Doom Report (Week 26: It's the Economy, Stupid)

I’ve often said that there’s nothing wrong with the concept of Communism; it’s just the implementations that tend to go badly.  It turns out that implementing communism in a pure form is basically an impossibility, because people are gonna people, and they will always pervert the system.

We, as good old capitalist Americans, can easily see this.  We even get to point to the fall of the Soviet Union, and the conversion of China to an at least partially capitalist system, and say “look! they failed—we were right all along.”  But you also have to consider that it’s difficult to get a clear picture of a system that you’re currently submersed in, just like Stephen Hawking’s goldfish trying to formulate scientific laws about objects moving outside their bowls.  The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that implementations of capitalism can also never be pure, and they too may inevitably fail.  If you hear people talking about “late-stage capitalism,” this is what they mean.  Critics of the term say it’s impossible to know whether capitalism is actually on its last legs, but it seems pretty clear to me that the American implementation of it, at least, is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

This was the topic of The Weekly Show this week, where Jon Stewart interviews two economists, Clara Mattei and James Robinson.  Throughout the interview, it becomes clear that Mattei is quite liberal, and Robinson is a secret conservative.  But the initial discussion about the capital class vs the working class—or, as some call them, makers and takers—is what really drew me in.  Because we don’t live in a pure expression of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations any more than the Soviets lived in a pure expression of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  There is no “free market” in America, as Jon is quite fond of pointing out (and does so again quite articulately here).  There are earners and owners (which feels a bit more charitable than “makers and takers” to me), and the government intervenes on behalf of the owners constantly, while intervention on behalf of the earners is decried as socialism and moral hazard.

And this, it seems to me, is where the system must inevitably fall apart.  Because the owners have already been so successful at extracting all the wealth from the earners—as Mattei reminds us at one point, “three people own more than 150 million Americans”—that soon there will be no more wealth to extract, and no more earners to extract it from.  If the workers can’t make a living and can’t get sufficient healthcare, it sure does seem like we’re headed for a future shortage of workers.

Another thing they talk about is economic growth, and they point out that “capital accumulation, which is economic growth—we tend to call it economic growth because it sounds less political; it sounds more kind of neutral.”  And this dovetails nicely with my own thoughts from a year and a half ago when I wrote about vibecession.  All the economic indicators show that our economy is booming, because it is ... for the ultra-wealthy.  See, the problem with our traditional economic indicators is, they measure dollars.  If they were somehow measuring people, then the very tiny minority of billionaires would be statistically insignificant next to the rest of us.  But in terms of raw dollars, the growing inequality in our society means that the ultra-wealthy overwhelm the lower and middle classes (put together, even).  So the economic growth indicators can seem positive even while the majority of the people are starving.  In my vibecession post, I posited that we should probably start using different economic indicators.  So far, no luck on that.

Another topic essayed by Stewart and his guests is austerity.  And, as they point out, “austerity” always means austerity for the workers: no one ever seems to propose that the billionaires suffer any austerity.  Worse, austerity often means helping the capital class, because that supposedly stimulates the economy.  Forget the fact that nearly fifty years of trying trickle-down/supply-side economics has never worked.  Seriously: not once, in fifty years.  What other philosophy has failed so blatantly for so long and yet people still keep doing it?  And it doesn’t help that the capital class has managed to cloak its deeds in increasingly complex terms.  So when government passes all these laws and rules about “depreciations” and “capital gains” and “derivatives” (etc etc ad nauseum), it’s often difficult for the working class to figure out how badly they’re getting screwed.  This has nothing to do with the owners being smarter than the earners, of course; it’s just that the owners have nothing better to do than sit around and invent more and more byzantine financial instruments.  Meanwhile, the earners have actual work to do: they don’t have time to try and understand all this investment bullshit.

The contrast between the two economists is extreme, and in many ways Jon is balanced between them.  While he agrees with Clara on most points, he thinks her alternatives to capitalism (such as those practiced by native peoples) are far too idealistic, and that her ideas can’t scale to an economy of our size.  And he’s probably right.  But James goes too far in the other direction.  I called him a “secret conservative” because he starts out agreeing with Jon—and even Clara, to a certain extent—and waits about half an hour (almost exactly halfway through the interview) to drop this gem:

And I think, like—I’m not denying anything that Clara says—but I think if you think about the big picture, you know, the United States has actually been better at solving those sort of problems than Nigeria, or Colombia, or any poor country in the world has been.  Any country in the world has elites that want to rig the game in their favor.  And boy, have they been more successful in Colombia, you know, than they have in the United States.  I think that’s the big picture.  You know, and, in fact, you know, there are all these problems.  I agree.  But if you look at the last 100, 150 years, yeah, you have to fight.  You have to fight for your rights.  You have to fight for wages.  You have to fight to get the government to pay attention to you.  But that fight has been much more successful for ordinary people in the United States than it has in Colombia.  And I guess that’s what I said here.

In other words, James is starting out from the perspective that “America’s not doing so bad” ...  which is just demonstrably untrue.  And his “proof” is logically unsound—in fact, in the clip, you can hear (and see) Clara snort and say “of course.”  Because “other places suck worse” is not proof that it doesn’t suck here.  “Sucks less” is a far cry from “doesn’t suck,” and the inability of people to distinguish between those two never ceases to amaze me.

But James really proves his perspective is suspect when he tries to sell us this line about Elon Musk:

What was it that drove him to take over this whole DOGE?  He was not trying to make money.  He actually lost enormous amounts of money.  He was doing it because he’s a libertarian, because he’s ideologically driven to oppose anything the government does, I think.

And, stunningly, neither Jon nor Clara calls him on this bullshit.  He wasn’t trying to make money?  I suppose it was just coincidence, then, that he just happened to quash 65 federal investigations into his companies, potentially saving him $2 billion in fines and liabilities? or that he used his time in the government to try to steal a $2 billion contract from Verizon and to award himself over $13 billion in Space Force contracts?  Somehow I think he’s coming out okay in the long run ...  Not to mention, “he lost money doing it”—even if that were true (which I doubt: see previous points)—is only relevant if Musk understood that he was going to lose money before he started DOGE.  Now, given everything that we all now know about President Musk (and we know way more than we ever wanted to, I’m sure we can all agree), do we honestly think that he said to himself “this is going to cost me a bunch of money, but I’m going to do it anyway, because of my principles!”?  Or do we think it more likely that, because he is a complete narcissist, it never even occurred to him that anyone would come to hate him so much that it might cost him money?  I refer you to the interview where Musk was pissed at Tim Walz for saying he had started watching the Tesla stock price drop to add a little pick-me-up to his day.  Listen to what he says there: the only explanation he can come up with as to why someone might be pleased to see his company’s stock in the toilet is that they must be “evil.”  He literally can’t think of any other reason.  But that guy predicted that cutting over three-quarters of a million jobs would get people upset at him?  Yeah, right.

So, it was a great show about our economy, and that was after Stewart interviewed Kyla Scanlon on Monday’s Daily Show; her new book In This Economy? is apparently a great resource for understanding economics at a very accessible level.  And you know what the one thing is that gets pointed out in both interviews?  The reason the working class is always the one that gets screwed is because they don’t have lobbyists.  Which is depressing enough.  But the real bombshell Scanlon dropped was this one, when Jon asked her why we can’t choose demand-side solutions vs supply-side ones:

Scanlon: It’s a tough sell, politically.  Like, it’s a tough narrative.
Stewart: So this is a political problem, not an economic problem?
Scanlon: Most economic problems are political problems, at the end of the day, yeah.
Stewart: That’s—but they never say that.
Scanlon: Why would they?

I can’t think of a more succinct summary of our system (both economic and otherwise).

Other things you need to know this week:

• On Tuesday’s Daily Show, Nick Offerman does his first “In My Opinion” segment, and he talks about our National Parks.  In regards to Trump’s plan to charge foreigners more to visit the parks, which is estimated to bring in about $90 million, Nick had this response: “So let me get this straight, Mr. President: you cut 267 million to get back 90 million?  Now, I’m no mathematician, but I believe that’s called ‘shitting the bed’.”  Definitely worth the watch.

• In this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich tries out the line that Trump is the Deep State.  Despite bringing a few receipts, I’m not sure that message is going to break through.  Still, I gotta respect the hustle.
• It’s a longer video, but if you want a really articulate—and also hilarious—summary of the Trump-Epstein debacle, Josh Johnson has you covered.

I wish I had a note of hope to end on, but in reality the item I must leave you with is one of defeat.  Stephen Colbert announced this week that The Late Show has been cancelled by Paramount.  He’ll finish out his contract through May of next year, then the entire show will be dismantled.  Now, Paramount is claiming that their reasons are strictly financial, but it sure does seem related to Paramount’s decision to pay (at least) $16 million to settle a meritless lawsuit, a move that many (including Colbert himself) called a bribe.  Certainly Adam Kinzinger thinks the two are related.  We may never know, and I certainly hope Colbert finds a new outlet, but this is not particularly encouraging for an informed populace.  The Daily Show is also owned by Paramount, so they could be next on the chopping block, and honestly, no one is safe.  Brian Tyler Cohen has started pointing out that YouTube could shut off access to his videos at any time, and Google is certainly pro-Trump these days.  Jimmy Kimmel’s bosses at Disney have already showed a predilection to doing as Trump asks, and the jury is still out on Warner Bros (owners of HBO Max and consequently Last Week Tonight).  Once upon a time, you could only trust the big corporations when it came to accurate news; now we’re entering a time when you can only trust anyone else.  And, since Joe-Blow-with-a-blog could be a MAGA nutjob just as easily as a crusader for truth, you can’t really trust them either.

They used to say “democracy dies in darkness,” but then the Washington Post got bought by Jeff Bezos.  Now it seems we’ve passed democracy’s twilight and are moving into dusk.  I don’t think we’ll miss these things until they’re gone—isn’t that always the way?—but I feel pretty confident we will miss them.  So let’s make the most of Colbert while we still have him.  The future is looking kind of dim.

Doom Report (Week 25: You Got a Bit of Epstein Conspiracy Slop on You There)

So, obviously the biggest news this week was the Trump regime suddenly proclaiming that, in fact, there are no Epstein files.  Now, on the one hand, this is more amusing than newsworthy: the Epstein files are a conspiracy theory invented by right-wing nutjobs, and now many of those right-wing nutjobs are in charge of the government, and they’ve kind of been forced to admit that there are no Epstein files, and so the right-wing nutjobs who didn’t get into the government are now convinced they’ve been co-opted by the Deep State or some such twaddle.  So, it’s a bit of cosmic irony to hear people like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino—who, in both cases, derive their qualifications to run the FBI from their experience doing MAGA podcasts—go from spewing this nonsense to now having to try to quash it.  But, I gotta tell ya: I never belived there were any Epstein files ... until Trump said there weren’t any Epstein files, and now I know they exist.  Or, if you’d like to hear that put with more gravitas (and some legal perspective), you can listen to Brian Tyler Cohen and his frequent guest, litigator Mark Elias.  It’s weird times we live in.

And, also, the doom predicted in last week’s report has now come to pass: the Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery is now law.  The Daily Show has a good summation of the consequences, and Christopher Titus summed it up rather succinctly as “Republicans kill people”.

Sadly, I have no time to inform you further, or depress you further (which at this point is just redundant), but I will point out that this week’s Strict Scrutiny contains this gem:

So, I know a lot of folks saw—and we have mentioned—the eyepopping statistic that political scientist Adam Bonica compiled a week or so ago, finding that from May 1st to June 23rd, federal district courts ruled against the Trump administration 94% of the time, and the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration the same 94% of the time.  Just, like, pretty stunning data.  And, look: there are some caveats to the data, in that the administration only asked the Supreme Court to take up a small subset of the cases that they lost, ones where they thought they could make some kind of procedural argument that they could notch a win on.  But it’s still, like, that track record and this big win at CASA is hugely emboldening.

Because that’s just what we needed: Trump to be emboldened.  He was such the shy wallflower before.

In terms of hope, you’ll have to settle for something aspirational I happened to catch from an unusual source this week.  While listening to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, I was struck by something said by guest Jan Jensen, college women’s basketball coach who has mentored many WNBA stars, including Caitlin Clark (jump to about 23:35 for the quote):

I believe the best thing in life is, if you can get a team—I’d like to think if you can get a society—to be celebrators of each other, that’s the hardest thing.

It surely must be the hardest thing, but just the concept of our society becoming celebrators of each other is quite encouraging.  I think we might have to kick a few people out first, but surprisingly few.  At least I continue to believe that to be true.

Doom Report (Week 24: Another Rough Week)

Everyone else has come up with their funny takes on the ridiculous name of the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—from the “One Big Ugly Bill,” which just feels lazy, to the “One Big Bullshit Bill,” which is only mildly better, to ever more convoluted wordplay—but so far I haven’t personally settled on one.  How about ... the “Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery”?  What—too much?

Well, in case you still don’t have sufficient concept of just how bad this will be, Hank Green has a good explainer on its financial impact, while John Oliver on Last Week Tonight explains the rest in his inimitably entertaining fashion.  Meanwhile, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse on the Coffee Klatch this week give even more context, including making the point that the (at least!) 11 million people who will lose access to Medicaid won’t actually lose it until after the next mid-terms, which is a level of political cynicism that’s shocking even in today’s climate.

And, since this bill will make ICE’s budget bigger than the entire military of Israel (and, excepting only 15, every other country in the world too), Jesse Thorn recently repeated his call to donate to Al Otro Lado, which I originally reported on in Week -4.  Especially if you both feel helpless to effect any change and also have some money to spare, please consider donating.  It could mean the difference in people getting lawyers or being held in concentration camps.

On Election Profit Makers this week (jump to around 28:45 for the exact quote), David Rees used the OBBB as the backdrop to the the juxtaposition of Mamdani winning in NYC and Jeff Bezos’ conspicuous-consumption wedding.  It’s quite a contrast between the class strata in our country.  As David put it:

... this budget is the perfect document that kind of summarizes, or codifies, the vibes that we get when we see a socialist win the primary in New York and then we see Oprah Winfrey and Ivanka Trump having fun at a foam party in Venice ...

It’s a startling mental image, for sure, and reminds us that Left and Right is not nearly so interesting a division in our country as Ultra-Rich and Working Class.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Be sure to check out the Zeteo panel on the deportations in LA.  Mehdi Hasan hosts Brian Tyler Cohen, Van Lathan, and LA city councilwoman Nithya Raman.  Among many others, Mehdi’s comment on masked ICE agents is quite incisive: “Am I the only one who thinks it’s absolutely insane and also weirdly hilarious that the people who screamed about not wanting to wear masks for 5 years are now wearing masks all the time?”

• Speaking of masks, Spencer from Legal Eagle does a deep dive on the legality of mask-wearing by law enforcement.

• Also on Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan interviews Brad Lander about the attempts to smear Zohran Mamdani with charges of antisemitism.

• Michael Ian Black (now of the American Have I Got News for You) had a great video this week on the Daily Beast where he explains the bizarre position that MAGA has put us liberals in: while we want to be the iconoclasts, now we’re reduced to defending the institutions: USAID, the IRS, the Post Office, etc.  Weirdly, we’ve become the conservatives.

Not a whole lot of room for hope this week, sadly.  The best I can muster is this: in the Zeteo video I mention above, Van points out:

We’re living in times of kidnappings and gulags.  We’re living in times of bodily autonomy being gone.  We’re living in genocidal times.  We’re living living in times of blockades and starvations ...

And, while it’s not a direct response to the above, I can’t help but find this exchange between Mehdi and BTC a useful and inspiring counterpoint:

MH: What advice are you giving them when you’re doing your monologues, when you’re interviewing people?  What do you
want them to hear?
BTC: Fight, fight, fight, fight.

Good advice, if difficult to follow.  Still, one could do worse than to donate to Al Otro Lado, and prepare to fight.

Doom Report (Week 23: A New Hope)

When I was a kid, my mother told me the story of King Canute.  Now, the actual story is that the king’s advisors kept flattering him and telling him that he could command anyone (and anything) in his kingdom, and he was trying to teach them a lesson by showing them otherwise.  But often the story gets repeated that the king himself was delusional and thought he was capable of commanding anything.  Either way, the bulk of the story is about the king going down to the ocean and commanding the waves to stop.  Which, of course, they don’t.  And then, depending on which version of the story you’re getting, either the advisors feel foolish and chastened, or the king gets a lesson in humility.  Now, I honestly can’t recall which version my mother told to me as a child, but it was the delusional king version that sprang to my mind when I heard about Trump saying that Israel was not going to drop any more bombs on Iran.  As The Guardian explained:

After a phone conversation with Netanyahu, Trump returned to the platform [Truth Social] to announce: “ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran.  All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran.  Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect!”

Minutes later, explosions were reported by Iranian media around Tehran and in the north of the country.

Because, yeah, dude: the waves are not going to stop for you.  Dumbass.

The best explainer videos on the Iran situation I’ve seen are Seth Meyer’s A Closer Look segment early in the week, and then the Even More News crew’s take from mid-week.  If you prefer to learn about whether or not Trump’s actions were legal (spoiler alert: they were not), try Legal Eagle, where Spencer will explain the whole thing for you in quite entertaining fashion.

And, because we live in the worst timeline, there were not one but two emergency episodes from Strict Scrutiny this week.  The thing that is always the most frustrating to me about the Supreme Court is that they do things now that they obviously would never do if there was a Democrat in the White House.  In some cases, things that they literally already refused to do when Biden was President.  But no point listening to me blather on it about it: Kate, Melissa, and Leah explain it so much better than I ever could.  They cover the decision against Planned Parenthood on Thursday and the decision limiting nationwide injunctions on Friday.  And also a few thoughts on how Amy Coney Barrett is not the moderate that many (including me, back in Week -4) had opined she might be—in restrospect, that was a melange of foolish hopefulness and naïvete.

BUT! I’m actually going to leave you with two pieces of hope this week.  First of all, remember the first person Trump’s regime disappeared for having opinions?  I know it’s difficult, as there have been so many by this point, but cast your mind back to Week 8, and the disappearing of Mahmoud Khalil.  ICE agents kidnapped him right in front of his 8-months-pregnant wife and renditioned him from New York to Louisiana.  And they’ve kept him there for the intervening fifteen weeks, even refusing his request to attend the birth of his first child.  But, this week, finally, a judge ordered him released.  The wheels of justice move ever so slowly, but they do move.

And the second piece of hope?  The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was won this week, not by former governor (and current sex pest) Andrew Cuomo, despite spending nearly $25 million dollars and gaining the backing of many high-level Democratic leaders who really should have known better.  No, the Democratic primary was won by a self-described Democratic Socialist, a man born in Africa of Indian and Indian-American parents, a man who, should he win the general election, will be the city’s first South Asian mayor, first Muslim mayor, and youngest mayor in over a century: Zohran Mamdani.  And there’s a very good chance he will win the general—in normal times, the winner of the Democratic primary could just be assumed to be the next mayor, but in this election both disgraced former governor Cuomo (found to have sexually assaulted 13 employees by a state investigation) and disgraced current mayor Eric Adams (indicted by the federal government for bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy to solicit contributions from foreign nationals) have announced their intention to run as independents, and the days when such things were disqualifying for public office are long behind us.  So we should not count our chickens before they’re hatched, but it’s a hopeful sign nonetheless.  And we know what a good thing it is by the reactions of the protectors of the status quo.  The crazy right-wing nutjobs are proclaiming that Mamdani is a Communist who will usher in Sharia law, without understanding (or perhaps caring) about the oxymoronic nature of such claims.  But the establishment Democrats are just as panicky.  As Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse put it in this week’s Coffee Klatch:

Reich: They’re worried about somebody like AOC, or, you know, Mamdani, or Bernie Sanders for that matter—anybody who actually is talking about what’s happened to the economy and why—
Lofthouse: And who refuses to take corporate dollars and who is supremely authentic—
Reich: And who wants to raise taxes on big corporations and the wealthy in order to pay for what people need instead of doing the opposite, which is what Trump is doing ... So obviously corporate Democrats are worried.  Good.
Lofthouse: Good.

And, I have to tell you: any time the leaders of both sides hate a candidate, you can bet your ass that that’s a candidate of the people.  Check out Zeteo’s announcement of Mamdani’s win for some trenchant analysis.

So we may be well on our way to an actually progressive mayor of New York, one who believes in providing free services to its residents and favoring people interests over corporate interests.  And, after some of the mayors they’ve had to suffer through up till now—from Giuliani to Adams—it should be a welcome change.

Doom Report (Week 22: There Seems to Be No End to the Snippets)

In 1980, the year that Donald Trump turned 34, a group named Vince Vance and the Valiants released a song called “Bomb Iran.”  A Weird-Al-style parody of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” (except of course Weird Al would never record a song this mean-spirited), it had its moment in the sun, and some people seemed to enjoy it a bit too much.  We can’t say for sure, obviously, but somehow I imagine that Donald Trump was one of those people.  And now, 45 years later, he’s finally achieved that dream.  Heaven help us all.

So, this is, perhaps, how World War III begins.  On the run up to this armageddon-adjacent move, Trump was playing very coy.  In one interview, he said:

I mean, you don’t know that I’m going to even do it.  You don’t know.  I may do it.  I may not do it.  I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.

Various punch lines have been attached to this clip, the most common being “nobody knows what you’re going to do ... including you.”  Or, in the Seth Meyers A Closer Look segment I linked to, Seth retorted “Yeah: and that’s bad.”  But no one seems to have had my reaction, which was: no, of course the reporter doesn’t know what you’re going to do—that’s why she’s asking you, you moron!  I agree it’s frustrating that Trump is treating World War III like a commercial break cliffhanger, but it’s also irksome that he still doesn’t seem to understand how press conferences work.

And this news has not been without controversy.  First and foremost, it seems to contradict everything Trump has been saying about war in the Middle East for the past 20 years or so.  (If you need a refresher on exactly what that was, Brian Tyler Cohen has a montage for you.)  Secondly, there is zero evidence that Iran is actually any closer to getting nukes now than it has been for the past 30 years; Jon Stewart eviscerates Netanyahu’s constant wolf-crying in a Daily Show episode from all the way back on Monday, not to mention Tulsi Gabbard testifying that Iran wasn’t close, only to have Trump proclaim that he knew better than her (although where he’s getting this information if it’s not from his intelligence experts is a bit unclear).  And even some of the most loyalist MAGA-ites have been making rumblings: Marjorie Taylor Greene opposed the move, and Tucker Carlson even took Ted Cruz to task in a completely hilarious interview.  (If you want to see a fun take on Tucker and Ted’s little spat, I recommend the Even More News crew’s.)

But the most infuriating thing is that we had a deal with Iran: Obama made it ten years ago.  But then Trump blew it up because it was something that Obama had done, and we never made a new one.  Jon Stewart covers this very well in this week’s Weekly Show with guests Christiane Amanpour from CNN (whose father was Iranian) and Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor under Obama.  Not to mention that the entire reason Iran hates the US is that we overthrew their democracy way back in 1953.  We’ve been trying to topple the government we directly caused to come to power ever since, and we’ve never succeeded ... not there, and, realistically, not anywhere else either.  TIME has a good article outlining why this current effort will also fail.

But that, of course, is logic, and common sense, and understanding of history, none of which our current president has.  He announced the bombing via social media (because of course he did) and ended with an all caps screed that “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”  The cognitive dissonance is palpable.  As Mehdi Hasan said in his interview of Iran expert Trita Parsi:

I mean, Trump is posting tonight on his post “now is the time for peace,” which is a typically Orwellian American imperialistic position: we get to bomb you, and then say now is the time for peace.

But I suppose this is what bullies do.

Other things you need to know this week:

• There were no shortage of people contrasting Trump’s very sad birthday parade with the No Kings Day protests; probably Seth Meyers provides the best one on A Closer Look.

• Some More News had a great explainer video on ICE: its history, and why it’s so problematic.

• The Supreme Court banned gender-affirming care in Tennessee; the ladies of Strict Scrutiny had an emergency mid-week episode to discuss the decision and its repercussions.

• Hank Green goes into a rabbithole of how Congress sneakily uses budget reconcilation to change laws, using an actual example in Trump’s idiotically named budget bill, still currently in the Senate.

Hope is a precious resource right now, so I think you’ll have to settle for schadenfreude this week.  As BTC puts it in his video title, “Mike Lindell hit with multi-million dollar defamation judgment.”  If you ever got tired of the My Pillow guy blathering on about all the evidence he had of the fraud in the voting machines, this may put a smile on your face.

I hope that we don’t proceed further down the path to World War III.  Not holding my breath on it, but we can hope.  Till next week.

Doom Report (Week 21: Third-World Lawlessness)

So our wannabe dictator has decided that you should not look over there, where Elon Musk is calling him a pedophile, but rather over here, where people are protesting the insanity of ICE rounding up, not criminals, but day laborers, farm workers, people showing up for court dates, and even elementary school children.  How dare people assemble peacefully to object to the government trying to arrest children! 

Now, since “here” in this case is the actual city where I actually live, I’ve chosen to take this personally.  Oh, not because of the ICE raids: it’s hard to feel singled out on that count when they’re shutting down meat packing plants in Nebraska and roofing companies in Florida.  And not because of the military either: while LA may be the first, it certainly won’t be the last, and anyway they’re ripping up the roads in DC even as I’m typing this.  Is it because they threatened to arrest my governor, or because they manhandled and handcuffed my senator, throwing him to the floor because he tried to ask a question at a press conference where noted dog-murderer Kristi Noem had just said that homeland security had come to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of its mayor?  Nope—although those things are very bad.  No, I take it personally because they are creating the crisis they are supposedly responding to.

I hear people like Robert Reich and Jimmy Kimmel say “there is no crisis here.”  But that’s not true.  There’s a crisis now, because Trump and his cronies—in particular Stephen Miller—made damned sure there was one.  They sent in the National Guard without the permission of—over the express objections of, even—the governor, for which they were already on shaky legal ground, and then threw in some Marines just for fun.  The majority of them have nothing to do, and even nowhere to sleep.  Now reporters are getting shot with rubber bullets (and be sure to watch the left side of the screen to see the cop deliberately turn to shoot her), and government SUVs are threatening to run people over to elicit reactions of “violence” from the surrounding crowd.  The President of the country is publishing screeds about arresting everyone wearing a mask while the majority of mask-wearers are the ICE agents people were protesting in the first place.  And, as Jimmy Kimmel said: “Putting out a fire you purposefully start doesn’t make you a firefighter: it makes you an arsonist with a hose.”  Even Hank Green—typically known for videos about science, not politics—had this insight:

This is a situation that inevitably will create conflict.  And in my opinion this is a situation that is intended to create conflict.

(You should probably watch the whole video.  It gives a really incisive overview of the strategic aims of Trump & Vance.)

Trump said at Fort Bragg that what’s happening in California is “invasion and Third-World lawlessness”—well, it sure is, because he’s invaded us, just like a Third-World tinpot dictator.  And, even after all that, the real situation is still not as bad as he’d like us to believe.  One of my personaal heroes, Lou Wilson, is also Kimmel’s announcer, and he, as Jimmy put it, “went downtown today [June 12th] where all hell isn’t breaking loose” and showcased the contrast between the peaceful protesters and the military presence.  As Lou put it when talking about the Marines, “the general vibe I get from them is boredom and a sense of ‘what are we doing here’.”  The crowd Lou showed was pretty tame, since it was a lull in the protests; if you’d like to see a bit more active scene, Brian Tyler Cohen (who, like Kimmel, Lou Wilson, and most of the Some More News crew actually lives here) went down yesterday for the merger of the ongoing local protests with the nationwide “No Kings Day” protests where he spoke quite eloquently, as well as showing the (entirely peaceful) crowds being fired up to show their support for, you know, not being invaded by a guy with (as BTC put it) “small dictator energy” who seems to think Third-World lawlessness is what America’s been missing for the past 250 years.

But, hey: don’t believe what you can clearly see with your own eyes.  Just believe what they tell you.  Watch the video where the FBI grabs Senator Padilla and drags him out of the room; note that the first words out of Padilla’s mouth are “I’m Senator Alex Padilla.”  Yet Noem’s department later tweeted that Padilla “interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself.”  As Devon notes in his excellent breakdown of the whole incident, this makes perfect sense:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command ...
— George Orwell, 1984

But I’m not “the party.”  I’ll tell you to make your own decisions.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Zeteo had a great interview with civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis about “copaganda,” by which he means that the harms the media tends to focus on pale in comparison to the ones they never mention.  A simple example he gives: “There was one viral video of a shoplifting from a Walgreens in San Francisco of a guy on a bicycle that spawned 309 news stories around the country.  During that same period, there was not a single national news story about the far larger wage theft cases against Walgreens from stealing from its own employees.”

• If you’d like to know about the Trumped up charges (quite literally, in this case) against illegally deported, newly returned Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, both Devon from Legal Eagle and Brian Tyler Cohen did excellent videos this week.  My favorite was when the reporter interviewed by BTC (who was in the courtroom when the government presented its “case”) noted that they asked the judge to deny bail because Abrego-Garcia was a flight risk.  And the reason they gave for him being a flight risk?  Well, if the judge lets him out on bail, ICE would just pick him up and deport him!  Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up (because people would call you an idiot for saying such moronic things).

It’s a difficult week to find much hope to leave you with, but I’ll defer to the exemplar for why not all old white guys are bad: Bernie Sanders.  He put out a short video this week which he ended with these words:

If there was ever a time in American history when we need to come together, now is that time.  If we continue to fight for the basic principles of economic, social, racial, and environmental justice, I am confident that we will not only get through this unprecedented crisis in modern history, but that we will lay the foundation for a better and more just America in the future.

I can’t say I share his confidence, but, then again, if people had taken him seriously for the past 40 years, we wouldn’t be in this mess.  So I guess we have to take him seriously now.

Doom Report (Week 20: Why, Yes: More Snippets)

Well, the news has all been about President Musk stepping down.  He “left” the government, accepting a golden key (which his sidekick Trumpy, hilariously, made sure to point out has been given out to a lot of people), and headed back to spend more time tanking his stock prices.  And, even up through the middle of the week, I didn’t buy it for a second.  I was completely in accord with Jon Stewart, who said on the Weekly Show this week:

I think everybody thinks it’s—I think people are talking about it like, it’s over.  It’s not over.  That was the first—that was an official, explicit confluence of the richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world, sitting next to each other, seeing how they’re going to divvy up the spoils and how it’s going to go down.  But it is still unofficially, implicitly—they are still together, collaborating on despoiling whatever it is, and he will still use his media might and influence to shape things, and Trump will still shower him with the spoils that go to those that are in favor of the king ...

But then shit started to get ... messy.  And I was suddenly reminded of something I said way back in Week -4:

I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.

Remember right at the end of last year? when Musk was having twitterbattles with Bannon and Loomer over immigration?  I was surprised that the Trump-Musk alliance was breaking down so quickly.  But then it all blew over, and I was surprised that the alliance seemed to be holding.  Quite frankly, this has taken way longer than I at first anticipated, and I think I almost forgot that I was expecting it—maybe even forgot to expect it at all.  But, also I don’t want you think I’m breaking my arm patting myself on the back; after all, as Brian Tyler Cohen said this week:

... but sometimes it’s just entertaining to watch the most predictable outcome on Earth take place between the most thin skinned narcissists ever born.  No one didn’t see this coming.

So, the thing that everyone with half a brain said was going to happen happened ... not like I needed to be an oracle to make that prediction.  Seth Meyers had a pretty good Closer Look summarizing the feud (although it missed some of the juicier bits that came later), and The Daily Show also did a good summary, including the delusional belief coming from Newsmax that Trump and Musk staged all this in what they call a “4D chess move.”  This is exactly as hilarious as it sounds, not only because Trump is so dumb he can’t even read his daily intelligence briefings, but also because, despite the legions of fanboys who assume that mega-rich must equal mega-smart, Musk is also a dumbass, as Adam Conover pointed out over 2 years ago.  (Fun fact: while I’ve never met Musk personally, I actually work closely with someone who has met him, and, based on the stories of that meeting, Conover ain’t wrong.)  Basically, these idiots probably couldn’t finish a game of 2D chess, much less “4D chess,” which isn’t even a thing.

Good things to watch this week:

• In this week’s Strict Scrutiny, one of Leah’s favorite things is a New York Times article about how many children President Musk has murdered.  Now, the “favorite things” section is supposed to be where the ladies of Strict Scrutiny end the show on a more upbeat note: here are some things we enjoyed this week.  It might be a new novel they read, a new song—usually by either Beyoncé or Taylor Swift—that they like, etc.  I’m not sure this article, which references mathematician and professor of infectious diseases Brooke Nichols’ model showing that DOGE cuts are responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 people, over two-thirds of them children, counts as “positive.”  But it certainly is interesting.  (Note that Christopher Titus picked up on this story as well: his latest Armageddon Update provides an articulate take on it.)

• Speaking of Leah Litman from Strict Scrutiny, the fact that she’s got a new book out means she’s showing up everywhere these days.  Last week, I mentioned seeing her on Even More News; this week, she was interviewed by Michael Kosta on The Daily Show, and by Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo.  Both are great.

• In case current events aren’t depressing enough for you, you may want to check out More Perfect Union’s video on PFAS (a.k.a. forever chemicals).  As dispiriting as it is to know that our bodies are full of chemicals that never break down and that chemical companies have known about this for decades and done nothing, I actually find it heartening that MPU isn’t letting the avalance of current events stop them from bringing long-term things like this to our attention.

• More Perfect Union also gives us an excellent study of why young men are turning to the Right (or maybe just away from the Left?).  Basically, every news story you’ve heard about this since the election is reductive and silly; not exactly wrong, but the truth is way more nuanced, and this video does an amazing job of clarifying the situation.

Finally, our hopeful news for the week is that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia has finally been returned to the U.S., although we must temper that with the knowledge that the Trump regime immediately arrested him on ridiculous charges.  Still, if he manages to get the due process he was denied for all this time, he’ll likely end up going free at the end of the day ... and then maybe ICE will deport him somewhere else, but at least he won’t be locked up in a megaprison that many have called a concentration camp.  We have to be very liberal in what we describe as “hopeful” in these times.

Robert Reich closed this week’s Coffee Klatch with these words, and I think they’re worth closing my post with as well.

People come up to me in the street and say “How are you?”  And my first impulse is to say, “Okay.”  And then my second impulse is to tell the truth, and to say “I’m not okay.  You know, I feel like shit.”  And a lot of you feel that way too.  But know that you’re not alone.  Know that we will get through this, and know that we all, together, in solidarity, have a much greater chance of getting through this if we’re together.

Stick together, people.

Ataraxic Ratattoo I

"Reality and Life Are Not the Same"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

One year—it was presumably 1991—my brother gave me two CDs for Christmas.  One was the debut album by the Infectious Grooves, which he knew I would like.  With the lead singer and bassist from Suicidal Tendencies and the drummer from Jane’s Addiction, it was a funk metal supgroup that ticked all my boxes.  The second was the debut album by an entirely different group: P.M. Dawn.  This was a total shot in the dark on his part; he wasn’t sure I’d like it, but he knew that I’d recently gotten into Enigma,¹ and he figured I might dig it.  I remember a few months later when he expressed surprise that I had only played the Infectious Grooves album a few times, while I was playing the P.M. Dawn practically non-stop.  But perhaps it shouldn’t have been too surprising after all: the Infectious Grooves was good, but predictable (and also a bit silly, if I’m being honest).  But, when you listen to as much music as I do, there’s one thing you crave above all else, and Of the Heart, Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience had it: it was different.  Oh, sure, it had some superficial similarities to Enigma—it traded on New Age tropes and harkened to a meditative tradition while maintaining a strong beat that owed a lot to hip-hop—but it was also entirely new.  Its hip-hop beats were not filtered through trip-hop, but far more direct (the brothers that formed the group were stepsons of the drummer for Kool & the Gang), and there was actual rapping.  It’s the New Age touches that are far more muted here; they’re mainly found in the lyrics of older brother Prince Be, who weaves trippy metaphysical imagery with the clever rhymes and wordplay of a truly gifted rapper.  I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever heard that could be considered in the same genre.

Of course, being unique has its disadvantages.  Despite being one of my all-time favorite albums, I had never used a P.M. Dawn track in one of my mixes until very recently.  Where could they possibly fit?  Probably Smokelit Flashback came closest, but also not very close.  Then I started getting into some lofi artists (such as Kupla) about 3 years ago, which culminated in my creation of Dreamsea Lucidity.  With its combination of trip-hop and psychedelia, finally it seemed there was somewhere for P.M. Dawn to truly shine, so I included a track of theirs, and I was pretty happy with it.

But I felt like there should be more.  While a lot of P.M. Dawn is trippy, and it certainly has the strong trip-hop rhythm, there’s still that reaching for New Age, for a state of meditative bliss, and the beat is even more pronounced than most trip-hop (that’s their stepfather George “Funky” Brown’s influence, I’m sure).  And I was starting to hear some lofi artists hit that vibe as well: almost entirely instrumental, but music that is simultaneously fully contemplative and also entirely inappropriate for Numeric Driftwood because the bass is so strong it shakes the floorboards.  I think Tenno is probably the most emblematic of this sound, but there are several that we’ll explore here.  But really it all started with P.M. Dawn.

Ataraxia (originally an ancient Greek word) literally means “non-confusion.”  Contrary to psychedelic music, ataraxic music is about calmness: tranquil, not trippy.  This, to me, is the heart of what New Age (or at least good New Age) has to offer: a stillness of mind that is often desireable.  We may want that stillness in order to calm our thoughts for sleep (in which case you’d be reaching for Numeric Driftwood), or to focus our thoughts for creative work (in which case you should be looking at Shadowfall Equinox).  Or we might just want to jettison frustration or sadness and use that stillness to swing back around to being content.  In that latter case, we might even want to accompany our meditative music with a strong, uptempo beat.  A ratatat is a sound of knocking or rapping; a tattoo is a military drumbeat that signals something (such as warning that taps is approaching).  Both derive from the verb “to tap.”  An ataraxic ratatat or tattoo is a bit oxymoronic in some senses, but in other ways it makes perfect sense.  And it perfectly describes many P.M. Dawn songs, such as our volume namer “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine.”  As mellow as it is pulsating, its lyrics find Prince Be singing gems such as that reality “tried to house me, but a house has doors” and that “she tried to let prophecy sneak up on me, but I woke up, I told her ‘yo, step off me’.”  The personification of reality as an ex-girlfriend becomes so strong that you might hear “I just chose to laugh at her and disregard everything she tells me” several times before you remember who “she” is and start pondering the implications of disregarding everything reality tells you.  Truly a brilliant track.

But let’s not sleep on Tenno either.  Originally a Russian native, now living in Hungary, deeply inspired by Japanese and Chinese musical traditions, and one of the stars of the Lofi Girl label, I couldn’t resist including two tracks of his here.  “A New Beginning” is a bit more mellow, with some bamboo flute and a koto (or synth designed to replicate those instruments); meanwhile “Breathing Stone” has more of a watery, echoey sound, like droplets falling into the basin held by a stone idol.  Both, of course, have bass-heavy accompanying rhythyms.  And, while I did restrain myself to a single Kupla track over on Dreamsea Lucidity, I didn’t bother here: both “Magic” and “Melody Mountain” work perfectly here.  The former is a pleasant, upbeat tune with some synthesized sounds that evoke birdsong, while the latter is our closer: it winds down peacefully while still maintaining that strong beat that is the signature of this mix.

In fact, P.M. Dawn and Kupla are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Dreamsea Lucidity artists who also appear here: Jens Gad, Jakatta, Anugama, and Amethystium all make an appearance as well.  For Gad and Jakatta, it was just a matter of finding tracks that were a bit more upbeat and less psychedelic.  For Enigma co-founder Gad, that meant “The Miracle of Illusion,” a track which somehow manages to make you want to relax and move your body at the same time; for British DJ Jakatta, it was “I Don’t Know,” his laid-back groove with Nigerian-British rapper Ty (who we sadly lost to the COVID pandemic) spitting the verses.  Not many Jakatta tracks line up with P.M. Dawn this neatly, but this one does, and I couldn’t overlook it.  Amethystium and Anugama (especially the latter) are far more traditional New Age, but I felt like “Ascension” had a strong enough beat to be considered trance-adjacent, while “Eastern Sun” is actually a very traditional East Asian New Age track that almost serves as a bridge from Tenno’s koto-inspired “New Beginning” to Kupla’s almost neoclassical “Magic.”

And, speaking of traditional New Age, there’s a few more tracks here from traditional New Age artists.  For instance, Paul Avgerinos, who won a Grammy in 2016 for best New Age album.  His ambient-adjacent approach to New Age made him a natural for Hearts of Space, which is probably where I first heard him.²  “Invocation” is from Muse of the Round Sky, his 1992 album on the Hearts of Space label.  Here’s it’s a long, slow bridge with a bit of Middle Eastern flair and a percussive bassline that sounds like water droplets hitting something echoey.  It makes a great transition from Amethystium into P.M. Dawn.  Another giant of New Age is David Arkenstone, 5 times Grammy nominated, whose debut album was just a couple of years behind Avgernios’, way back in 1987.  “Valley in the Clouds” is the title track off that album, and it gives the vibe of being on a Final Fantasy airship.³  With an understated but throbbing bassline, I thought it fit nicely in the back third, winding down to our closing.  And of course Anjey Satori, who’s been heavily featured in Numeric Driftwood (5 tracks on the first 3 volumes), is always a solid New Age choice, although usually too mellow for this mix.  Relax with Forest is a newer find of his,⁴ and its opening track, “Good Morning,” was also a perfect opener here: it starts very subtly, with birdsong, then a very light melody that moves from background to foreground, then the percussion kicks in at nearly the halfway mark, and it becomes quite an upbeat number for an artist that I traditionally associate with putting me to sleep.

But of course the true giant of New Age is Kitaro, and it certainly wouldn’t have felt right to exclude him here.  Although he’s not known for having songs with particularly strong beats, I knew I could find something that would work here, because all his music has a certain sense of drama and scope.  I finally settled on “Sunset,” from my favoriate Kitaro album, India.  Like Satori, Kitaro has been primarily featured on Numeric Driftwood,⁵ but I thought “Sunset” made a nice contrast in the middle stretch, where we go back and forth a bit between the New Age and the lofi: Tenno to Anugama, Kupla to Kitaro.  A bit more Ataraxic than Ratattoo, granted, but I think it works.

Naturally, the bulk of the Ratattoo is provided by the lofi selections, which often have enough subwoofer fodder to vibrate your sound system, if not your bones.  In addition to the obvious choices of Kupla and Tenno, we have a collaboration between Kanisan and Dario & Claudia Lessing; “dance of the fairy” is a tinkling little bridge from Kitaro to Bent, with Kanisan’s beats backing Dario’s piano and Claudia’s violin.  Then a triple-play to set us up for the wind-down, kicked off by another Lofi Girl collab: this time Casiio and Sleepermane.  The two Dutch producers give us “Pandora,” a slow trek through a fantastical landscape, again with some water ambiance.  Then into yet another collaboration, probably one of my favorite Lofi Girl pairings: Seoul-based producer Softy matched with Wishes and Dreams, an entity about whom I know nothing other than they’re German and seem to only work with other artists, to produce Secrets of Castle in 2022.  “The Mist” is typical of the album: beautiful, vaguely haunting, but still with that powerful bassline.  Last in the triptych, Amess—sometimes credited as (and in real life known as) Nadav Cohen—is an Australian who cites Hans Zimmer and fellow Lofi Girl labelmate Kupla as influences.  “Sunrise over Casablanca” is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.  Finally, after an interlude from Arkenstone, we get one more Lofi Girl artist before the Kupla closer: French producer Dosi.  Haunted Castle is another vaguely haunting, castle-themed album with strong electrobeats, and “Shadows” is the closer on it.  I thought it worked well as the penultimate track here.

Ataraxic Ratatto I
[ Reality and Life Are Not the Same ]

“Good Morning” by Anjey Satori, off Relax with Forest
“Breathing Stone” by Tenno, off Sleeping Soul
“Streamlet” by Irina Mikhailova, off Russian Twilight
“Ascension” by Amethystium, off Odonata
“Invocation” by Paul Avgerinos, off Muse of the Round Sky
“Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” by P.M. Dawn, off Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience
“Enlightenment” by Guy Sweens, off Gaya of Wisdom
“The Miracle of Illusion” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“I Don't Know” by Jakatta, off Visions
“Searching for 9” by Stray Theories, off Oceans, Volume 1 [EP]
“Barocco” by Stratus, off Fear of Magnetism
“A New Beginning” by Tenno, off Mind Temple
“Eastern Sun” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“Magic” by Kupla, off Life Forms
“Sunset” by Kitaro, off India
“dance of the fairy” by Kanisan, Dario Lessing & Claudia Lessing, off Edda
“On the Lake” by Bent, off Ariels
“Pandora” by Casiio × Sleepermane, off Unexplored
“The Mist” by Softy, Wishes and Dreams, off Secrets of Castle
“Sunrise Over Casablanca” by Amess, off Tales from Babylon
“Valley in the Clouds” by David Arkenstone, off Valley in the Clouds
“Shadows” by Dosi, off Haunted Castle
“Melody Mountain” by Kupla, off Melody Mountain

Total:  23 tracks,  85:49

For other sources, I mined a fair amount of chill/downtempo.  I can’t recall where I discovered New Zealand’s Micah Templeton-Wolfe, a.k.a. Stray Theories, but you can hear his roots in ambient and shoegaze on “Searching for 9,” a nearly minimalist combination of synth chords, hand drums, and swirling ethereal background wash.  I immediately follow that up with another track from Stratus, who we’ve seen before on Paradoxically Sized World and Phantasma Chorale.  “Barocco” is fairly typical of their output, which seems tailor-made for this mix.  As does that of another duo of Englishmen, Bent, who are probably more well-known in the chill scene, if only by virtue of having been around longer (their debut album dropped in 2000).  We’ve seen Bent before: their more ambient side was featured on Shadowfall Equinox I, while their more playful side was included on Paradoxically Sized World III.  “On the Lake,” from their third studio album Ariels, is a layered track featuring some gorgeous steel guitar work and topping it off with a swoop of harp trills to close out the track.

When it comes to unexpected tracks, there isn’t much that fits in that category.  Guy Sweens, for instance, produces New Age infused with trance, making him the most likely candidate to show up here out of everyone.  But the truth of the matter is, I’m not a huge Sweens fan, overall, so perhaps it’s unexpected for him to show up anywhere at all.  Still, his 2005 album Gaya of Wisdom does have a few decent tracks, and I thought “Enlightenment,” with its Bhuddist-inspired elements, worked pretty well here.

And finally we have Irina Mikhailova.  Born in Kazakhstan, educated in Russia, toured in what was then Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Block countries, finally landing in California, Mikhailova embodies all that Eastern European and Central Asian influence into a style which is not quite New Age, not quite worldmusic, not quite ambient, and not quite folk.  From the opening notes of “Streamlet,” played on what sounds like a steel drum, soon accompanied by her wordless vocals and a stringed instrument which is almost certainly a dombra, I was captivated.  While she qualifies as an “obscure artist” by my definition—AllMusic knows she exists, but not much beyond that, while Wikipedia is utterly clueless—she really shouldn’t be.  While “Streamlets” is probably the pinnacle, and good enough that I included it here despite its not really being on theme as it has practically no beat at all, if you enjoy worldmusic and can track down a copy of her 1997 album Russian Twilight, definitely do so.

Next time, I think we’ll go back to the 80s.

__________

1 Indeed, we’ve heard Enigma pop up on these mixes in several places: Numeric Driftwood III, Dreamtime I, Incanto Liturgica I, Cantosphere Eversion I, and Dreamsea Lucidity I.

2 Although he also spent a little time with Magnatune, so it might have been there instead.

3 Which is why it makes sense that the other place we’ve seen Arkenstone was on Mystical Memoriam.

4 Recently I discovered that he’s now on Bandcamp, since Magnatune is more or less shuttered.

5 Five tracks on the first four volumes, in fact, with 4 of the 5 also being from India.

Doom Report (Week 19: Congress Is Too Old for This Shit)

This week the Republicans passed Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which they actually named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.  And if you need more proof than that they’re all morons, I don’t know that I can help you.  If you want to see my personal reaction to learning this fact, you can just watch Cody over at Even More News: trust me, his reaction perfectly mirrored my own.

But, if you stick around until Cody puts his brain back together, you can hear producer Jonathan Harris say this:

So the thing passed; it passed 215 to 214, two Republicans voting no, and three Democrats voting not being alive any more on planet Earth.

Now, we often talk about how it’s a problem that all our Congresspeople are too damn old, because they’re out of touch, because they don’t understand what it’s like for the younger generations, because they don’t understand technology, etc etc.  But I think too often we forget that there’s another really good reason it’s not a great idea to have nearly half of your entire Congress being Baby Boomers (or older!): they have a tendency to die.  The 3 Democrats who have passed away since Trump’s inauguration were 72, 75, and 77, with a wide array of health problems, and the fact that all Representatives are up for re-election every two years means that they all ran for office in that state, knowingly.  And they all died of old age.  If even 1 of those 3 seats had been won by a younger candidate, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” would not have passed.  And I haven’t heard a single show talk about this other than the good folks over at Some More News.

About the only other thing of interest this week was a reporter telling Trump that Wall Street has coined the acronym “TACO”—which stands for “Trump always chickens out”—as the new, best way to make money.  You just wait for Trump to raise a tariff (or fifty), the stock market crashes, you buy heavily, then all you have to do is wait for Trump to reverse himself, sell everything, and boom! you just made a killing.  Probably the best take on this story was Brian Tyler Cohen’s coverage of the press conference.  And, this is hardly the most important part of the story, but notice how Trump gets pissed at the reporter for asking “such a nasty question.”  Dude: all the reporter did was let you know what people were saying about you.  Talk about shooting the messenger.

Top shows to watch this wee:

• Adam Conover talks about the Right Wing Nutjobs’ plan to convince more white women to have babies.  I was pleased to note that the ultimate conclusion was the same I came to back in Week 16: stop trying to keep the immigrants out.

• If you’re into conspiracy theories, Christopher Titus has been going on for a while now about how Trump’s victory last year was pretty suspicious.  This week he got an expert (a statistician from the Election Truth Alliance) and released several videos diving deep into this theory.  (If you just want to try one to see if it’s for you, I’d probably start with part 3, strangely enough.)  What I will tell you about this particular conspiracy theory:
• Don’t believe in conspiracy theories.  People believing stupid shit is how we got into this mess in the first place.
• That having been said, while all conspiracy theories are stupid, they are (sadly) not all wrong.  As I wrote once in an off-topic work discussion about them:  I always used to think that the conspiracy theory that the U.S. totally invented an excuse to get into the Vietnam War was kookoo for Cocoa Puffs.  Turns out ... not so much.  Or, if I had told you ten years ago—hell, even five—that some shadowy group called “the Federalist Society” was engaged in a 50-year plan to change the meaning of the Second Amendment and reverse Roe v Wade, I’m sure I would have sounded like a total nutjob.  Today, it’s a documentary on Showtime.
• I actually used to work on electronic voting systems.  While I can make you feel a little better and tell you that some of the stuff they discuss in this video doesn’t track for me, I’m also going to make you feel a little bit worse by telling you that a lot of it is totally plausible.
• Every time Trump and the MAGA crowd accuse someone of doing something, it’s always what they’re doing themselves.  Every time.  It’s like the dumbest version of “nuh-uh, you are!”  And they sure do accuse the other side of rigging elections a whole bunch ...
• Definitely don’t believe in stupid shit.  Also, sometimes listen to the stupid shit and work out for yourself just how stupid it is.  Or isn’t.

• I love it when BTC interviews James Talarico, the fundamentalist Christian Democrat on the Texas state legislature.  In their discussion this week about Texas mandating the 10 Commandments in classrooms, Talarico drops this truth bomb: “The Christians in Congress should be feeding the hungry, but they’re cutting food stamps; they should be healing the sick, but they are cutting Medicaid.”  You know, my friend (who you may recall as being the impetus for this whole series) is also a devoted Christian.^*  I sort of wish he were reading along here, because I’d love to hear his response to Talarico’s poignant words, but I suspect he’s not bothering.

• The Some More News crew did an excellent report on the influencer culture on the right, which included this remarkably depressing graph from Media Matters.  Those red bubbles are the Right Wing Nutjobs, and the blue ones—the ones that are few, far between, and generally much smaller—are the progressive shows.  I love that Trevor Noah and Charlamagne tha God are two of the three biggest, and it’s nice to see BTC (in a fairly small bubble in the upper left), but, as Cody notes, Some More News itself doesn’t even show up at all.  (The reason being that the minimum is 1 million subscribers, and SMN has just over 900K.  If you haven’t subscribed yet, take this opportunity to help push them over the edge.)  But the video covers the problems with the Nutjobs’ dominance in this space and why you should be worried about it.

• And, for even more reason to subscribe to SMN, this week’s second installment of Even More News features a crossover with another of my favorite political shows, Strict Scrutiny.  Their guest is Leah Litman, who’s got a new book to promote.  This is a really great confluence of judicial insight and absurdity acknowledgement; don’t sleep on this one.

Is there any reason for hope this week?  Well, Leah tells Katy, Cody, and Jonathan that she doesn’t believe the Supreme Court will support Trump’s batshit crazy legal theory on birthright citizenship, but she packs it with enough caveats that I’m not sure we can count that as good news.  Everyone is continuing to report that President Musk is stepping down, which is certainly good news if true (personally, I’ll believe it when I see it).  And there’s some reason to believe that the One Big Beautiful Bill won’t make it past the Senate, and, even it does, it almost certainly won’t make it through in its current form, which means it’s back to the House where it passed by a single vote last time.  And maybe that will take long enough that some special elections can be held to fill the seats of the Democrats we lost to the Grim Reaper this year.  Honestly, that might be the best we can hope for.

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* Full disclosure: I myself am not.  I was raised an indifferent Methodist, and would now best describe myself as pan-theistic agnostic.  When I don’t outright claim to be a Baladocian.

Doom Report (Week 18: What? More Snippets???)

This week marked yet another insane Oval Office meeting with a foreign head of state.  This time the strategy seemed to be to overwhelm the President of South Africa with conspiracy theories of “white genocide.”  Of course, all these theories have been thoroughly (thoroughly) debunked, but reality has never stopped President Musk’s sidekick Trumpy from telling a good story.  And no doubt President Musk himself is the driving force here.  This motherfucker: nearly 50 years of apartheid, and he’s decided white people are the ones getting oppressed.  As for Trump, I think Ronny Chieng summed it up best on The Daily Show this week: “It’s like someone told him, hey, it’s not just a genocide, it’s a white genocide.  You know: the bad kind.”  But the person who really had Trump’s number this week was Heather Lofthouse; on this week’s Coffee Klatch, she says:

I mean, watching Trump bring these foreign dignitaries in to be so horrific to them—I mean more to some than others, right?  We had Zelenskyy; we had the president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa.  It’s not lost on me that one is Jewish and one is black.  And Donald Trump goes after them.

Let’s see ... who hates Jews and black people?  Nope; can’t think of anyone like that.

Top things to watch this week:

• On The Daily Show this week, Charlamagne tha God deconstructs the whole “Daddy’s home” bullshit that Repulicans were doing for a while there.  Charlamagne is always incisive, and this take does not disappoint.

• Brian Tyler Cohen discusses the brain drain to Europe that Trump and flunky Kristi Noem have kicked off by attacking international students.

• I’m really starting to love Ezra Klein.  Too often progressives decide he’s a “closet Republican” when he points out that we’ve overregulated ourselves.  But I’m convinced those people aren’t actually listening to what he’s saying.  This week Hasan Minhaj interviews Klein and, as usual, it’s a banger.

• Medhi Hasan interviews Molly Jong-Fast (daughter of seminal author and feminist icon Erica Jong) where they discuss just how stupid Trump is (it’s entitled “Thank God Trump is a MORON,” if that gives you a clue just how entertaining it gets).

And the continuing proof that Trump—and most of the people around him—are utterly incompetent is about all the hope I can offer this week.  Maybe it would make you feel better to know just how bad Trump’s lawyers are; my father might say they couldn’t find their asses with both hands, a map, and an ass-finding machine.  Well, Liz Dye from Legal Eagle has got you covered.  Enjoy.