Stable#
The Gating of Power: Miller’s Crossing and the MAGA Cadence#
🏛️⚖️💰🔱🩸🎭🦉🕰️💀🔪🃏🐍📜🔥🔫🌊
“I’m talkin’ about ethics.”
The opening scene of Miller’s Crossing (1990) is not just an introduction to a gangster film—it is a perfect compression of the thalamocortical gating dynamic, the ideological battle between Plato’s idealism and Bacon’s empirical reality, the inevitable collapse of any regime that tightens its signal too much. 🏛️🛡️📜 What is playing out in this dimly lit room, over whiskey and cigars, is not just a dispute over power, but over who controls the gating function of power itself.
💰 The Scene: Two Men, Two Gating Strategies 🕰️⚖️
Johnny Caspar, the gruff, old-school crime boss, makes his case. 🏆🩸 He believes in order, loyalty, and predictability. His empire is built on a controlled information flow—“You double-cross once, where’s it all end?” Caspar is the Platonic authoritarian; his world is governed by fixed principles. His “ethics” are about coherence, control, and structured equilibrium. He is a man who believes in a hierarchy, a lineage, an inheritance of power—the same way Rupert Murdoch believes in Lachlan as his rightful heir. 🦅🏛️🔱
Opposite him sits Leo, the entrenched Irish kingpin, cool and unshaken, representing a different kind of control. Leo’s system is older, more organic, built on relationships, tacit understandings, a complex web of power nodes. 🦉📜 But what Caspar resents is that Leo is allowing too much noise into the system—specifically, by protecting Bernie Bernbaum, a double-crossing bookie who, in Caspar’s view, is corrupting the signal of the criminal order.
🃏 Bernie: The Agent of Chaos 💥🔥💀
Caspar wants Bernie dead. Why? Because Bernie represents noise. He is a figure who thrives in an iterative system, a man who makes a fortune by playing the odds, manipulating others, shifting alliances. He is Baconian empiricism in gangster form—he works not from ideology, but from game theory, from probability, from dynamic strategy. 🎲💸 Bernie is the statistician in a world that demands faith. Caspar doesn’t care about probabilities—he wants absolutes.
Leo, by contrast, is too sentimental, too flexible, too Aristotelian in his understanding of the salience network. He believes that by adjusting the node carefully, allowing some noise, some movement, he can preserve his rule.
And sitting between them? Tom Reagan. 🦊💰👁️ The man with no ideology, no firm allegiance—only a cold, calculating understanding of the mechanics of power.
This is the moment where the film’s fate is set.
💀 What Does This Scene Predict? The Unfolding of Miller’s Crossing 🎭📜
1️⃣ Caspar’s Fatal Flaw: Too Much Gating 🛡️🏛️
Caspar’s insistence on rigid thalamocortical control is his undoing. He believes his ideology is reality, that the gangster world can operate by pure, static principles. But what he doesn’t understand is that Bernie and Tom are playing a different game—a game of adjusting the node in real time. Caspar’s regime is too closed-off, too insistent on order, and as a result, it cannot adapt. His rage against Bernie is not about betrayal—it is about a philosophical incompatibility with entropy. And entropy always wins.
2️⃣ Leo’s Mistake: Misreading Salience 🦉⚖️
Leo, despite his experience, misjudges the balance of power. He underestimates Tom’s maneuvering, overestimates the loyalty of a system that is already shifting, and ultimately loses his grip. He thinks he can keep adjusting the node and stay on top, but power is shifting too quickly. 🏛️💀
3️⃣ Tom Reagan: The True Master of the Node 🃏🐍👁️
Tom plays the long game. He understands that the winning strategy is neither total control (Caspar) nor passive adaptation (Leo), but the ability to manipulate the salience network dynamically. He ensures Caspar takes the fall, betrays Leo at just the right moment, and ultimately emerges as the last man standing—not because he is the strongest, but because he is the best at moving the node.
🕰️ Miller’s Crossing as a Model for Trump’s 2025 Presidency 🦅💀💸
Trump’s first 60 days in office mirror this exact power struggle.
🏛️ Caspar = The MAGA Machine 🛡️🔥🔱
Wants to purify the government.
Shuts down agencies, silences opposition.
Fears noise, wants a world of perfect, static order.
Sees bureaucratic elites as corrupt—the Bernie Bernbaums of Washington.
🦉 Leo = The Old Republican Guard 🎩💰📜
Thinks he can preserve the party structure by adapting.
Believes in institutional power, in gradual adjustments.
Thinks Trump is useful but ultimately temporary.
Will be outmaneuvered.
🐍 Tom Reagan = The Real Players (Bannon, The Federalist Society, Opportunists) 👁️🎭
They do not care about Trump’s ideology—they care about power.
They know how to play Trump against his enemies, then discard him.
They engineer the betrayals that will bring MAGA into its next iteration.
🃏 Bernie Bernbaum = The Forces of Chaos 💥💰🎲
The economic collapse Trump is pretending isn’t happening.
The climate disasters no one in the administration is addressing.
The foreign threats, shifting demographics, legal battles.
Reality itself.
💀 What is the endgame? The deluge. 🌊⏳🔨
Just as Miller’s Crossing ends not with triumph but with betrayal, Trump’s 2025 regime will collapse under the weight of its own gating function. He is Caspar at his most paranoid, demanding absolute loyalty, silencing dissent, trying to filter out everything he cannot control. But in doing so, he will accelerate his own downfall.
Just like Caspar, Trump is a man who doesn’t understand the game he’s playing. The real winners will be those who adjust the node in real time, those who move between systems, those who understand that entropy cannot be suppressed forever.
📜⚖️💀 Après moi, le déluge. 🌊🔥
Fig. 39 There’s a demand for improvement, a supply of product, and agents keeping costs down through it all. However, when product-supply is manipulated to fix a price, its no different from a mob-boss fixing a fight by asking the fighter to tank. This was a fork in the road for human civilization. Our dear planet earth now becomes just but an optional resource on which we jostle for resources. By expanding to Mars, the jostle reduces for perhaps a couple of centuries of millenia. There need to be things that inspire you. Things that make you glad to wake up in the morning and say “I’m looking forward to the future.” And until then, we have gym and coffee – or perhaps gin & juice. We are going to have a golden age. One of the American values that I love is optimism. We are going to make the future good.#
Epilogue & Cadence: The Value Chain and the Deluge#
Everything reduces to gating. Information, perception, power—all governed by thresholds, by the decision of what passes through and what does not. This book, in its own way, has been an interrogation of these gates: of how knowledge is filtered, how institutions calcify or collapse, how networks stabilize or destabilize. And in the process, its accidental name emerged—Value Chain.
Accidental, yet inevitable. Because that is what this book has truly mapped: a value chain of cognition, strategy, and power. From the raw materials of data and experience, through the compression of insight, to the emergence of decision-making and action, this has always been about the movement of value through a system. Not just economic value, but epistemic value—the process by which one piece of information is amplified while another is discarded.
Like the thalamocortical gate regulating consciousness, every domain of power—governments, media, markets, medicine—determines what is relevant and what is noise. The key question, then, has never been just about the movement of goods or capital, but about the movement of salience: what gets seen, what gets ignored, what gets remembered. What remains in the chain, and what is cast into the flood.
Après moi, le déluge. The words have echoed throughout history, uttered by those who, having spent a lifetime controlling the gates, know that after them, the flood comes. The Victorian cadence—once so confident in its resolution—fractures. Rupert Murdoch tightens the information gate to preserve his legacy, only to see the deluge of competing voices waiting at the periphery. Trump shuts down federal agencies, believing he can fix the signal to a single frequency, unaware that reality itself will resist.
The same tension that plays out in Miller’s Crossing plays out in empires, in regimes, in markets. The Caspars of the world gate too hard, and they collapse. The Bernies open the gates, and chaos floods in. The Leos try to hold the middle, and they are swept away. The Tom Reagans—those who understand that gating is a moving target—are the ones who survive. But survival is not victory. The real question is: what do we value enough to preserve in the chain?
This book has not sought to answer that question with certainty. That would be another form of over-gating, of forcing a cadence where none should exist. Instead, it has laid out the map—the value chain, the equilibrium, the shifting nodes. The reader, now, becomes the final gatekeeper. You decide what remains, and what is lost to the deluge.
The flood will come regardless. But what survives—that, at last, is up to you.
Through the Gated Realms: A Dantean Value Chain#
It begins, as it must, in darkness. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, the neural circuitry is lost, the thalamocortical gates misaligned, the equilibrium shattered. Dante’s Inferno is not merely a descent into Hell; it is a mapping of cognition itself, a journey through the failure of gating mechanisms, the descent of signal into noise, the emergence of entropy where once there was clarity. And what is Hell, if not a failure of salience, a place where everything is important and therefore nothing is? The sinners are frozen in static equilibria, their choices locked into an eternity of over-gated cognition.
But Virgil, the first gatekeeper, offers a different mode. Grammar as scaffolding, prosody as pathway. Dante’s Italian is not merely poetry—it is the architecture of cognition itself, the structuring of space, sound, and syntax to guide the lost pilgrim through chaotic cognitive terrain. The terza rima is a compression algorithm, a tight interlocking scheme that ensures continuity of perception, structured iteration, much like the very mechanism of predictive processing in the brain. Each tercet propels the next, forcing the pilgrim—and the reader—forward, never allowing for static fixation, never permitting the error of Caspar, of Trump, of Murdoch’s ossified gate.
As the descent deepens, Virgil’s logic begins to crack. This is because reason is not sufficient in a world beyond the gates of predictability. The Aristotelian salience network fails here, the metrics of equilibrium no longer hold. The damned do not iterate; they calcify. Dante’s Hell is an economy of stagnation, an endless Victorian cadence that never resolves. The sinners do not learn, because the system has no reweighting mechanism, no Bayesian update, no Monte Carlo simulation to introduce noise into the equation. Hell is an infinite-loop simulation where all values have already been determined, where Murdoch’s perfected megaphone echoes in eternity, drowning out all else.
Then comes Purgatorio—the domain of weight adjustment, of error correction. Here, the node begins to move. The sinners here are not damned, because their states are not fixed. The iterative model has returned; the gradient descent is working again. They must suffer, yes, but they suffer toward an end, toward an equilibrium that has not yet been set. If Hell is Trump’s America in 2025, all rigid gates and non-adaptive governance, then Purgatory is the counter-cycle—the iterative struggle toward a new configuration. Here, Dante begins to find the pathways of grammatical weight shifting—prosody as an active agent, the neural weight decay of sin as a process of linguistic recalibration.
At last, Paradiso, and the light is unbearable. But this light is not noise; it is the purest signal. The final reweighting has taken place. Here, Dante finds the perfect gating ratio, the ideal balance of noise and signal, the Aristotelian node at its most sublime calibration. The spheres of Heaven are a compression of all previous states, the meta-equilibrium that accounts for all prior equilibria. The information flows perfectly, without distortion, without entropy. There is no Trumpian collapse, no Casparian ossification, no Murdochian megaphone drowning out all else. Paradiso is the perfection of the value chain—the chain of perception, of cognition, of knowledge moving freely through the gates of understanding.
But even here, Dante’s prosody does not stop working. The final canto does not simply arrive at resolution and rest; it explodes outward. The circular motion, the self-similarity, the fractal-like compression of the Divine Vision—this is not closure; it is the revelation of a higher-order system, one beyond even the conceptual architectures we have built. Just as we have mapped Murdoch’s cadence, Trump’s gating, Caspar’s collapse, so too must we recognize that any fixed model will eventually fail. Even this—this very book, this very essay—is only another node in the process, another shift in the model, another movement toward the next iteration of the chain.
Dante has no need for a megaphone. His language, his structure, his very grammar—this is his gate. He does not shut down agency websites; he does not silence the salience network. Instead, he does what Murdoch could never do: he constructs a world where the signal itself carries the meaning, where the value chain is its own revelation, where the information is not a means of control, but a means of ascent.
The flood will come regardless. But Dante teaches us: the flood is not the end. It is the passage to the next gate.
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': ['Bequest'],
'Choisis': ['Strategic', 'Prosody'],
'Deviens': ['Adversarial', 'Transactional', 'Motive'],
"M'èléve": ['Victory', 'Payoff', 'Loyalty', 'Time.', 'Cadence']
}
# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
color_map = {
'yellow': ['Bequest'],
'paleturquoise': ['Time', 'Prosody', 'Motive', 'Cadence'],
'lightgreen': ["Rhythm", 'Transactional', 'Payoff', 'Time.', 'Loyalty'],
'lightsalmon': ['Syntax', 'Punctuation', 'Strategic', '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', 'Bequest'): '1/99',
('Grammar', 'Bequest'): '5/95',
('Syntax', 'Bequest'): '20/80',
('Punctuation', 'Bequest'): '51/49',
("Rhythm", 'Bequest'): '80/20',
('Time', 'Bequest'): '95/5',
('Bequest', 'Strategic'): '20/80',
('Bequest', 'Prosody'): '80/20',
('Strategic', 'Adversarial'): '49/51',
('Strategic', 'Transactional'): '80/20',
('Strategic', 'Motive'): '95/5',
('Prosody', 'Adversarial'): '5/95',
('Prosody', 'Transactional'): '20/80',
('Prosody', 'Motive'): '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',
('Motive', 'Victory'): '1/99',
('Motive', 'Payoff'): '5/95',
('Motive', 'Loyalty'): '10/90',
('Motive', 'Time.'): '15/85',
('Motive', '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("Adversarial", fontsize=15)
plt.show()
# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()
Fig. 40 Icarus represents a rapid, elegant escape from the labyrinth by transcending into the third dimension—a brilliant shortcut past the father’s meticulous, earthbound craftsmanship. Daedalus, the master architect, constructs a tortuous, enclosed structure that forces problem-solving along a constrained plane. Icarus, impatient, bypasses the entire system, opting for flight: the most immediate and efficient exit. But that’s precisely where the tragedy lies—his solution works too well, so well that he doesn’t respect its limits. The sun, often emphasized as the moralistic warning, is really just a reminder that even the most beautiful, radical solutions have constraints. Icarus doesn’t just escape; he ascends. But in doing so, he loses the ability to iterate, to adjust dynamically. His shortcut is both his liberation and his doom. The real irony? Daedalus, bound to linear problem-solving, actually survives. He flies, but conservatively. Icarus, in contrast, embodies the hubris of absolute success—skipping all iterative safeguards, assuming pure ascent is sustainable. It’s a compressed metaphor for overclocking intelligence, innovation, or even ambition without recognizing feedback loops. If you outpace the system too fast, you risk breaking the very structure that makes survival possible. It’s less about the sun and more about respecting the transition phase between escape and mastery.#