If Democrats wanted to put on a united front against Trump, they could have had Spanberger delivering her rebuttal at the rally on the National Mall immediately after Trump’s speech ends. One of the reasons State of the Union rebuttals tend to get poor grades is that they’re usually delivered in a silent room with no audience, following a speech delivered to an audience that’s half full of pumped-up presidential loyalists. The president gets multiple standing ovations. The rebutter gets silence. Why not change it up?
blue bits. red rocks.
And this, my friends, is how rich people can become public intellectuals. They pay for it, and money talks.
Famous Economists Who Called Themselves "Socialists"
A common belief among all right-wingers is that the economist F.A. Hayek proved all government interventions to improve the welfare of the people are the first step to totalitarianism, an argument he made in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. (See also Mises 1950.) The fact that all postwar history disproved Hayek’s thesis is never admitted; to right-wingers, the slippery slope from the welfare state to communism is irrefutable fact (McInnes 1998; Shapiro 2001). (Think about it. How could communism have collapsed or state-owned enterprises in Britain and elsewhere been privatized if Hayek’s theory was remotely correct? See Alves & Meadowcroft 2014; Barry 1984; Farrant & McPhail 2009.)
This recent onslaught of attacks on socialism is odd because there is no serious effort anywhere to convert the United States or any other Western nation into one where government owns all the means of production. (Ironically, the major exception is the Trump regime, which has forced major companies to sell shares to the federal government; see Swanson 2025.)
US economy: jobs and AI
The official consumer price inflation year-on-year rate has been falling during 2025, but several studies have shown that the official measure of consumer price inflation in the US is biased downwards. One study pointed out that mortgage and financing rates are left out of the costs for consumers in the official index. Including such costs would double the inflation rate. In a previous post, I have shown studies that reveal how the official index does not account for the real rise in prices for American households. If it did, using a ‘value rate of inflation’, (that Mino Carchedi and I have developed), it would show that real household incomes have fallen some 20% since 1960 and 4% since the end of the pandemic.
Set in Stone
Stone walls stand in contrast to much of the contemporary built environment, where large portions of modern construction—commercial architecture, retail development, even infrastructure—are designed for speed, efficiency, and replacement. Buildings are temporary by design. Economic shifts and branding cycles ensure that little is meant to last. Stone walls represent the opposite ethic. They were built slowly and adapted to terrain rather than reshaping it, designed not for visibility but for durability. Their persistence is not stylistic but structural. And their removal signals a broader shift, to land treated less as lived place and more as resource and commodity. Walls that once marked working landscapes are now treated as inventory.
The Court is corrupt. There’s no future for the America republic without thoroughly reforming it of its current corruption. Today’s decision is simply one of those cases where the Constitution happens to coincide with the Court’s partial and illegitimate self-interest.
A war on Iran will result in a disaster for all parties involved. There is no guarantee of success on the part of the United States and Israel, or failure on the part of Iran. There is a huge risk that this war will result in massive disruption of critical energy production capability in one of the most critical energy production regions in the world, triggering a massive energy security crisis that could collapse regional and global economies.
Among the Prophets
I thought of Ed Bryant’s quote—and Yogi Berra’s and Niels Bohr’s and user1202136—while reading The Running Man by Richard Bachman, a pulp science fiction novel published in 1982, set in 2025. The Running Man was the last of Bachman’s novels to be published before the author’s true identity was revealed: Stephen King, who had been using the pseudonym as something of a literary petri dish between 1977 and 1984. The Bachman books—Thinner, Rage, The Long Walk, The Running Man, and Roadwork—are early works by King. (King would later “discover” two more Bachman novels in 1996 and 2007.) What Bachman published was angry, opinionated, and breathless in its sketching of a mercenary, crumbling world. In an essay attached to more recent editions of The Running Man, King writes, “Dark-toned, despairing even when he is laughing (despairing most when he is laughing, in fact), Richard Bachman isn’t a fellow I’d want to be all the time … but it’s good to have that option, that window on the world, polarized though it may be.”
More than forty years on, The Running Man’s success lies, in part, in that it’s a sturdy fable about the shittiness of the world, a pulp novel with a distinctly socioeconomic outlook. It focuses on perennial themes of American discontent: white male rage, the desensitization to and hunger for violence, the frustration with yet desire for revolution. Set in a totalitarian United States where the populace is enthralled by a series of brutal reality shows run by the Network, poverty is high and pollution blankets the land. The novel boasts canny similarities to the present: over-armed and trigger-happy police, telemedicine, rampant disinformation, sensationalist news, entertainment holograms. One feature of The Running Man’s world is the ubiquitous Free-Vee, essentially a high-concept television much like the hypnotic parlor walls in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that runs the Network’s highly addictive and cruel programming constantly.
Drab, violent, and bereft of anything resembling hope, The Running Man is a vehicle for righteous anger, not at some vague imbalance in the world, but the very structure of it. The Network’s carnival of cruelty could fairly be seen as a predecessor to the battle royale genre, though its repressive methods are more in line with Jerry Springer than The Hunger Games. One show called Treadmill to Bucks features contestants with chronic heart, liver, or lung disease. For every minute the contestant stays on the treadmill while answering the host’s questions, they win ten dollars (King’s predictive powers don’t account for inflation). Every two minutes comes a bonus question worth fifty dollars. Miss a question, lose fifty dollars—and be forced to walk faster until you drop.
Meanwhile, the blockbuster titular show, which the novel’s protagonist Ben Richards enters in order to afford to buy medicine for his ailing daughter, sets a contestant on a nationwide game of hide-and-seek, where every hour Richards isn’t caught by the Network’s Hunters, he earns one hundred dollars. Bonus Benjamins for every cop or Hunter he kills. Through audiovisual manipulation of photos and video, the Running Man’s host, Bobby Thompson, frames Richards as a libidinous murderer on a psychotic rampage, inciting the in-studio crowd to jeer and boo, while urging the audience watching at home to report any information they might have about Richards’ whereabouts to the Network.
Five years after The Running Man’s publication and two years after Bachman was outed as King by a bookstore clerk in D.C., Arnold Schwarzenegger would star as Ben Richards in an adaptation of the novel. Instead of the King everyman hampered by circumstance, Richards turns into a brawny, principled cop who refuses an order to kill unarmed rioters in California. Banished to a labor prison camp, Richards escapes and goes on the run, is framed for murder, and coerced into joining the Running Man TV show, increasing the show’s ratings. Instead of the wide open cover of America, the game is sequestered to an abandoned area of Los Angeles, where Richards is hunted by a band of villains that look like evil Power Rangers. A resistance network links up with Richards, including a fugitive named Amber. The resistance topples the Games Network. The evil is vanquished, and Richards and Amber share a triumphant kiss.
In Schwarzenegger’s oeuvre, The Running Man is mid-tier fare. Ditto for King’s many, many television and movie adaptations. The most famous King adaptations, apart from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, have tended toward the sentimental, as rose-tinted portraits of small-town America with a dark underbelly. In more recent years, remakes of It, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, along with the adaptation of The Shining’s sequel Doctor Sleep, have trafficked in a nostalgia for classic horror cinema of which King has long been an indelible component. It would be too rich to venture that any of the films made from King’s fiction were done so under strictly admiring, earnest pretenses, cinematic efforts to translate literature to image. But, as with most mainstream filmmaking this decade, preexisting IP is stock and trade. Connie Willis’s 1995 novel Remake anticipated this eventuality, a future where entertainment is churned out and the same stories get told over and over, just with different faces.