Waiting For Octopus City

 

Octopus City, rendering of a plan by Peter Thiel's Seasteading Institute, via Wired, May 2015, when the techie billionaires were giving up on their idea. Then Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy.

Found myself unexpectedly attracted by a conspiracy theory around the tariff mishegas, from a Substacker, Daniel Pinchbeck, with an excitingly transgressive headline: Paul Krugman is wrong.

Not that I was planning to go that far myself! I think Krugman's judgment of the White House at the moment is fundamentally right:

These Are Not Serious People

 

Hey, Mom, I told you I'd finish the project in time. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, via Newsweek.

I had a pretty strong suspicion that there was some bullshit involved when I heard about the chart (at first on the radio) of Trump's proposed "reciprocal tariffs", announced on NPR as

a 10% minimum tariff to apply to goods from all countries. However, certain trading partners will face higher, "reciprocal tariffs" aimed at penalizing them for their trade barriers. Those taxes on imported goods are calculated on a country-by-country basis, and the levels Trump announced for some trading partners are substantial. He said he plans to impose 34% tariffs on China, 20% on the European Union and 24% on Japan, among an array of other trading partners.

and a little more suspicion when I saw the charts Trump put on display for illustration, which seem to be describing something different, or maybe two different things, with the left columns headed "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers", and the right column headed "U.S.A. discounted reciprocal tariffs" of around half the amount given in the first column, except for a number of countries, such as UK, Brazil, Singapore, Chile, Australia, and Colombia, where the number in both columns was 10%, which looked like a reference to the 10% "minimum tariff" instead. Why were those on the same chart? 

But the thing I really wanted to know about was where the numbers in the other cells of the left column came from: how had the administration calculated a single number for "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers" for each of the 65 countries, 67% for China, 39% for the EU, 90% for poor Vietnam? Not that I would have any ability to imagine other numbers, or even to say whether such numbers exist, but could they say something about how they did it? There are no clues in today's executive order or in the presidential memorandum to which it alludes.

Anyway, I was pleased to see that Dr. Krugman, who is probably as well positioned to talk about these subjects as anybody alive (work in international trade theory is what he won his Nobel for), put up a quick note on the Substack that has replaced his New York Time column that suggests he was wondering exactly the same thing: 

So where does this 39 percent number [representing the EU's "tariffs charged to the USA"] come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.

You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.

Now it seems, as NPR reports it, that's pretty much what happened:

Trump calls the move "reciprocal tariffs," however, the White House acknowledged it would be hard to calculate the actual trade barriers from every country, NPR's Scott Horsley tells Up First. As a result, the Trump administration picked an arbitrary number they thought would be high enough to chip away at each country's trade surplus. Economists say the tariffs will likely mean higher prices and slower growth in the U.S.

Got that? It would be hard to calculate, so they decided they'd just make the numbers up. And it's not like it was totally arbitrary, they were careful to pick numbers that sounded "high enough". Close enough for country music, as we used to say. Everybody's OK with that, right?

It was government by bullshit. They just brought their big charts with the made-up numbers out to the Rose Garden like Trump's hurricane map and read Stephen Miller's statement, with news that is I mean cataclysmic for most of these countries, threatening them all with recession, and lay back in the expectation that everybody would treat it as some kind of real thing. Presumably it's another Trumpy extortion attempt. Hey Vietnam, nice little export economy you have here, shame if anything were to happen to it, why don't you make us an offer? (Except Vietnam did make them an offer, back in February, and ambassador Marc Knapper assured them that Trump's tariffs were not going to be aimed at them in any way. Maybe President Trump wasn't informed of what President Trump was doing.) 

I'll have more to say about the whole event later on, but I feel like this thing on its own is so key to the understanding of what the Trumpery is about: they made the numbers up, because they felt getting real ones would be too hard, and admitted it to Scott Horsley, and they still expect to be treated as adults.

Update: The actual calculations are now available from various sources, including good old Atrios, Dean Baker, and The New York Times. And Krugman, with some hard evidence that the formula was created by an Large Language Model generative AI (though Gemini 3.5 is very insistent that it’s a stupid idea). Still insane, but helpful indicators of what kind of insanity.

Oh Freedom Over Me

 

In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:

Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead? 

(If it had been four days, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)

Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist. 

Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!

And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).

But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.

I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'n not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'd fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal. 

If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.

They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.

Annals of Intelligence

 

Director of Central Intelligence lies to Senator Ossoff.

Unsurprisingly, Pete Hegseth's first instinct was to lie about the thing, brazenly, and about the messenger, Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, suggesting that he'd somehow made the story up:

“I've heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said shortly after landing for a layover in Hawaii on a trip to Asia.

Hegseth criticized Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again, to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides, hopes, or suckers and losers.”

“This is the guy that pedals [sic] in garbage. This is what he does,” he added.

It's true that Goldberg scooped a bunch of news about Trump's contempt for America's war dead ("Why should I go to that cemetery? It's filled with losers"), but it's not as if there were any doubt about the truth of that, given his publicly undisguised contempt for Vietnam POW John McCain, and World War II hero George H.W. Bush (shot down as a Navy pilot by Japanese), and the parents of Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq in 2004, etc. And if Goldberg was an early proponent, in summer 2016, of the idea that Trump might be a "de facto" Putin agent, he plainly meant not a Putin agent—

Trickle-Down Misinformation

One of my nephews—a good and smart kid (actually past 30 and becoming a father next month but they're all forever kids to me), but with some manosphere items in his media diet—told his mom that the Trump administration is going to free everybody who earns under $150,000 a year from paying any federal taxes, or at least federal income tax, and she texted me to find out what I knew about this, which at that point was pretty much nothing (my first thought was I'd heard something that might have sounded like this but actually meant something different). But it hasn't been reported by The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR, perhaps because they don't want anybody to know what a generous populist our president is.

In fact there really is something, though I wasn't able to trace such a plan to Trump himself. Trump has definitely talked about eliminating income tax for everybody, and the 16th Amendment, altogether, and going back to the McKinley era when the federal government was entirely financed by import tax revenues or tariffs. I believe that's a very long-term aspiration: right now, individual income taxes raise just short of a trillion dollars a year ($959 billion), 51% of government revenue, along with something like another trillion in corporate taxes, while tariffs bring in $35 billion, or 1.9% of the total. If Trump went as far with the tariffs as he's suggested he'd like to do, Peterson Institute calculates he could get that up to $225 billion, or a little less than a quarter of the way to replacing personal income tax (causing a massive recession along the way as the prices on imported consumer goods rose to make up for it, and an international financial crisis as US consumers stopped buying imported goods such as steel, aluminum, motor vehicles, appliances, food, lumber, and so on, and turned to housing themselves in Hoovervilles and eating at breadlines, so that they'd never raise that much revenue anyway; probably bankrupting the Social Security trust fund and Medicare too, as all the newly unemployed workers stopped paying the payroll tax!). 

It turns out, however, that the more modest proposal for incomes under $150,000 comes from our clownish billionaire secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, as he told CBS in an interview on Wednesday:

I know what his goal is — no tax for anybody making under $150,000 a year. That's what I'm working for...

That's 93% of the population, though only about 25% of the individual income tax revenue, but sounds like he's eliminating the payroll tax (another $1.5 trillion a year) as well. And he remains committed to renewing the 2017 tax cuts especially benefiting the wealthiest, and a further reduction in corporate income tax (so we can lure businesses home from Ireland). But then maybe those DOGEboys will find a way to cut $2 trillion a year from the budget one of these days, and then there are those $5 million "gold cards" buying you instant permanent residence, if you could sell those to something like 40,000 billionaires per year you'd practically be home free. No, there aren't that many billionaires, or centimillionaires (something over 28,000 in the world, a pretty large number already Americans) either. 

But then again, who needs Social Security? Not Howard Lutnick's 94-year-old mother-in-law, though she does appreciate it when the check shows up:

"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain," Lutnick — a billionaire former Wall Street CEO — told the billionaire "All In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya. "She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining."

It's only a bunch of malcontents who think they're entitled to it (they are, that's why it's called an "entitlement"), and they're probably fraudsters (they aren't).

And the reason The Times and WaPo and NPR haven't reported the story of the near-universal income tax exemption is that it's not ever going to happen, but isn't quite funny enough (unlike the plans to conquer Greenland, or the cheerful indifference to money of Mrs. Lutnick's mom). Or even Fox News or New York Post, as far as I can tell

But it does get picked up by Newsweek and Forbes and Reuters, and the Hindustan Times and the Farm CPA Report, and taken pretty seriously by the libertarians of Reason and Mint and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and from there down to a goodly number of bottom-feeding YouTubers like Mr. Snyder up at the top of the page, and that's how it gets out to the Internet, and somebody says, “Wow, if I ever make $150K this is gonna save me $24,000!”

Free Mahmoud

 

"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regime Gift link to the piece.

Somebody I respect, I don't actually remember who, was warning us against trying to show that Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian with a graduate degree from Columbia University who was kidnapped from New York over the weekend by ICE, and spirited away to Louisiana for deportation proceedings, was innocent of whatever wrongthink he's suspected of, on the grounds that it doesn't matter. He's clearly not charged with any crime, which would be a problem, but he has a right in the United States of America to hold any thoughts whatever, and associate with whomever he wishes to associate with, whether they're good people or bad, if only because that's what the First Amendment says, and if I were to use Mahmoud Khalil's personal behavior as evidence that he doesn't "deserve" to be deported I'd be suggesting that other people in a similar position might indeed "deserve" it, but the First Amendment isn't about what you deserve. It's about what you are owed, your unalienable rights, even if you are a bad person or have bad friends. It's "the thought we hate", as Justice Holmes said, that needs the most protection of all, because that's where it's easiest to not care about people's rights and let the cops do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, it isn't just about him.  It's about what ICE and the Trump regime have in mind, what they are trying to accomplish, which isn't really about the thought they hate. That's just an excuse. If you look more closely at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, if you try to figure out what he's accused of and whether or not he might have done something that merits deportation, you get a clearer picture of what they're really up to, and how it threatens all of us.

That there was something very funky about the case was evident right from the beginning:

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night [March 8] when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. (AP)

How did the ICE agents not know whether the man they were picking up had a student visa or not? (He had finished his masters' degree—in public administration, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and of course gotten married, which favored his getting the green card.) Or, given the swiftness with which they changed their story, were they making stuff up?

Showtime

 

This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

For the record: The Secret History of Diversity in US Higher Education

 

He doesn't look like an African explorer called Dr. Spaulding. He looks like a Commie from the Lower East Side. Duck Soup, 1933.

And that's where we are.

White House Kayfabe

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II. 

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards. 

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Git Along, Little Doges

Watching King Abdullah and Marco Rubio squirm in their seats while Trump continues on about his Gaza plan is quite something.

“We’ll take Gaza, we’ll own it and cherish it” - boy oh boy pic.twitter.com/SLKBWnap5B

— Lani Refiti (@LaniRefiti) February 11, 2025

Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not  to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

Bonapartheid

 

From Michael Meschke's production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, Stockholm 1964.

I guess that should be counted as a kind of confession, with a plea for jury nullification: yes, when you come down to it, he kind of has tried to overthrow the US government, a couple or three times, and that's probably illegal in the normal way of things, but then the price of eggs is really high, so what choice did he have? You can't make a revolution omelette without breaking some constitutional eggshells, even if that's going to push the egg price even higher.

That is, Trump is really and truly making the claim that he has led a revolution against unbearable oppression, and at a time like this, the ordinary laws that we've been living with don't apply any more. Laws specifying procedures you have to follow if you want to fire a few hundred civil servants, or saying you have to spend the money Congress has allocated for a certain purpose on that purpose, or demanding that you treat immigrants as if they were human beings. You're busy saving your capital-C Country, for Christ's sake! Like the Founders, who were breaking the law too! 

Though Jefferson wrote his complex and sophisticated argument denying that they were doing that at all, putting all the blame on poor George III and claiming not that the revolutionary gang were the saviors of a Country which didn't in any case exist yet—just that they were breaking up with the abusive old country, and that they were acting in the service of self-evident truths, a higher kind of law that George was alleged to have relentlessly violated, including the unwritten British constitution, particularly in his refusal to grant them the traditional liberties of the British citizen with respect to representation in Parliament.

The quote itself is usually attributed to Napoléon Bonaparte, as a presumptive defense for his role in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November 9) 1799, which overthrew the government of France under the five-man revolutionary Directoire, and established him as First Consul, though it wouldn't have made much sense for Bonaparte to say it either; he undoubtedly thought of himself as the savior of the nation, but preferred to have other people say that for him (unlike the irrepressible Donald Trump), and was anxious that the thing look backed by stringent legality): "The extraordinary decree of the Council of Ancients, in conformity with articles 102 and 103 of the Constitution, has put me in charge of the city [of Paris] and the army," he told the soldiers gathered at the Tuileries, after the Council finished its vote before high-tailing it out of town to Saint-Cloud; "I have accepted, in order to support the measures it will be taking, all on behalf of the people." 

The French emperor was certainly a murderous and narcissistic psychopath, but he wasn’t an idiotic meme like our American emperor. He had some sense of dignity, and some sense of what ordinary people are like and what they need to hear.

Imagine Vought or Miller writing Trump a speech offering a legal justification from the Constitution or statutes for firing 12 or 17 inspectors general (we still don't know exactly how many) or decreeing the end of birthright citizenship, or sending the military in contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act to pacify the southern border area. Of course they wouldn’t be able to do it, any more than they are able to write up the administration’s executive orders and memoranda with the minimal professionalism required to keep judges from grinding their teeth in rage or laughing in the administration’s faces.

In fact Napoleon didn't say it, as I've been able to determine with my advanced Googling skills. The first appearance of the sentence "Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi" is in 1838, 17 years after Napoléon's death on St. Helena, in a little collection of 525 unsourced sentences attributed to the emperor under the title Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, signed by a hatmaker called Jean-Louis Gaudy, but actually written by no less a figure than Honoré de Balzac, it turns out, who ghostwrote it on commission from Gaudy, making the quotes up mostly up out of his head (Gaudy was apparently hoping to earn a decoration from King Louis-Philippe, the "citizen king" crowned after the 1830 revolution, who encouraged the Napoléon cult to bolster his liberal bona fides—Balzac himself was a Legitimist supporter of a Bourbon restoration but also a great admirer of Napoléon and his contrast with the destestable bourgeois dominance of the age of Louis-Philippe, which shows how confused French political thinking was in the early 19th century). Balzac could never afford to turn down some easy money. He probably tossed it off in three days with 60 cups of coffee and then hurried back to whichever installment of La Comédie Humaine he was working on.

That makes the thing a neat little epitome of what this Trump administration is about. We can argue what he means by using the sa ying, we can debate where he got it from (the prevailing opinion on X and Threads seems to be that it's Stephen Miller, who loyally retweeted its appearances three times yesterday afternoon), but what stands out in the end is that it's fundamentally bogus, like everything else they do. 

We are being ruled by memes, meme stocks, meme coins, meme policies, meme slogans, meme philosophies of government, a meme emperor who thinks he's Napoléon when he's actually more like Père Ubu, and his Batman villain billionaire sidekick. And we do have to worry about what it portends for the administration as a whole in the awful future, because it's actually going to kill people, throw families into turmoil, halt important research, destroy international relationships, spread poverty, crash markets, encourage criminal corruption, weaken the military, harm the education system, and generally humiliate our country in the eyes of the world, but we can't let them continue to make us stupider. Refusing to become stupider is our only hope.

The Emperor's New Immigration Policy

Image from The New York Times of the US Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The "Migrant Tent Camp" at lower left is an area that was used to house boat people on their way to Florida, in the days when America used to welcome refugees from godless socialism, and still did during the Biden administration, from around 37 at the beginning of the term to 4 last February; it's theoretically capable of holding 13,000, but for the current exercise they've just assembled a camp of 150 tents. However, the actual 10 Venezuelan migrants sent to Guantánamo this week from America, in one of the first big moves of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, are being held seven miles to the east in the prison complex, not with but not too far from the 15 9/11 terrorism suspects still languishing there since 2002 or 2003. 

This from The Guardian is hilarious on first look:

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

It seems in the first week of the Trump presidency when you Googled ICE operations or raids you got the impression of a great big wave of arrests across the country of unauthorized foreigners in the form of ICE press releases, but when you looked at the stories there was something wrong:

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008. 

They were old stories, some 13,000 of them, all timestamped "updated 1/24/2025", which shot them to the top of the Google and Bing rankings. Some Merry Pranksters (at the White House?) had spoofed us all into thinking Trump was keeping his violent Day One promises.

Not Ready for Prime Time

 

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24,  cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

Birthright Citizenship

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Trump's executive order from last week "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship" suggests that there are categories of persons born in the United States who are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the federal government and hence not citizens, specifically:

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States:  (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth. 

This is such bullshit I'm still gobsmacked a week later. In the first place it doesn't even attempt to make a case against the baby, only against its parents. Section 1 doesn't say "all persons born...in the United States whose parents are subject to the jurisdiction thereof". And then do the authors have a clue what the word "jurisdiction" means?

Dictatorship Takes Shape

Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.

An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called 

a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...

in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).

The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016. 

Pardon Me, Boys

Is that the Mar-a-Lago Cuckoo?

From Sun Valley Serenade (1941), with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the always unbearably smug-faced Tex Beneke, in a stupid baseball cap, on vocals, redeemed later in the cut by the appearance of Dorothy Dandridge and the tapping Nicholas Brothers.

My dad's dad jokes tended to follow an exclusively linguistic pattern, as I guess they mostly do. If you gave him an opportunity to ask you, "What's an armored personnel carrier?" you'd answer "Tanks" and he'd say "You're welcome." And if you bumped into him and said, "Pardon me," he'd say, "Son, only the governor can do that." That's an index, by the way, of how rare the presidential pardon used to be.

So Joe Biden issued an official presidential pardon to his son Hunter for any crimes he may have committed between 2014 and 2024, including the ones he was in fact convicted for (false statement on a federal form seeking permission to buy a gun he turned out not to actually want, and a very late income tax payment). Crimes that wouldn't normally be charged (nobody would know they'd been committed if the defendant hadn't told on himself by acknowledging he was a drug user in the first case and paying the damn tax bill in the second place, as he did before the charge was filed).

The Emperor's New Foreign Policy

Sorry about this piece of AI dreck, I saw it and couldn't resist it. I think the source has something to do with crypto, I won't link it.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that Democratic President Harry S Truman attempted to buy Greenland in 1867? (Hint: Truman was born in 1884, and his presidency was between 1945 and 1952.)

The Fox Friend in the video—I believe it's Katie Pavlich, who used to blog at the truly demented Heritage website Townhall, and now hosts Fox Nation's "Luxury Hunting Lodges of America", is that a real thing? where they burnish their anti-elitist cred by worshiping people like Harlan Crow?—really says those words. Click the link and watch if you don't believe me. I think I know what happened: there's a moment, around 30 seconds in, where she casts her eyes down at the table, as if checking her notes, and my idea is that's what the notes say, just "1867" and "Harry Truman", maybe drawn from a quick scan of the Wikipedia article on "Proposals for the United States to Purchase Greenland". A brief look of panic crosses her face as she realizes what she's saying can't be right, but she soldiers on with a smile.

It's part of a concerted effort on the part of the Trump Republican party, of course, to pretend there's nothing outlandish about Trump's suggestions, re-aired in his Tuesday press event, that the U.S ought to purchase Greenland, acquire Canada as a 51st state, reconquer the Canal Zone, and rename the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't know what all else. Look, folks, your Democrat Harry Truman did the same stuff, or some of it! It's not abnormal at all!

Question of Hu

Screenshot via ABC News, October 2023

I'll get to Carter in a moment.

But first I have a few words to say about Hu Yaobang, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party of China during the early parts of the Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-Up) of the 1980s, when the real power in China was held by Deng Xiaoping from his shadowy perch as chair of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Hu really was pretty popular, in a way that hadn't been familiar in the Mao years (when being popular could get you disappeared, like Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao), as an acknowledged architect of the government's move to what we call market socialism (and the CPC calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), especially among the people who stood to benefit the most from the reforms, such as university students; Deng didn't mind allowing him the credit for the hugely improving Chinese economy, perhaps because he also served as a lightning rod attracting the attention of Deng's enemies, the angry old Communists who saw the reforms as a political threat.

This became a big and problematic thing in 1986 and 1987, when students began agitating for political reforms in the context of a brutal 16% inflation rate and widely circulating stories of government corruption, particularly inside Deng's own family. The demonstrations began with students at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, who demanded the right to nominate their own candidates for the National People's Congress instead of having to choose from a government-nominated slate, and spread from there to some of the most prestigious schools in the most important cities in regions across China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Beijing, and others.

The protests were not very well organized, and not especially successful, but they had an important consequence for Hu Yaobang, in that he failed to crack down on them and thence fell out of favor with Deng; that was more Opening-Up than Deng was prepared to put up with. Hu was pressured into resigning his power posts, though he kept his seat in the Politburo, and went into semi-retirement in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, where he died of a heart attack suffered during a meeting on education reform, in April 1989, at the age of 73.