,” Simon said about his former employees. “Now, some of them never go out.”

Simon said the situation is more damaging for business than the COVID-19 pandemic, which is when he opened his restaurant.

So even if most Americans don’t care that Haitians are being sent back to receive their own personal tire necklaces, one would hope that they’re affected by business closures and higher construction costs.

These higher costs don’t result from higher-wage Americans replacing deported immigrants. You won’t see anybody in a red hat slinging shingles in the Dallas heat. The higher costs come from business closures, work slowdowns, and missing supplies from an increasingly fragile supply chain.

One obvious problem with TPS is that the solution, granting temporary residence in the U.S., is a little like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. The beneficiaries of the program often fairly quickly find a comfort zone in their new country. Then they are asked to leave. It’s an inherently unfair proposition.

One thing Democrats must do as soon as they get the nation back is to remove “Temporary” from the name of the program. What’s left of it.

ICE officials have admitted that they are targeting people who have found comfort zones. Per the New York Times:13

In July, ICE arrests jumped to nearly 50,000 people, and the administration has focused on deporting people who have been able to remain in the country for years with court orders protecting them from being sent home, another official added.

Meanwhile, according to another New York Times article, “The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.”14

The new data contains details on every ICE arrest through Aug. 5 and offers the fullest picture yet of how the agency’s activities have shifted since public backlash forced a retreat from the aggressive tactics seen in Minneapolis early this year. It was obtained by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group, through a public records lawsuit and analyzed by The New York Times.

After his confirmation this spring, the secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, promised quieter but more effective enforcement. ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.

“They have more officers, more money, more detention space, more local partners and better systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official. “And they’re finally putting all the pieces together to build out this deportation machine.”

Meanwhile, in Chicago…15

The boy who faced Immigration Court Judge Shawn Abraham needed the microphone lowered before his hearing could begin. His feet didn’t reach the floor.

He is 12 years old.

The lawyer and advocate who sat with him at the respondent’s table told Abraham that he had no caregivers in El Salvador, where Abraham would order him deported moments later.

As Trump keeps distracting us with name changes and other blowhardiness, the cruelty continues.

Notes

I’ve been complaining about Miller since before the last presidential election. The result of my efforts? He’s more powerful than ever…

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My Eternally Beloved:

Milo has been captured by the enemy.

And the world is again upside down.

I am no longer able to apply my usual positive spin to the battlefront, my darling cherub of hate. Our forces are in disarray. The enemy, which is us, consumes us from all directions.

I know you worshipped Milo from afar and that it is quite likely your affection for him resulted in at least one of the seventy or so Dear John letters you have sent me during these last few months.

To honor your unrelenting affection for the man, the hero, the myth, I’ve created a collage of his various likenesses over the years, which I am forwarding to you as a framed gift under separate cover.

I call the piece, “The Many Looks of Milo.” I am confident that you will appreciate it enough to revoke your most recent collection of restraining orders, which have kept me somewhat on the run of late.

I hope you can understand the fury of the passions involved in this, our movement’s latest civil war.

These days, honestly, who knows whose side anybody is on? Our friends are our enemies, and our enemies are our friends.

Case in point: Longtime warrior Thomas Massie has gone from this…

…to helping our common mortal enemy.

He is attacking the Great Leader from every side these days. He has, in fact, apparently joined the axis of evil that is trying to blacken the soul of this once great, proud, white nation. Has he not lately pondered the tint of his skin? What has become of the man?

The world is upside down, my lovely vixen of venality. We forge ahead anyway, determined that our cause is just, no matter what the rest of the world may say.

The trouble began when the persistently servile and fanatical Laura Loomer reported Milo to ICE, which is supposed to be on our side.1

I don’t know who on the other side put them up to this, but the Department of Homeland Security, which used to be our most reliable ally, dared to write this treasonous babble in reference to our dear friend:

He chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.

Yiannopoulos was issued a final order of removal by an Immigration Judge on July 22, after failing to show up for his immigration hearing. He will remain in ICE custody pending removal.

Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App. The United States is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.

How can an English citizen be in violation of immigration laws in a nation England herself created? How do we prevail against such madness? This grave insult takes place in the wake of the debauchery behind sending and incarcerating the great warrior Andrew Tate, who now faces the possibility of being punished in the authoritarian English kingdom for simply having an enviable lifestyle.

Adding insult to obvious injury, my sweet, fire-breathing fräulein, Milo was on his way to a Kanye concert when he was apprehended.

The ever-vicious (and some say viscous) Laura Loomer, whom Milo heroically outed for her mental illness issues2 (which she has never admitted to), alerted ICE that he could be found arriving at Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans on his way to Kanye’s concert at the New Orleans Superdome.

Such treachery will not go unanswered, I can assure you, my sweet siren of Satan.

I believe their feud goes back as far as his days as a loyal intern to Marjorie Taylor Greene, that blonde bombshell of turncoats, whom he has since, hopefully, disavowed (it can be admittedly difficult to follow Milo’s pattern of well-crafted hate).

Internecine conflict, of course, is the patron saint of our movement, so we cannot be moved by its occasional friendly fire, but when the losses mount as they have during these dark hours, it can be a challenge to stay positive, which is where I find myself today, as I write this letter under the fire of an enemy I no longer understand.

Even the great founder of our movement seems to be in disarray. We’ve long measured his general mood by evaluating the size of what our mortal enemy calls “cankles,” which are now the size of the very buildings he names for himself. He seems to be angry with everyone, and has of late sequestered himself with Natalie, who I’m told by unreliable sources now feeds him through a bottle every night for his only dietary sustenance.

How, you must wonder, is he then nearing 300 pounds, which has become apparent as we watch him lumber through his days? I think, my dear, that his inflammation, grown by anger, has merely expanded his girth to such a degree that he appears to the public as nothing more than a large, orange mass of diseased flesh.

These days, he’s sleeping with strange bedfellows such as Lyndsey’s wife, Darline Graham, who can’t even spell her own first name. Losing Lyndsey was such a devastating loss, but he had a true MAGA patriot waiting in the wings before he turned to Lyndsey’s wife.

As I said. Everything is upside down.

He has seized Venezuelan oil fields, so all is not lost. Word is that he will try to capture Argentine beef next to assuage the anger of ranchers, who were once a proud constituency but who are now more bankrupt than one of our dear leader’s casinos.

But there is a shadow looming over the conquest of Venezuela, my sweet succubus of sadism. The great fighting men of our navies are jumping ship, literally, after achieving their great victory obliterating Iran’s nuclear weapon fields. The nation’s once proud war machines are limping through the Strait of Hormuz, bathroomless and rudderless, the personnel living on peanut butter sandwiches and Captain Crunchberries (if they’re lucky).

We have succeeded, of course, in achieving full autonomy from the rest of the world through our leader’s brilliant policies of isolation and tariffs, but at a cost we’ve yet to fully count.

But these are small matters. We need not worry about our leader’s greatness. He will prevail while we fight on in the trenches of this third Groyper War on his behalf. We can trust him to lead us forward. All we need to do is continue our great march and help the nation understand the need to cast off its colored sheets in favor of white.

Onward, purity!

I pray you find happiness during this, our third Groyper War, and that you stay well as you eagerly await my return. May the farce be with you.

Notes:

My regular readers will recognize this as satire, borrowed from many different iterations of wartime Letters from the Front Lines.3

Hopefully, the rest of you will, too. If you don’t, who can blame you?

They’ve ruined satire, pretty much.

Meanwhile, I, too, will soldier on, as I celebrate the great leopard of fascism:

Background music while reading

Other Groyper War “Letters from the Front”

I can’t explain why there is a Groyper War Four, or even if there really was one. It’s all part of the mystery!

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Footnotes

Thanks for reading! Happy Friday!

Read Joyce Vance’s latest on the election vote-by-mail ruling if you’re looking for something more serious:

Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance

Judge Talwani’s Most Recent Order On Voting By Mail

As a friend wrote to me this morning, “I need a break.” On top of everything else, I’ve been working you overtime, writing about the legal challenges to Trump’s executive order on voting, along with everything else. We’ve talked not just about standing, but about ripeness. We’ve discussed the legal standard for getting an injunction and the distinction …

Read more

16 days ago · 899 likes · 112 comments · Joyce Vance

Let’s end this. I’m tired of talking about this jackal.

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When she was writing heartbreaking, tragic songs like “Down From Dover,” a song about teenage pregnancy so grim that her record company refused to release it as a single, I was entering my teen years listening to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and, on my more refined days, Traffic.

I was also writing at that young age, though, and I would have appreciated both the lyrics and the song’s tragedy at the end:

My body aches the time is here
It's lonely in this place where I'm lying
Our baby has been born but something's wrong
It's much too still I hear no crying
I guess in some strange way she knew
She'd never have a father's arms to hold her
And dying was her way of telling me
He wasn't coming down from Dover

Dolly was much more a part of my world than I knew.

During those early years, in my crowd, she was mocked for her breasts. That was her highlight reel. Little did those who mocked her realize the grit and splendor of her life story. America, you see, is not so different today than it was fifty years ago. Mockery and shame have long been a part of its highlight reel.

When Whitney Houston sang “I Will Always Love You” to Kevin Costner in the flick, “The Bodyguard,” I thought it was her song. I had no clue that Dolly had written it nearly 20 years before the movie’s release in 1992.

So I’m not going to come at you with platitudes based on a lifetime of Dolly love. I can’t make that claim. I only learned about her later in her career through her actions as I discovered what kind of a person she was.

My loss. And a lesson that, if I could express it to a teenage me, would have gone something like this: “Expand your musical horizons.”

This is a lesson I have learned, but it took me too long. I probably didn’t discover one of my favorite songs, “Jolene,” until more than twenty years after it was released.

But one thing was always obvious to me: Dolly Parton was one of those very few people who carried the goodness and light of the universe in her soul. You could see it when she was on talk shows like “The Tonight Show.”

Here, she serenades Johnny Carson, showing her appreciation for him as a star who cultivated other talents, including hers:

She was much more than an entertainer.

Her Imagination Library is said to have been responsible for distributing as many as 200 million books to children during its 31 years of existence. Everyone around her seemed to receive some of her light. Even people who didn’t want it.

Not even the orange menace could find his way to express his usual hate. He ordered U.S. flags to fly at half-mast for a week, probably unaware of the work she did for the LGBTQ+ community and other maligned or disadvantaged parts of society. This is the one thing he’s done right in his life.

What an irony that is. Because, as a writer on Medium wrote yesterday, she lived by beating the devil at his own game.

And now, with no apology, I’ll steal a playlist from the New York Times (with a paywall-free link included at the end that includes descriptions and history about each song):

‘Something Fishy’ (1967)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Just Because I’m a Woman’ (1968)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Mommie, Ain’t That Daddy’ (1968)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)’ (1968)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Little Bird’ (1968)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Evening Shade’ (1969)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Just the Way I Am’ (1970)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Down From Dover’ (1970)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Jolene’ (1973)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘I Will Always Love You’ (1974)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Here You Come Again’ (1977)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Two Doors Down’ (1978)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Baby I’m Burnin’’ (1978)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘9 to 5’ (1980)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube

‘Little Sparrow’ (2001)

▶ Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

🎁 Ruminato Gift Link 🎁

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Talk to white Indiana residents, and you’ll hear a hundred different disparaging remarks about Gary, Indiana. Repeating them all here would be like listing the 100 worst things said by Huck Finn, but without Mark Twain’s sarcasm.

So the indifference of Gary’s plight to most Indiana residents doesn’t come as a surprise.

But does the rest of the nation care that Gary has been without power for twelve straight nights? Thanks to a series of deadly storms and hurricane winds and a hapless utility, Gary is America’s Cuba. Blacked out, with few people noticing or caring.

Reverse the numbers you see in this chart, then convince me that if Gary were 79% white, most of those 85,704 residents would be in the dark for twelve days.

Comments are open.

There have been accusations that the power company involved,1 NIPSCO, is slow-rolling a fix because of racism. I would argue that the real problem is that the company is overwhelmed. Its resources, compared to the Chicago urban area’s utility monolith, ComEd, which quickly got people back online after a rough battle with the same severe thunderstorms Gary endured, are minuscule.

What is criminal is that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) has not made an appearance, and that state and federal responses in general have been nonexistent.

You can be sure that the round, orange ball of toxic sludge sitting in his gold-plated Oval Office doesn’t give a damn.

Sadly, in a way, the problem is more nefarious than NIPSCO’s inability to fix the power outage. Black enclaves in America like Gary are still regarded with the same disdain and disinterest as third world countries and other far-off places have been for decades.

Most Americans tolerate these places by avoiding them.

A modern nation overflowing with data center money could, if it wanted to, flood Gary tonight with portable generators for every person without power there. Billionaires could send food, water, even stocked refrigerators and trailers.

The problems of Gary could be resolved in about an hour. It’s right next to Chicago. The travesty is astounding. The lack of concern among Americans is, frankly, kind of scary.

This is a nation that just spent $20 million on shock gloves to help shove immigrants into cages:

For that money, FEMA could purchase 40,000 portable generators, enough for half the population of Gary, and probably most of the households currently without power.

Indiana is another failed red state

As always, there is some history to consider here.

Indiana is in a deplorable state. Its small rural towns are ruined shells filled with decaying reminders of an agrarian past that now consist of farmers either hoping to sell what’s left of their farms or trying to, as massive agricultural companies, data centers, and urban sprawl close in on their land.

The state lost 345,700 acres of farmland between 2010 and 20222. This is a common tale in Midwestern rural areas.

They’ve moved beyond prejudice to anger. That they don’t quite understand who they are mad at doesn’t matter.

Whatever exists of an Indiana economy is centered around whatever they can leech out of Chicago, a city Indiana residents are happy to also denigrate while living off its cosmopolitan successes.

Red state socialism

Indiana’s attempt to lure the Chicago Bears to a new stadium location at a former slag waste site near the Illinois border is an example. It’s also classic red state socialism, and why the residents of Indiana’s rural counties are spinning their Caterpillar wheels in the mud.

The Bears’ owners, as part of a nearly decade-long effort to bully Chicago and Illinois into embarking on a corporate socialist sports experiment, have had an easy time convincing Indiana state legislators to try feeding from the Chicago cash trough.

The Bears have tried so many gimmicks trying to cajole Illinois legislators into funding a new stadium that they’ve finally thrown up their hands, realizing that red staters will fawn over the possibility of using public funds to build the infrastructure the team craves.3

So the team marched into Indiana and said, “Hey, we love red state socialism. For a steep price that your constituents will pay, we’ll build a new stadium on some of your expired steel slag!”

The real shame is that the Indiana location they’ve identified is a rare successful red state foray into environmentalism partly funded by the now nearly extinct EPA to transform a former slag site into a place called Lost Marsh Golf Course in Hammond, Indiana.

If you don’t know what slag is, it’s about as bad as it sounds. It’s basically the excrement of steel mills that deposited the stuff all around Chicago’s south suburbs and parts of Northern Indiana when the area had a thriving steel industry.

That industry left behind massive piles of toxic, porous steel slag in the area, much of which seeped into the ground.

One slag mountain, near 129th Street and Calumet Avenue in Hammond, Indiana, was known as Bairstow Mountain. It was a mound of slag collected by industrialist Harry Bairstow, who sent trucks to local steel mills to collect their metallic, toxic excrement and haul it to the mountain, where it became a 3.5 million-cubic-yard mound of slag, oil drums, and abandoned, decaying cars.4

The Hammond eyesore, which was as mountainous as the name implies, was a template for how the Black community was treated during the post-World War Two industrial era in that part of Indiana.

When Bairstow abandoned his mountain of metallic sludge (because of course he did), local officials tried to cut it to pieces and remove it, but the industrial-size augers and drills used to bust the thing open got busted by the mountain instead.5

So they just covered it up. Eventually, human ingenuity and a whole lot of work turned it into a golf course.

The area was governed with the same mentality that resulted in freeways slicing through quiet, well established working class Black neighborhoods throughout the country, including Chicago, where I-57, also known as the Dan Ryan Expressway, cut open Chicago’s South Side, gutting its neighborhoods and creating rows of crappy, cheap housing like Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes.

Black neighborhoods were treated with such disdain that eventually the troubles created by white power brokers needed someone to blame, so people started blaming the Black residents whose neighborhoods were ruined by industrial poisons, mass incarceration (aka modern slavery), and freeways. “Black on Black” crime became the accepted explanation for all the problems of these ruined neighborhoods as education and economic opportunity got buried under the toxic sludge of industry.

Most of this narrative was bipartisan. It still is.

There was so much slag during steel’s golden era that a canal in the South Suburbs called the Cal-Sag Channel was used to help move the stuff. Its name was likely a typo: Cal-Slag Channel was most likely what whoever invents those kinds of names had in mind.

The channel was intended to help halt pollution and sewage from the southern suburbs from flowing directly into Lake Michigan. God forbid wealthy north shore residents get a taste of metal in their morning espresso.

The Bears’ threats to move to Indiana are likely a ruse, just a way to treat its majority minority population (65% Black or Latino or Hispanic) with the usual contempt.

The Bears purchased Arlington Park Racetrack for $197.2 million in February 2023. They did this after convincing the city of Chicago to use public money for renovations to their current Bears home at Soldier Field in 2002, a corporate socialist project for which Chicago residents still owed $640 million as of 2023.7

That $197.2 million is probably less than they’ll pay their new quarterback to continue being the Michael Jordan of the football field, but it’s still a lot of money.

The Arlington Heights racetrack was demolished in 2021, so the Bears essentially purchased a big empty bargaining chip for their nearly $200 million, hoping to grab some corporate socialism cash to help build what modern sports real estate hucksters like to call a mixed-use project, full of trendy restaurants, bars, and gambling. They’re not walking away from that. Eventually, they’ll wrangle something out of the Illinois legislature.

But they’ve convinced Indiana politicians and anyone who will listen that they will walk away from Illinois. That’s catnip to a red-state socialist, who is always eager to give Chicago a black eye and hand money to corporate interests, especially now that there is a federal regime in Washington, D.C. that’s eager to encourage graft. You can be sure that if a deal with Indiana somehow goes through, each Indiana politician involved will find a way to grab enough cash from actuarial dead zones to pay enough for a new house or three.

This is the essence of red state governing: corporate socialism that ignores places like Gary, where people have been without power for twelve days. If you read the stories about the power outage, you’ll find that some Gary residents are so used to this treatment that they shrug it all off as just another day, just like many Black U.S. voters shrugged off Trump’s first election.

Indiana’s governor has recently made a few performative statements, but meanwhile, Gary resident Melissa Dixon is trying to figure out how to feed her three daughters tonight on a thirteenth night without power. No cold food to rely on, not even a Taylor Farms explosive diarrhea salad. No lights, no air conditioning, no fan.8

She stumbled into her home the other day sobbing after spending the day in line in the summer heat waiting for food rations from local charity groups. Those rations were mostly gone by the time it was her turn to outstretch her palms.

52% of Gary was still without electricity on Day 11, a Saturday. Residents were forced into cramped school gyms to catch a little air conditioning and charge their phones and maybe scrounge for some food donations.

This is not the kind of thing you expect to see in a nation where billionaires and trillionaires are polishing their yacht decks and chartering flights to tropical islands. It’s not even the same nation where some people can afford the high-end Disney World while others have to stand for hours to jump onto crowded rides because they aren’t part of Disney+ or whatever Disney calls their premium offering.

Gary has entered the third world. Americans have never paid much attention to the third world. I doubt they’ll start now.

Melissa Dixon has another thought about this. If she were unable to provide essentials for her children like food and power, the repressive conservative Indiana government would call her an unfit mother and try to take away her children.

What does that make our government? What does that make us and our silence?

Thanks for reading!

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Footnotes

Remember, none of my stuff is written with AI. Let’s all support indie writers who reject using AI in our posts, okay?

Anyhoo, here’s a roundup of some recent posts. Some humorous, some not so funny, some just downright grim. Pick your poison, and restack what you like (my subscriber numbers have remained the same for a long time, so I can use all the help I can get!):

This first one was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. If it looks familiar, but different, it’s because I sent it out with a different headline and graphic. It’s been tightened up a bit, too.

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This one is about Trump’s insider trading war, which mainstream media mysteriously still refers to as the Iran War and similar monikers:

This is a short one. Short and sweet. Self-explanatory, too!

This one’s just a little reality check:

My G.L.O.V.E.s are off in this story about American fascism:

Some things Caligulus Trumpus does are too ridiculous to write about, but we do it anyway to help maintain the anti-Trump cottage industry as a major part of the U.S. economy:

In the mood for reading about an epic asshole? Here ya go:

ICE brings its cowardice to the skies:

How a scammer used AI to pretend to be an editor at a major publishing house to try butter me up into sending him money:

Where Rand Paul got his ludicrous ideas — It’s almost like there’s a little factory in the South that generates bidedal rectums and places them into political office:

Wildberries and oil and the end of the axis of evil:

Chapter Three of the Psalm of Vampires sequel. The remainder is on hold a little. Frankly, I’m not seeing enough traction on this to move forward, and my brain has about 50 other ideas for novels in its head. I’ll see how it goes, but for now, all three first chapters are available here on Ruminato Substack:

In praise of my favorite centrist politician. We probably don’t do this as often as we should, you know? I mean, just compare the two men, right?

It’s always good to hear from Dr. Harry Hemogoblin, isn’t it?’

There’s more, of course. Just go to ruminato.com, my Substack domain, for more. If you look at it on your laptop or tablet, you will find it’s very easy to navigate and find the content you’re looking for.

Ruminato

Essays, Political Rants and/or Satire, Humor, and Fiction by Charles Bastille, author of MagicLand, Psalm of Vampires, and Restive Souls

By Charles Bastille

Happy Sunday! Give me a restack if you feel like offering support. Or, buy my new fiction anthology!

Thank you, as always. Love you all! Unless you unsubscribe, in which case I harbor a minor resentment for several weeks.

Let’s close with some appropriate music. I love the filmed choreography and art direction of this cover of Roland Orzabal’s (Tears for Fears) song by Gary Jules:

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Mr. Fulbright is filing a report to Screwtape on the demonic attempts to control Caligulus Trumpus.

Greetings and Salutations, Screwtape:

My apologies for my recent lack of timely communication. As you know, the patient has fallen quite ill, which makes it more difficult to apply our usual invasive suggestive techniques.

Luckily, the patient has devolved so fully that he is quite capable of acting on our behalf with little intervention.

I’m happy to report that the lovely Mrs. Breckinridge has found a most delightful tart to aid our efforts.

Her name is Natalie, and I’m sure by now you’ve heard of her.

Natalie has quickly achieved legendary status in the human world. Stories abound of her exploits, even though she has been under Mrs. Breckinridge’s tutelage for just a short time.

One of our favorite stories, which I must say forced me into a howling guffaw loud enough to have transcended our continuum and into the human realm for a brief moment, involves a little story involving one of the patient’s many court cases.

Well, dear mentor, it seems young Natalie was left off a passenger list on the patient’s entourage to the courthouse. The Secret Service wouldn’t let her into the patient’s heavily armored SUV because of the oversight.

She huffed, she did, and she puffed, and she screamed, as well. A delightful scream it was, too, a shriek, really, which would have pierced eardrums had it been inside a room.

She was livid at being left off the entourage list because, as you may be aware, she is usually affixed to the patient’s side as if by epoxy.

Desperate to join the patient, she jumped into the trunk of the vehicle as it drove off. How the Secret Service was unable to prevent this, I can’t say.

Luckily, the only mortal who heard my laughter as it wafted into the human world was Steven Cheung, the patient’s communication director, who has already joined our team and is destined, I’m told, for basement duty tending to the baser needs of ghouls and trolls upon his exit from the foul planet that humans live on.

Natalie became a pet project of Mrs. Breckinridge shortly after the patient was smitten upon seeing her at something called the Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in 2019. When Mrs. Breckinridge heard him say, “She lit up the television screen like very few people I’ve ever seen do it,” she immediately went to work.

I remember that day well. The patient’s heart rate reached 150 beats per minute when he first set eyes on her, touched, I knew, by what he perceived as a strong resemblance to his daughter, which always sends his delightfully soiled mind into a besotted sexual frenzy.

Well, regardless, I thought he was a goner with that heart rate turning his orange skin purple and sweat soaking his exterior like the side of a cold glass of iced tea.

The enemy might have called that reaction sweet, a sign of a blooming love, but only if they were unaware of the patient’s unrequited longing for his primary blond offspring, which, let’s be honest here, is a bit much even for our team (Some of Mrs. Breckinridge’s younger helpers were said to be somewhat nauseated by the patient’s natural instincts).

However, this is what makes working with this patient such a delight. He rarely requires more than a nudge, and lately, not even that.

I’m happy to report that the relationship has indeed blossomed, and we have Mrs. Breckinridge to thank for that, since the patient’s ability to express himself in ways that traditionally offer physiological pleasure to human females of Natalie’s age has, shall I say, expired. Not that there was much for him to work with in the first place, which itself is an irrelevant factor with his personality type, who take no interest in the carnal satisfaction of their paramours.

Mrs. Breckinridge instead went the obsession route, which is always a reliable weapon when it can be nurtured properly. For example, the large newspaper that we have been moderately successful at influencing, the New York Times, still employs a reporter by the name of Maggie Haberman, who I find to be a bit of a pest.

I’m told by Mr. Jones that he’s working on that problem, but for now, loser Haberman continues to write such things as:

Several videos shared with The Times show Ms. Harp sprinting across great distances to keep up with Mr. Trump’s golf cart as it putters across his course in Scotland.

I have confirmed this with Mrs. Breckinridge, who says she and her helpers laughed endlessly as Natalie caught up to the golf cart, quite out of breath from all the running and chasing, and with bed hair suitable for a mug shot. As I understand it, this kind of foot chase across the golf links is a frequent occurrence.

“I Want to Bring You Joy” is one of many expressions of devotion Natalie has expressed to the patient, but, as you know, she is consumed by our kind of devotion, not the enemy’s.

Mrs. Breckinridge has managed to obtain for Natalie a kind of proximity to the patient at all times that his other sycophants can only dream of. Mrs. Breckinridge, with her wry humor, has told me on multiple occasions that Natalie isn’t merely pasted onto the president; she is the paste itself, so close is she to him.

Natalie is with him at all hours. I have witnessed much of this, and it pleases me to no end. The patient eats up the attention the way starving jackals chomp the bowels of a lion’s quarry.

Natalie and the patient sit together on his massive gold-framed bed, he on his phone, she on her laptop, posting wild AI memes together deep into the night, often with no sleep, giggling like school children during a clandestine sleepover.

Occasionally, one of them will whisper a derogatory remark about his wife, Melania. More giggling follows, hand to mouth, as if to hide their illicit laughter from an unnamed observer. It’s all quite atrocious and enjoyable.

He especially enjoys when Natalie mocks Melania’s accent. I believe those are the rare moments when there is a brief stirring within the front of his adult diapers, but that fades quickly, especially when Natalie finds it necessary to tend to cankle leakage.

The patient considers this late bedtime activity a way to consummate the relationship. It is the best he can hope for, after all, given his various medical conditions.

She participates in many social media posting frenzies with the patient, including 40 different times referring to E. Jean Carroll in one sitting. One post after another for hours. It was, please forgive my word usage, dear Screwtape, quite heavenly.

Mrs. Breckinridge herself helped Natalie pen one letter to the patient, which read, “You are all that matters to me.” I’ll admit to seeing the patient read this letter and not being particularly interested in its origin, because he displayed his usual aloofness when she called him on his cellphone ten or so times that same day without his answering.

This all occurred before I had had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Breckinridge, so I was not yet attuned to her exquisite maneuverings.

I truly thought he was merely examining a piece of his deranged fan mail, one of his favorite pastimes. I had not yet been made aware of Natalie’s deep obsession with the patient.

When I did learn about it, I was in disbelief. How could such a troubled soul be allowed such proximity to a president by his security team? I was, frankly, a bit worried as well, knowing that these relationships, although quite enjoyable, usually end badly for one or both of the parties.

Credit here to Mr. Simmons, who assured me that the Secret Service had developed several plans for taking her out of the picture if need be. We can’t lose our patient as an asset before his natural time elapses. We have no control over that, of course, it being the exclusive purview of the enemy, but if there are courses of action we can take to prevent an assassination, we must do so.

Mr. Simmons, as you know, was the demon who helped concoct the phone-blown-off-ear story by urging a troubled Secret Service agent to plot it with a few others. Some of our finest work. I was pleased to learn that Mr. Simmons had moved on to charge d’affaires of Mitch McConnell photography sessions.

He’s done some fine work there, as well.

Permit me, then, my most merciless mentor, to provide a roundup to highlight the relationship between Natalie and the patient. I offer this in bullet format, even though I know you despise them, because, frankly, I do enjoy tickling the underbelly of my tormentors. In addition to what I’ve described to this point:

• First off, Natalie is Christian, but the kind we like.

• Quoting the New York Times again, which I know you don’t mind now that we’ve had so much success getting them to sanitize the patient’s activities: “She rarely speaks on camera and yet she is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president.”

• She made news as one of those lucky few to be stuffed into a catering container in Turkiye during a recent threat by one of our favorite countries of all time, the Islamic Republic of Iran (I get goosebumps every time I mention the place).

• She provided AI graphics and video to the patient that prompted him to post a video of a previous president and his wife, and one of our mortal enemies, Obama, as apes. I know how much you enjoyed that one.

• The press reports that she loves him as much as his wife and children, a report that I find humorous beyond words, since they don’t love him very much at all. Take away his ability to fill their coffers with ill-gotten money, and they’d all be lining up to hang him at the gallows. No, my eminence, hers is a unique obsession. What the patient’s wife and children feel toward him is less than a shadow of Natalie’s dark obsession, I’m happy to report.

• Her devotion to the patient has stirred a mixture of jealousy, disbelief, anxiety, frustration, fear, and other wondrous emotions within his team at the improved West Wing, bolstered, I believe, by her access to him, which is absolute. She is more than his Wormtongue. She is both his mouthpiece and the conduit through which all information to him flows. I’ll admit to being apprehensive about this at first, but it has proven to be remarkably helpful.

• In one letter made public, she wrote to him: “I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).” If only we could snip her DNA and spread it through the populace.

• The patient has stated that she is the only person who cares about him.

• The news gadflies Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan call her a human binky, which I do appreciate, but not on their terms. We need to accelerate our conversion efforts on these two fools.

There’s much more, details of which I have sent through other channels.

If there’s any bad news to report, it is that the devious enemy has found its own surrogate, a fellow named Jon Ossoff, who is a Democratic senator from Georgia. By doing nothing more than mentioning her name in the same breath as the patient, he has become a legitimate presidential contender, and thus a threat to our cause, considering his tendencies, which veer directly into enemy territory.

He often makes wisecracks about the patient, and worse, all of them are spot on. Example: “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

He is going to be a big problem for us. I recommend assigning one of our best to him, assuming he’s not a lost cause already.

Until next time, dear mentor…

— Yours with everlasting and demonic intent,

~ Mr. Fulbright

Notes

Most of the news content regarding this comes from two sources. Here are gift links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/politics/natalie-harp-trump-devotion-white-house.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/us/politics/trump-natalie-harp.html

“Mrs. Breckinridge” is a bit of an Easter Egg, but you might need to be a boomer to figure it out.

For those of you not familiar with The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, they’re a series of letters written by a demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood, on how to cajole and tempt Wormwood’s assigned target, an everyday British man.

For more on Natalie Harp, check out Jay Kuo’s Natalie Biography:

The Status Kuo

More Than Just a Human Printer!

Sen. Jon Ossoff mentioned a name most Americans had never heard, and the White House and right-wing media freaked out. It seems he’d touched a nerve…

Read more

24 days ago · 612 likes · 92 comments · Jay Kuo

Snopes is unable to verify Natalie’s cancer story

https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/08/20/natalie-harp-bone-cancer/

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I made an exception to my usual NO-AI in my graphics mantra because my prompt was very specific about the artist I wanted to emulate, Gustave Doré, who no longer has copyrights associated with his work. I used Adobe Firefly to create the background image, and then I superimposed Natalie over that myself using Photoshop. Adobe claims Firefly doesn’t use outside copyrighted images for its LLM (model), but instead uses contributions by Adobe users through Behance and other opt-ins. The prompt was: “Demonic scene similar to illustrations in Dante’s Inferno by Gustave Doré.” The image of Natalie Harp is in the public domain by the White House.

Here is Mr. Fulbright’s original report to Screwtape:

Thanks for reading!

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You remember the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), right? Oh, you poor, sweet summer child. You forgot, didn’t you?

Well, all those “on again,” “off again” ceasefires during the Strait of Hormuz Insider Trading War, those wonderful “We’re about to bomb, oh, wait, no we’re not,” market manipulation statements coming out every few days from the ruins of the White House, were actually related to a theoretical and mostly fictional Memorandum of Understanding that expired today.

The MOU was allegedly a document signed by the U.S. and Iran last June stating that the two countries were committed to achieving a lasting peace agreement. It was “negotiated” by ace diplomats/real estate tycoons Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who probably envisioned turning Tehran into the capital of the 55th state (after Canada, Venezuela, Greenland, and Cuba were happily in the fold of the big, new, beautiful, bountiful United States).

Nobody really remembers why TrumpleSickSkin bombed Iran all those months ago in the first place. Especially Democrats, most of whom are still sitting around with their butts on their hands while Rome burns.

It doesn’t matter why he let loose the bombs, because trying to assign logic to anything the orange puffaroon does is like trying to understand why an enraged chimp just bit off your face.

The damage is done, and here we are, trying to prognosticate a madman’s next move. This is an impossible task.

Anyhoo, Iranian Republican Guards, fresh off slaughtering tens of thousands of their own people protesting a crappy economy and the theocratic regime responsible for it, used those two months to consolidate power in the wake of the idiot killing the nation’s “Supreme Leader” (that’s Iran’s name for the ayatollah in charge of things).

So, yeah. He died, and so did the family of his son, who replaced him. The word is that the son, who is now the Supreme Leader (name not important), is alive but possibly lying in multiple pieces on a hospital bed somewhere, so he makes no public appearances, since it’s hard to travel when you have to reattach parts of your body before standing before crowds of people lecturing them on how women suck and should remain mostly uneducated and hidden from view.

Quick history lesson!

I hate to do this to you again, but we need to backtrack a little for some historical perspective.

To understand what Iran has been doing during these two months of dithering by the TrumpleManiacs who run the U.S. war machine these days, we need to explore how the government of Iran works. Don’t worry, I can do this in a paragraph or three.

Way back in the 1970s, Iran had a little revolution to overthrow the Shah of Iran, who was a nasty dictator installed by the U.S. and Britain because they were mad about a socialist prime minister who had won an Iranian election fair and square (mostly).

At first, the government that replaced the Shah was sort of semi-democratic in nature. They had a parliament (called the Majlis) and everything! But it didn’t take long for the top cleric in the nation, a truly nasty fella named Ruhollah Khomeini, to consolidate power and become Iran’s “Supreme Leader.”

Take a look at this guy and tell me that’s the face of someone you want knocking on your door surrounded by a cadre of well-armed misogynists.

He then began a pogrom against women, of all people. Imagine an American Christo-nationalist taking power as supreme dictator in the United States, but without all the publicly known sex stuff.

One way he consolidated power was through a militia group of hardened misogynists called the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). These were, and are, basically army guys who think that women who don’t do everything they are told and hide their faces properly should be sent directly to a grave.

Khomeini bolstered the IRGC with a huge voluntary force of men called the Basij, who did things like run around Iranian cities on motorcycles chasing women who dared to show more than an eyebrow. Seriously, that’s what these men were tasked with. Jump on a motorcycle and look for bare ankles.

Khomeini turned Iran into a pretty crazy place. Lots of people went to prison for just being human beings. Iranians can thank American foreign policy for the gift later, maybe after we bomb the crap out of them again, if we can find the bombs to do it with (Hegseth pretty much ran the inventory down to nothing, so that’s a big if).

When Khomeini died, he was replaced by a guy named Khameini. As we say in America these days, you can’t make this shit up.

Well, Khameini was just as nasty as Khomeini.

They’re both dead now. Khameini (the one with the “a”) was killed when Trump got a hair up his ass and decided to bomb Iran for reasons.

So he was replaced by another Khameini.

But, as I said, the newer Khameini was apparently blown up some, too.

Remember that Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) of which I spoketh (spaketh?) earlier?

Well, my friends, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (I’m gonna just call them the IRGC from now on) were very happy that the Trumpanzees in charge of things negotiated with themselves and finally came up with the MOU.

The Iranian diplomats took a look at what the real estate guys came up with and said, “Yeah, sure, whatever buys us some time.”

One important small but salient fact about the real estate guys’ MOU is that the little sheikdom of Oman played a central role in the “negotiations,” which was, from the beginning, a farce.

This matters because today Trump threatened to bomb Oman. For reasons.

The IRGC knew, of course, that the MOU was a sham, even if our orange clusterbomb of diseased flesh did not. (He probably did not.)

So, the IRGC scrambled to consolidate power, since Khameini 2.0 was still in multiple pieces in a hospital. This is what you call a power gap, and the IRGC seized the opportunity to snatch power away from the clerics so they could simultaneously crank out a crash drone buildout and keep chasing women back into their homes.

One might think that this should turn Khameini 2.0 westward ho. But no. That will not happen, because the Trump bombs killed the following members of his family:

• Zahra Haddad-Adel: (wife of Khamenei 2.0).

• Mohammad Bagher: Khamenei 1.0’s teenage grandson (son of Khameini 2.0).

• Khamenei 1.0’s Daughter: Khameini 2.0’s sister.

• Khamenei 1.0’s Son-in-law: The husband of 2.0’s deceased sister.

• Khamenei 1.0’s Grandchild / Granddaughter: The young child of his deceased daughter and 2.0’s sister.

Let’s pause and summarize the results of the Hormuz Insider Trading War so far:

• Trump/Hegseth Crazytown has turned a thorn in its side into a mortal enemy.

• Trump/Hegseth Crazytown has closed the Strait of Hormuz, which only a few months ago saw hundreds of ships passing through per day on open sea lanes and now is lucky if three slip through.

• A strengthened Iranian government, which had been badly weakened by protests and the general unhappy mood of its people, who are now mostly rallying around the flag thanks to the blathering antics of the American president.

• More than 100 children killed when an American missile was erroneously programmed by a hallucinating AI system to strike a girl’s school.

• Lots of newly rich folks, many of whom, according to evidence that I’m not going to back up with sources here because I believe you’re fully capable of researching it on your own, are getting insider tips about the various pronouncements that issue every few days from the Oval Office (“we’re bombing someone,” “No, we’re not!”).

• Significantly higher oil prices and gas prices. The mainstream media, of course, is flooding the zone with headlines like, “Why gas prices aren’t worse,” because half the corporate media is owned by Trumpanzees, and the other half is too afraid to challenge the hegemony. Most economists seem to agree the sleight of hand that has kept oil prices under $100 per barrel are about to run their course.1

• Trump/Hegseth Crazytown’s primary accomplishment has been turning the Strait of Hormuz into a gauntlet, a sort of shooting gallery for armed mariners. Every few days, we read about how Iran has smoked another tanker or barge at sea. It’s a narrow shipping lane. Just imagine how much insurance rates on oil tankers have skyrocketed.

• If the Strait of Hormuz ever does open for business again, Iran will pretty much be in charge of it, and might even collect tolls. This is completely different than it was before the Trump/Hegseth attacks against Iran.

The Wall Street Journal, where a few intrepid journalists still manage to occasionally sneak out a good story, reports on what the IRGC has done with its MOU window:2

After President Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran in mid-June, administration officials fanned out to build support for an agreement they hoped would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and start winding down the war.

Iran’s hard-line leaders huddled in Tehran and came up with a different plan, according to Iranian and Arab officials. In their view the pact was likely just an attempt by the U.S. and Israel to take pressure off the global economy and buy time for a bigger attack down the road. Instead of putting faith in talks, they took the past two months to prepare for a bigger fight.

Their efforts include giving the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps more control of the country’s regular army, appointing hardened veterans of the war with Iraq and past internal crackdowns to key posts, expanding domestic counterintelligence operations and ramping up production of missiles and drones. The leadership quickly seized the initiative, attacking ships to tighten Iran’s grip on Hormuz and expanding the battlefield to the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia has used to get around Iran’s chokehold on the Persian Gulf.

The Iranian government is preparing to raise havoc to levels Americans might become so uncomfortable with they won’t wait for the midterms to demand a change in government.

I don’t expect you to believe my hyperbole. But the messaging is coming directly out of Iran:3

“There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun.”

That’s Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, an Iranian defense analyst, who goes on to say, “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics—limited, incremental escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”

In war, we can never know if such bellicosity is posturing or what they really have in mind. But one thing we do know is that the IRGC spent these two months not only rebuilding their forces, but making important improvements to their missile systems’ targeting capabilities.

Their missiles can now change course in mid-flight, making it easier to find their targets. This comes at a bad time, because American air defenses in the region have been depleted.4 American military bases are vulnerable, while Navy personnel are jumping off ships because they’re malnourished, unwashed, and miserable.

And it’s not like the IRGC has been quiet during the MOU. The little red dots are Iranian strikes against American bases and the oil infrastructure of U.S. allies.

That’s one hell of a misunderstanding, isn’t it? What, exactly, is a Memorandum of Understanding good for? It’s simple: It was always intended as a device for manipulating the stock market. This is what you get when you have a crooked president who appoints billionaire real estate tycoons to “negotiate” peace treaties.

Meanwhile, Khameini 2.0 has recovered enough to announce that the armed forces have been restocked and stacked. Within the scope of that announcement, Khameini added that the repression of women will enjoy a fresh round.

To accomplish this, he named Hossein Taeb, who made a name for himself by leading a punishing assault against protesters in 2009, to head the Basij, that volunteer force I told you about.

The Iranian people, therefore, are now getting assaulted by both sides in this war. Their future is as bleak as it’s been in a century.

The American people don’t much care, because the mainstream media has flooded the U.S. with “Death to America” imagery for the last forty years. This, even though most young Iranians would kill to live in America.

Notes

Speaking of shelf lives we’d like to see shortened, I wrote this last August. Not much has changed:

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Footnotes

1

For some wonky reasons why oil prices are likely to explode, check out Krugman:

Paul Krugman

Why Isn’t the Price of Oil Even Higher?

Donald Trump is not a well man. He is, unfortunately, also President, which means that we all pay a price for his inability to accept reality. Notably, while he insists that he has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz,” shipments of oil through the Strait will remain minimal unless Trump can find a way to smuggle oil out in catering carts — or until…

Read more

a month ago · 2509 likes · 428 comments · Paul Krugman

He’s won a Nobel Prize in economics, and I haven’t, so I would rather just let him explain it all.

I say, let’s let him run (assuming the walking corpse will still be alive).

Since we are playing the three-term president game, his opponent is obvious. Feel free to share the graphic (No AI, except the idiot’s) on your favorite social media. Just right-click to save, or do whatever you do on your smartphone.

Happy Sunday, and thanks for reading!

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1. Climate change, which is about to ravage the world in catastrophic ways we are still mostly blind to.

2. China’s takeover of the world economy.

The first item demands its own post(s). I recommend you read ’s Substack on climate change. All you need to know, if you have the courage to read it, is there.

This post concerns the other thing. Given the continued bellicosity over a potential war with China from both U.S. political parties, I’m here to say that the war has already begun, and that the United States lost without China firing a single round.

The result, barring a miraculous change of American policy, will be an impoverished nation dependent on a one-way supply chain of Chinese goods pouring into the country dictated to Americans by the whims of the victor.

Arguments over vaccines and data centers will become moot because the U.S. will transform into a purely consumer nation full of illiterates in which only a few will be lucky enough to brag about the prestigious job of dodging Amazon warehouse robots (made in China) for a living.

Since consumption requires money, the economy will transform into one that, aside from a wealthy few who find a way to thrive while having one foot out the door (Peter Thiel in Argentina), will be weighed down by a huge dependent American peasant class relying on government handouts.

This ironic result of Republican late-stage capitalism is unavoidable. An exciting, charismatic leader, maybe AOC, will dominate the next presidential campaign as the economy collapses, or the one after that, and all the Republican fears about socialism will come to pass with wild abandon.

But socialism won’t save us, because it will be too late. A bankrupt nation will not be able to compete with China, which will, based on current trends, control every aspect of the world economy through vast investments and an absurdly dominant position in technology.

As it stands now, while the U.S. dithers, a fraction of its aware population barely stands on the back of its heels in protest as a rancid, foul-mouthed regime of hate spends its limited resources on tracking down ways to line the pockets of its primary donors and send important segments of its population into concentration camps or other countries.

Meanwhile, China is discovering glueballs and other edgy teasers of quantum computing while its auto industry, with more than 100 car manufacturers, laughs at the dying embers of what used to be the pride of American manufacturing.

There are 743 auto-related manufacturers in China. Some of them, of course, are joint ventures with European and U.S. firms, but U.S. firms are finding their participation in China’s vast market increasingly tenuous.1

China produces three times as many cars as the United States.2

Chinese auto manufacturers are currently marketing a ridiculous 7,142 models of cars.3 U.S. car aficionados work themselves into a lather when Tesla announces one new model, which then takes six years to get to market, partly because Musk is too busy pumping right-wing noise into the echosphere with his Apartheid Twitter machine.

China built its auto industry almost instantaneously while the U.S. spent its time figuring out how much it should feed its growing monolith of hate and misogyny.

China didn’t build its massive auto industry with cheap labor. It built it with robots.

It’s not just cars

China has 1,527 companies or entities (some are government-run) building smartphones or their constituent parts.4 Americans haven’t heard of many of them because both Republicans and Democrats are afraid of what will happen if they allow them into the country. I suspect the fears run from the possibility of all of the Chinese-made devices blowing up simultaneously to simply knocking the U.S. cellular manufacturing industry to the ground.

This short bullet list of Chinese brands won’t mean much to most of you, because the United States either outright bans them or makes it difficult for them to establish U.S. market share:

• Huawei

• Xiaomi

• Oppo

• Vivo

• Honor

• Transsion (Tecno, Infinix, and Itel)

• ZTE

But most Chinese are well aware of all of them.

While large portions of the U.S. population sit numbed by its addiction to drugs, booze, celebrity entertainment, and short, cheesy videos, China is building things at such prodigious rates that there is a cottage tourist industry devoted to exploring Chinese industrial and technical development. Hyped up trend names like “infrastructure porn” and “Chinamaxxing” lure tourists into China as they gawk at spectacular bridges, trains that run at 300 mph, and clean, glittering airports.

Meet the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge. At 102.4 miles, it’s the longest bridge in the world. It connects Shanghai and Nanjing (among other cities) in Jiangsu province, mostly following the route of the Yangtze River.

The bridge also spans a 5.6-mile section of Yangcheng Lake in Suzhou.

It cost $8.5 billion (U.S.) to build in four years, then opened in 2010.

China is also home to the longest span across the sea, a 34-mile beast that connects Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao.

The American fascination with Trump, which extends even to his haters through non-stop posts about him, has led Chinese citizens to consider the decade-long obsession enough of a blessing that there is a Chinese term for it: Chuan Jiangao, or “Make China Great.”

Wang Wen, writing for Renmin University’s Institute for Financial Studies, tells readers:5

Trump’s first term made at least three notable contributions to China’s rise.

First his presidency shattered the image of the US as a paragon of democracy for many Chinese…

…Second, Trump helped accelerate China’s push toward technological independence... By 2024, China had achieved significant strides in tech independence, including breakthroughs in semiconductor manufacturing. This shift was underscored by record-high chip exports in 2024, which surpassed $159 billion, doubling 2018 figures.

Third, Trump’s tariffs and trade restrictions pushed China to strengthen its ties with the non-Western world… China’s reliance on the US for trade fell from 17 to 11 percent.

Trump’s trade war with China has driven a rapid restructuring of global trade, leading more Chinese to recognise that the world is far larger than the United States.

Wen goes on to point out that Chinese industry leaders are reacting to tariffs not with fear and anger, but happiness at the opportunity to use this window of U.S. fecklessness to their advantage.

Worse, the notion of mutually assured destruction from a real war, which was long a centerpiece of the relationship between the U.S. and Chinese economies, has evaporated into the storm clouds of Chinese dominance. U.S. trade now accounts for only 11 percent of Chinese trade overall. Its economy would survive a war much more easily than the American economy would, assuming no nukes are involved.

And China’s military is nearing parity with the U.S., at least as measured by weapons system technology:6

Right-wingers are quick to point out that China has achieved its technical apex by copying U.S. technology.

Welcome to the real world, numbskulls.

China has eagerly exploited Trump’s laser focus on ruining the U.S.’s relationship with the rest of the world, particularly its allies. Trump’s rejection of science in favor of the black magic of grift is triggering an exodus of researchers to other countries, and an exodus of allies into the arms of each other.

I’ve written about this exodus before, and it’s only accelerated since then:

It’s a march of progress versus a retreat into the marshes

In 2023, China built more solar power capacity than the U.S. has in its history, according to a recent article in New Yorker magazine.7

China’s trade surplus is at $1.2 trillion, even though it is moving its exports away from U.S. ports and into other world ports. The U.S. trade deficit was $73.3 billion in June 2026. Trump’s trade war has barely knicked it. It was $77.6 billion in May.8 The difference between when he snatched the Oval Office and now is not much more than a rounding error.

The result of this small change isn’t more U.S. manufacturing. It’s simply less commerce. The other Atlas in the world capitalist fever dream, China, has simply shrugged and moved on to other countries.

There is strong evidence that at this point in the trade war, China considers the U.S. nothing more than a dangerous pest. Some of this has crept in through bipartisan efforts, but the real catalyst for the worst of it is the American obsession with all things Trump.

While we raise our fists in rage at the lunatic-in-chief, China builds.

It’s building the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, with its 1548 horsepower engine and acceleration from 0 to 62 mph in less than two seconds.9

That’s like being fired out of a cannon.

Here’s Motor Trend, in a headline starting with “Just Wow,” describing the vehicle:10

In the short time it’s been on the market, the SU7 Ultra has already become one of the world’s most talked-about performance cars. It holds the Nürburgring lap record for the quickest production four-door vehicle, and with 1,526 horsepower and 1,305 lb-ft of torque, it ranks among the most powerful production cars ever built.

China is doing things like building seven-hundred-ton die-casting machines to make cars like this. On the regular. Every day. Churning them out like American ag companies splattering American consumers with corn syrup and fat and forever chemicals.

It’s building pharmaceutical companies like Akeso, which recently rolled out an experimental cancer drug that studies show blows a similar drug made by American mega-pharm company Merck out of the water.11

While Trump is denigrating scientists and researchers, China is investing in hunting for them wherever it can.

Chinese government programs extricate people from the hinterlands — people like AInnovation chief technology officer Fan Li, who was a hidden prodigy lodging quietly in a Chinese coal mining town before government recruits found him. Fan Li now presides over a company that has helped transform Chinese industry from a maker of schlockware into one that makes precision instruments.

His company makes, among others, a machine with an AI-driven high-resolution camera that inspects screws that roll out of high-capacity production lines in numbers unheard of on American production lines.

A few weeks ago I purchased a small desk. I knew before it arrived that its country of origin would be China. What I didn’t expect was the precision by which the thing was made. No more of those misaligned screw/screw holes that used to plague Chinese products we had to fight with when putting them together.

The directions still barely make sense. But it no longer matters. This thing was so simple that a five-year-old could have put it together, and everything fit like it had been handmade.

And it was idiot proof. Not even I could attach a piece to the wrong part of the desk. The design, probably driven by AI, simply wouldn’t let me.

I thought of Han Li, and then realized there are millions of people like him in China doing the same kind of thing he’s doing while we’re sitting at our laptops and tablets yelling about Trump.

Even Chinese beer promises to someday be better than what we find in America. Han Li’s company offers its AI services to dozens of Chinese firms, including Tsingtao Brewery:12

On a screen, Li pulled up an intricate diagram of a factory for the Tsingtao Brewery, one of his customers. He typed in a prompt: “Have they achieved their energy-saving goal in the past year? If not, why?”

Moments later, Li’s AI machine reports on anomalies it has detected in four devices in the Tsingtao plant, along with suggested solutions:

“Look for wet malt or jams at the mill; investigate steam and pump behavior in the pasteurizer.”

China cranks out nine industrial robots for every one in the United States. You might cheer this, happy that another American worker is saved from the unemployment line, but that worker is probably going to be removed by bankruptcy when the American firm he works for is hammered by Chinese automation.

Whether we like it or not, robotic automation is coming, even if it means that they’ll all be Chinese:13

There was another sprawling display of robotics expertise at the Spring Festival Gala, the most watched television event of the year. Humanoids marched, backflipped, and twirled nunchucks; robotic pandas gambolled.

This freaks out people in China, too, not just us. After all, they aren’t much different than us when it comes to AI fears. Viewer complaints about the television show displaying robotic athletic prowess were rampant.

But while people in China are expressing some alarm online over their robotic future, China continues to develop and build. And they’re doing it like they’re in the race of the century, because, guess what? They are.

In this race, China is doing things like developing the Galbot G1, which looks like a friendly Terminator.

The Galbot, and its surprising dexterity, is used for everything from household chores to offering service options at convenience stores.

The company that makes it is led by robotics experts like He Wang, a Stanford PhD graduate who, like many Chinese Stanford grads, now lives in China. He is typical of the kind of immigrant the Trump regime has been chasing out of the U.S. since 2016.

That work, led by Stephen Miller, is now so thoroughly complete that many Chinese researchers are happily self-deporting because Trump has helped power the transformation of China into the world’s leading nation of science.

Elections have consequences.

Smart, educated immigrants from many nations are leaving the hostile environment of the United States, but none more eagerly and in numbers like those from the Chinese mainland.

This former Chinese diaspora, returning to a hero’s welcome in China, is helping to build next-generation solar equipment, batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots, cars, and dozens of other vital pieces of a modern economy.

Before 2016, in the days when they weren’t overtly hassled for being Asian, many Chinese Americans were happily ensconced within the American industrial machine. Since 2016, they’ve reverted to being Chinese Americans. The hostile environment in the U.S. became overt and, sometimes, dangerous. “Stop Asian hate” became a rallying cry against this development, but it never changed the facts on the ground very much.

This isn’t to suggest that American research is helpless without Chinese-born researchers. That would be dumb to say. American research prowess is, however, heavily influenced by immigration from all over the world, and many of them are leaving, too.14

I don’t think you’ll find many people who work at universities who don’t offer positive reports on the influence of foreign students and teachers, all of whom now face a hostile federal government.

But a few immigrants traveling back to their home country do not account for the growth of the Chinese juggernaut. It helps a bit, to be sure, but it isn’t what drives it. What drives the new Chinese economy is an industrial policy that directs resources into industries the government wants to succeed in, and possibly dominate.

The current U.S. government has an industrial policy, too. I call it the Trump Enrichment program. This is good for Trump and his cronies, but not so good for the rest of us.

Americans will have no say in their future

We can argue amongst ourselves all we want about whether robotics, AI, and CRISPR should be part of our future, but the argument is on the verge of being rendered moot by the long march of China.

Soon, Americans will have no say in the matter.

Notes

Correction: The image showing the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge must be wrong, because the bridge is a viaduct for a high-speed train railway, and the picture clearly depicts car lanes. I noticed this when porting this story over to Medium.

Per Wikipedia, this is the bridge:

Jaded opinion warriors will note that the same fears were made about Japan several decades ago, and look what happened! A nothing burger!

If you think the situation is the same, I have a bridge in Nanjing to sell you.

Biden hinted at introducing industrial policy, and his vice president was routed from office by troglodytes.

But that’s what it will take to turn things around. I see little talk of it from either Republicans or Democrats.

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Footnotes

When I saw that ICE was going to use some of its $39 billion in funding for the 2026 fiscal year to purchase gloves that electrocute people, I finally said, “Damn, give me some of that action.”1

Their endless recruiting drive has finally reached this old white dude through a pair of gloves. God, how I love America.

Also? This is NOT Satire. These are real things that ICE is loading up on.

Here’s how the gloves work

ICE stormtroopers do their usual thing where they sling their darkened SUV in front of an unsuspecting motorist at an intersection. They jump out of the SUV and approach the vehicle, body cams off, of course, if they have them, face coverings on.

They open the door, turn on an easily accessible switch on their glove, and boom! The glove turns into an electrocution device.

They then pull the driver out of their vehicle and electrocute them while doing so. And Ukrainian President Zelenskyy thinks he’s hot shit with his drones. He’s got nothing on ICE, let me tell ya.

The devices are called G.L.O.V.E by their clever manufacturer, Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky, which advertises itself as a manufacturer of “non-lethal” (unless you use them wrong) compliance tools.2

I am old, hear me roar

G.L.O.V.E. stands for “Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter.” How low is that output? According to the company, per AP:3

The gloves must be applied directly to someone’s skin to deliver a pain stimulus that typically helps an officer gain compliance within seconds, according to the company.

Did you say, “within seconds?” And “pain stimulus????!” Sign me up! I might even start drinking again so I can hang out in bars wearing the gloves and an old man’s “get off my lawn” attitude. Who says you can’t have fun during your twilight years?

Or maybe I can add a distinctive touch to the role of Walmart greeter. The possibilities are endless.

ICE even gives the gloves a funny, Orwellian name: “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.”

I personally prefer “Buzz Gloves,” ICE, but you do you.

The Buzz Gloves are just a tiny part of the ICE budget: $20 million, which tells me ICE has got all sorts of other fun stuff planned for the inner sadist in me.

I decided to check out the handy user manual for the gloves, and wow, was I pleased. Just the first page was a delight:4

I can imagine the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) spokesperson after the first fatality: “The illegal and criminal immigrant was resisting arrest and threatening our patriotic officers. Reports of the officer choking the criminal while attempting to restrain her are inaccurate. We regret that her nine-year-old child also expired when she tried to intervene, but this is a reminder that if you are an illegal alien, we will find you, and we will arrest you.”

What other goodies await me in the user manual? Well, after that promising start, I decided to dig in.

I skipped all the way to section 6.3 of the manual because it looked like the most fun:

Agitated Chaotic Event (ACE) previously known as Excited Delirium Syndrome (ExDS) and Suicidal Considerations

Agitated chaotic event is basically my middle name, so I rushed to that section like a MAGAt sniffing out bad crypto. That part was slightly disappointing, but as I scrolled down, I noticed this section just before it:

6.2 PHYSIOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

CD3s may increase the affects that can cause sudden death including physiological changes with:

• Increase in blood pressure

• Changes in blood chemistry

• Increase in respiration and heart rates

• Changes in heart rhythm

• Increase in Adrenaline

• The longer the CD3 exposure, the greater the potential risk

Can I just say here that a manual stating, “The longer the CD3 exposure, the greater the potential risk,” will be like catnip to my fellow sadists in my new job?

If this product doesn’t help recruitment among my fellow white male brethren living in fear of the extinction of the mighty white race, as well as all men, I don’t know what will.

Oh! Maybe this:

Buzz Vests!

The company that makes G.L.O.V.E. also makes a nice little vest to help transport those nasty, squirmy illegal aliens to far-off places they’ve never heard of.

Or maybe just by transport van to a domestic concentration camp. Either way, with that budget, we can be pretty sure they’ll all be wearing Buzz Vests.

Time for a test

I hope you’ve had your morning coffee or are otherwise alert, because I’m going to give you a little test.

It’s not as difficult as those crazy hard cognitive tests they give the caterer-in-chief every few days, but it’s pretty damn difficult.

The instructions: examine this E-vest marketing GIF below and let us know in the comments what you think the vest does.

Leave a comment

With ICE’s new, unlimited budget, they’ll be able to stockpile these things like the human gas giant in the Oval Office has stocked up on Epstein file references over the years.

The thing is, these new toys will barely put a dent in ICE’s new budget.

I did the maths, and the cost of the gloves to ICE is only .0005% of the budget.

Oh, my friends, there is so much more to come.

Aren’t those of you who didn’t vote for Kamala because you had yourself a litmus test she failed happy with yourselves now?

I have a great idea for those of you who didn’t vote for her. Offer your services to Compliant Technologies to be a test subject for all their new products.

Notes

The manual also includes this bit of info, which I’ll include verbatim to stimulate the comment section:

The G.L.O.V.E. SHALL NOT be deployed for any of the following:

• Verbal defiance or belligerence

• Punishment

• Torture

• Horse play

Avoid using the G.L.O.V.E. against certain portions of the population to include:

• The elderly

• Small children

• Pregnant women

• The severely handicapped

If they think I’m buying these things and not using them for horseplay, they’re crazy.

Leave a comment

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Footnotes

In case you missed this latest news from the Hormuz Insider Trading War, we learned yesterday that the U.S. Secret Service, acting on credible reports that Iran might try to shoot down Air Force One as it left the NATO summit in Turkiye a month ago, stuffed Trump and his entourage into a catering container and onto a C-32A, which is a military transport plane based on the Boeing 757 that is sometimes used to disappear U.S. immigrants to concentration camps outside the country.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s the sickly macabre part of this story: Air Force One took off from Turkiye as if the bloated one was still on it, thus serving as a decoy for the Iranians to shoot down.

This means that the Secret Service is now in full deviance mode, thus becoming yet another U.S. security agency that will need to be cleansed once this nightmare is over.

As usual, I have my ideas on what should have transpired, and am sad that it did not. My fantasy news report, as written by a New York Times reporter, on how the catering trip ends:

What I envision, and this might be one reason I would never be considered for a Secret Service job, is His Oafishness trussed like a turkey, an apple stuffed into his mouth, then dropped by a parachute into one of those hedonistic Monaco parties where petrostate sheiks get so obliterated on Monaco booze they won’t know they’re eating the president instead of fine, imported meats.

“Tastes like chicken,” one of the more alert members of the tribe exclaims in between pinching the butts of passing waitresses dressed in tiny skirts.

Sigh. As I said, there are reasons I’m not given important jobs.

Did I ever tell you the story about the time I drank so many vodka martinis at a Christmas party whilst chatting with the CTO of the big tech company I worked for that I was called into his office the following week? The key bit of information you need here is that I had never spoken to him before that party.

Yeah, well, so I arrive at work and see in my inbox that a meeting has been scheduled with him by one of his underlings. I arrive for the meeting; he invites me to have a seat, and he rubs his head, which was probably still smarting after the party, and asks, “Do you have any idea what this meeting is about?”

I told him I did not. We spent the next hour chit-chatting about whatever came to mind, occasionally trying to guess what one of us might have thought during our conversation was important enough for a meeting.

It was a beautiful moment between two lost souls, and a reminder that alcohol can be powerful stuff that should be treated maybe with a bit more respect than people tend to give it.

I don’t know why dropping Trump into a party full of Monaco sheikhs reminded me of one of my finer tech career highlights, but it did, and now you had to suffer with me for a few moments, and for this, I apologize.

Moving on.

It’s pretty craven to let Air Force One take off, full of, you know, actual humans, knowing that it might be smoked by an Iranian missile or three.

Squirrelling away a president to prevent him being shot out of the sky? Yeah, sure, that makes sense. But then keeping the Air Force One entourage in the dark about it, where the only warning is, during the flight, some Secret Service goon telling everyone to shut their airplane window shades, is pretty much Hannibal Lecter-level darkness.

The orange puffaroon reconnected with his brand new Qatari version of Air Force One shortly afterward, telling the reporters he had used as decoys:1

“I’m number one on their list, before you. But if I go, you go. Right? Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”

Remember now that most of his press entourage consists of allies from the right-wing media, because he kicked out a large number of mainstream media reporters from the White House press pool early in the regime. So these are mostly his people he’s exposing to the wonders of Iran’s latest missile technology improvements.

I’m beginning to think that one explanation for the regime’s behavior is that there is one hellacious amount of drinking going on at all hours of the day, and not just by Kegsbreath and Patel. I sense, perhaps, too, more than a wee bit of other drug substances are flying around the West Wing.

The claim is that Trump himself is a teetotaler, and I suppose that must be true since there are no reports otherwise, but you can’t tell me he’s not on something.

One look at his Truth Social posts will provide enough evidence of that.

Much of the stuff he writes is undecipherable. It’s like a toddler’s nine-year-old brother hits the keypad to relay the toddler’s latest pontifications on things like the National Guard:2

Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had “NO impact on Crime.” How crazy is that. Hall was met with furious dissent. The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. Foreign support includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything “TRUMP.” These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean “TRUMP.” This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization. Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it. Liars, at this level, must be held accountable! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I have no idea what’s going on there.

Yesterday, when he somehow learned that Iran is asking for war reparations, he demanded the same from Iran, acting as though he was blindsided by their demand.

This is odd, because it’s right there in the so-called Memorandum of Understanding, which he signed on June 17. The memorandum proclaimed a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction. The memorandum was developed by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two real estate developers hoping to cash in on war and death.

For some reason, these two clowns are hopping around the Middle East acting as U.S. envoys that the rest of the world is forced to politely react to, even though everyone would be happier seeing both of them floating face down in the heavily mined Strait of Hormuz.

Kushner, especially, has his fantasies about Gaza, another place he and Witkoff have stuck their noses into.

Trump’s reparation demands were spelled out on his Truth Social app, presumably with an assist from Natalie (for the history-related stuff):3

I see that Representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran are asking for compensation for the damage done to them during the last five month Military Conflict (started because, THEY WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON), even though it was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings! But it is an interesting idea because now I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous, as led initially by General Soleimani, including the families of those killed on the USS Cole, and thousands of others killed in combat. Additionally, compensation should be paid to the families of the hundreds of thousands of innocent protestors that Iran has killed over the last 50 years, not to mention the 52,000 that have been killed in the last five months. I have instructed my representatives to put this firmly into any, and all, future negotiations. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

I have a mental picture of First Clown Natalie and Trump sitting together collaborating on that post, but since this is a family-oriented Substack that never goes deeply into R-rated material, much less X, I will not divulge what my imagination has conjured.

As funny as all this would be if it were part of a slapstick comedy, the seriousness of it all couldn’t be more real.

Trump’s idiotic war has depleted American missile reserves down to almost nothing. He has essentially handed the Strait of Hormuz to Iran. There is no way to get it back.

Technically, the strait is now being co-managed by Iran and Oman. Before the Hormuz Insider Trading War, the strait was an open sea lane.

I call it the Hormuz Insider Trading War because every few days, there’s a new agreement, the markets react, then there isn’t, and the market reacts again. Somebody is getting really rich.

All I know is that it isn’t me.

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Footnotes

You may have heard that Cassidy is the Louisiana Republican Senator who cast the deciding vote to formally turn what was once known as the Department of Justice (DOJ) into part of a criminal mob operation by voting to confirm Todd Blanche, the Grifter-in-Chief’s personal attorney, as U.S. Attorney General.

This officially makes the DOJ a state-run law firm in service to the most corrupt criminal presidential regime in American history. That the regime happens to be a racist cesspool doesn’t help matters.

And you thought Pam Bondi was atrocious?

Buckle up, my friends.

Cassidy is the same guy who once claimed he was against RFK Jr. as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) until he wasn’t. He issued a few performative objections during Brainworm’s confirmation hearings, then dutifully voted for his confirmation anyway. Just like he and every other Republican Senator does all of Trump’s nominees.

Occasionally, one or two of them will pretend to get the willies over one of the Cabinet choices, but only if they know the nomination isn’t in danger. It is an insulting game they play, but the mainstream media falls for it every time, so many voters do, too.

Here’s Cassidy trying to justify his latest kneepad purchase:

“The choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche.”

I have no idea what that means.

Now that the deed is done, let’s take a brief tour of the personal history of Todd Blanche, the crime family’s personal attorney, and now the head of whatever we call the DOJ these days. I call it a state-run law firm, and I’ll die on that hill until the orange puffaroon melts into the mantle of the Earth and his toxic sludge burns its way into hell where it belongs.

Let’s do history differently this time, and begin with the most recent awfulness, since we live in a “what have you done for me lately” kind of world.

Todd Blanche: Interim Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General

Blanche’s most recent history is his most important, even more so than all the times he represented Trump in court and managed to slip the snake through various legal holes.

The disintegration of lawfare

Let’s begin our tour with this simple January directive issued through Blanche’s office to 93 US attorneys during a weekly video conference. The meeting was chaired by a young 33-year-old MAGA maniac named Aakash Singh, who, while frothing like a rabies-infected jackal, told them that Trump is their chief client and anyone who didn’t want to click their heels and raise their hands forward should leave the DOJ.2

This may or may not have something to do with a rather incredible number. Before I reveal the number, let’s be clear that it took barely one year to achieve: Since Blanche became Deputy Attorney General in March 2025, 16,000 DOJ employees have left the department.3

The DOJ has lost one quarter of its attorneys during this exodus. The good news? Many of them are now on our side, fighting the hooligans who remain.

200 of them were fired by Blanche because they previously had worked on efforts to prosecute Trump.4 Blanche reportedly bragged about the firings to various cultists and insurrectionists in the regime.

In fairness, some who have remained are not hooligans, but dedicated public servants hoping against hope they can continue to fight non-Trump crime under the radar.

Some have remained simply because they have work they feel must be completed before they leave, such as a recent case in L.A. where a whole lot of people were busted for child sex trafficking in the Figueroa neighborhood, which had become almost as notorious for child trafficking as the Epstein-Mar-a-Lago crime ring of Palm Beach.5

But you can be sure many more will leave now that Blanche has been confirmed as Trump’s official federal attorney-at-large. Fights against the kind of crime Figueroa (not to mention Palm Beach) experienced will become increasingly rare as the DOJ is converted more fully into Trump’s personal, state-run law firm.

The good news, again, is that many exiting attorneys will join the ranks of the resistance and clobber the people who’ve remained when they meet in court.

I’d like you to ponder, for a moment, the type of person who might remain in the wake of this farce. They’ll either be desperately idealistic career prosecutors hoping they can quietly continue doing their jobs as Blanche continues to transform the DOJ, or they’re insurrectionists unaware of the damage they’re doing to their resumes, which makes them not too smart and thus easy targets for smart lawyers in cases the newly formed personal law firm brings forward.

We’ve already seen this in action. Trump’s state-run law firm is losing case after case in court. The only wins he’s been getting have been through the Supreme Court, which has become as corrupt as he is, but even the corrupt justices seem to have a few limits.

Time after time, the state-run law firm presents a case to a grand jury, and either gets laughed out of court or withdraws its case before the hysterics have a chance to begin.

A classic example of this is the current attempt to prosecute former FBI director James Comey over a seashell display on a beach. That case is about to end in the same result as the recent attempted prosecution of an Olympian, who they tried to charge with ruining the reflection pool, which Trump ruined.

Substack is replete with more examples (Fox News, not so much).

The reason for the consistent failures is that good prosecuting attorneys realize that cases are built on facts, not made-up stories and grim fairy tales. They’d rather leave the DOJ than try to tell tall stories invented by Blanche’s AI machines. Meanwhile, those who remain in the state-run law firm are discovering that American jurisprudence has a long history of legal discovery and application. The regime’s desire to wipe it all out is proving more difficult than they thought.

A Listicle of 20 terrible things Blanche has done as Deputy or Acting AG

Next, let’s do some random bullet points highlighting examples of Blanche’s work on behalf of the insurrectionists occupying the White House and the Republican side of the U.S. Senate. Much of this info comes by way of the very helpful folks at the Justice Connection, a group of disaffected DOJ attorneys with their knives out, chomping at the bit to meet the disintegrated DOJ in court for some retribution.6

I am not a fan of listicles, but I thought the format worked for this, so I made a top 20 list. There’s a lot more for intrepid readers to dig into if they want to.

• In May 2026, Blanche tried to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay insurrectionists, whom he called victims of “lawfare.” The slush fund would have (and still might) even paid those who assaulted police officers during the January 6 insurrection. He did this through a bizarre agreement with the IRS to end the tax agency’s investigation into the Trump crime family’s tax dodges.7

• He ordered the deletion of DOJ press releases regarding the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021.8

• In August 2025, video footage revealed a senior advisor to then Deputy Attorney General Blanche, Jared Wise, urging rioters to “kill” officers during the insurrection.9

• Under Blanche, the DOJ ended its prosecution of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders who were involved in the January 6 insurrection by moving to vacate existing seditious conspiracy convictions.

• Blanche forced the resignation of the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, for refusing to fire prosecutors in the Western District who said that a Trump obsession over classified Biden documents was a nothing burger.

• Like every other MAGAt on Planet Earth, Blanche has called for the investigation of George Soros, a money bag guy who favors the left. Specifically, Blanche called for the investigation of Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It’s probably only a matter of time now before a headline creeps out of the DOJ, but Soros is older than Trump, and probably could care less what Blanche tries to do.

• Blanche has repeatedly tried to make an example of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a newsy legal U.S. immigrant, but has been roundly defeated in the courts for his attempts to do so. Garcia was once sent to an El Salvador prison camp, but was freed after normal people blasted the publicity whistle loud enough for courts to hear public outrage. His case is still pending, though, and you can be sure that Blanche will remain transfixed. In April 2025, he put U.S. attorney Erez Reuveni on leave for conceding in court that Garcia should never have been prosecuted.10

• In June 2026, Blanche hired insurrectionist attorney Kurt Olsen as a senior US Attorney. In his new role with the state-run law firm, Olsen helped seize voting machines and related documents in places like Georgia and Arizona and promoted a theory, disproven in courts, that former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro hacked Dominion voting machines to favor Biden in the 2024 election.

• Blanche led the effort to use the DOJ to attack the beloved Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by suing them for allegedly defrauding donors through a paid informant program. In Blanche’s words, the SPLC was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.” It’s another AI-generated lawsuit by the state-run law firm that has no legs and is likely to disappear soon. Still, it’s a window into Blanche’s thinking, which is that all opposition can and should be targeted by the DOJ, especially given the fact that the state-run law firm has unlimited AI tokens.11

• As mentioned, he led the effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey over a seashell display, saying with a straight face, “While this case is unique, and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate.”12

• His misdirection, suffocation of evidence, and terrible treatment of Epstein survivors is legendary. Follow American hero Katie Phang for more on this. If Blanche comes to an ignominious end soon, we’ll have her to thank. Seriously. One person. Her.

  Katie Phang

  Law and Disorder

• In July 2025, Blanche interviewed the horror show known as Ghislaine Maxwell, who was moved to a minimum security prison shortly after. Blanche has repeatedly said that Trump was not deeply involved with Epstein, even though he appears in the public-facing Epstein query machine housed on DOJ servers thousands of times, and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has said he appears more than a million times in unredacted files.13

  Christopher Armitage, one of our more reliable, “Can we do something about all this, please, besides just complain?” people, has some thoughts on Blanche’s Maxwell visit:

The Existentialist Republic

Bombshell Uncovered: Evidence Shows Blanche Likely Committed Witness Bribery, Evidence Tampering, and Conspiracy in New Mexico. Those Crimes Carry at Least Seven and a Half Years in State Prison.

The President’s personal attorney now serves as the 88th US Attorney General of the United States of America…

Read more

a month ago · 353 likes · 29 comments · Christopher Armitage

• Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, stated in May 2026 that Blanche has had full responsibility over the Epstein Files “from the beginning.”14 A perusal of his record indicates that is not her throwing him under the bus. He’s really the gum in the works. If he doesn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars after all this is over, our next Attorney General will be as much of a failure as Merrick Garland was.

• In April 2025, Blanche disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit, mostly so he could grift in the balmy seas of cryptocurrency with $150,000 worth of crypto himself without snoopy federal attorneys poking around.15

• Accusing the American Bar Association (ABA) of being an activist organization, in April 2025, Blanche barred DOJ employees from participating in ABA events, just one day before the DOJ eliminated $3.2 million in federal grants to the ABA to help train lawyers fighting domestic and sexual abuse.16 The ABA said at the time the defunding was illegal and a result of the ABA’s criticism of the Trump regime.

• In January 2026, Blanche said that there was “no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” into the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis.17 He also tried to taint her reputation by pushing an assault investigation against her after her murder.18

• In January 2026, he threatened to prosecute Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey over acts of terrorism, saying on Apartheid Twitter, “I’m focused on stopping YOU from your terrorism by whatever means necessary. This is not a threat. It’s a promise.”19

• In November 2025, he urged Federalist Society lawyers to join a war against judges who block efforts to send immigrants to concentration camps.20

You remember who the Federalist Society is, right? Here’s a refresher:

• Strong evidence suggests that he lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings as Deputy Attorney General when he told Senators he had no direct knowledge of the Eric Adams (former New York City mayor) corruption case. However, memos revealed that he and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove were in communication over the case, which Bove recommended be dismissed, and that Blanche agreed with Bove’s assessment.21

Todd Blanche: The early years

One skill we must admit that Trump has managed to hold onto even as his mind continues to be hollowed out by madness, rage, and dementia is his unique ability to find the sleaziest lawyers on the planet.

Todd Blanche is such a slinky rat that he makes the grifter-in-chief’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, look like he spends all day soaping up at the Bar Association’s special bathhouse for reformed lawyers.

Back during the Trump 1.0 years, in a direct sign that there is a god or universe with a sense of dark humor, he represented a guy named Boris Epshteyn as part of his defense efforts for another Russian mole, Paul Manafort.

Manafort should be doing time right now, but he was pardoned by the crime family boss after his conviction for mortgage fraud. New York State tried to convict him again anyway, but the New York Supreme Court said, no, that’s double jeopardy, which, sadly in this case, is correct.

But the fact that he represented a dude named Epshteyn tracks with his life as a criminal attorney who aids criminals and who has spent much of his time lately trying to bury the Epstein files.

Manafort, Epstein, and Rudy Giuliani pal Igor Fruman were implicated in a Trump–Ukraine scandal that everyone has forgotten about. Blanche represented Manafort and Epshteyn while working for law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft.22

Before tainting himself with Trump, he was considered an accomplished lawyer and prosecutor. His drift to the dark side appears to have begun when he took on the Manafort and Epshteyn case. He eventually succumbed completely when he bought a beach home in Palm Beach near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago massage palace in 2024.23

You might think, “Well, that’s a smoking gun. He was up to his ears in Epstein.” But that’s not really how crime family lawyers operate. They rarely get their own fingers dirty in the filthy laundry. But for some reason, they seem to get a charge out of protecting those who do.

So, like the good mob lawyer that he is, Blanche went to work and signed up to defend Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He lost that case, but still managed to keep his client out of prison in a series of dark legal maneuvers that we’re all still licking our wounds from.

Blanche went on to represent Trump in three out of Trump’s four criminal cases.

But first, he had to do something most of you will never consider: Fix the awkwardness of being a registered Democrat. So he switched parties.

You might think, oh, a turncoat in more than one way. But, nah, he was probably a registered Democrat because it’s just easier to move around in New York political circles that way. Nothing to see here, methinks.

He eagerly ran up to Trump, got on his knees, and the rest is history.

He was his personal lawyer on three criminal cases, any of which would have buried any other politician.

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump

Trump was convicted on 34 counts related to the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme. As he often does, Blanche relied more on court maneuvers to delay the trial than he did on evidence to support his client’s innocence. The prosecution summoned 20 witnesses to plead its case. Blanche summoned two.

He repeatedly tried to delay or dismiss the case. He motioned for the judge to recuse himself. He even tried to get the trial moved from state jurisdiction into a federal courthouse because he knew Trump could just pardon himself if he won the presidency after losing the case.

This is how mob boss lawyers operate. They work their way around the darker tunnels of the law, looking for avenues of escape. Blanche has become a master of that dark art.

Even after Trump’s conviction, Blanche’s relentlessness and ability to pile up endless delays led to Trump being given an unconditional discharge after he was inaugurated instead of doing time in a New York state prison. When people said Trump was running for office again to avoid prison, they weren’t using hyperbole.

Trump being Trump, he has since gone on to use the office of the President to formally run his criminal operation from the Oval Office, and he now has his own personal state-run legal firm to accomplish his ends.

Not even Jack Smith could rescue us

Blanche also was Trump’s defense attorney in two cases brought by independent prosecutor Jack Smith on behalf of the Justice Department before it became Trump’s personal law firm.

In one of those cases, based in Florida, United States v. Donald J. Trump, Blanche stumbled into some luck when the random docket process gave him a Trump-friendly judge, Aileen Cannon, who basically killed the case. That case involved Trump’s alleged pilfering of classified documents. Our only bit of satisfaction out of that case was a few memes.

The other case, also called United States v. Donald J. Trump, was a voter suppression case. Smith indicted Trump on four felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.

Blanche managed to create one delay after another, to the point that by the time it came time to begin the trial, Trump was stumbling into the Oval Office with an awful grin, forcing Jack Smith to abandon the case thanks to the Supreme Court ruling on full presidential immunity.

Hoping for a new verdict

Why Blanche went from a lucrative career to gamble on a guy like Trump, whose reputation for not paying attorney fees was legion, is a mystery we won’t learn about until Attorney General Jack Smith prosecutes him in 2031, Supreme Court Chief Justice Barack Hussein Obama presiding, if there’s truly a god.

Notes

If a Republican argues that you wouldn’t be happy with any other choice for Attorney General that Trump might make instead of Blanche, it’s fair to concede the point and look for ice cream.

One thing you can tell Republicans is that having a state-run personal law firm is much closer to the kind of communism everyone is familiar with than anything Democratic Socialists, who are simply trying to claw back lost social welfare and civil rights, will ever dream up.

Thanks for reading!

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Footnotes (I love footnotes, don’t you?)