Exploiting people for ratings and profit

Because I do not watch TV much, there are huge swathes of popular culture that I am oblivious to. Well, not completely oblivious, because I do read news sites and come across news headlines about things that enter into the periphery of my consciousness so that I know that something is going on and may even be aware of the people involved without knowing the particulars. For example, I knew that there was some kind of public feud between two rappers one of whom was Drake while the other’s name escapes me but did not know what it was about. I could look it up of course, but I wasn’t interested enough to bother.

I am also aware that there are a vast number of reality shows out there but have never watched any, though I know that some of them involve squabbling housewives and others involve people trying to find romantic partners while yet others involve some kind of survival tests. I was aware that in their quest for ratings, the TV networks and the show’s producers go to some lengths to create drama among the participants, even providing them with scripts or prompts, so that the word ‘reality TV’, implying that the shows are organically evolving with the cameras being just passive observers, is really a joke. Since the shows are taped well in advance and heavily edited before broadcast to create various storylines, they have to be filmed in secret and the participants are sequestered so that they cannot meet with their families and friends and are bound by confidentiality agreements so that surprises can be sprung on viewers. This isolation likely increases their sense of vulnerability. It is only long after the shows have been broadcast that people start revealing the often brutal and abusive conditions that prevailed while the filming was going on.
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The strange second summit on Ukraine

After the damp squib of a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump said that it was up to Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to work things out between them. It was never clear that Putin had agreed to such a meeting and it seems unlikely that he would. Then it was announced that Trump would meet with Zelenskyy at the White House tomorrow (Monday) again with no clear statement about what purpose it would serve, other than perhaps to tell Zelenskyy that he had better make a deal with Putin that gives up territory that Russia has already seized. He could just have easily conveyed that through other channels.

The map of the current state of affairs is below and the mood in Ukraine is strongly against such concessions.

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The summit that wasn’t

The meeting between Trump and Russian president Putin in Alaska yesterday has left observers scratching their heads. In the past, summits between these two major nuclear powers the US and Russia (or the former Soviet Union) would have a clear agenda and be preceded by weeks of detailed negotiations between lower-level officials, down to the drafting of the final joint communique to reveal what had been decided. The summit itself would be for the principals to sign off on what had largely been already agreed, with the addition of a few relatively minor features. The idea of a summit so that the two leaders could just shoot the breeze was unheard of. While the two of them just chatting and getting to know each other better was of some value in lowering the temperature and reducing the risk of nuclear war, it was never the main point of those earlier meetings.

And yet that is what this summit ended up being. Originally scheduled to last six hours with lunch in between, it was reduced to just three hours with the lunch omitted. Instead of a joint communique being issued about the decisions that had been made, followed by a press conference with journalists asking questions, there were just 12-minutes of statements, nine by Putin and three by Trump, that consisted of just platitudes and revealed nothing at all and allowed for no questions.
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Film review: The Penguin Lessons (2024)

I just watched this charming film starring Steve Coogan and Jonathan Pryce. I don’t know what made me pick it from the seemingly infinite options that the streaming service Netflix provides, since I did not know anything about it. It was just on a whim, probably inspired by the fact that Coogan acts in interesting films, but I am glad I did so. Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher of English who takes up a position at an exclusive private school in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1970s. This school, whose headmaster is played by Pryce, is modeled after elite private prep schools in England and its students come from the wealthy ruling class. In the film, Michell is an itinerant teacher who is a loner and not politically active, seeking only to keep his head down and not get involved.

The film is based on a memoir by Michell and is built around the central true event, in which he rescues a penguin he found on a beach that was littered with dead penguins because they were covered in oil from a spill. But there was one that was still alive and Michell cleaned it up. But then the penguin (named Juan Salvador by Michell) refused all Michell’s efforts to guide it back into the wild, clearly seeing him as its life-long friend. So he smuggles the penguin back into his rooms at the school whose policies prohibit pets and tries to keep its presence secret while he tries to get the zoo to take it. His housekeeper and her granddaughter, who is her assistant, discover the presence of Juan Salvador and befriend the penguin and help him with its care.
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DOGE savings exposed as a fraud

Elon Musk boasted about how much money would be saved by DOGE’s actions but a new analysis finds that it achieved just a tiny fraction of the claimed savings.

Through July, DOGE said it has saved taxpayers $52.8 billion by canceling contracts, but of the $32.7 billion in actual claimed contract savings that POLITICO could verify, DOGE’s savings over that period were closer to $1.4 billion.

Despite the administration’s claims, not a single one of those 1.4 billion dollars will lower the federal deficit unless Congress steps in. Instead, the money has been returned to agencies mandated by law to spend it.
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POLITICO’s findings come on top of months of scrutiny of DOGE’s accounting, but the magnitude of DOGE’s inflated savings claims has not been clear until now.

Even so, President Donald Trump claimed hundreds of billions of dollars had already been used to reduce the federal deficit. The former head of DOGE, Elon Musk, initially promised the organization would reduce the deficit by $2 trillion. Many in Trump’s Cabinet have also celebrated DOGE’s efforts, including his secretaries of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture.

DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.

Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.

“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.”

Lies, smoke, and mirrors. That is what the Trump gang is all about. When the next numbers for the deficit come out without any significant change, expect Trump to fire those who put out the report and put in some stooges who will give him the numbers that he wants, like he is trying to do with the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But you can deny reality only for so long. It keeps requiring more and bigger lies to continue. What we are witnessing is a natural experiment to see how long a government built on lies and deception can function.

ICE thugs allowed to freely prey on people

Reports of abuses by the government’s thugs in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) keep growing. This is hardly surprising since there seems to be a quota, estimated at around 3,000 per day, that they are expected to reach. Combine that with lax recruiting standards that have likely resulted in white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and assorted fascists being employed, coupled with allowing them to be masked and given protection from any repercussions, is it any surprise that the worst impulses of people who are already prone to racist violence have been unleashed? They are now free to violently take into custody anyone whom they just think is an undocumented immigrant, whether they are or not or if they have any basis for that suspicion other than skin color.

The estimable news organization ProPublica has compiled a video dossier of ICE thugs in action, engaging in other violent actions in their drive to round up people. It is horrifying to see case after case of them breaking vehicle windows to grab people and assaulting them even when there are crying pregnant women inside.
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The desire of the wealthy to live forever

The August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating article by Tad Friend titled How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It on the huge amounts of money swirling around the efforts by some to lengthen their lives and even to reverse the aging process. This is a small community of billionaires who are willing to invest huge amounts of money on research into the aging process so that they might become immortal or at least increase their lifespans considerably. Naturally, this has spawned an industry of researchers who cater to this need because of the money available.

And these rich people, labeled biohackers, are willing to go to great lengths to increase their own lives. The article profiles one Peter Diamandis who can be considered an evangelist for this cause. His shtick is to get rich people to give huge amounts of money to create competitions that offer massive prizes under the umbrella category of XPRIZE for breakthroughs in longevity research and methods.

His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons—in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next.
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We all need car cameras to protect us from police brutality


Given that we now live in what is effectively a racist police state in which people of color can be targeted for arrest, beatings, and deportation by agents of the government, some masked, without even the semblance of due process, this recent experience of a young Black student serves as a telling symbol of how low we have sunk.

A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles.

William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can’t clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
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McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver’s seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states.

McNeil happened to have his phone camera running in his car which is why this video is available showing how the police lied. You can see the video in the above link.

Note also that the pretext for the stop was that “his headlights should have been on due to bad weather.” As pretexts go, this was about as flimsy as it gets since people routinely ignore that policy. I have seen people not turning on their lights while driving in a blinding snowstorm. Do you imagine that any person who is white would be stopped for such a reason?

It is thanks to the existence of this video that the police lies and brutality have been exposed.

Ordering delivery of small items

When surfing the web, one invariably comes across instances where there is a heated discussion over what one might consider a trivial issue. This then leads to thumb-sucking articles (such as this blog post) about What It All Means and What It Says About Our Society. One has to be a little wary of this tendency because it is always possible to find some extreme behavior on the internet and then treat it as if it were more common than it actually is and then draw Deep Conclusions.

I find such brouhahas faintly amusing and even a welcome distraction from the depressing major news that seems to now be part of our daily lives. One such case was the one I linked to recently about a DoorDash driver who was angry at the size of the tip given for delivery of one cup of coffee. Apart from the issue of the tip, I was bemused by someone actually ordering delivery of a single cup of coffee. Whether you like your coffee hot or ice-cold, surely by the time it reaches you, its temperature would have changed somewhat from its initial value to make it less pleasurable?
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