The Confluence

Mike Johnson wants to cut Social Security and Medicare to pay for decades of tax cuts for the rich.

You know, I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to tell Trump voters that THIS was the ultimate Republican goal but they’d just rather focus on transgender athletes. That is much more important than whether they can stay in their homes and get treated by a doctor.

Heather Cox Richardson explains it all:

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It’s a feature.

If you ever wondered why you knew the devil by the look in his eyes when he showed up on your radar years ago, you may fall into one or more categories. Ok, I fall into three.

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Have you ever heard of the screw worm? (Don’t go there) Well, it’s back in South Texas infecting cattle after decades of eradication. But don’t worry, our crack USDA under Brooke Rollins is on it.

Ok. Maybe you should worry:

I’m beginning to think this is an evil plan from Maine to get us to eat more lobster.

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Just like Stephen Colbert and many other people in know. I run into them in unexpected places. It comes out in our first or second conversations, “I’m a Tolkien person”. It also usually means that they’ve gone through some things, as Trump would say, whether it’s illness, war or families that we happen to be born into. We endure and hope and find comfort in nature or temporary mental escapes. Tolkien showed us the way.

I sort of already “knew” that Pope Leo was a Tolkienista. There’s just something about him. Yesterday, he confirmed it when he quoted Gandalf who gently reminded people that we don’t get to choose the times we live in or how overwhelming our tasks are:

“Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

There is enough evil that the Catholic Church is responsible for. Its treatment of women and gay people really rub me the wrong way. This is why despite the fact that I was baptized Catholic and split my childhood between St. Joe’s and a high control religious cult, I’ve made up my own mind about the nature of the universe and reject any organized religion that does not recognize the full equality, dignity and gifts of women and other people who were born the way they are.

Leo could do what is in his power for the succour of those years wherein he is set to right those problems. In his case, he has chosen to use his power to kindle the hearts of those who resist cruelty, inequality, oppression and war. Gandalf’s quote is not about perfection. It’s about facing the world as it is and doing what you can to make it better in some way for those who come after us.

Count me in.

Forth Eorlingas.

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I’m back. Didn’t really do much to be honest. I had surgery on my eye a few weeks ago and I’ve been sidelined since then. No running, no lifting, no bending over, no mowing lawn, gardening, being around dust, blah-blah-blah. The eye is coming along fine. I’m going to have to get used to depth perception again. Today, my month of almost non-movement is coming to an end. I have to mow part of my lawn. The grass is as high as an elephant’s eye. So I’m going to wear an eye shield, my glasses, safety glasses with side shields… that oughta do it.

Then, exactly a week ago today, my car was vandalized at the bus station. Yep, the bandits ripped up my steering column, broke a window and ransacked the contents of my car. They left my spare set of sneakers though. That was nice. 🙄

So I’ve been driving a mini-van until my car is repaired. It should take another week.

I’m probably not going to take that bus route again for awhile. I’ve heard of other issues there as well. There was a shooting om the bus a couple of weeks ago. So that’s not good. Fortunately, there is a bus closer to my house. I can walk to it. It’s just not as frequent as the busway and if I miss it, I could be waiting 20 minutes for the next one, increasing the odds that I’ll be late for work.

Speaking of work, I’ve been playing around with the AI tools. It’s been fun. It won’t do your thinking for you but it can fill in the gaps. And it’s very flattering. I’m not sure that’s a bug or a feature.

Anyway, property tax season is coming up, along with that insurance deductible. I’m beginning to think there won’t be a vacation this year. I had one all lined up last fall to fly to a country in Europe but the government shut down and because I wasn’t sure I’d get back in time for work, I cancelled my flight. Well, took a credit.

I thought I’d go in February or March and what happened? You guessed it. Another TSA shutdown. Then the Iran war happened and jet fuel skyrocketed. It would be great if there was a maglev across the Atlantic but alas, there isn’t.

So, here I sit for another year. My bad luck with vacations is unbroken.

But if I’m very efficient and tidy with my mowing and weeding, I’ll soon be able to sit in the backyard and watch the rabbits chase the fireflies. I’m thinking of creating hang out and driveway parties at the sign of the Hare and Firefly:

Let me know in the comments how to… uh… actually do that? I’m thinking board games, wood fired pizza, croquet, karaoke…

So. Welcome Summer 2026. Only 6 more months until our long national nightmare ends.

What I’m listening to, this song by Danica Dora sounds like a summer evening:

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It’s on CBS. If you don’t have a digital antenna, get a free trial on Paramount Plus and then cancel it immediately afterwards.

You could watch it hours later on YouTube but you never know who’s going to show up and watching it in real time is going to be worth it.

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I kind of suspected she was holding back something:

Yeah, Yeah, I know better than to trust Green about her politics. But trust me when I say that when someone breaks away from a cult, you never know how they’re going to end up. There are formerly “Christian” pastors who are now atheists and former anti-abortion fanatics who snap out of it and really regret what they did or encouraged others to do.

Marge has had a transformation. I also think her intelligence was being suppressed by the Trump cult. You have to stop being analytical in order to be acceptable. We know this is true because so many Republicans with advanced degrees from prestigious universities have put their brains on ice in order to do what Trump wants.

Yes, we can hate what she did in the past. Yes, I want to hear her say she’s sorry about January 6. I want to hear her ask for our forgiveness. We’re right to demand that of her. But after the above statement, I wouldn’t be shocked if she wasn’t already deeply regretting all the crazy things she did for MAGA and Trump. Anything can happen.

The more striking thing about that statement is she is getting closer to telling us what she knows about the Epstein class and who is in it. She not so subtly refers to Trump’s comment that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial difficulties even a little bit. She also takes a jab at AIPAC. If she could only sharpen the distinction between Jews and Israel…

(I heard Andrew Egger on the Bulwark defending AIPAC as some kind of benign PAC but I think the fact that it poured so much money into defeating Thomas Massie at Trump’s request undermines that notion. We are right to question what it’s up to. There’s nothing benign about any Trump foreign ally.)

There’s also nothing more dangerous to a cult than a person who knows the truth and starts talking about it to other cult members. They need to be excommunicated. Marge disassociated herself but that might not be enough if she’s gaining credibility with others in the cult. She could do a lot of damage in the lead up to the midterms. The people who she’s referring to might need to silence her permanently. Ruining Green’s, Massie’s and Bobert’s political careers isn’t enough. Marge might not be able to turn the hardest core MAGA cultists who are in it too deeply for too long. It’s the younger MAGA voters that stuck with Massie in the primary that are ready to deconstruct that Trump has to worry about. They’re coming undone.

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If no one stops him from doing it now, what will stop him from writing other $2 billion checks to himself?

I don’t care what party you’re from, if someone got hold of your debit card and started spending all the money in your checking account and the bank ignored your calls, how long do you think it would take to clean out your account?

Those of you maga lurkers who think it’s ok to compensate Trump for exposure of his tax returns should know that there are already laws on the books that protect your PII in case of deliberate exposure. There are already fines for that.

If your tax returns or social security information are turned over to someone eg Elon Musk and he is careless with it or uses it for malicious purposes, you can sue for damages. And with millions of suits, we could potentially bankrupt Musk. But no one individual would get billions of dollars.

So this is theft. He stole our money. His party will let him get away with it. There is nothing to stop him taking more.

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I was watching Paul Krugman’s tour of European cafes this morning. In one of his more recent shorts recorded during petite dejeuner, he talks about how back before Reagan (I’m guesstimating here) American corporations were stakeholders, not just servants to stockholders.

I’m not sure this is precisely true because I’m from Pittsburgh and remember when the mills went silent. That discussion should wait for another day but I do wonder sometimes if Reagan wasn’t just messenger from the ruthless rich, and not an originator.

What Krugman was saying about corporations once being stakeholders and how that changed was detailed in a book by an anthropologist who worked in Wall Street for a couple of years. The book is Liquidated by Karen Ho. I wrote about it extensively back in I don’t know, 2012? I’m too lazy to do a search on my own blog.

That book could only have been written by an anthropologist or ethologist, observing the corporate mind in its native habitat. Ho got a job at one of these Wall Street firms and wrote about the behaviors of the front office vs back office staffs and what motivated them. Short summary for the front office, It’s extrinsic rewards, not “I really want to make money so I can eliminate poverty in my lifetime”. I guess you already have to be wired that way to some extent by family background or popular culture. But Wall Street takes it to a whole new level like putting a lab rat in a cage with a push bar that delivers cocaine on a more than random frequency.

The Wall Street banking experience was just the experimental and data collecting part of her book. What was more jaw dropping is the way she tied that behavior back through American history. Corporations willfully misinterpret the Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market because when Smith proposed that model, the world was only just on the cusp of industrialization. It applied to small industry like family businesses, not to mergers and acquisitions.

America has gone through phases where we did have a stakeholder model of business and workers, communities, infrastructure, schools all benefitted from that but it occurred simultaneously with regulation. Left to their own devices, owners will work to maximize their own personal wealth and call it the American Way. That might seem obvious at first but there’s more to it.

Back in the 50s and 60s, corporations woke up from their post World War II blackout and realized how they had been shackled to this stakeholder model and it was like waking up in Vegas married to some woman they hardly knew. That woman was costing them a lot of money and they never agreed to all that stuff like union contracts, pensions and healthcare and paying local taxes to the municipality where their factories were located. These sons of the original titans of industry and financial wealth who brought forth the Great Depression, well, that was then. This was now. They wanted out of all those obligations. And you can’t get more cocaine if there are governments and labor unions standing in your way.

I encourage anyone who’s interested in how the owners decided to strip mine America to go read that book. It’s a dissection of how it all works from the point of view of an insider who studied how man operates. It will all make sense how people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos got to be the worshiped apex predators of your quality of life.

Some humans in nature need to be cut off and rehabbed. If anything, that book reinforced what I already figured out about the post 2008 crash. Those who are addicted to maximizing their bonuses will seek out enablers.

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Before I start:

Jeff. Bezos is selling his $400 million dollar yacht, Koru, that’s roughly $1000000 per linear foot. It’s only 3 years old but it’s so big it can’t fit into most marinas and because it is a masted vessel, it doesn’t have a helipad. It has to have a support yacht to carry most of the crew, the tenders, and toys. One of those toys is Lauren’s helicopter. The support yacht, Abeona, is also big at > 200 feet in length.

I’m not sure who will buy the Koru knowing its limitations. It can only hold 18 guests.

In the meantime, Jeff ponders what to do with the rest of the money he has. He’s run out of ideas on how to spend it. That’s why he launched Blue Origin. He just couldn’t think of what else to do. His ex-wife on the other hand, is giving away her billions to non-profits and other charities. Go figure.

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Gary Stephenson of Gary’s Economics has a new video out today about how the Left and Centrists need to band together and come up with a set of policies that will actually improve living standards for most Americans if they want to beat the far right.

Check.

Check it out here: https://youtu.be/lX3xtIjWRq8?si=VB2N7JJaNQgKn52m . Ugh, this damn editor on my phone has disabled the ability to link. Sounds like a defect because I don’t know why the developers would intentionally take out the ability to select specific text. Did anyone test this???

What I think the centrists don’t get yet is we do not want them to point to Mamdani as unrealistic for trying something new and different because they are expecting him to fail. Then they’ll turn around and say, “see, we told you that wouldn’t work. It wasn’t the art of the possible”.

Admit it oh Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and all you centrists. You want to see left candidates and elected officials fail because it makes you feel good about your own cowardice.

Have you seen what happened to Keir Starmer? That is your future.

Now, I consider myself an FDR liberal, which is where I think the country wants to be. It’s not too left and it’s definitely not centrist. At this point, if you call yourself a centrist, you are really a country club Republican that found yourself in the Democratic Party because the Republican Party is batshit crazy about greed and every other vice and you still have ethical standards.

Ethical standards are admirable but it’s your cowardice that is going to let the right drag us further into poverty and authoritarianism. If you don’t stand up for working people (definition- anyone who isn’t living off their investments) if you think Obamacare just needs a few tweaks (for godssakes, you are so far down the rabbit hole if you can’t see that for profit healthcare is bankrupting and killing people), if you don’t see that women are propping up the economy because they have to work but they get absolutely no breaks for it, then please, go reform the Republican Party because that’s where you will feel more comfortable. Don’t lie to your voters about caring for their well being. People are starting to see through that.

Find that sweet spot where FDR was. That goes for the lefties too. Drop the pronouns and the teachable moments and the anti-vax, crunchy mom stuff. If you get tied up trying to make the world into your idea of perfection, and don’t concentrate exclusively on improving living standards, you will lose.

So I’m completely onboard with Gary’s message.

BUT, and this a big one, there are some casual Trump voters who can be reasoned with and some who really are the worst of the worst. We can’t talk to them. Talking to them costs precious minutes of our lives that we will never get back. They will believe absolutely everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth. In fact, the crazier, criminal, selfish and immoral his actions are, the more they like him. My hope is we can peel away another 5% of these people and let the other 32% go.

It’s not talking down at them that is the problem. It’s that they would reject any criticism of Donald Trump as illegitimate. These are the modern day versions of the Goebbels’ family in the Berlin bunker in 1945. They WANT to live in Trump’s world and living without him and his vision is unthinkable to them. Robbing the treasury is what they actually want to happen. It’s like they have some insatiable desire to let it all go, run with scissors, destroy everything because it’s orgasmic to them.

In short, there is something wrong with them. All their actions are directed at demolition of the very system in this country that made their passport the most valued in the world for 80 years. They are all in with Trump.

These people love the void, Gary. There’s something missing inside of them. Some part of their brains is underdeveloped. I’m not talking about intellect. Some of these people are well educated or smart. But smartness is not the same as having good character.

In a way, it’s good to know what percent of the population they are. They’re psychopaths, sociopaths, antisocial, or have oppositional defiant and/or conduct disorder. I’ve always thought that Americans could get tricked into fascism because we don’t have a history of it here. We’ve never had a world war fought on our territory except for Pearl Harbor waaaaay out in the pacific. We never had a dictator before Trump. We think stuff like that only happens in other countries. What you’ve never experienced can sometimes make you curious and then you get trapped like you’re in quicksand. I never believed and I still don’t, that the American spirit is in tune with fascism. I think that those people who touched the hot stove and are in pain right now have learned their lessons.

But oh my god, Gary. There is a solid hard core of bad people in this country. They’re careless, unprincipled and turned on by letting their guy do whatever he likes to innocent people. These are the people who would have to be bombed into insensibility. Deprogramming won’t work. They’ll store their Trump memorabilia. Their heroes are ICE agents.

We now know their scope. We just need to activate the rest of the country to give no quarter to them. They are dangerous in every way.

There is no talking to them. They shouldn’t be allowed to vote because I’m not sure they’re human but we can’t stop them. All we can do it recognize that there are some beings who we need to stay away from and lock out of any access to power.

I know that the UK has a giant self- inflicted wound and a similar number of people have succumbed to Farage’s Reform party. I just don’t think they’re as vicious as the ones here who have mini arsenals.

Maybe that’s the difference.

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