News bits: Channel note; DJT’s new threat to democracy; Regarding the TTKP

Channel note

For the last two days, Disqus comments have been going into spam and not my in-box. There were 99 in there this morning. I will be a bit later than usual in responding. I am not ignoring anyone, but just have a strange problem going on.

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The New Republic and others are reporting that DJT has made a huge threat that if the USSC does not grant him immunity, he will be open to blackmail and extortion. I do not see it that way at all. He would feel justified to take bribes just as he always has felt justified in breaking any law he believed he could get away with breaking. 

TNR writes: Trump Admits He Could Be Very Easily Blackmailed, Actually -- Donald Trump has a new argument for why he deserves presidential immunity—and it’s mind-boggling.  On Monday, the GOP front-runner tried to argue that his preordained innocence is an issue of national security by admitting that he’s actually very susceptible to blackmail. “Without Presidential Immunity, a President will not be able to properly function, or make decisions, in the best interest of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Folks, it cannot get much clearer than this. Not only is he a lying, fornicating traitor, he is a self-serving, corrupt as hell, kleptocratic dictator. 

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After yesterday’s voting results, the NYT editorial board commented about the completeness of the take over of the GOP and its transformation into what I call the TTKP (Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party): Trump’s Conquest of the Republican Party Matters to Every American -- The party has become a vessel for the fulfillment of Mr. Trump’s ambitions, and he will almost certainly be its standard-bearer for a third time. This is a tragedy for the Republican Party and for the country it purports to serve. .... The Republican Party is forsaking all of those responsibilities and instead has become an organization whose goal is the election of one person at the expense of anything else, including integrity, principle, policy and patriotism. .... when an entire political party, particularly one of the two main parties in a country as powerful as the United States, turns into an instrument of that person and his most dangerous ideas, the damage affects everyone.

Well, it is nice to see a little wokeness going on in the MSM. Good for the editorial board. Just hope it is not too little or too late. Good job editorial board.

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The WaPo reports that Haley will announce she is dropping out of the TTKP race for president.

The Hill reports that Democrats ready to hit panic button in Trump-Biden race. That is nice. The party has gone a bit more woke! Attaboy Dems. 

Salon comments on what is now DJT’s mental deterioration and its irrelevance to his supporters:

Trump is degenerating before our eyes — MAGA voters don't notice or don't care

GOP base is now so consumed by incoherent QAnon babble that Trump’s obvious deterioration doesn’t even register

Lately, watching him speak has the feel of getting cornered by the weird creep at the nursing home.

After a few semi-coherent, if gross, remarks about how he was “honored” by the USSC ruling, Trump launched straight into a stream of paranoid jabber more appropriate for someone having a psychiatric episode on a city bus than for a major presidential candidate.

His appearance got stranger after most networks had muted him. A bit later, he complained that it takes him 10 minutes to wash his hair, which he somehow blamed on Democrats instead of on the full bottle of hairspray he uses on his remaining locks every morning.

Incoherent blithering

Is the U.S. a Democracy or a Republic?

 ONGOING DEBATE.

Does it depend on who you ask? Or is there a formal declaration?

The United States is a representative democracy.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/lesson-plans/Government_and_You_handouts.pdf

Well, that could be one definition. Still, the question lingers.

The Constitution establishes a federal democratic republic form of government.

https://clyburn.house.gov/fun-youth/us-government

Hmm, more opinions abound:

Long story short, the United States is both a democracy and a republic. Anybody who insists that we are one, not the other — to quote something I saw on Reddit — is like a child saying the ball isn't green, it's round. Those words are not mutually exclusive. You can say we're a democratic republic. You can say we're a constitutional representative democracy.

https://www.nhpr.org/all-things-considered/2023-10-31/civics-101-refresher-course-usa-democracy-or-republic

SO, if you are wondering if I have a point, I do. Lately some have argued that the U.S. is NOT a democracy. Why would some argue that, I wondered. Then I came across a 2 year old argument that makes perfect sense to me:

Despite the lack of evidence, and the judgments of election officials from both parties and judges appointed by presidents from both parties, election denialism has become not only a thing, but a movement. And when critics call this an attack on democracy, some election deniers respond by saying the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic.

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/10/1122089076/is-america-a-democracy-or-a-republic-yes-it-is

This folks is NOT a fairy tale, consider:

Today’s Republicans really hate Democrats — and democracy

1) Trump’s supporters have embraced anti-democratic ideas

This chart shows results from a two-part survey, conducted in late 2020 and early 2021, of hardcore Trump supporters. The political scientists behind the survey, Rachel Blum and Christian Parker, identified so-called “MAGA voters” by their activity on pro-Trump Facebook pages. Their subjects are engaged and committed Republican partisans, disproportionately likely to influence conflicts within the party like primary elections.

These voters, according to Blum and Parker, are hostile to bedrock democratic principles.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts

Now before I get too longwinded, how would YOU define the U.S.?

Which of the many definitions do YOU believe best fits U.S. governance?

The Human mind & bias: Climate change & the hot model problem

CONTEXT

Ladies and germs, we have another potential rut roh on our hands. 🥺 This one is about climate, but my interest in this is the human mind first, but also the possibility that the climate situation is worse than consensus expert opinion would have us believe. If I recall right, I first raised that possibility in 2017 or 2018 on the old, now extinct Disqus community platform. FWIW, my blog then was called Biopolitics and Bionews. 

The argument was simple to climate science deniers who claimed that climate prediction models overstated the severity of the climate issue because the models were inaccurate. Well if the models overstated the case due to being inaccurate, why can't they be inaccurate due to understating the situation. No one on the climate science-denier side ever responded to me convincingly with data. Not even once.

In the ensuing years, evidence of understatement kept accumulating but was downplayed by the clueless MSM and flat out denied by the pro-pollution radical right authoritarian propaganda Leviathan. 

This tempest in the teapot is between science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder and climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Andrew Dessler. 

To keep the complexity simple (sort of), I extract and translate this from a recent Steve Novella post at Neurologica blog entitled Climate Sensitivity and Confirmation Bias. Novella is a practicing medical doctor and self-professed science communicator and science skeptic. dcleve, an occasional commenter here, thinks Novella is a crackpot pseudoscientist when it comes to his attitude toward psi research, dualism, free will and consciousness. IMHO, he has a point. Outside of that ongoing kerfuffle, Novella strikes me as a simple guy just working hard to put food on the table for the young ’uns. He is an assistant professor of neurology at the Yale school of medicine, so he’s a regular lunch pail ’n coffee thermos working stiff just like the rest of us. (full professors get better lunches with martinis)

Novella focuses on the Hossenfelder vs. Hausfather and Dessler debate about the hot model problem. He is looking for the nuance and subtlety of thinking and reasoning when experts debate and disagree. In addition to finding out I am wrong, that is a major thing I look for when I disagree with people here. I like looking at how minds in disagreement work.

Confirmation bias, the hot climate model problem 

and other whatnot

Communicator Hossenfelder posted a 22 minute video, I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am, which focused on some recent climate modeling studies that suggest the climate change situation is significantly worse that consensus expert opinion had believed. That data is outside the usual range of warming that various other models have predicted. So the question is, should the data be taken as accurate or as a statistical fluke? 

A couple of weeks later Hossenfelder posted a shorter video (9 minutes), I Was Worried about Climate Change. Now I worry about Climate Scientists, that reflects how she sees climate science experts after the response to her hot model video.

We all can see where this is going, South. Hossenfelder's second video was prompted by what Hausfather and Dessler posted at The Climate Brink, a piece entitled Revisiting the hot model problem: 

In a recent YouTube video, the physicist and science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder brought up the “hot model problem” that one of us (ZH) addressed in a Nature commentary last year, and suggested that it might be worth revisiting in light of recent developments.

While 2023 saw exception levels of warmth – far beyond what we had expected at the start of the year – global temperatures remain consistent with the IPCC’s assessed warming projections that exclude hot models, and last year does not provide any evidence that the climate is more sensitive to our emissions than previously expected.

In this article we’ll explain a bit of the background of the hot model problem in CMIP6, how the community dealt with it in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report, and why we are still reasonably confident that we should continue to give hot models less weight in future warming projections.

Novella analyzes the disagreement like this:

To frame my take on this debate a bit, when thinking about any scientific debate we often have to consider two broad levels of issues. One type of issue is generic principles of logic and proper scientific procedure. These generic principles can apply to any scientific field – P-hacking is P-hacking, whether you are a geologist or chiropractor. This is the realm I generally deal with, basic principles of statistics, methodological rigor, and avoiding common pitfalls in how to gather and interpret evidence.

The second relevant level, however, is topic-specific expertise. Here I do my best to understand the relevant science, defer to experts, and essentially try to understand the consensus of expert opinion as best I can. There is often a complex interaction between these two levels. But if researchers are making egregious mistakes on the level of basic logic and statistics, the topic-specific details do not matter very much to that fact.

What I have tried to do over my science communication career is to derive a deep understanding of the logic and methods of good science vs bad science from my own field of expertise, medicine. This allows me to better apply those general principles to other areas. At the same time I have tried to develop expertise in the philosophy of science, and understanding the difference between science and pseudoscience. [remember dcleve!]

In her response video Hossenfelder is partly trying to do the same thing, take generic lessons from her field and apply them to climate science (while acknowledging that she is not a climate scientist). Her main point is that, in the past, physicists had grossly underestimated the uncertainty of certain measurements they were making (such as the half life of protons outside a nucleus). The true value ended up being outside the earlier uncertainty range – h0w did that happen? Her conclusions was that it was likely confirmation bias – once a value was determined (even if just preliminary) then confirmation bias kicks in. You tend to accept later evidence that supports the earlier preliminary evidence while investigating more robustly any results that are outside this range.

Here is what makes confirmation bias so tricky and often hard to detect. The logic and methods used to question unwanted or unexpected results may be legitimate. But there is often some subjective judgement involved in which methods are best or most appropriate and there can be a bias in how they are applied. It’s like P-hacking – the statistical methods used may be individually reasonable, but if you are using them after looking at data their application will be biased. Hossenfelder correctly, in my opinion, recommends deciding on all research methods before looking at any data. The same recommendation now exists in medicine, even with pre-registration of methods before collective data and reviewers now looking at how well this process was complied with.

So Hausfather and Dessler make valid points in their response to Hossenfelder, but interestingly this does not negate her point. Their points can be legitimate in and of themselves, but biased in their application. The climate scientists point out (as others have) that the newer hot models do a relatively poor job of predicting historic temperatures and also do a poor job of modeling the most recent glacial maximum. That sounds like a valid point. Some climate scientists have therefore recommended that when all the climate models are averaged together to produce a probability curve of ECS that models which are better and predicting historic temperatures be weighted heavier than models that do a poor job. Again, sounds reasonable.

But – this does not negate Hossenfelder’s point. They decided to weight climate models after some of the recent models were creating a problem by running hot. They were “fixing” the “problem” of hot models. Would they have decided to weight models if there weren’t a problem with hot models? Is this just confirmation bias?

None of this means that there fix is wrong, or that the hot models are right. But what it means is that climate scientists should acknowledge exactly what they are doing. This opens the door to controlling for any potential confirmation bias. The way this works (again, generic scientific principle that could apply to any field) is to look a fresh data. Climate scientists need to agree on a consensus method – which models to look at, how to weight their results – and then do a fresh analysis including new data. Any time you make any change to your methods after looking at the data, you cannot really depend on the results. At best you have created a hypothesis – maybe this new method will give more accurate results – but then you have to confirm that method by applying it to fresh data.

Perhaps climate scientists are doing this (I suspect they will eventually), although Hausfather and Dessler did not explicitly address this in their response.

It’s all a great conversation to have. Every scientific field, no matter how legitimate, could benefit from this kind of scrutiny and questioning. Science is hard, and there are many ways bias can slip in. It’s good for scientists in every field to have a deep and subtle understanding of statistical pitfalls, how to minimize confirmation bias [and hindsight bias and other biases!] and p-hacking, and the nature of pseudoscience.

There are 4 basic choice when faced with a mess like this. Mostly or completely accept it, mostly or completely deny it, not care/unaware or confused/unsure. The latter two groups are typically outcome-determinative.

Writing this post was really fun for me. This is at the heart of how I see the human condition, politics, ideology, the human mind and mental freedom vs. entrapment. Don't you just love bickering experts, especially ones in different areas of expertise ? I sure do! 

Q: Is this creepy wonkiness, good stuff, or something else, e.g., TL/DR & where is the popcorn?

News chunk ’n bits: Commentary on DJT’s insurrection case; Gaza peace talks go nowhere; Etc.

The New Republic published a great analysis piece on the what the USSC did to the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment. Here are some key bits of it:

The Supreme Court Butchered the Disqualification Clause

It was clear at oral argument last month that the justices, for whatever reason, did not want to enforce the disqualification clause against Trump. What they struggled to articulate during that session was a reason why it shouldn’t be enforced against him. The disqualification clause’s language—the very constitutional text that they are charged with interpreting—is categorical.

[The USSC argued] “there is little reason to think that these [election] Clauses implicitly authorize the states to enforce Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates,” the court wrote. “Granting the states that authority would invert the Fourteenth Amendment’s rebalancing of federal and state power. There is actually no reason to think otherwise. The Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters operated from the assumption that states had the power to decide a federal candidate’s qualifications. If they wanted to say differently, they would have done so.

They argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters did just that by including an enforcement clause at the end of the amendment. .... The [14th Amendment states that] Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. .... As a result, such state enforcement might be argued to sweep more broadly than congressional enforcement could under our precedents. But the notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible.”  

This interpretation is nonsensical on its face. While the enactment clause allows Congress to enforce other provisions in the amendment, it makes literally no sense if applied to the disqualification clause. That clause already provided a very explicit role for Congress to play in the process: Lawmakers can, by two-thirds votes in each chamber, lift disqualifications that are automatically imposed. To graft the enforcement clause on top of it as well would lead to clearly absurd results, as the court’s three liberals pointed out in their concurring opinion.  

The court’s reference to “nullify[ing] the votes of millions and chang[ing] the election result” by disqualifying presidential candidates is utterly contemptible. If Arnold Schwartzenegger ran for president this year despite being born in Austria, nobody would claim that any of his supporters’ votes were nullified or the election results would be changed when states rightly kept him off the ballot.

The article goes on at length with other criticisms, one of which is that the USSC caved in to red state threats to thrown Biden off the ballot if the USSC threw DJT off. The USSC’s argument that federal candidates and officeholders can only be disqualified if Congress passes a law to affirmatively enforce the clause is blithering nonsense. An existing federal law, 18 USC §2383 reads as follows:

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

Unless I am mistaken, that law disqualified DJT. If that is correct, this USSC decision nullifies that existing law as unconstitutional because for each insurrection or rebellion, congress has to say it applies to those involved. In essence, the USSC decision sanctions insurrection. The original purpose of the disqualification clause was to disqualify Robert E. Lee without indicting him for insurrection. That was a political calculation that 3/4ths of the states ratified in the 14th Amendment. In other words, the political branch decided a political question. Now the USSC is saying, ‘nah, not really’, creating a political uproar in the process.

Assuming all the foregoing analysis is basically correct, this is well beyond nuts. This is the face of arbitrary authoritarian rule of the powerful, not the rule of law. And this time, three clueless Dems on the court went along with it.

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The AP reports about peace talks: The latest talks on Gaza have ended with no breakthrough, officials say. -- The United States, Qatar and Egypt have spent weeks trying to broker an agreement in which Hamas would release up to 40 hostages in return for a monthlong cease-fire, the release of some Palestinian prisoners and an influx of aid to address the humanitarian catastrophe in the isolated territory.

No surprise there.

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From the Low Information Voters Files: The New Republic writes: Maddening New Poll: Voters Are Unaware of Trump “Dictator” Threats -- A small percentage of voters surveyed are familiar with Trump’s most overt authoritarian outbursts. Some new polling from a top Democratic pollster finds mixed news for Team Biden on [the defense of democracy messaging] front: Large swaths of voters appear to have little awareness of some of Trump’s clearest statements of hostility to democracy and intent to impose authoritarian rule in a second term, from his vow to be “dictator for one day” to his vague threat to enact “termination” of provisions in the Constitution.

Once again, Dems have crappy messaging. No surprise there either.

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An article that Salon published discusses the 2024 book, White Rural Rage: The Threat to Democracy, by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller. I discussed that book here recently. In essence, Waldman and Shaller reject the common narrative that DJT supporters are mindless children. Instead, they argue that they are adults and are responsible for their actions and false beliefs. They hold rural white voters accountable for their choices, and for “willfully gobbling down right-wing propaganda.” 

The article recalls and echoes basically the same critique that Kevin Williamson leveled at rural white voters in March of 2016. I posted about that essay in 2021. Williamson called on rural Americans to take responsibility for themselves, by asking harder questions about exactly what would it take to improve their communities. Williamson’s criticisms were blunt and harsh. His essay provoked a firestorm of ferocious criticisms from the radical right.[1] 

The thing is though, both Williamson and Waldman and Shaller were, and are still are, exactly right. Biden has tried to help rural areas and in return most rural voters see him as a worse than evil monster tyrant and treasonous criminal. That rural narrative is pure bullshit. They complain and whine and slander, but they do not offer solutions or even engage in good will. Most are arrogant, insulting and a deadly serious threat to democracy.

It is reasoning like this that over a period of a couple of years after DJT’s election led me to assign more and more responsibility, blame actually, to rank and file TTKP voters and independents who supported DJT. My assessment has remained unchanged for at least a year, if I recall right:

TTKP elites, propagandists and major donors get ~55% of the blame, or credit if one likes corruption and tyranny

TTKP rank and file voters get ~45% of the blame

TTKP: Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, formerly the Republican Party

Footnote: 

1. Here is some of Williamson’s blunt 2016 essay. It is entitled The Father-Fürher: 

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

 

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.

Our failing rule of law: A current example

The Hill reports about former long-time Trump organization CFO Allen Weisselberg getting a light tap on the wrist for committing five gigantic felonies: 

The former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization on Monday pleaded guilty to perjury charges stemming from his testimony in former President Trump’s civil fraud trial.

Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s longtime financial gatekeeper, was charged with five felony counts of perjury. He pleaded guilty to two counts Monday for lying during a 2020 deposition as the New York attorney general’s office built its civil fraud case against the Trump Organization.

As part of the plea deal, he also admitted he lied in his trial testimony and during another deposition last year, without pleading guilty to those charges.

The ex-Trump Organization executive surrendered Monday morning to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He entered state court later Monday in handcuffs and wearing a mask. A New York judge said he will be sentenced to five months in jail, the amount of time prosecutors requested.

“Allen Weisselberg looks forward to putting this situation behind him,” Seth Rosenberg, Weisselberg’s lawyer, said in a statement.

Five piddly months for protecting a gigantic fraud scheme? At the very least, it should be 5 years. 

The USSC just gutted the insurrection clause of the US Constitution

AMENDMENT XIV, Section 3

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

A unanimous USSC opinion says that congress gets to decide who is an insurrectionist and who isn’t. In essence, that holding kills and buries the insurrection clause. What DJT did on 1/6/21 is now formally and practically sanctioned as legal. We are well past the days of a reasonably functioning, bipartisan congress and the USSC knows it. 

Scotusblog comments:

Before disqualifying someone under Section 3, the justices observed, there must be a determination that the provision actually applies to that person. And Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives the power to make that determination to Congress, by authorizing it to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the 14th Amendment. Nothing in the 14th Amendment, the court stressed, gives states the power to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office, nor was there any history of states doing so in the years after the amendment was ratified.

Allowing states to enforce Section 3 against candidates for federal office could create a variety of problems. First, although Section 5 requires Congress to tailor any legislation that it enacts to implement Section 3 so that it specifically targets the conduct that Section 3 was adopted to prevent, state efforts to enforce Section 3 would not face this same limitation. “But the notion that the Constitution grants the States freer rein than Congress to decide how Section 3 should be enforced with respect to federal offices is simply implausible,” the court concluded.

In a relatively rare move, justice Barrett appeared to criticize the tone of the joint opinion filed by Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, asserting that “this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.”

In their six-page joint opinion, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed with the result that the per curiam opinion reached – that Colorado cannot disqualify Trump – but not its reasoning. The three justices acknowledged that permitting Colorado to remove Trump from the ballot “would … create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork.”

But the majority should not, in their view, have gone on to decide who can enforce Section 3 and how. Nothing in Section 3 indicates that it must be enforced through legislation enacted by Congress pursuant to Section 5, they contended. And by resolving “many unsettled questions about Section 3,” the three justices complained, “the majority goes beyond the necessities of this case to limit how Section 3 can bar an oathbreaking insurrectionist from becoming President.”

Before this, I thought that the USSC was tipping in favor of corrupt, bigoted Christian theocracy and corrupt plutocracy over corrupt dictatorship. In view of this decision, I am unsure of what kind of corrupt authoritarianism the USSC favors. It is clearly anti-democracy, anti-elections, anti-civil liberties and definitely pro-corruption and authoritarianism. But beyond that I am just confused. 

Supporting all three kinds of corrupt tyranny at the same time seems to me to be untenable and something that could spin out of control. For example, if DJT gets re-elected, he will try for full-blown dictatorship with martial law and lots of repression. He could easily turn that sentiment against the theocrats and plutocrats, in a way akin to what the corrupt dictators who run China have done or what Putin has done to Russia.  

For clarity, Christianity in America can be brought under the control of a brutal dictator like DJT wants to be.

Of course, DJT would need to be careful and thoughtful about whacking Christian elites to bring them to heel. There could be a major backlash among the clueless rank & file. And, DJT is not a careful or a thoughtful person. He is much more like an enraged, unthinking wild animal with sharp claws and fangs. He does not do nuance or shades of gray. He lightheartedly does blunderbuss and enthusiastically exerts blind, raw power for self-gain.

We live in interesting times.

. . . . and like an adult’s nightmare!