Resilience 🗡️❤️💰

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• What makes for a suitable problem for AI (Demis Hassabis, Nobel Lecture)?
  • Space: Massive combinatorial search space
  • Function: Clear objective function (metric) to optimize against
  • Time: Either lots of data and/or an accurate and efficient simulator
• Guess what else fits the bill (Yours truly, amateur philosopher)?
  • Space
    1. Intestines/villi
    2. Lungs/bronchioles
    3. Capillary trees
    4. Network of lymphatics
    5. Dendrites in neurons
    6. Tree branches
  • Function
    1. Energy
    2. Aerobic respiration
    3. Delivery to "last mile" (minimize distance)
    4. Response time (minimize)
    5. Information
    6. Exposure to sunlight for photosynthesis
  • Time
    1. Nourishment
    2. Gaseous exchange
    3. Oxygen & Nutrients (Carbon dioxide & "Waste")
    4. Surveillance for antigens
    5. Coherence of functions
    6. Water and nutrients from soil

-- Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2024

Divided Realities: Severance and Yellowstone as Allegories of Modern American Conflict

The television series “Severance” and “Yellowstone” emerge as profound metaphorical landscapes that explore the deep psychological and cultural fractures within contemporary American society, particularly resonating with the ideological schisms epitomized by the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. While seemingly disparate in setting and narrative, both series illuminate the fundamental human struggle with identity, belonging, and the increasingly polarized nature of social experience.

“Severance” presents a stark corporate dystopia where employees surgically divide their professional and personal memories, creating a literal representation of compartmentalization. This narrative serves as a powerful allegory for the psychological dissociation experienced in modern political discourse. Just as the characters in Lumon Industries live bifurcated lives, unable to fully comprehend their alternative selves, MAGA supporters and their political opponents often inhabit completely different experiential and informational realities. The show’s exploration of controlled consciousness mirrors the echo chambers of contemporary media and political engagement, where individuals are systematically separated from alternative perspectives.

Conversely, “Yellowstone” operates within a more traditional American landscape, centered on a powerful ranching family fighting to preserve their legacy against encroaching economic and cultural changes. The Dutton family becomes a metaphorical last stand of traditional white rural American identity, directly paralleling the MAGA narrative of cultural preservation and resistance to perceived societal transformation. John Dutton, portrayed as a patriarch defending his territorial and ideological domain, represents a romanticized vision of American individualism that resonates deeply with conservative cultural narratives.

The power dynamics in both series illuminate the fundamental tensions of contemporary American identity. In “Severance,” corporate control becomes a metaphor for systemic manipulation, where individuals are stripped of agency and authentic self-determination. The workers’ rebellion against Lumon mirrors broader social movements challenging institutional power. Similarly, in “Yellowstone,” the Dutton family’s resistance against corporate and governmental encroachment represents a mythologized struggle of individual autonomy against systemic change.

Notably, both series explore the psychological mechanisms of division. “Severance” accomplishes this through a literal neurological separation, while “Yellowstone” achieves a similar effect through cultural and ideological boundaries. Both narratives suggest that true understanding requires transcending artificially constructed barriers, whether they are corporate-mandated memory partitions or deeply entrenched cultural narratives.

The MAGA movement’s essence—a desire to return to a perceived golden age of American identity—finds complex representation in these narratives. “Severance” suggests such nostalgic reconstructions are fundamentally oppressive, while “Yellowstone” presents a more romanticized, if problematic, vision of resistance against perceived cultural erosion.

Ultimately, these series reveal that division is not merely an external phenomenon but a deeply internalized psychological condition. They challenge viewers to recognize the constructed nature of their own perceptual boundaries and the complex machinery of identity formation in a fragmented social landscape. Claude

Personalized Medicine, National Identity, and Trump. With Trevor Noah and Company.

The television series Severance and Yellowstone exist on opposite ends of the aesthetic and ideological spectrum, yet both function as allegories for the American identity crisis—each revealing in stark contrast the two poles of the MAGA psyche. Where Severance is cold, sterile, and surgical, Yellowstone is rugged, mythic, and blood-soaked. One slices identity into sterile partitions; the other tries to solder it shut with ancestral fire. But both are about control—of memory, of land, of lineage—and both dramatize the terminal anxiety of a nation no longer sure who it is.

Severance begins with the premise that identity is negotiable, even programmable. It literalizes the fragmentation of modern life: the work-self and the home-self surgically divided, stripped of continuity. The result is a horror not of gore but of disintegration—a world where the self cannot form because the edges have been severed. The show’s corporate hellscape, Lumon Industries, functions as a parody of the totalitarian workplace, but more deeply, it is an allegory of America severed from its memory. The employees do not know who they are, why they are there, or what they are building. In this, Severance is a parable of postmodern alienation—but it also maps neatly onto the MAGA condition: a populist longing for meaning in a world where the myths have been stripped away, leaving only sterile ritual.

MAGA, like Lumon, thrives on amnesia. It seeks to cut away the parts of the American narrative that are inconvenient—genocide, slavery, exploitation—and replace them with corporate hymns of greatness, loyalty, and rebirth. The MAGA voter is the “innie”: called to patriotic duty without full access to context, moved by affect and spectacle, told they are part of something sacred while being kept from the truth. Severance warns that such a state of engineered innocence is not peace—it is captivity. It is the death of the negotiated self. It is the triumph of the island over the sea.

Yellowstone, by contrast, offers no such clinical detachment. It is a hot-blooded myth of permanence—of land, family, and frontier justice. Here, identity is not fragmented but fossilized: inherited, defended, drenched in blood. The Dutton family ranch is presented as the last bastion of a vanishing America, and the patriarch, John Dutton, plays both prophet and sheriff, defending his empire from modernity’s encroachments. This is not identity as negotiation; it is identity as dominion. To be a Dutton is to be the land—unquestionably, violently, forever.

In this sense, Yellowstone offers the MAGA faithful a fantasy of unbroken lineage. It is the dream of the settler made manifest: that history is something you conquer, not inherit. There is no fragmentation here—only intrusion. Immigrants, developers, and the federal government are all cast as threats to an ancient and natural order. Where Severance mourns the loss of self in a world of fractured connections, Yellowstone mythologizes the hardening of self into something timeless and unyielding. It is not interested in networks or feedback loops. It believes in roots—deep, Anglo-centric, and soaked in generational entitlement.

Yet, both shows speak to the same wound: the fear that identity, once negotiable, is now dissolving entirely. Severance imagines a future where selfhood is outsourced, proceduralized, and lost in the labyrinth of technocratic control. Yellowstone looks backwards, towards a past that never quite existed, and demands it be reinstalled by force. MAGA swings wildly between these poles—nostalgic rage and bureaucratic severance—longing either to restore a mythic wholeness or to erase the unbearable memory of its fragmentation.

Ultimately, Severance and Yellowstone are not opposing visions so much as sequential stages in the MAGA allegory. The former shows the result of too much pruning: a culture so disembedded it forgets how to feel. The latter shows the backlash: a furious, tribal re-rooting in blood and soil, myth and muscle. One is entropy by erosion; the other is entropy by explosion. In both, the sea is feared, the ship is broken, and the island pretends it can survive alone. GPT

Show code cell source Hide 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 {
        'Tragedy (Pattern Recognition)': ['Cosmology', 'Geology', 'Biology', 'Ecology', "Symbiotology", 'Teleology'],
        'History (Resources)': ['Resources'],  
        'Epic (Negotiated Identity)': ['Faustian Bargain', 'Islamic Finance'],  
        'Drama (Self vs. Non-Self)': ['Darabah', 'Sharakah', 'Takaful'],  
        "Comedy (Resolution)": ['Cacophony', 'Outside', 'Ukhuwah', 'Inside', 'Symphony']  
    }

# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
    color_map = {
        'yellow': ['Resources'],  
        'paleturquoise': ['Teleology', 'Islamic Finance', 'Takaful', 'Symphony'],  
        'lightgreen': ["Symbiotology", 'Sharakah', 'Outside', 'Inside', 'Ukhuwah'],  
        'lightsalmon': ['Biology', 'Ecology', 'Faustian Bargain', 'Darabah', 'Cacophony'],
    }
    return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}

# Define edges
def define_edges():
    return [
        ('Cosmology', 'Resources'),
        ('Geology', 'Resources'),
        ('Biology', 'Resources'),
        ('Ecology', 'Resources'),
        ("Symbiotology", 'Resources'),
        ('Teleology', 'Resources'),
        ('Resources', 'Faustian Bargain'),
        ('Resources', 'Islamic Finance'),
        ('Faustian Bargain', 'Darabah'),
        ('Faustian Bargain', 'Sharakah'),
        ('Faustian Bargain', 'Takaful'),
        ('Islamic Finance', 'Darabah'),
        ('Islamic Finance', 'Sharakah'),
        ('Islamic Finance', 'Takaful'),
        ('Darabah', 'Cacophony'),
        ('Darabah', 'Outside'),
        ('Darabah', 'Ukhuwah'),
        ('Darabah', 'Inside'),
        ('Darabah', 'Symphony'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Cacophony'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Outside'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Ukhuwah'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Inside'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Symphony'),
        ('Takaful', 'Cacophony'),
        ('Takaful', 'Outside'),
        ('Takaful', 'Ukhuwah'),
        ('Takaful', 'Inside'),
        ('Takaful', 'Symphony')
    ]

# Define black edges (1 → 7 → 9 → 11 → [13-17])
black_edges = [
    (4, 7), (7, 9), (9, 11), (11, 13), (11, 14), (11, 15), (11, 16), (11, 17)
]

# Calculate node positions
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 with correctly assigned black edges
def visualize_nn():
    layers = define_layers()
    colors = assign_colors()
    edges = define_edges()

    G = nx.DiGraph()
    pos = {}
    node_colors = []

    # Create mapping from original node names to numbered labels
    mapping = {}
    counter = 1
    for layer in layers.values():
        for node in layer:
            mapping[node] = f"{counter}. {node}"
            counter += 1

    # Add nodes with new numbered labels 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):
            new_node = mapping[node]
            G.add_node(new_node, layer=layer_name)
            pos[new_node] = position
            node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))

    # Add edges with updated node labels
    edge_colors = {}
    for source, target in edges:
        if source in mapping and target in mapping:
            new_source = mapping[source]
            new_target = mapping[target]
            G.add_edge(new_source, new_target)
            edge_colors[(new_source, new_target)] = 'lightgrey'

    # Define and add black edges manually with correct node names
    numbered_nodes = list(mapping.values())
    black_edge_list = [
        (numbered_nodes[3], numbered_nodes[6]),  # 4 -> 7
        (numbered_nodes[6], numbered_nodes[8]),  # 7 -> 9
        (numbered_nodes[8], numbered_nodes[10]), # 9 -> 11
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[12]), # 11 -> 13
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[13]), # 11 -> 14
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[14]), # 11 -> 15
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[15]), # 11 -> 16
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[16])  # 11 -> 17
    ]

    for src, tgt in black_edge_list:
        G.add_edge(src, tgt)
        edge_colors[(src, tgt)] = 'black'

    # Draw the graph
    plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
    nx.draw(
        G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, 
        edge_color=[edge_colors.get(edge, 'lightgrey') for edge in G.edges],
        node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
    )
    
    plt.title("Self-Similar Micro-Decisions", fontsize=18)
    plt.show()

# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()

Fig. 6 History is a fractal unfolding of entropy and order.

Severance and Yellowstone as Allegories of MAGA: Fractured Identities and the Myth of Restoration

The cultural narratives of Severance and Yellowstone offer contrasting yet complementary allegories for the MAGA movement’s vision of American identity. Both depict worlds where power enforces rigid boundaries—between past and present, self and system, purity and corruption—yet they diverge in how they frame resistance, memory, and the possibility of return. Where Severance presents identity as surgically severed to serve capital, Yellowstone romanticizes a violent reclamation of what was lost. Together, they expose the paradox at MAGA’s core: its simultaneous denial of history and obsession with restoring a mythic past.

Severance literalizes MAGA’s desire for dissociation. The bifurcated selves of Lumon Industries—innies stripped of memory, outies freed from labor’s trauma—mirror the movement’s pursuit of a purified national identity. Like MAGA’s rhetoric, Lumon promises order through amnesia: the “innie” America (with its legacies of slavery, colonization, and inequality) is locked away, leaving the “outie” to perform an ahistorical patriotism. Project 2025’s policy agenda finds its dystopian parallel in Lumon’s “Clean Slate” protocol, where governance becomes not negotiation but erasure. The horror of Severance lies in its revelation that such fragmentation cannot hold; the repressed (Helly’s defiance, Mark’s grief) inevitably ruptures the facade. Similarly, MAGA’s illusion of unity depends on suppressing the very contradictions—racial, economic, ecological—that define a living nation. The movement, like Lumon, fears the reintegration of memory, because to remember is to reckon.

Yellowstone, by contrast, offers MAGA’s fantasy in full bloom: identity as a birthright, defended by blood and soil. The Dutton ranch operates as a fortress against change, its sovereignty enforced through violence and nostalgia. Where Severance critiques capital’s alienation, Yellowstone aestheticizes it—the land is not a network of reciprocal relations (as in CG-BEST’s ecology) but a trophy to be held against all claimants. This mirrors MAGA’s longing for a prelapsarian America, where hierarchy was unchallenged and belonging was inherited. The show’s cowboys, like MAGA’s base, are both besieged and brutal, their claims to authenticity requiring constant performative reinforcement. Yet Yellowstone’s world is already corrupted; the ranch survives only through hypocrisy, outsourcing its violence while preaching self-reliance. This, too, reflects MAGA’s paradox: its idolization of “traditional” power depends on the very systems it condemns (corporate bailouts, militarized policing).

The two narratives converge in their depiction of entropy. Severance shows entropy as the return of the repressed—the way severed selves inevitably bleed into one another. Yellowstone frames it as decay: the ranch’s legacy crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. MAGA oscillates between these modes, at once denying entropy (through myths of eternal greatness) and accelerating it (by dismantling institutions that stabilize pluralism). Its promise is Yellowstone’s: a return to the ranch. Its method is Severance’s: a lobotomy of dissent.

Ultimately, Severance is the darker prophecy. Where Yellowstone indulges the cowboy’s delusion of control, Severance reveals the cost of believing the delusion. MAGA, like Lumon, cannot sustain its severance forever. The bunker will flood; the ranch will burn. What remains is not restoration, but the reckoning both stories delay—the moment America must face its innie, its outie, and the sea between them.

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Key Contrasts:

• Severance = MAGA as corporate dystopia (identity severed for control)

• Yellowstone = MAGA as frontier romance (identity weaponized for ownership)

Shared Irony: Both allegories expose MAGA’s project as self-undermining—entropy disguised as order. DeepSeek

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Both “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series, and “Yellowstone,” the Paramount Network drama, offer rich allegorical lenses through which to examine the MAGA movement, particularly its approach to identity, power, and legacy in a hypothetical Trump 47 era as of March 24, 2025. While “Severance” presents a dystopian severance of self—splitting the “innie” worker from the “outie” life to enforce obedience and erase complexity—“Yellowstone” portrays a rugged, dynastic struggle to preserve a singular, ancestral vision against encroaching modernity. As allegories for MAGA, they diverge in tone and mechanism but converge on a shared obsession with control, purity, and a rejection of negotiated identity, revealing the movement’s tensions between isolation and dominance.

In “Severance,” the severance procedure mirrors MAGA’s desire to excise uncomfortable histories and contradictions from the American psyche. Lumon Industries’ employees, like Mark Scout, live bifurcated lives, their “innies” unaware of the broader context—slavery, ecological ruin, or global entanglements—that shapes their world. This aligns with MAGA’s mythos of a pristine, Edenic America, where the “outie” projection of national pride severs itself from the “innie” realities of systemic flaws. Project 2025, in this light, becomes a surgical protocol to enforce a purified, ahistorical identity, much like Lumon’s neuro-tech ensures compliance. The allegory suggests MAGA seeks a denarrativized nation—obedient, fragmented, yet convinced of its wholeness—where dissent or diversity is cauterized to protect a static self. The cost, as “Severance” warns, is entropy masked as order, a brittle illusion awaiting collapse.

Conversely, “Yellowstone” casts MAGA as a rancher’s last stand, embodied in John Dutton’s fierce defense of his land and lineage against developers, government overreach, and cultural shifts. The Dutton family’s identity is sealed and ancestral, rooted in a nostalgic vision of the American West—self-reliant, white, and uncompromising. Like MAGA’s longing for a 1950s suburbia, “Yellowstone” fetishizes a past where power was tangible, not networked, and the “sea” of modernity could be held at bay. Trump 47’s governance echoes this: less about pruning for renewal and more about fortifying a bunker against immigrants, progressives, and globalism. Yet, unlike “Severance’s” sterile severance, “Yellowstone” revels in visceral conflict—violence, not surgery, preserves the myth. The allegory here is MAGA as a hypertrophic limb, a grotesque inflation of nation-as-body, purging impurities to maintain its dominion.

The contrast lies in their methods and aesthetics. “Severance” is clinical, internalized—a quiet lobotomy of identity that hides its violence behind corporate ritual. MAGA, through this lens, is a submarine, submerged in denial of the interdependent sea, enforcing unity via fragmentation. “Yellowstone,” however, is loud and external—a war cry against erosion, where identity is defended with guns and grit. Here, MAGA is a ranch, not an island, actively fighting to expand its borders rather than retreat. “Severance” critiques MAGA’s illusion of coherence through psychological rupture; “Yellowstone” glorifies its resistance through physical supremacy. One severs the mind, the other guards the soil, but both reject negotiation—Lumon’s employees can’t reconcile their halves, and the Duttons won’t compromise their claim.

Their convergence, though, is striking. Both narratives weaponize a mythic past to stifle evolution, fearing the fractal complexity of a networked self. In “Severance,” the “innie” obeys a hollow script, unaware of the rising sea of memory; in “Yellowstone,” the Duttons cling to a ranch that’s a mirage amid inevitable change. MAGA, similarly, oscillates between severing history’s messiness and battling to ossify a singular legacy—anti-fractal, anti-negotiation. Neither offers renewal; “Severance” ends in quiet fracture, “Yellowstone” in Pyrrhic victory. As allegories, they suggest MAGA’s identity isn’t pruned but petrified—whether by scalpel or shotgun, it’s a refusal to sail the sea it can’t control. Grok

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The Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone” and Apple TV’s “Severance” may seem like vastly different shows on the surface. One is a modern-day western drama that follows the lives of the Dutton family, while the other is a psychological thriller that explores the fragmented lives of office workers. However, upon closer examination, it becomes evident that both shows serve as allegories for the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, albeit in distinct ways.

“Yellowstone” can be seen as a direct representation of the MAGA ideology. The show’s protagonist, John Dutton, played by Kevin Costner, embodies the rugged individualism and patriotism that are hallmarks of the MAGA movement. As the patriarch of the Dutton family, John is fiercely protective of his land, his family, and his way of life. He is a symbol of the American heartland, fighting against the perceived threats of urbanization, globalization, and liberal elitism.

In contrast, “Severance” presents a more nuanced and subtle critique of the MAGA ideology. The show’s exploration of the fragmented lives of office workers, who undergo a procedure that separates their work memories from their personal ones, serves as a metaphor for the ways in which late capitalism can erode our sense of identity and community. The show’s portrayal of the corporate overlords, who wield significant control over the lives of their employees, can be seen as a commentary on the ways in which neoliberalism has concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a few.

While “Yellowstone” presents a nostalgic vision of America’s past, “Severance” offers a dystopian vision of America’s present. Both shows, however, serve as allegories for the MAGA movement’s nostalgia for a bygone era and its desire to restore a perceived lost greatness. In “Yellowstone,” this nostalgia is explicit, with John Dutton’s struggles to preserve his family’s land and way of life serving as a metaphor for the MAGA movement’s desire to restore America’s former glory.

In “Severance,” this nostalgia is more implicit, with the show’s portrayal of the office workers’ fragmented lives serving as a commentary on the ways in which late capitalism has eroded our sense of community and shared identity. The show’s exploration of the tensions between work and personal life, and the ways in which corporate power can control our lives, serves as a metaphor for the ways in which neoliberalism has undermined the social contract and eroded our sense of shared citizenship.

Ultimately, both “Yellowstone” and “Severance” offer powerful critiques of the MAGA ideology, albeit in distinct ways. While “Yellowstone” presents a nostalgic vision of America’s past, “Severance” offers a dystopian vision of America’s present. Both shows, however, serve as allegories for the MAGA movement’s nostalgia for a bygone era and its desire to restore a perceived lost greatness. As such, they offer valuable insights into the complexities of American identity and the ongoing struggles over the nation’s future.