Rest in Peace, Sir

"I know it when I see it."

Obscenity.

      

 

 

UPDATE

 

420, the bio/neuroscience of Weed

Don't Bogart the roach clip.
  

 

A personal note.

 

Also, I did my grad thesis (pdf) on illicit drug testing.

An Open Letter Opposing White House Retaliatory Investigations

"We write with grave concern about the two presidential memoranda dated April 9, 2025, targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, respectively — two former national security officials,who served the people of the United States. These executive actions represent a dangerous escalation in the abuse of presidential power: weaponizing federal agencies to carry out personalized retribution against named individuals.

Presidents of both parties have long respected the independence of federal law enforcement and refrained from using the power at their disposal to punish perceived enemies. Indeed, presidents have gone out of their way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or influence. President Trump’s statements are a profoundly unconstitutional break with this tradition. He is explicitly targeting two Americans because they exercised their First Amendment rights and criticized him. That is a miscarriage of justice which these individuals, and other people and institutions vindictively singled out by him, will be unfairly forced to endure. The president of the United States must not direct federal authorities to investigate people with whom he disagrees.

This is not democratic governance. It is baseless retaliation—and it has no place in the United States of America. Across our history, there have been dark chapters where state power has been weaponized and dissent suppressed, including the crackdown during and after World War I, the Red Scare of the 1950s, and President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” These episodes are now seen as shameful deviations from the fundamental American principles of free expression and impartial justice. The April 9 presidential memoranda are an appalling rejection of those bedrock democratic values.

Indeed, the President’s actions not only evoke some of the worst moments in our history; they go even further. For a president to personally and publicly direct the levers of the federal government against publicly named citizens for political reasons sets a new and perilous precedent in our republic. It brings to mind the abuses of power that characterize authoritarian nations, not the United States. No matter one’s party or politics, every American should reject the notion that the awesome power of the presidency can be used to pursue individual vendettas. Behavior of this kind is more to be expected from a royal despot than the elected leader of a constitutional republic. This is the path of autocracy, not democracy.

For these reasons, we urge that the President immediately rescind these memoranda and that agency heads repudiate any order that undermines their oaths, politicizes their missions, or betrays the constitutional principles they are sworn to uphold.

These actions, if carried out, will leave a permanent stain on our institutions and erode our democracy. History will not forget who stood silent. We will not stand silent."

List of Signatories:

Amb. Norman Eisen (ret.), Executive Chair, State Democracy Defenders Fund
Christine Todd Whitman, Governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 (R); Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush Administration from 2001 to 2003
Jeffrey Amestoy, Chief Justice (ret.) Vermont
Caroline Anderson
Alex Aronson
Les AuCoin, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Oregon from 1975 to 1993 (D)
Chiraag Bains, Former Deputy Assistant to the President, Domestic Policy Council
Brian Baird, Representative of the 3rd Congressional District of Washington from 1999 to 2011 (D)
Marge Baker
Daniel Barkhuff, MD
Lavora Barnes
Ian Bassin, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Protect Democracy
Joseph Bean
Paul E. Begala, Counselor to the President from 1997 to 1999
Mark Begich, U.S. Senator for the State of Alaska from 2009 to 2015 (D)
Michael L. Belitzky, Alliance for American Leadership
Nate Bell, Representative of the 20th Arkansas House District from 2013 to 2017 (I)
John B. Bellinger III, Former Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council
Matt Bennett, Co-Founder, Third Way
James Blanchard, Governor of Michigan from 1983 to 1991, Representative of the 18th Congressional District of Michigan from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Sidney Blumenthal
Reverend Glynden Bode
Roger Bolton, Formal Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administration Official
John Bonifaz, President, Free Speech For People
Kathy Boockvar, President, Athena Strategies; Former Pennsylvania Secretary of State
Noah Bookbinder, President, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Spencer P. Boyer, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy
Barbara Boxer, U.S. Senator for the State of California from 1993 to 2017 (D)
Shellie Bressler, Senior Professional Staff Member for Global Health, Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2007 to 2013; House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2015 to 2019
William Brodhead, Representative of the 17th Congressional District of Michigan from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Rosa Brooks, Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law, Georgetown University; Former Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense
Steve Bullock, Former Governor of Montana (D)
Steve Bunnell, Former General Counsel, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Lucy Caldwell, Political Strategist
Arne Carlson, Former Governor of Minnesota (R)
Davy Carter
Rod Chandler, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Washington from 1983 to  1993 (R)
Linda Chavez
Jeff Chester, Executive Director, Center for Digital Democracy
Ty Cobb, Special Counsel to the President in the Trump Administration from 2017 to 2018; Former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland from 1981 to 1986
Barbara Comstock, Representative of the 10th Congressional District of Virginia from 2015 to 2019 (R)
George Conway, Board President, Society for the Rule of Law
Sam Coppersmith, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Arizona from 1993 to 1995 (D)
Susan Corke, Executive Director, State Democracy Defenders Fund
Geoffrey Cowan
Eugene Craig III, Former Vice-Chair, Maryland Republican Party
Tom Daschle, Senator from South Dakota from 1987-2005 (D), Senate Majority and Minority Leader
Glyn Davies, U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
Mark de la Iglesia
Charles W. Dent, Representative of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 2005 to 2018 (R)
Laura Dickinson, Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law, The George Washington University
Murray Dickman, Primary Assistant to U.S. Attorney General from 1988 to 1991
Renee DiResta
Charles K. Djou, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Hawaii from 2010 to 2011 (R)
Donna F. Edwards, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of Maryland from 2008 to 2017 (D)
Mickey Edwards, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Oklahoma from 1977 to 1993 (R)
Marc Elias
Uriel Epshtein
Janice Feather
Praveen Fernandes, Vice President, Constitutional Accountability Center
Claire Finkelstein, Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Don Fox, Former General Counsel and Acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics
Emil H. Frankel, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002-2005
Hannah Fried, Executive Director, All Voting is Local
Brian Frosh, Former Attorney General of Maryland
Mark Gallagher
Hon. Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (ret.)
David Gee
Jennifer Gee, Elder, Presbyterian Church (USA)
Richard Gephardt, Former Democratic Leader, U.S. House of Representatives
Stuart Gerson
Hon. Nancy Gertner (ret.)
Lisa Gilbert, Co-President, Public Citizen
John Giruado, Attorney Advisor, Office of Legal Counsel, Associate Deputy Secretary in the Reagan Administration
Michelle Glogovac, Founder & CEO, The MLG Collective®, Podcast Publicist & Author
Jerry Goldfeder, Director of Fordham Law School Voting Rights & Democracy Project
Brianne J. Gorod, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center
Hon. Joshua Gotman, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense & Treasury
James Greenwood
Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO, Fair Fight Action
Ânne Gruner
Vanita Gupta, Former U.S. Department of Justice Official
Bill Hafker
Kathleen Hamill, Attorney
Kenneth Harbaugh, President, VALOR Media Network
Mark Harvey, Former Special Assistant to the President, National Security Council Staff
Jeff Hauser, Executive Director, Revolving Door Project
Michael Hayden, Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
Jeremy M. Helfgot, Principal, J.M. Helfgot Communications; Co-founder, West Coast Women Forward; Co founder, Blazing Desert Indivisible
Paul Hodes, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of New Hampshire from 2007 to 2011 (D)
Joe Hoeffel, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2005 (D)
Kate Helfrich
Jerry Huckaby, Representative of the 5th District of Louisiana from 1977 to 1993 (D)
Daniel Hunter, Choose Democracy
Joe Hunter, Former Congressional Chief of Staff
Bob Inglis, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of South Carolina from 1993 to 1999 and again from 2005 to 2011 (R)
Steve Israel, Representative of the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts of New York from 2001 to 2013 and 2013 to 2017 (D)
David Jolly, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Florida from 2014 to 2017 (R)
Virginia Kase Solomón, President & CEO, Common Cause
Gary Kasparov
Peter Keisler, Acting Attorney General in the George W. Bush Administration in 2007
James Kelly, Deputy Assistant Secretary, International Trade Administration, 1984-1988
Bob Kerrey, Governor of Nebraska from 1983 to 1987 and Senator from 1989 to 2001 (D)
John Kingston, Former U.S. Senate Candidate; Candidate and Coalitions Chair, Forward Party
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum
Peter H. Kostmayer, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1977 to 1981 and 1983 to 1993 (D)
William Kristol, Chief of Staff to the Vice President in the George H.W. Bush Administration from 1989 to 1993
James R. Kunder, Former Deputy Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Philip Lacovara, Counsel to the Special Prosecutor, Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office in the Nixon Administration from 1973 to 1974
Leonard Lance
David Lapan, Former Spokesman for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security
John LeBoutiller, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of New York from 1981 to 1983 (R)
James M. LeMunyon, Member, Virginia House of Delegates, 2010-2018
Marty Linsky, Former Assistant Republican Floor Leader, Massachusetts House of Representatives
Harry Litman, Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Mike Lofgren
Sheree Lopez
Linda Lorelle, Co-Founder, Civil Dialogues
Charles D. Luckey
Sally Lyall
Joanna Lydgate, CEO, States United
R.J. Lyman, Citizen of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Mairin Macaluso, Senior Advisor, Leadership Now Project
Tom Malinowski, Representative of the 7th Congressional District of New Jersey from 2019 to 2023 (D)
Debrianna Mansini, Activist
Marjorie Margolies, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1995 (D)
Rabbi Bonnie Margulis
Andrew G. McCabe, Former Deputy Director, FBIMary B. McCord, Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security
John McCormick
Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, CEO, RepresentUs
Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, United States Marine Corps (ret.)
John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington appointed by George W. Bush from 2001 to 2007
Brian P. McKeon, Former Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources
Hon. Donna McLean
Barbara McQuade, United States Attorney, Eastern District of Michigan, 2010-2017
John M. Mitnick, Former Associate Counsel to the President
Jeff Modisett, Former Indiana Attorney General; Former Assistant U.S. Attorney
Toby Moffett, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of Connecticut from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Larry Moore, Substack Creator, Democracy Forge
Mike Moore, Former Attorney General of Mississippi
Alberto Mora, Former General Counsel, Department of the Navy
Seth Moulton, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of Massachusetts from 2015 to present (D)
Virginia A. Mulberger, Former National Security Council Senior Director and Special Assistant to President George H. W. Bush
Tiffany Muller, President, End Citizens United
Lissa Muscatine, Presidential Speechwriter, Clinton Administration; Director of Speechwriting for the Secretary of State, Obama Administration
Elizabeth Neumann, Former DHS Assistant Secretary of Counterterrorism
Mario Nicolais, General Counsel, The Lincoln Project
Cheryl Niro, Past President, Illinois State Bar Association
Joseph Nye, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense
Sean O'Keefe, Professor, Syracuse University
Ted O'Meara, Former Chair, Maine Republican Party
Robert F. Orr, Former Justice, North Carolina Supreme Court (ret.)
Jan Peter Ozga
Richard Painter, Former Associate Counsel to the President and Chief White House Ethics Lawyer for President George W. Bush
Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015 (D)
Jed Pauker, Co-Founding Board Member, Venice Resistance
Tony Payne, Former Executive Director, Maine GOP
Valerie Plame
John D. Podesta, Former White House Chief of Staff and Former Senior Advisor to the President
Michael PodhorzerJen Porter
Trevor Potter, Chairman and Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission from 1991 to 1995; General Counsel to John McCain’s Presidential Campaign from 2000 to 2008
Edward A Powell, Former Assistant Secretary for Management and Deputy Secretary (Acting) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; CEO, USO World HQ; Defense Business Board
Kristopher Purcell, Former White House Aide in the George W. Bush Administration
Marc Racicot
Alan Charles Raul, Associate Counsel to the President in the Reagan Administration from 1986 to 1988
Reid Ribble, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Wisconsin from 2015 to 2017. (R)
Kathleen Rice, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of New York from 2015 to 2023 (D)
Stephen Richer, Maricopa County Recorder from 2021 to 2025 (R)
Hon. Denver Riggleman, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Virginia from 2019 to 2021 (R)
Robert Riley
Amb. John Ritch, Former U.S. Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency
Bill Ritter, Governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011 (D)
Miriam Rocah
Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
Theodore Roosevelt IV
Paul Rosenzweig, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush Administration from 2005 to 2009
Steve Russell, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Oklahoma from 2015 to 2019 (R)
Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011; Representative of the 1st Congressional District of South Carolina from 1995 to 2001 and again from 2013 to 2019 (R)
Anthony Scaramucci
Steven M. Schneebaum
Claudine Schneider, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Rhode Island from 1981-1991 (R)
Nancy Schulte
Kathleen Sebelius
Ricki Seidman, Former Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
James M. Seif
Joe Sestak, Former Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy and U.S. Congressman (PA-07)
Tara Setmayer, Co-Founder, The Seneca Project
Rina Shah, Geopolitical Adviser & Former RNC Delegate
Robert B. Shanks, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, 1981-1985
Hon. Phil Sharp, Representative of the 10th and 2nd District of Indiana from 1975-1983 and 1983-1995 (D)
Kate Shaw
Christopher Shays, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of Connecticut from 1987 to 2009 (D)
Donald Sherman, Executive Director and Chief Counsel, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Steve Silverman
David Skaggs, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Colorado from 1987 to 1999 (D)
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor Emerita, Princeton University
Fern Smith, Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California appointed by President Reagan from 1988 to 2005
Hon. Peter Smith
Craig Snyder, Former Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Arlen Specter
Ilya Somin, Law Professor at George Mason University
Julia Spiegel
Richard Stengel, Former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy
Stuart Stevens
Robin Tallon, Representative of the 6th District of South Carolina from 1983 to 1993 (D)
Neera Tanden, President and CEO, Center for American Progress
Michael Teter, Attorney & Managing Director, The 65 Project
Jennifer Thomas & Emma Addams, Co-Executive Directors, Mormon Women for Ethical Government
James Tierney, Former Attorney General of Maine
Jeff Timmer, The Lincoln Project
Ann Toback, CEO, The Workers Circle
Carmen Torres
Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University
David Trott, Representative of the 11th Congressional District of Michigan from 2015 to 2019 (R)
Olivia Troye, Special Advisor, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism to Vice President Mike Pence, 2018-2020
F. Andrew Turley, Major General, USAF (ret.)
Susan W. Turnbull
Chris Vance, Former Chairman, Washington State Republican Party
Josh Venable, Former Chief of Staff, U.S. Department of Education
Alexander S. Vindman, Lt. Col., U.S. Army (ret.)
Michael Waldman, President, Brennan Center for Justice
Liz Wally
Joe Walsh
Matt Walton, 2015 Republican Nominee, 74th District of the Virginia House of Delegates
Austin Weatherford
Judge William H. Webster
Randi Weingarten
Ellen L. Weintraub, Commissioner, Federal Election Commission, 2002-2025
Wendy Weiser, Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice
Robert Weissman, Co-President, Public Citizen
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colonel, USA (ret.)
Gregory P. Wilson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1986-1989
Rick Wilson, The Lincoln Project
Jonathan M Winer, Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Special Envoy for Libya
Timothy Wirth, U.S. Senator for the State of Colorado from 1987 to 1993; Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Colorado from 1975 to 1987 (D)
Ann S. Womble
John Yarmuth, Former Chairman of the House Budget Committee, 3rd District of Kentucky from 2007-2023 (D)

__________

 

Donald Trump is going completely CRAZY. Threatening and suing universities, media organizations, journalists, judges, prosecutors, non-profit organizations, law firms, etc.

"Let them hate,

so long as they fear."

 

...So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end.

Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost…

—Peter Wehner, "America's Mad King"

Also worth your time:

A Loophole That Would Swallow the Constitution
If Donald Trump can disappear people to El Salvador without due process, he can do anything.
By Jonathan Chait

Donald trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.

Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law. His administration has admitted that one such prisoner, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador in error, but insists that it has no recourse. Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty…

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT, April 17, 2025 (pdf)

…The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?∗ And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning….

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate…

It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered.

Oopsie… 

Smackdown? Well, we'll see where that goes from here.

UPDATE:

REALLY SICK OF ALL THIS TRUMP STUFF THIS WEEK

 

Some new readings...

 

 

Came on to Becker via a Science Magazine Review. The Amazon blurb for More Everything Forever:

forThis "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, 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, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these 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 the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.  

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. 

Comes out April 22nd. I also had to go after heis earlier book.

 

apropoa of the new one:

Came to this via Substack.

Careless People: The Book Meta Doesn’t Want You to Read

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and events she describes. “…like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” she writes in the prologue.

The subtitle, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism aptly describes this memoir, which begins with Wynn-Williams’s story of surviving a shark attack at the age of 13 in her native New Zealand and ends with her being escorted by security from the shark-infested headquarters at Facebook twenty-five years later. Hired in 2011 as the Manager of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams conveys her initial enthusiasm as a true believer in the power of Facebook to be a force for good and, on that basis, how she pitched the idea of a policy role for herself at a time when the leadership did not yet grasp why the company would need to build relationships with state leaders...
 

Stay tuned...

Welcome to the Law of Rule

A Trump Organization International Partnership Property

"FACILITATE" vs "EFFECTUATE"

[bleep] Mirriam-Webster’s… I KNOW!!!
Let’s pay a boatload of white-shoe DC lawyers $1,200 an hour each to throw down hermeneutically ad nauseum with the AG Pam Legally Blondi crew to ferret out the proper “constructions.”

APRIL 16 UPDATE

 

Trump Attorney General Pamela Bondi unequivocally declared this morning that Mr. Garcia will NOT be returned to the U.S. to be accorded his lawful deportation due process.

 

We will see. Also, just in from WaPo:

Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington, D.C., on Wednesday said he would launch proceedings to determine whether to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for defying his order not to remove Venezuelan migrants from the country based on the wartime Alien Enemies Act. 

Dark times draw nigh

 

The President of el Salvador, Nayib Bukele, will visit with Donald Trump at the White House this week.

 

 

I continue to fear for Mr. Garcia's life.

 

MONDAY UPDATE

 

 

Ivan Raiklin,

Donald Trump's self-appointed "Secretary of Retribution."

          

 

Ivan has previously publicly, summarily declared that Nancy Pelosi is "guilty of treason" and should be executed. A real Piece of Work, this Legend-in-His-Own-Mind.

Dire Wolf Donald

The Question(s) of the Day

 

ALSO NOTEWORTHY

 

 

 

POLICING THE PAST
By David Remnick

In the very first paragraph of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s operating manual for a second Trump Administration, battle lines over history are drawn: “America is now divided between two opposing forces: woke revolutionaries and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution.” Three weeks after Donald Trump’s election, Mike Gonzalez, a contributor to Project 2025, and Armen Tooloee, the former chief of staff to the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, elaborated on the new Administration’s martial maneuvers, writing in the Wall Street Journalthat, in order “to put a spike through the heart of woke,” the White House was duty bound to “retake control of museums, starting with the Smithsonian Institution.”

During the campaign, Trump professed ignorance of Project 2025. “I’ve never read it, and I never will,” he said. This was hard to parse. While it really was difficult to imagine Trump hunched over his desk, underlining passages in the report’s nine hundred-plus pages, he obviously had what is known in Washington as a “situational awareness” of its prescriptions to maximize executive power, slash government agencies, punish perceived enemies, intimidate dissenters, and rule as an autocrat. Trump is enacting Project 2025 nearly to the letter, deploying executive orders, lawsuits, and rhetorical bombast in an effort to force judges, law firms, cultural institutions, university presidents, and press barons into postures of pitiable obedience. He has even taken time to bring to heel that center of Brechtian cultural rebellion, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

As is true of autocracies everywhere, this Administration demands a mystical view of an imagined past. In late March, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its diagnosis is that there has long been among professors and curators “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” It continues:

Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame...
 

"Burning down Washington to 'save' America?"

895!

Donald Trump takes Gaslighting to a whole new level.

In a word: "Gasphxiation."

   

“How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”

People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”

I’ve struggled to offer an answer; so have those I’ve reached out to for counsel. I have yet to receive a menu of compelling options. But I am certain that what needs to inform the answers to these questions, and what needs to precede a comprehensive plan of action, is knowledge.

That means turning to experts on the history of disinformation, such as Thomas Rid, who can talk about how societies have addressed these questions in the past; political psychologists, such as Australia’s Karen Stenner, who can help develop the language for how to reach people awash in distortions and deceptions; and experts in psychology and neuroscience, such as Jay Van Bavel, whose work addresses issues of group identity, social motivation, cooperation, intergroup bias, and social media. It includes turning to cognitive scientists such as Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, who study how people reason, make decisions, and form attitudes and beliefs; philosophers of science such as Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, who argue that social forces explain the persistence of false beliefs; Peter Pomerantsev, who specializes in overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization; and political scientists such as Brendan Nyhan, who works on subjects including misperception and conspiracy theories...

Click for the full article

 

THIS WEEK'S CULMINATION OF TRUMP'S "LIBERATION DAY"

 

TIMELY NEW READ

 

 

Read a review in the new issue of my Science Magazine. Yeah, of course I bought it.

For my PhD, I researched human and social engineering in the mid-twentieth century, spending years peering into leather-bound journals at articles that described rats running through mazes millions of times. These seemed like the least-sought-after things in the library. Making my way along the shelves, I looked into radical behaviorist experiments that were first dreamed up in laboratories before World War II and then streamed into the world (as I argued) after World War II. I titled the resulting dissertation “The Laboratory Imagination.”

When I graduated in the spring of 2000, just as a new millennium began, I looked around myself. The dot-com bubble had just burst in the California Bay Area where I lived. The bubble’s “irrational exuberance,” as then Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan put it around this time, had meant huge tips for my waiter boyfriend who worked at a celebrated place with end-grain wood tables where they made upscale corndogs for the employees in the afterhours. Suddenly, when the exuberance drained away, so did the outsized gratuities (not to mention the corndogs, which slipped in quality). I had no permanent job and was considering an academic post—my doctoral supervisor had arranged a one-year stint at a private college a few states away—but I felt unequipped for the job, which scared me. I decided instead to dedicate myself to a year of yoga by enrolling in a teacher training program. Studying esoteric practices and working as a (very) part-time legal secretary to support myself felt like a way to address the sterility of a world where social control procedures were proliferating—the way everything was so managed, from your Starbucks order to your health insurance (had I been lucky enough to have any).

All around me, I was seeing the experiments I had studied come to life. Some of the most sophisticated of my scientist subjects, the ones whose previously neglected work I had exhumed, called their goal “canalizing.” The point of canalizing was to channel people’s impulses into desired responses by crafting their outer surroundings and even their inner psychology. (The “transformation of duty into desire,” as one put it.) People must be taught to want what was best for them. This was human engineering through behavior modification, and it was the opposite of neglected.

Canalizing appeared to be everywhere in the 1990s. Uniqueness was just starting to be mass produced. The slogan for a cell phone company around that time captured the nascent vibe: “You’re a unique individual. This phone is just for you . . . and everyone like you.” Even the Army was recruiting based on scripted individualism rather than social duty in those days, debuting a new slogan, “An Army of One,” in 2001. “I am an Army of one,” declared a corporal running across the Mojave at dawn while carrying a thirty-five-pound pack in a widely run TV advertisement: “Even though there are 1,045,690 soldiers just like me, I am my own force.” As in the military, so in the academic world: Aspiring to be a bold free thinker around that time in Berkeley, California, led to quandaries. Aiming to be a “thinker of one” was full of pitfalls. You were unique but simultaneously part of 1,045,690 others who were “just like me.” There was an acceptable way to be “different.” Norms expanded to incorporate this quirkiness. And so was born, or reborn, the hipster.

I had spent almost half of my twenties studying the long-forgotten records of a huge experiment in inculcating unfreedom. At Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, a well-funded program of running rats through mazes, with the objective of establishing a universal science of behavior control, flourished during the 1930s. It featured many scientists announcing breakthroughs in what they described as “the maze that a human must learn” in order to live decently and capably in society. But not every experiment was a success. In a 1934 study by psychologist Neal Miller, one particular small Norwegian rat—an animal that had been “variable throughout,” according to its handlers—suddenly refused to run at all after facing myriad electric shocks in an alleyway. The animal’s recalcitrance sabotaged the data for the whole experiment, and the umbrage-filled note in the scientific publication—“Unfortunately . . . [t]his [refusal] spoiled the statistical reliability of the outcome”—piqued my interest. Even in a huge program like Yale’s, one that sought to apply its animal discoveries to humans, a lone two-ounce creature could derail an experiment. I wondered: How did the past, with its seemingly unrealized stakes, contend with the bigger stakes of the present?

To bridge the gap between past and present, I started to think about brainwashing, a topic I had not covered directly in my dissertation but was implied. Brainwashing was a well-worn term, and certainly everyone could recognize it—yet I found I didn’t really know what it meant. It was over-the-top, scandalous, frightening, possibly silly. But it also struck me as possibly the most successful method in history to mold a human being into some new form. It was not just a matter of compelling someone to do something they didn’t want to do or breaking a person down. After all, brute force had a long history, a lot longer than brainwashing. Brute force did not really change people’s minds and sometimes it actually inspired resistance. Sheer physical punishment (“getting medieval on your ass” was the way the character Marsellus Wallace put it in Pulp Fiction) was not reliably successful. The Central Intelligence Agency’s MK-ULTRA program would prove this. Even an average man of the late seventeenth century, the priest Urbain Grandier of Loudun, France, managed to resist making a forced confession at the hands of his tormentors as he was burned alive.*

What concerned me were modern methods, in which physical force was involved but was not the primary driver of change. As Czesław Miłosz observed in his 1953 classic, The Captive Mind, “We are concerned here with questions more significant than mere force.” The scarier thing was people gladly volunteering for terrible outcomes—begging for the gallows or sacrificing their previous beliefs and blindly embracing new ones. Observers from Aldous Huxley to a notorious Communist interrogator agreed that whereas it was possible to resist torture, new methods of the mid-twentieth century were close to 100 percent effective in attaining compliance. Just about no one could withstand them. “If God Himself was sitting in that chair we would make him say what we wanted him to say,” claimed the interrogator. No one was exempt anymore. Said Huxley in Brave New World Revisited: “Government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children.” Breaking the will, Brave New World style, was possible using behavioral technologies of modern mind control. Not only pain but a targeted mix of pleasure and pain would ensure adherence. Brainwashing is neither pure persuasion nor sheer coercion but both: coercive persuasion.

What was this method? Was it possible that, to have a rate of compliance nearing total, the subject must—on some level, in some way, even subtly, even unwittingly—agree? And what did this all have to do with me and my concerns with being a unique and free individual—like everyone else—at the dawn of the internet age? This was not just a random cell phone campaign or a bohemian style of conformity but hard evidence of an extreme process.

The natural place to begin was during the early Cold War. Any proper discussion of brainwashing, I thought, must commence with its entrance into the English language. And even this was hazy…

Lemov, Rebecca. The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion (pp. 11-15). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Stay tuned. Lotta book here...

 

Random web definition

 

 UPDATE:  A BIT OF ONLINE CROSS-REFERENCING CURIOSITY

 

PREFACE

I WAS WORKING IN the library when I bumped into one of my former patients. I hadn’t seen her for maybe five years. We sized each other up. I was a retired professor of psychiatry lugging a pile of books. She was a bright young scholar carrying lots of baggage from her past. We chatted for a bit, surrounded by shelves of books in the stacks, and she asked what I was working on. I told her I had gotten interested in brainwashing.

“Umm,” she said. “Isn’t that kind of a stale, musty topic—Communists, bad science, and all that stuff?” As I said, she was bright and inclined to come right to the point—tact had never been her strong suit. Why was I spending so much time on this arcane topic? Granted, I am eccentric; but what made me think anybody else would be interested in this subject?

Then I came home to watch the evening news, which featured its usual dose of suicide bombers and mass shootings, followed by political leaders making preposterous statements (“Vaccination causes autism,” “Global warming is a myth,” “The COVID-19 virus is not a problem”). It is bad enough that leaders can propound such nonsense; the bigger problem is that they persuade so many other people to endorse their misunderstandings of the world. I thought about my patient again. How did she make sense of a world where people could be persuaded to believe rubbish and follow it up with self-destructive violence?

As a psychiatrist, I should be one of the last people to believe the world operates rationally. I know better. Leaders have all too often been pied pipers, but something new emerged in the twentieth century. I still don’t know what to call this phenomenon. Brainwashing, coercive persuasion, thought control, dark persuasion—all these terms refer to the fact that certain techniques render individuals shockingly vulnerable to indoctrination…

Dimsdale, Joel  (2021). Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media (Function). Kindle Edition.

Hmmm... From a prior post; #OnDisinformation.

“Oopsie… too late. 😂”

mockingly posted the President of El Salvador Nakib Bukele.

   

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

 

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up…

… attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody…

Trump-administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.

“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, “whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”…

OK, SHOULD THIS COMFY WASP SENIOR CITIZEN JUST PRUDENTIALLY STFU? RECALL DR/ FRANKS et al...

Improper Ideologies.

I am a 79-year-old natural born U.S. citizen from western Long Island, New York (Floral Park, bordering Queens borough, to be precise). I now live in Baltimore, Maryland. I recently renewed my passport and was shortly thereafter granted a Global Entry Pass by TSA. My Maryland driver’s license is Real ID compliant. I have no criminal record, and have had an FBI background check (replete with fingerprinting) pursuant to my 2000-2005 tenure as an OCC/FDIC regulated bank credit risk officer.

I have never wanted nor owned a firearm (never had a tattoo either). The totality of my experience with physical violence comprises one absurd schoolyard fistfight when I was a sophomore in high school. It lasted perhaps 30 seconds and didn’t resolve anything (beyond confirming my not even coming close to being the cinematic adolescent badass I’d assumed I was).

My wife and I have been together since 1974. We raised three children, and are now retired doting grandparents / great-grandparents. Across my wife’s career as an increasingly senior quality assurance executive, she underwent numerous federal security clearance investigations, and repeatedly held what is known as the (always project-specific) “Q clearance” (for her nationwide work in DOE nuclear waste remediation and worldwide DOD contractor engineering and construction, much of it classified). She has performed QA audits at all of the federal National Laboratories, and at US military facilities around the globe. She has forgotten more about classified information SCIF-level security protocols than our poignant Marvel Comics SecDefBro Pete Hegseth ever knew.

Notwithstanding the breadth and depth of our dispositively documented loyal U.S. citizen histories, it would not surprise me one whit were we to be detained and perhaps renditioned by Donald Trump‘s ICE/DHS thugs the next time we return from visiting abroad.

The unacceptable offenses? Hmmm… suborning Woke Leftist Secular Globalist MAGA/Project 2025-averse “alignment” with “Homegrown Improper Ideologies?”

RELEVANT PRIOR READINGS

   

Scroll down to recent prior posts. Better yet, buy the books and study them closely.

 

Trump DHS Secretary flies down to el Salvador on your dime to pose for a photo-op.