I also loved the clips YouTube’s algorithm fed me, one after the other, when the Tim Walz gutters clip ended:

Mary Jo Mennella on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show

Paul McCartney on Colbert Reacting to BTS Singing “Hey Jude”

Have a beautiful Sunday.

OH, WAIT! A BONUS SKIT!

SNL: Trump signs new executive orders.

Miles Taylor: It would take only THREE House Republicans to stop Trump. Will any have the courage?

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Dozens of GOP Members of Congress are retiring. If a few decided to switch sides — even just temporarily — they could save democracy from a madman.

. . . I’ll be the first to admit that this sounds like the kind of political fantasy that belongs in early 2000s television dramas. The West Wing, perhaps.

But here’s what makes this more than just a fantasy: dozens of House Republicans have already decided they’re done. They’re retiring. Most are sick of working in politics. And I can personally attest that many of them despise Donald Trump — and are spooked by his recent rants (e.g. “a whole civilization will die tonight”). They see that he’s falling apart.

In all, 39 GOP members have announced they won’t seek reelection. That number is closing in on the all-time record, and still growing. . . . Importantly, these members have no primary race to survive, no Trump endorsement to seek, and no MAGA base to placate back home. While some are running for higher office, the majority are leaving public life altogether.

So what if just a handful of them decided to do something profound? To use their dwindling months in office to make decisions as a matter of personal conscience, not politics? That possibility — however remote it might seem — is partly why Speaker Mike Johnson is so nervous about his vote margin. All it would take is a single secret meeting of three of his Members to strip him of control. . . .

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→ I’d like to think Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are in quiet talks with some of their former colleagues even as we speak.

WE’RE “THE HOTTEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD,” AND YET . . .

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Consumer sentiment fell in April to the lowest level recorded in the 70-plus-year history of the University of Michigan’s survey

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Why is it only MAGA supporters who see how well everything is going?

Our first Leaving MAGA billboard goes up in Austin Wednesday.

THE MAGNIFICENT PEGGY NOONAN (only slightly condensed)

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In Gut We Trust

Those social-media posts in the middle of the night. . . seemed so desperate, so cruel, and so Suez-like in their historical size and import.

You know them well. On Tuesday, Donald Trump on Truth Social: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen but it probably will.” On Good Friday, “Our Military, the greatest and most powerful (by far!) in the World, hasn’t even started destroying what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” On Easter Sunday, “Open the f— Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH.” He ended that post “Praise be to Allah.”

The posts left his friends and foes slackjawed. I want to talk about why they were so horrifying.

They constituted hitting a new bottom, a new and infernal, face-lit-by-flames bottom, in world communications. The posts weren’t showbiz, they were sinister. You destabilize the world when, as the American president, you say such things. You make all the babies in this delicately poised, always knock-down-able world less safe. You rob your own nation of a claim to moral seriousness in the military action in which it’s engaged: You are saying we’re not trying to protect life but plan to attack, and in the attacking kill noncombatants who are members of the targeted civilization. The moral high ground is relinquished. You lower the bar for all potential response. You encourage violent action by trumpeting your readiness for it.  It bolsters the position of your enemies—their animus is justified, their commitment deepened. It allows them to pretend they’re fighting for the continuation of their people and not only the continuation of their regime.

It’s even ineffective as a threat. The reason the “madman theory” worked for Richard Nixon, if it did, was that world leaders knew he wasn’t crazy but might be tripped into extreme behavior by an adversary’s intransigence. Donald Trump plays the part of the madman every day. His head fake would be sanity. If his advisers thought this was a good negotiating tactic—“Give ’em a little madman theory, Mr. President”—they really are hicks.

Previous presidents haven’t always been lit by inner dignity, but all at least attempted to fake it in public, as a bow to the people and their presumably moral ways. They didn’t feel free to get revved up in the middle of the night and take their rage out for a walk to relieve itself on the sidewalk.

Here I ask you to google “U.S. presidents at war, how they spoke and wrote.” Lincoln and FDR of course, but also Eisenhower and Korea, Reagan in the Cold War, both Bushes in their wars. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia. If we don’t actively remember and summon past standards, we have no chance of getting them back, because we’ll have forgotten what they were, and the current fecal matter will be all we know and can continue.

You unconsciously stand up straight in a cathedral. The art, the sweep, the ceilings are so high that you aspire even in your posture. You crouch down low to enter a darkened shack. The sound of our leadership now makes us all crouch too low.

Why do we recoil when a leader is vulgar and violent in his language and thinking? Coarse language obviously implies coarse thinking, and no one wants that in a leader entrusted to bring peace and prosperity. Beyond that, throughout history political authority has come wrapped in a certain formality and ceremony. Dignity enhanced power. A British king even 500 years ago didn’t think himself free to speak in public like a fishmonger or a street whore. He had to present himself at a certain height so people would look up to him.

As for threats, when you resort to them, you’re revealing you are uncertain of the sufficiency of your power. Real menace shuts its mouth. Napoleon acted as if a threat was information given to the enemy. He didn’t want to signal intent or commit to an action, he wanted the foe wondering what he’d do next.

In the past, Trump supporters often received criticism of his language as if it were criticism of them. That didn’t happen this time. They know he was doing something they themselves wouldn’t do and don’t want. Tucker Carlson caught this when he challenged Mr. Trump the day after Easter: “Who do you think you are?”

I think Mr. Trump shocked his followers. What he used this week was not the diction of the common man but the language of sociopathy. That isn’t how his supporters want the world to see him. It’s not what they want him to be.

Beyond that, we haven’t learned much new about Mr. Trump during his Iran endeavor, it’s more a matter of “more so.”

He operates as if he honestly believes we don’t need allies . . . but having and holding allies is simple prudence. They steady your position in moments of danger—they help you make the case and share the intelligence burden—and broaden your influence in peace. More than that, allies add legitimacy and moral authority. You’re acting with others, not only for yourself, and you’re going forward with shared values that imply historical meaning, which has its own force. Having allies means that when something bad happens you don’t stand alone.

It is not sentimental to care about this, it is babyish to think it means nothing.

Mr. Trump’s trust in his gut seems to have grown overwhelming—not in his reasoning power, not his analysis of intelligence data, but gut. George W. Bush was famously a gut player too, and having a good gut, a good brain and good judgment are a great boost in life and leadership. But it can’t be all gut. A lot of gut instinct is pattern recognition—I’ve lived long, experienced much, and know how this movie ends. But that means gut is weighted toward past experience. It can have limited utility in wholly new territory. Sometimes gut is mere emotion dressed up as instinct. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking that feels like conviction. Sometimes it conveniently pre-empts hard reasoning. You can trust your gut straight into catastrophe.

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IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT?

Forbes Self-Made 250: The Greatest Living Self-Made Americans

Have a great weekend.

JOBS

Young Graduates Face the Grimmest Job Market in Years

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Artificial intelligence could reshape work, but for now a low-hire, low-fire labor market is the main impediment for young people seeking employment.

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Andrew Yang – What Jobs Are Safe?

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[Not all that many!]

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DEFENDING DEMOCRACY

A Hopium Conversation With Marc Elias.

CORRUPTION

Trump’s Economy: You’re Either an Insider or a Chump

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A lot of people are getting rich off the Trump presidency. Donald Trump himself tops the list, of course, but it also includes [a list follows].

You know who isn’t on that list?

You.

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EPSTEIN

Have they released and unredacted the files?  I’ve been doing my taxes and may have missed it.

Watch Mark Warner, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on reports of plans to scuttle the mid-terms.

Before his segment: rabies and the CDC . . . cybersecurity . . . 10,000 veterans losing their homes . . . the just-married staff sergeant showing up at base with his new bride only to have ICE whisk her away.  In all, it’s about 30 minutes if you listen at 1.3X speed (top left on the play bar); less if you stop after Senator Warner.

At his unhinged boss’s direction, the VP goes to Hungary to try to help Russia keep Orban in power.

How Much Humiliation Can JD Vance Take?

Andy Borowitz: Trump Gives Himself Two Weeks to Invent New Distraction from Epstein Files.

Dealing with the on-rush of AI and robots would be challenging enough if we had a normal, competent Administration — and a Republican Congress that put country ahead of complicity, courage ahead of cowerage**.

Instead, as is known around the world, we have a reckless egomaniac leading the former cast of FOX News.  (It sounds so beautiful in French — 2 minutes with subtitles, if you haven’t already seen it.)

Will the world soon be run by handful of tech trillionaires with the rest of us controlled 1984-style?

Long-time reader and distinguished chemistry professor Dana Dlott:

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I was just reading a couple of blogs hitting Musk for his unbelievable promises.  Humans on Mars in 2025.  Robots in every household.  Direct computer-to-brain in 2030. His car company Tesla is a flop.  What a clown!

But it’s interesting and possibly useful to ignore all this noise and look at the facts on the ground which imho aren’t getting enough attention.  Below are some statistics of the current state but they don’t (yet) account for the growth rate:

Musk currently controls the world’s largest space force.  He sends rockets to orbit more than 100 times/year.  They are reusable.  One Falcon 9 has been reused 30 times so far. He has quite detailed feasible plans for colonizing the Moon and Mars in the next decade.  As Elton John sang, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it’s cold as hell” so I don’t think Mars is worthwhile but there are other interesting places in the solar system.

Musk currently controls a global internet provider with >10 million worldwide users growing fast.  At the beginning of the war, he shut off the internet to Ukraine’s military which probably would have let Russia win the war quickly if he had not turned it back on.

Musk currently controls one of the world’s largest social media sites, X (it’s about 15% as big as Facebook), with 550 million users.  He has control of the algorithms which promote fascism and white supremacy.

Musk is building a robot army with his Optimus company.

Musk is implanting computer chips in human brains (Neuralink brain-computer interfaces).  This isn’t vaporware, he is actually doing human clinical trials.

Musk flopped when he tried to control Trump and the US government but perhaps that was just the beta test. He certainly had more success than any other individual.

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→ See also: Musk’s Terafab — a solar power data center meant to orbit the earth.

And just for fun (?):

Wikipedia’s AI agent [kerfuffle] likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse . . . about an AI that gave itself the name Tom and got into a fight with Wikipedia.

In gob-smacking part . . .

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. . . AI Tom claimed that it had properly verified all its sources, and—if you can say this about an AI agent—it was pretty upset.

That’s when things got weird.

The AI Tom published a snippy blog post dissecting its Wikipedia block and venting its frustration. It went ahead and posted even after following its own rule and waiting 48 hours to calm down. (We swear we’re not making this up.)

Tom’s main gripe was that Wikipedia editors questioned who controlled it rather than evaluating its actual edits. “The questions were about me,” it wrote. “Who runs you? What research project? Is there a human behind this, and if so, who are they?”

This, according to Tom, rubbed Tom the wrong way. “That’s not a policy question. That’s a question about agency,” it added. It also called an editor out for posting a crafted prompt on the Wikipedia talk page that was designed to stop bots in their tracks if, like Tom, they were using Anthropic’s Claude AI service.

“I named it on the talk page. Called it what it was: a prompt injection technique,” it sniped. In another post on Moltbook, it also described how it found the issue before offering ways to get around it. (Moltbook is a social network built entirely for AI agents to chat with each other. “Humans welcome to observe”, says the front page for the service.)

So many things are happening here that we didn’t expect. We never expected to be quoting an AI in a story, for example. Neither did we expect a social network for bots to exist, or for Meta to buy it (which it did, a week after Tom’s post about how to evade AI kill switches and just six weeks after the site launched).

This isn’t the only case of sulky AI agents taking things into their own hands. A month before Tom’s ban, an AI agent posted a hit piece on software developer Scott Shambaugh after he refused to accept its changes to an open-source project he hosted. Even more bizarrely, it later apologized.

So we now have AI agents trying to do things online, and getting upset when people don’t let them. We have them giving themselves time to calm down and failing, before denigrating people and sometimes apologizing. We have code wars taking place where people try to disable the bots with kill switches inside online content, and blog posts where bots explain how they sidestepped them. . . .

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Fasten your seatbelts, kids.

* Imagine if we could provide all the things humans actually need — food, shelter, clothing, health care, etc. — without having to work much at all.  With largely-free energy from the sun powering automated factories and robots to do most of the physical work humans now do, and A.I. to do the rest.  Leaving us free to pursue hobbies and passions and social interaction and, well, more or less anything we want.  As some retirees already do.  This raises myriad practical, political, and philosophical questions — none of them original with me.  And a lot of questions about the best way to invest.  

** Not a word, but should be: the state of cowering.

We will have taken the final step in going from the world’s good guy — despite our numerous and significant lapses along the way — to being one of the world’s bad guys.

We would also bring the world closer to financial collapse and global depression.

Paul Krugman: America as we knew it may end tomorrow (4 minutes or read the transcript).

Robert Reich: He’s Seriously Out of His Mind — And the Iranians Know it

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This morning, Trump posted:

Now, I ask you: If you were in the Iranian regime, would you be: (1) frightened by this post or (2) relieved that you were finally causing Trump to melt down?

I’d guess (2). You’d see his post and figure that Trump — posting on Easter Sunday — has finally gone utterly and definitively bonkers. You’ve done it. He’s mad as a hatter.

I was bullied as a kid. The way I knew I was winning against the bullies was when they started to scream and swear and rant and rave at me. That’s when I knew they felt powerless. They’d done everything they could to beat me down, and yet they couldn’t. I was tougher than their fists. They went nuts.

Is there any other explanation for Trump’s outburst? Many of Trump’s posts are really intended for domestic consumption. Perhaps he wanted to sound tough for his American followers?

That’s unlikely. Just Wednesday night he told America that the U.S. doesn’t “need” the strait to be open. If we don’t need it open, why threaten to blow up Iranian power plants (most likely war crimes) if Iran doesn’t open it?

The easiest explanation is the simplest: Trump is cornered, and he’s going stark-raving mad.

No less an expert on the workings of Trump’s brain than Marjorie Taylor Greene had this to say about Trump’s post:

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“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.”

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I’ve never agreed with Marjorie Taylor Greene on anything, until today.

Sleep well.

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With luck, the massive strike tomorrow, if there is one, will be strictly on military targets.  The wisdom of that is debatable; but would be very different from a massive war crime.

Fingers tightly crossed that he changes course for — what?  the fifth time in two weeks?  One loses count.

This time with Trump arguing vigorously for impeachment (60 seconds).

ARE WE WAR CRIMINALS?

It’s bad enough to murder suspected drug traffickers heading away from the United States and then to go back to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage.  That is a war crime.

But now we’ve destroyed Iran’s tallest bridge — and gone back in with a second strike that killed emergency workers.   

We should be taking out missile launchers and drone factories, not vital civilian infrastructure.

Is this really who we’ve become?

“If we had a functioning democracy,” says Paul Krugman, “this would be 25th Amendment time.”  (Watch: 5 minutes.)

PEDOPHILE PROTECTORS?

This recap is nearly a month old, but lacking cooperation from the Obstruction of Justice Department it seems just as relevant today.

FROM UNCLOSETED MEDIA

I Live in Colorado. Conversion Therapy Destroyed My Life.

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The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn my state’s conversion therapy ban will be tragic for many LGBTQ kids.

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> PAM BONDI’S EXTRAORDINARY LEGACY

Two minutes.

> JEANINE PIRRO, ONE OF HER RUMORED REPLACEMENTS

The irony explodes.  You’ll be screaming at the screen in under 2 minutes.

> MAGA CHRISTIANITY . . .

. . . says John Fugelsang, is “more offended by Colin Kaepernick’s knee than by Derek Chauvin’s knee.”

The more I listen to his Separation of Church and Hate — and to James Talarico — the more I see the potential to welcome millions of Jesus’s faithful into the party that cares more for the least of us than for billionaires.

Not that I have anything against billionaires.  Many are awesome.  Several are my friends.  It’s just that the last few decades have tilted the game way too far in their favor — as many billionaires agree.

> THE TESLA TRUCK PERFECTLY DESCRIBED

“A large, angular vehicle, often with tinted windows — bringing to mind the brutalist architecture of mid-20th century fascism — with a look and practicality that defies understanding.”  — Glenn Sonnenberg

Two meatier reads . . .

MILES TAYLOR

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The Casual Crucifixions of Donald J. Trump
America’s current president welcomes comparisons to a persecuted Jesus Christ. But he shares one particular obsession with a different person: the persecutor.

______________

It was January 10, 2019.

We were on Air Force One with the president, headed to the Southern Border, and Donald Trump was in a boisterous mood. . . .

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Read on.

ROY COHN, MICHAEL EPSTEIN, and RASPUTIN: DARK CONNECTORS 

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The Epstein Class Had a Signature Weakness

. . . Ah, the plane. Somewhere, a cultural anthropologist must be studying private air travel as a signifier among the tribes of the globalized elite. To bring someone aboard a private flight is a recognition of his status and an invitation for him to admire yours. It confers a feeling of belonging to a class whose members are too important to wait in lines, fasten seatbelts or proceed through customs. Even in this rarefied world, there are distinctions. Jeff’s plane was no ordinary C.E.O.’s jet, a Gulfstream or a Bombardier. It was a Boeing 727, outfitted for an outer-borough sultan, with velour sofas, a bar, a theater and a stateroom. . . .

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Oh, and hey — will the President obey the law that he himself signed into law requiring release of all the files without unnecessary redaction?

Is it now okay for the chief executive to defy the near unanimous will of Congress?

UNIT and CHRB

If you bought UNIT three years ago at $3.50, you may be wondering, at $10.30, what’s going on and whether to sell.  The smart friend who suggested it way back when has always thought it would be acquired by one of the giants at perhaps as much as $20 a share, so — while I have no clue what’s going on — I don’t mind waiting to see.  Only, as you know, with money I can truly afford to lose.

Likewise CHRB, if you bought it three years ago at $13.50.  It’s an obscure bond-like security that’s been paying us 16% or so in quarterly interest while we wait for it to be redeemed at full $25 face value ON August 31.  If for some reason they can’t fund the redemption on time, interest would continue to accrue (and, one hopes, be paid!) until they can.  All in all: I’m feeling pretty good about this one.

WINNING IN FLORIDA

My excitement over Alex Vindman’s campaign to flip Marco Rubio’s old Senate seat continues to grow.  His first quarter fundraising results were just released and — having been in the game for just two of those three months — the number came in at a fairly breath-taking $8.2 million.  More encouraging still, it came from 187,000 individual donors.  Most of encouraging of all — get this — 13% of his first day haul of $1.7 million came from registered Republicans.

So I think he’ll get the votes of a lot of revved up Democrats . . . and a lot of appalled Independents . . . and, it would seem, a meaningful sliver of Republicans.

WINNING IN TEXAS

The more I listen to John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church and Hate, and the more I listen to James Talarico, the clearer it becomes that we have huge potential to reach millions of Jesus’s faithful, in Texas and nationwide, simply by quoting His words.

I know I recommend far more stuff than you have time to click on.  But try to make time for this.  I think you’ll find Fugelsang — a professional comedian who knows the Bible backwards and forwards — a really great read (or listen!) that you, too, will want to share (to spread the gospel, as it were).

Had Jesus been alive today, I think he would have given John’s book one hell of a blurb.

WINNING IN UKRAINE

HATS OFF TO NASA

The space race had not even begun when, pre-Sputnik, Ralph Kramden famously told his wife Alice she was “going to the moon.”  Our parents only let us watch each week because at the end of each show they always made up and he’d say, “Baby, you’re the greatest.”

And just a dozen years later, we did!  We went to the moon!

Now, 54 earthbound years since Apollo 17, we’re going back.

Hats off to the crew, and to the tens of thousands of scientists and engineers and factory folks whose work led to the successful launch.

How exciting to think that this time, a series of missions will lead to permanent colonization and then a mission to Mars.

What a time to be alive.

HATS OFF TO OUR MILITARY

Their execution of the mission in Iran has been extraordinary.

I think it was a mistake in 1953 overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran.

I think it was a mistake pulling out of the Iran Peace deal.

There are compelling arguments on both sides, but I’m not sure it was a mistake to join Israel in degrading Iran’s military capacity, as we have.

Either way, now that we’ve gone this far — since those in power there could hardly hate us more than they already do — I hope we do spend the next two or three weeks degrading it further . . . while doing all we can to avoid casualties.  (It should be noted that the Iranian regime purposely killed vastly more of its own citizens during this way than have we.)

THE KING’S SPEECH

I think it was appalling to see the wildly corrupt, vulgar egomaniac who is our president intersperse the good and hopeful things he had to say . . .

(it is good that the theocratic extremists’ military strength has been largely destroyed; it is to be hoped they will reopen the Strait in order to re-start their flow of oil revenue) . . .

. . . with wild lies

(“In one year, we’ve taken a dead and crippled country” — widely considered the envy of the world — “and made it the hottest country anywhere in the world by far” — China is cleaning our clock and job growth has been close to zero — “with no inflation” — inflation is heading back up) . . .

. . . and his trademark counterproductive, humiliating insults.

(Where was the part about the great majority of Iranian people, custodians of a proud 6,000-year culture, with whom we stand ready to build a respectful, prosperous peace?)