The cruelty is sickening

The US has very little in the form of safety nets for people who are struggling. One of the few things is the Supplemental Security Income program that “provides monthly payments to people with disabilities and older adults who have little or no income or resources.” Like most government social programs in the US, it does not cover the actual needs but at least it provides something.

Many of the people on SSI cannot live on their own because of mental or physical disabilities so it makes sense if they can find family members or other people with whom they can stay. This not only provides some emotional relief it actually relieves the burden on the state to fully cover the costs. But now ProPublica reports that the Trump administration is seeking to reduce the benefits paid to such people simply because they have families to help share the burden of care.
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John Oliver on AI chatbots

I have written before about my adventures with AI chatbots which were underwhelming, to put it mildly. Now John Oliver has come up with a detailed look at it, and all its problems. He points out that the companies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on software development and hardware and data centers but have no significant revenue as yet.

The business model for chatbots seems to be to get as many people hooked on using these chatbots as possible by providing people with an experience that they enjoy, mostly for free. Once people get hooked, we can expect the companies to steadily degrade the free experience in order to get users sign up with paid subscriptions for ‘better’ versions, often similar to the one they previously got for free or sometimes with enhanced features. It is the same tactic that has been used over and over again by the tech and internet companies, as Cory Doctorow documents in his book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, to lure people in before turning the screws on them.
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Powell to stay on at Fed until 2028

Jerome Powell has announced that even after his term as chair of the Federal Reserve ends in May of this year, he will continue to serve on the body until his term as a member expires in January 2028 around the same time as Trump leaves office. While the terms of office on the board and being the chair are not the same, usually the chair leaves the board as well when they stop being the chair.

Powell was very clear that his decision to stay on was prompted by Trump’s attacks on the board.

Jerome Powell said Wednesday he plans to remain on the board of the Federal Reserve after his term as chair ends next month “for a period of time, to be determined,” saying the “unprecedented” legal attacks by the Trump administration have put the independence of the nation’s central bank at risk.

“I worry these attacks are battering this institution and putting at risk the things that really matter to the public,” Powell said in remarks at a press conference after the Fed announced its decision to keep its benchmark interest rate unchanged.

Powell’s decision to stay — the first time a Fed chair will remain on the board as a governor since 1948 — denies President Donald Trump a chance to fill a seat on the central bank’s seven-member governing board with his own appointee. The Senate Banking Committee earlier approved Powell’s successor as chair, Trump appointee Kevin Warsh, on a party-line vote. Powell will continue as a Fed governor, possibly until January 2028. Warsh, if confirmed, will take a seat currently held by Stephen Miran, a previous Trump appointee, whose term ended in January.

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Kash Patel is an immature idiot

The director the FBI seems like someone who never successfully made the transition from frat boy to adult. One example is his antics in the locker room of the US hockey team during the Olympics where he whooped it up it up in a manner that would have embarrassed even John Belushi’s over-the-top character Bluto in Animal House.

So it was hardly a surprise to me when The Atlantic magazine for published an article by Sarah Fitzpatrick about his heavy drinking that seriously impaired his job performance. He was already in trouble with his bungling and impulsive prior behavior that had prompted speculation earlier this month that he would be fired around the same time as Pam Bondi was, because Trump was annoyed with all the distractions surrounding him.

The charges made against Patel are pretty serious. His paranoid behavior and rashness was visible when he panicked when he could not log on to his computer and frantically told many people that he had been fired, when all the time it was just technical issue of the kind that happens to all of us. As Fitzpatrick writes:

The IT-lockout episode is emblematic of Patel’s tumultuous tenure as director of the FBI: He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct.

They said that the problems with his conduct go well beyond what has been previously known, and include both conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences. His behavior has often alarmed officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice, even as he won support from the White House for his eager participation in Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement against the president’s perceived political enemies.

Several officials told me that Patel’s drinking has been a recurring source of concern across the government. They said that he is known to drink to the point of obvious intoxication, in many cases at the private club Ned’s in Washington, D.C., while in the presence of White House and other administration staff. He is also known to drink to excess at the Poodle Room, in Las Vegas, where he frequently spends parts of his weekends. Early in his tenure, meetings and briefings had to be rescheduled for later in the day as a result of his alcohol-fueled nights, six current and former officials and others familiar with Patel’s schedule told me.
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The lessons of Vietnam seem to be never learned

It is becoming very clear that Trump has no idea of how to get himself out of the mess he got himself into with starting the war with Iran. He seems to be increasingly disengaged with fewer unhinged posts about the war on his social media site. This may be because after oscillating back and forth between threats and calls for negotiations, between bombing and ceasefires, between demands that the Strait of Hormuz be opened to blockading it himself, between sending incompetent negotiators to talk with Iranian negotiators and then calling them back at the last minute, he seems to have run out of ways of reversing himself without seeming to look even more ridiculous. His latest announcement that he has extended the ceasefire indefinitely looks like he wants to get the war out of the headlines, like the way he stopped talking about Greenland when it became clear that his threat to take it over was going nowhere and he looked like a fool.

The Vietnam war has been analyzed extensively and many lessons drawn from it, the main one being that getting involved in a war in a distant country, especially a ground war, leads almost inevitably to a quagmire from which one cannot extricate oneself easily. But what is notable is how successive administrations tend to think that the next time will be different, with the Trump administration falling into the same trap. Each time they start out hoping for a quick victory, and quickly discover that that is not going to happen and end up in a stalemate, desperately looking for a way to extricate themselves without looking humiliated. Each time they launched massive bombing campaigns (Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam and Operation Epic Fury in Iran) thinking that it will destroy morale and lead people to overthrow their leaders or cause them to surrender, only to find that bombing only arouses local anger and nationalist sentiment and causes people to rally round their government however much they may have disliked it before.
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The gambling markets and addiction

As usual, on his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver nicely explains how these rapidly growing online betting markets like Kalshi and Polymarket (that I have previously discussed here) work and why they are such a menace.

Warnings are being issued that gambling in the US is getting out of control because of the ease with which the new apps can be used to make bets on pretty much anything at any time.

Gambling addiction is spiraling “out of control” in the US, a leading campaigner for stricter guardrails has warned, as experts from around the world are set to gather in Boston to push for more regulation of the industry.

The rapid expansion of online gambling, prediction markets and sports betting platforms, “demands a public health response”, according to Harry Levant, director of gambling policy at the Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI), urging policymakers to intervene.

“You regulate the distribution, the speed, the type, the access to the product, because the product is what’s dangerous,” he said, calling for gambling to be treated like alcohol or tobacco. “The problem is the product, not the people,” said Levant. “We have a crisis here.”
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Sports betting has been legalized in 39 states and Washington DC since the landmark 2018 supreme court ruling.
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On both the federal level and in numerous states, legislation has been introduced to regulate online gambling. One of the bills that will be talked about on Friday is the Safe Bet Act, introduced in Congress by Tonko and Blumenthal, which seeks to establish “minimum federal standards” for legal sports betting and seeks to impose limits on marketing, introduce affordability checks and restrictions on apps using artificial intelligence to track players and create bets.

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I hope this kills the WHCA dinner for good

As everyone will know, there was a shooting at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner. This is a loathsome affair where reporters schmooze with the very people they are supposed to be aggressively covering. Self-respecting reporters boycott the event, seeing it as compromising their ability to objectively cover politicians. But most reporters are not like that. They love to have the opportunity to hang out with politicians and celebrities.

Fortunately no one was hurt but I hope that it kills this event for good.

I was not at all surprised to hear about this since shootings are so common in the US. What surprises me is that the media are expressing such shock. Trump especially uses violent rhetoric all the time and gloats when people he dislikes dies. He dismisses the deaths of thousands of innocent people in his and Israel’s wars with Iran and Lebanon and Gaze. People are going to think that this is how one solves problems.

Keeping up with the Joneses

I thought that the phrase ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, signifying the attempt by some people to try and match the signifiers of wealth of their friends or neighbors, originated in some fictional account back in the distant past. But it turns out that it is based on real people

The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” first appeared in 1850 in The New Yorker, describing how the neighbors of Elizabeth Schermerhorn Jones, a wealthy New York socialite, were so intimidated by her summer home in the Hudson Valley that many were prompted to renovate their own properties to, as the magazine put it, keep up with the Joneses. 

Since then, the idiom has found a home in the competitive arena of middle-class America. For years, “keeping up with the Joneses” has conjured up images of a typically white, straight American family — husband, wife, two kids, a dog — standing on their front lawn, waving to their neighbors, the husband smiling as he clocks the neighbor’s new car and the wife wondering if the neighbors’ kids are dressed better than their own. It’s a nod to the pressure that comes when your home, family and a few key material possessions are treated as vital parts of your public presentation.

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Who knew I that am surrounded by witches?

Trump has fired the secretary of the navy John Phelan. Phelan’s only qualification for the job seemed to be that he was a rich crony of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein but his replacement Hung Cao, who previously lost two races for Congress in Virginia, while having military experience, is also seriously weird.

Cao’s record, however, is not without controversy. During his 2024 candidacy, for example, USA Today reported that the Republican, a decorated Navy veteran, “made repeated references to becoming disabled after he was ‘blown up’ in combat,” although his military record did not support those claims.
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Complicating matters, shortly after launching his Senate campaign, Cao also expressed concerns about, of all things, witchcraft.

During one 2023 interview, Cao said witches had “taken over” a California city, and he wanted to prevent similar problems in the commonwealth.

“We can’t let it turn like this,” he said during an interview with a Christian pastor. “There’s a place in Monterey, California, called Lovers Point. The original name was Lovers of Christ Point, but now it’s become — they took out the ‘Christ,’ it’s Lovers Point, and it’s really — Monterey is a very dark place now, a lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.”

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Suppressing good news that goes against your agenda

You would think that a CDC report that showed reduced hospitalization and emergency room visits among healthy adults last winter would be good news, right? Not if it is for reasons that go against Trump-Kennedy vaccine dogma.

A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots.
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The report is gaining attention at a delicate political moment: The Trump administration has sought to soften its public posture on controversial vaccine actions ahead of the midterm elections. GOP pollsters have warned of the political risks of vaccine skepticism, and many voters oppose Kennedy’s efforts to roll back vaccine policies. Publishing findings showing the vaccine’s effectiveness would be at odds with the administration’s moves to restrict its use, particularly for children, former CDC officials say.

The report had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, which includes dozens of scientists, according to two of the three people who spoke to The Post. Stopping an MMWR report at that stage is highly unusual, former CDC officials say.

So there we are. Kennedy and his appointees are so anti-vaccine that they do not want success stories to be issued, presumably because that would highlight the benefits of vaccines and might result in more people desiring them. The fact that fewer people will succumb to the serious effects of covid-19 does not seem to matter to them.

It is these people who are sick.