Hurt some and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else

My Sunday movie was Tales from the Script, documentary about movie screenwriters. More than 40 writers talk about their work. Some of the famous ones are John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Antwone Fisher, and William Goldman. They talk a bit about the writing process and needing to be willing to rewrite it 40 or more times. They talk more about: How competitive the business is and no one cares how good your previous script was, until you are a proven moneymaker. How hard it is to get an agent. How hard it is to pitch your story to a movie executive who loses nothing if he says no and might cause himself and his company a great deal of worry if he says yes. Costs are so high studios are very cautious. Or the producer says it’s a great idea but I want another writer to do it. Or they want changes – and if they want to add a chase scene it’s an indication there is a structural flaw elsewhere in the story. One must try to look lesser than the producer. What happens when the director and actors get ahold of it. They’ll say the character isn’t quite real and should say this instead. You must let them do it. This movie is divided in to chapters – talking about agents, producers, directors, actors – and at the start of each one is a scene from a movie about making a movie. And if you do end up with a hit the success can scare you so badly your writing freezes. So become a screenwriter only if your personality won’t let you do anything else. I enjoyed the film. Many of the stories are amusing or interesting. An example is Antwone Fisher working with Sidney Poitier. Fisher is so in awe in meeting his idol he can’t get coherent sentences out. I had previously written about documentaries about film composers and casting directors. I finished the book Packing for Mars, the Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. One might think this is about what to throw in a suitcase and a rebuttal to the book City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith that is highly critical of the efforts to get to Mars and that the fundamentally difficult problems in getting there seriously question the benefits of going. I reviewed that one back in April. But this book is more of a companion piece. I think a more accurate title would be Packing a Body for Mars. Getting a robot to Mars now seems easy. We’ve done it many times. Getting a human body to Mars is significantly harder. Roach, with a humorous touch, explores the history of getting a body into space and to the moon, covering several of the issues: Can someone live in a can for the many months flying there would take? Can someone live with someone else in that same small can without going outside for a break? (The International Space Station shows we can, though an escape to earth is never far away.) What can the forces of liftoff do to a body? Of landing? Of the weightlessness between those two points? How to deal with the weightless equivalent of motion sickness? Why we need to bathe and can one adequately bathe in space? The main purpose of Gemini VII was to spend two weeks testing that. I learned a lot more than I wanted to about space toilets. I think the first two paragraphs explain the book well:

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You’re inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you’ll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. It’s structural elements don’t start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing. To take an organism whose every feature has evolved to keep it alive and thriving in a world with oxygen, gravity, and water, to suspend that organism in the wasteland of space for a month or a year is a preposterous but captivating undertaking. Everything one takes of granted on Earth must be rethought, relearned, rehearsed – full grown men and women toilet-trained, a chimpanzee dressed in a flight suit and launched into orbit. An entire odd universe of mock outer space has grown up here on earth. Capsules that never blast off; hospital wards where healthy people spend months on their backs, masquerading zero gravity; crash labs where cadavers drop to Earth in simulated splash-downs.

This is a fun and enjoyable read, and a great book for those into space exploration. On Monday Homeland Security obtained a warrant and raided the house of Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Even NPR saw that the raid was politically motivated. The reason for the raid was to look for evidence of illegal immigration – she came to the US from Somalia as a child, though is now a US citizen. The raid was to look for evidence that her father did something wrong on the immigration papers. Of course, the real reason for the raid is because Omar is Muslim and also an outspoken critic of the nasty guy. He’s trying to silence his critics. David Michigan of the Daily Kos community says there is another reason behind the raid. In the midterm elections (results should be known in three weeks!) Republicans will quite likely lose control of the House and could lose control of the Senate. Once in office Democrats will open (they’d better open – it’s one reason why we’re sending them there) investigations into the corruption of the nasty guy, his cabinet, and the other big people in his administration.

Given all this, what does trump want to do, more than anything else? De-legitimize the very notion of accountability for public figures. Opening a blatantly corrupt investigation of a political figure may seem like a curious way of achieving this end, but work through the logic: Democrats and even neutral observers immediately picked up on the political implications of the Omar raid and denounced it as politically motivated. If an investigation of a Democrat is widely seen illegitimate because of the political motivation, then how could an investigation of trump or his minions by a political body be anything other than illegitimate? That’s the question they are working to plant in the minds of Americans, and especially in the minds of reporters and editors. Surely we must both-sides everything. Three months now, if (knock on wood) the Congress opens investigations into administration malfeasance, the media will be under intense pressure to compare the hearings to the blatantly illegitimate raid on Ilhan Omar. ... Yes, the Omar raid was blatantly corrupt. Such a clear violation of every norm that the norm-breaking itself made the front pages. That was the point.

Thom Hartmann of the Kos community has a different and complementary take on the raid. It is the same terrifying tactic used by every dictator:

As every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically-selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away.

The tactic costs the tyrant little and can have enormous impact on public behavior. Hartmann explored some of the history of this tactic. King George II executed Admiral John Byng because he lost a battle. Voltaire included that in his novella Candide. Hitler threw a few thousand liberal commentators into newly opened Dachau. Stalin used it. Putin used against one billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and all the rest immediately fell into line. Joe McCarthy never sent anyone to prison but his hearings prompted thousands of people in the movie industry and elsewhere to shut up. Hartmann also lists the people the nasty guy has attacked in this or similar manner: James Comey, Letitia James, Lisa Cook, Adam Schiff, Jan. 6 testifier Cassidy Hutchinson, former CIA Director John Brennan, Olympian Davey Hearn who touched the Reflecting Pool paint, black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, George Stephanopoulos and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, reporters banned from the White House, and many more.

As former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor told me on my radio/TV program when Trump went after him, Comey, and others, the raid itself is the punishment. To destroy a person financially, to traumatize them emotionally, and to scare the hell out of their colleagues in a way that will make them shut up you don’t need a conviction. Hell, you don’t even need a trial. Just a subpoena, a lawyer letter filled with threats, or a raid can lead to hundreds of thousands in lawyer bills and months of sleepless nights.

Right now judges are the only force capable of stopping the nasty guy. So, of course, he or his minions are attacking them too. If the legislature and the press are cowed the courts will eventually crack too.

Trump’s goal is a quiet country. A country where the prosecutor doesn’t bring the case against the powerful donor, the reporter doesn’t file the story, the professor doesn’t sign the letter, the grand juror doesn’t want the hassle, and the judge wonders about her family before she rules.

Another group that has a chance of stopping the nasty guy is Democrats in Congress. Vote to make sure they gain a majority in both chambers. In the comments of the pundit roundup for Kos from Wednesday a week ago exlrrp posted a meme of a message by Jon Stewart:

I just want to say this to Trump’s defenders. You don’t have to bend over backwards trying to make Trump’s authoritarian power grabs seem like the rule of law. He does not give a f--- anymore. He’s saying it straight up. Trump is saying the people like dictators. Trump is saying I hate my opponents and I want them punished. And Trump is saying I’ll use all the levers of government at my disposal to accomplish that goal. So you can get on board with that and say I’m with that or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional republic.

Another meme posted by exlrrp:

The liberal plot to make Republicans look stupid, also known as “Operation Just Let Them Speak,” is working splendidly.

In Sunday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Timothy Snyder writing for his own Substack about Hegesth saying the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. Hegseth says it will deter terrorism.

To livestream an execution will not deter terrorism. It will invite terrorism, as Mr. Hegseth no doubt understands. The deeper political consequence, however, is domestic. The basis of politics in the Trump regime is sado-populism. Rather than offer policy that benefits Americans, Trump uses the government to hurt some, and offer their pain as a spectacle to everyone else. To livestream a public execution is to take that politics to its logical extreme. The federal government would be instructing us to observe, and thus participate in, a public killing. This invitation to us is a major step towards seeing politics only as the pain of others. While execution by firing squad is the endpoint of a judicial proceeding, broadcasting it is to advertise killing is a political transformation. If Americans view, clip, share, and permanently enshrine an American public killing in a million ways on the internet, we will move towards fascist rituals of violence.”

In the comments darthstar included a tweet by News Eye that says, “This is how you write a headline.” The headline appeared in The Telegraph for an article about Trump making a deal with Putin to buy diesel fuel. The headline and subhead:

Trump backstabs Zelensky for five minutes of midterm relief. Deal with Putin for Russian’s oil might soften the markets but Ukraine will pay the price.

And a tweet by the James Talarico campaign, running against Ken Paxton for the Senate. It’s a spoof of the easily debunked claim that Talarico wasn’t seen for several days, not because he was home with the flu, but in a mental hospital in Ohio.

I challenged Ken Paxton to a debate 85 days ago, but no one has heard from him. People are getting worried. I’ve received credible reports he’s suffering from a rare condition that causes clinical levels of cowardice. @KenPaxtonTx: I’m asking for proof of ability to debate.

Ways in which AI could seriously hurt humanity

Mark Sumner had been a writer for Daily Kos and over the years I referenced his articles many times. He has retired and is now just a community member, still writing occasional insightful posts. Like this one about five ways in which AI could seriously hurt humanity. 1. The AI companies have been talking about AI replacing workers. That has already started to happen. Many are run by people who have demonstrated they don’t like humanity. They are projecting the value of their companies to reach $50 trillion. That means they are “planning to absorb all the salaries and benefits paid to every worker, at every level, on planet Earth.” While they predict that AI is going to turn all of us into zillionaires, their spending to figure out how we get that money is zero. Elon Musk has said there will be universal high income checks from the federal government. That’s a weird thing for someone who plays close to zero taxes to say.

A world in which AI succeeds as planned is one in which everyone on the planet is dependent on the largess of a tiny faction that has demonstrated again and again that they regard empathy as a flaw. It may not be the worst outcome, but it’s certainly not great.

I wonder if everyone loses their job to AI who pays to use the AI products that are the source of income for these guys. 2. What if AI fails? There is a great deal of circular investing. What if outside investors close their wallets? Sumner thinks the current level of investing can’t continue indefinitely. The AI companies make up 45% of the total value of the S&P Index, without them the S&P would be 25% lower. So people who have their life savings in stock will be hit big if these companies fail. The entire economy would go into recession or depression. The country would be dotted with dead data centers. Yeah, we could return to a time before ChatGPT. But that would not be painless. 3. AI stays meh. Only some companies fail. Investors stop urging corporations to get with AI. If this happens wealth concentration continues. 4. AI is getting better at simulating human presence. Now on TikTok bots sometimes account for 97% of new activity. Internet traffic from bots and agents has exceeded human traffic. Bots create more bots by the millions, filling the compute power of all those data centers. Tools to detect what is a bot and what is a human are becoming worthless. A great deal of that compute power will be used to attempt to scam us humans. Finding and interacting with an actual human on the internet could be difficult. Keeping business transactions working could be impossible. AI could take over the internet, making it unusable for humans. 5. There are a bunch of violence-loving idiots – the nasty guy, Putin, Kim, Netanyahu, maybe a few more – who have access to red nuclear buttons. They don’t use them because of MAD – mutually assured destruction. No one has used those buttons in 80 years. People often give AI far too much trust. They believe what AI tells them, even when the answer is entirely made up. AI has Artificial Gravitas. AI has already nudged the US towards war with China and approved of the bombing of a girl’s school. What happens when humans are removed from the launch decision or the lone human is faced with a chorus of AI voices urging a launch? AI can bring methods of mass destruction to a lot more people than currently have red buttons. Some of them might be more excited about inflicting damage than worried about any return fire. Sumner says the list of ways AI could harm humanity is much longer than five. I have considered a way AI could cause harm. Bots could take over the computers that control our utility companies. A bot in an electric company could open the floodgates of a dam, flooding downriver sites and bringing the water level so low the dam couldn’t generate electricity. Kos of Kos wrote: ⁠

As reported by NPR and ⁠The Washington Post, a foreign influence operation used artificial intelligence to generate propaganda and publish it across American media platforms, including right here at Daily Kos. The result from the made-up persona was three stories/diaries published in the community. The operation evaded our existing automated safeguards and human moderation. That’s a failure we take seriously, and one we’re working to address. None of the stories attracted much attention. But that’s beside the point. The problem isn’t how many people read them. It’s that a fabricated identity was able to participate in our community without anyone realizing it.

Kos is more than a news service. It is also a community of liberals discussing, even arguing, amongst ourselves. The problem is...

Every disagreement can become another opportunity to question someone’s authenticity. Every unfamiliar voice can become a suspect, which is particularly damaging to us because we can’t survive without growing our community. ... So yes, this happened. But no, it doesn’t mean that someone you disagree with is a bot, a foreign operative, or even using AI. Disagreement isn’t evidence of deception.

Kos promises that he and his team will do everything they can to prevent bad actors from succeeding on the site, to make it so difficult they’ll look for easier targets elsewhere.

We use media for indoctrination, so you must be doing it too

Arcelia Martin, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos reported:

More than 451,000 people are projected to die across the globe in the next six months from the additional heat brought by a super El Niño, according to estimates from climate scientists released Wednesday. ... In the new estimates, scientists at the University of Chicago Climate Impact Lab project the hotter land conditions brought by El Niño will resemble the higher temperatures climate change is predicted to deliver in 20 years. The estimated heat death toll, the scientists warned, are on top of the impacts from droughts, wildfires and flooding, expected from hotter temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns in a world already superheated by greenhouse gases.

This El Niño could be the strongest on record and could permanently push average temperatures past the 1.5C, the rise determined by scientists and written in political agreements to be the point where climate impacts could be irreversible. Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series on Explaining the Right, looked at the conservative view of Rachel Accurso, known as Ms. Rachel who is popular on various children’s television.

On Thursday’s broadcast of “Fox & Friends,” co-host Lawrence Jones described Ms. Rachel as “sinister” while the network displayed a graphic of the host, detailing her donations to charities assisting Palestinian children and her interactions with Democrats, including Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon. Among Ms. Rachel’s infractions: She discussed the joy of cartwheels with Nixon’s 5-year-old daughter Ashanti.

Other words used were “pure indoctrination.” Ms. Rachel is, of course, part of a long line of people where a conservative talking head has made similar accusations of children’s entertainment. There was Jerry Falwell condemning Teletubbies of turning kids gay. Sesame Street was attacked for advocating for vaccines. They also didn’t like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The motivation for these attacks can be traced to the right’s weird view of the media. Unlike the rest of the population, the right has come to believe that programming (like Fox News) mostly exists to indoctrinate viewers into a right-wing lifestyle. Since the programming they enjoy is oriented this way, they then believe that lessons about compassion, grace, and even sharing are the left-wing mirror of their media world. In this twisted take on things, Ms. Rachel isn’t just a figure advocating for Palestinian and migrant children, but an insidious left-wing agent. ... Trump so thoroughly embodies cruelty, bigotry, and discrimination that when “Sesame Street” or Ms. Rachel tells children to be kind, it sounds like a direct rebuke of conservatism.

Well, kindness is a direct rebuke of conservatism. People on children’s TV are popular because they are authentic advocates for value most people support. Republicans are included in “most people.” This is the American Library Association Banned Books Week. I’ll get to a few of the books on their top ten list of challenged books (actually eleven this year because of a four-way tie for eighth place).

The 2025 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts continue to originate from organized movements. In 2025, 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents. The most common justifications for censorship provided by complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice.

The ALA says many book challenges are not reported to them or covered in the press, so this isn’t a full count of challenged books.

OIF documented 5,668 books banned from libraries (66% of the total challenged) in 2025. An additional 920 books were censored through access restrictions such as relocation or requiring parental permission. This is both the highest number of titles censored in one year and the highest rate of challenges resulting in censorship from 1990–2025.

The LGBTQ books in the top 11 list, which seems a lot fewer than in previous years. 2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky 3. Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe 5. (Tie) Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo. The club is a lesbian bar. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported:

The European Parliament unveiled “The Orange Plague,” a new gold leaf-covered statue depicting President Donald Trump naked while sitting on the shoulders of a smaller man. The 8-foot statue—which is in a parliament building in Strasbourg, France—shows Trump holding a golf club on top of a pedestal that reads, “I am sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under my burden. I will do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”

The nasty guy’s part of the statue is covered in gold leaf. In addition to the golf club he is also holding the scales of justice. Alix Breeden of Kos has been interviewing Democratic candidates for US Congressional races who have a better chance of winning than pundits thought just a few months ago. One of those is Lindsay James, running for Iowa’s 2nd district. She is also a Presbyterian pastor. Her answer that caught my attention is in response to the nasty guy administration’s claim that Christianity is under attack.

Part of the reason why I’m talking about my faith a lot on this campaign has to do specifically with how I’ve been shaped by the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.” What I love about that parable—I think that this parable really meets this moment—is how Dr. Martin Luther King talked about it. Because what King said about this parable is, it’s not just our moral obligation to pick up the person who’s hurting and harmed on the side of the road. It’s our moral obligation to fix the road, because what King knew about the road was that it was a place that was notorious for being dangerous, where people were regularly exploited and hurt and harmed. And too often, this feels like what’s exactly happening in Washington, D.C. Politicians who have the power and the ability to actually fix this person’s circumstances are turning a blind eye and walking the other way, and we need leaders who have the courage to help their neighbor but also to fix the challenges that have caused the harm in the first place.

The story of the Good Samaritan is in the Bible, Luke, Chapter 10. A man is beaten and left for dead at the side of the road. Important church officials pass by on the opposite side. A Samaritan, someone loathed by Jews at the time of Jesus, offers considerable help. Jesus asks: Which of them acted like a good neighbor? I’ve heard a similar take on our obligation from Soulforce, an organization working to dismantle spiritual violence against LGBTQ people (I donate to them). Their version went like this: You are watching a swift flowing river. You see a person in the river calling for help and you rescue them. Soon you see more people in the river and rescue them as well. As the number of people in the river increases, at what point do you go upstream to find out why people are being thrown into the river and get that to stop? In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jerry Zremski writing for his own Substack:

In the most impassioned and eloquent sermon I’ve ever heard, Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, admonished all of us who have seen the suffering in front of us and then turned our heads. In his homily for the Mass for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, McElroy likened us not to the Good Samaritan, but to the priest and the Levite who, in Luke 10:25-37, saw a wounded robbery victim and just walked away. “For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by,” McElroy said. And that was just the start of a sermon that served as a call to action — one that seemed to make some parishioners squirm either out of guilt or, in some cases, disagreement.

An article in Politico said that this year Republicans have been trying to find a new boogeyman to rail against. The usual targets – Joe Biden, Zohran Mamdani. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders – aren’t working as targets so well this year.

Democrats’ foil, meanwhile, has never been more obvious, with Trump’s approval rating in the mid-thirties amid continued high prices and the Iran war.

In the comments indianobserver wrote:

Democrats seem to be in a David vs Goliath situation. Democrats are up against: 1. Billionaires and unlimited cash 2. Tech overlords and cutting edge tech 3. Wall Street 4. The oil and gas industry 5. Bought out national and local media 6. The DOJ (maybe) 7. The FBI (maybe) 8. The Trump administration 9. A majority of the Supreme Court 10. Elements of the Netanyahu govt/Israeli intelligence (maybe) 11. Elements of the Putin regime/Russian intelligence (maybe) What the Democratic Party has against this arsenal are 1. the rule of law 2. the judiciary 3. millions of votes. 4. stout hearts :)

Ben Urban tweeted a tweet by John Fugelsang:

My dad was a public school teacher; and he always said the toughest parts of the job were: 1. Having to play for your own classroom chalk, and 2. Performing gender-reassignment surgeries during class hours w/out parents finding out.

A cartoon by Jen Sorensen posted on Kos shows two women, one saying it feels like something is taking over everything and no one is capable of stopping it. The second says, yea, AI is scary. The first responds, “AI? I’m talking about our insane shareholder-first economy.”