The Zachbot’s spectacular flameout

Just before the FtB site went down, I had prepared a post about the spectacular flameout of Trump’s latest press secretary Katie Zacharia, whose tenure broke the record set by Anthony Scaramucci (11 days) and British prime minister Liz Truss (47 days), so I decided to post it anyway.

She lasted just a week, her appointment announced on Friday, October 9, took office on the following Monday, had a disastrous first press conference on Tuesday, and got fired on Friday the 16th.

Her ouster came despite a full-throated, reality-free defense of her inaugural press briefing by the White House website.

Today, Katie Zacharia delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing as the 37th White House Press Secretary. The briefing, which generated wall-to-wall coverage, served as a strong introduction to her tenure and highlighted the Trump Administration’s record of delivering historic successes for the American people.

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Introducing the Zachbot

Trump has a new press secretary Katie Zacharia who has the required qualifications for being hired by Trump: a blond woman who used to be a Fox News commentator, is willing to grovel with fawning praise of him, brazenly tell lies on his behalf, and looks unnervingly like a Barbie doll. But her debut was so stilted and robotic and excruciatingly bad that one reporter has christened her as the ‘Zachbot’, a name that might well stick.

Well, that was weird. Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, made her debut on the podium on Tuesday with all the warmth, wisdom and political dexterity of an AI avatar.

Zacharia was all stilted delivery, nervous tics and lack of eye contact. With an eerie lack of emotion, she served up pro-Trump talking points, took only three questions and vanished after 14 minutes. It was like the West Wing had turned into uncanny valley.

The Zachbot’s past is indeed a bit of a mystery. The 41-year-old claims to be a lawyer but later a reporter asked when she passed the bar exam and she gave the unconvincing answer: “When I moved to China.” 
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Zacharia has the blond hair, glossy makeup and Fox News aesthetic of her immediate predecessors Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt (her name also begins with a “K” – surely a tell to the AI detectors). 
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The Zachbot read from prepared notes about Trump’s many great accomplishments, awkwardly glancing up at her audience less than she should, smiling at odd moments and putting the emphasis on all the wrong words. “A great relationship …” (looks down, sighs, sounds like her cat just died) “with Venezuela”.

It was bad. Toe-curlingly, don’t-know-where-to-look bad. At least Leavitt had delivered her propaganda hot. Evidently Trump’s communications team have found new and ingenious ways to torture reporters.

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Kimberley Guilfoyle out

The US ambassador to Greece has been forced to resign supposedly because of her brazen corruption, asking wealthy people to give her money in return for political favors.

The controversy emerged in late September, when the Wall Street Journal began publishing a series of reports about Guilfoyle’s questionable activities—including promoting a Greek construction firm, bragging about luxury trips paid for by businessmen, and asking a Trump donor to pay a $100,000 credit card bill in exchange for getting the attention of the Trump Administration.

The State Department’s inspector general is looking into the allegations, the AP and the Journal reported.
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As the reports emerged, Trump did not defend Guilfoyle, who was in a relationship with his eldest son between 2018 and 2024. “I just heard about it—too bad,” the President told reporters on Friday. “I mean, I don’t know. She’s an ambassador. I just heard a little bit about it. I don’t know too much. She was always very nice.”
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The 57-year-old Guilfoyle was a former prosecutor in the San Francisco and Los Angeles District Attorney’s Offices and was appointed Assistant District Attorney in San Francisco in 2000. She gained fame as a co-host of the Fox News’ conservative political talk show The Five, which she joined in 2011 and left in 2018.

Besides Guilfoyle’s legal and media work, she also helped raise funds for Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020. Guilfoyle was also a witness to the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, and met with the House committee investigating the insurrection in 2022.

From 2001 to 2006, Guilfoyle was married to Gavin Newsom, then a San Francisco supervisor and later mayor and now California’s governor who’s widely seen as a Democratic presidential contender. 

The article goes on to detail the many abuses she committed, above and beyond the ones that have been widely publicized.

What surprises me is that the ability to engage in this kind of abuse, in using their official positions to personally enrich themselves, seems to be almost a given with members of the Trump administration, starting with Trump himself and his family. Perhaps her problem was that didn’t give them a kickback and/or was too open about it.

In her farewell statement, Guilfoyle praised Trump, no doubt hoping for a pardon if and when she is charged with corruption.

A matter of interest (1): The major economic indicators

I am very fond of the quote “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” because it captures what I have long been convinced of , that the ideas in one’s mind, even those that one thinks are clear, are often inchoate and confused, containing illogicality and errors that are only manifested when one openly articulates the ideas, especially in written form. The quote is attributed to E. M. Forster and can found in his 1927 book of essays Aspects of the Novel. But he is not the original source for the line. He is in fact approvingly quoting a character in André Gide’s novel Les Faux Monnayeurs. (The fact that this quote is a translation from the French explains why the quote is sometimes rendered differently, such as “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”)

The reason for this preamble is that in most instances, my posts are not written from the point of view of an authoritative expert on the topic but rather consist of my efforts to try and understand something by putting it out there. And today’s topic is the first in a series on macro-economic indicators: what they are and what they mean. Since I am not only not an economist nor have I taken even a single course in economics at any level, this series of posts will consist of my attempts to put together a coherent picture based on my casual reading on the topic. The subject is dull. Economics is not known as the dismal science for nothing, but it is important, and I will try to stumble my way through it.

The main macro-economic indicators, at least in the US, are (1) the stock market, (2) the bond market, (3) the exchange rate for the US dollar in relation to gold and other currencies, and (4) size of the deficit, (5) the national debt, (6) the Gross Domestic Product, and (7) the trade balance. These things do not act independently of course. They are linked together in many ways but the link that I am going to focus on is interest rates, the cost of borrowing money.
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Trump is desperate for a ‘win’ before mid-terms

Nothing is going right for Trump in the three conflicts in which the US is directly or indirectly involved, in Iran, Yemen, and Ukraine. He is desperate for a foreign policy win that he can brag about before the elections, given that he and the Republicans are getting hammered on the economy.

In Iran, the US is in a stalemate (despite occasional flareups of the conflict), with the Iranians unwilling to accept terms that are acceptable to the US and the US not having the offensive or defensive military capabilities to force them to do so. Short of sending in ground troops, a fateful Rubicon if there ever was one, he seems to have no cards left to play. Of course, he could always use nuclear weapons and with him one can never rule out the unthinkable, because he and his advisors and Republicans in general have long since left the city of the sane.

In Yemen, there seemed to be a sort-of deal between Ansar Allah (aka Houthis) and the US that gave the former some control over the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in Red Sea and in return they were allowing some ships to pass through but that seems to risk breaking down with an exchange of missile attacks between Ansar All and Saudi Arabia, with Riyadh airport suffering serious damage.
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George Carlin on public executions

Pete Hegseth’s obscene decision to livestream the December 3 execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan has generated worldwide revulsion and condemnation.

The US is facing worldwide condemnation over a “barbaric” plan to execute a disabled man by firing squad and livestream it to the public, with critics comparing the Trump administration to dictatorships in Iran and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.

The United Nations’ office of the high commissioner for human rights warned on Friday that broadcasting the killing would amount to a public execution and “breach the absolute prohibition of torture”.
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Hegseth gleefully confirmed the livestream plan after previously saying that the execution would be public. Speaking to the conservative broadcaster Real America’s Voice, he said people should be able to watch because they need to understand that there were “serious consequences” for such crimes.

The last public execution in the US was the hanging of a man in 1936 in Kentucky. There are no laws prohibiting them so why did they stop? Because of cultural and political revulsion for what had become seen as merely spectacles of cruelty that had no redeeming value.

The late, great George Carlin had a comedy routine on the death penalty back in 1996 where, in typical Carlin style, he took it way over the top, while embedding it is a more general critique of how the top 1% are exploiting the rest of us. He seemed prescient about Hegseth. While I think such a public execution would arouse revulsion, Carlin was far more cynical about Americans’ appetite for this kind of thing. He said that the death penalty does not mean anything unless you use it on people who are scared to die. It is no use executing drug dealers, you need to execute the people who launder the drug money, namely the bankers. He predicted that public executions would be a ratings blockbuster, bigger than the Super Bowl with the more horrifyingly gruesome the method, the bigger the audience to watch it. If the government sold advertising spots and sponsorships, that would generate so much revenue that it could eliminate the budget deficit.

Sadly, he may be right. My only concern is that Hegseth might see this video and get ideas.

Former UN human rights chief and critic of Israeli genocide wins Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has always had a political dimension to it and in the past has been awarded to people who were utterly undeserving (Barack Obama) and to outright war criminals (Henry Kissinger). It is sometimes a reflection of the political zeitgeist and that seems to be the case this year when it awarded it to Navi Pillay.

Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief whose career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her efforts to promote international law as it comes under attack.

Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the U.N. commission she led on Gaza. The leaders also have been highly critical of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Pillay has worked at both.

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Why not bring back public hangings and the guillotine as well?

Having the death penalty is barbaric enough. Now the defense secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that the execution Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, be by firing squad and livestreamed to the public.

“It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said.

People like Hegseth have this sick belief that seeing someone gunned down in public will somehow deter potential killers. Hegseth thinks that he is being tough. But no person with any scruples or sensitivity will want to watch such a sickening thing. I suspect that the only people who will watch are fans of horror and the macabre and such people actually get a thrill from seeing it. It might actually increase their bloodlust rather than reduce it.

The US is in dubious company when it comes to countries that still have firing squads: Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The US sinks deeper and deeper into depravity.

I’m sick of election coverage

There comes a time in every election cycle when I get sick of the coverage and can’t wait for election day to come around because we reach the point where there is breathless reporting of polls, who’s up and who’s down, and endless speculation of which party will do well and what that means for the next two years.

I reached that stage of fed-upness yesterday, four weeks before election day on November 3.

I suspect that most people are also probably sick to death of the endless repetition of ads and have already voted or have decided whom and what to vote for so that all this blather has little tangible effect unless there is some spectacular new development or revelation, something that has been given the name of ‘October Surprise’ but which rarely happens.

So from now on, I will just pay casual attention to the election coverage, mostly for amusing trivia to take my mind off the seriousness of the situation.

The rise of BRICS and the decline of SWIFT

One of Trump’s legacies will be the rearranging of global trade and alliances. Because of its powerful military and economic clout, the US has long been the guiding force in global affairs, able to dominate world trade and commerce and forming stable trade relationships and alliances with other major capitalist nations such as Canada, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and other nations. Trump has undermined that with his unilateral actions.

There was a time when the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) threatened US hegemony by creating an alternative power bloc comprised of developing countries (of which China was then one) that was broadly socialist in outlook and sought to be independent of the then two superpower blocs of the US and the Soviet Union. The US always disliked it, seeing any kind of independence as anti-US, and while that movement still exists, the US-backed coups in Indonesia and Ghana that overthrew their leaders Sukarno and Kwame Nkrumah (two of the five founders of the NAM) considerably weakened it. The deaths of the other three founders (Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Josef Tito of Yugoslavia, and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt) further reduced its influence.

But a new bloc known as BRICS (named after the five countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has arisen to try and find new ways to counter US hegemony. It has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. As can be seen from its composition, unlike the NAM, it is all over the map politically, ranging from communist nations to right wing dictatorships to oil-rich oligarchies. What unites them is not politics but economics, the need to achieve some level of independence from US hegemony in trade and commerce.
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