Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Travois:

Which is an old reference to my thoughts on Sectors of Society, which long-term readers might remember. Briefly, systems start in one state, with a different state being the goal. The crucial observation is that the processes used to transform the system into the goal state are aligned, or optimized for, the goal. I don’t recommend following the above link, as I was working out my thoughts online, rather than more properly organizing them in private.

And goals for other systems, for other sectors, are not the same. Using processes and, for that matter, sub-goals in a sector foreign to the origin sector of a process is a chancy business; the law of unintended consequences not only will apply, but be reinforced.

I see it as so chancy that asking What Should Government’s Profit Margin Be? should immediately instill doubt in the soul of anyone who’s running around yelling about privatizing this and privatizing that.

Apparently The New York Times got around to the first step recently, as Professor Richardson observes:

The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”

I hope the Times went further to observe the fundamentals of why trying to move business processes into the public sector is a bad idea. Not that the President and Mr Musk will pay attention; it’d go against their confirmation bias, I suspect.

But it sounds like the world is waking up to unpleasant realities. Maybe I should get a sub to the Times. No. I just don’t have time for it, although with WaPo turning turtle as journalists hurried away after Bezos showed himself craven, it may be worth the aggravation.

The gears grind slowly, but grind they do. First, Rep Moulton (D-MA), a relatively obscure Representative who announced doubts concerning trans-women competing, at least with his daughters, and the blowback he experienced.

But the next Democratic politician to explore these grounds isn’t obscure. Governor Newsom (D-CA) is considered a strong possibility for the next Presidential election, and now he’s jumped into the transgender sports controversy with both feet:

That history was top of mind for several Democrats last week, when the governor said in his new podcast that transgender girls and women participating in female sports leagues is “deeply unfair.” The comments made him the most prominent Democrat to buck the party and echo public opinion on an issue that helped shape the 2024 election and could be a political liability once more in 2028.

The episode quickly made good on the promise of the podcast, advertised as a place where the governor would “answer the hard questions.” Chief among those: Are there limits to the party’s support for transgender Americans?

“The issue of fairness is completely legit,” Newsom said on “This Is Gavin Newsom” last week. “And we’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.” [CNN/Politics]

There is nothing wrong with recognizing a legitimate issue and using it in the run-up to an election run. In fact, it’s part of the American way, these days, of running a campaign.

No matter how much alleged party activists run around screaming Nazis!, per Rep Moulton at the above link, and indulging in performative morality as if that qualified as perceptive intellectual discussion, this remains an issue that bothers large numbers of Americans:

A January New York Times/Ipsos poll found that 79% of Americans — including 67% of Democrats — said they believed female transgender athletes should not be allowed to play on women’s sports teams. A Pew Research poll released last month found that 66% of Americans favor laws that require transgender girls and women to play on the teams of the gender they were assigned at birth.

And, yet, according to Andrew Sullivan, decisions concerning trans-athletes are handed down as if on high, quoting science as it’s the final word, rather than the normal contingent knowledge and conclusions that any normal scientist would agree is the way of science.

I know both transmen and transwomen, and the only hidden agenda I own, when it comes to sports, is the importance of fairness for both cis and trans athletes. What does it mean?

That means we need to have a real, society-involving debate. We need to follow the rules of a liberal democracy, and transgender advocates need to stop being arrogant, abusive sods. It’s probably the only way to bring America back together on this issue – and an important step Democrats must take if they’re going to cease being highly unpopular, even in the presence of the deeply incompetent pack of autocratic 4th-raters that is the Republican Party.

… that’s hard to type fast five times.

Suzanne Spaulding on Lawfare discusses the necessity of judicial independence:

“Judicial independence is not conferred so judges can do as they please. Judicial independence is conferred so judges can do as they must.” This essential insight from Justice Anthony Kennedy is cited by Chief Justice John Roberts in his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary. The report rightly expresses concern about declining trust in the independence of the courts.

On March 4, following an address to Congress, cameras caught President Trump patting Roberts’s shoulder, saying, “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget.” Earlier, Attorney General Pam Bondi—commenting on the freeze on federal funds instituted by the administration—asserted that “the Supreme Court is backing us up.” Yet, on Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court rejected a plea from the administration to overrule a lower court’s decision that funds must be released to pay foreign aid contractors for work they have completed.

That said, many more cases involving the current administration are making their way to the Supreme Court. When faced with even more fundamental constitutional claims, there is a risk that, in a sincere effort to preserve the institution and avoid a constitutional crisis, the Court may seek to sidestep a significant confrontation with the executive branch in the face of recent threats to ignore court orders. This would itself reflect a devastating lack of independence and de facto create the very constitutional crisis and damage to the public’s trust that the chief justice presumably seeks to avoid.

A theme I haven’t revisited of late is the importance of the process of nomination of judges by the Executive, be that Governor or President, and confirmation or rejection by a designated Legislative branch.

The idea is to bring into the equation the judgment, both as to qualifications and character, of both Executive and Legislative, knowing that they are discussing a potential member of a branch of government that is independent, to a high degree, from the other two branches. That independence contributes to a governance system’s efficacy and stability.

And the ideological allegiance currently promoted by both Parties works precisely against such independence. Anything that works against rulings against the one’s nominator or confirmers is an important matter.

Let’s summarize this. Yes, politics is a normal part of government. However, illicit politics includes such actions that subvert the design of government, from the promulgation of laws, their execution, the judgment upon those on whom the laws fall, and the law itself.

Thus, when excellent, independent judges, regardless of their political stripes, are bypassed in favor of candidates who are considered middling, such as Justice Thomas, the system is subverted. Yes, Thomas and others may be reliable conservative votes, but that does not excuse such nominations for the top Court of the judicial branch of government.

Precarity:

the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse:
The older brother raised the younger one, a responsibility that gave him a perpetual sense of life’s precarity.
Despite the looming precarity ahead, I’ve found my time at grad school to be quite rewarding.

etc… [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Gripping account of how plants and animals shaped each other,” Simon Ings, NewScientist (1 March 2025, paywall):

[Author Riley Black] excels at conveying life’s precarity. Life doesn’t recover after extinction events, nor does it regenerate. It reinvents itself. Early on – 425 million years ago, to be exact – we find life flourishing in strange lands, under skies so short of oxygen, fires can only smoulder and dead plants can’t decompose.

Somewhere. I’m sure of it.

Noted in “The Pizzigano Portolan: A Cartographic Mystery at the James Ford Bell Library,” published by the University of Minnesota Libraries:

In November 1954, 530 years after its creation, the James Ford Bell Library acquired what is known as the 1424 Nautical Chart, inscribed with the name of Venetian cartographer Zuane Pizzigano. It seems fitting to share it with you on its 600th anniversary.

Uh, no. The James Ford Bell Library is not 530 years old. Ambiguity can be fun, even exciting, but not in an official publication of UMN.

I wonder if AI was involved in this mistake.

This does make me consider the point of writing ambiguity-free sentences, though, and, for me, it’s precision, the smooth, error-free intake of information. Ambiguity is rather like forcing a porcupine, quills out, down one’s throat.

I shan’t speculate as to the nature of the fluid best suited for helping the quilled monster down one’s esophagus.

I expect we’ll be seeing a herd of nominees, to be frank, for this award. Here comes one now!

Those who carry cash would have a denomination as an option with President Donald Trump’s face, at least under the idea of one of South Carolina’s congressmen.

U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-Springdale, a staunch supporter of Trump, says he’s planning to propose a $250 dollar bill to include the president’s portrait.

“Bidenflation has destroyed the economy forcing American families to carry more cash. Most valuable bill for (the) most valuable President!” Wilson posted on X. Federal law, however, prohibits any living person from being depicted on U.S. currency. [The State (South Carolina)]

Older readers may remember Rep Wilson (R-SC) as the dude who shouted “You likelie!” during an Obama-delivered State Of The Union speech. (I seem to remember he later apologized.)

Since inflation makes cash a least preferred instrument of wealth, his excuse for this little boondoggling flattery of President Trump collapses immediately; and, since the economy was in better shape at the end of President Biden’s term than at the end of Trump’s first term, the rest of his statement collapses as, ummmmm, lies.

So ol’ Earl, excuse me, Joe, places allegiance to an icon of corruption and narcissism over an allegiance to truth, to honesty. Someone remind me why South Carolina keeps returning Rep Wilson to Congress. Is it ‘cuz they don’t want him in South Carolina?

Playing at Theatre In The Round is Legacy of Light by Karen Zacarias. This is a production that explores disparate questions of gender role crossing; the realities of being a pregnant woman and having a child in the era of Voltaire; the connections between generations that are deeply separated by time; sexual freedoms then, the costs now; how the stretch for roles that are non-traditional can damage one’s sense of capability in traditional roles; and even something as trivial as the difference between stuffy old American accents, and, I presume, the translated French dialog from Voltaire’s era.

For all those themes, maybe that last one struck me most forcefully. Sometimes, it’s the visceral which catches one’s attention, isn’t it?

And how do they do? I was fascinated by the portrayal of Voltaire, famous polymath, and mathematician and scientist Mme Émilie du Châtelet, who was romantically involved with Voltaire. From their spoken dialog, to the revelation that Mme Émilie du Châtelet was a historical personage, and a scientist, made them all the more fascinating.

But not far behind are the modern American couple of a schoolteacher, Peter, and his wife Olivia, an astrophysicist, who happen to be infertile. They are looking for a surrogate mother to carry a child for them, and find her in twenty year old Millie, who recently lost her mother and is trying to pay off various debts owed by herself and her brother, Lewis.

Less inspirational, mostly due to the doctrinaire positions given them by the playwright, and not the capabilities of the actors, are the young lover of Mme Émilie du Châtelet, Saint-Lambert, who is distracted from his impregnation of Châtelet by the honors recently bestowed upon him by the King, and Millie’s brother Lewis, who is positively grating in his interpretation of what passes for informal traditional American morality; surrogacy basically breaks his brain.

Is it perfect? No. But, then, neither is life. In some ways, this is a lesson in living with the limitations of our fellows, whether they’re lovers, family, friends, or biology. And ourselves, even with death in the wings.

It’s worth the price of a ticket or two.

Portolan:

Portolan charts are nautical charts, first made in the 13th century in the Mediterranean basin and later expanded to include other regions. The word portolan comes from the Italian portolano, meaning “related to ports or harbors“, and which since at least the 17th century designates “a collection of sailing directions”. [Wikipedia]

A bit of a foreign import into the English language, which I’ve not seen before. Noted in “The Pizzigano Portolan: A Cartographic Mystery at the James Ford Bell Library,” Dr. Marguerite Ragnow, UMN Libraries:

Hand-painted on a single piece of parchment, Pizzigano’s map is what we call a portolan chart: a manuscript map that emphasizes the sea and the ports of call that dot the surrounding coastline. As Tony Campbell, former Map Librarian of the British Library, once put it: “portolan charts preserve the Mediterranean sailors’ firsthand experience of their own sea, as well as their expanding knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean.” The word “portolan” derives from the Italian word “portolano,” a collection of written sailing directions. These texts list places, with distances and directions to reach them. For example, the James Ford Bell Library has a fourteenth-century Italian Portolano del Adriatico e Mediterra, which gives sailing directions from Constantinople to Lisbon, from the Adriatic Sea through the Mediterranean (Bell call #: 1300 Po).

Samples and discussion of the subject portolan provided at the link. If you enjoy mysteries, this might be fun.

Replacing chemistry with biology:

Back in 2013, [Jim] Ajioka was looking at ways of monitoring water pollution with another researcher, Orr Yarkoni. When the pair realised that much of the water pollution in Nepal and Bangladesh came from the dyeing of textiles, they started thinking about how to reduce it.

Their solution is to use genetically modified bacteria or yeast to “grow” dyes, instead of manufacturing them from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. Ajioka and Yarkoni founded Colorifix in 2016 to commercialise the process.

Some of the colours produced by the modified microbes are pigments long used for dyeing, such as the indigo that gives denim its colour. Others are novel dyes never used before, such as a reddish pigment found in a mould [sic?] that can grow in showers. [“Dyes made by microbes could reduce the environmental impact of clothes,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (22 February 2025, paywall)]

Fascinating stuff from a science perspective. But they mention Bangladesh, where traditional methods, deadly as they may be, also provides employment for a large sector of the company:

In 2012 the textile industry accounted for 45% of all industrial employment in [Bangladesh] …

The NS article doesn’t address how a microbe-driven dyeing industry would affect employment.

We have a couple of nominees this time, who we tie together because of their methodology similarities. The first is Rep. Van Orden (R-WI), who has filed an impeachment motion … against a judge:

Impeaching Paul Engelmayer, judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The second is Rep Eli Crane (R-AZ) doing the same thing … to the same judge:

“Using the powers of his high office, Judge Engelmayer interfered with the will of the people,” Mr. Crane’s impeachment resolution stated. “In so doing, Judge Engelmayer used the powers of his position to engage in actions that overstep his judicial authority. By making a political decision outside the scope of his legal duties, he compromised the impartiality of our judicial system.” [The Washington Times]

There are co-sponsors involved, but they were slow to the gate and are, therefore, excluded from the nomination. The decision of your celebrity judge is final, of course.

Of course, this is wrong on more than one level. First, the notion that a judge slowing down radical, unheard of financial maneuvers by someone who has no qualifications – I speak of Mr Musk – to do the job is somehow an impeachable offense shows a lack of knowledge, or judgment, unacceptable in a member of Congress.

Typically, judges are impeached for offensive behavior, although the real point of impeachment is to curtail damage caused by corruption.

Second, the entire argument that the election result is a mandate is ridiculous. When your candidate gets less than 50% of the vote, it’s not a mandate – it’s a warning from the voters that both parties need to improve themselves.

Third, President Trump’s ideal role in cleaning up overspending is minimal; that is actually the role of these two members of Congress, along with some 530+ other members, now isn’t it? The purse strings are in Congress’ many hands, not the President’s. Try being responsible members, eh?

Another soap opera created by soap opera addicts. And it’s worth remembering that this judge was nominated by President Obama, and confirmed 98-0.

Erick Erickson seems to have it:

There is no equivalence between Ukraine and Russia in this war. Donald Trump, in yesterday’s General Assembly vote, aligned our nation with three ruthless dictators, all three of whom are actively engaged in the invasion of Ukraine.

That is wrong.

But I have no doubt he’s already back on his horse and whipping it along. Can’t have those rascally non-conservatives getting themselves organized.

Being part of the Axis of Evil won’t feel so bad, Erickson. Drink more bourbon.

Bitcoins have fallen a bit in value recently. Here’s a one month chart:

Back in late January, it was over $102,000/coin, so call it a 20% drop over roughly a month. Beyond noting that this much volatility invalidates any bids it may be making to become a real currency, I shall withhold any speculations. I’ve heard nothing about the cryptocurrencies sponsored by President Trump or his wife, Melania.

But the volatility is a warning. It’s up, it’s down – and Bitcoin isn’t just another investment. Real investments are in going concerns that are creating something of value. The value production of the cryptocurrencies lies in intangibilities, notoriously hard to value, and even harder when they have difficult to measure negative impacts on society.

Four kids and their Yorkie, named Fluffy. Or Gabriel. I can never remember.

Mysterious Island (2005) is a mixture of pirates, giant creatures out for a bite of dainty human flesh, and, ah, Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus. Oh, and Union and Confederate soldiers shepherding a few ladies.

It’s really quite the mess. The special effects, as well as the script, are particularly wretched, while the acting, featuring Patrick Stewart and Kyle MacLachlan, is not that bad. However, it also has some dude playing the pirate captain, who is stuck with terribly cliched dialog and compensates by leaving toothmarks all over the scenery.

All in all, absent a completist urge of some sort, I don’t think this is worth your time.

Somatic:

1. : of, relating to, or affecting the body especially as distinguished from the germplasm
2. : of or relating to the wall of the body : PARIETAL

[Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Why the best modern artists returned to nakedness to find the truth,” Sebastian Smee, WaPo:

All this particularity activates our sense of our own bodies, stimulating somatic memories of what it is like to touch and to feel the touch of others.

This was back on the February 18th, I fear I’m a little bit behind.

“Congress can’t do anything except complain about it,” [Senator Grassley (R-IA)] says, “but I think we have to have sympathy and understanding for people that are laid off.” [RadioIowa]

Where it refers to the firings of Federal employees, when Congress has authorized the funds to hire these folks for specific jobs. Grassley’s making the case that an Executive can fire who they want, as if Grassley works for the Executive; but Congress is the law making branch of the government, and the Executive is responsible for executing the actions to implement the laws, not decide if the laws should be implemented.

Trump is a case of someone believing propaganda and acting on it, and discovering that part of the definition of propaganda is that it’s false.

Grassley’s ninety-two, and should have the sense to simply retire.

Sadly, not all of the audience was charmed. Some were professional curmudgeons.

Fantasia (1940), as a mostly plotless experiment, defies easy description, and the fact that it was made 80+ years ago, when sensibilities were substantially different from today, and the experiential base in the area of animation far smaller, than today’s audiences’.

Think No Frozen (2013).

It might be best considered as eight experiments in mixing music with animation, and sometimes a bit of live action, as vignettes. It’s fun, it’s thought-provoking.

It’s even scary.

There’s good reason Fantasia is considered a classic, and that’s not confined to chronological origin. It’s a master class in telling stories through movement. Recommended.

It would seem there’s a bit of pressure being brought to bear on GOP Members of Congress, although whether it’s artificial or earnest is of some question. I brought this up yesterday in this post concerning the company that owns Truth Social. Today, I see three more townhalls mentioned, all in a single CNN/Politics article:

Rep. Scott Fitzgerald [R-WI-5th] was questioned by constituents about Ukraine and Elon Musk’s efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency during a town hall Thursday in West Bend, Wisconsin, according to CNN affiliate TMJ4.

One constituent asked, “How can we be represented by you if you don’t have a voice in Congress?” Other attendees brought signs, including one that read “presidents are not kings.” Trump referred to himself as a “king” in a social media post this week.

Fitzgerald disagreed with the president’s comments this week falsely accusing Ukraine of starting the war with Russia. “No, Ukraine did not start the war,” he said at the town hall, adding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky need to be “in the room” for negotiations to end the conflict.

Wisconsin’s Fifth District is heavily Republican. At least Rep Fitzgerald has publicly clashed with the President.

The second townhall was hosted by Rep. Glenn Grothman:

Grotham defended Musk’s efforts on Friday, telling WBAY, “I think if they understood more what was going on they would like him. They just don’t believe the degree to which he’s looking out for the average guy, which is what he is trying to do.”

Which sounds like political suicide to me. The final townhall was hosted by Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-OR), for whom I do not have a transcript, but is reported as also being contentious by CNN.

Again, townhalls are easily flooded by partisans. I have to consider this highly contingent on factors beyond my ability to evaluate.

But it is interesting.

Ostensibly fashion, it has the sour taste of a punkage of the fashion world, doesn’t it?

A while back I mentioned some new tech involving batteries built of aluminium. While I have nothing new on that, there’s an old tech battery, built in, ah, China, that may be a competitor for lithium ion batteries:

If you bought an EV with a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery, you could expect lower car payments, less fire risk and more years of use out of your car — but you wouldn’t be able to go as far on a single charge as you could with the nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) batteries commonly found in American and European electric cars. That trade-off has made LFP batteries the go-to choice for standard-range EVs in China, helping to make electric cars more affordable and limit pollution.

Now, American companies are starting to build their own LFP batteries to catch up to their Chinese rivals.

“I definitely suspect that there will be some homegrown LFP chemistries in the next couple years, and we’ll start to see it … grow quite rapidly over the next five to 10 years,” said Scott Moura, an environmental engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley. [WaPo]

Lower range, but better for the environment, according to the article. That’s halfway there.

The classic play returns to the boards at St. Paul’s Gremlin Theatre (later note: this website appears to be seriously out of date), put on by the production company Theatre 55. If a bit rough around the edges, let it be known that the company, already constrained to players over the age of 55 where possible, was ravaged by a flu pathogen midway through its run. The effort, skill, and talent is still there, though.

Oh, and Audrey II ! Such a great special effect she was!

I am sad to report that the last two showings are tomorrow, so if you’d like to see Little Shop Of Horrors on stage, don’t wait, get your tickets now!

It’s been a month and a bit since I last wrote about the stock price / market cap, yes, yes, different ways to express the same thing, of the stock of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., aka DJT. Last time we peeked in at this soap opera of a company, their only real product is its primary stock holder, President Trump, and perhaps the social media site, Truth Social, they provide. Their primary competition, due to similar styles, is the Elon Musk-owned X, née Twitter, with other social media, such as Facebook, being secondary competition due to differing styles of social media or, in the case of BlueSky, having lower profiles. X’s main draw seems to be transitioning from its style to its owner, incidentally, but I do not use X, so I cannot be authoritative.

The stock price of DJT five weeks ago was $39/share, roughly.

It’s been a month of the Presidency for President Trump, during which he’s drunkenly, metaphorically speaking, fired Executive Branch employees. Probationary employees come in great numbers and are least protected, so they’ve been fired first, but inspectors general, who are tasked with finding corruption and mistakes, and are thus a huge threat to a lifelong conman, have also been a favorite target. He hired the aforementioned Mr Musk to search computer systems for signs of corruption and waste, which are the lodestones[] of the political right.

Mr Musk has been notably prolix on the topic, but reportedly inaccurate. The media and, hopefully, everyone else has learned not to take Mr Musk’s pronouncements seriously.

One could credibly argue that President Trump is executing on many of his promises, although there are notable exceptions, such as admitting that inflation is not an easy demon to slay; he’s taken to blaming the previous Administration for necessary consequences of his own actions.

So what, if anything, has this meant for DJT? Is it skyrocketing in response to him keeping some promises?

This is the month Yahoo! Financial view of DJT, and so we can see DJT is down 21%; if we do the math for more than a month, $39 to $28, it’s more of a 28% drop. DJT has not been good to its buyers, but very good to its shorters. A $28/sh price translates to a market cap of $6 billion+.

So what’s happened? That’s always speculative, isn’t it? BlueSky’s profile has elevated in the last month, as it gains national media mentions. Incidentally, several of my friends, long-time (35+ years) social media users, have announced they are leaving X and Facebook for BlueSky. At the risk of sounding, well, old, this same sort of thing was happening forty years ago: Manage a site so that the users cannot trust the managers to treat them fairly, and, at some point, the herd picks up tents and moves to a different site. The “moat” that business analysts often discuss is quite fragile when it comes to social media, with threats from within (enshittification) and without (troll attacks).

Between the two threats, you have to wonder if all social media sites are going to become body farms, and we’ll all go back to interacting in Real Life. I presume Truth Social will remain popular, to the extent that it is, only so long as President Trump remains popular. At some point, its population will consist only of the top-level parasites who don’t understand why everyone else left. DJT will become worthless.

But that’s not quite the point. How shall we read the goat entrails that is the chart, above? I suspect that at this point, the Trump fanbase, MAGA, has bought all the DJT they can afford; professional investors have evaluated DJT, classified it as having little future, and either are not buying it or are even shorting it. Amateur investors, seeing President Trump’s popularity beginning to slip, are not buying. See this CNN/Politics story on a recent Georgia townhall in which a Republican congressman had a cool reception. It’s tricky to evaluate such townhalls, since they’re easy to flood with partisans, but I thought it interesting.

DJT is in decay mode. That doesn’t mean it’ll continue to decay. If DJT’s parent company has a trick up its sleeve, or announcement of a business alliance, or some other bit of news, it could easily leap upwards. Alix Breeden on Daily Kos has a take on its future, and, as it’s informed by more research than I have time for, it may have some interest.

As ever, I’m not a financial advisor, I’m just a worn-out software engineer with 4 decades in social media, some of it technological, some of it as a user, some of it as an author, some of it as a manager (not commercial). Find yourself a financial advisor. This is just honest opinion on a social media site that has no interest in screwing you over.

… but a defensive reaction. Here’s Erick Erickson:

Donald Trump has fired Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States.

He’s impressed by Ms Shogan’s “defiance” of President Biden when it came to the ERA count. And so…

This was a mistake. Donald Trump just fired the woman who stood up to Joe Biden and also who made veterans a priority for the National Archives. The Archivist should be a non-partisan position precisely because of the pressure brought by Joe Biden, and Ms. Shogan showed she had the fortitude to defy political pressure.

And it’s all in the last sentence, because President Trump cannot tolerate dissent, not even potential dissent. After all, dissent has to start somewhere, and dissent will be the origin of his downfall, so you gotta stamp it out wherever it’s located, even if it’s not active.

I’m unsure as to whether Erickson doesn’t understand his broken President Trump, or is merely covering up.