“It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public.” — Hunter S. Thompson
The sky here in suburban Detroit last week was an ugly sooty gray-brown that blanketed everything outside, and the boiling outside reeked of strange woodsmoke from hundreds of miles away where huge swaths of Ontario are burning in towering flames.
Blade Runner-Apocalypse Now vibes. Dystopian shit. This is the fourth year the smoke has blotted out the sun for stretches in Michigan and elsewhere.
Thankfully, the smoke and heat have retreated for now, but they’ll be back. We’re stuck with it all forever. These weird, mean days have my brain ping-ponging between despair and rage, so today’s essay will be a discursive adventure in whatever evil shit comes to mind.
My car’s exterior temperature gauge said it was 109 degrees at one point the other day. In Michigan. It was even too hot to keep the public pools open. The world is on fire in so many ways, many literally, and the fire department isn’t coming because its budget was slashed, and all fires matter anyway. Besides, extinguishing flames is woke. Or whatever these brain-damaged shithead Nazi ghouls say.
The visibly decaying president went on TV the other night and fatly told insane lies about the 2020 election that embarrassed even Fox News. Amid this latest airing of stale petty false grievances, he also paid a woman $5 million because he raped her and the Supreme Court said he actually had to pay.
Not to resign the presidency, just to pay the woman he raped decades ago. He also may have to pay her another $83 million, which he’ll certainly dupe his sheep-like disciples and eager supplicants into paying for him.
Can you imagine a country so perverse and degraded and morally reprehensible, repulsive, revolting, and repugnant that it shrugs its collective shoulders at its top elected leader being a convicted rapist (atop being a racist fascist bigot)? Rape isn’t disqualifying to become a MAGA president.
Is that the twisted modern version of the American Dream now, to be able to loot and rape without real consequences?
Lettuce now poisons you with crippling explosive diarrhea, and the Trump government is handling it about as well as you’d expect from this motley gang of bumbling shitheads. Honeybaked ex-junkie anti-vaxxer RFK Jr., always the logical Trumpian choice as United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday the outbreak is “under control” which echoes Trump saying that about COVID-19 in early 2020. Then a million-plus people died.
The government has stopped checking to see if anything is toxic or otherwise dangerous because doing so is bad for business. Only profits matter. The business of America is business, President Coolidge said, and then set America up for the Great Depression as he left office. How very Republican, eh?
Federal agents and their oafish Paul Blartian auxiliaries are back to shooting and murdering innocent people in the street as they conduct ethnic cleansing campaigns.
ICE/DHS has a bigger budget than that of the U.S. Marine Corps. Why do you think that is?
We have rolling brownouts and water shortages because of aging infrastructure and the massive data centers that need all of our energy and resources because nothing must ever threaten shareholder value or ruling class profits. And besides, the massive anti-democratic secret police surveillance state/garrison mindset cannot operate effectively without these enormous toxic data centers that harvest every detail about our lives to use against us, to control us. Or execute us in the street if we do not respect their authority in servile obedience.
Welcome to our ubiquitous Digital Panopticon. Your $4,000 Samsung “smart” refrigerator with a mandatory data subscription soon will inform the Department of Fatherland Security that you bought woke food items that are free of patriotic microplastics. You are guilty of being un-American. Report immediately to your local MAGA Re-Education Camp Brought to You By Capital One and the good people at Pulte Homes (Gulag Archipelago Division) so you can be force-fed Big Macs and 72 ounces of ice-cold Coca-Cola.
Huxley and Orwell would tell us to fuck off today.
Enshitification is very real. Technology used to liberate humanity from dangerous, inefficient work. Now it makes everything more annoying and more expensive, and spies on us to not only sell our data but to help a paranoid reactionary government track its citizens. Greed, paranoia, and authoritarianism are ancient bedfellows now with access to all the technology and cash they required to control humanity.
We live in a subscription casino and the house always wins, at least until the house is burned down. Are we willing to start over? It doesn’t seem like it, and plenty of people are willing to crack you over the skull for a government paycheck. Some will do it for free.
After watching FIFA further debase itself – hard to imagine it was possible, but they did it – on behalf of Trump for the 2026 World Cup, one has to wonder how long before some rich sporty boot-lickers propose a Trump Bowl for college football? Did you see him, in all his senile vanity, trying to glom onto Spain’s World Cup photo after the match? Remember when Trump tried to fix a match?
There’s no escape from 2026’s bullshit. Even Sunset Boulevard exploded. Tom Brady faked slapped one the Paul brothers as maybe a WWE bit? In a few weeks, my hometown Cleveland Browns and their washed-up sexpest quarterback will again force their agonizing brand of football on us while the billionaire team owner loots from the public. And every game will be dripping with advertisements urging all of us to gamble every last penny we have.
Trump is offering subscriptions for insider trading access on Truth Social because there are no laws, ethics, morals that have any meaning or power under his regime. It’s all law of the jungle, might makes right, greed is good.
“It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.” — Hunter S. Thompson
Speaking loudly with a big stick is a stupid and intellectually bankrupt ideology that only dumb bad people adhere to, and that’s probably why we’ve lost a recreational war to Iran. The president claimed dozens of time the U.S. has beaten Iran, wiped out its military, yet more Americans are being killed by Iranian missiles. Weird! And the U.S. government cannot be bothered to explain why these troops died, for what cause. Six months of war with less justification and more government lies than our nine tragic years in Vietnam.
The Trump regime has covered up for two weeks that about 100 U.S. troops have been wounded, and at least two killed, in the Mideast over the past two weeks.
Remember the Houthi rebels? They fought the U.S. to a draw in 2025 and now have declared a maritime embargo of Saudi Arabia, meaning the Red Sea route for oil tankers. Maybe Trump and Hegseth will get us to $6 for a gallon of the cheapest gas before Labor Day. More bombs and death are coming.
So as a treat, the military is going to be forced to take testosterone injections to please the wife-beating halfwit Klan wino running the Pentagon. The Nazis used to give their troops meth for the same reasons. They lost, too.
Not content with the ongoing deadly humiliation in the Mideast, the U.S. government is planning to invade destitute Cuba for no other reason than to bring back a grossly Trumpian version of the Batista regime’s American-backed gangster capitalism. As lazy and dishonest pretext, an absurd and childish new 100-page State Department report attempts to link Cuban communist influence, without evidence, to most of Trump’s domestic enemies, and the whole thing reads like a half-assed document the Third Reich might have issued about communists and anyone they wanted to link to communism and terrorism.
These feeble morons are still bitter about the humiliation at the Bay of Pigs after 65 years. Pathetic.
The Cuban people want a better life, and their government’s failures have been compounded by the grotesque and cruel U.S. embargo. Perhaps Cuba cannot successfully resist a full American imperial invasion, but they absolutely will send American paratroopers home in body bags, and the U.S. government will tell the grieving parents their noble sacrifice is appreciated on behalf of Exxon Mobil, Chiquita, Dole Foods, JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealth Group, Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, Tyson, Apollo Global, General Dynamics, Amazon, Meta, Marriott International, Carnival, Blackstone, etc.
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner, wrote those words in 1935. Wall Street felt him out about becoming a fascist dictator with a proposed 500,000-man army to topple President Franklin Roosevelt in the so-called Business Plot. Nothing changes. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, they say. They’re right. But now the Business Plot’s moral descendants run the government.
Trump is a buffoon but absolutely will try to find his own Reichstag Fire so he can rig the election in cartoonishly evil ways. They’re not being particularly sly about it because they think they can get away with it and that no one cares anyway. I think people do care. All of this can lead to unfortunate ends: Do not be surprised to wake up one morning to Trump declaring a national emergency that requires elections to be suspended and only Republicans to remain in power as the round-ups of disloyal suspects begin. But equally, do not be surprised to wake up to some buzzcut Marine general on TV telling the nation an infantry battalion has surrounded the White House and arrested the executive branch to end one coup for another.
Junta time! Today, Foggy Bottom. Tomorrow, the Falklands!
Let us hope, pray, or do whatever we need to do to ensure it doesn’t come to any of that. But I am not exactly optimistic these motherfuckers will surrender power without a fight. These are the descendants of the people that hanged John Brown and named schools for Robert E. Lee. These are the architects and foot soldiers of January 6th.
MAGA has become the official state religion, Christian in name but functionally a reactionary white nationalist personality cult built around a man closer to the antichrist than Christ. It dresses itself as evangelical Christianity but revels in cruelty, bigotry, and greed. It’s religious extremism blended with profit-minded 4chan trolling. Their twisted form of Christianity works only if everyone else follows their rules, too. All of it exists to seize power and use it to shape the country and world to its bleak vision.
It’s unclear how many Americans are genuine fanatics willing to kill and to die for Trump. There are only so many men willing to die for any lost cause. Plenty of banal nobodies will kill for it, but their ranks dwindle when it’s clear it’s all over but for the reckoning. After most of his forces his surrendered or melted away, Hitler’s Berlin bunker was defended by a battalion of French SS volunteers that knew they’d be executed back home, so chose to die in battle for a terrible cause at the hands of the Red Army. I don’t see many of today’s semi-literate obese red-hat tough guys taking a 5.56mm round to the skull for Dear Leader. I hope we never find out.
A new lawsuit says Meta is using AI to fire people with medical conditions, to save the company money. And it turns out, AI ends up costing more than the human workers and also remains error-ridden, so some fired workers are getting hired back by sheepish companies that fucked up with layoffs. When the AI bubble explodes, it’ll be 1929 all over again but probably with merch and memes and more rich old white men to tell everyone to suck it up. It’s also why tech companies in that space are beginning to shape the narrative for their inevitable plea for taxpayer bailouts (beyond current tax breaks) to keep the entire economy from overnight Weimar Republic collapse.
Speaking of medical conditions, is Mitch McConnell dead or alive, or something in between? No one knows! Well, some people know and are maybe hiding the truth. Even Republicans aren’t totally buying the proof-of-life photo. The most foundational contract between an elected official and voters is honest confirmation that the politician is fucking alive or not. Especially a U.S. senator.
Anyone those opposes AI, fascism, inequality, is a domestic terrorist. Anything even perceived as Leftist or liberal is now terrorism, and the feds want billions to crush dissent, and they’re using the rhetoric of the Third Reich and applying it to their foes. I used to just be an “enemy of the people” as a newspaper reporter but I guess I also am a domestic terrorist, too. Leveled up.
Humanitarian aid is now aiding terrorism. Arrests, intimidation, jail, then destroying food, water, medical supplies. America fully supports and finances the Israeli genocide in Gaza and elsewhere. Helping Muslims anywhere is terrorism, unless they’re rich and donate to Trump. Bigotry, racism, greed, and the smallest of minds belonging to the smallest of men. Opposing them makes you a Cuban Marxist terrorist, and probably trans and LGBTQ+ any other boogeymen they can gin up, too.
Since they have no ideas or policies or accomplishments, outside of ethnic cleansing and tax cuts and failed wars, Republicans have fallen back on the greatest hits like anti-communism. Trump is still trying to get his favorite voter suppression bill passed, but now McCarthyism is back, baby, like a political herpes flare-up. I am something close to a Democratic Socialist but not a communist, but do you think it matters to them? Do you think they could define a communist or socialist even with Marx and Lenin whispering in both ears?
Mike Johnson wants $350 billion in fresh spending in part to help fight communism at home. Who do you think that money will be used to target?
I do tend to dress like Che Guevara when I cut the lawn – M81 woodland camo pants and green surplus military t-shirt out there but no beret or cigar for the complete Guerrillero Heroico look – but I am not a Marxist, nor a capitalist. I guess am a third, undefinable thing that also scares cranky old white people that watch Fox News and that angers cranky tankies that want to execute the tsar and his family again. Maybe I’m just a half-bright bitchy Camus absurdist, patiently waiting his turn on the hill after Sisyphus gets done with the boulder.
If I have a Democratic Socialists of America membership card in my wallet, will I eventually be taken to a camp? Will I be dragged before HUAC to be asked if I am a communist? Marco Rubio, whose State Department staff had to manufacture out of whole cloth that communism report mentioned above as part of his personal crusade against Cuba, has been hinting at it. And by the way, his family didn’t flee Castro’s Cuba. They fled the murderously capitalist Batista regime, and Rubio has been caught lying about it. LMFAO. Look at Rubio’s ears some time – they’re wildly big. Once you see them, you cannot unsee them. Sorry.
They ban books and then burn them. And history shows us that those who ban and burn books eventually ban and burn people.
Sam Neill died. Thanks for everything, Dr. Grant. The actor Randolph Mantooth died, too. He was half of “Emergency!” that was my first favorite TV show as a little kid in the later 1970s. Squad 51, RIP.
The Heritage Foundation has moved past trying to prevent any trans person from participating in sports. Now, they want women’s sports eliminated entirely to preserve femininity and, based on their rhetoric, maintaining a quality herd of broodmares for the Alpha Males (which in Latin is incelus dipshittius).
Sculptor Sergio Furnari is whining that no one wants to buy his $100,000 terrible statue of the famous dead racist community college dropout podcaster. Apparently it’s head for Times Square, where it will be defaced by tourists, pigeons, and alcoholic hustlers dressed as Homeless Elmo. A perfect coda for a dismal career grifting actual college kids.
I take a galaxy of pills prescribed by my platoon of doctors every day to try to keep me from exploding in a ball of incandescent rage and Arby’s cheese sauce. All of it makes me bitchy, but not as much as anti-democratic fascists taking over the world so they can fashion it into a cruel Confederate Gilead for stupid paranoid white people that question nothing and believe anything they’re told as long as they can keep betting on shit via gambling apps and looking down on others. The American caste system is, frankly, embarrassing atop being obscene in a country built on equality myths.
These people are still pissed about the Enlightenment, the 13th and 19th amendments, Appomattox and Reconstruction, Vatican II, and the Civil and Voting rights acts – none of which they understand apart from what the slick man was shouting about on the cable TV news show last night.
Eventually, the high priests of capitalism are going to sell tiered subscriptions for clean air and clean water. Sunshine is already in the pipeline for sale. And they’re bragging about making data a metered utility like water or electricity for everyone. If health care – our literal lives – is rationed by profit-chasing insurance companies, why wouldn’t they sell clean air and water in a world increasingly on fire and poisonous? Why are teeth and eyes separate insurance policies? Profits, baby.
One of my favorite memes I see going around lately amounts to “The fire department is socialism. The insurance company denying your damage claim is capitalism.”
The cheerleaders of the so-called free market are the same people manipulating markets for personal gain, creating artificial scarcity, using inside information to profit while fucking over others. Crony capitalism is a deadly cancer on the human race.
We’re ruled by an oligarchy of weird Nazi-bent perverts whose insatiable lust for young flesh and for unrestrained power is topped only by their limitless need to pillage and plunder the Earth and human civilization for anything they think is of value that others will see and admire and crave for themselves.
The insecurity, paranoia, greed, cruelty, and vanity of the rich will kill all of us and destroy the Earth. And the answer is not “move to the Right so we can win more elections” that so many center-right pundits are insisting upon. The Overton Window inexorably moves Right in American politics, so these intellectual chuds publishing long thinkpieces in The Atlantic – the inflight magazine of neoliberalism – are doing the grunt work for conservatives.
Not to be even more of a bummer, but does this list below seem like a truly “great” country?
That sucks. Worse, we did it to ourselves while indulging in masturbatory self-mythologizing.
A better world is possible, despite the lies they tell us.
So what’s good in my world?
There’s a new Arthur Rimbaud movie that eventually will make its way to my (and Patti Smith’s) various screens.
The Tate brothers were arrested in Miami for more horrific sex crime charges, and Andrew Tate was wearing what’s best described (by me) as “cunty little black capris” as he was handcuffed. Trump, his sons, and his various greasy underlings have been said to admire the Tates and leaned on Romania to help them escape justice, but Trump must deem them no longer of any value to him.
The World Cup seems to have been mostly positive despite FIFA’s comic book villain corruption and naked greed. And Argentina losing meant its weird Ayn Randian president Javier Milei doesn’t get to celebrate. Good. Fuck that tiny goblin freak.
The bipartisan federal law that has started to reign in private equity from buying up all homes in America appears to have started paying modest dividends. Private equity kills everything it touches to enrich already rich assholes. It even killed our last major national toy store chain, so even effort to beat back these vampires is a net positive.
A new Blade Runner series later this year? I am in.
Russia is paying a stiffer and stiffer price for its attempt to conquer Ukraine, which is hitting oil facilities, logistics routes, and more importantly, the factories that produce key components for Moscow’s own drones and missiles.
I saw “The Odyssey” on Thursday in an Imax theater (ironically, in Troy, Mich.) with my cinematography student son. I do not have anything to contribute to The Culture War Discourse with all the people that never read the book nor have any knowledge of ancient Greek mythology. My personal deity Dionysus isn’t in the book or film and I am kicking myself for forgetting to wear my “Xanadu” t-shit to the showing!
The character Maron, directly linked to Dionysus, in the book gives Odysseus the sweet wine he later uses to get the cyclops drunk and sleepy. That wasn’t in the film, unfortunately. My brief non-spoiler review: Do not listen to any of the MAGA shitheads about this intense sprawling epic, but do go piss before the movie begins because it’s just shy of three hours! And definitely see it in IMAX.
There’s a new Jimmy Buffett album in the works, reportedly with unreleased songs recorded before the trop-rock icon’s September 2023 death from cancer. As many of you know, Buffett is a favorite of mine and I was fortunate to have interviewed him.
Alex Jones, a very red and very dishonest heavyset middle-aged man obsessed with the sexuality of frogs, has been publicly humiliated on a global scale.
People are destroying Flock cameras.
Johnny Depp as Ebenezer Scrooge this November? Cautiously intrigued, but prepared for a lame dud. Capt. Hunter S. Scroogehands?
Jimothy is entertaining people. Or maybe he’s a CIA psy-op. Either way, he now has a Wiki page.
The hot weather has cooled and the wood smoke cleared for now. It’s no longer immediately toxic to sit on the back porch in the gloaming as 20 milligrams of THC courses through blood to work its sublime magic on my exhausted central nervous system and various aged aching parts.
I got to spend a week at my beloved Chateau Marmont last month and to watch Robby Krieger of The Doors play at the Whisky A Go Go (prior to the water main exploding under Sunset Boulevard a few blocks away). I am forever grateful to be able to do such things.
The actuarial tables tell us Trump is on borrowed time. Never loose sight of that fact. For me, it’s Daisy’s green dock light across Manhasset Bay in East Egg.
When she’s not being the source of the worst anxiety of my life, the diminutive Marti Cat Shea continues to make me quite happy amid the burning madness of this terrible year/decade/epoch.
–30–
Unpaid Bills 
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