Some debt is good other debt is not. The reason matters.

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company, has settled a case over teen social media addiction, agreeing to pay $17 billion. The suit had been filed by 29 states. I think another 18 states had files separate suits. This trial had been in the news for about a week. The accusation is that Meta, parent to Facebook and Instagram, designed its products to be addictive, especially to youth. In addition to monetary damages the suit wants to force Meta to change how its products work. That Meta let a week go by before settling implies to me that the evidence presented so far is quite damaging to the company or that worse was about to be revealed. Another aspect of settling is they don’t have to admit to causing harm (though if that were the only reason they could have settled before the trial began). They can claim they are making these changes because of how benevolent they are. I think that Meta’s payout of $17 billion is too small compared to its 2025 revenue of $201 billion. In addition to paying the cash, Meta agreed to a few things for teen accounts. There would be a hard limit to daily use – I think I heard two hours. They would limit push notifications during school hours and overnight. They would add “age-appropriate” content controls and strengthen parental controls. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy’s ballroom has lost a primary reason for being built. He has said the ballroom is part of a military bunker for the White House. But, according to a Washington Post report, the White House has a military bunker. This one was actually rather secret – Obama built it after 9/11 and didn’t blab about it. It also looks to be a great deal more secure and survivable even during a nuclear blast, than what the nasty guy has been proclaiming for his bunker and ballroom. How can the ballroom be all that secure when it has so many and such large glass windows?

All of this makes it clear that the ballroom was always just a ballroom and that the military complex beneath it was invented out of whole cloth to justify the ballroom. And once Trump came up with that genius idea, everyone surrounding him just ran with it. ... Can’t wait for the next Democratic administration to tear the whole thing down, especially now that we know that the big, secret, totally necessary bunker was there all along. Nobody needs this gilded palace of sin.

Needham also reported on the comments of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. He has a solution for the ballroom – blow it up and sell the chunks as souvenirs as a way to recoup the costs to the American taxpayers. That’s in the same way chunks of the old Berlin Wall were sold (and I have a piece). Krasner would like a chunk of the ballroom to use as a paperweight. Kos community member xaxnar commented on an article by Celeste Davis, written for her Substack. Back in the 1950s college students were 2:1 men. By the 1990s the ratio of men to women was about even. Now 60% of students are women. A big dropoff in college enrollment is men not going. What happened to the men? Why aren’t as many going to college? There are a lot of reasons that have been proposed, including: Men having other employment opportunities that don’t need college and pay just as well. Their behavior is rewarded for things that don’t encourage scholarship. Men lean more conservative and college seems too lefty. Davis thinks there is a simpler reason: Male flight. This is similar to white flight, which turned many cities black while their suburbs are mostly white. Male flight means men tend to leave professions where women reach about 60%. When women’s participation reaches that high, it is seen as a women’s profession and men don’t want it anymore. That has happened to Veterinary medicine. And it is now happening to attending college. The exception is gay men, becoming the most highly educated demographic. But when education is seen as the thing for women we have a species at war with itself, which doesn’t have a viable future. Douglas Schonenberg of the Kos community commented on America getting to $40 trillion in debt. Now that the debt is so large Republicans like to say Democrats added to the debt too! But that is a flawed argument. We as individual humans would reasonably go into debt to pay for critical medical care, renovations to the house, or even buy a house. Some debt is good other debt is not. The reason matters. Obama added to the national debt to pull the nation out of the Great Recession. The nasty guy and Biden added to the debt to rescue the economy from the pandemic. The nasty guy and Republicans added to the debt, not to rescue us from economic calamity, but to give more money to the already extremely wealthy. They did it both in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Big Brutal Bill of 2025. So when Republicans say we have to do something about the debt and the place to do that is Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, Schonenberg asks why there? “The government needs to spend less” is not the answer. The government needs to spend better. Schonenberg wants the government to spend money on scientific research, clean energy, updating infrastructure, making healthcare more affordable, education for all, and support for workers. Government should not have the purpose of giving money to the already rich and gutting programs for others. And it shouldn’t hand the bill to future generations. Borrowing money so the rich become richer doesn’t make sense. To lower the debt let’s have an honest conversation. Does defense need those new weapons systems? Are those military contracts necessary? Let’s look at tax loopholes, corporate subsidies, low capital gains taxes, and tax rates for the rich. Borrowing money to improve the lives of all Americans makes a great deal of sense. Taxing responsibly should mean not needing to borrow money to improve the lives of all Americans. Dolly Parton died at the age of 80. I trust you heard the news by now. If you haven’t Jewly Hight of NPR has an obituary, as does Lisa Needham of Kos. I saw a meme saying the wrong 80 year old died. Michel Martin of NPR talked to country music journalist Tom Roland, who co-authored Parton's photographic memoir, “Star of the Show: My Life on Stage” about Parton’s importance to country music. I’m not a fan of Parton’s style of music. It’s just not my thing. If you like it, go for it! I am a fan of Parton’s character. She was always charming, and uplifting. I could add another dozen warm descriptors, including support for the LGBTQ community. She amassed wealth and used it for uplifting others. Just one example of that is her Imagination Library. Maureen Pao of NPR reported that has provided more than 300 million books to children around the world. The gift of reading was a way to honor her father, who never learned to read. An interview with Parton that’s gotten a few airings over the last few days talks about how she grew up as one of a dozen children. They didn’t have much money, but they did have what counted: love and kindness. I’m sure her remaining wealth and royalties from her catalog of 3,000 songs will continue to uplift others.

Constantly be tested on what it means to be a man

My Sunday movie was Drive Back Home. It is set in 1970 Canada. Weldon, in a small town in New Brunswick, gets a call from Toronto police saying his brother Perley was caught having sex with a man in a park. If family picked Perley up and took him home he could avoid jail time, as much as five years. Yes, this is a way to out a man to his family. Weldon, definitely a blue collar type, refuses to do it, but his mother demands that he go. So he does. He “borrows” his boss’s old truck and loads up with gas and sandwiches so that he doesn’t need to stop in Quebec – he doesn’t know French – and does the 800 mile trip to Toronto. He collects his brother. The purpose of a road trip is so the two people, through the adventures they experience, begin to understand each other. That takes a while because Weldon is quite annoyed he has to do this and with Perley’s insistence on bringing his taxidermied dog. There’s also some homophobic violence along the way. Thie IMDb page says the writer and director Michael Clowater based the story on true events involving his grandfather and grandpa’s partner. Though this is Clowater’s first film, he has enough friends in the movie business he was able to get Alan Cumming to play Perley. The actor who played Weldon isn’t someone I know. Overall, it’s a pretty good story about a time when being gay was dangerous. I was amused that whenever we see the truck crossing the rural landscape there is no other vehicle in the frame. But when we see into the truck to watch the characters interact, we can see out the back and there are always two vehicles following. Bob Berwyn, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos reported on the political consequences of the series of deadly heat waves that hit Europe this summer. One part is elected leaders facing constituent scrutiny because their response to the heat has been significantly insufficient. The other part is far right parties are “blaming governments they oppose for failing to protect people from the impacts of global warming, while denying that human activity is driving it.” In that first part a Green Party official said leaders know what to do. Meteorologists know how to forecast extreme heat. Public health experts know what things to do to reduce deaths. Yet, large numbers of people still died. That implies the known things to do weren’t done, but could also mean even if they were done well they couldn't handle the magnitude of the problem. Last week I wrote that perhaps four billion might die from the effects of global warming by 2050. Include in that tally 10,000 from the first heat wave this year, 63,000 in 2024, 51,000 in 2023 and so on back through the years. In Linz, Austria there is a department to make the city more resilient to climate shocks. They took “climate” out of the name of the department. Support of climate mitigation is tenuous. The far right parties complain that trees, which offer shade and lock away carbon, take up space that should go to roads and parking spaces, things that contribute to the heat. They also have a propaganda campaign to confuse the causes of the climate crisis and undermine the shift to renewables, such as wind. As for the general public, the heat has removed the political apathy. That comes as the media is covering climate change less. Kelcie Moseley-Morris, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, reported a federal court ruling in Idaho could send abortion to the Supreme Court again, this time in a way that is beneficial to women. The ruling says there is a narrow right to an abortion if the pregnancy could be a risk to their health and, key phrase here, including their mental health. Maybe this could be the start of a slow erosion to Dobbs in the way anti-abortion advocates chipped away at Roe. The problems of an abortion ban that doesn’t have exceptions for a woman’s health – there are states with such bans – are becoming well documented. I’ve written about a few cases. They center on the issue of how sick does a woman have to be before an abortion is allowed to be done. I’m glad to see a court decision saying such abortions must be allowed. In this ruling anti-abortion advocates are concerned about what constitutes a pregnancy causing mental harm. What if a woman comes to an emergency room and threatens to harm herself if not given an abortion? Of course, I believe that if a woman wants an abortion she should get one. Dion Nissenbaum, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos reported that the US Census Bureau released a report showing an analysis of the 2020 election that has “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens voted that year. The nasty guy said that proved he won the 2020 election. The Census Bureau said they examined 128 million voters to come up with their 24,000 figure. Election experts say there are some big flaws in this report, and that itself is concerning because the Census Bureau is usually meticulous in getting all the details right. Some of the problems: 24,000 is only 0.019% of 128 million, statistically minuscule. In no state election in 2020 would the number of noncitizen votes assigned to that state in this report have changed the outcome. This report does not list authors. It does not detail the reliability of the data nor the method of analysis. That makes them look like they’re hiding something. Of course, the nasty guy will use this report in his cry of voter fraud. NPR host Danielle Kurtzleben spoke to political reporter Elena Moore and producer Marc Rivers about how manhood is portrayed in movies. This is a part of their weekly series discussing various aspects of cinema. Yeah, there are whole genres of films that portray manhood – Westerns, gangster films, and movies like Top Gun. Rivers discussed two in particular.

In both of these films, we see that to be a man, living as a man means to constantly be tested on what it means to be a man. And so in "Carnal Knowledge," it's what kind of woman you can get. It's - and how many women can you get with? What kind of job can you get? In "Wake In Fright," it's - how strong are you? How many drinks can you guzzle? The screenwriter for "Carnal Knowledge" has talked about how he pitched his movie as a film about heterosexual men who don't like women. ... They think of women as objects that kind of project their own fantasies about how their life is supposed to be. So yeah, both of these films, I think, it presents masculinity as a constant performance and a fear of being humiliated by other men.

Moore said:

Some of the big themes that I've heard talking with young voters for years now, and especially young men out of the 2024 election - I'll go even more specific - is this feeling of feeling forgotten, this feeling of buying into a system that has not worked for them and this feeling of not meeting expectations that have been set for them. And I think for many people, in the political sense, that's translated to disaffection. That's translated to distrust in the system. And those are themes that have been reflected in movies forever. But, you know, not going too far back. I think a prime example is David Fincher's 1999 "Fight Club." ... The whole movie kind of explores this idea of, like, men realizing they are not alone in that anger and that frustration.

Then there are films like “Moonlight” of 2016 which is about a man who is gay and black. It shows how a man can break from the community expectation of what a man is.

We’re sick of corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions

After Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for US senator from Michigan, Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community wrote that a win by a Democratic Socialist seems to have broken the brains of Republicans.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism —that most other developed countries enjoy right now.

That includes: A healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt families. A K-12 education system that works for everyone. A college system that is available to everyone that can handle the work. A political system where foreign governments, corporations, and rich people can’t buy elections, legislators, and judges and where there is no barrier to voting. An environment with clean air, water, and food, and where strong actions are taken to reduce climate change. An immigration system that embraces diversity and isn’t cruel. A tax system in which the extremely rich pay their fair share. A respect for international law and human rights. An economy like 1981 when two-thirds of us could buy a car and home, take a vacation, put kids through college, and comfortably retire. A country not rigged by the rich. Those aren’t impossible demands. Canada has all of those things, as does England, France, Germany, Spain, and dozens more, down to Costa Rica.

The problem we face today is that a large cohort of our billionaire and CEO class are suffering from the mental illness commonly known as hoarding syndrome, a subset of obsessive-compulsive disorder. There’s never enough for them, no matter how much they have, so they don’t care how many people must die or live in poverty for them to maintain their (tax-deductible) islands, palaces, bunkers, yachts, and private jets. It’s like that popular meme you find these days all over the Internet: “If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

Hartmann then reviewed how we got here. There was the infamous Powell Memorandum, written by “notorious tobacco lawyer and sociopath” Lewis Powell. It urged rich people to develop the think tank and media infrastructure to convince Americans that oligarchy was the way to go. For that Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court. And in 1978 Powell delivered with the Bellotti decision, that included a couple phrases that have plagued us ever since: Corporations are people. Money is free speech. And Reagan was elected on a tsunami of oil money. That industry still has control of our politics and their grip became even firmer with Citizens United. Less than 0.0001% of Americans supplied about 17% of all money spent in all of the 2024 federal elections and 44.5% of all the money spent on electing the nasty guy. That is what Americans are voting against this year. Even the corporate Democrats can’t stop it.

Americans know they’ve been screwed over the past 45 years since the GOP’s Reagan Revolution stopped seriously taxing the morbidly rich, killed off our unions, and sent our jobs overseas. And they’re rapidly waking up to exactly who it is who screwed them.

Hartmann extended these ideas in a second post.

The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.

The people see it isn’t working because the Middle Class was about 66% of the population when Reagan took office and it is now at 41%. Fully 60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. The last time that was that high was the 1930s. Inequality in this country has never been this high. Americans tell pollsters they believe one man, Musk, could spend $290 million to elect the nasty guy is obscene. In addition to the list from the first article, add that Americans want wages high enough to live on, affordable utility bills, and an end to expensive wars with no purpose.

Every single one of these issues are on the progressive agenda, whether you call it that or “democratic socialism” or just point out that it aligns with traditional Democratic Party traditions prior to the Clinton presidency.