1973 Meets 1999

Open Bar on the Titanic

News has never been a source of comfort, mainly because we don’t want it to be. Let’s face it - Deep down, we have this primal urge to watch the gears turn. We don’t tune in to find out what’s working. We tune in to watch the train wrecks. We look for evidence of the less fortunate and the morally depraved to reassure ourselves that we are both lucky and virtuous. It’s a sordid little ecosystem. A classic case of “can’t live with it, can’t live without it.”

Lately, the American news diet has been a steady stream of three ingredients: wars, corruption, and AI. On any given Tuesday, the feed is a dizzying blur. The US is bombing Iran, Israel is doing the equivalent in Lebanon, and yet, somehow, there’s simultaneously a whisper about a backroom deal between Washington and Tehran. Trump is on TV delivering his daily diatribe against a woman reporter, or frankly anyone else who dared to breathe in his direction that morning. Meanwhile, the Ukraine-Russia war has apparently “peaked” in the public consciousness. No one wants to hear about it anymore, which is wild considering how fervently the entire internet was rooting for Putin’s absolute demise just a few years ago. Boredom, it turns out, beats geopolitics.

The economic news is just as surreal: every other week, some mega-tech conglomerate announces record-shattering, historic profits, and immediately celebrates by laying off ten thousand people. Gigantic sums of money are being spent on building datacenters and what not. And no one is telling us what they’re expecting to get out of them. It feels like the economy is running primarily on this “AI build out.” Take it away and there is not much to write about.

On the local news front, you just get a smaller radius of doom: a hit-and-run on a street five miles from your home, a gunman at a mall, and so on. There’s always a tech billionaire somewhere in California at any point in time currently spending millions to block the public from his private beach. There’s always something weird that the Oakland mayor is doing. There’s always a senior citizen who gave away his Bank of America account details when someone called and asked.

Globally, it’s a comedy of a different sort. The UK government is “tottering” again. Governments in the UK have been tottering for well over a decade now, yet it’s still breaking news. Will Keir Starmer hold on? Honestly, no one will remember his name the second he is gone, just like his immediate predecessors have vanished from our collective memory. What was the name of that Indian dude again who was PM for a while? Elsewhere in Europe, a German minister, or sometimes a Spanish one, depending on the shift rotation, is saying something nasty about Trump on any given Thursday. The Scandinavians? No one thinks of them until a civil war breaks out in Sri Lanka and they somehow manage to insert themselves as the polite, blonde mediators.

The news from the subcontinent isn’t exactly a basket of cheer either, though Pakistan has been surprisingly quiet. Well, they’re brokering that peace deal between Iran and the US. I’m certain they’re up to some shenanigans behind the scenes, but for now, they just aren’t making the cut for the prime-time news cycle.

India, meanwhile, is dominated by the usual programming: Modi winning some mathematically improbable state election, cementing his status as a legend. He’s been a legend for a while, of course. No one throws a political party quite like Modi. Has he had work done on his face? The photos on my feed lately show a remarkably well sculpted visage with high cheekbones that deserve their own investigative journalism piece.

My YouTube algorithm has decided these days that I’m a doom-scroller. Every third video on my recommended feed now asks, “Is India in trouble?” But in the middle of this algorithmic chaos, I stumbled onto a gem: the “Cockroach Janata Party,” or CJP. Apparently, an Indian student at Boston University started this “movement” as a joke, calling on “the lazy and the unemployed” to unite. Within three days, twenty million Gen-Zers actually signed up. Naturally, the Indian government panicked, declared it a threat to national security, and scrubbed them from social media.

What I’m realizing is that things are escalating by the day, and we’ve become adept at rapidly normalizing the insanity around us. We’re not fazed by any of this anymore. For example: Trump has openly looted billions using crypto tokens. He recently signed an executive order creating a $1.8 billion “national fund” to pay damages to anyone “unfairly sued” by the US government. By “anyone,” he primarily means himself. In all likelihood, that fund is a bespoke, taxpayer-funded checking account for his own personal needs. To top it off, the order exempts him and his family from being audited by the IRS ever again.

By any stretch of the imagination, this is breathtaking, cinematic corruption. Sure, people are screaming into the void on cable TV, but the rest of us are just anxious, exhausted, and silently furious. The breaking point is here, sitting on the couch in the room with us. November’s election seems a lifetime away, but I don’t think people are going to forget the bizarre theater of 2026 anytime soon. Let’s see what Trump has accomplished so far: started a war he can’t win or exit, driven prices into the stratosphere, created personal slush funds, berated women, and politically executed any Republican who looks at him sideways. And yet, it’s still unclear if the Republicans will actually lose ground in November. Go figure.

But hey, at least the stock market is fun! The market in 2026 has been an absolute banger. No new high is high enough and it just keeps climbing. We now have fourteen companies valued at a trillion dollars or more, and they are all American. OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all preparing to go public at trillion-dollar-plus valuations. These are heady times that will be written into history books. Whether for good or bad reasons, time will tell. But when your stock portfolio has swelled to proportions that you know you don’t deserve, perhaps the knots in the stomach become more tolerable?

We are living in some weird mutant hybrid of 1973 and 1999. It’s Watergate-level ethics and corruption mixed with a crippling oil crisis, combined with peak dot-com bubble euphoria and irrational exuberance. I don’t think American history has ever quite seen a moment this beautifully insane. We’re dancing on the decks of the Titanic but at least there is an open bar and the drinks are flowing.

Have a great weekend!