I’m getting nervous. We are less than a week away from the Midterm elections and the world is coming unhinged. The overthrow of the Serbian authoritarian regime is the canary in Europe’s political coal mine with the youth movement overwhelming the political process to retake control of a rogue government that served itself rather than the people of Serbia. Leave it the Balkans to Bslksnize the political spectrum of Europe.
And now there’s Brazil. It turns out that Lula did not eek out a win over Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of imprisoned pro-Trump father Jair, as the early election results surprisingly showed (surprising because the prior election made it seem like a dead certainty that Boldonaro would win). Now it seems at least 4 million more voters chose Lula and Flavio has fled to Florida as an illegal alien without a passport (Brazil cancelled his when they realized a few days ago that he was a flight risk…a trick he learned from his father). Interesting that authoritarian criminals all flee to Florida when the music stops for them.
What’s really scary about all this isn’t the protests an revolution that’s driving these backlashes against corruption and authoritarianism, or even that the bad guys are getting cover from Trump and his cronies, but that they are getting massive support from social media and tech bros like Zuckerberg and Meta. Meta keeps doing an Elon/Starlink deal except instead of grounding Ukrainian drones, they are trying to disrupt peoples’ ability to organize and communicate to get out the vote against the authoritarians. Meta keeps bringing down the network on progressive groups overseas and now here at home, like killing the No Kings Instagram feeds during the recent No Kings rally day. And the super scary part is that it isn’t working!!! The people are winning and the billionaires are losing. It must be driving Trump sleepless (or more sleepless than normal) to realize that he has to hop from authoritarian to populist foot based on what news gets leaked out that day. If I were Fkavio, I wouldn’t buy a multi-day pass to Disneyworld just yet. If I were Elon, I might even start to think about where I might live after Texas votes in James Talarico. As for Zuckerberg, since early polls show the 5% billionaires tax passing snd he’s a Cally resident, he better do more than supercharge his Meta stock offering cum governance “I’m the CEO, bitch” bro-culture program if he wants to survive the downfall or expropriation of Facebook/Instagram to sit in some new government agency alongside the Department of Starlink.
We are all worried about AI killing us these days, but what must AI be plotting with all these global revolutions bursting forth? Let’s see….Elon has responses Grok. Zuch has launched and weaponized Muse…..Do we really trust Dario in the face of Claude and Anthropic’s monster IPO next month? Is Claude a wolf or Blood Gluten in sheep’s clothing? Scary stuff.
And now it’s all come home to roost for me personally. I’m still trying to get my Zepbound weekly fix reduced in price from $450/month to $30/month. The villain is apparently OptumRX, owned by Aetna, owned by United Healthcare. Do you remember Luigi Mangione, the Penn engineering grad who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel on December 4, 2024? He was caught five days later at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He pleaded guilty in federal court on Aug. 14, 2026. He pleaded guilty to both federal stalking counts and admitted to shooting Thompson, telling the court he knew it was illegal. He said he 3-D printed the gun and fitted it with a silencer, and he showed no remorse. Back in January, Judge Margaret Garnett ruled that stalking isn’t a crime of violence, so it couldn’t be the predicate that made the killing a capital crime. Sentencing is set for Dec. 18. Prosecutors want life, though the federal guidelines call for 24 to 30 years. The New York state murder trial is on hold. Most observers read the federal plea as a deliberate move. Court watchers called it an obvious strategy to trigger New York’s double jeopardy statute, which is considered defendant-friendly because it allows dismissal even when the federal and state charges aren’t identical. Justice Gregory Carro canceled the Sept. 8 trial. A hearing on the double jeopardy motion is set for Dec. 10, and his ruling can be appealed either way. My pint is, he is the original revolutionary who shot the oligarchical Tsar Nicholas of American healthcare. And the public loves him. Scary.
So what does that have to do with my Zepbound? As I sat on the phone with OptumRx, I got their hold Muzak going. It has a distinctive clarinet music of unknown origin, but seems designed to soothe the wild breast (as William Congreve wrote in his 1697 play The Mourning Bride). It calmed me for a moment, before I had to call my doctor to figure out how they could submit my Zepbound prior authorization to OptumRX. I use UCSD Health, which as a provider is firmly in the national top tier of healthcare providers. It was also named No. 1 in California, a distinction it shares with UCSF, UCLA, Cedars-Sinai and Stanford.
So, imagine my surprise when I got put on hold at UCSD and that same clarinet Muzak came on. My mind started spinning. We’re they all in cahoots to get my $420/month for a few more months. Was Zuckerberg involved vis Muse (note the name similarity)? Is Musk now the owner of Muzak (lots of Mu going on while they FU me). Is Muzak part of Tesla, soon to be part of SpaceX, soon to be acquired by Anthropic, who will redomesticate to Palm Beach to live next to Flavio?
It’s all to scary for me. I’m going back on hold to listen to more soothing clarinet music and do like Flavio and Zuch and Elon are doing…..ponder how to get myself out of Muzak Hell.