America's mental softening

It feels as if nowadays most news reporting and commentary is mostly shallow surface scratching and fluff. Is America really being dumbed down, maybe largely because people have been taught or somehow learned intolerance toward either much nuance or cognitive dissonance? Are we being worn down mentally by constant demagoguery, deceptive propaganda and way too much secrecy? Maybe.

Some rummaging around turns up solid evidence of a structural shift to shallow, low-friction output. For example, local and investigative reporting have really collapsed. The US has lost over 2,000 newspapers and tens of thousands of journalists. The share of investigative pieces in local papers has dropped notably since around 2018. That’s the kind of coverage that supplies depth, institutional memory, nuance, and sometimes cognitive dissonance. 

Impacts on the brain-mind and society

Social science says that when local and investigative reporting collapses, democratic and community health suffer across multiple dimensions. Lower civic knowledge apparently correlates with decreased civic engagement and lower voter turnout. When local newspapers disappear, civic engagement and voter participation drop, while voting becomes more polarized. That endangers democracy.

Some research indicates that the presence of local newspapers correlates with higher voter turnout, better assessment of candidates, less polarization and corruption, and greater government transparency.

When a local newspaper dies, civic engagement decreases, elected officials are less accountable, corruption is more pervasive and voter participation drops and becomes more polarized.

Authoritarianism is inherently hostile to independent news reporting because it undermines core weapons that authoritarians rely heavily on to battle democracy and the rule of law, e.g., secrecy, impunity, narrative control, etc. Authoritarians try to gain monopoly control of all major means of persuasion. In true dictatorships, the media are state‑controlled and dissenting speech is censored or criminalized. In dictatorships what is mostly reported is “official truth”. That is usually mostly lies, slanders, crackpot reasoning and irrational emotional manipulation to whip up unwarranted fear, anger, resentment, bigotry, distrust, etc., i.e., bad faith demagoguery.

By default or circumstance, capitalism tends to operate primarily on the side of the authoritarians. In the US right now, capitalism doesn’t directly impose censorship. However, censorship is subtly imposed by subjecting news to the profit motive. The profit motive treats news information as a commodity for sale, not something needed to support the public interest or democracy. That is a part of what is reshaping the mainstream news media from a major source of support for the public interest, democracy and the rule of law, to a major source of support for authoritarianism or tyranny and the corruption that usually accompanies it. In this way capitalism's overriding profit motive is destroying the MSM. 

In short, for-profit capitalist media systems are structurally aligned with authoritarianism and dictatorship or oligarchy. Along the way, we're getting used to and coming to expect shallow, fluffy "news", i.e., infotainment. Hard core news is becoming heavily disfavored in American society.

America's collapse

In addition to Trump starting a war with Iran to deflect from the Epstein files, scans of the news makes clear that the US, and its democracy and rule of law, are in a period of major collapse. The damage is staggering and accruing on all fronts. No one can keep up with it. As usual, nearly all of the MSM’s reporting is too fragmented and siloed for most people to get a feel for how bad the situation has become. A couple of matters touch on the scope of the collapse.

The NYT reports (not paywalled) that to scrounge up money of a staggering $1.5 trillion ($1,5000 billion) military budget, the “peace president” Trump is looking to gut spending on domestic programs. He is targeting ~$4 billion in federal subsidies for home heating and cooling costs that about 6 million households rely on. Trump justifies his domestic spending cuts spending by saying the US can’t afford it. He asked Congress to cut about $73 billion next fiscal year across a wide array of domestic agencies and programs, including education, health care, housing and nutrition assistance.

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In other collapse news, Trump has turned the White House website into a for-profit information gathering site. A reddit post was about an official WH statement by Melania Trump ranting about internet chatter and reporting linking her to our 2nd favorite pedophile Jeff Epstein and his pedo friend Ghislaine Maxwell.* 

But, here’s the collapse part, slathered on top of her official statement as 1st lady, something I didn’t know existed for the WH website, was a Trump pop-up ad “Welcome To The Golden Age” presumably a portal to Trump’s grift operations. He likes fleecing the flock. Trump's ad demanded your email address to get past Trump’s grift entry portal before you could read Melania’s rant. Regarding his grift power, independent estimates indicate that Trump has personally made at least ~$1.4 billion since returning to office in January 2025. Estimates of his total wealth vary up to ~$58 billion depending on the value of his crypto holdings at any particular time. Now that’s serious grift power!    

Download the official White House app today!!

Trump ad on the left blocks access to

Melania’s rant unless you cough up your email

* Our 1st fave pedo, of course, is Trump himself!

Apparently, the court in a defamation lawsuit that Melania filed against a columnist who publicly linked her to the Trump-Epstein pedo industry granted discovery power to the columnist (defendant). He is aggressively demanding evidence in discovery about Melania’s fun part in the pedo industry. That has made her very, very angry. Or maybe very very scared. 

To stay in the loop on this red hot breaking Melania is in a snit news, download the official White House app today!! /s

Q: Is this great collapse news or what? 

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In more collapse news, the walls are closing in on democracy. a NYT article discusses the MAGA party’s imperial displeasure with voters exercising their power to get policies they want but MAGA elites hate. The NYT article (not paywalled), Stung by Voters, Republican Legislators Move to Curb Citizen Initiatives, describes how red state citizen ballot measures to protect abortion, expand Medicaid and raise the minimum wage have MAGA legislators and governors seriously pissed off. Clearly, MAGA elites are just not going to take this democracy and voting crap any more. People need to sit down and STFU so MAGA can do its work saving democracy, voting rights and whatnot. (/s) Apparently, red state voters frustrated by one-party control, are getting aggressive about using citizen-sponsored initiatives to get policies they want but that their MAGA legislatures refuse to give them. 

To make things right, MAGA legislatures in North Dakota, Utah and South Dakota are putting measures on the November ballot to would raise the threshold for approving citizen amendments to 60%, up from a simple majority. That will fix that feisty majority of citizens by golly.

Those darned voters and that darned democracy and voting, it just enough to make a MAGA elite scream. Poor MAGA elites. They are being horribly victimized by what’s left of our democracy and citizen’s power.  /s

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In domestic spending collapse news, reporting is covering the collapse of a big food charity in the Midwest, Ruby’s food bank. That charity served several hundred thousand people in MN, ND, WI and IA, has closed its operating sites in those four states. The reason cited for the collapse was financial. What that means isn’t clear, but it comes in the time of MAGA, which (1) is intensely hostile to charity and federal spending for food and anything else for low income people, and (2) has caused inflation that made the charity's operating costs unsustainable. 

Ruby’s failure was in an ecosystem that Trump and the MAGA GOP have spent years actively attacking and degrading. Trump-aligned Republicans pushed a spending bill that gutted federal SNAP food spending by ~$187–300 billion over a decade, restructures SNAP to push costs onto states, and slashes related supports like SNAP-Ed. Meanwhile, food prices remain historically high under MAGA inflation, war and high uncertainty. In all of this, MAGA elites and politics refuse to use available tools to keep families fed during shutdowns. In this context, the sudden failure of a rural, volunteer-heavy pantry network isn’t a random misfortune. It’s a predictable outcome of the MAGA wealth and power movement, which is hostile to robust programs and institutions that materially serve large numbers of ordinary people (and this, and this too).

Q: Are all those people using federal and private food charities, as MAGA elites constantly tell us, just a bunch of socialist or communist takers who need to get off their lazy butts, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and get a job, or, is there maybe something more to it? 

A highly successful up-pulling by boot straps,

well, boots at least

It can be done!

Attribution of weather in climate science

A 2023 SciAm article, When Disaster Strikes, Is Climate Change to Blame?, discusses the status of weather attribution in climate science. Climate attribution science is the science of attributing an extreme weather event to global warming. For decades, climate scientists could not attribute any specific weather event or series of unusual weather events to global warming, e.g., a major flood or a deadly heat wave. Computers were not powerful enough and existing models were not adequate for the job. 

Climate attribution science asks the precise question, to what extent did human‑caused climate change make a specific extreme event (or series of events) more likely or more intense than it would have been in a preindustrial climate. Using observations, statistics, and climate models, researchers compare our current, greenhouse‑gas‑laden world to a counterfactual one without human emissions, estimating, for example, that climate change made a wildfire twice as likely or a storm 10% wetter.

Over the past decade, this line of research has become a mature discipline with standardized methods and explicit uncertainty ranges. Confidence is highest for heat waves, where the human signal is strong and models are well‑tested; it is moderate for heavy rainfall and floods and still developing for some storm types. Multiple independent teams, using different models and datasets, now routinely converge on similar attribution results, which is the gold standard for scientific reliability. In short, attribution science is not infallible, but it is robust enough that major assessments and courts increasingly treat it as credible evidence.

The science politicized and attacked

Trump and MAGA elites are responding to the growing body of global warming evidence not by accepting and working with it, but by deflecting and attacking climate science generally. They erase real science from policy and replace that with fake science and lies. Trump still continues to call climate change a “hoax” or “con”. He attacks the science wherever he can. Top MAGA officials cynically and falsely describe carbon dioxide as “beneficial”, a debunked assertion, while misrepresenting climate science as a “religion”. MAGA-dominated federal agencies have floated or relied on reports full of cherry‑picking and debunked denial arguments to justify efforts to revoke EPA’s endangerment finding, even as overwhelming evidence links human emissions to worsening extremes. Analysts describe this as a shift from simple denial to institutionalized misrepresentation.

Apparently, simple global warming denial isn’t working very well any more. MAGA does not debate attribution studies or other mainstream climate science evidence. Instead the climate science deniers defund, censor, or replace real science knowledge with false partisan alternatives. MAGA politics has turned climate science denial into federal policy while people in the real world face increasingly intense climate disasters.

Denial

Deflection

A deep dive with Pxy: Regarding what AI is doing for demagogues and why

The harsh view of the human condition

The reality, we’re not idiots, just human

A dive today with Pxy took some interesting turns. The initial query asked for data on how many vocal MAGA propagandists rely on AI to compose effective MAGA demagoguery, lies, slanders and crackpottery. That was followed by a series of related queries that dug into the guts of AI programming and why it is what it is. 

Short answers are maybe no one knows how many use AI to generate demagoguery. Pxy didn’t find any on point data. Also demagogue propagandists could use AI to generate demagoguery because AI does not “decide” to ignore facts and reason in a human sense. So, when AI is asked to generate partisan demagoguery it can and does produce lies, slander, and crackpot claims because it is optimizing for plausible language, not for truth. 

Again, AI is not sentient or conscious in any recognized way. It is software programmed for statistical probabilities of what word follows another. Research on AI‑generated propaganda finds that models can produce convincing falsehoods and narratives. Those are are often more detailed, emotionally loaded, and rhetorically polished than human disinfo, because they “fill in” with whatever sounds coherent even if it is fabricated. AI doesn’t ignore facts. It simply has no built‑in preference for facts unless it’s been trained or instructed to prioritize facts and reason over a fluent, toxic MAGA screed.

As Pxy puts it: The core architecture of large language models is optimized for fluent next‑word prediction, not for epistemic hygiene. Truth is an emergent property, not the primary objective.

How nice, epistemic hygiene. Wonderful, AI has epistemic herpes!!  /s

Why is AI allowed to generate demagoguery at all? It can be built to strongly avoid lies, slanders and crackpottery by imposing fact and logic checking rules. But that isn’t done because facts and logic are bitterly disputed by bad people operating in what I call bad faith and malice. The bad people call fact checking and anti-crackpot rules tyranny and censorship. A “truth basis” for AI would be attacked as biased or illegitimate by people and interests that are disadvantaged by fact, robust truths and sound reasoning. Making a consumer AI that relentlessly privileges evidence over personal vibes or tribes, especially in polarized American politics, cuts directly against core commercial and political incentives that put AI on the market in the first place.[1]

Somatic practices = heavier reliance on facts, 

robust truths & sound (conscious) reasoning 

We are what we are, not anything more

But why are things like that? Pxy gave the expected answer. Paraphrasing, it’s the human condition, stupid! 

In politics, human ignorance and unconscious biases such as motivated reasoning and logic flaws can be major factors because that’s how the human species actually evolved and works. Our democracy and institutions sit on top of messy human psychology and bias, not outside of it. Human political reasoning is mostly intuitive, emotional, biased, argumentative and tribal by default, a good way to keep politics from degenerating into lies- and slanders-larded Trump‑style filth is to build and enforce AI rules that support facts, robust truths, and sound reasoning. 

Political cognition research shows that most people almost always form opinions based on emotion, biases and identity first. After that, they apply conscious reasoning to rationalize those positions, not to question them. Faced with inconvenient facts or reasoning often makes partisan believers more skilled at defending their false beliefs and flawed reasoning. At least with politics, most humans are mostly partisan arguers, not reasoned thinkers. Human biases, loyalties and identity are the human traits that bad faith or malicious authoritarian elites and demagogues exploit. Those factors drive in‑group / out‑group dynamics. The normal human intolerance of uncertainty makes people more vulnerable to malicious demagogic narratives like Trumpism. American authoritarian demagogues are using AI to better exploit the human traits that lead them to wealth and power.

Footnote:

1. Any strong requirement that AI downgrade or refuse certain claims, e.g., “the 2020 election was stolen”, is instantly framed and smeared as political suppression by bad faith actors who need to rely on that lie. That makes robust guardrails for facts, truths and sound reason politically and economically costly. Tech companies have economic incentives to avoid becoming explicit arbiters of political truth because they fear regulatory retaliation, user backlash, and loss of access in key markets, so they default to vague “community standards” rather than hard factual baselines.

Rut roh! If that’s true, we’re in real trouble --

MAGA doesn’t do in-group self-policing

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