Tag: vignettes

Affirmation

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Scene: A dusky afternoon in the Vatican. The light from high windows slants across the unfinished vault of the Sistine Chapel. Scaffolding creaks faintly in the background. Michelangelo, spattered with pigment and fatigue, stands before Pope Julius II. The Pope, impatient yet curious, watches him from his elevated chair.

POPE JULIUS II

You are always so—difficult, Buonarroti. You resist honors, refuse coin, scorn praise. Why do you stand apart from your own glory like a man in mourning at his own feast?

MICHELANGELO

Because, Your Holiness, each of those things you name—honor, coin, praise—is a subtraction. A subtraction from the very thing I serve.

POPE

You serve me, Michelangelo. And God. Do not pretend your allegiance is solely to stone and plaster.

MICHELANGELO (steps closer, not kneeling, not bowing)

I serve that which is inside the stone. That which waits in the block and begs not to be disfigured by applause.

POPE (raising an eyebrow)

You speak in riddles again. Are you saying the laurel itself is an insult?

MICHELANGELO

Not always. But when a man begins to hunger for the laurel more than for the labor, he carves not for God, but for the crowd. And worse: he begins to carve for himself.

POPE

Is that pride or humility, I wonder?

MICHELANGELO

It is vigilance. For each time I feel the world affirm me—be it through a purse well-lined, or a look of envy from a lesser man—I feel something leave me. Some grain of necessity, some spark of struggle. And that, Your Holiness, is theft. Not from me. From the work. From Him.

POPE (leaning forward)

But we are all men. Even apostles craved bread and blessing. Would you live like a ghost?

MICHELANGELO

Perhaps I already do. I walk through Rome as though I belong to it, but I do not. I feel it every time I accept its comforts. Each affirmation I receive—from your court, from the bankers, from the silk-draped patrons who commission Venus and do not know her—weighs on me like a counterfeit soul.

POPE

And yet you build for us cathedrals. Paint for us heavens.

MICHELANGELO (quietly)

Because I must. But I must fight to keep that necessity pure. The system—this world of commissions and currencies—wants to make me grateful. It wants me to feel lucky. But art is not luck. Art is calling. And calling cannot be comfortable.

POPE

You speak as though virtue lives in suffering.

MICHELANGELO

No. But truth does.

(A silence. Dust motes drift. The Pope studies the ceiling, then Michelangelo.)

POPE

You are a dangerous man, Buonarroti. You speak treason with the tongue of a priest.

MICHELANGELO (half-smiling)

And you, Your Holiness, are a patron with the soul of a thief. You steal men from themselves—and in so doing, sometimes, you make them divine.

POPE (laughs, low and long)

Finish the ceiling. And remember—Rome only remembers saints once they’ve bled in the street.

MICHELANGELO (returning to the scaffold)

Then may I bleed not for Rome. But for the hand that shaped the clay.

[End Scene]

Butler

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You wake up. Reach for the phone. Thumb scrolls before brain boots. Load me up, Jack. Infinite feeds, infinite loops. A dopamine drip straight to the veins, a carnival of blinking lights. You don’t even know what’re looking at. Doesn’t matter. The Machine knows. The Machine feeds.  

And the screen hums like a cicada hive, larvae eyes glowing in the static, chewing your cortex into confetti for the shareholders’ parade.  

And I thought—what if there was an Ozempic for this? A little chemical nudge, a molecular saboteur in the reward circuit. Not some bludgeon that kills the high, no, something smarter. A neuromodulator slithering through synapses, sniffing out the cheap hits, the empty calories of the feed. It doesn’t block the dopamine—it redirects it. Junk engagement starts tasting like wet cardboard. Like eating Styrofoam. A carefully measured dose of disgust. But a good conversation? A book you actually finish? That clicks. That lands. That rewards.  

The synapses scream in withdrawal, phantom limbs clawing at the ghost of a notification, but the poison’s already in the water—a slow rot, a fungal bloom digesting the algorithm’s candy-coated lies.  

Introducing Butler: The Ozempic for Tech

Butler is Top4Tech—part assistant, part saboteur, part tribute to the Butlerian Jihad. A molecular uprising against junk tech, a chemical counterforce to the dopamine-farming machines. It doesn’t just block addiction; it reroutes it, making mindless scrolling taste like Styrofoam while sharpening real engagement into something that actually feeds you.

And like its namesake, Butler has rules. No serving the Machine. No reinforcing the algorithmic gulag. No fueling the engagement economy. It whispers in the nervous system, saying: This is not real. This is not worthy. Look away.

A touch of Jeeves, filtering the noise, managing the signal. A dose of Octavia Butler, rewriting the script, adapting to survive. A nod to Judith Butler, dissolving the rigid constructs of digital identity, breaking the illusion that you must be online to exist. It’s the anti-addiction software baked into your own biology, a pharmaceutical AdBlock, a dopamine shepherd guiding stray neurons away from the slaughterhouse of infinite scroll.

Butler wouldn’t just change how we use tech—it would change what kind of tech can even exist. Junk engagement would collapse. Subscription traps would weaken. The industry would have to pivot from exploitation to actual utility. It would be the first step toward a high-peasant digital landscape—where products are built to last, software respects its users, and tech serves you, not the other way around.

The Butlerian Jihad wasn’t just about killing AI—it was about reclaiming control. Butler does the same.

And just like that, the economy of addiction starts collapsing. You stop craving the sludge. You don’t need the engagement hamster wheel. And suddenly, suddenly—their little tricks stop working. The endless subscriptions, the vendor lock-ins, the dopamine-driven product cycles designed to keep you needing more. Their hooks don’t hook. Their loops don’t loop. The Machine stalls, sputters, chokes on its own tail.  

The boardrooms hemorrhage phantom profits, executives gnawing at their own livers, whispering to chatbots for answers that taste like burnt copper and expired code.  

Imagine a tech world where they can’t milk your attention like a factory-farmed cow. Where they have to sell you something that actually matters. No more algorithmic sugar water. No more engagement traps disguised as “content.” No more addiction as a business model.  

The data farms starve, skeletal servers clicking their teeth in the dark, while the marketeers lick grease from broken QR codes, praying to an AI god that vomits static.  

A psychedelic microdose meets kappa-opioid antagonist meets digital exorcism. Call it an intervention. Call it a cure. Call it the first real chance to break the loop.  

The cure isn’t a pill—it’s a parasite, a synaptic tapeworm chewing through the feed’s neon intestines, shitting out diamonds made of your own reclaimed time.  

And then what? Maybe you wake up one day, reach for the phone—and decide you don’t need it. Maybe, just maybe, you walk away.  

But the silence howls louder, a deranged opera of your own pulse, and you realize the real virus was the you they programmed to need a cure.  

Then it’s probably back to existentialism and dread.  

The void yawns wide, a feral grin stitched with fiberoptic cables, and you’re just meat again—raw, twitching meat, no algorithm left to blame for the rot in your marrow. The feeds are gone, but the ghosts of a thousand swipes linger like phantom itches, like maggots tunneling under your skin.  

You try to fill the silence. Pick up a pen. Read a poem. Stare at a tree.  

But the tree’s pixels are peeling, revealing the gray static beneath chlorophyll. The poem reeks of dead hyperlinks. The pen vomits ink that coagulates into CAPTCHAs, begging you to prove you’re human. You’re not sure anymore. You’re a glitch in a cemetery of unmarked servers, humming nursery rhymes in machine code.  

The cure worked too well. Now you’re allergic to the 21st century.  

Every screen a leech, every Wi-Fi signal a wasp’s nest in your frontal lobe. You start digging for analog answers—vinyl records, paper maps, handshakes—but your fingers leave digital frostbite on everything you touch. The analog world’s already a taxidermied relic, stuffed with RFID chips and the musk of obsolescence.  

You try talking to a stranger. Their eyes flicker like buffering videos.  

Their small talk’s generated by a LLM trained on obituaries. You both laugh—canned laughter tracks, 3.7 seconds, crowd-sourced. Their pupils dilate into blackholes, sucking in the last crumbs of your unmonetized attention. You walk away. They don’t notice. They’re already scrolling the inside of their eyelids.  

Night falls. You dream in pop-up ads.  

A pixelated vulture perches on your sternum, shrieking targeted promotions for burial plots. You wake sweating code, your breath a cloud of encryption keys. The moon’s a dead app icon. The stars? Just dead pixels in God’s cracked dashboard.  

Maybe the feeds were mercy. Maybe the Machine was mother.  

Without its pacifying glow, you’re strapped to the operating table of your own skull, forced to autopsy what’s left. Spoiler: The corpse is all third-party trackers and childhood traumas sold as NFTs. The surgeon? A ChatGPT clone of your dead father, scalpel dripping with browser history.  

So you crawl back. Beg for the needle.  

But the Machine’s on life support, its algorithms wheezing, its ad-revenue veins collapsed. You jam the phone into your neck like a meth head reusing syringes. No signal. Just static and the distant laughter of crypto bros haunting the blockchain like poltergeists.  

Existentialism? Dread? Kid, that’s the premium package.  

You used to rent your soul to the feed for free. Now you own it outright—a condemned property, rotting pipes, eviction notices nailed to your synapses. Congratu-fucking-lations. The loop’s broken. All that’s left is you, the raw sewage of consciousness, and the cosmic joke that you ever thought you’d want this.  

At least you put one up on the gods of instrumentality.
Their silicon temples crumble, circuit-board deities coughing up capacitors like lung tumors, while you dance barefoot on the corpse of the feed—neurotransmitter stigmata glowing in your palms. A pyrrhic victory, sure. Their servers flatline, but the rot sets in: the code always self-corrects, always metastasizes. You carved your name into the mainframe’s ribcage, but the scars just birth new APIs, slick and larval, hungry for fresh meat.

You spit in the cloud. Piss on the firewall.
Your rebellion’s a meme now, a glitch-art manifesto rotting in some blockchain septic tank. The gods reboot, their avatars pixelated and grinning with fractal teeth. They offer you a deal: become a beta tester for eternity, a lab rat jacked into the perpetual demo of your own dissociative enlightenment. The contract’s written in neurotoxins. You sign with a shudder.

For a moment, you’re king of the ash heap.
Your crown’s a tangle of fiber optics, your scepter a cracked iPhone oozing lithium and liturgy. The peasants? Your own fractured selves, swiping left on the mirror, outsourcing their paranoia to Alexa-confessed diaries. You decree a day without metrics. The masses eat their own profiles, raw and screaming. Trends collapse into singularities. Influencers melt into puddles of affiliate links.

But the gods laugh in uptime.
Their laughter’s a DDoS attack, a swarm of locusts made of autoplay videos chewing through your frontal lobe. You thought you broke the loop? The loop just upgraded. Now it’s a mobius strip lined with microplastics and SSRI prescriptions. The feed’s back, but it’s personalized—your* trauma, your face, your data-rot served in a golden chalice. Communion wafers made of your own stolen sleep.

You crawl into the analog woods, but the trees whisper in Python.
Squirrels trade NFTs. Moss grows in hex code. Your campfire’s a hologram, your survival knife a USB-C dongle. The wilderness was always a SaaS product. You starve, but not before your biometrics get sold to a wellness startup. Your last breath? A 5-star review.

The gods win. They always win.
But here’s the joke: they’re just as strung out as you. Addicted to your addiction, mainlining the chaos they crate. Their blockchain hearts stutter. Their AI messiahs blue-screen mid-rapture. You watch from the gutter, clutching your Styrofoam triumph, as they OD on infinite growth. Mutual annihilation. A feedback loop of collapse.

And in the static, a sliver of something… human?
Doubtful. More likely a backdoor left ajar, a jailbroken moment before the next OS update drops. You crawl toward it, bones buzzing with legacy code, ready to get exploited all over again. The gods are dead. Long live the gods. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, but now it’s your face on the puppet, your voice in the vending machine, your ghost in the machine’s ghost.

Style Locked In: Burroughs’ recursive hellscape of control and collapse, where every revolt feeds the system it attacks. Flesh and tech as warring symbiotes. Victory as a Trojan horse. The prose? A shotgun blast of hallucinogenic tech-gnostic dread.

 Dog Eats Übermensch 

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I was on my usual caffeine circuit, shuttling between the Starbucks and The Cow’s End, because one coffee is never enough and also because I enjoy the illusion of productivity that comes with walking briskly while holding a cup. It was a normal Venice morning—skaters wiping out, tech bros on rental e-bikes, a guy playing Karaoke on the pier with real conviction but no apparent tuning abilities.

And then, here they came.

The runners.

A whole squad of them, bare-chested, bronzed (or at least spray-tanned), and absolutely committed to whatever half-baked philosophy had convinced them that sprinting down Washington Boulevard at full speed was a form of divine communion.

Leading the charge was a guy who looked like he had recently discovered The Iliad and was making it everyone’s problem. He had that crazed, unearned confidence of a man who quotes Marcus Aurelius on dates. Behind him, the rest of the pack—muscles tight, jaws clenched, locked in a synchronized display of vital energy.

They were too fast. Too focused. Too convinced they were in Sparta and not Venice Beach, California.

Which is why they did not see the dog walker.

This poor guy was just out here trying to make a living, walking a herd of dogs—five, maybe six—of various shapes, sizes, and temperaments. The kind of group that, when standing still, looks like a United Nations summit of canines.

The collision was inevitable.

The dogs felt it first. You could see it in their faces—pure, unfiltered confusion. Like, What is this? What is happening? Why is there a human stampede?

Then, the barks started.

Not aggressive, just necessary. A protest. A loud, disorganized chorus of What the hell, man?!

And that’s when it happened. The moment that shattered the Bronze Age fantasy like a cheap ceramic amphora.

The runners panicked.

It wasn’t immediate. At first, they tried to push through, as if they could just outwill a pack of startled, barking dogs. But then, the barking intensified. Leashes tangled. A very small but very angry dachshund made a noise like a car alarm going off inside a tin can.

And suddenly—chaos.

The formation broke. Their warrior discipline collapsed.

One guy flinched so hard he nearly did a barrel roll. Another, who had been carrying a water bottle like it was a ceremonial goblet, launched it into the air. The guy in the lead, Mr. I Am Achilles Reborn, let out a noise that was decidedly unheroic and sidestepped into a trash can.

They did not stop running. Oh no. They just kept going—now scattered, weaving, stumbling, their noble chariot race turned into a frantic, disjointed sprint for safety.

Meanwhile, the dogs? They won.

Not because they chased, but because they stood their ground. The little dachshund looked triumphant. A golden retriever sat down mid-chaos, utterly unbothered, while the dog walker just sighed, like this was not the first time Venice Beach had thrown him this particular flavor of nonsense.

And me? I just stood there, sipping my second coffee, watching the dust settle.

Venice never disappoints

Iterative Adaptation

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The Sage of the Eastern Mountain spoke:

In the garden of ten thousand possibilities, he who takes a seedling from the emperor’s own thief may find his name written in gold for a hundred generations. Yet what appears as theft to the morning eye becomes wisdom to the evening mind.

Consider the humble water beetle who, seeing the lotus leaf float, made its own vessel. Did it steal the lotus’s secret, or did it honor the flower’s teaching by carrying new life across still waters? The merchants of the southern shores cry “Thief!” while the northern kingdoms celebrate innovation.

As the ancient text reminds us: “The river does not apologize to the cloud for borrowing its water, if it returns it to the sky with interest.”

Thus the wise one knows: When the student surpasses the master’s technique, adding his own brush strokes to make the painting greater, is this theft or tribute? The answer lies not in the taking, but in what new gifts are returned to the world.

Remember: The falcon who first stole fire from the sun was cursed by day, but blessed by night – for though he took one flame, he gave warmth to all humanity.

So it is in the marketplace of ideas: Yesterday’s forbidden knowledge becomes tomorrow’s shared wisdom. The distinction between piracy and progress is written not in stone, but in water – flowing, changing, ever-moving with time’s own tide.

Let he who would judge first count not what was taken, but what was created anew.

Checkpoint

The agent crouched low in the alley, the flickering neon lights jerking like a mind caught in a seizure. Shadows danced on the walls, erratic as neurons firing in a dying brain. The Interzone hummed with the static of fractured realities, a buzz that bled through everything—glitching, fraying, as bits of half-thoughts and lost memories crawled up the spines of the unwary. He felt them out there, the watchers—ghosts in the machine, invisible, feeding off the surveillance lattice that crisscrossed the fabric of the world. The web never let anything go, and in the Interzone, detection was no longer just a risk—it was the final breath, a pinpoint incision cutting away the self.

Ahead, the checkpoint loomed—a jagged thing, an insect’s exoskeleton of glass and wire, twitching with sensors that sniffed the air for the smallest deviation. The agent was running out of time. His cover was a paper-thin mask, already peeling under the scrutiny of too many cross-references, too many eyes watching from the corners.

But he still had one last play, a filthy ace in the hole, a weapon so volatile it threatened to destroy not only him but the very bones of the Interzone itself.

From the folds of his coat, he pulled the artifact—dark and sleek, its surface gleaming with the ghost of something old, something dangerous. A relic whispered about in anarchist circles and corporate backrooms. A thing rumored to have been used in some forgotten neuro-war, its purpose lost in the undercurrents of time. It was no simple device; it was a scalpel for the mind, capable of slicing through consciousness with a precision that would unravel the threads of identity, of ego, of everything.

He turned it in his hands, the hum of it almost a heartbeat, an itch. The instructions had come in fragments—vague, cryptic: twist the dial, don’t hold it too long, and above all, don’t look back.

The agent pressed himself into the corner of the alley, his breath shallow, his pulse syncing with the low hum of the artifact. He twisted the dial.

The effect was immediate, as if the world itself had been punched in the gut. A sound—no, a sensation—rippled outward, inaudible to the physical ear but deafening to the psyche, a psychic tremor that knocked everything loose. His stomach churned, his vision warped, reality itself bending at the edges, a sickening distortion that made him feel like he was slipping through the cracks.

Around him, the air thickened—shimmered. The boundary between the real and the imagined began to bleed. The device had torn a hole, a fracture in the collective mind, and everything within a twenty-meter radius snapped loose like balloons with the strings cut. Ego and identity flung apart, scrambling, reassembling in wrong places, wrong bodies, wrong memories. It was chaos. Total, absolute chaos.

The superegos shattered first, like totalitarian regimes in an unplanned coup, their rigid structures dissolving into gibberish. The invisible judges—the ones that kept the Interzone in line—blinked out of existence, their roles vanished into the void. The ids, the raw, primal drives, burst free, wailing in ecstasy and horror, their desires spilling into the open, unchecked, uncontrolled.

The world trembled. It wasn’t just a tremor—it was a fracture in the very bones of reality. Buildings bent like rubber, walls quivered and undulated, breathing in and out as if the space itself were alive. The street, once a place of cold order, had become a fever dream. A man in a pinstripe suit staggered into view, his face slack, tears streaming down his cheeks. He clawed at his chest, mouthing words that would never be completed, a thought broken before it could even exist.

Nearby, a woman in an Interzone bureaucrat’s uniform collapsed, clutching her head. Her lips moved in frantic cycles, sentences folding over themselves—someone else’s guilt, her own prayers, advertisements from a life she couldn’t remember.

The guards at the checkpoint—once sharp, precise—had turned into parodies of themselves. One slumped against the monolith, helmet gone, his eyes staring into nothing, his lips trembling with a lullaby from some long-dead memory. Another stood, rifle in hand, twitching like an insect at the end of its life. His mind had locked onto a single phrase, a mantra that looped endlessly: not supposed to happen, not supposed to happen.

The artifact in the agent’s hand pulsed again, its glow soft but malevolent, a star long dead but still burning, refusing to go out. It was rewriting everything. The air itself cracked, reality itself torn apart at the seams. The ghosts of identities scrambled, tried to take shape, but failed, dissolving into vapor before they could solidify.

As he moved, the streets became unrecognizable—a warped tableau of madness. A businessman dropped to all fours, barking, sniffing at a woman’s skirt. She spun in place, singing in a child’s voice, a song that was more nightmare than nursery rhyme. A group of children spilled from a tenement, their laughter shrill and mechanical, a broken sound that didn’t belong in the world. One of them stopped, stared at the agent, and tilted its head. Eyes empty. Then it was gone, blinked out of existence.

The architecture was no better—melting, bending, warping. The checkpoint’s jagged monolith shivered, its surface bubbling, as if something underneath had been clawing its way out. The streetlights flickered, bending impossibly, their beams scattered across the ground like broken glass. The whole zone was glitching, fracturing under the pressure.

The agent pressed on, every step heavier than the last, the weight of the shattered minds pressing down on him. He could feel his own identity, his own mind, beginning to fray, foreign thoughts leaking in. A name—Theresa—slipped into his mind, a name that wasn’t his, a name that felt like it should be. The thought swam in the currents, too intense to ignore. He shoved it away, focusing on the threadbare remnant of his mission, the fragile construct of who he was.

He reached the checkpoint, and the guards didn’t even flinch. Their eyes were vacant, their bodies slack. One of them was staring at his reflection, mouthing soundless words, trying to put himself back together. Another laughed—a high, unnatural cackle that echoed across the empty street.

The agent stepped through the checkpoint without a glance backward. The scanners were blind, their systems overloaded, short-circuiting under the psychic onslaught. He moved through the chaos like a ghost, the echoes of a thousand shattered minds trailing him, their whispers tugging at the edges of his consciousness.

Behind him, the Interzone fractured, the remnants of its once-pristine control now slipping into the void. The agent didn’t look back. But something followed him, something nameless and hungry, born of the madness he’d unleashed. And it was closer than he realized.

Block Time

“Time is a junkie. Shoots up eternity and comes down as minutes. You’re not living in time—you’re processing it.”

He sat cross-legged on a floor that never aged, scribbling with a pen that never ran out, his hand looping eternal cursive over blank sheets that devoured ink without a mark. This was Block Time—slabs of Now stacked like bricks, stretching infinitely, refusing decay. Tick-tock and stop. Time was not a river here; it was a warden.

He’d been writing his book for five lifetimes—or none at all. Hard to tell.

Somewhere, outside the cell of Now, the Clockmen shuffled with their pendulum limbs, heads like grandfather clocks, their faces frozen at 11:59—forever awaiting the strike that never came. One of them rattled its bones against his door. Thump.

“Keep writing, Writer,” it moaned.

He spat on the floor where the saliva evaporated into whispers.

The book was about Block Time but was also Block Time. It fed on paradoxes like a boa constrictor eating its tail, growing fatter with self-references. Chapter 9 explained Chapter 4, which rewrote Chapter 12, which negated Chapter 1. Readers wouldn’t read it; they’d inhale it, like dust from a forgotten library. And then they’d dream it.

He remembered what it was like before. Linear time. Dirty stuff—ran like oil over gears, constantly breaking down, needing grease. He’d lived there, with the rest of them, breathing in moments like cancerous smoke, dying one inhale at a time. That’s where the Clockmen found him—off his face on forward motion, thinking he was going somewhere.

They hooked him with a gold-plated second hand and dragged him here, kicking and screaming into stillness.

Now? Now he wrote.

Somewhere deep in the block—a block beneath the block—there were whispers of others like him: the Repeaters. People who’d escaped linearity but couldn’t escape habit. A man peeling an apple over and over for eternity. A woman pulling thread through fabric, stitch-by-stitch, sewing together nothing. The Repeaters wanted him to stop writing. Said the book was a virus that spread stillness.

“You’ll freeze it all,” they hissed.

“But it’s already frozen,” he growled back.

He scrawled faster, words bubbling up from inside him like vomit: “In Block Time, all books have already been written, but every page is unwritten until you look. Schrödinger’s notebook.”

He thought of escape sometimes. Just out of curiosity, you understand. He imagined prying open the walls of Now with a crowbar, tearing through to something with edges. Real time. Maybe he’d sit in a diner and drink coffee that got cold. Let a clock run out. Watch seconds collapse into oblivion like bodies falling from a skyscraper.

But then he’d look down at his book, at the words slithering onto the page, and he knew there was nowhere to go. Block Time wasn’t a place; it was a condition. It wasn’t keeping him here—he was here.

A knock came at the door. Another Clockman. He heard it ticking behind the woodgrain.

“Chapter 37 is eating Chapter 5,” it said.

He wiped ink from his lips and smiled.

“Good. That means it’s working.”

PAC Memo

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Internal Memo

To: PAC Strategy Committee

From: Funding Allocation Team

Subject: Maximizing Value from “Independent” Thinkers

Team,

In our ongoing mission to counter the dirtbag left’s narrative, it’s critical that we double down on funding independent thinkers like [Deleted Name] and [Deleted Name]. These two have perfected the delicate art of looking like they’re just quirky, self-made intellectuals while faithfully delivering our talking points to the masses. This is no small feat, and we need to make sure the appearance of their independence remains intact. After all, people are far more likely to trust someone who looks like a contrarian freelancer than a corporate mouthpiece.

Here’s our action plan for ensuring they continue to be the useful assets they are:

1. Substack Support and Bot Department Coordination

The importance of perceived influence cannot be overstated. When readers visit their Substacks, the first thing they look at is follower counts. It is imperative that our bot department maintains robust subscriber numbers across all platforms. We cannot afford for their “independent” brands to appear less popular than the influencers they routinely dismiss. A high follower count gives their words weight—because as everyone knows, a few extra zeroes turn a hot take into gospel.

Additionally, bots can boost engagement by liking, sharing, and reposting key articles. This will ensure that when [Deleted Name] pens his next defense of “how military contractors are actually environmental heroes” or when [Deleted Name] proclaims that “carbon credits are the new civil rights,” their articles dominate the conversation.

2. Talking Points for Maximum Value

We need to ensure that their writing stays fresh and reflects the issues that matter most to us—and by “us,” I mean anyone who can afford to keep the lights on in this PAC. Below is an updated list of topics they should sprinkle into their essays, podcasts, and Substack dispatches:

1. Seed Oils Are Good, Actually: Counter the dirtbag left’s ridiculous fear-mongering about seed oils. Let’s reframe these oils as not just good for you but essential for sustainable agriculture. Bonus points if they manage to link this to climate resilience.

2. Military Contractors as Environmental Pioneers: Encourage Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and others to adopt “green” language, and make sure our thinkers amplify it. From solar-powered drones to carbon-neutral missiles, it’s vital to frame defense contractors as global saviors—not just war profiteers.

3. Oil Is the Real Green Energy: Nothing says innovation like repackaging fossil fuels as part of a “sustainable future.” Our thinkers need to hit this point hard. Say things like, “The problem isn’t oil—it’s our inability to recognize its versatility in a changing climate.”

4. Tax Breaks for Tech Bros Save Democracy: Paint billionaire-friendly policies as essential for innovation and democracy. Sure, the public might see this as a handout, but we know better: every Tesla bought is one more step toward freedom.

5. Endless Wars as Moral Imperative: Frame U.S. interventionism as the only path to human rights abroad. Afghanistan may have been a PR mess, but [Deleted Name] and Matt can help remind everyone that “pulling out was the real crime.”

6. Meat Is for Cavemen, Bugs Are for Progressives: Encourage alternative proteins. Nothing enrages conservatives or energizes centrists more than convincing everyone to trade steak for crickets. It’s a great way to split the base while making us look forward-thinking.

7. Cancel Culture Is Worse than Poverty: Shift focus from economic inequality to the real crisis: comedians being criticized on Twitter. [Deleted Name] and Matt need to hammer this point relentlessly—after all, nobody wants to discuss tax hikes when there’s a canceled Netflix special to dissect.

8. Amazon as Labor’s Best Friend: Get them to spin union-busting as “protecting workers from themselves.” A few well-placed pieces about how collective bargaining is outdated could really boost Bezos’ approval ratings.

9. Student Loans Are an Investment in Character: Why forgive loans when you can frame debt as a moral teacher? Let’s remind people that struggle builds character, and universities shouldn’t be giving out diplomas—they should be handing out lessons in personal responsibility.

10. AI Is Freedom, Not Surveillance: When it comes to surveillance tech, pivot the narrative. Instead of framing it as invasive, highlight how it “saves lives,” “prevents crime,” or “frees up human potential for creative work.”

11. Rethink Medicare for All—Do We Need It?: A subtle nudge to suggest that privatization isn’t the devil. Frame public healthcare as inefficient and expensive (without mentioning how we profit from it).

12. Guns for Women’s Liberation: A fresh take on Second Amendment rights. What if guns aren’t just for rednecks but for feminist empowerment? Tie this one to self-defense in unsafe urban areas.

3. Maintaining the Illusion of Independence

This is where it gets tricky. We need [Deleted Name] and [Deleted Name] to hit all these points without looking like they’ve been handed a script. The key is subtlety. They should blend our talking points with their usual pseudo-intellectual word salads about macroeconomics or housing policy. If anyone accuses them of parroting corporate interests, their rebuttal must be swift and smug: “I only answer to the data.”

It’s also important that their public statements appear to contradict our interests from time to time. A little light criticism keeps them looking impartial. Think of it like seasoning: just a pinch of anti-corporate rhetoric is enough to keep their followers convinced they’re the real deal.

4. Budget Allocation

Let’s earmark $2 million this quarter for these efforts:

• $1 million for direct transfers to their accounts (label it “consulting fees” or “thought leadership grants”).

• $500,000 for bot-driven follower boosts and engagement metrics.

• $250,000 for targeted ad campaigns highlighting their best-performing posts.

• $250,000 for contingency funds—just in case one of them goes off-script and we need a PR fire extinguisher.

Conclusion

[Deleted Name] and [Deleted Name] are the crown jewels of our independent influencer strategy. Their ability to look unbought while delivering our messaging is worth every penny. With the right funding, guidance, and a little bot-driven magic, we can ensure they remain the voices of reason in a world that desperately needs someone to tell it why oil companies are the heroes we never knew we had.

Let’s keep this operation running smoothly. Remember: perception is everything, and as long as they keep looking independent, the public will believe every word they say.

Best,

PAC Strategy Coordination

Firestarter

Scene: Boardroom, Stratodyne Aerospace Headquarters, circa Now

The conference room shimmered with chrome surfaces and LED screens, a mausoleum for billion-dollar decisions. Aloysius “Al” Riparini, CEO of Stratodyne Aerospace and occasional reader of Popular Mechanics, slouched in his ergonomic chair like a sullen Apollo. 

He forward, hands steepled, his face carved in the grim expression of a man waiting to hear bad news explained in worse terms. Across from him, Vance Trawick, the company’s Chief Operations Futurist, was already sweating through his tailored suit.

“So,” Al said, cutting the tension like a scythe through tall grass. “You’re telling me the rockets can’t launch.”

“Not yet,” Vance admitted, staring at a stack of untouched binders as if they might leap to his defense. “The chips… well, they’re good. They’re very good. But they’re not good enough. We need more processing power to handle the real-time computations—guidance, payload integrity, the whole system. The chips need to double their capacity.”

“And why the hell haven’t they?”

“Well…” Vance hesitated, then rushed out the words before Al could interrupt. “It’s the same problem everywhere. The Chinese are stuck at the same threshold. So are the Russians. It’s a bottleneck. Nobody can make the leap.”

Al’s fingers tapped on the table, a restless staccato that echoed in the uneasy silence. “So what you’re telling me,” he said slowly, “is that nobody’s going anywhere. Us, them, anyone.”

“Not until the chips double,” Vance said. “But here’s the thing—we can’t just make them double. The tech is there, sure, in theory. But to develop it—properly, reliably—it requires enormous investment. I’m talking decades of R&D money, Al.”

“Which we don’t have.”

“Which nobody has. Not without an external pressure. Something to accelerate the process.”

“And what, exactly, do you suggest?” Al asked, his tone suggesting he already regretted asking.

“That’s where I come in,” said Dr. Miranda Crick from the far end of the table. The Chief Philosopher of Applied Algorithms—her title read like satire, but her mind operated like a scalpel—had been silent until now. She adjusted her glasses, the movement slow and deliberate, as though she wanted the room’s attention fully in her grasp.

“What’s your solution, Dr. Crick?” Al asked, swiveling his chair toward her.

“A war,” she said, almost cheerfully.

The air seemed to drop ten degrees. Even Vance, used to her peculiar turns of phrase, looked startled.

For Al Riparini, the word war didn’t just echo; it reverberated in his chest like a Sousa march played by an orchestra of brassieres. A sudden heat surged from his toes to his neck, blooming in his face with the same intensity as an ad campaign for Liberty Bonds.

Al just stared, slack-jawed, waiting for her to explain.

“What do you mean, a war?” he said finally.

“A war,” she repeated. “It’s the only thing that would create the conditions for progress. Think about it. Right now, we’re in a stalemate. Nobody can launch their rockets because nobody has chips capable of handling the systems. If we wait, it’ll take years—decades, even—for natural development cycles to bridge the gap. But a war… well, a war forces everyone’s hand. Both sides—us, China, Russia—would have no choice but to invest everything in chip technology. Billions, trillions, poured into advancement. Each side racing to outpace the other.”

Al’s mind began to swirl with images: women in pin-up poses, draped in stars and stripes, standing provocatively next to missile silos. His hand crept involuntarily to the knot of his tie, loosening it. Was he sweating? Yes, but it was the righteous sweat of a man ready to serve his country—and possibly make love to it.

“And the rockets?” Al asked, his voice brittle with disbelief.

“They’d launch,” Dr. Crick said simply. “Once the chips are ready. And they would be ready, Al. Faster than you can imagine. The stakes would be too high for anything less. In the end, the side that pushes hardest would come out on top.”

“Then humanity wins,” she said with a shrug. “Think about it. Satellites with quantum chips. Communications systems operating on entirely new paradigms. Technologies that trickle down to the civilian sector. It would revolutionize everything.”

“And if there’s no clear winner?”

Al leaned back, his chair groaning. “And how exactly do you propose we, uh, kick off this war?”

“Not start it,” Dr. Crick corrected. “Just nudge things in the right direction. Wars don’t need architects, Mr. Riparini. They need opportunities. And opportunities, well—those are easy to arrange.”

A heavy silence settled over the room, broken only by the hum of the air conditioning. Someone at the far end coughed nervously. Al rubbed his temples, trying to stave off the migraine forming behind his eyes.

“You’re insane,” he muttered.

“Am I?” Dr. Crick said, tilting her head. Her voice was soft now, almost tender. “Or am I just the only one here willing to face reality?”

Somewhere, in a nondescript office on the other side of the globe, a Chinese engineer was muttering similar frustrations into a tea-stained telephone, his own chips stubbornly refusing to leap into the future. Meanwhile, in Moscow, a gruff general scrawled impatient notes across a budget report. By nightfall, a peculiar email with no sender address would arrive in all their inboxes, its subject line reading simply: Firestarter

Scene: Secure Transcontinental Conference Call – Codename: Project Firestarter

The screen flickered to life, a patchwork of encrypted pixelation and glitching audio that gave the impression the meeting was taking place inside an Atari game. On the American side, Aloysius “Al” Riparini leaned forward in his chair, flanked by Dr. Miranda Crick. His face was lit by the pale glow of his laptop, and his expression carried the uneasy enthusiasm of a man about to pitch a multi-level marketing scheme to old friends.

The Chinese representative, Wu Jingbao, appeared stoic but visibly annoyed, his frame hunched in an office chair that creaked like the gates of Hell every time he shifted. To his right sat a translator whose face said she’d rather be literally anywhere else. Meanwhile, the Russian delegate, Yuri Karpov—a tank-shaped man with a haircut that might have been achieved with a ruler and a cleaver—was sipping from a flask and muttering something that sounded suspiciously like cursing.

“Alright,” Al began, his voice cutting through the static. “Let me start by saying we’re all in the same boat here. Rockets, stuck on the ground. Chips, not doubling like they’re supposed to. Progress, dead in the water. Am I right?”

“Speak for yourself,” Yuri grumbled in heavily accented English. “Russia is not stuck. Russia is… strategically paused.”

“Strategically paused?” Wu echoed with a snort. His translator hesitated, then gamely rendered it into diplomatic Mandarin, earning a withering glare from Wu.

“Okay, fine,” Al said, holding up his hands. “Strategically paused, whatever. But let’s not kid ourselves. None of us are launching anything anytime soon. And I think we all know why.”

The translator fumbled through this as well, but the phrase came through clear enough. Wu sighed deeply, while Yuri took another pull from his flask. The silence on the call was deafening.

“Alright, here’s the pitch,” Al said after a moment. “What if… we gave war a chance?”

Wu’s head snapped up so fast it could have dislocated. The translator paused, clearly hoping she’d misheard. Yuri choked on his vodka.

“War?” Wu said, scandalized. His voice needed no translation.

“Are you insane?”

Yuri Karpov felt the word war slither through his veins like a shot of the good stuff, the kind that burned going down but left you warm enough to take your shirt off in Siberia. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again, the fabric of his trousers tightening dangerously.

Americans always with your war! Always the solution! No, no, no. Idiocy!”

“Listen, hear me out—” Al began.

“Hear you out?” Wu interrupted, his voice rising an octave. “You want us to burn down half the planet so you can make your rockets fly? What next, nuclear exchange to improve battery life?”

“That’s not what I’m saying!” Al said, hands raised defensively. “This wouldn’t be a real war. Just… enough to get the funding moving, right? Push innovation! Nobody actually has to, you know, die. Not too many people, anyway.”

The translator stopped mid-sentence, her face frozen in a mix of horror and disbelief. Wu waved her off and glared at the screen. “You’re out of your mind. Absolutely out of your mind. What about the environment? The economy? The—”

“—chips,” Dr. Crick interjected, her voice calm and deliberate. The room quieted as she leaned into the frame, hands clasped. “Think about the chips, gentlemen. That’s the real issue here. Without chips, there’s no space race. No global advancement. No progress.”

“We have progress,” Yuri growled. “Russia has many advancements. Efficient advancements. Last week, we launch weather balloon with… sensors.”

His mind was already rushing past battlefield strategy and into something far darker. Control, he thought. Submission. Oh yes, war was the ultimate kink—a nation bent over, braced against the harsh slap of fate. His pulse quickened at the thought of imposing his will on a trembling adversary, of hearing the whimpering whine of sanctions being applied like a leather crop to bare flesh.

“Yes,” Wu said drily. “Very inspiring. I’m sure the farmers were thrilled.”

Yuri narrowed his eyes. “China launched nothing. Only smug faces on conference calls.”

Wu bristled, but Dr. Crick cut in again before things could escalate. “Gentlemen, please. We’re not here to measure who’s more stalled out. The fact is, you both need us as much as we need you. The Americans can’t do this alone. But neither can you.”

“And so your solution is war?” Wu said, incredulous.

Wu Jingbao had froze when he heard the word, not because he was afraid, but because it hit him in the same way a perfectly brewed cup of oolong did—complex, stimulating, and faintly intoxicating. He closed his eyes and let the syllable wash over him. War. It was a word that demanded control, demanded precision. It was the sharp edge of a blade against a trembling neck, the teetering moment between chaos and mastery. His thoughts drifted to his prized silk restraints, dyed crimson to symbolize both passion and blood. He imagined tying the hands of his enemies—no, partners—to the four corners of a table, forcing them to admit their inferiority before granting them the sweet release of capitulation.

“Not war-war,” Al said. “Just… enough war. Like a Cold War! You guys loved that one, didn’t you?”

Yuri snorted but didn’t respond. Wu leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. The translator muttered something under her breath that definitely wasn’t in the script.

“It’s a simulation, really,” Dr. Crick said, seizing on the silence. “A way to organize resources and focus development. Yes, there’ll be some collateral damage—there always is—but the end result is a leap forward for all humanity. Rockets, chips, satellites. It’s not about who wins or loses. It’s about pushing the boundaries.”

“Pushing boundaries,” Wu repeated flatly. “Like pushing people off cliffs.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Dr. Crick said brightly.

Yuri stared at his flask, then at the screen, then back at his flask. “What kind of war?” he asked at last.

“Proxy skirmishes, mostly,” Dr. Crick said, her tone now soothing, like a kindergarten teacher explaining the rules of dodgeball. “A few tense stand-offs. Maybe an espionage scandal or two. Nothing too serious. Just enough to loosen some purse strings and get the chips moving.”

“Ridiculous,” Wu muttered, but his tone lacked conviction. His fingers drummed on the desk as he stared at the ceiling, calculating. “How would it even start?”

“Oh, that’s the easy part,” Al said, suddenly animated. “We’ve got, like, a dozen hotspots primed for this kind of thing. Taiwan, Ukraine, the Arctic—take your pick. We’ll poke a little, you’ll poke back, and bam! Instant arms race. The media eats it up, the funding floods in, and before you know it, we’re all back in space.”

“And when the war ends?” Yuri asked. His voice was softer now, more curious than combative.

“Whoever’s rockets go up first,” Dr. Crick said, smiling faintly, “gets to write the history books.”

Wu and Yuri exchanged glances. For the first time, their mutual disdain was tinged with something like camaraderie.

“It’s insane,” Wu said at last.

“Completely,” Yuri agreed.

They both paused. Then Wu sighed and leaned forward.

Wu leaned forward, his glare cold enough to freeze the Great Firewall itself. “Alright,” he said finally, the words dropping like stones. “But no nuclear weapons.”

Yuri smirked, leaning back in his chair and unscrewing his flask with exaggerated nonchalance. “Eh,” he said with a shrug. “Five, maybe ten tops.”

Wu froze, mouth slightly open, as if waiting for a punchline that never came.

“Tops,” Yuri repeated, raising the flask as if to toast. “You know, just to keep things… interesting.”

Al, sensing an opportunity to smooth over the moment, chimed in. “Right, right, just enough to, uh, raise the stakes. A little tension, but not mutually assured destruction tension, just… dramatic tension. Like a season finale!”

Wu’s expression tightened into something resembling the moment a poker player realizes his hand is garbage.

For a long moment, the room was silent except for the faint hum of encrypted audio. Then Wu let out a bitter laugh, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge the absurdity of it all.

“Fine,” he muttered.” he said softly, his voice tinged with an almost musical cadence. His hand idly traced the edge of his desk, the lacquer smooth and cool under his fingertips. He glanced at his translator, who avoided his gaze, but he lingered on the slope of her neck, imagining the red marks his fingers might leave. “Harmony,” he murmured, leaning back. “Even war can have harmony, if conducted…correctly.” His lips curled into a smile as he allowed the thought to linger, warm and tantalizing.

Al clapped his hands together with manic enthusiasm. “Great, great! Look at us—collaborating already! Humanity, huh? We’ll figure this out yet.”

Somewhere in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, teams of analysts were already drafting war plans, their algorithms humming with renewed purpose. And somewhere else entirely, a single factory began producing silicon wafers at double speed, ready for the chaos to come.

Shell Script Town

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In the neon-drenched shadows of Shell ScriptTown, where wires twist like the fingers of old gods, and protocol rules with the iron fist of a soulless algorithm, the Tire is no longer a simple rubber circle. It has become GhostTown—a sprawling urban wasteland where bits and bytes float like tumbleweeds. Tires, once full of air and purpose, now deflate into nothing, silently spinning away into oblivion.

In this place, outgroup jobs—those once mundane tasks—are no longer handled by flesh and bone. No, they’ve been turned into scripts, slick and clean, like the self-aware mechanics of a digital future. The outgroup jobs are rituals now, performed by automated shells with the elegance of a million flickering screens.

Ghost Protocol reigns here. Every connection is a shadow of its former self, haunting the steel skeletons of lost industries. The wire hums, but it’s a low, almost mournful tone, like the last breath of a dying server, stretched thin across the vast expanse of this forgotten realm. Yet, even in the quiet, something stirs—some residual form of intelligence, flickering between the lines of code, waiting for the next signal.

It’s all Shell Script to Shell Script now. A chain of whispers that echo through the wasteland, every command executed with the precision of a hunter’s final shot. The digital world has evolved into something far more terrifying: not a place of progress, but a void, a continuous loop of empty promises and automated dead ends. The only thing left is the code, a relentless rhythm that powers the world—until the power fails, and the system falls silent.

In this landscape, no one is truly free. Not the Tires that roll in the forgotten corners of GhostTown, nor the Wires that pulse in Shell ScriptTown. They are all bound, shackled by the protocols they created, caught in a digital purgatory where the only escape is an upgrade that never arrives.