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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good things to watch this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stick together, people.

Ataraxic Ratattoo I

"Reality and Life Are Not the Same"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total:  23 tracks,  85:49

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

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

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

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

__________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top shows to watch this wee:

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

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

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

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

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

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

Top things to watch this week:

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

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

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

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

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

Doom Report (Week 17: Even More Snippets)

Of course, the major news this week was Trump saying he would accept a $400 million plane from Qatar.  The commentary community can’t decide whether this is a dumb idea because it’s such an obvious bribe (especially given that the “palace in the sky” doesn’t remain government property after Trump leaves office), or because the plane could contain surveillance equipment to funnel national secrets directly from Air Force One to a Middle Eastern monarchy.  But I say: ¿por que no los dos?  Trump says he would be a “stupid person” to say no to a free plane, but then again he also said “I don’t know” when asked if he was responsible for upholding the Constitution.  One might note that he specifically swore to do that during his Oath of Office, but I’m sure that Trump would point out that he never actually touched the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony, which is the Presidential equivalent of crossing your fingers behind your back.  So I think we’re all good here.

There’s also been talk of President Musk stepping away from his important job of single-handedly tanking the unemployment figures by personally putting over a quarter of a million federal employees out of a job, presumably to spend more time with his plummeting stock prices.  If it’s true, then it would certainly wound my dogged meme of President Musk and his sidekick Trumpy.  But I would note two things.  First, much like the “ceasefire” in Gaza, it was announced, but it never actually happened.  And, second, even if it does happen, does it really mean anything?  Some might take it as a sign that Trump is retaking control.  But I would look at it like this: being the billionaire President because you bought the election is kinda like being a grandparent.  You get the joy of playing with the little ones, and whenever they get to be too much to handle, you just call your children and make them take the little brats back.  Doesn’t mean you’re not still sneaking them twenties whenever no one’s looking.  So I’ll take this news of Presiden Musk stepping down with several wheelbarrows of salt, thank you.

Things to check out this week:  Don’t miss Zeteo’s interview with Ras Baraka, the Newark mayor arrested by the regime this week.  Baraka is backed by the Working Families Party and other progressive orgs in a bid for governor; I wonder if Trump’s targeting of him will help him win, as it did for the Liberals in Canada and the Labor Party in Australia.  For the legal perspective on the Mayor’s arrest, Liz Dye over at Legal Eagle has got you covered.

Other good shows this week include Stephen Colbert’s examination of the Qatari plane scandal: both the initial report, where he pointed out that Trump’s claim that being up-front about taking the bribe made it okay was like saying that stabbing someone is okay as long as you do it “in broad daylight while saying the words stabbity stab stab stab,” and the follow up where he responds to Trump’s whine that all the other planes were bigger than his by noting that “Trump definitely does not have a little plane: it’s definitely at least an average American male plane.”  Also don’t miss SNL’s final Trump impression before they take off for the summer; as James Austin Johnson (speaking as Trump) says, “see you in the fall, if we still have a country.”  Fingers crossed.

Good news being few and far between these days, I’ll give you a bit that’s only slightly outdated.  Remember when I talked about Allison Riggs, way back in Week -1?  She’s the North Carolina supreme court justice who won a narrow victory over her Republican opponent and maintained the exact same narrow margin in not one but two recounts, only to have her opponent, one Jefferson Griffin, demand that the board of elections throw out 60 thousand votes—but only in Democratic-leaning counties!—due to supposed irregularities.  Well, 13 days ago a Trump-appointed federal judge threw out Griffin’s case on the grounds that he could not “change the rules of the game after it had been played” (which, duh).  Two days later, Griffin finally conceded.  As I noted, Brian Tyler Cohen was always leading the charge on this reporting, and he covered the news by interviewing both Riggs herself after the victory and legal expert Mark Elias after the cocession.  The fellows over at Election Profit Makers, being NC residents, also weighed in on the victory (jump to about 5:00 in), where they point out exactly what BTC has been warning about lo these many months: “obviously, if it worked, then we would see it all the time, everywhere.”  Mildly chilling thought, but the crisis has been averted.  After Griffin’s concession, the EPM fellows noted (following week, about 12:15 in) that Griffin’s “name is mud, and he should just be ostracized from society.”  I certainly hope that ends up being the case: it would be sad if there were no consequences for dragging out an election for six months and trying to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters, many of them serving in the military.  But for now I’ll just be happy that Riggs won, and she was finally sworn back in to her seat.

Sometimes the small victories are all the sweeter.

Doom Report (Week 16: Give Process Where Process Is Due)

Way back in Week -4, I said this in regards to the Trump regime’s plans to deport more people than there are illegal aliens in America:

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.

(And then I referenced the classic “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party meme.)  Well, in this week’s Friday edition of Even More News, Katy and the gang talk about the Argentinian family who voted for Trump and now their son is detained by ICE.  If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s pretty horrific.  The son came to the country as a toddler, holds a green card, has two children who are American citizens, and also was charged with a misdemeanor in 2020, for which he served 3 years’ probation and the case was closed.  The parents discussed it like this:

The couple is now reeling from what they call a betrayal.  They say they supported Trump under the belief that his policies would target undocumented border crossers and violent criminals—not legal immigrants who made a single mistake.

“We feel tricked,” said Verdi.  “If we had known this would be the reality, we never would’ve voted for him.”

So now I get to say “I told you so.”

Except ...

Except I don’t want to.  I know a lot of people get some pleasure out of that—my father is certainly one of them—but it’s never really made me feel better.  Basically, whenever there’s the opportunity to say “I told you so,” it means that your prediction about something horrible that no one would listen to actually came to pass.  And that, in turn, means something horrible has happened.  I guess some people find that basking in having been right all along reduces how shitty you feel about the terrible thing, at least somewhat.  And, hey: if you’re one of those people, I’m not here to make you feel bad about it.  It’s a human instinct that we all have.  And I have it too, which is why I brought it up.  I’ve just found, for me personally, that my instincts in this case are faulty.  Because it doesn’t make me feel better.  Because, regardless of whether I was right all along or not, there’s still something horrible going on here.  This guy may end up having to leave his parents and his children behind, to get sent back to a country that he has no memory of.  And some people seem to be having fun telling his parents what terrible people they are and what idiots they were—many of them right there in the comments of that article I linked, in fact—but that wouldn’t make me feel better.  Yes, it’s quite frustrating to see brown people voting for a white supremacist, believing him when he says he’s going after the other brown people and certainly not you ... but, look: Trump is a scam artist.  I’ve talked before about how we shouldn’t be blaming the victims of the con man.  Let’s keep the blame squarely on the grifter.

And, it might be a bit of a tangent, but can I just ask, what the fuck is the point of all this immigration policy anyway?  Democrats keep saying they don’t want to look “weak on the border.”  Well, why the fuck not?  A couple of weeks back journalist Kara Swisher appeared on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown.  Now, I don’t often recommend that show in this series, partially because it’s focussed on mental health more than politics, and partially because, while I agree with Mayim on many things, we diverge on the legitimacy of Israel’s actions in Palestine.^*  But politics and mental health are kind of colliding lately, and Mayim did this interview with Swisher, who I quite like, and I couldn’t help but be struck by this discussion:

I think we didn’t listen to people who live in our border states enough to—in terms of the difficulties they were facing, as much as I thought it was cruel for Southern mayors to send immigr—er, migrants up North, it does make you, like you have to, we have to figure this out as a country, to understand—I thought it was a cruel way to do it, but I understood—I have a lot of friends living in those border states—a really difficult situation.  And it’s not because immigrants are more prone to crime: they’re not; it’s not because we don’t have jobs: we do, like that need to be done; it’s that we have to, like, figure out a way to be ...

Now, most of the time when you see a quote from someone and it includes ellipses, it indicates that the quoter (that’s me in this case) cut something out of the quote.  But not this time: as you might guess from all the hemming and hawing, she just trails off and then changes the subject.  Because how else was she going to end that sentence?  Once you’ve already pointed out that the complaints of people in border states regarding crime and job loss are just straw men, you really have nothing else to talk about but racism, and I suspect Swisher just didn’t want to call out her friends.

So immigrants don’t commit more crimes than American citizens—because, you know, they don’t want to get deported—and they only “take” the jobs that citizens don’t want to do anyway.  Every time some Southern state cracks down on immigration, we see stories about construction jobs not being able to be finished and fruit rotting on the vine.  Immigrants come here, pay taxes but never get any of the services that those taxes pay for, subsidize your Social Security because they certainly can’t collect any; they don’t vote (because, again: they don’t want to get deported) so they change absolutely nothing about who gets elected, they open small businesses and contribute to the economy ...  I keep on hearing people on television say “yes, obviously immigration is a problem and we need to solve it” but I never hear them say why it’s a problem.  We’re just all supposed to know, I guess.  Well, I fucking well don’t know.  Tell me.  Seriously: if you live in a border state—or anywhere else, for that matter—and you are adamant that people coming into our country is a big problem, please try explaining why, using logic and words that you wouldn’t be ashamed to say out loud on national television.  Because, at the end of the day, much like Kara Swisher, I don’t want to believe it’s all racism ... but I’m having a hard time completing this sentence.

But, as many before me have pointed out, the cruelty is the point.  (If you’re up for a longer illumination of that point, check out the Some More News episode “The Right’s War on Empathy.”)  When you read about the Oklahoma family woken up in the middle of the night, forced to stand on the lawn in the rain in their underwear by ICE agents, with all their phones, laptop and life savings stolen from them with no clue when—or if—it will be returned, and the whole thing turned out to be a mistake because the person ICE was looking for had moved out weeks ago and had no connection to this family whatsoever ... yeah, the cruelty is the point.  (Jonathan and the Even More News crew have a great discussion on this story as well.)  When you hear Stephen Miller claim that “Due process guarantees the rights of a criminal defendant facing prosecution not an illegal alien facing deportation” and you wonder, even if that’s true—spoiler alert: it’s not—but even if it were true, how could you possibly know that the “illegal alien facing deportation” was, in fact, illegal?  The Oklahoma family were citizens.  The child with cancer who was deported a few weeks ago was a citizen.  The Argentinian son (and father) whose story started out this post was not a citizen, true ... but he was also NOT an illegal immigrant, because he had a green card.  That makes him, by definition, a legal immigrant.  Likewise, Mahmoud Khalil, who we’ve been talking about here since way back in Week 8, was also not an illegal immigrant, nor was Rumeysa Ozturk, whose story broke in Week 10.  Ozturk was finally released after six weeks; Khalil is still in jail and has missed the birth of his child.  The Argentinian family’s son is still in detention, and the Oklahoma family’s life savings still have not been returned.  But, sure, it’s probably fine to just skip the due process.

Other things that you should be aware of this week include Seth Meyers finally catching up to my last week’s view on the “30 dolls” quote on Monday’s “A Closer Look,” and More Perfect Union’s excellent explainer on how tariffs actually work (or at least should work).  The first is quite funny, and the second is quite informative.

And, finally, I continue to try to find lights in the darkness, no matter how faint.  On this week’s Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse showed a clip of a woman named Emily Feiner being forcibly removed from a town hall held by her Congressman, Mike Lawler.  Now, you might be shocked to hear that a sitting Congressperson had state troopers pick up a 64-year-old woman and bodily carry her out of a town hall meeting, but he had to: she asked him when he was going to start upholding his oath to the Constitution and refused to take changing the subject for an answer.  No choice, really: what else could he have done?  Certainly not answer the question!

But the truly uplifting part is how the rest of the crowd responds to this somewhat insane act: they start with chants of “Let her stay!” and end up just yelling “Shame!” at Lawler over and over, as if he were a Game of Thrones escapee.  If Lawler thought he was silencing opposition, it really does seem to have had the opposite effect.  And, as far as the Coffee Klatch goes, stay after the clip, because Reich and Lofthouse interview Feiner herself, and her reports of the positive support she’s received since her clip went viral reminds us all that, like her, any of us could make a difference.

And that’s something we all need to keep in mind, I think.

__________

* Nope, it’s not her stance on vaccines.  She’s actually way more reasonable on that topic than she’s generally given credit for.

Doom Report (Week 15: Snippets the Fourth)

This week marks the end of Trump’s first 100 days, which of course is a completely arbitrary landmark, but one that we’ve started making a big deal out of ever since FDR.  If you want a good summary of how Trump’s done during this period, I highly recommend Robert Reich’s video on the topic.  Reich is at his best when doing simple explainer videos such as this one.  His style is clear, his rhetoric is down-to-earth, and his facts are presented simply and without spin.  There’s bias, of course, but (in my opinion) no spin.

For a more amusing take on our current situation, I’ll refer you to Seth Meyer’s “A Closer Look” from Monday.  He’s coming off a two-week break, so he has to cover a lot of ground, and he does it with his usual panache.  When pointing out that Democrats need to do a better job of grabbing attention, he notes:

And, unlike Trump, Democrats have the benefit of not having to make shit up to get attention.  You can just shock people by reading actual headlines.  Like: “Two-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Appears to have been Deported with no Meaningful Process.”  Or: “Trump Cuts Threaten Agency Running Meals on Wheels.”  Or: “FDA Making Plans to End its Routine Food Safety Inspections.”

And that’s sort of a perfect summary within the summary.

One of the biggest new stories this week was that the US economy shrank this past quarter for the first time in 3 years.  If it does so again this current quarter, we’ll be in a recession.  And, in response to the looming consequences of his trade war with China (i.e. potentially bare shelves around Christmastime), Trump actually said “well, maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30 dolls.”  And, while I watched many people this week make fun of that quote, not one of them responded as I immediately did: what about the families that can’t afford even one doll?  This was so utterly tone-deaf that it forcibly reminded me of Lucille Bluth talking about bananas.  So, if it bothers you that President Musk and his sidekick Trumpy have fired over a quarter of a million governement workers—so far—and you wish you could do something about it, there’s a charity that offers legal defense to illegally fired government workers.  Worth checking out.

Good shows this week:

• The second episode of Bowman and Bush, the showcase of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, two former Representatives who were defeated for re-election last year by critics of their stance on the Palestinian genocide.  I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the two primaries in which they were defeated just happened to be the two most expensive primary races in US history.  They provide, as always, an excellent breakdown of what’s gone wrong with the Democratic party.

• On The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Andy Bashear, the Democratic governor of very red Kentucky.  Top quote: “Well, I think what the people of Kentucky want is what the people of America want.  They want a better life. And if you can convince them that you are working your hardest to create that better life, then they’ll give you that opportunity.”  Hopefully more Democrats learn this soon.

• Don’t miss Desi Lydic’s interview with Jon Meacham on The Daily Show.  You may recall that I talked about Jon Stewart’s interview with this historian back in Week -1, and he continues to not disappoint.  With brilliant and inspiriing quotes like “to cut mindlessly is just mindless”, it’s a great watch.  His best quote, though, was this one:

But to fight fear, you need courage.  And courage is one of the most contagious things you can imagine.

And, just in case that wasn’t quite uplifting enough—or perhaps not quite enough of the uplifting—I’ll leave you with the words of J.B. Pritzker, as highlighted on the final episode of America Unhinged, as he inspires his constituents to make their voices heard:

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.  They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.  We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box.

Let us hope so.