A good argument to vote for Democrats

My Sunday movie was Close, filmed in Flanders in 2022. It was Belgium’s submission for Best International Feature Film in 2023 Academy Awards and nominated for an Oscar. I’m sure I learned of it then. I got around to watching it now because it is about to leave Kanopy. I’m sure it is on other streaming services. The story centers on Leo, 13, and his best friend Remi, also 13. They are such close friends that Leo frequently does a sleepover with Remi. Both boys are well loved by their own and the other’s parents. Though they are besties, there is no hint, other than they’re always together, that either is gay. That fall they start a new school (not sure if middle school or high school). The other students notice their closeness. One asks if they are a couple, which Leo denies. At this point I don’t see any homophobia. But a while later another student uses the gay slur. Each boy begins to look for other interests and friends, and begins to push the other away. That leads to disaster. Much of the movie is about the consequences. Boys who are not gay can be harmed by homophobia. Both boys do an excellent job of acting – the whole cast does. It’s a beautiful bittersweet story. GoodNewsRoundup of the Daily Kos community discussed ten days ago about hints that Fox News (or at least their website) is turning on the nasty guy. A couple of the hints: Noting the nasty guy’s Iran deal is worse than the Obama agreement he tore up along with quoting Republicans who agree. Reporting on Republicans who question the funding of the new ballroom. This post also has examples of Republicans disagreeing with the nasty guy on the Iran deal. Even Newsmax is critical. There is also criticism of Bibi Netanyahu and Putin (though maybe not by Republicans). I don’t know the source of this quote:

Bibi is about to learn the ETTD rule the hard way. Everything Trump Touches Dies, and Bibi has just been touched, a lot. I say this as a man who advised a race against Bibi in 2021; if Bibi loses, he dies in prison. His odds of winning again are much lower than his odds of wearing the Israeli version of an orange jumpsuit. Bibi’s political utility for Trump in the United States was once decisive, both electorally and financially. When even Trump thinks you’re a war criminal who needs to be thrown off the sled to the wolves, you’re well and truly cooked.

Emily Singer of Kos reported words of Speaker Mike Johnson:

If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, … y’all, impeachment’s not even the biggest concern. They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors and friends—half of you in this room will be targeted.

Singer replied that is a good argument to vote for Democrats. Democrats like the idea too:

“Good point,” Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer wrote in a post on X, regarding Johnson’s remark. “If you think politicians, billionaires, elites, and members of the Epstein Class should be able to do whatever they want without any accountability, vote Republican this Fall.”

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Soren Dayton. That includes a tweet by Jordan Weissman. First by Weissman, quoting an article in Vox that quotes him.

So in several cities now, democratic socialists have put up younger, progressive “change” candidates who’ve channeled many voters’ dissatisfaction with Democratic establishments both in their cities and nationally – and promised something new, while an increasing out-of-touch establishment was defending the past. “You have an extremely energized left activist network that really knows how to put together a ground game, whereas on the moderate side there’s just a void,” said Jordan Weissman of the Progressive Policy Institute (who is sympathetic to moderates). “What’s the center-left organization that is supposed to provide any kind of counterweight to DSA? There’s none.”

Dayton added:

Another way to look at this is that moderates in both parties just aren't interested in building power. They are mostly interested in relying on the institutional power they have, even as it atrophies before their eyes.

In the comments of Sunday’s pundit roundup are a couple good memes, both posted by exlrrp One shows Richard Nixon in his famous victory pose. The caption says, “I am not a crook ... by today’s standards.” The other one, is of an AI generated book cover showing the nasty guy splattered with algae sitting in a rowboat on the Reflecting Pool. The title of the book is The Old Man and the Pool.

Why is someone donating this much money?

Kos of Daily Kos posted a piece titled Why Democrats need their own Trump. He admitted that was a poor choice for a title. But his point is a good one: The nasty guy has been the most effective recent president. Alas, what he’s done is all to benefit himself and not the country.

The reason is simple: Trump doesn’t believe in constraints. He doesn’t care about norms, traditions, public opinion, elite opinion, or whether anyone thinks he should be doing what he’s doing. ... Trump has shown that all those traditions and conventions were nothing more than artificial constraints on the power of the presidency. All those Democrats before him who claimed they couldn’t do this or that? It’s all been shown to be bulls---. The office has extraordinary power, now with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. ... Trump has exposed something that many Americans—and certainly many Democrats—never fully appreciated: The modern presidency is far more powerful than anyone admitted. For decades, Democratic presidents treated many of those powers as off-limits, constrained by norms and a fear of backlash from the wealthy and powerful interests most invested in the status quo. Sometimes public opinion mattered too. But more often, caution was treated as wisdom because the people who benefited from inaction demanded it. Trump has demonstrated that most of those constraints were voluntary.

Too often Democrats used their time in power to make small adjustments while explaining why they can’t make bigger changes. I see that as a big reason why voters are so annoyed with Democrats. To succeed in 2028 Democrats much actually use power. Anything less and voters are caught between Republicans who break the government and Democrats who restore the status quo. There is the illusion that good things can’t happen quickly. That illusion benefits the wealthy – and we now have a trillionaire. Kos knows what kind of candidate he wants out of the dozens who will run for the Oval Office in 2028. He knows what kind he doesn’t want. Anyone who talks about the old Congressional camaraderie, who wants to make sure the other party has a voice, who accepts that the Supreme Court can’t be fixed – instant disqualification. I add: Yes, Democrats have been too constrained. But in many cases we need that constraint. We need a president who spends money according to how Congress allocates it, who brings Congress with him when he thinks war should be declared, who respects the right to vote and its outcome, who protects the little guy from the big guy instead of the reverse, who works for democracy instead of breaking it. That post prompted a second. In the comments of the first post many said the nasty guy and Republicans smash things. Democrats need to build. Kos agrees that Democrats need to build – housing, clean energy, infrastructure, health care that actually works, an economy for all people. But before building, Democrats need to smash a lot of things too, to make all the building possible. They have to stop protecting the machinery that created and protects today’s extreme inequality. Kos lists more than a dozen things Democrats should smash and says in his first draft of the post the list went on for pages. Here’s just a few things from his list.

+ The Senate filibuster + Citizens United and the campaign finance system it unleashed + Corporate monopolies + The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington + Social media algorithms designed to maximize outrage instead of informing people + Major media outlets owned and controlled by right-wing billionaires + Private prison companies

These things exist because they protect the people with money and power. Democrats need to stop treating them as if they were inscribed on stone tablets – that was the party’s big mistake between the two nasty guy terms. Democrats like to say change takes time. Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York because he was able to say here is part of the solution we can implement right now. Obama accepted the conventional limits to the presidency. The nasty guy tested every limit. Don’t mistake the status quo for progress. Robert J Petersen of the Kos community posted Hunter Biden’s advice to Democrats prior to the New York primary earlier this week. Here are a few of his points:

+ Authenticity is measurable. Voters can smell a focus group from a mile away. + Conviction beats caution. The candidates who said hard things about rent, about who pays for what, about Gaza, they won. The triangulators lost. + Cost of living is everything. Everything else is wallpaper. + If you want to lead a party you have to be willing to fight inside it. Mamdani didn’t ask permission. He took the field.

In a third article Kos wrote that conservatives are sicker and die younger than liberals. We remember their antics during the pandemic when they refused masks and other things that could keep them healthy. But this study includes data from the mid-to-late 2010s. One reason for the disparity might be that less healthy people became more conservative. See how the right responded when Michelle Obama suggested children eat vegetables. Another reason might be more disturbing: “Conservative politics itself may now be a health risk.” People on the right are more skeptical of medicines, not just vaccines. They’re more distrustful of the “institutions and professionals trying to keep them alive.” They’ve been told expertise is the enemy and are hostile to it.

And to add insult to injury, liberals are now subsidizing those ridiculously unhealthy conservatives through higher health insurance premiums, just like rural red America wouldn’t survive without blue states and cities subsidizing them.

Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos, assembled by Greg Dworkin, features several quotes about the New York primary I mentioned. The short answer is that the candidates that Zohran Mamdani endorsed won. Below that Dworkin included tweets by Jamie Dupree:

Senate rebukes Trump over the Iran war, voting 50-48 to approve a House-passed resolution directing the President to remove U.S. military forces from hostilities against Iran. 4 Republicans voted Yes, 1 Dem (Fetterman) voted No. Trump cannot veto this war powers resolution on Iran - because the form it was in (a concurrent resolution) does not go to a President for signature. In essence, it is a non-binding vote by Congress.

Axios commented on US House races in Maryland suburbs to Washington. The summary: There is such a thing as spending too much on a candidate. It leads to people asking, “Why is someone donating this much money?” Down in the comments. ClimateHawk reported on the number of formerly Confederate states won by Republicans (the party that freed the slaves) from 1880 (after Reconstruction ended) to 1948. In those 18 presidential elections Republicans took zero of those eleven states, except for 1920 when they took 1 and 1928 when they took five (Hoover). They took 3-5 states from 1952-1965, two of those were for Eisenhower. Then Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965. He said he was doing the right thing but would lose the South for a generation. In the 15 presidential elections since then (much longer than a generation) Democrats have taken 0-3 states except when voting for Carter after Watergate, when all Southern states voted for him, and when Clinton took 4 of 11 states. In today’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Robert Jimison and Michael Gold of The New York Times:

“Hours after President Trump angrily confronted Senate Republicans for joining Democrats to approve a war powers resolution rebuking his handling of the war in Iran, Republican leaders brought another, nearly identical measure to the floor. In a 50-to-47 vote, with one senator voting “present,” they defeated the measure in a largely symbolic move that did nothing to change the resolution the Senate had narrowly approved a day earlier. Instead, it served as an unmistakable gesture to mollify a furious president who had just berated them. ... Ultimately, the maneuver did not undo Tuesday’s vote, which was the first war powers measure approved by both chambers since the war began and remains adopted. Wednesday’s vote neither rescinded nor superseded it. Still, Republicans sought to characterize the procedural move as a chance to “re-vote,” even though the initial action cannot simply be erased through a subsequent vote on different legislation.”

Jay Michaelson of Forward wrote that Israel is now pretty much isolated in the world and is doing a good job of alienating its allies in the US.

And for what? For what bowl of porridge did Israel sell its birthright as a member of the civilized world? For nationalist pipe-dreams of Gaza wiped off the map? For keeping Bibi’s coalition alive so he doesn’t go to jail for bribery? For messianic dreams of Greater Israel? For the most hawkish possible interpretation of Israel’s legitimate security needs? For revenge?”

I saw images of this elsewhere (which I can’t find now). The Independent in Britain reported that in 2014 a French TV channel showed a fictional weather report for August 2050 to show the effects of climate warming. It showed France hitting 43C (109.4F). That prediction was surpassed 24 years early. France and much of Europe and Britain are in a heat wave and the temperature in Paris hit 42.6C (108.7F). And that happened in June. This is a big problem because only a quarter of homes in Paris are air conditioned.

A grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold

I finished the book The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s a graphic novel. And it’s a beautiful one. The author and artist is the child of Vietnamese immigrants. The story is about Tiȇn, who is 13, and his mother Helen. He speaks mostly English and she speaks mostly Vietnamese and her name is the Anglicized version of her birth name. To help his mother learn English he reads fairy tales to her. The boy is gay, but doesn’t know the Vietnamese words to explain it to her. The first fairy tale featured in the story is Cinderella as told by German sources (which explains the images of Neuschwanstein Castle (the original on which Disney castles are modeled). Images here. The story isn’t exact, but does feature a beautiful woman attending a dance, meeting the prince, and leaving before he can know who she is. The second is a Vietnamese version of Cinderella in which the Stepmother is a lot nastier. Instead of a fairy godmother the story features a talking fish. The third fairy tale in Anderson’s Little Mermaid. Again the ending is changed. In all three the artwork is beautiful. The girls in the center of the stories are shown in wonderful gowns. I highly enjoyed and recommend it. At the end of the book the author says he sees the Little Mermaid story as an immigrant story. A person of one place tries to live in another place and doesn’t seem to fit. My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie and wasn’t on Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see lesbian comic Fortune Feimster. Her opening act was a gay guy with the last name Tower. I didn’t catch the first name. Both were quite funny, though definitely not PG, and I needed the laugh. Since both are queer, and their queerness is a part of their act, the audience was also quite queer. I very much enjoyed the evening. I’ve mentioned this before and Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the full story. Elon Musk, because of the initial public offering for his company SpaceX, is now a trillionaire, the world’s first.

That’s a grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold—made worse by the fact that it’s Musk, who has proven that he won’t use his fortune for good.

Some of the reasons Musk makes it worse: He has been spending big on Republicans. Through DOGE he has made government worse – less able to do the things Congress budgeted for and harming children and seniors. He destroyed USAID (US Agency for International Development), worsening health and hunger around the world. And he didn’t save the government any money.

Musk is a menace to society, and the fact that he’s now the world’s first trillionaire is a disgusting failure of public policy. “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X Friday. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”

Vyan of the Kos community discussed recent reports documenting the damage from Musk’s destroying USAID. Vyan suggests “Google ‘Deaths due to DOGE Cuts.’” The results, which Vyan quoted, looks like output from AI, though it does include links to specific articles. The current death toll is between 300,000 and 750,000 and is projected to “lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That implies Musk, according to Vyan, is a mass murderer. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would bring in enough money to fund “universal child care for every family.” That brought on a feud of words between Khanna and Musk with Musk hurling insults and Khanna referencing research. Vyan described Musk as “a perfect example of predatory capitalism.” Then he quoted a tweet from DogeDesigner:

USAID was a criminal organization that funded bioweapons, censorship & global coups with your tax dollars. It was never about helping the poor. It was a viper’s nest of radical-left corruption, waste, and anti-America operations.

The tweet then listed some places where USAID money supposedly went. I have no trust that any of those statements are true and dispute USAID was never about helping the poor – if it prevented millions of deaths it was very much about helping the poor. Musk threatened to sue Khanna for lying. Vyan tweeted, “Go ahead and sue; discovery will be an absolute bitch.” Also ABC News has verified Khanna’s claim. Tim Henderson, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the current state of American inequality.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%. The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies. Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Because of this inequality and the problems it brings a dozen states have passed or proposed new taxes on the wealthy. Californian has a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. This year at least 12 billionaires have left the state and new wealth has created 23 more. Nationally,

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

The divide also affects views on inflation. The lower classes are hurt by it and the rich are unaffected. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by millesini that includes a half-minute video:

Albanians have begun to push construction crates downhill, in protest of the Kushner and Trump families’ plans to take over and island. Well done.

Kos community member xaxnar quoted from Timothy Snyder’s Substack about his discussion of “Utopias of Violence.” The opening:

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

Big proponents of the idea that might makes right and that the US military can’t lose are the nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty. Will they turn their violence on Americans? They tried it in Minnesota and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for last Wednesday Greg Dworkin quoted the International Crisis Group:

The war’s ambiguous end carries a clear lesson: wars of choice, launched based on inflated threats and wishful thinking, are far more likely to deepen than to solve the problems they purport to address. The specific lesson regarding Iran is also difficult to escape. After years of deploying every available coercive tool, from suffocating sanctions to military force, diplomacy remains the only approach that has delivered positive results. That reality argues for taking it more seriously this time round, not less.

Dworkin included a tweet from Politics and Poll Tracker with results from a CNN poll. As of May 27% of those polled said they were a Democrat, 26% said they were a Republican. They are quite evenly matched, likely within the margin of error. And 47% said they were independent. That’s almost half and the highest in a decade. The accompanying chart shows Independents showing a steady rise from 35% and Democrats showing a steady drop also from 35% starting about 2021. Republicans started their decline about 2022. Voters are disgusted that both parties are beholden to the rich and aren’t doing anything about why they are getting screwed. In last Sunday’s pundit roundup, down in the comments is a variation of a meme posted by exlrrp. I’ve mentioned several other variations. The original shows a woman walking down the street towards us. A man walking the other way turns to look at her. A second woman, presumably the man’s wife or date looks at him with annoyance. Each of the three people is named or described in some way. In this new variation the woman walking towards us is replaced by the supreme leader of Iran. The man doing the looking is the nasty guy. The one annoyed at his gaze is Netanyahu. Last week Thursday Singer reported on the state of the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the center of Washington. Barely a week after the pool was “repaired,” painted by a nasty guy crony, and refilled, it became green with algae. Hydrogen peroxide was poured in to get rid of the algae, though not enough to actually make a difference there, but it was enough to cause the new paint to peel in chunks and float to the surface. That disaster is bothering the nasty guy, who blamed the mess on vandals on the nasty guy. That line of attack was taken up by conservative commentators, such as Grant Stinchfield. That prompted Singer to respond:

Hey Grant, if Democrats were so powerful enough to cause the biggest algae bloom in years in the reflecting pool just hours after it was refilled, they wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election. The real reason the pool is once again green is science, as algae thrives in hot water. But I guess we shouldn’t expect a halfwit like you to understand that.

The water is hotter because the dark “American Flag blue” absorbs more heat than the bare concrete. Democrats are using this mess to say the nasty guy is spending all his time on disastrous vanity projects and not on the cost of living. Instead of draining the Washington swamp the nasty guy has made it worse. In the comments of today’s roundup David Michigan posted a tweet by Edwin Heathcote that shows the green water of the Reflecting Pool with the words, “I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.”

Israel thought that Trump was a trusted partner

The nasty guy has announced an agreement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides have already signed it. And the more we hear about it the worse it is for America. The deal opens the Strait now and puts off the big issues to be resolved over the next 60 days (don’t hold your breath). One of the possible sticking points is Israel and Lebanon. Iran says that must be part of the deal. But the nasty guy doesn’t control Netanyahu – to the point of letting loose a few expletives. Merlin196360 of the Daily Kos community discussed that Netanyahu has the ability to blow up the deal. But does he have the chutzpah to use it?

There are two parts to this Israeli fantasy. The first is that the Iranian regime could be overthrown with just airstrikes alone. The American military knew this already, but Trump and Netanyahu just proved this point. The second part of the fantasy is that Netanyahu and the Israeli public thought that Trump was a trusted partner. The only people more delusional and gullible than Netanyahu and the Israelis about Trump are MAGA cultists.

Netanyahu was not told the nasty guy is capitulating and had no input to the terms. As the details of the deal are being made public the number of Israelis who object will skyrocket. They can’t take their anger out on the nasty guy. That leave Netanyahu to receive the backlash. The Israeli leader is surely hoping someone will stop the nasty guy. We’ve already seen such a person has already been shoved out of the way. The nasty guy signed the deal while in France and at the Palace of Versailles where he had dinner with French leader Emmanuel Macron. Emily Singer of Kos reported on the news:

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said Wednesday at a news conference in France during the G7 gathering. “But all I know is, every time we talked about the possibility of peace, the stock market shot up like a rocket ship.” Trump’s comment is an accidental admission that Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz boxed him into this deal—in which Iran gets both sanctions relief and hundreds of billions to rebuild from the bombing carried out by the U.S. and Israel—because the longer the major oil passageway remained closed, the closer we got to economic collapse.

This is a wild admission from an Oval Office occupant. Iran holding the global economy hostage worked. They’ll surely do it again. “Even Republicans are saying that the deal Trump struck is itself a catastrophe.” Singer is sure Macron knew and that the nasty guy didn’t that the Palace of Versailles is where Germany signed its unconditional surrender in WWII. I just realized I’m getting conflicting information. One part says he signed the deal while at the fight on the White House South Lawn that was staged for his birthday last Sunday. This site says he signed it while in France. That’s in addition to the formal signing in Geneva in Sunday (or maybe Friday?). Kos community member chloris creator discussed who profited from the Iran war. This list isn’t complete. At the top of the list is the Military Industrial Complex. That include nasty junior and his brother. Next is insider traders, the same people who bet on various aspects of the war as it started. Oil companies raked in windfall profits. Iran is getting $300 billion in reconstruction funds plus a suspension of sanctions. It will likely start charging “tolls” or maybe “fees” for ships sailing through the Strait, even though that’s illegal under international law. China is filling in the void created by the chaos. What it is gaining is explained in a video I didn’t watch. On to the losers. Short answer: It’s the rest of us. First is paying maybe up to $90 billion in taxes to fund the military. Second is paying close to $59 billion (so far) in higher gas prices. That doesn’t include the higher prices of jet fuel. Third is American farmers facing higher fertilizer costs and export tariffs. Fourth is America’s reputation in the world. We started a war we didn’t need to, it affected the world economy, and we lost, leaving Iran stronger. Our remaining ally is Israel and the nasty guy now cusses when saying his name. Then to global losers: Inflation hit everyone. I don’t know if inflation is worse here than elsewhere. Other possible losers: Taiwan. China may be seeing the US as unable to defend Taiwan. Maybe renewable energy? See oil profits above. The disruption of oil may spur more countries to switch to renewables. Is the deal any good? The text hasn’t been released and the vice nasty is spinning it as fast as he can. That’s all you need to know. In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing for his Substack that some of the terms of the deal are yet to be worked out, but what is there may be enough to finish off Netanyahu.

As analysts like Danny Citrinowicz have noted, for 30 years the Netanyahu doctrine was based on the proposition that Iran was an existential threat, that only force could stop it, and that he alone could make Washington exert the necessary force. Every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin feared the Iranian bomb. Netanyahu alone turned the fear into a brand. He carried a cartoon bomb to the rostrum of the United Nations. He lectured a joint session of Congress, over a sitting President’s objections, against the 2015 nuclear accord. He told Israeli voters, campaign after campaign, that he was the one man who could deliver an American President willing to finish the job. […] And the calendar is closing in on the prime minister. The Knesset has voted to dissolve itself, with an election due by late October and the ultra-Orthodox pressing for September — the same partners now drifting from Netanyahu over their sons’ exemption from the draft. The brief lift the war gave Likud is gone; the latest polling leaves his bloc around 51 seats, a long way from the 61 a majority requires. And the deal has already become a cudgel in the hands of his opponents, and some of his allies: Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and voices inside his own camp are competing to brand it a gift to the Islamic Republic. The autumn vote will not turn on the deal’s clauses, but on the doctrine that produced them.

Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo discussed the UFC fight that took place on the South Lawn:

Overall, the evening exemplified the new flavors of American life and power. By the time the last punch landed and the blood was wiped away, the night included suspicious stiff armed salutes, transphobic insults, and fresh allegations of sexual assault as well as pitches for Silicon Valley AI, crypto, prediction markets, and the Saudi regime.

Paul Krugman, in his Substack, compared today’s billionaires with the rich men of the Gilded Age:

Members of the Gilded Age elite didn’t solely aim to display their wealth. They also tried to appear respectable. There were surely many private affairs and betrayals we will never know about. But the important point is that the super-wealthy of that era presented to the American public an image of being responsible members of society… Today’s oligarchs, by contrast, have largely given up on the old norms of social and individual responsibility. They give very little money to good causes and their vulgar taste reflects their in-your-face attitude towards the public. In our current hyper-Gilded Age, extreme vulgarity and the decline of philanthropy are really different aspects of the same phenomenon: the rise of an elite so disconnected from ordinary Americans that it feels no need to even appear to be honorable.

In today’s roundup Kev quoted Ghosh again:

Long before the first American bomb fell on Iran this February, the US military had already fought this war dozens of times — on paper, in classified exercises, in rooms full of officers pushing markers around a map. It kept losing. Across more than two decades of these games, the script bent the same way every time: once the shooting started, Iran reached for the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and the global economy seized. The most famous of them, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, ended with the retired general playing the Gulf adversary crippling much of the American fleet using little more than small boats, couriers on motorbikes and the element of surprise. The umpires refloated the sunken ships and ran it again.

In the comments, which I’m able to see again, there aren’t the long list of cartoons, but memes still show up. Such as this one posted by exlrrp and credited to Cameron Corduroy, though I’ve seen variations with the same text:

Renames it to the Department of War. Names himself Secretary of War. Fights one war: Loses.

The nasty guy had the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial repainted and supposedly fixed because algae had been growing so well. The fix didn’t work and the algae is worse than before. So exlrrp posted a meme of a red cap in the muck with the slogan, “Make Algae Grow Again.”

AI described as heaven

Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote about the initial public offering of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. That happened today and the economic news said the price of the stock went up nearly 20% and the public offering fattened Musk’s net worth enough he is now a trillionaire (so it went up by at least $100 billion). Needham wrote about an annoying aspect of the public offering. The major stock indices, such as S&P 500 have rules for which companies are allowed in their index and which aren’t. The reason is to assure the company is stable and profitable and the offering isn’t overhyped. They usually require waiting a year and Musk’s Tesla waited ten years. The S&P 500 rejected Musk’s request that SpaceX be added to its index immediately. But Nasdaq said sure, welcome in. That means if you own shares in an index fund linked to the Nasdaq that fund is required to buy shares in SpaceX. Which means Musk is requiring you to own shares of SpaceX. Whether you want to or not. While the SpaceX Dragon is a reliable way to get to the International Space Station, the company’s much larger Starliner has frequently exploded and has not yet achieved orbit. News reports say that the nasty guy has nominated Jay Clayton to be Director of National Intelligence. That means the job isn’t going to Bill Pulte, the guy who had no intelligence experience but was nominated to the job in an “acting” capacity to avoid Senate confirmation. The Senate was not pleased with the choice or with being frozen out. At least Clayton has actual intelligence experience, as required for the job. Before Pulte was replaced Max Burns of Kos discusses why the nasty guy keeps nominating temporary flunkies. He’s done it several times, such as with Todd Blanche for Attorney General.

Under normal circumstances, Blanche would be required to leave the acting attorney general role on Oct. 29, which would set up a heated confirmation fight just five days before voters head to the polls. But if Trump “nominates” Blanche for the permanent job without ever moving his confirmation forward, the countdown clock would effectively stop. That also explains why Trump has failed to nominate any permanent successors for the multiple roles currently being held by his hand-picked acting appointees. Trump is wagering that Senate Republicans, already beaten down by months of brutal polling and the prospect of losing both chambers of Congress in November, will be in no rush to have hearings for Trump’s nominees. He’s probably right. In place of the transparency and accountability of public hearings, the American people will get only silence and excuses from a White House that long ago stopped caring about any opinion other than Trump’s.

Pope Leo recently was in the news because he released a teaching on AI, calling it “colonialism,” exploiting people’s data and resources similar to empires. NPR’s Steve Inskeep wasn’t able to discuss it with the Pope, but did talk to Karen Hao, who wrote Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI. That certainly puts it in colonialism terms. Hao also says the AI bros use religious terms to describe their work. To me that’s also scary. The AI guys describe their product as trying to benefit all of humanity. Hao says “Essentially, what they're describing is a heaven.” They promise utopian outcomes – cure cancer, end poverty, stabilize the climate – while saying if we don’t act we’re heading to catastrophe. Hao says that is similar to the missionary logic behind colonialism. I add that AI might be a help in curing cancer or other diseases. But ending poverty and stabilizing the climate depend on things AI cannot control – they depend on rich ending their effort to oppress those lower in the social hierarchy. Hao says data centers reflect a concentration of wealth at a time when more people are struggling with basic costs. That’s one reason for the massive protests against them. The idea of building public information can be seen as growing the economic pie for everyone. But the economic pie is shrinking for most people. As for some tech leaders...

“They just admit they do believe that the way that they are currently developing these AI technologies will, in fact, inflame inequality,” Hao said.

Last weekend while Brother was visiting we heard a portion of the NPR show This American Life that prompted us to wait a few minute in a parking lot to listen. The episode is not yet up on the show’s website, but I did see a corresponding article in last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press and Brother found other online sources. I found the article on the USA Today website (USA Today owns the Freep). The story is features Jeremiah Schofield. He was an employee (perhaps a mid level manager) at the Social Security Administration and is now a whistleblower talking to Congress. According to the portrayal on This American Life people from the Department of Government Efficiency (now well known as DOGE) came to him with a list of 6000 people they wanted assigned a death date and added to the Death Master File. The DMF is a list of all the people that have ever been issued a Social Security number and have died. There are a high level of internal controls to making changes to it because when you are added your financial life is frozen. Bank accounts, credit cards all frozen. Other areas of a person’s life become a serious mess and if the change was made when it isn’t true a person can spend days to a year getting it all straightened out. Schofield was assured they 6000 people were all illegal immigrants. Schofield did some searching and testing of 25 of the names. A large number (23?) were citizens are lawful residents. But the changes for the 6000 were put through. And the next day people started showing up at SSA offices to declare they were still alive. Then DOGE gave a demand to add death dates to 2.7 million people. According to the radio show Schofield went to his boss with the suspected reason for the demand. The boss said that couldn’t be right. Schofield said call them. The boss did and was surprised at how casual and candid the DOGE person was. From the news article:

Schofield, according to their letter, alleged a DOGE staffer said “the lives of these individuals would be ruined... and they would be driven to ‘self-deport’” or “they would have to go to a local Social Security office, at which point SSA field office staff would send them to DHS offices” where officials would “detain them for deportation.”

Shortly after that Schofield resigned, so he doesn’t know the details of what happened to the 2.7 million people. I suspect the SSA refused the demand, otherwise 2.7 million people showing up at SSA offices would have been in the news. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. The first is in response to the nasty guy declaring there was cheating in the Los Angeles primary because the Republican didn’t go on to the general election:

Wow, that is remarkable. Somehow, the Democrats rigged the ballots but only for the parts where people voted for [L.A.] mayor [in which the top two winning candidates were Democrats]. The votes for governor they left untouched. It’s diabolical. It’s a miracle that people who are so stupid can be so incredibly smart at the same time. In a sane world, that statement would’ve been the moment where the nurse came in and put him to bed. —Jimmy Kimmel Live Republicans calling [James] Talarico dangerous while nominating Ken Paxton is like warning people about the health risks of blueberries while smoking meth through a leaf blower. —John Fugelsang on BlueSky

In the comments of yesterday’s pundit roundup for Kos exlrrp posted a meme using the words of Rep. Robert Garcia:

If you think California is taking a while to count votes, wait until you hear how long the Trump administration is taking to release the Epstein files...”

In the comments of today’s roundup Acyn posted a tweet with words from Robert Pape, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago.

We’re about to enter the period of maximum leverage for Iran. When we hit the oil inventory cliff, as we’re going to do in the middle of July, end of July, that means when our inventories go down, Iran’s leverage goes up and will stay up through the midterms. So that is why there’s no chance, very little chance Iran is going to cut a deal right now. Why would it cut a deal when its leverage is about to grow? Everybody know it’s going to grow. President Trump can talk down oil prices only for so long. Once that oil inventory dries up here at the end of the first week of August, as all the world’s experts, the actual experts are predicting...

Hmm. I have plane tickets for overseas travel starting at the end of July. If oil inventories dry up, rather than just become hugely expensive, will I be able to get home? Then again, extending a foreign trip might be rather nice. At least for a while.

Point toward goodness, toward democracy, and toward hope

Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the primary election in California. The election day is a week ago and only this week were many races called. When a large number of people vote by mail and only have to get the ballot to the post office by election day, counting will take a while. And, of course, that gives an excuse for the nasty guy and Republicans to cry fraud. A prime example is the primary for mayor of Los Angeles. As at the state level, all candidates are on one ballot. The two who get the most votes, no matter the party, go on to the November ballot. This story is about Spencer Pratt, Republican. He wasn’t all that qualified for the job, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans. His campaign ads featured conspiracy theories. He came in second in early tabulation, but fell behind as mail ballots were counted. In Los Angeles the nasty guy got 26% of the vote in 2024. He would get a lot fewer votes now. There was no way Pratt would become mayor.

But now that their dreams of capturing control of LA are likely dead, Republicans have resorted to spreading baseless and dangerous voter-fraud lies to explain away their defeat, rather than admit that running a right-wing, reality-TV freak in dark blue Los Angeles was a bad choice. The lies about voter fraud come both from right-wing personalities and social media accounts that profit off lying to Republican voters, as well as from elected officials who know better but need to pander to their easily duped base of MAGA morons.

In a second post Singer continued the story.

But rather than accept that a conspiratorial, pro-MAGA grifter was not a good fit for the overwhelmingly Democratic city, President Donald Trump and other GOP lawmakers baselessly cried fraud—the same strategy they’re likely to employ when they lose in the midterms.

Singer then listed the many Republicans who claimed fraud, starting with the nasty guy. From the end of the article:

For now, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said that he and fellow Democrats have made it a crime to interfere with elections by lying about voter fraud. “Trump says voter fraud should land people in prison. Agreed. And let’s start with the politicians spreading election lies with the goal of illegally interfering with counting ballots,” Newsom wrote on X. “In California, I just signed a law making that punishable with up to 3 years behind bars. More to come. FAFO, Donald.” But given that Trump acts with impunity, and the Supreme Court he packed with right-wing hacks basically lets him do whatever he wants, that threat is unlikely to make any difference.

Leila Fadel of NPR reported that California Attorney General Rob Bonta is responding to the Republican claims by pushing against claims of fraud and promoting transparency. He explained the process and why the tally takes so long. And in in LA County there is a livestream of the counting.

"The best counter to misinformation and disinformation is calling it out, confronting it, providing the facts that show that it's demonstrably false," he said. "So I immediately went to my own platforms to share how Trump is lying. The facts rebut everything and contradict everything that he said, and it's important that he be called out for it, because it's wrong and it's not true." "I'm worried about what he might do. Will he deploy the military? Will he deploy ICE to the polls? Will he interfere with the U.S. Postal Service in the November election, and the vote-by-mail ballots that move through the U.S. Postal Service?" he said. "All those things are possible, and they rest on this lie, this fabrication that there's widespread voter fraud," Bonta added.

A White House spokesperson said a lot of people share the concern of fraud, but offered no evidence there had been any. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote about the best political nonfiction books released so far in 2026. I haven’t read any of them (and I’m trying to shift my reading to more enjoyable novels). I’ll list a few of them to show a sense of what authors want to call attention to. Eric Lichtblau: “American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate” Lichtblau’s book about the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein by a former high school classmate who targeted Bernstein because he was gay and Jewish traces a neo-Nazi history that is uniquely American. Danny Funt: “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling” Heather Ann Thompson: “Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage” In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers in a New York City subway car after one teen asked Goetz how he was doing and then asked for $5. Goetz said he believed they were about to mug him, and he carried a pistol—illegally—because he had been mugged before. For Thompson, Goetz is a way to unpack the Reagan-era retreat from the civil rights advances of the preceding decades. Nicholas Enrich: “Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID” If you feel like you already know how brutally immoral the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development was, you’re wrong. Enrich spent over a decade at the agency and was the director of policy, programming, and planning at USAID’s Bureau for Global Health when Trump returned to office, giving him a front-row seat to unprecedented, unimaginable cruelty. Commenters listed several more books. In Monday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted Lawrence Winnerman of Blue Amp:

The word we were given was cloud. It is one of the most effective pieces of marketing in the history of technology, because it tells you the thing is weightless, floating, somewhere up there and nowhere in particular—a place your photos live, made of nothing, costing nothing, sitting on no one. Ask Beverly and Jeff Morris what the cloud weighs. They live in Newton County, Georgia, in the kind of rural country people from the cities drive through without seeing. In 2018, Meta broke ground on a data center about a thousand feet from their home. Within months, the Morrises’ well—the private well their household actually drinks from—began to fail. Sediment in the water. The dishwasher, the ice maker, the washing machine, the toilet, all faltering. They have spent roughly $5,000 trying to fix it and can’t afford the $25,000 it would take to replace the well. Meta commissioned a study and concluded its data center was “unlikely” to have affected their groundwater. Three of the Morrises’ neighbors have reported well trouble since the data center went in. The cloud, it turns out, has to land somewhere. It landed on them.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Bobby Ghosh, writing in his Substack about that useless war.

The humiliation is not in the events of a single bad evening, it is in the design of the thing. Tehran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a precondition for any deal with Washington. Israel, insisting its Lebanese campaign falls outside the truce, keeps hitting Hezbollah whenever it suits. Each sortie over Beirut blows up the diplomacy elsewhere. The Houthis, never wanting for an excuse, have warned they will go after Israeli ships in the Red Sea. So the timetable for ending Trump’s war is set not in the Oval Office but in an Israeli targeting cell, an Iranian command bunker and a Yemeni hillside — none of which answers to the White House. Tehran grasps this more clearly than anyone, which is why it is in no rush. As Brett McGurk argues, Trump’s options have narrowed to three: endure the economic pain, concede on Iran’s terms, or fight the wider war he swore to avoid. The Iranian regime is employing the oldest move in its book, which is to hold what the adversary wants — and wait. It is holding the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now says will reopen only under its own conditions, transit toll included. […] The IDF’s resumption of attacks in Lebanon, after the briefest of pauses, gave Iran the opportunity to test that leverage — hence its Sunday missile barrage. That led to the astonishing situation where an American President publicly sought to protect the Islamic Republic from retaliation by Israel. In nearly three decades of covering the Middle East, that is a sentence I never could have imagined writing. It would have amused and pleased the Iranian leadership in equal measure.

Fred Kaplan, writing for Slate:

By most measures, the United States still hoists plenty of power on the global stage. It possesses the most lethal and far-flung military; it controls the leading currency; its leaders’ words and deeds are more closely observed and analyzed than those of any other leaders. But Trump has proved remarkably inept at brandishing this power. He seems to believe that he can rule the world through crude threats and assertions of unilateral dominance, that (to use Mao Zedong’s phrase) power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And so when this formula fails—when he backpedals from his threats, when his bark carries no bite, when relentless volleys of firepower destroy targets but fall short of accomplishing political aims (because he mistakenly thinks that the former automatically yields the latter)—then the rest of the world, friends and foes, start to take his (and, therefore, America’s) threats and assurances less seriously. They start going their own way, and try setting security arrangements and supply chains that avoid U.S. control. In other words, Trump’s misunderstandings and abuses of power in the short run are sparking a recalculation of power balances in the long run.

Alix Breeden of Kos poses the question, “Can there really be a Turning Point USA of the left?” Turning Point USA is the highly successful conservative movement started by Charlie Kirk, assassinated last September. There are also several popular conservative podcasters, notably Joe Rogan. Liberals have long wondered and hoped for a liberal equivalent of either of those. And now perhaps there is. William He started Dream for America when he was 16. He is now 19 and a student at the University of Texas – Kirk was about the same age when he started Turning Point. He was interviewed by Breeden. Here’s a bit of what he said. Dream for America has chapters on 50 campuses and another 600 schools wanting to join. Two thirds of the chapters are in red or swing states. Those 600 schools are waiting because DFA doesn’t have enough staff – they’re all college student volunteers facing burn-out. DFA will have a conversation with anyone, just to get the ideas out.

It’s not about trying to clip farm people. It’s more so about trying to really have conversations and point toward people, toward goodness, toward democracy, and toward hope. There’s a great quote that I always love: “There are two types of leaders: those that bring people down to the lowest common denominator,” which is what I think a lot of the right does. “And then there are those who uplift and bring out the best in people,” and that’s what I want to do—bring out the best in our young people, bring out the goodness in all of our young people, and really get our young people to believe in democracy again, and hopefully to believe in this country again one day too.

Zain tweeted:

A friend of mine has two tickets for game 4 of the nba finals. They are courtside seats plus airfare and hotel accommodations. He didn't realize when he bought them that this is the same day as his wedding - so he can't go. If you're interested and want to go instead of him, it's at St. Peter's Church in New York City at 5 PM. Her name is Donna. She will be the one in the white dress.

I worked all day and can’t feed my family

In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Leonard Pitts, of his own Substack:

In her 2020 book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson argues that those of us who have accused white people of voting against their own interests are defining those interests differently than white voters do. We assume those interests would be economic, particularly in financially straitened rural communities. But Wilkerson contends that those voters actually have no greater interest than to maintain white dominance. When you’ve got nothing of social value other than the tint of your skin, to what lengths would you go to protect it? As historian Taylor Branch, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner, observes in Wilkerson’s book, “If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” The answer, according to the last election: 57 percent. About 61 million people.”

Emily Singer of Kos reported:

But while Republicans may have a short-term high, their racist gerrymandering appears to be having the unintended and politically damaging consequence of boosting Black voter turnout in the midterms, erasing any gains the GOP made with the voting bloc in 2024. In Louisiana—where Republicans went as far as to throw out already cast ballots and delay the House primaries to redraw a new map more favorable to their party—Black voter turnout is skyrocketing.

Andrew Mangan of Kos wrote “the era of gerrymaxxing is upon us.” If both parties took gerrymandering as far as they could which party would come out on top.

If all states where one party controls redistricting were to maximize their number of safe seats in that same way, Democrats would walk away with 106 seats to Republicans’ 184. To win a majority in the House, Republicans would then need just 34 more seats out of the 145 that reside in states where redistricting is not under single-party control. Democrats would need 112.

Add to that five states – Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Washington – that have a separate redistricting commission but have Democrats in control of the government and could bypass their commissions. Republicans have only two states where this is the case – Idaho and Montana.

[That] would raise Democrats to 170 seats to Republicans’ 187 in states with single-party control over redistricting. That narrows the gap to 17 seats in favor of the GOP, which is seven better for Democrats than where things stand now.

This is theory. State laws might prevent the worst gerrymandering. Another way to win is for Democrats to control more state legislatures to reduce Republican’s efforts to rig maps. And there are places where Democrats are close, such in Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

It is a crime against democracy that this is what electoral politics in America has come to. But until partisan gerrymandering can be outlawed nationwide, Democrats must fight back. And hopefully, one day, they can gerrymander themselves into enough power to ban the practice forever.

Mangan also reported on a poll showing the net favorable opinion of the Supreme Court justices. The first important number is how many respondents chose “Don’t know.” That varies from 27% for Thomas to 44% for Kagan. As for net favorable, the three liberal justices all have a positive view, ranging from +7 to +11 and all six conservative justices have a negative view, from -4 for Gorsuch to -10 for Roberts.

Much of this difference is likely due to more highly educated Americans being more likely to have an opinion on the justices. For example, 43% of those without a college degree don’t know who Ketanji Brown Jackson is, while the same is true for only 25% of college graduates. And in general, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to have college degrees. So it would make sense that they, in turn, have a more positive view of the court’s liberals and a less sunny view of its conservatives.

David Horsey posted a cartoon on Kos showing a black man with a ballot being directed to throw that ballot into a trash can marked “Colored” instead of a ballot box marked “White.” The sheriff holding the trash can lid says, “It ain’t racism. It’s redistricting.” In Tuesday’s roundup Kev quoted Muflih Hidayat of the Australia-based Discovery Alert discussing the closed Strait of Hormuz on the availability and price of fertilizer. The quote includes a chart that shows the Persian Gulf share of the global supply ranges from 13% to 36% depending on the type of fertilizer.

These figures represent physical product that is no longer moving through global trade channels. Unlike a price spike that can be managed through substitution or efficiency, a physical removal of supply at this scale has no quick remedy. The world cannot conjure nitrogen from alternative sources on a growing-season timeline.

Fertilizer plants in the rest of the world will have trouble manufacturing the stuff because much of it is based on liquified natural gas and 20% of that comes from the Persian Gulf. That shortage will also lower the availability of fertilizer. Garrett Owen of Salon reported on how that affects American farmers.

The price of chemicals necessary to produce fertilizer — phosphorus, nitrogen and ammonia, among others — has risen sharply since the start of the war, putting even more pressure on the nation’s small and independent farmers and producers. When the Iran war began, fertilizer prices jumped from around $400 per ton in early February to nearly $600 per ton in early March. It’s only risen since then. This would be a problem in any other year, but this year is especially bad. Coming off of 2025, market volatility saw farmers across the country hesitant to buy their year’s fertilizer early, opting instead to buy it closer to the start of the spring growing season. What had been an expensive fertilizer became unaffordable for many, even after accounting for the Trump administration’s bailout to farmers. […] An April report from the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 70% of the nation’s farmers cannot afford the fertilizer needed to operate another year. The problem is especially acute in the Southeastern U.S., where just 19% of farmers and producers pre-booked their fertilizer shipments prior to the Iran war. As such, a whopping 78% report being unable to afford all the fertilizer they need.

Bobby Ghosh of his own Substack discussed Iran’s efforts to charge ships for passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

The closure of the Strait, in Tehran’s plan, is no longer a temporary act of war. It is the beginning of a permanent revenue stream and a permanent claim of sovereignty over the most important oil chokepoint on the planet. The pitch is aimed less at shipping companies than at the Trump administration, the Gulf monarchies and governments of countries that get their hydrocarbons through the Strait: Tehran wants them all to accept that this is the new normal. “We own the Strait now,” it is saying. “The world will pay.” It is a bluff. Iran threatened to close Hormuz for 40 years and never did it; there was a reason for that, and that reason has not gone away. I argued in a column for Foreign Policy a month ago that the surprise element of the Hormuz weapon was already spent — that the world would adapt and the costs Iran could impose would dwindle. The picture today is harsher than that for Tehran. The world is not adapting to Iranian leverage. It is dismantling it.”

Oliver Willis of Kos reported far right podcaster Ben Shapiro lashed out at other conservative media people. The division seems to be between traditional conservatism and the MAGA movement. Willis wrote:

But what’s happening is even more contentious than simple infighting. Right-wing media had a sense of unity and purpose under Democratic presidents, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden. But in Trump’s second term, they’re finding it hard to keep up the sustained attacks against Democrats while also making excuses for Trump’s increasingly unpopular policies. ... The right-wing media world is fundamentally based on decades of grift, where a willingly receptive audience is sold falsehoods, smears, and bigotry—where they’re constantly told to buy this product or donate to this campaign, all with the purported goal of defeating the left. ... The increasingly extreme beliefs among the right—and the need to constantly one-up each other—have reached a natural end point...

Willis reports that New York Mayor Mamdani has opened the first of five city owned grocery stores. At the opening he said:

“I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th President Ronald Reagan. He famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,’” Mamdani said. He continued, “It’s a good quote. But I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’ We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table.” Mamdani’s statement was a direct rebuke of the right’s consistent attacks on government help that became mainstream orthodoxy following Reagan’s presidency.

Living a life void of love and compassion is not a happy life

My Sunday movie was Project Hail Mary and I went to an actual movie theater this afternoon to see it. This is a movie for the big screen. The story, adapted from the book by Andy Weir, is about Ryland Grace (which means actor Ryan Gosling is in every scene) solving a science fiction problem. A microbe is nibbling on the sun (yeah, that’s a scientific stretch, but let’s go with it) and the decreasing heat and light will cause the death of humanity in thirty years. Scientists determined a lot of nearby stars are also dimming. But one, Tau Ceti, isn’t. So the scientists of the world want to send a crew there to figure out why that star is spared. Grace is a middle school science teacher. In his past he wrote a paper proposing life could exist in other forms that don’t need water. It got a cool reception in the scientific community. But now his way of thinking might be a help, so he is forcefully recruited for the project. At Tau Ceti he wakes up from a coma on the spaceship, quite disoriented (of course) and finds the rest of the crew is dead. He doesn’t seem to know how to run the ship and I wondered why they would send a man into space without thorough training. The reason is eventually explained. He sees another ship nearby, a being from another affected star also looking for a solution. But this being appears to be made of rocks, confirming the paper other scientists rejected. That turns the story into a first contact story, then into a buddy movie as Rocky (what else are you going to name it?) helps Grace in trying to find the solution. The spaceship is, of course, named Hail Mary. IMDb tells me that gives us “Hail Mary, full of Grace.” Overall, I enjoyed it. It’s a fun story, though one must let the problematic science slide on by. The filmscore by Daniel Pemberton (who I hadn’t heard of before) is pretty good too. So are the special effects. The film deserves its box office take (close to $328 million so far). Even seven weeks since it opened the theater was reasonably full. Before seeing the movie I saw there are related videos on YouTube. First is 19 minutes of behind the scenes, how they did the stunts and special effects. This included exploring the puppetry of Rocky, the large array of sounds used in the score, and the wire work to simulate weightlessness. It is pretty good (not great). One person wondered isn’t Ryan Gosling old enough to be Ryan Goose? Second is a 27 minute video of the science mistakes in the film. This is by Hank Green, who apparently has done a lot of these sorts of videos. He asked his subscribers for science problems that pulled them out of the movie. Green begins by saying he very much enjoyed the film. He sees it as hopeful that so many diverse people came together to solve a problem and that some people were willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. Also, if the film was extra careful to get the science exactly right it would likely be unwatchable as a story. That’s important in an Andy Weir story where science plays an integral part in the story. The thing that got most of the attention was Grace uses a centrifuge and puts two vials in adjacent spots, which could introduce a wobble into the machine. Grace, a scientist, should know to put the vials on opposite sides. Related, Grace rarely uses an isolation chamber when dealing with the microbes. That’s dangerous when he’s the only human on board and if the microbes sicken him there goes the chance to save humanity. There are scenes where Grace is weightless and others where spins up the ship to get gravity. But exactly which plane of rotation is used isn’t consistent. But Green wasn’t all that concerned about it. Green thought Weir having the bad guys, the microbes eating the sun, also serving as fuel for the spaceship was a pretty cool idea. There was one aspect of the science not being right that I caught and Green didn’t mention. That is ships in space move differently than they do on earth. In space once the rockets stop thrusting the ship doesn’t stop, it keeps going at a constant speed. And some of Grace’s maneuvering (he wasn’t trained as the pilot) didn’t move as a spaceship should. It’s a highly enjoyable film, even if the science isn’t quite right. Grace and Rocky are great buddies. D’Anne Witkowski, in her Creep of the Week column for Pridesource, discussed toxic masculinity. Her discussion was brought on by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signing an anti-DEI bill and claiming that white males are discriminated against. Witkowski wonders why white male politicians keep seeing white males as victims even while they say it’s weak to be a victim. But the oppression isn’t coming from DEI, but from white dudes telling other white dudes (like her son)...

they have a god-given duty to be violent and misogynistic and dismissive of anyone who doesn’t look like them. Toxic masculinity is at the helm in this country, and we’re headed straight for a tiny fishing vessel that we’re going to blow up just for fun because we think it’s cool to kill people.

She is teaching her son “Cruelty is not strength. Empathy is not weakness.”

As any human with a heart and soul knows, living a life void of love, compassion and care for others is not a happy life. Yet the message in this country being fed to white, heterosexual, cisgender men is that the key to a good life is seizing power from wherever you can get it, especially from people who have less power than you. Fuck love and other sissy s---. Unsurprisingly, this makes these men very unhappy. And their unhappiness is blamed on immigrants and drag queens and women who wear pants and complain about being called “honey” in the workplace. And so they must oppress them. It’s literally a cycle of abuse.

I can hear a lot of men feeling “I’m not happy.” They may not know themselves well enough to recognize they aren’t happy because the manosphere doesn’t talk about happiness or feelings. Instead of trying to find things that make them happy they lash out at the things the manosphere tells them are the cause of their unhappiness. They don’t see the cause of their unhappiness is what the manosphere is telling them.

The entire Trump administration is the perfect encapsulation of this. A collection of mediocre, mostly white males engaged in a never-ending dick measuring contest. That’s literally all they know how to do.

Last Friday Lisa Needham of Daily Kos commented on the recent Callais decision by the Supreme Court that gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. She wrote the decision was based on a statistical error, which is an alarming thing to base such a sweeping and harmful decision on. But Justice Alito, the decision author, doesn’t care about such things as truth when destroying democracy. The statistical error was fed to Alito by the Department of Justice. What they said in their brief on the case was: “Black voter turnout in Louisiana surpassed that of white voters in two of the last five presidential elections,” as Needham phrased it. I won’t go into Needham’s details of the flaws that went into that statement. But this is an example of Alito taking anything he can get to claim that racism is totally fixed so the VRA is no longer necessary. I think Justice Roberts made that claim when they first started gutting the VRA, prompting a strong rebuke in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent. But even if the DOJ statement were true, that does not imply that black people are not an oppressed minority in Louisiana and thus don’t need protections when districts are drawn. Alas, Alito has shown us many times who he is. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Nicholas Grossman of Arc Digital. Grossman provided links to articles that show “the judges denied facts, distorted law, and contradicted themselves” in crafting the Callais decision. I haven’t followed the links. He then wrote:

Republican partisans on the Supreme Court created a pretext to gut the Voting Rights Act so the former Confederate/Jim Crow states, and red states more broadly, could manipulate maps to lock Black Americans and other minorities out of government representation. After the decision, multiple Republican-controlled states rushed to do exactly that. Then Republican partisans on the Virginia state supreme court created a pretext to prevent Virginia Democrats from responding in kind.

Many months ago I wrote that it seemed like Alligator Alcatraz was going away. That’s the deportation detention center built in the Florida Everglades in eight days. Alas, my reading of whatever I read, was not correct. The facility is still there. Needham reports that it may really be dismantled now. After it was built there were lawsuits saying the environmental reviews were not done. The federal government sidestepped the issue saying it was a Florida facility, not one of the feds. But to make that statement stick in court the feds could not contribute to running it. Say goodbye to $600 million. Which means Florida has to pay for it with a cost of $1 million a day. And Gov. DeSantis is resenting the expense. Needham discussed what $1 million a day, well, just $1 or $2 million (a piddling amount), could do for many other programs in Florida, but DeSantis wasn’t going to direct money to such things as food banks.

DeSantis’s ongoing quest to either impress Trump, be Trump, or both has jammed him up here. His unique combination of malice and incompetence meant that the Trump administration could always fake him out, and now the state is left holding this very expensive bag.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Robert Kagan of The Atlantic. Kagan noted that previous military failures – early WWII, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq – didn’t prevent the US from keeping its dominance.

Defeat in the present confrontation with Iran will be of an entirely different character. It can neither be repaired nor ignored. There will be no return to the status quo ante, no ultimate American triumph that will undo or overcome the harm done. The Strait of Hormuz will not be “open,” as it once was. With control of the strait, Iran emerges as the key player in the region and one of the key players in the world. The roles of China and Russia, as Iran’s allies, are strengthened; the role of the United States, substantially diminished. Far from demonstrating American prowess, as supporters of the war have repeatedly claimed, the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started. That is going to set off a chain reaction around the world as friends and foes adjust to America’s failure.

Didn't bend, didn't cower, emerged with dignity intact

I finished the book Leg, the Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It by Greg Marshall. This is a memoir of Greg growing up with “tight tendons” that cause him to walk with a limp and about recognizing he is gay and beginning to act on it. He doesn’t learn the true reason for his limp until he’s close to the age of 30. The setting is Salt Lake City in the 1990s and beyond. Marshall is one of the few in his school who is not Mormon. His mother cycles between bouts of cancer with chemo and remission, still hanging on decades later. Marshall seems to accept being gay more easily than walking with a limp. He is afraid that no one will love him. Between the short term trysts (with fear of AIDS) he does have three long-term boyfriends. He wishes that two of them were more honest, and he talks about why that matters. When he’s in middle school the French Club goes to France. His father is one of the chaperons and Marshall is a bit jealous how easily his father gets along with some of the natives, even though he knows little French. A decade later his father develops ALS and Marshall is a key caregiver, partly because his mother is going through another round of chemo. I enjoyed the book. My Sunday movie was The Adventures of Mark Twain, directed by Will Vinton, the subject of the documentary Claydream I watched last week. In my description last week I said it was rated PG-13, if that rating was around in 1985. I was wrong – it is rated G. What the documentary said was that the movie has adult themes, but marketed to kids. I had interpreted that wrong. The adult themes were not about sex. They were about topics children wouldn’t understand or have much interest in. Those topics were Satan and Heaven and Twain’s ridicule of them. The time is 1910 and Halley’s comet is in the sky again. Twain had held the belief that since he was born with the comet in the sky he’ll leave this world when it comes back. In this story to help that happen he has created an airship so he could rise up and actually meet the comet. Three of his characters – Tom Sawyer wanting to be famous, Huck Finn and his pet frog Homer, and Becky Thatcher – steal aboard. During the flight they encounter more of Twain’s stories. Homer becomes the star of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Then comes The Diary of Adam & Eve, Twain’s version of the story from the Bible. There is The Mysterious Stranger, a novella Twain never finished in which the main character is Satan who has a rather poor view of humans. Another was Captain Stormfield’s Diary, which gave Twain a chance to criticize the popular view of Heaven. These are some of the views a discouraged Twain developed later in life. Through it all the story takes advantage of all the things that Vinton had developed during his work on claymation. I enjoyed it. My favorite quote of the movie: Twain says...

The human race, in all its poverty, has only one truly effective weapon: laughter. Against the assault of laughter - ha-ha-ha-ha! - nothing can stand.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos quoted from Carbon Brief:

Renewable energy has overtaken coal to become the world’s largest source of electricity in 2025, according to think tank Ember. The growth of solar and wind meant that, for the first time since 1919, the share of coal power was lower than that of renewables. Fossil-fuel generation fell by 0.2% in 2025, the think tank’s latest annual review says, with wind and solar alone meeting 99% of the growth in electricity demand last year.

Nadra Nittle, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, discussed book bans and libraries. Nittle tells the experience of librarians faced with demands to ban books and dealing with hostile school boards or city councils. It’s a story that’s been going on for a while, so here are some of the ideas included: Pennsylvania is behind Texas and Florida in highest rates of library censorship. Many people think other states would be higher. Because of the hostility “few fully certified librarians remain in the Philadelphia school district.” Back in the 1990s there were over 170.

“This is also a class war,” [American Library Association President Sam Helmick] said. “Whether people read freely and have access to information is really at risk. We’re in an information age. If we’re not willing to invest in our communities so they can successfully navigate the digital divide and digital citizenry, we will not be equipped to continue to be a nation of, by and for the people.” ... Despite a sustained years-long effort during the 2020s to restrict reading materials, Helmick finds hope in polls indicating that 70 percent of the public opposes censorship of any kind. “That’s quite incredible because I joke that 70 percent of Americans wouldn’t agree that water is wet,” they said. “The vast majority are uninterested in this, which makes me wonder why we’re attacking the public information sector in the middle of an information age.”

Tracy Fitzmaurice, a librarian in rural North Carolina warned her fellow librarians not to buckle to outside pressure.

Don’t do anticipatory compliance. ‘If I just move this book, maybe they’ll go away.’ They won’t. These people have been at it for five years. What it really comes down to is local elections.

Nittle linked to the American Library Association list of the most challenged books of 2025. There are 11 books in this year’s list because there is 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.

As has been the case for many years the usual justifications for filing a complaint against a book are false claims of illegal obscenity for minors, LGBTQ characters or themes, or topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice. There were 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025. That’s second only to the 4,240 titles in 2023. In 2025, 1,671 (40%) titles were about LGBTQ people and people of color. Out of the 11 books in this year’s list three of them are definitely about LGBTQ characters. There are likely more, but book descriptions are not on the page of the list and I don’t recognize the titles. An email from March For Our Lives discussed the number of shooting deaths over the first quarter of 2026 compared to prior years. In these three months of this year there were 3,103 lives lost to gunfire. There were shooting deaths in every one of the 50 states. That is way too many. But MFOL sent the letter because that number is lower than every year since 2015, which was slightly above 2026. The death toll rose each year with the highest in 2021 at well more than 4,500 deaths in 3 months. The chart doesn’t show actual numbers. Since 2021 the death toll has dropped. The MFOL message is that the culture is shifting away from guns and their advocacy to reduce and halt gun violence is having an effect. A week ago Emily Singer of Kos reported:

Since retaking office more than a year ago, the amount of corruption and lawlessness President Donald Trump has engaged in has been truly staggering. Between his grifts and profiteering off of the presidency, his pay for play pardons, his use of the Department of Justice for political retribution, and his shredding of the Constitution to impose tariffs, launch wars, and commit war crimes without congressional approval, Trump is committing impeachable offenses at a fast clip. And now, a majority of Americans agree it’s too much, with a new Verasight/Strength in Numbers poll finding that 55% of Americans say Trump should be impeached for a third time. Another 37% opposed and another 8% said they were unsure. “That net +18 verdict puts Trump in the neighborhood of the numbers Richard Nixon saw at the peak of the Watergate scandal in August 1974,” “Strength in Numbers” author G. Elliott Morris wrote.

The nasty guy is losing support from Republicans – 21% of those who voted for him in 2024 now support impeachment. In Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin included a tweet from Kevin Kruse commenting on the Department of Justice dropping its criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve and its outgoing chairman Jerome Powell. That investigation was more about intimidating Powell to get him to lower interest rates to boost the economy before the midterm elections.

Didn't bend, didn't cower, didn't even feel the need to stand next to Trump grinning awkwardly like it was normal. And now he's emerged unscathed with his job and his dignity intact and his reputation even stronger than before. Huh. Seems like this could be a model for others in power.

Jonathan Last of The Bulwark

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was fired. Twenty-one days ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired. Fifty-four days ago, the American military launched its largest war in a generation. These datapoints are linked. They are an admission by the president that America is losing the war. Because the simple fact of the matter is: You do not make high-level personnel changes in the middle of a war if you are winning.

In Monday’s roundup Dworkin quote Mike Brock of Notes from the Circus discussing an article Ben Shapiro wrote explaining why he voted for the nasty guy. Shapiro admits that the nasty guy is what every liberal critic says he is – a usurper who was constrained by strong American institutions. Brock then quoted and discussed Shapiro’s reasoning on why voting for the nasty guy was still a good idea.

The reasoning is the lunacy: “The guardrails would largely hold… his worst mistakes would end up being mitigated by the pushback of reality.” This is the argument. The president of the United States is a man who would, if he could, end the constitutional order. The reason it is acceptable to elect him is that he probably cannot. The institutions are strong enough to contain him. The Madisonian architecture will hold, the Supreme Court will strike things down, the Treasury Secretary lives on Earth, the bad picks will be replaced by the merely bad picks. The wannabe dictator is, in the Shapiro analysis, a manageable risk.

Sheesh, wasn’t that said about Hitler? In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

Donald Trump lost this war in its very first days. Everything that has happened in recent weeks — the threats, the negotiations, the live-on-social-media breakdowns — has simply been a matter of trying to get free of that fact. This isn’t a political attack. It’s simply an accurate appraisal of what we all see. More importantly, it is the only way to understand what is happening now. Everything that’s happening today and for weeks has been focused on breaking Iran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, something it didn’t have before the war started. That’s the definition of failure: fighting a war and continuing a war to clean up the mess the war of choice actually created. By this measure, the best way to achieve what is now the central war aim — opening the Strait — would have been simply not to start the war in the first place. You can see the reality of the power balance in the visible fact that Trump wants negotiations and an end to the conflict more than Iran does. He keeps asking for them or demanding them. Iran holds back. They have the upper hand, notwithstanding all the vast damage to infrastructure, civilian and military, Iran has suffered.

In today’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet from Anne Applebaum mentioning and linking to an article on Financial Times. Applebaum’s tweet:

Hungarian oligarchs begin fleeing the country, transferring assets, in anticipation of corruption investigations.

The article title and subtitle:

Hungary’s business elite pivots away from Viktor Orbán. Several loyalists have moved overseas while others vow to form ‘constructive co-operation’ with incoming premier.

David French of the New York Times:

A remarkable thing has happened on the world’s battlefields. Ukraine — a nation that was supposed to dissolve within days of a Russian invasion — has fought Russia to a stalemate, revolutionizing land warfare in the process. It has become an indispensable security partner in the Western alliance, including in the war against Iran. Now, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, is taking the next step, one that would have been unthinkable even as recently as 2024. By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence. This is what happens when, as Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote in a piece for The Atlantic, “Kyiv appears to have given up on the United States.” If that is true — and it looks as though it is — it may be worse news for the United States than it is for Ukraine.

Do your fellow citizens act morally?

A while back I wrote that the nasty guy and his military had allowed Iranian and friendly ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz while the Iranians blocked all other traffic from passing through the Strait. That such a detail had not been thought of seemed strange. That has changed. The nasty guy’s military now has a blockade of the Strait. If a ship is friendly to the US Iran won’t let it through. If it is friendly to Iran the US won’t let it through. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit wrote that this reminds him of Sarajevo – in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. Interlocking European alliances mobilized on the side of Serbia or Austria-Hungary starting WWI. As I mentioned before Hartmann wrote Israel’s Netanyahu has a reason for his attacks on Iran – he can claim emergency status to pause court proceedings in his fraud and bribery trial. Hartmann looked at the command authorizing the blockade. It is a global directive, meaning he says the US Navy may board Iran friendly ships anywhere in the world, not just near the Strait. Under international maritime law, that is piracy. China gets about 80% of its oil through the Strait. They will be desperate for it soon. China also has military ships in the region. China, along with Russia, has been providing targeting intelligence to Iran. So what happens if a Chinese ship challenges the nasty guy’s blockade? Does the nasty guy pull his famous TACO, collapsing the blockade? Or does the war escalate? Also Russia’s Putin, no matter how deep he is in Ukraine does not respond with moderation when cornered. He cannot be seen accepting defeat. He would love to see China humiliate the nasty guy.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned. ... The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

Hartmann ended the piece calling on us to call our senators to support another Democrat-led War Powers Resolution. I heard on today’s news it failed. Emily Singer of Kos wrote that Republicans know that they will lose the House and likely also the Senate in the midterm elections. One bit of evidence they know this: Republicans are suggesting that Justice Samuel Alito, now 76 and recently hospitalized with an unspecified illness, retire from the Supreme Court this summer so there is time to nominate and confirm his replacement before they lose that ability. They don’t want what happened to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to happen to Alito. Some are even suggesting Clarence Thomas, now 77, also retire. A month ago Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed a study from the Pew Research Center. It asked adults to rate the ethics and morality of the people of their nation. The US was worst with 47% rating their fellow citizens as ethical and moral and 53% rating them as unethical and immoral. The average of 25 countries matched Germany where 72% rated fellow citizens as ethical and moral. At the top of the list is Canada, where 92% rated their fellow citizens as ethical and moral. Pew hasn’t asked this question before, so they can’t offer a trend or speculate how long Americans have viewed each other this way. There are polls that have shows that over the last 20 years the intensity in which we view the other political party negatively has increased. These feelings have been made worse by the nasty guy, someone who relishes cruelty. And that explains why Democrats (at 60%) are more likely than Republicans (at 46%) to say their fellow citizens are immoral. But maybe he is a symptom of an already cantankerous citizenry. Those countries with better views of each other “don’t have such malicious, divisive heads of state, or their right-wing populist parties hold less power.” Kos community member cinepost discussed modern American composers that invested in society. These composers were the elites of their day. As society became more egalitarian, the elite composers did too. Aaron Copland incorporated American idioms into Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid and he wrote an opera to be performed by high school kids (this one I didn’t know about and I’m a Copland fan). Leonard Bernstein wrote Candide in response to the McCarthy hearings and gave the Young People’s Concert to bring in a new generation of listeners. Michael Tillson-Thomas composed From the Diary of Anne Frank in response to the Holocaust, created Keeping Score, a series of documentaries on how music gets to performance, and established the New World Symphony to train young musicians for professional careers. Turning to the Information Age elites, cinepost says they have done the opposite.

Rather than seeking to preserve their elite status by insuring strong societal support for that which made their position possible, the Information Age elites have decided that they will instead defend their position by eliminating any “threat” to their status. Bezos seeks to dispense with those “pesky workers” and their unionizing ideas by replacing industrial workers with robots. Musk, Thiel, Altman, Zuckerberg, et. al., want to “scrape” up the accumulated knowledge of mankind so as to hold title to it and sell it back to individuals “by the byte.”

But if they defend their position by destroying the working class, who will purchase their goods and services?

The lesson to be taken from the classical music “elites” is this: to maintain your position in society, you have to use your position to maintain the society in which you live, for without that society, you have no position at all. If they do not invest their time and resources in maintaining our society, they will find themselves lording over an impoverished land where even if the people might have the desire, no one will have the means to pay tribute to the Information Age elites. But if they do invest in society wisely so that it grows and strengthens, they will do more than simply maintain their position.