"These political entities committed collective suicide.

They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They too considered themselves to be omnipotent.

They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.

Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.

These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world.

They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism.

The flip side of ultranationalism is racism."

;;

Chris at his best, much more at the link.

The American Empire, defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan " as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam " learns nothing. It leaps into each new military fiasco as if the previous military fiascos did not happen. It believes it needs no allies. It will rule the world.

If occupying Greenland blows up NATO, so what? If funding and arming Israel to carry out genocide and bombing Iran and Yemen alienates huge swaths of the Global South and enrages the Muslim world, who cares?

If invading and kidnapping the president of Venezuela stinks of Yankee imperialism, tough! No one else matters.

Nations that stomp around the globe like King Kong infect themselves with a fatal virus.

Johnson warned that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, we will "lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates."

Blowback is next and with it the collapse of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. It is an old story. Although to us, and the cabal of misfits ensconced in our version of Ubu Roi's court, it will come as a terrible shock."

Video version of the entire article:

Philip K. Dick... wow, blast from the past. Thanks!

The Man in the High Castle (1962)... VALIS as you note, Blade Runner was based on his werk.

Speaking of Philip K. Dick on this Hedge's Grand Illusion thread...

"Through his studies in philosophy, he believed that existence is based on internal human perception, which does not necessarily correspond to external reality.

He described himself as "an acosmic panentheist", which he explained as meaning that

"I don't believe that the universe exists. I believe that the only thing that exists is God and he is more than the universe. The universe is an extension of God into space and time. That's the premise I start from in my work, that so-called 'reality' is a mass delusion that we've all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure".[24]

After reading the works of Plato and pondering the possibilities of metaphysical realms, he came to the conclusion that, in a certain sense, the world is not entirely real and there is no way to confirm whether it is truly there. That question was a theme in many of his novels."

from the wiki link above:

"Popular films based on his works include Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), Screamers (1995), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010).

Beginning in 2015, Amazon Prime Video produced the multi-season television adaptation The Man in the High Castle, based on Dick's 1962 novel; and in 2017 Channel 4 produced the anthology series Electric Dreams, based on various Dick stories.

In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik (1969) one of the hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923.[14]

In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer included in The Library of America series.[15][16][17]

Thanks to Donnerboy for bringing up a writer I hadn't thought about in a long time... now I have to check and see if I ever read Ubik, because I don't recall that title.

Perhaps Netflix will take on making Ubik: