The instinct to avoid giving offense

Women face dangers in all manner of situations that men rarely do. The news has been full of stories of men sexually assaulting and raping women whom they managed to get alone, some of the most recent and disgusting ones emerging from the trial in the UK of Russell Brand. He is accused of being a “ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator”, almost maniacal in the way he tried to assault women even in spaces where there was little privacy.

Soon after the accusations surfaced, he claimed to have found Jesus and appeared just three weeks ago at a RFK Jr’s MAHA event with Mehmet Oz, where Tony Lyons, the head of the MAHA PAC, strongly supported him.

Brand was charged more than a year ago, based on allegations from four women, but MAHA groups and the movement’s founder, Kennedy, have stood by him. Brand spoke on Lyons’ regular conference call for movement activists on Wednesday, the third day of his trial.

“He’s been falsely accused, he’s been vilified, persecuted, deplatformed, demonetized, censored, prosecuted,” Lyons said in introducing Brand.

Brand has denied the charges, three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault, saying any sex he had was consensual.

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Jon Stewart interviews Abdul El-Sayed

On his weekly podcast, he spoke with the Democratic candidate for the senate seat in Michigan. The interview lasts about 90 minutes and is engrossing.

El-Sayed comes across as charismatic, likeable, whip smart, principled, disciplined, and focused on the key issues. I can see why Trump, Republicans, oligarchs, Big Pharma, the hospital and Israeli lobbies, the tech billionaires, and other powerful interests are freaked out by the possibility of him winning and are throwing huge amounts of money into the race to try and defeat him.

Mo Amer talks about the unhinged Islamophobia on display and the extreme labels that the right are trying to pin on him.

The possible October surprise attack on Iran that Trump may be envisaging

We are now less than two weeks away from the mid-term elections to be held on November 3. There have been many predictions of a ‘blue wave’ of Democratic wins due to Trump’s record low poll numbers, high cost of gas prices, persistent inflation, and the stalemate in the US-Israel initiated war with Iran. I have become very wary of such predictions. I have been through many election cycles where the polls predicted Democratic wins only to find that the final results were underwhelming. I am particularly skeptical about potential wins in states like Texas and Florida, that have often proved to be mirages.

We are also now well into ‘October Surprise’ territory, where it is speculated that Trump and Republicans will spring some major new action in an effort to distract voters in general and galvanize their own supporters to go to the polls in large numbers. We never know what form these surprises take until after they happen but this article in The Atlantic says that planning is underway to renew attacks on Iran.
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Trump has high standards for his press secretaries

I was surprised to learn that the Deputy Press Secretary in the White House for the past two years has been Anna Kelly, who seems to meet pretty much all the requirements for a Trump spokesperson, being young (29 years old), female, a smooth liar, a Trump fangirl, and former beauty contestant. She was deputy to Karoline Leavitt for two years and could have taken over that role when Leavitt left and avoided the Zacharia debacle. The one thing that may have sunk her candidacy is that she has red hair and is not a blonde and Trump must not have been able to overlook that fatal flaw.

Meanwhile Jordan Klepper is miffed that his carefully researched piece on Katie Zacharia was not ready to air before her flameout.

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.” 
…

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”.
…

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.