Go to industry gatherings, especially in the media, and you’ll find that the old white male elite has been replaced, not by equality or equity, but by a different set of elites. The old boys’ club is gone, and that’s good. But this isn’t much of an improvement.
Whatever you think of the current administration, it is astonishing that so many Americans who hate the president and the government are willing to sit passively at home, rather than actively resist.
Venezuela is merely one of seven countries Trump bombed in 2025, one of several where regime change is the official but unstated agenda. Increasingly, Americans are being asked to support going to war and deploying the military in lethal actions even in the absence of anything approximating a casus belli.
ICE agents are the worst possible people. Masked and unidentified, they roam the country terrorizing innocent, hard-working people, and kidnap them and their kids with no consideration for their constitutional rights. Sometimes, you hear about some misfortune befalling one of them. Sadly, you have to pretend to at least feel neutral about this. Until the Trump madness blows over, here’s how to keep your poker face.
In the same way that companies like Facebook’s habit of scraping news from news websites helped drive traditional news organizations out of business, leaving Facebook with little original news to send out to its users, A.I. models are scraping websites for content, which will deny them the traffic they need to survive. Then, what will A.I. do?
Hundreds of thousands of STEM workers who have graduated with professional science and math degrees and have substantial tech experience are unemployed in the U.S. Yet American employers continue the fiction that they can’t find Americans to do these jobs, requiring them to import foreign workers under the H-1B visa program.
US Border Patrol collects millions of tracking data points about American motorists in order to form profiles of their travels. Those deemed suspicious are targeted for pretextual stops by local law enforcement in one of the most Orwellian developments of our age. Jack Kerouac would not have approved.
Given the logic of sanctions, it’s unsurprising that they hardly ever prove effective. A large country like the U.S. imposes economic misery on a country’s inhabitants in the hope that they, rather than hate the U.S., will blame their own government and then overthrow it, thus doing what the U.S. wants.
Presidents of both parties have assassinated thousands of innocent people all around the world with drones. The latest iteration of these extrajudicial killings is Trump’s campaign against so-called narco-terrorists in the southern Caribbean, who are carrying cocaine to Africa and Europe, not the United States. But the incident that attracted criticism and investigations was the DOD’s decision to kill a pair of survivors of one such strike off the coast of Venezuela.
Politicians and political parties that smear and lie about others find themselves in a dilemma that begins with the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much electoral punishment for lying.
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