Doom Report (Week 38: Little Doom Bits)

Things you need to know this week:

• Yet another excellent week in review from Adam Kinzinger.

• The Even More News crew welcomes Roy Wood Jr (of the US version of Have I Got News For You) to talk about Trump’s ridiculous “anti-ANTIFA” meeting.

• SNL is back, and their assessment of Pam Bondi’s performance at the Senate hearings this week are, as usual, spot-on.  “My name is Pam Bondi.  I spell it with an “I,” ’cause I ain’t gonna answer any of your questions.”

• Jon Stewart interviews the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton.  I did a deeper dive on this interview in my other blog post.

• Although Gary Stevenson of Garys Economics is talking about the Labour Party in the UK, much of what he says is directly applicable to the Democrats here in the US as well.  Labour is about as popular as the Democrats—which is to say, not very—and this week, Gary covered how to rehabilitate the party.

This week was mildly less crazy than most we’ve had thus far this year.  Let’s hope that pace (or lack thereof) continues.  With the Texas National Guard showing up in Chicago, and perhaps soon to arrive in Portland, I have doubts.  But we can always hope.

Deeper Into the AI Wave

I watched two brilliant video podcasts this week about technology.  The first was all about LLMs (a.k.a. “AI”), and the second was about enshittification, but it did touch on AI a bit.  You should watch them both for yourself: Jon Stewart’s interview with Geoffrey Hinton, and Adam Conover’s interview with Cory Doctorow.  They’re long, but well worth your time.

Now, you might not know who Geoffrey Hinton is, so let me enlighten you: he’s a British computer scientist, now living in Canada, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on neural networks, and is commonly known as “the Godfather of AI.”  So, you know: a guy who actually knows what the fuck he’s talking about.  And, while Jon was desperately attempting to get him to talk about the dangers of AI—which he eventually does—he seems determined to make Jon understand how LLMs work.  And it’s utterly brilliant.  Because it takes forever, and you can see Jon champing at the bit to get to the more “interesting” part of the discussion, but, in his slow, deliberate, professorial way, he keeps circling back to building up Jon’s knowledge, brick by brick.  And, at the end, Jon really does understand a bunch of things about AI that he just didn’t before.  And, as a result, he has a much firmer grasp on the positives of AI and the dangers.  That, to me, is valuable.

Of course, I also will admit to being thrilled that Hinton articulates (quite brilliantly) many of the same points I’ve tried to make in my posts about AI/LLMs.  In my more recent post on AI, I pointed out that we don’t really understand what “intelligence” means; Hinton goes further and says our concept of “sentience” is like to that of somone who believes the Earth is flat.  I said that perhaps in the far future, we would discover that our brains work the same way that LLMs do; Hinton goes further and says we already know that to be true (and it’s useful to understand that he started out with a degree in experimental psychology before transitioning to artificial intelligence).  So he and I are on the same page, but of course he explains things much better than I can.  I won’t say he’s smarter than I am, but he does have nearly 20 extra years’ experience and a PhD on me.  Also, he’s probably smarter than I am.

So here’s how he explains to Jon that claiming that AI isn’t actually “intelligent” isn’t as smart an observation as you think it is:

Geoffrey: Now, you just said something that many people say: “This isn’t understanding.  This is just a statistical trick.”

Jon: Yes.

Geoffrey: That’s what Chomsky says, for example.

Jon: Yes.  Chomsky and I, we’re always stepping on each other’s sentences.

Geoffrey: Yeah.  So let me ask you the question, well, how do you decide what word to say next?

Jon: Me?

Geoffrey: You.

Jon: It’s interesting; I’m glad you brought this up.  So what I do is I look for sharp lines and then I try and predict— no, I have no idea how I do that.  Honestly, I wish I knew.  It would save me a great deal of embarrassment if I knew how to stop some of the things that I’m saying that come out next.  If I had a better predictor, boy, I could save myself quite a bit of trouble.

Geoffrey: So the way you do it is pretty much the same as the way these large language models do it.  You have the words you’ve said so far.  Those words are represented by sets of active features.  So the word symbols get turned into big patterns of activation of features, neurons going ping—

Jon: Different pings, different strengths.

Geoffrey: —and these neurons interact with each other to activate some neurons that go ping, that are representing the meaning of the next word, or possible meanings of the next word.  And from those, you pick a word that fits in with those features.  That’s how the large language models generate text, and that’s how you do it too.

Which makes sense: LLMs were based on neural networks, and neural networks, as their name implies, were based on the way our brains actually work.  We designed these things to mimic our brains, but then we decided that our brains were “special,” somehow.  As they say later in the discussion:

Geoffrey: This idea there’s a line between us and machines: we have this special thing called “subjective experience” and they don’t—it’s rubbish.

Jon: So you’re s—so the misunderstanding is, when I say “sentience,” it’s as though I have this special gift, that of a soul, or of an understanding of subjective realities, that a computer could never have, or an AI could never have.  But, in your mind, what you’re saying is: oh, no, they understand very well what’s subjective.

We’ve just pre-determined that humans are different, somehow; that machines can’t possibly be as smart as we are, as creative as we are, as special as we are.  The number of times I’ve heard people use the word “obviously” when talking about how AIs will never write a song as good as a human can, or a poem as touching, or an essay as convincing ... look, I’m not saying that AIs can do those things.  I’m just saying that the word “obviously” doesn’t really apply.  Maybe one day we’ll actually figure out what it is that our brains can do that AI brains just can’t, for deep structural reasons.  But I’m pretty sure it won’t be obvious.  (Though of course this won’t stop some people from claiming they knew it all along ...)

The best part of these interviews, however, is how the people who know what they’re talking about gently correct the AI misgivings of their interviewers.  Here’s Jon and Geoffrey again.

Jon: ... my guess is, like any technology, there’s going to be some incredible positives.

Geoffrey: Yes: in health care, in education, in designing new materials, there’s going to be wonderful positives.

Jon: And then the negatives will be, because people are going to want to monopolize it because of the wealth, I assume, that it can generate, it’s going to change.  It’s going to be a disruption in the workforce.  The Industrial Revolution was a disruption in the workforce.  Globalization is a disruption in the workforce.  But those occurred over decades.  This is a disruption that will occur in a really collapsed time frame.  Is that correct?

Geoffrey: That seems very probable, yes.  ... my belief is the possibilities of good are so great that we’re not going to stop the development.  But I also believe that the development is going to be very dangerous.  And so we should put huge effort into saying, “it is going to be developed, but we should try and do it safely.”  We may not be able to, but we should try.

Jon is typically someone who thinks the benefits of AI are overstated, and it’s good to hear someone will some knowledge temper that.  This exact dynamic is mirrored in the Cory Doctorow interview; Adam is, if anything, even more of the opinion that AI is useless, while Cory, like Geoffrey, has a far more informed (and therefore more balanced) view.  Here’s a typical exchange from their conversation:

Adam: And you know what’s funny is, I’ve mentioned in in past episodes where we’re talking about AI, you know, that I find large language models pretty useless, but I’m like, “Oh, but I understand programmers find them useful.  It’s a labor-saving device for programmers.”  And I’ve had developers in my comments come in and say, “Actually, Adam, no, it’s useless to us, too.  Like, this is also a lie on the part of the companies that employ us.”

Cory: So, I got so fed up with having conversations about AI that went nowhere, that over the summer I wrote a book about AI called The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI that’s going to come out in 2026.  ... my thesis is that, so a centaur in automation theory is someone who’s assisted by a machine, okay?  And a reverse centur is someone who’s conscripted to be a peripheral for a machine.  So, you know, like I love Lucy where she’s got to get the chocolates into the chocolate box and the conveyor belts?  She’s only in the factory because the conveyor belt doesn’t have hands, right?  She is the, like, inconvenient, inadequate hands for the conveyor belt, and it works—it uses her up, right?  And I think that, you know, there’s plenty of senior devs who are like: oh, this routine task I can tell right away if the AI does it wrong.  It’s sort of time-consuming.  Like, one of the canonical examples is, I have this, like, one data file that’s in a weird format and I need to convert it to another format and I could, you know, do some regular expressions in Python and whatever and make it happen, or I could just ask—I could one-shot it with a chatbot, and then I can validate it really quickly, because I can check if the tabular data adds up or whatever.  And I hear from devs all the time who say this is great, and the thing is: they’re in charge of their work, right?  And this was like the thing the Writer’s Guild won in the AI strike, right?  We don’t have to use AI.  We don’t have to not use AI.  You can’t pay us less for not using or for using AI ... and we’re in charge.  ... but, like, if if there’s an artist out there who enjoys using AI in some part of their process, like, you do you, brother.  Like maybe it’ll be shitty art.  There’s lots of bad art out there.  It’s fine.  ... it’s the conscripting of people to assist a chatbot that I think is the thing that makes the difference.

Because here’s the thing: anyone who tells you that AI is completely useless—just a party trick to amuse stoned people by making Abraham Lincoln rap or having MLK drop the beat—is full of shit.  But anyone who tells you that AI is the future and is going to make everyone’s lives better is also full of shit (and likely trying to sell you something).  Somehow we decided that either this AI thing is all smoke and mirrors and sooner or later the bubble will collapse, or it’s inevitable and it will change the world.  ¿Por que no los dos?  Remember in the late 90s, when some people said that the Internet was inevitable, and sooner or later if you didn’t have a website your business was doomed?  And then other people said that all those Internet companies were losing money and they were all going to go bankrupt in spectacular fashion?  Now, with the benefit of hindsight, which camp was right?  Well, turns out both sides were right.  There was a bubble, and it burst, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.  Also, the Internet is now an integral part of everyone’s lives, and those companies who were slow to adopt—like Kodak, Toys “R” Us, and Borders—ended up filing for bankruptcy and/or getting gobbled up by their competitors.  And this is the lesson we need to internalize about AI as well.

The way that AI is currently expanding is absolutely unsustainable.  People are using it like a new buzzword and just jamming it into things where it can’t possibly be useful, or putting it into things where it might be useful, but doing so with such a poor understanding of how to use it that it will fail anyway.  None of the AI companies are making any money, and most have only the vaguest idea of how they will make money.  Like tulips or Beanie Babies, eventually the whole thing will come crashing down.  It’s inevitable.

But that doesn’t mean that AI isn’t actually useful, or that it won’t become an integral part of our lives.  Yes, I happen to be a senior developer, and, while I’m encouraged to use AI, I’m not required to by any means: I’m the “centaur” Cory was talking about, not the “reverse centaur” that has AI thrust upon them whether they like it or not.  So, since I get to decide whether to use it or not—and I get paid the same either way—I’m an AI proponent (mostly).  But this idea that people such as Adam are constantly espousing—that AI is only useful for developers—is just nonsense.  AI can help you choose the best air fryer to buy.  It can help you understand difficult concepts that you’re studying.  It can help you make the seating chart for your wedding.  Is it the case that you can’t always trust it?  Obviously.  You’re not trusting every web site that comes up in a Google search either, are you?  Hopefully not.  For that matter, you probably shouldn’t trust everything coming out of the mouths of all the actual human people in your life either.  Humans in the modern age have to become very good at sifting useful knowledge from bullshit, and nothing about that part changes with AI.  The big difference is, the AI can gather the data faster, can present it more relatably, and can help you integrate it into something approaching usefel, correct information.  That’s not just for developers.  That’s for everyone.

So I’m quite pleased to have some real experts here that I can refer to to back up my opinions.  Not that I felt like they needed backing up.  But it’s still nice to have some authoritative sources behind them.  And it’s especially nice to see Jon Stewart and Adam Conover, two people whose opinions I generally respect, learn some new perspectives in one of the few areas where they were annoyingly wrong.  Now let’s see if they can accept those perspectives and integrate them into their worldviews.

Doom Report (Week 37: No Fatties, No Beardos)

This week I think everyone wants to talk about the government shutdown, but I find that remarkably boring: the Democrats finally found some balls, which they will promptly shoot themselves in, because the point of a shutdown is to make sure everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault, and, even with the Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office, the Dems are so bad at messaging that the Republicans will inevitably convince everyone that they had nothing to do with this shutdown at all.  So I find that a foregone conclusion, and thus: boring.

No, to me the interesting thing that happened this week was Hegseth and Trump addressing all the generals.  Now, I’ve yet to figure out if this is a totally unprecedented conference, or whether it’s something that happens every year, but usually in secret, for obvious security-related reasons (I’ve seen it reported both ways), but, either way, the amount of utter batshit crazy that was spewed onto these poor military commanders is not just stunning, but also just plain bone-chilling.  The Even More News crew sums it up very well, especially highlighting the depth of shit we’re in by butting this quote from Hegseth:

We fight to win.  We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.  We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.  We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.  No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement: just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for war fighters.

up against this quote from Trump:

Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within.  We’re under invasion from within.  No different than a foreign enemy, ...

Yes, our President told our generals that they were to treat his enemies as the enemies of our country directly after our Secretary of Defense (playacting as the Secretary of War) that they should hunt down those enemies with overwhelming violence and maximum lethality while ignoring the rules of engagement.  Sure, the government is shut down, but I think that the fact that His Great Orange Bloviatedness wants to send American troops into your city to murder you might be slightly more problematic.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Seth Meyers also covers the “enemy within” speech to the generals in A Closer Look this week.

• Adam Kinzinger has another good weekly news round-up.

• Some More News this week did a really great assessment of the death of Charlie Kirk and its impact on our national conversation.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews David Faris and Tim Miller.  Normally, I put Miller into the same bucket as Kinzinger: former Republicans who left that party because of the MAGA takeover but are still sane—in other words, the few remaining voices of reason on the conservative side.  But I take exception to his characterization of the Dems as being too focussed on the “one trans girl that is in on the lacrosse team.”  The Dems didn’t focus on that at all: the Republicans did.  Now, do the Dems suck for allowing Repubs to define them in this way?  Of course.  If the Democrats were half as smart as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, they would just point out how immeasurably creepy it is for these old white men to be so obsessed with the bodies of trans children—hell, the SS women have said “leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks” so often at this point that they’ve literally made a shirt out of it.  But, point being: this is not something you can really blame the Dems for.

• At a very dense 90 minutes, I’ll still recommend one of Jamelle Bouie’s “favorite things” from the end segment of this week’s Strict Scrutiny: How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult from the Elephant Graveyard.  It’s surreal, and occasionally sounds like a PhD thesis, but it really is quite revealing of the Joe Rogan extended universe and how it got to the weird place it is today.

Our message of hope this week comes from an opinion from First Circuit Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, as read by Robert Reich on this week’s Coffee Klatch:

First of all, the judge gets, you know, one of these crazy, all handwritten, all in caps: “Trump has pardons and tanks ... what do you have?”  So, it’s a threatening note he gets.  Well, what does the judge do?  He puts this threatening note right on the top of his opinion.  And then the judge writes,

“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.

Together, we the people of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution.

Here’s how that works out in a specific case—”

Just in case we were all thinking that everyone had given up.  Apparently, a few people are still fighting.  For which I’m thankful.

Doom Report (Week 36: Back to Only as Bad as It Was 2 Weeks Ago)

Well, Jimmy Kimmel’s “cancellation” lasted barely a week, and Trump threw fits about the return and threatened to sue Disney (again).  Nearly everyone I follow weighed in on what the cancellation and return means (or doesn’t mean), including John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Josh Johnson, Adam Conover, Robert Reich, and Brian Tyler Cohen.  I think the general concensus is that the fight is far from over, but that public outcry snatched victory from the jaws of political intimidation.  Also several of them noted that the consolidation of the media landscape is really not making this easier.  Well, easier for aspiring dictators.  But not for the rest of us.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another good week in review.

• There was a Charlie Kirk Memorial Rally, apparently.  The Even More News crew breaks it down for you.

• In equally bizarre news, there is apparently such a thing as “Escaltategate” now.  Seriously, what a whiny bitch.  For full details, you can consult Seth Meyers or Jimmy Kimmel.

• On The Daily Show this week, Leslie Jones’ explores systemic racism and how the MAGA crowd is trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.

• Apparently, Trump is sending troops into Portland now.

• And, in other breaking news, the Supreme Court allows Trump to fire an FTC member.  Strict Scrutiny has an emergency video that explains the ramifications pretty clearly.

• I mentioned Steve Burns’ new podcast Alive last week.  The first two episodes weren’t particularly political, but, in the third, he asks Representative Ro Khanna what’s happened to the American Dream?

I suppose our hope for the week is that Kimmel is back on the air.  Now, as I said last week, I’m not the greatest fan of the man, though he has been known to make me chuckle.  But, like most everyone else, I agree that he really knocked it out of the park with his first monologue back.  As I write this, the YouTube version is closing in on 22 million views; if you aren’t yet one of them, you really should check it out.  Trying to be funny after some dark event has occurred is a tricky thing to manage, but I think Kimmel hit all the right notes: he is just as emotional when talking about Kirk’s actual death as he is biting when referring to the right-wing ghouls trying to capitalize on it.  The accolades are all well-deserved.

Doom Report (Week 35: Comedy Is Illegal Again)

Remember when we used to have the First Amendment?  Those were fun times.  Nowadays, the First is joining the Fourth, the Fifth, the Fourteenth, the Twenty-Second ... pretty soon the Second Amendment will just be called “The Amendment” and then we won’t have so much to learn in school.

Because this week, Donald Trump’s FCC forced Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of Kimmel—I’ve only quoted him twice in these Doom Reports (once in week 21 and once way back in week 1), vs the dozen or so times I’ve referenced Colbert or Seth Meyers.  But I watch him every now and again, and, to quote Hasan Piker:

What do you think of Jimmy Kimmel?  It doesn’t matter, okay?  For all intents and purposes, I am Jimmy Kimmel’s most loyal servant.  I am his fedayeen going forward.  I didn’t give a fuck about Jimmy Kimmel until this very moment.  Now he’s my GOAT.  Do you understand?  Because what is going on here is far more consequential than my own personal distaste for, like, Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes or whatever.  What’s going on here is this administration playing out its agenda of suppressing whatever they see fit.

And, I have to say, I really don’t like it when the news forces me to explain to my children what “McCarthyism” was.  Especially when I have to explain that there is no “have you no decency?” moment coming for us.  All the Republicans have their faces in the dirt because they’ve prostrated themselves to Dear Leader, and all the Democrats are writing sternly worded letters.

And, look: a lot of people misunderstand the First Amendment.  Remember when all the right-wing nutjobs were getting kicked off Twitter and Facebook for lying, back when those platforms actually cared about such things?  They all cried about how the companies were violating their First Amendment rights.  Except that a company can’t violate your First Amendment rights, because the First Amendment doesn’t protect you from companies: it protects you from the government.  If you want to use the service of a company, you have to follow its rules.  And, if the rule is, no blatant lying, and you go around spreading bullshit like it’s going out of style, you get the hook.

So, isn’t this the same thing?  Kimmel wasn’t cancelled—excuse me, indefinitely pre-empted—by the government, but by ABC, which is a company.  No harm, no foul ... right?  One might think so.  But then one would be ignoring the fact that FCC chairman Brendan Carr went on a right-wing podcast and said that Kimmel had to be suspended, and that ABC and its affiliates could “do this the easy way or the hard way.”  That’s not me saying that Carr was acting like a Mafia boss—those were his literal words.  So I guess I am saying that he was acting like a Mafia boss, but please don’t take my word for it.  Read about it in Variety, watch it on The Daily Show, listen to Stephen Colbert discuss it in detail.  You can hear the Even More News crew talk about the aftermath of the firing, or you can even hear them practically predict it in a video from the day before the event.

So this was government action: the head of a government agency threatened affiliates with government retribution if they didn’t comply with his wishes, and one of the biggest affiliate networks needs government approval because they want to own more than 40% of the local TV stations in the country.  So Nexstar condemned Kimmel’s comments as “offensive and insensitive,” and in turn threatened ABC, which is owned by Disney, which has already capitulated to Trump once and apparently had zero problem doing so again.

So! what exactly were these “offensive and insensitive” comments that Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk’s death?  Actually, he didn’t say anything about Charlie Kirk’s death—or indeed about Charlie Kirk at all.  You can see the clip of his show played interminably in any number of those videos I linked above, but, basically, he said that the MAGA crowd was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” and that they were trying to score political points.  Which is, you know: true.  He also played a clip where a reporter asks Trump how he’s doing after the shooting and Trump says “I’m doing great! look at my new ballroom!” to which Kimmel responds: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend.  This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

Literally nothing about Kirk.  Not nothing that could be considered offensive, or insensitive—literally nothing at all.  It’s possibly the only time in the history of human discourse where you can take a statement as subjective as calling someone’s comments offensive and insensitive and classify it as categorically false.  He got cancelled because he hurt their feelings, and they didn’t like it.  And, for fuck’s sake: the First Amendment means that even if he had said something offensive and/or insensitive, the government wouldn’t have the right to do anything about it anyway. People could write letters to ABC, executives could take Kimmel aside and have stern words with him, but the fucking chairman of the FCC has to stay the fuck out of it.

Except he didn’t.

So that’s why people are calling this a First Amendment crisis, and pointing out that this is how dictators start.  That’s why, when Jon Stewart interviewed Maria Ressa, she notes that she told him in March that shit was happening much faster here than it had in her native Philippines.  She (somewhat chillingly) says:

I think that was why we spoke in March.  Because I was like, this is happening.  If you do not reclaim your rights—if you don’t stand up—it’s going to be significantly harder to claw them back.

How prescient of her.

And I’m glad that all these stories are coming out and pointing out the hypocrisy.  I’m glad that Stephen Colbert plays the clip of Brendan Carr himself saying that political speech should be protected.  I’m glad that BTC is playing his clip montage of Trump, Musk, Hegseth, RFK Jr, Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance, and finally Musk again, all saying things like “if we don’t have free speech, we don’t have a country any more” and “free speech only matters when it’s someone you don’t like”—he’s basically been playing it on a loop, and I guess I’m glad for that even though I’m starting to get a bit sick of it.  I’m glad that so many people keep playing that clip of Musk saying “comdey is legal again!”  I’m glad that Colbert resurrected his right-wing nutjob Colbert Report host character to do one more installment of “The Wørd”; today’s word? Shhhhhh!.  I even managed to laugh out loud when, during the report from the Daily Show correspondents, Ronny Chieng is called out because his tie is not “MAGA red” and he responds “Can you calm down?  God, is this your first dictator?”  (He goes on to point out that “They don’t care about the exact shade, OK?  It’s just about being visibly uncomfortable while you praise them like a toddler.”)  But I would be much happier if there was no need for all that commentary.

Other things you need to know this week:

• The main Some More News episode this week contains a good rundown of all the fascisms thus far.

• Legal Eagle has a great video highlighting Jeannine Pirro’s failure to indict ham sandwiches (and everyone else too).

• Another good weekly round-up from Adam Kinzinger.

• Not technically this week, but it took me a few extra days to get around to watching it: Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know interviewed Karen Hao about AI, and I think it’s one of the most balanced perspectives on AI I’ve seen in months, if not years.  She doesn’t try to convince us that AI is stupid and useless and overhyped (even though much of it is), but nor does she try to persuade us that it’s going to change our lives forever (even though there’s a bit of truth to that as well).  I especially love the part where Hasan asks her if AI will take people’s jobs and she makes a point that I also often make: AI likely can’t take your job, but that doesn’t mean it won’t take your job.  Or, as she puts it: “So the reason why AI is going to automate jobs is not always going to be because the AI tools are actually up to snuff.  It’s because people are putting the cart before the horse and just getting rid of workers, being pulled into this allure that AI is the solution.  ...  because ultimately it’s not actually AI taking your job: it’s humans.  It’s an executive deciding that your job is now redundant.”

This is quite possibly the least hopeful I’ve been since the very beginning.  Hearing Maria Ressa saying “I warned you!” (I mean, she was much more polite than that, but that’s what it sounded like in my head) ... rereading my own words from week 7:

... maybe, in retrospect, we’ll look back on this moment and say, “no, it was inexorable ... we just didn’t realize it yet.”  Man, I hope not.

and then realizing that even that feeble hope has been dashed ... it’s tough.  Perhaps the best I can do is point you at something that, if you’re a Millennial, or the parent of a Millennial, you might appreciate.  Steve Burns, late of Blues Clues, has a new video podcast called Alive, and it’s encouraging, uplifting, and soothing.  If you never watched Blue’s Clues, you might not appreciate it fully, but give it a try anyway: I think there’s something there for everyone.  Two episodes out so far.

Kimmel may sue, if only for the benefit of his staff and crew.  He may get some money out of it, and I’m sure he’ll use that to make his employees whole, but he won’t get his show back.  Colbert gets to keep going till May—hopefully!—and I suspect he won’t get his show back either.  And Trump has already said that Fallon and Seth Meyers are “next.”  That’ll be four of the Strike Force Five, and John Oliver is a recently naturalized citizen, so I suspect he may be even easier to dispose of than the rest.  So perhaps we’ll be treated to a resurrection: Strike Force Five: AntiFascism Edition.  But where will it air?  YouTube is owned by Google, and their CEO was one of the billionaires given priority seating over the Cabinet members at the inauguration.  So I’m not sure that’s the answer.  Twitch is owned by Amazon, and Bezos has already helped out the regime by hobbling the Washington Post, so there’s no hope there either.  Maybe we’ll get the modern equivalent of The Boat that Rocked, a fictional account of the real-life pirate radio stations that broadcast from ships in international waters off the coast of Britain in the 60s when BBC Radio refused to play that new, evil “rock’n'roll” garbage.  Dunno about you, but I would go to some lengths to tune into a pirate signal that featured a rotating cast of all the comedians suppressed by our current regime.  Sounds like a rockin’ show.

Doom Report (Week 34: Death Comes for All)

The major news this week is that someone shot Charlie Kirk.  If you don’t know who that is ... well, first off, count yourself lucky.  To call him a “right-wing influencer” is a bit of an understatement; some of the things he’s said are truly horrible.  And of course, when someone like this dies—especially by violence, and especially especially by gun violence—some people will be heartbroken and some people will be angry and some will rejoice.  For my part, I’ll say that, exactly as was the case when I talked about Luigi Mangione’s shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, two things can be true.  His shooting was horrifying; if you managed to avoid watching the video, please continue to do so—personally, I specifically avoided watching anything which might have the full video of the shooting in it, but just seeing the thumbnails of some of those videos in passing was enough to give me disturbing dreams.  It’s a horrible thing, the ultimate tragedy for his wife and two children (all of whom were there and witnessed the event), and I as much as anyone condemn this action or any similar action that ends in such an awful tragedy.

It is also true that Kirk once said:

I think it’s worth it.  I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.  That is a prudent deal.  It is rational.

(He was, in fact, talking about mass shootings at the moment he was shot.)  He also said that “prowling Blacks” go around targeting white people, that women should submit to their husbands, and that the “great replacement strategy” is happening every day at our southern border.  He was a racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, self-righteous prick, an absolute shitstain of a human being.  That doesn’t mean I’m glad he’s dead.  But his death doesn’t make him a better person either.  So much of the news has his right-wing nutjob colleagues saying that he only ever tried to have a civil debate, but that’s bullshit: he was fundamentally uncivil, fundamentally radical, deliberately provocative.  He sought to offend the maximum number of people because it pushed his rascist agenda and made him more money.  And, while my sympathy for his widow remains deep, it’s also true that she has stated that she will continue to push that agenda.

And while it’s good for people to call for an end to political violence, it’s also frustrating to hear the MAGA crowd go crazy blaming “the left” for Charlie Kirk’s death when they’ve been ignoring violence against Democrats for years.  Hell, just 3 months ago a Minnesota state representative was murdered and another seriously injured, and the response from Republicans was to make jokes and boost conspiracy theories.  Now they want to “crack down on universities” and treat the Democratic party “as a domestic terror organization,” while completely ignoring the school shooting that happened just a minute later less than 500 miles away.  I’d like to believe that these people really cared about Kirk and they miss their friend, but it’s awfully tempting to believe they’re just using this death as an excuse to go after their political opponents.  But, as I say, I suppose two things can be true.

For a fairly balanced (if longer) take on the shooting, try Even More News; they show a great deal of empathy for him as a human being, while still not forgiving his abhorrent views.  For shorter takes, I’d say it depends on which side of the empahty divide you want to land on: for a more somber, sympathetic view, try Seth Meyers; for a less sympathetic, unabashed, tell-it-like-it-is take, it’s tough to beat Christopher Titus.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Robert Reich has a great Substack article on the looming government shutdown, and what the Democrats should do.  His argument is quite effective—I like how he uses “disappear people from our streets,” reminiscent of my own thoughts in week 8—I thought his “then what?” conclusion was not particularly encouraging.  Adam Kinzinger also addressed this issue, coming to roughly the same conclusions, but also including a good explainer on how the shutdowns work.

• On this week’s Election Profit Makers, starting at around 35:20, you can hear David Rees bemoaning the same thing that another of my friends said to me this week: that Trump doesn’t seem to actually have a plan, or even an ideaology.  But I think David’s ultimate conclusion is correct: at the end of the day, racism is the simplest explanation.  For a guy who seems to particularly hate black women, and who once said that he wished his generals would be more like Hitler’s, Occam’s Razor tells us we should stop looking for complicated reasoning when white supremacy is right there.

• On this Monday’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart compares Trump to the kid from The Twilight Zone who keeps sending people to the cornfield; some of the side-by-side’s of people flattering the two of them are pretty spot-on.  But my favorite bit is around 15:00, where the Newsmax anchor gleefully reports that the Supreme Court has ruled that ICE may take race into consideration when deciding who to arrest, even as her name is clearly printed below her: Bianca de la Garza.

• That decision, among others, is covered by this week’s Strict Scrutiny, although my favorite bit is one of Kate Shaw’s “favorite things” (a segment they do at the end of the show to try to end on a more upbeat note).  Alexandra Petri’s article in The Atlantic entitled “Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America!” is very short, and very funny.

Is there much hope this week?  No, sadly, not much.  James Talarico will run for Senate next year; this is not against Ted Cruz, but John Cornyn.  I won’t say Cornyn is just as bad as Cruz—“equally execrable” is not a phrase one uses in conjunction with Ted Cruz—but he’s pretty execrable all right.  And Talarico is a deeply religious Democrat who’s talked about how following the teachings of Jesus makes you necessarily liberal by today’s political standards, so at least he has a fighting chance as a Democrat in Texas.  What else ... Have I Got News for You? (the US version) is back for another season; catch new episodes Saturday on CNN, Sunday on HBO Max, or just watch clips on YouTube.  But, overall, a tough week.  Hopefully things get brighter.

Doom Report (Week 33: Steal Like No One's Watching)

This week, while being interviewed by Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan said:

A judge this morning said Donald Trump violated that law by putting the National Guard on the streets of LA against the governor’s recommendation.  So on the same day, literally the same day, that a judge is saying, what you did in LA was illegal, he comes out and says, “Well, I’m going to do it in Chicago, too.”  And he said today, “I may go back into LA.”  What a weird world we live in, Jim ...

He goes on to note:

Most people go, “Oh, I broke the law; hope no one notices.”  He says, “I broke the law, and I’m going to do it again and again.”

And this ties in with something I was pondering last week, but hadn’t yet well formulated.  Once upon a time, when the government did bad shit, you could expose them.  We used to have movies and novels where the heroes just have to get the story to the New York Times or Rolling Stone or Mother Jones, and then the evil politicians won’t be able to continue their evil plans.  In fact, we don’t even need to restrict ourselves to fiction: remember All the President’s Men (book or movie, take your pick), where reporters met informants in dimly-lit underground parking garages?  Just expose the story and that’ll put the brakes on a lawless President.  Seems almost quaint in retrospect.  Now, when the government does something bad, or illegal, or horrifying, they just don’t care who knows.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Josh Johnson has really been the rising star of the making-fun-of-the-news scene this year: if the YouTube clips of his stand-up tour are any indication, he’s doing entirely different routines in every city, keeping up with the frenetic pace of the news while keeping a very sharp edge.  His facility with words calls to mind a fusion of rappers with a complex flow, such as Nas and Lateef the Truthspeaker, with some of the best of the old-school British purveyors of comedic wordplay, such as John Cleese and Stephen Fry.  He has a way of relating the insanity of the Trump regime with personal anecdotes that are extremely relatable, blending it all together until the absurdity is manifest.  This week, he talks about the reasons that people voted for Trump in a way that I hadn’t considered before: that maybe people just “felt like there was no one looking out for them; that slowly everything that was their quality of life and everything that they earned was eroding away piece by piece.  Right?  And that they just needed someone to step up who would stand in the way of all that, and wouldn’t be swayed by it.”  I think what he’s saying is that the Dems and the Repubs are all locked into the status quo, and people just wanted someone who would say “fuck you” to everybody and do whatever the fuck they wanted.  And boy did we get that.  Maybe it’s not quite as good as we hoped it would be.

• Hank Green explains why your electric bill is going to get very, very bad, and how the Republicans will blame green energy for it.

• More Perfect Union is killing it this week.  They have two excellent videos exposing the bad shit that continues to fester behing all the bad shit that Trump is doing: one on Musk’s “self-driving cars” scam, and one on how to make tons of money in the stock market (hint: it’s by buying and selling whenever Congress does).

If you’re only going to watch one thing this week, I encourage you to spend an hour watching Hasan Minhaj interview the former head of USAID.  This is an organization that’s saved over 90 million lives over the last 20 years; now, it’s completely gutted.  Best estimates are over 300,000 lives lost because of this so far this year.  Here’s the stark reality that Dr. Gawande lays out:

You had people in a hundred offices around the world: those are shut down.  The organizations that they worked with that had expertise, local organizations in different countries and large organizations around the world, they’ve terminated their staff.  There’s a bank account that has billions of dollars in it that now has shifted to the State Department; who knows whether that’ll be spent appropriately, but there aren’t the people there anymore to to make this program work.  Sixty years of experience of an agency that’s built up these capabilities.  Now, if you turn that back on, it would take you years, if not decades, to rebuild.

Watch Hasan’s reaction to this pronouncement.

I wish there was a note of hope to leave you on this week, but, to echo Dr. Gawande, “What I am simply trying to do is bear witness to the destruction at at this moment.”  So keep looking ahead to a time when this is over, keep trying to laugh as best you can at the absurdity of it all, but never lose sight of the wanton destruction wrought by the hands of a few capricious and callous billionaires.

Doom Report (Week 32: Target on Their Back)

I’ve said before that I was a bit surprised that so many companies instantly caved to pressure from Trump on the whole DEI thing, after pointing out way back in Week 1 that all companies really care about is their bottom line, and diversity boosts that.  Of course, I forgot, apparently, that companies are run by people, and people are emotional creatures who don’t always make the most amoral, profit-increasing decision.  Well, it looks like Target has become the poster child for the finding out phase of jettisoning DEI, with their CEO announcing his departure amidst a loss that some estimate at over $10 billion.  The Target boycott is discussed in typically amusing fashion by Josh Johnson, if you’re willing to enjoy a longer video (with, to be fair, a lot of trenchant observations and really funny quips).

Now, some articles understand that Target’s decline is tied to its reversal of DEI policies, but a surprising amount don’t.  Yes, the anti-DEI measures happened, and subsequently profits declined, but of course correlation is not causation.  Both things could have been the result of a third factor, or it could just be a complete coincidence.  It frankly amazed me that I found so many articles that claimed the DEI policy change was completely unrelated to the drop in profits, or just failed to mention it altogether, like an entire cadre of financial reporters are sitting somewhere with fingers in ears, saying “la la la I can’t hear you!” in a too-loud voice.  But here’s the thing: Target’s profits increased shortly after they first instituted their DEI-friendly policies.  Sure, that too could be a coincidence, but those who desperately cling to the correlation-not-causation principle often forget another important principle: Occam’s Razor, which tells us that, all other things being equal, the most simple explanation is usually the correct one.  It’s not always true, of course, but in this case we might want to revisit William of Ockham’s original formulation: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”  I think some of these financial guys are multiplying the hell out of some entities up in here.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Apparently, you can’t get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

• On one of this week’s Even More News episodes, Trump reports that “people are saying” that maybe we need a dictator.  Just floating the idea, you understand.  More amusingly, the transcript of Ghislaine Maxwell’s conversation with Todd Blanche has her trying to convince us that Trump was a “gentleman.”  As Cody and crew point out, it would have been way more believable if she’d said “well, of course he was a sleazy asshole, but never with any underage girls.”  But calling the Miss-Teen-USA-dressing-room-crashing, if-she-weren’t-my-daughter-I’d-be-dating-her, sleeping-with-a-porn-star-while-his-wife-was-home-with-a-newborn, grab-’em-by-the-pussy guy a gentleman ... it’s such a laughably obvious lie that it might as well have a flashing neon sign pointing to it saying “PARDON PLEASE!”.

Apparently, Robert Reich said this in 1995:

The steady decline of the median wage in this country and the widening gap between the people at the top and the rest of us threatens the stability and the prosperity of this nation.

I suppose that, in 1995, people thought he was nutso.  How on Earth could a wage gap threaten our national security?  But then the CEO pay went from 30x that of the average worker to 350x, and a bloviating orange idiot who knew who to say all the right things managed to get himself elected twice, and now we’re cozying up to Russia and North Korea and pissing off our allies.  So, you know, he looks like a fucking psychic from our present day vantage.

The only question is, will the Democrats learn the right lesson?  So far, it seems like, every time they get beat, they decide that they need to act more like the other guys and completely miss the fact that people are just voting against whoever’s in charge and not changing anything.  I wish our hopes and dreams for a secure future weren’t pinned on the Democrats, who are just as useless as the Republicans but way less effective.  But I’ve yet to see any realistic chance for any third party or independent candidate, so I guess it’s the Democrats or nothing.

And, yes, we have people such as Bernie and AOC and Mamdani showing the way, but Bernie’s been doing that decades with no traction, and Mamdani can’t even get the support of his fellow New York Democrats.  You know, on this week’s Coffee Klatch, when talking about what is probably the very speech I quote above, Reich says that

The saddest and heartbreaking aspect to me is that the road we were on ... carried with it the inevitability of somebody like Trump.  If it hadn’t been Donald Trump, it would be another demagogue.  ... we couldn’t have stayed on the path we were on.  And maybe we needed something like ... Trump to shake us up—to, to wake us up.  We were taking so much for granted.  We were taking democracy, the rule of law, due process, the economy: we were taking it all for granted.  And we can’t, and shouldn’t, do that.

Now the only questions is, are the Democrats awake yet?

Doom Report (Week 31: Don't Forget to Bring a Towel)

Look, I don’t actually watch South Park much any more.  I thoroughly enjoyed it back in the day, and I always respected the fact that they weren’t afraid to be shocking.  But there’s a difference between not being afraid to be shocking, and just being shocking for the sake of being shocking.  And the latter can grow thin over time, in my opinion.  So it was that I gradually watched it less and less, even though I continued to appreciate their chutzpah.  But they’re having a bit of a resurgence these days, and I may have to starting watching again.

But, for now, I’m just watching the clips of South Park that they show on Pod Save America.  And, while I’m not the biggest fan of Favreau, Lovett, and Vietor (as witnessed by how rarely I reference them in these Reports), I do enjoy some of their stuff, and I confess I really get a kick out of them really getting a kick out of South Park lately.  The saga of Donald Trump’s “teeny tiny penis” is one of those over-the-top, shock-for-shock’s-value bits that dampened my enthusiasm for South Park in the first place, so that’s not the part that interested me.  But what I really loved was the saga of Towelie visiting DC to kiss Trump’s ass (as so many world leaders have been doing this year), accompanied by this shot of the perpetually stoned, anthropomorphic towel arriving in Union Station:

And what strikes me about this is, it’s the type of image you’d expect to see in a show about Franco’s Spain, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or Pinochet’s Chile, or Idi Amin’s Uganda, or, in more modern times, Orbán’s Hungary or Erdoğan’s Turkey.  Soldiers everywhere, citizens mostly in hiding, air of menace hanging thick in the air.  And, yes: South Park is exaggerating the situation in DC, and yes: it’a a friggin’ cartoon.  But against those counterpoints, I’ll tell you two things Donald Trump said this week.  After patting himself on the back about how well his military deployment in DC is going, he continued:

And after we do this, we’ll go to another location, and we’ll make it safe also.  We’re going to make our country very safe.  We’re going to make our cities very, very safe.  Chicago is a mess: you have an incompetent mayor, grossly incompetent.  And, uh, we’ll straighten that one out, probably next.

And, while hosting Zelenskyy in the White House, when Zelenskyy notes that they can’t hold elections while they’re being invaded by Russia, Trump interrupts:

So you’re saying, during the war you can’t have elections.  So let me just say three and a half years from now—so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections.

And, if you don’t find that chilling, then I fear you just haven’t been paying enough attention.

Other things you need to know this week:

• This week’s Strict Scrutiny covers just how much Trump can and cannot do as regards deploying the military in DC (and other cities).  Although I think we need to institute a new rule: any statement that contains “the president is not allowed to” must also include the word “allegedly.”  You know: just to cover all your bases.

• Robert Reich gives you 5 things you can do to stand up to the current fascism.

• Adam Kinzinger talks briefly about the raid on John Bolton’s house by Trump’s DOJ.

Is there hope this week?  I’d like to find hope in the fact that Sherrod Brown, who represented Ohio in Congress for over 30 years before being defeated by a Trumpist last year, will not be retiring, but rather running again next year to fill the Senate vacancy left by JD Vance.  The Republican who beat him, by the way, is an immigrant from Colombia who can be summed up trivially by this exact sequence of paragraphs in his Wikipedia page:

In 2016, Moreno called Trump a “lunatic invading [the Republican Party]” and said he could not support a party led by “that maniac”.  In a now-deleted 2016 tweet, Moreno wrote, “He attacked immigrants, tries to silence the press, & appeals to the darkest part of human nature”, then asked his followers whether he was describing Trump or Adolf Hitler.  He wrote in a tweet that he had written in a vote for Marco Rubio in the 2016 presidential election.  During a 2019 radio interview, Moreno said, “there’s no scenario in which I would support Trump.”

By 2024, Moreno was a Trump supporter, received his endorsement for Senate, and said, “I wear with honor my endorsement from President Trump.”

Beyond the triumph of crass opportunism, though, Brown is looking at an entirely different race next year than last year.  And he’s a left-wing populist, not a corporate Democrat, and therefore hopefully not as ineffectual.  Mirroring that divide, over in Maine, oysterman and bartender Graham Platner is going to challenge Susan Collins, she of the Trump-has-learned-a-“pretty big lesson” after his first impeachment.  Remember how she predicted he would “be much more cautious in the future”?  Yeah, that didn’t work out so well.  And, while Platner is still a big unknown, we can at least take comfort that Fox “News” is calling him “Maine’s Mamdani.”  So the call to action is being heeded.  Will it be sufficient?  Well, I guess it all depends on how many soldiers Trump can deploy between now and then ...

Doom Report (Week 30: We Need a Sandwich-Proof Vest)

In what may be the weirdest story of the week, Jeanine Pirro, perhaps best known for being the drunk racist aunt of Fox “News” until she was appointed US attorney for DC, has declared that a man who threw a sandwich at an ICE officer will be charged with felony assault.  It is at this point in these reports that I would typically make a comment pointing out how ridiculous the previous sentence is.  In this case, however, I’m not sure I can enhance the inherent ridiculosity of the news story itself.  Best take: Brian Tyler Cohen and Glenn Kirschner, the latter of whom points out that the officer was wearing a bulletproof vest.  So I guess it could get more ridiculous, after all.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger’s back with another “week in review.”  His perspective as a sane Republican is an important one to have, I think.  If you want a deeper dive on his point that Ukraine is absolutely not losing the war, he has a good video on that too.  It gets a bit repetitive in places, but he also brings a perspective as a former military man—he was a fighter pilot longer than a Congressman—that’s quite incisive.

• If you want to understand the ongoing situation with the Texas Democrats and efforts to arrest them, Liz Dye has you covered over on Legal Eagle.

• Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer interviews Gavin Newsom about ICE showing up at his press conference.

• BTC has what’s probably the best take on Trump’s cajoling for a Nobel Peace Prize.  He is, as always, a bit over the top in his liberal bias, but if you can look past that it’s an amusing summary of the situation.

One thing that I wish more of these shows would do is just take the time to go to Wikipedia.  For instance, both Some More News and Last Week Tonight have talked about former Lois & Clark actor Dean Cain apparently deciding to join ICE after a recruitment video of his went viral.  But neither of them noted the most insane part of the story: Cain’s birth name is Dean Tanaka, and members of his family were put into internment camps during WWII.  Apparently Margaret Cho picked up on the irony here, but no one else seems to have bothered to check the Wikipedia page, where you could have learned in about two paragraphs that Dean Cain is now in the Bizarro World position of having to arrest his own grandparents (figuratively speaking).  Cho nailed it when she said:

You have never been white, and no matter how many of these white activities you participate in, it’s never gonna make that happen.  No matter how racist you are.  No matter how wrong you act.  You will always be wrong—but never white.  Dumbass.

Over 30 years since her early stand-up days, but Margaret’s still got it.  Good to know she’s still out there serving up truth with a side of funny.

Doom Report (Week 29: The Flame in which there Lives the Gerrymander of the Human Soul)

Of course the big story this week is: gerrymandering!  You can see the original gerrymander up above; it was named after Elbridge Gerry, who happened to be the governor of Massachusetts in 1812, when that slice of Boston that was deemed, at the time, to look like a (mythological) salamander but was actually a state Senate district first began to attract some negative attention.  If you need more information on gerrymandering in general, there’s a great Hank Green explainer video on the topic which he titled “The Massive Fraud that’s Tearing America Apart.”  It reminds me of a quote from Earl Warren that I believe I heard in Deadlocked that, despite presiding over Brown v Board of Education, he always felt his most important case was the lesser-known Reynolds v Sims, which promulgated the “one person, one vote” philosophy.  Although that had to do with creating unequal districts with regard to population size rather than gerrymandering, it’s still telling that this bastion of liberal justice felt that the most important issue facing us was fair representation.  Also note that this first instance of gerrymandering—or at least the first to be called that—was done by Democrats.  But, like many things invented by Democrats, the Republicans have taken it to a whole new level.

And, so, the Democrats in the Texas state legislature have left the state to avoid having to vote in a special session called by their governor after he got a call from Trump asking him to redraw the state districts in order to get him 5 more Republican seats in next year’s mid-terms.  (And, if you need more information on this bit of gerrymandering in particular, Zeteo has you covered.)  It amuses me that Republicans can call for these Democrats to be arrested for “not doing their jobs” while at the same time desperately fleeing from Washington DC in order to avoid having to vote to release the Epstein files.  But I shouldn’t be surprised: at this point, all shame has been genetically bred out of the Republican party.  What’s really keeping me shoving the popcorn in my mouth is the current showdown between director of the FBI Kash Patel, who has said he will help round up the Democrats, who are hiding out mostly in Chicago, and Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who is standing firm in his stance to protect those same Democrats from arrest.  I mean, if you pitched a TV series where state troopers arrest FBI agents for kidnapping, sparking a second American civil war, I think you’d have a bidding war on your hands.  Gripping television, for sure.  Let’s see how it goes.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has another “week in review”; I don’t think this week is quite as good as the previous two, but he’s still a good resource.

• This week’s Some More News is an exhaustive indictment of the mendacious tactics of ICE.  Turns out that, while we already knew that ICE was lying, some of the things they’re doing are downright despicable.  Long, but worth it.

• In another of those “crossing the streams” moments, Brian Tyler Cohen interviews Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan.  BTC is smart, but he does have his blind spots, and his insistence that the Democrats’ problems will all be over if they just build a media ecosystem to compete with the Fox “News” empire is one of them.  Here Mehdi makes an excellent counterpoint: “We often say—you and I will rightly say, ‘oh, New York Times isn’t covering the story; it’s not on its front page’.  But to be fair to New York Times, the New York Times needs, kind of, quote/unquote permission to do that.  And the way they get permission to do that, in our system, is they need a senior Democratic politician to hold a press conference and ask questions or hold a hearing in Congress.  ... liberal Democratic parties will say, ‘oh, the media is just ignoring the story’.  And I’m not defending the media: I’m the last person to defend mainstream media.  But you also have to ask questions about the Democratic party.  If the leadership of the party is not pushing this at the same time, it allows the media to move on.”

Sometimes we find our messages of hope in the unlikeliest of places.  This week, the Judge John Hodgman podcast released the live show that they recorded in Burlington Vermont the day after Election Day.  His “obscure cultural verdict” was a the first paragraph of a post by feminist author Rebecca Solnit (this was a Twitter post, but, weirdly, you can no longer see the original post, which I’m sure is just a coincidence and not Elon Musk desperately trying to erase all trace of opinions that disagree with him).  I’ll repeat it for you here:

They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them.  You are not giving up, and neither am I.  The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.  You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in.  Remember what you love.  Remember what loves you.  Remember in this tide of hate what love is.  The pain you feel is because of what you love.

It certainly has felt like a tide of hate lately.  But, as Solnit reminds us, everything we can save is worth saving.

Doom Report (Week 28: Not Quite Total Recall)

Back in Week 25, the guests on The Weekly Show were Tony Gilroy and Mike Duncan.  (I actually thought I wrote about it at the time, but I guess not.)  Now, Gilroy was there because he’s the creator of Andor, a “science fiction” show which, many point out, is eerily parallel to our own current experiences in many ways.  Duncan is a bit tougher to describe: he started a podcast called The History of Rome way back in 2007.  As a historian, he was able to parlay that into 179 episodes across 5 years.  His next project was Revolutions, a series of deep dives into the various revolutions which have shaped the world: the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and 4 others.  This brought him to 2022, when he had not run out of revolutions, but he had run out of steam.  So he took a break, and then came back in 2024 with “The Martian Revolution.”

Now, obviously, this is not a real historical event, but rather a piece of elaborate science fiction.  But of course Duncan knows how to make it sound like a real historical event, complete with references to biographies and other secondary sources, controversies debated by competing historical viewpoints, larger-than-life personalities who are revealed to be just human after all, and everything else you could imagine.  I thought the whole thing sounded intriguing, and I decided to give it a listen.  In two episodes, I was hooked.  Two weeks and 27 more episodes later, I have emerged from nearly non-stop binge listening to tell you that you too must listen to this amazing piece of “fiction.”  And I put that in quotes rather advisedly, because, like Andor, it has a number of eerie parallels to current events, even though (like Andor) it was conceived and entirely written before President Musk started destroying everything.  And, yet, there is a character in “The Martian Revolution” who is an almost perfect Musk analog.  It’s almost like Musk himself is a tired stereotype instead of a tech genius.

Throughout the series, I kept seeing the parallels to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution, and I’m sure I’d have seen parallels to others if I knew more about them.  But it was hearing the echoes of our current American political landscape that intrigued (and disturbed) me the most: not just the CEO with tunnel vision cutting services and jobs that he had no understanding of, but the rule of the gerontocracy, the exploitation of the poor by the upper classes, the blindness of bean-counters making organization-wide decisions with catastrophic consequences, the inevitable in-fighting among the oppressed leading to movements being hijacked by selfish interests.  Each episode is pretty short, so it doesn’t take much investment to figure out if it’s for you.  But, trust me: it is.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Two great videos from Adam Kinzinger this week: the first, another great weekly news roundup (where, thankfully, “Jizz-lane” is replaced by “Jih-lane”: still wrong, but much easier on the ears) and, the second, a stirring condemnation of masked ICE agents.

• On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews Peter Beinart, a Jewish author who has been quite vocal lately (he showed up on several of my feeds this week, but this is likely the best introduction to him).  He takes the insane position that Jews should not be supportive of starving children—go figure.  Here’s a perfect quote that sums up Binart’s essential point: “And I know a lot of people caricature a lot of these people who care about Palestinian rights and freedom as, like, being anti-Semitic.  But to be honest, the vast, vast majority of people I meet, they strike me as, like, the kind of people who would have stuck up for us when we were in trouble, the kind of people who are willing to risk something because when they see people suffering and being abused, they act.  And those are the people who I want to be around.”  Amen.

• Also on Monday’s Daily Show, Stewart talks about Trump’s accusations against every black person he could think of, and a special guest shows up.  Exquisite commentary.

• On this week’s episode of Strict Scrutiny, Kate and Leah cover the motion by Chief Justice Roberts to stifle a FOIA request from Stephen Miller which, as Leah describes it, “seems to be a backdoor way to try to seize power over the federal courts by asserting that these entities, which are critical to the functioning of the courts, are actually executive branch entities subject to presidential control.”  The incisive observation from Kate exposes the hypocrisy of Roberts and the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court: ”... this seems like a pretty big indication that John Roberts is aware that things may not be purely on the up and up in the federal executive right now.  And he is kind of letting us see that when it is his institution at stake, not, say, those who by statute independently protect consumers from products that try to hurt us.”  Preach on, professor.

Where is the hope this week?  Well, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that it’s the Wall Street Journal that keeps fucking with Trump over the Epstein business.  He claims he’s suing them for one of his ridiculous amounts (I believe it’s actually $10 billion in this case, which is basically so large as to be meaningless).  But I wonder how long that suit will stand ... likely exactly as long as it takes to realize that Rupert Murdoch is not Disney, or Paramount, and he isn’t likely to roll over and throw money at Trump’s temper tantrum.  Because, if the suit goes on any longer than that, then discovery kicks in, and all of a sudden WSJ actually produces that utterly bizarre birthday letter that he wrote to Epstein.  And something tells me that people actually seeing this letter, which so far we’ve only heard described, would be really bad for ol’ Trumpy.

But what’s still breaking my brain is why.  Murdoch is, after all, the owner of Fox “News,” quite possibly the #1 reason we’re stuck with this idiot in the first place.  So why this sudden 180?  The only thing I’ve been able to figure—and I stress that this is a complete guess—is just that Trump is suddenly threatening Murdoch’s wealth and ability to continue making obscene amounts of money with all his tariff bullshit.  Remember, as far back as January Murdoch and the WSJ called Trump’s tariff policy “the dumbest trade war in history.”  Maybe Murdoch is cutting his losses and deciding that, as much good as Trump is doing him and his fellow billionaires, it isn’t worth the risks.  Maybe Murdoch will be the one that finally brings down the Teflon Don.  Not holding my breath, but a man can dream.

But I’ll leave you this week with a quote from Andry Hernández Romero, as read by Leah Litman (again, on this week’s Strict Scrutiny).  You may recall that Romero was the gay hairdresser who was, like Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, caught up in the Trump regime’s fervor to deport innocent immigrants.  At the end of last week, he was finally released from the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador.  As Leah reports:

I wanted to read a quote from him upon his release, when he learned that people continued to call for him to be released and drawing attention to his case.  So he said, quote, “It fills me with so much peace, so much comfort, so much tranquility that I was never alone from day one.  There were many people who worried for me.”

And, as Kate went on to say:

I do think that it can feel like you’re toiling in the dark and it’s totally futile to—whether you’re posting on social media or actually marching with signs—but continuing to call for the return of individuals detained at CECOT, whether or not any individual action has any kind of causal connection to what ultimately happened, A) it meant a lot to the people who, like Andry Hernández Romero, but also the other hundreds of men who, not only whose friends and families, but a lot of people in the kind of public at large, continued to press for the release of, but also I do think it matters from the perspective of policy makers and kind of the diplomatic effort, such as it was, that actually did kind of result in people actually being released from these horrific conditions.

So never doubt that these efforts are having an impact.  Sometimes it seems like it can’t possibly be enough.  But for the people who have been un-disappeared—for Romero, for Abrego-Garcia, for Khalil and Ozturk—for them, it matters quite a lot.  And that’s worth fighting for.

Doom Report (Week 27: The Fact that We Even Have to Care How to Pronounce It Is Disturbing)

Nearly 1200 years ago, there was a guy named Ghislain who got himself made a saint.  His Wikipedia page doesn’t really go into what he did that was so saintly—I’m neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox, but I always thought you had to do some miracles or something like that to get canonized.  And, hey: maybe he did drop a miracle or two here and there, but there’s no mention of it on Wikipedia.  Actually, the article reads like someone lifted it straight out a medieval text, with sentences like “He soon entered into relations with Waltrude, who was induced by him to build a monastery at Castrilocus, his former place of refuge” and “The intercourse between Ghislain and Aldegonde brought about a perfect understanding between Maubeuge and the monastery founded at Ursidongus under Ghislain’s direction.”  Wacky stuff.

Anyway, he may have been Germanic, but he died in Belgium, very close to the border with France.  And apparently it became a not-awfully-common-but-not-unheard-of name among the French-speaking peoples in Europe.  And, if you wanted to name your kid after this saint, but your kid happened to be a girl, you would just tack an “e” on at the end and call it a day.  Now, in “most of France and in Belgium,” you would pronounce the first syllable of this name as “ghee,” like the clarified butter.  The second syllable is pronounced “lehn,” with a bit of a nasal vowel and not much of the actual “n” sound, which I happen to do a passable job at because I have a friend from France whose name is “Alain,” and that’s pronounced the same way (although mostly he just gives up and lets us dumb Americans call him “Alan”).  The dumb American way for the second syllable of this name, though, is usually just “lane.”  So, overall: “ghee-lenh” or “ghee-lane” if you don’t want to sound pretentious and French.  But note that the source I linked to also, however, mentions that “in the south of France and in Canada,” the name is more commonly pronounced with an initial syllable like “jeez” (second syllable unchanged).  But nowhere does anyone pronounce it like “jizz.”  Unless you’re a dumb American pundit talking about Ghislaine Maxwell.

Because this person really has dominated our new cycle this week.  She is, in many ways, a fascinating figure, if you look at the totality of her life beyond just the horrific things that she probably (almost certainly) did for Jeffrey Epstein, a man who she never married (or perhaps more fair to say he never married her: the farthest he would go, apparently, was to refer to her as his “main girlfriend”), but will forever be associated with.  Her Wikipedia page tells us that she was born to non-native Brits living in France (specifically, the north of France, so the “ghee” pronunciation is presumably the correct one).  Her mother was originally French; her father had been born in what was then Czechoslovakia.  (Her father, by the way, has a whole interesting background as well: a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, he built a media empire in Britain, served in Parliament, died at 68 while pissing, nude, off the side of his yacht—presumably he had a heart attack, fell in the ocean, and drowned—was buried in Jerusalem at a lavish funeral attended by heads of state and heads of intelligence, including the Prime Minister of Israel, and then was discovered to have been embezzling from his companies’ pension funds.)  Ghislaine was their ninth and youngest child; two days after her birth, one of her older brothers was in a car crash that left him in a coma for six years, after which he died.  So that was her life up until age six.  Prep school, university at Oxford, dabbled in women’s clubs and business, possibly caught up in some of her father’s shady schemes, citizen of the US and the UK and France, lived in New York City off a Liechtenstein trust fund of 80,000 pounds (which is close to $300,000 in today’s money) per year.  Somewhere in there she managed to learn to fly a helicopter, which came in handy for transporting Epstein to his private island.  And her father’s yacht—remember, the one he died pissing off of?—a 180-foot, nearly 3,000 horsepower behemoth “equipped with a jacuzzi, sauna, gym and disco,” was named the Lady Ghislaine.

But, as Dear Leader Trumpy has proclaimed, this is all very boring.  “I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody,” he said, and then immediately started whining about how Obama rigged the election that he won.  C’mon, guy: it’s one thing to claim that the election that you lost was rigged, but the one you won?  Shit’s getting weird.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger delivers another good roundup of the week’s news.  I think Kinzinger started off slow, but he’s picking up steam, finding his footing.  Other than the unfortunate “jizz-lane” pronunciation, I’m quite enjoying his take.

• Two good videos from Adam Conover this week: one, an astute summary of the (coming) fallout from the Outlandish Bloated Beastly Buttfuckery (that name is really starting to grow on me), and, as an added bonus, a really incisive video comparing the fight for trans rights to the gay rights movement.

• In another bangin’ “In My Opinon” segment from The Daily Show, Charlamagne tha God asks, “does Trump have dementia?”  I suppose we can’t conclude definitively one way or the other, but Charlamagne brings the receipts.

• This week’s Weekly Show was pretty decent, but I mainly want to draw your attention to the outro segment, where Jon breaks down the interview with his producers.  Researcher and associate producer Gillian Spear is, as she so often is, the star of this one, throwing out banger after banger.  On House Speaker Mike Johnson’s whiplash-inducing change from demanding transparency in the Epstein case to just going along with whatever Trump says: “I mean, for Mike Johnson, morality and transparency is telling your son what porn you’re watching. Starts there; ends there.”  On Trump’s reaction to realizing that he couldn’t actually follow through on his threats to cancel President Musk’s contracts, because DOGE had fired everyone who might step in to take over: “And who led that charge, in some respect? It’s almost like—the guy that we have to give all our money to ...”  Stewart is entertaining, but Spears is who keeps me coming back for more.

• I absolutely adore that, even in the midst of all of Trump’s (very successful) attempts to flood the zone with shit, More Perfect Union is still putting out videos exposing everyday, ordinary corporate greed.  This time on the chopping block: why Spotify sucks.  To hear the prick who runs Spotify say shit like “I did this, not because I thought we could make a ton of money.  I did this because I cared about the problem.  I cared about music, and I cared about compensating artists fairly” and then to hear that he is worth nearly $10 billion and that many artists get paid, not pennies, not tenths of pennies, not even hundredths of pennies, but thousandths of pennies per stream ... it’s infuriating.

Finally, on this week’s Strict Scrutiny, the ladies are making excellent use of their time during the Supreme Court’s summer break.  While talking about how the Supreme Court keeps validating Trump by telling him “hey, we won’t say that what you’re doing is legal ... but we absolutely affirm your right to keep doing those potentially illegal things while we think about it,” Kate told this story:

And on the “impossibility of unringing the bell” point, I thought Kim Lane Shepley had a really evocative metaphor in a piece she wrote for The Contrarian about this, and I want to quote it in its entirety.  So she says, quote, “Think of the executive branch before 2025 as an aquarium in which various agency fishes were swimming around, acting like a government.  Trump inserted a blender into the fish tank because he asserted that he has the Constitutional power to create “fish soup.”  ...  So it matters, says Kim, if the court allows the blender to be turned on while it decides the legal question of whether the constitution in fact permits the president to make bouillabaisse.  Though it’s easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, the reverse operation is impossible.  So allowing Trump to turn on the blender while waiting for an answer about the soup decides the case.  Literally, I think that is what the administration has been doing since January 20th, but in particular in this case, turning on the blender and the lower court saying, like, “No, no, no.  You can’t do that.  We have to decide if you can make the soup.”  And the Supreme Court saying, “Go ahead and make the soup.”

Which, you know, is probably the best summary of the situation I’ve heard thus far.

They also have a guest, Rachel Barkow, who wrote a book about mass incarceration.  What she focusses on are several court cases where the Supreme Court decided—possibly improperly—to enable mass incarceration by curtailing liberties that should be enshrined in our Constitution.  And, while she doesn’t state this explicitly, what this discussion made me ponder was this:  We’ve managed to make imprisoning people easy (and profitable), so sending people to prison is a default outcome of most of our court cases.  But if prisons were difficult and/or expensive, we’d probably find other options.  It really makes you believe that we could have been better if it weren’t for a few errant Supreme Court cases, and then perhaps you can make the jump to: we still can be better, if we work at it.

And that’s about all the hope I can muster for you this week.  Maybe next time there’ll be more.