Amerika

• Epstein: We are slowly finding out that social media is an echo chamber that rewards dramatic, iconoclastic (“edgy”), and distinctive/simplistic speech rather than anything of value, and it will betray those who rely on it. The Trump-Epstein files is evidence of this. Everyone wants an easy answer that will unite all the threads. If only it were so simple as pedophiles running the government with help from Mossad, instead of the logical fact that democracy operates on voters choosing easy answers which opens the door to parasites of all types.
• Inflation: one of the people who works on the building next door is a true freelancer: no insurance, no bond, and no taxes. He takes cash in hand to get the job done and does a better job than the usual contractors. He charges $50 an hour and realizes all of it as income, which makes him a better deal for the people who live and work in the buildings around here, since the people who are bonded, insured, and taxed charge $200 an hour for the same thing. Imagine a society not obsessed with safety and equality, and how much more affordable it would be.
• Portal: a friend today opined that a cultural portal or window has opened up for radical change. People are ready now to consider what was unthinkable just a few years ago. They realize that change is needed because the ideas that motivated our past choices have failed. We have to take advantage of this and push toward sanity instead of compromises and half-measures. End diversity. Speaking of which, the crowd in Ikea today was admirable segregated in place. Different races and ethnic groups simply did not talk to each other. They walked as if on separate maps in separate timelines. People are ready to begin undoing the thousand-year horror of modernity from bureaucracy onward.
• BRICS: the BRICS exist at the intersection of envy, competition, and resentment of the first world; the ability of the first world to rise has made the third world feel bad about it. Then again, the third world is the most individualist place on Earth, from Russia to Mexico to Ireland to Cambodia. People do not focus on shared commons or institutions. Everyone does what they want. As a result, you spend most of your time there avoiding other people who are acting independently of any type of order. Like most pitfalls, it seems enlightened until suddenly it falls into darkness.

Tags: BRICS, jeffrey epstein, portal, riffs