Lizard Limbs

Continuing from the previous post, calls for prosecution and consequences for criminal activities in the halls of power are mounting. In view of widespread, systemic rot that enables those in power to lie, cheat, and steal their way through life — largely at taxpayer expense (with forfeiture of souls of evildoers) — it could be that removing all those people to dull, gray, jail cells somewhere could cause catastrophic government failure (i.e., a failed state). If it’s a choice between full discovery and expulsion of criminals from government, destroying civil operations in the process of returning to the rule of law (was rule of law ever really true?) vs. letting supposedly important, indispensable people skate on their villainy because, like banks, they are deemed too big to fail, then I opt for rule of law across the board and say let chips fall where they may. Besides, the U.S. is already a failed state projecting a fading empire inside collapsing industrial civilization.

In the past couple decades, several instances of rampant, out-of-control behaviors among the power elite have emerged with all the expected negative downstream effects on American culture and polity. Two that come to mind immediately are the #MeToo movement (gawd I hate hashtags) and the casino economy that led to the 2008 financial crisis. In the case of the former, lots of bad actors (pun intended) were exposed and a few individuals were drawn in as collateral damage, but only a couple truly egregious offenders were sacrificed. One surmises, given decades during which the open secret of the casting couch was an easy mechanism of procurement, that other malefactors must certainly exist. Similarly, with banks and hedge funds waaaay over-leveraged in financial instruments that were designed for short-term profit leaving someone else holding the bag, only one high-profile fraud/cheater went to jail. The rest were infamously bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.

In nature, numerous organisms are known to sacrifice limbs (autotomy) during a predatory attack or self-amputate as a result of injury, which can grow back later (i.e., regenerate). This adaptive capacity is perhaps best know among reptiles but is also found with octopi, crabs, sea stars, and some insects. Not all can fully regenerate a lost limb.

So what do I expect to happen in the wake of the latest scandals? To save the spoils system, the power elite will designate a sacrificial lamb (or perhaps a few) and feed him or her (or them) to the wolves to sate the blood lust of the people. They are the limbs that can be sacrificed so that the larger organism can live to fight another day. Some argue that FDR saved capitalism in just this manner. Basically, the established pattern is a primary reason that bizarre segment of society is understood to be composed of lizard people.

Getting to Next Week

“There are decades where nothing happens and there are
weeks where decades happen.” ―Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

/rant on

How many times does a business announce its going-out-of-business sale is being extended? How ironic that a giant bolus of sales occurs just at the moment a business owner decides to call it quits and liquidate inventory only to postpone the final day because profits are rolling in at the eleventh hour. Suggests a mispricing problem, no? That’s just one relatively benign example of things happening at the eleventh hour that alter the landscape so fundamentally that a major course correction is required. Similar corrections are needed in response to revelations disclosed through a variety of media (often elided by mainstream news) nearly every day this year. No longer just the latest killing or military action, though those continue apace, now details of systemic rot provoke reconsideration of relationships between citizen and state, or alternatively, the 99% and the power elite. And it’s coming at everyone hard and fast.

From the beginning of public awareness of a huge, billowing column of smoke suggesting an inferno below (pick your catastrophe and/or conspiracy), I believed in a there there that power brokers (and their minions — lots of those) prefer to hide from view or at least explain away. The old bromide “move along, nothing to see” applies except that anyone with their eyes open can already see there is plenty to see. So much is coming to light in the past few days/weeks that I frankly can’t keep up. Data dumps and newly pubic records numbering in thousands the are out of scope for me, but crowdsourced investigations and analyses process the information with surprising celerity, causing many exposed parties to run for cover. (Resignations and decisions not to seek office don’t make scandals go away.) The pace and depth of discovery put me in mind of my 9-year-old blog post What Fresh New Hell? that decried my inability to process the daily news grind, to course correct my thinking in real time. Although I’m not part of the so-called precariat struggling with ongoing living expenses, I wonder if simply getting to next week in terms of news and/or opinion hasn’t also become a losing battle against the Red Queen Effect.

The worst revelations astound me. I simply can’t get my head around them and deposit them in the wooly-eyed category: too far beyond the pale to be plausible. Truly nasty, depraved events and people are scattered throughout history, but in the postwar period (i.e., since WWII), I had hoped that radically improved quality of life characterized by technological abundance and cessation of suffering would render craven jostling and criminality unnecessary. (Psychological burdens are paradoxically far greater than in the past.) Yet for charismatic psychopaths pushed to the acme of various hierarchies, the chase must never end. Turns out Whac-A-Mole isn’t just an arcade game for kids; it’s a distillation of an enduring part of human nature.

/rant off

New and Noteworthy Architecture

I’ve been an avid reader for years of James Howard Kunstler’s Monthly Eyesore tab on his website, now part of his Substack. Kunstler first came to my attention because of his 2005 book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (didn’t read it, but I understood it was principally about the moribund concept of peak oil and secondarily about the giant overextension of industrial civilization in the fossil fuel era). His 1994 book The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (also not read) established his authority with regard to architectural design and criticism, noting that the buildout of the suburbs (U.S. cities, and one supposes, those abroad) following white flight from city centers was the “greatest misallocation of funds” in the history of mankind. That contention might be arguable in light of money directed to creating our own replacements much as peak oil hasn’t manifested on schedule as expected.

CNN (online) ran a techno-narcisist-optimist feature timed for release on the first day of 2026 to run down a list of “projects set to shape the world.” That’s a charitable framing considering the crisis of affordability in housing shaping the world right now — something far more important to priced-out demographic segments than flamboyant architecture. The Olympic Village in Milan, Italy, created to house athletes, is intended to be transformed into student housing after the 2026 Winter Olympics is over, but I would not be surprised if that plan is quietly altered late in the game. None of the other projects is even remotely related to housing except for one ultrarich project in NYC. The rest are grand, eye-catching prestige projects (not including the Obama Presidential Bunker Library, which looks like an oversized pillbox). Which are necessary and which are essentially masturbatory is debatable.

In a former era, it was far easier to be innocently gobsmacked with admiration for super-scale architectural prowess (spires and towers, supertall buildings, stadia, etc.) even though ancient megalithic structures easily put modern construction to shame. Infrastructure projects (primarily transit hubs such as airports and train lines and stations) possess less glamor but greater functionality while serving regular people. Searching online for construction projects in Chicago reveals developments and renovations proceeding in fits and starts, largely due to troublesome financing. For instance, multiple sites are being proposed for new stadia for both the Chicago Bears and the Chicago White Sox even though their current homes are perfectly serviceable, not decrepit. Gotta keep up with other cities, I guess. Work has already begun to refurbish the disastrous Thompson Center and nearby State & Lake “L” Station, both of which have handsome artist’s rendering that probably oversell their appeal. Nice to see that housing is mixed into new Chicago projects, though those garnering the most attention are megaprojects such as 400 Lake Shore Drive (reusing the site of the failed Fordham/Chicago Spire project — nothing approaching affordable there). In fairness, undue attention does not accrue to small projects like single-family homes or condo buildings of four storeys or fewer. Planning for and building a livable future (at smaller scale) vs. living large amongst multibillion-dollar projects is a difficult balance to strike given the developer impulse to go big while that possibility persists for a while longer.

Modes of Discussion

In interviews, debates, and commentaries filmed for and uploaded to YouTube, three basic options are available when it comes time for one to speak: (1) fundamental agreement, (2) qualified disagreement, and (3) flat denial. Let me discuss each in turn.

Yes, and … The preferred option when agreement is reached but there may be more to add. One might object that preaching to the choir and reaching concord is not especially worthwhile or entertaining. However, no one knows everything about everything and even when agreement has been found plenty of ways exist to reinforce, extrapolate, and interpret implications.

Yeah, but … A head fake where assent is signaled, often in bad faith, only to move immediately to areas of disagreement. A principled disagreement can be had without concessions, and the yeah portion may be a steel-manned restatement of an argument from the opposite side of the table, but the meat and potatoes portion is discord, often performative nonsense.

You’re an idiot! An accusation substituting for an argument from the TV show House. High points earned for theatricality. A follow-up argument may ensue, but the exchange is already ruined at that point because at least one interlocutor is put back on his or her heels.

Especially in news interviews, the second option is legion. Anchors refuse to conceded any points of agreement but rather pivot immediately to the next “what about …?” to spring traps on interview subjects and score presumed “gotchas!” It’s exhausting, unhelpful, and uninformative but commonly regarded as “hard hitting,” whatever that means. Those who fail to push back on idea laundering come across as unprepared or intellectually outclassed if indeed the responsibility and point of an interview is to refuse to let questionable ideas skate by. Attacking interview subjects from behind the anchor desk or in tit-for-tat attacks and counter-attacks in a debate may well convince those in the cheap seats who come for exploits but not to learn anything. Also, debate as a mechanism for revealing deeper truths is heavily oversold.

Ideally, in the ebb and flow of a conversation or interview that isn’t merely an extended harangue, each of these modes will appear situationally. That’s a generous expectation of good-faith presentation and unpacking of ideas, which is regrettably not very common. Far more prevalent is narrative management by parties whose agendas are not hidden from view but presented baldly and brazenly as duh! obvious. Takes a good bit of wherewithal to withstand such a rhetorical onslaught, not least because, as a hypersocial species, humans intuitively sync and become entrained in others’ movements, thoughts, and emotions forming consensus and social compacts. In that regard, cognition is distributed across a network, though I caution it does not rise to the level of mass mind or collective consciousness except under unusually stressful circumstances when masses form into mobs.

Empire Planners

[G]overnment officials have an amazing capacity not to learn. Their “solution” is
always to show resolve through military and/or police action. Nothing is “won,”
nothing is achieved, and the main product is more blood in the streets. —William Astore

As history wears on, I admit to being pretty amazed how many initiatives the Powers That Be cook up are based on old recipes. Thus, liberalism has morphed into neoliberalism, colonialism has become neocolonialism, monarchy and aristocracy have been exchanged (some places anyway) by corporate overlords, and slavery has … well … not changed very much. People may not be property anymore (exceptions hidden from view); they are instead indebted and indentured for entire lifetimes. The pretense is that one can lift oneself out of slavery and buy one’s freedom if only enough money is marshaled and paid to one’s de facto owners, but impediments are everywhere and notoriously difficult to overcome unless one is connected and/or protected somehow.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been in the news recently following its annual meeting, which this time around included a serious dressing down by members of the Trump Administration who asserted, for better or worse, that American sovereignty and interests will no longer be coordinated with or subservient to multinational organizations such as WEF, WHO, UN, and NATO. If the U.S. can make withdrawal from international agreements stick beyond the current administration, I would be surprised. More likely they will either be undone by the next administration (or the next swing of the political pendulum) or succeed in uniting the world (all those middle powers suffering mightily under depredations of one or more great powers) against the U.S. But the real surprise going largely unnoticed is that these groups and the U.S. are nonetheless busy enacting plans for world governance and Western domination formulated in the first half of the 20th century. The names and details of initiatives change over time as the public gets wind of maniacal concentration of power and forced forfeiture of freedoms. It’s frankly amazing that warmed-over plans so commonly stem from a relatively brief time period (immediately before and after WWII) when Axis powers had been defeated and a good portion of the world map was soft and malleable, open to being carved up into spheres of influence according to the desires of the victorious Allied powers. The two principal examples of which I’m aware are the Technate of America and the Greater Israel Project. Others lurk beneath the surface.

Empires throughout recorded history rise and fall with some inevitability, those the intervals are uneven. Many books and analyses have been written on the subject and I have no particular insights into the megalomania that would prompt individuals or organizations to seek unobstructed dominance over large portions of the map. Two individuals whose successes were legion but legacies are now regarded with disdain are Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Faded or lost political and/or economic entities include ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the Dutch West India Company and (British) East India Company, the British Empire, and now the unacknowledged American Empire. Attempts to shore up and reassert the American Empire are clearly underway, many of which appear to be aggressive, overweening, and flatly illegal according to international law. Remains to be seen if the American Empire can withstand larger cycles of decline and social disintegration all pointing to eventual collapse.

Collective Nouns (redux)

I take special notice of things in written language that appear infrequently in speech. Among them are archaic words, neologisms, and collective nouns. The latter has a subset called terms of venery identifying groups of animals, some of which are quite strange:

• a shrewdness of apes
• a bike of bees
• an intrusion of cockroaches

More broadly, collective nouns gather groups of things metaphorically into a unity. I’m partial to new collective nouns that demonstrate creativity and meme-worthiness. I’ve coined a few in the past, including a plague of conveniences, though I drew no attention to it as a collective noun. The newest one I might suggest (without expectation it will ever be adopted) is this:

• a pharmacy of knowledge (substituting for a wealth of knowledge)

The idea behind it is metaphorical pills one might take to reveal knowledge: red pill (unsettling truth), blue pill (comforting fantasy or illusion), black pill (nihilistic pessimism), and white pill (shiny optimism). There may well be others. The pill metaphor springs primarily from The Matrix (1999), a hugely influential science fiction film that divides reality into an elaborate, glamorous virtual reality spun up by a supercomputer and a real world of deprivation and servitude hidden from perception unless one opts for the red pill. Presumably, only a select few are ever given the option; the masses slumber inside the illusion. Characters in the movie can move between realities. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave may be the first written suggestion that humans are fundamentally separated from a wider reality and can only understand experience as shadows cast against a cave wall by the light of a fire.

Many other versions of the allegory can be found, but the basic finding is that humans are essentially starved of true information and only get derivations or (re)representations allowed by the limited sensory apparatuses of biology. Thus, the world of experience is but a pageant. Worse, depending on which pill one takes (or as a result of inborn character), bias is adopted that further distorts the truth. As one attempts to discard fetters and biases, closer approximations of truth may perhaps be revealed, but fullness of knowledge (i.e., omniscience) can never be obtained. Some chafe against this finding while other putter along in relative equanimity. Yet everyone is to varying degrees ignorant.

Offered Without Comment 44

Another from Jared Yates Sexton’s book The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis (2023):

This framing of Western civilization as the pinnacle of human achievement placed the dominion of European man at the center of the universe, and science as a means of harnessing the will of God. Nothing could be allowed to delay the march of progress, whether it was the fate of enslaved and oppressed peoples or the destruction of the natural world. Facts and empirical evidence made little difference. Whereas revelatory knowledge had once been the cornerstone of religion, science in the name of “progress” now became a faith all its own and the rewards of its pursuit nothing short of paradise. [p. 73]