The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers, and sycophants.

I am the virus. A Dadaist mashup with Joseph Goebbels, Lothar Wieler, Bill Gates, Thomas Paine, Emma Goldman, Frank Zappa, Frederick Douglass, Phillip Dick, David Graeber, George Orwell, George R.R. Martin, Lenny Bruce, Chris Hedges, Albert Einstein, Vandana Shiva and Thomas Jefferson.

Oroville declares itself a ‘constitutional republic’ in protest against ‘barrage’ of ‘increasingly intrusive’ government Covid mandates.

Researchers at OpenAI, a company working on cutting-edge AI tools, demonstrated a program that can predict, summarize, and auto-generate text with what often seems like remarkable skill, although it will also spit out biased and hateful language learned from text it has read.

A return to sanity? Sanity will not be restored for us by others. We are the ones that must restore it. We cannot wait for others to be brave on our behalf. We are here in this initiatory moment to choose who we are. The choice of whether to capitulate or to act is a declaration: Who am I to be?

Oligarchy or autocracy? There are no other alternatives. Neither are pleasant. Each has peculiar and distasteful characteristics. Each pays lip service to the fictions of democracy and constitutional rights.

Wolin wrote: “One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic, surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Taibbi and others respond to On the Media segment about the evils of so-called “free speech absolutism.”