On the matter of trust vs distrust

 

Deregulated brass knuckles capialtism doing its thing

A NYT opinion piece, The Open Secret Buried in Anthropic’s 300-Page I.P.O. Filing, focuses on the huge amounts on money in play. This opinion raises the usually-present issue of who and what to trust when elites in politics, commerce or religion are doing what they do. In the years before and after the USSC’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened floodgates that held back much of the corrupting power of special interest money in politics, power has been flowing from the public interest and the public itself to special interests with a lot of wealth, power, or both. With the election of Trump and rise of MAGA elites to power, they have blown the dam itself to smithereens, while being aided by additional pro-corruption USSC decisions. What is left for us are annoyances in the dam’s rubble that special interests have to steer their money and its power through. They usually get what they want.

The trust issue is grounded in what by now is obvious to most open-minded people paying at least some attention to politics. Specifically, now that Trump and MAGA elites have gutted and neutered power and protections for the people and the public interest, can institutions weakened or neutered by politicians made complicit by private wealth and power, still give the public a meaningful protection regarding AI’s basically unregulated expansion. Put another way, what if any any rational basis is left to trust what mostly unregulated AI, or any other business sector** wants to do, regardless of how badly it damages or disempowers us and the public interest?

** For example, consider Exxon-Mobil and other all major pollute-for-profit businesses and their financiers. The public interest dam has not vanished completely. But major breaches and feeble law enforcement leave wealthy interests far too much room to convert small amounts of their private fortunes into lots of public power. That is the political backdrop against which we are being asked to trust the architects of the AI economy, pollute-for-profit businesses, etc.

Thoughts on trust vs distrust

Based on closely watching how American elites operate and what they do, a reasonable person can believe that concluding bad motives** of MAGA and most deregulated businesses is supported by evidence. That can be sufficient for the court of public opinion. If one has watched events in the years before and after the USSC’s 2010 pro-corruption Citizens United decision, nearly all the evidence points to the worst motives in play for the elites in politics and commerce.

** Bad motives like corrupt, authoritarianism, mendacious, deceptive, autocratic, Christian nationalist theocratic, oligarchic, more mendacity, more corruption, etc.

That is not a reflexive suspicion of one company. It is a judgment formed over years. There is a persistent pattern in how powerful people acquire influence, justify their decisions, and distribute the benefits and costs. The accumulated public record of bad motives and bad acts arguably has exhausted the elites’ entitlement to any presumption of good faith.

Q1: Have Trump and MAGA elites in power exhausted their entitlement to any presumption of good faith?

Q2: Have elites among the Democratic socialists and social democrats exhausted their entitlement to any presumption of good faith? What about the Wall Street Democratic Party elites, e.g., Schumer and Hakim Jefferies?

Some info sources:

Ted Cruz for Senate, et al. v. FEC — The FEC struck down the $250,000 limit on using post-election contributions to repay a candidate’s personal campaign loans.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) — A pro-corruption USSC decision that legalized this: Corporation $ → PAC → politician’s campaign. Before this decision, this was (and still is) illegal: Corporation $ → politician’s campaign. See the new and “improved” way for special interest money to exert power over our political system by buying politicians and political parties?

McDonnell v. United States, 579 U.S. ___ (2016) — A pro-corruption USSC decision that narrowed the definition of an “official act” for the corruption charges at issue.

Snyder v. United States (2024) — A pro-corruption USSC decision that a federal law covering state and local officials prohibiting bribes, did not cover after-the-fact gratuities. Here the USSC converted illegal bribes to state politicians and officials into legal “gratuities” or “tips” after the politician did what the tip-payer wanted.

Buy me I’m for sale! Give me a gratuity I can’t be bought!

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Can democracy and the rule of law survive with a morally weak society?

 

Does that ask too much of people?

Is that the way to achieve freedom?

Describing an aspect of moral courage or strength

Probably inadvertently, the editors of the NYT raised an critically important but ignored point in their editorial today, Trump Has Failed. Hold Him to Account: Today’s Democratic Party has plenty of flaws, including a disappointing failure to present a coherent agenda of its own. Nonetheless, Democrats offer the only alternative this year to the damage that Mr. Trump and his party have inflicted on the nation.

Well at least for me they raised the point, which is this: Why are Dems so Dog-awful at presenting a coherent agenda of its own? For years, some people of good will have been telling Dem elites in good faith that, for the most part, they are not articulating a coherent agenda of their own. Their messaging was and still is too ineffective.

Why? Arguably an important reason is that for many people facing threatening or unwelcome facts takes significant moral courage. Humans being human, we often we fall short and distort inconvenient reality into something it isn’t. Facing unwelcome facts and reasoning can take more moral courage than we sometimes bring to it. Facing unpleasant reality sometimes means admitting that someone we trusted misled us, questioning a belief central to our identity, or risking disapproval from people whose acceptance matters to us.

This is a moral issue, not a question of intelligence. When our political choices affect other people, which they usually do, we owe each other an honest effort to examine the evidence, even when we would rather not. That responsibility applies just as much to those of us making this argument. The standard is not agreement with me or anyone else. It is willingness to consider or reconsider when the fact or reasoning evidence reasonably warrants it.

Plenty of research documents how people protect favored beliefs and political loyalties. Those phenomena are real, not in dispute by experts. The moral argument here is that we all have a responsibility to resist that temptation when other people’s welfare and rights are at stake. True, the demagogues and liars bear more moral responsibility for their deceit and unwarranted manipulations, but average people are also involved. In general, most people with sufficient moral courage can handle bad news a better than people who cannot. That’s the basic assumption here, but it is strongly supported by research.

The bad news too many people cannot tolerate

What might the critically important but uncomfortable messages be? It might be that the party is over, and the bill is coming due. The truthful message the Dems need to assert but cannot articulate is just too unpleasant. The bad news is that Americans are facing a decreasing standard of living and high cost of living. Although there are economically plausible ways for an honest, pro-democracy government to improve ordinary people’s living standards and make necessities more affordable, doing that is politically impossible at present.

There is no convincing account of how to assemble and sustain the political power needed to apply policies that get at the heart of most of the discontent among average Americans. The central issue is distribution of wealth and power. Improving affordability requires changing who receives income, who bears costs, and who can extract payments from everyone else. That makes it politically difficult, but not economically impossible. Given the intense anti-government and anti-public interest sentiment that dominates radical right MAGA dogma, addressing cost of living for the masses is not politically possible. MAGA authoritarianism is in power and it works very hard to take wealth and power from the public and the public interest, while transferring it to elites and allied special interests.

Q1: Is it plausible that one of the main reasons, maybe the main reason, Dem messaging sucks so badly is that too many Americans cannot handle the very nasty truths that (1) the US is in economic, technological, commercial, fiscal, and social decline, and (2) sooner or later someone has to start paying gigantic overdue bills, e.g., (a) the $40+ trillion on the books federal debt, (b) the additional tens of trillions in unfunded (off the books) federal debt (bye-bye social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.), (c) the coming hundreds of billions annually, maybe trillions, for costs of US support for global warming by deregulating or gutting pollution controls, (d) vast damage MAGA has caused critical US infrastructure, e.g., (i) basic and applied research, (ii) trashed alliances with former allies who are now economically and technologically distancing themselves from an untrustworthy and hostile US, (e) etc.?

Q2: Does this moral argument make sense to you? Political demagogues and deceivers wrong (morally violate) citizens by manipulating the information on which informed consent depends, but citizens also bear some responsibility to protect their own political agency (democratic rights and protections), and the agency of others, by making reasonable efforts to distinguish unpleasant truth from comforting falsehood.

Q3: Is it true that when citizens avoid accessible but uncomfortable evidence because it threatens identity, status, or group membership, they make themselves more available for political manipulation, and therefore because their resulting political decisions adversely affect other people, this is a moral failure, not just a matter of excusable ignorance?

Q4: If the US is in decline, is it plausible that the decline is significantly or mostly due to the fact that over the last ~50 years too much wealth and power have been taken from the public and the public interest and transferred to the elites and allied special interests?

Some info sources:

At Least Bias is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives — This research indicates that the left and right have inherent biases. The unanswered question is how those biases influence perceptions of reality and reasoning in the different information ecosystems that much or most of the left and right usually experience. Here, the authors explicitly acknowledge that similar processing biases can coexist with unequal factual accuracy because one side’s media ecosystem supplies less accurate information. The result here is not evidence that the two sides have equally sound relationships with reality, only that the two sides have a similar degree of bias.

Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions — Conservative users shared more unreliable news than liberal users across the datasets studied. That means neutral rules against misinformation on social media can penalize conservatives more without indicating political bias. People on both sides can favor information that supports their political loyalties. But that does not make the two sides equally accurate or their information sources equally honest. That is why I keep posting truth that’s inconvenient to some about significant MAGA propaganda, lies and slanders sources, e.g.,

Enquiring minds want to know all about the Epstein Files, and Trump

 Today, House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a new report about the Epstein files, The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover It Up (report summary at this link). One version of a summary is that there is more than enough evidence in the public record, including this new report, to reasonably believe that Trump is a serial rapist, a pedophile, a chronic liar, and a vicious criminal with sufficient power to subvert and neuter the DoJ, the FBI, and the rule of law as it applies to himself and people with dirt on him.

Sex predator: The released report says: A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s.

Of the 11 women who tie Donald Trump to Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, five of them—Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe—have directly accused Trump of raping or sexually assaulting them in Epstein’s company or direct physical presence: ….. Beyond these direct allegations of physical assault, three survivors speak of encounters with Trump whose circumstances indicate that he was a participant in Epstein’s crimes, as shown by how Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, tried to make (or made) these women available for sex.

In total, more than 25 different women—some connected to Epstein and many not—have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct. His ex-wife Ivana Trump stated in a sworn deposition during their divorce proceedings that Trump had physically and sexually assaulted her in 1989, pulling out clumps of her hair and raping her after an argument.

In the face of this wave of evidence, the only recourse for the President has been to spread lies and obfuscation. In July 2019, after Epstein was arrested on charges of conspiracy to traffic minors, Donald Trump claimed that he knew Epstein “just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him” and insisted that he “had no idea” about Epstein’s crimes. This evasion and this denial are contradicted by almost all of the available evidence, including Trump and Epstein’s own words and the documents contained in the Epstein files.

Subversion of the FBI and DOJ: The released report says: The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it. From the very first weeks of the Trump Administration, DOJ shut down ongoing criminal investigations into Epstein’s enablers and co-conspirators, lied about clear evidence of crimes in its possession, and sought to silence survivors. In July 2025, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and one of his senior deputies, Emil Bove—both former criminal defense lawyers for Donald Trump—released a memorandum stating that DOJ and FBI had determined that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files would be “appropriate or warranted.”

Instead of pursuing justice for Epstein’s survivors, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and Attorney General Blanche have been running DOJ like a private legal defense firm for their former client. Determined to protect the President at any cost, DOJ itself now leads the cover-up of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

Chronic liar: Trump lied to the public about his sex with Stormy Daniels and the later payoff to buy her silence. Cohen Plea Deal Exposes Repeated False Claims, Silk pajamas, spanking and questions about STDs: Stormy Daniels details sexual encounter with Trump, Get Caught Up: Trump’s Alleged Affair With Adult Film Star Stormy Daniels, Stormy Daniels Said 2018 Letter Denying She Had Sex With Trump Is a ‘Lie’

Also, there’s a nice graphic showing that based on 1,000 fact checks, about 76% of Trump’s assertions are “mostly false”, “false”, or “pants on fire”.

What PolitiFact learned in 1,000 fact-checks of Donald Trump

There is far more evidence in the public record, but this is a short summary showing that Trump is a vicious lying liar.

Q: Is it reasonable and evidence-based to believe that Trump is a chronic liar and a sex predator with sufficient power to corrupt the DOJ and FBI, or is that just vicious fact checkers and Dems lying and smearing Trump’s good name?

Time is not on our side

 And maybe there’s not much time left for our what is left of our fading democracy, rule of law, and civil liberties. That will depend on how the midterm elections come out. If the MAGA party retains a significant degree of control of the House or the Senate, it’s probably (more likely than not) game over for us by the Nov. 2028 elections.

By significant I mean (1) enough MAGA votes in the Senate to filibuster everything the Dems want to do, and to be unable to override Trump’s promised tidal wave of vetoes, and (2) enough MAGA votes in the House to constantly sabotage Dem bills. In the House, a slim majority won’t cut it. As we all know, the Dems will almost certainly be fatally fragmented and unable to get their shit together. All the MAGA politicians have to do is stick together, something they are very good at doing.

The main point this OP is arguing is pretty simple. By not winning overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, the Dems will be stymied. There will be another 2 years of congressional failure, gridlock, and believe it or not, further drift into tyranny and kleptocracy. When government is corrupted and broken, as it now is, time weighs heavily against democracy, the rule of law and our precious civil liberties. When government is broken and corrupted, the more time that passes, the weaker our defenses become. It’s siege warfare. We are stranded and our defenses are constantly weakening.

A person paying attention to MAGA politics, tactics and policy related to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties since Jan. 2017 when Trump was sworn into office the first time can easily see how close we are to degenerating into a true, cruel, bigoted kleptocratic tyranny. We’re close to that end.

An example of the slow but constant advance of MAGA’s siege against our defenses

An article The Nation published, The Fall of Scientific American, is a great example of how MAGA wears down and neuters our democracy and its defending institutions. Recently the owner of SciAm, Springer Nature, decided to sell SciAm to LabX. Springer is a publisher of serious, high quality science journals including the top science publication in the world, Nature. LabX publishes sensational stuff for clickbait purposes. Springer said to sold SciAm so it could concentrate on academic research and scientific publishing. The thing is though, SciAm is focused on academic research and scientific publishing.

So why sell a high quality science publication like SciAm to a crappy publisher? Money. With MAGA and corrupt capitalism, it always involves money and the power to move it where the elites in power want it to move.

What triggered the SciAm sale to a crappy business was a May 2025 editorial, Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. It’s no surprise that Trump and MAGA elites were super pissed off with that. Tyrants and kleptocrats vehemently hate criticism accompanied by inconvenient facts, truths, and reasoning. Reality make them look bad because they are bad.

MAGA’s political pressure threatened the parent company’s business. Springer Nature faced the potential loss of as much as $25 million in federal contracts after Trump canceled subscriptions to its scientific publications. Internal recordings show executives feared that SciAm’s criticism of Trump endangered their much larger academic-publishing business.

Corporate intervention changed editorial decisions. The Nation’s article documents management’s insistence on softening an opinion piece about government intimidation of scientific journals. After the May 2025 column, management suspended the opinion department’s publishing. Its editors were reassigned. Editor in chief David Ewalt acknowledged temporarily discouraging “Trump” in headlines because the word attracted corporate scrutiny. Ewalt wanted less “editorializing” and more factual reporting, arguing that rigorous news coverage could challenge the administration without jeopardizing the magazine.

Well, as we all know by now, rigorous MSM news coverage catastrophically failed to challenge Trump and rising MAGA tyranny and corruption. Ever since 2017 when it became clear who and what Trump and MAGA were, a few of us have been incessantly warning elites in the MSM (and the Dem Party) of the threat. Not surprisingly, those fine (arrogant, clueless and/or complicit) elites have been equally constantly ignoring the warnings. They acted and still act as if everything was/is more or less normal. Maybe a bit nastier than usual, but still mostly normal.

Anyway, SciAm staff who had not been fired or coerced into retirement wanted to form a labor union to protect SciAm’s editorial independence. What did Springer do? Springer announced the SciAm sale to LabX on June 23, 2026. That was three days before union votes were scheduled to be counted. The union alleged that the restructuring and sale were intended to defeat organizing; the article reports that the related NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) case remained open. But as we all know by now, Trump and MAGA elites have neutered the NLRB (another link), so those employees can go pound sand. Federal law is absolutely not going to protect them — MAGA policy has made damned sure of that worker complaints will be ignored or outright rejected by deeply corrupt MAGAfied government.

Power and wealth flows from protected workers (and consumers) to elite owners. That is MAGA’s core economic agenda and it always has been.

Q1: If the Dems do not win overwhelming control of the House and Senate, which they probably won’t, will we probably will lose having a meaningful democracy, rule of law and civil liberties by Nov. 2028, because as long as Trump and MAGA elites have sufficient power they will continue to wear down our defenses?

Q2: Is science inseparable from politics and social conditions, and thus SciAm commenting on the connections between science, and politics and society important for the public to be aware of?

PTSD treatment update

A 2023 post here mentioned an opinion piece from July 2023, The Best PTSD Treatment You've Never Heard Of.  At the time, the new protocol called RTM (Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories) sounded to be almost too good to be true. The US military was hostile to it because an effective, low-cost PTSD treatment threatened some military budgets and careers. An article in Science Daily about a different treatment protocol, Breakthrough PTSD treatment achieves 68% remission rate in clinical trial, raised the question, whatever happened to that old RTM protocol? Was it killed off and buried by hostility to effective, low cost treatments, or did it survive despite hostility?

Apparently, RTM is still being tested. Results of another study comparing RTM treatment of PTSD patients (n=48) with the existing longer-term standard of care (n=46) was published last April. in that study, RTM matched the standard of care control group, with meaningful positive responses happening faster in the RTM group. So, RTM is still alive.

The RTM study published April 2026

 An RTM study in Ukrainian children with PTSD appears to be underway. That study, NCT07185126, calls for ~40–48 children aged 6–14 to receive a modified-protocol RTM therapy. The record names the Charitable Foundation Voices of Children and Quresta, Inc. as collaborators. It does not clearly identify a funding amount or financial contributions. That study is detailed on the US government's clinical trials website. So far, no results have been posted for that trial.

And there's some sort of an RTM-clinician focused site that indicates future clinical trials are planned.

It's hard to compare RTM results with the brain stimulation protocol the Science Daily paper talks about. Existing results put RTM in the same broad range of observed improvement as MeRT (targeted transcranial magnetic brain stimulation), but results do not establish that either treatment is better. RTM’s strongest recent trial found substantial improvement comparable to standard prolonged treatment, with more early responders. MeRT’s larger trial found a statistically significant benefit over sham stimulation. Its 68% remission rate cannot validly be compared to RTM’s 58% loss-of-diagnosis rate (PTSD no longer diagnosable). The protocols and follow-ups are too different for direct comparison.

Global warming update: The Exxon-Suncor lawsuit

By now, many states are starting to feel significant economic damage from global warming. In Colorado, Boulder City and County filed a lawsuit against Suncor Energy and Exxon-Mobil to recover some of the damages. Boulder sued the energy companies in 2018. They argued that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods.

A 2026 fiscal analysis projected that from 2025 to 2050 Colorado would face about $36 billion in costs directly attributable to climate change, plus defined climate resilience spending. That's about $1.4 billion/year. 

An article discussing the lawsuit, Burned Cattle, Drought, Smoke-Choked Pastures—and the SCOTUS Case to Make Exxon and Suncor Pay, points out damage from the new climate situation and the potentially fatal flaw in Boulder's lawsuit against the polluters. An expert,  Alejandro Camacho (UCLA law professor) comments: “Suncor is not about whether climate change is real, and it’s not about who sets national emissions policy. It’s about whether a state court may hear an ordinary damages claim. ..... And that’s why I think it’s more useful for people to see it for what it is: a tort case.” The professor points out that Boulder linked its legal argument to climate change, not tort damages. He asserts that could hurt Boulder’s chances in front of a pro-pollution MAGA USSC. In corporate liability situations, tort law allows a plaintiff who’s been harmed, e.g., from pesticides or medications to the recent lawsuit against Meta for damages from social media addiction. That is how people can sue a company for compensation. 

Not surprisingly Suncor and Exxon are going for a total knock-out blow against all such lawsuits. Their argument is simple. Pollution is a matter of interstate commerce and only the federal government can regulate that. Suncor-Exxon argue that those damages claims are an unconstitutional attempt by states and others to regulate interstate and international emissions using state or local laws. They argue that federal law and constitutional limits on state authority foreclose the lawsuit. Also not surprisingly, the pro-pollution, pay-to-play Trump administration supports the polluters and the distribution and socialization of damages, while trickling profits up to the owners and executives.

  

A major ruling for the companies would probably gut dozens of similar lawsuits in other jurisdictions. A sufficiently expansive constitutional rationale would also threaten other state-law claims involving nationwide or international corporate conduct. How bad this will be for society that is eating the costs right now depends on how the MAGA judges word their opinion.

In oral arguments on Oct. 5, the MAGA judges signaled their worries about the well-being of the polluters. Apparently, damages the states are are incurring is of little to no concern. For example, Chief Justice Roberts asked what would happen if a municipality in every state copied Boulder’s lawsuit. He's worried about protecting the polluters. Similarly, Justice Beer Boofer Kavanaugh raised the possibility that such litigation could bankrupt energy companies. And of course, there's Trump pounding his shoe on the podium asking for more power, arguing that dealing with interstate air pollution belongs to the federal government. 

Plus, there are other legal arguments being asserted in this case. Also relevant is the reality that a Boulder victory only allows this litigation to continue. It would not establish deception, causation, liability, or damages. There's possibly a long way to go on this. But even at this early stage, one gets the feeling that MAGA's staunch protection of polluters and it's hostility to the concepts of service to the public interest and global warming is going to mostly dictate how this will eventually play out.

The polluters will probably get most of what they want, maybe all of it. Regardless, big polluter contributions called free speech will continue to roll in for Trump and MAGA politicians.

An American awakening?

An article by Democracy Docket, Nearly 6 in 10 Americans believe Trump is a ‘potentially dangerous dictator’ who threatens democracy, poll finds, conveys some evidence that a significant number of Americans are finally waking up to the reality of what Trump and MAGA politics and policy are, i.e., dictator and dictatorship. According to this poll data, worries that Trump’s exercise of dictator-level power now goes beyond just Democrats. Roughly two-thirds of independents and majorities of Hispanic Catholics and Protestants see Trump for the authoritarian treat he is.

Whether that poll data translates into a lot of votes against Trump’s MAGA party in Nov. is an open question. That’s just one poll, not proof of a major shift in public sentiment.

However, that poll, together with one described here, Majority of Americans say Trump prioritizes his personal financial interests over U.S. as a whole, indicates that a lot of Americans really are pissed off and are starting to see Trump and MAGA elites for what they are, highly corrupt and anti-democratic authoritarians.

And a 3rd recent poll indicates that public dissatisfaction is common, with ~80% wanting either substantial change or total upheaval in how the US is run. Not surprisingly, about 85%  of voters say the economy is one of the most important issues for their vote in the upcoming election. About 84% say the same about the cost of living. Health care is a top issue for ~69% of voters, and ~64% cite the war with Iran as a top issue. Less than half overall say that immigration and crime are among the most important issues.

Q: Is there a meaningful public awakening underway in American politics, or is evidence like this probably going to translate into few, if any, significant positive changes that voters say they want?

How tyranny grows

France's tyrant party leader Marine Le Pen BS-ing people about 

how she will fix things to make France great again 

Tyranny and tyrants are usually creative and hyper-persistent about gaining power and keeping it. Despite diversity in circumstances, forms of governments and social norms, there are generalizations about how tyrant wannabes go about their business of obliterating opposition, dissent, civil liberties and an even-handed rule of law. A common tactic, maybe the dominant one, is to either foment social unrest, fear, anger, bigotry, and dissatisfaction, or to amplify it when bad sentiments arise more or less spontaneously on their own.

A great example is unfolding now in France. There is an ongoing, widespread national protest against high cost of living (partly caused by Trump’s stupid, unprovoked, now lost Iran war), underfunded public education and public services, and deep dissatisfaction with Macron’s government. So what does the radical right authoritarian movement in France do? It does what tyrants everywhere nearly always do. They fire up their mind-poisoning demagoguery, lies and bullshit rhetoric. They are making a run at killing off France’s democracy, rule of law and civil liberties.

In other words, the radical right tyrant wannabes in France employ the same mind-poisoning demagoguery tactics that America’s radical right tyrant wannabes, i.e., Trump and his MAGA elites, are doing in the US right now.

A NYT article, France’s Far Right Seizes the Moment as Rioting Stuns the Country, is blunt: After riots erupted this weekend in cities across France, its centrist government blamed the main far-left party, accusing its politicians of inciting the violence. That party blamed the government, accusing it of stirring public anger through years of bad governance and heavy-handed policing. What did the main far-right party do? It blamed both, and launched into campaign mode. (emphasis added)

A spokesman for France’s radical right tyranny party commented: “We are paying for decades of being soft on crime, of weak authority, of the moral, psychological, and material disarmament of our internal security forces. ….. People [“honest citizens”] need to wake up now. They need to make the right political choices, and in any case, we stand ready to restore order in the country.”

So there we have it, France’s main tyranny party is going to reinstate national stability, law and order. The way for “honest citizens” to to that is by voting in the coming election for his tyranny party.

That should sound very familiar. America’s tyranny party, the MAGA Party, heavily demagogued national unrest and damage from George Floyd protests into a horror it wasn’t. America’s MAGA demagogues rigidly ignored and denied the fact (not opinion) that nearly all the Floyd protests were peaceful. MAGA demagoguery slandered America’s entire left as radical and lawless. The tyrants in France are doing the exact same thing there to gain power.

Also exactly like America’s radical right tyranny movement, the French radical right tyranny party has absolutely no plan for how to deal with high living costs and underfunded public services. Those were the triggers that set off the unrest. The French tyrant party ignores those core issues. As usual, the authoritarians deflect to talk about stopping protests with brute force. That is the same thing Trump said he would like to do with peaceful protesters in the US. Stopping protests in France by force will do absolutely nothing at all about honest citizens’ core complaints about a fading standard of living and increasing living costs.

Tyranny vs democracy

In France, this is how tyranny is making a run at power. It is not much different than how American tyrants made their run at power. Americans were unhappy with the old two-party status quo. They wanted major changes. They voted for major change. But they got MAGA with its major changes being cruelty, bigotry, fascism, kleptocracy, and significant loss of the rule of law for the elites and civil liberties for everyone else.

This should not need to be said. But it does need to be said because MAGA’s demagoguery has poisoned so many minds. Democracy is generally better and far more moral than tyranny because it gives people a voice, protects their freedom to criticize government, and lets them replace failed or abusive leaders through elections rather than violence (Our World in Data). Democracy does not eliminate corruption, but free journalism, organized opposition, and meaningful elections give citizens ways to expose wrongdoing and hold rulers accountable. Those are checks that tyranny suppresses or removes (V-Dem’s democratic criteria). Its advantages are also material: democratization raises income per person over the long run, with evidence suggesting improvements in investment, education, and health care (Acemoglu and colleagues). Democracy’s central advantage is not that its leaders are inherently wiser or more virtuous, but that citizens still have mechanisms for challenging crappy leaders and correcting their mistakes.

Q1: Is tyranny, with its usual deep corruption, generally better than democracy because the dictators can shoot protesters dead in the streets, leading to social calm and order, while making the grieving families or estates of the dead pay for all the costs?

Q2: Is there really such a thing as Plato’s benign Philosopher King or dictator, you know, a dictator who shoots us dead in the streets for the “greater good” or whatever lipstick the tyrant puts on murdering people in legitimate public protest?

Note for the trolls: No, this OP is not an endorsement of any violence or lawbreaking in the protests in France or in the Floyd protests in the US, or anywhere else, ever. Such violence is far worse than deplorable because it gives demagogues a great way to slander protestors and downplay or deflect from legit grievances. Demagogues point to the illegality of a few hooligans and thugs who commit violence to smear everyone and everything involved. If anyone is aware of a reasonably effective way to weed out people who join protests for the opportunity to enjoy being violent or to destroy property, let’s hear about it.

Plausible future scenarios

In the wake of the vast damage that Trump and MAGA elites have caused to democracy, the rule of law, the federal government, and our society and economy, one can reasonably see three possibilities for the US. They are (1) mostly likely, we muddle along and continue to slowly decline like we are now, (2) maybe less likely, we enter a period of accelerated and mostly unchecked decline into some miserable, poverty-riddled state of affairs for most Americans, or (3) maybe least likely, America makes some form of a comeback and works toward some semblance of the America’s old position in the world while restoring respect for democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and the public interest. At the moment it is impossible to know which path we will take.

America’s former allies, now alienated, insulted, and attacked by Trump with his seething hate of democracy and rule of law, might be coaxed back into an at least somewhat friendly but still rather distrustful state of affairs. Some serious apologies will be needed. Of course, that’s something that Trump and MAGA elites are incapable of.

An NYT opinion piece, Three Scenarios for a Leaderless World, sums it up nicely: By now it is clear to most of America and much of the world that America and what it stands for have changed. The dominant face of that change is President Trump and his determined and deliberate efforts to accumulate greater powers than the Constitution apportioned to the president, to create a cult of personality based on grievance and vengeance and to challenge every aspect of the postwar global order, demeaning allies and courting autocrats.

That opinion describes the three future scenarios.

The international system can survive with the US in a seriously degraded form even while American democracy suffers severe, lasting damage. “Muddling along” globally would not necessarily mean that Americans preserve an adequately functioning democracy. Right now under Trump and MAGA elites, the US is losing its democracy and the necessary respect for the rule of law. We are also losing our civil liberties, rights and protections.

Regarding MAGA’s erosion of US democracy, V-Dem’s 2026 assessment reports that the US Liberal Democracy Index score dropped by 24% in one year, with its ranking falling from 20th to 51st among 179 countries. Rapid concentration of presidential power was central to the decline. Those are changes argue strongly against treating the present situation as just ordinary partisan turbulence.

Unfortunately ordinary partisan turbulence is how the MSM and both main parties are generally treating the current political bitterness and authoritarian (fascist, actually) dysfunction. As gramps liked to say in his occasional moments of grumpiness, “they’re worthless as teats on a boar”. Nowadays, that description is a major understatement. They’re arguably seriously worse than worthless.

For what its worth, if anything, my AI analyzes this a bit differently.

Q1: Can one reasonably believe the three scenarios the NYT opinion posits are the most likely outcomes once cult leader Trump drops dead of whatever it is that plagues him?

Q2: Are the MSM and both major political parties merely they’re worthless as teats on a boar, or are they worse than that?

Q3: Collectively, are MAGA politics, tactics and policy reasonably described as an American form of fascism, or is that still too harsh an assessment?

Environmental degradation updates

 The term environmental degradation can also be referred to as climate change and pollution. The concept includes both global warming and toxic pollution.

Toxic pollution update

A SciAm article, Microplastics are linked to inflammation—scientists might have finally worked out why, discusses recent research about how microplastics might cause inflammation in humans and animals. The research that SciAm discusses was recently published in the Nature paper, Intrinsic physicochemical activity at microplastic–water interfaces. Short story kept short, with tiny microplastic particles in the micron (millionth of a meter) range, about the size of many bacteria, the interface or surface of the particle in water radically changes the local water chemistry. Water’s normal ability to hydrogen bond is disrupted at plastic particle surfaces because the plastics are water repellant (hydrophobic).

Examination of the chemistry at particle surfaces shows that highly reactive molecules are created and those appear to cause inflammation. Before this research, bulk plastics like water bottles were presumed to be inert or chemically not reactive. Before now, no one had looked for the status of chemistry of microplastics in water. A researcher commented that “for microplastics, this is especially important because fragmentation creates enormous amounts of new surface area”. As particle size decreases, the surface to volume ratio increases, creating a large surface area for microscopic plastic particles.

The paper reports that hydroxyl radicals, •OH, are formed in water that has microplastic particles in it. Hydroxyl radicals are very toxic. It is still unknown whether and to what extent the human body eventually converts microplastics in tissues into harmless end products. That may never happen. There is not yet evidence that the body reliably “digests” common microplastics into benign substances. At present, there isn’t even good measurements of how long different plastic particles last in the body. Research has shown that microplastics are present in human tissues. Their effects on human health are still uncertain, but early findings suggest harm, especially from chronic inflammation.

Fluorescent die in water was used to visualize the presence of reactive molecules at particle surfaces

Biological damage from reactive species

Global warming update

A SciAm article, Earth’s ‘life support systems’ are breaking down, climate scientists warn, reports that climate science experts say Earth is undergoing a “rapid destabilization” due to global warming. The SciAm article is reporting about a research paper, The 2026 state of the climate report: challenges and opportunities, that updates vital signs that track the state of Earth’s climate systems. The report is the latest in a series called the “State of the Climate”. For their report, climate science researchers measure 16 key markers of Earth’s climate. Seven of these have now reached “record extremes”. One author comments: “We are increasingly concerned about the risk of crossing climate tipping points that could lead to irreversible changes”.

The authors write: We are witnessing the rapid destabilization of the Earth’s climate system. This is no longer a warning for the future; it is a diagnosis of the present. Earth’s life-support systems are being pushed beyond stable limits, with changes unfolding faster than our ability to respond. Human activities are driving profound shifts in the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere.

Q1: Are you comfortable with microplastics in your body doing Dog only knows what to it, for Dog only knows how long?

Q2: Are these observations that some people make about global warming and the degree of human-non-response to it reasonable and rational (paraphrasing): We are playing Russian Roulette with the climate because our climate situation could be far worse than we know because he has passed a tipping point(s) that cannot be undone if we stay on our current failing response trajectory?