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This essay will not be read by anyone, or at least no one important, because the important people are busy, not dealing with the issues of the time. This is because the United States is collapsing, even as we speak, and the people who oppose the United States collapsing are busy hiding from the undeniable fact that we are now a dictatorship rather than a democratic republic. They would rather be affairs of the United States revert to the old way, and they think that if they just ignore the facts, then the facts will go away.

I'm not going to go into why this is a misguided notion, because I have explained this before: the forces now in power are not going to relinquish power easily, and little things like the law are not going to deter them. Their words are the law.

Instead, I am going to be talking about a deeper Meta issue that concerns us daily: the disintegration of the state of post-mondernity. The President of the United States, as Trump has constructed it, is a postmodern invention. This is because, at its very core, post-modernity requires that all features be constructed out of the language that humans recognize. Partially because human beings are the only verify language using species on the planet, or so post-maternity thought.

Part of the gag that any dominant meta-theory of human cognition gets trapped into is that it sharpens its fans to defeat the older version of human cognition and places it, but it then becomes the dominant form of meta-theory in the end, thus taking on the very features that it wished to supplant. The previous form of metatheory is modernism, and several of the worst features of modernism were deconstructed. For example, modernism declared that homosexuality was abnormal, debased, and an epiphenomenon that could be supplanted by heterosexuality.

I hope by this point this can be considered nonsense, and that homosexuality is normal for primates: indeed, the Bonobo to both because sexuality is a form of communication that is constant between two individuals in a larger tribe. While less so among human beings, it is still very important as a sign that signifies acceptance. And certain people are epigenetically more prone to homosexuality rather than heterosexuality. The postmodern worried about what the “gay gene” might be, and the system of Meta theory that replaces it realizes that it is not a “gay gene” but a system that is present in a large fraction of our population and is only expressed in some human beings. That is, it is normal, and the rest of society must deal with the fact that it is normal and that the people who practice it just want to get on with their lives as best they can.

This is a feature of the postmodern falling into its own trap: at first, it was the revolt against modernism. But it came to supplant modernism. And therefore its flaws were made obvious. They are different flaws than modernism created, because it is a different meta-theory, but also it is debased from it, pure form in the retelling and mistelling of its principles.

These principles can be reduced to three recognitions, as Derrida explained it in Dissemnation:

1. Differénce

   Instead of treating the difference between two objects, it is recognized that a system of signs cannot be based on a difference between two objects, but only in the differénce of their signs. That is, there is nothing “tableness” about the sign table, and thus we can assign “table “to anything that has a function that we can label as a table. For example, if we cut off a tree and use the stump to set up tea, then it is a table. But the sign table is different from the signified - that is, ticking the letters “t”, “a”, “b”, “l”, “e” is not the same thing as table because 桌子 is another sign which has nothing to do with the tableness of table - both are signs which signify a similar thing.

2. Deferral

   If this distinction is true, and it's most certainly is, then the next step is to admit that a deferral of meaning must also take place: we do not know what aspect of “table” is implied by this table immediately because it must be submitted to the same system of signs that it uses. That is, in order to be able to know what “table” means, we have to know enough English or a similar language to understand what the sign “table” means in English. If we do not speak English or some similar language from which we can assign the differénce, then the meaning of the word “table” eludes us, even though we can see a table and recognize it. That is, we do not recognize the sign, though we recognize the signifier.

3. This Differénce Always Raises a New Deferral

   Since each deferral raises a new differénce, the process must go on indefinitely because, as Derrida wrote, “There is nothing outside the text.” That is, we cannot establish anything other than the text itself and the signs and signifiers which it propagates. That means that anything can be a sign of irony if one just looks one more step along the differénce/deferral chain. Anything can be funny if one just looks hard enough.

But I promised that there are at least two flaws in the postmodernist argument. But this is because one has to go through the argument and accept it to be able to see the flaws that it has. If one does not engage and accept the argument, then one falls into one of the traps of modernism. This is also true of any meta-theory: you must accept the argument to be able to overthrow that argument. This is true, for example, of modernism: in painting, an accurate representation of the object is not the only form in which one can paint. This is what Les Demoiselles d’Avignon tells us: these are women who want to be wanted, and yet there is nothing in there sign that would make them wanted.

The first objection is in the recognitions themselves: the idea that there is nothing outside. The text is false. Right now, I can see not just a “table” but a different way of language. The sign/signifier of language is not the only way of perceiving my surroundings, and this is always the case for almost everyone involved in the act of perceiving. It is true that I can only communicate this with a sign/signifier construction, the most useful of which is language, but the sign/signifier relationship does not abnegate the means of perceiving, which is outside of the sign/signifier relationship. We can see that even if we can only communicate by some sign/signifier relationship.

The reason that engaging in the postmodern metatheory is necessary here is that the recognition is true, but only to a certain point. To engage in the logic of perception, one must have things such as linguistics, and that knowledge is outside of modernism. The modern theory of mind treats it as a black box. Think of Freud: his theory of the mind does not touch on any of the aspects of the brain, even though he admits that the brain is the seat of the mind. It is only in the postmodern that we can actually see the functions and map them over time.

The second objection is from the debasement of postmodernism. As the ideas of postmodernism become the default, many people use the idea of postmodernism to attack postmodernism. This is because they are not letting go of postmodernism, but the idea that postmodernism must be a revolt. They want to raise postmodernism to the idea of the dominant metatheory.

To prove this, that is to prove that the ultra conservative postmodernists are in fact, both ultra conservative and postmodern, I must explain why both their arguments are not modern.

Modernism relies on a single structure, which commands all authority to it. That is what Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan were participating in. They were indeed modern because they needed all of the material to wage a world war to conquer everything. They were not neoclassical, the way that the Kaiser was, and they did not need the intricacies of neoclassical monarchy to assert their dominance. The nations of World War I were still neoclassical and rejected both the airplane and the tank, both modern inventions, because these two inventions ran on a modernist machine called the internal combustion engine. Their framework was the external combustion engine, that is, the railroad, which was powered by steam and fueled by coal. The States were willing to use the tank in the airplane in limited ways, but they rejected both of them as superior to infantry. This was true, not only of the Central Powers, but also of the Allied powers - until they could win a victory on the battlefield with infantry, the war went on.

The Second World War began from the premise in both Germany and Japan that what was necessary was to eliminate monarchy from the government and base it on purely modern terms: propaganda would be the response, rather than allegiance to a monarchy. They needed a more powerful state in order to be able to command a complete dictatorship far beyond what a monarchy could do. The monarchy needed to have certain flexibility to make all of the pieces of that monarchy happy. There was no unified monarchy without lower-level actors who supported that monarchy. That is how monarchs work: the monarch trades allegiance from the aristocrats for loyalty when the monarch decides he wants to do something. By 1914, the monarchs, even in the best of circumstances, were as highly powered as they could get the system to deliver for them, but that was not enough to triumph on the battlefield.

This was because the tools of steam and bullets were not enough to take power under the monarchical system. The modern dictatorship fought that the answer was to remove the monarchy. So in Germany, it was removed, and in Japan, it did not have anything to say about the day-to-day conduct of the war, and only when it was necessary to surrender did the emperor have the last say.

This points out that at the end, there are multiple versions of a metatheory state, the United States and Great Britain were the modern form of democracy, and Japan, Germany, and the USSR were the modern form of dictatorship. World War II showed that the modern forms all failed to deliver victory. Either they were destroyed as Germany and Japan were or they converted to a postmodern system, as in the United Kingdom, the USA, and the USSR.

The difference was that the government had a single weapon, the atomic and leader the nuclear bomb, and it could rationally say that if they were not in control of using it, then the other side would do so and annihilate the entire population. But the government promised that it would not use it because the result would be unthinkable. In other words, the government had to gear up for a suicidal war to prevent a total war. This was the postmodern answer to how to avoid nuclear war, as put forward in Game Theory.12

That is the very first postmodern example, which was in government, even though it did not want to be that way; it was forced to be that way. 15 years later, the “postmodern” movement explained why there had to be a deferral of difference: whichever state one needed to control the past to control the future. This was pointed out in 1984 in a visceral way, far more cogently than in Dissemination, which was not published until the 1980s into English. That is to say, the theory of postmodernism was not the beginning of postmodernity, but a step that recognized postmodernism already taking shape. The roots were the atomic bomb and the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was important because it was the sole exception to modernist democracy, which did not work from a postmodernist standpoint. You cannot have allegiance to a system that destroys you from the inside. In the United Kingdom, it was class, not race, but it had the same effect.3

In the 1990s, almost every state was in some form of postmodern, the exception was the states that had oil sufficient to keep their native populations happy and their subservient populations begging for money, which is to say the Palestinians in most cases or the workers of Venezuela, who work for the few people who drill for oil. In other words, almost every state was postmodern in that there were no dictatorships nor any modern democracies. Which meant that the postmodern was no longer a revolt against the modern dominant state. It aligned with the broadcast of color television as its main distribution - the postmodern said that it conveyed the world the way it was, in color.

But that meant that it was no longer the intellectuals and the entertainers, taking shots at the modernist movement, but it had to run the system in all of its ugly glory. This is also a generalized phenomenon: in theory, everything is wonderful under the new regime, but in practice, it must now deal with the problems that come with the real world. Suddenly, the defects that it has become exposed for all of the world to see, and a new meta-theory starts to work its magic.

So the two flaws are internal, not everything is in the text, which means that the deferral/dissemination cycle is not solely a language phenomenon, and external, in that the practical way to implement a postmodern society is to find a structure, which uses the deferral/dissemination cycle in a way that it is the sole basis for knowledge. And the currency, which does this, is money, not as the postmodern theorists would have Marxist ideology. Marxism does not produce a car as good as capitalism, therefore capitalist money triumphs over Marxist ideology.

- - -

But now I must prove that the ultra-conservatives, or reactionaries, are postmodern. This is not new; other people have put forward that Trump is a postmodernist president. This is because he subscribes to oil being the fuel of the economy, and money is the transaction that blesses all before it. It is power in its ultimate form, and power is what postmodern theorists define all knowledge to be phrased in. Foucault recognizes reactionaries as postmodern; why shouldn't we?

The distinction here between modern and postmodern reactionaries is that modernist reactionaries make some semblance of historicity of their claims. Even if they have to manufacture copies that seem to be from history, as in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a concoction of pseudo-historical hash. The postmodern do not have to justify historicity because in the postmodern context, it is not necessary. Charlie Kirk didn't have to justify his beliefs by historical fact, but then anyone who is speaking at a Mormon seminary already knows that: the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints promulgates the worst kind of nonsense about pre-Colombian America. What is important to postmodern reactionaries is that they cater to whichever nonsense? Their audience believes in because it is what is underneath that which is important.

This means that the postmodern reactionaries are willing to make up nonsense to justify their beliefs so that they can do whatever it is they want to do anyway. This is not just an abstract belief: they are willing to disenfranchise people if they need to do so to maintain power.

The problem is that the oil which they worship is also going to destroy a large number of people due to climate change gases. The reactionary post-moderns are willing to ignore because they get the benefits of burning oil without taking a proportionate share of the disadvantages. That is, they get the profit, and everyone takes the climate change gas. In fact, right now, the consumer at the grocery store is paying for the oil in the cost of groceries. There is less coffee, therefore it needs to be charged more for the same amount. The postmodern system wants to export corn and soy because these are the most profitable forms of utilization of oil. They are not the most valuable in terms of profit, but they are the most easily produced for the owner; there is a difference.

That is right now, the postmodern system is charging you more than another system would because it is most profitable for the reactionary postmoderns. Oil is the key: oil is the postmodern fuel, in its debased form. It doesn't come out of Foucault or Derrida, but it comes out of their principles, applied to the real world.

This means that President Trump is not the problem. What is happening is that the postmodern system, which we have lived under, is broken and needs to be replaced by something else.

And that something else will be the next topic of my essay.

Introduction

In 2002, I began writing “The Fourth Republic,” and its structure was that 2001 marked the beginning of a new formation of the US Constitution, and the old roles would no longer apply. Today, this is a common place, but at the time, everyone felt that it was merely a close Supreme Court decision from going the other way. I felt, and still feel, that the method the Supreme Court used to determine how the argument was framed was novel and ushered in a new era in American political theory.

The impetus was Bruce Ackerman and his We the People, where he pointed out that there were two breaks in the constitutional order, one after the Civil War with the post-Civil War amendment, and the other in 1932 when a new class of law was administered, namely, Administrative Law and a wellness of Congress to delegate to the President, various powers that had originally been the Congress’s sole authority.

An outline here is the three republics as they were commonly understood, with particular names that pointed to the overarching theme of the republic:

1. The Federalist Republic (1789-1860)

This first republic is based on the original constitution plus a few amendments. The idea here is that there were two levels of power, one in the federal government and the other in the states. As one documentary put it: this was the republic of “are” as in “the United States are.”

The fact that the states could dictate who was an elector for the president was the first hurdle that would happen. Originally, the right to be a voter was essentially a property male vote, though there were exceptions, including in New Jersey, the right of women to vote, but these exceptions were quickly eliminated. There was in some states a graduated right so that the lower house required lower levels of tax.

However, the news states, as they entered the Union, often made simply being white, male, and 21 the barrier, except for a few states, which allowed women to vote in school board elections. But these were few and far between.

This is why I stated that “republic” was different from democracy, because a republic can choose who gets to vote, whereas a democracy must effectively allow anyone to vote. However, this is where technology starts to make an impact on the governing system, because new states were going to be introduced, and at a rate which would be accelerated by railroads; railroads and steamboats were the new technology that disrupted the Federalist Republic because the founders assumed that travel between states could be variable and could take a long time overland. The disruption that the Mississippi basin was seismic when pretty when in the Ohio Valley, and a series of ports along the Mississippi River and Ohio River drew people from the East Coast to fertile land in the interior.

This created a new form of politics, based on the party system, which became crucial. The party convention was formed in the early years of the Federalist Republic and established in 1832, when the Democrats, National Republicans, and the Anti-Masonic Party all used a national convention to nominate their presidential candidates, and could thus be another disruptor of the Federalist Republic.

The key feature of Federalism was that states controlled who and who was not a person, as opposed to property. Slavery was, and still is, the American way of capitalism. It is not that there are no other methods in other countries, but slavery hangs over the American Republic like nothing else. And when the end came, it was Dred Scott v. Sandford, which in 1857 sounded the death knell for the concept that the rights of one race are infinitely superior to others. This does not mean that there aren’t distinctions, but the line of “property” is a line too far.

And therefore, the federalist idea of a two-layered government, which at least had parity between the federal and state levels, was undone. It could survive the making of voters more equal, but it could not make “races” equal, nor could it handle women as full participants in society.

It therefore relies on examining the Civil War amendments to find out what a new order under the Constitution looks like.

1. The Union (1861-1932)

In the early years of the union, it was unclear whether it even needed a different organization from before. As Lincoln wrote to Greeley, on 22 August 1862: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

However, this faded rapidly in the third year of the American Civil War, and a new conception emerged that there had to be changes in the way that government functioned in the daily life of the citizenry. Again, it was not the complete citizenship which we now take for granted, but it was a clear, decisive step.

The technologies which hindered the federalist republic were key to the union because Fortune’s could be made in the interior, moved from the interior, and manufactured, relying on the interior. It was during the war that the transcontinental railroad was started, and completed by 1869. The Union was different from the phrase in 1789: by rail and by telegraph, it spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This made it essential that the corporation came of age and was defined by law, but also by relationships among the heads of large corporations.

Key commodities were often built into trusts and monopolies, and the railroad was the conductor for the commodities. This meant that the telegraph and later the telephone were the means of negotiation and contracts, and electricity was the engine to produce a greater sum of the commodity than could possibly have been imagined in the early days of the Federalist Republic. This led to an expansion of the political convention as a unifier and, paradoxically, a disunifier of party politics: 2/3 was required to nominate a presidential candidate, which meant that mechanisms to secure independent candidates in the early rounds were essential to how a political convention operated. Thus, the “Favorite Son” and “Dark Horse” became facets of political discourse, mirroring the economic discourse on the monopolization of commodities. Monopolies acted both locally and nationally because of the transportation system based on railroads, and to a much lesser extent, on steamboats. Steamboats diminished as the era wore on, and at the midpoint, the government began to regulate monopolies with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

It was noted that there were two forces acting on the government: centralization of power and decentralization of power. The first formed the new republic, and the second countered the effects of centralization. The example is that first the corporation is founded, and then the second limits the power in the form of a monopoly.

At the end of the Union came a tremendous bubble of prosperity at the end of the “Free Banking Era.” It also hid three recessions: 1920-1921, 1923-1924, 1926-1927. However, two of these were considered mild, and the Core engine on the East Coast felt them much less than the previous recession before “The Great War.” This meant that the crash of 29 was unexpected in its severity, and the government made it worse.

If Dred Scott was the harbinger of the end of the Federal Republic, the Union was undone by the unraveling of the finances of the market. What made it so severe was that the government made things worse by not recognizing that the policy of government spending being held down was exactly the problem that continued to cause the Great Depression; instead, there was a need to expand government to counteract the private sector. However, doing so required a change in the republic itself.

The Union was a more tightly knit republic than before, but it could not reach the level that the Great Depression required.

1. The Liberal Democracy (1933-2000)

In The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. began:

The White House, midnight, Friday, March 3, 1933. Across the country, the banks of the nation had gradually shattered their windows and locked their doors. The very machinery of the American economy seemed to be coming to a stop. Be a rich and fertile nation, overflowing with natural wealth in its fields, forests, and mines, equipped with unsurpassed technology, endowed with the boundless resources in men and women, lies stricken.

It was at the moment the wheels were put into motion, what had been voted on Election Day, with a waning of the last day of the old order. What shape an emerging state would have is an entire bookshelf, full of analysis. But several features changed the way that the union transformed into a liberal democracy.

One is that the power was more centralized, and this was eventually done by instituting administrative law as a key part of the federal government. The bounds of this administrative law are tested almost every day, and remember that the liberal democracy was trying to put down both an internal crisis, the Great Depression, and an external crisis, namely, the disruption of states by an untested theory that dictatorship could do what was necessary in order to fight the downward movement of the economy.

The centralization meant that be primaries as a test and deciding be nominee for president at a convention would gradually be replaced by almost all states and other dependencies using a primary or caucus and having the nominee picked before the convention. 1960 was the last time when even the threat of a fight at the convention was tried on the Democratic side.

Because administration was more important than before, the federal government expanded tremendously and had a reach because of the idea of macröeconomics. This concept, most adequately explained by Keynes, with Hicks as his profit, came to fruition because the older idea that there was one form of economics was disproven. A nation is not a family, nor a corporation. This is because a nation commands all of the outputs of the national economy, and therefore cannot go broke, whereas individual families and individual corporations can. This leads to certain facts: in the world of microeconomics, individual units can go broke, and therefore, there are situations that cannot be reached by individual units. But the national economy cannot go broke without dissolving the state itself.

This was paralleled by a change in the way economics, and indeed all soft sciences, were carried out: the mathematics of hard sciences came to the soft sciences with works such as Arrow, Coase, Friedman, and others. This points to one of the main suppositions of American republicanism: all parties must have a chance to participate, whether they are liberal or conservative. Indeed, it was a conservative president, Ronald Reagan, who made a series of changes that did not disrupt the idea of a liberal democracy, though they changed what the purpose of the state was.

1. The Oligarchic Plutocracy (2001 - )

The Plutocracy Republic was established in Bush v. Gore of 2000. This state, in particular, was the point where an unelected body, ensconced by the Constitution, made it its prerogative to choose the president in close cases. It seemed to be a minor fix to an otherwise broken system, but it was a break from the normal democratic form of the American Republic, which means that the form had changed, even if it could not conquer everything at once. The choice was between going to an electrical value economy or going to war, and in the latter, hope that everything would work out just fine. The Republican Party had war in mind, though it was not willing to say this out loud. But the information they had available showed that the reaction elements of the Middle East were going to strike, and strike hard, at the sinew of Liberal Democracy; they just had to wait.

This pattern is hardly new, and it has been done, for example, to take us into World War II when the people were not ready. It was also a change, which could be broken at any given moment if the willingness was found to do that. By the end of two terms, the Republican Party had a broken presidency, and the nation was willing to turn towards the Democratic Party. On the surface, a new president was elected with tremendous ability and a willingness to step in and clean up the mess that the Republican Party had left behind. But there was one problem: Barack Obama was not willing to do what was actually necessary, only willing to do what would stem the tide and let someone else take on the more massive project of economically liberalizing the economy, rather than simply socially liberalizing the economy with a bit of economic liberalism.

This is not entirely his fault, but he was the agent of change who decided not to be the agent of too much change. He was in a system on the democratic side, which wanted to give the best a chance to do all that they could. This flaw was utilized by the Republican Party to its fullest: Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not step down during Barack Obama’s term, and therefore was replaced by a Republican member of the judiciary rather than a Democratic member. What was not realized at the top of the Democratic Party was that the clash of values was existential: the Donks but that there were only minor changes to the American Republic, and therefore they could assume that the Phants felt the same way. This dynamic of each party assuming that the other party was like them was mirrored on the republican side, who assumed that their opposite number would take every chance to grab more power. This was not the elite part of the Republican Party, but it was the view of the electorate of that party.

This has been shown in the second term of the Trump presidency: he no longer can be said to be a president in the republican sense, small “r”, but is willing to take as much power as he can. While the Supreme Court is not willing to grant him all that he wants, they are willing to give the Republican Party the keys to power, and with Louisiana v. Callais, has hobbled the House of Representatives. While there are arguments for this, they are easily dismissed by pointing out that a party which represents the disadvantaged will have a section of the disadvantage which are obvious to anyone who looks at the population at present. In America, this is by race. There are other means in other countries, but as we have pointed out before, race is the shroud of America.

Let us put a number on it: 25 seats are going to be dismantled from the black population. As of this writing, 12.4% of the population of the United States of America is black. That means out of 435 seats, 54 seats in the House of Representatives should be black. Before Louisiana v. Callais, 59 were black, as well as two non-voting representatives from Washington DC making 61. The estimate is that 25 seats will be removed, so the total is 35 seats left. Taking almost half of a voting group away is the very definition of oligarchic.

In a democracy the normal course of order is to expand the franchise to as large a percentage of the population as the majority can stomach. In an oligarchy the the size of the electorate must be reduced so that the governing class can massage the results to victory. The only caveat on the oligarchic reign is, they cannot push things too far until they have complete control as opposed to nominal control.

This means that we now must face that since 2001 and oligarchic system has been in place, and now it is willing to overthrow the American Republic and replace it with an oligarchic model, which holds two norms of the liberal democracy, which preceded it with only a few alterations when needed. We are not a liberal democracy, but an illiberal democracy.

One of the many projects that has been left undone started in 2002 and was called, at the time, The Fourth Republic. The inspiration at the time was Bruce Ackerman and his work on American constitutional democracy called We, The People. In my fumbling around at the time, I realized that the old republic had fallen with the presidential race of 2000. I believed then, as I still believe, that a shift from the Supreme Court in deciding Bush v. Gore had created a new foundation for government under the Constitution. My idea at the time was to label these as “Republics” in the same way that the French had formally named governmental systems, so the First Republic was 1792 through 1804, and so on, with Ackerman providing the divisions for the first American Republic, the second American Republic, and the third American Republic. Of course, Ackerman did not label them separate republics, but he did label them as various orders under the republic.

The problem was that there was no scientific basis, only a disciplined basis, as could be said of economics, which is not a science because it relates to no other science, which is now a key component of a basis in the scientific method. So I produced a first draft and realized that it had a hole the size of Nebraska, and put it aside. It made me realize that I needed to formalize a science of history before I could set myself to, again, in the words of the time, the Fourth Republic.

Now, however, there is a scientific basis based on historical convolutions, and a framework as to how recursions can be made. In other words, a convolution is when a new form takes place, such as writing, and a recursion is a change to that convolution without changing the substance of how it is formed. An example would be writing in a script; many changes will happen to the writing of that script, but so long as the process is the same, writing convolution continues onward. A new convolution occurs when the substance changes, for example, the difference between writing and movable type: in the first one, the person engaging in writing needs to be able to understand the original language, at least in part; as in movable type, the person only needs to understand the letters and combine them. It is the difference between writing out Comedìa by Dante and purchasing the Divine Comedy at your bookseller's shop.

Several differences have happened since 2002: one is that the substance of the fourth republic has now been annunciated in government, and I will state that it is now a crisis point for the institutions of power. This is because the form of government was an oligarchic plutocracy that would end up as a president as dictator in an illiberal democracy. With the decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a crisis point has been reached because there is no way to allow the House of Representatives to create “majority minority districts.” This is a key aspect of the compromise that America reached in the 1960s. This is because plutocracy divides people into the have much, have something, and the shit end of the stick. It has a way of dividing people in a rough fashion, and in America, that is by the evidence of African extraction, which is called “black.” Being black does not automatically mean that you are lower class, but it is a 90% guarantee that you support the party, which supports your right to exist. Some people who are black can move up the scale, but ordinarily they can be recognized, though in certain cases this falls through and there is a minor scandal.

There are other people who are down near the bottom, and in a few cases, they are separated in the same way. For example, transgender. But taking away the obvious examples leaves the bottom end of the wrong of the ladder essentially impotent. And many people who are on the bottom rung of the ladder but are not obviously identified can at least say they are better than at least one other category. This is why “owning the libs” is so important war be bottom rung of the ladder republican voter: they think they are at least above someone who is certifiably below them. Even though the imagined crying actually does not happen.

If this does not make sense, it is because the recursion point has not been explained. So I will do so here. In a functional constitutional democracy, there are elections to determine which group has power at some level of government. The modern democracy has realized that levels need to be made so that the national government does not need to be in control of a particular Mayor's Office. The mayor and the national government have completely separate elections and can be of different parties. One can see this even at a very low level and at a very minimal level of knowledge. That is the convolution: the election and the manner of finding out who has been elected, produce the convolution. That means that every election is still part of the convolution of government, but it is recursively different in different locations within a government.

As you can see, it is a very different thesis because it is based on a scientific conception rather than on history as a discipline. This means that I should write this book because it has value.

The end comes at a shot. Dred Scott v. Sandford came out of the conviction that there were races of men, and that some were obviously better than others, to not even say this in law. It was a matter of nature, and of nature's God. Chief Justice

Roger B. Taney could not be more excoriating of the idea that there might be rights that a black man had that could be honored by a white man.

This set in motion the American Civil War. And all its dead and wounded can be laid on the 1857 Supreme Court. At least it was not very long in coming.

There is now a hum drum among the community in two separate and unequal parts: the Trump supporters scream that this is the pinnacle of justice and fairness, because they are too dense to understand that civil blood makes civil hands unclean in its wake. It is not war, but it is a test of democracy, which now cannot be met in the old rules of the republic on which it stands. The other part of the noise comes from those who oppose it. However, there is no consensus as to what to do. This is normal; just as with Dred Scott, there is no consensus because there is no bottom to Louisiana v. Callais. There must be representation for the lowest of the low because that is what plutocracy needs: someone must be held at the short end of the stick.

It is the rupture that both sides want: the reactionary forces know that they need to obliterate the sinews of the constitutional compromise upon which the current era is founded. They must rewrite, refigure, and by such means obliterate the very notion that if rights are given by wealth, then there must be losers as well as winners. And let us make no mistake, the black American is on the lowest totem pole in such a structure. That does not mean there are other losers who are seen in the homeless and faceless, but when 90% of a class is destined to lose, then the remaining 10% can be found or discarded as wastage in battle. What is one person if nine people are marked as being one of the enemy? But it is also the galvanic structure, which calls to everyone what is wrong with the current system, because the idiots in government protect the powerful in pursuit of unlimited wealth. Pete Hegseth is only one example of the fools in power.

This means that there is no turning back, because everyone is protected or no one is: requiring race to be a factor is to admit to ourselves that slavery was a founding principle of the American Republic, and it must be slain over and over again. It also means that the reactionaries must be defeated and their mechanisms for power must be abolished. Wealth is not speech. Race must be rectified. Men and women must have equal rights.

We must now meet this test as we have before, with the admission that even the constitution must be changed when the reactionary forces create an illiberal democracy, with the resolve to make right what has been wrong.

I do not have time to write an essay, so I will keep it brief. This means, of course, this piece will convince no one, but I need to hammer home the basic problem.

The Fertility gap is global.

Not all countries have billionaires.

Therefore, while billionaires can take the responsibility when they drive the formation of wealth, it is not the billionaire class that is responsible, but the beneficiaries when they are made by law and custom.

For example, China does not have billionaires. But it has the Fertility gap.

Most of Europe has billionaires, but not to the extent that the United States does, and it has a Fertility gap.

This means that while the billionaire expression of wealth is an expression of the fertility gap. It is not the cause of the Fertility gap.

It is merely one expression of a larger issue.

That issue comes from economics, and it can be explained extremely simply as follows:

All income for investment comes from the past, even if it looks as if it comes from the future.

All profits are paid for by the future.

Therefore their needs to be a minimum level of the future being expressed in the above equation.

Every nation has a different way of giving back to the past more than it is allowed by Fertility Replacement.

The solution is to put the feature until there is Fertility Equilibrium.

Which means that the present has to expect less, which the present does not wish to do. You go and talk to Elon Musk.

∴ We need to recognize the past/future as an axiom.

(and can we get back to the old method of displaying symbols? I do not need 🤣 but ∴ and other mathematical symbols are a requirement.)

So, where I am in the launch cycle of the new idea that I am working on…

1. A YouTube Channel on role-playing games.

2. A paper on why convolutions describe the road to history as a science.

And how these two things are interlinked… no really, honest and for true true. You can stop laughing out of both sides of your face.

😜

YouTube Channel

The first step is an easy course on role-playing game theory, with the idea of forming a group and starting to play. But of course it's not that simple. There are several channels which described essentially two things.

1. A game, which the channeller feels is the one true path to role-playing glory, and its mechanics, whether in broad strokes or immensely rules-driven approach.

2. Role-playing the game itself with other people.

As it is, there is nothing wrong with doing this. I like Questing Beast, Matt Colville (sidenote, I once wrote a Adventure with a more complicated map, it was sort of fun to do), GinnyDi, Ardwulf’s Liar, and Daddy Roll a 1, among others for their way of taking apart some simple concept, but there are other others which are equally fine and deserving of attention if you get into that that sort of thing. (In case you haven't noticed, I'm old-school before their old school)

But that is not my way as Star Trek says. (It is restrict to YouTubular) instead, I am trying to describe the Zen of playing almost any TTRPG - I mean if you want to play Toon, this will work for that - whether the New School or the Old School. Of course there is a reason for doing this, I mean aside for the fact that I regard role-playing as a fun experience. And that is the shroud of other components to role-playing game theory: Game Theory, Probability, the pillage of novelization for role-playing games, and World Building.

The idea here is that you don't just pick up a battle axe and go and hack. I mean you could, and there are systems devoted to this idea, but I find the idea of rolling up a dozen characters to survive a session to be a bit blasé. That does not mean you can't die in a role-playing game, but each encounter is basically a three option system: you can hack, you can run away, you can talk.

And that means that the players encounter a “monster” - which in role-play game speak is a non-player character who needs to be confronted for some object - and decides whether they can best get yet by hacking, running away, or talking. Each of these sets up a new game to be played until be encounter is resolved.

Each YouTube video will be about some aspect of role-playing games, whether it is a description of the things when needs to play the game (dice I say we need dice, the more the merrier, gleaming, sharp crystalline dice… where was I?) how to structure a session, kinds of campaign that work (I like Hârn, pace The Complex Game apologist)

These three elements also are future components of history as science. No, really.

Since starting a YouTube channel is a slow process, (really a S - L - O - W P - R - O - C - E - S - S ) by starting it now it should be usable as a tool in about two years, which should be around the time that I will work on the next paper in the other activity…

History Paper

Again the process of taking a paper and showing why the mathematics of dynamical systems points to a convolutions is the correct way to model history as a science. The title of the first paper is tentatively: Modeling the Emergence of Writing: A Dynamical Systems Approach with Archaeological Proxies, which takes Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs and shows how the dynamical model brings both of those two cultures to fruition as history. (Shoutout to Steven H. Strogatz for his book Non-linear Dynamics and Chaos, though I prefer to say it Xaos, because it is modeled differently from chaotic.[ Is shout out even done anymore?])

So when I am not working on videos, I am latexing a paper.

But how does a YouTube channel on wiling away time with role-playing also work as a history generation paper?

Because of course, one of the future instruments on the history papers is other convolutions and a game theory which predicts how each player in history can react to the challenges of their time to get the trade-off that they hope for.

Now back to what I was supposed to be doing, which is today working on the video…

Look at the picture.

No, look at the Picture.

Do you see the image on the screen in front of the AI-generated woman?

Good, now you have seen, but not understood, one of the concepts of the current generation of AI.

In the postmodern world, if we looked for information, we could go down to the smallest level and see what each individual piece did, and therefore we could understand the structure of the query.

But if you ask for the same in the world of the current generation of AI, they will tell you that they do not know how the information is obtained.

This is a change in the philosophy of ontological: the way we categorize what we know. This means that a change in the basic philosophy is happening, even as we speak. The postmodern is obsolescent. The digital is coming into being.

This means that AI has to work because it is how we will interact with the knowledge that we have accumulated and work with every day. This does not mean, however, that the individual instantiation will work. One cannot make money by post-modernizing digital interaction. This is why IBM went from typewriters to computers: a new model of accumulating profit had to be put in place for the revenue stream that was the computerization of information.

The problem is that people such as buffoons who run OpenAI cannot lead the challenge because they do not know what they are selling. This is part of the normal process that if you can define what you produce, you make less money than people who do not tell you what they produce. An executive that managers tool making will be paid less than an advertising executive, even though the first has a great deal for the grasp on what he produces for the firm.

This runs into a conundrum because whether you can contribute to the larger conversation is a job for people who do not actually know what is valuable and what is not. Thus, I am working on a paper that introduces the idea that writing is a convolute, that it sends from other convolutes such as symbology, and this can be shown by Mesopotamia and Egypt, because these are the first that we know introduced writing as a key syntactical object in their dominance.

Of course, I am not being paid for this even if it is of value, because I don't fit the proper role.

This gaggle of PhD's that decides this is wrong in enough regions of their discipline that if we were to expunge them and replace them with AI tools, no one would be the wiser. Except, of course, the PhD, who is without a job.

That the job is rather badly designed for humans does not mean that AI will do better, and it is probabilistically and statistically. Because the problem is that seeming is not the same thing as being. That is, the PhD, provided there are outlets for the exception, is still better than the computer-generated AI. But this will become the reality when AI becomes the reality rather than the talking point.

Which gets us back to the way AI is positioned, which is in direct contravention to its value: when an average person can interact with the store of knowledge and get the data that he or she needs, there is no value to be had. When was the last time you were charged in a public library for access to the card catalog? In other words, when there is value in AI, it will not be charged directly to an individual person. This does not mean that all AI will be free: after all, you do have to pay for access to digitized records. And this will be the way that individual people will charge for their time, rather than wasting it on video games.

So whether AI is going to work is yes and no. No, the dystopian version of AI is not going to happen. But when enough people can be seduced into working with AI for a living, AI will be the default just as UNIX and its descendants became the default for working with a computer. And remember that the Macintosh operating system is UNIX, and Linux is UNIX.

But Sam Altman has got to go, the headlights have caught him like a deer.

The problem is that AI doesn't know where to ship him.

1 February 1968 - Saigon during the Tet Offensive.

Towering overhead was the Ấn Quang Pagoda with the Buddha statue inside. Om. Om. Om. Clash fashion everywhere in a scene out of TS Eliot. Lilacs out of the dead land. Leaves on the trees.

The newscaster said: “We are here in Saigon.” A crackle went through the line. The cameraman caught it before it screeched out into the airwaves.

Motorbus in the street. White low rises in the distance.

I am not going to muff taking the shot, ready up the next frame. Take your time, Eddie.

Pagoda of the Light of the Dharma Seal stood and watched down. Spatters on the pavement.

“Set up here. Steady.”

You are in the right place at the wrong time. Wait for the right instant to take the shot.

He shot without wearing a uniform. What kind of monster is he? “Marine, kill this man.” Rage against the machine.

Man? Police man?

“Roll the film.” A cameraman wobbled.

A woman watched with a dumbfounded look. Helter-skelter.

Rage as the police of the Republic of Vietnam National Police pulled his own gun: a .38 Special Smith & Wesson Bodyguard revolver. “Hands behind your back.”

Whiplash. The steel polish of an unused gun.

“I’m stopping the camera.” Love is blue: Blue, blue, my world is blue, Mrs. Robinson.

Many people alike in dignity run for cover as shots rang hollow.

In heavily packed green, the marine could not shoot. Grazing in the Grass.

The police man aimed at the side of his head, extending arm.

Take the photo at the right angle.

Fire. Aim. Ready.

The cracking shot in the open sky. A ricochet into the fetid condensed air like a cà phê sữa.

The marine looked shocked.

Coming through the skull, I could feel it. I’m afraid. My mind is going. I can feel it. Daisy.

Blood was spurting into the air like a Bánh mì.

Just pull the trigger and move on.

Snapshot with the revolver at the center.

Falling bridges with green tambourine. Help a poor man build a pretty dream.

Lower the weapon.

A Saigon Execution.

With extreme prejudice.

Skip rattle rattle crash beep beep.

Within a day, it was on all the major newspapers - extensively.

Freeze frame.

The recent war with Iran, though it is called something else by the dictator in charge, is a reminder that we live in a globalized world, whether we like it or not. This is because energy flows easily between nations unless, as a political unit, we decide to nationalize it. This, the United States is not willing to do, so the alternative is to have private companies sell to the highest bidder, whomever the nationality might be.

The problem is that while we have enough oil, a great deal of it is in a rather marginal place with only a very small amount of profit: the great expenses of the Texas oil fields are fading into the distance. Whether we like it or not, energy is a globalized commodity, and with oil, the best oil fields are not inside the United States. However, the infrastructure for an oil-based economy is largely completed and needs only the maintenance, which is a small part of the total cost. This means that the holders of the fossil fuel-based economy want to milk it for as long as possible, and then longer still.

The trick is that they have managed for about 70 years to avoid paying the cost of the fossil fuel-based economy, which is called “climate change.” Every time you buy a cup of coffee, there is a tax from the fossil fuel-based economy on the cost of the cup. You pay for it because the regions that grow arabica beans are getting fewer because of the effects of climate change. But the people who created value do not have to pay the cost. If the fossil fuel-based economy had to pay for the effects of burning the fuel, it would not be profitable any longer. Which is why they have lawyers to fight any sort of distribution of wealth. The old expression goes he who robs Peter to pay Paul can count on the political support of Paul.

This is why we must ship from a fossil fuel-based economy to an electrical economy. You're burning up in the fossil fuel-based economy, but many of you have made the calculation that you will be dead before it really comes to that, so why bother? Texting the future to pay off the debts of the present is a feature of economics. Unfortunately, the cost is not computed very well because at a certain point it becomes unsustainable: the tax on the future is far above the value in the present. There is an economic formula for this, but the effect is known from other things that ordinary people can feel even though they cannot calculate.

The war with Iran shows that the oil-producing nations want to control the bottleneck of fossil fuel production, and since their lives depend on it, they will fight to the bitter end to keep those bottlenecks under their control rather than anyone else's.

The old expression is that the best time to move to an electrical value economy is 20 years ago. The next best time is now: we need to re-engineer the global economy to be based on electrical value rather than fossil fuel value. This is because the fossil fuel-based economy does not capture all of the costs that it produces. We have known this since the late 1950s in back-of-the-envelope calculations, and the number has grown sharper with each passing decade.

There are numerous aspects of the economy that need to be changed: one of them is that the car-centric model of development is no longer feasible. This is because there is a difference between high-energy, electrical batteries and lower-density electrical batteries. In this model, trains become more effective because they can use lower-density batteries at scale, whereas cars need higher-density batteries. There are many changes, but they lead to a second-level effect: we need labor here to do these changes, and that means that the labor force needs to be more adequately paid. This does not sit well with the wealthy, who base their whole existence on reducing the labor force cost of everything. The wealthy know that this is an existential threat to their dominance, and they will fight tooth and nail to keep the current system.

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This is not the first time that this has happened. In fact, it has happened twice in the history of the United States: the first was when the wind and water-based economy changed to a coal-based economy, and the second was when the coal-based economy changed to an oil-based economy.

In the 1700s, there were two ways of getting energy, other than buying manpower: using water-based force of gravity, which is most present in streams and rivers, which is how the mill towns were created, and by using the Coriolis effect to drive sales by wind. But then the power of burning wood, and then burning coal, became profitable. This led to an explosion in the area of transportation and manufacturing: the train, the wireless, and the intense heat and pressure used to make steel were some of the examples. There was also corruption because holding the bottlenecks in such a way is hugely profitable, especially when you can socialize the building out of it and privatize the profits.

This was the boom of the 1840s through 1890s - one needed to build railroads, telegraphs, and huge furnaces to make the quantities of steel, which were necessary to convert the economy to a coal-based economy. It was also the time of the robber barons, with Wikipedia listing the following:

1. John Jacob Astor (real estate, fur) – New York

2. Andrew Carnegie (steel) – Pittsburgh and New York

3. Jay Cooke (finance) – Philadelphia

4. Charles Crocker (railroads) – California

5. Edward L. Doheny (oil) – California

6. Daniel Drew (finance) – New York

7. James Buchanan Duke (tobacco, electric power) – Durham, North Carolina

8. James Fisk (finance) – New York

9. Henry Morrison Flagler (Standard Oil, railroads) – New York and Florida

10. Henry Clay Frick (steel) – Pittsburgh and New York

11. John Warne Gates (barbed wire, oil) – Texas

12. Jay Gould (railroads) – New York

13. E. H. Harriman (railroads) – New York

14. James J. Hill (fuel, coal, steamboats, railroads) – St Paul, Minnesota

15. Collis Potter Huntington (railroads) – California, Virginia, West Virginia

16. Andrew Mellon (finance, oil) – Pittsburgh

17. J. P. Morgan (finance, industrial consolidation) – New York

18. John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) – Cleveland, Ohio

19. Henry Huttleston Rogers (Standard Oil, copper), New York

20. Thomas Fortune Ryan (public transit, tobacco) – New York

21. Russell Sage (finance, railroads) – New York

22. Charles M. Schwab (steel) – Pittsburgh and New York

23. Leland Stanford (railroads) – California

24. Cornelius Vanderbilt (maritime, railroads) – New York

25. Peter Arrell Browne Widener (mass transit) – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

26. Charles Yerkes (street railroads) – Chicago

This list can be made longer, but it shows the concentration of wealth by making energy transportable at the continental level. It takes a stride towards making the economy global, but there is a problem with coal, which is solid and irregular in form, and does not have the energy density to be transported easily by ships. The only way for cool to make the world global is by making the military have a much longer reach than before. This crumbled the last of the wind and wood empires, such as Spain, in favor of new empires, which were their military on coal. This means that the United Kingdom and France could make the change because they had sufficient coal, and the United States was based on coal from the 1860s onwards.

The First World War was the conflict where coal was the dominant factor, and B problems with coal as a globalizing force became abundantly clear: it did not have the energy density to move an army, and the navy was tremendously expensive to the point where the United Kingdom changed to an oil-based economy for its huge battleships. The transition from World War I to World War II was the shift from a coal-based infrastructure to an oil-based one. This is why the Axis powers wanted to gain control of their own oil-based resource, because without such capacity, their energy density was too low to control a global empire. The bet of the Second World War was whether the Axis powers could control an oil economy, which would make for a short war, or whether the Allied powers, all of whom had an oil-based profit center, would hold on for the longer war. When looking at it from this perspective, it is clear that the Axis powers had a very small chance of accomplishing their ends, and by the end of 1941, it was almost 0.

All that was left to do was the fighting and dying. This is because the Axis powers are not going to go down without a fight.

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This leads us to the second change in energy supply: from coal to oil. From the 1930s, oil was the secondary source of energy to the primary source of energy. Even things which are not thought of as oil-dependent are, in fact, the transformation of technology, which is the savings of oil that the old system would require; instead, it is transformed to moving bits rather than moving atoms. Bill Gates is a multi-billionaire because he saved the necessity of moving atoms and instead moved bits.

Big Tech is based on oil. I say this as someone whose career was in Big Tech.

It also globalized the supply of energy: oil is liquid and can be transported on large ships because it is of higher energy density than coal. This means that the highest bidder for energy gets the energy, rather than a nationalist dystopia. The entire means of oil is to globalize the market for energy. Note that this is not the case for renewable energy sources because the loss over time is too large to ship energy from place to place.

The problem with the oil based economy in the present is that it needs to allow carbon dioxide to escape into the atmosphere. This blanket of carbon dioxide and methane produces a shroud of heat that is not captured in the legal framework, because the people who benefit from it do not want to have their losses privatized. Socialize costs, privatize profits. When you are old, it is far easier to get your hands into the profit center, and when you are young, you are dumped into a situation where you are socializing costs for your entire life.

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When one captures the cost of the fossil fuel-based economy, it does not work: it is already making less than it produces, and the only way it can continue is by chopping off the infrastructure and socializing the losses. Our war with Iran shows that the centers of the fossil fuel-based economy will be in the hands of the oil-driven economies because they need to have a surplus from the production of fossil fuels. Now is the time to change over to an electrical value, economy, and off of the fossil fuel economy.

Look out your window and see the fossil fuel cars, and realize that each one of them is a weakness in the United States economy, since it does not produce much high-value fossil fuels, only low-value fossil fuels. The problem with the fossil fuel-based economy is that it needs to be a dictatorship, and squash the millions of people who do not benefit from the fossil fuel economy. Many of the requirements are noxious: women who become pregnant must carry to term because there is no reason to do so from an economic standpoint, and the entire social system needs to produce babies to run the fossil fuel economy. At this point, the fossil fuel-based economy is a maw that consumes the very living flesh of the subjects.

17 April 1975 - Phnom Penh

Rollin’ rollin’ rawhide - ride up to the killing fields, starting out as lush green rice with tall palm trees, and ending up as brown. Like Johnnie Walker Black amidst the white verandas with noise, noise, noise.

On the boulevards of the capital city, smiles on the young soldiers’ faces - each and every one a fake. Waving to the people - the people that did not know they would soon be dead, giddily dead. Men, women, and children were bringing up flowers as they would be mourned in turn. Noise. Noise. Noise. Noise. Love will tear us apart on the ballroom blitz.

It was the beginning of Year Zero. But the civilians did not know what holocaust would come, under a shooting star. Howdy, partner.

But it was the end of the American bombing that the multitudes found their release, and what could be bad about the native army that promised to release them? The Americans had bombed Cambodia back into the Stone Age, and there was only up from there. Perhaps.

And then there was silence as the angels of death disappeared from the blue heavens. On the ground, everyone was facing inward to the wide boulevards or outward to sack the shops for whatever could be had. There was black water in the streets, and it sloshed about to keep on rolling.

There were gatherings of people in the courtyards, who knew that whatever happened, their fate was already sealed because they worked for the old government or the military, which had until yesterday promised to hold its ground. Adieu, l’ancien régime.

In a US Army battle taxi, two men who were not military had been picked up off the main Boulevard and were being transported to the French embassy. There were three Cambodian soldiers, a civilian driver, and three men who were hustled into the M113 to be taken to the last holdout of the west: the French Embassy, walled off by a high iron fence and stuccoed towers. In a very French way, everyone on the outside wanted to get in, and everybody on the inside wanted to get out, hoping there would be one more seat on the Vicomte de Bragelonne that was soon leaving on the next tide.

Cracks in the armor that shot shafts of sunshine that glistened in the darkness. Then there was light, before the next teardrop falls.

Then there were AK-47s with the long barrels, like many mouths made to stick in at them. The foreigner jumped - and as they did so, they were manhandled to kneeling submission. The black uniforms were as common as the orange robes of the monks had been the day before. Then the three foreigners were clubbed to the ground with a joie de vivre that ranged to schadenfreude.

The journalist stole a glance at the photographer. And he watched as two cameras were stripped away from his neck. And then the beatdown occurred again - pick up the pieces with mechanical strings on the concrete. After going through the papers, which the Khmer Rouge shoved in their pockets, the marching began. The three foreigners were pushed along by the Khmer Rouge thugs, occasionally getting pummeled on their sides if they put one foot out of line. They twisted a way through the blind alleyways and corridors, almost down to a tunnel wrapped under the palm shoots that blossomed into white flowers. The leaves tangled the flesh.

Suddenly, the sky above them opened up, and they found themselves in a ruined courtyard with many soldiers of the old regime lined up against the wall, their hands slapped against the gray walls. And then the shooting began, one at a time, as each one of them fell and plopped onto the ground. The foreigners watched with a slow sense of horror, realizing that they were probably next. Next. Next.

The photographer was yanked and pushed towards the slot opened up by a bloody body. They took off his last camera.

He said a prayer to whichever god or goddess would listen. But then a very thin man with jaunt cheeks waved them aside. Then the black uniform turned him roughly around and stared until the stare was returned. For almost half a minute, the two locked eyes on the other, until the soldier took a drink of Coke, then spat it onto the photographer’s face. Then the Khmer Rouge simply laughed and told the black soldiers something in their own language, and the men rapidly gathered together the cameras and bits of paper and shoved them back into the foreigners’ pockets.

They were trampled a different way, until they were on some forgotten Boulevard. The journalist recognized that the French embassy was on the left side, a long way down, but he could see the French flag fluttering in the breeze. With another kick from the buttocks of the rifles, they were then left adrift in a huge crowd that was going nowhere along the rumble in the jungle. The three men stood in relief as they saw their Cambodian guide up ahead. The stampede to catch him. Somehow, the journalist knew that their guide had been the one to plead for their lives, but he did not know how.

In some time, they were climbing the iron shafts that enclosed the embassy and began talking in some semblance of French. There was a weight lifted off their shoulders because they knew that it had been close, but it was all in the family now.

The journalist looked upward for planes or helicopters, but saw none. Rescue was still in the distance from this rock.

There is a moment when a change occurs, from, for example, Cambodia to Kampuchea. The older word is what other people call a place where the new name is the native dialect, but it does not tell you with what brutality the change occurred. The minutes ticked by in the early morning, and still, civilians held up white flags. But on the transports with treads slowly grinding up the dirt roads, a white cross with barbed ends flashed back. Everyone who was there remembered every detail; soldiers were black, and the civilians wore white. The green transports, with their heavily weighted, pregnant soldiers grinding down the asphalt, are now the heroic natives who promised liberation.

There was no noise, only silence.

This is a frozen moment, like an old timepiece, deeper than any language, any tears, any laughter that grinds along to the melodies of a different age - a Ragtime pacing to a hand-wound drummer.

16 March 1968 - Sơn Mỹ

The answer is always “Yes” in Viet Nam, especially when it’s no.

You don’t believe me? Talk to me after your weapon is firing bullets into a mother and her child while all you hear in reply is “Dạ.”

Until then, you might as well talk to the wall. You haven’t experienced it. Or maybe I should say you haven’t been “In Country”— out in the field, in the thick of it, wearing extra ammunition on your helmet.

Let me begin on a tarmac where a Huey helicopter is about to take off. Thirty minutes earlier, I got a paper with an emergency order to join the crew, handed to me by Mrs. Robinson, the local unit secretary who handled logistics and made sure that each man felt cared for between doses of Black mollies. Oh joy, oh rapture unforseen...

This note read said, in between the lines: “As in pronto.” This is the kind of order that you don’t even think about disobeying. It just isn’t done. Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day. Uh-hu. You would have to be beaucoup dinky dau to ignore it.

So there I was at the flattop, lowering my helmet to make sure that I didn’t have my head sheared off by the blades. It is in the manual because they make a rattling noise that disturbs the general. Once over the landing skid and butt on the base of the fuselage, I could look at the two men who were already stationed there as part of the airborne that was attached to whatever we were doing that morning. It was not even 0600, and there wasn’t even rock ‘n’ roll on the army station.

“Looey Jones.” A hand stretched out to greet mine.

“Robert Chase, I’m a civilian.” I read my fake name as if off of a mental set of cue cards.

“Observer?” Jones did not see a notepad, hoping I was not a journalist.

“Something like that... I won’t be reporting anything with lines on it.” We both grinned at the lie. “What’s your first name?”

He blushed. It was clear he was embarrassed by it, but stammered out: “Jude.” He then looked in.

Out... I looked out... At the streaming whirl of naked Cây tre - Banana trees by any other name - and the lush accoutrements of vines. Ain’t nothing like the real thing on the delta, whichever delta it was. I felt like a fool on the hill and looked inward. There was a platoon in the back, being carried up and away. In the front, in command as long as we were airborne, was the quiet professional - the WO. The fronts would joke that he was ass and trash, but I had seen enough to know that the warrant officers were the calm amidst the storm of randy infantry that they moved from place to place. I could look up and though I only saw glimpses of the face of the warrant officer that was the case now - rugged and sunburned, with an encyclopedic

knowledge of the terrain down to the last bush. Rather than bushes in the city, which is what the so-called combat infantry

knew. Come on baby, light my fire was the refrain through the heads of the passengers.

I looked below and saw the valley of the dolls - little people toiling away at making the rice grow in a suddenly flat plane that had been taken over by farmers to grow rice that bloomed like cà phê sữa. It came the hot air, and it was only 0729 in the sweltering sun. I wish I had some ice.

Then there was the boom, boom, boom of the quad 60 from the men in the back - it was clearly choreographed in grunts.

There was nothing to hit, so the bullets cut down the rice in a jumpin’ jack flash; it was a gas.

The warrant officer had that concerned look on his face because he saw in the distance, a line of infantrymen with their rifles out. Looking at the line, I did not see what he did not see: there were no VCs, only women working in the fields with children on their backs.

“Warn them off.”

Now, the WO knew that I was from the alphabet soup of spy agencies, and he immediately yanked the receiver and started jawing orders to the lieutenant on the ground with tranquility.

It did not matter. The warrant officer then switched to the long-range radio and looked over to me for what was to be said. It didn’t take me much time to yell back. “Tell them, we have a problem.”

The WO Hugh Thompson barked: “I need medical choppers. “ He waited a moment to send the landing point. Then he turned.

back to me: “I think we ought to go down.” If you don’t know, the expression that officers lead by following their NCOs - and that includes Warrant Officers - learnitlivitluvit, in a Julius Caesar kinda way.

“I see bodies in that empty brook near the money tree... land us there and see if we can find any survivors.”

The plates tore into the hot air with dust, sticking in the windows and on the M-60s. The fog only died down when we had the cry of humanity. The WO landed, and the engine slowed down to a dull roar. I got on the ground and surveyed the territory around me, not registering what I saw. It was like Lord of the Flies was cribbing from this: half-stripped bodies and a sweetly sick order with the rancid tang. It was as if an orgy had just stopped exploding here. Tighten up.

There was movement in the rice, the bending over and straightening up that said that there was a man there, a Western man, because the bends were heavy and forceful. Thompson and I watched, and gradually a combat soldier entered into the dirt road, but there was a twisted glance on his face, and his eyes were not blinking. There was a disheveled aspect to his uniform, and a hanging layer to his pants because they did not stick into his boots. And his boots were loosened, which was not the army way.

Thompson held up his arm and accosted the soldier, “I need some help going through the ditch to find any survivors.”

In grunts, the sergeant replied: “I’m helping them out of their misery.”

It went down from there.

Stomping out of the rice was a strung-out Second Lieutenant with a wet spot in the groin that wasn’t blood. At this point, the warrant officer winds up to him and has a low conversation in that encrypted language. Then the WO came back to me, and in a low, hushed voice: “I don’t know what’s going on here.”

My reply was low: “I think you do. The entire operation was looking for VC, and found civilians.” Pause. “And did their duty.”

He looked out over the rice fields and then went back to me. “What do we do?”

“Well, hurdy gurdy man, you’re about to become a hero because you’re the only person who can fly the chopper. I’ll take the grunts and bury the dead. You have to report to our superiors what has happened here.”

“They aren’t going to believe it.”

“Not at first, but they will eventually. Then they will have to cover it up, and that means whether they believe it or not, they know that other people will believe it. Now go up, note down every line of infantrymen who are blasting civilians. Then, when you get down on the tarmac, write down everything that you see.”

WO walked back into the chopper but then stopped and found a child who was still breathing, and he cradled it and gave it to an army private. I did not see what he said, but it was stern. And off they went. You can read about what happened to them in the transcripts. That and the raping and killing while the civilians begged for their lives. Every period is a shot.

“Hey Jude, we have some bodies to put into the ground.”

“And who the hell are you?”

“I work for the CIA, and if I so much as move my little left finger, I can make sure that your life, as short as it is, is a living purgatory. Ya got me?” Jude froze because he knew what I was saying was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the typing on the report I would file.

There had to be some shade, because it was going to take a long time, and I would rather not have the beating Sun on my neck. A bit a ways, I saw a tree near the Sông Hàm Giang River in the flat, and so we put the bodies in the shade under the Banyan. And gave a minute of silence.

I am not Army by that time. I was not Navy. I never had it in me to be a devil dog, much as I tried. No, I was working for the CIA, but not as a spy; I was the man who cleaned up after them. Call me a hitman if you want, I’ve heard it before. But if you look at the records, you will not see me in the list. I wasn’t there. Though in a different way than you.

25 June 1965 - Saigon

It was night, and the green stream was playing “Bring out your dead.” It was a wipeout. My Canh Café was a blaze with fire when moments before it was a blaze with fire - this one was the place where a Viet Nam woman singing erupted with a crash from a bomb. Suddenly, littered every place where heads and limbs are looking for a body to attach to. Shoes pattering over wood, as ripping over the side was the dark black of water. There was stillness in the glare as a gin of voices in at least two languages were shouting silently to the woolly bully without satisfaction. Help! It was the crying out because the Eastern world, it is explodin’… and then there was twisted quietude on the Saigon river.

Two stories on a boat built for pleasure, now stained with film noirish gashes of powder.

Hanging on a chair, black locks to the floor, was a dead woman with her eyes still open, but there was no there there anymore. Two men stopped and threw her on the push cart that was for the lifeless forms that once were human, but not anymore. Every service was black until it was hit with the beams of light from a dozen flashlights, each one picking up a ghastly scene from out of a horror movie in black and white. Eyes without a face in psychotic calamity.

It was only 30 minutes before the inspector arrived, because technically this was a civilian affair, at least until the MACV had its say in the paperwork, triplicate, to ensure. Welcome to Saigon, where the natives had control except when things were important. The police inspector was picked by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the police chief, and a general in the ARVN. Nguyễn wanted anything bad to be erased before it became part of a draft of history written by someone other than the authorities. However, upon looking around, the police inspector knew that this was not going to be possible this time, as the body count was already too high. There was going to be more than eight days a week when the paper settled. However, he had to toe the line till the rivers blocked up.

The police inspector scanned around, and it was chaos. Uniformed people going over to the side to throw up from the scene that was laid before them: tatters of cloth weaving into the breeze with bile and sanguine botch on their shavings. Bent wooden chair, legs strewn about with a strange sort of precision. Crashed dishes, scattered over cheap rugs that were matted with human organs everywhere. There was the odour of gin and marijuana pasted into the walls.

But the police inspector was not impressed, because he had seen what went on in the tangled up brush far from the city, and to his mind, this was simply a transposition of the jungle to the docks.

He looked around and found a young sergeant who was undamaged by the two explosions. “Can I talk to you?” While there was a Vietnamese accent, his crisp letters were punctuated with a staccato rhythm that made most people look over and then realize that this police inspector was in charge. For the moment.

The face of the sergeant looked blankly at the inspector, trying to grasp what he was there for.

“I said, can I talk to you?” It was a repetition of the first words the inspector, which oozed into the sergeant’s skull.

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“My name is Nguyễn Đạt Hùng - just call me Nguyễn.” It would be too much trouble to explain that Nguyễn was his last name. “What is your name?”

“Sir, Sergeant John Lewis, sir.” The man took a swig from the Bud.

“You don’t need to start with, sir, and close with it too.”

“OK. I need to change my clothes.”

“When we are done.” The police inspector looked around and saw the chaos still raining, but at least most of the bodies were on carts and being rolled off. Then he focused on the American sergeant, realizing he was from the Marines because of the regimented-beyond-regimented way of speaking and carrying himself, even though the sergeant was clearly debased, debauched, and dehumiliated. This was not the police inspector’s concern. “What did you see just before the first explosion?”

The sergeant shook his head. “I was... did not see anything. I heard something behind me... I saw the flash on the walls...” Then the sarg went into a long, quiet diatribe about how he had just blown his wad of military pay on booze and bhang and failing at carnal knowledge. Then the sergeant shut up, and the police officer turned away and smoked from his pack of Marlboro. He went to the starboard and looked out across the choppy water.

Drag... drag... drag...

When he finished the fag and flung it into the Saigon, he turned around only to see a cover across the black American. Stepping over to the Viet Nam orderly, he barked: “What happened?”

“That was a piece of long, sparkling sharpnel at the back of the neck. He died from blood draining down his esophagus.” Then the orderly called for a cart, because there was nowhere to run to; the next plank of the dead was neatly arranged, and the fallen were off into the distance. This one was processed.

Nguyễn knew he had to get out of this place.

31 January 1968 - Saigon

Just a splash of sugar in his coffee would make everything all right, all right in cascade. Bada bing bada boom: Concierto de Aranjuez in sketches out of Spain oh so long ago. Cradle me rockin’ as the cup was on a saucer, but it was the rattling of the rattan table, and onto the asphalt painted yellow - striped. You could feel the boom-rock-boom. And then came the quiet - in a Viet Nam kind of way - short sharp shocks in your bones.

Across the concrete there was a was a display of piss and blood mixed in with the cold black coffee, but instantly there were a troop of old women to brush aside with the antique brooms that were everywhere in Saigon, because there was a command from the mayors quarters that every spill must be cleaned up if it were in the site of the American patrols. And what the mayor wanted, the mayor often got because there was an inordinate pool of people to make it happen. But out over the roads, there were plenty of bodies that stared into the blackened sky until the western medical staff could look at them and count the shrapnel and the bullets, and add it to a growing list of the deceased on this Dead Tet campaign.

The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, or Việt Nam cộng sản or Việt Cộng, had risen up across the south and tried to claim that the old regime was not even “old” or “regime,” but an ancient footnote on the pages of history. The Americans were tone deaf and called them the Viet Cong in their rushed and unsubtle diatribe of words pouring out like Brinks on the Hotel. 1964 was a very good year, but 1968 looked to be spectacular with crack the sky, shake the earth.

That’s the way the young MD found the situation - eyeballs schmear with shit on an onion bagel. He fumbled for his walkie-talkie.

“Come in, base - this is Dr. Hunter.” There was a distant, echoing, smash of glass - the war never sleeps.

From over the banana radio came a grace under pressure vox: “This is base, what is your emergency?” It was slightly annoyed: Ma Nishtana ha-laylah ha-zeh, “What do you want now?”

“I have...” Hunter looked down, “An E-3 holding on to life. Face is badly mangled, and an eye rolls around.”

“Your location?”

He looked up, realizing the short cars were stopped, no mopeds were whizzing, and the rapidly Didi Mau were not present. He looked at the street sign, all riddled with holes. “Nguyen Thai Hoc... Near Minh Mang bazar.” Mispronouncing every syl-LA-ble as a tripped down the rabbithole à la Cu Chi tunnels following the White Rabbit on the soundtrack for dissent - one that mother gives you get here - sloppy dead.

Nearby, a stream joins up with the Saigon River in a choppy commotion as if the waters were on the side of the Viet Khong.

“It will be a while, Dr. Hunter...”

“He does not have that long...” Even as Hunter spoke this, he was stripping away the top end, trying to find what was the most important injury to take care of. He saw a red door, and he knew it must not turn black in the aftermath of pus and destruction brought to you live by Sanyo. So suddenly, he was not aware of when the medic came, only glanced out.

A voice came, like over the radio: “I am the medic with the 101st airborne.”

“Do you know CPR?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it.”

A block away, a chopper dropped a violet gas grenade, billowing up to the heavens, for reasons unknown. It mixed with the murky blooms of soot and ash - with a panache of fire engines from Uncle Sam. A few flakes rained down on them. Hunter tried to shield the worst of it, but it was a chain of fools. Hello. Hello. The shell says low. It hit the left femur of the medic. Another BOQ by DRV on the DMZ down on Corner Street RVN, sweeping wide on the boulevards amid the rubble. And the sarge went pa-pump-pa pa-pump-pa pa-pump-pa on the sidewalk - and for once he wasn’t being run over.

Yeah, it was clear to the doctor that the last squirt of sanguine was coming - the realization flooded the doctor’s brain. That meant that he could treat the untreatable sergeant or turn his attention to the medic, and one last pump, and finally, he moved to the medic.

“Steady... I know it hurts, but it will be all right.” Alright. Oh Lordie Alright. The medic smiled as he grimaced.

After the Dr. had set the medic’s bone, he turned around to look - but it was obvious the mortem was past. In nomine patrus rapped the chant in piss and blood as the trumpeter wailed.

He looked down on his work, and he saw a photograph in the sergeant’s jacket pocket. The Dr. shouldn’t have taken it, but it seemed new. He glanced. It was in the wide world of color - the sergeant and a Vietnamese woman.

They were both smiling, and in the foreground, a cup of cold cà phê sữa and a purple parasol on top.

What an individual person does not understand is that it is not the present that concerns other people, but the possibilities for the future. This means that be Nash equilibrium, and the prisoners dilemma factor into the degree of trust that a person or country projects.

Let us take an election where there are two parties. In an election where there are two candidates, or more, who both want to have a democratic mandate, and people know that future elections will be the same, then trust can be built that there will not be a dictator.

But if there is an election where there is one candidate who wants to form a democratic mandate and the other who promises to be dictator, then there is one choice to maintain a democratic mandate. But that means that the democratic mandate candidate must be competent, and this is not always the case. That means that in some future election, there will be a candidate who cannot convince the elected that a Democratic mandate is viable. This means that sooner or later a dictator will be chosen when the democratic mandate candidate is thought to be incompetent. Note that it does not mean that be democratic mandate candidate is incompetent merely that he or she cannot convince the public.

Realize that the media is slanted towards the very rich, and that means they will push the democratic mandate candidate down at every possible turn, and there will be a section of the electorate who actually wants a dictator. This means that only a small percentage of people need to be convinced that a competent seeming dictator is better than an incompetent seeming democracy.

This is the prisoners's dilemma: the worst possible outcome is a dictator, but next worst possible outcome is an incompetent democratically, elected president. This means that it is possible for a dictator to be elected if there is no choice in the forms of democracy available.

Which also means that after a dictator is overthrown or outlasted, you are back to the prisoners's dilemma election. There is no reason why a dictator cannot be elected in some future election unless the laws and formalities are enforced much more strongly.

That means that other people or other countries cannot trust the country because they know that eventually a dictator may be elected when there is a problem which cannot be easily solved by one election.

I submit that Obama was a competent president, but not a truly great one. The mess that be American republic was in, was not solved by his methods. This means that in the next election Trump was willing to say that he wanted to be a dictator because that is the structure that American companies fit best in because there are many companies not just one. The next election, the dictator was up against a democratic mandate candidate, who was only possible as president. The electorate decided that, with the appropriate amount of massaging from a media that wanted to become richer than they were, a dictator was better than another passable Democratic electorate candidate because they were on the edge of looming disaster.

That meant that they not only wanted a dictator, but an unlimited power dictator so the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress were put in Trump's hands.

In the corporate democratic party, which runs the offices of minority leader of both houses of Congress, they do not learn the appropriate lesson: they want to go back to the election after Obama and change very little and promise, cross my heart and hope to die, that this will not happen again. Unfortunately, other countries cannot believe this because they understand the lesson quite well: if there is a chance for a dictator to be elected, then eventually one will be. That means that Trump is not the last dictator, but only one of a string of dictators, which eventually will lead to an effective dictator that closes down all signs of dissent.

This means that, in a mathematically probable way, we must interact a series of laws that will prevent a dictator from coming to power and populating the other branches with friendly people who support a dictator, even if they do not have the ability to be one.

States, and their make-up, make the rules.

Ali Khamenei isn’t a dictator but the leader of a fanatic group, or Primus inter pares. This means that Hitler is a dictator while Tojo was the first among equals. Iran will pass the mantle to another Ayatollah, because while the theocracy of Iran is heated, they are still Iranians, or better, the people you know, than the people who you don’t know. We should think on this, because while Iran promises retribution for the Supreme Leader’s death, it is only 50-50 that they actually mean it. The leadership of Iran wants to maintain power. They have a plurality, but not a majority, of support. Much of the rest of the population of Iran either doesn't care or actively dislikes the regime in power. In the major urban centers, there is a core group of people who would like to shift towards the west, but there is also a large conservative population in the cities who believe that the current government represents their interests. And the dwindling, but still vital, rural population is sadly in the camp of Islamic fundamentalism.

The problem with a crass dictatorship is that there has to be another side for people to change their allegiance to, and this is not happening in Iraq at the present time. There has to be a side for millions of people to line up for rather than line up against. The trend will continue to be against the Supreme Council and the Supreme Leader, and it may be that the change is coming, but it is not yet here because the tools of repression are all in the government’s control, particularly the military.

This means that the dictator of the United States can blather all he wants about overthrow, but in reality, he is interested in profits for himself in this little bombing campaign. This is the reality of the current conflict: two powers control the apparatus of government, but do not control the loyalty of the people. While there are large differences, there are also similarities in terms of the religious power being used as a means of control.

This means that the President of the United States, the Blotus of Potus, says that this is a war that American service personnel must die in, but also that it is not a war just a series of strategic bombings. Which makes no sense at all.

One of the key pillars of a democracy is the right to vote in all elections. When this right is threatened, then the democracy itself comes under threat. People who have read my content know that I believed from almost the first that Trump declared himself a dictator almost immediately, but many others eschewed this notion at first. There are many people who did believe, and these people became the early adopters: people who believed that the rules were fundamentally different than before. Politics was not in operation, but instead confirmation that we were now a dictatorship rather than a republic, and that each vote was the confirmation that we were going to try the dictatorship road over the republic road.

Gradually, these few turned from early adopters and became the early majority: a plurality of people who understood that the end of this dictatorship was the dissolution of the right to vote. If you have been among this early majority, realize that the old media was targeted for destruction by the supporters of the dictatorship, and therefore, you were made to feel alone or pushed out to other forms of information. Since the rest of the world was not a participant in an attempt to disband the republic, this meant places like the BBC, DW, and France 24. Whole countries were against America taking the dictatorial road.

This set up a clock because one of the key aspects of democracy is the regular submission of the right of a particular party to continue to operate with the full faith and credit. The dictatorship must remove this pillar and rather quickly. When a dictatorship tries to take for itself the right to vote and determine who does not have the right to vote, this is a signature step.

Since we in the United States have a set timeline, which even in war must be submitted to, two years is often a stretch for even the most determined of dictators. It is one of the strengths of a congressional mandate as opposed to a parliamentary mandate. Even Lincoln was required to win a presidential election in time of war. Even FDR was required to win a presidential election in time of war. Trump has no war, but does not want to win even a congressional election. This is the sign that the dictator running the country wants to be a dictator for at least two more years.

This is the time when the people need to rebel against the government. Stripping away the right to vote by various machinations, however, gently they are phrased, is a line that may not be crossed and must be thwarted by any legal means available.

A dictator does not have the right because the right to vote is the test of his leadership, and therefore, it cannot be left to his choosing.

The intent of this paper is to show that history is a science rather than a discipline based on the humanities. This means that history must be pursued by the scientific method and proceed from an instantaneous work rather than looking backward. While the steps above are complicated, they are expressed in a linear framework that can be done for any civilization that has writing at its core

1. The Population Pyramid can be modified to a framework for primatology by giving it a one-to-one male/female Transmission and results in a zygote at the level below birth. This means that the population pyramid can continue at each moment.

2. This leads us to a convolution that tracks conception, which we will call the biological convolution. This is an extension of the homonidea, though obviously extended in the homo lineage.

3. Later compilations can occur once this biological convolution is established. This leads to a stacked convolution, each building on the one before it.

4. The reason for the convolution is that the stimuli occur at the derivative of two compilations, and the brain is the area underneath the curve.

5. .The simplest form of convolutions is considered natural, which searches for a pattern that is known to the genes.

6. Artificial patterns require an altered form of neurological activity when implemented.

7. To be a science rather than a humanity, things must be placed in an evolutionary framework, and that means that each convolution or recursive value of a compilation must be focused on the problem they are trying to solve rather than looking backward without necessity.

8. History is a step from previous steps, and the examples shown show that trade and Hierarchies are the essential steps that require the verbal convolution to be completely immersed in the symbolic system.

9. Outside forces may dismantle the need for writing, as shown by Linear A/Linear B. Writing can come back either through statistical analysis or the need for writing being present at a later point.

10. By the time of Rome, the central city was in a population sink. Further research must be done as to how long this population sink extends. The reason that this is important is that almost all of biology does not work if the central location of population increase is negative.

11. This produces a center with lower longevity, but enhanced choice of mates, with an outside where there is longer longevity and fewer choices of work, but pure choices of mates and working choices.

It should be noted that there are other convolutions, and that writing is not the final pollution, which will be examined later. It would be useful to have a game three for history, which is similar to, but not the same as, classical game theory or biological game theory. These points will be addressed in later papers because, without them, the science of history is incomplete.

I hate American cheese. It is disgusting, repulsive, and not very good. End it is part of a revival of cheap. There is nothing wrong with something being inexpensive and part of the terroir of the earth. This is why cheddar, extra-sharp, from Wisconsin or New York hits a certain spot that nothing else can: it is an inexpensive cheese, which bites to be quick and is part of the American cheese sandwich.

What American cheese has going for it is that it melts until you cannot taste what the actual cheese is. It is one step above Velveeta and several steps below the cheddar cheese, which is part of its agglomeration.

But there are other stains one the taste buds... Bud Beer, the Comic Queen of wash it down and don’t taste anything but the foam. And don’t get me started with baloney.

One of the problems is something we have lost: Cigarettes. I do not smoke the smoke. It is truly noxious and bad for your health.. However, my four bearers puffed away like a chimney on Marlboros and other sins against the taste buds. And cigarettes provide provided a taste, So that other things such as food did not need to do so. An American cheese sandwich fried with butter, you did not need to assert itself because the smoke from the Camel was enough to enhance the aroma on its own.

But now there is a revival in cheap, with all of the Extravagant and lavish funding over the clean assortment of cheap ass condiments. The difference between cheap and inexpensive is the difference between American and cheddar, between Bud from Milwaukee and Budweiser from Paha, Czechia. It is the difference between starvation without notice and being rich. Plenty with just enough flavor…

It is also the difference between the United States and Europe in politics: We have a conservative party and a reactionary party. The conservative party is the Democrats, and the reactionary party is the Republicans. And oven, since the solution is actually to be liberal and give the lower classes a route upwards to what is better, because it is made with the hands. Because both of the parties are conservative in their nature, the only question is whether we move very slowly or quickly towards the falls and plumb the depths of the pole of dictatorship.

Realize that the land of cheap cheese is also the land of a fork in the road, which leads to the same place, and no one will trust us to be impartial, knowing that we put our finger on the scales occasionally to get the outcome that we desire.

Because once Trump is gone, if we do not make it so that the obscenely fantastically got awfully rich, do not have a chance to take power again, we are not to be trusted. But that means that the conservative party must be balanced by a liberal one, not a reactionary one.

The bat swished through the air and plumbed the depths of emptiness, which even a grapefruit would not connect. A plug of dust rose in the sweet padding of the glove. The catcher lifted his face mask and spat away from home. Then he threw the seams back to the, loosely speaking, the pitcher.

“This is the Grapefruit League, not the beach ball league.”

“My contract says I am to be here this day, but it doesn’t say that I have to connect with anything.” The hitter watched the pitcher in his stance, and despite his lazy way of speaking, he took in every detail. Every curve, every angle.

“That’s not what I heard from the Winghouse.”

“The mama cat is in the City, and I don’t talk about what I do in Tampa.”

“And she never finds out?”

“Hasn’t said anything about it.”

“Yes, but that is why we play these things. What if she comes down?”“

“When the wife comes down, I take her out to the whiskey bar.”

“So she knows she’s special. One day you are going to move from a long ball hitter to a warning track slop.”

The picture, then wound up and loosely threw a meatball. The hitter didn’t move, and a strike was called.

“You didn’t even swing at that one.”

“The boys who are up from AAA need to flay the manager. Prove they are not just Punch and Judy on roids. I just need to hit when the first lineup is called.”

“There will come a day when that swing turns into a stagger.”

“And when that day comes, I will tip my hat and leave. I’ve got enough money in the bank to run the rest of my life.” He scanned the wall at dead center field. He stared at it. His stance had changed: the cleats dug in. Almost before the ball left the fingers, the hitters batter twinge. Ball meet George. Over the wall, it went sailing for the blue sky with a touch of salt in the air. Take that, Cactus League: the air out in Arizona was sterile and beat down over the heads of everyone who played there.

“You have been dodging the chief.”

The hitter just looked at the pitcher. He thought to himself, this guy would be cut before the week was out. And it was Thursday. The picture moved through the motions. The hitter stood out and took a graceful swing.

As he passed the dugout, he turned to the players with a mock look of surprise. All but one feigned a look of horror.

After the work-outs were over, and the short meet-n-greet ended, he change he went down the hole to the locker room and stripped for a shower. He wanted to be clean before the tightness.

Then he was off to get his Corvette and take a small drive to the Winghouse and collect at least two for a three on the evening’s activities. There was a slight grin. It was good to be the top hitter in the crowd. He stopped by an ATM to yank out the cash that he would need. He slid the guardian and punched up the buttons that held the code for release.

But then he stood as if plunked because the ATM would not spit out a C-note. He grew frustrated and proceeded to ask how much was in the account. The ATM rep replied with green figures: “.01.”

It felt like he was punched out. Looking like he was in a daze, and realizing his wife had zeroed his account. He fished for his iPhone and dialed her number.

There was no reply at all.

He then felt a nail on his back, squeezing into his chest. And he even knew, as he turned back, what he would see.

She was plumped and put out with the lips, both red and drooping. And then she spoke in a low, lustrous growl. “I see you didn’t check your mailbox.”

There was a halting to his voice, and he finally squeaked: “No. What’s wrong, Mama Cat?” There was a drag to his nether regions.

“You’ve been traded to the Rockies... for some money and bodies to be named later.”

“You are going to Denver?”

She bent over her bag and fished out some legal papers. “This is a filing for divorce.” She looked down and then looked up. “I wanted to see the look on your face in person. Have fun.” And then she turned around, with her floral dress scrunched. He saw on her hips the palm of another man’s hand. And he went back to the dugout and knew that the one person who had not smiled was the person whose hand it was.

Cactus League, here he came.