Not Sorry

Posted on July 17, 2026 by camelotkidd

I’m not sorry that Lindsey Graham is no longer with us. Not one little bit. More than just a politician and Washington insider, he was the Senate’s most pro-war advocate. Caitlin Johnstone well sums up his blood-soaked legacy. “Ever since the death of Graham’s dear friend John McCain, nobody on Capitol Hill has been able to match his gleeful enthusiasm for the shredding of human bodies using high-priced war machinery. Wherever there was any debate about dropping bombs, launching missiles, toppling foreign governments, arming proxy forces, or imposing starvation sanctions, you could always count on Lindsey Graham to be the first and loudest voice arguing in favor of more death and destruction.”

While we celebrate the death of the neoconservative senator from South Carolina it’s imperative to examine the imperial American foreign policies Graham personified. The unprovoked attack on Iran is a good place to start, with the kinetic phase followed by the MOU and now back to bombing. This kind of flailing around to no strategic point is typical behavior of US foreign policy, and in particular the Trump Administration. Indeed, the clueless strategic planning and decision-making and aggressive, out-of-control gangster behavior is something that Graham pushed for right up to the end of his life.

Since 9/11 America has been on the dark side, with imperial forms of violence unleashed while adherence to international law, reputation and morality were heaved over the transom. Graham’s fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. He bragged about talking Trump into attacking Iran and advocated for direct US military interventionism in Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had just returned from a trip to Kyiv promoting the US proxy war against Russia.

Graham was a tireless advocate for the military/industrial/complex and Zionist Israel, but ultimately he was part of a larger deep state that will continue humming along without him. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration’s flagrant disregard for international law and rampant corruption signal a rapidly decaying empire, lashing out as the world moves on. Actions, as they say, have consequences and as a result of the US egregious behavior other nations are increasingly treating us as a pariah, an entity that’s fundamentally untrustworthy and “not agreement capable”. If you were a leader, diplomat or official of another country would you believe anything Trump says?

Then there’s the international loss of credibility and morality. America has never been close to perfect but there was a sense that we should represent a higher purpose, rather than simply grubby mercantilism and savage imperialism. Since the war in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, unconditional American support for Israel has eroded America’s most precious resource: its moral/authority. It’s clear that Washington has renounced its own claim to uphold a “rules-based order”. Writing for the Cato Institute, Patrick Porter argued that Israel’s war on Gaza “has finally ended the myth of an American-led ‘liberal order.” The support for genocide was bipartisan, where Biden was terrible but if anything, the Trump administration has been worse, pairing a blank check to Israel with a war on Iran that critics across the political spectrum call a disaster.

Ultimately, the United States’ unconditional support for Israel’s Gaza and West Bank genocide and its ill-fated, expanding war in Iran have destabilized the Middle East, and more importantly, have severely eroded Washington’s credibility on the world stage. The attack on Iran, which was initiated in a large part by bloodthirsty neocons like Lindsey Graham is the stupidest war of my entire lifetime, even worse than the invasion of Iraq, which, unsurprisingly, was also promoted by Graham. The attack on Iran is a war of choice which the US has lost, won’t admit it has lost and is in danger of creating a decade long world-wide depression.

Burn in hell Lindsey.

“…I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead”

Update: Marjorie Taylor Greene just delivered the most honest eulogy Lindsey Graham’s legacy deserved:

“Lindsey Graham was a neo-con warmonger. A murderer. He wanted to wipe out innocent people in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon. He was a dedicated Zionist. He was the greatest lobbyist the military industrial complex ever had – with over 400 defense contractors in his state alone.”

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It’s a big club and you ain’t in it

Posted on July 14, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our feral elite may be oblivious but through their actions they are teaching us valuable lessons. From their unconcern during the Covid 19 pandemic, to their connections to Jefferey Epstein, to their commitment for Israel’s Gaza genocide, to their enthusiastic push for AI surveillance, to their hostility to progressive candidates, they are showcasing their vast sociopathy.

The Platner campaign and defenestration are a useful window in which to understand our feral elite and their priorities. Rebecca Traister on MSNOW says Platner was always disliked by establishment Maine and national Democrats, largely because he brought people real hope for change. The Democratic Party and elite operatives were eager to jettison Platner and his ability to electrify voters eager for a new politics and a new national direction.

Lately it’s become apparent that we can have phony “hope and change” or “make America great again” but anything that disrupts our flight into kleptocracy must be violently repressed. Donald Trump is the poster-child for our dystopia but, as I’ve repeatedly stated, he’s simply one of the more grotesque symptoms of our decades long neoliberal looting expedition.

At Naked Capitalism, Curro Jimenez writes–Winning Became the Shared Ethos of the US Oligarchy, and reexamines Joan Didion’s splendid political discourse.“People inside the process, constituting as they do, a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is,” wrote Joan Didion in her seminal essay Insider Baseball for The New York Review of Books in 1988.

By “people out there,” Didion meant the average American. The political discourse is built for them to hear, not to reflect reality. Its purpose is to manage them and convince them that “the process” is working. The only difference between Trump and other U.S. politicians is that he has changed the tune, but not the genre.

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.“

Didion describes our feral elite as an exclusive club composed of politicians, campaign strategists, corporate donors, and elite journalists. They pretend to oppose each other on TV, print, or social media, but they live in the same upscale neighborhoods, vacation together at Aspen or Deer Valley, and share the exact same class interests.

The “process” as Dideon describes it, has become more sophisticated and thanks to Citizens United, way more expensive, where campaign donations are solicited from billionaires by the two political parties, candidates and PAC’s then funneled through elite consultants for television ads, where much of the money gets returned to the billionaire owners of the corporate media. Like I said, it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

One of Platner’s best received lines was “I’m not afraid to name an enemy. And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.” His campaign with its focus on this power arrangement coupled with the possibility of change threatened this cozy arrangement and that’s why he was ratfucked.

This is post-neoliberal politics, where the big club has destroyed the New Deal reforms that somewhat economically leveled and democratized our country. Now it’s faux politics, where they pretend to do things for us but in reality just do things for their benefactors–the corporations and banks owned by billionaires.

They are making clear that this process is off limits to democracy, and that trying to work within the system is a fools errand. The massive reforms that are required cannot be accomplished with the system we have. The institutions have been abused for too long and are now broken. Our elite are the enemy and have demonstrated that there are no limits to what they will do to prevent the kind of change for which Platner represented.

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Enemy of the State

Posted on July 10, 2026 by camelotkidd

It’s starting to sink in that according to Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), I’m an enemy of the state.

When on September 25, 2025, President Donald Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” he essentially added to an ever-growing list of what he calls the “enemy within.”

What caught my eye is that NSPS-7 targets individuals by their identities, including: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, on race and on gender, hostility towards traditional American values on family, on religion and on morality.

That’s me. I’m the poster child of all those anti’s.

Because it’s the Trump Administration there are more caveats than you can shake a stick at. I’m not anti-American but anti-imperialist. And anti-capitalism, don’t make me laugh. Whatever we practice as an economic operating system is a lot of things but “capitalist”, as in the way it’s described in economics textbooks, is not one of them. Anyway, I am anti-neoliberalism, whose defining characteristic has always been the subordination of democratic politics to market rationality and the insulation of capital from popular demands. With Christianity, I’m with Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount kind rather than the prosperity gospel, Fundamental Zionism sacrilege the president is referring to.

The rest of it runs rough-shod over the 1st Amendment, but that’s point of the Trump Administration, where they are pushing the boundaries towards fascism on so many fronts as a means to overwhelm resistance. And even with their ham-fisted, corruption, much of what the Trump Administration is doing is likely to succeed due to the bi-partisan support from Democrats. The corporate media’s attempt to sound neutral in the face of flagrant lies brings disgrace to a tribe of ghost writers for oligarchy and perpetual war.

American imperialism drives much of the behavior, especially the way in which the US is joined at the hip with the genocidal state of Israel. Presently the US congress is poised to cement this arrangement, with bills to join US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies together. Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) proposes to join the US and IDF together, laying the groundwork for extensive cooperation into “seemingly every manner of U.S.-Israeli military-industrial complex cooperation,” according to the Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The other bill, section 622 of the National Intelligence Act, would merge the two countries intelligence agencies.

I’m anti-American for pointing this out.

Fortunately, the American empire is on its last legs, certainly because of the connection to Israel. Unfortunately, all of the imperial violence has been returning to the homeland. As America’s power is increasingly threatened abroad, the home front will suffer as the Trump Administration collaborates with the Silicon Valley surveillance and population control oligarchs in the name of battling the threat from within.

Fascism always uses fear, intimidation and violence to crush resistance. It divides societies into competing factions–patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It dissolves solidarity and promotes selfishness. Those who protest are branded domestic terrorists. Rights are abolished in the name of national security.

America, the one in which I grew up in, no longer exists. It’s been looted and destroyed by neoliberalism and non-stop militarization. Congress, the Supreme Court and investigative press that once offered up protection no longer function. As Trump’s NSPS-7 makes clear, those who protest are, smeared as communist traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.”

I rage against this, but am starting to realize the social isolation will soon be physical isolation. I fear that those of us who are protesting all of this will be criminalized or driven into exile.

The rat-fucking campaign against Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has finally got their man. As I commented at Naked Capitalism–“The whole thing smells fishy. You don’t run for the Senate as a socialist if you raped someone knowing the powers that be are going to throw everything at you. I don’t think he thinks he raped someone. I think he had sex with this woman and she’s been paid to say he raped her.”

I think Platner should give the Democratic Party the finger and continue his campaign as an independent. Get in his pickup and go to town to town doing town halls. What does he have to lose? He’s going to be known forever as a rapist even though no charges were ever filed and all of it was based on a she-said campaign of innuendo. The Republicans will clink champaign glasses and with all of their cash will run no-stop ads bashing him but as Trump demonstrated in 2016, Platner will get tons of free publicity from the scummy corporate media thanks to the whole controversy. Meanwhile, I think the powers that be are misreading the anger out there in flyover country at the poisonous status quo. I’d send Platner a check in a second and I bet a bunch of other pissed off Americans would too. Then Platners own TV ads write themselves–Fuck the Supreme Court and the Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited oligarchy and massive corruption. Fuck Susan Collins and her out of state billionaire funders. And, most of all, fuck the slimy Democratic Party with its toxic identity politics.

Sounds like a winning formula to me.

All of this got me to thinking about our late president John F. Kennedy’s speech before he was assassinated. ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Update: Matt Stoller takes no prisoners—“Let’s be clear, the goal of pushing Platner aside is to destroy the agenda on which he was elected, which is about taming oligarchy and reorienting us from endless war.”

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Walk the Talk

Posted on June 30, 2026 by camelotkidd

Socialism is not just about slogans and posturing. Socialists have to govern well and in fact they have to govern much better than conservatives due to the imposed ideological stigma.

And when I say “socialism”, I’m not talking about seizing the means of production, simply a return to New Deal reforms that somewhat leveled the playing field between capital and labor. But even these sort of policies would be greeted with shrieks of Communism, Communism, Communism, thanks to decades of pro-capitalist propaganda.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the wake of the recent primary elections that brought an influx of Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) candidates. Their dilemma is that they will have to learn how to govern in a socialist way while operating in a hostile neoliberal environment. Then there’s that wee problem that the left has been out of power for so long that the muscles of competent governance have atrophied alarmingly.

Democrats and Republicans, since Reagan, have largely refused to compete on doing things for ordinary Americans, especially when it comes to economic policies. Politics has consisted of cultural war bullshit, with the Red Team pushing guns, God and abortion while Team Blue obsesses over identity politics. Policies center on subsidizing banks and corporations, with the idea that money should be given to rich people and programs which help ordinary Americans are simply impossible.

Presently the US maintains a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labor, and technological infrastructures are privatized and redirected toward the enrichment of billionaires. Even though the United States possesses more wealth than any society in human history, and can afford universal healthcare, modern rail systems, affordable housing, renewable energy, rebuilt cities, and first-class public education, it simply chooses not to.

That’s an opportunity for socialists. Neoliberalism’s insistence that we can’t have nice things is bad politics, because a government that makes people’s lives worse is less popular than a government that makes people’s lives better. Since the US is a duopoly and you only get to vote for two options, neither of which intend to help, the only solution is to change the nature of one of the parties. Hence the efforts by socialists to take over the Democratic Party.

What seems obvious in the wake of the two Trump election victories is that the fascist-right can only be stopped in the long term by radically transforming our economic system, with changes that give all working people a shot at a stable, middle-class life. If progressives hope to build the durable majoritarian coalitions needed to make that happen, they will have to deliver concrete material benefits to working people’s lives, so ordinary Americans will once again feel that their lives are equal or better than their parents’ were. 

But to do any of this the newly elected socialists are going to have to relearn how to actually govern. Serendipitously, Matt Stoller has an amazing article on his site Big, talking about the nuts and bolts of governance. Matt says that not only have leftists lost the historical knowledge of how to govern but that conservatives have actively sabotaged competent government as a key component of their takeover. Conservatives, after all, have run on government-bad since forever, then when in power they make it so.

“From 1995-2007, the GOP held the U.S. House of Representatives, and continued to strip out internal capacity. President Bill Clinton and Gingrich cooperated on the “Reinventing Government” initiative, to privatize many executive branch functions. Large numbers of regulatory agencies willingly gave up authority, knowledge, and staff.

And the culture changed, as the Democratic Party and liberal elites became dependent on the Clinton White House. The West Wing created a template for the Democratic insider, which was someone who pretended to be nerdy and detail-oriented, but was in fact just a political operative with an Ivy League degree. Pretty soon, the only way anyone could think about governing was through the lens of deference to fake experts, whether economist, pollster, or corporate lawyer...Anyone who knew anything about governance, and wanted to act using public power, was perceived to be some sort of dirty hippie loser.”

Newly elected Democratic Socialist or leftist officials will face a daunting task of navigating a hostile political, economic and media landscape, where the Democrats are as much the enemy as the Republicans.

Update: Democratic Socialist, Seattle councilwoman, Kshama Sawant, explains what they will be up against. “Also, one of the tactics that the Democratic Party uses when you’re in elected office, and I experience this every single day, is it’s like being in a Mean Girls episode. They ostracize you socially. They try to make you feel like you’re isolated, that you are not welcome, all of that. And it is so crucial, because without this we cannot win, it is absolutely fundamentally crucial that the leadership of the working-class movement be completely clear. This is not about you. You are not there to make friends. You are not there to have a comfortable workday. No. The whole point is that if you are fighting for the working class in the halls of the power of capitalism, which is what a city council or US Congress is. They don’t exist to give working-class people better lives. These are institutions of the capitalist state. They exist to defend capitalist interests and so when you go there, you are not going there among colleagues. You are going there and the people who sit next to you are your class enemies. You are there to fight for the working class. And so, you have to be unbowed and unbroken in the face of all of this. And these are not exaggerations. This is exactly what it looks like. And it takes what I did, what we did, in order to win against the Democratic and Republican parties.”

She continues–“…the Democratic Party goes to absolute war against you if you dare to fight for the working class. And that is the whole point. If you are fighting for the working class, you will become enemy number one of the Democratic Party. So, it is up to you if you want to be a leader of the working class, then you have to embrace that enemy number one status as something that is necessary. And in fact, as I said, as a badge of honor.”

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Psycho

Posted on June 23, 2026 by camelotkidd

More clearly than Americans, Iranian leaders saw Trump’s mental condition and therefore utilized psychologists and psychiatrists in their negotiations of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) ending the Gulf conflict.

Drop Site News reported that–“In an effort to navigate President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior during the indirect negotiations aimed at ending the war, Iran’s negotiating team enlisted the help of psychiatric professionals to develop an assessment of the U.S. president’s mental condition and to assist Iranian negotiators in crafting messages passed to Trump by regional mediators.”

An Iranian official told Drop Site.“We added two senior psychologists to the negotiations’ advisory circle so that we can shape messages intended for President Trump from the perspective of managing what we regard as psychopathic behavior pattern.” He said the psychologists began assisting Iranian negotiators following the initial round of bilateral talks in Islamabad in April as the two sides began exchanging proposed terms for a potential MoU.

Here’s what the Iranians had to say about the use of psychologists. “Trump’s reactions have improved noticeably since we began incorporating the recommendations of these advisers into our messages and written communications,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Yet, Trump’s unhinged behavior continues. When Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, following Israeli attacks on Lebanon, disrupted the negotiations, Trump launched into another one of his tantrums. He reportedly told “Fox News” correspondent Trey Yingst he had informed Iranian negotiators if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, “You won’t even make it back to your fucking country. We’ll take over the rest of your country … I’ll blow the shit out of them” . Trump is behaving more erratically by the day, his threats are irrational and frankly cray-cray.

If we were a serious country questions about Trump’s mental condition would dominate political discourse.

What’s funny is that Trump has flipped the “madman theory” of executive power on its head. Instead of overthrowing the hated Iranian regime through his perceived insanity he’s turned out to be the first anti-imperialist president of the 21st Century. I’ve said for a while that Trump’s secret power is his candor, which is becoming more pronounced as his mental condition progresses. Trump has said maybe a dozen or a couple of dozen blurt-outs that were more truthful than anything any president has said about politics, economics and especially foreign policies for a long time. 

What’s not funny is while the Iranians have figured out that they need a team of mental health experts, I wonder where our team is. Trump’s is committing terrible crimes and deprivations in our name while we all go shopping, continuing on like none of this will ever affect us. And, Trump is not the only psycho out there. Our whole country is crazy. We would require a world-class team of mental health experts to grapple with the psychological compartmentalization and avoidance of all of the darkness of our kleptocratic empire. Maybe it’s a defensive measure to avoid descending into madness if we paid too much attention to all the war, imperialist extraction, exploitation, injustice and abuse that America is built upon, but it’s destroying our country.

It would be ironic if Trump, the psycho, helps us look in the mirror, and perhaps start a process to come to terms with it all.

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Dirty War

Posted on June 19, 2026 by camelotkidd

Having effectively lost the broader geopolitical war against Iran and realizing that conventional military force cannot crush the Axis of Resistance, the United States and Israel are transitioning from direct confrontation to a dirty war. The core of this strategy relies on weaponizing ISIS and al Qaeda from Syria to attack Hezbollah and plunge Lebanon and the wider region into a bloody Sunni-Shia proxy war.

Donald Trump’s recent declaration at the G7 summit reveals much about the diabolical scheme by Washington and Tel Aviv to ignite a devastating sectarian war across the Middle East. Trump stated–“I’d like to see a more surgical attack on Hezbollah. I think it should be more surgical. And we can help them with that, or we can recommend Syria. Syria’s doing a very good job of cleaning up their act. They have a very good leader. They have a leader that’s really done a good job in a short period of time. And he would love to help.”

And it’s not like the US hasn’t done this sort of thing before. The US weaponized Sunni terrorists during Operation Cyclone, where the CIA brought together jihadist‘s in Afghanistan to give the Soviets their “own Vietnam.” Hello Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Why do you think the US waged a 12 year dirty war in Syria, starting with Obama’s Operation Timber Sycamore, that employed a-Qaeda and ISIS to overthrow the Syrian Government led by Bashar Assad? Cynically, US officials waged their dirty war “of terror” while they pretended to battle the ISIS head-choppers. And of course the compliant corporate media went along with the ruse, although bits and pieces of the story were available to anyone who cared to find out.

By blurting out“if Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else… Syria will do the job,” Trump delivered a glaring, inadvertent confession of monumental strategic failure. It’s a direct admission that Israel’s army, the region’s most advanced conventional military machine, has completely failed to achieve its strategic objectives in Lebanon. But Trump’s statement also makes clear the logic of the dirty war against Assad. By publicly urging a newly reshaped Syrian leadership under Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly know as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, to cross borders and eliminate the resistance, Trump is calling in his chits and reminding al-Jolani of his role as Washington’s local terror-subcontractor.

Why did the US drop the Caesar Sanctions against Syria soon after Assad’s fall, except to prep Syria for its new role? Well…, there was that issue of the sanctions getting in the way of Trump’s son-in-law–Jared Kushner’s–Albanian island resort caper.

Terror is the American way of war. We don’t win wars but we end up turning the hostile country or region into a charnel house. Trump’s latest gambit is a calculated attempt to exploit regional wounds and drag neighboring states into a localized, grinding conflict. The true objective of the US/Israel alliance is no longer a military victory, which has proven impossible on the battlefield. Instead, the plan is to manufacture an endless cycle of civil strife, turning neighbors against one another to weaken the resistance from within.

We do know that if Israel is forced into of a ceasefire in Lebanon, Plan-B may be to attack Hezbollah by the Syrian proxy. Whether we are witnessing preparations for a direct Al Qaeda-ISIS military invasion or the agenda is to blockade Lebanon from the north and east, remains to be seen in the coming days.

Trump is already being attacked for the memorandum of understanding with Iran from across the US political spectrum. Neocons hate it, Zionist billionaires hate it, and pro-war Democrats are already attacking him over it. So the dirty war could be the prize offered to get a treaty?

The official war on terror was always a sick joke. From the Phoenix Program to the Salvador Option, the US has utilized terrorists to carry out its foreign polices of protecting capital and markets while securing resources, so it will be no surprise for the Trump Administration to go back to the well.

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Apophenia

Posted on June 16, 2026 by camelotkidd

My strength has always been pattern recognition but I often wonder if my ability has bled into Apophenia. Thankfully, even though I’m merely just an amateur in the difficult art of extracting truth/reality from a firehose of propaganda, so far events have largely confirmed my reasoning.

Apophenia is how humans tend to perceive connections, messages or patterns in meaningless data or unrelated events. It’s our brains evolutionary shortcut, a pattern recognition ability run wild. It becomes an issue when someone suffering from Apophenia shows tendencies toward wild conspiracy theories.

I’m sure that you, dear. reader, are familiar with this demographic.

The problem for most Americans is that there’s too much noise to signal. How is the average person supposed to filter out all of the bullshit between the 24/7 corporate media falsehoods and the social media sludge? And now there’s AI’s growing role in information abstraction and summarization, where it’s being used to determine what facts and theories are deemed to be valid. After being immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. Most individuals find it extremely difficult to admit that their understanding of our country and its history might be very different from the actual reality.

What’s ironic is that our world has grown so complicated, and frankly crazy, that a bit of Apophenia can be comforting. Indeed, Apophenic explanations can be very attractive. Witness how conservative Americans are drawn to Fox News with its ongoing parade of nefarious villains, such as George Soros, plotting to feminize their youth and herd them into UN reeducation camps with “black helicopters”. On the flip-side, liberals are convinced that Trump is a modern-day Hitler bent on cancelling elections and creating a fascist dystopia, with ICE acting as his MAGA “brown-shirts”. Although, to be fair, the second scenario appears much more plausible.

Political analyst, Aurelien, elaborates—“…Apophenia is the tendency to see patterns in data that aren’t really there. This doesn’t seem to be an illness as such (though schizophrenics tend to demonstrate it to a high degree) but rather an exaggeration to pathological extremes of the natural need to identify patterns in the world that help us survive. For many people, it’s more comforting to have any pattern to events, even a threatening one, than no pattern at all, as a classic Defence Mechanism against a world that is too complex to deal with. And of course the need to find the pattern (or avoid chaos) comes first: the actual “proof” is secondary, which is why apophenics very rarely give up in the face of negative or non-existent evidence. The proof is being hidden. If the files on alien contacts aren’t there, it’s obviously because they have been destroyed.“

I think that Aurelien is on to something. Apophenia is comforting to Americans in a country adrift, buffeted by nihilism, precarity and hopelessness, where it’s better to believe in a hero or monster rather than a flawed humans simply making it up shit as they go along.

It’s become apparent that much of what Americans take for conventional wisdom is utter bullshit. Luckily over the last couple decades the growing power of the Internet and select social media networks began offering entirely different channels of information. Heterodox intellect, Ron Unz has produced an American Pravda series that challenges many of the falsehoods promulgated by official sources. I highly recommend it.

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I’m Graham Platner too

Posted on June 9, 2026 by camelotkidd

Watching liberal Democrats attack Graham Platner is infuriating but not surprising. The donkey party has abandoned working class Americans for the professional/managerial/class (PMC’s) and to cover up their betrayal they have embraced an identity politics (id-pol) version of liberalism. So whenever an authentic economic populist comes along the attacks on him are almost always primarily about violations of “woke”.

Platner was a Marine, and when in the Corp, he got tattoos. There’s the skull and crossbones tattoo: Nazi symbology which he got when he was serving in Croatia. Like Platner, I served in the military. I was an Army paratrooper who joined the military for the adventure. Like Platner, I was young and “stupid”. It’s a thing in the military. They desire that demographic. How else are you going to indoctrinate civilians to go off and kill and die for some abstract ideal?

Anyway, liberal Democrats attacked him on the tattoos but it didn’t gain traction. It didn’t work for the same reason attacks on Trump didn’t work–because Americans are pissed and have been voting for anyone they thought would challenge the poisonous status quo. Platner appears very anti-establishment. He’s a left-wing economic populist. These are the policies he’s running on:

Take Back American Power: End Big Oil Price Gouging, Build Now

End Billionaire Welfare: A Tax Policy for the Rest of Us

Defend Democracy and the Constitution

Healthcare Policy: Replacing and Rebuilding A Broken System

You can see how these policies might upset the billionaires who fund both US political parties. So out came the sexual allegations. During his marriage he sent texts to former girlfriends. That caused marital issues, as one might imagine, but he and his wife, Amy Gertner, appear to have worked it out. Moreover The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Gertner told Platner’s campaign about the sexually explicit texts last year, near the start of his Senate bid. Her disclosure came during a conversation with campaign officials about potential opposition research into Planner, the two outlets reported, with the Times citing a former senior official in Platner’s campaign and the Journal citing people familiar with the matter.

If the sexual allegations don’t work, I’m sure they will find something else in which to attack him because Platner is a threat to the apparatchik’s that run the Democratic Party. They’ve perfected a system where they pretend to be liberal by deploying identity politics, while supporting the same oligarchic and imperial policies as the Republicans. The billionaires that fund the Democratic Party may have terrible policies against unions, workers health and safety, and workers rights in general, but now they can be given a pass by liberals by simply being an “ally” to the various identity groups. Those politicians and their billionaire owners can support exploitation of poor people, they can send billions of tax dollars to wars for profit, but if they fly a rainbow flag and use the proper pronouns it’s all good.

With identity politics political energy flows into defining, debating, and policing identity categories rather than material outcomes. Thanks to munificent corporate support, the liberal/progressive Democrats of yesterday who focused on concrete material policies have been transformed into a movement being singularly concerned about racial and ethnic issues, cultural issues, sexual and gender issues.

But identity politics divides people. It tries to change the working class from seeing themselves as a member of the working class with the concomitant class-based concerns about wages, health care, housing costs, etc., which had unified their class in the past through unions and political activism, into seeing themselves as belonging to separate and atomized tribal group identities based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender. Divide and conquer is the idea behind billionaire support for identity politics. They are literally paying woke ideologues to promote separatism between different racial, sexual, and ethnic identities, and even hatred towards people of a different race or sexuality.

What’s ironic is that as liberals pile onto Platner for his Nazi tattoos, they are literally cheering on and supporting actual Nazi’s in Ukraine. And when it comes to concrete material benefits, historically the socialist/New Deal ideal, that’s now something that only the working-class, who’ve been defined as “white supremacists”, desire. Whomever challenges the new identity based corporate/political agendas and decrees, like Platner, they are now treated as a de facto part of the worst identity group of all: white supremacist authoritarian extremists.

I am Graham Platner too. After the military I became an anti-imperialist/socialist, but have come to realize that Orwell’s 1984 didn’t go far enough in describing the lengths that the ruling uni-party would go to. With the new id-pol consensus, war is needed because other, “authoritarian” “regimes”, like Russia, China and Iran are not allies to the sanctified identities. If we don’t “color revolution” them then they will target gays and women. No identity will be safe. Anyone who is anti-war is by definition not an ally, they are part of the red/brown coalition that all like minded liberals should oppose. Instead you should support your local pro-war politician and billionaire ally.

Platner is a fly in the ointment. The “woke” attack takedowns, perfected and used for a couple generations now, are beginning to fail. Americans are looking at the actual issues and thinking that they care more about the fact that they can’t afford rent, food, gas and healthcare than some more cultural war bullshit.

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Rich people must not be allowed to lose money

Posted on June 5, 2026 by camelotkidd

Our political/economy is based on the concept that rich people must not be allowed to lose money.

Obama foamed the runway with American homeowners so that banks and the rich people who owned them didn’t’ have to take losses in the wake of the Wall Street Crash.

Wealthy, connected but uninsured insiders were made whole by the FCIC in the wake of the run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). We’re not supposed to call it a “bailout” but I’m pretty sure that if the bank had served regular people it would have been a different story. The bank was known for serving the founders of tech firms, as well as venture capitalists, premium wineries, and private equity firms.

Rich people.

And we are witnessing it now with the AI bubble, where suddenly there is legislation to nationalize the hyper-scalers because, of course, “national security”. The story is that the government will acquire “shares” in the AI companies, but don’t let that fool you because with rich people not being allowed to lose money, the costs get socialized by we the people, while the profits get privatized by the rich-fucks that control our country.

Senior U.S. officials have held preliminary discussions with AI companies about the potential for the federal government to acquire some shares in their firms. AI proponents like Sam Altman have been quietly pushing the idea since last year as the costs of AI mounted. And now Altman is telling us that gaining a stake in AI is a way to “more broadly distribute the economic benefits of AI to the public.”

Yeah, and I have a nice used bridge you might be interested in.

There will be another bailout. AI is economically nonviable, but, AI has “national security” applications, and China, etc. There’s also that teensy-wheensy issue of rich people having lots of money at risk with AI. Have I mentioned that rich people might lose money?

That the rich people can never lose money explains the system of kleptocracy that has grown up around us. I’ve used the term often enough that I should probably unpack it. Kleptocracy, literally means “rule by thieves,” and is a form of government where leaders use their political power to steal their nation’s wealth and exploit state resources for personal enrichment. It’s the monumental corruption that’s resulted from the financialization, and concomitant offshoring of US manufacturing. It’s the utilization of “offshore” finance and tax avoidance regimes to disguise the looting, and the necessity of finding politicians willing to support such an endeavor.

Sound familiar?

Anyway, rich people not losing money will last until rich people start losing their heads.

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FAFO

Posted on June 2, 2026 by camelotkidd

The Trump Administration has misgoverned with a blizzard of pronouncements, policies and actions.

There was Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”, random economic sanctions, the DOGE massacre, election rat-fuckery, the ICE attacks and murders, the West Wing Ballroom and command bunker, putting his name on the Kennedy Center, creating his own crypto-coin, suing the IRS for his new “anti-weaponization” slush fund, the new “anti-terrorist” laws, failure to release the Epstein Files where his name features prominently, providing intel for Ukrainian/NATO attacks on Russia, attempting to assassinate Putin, bombing Yemen repeatedly, attacking Venezuela and seizing president Madura and his wife, droning the so-called “drug boats” and murdering hundreds of fisherman, attempting to colonize Greenland, green-lighting Israel’s genocide of Gaza, sneak-attacking Iran with Israel and assassinating Iranian leaders, sanctioning China, again, unlimited support for the data center build-out despite widespread protest, turning over Cold War era plutonium to Sam Altman and Open AI, (what could go wrong?) suckering MAGA supporters with a gold-plated cell phone “designed with American values in mind”, and building a UFC cage on the White House lawn to celebrate our nations 250th birthday, because nothing says America-Fuck-Yeah like cage fighting.

I’m sure I missed lots of outrages, but what the fuck?

To put all of this in grim perspective, Trump is now presiding over the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of our republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies, like unstinting support for Israeli aggression and genocide, have fulsome bipartisan support from pro-war, Zionist Democrats. He has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like support for advanced scientific research, environmental controls and foreign policies that provided food, clean water and public health services abroad as a way in which to engage in constructive international relationships.

Unfortunately, all of this make it up on the fly cray-cray has caught up with the president, who spends most nights shit-posting. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way Trump has gone about driving the empire onto the rocks in the Middle-East.

Now, with Iran maintaining the closure of the Straight of Hormuz, Trump is desperate for a way out of the mess he made. The facts are stark. Trump effectively holds less than zero leverage with Iran. And Iran holds insurmountable escalation dominance. Former MI6 analyst, Alastair Crooke says that “Trump is in zugzwang. (Any move he makes, potentially only worsens his position, whether strategically or domestically). We saw this same zig-zagging, back of an envelope, non-strategy perfectly illustrated in the iconic imaging from Trump’s Beijing visit – Trump ‘winged it’; no prior preparation; a ‘seat of the pants’ summit.

That image may perhaps come to define this era – today’s iconic moment was of a U.S. President wearing the air of defeat whilst a confident President Xi’s comportment demonstrated who was in control.”

Trump grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth, confident that whenever he got in trouble he could simply declare bankruptcy and walk away. But he now finds himself in an entirely new situation with the war in Iran. He doesn’t have the advantage, no matter what he posted at midnight. And he can’t declare bankruptcy for the seventh time and go on his merry way, because his whole reputation is on the line now. The only path forward is the one that will permanently destroy his legacy. There’s no way he can claim victory and if he tries to slink away the neocon-hawks and AIPAC will eat him alive.

Trump had to fuck around, and now he found out.

Update: Intelligence reports suggest that Iran stands ready to test a nuclear bomb if the US and Israel persist in attacks.

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