On the Rise

You might think that America, and perhaps the entire world, is in serious decline.

Is everything going downhill?

Well, fear not. Some aspects of the modern world are on a steady incline toward greater heights.

For example, did you know that the world added nearly a million new millionaires last year? And almost half of those are American, at “a pace exceeding 1,200 per day.” 

Wow — so many people getting fabulously wealthy and… what’s that? It seems that “median wealth — a figure more representative of typical adults than the mean — dropped across the majority of countries,” which is further “evidence of widening inequality.” Yes, even as we got more millionaires, “most people got poorer.”

OK, that’s not what we had in mind for a great surge upward. But here’s something else that’s on the rise.

It appears that “billionaires’ billions are increasing faster than ever.” Billionaires have a “combined wealth that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.”

We are now at in a situation where “the surging financial and political power of a few hundred individuals contributes to a growing inequality that is likely to persist for generations because most of that wealth escapes taxation, creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy.”

These insatiable oligarchs are the chief reason for the “shrinking slice of the economic pie that goes to workers” and the acceleration toward “a level of wealth concentration that will break society.”

OK, that is not what we had in mind when we clamored for more. But we can’t help ourselves.. We are Americans. Clamoring for more is kind of our thing.

In any case, there is one more aspect of modern life that is skyrocketing.

Last year witnessed “the highest number of conflicts between states since World War II, and the highest number of fatalities recorded since the Rwandan genocide.”

Yes, we’re getting more war. And if you thought 2025 was just an anomaly, “data this year so far shows the rise in conflicts globally is a trend that's likely to continue.”

Researchers say that “the extremely high number of conflicts and wars … lends credence to the growing number of voices arguing that we are witnessing the end of Pax Americana and the liberal world order."

So if you’re feeling down, just remember that at least a few things are going up — like war, economic inequality, and the political power of trillionaires.

Truly, the sky is the limit.

Semiquincentennial Blues

As we celebrate (is that even remotely the right word?) our country’s birthday, let’s pause to consider that according to experts, “never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president.”

Yes, the guy who famously pledged to drain the swamp is so overtly corrupt that one has to assume his plan is indulge in massive amounts of grift so “people will not think anything about it is weird.”

Trust me — it’s weird. Also criminal.

In the quaint past, “presidents worked assiduously to show they were not connected to anything that could in any way compromise their decision making or leverage their public virtue.” But in this golden age of MAGA morality, the entire Trump family “has been unapologetic about its aggressive pursuit of profits,” causing historians, political scientists, and anyone who doesn’t watch Fox News to marvel at “the openness, the flagrant nature” of their blatant corruption, which they undertake “almost with pride — cashing in on the office itself” almost daily.

Unless one is delusional or oblivious, it has become “increasingly obvious that the obscene wealth and power of a select few, at the expense of the many, is a feature, not a bug for the Trump years.”

Those who are in on the scam — and that doesn’t include you and me — are “swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of self-dealing and greed that is unprecedented in American history.”

All those pardons for donors, contracts for flunkies, and misuse of inside information are not “a disconnected series of scandals” but a well-coordinated system of depravity.

Yes, our avarice-prone chief executive is fantastically obsessed with money and power (also windmills, for some bizarre reason). But there is more to it. There is a dark psychological neediness. 

You see, the drooling, shuffling occupant of the Oval Office “wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf.” We’re talking about a guy who insists he is a genius (a very stable one) even as the US economy teeters and he loses a war against a much smaller nation led by religious zealots. He proclaims himself to be an unparallelled mastermind, the mighty leader who “knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it” despite the overwhelming evidence of his incompetence and his “relentlessly oafish output.”

As others have noted, “the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.”

That’s the real symbol of America today.

Happy goddamn birthday.

Master Plan

I know. The terms of the ceasefire for the Iran debacle look, shall we say, rather underwhelming.

That’s being polite. You could also say that is the “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” which is what Republicans (yes, Republicans!) are calling it. I guess that would make it the biggest US fuck-up since the Iraq War, which was the last time a GOP president invaded the Middle East in a boneheaded, calamitous decision that let to disaster and death.

By the way, why does anyone vote Republican in the hope that the GOP will improve the economy and avoid warfare, when the exact opposite has been true this entire century? But let’s skip that conundrum for now.

Instead, let’s analyze the Trump Doctrine, which can be summarized as an approach that “combines amorality and incompetenceto empower enemies and betray allies, as it dilutes American power in a Dunning-Kruger stew of bluster, arrogance, and stupidity.”

Where’s the lie in that definition?

Everybody knew the Iran War (wait… are we calling it that?) would be a catastrophe. This geopolitical farce is “classic Donald Trump.”

After inflicting misery, this ace negotiator got bored, left the mess for someone else to clean up, declared victory, and wound up with a deal worse for America than before the war began. People who ask, “What was the point of the war?” are still inexplicably blind to the fact that there is no point to anything Trump does, because every decision he makes is based on his selfish, vile instincts and immediate needs.

There was never a point to the war, just like there is no point to all the needless suffering he is inflicting on America’s residents and the global population. He does it because he can and it sounded good at the time.

Now that this “humiliating comedown for him and the nation he leads” appears to be complete, he will move on to some fresh travesty, some other way to desecrate the nation for no good reason. 

There will be no lesson learned here. The guy doesn’t even understand the war he just lost. He has “confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran” while offering the “desperate rationalizations [of] a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat,” leading even the most impartial of observers to wonder if the president of the United States is “losing his grip on reality itself.”

However, there is one possible benefit to this idiotic fiasco. The resulting and completely predictable energy shock “is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power,” meaning that a right-wing administration of dullards and fabulists may have done more to jump start green technology than all the touchy-feely eco warriors ever have.

Wow — maybe that was the plan all along. 

Clearly, we are in the presence of a super genius. Yup.

The Wrong Kind of Inspiration

OK, so Hungary didn’t work out. What other small, corrupt nation can right-wingers emulate as their model for a future America?

Well, damn. They are fixating on my family’s homeland of El Salvador. How absolutely flattering. Yup.

It is constantly disconcerting how often conservatives boast about America being the greatest country in the world and then qualify it with “but we should really be more like [tiny authoritarian nation with a negligible GDP] because they have it right.”

Republicans have moved on from the flop in Budapest to focus on El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele has set himself up to be president for life. This neo-fascist hero has co-opted the separation of powers, heavily relied on the military for internal policing, and built the world's largest prison, which happens to be a concentration camp where the US sends many of its former residents to die. In El Salvador, authorities can detain anyone without a warrant, deny them access to legal counsel, and suspend the right to assembly. Independent media is nonexistent, and the state promotes “a cinematic version of Bukele” to create a cult of personality.

All of this is peachy keen with American right-wingers, who see Bukele as “an aspirational figure” and “yearn to implement his authoritarian transformation of El Salvador” in the United States.

On behalf of my family, let me say that we do not want America to become El Salvador. We would like more pupusas, but that’s about it.

Of course, it’s not just hardcore right-wingers who are flirting with despotism. Around the world, in “both developing and developed countries, democracies are facing historic tests” as polls show “mounting public apathy from voters, particularly young people, and growing disenchantment with the ideals of liberal democracy itself.”

Compared to just a few years ago, Americans are less likely “to see a democratically elected government as ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ important to the United States’ identity as a nation,” and there is a “growing rejection of the basic principles of democracy and human rights, and increasing support for authoritarian populism among people who feel that concepts like democracy and human rights and due process have failed them.”

To be fair, maybe democracy has failed them. After all, in this bastion of democracy, we are under the thumb of old men who hold disproportionate power over us and are quite overt about their contempt for anyone who was foolish enough not to be born rich and male.

But do we really want to be El Salvador? Have we given up on the American Dream (whatever the hell that is) and replaced it with the Authoritarian Settle?

If so, that will be a compromise that we soon regret.

I’m An Expert And So Are You

The only businessman I trust is Seth Godin. If you are not familiar with his work; Godin is an entrepreneur who focuses on marketing. 

But as opposed to our well-known titans of industry, Godin doesn’t blather on about how great he is or screw over whole countries so he can grab a little more cash or embrace fascism because nobody loves him or explode rockets left and right.

Those examples are not made up.

In any case, Godin wrote a recent article in which he explained the shitshow that we are living in. Well, he didn’t use that term because he’s a lot classier than I am, and he is politically nonpartisan. But his analysis holds up when trying to figure out how a corrupt gang of incompetents, loudmouths, and lunatics took over the US government.

Godin explains that “expertise and firmly held beliefs don’t always go together,” and he uses the following diagram to illustrate the idea:

As Godin points out, “plenty of well-trained professionals have earned the right to have strongly held beliefs,” a contingent that includes “surgeons, jugglers, and historians,” among others. Professionals combine expertise with strong beliefs.

Then there are the innovators, who have “plenty of experience and training and have chosen to be flexible.” As Godin points out, “when an innovator suggests a counter-intuitive or even nutty concept, it might pay to listen carefully.” After all, they have some idea of what they’re talking about.

Most of us, at some time or another, will fall into the category of curious. This is when we “don’t have a lot of domain knowledge, but we’re able to ask intelligent questions and to listen carefully to the answers.” We’re being curious when we’re honest about our lack of expertise. Ideally, we engage with others in the spirit of goodwill and exhibit a willingness to change our minds.

It’s that upper-left quadrant, where ignorance meets strongly held beliefs, that we encounter the foolish. These are the people who have “little in the way of expertise, and are generally unwilling to change their assertions or goals.” As Godin puts it, “Alas, social media has elevated the foolish.”

Think of the influencer who failed high school biology but still insists that vaccines are dangerous. They have no expertise in the field but refuse to listen to data or logic. Or better yet, consider the secretary of health and human services.

Now imagine a whole administration full of people who have no experience, no training, and no clue about what they’re rambling on about, but are convinced that they are brilliant. 

The professional, the innovative, and the curious wind up getting steamrolled by an incessant, aggressive horde of the foolish.

And that’s how we got here, to this most unhappy place.

That’s how we got present-day America.