I had asked AI to elaborate on the tension between medieval politics and modern–>
The tension between “medieval” and “modern” politics is a highly accurate framework for analyzing contemporary democratic friction. This conceptual clash does not mean a literal return to the Middle Ages, but rather a structural battle between two fundamentally incompatible philosophies of governance and power.
One side treats the state as a rule-based machine, while the other treats it as a private fiefdom.
The Core Friction: Personal Fiefdom vs. Institutional Rule
The “#MedievalVModern” dichotomy can be broken down into specific operational clashes that define current political instability:
Dimension
“Medieval” Politics
“Modern” Politics
Source of Authority
Personal loyalty, fealty oaths, and blood/chosen dynastic ties.
Institutional roles, constitutional text, and bureaucratic merit.
Nature of Public Funds
Treasury is a personal slush fund to reward allies and punish rivals.
Public revenue strictly separated from private wealth via oversight.
The Legal System
Sovereign immunity; the ruler is the law and hands out selective pardons.
The rule of law; laws apply equally to the ruler and the citizenry.
Communication
Direct, tribal appeals based on identity, protection, and absolute decree.
Policy debates filtered through open press and statutory processes.
1. The Medieval Side: The Rise of Neo-Feudalism
When political commentators identify “medieval” tendencies in modern leaders, they are looking at the deliberate dismantling of modern, rules-based institutions in favor of personal networks.
Patronage and Fealty: In a neo-feudal system, career expertise is replaced by absolute loyalty. Government officials are treated like vassals. Protection, promotions, and pardons are granted not based on law, but on how fiercely a subordinate defends the “lord” of the system.
The Sovereign is Above the Law: Absolute immunity and the sweeping use of executive pardons mirror the medieval concept of Rex Lex (The King is Law). When courts rule that a leader’s official acts cannot be prosecuted, the system shifts backward toward an era where the ruler’s personhood dictates what is legal.
Weaponized Dependency: Just as medieval peasants relied on a local lord for protection against outside threats, a modern patronage system manufactures tribal fear—casting the leader as the sole defender against perceived cultural or political enemies.
2. The Modern Side: Constitutional Meritocracy
Modern politics, born out of the Enlightenment and codified in the U.S. Constitution, was explicitly designed to kill medieval feudalism.
Separation of Powers: Modernity assumes that human beings are fundamentally flawed and power-hungry. Instead of trusting a single ruler, it distributes power across competing branches (the Senate, the Courts, the Executive) to create friction.
Institutional Memory: A modern state relies on objective, non-partisan civil servants, military officers, and judges who owe their allegiance to an abstract document (the Constitution), not to the shifting fortunes of an individual politician.
Transparency and Accountability: Modern governance requires open records, independent inspectors general, and a free press to prevent the state’s wealth from being funneled into private pockets.
Why This Tension Matters Today
The current crisis in American politics exists because both systems are currently operating simultaneously within the same government.
When a Senator attempts to use committee oversight or a military officer relies on the “lawful order” standard, they are operating in the modern framework. When an executive bypasses Congress, appoints family members to financial posts, and cleanses criminal dockets via sweeping pardons, they are operating in the medieval framework.
The primary danger of this tension is that the medieval model is inherently more agile; it requires only one willful ruler to function. The modern model is fragile; it requires thousands of independent actors to continuously choose their constitutional oaths over partisan self-interest.
Ours is an age in which everyone (online) may look up everything (OSINT) for any purpose evil or good at any time. For years now and living a “life online”, I have asked myself with so much “content” available through a fancy television screen, where to dwell? Add an earnest “why?” In the coverage of conflict–or curiosity about it–from the web’s second row seat to history there are of course the dots between events and places, the inflection points newly minted in a year–or a week or day–and the things a generation may–or must–never forget, e.g., the Rubicon, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 of their youth, but what is the choosing, clicking, scrolling point for the mind at the monitor?
For a small portion of the world beyond basic needs–cash flow is good, discretionary time is what we have, abundance in some measure small or great–the point becomes interesting. A modern Muslim woman, Qanta Ahmed asked me on Facebook decades ago (so it feels) after having registered her account, “What now?” My answer had been “Good influence.” I believe she has done her part–and I mine.
What now?
The answer for me has been one person’s diplomacy. The opportunity to read foreign newspapers in English, to make friends nine thousand miles away who would become better known than the neighbor in the apartment on the other side of the office wall–but for whom one could do nothing in a pinch–would build out one’s social media community. That was back in the Facebook uptake era. Then along came everything else and, well, X marked the spot!
And X has been the spot for responding to power and the tensions between the ambitions and attitudes of some wealthy, the arrangements made by power medieval–as well as brutal and unconscionable–and the aspirations and values of a nation blessed with valuing its own humanity and related dignity, freedom, and security. And then along came Donald–and DOGE–and the emergence of fuzzy philosophers dreaming of Tech Bro empires and new relationships between a plutocracy of programmers and the needs and wants of comparatively hapless consumers of “content” and other stuff.
The heady early days seem to me no longer new and novel–not even the “Tube” sites of the flesh trade–and all of the governments in attendance (I’m sure) watching decision patterns and trees for even that.
Ain’t it grand?
It turns out the “second row”–mediated–seat to history may be as well a space cordoned (almost) from life, but then even souls living through their screens have to step away and step out for fresh air and a good restaurant now and then.
Softshell Crab Sandwich, The Grille at Runways, HGR, Hagerstown, Maryland, May 2, 2026
And now what?
X has become a daily battle with bots, trolls, and indefinite fake names weighing in from their VPN locations (no doubt), and potentially for purposes as insidious as their being unknown and possibly unidentifiable. Then too, especially for me, there’s been the hash slung repeatedly toward every pair of eyeballs who didn’t get it — or believe it — on the first round: #AmericaForSale; #AmericaUnderAssault (good entry: welcome to my world!) all the way to where we really are (so I believe): #StateCapture / #StatePiracy. The epiphanies no longer leave me breathless but rather yawning it all back for having been repeated too often for too long.
Shall there be here a “Dining for Diplomats” section for the Washingtonians (who really may be diplomats)? And what happened to the sound track? America . . . Born in the USA . . . The Secret of Life . . . . Everyone of us — Americans — has his own. That’s our freedom . . . our individualism . . . our choice to choose how we grow our persons inside and out. Upstairs? Tabulation. Tell the universe what you want — Amazon will have it slipped into your shopping experience right soon.
With the #PhantomOfTheSoviet playing a fading devil and #IllTrumpolini providing an object lesson in #MalignantNarcissism — and this blog becoming weirdly hybrid with hashtags — Qanta’s “What now” has transitioned fully into two major questions, one public and an echo from history: “What is to be done!?” (Query AI on the famous Russian question). And the other personal: “What am I doing here? What’s my hunt, my role, my mission, my purpose? So I jump (virtually) in the air shaking my fists over my head before a distant, virtual, absent–from my space but not cyberspace– Michael McFaul who has posted a note on X expressing hope that the next President will be different without fully comprehending the challenges posed by having a piratical feudal-medieval mafia chief in the wheelhouse of the American Ship O’ State promising his portion of the Christian base relief from elections forever after: ““It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians . . . in four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Putin is an enemy of freedom and a supporter of dictatorship. That's why he invaded Ukraine and is aiding Iran.
The U.S. should be a friend of freedom and a supporter of democracy.
Trump doesn't understand this basic mission for our great country. I hope future leaders will.
While true, “Trump doesn’t understand this basic mission for our great country,” he understands being a chief with his own system of private patronage (#PPS on X) and all the methods attending criminally ruthless power from blackmail, bribery, and intimidation to the promising of generous rewards in exchange for loyalty, obedience, and silence.
What Donald Trump does — and what he has done to take America down — has been as obvious as it has been ugly. Check the list for his large targets or mishaps with tariffs: American agriculture, counterintelligence, election security, health, humanitarian aid, justice, natural resources, etc.
Whine it out on X, fashion the barbs that make the snark, send hints to those who know them, perhaps, but come forward from the curtains keeping the darker realities out of sight, the reckless, unresponsive, upside-down, and surreal Trump and his Trumpian Theater will just get right on to the next dumb move, the sort now paving the way toward national financial arrest, debilitating desperation, probably related crime (we shall see), and the unholy trinity leftover from Soviet post-Soviet Russian barbarity and stupidity: enserfment, gulag, and Soviet-style totalitarian surveillance. ICE will need work; the private prison system may appreciate a little expansion money; and the technology for observing or tracking everyone at all times might well exist —
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
Archaic, Criminal, Irrelevant, Medieval
My X-ing has been for some time a routine . . . another program involving a repetitious rollout of arguments, memes, and related talking points. Let’s leave this most egregious of observations here: the above faces defend and reflect in their game-faced hardness an outlook better fit with the worst barbarities of medieval power and related treachery than with anything like modern compassionate, responsible, responsive, and trustworthy governance. Whatever the wreckage each has left or will leave behind, they are together representatives of all that belongs behind us and none of what any should want waiting in the near future.
TrumpPutin have never been about the interests of their respective states but rather #TheMoney and the development of their own power to alter, erase, and shape public reality for their own emotional defense. The two have been life-long cowards and criminals and have made their marks political criminals–as thieving dictators–beyond the reach of their own societies.
For #Americans, #AmericanPoliticians, and #AmericanMilitaryAndPolice, most to all in each class have sworn on oath to defend our #AmericanConstitution and related principles and values. It would seem the same have now to rise to the challenges presented by a rogue #AmericanPresident.
Below: the archaic; the criminal; the hated; and the standard bearers of a discarded feudal past wholly without virtue, for they are neither of them noble or even good.
And then the images shown on the X post.
Here: Putin over Trump as each criminal and political criminal will be portrayed in Russian and American eternal memory; a tile popular when Trump’s Georgia election fixing case was hot news; an illustration detailing the locations at Mar A Lago of boxes loaded with classified, secret, and top secret Federal government documents to which Trump had not been entitled; and the last a popular meme illustrating Trump’s rape of America. The truth about Mafia Don: he has been all his life a privateer associated with organized crime. Most notable for his apprenticeship at the git-go: mob lawyer Roy Cohn; mafioso Fat Tony Salerno.
Why has Trump’s year of negotiations been the deadliest for civilians in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion? The number of deaths and injuries has increased by 31 percent compared to the previous year. Why did Putin not allow himself such brutal strikes on civilian infrastructure under Biden, whom Trump calls “weak,” but totally destroys peaceful cities and disregards the “strong Trump”?
TrumpPutin, an #IgnobleNobility, may represent our inability to contain #FeudalMedievalMafia. The interests of #America and #Russia aren’t even in the play between the two #DelusionalParanoid #PoliticalCriminals who believe the whole world against themselves and have acquired through the fraud, force, and coercion — or blackmail and bribery, reward and punishment — of each his own #PrivatePatronageSystem (#PPS) sufficient power and wealth to destroy the cultures — not save any! — of the #OpenDemocraticSocieties of #TheWest.
Key: #MalignantNarcissism. Thematic: #CriminalVLawful; #EvilVGood!; #MedievalVModern.– Note suggested for #AmericanMilitaryAndPolice and for #MAGA.
“Negotiations” between #TrumpPutin over #RussiaVUkraine appear without character, decency, integrity, or strength.
I present you with #CowardsAndCriminals.
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Access X for the images of the billboard; the Russian monster and American traitor; the four dictators–Stalin, Putin, Trump, Mussolini; and the evil standing together in Alaska.
Having criminals in power in both Moscow and Washington bodes ill for the world while sustaining within it the most horrific habits and nightmares of the past. The two wealthy and their tribute-paying cronies have put on the display of themselves as neither better nor more than feudal-medieval mafia who have the wealth to view themselves as feudal-medieval mafia and to behave in privacy and in secured secrecy criminally with impunity. That’s the “secret” coming out, finally, through the guarded spilling of the Epstein files.
So in addition to a Trumpian coup intended to install an ignoble nobility in power in Europe and North America, what have we been witnessing via the criminal Trump-Epstein relationship? A few would say male bonding through mutual affirmation of the deepest and most violent of lawless primitive indulgences, i.e., the most vicious libertinage. In that vein, Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut has been found to serve a perhaps quiet and seething reflection on evil. Here are three suggested video, two focused on Kubrick’s courageous (in fact) efforts to permanently imprint on the cave’s wall a world as rare and evil as could be imagined, and one detailing a portion of Jeffrey Epstein’s bottomless pit of sadistic and soulless deviltry at Zorro Ranch –>
Not to digress too much, back in the Vietnam Era, the Soviet Union invested a billion dollars in America’s own anti-war movement, and that money and unknown agents of influence left their indelible mark on the American Left and Far Left. It takes some courage, curiosity, and honesty to engage with the true drivers of anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict, among them for certain the long animus sustained by Russian civilizational powers and their equally barbaric and thieving proxies, i.e., contemporary terrorist organizations including the Hamas, PLO, PFLP, reliably hosted and praised by Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the middle east.
Regarding the above Dylanesque Jesse Welles . . . fine voice, folksy, strong, and memorable in a way that may bind generations . . . but the illusion of the Palestinian community in Gaza as free beneath the Hamas political and religious mafia — it’s true character is fascist and repressive — has flowed down through Moscow (related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures). Israel has its own issues with “medieval war with modern weapons” but the American avant garde Left may have yet issues with its own ignorance and related malleability and vulnerability to malign forces experienced in its exploitation.
American Don – State Capture & State Piracy
I’ll be following the No Kings Day action from my desktop and may update this page as the spirit dictates. Left more or less alone on X–>
Donald Trump is an American criminal with three insufficiently resolved indictments, 34 confirmed felonies, and a monstrous Trump-Epstein accusation and scandal haunting his every appearance before the public. Most notably, Trump, who may be referred to as “Ill Trumpolini” in echo of the Italian criminal and fascist whom he resembled with the January 6, 2021 assault on the the Capitol, appears to have little interest in the United States of America as a modern secular democratic republic guided by a powerful Constitution and devoted to the elevation of its complement in humanity in ways well recognized by the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans who informed what would become a predominantly Christian west. After the Thirty Years War and consequent Peace of Westphalia, the nation’s Founding Fathers and political architects chose the classical and modern route then available in political philosophy to fashion a government wary of political and religious power both–and that has been our American Government in Principle since both the 1776 Declaration of Independence from the King of England and the American Constitution of 1789 and associated Bill of Rights declared for all Americans and, truly, mankind as well.
Whether through uncontested criminal means or a deeply dissatisfying American election, Trump and his mob of associate ass kissers and leveraged sycophants — add a Catholic-majority Supreme Court apparently favorable to unchecked power — have been degrading in every facet the nation’s security community, and instead of enjoying the back-and-forth of a collegial and cooperating if fractious American government well defended from enemies foreign and domestic, Americans have gotten an ageing, delusional, and ill despot.
No Kings! America v. Donald Trump
“I am a journalist. I am an immigrant. And I am a Muslim. I am everything Donald Trump loves!”
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ICE / ICESTAPO – “Brutality is the Point”
Velshi with Ruth Ben Ghiat–>
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No Kings! Grant Park, Chicago (Video Short)
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No Kings! New York City x Fox 5 New York
The Live Feeds have kicked in on YouTube, but for posterity, the above provides a glimpse of a day still determined, still festive, still nonviolent.
Donald Trump now appears to have lost the People of the United States of America — Americans! — before destroying with his idiot loyalists The American Experiment.
No Kings! Boston Common: “Boston Doesn’t Back Down!”
No Kings! South Florida: “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Donald Trump Has Got To Go!”
The malignant narcissists share the same hidden misery in their fear of public humiliation and shame. Never give in, never give up, never back down? In modern life, cooperation, dignity, and freedom win for independent, modern, responsible, and responsive mentalities–cognizance, consciousness, emotion, and empathy comprising human virtues and nothing like the “mind viruses” of feudal-medieval mafia, all of them damaged goods made callous and deadened by their earliest experiences and adult excesses. Call them what they have been always: criminals and political criminals.
Ali the Thief
The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.
There’s the court order authorizing the takeover of her children’s three Tehran apartments in a multi-story building the family had owned for years. There’s the letter announcing the sale of one of the units. And there’s the notice demanding she pay rent on her own apartment on the top floor.
Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh ultimately lost her property. It was taken by an organization that is controlled by the most powerful man in Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She now lives alone in a cramped, three-room apartment in Europe, thousands of miles from Tehran.
For Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the image and power of his most pious religious position covers, in fact, an immensely ruthless callousness, greed, and self-aggrandizing and entirely self-serving madness. Man of God? Man of Peace? Thief, evidently, and murderer in his own feudal-medieval political and religious mode: see NCRI, “Iran: Khamenei’s New Record in Execution and Crimes, January 2, 2025.
Vladolph Putler
Putin’s pretext for his 2014 invasion of Crimea along with Donetsk and Luhansk–the Donbas–had been his duty to save a surrounded Russian culture in Ukraine–and never mind the comfortability of complacent Russian enclaves in Ukraine–from the bogey of Ukrainian tyranny, a thought as faked up and self-serving as his hallucinated Ukrainian Nazis. As a delusional and surreal malignant narcissist, the not-so-great Russian leader and mediocre mafia, secret police, and political thug had intended to make himself look like a hero. Instead, he provoked Russians in Ukraine to fight with Ukraine, and not a few of them as Russian partisans for Ukraine in Russia.
Today by way of Putin’s petulant lunacy, Russia has suffered more than a million military casualties of war. Financial losses appear immeasurable for their being multiple dimensions involved but staggering in the region of $100 billion and up (query AI on “Russia’s financial losses related to invasions of Ukraine”), and the direct losses to its defense appear in the Odessa Journal (June 18, 2025) approximately as follows — note: I’ve made the list alpha, adjusted typography for this blog, and edited with, I hope, experienced judgment:
Estimated total Russian combat losses from 24.02.22 to 18.06.25
Russian Military Casualties of War: about 1007160 (+1040) persons. Note: more than one thousand Russian soldiers have been dying per day in Ukraine. The numbers in parentheses indicate expected additional losses at the time of initial publication.
aircraft: 416 (+0)tanks: 10947 (+7)
anti-aircraft systems: 1187 (+0)
artillery systems: 29265 (+37)
boats: 28 (+0)
cruise missiles: 3369 (+23)
helicopters: 337 (+0)
MLRS: 1420 (+1)
special equipment: 3916 (+0)
submarines: 1 (+0)
troop-carrying AFVs:22845 (+31)
UAV operational-tactical level: 41165 (+184)
vehicles and fuel tanks: 52312 (+137)
warships: 28 (+0)
What kind of crazy drives a dictator? And what might turn him off?
Vladolph has yet to do anything that would refute the psychology involved. In his own head, his posture appears courageous, heroic, and unassailable, and that’s what he believes he must project. There is no reasoning with his mentality.
A glance a the CNN URL cited tells just how greedy, ruthless, self-serving, and sideways ol’ Mafia Don has been in his unbridled ambitions and related methods of getting his way:
It began in 1981. Trump bought a 14-story building on prime real estate facing New York City’s Central Park.
His plan was to tear down the building and replace it with luxury condos. But first he needed a small band of rent-stabilized tenants out of there.
To succeed, Trump played rough, according to lawsuits filed by the tenants. Renters said he cut heat and hot water, and he imposed tough building rules. Trump even proposed sheltering homeless people in the building.
It went on for five years as Trump fought tenants, real estate lawyers, New York state regulators and city officials.
The grim phantoms of history–whatever was thought to have been left behind in the many ways of the dreaded horsemen–Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death–have ways of appearing before us just when we think we have beaten them. So here are the three insults to modern humanity, each one callous and crude, greedy as sin, without boundaries or limits, an sickeningly delusional with criminal and messianic intents, and the authentic among those good and noble must wonder how they are to be met. That they will be “met” we may be certain for time evolves communities more than it resigns any to again living in caves and by tooth and claw, arrow or spear, or sword and shield, but for the living cohort subject to the will of evil leaders, all pay a price in the producing of better and more secure and permanent good circumstance.
For Americans, I believe it appears the “American Experiment” has taken its one giant step backward with Donald Trump as well as the “tech-bro threat” of a degrading and dehumanizing AI future, so perhaps we must all look forward to envisioning the character of our best possible “two steps forward” and then find ways of joining together and in irresistible force to get that next and better world.
They fought to keep #Americans safe–and they were not Americans.
#WeAreAmericans, as represented by past Administrations and national policy across decades, and we promised #AfghaniForces attached to the #GlobalWarOnTerror #GWOT #CoalitionOfTheWilling refuge in the #UnitedStatesOfAmerica. That’s what we stood for when we stood with #RealAmericans.
X #AmericanVeteran #GVC #GrumpyCombatVeteran #WillSelber.
For over twenty years, I’ve spent my life training, studying, and preparing to fight for my country. Even when my country turned its back on our Afghan allies, I, along with thousands of others, tried our very best to “relocate” (IYKYK) thousands of Afghan families to safety. Out of twenty years of futility, it was the only piece of honor that kept many Afghan combat veterans afloat with hope. Now, however, it seems that some of our Afghan allies might be detained and eventually deported – https://www.gcvfriends.com/p/its-not-your-fault.
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