AI is nothing without Robots

President Biden stands aside from his re-election campaign.

Endorses Vice President Harris to succeed him. 

  

   

Donald Trump, you must now agree to a Presidential debate with your new POTUS candidate rival, without delay. Failure to do so will speak a Library of Congress worth of hardbound volumes—that of a crass bully unwilling to face the forensic vaporization this woman of color will surely inflict on you in live view of a national and global audience.

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ERRATA ON TRUMP POIGNANCY

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JULY 22 UPDATE

 

I just made a donation to Kamala Harris for President.

Patriotic GOP strategist Rick Wilson and Project Lincoln are unreservedly in.

MUSICAL ERRATUM

 

 

A BRIEF ASIDE

My citations and excerpts custom and its rationale.
In addition to my numerous subscribed and episodically perused online periodicals, I read 2-3 books per week, and have done so for decades. On this blog (along with several others of mine), I often post "lengthy" excerpts (though far less in length than you'd see in the typical Amazon "Look Inside" preview). My readers deserve to hear directly from the authors in full salient topical contexts, with MY opinions significantly subordinated. Per "Fair Use" law—[1] I have never done ANY of this for money; nor do I solicit or receive freebie "reviewer copies," [2] I am consistently scrupulous to provide author / publisher / seller links, and I routinely apprise authors of my activities in support of their efforts.

to wit:

 

Just published.

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.

This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.

Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them…

Applebaum, Anne. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (pp. 1-3). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Could scarcely be more timely. Anne Applebaum is the Real Deal.

 

More to come... 

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We are now fervently admonished to "dial back the rhetoric.”

Some of us, anyway.

   

OTHER NEWS LOST IN THE FRENZY

Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the charges against him relating to the Mar a Lago stolen classified documents case.

 

NJ DEM SENATOR BOB MENENDEZ

 

Guilty on 16 felony counts of bribery-related charges invloving foreign officials. He remains defiant in the wake of the verdict. But, he will likely be heading to prison.

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Donald Trump shot at during rally in PA, grazed in right ear

OK, where do we stand now?

@NormOrnstein TwitterX thread, July 7th, 2024

Let me be clear: I don’t criticize our media for intense coverage of the health of the president and whether he can fill another term or stay on the ticket. Those are big stories. They are not the only stories. The fact that he is the incumbent does not excuse the inattention to the other major party candidate who was a former president, much less the dereliction of duty that comes with treating his abnormal behavior as normal. 1/

Of course, Biden’s disastrous debate performance was the biggest news. But Trump’s serial lies was also really big, and brushed aside. The revelations from Jeffrey Epstein’s investigation, including the multiple trips Trump took with him, largely ignored. Far worse is what we know will be the consequences of another Trump presidency. 2/

He completely ignored the question in the debate about deporting migrants. It is a clear responsibility of a free press to report on this, meaning the plans to put 12 million people in the United States in detention camps, people that he has called animals. His closest advisor and press secretary are tied directly to Project 2025. It was written in intimate connection withTrump‘s principaladvisors. That he lies openly about whether he knows anything about it no excuse for our press, largely ignoring it. 3/

If Joe Biden has moments where he falters, there is a stellar team of top advisors and staff to keep this from becoming a policy catastrophe. As Liz Cheney has said, even if you don’t like Biden’s policies, the country regularly survives, presidents, whose policies and don’t like. 4/

But as she says courageously and eloquently, we cannot survive the destruction of democracy and fundamental freedoms, which is openly in the game plan of Donald Trump. Trump talks about creating military tribunals to punish his enemies in an administration built around retribution. It is dereliction of journalistic responsibility beyond imagining that this gets shrugged off and not covered as if it were a four alarm fire. 5/

The shocking decisions of the court, especially Chevron and immunity, have not been covered as front page above the full stories or as a runaway Court that will turn governance upside down. Much less Supreme Court that will end up with a 72 right wing extremist margin if Trump is elected, probably including replacing Thomas and Alito with justices at least as extreme and much younger. 6/

Covering the deathwatch around whether Biden survives as a candidate, while ignoring the fact that this is truly an existential election, less about Biden and Trump, and more about whether our democracy survives , is simply not what mainstream press, much less everybody else, should make as their singular focal point. Don’t ignore it but please, please get a grip and make your focus what really matters.
End/

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CLEAR!

Shit...

The POTUS fallacy of sunk costs?

130 129 128 days now to the November 5th elections.

   

TOM NICHOLS

Joe Biden didn’t just have a bad night. American democracy is now more in danger than ever.

I have been harshly critical of calls for President Joe Biden to step down. I have argued with people across the political spectrum about this, including friends and colleagues. I think Biden has had a successful first term and that his age has been no barrier to his effectiveness as a leader. I still believe that. And if the choice this fall is between Biden and a man who I believe is a mentally unstable menace to American democracy, I won’t think twice about my vote.

But Donald Trump must be defeated, and after last night’s debate, I am no longer sure that Biden is electable. Politics can be a miserable business that too often turns on perceptions, and for the president, the debate was a full-blown, Hindenburg-level disaster. Biden’s performance was unnervingly bad, and it has led to a chorus of calls, including in this magazine, for Biden to step down…

I know that, for Biden loyalists, the gathering consensus around last night’s debate must feel like a betrayal: Friends and coalition partners now seem to be lining up with knives behind the back of the man who saved America from Trump in 2020. Political loyalty, although often useful and sometimes admirable, should not override practicality. Blind support of one man, after all, is the hallmark of Trump’s cult; the prodemocracy coalition is larger, and should be more resilient, than any single person in it.

Before we think about next steps, it’s important not to wave away what happened last night, and it’s especially important not to engage in random blame-storming. Biden had one job—don’t look old and befuddled—and he failed. Biden supporters are raging away on social media about how the CNN moderators should have intervened with more fact-checking (read: debating Trump themselves and saving Biden), but Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did a reasonable job of keeping the debate moving and giving Biden multiple chances to unload any number of haymakers on Trump had he wanted to do so.

Biden, however, was simply not present. Opportunity after opportunity to call out Trump passed him by as he garbled a basket of statistics and talking points. The president’s staff clearly overprepared their candidate, stuffing his head with factoids about Pell Grants and climate targets and tax rates and other things that are completely irrelevant in a debate with a deranged bully. If this was the work of the White House prep team, then they are guilty of egregious political malpractice—but in the end, the candidate is always responsible for what happens in the campaign.

I now accept that the Biden we saw last night is as good as we’ll get in the election, and that Americans—unfortunately—are likely to decide that an entertaining autocrat is less of a risk than a decent old man…

Today, in North Carolina, Biden was full of energy, self-deprecating humor, and fury. I suspect that this is Biden in a kind of late–Ronald Reagan phase, in which he is able to give a barn burner of a speech but not capable of heavier lifting; even during the North Carolina event, he looked vacant and slack-jawed while he watched others speak. He was animated at the podium—but that’s likely not going to be enough to win an election in which so many undecided voters think Biden is too old to be president…

Time is running out. The operatives out there trying to soothe nerves by invoking Reagan’s first disastrous debate in 1984 forget that Reagan was ahead in the polls at the time, with plenty of electoral cushion under him. Biden has no such margin. My friend Greg Sargent at The New Republic has argued that Joe and Jill Biden need to assure America that last night was the exception, not the rule. But I suspect that Biden has, at most, about a week to either make up his mind not to run or reassure America that he can take on Donald Trump and win. At this point, it’s very hard to imagine that such reassurance is possible…

My new hashtag coinage: #DonaldJBumpStock

 

Also, apropos terminology: "Gish Gallop."

 

UPDATE

 

Totally worthy your time and close attention.

 

 

DJT BUTTHURT NONETHELESS

 

 Awww...

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The Daze of Our Lives...

131 days to the Nov 5th U.S. elections.

   

3,007 days since I first posted about candidate Donald Trump. Zero days to the first Biden-Trump "debate."

   

[Below] I first posted about candidate Trump on April 3rd, 2016

Where’s the “Pre-Crimes Unit” when you need one?

Put aside the endless onslaught of reflexively arrogant, belligerent, and vulgar P.T. Barnum bombast. Forget the neurotic, tellingly insecure “The-Beautiful-Thing-About-Me-Is-I’m-REALLY-Rich” fixation, replete with gauche, ostentatiously cheesy gold-plated fixtures and escalators, and the “Finest Polished Marble.” Never mind the (made in China) monogrammed shirts and pastel silk ties, redolent of arriviste exhibitionist 60’s Manhattan throwback 4-Color Glossy tabloid “Style and Elegance.” Forget the creepy, objectifying, lecherous “Nice Tits,” “Down on Your Knees” sash, bikini, big hair, and spike heels misogyny. Forget that everyone who dares dispute Him is “A Loser,” “Weak,” “Stupid,” “A Moron,” “Disgusting,” “3rd-Rate,” “A Stiff,” “A Dope,” “A Low-Life” — someone to perhaps be the target of the latest 500 million dollar empty Trump lawsuit threat du jour.

Let pass the patently phony “I’m a Strong Evangelical” whose “favorite book” is “da BIBLE!” Forget the low-intellect Moths-To-The-Flame Totem comprising that stupidass Mexican Wall proposal. Forget the equally phony “I Have Many, Many Great Friends Here in ______________.” Forget the blindingly obvious time-worn boiler room grift M.O. of “Trump University®,” “Trump Network®,” “Trump Baja Ocean Resort®,” and “Trump Institute®.” Put aside that in the net worth ranking of world billionaires he’s a rounding error (Update: I’ve coined the hashtag “#BiglyFakeBillionaire”).

Forget his eye-rollingly fatuous “only rich people should be allowed to play golf.”

Forget that “maybe protestors should get roughed up.” “Maybe I’ll pay the [attackers’] legal expenses.”

Forget that “women must be punished” (well, uh, maybe not, at least until after Wisconsin).

Put aside all of that, along with the the rest of the maudlin, panoramic accruing expanse of its kindred lowbrow, cognitive-pollution Time Share Closer bullshit (see, btw, Harry Frankfurt’s instructive book “On Bullshit”).

Focus on, remember, and act against the truly important stuff.

Call them our Pre-Crimes Portents.
 
He’s dog-whistling war crimes. Without much subtlety, as is his style…

 

That was eight years ago. It's only gotten recursively worse. 

 

I am SO sick of Donald Trump.

 

INTERESTING AND TIMELY DOCUMENTARY NOW ON NETFLIX

Six episodes, roughly one hour each. [Update] I just finished all 6 episodes. Episode Two (the concomitant rise of German & Italian populist Fascism) is disturbingly comparable to our current times.

apropos, new book by Anne Applebaum coming in July.

POST-DEBATE SUMMARY

 

An unmitigated disaster for President Biden. Depressing.

 

FRIDAY MORNING ARTICLE HEADLINES, THE ATLANTIC

A Disaster for Joe Biden
Watching the president at the first debate was at times almost physically uncomfortable

Someone Needs to Take Biden’s Keys
The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Biden’s Loved Ones Owe Him the Truth
Those who have cared for Biden the longest cannot allow him to continue

Fore More Years
Two presidential candidates argue about who’s better at hitting a ball.
Nobody wins

Dropping Out Is Biden’s Most Patriotic Option
If he believes that Trump is a unique threat, the choice is clear

Time to Go, Joe
Biden needs to step aside—for the sake of his own dignity, for the good of his party, for the future of the country

The Unadorned Truth About Donald Trump
We must treat him like any other candidate for high office who is emotionally and mentally unstable

Trump Should Never Have Had This Platform
The debate was a travesty—because its whole premise was to treat a failed coup leader as a legitimate candidate for the presidency

Ugh.

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