December 26, 2025: Christmas Greetings From the President

Axios reported on December 23 that the White House has taken over the X account of the Justice Department, and on the same day, that account tried to undercut the new information by claiming that accusations in it are “unfounded and false.” But Trump’s behavior on December 25, Christmas, suggested otherwise.

Trump’s social media account posted: “Merry Christmas to all, including the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his Island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT, falsely claimed they had nothing to do with him, didn’t know him, said he was a disgusting person, and then blame, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who was actually the only one who did drop Epstein, and long before it became fashionable to do so. When their names get brought out in the ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!), and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do, much like there was when it was made public that the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax was a fictitious story—a total Scam—and had nothing to do with ‘TRUMP.’”

After misrepresenting the New York Times, he went on: “Now the same losers are at it again, only this time so many of their friends, mostly innocent, will be badly hurt and reputationally tarnished. But, sadly, that’s the way it is in the World of Corrupt Democrat Politics!!! Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas! President Donald J. Trump.” (...)

This evening, Trump posted: “Now 1,000,000 more pages on Epstein are found. DOJ is being forced to spend all of its time on this Democrat inspired Hoax. When do they say NO MORE, and work on Election Fraud etc. The Dem[ocrat]s are the ones who worked with Epstein, not the Republicans. Release all of their names, embarrass them, and get back to helping our Country! The Radical Left doesn’t want people talking about TRUMP & REPUBLICAN SUCCESS, only a long ago dead Jeffrey Epstein—Just another Witch Hunt!!!”

“I love the smell of panic in the evening,” former representative and Trump critic Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) posted over Trump’s screed. “Smells like… victory.”

Even before Trump’s evening post, in Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit noted that it seems “clear that there is likely something in the files that further incriminates” Trump, an observation with which scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder agreed. He added: “Horrible as the facts at hand are, there must be something else, something verging on the unimaginable.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American |  Read more:
Image: none, too disgusted

[ed. It's called Illeism (to talk about yourself in the third person):]

In the realm of clinical psychology, illeism takes on a whole new dimension. It’s been observed in certain personality disorders and mental health conditions, sometimes as a coping mechanism or a symptom of dissociation.

***

[ed. Also this: Americans are waking up. A grand reckoning awaits us (Guardian):]

The US had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.

I’m old enough to remember when the US had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.

I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.

I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights – not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.

But over the last 40 years, starting with Ronald Reagan, the US went off the rails: deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.

Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all, stock buy-backs and the wellbeing of investors more important than the common good.

Democratic presidents were better than Republicans, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of the US.

Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.

That reckoning has revealed the rot.

It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed silent or actively sought to curry Trump’s favor.

America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of the US. They are out for themselves.

The “fucking nightmare” is not over by any stretch. It’s likely to get worse in 2026 as Trump and his sycophants, and many of America’s “leaders”, realize 2026 may be their last unrestrained year to inflict damage and siphon off the spoils.

Hollywood Has Left L.A.

The past decade has been tough on Hollywood — both the industry and the place. L.A. has endured a parade of black-swan catastrophes that have repeatedly upended its signature business, including fires, strikes, COVID, the decline of movie theaters and linear TV, and streaming’s boom and bust. Taken together, these disasters have triggered something like an identity crisis. If you call up a couple dozen executives, agents, directors, producers, writers, actors, and below-the-line artists and ask about the scene on the ground right now, they’ll describe a city detached from its old rhythms and sense of purpose. Today’s L.A., a few say, feels more like a Rust Belt crater than the glamorous capital of the world’s entertainment. “It’s so grim, like a sad company town where the mill is closing,” says one executive. “It’s morose, and everybody’s scared,” says the actor and director Mark Duplass. “It’s a bummer to live here now,” says a writer.

Pieces of the business still hum along in the city, albeit more quietly than they used to. Executives and agents are back in the office, at least the ones who weren’t laid off. Pitching and deal-making continue, though much of that now happens over Zoom. But production — the physical process of turning script pages into movies and TV shows — has largely left town. What began years ago as a trickle has suddenly become an exodus. Today, only about a fifth of American movies and shows are filmed in L.A. (...)

As the labor of making movies and shows splinters across far-flung cities and countries, Hollywood has become dislodged from its physical home. Some of these new hubs may suit the needs of individual projects, but none of them offers what L.A. did for most of the past century: a stable gravitational center where crews can make a living and the craft can be passed down. This isn’t just a logistical reorganization; it’s an existential shift, and there may be no going back. “The nucleus that Hollywood grew out of is dying,” says Jonathan Nolan, the writer-director whose work includes Person of Interest, Westworld, and Fallout. “I don’t think Hollywood the industry has much to do with Hollywood the place anymore,” says Lowe.

One reason L.A. even became a city at all is because it was a great place to make movies. (It helped that it was far enough from New Jersey to escape the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion-picture cameras and projectors.) The weather allowed for year-round outdoor shooting, attracting the industry’s best filmmakers, actors, and crews. This created a self-reinforcing bubble in which the top talent was all concentrated in the same place; this, in turn, supported an informal apprenticeship system under which younger crew members learned on the job, providing a steady influx of skilled labor. For a long time, there was usually no good reason to shoot anywhere else.

Then, in the 1990s, British Columbia hatched a plan to bring some of that action north. The Canadian provincial government introduced one of the world’s first film tax credits — a financial incentive meant to lure foreign productions — offering a modest rebate on money spent employing local crews. It worked, and many U.S. states took notice. In the early aughts, Louisiana and New Mexico rolled out flashy credits of their own, transforming New Orleans and Albuquerque into viable production hubs.

A short while later, streaming boomed, and the demand for scripted entertainment exploded. With more production in play, regions around the world began ramping up their incentives, and many built soundstages and crew bases that could compete with those in L.A. What followed was a global bakeoff for Hollywood’s business. Canada, the U.K., and Australia enhanced their already aggressive tax credits, often made even more appealing by favorable exchange rates. Many U.S. states, including Georgia and New York, followed. Before long, most of the country, and dozens of countries beyond, were offering some version of a production subsidy.

These incentives can be shockingly generous. Today, producers can shoot in certain locations and receive back 30 to 40 percent of a project’s budget with local taxpayers footing the bill. Unlike traditional tax breaks, which merely reduce what a company owes, these credits often amount to direct cash payments, issued regardless of whether the production generates significant tax revenue in return. New York State, for example, offers a 30 percent base tax credit with a 10 percent bonus for projects made upstate. Last year, New York tax dollars helped subsidize TV shows including HBO’s The Gilded Age (which received $52 million from state coffers), Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ($46 million), and Apple TV+’s Severance ($39 million). An Albany-funded audit of New York’s film tax credit, published last year, determined that the incentive is probably a net loss for the state, returning as little as 15 cents in direct tax revenue for every dollar spent. Regardless, in May, New York added an additional $100 million for independent films, bringing the state’s total film subsidies to $800 million.

Meanwhile, California mostly sat on its hands, assuming its long-standing monopoly on talent and infrastructure would be enough to keep Hollywood anchored. Subsidizing an industry already based there was a tougher political sell, but the state introduced its own incentive program in 2009 and has sweetened it since. Unfortunately, while the credit may sound generous, in practice it’s miserly to the point of uselessness.

by Lane Brown, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Dominguez

Can Cruising Survive Influencers?

It was a balmy July day and Joseph had dick on the brain. The 25-year-old Brooklyn barista had agreed to walk a friend’s dog in Washington Square Park, so he figured that while he was in Manhattan he’d check in on one of his favorite cruising spots: a men’s restroom at Penn Station. Those in the know know this bathroom; Joseph (his middle name) estimates he’d cruised for sex there about eight times before. He likes that among the fresh faces he will often see the same old queens catching up in their de facto third space. Sure, he could open Grindr or Scruff to find a hookup, but then he’ll get picky and end up scrolling endlessly. Cruising feels more authentic, more real. It’s a ritual. A hunt.

In the early hours of the afternoon, he’d expected the restroom to be livelier. (Rush hour can bring too many commuters seeking to use the bathroom for its intended purpose.) But there was one guy standing at a urinal: a handsome Latino man with dark hair and eyes, and big, beefy arms protruding from his orange high-visability safety vest. This man nodded to Joseph as he entered, which he took as a sign to install himself at the adjacent urinal. The construction worker appeared to be rubbing himself and smiling, Joseph recalled. “He was looking at me. He was trying to peek over. He was doing it. He seemed seasoned at this,” Joseph said. “He was giving an Oscar-winning performance.”

That performance ended when Joseph, thinking he’d met a fellow traveler, flashed the guy his penis. “We got one,” the undercover Amtrak police officer immediately said into a radio microphone hidden in his collar. Stunned and embarrassed, Joseph barely had time to put his penis away before he was handcuffed and marched through the station—his fly still unbuttoned—to a holding room, where he spent the next few hours. One other man was already there, looking humiliated and sad. Two more were eventually brought in as part of the same sting operation: one who was adamant he’d just been in the bathroom to pee and another man in his 20s who spoke only Spanish. Joseph then watched as this man, freaking out, was eventually handed over to immigration agents.

Joseph is among almost 200 people who have been arrested since June 1 as part of a crackdown on cruising in the Penn Station restroom, an Amtrak spokesperson told me. At least 20 of these men were immigrants transferred to ICE custody. While other mass public indecency arrests were made in Indiana, Arizona, and Illinois during the same period, the Penn Station operation was unique in its scale and length. Rep. Jerry Nadler and other outraged lawmakers dubbed it a “hostile arrest campaign reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era.”

There is a major difference, though, between that era and now: the once-secret world of cruising has never been more out in the open. As Amtrak police were arresting men, nearby cinemas were screening Plainclothes, a movie in which Tom Blyth portrays an undercover New York cop who patrols bathrooms and falls for one of his targets, played by Russell Tovey. When thousands gathered in a Clinton Hill warehouse during Pride Month for the “Twinks vs. Dolls” event, they did so amid ample signage and merchandise from co-sponsor, Sniffies, the map-based cruising app. Mainstream media stories about cruising and orgies have outraged some gay men who say that their safe spaces have been exposed.

But cruising’s real “outing” has occurred on social media, where a growing cottage industry of men are vying to become the Rick Steves of cruising. Guys on TikTok or Instagram will now teach you how to cruise at your gym or how to avoid getting caught in the steamroom. You can learn the best ways to pick up guys in a Barnes & Noble (Step One: “Pick a book you’re not actually reading”) or at your Lowes hardware store. (Step One: “Dress like you know your way around wood.”) You can see videos of men following each other among trees in public parks or tapping their feet in bathroom stalls in the manner of Larry Craig. One creator named Connor (who did not respond to requests for comment) has amassed over 375,000 followers over various accounts with a seemingly endless stream of videos in which he boasts graphically about cruising in airport bathrooms, waterparks, or at his local Macy’s. On X, where content guidelines are much freer, adult performers with hundreds of thousands of followers share explicit videos of themselves having sex with blurry-faced strangers in what appear to be department store changing rooms.

“I’m a teacher by nature and so I thought, Hey, cruising has been around forever. It’s part of our history. Why not teach on it?” said Chandler (his last name), a 34-year-old adult creator who posts instructional guides or suggestive stories themed to what he calls “CruiseTok.” He puts his openness on social media down to a desire for authenticity. “I think in today’s world, it’s more acceptable to be who you are. If that means showing your expression or passion, then yeah!”

But amid a resurgent right-wing that has sought to wind back LGBTQ rights, all this openness has left some, including Joseph, uncomfortable or even worried about what they see as unwanted attention. “I think calling attention to it and trying to get your social media clout from it is annoying,” he said. “The whole point—the whole, historical purpose of cruising was to be super low-key and discreet.” While information about cruising has always been available for people who wanted to seek it out, it’s now being entrusted to algorithms that can push it on people who aren’t, including, potentially, the authorities. All this has left some men wondering whether certain things should still be gate-kept.

“A lot of these much younger people that are 22 and excited about this activity, their natural inclination is just supposed to post it online. There’s no way to control that fire,” said Leo Herrera, an artist and author who self-published a guide to cruising last year. He likened cruising to manning a grill: You need some exposure to act as oxygen to get the fire going, but you want to be able to control it. In the past, cruising might have been fueled by scribbles on bathroom doors or gay hotlines or newspapers, but now it’s an algorithm. “It supercharges it to a level where it just kind of blows up in our face,” Herrera said. “How do we celebrate our sexuality while protecting it?”

by David Mack, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: blissbodywork_, dbchandler_, showoffjonah

The Precipice

May 1991. Mumbai. Night.

While politicians slept, trucks were loading gold—67 tonnes of it—at the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in South Bombay. Essentially all of India’s gold reserves. The trucks drove 35 kilometers to the airport under armed guard. There, the gold was loaded onto chartered cargo planes.

Commercial airlines had refused the job. Too risky. Too desperate.

Between May 21 and 31, four flights carried India’s treasure out of the country: 20 tonnes to UBS in Switzerland, 47 tonnes to the Bank of England in London. The RBI had to charter something called “Heavy Lift Cargo Airlines” because nobody else would touch this operation.

The gold was collateral. India was pawning its jewelry.

If you want to understand what this meant culturally, consider: In India, gold isn’t just an asset. It’s sacred. The goddess Lakshmi is depicted sitting on gold coins. Indian weddings feature kilograms of gold because “Does she have gold?” is the first question asked about brides. Women remove their gold only at death or divorce.

And here was the nation shipping its treasure to its former colonizer. At night. In secret. Like a family selling heirlooms to pay the landlord.

When the news leaked, there was public outrage: “We have pawned our mother’s jewelry!”

The operation raised $600 million.

It bought India about three weeks.

Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $1.2 billion—enough for roughly fifteen days of imports. Fifteen days until the food shipments stopped. Fifteen days until the oil stopped. Fifteen days until a nuclear-armed nation of 900 million people defaulted on its debts.

What happens when a country that size defaults? What happens when the imports stop?

We know what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. India was heading there—fast.

The Most Important People You’ve Never Heard Of

Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.

Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.

Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.

That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.

The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history. (...)

Nothing else comes close to democratic poverty alleviation at this scale.

And here’s the thing about crises: they don’t automatically produce reform. Crisis alone doesn’t fix anything.

Argentina has had crisis after crisis—and keeps defaulting, keeps returning to the same failed policies. Greece in 2010 accepted bailouts, changed almost nothing structural, and remains economically fragile. Venezuela’s oil crises led not to reform but to doubling down on socialism, and now people eat from garbage trucks.

The Soviet Union faced a crisis and collapsed. It didn’t reform. It disintegrated.

India could have gone any of those directions. What makes these three men remarkable isn’t that they faced a crisis—it’s that they converted crisis into transformation. That almost never happens.

And because it worked—because the catastrophe was prevented—nobody remembers.

You can’t feel gratitude for the plane that didn’t crash. You can’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster you never experienced. The counterfactual isn’t real to anyone.

This is why India forgot them. But that’s for Part 3. First, let’s understand what they were saving us from.

by Samir Varna |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

North Pole Economics

Or, how the Grinch stole Christmas. Again.

Earlier this year, toy makers said tariffs would put Christmas "at risk." NPR's A Martinez gets an update on the price of toys from Jay Foreman, CEO of Basic Fun.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

We have a follow-up conversation about the price of toys. During the summer, a toy industry group warned that the president's Liberation Day tariffs would put Christmas at risk. Well, the holidays are now upon us, so we've called back Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Fun! That's the home of Care Bears, Tonka trucks, Lincoln Logs and Lite-Brite. Jay, so it might sound like we are completely obsessed with the price of a classic steel Tonka truck, but I got to ask again - what is it going to cost this year?

JAY FOREMAN: Well, this year, it's going to cost about 40 bucks, given the tariffs and general inflation. Last year, it was 30 bucks, and the year before, it was 25. So things are really accelerating in the toy space.

MARTÍNEZ: And these price hikes - what does that do to your sales? Are Tonka trucks so classic that people are just going to buy them anyway, or are you seeing a slowdown?

FOREMAN: Well, we're seeing sort of two different effects. The first effect was that we lost about eight weeks of shipping in the middle of the season, as well as this sort of uncertainty about what the tariff level would be sort of stunted the traditional pattern of buying from the retailers. So we got a lot less orders this year than last year. So whether the consumer shows up or not, there are going to be less Tonka trucks in the market. The other aspect, of course, is the consumer sentiment. We are really now starting to feel the consumer is noticing that prices are up and affordability is becoming an issue.

MARTÍNEZ: So I was looking at a report from the market research group Circana, and they say U.S. toy sales have been up by 7% this year. How do we square what they say and what you're reporting?

FOREMAN: So there's really two factors there. One is if you increase the price of toys anywhere from 10% to 30% because you've got a 30% tariff, then your gross sales are going to go up regardless. But the other thing that's skewing the sales data is there's a huge trend right now in the toy business, which is collectible trading cards, which aren't really toys. They're as much as a publishing item as they are toys, but they're sort of tracked by Circana in toys. And things like Pokemon cards, NBA cards, Major League Baseball cards, Magic: The Gathering trading cards - they're on fire right now. And the toy industry might be seeing some increase in sales, but it's in a very narrow band of categories and with a small group of companies. The smaller or medium-sized companies are really hurting pretty bad this year over the tariffs.

MARTÍNEZ: The last time we spoke, too, we talked about maybe considering where you manufacture things. Has enough time passed for you to make some kind of call, or maybe at least be leaning in a certain direction when it comes to where you manufacture your toys?

FOREMAN: Yeah. I mean, we held fast here at Basic Fun! and we kept our production primarily in China. It's just the most reliable supply chain. When you start to move the supply chain and set up new manufacturing, there's a big learning curve, not to mention a huge cost. We also kind of bet on the fact that there will be a recognition by the administration at some point that China is a very important trading partner. Almost, we have a symbiotic relationship with them, and while they can joust with each other, at the end of the day, they've got to play ball. And while we'd love to bring toy manufacturing back to the U.S., it's not really practical. We don't have the type of labor here. We don't have factories set up. We don't have the ability to finance the development of factories. So we're an industry that's generally not really going to be coming back to the United States, like some other industries might have a better opportunity to. So we've stuck it out in China, and so far it's paid off for us.

MARTÍNEZ: We mentioned back in the summer, too, that toymakers were saying that Christmas was at risk. Was that hyperbole, or is that maybe more of a reality now than ever before?

FOREMAN: Well, I mean, it was not hyperbole when, you know, tariffs were 145% and it was a de facto embargo on importations, not just from China but from other markets. You know, remember, India's tariffs are 50% right now. You know, I always say that consumers can always find products to buy. Stores will never be empty. It's all about the stuff you really want, and is that available when you want it, or are you going to get the next best item? So Christmas will come. It always comes. It will be full of a few less of the more desirable types of products, and consumers will have to, you know, be satisfied with sometimes the next or the third best thing on their list.

by A Martínez, NPR | Read more:
Image: Tonka truck/Walmart

[ed. See also: Mark Zandi, Chief Economist/Moody's Analytical (X):]

***

We’ve just updated our spending by income group data for the second quarter of 2025, based on the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts and Survey of Consumer Finance. Looking at the data, it’s not a mystery why most Americans feel like the economy isn’t working for them. For those in the bottom 80% of the income distribution, those making less than approximately $175,000 a year – their spending has simply kept pace with inflation since the pandemic. The 20% of households that make more have done much better, and those in the top 3.3% of the distribution have done much, much, much better. The data also show that the U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do. As long as they keep spending, the economy should avoid recession, but if they turn more cautious, for whatever reason, the economy has a big problem.

[ed. Solution - just lower your expectations.]

“You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils...Every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two. They don’t need that many, but you always need you always need steel,” Trump said.

“You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls,” he added.

The Shadow President

On the afternoon of Feb. 12, Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, summoned a small group of career staffers to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting about foreign aid. A storm had dumped nearly 6 inches of snow on Washington, D.C. The rest of the federal government was running on a two-hour delay, but Vought had offered his team no such reprieve. As they filed into a second-floor conference room decorated with photos of past OMB directors, Vought took his seat at the center of a worn wooden table and laid his briefing materials out before him.

Vought, a bookish technocrat with an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the U.S. government, cuts an unusual figure in Trump’s inner circle of Fox News hosts and right-­wing influencers. He speaks in a flat, nasally monotone and, with his tortoiseshell glasses, standard-issue blue suits and corona of close-cropped hair, most resembles what he claims to despise: a federal bureaucrat. The Office of Management and Budget, like Vought himself, is little known outside the Beltway and poorly understood even among political insiders. What it lacks in cachet, however, it makes up for in the vast influence it wields across the government. Samuel Bagenstos, an OMB general counsel during the Biden administration, told me, “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB.”

The OMB reviews all significant regulations proposed by individual agencies. It vets executive orders before the president signs them. It issues workforce policies for more than 2 million federal employees. Most notably, every penny appropriated by Congress is dispensed by the OMB, making the agency a potential choke point in a federal bureaucracy that currently spends about $7 trillion a year. Shalanda Young, Vought’s predecessor, told me, “If you’re OK with your name not being in the spotlight and just getting stuff done,” then directing the OMB “can be one of the most powerful jobs in D.C.”

During Donald Trump’s first term, Vought (whose name is pronounced “vote”) did more than perhaps anyone else to turn the president’s demands and personal grievances into government action. In 2019, after Congress refused to fund Trump’s border wall, Vought, then the acting director of the OMB, redirected billions of dollars in Department of Defense money to build it. Later that year, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden, who was running for president, Vought froze $214 million in security assistance for Ukraine. “The president loved Russ because he could count on him,” Mark Paoletta, who has served as the OMB general counsel in both Trump administrations, said at a conservative policy summit in 2022, according to a recording I obtained. “He wasn’t a showboat, and he was committed to doing what the president wanted to do.” [ed. See Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.]

After the pro-Trump riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, many Republicans, including top administration officials, disavowed the president. Vought remained loyal. He echoed Trump’s baseless claims about election fraud and publicly defended people who were arrested for their participation in the melee. During the Biden years, Vought labored to translate the lessons of Trump’s tumultuous first term into a more effective second presidency. He chaired the transition portion of Project 2025, a joint effort by a coalition of conservative groups to develop a road map for the next Republican administration, helping to draft some 350 executive orders, regulations and other plans to more fully empower the president. “Despite his best thinking and the ­aggressive things they tried in Trump One, nothing really stuck,” a former OMB branch chief who served under Vought during the first Trump administration told me. “Most administrations don’t get a four-year pause or have the chance to think about ‘Why isn’t this working?’” The former branch chief added, “Now he gets to come back and steamroll everyone.” (...)

What Vought has done in the nine months since Trump took office goes much further than slashing foreign aid. Relying on an expansive theory of presidential power and a willingness to test the rule of law, he has frozen vast sums of federal spending, terminated tens of thousands of federal workers and, in a few cases, brought entire agencies to a standstill. In early October, after Senate Democrats refused to vote for a budget resolution without additional health care protections, effectively shutting down the government, Vought became the face of the White House’s response. On the second day of the closure, Trump shared an AI-generated video that depicted his budget director — who, by then, had threatened mass firings across the federal workforce and paused or canceled $26 billion in funding for infrastructure and clean-­energy projects in blue states — as the Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. “We work for the president of the United States,” a senior agency official who regularly deals with the OMB told me. But right now “it feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-­making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” (...)

Vought is a stated opponent of the status quo. One of the few prominent conservatives to embrace the label of “Christian nationalist,” he once told an audience that “the phrasing is too accurate to run away from the term. … I’m a Christian. I am a nationalist. We were meant to be a Christian nation.” American democracy, he has said, has been hijacked by rogue judges who make law from the bench and by a permanent class of government bureaucrats who want to advance “woke” policies designed to divide Americans and silence political opponents. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country, in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus,” Vought said in 2024, during a conference hosted by the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit think tank that he also founded. “And they have aimed it at us.”

by Andy Kroll, Pro Publica |  Read more:

Image: Evan Vucci/AP Images
[ed. What a piece of work. A modern day Eichmann pushing his modern day version of Führerprinzip (Leader Principle) - the basis of executive authority in the government of Nazi Germany that placed Hitler's word above all written law, and meant that government policies, decisions, and officials all served to realize his will. Also Gleichschaltung the process of Nazification by which Hitler established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society "from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education. See also: The White House Is a Lost Cause (NYT):]

***

Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs... It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.

The Trump Mind-Set Is Not Complex

[ed. Actions speak louder than words.]

Peering into the Trump mind-set — the logic underpinning his priorities, his morality, his decision making — is like opening up a garbage pail left out for days during a summer heat wave.  [ed. An opening line for the ages.]

The dominant theme is governing by narcissism: Make Trump Great Again.

President Trump can be persuaded with money, the purchase of his crypto coins, contributions and sometimes with plain old obsequious flattery.

The two shining lights that guide his notion of morality are his self-interest and the enhancement of his self-image, both of which crowd out consideration of the national interest and the public welfare.

The strongest example: his refusal to accept the humiliation of defeat in the 2020 election, resulting in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by his followers determined to “stop the steal,” and Trump’s subsequent pardoning of the insurrectionists.

He is blind to the harms, up to and including death, that he and his policies have inflicted here and abroad. The notion that his actions have worsened the economy is, to Trump, intolerable. Asked by Politico to rate his handling of the economy, Trump replied, “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

Trump relishes his hatreds. Revenge brings him joy. “I hate my opponent,” Trump told mourners for Charlie Kirk at a memorial service in Phoenix, with a tone of relish. “I don’t want what’s best for them.”

The profit motive — for himself, for his allies and for his donors — dominates Trump’s decision making across the gamut, from his pardons of convicted criminals to negotiation strategies with foreign leaders to the formulation of tax legislation.

Trump lacks a basic sense of fairness, exemplified by his disregard of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, and he feels no obligation to honor alliances designed to protect democratic states.

The key measure Trump uses in defining justice, on the one hand, is whether an individual, group, corporation or country supports him (the Jan. 6 insurrectionists), contributes to his wealth (crypto) or elevates his stature (Vladimir Putin’s praise.) On the other hand, he condemns and calls for criminal prosecutions of all those who challenged the legality of what he has done or suggested anything untoward about his relations with Russia.

Trump does not think strategically. Instead, his compulsive need to be a winner, to have his ego or bank account rewarded, precludes anything but short-term tactical calculations shaped by the pursuit of his self-interest.

To quote a once-famous Washington sportscaster, Warner Wolf, “Let’s go to the videotape”:

On Nov. 4, a delegation of Swiss industrialists gave Trump a high-end Rolex desktop clock and a 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) gold bar worth $130,000 inscribed 45 and 47. Ten days later, the Trump administration agreed to cut the 39 percent tariff on Swiss imports to 15 percent.

The initial 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, drawn by Russia and the United States, makes no mention of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, providing instead for Russian retention of land it now controls. The 28 points do provide for substantial American business investment in the region and the end of sanctions against Russia.

In a key article, “Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine,” the Wall Street Journal reporters Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove and Joe Parkinson wrote that the architects of the plan were “charting a path to bring Russia’s $2 trillion economy in from the cold — with American businesses first in line to beat European competitors to the dividends.”

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, posted a denunciation of the plan on X on Dec. 8:

It’s being described as a peace plan to end the Russian war in Ukraine, but if you look at the details, it has nothing to do with peace. It is a business deal to make the people around Donald Trump rich. It’s just corruption, through and through.

Rich Trump donors, Murphy continued,

are right now trying to get in on the action. One donor just recently paid hundreds of 1000s of dollars to a lobbyist that’s really close to Trump’s inner circle to try to buy the Nord Stream two pipeline that’s a Russian gas pipeline, once again, something that is only possible for these investors to get rich on if the war is over and the US lifts its sanctions. Another close Trump associate is in talks about acquiring a stake in a Russian Arctic gas project.

What does Ukraine get? Murphy asks and answers:

Nothing, nothing. This deal sells out Ukraine. In fact, this deal would require Ukraine to give to Russia territory that Russia doesn’t even currently control. It provides amnesty for all of the war crimes that Putin has committed...

Trump’s transactional mind-set translates into a zero-sum mentality driving his trade and tariffs wars, based on his conviction that other countries are ripping off the United States, causing, in turn, self-inflicted damage through inflationary pressures and strained relations with allies and adversaries alike.

I asked Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton who has written extensively on the rise and fall of constitutional government, to step back and describe the Trump administration. She replied by email:

Many autocrats have used their positions for self-enrichment — Orban, Erdogan, Putin, Modi and more. But none have raised this possibility for self-enrichment to the heights we have seen here in the U.S., in less than one year of Trump. Economists have called their governments predatory states because instead of providing services, these governments use public wealth for private benefit.

In the forward to a book about Hungary, “The Post-Communist Mafia State,” Scheppele wrote about the regime of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, but she said in her email that her comments apply equally well, if not more so, to the Trump presidency:

When a mafia-like organization goes from underworld to upperworld and controls the state itself, the resulting mafia state takes its newly acquired tools of governance and deploys them with the principles of a mafia — holding its own loyalists in line with rigorously enforced rules of discipline while benefiting them with the spoils of power, and threatening its enemies with criminal prosecutions, libel cases, tax audits, confiscation of property, denial of employment, surveillance and even veiled threats of violence.

Mafias also have another quality: They do not operate through formal rules, bureaucratic structures and transparent procedures. Because mafias have the mentality of criminal organizations, even when they are part of the upperworld, they are accustomed to making their crucial decisions in the shadows. Like in families on which they are modeled, the political relatives in mafias are rewarded for loyalty, not merit, and divorces occur on grounds of disloyalty rather than bad performance. The distribution of available resources within the family rewards solidarity and punishes improvisational deviation. It is precisely not based on law.

Along complementary lines, Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who specializes in the study of authoritarian politics, replied by email to my inquiries:

We know that strongman rule — where power is concentrated in the leadership — is associated with greater corruption. Examples from Viktor Orban in Hungary and Alberto Fujimori in Peru illustrate this well. The more power grows concentrated, the more that we see the leader, their close friends and family and loyal business elites profit.

We are observing this play out in the U.S. context, where Trump and those in his entourage are growing richer through a range of activities, from cryptocurrency to real estate deals in the Middle East.

At the extreme, Frantz continued, “this becomes a kleptocratic system.” (...)

While I agree in the main with Scheppele and Frantz, I think that in key respects Trump stands apart from Putin, Narendra Modi, Orban and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, distinctions that get lost when they are lumped together under such categories as the rulers of mafia states or nascent kleptocracies.

The most important characteristic separating the four foreign autocrats from Trump is that they think in the long term, calculating the broad implications of their decisions, while Trump’s thinking is short term, if not childlike.

Jonathan Martin, a senior political reporter for Politico, described this Trump characteristic well in his Dec. 4 essay, “The President Who Never Grew Up”:

Trump is living his best life in this second and final turn in the White House. Coming up on one year back in power, he’s turned the office into an adult fantasy camp, a Tom Hanks-in-”Big,” ice-cream-for-dinner escapade posing as a presidency.

Trump is one part Orban, Martin wrote,

making a mockery of the rule of law and wielding state power to reward friends and punish foes while eroding institutions. But he’s also a 12-year-old boy: There’s fun trips, lots of screen time, playing with toys, reliable kids’ menus and cool gifts under the tree — no socks or Trapper keepers.

Yet, as with all children, there are also outbursts in the middle of restaurants. Or in this case, the Cabinet Room.

Trump’s petulance is one of the reasons Putin, armed with the discipline of a former lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., runs rings around our president. At the same time, Trump’s childishness underpins his submissive adoration of his Russian counterpart.

Finally, in an administration known for its erratic adoption and sudden abandonment of policies, Trump has demonstrated an unwavering determination to enhance the fortunes of the rich while doing little or nothing to ameliorate worsening conditions for the working-class MAGA electorate that helped bring him to power.

I wrote about this before, but the MAGA electorate stands out from other political constituencies in its disproportionate share of lower-middle-income and middle-income voters, whose families make from $30,000 to $100,000 a year.

When the effects of the “big, beautiful” domestic policy act — tax cuts and reduced spending on health care and food stamps — are combined with the effects of Trump’s tariffs, these moderate to middle-income voters come out behind.

The Yale Budget Lab calculated that virtually everyone in the $30,000 to $100,000 range would come out a net loser. Households making $75,730, roughly the middle of that range, would lose, on average, $1,060 this year...

The gains, however, are tilted heavily toward the very rich, who hold a majority of the equities. Gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution do not exceed $8,000 for any decile. For those in the sixth through ninth deciles, gains range from roughly $10,750 to $51,000. In the top decile, the gain balloons to just under $280,000.

The more than quarter-million dollars going to families in the top decile is, however, chump change compared with how well Trump and his family made out during the first months of his second term.

On Oct. 16, Cryptonews reported that “the family of U.S. President Donald Trump has generated pretax gains of around $1 billion in the past year from their diverse array of crypto-related ventures, a new investigation reveals.”

In the meantime, the Trump family’s search for ways to profit continues unabated, with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, taking the lead in the most recent ventures.

On Dec. 11, The New York Post reported that Kushner had initiated talks with Marc Rowan’s Apollo Global Management and Henry Kravis’s KKR “to assist with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine.”

At the same time, Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, has put money up in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, joining the sovereign wealth firms for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

For Trump and his family, there is no separation of holding government office and making money.

by Thomas B. Edsall, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Stier for The New York Times. Source photograph by Doug Mills/The New York Times.
[ed. I'm still in denial that this country elected this guy not just once, but twice. As George W. Bush famously said "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.” ... or, whatever. But I'm actually a little hopeful these days, with a feeling that things are reorienting, new alliances being formed, new scenarios being gamed out, new calculations. Politicos smell blood in the water like sharks. Also, people don't like losing (or being on a losing team). As players and coaches in the professional and college football ranks will tell you - support can evaporate in an instant when fans decide they've given you enough of a chance. Everyone has a ' let's try something different' threshold. We'll see where it is for Trump supporters. See also: Trump’s Top Aide Acknowledges ‘Score Settling’ Behind Prosecutions (NYT:]

***

Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told an interviewer that she forged a “loose agreement” with Mr. Trump to stop focusing after three months on punishing antagonists, an effort that evidently did not succeed. While she insisted that Mr. Trump is not constantly thinking about retribution, she said that “when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Ms. Wiles made the comments in a series of extraordinarily unguarded interviews over the first year of Mr. Trump’s second term with the author Chris Whipple that are being published Tuesday by Vanity Fair. Not only did she confirm that Mr. Trump is using criminal prosecution to retaliate against adversaries, she also acknowledged that he was not telling the truth when he accused former President Bill Clinton of visiting the private island of the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Over the course of 11 interviews, Ms. Wiles offered pungent assessments of the president and his team: Mr. Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality.” Vice President JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion from Trump critic to ally was based not on principle but was “sort of political” because he was running for Senate. Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck,” whose actions were not always “rational” and left her “aghast.” Russell T. Vought, the budget director, is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And Attorney General Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” in handling the Epstein files.

***

[ed. And, as they say - there's more! From one the few token conservatives on the staff of the NY Times, see: Our Petty, Hollow, Squalid Ogre in Chief:]

Though I tend to think it’s usually a waste of space to devote a column to President Trump’s personality — what more is there to say about the character of this petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man? — sometimes the point bears stressing: We are led by the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.

Markets will not be moved, or brigades redeployed, or history shifted, because Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their home in Los Angeles, allegedly at the hands of their troubled son Nick. (...)

To which our ogre in chief had this to say on social media:

“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

I quote Trump’s post in full not only because it must be read to be believed, but also because it captures the combination of preposterous grandiosity, obsessive self-regard and gratuitous spite that “deranged” the Reiners and so many other Americans trying to hold on to a sense of national decency. Good people and good nations do not stomp on the grief of others. Politics is meant to end at the graveside. That’s not just some social nicety. It’s a foundational taboo that any civilized society must enforce to prevent transient personal differences from becoming generational blood feuds. (...)

Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized. (...)

This is not a country on the cusp of its “Golden Age,” to quote the president, except in the sense that gold futures are near a record high as a hedge against inflation. It’s a country that feels like a train coming off the rails, led by a driver whose own derangement was again laid bare in that contemptible assault on the Reiners, may their memories be for a blessing.

Home-Schooled Kids Are Not All Right

By my third year of home-schooling — in 1994, when I was 12 — Mom’s project of turning me back into an infant was nearly complete.

Ever since she’d pulled me out of school, she had been applying lighteners and hydrogen peroxide to restore my brownish hair to the bright blonde of its baby color. After reading that a crawling phase might help an infant develop fine motor control, she determined that, even at age 12, it might not be too late for me to crawl my way to better handwriting.

She had me crawl whenever I was at home, which was most of the time. Mom home schooled me between fourth and eighth grades, and even today, as a parent who has come to see plainly how damaging those years were, I know that she believed that her choice was in my best interest.

It was the lack of state oversight or standards that allowed our situation. It was the laws that failed me. Today, as home-schooling numbers continue to surge, similar laws fail to protect millions of kids.

Mom called what we did “unschooling,” a concept championed by the home-schooling pioneer John Holt. She agreed with his assertion that “schools are bad places for kids,” or at least for a certain kind of kid; my brother Aaron, she decided, was better suited for public school and was sent off on the bus each morning.

I, on the other hand, was a “creative global learner,” and Mom said that she was going to give me a “free-form education” in order to “pursue passions.” Other than math, which I began to do by correspondence course, I mostly spent my days with her visiting shops, libraries and restaurants of our rapidly-growing suburb, or else having “project time” — drawing superheroes, rereading my David Macaulay and Roald Dahl books, or writing short stories by the pool as Mom reapplied my hair bleach.

Mom had been going through a hard time — ever since we’d moved to Plano, Texas, her social life was dim, her career as a children’s magazine editor had been put on hiatus, and her own mother had begun a long decline into dementia — but my presence by her side seemed to lift her spirits. “You are better than any grown-up, Stef. You are more than all I need,” she told me.

I felt proud to help her, but silently I worried. The longer I spent at home with her (Dad was at work five days a week), the more impossible it seemed that I might ever go back into the world. I knew how badly my return to school would hurt her, and increasingly school seemed to me a terrifying place. I’d mostly lost my friendships from my old school, and my few attempts to re-enter the land of other kids had been failures; after just a day or two at a Boy Scout camp, I’d actively tried to contract conjunctivitis so that I could be sent home early.

Sometimes, flipping through one of my brother’s old textbooks, I’d see how far behind I’d already fallen. But who could I speak with about any of that?

As the years passed, my isolation deepened. My mom needed to take on part-time work, so now I largely spent my afternoons alone in my room, where there was no one to witness the long AOL Instant Messenger romance I carried on with a supposed teenage girl, who in fact turned out to be an older sexual predator. No one noticed the track of scars I’d been making on my hip with the tip of a compass. No one saw how I’d spend countless hours alone in my room with a portable TV inches from my face, wanting to disappear into the worlds onscreen.

Not once, in the four and a half years I spent at home, did anyone from the state come to assess what sort of education I was receiving, or even just to check on me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but our home-school had fallen into a newly legislated invisible space, where a child could easily vanish from public view. For much of the 20th century, the law was essentially silent with regard to home-schooling. The 1972 Supreme Court case of Wisconsin v. Yoder granted Amish parents the right to withdraw their children from school after eighth grade due to unique religious beliefs and practices, but the U.S. Supreme Court has never specifically addressed a constitutional right to home-schooling in general.

In the absence of any federal law or Supreme Court decision, home-schooling regulation was left to the states. In large part driven by fundamentalist Christian lobby groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association (H.S.L.D.A.), home-schooling had become formally legalized in nearly every state by the time Mom pulled me out of school in the 1990s. Over the following three decades, H.S.L.D.A. and an associated network of smaller organizations have been staggeringly successful in furthering their anti-regulation agenda and quashing dissent. Current home-school laws still differ by state, but in nearly all states the lack of oversight beggars belief.

In 48 states, registered sex offenders and adults with a conviction of crimes against minors can still home-school a child, effectively removing the child from the observation of other adults and peers, even if that child’s safety is under active investigation by child protective services. In 12 states (including Texas), parents aren’t required to submit any documentation to home-school. They can simply remove a child from school, and then they will no longer be subject to any mandatory state assessments or contact with officials. In another 17 states, families are required only to provide notice to the state of their intention to home-school, but they too face no state-mandated assessments.

In 19 of the 21 remaining states that do have laws requiring assessments of home-schooled children, the laws are not enforced in all home-schooling situations. In 49 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have their children screened for medical issues or ensure that they receive care. In 40 states, home-schooling parents are not required to have a high school diploma.

As the number of home-schoolers has surged — around half a million when I was a kid, driven to around 3.5 million since the pandemic — the country has passively endorsed a nationwide system of blind spots, where the fate of home-schooled children has been left almost entirely to their parents. States continue to allow parents to operate with little or no oversight, resigning the fates of millions of kids to the assumption that parents know best, even if evidence abounds that this is not always the case...

Legal definitions of abuse vary, but the choice to isolate a child from peers and outsiders seems to me plainly abusive. I would also characterize as abuse a parent’s decision to limit a child’s access to learning materials, or to indoctrinate a child into one mind-set or ideology without the possibility of other perspectives, or to willingly limit a child’s ability to function in a larger society.

Each home-school is different, and of course most home-schooling parents do not abuse or neglect their children. Indeed, for many parents, the choice to home-school is about prioritizing a child’s safety and better meeting a child’s special learning needs.

But what home-schooling experiences — good or bad — have in common is that they remove what schools provide: a place where children learn and are with one another, a place where adults outside the home interact with children and can intervene on a child’s behalf, and also a transparent, public minimum standard of education. (...)

In my research, I met a 45-year-old woman who was home-schooled in Mississippi in the late 1980s and 1990s, and her experience resembles a woefully familiar pattern. When she was in second grade, she says, her parents found a simple way of avoiding the questions that her teachers might ask if they saw the bruises on her body: They simply removed her and her siblings from that school and so from the gaze of concerned adults. She says that once she and her siblings were behind the legal veil of home-schooling, their parents continued to beat them, locked away any educational materials in the house, and forced the children to spend their days doing chores on the property.

Those who oppose regulation claim that such cases are rare, and they rightfully argue that educational neglect and abuse happen at school as well. But we’ve created a system in which it’s impossible to know how common home-schooling abuse might actually be. Because home-schoolers in many states are not even required to officially register, proper data collection can be nearly impossible, and children who exist under the sovereign power of a home-schooling parent face enormous risks by speaking out.

Those in favor of home-schooling also point to a multitude of home-school successes under current laws, and certainly there are a great many. I agree with the pro-home-school lobby that the close attention of parent-educators and the student-interest-led learning model can teach children how to learn in creative and uncommon ways.

All of which makes me wonder why it is that this same lobby fights so fiercely to keep these children from even minimal oversight. Indeed, it would seem that these parents would invite outside assessments to demonstrate the success of their approach. At the very least, it’s hard to understand why home-schooling parents would not warmly welcome routine checks of health and wellness, in order to protect those children whose parents misuse home-schooling to abuse and isolate their children.

My father and brother, reading my account of those years, tell me that they recognize the episodes I describe, but that even they — the closest observers of that time — did not know how alone and often lost I felt while they were at work and school, or how desperately I wished someone would put an end to the situation. “I just assumed your mom knew what was best,” Dad says. 

by Stefan Merrill Block, NY Times | Read more:

Image: Olivia Arthur/Magnum Photos

[ed. Boggles the mind. We have truancy laws for school attendance but no oversight or standardized testing for home-schooling?]

Federal Government Blocks State AI Regulation

President Trump issued an executive order yesterday attempting to thwart state AI laws, saying that federal agencies must fight state laws because Congress hasn’t yet implemented a national AI standard. Trump’s executive order tells the Justice Department, Commerce Department, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and other federal agencies to take a variety of actions.

“My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard—not 50 discordant State ones. The resulting framework must forbid State laws that conflict with the policy set forth in this order… Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation,” Trump’s order said. The order claims that state laws, such as one passed in Colorado, “are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models.”

Congressional Republicans recently decided not to include a Trump-backed plan to block state AI laws in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), although it could be included in other legislation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also failed to get congressional backing for legislation that would punish states with AI laws.

“After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump,” US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said yesterday. “With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet.”

Markey said that “a broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again.” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said the “executive order’s overly broad preemption threatens states with lawsuits and funding cuts for protecting their residents from AI-powered frauds, scams, and deepfakes.”

Trump orders Bondi to sue states

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said that “preventing states from enacting common-sense regulation that protects people from the very real harms of AI is absurd and dangerous. Congress has a responsibility to get this technology right—and quickly—but states must be allowed to act in the public interest in the meantime. I’ll be working with my colleagues to introduce a full repeal of this order in the coming days.”

The Trump order includes a variation on Cruz’s proposal to prevent states with AI laws from accessing broadband grant funds. The executive order also includes a plan that Trump recently floated to have the federal government file lawsuits against states with AI laws.

Within 30 days of yesterday’s order, US Attorney General Pam Bondi is required to create an AI Litigation Task Force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws inconsistent with the policy set forth in section 2 of this order, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment.”...

It would be up to Congress to decide whether to pass the proposed legislation. But the various other components of the executive order could dissuade states from implementing AI laws even if Congress takes no action.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Kamikaze pilot WWII via:

[ed. Umm... state's rights? Whatever. The main intent of course is to do nothing, allowing AI to progress without any external oversight or regulation. This decision will go to court, lose, be appealed, lose, and then a couple years later get dumped on the Supreme Court - pretty much the same game plan we've seen over and over again on other issues. In the mean time, AI models will become so dangerous (and imbedded) that even if the Supreme Court renders a negative ruling it'll be too late.]

Growing Pains: Taking the Magic Out of Mushrooms

‘The attrition is setting in’: how Oregon’s magic mushroom experiment lost its way.

Jenna Kluwe remembers all the beautiful moments she saw in a converted dental clinic in east Portland.

For six months, she managed the Journey Service Center, a “psilocybin service center” where adults 21 and older take supervised mushroom trips. She watched elderly clients with terminal illnesses able to enjoy life again. She saw one individual with obsessive compulsive disorder so severe they spent hours washing their hands who could casually eat food that fell on the floor.

“It’s like five years of therapy in five hours,” Kluwe, a former therapist from Michigan, said.

In 2020, Oregon made history by becoming the first US state to legalize the use of psilocybin in a supervised setting, paving the way for magic mushrooms to treat depression, PTSD and other mental health challenges. A flurry of facilities like the Journey Service Center, as well as training centers for facilitators to guide the sessions, sprung up across the state.

But five years later, the pioneering industry is grappling with growing pains. Kluwe recalled how early last year, her business partner abruptly told her the center was out of money and would close in March – the first in a wave of closures that set off alarms about the viability of Oregon’s program.

The Journey Service Center isn’t alone. The state’s total number of licensed service centers has dropped by nearly a third, to 24, since Oregon’s psilocybin program launched in 2023. The state’s 374 licensed facilitators, people who support clients during sessions, similarly fell. And just this week, Portland’s largest “shroom room” – an 11,000 sq ft venue with views of Mt Hood offering guided trips in addition to corporate retreats – reportedly closed down.

“The attrition is setting in, and a lot of people are not renewing their license because it is hard to make money,” said Gary Bracelin, the owner of Drop Thesis Psilocybin Service Center.

Many worry about how the program’s rules and fees have pushed the cost of a psilocybin session as high as $3,000, putting it out of reach for many just as psychedelics are gaining mainstream acceptance as a mental health treatment. Insurance typically doesn’t cover sessions, meaning people have to pay out of pocket.

Furthermore, the industry is struggling to reach a diverse group of clients: state data show that most people who’ve taken legal psilocybin in Oregon are white, over 44 and earn more than roughly $95,000 or more a year.

Depending on who you ask, these are either signs of an experiment buckling under hefty rules and fees – or a landmark program finding its footing.

“It’s not totally shocking for a brand new program to have a higher price tag,” said Heidi Pendergast, Oregon director of advocacy group Healing Advocacy Fund. She added: “I think that any new industry would see this sort of opening and closing.”

Pendergast pointed to data showing the program is safe with severe reactions vanishingly rare among the estimated 14,000 people who have taken legal psilocybin in the state since mid-2023.

Some practitioners, however, say the state has a long way to go to realize the program’s promises, while other centers are experimenting with new ways to keep costs down, broaden their clientele, and integrate with the mainstream medical system.

‘Some of them are total overkill’

Legal psilocybin seemed like a natural fit for Bracelin. The self-described serial entrepreneur previously founded a cannabis dispensary chain and did sales and marketing for outdoor products during snowboarding’s early days. When the program launched, he started jumping through the many hoops for Drop Thesis to start taking clients in January 2024.

The first obstacle, he said, was finding a property that met the state’s requirements to be more than 1,000 feet from a school and not located in a residential area – with a landlord willing to rent for the center. Bracelin said more than a dozen landlords turned him down before he found a spot. Then there was the challenge of getting insurance for a business centered on a federally illegal drug. The center used private funders instead of banks, he said.

Drop Thesis charges $2,900 for a session, which can last up to six hours as well as before and after meetings with a facilitator, while offering discounts to veterans and during Pride Month as well as one monthly scholarship that covers the full price, Bracelin said.

Factored into the price of a session is the cost of a facilitator and a “licensee representative” who walks clients through paperwork and other requirements. State rules require centers to pay a $10,000 annual licensing fees, install surveillance cameras, alarm systems and securely store mushrooms in safes.

“Some [rules] are definitely justified,” Bracelin said. “And some of them are total overkill, out of fear from people who don’t understand the product.”...

Adding to regulatory hurdles is the fact that Oregon’s local governments can ask voters to ban psilocybin businesses, creating a patchwork of bans in 25 of Oregon’s 36 counties and in dozens of cities.

Angela Allbee, the manager of Oregon’s psilocybin program, said in an emailed statement that the state became the first to enact regulations for a drug that’s federally illegal, and those regulations were written with broad input that have proven safe. As more data and feedback come in, the state will consider adjusting the rules, she said...

Although psilocybin is associated with mental health concerns, the 2020 ballot initiative that created Oregon’s program was designed to keep it outside of the medical system. Now, many supporters say it needs an outside source of cash, which could come from integration with the medical system.

Oregon lawmakers earlier this year took a first step toward making that a reality.

by Jake Thomas, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/Jake Thomas 

This is the future of war (NYT)

Video credit: HighGreat drone show, via YouTube

Human history can be told as a series of advances in warfare, from chariots to crossbows to nuclear-tipped missiles, and we are living through what may be the fastest advancement in weaponry ever. Ask any five veteran national security experts and you will hear about five different emerging technologies with the potential to change the world of combat. Swarms of robotic aircraft that work in unison to find and kill targets without any human oversight. Advanced cyberweapons that can immobilize armed forces and shut down electrical grids across the country. A.I.-designed bioweapons engineered to kill only those with certain genetic characteristics. (...)

The Biden administration imposed multiple safety controls on A.I. development and use, including by the military. Mr. Trump reversed some of those steps and replaced them with his own directive to revoke “barriers” to innovation. The Pentagon intends to expand its use of A.I. in intelligence analysis and combat in the coming months, a top official told a defense conference earlier this month. “The A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” said Vice President JD Vance at a summit in Paris in February.

The world is unprepared for what’s coming and what’s already here. As the wars of the 20th century showed, deterrence alone is often not enough to prevent the catastrophic use of new weapons.  ~ Editors, NY Times (12/9/2025)

***

[ed. We're on a trajectory for things to get much, much worse, and not just in war. Imagine police and ICE agents using swarms of these things the size of birds and bumble bees (as depicted in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer).

What’s the Point of Congress?

I came to Congress five years ago believing I could make a difference for my constituents, for South Carolina and for a country I love deeply. I was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel’s Corps of Cadets. I don’t scare easily.

But I’ve learned that the system in the House promotes control by party leaders over accountability and achievement. No one can be held responsible for inaction, so far too little gets done. The obstacles to achieving almost anything are enough to make any member who came to Washington with noble intentions ask: Why am I even here?

The House’s problems didn’t start with this Congress. They’ve been building for decades. The current leadership has failed to reverse it — and in some ways deepened it.

A small number of lawmakers negotiate major legislation behind closed doors and spring it on members with little notice or opportunity for input. Leadership promises members their provisions will be in a bill, then strips them out in final drafts. Every must-pass bill is loaded with thousands of pages of unrelated policies, presented as take-it-or-leave-it. The House has abdicated control of appropriations, which the Constitution says must originate here, to the Senate.

For much of our history, most House business was conducted under an open rule: Any member could offer any germane amendment. Over the last two decades, both parties have moved to closed and structured rules, in which no amendments or only handpicked amendments are allowed votes. The House has not considered a single open rule since 2016. Leaders of both parties have systematically silenced rank-and-file voices.

Consider some issues on which Americans have made up their minds. Banning congressional stock trading: Eighty-six percent of voters are in favor. Term limits: Eighty-seven percent of adults support them. Voter ID: Seventy-six percent of people support requirements. These are bipartisan supermajority positions. The House cannot hold a simple up-or-down vote on any of them.

Rank-and-file lawmakers can still use discharge petitions to force action on b ills leadership won’t schedule. If 218 members sign one, a bill must come to the floor. We used this tool to pass a bill ordering the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files. I signed another discharge petition that would force a vote on a bill to ban congressional stock trading. Nearly every colleague claims to support this policy — in town halls, in local papers, on cable news. But when asked to sign that petition, they vanish rather than upset House leadership.

Would opening up the floor lead to more conservative bills passing or more bipartisan ones? The honest answer is: It would do both. Only about 5 percent of the bills introduced this year have seen a floor vote. Some Republican priorities would finally get a vote. So, too, would common-sense bipartisan measures. The point is to do more and let voters see where their representatives stand. What we have now is the worst of all worlds: little accountability, transparency and results.

by Nancy Mace, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Haiyun Jiang
[ed. Out of sight, out of mind. Follow the herd. Two winning strategies for decades. It's always amusing to see some congressperson leave for whatever reason and return home to run for governor. They might win one term, but then people see them up close and it's all over. See also: Republican Women Suddenly Realize They’re Surrounded by Misogynists (NYT).]

Damage Control

$12 billion bailout for farmers.

On President Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” in April, when he announced the tariffs that have upended global trade, he vowed that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” The imposition of taxes on imports, the president promised, “will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” leading to lower prices for Americans.

So far it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.

At the White House on Monday, the president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers who have been battered in large part by his trade policies.

Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.

China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technological competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.

And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.

Mr. Trump insists that his signature decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 is working, or will soon. He continues to blame his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., for every economic woe, though the argument is getting thinner and thinner as he approaches, in just six weeks, his first anniversary in office.

He finds himself in roughly the place Mr. Biden did in early 2024: Telling the American people that they are doing great, when many don’t feel that way. He has dismissed talk of high prices at grocery stores, insisting they are coming down. But inflation edged upward in September, to about a 3 percent annual increase, almost exactly where it was when his predecessor left office.

Manufacturing jobs have continued to decline gradually this year, with losses of roughly 50,000 since January. (Such numbers contributed to the dismissal in July of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after Mr. Trump announced that downward revisions to the official jobs reports were “rigged.”)

Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump tried on Monday to portray the $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers as a victory, another piece of evidence — at least to him — that his decision to impose the highest tariffs on American imports since 1930 are working, or will soon. (...)

The numbers don’t quite add up: The U.S. has collected about $250 billion in tariff revenue this year — a bit shy of the $2.66 trillion in federal individual income taxes in the 2025 fiscal year.

The president has promised that tariff revenue will pay down the national debt, now at $38.45 trillion. Over the summer, he told lawmakers that other deals he is striking — some in return for lowering tariffs — would reduce some drug prices by 1,500 percent, a piece of mathematical gymnastics that left some in his audience mystified.

The numeric magic continued on Monday, when Mr. Trump said he was using some of those tariff revenues as a “bridge payment,” to tide American farmers over Chinese until purchases resume, a commitment Mr. Trump says he extracted from President Xi Jinping when they met in late October.

The repeated use of the word “bridge” by the president and his top economic aides seemed intended to signal to Americans that they just needed to hold on, and the promised benefits from tariff plan would pay off.

“This money would not be possible without tariffs,” he told a small group of farmers and rice refiners who were brought into the White House for the event. “The tariffs are taking in, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, and we’re giving some up to the farmers because they were mistreated by other countries, for maybe the right reasons, maybe wrong reasons.”

He was skipping by the fact that the imposition of the tariffs, primarily on China, led to a Chinese boycott of American farm goods. And now, to stem the bleeding for a core constituency, he was boasting that he was using tariffs receipts to compensate them. (Most of the payments will come through the Agriculture Department’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program, and are not directly funded by tariff income.) (...)

“The farmers problem is not entirely government-grown, but there is a big trade policy aspect to it,’’ said Scott Lincicome, director of general economics at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank that has objected to Mr. Trump’s moves toward state-directed capitalism.

“Prices are depressed because the Chinese boycotted our farm goods much of the year,” he noted. “But fertilizer, machinery, those costs have remained elevated, and subject to tariffs. You’ve heard Caterpillar and John Deere complain,” he said, referring to two of the biggest manufacturers of farm equipment, which Mr. Trump said on Monday he would also help by paying them tariff revenues. (...)

Mr. Lincicome said that the tariffs have also introduced a new level of “unprecedented, crippling and truly insane complexity” to operating businesses. It has only gotten more confusing as Mr. Trump has slashed some tariffs — on imported beef, for example — to mitigate supermarket prices.

by David Sanger, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Bob Brawdy/Tri-City Herald

[ed. Just making shit up as they go along, Band-Aids for self-inflicted foot wounds. These bridge subsidies are apparently in addition to what farmers receive annually through the Farm Bill (roughly 13.5 percent of net farm income) and, since January 2025, another $30 billion in "Ad Hoc" assistance (because something, something... Biden's fault). See also: Federal farm subsidies: What the data says (USA Facts).]