.... Republicans — devoid of conscience and terrified of Trump — have shown an almost complete willingness to let him do whatever he wants and drag the country wherever he pleases, which is down into a sewer of despotism, corruption, cruelty and fiscal insanity.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court is clearing the way for him. Meanwhile, Trump and his enablers are busy trying to neuter the rest of the justice system with strategically placed sycophants.In The Seattle Times, Danny Westneat sympathized with Senator Lisa Murkowski, who said she felt “cheated” by Trump’s reneging on a deal with her: “If only there had been some clue, some sign, that a politician who cheated with his charity, cheated on taxes, cheated on his wife, cheats at golf, cheated his contractors, cheated his customers and then attempted the biggest cheat of all — on the American election system — might eventually work his way around to cheating you, too?”
Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Monday, July 28, 2025
The news is very bad and worse: Euphemisms can kill
Sunday, July 27, 2025
About Comet, Pxy's agentic AI extension
Q: In terms of searching and analysis, can Comet access and analyze more information, than Perplexity, e.g., by opening more links? For example, would Comet be better able to answer this query than Pxy?: "Scan this blog, https://dispol.blogspot.com/, for posts that link to Pxy searches and briefly describe the context for the link, and also state what % of blog posts there are by the author Germaine compared to other authors like PD and Susan.". I'm interested in a general capability assessment.A: Comet, Perplexity's AI-powered browser, provides significantly more comprehensive access to information than traditional Perplexity searches. The key advantage lies in its Personal Search feature, which leverages browsing history and AI-driven web navigation to retrieve and analyze information on your behalf.This includes:
- Direct tab and page analysis: Comet can analyze content across multiple open tabs simultaneously and maintain context between them
- Authorization-based access: Unlike regular web searches, Comet can access pages that require login credentials or personal authorization, such as social networks, email accounts, and private dashboards
Traditional Perplexity Limitations:
- Automated navigation: The browser can navigate through multi-page websites, follow internal links, and perform complex browsing workflows autonomously
Regular Perplexity searches are limited to publicly accessible web content and cannot maintain persistent browsing sessions or access authenticated content. While Perplexity excels at synthesizing information from multiple sources, it cannot perform the kind of deep, multi-page website analysis that your example query requires.Answering Your Specific Query Example
For your example query about analyzing the blog at https://dispol.blogspot.com for Perplexity links and author percentages, Comet would indeed be significantly more capable.
Comet's Advantages:
- Can systematically browse through blog archives and individual posts
- Maintain context about link patterns and author information across multiple pages
- Access and analyze the full blog structure, including navigation between different time periods and categories
Current Perplexity Limitations:
- Perform comprehensive content analysis across the entire site
Based on the search results, regular Perplexity can only analyze the immediate content available on a single page load. For the sample blog provided, this would mean limited analysis of only the most recent posts visible on the homepage, missing the comprehensive site-wide analysis your query requires.
A single search_web call can issue at most 3 keyword queries and returns up to 10 results per query.
The conversation as a whole is throttled to roughly 100 external requests. For large blogs (5 000+ posts) that is far short of an exhaustive crawl.
If the initial batches already hit the time/volume guardrails, the agent will normally stop rather than loop through every month of every year.
Heuristics that favour frequent authors
Comet looks first for the author label that Blogger places under the title (“Posted by …”) on archive pages. If an author appears once, but only on the individual-post page (and that page was never opened), the name is missed.
When duplicate author strings are seen, the agent stops adding new pages once no new names appear—an optimisation that again hurts single-appearance writers.
Practical constraints
Large HTML pages are clipped at 300 kB, so very long pages may be truncated before the “Posted by” line.
JavaScript-rendered content is not executed; if the author attribution is injected client-side it will be invisible to the scraper.
Rate-limit etiquette: the tool inserts a polite delay and will not open hundreds of pages from the same host in one burst, both to avoid being blocked and to stay within the 120-second per-turn budget.
How to catch the single-post author next time
Manually enumerate monthly archive URLs (
/2019/08/
,/2019/07/
, …) and let the tool open each page.Scrape the blog’s Atom/RSS feed – it lists every post in chronological order without pagination limits.
If the platform supports it, append
?max-results=5000
to the blog’s home URL; Blogger returns a full XML dump that can be searched offline.Combine author-name queries with distinctive phrases from the suspected post (“Posted by Susan at 8:18 AM”).
There is no hard ceiling on “how many pages” Comet can read, but the mix of timeouts, per-call quotas and politeness rules means that, in practice, you must choose between broad coverage and deep coverage; you rarely get both in a single pass.
Saturday, July 26, 2025
Regarding the Epstein-Trump affair
Q1: Estimate the likelihood that (1) Trump will face any legal or civil sanctions for his activities related to Jeff Epstein, and (2) Trump will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell. Take into account Trump's track record of lawlessness, contempt for the rule of law, subversion and corruption of the DOJ and FBI, etc. Before finalizing your response: (1) Cross-check all statistics and numbers against multiple sources, (2) Verify all proper names, dates, and organizational details, (3) Confirm all study references and research citations, .... Base analysis on current legal proceedings and Trump's track record of lawlessness.A1:1. Likelihood of Trump Facing Legal or Civil Sanctions for Epstein-Related Activities
Estimated Likelihood: Low to Medium (20-35%)
Factors Against Likelihood:
DOJ Policy Changes: The Trump administration has systematically dismantled anti-corruption enforcement mechanisms:2. Likelihood of Trump Pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell
Estimated Likelihood: High (70-85%)
Trump's Public Statements: When asked about pardoning Maxwell, Trump stated "I'm allowed to do it, but it's something I have not thought about"—notably not ruling it out and emphasizing his authority to do so.
Pardon Pattern: Trump has demonstrated a clear pattern of using pardons to reward loyalty and protect allies: ....
Trump's Track Record of Lawlessness and Institutional Subversion
High Confidence Assessment
Multiple scholarly analyses confirm Trump's systematic approach to undermining democratic institutions: ....Q2: When Trump said about pardoning Maxwell, "I'm allowed to do it, but it's something I have not thought about", how likely is it that he was lying? Take into account years of his public track record of chronic, constant lying and hostility to inconvenient truth. Give a probability estimate with specific percentage ranges.A2:Analysis: Likelihood of Trump Lying About Not Having "Thought About" a Maxwell Pardon
Based on extensive research into Trump's documented lying patterns, psychological analysis, and the specific context of his Maxwell statement, here is my probability assessment:Estimated Likelihood: 85-95%
Trump was almost certainly lying when he said he hadn't "thought about" pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell. This assessment is based on several converging lines of evidence: ....
Dictatorship update: Government censorship of the private sector
** The ideological spectrum that djt, Carr and MAGA elites demand get disseminated is acceptance by the American people of radical right dictatorship, deep corruption of government and belief in MAGA's endless lies, slanders, crackpot conspiracies and the like.
[The sole Democratic commissioner Anna] Gomez further criticized the FCC for overstepping its authority in "intervening in employment matters reserved for other government entities with proper jurisdiction on these issues" by requiring Skydance commitments to not establish any DEI programs, which Carr derided as "invidious." But Gomez countered that "this agency is undermining legitimate efforts to combat discrimination and expand opportunity" by meddling in private companies' employment decisions.
Carr went on to explain that CBS had committed to “ending invidious forms of DEI,” a pretext Trump has used to purge the federal government of anyone who isn’t white and male in leadership positions.
“One of the things they’re going to have to do is put in an ombudsman in place for two years,” Carr said. “So basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president. So that’s something that’s significant that we’re going to see happening as well.”
Friday, July 25, 2025
Dictatorship update: Punishing homelessness, gutting the constitution
** Most existing CC facilities are centers for holding confined people. They provide little to no mental illness or drug addiction treatment in prison-like conditions. CC typically costs states ~$30,000/year. Most states do not have much money for that. The EO explicitly defunds "harm reduction" and "housing first" programs that have proven effective, but cost more. States will have to pay nearly all of the increased costs. Politically speaking that just won't happen, especially in red states. And, unlike jail terms for criminal convictions, confinement to a CC facility has no definite end. The state can keep people incarcerated in a jail called a "CC facility" as long as it wants and no court can intervene because due process is gone.
Q3: How big a legal leap [is it] for MAGA legal scholars who believe in the unitary executive to go from (a) Trump's EO on ending crime and disorder, which undermines due process for homeless people, i.e., "people who cannot take care of themselves", to (b) getting rid of due process for "people who attack the US" by criticizing djt or MAGA elites? Can erosion of procedural safeguards for allegedly illegal immigrants, and then for people who cannot take care of themselves lead to loss of due process for anyone who criticizes Trump or MAGA because they threaten the state and need to be silenced? Does the progressive loss of due process and other procedural safeguards for targeted groups so far amount to significant evidence that procedural safeguards can eventually be lost for everyone? In view of all relevant evidence so far, does reasoning that we will lose our procedural safeguards under a Trump-MAGA dictatorship amount to irrationality, e.g., unreasonable alarmism or crackpot conspiracy theory? Focus mostly on analysis of existing evidence that this progression is already underway. Consider Trump's vindictiveness and lawsuits against critics.A3: .... commentary ....The progression from denying due process to homeless individuals deemed "unable to care for themselves" to targeting political critics who "attack the US" represents not a legal leap but a documented pattern of authoritarian consolidation already underway. For unitary executive theorists aligned with MAGA ideology, this expansion follows a predictable trajectory that scholars studying democratic erosion have identified as a warning sign of broader systemic collapse..... long analysis ....Scholars studying authoritarian transitions identify clear patterns in how democratic institutions are dismantled. Research on "autocratic consolidation" shows that regimes typically follow similar strategies:
1. Target vulnerable populations first to establish precedents2. Expand emergency powers using national security justifications
3. Weaponize legal systems against political opponents
4. Undermine judicial independence through direct defiance
5. Normalize exceptional measures until they become routine
Multiple scholars note that the U.S. is following this exact trajectory.Conclusion: Not Alarmism, But Pattern Recognition
The progression from denying due process to homeless individuals to targeting political critics represents neither a legal leap nor irrational alarmism. It follows a documented pattern of authoritarian consolidation that scholars have identified across multiple democratic breakdowns. The evidence shows this progression is already underway:
1. Due process protections are being systematically eliminated for vulnerable populations
2. Military force is being used against political protesters
3. Court orders are being routinely violated
4. Civil litigation is being weaponized against media critics
5. Federal agencies are being directed to investigate political opponents
For unitary executive theorists who believe the president possesses unlimited control over executive power, the expansion from homeless populations to political critics requires no legal innovation—only the continued application of existing theories to new targets.
The question is not whether this progression will occur, but whether democratic institutions and civil society can organize effective resistance before the erosion becomes irreversible.
Thursday, July 24, 2025
The MAGA mindset: Dealing with empathy
MAGA demagogues' claim that appeals to sympathy are emotional blackmail. They argue that border enforcement, budget cuts, anti-abortion laws or anti-trans laws only look cruel because liberals exploit empathy. This messaging equates cognitive empathy with gullibility. The implicit argument is that understanding an opponent’s viewpoint is a moral mistake. It's gullibility to be empathetic, so don't be empathetic!
Cognitive dissonance management is needed when MAGA policies cause obvious harm, e.g., kicking people off Medicaid or food stamps. Vilifying empathy allows supporters an easy way to preserve their righteous self-image while feeling little to no cognitive dissonance. Some research indicates that pleasure at out-group pain spikes when leaders signal empathy's irrelevance. Yeah, some people are getting crueler. They just have been tricked by MAGA demagoguery into not knowing it.
Dictatorship update: Federal agency collapse
The US Population is Aging
And what that will mean for the future generation who will have to find ways to support an aging population...........
The number of Americans ages 65 and older will more than double over the next 40 years, reaching 80 million in 2040. The number of adults ages 85 and older, the group most often needing help with basic personal care, will nearly quadruple between 2000 and 2040.
The nation is aging. By 2040, about one in five Americans will be age 65 or older, up from about one in eight in 2000. Because younger people are much more likely than older people to work and pay taxes that finance Social Security, Medicare, and all other public-sector activities, population aging could strain government budgets.
The number of workers sharing the cost of supporting Social Security beneficiaries will soon plummet unless future employment patterns change dramatically. The latest Social Security Administration projections indicate that there will be 2.1 workers per Social Security beneficiary in 2040, down from 3.7 in 1970.
Improvements in life expectancy have also propelled the increase in the older population. Between 1900 and 1960, life expectancy at birth increased from 51 years to 74 years for men and from 58 years to 80 years for women, primarily through reductions in infant, childhood, and early adult mortality. Longevity gains since 1960, fueled by declining death rates at older ages, have been slower, especially for women. Life expectancy's future course is uncertain but could grow dramatically. Some experts claim that half of girls born today will live until age 100 (Vaupel 2000).
This phenomenon is NOT unique to the US and what is missing in the above analysis is suggestions on how an aging population and longer life spans can be dealt with. Especially in an era where immigration is being discouraged and birth rates among WHITE populations is sharply declining.
I would imagine ANY suggestion on how to tackle this future nightmare will be met with resistance. Raise taxes? Not on my dime will be the response. Raise the retirement age? Any political party in any country suggesting this will be in for a nightmare. And quirky ideas like Trump offering kids $1000 in an account for the future will not work, as it doesn't help struggling families in the here and now.
A sharp increase in immigration from overpopulated countries would be another suggestion, but the US and other Western nations are actually now going the other way and restricting who can enter their countries and by what numbers.
So, what we are left with is a growing problem with no workable solutions that will fly with the general populace. THERE IS THE RUB - any solution for tackling this problem would require a massive change in taxation and having seniors work longer and/or a sharp increase in immigrant populations.
Unless anyone else has any suggestions?
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
Genocide and journalistic ethics, or lack thereof
In short, the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher? .... But furious comments in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities hardly amount to a Wannsee conference, and I am aware of no evidence of an Israeli plan to deliberately target and kill Gazan civilians.
First, while some pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge, it is also used by anti-Zionists and antisemites to equate modern Israel with Nazi Germany. The effect is to license a new wave of Jew hatred, stirring enmity not only for the Israeli government but also for any Jew who supports Israel as a genocide supporter.
Source Attribution Failures: Journalist ethics requires identifying sources when feasible along with information about sources' reliability. Stephens dismisses extensive documentation by organizations like Law for Palestine without engaging with their methodology or findings. That violates the fair source evaluation ethic.
Expert Opinion Exclusion: Professional journalism standards require presenting diverse expert perspectives. Stephens systematically excludes the large body of genocide scholarship, including analyses by Holocaust historians and UN Special Rapporteurs, that reaches contrary conclusions. This ethics breach is called "bias by selection of sources".
But Stephens has more ethics problems that just that. He asserts a false equivalency argument by drawing inappropriate analogies (WWII, Mosul) without accounting for major context differences. He downplays important relevant evidence. He dismisses documentation of official statements of genocide as merely "vengeful sound bites" with insufficient supporting evidence to validate his claim.
Premise 2: Antisemites are morally disreputable.
Conclusion: Therefore, anyone using the genocide label, or the label itself, is suspect.
The logical error presumes that because some disreputable groups deploy the term, the term itself, or other people’s use of it, must be discredited. This conflates the character of certain speakers with the truth-value of the claim. That is the textbook definition of an association fallacy. Thus, by equating the genocide allegation with antisemitism, Stephens sidesteps substantive legal and factual analysis. That deflection blocks honest engagement with evidence, also a hallmark of guilt-by-association reasoning.
Poisoning the well: Stephens poisons readers by saying that any advocate of the genocide claim is tacitly aligned with antisemites, so their evidence should be pre-emptively distrusted. The poisoning the well tactic simply starts with negative information about potential opponents before their arguments are heard. That poisons or primes the audience's reception. It is a deceptive persuasion tactic.
Premise: If the genocide claim spreads, it could “license a new wave of Jew hatred.”
Implicit Conclusion: Therefore, the claim should be rejected or regarded with great suspicion.
This is fallacious because the desirability or undesirability of potential consequences does not determine factual truth of the genocide claim. Predicting social harm if a claim is believed does not demonstrate that the claim itself is false. This propaganda technique uses emotional leverage, fear of antisemitism in this case, to evaluate factual truth. That violates the principle that truth claims stand or fall on evidence, not on anticipated reactions.
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
Dictatorship updates 3: Attacking the GAO; Regarding Russell Vought; CN's bigotry
The GAO is about a century-old. It was formed to help Congress keep track of federal spending. The legislative office primarily produces detailed reports on ways that Washington can save money. That sometimes angers administrations that hate to see allegations of waste.
The main source of GAO power is a 1970s law that explicitly prohibits the president from defying congressional instructions on spending. That is the power of the purse. Trump wants that power for himself. Since taking office, djt and MAGA elites been testing the law by illegally disbanding entire agencies and programs without lawmakers’ approval. Now, with the federal courts mostly neutered, with the USSC openly supportive of dictatorship, there is little to nothing that can protect the GAO and its independence.
The G.A.O. has twice determined in recent months that Mr. Trump’s actions violated rules that prohibit him from unilaterally canceling funding, a move known as impoundment. The office has 46 open investigations into other allegations that Mr. Trump illegally withheld funds, the agency confirmed this week.
Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, has strenuously denied any wrongdoing, arguing that the administration seeks to manage taxpayer dollars more effectively. He and his deputies have also initiated a series of attacks on the G.A.O., deriding it as partisan and publicly refusing to comply with some of its investigations.
Q2: How important is Russ Vought in the advancement of Christian nationalist theocracy in the federal government?A2: Russ Vought’s Central Role in Federal Christian Nationalist Theocracy
Over the past eight years, no figure has done more than Russell T. Vought to translate Christian nationalist ideology into the day-to-day machinery of the United States federal government..... long analysis ....
Conclusion: An Indispensable Architect
Russ Vought is not merely one strategist among many; he is the central node through which Christian nationalist ideas are converted into executable federal policy. His dual command of (a) the budgetary “chokepoints” that keep agencies alive and (b) the personnel system that decides who interprets the law gives him outsized leverage over the trajectory of American governance. While other figures—Flynn for grassroots zeal, Leo for the judiciary—remain powerful, none combine statutory authority, ideological commitment, and presidential proximity as comprehensively as Vought. Should the Christian nationalist project achieve lasting institutional victories, historians are likely to identify Vought as its chief engineer.
Q1: Analyze and comment on the role and influence of bigotry and racism in (1) Christian nationalism, (2) the broader MAGA wealth and power movement, and (3) who those two interact or synergize. Focus on events since 2017, once Trump was in power.A1: Conclusion
The intersection of bigotry, racism, Christian nationalism, and the MAGA movement represents a systematic challenge to American pluralistic democracy. Since 2017, these ideologies have moved from the political margins to positions of significant institutional power, influencing policy, electoral politics, and social norms.
The evidence demonstrates that racial animus is not incidental to these movements but central to their appeal and organizational structure. Christian nationalism provides religious legitimation for racial exclusion, while MAGA provides political power and institutional access. Their synthesis creates what researchers identify as a "permission structure" for political violence and democratic norm violation..... from the analysis ....Christian nationalism, as measured by extensive public opinion research, represents far more than traditional religious conservatism. According to the Public Religion Research Institute's (PRRI) comprehensive surveys spanning 2022-2025, Christian nationalism is "a political ideology and cultural framework that seeks to merge American and Christian identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America's constitutional democracy". The PRRI studies, involving over 22,000 adults annually, reveal that approximately 30% of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism adherents (10%) or sympathizers (20%).