Iranian Regime Thrilled! Cuba Drilled! Group Fantasy Willed! Credit Card Users Over-Billed!
By Robert Eringer
“How ChatGPT is flooding our lives” (WaPo)
One glorious aspect of ChatGPT’s existence is how the judicial system has been affected by it.
Meaning…
Should anyone, for any reason, want to sue me, kindly contact my attorney at: ChatGPTesq@tutamail.com.
While plaintiffs incur outlandish legal fees… I’ll be paying $20 a month.
“I Saw up Close the Dark Reality of OpenAI’s Race to Create God” (The Times)
Shock! Horror!
A new exposé reveals that OpenAI is secretive, aggressively competitive, fueled by vast capital, and populated by people who talk as though they’re building God.
In other words: water remains wet.
The real question is not whether Silicon Valley harbors ambition, ego, and billion-dollar power plays. That’s practically the dress code.
The only remotely interesting issue is whether OpenAI abandoned its original for humanity nonprofit halo earlier than advertised. In any case, most of us knew better then to believe they’re for humanity BS.
This lands less like Pentagon Papers than Breathless Observations from Inside the Obvious.
“Nimitz Aircraft Carrier Enters Caribbean” (NYTs)
“Castro could be captured like Maduro” (The Telegraph)
“CIA director brought paramilitary leader involved in Maduro capture to Cuba meeting” (CBS News)
These are tactics devised to bolster, with added leverage, CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent in-person message to Havana: As part of the Donroe Doctrine, Cuba’s role as a safe haven for adversaries of the United States must end—or face the consequences.
“Cuba tells its citizens to prepare for war as U.S. targets Castro” (LA Times)
It appears the decrepit Castro regime prefers to face the consequences.
“Ebola outbreak, as WHO upgrades risk assessment” (AP)
“Former CDC Director Warns Ebola Could be Very Significant Pandemic” (The Hill)
On the heels of COVID, might anyone explain why I should ever believe even a single word from anyone at WHO or CDC?
“Gunman killed after opening fire on Secret Service checkpoint outside White House” (CBS News)
The shooting outside the White House involves an individual whose motives will be parsed and assigned to a prosecutor.
But Lloyd deMause—the psycho-historian who viewed history as mass emotional acting-out—might have looked elsewhere, such as the surrounding psychic weather.
DeMause’s theory of group fantasy proposed that societies under stress generate shared emotional narratives: persecution, catastrophe, purification, looming doom, existential evil.
No central command is required. The messaging diffuses through headlines, hashtags, cable panels, political speeches, memes, opinion pieces, and social media dopamine dispensaries.
No memo is circulated.
The atmosphere does the work.
Most people consume such theater as theater.
Some do not.
When a culture spends years framing political opponents not merely as wrong, but as existential threats—Hitler, the end of democracy—it is optimistic to assume every recipient will interpret this metaphorically.
To psychologically stable adults, it’s just partisan melodrama.
To unstable minds, it may be instruction.
Psychohistory offers an unsettling thought: acts like this do not emerge from isolation.
They emerge from immersion.
A civilization that marinates itself in political hysteria ought not be astonished when one of its more unstable consumers mistakes performance for assignment.
“White House says ex-Secretary of State Pompeo should ‘shut his stupid mouth’ on Iran” (The Hill)
Another example of the sophistication, grace, and aplomb emanating, these days, from the Executive Branch.
“Ted Cruz, Trump ally battle online over criticism of Iran deal” (The Hill)
Cruz, Mike Pompeo, and Lindsey Graham have the better argument here: the Iranian regime has treated signatures less as binding commitments than decorative calligraphy.
Trust, in Tehran, tends to be a renewable fiction.
“US and Iran agree deal in principle to finally reopen Strait of Hormuz” (Daily Mail)
Jeez, I thought this war was about uranium/nuclear capability?
If Trump capitulates on the nuclear issue, his deal will not be a win but a spin—and he’ll wind up looking like a bombastic buffoon.
“What Is The Average Credit Card Interest Rate This Week?” (Forbes)
Answer: 25.28%.
The biggest scam is hiding in plain sight.
If a neighborhood loan shark charged 25.28% he’d be called predatory. But with credit card companies, it’s called “risk-adjusted lending.”
Credit card companies rake it in from revolvers, late-payers, minimum-balance carriers, and financially stressed households.
Their ideal customer is permanently indebted.
And that’s not a side effect. It’s the business model.
Look at your monthly statement.
It doesn’t say: Here’s what you should pay.
It says: Here’s the smallest amount required to avoid immediate punishment.
That number is engineered to feel manageable while preserving your debt indefinitely.
Then there are reward points—the glittering bread crumbs of modern serfdom.
Americans will financially self-immolate for 1.5% cash back, airline miles, priority boarding, a free mozzarella stick
Meanwhile, the issuer collects interest, fees, merchant charges, and your spending data.
Credit cards are marketed as freedom. But in reality they are subscription-based indebtedness—financial fentanyl in titanium packaging.
And the cruel brilliance of the system is this: The deeper you fall into debt, the more desperately you need the very instrument destroying you.
What a week—whew!
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