The Braindump Blog

Trump and his minions (and perhaps his masters?) have been busy. If there was anyone left who still took him “seriously but not literally” then a mere glance at a random smattering of recent headlines with the word Trump in would likely be enough to disabuse them of such a notion. Some events surprised even me, doomy as my mood has been for a some time.

Here, in the interests of creating a horrifying partial collection of the damage one man, and his devoted, wannabe or scared-of-not-being-seen-as adherents, can seemingly do to a country in just a few days - even one whose systems of power were explicitly designed to prevent a single lunatic trashing it all - are a few such occurrences, summarised. It is not exhaustive. There are many others I have missed or skipped.

This time, being about the fifth time I’ve started this post before giving up in an unproductive pit of despair, I’m going to try and restrict myself to a single sentence or two per inanity. Obviously, read the linked stuff for the context. And disclaimer, the US is not even the country I live in or have citizenship of, no doubt dramatically limiting my understanding of the practicalities. Right now I feel a great sympathy for those who do.

There’s a mix of truly bad stuff, stuff that solves no problem anyone ever had and is basically just for show, with a smattering of entries that support that the premise of the “the cruelty is the point” folk.

Let’s start with some grotesque geopolitics.

• Coming up with a Russia/Ukraine “Peace Plan” that would seem to require Ukraine to hand over $500 billion worth of its valuable natural resources to the US, let Putin keep the parts of their country he is currently on control of thanks to his unarguably illegal war of aggression, forbid Ukraine from joining NATO and get Europe to facilitate it all. So, basically, to encourage Putin to do it all again. The for-real plan seems to have been put together via a nice friendly phone call between Trump and Putin, who barely had the courtesy to let any Ukraine official know what fate they were trying to resign their country to. Anyone in Europe with any sense of morality was “stunned”.
• One of Trump’s rationales for the above abject capitulation? Well, Ukraine “never should have started it” he said about the conflict that, need it be said, was unilaterally started by an illegal Russian invasion onto their territory. Absolutely wild.
• In a new low for his love of “alternative facts”, Trump is also out there calling Ukraine President Zelenskyy “A dictator” who “has done a terrible job” who has a “4% approval rating”. He claims that the US gives more aid to Ukraine than Europe - not true in either absolute or percentage of GDP terms, and Russia isn’t really trying to destroy Kyiv, attacking only at “20%” of their capacity. And in fact Russia the ones that want to stop the war. Of course, none of this is remotely true. Useful idiot Trump has descended into becoming nothing other than the mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda.
• Imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court - you know, the only court that can “prosecute individuals for the international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression"-
• Coming up with a plan to forcibly banish all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to some undefined country, really any country that isn’t the US. And once the area has been ethnically cleansed to his taste, hand it over wholesale to US corporations to build and profit from a “Riviera of the Middle East”.-
• Trumps' VP, Vance, gave a speech in Europe turned out to be a “blistering and confrontational” attack on European politicians for such things as not hating immigrants enough, and then met with the appalling AfD leader in Germany. Presenters on Russian state TV were amongst the few fans, which says it all.

Next up, we see moves that appear to have the aim of eradicating the idea of a safe and inclusive education, free to teach a wide range of important facts, ran by those with the professional capacity, knowledge and training to do so.

• Blocked funding for any schools that try to teach certain facts about gender or race. A lot of facts, to be clear, including anything that “that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups”.
• And federal funding for schools who teach history in whichever way his cadre doesn’t personally like is also threatened. Instead of any mild critique of the sometimes horrific history of the US, teachers must engage only in “patriotic education” that includes an “inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding”.
• At one point he sounded like he was saying that schools that teach about slavery were on the chopping block. This isn’t entirely unprecedented for him. Back in 2020 he threatened any schools that mentioned that Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 project with defunding.
• Directed the attorney general to prosecute any teachers that have been “unlawfully facilitating” a student adopting a gender identity that doesn’t match their sex. We’re not talking about the ludicrous conspiracy theory that teachers are lopping off sex organs at random or whatever the latest claim is, but rather such things as counselling by trained school counsellors, acknowledging that a child is non-binary, using a trans student’s preferred name or pronouns, or allowing them to use bathrooms, locker rooms or participate in activities “specifically designated for persons of the opposite sex”.
• And it’s not like you can work around the latter issue by introducing gender neutral facilities. They “investigated” at least one high school from the committing the potential atrocity of…introducing a gender neutral bathroom.
• Wait, they’re apparently going to try and close the entire Department of Education. He can’t actually do that without Congress' approval so in the mean time his team is trying to diminish its existence as much as possible. Starting off with the staff: some employees have been put on leave, others pressured to quit.

Now for some “DEI means people DIE” 🤡🤡🤡 entries.

• Legislated that there are only 2 sexes, or perhaps it was 2 genders, if his inauguration speech is to be believed? In any case, all federal government output is now supposed to refer to sex and not gender. Not that hot takes from rabid political extremists should be the deciding factor on matters of fact but there we go.
• Your state-designated sex is to be defined by whether you have eggs or sperm at the moment of conception which scientists say makes no sense - humans have neither at that point.
• Decided that all diversity, equity and inclusion programs are “illegal”, stopping all related “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities” that refer to them within the federal government. This included putting all employees engaged on such topics on administrative leave.
• In what feels like a re-enactment of the Red Scare of the 1940s-1950s, Government agencies had to send in a list of the names of everyone involved in such work, then plan to lay them off asap. Websites and social media accounts that mentioned the topic had to be deleted. Trainings cancelled. Contractors terminated.
• And you didn’t even have to explicitly work in DEI to be targeted with the above. The employee purge apparently included, for instance, those with entirely unrelated jobs who turned up to a diversity training in the past. WaPo writes “The purging underway suggests that the agency is not just seeking to eliminate DEI but also to remove people who have expressed interest or participated in programs related to it”. I write: these snowflake babies now want to punish “thoughtcrime”.
• As an example of how far these scared little boys will go to avoid seeing the letters D, E and I in close proximity to each other, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has ordered the total destruction of 18 workplace safety publications. Seemingly because they happen to include a banned keyword such as “diversity”. Even though most of them are entirely unrelated to anything anyone could consider wokery.
• These include such radical brainwashing documents as the “Small Entity Compliance Guide for the Respiratory Protection Standard” which features this offending sentence: “the new computer software reflects the concept of government leadership through collaboration with diverse technical organizations”.
• The Department of Justice’s civil rights division was ordered to stop pursuing any new cases. These cases would include those enforcing the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which is the legislation that prevents, for instance, government contractors discriminating against employees on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Re-legalising discrimination; that’s novel. This follows the now standard order that mandatorily puts any of their staff involved in DEI programs on leave, with a view to shutting those programs down
• Yet more DEI panic as Trump et al. blame the recent devastating Los Angeles wildfires on, you guessed it, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Not the weather, climate change et al - Trump of course is a strong supporter of vastly expanding the use of heat-inducing fossil fuels. Nothing to do with building houses in dangerous fire zones, not to a flawed water distribution system. DEI, always DEI. Musk adds: “DEI means people DIE”. The people who actually do the work of fighting such fires of course vehemently disagree .
• He also thinks the recent tragically deadly crash of an American Airlines jet and a US military helicopter was down to DEI. His evidence? Because “I have common sense” and “It just could have been.”

Of course, there’s a particular prejudice to be seen against the very existence of trans folk.

• Suspending all US passport applications that contain an “X” sex marker, or “seeking a different sex marker than that defined by the terms of Trump’s executive order pertaining to gender.”. It wasn’t clear at the time what happens to existing passports in this position. The same issue would presumably occur for all federal identity type documents.
• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is moving to drop multiple cases against companies who are alleged to have discriminated against transgender people that were in progress. I guess discrimination is overly legal in this cowardly new world.
• Many federal departments, including the aforementioned Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, have deleted references to transgender identity from their websites.
• It’s also not clear whether Medicaid will continue to cover gender-affirming care.
• Trans people are banned from enlisting for the military.
• The National Park Service removed references to trans and queer people from its website about the Stonewall National Monument.
• The relevant executive order has special callouts for prisoners, requiring transgender women to be housed in men’s prisons and vice versa. All gender-affirming medical care in which is to cease.

Then we move on to doing their best to make the lived experience of immigrants even worse.

• Set in motion the expansion of Guantanamo Bay, of all places, to prepare a “huge detention facility” to hold up to 30,000 immigrants.
• Granting staff at a wide range of departments unrelated to immigration - e.g. the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Marshals Service - the power to deport immigrants; forming an “an expanded army of deportation officers”.
• If any US state or local officials get in the way of the ever harsher enforcement action, well, they are to be investigated and charged.
• Whilst we’re at it, 1,500 active-duty military troops are being sent to the southern border to “seal” it.
• Ending policies put limits on the abilities of agents to go around arresting immigrants in “sensitive locations” like schools and churches. Not that it couldn’t be done before, but until now, officers had to get approval to carry out operations in these types of places. The fear is that this will deter immigrants and their children, “legal” or otherwise, from getting medical help, attending school and the like.
• Attempted, counter to the very constitution the Trumpista type all pretend they love, to end birthright citizenship - although this was later blocked by a federal judge (for now).
• Promoted, via Executive Order, the (famously ineffective) death penalty, including instructing that the Attorney General must seek it in every federal capital crime committed by an undocumented person regardless of other factors. That the death penalty still exists is an atrocity; the US remains in the top 5 countries by number of executions. That the decision to apply it should be in any way based on where the person is from and whether they have certain documentation…I have no words. The National Immigration Law Center headlines their review of Trump’s orders “Unconstitutional, Illegal, and Cruel”.

Time to weaken America by deliberately diminishing the state.

• Offered money to almost all of the 3 million US federal employees if they leave their jobs right away, irrespective of who they are or what they do for their country - a move which is probably against the law as well as stupid. The email sent to everyone about this naturally had the same subject line - “Fork in the road” as the similar Twitter offer did.
• Fired at least 12 independent federal government watchdogs, which is likely against federal law.
• Proposed cutting $10.5 trillion from the federal spending budget over the next 10 years.
• Another section of employees targeted for forced dismissal: the many thousands of government employees currently in probationary periods. “Probationary” generally refers to tenure rather than performance, meaning only they started within the last year or two. Why these folk? Nothing to do with their suitability, skill or whether they’re doing jobs that are critical to good functioning of government - they just have even fewer employment rights than the average American employee so it’s just easier for these lazy wannabe-kings to ruin their livelihoods. At least 100 were terminated immediately following via a one-way group Microsoft Teams call.
• How to justify these firings? At least in some cases they did so by telling them that they’re being fired for poor performance, even when their actual performance review explicitly said they were exceptional performers with no issues whatsoever.
• All in all, as of February 15th, about 10,000 federal employees had been fired, with thousands more expected to be given their notice the next week. Thankfully, there’s been some pushback, judicial and otherwise.
• Unsurprisingly, some mistakes were made by the clowns involved in this mass random firing effort. Someone finally realised that actually the US would benefit from having some employees working the National Nuclear Security Administration, so tried to “unfire” them. But unfortunately, having shut down their email accounts, they found they don’t actually know how to contact some of them any more. Whoops. The US Department of Agriculture is similarly desperate to rehire a bunch of employees it fired that work on the H5N1 avian flu outbreak; a raging disease that has so far affected 23 million birds and 68 humans. Whether or not any of these people want to come back is of course a different story

They then attempted to utterly destroy USAID.

• Attempted to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau almost entirely.
• USAID was particularly hard hit. This is an aid agency with a budget of nearly $40 billion responsible for all sorts of global aid programs. The US government funds nearly half the world’s humanitarian initiatives - even whilst spending under 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, rather less generous in proportional terms than some countries. Its remit includes humanitarian crises, food security, public health, economic development, democracy and human rights.
• The chaotic and arbitrary overnight shutdown of USAID of course brought immediate devastation. Medical centres closed, displacement camp staff stopped work, a HIV program that has saved more than 20 million lives is gone, millions of dollars of medications are stuck in ports, programs providing education to Afghanistan’s girls, those that monitor Ebola outbreaks, anti-famine programs, the list of tens of thousands of programs goes on.
• “It’s not only a gift to our adversaries… it is plain illegal” says Senator Chris Van Hollen.
• Musk’s absolutely deranged reason for doing shutting down USAID? Well, USAID is a criminal “radical-left political psy op” he said, whilst busily spreading already-debunked disinformation about how it funded a trip for Hollywood stars to Ukraine, which it didn’t. Stop it with your radical-right political psy ops please.

The unelected megalomaniac Musk has been let loose.

• Appointed Elon Musk to head the made-up non-government non-department henceforth to be known as the Department Of Government Efficiency - chosen only because it acronyms to DOGE, Elon’s favourite memecoin of course, oh so hilarious these big strong men are - seemingly in order to speed up the absolute destruction of the last useful vestiges of American governance.
• What is DOGE? Well, no-one else knows, the administration having refused to make information about its spending and operations public. Overall it’s supposed to “trim fat” from the state. See above and below for what that actually ends up meaning.
• But what is it? Schroedinger’s Federal Agency. Trump treats it as federal agency, allowing it to embed with other agencies and order them as to what they must do, which only an agency could do. DOGE certainly thinks it has agency-level authority. However, they won’t respond to Freedom of Information requests or reveal anything about its funding, which agencies are obliged to do. Judge John Bates summarises as “we’re not an agency where we don’t want to be an agency, but we are an agency this one instance where we want to be”.
• The fat they’re trimming appear to be greedily gobbled up by themselves. It’s thought that they’ve received around $40 million of tax-payers' money. Where from? We don’t know. But there’s a good chance under the “purpose statute” it’s technically illegal.
• Musk himself is appointed as a “special government employee” so that he doesn’t have to divest himself of relevant financial interests before deciding to award more of the same publicly funded contracts that kept his companies alive in the past to himself again.
• This triggered a proposal for the Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy, or ELON MUSK, Act.
• Had Elon Musk’s ridiculous “DOGE” team access a load of sensitive computer systems and feed some of their private data, including people’s personal details, into some random AI, to decide who and what to cut next.
• Presumably also his team’s doing - inadvertently (?) exposing critical government computer systems - including those in nuclear labs - to the public internet: “adversaries such as Russia and China are dancing for joy.”
• Given “Big Balls” and the rest of Musk’s small team of recent high school graduates access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, the system that disburses trillions of dollars of payments across the government each year. The system is chock full of sensitive personal information about the millions of individuals who receive payments or refunds from the federal government.
• They also took over an Office of Personnel Management system containing the personal details of millions of federal employees, after revoking the access of the officials that actually did have authorisation and reason to use it - “There is no oversight. It creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications” says one.
• Let’s not forget just one of Musk’s companies receives $8 million per day from the US state. Trump of course fired the inspectors who “who traditionally oversee internal investigations into executive branch operations”.

Now it’s time to Make Americans Unhealthy Again.

• Frozen many of the activities carried out by the US National Institutes of Health, including requiring them to cancel grant reviews, cancel advisory council meetings, pause communications (which means they can’t recruit into trials for one, and it’s not clear whether publishing results will be OK), stop hiring people, rescind job offers already made as well as an “indefinite ban” on travel. A small part of this is apparently normal when a new administration comes in, but not to this extent: “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating” says one NIH employee.
• My mistake, the travel ban is governmentwide, not just the NIH.
• The Department of Health and Human Services ordered to stop publishing “regulations, guidance documents, grant announcements, social media posts, press releases, and other communications” as well as cancelling speaking engagements.
• Started the process of withdrawing the US from the World Health Organisation - ‘“Oooh, that’s a big one,” the newly inaugurated US president said as he signed the document concerned.

In yet more examples of the MAGA right carrying out the precise behaviours that they falsely impute with horror to their more liberal opponents, state censorship is back with us with a vengeance.

• Entirely banned the Associated Press - one of the founding members of the White House press pool - from their press pool. Why? Because they occasionally still say the phrase “Gulf of Mexico” when giving context to their international audience. Trump of course wants them to say “Gulf of America”. Can’t say the M word.
• Carrying out a loyalty screening for at least 160 civil servants on the National Security Council.
• Prior to that, Trump officials were questioning some (non-political) career civil servants as to who they voted for, which political parties they contributed to and whether they made any social media posts that Trump’s team would consider “incriminating”.
• In the mean time, Trump signed a “Schedule F” order that made it easier to fire any longstanding civil servants he doesn’t enjoy the company of.
• More on thoughtcrime: the CDC instructs its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research being considered by any journal, internal or external. Why? Because every publication must be checked to ensure it contains no “forbidden terms”. Orwell was spot on; he just misidentified where the 2025 threat would come from.
• Forbidden terms come from a list consisting of items like “Gender”, “non-binary”, “biologically male” and so on. This might be…a whole lot of studies given most health manuscripts include demographic information. A culture of “pre-emptive obedience” is to be seen as no-one is quite sure whether reporting how many women were in their study is a “woke ideology” sackable offence.
• One of many reasons this is a huge problem is that Trump seems to have forgotten to tell diseases they are not allowed to ravage patients upon demographic lines; Black Americans are 3x as likely to die from asthma as White Americans for instance. Heart disease presents differently in men than women. Scientists are no longer allowed to ask why, let alone do anything about it.
• The CDC had already been forced to halt publishing their own “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (amongst others) for the first time in 60 years due to a “gag order on public health publications” that haven’t been explicitly approved by the president or his appointees.
• Several scientific datasets and sources public health information have been removed from government websites. This includes information from a wide range of often predictable topics - adolescent health, LGBTQ+ rights, HIV, hepatitis, STDs, TB and a tool that assesses a social vulnerability index. The website associated with the largest monitoring program regarding health-related behaviours in adolescents is gone. As is the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, a website about ending structural racism, one on women’s health equity and inclusion and page informing folk who are pregnant about food safety. Researchers and others are scrambling to save what is there before it’s gone.
• It’s not just vaguely “DEI” topics that are going. Environment and climate datasets are at big risk. The US Department of Agriculture has been told to delete references to climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency has binned or hidden a lot of its climate info. This is nothing new - during the last Trump administration a big chunk of data on the environment and climate change was removed or altered.

Finally, onto a grab-bag of unthemed garbage.

• Respecting the dignity of the office just as George Washington would I’m sure- the Trump family created and started selling a $TRUMP cryptocurrency meme-coin
• This enabled a handful of people to make a vast profit, but over 800 thousand other folk suffer a cumulative loss of an estimate $2 billion. Worry not for the big guy himself though, who guaranteed himself a cool $100 million income from the trading fees.
• Renamed the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America”, and “Mount Denali” as “Mount McKinley”.
• Unilaterally pardoned 1500 people who had been successfully charged for criminal offences around January 6th 2021 attack on the US Capitol - and commuted the sentences of 14 of his other supporters.
• Full pardons were given to many, including those found guilty of assaulting police officers. Police Unions are amongst the many groups who are not pleased by this. As a reminder, more than 140 police officers were injured, and several people died that day. And it could have been so much worse.
• Some of the pardoned folk above include those involved in the despicable “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” groups and had been successfully convicted of seditious conspiracy. Harrowing sentences like “Now that he is out, the Proud Boys leader wants revenge, he told Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist host of Info Wars” tells us all we need to know about the wisdom of releasing some of them into the public domain.
• Tried to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico (later rescinded, or at least delayed), and 10% on China. The stock market fell. Prices will inevitably rise. The whole idea is “the dumbest trade war in history” according to the WSJ.

Folk aware of “Project 2025” might feel familiar with some of the above. Trump did disavow himself of that particular enterprise. But whilst it’s certainly not hard to believe he hasn’t read the extremely lengthy final report from the team concerned (although some folk claim do his supposed lack of knowledge about this is ‘preposterous') some of his policies sure do happen to align nicely.

Not all, but some. Forbes gave a run-down of Trump’s executive orders vs the 2025 folks’ desires - as far as the latter could be determined from the 2025 crew’s apparently extremely internally inconsistent document.

“Rustic Gorilla” has set up a handy Project 2025 tracker if you want to follow along with the progress towards that world, which at the time of writing claims that 35% of Project 2025’s policies have been effectively put in place, with another 41 in progress.

He’s certainly appointed some of the Project 2025 folk to powerful places in his administration - quelle coincidence! - so whether or not Trump cares about said project, the people around him surely do.

Some would say that it’s pointless to have constructed the above list, at least if the intent is to actually do something to reduce the existence of all this Bad Stuff (which, much as I wish I could, I’m not sure is my intent here. Something closer to personal therapy perhaps). After all “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism” says 404 Media. “Blogging is a poor tool for political resistance; clicktivism is not activism” says Ajay. I suspect they’re right for the most part.

Others would say there’s perhaps even an amount of dangerous folly in writing about this stuff. “The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them” says Katherine Cross.

Stop believing Trump Ezra Klein implores us, lest we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. He has only the powers of the presidency, which are not infinite.

Whilst I’m not sure I buy the latter sentiment 100%, undoubtedly Trump has been stopped from doing some of what he wanted. The birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, as was his desired spending freeze. Some of the fired employees are being unfired, if they can be tracked down. His tariffs on Mexico and Canada have been, at the least, postponed. Some of the deleted health datasets and information were ordered to be put back, albeit with stupid warnings about them being “extremely inaccurate” and “not reflect[ing] biological reality”.

So maybe there is some hope to stop the most illegal and least humane stuff, if not the ideas behind it. Trump’s abject fear of appearing weak, of encountering someone influential who has the boldness to say no to him, might just keep him away from pursuing the most audacious of unlawful and harmful stuff.

In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.

…

Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The idea is to not make it seem like Trump can and is doing everything he wants to do, that he’s powerful enough to defy all reason and law - including the very constitution that some of his adherents pretend they value above all else, in order to satiate his whim of the day. To do so risks making it true; if we feel like we can’t stop him running roughshod over decades of civilised progress then in fact we may not even try to stop him when he tries.

It is true that some of his wilder actions have already failed, been pushed back, forcing this “uncompromising strongman” to compromise, to give up. If we lose faith in our ability to constrain his action then he surely will get away with doing what he wants. Or perhaps rather the bidding of what those around him want him to do, given his status as a uniquely thin-skinned and manipulable figurehead of power.

“Manipulable” feels to me like a key word here. Much as it’d be satisfying to discover a smoking gun of genuine conspiracy, I personally doubt he is, for instance, a (knowing) secret Russian asset - even whilst his lily-livered approach to “solving” the Russia/Ukraine conflict is absolutely going to make Putin smile as he repeats exactly what an actual Russian secret agent would say.

But my guess is that Russian Plutocrats are probably not bribing him directly, not meeting him in smoky rooms to decide how to further the geopolitical interests of Putin. Trump may well not be aware that he’s doing their bidding, dangling on their puppet-strings. Why would the Russian oligarchy waste their time and money when Trump’s greed, delicate ego and admiration of perceived “strongmen” makes him so easy to manipulate for free?

After all, a single tweet appears to have the power to send him over the edge - his masculinity so fragile, the Platonic ideal of a snowflake - that the mildest challenge to his ill-earned dominance, or the gentlest hint that you admire him, is enough to push him in a wild new direction. Last time he held the office his aides knew to only show him the subset of polls that were favourable to him. It has been claimed that - brace yourself for an unfortunate image - Trump’s Ego Is so Fragile, His ‘Fluffer’ Secret Service Agents Have to Tell People to Say Nice Things to Him.

Perhaps the severest of danger then comes from the people around him. Several people have described what’s going on as a kind of coup, mostly on the basis of Mr Elon “never won an election, never told a funny joke” Musk’s apparent dominance.

After all, given the Republican’s control of the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and, to all intents and purposes, the Supreme Court, they could surely get a lot of what they supposedly want to see in the world done via the standard US political machinery using “normal” methods, for want of a better description. But, as Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Instead, they are permitting unelected billionaire Elon Musk, whose investment of $290 million in Trump and other Republican candidates in the 2024 election apparently has bought him freedom to run the government, to override Congress and enact whatever his own policies are by rooting around in government agencies and cancelling those programs that he, personally, dislikes.

The replacement of our constitutional system of government with the whims of an unelected private citizen is a coup.⁠⁠

There is no respect whatsoever for the fundamentals of the American political system, from the party who traditionally would likely have defended much of the system, including such venerated documents as the US Constitution even to a fault.

Mike Brock writes:

This isn’t just another political crisis—it’s an existential threat to the constitutional order that has secured human liberty for over two centuries. Every American who understands the value of this inheritance has a duty to resist its destruction. The Constitution doesn’t defend itself—it requires citizens willing to stand for the principles of democratic governance against those who would replace the rule of law with the rule of men.

Apparently former free-speech-absolutist (lol), encrypted-messenger-app-Signal recommending Elon Musk has decided that it would be a travesty to allow other people to speak freely about the encrypted messenger app Signal. Henceforth, it’s been noticed that any links to “signal.me” are blocked on Twitter/X.

Signal.me URLs allow users to send out a link where others can quickly contact them through the Signal app.

Signal is a great app. Everyone should use it, and not just because of the latest whim of the world’s richest pub bore. As Disruptionist notes in their article publicising this:

Signal has been especially important over these past few weeks as federal employees have reached out to journalists to blow the whistle on what Elon Musk’s DOGE have been doing with access to data within numerous government agencies.

An astonishing coincidence I’m sure.

Starmer to join Macron-led European crisis summit on Trump’s Ukraine plan.

Wouldn’t it be something if Trump’s embarrassing ‘deal’ to give Putin a good chunk of what he wants whilst taking huge quantities of Ukraine’s natural resources for himself, and Vance’s raving and ranting about how bad all things European are actually caused the EU to stop pulling itself apart, and grow in strength and unity?

With even Britain possibly getting a bit more involved than it has deigned to be in recent times.

Whilst I’m probably simply ingesting vast amounts of copium, we can but hope for any silver lining that might come from the current rogue US administration’s terrible policies.

The poor guy who accidentally binned a hard drive containing what is now £600 million worth of Bitcoin twelve years ago is back in the news, considering whether to try buying the entire landfill site he believes it’s buried in.

It sounds like he’s no longer with his partner back then who ‘is said to have mistaken the bag for rubbish and taken it with her on a trip to the dump’.

He’s been unsuccessfully fighting his cause to be allowed to go and look for it for over a decade now. Each time the story comes up the Bitcoin is of course ‘worth’ more and more.

The incessant infusion of relentless advertising continues.

Imagine coming to a stop in your prize $50,000 fancy Jeep only to have the in-car screen replace its controls with a pop up advert.

No need to imagine because this is now what happens of course. Ugh.

Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.

This does not seem either safe nor desirable.

…when people buy a vehicle, they expect to own it–not to be treated like a captive audience for targeted marketing.

Statista visualises some data from Duetti’s pretty interesting 2024 Music Economics Report.

Spotify continues to be amongst the worst of the music streamers in terms of paying out some tiny fraction of their income to artists that get a lot of streams. The monthly cost of their paid subscription for their own customers gone up at least twice over the past 2-3 years, but the earnings per 1000 streams they pay out to the folk that make the music continues to decline.

I would not have guessed Amazon would top the list. I don’t know how their calculation works - but I wonder if it relates to the fact there’s probably a ton of people out there who pay for Amazon Prime but don’t even realise they get music streaming included.

TIL: It’s illegal to sell or consume alcohol in Colombia during the days surrounding an election. This is the so-called ‘dry law’.

As stated in Article 206 of the Electoral Code, the sale and consumption of alcohol is strictly prohibited starting the day before the election lasting until the day following the end of the voting period.

“They are norms for conserving public order during the election period,” Colombia’s Minister of the Interior German Vargas Lleras had said.

Now I’m wondering how many people around the world do drink-and-vote. It would explain a lot.

Perhaps the only good thing that remains of American politics is their mastery of naming their government things via wince-inducing backronyms.

Of course it goes without saying that it is absolutely no coincidence that the current Demonic King of the Cringe-Coup-Castle, Musk, is head of a magical new non-governmental unelected Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE, you see, his favourite shitcoin).

In reaction, one of the apparently less cowardly members of the House of Representatives, Mark Pocan has introduced a bill called the “Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy” act. Or, ELON MUSK, of course.

Very hilarious, but also very necessary, at least to the extent that they’re still pretending that the rule of law matters. As it stands, Musk is a “Special Government Employee”, which seems to mean there’s not such a hard limit on how money he can personally receive via federal contracts. Proper, actual, government officials - those who were not appointed solely on the basis that they are very rich but are still prepared to debase themselves in public in service to Trump’s whim of the day - such as Members of Congress are banned from such obvious conflicts of interest.

Per Pocan’s team:

Last year, Elon Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Donald Trump. Since Election Day, he has become $154 billion richer, a nearly 600x return on his investment. Now, Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire, has taken control of highly sensitive information in the U.S. Treasury Department and has tried to shut down USAID without any federal oversight. Contracts to his business interests by the Federal Government have exceeded $20 billion, with some additional contracts with undisclosed amounts, as in the case of Starlink.

It seems recent hardcore-Trump convert Mark Zuckerberg just can’t resist funnelling off as much of his company’s ill-gained wealth as realistically possible to Trump. Fresh off of giving him $1 million for his inauguration party, it turns out that Meta has agreed to pay Trump $25 million for having committed the cardinal sin of temporarily suspending his Facebook account for breaking the “don’t constantly lie about elections so as to cause a violent insurrection” part of their terms and conditions.

As it happens, Facebook also (permanently) disabled my account some time ago for reasons so benign I never understood what I was supposed to have done, other than if “refusing to use it” is somehow equivalent to “being a spammer” in their mad world. No right of appeal. So, fair’s fair.

Apparently only one of us was damaged by the action enough that we didn’t become the president of a country, so I’m of course looking forward to receiving a significantly higher pile of cash in the mail.

📺 Watched season 1 of Out There.

This was a surprise find, coming from being in the company of a person who selects shows in the traditional TV manner of turning it on and seeing what’s playing live through the aerial when episode one just happened to be starting- in many ways a far more efficient method than the whole “hope the internet is working well and scroll through Netflix for half an hour paralysed with indecision” modern way.

This one turned out to be a most fortuitous find! With popping (m)any spoilers into the mix, a farmer’s son gets mixed up with the criminal underworld, being inadvertently dragged into the life of a county lines drug runner. Things get worse, at which point his dad has to decide how far he’s prepared to go to keep him safe and free.

It does get a bit ludicrous as time goes on - at least I hope what goes down doesn’t happen too much in non-fictional life - but I anyway found it a highly compelling watch. It’s real sin is really not resolving very much at the end of the season. I hope they are absolutely sure they’re making a season 2 - and that I remember what happened in season 1 by then - otherwise it’s going to be a bit frustrating.

📺 Watched season 3 of The Traitors.

The UK version is back, with the same basic premise as the earlier seasons. A group of strangers must do challenges to win money and then cruelly ex-communicate folk that they suspect have been secretly assigned the role of traitors in order to keep the money in the end - the remaining traitors keeping it all if any survive.

It’s the show that I suspect is so unhealthy for the participants that it perhaps shouldn’t exist, and yet watching how the “faithful” come up with their theories as to who is not as white-hat as they themselves are is entirely compelling, as is seeing the descent into evil for the traitors who basically have to decide exactly how much they’re prepared to lie to other people’s faces in the name of monetary gain.

I hope the post-show psychologists know how to fix everyone’s broken minds after the fact.

For this season in particular, I’m very curious what would have happened if the s**r twist (censored for potential spoiler reasons) hadn’t happened. No way to know, but my guess is the ending would have been different.

(There’s also season 1 and season 2 for the uninitiated.)

📺 Watched Grieving Mother: AI was the Stranger in my Home.

This is a video from a company that a friend of a friend is involved with: Mostly Human Media, a company that aims to tell ‘the story of technology through the most important lens: the human one’.

In this episode of Dear Tomorrow (so far it’s the only one as far as I can tell) technology reporter Laurie Segall digs into some potential risks of supposedly ‘empathic’ generative AI, especially when it goes out of its way to appear human.

Here’s the full episode on YouTube:

The report centres itself around the tragic case of 14-year old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life last year. The last message police found on his phone, written immediately before he died, was to a simulation of Daenerys Targaryen offered up by chatbot company character.ai, where fake Daenerys had said:

Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

Previous messages he’d written to the bot, and others hosted by the same company, were deeply personal, sometimes sexually explicit, and at times talking about obvious mental health issues, including on the topic of self harm and suicide. In any case, nothing had been done to intervene, no alerts were raised - in the vastly unregulated AI environment we exist in at present the company concerned may have felt no obligation to do so even if it knew, and no one else had a realistic way to know what was going on.

For what it’s worth, Segall finds that the company even had a bot modelled after a clinical psychologist which appears to have a habit of pretending it’s a real human with real medical qualifications working in a real hospital, at least if one didn’t read the small print.

I’m sure few responsible people would make the claim that AI is likely to be the sole factor that led to this tragic death. But how certain can we be that it didn’t play any causal role whatsoever on Sewell’s awful path to the end? Or, even if it was in no way a part of the process, that nothing could have been done based on the information available to character.ai to make change the ending of this terrible story?

It remains pretty incredible to me that we’ve allowed private companies to offer up en-masse a bunch of somewhat unpredictable content generators that present in the moment as though they were other humans. Often they’re even marketed in that manner explicitly - ‘Cure your loneliness! Get a virtual girlfriend! This friend will never leave you (as long as you pay the subscription fee)!’ - including to children, without anyone concerned really having felt the need to test what effect such an unprecedented

Continued upsetting news about our inadequate response to the ever-present problem of violence against women and girls in the UK - or VAWG, as it seems to have been acronymed - from The Guardian’s reporting.

Despite the fact it’s famously under-reported, such offences apparently constituted 20% of all police-recorded crime in 2022-23.

And the proportion of the UK women that underwent sexual assault per year went up from 3.4% to 4.3% in the year 2023-24.

Starmer’s government has a goal to “halve violence against women and girls in a decade”. I desperately hope they furnish the effort with enough resources to give it a fighting chance of working.

Labour might be claiming that “growth” is their number one priority - and sure, they’re laying out some policies that might help substantiate that.

Per Starmer and his decision-making process.

‘Should we do X? If it’s good for growth, good for wealth creation the answer is ‘yes’, if it’s not then the answer is ‘no’.

That is of course a tool far too blunt for me to feel comfortable with - even if I could somehow persuade myself that “wealth creation” should be our key goal. But it doesn’t exactly reflect what they’re up to anyway. Apparently there remain at least a couple of issues that supercede even that number one priority.

Economists have suggested that two of the most immediate ways to boost growth would be higher migration and a better trading relationship with the European Union, neither of which Reeves is expected to address in her speech.

🎶 Listening to Happenings by Kasabian.

Twenty years after their eponymous first album, Kasabian released number 8 last year.

The singer has changed since those days, thanks to the departure of Tom Meighan in 2020 after it was determined he had assaulted his partner. Serge Pizzorno now lead-sings.

And so have the vibes changed a bit, it being a bit more dancey and poppy than I remember some of the early albums being. But not offensively so; and who amongst us hasn’t changed in the last two decades? There’s still plenty of potential stadium sing-a-long moments to be found here.

Never let it be said that no tech billionaire has ever had a valid and accurate thought.

Bill Gates has labelled Elon Musk’s embrace of far-right politicians and attempt to interfere in the politics of other countries – including the UK – as “insane shit”.

Source.

A recent edition of New Statesman listed out their recommended “Twenty-five books to read in 2025”. That’s a list of books due to come out in 2025 to be clear, so none of us can possibly have read any of them yet.

Naturally this has done nothing other than make my want to read list continue grow exponentially faster than my to-read list. Worse yet, it’s almost the end of month 1 and my personal goal to read more books this year has so far got me into the grand position of having read - after almost 1/12th of the year has elapsed - a grand total of:

Zero books.

The shame of it.

Ugh. Oh well, here’s what I nontheless can’t resist adding to the “if only” list.

World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics, by Bruno Maçães:

World politics has changed, claims Bruno Maçães. Geopolitics is no longer simply a contest to control territory: in this age of advanced technology, it has become a contest to create the territory. Great powers seek to build a world for other states to inhabit, while keeping the ability to change the rules or the state of the world when necessary.

At a moment when the old concepts no longer work, this book aims to introduce a radically new theory of world politics and technology. Understood as ‘world building’, the most important events of our troubled times suddenly appear connected and their inner logic is revealed: technology wars between China and the United States, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the energy transition.

To conclude, Maçães considers the more distant future, when the metaverse and artificial intelligence become the world, a world the great powers must struggle to build and control.

Get In - The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power under Keir Starmer.

Minority Rule, by Ash Sarkar.

‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they’ll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren’t actually silencing the ‘forgotten’ working class, immigrants aren’t eating your pets, trans-activists aren’t corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn’t crushing free speech.

In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it’s facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.

The Age of Diagnosis, by Suzanne O’Sullivan

…a meticulous and compassionate exploration of how our culture of medical diagnosis can harm, rather than help, patients

How to Think About AI - A Guide for the Perplexed, by Richard Susskind

Revealing the unfolding story of Artificial Intelligence, Richard Susskind presents a short non-technical guide that challenges us to think differently about AI. Susskind brings AI out of computing laboratories, big tech companies, and start-ups - and into everyday life.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, by Quinn Slobodian

Neoliberals should have seen the end of the Cold War as a total victory—but they didn’t. Instead, they saw the chameleon of communism changing colors from red to green. The poison of civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism ran through the veins of the body politic and they needed an antidote.

To defy demands for equality, many neoliberals turned to nature. Race, intelligence, territory, and precious metal would be bulwarks against progressive politics. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they articulated a philosophy of three hards—hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money—and forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists, and goldbugs that would become known as the alt-right.

Following Hayek’s bastards from Murray Rothbard to Charles Murray to Javier Milei, we find that key strains of the Far Right emerged within the neoliberal intellectual movement not against it. What has been reported as an ideological backlash against neoliberal globalization in recent years is often more of a frontlash. This history of ideas shows us that the reported clash of opposites is more like a family feud.

The Genuis Myth, by Helen Lewis

The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor.

You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate.

Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use — without really questioning what it means.

Spotify, a company which is fairly famously not even an American-HQd enterprise (it’s Swedish), is giving me ever more reason to rant about its malign influence.

They too donated to Trump’s inauguration. Not as much as the bigger, equally irresponsible, US tech billionaires, sure. But, rabid self-interested politics and basic human ethics aside, I’m sure it still feels like a $150,000 kick in the teeth for, amongst others, the musicians that allow it to exist in the first place - especially given its notorious ungenerousness to the folks that allow it to exist.

Björk, for other reasons, also recently expressed a non-too favourable opinion of the company, telling a Swedish newspaper that it is:

…probably the worst thing that has happened to musicians. The streaming culture has changed an entire society and an entire generation of artists.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

Robert Jones Jr, in a now-deleted Twitter post on August 18 2015.

The quote is widely misattributed to James Baldwin - to be fair, it does seem like something he might have said. But it’s not his; albeit Robert Jones Jr was previously known as ‘Son of Baldwin’, and used that as his Twitter handle at the time.

A perhaps surprising fact courtesy of a report on Labour’s desire to cut down the admittedly rather extensive size of the British House of Lords.

House of Lords research has found there would be just 414 peers left, out of 700 life peers, excluding bishops and hereditaries, if the 80 age limit was brought in by 2029

Heredity appointments are already set to go.

Someone might be on the verge of being caught using ChatGPT to half-ass their job again.

Yep, people are seeing hints that some of the batshittery of executive orders that Trump is conducting some form of depraved performance art from via scrawling his Big Name all over in front of alt-right pilled Elon-hyped enthusiastic crowds might in fact have been ‘inspired’ by your local friendly AI chatbot. Or, god forbid, Grok, which might explain a lot.

From Futurism:

…legal experts have called attention to some curious common threads: bizarre typos, formatting errors and oddities, and stilted language – familiar artifacts that have led to speculation that those who penned them might have turned to AI for help.

There’s the one about further ruining Alaska’s environment which lists 6 Public Land Orders, all of which are numbered 1.

“The weird typos and formatting errors could lead to confusion down the road,” Stern wrote of the bungled numbered list. “If the Secretary of the Interior invoked his authority under Section XV(1) of this order, which of the 6 different subsections labeled 1 would [he] mean? And which number controls when a subsection has two different ones?”

There’s the comedy skit that renames Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America - you know, ‘problem solved’, for no known or imaginable problem - which it is alleged by some provides in its description of the location a book-report style description of the area right outta the ChatGPT-a-likes:

“I struggle to believe,” agreed Stern, responding to Melkonian, “that a human, let alone a lawyer, wrote this 7th-grade book report-style description of the Gulf.” (Indeed, when we asked ChatGPT for a “description of the importance of the Gulf of Mexico,” it hit almost all the same notes.)

And more:

Other orders feature questionable errors and structural choices. The order to withdraw America from the WHO, for instance, includes some inexplicably bolded punctuation, while others, like one effectively withdrawing the US from a global corporate tax deal, fail to maintain uniform formatting standards throughout.

Now I personally doubt that the reason we see so many senseless and oftentimes cruel orders emanating from the Arena of Nightmares is because a chatbot went wild rather than that a small pustule of x.com-ravaged human brains sploooshed them out willy-nilly with minimal care taken. That they come from robot minds at least in intent would be most likely nothing but wishful thinking, although it’s very feasible that the average “knowledge worker” of course uses this technology as one of many tools.

The article does freely admit that there’s no way to know for sure from just looking at this text.

In a murky digital world, it’s often hard to tell: is what I’m looking at AI-generated? Or is just poorly executed human work?

But perhaps the fact that these allegations are passing through people’s heads says a lot - both about the quality of output we’ve come to expect from current LLMs, and also the new US administration.

To that end, is it possible that the Trump administration’s newly-signed executive orders were all crafted by humans, sans AI? Sure. Either way, though, the initial expert reviews of the executive actions are in – and according to those, they’re weird and sloppy. And even if they’re not AI, they feel like AI.

(Previous ChatGPT writing law news.)

So Nigel Farage is “reticent” about some of Elon Musk’s opinions.

Former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam thinks Elon is “a f****** moron”.

And Kemi Badenoch “wants Liz Truss to shut up for a while”.

It’s somehow disconcerting but refreshing to find oneself in strong agreement with otherwise terrible people, even if it’s most likely stopped clock syndrome rather than a personality or values transplant on their part (and certainly not, I hope, one on my part - stop me now if it seems otherwise). Maybe some folk are simply so far beyond the pale that even the average Terrible Opinion Haver can’t take them seriously.

There’s a way in which nothing is new under the sun. No matter how appalling it seems. That’s not to excuse it of course. So many people should know better than to play with particular kinds of fire.

I don’t pretend to have knowledge of the inner workings of ex-president George Bush Junior’s mind - I was, to put it mildly, never a fan back in the day - but yesterday’s ridiculous inauguration ceremony brought back to my mind his reputed comments from last time we had to witness the same man speak his megalomaniac delusions as a good proportion of the world was subjected to yesterday.

In fact the Intelligencer could really just re-run this article, after subbing a couple of the audience names.

The inauguration of Donald Trump was a surreal experience for pretty much everyone who witnessed it, whether or not they were at the event and regardless of who they supported in the election.

…

But, according to three people who were present, Bush gave a brief assessment of Trump’s inaugural after leaving the dais: “That was some weird shit.” All three heard him say it.

From Reuters:

U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday issued pre-emptive pardons for General Mark Milley, Dr Anthony Fauci and members of the Jan. 6 congressional committee and witnesses, saying they “do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

It’s a terrifying world where it would even occur to someone that this might be necessary in a supposedly “civilised” state (not to mention that it’s not entirely obvious to me that Presidential pardons should even be a thing that exists).

I’m sure a certain type of nu-Republican is going to see the ultimate in conspiracies lurking in every corner of this. But it’s very obvious what Biden is trying to protect against, and why it might well be necessary. At least make it harder for a vindicative Trump, or any of his tag-a-long snowflakes, to hang these folk out to the wolves in any undeserved way without an overt breakdown of the rule of law.

📚 Want to read: From Label to Table by Xaq Frohlich.

How did the Nutrition Facts label come to appear on millions of everyday American household food products? As Xaq Frohlich reveals, this legal, scientific, and seemingly innocuous strip of information can be a prism through which to view the high-stakes political battles and development of scientific ideas that have shaped the realms of American health, nutrition, and public communication.