Enjoying the view from Limbo
America Descending / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 2, 2026 · Last modified October 9, 2026
Any member of the U.S. military, past or present, who is not humiliated by “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth must be even more buffoonishly pathetic than he is. So much of Donald Trump’s second term administration seems to be a grand effort to highlight the existence and effects of wee man syndrome. Have fears of personal inadequacy ever found themselves more overtly exposed...
Artificial intelligence will never be human. It will never have the best characteristics of humans. Neither will it ever have the worst characteristics of humans. What it will be, and all it will be capable of becoming, is an emulation, an imitation, a digital simulation, of the best and worst characteristics of humans. However, as it can only be simulating those elements of...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism? / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 29, 2026
Inevitably, the news comes that the Trump administration is deeply engaged in negotations aimed at establishing “a long-term stake in a vast share of Venezuela’s oil fields.” That is, a long-term U.S. Government ownership stake in Venezuela’s natural resources. So Trump invades a socialist country and deposes its leader, only to come to terms with the rest of the socialist regime at the...
Where is Mitch McConnell? As for where his body might be, I have no idea, although since all evidence points to his having suffered a massive heart attack, it is likely that he will never be what he was before his disappearance, and this is granting that what he was for the last couple of years before his disappearance was, if I may...
Lindsey Graham has been part of my personal political consciousness since he served as one of the House managers in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. I remember his portion of the prosecution’s presentation more clearly than anyone else’s, not because it was the most legalistic or the most rationally persuasive of the cases for removing Clinton from office, but because it was, in its...
The fatal flaw of all democratic arrangements: The only person who ought to be granted power over other people is one who is temperamentally averse to possessing practical power over others, who sees none of the personal material advantages of power as desirable in the least, and who has pressing concerns and abiding enthusiasms which would make the commitments and duties of political...
Bad Bunny was the performer at the Super Bowl half-time show. I never heard of Bad Bunny before this month. I understand he sings in Spanish. (I cannot verify whether “sings” is strictly the correct verb here, though I suspect not, based on the photos of Mr. Bunny that I have seen; and I surely will not attempt to verify it by listening...
Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, defended the right to bear arms, against all critics, arguing that the real reason for the Second Amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreational shooting, but was all about the God-given right of a free people to arm themselves against a potentially tyrannical...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 25, 2025
Back on November 9th, 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s election victory (known to this day among Trump loyalists as “The Steal”), I wrote here of the short-term future of America’s two main political factions. In that rumination, I posed a couple of questions about the prospects for the respective factions in 2024, questions which time has now firmly answered, though...
First, they came for the neocons, but I was not a neocon so I said nothing…. John Bolton’s house was raided by federal agents in the early morning hours of August 22nd. It was not a document request, not a subpoena, but an FBI raid — the showy and scary kind, with streets blocked off and boxes summarily removed, by uniformed federal officers...
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