Category: Politics
Sunday Morning Reading
Some Sunday Morning Reading to share. If you’re new to this now regular feature on Wicked Stage, you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. As always, it’s a varied collection of links. Some I find fun. Some informative. Some just weird. Regardless they caught my attention and I hope they catch yours.
The Debt Limit is Just One of American’s Six Worst Traditions. Lots of talk about the US Debt Limit debate at the moment. Here’s a look from John Schwarz and others at The Debt Limit and five other silly/stupid/bad political traditions in the US. Bet you’ll learn something from this one.
The Story Behind the Chicago Newspaper That Bought a Bar. Great read about a newspaper’s investigative unit and the lengths they went to exposing some Chicago backroom political shenanigans. By Andy Wright.
Why The Supreme Court is Blind to Corruption. By Randall Eliason in the NY Times.
And while we’re talking about the Supreme Court. How about an article from Gillian Brockell discussing the only impeachment of a Supreme Court Justice in an article called: Can a Supreme Court Justice Be Impeached? Meet ‘Old Bacon Face.’
The Battle of Beach Rowdies, B-Girls, and Disorderly Women. An excerpt from Robert Loerzel’s series on The Coolest Spot in Chicago: A History of Green Mill Gardens and the Beginnings of Uptown. (You can find much more on his site by following his links. Well worth your time.)
Rudy Giuliani, Timothy McVeigh, and Sexual Abuse. Teri Canfield weaves a few threads together, that should remind us all just how tangled this twisted mess we’re dealing with today really is.
The Song That Spawned the Four Chords of Pop by Tim Coffman. Fun stuff.
This Little-known Rule Shapes Parking in America. Cities Are Reversing It. By Nathaniel Myerson. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot…”
Apple announced some very interesting new accessibility features coming later this year. John Vorhees of MacStories did an interview with David Niemeijer of AssistiveWare, a company that makes augmentative and alternative communication apps for the iPhone and the iPad about how these kind of features can beneift real-world users.
Book Banning is all the rage. Not for the first time. Check out Book Bans Soared in the 70’s, too. The Supreme Court Stepped In. By Anthony Aycock.
Have a good week.
Sunday Morning Reading
Sunday Morning Reading was a regular feature back in my previous blogging days. I thought I’d continue it here. The idea originally came about because I used to love to read multiple newspapers on Sunday mornings. Some of you might remember those days when Sunday morning newspapers were chock-a-block with stories of all kinds, featuring information (we now call it content) on a variety of topics. Newspapers used to save up their best stuff for the Sunday edition.
Well, the Internet has replaced all of that. But I still do my Sunday morning reading. So this feature is nothing more, nothing less than a series of links to items and writers (with occasional commentary) I find interesting, informative, and indicative of things we are or should be thinking of in this moment. Typically I’ve discovered this in the week prior. Sometimes I actually do on Sunday mornings. For better or worse, the Internet has turned me into a prolific sharer of things I find interesting and here we are.
Note, I read a lot of different sources. Some with opinions I agree with. Some with opinions I disagree with. So you’ll find a bit of both here. I happen to believe in and enjoy exploring writers, opinions, and subjects that I disagree with. I think you should too. In fact I encourage it.
So on with this first Act 3 edition of Sunday Morning Reading.
Ben Franklin Would Have Loved Bluesky. Annalee Newitz’s take on the moment in social media. The headline skewers what the article is actually about. Worth a read if social media is your thing.
The Epic Battle No One Wanted, Or Asked For by David Todd McCarty. McCarty is a writer I’ve gotten to know since signing up on Mastodon“>Mastodon. Glad I did. His stuff is always thought provoking and often fun. Like this piece on The Magic And Mystery of Pommes Frites.
The Hedonic Treadmill – Are We Forever Chasing Rainbows by Seph Fontane Pennock A bit academic, but it’s about the temporary joys of happiness.
A Guilty Ex-President. Lots of folks don’t like David French and also don’t like that he’s writing for the NY Times. I don’t agree with a lot of his thinking, but when I want my thinking challenged I’m typically glad he’s writing about a subject I’ve been thinking on. His takes on religion and the law go far beneath the surface spewing we so much of these days.
The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett And The U.S. Treasury by Ariel Sabar. A great story in and of itself, but viewed with a wider lens says so much about where we are.
Deskilling On The Job from zephoria. If the age of AI an interesting look at the future of work.
The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe A Chicago mob story in Chicago Magazine by Dan O’Sullivan
Students’ Understanding Of History and Civics Is Worsening by Donna St. Geroge in the Washington Post. Well, given that this has been the plan for a generation or so, I guess it’s a good thing we’re discovering that the plan is working to our detriment.
And since this is a Mother’s Day edition of Sunday Morning Reading here’s a link to an origin story about Mother’s Day from Olivia B. Waxman in Time
Damn Those Kids and Those 10 Commandments
I’m all in when it comes to establishment clause of the US Constitution. I think it was put in as a response to more topical and pressing reasons that were very much alive in the minds and memories of the founders. Intriguingly, those reasons are proving just as important today even though we have accumulated vastly more knowledge to build our reasoning on. That said, I find it curiously entertaining about the recent news from Texas requiring schools to display the 10 Commandments in classrooms.
Curious because, if you’re going to insist on paying attention to the mighty 10, I wonder how much attention is going to be paid to the latter half of the list. You know the ones about bearing false witness (lying), stealing, killing, commtting adultery, and coveting.
Entertained because, hey this is just another ring in the circus run by clowns searching for a ringmaster. Remember, this is coming out of the same brain dumps that think ignoring and not teaching history is a good idea and that teachers shouldn’t be able to talk about our flaws and differences as individuals and a society.
So, tell me. How’s a teacher going to respond when some youngster asks about the lying, cheating, stealing, killing, adultering and coveting that these modern day clown crusaders practice and praise so openly?
Remember kids say the darndest things.
And five will get you ten that the last half of the 10 Commandments will eventually get edited out of the picture.
Rules are for Suckers
In the beginning there was one rule. Don’t eat the damn apple.
We’ve been adding rules, regulations, laws, by-laws, and constitutions ever since. Rules may be meant to be broken so I guess we like to break things because we keep making more and more of them. We also like to make rules for others and not ourselves in the same way we think other folks’ rules don’t apply to us. Heck, even those who don’t like rules and regulations as a thing into and of themselves, love making up rules and regulations to try and circumvent the rules and regulations that get in their way. We’re a wacky bunch we humans.
I once leased from and later worked for a theatre manager who had an ever expanding lease. Each time a tenant would do something he deemed inappropriate he would add a new clause to the lease to try and prevent that behavior in the future. He also, at lease signing, had the practice of reading out loud each and every clause in the lease and telling new tenants exactly who was responsible for the addition of each clause. It was always quite a show. Too bad he didn’t sell tickets to watch it.
We don’t like to reigned in. It’s where this whole freedom thing comes from. We want to be free to do what we want. We just don’t want those we disagree with to be free to do what they want. So we make up rules. If we have enough power we make up rules to take away rules from others. Those are the rules.
When someone gets angry and wants to get rid of red tape, they typically have to use “the rule of law” to do so.
That old comfort blanket, “the rule of law,” has seen better days. It may actually just be hanging around like that quilt your grandma made as a reminder of what’s lost. Memories of things long gone. Or perhaps were never really there in the first place.
Consider:
- The stripping of child labor protections. Who knew folks in Arkansas read so much Dickens?
- The battle over abortion.
- Voting restrictions.
- Guns.
- Sheriffs who choose not to enforce laws they don’t like.
- Banning books and libraries.
- Anything happening in Florida, Arkansas, or pick a red-state.
That list could go on. (And does.)
“The rule of law” only works as a rule when everybody plays by the same rules. Or more importantly pretends to. Sad fact. At no time in history has everyone played by the same rules. We’ve done a lot of pretending though.
Ignoring all the rules when they get in the way seems like the latest trend. Take Clarence Thomas. Take Neil Gorsuch. Please. Take most of the Supreme Court thinking a bit too supreme for most people’s liking. And not caring that they are essentially undermining whatever they aren’t hiding behind those robes.
Take any number of politicians. Throw a dart and you’ll score a bullseye. But I don’t think it’s a new trend.
Are we living in some sort of new age where those of us offended (easily or no) by rule-making rule-breakers really have no where to turn?
No. It’s always been this way. Throughout the history of mankind. Pretending takes too much effort. There’s just no longer any incentive to hide the game, much less the rules. The illusion has been shattered from the top to the bottom. When a huge chunk of the populace can push hard to nominate and elect an indicted decaying orange turd for president, given all that we know, but the system can’t seem or want to find a way to hold him accountable, there’s no system or collection of rules to have faith in any longer. When the chief justice of the Surpeme Court can simply decline to answer questions about the intergrity of his institution what’s the point of that instituion even existing any longer.
Some of those suffering are going through the same kind of awakening that most children do when they discover their parents are human and have faults. Many doing the yelling and screaming about this supposed rule breaking are just pissed that they weren’t shameless or gutless enough to do it first.
The shysters no longer give a damn about things like shame. The suckers and the suckups keep contributing, whether they be small donors or large and it’s better to focus their energy on hoovering up the loose change than the masquerade.
The rules haven’t changed. The games haven’t changed. The game players just realize they don’t have to work so hard on their act to bilk the bumpkins.
Are We Giving Up On Facts?
Artificial Intelligence remains and will remain all the rage. Whether it be text in Large Language Models or Digital Art creation there’s a rush, gold and otherwise, into this new world fueled by impressive technology. Impressive as it may be, at its core it remains a regurgitation of creations by humans. Which we all know at times have been impressive and at other times less so. (See Today.) Even once it reaches the point when new AI creations are redigesting its own regurgitations, its core will still be based on what has come before.
Set aside the sometimes laughable mistakes (two different models have declared me dead) and the “who owns this stuff” issues over the text and images these engines are trained on. Set aside the labor issues. (I’m waiting to see the sex-worker protests over AI generated porn spring up.) Those are fundamentally no different than the advent of any new disruptive technology business springing up. See Uber. See the explosion of rented scooters. See food delivery services. Ship it and sort out the problems later. The rush of the immediate craze always meets reality at some point and slows down before settling in, and in some cases fading from the scene.
But this rush feels different. Not the gold rush part. There’s nothing new under the sun there. But the rush to adopt. Which now that I think of it is essentially the same thing.
It feels different because I think it means we’re giving up on facts. Yes, sure these models are being trained on facts. But they are also being trained on a ton of bullshit. Because hey, again, they are being trained on all the stuff we’ve spewed out and is indexable on the Internet.
I may be wrong but I can’t find any reading that suggests that there are any attempts to weed out the wheat from the chaff. We can’t solve that problem in the real world, so I don’t have much hope that anyone even desires to in the artificial one either. On the on hand why do that? Aren’t these just tools for humans to use? And humans do human things like make mistakes, make stuff up, and make trouble. Often while trying to make money.
On the other hand, I’m not sure there will be another hand. If this new technology phase achieves the aims its creators are using to sell it, the next phase will be new tools that promise to do that wheat/chaff separating. Which, in turn, will get fed back into the same machine in an infinite loop that eventually churns out bread that all tastes the same. I can’t wait to read all of the AI generated articles that feature headlines reading “Everything You Need to Know About AI” a decade or so down the road.
There’s no great conclusion here. There’s merely questions. Or maybe just more fodder for the AI bots to suck up. But as I ponder this I am reminded of this quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune:
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Essential Reading: The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet
Read this book. Highly recommended.
That’s the summary and the sum.
I’m a big admirer of Jeff Sharlet. Have been for awhile. That admiration deepened with his latest book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War. (That’s not an affiliate link if you’re wondering.)
Sharlet likes to get right into the middle and the depths of the topics he’s exploring. He certainly does here as he walks the walk and talks the talk with a number of folks in the MAGA world seeking to understand just how close the embers of their smoldering hatred is to igniting.
Here’s a quote from the blurb that comes close to doing this book justice:
Exploring a geography of grief and uncertainty in the midst of plague and rising fascism, The Undertow is a necessary reckoning with our precarious present that brings to light a decade of American failures as well as a vision for American possibility.
Make no mistake. While Sharlet’s style makes for more than engaging reading the subject matter is not easy to swallow. But it’s a medicine that I think we all need to take if we want to understand what’s afflicting our national psyche in this era beyond the media moments both social and otherwise.
As someone who thinks we’re already in the early stages of this country’s next Civil War I would argue the word “slow” in the title might have more aptly applied 7-10 years ago. That said, the stories and moments Sharlet relates leave no doubt that the divisions we face are so deep that the chances to bridge them are few and far between and perhaps already out of reach.
Again, I highly recommend the book as I do the rest of Sharlet’s work. If you haven’t seen The Family on Netflix. I’d encourage you to check that out as well as Sharlet’s other work.
The American Catechism Comes To An End
The Rule of Law.
We are a country of laws not men.
No one is above the law.
If you’re of a certain age you can recite those tenets of the American Catechism as easily as drawing breath. I say of a certain age because I’m not sure they drill those fundamentals into the brains of youngsters anymore.
On the one hand, that’s too bad. On the other, maybe not so much. Those truths, never self-evident, weren’t much more than man-made myths anyway. We’ve been mauling those myths since we made them. They’ve always bordered on being a bromide. Meant to comfort. Meant to explain without the need of any real explanation. There’s always been a finger tipping the balance on the scales of justice and Lady Justice has been known to take a peek from under that blindfold now and again.
The magic behind any myth is the buy-in. When the customers aren’t buying anymore, well that leads to bankruptcy, dissolution, or disaster. Unless of course you’re a bank.
“Indications” are that the indcitment of the decaying orange turd is going to turn into the buttressing of our current American pathology as the media rakes in the ratings while spewing out speculation. I’m surprised they aren’t selling ads at Super Bowl rates as I’m sure they’ll follow the decaying orange turd’s plane to NYC like they followed OJ’s Bronco. But there’s not going to be anything resembling what we’ve come to think of as justice in any of this when all is said and done. I’m guessing we’ll see some sort of deal, artful or not, in the name of preserving our sanity for the sake of healing the country.
I know. Try not to laugh at that last part. Tough to heal a country that tore itself in two almost two centuries ago and has reopened those old wounds now that the bandages have been ripped off again.
We’ve accelerated the mauling of the myths and cratering of the catechism. But there’s a silver lining. There’s no longer a need to bend a knee and recite the litanies. Instead use that energy to find one of the increasing number of lawyers who don’t practice all of the supposed rules of their professsion if you get in trouble. Turns out those rules and regs were just myths also.
So many compare favorably our sacred sayings against the clichéd catcalls condeming third-world countries when political fortunes rise and fall. Well now that we’ve dispensed with another of those long held “we’re better than the rest of the world” legacies about the peaceful transfer of power, I’d put us pretty damned close to admission into that thrid-world circle and getting closer every day. We haven’t accepted that “failed peaceful transfer of power” reality and we’re still clinging like kudzu to that myth as we live through its continuing aftermath.
Bottom line. We’ve been had. We’ve let ourselves be had. We used to like that we’ve been had. We used to live with that quite comfortably just like we lived with most other myths and magical sayings that allowed us to sleep at night. Some are pissed off about it. Others are trying to pretend we can return to past like you can return to bed pulling the covers over your head to avoid the day a little longer.
The day is either here or damned near.
And yeah. I’m pissed.
Run George Santos Out of Town on a Rail
Whoo boy. I’m a bit angry. So be forewarned. Actually if you need forewarning more’s the pity. I think we should all be a bit angry.
Here’s what steamed me up this morning. The newswires went a-buzzing with the news that serial liar, conman, and fraudster George Santos had announced to his GOP House colleagues that he was going to take a “pause” on his newly appointed committee assignments. He’s pausing until the multitude of matters he’s under local, state, federal and International investigations for are resolved. Well, to be honest, I’m not sure which ones he’ll let continue before he backs off his “pause.”
So, I just have to ask what in bloody hell is going on?
One would think that this is a guy that everyone wants to see gone. His political opponents loudly push it. Many in his own polticial party do as well. (I hesitate to call it a political party any longer but that’s beside the point.) His constituents want him gone faster than the citizens of River City wanted to oust Harold Hill in The Music Man. From all appearances there’s no Winthrop or Marian the Librarian to come to the rescue.Quite frankly I think George Santos or whatever this fraud’s name is needs to be run out of town on a rail.
Further, I think it’s just the sort of thing this country needs. We’re all sick and tired of seeing Santos, Trump and other would-be decaying orange turds parade around their disdain for the rest of us. We all see the game. We all know the players and we all know we’re being played.
Running Santos loudly and publicly out of public life would do everyone some good. It would provide a brief cleansing moment amongst all the filth we’re wallowing through.
But while it makes some practical sense, several things will prevent his overdue public humiliation.
1. We are somehow stlll cliinging to the myths that we’re a nation of laws and due process. Merrick Garland has brought the final act of that farce to its sad conclusion.
2. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want to see him go. Oh, some talk a good game. But as far as the Democrats go they haven’t had this good of a punching bag in a long time. They’d prefer to keep him right where he is and keep punching. No matter what they say. As far as the Republicans are concerned they do need his vote. But more importantly he’s a great shiny distraction that allows them to more easily continue organizing things behind the scenes.
If Santos resigned or was booted out Congress critters would have to get back to actual work. The media would actually have to talk about issues. And no one wants that. On either side or in any circle. This show still has legs.
So, no. We won’t get any cathartic cleansing moment. No rails. No tar. No feathers. Just lots of noise. And our modern day political life will continue to be as out of tune as those trombone toting kids in River City.
We Need a Spartacus Moment on Classified Documents
I’m disappointed. This classified documents imbroligo has emeshed us in another make it worse everyday mess. In my not-so-humble opinion it needs to stop. But before it does I think we can make a little hay.
We need a Spartacus moment (if for some reason you don’t know, use Google or ChatGPT, although ChatGPT may give you the wrong answer.) The way it’s going quite a few folks who have ever had access to classiifed documents need to come clean, clean out their files, or cleanly escape to a country without extradition. Why they haven’t trashed these documents is…well…stupid. But their stupidity could be our gain.
I know it won’t be popular with those who thought the decaying orange turd’s mishandling of classified documents would be the quickest way to an indictment and possible conviction. I’d join you in that camp. But let’s get real. It’s turning out that even folks in high places that shy away from orange makeup don’t play by the rules because hey, rules are for suckers.
So, in the end we’ll most likely end up changing the rules.
But before we do, I think those who’ve taken a top secret souvenir or two ought to come clean. Publicly. Loudly. Turn it into a telethon or a game show. Folks can appear in person or call in remotely and confess. I’d say they could confess on Twitter, but no one believes anyone is really who they say they are on that site anymore. Raise a ton of money for some noteworthy cause (maybe toss a few bucks to Reality Winner.)
You could probably turn it into a limited streaming series by gamifying it the way we do elections. I’m sure Steve Kornacki would have fun with the math and the maps.
Things need to move quickly though. The shelf-life probably won’t be long and the streaming services would probably cancel realtively quickly. Interest is already waning. You can tell the media is just about over this story the way they’re covering it. They thought they had a big one and the air went out of that balloon.
So before the wind goes completely out of the windbags have some fun. I mean it’s all just a reality show anyway these days. No matter how unreal it seems to get.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 