If you’re feeling this morning like Alan Bates at the end of King of Hearts, join the club.


Full version?

There is a nugget of what I’m looking for in the terms below, but none of them quite captures it. I’m not the only one looking for a word to properly describe government by the insane.

plutocracy? : government by the wealthy
kakistocracy? : government by the worst people
oligarchy? : government by the few
kleptocracy? : government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed
autocracy? : the authority or rule of an autocrat (such as a monarch) ruling with unlimited authority
idiocracy? : a society governed or populated by idiots

When pre-MAGA conservatives like Grover Norquist mused about rolling back the 20th century to the McKinley era, they imagined rule by Gilded Age plutocrats. I don’t think they considered it might mean a return to an age of crippling and disfiguring disease.

But with the Second Coming of Trump, that’s just what they may get (New York Times):

The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.

That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.

Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.

He should have made Trump work for it

One of the most famous episodes in the Watergate saga 50 years ago was when CBS News reporter Daniel Schorr got a hold of Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” and read it cold on the air, only to find himself listed at number 17.


The Nixon White House actually committed dozens of abuses that came to light during the investigations spawned by the Watergate break in and one of them was the use of the FBI to investigate his enemies list. After discovering the full extent of the former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s overwhelming misuse of the bureau for decades, including blackmail, harassment and persecution, the Congress erected some strong guardrails designed to prevent such things from happening again. The Senate Judiciary Committee report explained:

The purpose of the bill is to achieve two complimentary objectives. The first is to insulate the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from undue pressure being exerted upon him from superiors in the Executive Branch. The second is to protect against an FBI Director becoming too independent and unresponsive.

They added, “it is the great value of the FBI as a criminal investigative agency as well as its great potential for infringing individual rights and serving partisan or personal ambition that makes the office of FBI Director unique.” Indeed it is as the decades of abuse by Hoover so amply demonstrated.

The main constraint they devised was the one ten year term and a requirement that a president has good cause to fire him before that term is up. All presidents since the law was enacted have had to deal with an FBI Director that was chosen by a predecessor and every single one of them, no matter who appointed him, has been a Republican. The idea that any FBI Director or the Institution itself is some bastion of woke liberalism is absurd,.

Christopher Wray let the country down with this namby-pamby exit. He was in a position to expose Trump’s disregard for the institution he purports to love and demonstrate his disrespect for the law and the constitution and he didn’t do it. Let’s hope we see more passive resistance coming from the rest of the federal employees.

Yes, I know it won’t stop him. But it will slow him down and it won’t be long until he’s officially a lame duck and all those Republicans will have to face the voters again. Then there will be a chance to deprive him of congressional power and reset the system of checks and balances.

Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.

Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state of ultimate turmoil.

To keep track of this cosmic decay, physicists employ a concept called entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorderliness, and the declaration that entropy is always on the rise — known as the second law of thermodynamics — is among nature’s most inescapable commandments.

I have long felt haunted by the universal tendency toward messiness. Order is fragile. It takes months of careful planning and artistry to craft a vase but an instant to demolish it with a soccer ball. We spend our lives struggling to make sense of a chaotic and unpredictable world, where any attempt to establish control seems only to backfire. The second law demands that machines can never be perfectly efficient, which implies that whenever structure arises in the universe, it ultimately serves only to dissipate energy further — be it a star that eventually explodes or a living organism converting food into heat. We are, despite our best intentions, agents of entropy.

“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics,” wrote (opens a new tab) Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s no sidestepping this directive. The growth of entropy is deeply entwined with our most basic experiences, accounting for why time runs forward and why the world appears deterministic rather than quantum mechanically uncertain.

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

The other day I just happened to watch one of the Bulwark podcasts and as it happened Sarah Longwell had just returned from participating in an event sponsored by the NY Times in which a number of media and political luminaries discussed the recent election. She seemed a little bit stunned as she explained that she couldn’t make herself sit there and take their nonsense so she aggressively confronted them, in particular Kevin McCarthy.

I was hoping we’d get to see it because it sounded amazing. Here’s that moment:
https://twitter.com/SarahLongwell25/status/1866912158866358544

I would really love to see more people have the guts to do this. At the moment there’s not a whole lot of evidence that very many do.

The Times article about the event said this:

The 2024 presidential election isn’t over.

While the vote count is official and President-elect Donald J. Trump will be the next occupant of the Oval Office, just about everything else, including how much of a mandate he has, why the Democrats lost and what the future of the two political parties — and the country — will look like, is still the subject of fierce debate.

That came through strongly during a discussion on Dec. 4 at the DealBook Summit in New York City about the election and its aftermath. The 10-member election task force, one of four held away from the main stage, included those involved in politics, the media and advocacy.

Early on, the lines were set: Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, thanked other task force members for joining him in “celebrating President Trump’s victory.” Shortly afterward, Sarah Longwell, an outspoken Republican against Mr. Trump and publisher of the website The Bulwark, described Mr. Trump as “the most dangerous criminal human being that America has ever elected.”

And, she said, gesturing at Kevin McCarthy, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and another task force member, “you’re the one who went down and resurrected him,” referring to Mr. McCarthy’s visit to Mar-a-Lago shortly after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

To which Mr. McCarthy replied, “You’re welcome.”

The common murre, a large black-and-white seabird native to northern waters, has become far less common in Alaska over the past decade due to the impacts of climate change.

A study published Thursday in Science reveals that a record-breaking marine heat wave in the northeast Pacific from 2014 to 2016 triggered a catastrophic population collapse, wiping out four million birds—about half the species in the region.

Strikingly, they have shown little signs of rebounding, suggesting long-term shifts in the food web that have locked the ecosystem into a troubling new equilibrium.

"There's a lot of talk about declines of species that are tied to changes in temperature, but in this case, it was not a long term result," lead author Heather Renner of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge told AFP.

"To our knowledge, this is the largest mortality event of any wildlife species reported during the modern era," she and her colleagues emphasized in their paper.

The finding triggers "alarm bells," Renner said in an interview, as human-caused climate change makes heat waves more frequent, intense, and longer-lasting.

Emaciated Carcasses

With their dapper, tuxedoed look, common murres are sometimes called the "penguins of the north."

Their slender wings power them across vast distances in search of food and make them expert divers. But even these hardy seabirds were no match for an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.

The largest marine heat wave ever recorded began in the late fall of 2014, spanning a massive swath of the northeast Pacific Ocean from California to Alaska.

It persisted for over two years, leaving devastation in its wake. During this time, some 62,000 emaciated murres washed ashore along the North American Pacific coastline—dead or dying from starvation.

Experts point to two key reasons for the bird deaths: elevated ocean temperatures reduced both the quality and quantity of phytoplankton, impacting fish like herring, sardines, and anchovies—the mainstay of the murre diet.

At the same time, warmer waters increased the energy demands of larger fish, such as salmon and Pacific cod, which compete with murres for the same prey.

"We knew then it was a big deal, but unfortunately, we couldn't really quantify the effects," explained Renner.

As unbearably cringe as the hunt for a "leftist Joe Rogan" is, it is (to use a shopworn phrase), "directionally correct." Democrats suck at getting their message out, and that exacts a high electoral cost.

The right has an extremely well-funded media ecosystem of high-paid bullshitters backed by algorithm-gaming SEO dickheads. This system isn't necessarily supposed to turn a profit or even break even: the point of Prageru isn't to score ad revenue, it's to ensure that anyone who googles "what the fuck causes inflation" gets 25 minutes of relatable, upbeat, cheerfully sociopathic Austrian economics jammed into their eyeballs. Far right news isn't a for-profit concern, it's a loss-leader for oligarch-friendly policies. It's a steal: a million bucks' worth of news buys America's ultra-rich a billion dollars' worth of tax-cuts and the right to maim their workers and poison their customers for profit.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have historically relied on the "traditional media" to carry their messages, on the ground that reality has a well-known leftist bias, so any news outlet that hews to "journalistic ethics" will publish the truth, and the truth will weigh in favor of Democratic positions: trans people are humans, racism is real, abortion isn't murder, housing is a market failure, the planet is on fire, etc, etc, etc.

This is a stupid policy, and it has failed. The "respectable" news media hews to a self-imposed code of "balance" and "neutrality" that is easily gamed: "some people say that Hatians don't eat pet dogs, some people do, let's report both sides!" This is called "the view from nowhere" and it gets Democrats precisely nowhere:

Balance and neutrality are bullshit, an excuse that has been so thoroughly weaponized by billionaires and their lickspittles that anyone who takes it seriously demonstrates comprehensively that they, themselves, are deeply unserious:

Press neutrality – the view from nowhere – isn't some eternal verity. In terms of the history of the press, it's an idea that's about ten seconds old. The glory days of the news were dominated by papers with names like The Smallville Democrat and The Ruling Class Republican. Most of the world boggles at the idea that a news outlet wouldn't declare its political posture. Britons know that the Telegraph is the Torygraph; that the Guardian is in the tank for Labour (and specifically, committed to enabling Blairite/Starmerite purges of the left); the Mirror is a leftist tabloid; and the Mail is so far right that its editorial board considers Attila the Hun "woke."

Writing for The American Prospect – an excellent leftist news outlet – Ryan Cooper proposes a solution to the Democratic media gap that's way better than the hunt for the elusive "leftist Joe Rogan": sponsoring explicitly Democrat news outlets:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-12-democrats-lost-propaganda-war/

US telecoms carriers would be required to implement minimum cyber security standards and ensure their systems are not susceptible to hacks by nation-state attackers – like Salt Typhoon – under legislation proposed by senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).

The Secure American Communications Act [PDF], if signed into law, would require the Federal Communications Commission to issue binding rules for telecom systems, following what Wyden calls the FCC's "failure" to implement security standards already required by federal law.

He's referring to the CALEA of 1994 – aka the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act – which required telecom providers to design their systems to comply with wiretapping requests from law enforcement.

The law also requires providers to secure their own systems against unauthorized interception – such as Chinese spies, who we recently learned did access these systems to steal communications and other sensitive information. While the feds haven't disclosed whose calls and texts were accessed by Salt Typhoon, the victims reportedly included president-elect Donald Trump and his VP pick JD Vance, people working for current VP Kamala Harris's presidential campaign, and other high-ranking political figures.

"It was inevitable that foreign hackers would burrow deep into the American communications system the moment the FCC decided to let phone companies write their own cyber security rules," Wyden asserted in a statement.

"Telecom companies and federal regulators were asleep on the job and as a result, Americans' calls, messages, and phone records have been accessed by foreign spies intent on undermining our national security," he continued. "Congress needs to step up and pass mandatory security rules to finally secure our telecom system against an infestation of hackers and spies."

Americans spend more time living with diseases than people from other countries, according to a new study.

On Wednesday, the American Medical Association published its latest findings, revealing that Americans live with diseases for an average of 12.4 years. Mental and substance-use disorders, as well as musculoskeletal diseases, are main contributors to the years lived with disability in the US, per the study.

Women in the US exhibited a 2.6-year higher so-called healthspan-lifespan gap (representing the number of years spent sick) than men, increasing from 12.2 to 13.7 years or 32% beyond the global mean for women.

The latest overall healthspan-lifespan gap in the US marks an increase from 10.9 years in 2000 to 12.4 years in 2024, resulting in a 29% higher gap than the global mean.

...

Describing the results, the study’s authors, Armin Garmany and Andre Terzic, said: “These results underscore that around the world, while people live longer, they live a greater number of years burdened by disease.”

The study added that in line with global trends, the gap in the US coincided with a disproportionate growth in life expectancy v health-adjusted life expectancy. In the US, life expectancy increased from 79.2 to 80.7 years in women, and from 74.1 to 76.3 years in men, the study revealed.