We Got the Supervillains. Nobody Ordered the Superheroes.

There's a frame that keeps recurring this week, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Jessica Burbank's analysis, aggregated at Kottke, lays it out with uncomfortable clarity: nation-states are no longer the apex predators of global power. That title has passed to billionaire-controlled syndicates of capital — extralegal by design, transnational by necessity, and effectively unanswerable to anyone. They exist, as Burbank puts it, where either no regulations apply or where no entity powerful enough to enforce them actually exists. Jason Kottke agrees this has been obvious for a while. So do I. The question nobody wants to answer is: so what do we do about it?

My response when I read this was a simple question: Oh, so we get Supervillains but no Superheroes?

Apparently not. And the rest of this week's news is just footnotes to that central, nauseating fact.

Take Musk's xAI winning a permit for its makeshift datacenter power plant despite significant community backlash. This isn't a story about a company getting a regulatory win through the normal, if frustrating, machinery of government. This is a story about a member of the billionaire syndicate class — one who now has his hands directly on federal levers — operating with the kind of impunity that the syndicate model predicts and enables. I can only wonder about the wonderful smells that will drift downwind from that installation. The neighbors of Memphis didn't ask for this. They have no meaningful recourse. That's the point.

This is what the extralegal sphere looks like on the ground. It smells like diesel exhaust and indifference.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration cannot decide whether the war it started with Iran is still happening. The president told CBS News that the war is "very complete, pretty much" — a phrase so self-contradicting it would get a college freshman marked down in a logic course. His Secretary of Defense appears to hold a different view. Nobody seems to know what the original objective was. Nobody seems to know what victory looks like. Nobody seems to know what the current operational status is.

I have zero confidence — and I want to be precise here, I mean zero, not "low" or "diminished" — in this administration's ability to manage what they are doing, present a coherent argument for what they are doing, or even know what the hell they are doing. What I see is a hydra: a tangle of actors with their own agendas, each willing to let the Golden Toddler believe he is the one pulling every string, as long as the game keeps paying out. Loyalty to the man buys you access to the levers. The levers move things. What things? Doesn't matter, apparently.

And here is the part that should stop everyone cold: I have equal-opportunity zero confidence in the Democratic Party's willingness to actually defend the Constitution, the Rule of Law, or America's posture on the international stage. This is not a both-sides-are-the-same argument. This is a both parties have forfeited the right to be considered the heroic option argument. Two parties. Two sets of power levers. Both pointed, functionally, at their own perpetuation.

Karim Sadjadpour's piece in The Atlantic makes the strategic picture even grimmer. Trump went into this hoping to produce an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — a pragmatic insider ready to deal. What he may have produced instead is an Iranian Kim Jong Un. Mojtaba Khamenei is doubling down, not capitulating. The regime has been militarily degraded and politically strengthened by the assault. This is what happens when you start a war without understanding that the other side gets a vote in how it ends. I've held this position for years: the moment you initiate force against another party, you surrender the fantasy of controlling the outcome. Chaos is not a strategy. It is what happens to your strategy.

The administration either never learned this or doesn't care. Given everything else we've seen, I'd bet on the latter.

And then there's Mike Johnson refusing to condemn anti-Muslim comments from Republican lawmakers. This barely qualifies as news at this point. It is perfectly, precisely on brand for the current philosophical position of this movement: the dehumanization of anyone who doesn't fit inside a very narrow definition of acceptable American identity. Racist xenophobia isn't a bug in this system. It is a feature, loudly advertised, increasingly codified. Johnson's silence is not the silence of discomfort. It is the silence of endorsement wearing plausible deniability like a Halloween mask.

So here we are. Extralegal billionaire syndicates reshaping global power while pumping diesel fumes into poor neighborhoods. An incoherent war in Iran prosecuted by an administration that can't explain what winning means. A political opposition that remains too structurally compromised to mount a real defense of the institutions it claims to love. A Speaker who won't say that calling for violence against Muslims is wrong.

Nautilus asked this week whether you were born to love music — whether aesthetic sensitivity is written into your DNA. It's a beautiful question, honestly, and yes, I was. But I am starting to wonder about the people who weren't born with whatever gene produces moral revulsion at cruelty, accountability for power, or the basic capacity to distinguish between what you can do and what you should do.

We built a civilization on the hope that those people would be constrained by rules and institutions and the countervailing force of other humans with conscience.

The syndicates noticed that the constraints were mostly theoretical. They made their move.

The rest of us are still waiting for the heroes.