When they fear the voters more than they fear the man

I finished the book Monk and Robot by Becky Chambers. The book is made up of short novels A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, originally separately published. The second is a continuation of the first. I was interested in the book because I had previously read her Wayfarer novels and enjoyed them. The monk is Dex, who is either nonbinary or intersex. Because of that they aren’t Brother Dex, but Sibling Dex. They work as a tea monk, pedaling a wagon from village to village and creating blends of tea for those who need relaxation or comfort. But they are no longer satisfied with this work and don’t know what to do instead. The thought of visiting a hermitage deep within the Wild offers a chance to deal with their dissatisfaction. About two hundred years before the story the robots that did the majority of work in factories “woke up.” (Peace, friend and debate partner, this is just a way to generate a story.) The robots left the factories and forged an agreement with the humans on what is human territory and what is Wild. The robots moved to the Wild. Shortly after entering the wild Dex encounters Mosscap, a robot name after a type of mushroom. It is a wild-built robot, created in the Wild from parts of previous robots. Mosscap guides Dex to the hermitage. That was the first novel. The second takes place back in the human lands. Mosscap wants to check up on humans because the robots are curious about what has happened since the time of factories. It gets discussions going by asking humans “What do you need?” and doing what it can to meet that need. So maybe don’t think of Mosscap as a robot. Think of it as a character from another culture. Mosscap can explain the culture of the Wild to Dex and Dex can explain the human culture to Mosscap. A great deal of the story is Dex and Mosscap talking. The human culture that Chambers describes is, of course, an idealized culture, one very much she (and I) would want to live in and in many aspects different from what we know on earth in the modern age. One example is that the humans didn’t reconfigure factories for human labor after the robots left. They abandoned factories and returned to hand-crafted goods. That has a lot of implications on the rest of life and is why Dex’s wagon – which includes their apothecary and living quarters – is powered by their own legs. Another example is the replacement for money. Instead of the seller demanding so many dollars in exchange for a good or service, the receiver offers so many “pebs” (short for pebbles) in thanks to the provider of the good or service. That’s an important distinction. A person’s pebs account can go negative because goods, especially food and shelter, are never denied. If a person’s pebs account, always publicly visible, stays negative for a length of time friends know to check in. All this is explained because Mosscap does things for humans and he is rewarded pebs before he knows to open a pebs account. I enjoyed this book, though I admit it is a discussion of ideas and won’t have much appeal for those who want action in their stories. A tipping point is where a gradual change in something causes something else that had been stable to suddenly change rapidly. News Corpse of the Daily Kos community wrote about the seemingly stable relationship between the nasty guy and the Republicans in Congress as the nasty guy’s actions get increasingly vile. Then the nasty guy wrote something vile in response to the murder of actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife allegedly by their son Nick Reiner. Steadfast Republican support suddenly isn’t. The response in MAGA-land was one that the nasty guy had gone too far. So Republican supporters in Congress are speaking out. And we get this comment from News Corpse:

It was inevitable that as Trump's approval ratings decline, as they have been, his supporters would start to fear the people – i.e. voters – more than they fear Trump. That's the tipping point at which we may be now. If this trend continues, Trump will not only find himself without a Republican majority in Congress, but without support from what remains of the GOP. Nobody will want to be associated with someone who disparages beloved Americans who were taken from us far too soon.

Kos community member jhecht reported that lawyers for the Pulitzer Prize Board have dropped a “discovery bomb” on the nasty guy. He sued the Pulitzer for some sort of slight, it hardly matters what, though it is about their 2018 investigation into Russia (their influence in the 2016 election?). Every suit there is a discovery phase in which each side has to share with the other all the facts and evidence of the case. And the Pulitzer team, playing hardball, said a great deal of information is relevant to determine how much the nasty guy was physically or mentally harmed. The Pulitzer team asked for detailed financial records, including tax returns from 2015, and complete medical and psychological records. Yeah, that’s a great deal of what the nasty guy has worked hard in the last decade to keep hidden. That gives him two choices: withdraw the suit or fight to keep all that info hidden, an effort he’ll likely lose. And the hits just keep on coming. Alex Samuels of Kos reported the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit preservationist group chartered by Congress to protect historic buildings, filed a lawsuit against the nasty guy saying he did not legally demolish the East Wing. Their goal is to stop work until the necessary federal commissions have approved the project’s plans, adequate environmental reviews have been done (the East Wing likely had a great deal of asbestos), and Congress authorizes construction.

Where the lawsuit goes from here is uncertain—but the idea of the court blocking construction after the East Wing has already been razed has not gone unnoticed.

This next bit is highly speculative and the evidence is slight and circumstantial, but it is intriguing in a bad way. TheSheeple of the Kos community discussed a Substack article that suggests the White House Ballroom is just a cover for a big military AI data center. Whether the ballroom sits on top of the data center to hide it or the data center’s code name is “ballroom” is part of the speculation.