In Robert Altman’s movie Short Cuts, which is packed with great quotes, there’s one particular bit of dialog I’m thinking about lately.
- Howard Finnigan: Hey Jer, how goes the war?
- Jerry Kaiser: Bad guys are winning, sir.
That’s how I perceive the world right now.
As much as I’ve been beating the Fourth Turning drum (for years), it’s quite a different thing to write about it as opposed to live through it. I’ve been around long enough to get a sense as to the cycles of culture and history, and it does seem to me that the bad guys are indeed winning and winning like never before. And I’m not just talking about Trump, Jared Kushner, or the rest of that criminal gang (including bootlicking empty suits like Howard Lutnick). I’m talking about the entire culture.
The evidence is all around me, and in different forms. I see it in crypto. I see it in equities. I see it in the shameless white-collar crime that rages all around, not just unpunished and celebrated. I see it in slimeballs like Grant Cardone and narcissistic whores like Lauren Sanchez and Kris Jenner. I see it in psychobabble hustlers like James Altucher. And I see it in every single press briefing that bubble-headed bimbo Karoline Leavitt holds.
The bad guys are winning.
This all goes way beyond politics. It has to do with the economic culture as well, as illustrated by this post:
The TL;DR of the above is that the writer is shocked at how many of his well-paid friends are getting shoved out of their jobs by AI. Here in the Silicon Valley, I read that skilled engineers that could have commanded $300,000 salaries one year ago are now looking at $250,000. No one is going to weep over that, but I suspect in two years the offers will be more along the lines of $50,000 or maybe $0.
It seems a great irony of the miracle of artificial intelligence that the very class of people that created it are, on the whole, the same class the suffers from its effects.
Let’s take yet another leap to another topic and address this fellow.
This weird-faced chap is, of course, Dan Bongino, the conspiracy crackpot. You wanna know something? I’m at the cusp of really, really admiring the guy.
Why on Earth would that be? Simple: because the word on the street is that he’s absolutely furious with Pam “Blondi” Bondi (the woman with multiple failed marriage who went to a third-tier law school with an 86.4% acceptance rate and is now somehow the nation’s Attorney General) for her shameless lying about the Epstein Files, in which Trump’s name appears over and over and over again. Over the weekend, Trump sent out this missive to his worshippers, and from what I’ve gathered, it’s the first time the MAGA crowd has actually turned on the guy. Some of these people with even the most severe daddy issues have decided that they actually hate the guy, which must be quite a sea change. They feel betrayed.
They say politics makes for strange bedfellows, and strange indeed it would be if I actually admired and respected the first person in this administration to actually do something out of principal and in search of the truth. It’s just as likely, though, that they all just pipe down about it and hope nobody asks any more uncomfortable questions. Still, let’s see if ol’ Dan actually winds up doing the right thing.
I want state again this isn’t just politics, though. I’ve written about the insane maldistribution of wealth for years, which has become worse nonstop for decades. The Bezos wedding was probably the most grotesque affair (in the Western world, at least) I’ve ever witnessed. A neutron bomb in Venice during the ceremony (once the innocent residents were cleared out) would have truly made the world a much better place. Sadly, they all managed to get back on their private jets and return to their mansions to tell us how we all need to do better with our carbon footprints.
Over the past twenty years, younger people have been trained to covet the kind of lifestyle that Bezos and the Kardashians celebrate and display in the most crass and vulgar terms. Everyone wants to be rich, even while they continue to get poor.
Just this morning, a county bus (empty, of course) went rumbling by on El Camino Real, and on the side the advertisement wasn’t for a personal injury law firm or a beer but – – an AI-driven trading product. Can you imagine? One of those zillion firms out there that claim you can pretty much print profits with their AI software is advertising on buses!
How’s THAT for a shoeshine boy moment?
I’m going to share one more anecdote, then I’ll get out of your hair. Promise.
You may recall that last year, a woman T-boned my car in my neighborhood and totaled my vehicle. Your humble narrator was uninjured, although it did change me psychologically, since I approach every single intersection with my car with measured trepidation. A “glass half full” person might say it’s made me a more cautious driver (looking at for nitwit middle-aged women blowing through Stop signs) whereas a realist might say that her recklessness kind of fucked me up.
Because it did.
In any case, I had sort of moved on. I got a brand new car after the accident (which set me back some thousands of dollars, but was mostly covered) and, like I said, I wasn’t physically harmed. Yet an article in the paper a few days ago reminded me of this accident in a peculiar way.
There’s a woman here in town about my age whom I’ve known for decades. I would never consider her a friend, but certainly an acquaintance, although we stopped having any reason to be in touch a long time ago. She was, and is, highly intelligent, and she’s credentialed with a top-tier education, including the finest MBA in the world, but her personality is so endlessly unlikeable that she’s been pretty much a flop in the business world. (To say nothing of her marriage, which was also a flop; she’s got a pretty horrid personality; I could give many details, but take my word for it).
In any case, she, too, was in an accident very similar to mine. Indeed, her accident took place only three blocks where mine did. From what I can gather, she wasn’t physically injured, at least not seriously. That, however, is where the similarities end, because instead of getting a replacement vehicle and moving on with her life, she proceed to sue…………….everybody.
She sued the driver. She also sued another driver. She sued the City of Palo Alto. She even sued a homeowner whose hedges were supposedly a contributing factor in the accident. I’m surprised she didn’t sue the maker of the asphalt on the road she was driving. Simply stated, it was a shakedown.
Thus, our little hometown newspaper reported that she had managed to garner $5 million from these various defendants she since was “permanently disabled.” I am not privy to the details, but from what I can gather, it’s not like both her legs were amputated. The article explained that her lawsuit asserted that she couldn’t keep up with her book club and that friends were avoiding her because her care was too burdensome.
I can offer assurances to the world that her friends were avoiding her for decades before this accident. Trust me.
I really get irked when I see someone use the legal system to shake down other parties. I also wonder just how much of a chump, or a sucker, I am for enduring the exact same situation and asking for precisely $0 for my own pain and suffering. I mean, I’m not even IN a book club. Doesn’t that count for something?
The bad guys are winning.
I can only live my own life by my own ethics and principals. I don’t think the slimeballs I’ve described here are going to Hell, because I don’t believe in such a thing. My present point of view is that the spirits inhabiting those bodies are malformed, and maybe they’ll do better next time around.
Still, in this life, and on this Earth, it’s hard to stomach at times.
The bad guys are winning.
