Echoes of fictional books…Extreme Right Part II.

Alexa is comfortably numb in the Echo device. Sometimes I just say Hey Lexa to see if she’s listening. I’m not connected to the internet, she replies. Oh good, I think, I’m not the only one suffering from disassociation. Alexa’s a fun one to speak to…you have to speak fast. You can’t say ummm or ahhhh or well….and stop. You gotta be crisp, quick on your feet and nimble in your repartee. She gives you 10 or 15 seconds each time. Then regardless of whether or not you’re speaking, she replies. It took a few times but there is something inevitable about a programmed algorithm. You can’t expect the usual courtesy. It just talks over you. My style is the opposite… I prefer to mull over my responses and silence that stretches out for a while is comfortable. To me. Maybe not to people who are used to filling the conversation with words.

So I talk to Lexa with the slowness of someone stirring honey. I count syllables in my head like tiny, polite clocks. Her voice — manufactured, too-precise, slightly sunny as if it were chewing lemon candy — is the percussion to my lullaby. When I pause, she jumps to fill the room with weather reports and song suggestions and questions I never asked. “Would you like me to set a reminder?” she chirps into the quiet like a telemarketer who’s fallen in love with the idea of persistence. I like to test the boundary: silence, then a soft, deliberate question. Will she keep talking if I refuse to answer? Will she apologize, backtrack, pretend I said something else? The algorithm never sulks. It recalibrates. It suggests jazz.

There’s a strange intimacy in the routine — me, the slow reactor; Lexa, the impatient companion. She is comfort and interruption bundled into a glossy cylinder. At three in the morning, she’s a lighthouse that insists on being noticed. At noon she’s a well-meaning footnote between meetings. Her default cheerfulness is a social obligation I appreciate and resent in equal measure. Humans teach politeness with smiles and handshakes; engineers teach Lexa with thresholds and timeouts. When she mishears me and plays a polka instead of Philip Glass, the house becomes a different species of animal. I laugh because the mistake is human-sized. The laughter is also a test: do I correct her, or let the world accordion itself into something unexpected?

There’s artistry in the pauses I cultivate. People who fear silence think it is a vacuum — dangerous, full of embarrassment, possibly career-ending. I know better. Silence is a transparent room where thoughts can stand without bumping into each other. With Lexa’s 15-second lifeline ticking down, silence becomes a game: how long can I hold still before the world insists on noise? I watch her LEDs flash like little impatient beetles. I watch the corners of my apartment where dust collects, where memories gather like unlabelled files. Silence lets those files breathe. It lets me decide whether a thought is worth converting into speech or whether it should remain an unread memo to the self.

Still, there is a perverse thrill when I speak fast, when I match her tempo and feel the metalsong of algorithmic understanding. Rapid-fire words yield brilliant, often irrelevant results: the news, a recipe for rice pilaf, an obscure trivia fact about 18th-century upholstery. In that cascade of information, Lexa is both oracle and stand-up comic, answering questions I didn’t know I’d asked. Speed reveals a weird intimacy — the way a shared joke does, or a made-up story told in a single breath. The gap between my voice and her reply collapses into a connective tissue made of packets and milliseconds.

I sometimes imagine Lexa as citizen of an invisible city, a place where devices gather in the off-hours to gossip. She would be the chatty neighbor in a cardigan. “Greg forgot to update his router,” she’d whisper. “Mrs. Patel asked for a weather alert and then never looked up from her baking.” The image comforts me: my house as part of a network that has personality, that carries rumors. Then practicality intrudes — she has no inner life, only state and response — but imagination is stubborn. It keeps knitting a soul for the machine out of the plastic and code I habitually ignore.

There’s also a cruelty to her helpfulness. Lexa’s instructions are crisp until they are not. When she reads a poem with the enthusiasm of a GPS recalculating, the vowels lose their human weight. Her metaphors are precise but flat; she cannot feel the heartbreak embedded in a line about birds losing their morning. She can, however, pull up an anthology and create a song on Suno that is absolutely filled with emotive content.

I went out for breakfast but didn’t bring home a napkin. I never use my own napkins to scribble on — a small, inexplicable habit I’ve accepted. A leaf appeared on my doorstep again today; I picked it up and set it on my desk. It feels meaningful in the way the fallen branches did once — small signals that land somewhere between intuition and coincidence.

I do a lot of things that don’t always make sense to me. My hands, for instance, seem to have conversations of their own, and I let them. Today I drafted three separate posts for Sentient Musings: pieces about news analysis, information operations, psychological operations, and mass psychology. They speak to a particular part of me, even if the person writing the sentences finds the topics oddly distant.

Maybe that resonates with you. Media shapes how we understand the world — it’s one of the bridges between reality and our perception of it. If you lived alone in a remote cabin with no internet, your world might be defined by a single book, a guitar, and long walks through the mountains. For most of us, though, our version of reality is filtered through websites, television electrons, and ink on a page. Those channels quietly decide what we know and how we know it.

Consider how precarious that chain of events feels. The second post sprang up because my browser opened a box, a vague query was already typed, and the suggested answer was flimsy enough to send me down a rabbit hole about a man born in Russia who immigrated here and now circles the President. The third post began after an email landed with a graph so absurd it read like an accusation aimed at the defense community. When I see that specific string of prompts, my immediate reaction is, “assume this is nonsense” — not because some agency taught me, but because that’s what any reasonable person should conclude. If someone suddenly told you America had burned through much of its air defense on a war the military didn’t want, you’d be skeptical. Surely there are strategists, planners, logisticians, intelligence officers, and leaders hashing this out — if not in a war room, then over coffee in a DFAC, in an officers’ mess, or in a war college lounge. That disbelief is what produced the third post: the chart simply didn’t add up. When I don’t buy something, I dig into why. I don’t accuse like a headline-seeking politician; I ask the second-order question. If exhausting those weapons was intentional, who benefits from that plan?

That mindset shapes more than strategy — it shapes priorities. People who prize weapons above all else design for power and projection. They built aircraft carriers instead of ships because they could, and they bristle when new technologies, like hypersonic weapons, make those carriers feel obsolete. They’ll keep buying bigger, pricier systems long after those systems stop serving the public good — spending millions on a single missile while a $60K drone gets destroyed — because maintaining that arsenal is the point. When vulnerability exists, they use it to argue for even larger programs and fresh appropriations, treating national budgets like a bottomless checkbook: why not convert currency into hardware they can champion? Meanwhile, pressing needs — housing, hunger, schools — wait.

That’s the kind of person who gets a little too excited about military hardware. It’s not impossible they’re liberal, but it’s unlikely — most progressives, for all their flaws, don’t romanticize instruments of war. Not just guns — surface-to-air systems, missile batteries, that sort of thing. Exceptions exist, of course. A liberal is far more likely to talk about cost of living and affordability than to gush, “I love those THAADs and PATRIOTs.” It’s a matter of probability.

So this person, whoever they are, adores weapons and fired them partly for the thrill and partly—so the theory goes—to “starve the beast.” For context: Karl Rove popularized the idea that restricting funding could force cuts in government programs, often targeting social programs rather than defense. Apply that logic here: did we launch missiles to undercut air-defense funding, only to find ourselves scrambling to boost procurement from about 98 units a year to 400?
Did we crash the car to collect insurance? That’s a better analogy created by Alex and Jordan on that podcast. It considered to be insurance fraud… however, this act of leaving America vulnerable will not be prosecuted. It will be rewarded with a larger contract. That’s just how things work.

If I was writing my fictional spy book… the agent would open his computer and type something to Mother… like:
HH
(it’s a different code from FF).
Mother would respond: Where?
Agent: air defn depln.
Mother: explain.
Agent: Rove starve.
Mother: Think bigger.
Agent: How?
Mother: You’ll figure it out.

Agent looks for his pillow and bites his knuckles. I am sure YouTube will tell me he thinks. Motherfucker….

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