10/28/2025
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Political Scandal, The Dean SCream

496 Words: The New World

Do you realize how weird today’s world is? Well, perhaps I should qualify that: I mean today’s America.

To wit: Today’s Silver Bulletin newsletter headline reads, “Do Political Scandals Still Matter?”

The gist of the piece is this holy land has become so polarized, so tribal, so my-team-versus-your-team-no-matter-what that missteps, corruptions, idiocies, N-bombs, extramarital affairs, workplace bullying, and outright violations of criminal law and/or the United States Constitution don’t mean much at all anymore to partisan voters.

Remember “The Dean Scream” back in 2004?

Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, was running for president in the Democratic primaries that year. He was a rising star in the Democratic Party and would go on to become the party chair from 2005 through 2009. He would be credited with the successful and aggressive Fifty-State Strategy.

Now I’m going to let you try to get back to normal breathing again. I know you were stunned to read that at some point in recent history, a Democratic strategy could be characterized as “aggressive.” Truth is, the ascendance of Bill Clinton the previous decade had been a hugely aggressive, kick ’em when they’re down and don’t let ’em back up offensive orchestrated by James Carville, who is to the contemporary Democratic Party what Flip Wilson was to television. That is, recognizable pretty much only to history geeks.

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Carville and Dean in successive decades goaded, spurred, and otherwise kicked the party in the seat of the pants, leading it to victory.

Now, the verbs goad, spur, and kick are as foreign to Democratic strategists as democracy itself is to the MAGA crowd.

Anyway, Howard Dean, the night of the Iowa caucuses in January 2004, stood before his supporters and cheer-led them. Sounds pretty innocuous, right? It wasn’t. He hollered and shook his fist. The Fox News universe went bananas, replaying his howls and gestures until, at last, he appeared to be a raving lunatic. Whgich is precisely what Fox News wanted.

It became a scandal. Dean was finished as a viable candidate for president. He folded his tent and the party did its mea culpas as if they’d been caught lotting the US Treasury. Democratic voters ran from him as if he were a house on fire.

Golly, that’s ancient history, isn’t it?

Now, the lot of us wouldn’t abandon our candidate if he or she…, oh, let’s say, shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, made fun of a handicapped person, bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, fomented a violent insurrection at the US Capitol, or any other conceivable heretofore death sentence blunder. The Democrats, having come to that chauvinistic position relatively late (too late, in fact for the likes of Dean and Al Franken (although Teddy Kennedy 56 years ago did get away with leaving the scene of a vehicular homicide, but members of his family had a special dispensation), are now as locked in to their candidates, no matter what, as much as the Republicans are.

So, yeah, political scandals do not matter anymore.

 

10/24/2025
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Moon Landings

464 Words: The Greatest Secret of All Time

On I-69, doing the loop around Bloomington because it’s the best way to get from Karst Farm Park, where I eat my lunch, to my home, clear across town on SR 466. I want to get over into the right lane so I can exit at SR 45/46 but there’s a pickup truck next to me. I’ll have to either speed up or slow down. He’s been inching ahead of me, so I catch sight of a bumper sticker he has on the rear window of his cab. It reads:

Let’s Quit Pretending We Landed on the Moon

The first crewed moon landing, the pretenders would like everyone to believe, took place some 56 years ago, on July 20th, 1969. That mission was followed by five more crewed moon landings. Overall, a total of 12 NASA astronauts have left their footprints on the moon. Another 15 crew members on various Apollo flights, orbited the moon, either waiting for their mates to finish cavorting on its surface, or in the case of Apollo 13, because their spacecraft had been damaged and they had to whip around the moon to get back home, or as in Apollos 8 and 10, the three-guy crews were rehearsing and testing equipment in orbit around the moon prior to that historic first touchdown.

That makes 27 people who’ve taken the spacetrip to the moon and back. Returned to Earth, they received congratulatory phone calls from the president, rode in parades, gave interviews, wrote memoirs, helped brief and train crews who’d succeed them, and to this day (or the day they died) insisted that, yes, they’d flown to the moon.

Liars, all of them.

Would You Trust These Three Men?

Twenty seven liars. Yet they’re a tiny percentage of people pretending “we” landed on the moon. Hundreds of thousands of people worked on the Apollo mission, planning, designing, testing, manufacturing, fixing, tweaking, cleaning up after, and writing reports on it all. And that’s just the Americans. How about the Indian, Chinese, and Soviet/Russian space program workers who participated in their countries’ uncrewed moon missions and willingly participated in the release of photographs of Apollo landing sites and equipment left behind? Call it another few hundred thousand.

That’s a lot of liars.

None of whom, to this day, has come forward to admit it was all a scam.

They were all good, man. Real good. Liars, that is.

As a rule, the best way for two people to keep a secret is for both of them to die before they blab. Somehow, though, several hundred thousand human beings, working for wildly disparate countries’ space programs, have remained mum regarding what has to be the greatest secret ever.

Somehow, a guy in a pickup truck, last seen on a south central Indiana interstate, has seen through their charade.

People are an odd lot.

10/18/2025
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2017 Women's March, No Kings Day

392 Words: Now What?

I just came back home from the Bloomington No Kings rally.

Lots of people. Lots of Noise.

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The march/rally in my beloved hometown Chicago looked like Woodstock.

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Today made me think of that huge Women’s March in January 2017. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

It was at the time the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

More than 400 marches and rallies were held in different US cities eight and a half years ago. Nearly half a million people turned out for the Washingt0n, DC march; 750,000 in Los Angeles; 150,000 in San Francisco; 250,000 in Chicago; 150,000 in Boston; 90,000 in St. Paul, Minnesota; 400,000 in New York City; 100,000 in Portland, Oregon; 175,000 in Seattle; 100,000 in Madison, Wisconsin. Overall, it was estimated more than one percent of the US population marched and/or rallied that day — and that’s huge. The only way you can get that many people to do a single thing in one day is to schedule a Super Bowl.

There were nearly a hundred other such happenings in cities around the world that day. Hell, there was even a women’s rally in Antarctica.

Remember all those pink “pussyhats”?

It was thought they’d be a symbol of resistance for years to come. I haven’t seen one since.

A woman ran for president in 2004. She was an experienced prosecutor, US Senator, and Vice President of the United States. She lost. To the guy against whom all those people in US cities and around the world protested in January 2017. After he’d been bounced out of office in 2020.

And who, I might add, fomented a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol on the day Congress was scheduled to certify the 2020 election results.

Here we are again. Same guy, back in office. Hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to oppose him. He’s already dismantled much of the federal government’s social service infrastructure that has been laboriously erected since FDR’s New Deal began. His Justice Department is prosecuting his political enemies. He’s sent the military into cities run by Democrats. He’s hastening the takeover of corporate media by right wing billionaires. He’s etting the new American oligarchy in stone.

A lot of people I know feel all pumped up about the turnout today.

Me? Like I said, I saw a lot of people. I heard a lot of noise. And all I could think was, What do we do next?

10/17/2025
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Limestone Post, Pirate Radio, WFHB

885 Words: Pirates

With my book-length history of community radio WFHB edging so near completion that I can taste it, I’m spiraling off on a related tangent to write a piece for the Limestone Post on an odd little moment in the station’s history.

And, by the way, the Limestone Post itself is fixing to celebrate its 10th year of existence. To that end, I’m having executive editor Dason Anderson on my WFHB interview program, Big Talk, next month, so stayed tuned.

The LP story will recount the time a local radio pirate threw a monkey wrench into the works and sabotaged Bloomington Community Radio, Inc.’s second attempt to gain an FCC license. BCR was the third and current moniker for the nonprofit corporation hell-bent on starting a community radio station hereabouts. A motley pair of roommates had come up with the crazy idea in the summer of 1975. It took them and others nearly two decades to get WFHB off the ground.

Correction: the two, Mark Hood and Jeffrey Morris, were actually garagemates. They lived in a converted garage behind Jack Gilfoy’s recording studio on the then-outskirts of Bloomington. Hood was Gilfoy’s chief engineer and Morris did a lot of electrical and handyman work for the studio. The two didn’t always have a TV so they listened to Michael Bourne‘s eclectic WFIU afternoon music program and, in the evening, they’d tune their old clunky receiver to WWL, a clear-channel, 50,000-watt powerhouse out of New Orleans. WWL back in the mid-1970s was big with long-haul truckers and featured such countrified luminaries as Red Sovine and the Carter Family. One record Hood and Morris heard again and again was Sovine’s 1965 hit, “Giddyup Go,” a spoken-word ditty telling the tale of a truck driver father and his estranged son sharing an emotional reunion at a truck stop.

Hood and Morris would never have heard “Giddyup Go” on Bloomington radio in the mid-1970s, nor would they have heard anything other than commercial pop proffered by whichever Indianapolis Top 40 station could come in clear enough to be heard. Michael Bourne’s WFIU program was so good he had to pack up and move to New York City where he became a legendary radio personality on WGBO. Bloomington 50 years ago was almost a radio desert. “Bloomington radio basically sucked,” says WFHB’s first general manager, Brian Kearney, of the local AM/FM scene.

BCR was readying its second FCC application (its first had been denied in 1981) in the mid-1980s. Kearney, who was BCR president at the time, and the rest of the founding crew were confident they could get their station on the air before the ’80s were out. It didn’t work out that way, though. Local radio pirate Bruce Quinn filed a competing application with the FCC and, surprisingly, won. If you’re hot for details on the Bruce Quinn Affair, you’ll have to click on over to the LP next month.

Anyway, pirate radio, or broadcasting without an FCC license. That Bruce Quinn fellow would set up his turntables, mic, and transmitter in his living room or that of a sympathetic friend or supporter and crank out a weak signal, irregularly, in the evening, playing records not heard on any other Bloomington station. He was a radio pirate and every time he flipped the on/off switch on his transmitter, he risked prosecution, fines, and seizure of his equipment by the FCC.

Pirate radio has been in existence since the very first governmental agency established regulations and licensing for the AM/FM spectrum. It reached its zenith in the 1960s with “border blasters” (think of Wolfman Jack at XERF/XERB, mega-powered AM stations just over the Mexican border, the Wolfman’s voice reaching far into the United States) or the UK’s many, storied unlicensed stations emanating from ships in international waters (see the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie Pirate Radio, aka in the UK The Boat That Rocked).

It’s not so much of a thing anymore, what with the emergence of internet streaming. Hell, anybody on Earth can hear my voice any time of the day or night even though my show airs Thursdays at 5:30pm. People who, for whatever reason, once eschewed the FCC route (or whichever authority regulates the airwaves in their country) can now transmit their voices, their music, their opinions, their ideas, and (mostly) their nonsense around the globe so why go pirate?

There just might be good reason to go pirate in the coming years. Now that Li’l Duce (or Caligu-lite or the Mad King) has led the charge to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is paving the way for his select group of billionaire cohorts to take over every single freaking media outlet on the planet, there will be vanishingly fewer opportunities for people to dissent, to protest, to air contrary opinions, to be weird, and to let the world know about it.

With many of those same few billionaire cohorts owning internet social media empires, posting about, say, 2027’s No Kings Rally may well be next to impossible.

There may come a day when the only folks able to let the world know about ICE’s evils, MAGA’s manias, QAnon’s canards, or any of today’s other democracy-snuffing goings-on will be radio pirates in their dens or living rooms, using vintage transmitters, sending unlicensed signals throughout their neighborhoods. Pirates, in other words.

 

10/15/2025
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Bloomington Science Cafe, Piltdown Man, Tylenol

796 Words: Thinking

Li’l Duce (whom I alternately call Caligu-lite these days) had a thought not long ago.

Folks on my side of the fence might snort derisively at the notion that the Once and Current King can actually think, but he does. I had a cat once, named Jack. He always wanted to jump up on the kitchen table and do cat things. I’d see him sitting near the table, intently calculating height, weight, mass, force, momentum, and all the other factors that go into the launching of his cat body onto the very surface where I was enjoying my cold pizza in the morning.

Jack’d work out the calculus and propel himself upward, landing inches from my plate. With a gruff Get outta here, I’d sweep him off the table and he’d land almost precisely at the spot where he’d launched. Once there, he turn his gaze again to the tabletop and, again, begin calculating height, weight, mass, force, momentum, et cetera. Again he’d leap; again I’d sweep.

This might go on three or four times before, finally, having had enough, I’d fetch the spray bottle of water and give Jack a swift spritz in the face. Water spritzed in the face is to a cat what lethal injection is to a cold blooded murderer. It’s a deterrent.

Then again, the spritzing actually works, whereas capital punishment…, well, y’know.

Anyway, as mindless and dense as Jack might appear, unable to grasp a simple taboo, he was, indeed, thinking. The impulse, Hmm, I wonder what’s on that table, simply popped into his little cerebrum again and again despite his repeatedly being given the prompt brush and landing unceremoniously on the floor, as if the previous iterations of the process had never occurred.

So Jack could think. And so, similarly, can Li’l Duce.

I mean, we’re not talking Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell thinking here. We’re talking random, impulse-y, fleeting thoughts. But thoughts nonetheless.

Among Caligu-lite‘s random, impulse-y, fleeting thoughts of late has been his claim that the pain reliever Tylenol™ is a dangerous drug. Of course, like any drug, Tylenol™ can pose danger if swallowed like M&Ms™ or any other similarly addictive substance. (Also, it must be added, when an anonymous psychotic opts to lace drugstore shelf packages of Tylenol™ with cyanide, killing seven people and inspiring reasonable package reforms and anti-tampering laws as well as irrational Halloween candy poisoning panic.) But that wasn’t what the Mad King was trying to get at. More than likely, he was simply greasing the skids for some robber baron crony who wants to peddle a snake-oil pain reliever.

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Dangerous?

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The violence Li’l Duce has committed upon truth, science, inquiry, rational thought, learning, teaching, and anything else having to do with obtaining a reasonable picture of the world and universe in which we live can be countered but, at times, it seems as though the task is akin to slamming your head into a brick wall.

The gang at Bloomington’s Science Cafe is back this year, banging their heads against the wall, trying to educate the local rank and file about science-y things. Last month, for instance, my pal Alex Straiker — who professionally pokes his nose into the brain, neurons, and cannabinoids — hosted a Science Cafe on the Piltdown Man.

A celebrated hoax in 1912 and for a few years after, Piltdown Man was embraced by much of England’s scientific establishment even though the faux-fossil’s “discoverer” was a shady, sloppy, greedy, amateur archeologist. Charles Dawson’s purported Piltdown Man skull was a patchwork of bones artfully manipulated to resemble an ancient ape-man missing link’s coconut.

People bought his story because they wanted to believe it. The German anthropologist Otto Schoetensack (swear to god, that was his real name) had, four years prior to Dawson’s “finding,” discovered the remains of Homo heidelbergensis, at the time the oldest identified human fossil in Europe. Scientists around the world went gaga over Schoentensack’s discovery. Dawson, being a good, patriotic Brit, couldn’t bear that a hated Hun was reaping all this archeological ardor, so he cooked up Piltdown Man out of thin air.

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The rest of the British scientific community, who might have challenged Dawson, instead jumped on the Piltdown bandwagon because, hell, they too were good and patriotic.

Straiker’s message was fraud is easy to perpetrate, especially when it’s done in a climate of high-pressure nationalism.

And that’s precisely the kind of climate we’re living in today.

Bloomington Science Cafe will convene next Tuesday, October 21st, 7:00pm at Friendly Beasts Cider Company tap room. Postdoc chemistry researcher Misha Dvorakova is scehduled to set the record straight about Tylenol™ that night. She’s a real thinker, trained to filter out all those random, impulse-y, fleeting ideas that the Most Powerful Human Being on Earth loves so dearly.

10/07/2025
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Dentists, Fish on a Dome

682 Words: This & That

THIS

Went to the dentist yesterday. Thank my lucky genes, my teeth are fabulous. Honestly, I’ve never had a cavity in my life.

It helped, I guess, that I grew up in a locale where the tap water was fluoridated. I drank water like a fish as a kid. While all the other kids were hydrating with Cokes and other tooth enamel-annihilating bevs, I was bending over those great Chicago Park District concrete water fountains. Nothing in my life has ever tasted as good as my first sip of water fountain water on a hot July day after playing baseball on a dusty, dry, rock-hard Riis or Amundsen park diamond.

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The actual sitting-in-the-chair is not the worst part of a visit to the dentist. It’s the week or so leading up to it. For pity’s sake, my dentist’s office sent me countless messages reminding me of my upcoming appointment. My phone was non-stop buzzing. Calls. Texts. Hell, I even got emails, You have an appointment Monday, October 6th…. What is going on? Are these people insecure, or what?

Let me answer that. Yes, they are insecure. Because, now that the visit is over, I’ll be inundated with messages demanding to know how I enjoyed my visit. It’s like they’re desperate to know: Do you like me, huh, do ya?

Funny thing is, I started ignoring all those pre-appointment messages immediately after the first one. I did so to my own detriment. Because I’m a heart patient, a cancer-remission patient, and I’ve had a couple of artificial joint replacements, I have to take a heavy antibiotic dose every time I see the dentist. His office did indeed send me a reminder to pick it up at my pharmacy but I missed it because it was just another one in an endless series of stalk-y, annoying, infuriating, ignored messages. It was like the boy who cried wolf. The receptionist asked me if I took my antibiotic and I said, no, I forgot. She shook her head and looked at me as if I’d belched in her face.

I wanted to scream, If you hadn’t pestered me with a thousand messages, I wouldn’t have forgotten!

To top it off, every time I see my dentist (I go, religiously, every six months) the receptionist demands that I fill out a lengthy questionnaire on a tablet. Dozens and dozens of questions and checklists, exactly the same as I answered the last time I was in. One question was, Are you under the care of a physician?

What in the hell kind of a question is that? I have a doctor. Like everybody else on Earth. Of course I’m under the care of a physician. I answered: I have no idea what this question means.

Then they wanted the name, address and phone number of my primary care physician. All I know is his name. That’s it. Look it up if you’re so curious about him.

So, anyway, my exam completed, I dashed over to my headquarters at Hopscotch on Dodds Street to begin my day’s writing. I ran into an old pal, Dana Habeeb, a professor of urban environmental issues. When I told her I’d just come from the dentist, she launched, unprompted, into her own screed about how her dentist’s questionnaire is so ridiculous and how his office harasses her in the lead-up to her visit. Turns out she sees my dentist. We commiserated like a couple of PTSD sufferers.

Anyway, I got a new toothbrush (soft bristles), one of those little floss dispensers, and a tiny tube of toothpaste, all free, out of the deal. Now I don’t have to worry about my dentist’s harrassments and nosy questionnaires for another six months.

♦︎

THAT

Tristra Newyear’s and my new podcast episode has dropped. Our re-jiggered effort is called Fish on a Dome and for our inaugural drop in this new iteration, we interview audio book narrator and outhouse archeologist Jessica Marchbank, plus we chat with and play a track from Iraqi-American musician Dena El Saffar.

♦︎♦︎♦︎

 

09/27/2025
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Caligu-lite, Donald Trump, Li'l Duce

528 Words: Struggling

I’ve gone back and forth on this more times than I can remember. That is, my feelings about how I should look at and treat those who voted for Li’l Duce.

The night he was elected the first time, back in 2016, I wrote on FB, “America, you disgust me.”

That hasn’t changed. There are some 75 million voters in this holy land who’ve consistently demonstrated they don’t give the slightest damn that their candidate once mocked a disabled person.

If your kid did that while talking about a disabled classmate, you’d whack him one. A grown man did it and has been elected President of the United States of America twice.

I’ve detested Donald Trump since the mid-1980s when he was first making waves as the playboy real estate magnate of New York City. The magazines Vanity Fair, New York, and Spy covered him like a blanket back then, portraying him as a psychologically damaged clown — which he is. In fact, back then I used to say if I were king I’d decree that every single human being has to scrub his or her own toilet. It’d be the ultimate and just imposition of humility on those who make “little people” do those kinds of things for them. Every time I said it, I had Donald Trump in mind.

When he became a presidential candidate, I thought his campaign would be comic relief during the endless 2016 election cycle. Then came the dark night of November 8th and 9th nearly a decade ago.

Yeah. I’m still disgusted.

I’ve struggled to think and do the right things vis à vis the MAGA cult and the few tens of millions more who weren’t similarly deluded or outright racist/misogynist/transphobic/white supremacist/xenophobic/just plain lunkheaded but voted for him because prices were high, or they wanted to see “change,” or whatever bullshit reasoning they gaseously expelled from the wrong orifice.

The cultists, I quickly concluded, were beyond me. No way could I ever understand or hope to engage them. I remember that street corner preacher who used to rant about the abomination of homosexuality up and down State Street in Chicago’s Loop, waving his Bible and using a mic and portable amp. No one ever thought to stop and say, My good man, what say we have ourselves a lively debate on the topic?

What would be the use?

Same with the MAGA cult.

But how about those few tens of millions who felt the American system is broken and that’s why they pulled the lever for Caligu-Lite?  Perhaps I could — perhaps I should — try to reason with them. Perhaps we all should. After all, I think the American system is broken, too. We’ve got common ground.

Yet, every time Li’l Duce pulls off one of his Führer-esque stunts — and they seem to be pouring down on us like a summer thunderstorm now — I find that nice-guy, bipartisan, kumbaya approach to Trump voters harder and harder to pretend to. Those voters’ll tell me I’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, that comparing him to Hitler is the primary symptom thereof, but, for pity’s sake, the dude’s got Hitler’s playbook down, people.

It’s a struggle, I tell you.

09/26/2025
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Caligu-lite, Li'l Duce

441 Words: Nothing Lasts

Starbucks is closing stores.

Now there’s a line that would have been unthinkable from the 1990s and into the ‘teens. Some 30 years ago, when Jerry Seinfeld was still doing standup, he cracked that he noticed a new Starbucks had opened in his neighborhood. It was inside another Starbucks.

So many Starbucks were popping up around the country — around the world — that it seemed they were growing inside each other, like scifi Aliens.

That was then; this is now.

We can speculate any number of reasons for the store closings. Union busting, coffee tariffs, a corporate mid-life crisis, and even the spread of local, independent coffee houses. Take your pick. Or mash them all together. No matter. Starbucks is no longer growing.

It is shrinking.

The only sure thing we can conclude is nothing ever lasts. Especially not in this throwaway consumer culture.

What else, what other erstwhile rock solid thing that we hold dear and dependable will go poof any time soon?

A lot of us are scared to death that democracy itself is teetering, thanks to the Resurrection of Li’l Duce. (And, by the way, I’ve come up with another nickname for the Crazy-Commander-in-Chief: Caligu-lite. I like this one almost as much as Li’l Duce.)

Democracy! Hell, our whole American identity is based on the idea of democracy (even if, throughout our history, it has rarely been practiced in a truly comprehensive democratic manner). The rise of an emotionally crippled, morally bankrupt, psychologically stunted greed monkey has indeed put our aspirational better angel in mortal peril.

If we stick to corporate powerhouses that have vanished or become mere shadows of their former selves, we can cite Sears, Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Lehman Brothers, Pan Am, Bethlehem Steel, Woolworth’s, Kodak, and a few dozen more.

And how about empires, real actual political, geographical realms? Caligula’s Rome is now just a place where American tourists go to see St. Peter’s and sample authentic Italian cooking. Ancient Greece is a driving tour of crumbling architectural ruins. Ancient Egypt is a few pyramids and the Sphinx. Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire was the greatest, in terms of land area, in the history of the world — it lasted just shy of a hundred years. The British Empire now is just another tourist trap, monetizing Americans’ bizarre fixation on its outdated, interbred royalty.

All empires die.

While we’re fretting over the possible demise of our own empire — even if we liked to think of it as a shining city on a hill — we might also take heart in the possibility that the Reign of Caligu-lite can, like every other empire or wannabe realm, implode.

Fingers crossed.

 

09/20/2025
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Colleges & Universities

63 Words: Higher Education

In case you’ve been wondering what is happening to American universities, here’s the answer in a nutshell:

  1. American universities used to exist to broaden the minds and outlooks of their students for the express purpose of making them better human beings.
  2. American universities now exist to narrow the minds and outlooks of their students for the express purpose of making them better employees.
09/19/2025
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Charlie Kirk

26 Words: Kirk

The entire tragedy of September 10th can be distilled into two simple sentences:

  1. Charlie Kirk should never have been shot and killed.
  2. He was an asshole.
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