The news is very bad and worse: Euphemisms can kill

There have been too many major major blows to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and truth for our country to survive as it was. The damage that djt and MAGA elites already has caused is enormous. What little is left of our democracy and rule of law will probably not survive much longer. The November 2026 mid-term elections will probably, ~70% chance in my opinion, be manipulated to favor dictatorship if it is necessary to keep the Republicans in power in congress. Otherwise, American voters will voluntarily end the democratic experiment, their rights and our republican form of government. America is reverting to the historical mean, old-fashioned kleptocracy and dictatorship.

Evidence that our elected leaders and the MSM failed us is solid. A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by Frank Bruni, November 2026 is Everything, is one of the few items that evinces significant understanding of what is happening to us and what has already happened. But that either falls short of full understanding, or reflects damage to an MSM now afraid of djt and MAGA power. Bruni writes: 

.... 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?”

Yes, the terrified Republicans support and enable djt. Knowingly or willingly or not, they put themselves and their jobs over our country. Yes, Murkowski was an absolute idiot (or a cynical liar) claiming to trust djt. Maybe it was idiocy or gross incompetence amounting to treason. Is it possible to be a traitor in the court of public opinion out of gross incompetence, with or without malice? Yes, but that is a matter of public opinion, not law.[1]

Just as bad, Bruni represents the dismal MSM norm by once again making the same horrific mistake that most of the MSM have been making over and over and over since 2017. He and the MSM call djt and MAGA "conservative." Under current political circumstances, political history since 2010 (especially since 2017), and based on facts, the label "conservative" is a euphemism for dictatorship, theocracy, plutocracy and kleptocracy, where dictatorship is dominant.

Euphemisms

By now, the MSM knows that djt and MAGA are authoritarian and deeply corrupt. But to keep from losing some readers, players like Bruni and the editors of the NYT continue to use to the deceptive, misleading euphemism "conservative." Conservative is an effective rhetorical shield. It has decades of positive associations built in, e.g., small, efficient government. That allows authoritarianism and corruption to masquerade as just normal politics as usual. Poll data indicate that about one-third of Americans, including a Repub supermajority, grossly underestimate the MAGA movement's autocratic, plutocratic and theocratic ambitions in large part because of the label. 

The "conservative" rhetorical con game that MAGA elites play is reinforced by a radicalized authoritarian  MAGA USSC. The court calls djt's dictatorship "conservative constitutionalism." That sleight of hand numbs the public. The conned public lets its guard down. Remember "compassionate conservatism"? Same cynical trick, same authoritarian goals, different decade.

A final observation. The "conservative" euphemism for MAGA politics and policy will literally get people killed. There is no rational basis for any doubt about that. Dead people is foreseeable and inevitable when you kick 11 million people off Medicaid, con people into not getting vaccinated, get rid of consumer and worker safety regulations, reverse environmental protections and allow poisoning of the air and water, or etc. Even if it is called conservative constitutionalism, MAGA's authoritarian, kleptocratic politics and policy will kill more people than honest democratic politics and policy. Period.

 

Footnotes:

1. Shockingly gross incompetence and/or cynical lying sometimes morphs into a public verdict of betrayal and treason even if no ill intent existed. Murkowski's vote cast in moral terms, the  foreseeability of djt's dishonesty, her fiduciary duty, and the harm of her vote was enough for some people to see her vote as "treason." Leaders who ignore predictable consequences, or shift blame by claiming they were heated can expect the court of public opinion to rationally treat their failures as a profound breach of trust amounting to treason. In the law, intent matters to judges and juries. In the court of public opinion, things like competence, foresight and duty sometimes matter.

About Comet, Pxy's agentic AI extension

AAI (agentic AI) like can "do things" you tell it to do. Unlike Pxy, which can just search and analyze, AAI has "agency" and can actively find things by more than just searching webpages, e.g., it can open and analyze webpages it finds links to on a webpage. An example explains it better than I can.

I asked Pxy to compare itself to Comet, which is the AAI addition to what Pxy corp. is selling: 

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

• Automated navigation: The browser can navigate through multi-page websites, follow internal links, and perform complex browsing workflows autonomously

Traditional Perplexity Limitations:

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

• Perform comprehensive content analysis across the entire site

Current Perplexity Limitations:
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.

Comet opens up a vast new way to do searching and analysis of far more data than Pxy, which can do far more than me.

I'm a bit scared of Comet because it is programmed to learn "me" and eventually be able to shift me into the intention economy from the current state of internet affairs called the attention economy. However, since I get Comet for free at least until my current Pxy pro subscription ends, it need to be tested out. Presently, Comet costs $200/month for new subscribers. I got on a wait list to get access to Comet for free at least for now.

My 1st Comet search, "Scan this blog, https://dispol.blogspot.com/, for posts that link to Perplexity 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.", gave an impressive response. It was able to count all the posts for July 15-26 (a time period Comet picked), find where in the post the author is named and list which posts I had linked to Pxy searches and state the context for why the link was there. Pxy simply cannot do that.

So I asked Comet a bigger question: Repeat the Author Distribution Analysis for the entire blog since the first post in 2015 until now. It did it, but wrong, finding no posts by Susan or PD. I posed multiple rounds of queries. Comet kept failing, so I refocused my queries to why it failed. It failed because my query passed Comet's data and bandwidth limits, e.g., "Comet does not “spider” every file on a site.– Each browse _web call is capped at ±30 seconds and ±300 kB of returned HTML."[1] 

This AAI business is kind of scary. But like it or not, it is now here. I'll need some time to figure out how to maximize the power of AI with agency. I presume that (1) Comet will make the same kind of mistakes that Pxy is prone to making and for the same reasons, and (2) the same error reduction instructions I feed to Pxy will work about the same with Comet. 

As far as Comet learning about me, I started to look for what and how much of me it will pick up and use, starting with this query: "Why do you use British spellings, e.g., favour and optimisation, instead of favor and optimization? It is annoying."

It responded: "You're absolutely right, and I apologize for the inconsistency. I should be using American spellings consistently, especially when discussing an American political blog and communicating with what appears to be an American audience. .... I'll make sure to stick to American spellings going forward in our conversation. Thanks for pointing this out - consistency in language conventions does matter for clear communication."

Time will tell how AAI plays out.

Footnote:

1. There is a learning curve here. This further describes Comet's limits:

1. • 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

I don't understand a lot of that. Learning curve.

Regarding the Epstein-Trump affair

The Epstein-Trump affair never seemed to be a significant threat to djt. He has shaken off major scandals in the past. He holds the rule of law and US Constitution in open contempt. His sexual predatory history is public but not important enough so far to cause his supporters to reject him. He controls and has subverted both the FBI and DoJ and cowed congress into submission, so chances of any federal action against him are extremely low. He can, and very likely will, pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in return for her protecting him. Finally, the USSC routinely protects him from criminal charges and federal court sanctions.

Given all of that, odds of him actually being found guilty of significant criminal guilt or civil liability is very low, maybe ~5% by January 2029. Odds of his base abandoning him also seems to be very low, maybe also ~5%. But those are just personal assessments.  

Two points of view are better than just one. Can we get another assessment? Sure, here's one.

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: ....

So, by that second assessment, the odds of djt facing significant consequences for his pedo crimes is significantly higher, but still fairly low. 

Dictatorship update: Government censorship of the private sector

MAGA elites are well on their way to fully corrupting federal government messaging. But what about the private sector? 

A part of the capitulation of Paramount and CBS to djt in return for FCC (Federal Communications Commission) approval of Paramount's merger with Skydance includes government censorship. There will be a censor make sure that CBS stops criticizing Trump and MAGA generally. ars Technica reports that Skydance told the FCC that all of the new company’s programming will embody "a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum."** FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a radical MAGA authoritarian, claims that the requirements were necessary to restore Americans' trust in mainstream media. This is in accord with MAGA's authoritarian lies that media is biased against Trump. Skydance will appoint an "ombudsman" for two years to ensure that CBS's reporting "will be fair, unbiased, and fact-based." 

** 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 government imposing a censor to block political criticism is unprecedented. MAGA elites are now censoring news and entertainment outlets to quash media criticism of Trump's dictatorship and MAGA's kleptocratic authoritarianism. MAGA control of newsroom decisions and editorial judgment directly violates First Amendment press and free speech protections. In the 1940's FDR established the Office of Censorship after Pearl Harbor. It had broad authority to censor communications and media as needed for national security. Newspapers, radio, and film studios followed government-established guidelines to prevent publishing sensitive military information and other content deemed dangerous or damaging to the war effort. That censorship was for necessary national security. But this censorship is moral rot in the name of completely unjustifiable kleptocratic dictatorship.

The deal also censors any DEI presence after the merger. ars Technica writes:

[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.

In addition to gutting CBS's 60 Minutes program, which MAGA falsely claims to be based on bias and lies, Gizmodo reports: 

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.”

A censor who reports directly to djt. If Biden, Obama or any other Democratic president ever tried to do anything remotely close to this, MAGA would be screaming bloody murder about tyrannical socialist/communist violations of free speech and press freedom. But when MAGA violates the constitution as a means to its own ends, it's just fine.

This is another serious wound to democracy. MAGA authoritarians are now targeting neutering news and entertainment media. The obvious goal is to crush legitimate, fact- and reason-based political criticism and replace it with djt's and MAGA's authoritarian demagoguery, lies, slanders and crackpottery, and anti-inconvenient science and history messaging and tactics. 

We are in very, very serious trouble.