Latest posts

  • When the Great Shutdown Becomes the Great Purge: Welcome to the RIF Apocalypse

    When the Great Shutdown Becomes the Great Purge: Welcome to the RIF Apocalypse

    Week two of the federal shutdown was supposed to be grim but familiar—employees furloughed, services on pause, griping about microwave lines in the Pentagon cafeteria. But this week, the White House slipped a clause into the apocalypse: permanent layoffs, not temporary pauses. On October 2025’s midpoint, OMB Director Russ Vought dropped the bomb that “the

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  • X’s Algorithmic Hunger Games: When Your Feed Becomes a MAGA Mall

    X’s Algorithmic Hunger Games: When Your Feed Becomes a MAGA Mall

    If you logged into X on October 9 or 10, 2025, you probably expected the usual feed: a few memes, your cousin’s dog video, maybe one of those cryptic subtweets from someone who still thinks “vaguebooking” works in 280 characters. Instead, what you got was a carnival barker’s megaphone of right-wing political content—accounts you never

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  • Letters From the Border, Echoes in Rome: Pope Leo XIV vs. Operation Midway Blitz

    Letters From the Border, Echoes in Rome: Pope Leo XIV vs. Operation Midway Blitz

    If you want to know how power really moves in 2025, don’t watch the tank convoys rolling down Chicago boulevards or the ICE jackets fanning out across El Paso school zones. Watch instead the moment when a packet of handwritten letters from parish shelters in Texas and New Mexico lands on the Pope’s desk in

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  • Trump’s Jail Talk: When Presidents Play Sheriff of Dissent

    Trump’s Jail Talk: When Presidents Play Sheriff of Dissent

    It starts, as so many American breakdowns do now, with a social media post typed out between the golf course and the motorcade. On October 8, 2025, President Donald Trump fired off on Truth Social that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” for “failing to protect ICE Officers.” He added, as a flourish,

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  • The AI Boom’s Cisco Moment: Seventh-Inning Hype with Dot-Com Déjà Vu

    The AI Boom’s Cisco Moment: Seventh-Inning Hype with Dot-Com Déjà Vu

    If the stock market were a baseball game, investors in Nvidia and the broader AI trade would be screaming from the bleachers, “Relax, we’re still warming up!” But Lisa Shalett of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management begs to differ. In an October 7 Fortune interview, she invoked a metaphor that landed like a bucket of ice

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  • CDC Throws Out the Blanket, Hands You a Needle and a Therapist Instead

    CDC Throws Out the Blanket, Hands You a Needle and a Therapist Instead

    It happened with all the subtlety of a balloon deflating at a child’s birthday party: on October 6, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided that the era of sweeping, one-size-fits-all COVID vaccine guidance is officially over. No more “everyone six months and up gets a shot” slogans. No more universal calendar reminders.

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  • “Democrat Layoffs” and the Great Shutdown Purge

    “Democrat Layoffs” and the Great Shutdown Purge

    Day five of the shutdown, and the White House’s playbook just got darker. At 12:01 a.m. on October 1, federal funding lapsed. By October 5, director Kevin Hassett appeared on State of the Union to publicly warn: yes, mass federal layoffs could begin—if Trump deems negotiations “going nowhere.” He framed this as a conditional escalation,

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  • The Guard Was Called (and Illinois Put On Notice)

    The Guard Was Called (and Illinois Put On Notice)

    The White House confirmed that the president authorized federalization of three hundred Illinois National Guard troops to “protect federal officers and assets” in Chicago. Governor J.B. Pritzker answered with fury, saying he had been handed a manufactured performance disguised as an ultimatum: activate the Guard himself or watch Washington seize control. The move followed a

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  • When Apple Ditches the Goggle in Favor of the Invisible Lens

    When Apple Ditches the Goggle in Favor of the Invisible Lens

    It began with a whisper, a rumor caught in internal memos and whispered hallway code names. Then it broke: Apple has paused its overhaul of the expensive, bulky Vision Pro headset and is reallocating staff toward a two-track glasses program. The $3,499 mixed-reality goggle is no longer the future—it’s the relic. The future is voice,

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  • Quantico Overture: Trump’s Speech, the ‘Enemy Within,’ and the Militarization of American Cities

    Quantico Overture: Trump’s Speech, the ‘Enemy Within,’ and the Militarization of American Cities

    In the glare of flags, in the shadow of rank, Donald Trump addressed roughly 700–800 generals, admirals, and senior enlisted leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico. It was a moment staged with the precision of a director: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s prelude, the audience summoned at short notice, the hush in the hall as Trump

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