This is about politics, artificial intelligence, con artists, and economics, but also a little about art. It’s also mostly aimed at Americans, because my country is the one that’s losing its little pink and grey mind.

The Republican Party has lost the mandate of heaven, and thank fucking God.

I keep hearing people talking about the 25th Amendment as if it were a thing that could really happen at this juncture, and I could be wrong (I’m often wrong) but it feels like cope to me and here’s why.

The MAGA coalition is six angry monkeys fighting in a trenchcoat, and the only thing that holds them together is their belief that they can use the cult of personality surrounding DJT to get what they want. Cults of personality are not a fungible resource. They are not transferable.

I don’t think any angels are coming to rescue America. I think we’re going to have to do it ourselves, and I think we will need to hold our representatives’ (local, state, and federal) feet to the fire in order to get some justice. Any elected Democrat or Independent who wants reconciliation and to just “go back to normal” needs to be roundly mocked and harassed by their constituents until they agree, at the very least, to armies of forensic accountants and attorneys trained in analyzing legal malpractice reviewing essentially everything the current administration and Congress have done.

We need to investigate the finances of certain supreme court justices and probably impeach a few.

And we’re gonna have to insist. If you’re lucky enough to have good representation (my senators are Warren and Markey) then keep yelling GET ‘EM, and tell them to convince their colleagues that the will of the people is that the rule of law be restored and enforced on the criminals currently in charge.

Yes, TFG or his successor are going to pardon everybody they can touch. Some people have ideas about challenging the legitimacy of the current administration on Supreme Court malfeasance that might actually fly. I don’t know. That all depends on political will. If it does, that would allow us to fix a lot of stuff.

Unfortunately, unlike many microblogging platforms these days, reality does not have an edit button. So I am dubious that we can retroactively declare a bunch of evil shit illegitimate.

But we should not give up without trying everything, either.

Anyway, if your reps are wishy-washy moderates, push them hard to get behind hearings and trials.

If they are fascists or fascist-adjacent, tell them you will vote for anybody who runs against them, and vote to see them in jail.

The Epstein class are trapped. They have the tiger by the tail and their only option is to keep juggling that angry cat forever. Or until they get tired and the tiger catches up with them. They have to keep all the money in their new Gilded Age with its increasingly unsustainable inequality round-tripping, because they have no way to get off the carousel.

Their robots and A.I. servants aren’t going to protect them when the wheels come off their Ponzi schemes. Those robots and A.I. models, it turns out, don’t work very well, if at all. With enough political will their owners can be taxed into lifestyles that would merely be the envy of the average 80s cartoon villain.

And then the rest of us can afford our diabetes drugs.

(Universal healthcare is polling better, which is great, because the current system is in crisis and crumbling around us. We have the best medical technology and knowledge in history, and we can barely get in to see our GP. If we even have a GP.)

Possibly Americans are tired of being treated like a resource to be extracted.

(This has happened before, which is why I think we can fix it if we get our shit together. It’s just that apparently we cannot, as a body politic, see that we are in an abusive relationship with the oligarchs until they get so cocky and vile that it is impossible to ignore.)

The Epstein class are in a situation where they are forced to keep doubling down on a situation that’s becoming increasingly unsustainable. Part of that is because the vast majority of them are operating out of unexamined entitlement and survivor bias. They really do believe they’re better and smarter than most people and that they cannot fail. Some are narcissists who react with unchecked rage when they’re told they can’t have total power over everyone. They don’t have the self-awareness to quit performing the stereotyped behaviors that have worked for them before.

A very few understand that they owe their extraordinary good fortune to a robust civil society and its infrastructure and a heaping dose of luck on top of a good idea or two, and possibly some inherited money. But once you have a certain amount of money, it just keeps making money.

Another factor is that it’s very hard to disengage yourself from a doom loop before it crashes.

The bootstrap levitation of AI and the MAGA/MAHA economy (more round-tripping) (MAHA is a get rich quick scheme for wellness influencers who don’t care if you die of typhus, mercury poisoning, or something else as long as you buy their scammy products) seems like a huge pump and dump to me.

The smart grifters are the ones who have figured out a way to blow off the marks and vanish with the cash. (It’s us. We’re the marks.) The rest of them are also marks and don't know it.

The Trump administration is populated with people who want to amass money, obtain their narcissistic supply, or both. That’s why they behave in such fashions that are incomprehensible to anybody with a scrap of duty or morality. They’re just in it for what they can grift. And they are not, in large part, planning for the collapse of the system. (Some probably have a bank account in the Caymans or where-ever criminals keep their money now.)

They use racism and homophobia and transphobia and misogyny as bait. But the hate is a product they’re selling to a slice of America that feels uncomfortable when they look around and see that maybe interacting with the real world requires a little emotional growth from them. And so they retreat to denial and a fantasy of the Good Old Days, which didn’t exist and also had a lot of polio.

(I say they’re just in it for what they can grift, but I should except Stephen Miller from that limiter, “just.” He’s also getting a little ethnic cleansing, as a treat.)

So all our money is getting vacuumed up by the .00001%, who then use that money to support the politicians who keep the money vacuum running, and we can’t afford to buy butter. Or medical care.

Meanwhile anything that uses a microchip or lithium battery is going to get harder and more expensive to get as they all get grabbed up for data centers to support the bootstrap levitation that keeps the A.I. bubble spinning. So your Ford F-150 Lightning and your Playstation 5 become more and more and more expensive. And rare, because there aren’t enough resources to go around.

(The good news, if there is good news, is that means a lot of secondhand green energy components are going to be cheap for salvage if this bubble collapses, as I think it probably will.)

The thing is that quote-A.I.-unquote are transformative technologies in a lot of ways. They excel at parsing massive amounts of data. They’re fantastic research tools. They may save countless lives when used for diagnostic purposes because they are great at spotting patterns. They may revolutionize ecological biology because they can pick out DNA traces in air samples and tell you what plants and animals live where and how the populations are doing, noninvasively.

But I don’t believe they are what hype machine makes them out to be. They have no judgement and they have no world model. They do not understand.

They are huge piles of really complicated statistical models based on literally all the data there is. (And the consumer models are out of new data, so they’re feeding on their own shit, which means that things are about to get weird. Weirder. Like a star burning iron because that’s all the fuel it has left.)

I think a lot about General A.I. (for obvious reasons) and I still think if anything gets us there it is likely to be the A-Life model. As you have probably deduced, if you have read my fiction.

Anyway, it’s absolutely bananas that a third of the U.S. economy is currently circulating between these few companies.

There’s a famous, rather brilliant book by Patricia Highsmith called The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s a banger read and I highly recommend it. (Like a lot of Highsmith, it’s a shattering indictment of so many things about society and class, as well as a deep dive into the psychology of people who loathe themselves and everyone around them, and will do anything to fill the void.)

It’s been adapted as a Matt Damon movie from 1999 that I have not yet seen, but mean to watch before it goes off Netflix (better get on that, Bear) and as a 2024 limited series (I typed “miniseries” and realized I was dating myself) that’s just called Ripley.

Scott and I just started watching that and it’s fucking amazing. A stately pace, gorgeously filmed in black and white, saturated in the era or the early 60s.

Not to spoil too much, but Tom Ripley is a small-time con artist who gets a big score completely by accident.

To keep the wealth ball rolling, Ripley has to take bigger and bigger risks and commit bigger and bigger crimes. He’s in a doom loop, and all he can do is keep thrashing, destroying himself and everyone around him because he cannot imagine his way out of the trap.

I feel like we’re somewhere in Act III of this story.

Hang in there, my friends. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Best,

Bear