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From Your Job to Your Politicians, Welcome to the Big Con

Look around. School? Scam. Work? Scam. Democracy? Don’t get me started. From birth, you’re signed into a contract you never agreed to—and the ink’s invisible.

The Scam of Education

They told you education was freedom. Translation: a lifetime subscription to debt. In the U.S., the average graduate owes forty grand for a piece of paper that certifies one skill: obedience. You don’t buy knowledge you buy permission. Knowledge is free at a library. But you won’t get hired unless you pay six figures to prove you can sit still and take it. That’s not education. That’s extortion dressed in a cap and gown.

The Scam of Work

Welcome to the office. Eight hours of pretending to work, three hours of meetings about nothing, two hours making PowerPoints nobody reads. Economist David Graeber called it: “bullshit jobs.” Jobs that exist to justify bosses who exist to justify other bosses. And your paycheck? It’s hush money. It says: “Don’t ask if any of this matters. Just cash it.”

The Scam of Consumer Life

Your phone breaks on schedule, your clothes unravel by design, your apps charge you to exist. Even rebellion is monetized punk is a T-shirt at H&M, mindfulness is a $300 retreat. You’re not a citizen. You’re a subscriber. You’re not living. You’re leasing.

The Scam of Politics

Ah, democracy. Every four years, you pick your favorite liar. Ninety-one percent of U.S. elections and everywhere else, are won by the candidate with the most money . That’s not choice it’s an auction. Every speech is a product demo, every promise is vaporware. “Hope and Change.” “Make it Great Again.” Doesn’t matter. Different logos, same scam.

The Meta-Scam: Hope

And here’s the cruelest trick: they even scam your hope. Hustle culture says grind harder. Spirituality says manifest harder. Politicians say vote harder. It’s always on you to fix what they broke. And if it doesn’t work? They’ll sell you a premium upgrade.

So yeah. Is everything a scam? Pretty much. From your first day of school to your last ballot, life is one big pyramid scheme with better branding.

The truth? You were born into a scam. The only choice you’ve ever had is whether you sell it, buy it, or burn it down. What do you think?

The vow that was supposed to save humanity has collapsed into a slogan. In Gaza, “Never Again” is happening again, while the world watches and whispers excuses.

The Hollow Ritual of Memory

Every January, the world lowers its head. Leaders line up at Holocaust memorials, candles flicker, violins weep. “Never Again,” they whisper, as if repeating the words will keep the past at bay. We congratulate ourselves for remembering. But remembrance without courage is theatre. And theatre does not stop the bombs falling on Gaza.

For the children buried in the rubble, the words “Never Again” ring like a cruel joke. Never Again? It is happening again—different accents, different uniforms, but the same dehumanization, the same silence, the same graves filled with children who should have lived.

The Machinery of Dehumanization

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with words. Rats. Vermin. Parasites. The steady erosion of dignity until killing became a bureaucratic task.

Today, Gaza is described in almost identical terms. Its people reduced to “human animals,” its children cast as shadows rather than lives. Once language strips away humanity, mass death becomes “collateral damage.” Bulldozers flatten homes as if clearing debris. Starving families are labeled “security risks.” A whole population turned into statistics, denied the simple recognition of being human.

The machinery changes its tools, but the blueprint remains the same.

The Complicity of the World

Here is the obscenity: the very nations that stand solemnly at Auschwitz every January are the ones arming the bombardment of Gaza. American presidents, European prime ministers, they mouth “Never Again” with one hand on their chest while the other hand signs arms deals.

The hypocrisy is unbearable. A leader who weeps at a Holocaust memorial in the morning will justify the bombing of schools in the afternoon. Newspapers that publish endless anniversary spreads on the Shoah relegate Gaza’s dead children to a back-page statistic.

The world, once again, is silent. Silence that is not neutral, silence that is consent. Silence that kills twice—once by omission, once by complicity.

The Weaponization of Memory

“Never Again” was meant to be humanity’s oath. But memory has been narrowed, twisted, turned into a national brand rather than a universal principle. The Holocaust’s memory, instead of serving as a warning for all peoples, is used as political currency.

This betrayal is worse than denial. To deny the Holocaust is to erase the past. To weaponize its memory is to poison the present. It means “Never Again” does not apply to everyone—only to some. It becomes conditional. Selective. Hollow.

And what is a broken oath if not another crime?

The Children as Witnesses

Walk through Auschwitz today and you will see small shoes piled behind glass. In Gaza, those shoes are still on children’s feet when the bombs tear them apart. Both sets of children cry out through time: What is the point of memory if it cannot protect us?

History’s testimony is not abstract—it is flesh, bones, laughter cut short. A six-year-old who drew butterflies in the Warsaw Ghetto. A six-year-old in Gaza who just wanted bread. Both silenced by walls, by starvation, by human cruelty justified as necessity.

They are each other’s witnesses, across time and rubble.

The Oath That Became a Lie

The world swore “Never Again” and then built museums, carved speeches, erected statues. But monuments without conscience are empty stones. Words without courage are lies.

Every child buried in Gaza makes those words hollower. Every silence from the West makes them more obscene. “Never Again” was not supposed to be a marketing slogan. It was supposed to be humanity’s line in the sand. In Gaza, that line is not only crossed—it is erased.

If “Never Again” does not mean never again for them, then it never meant anything at all.

“Never Again” was humanity’s promise. Gaza proves it was only humanity’s excuse.

Every house cat has secrets.
Lucifer has an agenda.

When Michael rescued a shivering tuxedo kitten on a rainy night, he thought he’d found a companion. What he actually brought home was a charming apocalypse wrapped in fur. Behind the purrs and head-butts lurks a strategist, a tyrant-in-waiting, a would-be ruler of shadows.

From yarn spun into occult sigils to kibble maps of global conquest, Lucifer’s rise unfolds in a series of eerie, hilarious vignettes that blur the line between everyday cat antics and world domination. Michael, ever the devoted human, remains blind to the truth his living room has become the throne room of a would-be conqueror.

Hell in a Tuxedo is a gothic-satirical fable for adults who suspect their cats are plotting something more than naps. Darkly whimsical, slyly funny, and wickedly illustrated in prose, it’s a bedtime story for grown-ups who know the devil wears whiskers.

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The new Chief Marketing Officer of America’s biggest brands doesn’t sit in Madison Avenue boardrooms. It sits in Washington. And it doesn’t care about brand love, market share, or cultural relevance. It cares about tariffs.

This summer, General Motors reported a $1.1 billion tariff hit. Apple lost another $1.1 billion in a single quarter. Nike: $1 billion. Adidas: $218 million. These weren’t bad campaigns. They weren’t consumer revolts. They were politicians pulling levers that bled global brands dry.

And the bleeding has reached advertising.

The Ad Industry’s Sudden Survival Mode

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has slashed its 2025 forecast: US ad spend growth down to +5.7%, from +7.3% in January. The first half of the year looked stable. The second half is where the pain lands.

Marketers aren’t pretending otherwise. Nearly half say they’re cutting budgets outright. Others are shortening campaigns, pausing buys, or fleeing to performance-driven channels where every click can be measured.

The casualties over at the USA are obvious:

  • Linear TV spend: -14.4%.
  • Print, radio, OOH: -12.7%.
  • Meanwhile, social (+14.3%) and CTV (+11.4%) are the lifeboats.

It’s a forced pivot from storytelling to transaction. As one media buyer put it bluntly: “Forget brand equity. Just sell before the next tariff drops.”

Tariffs Don’t Just Tax Goods …They Tax Culture

For decades, marketers told us they were culture’s architects. They built myths, symbols, slogans. But if trade policy can erase billions in ad spend overnight, then culture isn’t designed in creative studios anymore. It’s dictated in tariff negotiations.

That Nike campaign about human potential? It now competes with headlines about price hikes. Apple’s latest innovation launch? Drowned out by quarterly earnings wrecked by tariffs.

Marketers don’t control the message when they’re busy firefighting margin losses. Politicians do.

The Quiet Extinction of Branding

This isn’t just a budget story. It’s the slow death of brand advertising itself.

With customer acquisition and repeat sales now the only goals that matter, campaigns have collapsed into endless “buy now” loops. The promise of brand-building has been traded for measurable clicks.

It’s not strategy. It’s survival. And survival stories don’t go viral. They go silent.

Who Really Runs Advertising Now?

The ad industry is bracing for more shocks in 2026. Social, CTV, and retail media will grow. Traditional media will shrink further. Marketers will keep demanding proof of ROI at every step.

But the bigger story is this: advertising has lost sovereignty. It no longer writes culture on its own terms. It rents its megaphone from politics.

In 2025, the Chief Marketing Officer of American brands isn’t a strategist, a creative, or even an algorithm.

It’s the tariff.

A former French president may soon be sleeping on a thin prison mattress. Nicolas Sarkozy—once the most powerful man in France—has been sentenced to five years for criminal conspiracy. For once, appeals may not save him.

That single fact matters. Because for decades, the world has watched the same story repeat: politicians loot, cheat, and launder. They deny. They stall. They retire rich. Ordinary people go to jail for tax mistakes or shoplifting. Presidents collect pensions.

Sarkozy’s fall rips a hole in that script. Judges treated him not as a monument, but as a man who broke the law. That is justice in its rawest form: equality. And yet, France is split. Some cry vengeance, others justice. But here’s the truth: if this feels extraordinary, it’s because we’ve accepted corruption as ordinary.

And it isn’t just France.

The pattern is global: politicians treat office as a cash register, then rely on delay, distraction, or division to escape justice.

Meanwhile, citizens see the hypocrisy and stop believing in the system.

In 2024, 94 countries — 54 % of all assessed — declined in at least one core measure of democracy. Only 55 nations (32 %) even advanced. The weakest pillar? Rule of Law, where declines outpaced gains more than any other domain. That’s not a temporary wobble. It’s structural decay.

Democracy no longer just frays at the edges—it’s unraveling in its seams. If the law won’t hold princes to account, democracy isn’t being defended. It’s being hollowed.. When that trust collapses, votes remain—but meaning evaporates.

Democracy does not collapse with tanks in the streets. It collapses when citizens stop believing the law applies to the powerful.

That is why Sarkozy’s cell matters. Not because it redeems France, but because it sends a signal: no one is above the law. And it should not stop here. If democracies are to survive, prisons must stop being warehouses for the powerless and start being reckoning grounds for the corrupt politician around the world.

The question is not whether Sarkozy sleeps in a cell. The question is whether the rest of us will keep tolerating leaders who behave like monarchs while preaching equality.

If democracy is to live, its thieves must fall. Lock them up. Every last one.

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