Doom Report (Week 2: Hurtling towards Rock Bottom)

We seem to be in the business of continually reaching new lows these days.  The most amusing was Trump’s claim that he had “turned on the water” in California.  He’s apparently moved beyond taking credit for things that he didn’t do and moved on to taking credit for things that never even happened.  As Leah Litman put it in this week’s episode of Strict Scrutiny, “America is officially in its finding out era.”

Strict Scrutiny is another great show that I recommend people listen to; while I’ve never been a huge fan of the flagship Crooked Media show (Pod Save America), some of their other shows (such as Scrutiny and Pod Save the UK) are pretty good.  Also in this week’s show, Melissa Murray proposed that, under Trump, “DEI” was being redefined as “dicks, ex-husbands, and incels,” which I thought was a pretty trenchant observation.

I didn’t even get a chance to talk last week about their previous episode, where they covered the Supreme Court’s response to oral arguments in the Texas pornography case.  The concensus of the conservative judges—who seem to be the only ones who matter any more—was that technology is advancing too fast, so I guess I that means we don’t need to follow the Constitution any more.  You know, historically, I’ve been very opposed to slippery slope arguments, because they are often used by the Right to justify opposition to popular positions with completely ridiculous, made up consequences (remember how gay marriage was going to lead to people marrying turtles?).  But the Right has actually made me rethink this position.  If Trump 1.0 was the first step on a slippery slope, we seem destined, inevitably, to break our necks at the bottom of the incline.

Also from this week’s Strict Scrutiny episode: buried in the spectacle of pardoning 1600 insurrectionists, Trump also pardoned the first police officer in DC convicted of murder while on the job, as well as his pal who helped him cover it up.  Why?  Because they were white cops convicted of killing an unarmed black man, of course.  Just in case you were still, somehow, doubting that Trump is all in on the white supremacy.

On the Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews Chris Christie.  As an anti-Trump Republican, Christie is worth listening to: much of what he says you want to cheer, because he hates Trump, and much of what he says has you yelling at the screen, because he is after all still a Republican.  On the topic of why Trump won (or, rather, why Kamala lost), he dovetails nicely with what I’ve also been saying:

And I think strategically, for her, the big mistake was, she didn’t distance herself from Biden.  And when 72% of the country (as the last poll the last weekend) said the country is on the wrong track, not separating yourself from the person who was president when it went to 72% wrong track, is a politically fatal mistake.

Fair enough.  Brian Tyler Cohen has said (and many seem to agree) say that the Democrats were “punished for high prices.” Bullshit: they were punished for trying to gaslight the American people.

But Christie then goes on to talk about how Americans feel like their government is failing them, and he cites the LA wildfires and the air traffic controllers.  Now, it’s not clear if this interview took place after the horrific plane crash on Wednesday, or if Christie was just being eerily prophetic here, but what struck me at the time was how both of his examples about how the government is failing could be construed to be the fault of the Republicans.  Of course, this never occurred to him (because apparently we live in a post-irony society).  On the topic of the wildfires, I completely agree that some of the funding decisions made by LA Mayor Karen Bass had some impact on the fires, but it’s hard to argue that the 100MPH winds weren’t the major factor.  And why do we have such insane winds? could it be because the Republicans have been waging a deliberate, decades-long campaign to convince us that climate change was a hoax when we all know—can see with our eyes, for fuck’s sake—that it’s very real, and endangering property and lives?  As for the air traffic controllers, I’m trying not to leap to judgement on the recent crash, even though it’s very tempting to do so when Trump forced out the head of the FAA (because President Musk didn’t like him), fired the entire aviation security advisory committee (which had been around since the 1989 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie), and then tried to convince us that DEI initiatives instigated under Obama were responsible, even though they somehow were fine for 15 years until Trump managed to get into office again.  But we don’t even have to blame Trump here: Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers back in 1981—wiping out over 11 thousand jobs in one fell swoop—and the industry never recovered.  More Perfect Union all but predicted an incident like this in a video they did on the topic almost a year ago.

But Christie goes beyond not seeing the irony in pointing out a bunch of deficits in the government that his own party is almsot certainly responsible for (or at least responsible for making worse).  He and Stewart get into a pretty spirited debate over DEI.  Christie is, predictably, against it.  He says that the American people feel like DEI forces companies to choose unqualified candidates just because they’re women or minorities—note that he won’t quite so far as to claim DEI actually does this, merely that people have this perception.  But Stewart points out that all DEI does is throw open the pools of candidates to people who traditionally would have never been considered.  Christie somehow manages to disagree with this perspective and then tells a long story about how he, when he was a US attorney in New Jersey, specifically sought out candidates of color because he recognized his office was “the whitest, male-est office I had ever been in, in my life.” And yet somehow, when he says it, that’s not DEI ... man, I hate to tell you, Chris, but if you were doing that today instead of 20 years ago, someone would have reported you to the DEI snitch line by now.  (As a side note, it never ceases to amuse me that the Trump regime’s poster child for the “meritocracy” that’s going to replace all the evil DEI initiatives is Pete Hegseth, a straight white man utterly devoid of merit.)

And the takeover of the government continues.  The OPM is sending out memos written by Project 2025 authors, President Musk is getting in on the act by recycling his buyout offer to Twitter employees, now directed at government employees, and federal workers are suffering an existential crisis.  Still, that’s nothing compared to Mike Pompeo and John Bolton (and others) having their security detail eliminated when there are still credible threats on their lives, just because they spoke out against Trump.  On this week’s Coffe Klatch, Reich had another take on this:

I think the Press gets this wrong, Heather: even the mainstream press are are describing this as retribution for people like Fauci or Bolton who have crossed Trump in the past, but, if you understand this in the terms that I’ve been giving you—and that is the consolidation of power—what Trump is really doing with all of these punishments is warning people who are currently in the government, currently officials, anybody who is potentially standing up to him, he’s saying to them “Don’t try to cross me, because if you do I’m going to make your life miserable in the future.  If for example you do something that causes you to receive death threats, ... I’m going to take away your security detail, or I’m not going to give you a security detail ...” In other words, this is this is all about consolidating power.

But, honestly, I think that might be a distinction without a difference.

Trump also fired a bunch of Inspectors General, without providing the requried 30 days’ notice to Congress.  Lindsey Graham was on CNN saying, sure, it was “technically” illegal, but Trump has the authority, so he wasn’t worried about it.  Weirdly, John Stewart, on Monday’s Daily Show, ended up agreeing with Graham.  Stewart’s point was that we shouldn’t be freaking out over everything Trump does; we need to save our outrage for the really bad stuff.  And this was a thing he did because we elected him, not because he’s a fascist.  But I think Stewart (uncharacteristically) misses the mark here.  IGs were invented to provide independent government oversight in the wake of Watergate.  As one acerbic Internet observer wrote, “Welp, if you’re the manager of a bank and you plan to rob the bank, firing the security guards is step one!” So I respect the point Stewart was trying make, but I think it’s a bit bigger deal than he intimated.  Also, being in agreement with Lindsey Graham pretty much always means you’ve gone wrong somewhere.

I think Stephen Colbert summed it up best this week with the story of his first car:

First car I ever owned was a 1978 powder blue Pinto.  I bought it from my brother Billy for a dollar, and I got ripped off.  But what she lacked in acceleration she made up for in rattle.  It clearly had some problems, but I didn’t have any money to fix it, and I didn’t know anything about cars.  So what I would do is, I would drive it over a shallow drainage ditch across the street from me, and I would keep it running, and I’d pull the handbrake really hard, and I’d shimmy underneath it with a hammer, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver.  And then I would touch the hammer to various things under the car and, if by touching them, the rattling stopped, I would use the other tools to remove that thing from the car.  And after a while I had a beautiful collection of rusty hunks of metal on the wall of my garage.  I had no idea what they did, but the car was still running.  Until one day I removed one too many mystery parts and then it died.  So I left it on the street where it was eventually towed away to an area of Chicago you don’t want to know about called Lower Whacker Drive.  Now, I’m not saying the American government doesn’t have problems—it clearly does—what I’m saying is, if we just let Trump start firing people and cutting programs without knowing who any of them are or what any of them do, sooner or later America’s going to get Lower Whackered.

I don’t think I can put it any better than that.

Doom Report (Week 1: Shock and Aw, Fuck)

Well, there was definitely no week 0 for this shit.  Week 1 of the Trump regime (credit to Robert Reich for proposing that alternative to “administration”) was a shit-show, with Trump demonstrating Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” strategy, but also the military strategy of “shock and awe.” It’s important to remember, as you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed, that that’s all by design.  If you’re too overwhelmed to focus on any one thing, then at least some of it will slip through the cracks, and that’s all they want.  Divide our focus, blast us with a firehose, then watch as we scramble around uselessly trying to recover.

So, there have been executive orders a-flyin’, for everything from cancelling DEI programs to a literal royal decree that trans people don’t exist.  Looks like project 2025 is right on track!  On the one hand, it makes me want to call my friend and remind him of his claims that Trump wasn’t running on Project 2025—not to mention the actual scoffing I mentioned last week at the suggestion that Trump wanted to erase trans people—but I don’t think I can.  It would be too exhausting.  And, if he didn’t express remorse over his arguments, then I don’t think we could be friends any more, and I don’t want that.  Because, even though this week’s Even More News posits that people are starting to regret their choices, and even talks about how we really need to talk to them about that with empathy and not just devolve into “I told you so!“s ... I’m not sure the time is right for that.  Oh, I think they’re absolutely right about what needs to happen eventually; I just don’t believe the people who voted for Trump are getting it yet.  Sure, it’s true that he’s mainly done a bunch of culture war bullshit, like pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accords (because climate change isn’t real) and pulling us out of the World Health Organization (because ... I dunno, pandemics aren’t real either, I guess?), and in all of that was absolutely nothing that could possibly make the price of eggs go down or end the war in Ukraine, which are two major campaign promises he made, and (at least for that first one) the primary reason most people gave for voting for him, but I think people, if asked, would just say, “well, let’s give him some time.” (Of course, on the Ukraine thing he said he could end the war in 24 hours, and it’s been closer to 150, but we’re not supposed to take him seriously when he says stuff like that ... remember?)  Typically, when humans make mistakes, it usually takes a while before they’re willing to admit to them.  And of course some never will.  But I don’t think very many Trump voters are regretting their choices ... yet.

So, while a lot of the executive orders are just silly—I think trying to rename Mount Denali back to “McKinley” or imagining that he can unilaterally change “Gulf of Mexico” on all the maps is basically a white supremacist temper tantrum—and some of them (like his feeble attempt to end birthright citizenship—already struck down by one conservative judge—and the mass firing of inspectors general on Friday night) will not survive legal challenges, but buried in there are some actual harms.  Including the two Project 2025 gems I led with: the DEI rollbacks, and the attempt at trans erasure.

The MAGA crowd often claims they want to replace DEI initiatives with a focus on choosing whoever’s the “most qualified.” Sadly, “most qualified” seems to be code for “whitest.” Look at how they blame the LA wildfires on black mayor Karen Bass and lesbian fire chief Kristin Crowley: it’s because they’re “DEI hires.” It’s never stated why this means they’re unqualified, but the unspoken undertone is that there were obviously some straight white guys who could have done a better job, but were passed over.  Poor straight white guys: always getting the shaft.  Still, we can try to find some heartening news in all this.  For instance, Costco’s shareholders voted by more than 98% to resist the pressure that the government (via Right Wing thinktanks) is putting on corporations to eliminate their DEI policies.  Which makes sense: the business world figured out a long time ago that diversity increases profitability, and they’re only going to engage with your idiotic culture wars if they think it will impact their bottom line.  Obviously companies like Meta/Facebook and Amazon do think that.  They have government contracts to protect and government regulations to avoid.  But I think most companies won’t be interested in any sort of pressure: they just want that profit line to keep going up.  As for the gender thing ...

Congratulations! we’re all women now.  Yes, in their haste to attempt to erase trans people from existence, the moron architects of Project 2025 have adopted the clumsiest language possible (I even heard one pundit claim it must be AI-generated), with the stunning end result that, according to an executive order that claims to “defend women from gender ideology extremism,” every human on earth is now, technically speaking, female.  Now, while it’s true that this embarrassing boner likely won’t mitigate the cruelty that will result from its “enforcement,” I disagree with people who have said it doesn’t matter.  Because what strikes me about this little bit of idiocracy is that, for years now, conservative pundits and influencers have opened shows featuring liberal guests with the “gotcha” question of “can you define what a woman is?” And now, when they finally have the chance to answer their own question, they’ve totally blown it.  Because defining something like that is not easy.  Here’s their attempt:

“Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.

and then:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

So, first thing, notice how they’ve slyly introduced the very controversial concept of fetal personhood right into the language, no doubt in an attempt to normalize it.  But here’s where they fucked up.  First of all, at conception, zygotes can’t produce reproductive cells at all.  And, once they can, they’re all female.  For at least six weeks.  And of course the 1.7% of the population that’s intersex has just been left wondering what the fuck this all means for them.  Also worth noting: the second episode of Zeteo’s new show American Unhinghed observed that there are currently more anti-trans bills than there are professional trans athletes.  Truly this is a “solution” in search of a problem, but it’s also not much of a solution.

And now a word from our sponsors.

Want to deport your neighbor?  Not sure how to do it?  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a law that said that any immigrant who commits a crime can be deported?  Well, there actually already are laws like that, but what if your annoying neighbor just refuses to commit any crimes?  No, problem: try the Laken Riley Act!  The Laken Riley Act gets rid of pesky details like due process, so you can just claim your neighbor committed a crime and, poof! no more neighbor.  They’ll be whisked away to private detention centers, at no cost to you (other than via your taxes, of course), where they’ll be held without charge or access to legal representation, until they can be deported to wherever we can think of!  (Terms and conditions apply.  Your neighbor might be an American citizen, in which case we cannot guarantee deportation, though we will still make the attempt.)

And we’re back.  If you want to know more about the Laken Riley Act, I would direct you to The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviews AOC.  Key facts include that Riley’s parents did not want their murdered daughter’s name on this bill, but Republicans just ignored that, and that 46 Democrats in the House, and 12 in the Senate, voted for it (theoretically because they were afraid to look “weak” on border issues), thus allowing conservative media to crow that the bill was passed with “bipartisan support.” Again, it’s week 1.  I think the Democrats should probably pace themselves a bit more: they’ve still got 207 more weeks to spinelessly cave in to Trump’s fascist agenda.  Don’t blow your wad all at once, guys.

What else?  Oh, yeah, President Musk did a Heil Hitler salute.  Twice.  Weirdly, some people—including the Anti-Defamation League, which is an organization that’s supposed to be fighting against anti-Semitism—have defended this.  I’m not sure why ... it’s not particularly defensible.  He literally did it twice.  This “it was just an awkward gesture” thing is so bizarre: as the folks on Even More News pointed out, if he had actually done it by accident, he would have apologized for it.  Instead, he posted a bunch of Nazi puns, which ... I mean, why are Nazi puns even a thing?  I think maybe they aren’t a thing and Musk is just gaslighting us.  Even the ADL reversed course after that bit, alhtough I believe Netanyahu is still on board.  Which I suppose makes sense, actually: when you’re doing a genocide yourself, you probably figure the Nazi supporters are totally going to be on board.  Also, given the fact that Musk has boosted white supremacists on Twitter and even openly supported a neo-Nazi party in Germany, we may want to heed the words of Jon Stewart on The Weekly Show: “This all does fit together.  It’s not like it comes out of nowhere.” Also also, as someone this week noted (sorry, I can’t recall who it was right now), the conservative shitbags claiming we need to give Musk a break because he has Asperger’s are the same pitiful excuses for human beings that made fun of Tim Walz’s son Gus.  So, you know: fuck them.

And so many things we don’t even have time to get into.  The brave Episcopalian bishop who Trump and his allies called nasty and extreme because she had the audacity to express the radical ideas of that crazy liberal, Jesus Christ; the massive pardons for the insurrectionists, including some who violently assaulted police officers, about which Trump said, pithily, “Fuck it: release ’em all.”; the so-called QAnon Shaman adopting a bad British accent in a desperate attempt to turn the tables on a BBC interviewer when her questions got too uncomfortable; Trump literally saying that America was at its richest during the Gilded Age, so that’s what we’re shooting for again.  Or how about Carrie Underwood desperately attempting to sing “America the Beautiful” despite some amusing (though not, apparently, to her) technical difficulties?  Kimmel here makes fun of her (or at least of the situation), as many did; conservatives, on the other hand, focussed on her “the show must go on” efforts to sing a cappella when the music just refused to cooperate.  I had a different take altogether.  I think this episode was emblematic of how the Republicans assume that they just don’t need anyone, so they try to do everything themselves.  Sometimes that even works.  And, sometimes, they just embarrass themselves.  Well, they would, but I think they’ve all had their shame surgically removed, so it doesn’t seem to bother them too much.

But the Carrie Underwood appearance—as well as others such as Nelly, Snoop Dogg, and even the Village People, who not only performed but also announced they would sue anyone who referred to “YMCA” as a “gay anthem”—raises a more sinister spectre.  Remember in Trump’s first term when he had trouble finding performers for the inauguration?  And remember how many sports teams refused to accept invitations to come to his White House?  But now football players are doing the Trump jack-off dance in the end zone and Snoop Dogg is at the inauguration.  He’s been normalized now.  The times, they are a-changin’.

If you’re looking for only one political show to watch this week, I’d recommend the AOC interview over on The Weekly Show.  If you’re willing to go to two, try the first episode of America Unhinged (and, if you’ve got a third hour to invest, the second episode is pretty good too).  The only other video I’d recommend this week is perhaps Legal Eagle’s breakdown of Trump’s executive orders.  He does a pretty good job of outlining what will and likely won’t pass muster.

Finally, I’ll try to end on as hopeful a note as I can manage.  I noted that AOC, in the interview I mention above, when talking about insider trading by Congresspeople (of both parties) says that:

... it explodes the cynicism that fuels the Right.  It doesn’t benefit us.  It benefits Republicans because they make no bones about ... what class they are here to serve.

And I think she has a point.  Cynicism is almost inevitable with weeks like this one, but it’s only going to help the other side.  And let me be clear what the sides are: we’re talking about right-wing fascism vs progressive liberalism.  Screw Rebpulican vs Democrat.  Rapper Talib Kweli was on The Daily Show on Thursday, and he put it brilliantly:

I’m not a Democrat.  I’ve never been a Democrat.  I voted Democrat before; I’ve never voted Republican, but I’ve never identified as a Democrat.  This is not about Democrat vs Republican: this is about good vs bad; this is about the oligarchs vs the poor and working class people.

And AOC, I think, summed this up trenchantly when she talked about how in the world people could simultaneously vote for Trump and for her, two people who seem diametrically opposed on the political scale:

They see two people that are fundamentally anti-establishment, two people that do not respect a rule
if the rule does not lead to ... a positive outcome.

And, when I heard her say that, despite the fact that it’s a seeming compliment to Trump, I couldn’t help but remember that Monday, apart from being the spectacle of the launch of yet another disastrous Trump regime, was also Martin Luther King Day.  And I had gone back to reread some of Dr. King’s words that I quoted in a post several years ago, and one of those quotes was this one:

One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.  I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws.  One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.  Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.  I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

We already knew that Trump was willing to break the laws he doesn’t care for.  But hearing that there are people like AOC who are willing to break ... if not the laws, but at a minium the rules ... that she can’t abide—that’s what gives me hope.  Let us all hope for more progressives—for more politicians of all ideologies—to make what Civil Rights icon John Lewis often referred to as “good trouble.” And pray that Trump can’t keep up this pace.  He is, after all, very old.

Doom Report (Week -1: Hot Flashes)

In 1935, about 100 cane toads were imported into Australia to control the cane beetle, a pest which was destroying crops.  By 2011, there were an estimated 200 million: they eat bugs that native species used to eat, edging them out; they poison anything that eats them, from native species to family pets; and, to add insult to injury, Wikipedia says that “there is no evidence that they have affected the number of cane beetles which they were introduced to prey upon.” And that’s how cane toads became the poster child for the law of unintended consequences.

Once upon a time we thought eating butter was bad for you, so we invented margarine, which we made out of trans fat, which (it turns out) is way worse for you than butter.  And remember how our government had this briliant idea to cure public drunkenness and alcoholism by inventing a little thing called “Prohibition”?  Turns out what they actually invented was organized crime.  Well, in the grand tradition of all those brilliant ideas, today (literally the day I’m posting this), our government brings you yet another one: they’re banning TikTok.  Can’t imagine there’ll be any unintended consequences from that.

Oh, wait: there already are.  See, TikTok creators, in anticipation of the looming shutdown, have started flocking to RedNote, an app much more closely tied to the Communist Party, and whose terms and conditions are entirely in Mandarin.  Reporting on what you’re actually agreeing to when you click on that varies—it’s a bummer, but apparently no one in the world can read Mandarin and tell us what it says—but, at a bare minimum, you’re apparently agreeing not to “slander” the culture of China, nor violate the basic principles of the Chinese Constitution ... you know, the document that establishes the Chinese Communist Party.  Actually, the proper name of this app is “Xiaohongshu,” which more literally translates to “Little Red Book.” So glad that our government is keeping TikTok from collecting everyone’s data!  You tell ’em, Congress, and also Biden, and also the Supreme Court: if you want Americans’ data, you’ll just have to buy it from Facebook and Google like everyone else!

Since this is (ostensibly) a short post week, I’ll keep the remainder of my comments on the cesspool of the week’s news to quick takes:

• The Republicans are quite outraged at the mismanagement of the wildfires in Southern California, and they’re claiming that they’re going to condition aid on policy changes.  I mostly agree with Jonathan Harris over at Some More News, who says this is probably all performative, but they’re really hammering on the bits about Gavin Newsome taking all our water because of smelt (which is complete bullshit), and Karen Bass (who is obviously a DEI hire because she is neither white nor a man) cutting the budget of the LA fire department.  They probably have a reasonable point on that last one at least, but it’s also instructive to listen to Heather Lofthouse, who pointed out on this week’s Coffeee Klatch:

But I mean, it’s “Karen Bass cut the budgets: how dare she” is ... kind of the headline, as we give Elon Musk an office in the White House and his mandate is to cut the budgets for vulnerable people and for the things that matter.  I mean the hypocrisy around that and “I’m not going to spend it, I’m not going to spend it, I’m not going to spend, but that person cut budgets in the wrong way” is wild to watch, too.

• But the thing that most irks me about the wildfires is the utter refusal to understand how climate change is such a huge factor.  Instead we have Joe Rogan trotting out his “whiny liberal” voice and mocking people saying “it’s climate change!” and then following up with “no, it’s arson, stupid.” Which, even if it were arson—which there is currently no evidence to support, at least for the largest of the fires—but even if that were true, is arson making the winds blow 60 – 100MPH and spread the fires over miles in seconds, and also whip up the fires to truly horrific peaks?  (Or, as Jon Stewart put it on The Daily Show this week, it’s like fire fucked a tornado.)  Arson didn’t cause the flooding last year, nor the drought this year, the combination of which resulted in a massive quantity of new growth which is now bone dry and just waiting to catch fire at the slightest provocation.  I honestly thought that once climate change started costing all the rich assholes a lot of money, they’d finally do something about it, but it turns out that the response to insurance companies losing billions in natural disasters like this is that they just stop insuring people.  Whew! problem solved.

• Biden and Trump have been fighting over who deserves credit for the cease-fire agreement in Gaza.  How about we wait to see if it actually happens before we quibble over who gets the kudos?

• Biden gave us a farewell address in which he warned us about the dangers of oligarchy.  Many this week lamented “where was that message during the CAMPAIGN??” Which is fair.  Of course, Biden essentially has senioritis (in multiple meanings of the word, I suppose) and has entered his “I don’t give a fuck” phase.  But note how neatly this lines up with my thoughts (such as I outlined last week) that what the Dems really need to do is start talking about how evil the billionaires are.  (Also it amuses me that Biden, 82, is finally catching up to Bernie Sanders, 83, and Robert Reich, 78.)

• People are also whining this week about how the lack of reporting on Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s insurrection indictment is a failure of the traditional media.  Well, duh: the traditional media is now all owned by the same billionaires who are funneling all their money to Trump.  The meme that people are stupid from getting all their news from the Internet is dead: the implication was always that you might not be able to trust what you hear from some rando on Reddit or Facebook.  Now, sadly, you might be able to trust what you’re reading in the Washington Post or the New York Times even less.

• On this week’s The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviewed historian Jon Meacham.  As expected, he trotted out one of his favorite talking points: that democracy is, increasingly, an analog system in a digital world:

And the chasm that that creates between the emotional catastrophizing of its people versus the kind of glacial pace of change—I do think democracy itself has to find a way for government to be more agile and responsive.

To which Meacham pointed out that this was the same argument Anne Morrow Lindbergh used to justify her “America First” position in 1940 that the US needed to become more like Germany and Italy and Russia: obviously totalitarianism was the solution to the sluggish response time of democracy.  Not saying I’m favoring Meacham over Stewart here, but it is food for thought.

• Speaking of The Weekly Show, every episode ends with Jon talking to some of his producers.  At first, this was Lauren Walker and Brittany Mehmedovic, but within a few episodes they were joined by Gillian Spear, who, in addition to being an associate producer, is also their fact checcker.  I really enjoy these post-show chats, and especially appreciate the fact that Spear often drops little truth bombs.  So here’s your Gillian Spear fact-of-the-week:

... the Democrats haven’t won the white vote since 1964.  And what happened after 1964?  The Civil Rights Act ...

• If you recall how this whole series started, you’ll remember my talking about the phone conversation I had with my friend.  I mentioned in passing that I’d pointed out to him that Project 2025—and, by extension, Trump—wish to erase trans people.  I did not, however, mention his reaction: he scoffed at me.  In this day and age, I don’t experience a lot of scoffing.  But I can’t think of any other word to describe it.  This was, to judge from his reaction, an utterly ridiculous prospect.  Except that, of course, here we are 10 weeks later, Trump hasn’t even taken office yet, and already utter psychopath Nancy Mace has introduced a rule to ban transgender people from using public bathrooms that don’t match their “biological sex”—a rule that would impact a single person, by the way (incoming representative Sarah McBride)—and the Republicans in the House have voted to ban transgender athletes.  So, I dunno ... maybe not so crazy after all.

• On this week’s Election Profit Makers, we are somehow still talking about Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter.  Apparently a listener wrote a long email about how disappointed he was in Biden for doing it, and then another listener wrote back challenging that opinion, and so forth.  My opinion is simple: I care not one whit that he pardoned his son—it was a thing any father should be willing to do for his child, especially one that was being harassed by bullies.  I was a bit disappointed in him saying he wasn’t going to pardon him ahead of time.  It’s the same situation with Bush (Sr) ... remember how that guy said “read my lips: no. new. taxes.”? and then he went and raised taxes?  Same deal: the sin was not in the doing, but rather in the foolish promise prior to it.  A stupid promise that was nearly impossible to keep ... one would think politicians would learn not to do that by now.  Apparently not.

• It’s also occurred to me that Trump has so flooded the zone with shit (as I discussed last week) that he’s managed to completely eclipse the news coverage of the New Orleans terrorist attack.  Of course, part of that is probably because the MAGA nutjobs got so excited over the fact that the terrorist drove his truck across the Mexican border that they wet themselves, and then it turned out that the guy was an American—not a naturalized immigrant, but someone born in the US—and then all of a sudden they found other interesting things to talk about.  And it saddens me that we, as a nation, didn’t even talk about it very much.  I’ve been to New Orleans 3 times in my life, and I’ve walked down Bourbon Street in those packed crowds, and it hurts my heart to think that 14 people died and we never even made the Repubs babble on about how everything was to blame except for the AR-10 rifle and the Glock wielded by the domestic terrorist.  It’s like it’s now so commonplace that we can’t even be bothered to go through the motions any more.

• And, while I continue to be skeptical of Brian Tyler Cohen’s repeated screeds about how the entire problem is that mainstream media is overlooking important stories (although also see first point), I do wonder how no one is reporting nationally on the Republicans in North Carolina literally stealing an election from an NC supreme court judge.  Democrat Allison Riggs, one of only two Democrats on the court, won her election by a mere 734 votes.  A slim margin to be sure, and her opponent demanded a recount, as well he should.  Riggs won that recount by the exact same number of votes.  So her opponent demanded a second recount, which seemed a bit over the top, but, sure: that’s his right.  Riggs won that one too, by, say it with me now: 734 votes.  So then the crazy Repub demanded that the board of elections throw out 60,000 votes.  Yes, that’s correct: sixty thousand votes.  But only for the supreme court justice race, of course: the votes would still count towards Trump’s victory in NC.  The NC board of elections (obviously) rejected this insane request.  But the schmuck appealed it ... to the NC supreme court.  The elections board tried appealing up to a federal level, but they kicked it back.  So now we’re waiting for 4 Republicans and 1 Democrat (Riggs recused herself, obviously) to decide whether they will unilaterally just pick their fellow Republican over the will of their own electorate.  And I think we’d better be cognizant that, if it works there, it’ll become the new pattern of how to rig elections in the future, everywhere.  So it may not be hyperbole to say that the entire fate of respecting election results depends on whether at least 2 Republicans on the North Carolina supreme court have any scruples or not.  I’m not hopeful.

• Finally, I’ve been much amused over the past few weeks as Brian Tyler Cohen and other pundits claim that the only “good” thing about the Republicans having control over all 3 branches of government is that they no have no one else to blame: whatever mistakes there are going forward, they own them.  To which I can only reply: oh, my sweet summer child.  If you think the Repubs can’t blame the Democrats when the Dems have nothing to do with anything, you just haven’t been paying attention.  Remember when it took 15 tries to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House and they blamed the Democrats?  Remember all the whiny Trump moments from his first presidency?  It’s the Democrats, it’s the Deep State, the system is rigged, my enemies are everywhere: I’m the most powerful man in the world, and anything that gets accomplished is absolutely my doing and also anything that didn’t happen is someone else’s fault.  Blame shifting is the most powerful weapon in the Republican arsenal.  Expect to see it on full display, starting ... well, tomorrow.

Well, this “short” post ballooned into something out of control.  So I’ll leave it there for now and wait for ... week 0? week 1?  I haven’t quite decided if this should be like going from 1 BC to 1 AD or if it should be more mathematical than that.  I guess we’ll find out next week.

Doom Report (Week -2: That's Enough Flooding, Thank You)

A few months back, I watched a really good Some More News video on Ronald Reagan.  Specifically, on how Reagan led us to Trump, and that included a long section on how Reagan fucked up the Democratic party.  This was a thing I had never considererd before: while I understood that Reagan fucked us over in a number of really important ways (his racism amped up the “war” on drugs; his economic policies started the whole “trickle-down” lie; his man Robert Bork reinvigorated corporate greed by saying that, no, monopolies were actually good for consumers; he killed the popularity of unions by firing all the striking air traffic controllers, which the safety of the air travel industry has never recovered from; etc etc etc) ... while I knew all that, I never thought that the Democrats might have gotten fucked up too.  But, what Cody and team point out in this quite persuasive video is that Reagan beat the Democrats so badly that they all started to adopt his policies.  Clinton, for instance, ran on “ending welfare as we know it” (which he delivered by crippling the program in ways from which it’s never recovered), passed crime bills that led to today’s mass incarceration crisis, and signed NAFTA, which allowed—nay, encouraged—America’s corporations to move jobs off-shore to get cheaper labor, thus screwing over the working class.  Really, if you think about it, Clinton often sounds more like a Republican president than an Democratic one.  Even Obama, who campaigned on hope and change, sadly listened to all those Third Way advisors and in the end actually delivered very little of either.  And the point of all this is, the Democrats learned the wrong lessons from Reagan.  They figured, he beat us, and he pushed this stuff, so now we better push this stuff too.

I think about that this week because there appears to be a lot of learning the wrong lessons going around these days.  I mean, Trump won, right?  So obviously that means that the country wants its leaders to be more racist, attack minorities more, and be nicer to our poor, persecuted billionaire class.  At least that seems to be what people are getting out of it: Zuckerberg, for instance, says he’s getting rid of all Facebook’s fact checkers, moving moderation to Texas (because those evil liberal Californians can’t be trusted, obviously!), and that “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression.” Of course, the roots of Facebook are comparing women like cattle, so the fact that the restrictions against referring to women as property are now lifted makes perfect sense.  Or how about Amazon announcing that it would pay $40 million to the Trumps for the rights to make a documentary about Melania?  Attached to direct: Brett Ratner, who hasn’t been seen in Hollywood since being disgraced during the #MeToo movement.  (Side tangent:  People on the right are always going on about how you can never be sure whether the women who accuse men of sexual misconduct are telling the truth, and that people should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  And it’s true that there were a very few innocent people who got caught up in #MeToo (Chris Hardwick, for instance).  But I’ve never understood why people—on either side—have difficulty with figuring out whether someone is guilty of what they’re accused of when it comes to this particular behavior.  Basically, there are exactly two things that occur immediately after one woman comes out and says that a famous man assaulted her: either a dozen more women come forward to support her, or 3 or 4 women come forward to say they’ve never experienced anything but support from the man and no other woman agrees with the accuser.  If you ever hear about a situation that doesn’t fall into one of those two camps, then you can wonder whether the man’s guilty or not.  But so far I never have.  And, if it does follow one of those two patterns, no need to wonder: you know whether or not they did it.  By the way, guess which one Ratner’s story falls into?)  So, I guess the lesson we learned from Trump’s victory is, it’s okay to call LGBTQ people “freaks,” and also thatarapists aren’t so bad—after all, we’ve now elected our first rapist-American president!  Overall, the nearly immediate flood of fake headlines on Facebook, including one that announced that Zuckerberg was the “recipient of world’s first rat penis transplant,” is cold comfort.

Of course, the news this week has been dominated by Trump’s insane rantings about taking over Greenland and changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico.  (Presumably, he plans to do the latter by taking his trusty Sharpie and crossing out “Mexico” on all the maps in the world.)  He’s also talked about reclaiming the Panama Canal Zone, and even annexing Canada.  Don’t worry: it gets crazier.  President Musk has even started a poll to ask users of the site-formerly-known-as-Twitter if the US should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” I find it difficult to take any of this seriously, though, because that’s what they want us to do, and I’m just stubborn enough to refuse to do it.  Because, see, all this bullshit talk is Trump following the advice of Steve Bannon, who once famously said:

The Democrats don’t matter.  The real opposition is the media.  And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

Or, as Michael Lahanas-Calderón said in this week’s Coffee Klatch:

But isn’t this ... one of the many distractions that the Trump Administration presumably has—if not pre-planned, down the road will make up some—to keep hiding that oligarchic control that you’re talking about, right?  This is to throw people off balance more than anything ...

Which is spot on.  Because now the prime Minister of Greenland has to respond, and the government of Denmark has to respond, and the president of Panama has to respond, and the new president of Mexico has to respond, and the prime minister of Canada has to respond, and even the counter-extremism unit of Great Britain has to investigate.  Trump has managed to send dozens of world leaders—not to mention the media—scrambling after moronic ideas that will never come to fruition ... more importantly, that were never serious in the first place.  Meanwhile, the grift goes on: the billionaires are falling in line, the judge in the one case that managed to struggle through to conviction grants him an unconditional discharge, the special counsel that bedevilled him by actually listing all his crimes is resigning, and the media has no more space to report on his insane cabinet picks, such as trying to appoint a potential Russian asset as Director of National Intelligence.  The zone is flooded, the shit is knee high and climbing, Trump continues to live a consequence-free life, and the rich just keep getting richer.

Let me leave you with this.  I’ve been calling out Robert Reich quite a bit in my previous posts.  Partially that’s because I tend to highlight the opinions of pundits most when they’re different from my own: if we’re all in agreement, there’s not much more to be said.  But partially it’s because Reich, like many of the public personalities whose opinions I respect in spite of the fact that they’re Democrats, has just had some terrible takes on why the Democrats lost to Trump.  But, for all my criticism, I really do like Reich, and I really respect someone who’s achieved that level of old age without losing all their progressive fervor.  (While I like to think that I’ve thoroughly debunked the young-equals-liberal-old-equals-conservative meme, it is sadly true that the right wing tends to be dominated by old white guys, while the progressives are full of youth and diversity.)  And I like Reich precisely because he sometimes says some pretty smart shit.  This is what he said this week:

There really are two kinds of populism.  The right wing the ... Trumpers have been embracing for years: cultural populism.  And that means going after the symbols of elitism—many of them made up!—I mean, transgender people, you know, you go after them; go after immigrants; go after the Deep State; go after all sorts of symbols that people can get riled up again.  But the alternative to cultural populism is real, and that’s economic populism.  That’s going after the Musks and the people who abuse their their wealth, and and turn it into political power.  That’s what’s happening in this country, and this is why I am optimistic (just to repeat myself) that, as we descend into the horrors of the Trump Administration, people will actually see how important economic populism is.  Democrats will find their voice—and, if they don’t, we’ll have another party that will replace them and find its voice.

I’m not sure I share his optimism that the Democrats might actually get replaced one day.  But I think he’s onto something nonetheless: maybe someone, somewhere inside the party, will learn the right lessons from Trump’s victory.  And the right lesson is that people are tired of all the billionaires standing on their necks while picking their pockets.  That people need change which actually accomplishes something, and they’re just going to keep voting against whoever’s in power at the moment until they get it.  That that FDR fellow was onto something when he decided, in the first hundred days of his first administration, that he would thumb his noses at the rich fat cats in the stock market (well, those that hadn’t thrown themselves out windows, at any rate) and actually help the working class for a change.  And, as long as the Democrats keep doing what Kamala did by staying hands-off the big corporations, they’ll keep losing.  When they figure out that that all that corporate money isn’t doing them any good if all the working class people hate them, then maybe we’ll see some change.

Doom Report (Week -3)

Well, it’s a New Year, finally.  I was supposed to celebrate the new year on Tuesday night, along with everyone else, but that didn’t really happen.  Having had the flu (or perhaps a bad cold) for several days just before Christmas (along with the rest of the family), I had stopped doing my daily fiber.  And, since I have diverticulosis, not doing fiber for an extended period has a tendency to result in a diverticulitis flare-up.  So that’s what I was doing on New Year’s Eve.

Happily, I soon recovered, and we celebrated New Year’s on Friday night.  It’s actually quite nicer when you can pause the ball drop at any time.  So a bottle of champagne for the older two, a bottle of sparkling strawberry lemonade for the younger two, and we “cheers"ed at whatever time the littlest one said she was getting too tired to stay up any longer.  So, 2025, ye have been rung in.  For all that’s worth.

In the ongoing political drama, the only interesting development, to my way of thinking, is the memo put out by Susie Wiles.  Wiles, you may recall, is slated to be Trump’s chief-of-staff.  She’ll be the first female chief-of-staff, which is nice and historical and all, but, as we might expect from anyone associated with Maga World, she’s not exactly a model human being.  Still, she seems to have a few redeeming qualities.

The first time I ever heard of Wiles was when it was reported that Trump had to pick Gaetz while Wiles was out of the room.  The implication was clear: if Wiles had been around, she never would have approved.  Even more intriguing, there was just a hint, just a whisper that Trump wouldn’t have dared do it if she’d been there.  Now, that is an impressive woman—actually, fuck that: that, friends and neighbors, is an impressive person utterly regardless of gender.  If there’s one thing that we can say about Trump somewhat consistently, it’s that he does whatever the fuck he wants.  The mere idea that anyone could control him—even a little!—is a bit amazing.  So that’s when I started to wonder who this pit bull of a person was.

And now, apparently, she’s put out a memo “reminding” everyone that people up for government positions do not speak for the incoming administration.  Now, she apparently stressed that this doesn’t apply to Musk, as he’s not actually up for a government job, because the “department” of government “efficiency” is a thing that doesn’t exist, and Trump can’t make it exist, because that’s not a power that presidents have.  So, supposedly, this memo has nothing to do with Musk, and nothing to do with Musk’s little kerfuffle with Bannon and Loomer (which I mentioned last week).  To which I, much like the author of the article at the other end of that link I pointed you towards, say: bullshit.  And, the best part is, it seems to have worked.  No more episodes of Vicious Tweets, at any rate.  Which means that the world’s richest man—a.k.a. the world’s biggest brat—just got put in his place by a little old white-haired lady who Trump, apparently, calls the “Ice Maiden.” Quite impressive indeed.

We shall see what the future holds, I suppose ...

Doom Report (Week -4: Goodbye, 2024)

The rapidity with which Musk and Trump are falling out is highly amusing to me.  I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.  But I did think it would happen after he actually took office.  The fact that they just can’t wait to start sniping at each other is quite delightful to me.  Is this schadenfreude on my part?  Oh, certainly.  Does it make me a bad person?  Shit, I dunno; maybe.  Do I care?  Fuck no.

I should clarify: Trump and Musk have not quite started going directly at each other.  Mostly what’s been happening over the holidays is that Musk (in typical Musk fashion) could not wait to start putting his agenda out there, and part of his agenda is to ramp up H-1B visas: people on such visas don’t typically ask for raises, and they certainly can’t unionize, so they’re sort of the perfect workforce for someone like Musk.  But, see, the crazy MAGA-heads don’t want more immigrants: they’re busy trying to get rid of all the ones we already have.  And they (in typical crazy MAGA fashion) don’t much care who’s footing the bill—they’ll spew all over whoever gets in their way.  So it’s less Trump going after Musk and more Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz and ever-reliable looney Laura Loomer doing so.  If you want a breakdown of the ongoing saga, which I would title “Vicious Tweets,” you could watch a recent BTC video, but, trust me: you don’t actually want that.  It has all the high intellectualism of a middle school mean girls drama (the high school equivalent would have much more depth, believe it or not) and even lacks the draw of making you want to root for one side or the other, because in this case both sides are equally execrable.  Just take my word for it that it’s all unraveling before it’s even gotten started.

Now, Trump has been conspiciously missing from these articulate “you’re a poopyhead!” “nuh-unh! you are!” exchanges, because he actually does know (and, apparently, care) where the money’s coming from.  Remember, people like Bannon and kids-in-cages architect Stephen Miller appear to be true White Nationalist believers, but Trump is strictly in it for the money.  He’s not Christian, but he’ll take money from the Christians (see also: $60 Bible).  He’s not a neo-Nazi, but he’ll take money from the neo-Nazis (stand by, Proud Boys!).  For Trump, being President is the ultimate grift: he overcharges the Secret Service for staying in his hotels, secured billions from the Saudis by going through Jared Kushner, and conned ABC into donating $15 million not by having a great case (the case was almost certainly unwinnable), but because parent company Disney didn’t really want to be on the wrong side of the incoming administration.  At this point, he’s basically selling cabinet positions and ambassadorships: we will soon have a cabinet with a net worth of over $10 billion dollars, and that’s not even considering Musk, whose “department” is not even a real department, so he won’t be part of the cabinet.  So Trump knows where his bread is buttered, and he’s not quite willing to join in with the MAGA nutjobs.

BUT.  At the same time, Trump hates it when people other than him get attention.  And the Democrats know this, and so they started the whole “President Musk” meme.  Just as they knew that talking about his dwindling crowd sizes would get under his skin, they’re transparently playing him, trying to drive a wedge between him and Musk.  And the great thing about playing this game with Trump is that it always works, no matter how obviously you do it.  So where I see the true friction—the real breakdown of the bromance—is in this fantastic clip where he goes back and forth, nearly Gollum-like, between praising Musk and snidely pointing out that he can’t be president, because he wasn’t born here.  You really have to listen to that part of the clip: the fake, Nelson Muntz-like laugh at Musk’s foreign-born status, followed by a whiplash-inducing “nah, he’s a great guy” is so revealing.  If the Dems can keep the whole “President Musk” thing in the news for a bit longer, that’ll solve the problem right there.

But the pitched battle over immigration—“absolutely no one” on the one side vs “only the ‘good’ ones” on the other—is also pretty entertaining to watch, though I’m not sure it will lead to the dissolution as fast as the President Musk bit.  At the end of the day, Trump likes people like Bannon and Loomer because they worship him.  But he doesn’t need them.  If they become inconvenient, he’ll ditch them in a heartbeat, as he has so many others.  Loyalty is never rewarded in Trump-world; Trump lives by the credo of the old Janet Jackson song: what have you done for me lately?  So, from his perspective, he’s happy to sit back and watch them fight it out—he probably thinks of himself as a Roman emperor, facilitating gladiatorial “survival of the fittest” fantasies—but I think that if he has to pick, he’ll go with the checkbook.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the show in the meantime.

Because we must take our joys where we can find them.  Though that clip doesn’t show it, the speech Trump is giving there is the same one where he said this:

On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign a historic slate of executive orders to close our border to illegal aliens and stop the invasion of our country.  And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D Eisenhower.

Of course, the deportation is a grift as well: the value of the private prison industry is soaring right now, and which company gets to lock up all those prospective deportees will no doubt go to whichever company manages to line the pockets of the Trump family most effectively.  But that doesn’t ameliorate the wave of human misery that is about to be unleashed.  I’ve heard many commentators point out that this will be radically unpopular and may be the very thing that costs the Repubs control of the government ... but there’s a real cost to real people in the meantime.  Will some of those rounded up end up being Americans who actually voted for Trump, possibly screaming “wait, wait: I didn’t think you meant me!” the whole time?  Maybe.  But not that many of them.  So, even if we’re cruel enough to revel in the classic joke of “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, it still wouldn’t be worth the cost to all those who never even got the chance to vote, because ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DON’T VOTE ILLEGALLY.  Man, I thought the con man who convinced people to pay for bottles of something that comes out of the tap for free was a genius, but the hustler who managed to convince half the country that people terrified of being deported would risk their freedom to do something nearly half of Americans can’t be bothered to do ... man, that guy was really slick.  So the horrors, they are a-comin’, and thus we takes our small joys where we can find them, even when they’re a bit cruel.

And, by the way, if you find yourself a bit overwhelmed by the thought of all that human misery and unsure what to do about it, I’ll pass on a message from Jesse Thorn, founder of Maximum Fun and co-host of Judge John Hodgman, who’s worked with his wife Theresa for a couple of different immigrant advocacy organizations.  Jesse advises us to donate to Al Otro Lado (that’s “to the other side,” for those whose Spanish is a bit rusty).  While they’ve already nearly doubled their goal as I write this—blowing away the amount that Jesse and Theresa pledged to mach dollar for dollar—I’ve no doubt they’d still be happy to receive more financial help.  These are folks who provide free legal help to immigrants (remember: unlike most people who are arrested in our country, immigrants don’t have access to a free attorney), and, as Jesse said in a recent episode of JJH:

One of the pieces of good news that I can offer is, as cruel and unjust as our immigration system is for migrants, migrants who have legal representation and have legal assistance actually have a pretty good shot.  The reason is that our government is so incompetent that they always mess up a thousand things.

And that’s, once again, a bit of a sad place to find comfort, but, as I said: wherever we can find it.

Finally, I thought I’d address the “Trump can’t take the oath” thing that seems to be going around.  Remember how, in 2020, the MAGA crowd kept saying that Trump would just refuse to leave the White House, and that way he’d stay president?  Remember how we all laughed at them and shook our heads sadly at how deluded they were?  Well, liberals have their sad little delusions too, and this is one of them.  Let’s break it down.

Remember how Trump incited an insurrection?  And remember how the 14th Amendment says that people who do that can’t hold office?  Okay, now remember how several states sued to keep Trump off the ballot on the grounds that, you know, the 14th Amendment said he couldn’t be President?  And then remember how the Supreme Court said, fuck the Constitution! we work for Trump, and he can do whatever he wants!  Remember all that?  Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

See, the Supreme Court didn’t actually say that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply to Trump.  And they didn’t say that Trump wasn’t an insurrectionist ... because they couldn’t.  Although the Supreme Court has gotten very good lately at doing things they’re not supposed to be able to do, they weren’t actually willing to go as far as that.  See, one of the rules of an appeal to the Supreme Court is that they’re not there to overturn what’s called “findings of fact.” And the Colorado courts (and a couple of others as well) had adjudicated Trump as an insurrectionist as a finding of fact.  So the Supreme Court couldn’t (theoretically) even look at that aspect.  They just had to decide whether that fact meant that he could be kept off the ballot.  And what they decided, in the end, was that the 14th Amendment never says an insurrectionist can’t run for President ... only that they can’t take the oath of office.  So taking someone off the ballot isn’t an option.

But now (so the liberal delusion goes) it’s actually time for that oath of office, and so now the 14th Amendment will kick in and Trump can’t become President.  See?  Where this fantasy falls apart is, of course, that the person administering the oath of office is ... the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.  And remember how the Supreme Court works for Trump?  Well, it might be more fair to say that the 6 conservatives on the Court work for Trump.  And, actually, it might be even more fair to say that Alito and Thomas work for Trump—and even more fair to point out that Thomas just works for whoever pays him the most—while Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh work for the Conservative legal movement (and Barrett sort of does too, though I suspect that one day she’ll be more of a moderate than most people think at the moment).  But I think that’s a distinction without a difference in this case: Roberts has absolutely no problem with ignoring the whole inconvenience of the 14th Amendment and giving Trump the Oath, which he will do, and there we’ll have it.  It’s a really pretty fantasy, guys, but it’s just that.

So that’s where we are, here at the end of another fairly awful year.  Do I wish I were talking more about, say, the fact that a favorite hobby of mine has returned after nearly 15 years being out of print?  Sure.  Or that I were talking about how my middle child (typically referred to in these posts as “the Smaller Animal,” despite the fact that they’re now the tallest of my children, and nearly a foot taller than myself) became an adult this year, getting to vote in their first Presidential election?  Definitely.  But we are where we are, and there’s no use crying over spilled water under the bridge or what-have-you.  The year has held a few bright spots, but mostly it’s been a great steaming pile of shit, and I don’t think I’ll be too sad to see the back of it.  Next year?  I mean, honestly I don’t hold out a lot of hope.  So I’ll take my amusements—like watching idiots such as Loomer and Musk go at each other like the Real Housewives of MAGA—while I can still get ’em.  Wherever we can find it.

Everything's gonna be cool this Christmas

This week, we’ve all been ridiculously sick.  Which is a shame too, because I totally wanted to talk about the whole “President Musk” meme.  But I’m sure there’ll be time for that later.  Till then.

Doom Report (Week -6: When It's Obvious, It's Easy)

This week, I really enjoyed The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviewed billionaire Mark Cuban.  Cuban is famous for supplanting Warren Buffet as “the good billionaire”: a billionaire who seems to want to do some good in the world instead of just screwing over everyone else.  When Stewart talks about how people only rail against billionaires on the “other” side—basically, that whatever billionaires do is fine, but only if they’re “our” billionaires—the billionaires he’s talking about as being “ours” are Cuban, Buffet, and perhaps George Soros, who of course has long been the boogeyman billionaire of Fox “News,” where they constantly trot him out to cover for the much more sinister billionaires behind the curtain that are propping them up, like Murdoch and the Koch Brothers and Harlan Crow (most notable for being the “emotional support billionaire,” as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny put it, of at least one Supreme Court justice).  One gets the idea that Stewart is vaguely saying that all billionaires are probably bad, though he typically has a good enough time talking to Cuban that he doesn’t want to go quite that far explicitly.  And, if you’d like to hear a well-reasoned rant on why all billionaires are bad, Adam Conover has you covered, and, if you’d like to hear specifically why George Soros is the target of so many right-wing conspiracies, and which ones may actually have some foundation in reality, the Some More News team has got you covered there too.  But, in general, I think that people like Cuban—and maybe even only Cuban, since I’ve never heard Buffet or Soros talk as openly about their philosophies—are a fascinating mix of good billionaire and bad billionaire.  Many people (such as Ingrid Robeyns and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) have argued that you can’t be both a billionaire and a good person, and I think there’s some grain of truth to that.  Certainly there are times when I’ve listened to Cuban and thought, ah, there’s the coldness and moral apathy that helped him acquire those billions.  But there are also times when he says things that are both articulate and progressive.  So I always have a fun time listening to his interviews.

I noted this one for a couple of places where he seemed to be agreeing with some of my prior posts.  For instance, when talking about AI, he said this:

Cuban: Then there’s using AI.  And so there are things like NEPA, which go into the environmental protection stuff to try to find out if there’s a little frog or whatever before something’s built.  In my opinion, in the conversations I had with some of the Harris folks, is that’s where AI really, really can apply.  Because there’s a process designed for the people in NEPA who go through and determine what should be approved and what data is required and what friction should be added or what friction should be removed.  Artificial intelligence is great for that. All the rules that the individuals on those councils and boards that make those determinations, they have rules that they follow. They have guidebooks that they follow.

Stewart: It’s onerous.

Cuban: Yeah, it’s onerous.  There’s tons of bureaucracy, but tons of data there.  You put that into artificial intelligence,
into a large language model, and you use that to train the large language model.  And then when a new project comes along, you set up agents which then feed the questions and the answers, and the answers to the responses to that new organization, whatever it is they may be building.

Which is exactly correct: this is using AI in how it’s meant to be used.  There’s a process, and it takes a long time for humans to complete that process, but a computer can do it faster.  Up until now, whenever that process involved people weighing different abstract factors and trying to figure out what’s the best approach, you just couldn’t use a computer to try to speed things up, because computers can’t do that.  But AIs—more specifically, LLMs—can.  (You can read more of my thoughts on the current crop of AIs in my post questioning is AI intelligent and several other posts: just click “technology” in the “Things about Things” box over there to the left of that post.)

But Jon comes back with this:

Stewart: Does that abdicate our autonomy?  ...

Cuban: ...  The challenge is, who makes that decision?  When it’s obvious, it’s easy.  When it’s not so obvious, it’s far more difficult.  And so that’s where the AI comes in and large language models.  Because across the breadth, however many instances of evaluations that need to take place across the country, you don’t want individuals having to make those decisions.

Stewart: But I thought that’s the whole point.  I thought the whole point of people running for office is that they’ve got a vision and they earn our trust, as opposed to AI. And this, again, may be more of the Luddite’s view of not understanding ... AI. I’m nervous about abdicating that.  At least with people, there is a certain regime of accountability that we can bring through.  I can’t vote out a large language model.

And Cuban was, surprisingly, not able to mount a cogent response to this.  I, however, am.

• You can’t vote out the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people in the EPA or whichever bureaucracy we’re talking about who are making the decisions about how to navigate all those regulations either.  You can vote out the guy at the top, maybe, but they’re just the person who either approved or rejected the work of all those faceless bureaucrats.  How is that different from the AI example?  Asking the AI to help make a decision doesn’t automatically mean that there’s not someone at the end of the day who will either approve or reject the AI’s plan.
• Jon says it would be better to just get rid of all the red tape.  Well, duh.  Of course that would be better.  Sadly, the “science fiction” plan of replacing the work of all those bureaucrats with AI is more feasible (and likely) than any plan to reduce the current bureaucracy of our governmental agencies.
• Jon also says that people can cut through the red tape too, like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro did when fixing the collapse of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.  Cuban points out that humans can do things quickly when the answer is easy, but not so much when the answer is harder.  This is vaguely correct, but it doesn’t explain things well enough.  He was closer when he talked about the “little frog.”  There are always going to be cases where the “right” decision means weighing environmental factors vs economic ones (to take a simple example), and for the most part we have a tendency to devolve into camps.  There are people who are always going to take the side of the environment, regardless of the cost, and there are people who are always going to take the side of the business, regardless of the impact on the planet.  But an AI doesn’t have a predetermined agenda.  It can weigh factors, given all the background context, and make a dispassionate decision on where to draw the balance.
• And, despite the fact that people are predisposed (by scifi thrillers, mostly) to believe that AIs are black boxes and we can never understand how they arrive at their decisions, the truth is that, at least for the LLMs that are currently what we mean when we say “AI,” we actually do know exactly how they arrive at those decisions.  LLMs use something called “chain of thought reasoning” (usually abbreviated in LLM literature as CoT), which basically means that LLMs “think out loud” so that humans can review all their logic and make sure it’s sound.
• Which also knocks down Jon’s other objection (which is expanded upon in the show’s closing segments, where his producers talk about the very real cases of people losing their jobs to AI): that this process will eliminate people’s jobs.  Sure, in business this is a very real problem: many businesses look at AI as a way to save money, and eliminating jobs is one way to do that.  But that ain’t an AI problem.  Why do so many companies lay off people right around Christmas?  Because it makes their bottom line look better at end-of-year.  Companies killing jobs to improve their bottom lines ain’t an AI problem: it’s a shitty company problem.  But government is different.  Most government workers have protection from being downsized in this fashion.  Plus, the whole reason all this red tape takes forever is that the government is constantly understaffed.  Having AI make decisions which are then reviewed by experts doesn’t in any way reduce how many people you need to get the thing accomplished: it only reduces the amount of time those people end up having to devote to the job.

Anyway, another place Cuban appeared to agree with me is on the topic of insurance, which I broached in a long tangent last week.

Cuban: But it gets worse.  It gets worse.  And so now these providers, the hospitals and doctors, they negotiate with the big insurance companies.  And it’s fascinating.  If you walk into a hospital to pay for an MRI, as an example, and you don’t mention your insurance, you just say, I want a cash price, they’ll probably say it’s $350 to $450, depending on where you live.  That same hospital will negotiate with what they call the BUCAs, the big insurance companies.  For that same thing, they’ll negotiate a price of $2,000.

Stewart: What?

Cuban: Yeah.  So you would think that big insurance company negotiating with the hospital and that insurance company
covers millions of lives.  They insure or deal with—

Stewart: Why wouldn’t they negotiate that if it’s a bulk thing to $100?  Why would it be higher?

Cuban: Because the hospital needs the insurance company as a sales funnel to bring patients in so they can pay their bills. And the insurance company wants that price to be higher, particularly for things like the ACA, because the ACA requires for all the plans they cover that they spend up to 85%.

Again, I’m not sure Cuban is explaining it particularly well, but remember how I put it last week: “companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets ...  insurance is enabling the whole cycle.”

Anyway, that’s my too-long review of the Mark Cuban interview.  I’ll just ding Stewart one last time—and I really do love Jon Stewart, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not always right, and I’m not afraid to call him out on it—on some lack of self awareness.  In the wrap-up with his producers, he reiterates his skepticism on using AI that I talked about above: he refers to it as “dystopian” and then extrapolates to “hey, just so we’re clear here, you’re saying that the computer controls the entire hospital and decides what oxygen to turn on and turn off through analytics?”  Then, less than a minute later, he answers a listener question about what he thinks his mistakes were for the year.

Well, you guys know this.  I get annoyed at myself for being a little high-horsey.  And you get a little of the sanctimony in there.  So I try to relax sometimes on the certainty of my opinions.

Oh, you get a little sanctimonious, do you?  You mean, like you did a few seconds ago?  Work harder on the relaxation part, my man.

But, all that aside, still a great host, very incisive, very trenchant.  Looking forward to more shows next year.