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The End of Credibility
“Don’t do it, Danny. Don’t sell out. I told you not to do it, man. You could’ve been a contender, a goddamn hero—one of the good ones. But no, you didn’t listen. You had to chase the golden ticket, the greasy handshakes, the champagne luncheons with the bastards in suits. Now look at you: another…
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The Great Firesale
Raw, Pure and Uncut Edition I think one of the most salient points of Donald Trump is that with him you’re entitled to your own reality, even if it doesn’t have a shred to do with the real world. It’s a carnival of subjective truths, a free-for-all where every lie is valid as long as…
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Motorik
The machine starts slow, a hum. No, a growl. Wheels spinning on the autobahn—rubber burning under tungsten lights. Motorik. They called it motorik. Not a rhythm. Not a beat. A state of being. Steady as a morphine drip, endless as the static on a dead radio channel. This is where it started: Germany, post-war, the…
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The Retro Maelstrom
Bowie’s Final Act in a World of Vintage Chaos David Bowie’s career was built on reinvention, on taking the cream of contemporary styles and spinning them through his black box of creativity to emerge as something that felt entirely new. In the 1970s, this process was electrifying: glam rock filtered through sci-fi androgyny, Philadelphia soul…
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Echoes
The machine never sleeps. It grinds and grinds, fueled by desperate dreams and the endless churn of small-time predators, each sniffing for a hit of the almighty dollar. They’re happy to let me buy in—oh yes, always happy to let me throw my stack into the pot. It’s the illusion of reciprocity, the great snake-oil…
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Campaing for Greta Thunberg
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Empire Overreach
One of the most intractable problems of the American empire has been that it was hard to see the overreach because, as everyone knows, empires simply don’t overreach. Not ever. Not in the long, groaning history of human civilization has any empire—be it Roman, British, Mongol, or otherwise—stretched itself too thin, spent beyond its means,…
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American invasions of Mexico to go after bandits always go well
Well, here we are again, ladies and gentlemen. Another round of America’s favorite geopolitical drinking game: Invade Mexico, Why Not? Our perennial fixation with turning our southern neighbor into a glorified shooting range has been resurrected by none other than Donald J. Trump. Yes, the man whose diplomacy skills rival those of a raccoon raiding…
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Waiting for the Flood
Boomers have plenty to say, but let’s be honest—if it’s a video, you’re watching it at 1.5x speed, and if it’s a Substack or a PDF, you’re skimming it at 2x. It’s the only way to bear it. Millennials and Zoomers? You don’t bother—most of them still need to season a bit before they say…
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The Ralph’s Doctrine:
Groceries, Geopolitics, and the End of Civilization by a Drunken Lunatic with a Cart Full of Frozen Burritos Power is unequally distributed, but it’s not supposed to be this obvious. Walk into any Ralph’s supermarket at 11:45 PM on a Tuesday and you’ll see what I mean: exhausted cashiers managing checkout lines longer than a…
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