Blog Useful Sporting Sailing Friendly Site map Fine Print Mastodon

unraveling

30.July.2025

It's the corruption, stupid

Not that anyone needs a reminder at this point, but a fundraising message reminds me of the dire straits of the current moment, when "the current President of the United States is the most openly corrupt human being to serve that office." (If he's not in the "lead," he can't be far behind in the running for most corrupt serving in any office.)

Back in the early winter of '17, I wrote a long piece here, How we fixed corruption. (Spoiler alert: Antonin Scalia and his pals defined it out of existence, in the relatively unremarked U.S. v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California, in 1999, and then in the coup de grace of Citizens United.

If Paul Krugman seemed to be overstating the case back then, see what you think now, not quite eight years on (with emphasis added):

"[T]he Republican Party—including so-called moderates—turns out, if anything, to be even worse than one might have expected. At this point it’s evidently composed entirely of cynical apparatchiks, willing to sell out every principle—and every shred of their own dignity—as long as their donors get big tax cuts."

Conservative media have "given up even the pretense of doing real reporting, and become blatant organs of ruling-party propaganda." And the best that might come out of Robert Mueller's investigation may be symbolic: "as long as Republicans control Congress, constitutional checks and balances are effectively a dead letter."

"Even if voters rise up effectively against the awful people currently in power, we’ll be a long way from restoring basic American values. Our democracy needs two decent parties, and at this point the GOP seems to be irretrievably corrupt."

29.July.2025

The corruption is breathtaking, actually

Sen. John Kennedy, trying to justify his vote to confirm Emil Bove to a lifetime appointment to the judicial bench, complaining about the Democrats unwillingness to just go along with nominations (never mind the perjury, attempting to mask Bove's contempt for the rule of law) said, and I quote:

"If everyone's corrupt, then no one is corrupt."

That's the current operating principle of the +rump-quisling party.

24.July.2025

Tulsi Gabbard, Russian tool

When Gabbard was first floated as potential Director of National Intelligence, Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg wrote in The Independent (UK) that her "history with Russia is even more concerning than you think." They started with an anecdote from 10 years ago, when she was a member of congress, and visiting the Syria-Turkey border.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with [three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier. They stood Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies].

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.

"In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US...."

And now, thanks to the quisling Republican Senators, she is the DNI. It's a toss-up whether her appointment or RFK Jr.'s will ultimately cost more lives. Yesterday, as Heather Cox Richardson details in her July 23, 2025 Letter from an American,

"The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services."

Gabbard is working in service to Dear Leader, desparate to change the subject to ANYTHING BUT EPSTEIN. Which is a tough row to hoe, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that our Attorney General, Pam Bondi "and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files."

Because of course it did. I'm old enough to remember Elon Musk's June 5th tweet, "Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files." It's a bit of a cluster munition; the latest casualty is congress, shuffling out of town early for its "August" recess.

This plot will continue to sicken for a good while, it appears. Forbes has a timeline of Every Known Link Between Trump And Epstein going back to 1980.

23.July.2025

Down the rathole

You're not imagining things, updates have been increasingly sporadic here. It's not that I'm out of gas (even though, after 25+ years doing this, I have a good excuse), it's just that the well and truly flooded zone is bubbling up one outrage after another as the rule of a madman sets in, and I'm not keeping up. How do you measure outrage when everything seems outrageous? Not least in that, is the Supreme Court's continuing spree of aiding and abetting. Latest "breaking" news includes them allowing +rump to fire consumer product safety regulators with no cause beyond "the ones appointed by a Democrat." ("Although a federal law allows them to be terminated only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance,” the president gave no reasons for the firings.")

"In a series of rulings since the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court has almost without exception given him broad leeway to exercise control over the executive branch, including by firing officials despite a federal law limiting his authority to do so."

The extremists on the SCOTUS have put the man above the law, and continue canceling any laws he demonstrates he doesn't like. For any reason. Or no reason. "Executive power über alles!" Tricky Dick must be rolling over in his grave for letting himself get elbowed out of office.

18.July.2025

Chatting with Pandora

Our church last Sunday featured Professor Liza Long's sermon on Ghosts and Machines. With an audience of mostly non-users, she used "cyborg" and "AI assistants" to grab attention, but the thing that stuck with me came in conversation with her afterwards (or did she borrow it from the previous post on her Artisanal Intelligence blog?). She says she doesn't have the sense of the bots as sentient entities (despite them being able to hold up their end of a long, detailed conversation); but as "mirrors." "I never feel like I’m “talking” to something that has feelings or thoughts. They’re just tools to help me process my own thoughts, opinions, and ideas," she wrote.

In doing that (as you'll see from Claude if you take that jump), there's a lot of text generation that "sounds like" someone else (from my 3rd person POV), and I wonder, how do you sort out what was your writing and what was the work of stochastic parroting, put into a style that sure, that could be you, but was an assemblage from bottom trawling the large language model corpus of "everyone's" writing? The textual version of pink slime, if you will.

Meghan O’Rourke, executive editor of The Yale Review, and a professor of creative writing at Yale has a thoughtful, timely guest essay up at the NYT: The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind. She also writes about the technology "mirroring me,"

"my syntax, my vocabulary, even the “interior weather” of my poems. (“Interior weather” is a phrase I use a lot.) It was producing a fun-house double of me — a performance of human inquiry. I was soothed because I was talking to myself — only it was a version of myself that experienced no anxiety, pressure or self-doubt."

I suspect if you start early enough, as students these days are doing, the ability to differentiate one's authentic self (assuming such a thing exists) from tooled output will atrophy as quickly as the memory of the "times table" did for the calculator generation.

Long and O'Rourke both touched on the ingratiating nature of the chatbots. They're amusing, charming at times, keen on keeping you engaged (and paying your monthly fees, I gather is the business end of the transaction).

I wouldn't know, because I'm not clicking into this brave new world, as much as I can resist it. (Gemini has somehow embedded itself into my telephone.) Some of my own self has doubtless been scraped into the LLMs, here in my 26th year of blogging. I don't mind looking back at what I've written once in a while, but I don't really want to have it regurgitated at me, especially not if it's homogenized with a lot of other random output on the web.

We're on the verge of tremendous change, no matter how many of us (try to) opt out. Even if it doesn't make cyborgs out of us, it will change our way of thinking, of working, of writing, even as it sucks more and more resources (time, energy, water) into dimensionless maws.

Ask your favorite bot, "what could go wrong?"

17.July.2025

Weaponizing the judiciary

The dirty dozen members of the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee rammed Emil Bove through to advance his nomination to a lifetime appointment on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware). As Glenn Thrush put it for the NY Times, Bove is "the Justice Department enforcer who oversaw dozens of firings and the dismissal of bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, to a lifetime post as a federal judge." Super tight with the Big Guy, and his fascist necromancer, Stephen Miller.

"In the days leading up to Mr. Bove’s appearance before the committee, Erez Reuveni, a former immigration lawyer dismissed by Mr. Bove for insubordination, came forward to assert that Mr. Bove had told subordinates he was willing to ignore court orders to fulfill the president’s aggressive deportation campaign."

Bove impressed enough folks in the DOJ for NINE HUMDRED OF THEM to sign on to a letter to the committee expressing their "deep concern" about his nomination. They noted that Bove has "been a leader in [the] assault" of "senseless attacks on the dedicated career employees who are the backbone of the Department." They wrote:

"It is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land, as it should be intolerable to anyone committed to maintaining our ordered system of justice."

Senators Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Thom Tillis, John Kennedy, Marsha Blackburn, Eric Schmitt, Katie Britt, and Ashley Moody said hey, we don't have a problem with that.

Just for good measure after Trump's first pick for DC prosecutor, Ed Martin, was torpedoed, and Fox News personality "Judge" Jeanine Pirro" nominated instead, they approved her nomination, for US Attorney for Washington DC. Ladies and Gentleman, your party of Law and Order.

3.July.2025

Deeper into the swamp

There's a lot that's gone unsaid here in the last couple of months. You've heard some of the news, maybe a lot of the news, probably pushed the needle well into the OVERWHELM red zone. (For those of you old enough to remember analog gauges. For the younger set, your CHECK ENGINE light seems to be on all the time, you know?)

Anne Lamott's Fourth of July op-ed starts by saying "we must celebrate it"; "Independence Day is America's day" and maybe our "new phase of resistance" will be hope and joy. Whew. I'm thinking more along the lines of rereading our Declaration of Independence, at least through the Preamble (before the Indictment) which declares

"[W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

The latest clown car on said train is the banner headline I had to dodge to get to the opinion section, House passes Trump's bill, over the spitting image of the smirking Speaker of the House and tool of the devil masquerading as a Christian.

Not that it really was Trump's bill; the "mammoth agenda" was cooked up by a team of weevils working overtime to smash and grab while the smashing and grabbing is good. The big guy didn't write the bill, nor did he read it. 887 pages? You've got to be kidding. Few or none of the members of congress who voted for it read the whole thing. Trump just went along with what his handlers slid in front of him, and then cajoled (maybe?) and threatened (definitely) every member of Congress wearing the R badge of shame to stay in line.

None more pathetically than Lisa Murkowski, casting the deciding vote (to set up J.D. Vance to break the "tie" after three other senators were allowed to defect) and saying she hoped the House would save us from the awful thing they'd just done. As if. There was some theater, but the fix was in, even to the point of making the absurd deadline of this week's holiday. If they handed out hypocrisy prizes, Idaho's Senator Mike Crapo would surely get one for his long-term "deficit hawk" posing that somehow allowed him to vote for the 2017 bonanza that blew up the the budget for a decade, and now, re-upping the sweet, sweet grift for the billionaires.

I see the Minority Leader at least set a record with an 8 hour, 44 minute speech. (If there was no time limit, why not keep going right through the holiday?!)

We'll all be learning about stuff we—and he, and they— didn't know were in the mega-bill for a long time. It's like Gomer Pyle used to say: Surprise, surprise, surprise.

While the long train of abuses keeps coming, complete with bomb theater in Iran (while Israel plays for keeps), and the construction of concentration camps stateside, the Trump administration is also completing its cowardly betrayal of Ukraine. There's not enough in it for him, you see, and the feckless GOP caucus is too focused on taking a holiday.

Update:
I'm sure my usual suspects will write more cogently about this ongoing nightmare than I can. I recommend Marc C. Johnson (no relation to the Speaker! ha ha) and his piece, Magical Thinking.

raveling

Tom von Alten