If I can clothe the naked and don't am I not a robber?

I finished the book Joseph and His Friend by Bayard Taylor, first published in 1870. I bought it in a modern reprint because it was described as early gay literature and has a cover photo of two men, one with his hand on the other’s shoulder. The introduction describes it as the first gay novel, almost 60 years before Radclyfffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness about lesbians in 1928. The story is about Joseph (of course), age 22 and owner of a farm in Pennsylvania. His parents are gone, so his aunt lives with him to take care of the house while he and a hired man do the farm work. His friends begin to hold social events at each other’s homes. At one of these he meets Julia, who is from the city (which city isn’t mentioned). For a while the tone seems to be country good, city bad. Soon Joseph and Julia are engaged. I’ll pause at this point to say the story was pretty good and enjoyable. But it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. The rest of this review will contain spoilers. Starting with: Joseph and Julia get married. So if this is a gay story we have to deal with the wife. That seems possible because Julia reveals another side of herself. During the visit to the country she talked about the insincerity of the city social life. But after the wedding and when development begins to come to the country she quickly brings city social standing ideas to the country. She wants her home to be a splendid showcase to impress the neighbors, a very city thing (and social hierarchy thing). She is aided in this effort because her father is a speculator, always having some investment plan going (in reading about his plans I kept thinking I would never let this guy invest my money) and she is counting on Joseph’s future profits. Joseph begins to despise her. Step one of bypassing the wife seems to be going well. Step two then would be acquiring the friend of the title. That is Philip, who rescues Joseph after an accident. They become quick friends (without actually describing how that happens). And then... nothing. Well, nothing more. Joseph and Philip kiss once and hold hands once. They talk about obeying a higher law and mention manly love. At a critical time Philip does a great deal to help Joseph. But they never do anything to make me think the relationship has passed beyond best friends. They don’t even move in together. So I dispute this is a gay novel. I think the photo on the cover is misleading because the central relationship of the story isn’t between Joseph and Philip, it’s the change in relationship between Joseph and Julia. And nothing between Joseph and Philip has any bearing on it. So, a decent and enjoyable story. It’s just not a gay story. But in 1870 a gay story would have been difficult to get into print. My Sunday movie was Sublime, a 2022 release from Argentina. Manuel and Felipe have been best friends since they were young children. They’re now 16 and have formed a band with Mauro and Fran. Manu writes many of their songs. Manu and his girlfriend Azul are beginning to explore their sexuality, but Azul senses he’s not all that into it. Manu begins to understand the one he is into is Felipe. But that feels scary to Manu. Will professing his feelings destroy their friendship? Will it break up the band as they are preparing for their first big gig? Will Felipe feel the same way? Is Manu okay with Felipe not feeling the same way? This was an enjoyable movie, but not a great one. One reason is I became annoyed with how much the camera focused on the back of Manu’s neck leaving the scene visible over Manu’s shoulders out of focus. Last Sunday Kos of Daily Kos wrote that Democrats were about to cave on the shutdown and get very little for it. The government shutdown started because Democrats saw it as a chance to force concessions from Republicans. The concession this time was to restore subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, without which they would likely double or more. It has been the longest shutdown. In caving the Democrats got a promise of a vote on ACA subsidies in the Senate. Defeating it will be easy. Johnson said if it got to the House he’ll never bring it up for a vote. So all that will do is to identify which Republican senators voted no, a handy tool for next year’s election. Something, but a small something. The surrender is perplexing because the shutdown was hurting Republicans and the nasty guy cited it as a reason why Democrats won big in the recent election. On Monday Oliver Willis of Kos included several senators explaining why they voted to end the shutdown. One said the shutdown wasn’t accomplishing its goals and gave the nasty guy more power to withhold SNAP benefits. Another said there are Republicans willing to support ACA subsidies, ignoring the long Republican history of doing the opposite. Not convincing. Several months ago Niece said because of the cuts in food inspectors she was considering doing her grocery shopping in Canada. In Michigan that’s a viable alternative, though not easy. She hasn’t said if she’s actually doing that. Annie Waldman and Brandon Roberts, in an article written for ProPublica and posted on Kos, reported that there is such a thing as American inspectors at foreign food facilities and due to steep staffing cuts they are doing a lot less inspecting. This is at a time when the US is at its highest dependence on foreign food. Food safety laws are a lot more lax in many other counties. This article mentions a few bad cases. But if a facility wants to sell to America they must follow the demands of American inspectors. Who are cutting back on inspecting. So, Niece, check up on how well Canadian inspectors in other countries are doing their jobs. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reported that the Supreme Court will allow the nasty guy to continue a policy of blocking transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers. The ruling is through the emergency docket and lasts until the case is later heard. The order is not signed, though the three liberal justices dissented with Ketanji Brown Jackson writing the dissent. The conservatives said the government is confirming a historical fact (of being assigned a gender at birth) “without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” Wrong, said the liberals. When a passport marker doesn’t match the appearance of the person there is “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination.”

Transgender and nonbinary people who sued over the policy have reported being sexually assaulted, strip-searched and accused of presenting fake documents at airport security checks, [Jackson] wrote.

Sex markers appeared in passports in the mid 1970s. In 2021 Biden removed documentation requirements for changing a marker and allowed nonbinary people to use an X marker. The Supremes aren’t all bad (though these days are close to it). Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Tuesday Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted an article from NBC News. When marriage equality was granted by the Supremes Kim Davis, a county clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky denied marriage licenses to same sex couples. She served six days in jail. This year, seeing a much more conservative Court and knowing that Clarence Thomas said he wanted to review marriage equality, Davis filed suit to give the Court that chance. After losing appeals in the 6th Circuit Court she turned to the Supremes. They refused to hear the case. A week ago, after the election, Kos wrote that the big gerrymandering effort might backfire on Republicans. Four of the new districts in Texas are Hispanic-majority. In the 2024 election they shifted strongly to the nasty guy. In the 2025 election they shifted strongly away from him. Republicans look like they assumed the shift would be permanent. In yesterday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Russell Berman and Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic about why Democrats caved on the shutdown.

“I came to the conclusion that they were not going to cave on that red line,” Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, one of five Democrats who flipped his vote yesterday after previously backing the shutdown, told us by phone this afternoon. He acknowledged that many of his colleagues disagreed. But when he would press them on whether they believed that Republicans might come around on health care, they could not say. “There really was no evidence to suggest that they would.” ... But even though polling had swung in the Democrats’ favor, it was not enough to move the president or GOP leaders in Congress.

As I had heard put another way: The nasty guy is so much enjoying forcing the poor and working poor to go hungry to ever think he was going to give in, no matter what predictions on next year’s elections say. There are several other quotes about Democrats and Chuck Schumer. In the comments Captain Frogbert posted a quote from Saint Basil of Caesarea, (330-379 c.e.). Here’s a bit of it:

Now, someone who takes a man who is clothed and renders him naked would be termed a robber; but when someone fails to clothe the naked, while he is able to do this, is such a man deserving of any other appellation? The bread which you hold back belongs to the hungry; the coat, which you guard in your locked storage-chests, belongs to the naked; the footwear mouldering in your closet belongs to those without shoes. The silver that you keep hidden in a safe place belongs to the one in need. Thus, however many are those whom you could have provided for, so many are those whom you wrong.

Captain Frogbert added a meme, also by St. Basil:

Hell can’t be made attractive, so the devil makes attractive the road that leads there.

Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon on Kos showing an elephant holding a sign saying “Food Aid” with a line through it. He asks Jesus, “Quick question, do I still have to feed the poor if my Christianity is purely performative?”

Standing up despite the fear

Last Friday, the day before nutrition assistance money didn’t go out Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported that even though the poor will go hungry the nasty guy bragged that he had renovated the Lincoln bathroom (the bathroom by the Lincoln bedroom?). The old décor as he described it was “art deco green tile” – “totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era.” That was replaced with black and white “statuary marble,” – supposedly more appropriate for the time of our great president? Wrote Singer:

The absolute lack of self-awareness it takes to post about fancy renovations to the White House that virtually no Americans will ever see or utilize, while millions of federal workers are not being paid and throngs of Americans are worried about losing the funding they rely upon to feed their families is hard to fathom.

This is after razing the East Wing for a ballroom, gilding the Oval Office, and paving over the Rose Garden.

Trump is obsessed with renovating the White House, turning the historic building into a second version of his tacky Mar-a-Lago resort—a terrifying sign as it’s hard to imagine Trump willingly leaving the building when he’s remade it to be his own.

Oliver Willis of Kos, as part of his series on Explaining the Right, tackled the question: Why Republicans think it’s okay to starve poor people. As before in this series Willis is good at documenting that at least since Reagan Republicans are starving people, repeatedly refusing to fund food assistance programs. Their reasoning can tie them into rhetorical knots, producing nonsensical answers. They oppose food assistance and say getting rid of the social safety net is popular. But that idea is really only popular with billionaires and other hard conservatives. Though Willis is good at documenting what Republicans are doing, he’s not so good at answering the questions he poses and I don’t think he did this time either. So I’ll provide the same answer I usually do. To assert a place at the top of the social hierarchy they oppress those towards the bottom. Causing hunger is another way to do it. I’ve written about Kat Abughazaleh, who is running for Congress in a district near Chicago. She has protested at the ICE detention facility in Broadview, IL and has now been indicted by the Department of Justice for impeding an ICE officer’s work, something about he had to drive slowly to avoid injuring Kat’s fellow “conspirators.” That gave Daily Kos another chance to interview Kat. The interviewer was Alix Breeden. Here’s a bit of what Kat said:

And don't get me wrong, this is scary, just like every time I've been thrown to the ground by ICE, every time I've been tear gassed, every time I've been shot with pepper balls, that's been scary. But standing up for what you believe isn't about doing it without fear. It's doing it despite the fear. And that's what so many people across the country and especially right here in Chicago, have been doing. That's really what the far right is. At its core, it's fear of being irrelevant, of things that are different, fear of losing control, losing power. That is why their messaging depends on fear. It depends on pitting us against each other to distract us from billionaires and oligarchs that are trying to hold this country ransom for their own profit. No matter how scared I or anyone else feels, I think we can take some comfort knowing that they are more scared. They are more afraid, and they know that they are on the wrong side of history. ... I have believed in my values since I was a child. I truly believe that if you don't stand by your values, even to your own detriment, then you have nothing at all. And so there is no unconstitutional attack that can make me stop talking about what is right and stop standing up for others. That's why I'm running for Congress, and that's why I'm going to win on Election Day and in court. ... If they're triggered by the people that they claim to represent, what do you think they'll do to you if you don't stand up to them? ... This is a state terror campaign that is meant to attack the people they have spent years prepping the public to accept as “other.” And this has happened in every authoritarian regime we've seen.

In Monday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Greg Sargent of The New Republic, which I’ll summarize. Admiral Holsey resigned from leading the Southern Command of the military before his term was up. Democrats of the House Armed Services Committee would very much like to get Holsey’s testimony about why he left. Was it because he was uncomfortable about the US rattling sabers off the coast of Venezuela? Congress should want to know. But Republicans don’t want Holsey’s testimony. Zack Beauchamp of Vox discussed Republican antisemitism and the feeling that one gets a lot more likes and clicks when promoting an anti-Jewish agenda than when doing the opposite.

Yet this raises a deeper, and more troubling, question: Why is it that they’ve been able to build such a large audience? Why do “you get a lot more clicks” nowadays if you promote right-coded antisemitism? And why is it that so many of the party’s youth operatives get seduced by neo-Nazism?

Kim Holmes tweeted:

I am one of those people who left Heritage for this reason. And I was Executive Vice President.

This tweet included one from Jonah Goldberg which included an excerpt from The Dispatch Newsletter which says, “Unlike other think tanks, scholars at Heritage [Foundation] are not permitted to publicly deviate from the part line.” Conservatives shouldn’t argue among themselves because it “sows division.” I’ve heard that phrase used a lot to silence dissent. A tweet from David French:

The reason this moment isn't remotely surprising is that the conservative movement (such as it exists) has been refusing to police itself in large part because Trump fails any reasonable character test. He'd be one of the first policed out of the movement. So, instead, all too many people try an untenable middle way – sanctifying Trump and anyone in his inner circle while trying to maintain standards on everyone else. It simply can't work. When your leaders are hateful and nihilistic then your movement becomes hateful and nihilistic.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Jeff Danziger of two generals talking quietly, demonstrating why the military frequently goes along with despots.

First: Why don’t we go public? Second: You mean let everyone know that we think Hegseth is a punk and a moron with no idea what he’s doing, pushing the U.S. toward a war with millions of deaths? First: Nobody would believe us. Second: We’d be fired the next day. First: Goodbye career... Second: Goodbye retirement... First: Hmm... Millions of deaths. Second: Shhhh...

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Sophia McClennen of Salon on the way the nasty guy attacks the minds of Americans.

It isn’t just that the Trump team offers an incessant flood of faulty logic. They also create an environment that makes thinking critically exceptionally difficult. As cognitive scientists Keith Stanovich and Richard West have shown, humans possess two systems of thought: One fast and emotional, the other slow and deliberative. Trump keeps the public in the first mode — triggered, reactive, impulsive. Under Trump, critical reasoning collapses from emotional overload. The threat, then, isn’t just misinformation; it’s misreasoning.

In the comments is a cartoon by Toonerman:

American Mainstream Media kowtows to Trump. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN... They all kiss the Orange one’s ass. There’s no reason to watch any of them. We already have FOX State TV. An authoritarian only needs 1 propaganda network. Fox should be getting worried about all of their kiss ass rivals.

Starvation is apparently not an emergency

Instead of handing out Halloween candy I went to see the movie Blue Moon. It is about Lorenz Hart of the musical team Rogers (music) and Hart (lyrics) who dominated the 1920s and ‘30s. The show is about ninety minutes of the evening of the opening of the musical Oklahoma! in 1943. If you remember much of musical history you know this was the first show by the team Rogers and Hammerstein. Hart leaves watching the show before it ends and goes to Sardi’s, where the after-party is to be held. He talks to the bartender, to the piano player, and to author E. B. White about how bad the lyrics of “Oklahoma-Exclamation-Point” are (“Corn as high as an elephant’s eye”? There are no elephants in the Midwest). There are hints that Hart was gay or bisexual. He can tell that, as bad as he thinks the show is, it will be a success. But not his success. Hart talks to his protegé and dear friend Elizabeth. He does a lot of talking. Eventually the theater crowd comes in and Rogers explains to his dear friend Hart why he turned to Hammerstein as Hart pitches ideas for another show. Along the way we’re introduced to George Roy Hill (who later made The Sting) and a preteen Stephen Sondheim. The real Lorenz Hart was quite short. Ethan Hawke, who played him, isn’t. So through the movie I wondered how tall Hawke is (almost a foot taller than his character) and what kinds of things the director and camera crew had to do to make the actor appear short. I mostly enjoyed the show but this one may be for theater nerds. Hart does a lot of talking and not much happens. I think Hawke will be mentioned as awards season comes around. Margaret Qualley, who played Elizabeth, might also get a mention as a featured actress. The screenplay might get a nod too. Once home after the movie I joined the neighbors around a bonfire. While I was there one child came by. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos, as part of his series on Explaining the Right, tackles the question “Why Republicans want you to die – and fast.” Willis has many examples of Republicans wanting us to die. The current government shutdown because Republicans refuse to restore health care subsidies. Back in the 1960s the creation of Medicare and Medicaid were claimed to open the door to communism. In the early 1990s the health care reform promoted by first lady Hillary Clinton was killed. Obama did get the Affordable Care Act through Congress with a great deal of pushback and long-term efforts to kill it. Add to that the constant lack of any sort of a plan from Republicans. Willis concludes:

Conservatives have devoted themselves to destroying and undermining government assistance on health care while failing to provide any real alternative. The right supports a world where health care is so nonexistent that the alternative is sickness, suffering, and death—and the quicker the better.

I think Willis has provided enough examples showing that Republicans don’t want much of the country to have health care. I don’t think he got to the why. So I’ll add a bit from my own understanding, which is the same as I’ve written previously. Those high in the social hierarchy – which Republicans desperately claim to be – demonstrate their position in society by the oppression they can inflict on those below them. And denying health coverage is as good a tool of oppression as is a much too small minimum wage. Speaking of tools of oppression, Lisa Needham of Kos discussed the nasty guy’s refusal to extend SNAP food support beyond the end of October. There is a $5 billion SNAP contingency fund that should be used in an emergency, though starvation is apparently not an emergency. That’s even though previous government shutdowns didn’t pause SNAP payouts. As is typical the nasty guy and Republicans are blaming Democrats using bogus reasons. Needham included a tweet by lawyer Mike Davis ranting that the people with SNAP benefits are from the ghetto, don’t have jobs, and have too many kids while the program gives benefits to immigrants. Needham responded:

Shhh, nobody tell him that no matter how you slice and dice the government’s own data, white people are the largest racial demographic of SNAP recipients. Definitely don’t tell him that the majority of SNAP recipients who can work do work. Withholding SNAP funds is nothing but abject cruelty toward some of the most vulnerable people in America. Meanwhile, when it comes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons or the military, the cash flows freely. The administration is making its priorities crystal clear.

In Halloween’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted the first verse of “The Raven of the Republic” by David Shuster of Blue Amp Media. It is definitely inspired by that poem by Edgar Allen Poe. Here’s that first verse.

Once upon a term infernal, through a midnight dark, nocturnal, While I watched the news external, trembling at Trump’s fresh uproar— While I pondered, weak and weary, over the state of freedom’s theory, Suddenly there came a query, echoing through the chamber door— “Is this justice still?” I whispered, staring through that oaken door— Answer came: “Not anymore.”

This has a tiny bit more hope than Poe’s original. In the comments is a cartoon by Dennis Goris of a woman trying to pay for groceries. The clerk says, “Your SNAP card has been declined, but you do have a large deposit of thoughts & prayers.” Liberal Jane posed a meme with the message, “No one chooses to need welfare.” Around that are many of the types of people who do need it, including low-wage workers, foster kids, veterans, seniors, and those on disability. A meme posted by exlrrp, who included a link to the full story, says:

Trump is found to have paid for most of the January 5th [sic] protesters. Jack Smith’s new document drop shows that the Trump Campaign PAID for travel, hotels, expenses, and organizing efforts to bring outside radical organizers to the Capitol on January 6th. Trump and his lackeys planned the assault on our Capitol.

A couple more memes posted by exlrrp:

Watching poor people go hungry is a wet dream to MAGA Republicans. They have dreamed of doing this for years. Prove me wrong.

And...

If 42 million people going hungry makes you happy, you might be a bad person. Might? There’s no might. You are a bad person.

Needham wrote “The East Wing never had a chance.” She then listed the steps the nasty guy took to make sure no one opposed his demolition of part of the White House. He asked Meredith O’Rourke, a top fundraisers, to ask for donations from corporations willing to bend a knee. So when the proposed price kept rising, no problem! He found an architectural firm to create plans on the cheap. He had cronies loot the East Wing, emptying it of anything of value, without telling anyone else about what is coming. I’m not sure if “loot” should be replaced with “preserve”... Gabe Gutierrez, Monica Alba, Peter Alexander and Dareh Gregorian of NBC News reported all the stuff was stored under the supervision of the National Park Service and the White House Historical Association. I wonder what it cost him from them to keep their mouths shut. This article also shows a model and position of the ballroom, and it is indeed bigger than the rest of the White House. Avoid the mountain of approvals by gutting the National Capital Planning Commission and installing cronies. Back to those architectural plans. Needham says the problem is there are multiple sets. Is the ballroom to hold 650 people or 1350? Another source (that I mentioned) said it would hold 999. One rendering appears to have a stairway to nowhere. So how can construction begin if he hasn’t definitely decided on one set of plans? Is construction subject to his daily whims? Does he not care about quality, but only about how much gold is used to decorate the surfaces? In Saturday’s pundit roundup Dworkin included a pair of tweets from Aaron Rupar. The first:

Kristi Noem: “We will continue to do this work until there are no longer anybody in our communities that's here illegally.”

Rupar’s response:

note how the messaging has shifting from "we're targeting criminals" to "we're deporting everyone"

In the comments is a meme from Seth Myers discussing the nasty guy:

If you take a dementia test and think it’s an IQ test, then I’m sorry to say you failed both the IQ test and the dementia test.

And a meme by David Pakman, showing Putin and Xi:

How does Trump fall for the same playbook every time, where an authoritarian mildly praises him, completely plays him, and he comes away thinking he “won” even though he got manipulated?

He falls for it every time because he hasn’t figured out he’s been played. He’s satisfied with the mild praise. His minions are also satisfied with the mild praise, also haven’t figured he’s been played, or won’t contradict him. Alan Austin of the Kos community posted an edited version of an article published on Monday in Independent Australia.

Federal U.S. debt has just clicked over 38 trillion dollars for the first time, bringing total borrowings in Trump’s second term to an eye-watering $1.81 trillion. Most of this has been added since the so-called Department of Government Efficiency ostensibly cut wasteful spending in order to reduce the deficits and the debt. One trillion dollars was added in just eight weeks in August and September, by far the deepest peacetime increase anywhere in the world.

Interest paid on that dept in the fiscal year just ended is reported (though maybe not accurately) to be $1,218.5 billion. Which is also $1.2185 trillion. Paying interest on all that debt is above a trillion a year. So how did a trillion get spent in eight weeks?

Fraud and theft are rampant now Congress refuses to monitor White House decisions, Trump has fired the inspectors general, and the Supreme Court has given Trump monarchic powers.

We know about the $40 billion currency swap with Argentina, which didn’t get Congressional approval (and Congress doesn’t seem to care). How much has been handed out in similar payments to other people? How much has been given to Putin? We probably won’t know until the nasty guy vacates the Oval Office.

The squeeze is more important than the juice

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down. An Associated Press article posted to Daily Kos has more details. The reason for the shutdown is it was defunded by Congress. The CPB has announced its schedule for an orderly shutdown. The CPB has been funded for 58 years. Some of the money it gets from the government goes to PBS and NPR, but most of its funding directly supports more than 1,500 local public radio and television stations around the country (later the article says there are 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations, though not all public radio stations are NPR). The stations in small communities may have to close. In many of these places their local public station is their only source of news (or at least unbiased news). The closure is a direct result of the nasty guy targeting public media, which he claims has a liberal bias, views opposite of what he says the US should proclaim. Though funding for CPB had been approved and signed by the nasty guy earlier this year he demanded Congress overturn that earlier allocation. And Congress did. I’ve also mentioned a couple times that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has modified its exhibit on US presidents to remove mention of the nasty guy’s two impeachments. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the details. And yes, this is a part of the nasty guy rewriting history so that he appears to be a complete success. The museum says it removed mention of the impeachments because the whole section hadn’t been updated since 2008 and they aren’t able to update it all – except it had been updated in 2021 to add the impeachments. A couple stories about more opportunities of corruption and feeding a bloated ego. First, Kos of Kos discussed the trade deals various countries are making to avoid the nasty guy’s tariffs. The deals struck so far seem to have a common theme.

President Donald Trump is addicted to the fanfare of announcing his trade “deals,” but he doesn’t care about the details or what happens afterward. As trade policy expert William Reinsch told the Washington Monthly, “For Trump, the squeeze is more important than the juice.” That’s a powerful character flaw for other nations to exploit. Take, for instance, the European Union. Trump has been touting a new “deal” with the E.U. that’s more framework than substance. But again, he doesn’t care—it’s all about the flashy toplines. Among them: The E.U. will supposedly buy $250 billion worth of U.S. energy imports per year, for the next three years. That’s over three times what the E.U. imported last year from the U.S. However, with this deal, there’s no binding commitment, no timeline, no enforcement mechanism. It’s little more than a press-release number designed to impress. It’s not a real plan, just a fantasy dressed up as a win.

That huge amount of energy the EU has agreed to import is much larger than the EU could actually use and much larger than US producers could supply. So it won’t happen. And there is no legal requirement for it to happen. That the nasty guy got his deal is the only thing that matters. And the only ones that don’t see through the charade are the MAGA cultists. Second, Kos discussed the nasty guy’s fixation on the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama got one, he should too. And foreign leaders are using that to manipulate him. While only certain people can nominate someone for the Peace Prize the list includes government officials of any country, university professors, and members of the League for Peace. And they can nominate anyone. Which means a nomination has very little value. And from the nasty guy’s comments over the last few years he is equating being nominated with winning. So foreign leaders are buttering him up by saying they have or will nominate him for the prize he covets. Kos lists the reasons why the nasty guy won’t get the Peace Prize:

He bombed Iran. He encouraged ethnic cleansing in Gaza. He’s currently threatening nuclear war against Russia. He sanctioned International Criminal Court judges. He trashed the United Nations. He gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, which will cause millions of avoidable deaths, according to a study by The Lancet. And somehow this is a man promoting “fraternity between nations”? Trump wants the world to see him as a peacemaker. But he’s never created peace—only chaos. And no amount of flattery from influence-seeking foreign leaders will change that.

Emily Singer of Kos reported that Jeffrey Epstein assistant Ghislaine Maxwell had a two-day interview with someone from the Department of Justice, likely saying a lot of things the nasty guy wants her to say (but legally useless). She is now urging the nasty guy to pardon her. Shortly after the interview she was taken from a Florida prison known for its poor conditions and placed in a comfy minimum security prison in Texas. Kos discussed the view of government held by conservative citizens. If a program personally helps them it’s good and should be kept. Otherwise, get rid of it. Kos uses the Postal Service to demonstrate a point. One mail carrier’s route in rural Nebraska is 150 miles for 334 delivery points. That route bleeds money. If the Postal Service is privatized this route would be dropped. It isn’t profitable.

But the government isn’t supposed to be profitable. It’s supposed to serve the common good, even when that good is a tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere.

Kos noted “conservatives get off on the suffering of people who aren’t like them.” Liberals believe in a basic social obligation, “especially when it costs us something.”

The social contract isn’t a vending machine for personal convenience; it’s a mutual agreement that binds a nation of people together, one that says we all pitch in so that no one—no matter where they live—falls through the cracks. It’s a recognition that the government is the tool we use to express collective values, not individual preferences. When conservatives start picking and choosing what parts of society are worth funding based solely on their own needs, they’re not just being selfish. They’re breaking the very foundation that holds this country together.

jasciu of the Kos community wrote:

Something strange is happening in Japan—not with its politics or its technology, but with its spirit. Quietly and without fanfare, the country appears to be opting out of the global race for growth. Its economy is stagnant, its birth rate declining, its appetite for innovation dulled. But more striking than the numbers is the cultural shift behind them. Young Japanese are not merely failing to strive—they are choosing not to. They are working fewer hours, skipping promotions, and living modestly. They are renting instead of buying, saving rather than investing, and increasingly uninterested in romantic or sexual relationships. To Western economists, this is deeply troubling. To politicians, it’s a puzzle. To the people living it—it may not be a problem at all. What if this isn’t economic malaise, but existential clarity?

I pause a moment to say while I am very much intrigued by what the author wrote, the article has no links to sources. Japan was a postwar dynamo. I worked in the auto industry during the 1980s (and into the 2000s) when the auto companies struggled to respond to Japan’s economic power. Then Japan’s asset bubble burst in the 1990s, leading to the “lost decades.”

Those who grew up amid collapse and uncertainty no longer believe in ambition as a path to security. Many simply do not want what their parents wanted. And if they do, they no longer believe it's attainable through hard work alone. The response has not been revolution or despair—but resignation.

And that appears to be a choice. Are we being authentic to ourselves? Are we chasing after things because we want them or because our culture tells us we’re supposed to want them? Answering that question is a moment of honesty. Perhaps we should not measure America by the Gross Domestic Product. Perhaps we should describe our success through a Gross National Happiness index as Bhutan does. Or adopt New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget that spends towards mental health, child poverty, and sustainability. The American Dream has equated freedom with consumption. Freedom can also mean stop consuming and find dignity in simplicity. While in the auto industry I applied for a management position once and didn’t get it. I saw how my boss was treated and was glad it wasn’t me. I enjoyed my work (though got tired of the office games) and felt I had enough to live as I wanted. A low-desire society has perils. Losing a taste for risk may also mean losing the capacity to adapt. A population that declines too quickly can risk the social safety net with too few workers to support the retirees. And there is a need to distinguish low desire as enlightenment from depression and despair. Japan prompts us to ask whether we truly always want more or can we tell if we have enough? A stop in growth may mean a society is now asking different questions.