Apollo & Dionysus#
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The first portrait of Gen. Milley, from his time as the U.S. military's top officer, was removed from the Pentagon last week on Inauguration Day less than two hours after President Trump was sworn into office.
The now retired Gen. Milley and other former senior Trump aides had been assigned personal security details ever since Iran vowed revenge for the killing of Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in 2020 ordered by Trump in his first term.
On "Fox News Sunday," the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tom Cotton said he hoped President Trump would "revisit" the decision to pull the protective security details from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook who previously served under Trump.
Asked why these actions were being taken, a senior administration official who requested anonymity replied, "There is a new era of accountability in the Defense Department under President Trump's leadership—and that's exactly what the American people expect."
Gen. Milley served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023 under both Presidents Trump and Biden.
-- Fox News
Here’s something compelling to begin with:
America Unmasked: The Oprahverse and the Gating of Civilization
For decades, America presented itself as a unified civilization, a nation bound by shared ideals of democracy, prosperity, and progress. Yet, beneath this polished veneer, something more fundamental was at work—a slow, tectonic shift in the cultural, political, and neurological landscape of the country. The unraveling of this pretense has become particularly evident in the last twenty years, a period marked by the rise of Donald Trump, the fragmentation of institutional trust, and the political engagement of figures like Oprah Winfrey and the men she once anointed into the Oprahverse. Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, once harbingers of soft, middle-class wisdom, have pivoted sharply into the realm of conservative populism, aligning themselves with the aggressively male, white, and hierarchical ethos of Trumpism. What happened to America? What were these figures wearing before, and what does it mean that the masks have now come off? To understand this, we must look beyond the surface of media narratives and into the deeper biological and neurological architectures that underpin human civilization itself.
The concept of civilization is often treated as a cultural and sociopolitical construct, but at its core, it is a function of cognitive gating—of filtering, suppressing, and organizing sensory and conceptual inputs to maintain social order. This is where the neurophysiology of the default mode network (DMN), the task-positive network (TPN), and the salience network (SN) become relevant. The DMN governs introspection, narrative identity, and social cohesion, while the TPN regulates action-oriented cognition, driving focused, goal-directed behavior. The SN acts as the switchboard, determining which network should be dominant at any given moment. Central to this interplay is thalamocortical gating, the process by which the thalamus filters incoming sensory and cognitive information before it reaches higher cortical processing centers. Civilization, in many ways, is the collective manifestation of these gating mechanisms—what is allowed into the social consciousness, what is suppressed, what is permitted to rise to the level of articulated identity. For much of modern American history, this gating function created the illusion of unity, sustaining the fiction that figures like Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Oz were all part of the same cultural ecosystem. But as thalamocortical gating weakens—whether through social upheaval, technological shifts, or mass psychological dysregulation—the hidden fractures of civilization become visible.
Fig. 15 An essay exploring the relationship between servers, browsers, search mechanics, agentic models, and the growing demand for distributed compute. You’re setting up a discussion that touches on the architecture of information retrieval, the role of AI as an autonomous agent in querying and decision-making, and the economic implications of compute optimization. The key tension lies in the shift from user-initiated queries to AI-driven agentic interactions, where the browser becomes less of a search engine interface and more of an intermediary between users and computational agents. The equation Intelligence = Log(Compute) suggests a logarithmic efficiency in intelligence gains relative to compute expansion, which could be an interesting angle to explore in light of the exponential growth in AI capabilities.#
Oprah Winfrey, as the central figure of the Oprahverse, built her empire on a carefully modulated balance between empathy and authority, between emotional appeal and intellectual legitimacy. Her platform functioned as a kind of societal DMN, a space where Americans could reflect on their personal and collective narratives, integrating diverse perspectives under the broad canopy of self-improvement and universalist progressivism. Figures like Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz were extensions of this system, operating within its controlled boundaries. Yet their later political realignments suggest that they were never fully bound by the same ideological commitments as their benefactor. Were they always wearing masks? More precisely, was Oprah’s DMN-style civilization always precarious, always at risk of losing its filtering capacity?
The American political landscape now exhibits a stark bifurcation between two competing neurocognitive modes: one that prioritizes introspection, narrative complexity, and inclusive identity formation (the Democratic coalition, represented by Oprah), and another that privileges action, decisiveness, and rigid categorical distinctions (the Republican alignment with Trump, embodied by Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz). These are not just political differences; they are fundamental differences in the way cognition is structured. Trumpism thrives on the TPN’s direct, goal-driven engagement with the world, a mode of thinking that rejects the ambiguity of the DMN in favor of binary action: us versus them, strong versus weak, winning versus losing. The salience network, which under stable conditions mediates between these two modes, has effectively been hijacked by media algorithms and political spectacle, perpetually shifting America into an adversarial, task-oriented state.
This neurocognitive framing helps clarify why Oprah’s shift into overt political engagement was both inevitable and structurally necessary. As the salience network of American discourse became increasingly captured by TPN-driven reactionary politics, Oprah—once content to remain in the introspective sphere of the DMN—was compelled to engage. Civilization, as a delicate balance of these networks, was being overridden by an aggressive, unfiltered stream of activation, one that bypassed traditional social gating mechanisms. Figures like Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, whose entire professional identities had been shaped within the controlled environment of Oprah’s DMN, now found themselves drawn toward the unmediated, high-stakes game of the TPN, where the political battlefield became a stage for their reinvention.
What does it mean, then, that America was pretending? It means that for decades, the nation maintained a carefully gated illusion of integration, where figures like Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Oz could coexist within a shared cultural framework. This illusion depended on a stable salience network, one that could effectively mediate between different cognitive and ideological modes. But as thalamocortical gating weakened—through economic instability, social media disruption, and political polarization—the hidden architectures of American cognition were exposed. The supposed unity of the Oprahverse dissolved, revealing the underlying fault lines that had always existed.
The last twenty years have not created new political realities so much as they have unmasked the neurophysiological structures that sustain them. Civilization is, at its core, a function of cognitive gating, an intricate balance between reflection and action, between narrative integration and decisiveness. When that balance is lost, when the salience network is overwhelmed by unfiltered stimuli, the masks come off, and the raw architecture of power is revealed. Oprah, Dr. Phil, and Dr. Oz were never fully aligned in their ideological commitments; rather, they were bound by the gating mechanisms of their time. As those mechanisms erode, their divergence is not a betrayal, but an inevitability—one that forces us to reconsider the very nature of American civilization itself.
Show code cell source
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx
# Define the neural network layers
def define_layers():
return {
'Suis': ['Foundational', 'Grammar', 'Syntax', 'Punctuation', "Rhythm", 'Time'], # Static
'Voir': ['Syntax.'],
'Choisis': ['Punctuation.', 'Melody'],
'Deviens': ['Adversarial', 'Transactional', 'Rhythm.'],
"M'èléve": ['Victory', 'Payoff', 'Loyalty', 'Time.', 'Cadence']
}
# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
color_map = {
'yellow': ['Syntax.'],
'paleturquoise': ['Time', 'Melody', 'Rhythm.', 'Cadence'],
'lightgreen': ["Rhythm", 'Transactional', 'Payoff', 'Time.', 'Loyalty'],
'lightsalmon': ['Syntax', 'Punctuation', 'Punctuation.', 'Adversarial', 'Victory'],
}
return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}
# Define edge weights (hardcoded for editing)
def define_edges():
return {
('Foundational', 'Syntax.'): '1/99',
('Grammar', 'Syntax.'): '5/95',
('Syntax', 'Syntax.'): '20/80',
('Punctuation', 'Syntax.'): '51/49',
("Rhythm", 'Syntax.'): '80/20',
('Time', 'Syntax.'): '95/5',
('Syntax.', 'Punctuation.'): '20/80',
('Syntax.', 'Melody'): '80/20',
('Punctuation.', 'Adversarial'): '49/51',
('Punctuation.', 'Transactional'): '80/20',
('Punctuation.', 'Rhythm.'): '95/5',
('Melody', 'Adversarial'): '5/95',
('Melody', 'Transactional'): '20/80',
('Melody', 'Rhythm.'): '51/49',
('Adversarial', 'Victory'): '80/20',
('Adversarial', 'Payoff'): '85/15',
('Adversarial', 'Loyalty'): '90/10',
('Adversarial', 'Time.'): '95/5',
('Adversarial', 'Cadence'): '99/1',
('Transactional', 'Victory'): '1/9',
('Transactional', 'Payoff'): '1/8',
('Transactional', 'Loyalty'): '1/7',
('Transactional', 'Time.'): '1/6',
('Transactional', 'Cadence'): '1/5',
('Rhythm.', 'Victory'): '1/99',
('Rhythm.', 'Payoff'): '5/95',
('Rhythm.', 'Loyalty'): '10/90',
('Rhythm.', 'Time.'): '15/85',
('Rhythm.', 'Cadence'): '20/80'
}
# Calculate positions for nodes
def calculate_positions(layer, x_offset):
y_positions = np.linspace(-len(layer) / 2, len(layer) / 2, len(layer))
return [(x_offset, y) for y in y_positions]
# Create and visualize the neural network graph
def visualize_nn():
layers = define_layers()
colors = assign_colors()
edges = define_edges()
G = nx.DiGraph()
pos = {}
node_colors = []
# Add nodes and assign positions
for i, (layer_name, nodes) in enumerate(layers.items()):
positions = calculate_positions(nodes, x_offset=i * 2)
for node, position in zip(nodes, positions):
G.add_node(node, layer=layer_name)
pos[node] = position
node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))
# Add edges with weights
for (source, target), weight in edges.items():
if source in G.nodes and target in G.nodes:
G.add_edge(source, target, weight=weight)
# Draw the graph
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
edges_labels = {(u, v): d["weight"] for u, v, d in G.edges(data=True)}
nx.draw(
G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, edge_color='gray',
node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
)
nx.draw_networkx_edge_labels(G, pos, edge_labels=edges_labels, font_size=8)
plt.title("Grammar is the Ecosystem", fontsize=15)
plt.show()
# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()
Fig. 16 Change of Guards. In Grand Illusion, Renoir was dealing the final blow to the Ancién Régime. And in Rules of the Game, he was hinting at another change of guards, from agentic mankind to one in a mutualistic bind with machines (unsupervised pianos & supervised airplanes). How priscient!#