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For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms. It follows an end-of-year tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); 2020 (for those see here); 2022 (for those see here); 2023 (for those see here), and 2024 (here).
If 2023 was the year in which belief matured into conflict, 2024 saw that conflict escalate and move decisively toward its end games. The year 2025 proves to be one of realization--realization of the triumphs and failures of the end-games that had been gathering speed and moving toward decisive phases between 2019- 2024. At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Eleggua/Oya (The Orishas Speak: The 2025 Letter of the Year of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2025 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation).
The 2025 Letter of the Year is interesting especially after several years of oracular suggestions (2019-2024) of turmoil, explosion, and transformation traveling along pathways that are both conduit and are disrupted and reshaped. It is the year of finalization of the great cycle the unavoidable period of ending of which was introduced by disease (2019) and will end with the establishment of new structures (good and evil) toward which all will be expected to bed the knee. The Letter of the Year (the official version and that of the independistas; Miguel Febres Padron (below) and my own) point to the emergence of emperors and the corruption of order, of liars and of the return of defeated enemies to which victors had shown mercy. This is the year of the sacrifices required for new ordering; and the sacrifices will be painful.
Welcome to the 2025 disco scene after-party. And 2025 did not disappoint as to venue or tunes. Those who emerged from the explosions that had erupted between 2022 and 2024 began the process, often quite ruthless, of reshaping the world in the wake of their triumphs. There were transformations everywhere--violent transformations, ongoing transformations, upending of power-relations, the transformations that are the end product of vendetta, and the transformations of one set of ideologies for another. Transformation became substantially transactional as well. But transformation into what? That is the question for 2026.
And it is in that spirit of explosion, of explosions that reveals, transforms, dissipates--in the spirit of 2024--that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. Each aphorism links to a essay or news story written during and about the events occurring during the year. This first set focuses on the power of the quality or condition of being a fact (facticity) and its therapeutic and transformative power on social relations and the rationalizing of social relations in 2024. It is in the context of facticity and its manifesting, that the highs, lows, and sideways of 2024 begin to emerge.
Links to the 2025 Year End Ruminations here:
Part 1: The Serendipity of the Post-Transformation Order;
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1.Sometimes the enemies of the political order are the friends of those who strive for power within it.
"Author Sean M. Wiswesser takes readers deep into the heart of Maskirovka―the Russian art of denial, deception, and manipulation. Using historical examples and firsthand accounts, this book reveals the tactics employed by the three main services of Russia’s intelligence apparatus: the SVR, GRU, and FSB. Learn about the RIS’ use of double agents, surveillance, and “street work,” honeytraps, sabotage, active measures, assassinations, the RIS roles in the Russo-Ukraine War, and much more. . . . This book is more than an exposé―it’s a toolkit for understanding and countering the RIS’ manipulative tactics. Wiswesser breaks down ten key elements of their tradecraft," Sean Michael Wiswesser, Tradecraft, Tactics, and Dirty Tricks: Russian Intelligence and Putin's Secret War (Naval Institute Oress, Hardcover – April 21, 2026).
Liberal democracy has gotten used to consuming information from all quarters; depending on its filtering systems to distinguish between the good, the bad and the dangerous. But information is also a tool; and sometimes people are not fussy about the source or character of that tool. Is is indeed the fundamental problem for a liberal democratic spectrum that sometimes finds these interventions useful for their own ends thinking that instruments can be used and discarded. An ancient error that generation learns anew.
2. Inter-State competition becomes more interesting when a common language disguises the incompatibility of meaning and values--especially when leaders deeply embedded in the transactional universe of a merchant type interact with the management of ability and expansion of institutional guidance power of the official-bureaucrat-expert type; even worse when the press apparatus is oblivious or hostile.
Edward Luce, China’s escalation dominance over Trump; The US president has handed the initiative to Beijing in tech, energy and security (Financial Times 16 December 2025). What happens when the official/bureaucrat type meets the merchant type? (Reflections on President Trump: "America 250: Presidential Message on the Anniversary of our Victory in the Spanish-American War"). The lenses are different, the definition of the prize is different, and the things that matter and their value are different. From the perspective of the official (toward which global elites had shifted for the last several centuries) the analysis is correct. . . but from the perspective of the merchant, where objects of value to the official have no value to the merchant, what then? What is initiative for the merchant is quite distinct from that of the bureaucrat, and the metrics for assessing one has little relevance for the other. The only point of putting them together is if one is actively campaigning to substitute one "type" for the other. I am not sure but I am reminded of the serendipity of the story of the construction of a famous building that turned disastrous when the architectural plans, in inches and feet was built in metric.3. Transforming political desire requires its own National Security Strategy as much to secure its own inculcation internally as it is to secure its own desires, its own wants and its own dreams from the contrarily desires of others.
America First as the Essence of National Security and the American Post-Colonial 'Howl': Reflections on the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States (2025). A merchant politician worships the idea/ideal of Venice, at least Venice before it collapse from its own contradictions and inertia; Venice is a grand moment in history. But times change and so do the technologies of performance. For me the most interesting parts of NSS were centered on two related trajectories. The first touches on the way in which national security has now become the operative language of economic policy, in ways that in some respects parallels developments in China (and indeed the shadow of China is notable in a variety of respects). In effect economic policy is now an expression of as well as an object of national security, and national security is an essential component of economic policy. Economic policy, in turn platforms transactions in now differentiated spheres (energy, tech, commodities, infrastructure, finance) the national security implications of which are distinct. The second is the way that America First has been evolving and with it the forms of post global ordering (that is what elites like to call it I think; my preference is to call it the structural formation of regional and trade/commodity routed imperium ) that reconceptualize territory as a contingent object that is both the place where communities are housed and the enterprise of those communities.
4. What is territory if not the afterthought of an identity looking for a place to take a nap; in a de territorialized environment, identity solidarity becomes the operative substitute and territorial occupation its consequence.
It is the body count that counts; occupation of space is meaningless in the absence of the absence of an "occupying" other. “IS and Hamas hate each other. IS terrorism, like Al-Qaeda’s before it, is religious, albeit deeply twisted; it wants to impose its violent version of Islam on the planet and it wants those who do not share its views to die, particularly other Muslims. . . . Islamic State is reclaiming territory in north Africa and in Afghanistan. But it doesn’t need land to continue its crusade; its instruction in religious extremism and the how-tos of terrorist violence is easily found online. Al-Qaeda, another fundamentalist group, preferred to control terror activity, but IS doesn’t care. It’ll take any brutality in its name. “They don’t even need local cells,” says University of Canberra law professor Sascha-Dominik Dov Bachmann. “You just need a self-radicalised individual.”Jordan Baker, Michael McGowen, 'A father, a son and the radical world of terror: The final days of the Bondi Beach shooters were spent in bare, rented rooms and off the radar of authorities," Sydney Morning Herald (10 December 2025)
5. When all else fails it is easiest to retreat into the simulacra of the thing that fails, and so fail on two levels. That is the essence of of the transformation after-party.
Evrim Ağacı, 'Scottish Tribunal Judgment Sparks Legal Uproar Over Errors: A high-profile employment case involving NHS Fife and nurse Sandie Peggie draws criticism for misquotes, legal confusion, and questions about AI involvement in the ruling, 'Grand Pinnacle Review (13 December 2025) ("But it was not only the legal findings that drew attention. As legal experts and interested parties combed through the lengthy judgment, they uncovered a litany of misquotes, errors, and what some described as “phantom” citations—statements attributed to other court decisions that, upon review, simply didn’t exist or had been altered in meaning and context."). We appear to be two tracking error, one entirely human and one either all machine generated or partially machine generated with a (careless or inattentive human in the center). Perhaps three tracks, at least, then. But what of them? Is one to focus on the error, is one to attach significance to the origins of error, is one to focus on transparency in production, is one to focus effects of error; etc. and if some or all, in what combo and how to weigh? And there is so much left out of this--especially the why of it, the objectives of it (for the courts, for work expectation, for the administration of justice, for the relationship between humans and their tools, and so on. As you say, the genie is quite out of the bottle, and the toddlers are all in the school yard while the teacher, unguided, is for the moment both overwhelmed and paralyzed for lack of confident direction.
6. People and their collectives striving for a per-fabricated great and the good they incinerate not the bad but the good in themselves that made it possible to burn with the fervor of righteousness; the match will be lit by the generative intelligence systems that have been created not just in their image but to "serve humanity", ironically enough in the ovens of their own vanities.
Remarks by the Vice President at the Munich Security Conference (14 February 2025) ("And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. . . ")
Might it be possible that a "good man" will burn his own nation to the ground to rule with perhaps even greater fervor. We return to the fundamentals here--good and evil, and might for a moment rethink the value as Nietzsche sort of tried to do in his own though 19th century bound way of achieving something beyond good and evil as the predict for action and judgment. Ancient people recall the Koestler's book "Darkness at Noon", probably one of the great lamentations of the last century. And so is the problem the man, is the problem the evil that drives the man, is it the willingness to burn a nation to the ground, or is it the desire for some values based purpose (always good in the eyes of those with the torches) to rule over the ashes. . . . that is beyond the space of knowledge to which we might have access....yet.. . . perhaps another bite of the apple of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil is in order. That is a reminder that all premises can be flipped on the ir head, so so flipped might produce more pointed knowledge. Had Make Antoinette fed Paris cake when they had no bread she might have kept her head.....otherwise perhaps all is variation on bin fires of the vanities one in which its author and driver eventually found himself to be the last bit If food for the fire..... (Democratic Demons and Family Drama, A Valentine's Day Text From the United States for their European Soulmates--Vice President JD Vance's Remarks Delivered at the 2025 Munich Security Conference)
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