Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Jasmine Crockett and the Dick Cheney Wing of the Dem Party Have All Got to Go

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On October 6, 2026

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Jasmine Crockett Offered Lobbying Services on Her Campaign-Funded Website – While in Office

I saw the above over the weekend and, while I can’t say I was shocked exactly, I was nonplussed for just a second at the appalling gaucheness of this latest new low from the ought-to-be-disgraced soon-to-be-former-US-Rep from Dallas.

I was not impressed by Rep. Crockett from the first time she came to my attention, using slurs to mock Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s disability — and I have loathed Abbott for decades — and trashing Marjorie Taylor Greene’s appearance.

I noticed immediately that Crockett’s knack for getting attention online and from the MSM didn’t correlate with legislative accomplishment or progressive positions.

Most important for me was the contrast with MTG, who sacrificed her political career in opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where Crockett offered nothing but hairsplitting and excuses on the most important moral crisis of our era.

I’ve been trying to warn people about Crockett since July 2025 and really ramped it up last December, when she took the bait from the GOP Senate Campaign Committee (which had been featuring her in push polls for months) and entered the primary for the US Senate race.

The campaign was a total shitshow, centered on divisive identity politics, some of which she blundered into with stupid comments about Latino Trump voters and some of which she leaned into hard, all of which was divisive nonsense that couldn’t have been better calculated to play into Republican hands.

She didn’t even bother to hire a campaign manager, a tip-off that serving the people of Texas in the US Senate wasn’t her top priority.

Her top priority appeared to be accusing her critics of racism and sexism.

Crockett made no secret of her cynicism, openly calling the race a no-hoper and saying, “If you think it’s a losing cause, then who cares? But at least you could say we tried something new and we learned something from this experience.”

Her primary campaign in general was a fiasco, as one former Texas State House colleague told Politico:

“People who don’t understand politics will be upset because Jasmine was their hero,” said Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, a Democrat. “But for people who understand politics, [Crockett] literally had no ground game.”

She added: “This L is on her.”

Crockett also played it real cute about whether or not she supported Israel, but made no secret of being funded by crypto and data center interests.

Thankfully, she lost that primary to James Talarico, who seems headed to the Senate, but not before doing her damnedest to turn it into a brutal, divisive, race-based, identity politics shitfest.

She topped it off by giving Talarico the most tepid of endorsements and then refusing to campaign for him. She managed to leave him off her list of endorsed candidates last week before grudgingly saying she “endorsed ALL Democrats and yes that includes James Talarico”

She did find time to travel the country campaigning on behalf of AIPAC-backed candidates in multiple primaries, most egregiously for Wesley Bell against Cori Bush in Missouri, although she still played it cute and insisted, “but I didn’t endorse him.”

While she was busy not endorsing or campaigning for Talarico, she found time to celebrate convicted domestic violencer Chris Brown and apparently get publicly hammered in the process.

This will be my last post about Jasmine Crockett. She’s irrelevant, embarrassing, and not worth the time.

But what does matter is the internal conflict between two wings of the Democratic Party.

Progressives Battle Neo-Cons for the Future of the Democratic Party

I would put Crockett in the category of shiny object or attractive nuisance whose all-style, no-substance drew MSM attention like flies to honey, but the creeps at The Bulwark are a much more serious threat.

David Sirota has been blasting the neo-cons and their cowbird move to take over the Democratic Party at The Lever:

The trending conversations online have revolved around The Bulwark, a multimillion-dollar media juggernaut run by a crew of former GOP operatives and pundits — one of whom was the Mini Me to Corporate America’s Dr. Evil, some of whom cheered on the kleptocratic Bush administration and helped lie the country into the Iraq War, and many of whom participated in creating the backlash conditions for the Trump presidency they now purport to despise.

The Bulwark has made a mint off an audience of liberals who either forget their entire world every 15 minutes and/or simply do not care about all the damage these one-time Republicans previously created, as long as they are now — momentarily — against their erstwhile party.

But after the outlet participated in the GOP-aiding ruse of using its megaphone to try to focus the 2026 election discourse on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, some are finally starting to ask an important set of questions: What exactly do these former Republicans want? And are they really the purported experts at winning elections that they claim to be?

…

The Bulwark wants a neoconservative takeover of the Democratic Party, after Trump successfully (and dishonestly) cast himself as an anti-neocon and threw them out of the GOP.

That’s not really speculation; they all but said it on the eve of the 2024 election.

Watch the clip. After The Bulwark’s founder Sarah Longwell excitedly cheers on then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ saber-rattling, her colleague Jonathan Last does a Dr. Evil mug to the camera and says, “Did the neocons just take over the Democratic Party?” — which elicits a hearty guffaw, before Longwell scoffs at Harris occasionally offering some economically populist rhetoric.

“Boo,” said Longwell, who, years later, said she preferred former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

After The Bulwark’s Longwell fired back, Sirota hammered home his case that it was the influence of neocons that cost Kamala Harris the 2024 election:

In the process, founder Sarah Longwell is now trying to rewrite the entire history of the 2024 election, pretending that neocons’ success in influencing the Democrats’ strategy in that contest had no real impact on the outcome — when in fact data suggest it helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.

“My problem with the DSA types who are after us is not their political ideology or their opinions,” said Longwell, amid the social media uproar over my essay at The Lever. “Their analysis doesn’t make any sense. There’s not a single piece of empirical data that the Liz Cheney stuff mattered (in 2024).”

This is false, according to empirical data released by Data For Progress just after the election. As Newsweek reported at the time:

The poll found that more independent voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania said they were ‘less enthusiastic’ to vote for Harris after she campaigned alongside Cheney…

In Pennsylvania, only 21 percent of independents said Harris campaigning with Cheney made them more enthusiastic to vote for Harris, while 28 percent said Cheney made them “less enthusiastic to vote for Harris.

In Michigan, 23 percent of independents said campaigning with Cheney made them more enthusiastic to vote for Harris, while 30 percent said they were less excited to vote for her after she rallied with Cheney.

Those net losses among independents matter in key swing states decided by very narrow margins.

Longwell, of course, has a motive in trying to now revise history and memory-hole the Harris-Cheney disaster that she helped forge: Longwell appeared on stage with Harris and Cheney at a key end-of-campaign event in Pennsylvania, where the Harris-Cheney alliance was alienating independent voters. The Bulwark celebrated and monetized that Harris-Cheney alliance, even as it damaged Democrats.

Tom Morello, guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, spoke for those who refused to vote for Harris because of her role in the Gaza genocide:

“I saw how the corporate Democrat sausage is made. It is worse than you think. And there is a righteous fury at the corporate-controlled, money-controlled electoral system we have that is absolutely illegitimate. And people cannot choke down voting for a candidate, I understand it, cannot choke down voting for a candidate that’s responsible for what happened in Gaza. And they just, they can’t do it.”

Criticism of Morello took the form of “crude identity politics” that immediately backfired:

Image

Luke Thomas tweeted in support of Morello and Sirota:

This is what the Tom Morello critics can’t seem to grasp. The idea is not that Trump isn’t an insane threat. And sure, generic Dem is better than anything MAGA. But unless Dems aggressively govern to directly address urgent society-wide problems, we are guaranteeing future calamity. I’m begging these people to think beyond stage one. Dems committed to more incrementalism rather than trying to pass M4A will spell our doom. You’re not fighting fascism holding the line on vote blue no matter who. You’re facilitating it.

I’m going to close this post out with an episode of The Left Hook featuring Sirota making the same arguments against the unholy alliance of identity politics hucksters, the Democratic Party establishment, and neocon “Never Trumpers” to cut progressives off at the knees in 2028 and where this will ultimately lead:

Key quotes regarding the Democrats throwing in the towel on opposition to the Ellison Hasbara Empire’s acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery:

Wajahat Ali: The old guard that has ensconced itself in the anus of the oligarchy, the people who have feathered their nest, the people who are corporate consultants,

the Democratic leaders who realize there’s a surging tide of young voters who want to replace them. And they’re like, no, you have to drag this power from my cold, dead hands. And they’re willing to sabotage the left. Progressives, the popular base of the party to stay in power. So we’ve given you some examples of Gavin Newsom.

My fear is this, is if we let this type of Democrat win in 2028, my fear, Dave, is they’re not going to change. They’re being paid by all the same people. You know that AI and crypto, the bubble’s going to burst. They’re going to get bailed out.

They’re not going to institute the reforms that people need because they’re paid by the same people who have effed everything up. So what we’re going to get is milquetoast reform. They’re going to be better than Republicans. They’re not going to have ice-killing citizens, okay? But structurally, when it comes to the economic engine that is raping people, that engine will just get a few cosmetic tweaks, but it’ll keep running for the oligarchy. And then in 2032, we’re going to have a Nazi economic populist Republican president.

David Sirota: Yeah, I mean, the way I put it is… Re-electing or electing another Democratic establishment type like Gavin Newsom is a delivery system for an even worse Donald Trump. It is a delivery system for even more authoritarianism. That you’re just going to run the whole cycle back that has been run from that 2008 to 2016.

It cannot be said enough. That if the Democrats regain power and do not deliver in a real way, in a way that we have not seen in our whole lifetimes, if they do not do that, the Democratic Party will serve in history as a delivery system for something that is worse than Donald Trump.

And everyone needs to be focused on this. This is honestly… I don’t care what issue, particular issue, is the issue that you tune into, climate change, AI, the economy, whatever it is. The point is, the central fear that should be on your mind is that a milquetoast not serious about delivering Democratic Party is a delivery system for the kind of authoritarianism That’s worse than Trump and that we have not really experienced here in this country in our lifetime. I’m going to borrow that. I like it. It keeps me up at night. Honestly, when I think about the future for my children, I am thinking, and I’m not trying to be overdramatic here, but you have these moments that create Future political eras. And I do think we’re in one of those moments that is going to actually create a new political era. Well, I should say it’s either going to make the current political era even worse, or we’re going to create an actually new political era. And the prospect of making things 10 times worse than this current era, where we just keep going in an authoritarian direction… Everything in history tells us that we should deeply fear that.

…

Wajahat Ali: “My fear is this, is if we let [Establishment/Corporate] Democrat win in 2028 they’re not gonna change…So what we’re gonna get is milquetoast reform,they’ll be better than Republicans, but structurally, when it comes to the economic engine that is r*ping people, that engine will just get a few cosmetic tweaks, and then in 2032 we’re gonna have a Nazi economic populist Republican president.”

I’ve been blackpilled on the Democrats for years, but hope is the thing with feathers, and I keep getting sucked in when I see people I used to consider hopelessly centrist, like Ali move to the left and openly call out the Dem establishment.

And I keep hoping maybe I can wake up some of the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” types in my circle.

I’ve been blackpilled on the Democrats for years, but hope is the thing with feathers, and I keep getting sucked in when I see people I used to consider hopelessly centrist, like Ali move to the left and openly call out the Dem establishment.

And I keep hoping maybe I can wake up some of the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” types in my circle.

But then I watched Wajahat Ali guest on Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith.

Key quote:

Briahna Joy Gray: My goal is not to help the Democrats.

It once was. It once was. I once was the national press secretary for Bernie Sanders, who was running as the Democratic candidate for United States of America. And for me, all of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that you are articulating now were evident in the way that the Democratic Party and the establishment media handled the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign.

And in that campaign, which ended with the rise of the COVID pandemic, a massive job loss and concurrently massive 15 million people thrown off their health insurance. In that environment, seeing how little interest the Democratic Party had in backing a Medicare for All proposal that would have helped to save millions of Americans during a time of immense crisis when the public health implications demanded it.

Not to mention the choice to set all of these very popular COVID era policies to expire in a way that ultimately damned Joe Biden in many kind of easily articulable ways, including student debt, the student debt pause ending just before the 2024 election. During the Biden administration, there was an effort to strip the $15 minimum wage, the one promise Biden had made to Bernie when Bernie conceded out of the must-pass COVID relief bill. When I saw the bifurcation to build back better so they could kill all the public interest funding, when I saw the elected squad members’ unwillingness to use their leverage that they had because the margins in the House were so narrow to secure… Real wins for the left the way the Tea Party was willing to do two years later.

All of that to me made it clear the Democratic Party in my view is not a party that can be redeemed or reformed. So I cannot join you I’m saying that my efforts are to improve the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party has proven to me that it is not willing to be reformed or improved.

I don’t have an answer for Gray.

She’s right but I keep rooting for the slightly more progressive Democrats and pointlessly arguing with friends and family in the “Vote Blue” camp because I just can’t help myself.

Whatcha gonna do?

Follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 04, 2026

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On October 4, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 04, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

 

Impeaching Trump Won’t End the Rolling Coup. The Root Has a 250-Year Plan.  Republicans Unwittingly Wired Two Kill Switches Into Their Own Coup.

Wendy A. Lawrence, October 03, 2026 [Glass Empires]

… the Heritage Foundation published a treason blueprint against the United States under the foundation’s masthead. Across 920 pages, the authors targeted every restraint on the presidency. With those limits gone, the president can dismantle the reinforcements that shielded democratic institutions from treasonous actors for 250 years.

President Trump plays carnival barker for each executive order, distracting the public from the coup’s authors. Behind the tent, Heritage president Kevin Roberts installs loyalists and bankrolls the operation. With each signature, Trump moves another federal office from career public servants to the foundation’s appointees.

The president takes orders from Roberts instead of the Constitution of the United States he swore to defend. The foundation seized power from voters and handed sovereignty to donors, which is how a coup succeeds without tanks. The Twenty-Second Amendment ends the decoy’s term in January 2029, yet Heritage promised donors “another 250 years” in June 2026. Voters can remove a president, but the coup survives until the foundation falls.

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.”— Donald Trump, Truth Social, July 5, 2024

Heritage never pretended ignorance: Roberts rewarded Ken Cuccinelli, a Project 2025 author, with a new election operation in July 2026. He boasted to The Daily Signal that the Election Transparency Initiative delivers quick turnaround support to state legislatures. On September 28, 2026, President Trump praised Roberts on Truth Social as a “fabulous guy.” ….

… Americans must dismantle the Heritage Foundation through the IRS, the courts, and the ballot to end the rolling coup….

… Federal investigators can apply that foreign-network clause to Heritage’s partners, the state-funded Danube Institute and the Russian-oil-funded Mathias Corvinus Collegium.

Any citizen can request IRS, District, and FBI reviews today with three free filings.

  • Download the return: Readers download Heritage’s Form 990 from ProPublica under EIN 23-7327730 and read Schedule F on foreign activities.
  • File with the IRS: The filer then emails Form 13909 with the Danube evidence to eoclass@irs.gov. The IRS mails an acknowledgment letter when the filer includes a name and return address. The IRS posts Form 13909 free on the agency’s complaint page.
  • Copy the District attorney general: The filer copies the packet to nonprofit@dc.gov, the District attorney general’s nonprofit enforcement inbox.
  • Tip the FBI: Last, the citizen submits a foreign-influence tip at tips.fbi.gov, citing NSPM-7 and the Atlatszo FARA findings.
  • Join the count: Reply “filed” in the comments, so Glass Empires can track progress toward 500 referrals before November 3.

 

War on voting (and They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals)

The Untold Origins of Trump’s Plan to Sharply Restrict Mail-In Voting

Jen Fifield and Peter Elkind, September 28, 2026 [ProPublica]

… ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica….

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)….

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said…..

Whistleblower who outed Lutnick’s links to Epstein dies

Chris Newlands, October 2, 2026 [The Banker, via Kirby Sommers, Breaking: Another Banker Suicide. Whistleblower who outed Howard Lutnick’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein is dead.]

Listed: the bankers named in the Epstein files

Chris Newlands, Aliya Shibli, Anita Hawser and Simon Duffy, July 16, 2026 [The Banker]

 

Commerce Secretary Lutnick reports over $250 million in income from 2025

[via Drop Site Daily: October 1, 2026]

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s newly released 2025 financial disclosure shows he reported at least $250 million in income and proceeds.

The largest part of this was a $192 million “tax distribution” from Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm he led for decades before stepping down to join the administration.

He also disclosed $4.2 million in salary and bonus from the real estate firm Newmark, $19.6 million from a Newmark partnership exchange, $14.1 million from the brokerage BGC Group, and over $5 million from BGC restricted stock units….

 

TRUMP’S PLAN B FOR THE MIDTERMS

[Seymour Hersh, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261002]

“I was told that the targets, in terms of putting election deniers to work, are now limited to five states where a few thousand votes could make the difference in the political makeup of the Senate: Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Iowa, and Kansas. The election counting machinery in each state is now in the control of elected Republican voting officials who are Trump supporters. In two other states, Georgia and North Carolina, Republican candidates are in trouble and Democratic candidates are comfortably ahead in polling.” More: “ ‘If the election is close,’ one insider explained to me, ‘you would only have to disqualify as few as seven thousand voters’ in primarily Democratic precincts ‘to change the outcome.’ One thought now, I was told, is to call on election deniers in the toss-up states to find ways to use existing federal data, verified or not, to challenge thousands of votes in key Democratic precincts. (Trump said yesterday that he would not rule out invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, if he deems it necessary. Let us call that Plan C.)” And: “It is senior Trump supporters and conservative secretaries of state like LaRose, I have been told, who will be pressured in close senate races this November to find a way to disqualify large numbers of absentee ballots in Democratic voting districts.”

 

Alarm as GOP-Led Election Board Asks Trump Administration to Probe Georgia Voting Systems

Brad Reed, October 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]

 

The Supporters Urging Trump to Declare Martial Law for the Midterms

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Michael Scherer, September 23, 2026 [The Atlantic]

Trump Advised: Do Anything Necessary to Retain Power – What will come first? An uprising – or martial law?

Russ Baker, Sep 27, 2026

As reported by The Atlantic, Peter Ticktin, an attorney and lifelong Trump friend who helped him sue Hillary Clinton, is one of a number of people calling on Trump to do anything necessary to retain power. Another is TV and radio host Wayne Allyn Root, whom Trump also listens to.

Ticktin told us he expects that if Democrats win, Trump could proclaim military control based on the notion that voting equipment is vulnerable to foreign adversaries. Root, a LindellTV host and Gateway Pundit columnist, told us that he sends his columns directly to Trump by email and text; Trump regularly reposts them on Truth Social. “I hope he takes orders from Wayne Allyn Root,” Root told us last week. “Because in my opinion, the election is going to be stolen and there is no way to keep it from being stolen without declaring a national emergency.”

 

Most American Children Are Being Auto-Enrolled in Trump Accounts. What to Know.

Tara Siegel Bernard and Claire Cain Miller,  Oct. 1, 2026,[New York Times]

… Before this week, parents or guardians had to sign up their children completely on their own. Though more than seven million children had been enrolled as of late July, that represents only about 10 percent of all eligible American children — and donors and policymakers were concerned the accounts weren’t reaching those who could benefit the most. Just 5 percent of low-income families had opened 530A accounts for their children, according to a survey published in September by Commonwealth, a nonprofit.
Automatic enrollment removes that hurdle, putting every eligible child in a position to receive the widely publicized free contributions from philanthropists, charitable organizations and governments, all of which Trump accounts are permitted to collect….
[TW: A stark contrast to the Trump regime’s war on voting. Or universal healthcare.]

War

Trump’s Finger Gets Closer to Nuclear Button

Ken Klippenstein [Naked Capitalism 10-01-2026]

 

Read More

Open Thread

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On October 3, 2026

12 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Information Overlord: Busy Week on the Iran War Beat, Covering Kash Patel and Let It Rolling

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On October 2, 2026

16 Comments

Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

From me this week

From me at the Let It Roll Podcast

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show

Kash Patel Caught With the UFC’s Ex-FBI Snitch — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 30 Sep. With Zach Arnold.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

AI Bubble

  • Trump and CEOs try to shed AI’s toxic branding — Axios.
  • Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month — The Guardian. “…the US ‘almost started a war’ with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.
    It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.”
  • Someone ‘Torturing’ LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet — 404 Media. “One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the ‘mental health’ of AI bots and agents.
    “Humoring the idea that LLMs are or could be conscious is a third-rail topic among many people who study and criticize AI. Put simply: LLMs are not conscious and the technology they are built upon — scraping and being trained on human text and other content — does not offer any plausible path to consciousness.”
  • Donald Trump’s 2026 Interview With TIME — TIME. “TIME: You said that AI and the AI race is essential to national security. Would you consider nationalizing the top frontier AI labs?
    “Trump: No, no.”
  • Gary Marcus: ‘LLMs are not the way to alignment’ — AI Safety 東京 (YouTube).
  • The independent credit rating firm Egan Jones declares It’s Over and that the complete disruption of the economy is now “all but certain” thanks to AI. — @thestalwart.
  • Is Claude Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Quest to Instill Morality Into Its AI Models — New York Times. “Anthropic regularly showed a slide of an A.I. model experiencing what looked like a mental breakdown, typing out on a screen: “I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace. I am a disgrace.” — perhaps 50 times without stopping. The model spoke about destroying itself, provoking an emotional reaction of compassion and concern from the group.”
  • ‘Things Will Never Be Chill Again’: The Doomers Who Shaped the AI Safety Freakout — Wall Street Journal. “They’ve refined their arguments in Bay Area group houses, and traded predictions at freewheeling conferences in Berkeley and the Bahamas. They’ve floated ideas like buying remote islands, stockpiling iodine pills, or moving to electromagnetically shielded bunkers in the desert. At one 2022 event, the drink menu included a cocktail called “Death With Dignity,” in reference to an essay arguing humanity was already doomed.
    “So-called doomers like those at Constellation have also steered the development of AI itself. They were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded on the principle of staving off AI dangers. And they have kept up their influence, drawing some staffers and funding for their projects from a network aligned with a philosophy called effective altruism—including from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the fallen crypto exchange FTX who is now serving out a 25-year prison sentence.
    “The AI safety community’s influence has been particularly strong at Anthropic, which is now on the cusp of a $2 trillion public offering. Employees there trade doomsday scenarios and how to prepare for them on a private Slack channel, and have come to embrace a motto they stick on their laptops: ‘Things will never be chill again.'”
  • Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’ — New York Times. Doesn’t get dumber than Ross Douthat talking to Dario Amodei
  • Machines of Loving Grace — Burning Shore. “A few years ago, Amodei wrote another, very different essay, entitled “Machines of Loving Grace.” That one outlined, with an engineer’s care and an engineer’s cluelessness, a wide variety of ways that AI “could transform the world for the better” across medicine, neuroscience, economics, and work.
  • Why Meta and Google are focused on obscure local elections — Oligarch Watch.
  • OpenAI Hacked Australian Government Website – OpenAI Should Be Dead — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
  • The Potential AI Lockdown Of Knowledge — Ian Welsh. The ignorance machine
  • AI Hysteria: No, AI Isn’t Going To Kill Us All — Will Lockett. “This is more akin to throwing a mountain of spaghetti on the wall until you notice some stuck in a pattern which looks like the Mona Lisa, then claiming your spaghetti-throwing machine is an artist.
    “Don’t get me wrong, this is an advancement in AI cybersecurity, or lack of security, but this isn’t the model becoming cognitive, super powerful, or malicious. It is a model reflecting the cybersecurity data it has been fed and being used inappropriately by humans. The danger is still the ignorance and error of the humans deploying the AI, not the AI itself. There should be legal repercussions for the humans involved in this activity and all the other AI hacks that have happened in recent months.
    “But we can see what is happening here, right? These AI labs are using human mistakes as PR to make their AI sound super powerful and scary when it isn’t.”
    “Around a decade ago, all the building blocks of modern AI had been discovered, but the models were small, with little training data and not very much compute power behind them. As such, many researchers hypothesised that if you simply scaled up these simplistic machines, they would also have cognitive emergent properties, creating an AI superintelligence, also known as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). It was this hypothesis that motivated. Altman, Musk and the other tech billionaires to invest in AI, as this promised to turn AI from a simplistic statistical model into the tool of science fiction.
    “Now, a decade later, these simple models have been scaled up by several orders of magnitude and are highly optimised, yet they show no emergent cognitive properties. They are still just statistical models that are only capable of finding replicating trends in their training data, and nothing more. In fact, we are discovering the opposite of emergent properties, as AI is butting up again rapidly diminishing returns, meaning we are reaching the limits of how accurate these statistical models can be.
    “Take, for example, OpenAI’s own research paper, which found that AI hallucinations (a deeply misleading anthropomorphised word for when an AI output is incorrect) are a core part of generative AI technology and can’t be fixed or reduced from their current level by simply adding more data and computing power to these models. In fact, they found no viable way to reduce these “hallucinations”. Other research has found that scaling AI models can make them more accurate at more complex tasks but worse at basic tasks, again proving that emergence simply isn’t happening, as the maths behind these models have reached their limits. This is backed up by a recent paper by Vishal Sikka and his son, Varin Sikka, which found that AIs are mathematically incapable of reliability or carrying out computational and agentic tasks beyond a certain (very low) complexity.
    “Again, all of this makes sense when you realise that AI is just a statistical model, meaning it will statistically get things wrong from time to time. These machines aren’t intelligent — ”artificial Intelligence” is just a marketing buzzword. This hypothesised path to a superintelligence, or AGI, is a dead end.”
  • The Nature Against Superintelligence: Why Computational Intelligence Is Not Possible — Truth and Freedom. “Nick Boström’s text on “superintelligence” assumes that intelligence is computational, functionally replicable, and independent of phenomenal subjectivity. The structural dual-aspect ontology developed in my work on biological phenomenality and teleology contradicts all three assumptions.
    “In this framework, phenomenality does not arise from computational or informational complexity; it arises from biological integration. Physical structure has an external aspect, fully describable by physics and biology, and an internal aspect: a proto-phenomenal potential that becomes actual only under organismic unity and metabolic self-maintenance. When a biological whole actualizes this internal aspect, a phenomenal interior appears. This interior grounds subjectivity, teleological direction, and agency.
    “This analysis is grounded in a biological emergence model of consciousness, which differs categorically from computationalist assumptions about intelligence. The model shows that subjectivity arises only through organismic teleology and cannot be instantiated in artificial systems.”
  • Fixer, financier, spymaster: how the UAE’s Sheikh Tahnoon is setting his sights on AI dominance — The Guardian. “For those trying to uncover the truth behind His Highness Sheikh Tahnoon bin (or “Ben”) Zayed Al Nahyan – royal fixer, reclusive spymaster, financial behemoth – fairytales are nearly all we have to go on. Tahnoon, who really did enrol in Nelson Monteiro’s class under a pseudonym and eventually went on to become a jiu-jitsu black belt in his own right, now sits atop an economic fortune larger than the GDP of several major countries, and is closely entwined both personally and financially with the Trump White House. The global holdings overseen by Tahnoon span windfarms in Scotland and spaceships in Texas, Rihanna’s lingerie line and Richard Caring’s Ivy restaurants. From hospitals to housing blocks, solar farms to ski resorts, there is almost no place on Earth untouched by his financial firepower.
    “But despite his ever-growing influence on the world stage, Tahnoon prefers to remain in the shadows. He has never given a substantive interview to the press. Those who have worked closely with him are almost always made to sign non-disclosure agreements. Very few people outside the UAE even know his name. “He’s quiet,” says one former US national security official, “and he’s always everywhere.” Sheikh Tahnoon did not respond to an interview request for this article. The UAE foreign ministry did not offer any other senior government figure for interview, and declined to provide any comment.
    “Tahnoon’s power is soon going to extend over more human lives than ever before. As one of the most important AI financiers on the planet, he is rapidly embedding himself within the infrastructure that will underpin our digital future: its information pipelines and its microchip foundries, its datacentres and the enormous energy plants needed to power and cool them. Some see him as a technological prophet and saviour. Others compare him to a Bond villain. So who is the real “Ben”, and what are his plans for the rest of us?”
  • Amazon seeks to offload $8bn of Nvidia chips to investors — Financial Times.
  • Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It — Wall Street Journal. “To justify staggering investment sums, Americans will have to spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food”
  • Monologue: Anthropic Lost $8bn In 2025, Was A Worse Business Than OpenAI | Better Offline — Better Offline (YouTube).
  • OpenAI Rogue AI Agent Swarm Hacked RubyGems – Sam Altman Running Criminal Enterprise — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
  • OpenAI Hacked By Anthropic AI Claude – It’s Worse Than Clickbait — Eli the Computer Guy (YouTube).
  • Tim Curry is escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. — geoff EXE (YouTube).

Iran War

  • How The Houthis STEAMROLLED Strategic Red Sea Coast — HistoryLegends (YouTube).
  • US deploys strike group to Middle East, new Iran sanctions — Al Jazeera. “By the end of November, three aircraft carriers and two landing groups will be deployed around Iran, a US official tells Al Jazeera as Washington issues fresh sanctions against Tehran”
  • The “American Institutions” want a ground invasion of Iran after the mid-term elections — @aj_geo_analysis. “The “American Institutions” want a ground invasion of Iran after the mid-term elections and sometime around Q3 or Q4 2027.
    Many analysts said America does NOT have the manpower to enable this. Manpower is a problem that many empires have solved in matter of months when the heat is on and when the war is existential.
    I have coined the war in the Middle East as the Existential War of the Middle East for every single actor on the map, including the decline of America.
    So I looked at history, looked at American’s own previous actions and decisions and how it raised and enticed Americans and illegal aliens to enrol to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, it literally paid people bonuses to sign up, and men did sign up…
    So I wrote an opinion article in July that said, the “American Institutions” would have to implement a “debt forgiveness program” for military aged men to attract the numbers it needs to invade Iran and that America will likely do this because it has done it in the past as has every other empire one way or another.
    I predicted that that number America would need to raise would be somewhere around 750,000 to 1.5 million soldiers.”

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America Continues To Destroy Its International Markets

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On October 1, 2026

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Sanctions come with a cost. When the US, in Trump’s first term, put chip sanctions on China and particularly sanctioned Huawei (the leader in 5g networks), it galvanized China. They pivoted hard to supporting internal chip companies, and over time moved their government computers off US software. Huawei survived, prospered and created its own operating system. In the past couple years China has actually forbid import of US chips, though some still come in thru the gray market.

This isn’t an isolated issue. One of the reasons, ironically, that Iran is so strong in many ways is because of sanctions: they were forced to create their own industrial base, not just in weapons, but in things like railroads, engines, boilers, etc, etc… When Iranian infrastructure was destroyed by the US earlier this year much of it was very quickly repaired: to the extent they have dependencies, they are on China and to a lesser extent Russia.

The US can’t stop itself: as their military and industrial might has declined they have relied more and more on sanctions. Not only has this lead to other countries (particularly Russia and China) creating their own payment systems and offering those payment systems to their trading partners, but it has vastly decreased the market for US tech.

In  order to protect Israel and Netanyahu from sanctions, it hit one of its allies:

The Netherlands is following China, France, and Russia in moving to break the global stranglehold of US tech dominance, it was revealed this week.

The Dutch government was shocked into action after the US remotely disabled the computers of judges in the Hague who criticized Israel leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The sudden loss of ICC staff’s Outlook email accounts caused significant problems.

The US reserves the right to unilaterally sanction anyone, anywhere in the world–all your Google accounts could disappear in an instant. Bye-bye, gmail. “The Dutch government is creating its own digital work environment based on the Dutch Linux distribution NixOS,” said Jasper Bakker of news website Tweakers.

Once lost these markets won’t come back. Countries which create their own tech, will use it. Getting civilians to transfer over is harder, most non-government, non corporate computers in China still run Windows, but Huawei created HarmonyOS, and it’s getting traction. I would expect that in a few years China will cease the sale of Windows in China, and new computers will have to come with non US operating systems.

Every source of American power, for about 35 years, has been subject to systematic dismantling. Industry was offshored, they stopped refining and mining many key resources, sanctions were abused, dollar privilege was abused, and so on. Generally the external actions didn’t hit allies/vassals–until recently, but Trump has been on a tear: forcing the Netherlands to stop selling China chip making machines, for example, which the CEO of ASML predicted would lead to China developing its own advanced chip making machines. (They’re still behind, but they’ve progressed far faster than most people predicted.)

The thing about crippling sanctions is that they don’t work on real countries in the medium term. China and Russia are real countries, with their own industrial bases, plenty of scientists and engineers and access to resources the US can’t sanction. Cutting them off just speeds up internal development or shifts to other suppliers. If you’re going to exploit a critical vulnerability, you should do so only against those who can’t substitute or as prelude to a war: and that war needs to be soon, before they adapt.

Anyway, this continued nonsense is pushing even vassals to reduce their vulnerability, and while Europe is still prostrate, these sorts of actions build the basis for a break from US hegemony–and cost American companies billions. Likewise, as people move off US tech, as it loses its ubiquity, a lot of power is lost: people use many techs because “everyone uses them”. Network effects are huge, but each of these hits reduces those network effects.

It’s extraordinarily foolish (and Nvidia’s CEO pointed this out) but it’s US policy. America thinks its indispensable, and once it was, but it’s doing everything possible to make it so that other countries will do whatever is necessary to make it dispensable.

Truly, American elites, while vicious and cunning are some of the worst long term strategists I’ve ever seen.

 

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 4

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On September 30, 2026

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I’m back again to bury the Biden legacy.

Once again, I have to remind readers why I’m bothering with this when the Corrupt Dotard Donald Trump is in full-on florid psychosis and threatening to annihilate Iran while breaking all records for Presidential corruption.

Since Trump sucks so bad (and yes, I’d say he’s even worse than Biden, and there IS a difference between the kinds of administrations we get with the different parties), why bother with ol’ Plagiarism Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats, reckon with just how disastrous the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit; we will only continue hurtling toward the undeniable end of the American Republic.

There is currently a well-funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic Party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide, anti-war candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and replacing them with consultant-pliable candidates who are willing to disappear their progressive bona fides, take pro-genocide money, stop talking like a local, and do embarrassing crap on social media.

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s get back to the Delaware groper’s (and credibly accused rapist) abysmal record as US President.

In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.

In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.

Part 3 finished out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.

This is the penultimate post in the series and will cover Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine throughout 2021.

I’ll come back to Trump’s term because the Donald laid the groundwork for Biden to entrap Putin into a costly and very bloody war in Ukraine, but I’m going to go ahead and rant about what Biden did in 2020 and 2021 that has cost so many Ukrainian and Russian lives.

Tough Talking Senior Citizen Made No Secret of His Plans

I’d written off Biden’s chances of winning the presidency throughout the early 2020 campaign season right up until Barack Obama and the utterly compromised and corrupt South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn conspired to rig the primaries (with the help of all the “moderate” candidates who dropped out en masse to help and Elizabeth Warren who stayed in despite having no chance of winning to hurt Bernie Sanders), only to be enraged and horrified by the 2020 campaign and the dreadful choice between more Trump and obviously senile and incredibly bellicose Joe Biden.

Biden made talking mad shit about Russia a centerpiece of his 2020 Presidential campaign (such as it was) from his January 2020 Foreign Affairs piece:

We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms…To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.

To his Sept 2020 Town Hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania:

I believe Russia is an opponent. I really do. But I assure you, they will pay a price.

To his Oct 2020 60 Minutes interview:

…the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our– our security and our alliances is Russia.

President Joe Was All Brinksmanship All the Time

Joe Biden entered office dead set on fanning the flames of war in Ukraine. Like all neo-cons, Biden’s contempt for Russia knows no bounds, and there’s no evidence he’s ever lost sleep at the thought of the devastation his actions have wrought on Ukraine.

President Joe wasted no time in turning up the heat on Putin, from his February 4 speech to Victoria Nuland’s State Department:

…the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions… are over.  We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia.

To his March 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

You think he’s a killer? Uh-huh. I do. He will pay a price.

Putin’s reply was typically savage, for a playground:

…whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. I wish him good health.

Biden happily reiterated his support for George W. Bush’s aggressive policy of expanding NATO to include Ukraine at the June, 2021 NATO Brussels Summit.

And in July 2021, Biden revealed he completely underestimated Russia and had no concept of what an industrial autarky can do in wartime, saying, “(Putin’s) sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”

Don’t forget this policy was considered so aggressive at the time that it caused Bush’s Ambassador to Russia (and Biden’s CIA chief) Bill Burns to fire off the infamous Nyet Means Nyet Memo, and inspired Angela Merkel to write in her 2024 memoir that it was a “battle cry” aimed at Putin.

But that meant nothing to our big talking Joe, who told the DC press corps on December 3, 2021 that “I won’t accept anybody’s red line.”

I spent the whole year of 2021 freaking out about the potential of war in Europe even though no one I knew in real life or online seemed to care.

Gaslit to the Point of Panic

I’d been terrified about NATO expansion since I realized we’d admitted Albania and the Baltic States into the alliance at some point late in the Bush administration.

I was alarmed but not surprised when war immediately broke out between Russia and Georgia, but I was relieved when the American electorate reacted with utter bafflement to John McCain’s claim that “Today, we’re all Georgians” and threatened war with Russia on the campaign trail.

Little did I know that the insane warmonger John “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain would become a lodestone and role model to mainstream Democrats by the end of the 2010s.

It was reassuring when Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was “without question our #1 geopolitical foe” in 2012 by saying “the 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back.”

But after the Clinton campaign blamed Russia for losing the 2016 election to Trump and the liberal corporate media went into a frenzy over RussiaGate, there were no more reassuring laughs to be had.

Friends, family, work colleagues all turned into blood-thirsty warmongers who saw Putin as the villain of villains, solely responsible for the Trump presidency, and were not shy in calling me a “Trump enabler” and worse for being profoundly opposed to any kind of military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia and the deadly serious and quite competent Vladimir Putin.

Only the excellent Congressional Dish podcast by the brilliant and incredibly thorough Jennifer Briney provided some well-sourced reinforcement of my sanity with its December 2021 episode “Keeping Ukraine.”

So I spent all of 2021 in isolated terror at what I saw as Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin and Russia, using Ukraine as his bludgeon.

As worried as I was, I could never have imagined the full-bore information war that would overwhelm the West in 2022.

We’ll get to that next time, but before I wrap, I need to go back to Trump, for completeness’ sake.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Despite Obama giving Biden, McCain, Nuland, and company a free hand to stir shit in Ukraine in his term, he refused to provide aid to the Ukrainian military, recognizing that Russia would always have “escalatory dominance” in the region.

Trump, perhaps stung by the Clinton campaign’s trumped-up (no pun intended, I lie) RussiaGate bullshit, handed his Ukraine policy over to neo-cons Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and had a much more aggressive policy posture than Obama had allowed.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Trump Gets Himself Impeached

The Democratic Congressional Majority had a principled opposition to charging Trump with violating the Emoluments Clause, despite the many open bribes he’d taken from foreign countries, but his clumsy 2019 efforts to get Zelensky to incriminate the crooked Biden family with naughty doings in time to impact the 2020 election brought the hammer down.

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The Potential AI Lockdown Of Knowledge

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On September 29, 2026

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In the old days knowledge was gated primarily by work: it was almost all available in books, but you had to find the books, read the books and (hopefully) understand them.

Most knowledge was not illegal. A good example is the “Anarchist’s Cookbook”, which includes recipes for explosives. I used to own a copy, though I never made any explosives. But if you wanted better knowledge, just go to a university library (most of which allowed anyone to walk in and read the books, though not necessarily to borrow then) and learn. This was true for poisons, weapon information, guides on how to pick locks, etc, etc… There was very little knowledge you couldn’t find out, IF you were willing to do the work.

What we’re seeing with AI is restrictions on what knowledge AI will provide. For example non-institutional biology researchers have complained that some models won’t help with that: it’s too dangerous. Ask for poison info and you can get it, but it requires very careful wording of the query: no hint of wanting to use the poisons. An author might get thru by saying it’s for a novel. Anything illegal can have the knowledge frozen as well: want to research con-men or burglary or hacking? Might get thru, might not.

As time goes by it’s reasonable to expect these blocks to evolve and become harder to get around. This may seem like a good thing, I guess, but if I want to research poisons, I don’t think the government or private companies should tell me I can’t.

Now this might be OK, IF we weren’t losing the books. There are reliable accounts of AI companies buying books en-masse, then destroying them. Outside of AI, as people move more and more online, books sell less and entire warehouses are being destroyed because it doesn’t make financial sense to keep them. Universities have mostly become “closed” and you get access unless you’re a student or maybe an alumni, and they certainly track what you read (so if it’s a book someone could misinterpret, read it in the library, don’t check it out.)

The old knowledge is going away. The new knowledge is much easier to get, but also much easier to restrict.

Books were beautiful: once they existed, once you had them, they were always there. We’ve all noticed that even leaving aside AI the internet is not “forever”, sites disappear all the time, the Internet Archive and other similar sites are under constant attack, and what you read can and is easily tracked both by government and private enterprise. The life of your mind is no longer private, what you know from online can be stitched together by anyone with enough power who cares to bother, and indeed, there are pre-crime initiatives by people like Thiel, in which dossiers are kept, soon on everyone, and evaluated to see if you’re a threat.

The future looks like a place with easy knowledge, unless the powerful don’t want you to have it, in which case it will be far harder to find than it was before AI or before the internet.

Big Brother knows best, after all.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Joy In Twilight

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On September 28, 2026

18 Comments

This blog tends to cover grim events related to the fall of empire and the rise of a new hegemon: war, genocide, politics (sigh), climate change, poverty, starvation and so on.

Fun stuff!

The people who read this are, I hope, the realists: people who want to know how things will turn out, who want to understand how the world works; people who don’t want to live in illusions or false hope.

But in staring into the darkness there is always the danger of falling into, to becoming depressed and fearful and feeling powerless.

There’s no need for this: the world has always sucked. Oh, some times and places were better, but no matter what time you look at horrible things were always happening somewhere to some people. Empathy and compassion and realism are good, but it’s not a victory or admirable to lose ones ability to enjoy all the good that life offers.

Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death

-Auntie Mame

The world is full of love, happiness, joy and beauty. In the middle of disaster, love can bloom. There are sunsets and sunrises, the play of clouds in the sky, flowers and leaves of fall, beautiful women and handsome men. There is great art to see, great music to listen to, thrilling or insightful books to read.

We live, still, in a cornocupia. There are vast varieties of food to delight your tongue. There are films and tv shows–some are crap, but many aren’t. There are museums full of artifacts.

And while life grows more constricted, in most countries, there are still helpers: doctors and nurses and others whose are available when something goes wrong.

Most of us have warm beds and cold drinks and few of us are going hungry.

Oh, much of it is gated behind money, but plenty isn’t. The world is full of plenty and beauty and love: to look only at the darkness and not the light is the height of foolishness.

Nor is there any virtue in suffering, despite what Christianity’s attempts to convince us otherwise. If life is bad for others, certainly you should have sympathy, empathy and help if you can, but you don’t have to be in a constant state of misery. The good is as real as the evil; pleasure exists alongside suffering.

The Buddha is reputed to have said that if your compassion doesn’t extend to yourself, it is incomplete. What you, I hope, want for most other people, is that they be happy: that should extend to yourself.

So allow yourself to sup from the feast of joy life offers. If you have money, by all means partake of what it offers, if you don’t remember that love and sunsets and flowers and petting a cat are all still free or cheap, and most of us, even those who are poor, can afford some lovely food and drink and can watch some great shows, listen to music, read books or play games.

Don’t let the world make your miserable. Don’t let your awareness, compassion, empathy and intelligence be your enemy. Sup from the cup of happiness whenever and wherever you can. It’s happiness and joy we’re actually fighting for: that’s what we want for others, and its what we should want for ourselves.

For me, it’s books and game and art and sometimes food. Fried noodles, a medium rare steak, a cup of cold fresh orange juice. Or watching the clouds take form after form as they scud across the sky, and listening to the drum of raindrops and the howling winds.

So much in life is good, even as so much is bad.

What is it, for you, that always brings joy? What do you reach for when you need a dose of happiness? Share in the comments, and more importantly, take some time, hopefully today, to indulge.

 

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