You can always trust the Republican candidate to be wrong on all matters of science. Now Trump is opining on magnets. It’s all part of his long history of complaining about magnetic elevators and electronic catapults on aircraft carriers, and it’s just plain stupid.

This guy is the leading Republican candidate. He’s an idiot.

Join me in getting a glimpse of the demented, broken minds of the people who idolize right-wing autocrats.

Here’s Neil Strauss, formerly best known for writing about pick-up artists, and then landed a job writing cover stories for Rolling Stone. I don’t know why. He wrote the November 2017 cover story on Elon Musk, the Architect of Tomorrow.

If we don’t send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream’s inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

And then the article just goes on and on in this vein. I couldn’t get far before cramping up with all the cringing.

Matt Binder tells us about Kevin Sorbo’s January 6th Twitter epistles. It’s a classic, here they are in chronological order:

Beautiful descent. I remember watching Hercules with the kids years and years ago…if I knew then what we know now…

It’s January 6th! Not normally a date to party down, but if I were to celebrate it, this is a good way to do so: arrest more insurrectionists. Three more traitors got picked up from their hideout in Florida today. Three years after the fact…the wheels do grind exceedingly slow, but it means we’ll be getting these events for a while to come.

Stupid dupes. I feel no sympathy for these people who challenged the law in order to support a colossal fool and fraud like Trump.

The Washington Post featured this messy caricature of the 147 Republicans who opposed the election of Joe Biden, and are now trying to get re-elected, in spite of their opposition to democracy. I don’t care for it.

The problem is that it exaggerates the surly, nasty, hateful expressions of each individual to the point that they are unrecognizable. I stared at this image for a long time trying to figure out who was who, and just couldn’t do it. At least the article provides a labeled key, which in this case is absolutely essential.

For instance, here’s my state representative, Michelle Fischbach.

If all you knew was the caricature, would you recognize her walking down the street? I don’t think so. Even familiar, easily cartoonish people like Cruz and Green are harder to identify than they should be.

Sure, it accurately captures the spirit of the person — Fischbach is a nasty regressive Catholic culture warrior — but a caricature should at least give us a hint of the physicality of the figure being mocked, or it’s going to miss every time.

Nikki Haley got asked a straightforward question: “What was the cause of the United States’ Civil War?” She staggers back, stalls for time, and finally coughs up, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do. She just couldn’t spit up a statement about how slaves were denied those freedoms, and instead tried to turn it into some variation of a state’s right excuse.

The questioner was inaudible, but said something about slavery. Haley says What do you want me to say about slavery? and then fails to say anything…Next question.

It’s a perfect example of why the Civil War isn’t over yet, and how the Republican party has inherited the mantle of the Confederacy.

---

Oh, good. Someone transcribed the whole exchange, including the inaudible bits I couldn’t make out.

“In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you’d answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.'” That about sums it up.

Last week at this time, I was back in the suburbs of Seattle, in the towns where I grew up. My sister lives in Kent, in the familiar neighborhood where my grandparents lived, where the church I attended was located, and also, where my wife-to-be grew up. My sister can’t drive anymore, so she let me use her car that week, and I drove out to Kent multiple times to pick her up and bring her to my mother’s place, and I’d drive through old familiar places and reminisce a bit.

Except…they all felt terribly cramped.

It wasn’t just that these were places I frolicked in when I was a small child, and now I’m all growed up, but because everything was walled off with barricades and police tape. In particular, the entire strip along the railroad tracks was cordoned off. This was one of my favorite places to play, because it was full of garter snakes and grasshoppers, and when I was very young, we’d walk along the tracks picking up coal that had fallen off the coal cars to bring to my grandmother, who’d burn them in a pot-bellied stove to keep her house warm. It never appealed as a place to camp, though, since all through the day and night the freight trains would roar through there, and the crossing would flash red lights and ding-ding-ding. You’d have to be truly desperate to want to sleep there.

Well, now no kid is going to want to play there because it’s taped off and there never were any toilets there, so I guess people would just go in the bushes, and they were strewn with garbage. It’s all very unsightly. Here’s a convenient map of homeless hot spots in Kent, and it’s disturbing because I knew the area well. #18 is right next to my grandmother’s house, and #33 is the Green River Road where I’d often go biking and swimming in the river and fishing.

So far it seems like the solution is to send the cops in to chase everyone away, and to ask local religious charities to help out. Remember, this is in the kingdom of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, where incredible wealth thrives, but at the same time many people are assembling cardboard lean-tos in rocky fields next to the railroad tracks. It’s a bit chilly out there, and it rains almost all the time. Too bad they can’t all build a mansion with a gorgeous view of Lake Washington or something.

Another solution: the NY Times ran a story about people in Oregon who were so distressed by all the homeless people that they fled to red Missouri, where apparently they do a more thorough job of rousting the layabouts and keeping them away from good Republican citizens. AR Moxon summarized the story, which is good for me, because I do not read the NY Times anymore and forevermore. The whole article is worth reading, but this is the hard nasty core of it all.

Anyway, everywhere around this country, cities whose governments (not always Republican government, I notice) have agreed to accept the underlying supremacist premises (even if they oppose various supremacist tactics), and have engaged in a policy of elimination of unhoused people, all in the name of safety, even while state governments pursue policies that ensure that more and more people will fall into poverty and lose their access to housing.

It seems to me that better, but more expensive, strategies than walling off portions of the town with police tape would be things like Universal Basic Income, and cracking down on predatory landlords, and capping and enforcing limits on rent, and taxing the hell out of McMansions and especially real mansions, and changing zoning laws to encourage the construction of low income housing. I imagine the people running those towns would panic over the hit to their tax base, but you’d think they’d realize that having refugee camps scattered all over town wasn’t particularly attractive, either.

There is more to that NY Times story, though, because it sure as heck isn’t about deploring policies that create a tide of homelessness. No, it’s about how the Huckins family of Portland was so disturbed by liberal Oregon policies, in exactly the same way that the Nobles family of Iowa was forced to flee to Minnesota because of red state policies. They’re exactly the same! Both sides are indistinguishable.

The Nobles moved because one of their children is trans, and the government of their home state of Iowa has decided that it would be better if trans people didn’t exist quite so much in Iowa, and have passed a law to make that happen. Iowa isn’t particularly special here. Pretty much every state controlled by Republicans has decided much the same thing, and has either passed a similar law or is planning to. There are a lot of intentions stated behind this: the desire for fairness in girls’ sports is one, for example—which is interesting, since Republicans have never been particularly interested in funding girls’ sports, and the actual impact of trans kids on high school sports in Iowa is best described as “undetectable.” The desire to keep girls safe in school bathrooms is another, which is sort of rich coming from the same people who refuse to make schools safe from gun massacres, and who insist on forced birth legislation that is making maternal mortality rates spike, and who pass laws that require genital inspection. The desire to make students comfortable is cited, which is interesting, since it gives away the clear belief that trans kids, who are being othered and excluded in the name of this comfort, are not considered students, or at least that their comfort is considered utterly immaterial, that their existence as students is something divorced from the general responsibility to create a safe comfortable environment for students—that their existence as students represents only discomfort and danger for others.

The NY Times pretended that these two families were exactly the same. They ignored the fact that what drove the Huckinses away were wasteful, destructive Republican policies that amplified the rich-poor divide and that have dismantled the social safety net, while what drove the Nobles away were hateful Republican policies that directly threatened their family. There’s a reason I don’t read that rag that props up the status quo.

The Nobles needed safety. They left their home state because they were being eliminated by their state government. The Nobles were, and are, in serious danger.

The Huckinses wanted to feel safe. They left their state because of insufficient elimination of unwanted and deliberately abandoned people, and came to a state where the people they would rather not see—people who are in the greatest danger—are nowhere to be seen, almost as if they had been pre-cleared away ahead of time, specifically for people like the Huckinses, who enable the danger that others are in, and still do.

I guess I can be thankful this Christmas that we don’t have a visible homelessness problem here in rural Minnesota — you can’t survive a Minnesota winter with a makeshift camp, it takes a serious investment in survival to build the kind of shelter you need here.

Although that makes me wonder — we still have a serious problem with poverty here, there are homeless people around, we just don’t see them. Where do they go? Missouri?

It’s straight from Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin’s Law — you know, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” He wants us all to know that that is not a proscription, just a description. When he coined it, it was intended as a joke, but it’s not funny anymore.

But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

It used to be that you could use Godwin’s Law to accuse someone of hyperbole, but not in the case of Trump. He really is a bombastic racist who wants to take over the government and round up his critics in camps. He has said so!

The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.

Godwin is so confident that “more and more of us can see” how awful Trump is, but there is a troubling exception. The major media haven’t figured it out. Or they have, and are doing the bidding of their wealthy masters. Rather than calling out the wanna-be dictator, they’re instead doing their best to raise doubts about his opponent, Biden. I’m not a great fan of Biden, but he is a competent bureaucrat, and a far, far better person than Trump. This election ought to be sliding towards a total blowout, but I still see ridiculous headlines and op-eds that are desperately trying to inflate the contest into a nail-biter, and they might succeed.

Every article that whines that Biden is “too old” needs to recognize that yes, he is old and we’d prefer someone younger, but he’s a fit and active man, in contrast to the guy who is only four years younger, has to paint his face orange to look less corpse-like, and who thinks driving around a golf course on a cart is exercise. And is so bad at golf that he has to cheat.

Every article that blames Biden for the economy needs to be taught about relative comparisons. The economy is better than it was under the Republicans, as it always is. If the state of the economy isn’t good enough for you now, why do you still give the time of day to an incompetent crook who is guaranteed to make it worse?

Oh no, his poll numbers are down. Who cares, a year before the election? Poll numbers are going to be jittering up and down like the chart lines on a Trump lie detector test. They’re a game the media plays to drive up interest in their lazy reporting, and no one should care. This should not be a popularity contest, it should be a competence contest. But that isn’t entertaining enough.

Here’s what I want: the presidency should be an office filled by a civil servant, not a drama queen. It’s work. It’s a job. It’s well-rewarded, but the office holder should be recognized for how efficiently and smoothly they keep the country running, and that person should be eminently replaceable — they represent a set of policies that can be promoted by anyone with a history of training in government. Right now, the media are treating it as if it were a reality TV show, and are auditioning for someone sufficiently clownish, who can stir up conflict from week to week and keep the ratings high, and nothing could be more stimulating to the viewers than a needy, narcisstic, Hitler wanna-be. Stupid stereotypes and annoying characters are what made “Big Bang Theory” a commercial success, so let’s repeat that formula in our government.

Biden is far from perfect and, like anyone, has flaws, but at least he’s a sane grown-up, and that’s all I want for my president. You know the Republicans aren’t going to promote one of those, ever again.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Best pratfall ever.

Rudy Giuliani, who has spent the last several years hitting rock bottom and somehow keeps hitting rock bottom again and again and again, has been ordered to pay an astonishing $148 million in damages to Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, the election workers he defamed in an effort to keep Donald Trump in power. The figure is more than three times the high-end amount that the women had been seeking, which the former mayor’s lawyer had warned earlier in the week would constitute a civil “death penalty” and “be the end of Mr. Giuliani.”

The jury came to the $148 million by awarding Freeman $16,171,000 for the damage Giuliani had caused to her reputation, awarding Moss $16,998,000 for the damage to her reputation, giving each woman $20 million for emotional distress, and adding $75 million in punitive damages.

He’s been disintegrating for years. Freeman & Moss shouldn’t count on getting the money they’re owed, because I bet Giuliani crumbles into dust and slime before he pays up.

A tragic story in six panels.

Some clarification is required. People did go back into the hospital later.

You may not want to read what they found.

[Read more…]

Regulation isn’t free. It costs money to compel for-profit companies to comply with the rules that benefit them in the long run, but cost in the short run. Conservatives don’t like that, and want to be free to ignore, for instance, conservation regulations (I know, it’s sad that conservatives don’t like conservation). Now the Supreme Court is getting into the act.

On New England fishing boats, cramming another person into a space that barely fits a half-dozen employees already is a big ask. But the National Marine Fisheries Service, a federal agency within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Commerce, requires that herring fisheries notify it before embarking on fishing trips, and on half of such trips, a federal inspector rides along. The inspector checks the crew’s compliance with federal rules about where they can fish, how many of which types of fish they can catch, and what kind of gear they can use in the process. The rule also requires that companies help foot the bill for its inspectors’ salaries—about $710 a day. Fishery owners say this reduces their annual returns by about 20 percent.

Last year, four fisheries challenging the rule asked the Supreme Court to put a stop to this practice. And last week, the Court granted certiorari in the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. The justices will hear oral argument sometime next fall.

You can trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing, right? Ha ha, no. The Supreme Court doesn’t believe in science.

The Supreme Court is one of the most scientifically illiterate bodies in government, but why don’t we let it take over federal regulation? That is the basic question behind Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, scheduled for argument next month at the Supreme Court, and it should scare you. To those only recently paying attention, the court’s disdain for the scientific consensus, as evidenced in cases like West Virginia v. EPA, may seem surprising. However, even before the installation of its conservative supermajority, the court had long viewed scientific evidence that runs contrary to its policy preferences with contempt.

Skepticism of an inconvenient scientific consensus is nothing new for the Supreme Court, particularly for the conservatives. In Stanford v. Kentucky, the 1989 case on the constitutionality of capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, Justice William Brennan pointed out the conservative majority’s “evident but misplaced disdain” for scientific evidence, particularly that of the social sciences. In Lockhart v. McCree, Justice William Rehnquist took it upon himself to disregard 14 of 15 submitted peer-reviewed studies, stating that the only reliable study happened to be the one that supported his position, contrary to the scientific consensus. Chief Justice John Roberts has gone so far as to call certain fields “sociological gobbledygook.”

Conservatives’ dislike of science does not stop at social sciences, though. In recent years, conservative justices have made statements completely at odds with the scientific consensus, including saying that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and taking the position that a surface connection between navigable waters is necessary for pollution of wetlands to matter. There is a strong scientific consensus contrary to each of these contentions, but the conservative justices chose to disregard it in favor of their prior opinions.

This is what happens when you let theocrats pack the courts. The only laws they’ll accept are the ones they’ve invented for themselves. You may recall this notorious quote.

The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

That’s the law of the land now.