Month: April 2025

Crackpots and charlatans

John Ganz summarizes the current situation perfectly: 

This regime can give no actual account of itself that stands up to the merest scrutiny: It’s all nonsense and lies. This is a government of crackpots and charlatans, for crackpots and charlatans, by crackpots and charlatans. Anyone who believes any of its justifications and apologies is allowing himself to be deliberately confused or, even more pathetically, is indulging in absurd fantasies of racial or national rejuvenation amid the ruin of a great civilization. The people in charge want to replace thinking human beings with AI and an underclass of serfs they keep docile with digital slop. Ultimately, that is its only logic and its only rationale: domination, subjugation, repression.

Crackpots and charlatans who are obsessed with domination, subjugation, repression pretty much nails it. 

Impeach and prosecute them all. Josh Marshall’s DOJ in Exile must happen so that the prosecutions can begin immediately once people who will actually uphold their oaths to the Constitution are in office. More on that here and it looks like maybe also something happening at The Marshall Project?

Bike commuting: A life saver!

Great video from Berm Peak (Seth Alvo) about the benefits of bike commuting, which he summarizes this way: “Biking to work, even on an e-bike, decreases your chances of early death to a degree that far outweighs the risks.” If you pedal w/o assist and do it every day, a long term study indicates you reduce your chances of “early death” by 47%. That’s astounding. 

I commuted by bike very consistently, rain or snow or shine, for years … until the pandemic. I have had periods of consistency since going back to work after the pandemic, but I no longer go into the office every day so it’s harder to maintain that consistency and much easier to talk myself into driving. I still get regular exercise, but I know I’m not at the same level of fitness I was at when I rode 20 miles/day on a pretty loaded bike, no matter what. Seems like a great time to turn that around. 

Columbia: Tell Trump to Pound Sand

Trump and the Magats are trying to humiliate and control Columbia University by taking away $400 million in federal funding. Columbia is a private university with an endowment of $14.8 billion. What the hell is Columbia doing making a single conecssion to this regime? It’s unconscionable. Pathetic. 

Why can’t people and institutions with actual power and independence stand up to this regime? 

🤯

The Prerogative State

The rule of law has been replaced by the rule by law, and this is exactly how it is happening:

As [Ernst] Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. (A prerogative power is one that allows a person such as a monarch to act without regard to the laws on the books; theorists from John Locke onward have offered various formulations of the idea.) In this prerogative state, judges and other legal actors deferred to the racist hierarchies and ruthless expediencies of the Nazi regime.

The key here is that this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state. The two states cohabit uneasily and unstably. On any given day, people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one.

This regime is so far keeping the lives of everyday Americans mostly unchanged, while opening up a  parellel black hole of cruelty, misery, and completely arbitrary lawlessness, hoping those of us living our lives in the “normative state” won’t care enough to put a stop to it. 

The Hands Off! protests last weekend were a good start to show that the regime is wrong. What’s next?