The next issue of my occasional comments on various topics on various
sites over the past week or so with, as always, enough additional
context for folks to be able to tell what’s going on. A note on style:
If within a comment something is in brackets - [ ] - it’s as the comment
originally appeared and signified I was editing something inside a
quote; if it’s in italics it’s something added here for added context.
Let’s go.
2026-03-21
[Chris Giedner (Law Dork) posted about
a recent court action in a case involving employees of the US Agency
for Global Media who had been placed on administrative leave during the
DOGE days of defenestrations.]
Your last line - “it is
likely that a number of employees have left the agency for other work” -
raises something I think hasn’t been considered enough.
The
minions and jesters of the court of The Orange Overlord don’t have to
outright win to do significant damage to the ability of the federal
government to do useful work, they just have to stall long enough for
the employees booted out to be unable to wait for a resolution.
Suppose
half of those employees have gone on to other jobs. The result would be
a court-approved 30% cut in USAGM staff with no requirement (or reason
to expect) that those open positions would be filled.
For a
similar reason, I’m also concerned about another topic up for discussion
which I will make bold to refer to here: The Orange Overlord’s
half-brag, half-threat to issue an EO federalizing the midterms. I keep
hearing it said that in that event he’d be sued and he’d lose because
the law, the Constitution, and history are so clear on the matter.
But
my worry is that, just like with DOGE (which I always pronounce
“dodgy,” because it was/is), he doesn’t have to win - he just has to
cause enough confusion and delay to screw things up, disrupt the whole
voting process, in enough places to give him a reason (not a good one,
just a “reason”) to declare a national emergency and start seizing
ballot boxes and declaring the vote void.
This doesn’t mean he’d
succeed or even that he’d try; maybe he’ll think the FUD (fear,
uncertainty, and doubt) raised by his constant ranting about “voter
fraud” will be sufficiently useful to convince the faithful the election
was “stolen” and enough others that elections are “insecure” and voting
must be restricted.
But either way, it is a potential for social chaos that we ignore at our peril.
==
2026-03-22
[YouTuber Farron Cousins posted about a report that the USPS is within a year of bankruptcy. Just to be clear, Cousins was speaking in support of the USPS.]
Thanks
for the attention to this, but you left out the part about requiring
the USPS to pre-finance retirement benefits out to 75 years - meaning
the USPS is putting aside money to pay future benefits for future
retirees who haven’t been born yet. Oh, and the rules limiting how much
the prices for stamps and services can go up. And how Congress can make
all these rules for how the USPS operates while - as you note - not
putting a single damn dollar toward the cost.
That last is
particular infuriating because the wingnuts are forever going on about
how people too poor to pay federal income taxes should have to pay them
in order to have “skin in the game.” Shouldn’t the same apply here?
==
2026-03-23
[A discussion about Flat Earth brought in a reference to Einstein and the Theory of Relativity.]
Just
a correction about the history: Einstein did not think the universe was
shrinking. He thought it was eternal, steady, neither shrinking nor
expanding - because that was the accepted belief at the time. But
someone (I’m embarrassed to admit I’m both unable to remember the name
and too lazy to look it up) [Credit is usually given to Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman in 1922.]
proved that Einstein’s universe was unstable, it had to be growing or
shrinking. So he created the so-called “cosmological constant,” an
arbitrary factor inserted to keep the universe stable. When it was
proved the universe is expanding,, he took it out, calling his failure
to trust his own work his “greatest blunder.”
==
mis2026-03-24
[A meme criticized using “they” as 3rd-person singular - and used it that way in the meme.]
Use
of “they” as a third person singular has been in use since the 14th
Century. At some point, apparently in the mid-1700s, some tight-ass
grammarians decided it was wrong or low-class or some such crap.
The meme only serves to puts an exclamation point on how stupid the complaint is.
==
2026-03-24
[A
video showed a dog aggressively defending a stray kitten during a
rainstorm. A passing driver rescued both. People claimed it was AI
because the dog appeared to have an extra paw.]
The
argument is not entirely convincing because if the dog was leaning
against the curb with its back legs sprawled out to the other side, that
“extra foot” could easily be the foot of the left back leg folded under
the dog’s body - particularly because the “extra” paw is turned in the
way that such a paw would be in that case.
However - my problem is that I can’t see a way to trace that paw back to a leg. Maybe there is, but I’m not seeing it.
My
conclusion: AI? Yeah, I suppose more likely than not - but not for the
reasons people here have cited. And I’m not convinced it is.
What’s sad is not only that now we have to think “Is it real or is it AI” (Anyone else old enough to recall “Is it live or is it Memorex?”)
but that it’s become an ego game to pore over details of cute but
ultimately unimportant videos in order to be the first to shout “AI!”
and thus demonstrate your supposed cleverness. Or cynicism, whatever.
==
2026-03-24
So
now it’s “extermination” rather than “obliteration” in Iran? What, did
The Orange Overlord turn the page on his “Word of the Week” desk
calendar?
==
2026-03-25
A
the risk of appearing in a future video about odd comments, I have to
dispute one assertion you made about sex and gender. They are indeed
different things, but gender is not a social construct. Gender expression,
what behaviors, dress, and the like mark “masculine” and “feminine” in a
given culture, is. But the concept of gender itself is not.
==
2026-03-28
[Kentucky is about to pass a bill
declaring trans people to be mentally ill and barring them from being
teachers. A response referred to a likely veto by Gov. Andy Beshear.]
GOPpers
hold super-majorities in both Houses of the Kentucky legislature.
Beshear’s likely veto is for them a mere momentary glitch.
There
was a time - not even all that long ago - when it was possible to regard
moves like this as cold-blooded political calculation driven by selfish
interest and rooted in the the notion that it was good for votes.
But
we have gone far past that. There is nothing cold-blooded about this;
rather, it is the fiery blood of hatred fueled by fanaticism - and, I
strongly suspect, the self-loathing over guilty fantasies turned
outward.
-
2026-03-28
[By the time the red and blue states finish passing their “Soft Secession” laws, there will be no “United” in United States.]
Tgerue
enough. You can get a reasonable sense of the geographic nature of that
division by examining a map of the US Courts of Appeal and looking at
the 5th, 8th, 10th, and 11th Circuits, removing Minnesota, Colorado, and
New Mexico, and adding Montana and Idaho.
-
2026-03-28
[A different comment on the same post referred to the Kentucky bill as “stupid” because of the mixture of standards it uses.]
It’s
not stupid. Offensive, hating, vicious, lots of other noxious
qualities, but not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing, picking
and choosing what works and words serve their twisted impulses.
It’s
much like Humpty Dumpty, who said “When I use a word” - or a citation -
“it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
I look to the time when these Humpty Dumptys have their great fall and can’t be put together again.
==
2026-03-29
[At a hearing on March 26,
Minnesota State Rep. Mary Franson dismissed a panel discussing climate
change because “my faith is not in climate change ... my faith is in
Jesus” and the world doesn’t end that way. The post also referred to
Sen. James Inhofe who once carried a snowball onto the Senate floor to
deny climate change.]
To Rep. Mary QuiteContrary, who says “My faith is not in climate change.” That’s because recognizing climate change does not require faith.
You have actual physical evidence and records; you have observations
and measurements; you have predictions borne out by later observations
and measurements. You don’t need the “evidence of things not seen” if
the things are seen.
Oh, and climatologists are not
predicting the end of the world, you dumb bozo. They are predicting mass
damage to human civilization. You may in your delusion think they’re
the same. I suspect both those who die from the coming changes and those
who manage to survive them will think differently.
You might do well to contemplate Mark 8:18 - “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”
(As
a footnote, I clearly remember five-time winner of my “Clown Award”
James “RocksInHisHead” Inhofe - my appropriate name for him because his
middle name was no joke “Mountain” - and his being repeatedly mocked by Sheldon Whitehouse
after his stunt by going through a list of proofs for climate change
and punctuating each by saying the Senate could believe the science or
“the senator with the snowball.”)
==
2026-03-30
A few brief thoughts on my New Kings day.
All
the expected adjectives - exciting, invigorating, enthusiastic,
simultaneously joyful and angry, and more - all apply. The crowd was
larger than the last time (although the organizers did fall short of
their hope to double it) but the growth in energy clearly outstripped
the growth in numbers.
I have a decent degree of confidence in my
own crowd size estimates but I do lean toward being conservative because
I envision a protest crowd as a measure of potential energy and I like
thinking that the energy present is more than I’m estimating rather than
less. With that in mind, I estimated 4,000 were present.
Beyond that, I was surprised even maybe taken aback by the overwhelmingly
favorable response by the cars coming by on this busy roadway to the
point that I didn’t hear a single vulgar shout and my housemate only
noticed two - and it wasn’t just a single beep going by, it was people
riding the horn the length of the line.
But what
really did my heart good is that when things broke up, I hopped in my
car to catch the last quarter hour or so of another rally because it was
in the town I grew up and the idea there was one there,
well, I had to see that. As I approached, I saw a small group at one
corner of an intersection, okay, maybe they turned out 200 or maybe more
- only to then realize that the line actually stretched out in all four
directions and there were by my guess pushing 1000 people there. And
yes, that made me smile. To steal a phrase, bigly.
Next up big day: May 1.
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