Monthly Archives: August 2025

Ombudsman:

an official who deals with the complaints made by the public against the government, or against organizations such as banks or insurance companies:

• A long list of complaints was submitted to the financial ombudsman.
• I was advised to send my complaint to the banking ombudsman.

[Cambridge Dictionary]

I skipped the first definition provided, since it seemed patronizing and out of date. Noted in “Why I left The Washington Post,” Glenn Kessler, Substack:

My decision to leave The Washington Post after nearly three decades began with a quixotic mission — reinstate the ombudsman. That’s an in-house critic who responds to reader criticism, investigates how a story was reported and assesses whether the complaint is valid.

It’s been a while since my last note on the stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group, known as DJT. Back on June 22, it was priced at $17.83. Today?

Source: yahoo! finance

Not a great deal of movement.

But, and yes I’m way behind on my reading, last week Steve Benen, writing about the Trump Administration, had this note, and it caught my eye in connection with DJT valuations:

4. Making up data: The same president who condemned his own administration’s jobs data as “rigged,” “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam” boasted a few days later that he has successfully lowered the costs of prescription drugs by up to “1,500%” — which remains a literal impossibility.

But this happens practically every day. Trump keeps claiming that gas prices have fallen below $2 per gallon in several states, which is demonstrably false. Confronted with discouraging public opinion research, Trump also has a habit of making up imaginary approval ratings for himself.

He makes up inflation data. And figures related to construction costs. And tax data. And trade data. And crime data.

How is this different from the White House’s routine lying? As MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell recently explained in a column for The Washington Post, “For months, President Donald Trump has waged war on objective, reliable federal statistics. By ‘statistics,’ I mean the bits of information, large and small, that Americans might take for granted but need to make sense of the world. These figures help families decide where to live, physicians how to treat their patients, and businesses what to sell or whether to hire.”

Really, the entire post is worth a look, especially if you have DJT in your portfolio. But what it comes down to is this: When Trump doesn’t like reality, he makes up his own reality and tries to sell the public on it, trusting that when reality bites him on the ass, he can lie his way out of that, too.

So if the reality of Trump Media & Technology Group, and how it affects DJT, displeases him, what will he do? Lying is a good bet, particularly as he considers himself immune to legal consequences.

But investors hate lies, and as each lie comes to light, they’ll look on DJT with more and more disfavor. If enough are paying attention, especially those who invested their life savings in DJT, the price will drop. He’ll discover that he’s not immune to civil suits, and investors will start taking chunks out of him.

President Trump may transfer his funds overseas, out of reach of investors, if he can’t find a way to forbid the courts from raiding his accounts to satisfy judgments. And if he can find a way to forbid such actions, the entire market may become unstable.

Part of our problem these days is public distrust of public servants, from Congress people to the military. The biggest liar of them all, the Mendacity Machine, could cause a collapse of the American economy.

As ever, I’m not a financial advisor and this is not financial advise. Just an observation on human nature.

Metaphorically, of course. “Burgum” is current Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum (R-ND), who was also Governor of North Dakota in a prior life.

Burgum: "When the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there's no solar energy produced, and yet we're subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive. We've gotta get back to base load."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-07-31T13:33:22.168Z

Burgum: “When the sun goes down, you have a catastrophic failure called sunset and there’s no solar energy produced, and yet we’re subsidizing these things that are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive. We’ve gotta get back to base load.”

And Burgum apparently hasn’t heard of batteries. Elon Musk, who once made a bet on supplying batteries to Australia, and quietly supplied batteries to Puerto Rico after a hurricane hit, must be steamed^[1].

So what’s going on? This is not just a bunch of old men – and women, heaven forbid – clinging to the old ways. The President may be, but not these folks. No, these folks have substantial investments in doing things the old way. They’ve built up financial structures in which fossil fuel companies play a critical role.

And their self-importance requires that to remain true, even if it pushes the climate from salubrious humanity to hostile. It’s easier to cry hoax! than to modify that financial structure.

And, in the end, we get bizarre statements like the above. Steve Benen has more. I’m using bizarre particularly, because the left side of our lovely political spectrum, in the minds of many independents, has a tendency to spew bizarre statements as well, from Modern Monetary Theory to transgenderism.

Our political system is tired, worn out even, from the grifters and the undisciplined who’ve invaded, all in a hurry to use the system for their own ends.

¹ Pun intended.

[Harriet] Tubman’s little-known [military] mission came to fruition on June 1, 1863, when she guided three U.S. Army boats loaded with 300 Black soldiers from Col. James Montgomery’s Second South Carolina Volunteers, and a battery of White soldiers from another regiment, up the Combahee River into Confederate-controlled territory. Earlier, Tubman and her men had infiltrated Confederate plantations and identified the enslaved men who were forced to plant mines along the Combahee River to prevent Union access. With their help, Tubman’s men and the U.S. Army officers defused the mines. Those soldiers also rooted out Confederate forces, burned seven plantations— including the owners’ homes, barns, stockpiles of rice, and stables— and cut Confederate supply lines by destroying a bridge.

From those burned lands, hundreds of enslaved people flocked to the soldiers’ rowboats at the river shore. Fearful that the rowboats might capsize, Montgomery asked Tubman to calm the crowds. Using her strong voice, she started singing and was met with a joyful response of clapping and shouting. Seven hundred and fifty-six people were liberated that day; the U.S. Army did not lose a single life. The Combahee Ferry Raid is now considered the largest and most successful slave rebellion in U.S. history.

“Actually, Secretary Hegseth, Harriet Tubman was a war hero,” Edda L. Fields-Black and Kate Clifford Larson, WaPo.

OK. A corrective for the frantic Secretary Hegseth. Will he do the right thing and retract all of his ship renamings?

Oh, that’s clumsy. It shan’t catch on.

But this report from Bloomberg, not paywalled, will be alarming in certain quarters.

When the world’s elite gathered in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2024, Sachin Dev Duggal reveled in his role as the founder of a bona fide artificial intelligence unicorn. His startup, Builder.ai, sponsored glitzy events with celebrities and magazine editors. The BBC featured him on air as an expert in the buzzy technology. Builder.ai’s “Chief Wizard,” as Duggal called himself, told another interviewer at Davos that generative AI is “the cape that you make people superheroes with.”

Whatever magic Duggal once conjured is now gone. A year after his Davos appearance, he was pushed out as chief executive as investors began to suspect him of inflating revenue and mismanaging funds. The startup’s board later restated sales and a major lender seized virtually all of its cash, forcing the company into bankruptcy in June.

My bold. I fear his cape is a bit holey. More seriously, this looks like the first of the really big scams based on generative AI:

Builder.ai’s audit committee uncovered a web of dubious transactions. The London-based company booked $142 million in sales from resellers that never paid any money and claimed an additional $107 million from customers who made deposits of as little as $1. Such methods, the audit committee found, were used to overstate revenue by 300% as Duggal secured an emergency loan last year. A law firm hired by the company also determined that Duggal “orchestrated a scheme” with a high-profile Indian startup to exaggerate sales through what’s known as “round tripping,” according to documents viewed by Bloomberg News.

Based on that article, the scam is based on a couple of principles as old as the hills: promise folks their heart’s desire — coding for the masses — and threaten the rich with buggy-whip obsolescen, and then keep on smiling as the money rolls in. Whether it’s a common investor or Microsoft, they gave and gave and gave.

And now it looks like it’s all gone.

On the last day of the 2025 Minnesota Fringe Festival we finally got back out and saw three more plays, missing a fourth only due to lack of stamina.

An Exorcism, Don’tcha Know? is a parody of a small-town Minnesota Lutheran Church council faced with a snowstorm, a new pastor, bickering – and a demon. It was a lot of fun, but it also felt fairly conventional, not having that Fringe edge that the better shows often have. But it was well-thought out and well-written. B.

The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch! explores the intellect and delusions of a man who has never been quite able to shake the grip of Alice Carroll’s Jabberwocky, and how that critter has led him down rabbit holes so deep he may never crawl out of them. Well-written and very well-acted, I’m still left with the basic question: Why? B+.

Joan of Arc for Miss Teen Queen USA finds the eponymous Joan sent off to fend for herself at … a beauty contest. Complete with sly sniping, smarmy hosts, and an angel that seems unconscious of the anger of a supreme warrior, ready to strike, only held back by her fear for God, I’m not sure if this is a success or not, despite the standing ovation at the end. It was certainly funny and unlikely, well-written and well-acted.  I see Joan d’Arc is glaring at me! A-!

We had considered seeing Invasive Species or: In Space No-One Can Hear Your Steam.

Finally, some readers may wonder if writing reviews of plays on their last day is evidence of an odd mental twitch. There is a practical reason: some Fringe shows are repeated in following years, and some are traveling productions, following a circuit of Fringe Festivals. Readers may therefore find such reviews useful.

From Rolling Stone:

Within the past few weeks, Section 9 from Article 1 of the Constitution — which states, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” — disappeared from the Library of Congress’ Constitution Annotated webpage.

By this morning, officials in Trump’s government were quietly telling staff that the deletions were the result of a technical “glitch,” sources familiar with the matter say. As a result, personnel scrambled to fix the issue, figure out how exactly it happened, and also review other parts of the website to see if there were any other conspicuous deletions.

Some federal staffers raised their eyebrows at the blame-a-glitch explanation, given the apparently coincidental nature of the deletions affecting sections of the Constitution that the second Trump administration is openly working so hard to shred. “Funny coincidence,” one federal employee who was dealing with this situation tells Rolling Stone dryly.

That explanation certainly gives staffers and their superiors legal cover if they are put on trial for subversion and other such crimes. Just why a coding error would occur in what should be a static part of the site is a bit of a question. It doesn’t seem likely that a change to the presentation code would affect content in this way, but I’m just waving a finger in the air at this point.

Watching a video tour of a house….

ME: Yeah, that thing right next to the painting of Santa Claus.

ARTS EDITOR: That painting is really incongruous.

ME: Santa Claus was never in Congress.

Yes, it has to be said. Who has the bigger —

Is Spy (2015) a farce? From the suave smarminess of spy Bradley Fine to the panicky insertion into the field of Fine’s handler, Susan Cooper, you betcha.

Is it any good? Depends on the viewer, I think. I wasn’t particularly amused by the fat jokes, implied or otherwise, but I did have to admire the twists and turns of a plot right out of 007. And the parodies of certain stereotypes were spot on.

Chances are you won’t remember this one a week later – I know I didn’t – but you may find some grins while you’re actually watching.

It’s always interesting to see Erick Erickson trying to exercise some self-criticism. Sometimes it’s very good, but I fear this time he made an error or two:

On our side, we’ve abandoned a century of sound economic thinking to scratch an itch from the 1950’s Democratic Party, which had been thoroughly infiltrated by socialists and communists. We have abandoned the careful and reasoned judgment of voices from history for the voices of the here and now, telling us the ideas we long held no longer matter because… reasons.

The mistake du jour? Believing his side’s propaganda. A central tenet of the Republicans has been a belief in the universal validity of the Laffer Curve, a theory that if you just remove the shackles of taxation and regulation, the increase in revenue will more than cover the drop in tax rates.

Hasn’t worked, not ever. Kansas tried it and watched it crash and burn – and then kicked its legislative advocates out of the legislature. This was an object lesson in what I consider an under-appreciated fact of American taxation, at its best: it’s an investment in improving the community where the private sector is unlikely to go, not a confiscatory mechanism used for punishment or other corrupt ends.

As a central tenet, this belief invalidates any claims to having sound economic thinking.

On other matters, I’m not an expert in the Democratic Party’s history, but I still rather doubt they were thoroughly infiltrated by socialists and communists; the Party would have collapsed rather than survive and thrive. I see this as a handwave to distract loyal readers from uncomfortable truths concerning the right’s allegiance to democracy.

The point? It’s an old one. Good conclusions are rarely reached using lies and omissions. Self-delusions such as this usually leads to, well, humiliation.

A few months back I had an ambition to write a post comparing the Trump Administration to a poorly assembled engine that disintegrates when run; the closest I came to fulfilling that ambition was this.

I should have tried harder, in view of this post from Professor Richardson. Incidentally, I’d quote the Bloomberg article upon which Richardson’s post is, in part, based, but that article is paywalled, of which I approve, and I don’t often have a need for a Bloomberg subscription.

Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump’s determination to control economic statistics: “The peril…isn’t a potential recession; it’s losing highly reliable, accurate and transparent data on the health of the world’s largest economy.” As Ben Casselman pointed out in the New York Times, officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages.

It might be best to visualize the President’s mendacity and ego’s needs as throwing a bag of ball-bearings into a tornado. Lying and smirking isn’t going to get him an advantage; the ball-bearings will likely reduce his body to jelly.

It’s a useful lesson in why honesty is the best policy. We all lie about little things, but that’s just a single ball-bearing in our analogy, unlikely to cause damage as it is spun out of the vortex.

But throw in a full bag of bearings and they become vengeful demons, sooner or later running down their originator.

That’s the President. His disregard for the core tenet of any successful society, honesty, is leading to his undoing. He’s survived this long based on his alleged wealth, a fleet in being if you will, his acting chops, and a long line of naive victims receptive to, nay desperate for, the messages he was peddling.

The left was unconsciously complicit in their autocratic inclinations.

But will the independents and even MAGA remain loyal to the Mendacity Machine? Rather than cite special elections, let’s look at a more extensive history: How does Trump’s true hometown, Manhattan, feel about the man who failed to fulfill his contracts incessantly?

Trump lost his hometown in 2016, 86% – 10%, to Hillary Clinton. That’s what proximity to Donald J. Trump does to folks.

Retensioning the timing belt isn’t going to help. If the electorate doesn’t find a way to remove Trump from office, we’ll be learning all about austerity, while the propaganda dins incessantly in our ears.

That is, if you think every bit of evidence from special elections is important. Personally, I don’t think that’s true. But Rhode Island held a special election for the State Senator for District 4, and the Republican candidate … didn’t do well.

For what it’s worth, the Democratic primary actually attracted more voters than the general election, so enthusiasm was down. The district was redrawn recently, so it’s not so easy to compare results. However, Political HQ makes this point:

Harris won this district by 11 points in 2024.

This is a 56 point Democratic overperformance.

Yes, 56. That’s not a typo.

The problem with interpreting results like these is that special elections are usually and basically an overly small sampling of those voters likely to vote in the next regularly scheduled election. As politics are local, it may be that independent voters had a negative reaction to Mr Asermely on a personal level.

Or the voters are outraged by the nonsense in the Trump Administration. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Fulminous:

1. harshly critical
2. of, involving, or resembling thunder and lightning [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “Jimmy Swaggart, televangelist felled by sex scandal, dies at 90,” Paul Vitello, WaPo:

Relatives told biographers that, as a boy, Mr. Swaggart was considered the shy counterpart to his reckless cousin Jerry Lee [Lewis]. In “Hellfire,” his 1982 biography of Lewis, Nick Tosches wrote that Mr. Swaggart and his cousin shared “the same fulminous vision of good and evil” but preached “from opposite shores of the river they call salvation.”

For those who wonder,

Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth College who wrote about Mr. Swaggart for Christianity Today magazine in 1998, described a disarmingly likable preacher, singing and sermonizing at his piano to a much-reduced but fiercely devoted audience.

For the audience, such is the importance of being a drama queen in American culture.

I missed this one the first time around, which was reported on July 22:

Republicans on Tuesday proposed naming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Opera House after first lady Melania Trump, with the lawmaker who sponsored the measure saying he wanted to honor the first lady’s “support and commitment in promoting the arts and humanities.”

House Republicans tucked the provision by Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, into the bill that would fund the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and other related agencies for fiscal year 2026, which begins in October. The House Appropriations Committee adopted it as part of an amendment in a 33-25 vote and reported the legislation out of committee in a 33-28 vote. It would next head to the full House for a vote. [NBC News]

Rep Simpson is thus in the running for the ceremonial used soup ladle that has been proposed as the trophy for those seeking to curry favor with Mr Trump. Hopefully, his constituents will take note and celebrate his entry by voting him out of office at the next opportunity.

Yesterday, we Fringed again. We saw:

Boxcutter Harmonica seemed to be an exploration of the mixture of artist and Divine, as our host explores the old story of Robert P. Johnson, who reputedly sold his soul for mastery of the guitar. But what does this have to do with our increasingly disturbed host? It’s an interesting, but opaque, exploration of a topic that is allegorical at best.

And …

Breakneck Twelfth Night is easy enough to describe, a one man show consisting of selected scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. A favorite of my Arts Editor, our host was most interested in the contemporary restriction on female presence on stage, meaning men portrayed the ladies – who sometimes portrayed the men. I was a little less charmed, as i find the language of Shakespeare to be overly ornate.

Go! Enjoy!

From Chris Truax, an appellate attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008 [I cannibalized that from the article below]:

Given this lack of independence in Trump’s Cabinet, I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is. But I know that the first step is for Trump’s most loyal supporters to admit, even if only to themselves, that there is a problem, just as Biden’s supporters did for him.

Donald Trump is showing all the signs of suffering from dementia. If this were a neighbor, a parent, or a family friend, you would have no trouble seeing it. We should not turn our heads just because it is the president. [“Trump’s mental decline is undeniable — so what now?” The Hill]

Truax alludes to the problem, doesn’t he? The relevant section of the 25th Amendment, pertaining to the involuntary relieving of the President of his duties and, eventually, his office, reads …

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department [sic][note 2][7] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

The thing about having a man-child with pathological narcissism as President and a subservient majority in the Senate is that the President, almost to the last Secretary, will select nominees whom he can dominate and manipulate, simply as a matter of his psychological processes. He’s not comfortable with competent, independent people, because he himself is not competent and only barely independent.

So could Vice President Vance, himself a weak occupant of his office, gather enough negative opinions from the Cabinet to oust the President?

Doubtful.

I just like these.

“So you liked the book, you’re saying?”

The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2012) is a tidy little murder mystery set in Australia. It’s almost a primer on how to write such mysteries: motivations, the awkward and sometimes unjust machinations of society and how they interact with the crime du jour; egos and their place; societal attitudes and their place; methods of murder and detection; and karma. In this mystery of a body is found in a hansom cab, who could have committed the crime and why, and then digging through layers of other crimes and the accompanying avarice, it’s all nicely done.

But there’s no standout characteristic. Audiences being human, we like to curl our fingers around some salient story feature, whether it’s Holmes, Dr Watson, Father Brown, Dexter, or any number of other characters, the bumbling upper class of Agatha Christie, seemingly impossible crimes yet committed, impossible-to-solve crimes solved, sometimes even something even as simple as Mrs. Murphy or Koko the Cat, those salient features make the stories memorable – something worth discussing.

And, in this respect, while the movie dates from 2012, the source material, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, by Fergus Hume, dates from 1886, and is, presumably, based on Hume’s experiences of his three years spent in Melbourne. While poverty is no fun for anyone experiencing it, today’s poverty does not compare to that of the late 1800s, and the Wikipedia page does mention that Hume’s novel served to underline the grinding, oft-fatal nature of the poverty of the time, sparking conversation of same.

In this way, our progress in reducing poverty has also reduced the impact of a generally well-made movie. Rather than be upset by the poverty, for audiences it simply becomes part of the expected background of the movie. That’s too bad, as Hume did the public a service with a novel that illustrated the fate of the unfortunate; and, yet, it also implicitly illustrates the progress it helped promote.

So, see The Mystery of a Hansom Cab? If you like complex murder mysteries, sure. It won’t knock your socks off, not like the novel affect audiences in 1886. But it’s still well done and makes one think.

[I wrote this probably more than a month ago and then forgot to publish it. It’s still worth a thought.]

Why smart nations don’t let attention-craving amateurs near important buttons.

Former top European Union Iran nuclear negotiator Enrique Mora warned Wednesday that the June 21st U.S. strikes on Iran could be a turning point that makes Iran forego efforts to try to reach a nuclear deal with the United States, and possibly decide it needs to obtain nuclear weapons.

“This unprecedented strike has shown, for the second time, the Islamic regime that nuclear diplomacy is reversible, fragile and vulnerable to changes in leadership in Washington,” Mora wrote in Spain’s Politica Exterior magazine. “There will not be a third time.”

“If Iran now decides to move towards a bomb, it will do so following a clear strategic logic,” he wrote. “No one bombs the capital of a nuclear-armed country. June 21, 2025 may go down in history not as the day the Iranian nuclear program was destroyed, but as the day a nuclear Iran was irreversibly born.” [“Trump turns Iran strike intel into loyalty test,” Laura Rozen, Diplomatic]

But I suppose this is the inevitable result of a decision-making process of a narcissist who doesn’t really believe anyone else is a human being. Think of his frantic attempts to reverse progress on several fronts, such as military force composition and the names of the military bases. The very idea of change beyond Trump’s control will terrify him.

And it’s a symptom of serious psychological disease.

You do have to wonder:

Trump: I solved 6 wars, I am averaging a war per month. Including wars that lasted 500 years.

— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) 2025-07-29T19:22:54.820Z

I solved 6 wars, I am averaging a war per month. Including wars that lasted 500 years. – President Trump

I’m not shy to admit that, speaking, and I do mean speaking, to a large audience could compel me to misstate facts.

Now, if they can get whitehouse.gov to publish such misstatements it might mean something.

The Minnesota Fringe Festival began on Thursday, and last night we saw three shows.

Withering Lows: A Love Story Better Off Dead was a bit off-key, which is partly my fault for not remembering the original material from 40 years ago. But it also felt like lines were recited in proper order, rather than organically originating from the actors, and that was disappointing. It felt like a training exercise, in some ways. C.

The Spirit Moves You To Color The Unseen was closer to the essence of Fringiness, being a frankly mysterious homage to the artist Hilma af Klint and the philosophy of theosophy. The five six seven women constituting the cast clearly had rehearsed this thoroughly in both word and gesture, but I have to wonder if the script could have used another draft – or if theosophy itself needed a bit more work. Still, it moves beyond the vapid Hollywood question of Is it good? to the more pertinent question of Does it provoke thought? B+.

And finally …

Duluth: An Improvised Midwest Murder is an improv show that was, like most improv shows, wacky and silly. You’ll probably tire yourself out trying to keep up, but your questions may be only banal at the end. A fun improv show. B-.

We still have a 10-pass with four left, so two more shows are in our near-future.

From the redoubtable, and paywalled, Andrew Sullivan:

The point of the gay rights movement, as I’ve said many times, is not to empower people to be gay; but to empower people to be themselves. The goal is enhanced individuality; not collective consciousness of eternal “oppression.”

The tension of the sometime-necessity of collective action and its vulnerability to abuse.