Vacation

 Tons of relevant prior posts.

Rest in Peace, Ranger

   

We have had Ranger for 7 1/2 yrs. A stray rescue who my son found late on the night of January 15th. 2018 in California. Cheryl and I had to have him put down this morning. He'd become terribly, irreversibly ill, immobilized, no longer eating, incontinent, stone-deaf for more than a year. I am just crushed. The big dogs just don't live long enough. 

 

My scrappy little terrier-mix elder dog Carlos (going on 16) is wandering around the house perplexed.

Donald Trump, Two weeks' Notice on Iran.

OK, shall we rewind the news clips back 4 years?

 

 

 

 

JUST ANNOUNCED, NATIONWIDE THEATRICAL RELEASE IN TWO WEEKS!

 

I  coulda done better with that one. Whatever; a 5 minute Photoshop quickie.

Confidence Man

 

 

I'll likely take shit over this from the huge cohort of Haberman Haters, but, I'm finding this book quite worthy. Particularly given that Trump is now in a position to cause a monumental military mess in Iran.

 

AND, ANOTHER BOOK

 

 

Heard an NPR interview...

Ambassador Mike Huckabee to Donald Trump:

"It is my honor to serve you!"

Mr President, God spared you in Butler, PA to be the most consequential President in a century-maybe ever.

The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. You have many voices speaking to you Sir, but there is only ONE voice that matters. HIS voice. I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No President in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945. I don't reach out to persuade you. Only to encourage you. I believe you will hear from heaven and that voice is far more important than mine or ANYONE else's. You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears and voice and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. My job is to be the last one to leave.

I will not abandon this post. Our flag will NOT come down! You did not seek this moment. This moment sought YOU! It is my honor to serve you!

Mike Huckabee

The foregoing is the full text of a Truth Social post of Mike's (which Trump re-posted). Note he did not say "an honor to serve the American people."

 

THINGS ARE MOVING QUICKLY

 

Congress didn't get The Article I
Declaration of War Memo, one presumes.

 

UPDATE

Trump’s Gilded Gut Instinct

Wall Street analysts recently began joking that the best way to predict the behavior of President Trump — and make money in the process — was by practicing the “TACO trade,” which stands for “Trump always chickens out.” You can always bet on Trump rolling back a reckless tariff.

This mocking of Trump’s inconsistency, which drives him nuts — “Don’t ever say what you said,” he told a reporter who asked him about it — not only is accurate but also deserves to be more widely applied.

One day he is pushing Ukraine away; the next day he is shaking Ukraine down for its minerals; the next day Ukraine is back in the fold. One day Vladimir Putin is Trump’s friend; the next day he’s “crazy.” One day Canada will be the 51st state; the next day it is the target of tariffs. One day he brags that he hires only “the best” people; the next day more than 100 experts at the National Security Council are pushed out just weeks after many were hired. One day the president hosts a gala at his Virginia golf club for the biggest buyers of his memecoin, who spent a combined $148 million for the chance to hear him give a talk standing behind the presidential seal, and the White House spokeswoman suggests it’s not corruption because the president was “attending it in his personal time.”

Trump is governing by unchecked gut impulses, with little or no homework or coordination among agencies. He respects no real lines of authority, has his golfing buddy (Steve Witkoff) act as secretary of state and his secretary of state (Marco Rubio) act as his ambassador to Panama. He compels anyone who wants to stop him to take him to court, while blurring all lines between his legal duties and personal enrichment.

What is this telling us? We are not being governed anymore by a traditional American administration. We are being governed by the Trump Organization Inc…
 [ Thomas Friedman ]

ARTICLE EXCERPT FROM FOREIGN AFFAIRS

...To avoid a total surrender, Khamenei could also keep the fight going. That might include going for a nuclear breakout. Assuming Iran still possesses its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and retains the know-how, the regime could still try to test a nuclear device, hoping that becoming a nuclear state will restore a measure of its lost deterrence. Tehran could also continue to wage war, aiming to either exhaust Israel’s will to fight or increase support for the regime among the Iranian people. The regime may even hope that Israel expands its strikes, or aim to draw in the United States, believing that if more Iranian civilians are killed, Iranian society will become more sympathetic toward the country’s only defenders: the regime. That “rally around the flag” effect is, at this point, the regime’s last remaining hope to get Iranians on its side.

But increased aggression is a very dicey bet and could leave the regime isolated and broke. The longer the war continues, the greater the destruction the country will face, which would reduce the regime’s capacity to simply operate. If there is no rally around the flag effect, or if it eventually passes, the Islamic Republic’s citizens could ultimately turn on the regime. And if the government secures a nuclear weapon in order to safeguard its hold on power, Iran could end up looking quite a lot like North Korea—a scenario no Iranian would want.

Whatever happens, the Iranian regime has doubtless lost its decades-long conflict with Israel. It will either have to give up its foundational political ideology and seek integration with the rest of the region through diplomatic and economic engagement, or it will need to double down on its beliefs, drawing further into itself. Ali Khamenei and the IRGC have lost; the regional status quo they established is finished.


 More to come...

On the 10th anniversary of the Golden Escalator

In the wake of Donald Trump's June 14th, 2025 DC military parade. 

 

America is not the country of perfectly synced swinging arms. It’s the country of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” That song, by the legendary Duke Ellington, belongs to a genre of music that could only have been invented in America — jazz. As the documentarian Ken Burns explained, jazz was born in New Orleans when and because people from so many heritages were jammed together — the sounds of Africa and the sounds of Appalachia and the sounds of Germany and the sounds of indigenous people colliding to make something new. It was never scripted, always improvisational. Ellington himself made the connection to democracy:

"Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom…In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country."

I may be wrong, but I would wager that societies that have first-rate matchy-matchy uniform aesthetics may look good but fight wars mediocrely, and societies that allow for variety and diversity may give less pleasant aerial shots during parades but fight wars better.

Today is ten years to the day since Trump came down the escalator and changed the course of the country and, in so many ways, changed us. It is a moment to think back and think of how much coarser, uglier, crueler the nation has become in the hands of an unwell man. The daily drumbeat of abductions and cuts and eviscerations and illegal actions and sadistic policy ideas slowly corrodes the heart. We are being remade in Trump’s sickness.

And yet. And yet what the parade reminded me is that Trump, in one regard, at least, faces steep odds. His project depends on turning Americans into something we are deeply not: uniform, cohesive, disciplined, in lockstep.

But we are more hotsteppers than locksteppers. We are more improvised solo than phalanx. We are more unruly than rule-following. Trump has a lot working in his favor as he seeks to build a dictatorship for his self-enrichment. But what will always push against him is this deep inner nature that has stood through time: the chaotic, colorful spontaneity of the American soul. We don’t march shoulder to shoulder. We shimmy.

 

—Anand Giridharadas

Perfectly put. That comes from his Substack. While I'm not a big Substack platform fan, I do have a number of subscriptions. Anand's is among the best I've encountered.

 

UPDATE

    

Donald is apparently going into the mobile phone business.

TRUMP and the associated design are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of DTTM Operations LLC. Trump Mobile, its products and services are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals. T1 Mobile LLC uses the "Trump" name and trademark pursuant to the terms of a limited license agreement which may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.. T1 Mobile LLC uses the "Trump" name pursuant to the terms of a limited license agreement which may be terminated or revoked according to its terms. © DTTM Operations LLC

 

Okeee Dokeee, then. Dig around briefly:

The entity which manages US President Donald Trump’s trademarks filed two new applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office recently to use his name for telecom services.

Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney and founder of Gerben IP law firm, wrote in a blog post last week DTTM Operations LLC filed to use the trademarks TRUMP and T1.

The requests cover retail stores “featuring mobile phones, cases for mobile phones and battery chargers for mobile phones”.

Gerben explained the applications are filed under an intent to use basis, which means Trump’s company currently is not offering any of the products but intends to do so.

“While a trademark filing doesn’t guarantee a product launch, the specificity of the applications points to serious consideration,” Gerben stated. “It would mark a significant expansion for Trump’s private business, which has historically focused on real estate, hospitality, and branded merchandise.”

He noted if the plans materialise, Trump’s telecom venture “could deliver a MAGA-branded alternative in the mobile space—offering loyal supporters not just red hats, but possibly red phones for their pockets”.

The Trump telecom service or branded phones will compete against US heavyweights Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile US, along with a wide range of MVNO-based services and budget brands.

Gerben noted as of 13 June, a total of 27 trademark filings have been made by companies affiliated with Trump since he took office in January. 

27 trademark filings across the past 147 days since his 2nd inauguration? All while Presidentin' and golfing.

 

TRUMP IN CANADA FOR THE G7 CONFERENCE

 

 

Trump could simply not resist making a fool of himself, going off to gargle inappropriately via his formulaic meandering MAGA grievance rant. Canada’s PM, chairing the conference, had to step in and shut down the Presser.

 

WORLD NEWS SUMMARY

 

 ERRATUM

Don't even get me started on this murderous Minnesota nutcase.

On Father's Day 2025

This Girl Dad's message for Stephen Miller.

    

Click here

Been a surreal weekend, 'eh?

“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!”

“I’ve known this guy a long time.”

 “He’s not the sharpest bulb.”

—Donald Trump, characterizing Joe Biden, June 10th, 2025

 

ICE in LA

Good luck getting any actual, true news reporting this week.

 

UPDATE

Will things continue to escalate, perhaps culminating in a Trump declaration of "Insurrection Act" martial law in DC on June 14th during his controversial, sure-to-be-angrily-protested self-glorifying military "celebration" parade?

  

Trump says anyone who protests at Saturday's military parade 'will be met with very heavy force'

Donald Trump warned people against protesting at this weekend’s military parade in Washington to celebrate the US Army’s 250th anniversary.

“For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I haven’t even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”

Law enforcement agencies are preparing for hundreds of thousands of people to attend Saturday’s parade, Secret Service special agent in charge Matt McCool (his real name) said yesterday, according to Reuters.

McCool said thousands of agents, officers and specialists will be deployed from law enforcement agencies from across the country.


The FBI and the Metropolitan police department have said there are no credible threats to the event. [per The Guardian]

 

Musk Rat, Musk Rat...

 

Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2.1 One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later. 

Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry. 

Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” 

“Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.” 

Musk’s mind was elsewhere. 

“I have bigger visions,” he said. Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation. 

“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.” 

What? 

Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?” 

“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.” 

That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.

Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-265). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 

 

A total shitshow

 

A new book jumping the queue

"The Haves and the Have Yachts."

    

The makings of history can be hard to discern in the moment, but, occasionally, a scene arrives that is instantly indelible. On January 20, 2025, the world watched American politics embrace plutocracy without shame or pretense. Donald Trump took his oath of office on a stage filled with billionaires. Off his left shoulder stood the world’s three richest people: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. A few feet to the right were Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google, who, in the past, had said Trump’s rise to power was “deeply offensive,” and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, who had evidently got over his outrage at the “shameful” riot at the Capitol. There were so many billionaires onstage that the leaders of Congress were relegated to the audience. 

The moguls on hand to celebrate Trump’s return to the White House had little in common with the old-fashioned corporate conservative elite. They were political players born of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2010 to remove limits on political contributions. As a result, candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultrarich supporters, who gave far more and received far more in return. When oil-and-gas executives had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he told them he would remove restrictions on drilling, for which they should raise $1 billion for his campaign. Musk devoted at least $288 million of his fortune to getting Trump and other Republicans elected, and, after Election Day, it proved to be a colossally fruitful investment. In a single week, stock traders, betting that Musk’s businesses would prosper from the new era, boosted the value of his shares by an astounding $54 billion. 

Trump named thirteen billionaires to the top ranks of his administration. Musk devised the Department of Government Efficiency, a new entity ostensibly charged with finding savings. Within weeks, Musk and a small band of acolytes, some barely out of college, had tipped the federal government into chaos by seizing the powers to fire people, access classified files, and all but close branches of the government. Opponents sued, but Musk was backed by a fortune so large that he could exhaust almost anyone in the courts. 

There had, in retrospect, been many signs that this is where we were headed. Days before Trump’s inauguration, Joe Biden, in his final speech as president, said belatedly: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” In fact, that oligarchy had been taking shape for decades. The tableau at the inauguration was the culmination of ideas and ambitions that run through the pages of this book. 

The effects of great fortunes exist in a conditional state of visibility: they are meant to be unmistakable to a slender stratum of society, but otherwise obscured by jargon and secrecy. Only occasionally, when something collapses—a myth, a confidence, a scrim of propriety—does the true power of the world’s biggest fortunes become visible…

Osnos, Evan. The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich (pp. XIII-XIV). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Just in ... 

 

OK, WE'RE GONNA HAVE TO SPEND SOME TIME ON THIS DUDE

 

Whatever gift Yarvin has for attracting attention, his work does not survive scrutiny. It is full of spurious syllogisms and arguments retconned to match his jaundiced intuitions. He has read widely, but he uses his knowledge merely as grist for the same reactionary fairy tale: once upon a time, people knew their place and lived in harmony; then along came the Enlightenment, with its “noble lie” of egalitarianism, plunging the world into disorder. Yarvin often criticizes academics for treating history like a Marvel movie, with oversimplified heroes and villains, but it’s unclear what he adds to the picture by calling Napoleon a “startup guy.” (He has favored the revisionist theories that Shakespeare’s plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and that the American Civil War, which he calls the War of Secession, worsened living conditions for Black Americans.) “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he has proclaimed, which would come as news to historians.

Some of his most thoroughgoing critics are on the right. Rufo, the conservative activist, has written that Yarvin is a “sophist” whose debating style consists of “childish insults, bouts of paranoia, heavy italics, pointless digressions, competitive bibliography, and allusions to cartoons.” He added, “When one tries to locate what it is that you actually think, he cannot help but discover that there really isn’t much substance there.” The most generous engagement with Yarvin’s ideas has come from bloggers associated with the rationalist movement, which prides itself on weighing evidence for even seemingly far-fetched claims. Their formidable patience, however, has also worn thin. “He never addressed me as an equal, only as a brainwashed person,” Scott Aaronson, an eminent computer scientist, said of their conversations. “He seemed to think that if he just gave me one more reading assignment about happy slaves singing or one more monologue about F.D.R., I’d finally see the light.”

Ava Kofman, The New Yorker. (72 minute long-read)

 

Lordy...

 

MORE READING

 

      

Compulsive,,,

AI is nothing without Robots

AI 2027 follow-up

AI 2027

 

PDF link

 

Follow-up on the heels of Karen Hao's new book Empire of AI.

 

Yeah, but then there's this current crap:

 

THE WARLORDS WHO SACKED ROME did not intend to doom western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical…

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic.

…The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.

Frank Bruni

...To live in fiction, commit to it. That’s the moral not merely of Trump and Jan. 6 but of Trump, period. Yesteryear’s hand-wringing about whether to label his individual falsehoods “lies” and those periodic tallies of his misstatements now seem quaint; they don’t do justice to the scope and audacity of what he’s up to. Nor does the occasional current chatter about “propaganda.” Trump is engaged in a multifront, multipronged attack on any and every version of events that impedes his goals and impugns his glory. It makes the spin control of presidents past look like child’s play.

Politicians routinely don masks, twist facts and peddle fables — President Joe Biden’s pretense of undiminished vigor and acuity is a recent and egregious example of that. But Trump’s machinations and manipulations go beyond discrete feints and specific ruses. They’re in an unscrupulous league of their own...

 

...If history is written by the victors, the present is fabricated by those who throw themselves most ruthlessly and shamelessly into the storytelling. Trump and his principal abettors are just about peerless in that regard. Rather than own up to the administration’s error in consigning Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump falsely and stubbornly insists that Abrego Garcia has the name of the gang MS-13 tattooed on his hand. He showcases accusations of domestic violence in Abrego Garcia’s past. He and his aides rework the details so that Trump is without blame or blemish.

Just as they’ve done with Jan. 6. That day is a searing indictment of Trump — so he inverts it. Babbitt is reborn as an innocent. The hellions around her are a heavenly choir. That song they’re now singing? It’s an elegy for honesty.

QUICK TANGENTIAL DIVERSION

This elite higher ed dustup is insane.

 

NEW

 

Click

 A review of Adam Becker's new book on AI

Technologists currently wield a level of political influence that was recently considered unthinkable. While Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashes public services, Jeff Bezos takes celebrities to space on Blue Origin and the CEOs of AI companies speak openly of radically transforming society. As a result, there has never been a better moment to understand the ideas that animate these leaders’ particular vision of the future.

In his new book, More Everything Forever, the science journalist Adam Becker offers a deep dive into the worldview of techno-utopians such as Musk—one that’s underpinned by promises of AI dominance, space colonization, boundless economic growth, and eventually, immortality. Becker’s premise is bracing: Tech oligarchs’ wildest visions of tomorrow amount to a modern secular theology that is both mesmerizing and, in his view, deeply misguided. The author’s central concern is that these grand ambitions are not benign eccentricities, but ideologies with real-world consequences…

I totally love the dated USB cable in the art.

 

Nice review in the aggregate. Perhaps episodically out over his skis just a smidge. Nonetheless, quite worthy.

 

Check this out:

Astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker has his eye on the dreams of Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite—and he’s unimpressed. He says Silicon Valley’s “heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions”—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

He argues that tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us, and that the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.

In More Everything Forever, Becker investigates what he calls wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but Becker says the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.

Adam Becker says that powerful and sinister ideas are alive in Silicon Valley. Now he comes to the heart of the global tech world to challenge us to see how these visions of the future are foolish and dangerous.

'eh?

 

More shortly...

The Oaf of Office,

Memorial Day 2025