Friday cat blogging

Two cats, one bed. Despite the size discrepancy, Janeway holds her own when Mio approaches. They work it out, often by both abandoning the choice window spot.

An abomination, not a mere embarrassment

Last night, I had terrible dreams of encroaching deaths and horrors. I am not the only one living with bad dreams

This morning I opened Facebook to this, from the Rev. Br. Richard Edward Helmer, Rector of the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Mill Valley, California.

Beyond American Vulgarity
It is arguably very late to say something, but the glorified visage of the Secretary of Homeland Security standing in front of half-naked, deported, incarcerated prisoners who had no recourse to due process — incarcerated, I should add, in an overseas prison with no access to legal representation and completely voided of their rights — a prison bought and paid for with U.S. tax dollars…

…crossed the line for me from the all-too-familiar vulgarity of this administration into outright obscenity.

No cynical veneer of deterring illegal immigration or criminality holds when those in power glorify the treatment of basic human life and freedoms with no greater notice than did the “owners” of those caught in chattel slavery or, for that matter, the overseers of concentration camps.

This is a criminal administration for its utter contempt for human dignity and rights, for its corrupt anti-constitutional assumption and conflation of the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury, and for its sheer bloody-mindedness when confronted with simple appeals for the truth. We are witnessing an abomination, not a mere embarrassment. All the more so because so many in this cabal lay claim to Christian faith as justification for their actions. There is nothing Christian about this. To say otherwise is blasphemy.

The bone-chilling truth is that this line, departing from all valued constitutional process that this government was sworn to uphold, puts all of us — citizen and immigrant alike — in danger. From abroad, reprisal and encouragement to every enemy of human dignity and freedom. And from within: If the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers may be treated with such open and gleeful contempt by this presidency, so may the rights of our citizens. Some would say that may in fact may be the point. In which case I say we are already tumbling over the precipice.

Our work ahead could not be clearer. Wherever we are, whoever we are, we must be doubly-prepared to stand up, speak up, and take action to preserve dignity, rights, and freedoms while we still can. If we do, our children will thank us.

If we do not, they will never forgive us.

The crime is in plain sight

Somebody on social media created this all-too-appropriate image.

 

Our rulers are running national security like a marginally competent, clubby family business. They don't trust the apparatus of government, so they have been going "off the books" to try to do their stuff. Since they are mostly ignorant light-weights, they are making a dangerous mess.

People keep suggesting that the Trumpies are so much more competent this time around. Not so. They've just found new, less orderly, and more vicious ways to impose themselves on the American state and people.

Paul Waldman explains how it is all about grievance.

No Republican alive has felt the kind of intoxicating surge of power they are experiencing right now, not because of the size of their 2024 electoral victory but because they have collectively decided that with sufficient aggression and creativity, they can go after just about every individual or institution that ever pissed them off. Even as they set about destroying the federal government, they are expanding its power to harass and intimidate their enemies wherever they may be found.

Incompetently of course, but no less malicious for that. 

Trump amplifies the stupid

Maybe this wasn't the smartest move?

Most people watching around the world recognizes foolish pride mixed with incompetence when they see it. 

And any woman who has competed with a particular sort of oblivious man for a job knows the special stupidity unqualified guys bring to tasks in which they are pretending to expertise they don't possess. (Few women get to try that dodge.) Here's journalist Jill Filipovic:

I cannot emphasize enough that these people do not know what they are doing. They were hired not in spite of that fact, but because of it. Hegseth, Gabbard, and the rest of mostly-men who make up the Trump administration clown show would simply never have otherwise ascended to the positions in which they currently find themselves. No other president would have appointed them, because other presidents at least try to appoint for competence. 

Trump knows that people who have no career prospects without him will do whatever they need to do to stay in his good graces. And that matters more to him than actually getting anything done, or keeping America safe and prosperous.

When your only route to power runs through one man, you are loyal to that one man.

This group chat debacle is not an aberration; it is a predictable result of what happens when you put a bunch of people in power who don’t know what they’re doing, and when you fire everyone who does know something. 

Trump’s paranoia about the Deep State being out to get him is amplified in his second term; he feels that last time around, his ambitions were thwarted by career civil servants and those who had careers before him and ambitions after him. So this time, the confidence man has gotten rid of the competent men.

... Incompetent people behave incompetently. That’s all part of the plan.

What more are these fools broadcasting to a listening world?

Oh Canada! as so often, DJT is shaming us

What if they don't want to get married? 

Historian Marc-William Palen knows a lot more about Canada, and also about the real world consequences of tariffs, than Donald Trump. Trump's attempt to make Canada the 51st state by economic coercion is a re-run of a plan tried by the late 19th century McKinley administration, also to reverse effect.

While Trump’s protectionism and imperial designs are a sharp break with the recent past, they aren’t new. In fact, they’re part of a very old GOP playbook that dates to a period Trump regularly lionizes: the late 19th century. He sees it as a golden era in American history. Yet, the history of the 1890s actually exposes the dangers of the U.S. trying to force Canada into American hands.

Like Trump, Republicans in the late 19th century wanted to annex Canada—which was then still a British colony. The push to make Canada part of the U.S. reached a fever pitch following passage of the highly protectionist McKinley Tariff in 1890, which raised average tariff rates to around 50%.

To pressure Canada into joining the U.S., the McKinley tariff explicitly declined to make an exception for Canadian products. Republicans hoped that Canadians, who were becoming ever more reliant on the U.S. market, would be eager to become the 45th state to avoid the punishing tariffs. 

Secretary of State James G. Blaine saw annexation as a way to eliminate continued and contentious competition over fish and timber. Blaine, who co-authored the McKinley Tariff, publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.” Blaine declared himself “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag. . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of American markets.” Privately, he admitted to President Benjamin Harrison that by denying reciprocity, Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”

Things didn't work out that way. The McKinley tariff inspired Canadian resistance. 

Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister John Macdonald wanted to react forcefully to send a message to the U.S. He proposed retaliating with high tariffs on American goods, as well as increased trade with Britain. He also recognized a political weapon when he was handed one. He adroitly turned the 1891 Canadian elections into a broader referendum concerning Canadian-American relations. He portrayed the Liberal opposition as being in bed with the Republican annexationists. According to him, they were involved in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by both, to force Canada into the American union.”

It looks as if Canada's current prime minister Mark Carney is going to pull out an unexpected victory for the country's updated ruling Liberal Party thanks to the unpopularity of today's Conservative leader Pierre Polievre apeing Trump.

by way of Paul Krugman

Thanks Donald!

Wedding graphic by way of Adam Tooze.

 • • •

I grew up much more aware of and fond of Canada than most residents of the USofA. Canada was just across the Niagara River, shores to sail my little Sailfish to if I was being adventurous. Nobody worried much about the border when I was a kid. Canadians didn't mind US visitors to their side of Niagara Falls and we didn't mind Canadians coming to shop in Buffalo malls when for a moment the value of the currency made this a good deal. My father added a booster antenna to our house so we could watch hockey and other interesting broadcasts on Canadian TV. 

Interestingly, the US Secretary of State James G. Blaine mentioned here also figured in my early life because I went to high school with a descendant of that Republican luminary. Like me, she was interested in what we called "current events." 

Trump's assault on Canada makes me feel ill.

To "improve the world"

Did you know that Washington, DC -- the 68 square mile federal district and city -- is not truly self-governing? Because the city government exists on the sufferance of the national Congress, when Republicans control both Houses -- and DC's budget! -- they can dictate to the city.

And so the GOP Congress demanded that the Black Lives Matter Plaza be erased -- and it was. The mayor needed her budget approved. Talk about "no taxation without representation!" in the slogan of the American Revolution.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar often strikes me as the last judicious rationalist standing, determined to be a thoughtful reasonable man, come what may. And not only that, he seeks to find something affirmative in the worst of times. It can be a very difficult posture to maintain. But this piece of racist Republican vandalism in DC got to him. In every edition of his substack, he reflects on something that grabbed his attention. He wrote:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. -- Anne Frank (1929-1945), died at 16 in a Nazi concentration camp

Through her diaries written while hiding from Nazis for two years, Anne Frank has become an international symbol of hope and optimism, despite her tragic death at sixteen in a Nazi concentration camp. Her quote here is an inspirational call to action that most people can embrace.

However, what does it mean to “improve the world”? That question is where sunny optimistic slogans meet the harsh reality of the real world. The Nazis thought they were improving the world: They were ridding the world of inferior people. Lynch mobs thought the same thing: They were imposing social justice on uppity Blacks, thereby restoring natural order. Billionaire industrialists convince themselves, and others, that because they employ many people, whatever they do improves the world. Politicians, judges, and others in power justify their corrupt behaviors with the soothing mantra that they, too, are improving the world.

Musk and his cohorts refer to anyone who disagrees with them as NPCs, a gaming acronym for non-player character. They convince themselves that they are improving the world because those whose lives they are destroying aren’t real people, just stick figures to be manipulated. Their self-delusion is so complete that they are beyond reason.

It’s a game of fake virtue that anyone can play.

The dismantling of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. hit me hard. Republicans threatened to withhold crucial funds for the city in order to bully the mayor into ripping up the pavement that featured the words Black Lives Matter. Why spend the money to do that except to insult, not just Black people, but the up to 26 million Americans who marched in support of BLM in 2020? This is a gauntlet thrown to the ground by Trump’s GOP that dissent will not be tolerated. How did this action improve the world? (FYI: It cost $610,000 to destroy.)

It would be easy to say that it’s all just a matter of point of view: One person’s ceiling is another person’s floor. It’s all just a friendly disagreement between two equally valid sides. But it rarely is. Evidence and logic usually favor one side more than the other. Yet so many people ditch evidence and logic in favor of a knee-jerk reaction that favors their biases. Examining evidence and employing logic requires rigorous research and thought. The process makes one feel overwhelmed and anxious, while just shouting a thoughtless opinion feels smart and virtuous, even though it is the opposite. But, as the saying goes, it is better to feel good than be good. Of course, we should strive to feel good by doing good.

There are so many ways—large and small—to improve the world. I often ask myself, “What can I do today to make someone’s day better?” Chat with a neighbor. Sign an autograph. Lend a beloved book to a friend. Those are the small ways.

But I don’t think doing those small actions alleviates my responsibility to do the larger things that improve the world. To do whatever it takes to promote the American ideal that all people are created equal and deserving of equal opportunities. And fighting those who are marginalizing people and punishing dissenters, while enriching themselves at the cost of the U.S. Constitution.

I don’t need to wait a single moment to do that.

Kareem's musing are available here.

Trump/Musk is coming for your mail service

The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) -- that's the postal workers union -- held rallies all over the country today against the Trump/Musk threat to privatize the post office. They were out in force on San Francisco's Embarcadero today.

Trump and Musk probably don't know this, but the US Constitution explicitly empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and post Roads." The USPS is one of the original functions of the federal government, right in there alongside raising an army for defense.

NALC sure doesn't trust Trump's Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and DOGE to identify inefficiencies in the complex nationwide mail system.

The union issued a letter:

As DOGE attempts to tackle [financial and pension issues] at the Postal Service, it is important that they know what our members do and who they are. Letter carriers are lifelines to American communities who uphold our Constitutionally mandated service obligation by delivering to 169 million delivery points, including 51.5 million rural households and businesses, six and sometimes seven days a week.

Five years ago, during a global pandemic when most businesses shut down, letter carriers did not take one day off. We did not work from home. Instead, we delivered every single day, just as we have for 250 years.

... Common sense solutions are what the Postal Service needs, not privatization efforts that will threaten 640,000 postal employees’ jobs, 7.9 million jobs tied to our work, and the universal service every American relies on daily.

As is true in so many arenas, the people most likely to be hurt by diminished postal service are poor and rural folks -- so many of whom were Trump voters. Let's all of us stand up for a strong national postal service. It's part of what brings us together as one country.

All out against Trump/Musk ...

Resistance looks different in Trump 2.0. But that doesn't mean there isn't any. In fact, say scholars of protest Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam, "Resistance is alive and well in the United States."

Doubt this? They've collected the evidence. 

... since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago. ... In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. 

Their study of popular movements gives them a framework within which to describe what resistance works in the face of broad challenges to rule of law and democracy.

Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed.

Consider the protests against Tesla [join by way of Tesla TakeDown] in response to Elon Musk firing federal workers and blocking federal funding. The multifaceted campaign has a quite specific goal: punish Tesla, Musk’s signature company. ...

... The MAGA faction controls the GOP and enforces strict discipline among its members through fear and the threat of a well-funded Republican primary opponent in the next election. The Supreme Court majority is solidly on the right. Elected GOP officials are abandoning town halls and discouraging constituents from calling their offices. Street protests endure but are increasingly surveilled and high-risk, as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil suggests. Uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will ignore the First Amendment and weaponize the government to persecute political oppositionists looms large.

In the face of such changes, the public’s most powerful options are often withholding labor power and purchasing power. ...The prominence of billionaires in the administration and populist anger toward them make this type of approach even more viable in today’s climate. 

The world stage offers inspiring examples.

... Indeed, the diversification of resistance methods puts the United States on a similar trajectory to many democracy movements of the past. ...in Czechoslovakia, six days after the Soviet invasion in 1968, the newspaper Vecerni Prah published “10 commandments,” writing: “When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU: 1. Don’t know 2. Don’t care 3. Don’t tell 4. Don’t have 5. Don’t know how to 6. Don’t give 7. Can’t do 8. Don’t sell 9. Don’t show 10. Do nothing.”

Read the scholars' Waging Nonviolence article about today's resistance here.

This pairs well with an eariler, time-honored response all of us need to know to any interaction for police or immigration cops. 

And be heartened that Bernie and AOC drew 30,000 people to a Denver rally against the regime yesterday. We are indeed everywhere.

Elon Musk is trying to buy a Wisconsin judge

This Schimel guy is really a piece of work; take a look.

Wisconsin elects its Supreme Court judges. Right now, the court leans toward Dems -- that is, in support of abortion rights for women and against a Republican plan to disenfranchise half of Wisconsin voters by corrupt gerrymandering. Electing Susan Crawford holds the line.

The Wisconsin Democratic Party is probably the most effective state party apparatus in the country. If any Dems can go up against Elon, it's WisDems. Our small donations can still help get out the vote in this April 1 election. Voting has already begun. 

I've contributed; if you can, you should too.

Stupid, destructive, and utterly unrealistic: that's our Prez say the economists!

Why are Trump, along with Musk and his Muskrats, breaking government and the institutions that make this country a somewhat livable place? Seems crazy.

A couple of our most significant economic thinkers took up the puzzle in the last few days. Short answer: yes, the Trump regime is crazy -- and vile too.

Adam Tooze is the preeminent English language economic historian of the 20th and 21st century world capitalist system. (I have written about his highly accessible books here, here, here and here.) He does the work to engage what passes for economic theory claimed by Trump's intellectual apologists and wrecking appointees. 

I began to wonder whether this search for a rational wing in Trump’s economic policy is not, in fact, a step towards sane-washing and whether this sane-washing is not driven by some engrained mainstream framings of America’s problems that react in sympathy with the Trump administration’s rhetoric of crisis and victimization even if they are out of sympathy with the Trump administration in general.

Is there a real and important continuity of problems in America’s political economy that at least parts of the new Trump administration are trying to address, thus forming a continuity with the Biden team and Trump 1.0?

Or is the shellshocked commentariat of 2025 in the grip of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which our own inner fears lead us to engage with our captors in a way which denies the actual reality of being hurled into a mad house? Call it Mar-a-Lago (Accord) Syndrome.

... we are all struggling to find some kind of rational purchase on the unhinged situation created by the Trump administration.

Turns out, after serious engagement with some Trump apologists, that he finds "no there there" in Gertrude Stein's memorable formulation. 

The Stockholm syndrome element kicks in when we come to the original framing of the problem: The belief that something must be done. Once you are convinced that “something must be done”, you become vulnerable to someone hawking a big plan to “do things”.

Why do sane people in contemporary America believe that “something must be done”? Ignoring the reflexive element of crisis by which Trump himself is the main reason something must be done, which renders one susceptible to any big idea that might fix Trump (even if elements of that “fix” are shared with analysis offered by the Trump camp itself) etc etc, there are two main schools of thought:

• 1. American deindustrialization and class balance. ...

• 2. American debt....

Both arguments 1. and 2. are well known. Both are also contentious. No reader of Chartbook will be surprised to hear that I find both 1. and 2. unconvincing. But that is not my point here. My point is that if you do believe either 1. or 2. you need to be on your guard against Mar-A-Lago syndrome.

Even if you disapprove of the Trumpites style and lawlessness, you may be tempted to take at their word the more reasonable members of the highjack team who insist that they offer a dramatic and comprehensive plan to address the crisis you also believe in, leading you to lose track of the fact that … they are highjackers and they are holding you hostage!

By buying into the reality of underlying problem that Mar-A-Lago claims to be addressing you run the risk of overemphasizing the rational element in Trump 2.0.

Tooze simply finds no rational element.

None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. ...

... To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it.

Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.

You can read the entire Tooze argument here. 

Paul Krugman, former NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize for economics recipient, comes to similar conclusions, even more pithily expressed. In trying to understand the Trump/Musk vandalism in government, he sees no plan -- just the wounded egos of ignorant men.

My guess, instead, is that it’s an ego thing, that Social Security has become to Musk what Canada has become to Donald Trump. Both men at one point said something stupid, something that would have turned them into laughingstocks if there weren’t so much fear in the air. But both men have been unable to let go, doubling down in what amounts to an attempt to redeem their initial foolishness.

In case you’ve forgotten, back in December, when Justin Trudeau visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump taunted him by suggesting that Canada become a U.S. state, calling him “Governor Trudeau.” Some people suggested that it was meant as a joke, but it would be more accurate to call it a dominance display.

Trump's chief of staff listens to him threaten to annex Canada

But once Trump realized how ridiculous the performance made him look, he refused to let go. Instead, annexing Canada seems to have become a fundamental plank of Trump’s foreign policy, with his demands getting ever more insistent the more obvious it becomes that Canadians loathe the idea.

Since then, Musk has replicated his insecure co-president and put Social Security under the gun:

Musk’s big blooper was his claim that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. This claim probably reflected the failure of young Musk staffers — what Dudek called the “DOGE kids” — to understand how the SSA’s databases work, combined with a complete lack of common sense. I mean, if there really were huge numbers of dead people receiving Social Security payments, don’t you think someone else would have noticed?

In a normal political environment, getting something that big that wrong would have destroyed Musk’s credibility and led to his permanent exile from any role in setting policy. But this is America in 2025, so Trump amplified the already-refuted claim when addressing Congress, and Musk seems more powerful than ever.

Furthermore, Musk refuses to give up his Social Security smears, making the completely implausible claim that fraudulent use of Social Security numbers accounts for 10 percent of federal spending. And I’d argue that that the plan to effectively cut off many disabled Americans is best seen as part of a desperate effort to find or pretend to find Social Security fraud, retroactively justifying Musk’s big mistake.

Still, does the plan have to be this cruel to the most vulnerable Americans? As I see it, the cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

... It's hard to escape the sense that DOGE staffers are actually enjoying this. And why not? We’re mostly talking about poorly socialized young men suddenly given the power to ruin other people’s lives, taking their cues from a leader who has declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” So why should we be surprised that the DOGE kids’ rampage through the government looks more and more like a remake of Lord of the Flies?

Krugman read Tooze's screed and agrees. 

Look, I understand that it’s more fun to write an article about the supposed emergence of a new economic philosophy than to write yet another article about how ignorant men are, once again, saying stupid things. And I guess some journalists are uncomfortable at the thought that people with great power to shape policy have no idea (or rather nothing but false ideas) what they’re doing. 

But trying to put an intellectual gloss on Trumpist international economic policy is sanewashing that misinforms readers rather than helping their understanding.

... My point is that Trump believes many blatantly false things that suit his prejudices. Why imagine that he and his courtiers have sophisticated ideas and a deep strategy when it comes to international economics?

On the surface, Trump’s trade policy looks stupid and destructive. Dig deeper, and you discover that this first impression was completely valid. Trying to pretend otherwise is just misinforming readers.

We don't have to be overawed because these guys are considered some of the best academia has to offer in their field. They care about being understood and they have given us the goods: Trump's economic antics are stupid and cruel, without any rationality beyond grift and grievance. 

Why attacking Tesla is a good tactic in this moment

This fantasy Boston Tesla Party is extreme, but the national impulse among those repelled by co-president Musk and all his doings is smart. 

Why?

•  Generic conscience boycotts of big retailers, especially ones with few retail outlets to disrupt, are usually poorly targeted to get results. Sure, we can "boycott Amazon" but it will likely remain impossible to quantify whether we are having any impact. (Yes, Bezos is a pig-- but his creation does deliver actual value to many people.)

• But Tesla is an ideal boycott target because it's almost more a brand than a car these days, floating on marketing hoopla. In 2008, Tesla succeeded by being a "cool" breakthrough in EV tech. Today, Elon's fascist antics make his cars "uncool." And that matters when their value proposition is has become mostly hype.

• Once upon a time, Teslas were uniquely innovative, introducing the possibility of viable EVs in car-centered American life. But Tesla has serious competitors these days. No need to buy a Tesla to get the technological and self-congratulatory ego boost that many people get from buying a less polluting car.

• And having opened the EV market, Tesla hasn't improved its product much. The cybertruck is an ugly horror. Again, there are alternatives and new classes of vehicles.

• Tesla's market includes many people repelled by Trump and Musk's antics. He hopes he can replace these buyers with Republicans? Fat chance! Trump may be dumb enough to go that way, but most of his non-MAGA followers are not.

• Even Elon's investors fear he has lost the thread with his car company in his ketamine-addled rampages. His shareholders ask questions.

Let's keep up the pressure. Consumers have hurt Tesla's stock price and thus Elon's bottom line. And his car company is still overvalued. 

Teslatakedown is working. And many people are located where they can join in. Let's make Teslas a sign of iniquity. When you live off hype, you can die from being submerged in a better story.