Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ex ante:

The term ex-ante (sometimes written ex ante or exante) is a New Latin phrase meaning “before the event”.

In economics, ex-ante or notional demand refers to the desire for goods and services that is not backed by the ability to pay for those goods and services. This is also termed as ‘wants of people’.

Ex-ante is used most commonly in the commercial world, where results of a particular action, or series of actions, are forecast (or intended). The opposite of ex-ante is ex-post (actual) (or ex post). Buying a lottery ticket loses you money ex ante (in expectation), but if you win, it was the right decision ex post. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Donald Trump Is Not Gonna Bomb Iran,” Daniel W. Drezner, Drezner’s World:

Now I could easily be wrong — which is why I’m making the prediction. This seems like one of those moments when making an ex ante prediction is worth doing as a test of my international relations acumen. If I’m wrong, people can and will mock me. If I’m right, well, everyone gets lucky once in a while.

Why do every single one of these government officials sound like they’re hysterically defending themselves with frantic lies and irrelevancies?

Stephen Miller: "All these demonstrators that you've seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they're not part of the city and never have been … we're gonna ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they're all over 90 years old."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-08-20T16:57:32.931Z

In case the BlueSky post disappears:

Stephen Miller: “All these demonstrators that you’ve seen out here in recent days, all these elderly white hippies, they’re not part of the city and never have been … we’re gonna ignore these stupid white hippies that all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old.”

This’ll certainly appeal to some folks through confirmation bias, but it’s ridiculous on its face, in my estimation. This is important, as are all the other utterances of Miller and other members of the Trump Administration, because the more such unsupported ludicrous claims are made, the more undecided and even conservative citizens will add together all the evidence and come to the conclusion that this Administration, for the good of the country, should be replaced – even possibly before the next election.

This is the painful process of realizing a major political party is falling into evil. Not supernatural evil – I’m an agnostic – but the simple human evil that, as we observed in Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Japan, and, yes, Germany, is so horrific that we don’t need supernatural evil to be convinced that it’s wrong. Not that the Republicans have achieved anything like those examples, but they’re walking down that path. An important set of cobblestones in that path is arrogance, an arrogance convinced that anything it does is justified by its goal – and, in this case, backed up by God.

Never mind they never talk to the Divine, objectively speaking.

This may turn out to be a very hard path to tread, although I hope not. A key part of the Republican Party’s path is information compartmentalization, which means keeping voters from knowing and understanding the wrong things perpetrated by the Party’s leaders. One of the Republicans’ hurdles is the Bible, which seeks to teach good, to its credit, even if it’s often twisted into something else entirely. Add to that the bloviating, mendacious braggarts making up their ranks, frantic to grasp after fame and power. The end result is that they’ll strangle themselves in all likelihood.

But it doesn’t help that the Democrats have managed the mean feat of being even less popular than the Republicans, due to a variety of positions and methods which have added up to the general impression that Democrats are no longer connected to the working class or even the technocrats, but to ideological warriors holding bizarre beliefs and positions such as identitarianism. I think there’s a yawning abyss for one or more new political parties. Not Elon Musk’s threatened new party, because that would turn out to be a vehicle for his wacky ideas and would not appeal to enough independents, but parties much like that of forty years ago – willing to compromise, aware & wary of positions smacking of arrogance and autocracy, etc. And humble!

Let’s hope those parties form.

It has a little bit of swordplay, so that’s a plus.

The Assassination Bureau (1969) is a 1960s Brit film – bright, farcical, and brittle. It’s built on the idea of a assassination bureau, which kills for a fee. This goes along OK until someone takes out a contract on the Chairman of the Bureau. The Chairman accepts the contract, forcing the members of Board of Directors to try to knock him off, an excuse for having some lovely views of various locations in Europe.

But little effort is made to introduce reality, tension, or any real plot, and when we reach the end, it’s all about the romp and nothing about theme, barely anything about resolution.

It has moments of cleverness, but it’s not to my taste. Maybe it’ll be to yours. Or maybe you like museum pieces.

Dominion Voting Systems wins again:

Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle one of the last outstanding defamation lawsuits against a news organization for airing false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems — the same voting-technology company that had received a $787 million settlement from Fox News over its election coverage — brought the lawsuit against Newsmax. A trial was scheduled to begin in October.

In the lawsuit, filed in the months after the 2020 election, Dominion accused the cable news network of spreading false claims that the company’s voting technology had been manipulated to help Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. Like other right-wing news networks, Newsmax featured Trump allies who promoted these conspiracies, including former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell and supporter Mike Lindell of My Pillow. [NPR]

Regardless of who you were cheering on in Dancing with the Stars the 2020 Presidential Election, the matter of media honesty, which was poorly exhibited by Newsmax and Fox News, should be of vital importance, and the loss in court by both sites should be a signal of a potentially existential rot in the right-side media, no doubt motivated by offers of potential wealth by their audience – and possibly others.

One losing in court can be overlooked as perhaps a bias in the judge, but both losing – indeed, Newsmax settled and is paying in installments, while Fox News settled and I think paid in a lump sum, but I could be wrong – suggests a confirmation of a pus-filled wound in the right’s side.

It’s worth meditating on the implications of a settlement. I see two mutually exclusive interpretations:

1. The offer from the adversary is so small that it’s not worth the litigation. The fact that Newsmax is paying in installments suggests this interpretation is invalid in this case.
2. The requested damages is so large, and the guilt of the defendant so inarguable, that paying a settlement, even one that announces to the world your shameful guilt, is the better option.

I’ll take #2. Fox News and Newsmax should be changing out their management and other responsible parties. I doubt we’ll see that.

There have been similar, if of lesser magnitude, accusations of the mainstream media, and the left. Both sides need to remedy the situation.

At least here in the Twin Cities, so let’s have some perky pictures. Here’s a common, but lovely, zinnia.

Here’s another:

A monarch on its throne.

And a nice lily to finish off the sequence.

Hadal:

The hadal zone is the ocean region extending from 6,000 meters (19,685 feet) down to the bottom of the deepest trenches, which can reach nearly 11,000 meters (36,089 feet). These depths are found exclusively within long, narrow submarine canyons formed where one of Earth’s tectonic plates subducts beneath another. The combined area of all these trenches is roughly the size of Australia.

Life in this zone must withstand hydrostatic pressure that can exceed 1,000 times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. This pressure is equivalent to about 100 elephants standing on a dinner plate.

Beyond the pressure, the hadal environment is characterized by perpetual darkness, as sunlight cannot penetrate these depths. The only light is produced by bioluminescent organisms. Water temperatures are consistently just above freezing, typically ranging from 1°C to 4°C, due to the lack of solar heating. [Biology Insights]

Noted in “How life thrives in one of the most hostile environments on Earth,” James Woodford, NewScientist (9 August 2025, paywall):

[Mengran Du at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Sanya] and her colleagues completed 24 dives in a crewed submersible between 8 July and 17 August 2024, exploring 2500 kilometres of the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench and western parts of the Aleutian Trench, at depths ranging from 5800 to 9533 metres. The hadal zone, a near-freezing area more than 6000 metres deep, is devoid of light and has crushing pressure.

The life there is called the hadal biosphere. It survives by either harvesting energy from nutrients that descend from the surface, which were created via photosynthesis, or by chemosynthesis, where chemicals are the energy source.

The moviemakers only paid for the top half of their heads. It didn’t go well.

The Librarian: Quest For The Spear (2004) is a comedic adventure story along the lines of, but created before, the unrelated Warehouse 13 (2009-2014) television series. This, the first in the series, introduces the Library, located in an unnamed American city; their induction of a new Librarian into his position; his introduction to his staff of assistants; and the first task.

The search for the bits and pieces of the Spear of Destiny (see the unrelated Constantine (2005)) is the task du jour, not to mention surviving multiple capture/assassination attempts, leaping from an airplane sans parachute, surviving the amour of his bodyguard (just kidding!), and, well, I’m sure other things.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Remembering this story isn’t in the cards. It’s fun, yes, and the Librarian has his moments, along with experienced comedians in supporting roles. The cast is not inferior.

It’s the story. It needed multiple rewrites and a rethink to discover what they were trying to say, and it didn’t get it.

See this if you need to pass some time, but don’t look for important life lessons, except for those of persistence and knowledge.

So much knowledge.

It’s nicely done.

In case it disappears, or my reader wants the complete message:

DONALD IS FINISHED — HE IS NO LONGER “HOT.” FIRST THE HANDS (SO TINY) AND NOW ME — GAVIN C. NEWSOM — HAVE TAKEN AWAY HIS “STEP.” MANY ARE SAYING HE CAN’T EVEN DO THE “BIG STAIRS” ON AIR FORCE ONE ANYMORE — USES THE LITTLE BABY STAIRS NOW. SAD! TOMORROW HE’S GOT HIS “MEETING” WITH PUTIN IN “RUSSIA.” NOBODY CARES. ALL THE TELEVISION CAMERAS ARE ON ME, AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR. EVEN LOW-RATINGS LAURA INGRAM (EDITS THE TAPES!) CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL MAPS. YOU’RE WELCOME FOR LIBERATION DAY, AMERICA! DONNIE J MISSED “THE DEADLINE” (WHOOPS!) AND NOW I RUN THE SHOW. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GCN

If Newsom ends up as a national leader, I hope we aren’t looking at an omen, but only a parody, right here.

“I’m sorry, but my war experiences have made me a trifle … blurry.”

A Month In The Country (1987) follows the lives of two British veterans of The Great War, aka World War I, for a month of the post-war era.

One is an archaeologist, James Moon, an outsider to the community who’s been asked to find the bones of a non-Christian, buried near the cemetery. He also hopes to find evidence of a Saxon church. He searches for both between episodes of PTSD and blazing loneliness. He is one of the few survivors of his regiment.

A friend he makes is Tom Birkin, also an outsider, hired by the local church to restore a mural in their chapel. He sleeps in their belfry and is therefore awakened each morning by the clanging of the bells. Part of the progression of the story is his relations with various community members: the Church of England vicar and his wife, and a family who get to know him, have him ’round for Sunday dinners, and introduce him to others in the community. The vicar, meanwhile. disapproves of the hiring of Birkin for the restoration of the mural, but is ineffectual in the face of the funding bequest as accepted by his superiors, the local church council. He, and his wife, putter about their large house, doing little.

If this review seems a bit flat, well, that’s how the movie comes across.

Generally, I avoid reading up on the movies I review, but in this case, it being a while since I’d seen the movie, I glanced at the plot in Wikipedia and was pleased to discover there was far more going on than I, an American (or colonial, if you prefer) would pick up on. The happy little family isn’t members of the Church of England, but part of the Nonconformists, a collection of groups who cannot become civil servants, go to University, etc; I suspect they, in contrast with a vicar and wife no doubt representing the the empty character of the Church of England in the opinion of the storytellers, suggest the joyfulness and solid community still available even to a repressed religious minority in England at the time. There are strains under the surface that, for someone who’s aware, no doubt add a great deal to the sotry.

I may have to watch this again, trying to appreciate the subtle strains of a society still employing religious repression, while still subsisting on the deeper pastoral myths from the past. As a contrasting strain of thought, meditation on the opposite society in which all religions are accepted and associated bigotry is disapproved, may also be in order.

This isn’t a clumsy Hollywood blockbuster, but a surprisingly provincial story in that it doesn’t explain peculiarly British salients; audience must know of them going in, I suspect, in order to have a proper appreciation of the story. That said, it’s also beautifully made, and the putative mystery bothering these friends, unmentioned here, is a bit fun in itself.

This is that rare bird for Americans, a movie requiring prior research, but you may find it worth the time to do so.

President Trump sticking his fingers into these pies could lead to an unfortunate observation by interested observers.

Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)

Biden overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.

Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.

Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy. [“The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics,” Greg Ip, Wall Street Journal]

It’s difficult to see that and not visualize a pack of opponents baying “Socialist! Socialist! Socialist!”.

Not at all.

This paragraph has to be treated with the obvious care, though.

Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.

China’s numbers are always suspect. For years, as someone on the Treehuggers site once observed – I think – China hits its 6% growth number every year, like clockwork. It finally came out that they just announced the number every year with no proof.

So I hesitate to admire China. It’s run by Communists, a group utterly notorious for its piranha-like pursuit of power, utterly lacking in an obvious morality. Honesty? Mendacity?

Which works best today?

In the meantime … “Socialist! Trump is a Socialist!” It has the added benefit of being true.

I’d expect half of the House of Representatives GOP caucus to see their hair fall out.

Hit me, beat me, make me write bad checks!

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.