A nation of private opulence and public squalor

I finished the book To Be Taught, if Fortunate by Becky Chambers. I’ve read several of Chambers’ other science fiction books and enjoyed and wrote about them. This one is a novella, only 140 pages. The title comes from words by UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim that went on the Voyager Golden Record in 1977 saying that humanity (or at least its artifacts) leave the solar system...

to teach, if we are called upon; to be taught, if we are fortunate.

The story is of four astrobiologists who go to another solar system to study four planets that might have life. That is wrapped up in a report they send back to earth. The story isn’t so much conflict and resolution, but a description of what an astrobiologist might do in their setting and how they would go about doing it. I enjoyed the story and if this kind of science fiction is your thing, you might enjoy it too. A week ago Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported that Democrats in New York have reached an agreement to tax multimillion-dollar second homes. The money raised, perhaps up to a half billion will help pay for the affordability issues Mayor Mamdani wants to address. He announced the plans for the tax in front of the $238 million penthouse owned by billionaire Ken Griffin. Of course, Griffin and other billionaires had a few things to say. They described Mamdani’s words as “Just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs.” That it’s a message to “resent success rather than trying to emulate it.” They called Mamdani a communist and un-American. I see that phrase “resent success” and think Mamdani isn’t resenting success as he is opposing the oppression that billionaires do to get that much money, then refusing to support the society that helped them get it. This past Monday Willis reported on words by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the response by Jeff Bezos, the guy made rich by Amazon. AOC had said:

You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.

Bezos replied through the editorial board of the Washington Post, the paper he owns and has bent to his will.

If someone becomes a billionaire selling expensive shoes, it’s because people want and are willing to pay for them. That’s something to celebrate, not admonish. ... To say that it’s impossible to legitimately earn a billion dollars is to put an arbitrary limit on human potential.

I’m amused that the Post editorial board included the word “legitimately.” Bezos certainly got his billions legally. But he did it by overworking and underpaying the people who work for him. That’s ethically wrong. Also, the editorial board sidestepped the possibility that a company can sell shoes, even expensive ones that people will pay for, and then make sure all the employees and suppliers are paid well, even if the CEO doesn’t reach the billion dollar level. Every Thursday Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quotes a bit from the late columnist Molly Ivins. Today, Bill posted:

The conservatives have been preaching this Me First stuff as though life were a race to the finish and the only object is to pick up as much money as you can. It doesn’t work—not even if you wind up with a lot of toys. As another noted economist said, we are becoming a nation of private opulence and public squalor. Look, we all do better when we all do better. You raise the minimum wage, it works for everyone. —May, 2006

In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Bob Flaherty of The Bulwark. The topic is the “autopsy” of the 2024 campaign that the Democratic National Committee shelved. It was said to be a detailed assessment of the Harris campaign. Flaherty wrote:

My understanding—based on Dem-world hearsay—is that the truth is stupider than the fiction: No autopsy was released because there is no actual autopsy. The members of the “autopsy team” were in over their heads and struggled to put the thing together.

Flaherty added that he wonders what an actual 2024 autopsy would have said. Yes, 2024 was the year that incumbents around the world were thrown out of office.

We underestimated then—and are underestimating now—just how disillusioned people are. There was and is a pervasive sense that nothing works and the institutions holding us up have failed. Media, government, business—no one trusts anyone anymore. For reasons both of Democrats’ own making and from simply being incumbents, the Democratic brand sucked.

I think people are disillusioned because Democrats seem to be beholden to billionaires as much as Republicans are. Historian Timothy Snyder, in his “Thinking about...” Substack discussed Superpower Suicide. The war with Iran, which is utterly unethical and utterly self-destructive, suggests the nasty guy’s foreign policy is superpower suicide. I think Snyder came up with the term and readers asked him to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

To explain Snyder listed thirteen traditional bases of state power and what the nasty guy has done with them. Here are some of them. Of course, Snyder has a much fuller explanation. 1. A superpower must be a state. It has institutions of law and other things. But the nasty guy sees it as a commercial opportunity. (Or a grifting opportunity.) 2. The power must be used for the good of the people. The nasty guy sees the power to be used for the good of himself. 3. The state must be able to maintain itself, to have a line of succession. Democracy can provide that. The nasty guy has declared he wants to stay in power indefinitely. 4. The right people have to be in charge. There is a tension because those who gain authority want to pass it to their children, which is why Roman Catholic priests are celibate. The source of qualified people is usually civil service or the military. The nasty guy gutted the first and is firing the competent ones of the second. 5. Education is the way to refresh society and help citizens understand the challenges of the world. The nasty guy is attacking them. 6. A great power forges an alliance with science. The nasty guy is shutting down research. 9. A great power practices diplomacy to understand other countries. The nasty guy trashes it. 10. A great power has allies. They may change as national interest changes. But the nasty guy damages alliances based on personal whim. 12. A superpower tends to win confrontations. The nasty guy loses a lot and others see his actions as loss (see: TACO and then Iran).

After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable. The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

In Sunday’s pundit roundup Kev quoted Michael McFaul, writing for his own Substack, about the growing cracks in Valdimir Putin’s rule of Russia. The top reason is his failure in Ukraine. That war has now lasted longer than the Soviet’s war against Nazi Germany. I hear he’s losing ground. He hasn’t achieved regime change. Instead of stopping NATO expansion he hastened it. The Russian economy is stagnating, a combination of recession, inflation, and budget crisis. The lifting of oil sanctions in response to the closed Strait of Hormuz won’t produce enough cash to make enough of a difference. The military is eating too many resources. Demographic challenges are worse because so many young people have fled or have died in the war. How long until this might remove Putin from power is not discussed.

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.

A majority of book challenges come from organized movements

My Sunday movie was Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln. Several years ago I saw stories in the press about Lincoln perhaps being gay. This is a documentary exploring that possibility in more detail. The movie shows many letters by Lincoln and others that are evidence of his relations with other men. The letters are authentic. The movie uses actors to portray scenes. We see emotions (mostly tender glances) but hear no words. Where possible the scenes are enacted in the location where the original happened. From what I heard before Lincoln shared a bed with four men at various times, the most famous was Joshua Speed. This movie says Lincoln shared a bed with Speed for four years, declining housing where he would have a room and bed of his own. The two men were seen as great friends. Speed was instrumental in turning Lincoln from a country bumpkin into a man ready for national politics. This was at a time when mattresses were rare and men sharing a bed, especially in a tavern, was common. It was also a time that was homosocial – men and women socialized separately and all of one’s friends were of the same sex. Photos with fingers intertwined and with hands on thighs were not seen as strange. Letters mentioned Lincoln as being uncomfortable around women, perhaps having an aversion to them. But to get anywhere in politics one needed a wife. Speed introduced Lincoln to Mary Todd and they became engaged. But since that caused a rift with Speed Lincoln broke the engagement. Speed soon inherited the family plantation in Kentucky. Lincoln went to visit, which is where he saw the Speed family wealth and the human cost of slavery. Back in Illinois Lincoln resumed courting Todd and married her. There was another man, Billy Greene, who shared a cot (even smaller than a bed) with Lincoln for 18 months. They really had to want to share it. There was Elmer Ellsworth when Lincoln campaigned for and became president. And there was David Derickson who was Lincoln’s personal bodyguard and shared his bed at what became the “Lincoln Cottage” when Mary was away. The history of Derickson’s regiment mentions that Derickson was seen wearing Lincoln’s nightshirt and the mention includes no shame. Towards the end of the 19th century science replaced religion as the source of morality (well, to some extent). But science institutions were led be white men. And we get eugenics, the effort to “prove” scientifically that black people were inferior. Also a part of that effort was to show sexual difference also meant inferiority. Science supported hierarchy. Sigmund Freud said that doing a certain type of thing showed that you were a certain type of person. Have sex with men and you were a homosexual, which according to their “research” claimed homosexuality was not natural and homosexuals were inferior to heterosexuals. So sexuality became performative. One had to act in a way that removed all doubt one was straight. That’s why images of the American West of the time were filled with rugged men. Since homosexuality was said to be not natural it became punishable. There were brutal and abusive treatments in hopes of turning men straight. Lincoln is easily seen as the best president our country has had. He was the most invested in the country and in democracy. He is the closest we have to a national saint. How could one be so masculine as to win a war and also be queer? One of the historians is tired of that question because it implies stereotypes. Was Lincoln gay? There is strong evidence and no proof. Also, there was no concept of sexual orientation at the time. I quite enjoyed this movie and recommend it. There is, of course, a lot more information than I can include in my discussion of it. I finished the book The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills. This is a good science fiction novel that mirrors our current political climate. The story is about Zemolai, nicknamed Zenya. She lives where there is a domain of five gods. Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” might be useful here or maybe, “... indistinguishable from divine intervention.” The gods are in charge of creation (engineering), scholarship, workers, farming, and security (mecha). Those that follow the mecha god, if they’re good enough, can earn mechanical wings to help with their security duties. The story begins with an incident 26 years after earning her wings that causes Zemolai to lose them. The rest of the novel has alternate chapters on how she earns her wings and what she does after she loses them. With this alternating format the two parts of the story highlight and parallel each other. When Zenya is young she is captivated with the idea of flying. When old enough she leaves her father and brother to begin training. She becomes a student of Vodaya, the top teacher who seems to be in direct contact with the mecha god. Vodaya drives Zenya to excel, and she does, and also becomes a tender mother to her. The five parts of the society are supposed to be an interrelated community. But rivalries develop. The scholars want to know all about the gods, even if the knowledge can upset current understanding. The mecha don’t want to disrupt the current stability, though the rivalries do exactly that. And the mecha shift from protectors against external threats to enforcers of internal doctrine. Spoiler alert: After Zemolai loses her wings she is cared for by rebels while her body recovers from the withdrawal of drugs that made control of the wings possible. As she maintains her devotion to Vodaya there is a long process to understand how abusive Vodaya had been to her and the rest of the community. Zemolai had earlier interpreted that abuse as just a tactic to make her stronger and more fit to receive the wings. She also begins to realize the abuse she doled out to stay in Vodaya’s favor and stay within the theology Vodaya upheld. Zemolai’s desire for the wings blinded her to the abuse. I enjoyed and recommend this book. I saw similarities to the nasty guy supporters. They also want something desperately – a restoration of the middle class and the hierarchy that places straight white Christian men at the top. They see the nasty guy getting it for them, certainly he’s blaming and hurting the people they want blamed. But their lives are being made worse as the nasty guy’s policies are implemented. They may need a long time to see he is abusive and has always been abusive. I found a page of Arthur C. Clarke quotes. A few:

The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system. Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all. In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.’

While I’m discussing a book... The American Library Association is marking Banned Books Week by releasing the list of the top ten most challenged books of 2024. From their top ten page:

The 2024 data reported to ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) shows that the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organized movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries. Parents only accounted for 16% of demands to censor books, while 5% of challenges were brought by individual library users. The 120 titles most frequently targeted for censorship during 2024 are all identified on partisan book rating sites which provide tools for activists to demand the censorship of library books. The most common justifications for censorship provided by complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice.

There were 821 attempts to ban books, down from 2023, but up from 2021. Those 821 attempts included 2,452 unique titles. That’s significantly up from 2001-2020. The LGBTQ books in the list. 1. All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Johnson. This had 39 challenges. 2. Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. 3. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. 10. Flamer by Mike Curato. All of them on the list, including those above, were challenged for a claim to be sexually explicit. Also related to literature is the end of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I realized that I hadn’t heard about this year’s winners, which had usually been announced around Labor Day, so I looked for the website. That’s where I learned Scott Rice, the guy who created and ran the contest since 1983 announced his and the contest’s retirement back in March (sheesh he’s older than Biden). The archive of winners will be maintained. In August Deena Prichep of NPR talked to Rice about the contest and retirement. He explained the contest (which I’ve mentioned several times over the years) is to create the worst possible opening sentence for a novel. The rest of the novel is irrelevant. Last year Rice got 6,000 entries. The contest is named for Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a 19th century author who wrote best sellers, but is remembered for the bad opening sentence of his novel Paul Clifford, “It was a dark and stormy night.” An example of a contest winner included in Prichep’s report:

For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss - a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil.

I never submitted to the contest, though thought the worst first sentence would be one where there was no possible second sentence.

I could tell you about my life but thought it’s none of your damn business.

I searched previous blog posts for contest winners. I found these:

This dishonorable mention in the Fantasy category from the 2009 winners is by Shannon Gray of Wichita, KS. Detective Pierson mentally reviewed the group of suspects milling around the recent crime scene – two young siblings eating gingerbread, a young girl in a red hoodie, a beautiful girl with narcolepsy, and seven little people with the profession of miners – then gave his statement of "It's a grim tale" to the press. A winner in the Vile Puns category for 2015 is by Matthew Pfeifer of Beaman, Iowa: Old Man Dracula forgot to put his teeth in one night, and so had to come home hungry, with a sort of “nothing dentured, nothing veined” look on his face.

From 2018:

In preparation for visits by African dignitaries, we had redecorated the West Wing of the White House in an African motif with numerous artificial plants and animals, but the President asked that we remove the papier-mache wildebeests, saying he was "tired of fake gnus." Wm. "Buddy" Ocheltree, Snellville, GA

From 2023 and working with the inspiration for the contest:

It was a dark and stormy night at the harbors of Sydney, where wind whipped the seawater across the docks and the torrents of rain soaked everything that the waves could not reach, but luckily for James Tyche this story begins at a beach in Southern France, where it was currently day and James was gradually developing a healthy tan and less healthy sunburn. Robin Alberts, Ludenscheid, Germany

And from last year’s contest:

Stepping outside just after dawn, Chef Billingsworth was pleased to discover that for once the morning fog was not as thick as pea soup—or even lobster bisque for that matter—but was more a chicken velouté, or perhaps a beef remouillage. Mark Meiches, Dallas, TX

I’ll miss this fun. A while back I wrote about Kat Abughazaleh, who is Gen Z and running for Congress in a district that’s a long strip in Chicago’s northern suburbs. Alix Breeden of Daily Kos interviewed her. She’s a person I’d very much want to see in Congress right now, willing to take on the fascists (she’s been taking on ICE) as well as the stodgy Democratic leadership.

Messing with the numbers doesn't shield you from reality

My Sunday movie was Universal Language. It is one of the most eccentric movies I’ve seen. Matthew Rankin was one of the writers. He also directed and plays a major character named Matthew Rankin. I have no idea how much is autobiographical. A tagline says it happens somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg. Most of the story takes place in Winnipeg, though the major language isn’t English, but Persian. All the signs are in Persian and nearly all the characters – Matthew is one of the few exceptions – look to be of Persian descent and speak Persian or French. How this came to be is not explained. The story takes place during a Winnipeg winter. Matthew leaves his government job in Montreal (or maybe Quebec) and takes the bus to Winnipeg, where he grew up. He is trying to find his mother. Two young girls find paper money frozen in ice and try to get a way to get it out before an adult can do so. Massoud leads walking tours of Winnipeg for tourists. Many major sites on his tour now have highways next to them. Another site features a briefcase on a bench someone left behind fifty years ago. The tourists complain of the cold. There is a turkey shop owner promoting his frozen turkeys and he paid for a prized turkey to be a passenger on Matthew’s bus. A scene takes place in a Kleenex repository. Canada submitted this for “Best International Feature Film” for the 2025 Academy Awards. It wasn’t chosen as a finalist. It did win an award at the Cannes Film Festival and won and was nominated in many other film festivals. I heard about it when it was shown at the Detroit Film Theater perhaps a year ago, but didn’t see it then. This is definitely an unusual movie, something to watch when one is tired of movies seeming all the same. And I enjoyed it. Sharon Lerner, in an article for ProPublica posted on Daily Kos, discussed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr and his effort to find the cause of autism. He said he would have an answer by September. Erin McCanlies, an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a part of HHS, was stunned by Kennedy’s announcement. She was about to release her fourth paper on exactly that. I think she was able to finish it before she was fired, though many offices around hers were already empty. So why was her job and funding cut when Kennedy said he was looking for an answer that she and the rest of his department were well on the way to finding? Kennedy said the answer was vaccines and environmental toxins. Based on what McCanlies found he was half right. To put this in proper scientific terms, McCanlies and others found autism risk factors. The more factors the higher the chances of a child being on the autism spectrum. That doesn’t mean a particular child will be autistic. Some of the factors are genetic, others are things like parental age and whether the mother had a fever during pregnancy. Still others are whether the mother had been exposed to chemicals such as the solvents varnish, xylene, methylene chloride, and others. More culprits are certain pesticides, certain metals, and air pollution. Folic acid, one of the B vitamins, can decrease the chances of autism. One can see reasons why Kennedy doesn’t like the results McCanlies and others are publishing. His favorite culprit of vaccines has been proven not to be a cause of autism. The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin is blocking air pollution rules and reversing bans on several chemicals that have been shown to be a risk. Kennedy likes to say we don’t know the causes of autism and because the condition can be so devastating we need to find those causes quickly. I’ve heard media say over the last several years that the higher rates of autism are because of more frequent testing, implying there isn’t a cause. But we do know the causes. Alas, the corporations that back the nasty guy would rather protect their profits through the use of harmful chemicals and releasing pollutants into the air. So the nasty guy hires people willing to put corporate profits over the health of mothers and children. Mary Childs of NPR discussed the consequences of a government not publishing honest and trustworthy financial statistics. The story was aired because the nasty guy recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the reported jobs numbers. Childs talked to George Papaconstantinou, who became the finance minister of Greece in 2009, just after the financial mess that caused the Great Recession. At the start of his term a person went to him and said the financial situation is quite bad, much worse than what is officially said. His team needed more than a year to figure out the real numbers. According to European Union rules, member countries were to keep their deficits under 3%. The real deficit number, once determined, was 15%. That created a huge loss of trust. To recover Greece had to borrow a lot of money at much higher interest rates and cut its spending to austerity levels. “Messing with the numbers doesn't shield you from reality.” Recovery took nearly ten years. I usually use dashes or asterisks to soften expletives. I grew up at a time and in a family where such words were not used. There have been times where I thought including such words were critical to the tone or forcefulness of a quote, but years have passed since I’ve let one through. But I can’t hide the expletives in this next quote because they’re the point. So if such words offend you just skip the first quote. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quotes Glenn Kessler, formerly of the Washington Post and now writing his own Substack.

Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make. When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier. [...] But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.

Kev followed that quote with one from Frankfurt. I’ll let you read it. Kev also quoted Jason Linkins of The New Republic:

But Trump is getting plumped by some in the media as well: The Atlantic’s Michael Powell idly handwaves the fact that D.C. brought the violent crime rate to a 30-year low in 2024 to admonish Democrats for “downplaying crime.” (In this case, “downplaying crime” means “marshaling statistics demonstrating that the crime rate is trending in the right direction.”) Charles Fain Lehman, also in The Atlantic, goes to similar lengths to dismiss the actual facts to assert that “the reality is more complicated” and that some “deliberate intervention”—atop the one that brought the crime rate to a 30-year-low, presumably—is warranted. These authors and others are making a profound error from the jump in assuming that Trump sincerely desires to lower the crime rate in D.C. Trump is actually a “blank, sucking nullity” who wants to see himself on television and has decided that his second term in office will be about self-enrichment and revenge. He is inventing a crisis of crime as a pretext for further consolidating his power; this is authoritarianism 101. Personally, I think downplaying crime in the nation’s capital is not nearly as irresponsible as downplaying Trump’s authoritarianism. But if we must pretend that Trump’s efforts are sincere, then I’d challenge the proponents of his militarized deployments to approach their work with more rigor, and less vibes. Trump has proposed a thesis: Crime in D.C. will go down if masked paramilitaries flood the city and amble about the streets. The task, then, is to see if his theory stands up to the test—to take this seriously.

The myth of the self-reliant, salt-of-the-earth American

Last Thursday Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had instituted a policy that any departmental expense greater than $100,000 required her approval. That meant FEMA could not do its usual pre-positioning of its Search and Rescue crews ahead of the central Texas floods. The floods happened on a Friday and Noem didn’t give her approval until the following Monday. A DHS tweet bragged that by Tuesday FEMA had deployed 311 staffers to help with state-led rescue efforts. On Thursday Noem was on “Fox & Friends” and declared CNN’s reporting of the delay was fake news. Abrahm Lustgarten, in an article for ProPublica posted on Kos, discussed the flooding and said things will get worse. The effects of global warming are just getting started. Each small increase in average temperature means a large increase in the amount of water the atmosphere can hold, leading to a large increase in the destructiveness of the storms when that water is released. Lustgarten wrote that President Lyndon Johnson was briefed about the coming climate crisis way back in 1965. Here we are ten presidents later still discussing the problem and doing very little about it. And the current guy in the Oval Office has revoked funding for data collection and research into what the climate is doing. Kos of Kos wrote another article on a topic I’ve written about a few times.

One of the most enduring conservative myths is that of the self-reliant, salt-of-the-earth, rural-dwelling American who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, wrestles a steer before breakfast, and builds his own house out of patriotism and chewing tobacco because, by god, they sure do love America! If that were ever true, it hasn’t been for a while. These days, rural America is largely dependent on the federal government it claims to hate. In fact, far from self-reliant, rural America is subsidized by blue states. And it’s not even close.

Kos discussed several of the government programs rural areas depend on because so many young people have fled to the cities over the decades. The big ones are, of course, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Government benefits are a good thing, so none of this is inherently bad, per se. But it does mean those rural areas are dependent on the very social safety net that Republicans are gleefully hacking apart with their cuts on Medicaid, food assistance, and the like. They’re also poorer than expensive urban regions, so they rely more on federal food assistance to eat. But hey, that’s what these voters asked for. Rural areas lean heavily Republican, and farming-dependent counties voted for Trump at an eye-popping average of 78%.

George B. Sánchez-Tello, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Kos, reported on ICE and Border Patrol agents at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. The park is in an area where a lot of people from Central and South America live and it has a lively scene. The agents thought the could sweep through the park and easily make their quota for the day. But the park was nearly silent.

The previous day, warnings appeared — single sheets of paper taped to light poles, trees and fences around the park — warning locals to stay away. They cited rumors of possible ICE raids at MacArthur Park. Word also spread on Instagram, as well as other social media apps such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp.

The park wasn’t completely empty. Local Spanish-language television crews were ready to film. Photographers from various newspapers were there. Dozens of organizers from anti-ICE rapid response teams and legal observers there there too, some using megaphones to warn people to stay away and to tell people their rights. By the time the agents had completed their sweep across the park they were surrounded by hundreds of people. Some yelled, “ICE out of L.A!” Many recorded the confrontation on their phone, livestreaming straight to social media. The agents retreated without making any arrests. Normal life in the park resumed. Signs had been taped to poles in the park:

Military Members Is this what you signed up for? Will you feel proud about what you’re being ordered to do when you look back on it? If you have concerns about mobilizing against civilians, you’re not alone. You have options. You have rights.

Lisa Needhan of Kos discussed the legal challenge to the nasty guy’s executive order banning birthright citizenship when parents are undocumented. The Supreme Court had ruled that lower courts (I think there were three of them) could not place a nationwide injunction against the EO without a class action suit. The previous injunctions were not based on class action cases. So the ACLU filed a class action case, covering the nation. And Federal District Judge Joseph Laplante quickly certified the case as one for a class of plaintiffs and issued a nationwide injunction. Isn’t that what the Supremes told him to do? Well, certifying a case as covering a nationwide class has rules that must be scrupulously followed. These rules take time. And Laplante couldn’t possibly have followed all the rules so scrupulously in so little time. Of course, it was Justice Alito that wagged that finger.

Getting nationwide relief this way is complicated, but it’s necessary. The plaintiffs are fighting the Trump administration, but lower court judges have also found themselves locked in a battle with a lawless Supreme Court, which essentially decided that lower courts are enemies who must be stopped from thwarting Trump. But the lower courts are the ones that are following the rule of law. Someone’s got to.

Oliver Willis of Kos wrote the nasty guy ranted on Truth Social that his base should not be criticizing AG Pam Bondi about the Jeffrey Epstein case. One reason is, contrary to claims the files don’t exist, the nasty guy claimed they were “written” by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So his base should not waste their time on Epstein, “somebody that nobody cares about.” That Truth Social post brought out something quite rare – many more negative responses than positive. The base was not pleased. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Heather Digby Parton of Salon:

The appointment of Patel and Bongino — as well as Bondi, who jumped into pursuing the scandal with both feet, promising far-right influencers that she was personally overseeing the investigation — made MAGA true believers believe they were about to get their hands on what Glenn Beck called “the Rosetta Stone of public trust.” These new appointees were the very ones who had been chasing this scandal for years, and they were now in a position to blow the lid off the whole thing. All those who had mocked the MAGA movement as kooks would soon be proven fools. The Justice Department’s memo was a slap in the face to the MAGA faithful. They were stunned. And when Trump rudely dismissed their concerns in a cabinet meeting and then admonished them on Truth Social in a long rant blaming former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, demanding that his followers focus on the scandals he wants them to focus on, the crushing betrayal was personal. Never before has a Trump post received such a massive negative response on his own platform. Even his most loyal influencers, including popular MAGA commentator Benny Johnson and Fox News, were hostile. Trump’s loyal base has taken all that heat for so long, defending Trump through everything, and now it appears their Dear Leader is just another deep state operative covering up the crimes of his accomplices — and possibly his own. They are confused and angry and inconsolable. Have they had a mass epiphany and collectively awakened to the fundamental dishonesty and corruption of the man they worshipped for the past ten years? It’s hard to believe.

bear83 of the Kos community reported the Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim was destroyed by wildfire on Sunday. It was built in 1937. Dozens of other structures, including individual cabins, were also destroyed. The fire was started by lightning on July 4. It was initially managed as a controlled burn to clear away what could fuel a larger fire. But nine days later low humidity and strong winds and the fire was no longer under control. bear83 wrote that DOGE and the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, terminated a lot of jobs, including people who would have helped prevent and fight wildfires. The nasty guy had said the Los Angeles fires wouldn’t have been so bad if communities would clear the combustible undergrowth. Which the crew at the North Rim were trying to do with perhaps not enough staff to do it safely. The North Rim website has a photo gallery of before. I was at the North Rim as part of a family vacation decades ago. We stayed at the campground near the lodge, though I’m sure we went past it to peer down into the canyon. On the long drive from the main road a large deer jumped onto the road and paused. We had to brake quickly and did not hit it. I’ve been to the South Rim a couple times, much more recently, though still decades ago. The Grand Canyon is a beautiful and impressive place. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup Greg Dworkin of Kos quoted a tweet by Matthew Cappucci, commenting on a tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene. First Greene:

I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity. It will be a felony offense. I have been researching weather.

She’s the one claiming that Democrats can control the weather and she’s referring to jet contrails that Robert Kennedy Jr. is calling chemtrails, the release of chemicals into the atmosphere to do dastardly things. Cappucci’s response:

It’s not a political statement for me as a Harvard-degreed atmospheric scientist to say that elected representative Marjorie Taylor Green doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. She’d be equally qualified to fly a Boeing-737, practice nuclear medicine or train zebras.

Dworkin quoted Jack Jenkins and Smietana of Religion News Service discussing the recent IRS announcement that churches can endorse political candidates from the pulpit. This is in response to a lawsuit brought by two Texas churches and religious broadcasters.

Americans — including religious Americans — generally take a dim view of political endorsements in the pulpit. According to an analysis of 2023 polling provided to RNS by the Public Religion Research Institute, majorities of all major religious groups oppose or strongly oppose allowing churches and places of worship to endorse political candidates while retaining their tax-exempt status. That includes white evangelicals (62%) as well as Black Protestants (59%), white mainline or nonevangelical Protestants (77%), white Catholics (79%), Hispanic Catholics (78%), Hispanic Protestants (72%) and Jewish Americans (77%). Researchers noted opposition to the idea among white evangelicals remains virtually unchanged since 2017, when they last polled on the topic. There was one outlier, however: People labeled by PRRI as “adherents” to Christian nationalism — people who agree with statements such as “the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation” — were statistically more likely (45%) to support endorsements from the pulpit, with only a narrow majority (51%) opposed.

Dworkin added that pastors are wary of splitting their congregations so tend to avoid blatant politics. In the comments is a cartoon by Bill Bramhall. It shows a job interview and behind the boss is a sign saying, “Disclosure: The content of this interview will be used to build a chatbot we will hire instead of you.” In Thursday’s roundup Kev quoted John Timmer of Ars Technica:

From a distance, the gathering looked like a standard poster session at an academic conference, with researchers standing next to large displays of the work they were doing. Except in this case, it was taking place in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill, and the researchers were describing work that they weren’t doing. Called "The things we’ll never know," the event was meant to highlight the work of researchers whose grants had been canceled by the Trump administration. ... Many of the grants were focused on STEM education, and it's extremely difficult to imagine that people will be better off without the work happening.

In Friday’s roundup Dworkin included a tweet from Echelon Insights:

Where do most American voters fall on the political compass? Using nine questions on cultural issues and nine questions on economic issues, we mapped voters onto a political compass.

This is the start of a thread on X I don’t have access to. However, here’s the summary of the results:

Liberals, both economic and social: 43% Populist, economically liberal and socially conservative: 22% Conservative, both economic and socially conservative: 31% Libertarian, economically conservative and socially liberal: 5%

Dworkin added:

This is why Democrats on occasion (and warily) try to recruit populists. Conservatives won’t play and libertarians are too few. But the name of the game is a majority.

Aaron Astor tweeted:

Ever wonder why the CDC is based in Atlanta? The reason: its forerunner was the WWII-era Office of Malaria Control, based in Atlanta to fight malaria around rapidly growing US military communities in the South.

In the comments Zoli Osaze posted a cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz showing an ICE agent confronting a farm worker holding a box of produce on his head.

Agent: Keep your hands up! Worker: Don’t worry, they’re busy holding up your economy.

War frightens citizens into giving up rights

There is still a lot of news about the nasty guy ordering “bunker buster” bombs to be dropped on nuclear facilities (especially since I’m a couple days behind in reading the news). In what I’ve read and heard so far there isn’t much I want to emphasize, beyond the strangeness of dropping bombs, then seeming to declare a cease-fire before the enemy can retaliate. I’ll admit I probably haven’t heard the full story. If you’re still curious there is an Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos about the bombing and another AP article about the spin the nasty guy’s goons are trying to give the story. Of more interest to me is an article by Mark Jacobs on Stop the Presses pleading with media to not turn the war into entertainment. He lists eight things journalists should keep in mind. 1. Don’t sanitize the impact on humans. Saying people don’t want to see dead and wounded with their cornflakes is a terrible way to judge what to show. 2. Put events in a complete, honest historical context. The question “Why does Iran hate us” and most of the answers are shallow. The full answer includes how the CIA helped a coup in Iran install the Shah, which was seven decades ago. 3. Hold politicians accountable. Too many headlines imply politicians have no agency, that things just happen. 4. The peace movement is patriotic too. Dissent is lot disloyalty. 5. Lying politicians are more dishonest in war. Be extremely skeptical of the wins they claim. 6. Don’t act like you’re “in the know” when you’re not. 7. Beware of optimism, such as the vice nasty claiming the war won’t be a long one. 8. War allows governments more easily take away liberties. Authoritarian governments use war as a reason to control citizens. They frighten citizens into giving up rights. From 1984 by George Orwell, “The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” In his conclusion he adds one more: Don’t let the war engross you so much you miss the domestic misconduct. I first heard of Sarah Kendzior through her work on Gaslit Nation. She is no longer a part of that and now had her own newsletter on Substack. I hadn’t checked it in quite a while. What I found was a post with a long list of perceptive questions from readers and Kendzior’s answers. She does this monthly and this one was posted June 13. I picked several questions and answers to include. Be wary of the “feud” between Musk and the nasty guy.

Dictators seek to be the sole star of a spectacle state. Doing so drains public imagination, making it difficult for citizens to conceive of a politics beyond the demagogue.

And we had two demagogues trying to be the sole star. Beyond that the feud doesn’t matter. Kendzior doesn’t trust Gavin Newsom, governor of California. At times he seems to want California to secede from the rest of the country (part of the idea that rich people want to break it up) and being the president of California instead of its governor might sound pretty cool. One reason for gutting Medicaid (and Medicare) is “a sick and scared populace is easier to control.” But note that for a long time health care has been tied to jobs to prevent our independence. A surprise of the nasty guy’s second term:

That pundits and politicians treat Trump’s first term as if it never happened and as if there’s not a template to these crises. They’ve done that before (they ignored his entire organized crime career) but, like, we were there! He was the president and we saw the whole four years! This bizarre selective amnesia is a big part of why people do not trust the media or the Democratic party.

Kendzior is wary of politicians, even Democrats, “because of the lack of accountability for sedition.” The Department of Justice under Biden was obligated to prosecute that and didn’t. Every state crime should be treated seriously, even if the perpetrators are old news. Not doing so make containing new operatives who use the same illegal and destructive tactics. This prosecution could bring the country together, since there were perpetrators in both parties. Why did the DoJ refuse to prosecute? Because Merrick Garland was nominated by Biden to make sure it refused. In the past an authoritarian would let protestors go for a few months to exhaust them and the public’s attention before calling in the national guard. By acting fast the nasty guy energized the opposition. But in the digital and AI world speed is more important. Algorithms control attention and curtail choice, so people don’t know what is happening. The nasty guy needs a military willing to fire on Americans. The more time soldiers have to see through his propaganda the less likely they are to fire. He needs his soldiers frenzied and frightened. The nasty guy may get around a possibly reluctant military by also using “deputized” civilians. Also, the nasty guy is more of a mob boss than a dictator. He doesn’t care if the US collapses. Pat attention to who is labeled a “resistance fighter” and who is called a “terrorist.” Keep in mind that in the past Native Americans and Blacks had their righteous rebellions portrayed as barbaric violence. “Palestinian terrorism” was accepted description until smart phones showed Israeli violence. Watch out for sadism hiding behind a uniform. In response to a question about tipping points in a country facing the loss of democracy, Kendzior wrote:

Protests are good ways of showing dissent and noncompliance with immoral orders, but they should be strategic when dealing with a regime that seeks the collapse of the state. The tipping point is different for each country. I actually think the US reached our tipping point in January/February 2021, and then Biden DOJ tipped it back through inaction. The inaction confused much of the public, leading them to conclude that Trump must be innocent, or else he’d quickly be punished. The refusal of the Democrats to examine why that happened is keeping the whole country from moving forward and reaching a new tipping point. People need to have confidence that if they bravely confront the Trump administration, they will have the backing of powerful officials. They have no confidence now, due to the abandonment of accountability by Biden administration, and that is a shameful thing.

The confidence has begun to grow again. Republicans abandoned the idea of trying to win people to their ideas and they would not win in a fair fight. So they cheat. They also see that the instigators of the Capitol attack were never punished and the participants have been pardoned. They could do it again without consequence. Cutting the staff of National Parks – the beloved federal workers – reminds people the federal government can do great things, not just corruption. That might be a mistake in all the slashing of federal jobs. After getting to the end of Kendzior’s Q&A session I followed a link to another one of her posts, this one from last November, about a week after the election.

I warned you for nine years, because I wanted you to be prepared. Biden was a Placeholder President designed to fill the four years between two terms of Trump while plutocrats shifted American political culture sharply to the right. Media gutted, Twitter decimated, activism destroyed, books censored, minorities demonized, public health annihilated, victims blamed, empathy scorned. That is the main thing they are after now: your empathy. They want you to hate each other so you don’t hate them first.

They want us to hate each other so we agree to their plan to tear the country apart for the rich to plunder. There is a larger plan and we are merely a pawn. Though we can’t vote out the mafia our “power lies in refusing to abandon each other or abandon the truth.” As for that election:

The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run. The second most important thing is who paid for it.

To see that look at the nasty guy’s donors and to who he pardoned. Look at who procured the pardons and the name Jared Kushner, the pandemic prince, comes up a lot. Kushner is relevant to Israel’s wars, yet he has vanished from punditry. Whether the US is in a mafia state centers on Kushner. Over the years I collected browser tabs, intending to use a particular tweet or cartoon when the subject came up elsewhere. That tended to not happen. So here are some old and unrelated tweets as I go through old tabs. Back in November 2022 (I did say “years”) Leah McElrath (who has now switched to Bluesky) wrote:

One problem with many well-intentioned efforts over the years to provide housing to the unhoused has been that the programs have difficulty getting funded without including a lot of moralistic conditions for the housing. Just. Give. People. Housing. THEN offer other services.

From Prof. Feynman, posted September 2022:

SCIENCE: If you don't make mistakes, you're doing it wrong. If you don't correct those mistakes, you're doing it really wrong. If you can't accept that you're mistaken, you're not doing it at all.

In August of 2024 Jeff Danziger posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a college finance officer telling a student “Here... Sign this. Won’t take a moment.” The student looks down at a bin that is encasing her feet in concrete coming from a mixer labeled “College debt.”

We did the hard work, you got a handout

I finished the book The World in Six Songs; How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature by Daniel Levitin. I had read and enjoyed his earlier book This is Your Brain on Music so when I saw this one I bought it. The title might properly be The World in Six Types of Songs. The author discusses six categories of songs and how each would have influenced the evolution of humans. He also discusses the opposite – how humans developed the capacity to create music while animals cannot. The six types, common to all cultures, are: Social bonding, including helping us develop synchronous movement. Joy, being so joyful we want to sing. Comfort, why we sing lullabyes and why we don’t listen to happy music when we’re sad. Knowledge, more than the ABC song. Religion, music that accompanies rites. And Love. That last one prompted a long discussion of what love is. Decades ago I had heard when the Christian Old Testament (the Jewish Testament) was written down the scribes had to sort through four sources. More modern scholars had identified four threads of influence. The chapter on knowledge songs explained how the ancient text could have had four sources. The reason is that for perhaps the first thousand years of the Jewish story the Torah and other books were not written down, they were sung. Levitin explains how singing influences memorization. But over a thousand years the words and tune would drift, both within a community and between separated communities. So, yes, four (at least) sources. I enjoyed the book and learned from it. But I can recommend the book only to people who have a strong interest in both music and how the brain works. He definitely gets into the details. My writing time has been limited lately, enough that I finished a second book. It is the novel, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad. The pivotal event is portrayed in the first chapter – a boat full of refugees has come apart and the humans have washed onto the shore of an island. Only one of the travelers is alive. He is Amir and about nine years old. The rest of the book is alternating chapters of Before and After that event. The Before chapters tell about how Amir got onto the boat and what the crossing was like. He, his mother, infant brother, and Quiet Uncle (brother to Loud Uncle) flee the regime in Syria. They get to Alexandria, Egypt and Quiet Uncle buys passage on a ship to smuggle him to the West and Amir also gets on board. As is frequently the case with these sorts of things the passengers pay a lot of money and are duped onto a rickety boat. The crossing is not what they thought they paid for. Because of the structure of the book we know what will happen to most of them. TheAfter chapters are about what happens on the island. It is not named, but presumably is Greek. Amir flees from officials in uniform and is protected by Vänna, a fifteen year old girl. Both don’t know the other’s language. She wants to get him off the island in a way that doesn’t get him bogged down in the official government method of processing refugees. They are pursued by Colonel Kethros, who wants to make sure Amir does go through the approved system. Along the way various characters discuss how the West views refugees and how the island locals view tourists. I enjoyed the book. It sheds important light on what the refugee crisis is about in human terms. Meteor Blades of Daily Kos posted a mashup video, less than 3 minutes long, of scenes of many No Kings protests around the country. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Zeeshawn Aleem of MSNBC, who discussed the end “protest fatigue.”

In the early months of Trump’s second term, it was common to ask “Where is the resistance?” Whereas Trump’s first inauguration triggered the largest single-day protest in American history, his second inauguration was met with far smaller demonstrations. Combined with Democratic Party leaders’ timidity and a business community that was much more receptive to Trump than in his first term, there was a widespread sense that Trump’s victory had fundamentally demoralized the left and that MAGA was the new normal. ... Another encouraging phenomenon: According to the Crowd Counting Consortium researchers, the total number of protest events this year is far outpacing 2017. That’s a proxy for how organized protest coalitions are — and suggests that activist networks may be building up more extensively than during the comparable part of Trump’s first term.

Kev added:

IMHO, I think that Trump’s popular vote win in the 2024 presidential election accounts for much of the “timidity” and even shock from the Democratic Party overall, including some of the party leadership. (The MSM capitulation, by and large, to MAGA coverage has also been a huge factor in a downplaying of the resistance.) I will note that the mass protests that I have seen televised and even live here in Chicago seem to be better organized than many of the protests during Trump’s first term.

In the comments is a cartoon by DaylieDoodle. It shows an elephant lecturing:

Now remember kids... When we win, it’s because we’ve earned it fair and square. But when you win, the system is rigged. When we catch a break, it’s a reward for our hard work. When you catch a break, it’s a handout. If we stop supporting something, we boycott. If you stop supporting something it’s “cancel culture.” Our extremists have nothing to do with us. But yours are indicative of everything that you believe in. Yearning for what this country used to be is patriotic. And changing it is un-American. And if you aren’t American, you’re the enemy.

Last Thursday Emily Singer of Kos reported that California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla went to a Department of Homeland Security news conference to ask Secretary Kristi Noem a question. She was defending the nasty guy’s use of the military to subdue protests against deportation. Two men forced Padilla out the news conference where FBI agents pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him. DHS accused Padilla of not identifying himself (he had) and that he “chose disrespectful political theatre” and that Secret Service thought he was an attacker. What is known about Padilla’s actions do not sound like an attacker and anything Noem says about the incident is highly suspect. Even if this was disrespectful political theater he did not deserved to be shoved out the door, then pushed to the floor and handcuffed. No one who did what he did deserves it. But this is another instance of the nasty guy’s administration calling law enforcement on Democrats wanting answers about the treatment of immigrants. Last Wednesday Alex Samuels of Kos reported that Elon Musk is trying to mend his relationship to the nasty guy after the spectacular public breakup. About all he said, though, was:

I regret some of my posts about President Donald Trump last week. They went too far.

He didn’t say which of the many posts crossed the line. Though Musk is trying to revive their alliance, the nasty guy may not want him back. Also, the public didn’t rally to Musk’s side. And he still wants those government contracts. The nasty guy did walk back his threat of pull those contracts. The nasty guy went off to the G7 conference, held in Canada this year. He then left early. YourAnonCentral explained the various humiliations he may have felt, prompting him to leave. His microphone was cut off in the middle of a rant against US citizens. He tried to act as a spokesman for Putin. He defended Israel’s attack on Iran as the others called for de-escalation. A picture circulated on him falling asleep at the meeting, prompting the name “DonOld.” He struck a deal with the UK while calling it the EU. Last Friday Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary. Here’s a couple:

"Everyone was talking about Trump being on the Epstein list and fighting with Elon. So what did he do? He manufactured a crisis. He got back to what got him here in the first place—good old xenophobia. I don’t know what happened to the states' rights he thinks so much of when it suits him, but I know I speak for a lot of us here when I say leave us alone here. We don’t need you. We don't need your 'help.' [...] And to those of you in the National Guard who have been thrust into this: when Donald Trump orders you to do something that is immoral, try to get your dad's podiatrist to write a note to say you have bone spurs." —Jimmy Kimmel "Trump's terrible policy has generated a huge backlash, which he's responded to by overreacting, which is gonna generate another backlash. We don’t know how this is gonna end, but at least we know it'll be a huge waste of money. Hello, DOGE? I found some cuts for ya." —The Daily Show's Desi Lydic

That line at the airport is security theater

Oliver Willis of Daily Kos reported that the nasty guy has been losing elections all over the world. I’ve already written that the nasty guy’s portrayal of Canada boosted the chances of the liberal party, giving a win to Mark Carney. The latest example is the Labor Party in Australia getting a comfortable win over the Liberal Party (which is center-right, not really liberal). The next Australian Prime Minister is Anthony Albanese and not Peter Dutton, who had been portrayed as a cheap knock-off of the nasty guy. And in Singapore the People’s Action Party and Prime Minister Lawrence Wong won in a landslide. They portrayed themselves as a force for stability in a world made turbulent because of the nasty guy’s tariffs. Steve Inskeep of NPR talked to author Walter Isaacson about the end of World War II in Europe, which happened 80 years ago. At the time America helped build global institutions. How are those institutions being changed now? The Marshall Plan sent billions of dollars to help rebuild Europe. The plan created a market for US goods. It stopped the spread of Soviet communism. It was also “one of the most generous, least selfish acts in history because it took a war-battered Europe and got it back on its feet.” Then came the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and agreements on tariffs and trade that became the World Trade Organization. All were designed to protect free markets and democracy from the threat of communism. Dean Acheson had developed the Marshall Plan with George Kennen. They saw that after WWI the Treaty of Versailles punished Germany so harshly that it fueled the rise of Hitler, resulting in WWII. They wanted to not do that again. Rebuilding Germany and Japan would make the world safer. We now have tight alliances with both. These institutions that promoted free markets also meant free trade and free immigration. A lot of wealth was built. And a lot of people got left behind. That produced a nationalist backlash. See Brexit, Orban in Hungary, and the nasty guy here. Some of those who created and believed in the global institutions didn’t understand the number of people left behind was so huge, how resentful they would feel, and how strong nationalism would become. After WWII politicians put the national interests and values before party. That isn’t true now. Also, no one is proposing the next set of global institutions we need now to make sure everybody shares in the prosperity they help build, to balance trade with domestic manufacturing that promotes democracy, to address climate change, to lessen terrorism, and to find meaning in living. A week ago Kos of Kos discussed the resource-sharing agreement between the US and Ukraine. This is the successor to the deal that didn’t happen in February when the nasty guy and vice nasty verbally attacked Zelenskyy. And, from the way Kos tells it, this time the nasty guy caved. The deal creates the United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The deal does not include reimbursement for the aid the US gave to Ukraine. The deal covers only new leases, not existing ones. While the minerals, oil, and gas may be exported, the money stays in Ukraine for at least ten years to fund new projects and reconstruction. The US commits to long-term peace. This is a joint project, not one directed by the US. By those terms one can see what the nasty guy wanted and didn’t get. There is a big reason why the deal covers only new leases.

Most of Ukraine’s mineral wealth is in Russian-occupied territory. That is literally the reason Russia invaded. If Trump really wants it, he’s gonna have to fight the Russians (via Ukraine) for it.

One thing Ukraine didn’t get – American security guarantees. The resource deal is separate from a peace deal. About that Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows the nasty guy dictating terms to a skeptical Zelenskyy, saying, “Here’s the deal, let the guy who broke in and attacked your family, remain inside and be gifted the kitchen, guest bedroom and den.” In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman, writing in his own Substack about the defunding of scientific research.

Why should those who aren’t scientists care? In the 21st century, science isn’t some esoteric intellectual affair. It’s the foundation of social and economic progress. And no, we can’t expect the private sector to fill the gap left by loss of government support. Basic research is a public good: it generates real benefits, but those benefits can’t be monetized because everyone can make use of the knowledge gained. So government support is the only way to sustain science. And that support is being rapidly ended. But why do our new rulers want to destroy science in America? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Science has a tendency to tell you things you may not want to hear. Medical research may tell you that vaccines work and don’t cause autism. Energy research may tell wind power works and doesn’t massacre birds. And one thing we know about MAGA types is that they are determined to hold on to their prejudices. If science conflicts with those prejudices, they don’t want to know, and they don’t want anyone else to know either. So they really want to destroy science.

Kev quoted Rebecca Gordon of TomDispatch:

It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted. [...] The constant thrill of what some have called security theater has kept us primed for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our computers, removing our shoes, sorting our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed protect us.

Michigan Public, my NPR outlet, has a spot that runs frequently that says public media is under threat. It then directs me to a website. I haven’t gone there yet. That’s not because I think the threat isn’t real. Wednesday of last week Willis reported that the nasty guy fired three of the five directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In response the CPB said it is not a government entity and is not subject to the president’s authority. It filed a lawsuit to block the firings. Willis then gave some of the history of the CPB. Willis reported last Friday that the nasty guy issued an executive order instructing the CPB to “cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS.” The order says NPR and PBS don’t provide unbiased, fair, and nonpartisan news. Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of CPB repeated the CPB is not subject to the president’s authority. It is authorized and funded by Congress to be independent of the federal government. His executive order is meaningless. The nasty guy claims the media landscape has changed since CPB was created. There are now “abundant, diverse, and innovative news options.” Willis responds that most mainstream media are owned by private corporations that are willing to bow to him. He’s already shown he doesn’t like media that doesn’t do his bidding. I’ve heard the Nasty Guy’s proposed budget calls on Congress to defund the CPB. At the end of March Willis, in one of his posts explaining the right, sets out to explain why Republicans want to murder Big Bird. This is a long Republican tradition going all the way back to Nixon in the 1970s, shortly after the CPB was created. One reason why Republicans hate is it because PBS and NPR content is trusted by a large number of Americans because they provide info without corporate or political influence. For 22 years PBS has ranked as the most trusted institution in the US, beating out commercial television, print media, courts of law, Congress, and the federal government. Sesame Street and related companies are trusted by 88% of parents and 90% of parents say the programs help prepare children, including black and brown children, for schooling. It also tackles important topics like racism.

In short, public broadcasting represents the opposite of many conservative beliefs. The networks support accessible information, prioritize education, and strive to produce content opposing bigotry. Conservatives see more utility in divisive, bigoted figures—like Greene and Trump—than in Big Bird, who promotes kindness and friendship. That’s why the networks are under attack from one Republican leader to the next.

In the comments of another pundit roundup is a cartoon by Garth German:

Man: ...But the Founding Fathers didn’t intend... Woman: I’mma stop you right there. The Founding Fathers didn’t intend for black slaves to go free. Nor for me to vote. Nor for you to vote since you don’t own land. I’m kinda over the Founding Father’s intent.

Trilemma posted a cartoon of the white supremacist future.

You dreamed of a whites-only paradise. Big checks, cheap gas, everything finally “right.” But your heroes were flying over your potholes, on their way to brunch with billionaires. A man says: “We were never one of them. Just the background noise for their victory lap.” You thought expelling non-whites & immigrants would elevate you. But it fed no one. Built nothing. And the messes still needed cleaned. The blame still needed a name. You used to cheer as your leader crushed dissent. Now it’s your turn, hogtied, silenced & robbed blind by the man you worshipped.

Those who hate need a social hierarchy. The hierarchy is how they define themselves. They assume their position is high in that hierarchy. But if the lowest levels of a hierarchy are swept away those higher in the hierarchy still need the hierarchy and will oppress those now at the bottom. They don’t care you supported their previous efforts. In the comments of a third roundup is a meme posted by exlrrp showing a man and two women drinking Champagne on a yacht. The caption:

Billionaires Imagine having more money than you can spend in 1,000 lifetimes and still being mad that people get Social Security. It is time to end this!

For those toward the top of the hierarchy having lots more money than other people isn’t enough. They also need to take money away from the poor to emphasize the gap between themselves and those at the bottom. Another example of that is a cartoon by Toonerman. It shows a man sitting on a large mound of bags of money talking to a red hat family below. “There’s been a change in plans. Things are gonna suck for awhile ... for you that is. MAGA’s working for me.” Another meme posted by exlrrp shows a man in a bathing suit and wearing a MAGA hat next to a (real?) woman whose bikini top is strained by her assets. The caption, “I voted for him, and now I only get to have a couple of dolls?” Just below that is a tweet by Dare Obasanjo, “At this rate MAGA will only be able to afford to rent the libs.”

Eat Together, Stick Together

My Sunday movie was The Old Oak. It is one of a series of films director Ken Loach has made about the lower class in England. The Old Oak is a pub, the last one in a village in northeast England. The village is not named but is near Durham. The town is deep in poverty because it had been dependent on coal mines, now closed. Town houses are going for dirt cheap prices because people are leaving. Many of those who remain can’t sell when prices are that low. That means in 2016 there was plenty of space to move in Syrian refugees. The locals are quite annoyed because the refugee families get government assistance and they don’t. Of course, there are the usual white – non-white issues. The pub owner is TJ. He tries to do what he can to help the refugees and is soon working with Yara, whose English is decent. She had worked with the nurses in the refugee camp in Syria, which gave her some medical training and helped her learn English. The pub has a back room, which has been locked up for 20 years. It has been neglected so long it can no longer be used, even though it might be the last place in town that big enough for any sort of community gathering. TJ takes Yara into the room to get something. She sees on the walls photos and sayings from the miner strikes. One photo shows big community meals with the caption “Eat Together, Stick Together.” And that gives her ideas for how to get the English and Syrians to respect each other. Of course, it doesn’t go smoothly. In the meantime TJ is dealing with poverty and failed relations. Yara and the other Syrians are dealing with the trauma of having lived in a war zone, being pulled from their homeland, and trying to make sense of a new country where they don’t feel welcome. I recommend this one. It is a good example of building community. I finished the book Boys Come First by Aaron Foley. It is a novel about Dominick, Troy, and Remy, three black gay friends (not lovers) in their early thirties living in Detroit. Over about nine months they deal with common issues of that age. Looking for sex and trying to turn it into love. Struggling to keep or establish a new career. Worried the best in life has already passed them by. Dealing with aging parents. And some issues unique to being black and living in Detroit. It has been a black city for decades. So white people moving back into the city feels like gentrification, leading to pushing out the black people and taking over the levers of power. This is very much a Detroit story. It is full of Detroit and suburban locations and of Detroit products. People not in the area won’t know the character of such places as Corktown, Midtown (formerly Cass Corridor), Rosedale, Indian Village, Somerset, Ferndale, Livonia, Novi, and Birmingham. They won’t know the reputations of Renaissance and Cass Tech High Schools. They won’t recognize Vernors and Faygo. I’m familiar with them because I’ve now lived in the area for more than forty years. I enjoyed this one. An item in the news today is the nasty guy had a long conversation with Putin about Ukraine. Whether Ukraine had any input about its own fate seemed to not be a part of the discussion. Yesterday, Kos of Daily Kos reported that in an interview with Fox News the nasty guy sounded like he was saying he would give Ukraine a half-trillion in military aid and wants a half-trillion in rare earth elements. Kos says though an exchange like that is morally repugnant, it would be an easy yes by Ukraine. First is that half-trillion in military aid. Second, the biggest deposits of rare earth elements are in the districts that Putin claimed back in 2014. To give those elements to America implies pushing Russia out of there. And those elements were why Russia invaded. Third, it seems this offer comes without the conditions Biden put on his gifts. Ukraine could use the supplies to attack sites within Russia. Lisa Needham of Kos wrote that the way the nasty guy has been talking matches the idea of the unitary executive, that the Constitution gives the president complete authority over the executive branch of our government without any checks from Congress or the judiciary. The prez can ignore a law he doesn’t like and can fire any employee he doesn’t like. No, the Constitution does not say that. Needham says this is not a new idea. Back in the Reagan years Attorney General Edwin Meese created the idea. Under Bush I Deputy Attorney General Bill Barr used the idea to say Congress didn’t need to authorize sending the military into Iraq. Under Bush II John Yoo and Dick Cheney said the president could authorize torture even though it was illegal. And Barr was back to push that idea onto the nasty guy. Needham then described a couple of the ways the nasty guy is acting like a unitary executive. He fired 17 inspectors general and removed the chair of the National Labor Relations Board. Now the question is whether this Supreme Court will side with the nasty guy or tell the executive branch it must follow the laws laid out by the legislative branch. We’re depending on the Supremes to uphold the Constitution because, as Emily Singer of Kos reported, Republicans in Congress aren’t going to do it. She listed many of the excuses they are using. And I’m not going to repeat them. Jeff Stein of the Washington Post tweeted the apparent DOGE game plan. It has three parts: 1. Gut and fire the federal workforce, which unlocks: 2. Control over agency functions and records, which unlocks: 3. Mass budget and agency cuts, reducing the size of government. As part of (1) we’ve seen attempts at buyout and purges of agency leadership. Coming soon might be mass sales of federal property. Part (2) would include sucking up internal and personnel records that had been carefully guarded, feeding sensitive government databases to AI to look for automation, and to put allies in charge of the payment systems. Then in part (3) they cut freely.

To me the biggest outstanding question now is what happens if/when the courts say much of this is illegal, as is widely believed by senior U.S. officials. Do Musk/Trump back down? Or do they ask John Roberts what troops he commands?

Kos reported that the mass deportations ordered by the nasty guy aren’t up to demanded quotas. That’s because immigration officials are already at capacity. They need help from local and state law enforcement. The nasty guy doesn’t want to punish red states by doing his mass purges in friendly territory. He would rather punish blue states. So his Justice Department filed suit against Illinois for being a sanctuary state. The stated reason is that there is a national emergency from illegal immigration (which is not an emergency). Illinois’ defense is solid. Back in 2017 Antonin Scalia wrote the federal government cannot command state or local officers and police to enforce a federal program. And if the Supremes reversed that decision the next Democratic president could demand local police more aggressively enforce gun laws. That’s the reason why Scalia ruled as he did. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted the New York Times:

Mr. Vance, a 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, has repeatedly argued in recent years that presidents like Mr. Trump can and should ignore court orders that they say infringe on their rightful executive powers. While his post did not go that far, it carried greater significance given that he is now vice president. The post may also offer a window on the administration’s thinking toward the orders against it as Mr. Trump has openly violated numerous statutes, like limits on summarily firing officials and effectively dismantling U.S.A.I.D. and folding it into the State Department. It also raised the question of whether the administration would stop abiding by rulings if it deemed them to be illegitimately impeding his agenda.

A major part of any court ruling against Vance and the nasty guy will be whether what they did was indeed a “rightful executive power.” In the comments Frank Amari posted a cartoon by Garth German showing a barbecue presided over by a man in a MAGA hat, who says, “I don’t want immigrants bringing their culture and ruining our country!!” Around him are pointers to where the barbecue supplies originated – fireworks from China, hot dogs from Germany, beer and chips and salsa from Mexico, lemonade from Egypt, apple pie from England, Cole slaw from the Netherlands, and the hat made in China. In a second roundup Chitown Kev quoted Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. This one is about the National Institute of Health drastically cutting indirect support (the costs of simply running a lab) to universities. Marshall thinks there are two reasons. One is payback for COVID research and a general hostility to scientific expertise with the belief universities are not friendly to the nasty guy. The second reason is once the grants are seen as coming at the political pleasure of the Oval Office they become a powerful tool to discipline the institutions. Criticize him and your budget gets cut. In the comments of this roundup is a cartoon by Dennis Goris. A husband and wife are in bed. She shows him her phone and says, “It’s a text from Elon Musk – he’s in our checking account. We just bought a Tesla.” Way down in the comments of a third roundup The Geogre talks about the advantages of demonizing DEI.

Quite simply, it is a magical term for every person a bigot hates explained away by category so as to escape any individual critical thinking or moral accounting. 1. I don’t want to work around [Black people/ women, because I’m convinced I’ll be sued every minute of the day by those 1980’s propaganda campaigns/ gay people (because I have a stereotype of Ru Paul calling me names I don’t understand], 2. There is this one person _____, and I really envy/hate/argue with her/him. 3. If there were no quotas affirmative action DEI, then THEY wouldn’t be around me. 4. Therefore, I don’t have to think about why I dislike/avoid/can’t talk to THEM, and, even better, 5. No one can tell me I’m a bigot! Best of all, 6. I can tell them that they’re for waste fraud and abuse because they want DEI!

Yes, we can tell him he’s a bigot. Further down in the comments is a cartoon by Paul Fell. It shows three wolves, labeled as the Nebraska Legislature and their Stand with Women Act, surrounding a girl with a red hooded cape. The wolves say:

Hiya, sweetie! Don’t mind us... We’re here to protect you from boys in girls restrooms! What’s in the basket?

The caption says:

What those pushing anti-trans legislation never tell you is that in order to apply their new laws, someone has to examine your kids. And as we all know, from religious figures to Olympic team doctors, too often that ends up with kids being assaulted.

Kyle Bravo posted a cartoon of God talking to an angel as he looks at a blackboard covered in mathematical equations, “I guess I can’t prove I exist either.” Pundit roundups seem to be a good way of getting a sense of what’s going on. In a fourth roundup Dworkin quoted Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum of Musk Watch discussing the invasion of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Musk has been talking about creating a peer-to-peer payment system, the kind of app the CFPB regulates. With Musk in control of this system he “now has tremendous access to confidential information about his competitors,” an official warned. Dworkin included a tweet by Chad Pergram:

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Dems/DOGE: The Democratic party has latched on to this new, shiny object called the rule of law

Noah Smith of Noahpinion wonders what DOGE is up to. It moves so fast and is so secretive we can’t keep up. Coverage is mostly reactive, filing suits against it and digging up dirt on its people. That’s too slow. So we should focus on two questions: “1. What is the actual purpose of DOGE? What are the main dangers of DOGE?” We have to think about what it is doing now and what it will do in the future. David Dayen of The American Prospect notes that for a half-century conservatives have been digging up dirt on small government programs while ignoring the real waste, “like the trillions of dollars that get funneled up from ordinary taxpayers to elites like Elon Musk.” One reason DOGE is going after IT systems is to integrate AI into government operations. The purpose is to automate government work and use AI to catch discrepancies.

So you have a bunch of techno-futurists who think that the future of government efficiency is either cherry-picking stuff that sounds bad, or running everything through a supposed HAL 9000 super-computer to weed out the waste. Neither will accomplish their aims, and will probably lead to tons of negative consequences in the process.

Dayan titled his piece, “Government by Malicious Autopilot.” Down in the comments Regina Schrambling posted a cartoon by Pedro Molina:

Two weeks ago he said he wanted Panama. A week ago he said he wanted Canada, Yesterday he said he wanted Greenland. Today he said he wants Gaza. But what he really wants is the attention of the world while his minions destroy the USA.

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Jen Sorensen titled “In the end it was a catch-22.” It shows a gay man and two women talking to a guy in a suit. The black woman says, “Hey, we’re feeling a little existentially threatened over here.” The suit responds, “So elitist and polarizing! You mustn’t alienate the people who demonize you.” Not so far down in the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Marco De Angelis. It shows a formal dinner with a waiter serving an apple. Around the table are people looking to enjoy that apple – Adam and Eve and the snake, Isaac Newton, William Tell and his son, Snow White and the witch, a couple I haven’t identified, and Bill Gates (though some say it should be Steve Jobs). In a separate post on Kos is Sorensen’s cartoon about the Consumer Financial Destruction Bureau. The tagline is a CFDB official saying, “Remember, the weak call strength ‘crime.’” At the top of a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos from Bill in Portland, Maine is a video from Denmark’s TV2. Several dozen people come into a room, each definable group standing in a square on the floor. There’s us and them, people we trust and people we avoid, the young and old, farmers and city dwellers. The announcer asks people of various characteristics to come forward to stand before a wall for a group photo. Who was the class clown? Who are stepparents? Who believes in life after death? Who has seen a UFO? Who loves to dance? Who has been bullied? Who has bullied? Who has had sex in the last week? Who feels lonely? Who is bisexual? (Only one came forward.) Who admires his courage? Who loves Denmark? That brings everyone forward. “Maybe there’s more that brings us together than we think.”